The historical significance of Giordano Bruno's story can only be understood within the context of the historical and social events of Europe between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. ---- This was a period in which tendencies toward social transformation were far from dormant, even in Italy. It was a situation in which the material conditions for social transformation had developed, exacerbating the conflict between oppressor and oppressed. At the end of the sixteenth century, in most of Europe, the struggle involving bourgeoisie, peasants, nobles, clergy, and absolute monarchs did not end with the victory of the revolutionary forces, but with the shared ruin of the contending classes.
The revolution's failure to assert itself led to a state of social decay. The counterrevolution, which took the form of the Counter-Reformation, succeeded, and the social devastation was enormous. At the end of the sixteenth century, Italy was still a leading European country, both economically and culturally, even though it was now on the margins of the great trade flows that were taking the oceans and abandoning the Mediterranean. Precisely during that period, despite attempts to maintain the industries and trade that had made Italy prosperous, a period of decline began, which would accelerate under Spanish rule.
Spain itself saw its countryside and cities depopulated, following the militaristic and imperialist policies of successive prime ministers in those years. We were witnessing a neo-feudal restoration that reinstated the dominance of the nobility, the aristocracy of the sword, and transformed the peasants once again into serfs. This was happening in both East and West: it was happening in Spain, but it was also happening in Poland, Germany, and so on. It was a massive counterrevolutionary phenomenon that destroyed the material foundations of the revolutionary classes.
At the end of the 16th century, the great European monarchies-Habsburg Spain, Henry VI's France, and Elizabeth I's England, succeeded in 1601 by James I-achieved a peace that would last until the start of the Thirty Years' War and beyond. The monarchies shared the belief that there existed a "bien commun des couronnes," a common good of the crowns, as a minister of the king of France wrote to the ambassador in London. And what could this common good be, if not the fear of new revolutionary crises?
Spain was a protagonist in counterrevolutionary politics, which would continue even after losing its status as a great power, but France had also suffered a bitter experience from the Wars of Religion, while the king of England now had to contend with the Puritans, and even the wealthy Dutch bourgeoisie had to guard against the popular radicalism of the most intransigent Calvinists.
One of the most obvious signs of the counterrevolutionary nature of this "pacifism" of absolute monarchs is the rapprochement between crowns and aristocracies. National states had been formed through the struggle against the feudal nobility; in this struggle, absolute monarchs had relied on the artisan and financial classes of the cities and the peasants of the countryside. At the end of the sixteenth century, by contrast, the political scene was dominated by the rapprochement between crowns and aristocracies, which sometimes led to the absolute state's actual capitulation to the noble caste. This anachronistic neo-feudal restoration was accompanied on the international level by courtly pacifism, and on the religious level by the anti-Calvinist reaction, which converged both the forces aroused by the Catholic Counter-Reformation and the conservative, Anglican and Lutheran wings of the Protestant Reformation. It must be kept in mind that class conflicts, in the cultural climate of the time, took the form of religious conflicts.
The neo-feudal wave was strongest in areas where the Counter-Reformation was taking hold, such as Italy, Spain, Poland, and southern Flanders; it was visible, though its effects were attenuated, in countries with regalist Catholicism or conservative Protestantism, such as France, Germany, and Scandinavia; it diminished in England, where this tendency encountered energetic resistance from the Puritans, and it diminished further, almost to the point of disappearing, in Calvinist countries, such as northern Flanders: the United Provinces.
Restoration reigned supreme in the countryside, where the landed nobility benefited from the rising value of land caused by inflation and imposed, with the support of state authority, the reinstatement of royal servitudes, which at the end of the Middle Ages free cities or absolute monarchies had abolished or transformed into cash income. Land ownership, in the neo-feudal imagination, symbolized the dominance of the aristocracy's caste: thus, lands were covered with entails and trusts, designed to prevent inheritance divisions, so that they could be passed intact to the firstborn.
This nobility treated work as degrading, viewing thrift and the meticulous care of one's affairs as a sign of avarice and narrow-mindedness, while considering military prowess the most admirable of virtues and lavish idleness the ideal of a gentleman's life. This is why the ostentatious and irresponsible aristocracy of the seventeenth century found itself short of money, despite all its grain and lands, and had to scramble to obtain it. The nobility then sought other people's money, that is, the money of all those who worked and paid taxes. The attack on the public treasury was the core of the neo-feudal restoration: the mutual pacification between absolute monarchies and aristocracies was nothing more than a gigantic compromise to devour, by mutual love and agreement, the sweat of the common people, especially the peasants.
All this has only one brutal conclusion: death. The European population, which had grown rapidly until the end of the sixteenth century, would halt its growth in the early seventeenth century and then begin to plummet. And when one reads that so many Italian, Spanish, or German cities lost up to half or three-quarters of their population, one can only think of a long line of corpses: corpses of people starving to death in famines, corpses of plague victims, corpses of those stabbed and executed, corpses of soldiers left to rot on battlefields, corpses of sons of the people, dying like locusts at the foot of magnificent palaces or gleaming cathedrals.
Italy, in the late sixteenth century, was engaged in an interminable rearguard battle. It was the effort of a country unwilling to die, against a complex of factors dragging it toward decadence. Genoese or Medici finance, the grain trade, Venetian industry, or Lombard silk marked the peninsula's enduring economic vitality. But this vitality was closely tied to the production of luxury goods for the courts and aristocrats, or to financing Spain's military adventures. With the decline of the aristocracy and the repeated bankruptcies of the Spanish state, this vitality would fade, unable to find other outlets, because Italy was cut off from the major ocean routes, Asian markets, and access to Baltic raw materials. The regional states-the Duchy of Savoy, the republics of Genoa, Venice, and Lucca, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, and the Papal States, which had grown stronger in the shadow of Spanish rule-had no future.
Even on the intellectual level, late sixteenth-century Italy continued to fuel European culture: great pontiffs holding up the symbols of Catholic universalism to the masses, Jesuit missionaries swarming from France to Japan and from Sweden to China, tormented followers of Socini's radicalism, naturalist philosophers, precursors of the founders of modern science, such as Bernardo Telesio, Tommaso Campanella, and Giordano Bruno.
Intrepid thinkers who courageously faced prison or, like Giordano Bruno, the stake at the hands of the Inquisition.
Recline in slothful conformism is the fate of Italian culture, a faithful mirror of the submission of capitalist economic activity itself to neo-feudal restoration and the submission of the Italian states to Habsburg supremacy. The burning of Giordano Bruno illuminates Italy's decadence.
It is the common ruin of the warring classes, mentioned above.
Fear of peasant revolution and the urban plebs inspired the neo-feudal reaction of the seventeenth century.
Even today, the fear of proletarian revolution is the unspoken protagonist of the political scene of every country. The exhaustion of capitalism's animal instincts pushes the ruling classes into an increasingly shameless policy of plundering natural resources and labor capacity, disguised as artificial emergencies or, at any rate, resolvable with a radical shift in the economic paradigm and the elimination of increasingly bloated and useless state apparatuses. Financial and real estate restoration is the lifeline of a system suffocated by its contradictions; but this restoration has its consequences in the form of increased poverty, hunger, and unemployment, and economic poverty is accompanied by intellectual poverty, which excludes ever-larger masses from culture and knowledge, which are transformed into barren sources of income.
Even today, the ban on critical thinking is accompanied by the persecution of those who champion it. Just as the economic stagnation looming for capitalist society reproduces the stagnation of the seventeenth century, so the current repression of dissent, which sometimes takes violent forms, recalls the burning of Giordano Bruno and many other lesser-known figures.
The Judeo-Christian restoration of the West is currently accompanied by the Confucian restoration in China and the rise to power of fundamentalist Muslim or Hindu political forces in other Asian states.
The restoration will collapse, sooner or later, under its own weight; but how many deaths, how many sacrifices to people and the environment will depend on the time we allow before ending its rule. In the meantime, our task is to connect critical thinking and alternative social models, to create, strengthen, and broaden the elements of the new society.
The sacrifice of Giordano Bruno teaches us that religious critique cannot be left to the spontaneous evolution of social consciousness, but must become a weapon of attack against the main ideological underpinning of the restoration.
Titian Antonelli
https://umanitanova.org/ma-se-giordano-bruno-fosse-campato-opporsi-alla-restaurazione-tradizionalista-liberare-il-pensiero-critico/
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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