French Rule in Dalmatia, 1806–1814: Globalizing a Local Geopolitics

Abstract

After the signing of the Treaty of Schönbrunn on 14 October 1809, which created the short-lived Illyrian Provinces (1809–1814), a group of Zadar’s (Zar a) Francophiles, led by city mayor Pietro Ver gada, judge Francesco Papafava and lawyer Nikola Jaksic, performed an act of bravado by burning a Habsburg straw effigy mounted on the city walls.¹ During the Austrian Restoration, however, which began five years later, Jaksic denounced his own Jacobin past in a pro-government pamphlet, writing of the ‘immature democracy’ of the fallen French regime. His colleagues, seeking state employment, praised the restored Habsburg rule for reinstating law, morality and order, and blamed the liberal optimism of the former government for ‘arrogant liberty’ and for being an ‘infamous democracy’.²