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The flights of other monarchs – 1798-1808 Laura de Mello e Souza Universidade de São Paulo

I. Between late November 1807 and early March 1808, the Portuguese Royal family fled to Brazil, marking one of the founding events of our nation’s history. While the same historiography that deems the prince regent a statesman has praised the Bragança court for its astuteness and skill in political maneuvering, those who consider Dom João the king of cowards have classified this flight as the ultimate disgrace and the death certificate of a dying court. While I will refrain from exploring the convolutions of historiography, both viewpoints undeniably contain a good measure of ideology—in fact, almost nothing but ideology. The facts themselves reinforce this idea, for at first glance the events seemed to have played out like the enredo—or theme—of a carnival school parade, like a soap opera, reifying a certain vision that we have come to construct of ourselves: What king, or what crown prince, had ever left his kingdom behind, to resettle in a possession, much less one overseas? And who had fled in the dark of the night, taking with him belongings, family, court, and government, journeying aboard sailing ships, confronting tempests and other dangers? What other monarchy had been able to survive Napoleon and keep a conservative government in power for quite some time? I can begin introducing my line of reasoning here, in answering these questions. Prior to 1807, two other kings had fled and, in the medium term, had made out all right: the king of Sardinia and the king of Naples, both on the same dates and in two installments: 1798 and 1806. As to attempts to flee, there were two others of import: preceding all the rest, the king of France, in 1791, who served as a model for those who followed; and a bit later, in 1808, the king of Spain, who almost set off for Mexico, clearly opting for the Portuguese model. It is interesting how the memory we have constructed of all these protagonists has many features in common: weak, indecisive, inept, and cowardly kings; ambitious, calculating, wanton, and deranged queens. While I do not want to deny the extraordinary or fantastic features of the flight of the Braganças, my proposal today is to question the singularity of the event. More than describing it or memorializing it, I intend to examine it alongside other, quite similar—indeed, almost identical—events. Rather than trivializing the episode, we can 2 thus better understand what is unique in historical processes. It can be both comfortable and comforting to believe we’re different in everything. Yet it is more productive to recognize the tensions—and the contradictions—lying between the same and the other, and this demands that we recognize what is the same. I want to stress that what interests me here is not the anecdotal, but rather a reflection on the crisis of the Ancien Régime. My path leads through a forest of facts and human figures, which I believe are indispensable to an understanding of history—something that sets this field apart from other sciences of the human being. At times, twentieth-century historiography showed a certain disregard for the weight of events when it came to explaining and understanding History, while nineteenth-century historiography taught us to venerate national history. In Brazil, we have suffered from both evils, and for a long time we tended to write history like turtles inside our shells, as if our processes were only our own processes, as if Brazil could be understood from within, from specific traits that were ours alone and no one else’s. So what I propose is an approach that links people and facts—a “connected history,” to use an expression dear to Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Serge Gruzinski. We cannot connect histories without an exhaustive analysis of the facts. And facts in themselves do not matter; they are never solely unique, although they are indeed also unique: when placed side by side and compared, historical facts reveal deep-lying processes and structures that might otherwise remain hidden. In history and in fiction, we find many references to kings who fled or wandered about throneless. One of Shakespeare’s most well-known passages has to do with a king who wanted so badly to flee that he was willing to give up his kingdom—which he was losing on the battlefield anyway (Bosworth Field)—for a horse. I am of course referring to Richard III. Defeats or uprisings forced royalty to flee or go into exile, and in Europe, in modern times, there was no scant number of such runaway or dethroned kings. In the eighteenth century alone, James II Stuart fled the British isles and came to die in Saint Germain en Laye in 1701; Stanislas Poniatowski, the illustrious king of Poland, was overwhelmed by the savagery of the partitioning of his country and eventually passed away in St. Petersburg, in 1798. In one passage of Voltaire’s Candide, the author satirizes these escapes by fleeing monarchs, with the hero sitting down to table with a number of them. So the flight of kings has never in itself constituted a unique event. But, there are flights, and there are flights. The ones I am interested in comparing were expressions of the crisis of the Ancien Régime, between 1798 and 3

1808. In my view, these are references to a kind of founding myth. The June 21st, 1791 escape of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and family to Montmédy—interrupted when the king and queen were captured at Varennes. They slipped away at night, evading revolutionary surveillance and confirming the persistent rumors that had been circulating since April, when the monarchs had practically become prisoners at the Tuileries. Ergo, a flight foretold—yet even so, successful for five days. But with its ultimate failure, the rift between the monarchy and the nation became irreparable and the revolutionary violence, unbridled. Before Varennes, however—and some days after the fall of the Bastille, on July 14, 1789—a new phenomenon began taking shape, likewise related to the set of facts I am analyzing here: the movement of people who left France, frightened by what was taking place there, a movement known as emigration. Contrary to what we might think, rich and poor, nobles and peasants emigrated. But what bears a direct connection to the flight of monarchs is the mobility of the noblemen, who at first headed for borderlands and then, as the revolutionary process gained ground, traveled as far as Russia, Sicily, Portugal, and the United States. Chateaubriand, the great name of French letters; Madame de Staël, daughter of Jacques Necker and one of the mothers of the novel; the Count de Damas, once responsible for the Neapolitan army—all were émigrés. Louis XVI’s two brothers, the Count of Provence—later Louis XVIII—and the Count of Artois—future Charles X—emigrated shortly after July 14th. Staël and the royal princes were among those who organized small ‘courts’ around them: the chateau of Coppet, in Staël’s case; castles and palaces on loan in Turin, Verona, Coblenz, Mitau, and London, in the case of the princes of the blood. Europe grew used to this movement; aristocratic life took on a temporary, itinerant tone, quite irresponsible at first, more tragic and pathetic as the Jacobins went about installing themselves in France and the possibility of return grew ever more remote. II

In 1789, Turin became the Count of Artois’ first residence outside of France. The countess, Maria Theresa, was daughter of the old king of Sardinia and duke of Piedmont, Victor Amadeus III, who was also the father of Maria Josephina, wife of the future Louis XVIII. Together with her husband, Maria Josephina also emigrated to Turin shortly thereafter. In all, three siblings married three siblings, because this monarch’s son—who would rise to the throne after his father’s death, in 1796, as Charles 4

Emmanuel IV—wed one of the princes’ other sisters: Maria Clotilde. Piedmont not only became the nest of the Bourbons; at the outset of the revolutionary process, it was also one of the most coveted destinations for émigrés because it lay along the border with France. The old king struggled in vain for neutrality, apprehensive about his own weakness—“the smallest of all the kings of Europe,” in the words of a great son of Turin, poet and patriot Vittorio Alfieri. Nevertheless, Sardinia was by no means some kingdom out of an operetta: the dynasty prided itself in being the continent’s oldest, its finances were stable, its soldiers enjoyed a fine reputation, the royal palaces were magnificent, its art collections famous throughout Europe. Dom Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho, Portuguese minister under Dom João and one of the minds behind the royal flight in 1807, was a great admirer of the kings and government of Piedmont, with which he was acquainted first hand, since he had been a diplomatic envoy there from 1779 to 1796. Regarding the king under whom he served—Victor Amadeus III—the then-diplomat called attention to his penchant for hard work and his attention to his family, as well as his intellectual preparedness. Dom Rodrigo watched as national sovereignty fell apart under the pressure of the advancing revolution, and he left a record of it in letters and dispatches. He married Dona Gabriela of San Marzano, from an illustrious Turin family, and when he returned to Lisbon, he continued to accompany from afar the vicissitudes of Sardinia, the fall of the monarchy, and the royal escape in late 1798. Dom Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho is one of the threads running through these stories of flight. In September 1792, France declared war on Sardinia, alleging that anti- revolutionary conspiracies were being hatched there. The king did what he could and what he knew how to do, even sending his sons-in-law and daughters away. In a letter to Maria Josephina, he wrote of his sorrow and his duties to the State, which eclipsed his duties to his family, and he confessed to his feeling that there was no way to preserve decorum under these circumstances, and that it would be best if they would all try to, quote, “prolong their existence,” unquote, until, with the help of God, better days would come. They didn’t come. The Austrian allies kept Sardinia on a slow boil while England, with a hungry eye on the island’s strategic position in the Mediterranean, enmeshed and compromised the tiny kingdom more and more. French pressure was growing along the borders, as the revolutionary government was upset over the émigré occupation of the Aosta Valley, which the residents of Piedmont watched with 5 complacent eyes. In the years just prior to the fall of the kingdom, in 1798, diplomatic documents indicate how the number of reciprocal accusations multiplied, with the French ridiculing the exaggerated piety and, quote unquote, “imbecility” of the Sardinian monarchs, as well as their secret military preparations. Those in Piedmont, on the other hand, gave emphasis to Jacobin treachery and violence and decried the public acts of republicanism and contempt for the monarchy. We see here the clash of two worldviews, one bourgeois and arriviste; the other, aristocratic and cornered. In 1795, Tuscany, Spain, and Prussia withdrew from the anti-French coalition. In early 1796, Bonaparte occupied northern Italy and inflicted upon it a series of famous defeats, firmly establishing his own military and political career. Between April and May, the Cherasco negotiations broke the back of Piedmont, and in October, while Naples was celebrating peace with France, Victor Amadeus III passed away, depressed by his impotence and humiliated by the French presence in his kingdom, which by that point had lost Nice and Savoy. The new king, Charles Emmanuel IV, did not boast the qualities of his father, nor of the two brothers who would succeed him: the Duke of Aosta—later Victor Emmanuel I—and the Duke of Genoa—Charles Felix I. He had an unbalanced temperament and when he was annoyed or upset, he was prone to nervous attacks suggestive of epilepsy. He was very religious and, as mentioned earlier, had married one of Louis XVI’s sisters, Maria Clotilde; but both spent most of their married life faithful to a vow of chastity and following the strictest body discipline. Of course, they had no children. This was the couple—increasingly headed by the queen, an extremely devout woman who was nevertheless quite at home with politics—that the June 1798 military occupation of Turin caught on the throne. In exchange for keeping the peace and safeguarding his subjects, right from the start Charles Emmanuel indicated he was ready for anything, even abdicating, as demanded by General Grouchy, commander of the citadel of Turin, in name of the victors. More bellicose, the Duke of Aosta wanted to resist but the king gave in. On December 8, during the act of abdication, Charles Emmanuel supposedly pointed to his wife and, invoking the founding myth of the royal odysseys of his day, said to his brother: “So you would have me sent to the gallows, along with this holy woman?” In turn, the ‘holy woman’ knelt down before the French generals, who were considering keeping Aosta in Turin as a hostage, and begged them not to imprison him. In the end, everything was worked out. In the agreement signed with General Joubert, who became the ruler of Piedmont, the king ordered his subjects to obey the French soldiers. Put out, the Duke of Aosta wrote 6 in his own hand: “I guarantee that I shall not raise any obstacle against the present act”—that is, the abdication. On December 9th, at five in the afternoon, Charles Emmanuel IV and his family left Turin in the midst of falling snow, escorted by the French; they traveled through the night, stopping only in Crescentino at ten the next morning. On the 12th, always under heavy snow, they crossed the Po River at dusk and reached Alessandria, where they were booed by crowds of people who wore the Phrygian cap of the Revolution on their heads. From then until their arrival in Florence over a month later—on January 17th, 1799—they lived a veritable via crucis. There were no suitable lodgings. Sometimes the travelers would sleep in a room underneath a stairs, where paneless windows let in the bitter cold; sometimes the feverish queen, who was spitting blood, would lie in the same bed that had served for an officer just the evening before, with tattered curtains precluding the slightest bit of privacy. At times they found comfort in the attention of a stranger, like the one in Stradella who offered them chocolate. Other times, they were left in the main square, like harlequins or circus performers, enduring the stares of passers-by while the entourage looked for some place to spend the night. At each stop, they held a mass and prayed for divine mercy. The queen was always busy fasting or engaging in mortifications—as if the pains of the trip were not enough. In Parma, the exhausted king fell victim to violent convulsions, and there they stayed for three weeks. A little beyond Bologna, the snowstorm held the carriages back, and part of the trip had to be made on foot. When the vehicles could finally get underway, one of the wheels came loose and dropped into an abyss—with the royal couple almost following suit. In Florence, Vittorio Alfieri—a liberal and a relentless anti-Absolutist who had left his native Piedmont to exile himself in Tuscany—went to pay tribute to the king: “It was two times my duty,” the ‘patriot’ noted in his memoirs, “as he had been my king, and was at that point most misfortunate. He received me very well, and upon seeing him I was moved more than a little, and on that day I felt what I had never felt before: a certain urge to serve him, seeing him so abandoned, and so incapable those few who were left him; and I would have offered myself, had I believed I could be of use to him; but I lacked any ability in those sorts of things and, in any case, it was too late.” Maria Clotilde and Charles Emmanuel also visited Pope Pius VI, an even more illustrious fugitive than they, swept away by the French troops that had proclaimed the Roman Republic early the previous year. On February 13th, at last, they commenced the final stage of the journey that would take them to Sardinia, the ‘mount of rocks’ over 7 which they would find themselves reigning from that point on. They reached Livorno. It would still be several days until the queen and family members could convince the king to board ship: his nerves shot, his convulsions coming more and more often, he showed no sign he would be able to control his panic about the sea. Finally, on February 24th, the winds were favorable and they weighed anchor: the monarch, along with his brothers, sisters-in-law, and aunts and uncles, made off on six merchant ships, escorted by a Portuguese frigate, the Andorinha, part of the British fleet in the Mediterranean; under the orders of Horace Nelson, the ship had left Palermo, from there heading to Livorno. On the first night of the crossing, a corsair appeared and fired two canon shots; it then silenced its guns and vanished. At last, on March 3rd, 1799, almost three months after leaving Turin, they disembarked in Cagliari and entered History as the first monarchs of Sardinia to step foot on the soil of the land that gave them their title. The initial reactions were of great jubilation. Making their way by small boat out to the Andorinha—which carried the royal couple—the viceroy plus representatives of the three assemblies met with the king right onboard. The court left the ships at four o’clock in the afternoon, reaching the docks over a bridge fashioned of carpeted boats. Sailors and fishermen unhitched the horses from the carriage that was to transport the monarchs and pulled it themselves from the Piazza della Dogana to Santa Lucia, where Charles Emmanuel and Clotilde called for the horses to be hitched back up again, saying they didn’t want men to do what should be done by animals. Giuseppe Manno, a noted mid-nineteenth-century Sardinian politician, left a colorful description of the king and queen’s arrival, in Giornale di un collegiale. He had imagined that this sort of people would go about covered in gold, silver, and precious gems, as in a children’s fairy tale. But the royal couple refused any pomp and circumstance, instead walking the narrow streets up to the castle, arm in arm, leading the rest of the royalty. There was general excitement. Those who didn’t shout hurrahs, broke into tears. And the princes were moved as well, greeting the people with eyes filled with affection. A crowd member remarked that at that moment perhaps the monarchs managed to forget, quoting, “their past misfortunes a bit, for all was not lost when there was still a people so devoted and so faithful.” The idyll was short-lived, on both sides. The viceroy—the Marquis Vivaldo Pasqua—left the palace to the new arrivals but took the furniture with him. So the king and queen of Sardinia ended up living in a gloomy, cold place that had been picked clean. Years later, the royal physician would describe the new residence of the 8 sovereigns of Savoy as a “hovel,” and would tell how the eyes of Louis XV’s granddaughter had filled with tears when she entered the castle. The population, in turn, soon grew annoyed with the throng of strangers invading the island; moreover, they felt they were being fleeced by the taxes levied on them. The Sardinian elites clashed with the Piedmont elites—mimicking what would happen around the same time with the nobility of Palermo, angered that the Neapolitan nobility was shown favor, and then again years later, in Brazil under Dom João, when those born in Brazil saw the Portuguese newcomers advance on government posts. The king and queen of Sardinia had taken nothing with them when they left, unlike those who were to flee later. Upon her departure, Maria Clotilde only agreed to accept a small amount offered by one of the ministers once her confessor had assured her that she was cheating neither the tax collector nor her subjects. Left behind in the sumptuous palaces of Piedmont were all the Crown Jewels, pearl-encrusted furniture, sculptures, silver sets, tapestries, porcelain from Japan, ancient suits of armor from the days of the ducal wars, and an impressive collection of paintings—which included works by Rafael, Brueghel, Dürer, Holbein, Guido Reni, Rubens, Veronese, Rembrandt, Teniers, Poussin, Canaletto, Claude Lorrain. Left behind as well were books and rare manuscripts, some coveted even by popes. The ornaments in the royal parks and gardens had a good deal of iron in them, which the French used in their artillery. Blankets and fabric found at the family’s residences were confiscated to swaddle the injured who were packing the hospitals. The documents preserved at Turin’s Public Archives give us a good idea of the method and system that guided French pillaging during the first moment of expansion, still revolutionary and republican. A model not just military and political but also cultural gained form during the occupation of Piedmont, and also that of Milan, Rome, and, soon after, Naples. Objects once belonging to royalty came to form a substantial part of the Louvre’s collection, which was coming into being at that precise moment. As the act of taking flight grew increasingly complex, the monarchs started carrying off with them all they could: money from the Treasury, State archives, sterling silver artifacts from churches, and whole libraries—just like the Braganças of Portugal. During one of the brief periods when the allies were getting the better of Bonaparte, Sardinia’s royal family left Cagliari aboard British ships (on September 18th, 1799), thinking they would go back to Turin. The new wave of spectacular French victories—including the Battle of Marengo, on June 14th, 1800—preempted 9 achievement of this goal. Poor, wretched, and ill, living off stipends from the Russian czar, from Great Britain, and from more modest allies like Portugal, the Savoys roamed about Italy a bit longer, praying and doing penance, until the queen eventually passed away in Naples and the king, despondent and suffering ever more from convulsions, decided to abdicate in favor of his brother, in 1802. He then withdrew to a Roman convent, where he stayed for the rest of his life, which ended on October 6th, 1819.

III.

Like the kingdom of Sardinia, the modern kingdom of Naples was born in the first half of the eighteenth century, in the context of Europe’s geopolitical reordering, following the end of the War of Spanish Succession and the Treaty of Utrecht. The kingdom was handed to the Bourbons of Spain, and Don Carlos—later Charles III of Spain—played a decisive role in organizing it. In 1759, he had to abandon a wholly remodeled Naples to assume the throne in Madrid, left vacant by the death of his brother, Ferdinand VI. A boy king—his son, the Infant Don Ferdinand—took his place. The young Ferdinand was entrusted to the care of tutors and ministers, the most influential of which was Tanucci. He was raised rather by the laws of nature, speaking the Neapolitan dialect, given to the great outdoors, a fanatic fisherman, and, like the Bourbons as a whole, crazy about the hunt. He came of age in 1767 and rose to the throne under the name of Ferdinand IV of Naples. The following year, he married one of the youngest daughter’s of Austrian Empress Maria Theresa: the archduchess Maria Carolina, lovely, cultured, of sharp intelligence, and a mite touched in the head. Of the Empress’s numerous offspring, Maria Carolina and Maria Antonia were a very close- knit pair. With an explosive, passionate temperament, Carolina was never to recover from what happened to her sister during the French Revolution, and she spent the remainder of her life wavering between a thirst for revenge and the awful fear that she might meet the same fate. Antonia had married Louis XVI and went down in History with the name they gave her in France: Antoinette. The kingdom of Naples encompassed Sicily—and hence it was also known as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, a designation only made official after the Treaty of Vienna. Strategically, its position meant it was extremely vital to controlling the Mediterranean, and the British—lords of the seas—always sought to make their presence felt both on terra firma and on the island. Carolina possessed greater political 10 talent and inclination than Ferdinand and, pursuant to her marriage contract, was supposed to—and in fact did—take a seat on the State Council as soon as she produced an heir. The king, who hadn’t much education, greatly admired Maria Theresa’s daughter, and would repeat time and again: “My wife knows everything.” Carolina remained an Austrian and a Habsburg to the core, and in all things sought the counsel of her emperor brothers, especially Leopoldo II, to whom she was greatly attached. In 1790, Carolina’s eldest daughter, Maria Theresa, married the heir to the Austrian throne, later known as Francis II. Besides being a Germanophile, Carolina allowed the English to meddle more and more in the kingdom’s affairs, through three figures in particular: John Acton, something of an adventurer, who became an all- powerful minister of the kingdom and was reputed to be her lover; Lord Nelson, rising star of the British navy and, after Abukir, in September 1798, a hero celebrated by all of France’s enemies; and, lastly, Sir William Hamilton, scholar of volcanoes and archeology, sent to serve as ambassador to Ferdinand’s court in 1764 and married for the second time, to an adventurer befitting those Romanesque days: Emma Hart, who to the scandal of the British court became Lady Hamilton. By the time Hamilton finally left Naples in the early nineteenth century, he had become a local institution and, together with his wife, wielded great influence over the monarchs. Following the events of 1789, Maria Carolina became obsessively anti-French. When news of Marie Antoinette’s execution arrived, the queen fell ill and was confined to a room, where she spent days out of her mind. Carolina grew closer and closer to the Hamiltons and to Lord Nelson, who, from late 1798 through all of 1799, left neither Naples nor Emma Hamilton, with whom he had fallen in love. Carolina upset her husband’s efforts to remain neutral. With French troops controlling northern Italy, the king tried to devise a treaty with the Directory, but the invasion of Rome, the proclamation of the republic, and the imprisonment of the Pope persuaded him to march on the Eternal City in November of 1798, in a show of bravado that irritated Bonaparte and sounded the death knell on the policy of neutrality. Between December 7th and 21st of 1798, while in the north the king of Sardinia abdicated and left Turin behind amid blinding snow, the events in Naples got ahead of themselves. With British ships anchored in the gulf, Nelson took on an ever more active role. During the burlesque episode of the invasion of Rome, he had already played a fundamental one. Now, with the support of the Hamiltons, he insisted the monarchs flee to Sicily. As an actual Neapolitan king, following centuries of foreign control of the 11 region, Ferdinand enjoyed tremendous popularity, especially among the people—or, as it would be put in the days of the Roman Empire, among the plebs. Naples had legions of lazzaroni—members of the lowest social stratum—and Ferdinand thought he could count on them if the French came down from Rome. Naples too had an enlightened, Masonic, and liberal nobility; it was perhaps the only region of Italy that saw an Enlightenment deserving of the name, with Vico, Genovesi, Galiani, Filangieri. Feeling that he had the support of the lowest social strata and knowing that the aristocracy was flirting with the French, the king hesitated. The queen, in a jumble of nerves, set about packing up valuables and other belongings, with the aid of Lady Hamilton. According to the narratives of that day, everyone in the city knew that between the palace and the British Embassy, preparations were underway for an escape, and baggage was being loaded through a secret passageway leading to the docks. Processions of penitents paraded through the streets, and all waited for the blood of San Gennaro, patron saint of Naples, to turn to liquid—for its failure to do so would be a portentous omen. Deserters were disarmed and ministers imprisoned, one of them committing suicide. On December 20th, the crowd gathered before the royal palace, asking for weapons to defend the city. One poor royal messenger was mistaken for a Jacobin, and dismembered; his head was stuck on a spear and displayed before Ferdinand IV. The queen ranted that they would become prisoners of the malefactors, just like Louis and Antoinette at the Tuileries. On the 21st, around nine o’clock at night, Nelson personally accompanied the king and queen and their numerous royal offspring to his ship, the Vanguard. Prince Caracciolo, commander of the Naples navy, was not happy about this, but he had no way of complaining: the Neapolitan sailors had fled and, once again, it was Nelson who had provided the crew, recruited from among British seamen. Six war vessels and about twenty merchant ships lay ready in the gulf, far from the dock so what everyone already suspected would not become actual public knowledge. Terrible weather hampered transportation from the dock to the ships. The English writer Cornelia Knight, a participant in these events, has left us a vivid description. Rushing to the dock—she writes—came major figures like Minister Acton, diplomats like Austrian Ambassador Prince Esterhazy, courtiers, ladies in waiting, British businessmen, French émigrés, servants, chefs, the chief huntsman, the royal confessor, and the head of the Treasury—carrying money and valuables estimated at 2,500,000 sterling pounds. The cold was harsh, the ships packed with people. The 12 writer and her mother were taken to a Portuguese vessel, where the cabins were jammed with a confusion of women speaking a Babel of languages of the world, and a wealthy Russian woman was the only one who managed to find a bunk. The crew of the Vanguard worked feverishly to transform a warship into a royal vessel, mending sails and painting walls. At the break of day, on the 22nd, the disconsolate Neapolitans realized the monarchs had already left, prefiguring what would transpire eight years later when the residents of Lisbon realized that Dona Maria, Dom João, and the Portuguese court had put to sea in the middle of the night. Ferdinand left behind a proclamation, justifying his departure with the excuse that he had gone for reinforcements, leaving General Francisco Pignatelli in charge of the government and General Mack, an Austrian imported by Carolina, responsible for the military. But a mighty storm hit and the ships had to remain at anchor, unable to depart or even to communicate with each other. When the tempest had passed, the Vanguard found itself surrounded by boats filled with delegations of subjects, begging them to stay. On the night of the 23rd, having spent forty-eight hours at anchor in the gulf, buffeted by stormy seas, the Vanguard bore off, accompanied by the other craft. A number of witnesses left accounts that give us a glimpse into the ensuing horror. A fierce wind howled, while lightning ripped open the clouds—always the sign of a furious storm in the Mediterranean. Sails were torn to shreds. The waves rose above the sea like mountains. The Vanguard lost one of its masts, and the crew was ready to sacrifice the main one. No one could keep their footing on the tilted quarterdeck. Princess Castelcicala, wife of the future ambassador of Naples to London, fell and cracked open her head, right beside Lord Nelson. The royal confessor broke his arm. Little six-year-old Prince Albert, second-to-the-last of the monarchs’ children, went into convulsions and died in the arms of Lady Hamilton, who more than rose to the occasion, tending to all who took sick. Hamilton shut himself up in a cabin, a loaded pistol in each hand, ready to kill himself if the ship were to sink, for he didn’t want to die while gulping down salt water. The vessels all smelled of vomit, fresh paint, and dirty bodies. Nelson, a hardened sailor, would always recall this voyage as the most horrendous of his career. Early on the morning of December 26th, under the king’s flag and followed by Admiral Caracciolo’s ship, Lord Nelson’s Vanguard entered the bay of Palermo. The city was meant to house 2,000 people. The miserable queen withdrew to Colli Palace, 13 on the outskirts of the city. It was snowing, and she found the place dismal, dark, bitter cold, and unfurnished. There were no rugs or fireplaces in the rooms; the windows were warped; the doors wouldn’t shut. In a letter, she wrote that it all seemed “African,” and she would rather be dead, together with her little son, than living as if at a temporary inn. From that point on, Carolina never quit conspiring. The Hamiltons took ill, Sir William with hepatic fever, Emma with exhaustion after twelve nights of vigil. Nelson was enraged by the news from England that the command of operations in Egypt had been handed over to Rear Admiral Sidney Smith—for whom Nelson nursed a profound hatred, and another figure that ties these stories of flight together. Undismayed, the king ate well before disembarking at nine o’clock in the morning, in the company of his favorite dogs, who had been brought from Caserta palace. From then on, it seems he thought of nothing but the hunt. As was to happen years later with the House of Bragança, the monarchs of Naples suffered harsh criticism for transferring the court to Palermo rather than face humiliation and expulsion, like the Pope and the King of Sardinia, or meet a violent death, like the Bourbons of France. In Naples, a liberal revolt along the lines of the French model broke out, and on January 23rd, 1799, the Parthenopaean Republic was proclaimed. I won’t go into the details of the bloodbath that smothered it between late June and early July of 1799, led by Nelson and watched by the king, who remained on the Vanguard, fishing and shooting sea birds while longtime collaborators of his, like Caracciolo, were executed. But these events were decisive for Ferdinand VI, who, with the support of the lazzaroni—the urban plebs—and the guerrillas that had come up from Calabria, managed to regain the capital for a few more years. He entered it on June 27th, 1802, in a different context, when peace seemed to have returned to Europe.

IV. As we know, however, the truce was short-lived. Bonaparte crowned himself emperor, built his identity as Napoleon, and went on to amass victories against the coalitions, the most spectacular being the Battle of Austerlitz, on December 2nd, 1805. On February 11th, 1806—all on the same day—queen Maria Carolina headed from Naples to Palermo, while the dethroned king of Sardinia, Victor Emmanuel I, set sail with his family from Gaeta to Cagliari. Both were on the run for the second time. Carolina, who went with their daughters and the heir, had resisted the idea of departure, imagining that she would never see Naples again—which turned out to be the case. Her 14 husband, Ferdinand, had fled two weeks earlier, on January 23rd, impatient to return to Sicily, a land he had come to love, and also because he was not really given to acts of bravery: the French were in the habit of saying that Carolina was the only real man in Naples. In late 1805, Napoleon had made his famous declaration to his soldiers, in which he said he could no longer stand the betrayals and treachery of the Court of Naples, poisoned by the British presence, and that from then on, its king would no longer reign. Two years later, the Moniteur would carry an analogous proclamation about the House of Bragança, opining that destruction was the inevitable end of all who associated with England. While the Savoys once again left practically empty-handed, Carolina— mimicking her actions of years earlier—ordered a veritable relocation. The Arquimedes was loaded with furniture, materiel from the arsenal, money from the public coffers and banks, and the herds of animals living at the royal palace of Caserta. As one historian as pointed out, the symmetry of these two flights is accentuated by the frightful tempest that struck, with southerly winds and choppy seas. A frigate, a corvette, and twenty-six transport ships were captured by the French. The people, however, remained indifferent, marked by the 1799 massacre. On February 16th, the queen made safe harbor at the much-hated Palermo, one day after Joseph Bonaparte entered Naples. The Lavagna papers, a set of various kinds of documents from the archive of Sassari, in Sardinia, show that contemporaries did not miss the direct ties between these flights. On February 12th, one journal tells us that one of Victor Emmanuel I’s captains of the guard had reached the island and guaranteed, quoting, “the approaching departure of our sovereign for Sardinia and the effected departure of the king of Naples for Sicily, the queen having remained in Naples with the family.” What follows suggests other connections, pertinent to my line of reasoning. Again quoting: “Here, appropriate lodging was soon arranged for the King, his entourage, and for the three diplomats, that is, from Russia, England, and Portugal.” End quote. Victor Emmanuel disembarked in Cagliari on February 17th, doing so for the second time in his life but for the first time as the king—albeit dethroned—of Sardinia. Over the years, Portugal would remain one of the closest friends of Sardinia, helping the Savoys in exile under various circumstances. The country in fact responded to appeals by King Charles Emmanuel IV, laid out in a letter to Dona Maria the First at the time of the first flight, on March 8, 1799, five days after arriving in Cagliari: “I hope that the friendly and allied Courts will be concerned with bettering my lot. Your Majesty 15 can well understand how I and my family are counting on and hoping for the good gr ces of the Court of Portugal, especially at a time when the affairs of Europe are being r ordered.” In 1803, records show that the House of Savoy was granted a subsidy of 25,000 cruzados. In 1810, there was word of a deposit of money in Lisbon, coming from a subsidy provided by the regent of Portugal to the king of Sardinia. Two years later, on a trip to the island, Francis Ferdinand, archduke of Austria-Este, wrote a description of this kingdom, in which he emphasized that, although no diplomatic relations were maintained with the court in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the king of Sardinia had relations, quote, “not just of peace but of friendship” with the “kingdom of Portugal and of Brazil, that is, with the reigning house of Bragança.” On the ‘mountain of stones’ which, in the eyes of its detractors, constituted Sardinia, the life of the Savoys remained tough and taxing. While etiquette may have been observed—including the use of uniforms and of carriages—habits were simple and methodical. On the outside, the so-called royal palace looked fine, but all water had to be brought in, the furniture was humble, the floors bare, and the walls poorly painted. The rooms served more than one purpose: the Reception Hall was also where meals were taken, dancing was done, and a bit of everything involving public life took place. The kitchen was small and ugly, there was no wine cellar, nor was there any place for firewood or stables.

V.

The 1807 flight of the Braganças belongs to this second context of royal getaways, subsequent to Austerlitz, Tilsitt, and the Continental Blockade. Varennes was a kind of founding myth because it set an example for the rather absolute monarchs who were afraid of losing both throne and head. It also served to show what shouldn’t be done, and the escapes were perfected bit by bit. Charles Emmanuel IV’s flight was honorable; he abdicated and carried off nothing of the public treasury, giving in to shame and forfeiting his rights in favor of his brother. Carried out in two acts, the flights of Ferdinand of Naples were much more questionable, triggering a memorable bloodbath and splitting the country in two: one part French and liberal; the other, monarchic and conservative. The escape of Dom João, which was more like the one from Naples than the one from Piedmont, and which was the fifth in a series, perhaps saw greater doses of cunning and shrewdness because he could draw inspiration from 16 four previous examples, tying them to the long Portuguese tradition endorsing the inevitable move of the capital of the Empire from Lisbon to Portuguese America. All of these flights complemented Varennes: what hadn’t been done then, was done later. The questions they raise are analogous: Were they right or wrong to flee? Were they patriots or cowards? But they transpired in various contexts. In the final analysis, perhaps these flights might not have occurred were it not for the execution of the Capets, but they should still be understood in the light of two major, and specific, conjunctures: the first being the campaigns in Italy, which garnered glory for Bonaparte and corralled the small Italian states; the second, after Austerlitz and Tilsitt, when the Continental Blockade left secondary powers no way out and no options, and when Great Britain bared its teeth in earnest. Facts that had such similar anatomy, and cloaked in such common stereotypes: the king, weak and indecisive; the queen, frivolous, crazy, lewd, and lascivious; the king-father who abandons and betrays the people-son. The monarchs also found themselves entangled in quite singular historical processes. Yet the consequences were distinct and unique. Varennes completes itself in these other episodes because they hit the target aimed at by that first flight: preserving the old Capetian dynasty. The latest research shows that Louis XVI didn’t want to flee in order to organize and, upon his return, metamorphose into a constitutional monarch: recently discovered documents of the Bombelles family indicate that the king was more concerned with preserving the dynasty than the nation. The foiled escape sealed the demise of the monarchy and, in the medium run, that of the dynasty. The republican Madame Cavaignac was to say with conviction: “I don’t like the Bourbons, and I am most pleased to tell of the bad things I know about them. They have done evil and they do evil wherever they go, the branch of the first-born and the branch of the youngest, in France, in Italy, and in Spain.” These other flights, however, preserved the dynasties. For Mona Ozouf, Varennes brought an irreversible rift between king and nation. This was true for France, where the nation was being born. It was not so true in Portugal, where the colony was lost but the heart of the monarchy was safeguarded until 1910. Perhaps it didn’t hold true for Naples, where King Lazzarone returned to the applause of the people in 1815 and managed to keep his dynasty alive until 1860—a dynasty that in fact gave Brazil its second Empress, Dona Teresa Cristina. And it certainly was not true for Piedmont, which a few years later became a kingdom and, in 1860, captained the unification of 17

Italy under the leadership of the Savoys, from 1821 on recognized as monarchs in Piedmont as well. The episodes highlighted here guaranteed the continuity of runaway dynasties and may have helped sustain traces of the Ancien Régime down through the nineteenth century, demonstrating—as Arno Meyer has argued—that tradition carried greater weight than many of us would once have liked to admit. Within this gamut of weak monarchs and secondary kingdoms, the Savoys were, over time and from a European perspective, the ones who proved most successful: their crown only toppled in 1945, at the end of World War II, when the world no longer had anything to do with the age of Charles Emmanuel IV or Victor Emmanuel I. Perhaps it is more of a generalization than one would like, to say that from this set of flights, inside of Europe Italy was born, while outside of it, Brazil was. In any case, the flight of the Portuguese Braganças was not a unique event, or incomparable in its consequences, just as Dom João’s vicissitudes were not more fantastic than those of other monarchs. It should be emphasized that this was a conjuncture marked by the retreat of the conservatives and, at the same time, by the rise of new historical facts, such as the appearance of nation-states. While regard for rhetoric has kept me true to the term ‘flight’ in my talk today, greater historical rigor obliges me to defer to coeval sources and consider these actions as a constituent part of Europe’s anti-revolutionary emigration. For historians devoted to constructing national memories and, among these, especially in the Portuguese and Brazilian cases, these monarchs indeed fled. But for their contemporaries, who were able to observe the episodes with greater calm and less surprise than later generations, they emigrated. Writing to the lords of the Admiralty while the Portuguese court was readying its departure, on November 25, 1807, Rear Admiral Sidney Smith referred to the episode as “the measure of emigration.” Five days later, when he was telling the Emperor of the French about his entry into Lisbon, Junot remarked on the necessary confiscation, quoting, “of the assets of the Crown and those of the families that we may call émigrés.” If the first reference suggests a certain hesitation in light of the novelty of this phenomenon, other references scattered through the remainder of the correspondence make broad use of the term, and on March 11th, 1808, General Junot goes on quite naturally about the major losses suffered on the tobacco contract, quoting again, due to the “effect caused by the emigration of the prince of Brazil.” 18

In conclusion, there are clear connections between these episodes, worthy of investigation. The trajectory of some of these figures is the living expression of such connections, and their study may help us to better understand the structural phenomena underpinning them. For now, I can name two figures who certainly tied these flights together: Dom Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho, diplomat and later minister under Dona Maria I and Dom João, and Sidney Smith, one of the British navy’s main officers back then. As we can infer from his dispatches, Dom Rodrigo was a welcomed regular at the Royal House of Sardinia, and I believe it was he who linked tradition—the idea of moving the court, a longstanding notion within Portuguese political thought—with the new practice taking shape before his eyes: the actual flight of monarchs with their courts and bureaucratic apparatus. Sidney Smith, Nelson’s arch-adversary, was in Naples at the time of the second flight, first ensuring that Ferdinand I remained on the throne and later, when this proved unfeasible, lending support to the Royal House in Sicily. The following year, he was to do the same for the House of Bragança, which he helped move to Rio de Janeiro and, once in Brazil, helped to maintain on the throne. This is not to mention his steady support for the ideas Dona Carlota Joaquina nursed about the Prata region—even after Dom Rodrigo, Dom João, and Lord Strangford had withdrawn what meager support they had previously shown. Lastly, Smith kept in constant touch with Sardinia throughout this period, visiting it in 1814, when he dined onboard his ship with king Victor Emmanuel I. So much is left to explore, beyond the apparently pathetic fate of the weak—that is, of the secondary powers vanquished by the advance of France’s Great Nation between 1792 and 1815. I can say that I have learned three lessons so far. The first has to do with the power that weak kings and queens could wield in a context where everything was in constant flux, and when historical time seemed remarkably rapid. The second lesson has to do with a coincidence: that all these monarchies were constructed upon discontinuous territories—in the Portuguese case, an Empire (which made all the difference). Sovereigns like those from Modena and Tuscany also drifted, but without their courts and without their bureaucracy; without, in short, having any land of their own to shelter them. They were monarchs like those in Voltaire’s Candide, good for playing a role in Venice’s carnival. The third and final lesson is about the tight ties between these stories, which on the one hand relativize and on the other reinforce the notion that each of these episodes was unique and that the relationship between events and structures must necessarily be taken into account. If the flight of the Portuguese 19 royal family in 1807 was much less singular than it might appear, its consequences were decisive. Without them, we Brazilians would not be what we are today, or at least not in the way that we are.