The victors thereupon ransacked the houses of the opposing faction and found lists of names of those who were to have been proscribed, besides documents which revealed the complicity of the French agents in the rising.

Bonaparte was enraged at the folly of the Genoese democrats, which deranged his plans.

As he wrote to the Directory, if they had only remained quiet for a fortnight, the oligarchy would have collapsed from sheer weakness.

The murder of a few Frenchmen and Milanese now gave him an excuse for intervention.

He sent an aide-de-camp, Lavalette, charged with a vehement diatribe against the Doge and Senate, which lost nothing in its recital before that august body.