80 Chapter IV
and the young Joseph II, who became coregent with his mother, Maria Theresa, in
- “Whenever old disorders have been eradicated speedily and with success,”
wrote Verri, “it will be seen that it was the work of a single enlightened person
against many private interests.”^21
The private interests at Milan were many- sided and complicated, though they
all reflected a small number of people, the hereditary patriciate and its allies in the
nobility and the church. They were entrenched in the Council of Sixty (or Decuri-
ons) of the city, in the Senate of the Duchy, and in other closed and self-
perpetuating boards and councils. These bodies, and the local liberties that they
represented, had been hitherto little affected by the annexation of Milan to the
Austrian empire in 1714. Trouble began in the 1750’s when Pompeo Neri at-
tempted (like Louis XV’s ministers in France) to introduce a census of all landed
property with assessments in some correspondence to actual value. Verri, in addi-
tion, wished to get rid of the practice of tax- farming, which he thought very unfa-
vorable in its effects on economic enterprise in the duchy. The tax- farm was in fact
abolished in 1770. Such efforts of course ran up against powerfully entrenched
interests. Plans for fiscal and tax reform therefore broadened out into plans for
more general administrative and even constitutional change. The power of the en-
trenched councils was the more absolute because each council, within its own ill-
defined and overlapping domain, enacted regulations, enforced them, and judged
offenders in particular cases. The reformers, both Milanese and Viennese, therefore
urged separation of judicial and executive functions. The power of magistracies was
made more formidable by the use of torture. In 1774 Maria Theresa, pressed by
Beccaria, Verri, Martini, and Sonnenfels, abolished torture in her hereditary do-
mains of Austria- Bohemia. In the Milanese she could act only with the consent of
the local bodies, and the Senate of the Duchy pronounced torture to be necessary
to government. Not until the Senate itself was destroyed by Joseph II a few years
later could torture be abolished in the city of Beccaria.
Hungarian writers say of their country—as Americans have said of the British
colonies on the opposite frontier of Western civilization—that new ideas were
brought into it by soldiers of the Seven Years’ War.^22 In 1761 Baron Orczy founded
a society for the purification of the Hungarian language. The members were well
aware of the contemporary French philosophes, and discussed political as well as
linguistic matters. Montesquieu himself had spent a month in Hungary in 1728;
his Spirit of Laws is said to have appeared in Latin, for Hungarian use, as early as
1751; and while I know of no proof of the existence of such a book, it is entirely
possible that at least parts of it may have been so translated.^23 For Montesquieu’s
21 Quoted by Donald Limoli in “Pietro Verri, a Lombard Reformer under Enlightened Despo-
tism and the French Revolution,” Journal of Central European Affairs, XVIII (1958), 260. I am indebted
in these paragraphs to Mr. Limoli and to Valsecchi, Assolutismo, II, 157–94.
22 For these paragraphs on Hungary I depend on Arneth, op. cit.,VII, 111–33, and on a seminar
paper and research assistance by Mr. Peter F. Sugar, who has given me the content of S. Eckhardt, A
Francia Forradalom Eszmei Magyarorszagon (Budapest, 1924), and other works.
23 Eckhardt, op. cit., 20–28, speaks of a letter from the Englishman Calwell, in 1751, telling Mon-
tesquieu that he has seen the book in Latin at a bookstore at Pozsony (Bratislava); but I find no such
letter in Montesquieu’s published correspondence, and no Latin version of the Spirit of Laws in any of
the great printed library catalogues.