During the first years of the Revolution, an attempt had been made by French enthusiasts to extend the Revolution into Italy by means of associations in the principal towns; but it met with no great success. A certain liberal movement arose among the young men of the upper classes at Naples, where, under the influence of Queen Marie Caroline, the Government had now become reactionary; and in Turin and several of the Lombard cities the French were not without partisans; but no general disaffection like that of Savoy existed east of the Alps. The agitation of 1789 and 1792 had passed by without bringing either liberty or national independence to the Italians. When Bonaparte received his command, that fervour of Republican passion which, in the midst of violence and wrong, had seldom been wanting in the first leaders of the Revolutionary War, had died out in France. The politicians who survived the Reign of Terror and gained office in the Directory repeated the old phrases about the Rights of Man and the Liberation of the Peoples only as a mode of cajolery. Bonaparte entered Italy proclaiming himself the restorer of Italian freedom, but with the deliberate purpose of using Italy as a means of recruiting the exhausted treasury of France. His correspondence with the Directory exposes with brazen frankness this well-considered system of pillage and deceit, in which the general and the Government were cordially at one. On the further question, how France should dispose of any territory that might be conquered in Northern Italy, Bonaparte and the Directory had formed no understanding, and their purposes were in fact at variance. The Directory wished to conquer Lombardy in order to hand it back to Austria in return for the Netherlands; Bonaparte had at least formed the conception that an Italian State was possible, and he intended to convert either Austrian Lombardy itself, or some other portion of Northern Italy, into a Republic, serving as a military outwork for France. [Bonaparte separates the Austrian and Sardinian Armies, April, 1796.] [Armistice and peace with Sardinia.]