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562 David Laven

restoration of Bourbon rule. At the time, the middle-aged Machia-
vellian and translator of Horace was trying to ease his way back
into favour, under a régime in which he had initially been margin-
alised and persecuted. The Histoire de la République de Venise is
not a piece of Napoleonic propaganda . For example, its account
77
of the events immediately before the French occupation of the city
it is incredibly balanced. When treating the pro-French risings in
Venetian Lombardy, he is dismissive both of those commentators
who saw them as purely the result of French agitation and intim-
idation, and of those who sought to present them as spontaneous
revolutions against Venetian domination: «Je ne prétends ni con-
cilier ces deux versions, ni leur en substituer une qui soit exacte.
Il est probable que dans l’une et l’autre il y a de l’exagération» .
78
When it came to a narrative of Venetian decline, Daru was also
more indulgent than many Venetian historians. Reflecting on the
outcome of the War of Candia, he remarked that «Ce n’était pas
un médiocre gloire pour les Vénitiens d’avoir soutenu pendant
vingt-cinq ans une lutte corps à corps avec l’empire ottoman. Ils
n’en sortaient pas sans pertes, mais l’honneur des armes leur res-
tait» . Victorious in ten naval battles, and having inflicted
79
100,000 casualties on the Turkish besieging army, «ils pouvaient
se vanter d’avoir porté les premiers coups à ce colosse, qui avait
menacé de fondre de tout son poids sur l’Europe» . In Daru’s opin-
80
ion, the eighteenth-century adoption of neutrality was not a mis-
take on the part of the Venetians. In discussing the War of the
Spanish Succession, for example, he highlighted how the Pied-
montese with fewer resources than the Venetians only managed to
profit from the conflict through pure self-interest and duplicity.
Daru never suggested that the Venetians should have done the
same, but that they should have profited more from the peace:
while they rebuilt fortifications, and maintained an army of some
20,000 men, they did not invest sufficiently in their military ca-
pacities . Daru criticised them not for remaining neutral, but for
81
their impotence in the face of both French and Austrian violations
of that neutrality. And faced with the Turkish threat in Morea, the
Venetians were again unable to mobilise sufficient men to pose a

77 P.A.N. Daru, Histoire de la République de Venise cit., 1819; P.A.N. Daru, Histoire
de la République de Venise cit., 1821; P.A.N. Daru, Histoire de la République de Venise
cit., 1826.
78 P.A.N. Daru, Histoire de la République de Venise cit., 1816, vol. v, p. 293.
79 P.A.N. Daru, Histoire de la République de Venise cit., 1819, vol. iv, p. 632.
80 Ibidem, p. 632.
81 Ibidem, p. 666.

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