290 Chapter XII
that the sovereign drew authority from his people or peoples, that he had only such
rightful powers as they had agreed to assign him, and that if he exceeded these
powers they were absolved from obedience. Such ideas might seem subversive to
the advisers of kings, but they were by no means novel; neither Locke nor Montes-
quieu had exactly invented them, for they came out of the Middle Ages and out of
traditions of elective monarchy which still had vitality in eastern Europe. They
were the common stock of political argument from the Transylvanian Alps to the
Pennsylvanian Alleghenies.
Leopold, before becoming emperor, had been Grand Duke of Tuscany for
twenty- five years, and had there carried out a remarkable series of reforms, in the
spirit of the Enlightenment, in taxes, tariffs, land valuations, the gild regime, town
government, and church affairs. He had even worked out a project for a Tuscan
constitution, to which a certain interest attaches in the context of the present book.
During the American war Leopold received a visit from the Tuscan- born Philip
Mazzei, who hoped to borrow money from him for the State of Virginia. They
naturally discussed American issues, and the newspapers at Florence, as elsewhere,
gave attention to the American rebellion and the American constitutions. Leopold
worked on his constitutional project from 1779 to 1782, during which it is clear,
from the use of certain phrases, that he had the constitution of Virginia on his
desk. The idea of proclaiming a constitution was probably suggested to him by
events in America, but he drew its content from the European Enlightenment as a
whole, and from his immediate practical needs in the politics of the grand duchy.
What he needed was support against the nobility and the church, and he provided,
therefore, for a representative assembly to be elected by taxpayers as taxpayers, not
by members of the existing status groups. He hoped thereby to awaken the prop-
ertied middle class to political life as his own allies, and believed that his govern-
ment, and in principle any government, would be the stronger if it rested explicitly
on public approval and a measure of public participation. It was not that he ex-
pected his own authority to be reduced; on the contrary he expected it to be
greater, for the assembly was to be consultative only, to learn what the ruler in-
tended, and supply him with information: the first servant of the state, as enlight-
ened princes now called themselves, would lead an interested people against “feu-
dalism” and “clerocracy.” Leopold’s project never went into effect, because his own
Italian advisers advised against it, insisting, probably rightly in 1782, that the
people were not as interested as Leopold thought, and that if anyone was to clash
with feudalism and clerocracy they much preferred that the Grand Duke do it
himself.^9
At any rate, when Leopold II in 1790 became Archduke of Austria and King of
Hungary and Bohemia he probably thought that Virginia had a better constitu-
tion than any of his own numerous domains. On the other hand, he did not believe
it possible, as Joseph did, to govern in outright defiance of all constituted bodies in
the empire. He began to pacify his irate subjects by promising them their old con-
9 C. Francovich, “La rivoluzione americane e il progetto di costituzione de granduca Pietro Leo-
poldo,” in Atti del XXXII Congresso di storia del Risorgimento italiano (Rome, 1954), 201–7; F. Valsec-
chi, Le riforme dell ’ assolutismo illuminato negli stati italiani, 1748–1789 (Milan, 1955), 217–22. Valsec-
chi discusses the constitutional project without reference to American influence.