The French army occupied the city on 15 May. An official report to Bonaparte, on this occasion, reported that the ordinary people of Venice “retired in silence to their homes, exclaiming with tears—Venice is no more! Saint Mark is fallen!” The lion of Saint Mark was indeed toppled from its column, and a “tree of liberty” erected in the square. The ducal insignia, and the “Golden Book” of patrician membership, were ritually burned. The former doge, and members of the great council, joined in the dancing around the tree. Thus ended a polity that had endured for more than a thousand years. The most ancient government in the whole of Europe was another indirect casualty of the French Revolution.
Napoleon also plundered the art and treasures of the city, just as Venice had plundered Constantinople and the dominions of its empire. There is something apposite about the transference of the four bronze horses to Paris; they had been snatched by Venetians from Constantinople six hundred years before. They were always the spoils of victory. Then Napoleon bartered Venice itself. In the autumn of 1797 he handed it to the Austrians as part of the Treaty of Campo Formio. Eight years later, having defeated the Austrians, he took it back. In 1805 it became part of his unified kingdom of Italy. For Venice, accustomed to stand apart from the mainland, this was a further humiliation. It had never played any part in the burgeoning national consciousness of the Italians, and only reluctantly accepted its status as a peripheral part of a nation. In 1814 the city again returned to the control of Austria. It suffered these changes of regime with docility. It bowed its head. It was now a spectator of its own fate.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century Napoleon had instituted a policy of public works. A new royal palace was erected at the west end of Saint Mark’s Square. Churches and monasteries were pulled down to create public gardens just beyond the Arsenal. A new road, the Via Eugenia, now known as the Via Garibaldi, was built along the waterfront towards the gardens. The public works continued under Austrian occupation. The lagoon was fortified. The Accademia bridge, only the second bridge across the Grand Canal, was erected in 1854. Yet the most radical change of all consisted in the building of a railway bridge that connected Venice to the mainland; the city was no longer an island, and it lost its hallowed status as a refuge from the world. This meant, too, that the prime significance of the water had gone for ever. It became a city of mechanical, rather than of natural, time. It had, perhaps, been prophesied. In the early 1500s the doge, Andrea Gritti, consulted the Delphic oracle. He had been assailed by rumours concerning the imminent collapse of Venice. There appeared to him, beside the statue of Apollo, a panorama showing Venice surrounded by green fields rather than by the sea. The priest told him that this signified one thing: the republic would die when Venice became part of the mainland.
Throughout this period, in fact, there was an accelerating economic slump from which the city scarcely recovered in the twentieth century. The patrician class was emasculated, and one family in three simply died out. Some of the remaining nobles were awarded honorary titles by the Austrian government. But these were empty forms. They fooled nobody except their holders. The general population diminished, too, as a result of epidemic sickness and migration. There had always been beggars in Venice, but by the beginning of the nineteenth century the poverty and mendicancy became the most obvious aspect of city life. It was estimated that a third of the population depended on charity. This was precisely the time when the English Romantics became interested in Venice. They were drawn to decay and desuetude.
In some ways it was the most interesting period in the history of the city. The grass and weeds had sprung up in the
