Letters from France and Italy (1847-1852)

Long struggles and painfully acquired victories bind it and limit it to what has been conquered; many things are dear to it, even though they no longer fit it. We have conquered nothing, we have nothing to defend, we have no reason to keep border forts on a war footing. Everything with us is still so wavering, so vague, so forced; everything is done without our consent, not to our measure, that we must rejoice if the foreign garment tears and we can freely seek another, more comfortable one, no matter where or how it is found. In certain questions, we are more advanced and freer than Europe precisely because we are backward. To explain this to you, here is an example: who does not know what an immense step peoples took by moving to Protestantism? But in our era, there is no country where religious intolerance has entered more deeply into customs, or is more oppressive and incurable, than in Protestant regions. There was a time when their current moral slavery was for them an emancipation, when they paid with their heads for the right to sing psalms and to mope about on Sundays. That is why religion is much more deeply rooted in England than in Italy. In Italy, after the revolution of 1848, attempts were made to counter the Pope with a sort of Protestantism; but the Savonarolas of the nineteenth