This is not the place to write a history of French supremacy in Italy,
but several points connected with it must be glanced at, because,
without bearing them in mind, it is impossible to understand the
events which followed. The viceroyalty of Eugène Beauharnais in North
Italy, and the government of Joseph Buonaparte, and afterwards of
Joachim Murat, in the South, brought much that was an improvement on
what had gone before: there were better laws, a better administration,
a quickening of intelligence. 'The French have done much for the
regeneration of Italy,' wrote an English observer in 1810; 'they have
destroyed the prejudices of the inhabitants of the small states of
Upper Italy by uniting them; they have done away with the Pope; they
have made them soldiers.' But there was the reverse side of the medal:
the absence everywhere of the national spirit which alone could have
consolidated the new _régime_ on a firm basis; the danger which the
language ran of losing its purity by the introduction of Gallicisms;
the shameless robbery of pictures, statues, and national heirlooms of
every kind for the replenishment of French museums; the bad impression
left in the country districts by the abuses committed by the French
soldiery on their first descent, and kept alive by the blood-tax
levied in the persons of thousands of Italian conscripts sent to die,
nobody knew where or why; the fields untilled, and Rachel weeping for
her children: all these elements combined in rendering it difficult
for the governments established under French auspices to survive the
downfall of the man to whose sword they owed their existence. Their
dissolution was precipitated, however, by the discordant action of
Murat and Eugène Beauharnais. Had these two pulled together, whatever
the issue was it would have differed in much from what actually
happened. Murat was jealous of Eugène, and did not love his
brother-in-law, who had annoyed and thwarted him through his whole
reign; he was uneasy about his Neapolitan throne, and, in all