The aristocracy retained hegemonic control of politics and economics, dominating land ownership and manipulating legal and political institutions in the towns to maintain their position. Tensions and conflicts arose from time to time between the central authority of the absolutist states and the nobility, between the rich bourgeoisie or professional classes and the nobility, and among the nobles themselves, but the nobility blocked, worked out compromises with, and co-opted these rival groups to preserve aristocratic predominance. In the north, especially in the republican states, city oligarchies resisted erosion of their power and privileges. In sharp contrast, the social and economic position of the urban masses and the growing rural population deteriorated, while the difficulties of daily life increased. Political thought and early attempts at reform
By the beginning of the 18th century, a new cultural climate opened Italy to a wide range of European ideas—especially the philosophical thought of René Descartes, Pierre Gassendi, Benedict de Spinoza, Pierre Bayle, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Sir Isaac Newton, and Hugo Grotius. With it new cultural institutions came to the fore. The Academy of Arcadia, founded in Rome in 1690, exemplified the channeling of energies for rationalism and innovation. Among its more famous members, Gian Vincenzo Gravina, Ludovico Antonio Muratori, and Giambattista Vico gained renown by launching juridical, historical, aesthetic, and “scientific” critiques of society. Vico’s Scienza nuova (1725; The New Science), the most enduring work produced by this group, found tepid reception in its own day, and the author’s ideas on a universal philosophy of history won wide acceptance among Enlightenment thinkers only in the 1770s. Paolo Mattia Doria (1662?–1746) and the Medinaceli Academy in Naples also employed historical inquiry to seek remedies for society’s ills. Doria revived the idea of a Platonic republicanism of philosophic magistrates, in which an anti-Enlightenment Catholicism would become a kind of civil religion. In Naples he led his group of self-styled “ancients” against the scientific “moderns” led by the Neapolitan diplomat Celestino Galiani and Bartolomeo Intieri, a Florentine factor in Naples who provided a link to Tuscan intellectual circles. The ministerial class that developed in Spanish Italy from the early 16th century helped foster such networks of intellectual exchange between the cities of Italy and between Italy and the broader cosmopolitan centres of 18th-century Europe.
The political and cultural roles of the church—in particular, the supranational character of the papacy, the immunity of clerics from the state’s legal and fiscal apparatus, the church’s intolerance and intransigence in theological and institutional matters, as well as its wealth and property—constituted the central problems in the reform schemes of Italy’s nascent intellectual movement. The most incisive breakthrough came from Pietro Giannone (1676–1748), a Neapolitan jurist, who employed a jurisdictional, historical method to oppose church abuse of power and to break the church’s stranglehold on the state. Probably the strongest arguments for church reform came from Enlightenment thinkers Francesco Scipione, marchese di Maffei (1675–1755), and Muratori (1672–1750), who sought to reconcile politics with morality and religion. Muratori’s Della pubblica felicità (1749; “On Public Happiness”) reached Bourbon audiences in French and Spanish translations and was probably read in the Austrian Habsburg realms by Maria Theresa herself. The era of Enlightenment reform
By the mid-18th century, economic recovery, Muratori’s program of Enlightenment Catholicism, and a renewed interest in natural science, political economy, and agronomy produced the first stirrings of reform. The dynasties installed after the wars of succession—the Habsburg-Lorraine in Milan and Tuscany and the Bourbon in Naples—led the way. Milan
A first wave of reforms under Maria Theresa came to Milan in the early 1740s. The Genoese patrician Gian Luca Pallavicini prepared them as a minister after 1743 and then implemented them as governor after 1750. The reforms reorganized government administration, ended the sale of offices, reordered state finances, founded a public bank, and, most important, in 1749 placed a new cadastral survey—begun in 1718 but interrupted in 1733—under the direction of the Florentine jurist Pompeo Neri. The Theresian cadastral survey took effect in 1760. Applying objective principles of fiscal justice and administrative rationalization, the new method of registering the ownership and value of property not only revamped Milan’s fiscal system but also improved agriculture, increased productivity, and centralized control of revenues in impartial hands.
In Vienna the Department of Italy oversaw Milanese affairs after 1757 and orchestrated a second wave of reforms during the 1760s. Another imperial official, Carlo, conte di Firmian of Trent, arrived in 1759 to implement wide-ranging changes. Firmian completed the earlier reforms in political administration, in the judicial system, in ecclesiastical relations, and in educational policy. But strong opposition from diverse social groups defending traditional rights and privileges weakened the reform movement. In 1761–62, however, an important group of young reformist noblemen formed around Pietro Verri (1728–97) and took the name of his militant journal, Il caffè (published 1764–66; “The Coffeehouse”). The circle’s best-known work, Cesare Beccaria’s Dei delitti e delle pene (1764; An Essay On Crimes and Punishments), castigated torture and capital punishment as symptoms of the injustice and inequality inherent in the society of the old regime.
Joseph II (ruled 1765–90) promoted a new wave of reforms after 1770 that gained strength when he became the sole ruler after Maria Theresa’s death in 1780. The old system of public administration and magistratures came under attack and was abolished by 1786. In the 1770s and ’80s the reform policies of “Josephism” succeeded in suppressing all the chief political and judicial bodies of the Milanese aristocracy and in establishing modern ones in their place. Joseph’s government appointed provincial intendants and reduced the church’s power in the state. Educational reform established popular elementary schools as well as new disciplines at the Palatine School of Milan and the University of Pavia.
Such reforms, however, proved to have few long-term cultural or social consequences. Opposition from nobles, local administrators, aristocratic landlords, magistrates, clergy, and even Enlightenment intellectuals, who feared Joseph’s new authoritarianism, undermined the reforms. Leopold II (ruled 1790–92), who had ruled Tuscany as Grand Duke Peter Leopold before succeeding his brother Joseph, could not overcome their resistance, which gained strength from the forces unleashed by the French Revolution. Francis II, who succeeded Leopold II in 1792, faced a war with Revolutionary France, which seized Milan in 1796. Tuscany
Emmanuel, comte de Richecourt, who served in Tuscany for 20 years as the chief representative of the regent, Francis I, followed the main lines of Habsburg policy in Milan. Local aristocratic divisions, the privileged position of Florence (the Tuscan capital), and the corruption and private enrichment of public officials came under scrutiny. Reforms aimed to restore revenues, reorganize magistratures, control the old nobility, and moderate the influence of the church. Pompeo Neri, who was recalled from Milan to Florence in 1758, advocated the free trade of cereals to address problems of economic scarcity and provide incentives to agricultural production.