Down into this little world of periwigs and lavender came the French Revolution. All who had applauded Alfieri's tragedies were delighted, except Alfieri himself, who hated the French. But the Italian princes took fright at the democratic volcano, and talked of a general union against France. Piedmont alone was vigorous enough to take action; she made a league with Austria (1792). Nothing important happened until young Napoleon took command of the French army of invasion (1796), and began to tear "the heart out of Glory." It would be useless to relate in detail his wonderful career in Italy. He arranged the peninsula as a housekeeper shifts the furniture in an unsatisfactory room. He took Nice and Savoy from Piedmont, Lombardy from Austria, formed the little states south of the Po into a republic, took the temporal power from the Pope, and set up a Roman Republic. He turned the Kingdom of Naples into a republic and then back again into a kingdom, first for his brother Joseph, and then for his general, Murat (1808). He converted Genoa into the Republic of Liguria. Venice, like old Priam before bloody Pyrrhus, fell at the whiff and wind of the victor's sword; the Great Council resigned without a struggle, and the Republic of St. Mark after an existence of a thousand years came to its end. It was then handed over to Austria, but after Austerlitz taken back again. In 1805, having become Emperor, Napoleon turned the northern part of the peninsula into the Kingdom of Italy, and put the iron crown of Lombardy on his own head, saying, "God has given it to me, woe to him that touches it." In 1806 he put an end to the Holy Roman Empire, and forced the Emperor, Francis II, to resign the Imperial crown. The old laws of political gravitation ceased to act, and Italy was moulded and broken and moulded anew, as if creation had begun again. The revolutionary ideas on which Napoleon's power at first rested had spread everywhere; liberty, equality, democracy were a part of every man's stock of familiar thoughts, and the conception of an Italian kingdom, vaguely associated with the poetic dreams of Dante, Petrarch, Machiavelli, had become a political fact. Italy was changed forever, the old Goldoni comedy was gone; Napoleon had given the _coup de grace_ to the old regime. There was another side to the Napoleonic domination. A multitude of men had been forcibly enlisted in Napoleon's armies; twenty-six thousand, it is said, perished in the terrible retreat from Moscow. The French were arrogant and they were foreigners. Changes had been made too quickly and with too reckless a disregard for Italian wishes. Nobles and clergy had been despoiled of privileges, peasants had been confused and bewildered, the pious had been scandalized by Napoleon's treatment of the Pope; all these longed for the restoration of the old political divisions and of the old easy ways.