The Revolution Comes to Italy 579
and the contrary purposes of social classes,^31 but they agree in seeing the revolu-
tionary movement as a positive phenomenon arising from serious causes, and in
refuting the charges that it was “passive” and “abstract.” These charges were not
peculiar to Italy. They were made in somewhat the same way against the Batavian
Republic, and after 1798 against the Helvetic Republic in Switzerland. No allega-
tion was more common in conservative quarters than that the French Revolution
itself was too “abstract,” and the same had been said even earlier of British and
Irish reform bills. By “abstraction” was meant that the principles invoked in these
movements were irrelevant to real problems. By “passivity” was meant, in part, a
mere imitativeness, a response to external stimulus, an uncritical enthusiasm for
someone else’s revolution and for “French” ideas. This charge was also made against
British radicals and American republicans, when their critics supposed them to
reflect a vogue for French principles but to have no genuine roots within the coun-
try. Passivity also meant an inability to precipitate a revolution oneself, a depen-
dency on France—no arrival of the French, no Italian revolution. In this limited
sense the Italian revolution was “passive”—more so than that of the Dutch, who
had attempted a revolution in the 1780’s, and agitated in Paris from 1787 to 1794,
forming a Batavian Legion and a revolutionary committee when the war began.
But this argument shows only that the pressure for revolution in Italy had not in
1796 reached the point of spontaneous explosion, not that no such pressure ex-
isted, or that it was not rising.
The situation in Italy was in some ways distinctive, in others resembled that of
other parts of Europe. Special to Italy was its own kind of territorial fragmenta-
tion. Less pulverized than Germany, less united than the seven Dutch provinces
before 1795, the country supported about a dozen independent and very dissimilar
states. There were two royal monarchies, Sardinia- Piedmont and Naples- Sicily, the
papal “monarchy” in the middle, and the ducal monarchies of Parma, Modena,
Milan, and Tuscany. Milan, along with Mantua, was part of the Hapsburg empire.
Tuscany belonged to the Hapsburg family, but was independent in domestic and
foreign policy under its own grand duke. There were also the old patrician repub-
lics of Lucca, Genoa, and Venice. Lucca was very small, Genoa ran for over a
hundred miles along the Ligurian shore, shutting off Piedmont from the sea, while
Venice possessed Venetia, Istria, and the Dalmatian coast and islands. The stron-
gest political units, however, at least in the center and north, were the cities. Mu-
nicipalism, descended from the medieval communalism, was ingrained in institu-
tions and mental habits, setting town against country, and town against town.
1700–1800, 2 vols. (Milan, 1948), comes toward the end of a career devoted to the subject since 1910.
For two excellent discussions of the new Italian literature see Renzo de Felice, “Studi recenti di storia
del triennio rivolutionario in Italia, 1796–99,” in Societa, XI (1955), 498–513, and G. Spini’s long re-
view of Cantimori in Rassegna storica del Risorgimento, XLIII (1956), 792–96.
31 Notably G. Candeloro, Storia dell ’ Italia moderna, 3 vols. (Milan, 1956- ), I, 159–288; B. Per-
oni, “Gli Italiani alia vigilia della dominazione francese, 1793–96,” in Nuova rivista storica, X X XV
(1951), 227–42; A. Saitta, Filippo Buonarroti, 2 vols. (Rome, 1950); A. Galante Garrone, Buonarrot e
Babeuf (Turin, 1948); D. Cantimori, Giacobini italiani (Bari, 1956); Renzo de Felice, ed., I giornali
giacobini italiani (Milan, 1962); and a series of articles by Renzo de Felice in the Rass. stor. del Risorg.,
of which the one on Giuseppe Ceracchi (XLVII, 1960, 3–32) will be of especial interest to American
readers.