Melchiorre Gioia on the Italian anti-French resistance and the devastation of Lombardy
Mitrofanov Andrei
For those studying the anti-French popular resistance in Italy during the Napoleonic Wars, the few historical works by contemporary Italian authors of the early 19th century are particularly significant. The author analyzes how the renowned Milanese intellectual Melchiore Gioia (1767–1829) interpreted the phenomenon of popular resistance in Northern Italy. In 1801, Gioia was appointed historiographer of the Cisalpine Republic. Although he was not a professional historian, but a political thinker and economist, in 1805 he published in Milan the historical work «French, Germans, and Russians in Lombardy», in which he described the events in his country in the late 1790s and early 1800s. The arrival of the French in Italy, according to Gioia, contributed to progress in economics, politics, and culture. On the contrary, he believed the Austrian occupation of 1799–1800 was a period of total ruin and social hardship. From this perspective, Gioia also evaluates the Lombard national resistance to the French conquerors, which for him culminated in the uprising in Pavia in May 1796. The author of the article notes that in this case, Gioia acted not as a historian, but as a propagandist. An analysis of the Italian writer's discourse and key conclusions reveals that he was extremely biased in his assessments and made no effort to be objective. Gioia sought to enhance his social status and secure a firm foothold in the hierarchy of the Kingdom of Italy by offering the Italian elite and the French imperial bureaucracy a version of the history of the Cisalpine Republic and the First Austrian Restoration that could serve as the ideological foundation for a new political regime in Italy.
The study is realized in the State Academic University for the Humanities within the framework of the state task of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation (project FZNF–2023–0003 Traditions and values of society: mechanisms of formation and transformation in the context of global history).