He defined tyrants as
all those who by force or fraud—or even by the will of the people or the nobles—obtain the absolute reins of government, and believe themselves to be, or are, above the law. … Tyranny is the name that must be applied … to any government in which he who is charged with the execution of the laws may make, destroy, break, interpret, hinder, or suspend them with assurance of impunity.95
Alfieri considered tyrannical all European governments except the Dutch Republic and the constitutional monarchies of England and Sweden. Influenced by Machiavelli, he idealized the Roman Republic, and hoped that revolution would soon establish republics in Europe. He thought the best thing any minister of a tyrant could do would be to encourage him to such excesses of tyranny as would drive the people to revolt.96 In its first years a revolution is justified in using violence to prevent the revival of the tyranny:
As political, like religious, opinions can never be completely changed without the use of much violence, so every new government is at first unfortunately compelled to be cruelly stern, sometimes even unjust, so as to convince, or possibly coerce, those who neither desire, understand, love, nor consent to innovations.97
Though he himself was a noble as Conte di Cortemilia, Alfieri condemned hereditary aristocracy as a form or instrument of tyranny. He applied the same condemnation to all organized religions of authority. He admitted that “Christianity has contributed no little to softening universal customs,” but he noted “many acts of stupid and ignorant ferocity” in Christian rulers “from Constantine to Charles V.”98 In general,
the Christian religion is almost incompatible with freedom. … The pope, the Inquisition, purgatory, confession, indissoluble marriage, and the celibacy of priests—these are the six rings of the sacred chain which binds the profane one [the state] so much more tightly that it becomes ever heavier and more unbreakable.99
Alfieri so hated tyranny that he advised against having children, or ever marrying, in a despotic state. Instead of children, but with comparable Italian fertility, he produced fourteen tragedies between 1775 and 1783, all in blank verse, all classical in structure and form, all excoriating tyranny with declamatory passion, and enthroning liberty as nobler than life. So in La congiura dei Pazzi his sympathy was with the attempt of the conspirators to overthrow Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici; in Bruto primo and Bruto se-condo he gave short shrift to Tarquin and Caesar; in Filippo he was all for Carlos against the King of Spain; in Maria Stuarda, however, he found more tyranny in the Scottish chieftains than in the Catholic Queen. Criticized for bending history to his thesis, he defended himself:
More than one malicious tongue will be heard to say … that I never depict anything but tyrants, in too many pages devoid of sweetness; that my blood-red pen, dipped in venom, always strikes a single and monotonous note; and that my surly Muse rouses no man from evil servitude, but makes many laugh. These complaints will not divert my spirit from so sublime a purpose, nor deter my art, though weak and inadequate to so great a need. Nor will my words ever be scattered to the winds if true men are born after us who will hold liberty vital to life.100
Only next to his passion for freedom was his love for the Countess of Albany. Daughter of Gustavus Adolphus, Prince of Stolberg-Gedern, she married (1774) Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, who now called himself the Count of Albany. Once so gallant as Bonnie Prince Charlie, he had taken to drink and mistresses to forget his defeats. The marriage, arranged by the French court, proved childless and unhappy. Apparently the Countess herself was not without fault. Alfieri met her in 1777, pitied her, loved her. To be near her, free to help her and follow her fortunes without the irksome necessity of securing royal permission for every move across the frontier, he gave up his citizenship in Piedmont, transferred most of his fortune and estate to his sister, and moved to Florence (1778). He was now twenty-nine years old.
The Countess returned his love with a discreet delicacy that observed all public decorum. In 1780, when her husband’s drunken violence endangered her life, she retired to a convent, and later to the home of her brother-in-law in Rome. “I remained in Florence like an abandoned orphan,” wrote Alfieri, “and it was then that I became fully convinced … that without her I did not so much as half exist; for I found myself almost completely incapable of doing any good work.”101 Soon he went to Rome, where he was allowed to see his inamorata now and then; but the brother-in-law, under priestly guidance, opposed his efforts to secure an annulment of her marriage. (Hence his Miltonic plea for divorce in Delia tirannide.102) Finally the brother-in-law forbade him any further visit to the Countess. He left Rome, and tried to distract himself with travel and with horses—which were his “third love,” next to the Muses and “my lady.” In 1784 she won a legal separation. She moved to Colmar in Alsace; there Alfieri joined her, and thenceforth they lived in unwedded union until the death of the husband allowed them to marry. Alfieri wrote of his love with an ecstasy that recalled Dante’s Vita nuova:
This, my fourth and last fever of love, was … quite different from those of my first three liaisons. In those I had not found myself agitated by any passion of intellect counterbalancing, and commingled with, the passion of the heart. This had indeed less impetuosity and fervor, but proved more lasting and more deeply felt. The strength of my passion was such that it … dominated my every emotion and thought, and it will never henceforth be extinguished in me but with life itself. It was clear to me … that in her I had found a true woman, for instead of her proving, like all ordinary women, an obstacle to attainment of literary fame—one who set up occupations of utility and cheapened … one’s thoughts—I found in her, for every good action, both encouragement and comfort and good example. Recognizing and appreciating a treasure so unique, I gave myself to her with utter abandon. Certainly I was not wrong, for now, more than twelve years later, … my passion for her increases in proportion as those transitory charms (which are not her enduring self) by time’s decree fade away. But concentrated upon her, my mind is elevated, softened, and with every day made better; and as regards hers I am bold to say that the same is true, and that from me she may draw support and strength.103
So spurred on, he wrote more tragedies, some comedies, and occasional poetry. He had already composed five odes entitled “America libera.” In 1788 the lovers moved to Paris, where Alfieri supervised the publication of his works by Beaumarchais’ press at Kehl on the Rhine. When the Bastille fell Alfieri, all fiery for freedom, hailed the Revolution as the dawn of a happier age for the world. But soon the excesses of the Revolution disgusted a soul whose conception of liberty was aristocratic, demanding freedom from mobs and majorities as well as from popes and kings. On August 18, 1792, he and the Countess left Paris with such possessions as they could take in two carriages. They were stopped at the city gates by a crowd that questioned their right to leave. Alfieri “jumped out of the coach amongst the mob, brandishing all my seven passports, and started in shouting and making a row, … which is always the way to get the better of Frenchmen.”104 They drove on to Calais and Brussels; there they learned that the Revolutionary authorities in Paris had ordered the arrest of the Countess. They hurried on to Italy, and settled in Florence. Now Alfieri composed his Misogallo, hot with hatred of France and its “crowd of ill-begotten slaves.”105
In 1799 the French Revolutionary army captured Florence. Alfieri and the Countess took refuge in a suburban villa until the invaders departed. The excitement of these years weakened and aged him; ending his autobiography in 1802, aged fifty-three, he spoke of himself as already old. After bequeathing all his goods to the Countess, he died at Florence on October 7, 1803, and was buried in the Church of Santa Croce. There in 1810 the Countess raised to him a massive monument by Canova; she posed for the figure of Italy mourning over the tomb. She joined her lover there in 1824.
Italy honors Alfieri as Il Vate d’Italia, prophet of the Risorgimento that freed her from alien and ecclesiastical rule
. His dramas, though strident and monotone, were an invigorating advance upon the sentimental tragedies that had been offered to the Italian stage before him. From his Filippo, his Saul, his Mirra the soul of Italy prepared for Mazzini and Garibaldi. His Delia tirannide was not confined to foreign publication at Kehl (1787) and Paris (1800); it was printed in Milan (1800) and other Italian cities in 1802, 1803, 1805, 1809, 1848, 1849, i860; it became for Italy what Paine’s Rights of Man (1791) had been for France, England, and America. Alfieri was the beginning of the Romantic movement in Italy, a Byron before Byron, preaching the emancipation of minds and states. After him Italy had to be free.
CHAPTER XIII
The Enlightenment in Austria
1756-90
I. THE NEW EMPIRE
STRICTLY, Austria designates a nation; loosely it may stand for the empire of which Austria was the head. Formally, till 1806, this was the Holy Roman Empire, which had included Germany, Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, and parts of Italy and France. But nationalistic aims had so weakened Imperial allegiance that what now (1756) survived was really an Austro-Hungarian Empire, embracing Austria, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, the Tirol, Hungary, Bohemia, the Catholic archbishoprics of Cologne, Trier, and Mainz, diverse and varying parts of Italy, and, since 1713, the formerly Spanish, now Austrian, Netherlands—approximately the Belgium of today.
Hungary, with a population of some five million souls, was proudly feudal. Four fifths of the soil were owned by Magyar nobles, and were tilled by serfs; taxes fell only upon the peasants and the German or Slav burghers of the towns. The new empire had had its legal birth in 1687, when the Hungarian nobles renounced their ancient right of electing their king, and acknowledged the Hapsburg emperors as their sovereigns. Maria Theresa, following Bourbon strategy, invited the leading Hungarian magnates to her court, gave them offices, titles, and ribbons, and lulled them into accepting Imperial law for their domains, and Vienna for their capital. In generous response the Empress commissioned Lukas von Hildebrandt to draw up plans for governmental buildings in Buda; the work was begun in 1769, and was renewed in 1894, giving the old capital one of the most impressive royal structures in the world. Rivaling the Queen, rich Hungarian nobles built lordly châteaux along the Danube or in their mountain retreats; so Prince Pal Esterházy built a family seat at Eisenstadt (1663-72), and Prince Miklós József Esterházy built in Renaissance style, some thirty miles away, the new Schloss Esterházy (1764-66). Here were 126 guest rooms, two great halls for receptions and balls, a rich collection of art, and, nearby, a library of 7,500 volumes, and a theater with four hundred seats. Around the palace a vast swamp was transformed into gardens decorated with grottoes, temples, and statuary, with hothouses, orangeries, and game preserves. Said a French traveler: “There is no place—perhaps excepting Versailles—that equals this castle in splendor.” Here came painters, sculptors, actors, singers, virtuosi; here, for a full generation, Haydn conducted, composed, and longed for a larger world.
Bohemia, which is now the Czech part of Czechoslovakia, did not fare so well under Maria Theresa’s rule. It had withdrawn from history after the Thirty Years’ War, its national spirit broken by foreign rule, and by a Catholic creed imposed upon a people that had once known Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague. Its eight million inhabitants suffered the wounds of war in the repeated conflicts between Prussia and Austria, and its historic capital changed hands again and again as its alien Queen passed from defeat to victory to defeat. Bohemia had to content itself with an independence of culture and taste; it developed its own composers, like Georg Benda, and Prague distinguished itself by giving a hearty reception to the première of Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787), which Vienna later damned with faint applause.
In the Austrian Netherlands the struggle of local dignitaries to retain their traditional authority was more successful than in Bohemia; it was to cloud with tragedy the last days of the “revolutionary Emperor.” Those seven provinces—Brabant (which included Brussels, Antwerp, and Louvain), Luxembourg, Limburg, Flanders, Hainaut, Namur, and Gelders—had an ancient and prestigious history, and the nobles who ruled their four million souls were jealous of the privileges that had survived so many centuries of trial. “Society” displayed its fashions, gambled its gains, and sometimes drink the waters, as well as the wines, at Spa in the neighboring episcopate of Liége. The flower of that society in this age was Prince Charles-Joseph de Ligne, whom Brussels gave to the world in 1735. He was tutored by several abbés, “only one of whom believed in God”; he himself was “devout for a fortnight”1 in this strongly Catholic country. He fought with distinction in the Seven Years’ War, served Joseph II as counselor and intimate friend, joined the Russian army in 1787, accompanied Catherine the Great in her “progress” to the Crimea, built himself a luxurious château and art gallery near Brussels, wrote thirty-four volumes of Mèlanges, impressed even the French with the perfection of his manners, and amused the cosmopolitan circles of Europe with his philosophic wit.*
It was this complex empire, stretching from the Carpathians to the Rhine, which for forty years submitted to one of the great women of history.
II. MARIA THERESA
We have seen her in war; there she yielded only to Frederick and Pitt in military statesmanship, in scope of view and pertinacity of purpose, in courage confronting defeat. Said Frederick in 1752: “Except the Queen of Hungary and the King of Sardinia [Charles Emmanuel I], whose genius triumphed over a bad education, all the princes of Europe are only illustrious imbeciles.”3 Elizabeth I of England before her, and Catherine II of Russia after her, excelled her in the art of rule; no other queens. Frederick thought her “ambitious and vengeful,”4 but did he expect her to seek no redress for his rape of Silesia? The Goncourts saw in her “a good average brain with a loving heart, an exalted sense of duty, astonishing powers of work, an imposing presence and exceptional charm; … a true mother of her people.”5 She was the soul of kindness to all who did not attack her empire or her faith; note her warm reception of the Mozart family in 1768.6 She was a good mother to her children; her letters to them are models of tenderness and wise counsel; had Joseph listened to her he might not have died a failure; had Marie Antoinette followed her advice she might have escaped the guillotine.
Maria Theresa was not an “enlightened despot.” She was no despot; Voltaire thought “she established her reign in all hearts by an affability and popularity which few of her ancestors had ever possessed; she banished form and restraint from her court; … she never refused audience to anyone, and no person ever departed from her presence dissatisfied.”7 She was far from enlightened in Voltaire’s sense; she issued intolerant decrees against Jews and Protestants, and remained a devout Catholic to the end. She saw with tremors the infiltration of religious skepticism into Vienna from London and Paris; she tried to stem the tide by a fervent censorship of books and periodicals, and she forbade the teaching of English “because of the dangerous character of this language in respect of its corrupting religious and ethical principles.”8
And yet she was not untouched by the anticlericalism of her councilors and her son. They pointed out that the territorial and other wealth of the clergy was rapidly increasing through priestly suggestions that moribund patients might expiate their sins and propitiate God by bequeathing property to the Church; at this rate the Church—already a state within a state—must soon be master of the government. Convents and monasteries were multiplying, removing men and women from active life, and excluding more and more property from taxation. Young women were being induced to take conventual vows before they were old enough to realize the significance of these lifelong dedications. Education was so completely controlled by the clergy that every growing mind was being molded into giving its supreme allegiance to the Church rather than to the state. The Empress so far yielded to these arguments as to order some substantial reforms. She forbade the presence of ecclesiastics at the making of wills. She reduced the number of religious establishments, and ordered the taxa
tion of all religious property. No vows were to be taken by persons under twenty-one years of age. Churches and convents were no longer to afford asylum to criminals by “right of sanctuary.” No papal brief was to be recognized in the Austrian realm until it had received Imperial consent. The Inquisition was subjected to governmental supervision, and was in effect suppressed. Education was reorganized under the direction of Gerhard van Swieten (the Queen’s physician) and Abbot Franz Rautenstrauch; in many professorships Jesuits were replaced by laymen;9 the University of Vienna was brought under laic administration and state control; the curriculum there and elsewhere was revised to widen instruction in science and history.10 So the pious Empress anticipated in some measure the ecclesiastical reforms of her skeptical son.
She was a model of morality in an age when the courts of Christendom rivaled Constantinople in polygamy. The Church might have used her as an argument for orthodoxy, except that Augustus III, the Catholic King of Poland, and Louis XV of France were the most avid pluralists of all. The Viennese aristocracy did not follow her example. Count Arco fled to Switzerland with his mistress; Countess Esterházy eloped to France with Count von der Schulenburg; Prince von Kaunitz took his current mistress with him in his coach, and when the Empress remonstrated he told her, “Madame, I have come here to speak about your affairs, not mine.”11 Maria Theresa looked with disgust upon this laxity, and issued Draconic decrees to enforce the Sixth Commandment among the people. She ordered that women’s skirts should be lengthened at the bottom and blouses at the top.12 She organized a corps of Chastity Commissioners empowered to arrest any woman suspected of prostitution. Casanova complained that “the bigotry and narrow-mindedness of the Empress made life difficult, especially for foreigners.”13
A great part of her success as a ruler was due to her able ministers. She accepted their lead and earned their devotion. Prince von Kaunitz, despite the failure of his “reversal of alliances,” remained in charge of foreign affairs, and served the Empire well for forty years. Ludwig Haugwitz transformed internal administration, and Rudolf Chotek reorganized the economy. These three men did for Austria what Richelieu and Colbert had done for France; in effect they created a new state, immeasurably stronger than the disordered realm that Maria Theresa had inherited.