Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [65]
Baraguey d’Hilliers’s successor, General Antoine Balland, was known as the man who had drowned in blood the Easter uprising in Verona the previous year. He was soon to demonstrate his incompetence in Venice as well. In early October, government informers picked up the rumour that a lawyer by the name of Giovanni Pietro Cercato was conspiring to deliver Venice to the Austrians. When Cercato was arrested, maps, money and false documents were found in his house. “The fatherland is safe,” Il Monitore proclaimed the next day. “The treacherous plot that was to bloody this city, oppress the sovereignty of the people and leave it in chains at the feet of despots, has been uncovered.”17 But the Committee of Public Safety, already in the throes of collective paranoia, felt incapable of handling the Cercato case, and asked General Balland to intervene. General Balland overreacted: instead of assessing the seriousness of the threat, he declared a state of siege, suspended government meetings and brought out his soldiers from the barracks. Not satisfied, he announced that he was taking fifty hostages until the matter was cleared. Alvise’s name was on the list and that same night, the National Guard went to Palazzo Mocenigo and arrested him. He was taken to the island of San Giorgio, directly across the Basin of Saint Mark, and locked up with forty-nine fellow hostages.
Cercato turned out to be a two-bit schemer with very flimsy connections to Vienna. The conspiracy threat had been wildly overblown. Balland realised his mistake and released all the hostages three days after their arrest. Alvise was relieved to return to Palazzo Mocenigo alive. He was also fuming after such a display of incompetence on the part of the authorities. The next day, at the government’s morning session, he insisted that all the hostages receive a complete and public rehabilitation. A motion was approved unanimously, and the hall broke out in applause.
The hopelessly confused state of affairs in Venice—the phoney conspiracy, the state of siege, the taking and releasing of hostages—irritated Bonaparte no end. But more irksome news was on the way to Passariano. Under the aegis of the inept Balland, the municipal government organised a congress of representatives from the former Venetian territories to decide whether to join the Cisalpine Republic Bonaparte had founded, with Milan as its capital. The congress was held in mid October, and the delegates voted unanimously in favour of annexation to the Cisalpine Republic—this at a time when Bonaparte was preparing to hand a large chunk of the former Venetian territories over to Austria.
Bonaparte was furious with Balland for allowing this to happen, and immediately replaced him with the more experienced General Jean Sérurier, a trusted old officer from the pre-revolutionary military school. Sérurier did not come alone: 10,000 French soldiers crossed the lagoon aboard hundreds of transport vessels and took over the city. They were to complete the pillage of Venice’s art treasures and ensure, when the moment came, a peaceful transfer of power to the Austrians.
The Treaty of Campoformio, named after a small village near Passariano, was signed on 17 October, the same day Sérurier arrived in Venice. The contents were even more devastating for Venice than the secret agreement reached in Leoben at the beginning of 1797. In exchange for peace and the recognition of the Cisalpine Republic, Austria obtained not just the eastern territories of the former Venetian Republic, but also Venice itself. There was nothing left of the sovereign Venetian state. The details of the treaty were not immediately made public, but chilling rumours quickly spread in Venice, and led to one last desperate attempt to prevent the