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REVIEW ARTICLE FRANCO VENTURI'S ENLIGHTENMENT

Of all great achievements of historical scholarship in the second half of this century, few can claim to have been as truly European as Franco Venturi's Settecento riformatore.1 Seven instalments of this epic work have now appeared, and the publication of another is imminent. The first volume, Da Muratori a Beccaria, 1730-1764, appeared in 1969. The second, La chiesa e la repubblica dentro i loro limiti, 1758-1774, followed seven years later: like the first it was concerned principally with the development of the Enlightenment within Italy. In a remarkably short space of time these were followed by three further instalments devoted to the Enlightenment beyond Italy: La prima crisi dell'Antico Regime, 1768-1776 (1979) and La caduta dell'Antico Regime, 1776-1789, divided into two parts, I grandi stati dell'Occidente and II patriottismo repubblicano e gli imperi dell'Est (published together in 1984). Since then two more instalments have appeared, both parts of the fifth volume, L'Italia dei lumi, 1764-1790: La rivoluzione di Corsica: le grandi carestie degli anni sessanta: la Lombardia delle riforme (1987), and La repubblica di Venezia, 1761-1797 (1990). As the title indicates, this volume returns to the Enlightenment in Italy. The outstanding third part of volume 5 will, we are told, be devoted to the Enlightenment in Piedmont, the Papal States and Naples during these years of the final crisis of the ancien regime.

The first thing to strike the prospective reader of Settecento riformatore must be its quite awesome scale. The first volume, with 747 pages of text, gave due warning; and if Venturi then

1 Franco Venturi, Settecento riformatore (Turin, Einaudi, 1969-): i, Da Muratori a Beccaria, 1730-1764 (1969), xxiv, 772 pp.; ii, La chiesa e la repubblica dentro i loro limiti, 1758-1774 (1976), xvii, 355 pp.; iii, La prima crisi dell'Antico Regime, 1768-1776 (1979), xviii, 458pp.; iv, La caduta dell'Antico Regime, 1776-1789 (1984), xviii, 1065 pp., pt. 1, I grandi stati dell'Occidente, and pt. 2, II patriottismo repubblicano e gli imperi dell'Est (continuously paginated); v, L'Italia dei lumi, 1764-1790, pt. 1, La rivoluzione di Corsica: le grandi carestie degli anni sessanta: la Lombardia delle riforme (1987), xv, 857 pp., and pt. 2, La repubblica di Venezia, 1761-1797 (1990), xiii, 478 pp. For the English translations of some of these volumes, see below, n. 16.

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seemed to draw breath, giving volume 2 only 342 pages, he soon recovered, the number gradually increasing to a high (so far) of 834 pages in the first part of volume 5. Altogether the seven separate parts already published have contained 3,869 pages, or, at a rough estimate, a little over 1.5 million words. Venturi himself, however, has insisted that quantitative criteria are among the least helpful to an intellectual historian: it is not the size of the work (or its print-run, or its readership) which matters, but the scope and spirit of its vision. And in the case of Settecento riformatore these too are not in doubt. Moving outwards from Italy, itself depicted in all its variously different parts, this is a work which ranges from North America in the west to Russia in the east, from Sweden in the north to Spain and Greece in the south. Few are the historians who have the linguistic competence to range so widely; fewer still possess the imagination and the learning to join such distant parts in a single connected enquiry. Settecento riformatore embodies a conception of Europe which was unusually extensive for the time in which it was written, and which has now become remarkably pertinent. It is not too much to suggest that the revolutions of the past three years have made Settecento riformatore into a tract for our times.

To understand why Venturi was able to form such a vision in the apparently adverse political circumstances of postwar Europe, we need to turn back to trace the intellectual and political itinerary which led him to Settecento riformatore, and which shaped the work's subsequent evolution.2 Born in Rome in 1914, the son of the distinguished art historian and critic Lionello Venturi, Venturi studied first in Turin and then, following his father's refusal to swear allegiance to the fascist regime, at the Sorbonne.3 Among the most important figures in his father's intellectual world were

2 For biographical and bibliographical information and insight into Venturi's intellectual formation, I am indebted to the brief biographical note and the list of his publications prefixed to his Festschrift: Raffaele Ajello et al. (eds.), L'etd dei lumi: studi storici sul settecento europeo in onore di Franco Venturi (Naples, 1985), pp. xvii- xxxi. I have also drawn on the contributions by Furio Diaz and Marino Berengo to the discussion of Settecento riformatore organized by the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, printed in the Annali della Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, xix (1985), pp. 427-50. For additional information and comments I am grateful to John Davis and Robert Oresko.

3 On Lionello Venturi, himself the son of an art historian, Adolfo Venturi, see the catalogue of an exhibition in Verona and Rome in 1992 devoted to Lionello's once controversial tastes in modern art: Da Cezanne all'arte astratta: omaggio a Lionello Venturi (Milan, 1992). The catalogue also contains contributions on other aspects of his career, which included important studies of Caravaggio.

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the philosopher-historian Benedetto Croce and the historian Gaet- ano Salvemini, and it seems likely that their writings, as well as participation alongside his father in the anti-fascist movement Giustizia e LibertY, provided Franco Venturi with the initial inspiration to study what were to be his twin lifelong interests, the Enlightenment and the history of liberal and socialist ideas. By the later 1930s he was engaged in research on the young Denis Diderot and on the origins of the Encyclopedie, publishing his first book on the former in 1939; in 1940 he also submitted a thesis on the Piedmontese reformer Dalmazzo Vasco.4

The war interrupted these studies: interned first in Spain and then in Italy, Venturi joined the partisans in 1943, and from 1945 until 1946 edited the Turin journal of the Partito d'Azione. The experience sharpened the political edge of his scholarship: his disenchantment with the sort of literary and philosophical approach to the Enlightenment favoured by Croce now became increasingly pronounced.5 Engagement in Italian affairs also re- directed his interest, as he began in earnest to study the Enlight- enment in his own country. Previously neglected, this became in the postwar period a major area of research for Italian historians anxious to cultivate a past which was progressive without being nationalist or clerical. In taking the lead in this enquiry, however, Venturi was careful to preserve his political independence. Fol- lowing the dissolution of the Partito d'Azione in 1946, he chose not to join another party, and apparently has not done so since. His sympathies might remain firmly liberal and socialist; but on occasion he clashed publicly with leading sections of the left, including the Communist Party and the radical student movement of the 1960s.

Although his interest in the Italian Enlightenment had been foreshadowed in the study of Vasco, the enormous potential of the subject first really became clear in a study of another Piedmon- tese, the radical unbeliever Alberto Radicati de Passerano. As

4 Franco Venturi, Jeunesse de Diderot (de 1713 d 1753) (Paris, 1939); Franco Venturi, Dalmazzo Francesco Vasco (1732-1794) (Paris, 1940).

5 The classic statement of this philosophical approach is Ernst Cassirer, Die Philoso- phie der Aufkldrung (Tiibingen, 1932); trans. F. C. A. Koelln and J. P. Pettegrove as The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton, 1951). An Italian example of this approach was the work of Croce's associate, Guido de Ruggiero, Storia della filosofia: I'etd dell'illuminismo (Bari, 1938). Though he also became a member of the Partito d'Azione, Ruggiero had held his university chair until 1941, and must therefore have taken the oath of loyalty to Mussolini's regime which Lionello Venturi had refused.

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Venturi followed Radicati from his initial conflict with the Savoyard authorities into the freedom and isolation of exile in England and Holland, a pattern of connections was established which was to be repeated many times over in subsequent similar enquiries.6 Thereafter the individual biography, accompanied by a selection of texts, became Venturi's favoured mode of enquiry, yielding three substantial volumes of Illuministi italiani.7 Only when this cycle of enquiry was complete, and the individual reformers were in place, did Venturi begin to write the narrative of the Italian Enlightenment in the opening volumes of Settecento riformatore.

The first volume, Da Muratori a Beccaria, was prefaced by a remarkable statement of intent and justification. To the historian of thought, Venturi wrote, Italy ought to seem as the "promised land", rich in those works of the mind which have accompanied every great intellectual and political movement. Yet its Enlighten- ment remained astonishingly neglected: literary historians of the period had devoted themselves to Arcadian poetry, philosophers to Giambattista Vico and political historians to diplomatic dispatches. Only economic historians escaped censure, and only recently had they recognized that the vital thread of Italy's economic history - indeed of all its history - in the eighteenth century was the drive for reform. As Venturi acknowledged, institutional obstacles to research, notably the deficiencies of Italy's libraries, made this neglect understandable; but it was none the less shameful. In these circumstances, to recover the history of the Enlightenment in Italy was nothing short of an act of national cultural self-respect.8

Venturi's decision to begin his work in the 1730s was itself significant. The "reform" with which he would associate the

6 Parts of Venturi's writings on Radicati were translated as Franco Venturi, "Rad- icati's Exile in England and Holland", in Franco Venturi, Italy and the Enlightenment: Studies in a Cosmopolitan Century, trans. Susan Corsi, introd. S. J. Woolf (London, 1972).

7 Franco Venturi, Illuministi italiani, iii, Riformatori lombardi, piemontesi e toscani (Milan and Naples, 1958); v, Riformatori napoletani (Milan and Naples, 1962); Franco Venturi, Giuseppe Giarrizzo and Gianfranco Torcellan, Illuministi italiani, vii, Riforma- tori delle antiche repubbliche, dei ducati, dello Stato Pontificio e delle isole (Milan and Naples, 1965).

8 Venturi, Da Muratori a Beccaria, preface, pp. xii-xviii. The situation in the libraries, Venturi has observed in the most recent volume, has only worsened in the twenty years since the first volume was written: Venturi, Repubblica di Venezia, p. xii.

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eighteenth century could only be said to have begun in its fourth decade. Venturi attached particular significance to the change in the political and intellectual atmosphere in Naples as a result of the unexpected accession of Carlo Borbone to the throne in 1734, by which the kingdom was restored to independence after more than two centuries of Habsburg viceroyalties.9 To highlight the expectations aroused by the advent of a new, would-be reforming ruler would subsequently be a hallmark of Venturian rhetorical technique; at the same time, the impression of a new departure necessarily cast into shadow whatever intellectual life had gone before. Since in the case of Naples this meant neglecting the intellectual ferment of the previous three decades, the decades dominated by Vico and Pietro Giannone, the implications of Venturi's decision were considerable (and I shall return to them shortly).10 The starting-point chosen, Venturi proceeded to uncover a wealth of hitherto neglected intellectual activity over the following three-and-a-half decades. Supported by his north- ern contemporaries Scipione Maffei and Pompeo Neri, and by the Neapolitans Carlantonio Broggia and Bartolomeo Intieri, Ludovico Muratori emerged as the standard-bearer of a first generation of reformers in the 1730s and 1740s; and they in turn had paved the way for the second, more radical generation of Ferdinando Galiani and Antonio Genovesi in Naples, and Cesare Beccaria and the brothers Alessandro and Pietro Verri in Milan. By the close of this first volume, it was clear that it was particularly these young Milanese members of the circle of II Caffe, along with the Neapolitan Genovesi, who were to carry the aspirations of Venturi's century of reform forward into the 1760s and beyond.

The second volume, La chiesa e la repubblica dentro i loro limiti, was more precisely focused, being concerned with the crisis in relations between the Italian states and the papacy which culminated in the suppression of the Jesuit order in 1773. The greater definition of the subject matter was, nevertheless, accompanied by an enlargement of perspective. While this was a crisis which for obvious reasons came to a head in Italy, its genesis had to be traced across Europe, from Portugal, through Spain and France; and when the crisis became acute in Italy, as a result of the papal claim upon the duchy of Parma, it was a matter of European

9 Venturi, Da Muratori a Beccaria, pp. 28-46. 10 See below, pp. 196-7.

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concern. Within Italy, moreover, the two most important inter- ventions in the public debate were those which broke with the established "jurisdictional" critique of the church, and presented the case for a radically new, lay, moral and social order: these were the tract of 1768 attributed to the Rousseauist Cosimo Amidei, whose title Venturi adopted as his own, and Carlantonio Pilati's Di una riforma d'Italia (1767).11 Drawing as it did on European sources of inspiration to project a vision of reform throughout Italy, Pilati's work made it quite clear that the Enlightenment in Italy could no longer be understood in purely peninsular terms. To think thus was to remain locked into the particularism of Italy's small states, which Pilati had set himself to transcend.

The importance of the European setting for the Italian Enlight- enment having been established in the case of relations with the church, Venturi's next step was to complete the enlargement of his perspective by exploring the Italians' understanding of the entire crisis of Europe's ancien regime. The stage was set for the central volumes of Settecento riformatore, those devoted to the crisis and fall of the ancien regime throughout Europe.

There is more to the enlargement of Venturi's perspective in Settecento riformatore, however, than a process of internal evolution of the argument. Fully to appreciate the European scope of Venturi's vision of the Enlightenment, it is necessary to take account of two further aspects of Venturi's intellectual formation. The first is his commitment to the inclusion of Russia within Europe. Originating, perhaps, in the experience of the war, Ven- turi's sympathy for Russia was later confirmed and deepened when he was invited to take up the post of cultural attache at the Italian embassy in Moscow. It was an opportunity which he quickly turned to scholarly advantage, and by 1952 he had published a path-breaking two-volume study of nineteenth-century Russian Populism, II populismo russo. Translated in 1960 as Roots of Revolution by Francis Haskell, with an introduction by Isaiah Berlin, this was until recently the book for which he was best- known in the English-speaking world. At the same time, Venturi's interest was also aroused by earlier, eighteenth-century Russian reformers, in particular Alexandr Radiscev, of whose Voyage from

1 Venturi, Chiesa e la repubblica, esp. chs. 9-11; Cosimo Amidei, La chiesa e la repubblica dentro i loro limiti (n.p., 1768); Carlantonio Pilati, Di una riforma d'Italia (Villafranca, 1767).

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St. Petersburg to Moscow (1790) Venturi and his wife were later to prepare an Italian edition.'2 Henceforth Venturi would insist that the struggle for reform in later eighteenth-century Russia must be included in any general account of the European Enlightenment.

To the encounter with the Russian reformers can also be traced distinctive features of Venturi's general approach to the Enlight- enment. As in Russia, the key to the Enlightenment everywhere would be sought in the relation of ideas to reform, a relation to which the existing literary and philosophical approaches simply could not do justice. At the same time the writers and reformers would be studied as individuals, acting as autonomous "intellectuals" in the original Russian sense of the term, independent of the institutions of power. That such independence would bring some thinkers closer to utopian revolution than to reform would provide Venturi with one of his most enduring interpretative motifs; that it limited the political effectiveness of even the most practically minded reformers did nothing to diminish his sympathy for their efforts. It was the aspiration to reform which would command Venturi's attention, not the compromises required for its attainment.

A comparable openness to the English-speaking world has added a further dimension to Venturi's understanding of Europe. In this case it was an interest nourished by repeated shorter periods of work in the libraries of London, Oxford and Cambridge (where his generous enthusiasm in sharing discoveries made his presence a stimulus to those working around him, graduate students not least). Such research led Venturi to be among the first to suggest that it was the late seventeenth-century English repub- licans, rather than John Locke, who made the crucial English contribution to the Enlightenment. The insight provided the starting-point for his G. M. Trevelyan Lectures at Cambridge, published as Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment in 1971.13

12 Franco Venturi, II populismo russo (Turin, 1952); trans. Francis Haskell as The Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth- Century Russia, introd. Isaiah Berlin (London, 1960); Alexandr Radiscev, Viaggio da Pietroburgo a Mosca, ed. and trans. Gigliola and Franco Venturi (Bari, 1972). Though the circumstances in which Venturi's sympathy for Russia developed were far less horrendous, it might be compared with that expressed by Primo Levi in La tregua (Turin, 1963); trans. Stuart Woolf as The Truce (London, 1969), with subsequent paperback reprints.

13 Franco Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1971).

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Likewise Venturi was among the first to acknowledge that British participation in the later, high Enlightenment was far more a Scottish than an English affair: his appeal in the same work for a comprehensive study of the Scottish Enlightenment anticipated the subsequent upsurge of interest in the subject. At the same time his sense of the continuing importance of republicanism made Venturi alert to the existence of still another English- speaking Enlightenment, in North America. If the eastern frontier of Venturi's Enlightenment lies beyond Russia, so in the west it certainly extends to North America: his is not a Europe confined to the Continent.

Venturi has also been an attentive reader of English and Amer- ican historians. In Lewis Namier Venturi recognized the author of the most devastating challenge to the old philosophical approach to the history of ideas: if the importance of ideas in politics was to be defended against Namier's dismissal, it had to be through the development of an alternative approach which concentrated upon historical individuals rather than abstractions. More directly relevant to the changing conception of Settecento riformatore, however, were a number of innovative studies of the ancien regime and the Enlightenment produced by English and American scholars in the 1960s and early 1970s. One whose stimulus Venturi particularly acknowledged was R. R. Palmer's two-volume The Age of the Democratic Revolution, a synoptic account of American and European political history between 1760 and 1789 as a continuous process of radical change. Another was Peter Gay's similarly ambitious attempt at a general interpretation of the Enlightenment.14 Works such as these have provoked Venturi to - sometimes sharp - criticism, but also to emulation. It was in response to their example, as well as to the internal evolution of Settecento riformatore, that Venturi gradually enlarged his own perspective, until he set himself to undertake an account of the crisis and fall of the ancien regime in Europe as a whole, in the three central volumes of the work.

Venturi's openness to the Britannic contribution to the Enlight- enment and to Anglo-American scholarship has been repaid in considerable recognition in the English-speaking world. The early translations of his work on Russian Populism and the Trevelyan

14 R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1959-64); Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (London, 1967-70).





Lectures were followed by the translation, at the instigation of Stuart Woolf, of a selection of his articles on the Italian Enlighten- ment.15 Still more substantial, however, has been the recognition afforded him since 1989, through the translation of the three volumes of Settecento riformatore devoted to the crisis and fall of the ancien regime. Collectively entitled The End of the Old Regime in Europe, they have been translated by the American historian R. Burr Litchfield, himself the author of a substantial study of the Florentine patriciate from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.16 Litchfield's stamina in writing some 1,450 pages of English prose has been remarkable, and his rendition of Venturi's energetic Italian is impressively fluent. His achievement is to enable the English reader to engage with Venturi's understanding of the European Enlightenment at its most expansive.

* * *

In a preface to one of these volumes, Venturi admits to the temptation to adopt the formula of Gibbon, to speak of the decline and fall of the ancien regime.l7 The implicit comparison is by no means inflated: Venturi's subject in these three volumes is the uprooting of a political culture dominating an even larger area than that of the Roman empire. What Venturi calls "the first crisis of the ancien regime" began with Catherine the Great's decision in 1768 to send a Russian naval squadron into the Medi- terranean, by way of the Atlantic, in order to assist the Monteneg- rin and Greek revolts against Ottoman rule. Far from being a Balkan sideshow, this was an enterprise with implications for the whole of Europe, and for Italians in particular. Involved from the start in the provision of intellectual support as well as naval bases, Italian politicians and men of letters were stimulated to broaden their horizons by contact with educated Russian officers, and in

15 Venturi, Italy and the Enlightenment. 16 Franco Venturi, The End of the Old Regime in Europe, 1768-1776: The First Crisis,

trans. R. Burr Litchfield (Princeton, University Press, 1989), xxiii, 453 pp. (translation of Venturi, Settecento riformatore, iii); Franco Venturi, The End of the Old Regime in Europe, 1776-1789, trans. R. Burr Litchfield, 2 vols. (Princeton, University Press, 1991), xiv, 1044 pp., i, The Great States of the West, ii, Republican Patriotism and the Empires of the East (translation of Venturi, Settecento riformatore, iv. 1, 2, continuously paginated). For Litchfield's own work, see R. Burr Litchfield, Emergence of a Bureau- cracy: The Florentine Patricians, 1530-1790 (Princeton, 1986).

17 Venturi, Great States of the West, p. x/Grandi stati dell'Occidente, p. xv.

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turn revived the old Italian awareness of sharing a common culture with Greece. From the eastern Mediterranean, the crisis then moved northwards, into the heart of Russia itself, as Puga- cev's Rebellion of 1773-4 forced Catherine on to the defensive, and westwards into Bohemia, where a peasant insurrection in 1775 served warning upon the Habsburg empire of Maria Theresa. Thence the crisis moved north again, to the shores of the Baltic, and the flux and reflux of reforming initiatives and would-be monarchic authoritarianism in Poland, Denmark and Sweden, in each of which crisis-point had been reached in 1772. Only once so much ground has been covered does Venturi direct the gaze back to the conventional centre of historical concern, the first crisis of reform in France between 1770 and 1776, and even then he proceeds by way of Geneva, and the opening rounds of the conflict between the patricians and the bourgeois, underlin- ing the importance attached to the experience of this single city by both French and Italian observers. The initial crisis of the ancien regime comes to a head, finally, in the Britannic world, whence in 1776 there emerges "the only victor" among the many movements of reform in this period, the new American republic.18

Resuming the second of these volumes where the first left off, Venturi traces "the fall of the ancien regime" back eastwards. An account of the European-wide debate over the implications of the Americans' success is followed by reflection on the short-lived stimulus it offered to reform within Britain, before Venturi moves on again to an equally wide-ranging account of the frustrations of reform in Portugal after the fall of the marquis of Pombal and in Spain under Carlos III (formerly that first king on the newly restored throne of Naples whose accession aroused such expectations) and his minister, the count of Floridablanca. The tale of inadequate and unsuccessful reform in these western monarchies is rounded off in France, where Jacques Necker's caution drove Diderot to an ever more thoroughgoing (albeit still discreetly expressed) radicalism, and the publicists Raynal, Linguet and Brissot de Warville in such differently radical directions that the crisis in France became the crisis of the Enlightenment itself.19

The final volume begins by directing attention once again to the republican contribution to attempted reform, in the Genevan Revolution of 1782 and the Patriot Revolution in the United

18 Venturi, First Crisis/Prima crisi, passim. 19 Venturi, Great States of the West/Grandi stati dell'Occidente, passim.





Provinces that began in 1780. Thence the focus returns eastwards, as Venturi devotes a long chapter to the "Grand Project" of the ruler whom he clearly regards as the most remarkable, if flawed, reformer of them all, Joseph II. Further east still, reform and despotism are shown to have been coming close to head-on conflict in Russia and Turkey; in the north there was a similar clash, hostility to Gustavus III of Sweden culminating in his assassina- tion, while in Poland the last, ever-imaginative efforts of republican patriotism were crushed by the despotisms that surrounded and eventually partitioned the great commonwealth. Only then, with the ancien regime shown to be tottering right across Europe, does Venturi call the reader back for the expected final act, in a short, simply-titled chapter, "Towards the Revolution in France".20

* * *

The themes on which Venturi relies to shape this vast panorama are familiar in outline from his earlier works, Utopia and Reform and Italy and the Enlightenment. The interrelation of reform and revolution, the marriage of patriotism to cosmopolitanism - these are now observed wherever the European Enlightenment was at work, and presented as the keys to understanding the end of the ancien regime. To the extent of Venturi's success in projecting these themes on so much larger a scale I shall come in a moment; before then, however, it is important to recognize that for all the breadth of their vision, these volumes of Settecento riformatore rest on particular - we may even want to say limited - foundations.

The first point to be made concerns the nature of the evidence on which Venturi is most reliant. There are two main types of sources. One, to whose hitherto untapped potential Venturi draws justified attention, consists of the journals and newspapers through which Italians were informed of events elsewhere in Europe. The best of these, such as the Notizie del mondo or the Gazetta universale, were produced in Florence and Venice; but almost everywhere (with the exception of the south) there were

20 Venturi, Republican Patriotism and the Empires of the East/ Patriottismo repubblicano a gli imperi dell'Est, passim.

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lesser equivalents.21 Venturi's second major source is provided by the writings - books, pamphlets, memoirs and correspond- ence - of Italians travelling or living abroad, who observed and in varying degrees participated in the reform debates in the countries in which they found themselves. From these sources it is clear that a contemporary Italian could be remarkably well informed about events elsewhere in Europe: what Venturi then seeks to do is to use such evidence both as a basis for the narrative of those events, and as offering a distinctively Italian perspective upon them. Italy, its journalists and its exiles, thus provide, in a phrase coined by a friendly critic, the "prism" through which the crises and struggles of others are observed and comprehended. It is an engaging methodological metaphor, but perhaps also a dangerous one, for the light that emerges from the prism is decidedly variable.

For all the remarkable detail of their news coverage, the Italian journals hardly provide the basis for a general narrative of Euro- pean history. By its nature their evidence is partial and (for the modern historian) at least secondhand: even when their content was not subject to censorship (or self-censorship), it was often derived from other journals, not necessarily those of the country which the news concerned. The Italian journals thus cannot substitute for the domestic sources of the individual countries, or even for the diplomatic dispatches of which Venturi was once so dismissive. As if recognizing such limitations, Venturi supple- ments the evidence of the journals by discussing the interpreta- tions of events offered by modern historians of the countries concerned. The resulting historiographical observations are often instructive, Venturi's cosmopolitan perspective exposing the limitations of "national" histories, not least in the case of England.22 But to combine modern historiographical observation with the evidence of contemporary Italian journals is not the most straightforward of procedures: it still leaves a narrative founded neither upon secondary nor upon directly primary sources. Venturi's second major source, the writings of Italians abroad, likewise has its limitations. However variously interesting they were as indi-

21 There were two Notizie del mondo, one published in Florence from the late 1760s, the other launched in Venice in 1779; the Gazetta universale was Florentine, and likewise began in the 1760s.

22 See the critical remarks upon the self-professed "isolationism" of I. R. Christie: Venturi, Great States of the West, pp. 189-90, a paragraph not in the Italian original.





viduals, some Italians were more successful than others in making a significant contribution to the debates they encountered. One who did was the Tuscan Filippo Mazzei, who emigrated to Amer- ica in 1771, engaged himself in the colonists' cause, and did much to shape the European debate on the American Revolution's significance after 1776. The chapter devoted to this debate, "Libertas Americana", is as a result one of the most successful in these volumes.23 But other observers, like Isodoro Bianchi (the Sicilian translator of David Hume) in Denmark, or the abbate Michelessi in Sweden, had much less impact, the accounts of their contributions threatening to distort rather than illuminate devel- opments in those countries. Again Venturi would seek to com- pensate for such deficiencies by introducing other material, in this case amplifying his accounts of major debates with expositions of the contributions of native participants. Often these are enorm- ously instructive, especially in the case of the later, less familiar writers of the French Enlightenment; but one cannot be sure that they have corrected the distortions inherent in giving pride of place to "the Italian prism".

In any case, whatever their merits, Venturi's attempts to com- pensate for the limitations of his chosen primary sources only compound a problem already manifest in his handling of the sources themselves: a tendency to expound their contents at quite unnecessary length. These volumes of Settecento riformatore (and their untranslated successors) are simply too long. If many could benefit by reading them, few are likely to persist until the end; even the translator, it is almost reassuring to note, appears on occasion to have nodded.24 Venturi himself sustains an enviable enthusiasm for all his protagonists, from the sublime Diderot to the workaday journalists of the Notizie del mondo. But it is an enthusiasm carried to excess, repeatedly losing the thread of the argument, and frustrating the reader by resorting to rhetoric where there should be explanation.

If the nature of the evidence delimits the achievement of Sette- cento riformatore in one respect, certain of Venturi's analytical preconceptions may do so in another. As an account of the end

23 Venturi, Great States of the West/Grandi stati dell'Occidente, ch. 1. 24 See, for example, a succession of uncharacteristic infelicities, Venturi, Great States

of the West, pp. 313, 326, 351, 367, which may indicate a flagging of the translator's spirits; if so, he gained a second wind to carry him happily through the final volume. I noticed one minor mistranslation in the opening volume, Venturi, First Crisis, p. 410 1. 21, where "became" should have been "replaced".

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of the ancien regime in Europe these volumes are distinctly one- sided. It is with the critics of that regime that Venturi is almost exclusively concerned: the ancien regime itself, its culture and its adherents receive very little attention at all. Occasionally an exception is made: as a sequel to his previous study of the crisis of church and state which culminated in the suppression of the Jesuits, Venturi devotes several intriguing pages to the attempts of Spanish-Italian ex-Jesuits, the destierros, to come to terms with Enlightenment culture, and he comments particularly on their admiration for the art of Anton Raphael Mengs.25 But their case is unusual, and the expression of interest in the art of the ancien regime even more so. There is no parallel here with Gibbon's fascination with the character of the empire whose decline he was narrating, or with his interest in the intricacies of the neo- Platonist intellectual culture which dominated late paganism. Aside from a few anti-Enlightenment churchmen, Venturi leaves the identity of those who adhered to the ancien regime shadowy to the point of invisibility: the dark forces frustrating reform remain mostly dark. This refusal to engage with the intellectual culture of the ancien regime spares Venturi the sort of problem which troubled Croce: how to account for the Baroque if not in terms of "decadence"? But there is no sense of the scope for cultural and intellectual "shift" which H. G. Koenigsberger has suggested as an alternative, more appropriate way of assessing the pattern of artistic and intellectual development in the courts and churches of the ancien regime.26 The result is an unargued, but implicitly negative, view of the ancien regime and the Baroque which those with any sympathy for their cultural and intellectual achievements are unlikely to find satisfying.

Venturi not only disregards the Baroque; he is also inclined to discount those lines of thought which had made it possible to criticize the ancien regime from within. Thus the juristic critique of the power and property of the church, which culminated in the great anti-papal history of Giannone, Dell'istoria civile del regno di Napoli of 1723, does not, strictly speaking, belong within Venturi's Enlightenment. As we have seen, he begins the story

25 Venturi, Great States of the West, pp. 258-75/Grandi stati dell'Occidente, pp. 261-78.

26 Benedetto Croce, Storia della'etd Barocca in Italia (Bari, 1953), introd.; H. G. Koenigsberger, "Decadence or Shift? Changes in the Civilisation of Italy and Europe in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries", Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc., 5th ser., x (1960), repr. in H. G. Koenigsberger, Estates and Revolutions (Cornell, 1971).





of reform in Naples in 1734, after Giannone's flight into exile; and when he comes to consider the ecclesiastical conflicts of the 1760s, those who pursued a Giannonian critique of the church are regarded as traditionalists. If Venturi's Enlightenment has little place for the tradition of Giannone, still less does it admit of a religious colouring. Individual reformers, notably the abbe Genovesi, may have been men of the cloth; but there is no suggestion of there having been a Catholic or even a Protestant Enlightenment.27 In justification of such exclusions, Venturi has argued that to write the history of the Enlightenment in terms of its intellectual origins runs the risk of missing what is most essential to it: its creativity, and commitment to concrete political action.28 To search for origins, to emphasize continuities, Venturi believes, is to compromise the essential identification of Enlight- enment with change.

The same preference for change underlies other exclusions. In characterizing the Enlightenment in terms of its political and economic ideas rather than its philosophy, Venturi has effectively discounted other, less directly political alternatives to the old interpretation. He has, in particular, been indifferent to the com- parably original interpretation outlined in 1959 by Reinhard Koselleck in Kritik und Krise: to Koselleck it was the individual's withdrawal from active politics into an ideal world of social behaviour which was the hallmark of Enlightenment intellectual culture.29 Close to the centre of that culture, Koselleck argued, was Freemasonry; by contrast, though he by no means ignores its presence, Venturi is clearly reluctant to acknowledge Free- masonry as enlightened. In the same vein, Venturi is unwilling to regard the rise of Mesmerism in the 1780s, highlighted by Robert Darnton, as other than an irrational deviation from the course of enlightenment.30 Equally marked has been Venturi's

27 Despite a generous acknowledgement of the work of the foremost Italian pro- ponent of the idea of a Catholic Enlightenment, Mario Rosa: see, for example, Mario Rosa, "Introduzione all'Aufkldrung cattolica in Italia", in Mario Rosa (ed.), Cattolices- imo e lumi nel settecento italiano (Italia sacra: studi e documenti di storia ecclesiastica, xxxiii, Rome, 1981). For Giannone, see Pietro Giannone, Dell'istoria civile del regno di Napoli, 4 vols. (Naples, 1723).

28 Venturi, Utopia and Reform, introd. 29 Reinhard Koselleck, Kritik und Krise: Eine Studie zur Pathogenese der biirgerlichen

Welt (Freiburg and Munich, 1959); Eng. version Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society, introd. V. Gourevitch (Oxford, 1988).

30 In Russia, enlightenment and Masonic institutions are explicitly counterposed: Venturi, Republican Patriotism and the Empires of the East, p. 844/Patriottismo repubblicano e gli imperi dell'Est, p. 863. On Mesmer, see Venturi, Great States of the West,

(cont. on p. 198)

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distance from Darnton's subsequent interest in "the business" of the Enlightenment, in the economics of journalism and the book trade.31 To Venturi the emphasis on the journalistic "low life" of the later Enlightenment tends to devalue the intellectual commitment which, he believes, still shines through the work of Linguet and Brissot de Warville.32 The material questions of how many bought and read the journals by which he sets such store Venturi has simply ignored: what is in the journals, he claims, may best be taken at face value.33

Similarly lacking in interest for Venturi are the institutions of learning which often sustained the Enlightenment, and which in some countries, notably Scotland and Germany, were essential to its development. While others now explore the ways in which the teaching of philosophy in universities and academies was adapted to the task of educating an enlightened elite, and thus tend to narrow the gulf between philosophy and politics,34 Venturi remains committed to doing justice to the men - and the women35 - of the Enlightenment as individuals, rather than as creatures of institutions.

Venturi's early dissatisfaction with a purely literary and philosophical conception of the Enlightenment has, in short, taken him in one direction, while other scholars have set off in others. Venturi's interpretation of the Enlightenment can be seen to rest upon certain preconceptions about its character, preconceptions (n. 30 cont.)

pp. 414-19/Grandi stati dell'Occidente, pp. 423-7; cf. Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, Mass., 1968).

31 Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopedie (Cambridge, Mass., 1979). Venturi stands at a comparable distance from the work of the French historians Daniel Roche, Franqois Furet and others associated with the VIieme Section project on books and their readers in eighteenth-century France.

32 See Venturi, Great States of the West, pp. 427, 444/Grandi stati dell'Occidente, pp. 435, 452, for expressions of irritation with Darnton's view of Brissot in particular.

33 For statements of this straightforward assumption, see Venturi, First Crisis, pp. 213, 284/Prima crisi, pp. 215, 286.

34 Such studies have been particularly important in the case of the Scottish Enlight- enment: see the contributions (alongside one by Venturi himself) in Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (eds.), Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1983); R. B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1985).

35 Such as the remarkable Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel, exiled from Portugal to Naples, where "she made a narrow but solid bridge between the age of Pombal and the Neapolitan Republic of 1799", before dying at the hands of its restored ancien regime: Venturi, Great States of the West, pp. 224-8/Grandi stati dell'Occidente, pp. 227-31.





which have led him to exclude much that others have shown to be significant. For all his reaction against Croce's concern with philosophy and literature, there is an important sense in which Venturi remains loyal to a specific Crocean idea of the Enlighten- ment as a consciously rational, lay movement of political and economic reform.

* * *

Between the vast scale of these central volumes of Settecento riformatore and their actual documentary and analytical foundations there may well appear to be a critical discrepancy. Can such a particular, even idiosyncratic, choice of sources, coupled with so specific a set of analytical preconceptions, support so large an edifice? The answer to the question must lie in the extent to which Venturi succeeds in sustaining the two themes which, I suggest, run through the entire work: the constant interplay between reform and revolution in the aspirations of the Enlighten- ment's adherents, and the similarly close connection they established between cosmopolitanism and patriotism.

Of the two, the relation between reform and revolution is the more elusive. But Venturi himself seems determined not to sim- plify his story by too rigid an application of the theme. Despite the polarity announced in their title, no clear line of distinction emerged from the (much more concise) Trevelyan Lectures, Uto- pia and Reform. It was, rather, the coexistence of the two aspirations which marked the thought of a Beccaria, even of a Rousseau.36 In Settecento riformatore there are moments when a contrast seems to be implied: the "first crisis" of the ancien regime closes with the triumph of a constitutionalist reform movement in America, while the "fall" of the ancien regime occurs when the failures of reform in France leave its people with no alternative to revolution.37 But as Venturi criss-crosses Europe from his Italian vantage-point, it becomes ever clearer that no schematic distinction between reform and revolution can be sustained. The two possibilities are now seen to have coexisted in the minds of

36 Venturi, Utopia and Reform, chs. 3-4. 37 Venturi, First Crisis, p. 423/Prima crisi, p. 429; Venturi, Republican Patriotism

and the Empires of the East, pp. 952-7/Patriottismo repubblicano e gli imperi dell'Est, pp. 975-80.

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many more intellectuals, the tension between them being felt with exemplary intensity by Diderot and Radiscev.38 Monarchs and their ministers were no more successful in holding the line, some abandoning reform for reaction, others pursuing it to revolutionary lengths. Catherine of Russia and Gustavus III of Sweden were examples of the former, sacrificing early reforms to their fears of liberty and constitutionalism (and, in Catherine's case, allowing her initial, adventurous inclination to encourage revolution in the Balkans to be displaced by ambitions of imperial expansion south- wards).39 By contrast, two others pressed on regardless. In Denmark Count Struensee offered an outstanding example of a ministerial reformer, as for two years between 1770 and 1772 he subjected the country to relentless liberalization, until he was summarily overthrown.40 The most radical of them all, however, was the emperor Joseph II.

The rhetorical force of Venturi's account of Joseph II's "Grand Project" is especially striking. Reluctant as ever to acknowledge continuity, Venturi gives short shrift to those who would insist that significant reform had begun under Maria Theresa. The evidence of the eulogies for the deceased empress and the expectations aroused by Joseph's succession is deployed at length to demonstrate the extent to which the latter signalled a new departure.41 Among Joseph's reforms, Venturi emphasizes the assault on monastic property, the imposition of religious toleration, the abolition of serfdom and the limitation of the death penalty; his administrative reforms, such as the redrawing of boundaries, are deliberately accorded much less attention. Undeniably, Venturi concludes, it was the programme of "an enlightened and efficient reformer".42 Later he is still more emphatic: "enlightened despotism found its most authentic and effective expression in the

38Venturi, Great States of the West, pp. 357-65/Grandi stati dell'Occidente, pp. 363-71; Venturi, Republican Patriotism and the Empires of the East, pp. 845-51/Patriottismo repubblicano e gli imperi dell'Est, pp. 863-9.

39 Compare Venturi, First Crisis, pp. 3-22, 279-339/Prima crisi, pp. 4-21, 281-342 (on Catherine and Gustavus respectively) with Venturi, Republican Patriotism and the Empires of the East, pp. 764-851, 877-907/Patriottismo repubblicano e gli imperi dell'Est, pp. 780-869, 896-927.

40 Venturi, First Crisis, pp. 246-59/Prima crisi, pp. 249-62. 41 Venturi, Republican Patriotism and the Empires of the East, pp. 605-22, 634-7/

Patriottismo repubblicano e gli imperi dell'Est, pp. 615-32, 645-9. 42 Ibid., pp. 635-746/pp. 647-762. See also Carlo Capra, "Imagine e realta nel

'grande projetto' di Giuseppe II", Annali della Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, xix (1985), pp. 419-26, with Venturi's response in Franco Venturi, "Postilla", ibid., pp. 452-3.





Vienna of Joseph II". It was the century's "greatest revolution from above".43 But Venturi also emphasizes Joseph's critical fail- ing: he did not believe in the autonomous force of enlightenment, and would not wait for public opinion to be engaged in his support. Writers and journalists he would have as apologists, but not as collaborators. Jealous of independent centres of initiative, unwilling to relax control of economic activity, Joseph thus ended by provoking a reaction of republican patriotism against his reforms.44 Readers are left to connect these judgements as best they can, but the point would seem to be that enlightened despotism was self-defeating: even when pushed to revolutionary extremes, its reforms would fail for want of support among the people, support which only an independent movement of enlightenment could have generated.

The assessment of revolution from below is no more clear cut. Like Alexis de Tocqueville, Venturi ends his account of the fall of the ancien regime at the outset of the French Revolution, and abstains from direct judgement upon the latter. It is apparent, even so, that Venturi would rather be positive. If it was the repeated failure of French ministerial and royal reform which made revolution unavoidable, its outbreak was not the end of reform. Instead, what the last of his Italian observers, the brothers Dalmazzo and Giambattista Vasco, suggest is that the outbreak of revolution only intensified the need for creative reform: the challenge to devise new, constitutional forms of government for France was more urgent than ever.45 Beyond this, however, Venturi does not go. Challenged by critics to be more precise about the nature of the Revolution, he has declined to oblige, insisting that his ambition was rather to make what happened in France understandable as part of a European process: "The volumes which I have written are attempts to demonstrate that without looking to Sweden, to Russia, to Wallachia, to Italy, to Greece and to America, as much as to Paris, the great transforma- tion of the European world in the last decades of the eighteenth century will be incomprehensible".46 That the crisis of the ancien regime extended far further than France is indeed triumphantly

43 Venturi, Republican Patriotism and the Empires of the East, p. 952/Patriottismo repubblicano e gli imperi dell'Est, p. 974.

44 Ibid., pp. 706, 747-58/pp. 720-1, 763-74. 45 Ibid., pp. 1011-15/pp. 1036-40. 46 Venturi, "Postilla", p. 453 (my translation).

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demonstrated by these volumes of Settecento riformatore; what remains underdeveloped is the explanation of just how events in these countries were connected by the interplay of reform and revolution.

The second great theme traversing Venturi's Enlightenment, the conjunction of cosmopolitanism and patriotism, is more straightforward to follow. It too is a theme which Venturi has long insisted upon, and it permeates virtually every page of Settecento riformatore.47 Cosmopolitanism is apparent in the pas- sionate interest taken by his Italians in the affairs of other countries, in their willingness to contribute to others' debates, and in others' willingness to engage with their contributions. Simultan- eously the same Italians, and their reforming counterparts elsewhere, manifested their patriotism in their commitment to the improvement of their own societies. Together, Venturi argues, cosmopolitanism and patriotism combined to give the Enlighten- ment its unprecedented intellectual openness, as its adherents everywhere sought in the experience of other societies models for the betterment of their own.

It may seem commonplace to characterize the Enlightenment as "cosmopolitan". But the cosmopolitanism which Venturi identifies in the outlook of those he studies has a specific, original quality. It is clearly to be distinguished from the universalism which was so strong an element of early modern European religious, artistic and political culture. A cosmopolitanism which is receptive to the ideas of others, while respecting the different circumstances of each, is the antithesis of the pretensions to universal authority upheld by the Roman Catholic and some Protestant churches, and by the great imperial monarchies of early modern Europe, Habsburg, Bourbon, even Hanoverian. Such a cosmopolitanism is also antithetical to those philosophies which had hitherto aspired to universal validity - which is why jurisprudence, including the modern natural jurisprudence of Samuel Pufendorf and his followers, falls outside Venturi's understanding of the Enlightenment. By contrast, political economy and penal reform were cosmopolitan, not universal in character, since their prescriptions were adapted to circumstances. For Ven- turi, in short, cosmopolitanism implies a renunciation by rulers

47 Venturi focused particularly on it for his English readers in the preface to Venturi, Italy and the Enlightenment, pp. xix-xxi.





and writers of any aspiration to hegemony over others, whether in politics, in religion or in ideas.

For its part, the "patriotism" which Venturi identifies in the Enlightenment stands in contrast both to the jealous, often xeno- phobic myths of national and ethnic identity so widespread in early modern Europe, and to the exclusive, frequently aggressive ideals of later nationalisms. A Venturian patriot - a Pilati or a Radicev - is committed to the betterment of his own commun- ity, but not to its superiority over others. Again, the natural intellectual expression of such an outlook is provided by political economy. This is not the patriotism which inspired the fashion for Ossianic epics, or the movement of Sturm und Drang in literature: it is the practical commitment to reform exemplified by Genovesi when he declared the cultivation of arts and manufac- tures to be the precondition of progress in the kingdom of Naples.

Although Venturi's understanding of the theme of cosmopolitanism and patriotism is thus subject to the limitations of his conception of the Enlightenment, it is nevertheless the theme which carries most conviction in these volumes. It is perhaps also the theme which presently has most to offer students of the Enlightenment as a European movement. By demonstrating how among contemporaries themselves a sense of common purpose coincided with a recognition of diversity of experience, Venturi has removed the justification for the attempt to set the movement within a single overarching intellectual frame, whether "the Age of Democratic Revolution" or "the rise of modern paganism". Equally his demonstration of the extent to which intellectuals and reformers looked outwards for inspiration offers a timely warning against the recently fashionable tendency to view the Enlighten- ment primarily "in national context".48 The studies that are now needed, his achievement suggests, are those that cross national boundaries, explore the connections between different branches of the Enlightenment, and compare the understanding and application of ideas in different contexts. These studies will not - indeed should not - necessarily be confined by Venturi's distinctive presuppositions. They may explore connections across the line he has drawn between the earlier, internal critics of the ancien regime and the thinkers of the Enlightenment. They will need to be aware of confessional differences, whether they follow, or

48 As in an influential collection of papers, Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (eds.), The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge, 1981).

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cross, the lines that separate them. Not least, these studies may need to enlarge the areas of intellectual activity included within the Enlightenment. But to all such investigations the theme of patriotism and cosmopolitanism should be pertinent and helpful, as a constant reminder that the Enlightenment was neither an abstraction nor a movement defined by national borders.

Many of these studies may also have to acknowledge that Venturi's other theme, of reform and revolution, remains unavoidable: in this case, the lesson of Settecento riformatore may lie rather in its exemplifying the difficulty of sustaining the analytical distinction between the two. In one respect, however, Ven- turi's example should be wholly positive. If the tumultuous events in the European world during the second half of the eighteenth century are ever to be satisfactorily understood, it must be through study of the entire range of the Enlightenment's chal- lenges to existing social and political orders. A movement whose adherents combined cosmopolitan openness with patriotic commitment to their own individual communities can no longer be understood as destined to end in just one nation's revolution, however far-reaching that revolution's subsequent impact. To direct the Enlightenment towards the French Revolution alone, Venturi has demonstrated, is to miss its European significance, which was to have challenged the ancien regime in its many different guises across the entire continent (and beyond, in its colonies overseas). It is here, moreover, that Venturi's argument has received such unexpected reinforcement in our own times, when events since 1989 have opened a new perspective upon those of 1789. As French bicentennial celebration has been abruptly overtaken by the actuality of reform and revolution sweeping through the states of central and eastern Europe, extending eventually to Russia itself, the need to take a compar- ably extensive view of the Enlightenment suddenly seems much more obvious. And not only may historians thus achieve a better understanding of the extent of the Enlightenment's impact in the eighteenth century: in a Europe threatened anew by exclusive nationalisms, a movement which was equally cosmopolitan and patriotic may in turn be seen to have a fresh and urgent relevance to the present.

* * *





Venturi, meanwhile, has his own agenda to pursue, and the fifth volume of Settecento riformatore is well on the way to completion. Devoted to the Italy of the Enlightenment, this has seen Venturi return to his peninsular starting-point to resume his detailed account of the patriotic endeavours of Italian reformers in their own lands. Beginning with the Corsican Revolution of the 1760s, the massive first part moves on to consider the reformers' responses to the terrible famines which struck Naples, Rome and Tuscany in 1764, before attention is turned once more to the Lombardy of Beccaria and the brothers Verri.49 In part 2 the focus of attention becomes the reformers in Venice and its hinter- land, here as in Lombardy increasingly devoted to agronomy as well as to political renewal.50 Before long the account of Enlight- enment Italy will be completed by part 3 (the eighth instalment in all), where for the last time Venturi will retrace his steps the length of the peninsula, from Piedmont, through the Papal States, to the kingdom of Naples. There, perhaps, Settecento riformatore may end, and we can anticipate an account of the short-lived Parthenopean Republic of 1799 as the tragic finale to seven decades of reforming effort in the kingdom, when the Bourbons shamelessly extinguished the last of the hopes aroused by their accession in 1734.

Together with the opening two, this final volume devoted to the Enlightenment within Italy should further diminish the temptation to treat the intervening (translated) volumes as a separate account of the European Enlightenment. As attention to their sources makes plain, those middle volumes too belong within a larger, Italian project. Yet even when viewed, once again, as an Italian whole, Settecento riformatore can still stand as an inspiration to historians of any part of the European Enlightenment. For Venturi's approach to Italian history exemplifies that combination of cosmopolitanism and patriotism which he has identified as the key to the Enlightenment itself. Cosmopolitan in the unflagging breadth of his conception of Europe, he is no less intensely patriotic in his commitment to Italy. It is with this commitment that we should leave Settecento riformatore. In contrast to many even of the best Italian historians, whose first loyalty is to their region, Venturi has a commitment to Italy as a whole. Within

49 Venturi, Rivoluzione di Corsica: le grandi carestie degli anni sessanta: la Lombardia delle riforme.

50 Venturi, Repubblica di Venezia.

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this commitment, moreover, Venturi has shown a sympathy for - and acquaintance with - the history of the south, its capital Naples and its far-flung provinces, that is rare among those not from the region. Nowhere is his identification with the reformers' ideals of rationality and material improvement more evident than in the face of the entrenched economic and political structures of the south; nowhere is his endorsement of their efforts more generous. It is as if, for Venturi, Naples was the crucible of Italy's century of reform.

Yet, as Venturi will have to acknowledge, Naples was the test that the reformers failed most decisively. The republic of 1799 was itself an act of desperation, and the southern masses rallied to the Bourbons to overthrow it. Against that ancien regime, and that Baroque, the Enlightenment ideals of the reformers had battered in vain. Since those ideals are so clearly Venturi's own, moreover, the latter may be thought liable to the same test. In his insistence on identifying the reformers' values as those of rationality and material well-being, Venturi has effectively yoked the Enlightenment to the Italian liberal and socialist traditions to which he gave his own allegiance in the period of the Second World War. That by doing so Venturi has enhanced the quality of those traditions is beyond question: for Mazzinian hyperbole and Crocean Hegelianism he has been able to substitute an infi- nitely preferable cosmopolitanism. But the political consequences of those traditions' overriding commitments to reason and material well-being remain the same as they were in the eighteenth century: the modern Italian "ancien regime" must be repudiated as abruptly as its eighteenth-century predecessor, without compromise or concession. Only if all energies are turned instead to a programme of rational political and economic reform, understood in the cosmopolitan, European terms of Venturi's Enlight- enment, can such obstinate backwardness as that displayed in Naples and the south be overcome. Whether that most complic- ated of Europe's cities can be reformed upon so straightforward an agenda remains, however, as uncertain, if not as unlikely, now as it was two hundred years ago.

St. Hugh's College, Oxford


John Robertson



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