Glauco Schettini

This article reconsiders the Catholic reaction to the French Revolution, focusing on Nicola Spedalieri’s On the Rights of Man (1791) and on the debate that its publication sparked in Italy and beyond. The outbreak of the Revolution and the polarization of public opinion between the supporters of the new regime and its relentless opponents convinced Spedalieri, a well-reputed Catholic theologian, of the need to find a via media between these two extremes. Assuming the re-Christianization of the postrevolutionary world as his goal, Spedalieri argued that some aspects of revolutionary political culture were acceptable from a Catholic standpoint as long as the revolutionaries, in turn, agreed to abandon secularization and to uphold the traditional confessional organization of the state. It was not modernity itself, he claimed, that should be rejected, but secularization, for a different modernity from that conceived by the revolutionaries—a confessional modernity, combining revolutionary politics and confessional states—was possible. Far from gaining immediate acceptance, Spedalieri’s ideas were harshly criticized during the 1790s and then set aside by the triumph of reactionary Catholicism during the Restoration. However, they resurfaced later in the nineteenth century and ultimately played a decisive role in the development of the church’s attitudes toward modern culture, for they carved a path for Catholics to fight secularization from within and to reshape modernity accordingly.

Free readable version: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-intellectual-history/article/confessional-modernity-nicola-spedalieri-the-catholic-church-and-the-french-revolution-c17751800/95B7509A231CF7D6537DDE9DC9451585/share/a50487aa36b21cde9249f3d8fb3921c2eab4fef9

When the Italian army breached the Aurelian Walls at Porta Pia in 1870 and Rome was seized from the Pope, the city could not have been more unlike a contemporary European capital city. In the years after it became Italy’s capital, Rome underwent a process of radical urban renewal. This article, focusing on the creation of a new neighborhood in Prati di Castello – the area northeast of the Vatican – frames Rome’s transformation as part of the ‘culture wars’ between the Church and the new Italian State. The decision to postpone the creation of the new district in Prati until the 1880s and the way it was then carried out reflect the wider shift of Italian politics from Cavour’s notion of ‘a free Church in a free State’ to the more combative anticlericalism of the Left after 1876. Against this background, Prati emerged as a political landscape in which competing powers articulated their aspirations and values, negotiated their respective authorities, and transmitted political ideas.

Free online version: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-italy/article/building-the-third-rome-italy-the-vatican-and-the-new-district-in-prati-di-castello-18701895/99F063AC155531788F5DEA000D920449/share/d6a29617db8df057abb84e106826f3db52d1e399

Scipione de’ Ricci and Henri Grégoire were two of the leading figures of the European Jansenist movement between the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. The letters they exchanged during over a decade were published in 1963 by Maurice Vaussard. However, Vaussard’s edition did not include twenty letters that have been recently found in the Archivio di Stato in Florence and in the Bibliothèque de la Société de Port-Royal in Paris. This article presents the text of the newfound letters and places them in the political and cultural context in which they were produced. Not only do these letters integrate Vaussard’s edition, but they also shed new light on the personal relationship between Ricci and Grégoire and on the way they adapted their projects of religious reform to the rise of Napoleonic power. Moreover, these letters are an invaluable source on the last years of Ricci’s life and on his late literary production, which had remained completely unknown up to the present day.

As a part of a broader investigation on political sociability in the first Cisalpine Republic (1797–99), the essay reconstructs the organization of the constitutional circles, patriotic societies which were promoted by some of the leading exponents of the Italian republican movement, and formed a network over the whole Cisalpine territory. By analyzing the different statutory models and their circulation, the essay outlines the characters of the new democratic and politicized sociability, and delineates the fundamental part played by the circles within the patriots’ pedagogic project. The debate on the circles’ statutes, which focuses principally on three topics (the role of the moderators in directing the circles’ activities, the political instruction of the people, and the part which Catholicism and priests play in republican pedagogy), can shed new light on the actual nature and the distinctive features of the Italian patriotic movement.

Patriotic banquets, a massive phenomenon in revolutionary France, obtain an appreciable diffusion south of the Alps and emerge as an instrument to promote fraternity among the citizens. On the basis of a wide range of sources, the article reconstructs the genesis and the circulation of a particular kind of banquets in Emilia and Romagna in 1797-98. These banquets, where the poor sit at the table next to their benefactors, are an original creation of local Jacobins and arouse enthusiastic feelings in the participants. Commenting on them, patriots express different opinions: the constitutionalist Compagnoni criticizes them as an unrealistic attempt to resolve the social question; others, like Massa, emphasize their role in producing consensus and in marking the difference between the new and the ancient regime. The definition of the religious phenomenon formulated by Albert Mathiez in his study about French revolutionary cults allows us to read these ritual occasions as germinal moments of a revolutionary faith. Besides, these banquets are a testimony of the effort made during the Triennio to develop an original Italian way to revolution, not passively copied from the French model.

Theophilanthropy, the last and least studied French revolutionary cult, is invented in Paris in September 1796 and spreads around the country in 1797. Through the mediation of Marc-Antoine Jullien de Paris, it becomes known in Italy as well, so that some patriots start to think of diffusing it in the Cisalpine Republic. Matteo Galdi, supported by Carlo Lauberg and Giovanni Fantoni, proposes to create a theophilanthropic club in Milan, and to substitute Christianity with the new cult. This project is opposed by Giovanni Ranza, who envisions an evangelic reform of traditional religion. Although the theophilanthropic Manual is translated in Italian and published in Milan in spring 1798, Galdi’s efforts yield no results. Likewise, between spring and summer, other patriots try in vain to spread Theophilanthropy in Bologna and Ferrara. The new cult seems to have more success in Turin, in 1799, thanks to Gaspare Degregori and Gaspare Morardo. However, their efforts are vigorously contrasted by the Jansenist Michele Gautier and the Franciscan Guglielmo Della Valle. The end of the Jacobin Triennium marks the definitive failure of any project of diffusing Theophilanthropy in Italy, even though some theophilanthropic and anti-theophilanthropic texts continue to circulate. At the same time, in France, Henri Grégoire attends to his "History of Theophilanthropy", which constitutes the first attempt to reconstruct the development of the cult, and also contains the first historical information about its diffusion in Italy.

English Title: Emotional Politics: Imagining the Enemy in the Constitutional Circles of the Cisalpine Republic, 1797-99

This paper, based on the analysis of a number of speeches delivered by Italian patriots between 1797 and 1799, sheds light on the emotional implications of a key feature of all these speeches—the portrayal of the counterrevolutionary “enemy.” Invariably qualified as aristocrats regardless of their social conditions, counterrevolutionary enemies were the objects of processes of stereotyping, stigmatization, degradation, and dehumanization. Their supposed anti-republican plots fostered the endless flourishing of conspiracy theories. This paper argues that the anti-aristocratic discourse stood at the heart of the patriots’ emotional politics. Anti-aristocratic hatred, conveniently fueled, was meant to serve as an emotional glue for the patriotic movement and to raise feelings of fondness for, and attachment to, the new regime.

That the French Revolution was the product of a vast anti-religious conspiracy was a commonplace of counterrevolutionary writing already in 1790. However, it was only after the beginning of the European wars in 1792 that Catholic intellectuals explicitly started conceiving the fight against revolutionary France as a war of religion. This paper traces the transnational development of this idea, from its origins in the Spain of the War of the Pyrenees to its re-elaboration in Francisco Gustà’s Critical Essay on the Crusades, published in Italy in 1794. A Catalan ex-Jesuit, Gustà exhorted Pope Pius VI to launch a modern crusade against revolutionary France. A close analysis of this text and of its reception in the late 1790s reveals how the preaching of a modern crusade led to the emergence of some of the defining features of modern Catholic conservatism: the myth of medieval Christendom as an alternative to revolutionary modernity; the role of the pope—the only authority who could legitimately launch a crusade—as a supranational leader; and the need for mass mobilization in defense of religion.

That the French Revolution was the product of a vast anti-religious conspiracy was a commonplace of counterrevolutionary writing already in 1790. However, it was only after the beginning of the European wars in 1792 that Catholic intellectuals explicitly started conceiving the fight against revolutionary France as a war of religion. This paper traces the transnational development of this idea, from its origins in the Spain of the War of the Pyrenees to its re-elaboration in Francisco Gustà’s Critical Essay on the Crusades, published in Italy in 1794. A Catalan ex-Jesuit, Gustà exhorted Pope Pius VI to launch a modern crusade against revolutionary France. A close analysis of this text and of its reception reveals how the preaching of a modern crusade led to the emergence of some of the defining features of Catholic conservatism: the myth of medieval Christendom as an alternative to revolutionary modernity; the role of the pope—the only authority who could legitimately launch a crusade—as a supranational leader; and the need for mass mobilization in defense of religion. Thus, this paper argues that what characterized Catholic conservatism from its very inception was the inextricable entanglement of modern means and anti-modern ideals.

The revolutionary wave of the 1790s subverted long-standing balances of power and forced European intellectuals to rethink the geopolitical arrangement of the continent. Analyzing the geographical imagination of pro-revolutionary Italian patriots in the 1790s, this paper argues that these patriots produced new imagined geographies to subvert existing cultural and political hierarchies and to renegotiate the relationship between European centers and peripheries. Throughout the eighteenth century, European identity had been defined in antithesis to what was regarded as the uncivilized other—the Orient, but also the European South. Reconsidering the role of the Mediterranean Basin in the revolutionary process, Italian patriots argued that it was in the Mediterranean that the Revolution would fight its most important battle. This was, of course, the battle for the liberty of navigation and commerce against British monopoly of trade, but also the battle of the “peoples of the South” against the “peoples of the North.” The peoples of the South were described as the promoters of international cooperation, freedom, and peace, whereas the peoples of the North were characterized by aggressive and exploitative attitudes. Both South and North, thus, were not merely geographical but cultural definitions—in fact, the South spanned from the Ottoman Empire to the Netherlands, including Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal. The production of such a new imagined geography was meant to upend long-established hierarchies of civilization and to imagine a new peaceful European order based on the “southern spirit” and on new forms of continental governance.

This paper focuses on the ways Catholic writers conceived the war against revolutionary France as a crusade—a war fought by all the Catholic powers in defense of their religion and formally sanctioned by the pope. The idea of an international mobilization against the French Revolution came to the fore as early as 1791 in the works of counterrevolutionary writers as Edmund Burke and the François Dominique de Montlosier. Catholic writers, too, had already taken issue with the revolutionary principles, but it was only in 1793-94 that the idea of a war of religion against France—meant both to stop the spreading of revolutionary principles throughout Europe and to halt the process of dechristianization promoted by the Jacobins in France—was explicitly formulated and gained currency among Catholic thinkers. In Spain, in particular, priests and bishops openly defined the War of the Pyrenees against France as a religious conflict and exhorted the faithful to take up arms in defense of both their king and their religion. Highly influenced by the works of Spanish counterrevolutionary authors, in 1794 a Catalan former Jesuit, Francisco Gustà, who had taken shelter in the Papal States after the suppression of the Society of Jesus, published in Italian his Critical Essay on the Crusades. In the Essay, after challenging the negative judgement on medieval crusades formulated by enlightened historians during the eighteenth century, Gustà explicitly exhorted Pope Pius VI to launch a modern crusade against revolutionary France. Even though the pope never resolved to recognize the war against France as a religious conflict, Gustà’s ideas met with great success in the Catholic world. Crusade, this paper argues, became one of the catchwords of Catholic counterrevolutionary thought, because it provided the struggle against the Revolution with both a modern means—mass mobilization—and an anti-modern, alternative sociopolitical model—medieval Christianity. In the following years, and in particular after the French invasion of the Italian Peninsula in 1796, Austrian and Neapolitan diplomats repeatedly, though unsuccessfully, urged the pope to launch the crusade. Most importantly, Italian Catholic priests effectively popularized Gustà’s ideas, which provided the ideological foundations for the victorious Italian counterrevolutionary insurrections of 1799. Thus, this paper sheds new light on the circulation of counterrevolutionary ideas across both national borders and social barriers and on the origins of Catholic medievalism—a crucial component of the ideological struggle between the Catholic church and modernity.

The production of imagined geographies is widely understood as a tool of colonial power. This paper, analyzing the writings of pro-revolutionary Italian patriots in the 1790s, argues that imagined geographies can also be used to subvert existing hierarchies and to renegotiate the relationship between centers and peripheries. Throughout the eighteenth century, European identity had been defined in antithesis to what was regarded as the uncivilized other—the Orient, but also the European South. After the French army invaded Italy in 1796, Italian patriots, who advocated the creation of a democratic republic in the Peninsula, started to reconsider the role of Italy and the Mediterranean Basin in the revolutionary process. They argued that it was in the Mediterranean that the Revolution would fight its most important battle. This was, of course, the battle for the liberty of navigation and commerce—against the British monopoly of trade—but also the battle of the “peoples of the South” against the “peoples of the North.” Challenging a long-established hierarchy of civilization, Italian patriots argued for the superiority of the South over the North. The peoples of the South were described as the promoters of international cooperation, freedom, and peace, whereas the peoples of the North were characterized by aggressive and exploitative attitudes. Both South and North, for them, were not geographical but cultural definitions—in fact, the South spanned from the Ottoman Empire to the Netherlands, including Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal. Producing such a new imagined geography, Italian patriots reconceptualized the Revolution as a worldwide event that would eventually produce the emergence of a new peaceful global order based on the “southern spirit.” The creation of a worldwide federation of nation-states—including an Italian republic—would naturally follow.

The publication of Nicola Spedalieri's "De' diritti dell'uomo" ("On the Rights of Man") in 1791 marked a turning point in the relationship between Catholicism and modern political culture. While after the outbreak of the French Revolution many Catholic intellectuals sided with the Counterrevolution and a scattered few others openly embraced the new order, Spedalieri chose a different path. Profoundly convinced of the need to come to terms with the spirit of the century in order to defend Catholicism, in his work Spedalieri selectively appropriated key terms and concepts of Enlightenment and revolutionary culture, such as the social contract and the rights of man, in the attempt of neutralizing their most radical features. Purporting to speak "as a pure philosopher," Spedalieri bet that only by speaking the same language of the enemies of religion he could provide a persuasive demonstration that religion had still a fundamental part to play in the post-revolutionary world, and that society and the state should be re-Christianized. In other words, Spedalieri suggested that Catholic culture should incorporate elements of modernity in order to better fight modernity itself and its most dangerous offshoot, secularization. This paper analyzes the debate sparked by the publication of Spedalieri's work as well as its long-term implications for Catholic intellectuals in the modern era.

This paper sheds light on how Jewish-Christian relations were reconfigured in late eighteenth-century Italy by analyzing the Italian debate over Emperor Joseph II’s Patent of Toleration (1781) and the status granted to religious minorities in the Cispadane constitution (1797)—the first “Italian” constitution. Religious difference had long provided the basis for Jewish legal separation from the non-Jewish world. This arrangement was based on a confessional framework—meaning that the organization of the state was supposed to reflect the religious belonging of the subjects. Such an arrangement was challenged at the end of the eighteenth century by the emergence of new regulatory frameworks—the Enlightenment framework of utility and the post-revolutionary framework of nationality. According to the former, membership in the political community was predicated on the basis of social utility, not on religious belonging, so religious difference should not provide the ground for any kind of social exclusion or legal discrimination. On the contrary, the emergence of the principle of nationality led to the singling out of the Jews as others from the national community, as Catholicism was soon identified as a key component of the emerging Italian national identity. Thus, the analysis of Jewish-Christian relations calls into question the traditional understanding of the age of revolutions as a period of secularization and illuminates the role that religion played in the emergence of national identities.

The revolutionary wave of the 1790s subverted long-standing balances of power and forced European intellectuals to rethink the geopolitical arrangement of the continent. Some Italian patriots, while advocating the creation of a unitary state south of the Alps, primarily understood the revolution as a transnational phenomenon and thus regarded the republicanization of the Peninsula as part and parcel of a wider geopolitical transformation, centered around the Mediterranean Basin. This paper deals with the writings of two of these patriots, the Roman Enrico Michele L'Aurora (circa 1760-?) and the Neapolitan Matteo Galdi (1765-1821), who were both in exile in Milan between 1796 and 1799. According to them, the Mediterranean shores were not just peripheral spaces that were being involved in a transformation originated elsewhere. This is not to say that they did not recognize the centrality of France to the whole revolutionary process, but they also viewed the creation of the so-called "sister republics" in the Italian Peninsula as the first step towards a broad geopolitical transformation. From this perspective, the Mediterranean Basin was at the very heart of the revolution. Placing the south of Europe at the center of the emergence of the new post-revolutionary world, L'Aurora and Galdi challenged a long-established hierarchy of civilization that throughout the eighteenth century had defined the very concept of Europe in antithesis to what was regarded as the uncivilized other-the East, but also the European South itself. In their views, it was the South that would eventually revolutionize and regenerate the North. So, while rethinking the revolution as an inherently transnational phenomenon rather than a French-centered event radiating its influence abroad, L'Aurora and Galdi redefined the asymmetrical relationships between European centers and peripheries, and at the same time, they put forward a new form of "cosmopolitan patriotism," which could coexist with the principle of nationality.

In this paper, I shed light on the ways the idea of a correspondence between the structure of the family and the structure of society was formed in the eighteenth century. Of course, the family had long been used as a metaphor to describe the political community, but it was during the second half of the eighteenth century that intellectuals like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Cesare Beccaria realized that the structure of the family mirrored the wider structure of society, and that the family itself could be deployed as a tool of social control. Thus, the critique of the traditional family started to be linked to the critique of the existing political order. Enlightened intellectuals censured the abuses of paternal authority, which mirrored the misdeeds of the monarchs. At the same time, defending freedom of marriage and advocating the reform of inheritance laws, they reshaped the family into a community based on strong emotional ties rather than on economic interests, and on more equal relationships among family members. Such a family, long dreamed of by the intellectuals, suddenly became real in the 1790s as a result of the reforms passed by the r​evolutionary assemblies in France and in the European sister republics—and in particular in Italy between 1796 and 1799. It was in this context that, once the family had been reshaped, the family metaphor eventually became one of the discursive tools most frequently used to describe the nation.

At the end of the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that the structural transformations that European societies were undergoing at the time were inextricably linked to the emergence of a new family model. In this paper, I shed light on the ways the idea of a correspondence between the structure of the family and the structure of society was formed in the eighteenth century. Of course, the family had long been used as a metaphor to describe the political community, but it was during the second half of the eighteenth century that intellectuals like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Cesare Beccaria realized that the structure of the family mirrored the wider structure of society, and that the family itself could be deployed as a tool of social control. Thus, the critique of the traditional family started to be linked to the critique of the existing political order.  Enlightened intellectuals censured the abuses of paternal authority, which mirrored the misdeeds of the monarchs. At the same time, defending freedom of marriage and advocating the reform of inheritance laws, they reshaped the family into a community based on strong emotional ties rather than on economic interests, and on more equal relationships among family members. Such a family, long dreamed of by the intellectuals, suddenly became real in the 1790s as a result of the reforms passed by the r​evolutionary assemblies in France and in the European sister republics—and in particular in Italy between 1796 and 1799. It was in this context that, once the family had been reshaped, the family metaphor eventually became one of the discursive tools most frequently used to describe the nation.

The outbreak of the French Revolution marked the beginning of a new era of international relations. The legacy of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism and the emergence of the new revolutionary principle of popular sovereignty forced politicians and intellectuals all across Europe to rethink the political order of the continent and its relations with the Mediterranean Basin. This paper deals with the Euro-Mediterranean visions of two leading figures of the Italian patriotic movement during the so-called republican triennium (1796-99), Matteo Galdi (1765-1821) and Enrico Michele L’Aurora (ca 1760-?). Galdi envisioned the creation of a worldwide federal “republic of mankind,” whereas L’Aurora strongly advocated the creation of a European federation and of a European Congress. Exploring their published and unpublished works, this paper shows how both Galdi and L’Aurora merged Enlightenment cosmopolitanism with the new principle of nationality. The way they tried to combine these two elements reveals how they understood the revolution and the idea of nation themselves.

In March 1791, Pope Pius VI officially condemned the French Revolution. However, the breach between Rome and Paris did not go uncontested. Some sectors of the Curia were afraid that the papal condemnation would produce a schism and urged a softer line. It was in this context that Nicola Spedalieri published his book "On the Rights of Man". While criticizing the religious policies of the French Constituent Assembly as the product of an anti-Christian conspiracy, Spedalieri accepted the basic principles of revolutionary public law, as the social contract and the right of revolution, and delineated a path of conciliation between Catholicism and the new regime. Arguing that civil society had to be grounded in religious basis, he called for the proclamation of Catholicism as the state religion. “On the Rights of Man” soon became a literary case and sparked a wide debate. Between 1792 and 1800, almost forty books were published either against or in defense of Spedalieri’s work. Spedalieri’s opponents praised his critique of the Revolution but advocated the divine right of the kings and the alliance of throne and altar, whether they attributed to the papacy a sort of primacy over temporal authorities or embraced regalist doctrines. On the contrary, most of Spedalieri’s supporters ended up embracing the new revolutionary order, while still emphasizing that it needed a religious foundation. Spedalieri’s work certainly allowed for a diverse range of interpretations, but it was crucial in putting the rethinking of the role of religion in society at the center of the ongoing political debate. Examining this debate, the paper argues that the age of revolution was not simply a period of secularization and that the emergence of modernity did not necessarily entail the displacement of religion from the public sphere.

The age of revolutions is usually regarded as a period of radical secularization and dechristianization. This paper, which focuses on the debate on religion and politics in Italy during the 1790s, challenges this view and argues that religion continued to play a crucial role in European public life after 1789. However, both “patriots” and counterrevolutionary writers seemed to be more interested in the social utility of religion than in its truth—which had been for centuries the most contended issue. Counterrevolutionaries maintained that post-revolutionary society, deprived of its religious foundations, would rapidly turn into anarchy. Some of them identified the restoration of religion as the only possible way out of the revolutionary deadlock, whereas some others went as far as to assert that even the new order could be accepted if it was grounded in religious principles. On the other hand, revolutionists of all stripes were conscious that their chances of gaining popular support for the new republican regimes were contingent on th​eir ability to turn religion into a tool of propaganda. At the same time, some of them, while arguing for an evangelical reform of traditional religions, claimed that religious morality had to innervate republican society in order to make it stable.

Traditional religious beliefs played a major role during the revolutionary upheaval of the end of the eighteenth century. This paper analyzes how Italian pro-revolutionary Catholics reimagined the role of religion in the new post-revolutionary order, focusing on the cases of Niccolò Fava Ghisilieri, Cardinal Gregorio Barnaba Chiaramonti (later Pope Pius VII), and Gaetano Giudici. Fava Ghisilieri, a deputy at the Cispadane Constitutional Convention of 1797, advocated the proclamation of Catholicism as the state religion of the newborn Cispadane Republic. Chiaramonti argued that the state could be secular, but a republican society had necessarily to be based on Catholic moral teaching. Giudici, a Milanese Jansenist priest, while commenting on a draft divorce law in 1798, went even further and suggested that both state and society could be secular. These three cases reveal that the rethinking of the role played by religion in the state and society was crucial to the emergence of the modern post-revolutionary order.

The notion of republican virtue stood at the very heart of revolutionary politics after 1789. Republican thinkers had described virtue as a love for the country requiring the citizens to sacrifice their personal sphere, their feelings, and, if necessary, even their own life for the common good. When the Italian Peninsula was republicanized by Napoleon after 1796, Italian patriots got involved in a large endeavor meant to gain popular consensus for the new republics. Since virtue was widely considered as the only solid foundation of a republican government, its dissemination was absolutely crucial. Some patriots started preaching the traditional heroic notion of virtue. Some others were convinced that such a virtue was too "hard" to be practiced by vast masses of people or even incompatible with the Italian national character, and wondered how to allow common people to be virtuous without demanding too much from them. As a result, they started thinking of virtue in terms of humanity, benevolence, and fraternal love. According to these patriots, virtuous citizens were no longer supposed to sacrifice themselves for their country, but to love and care for their neighbors as if they were members of the same family. Reshaping virtue in such a way, these patriots put forward a definition of republic that was compatible with the preservation of the autonomy of the private sphere and that was supposed to accommodate the needs of the people.

The revolutionary era is usually interpreted as a moment of radical secularization, and the emergence of national identities has been regarded as a consequence of the erosion of traditional religious identities. This paper, which is part of a larger work on the debate on Jewish civil inclusion in eighteenth-century Italy, revisits and challenges these assumptions. Analyzing the drafting of a constitution for the Cispadane Republic (January-March 1797), the first democratic republic created after Bonaparte's arrival south of the Alps, this paper reveals that some patriots regarded Catholicism as the key component of the Italian national identity and demanded that it be declared the state religion of the newborn Republic. The Jews were granted citizenship rights by the new constitution, but, as members of a religious minority, they occupied an eccentric position within the new polity. Religious affiliation, far from being confined to the private sphere, still played a major role in the realm of politics.

What freedom of speech really meant at the end of the eighteenth century is anything but easy to determine. However, in France and abroad, revolutionary politicians regarded it as one of the most important features of the new order that had replaced the ancien régime. My paper will examine how freedom of speech was conceived and debated in the Italian Peninsula in the very last years of the century. I will argue that it proved both a powerful rhetorical tool to condense the differences between the old and the new regime and a crucial claim within the revolutionaries’ political agenda. Between 1796 and 1799, the French Army, led by Napoleon Bonaparte, brought down all the ancient Italian States and created new democratic Republics, that were patterned after the French revolutionary model and based on the new ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. In this context, notions of democracy and representation were widely debated, and the idea of the Italian nation as a political community was first elaborated. In dozens of newspapers and several hundreds of pamphlets, the Italian “patriots,” that is, the supporters of the new republican regimes, widely discussed freedom of speech. In their eyes, censorship had served as the main basis for pre-revolutionary States. Since monarchical, aristocratic, and oligarchic power relied on the widespread lack of education, reading books and exchanging ideas had long been considered subversive activities. When the patriots spoke of the ancien régime, even more than a specific set of institutions, they meant a social system in which the circulation of ideas was programmatically impeded. The Roman Inquisition, responsible for prosecuting crimes of opinion, even came to be regarded as the most effective symbol of the old political order. Freedom of speech, in turn, was represented as the most revolutionary among the new rights. However, freedom of speech was not just a rhetorical tool that proved useful to stress the difference between the ancien régime and the new republics. On the contrary, the new regime was actually based on the exploitation of the opportunities that freedom of speech offered. Since political clubs were regarded as the main arena for free speech, this freedom was considered inseparable from freedom of association. Addressing the people in the so-called “constitutional circles,” the patriots tried to gain support for the new republican regimes. Therefore, the exercise of the two freedoms of speech and association stood at the core of the patriots’ political agenda. Only these freedoms, they claimed, could foster the emergence of a political consciousness in the Italian population. Even the constitutions imposed by Bonaparte to the new republics, which were patterned after the French Thermidorian constitution of 1795 and limited the right of voting, could be accepted only as long as they granted these two freedoms, that, according to the patriots, would allow for further democratization.

The arrival of the French army in Italy in 1796 produced a momentous upheaval south of the Alps. Between 1796 and 1799 the whole Italian Peninsula was republicanized, the idea of the Italian nation as a political community was first conceived, and notions of democracy and representation were widely debated. The constitutional circles, popular societies led by the patriots and specifically devoted to the politicization of the masses, played a crucial role within this debate. My paper, widely based on manuscripts and printed primary sources produced by the circles of the Cisalpine Republic, deals with the way in which the discussions held in popular societies led to a substantial redefinition of the concept of virtue. As historians have recently pointed out, over the eighteenth century the concept of virtue had been at the center of a wide debate, and the long-standing notion of republican virtue had already been eroded by the increasing recognition that the pursuit of private interests provided benefits to the state as a whole. The Italian patriots, in spite of being imbued with republican thought, shifted the meaning of virtue in yet another direction. They realized that the classical republican notion of virtue, which was intrinsically heroic, could not be proposed as a practicable ideal to a wide popular audience. Therefore, drawing on the concept of natural virtue, they started thinking of virtue in terms of humanity, fraternal love, and bienfaisance. In so doing, they did not reject the language of classical republicanism in its entirety, yet thoroughly redefined it from within, putting a new concept of private virtue into the foreground. The citizens were no longer supposed to sacrifice themselves for their patrie, yet to love and care for their fellow citizens as if they were members of the same family. Since virtue was the basis for the construction of a national community, its redefinition as familial love led the patriots to think of the nation in terms of a familial community.

After the arrival of the French army south of the Alps in 1796, the entire Italian peninsula was republicanized and the patriots struggled to build popular consensus for the new regimes. In the course of this struggle, the depiction of the stereotypical image of the aristocratic enemy proved to be one of the most powerful tools at their disposal.
Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, my paper analyzes how the patriots created and used this image in the speeches they gave during the meetings of political societies in the Cisalpine Republic. In the eyes of the patriots, the aristocrat was not a member of a specific social class, nor was the term a synonym for noble. Rather, the aristocrat was depicted as the specular opposite of the virtuous patriot. Since he refused to embrace the new ideas, he was considered as the embodiment of the vices that had animated the ancien régime. Thus, whoever rejected or opposed the new regime, even a peasant, could be accused of being an aristocrat. Labeling people as aristocrats became an effective way to stigmatize and exclude them from the social fabric. Even their belonging to the human race was called into question, since they were usually described as monsters, animals, and cannibals.
Evoking the figure of the aristocrat during their speeches, the patriots were able to raise feelings of contempt, hatred, fear, and even conspiracy obsession in their audiences, thus strengthening the loyalty to the republic. Although eventually the patriots failed to stabilize the new regime, my paper sheds new light on the connections between political emotions, revolutionary rhetoric, and popular propaganda.

As historians have recently pointed out, over the eighteenth century the long-standing notion of republican virtue was eroded by the recognition that the pursuit of private interests provided benefits to the state as a whole. After Bonaparte republicanized the Italian Peninsula in 1796, the patriots, in spite of being imbued with republican thought, shifted the meaning of virtue in yet another direction. They realized that the traditional notion, which was intrinsically heroic, could not be proposed as a practicable ideal to a wide popular audience. Therefore, they started thinking of virtue in terms of empathy, brotherly love, and charity. In so doing, they did not reject the language of classical republicanism, yet thoroughly redefined it from within, putting a new concept of virtue into the foreground. This concept implied that the citizens were no longer supposed to sacrifice for their country, yet to love and care for their fellow citizens as if they were members of the same family. They were also called to lead a harmonious family life. This redefinition of virtue led the patriots to think of the nation itself in terms of a familial community and fostered the emergence of an autonomous private sphere, that could be properly defined as bourgeois.

In 1798 the Jacobin Matteo Galdi theorized the distinction between methodical public education, given in the schools, and revolutionary public education, «which instructs the masses in the principles of democracy». Among the latter’s tools, Galdi enumerated the constitutional circles, which were patriotic societies specifically devoted to educate the adults, who could not take advantage of the new scholastic system.
Many patriots got involved in the circles’ activities in 1797-98. In comparison with precedent experiences of patriotic sociability in 1796-97, the circles did not set any admission requirements and allowed women and men of all social classes to actively join the sessions.
My paper primarily analyses the way this new form of egalitarian republican sociability was intended as a useful tool for the political education of Italian people. Particular emphasis will therefore be placed on the pedagogic instruments conceived by the patriots within the circles: they included not only speeches and catechisms, but also chants, poetry readings, festivals, para-religious ceremonies, and commemorations held in honour of the martyrs of freedom. Through the revolutionary education, the patriots aimed at giving birth to a new political community, replacing the ancient regime’s one. Furthermore, my paper deals with the patriots’ successful attempt to organize all the Cisalpine circles in a similar way, in order to build a real network devoted to the popular education and to maximize the positive effects of patriotic sociability.

Drawing on a wide range of primary sources and on the most recent historiography on the age of revolutions, the thesis traces the spreading of political societies in revolutionary Italy at the end of the eighteenth century and highlights their crucial role in the birth of modern political culture south of the Alps.
Indeed, unable to seize the power, Italian patriots decided to accept the constitution conceded to the Cisalpine Republic by Bonaparte in 1797 as the structuring framework of their action, and tried to find a mediation between a sincere respect for constitutional legitimacy and their radical political agenda. In so doing, they adapted the neo-Jacobin strategy developed in France over the directorial years (1795-99) to the Italian context. The constitutional circles, the core of the neo-Jacobin 'party system' in France, were imported south of the Alps through a process of transfer and national reworking. The patriots, indeed, identified in the circles the crucial tool for their pedagogical effort of mass politicization. Thus, the circles became the place where a new political culture was collectively elaborated and circulated.
This political culture was influenced by French revolutionary ideals but also by the legacies of the Italian Enlightenment. Its most prominent features were the stigmatization of the 'aristocratic' enemy, the projects of religious reform and a significant redefinition of republican virtue. The national political community had to be accordingly reshaped so as to include women and the poor. Therefore, although the republican experience was interrupted by the reaction of 1799, the ground for the Risorgimento was paved.