MAZZINI, GIUSEPPE. - I. VITA. - Born in Genoa on 22 June 1805, died in Pisa on 10 March 1872, son of Giacomo, professor of medical pathology at the University of Genoa, and of Maria Drago. He received a religious education under the guidance of the priests De Scalzi and De Gregori, well-known Jansenists, by whom his mother was also directed; she nurtured a special tenderness for her son and encouraged him in his undertakings and in the harsh vicissitudes of life. He attended the course of philosophy, literature and law, when, having just graduated in jurisprudence on 6 April 1827, he was admitted to the Carboneria by his fellow student Pietro Torre, and he devoted himself with ardour to intense propaganda activity, also beginning his journalistic activity on the Indicatore genovese and, once that periodical was suppressed, on the Indicatore livornese founded by Guerrazzi. On 13 November 1830, on his return from a propaganda journey in Tuscany, he was arrested, on the denunciation of a false conspirator, one Raimondo Doria, a police informer. Between confinement and exile, he chose the latter, and thus began a wandering life that he would spend entirely amid conspiracies, ambushes and poverty, until his death.
Having set out from Genoa, he went to Geneva, and here, at the urging of the Lombard exile Giacomo Ciani, he was induced to go to Lyon, where the well-known ill-fated expedition of exiles into Savoy was being organized; but finding there the preparations being made scarcely promising, he continued on to Corsica, together with another spirited conspirator, Borso de Carnated, hoping to be able there to organize an incursion into central Italy. But, the enterprise having come to nothing, he set out again for Marseilles, and there in 1831 founded the secret society "Young Italy," and the periodical of the same title, for the diffusion of the idea and of the program. He had the good fortune to attract to his following many of the most active elements that were serving in the Carboneria, so that Young Italy rapidly spread through many cities of Italy; but once the police discovered the ranks of the conspiracy in Genoa, arrests and condemnations followed (Jacopo Ruffini committed suicide in prison) and M. himself, forced to leave Marseilles, had to take refuge once again in Geneva. Here he seconded Antonio Gallenga's idea of an attempt on the life of Charles Albert, and armed with a dagger, but in vain, the hand of the young daredevil. Even a new expedition into Savoy, organized by Young Italy, in agreement with Polish exiles and with the Carboneria (1834), ended in a disaster, the principal cause of which was attributed to the betrayal of the Niçard Gerolamo Ramorino, to whom its command had been entrusted, but which was due above all to unpreparedness and to the negative if not hostile dispositions of the people. M., as likewise Ramorino and Garibaldi, was tried and condemned to death in absentia, and, having taken refuge in Bern, he launched the first idea of Young Europe (Apr. 1834). This, considering nationality as a problem not only Italian but European, comprised a plan of secret organization extended to all the nations subject to servitude, which were to draw together, in concerted action, into a federal pact for their own independence. The periodical La jeune Suisse, founded in 1834, is the first mouthpiece of this idea, for which M. labored indefatigably until, expelled from Switzerland, he had to seek safety in London, where he arrived on 13 Jan. 1837.
Here a life even more wretched and straitened than the one he had led in Switzerland awaited him, and he had to resort to the humblest expedients to procure bread. Only thanks to tenacity of will did he succeed in getting his articles and studies on artistic and literary subjects accepted in English reviews, always directed at making appreciated the glories, the misery and the needs of his own country. In those years he began the publication of the writings of Ugo Foscolo, which had remained unpublished in London, starting with the commentary on the Divine Comedy, published in two volumes in 1842 and 1843; but above all he attended to the reorganization of Young Italy and of its review, and established in Paris with the help of Giuseppe Lamberti and of other friends (among whom also informers such as Michele Accursi) a center of diffusion that was active until 1848. In London he founded a popular school for young fellow-countrymen who had no one to take care of their literary and moral formation.
Painful to his political and religious principles, M. viewed with diffidence the patriotic enthusiasm that arose around Pius IX at the beginning of his pontificate; nevertheless he strove to orient it in harmony with his ideals. To this end, in 1846, he published in an English newspaper the article The Pope and the Italian question, pointing out what the line of conduct of Pius IX ought to be; and for the same purpose he wrote an open letter to the Pope, dated 7 Sept. 1847, which, by means of friends, he had delivered into his hands, while the latter was passing in a carriage through the streets of Rome. But being unable to trust that he could lead Pius IX along the desired path, he consented to the method of demonstrations and clamorous manifestations, aimed at turning the concepts of papal policy in accordance with the program of Young Italy. When the revolution of the Five Days broke out in Milan, M. hastened there promptly, and for three months directed the daily L'Italia del popolo (20 May 1848), well received by the provisional government and at odds with Carlo Cattaneo, who accused him of betrayal. But as the fortunes of the war turned bad (Aug. 1848) he moved on to Lugano, then to Marseilles, and from there on 15 March 1849 he arrived in Rome, where on 12 Feb. the Republic had been proclaimed.
As a member of the Constituent Assembly he took part in the works of the Assembly and on 29 March, together with Saffi and with Armellini, he became part of the triumvirate of government, becoming its mind and its arm, resisting, with energy and moderation together, against the most intemperate elements, which were gaining ever more ground. He strove, as far as the anomalous conditions of public affairs allowed, to embody in the republican government the politico-social ideas he had always tenaciously championed, once again coming into conflict with his own fellow believers, who regarded him as a deluded man, who saw no other path to salvation than the one written in his own mind.
On July 12, after protesting against the Assembly's vote to cease resistance, he left the city, and after stops in Marseille and Geneva returned to London, and in July 1850 founded a European Democratic Committee, of which Ledru-Rollin for France, Ruge for Germany, Darasz for Poland, and others for other countries were members, but the initiative did not meet with great success. Invited by some Milanese agitators to take the leadership of the uprisings that were to be stirred up simultaneously in various cities of Italy, he soon made his way to Switzerland, in order to be present on the spot: but the uprising, which broke out on April 6, 1853, and was promptly suppressed, left a bitter aftermath of trials, hangings and recriminations. No better outcome had other similar attempts in 1854 and 1855 by the Mazzinian party of action, nor the one of greater scope, organized in the Neapolitan territory in 1857, in agreement with Nicola Fabrizi and Carlo Pisacane, which cost the latter his life. All these setbacks decisively damaged M.'s personal prestige for organizational capacity, so that he found himself abandoned even by his most trusted friends, such as Bertani, Manin and Bixio. He, having returned to London, and having established there his permanent residence, brought out a new periodical: Pensiero ed azione (September 1, 1858), taking a position against the policy of Cavour, of Napoleon III and of Victor Emmanuel II. After the armistice of Villafranca, he made a clandestine appearance in Florence to organize a plan for the occupation of the Marches and Umbria and of all southern Italy, in order to proclaim the republic there; a similar design he attempted to carry out in June 1860 in Genoa, but always without success; nevertheless he saw with great displeasure that Garibaldi, setting aside the republican cause, placed his sword at the service of Victor Emmanuel, collaborating with concrete works for Italian unification. This created a rupture between the two agitators, which healed only in 1864, on the occasion of the leader's journey to London. There was a moment when M., seeing all his initiatives fail, would not have been averse to a rapprochement with the monarchy and with the king; but the relations conducted through a third person with Victor Emmanuel in 1863 had no follow-up; M. continued in his rigid republicanism and, as long as his strength lasted, he strove to stir up local uprisings with ever less following and success. To this end, on August 10, 1870, he set out from Genoa for Sicily, when, arrested in Naples, he was confined in the Fortress of Gaeta. Freed, he returned to London and founded the periodical Roma del popolo (February 9, 1871); in February 1872 he left England, and having reached Pisa he was seized by a fatal illness that carried him off within a few days, as a guest of Giovannetta Nathan Rossello. The body was buried in the cemetery of Staglieno in Genoa.
II. MAZZINI AS PUBLICIST
M.'s activity as a publicist (scattered across the many periodicals he founded, including also the few separate pamphlets, such as I doveri dell'uomo, and I fratelli Bandiera, these too having first appeared in periodicals in instalments), is entirely coordinated with the patriotic and humanitarian ideal that formed the supreme object of his whole life. There is no other figure in the history of the Risorgimento who served the national cause with an ardour of dedication, an unshakeable strength of faith, and a contempt for his own advantages and tranquillity equal to his. For this reason, even though from the Catholic point of view the broadest reservations must be made about M.'s doctrines, conduct, and work itself, one cannot but admire the man who served his ideal with a dedication that borders on the heroic.
By coordinating the manifold and feverish activity he carried on under such harsh and difficult conditions with the inspiring concepts, as they now emerge extensively from his very copious correspondence and from his writings, diligently collected in the national edition, one will see that between M.'s thought and action there runs a close connection and harmony. It cannot be said that he had a mind endowed with exceptional speculative and philosophical qualities, or that the philosophical concepts by which he was inspired are truly original and profound. What explains the powerful fascination he exercised through his writings must be sought above all in their warm, impassioned, gripping form, with the imaginative accents of a seer.
He starts from the principle that to Italy, not out of nationalistic pride but by virtue of a mission entrusted to her by God, there belongs a civilizing function pre-eminent over the other nations: that of «transforming the social and political conditions of Europe and of the entire world». The three great peoples, the Greco-Latin, the Germanic and the Slavic, who inhabit Europe, are destined to merge into a single family, forming a connecting knot on which the salvation and prosperity of the world depend. From this concept was born in him the design of Young Europe, which was ultimately to be divided into three branches, Young Germany, Young Poland and Young Italy, united in a central committee, with «a federal arrangement» for the coordination of action. Young Switzerland, founded in 1834, was merely a first step, in order to exert influence on the other countries.
III. GOD AND PEOPLE
From the moment he launched the idea of Young Italy, he adopted as the synthesis of his program two formulas: "God and Humanity" and "God and the People," affirming that from these concepts the new society he envisioned must draw and deduce "all its religious, social, political, and individual beliefs." He repudiated, as now obsolete and superseded, the formula of the French Revolution "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," while the one he proposed was meant to be a step forward and to encompass in a single concept all the manifestations of national life, harmonizing with the conquests of the past those of the future, illuminated by the ray of religious light.
IV. GOD
It should be noted how M. establishes his fundamental conception on transcendental foundations; he expressly protests that «the ideal is outside us, is supreme over us all; it is not a creation, it is a discovery of the intellect»; and with equal energy he affirms his faith in the spirituality and immortality of the soul and therefore reacts both against the immanentist idealism in vogue since his times and against pantheism. From the concept of God, supreme legislator, deeply impressed upon his soul, M. deduces every law of progress. Accordingly, «the cry God wills it, God wills it of the Crusades — he affirms — can alone convert the inert into the active, give courage to the fearful, enthusiasm to the calculators, faith to those who reject every human concept with doubt». M. glories in having been the first to react against the philosophism of the 18th century by promoting the moral reconstruction of the values demolished by the French Revolution, by restoring to vigor the «holy authority» that had been extinguished in Europe, by giving it the power of «initiative», and by preaching the failure of Enlightenment philosophy and emancipation from French influence.
V. PEOPLE
From the concept of God M. derives the principle of the universal and immutable moral law. God informs our manner of existing, and at the same time exercises over the universe, as over individual beings, both physical and moral, a continuous inspiration, which they have the duty to second, and from which, as from its source, the law of progress emanates. Between humanity (people) and progress (God operating upon the world) he conceives a relativity so necessary and perpetual as to affirm that "the only interpreter of the divine law is the people, the people is one and indivisible, knowing no castes and privileges save those of genius and of virtue"; furthermore that "humanity is the living word of God." "The spirit of God fecundates it and manifests itself ever purer, ever more active from epoch to epoch within it." "God becomes incarnate successively in humanity." To signify this intimate nexus that exists between God and the people he finds no more adequate formula than that of the Koran, adapted to his purpose: "God is God and the people is his prophet."
VI. RELIGION
From this it is understood how M. radically altered the traditional concept of religion. Religion is not founded upon an external code such as that of Revelation and the ecclesiastical magisterium. All positive religions, good in themselves, insofar as and limited to the time in which they express the true sentiment of the human soul, represent only one stage of humanity, in its perpetual evolving and progressing under the breath of the spirit of God. "We have sects, not a Church," he affirms, "imperfect, contradictory philosophies, not religion, not a collective belief that joins the faithful under one sign and establishes harmony among their labors."
The idea that M. had formed of Christianity reveals him as an unwitting son of that Enlightenment against which he protested he was reacting. Christianity is considered by him an individualistic, antisocial religion; a religion which, by the very fact of positing "as its end the salvation of the individual, as its means belief in an intermediary being between God and the individual, as its condition Grace, as its dogma the fall and Redemption through another's work, cannot found a society which, having likewise the same end, has as its means belief in the collective life of humanity, the sole intermediary between God and the individual, as its condition one's own works performed on earth, as its dogma progress." Expressed in these words, in the most explicit form, is the profound antithesis that exists between the concept of religious society as taught by Catholic doctrine and the one that M. professes. Yet the latter draws upon a theological truth, that of the mystical body of the Church and of the action of Grace upon souls, the thought that forms the core of his doctrine. The close analogy cannot escape notice that "exists between the Mazzinian idea of the vivifying influence exercised by God upon humanity and the action of the Holy Spirit upon the Church; between the human divinization as M. conceives it and that which is wrought through Grace; between the incarnation of God in humanity for its progressive elevation and salvation and the incarnation of the Divine Word for the redemption and salvation of men. This clearly demonstrates how M. never entirely divested himself of those fundamental principles that had been instilled in him by the Christian education received in his youth (nor is it without significance that he always was fascinated by the figure and doctrines of Joachim of Fiore). He confesses that he was touched by skepticism and atheism only briefly, during his university studies. M.'s religious system is nothing but the disguise of Christianity, humanized and stripped of its positive, hierarchical and supernatural character. Between the people and God there must be no mediator: "we have only one master in heaven, who is God; only one interpreter of his laws on earth, which is the people. Free the country from cardinals, primates and from all those traffickers in lies who form the aristocracy of the clergy!" As faith, so too the priesthood is to be humanized, laicized; "the wisest and most virtuous among the believers" must be elected priest of the people, "with freedom of conscience and of election as patron." The dogmas of the new faith will no longer be idols and phantoms, "but the true, virtue, genius"; the source of this new faith must not be sought in the hierarchical magisterium, in the Pope and the councils, but in the people itself, which constitutes "the living law of the world" and is invested with such authority that when it "declares that such is its belief, you must bow your head and refrain from any act of rebellion." The triumph of the Protestant revolution, in M.'s thought, marks the beginning of the agony of the papacy and of the Church. Today it would be nothing but "a decrepit institution and a mask of religion"; and for at least three centuries it would have had no explicit mission other than that of hindering the divine mission entrusted by God to Humanity. He represents the papacy and the monarchy as two specters groping in the darkness, which support each other so as not to plunge into the abyss, and, Rome being occupied, he recommended to his friends to act in such a way as to "render impossible any life for the papacy within its walls"
VII. THE SOCIAL QUESTION
Social justice, as M. conceived it, was to be achieved by means of free associations of workers and by recognizing the worker's right to the integral fruit of his labor. It should be the task of the State and of parastatal or free bodies to provide the capital necessary for these associations through credit institutions and special national funds, to be constituted by absorbing ecclesiastical and state lands and uncultivated lands, and to be sustained by a wise tax reform, restricted to a single tax on income, and with exemption of what is necessary for life. With reforms of a social order there should also be joined reforms of the other branches of public life, and in particular of education, which M. conceived as a proper and inalienable function of the State, since it has, more than the right, a precise duty to form citizens according to its own form and ideal. This, however, must not be brought about in revolutionary form, but rather by progressive and methodical reforms. Although he remained, throughout his life, an intransigent republican and a convinced supporter of democratic reforms, he nevertheless openly ranged himself against the Marxist system and the materialist conception of life on which it is founded, and tenaciously advocated, as one of the specific tasks of the State, that of preventing class struggle with opportune measures and reforms. Precisely for this reason, in 1864, on the occasion of the founding in London of the first proletarian international, he came into open rupture with Marx, Bakunin and their followers, who accordingly did everything to preclude him from any influence over the working class.
VIII. LABOR
M. regards labor as a quid that impresses upon its product an indelible personal stamp, and renders property sacred and inviolable; at the same time it is like a "symbol of the human vocation" with regard to progress and civilization. Labor, therefore, is subject to the moral law that governs the individual and society; and it constitutes a duty to which the individual and society must lend themselves by making themselves fit through the perfecting of the physical and moral faculties, which can render it easy and profitable. He, moreover, who "is disposed to give for the good of all what he can of labor," has a right to a remuneration such as to place him able to develop his own existence "under the aspects that define it," that is to say, for the greatest possible output. The price of labor must not be assessed by its material duration, but rather by its difficulty, the expenditure of energy, its social utility, etc.; and on the basis of these factors it must secure for the worker a wage corresponding to family needs.
Bibliography19 works
Pietro Pirri