78 alfredo viggiano
European debate on the relationship between reason and tradition, civil
and ecclesiastical power, tolerance and intolerance. Such tension, while
not modifying the city’s long-standing aristocratic constitution, never-
theless involved a part of the patriciate and modified customs and taste
in the process.
The “critics,” in contrast, as they tried to comprehend the extent of the
sites of power affected by the presumed reforms—which included the
corrective rationalization of the civil and criminal justice system, a revi-
sion of the criteria for direct taxation, the cancellation of the privileges
of feudal lords, a new policy for the control and management of environ-
mental resources, especially with regard to forests72—insisted on the rhe-
torical and impracticable nature of those attempts. Indeed, the republican
regime was, for systemic reasons, impossible to reform.73 If they were truly
realized, the reforms would have sanctioned the de facto extinction of the
patrician class: the network of privileges that enveloped the Republic’s
political class could not be undone; the foundations of the entire struc-
ture were now far too fragile.74 These plans for reorganizing the Venetian
state have met with ambivalent views on the part of the historiography:
the more negative views have characterized these reforms as a passive
reproduction of what happened elsewhere and rediscovery of older, local
administrative traditions, while, on the positive side, they have been seen
as the fruit of the acculturation of at least a part of the patriciate and
a cosmopolitan vocation that tried to establish a dialogue between the
Republic and the European powers proceeding most forcefully towards
constitutional transformations. In both cases, however, it was evident that
such plans could not be realized.
Venetian political history of this period might be described as a hyper-
trophic accumulation of writings, plans, and debates destined to come
to nothing. Even tensions regarding foreign policy decisions, which reac-
quired the important role they had enjoyed in the early 17th century in
72 On these themes, see Gaetano Cozzi, “Politica e diritto nei tentativi di riforma del
diritto penale veneto nel Settecento,” in Cozzi, La società veneta e il suo diritto. Saggi su
questioni matrimoniali, giustizia penale, politica del diritto (Venice, 2000), pp. 311–56; and
Antonio Lazzarini, Boschi e politiche forestali. Venezia e Veneto fra Sette e Ottocento (Milan,
2009), pp. 42–44.
73 See the classic interpretation in this regard of Marino Berengo, La società veneta alla
fine del Settecento. Ricerche storiche (Florence, 1956).
74 On the impoverishment and progressive exclusion of an increasingly large part of
the nobility, see Laura Megna, “Nobiltà e povertà. Il problema del patriziato povero nella
Venezia del ’700,” Atti dell’Istituto Veneto di Scienze Lettere ed Arti CXL (1981–82), 319–40.