IL CONTESTO SOCIALE E POLITICO DELL’ILLUMINISMO LOMBARDO

The political and social context of the Lombard enlightenment. The dawn of the Lombard enlightenment in the 1760’s was coincidental with the second and more radical wave of Habsburg reforms in the State of Milan, beginning with the adoption on 1st January 1760 of the new fiscal system based on the cadastral survey. In the following decade, new foundations were laid for the relationships between Church and State, a thorough overhaul of legislation and the judiciary was envisaged, new government agencies were established (prominent among them the Supreme Economic Council, chaired by Gian Rinaldo Carli and including Pietro Verri as a councillor), a new and competent bureaucracy replaced patrician rule, and State control was introduced over education, public health, and welfare. Earlier reforms, under Gianluca Pallavicini as plenipotentiary minister, had been largely confined to finance and administration; now the declared goal was public happiness, as described in Lodovico Muratori’s last work. At the same time, political power was decisively shifted from the Milan government to Vienna, where an Italian Department under chancellor Kaunitz’s supervision replaced the old and lethargic Italian Council. Another factor for change was the Seven Years’ War, which proved a hard test for the Austrian Monarchy and thus opened the way to further adjustments of the State machinery both at the centre and in the periphery. Moreover, the diplomatic revolution leading to a rapprochement with Bourbon France had the effect of neutralizing the Italian peninsula, thus making governments more confident and secure in adopting long-range reform policies. Compared with Naples or Florence, Milan was slower in opening itself to the currents of thought radiating from France and to a lesser extent from Britain in the age between Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois and Rousseau’s Contrat social and Nouvelle Éloise. But when it did, it immediately established itself as one of the foremost European centres of the enlightenment, especially in the fields of criminal law and economic science. A peculiar feature of the Milanese experience, which lasted throughout Maria Theresa’s reign, was the close collaboration of leading intellectuals, such as Pietro Verri, Cesare Beccaria and Giuseppe Parini, with the Habsburg government.