This article was downloaded by: [Universite De Paris 1] On: 25 August 2013, At: 10:23 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK History of European Ideas Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rhei20 From Luxury to Consumption in Eighteenth-Century Europe: The Importance of Italian Thought in History and Historiography Cecilia Carnino a a Department of Historical Studies , University of Turin , Italy Published online: 07 May 2013. To cite this article: History of European Ideas (2013): From Luxury to Consumption in Eighteenth- Century Europe: The Importance of Italian Thought in History and Historiography, History of European Ideas, DOI: 10.1080/01916599.2013.793485 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2013.793485 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms- and-conditions
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This article was downloaded by: [Universite De Paris 1]On: 25 August 2013, At: 10:23Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
History of European IdeasPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rhei20
From Luxury to Consumption inEighteenth-Century Europe: TheImportance of Italian Thought inHistory and HistoriographyCecilia Carnino aa Department of Historical Studies , University of Turin , ItalyPublished online: 07 May 2013.
To cite this article: History of European Ideas (2013): From Luxury to Consumption in Eighteenth-Century Europe: The Importance of Italian Thought in History and Historiography, History ofEuropean Ideas, DOI: 10.1080/01916599.2013.793485
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2013.793485
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to orarising out of the use of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
From Luxury to Consumption in Eighteenth-Century Europe: TheImportance of Italian Thought in History and Historiography
CECILIA CARNINO
Department of Historical Studies, University of Turin, Italy
Summary
The aim of this article is to shed light on the eighteenth-century Italian reflectionon luxury and consumption in a comparative perspective, clarifying, on the onehand, the complex significance that it assumed and, on the other, the specificity ofthe Italian context, marked by the immense political value of the debate on thesubject. In particular this objective will be pursued through the analysis of specificcases among the many offered by the Italian context and through differentresearch strands. These are: the debate on the evaluation of luxury; the transitionfrom the notion of luxury to that of consumption; and the discussion on luxuryand consumption in the revolutionary context. This article intends to outline theparticular contribution made by Italian thought, which conveyed a multifaceteddiscourse of social reform, critique and understanding built on more evenfoundations, and at the same time to clarify what contribution can be made tocurrent historiography by the study of this theme within eighteenth-century Italy.
objectives will be pursued here through the analysis of specific cases among the many
offered by Italy itself and also by the fragmentation of the peninsula’s political
situation. The existence of different Italie, from both the political-institutional and
socio-economic points of view, and also within the setting of a wide circulation of
ideas and in the presence of a common culture, makes the case of Italy more difficult
to investigate than that of other European countries. However, precisely this
uniqueness helps to determine the multifarious importance, both political and
economic, that the Italian reflection on consumption assumed, and thus it helps also
to explain the interest in the study of the Italian context. In the main, this
investigation will travel three paths: the discussion of the revaluation of luxury that
took place in Europe from around the 1740s, and its reception in Italy; the transition
from the economic and political valuation of the concept of luxury to that of
consumption that occurred during the 1760s and 1770s; and the reflection on luxury
and consumption that was a feature of the revolutionary period.1
Since the last decades of the twentieth century, consumption has become a core
theme of historiographical debate, set within a more complex general reflection on the
culture of consumption.2 Although in recent years studies of consumption in the early
modern era have expanded significantly, the experience of Italy has received scant
attention.3 The only area that has been explored in detail is that of cultural
consumption, especially in relation to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
moments in which an older, well-established urban tradition and the central position
of Italy in the international economy had created the conditions for a premature birth
of the culture of consumption.4 Even so, there has been little research on consumption
in eighteenth-century Italy. Studies on the Italian economy during this period drew a
picture that has long discouraged specific investigations into the subject: although
marked by significant changes and by trends that could give rise to innovation in the
system of production, the economic system of eighteenth-century Italy was never
oriented towards an agrarian revolution, let alone an industrial one, and only towards
the middle of the nineteenth century did a society adhering to consumerism come into
being.5 Historiography, particularly British historiography, nevertheless shows how
changes in consumption should be sought not so much in the increase of the value of
purchased goods, but rather in a propensity to consume, or rather in the desire to
1 The study of these specific instances is part of a book currently being written on the political implicationsof economic theories on luxury and consumption in Italy during the second half of the eighteenth centuryand during the three years of revolution (1796�1799).2 It should be noted that the concept of a ‘consumer revolution’, which in fact has been used by Italian andFrench historians with much greater caution than by the English and the Americans, has been the subjectof open criticism; see Gregory Clark, ‘The Consumer Revolution: Turning Point in Human History, orStatistical Artifact?’, 4 July 2010, http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1653155 [accessed 09 April 2013]. While itis certainly useful to question the actual scope of the changes in material conditions that took place in theeighteenth century, studies on the subject have manifestly demonstrated that significant changes occurredduring the course of the century and were perceived by the people of the time, legitimising the importanceof consumption as a key theme for historical research.3 The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England, edited by NeilMcKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb (Bloomington, IN, 1992). For an overview of the materialchanges in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Consumption and the World ofGoods, edited by John Brewer and Roy Porter (London, 1993).4 Richard A. Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic and Social History(Baltimore, MD, 1980); Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods (London, 1996). For a balanced look at the study ofmaterial culture in Italy, see Alida Clemente, ‘Storiografie di confine? Consumo di beni durevoli e culturadel consumo nel XVIII secolo’, Societa e storia, 109 (2005), 589�98.5 Domenico Sella, Italy in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1997).
acquire a greater number and greater variety of economical products.6 On the other
hand, it must be noted how the few works that have so far addressed, albeit in ways
limited to specific geographical locations, the issue of the transformation of
consumption in Italy in the eighteenth century have shed light on the actual realisation
of an expansion of consumption that involved, in varying degrees, all social orders.7
The question of whether eighteenth-century Italy underwent major changes in
consumption patterns, comparable to those experienced by French and British society,
is still open. The task facing economic and social history is therefore that of clarifying
to what extent a significant change in consumption also took place in Italy. This article
will focus on a survey of intellectual reflection, which provides an original yet essential
perspective from which to examine the complex issue of consumption and to clarify the
importance it assumed in eighteenth-century Italy. In fact, it is possible to trace in Italy,
especially from the second half of the century, a clear perception*not so much by
supporters of material transformation as by its critics*of a substantial change in
consumption manifest in the circulation of new goods, mostly imported, as well as in
an unprecedented inclination towards consumerism that affected all levels of society.
Even more crucial is the complex thinking about consumption, both economic and
political, by Italian authors, in particular among those who added depth to the
economic analysis of the second half of the eighteenth century, especially the three
years of revolution, making it an issue central to the debate of that time.The debate on consumption, understood as widespread growth in prosperity (it
was in fact in this sense that the term was used during the eighteenth century by those
who reflected on the material changes in society) is a key theme of the reconstruction
of debates in the politics of reform, which were to have radical implications. An
approach to intellectual history, open to interdisciplinary stimuli and alert to the
linguistic and conceptual dimensions, allows a full inquiry into this reflection,
clarifying the many meanings that it assumed. Such a methodology, in which
comparative research has a vital part*fundamental, though as yet still largely absent
from current historiography on the subject*at the same time makes it possible to
underscore the specificity of Italian circumstances, which were marked by a strong,
multi-faceted political evaluation of the economic analysis of luxury.
However, this specificity prompts us to pursue the reflection on consumption on
two fronts, that of an economic analysis and that of a political one, thus showing how
the reconstruction of economic thought is a rewarding way of conducting research
into the political culture and social projects of the Italian authors in the complex
passage from the Old Regime to the revolutionary period while, at the same time,
emphasising the strong intrinsic interdisciplinarity of the subject.
2. The Debate on the Evaluation of Luxury and its Political Implications
The material changes that recurred, with varying intensity, in eighteenth-century
Europe were accompanied by a long, careful intellectual consideration that today
occupies the centre of historical research. An articulated reflection on consumption,
6 Carole Shammas, ‘Changes in English and Anglo-American Consumption 1550 to 1800’, inConsumption and the World of Goods, edited by Brewer and Porter, 177�205.7 Paolo Malanima, Il lusso dei contadini. Consumi e industrie nelle campagne toscane del Sei e Settecento(Bologna, 1990); Alida Clemente, Il lusso cattivo: Dinamiche del consumo nella Napoli del Settecento(Rome, 2011).
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its benefits for national prosperity or its damage to the economy, morality and social
stability, continued throughout the eighteenth century, revealing how the material
transformations that were impacting on society were perceived. The value of this
reflection was not confined to identifying how the modality of consumption altered.
Indeed, it also enabled an inquiry into the social ideals and economic models
underlying the new perception and representation of consumption and, simulta-
neously, to understand the ideological and political uses that were made of what
flowed from it. The debate on consumption that took place in Europe during the
eighteenth century in fact served a fundamental cultural and political purpose,
becoming a language for defining social identities, for criticising the traditional social
structure and for implementing political action.
The first place to be investigated from this perspective was Britain. On the one
hand, historiography has highlighted the attention given in late seventeenth- and
early eighteenth-century England to a new positive conception of consumption and
the emergence of a reflection on the beneficial effect that increased domestic demand
had on wealth creation. On the other, it has shed light on the implications, some
radical, for politics and society conveyed by this new economic reflection.8 The
discourse on the evaluation of consumption even managed to call into question the
traditional socio-economic model based on the discipline of subordinate social
orders. Furthermore, studies are now revealing how the development of new
consumption patterns was a major topic of discussion in the debate on luxury, being
considered the fulcrum around which the reflection of consumption in the eighteenth
century revolved.9 For this reason, the concept of luxury is no longer treated as a
question intrinsic to the history of political ideas or as a literary theme, but as a
concrete discussion on the significance of goods and their social function. Therefore
this is not merely the reconstruction of a debate, which has in any case already been
well investigated:10 rather, the debate on luxury is accepted as crucial to reassembling
the political and cultural implications of the proliferation of new consumer goods
and to analysing the perception that the people of the time had of them.11
Such studies of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, insofar as they have
contributed significantly to making a decisive break in the way in which luxury and
the transformation of consumption are studied, have not yet exhausted the
complexity of the issue. The discussion on luxury had an overriding focus on the
socio-economic changes that took place in England in the eighteenth century. Thus
only a marginal interest in the political dimension of this reflection has emerged,
being interpreted primarily as an intellectual response to the complete assertion of a
commercial society and the rise of the middle social orders.
The debate on a positive evaluation of luxury that permeated Europe and the Atlantic
in the eighteenth century, characterised by profound economic and social changes and
the maturation of new political interests, meant something more than the emergence of a
8 Joyce Appleby, ‘Ideology and Theory: The Tension Between Political and Economic Liberalism inSeventeenth-Century England’, The American Historical Review, 81 (1976), 499�516.9 Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe 1650�1850, edited by Maxine Berg and HelenClifford (Manchester, 1999); Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires, and Delectable Goods,edited by Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger (Basingstoke, 2003).10 For a brilliant reconstruction of the European debate on luxury, see Istvan Hont, ‘The EarlyEnlightenment Debate on Commerce and Luxury’, in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-CenturyPolitical Thought, edited by Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler (Cambridge, 2006), 379�418.11 Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2005).
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discussion on commercial economy and middle-class consumerism. It had in fact
fundamental political and ideological ramifications, as John Shovlin demonstrated in
The Political Economy of Virtue, in which he reconstructed the diversified political
significance that the critique of luxury held in eighteenth-century France.12
From this standpoint, Italy’s own consideration of luxury, which took the form of
a real political language of reform and criticism of traditional society, is particularly
important.13 It acquired its full expression from the early 1750s onwards, somewhat
later than France and Britain, where the debate got underway in the middle of the
century, quickly becoming, with the prompting of physiocracy, one on the relation-
ship between luxury consumption and accumulation. The discussion initially
developed in the Kingdom of Naples*an emblematic example of that movement
of men and ideas which marked the fragmented eighteenth-century Italy*and in
particular the group of novatores, who had been inspired by Melon’s Essai politique
sur le commerce and gathered around Celestino Galiani and Bartolomeo Intieri, a
Tuscan mathematician who had moved to Naples, gave it a distinctive form.
However, in contrast to what happened in France and Britain, the Italian debate
on luxury was only partly stimulated by an awareness of a transformation in
consumption. In effect, Italy’s particular circumstances, characterised by the
increasing failure of its manufacturing sector to compete with Northern European
countries in the production of less expensive goods that satisfied consumers’
changing tastes and to penetrate the colonial trade market, were less marked by a
change in material reality than was the rest of Europe. The reasons for the economic
reflection on luxury becoming one of the central questions of the second half of the
eighteenth century should therefore be sought in the attempt by Italian authors to use
the debate to expound a project of political, economic and social reform. In the
reality of the reformist policies of the different Italian states*characterised by close
collaboration between power and intellectuals bent on reforming society*the
economic discourse was in fact one of the main languages available for change and
a social criticism of the Old Regime.14
12 John Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the FrenchRevolution (Ithaca, NY, 2006). Among the works that have focused their investigations on the complexsocial and political implications on eighteenth-century thinking on luxury and consumption, see MichaelKwass, ‘Ordering the World of Goods: Consumer Revolution and the Classification of Objects inEighteenth-Century France’, Representations, 82 (2003), 87�116; Rebecca L. Spang, ‘The FrivolousFrench: ‘Liberty of Pleasure’ and the End of Luxury’, in Taking Liberties: Problems of a New Order fromthe French Revolution to Napoleon, edited by Howard G. Brown and Judith A. Miller (Manchester, 2002),110�25; T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped AmericanIndependence (New York, NY, 2004).13 While the Italian reflection on luxury in the eighteenth century has long been obscured by thehistoriography, in recent years there appears to have been more attention paid to this theme. The two mostrelevant contributions to highlight are Till Wahnbaeck, Luxury and Public Happiness: Political Economy inthe Italian Enlightenment (Oxford, 2004); Modelli d’oltre confine. Prospettive economiche e sociali negliantichi Stati italiani, edited by Antonella Alimento (Rome, 2009). However, it should be pointed out howthese works do not place the question in the context of the new perspectives offered by the historiographydealing with the consumer revolutions and instead essentially focus on the study of the debate on luxury inthe traditional viewpoint of the move from criticism to a positive judgement.14 Franco Venturi, Illuministi italiani, 3 vols (Milan, 1958�1965); Franco Venturi, Settecento riformatore, 5vols (Turin, 1969�1990). On the political value of the Italian economic thinking, see also KoenStapelbroek, Love, Self-Deceit and Money: Commerce and Morality in the Early Neapolitan Enlightenment(Toronto, ON, 2008); John Robertson, The Case for The Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680�1760(Cambridge, 2005).
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In this respect, a case in point is that of Milan, where the reflection on luxury
played a large part when calls were made for a more equitable redistribution of
wealth and when political attacks were made on the traditional nobility. This
particular case also makes it possible to see in the clearest possible way the link
between economic analysis and political thought that characterised the debate on
luxury and, at the same time, to underline how the analysis of economic theory
provided fertile ground for the cultivation of plans for social reform and the political
culture of the Italian authors.
In Lombardy, political and economic debates centred on luxury during the 1760s
and 1770s, being fuelled by stimuli coming from the European debate. Moral
recriminations were rejected as luxury came to be recognised as an essential element
of the progress of civilisation and as a factor in economic development. Hume,
Melon, Montesquieu and in particular Forbonnais were referred to and often directly
cited by Lombard authors. The debate was given a platform by the Milanese
periodical the Caffe, which, in 1764, beginning with ‘Elementi del commercio’ and
‘Considerazioni sul lusso’ by Pietro Verri, and ‘Del lusso delle manifatture d’oro e
d’argento’ by Carlo Sebastiano Franci, three articles that dealt directly with the
issues, robustly opposed any restriction on luxury, which was considered an effective
stimulus to trade and public prosperity.15
Also in the framework of this continuity with the European debate, a particular
aspect of Lombard and, more generally, Italian thought, can be detected in the strong
political importance accorded to the discourse on luxury as a language for the social
transformation of the Old Regime. The Lombard reformist intellectuals in fact used
the reflection on luxury principally as a potent language for denouncing the amassing
of wealth and as an instrument for its redistribution. From this perspective, luxury
was defined by Verri in his ‘Considerazioni sul lusso’ as ‘a political good’, since
‘breaking up the rich patrimonies [. . .] contributed to dividing them’.16 And in Dei
delitti e delle pene, also published in 1764, Cesare Beccaria found in luxury ‘a
necessary remedy to inequality, which grows with the progress of a nation, without
which wealth would accumulate in one hand’.17
The argument on the circulation of wealth taken, at least in part, from Melon’s
Essai politique sur le commerce was later re-examined by Plumard de Dangeul in his
Remarques sur les avantages et les desavantages de la France et de la Grande
Bretagne.18 However, unlike the French debate, in Verri and in Beccaria the ideas
touched directly on the problem of inequality between individuals and merged in that
of property. It was in fact during the 1770s and 1780s that the discussion on
15 Pietro Verri, ‘Elementi del commercio’, in Il Caffe (1764�1766), edited by Gianni Francioni and SergioRomagnoli, 2 vols (Turin, 1993), I, folio III, 30�38; Pietro Verri, ‘Considerazioni sul lusso’, in Il Caffe,edited by Francioni and Romagnoli, I, folio XIV, 155�62; Carlo Sebastiano Franci, ‘Del lusso dellemanifatture d’oro e d’argento’, in Il Caffe, edited by Francioni and Romagnoli, II, folios VIII�IX, 494�98.16 Verri, ‘Considerazioni sul lusso’, in Il Caffe, edited by Francioni and Romagnoli, I, folio XIV, 158. Thisarticle published in Il Caffe was a reworking of an earlier work, ‘Considerazioni sulla preposizione direstringere il lusso nello Stato di Milano’, composed towards the end of 1763, since republished in PietroVerri, Edizione nazionale delle opere di Pietro Verri, edited by Gianni Francioni and others, first series, 6vols (Rome, 2003�2012), II, book I, 93�106. All translations are my own.17 Cesare Beccaria, Dei delitti e delle pene (1764) con Le edizioni italiane del ‘Dei delitti e delle pene’ di L.Firpo, in Edizione nazionale delle opere di Beccaria, edited by Gianni Francioni and others, 16 vols (Milan,1984�2009), I, 105.18 Louis-Joseph Plumard de Dangeul, Remarques sur les avantages et les desavantages de la France et de laGrande Bretagne (Amsterdam, 1754), 53.
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primogeniture and fideicommissum, which had reached its peak at the time of
Muratori and Pompeo Neri, soon turned into new thinking on private property and
the need to demolish the barriers to economic mobility that still stood in
Lombardy.19
Within the compass of this positive consideration of luxury, a discussion that was
at once more specific and distinctive took place from the mid-1760s to the early
1770s. In it, emphasis was placed on negative and unproductive luxury, which was
linked to ostentation and the legitimisation of the traditional nobility’s social pre-
eminence, as opposed to a useful and beneficial luxury, which was a manifestation of
personal well-being and based on market goods. The discussion received extensive
coverage in Caffe, from the article ‘Dell’Ozio’ by Alessandro Verri and the
‘Osservazioni su i fedecommessi’ by Alfonso Longo to Verri’s ‘Elementi del
commercio’.20 It was absorbed into the project of transformation and modernisation
of the traditional aristocracy which animated the Accademia dei Pugni group and
was associated with the reform of nobility much desired by the Habsburg authorities.
This aimed to make the monarch the only legitimate source of nobilisation and
resulted, in 1769, in the establishment of the Court of Arms.21
The distinction between positive and negative luxury served the purposes of a
determined political strategy, based on an economic rationale, to revoke the
legitimate status of traditional hereditary aristocracy.22 In this reflection on the
nobility, a general rejection of the patrician ideology of honour and the cultural and
behavioural models of past generations converged with a concrete struggle against
juridical institutions, such as primogeniture and fideicommissum, aimed at securing
and safeguarding noble property.23 The goal, which may be correlated to the new link
between the capacity for economic initiative by individuals, especially landowners,
and political and administrative accountability, put in place by the reform of
communal and provincial orders that Pompeo Neri championed in 1755, was that of
promoting a new elite, better educated and more oriented towards the general
interest, to underpin both economic development and the assignment of civil and
political functions.
The use of this critical political discourse against traditional nobility made
through the contrast between positive and negative luxury emerged in its most
articulate form in Verri’s ‘Elementi del commercio’. In the article, which bears traces
of a late-mercantilist formulation and pays special attention to the balance of trade,
luxury was perceived and presented, in line with ideas emanating from the European
19 Carlo Capra, La Lombardia austriaca nell’eta delle riforme, 1706�1796 (Turin, 1987); Franco Venturi,‘La rivoluzione di Corsica. Le grandi carestie degli anni sessanta. La Lombardia delle riforme’, inSettecento riformatore, V, 425�50.20 Alessandro Verri, ‘Dell’ozio’, in Il Caffe, edited by Francioni and Romagnoli, I, folio XXVI, 288�291(289); Alfonso Longo, ‘Osservazioni su i fedecommessi’, in Il Caffe, edited by Francioni and Romagnoli, I,folio X�XII, 115�132 (119).21 On the law relating to nobility, passed on 20 November 1769, and its moderate and compromisingnature, see Claudio Donati, L’idea di nobilta in Italia. Secoli XIV�XVIII (Rome, 1988), 354. For a detailedanalysis of the legal background, see Orsolamalia Biandra de Regalie, ‘Provvedimenti araldico-nobiliari inLombardia durante il governo austriaco (1707�1796; 1815�1859)’, in Studi in onore di Ugo Gualazzini, 3vols (Milan, 1981), I, 143�68.22 Renato Pasta, ‘Per una rilettura de ‘‘Il Caffe’’, 1764�1766’, Rivista storica italiana, 112 (1995), 840�74.23 On the reformist activities of the Pugni group, see Franco Venturi, ‘Da Muratori a Beccaria’, inSettecento riformatore, I, 645�747; Venturi, ‘La rivoluzione di Corsica’, in Settecento riformatore, V; CarloCapra, ‘Il gruppo del ‘‘Caffe’’ e le riforme’, in Cesare Beccaria: La pratica dei lumi. Atti del Convegno 4marzo 1997, edited by Vincenzo Ferrone and Gianni Francioni (Florence, 2000), 63�78.
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debate*in particular from Montesquieu, Bielefeld, Melon, and Forbonnais, the
authors specifically mentioned as models of reflection on the issue*as an element of
civil development, as a factor of economic growth, and as a way of circulating
wealth.24 In open criticism of those, including some in government circles, who
considered the imposition of restrictive measures on luxury to be an effective means
of reviving Lombard trade, Verri insisted that luxury was not only the ‘means, by
which wealth held in a few hands returns to spread over the nation’, but was also ‘the
most vigorous spur to industry’, since it gave ‘citizens the hope of enrichment’.25 This
was a deep conviction that he would retain in his activities as a man of government.
These were marked by his readiness to implement plans for gradual economic
liberalisation that would open the way to the modernisation of the system when in
1764 he joined the Lombard administration after becoming a member of the Giunta,
instituted in the same year to study in depth the trade balance problems of Austrian
Lombardy.26
Although ‘Elementi del commercio’ was distinguished by a strong social and
economic appreciation of luxury, at the end Verri still differentiated between positive
luxury, based on a desire for market goods, and the ‘truly pernicious luxury of a
nation’, specifically ‘that which takes farm land, to devote it to hunting, parks and
gardens’, associated with the characteristic idleness of traditional nobility.27 The
comparison between these two types of luxury and the reference to a request for the
‘enlightened legislator’ to intervene on this waste show clearly how Verri’s objective
was to call for a reform of the nobility that would ultimately re-legitimatise it on the
basis of economic usefulness.
Political considerations, psychological analysis and economic reasoning were
closely intertwined in this critique of the nobility. Against the backdrop of politically
significant economic debate, which marked the Italian eighteenth century, this
rhetoric of attack against the nobility had its roots in the economic thought of Milan,
which adhered to the utilitarian paradigm. The Milanese reformers reflected on
eudemonia from a hedonistic perspective, strongly influenced by Condillac’s sensism:
economic advancement was set in motion by needs, desires and aspirations to a better
life. Indeed, in Meditazioni sulla felicita, published in 1763, Verri asserted that the
‘love of pleasure’ constituted ‘the only universal and always obeyed law by sentient
beings’,28 and Beccaria in Elementi di economia pubblica identified the desire for
comfort and luxury goods as the stimulus of man’s increasing ‘industry and labour’.29
The emphasis was not on the sense of fulfilment of desires already achieved, but
rather on that creative process that drove people to commit themselves to a definite
effort in order to procure the goods they coveted. The aspiration to happiness and
well-being was the basis of society’s economic development, made by dint of an active
24 Verri, ‘Elementi del commercio’, in Il Caffe, edited by Francioni and Romagnoli, I, folio III, 33�36. Fora general look at the European intellectual sources used by Pietro Verri in his work on economics, see SeizoHotta, ‘Fonti europee del pensiero economico di Pietro Verri’, in Pietro Verri e il suo tempo. Milano (9�11novembre 1997), edited by Carlo Capra, 2 vols (Bologna, 1999), II, 981�99.25 Verri, ‘Elementi del commercio’, in Il Caffe, edited by Francioni and Romagnoli, I, folio III, 37�38.26 Venturi, ‘Da Muratori a Beccaria’, in Settecento riformatore, I, 690 and following.27 Verri, ‘Elementi del commercio’, in Il Caffe, edited by Francioni and Romagnoli, I, folio III, 38.28 Pietro Verri, Meditazioni sulla felicita, edited by Gianni Francioni (Como, 1996), 56.29 Cesare Beccaria, Elementi di economia pubblica, in Scrittori classici italiani di economia politica, vol. XI�XII, edited by Pietro Custodi, modern series (Milan, 1804). Given the notable differences between theedition edited by Custodi and Beccaria’s manuscript, I have chosen to use that published in CesareBeccaria, Opere, edited by Sergio Romagnoli (Florence, 1958), I, 379�649 (620).
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mechanism of longing for the realisation of desires based on creativity and work*and capable, therefore, of combining personal self-interest and public happiness.30
From this perspective, the damage caused by the inactive nobility, on account of the
security of wealth guaranteed by conservative property institutions, as well as the
traditional nobility’s disposition, was offset by the economic dynamism of a new class
of owners. This dynamism, spurred on by the desire to achieve happiness, created
jobs and increased domestic productivity, thus becoming the foundation of the
strength of nations.
The subject of luxury enables the premises of an author’s argumentation to be
made clear by highlighting on the one hand the common elements of the political and
economic culture of the period and, on the other, the diversity that existed within it.
In this regard the thoughts of Beccaria are symbolic. On the one hand, he developed
a discourse of political critique against the traditional nobility built on an economic
reflection similar to that formulated by Pietro Verri. On the other, his ideas were not
only more radical than Verri’s, being nourished by a more pronounced social
sensibility in part as a result of his reading of Rousseau, but were also based on an
economic analysis (which was to emerge with the Elementi di economia pubblica)
quite different from that of Verri. Beccaria in fact put at the base of Lombard
economic expansion the low-cost production of agricultural goods to be achieved
through investment in large estates, while a key aspect of Verri’s economic analysis, as
we will see more clearly below, was the revival of competitiveness in domestic
manufacturing, to be supported by an increase in domestic consumption of
manufactured goods, albeit within the framework of the value attributed to
agriculture.
The political criticism of nugatory noble groups*made by juxtaposing their
idleness, guaranteed by the security of income, and activity, driven by the desire for
new commodities*was first highlighted by Beccaria in Dei delitti e delle pene, where
he likened the traditional nobility to those who contributed
to society not with labour, nor with wealth, which it acquires without everlosing [. . .] and that being without that stimulus towards an active life, which it
is necessary to nurture, or to increase the comfort of life, leave to the passions of
opinions, which are none the weaker, all their energy.31
In this reflection Beccaria distinguished between the ‘luxury of ostentation’ and the
‘luxury of comfort’, including them in a broad, complex discussion of population and
despotism.32 For Beccaria, who resumed Montesquieu’s considerations on the link
between luxury and inequality and on the positive role played by luxury in larger
states, the poorly developed countries and those with small populations were
characterised by the ‘luxury of ostentation’, perceived as at once the cause and
effect of despotism, which, in the manner of the past, indulged in ostentation and
30 On the economic reflections of the Milanese authors, see Pier Luigi Porta, ‘Economia politica eilluminismo in Italia: Pietro Verri e la ‘‘Scuola di Milano’’’, Rendiconti dell’Istituto Lombardo Accademia diScienze e Lettere per l’anno 2008 63�94; Economics and Happiness: Framing the Analysis, edited by LuiginoBruni and Pier Luigi Porta (Oxford, 2005); Luigino Bruni and Pier Luigi Porta, ‘Economiacivile and pubblica felicita in the Italian Enlightenment’, History of Political Economy, 35(Suppl 1)(2003), 361�85.31 Beccaria, Dei delitti e delle pene, 78.32 Beccaria, Dei delitti e delle pene, 78.
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magnificence, and reproduced and reinforced social hierarchies.33 In contrast, in
more populated countries, identified with modern monarchies, there developed a
‘luxury of comfort’, based on market goods capable of triggering the circulation and
redistribution of wealth.34
The distinction between ‘luxury of comfort’ and ‘luxury of ostentation’ was
restated and elucidated by Beccaria in Elementi di economia pubblica, a profoundly
analytical reflection that was the fruit of lectures delivered during his professorship in
the Cattedra di Scienze Camerali from 1760 to 1771, the year in which the Lombard
economist became part of the region’s administration as a member of the Consiglio di
Economia. The luxury of ostentation was equated to services to the person, such as
the employment of servants, while the luxury of comfort found expression in the
‘productive’ and ‘functional’ consumption of market goods. Real economic benefit
was given only by the latter, since it relied on the production of goods ‘convenient to
everyone’s use’,35 and indirectly had favourable effects on the population.36 This
positive value attributed to the luxury of comfort should be understood in the context
of the economic model that Beccaria proposed as the basis for Lombard
development: the low-cost production of agricultural goods, made possible by
greater productivity and the division of labour.37 In this picture the function of
luxury was to absorb excess employment in the agricultural sector, thereby
encouraging population growth and manufacturing enterprise, elements that both
helped to strengthen agriculture. At the heart of Beccaria’s reasoning was the notion
that agriculture and industry were intrinsically complementary. Consequent upon
this was the conviction that the expansion of manufacturing, driven by the spread of
the luxury of comfort, could help to sustain a population greater than that which the
land alone could allow, as well as a concomitant increment in demand for agricultural
produce.38
The case of Milan thus makes it possible to understand the complex significance
that the reflection on luxury assumed in eighteenth-century Italy. It also demon-
strates how that reflection did not end in the valorisation of luxury as the exaltation
of commercial society, but instead made luxury a core constituent of eighteenth-
century reformist policies, part of a finely tuned political strategy to undermine the
structures of the Old Regime by using a language derived from the economic
discourse. Traditional hierarchies, founded on external appearance, were weakened
not only by the wide availability of new luxury goods, accessible to the rising middle
33 For Montesquieu, see Charles de Secondat de Montesquieu, ‘Du luxe’, in De l’esprit des lois ou Durapport que les lois doivent avoir avec la constitution de chaque gouvernement, les mœurs, le climat, la religion,le commerce [. . .], 2 vols (Geneva, 1748), I, book VII. In a letter sent on 26 January to Andre Morellet,Beccaria explicitly recognised Montesquieu as an author fundamental to the formation of his own ideas;see Cesare Beccaria, ‘Lettera del 26 gennaio 1766 a Andre Morellet’, in Edizione nazionale delle opere diBeccaria, IV, 219 and following.34 Beccaria, Dei delitti e delle pene, 105�06.35 Beccaria, Elementi di economia pubblica, 618.36 Beccaria, Elementi di economia pubblica, 617.37 On Beccaria’s economic ideas, see Pier Luigi Porta, ‘Le lezioni di Economia di Cesare Beccaria’, inCesare Beccaria tra Milano e l’Europa: convegno di studi per il 2508 anniversario della nascita promosso dalComune di Milano, prolusioni di Sergio Romagnoli e Gian Domenico Pisapia, edited by Sergio Romagnoliand Gian Domenico Pisapia, (Bari, 1990), 356�70; Peter Groenewegen, Eighteenth-Century Economics:Turgot, Beccaria and Smith and Their Contemporaries (London, 2002); Phillipe Audegean, La philosophiede Beccaria. Savoir punir, savoir ecrire, savoir produire (Paris, 2010).38 Beccaria, Elementi di economia pubblica, 412.
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class that created its identity through the enjoyment of such assets, but also by a
language that confirmed the value of luxury.
This perspective uncovers a difference with respect to French ideas, in spite of
these being characterised by a political exploitation of the value of luxury as alanguage with which to attack financial wealth and to denounce the financiers and
the French fiscal system and public finances. In fact, in the French context, the
discourse on the value of luxury was aimed at maintaining the balance between social
groups endangered by quick fortunes, and not at posing questions of the traditional
hierarchies.39
3. The Transition from the Notion of Luxury to that of ConsumptionRecent studies on the intellectual implications of consumption therefore have the
merit of recognising the centrality of the notions of luxury and consumption in the
reflection on material transformations. However, this historiography appears to be
marked by a lack of attention to the definition of the two concepts, their evolution,
and the different sense in which they were used in various social and economic
settings. This limited interest in a real linguistic and conceptual dimension is
exemplified by the dearth of comprehensive studies of eighteenth-century dictionaries
and encyclopaedias. Yet these books, and their attempts to define terms, are aprecious resource for the tracing not only the conventional meanings of the two
concepts, as they came to be defined during the eighteenth century, but also the
conceptual changes they passed through.40
The reconstruction of the notions of luxury and consumption, their semantic
shifts and the shades of meanings they were given in diverse linguistic and discursive
contexts is of fundamental importance not merely because it allows a more
exhaustive investigation into eighteenth-century ideas on the subject, but principally
because it enables light to be shed on the progressive change from the notion ofluxury to that of consumption, through a focus on the concepts of ‘convenience’ and
‘comfort’, which were gradually to replace the idea of luxury in the debate on the
value of consumption. This shift from the appreciation of luxury, linked to the
consumption of a few, to that of average nationwide consumption, was a major break
in Italian thought, which initially matured, from the 1760s onwards, in economic
analyses, before passing into political debate in the 1780s.
In the Italian political economy of the second half of the eighteenth century the
emphasis on the dynamics of consumer desires was of crucial importance. Italianauthors, from Ferdinando Galiani to Antonio Genovesi, Verri to Beccaria, and
Isidoro Bianchi to Agostino Paradisi, took inspiration from the ideas of Mandeville
and Melon, which they placed in a more mature model of economic analysis
characterised by the strong ethical-social concern that distinguished the thinking of
Italian economists. Thus the authors perceived that the fundamental factor that
made the economy grow through the development of trade and production was the
39 Shovlin, Political Economy of Virtue.40 Some reflection on the use of the word ‘luxury’ in French dictionaries can be found in Audrey Provost,‘Les usages du luxe. Enjeux d’un debat au XVIII siecle’, in Le luxe. Essais sur la fabrique de l’ostentation,edited by Olivier Assouly (Paris, 2005), 74�75; Phillipe Perrot, Le luxe. Une richesse entre faste et confort.XVIII�XIX siecle (Paris, 1995), 33�34. For the Italian context, see Cecilia Carnino, ‘Il ‘‘lusso’’ neidizionari e enciclopedie di lingua italiana del XVIII secolo’, in Governare il mondo. L’economia comelinguaggio della politica nell’Europa del Settecento, edited by Manuela Albertone (Milan, 2009), 81�102.
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continually evolving desires of individuals. However, their thoughts on the subject
were largely marked, at least in a first phase, by the lack of a clear conceptual
distinction, in the mechanisms of economic growth, between luxury and widespread
generalised consumption.Pietro Verri was the first author to focus his attention fully on this distinction
between the luxury of a few and the spread of domestic consumption, making moreover
a lucid conceptualisation of the latter’s role in the economy. From ‘Elementi del
commercio’ and ‘Considerazioni sul lusso’ he had assigned, as we have already seen, a
central position to luxury as a factor in the increase of wealth.41 In a positive
valorisation of luxury as a means of stimulating trade and manufacturing, and also as
an instrument for the redistribution of wealth, he concentrated on one specific aspect:
identifying in the increased profitability of the agricultural sector the first and most
positive consequence of the spread of luxury. In fact, he pointed out that it was mainly
luxury that spurred landowners to invest in their land, in the knowledge that by doing so
they boosted productivity and so produced a surplus that could be spent on new market
goods. This theoretical reflection on the economic usefulness of luxury, found in the
earliest works of the Lombard author, appeared to be paralleled by the reformist
activities he pursued as a member of the aforementioned Giunta, formed to review the
articles of the Ferma and to amend tariffs on exchange duties. On 9 March 1764 he
presented a report in which he proposed to fix an average eight-per-cent levy on the
value of all commodities.42 The decision to attach a very moderate share on luxury
goods to avoid burdening them more than others reflects his thoughts on the value of
luxury as a driving force for the growth of national wealth.
With Meditazioni sulla economia politica, published in 1771, he made a break in
the thinking on luxury, which should be understood in the more general change in
economic theory that marks this work, where he identified the measure of wealth as
the ratio of ‘annual consumption’ to ‘annual reproduction’, and attributed a key role
to manufacturing as a driver of economic growth.43 In Meditazioni the reflection on
luxury was no longer as pre-eminent as it had been in previous writings, giving way to
a focus on the part played in the economy by average consumption spread among the
population, distinct from and opposed to the spending of the elite. This was a
maturation of economic thought*in the context of an economic science that was
progressively defining the concept of consumption and would provide it with a
complete conceptualisation with Jean-Baptiste Say*which made the transition from
a reflection on luxury as a factor of economic development to an analysis of the role
of consumption in a well-defined working model of the economic system.44
The central position given to domestic consumption as an outlet of national
production had already been clearly recognised by Forbonnais in Elemens du
41 For an outline of Verri’s economic theory, see Pier Luigi Porta and Roberto Scazzieri, ‘Il contributo diPietro Verri alla teoria economica. Societa commerciale, societa civile e governo dell’economia’, in PietroVerri e il suo tempo. Milano (1997), edited by Capra, 813�52; Peter Groenewegen, ‘The Significance ofVerri’s ‘‘Meditazioni’’ in the History of Economic Thought: The Wider European Influences’, in PietroVerri e il suo tempo. Milano (1997), edited by Capra, II, 693�708; Peter Groenewegen, ‘Reflections onPietro Verri’s Political Economy’, in Eighteenth-Century Economics, 270�80.42 Pietro Verri, ‘Proposizione per la riforma delle tariffe, ossia Dato della Mercanzia’ [first published in1764], manuscript preserved in the Verri Archive (382.I), since republished in Verri, Edizione nazionale delleopere di Verri, first series, II, book I, 735�49.43 Pietro Verri, ‘Meditazioni sulla economia politica’ (Livorno, 1771). Critical edition in Edizionenazionale delle Opere di Pietro Verri, II, book II, 391�670 (349�62).
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commerce,45 a book which was not only described by Verri as ‘the best work so far in
this genre’,46 but which also formed, together with Melon’s Essai politique sur le
commerce, the foundation on which the Lombard economist built his discourse on
the value of luxury.
In Meditazioni, however, Verri presented a more mature formulation of the
positive valorisation of consumption compared to the Elemens*in which can be
traced a less obvious comparison with physiocracy, mediated by the reading of works
by the Quesnay group47 that recognised the positive role of consumption48*focusing
on a clear differentiation between consumption and luxury, and detailing their
specific roles in the mechanism of wealth production, elements that were missing in
the treatment by Forbonnais. If the ‘vanity of landowners’, or the ‘luxury of
consumption’, persuaded owners to invest in land in order to acquire more market
goods,49 domestic consumption augmented ‘annual reproduction’ since it was an
incentive to ‘create each year a new value that corresponds to total consumption’.50
In Meditazioni a full appreciation of enhanced consumption as a factor in
national prosperity*in the context of the role attributed, in terms of political
thought, to widespread consumption as a means of redistributing wealth and creating
a more egalitarian society*was articulated by accentuating the cause-and-effect link
between the multiplication of needs and the expansion of agricultural and
manufacturing production. Not only did needs guarantee the ‘civilisation’ and
development of trade, but in the ‘cultured nations’ it was mainly the desire for ‘man-
made needs’ that stimulated the growth of wealth, the goal of political economy. Thus
in Verri’s political economy, the needs and desires of the people formed the bedrock
of ‘annual reproduction’, encouraging creativity and giving a new impetus to supply,
triggering a virtuous circle of economic growth:
44 Jean-Baptiste Say, Traite d’economie politique, ou simple exposition de la maniere dont se forment, sedistribuent, et se consomment les richesses (Paris, 1803). See also Jean-Baptiste Say, Traite d’economiepolitique, in Œuvres completes, 5 vols (2003�2010) edited by Emmanuel Blanc and others (Paris, 2006), II,book II. On the role given to luxury in Say’s economic theory, see Joel-Thomas Raviz and JacquesSpindler, ‘Richesse et luxe chez Jean-Baptiste Say’, in Jean-Baptiste Say. Nouveaux regards sur son ouvre,edited by Jean-Pierre Potier and Andre Tiran (Paris, 2003), 381�400.45 Francois Veron Duverger de Forbonnais, Elemens du commerce, 2 vols (1754), I, 290�95. On this pointsee also Michel Malherbe, ‘Hume en France: la traduction des Political Discourses’, in Cultural Transfers:France and Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century, edited by Ann Thomson, Simon Burrows and EdmondDziembowski (Oxford, 2010), 243�56.46 Pietro Verri to Alessandro Verri, 9 February 1767, in Pietro Verri and Alessandro Verri, Carteggio diPietro e di Alessandro Verri (dal 1766 al 1797), edited by Francesco Novati, Emanuele Greppi, AlessandroGiulini, and Giovanni Seregni, 12 vols (Milan, 1923�1949), I, part 1, 222�25.47 Answering a letter of December 1770 from his brother Alessandro, who asked for his news and ajudgement on the works of the physiocrats, amongst which were included the Physiocratie and theEphemerides du citoyen, Pietro confirmed his knowledge of the works and declared that they ‘were verymuch on the side of precision’; see A. Verri to P. Verri, 5 December 1770, in Carteggio di Pietro eAlessandro, IV, 86�87.48 Already in the entry ‘Grains’ of the 1757 Encyclopedie, del 1757, Quesnay underlined how ‘consumptioncarried out by the subjects is the source of income for the sovereign’; see Francois Quesnay, ‘Grains’, inŒuvres economiques completes et autres testes, edited by Christine There, Loıc Charles and Jean-ClaudePerrot, 2 vols (Paris, 2005), I, 162. In 1767, Mercier de la Riviere defined consumption as ‘the measure ofreproduction; because products which are not consummated degenerate into something superfluous andwithout use, without value’; see Pierre-Paul Le Mercier de la Riviere, L’ordre naturel et essentiel des societespolitiques, 2 vols (London, 1767), II, 250.49 Pietro Verri, Meditazioni sulla economia politica (1771), 152.50 Verri, Meditazioni sulla economia politica, 69.
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As soon as a nation begins to move away from a state of savagery, knowing new
needs and comforts of life, then it will be forced to proportionally grow its
industry, and to multiply the annual production of its products [. . .] and this is
how, to the extent that the needs of a nation multiply, the annual product ofland and national industry naturally tends to increase.51
This specific economic importance given to consumption fit snugly in the framework
of the valorisation of desires. First, if, for Verri, in order to guarantee the increment
of wealth and economic development, annual production had to exceed consump-
tion, he was always cautious when addressing the question of a reduction in the
number of consumers. A decrease in consumption would in fact involve a contraction
of production. The optimal balance between producers and consumers could not
therefore be reached through a compression of consumption, which would have to
stay high, but only through increased production.52
Nonetheless, Verri did not only show how a reduction in the number of
consumers was negative and harmful but also identified those consumers as the
actual driving force of ‘creative production’ on which growth in wealth was founded.
Addressing the problem of consumption exceeding production, he found in fact that
such an excess of demand was the very spur that production required, ‘because the
work of the producer acquires an ever stronger stimulus when the market is secure,
and all the more so if consumers increase’.53 In his economic theory therefore not
only were production and consumption closely related, but demand itself and thus
the increase of consumption, based on the expansion of desires, was recognised as a
key factor of national wealth, insofar as it stimulated higher ‘annual reproduction’.
The economic theory elaborated by Verri, influenced by his insights into the
socio-economic situation of Habsburg Milan in the 1770s, was partly filtered*at a
time when ideas flowed from all corners of Italy*through the South, which was
experiencing a slower economic development than that of Lombardy. The Kingdom
of Naples, especially in the 1780s, was however experiencing a shift, on the one hand,
in economic thinking, marked by new attention to agriculture fomented by the
penetration of physiocratic ideas and the increasingly bitter criticism of feudal
revenues and, on the other, changes in government activities.54 With the institution in
1782 of the Supremo Consiglio delle Finanze, in which Gaetano Filangieri took part,
and which was one of the fullest realisations of practical collaboration between
intellectuals and government, a series of key measures were adopted for the
development of manufacturing and agriculture, resulting in the freedom of movement
of annona goods within the kingdom and the abolition of internal customs, rights of
way and tolls.55
However, the activities of the Supreme Council of Finance were marked above all
by a radical anti-feudal controversy, the demands of which were partially
implemented with the privatisation in 1792 of municipal domains. This was a battle
fought by the second generation of reformers, whose thinking had been formed by
51 Verri, Meditazioni sulla economia politica, 12�13.52 Verri, Meditazioni sulla economia politica, 89.53 Verri, Meditazioni sulla economia politica, 90.54 On the spread of physiocratic ideas amongst Neapolitan Enlightenment figures, see Lucio Villari, ‘Notesulla fisiocrazia e sugli economisti napoletani del ‘700’, in Istituto italiano per gli studi storici, Saggi ericerche sul Settecento (Naples, 1968), 224�51.55 Anna M. Rao, Il regno di Napoli nel Settecento (Naples, 1983), 110 and following.
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contact, on the one hand, with a backward provincial reality and, on the other, with
Genovese and Enlightenment teaching. The anti-feudalism of those years was linked
to concrete changes in the socio-economic fabric of the rural South, which the weight
of the baronage, exercised through the powers of the judiciary, had made untenable.
At the same time it was fed by the ambiguity of the anti-feudal policy initiated by
Prime Minister Giuseppe Beccadelli, Marquis of Sambuca, which marked a reversal
of the policy of his predecessor, Bernardo Tanucci, and also from the economic
downturn ensuing from the famines of 1759 to 1764 which assailed the whole
Mediterranean area, damaging production and trade in the kingdom.
In this context there came about, beginning with Verri’s economic analysis, a
crucial turning point in the political debate, which materialised in the shift from the
valorisation of luxury as a factor in the redistribution of wealth to the recognition of
nationwide consumption as a means of achieving a fairer society. What emerged,
however, was not so much the model of political economy proposed by Verri as the
distinction he made between luxury and consumption, on the basis of which a new
political and social assessment of consumption could be made.
This new reflection on luxury and widespread consumption was first articulated,
albeit within the framework of an incomplete conceptual and terminological
clarification, in the work of Filangieri, who was an avid reader of Verri’s
Meditazioni.56 In La scienza della legislazione, the first volume of which was
published in 1780, Filangieri set out a complex reflection on luxury, using as his
main sources Georg Ludwig Schmidt d’Avenstein’s Principes de la legislation
universelle and the article ‘Luxe’ in the Encyclopedie.57 While the influence of
physiocratic opposition to sumptuary laws as a criticism of the restriction of
individual freedom reached Filangieri through Schmidt d’Avenstein,58 the article
written by Saint-Lambert furnished him with the definition of luxury as the ‘use which
one makes of wealth and industry to obtain a pleasurable existence with the aid of the
most sought-after means that can help augment the comforts of life and the pleasures
of society’.59 This definition, together with the intellectual references of the
Neapolitan economist, makes clear its positive judgement of luxury, which was the
mature outcome of the rethinking of ideas coming from the European debate: it was a
positive and progressive influence on society because it was linked to the idea of a
good life and simultaneously to the productive use of wealth and labour. Luxury was
in fact ‘the soul of industry and the distributor of riches [. . .] a necessary source for the
state’s affluence and the corollary of the nation’s well-being’.60
It was the second book of La scienza della legislazione that presented the most
detailed reflection on luxury. In particular, the issue was first addressed in a
discussion of the contrasts between ancient and modern societies and their
foundational systems. This was not a new topic, as Montesquieu had already applied
himself to it and it had also been analysed in Hume’s Of Commerce, which
56 The close reading of Verri’s Meditazioni is due to the point-by-point reworking in the Scienza dellelegislazione of certain passages from the work of the Lombard economist, particularly on the issue oftaxation. On this point, see Gianluigi Goggi, ‘Ancora su Diderot-Raynal e Filangieri e sulle altre fonti della‘‘Scienza della legislazione’’’, Rassegna della letteratura italiana, 94 (1980), 112�60.57 Gaetano Filangieri, La scienza della legislazione, 4 vols (Naples, 1780�1785). See also GaetanoFilangieri, La scienza della legislazione, edited by Vincenzo Ferrone, critical edition (Venice, 2004).58 Franco Venturi, ‘Nota introduttiva’, in Illuministi italiani, IV, 603�659 (615).59 Filangieri, La scienza della legislazione, II, 246.60 Filangieri, La scienza della legislazione, II, 251�252.
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concentrated on the socio-economic mechanism of production and wealth redis-
tribution. This, by profoundly altering the traditional structures of agrarian
countries, such as the ancient states, directed resources towards the enlargement of
the production base, thereby causing a subsequent correlated expansion of needs and
consumers, and of luxury.61
Hume’s ideas were prevalent in Science della legislazione, where Filangieri, on the
one hand, saw the market as an exceptional factor of growth and, on the other,
argued that if poverty and frugality comprised the basis of virtue and happiness in
ancient republics then in contemporary society, in which the development of the arts
inspired new and more complex modes of behaviour and consumption, it was riches
and luxury that ensured public prosperity and individual happiness:
Industry, trade, luxury and the arts, all these means that at other times helpedto weaken states and perhaps made Tyre the prey of Alexander and Carthage
that of Scipio, have now become the firmest support of the prosperity of the
people. And in fact since the time of the foundation and overthrow of Empires
[. . .] riches no longer corrupt people, since they are no longer the fruit of
conquest but the reward for hard work and a fully occupied life.62
This positive view of luxury is best understood, however, in Filangieri’s economic
model, erected on the belief that labour was the fundamental factor of the growth
of wealth. Thus in La scienza della legislazione he attacked the unproductiveness
of aristocratic society, insisting that consumption was a major inducement to
endeavour.63
As part of this more general reflection on the relationship between virtue and
wealth, nourished by the European debate, the discourse on luxury served a specific
purpose in the anti-feudal polemic that swept through southern society from the
1780s onwards. This controversy gave voice to the exigencies and the ascent of new
social forces and thus was directly linked to real transformations of the socio-
economic fabric of rural areas of the South,64 which, in La scienza della legislazione,
found focus through the recovery of an egalitarian approach oriented towards an
ideal of the ‘equitable distribution of money’.65
In fact, Filangieri, taking up an issue which, as we have seen, had already been
carefully examined in the Milanese debate of the 1770s and 1780s, designated luxury
the re-distributor of wealth. This recognition of luxury was closely bound to his views
on property, specifically his utter denunciation of feudal property that had its roots in
hereditary privileges, and to his call for a broadening of land ownership, which he
held would never be achieved through the pipe dream of an agrarian law, but only
through the use of indirect means, such as the abolition of the rights of primogeniture
and fideicommissum, and the abolition of the right of devolution.66 The solution
proposed by Filangieri was that of converting fiefdoms into free property, alienable
and marketable, and subject to taxation. In other words, he posited an incremental
61 Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois, book I, book VII, chap. IV XXI; David Hume, Of Commerce, inPolitical Discourses (Edinburgh, 1752).62 Filangieri, La scienza della legislazione, I, 27�28, 34.63 Filangieri, La scienza della legislazione, II, 252.64 On this point see Rao, Il regno di Napoli nel Settecento, 117.65 Filangieri, La scienza della legislazione, II, 261.66 Filangieri, La scienza della legislazione, II, 180.
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but profound switch in the nature, distribution, and management of property,
whether feudal or state-owned, and, as a member of the Supreme Council of Finance,
he argued again for this in his Parere on the draft reform that the Tavoliere delle
Puglia presented to the sovereign on 7 March 1788.67
Developing this positive assessment of luxury as a political weapon with which to
combat feudal nobility, Filangieri shed light on a new valorisation of the average
consumption*of the people and opposed to luxury*in which Verri’s influence was
discernible in the distinction made in the economic analysis of luxury and
consumption. In fact, Filangieri differentiated between luxury as a means of wealth
redistribution and another luxury defined as ‘positive’, no longer identified with the
spending, however productive, of a rich elite, but with the average level, symbolic of a
society founded on well-being and prosperity. In this way there took shape a more
mature understanding of consumption, one which provided a privileged means
through which to achieve greater equality among all social orders:
It is therefore not possible to arrive at an exact and precise equality of wealth in
the families of a state; but not for this is it impossible that riches be well
distributed. By good distribution or apportioning of wealth I mean an equitable
spreading of money, which, by preventing its concentration in just a few hands,
results in shared comfort, the necessary means for the happiness of men.68
If the notion of equality of happiness based on the ability to perform a job that
allowed one to benefit from goods of comfort and pleasure was borrowed from
Helvetius, as a summary of a passage from De l’homme included in La scienza della
legislazione suggests, in Filangieri’s ideas it is possible to trace something more of his
adherence to a social ideal based on greater well-being and easier accessibility to
wealth, as set out by the French philosopher.69 The potential right to enjoy the same
assets and pleasures was in fact adopted by Filangieri as fertile ground in which to
realise an effective equality between individuals, understood as equality of
opportunity.70 For him the ‘equality of happiness for all classes’, which had to be
‘the object of politics and laws’, was rooted in the ability to enjoy a ‘certain common
comfort’, or rather of having an occupation that opened the way to commodities that
made life comfortable and pleasant.71 He thus described a third way that ran between
those who accepted with realism inequalities among men in all fields and even posed
this inequality as the guarantee for economic development, and those who postulated
absolute equality among men, outlining a more levelled society founded on
individual well-being derived from work. In this reflection there seemed to be traces
of the Way to Wealth by Benjamin Franklin, with whom Filangieri regularly
corresponded in the 1780s, in which the exaltation of a middle level of conditions,
resulting from work and opposed to unproductive privilege, equated to a demand for
67 Gaetano Filangieri, ‘Parere presentato al Re dal Cavaliere Gaetano Filangieri, Consigliere del SupremoConsiglio delle Finanze di Napoli sulla proposizione di un affitto sessennale del cosı detto Tavoliere diPuglia’, in Opuscoli scelti editi, ed inediti del Cav. Gaetano Filangieri, edited by Gio. Battista Ferrari (Paris,1815) 62�75. On this question see also Anna M. Rao, L’amaro della feudalita. La devoluzione di Arnone e laquestione feudale a Napoli alla fine del ‘700 (Naples, 1984), 60�65.68 Filangieri, La scienza della legislazione, II, 260�61.69 Filangieri, La scienza della legislazione, II, 362; Claude Adrien Helvetius, De l’homme, de ses facultesintellectuelles, et de son education, 2 vols (London, 1776), I, chapter II, section VIII.70 Filangieri, La scienza della legislazione, II, 260.71 Filangieri, La scienza della legislazione, II, 260.
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greater equality. At the same time Franklin, like Filangieri, considered consumer
goods and better living conditions to be instrumental in levelling society, a process
which had democratic connotations.72
In La scienza della legislazione Filangieri therefore elaborated an egalitarian
argument built on a reflection on consumption which if, on the one hand, fed largely
on European and North American ideas, was, on the other, a clear restatement*at a
time when innovative thinking swirled around Italy*of insights that came from the
stimulating the Lombard debate of the 1760s and 1770s on luxury as a factor in the
redistribution of wealth.
4. Luxury and Consumption in the Revolutionary Context
The reflection on luxury and consumption assumed a central position and a new
significance with the eruption of the revolutions that shook the Atlantic world in the
final decades of the eighteenth century. If the French Revolution is the most studied
in this context, it should be noted that this historiographic interest has matured only
in recent years. Indeed, it has long been maintained that the French revolutionary
period could not be profitably examined through the lens of the consumer revolution.
However, recent studies have demonstrated that, to the contrary, those years
constitute an extremely fertile area of research for at least two reasons, because in
this phase the legislative assemblies were actively seeking to distinguish between
necessary goods and luxury goods. On the one hand, the detailed tabulations
compiled by the Committee of Subsistence aimed to set the general maximum of
many consumer products, and, on the other, there was opposition to indirect taxes.
These were the two main ways through which to give concrete meaning to the two
ideas after the long theoretical reflection of the previous decades. Furthermore, this
attempt to reflect on the nature of goods highlighted how, at the time of a burgeoning
diffusion of new consumer goods, it was still difficult to decide what should be
defined as a necessity and what as a luxury.73
From another standpoint it has been observed how the transition from the
Jacobin and Robespierrist period to the Directory brought about an important
change in the reflection on luxury. While an ethical and political critique of luxury
was a dominant feature of Jacobin ideology, during the period of the Directory the
idea of luxury was progressively substituted*partly thanks to the contribution of the
Ideologues, who left a deep impression on the philosophical and economic debate on
luxury and consumption*by that of pleasure. Thus it was possible to pose individual
wishes and desires at the base of social organisation and to interpret consumption
through the parameters of national economic benefit.74 Goods, and their production
and sales, thus became the signs of a developing economy in the context of a more
72 Benjamin Franklin, The Way to Wealth [first published in 1757], in The Works of Benjamin Franklin,edited by Jared Sparks and Benjamin Franklin Stevens, 10 vols (London, 1882), II, 97�101. On therelations between Filangieri and Franklin, see Antonio Pace, Benjamin Franklin and Italy (Philadelphia,PA, 1958), 144�66, 339�43.73 Rebecca L. Spang, ‘What is Rum? The Politics of Consumption in the French Revolution’, in ThePolitics of Consumption: Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and America, edited by MartinDaunton and Matthew Hilton (Oxford, 2001), 30�55; Spang, ‘The Frivolous French’, in Taking Liberties,edited by Brown and Miller.74 Jeremy Jennings, ‘The Debate about Luxury in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century French PoliticalThought’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 68 (2007), 79�105; Shovlin, Political Economy of Virtue, 182�83.
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general adherence to a model of modern republicanism, compatible with trade and
social progress.75
Historians are therefore beginning to point out the importance of investigating
the debate on luxury and consumption during the revolutionary era, above all in
relation to France, for the way in which it provides evidence of changes in the
thinking of society and in the economic analyses of those tumultuous years. However,
the investigation in that direction must be intensified. First of all, it is essential to
follow the reflection while holding together the Old Regime and the revolutionary
phase. This is of course a task of immense complexity which has often led scholars to
abandon a combined study and to concentrate instead on just one of the two periods.
The theme of consumption is nevertheless a particularly profitable path by which to
explore the changes and continuity of the economic and political culture in the
passage from the reformist period to that of the revolutions. Furthermore, it is
important to deepen the analysis of the reflection on luxury and consumption that
was made in the Jacobin-Robespierre years and during the Directory, for the purpose
of clarifying the many political implications that it conveyed.
Also in this context, to understand the complex value that the discussion on
consumption acquired in the revolutionary period it is useful to consider the specifics
of the Italian context, where ideas were strongly influenced by those of France. The
democratic Triennium (1796 to 1799) was in fact marked by a strong valorisation of
consumption, as much economic as political. Within the latter sphere, consumption
was given a multi-faceted meaning and placed at the heart of the reflection on
equality between individuals, founded on the egalitarianism of opportunity.
If during those three years the discussion on equality, articulated mainly by
distinguishing between formal equality and substantive equality, was a crucial issue,
the adherence to an idea of equality based on the equal allocation of goods
represented an entirely minority position. In the literature addressed directly to the
people with the aim of educating them in the new republican principles, an insistence
on the unrealisable nature of an absolute egalitarian distribution of wealth responded
to the decision not to raise false expectations. Thus there were few who proposed
egalitarian solutions based on the redistribution of land.76 What largely prevailed
instead was an attempt to secure a consensus on the notion of equality before the law,
in line with the French Constitution of Year III, in an effort to safeguard the results
gained through the process of radically transforming the society of the Old Regime.
In consequence things moved from the French democratisation which survived the
Terror to a rejection of those radical notions that risked compromising the socio-
economic innovations that various republican realities were sanctioning: formal
equality, the elimination of titles, and the abolition of all residual feudalism.
75 Richard Whatmore, Republicanism and the French Revolution: An Intellectual History of Jean-BaptisteSay’s Political Economy (Oxford, 2000); James Livesey, Making Democracy in the French Revolution(Cambridge, 2001).76 Vincenzio Russo, Pensieri politici (Milan, 1801). Among the few authors who proposed a model of afrugal and agrarian society based on the restraint of passions and the rejection of luxury were NiciusEritrea [Claudio della Valle], Grammatica repubblicana di Nicio Eritreo dedicata al generale in capodell’armata di Roma Gouvion de Saint Cyr ([Rome, 1798]); Giuseppe Fantuzzi, ‘Discorso filosofico-politicosopra il quesito proposto dall’amministrazione generale della lombardia: quale dei governi liberi meglioconvenga alla felicita dell’Italia di Giuseppe Fantuzzi italiano. Presentato all’amministrazione li 15.dicembre 1796’, in Alle origini del Risorgimento, I testi di un ‘celebre concorso’, edited by Armondo Saitta, 3vols (Rome, 1964), I, 211�62.
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All the same, it is possible to bring to light the effort, which characterised the men
who joined the revolutionary cause and who collaborated, albeit at different levels
and from different positions, with the new political authorities, to seek a new scheme
related to consumption by which to establish an equality that went beyond equality
before the law. This was found in the equality of opportunities, guaranteed by the
feasibility of securing new pleasures, ease and comfort. It was a full political
valorisation of consumption as an agency through which greater equality among
citizens could be realised, while not denying the usefulness of a moderate economic
inequality as a determinant of economic development.
This discourse on the consumption/equality nexus, which was central to the
political debate taking place in different republics*from Rome to Naples, from the
Liguria to the city of Venice*was most plainly articulated in the Cisalpine Republic,
where it was grounded, especially in the reflection of authors such as Giuseppe
Compagnoni, Matteo Galdi and Melchiorre Gioia, in a mature economic analysis of
the role of desires, and hence the augmentation of consumption, as a constituent of
the growth of wealth. At the same time, it was in the context of the discussions of the
Cisalpine legislative assemblies that the conception of a balance between producers
and consumers, ensured by full economic freedom, was first mooted in an incisive
form.77 For the brief duration of the republican experience and the serious political
and economic difficulties with which it had to contend, these discussions did not
translate into the adoption of consistent economic policy measures designed to
stimulate and expand the demand for market goods. Nonetheless, they did
demonstrate how strong and widespread was the belief that the free market would
ensure the creation of an economic circuit capable of sustaining supply and demand.
In this way the positive recognition of both increased consumption, seen as the
demand for production, and luxury spending, seen as the result in profit determined
by a completely free market and leading to a virtuous cycle of national economic
development, could find space.
Particularly significant from this point of view was the reflection elaborated in
Elementi di diritto costituzionale democratico, published in 1797. The author was
Giuseppe Compagnoni, a former priest and a law scholar who alternated reading of
Grotius and Pufendorf with that of Montesquieu, Beccaria and Filangieri and who,
in 1797, having abandoned his ecclesiastical career and become, with a conspicuous
shift from his hitherto moderate positions, a staunch supporter of the revolutionary
cause, was appointed iuniore in the legislative body of the Cisalpine Republic. In
Elementi di diritto costituzionale he explicitly contrasted substantive equality with an
equality based on the assurance of being able to enjoy all the same things. The right
of man was to ‘aspire, demand, compete [. . .] in the insuperable sense of well-being’
that was natural to him.78 Men were equal not only before the law, but also in their
needs and desires and in their right to have them met. This was not simply a matter of
guaranteeing a right to subsistence, although this had often been invoked in the
77 ‘Processo verbale Consiglio dei Juniori’, in Assemblee della Repubblica cisalpina, edited by CamilloMontalcini, Annibale Alberti, Roberto Cessi and L. Marcucci, 11 vols (Bologna, 1917�1948); SittingLXXXVII, 25 pluviose year VI (13 February 1798), in Assemblee, II, 537; Sitting CVII, 15 ventose year VI(5 March 1798), in Assemblee, III, 167�68; Sitting CLXXII, 21 floreal year VI (10 May 1798), inAssemblee, IV, 592; Sitting CLXXIII, 22 floreal year VI (11 May 1798), in Assemblee, IV, 606; SittingCLXXII, 21 floreal year VI (10 May 1798), in Assemblee, IV, 588.78 Giuseppe Compagnoni, Elementi di diritto costituzionale democratico ossia Principj di giuspubblicouniversale del citt (Venice, 1797), 46.
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revolutionary debate. In reference to the needs of man, Compagnoni’s appeal was not
for basic necessities and staples but for the sum of a wide variety of ‘means’ which
could ensure ‘well-being’ and which would multiply and diversify on account of being
produced by a society in constant evolution.79
Compagnoni’s work included elements of egalitarian radicalism inspired by
Rousseau: for example, the reference to the ‘scandalousness and futility of wealth’
and the exaltation of the simplicity of the ancients. However, he tried to harmonise
these affirmations*often in striking contrast with the socio-economic ideal that gave
substance to his writing*with an evident aspiration to a widespread well-being. The
evolution of society had introduced ‘a thousand different needs, for which to live
more comfortably and happily a man needs a hundred different means, and which in
the state of nature he would never have had occasion to desire’.80 He linked this
reasoning on a progressive unfolding of needs to his reflections on the right to
property. This was the spur to satisfy needs and to legitimise property:
from the nature of new needs intimately linked to the new state there emerges a
new right, that of surrounding oneself with the greatest abundance of
possessions.81
A fairer distribution of property, to be achieved through the full liberalisation of
production and the abolition of institutions of feudal origin, such as primogeniture
and fideicommissum*in keeping with the views that Compagnoni expressed in the
sittings of the Consiglio dei Iuniori that dealt with direct taxes,82 a subject that
occupied the legislative corps from December 1797, after the Directory proposed
introducing a proportional land tax83*thus led to the realisation of an equality
between men that was not purely formal, but was expressed in equal opportunity to
satisfy desires expected to expand with the progress of society. Compagnoni’s ideas
thereby shed light on the intimate reciprocity of economics and politics. On the one
hand, the economy became the ground on which to build greater equality among men
and, on the other, the political rupture of the Revolution and the abolition of Old
Regime hierarchies made possible economic development and created conditions of
equal opportunities for individuals.In the perspective of a close link between economics and politics in the
valorisation of consumption as an equalising agent, the thinking of Melchiorre
Gioia was of central importance, both for the intense political activity that
distinguished the author during the years of the Cisalpine and Italian Republic,
and for the breadth of his economic analysis. The theme was addressed comprehen-
sively in the essay with which he won a competition organised in 1796 by the General
Administration of Lombardy on the question of ‘Quale dei governi liberi meglio
convenga alla felicita dell’Italia?’, with Pietro Verri chairing the panel of judges. In
79 Compagnoni, Elementi di diritto costituzionale, 48.80 Compagnoni, Elementi di diritto costituzionale, 94.81 Compagnoni, Elementi di diritto costituzionale, 94.82 On this point see also Andrea Brandolini, ‘Giuseppe Compagnoni e la politica economica dellerepubbliche ‘‘giacobine’’’, in Giuseppe Compagnoni. Un intellettuale tra giacobinismo e restaurazione, editedby Sante Medri (Bologna, 1993), 329�42.83 Sitting XV, 15 frimaire year VI (5 December 1797), in Assemblee, I, 242 and following. On this point seealso Alberto Cova, ‘Le finanze cisalpine tra crisi politica e difficolta economiche (1796�1799)’, in Lafinanza pubblica in eta di crisi, edited by Antonio Di Vittorio (Bari, 1993), 19�49 (40�41).
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this paper substantive equality among individuals was contrasted with an equality
achieved through consumption, or rather through the ability to satisfy desires.84 In
the framework of the theory of elementary sensualism, which based the legitimacy of
economic activity and the pursuit of self-interest on pleasure, Gioia focused on a
notion of equality founded on ‘a certain equality of goods [. . .] and the hope of
increasing them’.85 The model he outlined was that of a society characterised by an
average wealth, which allowed all men to enjoy the same goods. This would create a
feeling of sociability among men and a common ‘enthusiasm for the nation’.86
The same notion of equality was repeated by Gioia in Il Monitore italiano, a
periodical which, established with Ugo Foscolo in January 1797, became known for
the harshly critical stance it took against the policies of the French Directory. Indeed,
in an article published in March 1798, Gioia stressed again*using words from his
1797 dissertation that demonstrated the continuity of his ideas*how ‘a certain
equality of goods, the common security of preserving them, the hope of augmenting
them’, guaranteed by a commensurate possibility of enjoying them, would reinforce
links between men, thereby engendering a more prosperous and economically
developed society.87
Further evidence of the relevance that the link between consumption and equality
acquired in the reflections of the Cisalpine Republic is found in De l’abolizione dei
fidecomessi, published in 1797. The author was the Matteo Galdi of Salento who,
having moved to France after the discovery of a conspiracy in Naples in 1794 and
having obtained French citizenship the following year, transferred to Milan to take
up the post of secretary to the French Republic’s representative, Villetard.88
According to Galdi, if the theoretical perspective of the substantive equality of
citizens, combined with that of law, constituted the pinnacle of ‘political perfection’,
in the practices of society the objective had to be that of facilitating a widespread
average consumption, based on a more equitable distribution of wealth, to be
brought about through the free movement of property.89 In the context of the
importance attributed to the theory of needs and the belief that man’s desires (in
constant evolution and expansion because of trade) were not only a powerful force of
commercial development but also the mainspring of human activity*as better
argued by Galdi in Dei rapporti politico economici fra le nazioni libere, published in
1798*equality was deemed not to depend on wealth itself, but on man’s capacity for
happiness.90 For this reason, the objective could not be an equality of wealth, but an
equality of happiness.
84 Stefano Nutini, ‘Melchiorre Gioia a Milano, tra giacobini e moderati’, in Melchiorre Gioia 1767�1829:Politica, societa, economia tra riforme e restaurazione. Atti del Convegno di Studi. Piacenza, 5�7 aprile 1990,edited by Carlo Capra (Piacenza, 1990), 81�104.85 Melchiorre Gioia, ‘Quale dei governi liberi meglio convenga alla felicita d’Italia’ [first published in1797], in Alle origini del Risorgimento, edited by Saita, II, 162.86 Gioia, ‘Quale dei governi’, in Alle origini del Risorgimento, edited by Saita, II, 163.87 Melchiorre Gioia, ‘Politica � continuazione delle illusioni e perfidie degli aristocratici’, Il Monitoreitaliano, 1 March 1798.88 Matteo Galdi, Dell’abolizione de’ fedecommessi. Memoria politico-legale del cittadino Galdi (Milan,1797), 25.89 Galdi, Dell’abolizione de’ fedecommessi, 34.90 Matteo Galdi, Dei rapporti politic-economici fra le nazioni libere (Milan, 1798), 35.
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This reflection, which expressed well the aspirations and anticipations of men
whose roots lay in a middle class of professionals, landowners, and small business-
men, responded to the practical need for a conception of equality compatible with a
dynamic vision of society and desires, founded on prosperity and growth, and
guaranteed by consumption. This was influenced not only by the philosophical and
economic revaluation of passions being carried out by the Ideologie, in particular
through the ‘Decade philosophique’ and the ideas of Jean-Baptiste Say, but also by
the reception to the economic analysis developed in Italy during the 1770s and 1780s.
In the latter it is possible to trace, on the one hand, echoes of the Milanese debate of
the 1760s and 1770s in the centrality attributed to needs and desires, placed at the
heart of political economy as an element of economic development, and, on the
other, the influence of Filangieri, who in La scienza della legislazione had explained in
detail the link between consumption and equality.
During the triennium there was also a strong and decisive break from the ideas of
the Old Regime. Firstly, the valorisation of consumption no longer used the reflection
on luxury as its main vehicle. Additionally, during those three years great attention
was paid to the distinction between dependence among men, typical of the Old
Regime, and interdependence based on the economic relationships which charac-
terised the new democratic societies. The trend towards greater equality through
consumption no longer passed through the dependence between individuals, but
through their interdependence. Moreover, consumption was no longer perceived as a
positive and legitimising consequence of economic development but rather presented
as a right, which could be secured only by the new democratic realities and which was
fundamental*and so not accidental*to economic development.
The strong political valorisation of consumption as the field in which to actualise
a greater equality, which marked this period, was resultant upon a maturation of
economic theory and the expression of a new and fairer vision of society, as well as
the perception of the need for a firm political break with the Old Regime, but was
also linked to the retention of traces of a traditional mindset, which was difficult to
eradicate and which intended to reaffirm and legitimise entrenched political
inequalities. A particularly significant example was the attempt during the triennium
to exclude women from active citizenship and to limit their public role. Of crucial
importance to this issue was the debate on female luxury, as this helped create a
language of justification for the denial of political rights to women.
The subject of the link between women and luxury, and the reconstruction of the
political implications underlining it, has up to now been inadequately explored in
connection with the three revolutionary years in Italy. The French case has, however,
been better studied. Historians have in fact not only investigated the value of political
and social de-legitimisation that the link between women and luxury held in eighteenth-
century France, both in the Old Regime and in the revolutionary period,91 but they have
also centred attention on the French definition of citizenship, a formulation elaborated
from the start of the revolutionary phase, as being associated with maleness and
intended to exclude women from being given active political rights.92
91 Jennifer M. Jones, Sexing La Mode: Gender, Fashion and Commercial Culture in Old Regime France(New York, NY, 2004); Lynn Hunt, ‘The Many Bodies of Marie Antoinette: Political Pornography and theProblem of the Feminine in the French Revolution’, in The French Revolution: Recent Debates and NewControversies, edited by Gary Kates (New York, NY, 2006), 201�19.92 Anne Verjus, Le cens de la famille. Les femmes et le vote, 1789�1848 (Paris, 2002).
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Seen in this way, the enquiry is plainly relevant to the Italian context, marked as it
was by a concerted effort to discredit women by associating them with luxury. The
woman/luxury binomial, with its strong negative connotations, had already been put
under the spotlight and utilised by the Italian Catholic moralists of the second half of
the eighteenth century in their critique of luxury, the core of which was a
denunciation of any use of goods that did not comply with social conditions.93
Undue use was perceived as a grave danger, since it was the cause of a confusion of
ranks and threatened the hierarchy on which societal coexistence was grounded. The
undisputed requirement to respect the social hierarchy was applicable to men as well
as women, yet the recurring examples used by the moralists of the eighteenth century
regularly focused more on the latter. This first Christian reflection, which established
a close link between luxury and the female sphere, was destined to typify many of the
considerations of the subject in succeeding centuries.94
If the revolutionary period was marked by a resumption of interest in these issues,
the depiction of women as being dominated by a passion for luxury was not simply a
reiteration of the traditional moral critique, but instead took on a new value. Indeed,
in a departure from earlier thinking, emphasis was placed on the danger posed to the
stability of the republics by the propensity of women towards luxury and their
inability to control their instincts.
The connection between the luxury of women and the denial of their political
rights featured widely in the literature designed to educate the people about
revolutionary principles and to build a popular consensus. The revolutionary
literature is the main font from which to draw in order to reconstruct the criticism
of luxury during the triennium, as the invective against luxury was chiefly expressed
through this literature. The theme of this discourse was the standard one: women, the
victims of luxury, were a danger to the common good insofar as they were incapable
of controlling their passions and*behaving in a way similar to that of the old
aristocracy*they showed that they had not passed through the necessary process of
regeneration required of citizens of the new republics.95
A case particularly useful to the in-depth study of this critical discourse, both for
the lucidity of exposition and because it established argumentations that would be
revisited, with little originality, by later works, is the Dissertazione sul lusso, published
in Turin in 1797. The author was the former Piarist Gaspare Morardo who, having
grown close to jurisdictional and Jansenist ideas during the 1780s when he was
honorary professor of moral philosophy at the University of Turin, began to develop
93 On the woman-luxury nexus in eighteenth-century Italian moral thought, see Cecilia Carnino, ‘Lafemme vicieuse et l’homme vertueux. Le debat sur le luxe et la consommation au xviiie siecle en Italie’, Clioet themis, 3 (2010), 145�79.94 Jean-Marie Aubert, L’exil feminin. Antifeminisme et christianisme (Paris, 1998), 113�16.95 Matteo Galdi, ‘Per lo stabilimento della Repubblica Italica’, Giornale de’ Patrioti d’Italia, 16�18 May1797; Girolamo Bocalosi, Dell’educazione democratica da darsi al popolo italiano (Milan, 1797), 255�60;Enrico Michele L’Aurora, All’Italia nelle tenebre (Milan, 1796); F. M. Porcellu, Dell’anima delle donne edella liberta del vestire (Naples, 1799); ‘Opinione di un libero cittadino sulla nuova istituzione d’un TeatroCivico’, in Raccolta di carte pubbliche, istruzioni, legislazioni ec. ec. ec. del nuovo veneto governo democratico12 vols (Venice, 1797), II, 37�45 (39) Discorso di tre cittadini della Commissione legislativa al Popolo ligure(1797), 8; Giorgio Ricchi, Discorso sull’influenza che possono avere le donne, sullo sviluppo dello spiritopubblico, pronunciato nella Societa Patriottica li 17 pratile anno I della liberta italiana (Venice, 1797);Francesco Tognetti, Discorso pronunziato dal cittadino Francesco Tognetti nel Circolo Costituzionale delGenio Democratico, sulla necessita di educare le donne (Bologna, 1798), now published in Il Gran CircoloCostituzionale e il ‘Genio Democratico’, (Bologna, 1797�1798), edited by Umberto Morcelli 3 vols(Bologna, 1986), I, book II, 359�73.
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new constructs in the ethical and religious spheres and in those of politics and
sociology which, after 1789, led him to openly side with the revolutionary cause.
During the triennium he embarked on an extensive production of literature, which
the Church placed on the Index in 1821, and he became chief editor of the women’s
periodical La Vera Repubblicana, which, on the one hand, denounced the protection
afforded by law to adulterous and violent husbands, from whom wives could not
divorce, and, on the other, strongly condemned the luxury of women.96 In his
Dissertazione sul lusso Morardo discussed female nature, marked by luxury and the
inability to control passions and instincts, and likened it to the political and social
instability of the republics:
From this situation of unregulated luxury come uncontrolled women of ease or
those who want to become such. Their lack of control leads the public to
deprivation: this causes a loss of freedom and equality, which is to say, the total
massacre of the republic. Vicious feminine luxury [. . .] womanly luxury, the
depriver of public honesty, destroyer of customs and ruiner of republics.97
According to Morardo, the danger posed by women to the very survival of the new
republican institutions proved they were completely unqualified for active citizenship
and taking up positions in public office, which instead had to remain the preserve of
men, who were capable of self-control, as was demonstrated by their informed
renunciation of luxury.The theme of the relationship between women and luxury had already been
tackled by Morardo in one of his earlier works, La damigella istruita, published in
Turin in 1787. In it he had bitterly criticised the luxury that characterised women,
without however underlining the negative implications of feminine behaviour for
society. That element instead took a central role in the paper written during the
revolutionary phase, and which was later exploited to legitimise the denial to women
of active political roles.98
The explicit connection between excessive female consumption and the denial of
political rights was a key theme in publications of the era, and was central to the
public debate in different republics in the context of the strong circulation of ideas
that marked the revolutionary period. They typified the revolutionary years, as the
words of an anonymous parish priest in Venice made clear:
Do you believe that those unruly youths and vain women deserve the name of
citizen, who degrade with their idleness and softness the virtues of a soul
capable of elevated and magnificent objectives, and consume their shallow
brains with the invention of new fashions of ridiculous and scandalous
clothes?99
96 Elisa Strumia, ‘Un giornale per le donne del Piemonte del 1799: ‘‘La Vera Repubblicana’’’, Studi storici,30 (1989), 917�46.97 Gaspare Morardo, Del lusso. Dissertazione di Gaspare Morardo professore emerito di filosofia (Turin,1797), 25 and following. Similar considerations were also developed in Gaspare Morardo, Quali debbanoessere le donne in tempo di guerra (Turin, 1799). On Morardo and his activities during the revolutionaryperiod, see Luciano Guerci, ‘I giornali repubblicani nel Piemonte dell’anno VII’, Rivista Storica Italiana,102 (1990), 375�421.98 Gaspare Morardo, La damigella istruita (Turin, 1787), 57.99 Anonymous, ‘Discorso recitato al popolo dal cittadino sacerdote G.G.P. al compirsi del settenario’, inRaccolta di carte pubbliche, V, 284�289 (289).
25From Luxury to Consumption in Eighteenth-Century Europe
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Even when the relationship between female nature and the exclusion of women from
citizenship was not stated as openly, the link was fully evident. In the vital moment of
the redefinition of the role of individuals in society, the reflection on consumption,
which also touched upon the theme of women’s inordinate participation in it, was
used as a way of making their debarment from politics appear perfectly normal.The discourse on luxury, then, reflected, crystallised, but also contributed to
corroborating the idea that women were incompatible with politics: weak figures,
easily corruptible, over whose ‘public, and private control’ fathers and husbands had
to keep a close watch lest they became the cause of the nation’s degeneration,
rendering ‘unclear the love of the homeland, and that steadfast and noble character
of placing the salvation and happiness of others before one’s own’.100
In this way the revolutionary political debate brushed aside the stimuli emanating
from mid-century European ideas, which had brought to the fore a revaluation of
female luxury, as verification of progress in society. In his Fable of the Bees
Mandeville had indicated in unambiguous terms how national prosperity was linked
to women’s predilection for luxury goods:
I have shown already that the worst of Women and most profligate of the Sex
did contribute to the consumption of Superfluities as well as the Necessaries of
life, and consequently were Beneficial to many peaceable Drudges, that work
hard to maintain their Families, and have no worse design than an honest
Livelihood. The variety of Work that is perform’d, and The numbers of Hands
employ’d to gratify the Fickleness and Luxury of Women is prodigious.101
In the middle of the century, with the Esprit des lois, feminine inclination towards
luxury consumption, interpreted as a powerful spur for the development of trade, was
presented as a source of national wealth.102 Women became the symbol of the ethics
of exchange in a commercial society. Seen from this viewpoint, the feminine sphere
belonged to a civil and refined society, such that its values, its ways and its state were
considered the measure of the progress of civilisation.
But this discourse of revaluation of female luxury did not filter into the
revolutionary debate, precisely because the accent placed on the female penchant
for luxury was a useful means of denying political rights to women. During the
triennium this language of political inclusion and exclusion was seen to be even more
necessary than during the Old Regime. In a society of orders based on privilege, the
unequal distribution of freedom and resources was, at least from a theoretical point
of view, irreproachable. But in a society of fundamental rights and equal citizenship,
every act of exclusion had to be justified. In light of this, full advantage was taken of
the association between women and luxury in order to validate a limitation of the
universalism of rights proclaimed by the Revolution which, by being applied only to
men and the citizen, had barred women from the exercise of those rights.103
100 ‘Opinione di un libero cittadino’, in Raccolta di carte pubbliche, V, 43.101 Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: Or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (London, 1723), 250.102 Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois, I, 415, 359�360. On the link between women and civil development ineighteenth-century France, see Tjitske Akkerman, Woman’s Vice, Public Benefits: Women and Commerce inthe French Enlightenment (Amsterdam, 1992), 43; Sylvana Tomaselli, ‘The Role of Woman in Enlight-enment Conjectural Histories’, in Conceptualizing Woman in Enlightenment Thought, edited by Hans ErichBodeker and Leiselotte Steinbrugge (Berlin, 2001), 7�22.103 A sign of the full understanding of the limits of the universalism of the rights proclaimed by therevolution was the intervention of the Roman tribuno, former Piarist and exponent of the moderate wing
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This analysis of the language that legitimised the denial of political rights to
women, articulated through the woman/luxury nexus, does not exhaust the complex-
ity of the issue or the various and multi-faceted meanings that the critical discussion
of luxury assumed in the three revolutionary years. It makes it possible, however, toclarify how the invective against luxury which permeated revolutionary rhetoric did
not terminate*as historiography has so far shown104*in adherence to an economic
and social ideal based on the containment of passions and the reduction of
consumption, replicating the models of the ancient republics. In contrast, the
discussion of luxury was intended to communicate a complex political language and
diverse values, which helps to evidence, on the one hand, the need to investigate in
greater depth, from a comparative perspective, the multiple political meanings of the
reflection on revolutionary Europe on the subject, and, on the other, the specificity ofthe Italian context, marked by the immense political value of the debate on luxury
and consumption.
the Tribune, Marco Faustino Gagliuffi on the need to clarify the term ‘citizen’ also for women. Gagliuffireferred to the French experience, where there had been a failure to make clear that women were includedin the universal obligation to use the epithet ‘citizen’, so that they continued to be addressed with the titlemesadames. Gagliuffi did not deal with the rights of women, but nonetheless recognised the threat thatapparently universal laws that did not in fact include women might represent to the democratic tradition;see Sitting XXI, 26 germinal year VI (15 April 1798), in Assemblee della Repubblica romana, edited byVittorio Emanuele Giuntella, 3 vols. (Bologna, 1954�1993), I. On these issues, see Diritti e privilegi, editedby Giorgia Alessi, Marina Caffiero and Dinora Corsi (Genesis, 2 [2002]).104 Monica Righelli and, Sonia Vercesi, ‘L’economia civile dei giornali milanesi del periodo giacobino enapoleonico’, in Le riviste di economia in Italia (1700�1900): dai giornali scientifico letterati ai periodicispecialistici, edited by Massimo M. Augello, Marco Bianchini and Marco Enrico Luigi Guidi (Milan,1996), 117�127 (122�23); Daniela Donnini-Maccio and Roberto Romani, ‘L’economia politica dellademocrazia nell’Italia settentrionale 1796�99’, in La pensee economique pendant la Revolution francaise,edited by Gilbert Faccarello and Phillipe Steiner (Grenoble, 1990), 515�533 (526�28).
27From Luxury to Consumption in Eighteenth-Century Europe
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