annexed by France in 1792, and a stalemate was reached
until Napoleon’s invasion in April 1796. In his first major
continental campaign, by early 1797, Napoleon had
conquered almost all Northern Italy, except for Venice,
which was taken by the Austrians. The Treaty of Campo
Formio, signed with the Austrians in October 1797, ended
the War of the First Coalition and recognized a number of
French-controlled republics in Northern Italy. However, the
French continued to expand their control over Italy even
after this treaty, invading the Papal States and establishing
the Roman Republic in March 1798. In January 1799,
Naples was conquered and the Parthenopean Republic
created. With the exception of Venice, which remained
Austrian, the French now controlled the entire Italian
peninsula either directly, as in the case of Savoy, or through
satellite states, such as the Cisalpine, Ligurian, Roman,
and Parthenopean republics.
There was further back-and-forth in the War of the
Second Coalition, between 1798 and 1801, but this ended
with the French essentially remaining in control. The French
revolutionary armies quickly started carrying out a radical
process of reform in the lands they’d conquered, abolishing
the remaining vestiges of serfdom and feudal land relations
and imposing equality before the law. The clergy were
stripped of their special status and power, and the guilds in
urban areas were stamped out or at the very least much
weakened. This happened in the Austrian Netherlands
immediately after the French invasion in 1795 and in the
United Provinces, where the French founded the Batavian
Republic, with political institutions very similar to those in
France. In Switzerland the situation was similar, and the
guilds as well as feudal landlords and the Church were
defeated, feudal privileges removed, and the guilds
abolished and expropriated.
What was started by the French Revolutionary Armies
was continued, in one form or another, by Napoleon.
Napoleon was first and foremost interested in establishing
firm control over the territories he conquered. This
sometimes involved cutting deals with local elites or putting
his family and associates in charge, as during his brief
control of Spain and Poland. But Napoleon also had a
genuine desire to continue and deepen the reforms of the