The background – In the winter of 1792-93, in the midst of the French Revolution, when King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette were locked in a dark cell waiting to be guillotined, a military expeditionary force of revolutionaries from beyond the Alps came to Sardinia to bring “liberty, fraternity, equality”. If we had welcomed them, they would certainly have freed us from the hated Savoy sovereigns, they would have freed us from the old local noble parasites, they would have united us into a single, all-Sardinian nation. It was the first attempt by the new “French Republic” to spread the revolutionary principles theorized by the great Enlightenment philosophers outside its borders (the proof is in the “Island of Liberty” already established by Buonarotti in Carloforte a few months earlier). And what did we do? We fought them and kicked them out. Then, we sent a delegation to Turin to the Savoy King to ask for a dutiful reward; which he, with all Savoyard haughtiness, did not give us. Pissed off, we returned to Cagliari to make “The Sardinian Revolution” with broken chairs, expulsions of foreign employees and the lynching of Pizzolo and Paliaccio considered “traitors of Sardinian interests”. Now, after more than two centuries, we celebrate it every 28th April with the name of “Sa Die de sa Sardigna”, singing at the top of our lungs our Marseillaise: “Procurade moderare barones sa tirannia” , which in Italian means: “Oh barons (of yesterday and today) rape us but with delicacy: do not hurt us too much”. No comment.
The “Sardinian Revolution” – Leaving aside the bitter sarcasm, the story of this historical episode is briefly the following:
On 21 December 1792 a large French naval fleet under the command of Rear Admiral La Touche-Tréville appeared off Cagliari without causing any damage.
On January 8 of the new year the French took Carloforte on the islet of San Pietro, renamed the Island of Liberty, where the Jacobin propagandist Filippo Buonarroti established the first revolutionary state in Europe with the constitutional form of a Republic, governed by the Code de la Nature, which unfortunately lasted only four and a half months.
