on political economy; and among them was one, Cesare Beccaria, who
on another theme produced perhaps the most practically influential
single book of the eighteenth century, [1580] the treatise on Crimes
and Punishments (1764), which affected penal methods for the better
throughout the whole of Europe. Even were he not known to be a deist,
his strictly secular and rationalist method would have brought upon
him priestly suspicion; and he had in fact to defend himself against
pertinacious and unscrupulous attacks, [1581] though he had sought
in his book to guard himself by occasionally "veiling the truth
in clouds." [1582] As we have seen, Beccaria owed his intellectual
awakening first to Montesquieu and above all to Helvétius--another
testimony to the reformative virtue of all freethought.
Of the aforesaid eight-and-twenty writers on economics, probably the
majority were freethinkers. Among them, at all events, were Count
Algarotti (1712-1764), the distinguished æsthetician, one of the
group round Frederick at Berlin and author of Il Newtonianismo per
le dame (1737); Filangieri, whose work on legislation (put on the
Index by the papacy) won the high praise of Franklin; the Neapolitan
abbate Ferdinando Galiani, one of the brightest and soundest wits in
the circle of the French philosophes; the other Neapolitan abbate
Antonio Genovesi (1712-1769), the "redeemer of the Italian mind,"
[1583] and the chief establisher of economic science for modern
Italy. [1584] To these names may be added those of Alfieri, one
of the strongest anti-clericalists of his age; Bettinelli, the
correspondent of Voltaire and author of The Resurrection of Italy
(1775); Count Dandolo, author of a French work on The New Men (1799);
and the learned Giannone, author of the great anti-papal History of
the Kingdom of Naples (1723), who, after more than one narrow escape,
was thrown in prison by the king of Sardinia, and died there (1748)
after twelve years' confinement.
To the merits of Algarotti and Genovesi there are high contemporary
testimonies. Algarotti was on friendly terms with Cardinal Ganganelli,
who in 1769 became Pope Clement XIV. In 1754 the latter writes [1585]
him: "My dear Count, Contrive matters so, in spite of your philosophy,
that I may see you in heaven; for I should be very sorry to lose sight
of you for an eternity. You are one of those rare men, both for heart
and understanding, whom we could wish to love even beyond the grave,
when we have once had the advantage of knowing them. No one has more
reasons to be convinced of the spirituality and immortality of the
soul than you have. The years glide away for the philosophers as well
as for the ignorant; and what is to be the term of them cannot but
employ a man who thinks. Own that I can manage sermons so as not to
frighten away a bel esprit; and that if every one delivered as short
and as friendly sermons as I do, you would sometimes go to hear a
preacher. But barely hearing will not do ... the amiable Algarotti
must become as good a Christian as he is a philosopher: then should
I doubly be his friend and servant." [1586]
In an earlier letter, Ganganelli writes: "The Pope [Benedict XIV]
is ever great and entertaining for his bons mots. He was saying the
other day that he had always loved you, and that it would give him very
great pleasure to see you again. He speaks with admiration of the king
of Prussia ... whose history will make one of the finest monuments of
the eighteenth century. See here and acknowledge my generosity! For
that prince makes the greatest jest possible of the Court of Rome,
and of us monks and friars. Cardinal Querini will not be satisfied
unless he have you with him for some time at Brescia. He one day told
me that he would invite you to come and dedicate his library.... There
is no harm in preaching to a philosopher who seldom goes to hear a
sermon, and who will not have become a great saint by residing at
Potsdam. You are there three men whose talents might be of great
use to religion if you would change their direction--viz. Yourself,
Mons. de Voltaire, and M. de Maupertuis. But that is not the ton
of the age, and you are resolved to follow the fashion." [1587]
Ganganelli in his correspondence reveals himself as an admirer
of Newton [1588] and somewhat averse to religious zeal. [1589] Of
the papal government he admitted that it was favourable "neither
to commerce, to agriculture, nor to population, which precisely
constitute the essence of public felicity," while suavely reminding
the Englishman of the "inconveniences" of his own government. [1590]
To the learned Muratori, who suffered at the hands of the bigots,
he and Pope Benedict XIV gave their sympathy. [1591]
But Ganganelli's own thinking on the issues between reason and religion
was entirely commonplace. "Whatever," he wrote, "departs from the
account given of the Creation in the book of Genesis has nothing to
support it but paradoxes, or, at most, mere hypotheses. Moses alone,
as being an inspired author, could perfectly acquaint us with the
formation of the world, and the development of its parts.... Whoever
does not see the truth in what Moses relates was never born to know
it." [1592] It was only in his relation to the bigots of his own Church
that his thinking was rationalistic. "The Pope," he writes to a French
marquis, "relies on Providence; but God does not perform miracles
every time he is asked to do it. Besides, is he to perform one that
Rome may enjoy a right of seignory over the Duchy of Parma?" [1593]
At his death an Italian wrote of him that "the distinction he was
able to draw between dogmas or discipline and ultramontane opinions
gave him the courage to take many opportunities of promoting the
peace of the State." His tolerance is sufficiently exhibited in one
of his letters to Algarotti: "I hope that you will preach to me some
of these days, so that each may have his turn." [1594] Freethought
had achieved something when a Roman Cardinal, a predestinate Pope,
could so write to an avowed freethinker. Concerning Galiani we have
the warm panegyric of Grimm. "If I have any vanity with which to
reproach myself," he writes, "it is that which I derive in spite of
myself from the fact of the conformity of my ideas with those of
the two rarest men whom I have the happiness to know, Galiani and
Denis Diderot." [1595] Grimm held Galiani to be of all men the best
qualified to write a true ecclesiastical history. But the history that
would have satisfied him and Grimm was not to be published in that age.
Italy, however, had done her full share, considering her heritage
of burdens and hindrances, in the intellectual work of the century;
and in the names of Galvani and Volta stands the record of one more of
her great contributions to human enlightenment. Under Duke Leopold II
of Tuscany the papacy was so far defied that books put on the Index
were produced for him under the imprint of London; [1596] and the
papacy itself at length gave way to the spirit of reform, Clement XIV
consenting among other things to abolish the Order of Jesuits (1773),
after his predecessor had died of grief over his proved impotence to
resist the secular policy of the States around him. [1597] In Tuscany,
indeed, the reaction against the French Revolution was instant and
severe. Leopold succeeded his brother Joseph as emperor of Austria in
1790, but died in 1792; and in his realm, as was the case in Denmark
and in Spain in the same century, the reforms imposed from above
by a liberal sovereign were found to have left much traditionalism
untouched. After 1792, Ferdinando III suspended some of his father's
most liberal edicts, amid the applause of the reactionaries; and in
1799, after the first short stay of the revolutionary French army, out
of its one million inhabitants no fewer than 22,000 were prosecuted for
"French opinions." [1598] Certainly some of the "French opinions" were
wild enough; for instance, the practice among ladies of dressing alla
ghigliottina, with a red ribbon round the neck, a usage borrowed about
1795 from France. [1599] As Quinet sums up, the revolution was too
strong a medicine for the Italy of that age. The young abbate Monti,
the chief poet of the time, was a freethinker, but he alternated his
strokes for freedom with unworthy compliances. [1600] Such was the dawn
of the new Italian day that has since slowly but steadily broadened,
albeit under many a cloud.
§ 5. Spain and Portugal