How the American and French Revolutions were interpreted in the Italian states and how that understanding helped redefine the concept of revolution itself
In Echoes of a Distant Republic, Anna Vincenzi explores the evolving meaning of "revolution" in the eighteenth century by surveying the reactions in Italy to the upheavals in America and later France. Drawing on a wide range of sourcesāfrom periodicals and gazettes to diplomatic correspondence, ecclesiastical documents, and private lettersāVincenzi reveals how observers in Venice, Florence, Rome, and Naples made sense of events across the Atlantic from the 1770s to the 1790s.
Italian political thinkers at first did not treat the American experience as a revolution in the modern senseāa radical break with the past meant to establish an egalitarian societyābut rather as the culmination of a long age of reform. It was the French Revolution, Vincenzi shows, that made the American Revolution appear, only in retrospect, as the beginning of a new age. What had once seemed a circumscribed, reformist movement within the anglophone world came to be understood as an epoch-making eventāan invitation to revolution in Europe against the monarchies of the Old Regime.