No Disaster Worth Recording Befell The City Till Bonaparte Came With The
Rights Of Man In 1796 And Left A
French garrison, which evacuated the
place the next year, after having levied a fine of two million francs.
The year
After that Nelson occupied it with eight thousand English
troops, and the following year the French reoccupied it and sacked the
churches and imposed another fine nearly as great as the first. After
the Napoleonic victories in the Italian wars, they seem to have come
back again and fined the city two million francs more. They now remained
five years, and in the mean time a Livornese, Giovanni Antonio Giaschi,
invented a submarine-boat for attacking and destroying war-vessels, and
a Spanish ship brought the yellow-fever. In 1808 Napoleon gave all
Tuscany, and Leghorn with it, to his sister Elisa, but when in 1814 he
was deposed, Leghorn was restored to the Tuscan grand-dukes and
garrisoned for them by German troops, an earthquake having profited by
the general disorder meantime to pay it another visit. The grand-duke
now being driven out of Florence by Murat, he took refuge at Leghorn,
which fell a prey to an epidemic of typhus. The first steam-vessel
appared there in 1818, and in 1835 the Asiatic cholera; in 1847 a
telegraphic line to Pisa was opened.
In 1848 the revolutions prevalent throughout Europe had their effect at
Leghorn. The citizens shared in the uprising against the grand-duke, and
elected among its representatives F. D. Guerrazzi, once famous as the
first of Italian novelists and a man of generous mind and heart, who
duly suffered arrest and imprisonment when the grand-duke was restored
by the Austrians.
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