1798: Religious Revolt or Something Wider?
In September 1798, three months after Bonaparte's expedition had taken Malta in June, the Maltese rose against the French garrison. Within weeks the French were confined to Valletta and the Cottonera lines, and a blockade began that lasted until the capitulation of 4 September 1800. A candidate is given three pieces of evidence. (i) The French had begun selling the property of the Maltese Church to finance their expedition, and on 2 September 1798 an auction of church silver in Mdina provoked a riot. (ii) French soldiers were billeted in Maltese homes and the new administration demanded cash contributions and requisitions. (iii) The French had abolished the Order of St John, and with it the courts, offices and privileges through which the local nobility and town elites had governed themselves. The examination question reads: 'The Maltese revolt of 1798 was a religious revolt.' How far do you agree? The candidate has already written an opening line: 'There were three causes: religion, money and politics.'
1. Criticise the candidate's opening line and explain how the answer should be planned instead.
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'There were three causes' is a list, not an argument, and it does not answer 'how far'. The examiner is asking for a judgement with degrees, so the introduction must define the claim being tested and state a line: for example, that the revolt was religious in its language and leadership but fiscal and political in much of its content.
The plan then needs criteria of weighing rather than three parallel paragraphs. Ask which cause best explains the timing - why September 1798 and not June, and why Mdina rather than Valletta? The auction of church silver works well here as a trigger. Ask which cause best explains the breadth of participation, from cathedral clergy to villagers to nobles. Ask which explains the rebels' demands once the rising had spread. And ask whether the three causes are genuinely separable: an attack on church property was simultaneously an attack on local institutions and on the household economy, since the clergy were often the only local leadership and the church the only lender and employer.
A list produces three unconnected paragraphs. An argument produces a criterion, evidence on each side, a weighing, and a conclusion that distinguishes trigger from underlying cause and form from content.
2. A candidate concludes: 'The revolt of 1798 was the first expression of Maltese nationalism.' How should this be judged?
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It should be judged as an anachronism unless very carefully defended. Nationalism as a mass political ideology, with a claim that a linguistically distinct people should form its own sovereign state, belongs to the nineteenth century and later. To read it back into 1798 is to assume the outcome.
What the evidence supports is a strong local identity - a shared language, a diocese, a legal and administrative tradition, and loyalty to a Catholic sovereign - combined with concrete grievances about property, billeting and the loss of the Order's institutions. The rebels sought the restoration of the old order and protection from an outside Catholic power, not the creation of a nation-state. That is not nothing; a proto-national sense of 'us' against foreign soldiers is visible in the sources. But it is not nationalism in the nineteenth-century sense.
The examinable skill is precision in using terms. A good answer would set out what nationalism requires, test the evidence of 1798 against those requirements, and conclude that the revolt shows communal and religious solidarity and a defence of established rights, and that describing it as nationalism is a retrospective projection that tells us more about later Maltese politics than about 1798.
3. Which single piece of evidence would most seriously challenge a purely religious interpretation, and how would you use it?
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The most damaging evidence would be anything showing that the rising's demands and organisation concerned taxation, legal privilege, grain supply or representation rather than doctrine. If, once the French were besieged, the rebels' assembly spent its energies petitioning for the restoration of the old courts and commercial protections, and negotiating with foreign powers for protection and supply, then religion was the vocabulary of mobilisation rather than the whole content of the conflict.
Used well, such evidence does not refute the religious reading; it refines it. The argument becomes that religious grievance was the most effective mobiliser - an auction of church silver could bring out villagers and clergy in a way that a dispute over a tax rate could not - while the political and economic programme that emerged afterwards was broader. That is a 'how far' answer of the kind the question invites.
Weaker use of the same evidence would simply assert that 'it was really about money', which commits the opposite error of dismissing what participants said they were defending. The judgement to demonstrate is that the historian weighs the language people used against the interests those words served, and does not assume the two must be identical.