PISACANE, CARLO

PISACANE, CARLO. — Patriot and writer, born in Naples on 22 August 1818, died at Sanza on 2 July 1857. Of noble family, he entered the Nunziatella College at the age of thirteen and then joined the army (engineering corps). He later went into exile in Marseille, London, and finally Paris. On returning from Africa, where he had enlisted in the Foreign Legion, he fought in Lombardy in 1848.

When the Republic was proclaimed in Rome, he presented himself to Mazzini on 10 March 1849 and became the organizer of the republican army. In opposition to Garibaldi, he reiterated his severe judgments in the work Guerra combattuta in Italia negli anni 1848-49, published in Genoa in 1851, where he had taken refuge and lived until 1857, devoted to his studies; the fruits of these were the Saggi storici-politici-militari sull’Italia, published posthumously in Genoa (1858) and Milan (1860) in four volumes. Having drawn closer to Mazzini in 1855, after a period of tension caused by differences over the social question, he opposed, together with him, the Crimean expedition and Murattism. Believing that the Italian revolution could be achieved through a popular action in the South, he organized the Sapri expedition, which ended with his death. On the eve of his departure, he entrusted Jessie White with documents and papers, as well as his will, a document expressing his political faith.

On the one hand he drew close to Cattaneo and on the other to the French socialists. Freedom and socialism are not, for him, irreconcilable, but rather mutually complementary. Relying on Proudhon’s authority, he asserted that each person’s freedom encounters in the freedom of others not a limitation but an aid: the freest person is the one who has the greatest number of relationships with his fellow human beings; P. expressed his thought in the formula: Freedom and association.