In 1797, considering the state of public opinion in Italy, the typographer Giovanni Capelli, a committed republican, was forced to admit that “writings on liberty and equality [were] not having any impact on the public mood.”Footnote 1 One year before, the north of Italy had been invaded by the French army and democratized. Radical writers and journalists had soon engaged in a vast struggle to republicanize the population, yet the new revolutionary ideals were hardly meeting the favor of the Italians, who seemed much more inclined to erupt in counterrevolutionary riots than to endorse the republic. According to Capelli, the reason was that those who preached republican ideas were too implicated in the new regime to appear impartial and trustworthy. “We would need a writer,” he concluded, “who is not involved in the current political struggles and is indisputably authoritative.” Thus he decided to edit a compendium of the doctrines of two authors above suspicion. The first was a philosophe, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, who had died well before the outbreak of the Revolution. The second was a Sicilian cleric, Nicola Spedalieri.
“As for Spedalieri,” wrote Capelli, “this distinguished theologian was a sworn enemy of the French Revolution, against which he wrote his famous book On the Rights of Man,” published in 1791. Paradoxical as it may seem, Capelli was convinced that the work of a supposedly counterrevolutionary writer could secure more supporters to the republic than those of pro-revolutionary pamphleteers. Spedalieri, a respectable theologian who had gained a solid reputation as a Catholic apologist in the two decades before 1789, could not be under suspicion of partiality for the French principles; however, notwithstanding his harsh criticism of French revolutionary policies, he had accepted the concept of the rights of man, the theory of the social contract, and the legitimacy of the right of revolution. “If Spedalieri agreed with these principles,” suggested Capelli, “it means that they are so evidently true that he could not help but give his assent to them.”
Historians have long discussed whether On the Rights of Man can be considered a counterrevolutionary work. The book first attracted the scholarly attention of the legist Giuseppe Cimbali, a professor at the University of Rome, who between the 1880s and the 1900s described Spedalieri as a committed revolutionist and a precursor of modern liberalism.Footnote 2 In more recent times, historians have rejected Cimbali's oversimplifying interpretation, but they have not reached any consensus. Some have defined Spedalieri as an outspoken reactionary,Footnote 3 an apologist for papal authority,Footnote 4 or one of the founding fathers of modern Catholic traditionalism.Footnote 5 Others have depicted him as an “enlightened conservative,”Footnote 6 an Enlightenment thinker tout court,Footnote 7 a cunning apologist deploying the vocabulary of philosophie to defend Catholicism,Footnote 8 the promoter of a compromise between the French Revolution and the church,Footnote 9 or a theologian addressing the moral needs of the emerging modern society.Footnote 10
Spedalieri's book can best be understood as an “amphibious work,” as one of its commentators described it in 1796, because two natures coexist within it.Footnote 11On the Rights of Man was not a mere product of counterrevolutionary ideology, but it surely condemned the deeds of the French Constituent Assembly of 1789–91 and deployed some of the most infamous tropes of counterrevolutionary literature, such as the interpretation of the Revolution as an anti-Catholic conspiracy. On the other hand, if Cimbali overplayed the book's liberal character, some aspects of Spedalieri's thought delineated a path of conciliation, if not of convergence, between the church and the Revolution. The reason why On the Rights of Man stirred the public opinion lies in this ambiguity.
A close examination of Spedalieri's book and the debate that it sparked in the decade following its publication casts new light on the relationship between religion and politics in the age of revolutions. Until recent times, historians of modern Europe tended to dismiss religion as a marginal phenomenon. According to the secularization paradigm, starting from the eighteenth century, Western societies saw a steady decline of religious belief and practice and of the influence of creeds on politics and society; this transformation was allegedly sparked by the Enlightenment and then fostered by the French Revolution and by processes of industrialization and urbanization.Footnote 12 To be sure, there have been attempts to update this narrative in more sophisticated ways;Footnote 13 nonetheless, it has been increasingly called into question. While it is hard to deny that the Western world is today a secular society—that is, according to Charles Taylor, a society in which belief in God “is understood to be one option among others”—scholars have recently shifted their attention to the ways existing religions actively renegotiated their roles throughout the modern era.Footnote 14 Historians of the long nineteenth century on a global scale have criticized the narrative of secularization as simplistic and one-sided. According to Christopher Bayly, the period between 1780 and 1914 witnessed “the triumphal reemergence and expansion of ‘religion’ in the sense in which we now use the term.”Footnote 15 Jürgen Osterhammel, in turn, claimed that the decline of religion's influence “followed a number of different paths.”Footnote 16 Accordingly, secularization has been rethought as a process involving the redefinition of religious sensibilities and organizations rather than their sheer displacement from the public sphere.Footnote 17
Perhaps more than other periods, the eighteenth century has long been regarded as the era of the triumph of secularism. Only recently have historians shown that, even in the decades that preceded the French Revolution, religion was hardly a minor factor on the cultural and political scene.Footnote 18 It maintained a vital role in the daily life of Europeans and was even a significant component of the Enlightenment that was once considered its nemesis.Footnote 19 Some scholars have asserted that the origins of modernity and secularization are located within religion itself, and even that it is the idea of civil religion, rather than toleration and secularization, “that epitomized the basic political impulse of the Enlightenment.”Footnote 20
Be that as it may, the historiographical category of religious Enlightenment has gained much currency. Religious enlighteners, as they have been depicted by David Sorkin, advocated toleration and promoted a reasonable belief, compatible with the changing face of European society.Footnote 21 Helena Rosenblatt has specifically described the Christian Enlightenment as an attempt to renew Christian beliefs and to counter radical skepticism by using the tools of secular culture.Footnote 22 Ulrich Lehner and Jeffrey Burson, in turn, have further stressed the need to investigate the Catholic Enlightenment on its own terms, highlighting both its cultural dynamism and its apologetic nature.Footnote 23 This historiography has invaluably contributed to our understanding of eighteenth-century intellectual history, and it certainly calls for a reassessment of the role of religious ideas in the age of the French Revolution.Footnote 24 However, the label of Catholic Enlightenment has been applied too extensively—Spedalieri himself is frequently featured as an exponent of this trend.
In fact, although he felt the need to come to terms with secular culture, Spedalieri was not really an “enlightened” figure. In the works in defense of Catholicism that he published before 1789, which tried to strike a middle ground between the Catholic Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment, Spedalieri made ample use of terms and concepts of Enlightenment culture in order to neutralize what he regarded as the most radical and threatening feature of the Enlightenment itself—the drive to secularization conceived as the removal of religion from political life and perhaps even its abolition altogether.Footnote 25 However, although his writings contrasted strikingly with those that unequivocally condemned the philosophes and integrally rejected their ideas, Spedalieri did not agree with Catholic Enlightenment calls for the reform of Catholicism and of the church. Quite the contrary, the appropriation of some of the keywords of the Enlightenment was meant to make his defense of Catholicism in its then-current state more palatable to critics of religion.
The outbreak of the French Revolution and the polarization of public opinion between the supporters of the new regime and its relentless opponents convinced Spedalieri that the need to find a via media between the two extremes was all the more urgent. He further developed the ideas he had already put forward and adapted them to the new context. Assuming the re-Christianization of the postrevolutionary world as his ultimate goal, Spedalieri argued that some aspects of revolutionary political culture—popular sovereignty, the rights of man, and the contractualist origins of political power—were acceptable from a Catholic standpoint as long as the revolutionaries, in turn, agreed to abandon secularization and to uphold the traditional confessional organization of the state. Emphasizing the social utility of religion, Spedalieri maintained that the church should preserve its legal privileges—including the recognition of Catholicism as the only legal religion; the inalienability of church property; exemption from secular jurisdiction and taxation; control over censorship; the registering of births, deaths, and marriages and over charitable and educational institutions; state recognition of religious vows; and enforcement of judgments issued by ecclesiastical courts. However, defense of the confessional organization of the state did not correspond to defense of the Old Regime. According to Spedalieri, the church could coexist with any government willing to recognize its privileged legal status, including the new revolutionary regime. It was not modernity itself that should be rejected, but secularization, for a different modernity from that conceived by the revolutionaries—a confessional modernity, combining revolutionary politics and confessional states—was possible.
Spedalieri's confessional modernity was thus a third way between the excesses of the counterrevolutionaries and those of the enthusiasts of all things French. Far from gaining immediate acceptance, Spedalieri's ideas were harshly criticized during the 1790s and then set aside by the triumph of reactionary Catholicism during the Restoration. However, they resurfaced later in the nineteenth century and ultimately played a decisive role in the development of the church's attitudes toward modern culture, for they carved a path for Catholics to fight secularization from within and to reshape modernity accordingly.
SPEDALIERI'S WAGER
In 1775, in his encyclical Inscrutabile Divinae, the newly elected Pope Pius VI lambasted the “ravings” of modern Enlightenment culture as a “plague” and a “cancer” rapidly spreading throughout Europe. In such perilous times, he wrote, it was the duty of all “the guardians and shepherds of the Lord's flock” to come together in defense of the church. Overturning the attempt, though faint, of his predecessor Clement XIV to find a common ground between Catholicism and some aspects of Enlightenment culture, Pius VI deepened the divide created by Benedict XIV's “conservative turn” in the 1750s.Footnote 26 His clarion call resonated well beyond the Papal States.Footnote 27
It was at this time that Nicola Spedalieri first set foot in the papal capital. Born in Bronte, in eastern Sicily, in 1740, Spedalieri had studied at the Seminary of Monreale, where he became professor of theology in 1764, and then relocated to Rome between 1773 and 1774.Footnote 28 A modest theologian when he left his native island, Spedalieri rapidly established his reputation over the following decade, participating enthusiastically in Pius VI's campaign for the defense of the church against the perceived evils of the time. In 1778 he published his Analysis of Nicolas Fréret's Critical Examination of the Evidences of Christianity, in which he first sketched the argument for the social utility of Catholicism that he would fully develop in the 1790s.Footnote 29 Catholic apologists had long countered disbelief by arguing that only religion could ensure the survival of society. Such “social-utilitarian” assertions had become particularly common in the second half of the eighteenth century: French writers, such as Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier, explicitly asserted that Catholicism was necessary to the preservation of political stability; likewise, Italian Catholic apologists repeatedly stressed that religion offered an irreplaceable contribution to the welfare of the state.Footnote 30 Spedalieri's Analysis echoed such reflections and suggested that religion was undeniably beneficial to society because it turned the “external obligation” imposed by laws into a moral imperative, menacing the wicked with the threat of God's eternal punishment.Footnote 31 The Analysis, which received an enthusiastic reception, was followed in 1784 by a second apologetic work, the Refutation of the Examination of Christianity Conducted by Edward Gibbon, which countered Gibbon's claim that Christianity had contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire and reasserted the role of Catholicism in maintaining the social order.Footnote 32 Spedalieri's efforts as an apologist gained him the sympathy of Pius VI, a decent living as a beneficiary of the Vatican Basilica, and admittance to prominent intellectual and political circles in Rome. A member of the literary Academy of Arcadia since 1774, Spedalieri also entered into a close relationship with prelates of the Curia.Footnote 33
Spedalieri's contribution to the campaign launched by Pius VI, however, did not simply echo the recurrent tropes of Catholic polemics. Spedalieri also sketched out a new apologetic strategy in two academic discourses delivered in 1779. In the Reflection on the Influence of Christianity on Civil Society, he refined his argument for the social utility of religion. Targeting European monarchs’ recent attempts to intervene in ecclesiastical affairs, he suggested that it was the existing institutional organization of the church and the clergy's educational efforts that guaranteed Catholicism's beneficial influence on society.Footnote 34 Thus any attempt to reduce the autonomy of the church would also reduce social cohesion.Footnote 35 However, Spedalieri also exhorted his fellow apologists to speak the language of the Enlightenment in order to reach out to a wider audience, explaining that in order to be effective, the church's teachings should be “adapted to the dispositions that minds assume according to circumstances.”Footnote 36 This was not a call for unconditional acceptance of Enlightenment ideas, but rather an attempt to strike a middle ground between the excessive openness to secular culture of some Catholic Enlightenment thinkers—such as Giovanni Cristofano Amaduzzi, the author of the eloquently titled Philosophy Allied with Religion (1778)—and the abrasive criticism of modern philosophie by Counter-Enlightenment authors, which, Spedalieri thought, would hardly convince the enemies of Catholicism to reconsider their stance.Footnote 37 Without calling into question the doctrine and structure of the church, Catholic apologists had to accommodate features of the Enlightenment.
Such an effort surfaced even more explicitly in the Reflection on Statesmanship, in which Spedalieri affirmed that sovereignty was created by the people's consent and had to be exerted for the public good. He did not speculate on the possibility of removing a sovereign from the throne, but he cautiously endorsed contractualism and accepted a secularly defined “common happiness [as] the foundation of law.”Footnote 38 Spedalieri was not the first Catholic thinker to talk of happiness in secular terms—in Italy the word had been famously used in this way in Ludovico Antonio Muratori's 1749 On Public Happiness. However, the appropriation of the vocabulary of the Enlightenment did not imply an overall agreement with the new ideas. Rather, it served the purpose of reasserting the social utility of Catholicism and fighting more effectively against what Spedalieri regarded as the most dangerous outcome of modern thought—secularization.
The outbreak of the Revolution led Spedalieri to further elaborate on the principles he had outlined in the 1770s. In December 1789, he delivered a new speech to the Academy of Arcadia. Investigating “the means of preserving the rights of man in society,” he argued that no polity could survive without being innervated by Catholicism. This was the first step toward the drafting of On the Rights of Man, which kept Spedalieri busy for more than one year. On 21 November 1790, he wrote to the Parmesan publisher Giambattista Bodoni that he would probably submit to him “a new work, which I am finishing right now, in which I demonstrate that Catholicism is the only guardian of the rights of man in civil society. It is an almost all-political work of natural law, perfectly timed for the novelties that are currently being introduced everywhere.”Footnote 39 The agreement with Bodoni was not concluded, but Spedalieri continued to work. When the second edition of his 1778 Analysis was published in 1791 in Assisi by Ottavio Sgariglia, one of the main Italian publishers of anti-Jansenist and counterrevolutionary texts, Spedalieri himself announced in the introduction that his new work on the rights of man was “already under press.”Footnote 40
In fact, the publication process was not smooth and intersected with the formulation of the papal condemnation of the Revolution.Footnote 41 Still at the end of 1790, Pius VI had not expressed any public judgment on the Revolution, even though in a secret consistory on 29 March he had censured the principle of religious liberty proclaimed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The promulgation of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy by the French Constituent Assembly on 12 July and the passing on 26 November of a law that required all Catholic priests to take an oath of allegiance to the Civil Constitution itself precipitated the crisis. Between March and April 1791, Pius VI issued two breves, Quod aliquantum and Charitas, that condemned the revolutionary principles and produced a rift between Rome and Paris.Footnote 42 In this context, the circulation of Spedalieri's work, which accepted contractualism and the concept of the rights of man, seemed untimely to many. Cardinals Giacinto Sigismondo Gerdil, the prefect of the Congregation of the Index, and Tommaso Maria Mamachi, who was in charge of granting On the Rights of Man the imprimatur, opposed its publication. However, the breach with Paris had not gone uncontested. Some prelates were afraid that the papal condemnation would produce a schism and urged a softer line.Footnote 43 Appealing to this group, and possibly to Pius VI as well, with whom he had good relations, Spedalieri managed to have his manuscript reexamined.Footnote 44 The ex-Jesuit Gianvincenzo Bolgeni, the new reviewer, recommended its publication, while suggesting that the book appear without an official imprimatur and with a false place of publication, Assisi.Footnote 45 According to Bolgeni, this would shelter the Curia from the accusation of allowing the circulation of potentially subversive ideas.
On the Rights of Man, a four-hundred-page volume subdivided into six books, eventually appeared in Rome at the end of 1791.Footnote 46 Book One was devoted to the examination of the rights of man and of the organization of civil society. Books Two to Four highlighted the inefficiencies of societies based respectively on natural morals, atheism, and deism. Book Five spelled out the beneficial effects of Catholicism, and Book Six analyzed the French Revolution in the light of the principles hitherto expounded. “It is my intention,” wrote Spedalieri in the introduction, “to deal with these extremely serious subjects as a pure philosopher before the court of human reason. I will forget that I am a Christian and shelve my opinions on the divinity of Christian revelation, speaking exclusively from a political perspective.”Footnote 47 This affirmation, which echoed Hugo Grotius's statement in On the Law of War and Peace, was in line with the reflections that Spedalieri had presented in his earlier works and was meant to establish a point of contact with non-Christian thinkers.Footnote 48 However, while adopting the Enlightenment vocabulary of rights and contractualism, Spedalieri relied heavily on Thomas Aquinas and the Catholic tradition of natural law.Footnote 49
Spedalieri argued that natural rights could be exercised only in a civil society based on a social contract. His analysis was grounded in the claim that everyone instinctively pursues earthly happiness. Natural rights, whose exercise was necessary to achieve happiness, could be rationally derived from this inclination and consisted in the rights to self-preservation, self-improvement, and property, and in the freedom to assess and pursue the means most conducive to one's happiness. However, the exercise of rights was impossible in the state of nature, in which human instincts outweighed reason. Thus Spedalieri concluded that human happiness was contingent on the existence of a social contract—which could not be broken, because its infringement would precipitate society into anarchy and make happiness unachievable.Footnote 50
The social contract established sovereignty, but sovereignty had to be delegated to a prince in order to be exercised. The prince could be either a single man or a group of men, for “the people,” Spedalieri explained, remained “absolutely free to choose their form of government” between monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, and to change it on certain conditions. It was the people's right to select the prince too. The prince's appointment did not derive from the social contract; rather, it was “the object of a second contract, clinched by the people and the one to whom the exercise of sovereignty is offered.” The people delegated the exercise of power to the prince, who managed it in view of the public good, granted equal rights to everyone, and enforced compliance with the laws.Footnote 51
The existence of this second contract provided the basis for Spedalieri's defense of the right of revolution and for his controversial justification of tyrannicide. As an “ordinary quid pro quo contract,” the second contract was valid as long as the prince remained committed to the preservation of his subjects’ rights; if he failed to comply with this commitment, the contract was automatically terminated, and the prince, having turned into a tyrant, could be legitimately deposed. Admittedly, precautions had to be taken in order to make sure that the prince's removal from power was legal: the detrimental effects of his misconduct had to be “evident, notorious, and unquestionable,” and his deposition had to be sanctioned by a legally constituted body representing the whole nation. If this was the case, the overthrow of a tyrant—and, if necessary, even his killing—was legitimate.Footnote 52 Spedalieri buttressed his argument with a passing reference to the Jesuit monarchomach Juan de Mariana and with extensive citations from Aquinas's De regimine principum, which had argued that a tyrant's overthrow could be considered legitimate in exceptional cases in which “it belongs by right to a community to provide a ruler for itself.”Footnote 53 Such an excusatio non petita betrayed Spedalieri's awareness of how controversial this stance would prove to be. His justification of tyrannicide, which assumed an eerie air of prophecy after Louis XVI's beheading in January 1793, was not welcomed by counterrevolutionary intellectuals. Most importantly, references to Aquinas and Mariana could hardly belie the fact that Spedalieri's defense of the right of revolution relied on his endorsement of contractualism. Aquinas had made it clear that only some communities had the right to choose their sovereign, and even Mariana's argument for tyrannicide prescinded from any use of a contractualist vocabulary.Footnote 54 It is no coincidence that Spedalieri's harshest critics would identify, and decry, his system as “the system of the social contract” for years to come.
Religion, which had played no role theretofore, featured prominently in the ensuing discussion of the conditions ensuring the stability of society and the respect of the rights of man. According to Spedalieri, the existence of a coercive power was not enough, since the fear of a punishment was not sufficient to enforce the law. Civic education could certainly play a role, but not all people were likely to be properly educated. Thus, a society whose survival depended on “purely natural means” was doomed.Footnote 55 Nor was a society based on atheism or deism much sounder. Denying the existence of a God who punishes evil and rewards the good, atheists rejected the most effective instrument of social control; deists, too, even if they admitted the judgment of souls, could not make the most of this admission, because by opposing the practice of worship and the existence of a clergy in charge of admonishing the faithful, they made the introjection of moral principles impossible.Footnote 56 Only Catholicism could “make men constant in virtue” and maintain the social order. Priests, providing moral guidance to the faithful, made Catholics “the best friends of order, peace, and tranquility.” Catholicism, he concluded, was “the most reliable keeper of the rights of man in civil society.”Footnote 57
Spedalieri's analysis of what he considered the calamities of his time relied on these principles. The French Revolution was only the last manifestation of a wider attack on Christianity. Thus, while using the policies of the French Constituent Assembly as an example, Spedalieri also took issue with enlightened monarchs. Both monarchs and the Assembly had granted religious toleration, diminished the jurisdiction of the bishops, promoted the confiscation of ecclesiastical properties and the suppression of religious orders, and challenged the Pope's authority over the universal church.Footnote 58 However, Spedalieri declared, all of them had been fooled into thinking that these measures would consolidate state power. In fact, the eradication of Catholicism, he claimed, was the product of a plot for the destruction of all existing governments hatched by philosophes, Freemasons, and Jansenists. Conspiratorial readings of contemporary history circulated widely among counterrevolutionary authors and had deep roots in the intellectual tradition of the Counter-Enlightenment.Footnote 59 Spedalieri mentioned the works of Edmund Burke and d'Antraigues, among the first to put forward a conspiratorial interpretation of the Revolution, but he also referred to the Bourgfontaine plot, an anti-Jansenist canard invented in the mid-seventeenth century and popularized by the French polemicist Henri Michel Sauvage in the 1750s.Footnote 60 Conspirators, he warned, were aware that “it is impossible to bring down the social order without previously wiping out religion,” hence their attack on Catholicism. The only possible response, according to Spedalieri, was “to make Christianity flourish anew,” reestablishing a strictly confessional organization of the state, restoring Catholicism to its privileged legal status and the Pope to his condition as the head of the universal church.Footnote 61
Spedalieri was certainly among the harshest critics of the new order. However, Catholic counterrevolutionaries were generally adamant that revolutionary notions of rights and the doctrine of contractualism were unacceptable.Footnote 62 On the contrary, while repudiating French religious policies, Spedalieri accepted the principles of revolutionary public law, including the social contract, the right of resistance, and the rights of man—except for religious liberty and freedom of the press, principles incompatible with a confessional state.Footnote 63 If Catholicism were to be adopted as the state religion, he suggested, the revolutionary order could have been acceptable. All things considered, such an assertion equated to a denial of the autonomy of the political, for Spedalieri assumed that the legitimacy of a given regime depended on its subordination to rules and goals defined by religion. However, he was not as inflexible as most counterrevolutionary thinkers. He confronted the supporters of the new regime on their own ground and spoke their language to provide a reasonable demonstration that religion had a fundamental role to play in the modern world. Searching for a third way between counterrevolution and unreserved support for the new order, Spedalieri bet that the confessional organization of the state did not require the traditional alliance between church and monarchies, and that, on certain conditions, Catholicism could coexist with any political regime. This was a risky wager, since it separated the church from its long-time allies. It was ultimately based on the hypothesis that the most threatening aspect of modern culture—secularization—could best be fought by accommodating some aspects of revolutionary political culture, in order to produce an alternative form of modernity, in which representative regimes would go hand in hand with confessionalism. This was, in effect, a confessional modernity.
THE GREAT “PRESCINDER”: COUNTERREVOLUTIONARIES AGAINST SPEDALIERI
On the Rights of Man sparked the interest of dozens of readers well beyond the Papal States—theologians and diplomats, refined intellectuals and unsophisticated provincials. For instance, in May 1792 a Genoese correspondent informed Spedalieri that about a hundred copies of his book were being marketed in Liguria and that the rights of man were on the lips of priests, regulars, bishops, and even nuns.Footnote 64 However, Spedalieri's success also triggered the appearance of a good number of rejoinders, which defended the divine origin of sovereignty and the alliance of throne and altar, calling into question the viability of Spedalieri's confessional modernity.
Calls to counter Spedalieri's work first came from the diplomats and authorities of Catholic Europe, as On the Rights of Man apparently added fuel to the fire of those who contested the legitimacy of absolute monarchy. On 27 January 1792, the Portuguese ambassador in Rome sent an alarming letter to Lisbon, advising the minister of foreign affairs to forbid the publication of any translation of Spedalieri's work and to prevent the spreading of its “horrible principles.”Footnote 65 Likewise, on 29 February the Spanish ambassador, José Nicolás de Azara, wrote to his government that the title of Spedalieri's book was “the same as the declaration approved by the French Assembly; its principles [were] identical too.” In order to drive back such a threat, Azara argued on 7 March, “Church and kings [had] to take the field together and fight with all the temporal and spiritual weapons at their disposal.”Footnote 66 These reactions were not isolated. The Piedmontese government, urged by the Archbishop of Turin, Cardinal Vittorio Gaetano Costa d'Arignano, prohibited the importation of the book and recalled the copies already in circulation.Footnote 67 The same decision was taken in Vienna and Naples. However, censorial measures proved ineffective. In May 1792, a Sicilian correspondent wrote to Spedalieri that, despite the ban, he had smuggled eight copies of the book into the country with the complicity of a customs guard. Some months later, another letter from Sicily informed Spedalieri that his work “had been read by all the professors of the University of Catania,” and that the local bishop “always [kept] it before his eyes.”Footnote 68
It was in Rome that a response to Spedalieri was first elaborated by writers who had embraced Counter-Enlightenment ideals and after 1789 transitioned into the counterrevolutionary field. Among them was Luigi Cuccagni, the editor in chief of the Ecclesiastical Journal. Published weekly, the journal reviewed books pertaining to religion. Since its editorial line was regularly discussed by Cuccagni with Pius VI, the journal was generally considered a semiofficial voice of the Holy See, so it could not host the refutation of a book whose appearance had been supported by sectors of the Curia. However, if Spedalieri could not be openly criticized, his much-contested principles could certainly be rebutted.Footnote 69 As soon as the end of March 1792, while reviewing the anti-Rousseauist book of an obscure Cistercian monk, Bernardo Salvoni, Cuccagni made it clear that “obedience [was] due to the sovereign not just because of a pact, but because of a law that precedes every pact.” The relationship between monarch and subjects, he argued, echoing a traditional trope of absolutist political theory, was as natural and unbreakable as that between father and child. Cuccagni further elaborated this argument some months later in the Supplement to the Ecclesiastical Journal. “By God's will,” he wrote, “man was born to obey and to be subject” and had no right to resist sovereigns. Drawing on Aquinas and Tertullian, he also argued that the “impious doctrine of tyrannicide” and contractualism had to be “execrated by every Christian.”Footnote 70 Religion, for Cuccagni, had to stand as a bulwark against every attempt to undermine the foundations of monarchical power.
Not only contractualism, but also Spedalieri's strategy at large, were soon called into question by counterrevolutionary authors. This was the case with Giuseppe Tamagna's Two Letters, a three-hundred-page treatise showcasing a vast apparatus of biblical and patristic erudition. A professor of theology at the University of Rome, Tamagna expanded on Cuccagni's argument for the divine origin of sovereignty, but he also rebuked Spedalieri for “conducting himself as a pure philosopher.” The shortcomings of Spedalieri's work were the consequence of his attempt to incorporate features of Enlightenment culture. “Do not disassemble the Catholic system,” Tamagna warned his readers; “do not graft Rousseau onto Christ, the false politicians onto the Apostles, the citizen generated by philosophy onto that created by God.”Footnote 71 Catholicism and revolutionary political culture, apparently, were bound to remain separate from each other, and reciprocally hostile.
Tamagna's claim met with great success among Spedalieri's critics. Camillo Rubbi, a professor at the Roman College and the author of Spedalieri's Doctrine of Sovereignty Refuted by Itself, lamented that Spedalieri, though “a man extremely attached to our saintly religion,” had decided to follow exclusively the path of reason. As a result, his doctrine of sovereignty was self-contradictory—a symptom of the flaws of unaided human reason.Footnote 72 Such criticism was further developed by the Barnabite Paolo Agostino Cavalleri in Antonio Bianchi's Letter from the Adriatic. Cavalleri blamed Spedalieri for acting as a “prescinder”; that is, as one of those philosophers, mainly “Protestant scholars of public law,” who “prescinded from God, religion, and the afterlife” in their works. Lacking any stable point of reference, “prescinders” were “able to prove one thing and its opposite simultaneously,” unintendedly demonstrating the fallibility of human reason.Footnote 73 Even if Spedalieri's religiosity could not be doubted, his purely rational political theory was not different from those of other “prescinders” and had to be dismissed as “totally false, completely unreasonable, and unfounded.”Footnote 74 Following in the same wake, the anonymous author of A Philosopher's Letter on Spedalieri's “On the Rights of Man” argued that Spedalieri's reason came “from the same mint” as d'Holbach's System of Nature, and that Spedalieri himself, “failing to take into consideration the double being of men,” material and spiritual, had taken sides “with atheists and naturalists.”Footnote 75 Likewise, an anonymous two-volume work, Spedalieri's System of the Social Contract Refuted, criticized Spedalieri's ambition to act as a pure philosopher, remarking that “reason, if led by merely human principles, [was] often uncertain and even absurd,” and refuted his identification of earthly happiness as man's main goal.Footnote 76 However, On the Rights of Man did not have to be entirely thrown away. “Without Book One,” wrote the anonymous author, Spedalieri's defense of the church and his criticism of the Revolution were commendable.Footnote 77 The confessional organization of the state, in other words, had to be paired up with the utter rejection of the revolutionary order and the restoration of the Old Regime.
Refusing any accommodation with revolutionary France, Spedalieri's opponents called into question the legitimacy of Spedalieri's wager and dismissed his project as pointless or even dangerous. As Counter-Enlightenment intellectuals had shown, the idea that reality could be understood through, and regulated by, human reason alone could not be accepted—not even as a way to make one's arguments more palatable to secular intellectuals, as Spedalieri had done.Footnote 78 Moreover, defending the divine origin of sovereignty against contractualism, Spedalieri's critics emphasized that only the alliance of throne and altar could grant religion its role at the center of human society. For them, Spedalieri's attempt to seek dialogue with secular culture was useless. The cause of religion was inseparable from that of absolute monarchies, and the re-Christianization of Europe could only be the outcome of a no-holds-barred fight against the principles of 1789. This response to the Revolution was modern in its own way, but hardly compatible with Spedalieri's plan.Footnote 79
CONFESSIONAL MODERNITY, ENLIGHTENED ABSOLUTISM, AND PAPAL SUPREMACY
Writers like Cuccagni and Cavalleri were the heirs of an intellectual tradition—the Counter-Enlightenment—that had long affirmed the need for a head-on confrontation with modern secular culture. It is hardly surprising, thus, that they did not look kindly upon Spedalieri. However, On the Rights of Man also displeased several Italian Jansenists who had been trying to conciliate, not without difficulties and ambiguities, Catholicism and Enlightenment. To be sure, they found Spedalieri's endorsement of conspiracy theories particularly irritating, but it was his criticism of enlightened absolutism, which they had staunchly supported, and his defense of the privileges of the church—and of papal primacy—that convinced some of them to join the fray and attack his work.
In the decades preceding the Revolution, Jansenists had insisted on the need to rethink the relationship between religion and politics, placing all their bets on the reforming action of enlightened monarchs such as Joseph II in Austria and Peter Leopold in Tuscany.Footnote 80 Of course, this was not to argue for the disentanglement of church and state. Kings, according to the Jansenists, received their authority from God and had the right to reform a church apparently unable to reform itself. Thus renewed, national churches, roughly modeled on the French Gallican Church and turned into branches of state administration, would give up their utterly political concerns to devote themselves exclusively to their spiritual mission. Although this transformation did not equate to the overcoming of the confessional state, it certainly implied severe curtailment of church privileges, as well as a substantial limitation of papal authority.Footnote 81 The rights of sovereigns in religious affairs, on the contrary, were expanded. Accordingly, the Jansenists at first looked with interest at the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, whose project for the reform of the church seemed to echo the provisions of enlightened monarchs, but then developed a more critical stance toward the Revolution after the monarchy's overthrow. It is not surprising, then, that for them Spedalieri's confessional modernity was a no-go, because it presupposed the restoration of the rights of the papacy over national churches and undermined the authority of monarchs.
The vindication of enlightened absolutism stood at the core of the anonymous Letter of Reflection to Spedalieri published in Milan in 1792. While debunking the “nauseating” theory of the Jansenist conspiracy, the anonymous author rebutted Spedalieri's attack on enlightened absolutism as an antecedent of the Revolution and embarked on a wholehearted defense of Joseph II's measures against ecclesiastical jurisdiction, of his regulation of worship practices, and of his attack on monastic orders. Against Spedalieri's emphasis on the Pope as the head of the church, the author invoked the reforming intervention of “Christian legislators” in religious matters.Footnote 82
These reflections were more fully developed by Pietro Tamburini, a professor of moral theology at the University of Pavia and the principal Jansenist theologian south of the Alps. His Theologico-political Letters, published in several editions between 1792 and 1794, were the most complex rejoinder to Spedalieri's book.Footnote 83 While arguing extensively that the equation between Jansenism and Revolution was “an out-and-out lie,” the Letters defended the divine right of kings and advocated the creation of national churches under monarchs’ control.Footnote 84 Although in 1797, after the republicanization of Lombardy, Tamburini would conveniently appear much more willing to set aside the defense of divine-right monarchy and to accommodate contractualist theories of sovereignty, he never came to embrace Spedalieri's ideas, which were incompatible with the state-sponsored creation of national churches more or less autonomous from Rome.
Tamburini's defense of enlightened absolutism prompted several Curial theologians to publish refutations of the Theologico-political Letters between 1793 and 1795. Whilst some of these works were mainly repertoires of anti-Jansenist allegations, primarily meant to counteract Tamburini's call for a state-led reform of the church, others were outright defenses of Spedalieri's principles. Among the former, Bolgeni's Problem whether Jansenists Are Jacobins and Alessandro Stagni's Theologico-political Work barely mentioned Spedalieri, while Cuccagni, in his Jansenism without Defense and Poorly Defended, specified that he did not want to “defend the doctrine of the social contract or any other of Spedalieri's principles.”Footnote 85 On the contrary, other writers seized the opportunity to uphold Spedalieri's system. Piatti, the otherwise obscure author of The Faulty Logic of the Jansenist Pietro Tamburini, contrasted Tamburini's political thought with Spedalieri's.Footnote 86 Francesco Maria Bottazzi, a young priest and the author of The Enemy of the Throne in Disguise, argued that Tamburini's doctrine, undermining the church's authority, jeopardized the prince's power, whilst Spedalieri, shedding light on the real origin of sovereignty, had indicated how to make it stable.Footnote 87 Spedalieri's work also exerted a great influence on the polemicist Luigi Martorelli, whose treatise On Monarchy, though not explicitly directed against Tamburini, rejected the divine right of kings and supported the social contract.Footnote 88 Admittedly, these authors’ primary concern was the defense of the rights of the church against the pretensions of enlightened monarchs. Nonetheless, convinced as they were that the church should retain the role it had traditionally played in the political arena, they were airing Spedalieri's ideas even when the proclamation of the French Republic and the killing of Louis XVI had made them still more controversial than they were in 1791.
Although after 1791 Pius VI no longer took into consideration the possibility of an accommodation with revolutionary France and never embraced Spedalieri's project, Curial prelates were happy to use On the Rights of Man as a pawn in their fight against the curtailment of church privileges. In 1794, the Pope issued the bull Auctorem fidei, which condemned the 1786 Synod of Pistoia, summoned in northern Tuscany by the local Jansenist bishop, Scipione de’ Ricci. Inspired by Tamburini and supported by Grand Duke Peter Leopold, the synod had envisioned a Jansenist reform of the Tuscan Church, which was supposed to strengthen its ties with the grand-ducal government and to acquire a certain degree of autonomy from Rome. Hitherto the boldest assertion of the rights of sovereigns over the church, the synod soon became a reference point for supporters of enlightened absolutism throughout Europe.Footnote 89 Thus censoring the synod's decrees in 1794, the Holy See was severely limiting the princes’ right to intervene in religious affairs and restating the centrality of the Pope as the head of the church.
When, unsurprisingly, Catholic monarchs hesitated to permit publication of the bull in their countries, Curial prelates resorted to Spedalieri's work to make their case.Footnote 90 On the one hand, Spedalieri's anti-Jansenist assertions could be effectively used to discredit the Jansenist-led synod and its supporters. Most importantly, however, some of Pius VI's collaborators thought that adumbrating the idea that the church might eventually relinquish its role as the defender of the Old Regime to embrace contractualism and representative government could convince monarchs to promulgate Auctorem fidei and recognize papal supremacy, thus advancing an ultramontane agenda. With foresight, the Curia had already allowed the reprinting of On the Rights of Man at the end of 1793, while the theologian of the pontifical household, Tommaso Vincenzo Pani, prohibited the publication of new works against Spedalieri.Footnote 91 Some months later, Giovanni Marchetti, an editor of the Ecclesiastical Journal, reviewing Bolgeni's book against Tamburini, stated that “the origin of sovereignty [was] a matter of contention,” without taking a clear stance for the divine right of kings.Footnote 92
This is not to say that Pius VI and his collaborators were actually thinking of an agreement with revolutionary France as a viable alternative to the alliance of throne and altar, nor were they willing to seek dialogue with the enthusiasts of the Revolution—quite the contrary, the Pope was growing increasingly supportive of the anti-French coalition. However, he was aware that On the Rights of Man could be expediently used to restate the supremacy of the Holy See over religious affairs. This was the price kings had to pay to retain a precious ally in the fight against the Revolution. Spedalieri's argument for a form of modernity combining revolutionary political culture with confessional regimes—scathingly criticized by the Jansenists and instrumentally used by the Pope and his collaborators to shore up the counterrevolutionary alliance—seemed already bound to fade away.
THE ITALIAN “SISTER REPUBLICS” AS CONFESSIONAL STATES?
Although it might have been tempting, Spedalieri decided not to reply to any of his many refuters. While some of his correspondents wrote him that his rejoinder was much needed, others convinced him that the best way to express his contempt for his opponents was by remaining silent.Footnote 93 Among all his adversaries, he wrote contemptuously to a friend in 1794, “there [was] not even one who [was] not a nonentity.”Footnote 94 However, his silence was perhaps also the consequence of the controversies sparked by On the Rights of Man. Before dying in 1795, Spedalieri started working on a history of the Pontine Marshes, a swampy area southeast of Rome. It was Pius VI, the main promoter of the marshes’ reclamation, who commissioned this work from him—a confirmation of their close relationship—but it is hard not to see this last endeavor as a retreat from politics, whether voluntarily chosen or forced upon Spedalieri.Footnote 95
However, the republicanization of the Italian peninsula after 1796 gave Spedalieri's ideas a new impulse. Notwithstanding the criticism of revolutionary religious policies, On the Rights of Man was largely seen as the first step toward a reconciliation between the Catholic Church and the new order—a need strongly felt by the supporters of the so-called “sister republics,” daily faced with opposition from most Catholic clergy. Spedalieri's book was reprinted in Venice in 1797, right after the fall of the Most Serene Republic and the creation of a French-like democratic municipality, and was referenced along with Rousseau's Social Contract by Giuseppe Compagnoni, the first-ever professor of constitutional law south of the Alps, in his 1797 Fundamentals of Democratic Constitutional Law.Footnote 96 Most importantly, several Catholics found in Spedalieri a rationale for their support for the new republics, which, they hoped, would subsume religion as their founding principle.
Drawing explicitly on Spedalieri, the Venetian priest Scipione Bonifacio chose to cooperate with the new republican regime in order to Christianize it and avert the promulgation of anti-religious legislations. An experienced apologist and an opponent of religious toleration in the pre-revolutionary years, in 1797 Bonifacio published a series of seven pamphlets calling for a closer cooperation between ecclesiastical authorities and the secular arm. Specifically, he advocated the equalization of religious and civil laws, affirming that “no one [could] be legally forced to do what is prohibited by religious laws or prevented from doing what religious laws command.”Footnote 97 Moreover, since public ethos and religious morality supposedly coincided, Bonifacio identified the cornerstone of every stable human polity in a “religious social contract.”Footnote 98 Catholics, he made clear, could accept the new regime as long as it remained confessional, as Spedalieri had taught.
Spedalieri's ideas also guided the Bolognese Niccolò Fava Ghisilieri, a member of the Cispadane Constitutional Convention of 1797. The convention was supposed to draw up a constitution for the Cispadane Republic, which, at least in its supporters’ intentions, would progressively incorporate the Italian peninsula. Fava soon emerged as one of the prominent members of the convention's moderate wing and persuaded his colleagues to include in the constitution an article that recognized Catholicism as the official state religion. The speech he delivered on 25 January to convince his fellows was woven with references to Spedalieri. Arguing that the “political happiness of the republic” depended on its moral principles, Fava identified Catholicism as the primary staple of the new regime and emphasized the importance of public worship as a means to construct a widely shared ethos.Footnote 99 As he made clear in a second speech On Religious Tolerance, believers of other religions were to be granted political rights, but they could not receive the right of public worship.Footnote 100 Admittedly, Fava accepted a certain degree of institutional separation between church and state. In his Politico-moral Reflections, published right after the end of the Convention, he suggested that Catholic priests be excluded from public offices, in order to avoid any direct tutelage by the ecclesiastical hierarchies of the new regime. Nonetheless, following in Spedalieri's footsteps, he maintained that Catholic laity had to cooperate with the new republics in order to turn them into confessional states.
The experience of Catholics living under the new regimes, however, also revealed the limits of Spedalieri's project, which was ultimately predicated not upon the pure and simple acceptance of the revolutionary order, but rather upon the need to neutralize its most subversive aspect—secularization. This was the case with Francesco Maria Bottazzi. The author of a book in defense of Spedalieri in 1794, after the proclamation of the Roman Republic in 1798 Bottazzi published a Republican Catechism that was meant as a “vindication” of Spedalieri but went actually far beyond the limits of Spedalieri's work.Footnote 101 On the one hand, Bottazzi argued that democracy was the best form of government—whereas Spedalieri had just affirmed that Catholicism was compatible with any political regime. On the other hand, Bottazzi expected the establishment of a new regime to encourage a reform of Catholicism itself, which had been “horribly disfigured by those who used to preach doctrines that are not contained in the sacred code of revelation.”Footnote 102 While Spedalieri had maintained that Catholicism was in no need of reform whatsoever, Bottazzi was adamant that such a process was necessary and entailed the rejection of any conflation of religion and politics. For Bottazzi, the depoliticization of Catholicism would make it more suited to the needs of modern society. If Catholicism was to play a role in the modern world, that role required the overcoming of the confessional state. Of course, this was not to say that religion should be plunged into social irrelevance. Rather, the better to promote the practice of Catholic values in society, Bottazzi claimed, Catholics should—and could—accept the complete secularization of the political sphere.
For another of Spedalieri's early disciples, Federico Cavriani, not even the secularization of politics was enough. In 1792, Cavriani, who was then a priest and the right-hand man of the papal legate in Urbino, had authored an Essay on the Basic Principles of the Rights of Man, a seventy-page summary of Spedalieri's book.Footnote 103 In 1797, after renouncing the priesthood, he published a revised version of his Essay, titled Elements of Republicanism. The following year, a second edition of the Elements came out. While Spedalieri's argument about the social utility of religion held true in both versions of the Elements, little remained of the rest of his project. In the 1797 edition, Cavriani called for a radical democratization of the church in order to meet the needs of modern society.Footnote 104 However, church reform was not enough. In 1798, Cavriani explained that the reform of Catholicism—now turned into a sort of Christian deism—would ultimately make the very existence of an institutional church superfluous.Footnote 105 In a world with no church, it goes without saying, the confessional organization of the state would be nothing more than a distant memory. Although their positions did not coincide, both Bottazzi and Cavriani fundamentally altered Spedalieri's ideas by assuming that a society informed by Catholic values was not necessarily the product of an officially Catholic state—a distinction that would arguably be crucial for liberal Catholics during the nineteenth century, but that was also a far cry from Spedalieri's project for a confessional modernity.
Faced with the need to deal with the republican regimes created in the Italian peninsula by the French army, Catholic intellectuals tried to turn Spedalieri's ideas into a blueprint for political action. Some, like Bonifacio and Fava, chose to cooperate with the new regimes in order to promote their confessionalization, and their attempts were at least partially successful. By contrast, to those who, like Bottazzi and Cavriani, came to consider the advent of secular polities as an irreversible step, Spedalieri's project seemed too closely tied to the defense of a key feature of prerevolutionary regimes to offer a viable solution. In order for Catholicism to suit the needs of newly emerging societies and to retain social relevance, they argued, it was necessary to do away with the defense of confessional states.
CONCLUSION
Born as an attempt to mediate between two opposites, Spedalieri's book ended up caught in the crossfire. Counterrevolutionary thinkers blamed Spedalieri for envisioning a confessional state outside the framework of the Old Regime, and reasserted the need for the alliance of throne and altar and their outright rejection of revolutionary modernity. The Jansenists questioned Spedalieri's negative assessment of enlightened absolutism and defended regalist doctrines, vindicating the possibility of a state-led religious reform with no revolutionary implications. Only a few of Spedalieri's admirers, in turn, proved willing to partake in the new revolutionary regimes in order to re-Christianize the state and society. Some others, by contrast, while maintaining that society needed religious foundations, came to believe that confessional states had become anachronistic, and that Catholicism itself should be reformed in order to suit the needs of newly emerging societies. The debate over On the Rights of Man thus reveals that the French Revolution did not just pit the supporters of the new regime against the advocates of traditional confessional states, but also engendered the emergence of competing views on how religion should inform politics and society.
Spedalieri's ultimate goal was certainly the defense of Catholicism and of the confessional organization of the state, but the means he chose—the selective appropriation of elements of modern culture—distanced him from many other Catholic intellectuals who had stood up against the Enlightenment and then embraced counterrevolutionary ideas. Nonetheless, he did not advocate any kind of reform of Catholic hierarchies and practices, as Catholic Enlightenment thinkers had done, nor did he accept the separation of church and state or the principle of religious liberty. His wager relied on the conviction that Catholicism and the Catholic Church in their then current state were not incompatible with modernity, because an alternative to the secular modernity of the Enlightenment and the Revolution could be created—a confessional modernity, combining the new forms of politics with the traditional confessional organization of the state. Giving up the alliance with kings and embracing the doctrines of contractualism and popular sovereignty, the church would maintain its public relevance and its hold on society. Rejecting secularization and sacrificing religious freedom, in turn, modern states would gain the support of Catholicism, the only ally that could ensure their stability and survival. According to Spedalieri, this would be a win–win situation.
Notwithstanding Spedalieri's hopes, his project did not fare well in the 1790s and in the early nineteenth century. However, the idea that a mutually advantageous agreement between the church and the new world produced by the Revolution was possible did eventually gain wide currency. Although it did not play a significant role in the drafting of the Napoleonic concordats, which were essentially forced upon Pius VII, and nor was it popular among the reactionary Catholics of the Restoration era, it resurfaced in the 1820s, when both in Europe and in Latin America Catholicism was confronted with another wave of revolutions. While a German translation of On the Rights of Man had already appeared at Passau in 1794–5, and a new Italian edition was published at Genoa in 1805–6—in the aftermath of the concordat between the Holy See and the Napoleonic Republic of Italy and of the annexation of the Ligurian Republic to the French Empire—new editions of Spedalieri's work appeared frequently in the following decades. A Spanish version of Book One of On the Rights of Man appeared in Mexico City in 1823—when a new constitution was soon to be drafted and the confessional nature of the Mexican state was under discussion—integral Spanish versions were published in Mexico City in 1824 and in Salamanca in 1842, in the aftermath of the liberals’ victory in the first Carlist war; and new Italian editions came out in 1848 in Palermo and Milan, when yet another wave of revolutions was already on its way.Footnote 106 Spedalieri's ideas, which apparently resonated with portions of Catholic public opinion, continued to be widely discussed.Footnote 107 Both Antonio Rosmini, the leading figure of Italian liberal Catholicism, and the Jesuit Luigi Taparelli d'Azeglio, the author of a major Essay on Natural Law (1840–43) and one of the first theorists of the principle of subsidiarity (as well as the coiner of the phrase “social justice”), read and commented on On the Rights of Man—although neither particularly liked it.Footnote 108 In France, by contrast, Léon Godard, the author of The Principles of ’89 and the Catholic Doctrine (1861), a complex attempt to reconcile Catholicism and revolutionary political culture, repeatedly cited Spedalieri as one of his main influences.Footnote 109
It took longer, but eventually Spedalieri's prospect of a confessional modernity came to be embraced in Rome as well. In the summer of 1820, when the Congregation on the Ecclesiastical Affairs of Spain met to discuss the restoration of the Constitution of Cádiz, only one of its members argued that the principle of popular sovereignty, sanctioned by the Constitution, was acceptable, “as [had] been argued by Spedalieri.”Footnote 110 But from the second half of the nineteenth century, leading figures of the papal Curia endorsed the idea that in order to re-Christianize society and reconfessionalize the state, a certain degree of flexibility might be more expedient than intransigent opposition to revolutionary and liberal political culture. Whether they had read Spedalieri or not, these figures argued that some aspects of liberal politics should be accommodated in order to halt the process of secularization, as Spedalieri had taught. To be sure, the promoters of a strategy of hostile confrontation had hardly disappeared—the publication of the Syllabus of Errors in 1864 proves that they were still a majority—but the need for a change was ever more widely perceived. In 1863, for instance, the Jesuit Carlo Maria Curci, the influential founder of La Civiltà Cattolica, explicitly affirmed that Catholics could accept modern liberties and cooperate with liberal regimes if this was the best way they had to fight for the re-Christianization of society and the state.Footnote 111 The increasing involvement of Catholics in the public life of liberal states in the late nineteenth century, frequently combined with the ill-concealed goal of re-Christianizing politics, stands as a testimony to the success of a strategy first outlined by Spedalieri, if not directly inspired by his work. Yet that same strategy could serve very different ends. The twentieth century would show in turn that Spedalieri's notion that the church might cooperate with any political regime, as long as that regime offered a chance to re-Christianize the state and society, could be used to accommodate a diverse range of modern political associations, including those that explicitly rejected liberal or revolutionary principles. But that, more troubling, story of accommodation and the unintended consequences of ideas first articulated by Spedalieri is one best left for a later exploration.
