ABSTRACT
The sister republics all belonged to what was there called the second zone of Europe, the region of urban civilization, a developed middle class and a free landowning peasantry, with exceptions for south Italy, where the new republicanism showed little strength. It was in the sister republics that the expanding wave of the French Revolution was most manifest. The observation applies to the area of the sister republics, none of which, except in Naples, had a native monarch to dethrone, but all of which menaced the former legal position of the church and the older socio-political ruling elites. It could neither check the ideological passions aroused in neighboring countries nor disown the sister republics once they were born. It was the strength of revolutionary sentiment in the invaded regions, when combined with the programs of French generals or other agents in the field, that produced the sister republics as a solution to the French problem.
