Although the Italian Peninsula saw fierce fighting between 1796 and 1800 during the First and Second Italian campaigns, it did not experience any major military operations again until 1814, save for some counter-insurgency operations in the north-eastern Alps in 1809, in the wake of the Wagram campaign and Hoffer’s Tyrolean revolt. The first impression is of a region in a rare and enviable state of peace in a largely war-torn continent, receiving its apprenticeship in a long overdue process of state building, albeit under foreign tutelage. This picture is very misleading, however. The experience of Napoleonic occupation was not only unwelcome and resented by Italian reformers for its authoritarianism and the disappointment of initial ‘Jacobin’ hopes; it was a traumatic experience for the Italian masses, and that trauma often expressed itself in violent revolt.