In the years of famine, the soldiers longed for the profitable adventures of wartime. Italy was exceedingly wealthy, so the representatives remaining in Lyon could hardly be blamed for suspecting that Napoleon intended to send troops out to plunder again.
When he set out for Egypt, the Directory gave him no military funds. Napoleon had Berthier, Joubert, and Brune extort "donations" in Rome, the Netherlands, and Switzerland respectively. Napoleon himself estimated that he needed eight million; only the men he sent out knew how much they had actually extorted.
Napoleon's feelings toward Italy were complicated. When he heard that an Italian had killed an Austrian woman for revenge, he did not feel threatened in the slightest. Instead, he was pleased, believing that it was his own achievement that people in Italy had become like this.
Italy after the Renaissance no longer possessed the spirit it had had during the ancient Roman Empire. Besides the armies of ancient Rome, its laws were also a bloody and glorious part of Rome.
Under Roman Law, heirs could be divided into testamentary heirs and intestate heirs, and also into household heirs and heirs from outside the household.
Hereditary systems were passed down through bloodline families. Joseph Bonaparte was Napoleon's elder brother and the eldest son of the Bonaparte family. Primogeniture was indeed beneficial for unity, but Joseph had no sons, and restoring hereditary succession was neither "democratic" nor "republican."
Only restoring the monarchy could legalize hereditary succession. Yet if that happened, the French would merely have overthrown one king and set up another. For most Frenchmen, especially peasants who had not yet undergone the Enlightenment, there was nothing wrong with Napoleon becoming king. But to the "enlightened" French, it would be a regression.
Eugene could originally have served as Napoleon's heir. He too had