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| The Destruction of the Tree of Liberty in the Largo di Palazzo by Saverio della Gatta (active from 1777 to 1827) |
Restoration, Aftermath, and the Memory of Sanfedismo
By early June 1799, the Parthenopean Republic existed largely in name. French forces had withdrawn to the north, provincial administrations had collapsed, and Cardinal Ruffo’s army stood at the gates of Naples. On June 13th, the Feast of St. Anthony of Padua, Ruffo and his forces, having heard Mass and invoked the saint’s intercession, entered the city. Intense street fighting followed as loyalist and Sanfedisti forces engaged the remaining republican defenders. By day’s end, the Bourbon banner once again flew over Naples.
The surviving leaders of the Republic withdrew to fortified positions and entered into negotiations. In a gesture of Christian clemency, Ruffo offered generous terms: safe conduct and preservation of life in exchange for peaceful surrender. These terms were accepted—and then violated. Upon the arrival of Admiral Horatio Nelson with the British fleet, the agreed-upon capitulations were set aside. Acting independently of Ruffo and in defiance of his guarantees—whether on his own initiative or with tacit royal encouragement remains debated—Nelson authorized arrests and executions, most notably that of Francesco Caracciolo, Duke of Brienza. This decision remains a source of enduring controversy. Ruffo himself protested vigorously and withdrew from Naples in disgust. Modern scholarship has increasingly recognized that the ensuing reprisals cannot be laid at his feet.
The republic had lasted scarcely five months. Its legacy, however, was disproportionate to its duration. Governed by a narrow elite and sustained by foreign arms, it left behind deep divisions, widespread devastation, and a body count that even French officers acknowledged with unease. The people they claimed to liberate neither consented to their rule nor mourned its end.
The moral narrative constructed after the fact inverted these realities. Counter-revolutionary violence was magnified—no calumny was too great to lay at its feet—while republican and French atrocities were minimized, contextualized, or ignored. General Thiébault recorded that more than sixty thousand civilians were killed during the five-month occupation—excluding combatants. [21] This staggering figure also clarifies the environment in which reprisals occurred. A society subjected to systematic looting, sacrilege, massacre, and coercive rule does not emerge morally neutral. That later commentators expressed shock at retribution while excusing the conditions that produced it reflects less a concern for justice than a preference for ideological symmetry.
The subsequent French return in 1806 further exposes the limits of revolutionary apologetics. Critics have pointed to the absence of a comparable Santa Fede uprising as evidence that support for the Bourbons had evaporated. The argument is unconvincing. The political context had changed. This time, Napoleon did not impose a Godless republic but installed monarchs—first his brother Joseph Bonaparte, then his brother-in-law Joachim Murat—thereby blurring the symbolic clarity that had unified resistance in 1799. More decisively, the methods of occupation intensified. Mass executions, village burnings, and collective punishment were employed to suppress resistance before it could coalesce.
Modern historians have documented this with precision. In a 2009 issue of War in History, historian Philip G. Dwyer offers a stark account of the period’s brutality, focusing in particular on the French conquest of Southern Italy. In his article “‘It Still Makes Me Shudder’: Memories of Massacres and Atrocities during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars,” he describes towns set ablaze, civilians shot or bayoneted as they fled, prisoners executed afterward, and entire communities erased as political warnings:
“In southern Italy, where in the summer of 1806 the French army killed thousands of locals and devastated more than 25 villages in an attempt to wipe out all armed resistance. Lauria, a town of around 9000 inhabitants was perhaps the worst hit, possibly as an act of revenge for what had been done to a French officer sent to parlay with the town: his body was supposedly cut into pieces, put in a basket and sent back with French prisoners. During the fighting the town was set on fire so that those attempting to escape the flames were simply shot or bayoneted, without distinction of age or sex, as they emerged from their houses. The lower part of the town was reduced to a smoldering ruin. Masséna and his officers unsuccessfully attempted to prevent the troops from pillaging and burning. Some 734 men, women and children were killed in this way (according to the French). One Neapolitan colonel estimated that there were more than 3000 dead and wounded. A further 341 people taken prisoner were shot and hanged over the following days.” [22]Writing again in 2013 in the Journal of Genocide Research, in an article titled “Violence and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: massacre, conquest and the imperial enterprise,” Professor Dwyer observes:
“The French presence in Calabria, led to a diminution in population of 21,000 people, out of an estimated population of a little more than 800,000. That is about four percent of the population.” [23]
“Massacres were, therefore, not only responses to local acts of ‘brigandage’; they were political statements. In July 1806, Napoleon directed his brother Joseph, King of Naples, ‘to execute at least 600 rebels and to ‘pillage five or six of the villages that have behaved the worst’. Joseph carried out the order, hanging and shooting 600 ‘brigands’ over an eight-day period.” [24]Under such conditions, the absence of mass uprising signifies not acquiescence but the successful application of terror.
Following Murat’s defeat by Austrian forces in 1815 during the Neapolitan War, he fled to France. Naples then sued for peace and signed the Treaty of Casalanza, effectively restoring Ferdinand IV, a settlement later reaffirmed by the Congress of Vienna. Uniting his realms, Ferdinand assumed the title Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies—a decision that, in this author’s view, proved a fatal error. By unifying Naples and Sicily, he effectively trampled on Sicily’s historic rights—though that is a discussion for another day.
In an ill-fated attempt to replicate Ruffo’s triumph, the swashbuckling Murat sailed for Calabria, consumed by delusions of grandeur. Instead of a hero’s welcome, the pretender and his small band of would-be reconquerors were met with sticks and stones, treated less as liberators than as common brigands. One woman—whose sons had been murdered by Murat’s heavy-handed aide-de-camp, General Charles Antoine Manhès, charged with the extermination of so-called “ruffians”—struck him in the face, crying, “You speak of liberty, and you had four of my sons shot!” [25] Like the terrorist Bandiera brothers in 1844 and the subversive Carlo Pisacane in 1857, Murat and his men were captured, beaten, and executed by the very people they claimed to “liberate.”
To this day, the tragic events of the Neapolitan Revolution and Napoleonic invasions remain vivid in popular imagination. Annual Requiem Masses for Cardinal Ruffo are held in his native Calabria. The effigy of General Championnet is burned during Carnival in Frosinone. Murat’s execution is reenacted in Pizzo Calabro. In Fara Filiorum Petri, the miraculous deliverance of the town is commemorated by lighting the Farche, traditional ritual bonfires recalling the apparition of St. Anthony the Abbot and the rout of French troops. [26] These rituals are not relics of folklore alone; they are acts of memory that resist official narratives.
Later movements of resistance, particularly brigantaggio after 1860, were not direct continuations of Sanfedismo but shared its underlying rejection of imposed political order. Where the Sanfedisti represented organized counter-revolution under legitimate authority, brigand resistance was fragmented and often chaotic. Both, however, expressed opposition to conquest disguised as national unification. Following the annexation of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies by the Kingdom of Sardinia, Southern Italy experienced systematic dispossession, economic extraction, and repression comparable in structure—if not in rhetoric—to earlier occupations. The region’s subsequent impoverishment was not accidental but the result of deliberate policies.
The collapse of prosperity, combined with widespread violence against Southern Italians, produced a trauma whose multigenerational consequences have been largely ignored. This neglect extends not only to the material devastation inflicted upon the South, but also to the absence of any serious inquiry into the residual psychological effects of conquest, occupation, internal colonization, and historical erasure—effects that produced a durable alienation and continue to shape Southern Italian society into the present.
Sanfedismo was not an irrational spasm at the margins of history, but a coherent popular counter-revolution that exposed the gap between revolutionary mythology and political reality. The Parthenopean Republic did not fall because the people failed to understand “liberty,” but because they understood domination when they encountered it: foreign bayonets, confiscations, sacrilege, and ideological rule enforced by violence. Ruffo’s achievement was not merely military but political and spiritual. He mobilized legitimacy—altar, throne, local loyalties—against an elite project sustained by occupation. That later historiography elevated collaborators into martyrs while branding the victors as barbarians follows a familiar pattern: revolution demands, even after defeat, that its opponents be recast as criminals so that conquest can masquerade as emancipation. To remember the Sanfedisti is to recover a suppressed truth about how societies actually resist: not through slogans, but through faith, memory, and the stubborn will to remain themselves.
~ By Giovanni di Napoli
Footnotes:
[21] Thiébault, Paul Charles François, Mémoires du Général Baron Thiébault, Paris, 1894, II, p. 324-325.
[22] Dwyer, Philip G., "'It Still Makes Me Shudder': Memories of Massacres and Atrocities during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars," War in History, Vol. 16, No. 4, November 2009, pp. 381-405, Sage Publications, Inc. p.387.
[23] Dwyer, Philip G., “Violence and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: massacre, conquest and the imperial enterprise,” Journal of Genocide Research, 2013, Vol. 15, No. 2, (pp.117-131) p.119.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Atteridge, A.H., Marshal Murat: King of Naples, Worley Publications, 1992
[26] According to local tradition, on January 16, 1799, a detachment of French soldiers emerged from the forest and advanced on the unsuspecting townsfolk, who were celebrating the vigil of St. Anthony the Abbot. Amid the chaos, the Faresi desperately called upon their glorious patron, who suddenly appeared before the French host clad in full Bourbon military regalia. Commanding the invaders to halt their advance, the soldiers foolishly ignored the saint’s warning and continued forward. In response, the trees erupted into blazing infernos, driving the enemy away. In some more fantastical versions, the trees are said to have sprung to life, in mythical Tolkienesque fashion, to rout the Grande Armée.