Napoleon, Ferdinand and Italian American Ancestors - “When the elephants fight, the grass gets trampled”
Napoleon, Ferdinand and Italian American Ancestors - “When the elephants fight, the grass gets trampled”
(May 10, 2011)
Napoleon (lf.) Ferdinand (rt.) & “Travelers Attacked by Brigands” by
Nicolaes Bercahem
Italian America bourgeoisie/literati, acting the de-facto role of Northern Italian tourist agents, promote the Streets of Florence and Milan. While the reality of southern-Italian American history can be found on Calabrian roads like SS107 and E846 from San Lucido through the Salis Mountains to Crotone. On roads such as these, they will not see Renaissance art, they will see the land and places where their ancestors, who ask for so little and so much was taken, time and again gave the insatiable greedy more than they asked for – BRIGANDAGE!
Glass Beads and Cow’s Milk Cheese
Doctorial Robes Emeritus Laurels Fulbright Crown
“Magister Ludi”
Master of the
“Glass Bead Game” (Hesse)
plays in the high
“Chair of Wisdom”
“sees invisibles in DeLillo”
“counts angels on heads of pins”
New York’s famous Casa
Milanese ammira
smiling faces
starched table cloth places
if you please
Cow’s Milk Cheese
“Behold the students sleeping before the
Chairs of Wisdom” (Nietzsche)
southern-Italian Americans All
“Dogmatic Slumber” ease (Kant)
dreams recall
Glass Beads and Cow’s Milk Cheese
........
Partria Meridionale
DREAMING
“I have a dream - someday!”
Southern-Italian American
“boys and girls walking together”
into classrooms
learning THEIR history
“I have a dream!”
Preface
All European history courses from public school through university discuss Napoleon. There may be some mention (but not much) of his exploits in the Kingdom of The Two Sicilies – the Patria Meridionale of almost 17 million Americans of Italian descent. But, virtually none will report the specific and profound affects he had on our ancestors.
In part,those 17 million are the result of events beginning with Napoleon’s conquest of southern Italy circa 1800. This ultimately gave rise to the great migration of southern-Italians to America circa 1900. Of course, none of this is to be found in the curriculums of the American education system. Southern-Italian Americans are systematically denied their history from grammar school to PhD Italian and Italian American Studies programs.
Introduction Southern Brigandage’s long history
David Hilton Wheeler, classical scholar and Italian language translator, while serving as the American Consul to Genoa 1861-1866, published (1864) a two-volume history of southern Italian Brigandage – “Brigandage in South Italy” – wherein he traced it from ancient times to the brigandage war raging south of Rome during the 1860s against the Piedmont invaders (aka Risorgimento).
For example, he writes:
“BRIGANDAGE has always existed in Southern Italy. In pre-Roman times, under the republic, and under the Empire...The Latins and Campanians demanded equal privileges and rights in the Republic (as in 1798 Ferdinand’s people asked for political rights) giving rise to Roman brigandage wars on the slopes of Vesuvius over which Cardinal Ruffo marched in 1799 with his ragged and reckless brigandage army of the Santa Fede. (v.1 p.1, 4)
Wheeler, captures the endlessness of southern Italian brigandage that began each Spring with the “Calabrian proverb: the brigands grow with the leaves” (p. 9)
More specifically, he writes:
“Brigandage begins in June, attracts the attention of the Viceroy in August; an army is sent against it in September; there are many skirmishes in October and November, in December the general returns to Naples to report for the hundredth time, that brigandage is extinguished in the provinces. (v.1, p.17)
Hilton provides detailed descriptions of brigandage in southern Italy during ancient, feudal and modern times up to the early 1860s.
However, it is the brigandage of the late 18th century under both the Bourbon and Napoleonic regimes that directly affected the history of southern-Italian Americans. For the history of that period, one can almost certainly not do better than John A. Davis’ Naples and Napoleon: Southern Italy and the European Revolutions (1780-1860).
Professor Davis is unique in that he writes a narrative that reads like a novel yet it is steeped in scholar attributions; both original source documents and secondary scholarship. The present article will be based on a small part of that very excellent work which uniquely combines a narrative hiSTORY with scholarly historiography.
“When the elephants fight, the grass gets trampled”
To my mind, nothing captures the whole history of the southern-Italian American ancestral experience better than that African proverb. The history of the southern Italian urban poor and rural peasants (the ancestors of today’s Italian Americans) is one of people who bore the burden of conflicts not of their own doing; rather, the conflicts between local aristocratic forces and international intrigue. Davis describes in great detail the politics and economics giving rise to many such conflicts between the rich and powerful {elephants} and the consequences to the poor {grass}. A couple of examples follow.
Ancien Régime – Feudal land use-rights law
During the eighteenth century the political economy of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies was organized along the lines of a feudal society known as the Ancien Régime. Under this Ancien Régime system, rights of usage claims for given area of land could be made by multiple parties. Davis writes:
“Feudal landowners were entitled to levies over local communities...[also there were] numerous collective use-rights that the local communities exercised on the feudal land and common lands...
“Unlike private property, the ownership of feudal land was therefore strictly conditional and the land remained subject to multiple uses and rights.
Imagine an acre of land where more than one person had equal claim of use – by law. Thus, the basis of conflict was set in feudal land use-rights law; i.e. more than one person claiming ‘legal’ right to use the land.
Importantly, for purposes of this discussion, were the implications those conflicts had for the poor and disenfranchised. Davis:
“The collective use rights on both ‘feudal’ and ‘common land’ constituted one of the principal resource of the rural poor”.
“These rights included the right to pasture animals at certain times of year, to fell timber for fuel and building, to glean after the harvest, to gather chestnuts, to hunt for game in the woodlands, or to fish in the ponds and swamps. “(p 19 emp. +)
Clearly, if the “rural poor” were denied “rightful use of the feudal and common land” they were denied their principle means of making a living.
The Sila Forest Conflct – Elephants and Grass
The scenario of the Sila Forest conflict in 1790 is a good example of how the peasants {grass} are crushed when the powerful {elephants} fight. The basis of the conflict lay in the “collective use rights” vs. “feudal ownership rights”. The government became concerned about the “state of lawlessness and unrest in the Calabria’s Sila Forest region. A royal magistrate named Giuseppe Zurlo was sent from Naples to investigate.” (p 62)
Davis:
“As these rights become more contentious they gave rise to conflict. [For example,] in response to rising commodity prices and land rent, the feudal landowners created illegal enclosures, thus denied the local communities their collective use-rights.
“These actions threatened the livelihood of the rural communities, whose survival depended on their customary and seasonal use-rights on feudal land and access to common land.
“Every spring and autumn, millions of sheep made their way back and forth between upland summer pastures and winter grazing on the coastal plains. For these seasonal migrations to take place, the flocks enjoyed rights of passage across private and public land. However, as enclosures spread, the transit routs were threatened...it was no accident that brigandage and the transhumant economy were closely linked... (p 19-20 emp.+)
The linkage of transit routs and brigandage was illustrated in the 1790 Sila Forest brigandage outbreak.
“In the case of the Sila, the usurpations of the common lands had impoverished the rural communities. The struggles between powerful landowners vs. rich sheep herd owners {elephant fight}, left many villagers {grass trampled}with no alternative but to join the bands of brigands. (p 63)
Napoleon and Ferdinand - The mother of 19th Century elephant fights
The peasants suffered mightily as the result of intra-kingdom {elephants fight} between the rich and powerful aristocracy over feudal use-rights laws. However, what the peasants endured in places like the Sila Forest was nothing compared to the pain and suffering resulting from international conflicts and war between Napoleon and Ferdinand.
1799
The onset of eighty, ‘grass crushing elephant fighting’, years ending in massive emigration and the birth of southern-Italian Americana
In 1776 Napoleon invaded Italy, defeated the Austrians and thereby took control of northern Italy. Wisely, on 5 June 1776:
“Ferdinand entered into an armistice agreement with Napoleon, whereby Naples would observe strict neutrality and close its ports to British shipping.” (p 73)
Napoleon then proceeded to occupy Rome in 1798. Significantly,
“Paris continued to insist that it had no hostile intent towards Naples, provided that Ferdinand continued to observe the armistice...Napoleon was concerned that the French lines of communication were dangerously extended already in Rome...the French representative in Naples informed Paris that there would be no military advantage from invading Naples.” (p74, 78)
In short, the Kingdom of Two Sicilies was at peace and the people of Naples were under no threat of war and invasion.
However, the British fighting the French for control of the Mediterranean convinced Ferdinand to break the armistice and enter into a military alliance whereby Ferdinand attacks Napoleon in Rome – the elephants fight.
In as much as one could purchase military exemption, the Neapolitan army consisted largely of the poor and disenfranchised who could not afford the 25-ducat exemption price. The ‘rag-tag’ Neapolitan army was no match for the professional, well-equipped and highly experienced French; and the ‘grass got trampled’ to-the-tune-of 2,000 Neapolitan dead and wounded, and 10,000 prisoners taken.
Meanwhile, leaving the people of Naples to pay the price for his folly,
“On December 21, 1798 Ferdinand in headlong flight paused in Naples only long enough to collect this family, closest courtiers, the crown jewels, the cash deposits of the public banks, and proceeded to the safe and luxurious life in Palermo” (p 74)
Sicilian Vespers – Déjà vu
On January 19, 1799 when the Neapolitan poor became aware that pro-French Aristocrats and exiles were negotiating the entry of the French troops into the city, “mobs took to the streets.” Whatever, problems they had with the King paled when it came to the French. Ferdinand was their king, the French were foreign conquers and occupiers. That was not acceptable. In short, as one French official observed:
“In Naples we arrived as Liberators. We freed the wealthy classes...We have powerful support from the ex-Nobles, the wealthy and the enlightened classes. They have welcomed us with great enthusiasm...The populous of Naples are ignorant, highly superstitious, fanatically loyal to Ferdinand and hostile to the French...The French seem to have forgotten that we are in the land of the Sicilian Vespers.
Consistent with the above Calabian proverb the brigands grow with the leaves,
“On 11 April 1799, the French General reported to Paris that the French position in Naples was no longer tenable....‘Every day there are fresh attacks and acts of brigandage... the number of placards and incendiary proclamations presage a general rising’.” (p 90)
By the end of May 1799 the French withdrew from Naples. However, this was not the end of war and beginning of peace. Rather it was the end of the first chapter of intra- and inter-national conflict culminating with the last great southern Italian/Sicilian Brigandage war of the 1860s against the Piedmontese invasion.
Finally, by the last decades of the nineteenth century, the urban poor and rural peasants south of Rome came to the conclusion that they could tolerate the elephant fights no more, they could not allow themselves to be treated as the grass under the feet of the rich and powerful; accordingly they packed up and left by the tens of millions to begin a new life and culture in the Americas.
Camorra Brigandage’s ghost?
David Hilton Wheeler in the above referenced Brigandage in South Italy quotes Marc Monnier’s famous 1863 study of the Camorra - La camorra: Notizie storiche raccolte e documentate(still in publication Argo, Lecci, 1994).
“The people had more confidence in the Camorrist than in the regular officers of justice...I known a man in the vicinity of Naples who was robbed of his money during the night. He made his compliant, not to the delegate of his quarter, not to the brigadier of the military station close at hand; rather, he went to see the Camorrist to make his complaint...The money was found.” (p 310)
In 1920 Gramsci wrote:
"The Italian state is a cruel dictatorship that massacred and burned southern Italy and the island, quartering, shooting and burning alive the poor peasants that mercenary writers tried to shame with the brand of bandits" ("Ordine Nuovo").
For those who do not see the world in journalist/movie maker bipolar Manichean terms of quintessentially good people vs. quintessentially bad people à la Gomorrah... rather those who see society in terms of “Genesis - East of Eden” where all persons partake of both good and evil...
East of Eden one wonders if today’s Camorra maybe (possibly) is a contemporary manifestation of brigandage, where the {grass} tries to mitigate the pain of being trampled by the fighting {elephants}. And, the {elephants} condemn and punish the {grass} for their temerity. And, movie and media mercenary writers trumpet the condemnation with the brand of bandits.
In short,
“There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of by movie script writers and journalist! (Hamlet paraphrased)
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