HISTORY

Verona and its surrounding territories rose up against the French occupiers of Napoleon Bonaparte.

War council at Palazzo Pubblico. The population rejoices upon hearing that Verona will take up arms against the Franco-Jacobins. March 22, 1797. Illustration by Mariano Zardini.

Verona and its surrounding territories rose up against the French occupiers of Napoleon Bonaparte.

It was 1797, the final year of the Venetian Republic’s existence.
Verona and its countryside rebelled against the revolutionary French troops of Napoleon Bonaparte, who had invaded Venetian territories, officially neutral,under the pretext of pursuing retreating Austrian forces.

Although anti-French uprisings broke out throughout the peninsula, Verona’s insurrection was the most significant in northern and central Italy. It succeeded in forcing the French garrison to surrender and inflicted heavy losses on Napoleon’s army, until then undefeated.

French soldiers killed in action

French soldiers wounded, hospitalized and guarded by the Veronese

French prisoners held by the people of Verona

Veronese casualties

The Noble Guard patrols the Gates of Verona, inspecting passes to prevent pro-French Jacobins from entering the city. Illustration by Mario Zara.

Historical Context

After the assassination of the King and of the Dauphin, left to die in prison at only ten years old, many uprisings broke out in France, such as the Wars of the Vendée.

Many clergymen and royalists went into exile; others enlisted in the legitimist armies fighting against the revolutionaries, supported by England or Imperial Austria, even organizing landings such as the one on the Quiberon Peninsula in Brittany in 1795.

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The Bishop of Verona, Monsignor Gianandrea Avogadro, is dragged along Via San Carlo from the courtroom to the prison within the castles overlooking the city. Illustration by Beniamino Delvecchio.

The Bishop of Verona taken to prison

In France, there was a relentless hunt for counter-revolutionaries, priests, and religious figures who refused to swear allegiance to the Revolution. They faced torture, slow death from starvation aboard prison ships off the Atlantic coast, executions, denunciations, deportations to Guiana, and clandestine masses held in forests and private homes, often betrayed by spies.

In Italy, the persecution was milder, yet the orders from Paris were clear: to destroy the Papacy and the Church, and to plunder everything possible to repay France’s massive national debt.

Except for a few scattered Jacobins, everyone despised the French revolutionaries.

Popular uprisings were the largest people’s war ever fought in Italy.

Popular uprisings

The populations fought against the occupying forces from revolutionary France, whose aim was to destroy the Church and the Catholic states of Italy, in order to establish “sister republics” modeled after the French one, governed by pro-revolutionary regimes.

In an Italy that then had only a third of the population it would have in later centuries, the losses were devastating: fifty times the deaths of the Risorgimento and twenty times those of the 1943–45 Resistance. The most conservative estimate speaks of 250,000 dead between 1796 and 1814.

The Capuchin friar Father Luigi Maria da Verona and the innkeeper Agostino Bianchi are executed by firing squad by the French revolutionaries at Porta Nuova, on June 8, 1797. Concept by Danilo Morello. Illustration by Michele Nardo

Fighting between Schiavoni and French soldiers in Via Mazzanti. Illustration by Silvano Mezzatesta.

When

Veronese Easters, so named by the French commanders themselves, in reference to the Sicilian Vespers of 1282, broke out on April 17, 1797, Easter Monday, and raged for nine days.

First, the city gates were freed. Once the citizens regained control of Verona, communications were restored with the surrounding province, Venice, and other nearby cities.

The small Veronese army led by General Maffei fought in the Brescia area and along the lake to drive out the pro-French forces from several towns.

The Napoleonic troops, barricaded without provisions in Castelvecchio and in the fortresses on the Torricelle hills, were bombarded by the citizens and by Austrian artillerymen, former prisoners of the French, who had been freed by the Veronese.

Verona, April 17, 1797. Battle in front of the Gran Guardia and near the Monument to Venice, which once stood in Piazza Bra. The Schiavoni crush every attempt to raise the Tree of Liberty, cutting it down. Illustration by Giuseppe Rava.

Why

Occupied by Bonaparte, Verona and the Veneto fell from a state of prosperity into a nightmare.
Traditions were persecuted, churches desecrated, and enormous taxes imposed along with the revolutionary calendar and hours.

Seeking to revolutionize Italy and destroy the Venetian Republic, the French first (in March 1797) detached Bergamo, Brescia, and Crema from Venice through coups d’état, then attempted to do the same in Verona.

But the city chose to remain faithful to Saint Mark and to take up arms.
The Napoleonic troops, confident they could easily crush the uprising, began to bombard the city but the situation spiraled out of their control, threatening to undermine Bonaparte’s conquests in Italy.

The French revolutionary military tribunal tries the Veronese insurgents. Illustration by Mariano Zardini.

Consequences

Show trials were held before a French military court; the Venetian garrison defending Verona 2,700 men, was deported to concentration camps in France.

Churches and convents were attacked, the Monte di Pietà was looted, and artworks and manuscripts were seized, many never returned from Paris.

Church silverware was melted down into bars and sent to France.
Ancient civic institutions were suppressed, including hospitals, charitable works, and noble academies.

There were also executions, and some of those shot were later venerated as martyrs.

The Municipalities ruled by local Jacobins, servants of the French, destroyed all the Lions of Saint Mark, erased noble coats of arms from palaces, confiscated private property through taxation, and imposed a republican catechism to indoctrinate the faithful.

The triumphant entrance of the Austrian army into Verona, in parade formation. The imperial commander, Baron von Kerpen, receives the keys to the city. January 21, 1798. Illustration by Mariano Zardini.

The Restoration

With the arrival of the Austrian army, all institutions in Venice and on the mainland were restored to their state as of January 1, 1796, that is, before Napoleon’s invasion of Italy.

The revolutionary gazettes were shut down.
Nobles, clergy, and citizens swore allegiance to Emperor Francis II.