582 Chapter XXIV
their own exclusion from power, and at the slow pace with which the foundations
of a modern state were being laid. Revolutionary leaders made no appeal for popu-
lar support, as they had done in France at moments of exceptional crisis. Nor could
much response be aroused in the name of the “nation,” whether in the sense of all
Italians against all foreigners, or of cooperation of social classes, or of working
across territorial and municipal barriers. The revolution was therefore, compared to
the French, less massive, less violent, less self- sustaining, and more dependent on
outside aid. To say that it was no revolution at all, however, would be to premise
that all revolutions must closely resemble the French.
The news from Paris, beginning in 1789, soon divided the Italians, as it did oth-
ers, into those who feared and those who favored the French Revolution. What
this really meant was a division between those who feared and favored the attain-
ment of similar objectives in their own countries. Conservative Italians, as Pietro
Verri observed in 1789, soon tried to discredit the new ideas as “metaphysical.”
Italian governments, both those that were native and those that were subordinate
to Austria, made efforts to keep out French newspapers like the Moniteur, and
imposed a strong censorship on their own presses. These measures proved to be
difficult and unpopular, since no revolution had ever occurred in such a glare of
journalistic publicity, and the number of persons able and eager to read of these
events in north Italy was very large. When, with the war of 1792, revolutionary
propaganda began to assume larger proportions, it inspired terror in the authori-
ties. It may be recalled that Joel Barlow’s Advice to the People of Piedmont, in its
Italian translation, was so thoroughly repressed by the King of Sardinia that no
known copy now exists.
Such negativism on the part of the governments, and harping on the beauties of
purely traditional institutions, made many liberally minded and reformist Italians
more receptive to the French. Verri, for example, as a writer on economic and fiscal
subjects, had in former years been a staunch supporter of the Austrians at Milan,
looking to the enlightened monarchy of Maria Theresa and Joseph II to drive
through certain reforms in taxation. When Joseph, to carry out his plans, began to
cut down the liberties of the Milanese constituted bodies that opposed him, Verri
had second thoughts. He became less willing to accept reform at the price of a
despotism that crushed the local organs of expression. But he could have no faith
in the existing Milanese magistracies, closed, exclusive, self- perpetuating, and
overwhelmingly conservative as they were. He came to believe, therefore, that the
combination of practical reform with political liberty was possible only in some
new kind of state, which would be at first revolutionary, then constitutional. He
saw a state of this kind in the French Directory with its Constitution of the Year
III, which embodied what many Italian writers and law professors had been saying
for many years.^34 When the French reached Milan in 1796, Verri, Melzi d’Eril, and
other prominent citizens were willing to work with them, in the hope of using
them for their own purposes.^35 Somewhat similarly, when the Pope spoke out
34 Ghisalberti (see note 30 above) in particular shows that the Italian republican constitutions of
1796–1799 carried out the thought of the Italian Enlightenment.
35 Above, p. 555; D. Limoli, “Pietro Verri, a Lombard Reformer under Enlightened Despotism