Physiocratic solutions to economic problems—that is, solutions based on laissez-faire economics and on the belief that land is the source of all wealth—characterized Tuscany under the leadership of Peter Leopold (laterLeopold II" class="md-crosslink"> Leopold II), who ruled from 1765 to 1790. The Accademia dei Georgofili, founded in 1753, exercised a wide influence on a range of issues touching on agrarian reform. Legislation confirmed the free trade in grain in 1767, suppressed artisanal guilds in 1771, and eliminated all internal customs duties in 1781. Peter Leopold planned to redistribute church and state land to a new class of independent small farmers. These, in turn, would form a genuine foundation for a new kind of polity based on a constitutional monarchy with representative assemblies. Although the land reform occurred from 1766 to 1784, the constitutional reform never matured. Peter Leopold’s reforms completely transformed the bureaucratic and administrative state machinery, vigorously attacked church property and prerogatives, overhauled the judiciary, and promulgated a new penal code, which was the first in Europe to abolish the death penalty. Tuscany served as a true European model of Enlightenment absolutism for 25 years. But, upon the grand duke’s election as emperor at his brother Joseph’s death in 1790, Tuscany, left to his son, Ferdinand III, erupted in violence as hostile clerics and civil servants manipulated the European crisis of the 1790s against Leopold’s reforms. Naples and Sicily
Under Austrian Habsburg rule after 1707, Naples witnessed numerous reform plans but little concrete action. When Sicily came under Austrian rule in 1720, similar good intentions foundered in the face of local resistance, a worsening international economy, and the political exigencies and fiscal burdens of imminent wars. With the conquest of Naples and Sicily in 1734 by Charles of Bourbon (who ruled as Charles VII until 1759), the Italian south celebrated its nominal independence under a new foreign dynasty. The new regime introduced significant reforms, including new administrative and judicial systems, fostered economic recovery, and patronized an important Enlightenment community. The discipline of political economy originated during this period with the publication in 1751 of Ferdinando Galiani’s treatise Della moneta (“On Money”) and Antonio Genovesi’s appointment in 1754 to the first university chair in political economy.
In 1759 Charles abdicated his Neapolitan throne in order to become King Charles III of Spain, leaving his minister Bernardo Tanucci to head the regency council of his son Ferdinand IV (ruled 1759–1825). The turning point in the Neapolitan reform movement came with a catastrophic famine in 1764, which urgently called into question the effectiveness of old-regime structures. After Ferdinand’s marriage to Maria Carolina, the daughter of Maria Theresa, Tanucci began to lose favour with the disengaged, weak monarch. He was forced to resign in 1776, having pushed Bourbon reform to its limits, although with few tangible results. Naples moved away from its Spanish Bourbon ties and into the orbit of Habsburg policies. Fearing that the reforms had run their course, Genovesi’s students in and out of government—Giuseppe Maria Galanti, Francesco Longano, Traiano Odazzi, and the Grimaldi brothers, Domenico and Francesco Antonio—pursued his interests in solving economic and agricultural problems. The 1780s were the high point of the Neapolitan Enlightenment, both through their work and through the writings of Genovesi’s students Francesco Maria Pagano and Gaetano Filangieri. The latter’s Scienza della legislazione (1780–85; The Science of Legislation), which called for equal justice for all, state intervention in economic affairs, and broad educational reforms, ranks among the most important works of the European Enlightenment. At the same time, Domenico Caracciolo, the viceroy to Sicily from 1781 to 1785, implemented a reform program that abolished the Inquisition and challenged the fabric of the feudal system, but again without concrete results. In the end, political ties to Austria and Britain against Revolutionary France put Naples on the defensive, and, when France invaded in January 1799, the monarchs fled to Palermo for safety, and the French established a republic. The other Italian states
The Papal States, the states governed by the pope—Venice, Genoa, and Savoy—eschewed political-institutional reform. The theocratic monarchy of Rome, however, was open to moderate forms of Enlightenment thought under Clement XII (1730–40) and Benedict XIV (1740–58). Under Bourbon pressure the papacy even disbanded the Jesuits in 1773, albeit sometime after their expulsion from Portugal (1759) and from Bourbon Spain, Naples, and Parma (1767–68). Venice and Genoa lost ground as international powers and remained subject to a shrinking, conservative patriciate. Venice, however, remained Italy’s most important publishing centre and home to a lively literary and artistic culture including figures such as the dramatist Carlo Goldoni and the painters Giovanni Antonio Guardi and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. In Piedmont and Sardinia the long reign of Charles Emmanuel III (ruled 1730–73) further developed Savoyard militaristic absolutism and administrative centralization without the liberal spirit of Enlightenment reform. The crisis of the old regime
The French Revolution did not create the continentwide crisis that followed in its wake; rather, the revolutionary repercussions that rocked polities and societies after 1789 arose from the long-standing and unaddressed problems of the old regime. French and Austrian Enlightenment thought circulated freely in Italy, and a wide range of Italian intellectuals and ministers contributed to the growing body of Enlightenment thought and practice that emphasized secularization and science. However, this cosmopolitan movement confronted powerful feudal and ecclesiastical estates that controlled vast land and wealth, combated bad government that had grown habitually resistant to rationalization, struggled with the difficult task of reforming a retrograde economic system unsupportive of trade or industry, and, at the same time, found itself out of touch with the daily concerns of the mass of society facing economic hardship and wedded to traditional religious beliefs. Enlightenment culture ultimately exacerbated the problem of reform, since reform from above highlighted the disparities between high and low, raised unrealizable expectations, and imposed solutions that rarely overhauled the structure of power. The inequalities in Italian society, the obstacles to its economic development, and the political conservatism of its privileged interest groups would not easily yield to reason alone. John A. Marino John Foot Revolution, restoration, and unification The French Revolutionary period
When French troops invaded Italy in the spring of 1796, they found fertile ground for the revolutionary ideas and practices of their native country. Since the 1780s, Italian newspapers and pamphlets had given full play to news from France, especially to the political struggle between the king and the Parlement of Paris. As the Revolution unfolded in France, news reports became more frequent and more dramatic. After 1791 they were further enhanced by the personal testimonies of political émigrés. Vigilant censorship by the Italian governments could not stop the spread of revolutionary ideas. Yet Italians viewed the French Revolution simplistically as a struggle between monarchists and revolutionaries. The early years
As the reformist impulse of the 1780s waned, Italians took a growing interest in the French Revolution. Educated landowners and entrepreneurs who had put their trust in the enlightened rulers of their own states and had looked forward to important administrative and political reforms were disappointed. The French example gave them new hope. During the 1780s Masonic lodges had begun to replace scholarly academies and agrarian societies as loci of political discussion. In the 1790s more-radical secret societies emerged, modeled after the Illuminati (“Enlightened Ones”) founded in Bavaria by Adam Weishaupt, a professor of canon law, which promoted free thought and democratic political theories.