The Naples Uprising

The anti-French uprisings in Naples refer to the violent popular revolts of 1799 against Bonapartist authority. Led by the clergy and supported by the deeply Catholic and royalist people of Naples, this movement overthrew the republican government and brought the Italian revolutionary experiment to an end.
The working classes feared looting, taxes and requisitions by the French occupying troops. They regarded the ‘local Jacobins’ – the intellectual and bourgeois elites who had supported the arrival of the French – as traitors.
Led by Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo, the ‘Army of the Holy Faith’ (the ‘Sanfedists’), made up of peasants, prisoners and militias, marched on Naples, carrying out a violent crackdown on these Neapolitan republicans.