RISORGIMENTO ITALIANO. - Il termine stesso di R. ci riporta alle aspirazioni letterarie ed
RISORGIMENTO ITALIANO - A detail of the Mazzini Room. On display are sheets of Mazzinian inspiration, among which L'Indicatore genovese, Il Dovere, L'Italia del popolo, L'Internazionale, etc. - Rome, Museum of the R.
academic aspirations of the late eighteenth century, in which the premises of the national movement are not yet elaborated, even within the sphere of culture. The eighteenth-century educated class, protagonist of enlightened reformism, ignores romantic national patriotism, even though it is nourished by the same exceptionally rich cultural tradition. On the other hand, regional patriotism, which grew stronger in the age of reforms, already developed elements that would slowly dissolve the lesser "homelands" and exclusive municipalisms, rebellious to any more modern arrangement. Anti-feudal polemics contributed to this, especially in the Mezzogiorno, democratizing the sense of the State. There was also an anti-curial patriotism among jurisdictionalists of Gallican or Josephist training; the civilizing and "patriotic" "good parish priest" was also idealized in Italy (who ideally would be more faithful to the temporal sovereign than to papal Rome). But in Italy, Enlightenment and jurisdictionalist currents were counterbalanced by a persistent attachment to Catholic unity, by the resurgence of strong traditions of Christian natural law, and by a "Catholic Enlightenment" that still took Muratori's pre-Enlightenment as its model.
The boldest developments of Enlightenment thought in Italy occurred on the concrete terrain of economic and social problems (A. Genovese, F. Galiani, P. Verri), of legal-institutional or educational problems (G. Filangieri, C. Beccaria) within the framework of a rationalism refined by pre-historicist and pre-romantic needs, though the tendency toward utilitarianism and a "social individualism" still prevailed (L. Salvatorelli): the polemic against "reason of state" always attenuates the sensitivity of these reformers to certain problems of political force and power. The revolutionary crisis, suddenly arousing new problems, reveals the limits of enlightened despotism and reforms from above. Italian so-called Jacobinism, which is an unoriginal reflection of French doctrines and practice, brings a sense of living struggle, still unknown to the old reformism; the unleashing of passions breaks the academic crust of certain disputes, but often replaces the old rhetoric with a new one. A consistent political organism capable of overcoming regionalisms and provincialisms could not yet be formed with one's own forces.
The distance that still irremediably disjoined the middle classes and the progressive patriciate from the lower classes reveals itself precisely in the republican triennium (1796-98) and in the year of reactions (1799) which witnessed the sacrifice of the Neapolitan "patriots."
Then Cuoco discovers a new politics, beyond Enlightenment ideals and beyond the contradictions of the "passive revolution": a politics that nevertheless justifies the redemption of the enslaved peasant masses through the "abolition of feudalism," which seemed to him much urgent than legislative reform projects, republican propaganda, etc., because "the people are moved not by reasoning but by needs," and because "the ideas of the revolution of Naples could have been popular, had one wished to draw them from the very depths of the nation." This nationalism, more cultural than political, also constitutes the limit of Vincenzo Cuoco's much-touted realism, but it provides him with a weapon to maintain a certain spiritual independence even when he adapts to the new atmosphere of Napoleonic hegemony, and it exercises an early apostolate of patriotism in a national sense with the Milanese Giornale italiano: he is supported by the greatest politician of Napoleonic Milan, Francesco Melzi d'Eril. Thus, collaboration with the French system by the best minds, especially in Milan and Naples (after the fall of the Bourbons in 1806, and more so from 1808, with the advent of the Murat regime), did not entirely exclude the possibility of an overt development of national needs, even apart from the opposition of pro-English or legitimist tendencies (the Sicilian aristocracy with the support of Lord Bentinck; Bourbon agents, such as the Prince of Canosa; the clergy and rural populations, especially in Piedmont, in the formerly papal provinces, and in the Mezzogiorno, where strong banditry existed); secret societies also arose (anti-French resistance already began in 1799 with the Società dei Raggi or Lega Nera, in which General La Hoz participated) especially in the final years of the Napoleonic period (Carboneria, Adelfia, Italici puri: among the latter, Foscolo and Federico Confalonieri). At the same time, the "guide-nation" of the Jacobin patriots continued to bring—through Napoleonic laws and administrative methods, through the experience (even if somewhat domesticated) of political assemblies initially invested with certain responsibilities (Comitia of Lyon in 1801), through conscription and the formation of an army composed of Italians and commanded in part by Italians, who would then be present in all independence movements—the teaching of a great political effort, more European than French, destined to awaken infinite energies, to give a whip-crack (M. d'Azeglio) to all youths thirsty for action and romantic "glory."
The crisis of 1814 presents itself simultaneously as a decisive moment and a catastrophic one, revealing that in the game of the European balance of power, once again entrusted to a directory of conservative powers, there was still no place for an Italian State.
After the Restoration, a dual retreat of Italian patriotic demands seemed to occur: moderate and legalitarian liberalism, modeled on English and French constitutional doctrines, ostensibly returned within the framework of reformism directed by paternal monarchies and limited within the narrow confines of the regional States, which arose almost unchanged after the storm; secondly, legitimist ideology defended—with reasons entirely opposed to the reformist spirit—traditions, historical rights, and even entirely irrational customs. Romantic culture was also influenced by this extreme form of the counter-revolutionary spirit, but in Italy, romanticism—national in politics—was rather the child of the pre-romantic eighteenth century of Alfieri and Rousseau, or of the Italianizing Sismondi (who had behind him the most lively vanguard of Staëlian liberalism) than of the political mysticism of certain French or German legitimist theorists.
A strange ambiguity of the patriotism born in the Napoleonic years permitted loyalist attitudes toward the restored sovereigns and at the same time lingering nostalgia for a "liberal bonapartism" fleetingly experienced in 1815; or even admiration for the military laurels harvested in the wars of the Empire, and simultaneously veneration for the "national resistance" of the Spaniards against Napoleon, to the point of being able to idealize band warfare against the foreigner and the desperate defenses of besieged cities (thus the moderate Cesare Balbo himself, in Studi sulla guerra dell'indipendenza di Spagna e Portogallo, written in 1817 but published thirty years later; in a different sense, with more radical ideological premises, the Spanish guerrilla was pointed to as a model by Bianco di S. Jorioz in 1830).
Montanelli defines the ambiguity of the romantic liberal-national movement better than others, in an 1856 writing on the "Italian national party," which he says was conceived "not in the womb of the revolution, but in that of the counter-revolution," because "the foreigner against whom Italy posed the problem of its personality for the first time, its national ego, was not the German, but the Frenchman. Thus, an alliance was forged between the partisans of the past and the apostles of the future... Who gave the first example of this alliance was Spain: there the monk and the Freemason, the Middle Ages and the 18th century, democracy and monarchy shook hands on the field of national independence." But Montanelli's suggestive definition does not sufficiently emphasize the radical, sometimes even egalitarian demands that were connected to the Jacobin experience and reappeared in the Italian patriotic conspiracies of '20 and '21, precisely through the symbol of the Spanish Constitution; this made the survival of an aristocratic class impossible through any form of distinct representation (hereditary Chamber of Peers). Meanwhile, there is rather a coexistence and a concordant discord, rather than a conscious amalgamation of doctrines, between republican-radical patriotism, often linked to a revolutionary internationalism (F. Buonarroti, L. Angeloni), and monarchical-legalitarian patriotism. Before 1830, the conservative internationalism of the Holy Alliance seemed to prevail over revolutionary internationalism, but by contrast it stimulated the formation of a national ideology, especially in Italy. The "holy alliance of peoples" later evoked by Mazzini, and the "united states of Europe" hoped for by Cattaneo, are nevertheless found in the form of a germinating idea in the writings of French Democrats around 1830, or in vanguard newspapers like the Globe, in its second phase, and even in the first, through an expansion of the ideals of legitimist liberalism.
Already in the Conciliatore (1818-19), which is the highest voice of the renewal movement of Italian culture after the Restoration, Enlightenment motifs, linked to 18th-century utilitarianism and empiricism, are mixed with new motifs, drawn also from German romanticism through Staël, and di Breme (the latter proposes a "Christian-European poetry": while Borsieri defines the "idea of spiritualism, of Christianity, and of the chivalric genius" as "the three main elements of the Romantica"). In reality, the great polemic of the Italian romantics continually leads beyond the borders of the old literary disputes, turning on the content of the new literature and on the very concept of civilization: but it by no means resolves the speculative contrasts that have been mentioned. Only at the end of the second decade of the 19th century does Rosmini tackle the great enterprise of a "philosophical restoration," in order to defeat sensism. However, there is no Italian equivalent in the field of culture and political action to the French Catholic movement of those years, so that the Italian disciples of La Mennais appear as isolated theorists, whether they adopt the counter-revolutionary ideas of his "first manner" (like a Cesare d'Azeglio), or share the hopes of L'Avenir after 1830. Italian liberal Catholicism coexists with the secular culture of Enlightenment filiation, amid agreements and disagreements.
The Italian romantic Left asserts itself more vigorously through the writings and action of Mazzini, not without having initially drawn from the same sources from which the moderate liberals had drawn: from the early "cultural nationalism" of Cuoco, from the religious democraticism of certain revolutionaries of the Rousseauvian school; from the renewing spirit of the Encyclopédistes. The reading of I Promessi Sposi induces Mazzini to abandon, around 1827, Foscolian pessimism (D. Bulferetti). Mazzinian Europeanism fits into those currents of political culture that, connecting above all to the most advanced French liberalism and democraticism (A. Thierry, H. de Saint-Simon, P. Leroux, etc.), dream of a Europe quite different from the one that emerged from the hands of the diplomats, with the "politics of Congresses," and conceived the various European nations as great collective individualities, called upon to cooperate in a common mission of civilization. The concept of civilization is then filled — like that of "progress," which is always intertwined with it — with an ethical-religious content: from the early compromises between spiritualism and empirical utilitarianism, which are characteristic of the school of French ideologues (and find correspondence in Italy in the doctrines of a Romagnosi), one passes to an extreme moralism: this is associated, in left-wing romanticism, with a mysticism of active apostolate. Where the "democratic school" intends to break down the barriers, to create a new custom and a new social and political edifice, since the ancient one appears radically corrupted, moderatism is instead content with a slow preparation of a reform of popular education, which moreover moves Mazzini himself at a certain point; but the forced reconciliations and ambiguous compromises that one must often indulge in lead the intransigent Ligurian thinker to accuse the moderates of opportunism or even of "political atheism." Mazzini's detachment from certain revolutionary traditions, from the socialist-leaning egalitarianism, but with an ethical background, of a Buonarroti, has a social motivation: the necessity of attracting to himself the educated middle classes, the only possible support of the national revolution in Italy; it has a deeper cultural motivation in the reborn historical sense, in which the "democratic school" founded by him almost entirely participates. Revolutionary action is also conceived as an interpretation of the grand design traced by historical providence, which is opposed to the transcendent Providence of Christians.
The romantic cult of creative spontaneity, which applies both to the single individual and to collective individualities, brings the democrats — think of Mazzini's refutation of French primacy — close to Christian spiritualists, who also believe in a progress that is creative work, and leads man almost to compete with Divinity (Gioberti). But in the "Christian doctrine of progress" there is a often-rejected pantheistic temptation: suffice it to recall the polemics between Rosmini and Gioberti on this point, and it is noteworthy that in Italy the analogous discussions carried out between Catholics and laymen in France are also followed with interest, as proven by the translation published in Milan in 1850 of the Essay on Pantheism in Modern Societies by E. Maret. In Mazzini's concept of progress, which is defined as a "moral law," but is a law in a certain sense deterministic, all the more so when it has for its incarnation the incorruptible community symbolized in the "third Roma," the pantheistic inclination instead finds no limit, no stopping point.
In stark contrast with the speculative and practical tendencies of the Mazzinian apostolate, but not without some notable points of contact, the Catholic Gioberti attempts after the '40s to leverage the "educated lay class," that is, the liberal bourgeoisie, for a risorgimento alien to any violence and any illegal action; since legality itself appears to the moderates as a guarantee of morality and grounds all their polemics against corrupting and violent "sects."
The "Pio-Nono movement," arising suddenly between 1840-48 from the contact between deeply rooted Catholic traditions and national-liberal aspirations, with the initial reform initiatives of the new Pope, brought many of the impatient demands of liberalism and Italian democratic thought back into the fold of Catholicism. Recently, authoritative lay scholars have noted the European scope of the movement of opinion originating from the idealization of the meek Pontiff's work, leading them to conclude that it generated the most powerful impetus for the European revolution of 1848. Undoubtedly, the ideas of country and religion were then, and for a certain time, fused and almost confused together (Salvatorelli) and the
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