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546 David Laven

I do not wish to dwell on the causes of the collapse of Venetian
independence. The Venetian Republic did not expire because of
mask-wearing, whoring, gambling, or, indeed, neutrality; it col-
lapsed because of the military superiority of French forces and the
total absence of scruple on the part of Bonaparte as commander of
the Armée d’Italie. Bizarrely, anglophone historians and commen-
tators continue to repeat the tired story of Venice as a city of the
Ridotto and the coffee house, of cicisbei and Carnival, of Goldoni
and Longhi, somehow equating these with the failure of republican
government. Just as it seemed beyond the comprehension of the
anglophone poets and scholars of the early nineteenth century to
attribute the collapse of the Serenissima to the Directory’s most tal-
ented and violent general, it seems beyond many later twentieth-
and twenty-first-century historians to understand that Venice was
just one of dozens of states that Napoleon wiped from the map of
Europe. British and American historians glibly continue to dismiss
the history of the Venetian Republic in the century after the loss of
Candia as a narrative of terminal decline, often willfully ignoring
the existing secondary literature.
Consider, for example, Venice: a new history by Thomas F. Madden.
That Madden’s expertise is as a mediævalist explains his sketchy un-
derstanding of the eighteenth century, but his treatment of Venice’s
more recent history offers an unedifying panoply of ignorance . It is
11
scarcely surprising that Joanne M. Ferraro’s Venice: history of a float-
ing city is vastly superior to Madden’s work : Ferraro is one of the
12
most respected historians of early modern Venice, innovative,
thoughtful, and meticulous in her archival research. Yet her general

text also displays a marked lack of engagement with research on the
last 300 years. For many British and American historians, the years
after the fall of Candia can be summed up by a series of lazy assump-
tions with scant reference to those who have actually bothered to
study the period . For Ferraro, eighteenth-century Venice is culturally
13
vibrant but little more than an international irrelevance. Between the
fall of Candia and French invasion, her Venetian chronology mentions

11 T.F. Madden, Venice. A new history, Viking, London, 2012. See, for example, com-
ments on p. 358, pp. 362-3.
12 J.M. Ferraro, Venice. History of a floating city, Cambridge University Press, Cam-
bridge, 2012.
13 Jean Georgelin’s Venise au siècle des lumières, École des Hautes Études en Sci-
ences Sociales/Mouton, Paris & The Hague, 1978, for example, is absent from the bib-
liographies of Madden or Ferraro. Meanwhile, some anglophone historians have simply
opted to assert that they treat the eighteenth century, only to disregard it. Oliver Logan’s
otherwise excellent Culture and society in Venice, 1470-1790, Batsford, London, 1972
could easily have inserted an end date in the 1690s.

Mediterranea – ricerche storiche – Anno XIX – Dicembre 2022
ISSN 1824-3010 (stampa) ISSN 1828-230X (online)