The rise of liberal constitutionalism in Italy: Pietro Verri and the French Revolution

Abstract

In the 1780s and 1790s, Pietro Verri (1728–97) wrote a large number of autobiographical and political texts, which have only recently been collected and printed in two volumes of the Edizione Nazionale of Verri's works. These writings are examined in this essay as documents of a turn from enlightened absolutism to liberalism and democracy in Italy towards the end of the eighteenth century. Verri's acceptance of the principles of liberty and equality proclaimed by the French revolutionaries was made easier by his dissatisfaction with the authoritarian and bureaucratic nature of many of Joseph II's reforms. He also came to realize that the transition of sovereignty from the prince to the people was a necessary step in the way to the unification of the Italian peninsula, which became a political and not only a cultural goal in the same years. He was aware, however, of the difficulty of spreading these views among an ignorant, backward and priest-ridden populace and thought that their education was the most important task facing Italian literati. This explains why he firmly opposed the ultra-radical propaganda of Italian jacobins in the early stages of the French occupation of Lombardy.