The tree of liberty in Carmignano

It was planted on May 8, 1799 and soon cut down.

Once upon a time there were the Trees of Liberty. Originally from the ancient custom of planting trees on the occasion of folk and religious rituals, they symbolize the cyclical rebirth of nature and life. During the French Revolution, which reintroduced them, and especially in Jacobean times, they became an obvious political symbol. They already  were very widespread in America, where American settlers used them in the fight against the British and where they were also portrayed on the flags of some countries. With the French Revolution exported to most of Europe and in the wake of the victorious Republican troops, these trees were also planted in Italy. Even Carmignano had its own tree of liberty. It was planted in the square of the provincial capital, which is now named Vittorio Emanuele II, on May 8, 1799 or better on the 18th day of the Floréal month in the VII year of the Revolution.
Hard to say what kind of tree it was: of the thousands planted throughout Italy, only a century-old elm tree in a small Calabrian village seems to have survived the complex Napoleonic events and the Restoration. The plant generally preferred in our country was the poplar. Because of its Latin name “populus”, it lent itself well to represent the freedom of the people. Around the trees of liberty people danced, partied, and put up slogans such as the famous “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” or “Shudder in fear evil men and tyrants at the sight of the Sacred Image of Liberty.”

It probably was not a poplar that was planted in Carmignano but rather an elm : both to follow the French and American customs, and also because the elm, nowadays very rare due to an illness, was considered at the time a typical tree of Tuscany. Furthermore, in the square of Carmignano in the previous centuries there had been an elm so monumental as to be shown on the maps of the sixteenth century. This same elm perhaps was still remembered two centuries later. In any case, in the morning of that distant day in May, the tree was planted in what will be the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II with “a large gathering of people from all the towns of the Community.”

Even the French dragoons on horseback, who were probably staying at the stables of Poggio a Caiano,  participated. /However, we must not think that this initiative was enthusiastically approved by everyone. In fact, in Tuscany, between 1799 and the 1800s there were several riots, mostly lead by farmers, against the French occupation. And on those occasions the Tree of Liberty was immediately cut down, as farmers from the market did in Pistoia on April 13, 1799. Similar events took place also in Arezzo on May 6 and in Florence on July 7, where the tree was located in the area that later became Freedom square. Also in Carmignano the tree would not last long. Riots and insurrections developed. Around the tree the distinction, now for some more nuanced and almost obsolete, between right and left, “Republicans” and “Reactionaries” was born (Wf)

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