Note 3 — Chapter XXI · FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

In the Catholic countries, naturally, the reaction was no less violent. In Italy, as we saw, it began in Tuscany almost at once. The rule of Napoleon, it is true, secured complete freedom of the Press as regarded translation of freethinking books, an entire liberty of conscience in religious matters, and a sharp repression of clericalism, the latter policy going to the length of expelling all the religious orders and confiscating their property.3 All this counted for change; but the Napoleonic rule all the while choked one of the springs of vital thought—to wit, the spirit of political liberty; and in 1814–15 the clerical system returned in full force, as it did all over Italy. Everywhere freethought was banned. All criticism of Catholicism was a penal offence; and in the kingdom of Naples alone, in 1825, there were 27,612 priests, 8,455 monks, 8,185 nuns, 20 archbishops, and 73 bishops, though in 1807 the French influence had caused the dissolution of some 250 convents.4 At Florence the Censure forbade, in 1817, the issue of a new edition of the translated work of Cabanis on Les Rapports du physique et du moral; and Mascagni, the physiologist, was invited to delete from his work a definition of man in which no notice was taken of the soul.5 It was even proclaimed that the works of Voltaire and Rousseau were not to be read in the public libraries without ecclesiastical permission; but this veto was not seriously treated.6 All native energy, however, was either cowed or cajoled into passivity. If, accordingly, the mind of Italy was to survive, it must be by the assimilation of the culture of freer States; and this culture, reinforced by the writings of Leopardi, generated a new intellectual life, which was a main factor in the ultimate achievement of Italian liberation from Austrian rule.