long and desperate
conflict in the narrow streets of Genoa the democrats were completely
worsted (May 23rd). The victors thereupon ransacked the houses of the
opposing faction and found lists of names of those who were to have
been proscribed, besides documents which revealed the complicity of
the French agents in the rising. Bonaparte was enraged at the folly of
the Genoese democrats, which deranged his plans. As he wrote to the
Directory, if they had only remained quiet for a fortnight, the
oligarchy would have collapsed from sheer weakness. The murder of a
few Frenchmen and Milanese now gave him an excuse for intervention. He
sent an aide-de-camp, Lavalette, charged with a vehement diatribe
against the Doge and Senate, which lost nothing in its recital before
that august body. At the close a few senators called out, "Let us
fight": but the spirit of the Dorias flickered away with these
protests; and the degenerate scions of mighty sires submitted to the
insults of an aide-de-camp and the dictation of his master.

The fate of this ancient republic was decided by Bonaparte at the
Castle of Montebello, near Milan, where he had already drawn up her
future constitution. After brief conferences with the Genoese envoys,
he signed with them the secret convention which placed their
republic--soon to be renamed the Ligurian Republic--under the
protection of France and substituted for the close patrician rule a
moderate democracy. The fact is significant. His military instincts
had now weaned him from the stiff Jacobinism of his youth; and, in
conjunction with Faypoult and the envoys, he arranged that the
legislative powers should be intrusted to two popularly elected
chambers of 300 and 150 members, while the executive functions were to
be discharged by twelve senators, presided over by a Doge; these
officers were to be appointed by the chambers: for the rest, the
principles of religious liberty and civic equality were recognized,
and local self-government was amply provided for. Cynics may, of
course, object that this excellent constitution was but a means of
insuring French supremacy and of peacefully installing Bonaparte's
regiments in a very important city; but the close of his intervention
may be pronounced as creditable to his judgment as its results were
salutary to Genoa. He even upbraided the demagogic party of that city
for shivering in pieces the statue of Andrea Doria and suspending the
fragments on some of the i