MAZZINI, GIUSEPPE. —
I. LIFE
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, known Jansenists, by whom his mother was directed; she nurtured a special tenderness for her son and encouraged him in his undertakings and in the harsh vicissitudes of life. He attended courses in philosophy, literature, and law, and upon graduating in jurisprudence on 6 April 1827, he was admitted to the Carbonari by his fellow student Pietro Torre. He then devoted himself with ardor to intense propaganda work, also beginning his journalistic activity in *L'Indicatore genovese*, and, after that periodical was suppressed, in *L'Indicatore livornese*, founded by Guerrazzi.On 13 November 1830, upon returning from a propaganda trip to Tuscany, he was arrested following a denunciation by a false conspirator, one Raimondo Doria, a police informant. Between confinement and exile, he chose the latter and thus began a wandering life that would continue, marked by conspiracies, setbacks, and hardship, until his death.
Departing from Genoa, he went to Geneva, where the exiled Lombard Giacomo Ciani encouraged him to travel to Lyons, where the ill-fated expedition of exiles into Savoy was being organized. Finding the preparations there unpromising, he proceeded to Corsica with another ardent conspirator, Borso de Carminati, hoping to organize a raid into central Italy from there. When the venture failed, he returned to Marseilles and in 1831 founded the secret society *Giovine Italia* and the periodical of the same name to spread its ideas and program. He succeeded in attracting many of the most active members of the Carbonari to his cause, so that *Giovine Italia* rapidly spread to many Italian cities. However, when the police uncovered the ranks of the Genoa congregation, arrests and convictions followed (Jacopo Ruffini committed suicide in prison), and Mazzini himself, forced to leave Marseilles, had to take refuge again in Geneva.
There he supported Antonio Gallenga’s idea of an assassination attempt against Charles Albert and armed, though in vain, the hand of the reckless young man with a dagger. A new expedition into Savoy, organized by *Giovine Italia* in agreement with Polish exiles and the Carbonari (1834), ended in disaster, for which the principal blame was laid on the treachery of the Nizzard Gerolamo Maromino, to whom command had been entrusted, but which was due above all to unpreparedness and the negative, if not hostile, disposition of the people. Mazzini, along with Maromino and Garibaldi, was tried and condemned to death in absentia. Taking refuge in Berne, he launched the first idea of *Giovine Europa* (April 1834). This movement, considering nationality not merely an Italian but a European problem, envisaged a plan for a secret organization extending to all nations living in servitude, which were to unite in a federal pact for their independence. The periodical *La jeune Suisse*, founded in 1834, was the first mouthpiece of this idea, which Mazzini indefatigably promoted until he was expelled from Switzerland and had to seek refuge in London, where he arrived on 13 January 1837.
There he faced an even more wretched and difficult life than the one he had endured in Switzerland, and he had to resort to the humblest expedients to earn his bread. Only through sheer willpower did he manage to have his articles and studies on artistic and literary subjects—always aimed at making known the glories, the sufferings, and the needs of his country—accepted by English journals. In those years he began publishing the writings of Ugo Foscolo that had remained unpublished, starting with the commentary on the *Divine Comedy*, issued in two volumes in 1842 and 1843. Above all, however, he devoted himself to reorganizing *Giovine Italia* and its journal and, with the help of Giuseppe Lamberti and other friends (among whom were informers like Michele Accursi), established a center of dissemination in Paris that remained active until 1848. In London he founded a popular school for young compatriots who had no one to care for their literary and moral education.
Consistent with his political and religious principles, Mazzini viewed with suspicion the patriotic enthusiasm that arose around Pius IX at the beginning of his pontificate; nonetheless, he endeavored to guide 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*, indicating what line Pius IX’s conduct should follow; and for the same purpose he wrote an open letter to the Pope, dated 7 September 1847, which, through friends, he managed to have placed in his hands as the Pope rode through the streets of Rome in his carriage. Unable to rely on leading Pius IX along the desired path, he consented to the method of demonstrations and sensational manifestations aimed at steering papal policy toward the program of *Giovine Italia*.
With the outbreak of the Five Days’ Revolution in Milan, Mazzini hastened there and for three months directed the daily *L’Italia del popolo* (20 May 1848), which was well received by the provisional government and in conflict with Carlo Cattaneo, who accused him of treason. As the fortunes of the war turned for the worse (August 1848), he went to Lugano, then to Marseilles, and from there on 15 March 1849 he arrived in Rome, where the Republic had been proclaimed on 12 February.
As a member of the Constituent Assembly, he took part in the Assembly’s work and on 29 March, together with Saffi and Armellini, formed part of the triumvirate of government, becoming its guiding mind and driving force. With energy and moderation alike, he resisted the most intemperate elements, which were gaining ever more ground. He strove, as far as the abnormal conditions of public life 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 visionary who saw no other path to salvation than that written in his own mind.
On 12 July, after protesting against the Assembly’s vote to cease resistance, he left the city, and after stops in Marseilles and Geneva returned to London, where in July 1850 he founded a European Democratic Committee, of which Ledru-Rollin represented France, Ruge Germany, Darasz Poland, and others various countries; but the initiative met with little success. Invited by some Milanese agitators to direct the uprisings they wished to foment simultaneously in several Italian cities, he soon made his way to Switzerland to be on the spot; but the rising, which broke out on 6 April 1853 and was quickly suppressed, left a bitter aftermath of trials, hangings and recriminations. Other similar attempts by the Mazzinian party of action in 1854 and 1855 likewise came to nothing, nor did the more ambitious one organized in the Neapolitan region in 1857 in league with Nicola Fabrizi and Carlo Pisacane, which cost the latter his life. These repeated failures dealt a decisive blow to Mazzini’s personal prestige and organizational capacity, so that even his most loyal friends, such as Bertani, Manin and Bixio, abandoned him. Returning to London, where he established his permanent base, he launched a new periodical, Pensiero ed Azione (1 September 1858), taking a stand against Cavour, Napoleon III and Victor Emmanuel II. After the armistice of Villafranca he secretly appeared in Florence to organize a plan for seizing the Marches and Umbria and all southern Italy in order to proclaim a republic there; a similar scheme he attempted to carry out in June 1860 in Genoa, but again without success. He viewed Garibaldi’s abandonment of the republican cause and his putting his sword at the service of Victor Emmanuel, thereby contributing concrete works to Italian unification, with deep disfavour. This created
a breach between the two agitators that was healed only in 1864, on the occasion of the condottiere’s visit to London. There was a moment when, seeing all his initiatives fail, Mazzini would not have been averse to rapprochement with the monarchy and the king; but the negotiations conducted through a third party with Victor Emmanuel in 1863 came to nothing. Mazzini persisted in his rigid republicanism and, as long as his strength lasted, continued to foment local uprisings with ever-diminishing support and success. To this end, on 10 August 1870 he left Genoa for Sicily, when, arrested at Naples, he was imprisoned in the fortress of Gaeta. Freed, he returned to London and founded the periodical Roma del Popolo (9 February 1871); in February 1872 he left England and, arriving at Pisa, was struck down by a mortal illness that carried him off within a few days, while a guest of Giovannetta Nathan Rossello. His remains were interred in the Staglieno cemetery in Genoa.
II. MAZZINI AS A PUBLICIST
Mazzini’s activity as a publicist (scattered through the many periodicals he founded, including a few separate pamphlets such as I doveri dell’uomo and I fratelli Bandiera, which had first appeared in serial form) is entirely subordinated to the patriotic and humanitarian ideal that formed the supreme object of his whole life. No other figure in the history of the Risorgimento has served the national cause with a devotion, an unshakable faith and a disregard for personal advantage and tranquillity to match his. Hence, even if, from a Catholic standpoint, the widest reservations must be made regarding his doctrines, his conduct and his work, one cannot but admire the man who served his ideal with a dedication bordering on the heroic.When one coordinates the multifarious and feverish activity he carried on under such harsh and difficult conditions with the guiding ideas that now emerge so clearly from his copious correspondence and writings, diligently collected in the national edition, one sees a close and harmonious connection between Mazzini’s thought and action. It cannot be said that he possessed a mind of exceptional speculative or philosophical gifts, nor that the philosophical concepts to which he adhered were particularly original or profound. What explains the powerful fascination he exerted through his writings is to be sought above all in their warm, impassioned, compelling style, with the vivid accents of a seer.
He starts from the principle that Italy, not out of national pride but by a mission entrusted to her by God, has a pre-eminent civilizing role to play among the nations: that of “transforming the social and political conditions of Europe and of the whole world.” The three great peoples—Greco-Latin, Germanic and Slav—inhabiting Europe are destined to fuse into a single family, forming a bond of union on which the salvation and prosperity of the world depend. From this concept sprang his design for 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 organization” for coordinating action. The Young Switzerland founded in 1834 was merely a first step towards influencing the other countries.
III. GOD AND THE PEOPLE
From the moment he launched the idea of Young Italy, Mazzini adopted as the synthesis of his programme two formulae: “God and Humanity” and “God and the People,” affirming that from these concepts the new society he envisaged was to derive “all its religious, social, political and individual beliefs.” He rejected, as now obsolete and outworn, the formula of the French Revolution—“Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”—while his own was meant to be a step forward, comprehending in a single concept all the manifestations of national life, harmonizing the achievements of the past with those of the future and illumined by the light of religion.IV. GOD
It should be noted how Mazzini bases his fundamental conception on transcendental foundations; he expressly protests that “the ideal is beyond us, supreme over all of us; it is not a creation but a discovery of the intellect”;and with equal vigour he affirms his belief in the spirituality and immortality of the soul, reacting thus both against the immanent idealism current in his day and against pantheism. From the concept of God, supreme legislator, deeply imprinted on his soul, Mazzini deduces every law of progress. Hence, “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 calculating, faith to those who reject every human concept with doubt.” Mazzini prided himself on having been the first to react against the philosophism of the 18th century by promoting the moral reconstruction of values demolished by the French Revolution, by recalling into force the “holy authority” that had died out in Europe, by investing it with “initiative,” and by proclaiming the failure of Enlightenment philosophy and emancipation from French influence.
POPOLO
From the concept of God, Mazzini derives the principle of a universal and immutable moral law. God informs our mode of existence and, at the same time, exercises a continuous influence upon the universe and upon individuals—whether physical or moral—an influence which they are duty-bound to follow. From this influence, as from its source, emanates the law of progress. Between humanity (the people) and progress (God operating upon the world), he conceives a necessary and perpetual relativity, affirming that “the only interpreter of the divine law is the people, the people one and indivisible, which knows no castes or privileges, save those of genius and of virtue”; moreover, that “humanity is the living Word of God.” “The spirit of God fertilizes it and manifests itself ever purer, ever more active from age to age within it.” “God successively incarnates Himself in humanity.” To signify this intimate bond between God and the people, he finds no more adequate formula than that of the Qur’an, adapted to his purpose: “God is God, and the people is His prophet.”
RELIGION
From this, it is clear how Mazzini radically altered the traditional concept of religion. Religion is not founded upon an external code, such as that of Revelation and ecclesiastical magisterium. All positive religions, good in themselves insofar as they express the true sentiment of the human soul within the limits of the time in which they arise, represent only a stage of humanity in its eternal evolution and progress under the breath of the spirit of God. “We have ethics, not Church,” he affirms, “imperfect philosophies, contradictory; not religion, not a collective belief that unites the faithful under a single sign and harmonizes their labors.”
The idea which Mazzini formed of Christianity reveals him as an unwitting son of that Enlightenment against which he claimed to react. Christianity is by him regarded as an individualistic, antisocial religion; a religion which, by placing “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, and as its dogma the Fall and Redemption through another’s work, cannot found a society which, having the same end, should take as its means belief in the collective life of humanity—the sole intermediary between God and the individual, as its condition the works performed by men upon earth, and as its dogma progress.” In these words, in the most explicit form, is expressed the profound antithesis that exists between the concept of the religious society as taught by Catholic doctrine and that which Mazzini professed. Yet he drew upon a theological truth—the truth of the Mystical Body of the Church and of the action of Grace upon souls—the very thought that forms the core of his doctrine. One cannot fail to note the close analogy between Mazzini’s 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 conceived by Mazzini and that which is effected 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 Mazzini never entirely cast off those fundamental principles that had been instilled in him through the Christian education received in his youth (nor is it without significance that he always felt the fascination of the figure and doctrines of Joachim of Fiore). From skepticism and atheism, he confesses, he was delivered only for a brief time during his university studies. Mazzini’s religious system is nothing other than the transfiguration of Christianity, humanized and stripped of its positive, hierarchical, and supernatural character. Between the people and God there must be no mediator: “We have but one Master in heaven, who is God; one interpreter of His laws upon earth, who is the people. Free the country from cardinals, primates, and all those traffickers in falsehoods who form the aristocracy of the clergy!” As with faith, so too with the priesthood: it must be humanized and laicized. “The wisest and most virtuous among the believers” must be elected priest by the people, “with freedom of conscience and of election as a guiding star.” The dogmas of the new faith will no longer be idols and phantoms, “but truth, virtue, genius”; the source of this new faith is not to be sought in hierarchical magisterium, in the Pope, or in councils, but in the people itself, which constitutes “the living law of the world” and is invested with such authority that when “it declares what its belief is, you must bow your head and refrain from every act of rebellion.” In Mazzini’s thought, the triumph of the Protestant revolution marks the beginning of the agony of the papacy and of the Church. Today it would be nothing more than “a withered institution and a mask of religion,” and for at least three centuries it would have fulfilled no other mission than that of impeding the divine mission entrusted by God to humanity. He represents the papacy and monarchy as two specters groping in the shadows, supporting one another so as not to plunge into the abyss, and when he occupied Rome, he recommended to his friends that they act so as to “render impossible any life for the papacy within its walls.”
THE SOCIAL QUESTION
The social justice which Mazzini conceives should be achieved through free associations of workers and through the recognition of the full fruit of their labor. It should be the task of the State and of para-statal or free entities to provide the necessary capital for these associations through credit institutions and special national funds, constituted by the absorption of ecclesiastical, state, and uncultivated lands, and sustained by a wise tax reform restricted to a single levy on income, and by the cession of what is necessary for life. To social reforms should be joined reforms in other branches of public life, and in particular in education, which Mazzini conceived as a proper and inalienable function of the State, which has not merely the right but a precise duty to form citizens according to its own form and ideal. This, however, must not be effected in a revolutionary manner, but through progressive and methodical reforms. Although throughout his life he remained an intransigent republican and a convinced supporter of democratic reforms, he openly opposed the Marxist system and the materialist conception of life upon which it is founded, and tenaciously advocated—as one of the specific tasks of the State—that of preventing class struggle through suitable provisions and reforms. Precisely for this reason, in 1864, on the occasion of the founding of the First International in London, he broke openly with Marx, Bakunin, and their followers, who did all in their power to exclude him from any influence over the working class.
LABOR
Mazzini regards labor as something that imprints upon its fruit an indelible personal mark, rendering property sacred and inviolable. At the same time, labor is “a symbol of the human vocation” in relation to progress and civilization. Labor, therefore, is subject to the moral law that governs the individual and society, and constitutes a duty to which the individual and society must conform by rendering themselves capable through the perfection of their physical and moral faculties, which can render labor easy and fruitful. He who “is ready to give, for the good of all, what he can of his labor” has the right to a wage sufficient to place
Mazzini, Giuseppe - Ultima pagina della lettera autografa per la morte di Chiazzi (20 luglio 1871) - Roma, Museo del Risorgimento.
Mazzini, Giuseppe - Ultima pagina della lettera autografa per
la morte di Chiazzi (20 luglio 1871) - Roma, Museo del Ri-
sorgimento.
Able to develop his own existence “in the aspects that define it,” that is, for the greatest possible yield. The price of labor must not be measured by its mere duration, but by its difficulty, the expenditure of energy, the social utility, etc., and on these factors must be based a wage that ensures the worker a livelihood adequate to family needs.