Spain, enervated by the reign of Philip III. and Ferdinand VI., had recovered some degree of internal vitality and external dignity during the long reign of Charles III.; Campomanes, Florida Blanca, the Comte d'Aranda, his ministers, had struggled against superstition, that second nature of the Spaniards. A coup d'état, meditated in silence, and executed like a conspiracy by the court, had driven out of the kingdom the Jesuits, who reigned under the name of the kings. The family agreement between Louis XV. and Charles III., in 1761, had guaranteed the thrones, and all the possessions of the different branches of the house of Bourbon. But this political compact had been unable to guarantee this many-branched dynasty against the decay of its root, and that degeneracy that gives effeminate and weak princes as successors to mighty kings. The Bourbons became satraps at Naples, and in Spain crowned monks, and the very palace of the Escurial had assumed the appearance and the gloom of a monastery.
The monacal system devoured Spain, and yet this unfortunate country adored the evil that destroyed it. After having been subject to the caliphs, Spain became the conquest of the popes; and their authority reigned paramount there under every costume; whilst theocracy made its last efforts there. Never had the sacerdotal system more completely swayed a nation, and never had a nation been reduced to a more abject state of degradation. The Inquisition was its government,—the auto-da-fés its triumphs,—bull-fights and processions its only diversions. Had the inquisitorial reign lasted a few years more, this people would have been no longer reckoned amongst the civilised inhabitants of Europe.
Charles III. had trembled at each new effort he made to emancipate his government; his good intentions had all been frustrated and checked, and he had been forced to sacrifice his ministers to the vengeance of superstition. Florida Blanca and d'Aranda died in exile, to which they had been condemned for the crime of having served their country. The weak Charles IV. had mounted the throne and reigned for several years, guided by a faithless wife, a confessor, and a favourite. The loves of Godoy and the queen formed the whole of the Spanish policy, and to the fortune of the favourite all the rest of the empire was sacrificed. What mattered it that the fleet rotted in the unfinished ports of Charles III.—that Spanish America asserted its independence—that Italy bent beneath the yoke of Austria—that the house of Bourbon combated in vain in France the progress of a new system—that the Inquisition and the monks cast a gloom over and devoured the whole of the peninsula,—all this was nothing to the court, provided the queen were but loved and Godoy great. The palace of Aranjuez was like the walled tomb of Spain, into which the active spirit that now agitated Europe could no longer penetrate.
VI.
The state of Italy was yet worse; for it was severed into pieces that, unlike the snake, were unable to reunite. Naples was under the severe sway of Spain, and the yoke of Austria pressed on Milan and Lombardy. Rome was nought but the capital of an idea—her people had disappeared, and she had now become the modern Ephesus, at which each cabinet sought an oracle favourable to its own cause, and paid for this purpose the members of the sacred college. Although the centre of all diplomatic intrigue, and the spot where all worldly ambition humbled itself but to increase its power,—although this court could shake Europe to its foundations, it was yet unable to govern it. The elective aristocracy, cardinals chosen by powers at variance with each other; the elective monarchy, a pope whose qualifications were old age and feebleness, and who was only crowned on condition of a speedy decease: such was the temporal government of the Roman States. This government combined in itself all the weakness of anarchy, and all the vices of despotism. It had produced its inevitable result, the servitude of the state, the poverty of the government and the misery of the population; Rome was no longer anything but the great Catholic municipality, and her government nought save a republic of diplomatists. Rome possessed a temple enriched with the offerings of the Christian world, a sovereign and ambassadors, but neither population, treasure, nor army. It was the venerated shadow of that universal monarchy to which the popes had pretended in the golden age of Catholicism, and of which they had only preserved the capital and the court.
VII.
Venice drew near its fall, but the silence and mystery of its government concealed even from the Venetians the decrepitude of the state. The government was an aristocratic sovereignty, founded on the corruption of the people and treachery, for the master sinew of the government was espionage; its prestige, mystery; its power, the torture. It lived on terror and voluptuousness; its police was a system of secret confession, of each against the other. Its cells, termed the Piombi or Leads, and which were entered at night by the Bridge of Sighs, were a hell that closed on the captive never to re-open. The wealth of the East flowed in on Venice from the fall of the Lower Empire. She became the refuge of Greek civilisation, and the Constantinople of the Adriatic; and the arts had emigrated thither from Byzance, with commerce. Its marvellous palaces, washed by the waves, were crowded together on a narrow spot of ground, so that the city was like a vessel at anchor, on board which a people driven from the land have taken refuge with all their treasures. She was thus impregnable, but could not exercise the least influence over Italy.
VIII.
Genoa, a more popular and more turbulent republic, subsisted only by her fleet and her commerce. Hemmed in between barren mountains and a gulf without a shore, it was only a port peopled by sailors. The marble palaces, built one above the other on the rocky banks, looked down on the sea, their sole territory. The portraits of the doges and the statue of Andreà Doria constantly reminded the Genoese that from the waves had proceeded their riches and their renown, and that there alone they could hope to look for them. Its ramparts were impregnable, its arsenals full; and thus Genoa formed the stronghold of armed commerce.
The immense country of Tuscany, governed and rendered illustrious by the Médici, those Pericles of Italy, was learned, agricultural, industrious, but unwarlike. The house of Austria ruled it by its archdukes, and these princes of the north, transported to the palaces of the Pitti or the Cômo, contracted the mild and elegant manners of the Tuscans; and the climate and serenity of the hills of Florence softened there even tyranny, and these princes became voluptuaries or sages. Florence, the city of Leo X., of philosophy, and the arts, had transformed even religion. Catholicism, so ascetic in Spain, so gloomy in the north, so austere and literal in France, so popular at Rome, had become at Florence, under the Médici and the Grecian philosophers, a species of luminous and Platonic theory, whose dogmata were only sacred symbols, and whose pomps were only pleasures that overpowered the mind and the senses. The churches at Florence were more museums of Christ than his sanctuaries; the colonies of all the arts and trades of Greece had emigrated, on the entry of Mahomet II. into Constantinople, to Florence, and there they had prospered; and a new Athens, enriched like the ancient with temples, porticoes, and statues, beautified the banks of the Arno.