[1755-1790 A.D.] their own class in each town; the representatives elected by the landholders of the province; and the mercantile men who represented, and were elected by, the corporation of merchants. The council so formed devolved its ordinary powers on a committee of its own body, called the prefects of government. Communal councils were also instituted, according to regulations laid down in a prolix code. Each of them administered the patrimony of the commune, under the presidency of a chancellor appointed by the sovereign. Their own members were five for each commune: three representatives of the landholders, one representative of the mercantile body, and one representative of those who were subject to the capitation-tax. They were elected annually in a meeting of all the landholders rated on the books for the land-tax; soldiers and churchmen, however, being ineligible. The same constituency also elected the consul, who was an inferior criminal judge, and the syndic, who had dignity without any real duties.

Joseph, seconded by his excellent viceroy Count Firmian, under whom served Verri, Carli, Neri, and other enlightened Italians, followed out the plan of amelioration which had been thus delineated for him. He improved the courts of justice and the judicial procedure, especially in criminal causes, abolishing, at the suggestion of Beccaria, torture and secret trials. He annulled or diminished the most vexatious of the feudal privileges, and imposed checks on the perpetual destination of estates. He patronised agriculture, and extended commerce and manufactures by the construction of roads, as well as by the abolition of some remaining imposts and restrictions. When the death of his mother, in 1780, freed him from her remonstrances on ecclesiastical matters, he commenced with his accustomed impetuosity a series of changes in that department, which Pius VI considered so dangerous that he made a fruitless journey AN ITALIAN PEASANT, to Vienna in the hope of procuring their repeal. The most material of those measures were the following: all dissenters were to enjoy toleration; the bishops were forbidden, as they had already been forbidden by other princes, to act upon any papal bull but such as should be transmitted to them by the government; the monastic clergy were declared to be dependent, not on the general of their order who lived in Rome, but directly on the resident bishop of the diocese within which their cloister was situated; lastly, all nunneries were suppressed, except those which pledged themselves to occupy their members in the education of the young. The emperor's death interrupted the consolidation of his famous system for giving uniformity to his system of government throughout all the Austrian dominions. The decree of 1786, which promulgated this new constitution, divided the Italian provinces into eight circles, in each of which the local administration was to be vested in a chamber closely dependent upon the government. This departure from the late arrangement created in Lombardy universal discontent.

Sometimes unjust and cruel, often misjudging and imprudent, always headstrong, passionate, and despotic, doing good to his subjects by force, and punishing as ungrateful all who refused to be thus benefited, Joseph was

[1765-1790 A.D.]

an unconscious instrument in the hand of providence for advancing in southern Europe the great revolution of his time. One inveterate evil was extirpated, that another might be substituted for it, which, being less deeply rooted, was destined in its turn to wither and die away. "At length," said a noble-minded Italian in the last stage of the emperor's reign, "the obstacles which hindered the happiness of nations have mainly disappeared. Over the greater part of Europe despotism has banished feudal anarchy; and the manners and spirit of the times have already weakened despotism.

The reforms in the grand duchy of Tuscany went infinitely further than those of Joseph and his mother in the provinces of the Po. They were commenced during the life of Francis, by the prince of Craon, his viceroy at Florence; and the plan was formed, even thus early, for consolidating into one common code all those contradictory laws which, subsisting in the old Tuscan communities, had been maintained since the subjection of all to the duchy. But it was reserved for younger hands to construct this noble edifice.

Till we reflect that Leopold's scheme of legislation for Tuscany was devised and executed long before that change of opinions which the French Revolution diffused through the whole of Europe, we are not fully aware how very far he stood in advance of his age. In his new code the criminal section was especially bold, inasmuch as it swept away at once torture, confiscation, secret trial, and even the punishment of death. Imprisonment for debt, forbidden by one of his laws unless the claim exceeded a certain amount, was afterwards abolished altogether. All privileged jurisdictions were destroyed, and the public courts fortified in their independence and authority. Restrictions on agriculture were totally removed; and large tracts of common were brought into cultivation by being divided among poor peasants in property, subject only to a small crown-rent. The grand duke discontinued the ruinous system of farming out the taxes; he diminished their amount, and abandoned most of the government monopolies. Notwithstanding, he was able, before he left Italy, to pay off the greater part of a large national debt; for, under his new system, and especially through the absolute freedom which he allowed to commerce, industry flourished so wonderfully, that his revenue suffered hardly any diminution.

Leopold's ecclesiastical reforms were equally daring, and gave deep offence to the papal government. They were chiefly designed for improving the condition of the parochial clergy, and for curbing the monastic orders. He suppressed the Inquisition; he imposed severe limitations on the profession of monks and nuns; he made the regular clergy dependent, not merely (as his brother had done) on their bishop, but directly on the priest of the parish; he taxed church-lands like those belonging to laymen; he even seized arbitrarily several large estates which had been destined to useless ecclesiastical purposes, and applied their proceeds towards increasing the insufficient incomes of the priests in rural parishes. This step, as well as several others, formed parts of his great scheme against tithes, of which he gradually introduced a general commutation.

In the system which this great man enforced there were unquestionably many defects. There was something (though not much) of his brother's hasty disregard for obstacles arising from foreign quarters; a fault which made his scheme for free trade in some respects injurious to his subjects, and forced him in his later years to resume a few restrictions. There was a disposition to overstrain the principles of reform, manifested when he totally abolished trading corporations, or when, in the last year of the period, he annulled at a blow all rights of primogeniture, and all substitutions in

H. W. VOL. IX. 2N

[1765-1790 A.D. succession to land. There was a jealous watchfulness over details, a temper exceedingly useful but very irritating, which displayed itself with equal force in the severe system of police, and in the curious circular letter which he addressed to the nobles, requesting that their ladies might be made to dress more economically. There was some fickleness of purpose, though much less than those have believed, who forget the existence of that chaos of local laws and privileges, through which he had for years to pilot his way, embarrassed, misled, and thwarted at every step. Lastly, there were two absolute wants. Leopold did not, because in a single generation he could not, renovate the heart and mind of his people; and therefore the degenerate Florentines murmured at his strictness of rule, and ridiculed his personal peculiarities. He did not give to his subjects a representative constitution; and therefore his fabric of beneficent legislation crumbled into fragments the moment his hand ceased to support its weight.

It is said, indeed, that he had sketched a constitution before he left Tuscany; but, at all events, his reforms in the local administration went very far towards this great end. His purpose, in which, as in so much besides, he was obstructed by a multiplicity of special statutes and customs, was to introduce over the duchy one uniform system of municipal government, embracing all districts, rural as well as urban. During his whole reign, step after step led him towards this result, by organising new communal councils in various provinces, which had at length comprehended nearly the whole state. At the same time there was extended to the new boards the privilege conferred first on those in the Florentine territory, of managing their local patrimony as of old, without dependence upon the supreme government. The polity of Alessandro de' Medici, which still prevailed in Florence, was annulled in 1781; and the elective board which administered the affairs of the city thenceforth consisted of a gonfalonier, as president, eleven priors, and twenty councillors.

A Tuscan Estimate of Leopold

The reforms of Leopold I (Emperor Leopold II) did not suffice to drag Tuscany from the abyss into which she had been cast by the sbirocracy of the Medici. A fallen people would rise again to the enthusiasm of grand ideas, but what grand idea did Leopold I place at the head of the regenerative movement? He corrected clerical abuses, but did not enkindle the religious

[1765-1790 A.D.]

faith of the people after the example of the ardent preachers of the Crusades of the Middle Ages and the sixteenth century reformers. He recognised equality in civil laws, but did not make a social credo of it like the French republicans.

Leopold's idea was a paternal government, a sort of family council, where the most touching accord would reign between the prince and the assembly elected by the commons. He wanted to make another Arcadia of Tuscany, an Arcadia simply occupied with its well-being and material progress, foreign to the use of arms and neutral in all aspects of war. But this was not the way to model character and make free citizens. The shock given to Europe by the French Revolution and the results therefrom had quite other effects. When Italy owed to the France of '89 that moral shock which stirred up men's minds and made them enter into communication with the universal conscience, it did not need more to convict of error those who reproached the French Revolution with having upset the reforms of Italian princes without any compensation. Abstention in this gigantic struggle was impossible. It was imperative to fight either for the powers of the past or for those of the future; so this worship of principles became the great passion of souls, and character regained all its old vigour. The Restoration came to check this salutary movement.

The sleeping sbirocracy inaugurated by Fossombroni went back to the Medici traditions and the meanness of the old régime was again substituted for the moral and political grandeur of the French epoch. But it was thenceforth impossible to stifle the germs of the new life. We shall see these germs, in spite of most unfavourable conditions, fructifying in Tuscany as in other parts of Italy; we shall see the country of Michelangelo coming out of its abasement and paying the Italian revolution the tribute of its genius, its love, and its blood.g

ITALY IN THE REVOLUTIONARY AGE

For the sovereigns of Italy, as well as for the people, the first three years of the revolutionary age formed a time of abortive plans and earnest preparation.

Events of immediate interest cut short two visionary designs, of which, although both must have failed of success, yet either, by the very attempt, might have given another colour to the history of Europe. A few aspiring cardinals, looking back to Gregory VII and Sixtus V, devised an Italian league, to be headed by the pope; and at the court of Turin, which took example from its own more recent annals, there was planned a campaign against its Austrian neighbours. But Rome was destined to fall a passive victim to foreign aggression; and the ambitious king of Sardinia became the scapegoat of the prince whose Lombard crown he had wished to transfer to his own brows.

The emperor Joseph died in the beginning of the year 1790, and Leopold, leaving Tuscany to his second son Ferdinand, received both the hereditary dominions of Austria and the imperial dignity. He extricated himself skill fully from the foreign wars into which his brother had plunged; but neither the internal discontents of the Low Countries, nor the dangers which threatened Louis XVI, were evils so easily remedied. He employed his diplomacy in endeavouring, by means of a European congress, to impose constitutional limitations on all the contending parties in France; but disappointment in

[1790-1794 A.D.} this scheme, and fresh revolts among his own provinces, embittered every moment of his life. He was tempted to become a leading party in the fatal Treaty of Pilnitz, which may be truly said to have destroyed the French monarchy; and in the spring of 1792, his death, at the age of forty-four, saved him from beholding the calamities which speedily followed. His hereditary estates descended to his eldest son Francis, who likewise succeeded him as emperor; and the policy of the new reign, warlike as well as anti-revolutionary from its very opening, accelerated the contest which soon desolated Europe.

Two other Italian courts, besides those of Lombardy and Tuscany, were deeply interested in the fate of the royal family in Paris. The queen of Naples was, like Marie Antoinette, a daughter of Maria Theresa; and the two brothers of Louis XVI were sons-in-law of the king of Sardinia. The advisers of Ferdinand prepared for the struggle by strengthening the artillery and marine, by reconciling themselves with the see of Rome, by imposing extraordinary taxes, and by seizing the money deposited in the national banks; but to these measures were added others of a different cast, designed for crushing the dreaded strength of public opinion. Arbitrary commissions were organised for trying political offences; spies were set to watch Cirillo, Pagano, Conforti, Delfico, and other men of liberal views; foreign books and newspapers were excluded; and Filangieri's work was burned by the hands of the common hangman. In the other extremity of the peninsula, the count d'Artois imitated at Turin, on a smaller scale, the court of emigrant nobles which surrounded Monsieur at Coblenz. Simultaneously with that alliance between the emperor and the king of Prussia, which produced the abortive invasion of France in 1792, there was concluded an Italian league, headed openly by Naples and Rome, and secretly joined by Victor Amadeus, while the grand duke of Tuscany, as well as the Venetians and the Genoese, remained determinedly neutral.

Time of the French Republic under the National Convention

The little cloud which rose over the tennis-court at Versailles, had already overshadowed all the thrones in Europe; and that of Sardinia was the first on which it discharged its tempest. Where both parties were resolved on war, a pretence was readily found. Semonville, sent to negotiate for a passage for the French armies through Piedmont, was reported to have propagated revolutionary doctrines on his way: he was ordered to quit the king's dominions, and a second envoy was refused leave to cross the frontier.

On the 18th of September, 1792, the national assembly declared war against the king of Sardinia; and an invasion of his states immediately ensued. The Savoyards, discontented and democratic, had no will to fight; the Piedmontese, ill-officered as well as mutinous, had neither will nor ability; and within a fortnight Savoy and the county of Nice were in the possession of the French troops. The atrocities, however, which took place at Paris during the autumn of that year, and the execution of the king in the beginning of the next, not only gave fresh vigour to the operations of the allied sovereigns, but added new members to their league. In 1793 a British fleet occupied Corsica; while the Austrians and Piedmontese vainly tried to fight their way against Kellermann through Savoy to Lyons. During the succeeding summer, the republicans, entering Italy with one army by the Alps, and with another through the neutral territory of Genoa,