Flags of Napoleonic Italy
The Flags of Napoleonic Italy were the green, white and red tricolour flags and banners in use in Italy during the Napoleonic era, which lasted from 1796 to 1814. During this period, on 7 January 1797, the green, white and red tricolour was officially adopted for the first time as a national flag by a sovereign Italian state, the Cispadane Republic. This event is commemorated by the Tricolour Day.
The premises
The Italian tricolour, like other tricolour flags, is inspired by the French one, introduced by the revolution in the autumn of 1790 on French Navy warships, and symbol of the renewal perpetrated by the origins of Jacobinism.The first documented trace of the use of Italian national colours is dated 21 August 1789. In the historical archives of the Republic of Genoa it is reported that eyewitnesses had seen some demonstrators pinned on their clothes hanging a red, white and green cockade on their clothes.
History
The banner of Cherasco
The oldest documented mention of the Italian tricolour flag is linked to the first descent of Napoleon in the Italian Peninsula. With the start of the first campaign in Italy, in many places the Jacobins of the peninsula rose up, contributing, together with the Italian soldiers framed in the Napoleonic army, to the French victories.This renewal was accepted by the Italians despite being linked to the conveniences of Napoleonic France, which had strong imperialist tendencies, because the new political situation was better than the previous one. The double-threaded link with France was in fact much more acceptable than in past centuries in absolutism.
During the first campaign in Italy, Napoleon, under the command of the Army of Italy, conquered the states into which the Italian peninsula was divided by founding new republican state bodies inspired by French revolutionary ideals. Between 1796 and 1799 were born, among others, the Piedmontese Republic, the Cispadane Republic, the Transpadane Republic, the Ligurian Republic, the Roman Republic, the Anconine Republic and the Parthenopean Republic. Many of these republics had a short existence, but despite this, the length of time that they existed was more than enough to spread the French revolutionary ideals, including that of the self-determination of the people, which laid the foundations for the unification of Italy.
The first territory to be conquered by Napoleon was Piedmont; in the historical archive of the Piedmontese municipality of Cherasco there is a document that proves, on 13 May 1796, on the occasion of the homonymous armistice between Napoleon and the Austrian-Piedmontese troops, with which Victor Emmanuel I of Piedmont-Sardinia ceded Nice and Savoy to France to end the war, the first mention of the Italian flag, which refers to municipal banners hoisted on three towers in the historic centre.
On the document, the term "green" was subsequently crossed out and replaced by "blue", the colour that forms — together with white and red — the French flag.
The war flag of the Lombard Legion
Despite the various hypotheses on the origin of the Italian tricolour and the meaning of its colours, there is no certain and unequivocal evidence of its existence before the entry of the French into Milan, which took place on 14 May 1796. In France, due to the Revolution, the flag had passed from having a "dynastic" and "military" meaning, to having a "national" one, and this concept, still unknown in Italy, was transmitted by the French to the Italians.This explains both the initial indifference to the adoption of the new flag, which left few certain traces of its origin, and the fact that initially, instead of adopting their own flag, many cities had raised the French tricolour. The new conquest was not, as in ancient times, "jealous" of its colours but proud that they were put on display, these being the symbols of a conquering army and a victorious people. It is to the French flag that the documents, at least until October 1796, refer when they use the term "tricolour".
On 11 October 1796, Napoleon communicated to the Directory the birth of the Lombard Legion, a military unit constituted by the General Administration of Lombardy, a government headed by the Transpadane Republic. On this document, in reference to its war flag, which traced the French tricolor and which was proposed to Napoleon by the Milanese patriots, it is reported that:
In this regard, one of the pro-Napoleonic Milanese patriots, the lawyer Giovanni Battista Sacco, declared:
The Lombard Legion was therefore the first Italian military unit to have a tricolour war flag as a banner. According to the most authoritative sources, the choice made by the members of the Lombard Legion to replace the blue of the French flag with green is also linked to the colour of the uniforms of the Milanese city militia, whose members, since 1782, wore a uniform of this shade, that is a green outfit with red and white gorget patches. This is the reason, in the Milanese dialect, the members of this municipal guard were popularly called remolazzit, or "small radishes", recalling the luxuriant green leaves of this vegetable.
The white and red were also peculiar to the very ancient municipal coat of arms of Milan and were also common on the Lombard military uniforms of the time. It was therefore no coincidence that the green, white and red tricolour was chosen as an insignia by the Lombard Legion.
The first official approval of the Italian flag by the authorities was as a military insignia of the Lombard Legion and not yet as the national flag of a sovereign Italian state. On November 6, 1796, the first cohort of the Lombard Legion received its tricolour banner during a solemn ceremony at five o'clock in the afternoon in Piazza del Duomo in Milan. The flag was divided into three vertical bands; it also reported the inscription "Lombard Legion" and the cohort number, while in the centre there was an oak crown that enclosed a Phrygian cap and a Masonic square with pendulum. As shown in the "Prospectus of the formation of the Lombard Legion", each cohort was equipped with:
Flags of the same style were also assigned to the other five established cohorts. All six banners are still extant, five being exhibited at the Museum of Military History in Vienna and one at the Musée de l'Armée in Paris. With the succession of Napoleon's military victories and the consequent birth of republics favourable to revolutionary ideals, in many Italian cities, red, white and green were adopted on military banners as a symbol of social and political innovation.
The war flag of the Italian Legion
From 16 to 18 October 1796, in Modena, a congress was held in which the delegates of Bologna, Ferrara, Modena and Reggio Emilia participated, which decreed the birth of the Cispadane Republic, with lawyer Antonio Aldini as president.The congress also deliberated the constitution of an Italian Legion, later renamed Cispadane Legion, which was to participate together with France in a war against the Austrians. The military banner of this military unit, which consisted of five cohorts of six hundred soldiers each, was composed of a red, white and green tricolour, probably inspired by the similar decision of the Lombard Legion:
Not yet a national flag, but a war flag, the uniform of the soldiers of the Italian Legion was of the colours "already admitted by our Lombard brothers".
The civic banner of the congregation of Bologna
On 19 June 1796, Bologna was occupied by Napoleonic troops. At the same time, a Civic Guard was established, which adopted a uniform identical to that of the Milanese city militia, that is a green outfit with red and white displays. On 18 October 1796, at the same time as the constitution of the Italian Legion, the pro-Napoleonic congregation of magistrates and deputy deputies of Bologna, on the third point of the discussion, decided to create a tricolour civic banner, this time detached from military use. A document preserved in the Bologna State Archives states:A resolution of the Senate of Bologna of 5 November 1796 abolished "all those badges that characterize a diversity of ranks among citizens" while prescribing that "everyone must be provided within the term of eight days and wear the French tricolour cockade or also our mixed national colours".
After the adoption by the Bolognese congregation, the tricolour became a political symbol of the struggle for the independence of Italy from foreign powers, given its use also in the civil sphere, taking the name of "flag of the Italian revolution".
The subsequent adoption of the Italian flag by a state body, the Cispadane Republic, was inspired by this Bolognese banner, linked to a municipal reality and therefore still having a purely local breath, and to previous military banners of the Lombard and Italian Legions. which took place on January 7, 1797.
The national flag of the Cispadane Republic
The premises
With the invasion of Napoleon's troops, the Duke of Modena and Reggio Francesco III d'Este fled and the Reggian Republic was proclaimed. At the same time the Civic Guard of the city of Reggio was constituted and this military formation, aided by a small group of French grenadiers, defeated a squad of 150 Austrian soldiers at Montechiarugolo on 4 October 1796. The victory was important — both from a political and symbolic point of view — that Napoleon made an official commendation to the Reggio soldiers who were the protagonists of the battle. For the armed clash of Montechiarugolo, Napoleon defined the city of Reggio Emilia as:Ugo Foscolo dedicated the ode A Bonaparte liberatore to the Reggio protagonists of the battle of Montechiarugolo. The title page of this poem reads:
Vincenzo Monti dedicated these verses from his cantica In morte di Lorenzo Mascheroni to the event:
Moreover, in Reggio Emilia, in August 1796, one of the first liberty pole had been planted. This event, which arose from a revolt against the ducal government on 20 August 1796 in Reggio, contributed, together with the events linked to the battle of Montechiarugolo, to the decision to choose Reggio Emilia as the venue for the cispadane congress, the assembly that then led to the birth of the flag of Italy.
As a symbolic recognition of the Montechiarugolo clash, and for the event related to the tree of liberty, Napoleon suggested to the deputies of the Cispadan cities to gather for their first congress assembly on 27 December 1796 in Reggio Emilia.