ABSTRACT
Swiss and Italian, submitted to the organization of satellite republics under constitutions worked out by local admirers of the Revolution, with the peremptory advice of French officials.
Practically everywhere they went, from Amsterdam to Mainz and from Basel to Naples, the armies of France could count on immediate support from critics of the Old Regime in each locality. Some of those who hailed the invaders as liberators were, as earlier noted, individuals educated to demand reform under the aegis of the Enlightenment. Others had belonged to revolutionary clubs which stepped forward to claim political power once the French arrived. There is no questioQ that in encouraging these elements, often reinforced by the return of former democratic exiles, the occupation authorities created a situation which made possible an unattractive settling of personal scores. A newly erected guillotine in Brussels or Geneva could not fail to excite both fear and disgust among established social groups. In addition, the conquerors often imposed constitutional reforms which, although reasonable enough in themselves, struck many of their intended beneficiaries as unnatural importations from abroad. If certain arrangements, notably the creation of neat geographical districts on the model of departements, had lasting effects all the way from Holland to the Ionian Islands, many others, including reorganized judicial systems, proved viable only so long as the French forces were on hand to enforce them. This mixture of artificial support for radical minorities and doctrinaire insistence on historically rootless institutional reforms created an impression that Jacobinism bloomed under the Tricolour - even after France had thrown its own Jacobins out of power in 1794.
