A Knight Hospitaller's Nostalgia for Italy During The
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A Knight Hospitaller’s Nostalgia for Italy during the 1790s David F. Allen 1 The British Library contains numerous manuscripts relevant to the Sovereign, Military and Hospitaller Order of St John, including Additional Manuscripts 64099-64104, which were purchased for the Library at Sotheby’s on 27 January 1987 as lot 834. Of unknown provenance and written mostly in French, partly in Italian and English, these manuscripts comprise an illustrated description in epistolary form of France, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Portugal, and England by Louis Jérôme de Goujon de Thuisy, a French Hospitaller Knight of St John who travelled between 1778 and 1806, though some of his annotations extend at least to 1819. Goujon de Thuisy’s text includes accounts of leading artists, sculptors, engravers and literary figures as well as of the sights and antiquities he encountered. His text is illustrated with engravings, watercolours, drawings and maps, as well as the music and words of songs. Strictly speaking, a travelling Knight of St John, even one of Goujon de Thuisy’s refinement, could not be said to be on the Grand Tour. Nonetheless much in his manuscripts may be comprehended within the most discriminating definition of a Grand Tourist’s concerns in the eighteenth century.2 This Knight Hospitaller believed that travelling was to no purpose unless one travelled light and with a head already full of relevant reading about one’s intended destination. In striking relief to Goujon de Thuisy’s journeys after Napoleon’s demise is the Italian focus of this Knight of St John’s nostalgia during the 1790s, even as the peninsula was being transformed under his eyes by the descent of the revolutionary armies from France. At Malta (where his Order’s conventual residence had been established since 1530), Goujon de Thuisy wrote the main text of his ‘Description of Europe’ in the winter of 1797, dismayed by General Bonaparte’s re-arrangement of the Italian states in the Treaty of Campoformio. Goujon de Thuisy wanted to recall the various Italies he had known before their metamorphosis by the French invasion of 1796. This itself had been hanging like the sword of Damocles since 13 January 1793, when a Roman mob had assassinated the French diplomat, Nicolas-Jean-Hugon de Basseville.3 Goujon de Thuisy’s response to these Italian events of the 1790s remained aesthetic rather than military, contrasting with the counter-revolutionary career of his kinsman, Jean- Baptiste Charles de Goujon de Thuisy, with whom he had shared military training at Malta in 1771. Where Jean-Baptiste Charles exemplified the martial valour expected of a Knight of St John and officer in the royalist armies (eventually returning to France with the Bourbons as a maréchal de camp), Louis Jérôme had always had delicate health, sometimes 1 I remain grateful to Professor D. M. Wood of Birmingham University for sharing with me his knowledge and appreciation of French culture in the eighteenth century. 2 For some incisive comments on the Grand Tour, see Robert Oresko, ‘The British Abroad’, Durham University Journal , lxxix (1987), pp. 349-63. 3 The image of the assassinated envoy was highlighted by the Jacobins in Paris and amongst the Jacobin students of the French Academy in Rome, founded by Louis XIV for the education of young painters, sculptors and architects. Basseville (1753-93) had been sent to Rome by the French envoy to Naples and had encouraged the students of the French Academy besides insulting Pius VI’s cardinal secretary of state, Francesco Saverio de Zelada, and Cardinal de Bernis, the Protector of the French Church. 1 eBLJ 2006, Article 1 A Knight Hospitaller’s Nostalgia for Italy during the 1790s lacking energy even for the travels which he planned as his release from the boredom of life in Malta.4 He was a misfit for this knightly, Hospitaller vocation chosen for him at birth in Champagne by his parents, who had observed the custom of their house by sending a younger son to Malta. Goujon de Thuisy’s distaste for militarism was shared unwittingly with his contemporary Vittorio Alfieri, whose strictures on the French Republic Goujon de Thuisy quoted with approval in his own and understandably less celebrated travel journal.5 In 1797 Goujon de Thuisy’s heart ached because of his separation from the arts and antiquities of Rome and because he was anxious about Pius VI, Supreme Protector of the Order of St John, whom he apostrophized as one maligned by a corrupt century but whose virtues would be vindicated by posterity. Shyly addressing himself to the Braschi pontiff, Goujon de Thuisy began writing for himself and his nephews (in case they should ever retrace his journeys in happier times) a description of the Italian peninsula and Sicily as he had known them before Pius VI’s struggle with the French Republic and his humiliation at Tolentino in 1797 (fig. 1). The beauties of Renaissance Italy had been enriched by the emotions of Baroque connoisseurs and it was this continuity which Goujon de Thuisy intended to set down for himself and his relatives. He quoted Tasso at the outset of his ‘Description of Europe’: Quanto mi gioverà narrar ad altrui Le novite vedute, e dir; ‘io fui’. Of course Goujon de Thuisy’s descriptions never match, in that age of travel literature and cosmopolitan sentiment, those found in the pages of de Brosses, Goethe, Alfieri or Stendhal.6 Yet Goujon de Thuisy’s recurring reflections on Rome at least echoed an insight expressed by Goethe in 1786, ‘Rome is a world, and one needs years just to find one’s place in it. How fortunate those travellers are who merely look and leave!’7 ‘What people believe to be true about their past is usually more important in determining their behavior and responses than truth itself ’.8 This aphorism aids understanding of how the Hospitallers’ medieval foundation had survived as a seemingly obscurantist corporation of Catholic noblemen into the Europe of Enlightenment and Revolution and prompts our interpretation of the Italian focus of Goujon de Thuisy’s nostalgia during the 1790s. From his billet at Malta in 1797, he looked back to his first visit to Italy and Sicily in 1771, when he had been guided by an older and learned tutor, M. Héricart de Thury.9 Again like Goethe, 4 There are some papers illustrative of Jean-Baptiste Charles de Goujon de Thuisy in series T of the National Archives in Paris, as described by the archivist Philippe Bechu, Papiers d’origine privée tombés dans le domaine public (2001) http://www.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr/chan/chan/fonds/edi/sa/t.htm. See also J. Godechot, The Counter-Revolution, Doctrine and Action 1789-1804 (London, 1972), pp. 296-314. 5 Vittorio Alfieri (1749-1803) had loathed his time at the Military Academy of Turin and had dubbed Frederick II of Prussia the head of a military camp. Initially sympathetic to all things French, Alfieri was driven by Bonaparte’s First Italian Campaign into isolation and study of classical Greek at Florence. 6 Charles de Brosses (1709-77), ‘le Président de Brosses’, magistrate of the Burgundy parlement, travelled in Italy 1739-40, during which time he wrote the celebrated letters which were not published until long after his death, in 1799. Goethe had travelled in Italy during 1786-88. Stendhal (Henri Beyle, 1783-1842) published in 1817 both Histoire de la peinture en Italie and Rome, Naples, et Florence en 1817. 7 J. W. Goethe, Italian Journey, translated by Robert R. Heitner, Goethe’s Collected Works, vol. vi (Princeton, 1994), p. 121. 8 Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, 1993), as quoted by Jennifer R. Goodman, Chivalry and Exploration 1298-1630 (Woodbridge, 1998), p. 1. 9 Add. MS. 64100, f. 3b. Add MS. 64099, which describes Goujon de Thuisy’s travels through the Bernese Oberland in August 1778, is dedicated to M. Héricart de Thury. 2 eBLJ 2006, Article 1 A Knight Hospitaller’s Nostalgia for Italy during the 1790s Fig.1. Scenes of Rome. Add. MS. 64100, f. 95r. 3 eBLJ 2006, Article 1 A Knight Hospitaller’s Nostalgia for Italy during the 1790s Goujon de Thuisy believed that travelling was a vanity unless the traveller’s head was full of reading about his destination.10 When his brother Hospitaller, Joseph de la Porte, had implored Goujon de Thuisy to take from Paris in 1792 one of his kinsmen as a travelling companion through Italy, and thereby assist this youth to escape the Revolution, Goujon de Thuisy was reluctant, since Hippolyte de la Porte was unprepared for the artistic marvels awaiting him in Italy. But as a result of travelling together, Hippolyte de la Porte became one of Goujon de Thuisy’s friends, and was privileged eventually to be addressed in some of the letters which comprise this Knight of St John’s travel journal.11 Before visiting Rome in 1792 with young de la Porte in tow, Goujon de Thuisy had spent 1778 visiting the Bernese Oberland as well as contrasting places such as Plombières, Remiremont, Ballon and the Vosges.12 In 1790 Goujon de Thuisy had travelled through the Netherlands.13 When in Rome during 1792, Goujon de Thuisy met his old friend the duchesse de Brissac, another refugee who had been welcomed by Pius VI and by Cardinal de Bernis, Protector of the French Church. Bernis had been resident in Rome since 1769, first as Louis XV’s ambassador and then as Louis XVI’s representative. The cardinal had found quarters in Rome also for Louis XVI’s sisters, Princess Adelaide and Princess Victoire, les mesdames de France, who were of course included in Goujon de Thuisy’s social calls.14 Otherwise this Knight Hospitaller and his young protégé, Hippolyte de la Porte, spent their time in Rome like countless Grand Tourists before them, by observing and admiring the city’s arts and architecture.