606 Chapter XXV
The market for real property was revolutionized by the abolition of fidecommessi
and by the confiscation and sale of lands belonging to the church. Fidecommessi
were Italian equivalents to the English primogeniture and entail. They supported
landed aristocracy as a social institution, but many nobles as well as middle- class
persons in the Italian revolutionary movement desired an end to them. Their aboli-
tion allowed younger sons of landed families to inherit land, and individual land-
owners to sell or borrow at will. Income- producing church properties were confis-
cated in the Cisalpine as in France. Full studies have yet to be made of the actual
consequences, which in any case only began to make themselves felt after 1801,
when the new regime became sufficiently stabilized for buyers to take the risk of
purchasing land expropriated from the Church. It is known that in the neighbor-
hood of Bologna the proportion of land owned by church bodies dropped from 9
per cent in 1796 to 2 per cent in 1804. The share owned by noblemen fell from 78
per cent to 51 per cent in 1835. The corresponding increase went mostly to middle-
class city people, some of whom put the land to more productive use than the
former owners.^31
In Italy the Catholic Church was omnipresent, and disputes over ecclesiastical
institutions took place as much within it as against it. Church reformers, though
without influence at the court of Pius VI, were numerous throughout the penin-
sula. Some, like Scipione di Ricci, long before 1796, had stressed the power of
governments to reorganize and reform the clergy. Others (they were all called
“Jansenists”) preached a primitive Christian simplicity. Such was Giuseppe Poggi,
who edited several different papers at Milan. In Poggi the Jansenist and the Jaco-
bin were completely blended. He argued that true Christian doctrine and the new
principles of liberty, brotherhood, and equality of rights were the same. He thought
the church should have no authority in the state, and the state none in religion;
that there should not even be a civic cult in the manner of Rousseau or Robes-
pierre; and that state and church should simply be separated, with persons of any
religion or no religion equally acceptable to the state, and Christianity working
upon the state only through the moral consciousness of the individual. “In a well
ordered republic,” he wrote in his Repubblicano Evangelico, “the priest being re-
duced to a citizen equal to others, deprived of all extrinsic authority and temporal
possessions, restricted to a pure administration of the sacraments and preaching of
the Gospel... will no longer be harmful to the State, but will do his part to mak-
ing a republican government, such as ours, loved and cultivated as a matter of
conscience.”^32
The measures taken by the Cisalpine Legislative Body were not meant to be
fundamentally anti- Catholic, but they were inspired in some degree by French
Jansenism and Gallicanism, and even had a certain flavor of Protestantism. Secu-
larization of Church property has already been mentioned. Payment of fees to
priests for religious services was abolished. Monastic houses and religious vows
31 R. Zangheri, Prime ricerche sulla distribuzione della proprietà fondiana nella pianura bolognese,
1789–1835 (Bologna, 1957).
32 Rota, Poggi, 138; G. Cattana, “II giansenismo e la legislazione ecclesiasrica della Cisalpina” in
Nuova rivista storica XV (1931), 105–23.