for the Italians, through Vico, Giannone, Genovesi, had
an eighteenth century of their own. Sardinia preceded
France in solving the problem of feudalism. Arthur
Young affirms that the measures of the Grand Duke
Leopold had, in ten years, doubled the produce of Tuscany;
at Milan, Count Firmian was accounted one of the best
administrators in Europe. It was a Milanese, Beccaria,
who, by his reform of criminal law, became a leader of
French opinion. Continental jurisprudence had long been
overshadowed by two ideas: that torture is the surest
method of discovering truth, and that punishment deters
not by its justice, its celerity, or its certainty, but in proportion to its severity. Even in the eighteenth century
the penal system of Maria Theresa and Joseph II. was
barbarous. Therefore no attack was more surely aimed
at the heart of established usage than that which dealt
with courts of justice. It forced men to conclude that
authority was odiously stupid and still more odiously
ferocious, that existing governments were accursed, that
the guardians and ministers of law, divine and human,
were more guilty than their culprits. The past was
branded as the reign of infernal powers, and charged with
long arrears of unpunished wrong. As there was no
sanctity left in law, there was no mercy for its merciless defenders; and if they fell into avenging hands, their
doom would not exceed their desert. Men afterwards
conspicuous by their violence, Brissot and Marat, were
engaged in this campaign of humanity, which raised a
demand for authorities that were not vitiated by the
accumulation of infamy, for new laws, new powers, a new
dynasty.
As religion was associated with cruelty, it is at this point that the movement of new ideas became a crusade against Christianity. A book by the Curé Meslier, partially known at that time, but first printed by Strauss in 1864, is the clarion of vindictive unbelief; and another abbé, Raynal, hoped that the clergy would be crushed beneath the ruins of their altars.
Thus the movement which began, in Fénelon's time,
