CARBONERIA.—A political and pseudo-religious secret society which, appearing at the beginning of the 19th century, achieved a broad expansion and considerable influence in Italy. Like Freemasonry, it too surrounded itself with remote and legendary origins, but it is certain that it did not arise before the beginning of that century, or at most at the end of the preceding one: as to precisely when, how, and where, opinions and hypotheses are extremely varied. Some derive it from Neapolitan Freemasonry, or from other related sects, transformed under French rule into clubs of innovators and intellectuals; others from English Freemasonry, intent on creating obstacles for Napoleon; others from the legitimist reaction of 1799, in collusion with former Jacobins and English agents in opposition to the policy of the First Consul. It is said to have been created as a substitute for Freemasonry, which was blindly subservient to France. Now, following Martin Saint-Léon’s masterly studies on compagnonnage in France, the most widely accepted opinion derives it from one of those associations that flourished in Franche-Comté during the second half of the 18th century, bearing precisely the name charbonnerie, and possessing rites, statutes, initiations, and secrecy that have considerable affinities with those of the c. It is supposed that this society served to disguise anti-Napoleonic political maneuvers beneath innocent forms, and thus passed with the French troops to Naples, where it was transformed and adapted to the new circumstances. General Giuseppe Rossetti, in a document published by Sorigi, claims to have been affiliated with the c. in Franche-Comté in 1802. Pardi discovered documents that would place its existence in the Kingdom of Naples at least as early as March 1804. Colletta, who maintained close relations with the c., attests, on the other hand, that it showed no signs of vitality before 1807. Certainly its progress was very rapid, and within a few years it had not only penetrated almost all the regions of the kingdom, but had also gained ground in Sicily, the Papal States, and elsewhere. If what Gioacchino Murat wrote to Napoleon in 1809 is reliable, by that time it already had branches in almost all the principal cities of Italy, and
was plotting plans for an uprising in a Bourbon and anti-French direction.
Its organization, rites, symbolism, oaths, and so forth show evident affinities with Freemasonry, but it is difficult to say whether all this came to it as a direct inheritance, or whether it should be explained by their common origins in compagnonnage and the ancient craft guilds, as Martin Saint-Léon maintains. The political and moral tendencies, however, are sharply distinct: Freemasonry is predominantly doctrinal in character and is directed preferably toward the higher and more influential classes of society, preserving the naturalistic and Enlightenment imprint of the century in which it arose, and consequently tending to undermine Christianity like every other positive religion; the c., on the other hand, has essentially practical programs, is open to all classes but preferably to the bourgeoisie, the military, officials, and the lower classes, and preserves a mentality very consonant with that of the social elements it admits, traditionally religious and Catholic, and instinctively hostile to the impious and subversive spirit of Jacobinism. The Grand Master of the Universe, whom it honors as the supreme being, is to be identified with Jesus Christ the Savior; in the sect’s diplomas, a Cross surrounded by the symbols of the Passion and Redemption occupies the place of honor; the Carbonaro catechism is entirely imbued with religious and Christian symbolism; the patron of the sect is invoked as s. Teobaldo, count of Champagne (1017–66), who abandoned his comforts to lead a hermit’s life in the woods, practicing the trade of the charcoal burner. Admission to the sect took place through initiations and degrees (apprentice, master); and the hierarchy consisted of a regent, two assistants, an orator, a secretary, a treasurer, and an archivist; there were experienced or terrible masters, whose task was to subject candidates to the ritual trials; and overseers for the internal discipline of the assemblies, which were divided into chambers of honor (partial assemblies) and barracks (general assemblies).
Members were given the appellation of good first ones or good cousins. A regularly constituted unit was called a vendita; a group of vendite in a given region formed a mother vendita; at the summit was a supreme hierarchy called the alta vendita. The terminology proper to Freemasonry, derived from the masonry trade, was in the c. drawn from the charcoal burner’s craft: hence we hear of axes, woods, wolves, furnaces, barracks, and so forth. What above all distinguishes the c. from Freemasonry, however, lies in their respective political ideals. The former seeks to influence society through the constituted powers, and therefore endeavors to ally itself with rulers and persons influential in government, whom it willingly supports; whereas the c. has a few but clearly defined principles, from which it rarely deviates, such as the abolition of despotism, the establishment of democratic and constitutional forms, the right of peoples to self-determination, and national independence: that is, an essentially practical, autonomous, and revolutionary program.
The Neapolitan c. soon began to be troubled by opposing currents, one Masonic and Murattian, subservient to Murat’s policy; the other Anglo-Bourbon, with the aim of restoring Ferdinand IV to the throne of Naples. Thanks to the skill of Lord Bentinck, who managed to persuade the Bourbon to accommodate himself to Carbonaro aspirations by disguising himself as a constitutional king and champion of Italian independence and unity under the Bourbon scepter, the latter current prevailed, combining liberal demands with reactionary tendencies and making the c. a formidable weapon in England’s hands against Murat’s government. Murat reacted with measures of extreme severity in the edict of proscription dated 14 April 1814, which was followed by investigations, trials, and not a few death sentences. With the fall of Napoleon, the dispossessed princes restored by the Congress of Vienna immediately took steps, through laws of exceptional severity, to protect themselves from secret societies, and especially from the c., which had already spread throughout almost the entire peninsula and was regarded as the most dangerous of them all. Cardinal Pacca, pro-secretary of state to Pius VII, who admits (cf. Il mio secondo ministero, in A. Quacquarelli, La ricostituzione dello Stato pontificio, Città di Castello 1945, p. 168) that upon his arrival in Rome he did not even know the name of the c., issued a condemnatory edict on 15 August 1814: “we learned, to our great surprise,” he says, “that the Carbonari were circulating a purported brief of the Pope in which their secret society was approved. It was therefore necessary to refute such an imposture and to warn the peoples.” The first emigrations of Carbonari, mostly voluntary, then followed; they thus became disseminators and apostles of the sect in almost all the countries of the Mediterranean, especially in France, Spain, and Portugal. Disappointed in its hopes by the Bourbon, the Neapolitan c. once again threw itself into Murat’s arms and supported him in his mad enterprise of making himself king of Italy. That adventure ended tragically and was followed by a severe reaction; the prince of Canosa, appointed minister of police, “dared to propose in full council that the sect of the calderari be encouraged, so that it might serve as a counterweight to that of the Carbonari” (W. Maturi, Il principe Canosa, Florence 1944, pp. 129–33).
The Congress of Vienna, which should have healed the wounds inflicted on Italy by the French government, did no more than inflict new wounds upon her. Placing the peninsula at Austria’s mercy, it provided legitimate grounds for discontent and encouragement for conspiracies, which now surrounded themselves with a more seductive aura, insofar as they appeared suffused with noble and generous ideals that captivated peoples and even sovereigns. Filippo Buonarroti (1761–97), an old conspirator and Freemason, undertook in Geneva to reconnect the threads of the carboneria, reunite its countless associations, and reinforce its discipline, ritualism, and secrecy through terrible sanctions. Since he stood at the head of the supreme alta vendita, Masonic, illuminist, and anticlerical influence became more pronounced under him; and the carboneria gradually assumed a certain international character. Wherever political or civil claims were to be advanced, in Spain as in France, in Greece and in more distant countries, the carboneria took root, more or less covertly, and joined forces with other societies.
From the carboneria sprang innumerable sects, under the most varied names, among which the foremost were the Latin Confederation, widespread and powerful in the legations; the Federation, in the Subalpine countries; Adelfia, especially in the Papal States; and Guelfia, believed to have been inspired by Bentinck. Attempts at insurrection on a broad scale soon followed, especially in lands already predisposed to more inflammatory movements, such as the Romagna, the Marches, the Abruzzi, and the Kingdom of Naples: the most notable were those that broke out between 1816 and 1817 in the Marches, and those of 1817 in Terra d’Otranto. The success of the Spanish revolution gave the Italian carboneria greater boldness; the revolutions of Naples in 1820 and of Piedmont in 1821 were its consequence. But the difficulty of coordinating scattered and heterogeneous forces, together with the inexperience of the men who found themselves at the head of the movement, made it easy for Austria to carry out the task entrusted to it by the great powers assembled at Troppau: to suppress those movements and restore absolute governments. Thus the fruits, not altogether blameworthy, of that first period of conspiracies came to nothing.
A powerful reaction, directed by Metternich, succeeded in disorganizing and dispersing the sectarian ranks and sent a large number of those implicated into exile. Affiliation with the sect was equated by Austria with the crime of high treason, punishable by death. The mild Pius VII, repeatedly urged by the courts to break with Naples and to assist their repressive action through the use of spiritual penalties, did not consent; only after the events, on 13 September 1821, did he issue the bull Ecclesiam, by which the carboneria was expressly condemned, the excommunication and other penalties enacted against Freemasonry being renewed against II. The bull declared that the condemnation was inspired not by political motives, but by the pseudo-religious character the sect ostentatiously displayed, and because, under the appearance of “a singular observance and a certain affected favor toward the Catholic religion and toward the person and doctrine of Jesus Christ,” it inculcated impious doctrines and practices, diminished respect for every positive religion, and advocated an individual religion according to each person’s opinions and tastes. The Sacred Apostolic Penitentiary, moreover, in response to questions from the Neapolitan episcopate on 8 November 1821, declared that, “in view of the wicked dogmas and precepts of such a society, and in particular of its granting everyone great license to form a religion according to his whim,” the carboneria was to be regarded as “a rash and heretical sect”; consequently, the papal condemnation was to be understood in the strictest sense. The condemnation was subsequently confirmed by Leo XII in the bull Quo graviora of 13 March 1825, by Pius IX in the encyclical Qui pluribus of 9 November 1846, and by Leo XIII in the encyclical Humanum genus of 20 April 1884; it was also incorporated into canon 2335 of the CIC, with excommunication simpliciter reservata and other spiritual penalties.
Buonarroti again devoted himself to reorganizing the carboneria, together with Passano, establishing its central association in Paris, from which orders and directives thereafter emanated. Following the July Revolution (1830), which had a powerful repercussion in Italy, as throughout Europe, a general action was attempted anew. It began at Modena on 4 February 1831 through the efforts of Ciro Menotti, who ended on the gallows; the insurrection then spread from Bologna and the Romagna to the Marches and Umbria, reaching almost to the gates of Rome. Having sought to attract to their program the two sons of Louis Bonaparte, formerly king of Holland—Louis Napoleon, the future emperor of the French, and Napoleon Louis—by the prospect of a throne, the agitators were soon overwhelmed by the numerous veterans of the Napoleonic wars. These veterans took control of the movement and gave those uprisings an entirely distinctive character. Elected pope, Gregory XVI invited Austria to restore order, and the revolt was soon subdued. The failure brought the carboneria into a profound decline. Giuseppe Mazzini, who had belonged to its ranks since 1827, drew from the recent events that had unfolded before his eyes, and from the experience of the past, the conviction that the carboneria itself—that is, its lack of ideas, a well-defined program, and youthful, energetic forces—was responsible for its failure and was no longer capable of reform. The men on whom the carboneria relied, such as Barthe and La Fayette, were by then old and obsolete. He therefore decided to found Giovine Italia, which began in July 1831 at Marseille and rapidly attracted the best elements to itself, thereby dealing the carboneria a mortal blow.
The assertions of many historians that the carboneria disappeared after 1831 are nevertheless exaggerated. In France and in the principal centers of emigration—Corsica, Malta, Corfu, and Tunis—and in certain regions of Italy, it reconstituted its ranks and resumed conspiring alongside Giovine Italia, almost always in a spirit of antagonism, often destroying what the other had built. In the movements of the Romagna in 1843 and those of Rimini in 1845, however, they acted in concert. A carbonaro revival in Calabria, through the efforts of the Romeo brothers, provoked in 1847 the Calabrian-Sicilian movements which, together with the revolt of Palermo, sounded the reveille for the national insurrection of 1848. According to Cattaneo, however, it had allowed itself to be drawn by skilled Sardinian emissaries, among the first of them d’Azeglio, behind the Carlo-Albertine cause; and perhaps it was precisely “that royalist faction” that armed the hand which massacred Pellegrino Rossi. After the fall of the Roman Republic, the first nucleus of the national association that Mazzini planned to establish before leaving Rome consisted of Mazzinians and carbonari. “The carboneria,” De Cesare would later say (Roma e lo Stato del Papa, I, Rome 1907, p. 158), “had never died in Rome; indeed, in the lowest strata of Trastevere it may be said to survive, with its oaths, its ideals of equality, and the symbolism of its forms.” A carbonaro revival took place in Portugal in 1907, with its vendite, barracks, alte vendite, and so forth; it played a major role in the establishment of the republic.
If the effectiveness of the carboneria in Italy was not proportionate to its numerical strength, and if its course led not toward improvement but toward disintegration and progressive degeneration, the causes must be sought in those inherent weaknesses mentioned above; in particular, in the rivalries that always tore it apart and in the corrosive activity of informers, which made it easy for the police to control II. One may say of it what has been said of Mazzini and Giovine Italia: namely, that it worked more for the benefit of other parties than for its own, prepared the ground, and left others to reap the fruits.
ratori lombardi del 1821, in Rassegna storica del Risorgimento, 19 (1932), pp. 89-138; M. Menéndez y Pelayo, Historia de los Heterodoxos españoles, Madrid 1932; V. de la Fuente, Historia de las sociedades secretas antiguas y modernas en España, 3 voll., Barcelona 1933; D. Perez e E. Cerdeira, Historia de Portugal, VII, Barcellos 1935, p. 453 sgg. Pietro Pirri