Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 63, No. 392, June, 1848

We give those items in francs.

Five millions spent in repairing and constructing dikes in the Mantuan province.

Four millions in completing the canal of the Naviglio.

A million and a half for roads in the mountains of the Bergamesque.

A million and a half for the great commercial road of the Splugen.

Two millions and a half for the road over the Hiffer Jock.

Three millions for continuing it along the shore of the lake Como.

Three millions and a quarter for completing the cathedral of Milan.

A million for improvements in the city.

Half a million for the fine bridge over the Ticino.

Twenty-four millions for cross-roads, between 1814 and 1831, besides miscellaneous expenditure; – the whole being not less than sixty-six millions in the fifteen years preceding 1834, in the mere matter of keeping up the means of intercourse in a country where, half a century ago, the cross-roads were little more than goat-tracks; besides the annual expense of about a million and a quarter on the repair of the roads since. And this munificent liberality was expended in Lombardy alone. The expenditure in Venice in the latter period of its possession has been nearly equal. The first French conquest had given it the name of a constitution, and nothing else. The famous republic was plundered to the last coin. On its second seizure its treasury was again emptied by its French emancipators; and when it was restored to Austria in 1814, its population presented a pauper list of fifty-four thousand individuals. Its commerce was in a state of ruin; its palaces and public buildings were in a state of decay; its charitable establishments were without funds; and a few years more must have filled its canals with the wrecks of its houses. Within the next twenty years the reparations cost the Austrian treasury not less than fifty-three millions of francs! Thus Venice rose from a condition which all our travellers, immediately after the peace of 1815, pronounced to be irreparable ruin, and is now one of the first commercial cities of Italy.

But the Austrian government had not been contented with a mere improvement of the soil or of the modes of communication – it had employed extraordinary efforts in giving education to the people. We are to remember the difficulties which impede all such efforts in Romish countries. Where the priest regulates the faith, he must always be jealous of the education. But the German habits of the government predominated over the superstition of Rome, and a species of military discipline was introduced, to compel the young Italians to learn the use of their indolent understandings. Within a few years after the peace of 1815 a national school system was put in action in Lombardy. Within a few more years it had spread over the whole country, with such effect, that there was scarcely a commune without its public place of education. The schools for boys amounted to upwards of two thousand three hundred, and for girls to upwards of twelve hundred. Nearly a hundred of the schools for boys taught a very extensive course of practical knowledge. The higher classes learned architecture, mechanics, geography, drawing, and natural history, in the vigorous, useful way for which German education is distinguished. Still higher schools, or portions of the former, were placed in the chief towns, for the practical acquirement of the known ledge most important for servants of public offices. There the chief studies were history, commerce, mathematics, chemistry, and French, German, and Italian. Under this system, it is evident that very solid and valuable acquirements might be made; and those were solely the work of the Austrian sovereignty.

We give a slight abstract of the plan of education in the female schools, because it is on this point that England is still most deficient.

The female elementary schools had three classes.

In the youngest were taught spelling and writing, mental and written arithmetic, needlework, and the Catechism.

In the second were taught the elements of grammar, the four rules of arithmetic, and needlework, consisting of marking and embroidery, with religious instruction.

In the third were taught religion, sacred history, geography, Italian grammar, letter-writing, weights and measures, and the nature and history of coin.

All those acquirements were, of course, dictated by the necessities and habits of native life; but they compose a scale of practical knowledge which, while useful in their humblest capacity, would form an admirable ground-work for every attainment of the female mind. It is probably from some sense of hazard that we do not observe music among the objects of education: for doubtless singing must have been one of the habits of schools taught by a German system. We should also have desired to see some knowledge of domestic arrangements, of the culinary arts, and of making their own dress. However, it is probable that these obvious advantages, especially for the life of the peasantry, may have been added subsequently to the period from which our information is derived.

We should rejoice to see in England national institutions of this order established for the education of young females of every rank, thus withdrawing the daughters of the peasantry from those coarse drudgeries of the field which were never intended for them, relieving the female population of the manufacturing towns alike from the factory labour and the town habits, and training for the labouring population honest, useful, and moral partners of their lives. In the higher ranks, the activity, regularity, and practical use of all their occupations would be scarcely less essential; and we should see in the rising generation a race of accomplished women who had learned every thing that was of importance to make them the intellectual associates of the intelligent world, while they had acquired those domestic habits, and were entitled to avail themselves of those graceful and useful arts, which make home pleasing without feeble indulgence, hospitality cheerful without extravagance, and even time itself pass without leaving behind a regret for wasted hours.

The Lombard system had been subsequently applied to the Venetian provinces; where, twenty years ago, the number of schools had risen to between fourteen and fifteen hundred. The number of boys then attending the schools was upwards of sixty thousand. Higher still, there were eighty-six gymnasia or colleges, with three hundred professors, and attended by upwards of seven thousand students, with thirty-four colleges for females. Higher still were the twelve Lyceums, for philosophical studies; and, at the summit of all, the two universities of Padua and Pavia. The whole system being superintended by the general boards at Milan and Venice.

Whether all those regulations are applicable to our own country, may be a matter of question. But the grand difficulty experienced here, the power of making the parents avail themselves of those admirable opportunities, is easily solved by the German discipline. A register is kept in every commune, of all the children from six to twelve years old; and they are all compelled to attend the schools, except in case of illness, or some other sufficient cause. But the tuition is gratuitous, the expense and the schoolmaster being paid by the commune. Corporal punishment is wholly forbidden.

Such were the benefits lavished by Austria upon her Italian subjects; benefits which they never would have dreamed of if left to themselves; and which, in all probability, the pauperised exchequer of the revolt will never be able to sustain. Under this government, too, Lombardy had become the most fertile province of Italy, the most densely peopled, and the most opulent, of the south of Europe. Venice, too, which had been crushed almost into ruins by the French, rose again into a resemblance of that commercial power, and civil splendour, which once made her famous throughout the Mediterranean; and Milan, though characterised in the Italian annals as the most luckless of all the cities of earth, having been besieged forty times, taken twenty times, and almost levelled with the ground by the conqueror four times, – yet, when the late Emperor Francis visited her about twenty years ago, exhibited a pomp of private wealth, and a magnificence of public festivity, which astonished Europe, and was the most eloquent refutation of the declamatory ravings of the mob of patriotism.

That Austria should be unwilling to give up so fine a possession is perfectly natural; constituting, as it does, the noblest portion of the Italian peninsula; or, in the striking language of the historian Alison, —

"A plain, three hundred miles in length, by a hundred and twenty in breadth, and in the greatest portion of its length exhibiting an alluvial soil watered by the Ticino, the Adda, the Adige, the Tagliamento, and the Piave, falling from the Alps, with the Taro and other streams falling from the Apennines, and the whole plain traversed through its centre by the Po, affording the amplest means of irrigation, the only requisite in this favoured region for the production of the richest pastures and the most luxuriant harvests."

"On the west," says this master of picturesque description, "it is sheltered by a vast semicircle of mountains, which there unite the Alps and the Apennines, and are surmounted by glittering piles of ice and snow, forming the majestic barrier between France and Italy. In those inexhaustible reservoirs, which the heat of summer converts into perennial fountains of living water, the Po takes its rise; and that classic stream, rapidly fed by the confluence of the torrents which descend through every cleft and valley in the vast circumference, is already a great river when it sweeps under the ramparts of Turin."

The description of its agriculture is equally glowing with that of its mountain boundaries. "A system of agriculture, from which every nation in Europe might take a lesson, has been long established over its whole surface, and two, sometimes three, successive crops annually reward the labours of the husbandman. Indian corn is produced in abundance, and by its return, quadruple that of wheat, affords subsistence for a numerous and dense population. An incomparable system of irrigation, diffused over the whole, conveys the waters of the Alps into a series of little canals, like the veins and arteries in the human body, to every field, and in some places to every ridge, in the grass lands. The vine and the olive thrive on the sunny slopes which ascend from this plain to the ridges of the Alps, and a woody zone of never-failing beauty lies between the desolation of the mountain and the fertility of the plain. The produce of this region, which most intimately combines its interests with those of the great European marts, is silk. Italy now settles the market of silk over all Europe. Since the beginning of the present century, it has grown into an annual produce of the value of ten millions sterling! Within the last twenty years the export from the Lombardo-Venetian States has trebled." All those details give an impression of the security of property, which is the first effect of a paternal government. They fully answer all the absurd charges of impoverishment by Austria, of barbarism in its laws, or of severity in its institutions. Lombardy, independent, will soon have reason to lament the change from Austrian protection.

We come to other things. Italy is now in the condition of a man who thinks to get rid of all his troubles by committing suicide. Every kingdom, princedom, duchy, and village has successively rebelled, and proclaimed a constitution; and before that constitution was a month old, has forgotten what it was. A flying duke, a plundered palace, a barricade, and a national guard, are all that the philosopher can detect, or the historian has to record, in the Revolution of Italy. How could it be otherwise? Can the man who bows down to an image, and listens to the fictions of a priest, exercise a rational understanding upon any other subject? Can the slave of superstition be the champion of true freedom? or can the man, forced to doubt the virtue of his wife and the parentage of his children, which is the notorious condition of all the higher circles of Italian society, ever find fortitude enough to make the sacrifices essential to the purchase of true liberty? If all Italy were republicanised to-day, there would be nothing in its character to make liberty worth an effort, – nothing to prevent its putting its neck under the feet of the first despot who condescended to demand its vassalage.

The war of Piedmont and Austria is another chapter, written in another language than the feeble squabbles of the little sovereignties. There, steel and gunpowder will be the elements; here, the convulsion finishes in a harangue and the coffee-house. Charles Albert has passed the Mincio, but shall he ever repass it? Certainly not, if the Austrian general knows his trade. If ever king was in a military trap, if ever army was in a pitfall, the Piedmontese passage of the Mincio has done the deed. But, this must lie in the book of casualties. Austria is renowned for military blunders. In the Italian campaigns of Napoleon, her reinforcements came up only in time to see the ruin of the army in the field. Successive generals followed, only to relieve each other's reputation by sharing a common defeat; until Italy was torn by 50,000 Frenchmen from the hands of 100,000 Austrians. Yet the Germans have been always brave; their national calamity was tardiness. It clings to them still. They have now been gazing for a month at the army of Charles Albert; they ought to have driven it into the Mincio within twenty-four hours.

The Italian spirit of hatred to the German has exhibited itself in a thousand forms for a thousand years. It has murmured, conspired, and made vows of vengeance, since the days of Charlemagne. It has sentenced the "Teuton" in remorseless sonnets, has fought him in sinfonias, and slaughtered him in ballets and burlesques. But the German returned, chained the poets to the wall of a cell, and sent the writers to row in the galleys. For the last hundred years, Italy has implored all the furies in operas, and paid homage to Nemesis by the help of the orchestra – all in vain. At length, the French Revolution, by sweeping the Austrian armies out of Italy, gave the chance of realising the long dream. The "Cisalpine Republic" flourished on paper, and every Italian talked of Brutus, and the revival of the Consulate, and the Capitol. But the French price of liberty was too high for Italian purchase; the liberators robbed the liberated of every coin in their possession, and shot them when they refused to give it up. Even the "Teuton" was welcome, after this experience of the Gaul; and Italy found the advantage of a government which, though it exhibited neither triumphal chariots nor civic festivities, yet suffered the land to give its harvests to the right owners.

But even this feeling was to have a new temptation. About fifteen years ago, one of the chaplains of the King of Sardinia was struck off the court list, for uttering opinions which, touched with the old romance of Italian liberation, struck the whole court of Turin with horror. Charles Albert was then at the head of the Jesuits, and the Jesuits demanded the criminal Gioberti. Italy was no longer safe for him: he fled across the Alps, and took refuge in Belgium. There he wrote, through necessity. But he had something to revenge, and he wrote with the vigour of revenge. But he was an enthusiast, and he indulged in the reveries of enthusiasm. The double charm was irresistible to the dreamy spirit of a nation which loves to imagine impossible retribution, and achieve heroism in the clouds. His writings crossed the Alps. No obstacle could stop them; they wound their way through douanes; they insinuated themselves through the backstairs of palaces; they even penetrated into the cells of monks; – and his treatise "Del Primato Civile e Morale degl' Italiani," which appeared in 1843, was hailed with universal rapture. The literature of modern Italy seldom rises into that region of publicity which carries a work beyond seas and mountains. She has not yet attained the great art of common sense – the only art which furnishes the works of man with wings. Her poetry is local and trifling: her prose is loose, feeble, and rambling. Her best writers seem to the European eye what the wanderers through Soirees and Conversaziones are to the well-informed ear, – men of words living on borrowed notions, and, after the first half-dozen sentences, intolerably tiresome.

But the work of Gioberti was a panegyric on Italy, a universal laudation of the Italian genius, the Italian spirit, the Italian language, every thing that bore the name of Italian! Its very title, "The Pre-eminence, Civil and Moral, of the Italians," was irresistible.

The monster-folly of all foreigners is a passion for praise; and the unpopularity of the Englishman on the Continent chiefly arises from his tardiness in gorging this rapacious appetite. Gioberti, with evident consciousness of the offence, labours to justify the assumption. "Individuals may be modest, but modesty degrades nations," is his preliminary maxim. "A nation to have claims must have merits; and who is to believe in her merits, unless she believes in them herself?" This curious logic, which would make vanity only the more ridiculous by the openness of its display, is the grand argument of the book. It has made Italy suddenly imagine herself a nation of heroes.

"When a nation," says Gioberti, "has fallen into social degradation, the attempt to revive its courage must be by praise; possibly dangerous at other times, but now a generous art." It is admitted, however, "that the facts ought to be true, and the arguments forcible; and that no good can come from adulation." And in consequence of this wise precaution, the patriotic monk proceeds to inaugurate his country with the precedency in the grand procession of all the kingdoms of the earth! But another striking feature of this work was, that all those changes must emanate from a centre, and that centre the Pope, that Pope being a professor of liberalism, and having for his pupils all the princes of Italy. Whether Gioberti saw futurity with the eye of prophet, or only in the conjecture of a charlatan, there can be no doubt that the coincidence between his theory and the facts is sufficiently curious. We are to remember that book was published in the reign of Gregory XVI. – a genuine monk, hardened in all the old habits of the cell, who thought that a railroad would be the overthrow of the tiara, and the expression of a political opinion would call up the shades of all the past Holinesses from their purgatorial thrones.

The book declared that the Deity being the source of all influence on the civilisation of man, the country which approached nearest to general influence over the world must be the leading nation. It contends that Italy fulfils this condition in three ways. First, that it has created the civilisation of all other nations; second, that it preserves in its bosom, for general use, all the principles of that civilisation; and third, that it has repeatedly shown the power of restoring that civilisation. He further contends that the true principle of Italian power is federation, and the true centre of that federation must be the Pope. He declares that the whole light of Italy, in the eyes of the world, has flashed from the papal throne – that the Roman States are to the rest of Italy what the site of the Temple was to the Jewish people – and seems to regard the whole Italian nation, in reference to Europe, as like the Chosen Land to the rest of the world. Even then, he marked the Piedmontese throne as the chief support of the federation, and Charles Albert as the champion of the great pontifical revolution which, expelling all strangers, and uniting all princes, was to place Italy in secure sovereignty over all the mental and moral influences of the world.

The work is obviously a romance; but it is a romance of genius; it is obviously unsuited to the realities of any nation under the moon, but it touches every weak point of the national character with a new colouring, and persuades the loose and lazy Italian that he has only to start on his feet to be a model for mankind. With him the church of Rome is no longer an antiquated building of the dark ages, full of obscure passages and airless chambers, with modern cobwebs covering its ancient gilding, and, with the very crevices which let in light, exhibiting only its irreparable decay. It is on the contrary a temple full of splendour, and spreading its light through the world, crowded with oracular shrines, and uttering voices of sanctity that are yet destined to give wisdom to the world.

It must be wholly unnecessary for Protestantism to expose the superficial glitter of those views, and the feeble foundations of this visionary empire. The true respondent is the actual condition of Europe. Every Protestant nation has left Italy behind. Even the Romish nations, which have borrowed their vigour from intercourse with Protestantism, have left her behind. Of what great invention for the benefit of man has Italy been the parent during the last three hundred years? What command has she given us over nature? what territory has she added to the civilised world in an age of perpetual discovery? what enlargement of the human mind has she exhibited in her philosophy? what advance in the amelioration of the popular condition signalises her intelligent benevolence? what manly inquiry into any one of the means by which governments or individuals distinguish themselves as benefactors to posterity, and live in the memory of mankind?

It is painful to answer queries like these with a direct negation; but that negation would be truth. Italy has nothing to show for her intellectual products during centuries, but the carnival and the opera; for her gallantry, but the sufferings of French and German invasions; for her political progress, but the indolent submission to generations of petty kings, themselves living in vassalage to France, Austria, and Spain; and for her religion, but the worship of saints, of whom no living man knows any thing – miracles so absurd as to make even the sacristans who narrate them laugh; new legends of every conceivable nonsense, and leases of purgatory shortened according to the pence dropped into the purse of the confessional.

Italy has two evils, either of which would be enough to break down the most vigorous nation – if a vigorous nation would not have broken down both, ages ago. These two are the nobles and the priesthood – both ruinously numberless, both contemptibly idle, and both interested in resisting every useful change, which might shake their supremacy. Every period of Italian convulsion has left a class of men calling themselves nobles, and perpetuating the title to their sons. The Gothic, the Norman, the papal, the "nouveaux riches," every man who buys an estate – in fact, nearly every man who desires a title – all swell the lists of the nobility to an intolerable size. Of course, a noble can never do any thing – his dignity stands in the way.

The ecclesiastics, though a busier race, are still more exhausting. The kingdom of Naples alone has eighty-five prelates, with nearly one hundred thousand priests and persons of religious orders, the monks forming about a fourth of the whole! In this number the priesthood of Sicily is not included, which has to its own share no less than three archbishops and eleven bishops. Even the barren isle of Sardinia has one hundred and seventeen convents! Can any rational mind wonder at the profligacy, the idleness, and the dependence of the Italian peninsula, with such examples before it? The Pope daily has between two and three thousand monks loitering through the streets of Rome. Besides these, he has on his ecclesiastical staff twenty cardinals, four archbishops, ninety-eight bishops, and a clergy amounting to nearly five per cent of his population. With those two millstones round her neck, Italy must remain at the bottom. She may be shaken and tossed by the political surges which roll above her head, but she never can be buoyant. She must cast both away before she can rise. Italy priest-ridden, and noble-ridden, and prince-ridden, must be content with her fate. Her only chance is in the shock, which will break away her encumbrances.

We now come to the Avatar, in which liberty is looked for by all the romancers in Italy. On the 1st of June 1846, Pope Gregory XVI. died, at the age of 81. He was a man of feeble mind, but of rigid habits, willing to live after the manner of his fathers, and, above all things, dreading Italian change. The occasional attempts at introducing European improvements into the Roman territory struck him with undisguised alarm; and even his old age did not prevent his leaving six thousand state prisoners in the Roman dungeons. On the 16th of the same month the Bishop of Imola was chosen Pope. He was of an Italian family, which had occasionally held considerable offices; was a man of intelligence, though tinged with liberalism; and was one of the youngest of the Popes since Innocent III., who took the tiara at the age of 37. The Bishop of Imola was 54.

Adopting the name of Pius IX., his first act was one of clemency. He published an amnesty for political offences, and threw open the prison doors. An act of this order is usual on the accession of a Pope. But the fears of the population had been so much heightened by the singular stubbornness of his predecessor, that the discovery of their having a merciful master produced a universal burst of rejoicing.

But the popular excitement was not to be satisfied with the trumpetings and parades of the returning exiles – it demanded a new tariff, which was granted, of course. Then followed fêtes and illuminations, until the Pope himself grew tired of being blinded by fireworks and deafened by shouts. A succession of acts of civility passed between his Holiness and his people. He talked of railroads, canals, and commerce. He formed a council, which, so far as any practical effect has been produced by the measure, seems to have died in its birth. He cultivated popularity, walked through the streets, occasionally served the mass for a parish priest, and fully gained his object, of astonishing the populace by the condescension of a pontiff. To all this we make no imaginable objection. Pius IX. did but a duty that seldom enters into the contemplation of the prelacy, and which it would be well for their security, and not unwise in their calling, to practise in every province of Christendom.

But it is to be observed that, in all this pageantry of parliaments, and all those provinces of renovation, nothing has been done – that none of the real machinery of the popedom has been broken up – that the monk is still a living being, and the Jesuit, though a little plundered, is still in the world – that every spiritual law which made Rome a terror to the thinking part of mankind is in full vigour at this moment, and that whatever may be thought of the enlightenment of his Holiness, every weapon of spiritual severity remains still bright and burnished, and hung up in the old armoury of faith, ready for the first hand, and for the first occasion.

Lord Brougham, in his late memorable cosmopolite speech, has charged the popedom with being the origin of the European convulsions. There can be no doubt that the popedom, if it did not give birth to the movement, at least set the example. The first actual struggle with Austria was its quarrel about the possession of Ferrara, which was, after all, but a straw thrown up to show the direction of the wind. The call to the Italian states, though not loud, was deep; and an Italian army, for the purpose of forming an Italian confederation, made a part of every dream between the Alps and the sea.

Then came still more showy scenes of the great drama. France had looked on the Ferrarese struggle with the eager interest which inspires that busy nation on every opportunity of European disturbance. But the Parisian revolution suddenly threw the complimentary warfare of German and Italian heroism into burlesque. The extinction of the throne, the flight of a dynasty, the sovereignty of the mob, and the universal frenzy of a nation, were bold sports, of which Italian souls knew nothing. But their effect was soon perilously felt; the populace of Milan determined to rival the populace of Paris – had an emeute of their own, built barricades, fought the Austrian garrison, and made themselves masters of the capital of Lombardy.

But the Italian is essentially a dramatist without the power of tragedy; he turns by nature to farce, and in his boldest affairs does nothing without burlesque. Could it be conceived that a people, resolving on a revolution, should have begun it by a revolt of cigars! In England "sixty years ago," a noble duke exhibited his hostility to the government of Pitt, by ordering his footman to comb the powder out of his locks – this deficiency in the powder tax being regarded by the noble duke as a decisive instrument in the overthrowing the national policy. It must however be said, for the honour of England and the apology of the duke, that he was a Whig, – which accounts for any imbecility in this world.

The Milanese began by a desperate self-denying ordinance against tobacco. No patriot was thenceforward to smoke! What the Italian did with his hands, mouth, or thoughts, when the cigar no longer employed the whole three, is beyond our imagination. His next act of patriotic sacrifice was the theatre – the Austrian government receiving some rent as tax on the performances. The theatre was deserted, and even Fanny Ellsler's pirouettes could not win the rabble back. Even the public promenade, which happened to have some connexion with Austrian memories, was abandoned, and no Italian, man, woman, or child, would exhibit on the Austrian Corso. To our northern fancies, all this seems intolerably infantine; but it is not the less Italian – and it might have gone on in the style of children raising a nursery rebellion to this hour, but for the intervention of another character.

The history of the Sardinian states is as old as the Punic wars. But the glance which we shall give looks only to the events of the last century – excepting the slight mention, that from the period when Italy was separated from the fallen empire of Charlemagne in the ninth century, the command of the passes of Mont Cenis and Mont Genevre, with the countries at the foot of the Cottian and Graian Alps, was put in charge of some distinguished military noble, as the key of Italy, that noble bearing the title of Marquis or Lord of the Marches.

We come, leaving nine centuries of feud and ferocity behind, to the eighteenth century, when the house of Savoy became allied with the royal succession of England, by the marriage of Victor Amadeus with Anne Marie of Orleans, daughter of Philip, brother of Louis XIV., by Henrietta, daughter of Charles I. of England.

There are few historical facts more striking than the effect of position on the character of the princes of Savoy. The life of the Italian sovereigns has generally been proverbial for the feebleness of their capacities, or the waste of their powers; but Savoy exhibited an almost unbroken line of sovereigns remarkable for political sagacity, and for gallantry in the field. This was the result of their location. They were to Italy what the Lords Wardens of the Border were to England and Scotland; forced to be perpetually in the saddle – constantly preparing to repel invasion – their authority dependent from year to year on an outburst from France, or a grasp from the restless ambition and vast power of the German emperors. It is not less remarkable, that from the middle of the century, when the hazards of Savoy were diminished by the general amelioration of European policy, the vigour of the Savoyard princes decayed; and the court of Turin, instead of being a school of diplomacy and war, sank into the feebleness of Italian thrones, and retained its rivalry only in the opera.