A History of Italy 1700-1860

The Social Constraints of Political Change

Stuart Woolf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032270463
• eBook ISBN: 9781000602883
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

First Published in 1979, A History of Italy 1700-1860 provides a comprehensive overview of Italy's political history from 1700-1860. Divided in five parts it deals with themes like the re-emergence of Italy; Italy as the 'pawn' of European diplomacy; social physiognomy of the Italian states; problems of the government; enlightenment and despotism (1760-90); the offensive against the Church; revolution and moderation (1789-1814); revolution and the break with the past; rationalization and social conservatism; the search for independence (1815-47); legitimacy and conspiracy; alternative paths towards a new Italy; and the cost of independence (1848-61). It fills a major gap and presents a thoughtful and well-integrated political narrative of this complex period in Italy's development. This book is an essential read for students and scholars of Italian history and European history.

Part 1 The re-emergence of Italy 1700-60

DOI: 10.4324/9781003291091-2

But to leave these futile lamentations and sorrowful memories, let us rather give our thanks to the divine mercy, that this year has caused the fury of rulers to cease and by their withdrawal from the states they have had to cede has restored tranquillity and cheer to so many kingdoms and principates enveloped in the calamities of war for seven years. This peace must be judged the more memorable not only because it has spread throughout all Europe, but because it has been accompanied by universal peace throughout the earth; for in these times no other war of significance has been heard of in the other parts of the world; and thus we have no reason to envy the times of Augustus.... But besides the thanks we owe to the supreme Author of all good, it also behoves us to send to His throne our humble prayers that the great good of peace restored to us be not a gift of a few days, and that the potentates of Europe finally sacrifice their resentments, and likewise machinations of ever restless ambition, to the repose of poor peoples, who after so many calamities are beginning to breathe. While peace reigns in Italy, what can we not hope for, since we have princes of such good will and rectitude?

(Muratori, 26, t.XII)

To Lodovico Antonio Muratori, seventy-seven years old, the peace of Aixla-Chapelle in 1748 brought an overwhelming sense of relief and a glimmer of hope - relief that the savage futility of warfare was finally at an end, hope that the rulers of Europe, on whose decisions Italy’s fate rested, would at last leave her in peace, and that Italy’s princes would lead their ‘poor peoples’ towards a brighter future. Muratori’s long life had witnessed the changes which had marked Italy’s slow emergence from a state of impotence and isolation to an awareness of the backwardness of the Italian ‘nations’ in the general advance of European civilization, to a belief in the possibility of renewed contact and integration with Europe.

This provincial abbé, of cosmopolitan curiosity and erudition, was born in 1672, a moment when Italy’s ‘decadence’ seemed to have touched its lowest point, when Spanish rule and influence had penetrated the entire peninsula, when industrial and commercial activities had been eclipsed by the significant advances of the English, Dutch and French, when social relations had crystallized into a rigid, formal mould, symbolized by the Spanish etiquette adopted in all the local courts, manifest in the search of nobles and non-nobles for the security and prestige of landed possessions; a moment when intellectual and cultural enquiry seemed to have lost its vitality under the deadweight of the scholastic, casuistic, fossilized humanistic education inculcated by the Jesuits, when the princes, descendants of the more fortunate and successful signori, strove to create absolutist structures of government and the republican oligarchies withdrew into an affirmation of their privileges.

By the time of Muratori’s death in 1750, the political, economic and intellectual world of the Italians - though less so the pattern and relationships of Italian society - had undergone deep transformations. These were changes which emerged concurrently with, and were at least partially dependent upon, the renewed contact with Europe; and they gave rise to that belief in the possibility and effectiveness of rapid social change within a basically static structure which was to lie at the centre of the preoccupations of the generation of reformers and intellectuals who followed Muratori. But this world of the reformers of the later eighteenth century, imbued with an optimism generated and sustained by the very diffusion and apparent reception of their own convictions, was different from that in which Muratori had worked and hoped in isolation, almost alone. How this world came about, how Italy emerged from its prolonged isolation to observe a Europe which bore little resemblance to the Europe of ‘barbarians’ described by its humanist writers, are the first and most immediate questions that require explanation. For it was the interactions of this new European influence with the legacies of Italy’s ‘Spanish’ past that were to mark the course of the eighteenth century.

1 Italy, the `pawn' of European diplomacy

DOI: 10.4324/9781003291091-3

The search for a new equilibrium

Italy was thrown into brutal and violent contact with Europe by the breakup of the Spanish empire. Only once, during the previous century and a half, had Italian soil offered the battlefield for European warfare - during the Thirty Years’ War - and even then fighting, however savage, had been restricted to the northern plain. Spain had acted as a shield between Italy and Europe, by its direct rule of Lombardy, Naples, Sicily, Sardinia, the Tuscan garrison of the Presidi, and by its effective control of the political activities of the other Italian states.

With the death of Charles II of Spain (1700), Italy once more attracted the attention of European diplomacy as a crucial element in the overall balance of power. For both Habsburg and Bourbon the possession of Italy offered a dominant position in the Mediterranean. Half a century of wars was needed before a stable equilibrium was reached, an equilibrium based on the relegation of Italy to the periphery of European power politics, and on the achievement of a local balance of power within the peninsula through the exclusion of the direct rule of any of the great powers. During this halfcentury, and indeed after the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748), Italy was conceived of, not as a collection of separate states, but as a single piece on the chess-board of European international diplomacy. But this piece, especially after 1748, was regarded as of no more significance than a pawn. Although Italy continued to represent an ‘object’ of European diplomacy, it remained, until the new conflicts aroused by the French Revolution, an object of minor importance.

How these transformations and diminution of Italy’s international importance came about needs to be explained in terms of the political ambitions of the great European powers, not in those of the almost uniformly insignificant hopes, intrigues and activities of the Italian rulers. It was the extension of the struggle of the great powers to their colonial possessions outside Europe, the revival of Austria and the rise of Russia, and the new threat to the equilibrium represented by Frederick II of Prussia, that shifted the battlefield away from the Mediterranean and Italy. But during these long and bloody decades the desire for peace grew stronger among Italians, and was accompanied by a recognition by Italy’s princes and ruling classes of the peninsula’s insignificance in the world of power politics. Italy became neutral in 1748 because the great powers so decreed. But it was Italy’s rulers who ensured that its neutrality was maintained.

The struggle over the fate of the Spanish empire in the opening years of the eighteenth century had witnessed the alignment of the Bourbons of France and Spain against the Habsburgs of Austria allied to Britain and the United Provinces. The underlying purpose of the struggle was to maintain the balance of power by a territorial distribution among the two rival dynasties which would avoid the threat of predominance over Europe by either. It was to achieve this end that Britain, the major naval power, firmly installed in the Mediterranean through the conquest of Gibraltar and Minorca, ensured the strengthening of the house of Savoy by its acquisition of the former Lombard provinces of the Alessandrino and of the kingdom of Sicily. For this stronger Savoy was to act as a counterbalance to the extension of Austrian power with the imperial possession of Lombardy, Mantua, Naples and Sardinia (treaty of Utrecht, 1713). The three wars which followed - in 1718-19, 1733-6 and 1740-8 - centred wholly or partly on Italy because of the traditional rivalry of Habsburgs and Bourbons. But the roles of the two dynasties were now reversed: it was Bourbon Spanish and French hostility to the Austrian occupation of Italy that maintained the tension and led to hostilities.

Austrian policy was divided between concern for its possessions in Germany, Hungary and the Balkans and hopes of its new Italian lands. The major impulse towards an active Italian policy came from the Spanish exiles at Vienna - the ‘Catalans’, who had followed Charles VI (1711-40) when he abandoned Spain - and above all from the victorious and powerful general and statesman, prince Eugene of Savoy (1663-1736). Italy was of more immediate economic importance to the emperor than his possessions in the Netherlands as a market for commercial activities, as the base for a Mediterranean fleet and as a source of taxes. As the Piedmontese diplomat, marquis Ignazio del Borgo, wrote in 1725: ‘The provinces of Italy are the Indies of the Court of Vienna. For more than 25 years a good part of the silver of Italy has gone there’ (Quazza, 17, p. 30). The years before and after Utrecht witnessed Austria’s attempt to consolidate and expand its power in Italy by exploiting its claims as imperial suzerain of fiefs scattered in the territories of the other Italian states. The acquisition of Sicily in exchange for Sardinia in 1720, which was imposed on Victor Amadeus II, left Austria as strong in Italy as had been Spain and gave rise to hopes of power in the Mediterranean.

But Austrian influence in Italy was constantly undermined by the Bourbon threat and by the inefficiency of its government in the early years. Initially welcomed by large sectors of the ruling classes in the former Spanish provinces, as well as by heterogeneous groups in the other Italian states, who looked to the emperor as the natural and traditional leader of the struggle against the world of the counter-reformation, almost the personification of what was anachronistically regarded as the ‘ghibelline’* cause (Venturi, 30, p. 18), Charles VI and his representatives failed to live up to expectations. The corruption of the ‘Catalans’, the exaction of heavy taxes, the lack of resoluteness in the struggle against the papacy in southern Italy, led increasingly to abandonment of the imperial cause, even to nostalgia for Spanish rule. Austria never managed to consolidate its power in the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily. Only in the duchy of Milan did the ruling classes remain firmly tied in allegiance to Vienna, not least because of their fear of conquest by the enemy at Turin, who had already annexed the duchy’s western provinces.

* The term ‘ghibelline’ was a conscious re-evocation of the medieval struggles between supporters of the emperor (ghibellines) and those of the pope (guelphs). The words lost their original meaning almost as soon as they became current, and were used to describe or legitimize a multitude of factional, family or personal feuds before falling into disuse during the long period of Spanish and counter-reformation dominance. The revival of the term ‘ghibelline’ (to which the antiquarian studies of these years perhaps contributed) - as even more the diffuse usage of ‘guelphism’ a century later in the romantic and historicist environment of the post-Napoleonic period - throw an interesting side-light on the difficulties experienced by the Italian intellectual class in freeing itself of the heavy burden of Italy’s past.

The basic cause of the insecurity and apparent fragility of Austrian rule was the Spanish challenge. The close ties between the Italian and Iberian peninsulas had not been snapped by Utrecht. Too many Spaniards owned lands in Naples and Sicily. Too many Italians still served as Spanish diplomats, too many nobles, merchants, craftsmen, bureaucrats, and soldiers had emigrated to Spain in the previous century. Philip V’s second wife was a Farnese; her chief minister, cardinal Giulio Alberoni (1664-1752), aimed to oust the Habsburgs and ensure the return of Spain. Alberoni’s ‘plan’ was more than a mere return to the past. It was an unusual mixture of old and new. It picked up the theme - so frequently voiced by seventeenth-century publicists - of freeing Italy from the foreigner; it offered one more scheme to upset the local balance of power in favour of a single Italian dynasty. But at the same time it proposed a novel solution: that Italian states, when ruled by foreign princes, should not thereby revert to the status of provinces of the major European powers, but should remain autonomous. Spanish power was to be used to evict the Habsburgs from Italy. But the vacuum would not be filled by a simple restoration of Spanish power. For the new prince, don Carlos, son of Philip V (1683-1746) and Elizabeth Farnese (1692-1766), would rule over the Habsburg Italian possessions independently of Spain; the throne at Madrid would descend from Philip V to his eldest son, Carlos’ half-brother Ferdinand. A new and powerful Bourbon-Farnese dynasty, closely linked to the Farnese of Parma (whose state would be enlarged) would control Italy.

Alberoni’s plan survived the failure of the Spanish invasion of Italy in 1718 and the cardinal’s own fall the following year, to remain as the dominant theme of Italian and Mediterranean politics until Aix-la-Chapelle. The birth of a second son to Elizabeth and Philip, don Philip, merely led to the extension of Alberoni’s plan, with the proposal to create two Italian states rather than one for Elizabeth’s children. If the states could not be created at Habsburg expense, the imminent extinction of two of the old Renaissance dynasties - the Farnese of Parma and the Medici of Tuscany - offered a timely alternative solution. The complex modifications of Italy’s political geography in these decades reflected Elizabeth Farnese’s determination reluctantly accepted by the other great powers - to instal her two sons on Italian thrones. It would be anachronistic to ascribe ‘patriotic’ motivations to Alberoni’s plan. The cardinal conceived it in terms of the dynastic juggling of the age. It offered a solution which requited the ambitions of both the Spanish Bourbons and the Farnesi. Even if Elizabeth’s children, don Carlos and don Philip, ruled autonomous states in Italy, they were expected to remain - and for many years did remain - diplomatically, financially and militarily dependent on Spain. The relative independence and neutrality which ultimately characterized the new Italian dynasties was unforeseen and unexpected.

The initial short war upon which Alberoni embarked in 1717 only gained a promise from the Quadruple Alliance (Britain, France, Austria and the United Provinces) that don Carlos would inherit the states of Tuscany and Parma, which he would hold as imperial fiefs (1720). The following decade of continuous tension culminated in 1731 in the guarantee of this pledge by the introduction of Spanish troops into the fortresses of Tuscany and Parma. But the War of the Polish Succession (1733-8), in which French, Spanish and Piedmontese armies attacked the Habsburgs successfully in Italy, brought a new territorial arrangement: don Carlos received Naples and Sicily (he was King of the Two Sicilies from 1735 to 1759, and then King of Spain from 1759 to 1788), the Austrians were compensated with the duchy of Parma; Tuscany was to be given to Francis, duke of Lorraine, in exchange for his own state, ceded to the unsuccessful candidate for the Polish throne, Stanislas Leszczynski, with the promise of Lorraine’s reversion to France on his death (1766). The War of the Austrian Succession, which lasted for eight bitter years (1740-8), led to only one further change: the assignment of Parma to don Philip (1745-65). In 1748 the eighty-eight-year-old Alberoni triumphed, thirty years after he had first put forward his plan.

These decades witnessed a diminution of Britain’s direct involvement in the Mediterranean. Italy’s importance for British commercial activities had increased rapidly in the course of the seventeenth century. The control of trade with Leghorn, Genoa, Naples, Messina and Venice was fought over by the Levant Company and the Merchant Adventurers. Imports from Italy between 1717 and 1740 averaged about £500 000 annually, or nearly 10 per cent of all British imports. Strategically, Italy was of great significance for the British fleet. It was for this reason that Britain had assigned Sicily to the ruler of a small, almost land-locked state, the duchy of Piedmont-Savoy, which was bound to England as an export market for its silk produce, and wholly dependent on the British fleet: in 1713 the new king and his retinue were transported to the island kingdom on English ships.

British political intervention in Italian affairs was a response to Habsburg-Bourbon rivalry. Alberoni’s adventure, while confirming British naval supremacy (Admiral Byng destroyed the Spanish fleet off Cape Passero in 1718), also led to the sacrifice of Victor Amadeus II (1675-1730) and acceptance of the Habsburg possession of Sicily in exchange for Sardinia (1720). British policy, especially under Walpole’s leadership, remained tied to the traditional alliance with Austria and the United Provinces. But the advantages of a Bourbon counterweight to the Habsburgs, in the form of don Carlos, were not to be underestimated. Thus Britain was involved in Italy because of its concern for the European balance of power. As Victor Amadeus II wrote in 1729, ‘to dominate Italy has been the aim both of the Emperor and Spain . . . as experience has taught that domination in Italy goes far towards upsetting the universal balance of power’ (Quazza, 17, p. 136). Savoy was to be strengthened in order to check the French advance in the Mediterranean; don Carlos was to be supported as a balance to both Savoy and Habsburg Italy. Britain dominated the search for a secure solution to the Italian problem until the early 1730s, when Walpole’s parliamentary difficulties enabled Fleury to seize the initiative with the FrancoSavoyard and Franco-Spanish treaties (1733). Even in the following years Britain remained deeply involved, attempting to mediate in the Polish Succession War, preventing don Carlos from attacking the Austrians in north Italy in 1742 by a threat to bombard Naples. But British interests were turning elsewhere, to Germany and, supremely, towards the colonies. The equilibrium finally achieved at Aix-la-Chapelle could hardly have proved more satisfactory for British interests.

For the French the 1748 treaty did not mark so decisive a dividing line. French influence in Italy was still to be pursued, but by the more peaceful and personal methods of marriage ties and family pacts. Even before Aix-la-Chapelle, French concern with Italy had changed in tone. It is a matter of historical dispute whether Louis XIV - in accepting the inheritance of Charles II of Spain for his grandson - was aiming at a Bourbon hegemony of Europe, such as the earlier Habsburg union of the Spanish and Austrian empires under Charles V had seemed to threaten. But the Spanish Succession War that resulted had involved Bourbon France (whether for itself or on behalf of Bourbon Spain) in its last serious attempt as a dynasty to dominate Italy. In the two subsequent wars intervention in Italy played a subordinate part in a broader plan in which French strength and influence on the Rhine and in central Europe was regarded as of greater significance. It was in this context that the marquis d’Argenson put forward his famous plan in 1745 for a federation of independent Italian states, a ‘Republic or eternal association of Italic powers, like the German, Batavic and Helvetic ones’ (Quazza, in 4, vol. 2, pp. 845-6). The plan expressed an acceptance of what, by now, was strikingly clear - the futility of continuing the struggle for mastery of Italy and hence the need to achieve a permanent equilibrium outside foreign control.

Italy, ‘that apple of discord, that for so long has kept wars going almost continuously’ (in the words of a Savoyard diplomat, marquis d’Arvilliers) was being pushed towards the periphery of European politics (Quaz...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: The land and the people
• PART 1 THE RE-EMERGENCE OF ITALY 1700-60
• PART 2 REFORM AND AUTHORITY: ENLIGHTENMENT AND DESPOTISM 1760-90
• PART 3 REVOLUTION AND MODERATION 1789-1814
• PART 4 THE SEARCH FOR INDEPENDENCE 1815-47
• PART 5 THE COST OF INDEPENDENCE 1848-61
• 16 Epilogue
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index