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548 David Laven

thus justifying the faithless conduct of Napoleon in subverting it,
and delivering it over to Austria» . Daru had apparently written his
18
Histoire to legitimate the destruction of Venetian independence by
the man he had served .
19
What I write here is a mea culpa in which I question my own lazy
suggestions about Daru and certain other francophone historians. I
want to analyse what historians in the aftermath of 1797 actually said
about the supposed decline and fall of Venice in its last century or so
of independence. I want to stress that among both Venetian and
French historians there was a surprisingly wide recognition that Ven-
ice retained economic and administrative dynamism, and that it was
not without military capacity or Mediterranean significance. At the
same time, I want to show that much of the declinism – still evident in
modern historiography – can be traced to Venetian historians them-
selves. If French writers pointed to Venetian decadence, then they did
little more than echo Venetian historiography. This was not a strategy
to deprecate Venetians and excuse Bonaparte; it emerged from a
sometimes self-lacerating Venetian perspective that helped the nobles,
citizens, and subjects of the former Republic come to terms with the
end of the independence.

3. Venetian historians and the decline and the fall of Venice

The collapse of the Venetian Republic came as a shock. Venetian
historians responded quickly, celebrating the longevity of their lost
‘nazione’ and mourning its fall. In this they benefitted from the rela-
tively benign rule established in January 1798 under the Austrian
prima dominazione, which initially sought to accommodate Venice’s
patrician élites . Venetians, such as Cristoforo Tentori and Carlo An-
20
tonio Marin, who wrote on the extinguished Republic, drew on a
longstanding tradition of apologetic Venetian histories. Works pub-
lished in the decades after the fall of Venice continued to depend heav-
ily on this older historiography. Indeed, it is worth emphasising a very
simple point – often neglected by historians of historiography -, elo-
quently made by William St Clair: books are not always read as soon

18 F. Palgrave (Cohen), Handbook for travllers in Italy, John Murray, London, 1842,
p. xviii.
19 D. Laven, Lord Byron, Count Daru, and anglophone myths of Venice cit.
20 M. Gottardi, L’Austria a Venezia. Società e istituzioni nella prima dominazione au-
striaca, 1798-1806, Franco Angeli, Milan, 1992.

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