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4 - The emergence of the national question, 1789–1849

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2014

Christopher Duggan
Affiliation:
University of Reading
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Summary

The Impact of the French Revolution

The optimism that had underlain the European Enlightenment, the belief that a more humane and prosperous world could be built with reason, tolerance, and the systematic elimination of privilege, ignorance, and inhumanity, became tinged with uncertainty during the 1770s and 1780s. Most of the Italian states had succeeded in reducing the powers of the Church; but the afflictions of poverty, banditry, begging, and vagrancy remained and seemed if anything to be increasing. According to the reformers, such evils would only be cured when the stranglehold of the unproductive nobility had been broken: but doubts grew as to the will of princes to achieve this. Some felt that the only hope for real reform lay in a radical reshaping of the entire system. A new and in some ways desperate utopianism began to emerge, evident first in the rapid spread of freemasonry in the 1770s, and then during the 1780s in the appearance of sects such as the Illuminati preaching egalitarian and communistic messages.

As faith in princes and governments declined, those who longed for a better world began to cast about for alternative vessels in which to place their hopes. Many looked with growing interest and sympathy at the masses, whose virtues had been so eloquently described by Jean-Jacques Rousseau; and they drew inspiration from the American war of independence with its revolutionary assertion of a people’s right to determine its own laws. Some intellectuals, among them the Neapolitan legal reformer Gaetano Filangieri, grew passionate in the 1780s about the idea of equality: today, he wrote, ‘everything is in the hands of few. We must act to ensure that everything is in the hands of many.’ Others became absorbed in the largely philosophical search for the historical origins of contemporary society. This led to a revival of interest in Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), the maverick but deeply original Neapolitan scholar whose researches had included a wide-ranging enquiry into the customs and cultures of different peoples.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2013

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