Baudelaire's literary criticism

In the current debate on republicanism the relationship between republicanism and democracy is an aspect whose historical dimension has thus far hardly been investigated. It offers instead also the chance to clear up ambiguities on the opposition between republicanism and liberalism. In this sense, recent research on the radical Enlightenment, on the link between economics and politics, by a new reading of physiocracy as political discourse, and on the foundations of political representation represent some of the most important advances made by historical research over the last few years. This essay wishes to trace these results back to a long line of research on a modern republicanism that had already been investigated many decades ago by a historian of the Enlightenment interested in republican tradition, Franco Venturi, the author of Settecento riformatore and of Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment, to which John Pocock dedicated the first volume of his recent Barbarism and Religion. By means of a successful integration of three recent essays by John Israel on the uniqueness of Dutch republican discourse, by Richard Whatmore on the economic roots of French republicanism and by Nadia Urbinati on the foundations of representative democracy in Condorcet, it is possible to isolate the characteristics of a democratic republicanism. Among the various threads that have been followed up, the theme of equality has surfaced in various ways in the search for the characteristics of modern republicanism. These highlight the idea of the emergence in the early modern age of an European political culture and of a democratic and egalitarian republicanism that was encouraged by the contribution from various national situations within which it forged its identity, against the model of an Atlantic republicanism.     

A bigger Settecento Italiano: wider vistas and open terrain

This paper introduces the six essays from the UCLA-Clark Library Conference on ‘The Culture of Enlightenment and Reform in Eighteenth-Century Italy’ (23?–?24 January 2004). Franco Venturi's persona, productivity, method, and themes are reviewed to help explain his influence on Italian Enlightenment Studies, while at the same time showing how recent research has developed in a number of directions?–?following up on his insights, exploring new topics, or leaving large questions yet unexamined.     

The Enlightenment and the church in the work of Franco Venturi: the fertile legacy of a civil religion

The first part of this essay examines the reasons why the relationship between Enlightenment and religion was central to Franco Venturi's studies on the eighteenth century. In part this came from his own strong secular convictions and from the tradition of secular utopian thought in which Venturi came to intellectual maturity in Turin in the first half of the century, but whose origins lay in the eighteenth century. The essay then explores how these interests guided Venturi's choice to themes and topics, and how his understanding of the relationship changed in the course of his life and writings. The second part of the essay considers Venturi's legacy specifically in relation to this central theme, and discusses the works of subsequent scholars (including the author) whose work has most directly taken up and developed Venturi's own concern to explore the origins of different forms of secular religion in the age of the Enlightenment.     

Misunderstanding the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’: Venturi, Habermas, and Foucault

In his 1969 Trevelyan Lectures, Franco Venturi argued that Kant's response to the question “What is Enlightenment?” has tended to promote a “philosophical interpretation” of the Enlightenment that leads scholars away from the political questions that were central to its concerns. But while Kant's response is well known, it has been often misunderstood by scholars who see it as offering a definition of an historical period, rather than an attempt at characterizing a process that had a significant implications. This article seeks (1) to clarify, briefly, the particular question that Kant was answering, (2) to examine - using Jürgen Habermas’ work as a case in point - the tension between readings that use Kant's answer as a way of discussing the Enlightenment as a discrete historical period and those readings that see it as offering a broad outline of an “Enlightenment Project” that continues into the present, and (3) to explore how Michel Foucault, in a series of discussions of Kant's response, sketched an approach to Kant's text that offers a way of reframing Venturi's distinction between “philosophical” and “political” interpretations of the Enlightenment.     

Engels and the question about cities

In his 1969 Trevelyan Lectures, Franco Venturi argued that Kant's response to the question “What is Enlightenment?” has tended to promote a “philosophical interpretation” of the Enlightenment that leads scholars away from the political questions that were central to its concerns. But while Kant's response is well known, it has been often misunderstood by scholars who see it as offering a definition of an historical period, rather than an attempt at characterizing a process that had a significant implications. This article seeks (1) to clarify, briefly, the particular question that Kant was answering, (2) to examine – using Jürgen Habermas’ work as a case in point – the tension between readings that use Kant's answer as a way of discussing the Enlightenment as a discrete historical period and those readings that see it as offering a broad outline of an “Enlightenment Project” that continues into the present, and (3) to explore how Michel Foucault, in a series of discussions of Kant's response, sketched an approach to Kant's text that offers a way of reframing Venturi's distinction between “philosophical” and “political” interpretations of the Enlightenment.     

The rise of the new model army

In this paper the contribution of Robert R. Palmer to the now booming Atlantic history is put into perspective. It describes the main features of the political and historiographical context that inspired the writing of his book, The Age of the Democratic Revolution in the early 1950s (first volume published in 1959, second volume in 1964). It also argues that the war experience Palmer had in the historical section of the Army Ground Forces has been important in reviving the interest for the transatlantic dimension in modern history that was central in his PhD dissertation. This paper shows how the liberal-tocquevillian approach that Palmer adopted to explain the multiple revolutions that shook North America and Europe in the last quarter of the 18th century earned him the attacks of the Marxist historians. In its last part this paper makes use of private letters to claim that in the 1970s and 1980s the Italian historian Franco Venturi revived the scholarly interest in Palmer's perspective despite methodological differences between his Settecento riformatore and Palmer's analysis. Settecento riformatore and The Age of the Democratic Revolution have contributed to the interest in a transatlantic approach to 18th-century history that is now pursued under the heading of “entangled histories”.     

Les aleas de la reproduction sociale: ‘Le cas de la bourgeoisie d'sarles sous le second empire’

This article has two aims. The first is to outline Franco Venturi's ideas on absolutist monarchy and to highlight new analytical perspectives of his interest in the achievements of the reformist sovereigns. The second is to help shed light on his complex intellectual life. The article begins by underlining how Venturi's historical insights make it difficult to single out a unanimous understanding of absolutist monarchy, and then develops by reconstructing different notions of monarchy. These are: (1) monarchy as a dynamic impetus capable of renewing society in the ancien régime, (2) monarchy as a fundamental, albeit complex, collaboration between power and the intellectual, (3) monarchy as the ground in which libertarian ferment matured, (4) monarchy as a force that provoked revolts and rebellions. Focusing particularly on this last idea, the article suggests how Venturi's interest in the sovereigns’ actions grew in part from his sympathy for and appreciation of the rebellions to which their reformist policies gave rise. This particular perspective makes it possible to observe an ever-present streak of radicalism in Venturi's ideas.     

Commerce and morality in eighteenth-century Italy

This paper would like to discuss some aspects of current trends in studies on eighteenth-century Eastern Europe. In the first part it addresses recent approaches devoted to the reconstruction of the conceptualization of Eastern Europe at the time of the Enlightenment, which have often been inspired by the work of Edward Said and Martin Bernal. These include Larry Woolf's Inventing Eastern Europe (1994). Michael Confino has provided a detailed critique of Woolf's approach. It can be argued that Woolf is in fact projecting Cold War divisions back into the eighteenth century.

The article argues in favour of a less “Orientalising” approach to the history of Eastern Europe, by proving an alternative overview of the historical dimensions of the eastern (and northern) regions of Europe in the eighteenth century. Eastern Europe was inextricably connected to its western European neighbours. Without Eastern Europe, European history is incomplete and incomprehensible.

In the third part the article argues that the interpretative framework of the “first crisis of the Old Regime”, which Franco Venturi outlined in his Settecento riformatore in the 19870s and 1980s represented a subtle rejection of the East/West dichotomy, and in fact foreshadowed the eventual reunification of Europe after the end of the Cold War.     

Enlightenment and reform: an overview of culture and politics in Enlightenment Italy

This essay analyses the influence of the work of Franco Venturi on Italian studies of the eighteenth century over the last fifty years. Venturi's ‘model’ has certainly been of fundamental importance in stimulating new research on the connections between Enlightenment and reform in the eighteenth-century Italian states and is still an essential point of reference for all research in the field. But the direction of eighteenth-century studies in Italy has been shaped also by the contributions of many other scholars. Starting in the 1970s Italian historians became increasingly interested in new questions that were being posed by historians in France and Britain, which contributed to a more general shift away from the biographical focus on individuals characteristic of much of Venturi's work in favour of more collective topics, new types of sources and new ways of interpreting them. This article describes the different themes around which relations between culture and politics in eighteenth-century Italy have been studied, from civil, military and ecclesiastical institutions to the administrative and reform elites, the world of salons and sociability, publishing, religious beliefs, gender differences and science.     

Franco Venturi's ‘crisis’ of the Old Regime

This paper discusses Franco Venturi's concept of a general European ‘crisis’ in the period 1768 – 89, which is covered in volumes III, IV and V of Settecento riformatore. With this concept Venturi allied himself with R. R. Palmer, A. Sorel, J. Juarès and others who sought to explore the larger context of the Enlightenment and French Revolution. Critics of the English translation of Venturi's volumes III and IV (1989?–?91) have failed to perceive a European political crisis in this period. However, Venturi's concept also involved a birth of European public opinion, a development that has been affirmed in English, French and Italian studies more recently, despite a tendency to substitute a cultural for a political history of the Enlightenment.