GIOVINE ITALIA. - The founding of Y. I., carried out by Mazzini in July 1831 in Marseille, was determined on the one hand by distrust of the Carbonarist uprisings, which were rather local in character and generally lacked sufficiently ideal preparation, and on the other by the desire to assert the demand for the unity of Italy, no longer a mere geographical expression, but a programmatic goal to be achieved in the form of a republican government. The General Instruction for the brothers of Y. I. rejected any compromise with the monarchical status quo and with the existing fragmentation of the states of the peninsula. Affirming that Y. I. was « the brotherhood of Italians who believe in a law of Progress and of Duty, who, convinced that Italy is called to be a nation, consecrate, united in association, their thought and action to the great aim of restoring Italy as a nation of free and equal men, One, Independent, Sovereign », Mazzini, explicitly condemning the policy of the Restoration based on the preservation of territorial particularism, constituted through his political action, ideal and concrete, a powerful incentive for the realization of the Risorgimento of Italy.
Since this association founded by Mazzini proposed aims evidently subversive of the existing state of things, its action could only be illegal from the point of view of positive law. In the Instruction Mazzini himself affirms this apertis verbis: Y. I. is « an association tending first of all to a goal of insurrection, but essentially educative until that day and after that day (on which it will bring about the unity, independence and sovereignty of the people of the peninsula) »; and in the circular of 8 Dec. 1831 he affirms that the republican program cannot be realized except against the sovereigns. The affirmation of the unity of Italy, from the Alps to the Ionian Sea, from the mouths of the Var in the west to Trieste in the east, was not only the dream of an idealist, but also drew upon the concept of the European balance of power, the very solid basis of the political action of the European cabinets from the eighteenth century onward, especially thereafter. The attempt to insert positively Italian unity and nationality into the process of European history directly and immediately failed, above all because of the revolutionary and insurrectionary attempts, but the Risorgimento of Italy greatly benefited from it, because these failed attempts constituted a stimulus and an incentive toward a more national and less narrowly particularistic policy, a policy that in the final analysis led Piedmont to be the bulwark against foreign domination and gave the Italian national and independence movement a monarchical and unitary solution. In short, the action of Y. I. and of Mazzini, from the Savoy expedition to the sacrifice of the Bandiera brothers and the Milan uprisings of 1853, conditioned not only the policy pursued by Charles Albert in favor of independence, but stands in a certain sense at the basis of all of Cavour's diplomatic activity, from Plombières to the expedition of the Thousand and the proclamation of the Kingdom. Y. I. as such did not last so long: alive above all from 1830 to 1840, when its founder in 1834 also established Young Europe, aspiring to a republican continent with a Young Switzerland, a Young Poland, a Young France and a Young Germany, with a periodical in French and German (La jeune Suisse) and one in Italian (La G. I., of which six issues appeared from March 1832 to 1834); Y. I. was dissolved by Mazzini himself in 1848.
As a secret society permeated with principles clearly mently anticlerical and anti-papal, Young Italy was the object of the condemnations rightly pronounced by the Church against all associations of that kind, and this not for political reasons, but because of the conflict between certain of its principles and methods and the dictates of Christianity.
