A Bonaparte liberatore (To Bonaparte Liberator)

The ode, composed of nine stanzas of  hendecasyllable and seven-syllable lines, is one of the most celebrated works of political poetry composed during the Republican Triennium. It was printed for the first time in Bologna in May 1797 and then revised and republished, after numerous reprints, in Genoa, in November 1799, when Foscolo was in the last Italian stronghold of Republican liberty after the intervention of the Austro-Russian army. The decision to opt for a courtly poetic genre like the ode, which ties in with the Parini model, reveals an ambitious project in which an articulated political reflection translates into a language of great effect that aims to build, like all the poetry of that period, a patriotic and heroic image in which the Italian Revolutionaries could recognize themselves. At the start Foscolo addresses Liberty, a ferocious divinity absent from Italy since the times of the Romans, a land subjugated to tyrants and the Papacy, and who is ready to return thanks to Bonaparte, the “hero”, the “liberator”, the “Duce” never directly cited, but the real protagonist of the work, although not the subject of a servile eulogy. In addressing Italy and the Italians with tones that at times are bitter and threatening, Foscolo presents himself in the role of poet-bard, inflamed by the “Libero genio e ardor santo del vero” ("Free genius and holy ardour of the truth") and expresses the wish for a revival that uses the examples of history to take the nation back to the glories of the past.

The Genoa reprint was preceded by a Dedicatoria a Bonaparte (Dedication to Bonaparte), written immediately after 18 Brumaire, in which his admiration for the French general came with a threatening warning to the despot who must put himself at the service of the Italian nation and earn forgiveness for the insult of the Treaty of Campoformio. The demands were founded on a patriotic vision that was not very realistic; the writer interprets the aspirations for independence and unification of the most democratic fringes of the Italian republican movement, appealing to an abstract and purely utopian and libertarian spirit in Bonaparte, who he asks to help with the birth of a republic in Italy. The work drew the poet hostility from the French authorities.