THE THRONE IN THE TIME OF STORMS
the first half of the century opened with the decrees of the Congress of Vienna: restitution of the Archdukes, erection of a Lombardo- Venetian Monarchy as an Austrian province, and restoration therewith of Habsburg power over the largest part of the peninsula which Metter- nich insisted must henceforth be no more than a name on the map. Youth was to forget that there had ever been such a country as Italy. The study of Dante in the schools was forbidden, and instead young people were drilled in the questions and answers of a catechism in which blasphemous importance was attributed to the power and significance of the civil authority. One question was: "What does the word Fatherland mean?" The answer read: "A Fatherland is not only the country in which one is born, but also the country into which one has come by reason of annexation." The Austrian administration of Lombardy and Venice was better at least in intent than Metter- nich's politics, Matters were worse in Naples, where the rottenest branch of the Bourbons intermarried with the Habsburgs and allowed the whole of life to deteriorate into superstitious and bigoted ignorance, corruption, and lawlessness. The Bourbons were better in Florence and Tuscany, but there also the stirring of a national attitude seeking liberation from Vienna and Rome was suppressed.
The condition of the Papal States was such that they fostered rather than appeased the veiled civil war which went on in Italy between 1820 and 1848. The system of administration which associated service to the Church and service to the state in an incurably unnatural union produced a priestly bureaucracy which was soon staffed by men no longer called either to the priesthood that was required or to the state service in which they wished to carve out careers. The graft which the clear-sighted Pope Benedict XIV had already denounced grew still more colossal and aroused dangerous political passions in the Pope's subjects. Leo XII was hated for his spy system; and the learned Gregory XVI, for all his good intentions, could not transform himself into a territorial sovereign who realized that a new hour had long since struck in world history. When a large part of the Papal States re- belled in conformity with the spirit of the July Revolution in Paris, they were calmed down by hasty concessions and a glimpse of Aus- trian bayonets; and then the great powers sent the Pope the famous memorandum of 1831 suggesting reforms self-administration in
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