The full history of Filangieri's influence on the European democratic tradition in the opening decades of the nineteenth century remains to be written. Traces and circumstantial evidence are not lacking. The Russian Decembrists, who guided the 1825 revolt in St. Petersburg against the Czar calling for the birth of a modern constitutional regime, knew the Scienza della legislazione well and loved its incessant call to ‘know our rights,’ to ‘know the rights of humanity.’ The Spanish insurgents, massacred by French troops in Trocadero in 1823, had learned much from those dense and passionate pages where Filangieri indissolubly tied the right to happiness of all men to a just and fair distribution of wealth, and particularly of land.