580 Chapter XXIV
There were nobles in Italy, but they generally lived in the cities, and there was
less stress between nobility and bourgeoisie than in northern Europe. With no
central royal court to dominate fashionable society as at Versailles (though an at-
tempt might be made at Naples), with no military tradition for several generations
and hence no mentality of an aristocratic officer- caste, with nobles living in town
and the old urban families owning estates in the country, there was only limited
ground on which the nobleman could feel himself to be superior, or on which the
wealthy non- noble could resent the noble as a noble. There were many nobles
among the leaders of discontent before 1796, and of revolution after that year.
Though Italy had long lost its former leading role in long- distance commerce, it
was by no means economically stagnant, and the growth of a money economy, with
the habit of purposeful investment for profit, was visible in Italy as elsewhere. In
the south it took the form of unproductive acquisition of large tracts of rural land
by city men. In the north there was more economic enterprise, with new forms of
business activity, new manufactures, new crops and methods in agriculture, new
roads and better communications and development of regional markets. There was
also a growing number of persons in the professions, such as medicine, law, jour-
nalism, and engineering. The Italian universities were more alive than those of
France or England, with men of ideas in their faculties of law and theology; they
were also distributed about the country, with men going from one to another.
These developments produced geographical and social mobility. It was charac-
teristic of many Italian cities to have, on the one hand, an established in- group, an
oligarchy composed of a few families who had been resident for generations and
monopolized the offices and the honors, and on the other hand an out- group of
persons newly arrived in the city, or whose fathers had settled in it, who had no
local involvement with the established interests, and who believed themselves
equally qualified for the conduct of large affairs. What they wanted was less a
united Italy than a modern state. A united Italy was an old dream of literary peo-
ple, proclaimed also in the 1790’s by political intellectuals who had little connec-
tion with any organized affairs. For most persons interested in public questions, a
modern state was more important, one that could go beyond a mere municipal
outlook, favor economic development, be large enough to organize a significant
territory, promote education, communications, and public enlightenment, intro-
duce a reasonable kind of taxation, combat the ecclesiastical influences, use the
resources of church- owned lands for more secular purposes, and overcome the in-
breeding and routine- mindedness of the old urban patriciates. Enlightened despo-
tism had already accomplished something in this direction, especially in Tuscany,
which probably for that reason was the least disturbed of the Italian states by revo-
lutionary commotion.
The place occupied by the Roman Catholic Church also made the situation in
Italy distinctive. Italy had its share of writers of the Enlightenment, most espe-
cially in economic and legal studies. There was little opposition to Christianity, and
few were concerned to doubt the divine or at least legitimate mission of the
church. The more so, perhaps, because the Church seemed to be in the nature of
things, to which no alternative was imagined, a great many people were highly
critical of its personnel and procedures. They came to be called Jansenists, and they