Memories and narratives of the Roman Inquisition in the first half of the nineteenth century. Silences, apologies, denunciations

At the end of the 18th century, the Roman Inquisition was the object of criticism to which the Church responded by reaffirming its role in the defence of religion and political order. In the first decades of the 19th century, however, it had little place in anti-clerical literature, which focused rather on the crimes of the Spanish Inquisition. Nevertheless, the Roman censorship was attentive to the development of anti-inquisitiorial themes, which can be followed through the archival record of the Index and the Inquisition itself. Censorship is accompanied by a policy of memory that emphasises the mildness of the Roman Inquisition. The Inquisition's action is brought to the forefront around 1840 by the crackdown on the Jews in the Papal States, and by a few narratives produced mainly by Italian exiles in England. But the turning point came with the Roman Republic of 1849, which opened the palace of the Holy Office and its archives and helped to put the memory of the Inquisition and its victims at the centre of the battles of the Risorgimento.