Still the position of Napoleon required the most consummate firmness and wisdom. All the states of Italy, Piedmont, Genoa, Naples, the States of the Church, Parma, Tuscany, were agitated with the intense desire for liberty. Napoleon was unwilling to encourage insurrection. He could not lend his arms to oppose those who were struggling for popular rights. In Genoa, the patriots rose. The haughty aristocracy fell in revenge upon the French, who chanced to be in the territory. Napoleon was thus compelled to interfere. The Genoese aristocracy were forced to abdicate, and the patriot party, as in Venice, assumed the government. But the Genoese democracy began now in their turn, to trample upon the rights of their former oppressors. The revolutionary scenes which had disgraced Paris, began to be re-enacted in the streets of Genoa. They excluded the priests and the nobles from participating in the government, as the nobles and priests had formerly excluded them. Acts of lawless violence passed unpunished. The religion of the Catholic priests was treated with derision. Napoleon, earnestly and eloquently, thus urged upon them a more humane policy. "I will respond, citizens, to the confidence you have reposed in me. It is not enough that you refrain from hostility to religion. You should do nothing which can cause inquietude to tender consciences. To exclude the nobles from any public office, is an act of extreme injustice. You thus repeat the wrong which you condemn in them. Why are the people of Genoa so changed? Their first impulses of fraternal kindness have been succeeded by fear and terror. Remember that the priests were the first who rallied around the tree of liberty. They first told you that the morality of the gospel is democratic. Men have taken advantage of the faults, perhaps of the crimes of individual priests, to unite against Christianity. You have proscribed without discrimination. When a state becomes accustomed to condemn without hearing, to applaud a discourse because it impassioned; when exaggeration and madness are called virtue, moderation and equity designated as crimes, that state is near its ruin. Believe me, I shall consider _that_ one of the happiest moments of my life in which I hear that the people of Genoa are united among themselves and live happily." This advice, thus given to Genoa, was intended to re-act upon France, for the Directory then had under discussion a motion for banishing all the nobles from the Republic. The voice of Napoleon was thus delicately and efficiently introduced into the debate, and the extreme and terrible measure was at once abandoned.