A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 by J. M. Robertson

on political economy; and among them was one, Cesare Beccaria, who on another theme produced perhaps the most practically influential single book of the eighteenth century, [1580] the treatise on Crimes and Punishments (1764), which affected penal methods for the better throughout the whole of Europe. Even were he not known to be a deist, his strictly secular and rationalist method would have brought upon him priestly suspicion; and he had in fact to defend himself against pertinacious and unscrupulous attacks, [1581] though he had sought in his book to guard himself by occasionally "veiling the truth in clouds." [1582] As we have seen, Beccaria owed his intellectual awakening first to Montesquieu and above all to Helvétius--another testimony to the reformative virtue of all freethought. Of the aforesaid eight-and-twenty writers on economics, probably the majority were freethinkers. Among them, at all events, were Count Algarotti (1712-1764), the distinguished æsthetician, one of the group round Frederick at Berlin and author of Il Newtonianismo per le dame (1737); Filangieri, whose work on legislation (put on the Index by the papacy) won the high praise of Franklin; the Neapolitan abbate Ferdinando Galiani, one of the brightest and soundest wits in the circle of the French philosophes; the other Neapolitan abbate Antonio Genovesi (1712-1769), the "redeemer of the Italian mind," [1583] and the chief establisher of economic science for modern Italy. [1584] To these names may be added those of Alfieri, one of the strongest anti-clericalists of his age; Bettinelli, the correspondent of Voltaire and author of The Resurrection of Italy (1775); Count Dandolo, author of a French work on The New Men (1799); and the learned Giannone, author of the great anti-papal History of the Kingdom of Naples (1723), who, after more than one narrow escape, was thrown in prison by the king of Sardinia, and died there (1748) after twelve years' confinement. To the merits of Algarotti and Genovesi there are high contemporary testimonies. Algarotti was on friendly terms with Cardinal Ganganelli, who in 1769 became Pope Clement XIV. In 1754 the latter writes [1585] him: "My dear Count, Contrive matters so, in spite of your philosophy, that I may see you in heaven; for I should be very sorry to lose sight of you for an eternity. You are one of those rare men, both for heart and understanding, whom we could wish to love even beyond the grave, when we have once had the advantage of knowing them. No one has more reasons to be convinced of the spirituality and immortality of the soul than you have. The years glide away for the philosophers as well as for the ignorant; and what is to be the term of them cannot but employ a man who thinks. Own that I can manage sermons so as not to frighten away a bel esprit; and that if every one delivered as short and as friendly sermons as I do, you would sometimes go to hear a preacher. But barely hearing will not do ... the amiable Algarotti must become as good a Christian as he is a philosopher: then should I doubly be his friend and servant." [1586] In an earlier letter, Ganganelli writes: "The Pope [Benedict XIV] is ever great and entertaining for his bons mots. He was saying the other day that he had always loved you, and that it would give him very great pleasure to see you again. He speaks with admiration of the king of Prussia ... whose history will make one of the finest monuments of the eighteenth century. See here and acknowledge my generosity! For that prince makes the greatest jest possible of the Court of Rome, and of us monks and friars. Cardinal Querini will not be satisfied unless he have you with him for some time at Brescia. He one day told me that he would invite you to come and dedicate his library.... There is no harm in preaching to a philosopher who seldom goes to hear a sermon, and who will not have become a great saint by residing at Potsdam. You are there three men whose talents might be of great use to religion if you would change their direction--viz. Yourself, Mons. de Voltaire, and M. de Maupertuis. But that is not the ton of the age, and you are resolved to follow the fashion." [1587] Ganganelli in his correspondence reveals himself as an admirer of Newton [1588] and somewhat averse to religious zeal. [1589] Of the papal government he admitted that it was favourable "neither to commerce, to agriculture, nor to population, which precisely constitute the essence of public felicity," while suavely reminding the Englishman of the "inconveniences" of his own government. [1590] To the learned Muratori, who suffered at the hands of the bigots, he and Pope Benedict XIV gave their sympathy. [1591] But Ganganelli's own thinking on the issues between reason and religion was entirely commonplace. "Whatever," he wrote, "departs from the account given of the Creation in the book of Genesis has nothing to support it but paradoxes, or, at most, mere hypotheses. Moses alone, as being an inspired author, could perfectly acquaint us with the formation of the world, and the development of its parts.... Whoever does not see the truth in what Moses relates was never born to know it." [1592] It was only in his relation to the bigots of his own Church that his thinking was rationalistic. "The Pope," he writes to a French marquis, "relies on Providence; but God does not perform miracles every time he is asked to do it. Besides, is he to perform one that Rome may enjoy a right of seignory over the Duchy of Parma?" [1593] At his death an Italian wrote of him that "the distinction he was able to draw between dogmas or discipline and ultramontane opinions gave him the courage to take many opportunities of promoting the peace of the State." His tolerance is sufficiently exhibited in one of his letters to Algarotti: "I hope that you will preach to me some of these days, so that each may have his turn." [1594] Freethought had achieved something when a Roman Cardinal, a predestinate Pope, could so write to an avowed freethinker. Concerning Galiani we have the warm panegyric of Grimm. "If I have any vanity with which to reproach myself," he writes, "it is that which I derive in spite of myself from the fact of the conformity of my ideas with those of the two rarest men whom I have the happiness to know, Galiani and Denis Diderot." [1595] Grimm held Galiani to be of all men the best qualified to write a true ecclesiastical history. But the history that would have satisfied him and Grimm was not to be published in that age. Italy, however, had done her full share, considering her heritage of burdens and hindrances, in the intellectual work of the century; and in the names of Galvani and Volta stands the record of one more of her great contributions to human enlightenment. Under Duke Leopold II of Tuscany the papacy was so far defied that books put on the Index were produced for him under the imprint of London; [1596] and the papacy itself at length gave way to the spirit of reform, Clement XIV consenting among other things to abolish the Order of Jesuits (1773), after his predecessor had died of grief over his proved impotence to resist the secular policy of the States around him. [1597] In Tuscany, indeed, the reaction against the French Revolution was instant and severe. Leopold succeeded his brother Joseph as emperor of Austria in 1790, but died in 1792; and in his realm, as was the case in Denmark and in Spain in the same century, the reforms imposed from above by a liberal sovereign were found to have left much traditionalism untouched. After 1792, Ferdinando III suspended some of his father's most liberal edicts, amid the applause of the reactionaries; and in 1799, after the first short stay of the revolutionary French army, out of its one million inhabitants no fewer than 22,000 were prosecuted for "French opinions." [1598] Certainly some of the "French opinions" were wild enough; for instance, the practice among ladies of dressing alla ghigliottina, with a red ribbon round the neck, a usage borrowed about 1795 from France. [1599] As Quinet sums up, the revolution was too strong a medicine for the Italy of that age. The young abbate Monti, the chief poet of the time, was a freethinker, but he alternated his strokes for freedom with unworthy compliances. [1600] Such was the dawn of the new Italian day that has since slowly but steadily broadened, albeit under many a cloud. § 5. Spain and Portugal