The Grand Duke of Tuscany timidly inquired of the Austrian premier if he might renew the constitutional _régime_ in his state. Schwarzenberg replied with the artful suggestion that he should hear what the Dukes of Modena and Parma, the Pope, and King Ferdinand had to say on the subject. Their advice was unanimously negative: Cardinal Antonelli going so far as to declare that Constitutionalism in Tuscany would be regarded as a constant menace and danger to the States of the Church. The different counsels of Piedmont, conveyed by Count Balbo, weighed little against so imposing an array of opinion, backed as it was by the Power which still stabled its horses in the Convent of San Marco. The Tuscan Statute was formally suspended in September 1850.
From that day forth, Tuscany sank lower and lower in the slough. To please the Pope, havoc was made of the Leopoldine laws--named after the son of Maria Theresa, the wise Grand Duke Leopold I.--laws by which a bridle was put on the power and extension of the Church. The prosecution and imprisonment of a Protestant couple who were accused of wishing to make proselytes, proclaimed the depth of intolerance into which what was once the freest and best-ordered government in Italy had descended.
The ecclesiastical question became the true test question in Piedmont as well as in Tuscany, but there it had another issue.
It had also a different basis. In Piedmont there were no Leopoldine laws to destroy; what was necessary was to create them. To privileges dating from the Middle Ages which in the kingdom of Sardinia almost alone had been restored without curtailment after the storm of the French Revolution, were added the favours, the vast wealth, the preponderating influence acquired during Charles Felix' reign, and the first seventeen years of that of Charles Albert. Theoretically, the Statute swept away all privileges of classes and sects, and made citizens equal before the law, but to put this theory into practice further legislation was needed, because, as a matter of fact, the clergy preserved their immunities untouched and showed not the slightest disposition to yield one jot of them. The Piedmontese clergy, more numerous in proportion to the population than in any state except Rome, were more intransigent than any ecclesiastical body in the world. The Italian priest of old days, whatever else might be said about him, was rarely a fanatic. The very nickname 'Ultramontane' given by Italians to the religious extremists north of the Alps, shows how foreign such excesses were to their own temperaments. But the Ultramontane spirit had already invaded Piedmont, and was embraced by its clergy with all the zeal of converts. There was still a _Foro Ecclesiastico_ for the arraignment of religious offenders, and this was one of the first privileges against which Massimo d'Azeglio lifted his 'sacrilegious' hand. To go through all the list would be tedious, and would demand more explanation regarding the local modes of acquisition and tenure of religious property than would be interesting now. The object of the Siccardi laws, as they were named after the Minister of Grace and Justice who introduced them, and of the stronger measures to which they led up, was to make the priest amenable to the common law of the land in all except that which referred to his spiritual functions; to put a limit on the amassment of wealth by religious corporations; to check the multiplication of convents and the multiplication of feast days, both of which encouraged the people in sloth and idleness; to withdraw education from the sole control of ecclesiastics; and finally, to authorise civil marriage, but without making it compulsory. The programme was large, and it took years to carry it out. The Vatican contended that it was contrary to the Concordat which existed between the Holy See and the Court of Sardinia. Massimo d'Azeglio replied that the maintenance of the Concordat, in all its parts, meant the ruin of the state; that he had tried every means of conciliation, made every effort towards arriving at a compromise, and that since his endeavours had failed in consequence of the refusal of the Vatican to abate pretensions which it neither could nor did enforce in Austria, Naples or Spain, heaven and the world must judge between Rome and Piedmont, between Cardinal Antonelli and himself.