CANTÙ, CESARE. - Historian, man of letters, patriot and politician, b. at Brivio (Como) on 5 Dec. 1804, d. at Milan on 11 March 1805 [sic]. From a deeply religious working-class family, he studied with scanty means as a cleric at the Milanese gymnasium of S. Alessandro, and, having abandoned the idea of entering the ecclesiastical life, began at eighteen to teach at the gymnasium of Sondrio, then moving on to that of Como, soon orienting himself toward the fertile field of research and historical erudition.
An indefatigable worker, he read, investigated and wrote as much and as well as he could, always keeping in view the great and noble ideal of religion and fatherland. So that it may well be said of him that he was at once the first and the last of the most convinced among the Neo-Guelphs.
A lover and student of the fair Catholic and patriotic Middle Ages in that full and "romantic" sense that was proper to his age, upon the publication of the polished short poem Algio (1828), he soon followed it with that Storia della città e della diocesi di Como (1829-51) which enthused Manzoni, and which remains a typical example among our municipal historical monographs. Already implicit in it was the formula that was later to characterize his entire historiographical work: "A commune and a saint: these are the elements of which Italians have always composed their liberty." Having thus suddenly come into well-deserved fame, he moved in 1832 to teach at that same Milanese institute where he had spent the decisive years of his formation, entered the Manzonian circle, and, after a collection of sentimental verses, published in the Indicatore a historical commentary on the Promessi sposi (Ragionamenti sulla storia lombarda del sec. XVIII, Milan 1833). To this commentary there should rightly be connected the volume on L'abate Parini e la Lombardia nel secolo passato (1854), itself the fruit of that familiarity, not always intimately concordant and cordial, with the great Lombard, from which were much later to spring the famous and much discussed Reminiscenze su Alessandro Manzoni (1882), equally rich in precious and penetrating biographical elements that bring well into light the most indicative similarities and dissimilarities of character and of ideological and practical attitude between the two.
Thus had to begin, and it did not end except with death, that whirl of manuscript sheets, of proofs, of volumes, of pamphlets, of essays, of articles, of translations, of revisions and reworkings of what had already been published, of bibliographical research and archival discoveries of every kind, not without constant passages from the historical field to the literary one, which, to the spiteful disappointment of late and lazy emulators and critics, will always constitute the only true satisfaction of C.
Not a conspirator and patriot in the manner of others, but a faithful depositary of many political secrets of others, and above all a convinced adherent of the Neo-Guelph "open conspiracy," with the very clear aim of educating and elevating our people in the sense of Christian tradition in the face of foreigners, he fell under the suspicion of the Austrian police, was thrown into prison (1835), and emerged from it only for lack of evidence and only after ten months of shrewd and steadfast silence. But, definitively compromised, he suffered long harassments from it and the immediate loss of his employment.
Consequently he had to rely for his living on his inexhaustible pen, and he interspersed between the Notizia di G. D. Romagnosi (1835) and the well-known and widely read historical novel Margherita Pusterla (1838) various occasional short works of an educational nature such as the Carlambrogio da Montevecchio (1836), the Galantuomo (1837), the Buon fanciullo, the Giovinetto, down to an article Sulle precauzioni nella cultura del pomo di terra (1848), and the widely circulated Buon senso and Buon cuore (1870).
His release from prison coincided with his meeting the bookseller Pomba, who opened for C. the road toward fame in Italy and beyond the Alps. From the idea cherished by Pomba of a historical encyclopedia there originated and immediately imposed themselves with extraordinary and lasting success the thirty-five volumes of the Storia universale (1846), in which history is considered as the constant and perennial work of Providence, which watches over, guides and judges men and institutions, and which through Christianity leads to a work of pacification, of fraternization, of cultural and social civilization by way of the Church and the Papacy. There resulted from it the author's clear intimate certainty that, trusting in the soundest demands of liberty, he glimpsed a future far less gloomy than was thought, thanks to the promises of Neo-Guelphism, understood in the sense of a great, universal return of civil society to Christianity.
In the persuasive and truly powerful effort of the Storia universale there undoubtedly lies the standard by which the entire work and the singular personality of C. must be judged. If he was not always equal to the modern demands of criticism and scientific historiography, he nonetheless knew how to frame an enormous congeries of facts, institutions and customs, texts and figures until then obscure or unknown. He thus made easily accessible to scholars and cultured persons an immense heritage of the past, and therefore enormously widened the narrow historical horizon of his time. And while the narrative parts may be considered superseded today, the others remain ever alive and useful, no less rich and numerous, of the bibliographical and documentary apparatus.
If after the publication of the Storia Universale the envy of scarcely worthy emulators and the spite of anticlerical radicalism continued to persecute C., on the other hand he was generously compensated by the admiring esteem of good people, by the fame of which he made little account, and also by that comfort which, strengthening his innate, intimate sense of proud independence, made him write in the preface of his most combative study: "Fortunately, to princes, to heroes, to ministers, I owe no other gratitude than that of having let me tell the truth, free to make me pay for it." And precisely from the complex and multiform web of the Storia universale derive almost all the very numerous other later writings, among which should be remembered the Storia di cento anni (1851), the Storia degli Italiani (1854-56), Beccaria e il diritto penale (1862), the Storie della letteratura (Greek, Latin and Italian, 1865-66), Gli eretici d'Italia (same date), Alcuni Italiani contemporanei (1868), Italiani illustri (1873-74), Il Consiliatore e i Carbonari (1878), Monti e l'età che fu sua (1870), Gli ultimi trent'anni (same date), etc. Volumes and essays, these and the others, in which there is no lack of eloquent pages, rich in precious observations and severe meditations.
A constructive precursor of Neo-Guelphism and a balanced patriot, C. was one of the few, perhaps the only one, among the Neo-Guelphs, who did not let his spirit and mind be seized by the euphoristic dreams and enthusiasms of the tumultuous biennium 1846-48. Making the most of his great historical experience, he intuited, beneath the naively rhetorical mantle, its intimate weaknesses, foresaw the inevitable dark hour of catastrophe and disillusionment, and the consequent final unleashing of extreme radicalism and reactionarism, which were to open for a long time in the conscience of Italian Catholics as an abyss between the faith and his dearest political aspirations. And it is precisely in the constant and inflexible uprightness of C.'s thought and work that the explanation lies for the decidedly Neo-Guelph attitude and orientation which he alone, and in spite of everything, pursued in the crucial years that followed and which practically earned him banishment from political life and a thankless unpopularity in the new Italy.
In truth, that Italy pieced together by strokes of dynastic and revolutionary audacity, that reconstruction of the most Catholic of nations carried out in an anti-papal and anti-clerical sense, that monarchical predominance over all the ancestral and finest republican traditions, those destructive frenzies against every sound tradition, could not please C., just as, for that matter, they did not please Capponi or D'Azeglio either. Therefore, as a deputy in Parliament, from 1860 to 1867 he was an open and declared opponent of that laborious offspring of the Right which was called the "liberal State." And well "certain, as has rightly been written precisely in these days, of having behind him the real Italy against the legal Italy, the consent of the multitudes of humble Christian folk against a minority installed in power thanks to an artificial electoral law, he struck at the quick and denounced aloud all the equivocation and all the inner emptiness hidden beneath the new state structure, infallibly destined — he foresaw it — to collapse as soon as all Italian Catholics had either been able to affirm their faith by their vote, or had lost it by becoming revolutionaries."
From this was to arise, in the welcoming quiet of the State Archive of Milan, whose superintendency was the only office that no one dared deny or revoke from him, that interesting and harsh, often impassioned and violent, but at bottom truthful and honest indictment against the actors and events of the new Italy, against the omissions and adulterations of the courtly or official or simply celebratory and partisan historiography of the Risorgimento, which is his chronicle Della indipendenza italiana (1872-77): a bold attempt at revising outworn positions; a firm warning of unresolved problems addressed to Italians.
And, moreover, events, times and studies seem in our own day to have done justice to C. as well, sometimes conferring on his writings and his thought a deserved flavor of pertinent topicality.
Bibliography9 works
Paolo Dalla Torre