BEFORE THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
sance made Italy for a time the chief center of European culture and art. But war from without and dissension from within had long before the eighteenth century impoverished the land and left it weak and divided. Says the historian of Piedmont: "What Italy really attained during the latter end of the eighteenth century was not happiness, but cessation from suffering; there was not actual progress in Italy, but only a stay in her decline."[1] Spain and France and Austria for generations regarded Italy as a mere pawn upon the chessboard — a mere make-weight to aid in adjusting the "Balance of Power."
After the middle of the sixteenth century, France in her own name figured little in Italian affairs in comparison with Spain, but the so-called Spanish Bourbons, who ruled a large part of Italy in the eighteenth century, were of course really French; and French ideas and French fashions never ceased to exert a marked influence in the peninsula. Throughout the seventeenth century the greatest power in Italy was Spain, which, indeed, maintained peace, but hampered industry and individual initiative by narrow-minded and absurd interference. Early in the eighteenth century, as a result of the war of the Spanish Succession, Austria forged to the front in Italy and assumed the leading political rôle.
It is needless to remark that as yet Italian unity was hardly a dream, and that Italy as such had no voice in the councils that parceled out her territory among foreign rulers. This very fact makes difficult a clear understanding of political conditions below the surface in Italy in the eighteenth century, since the changes in boundaries and in masters were made without reference to the desires of the people and the interests of the country, and hence without reference to the organic development of the national life. Whereas in French or English history the sequence of events can be traced in something like logical order, the thread of Italian history is so tangled that one has difficulty in following any line for a great distance. Where unity is lacking, there can be no strict sequence.
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