Italian Risorgimento

ITALIAN RISORGIMENTO. - The very term R. brings us back to the literary and academic aspirations of the late eighteenth century, in which, however, the premises of the national movement are not yet elaborated, not even remaining within the sphere of culture. The cultivated class of the eighteenth century, protagonist of Enlightenment reformism, ignores the romantic national patriotism that nonetheless feeds on the same exceedingly rich cultural tradition. On the other hand, the regional patriotism that grows stronger in the age of reforms already develops elements that will slowly come to dissolve the lesser "fatherlands" and exclusive municipalisms, rebellious to any more modern arrangement. The anti-feudal polemic contributes to this, especially in the Mezzogiorno, democratizing the sense of the State. There is also an anti-curial patriotism, among the jurisdictionalists of Gallican or Josephinist formation; the civilizing and "patriotic" "good parish priest" is also idealized in Italy (one who would be more faithful to the temporal sovereign than to papal Rome). But in Italy the Enlightenment and jurisdictionalist currents are counterbalanced by a persistent attachment to Catholic unity, by the re-emergence of strong traditions of Christian natural law, and by a "Catholic Enlightenment" that still has as its model the pre-Enlightenment of Muratori.

The most audacious developments of Enlightenment thought occur in Italy, on the concrete terrain of economic and social problems (A. Genovese, F. Galiani, P. Verri), of juridical-institutional or educational problems (G. Filangieri, C. Beccaria) within the framework of a rationalism refined by pre-historicist and pre-romantic exigencies, though the tendency toward a utilitarianism and a "social individualism" (L. Salvatorelli) still prevails: the polemic against "reason of State" always blunts the sensitivity of these reformers in the face of certain problems of force and political power. The revolutionary crisis, suddenly stirring up new problems, reveals the limits of enlightened despotism and of reforms from above. So-called Italian Jacobinism, which is a scarcely original reflection of French doctrines and practice, brings the sense of living struggle, still unknown to the old reformism; the unleashing of passions breaks the academic crust of certain disputes, but often substitutes a new rhetoric for the old. It is still not possible to form, with one's own forces, a substantial political organism capable of overcoming regionalisms and provincialisms.

The distance that irremediably still separates the middle classes and the progressive patriciate from the common people is revealed precisely in the republican triennium (1796-98) and in the year of the reactions (1799), which sees 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 nonetheless justifies the redemption of the enslaved peasant masses through the "eversion of feudalism," which seems to him far more urgent than projects of legislative reform, republican propaganda, etc., because "the people are not moved 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 the much-vaunted realism of Vincenzo Cuoco, but it furnishes him with a weapon for maintaining a certain spiritual independence even when he adapts to the new atmosphere of Napoleonic hegemony, and he exercises a first apostolate of patriotism in the national sense with the Milanese Giornale italiano: he is supported by the foremost political man of Napoleonic Milan, Francesco Melzi d'Eril. Thus the collaboration of the best minds with the French system, especially in Milan and in Naples (after the Bourbons fell in 1806, and more from 1808, with the advent of the Murattian regime), does not entirely exclude the possibility of an open development of national demands, even apart from the opposition of pro-English or legitimist tendencies (the Sicilian aristocracy with the support of Lord Bentinck; the Bourbon agents, such as the prince of Canosa; the clergy and the rural populations, especially in Piedmont, in the former papal provinces and in the Mezzogiorno, where there is strong brigandage); secret societies also arise (the anti-French resistance already begins in 1799 with the Society of the Rays or Black League, in which General La Hoz participates), especially in the last years of the Napoleonic period (Carboneria, Adelfia, Italici puri: among the latter Foscolo and Federico Confalonieri). At the same time, the "guiding nation" of the Jacobin patriots continues to bring, with Napoleonic laws and administrative methods, with the experience (even if in some way tamed) of political assemblies, initially invested with certain responsibilities (the Comizi of Lyon of 1801), with conscription and the formation of an army composed of Italians and commanded in part by Italians, who will later be present in all the movements for independence, the teaching of a great political effort more European than French, which was to awaken infinite energies, to give a lash (M. d'Azeglio) to all the young men thirsting for action and romantic "glory."

The crisis of 1814 presents itself, at one and the same time, as a decisive moment and as a catastrophic moment, revealing that in the play of the European equilibrium, once again entrusted to a directorate of conservative powers, there is still no place for an Italian State.

After the Restoration a twofold retreat of Italian patriotic demands seems to occur: moderate and legalitarian liberalism, which models itself on English and French constitutional doctrines, apparently withdraws into the sphere of reformism directed by paternal monarchies and limited within the narrow confines of the regional States, which rise again almost unchanged after the storm; secondly, legitimist ideology defends, with reasons altogether opposed to the reformist spirit, traditions, historical rights, and customs even entirely irrational. Romantic culture too is influenced by this extreme form of the counter-revolutionary spirit, but in Italy romanticism, national in politics, is rather the child of the pre-romantic eighteenth century of Alfieri and Rousseau, or of the Italianizing Sismondi (who has behind him the liveliest escort 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 allows loyalist attitudes toward the restored sovereigns and at the same time belated nostalgias for a "liberal Bonapartism" fleetingly perceived in 1815; or even admiration for the military laurels gathered in the wars of the Empire, and at the same time veneration for the "national resistance" of the Spaniards against Napoleon, so much so as to be able to idealize guerrilla warfare against the foreigner and the desperate defenses of besieged cities (thus the moderate Cesare Balbo himself, in the 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 is held up as a model by Bianco di S. Jorioz, in 1830).

Montanelli defines better than others the ambiguity of the romantic liberal-national movement, in a writing of 1856 on the « Italian national party », which he says was conceived « not in the bowels of the revolution, but in those of the counter-revolution », because « the foreigner, against whom Italy for the first time posed the problem of her personality, her national self, was not the German, but the Frenchman. Thus, an alliance was struck between the partisans of the past and the apostles of the future... The first to give the example of this alliance was Spain: there the monk and the freemason, the Middle Ages and the 18th century, democracy and monarchy joined hands on the field of national independence ». But Montanelli's evocative definition does not sufficiently underline the radical, at times even egalitarian, demands that were bound up with the Jacobin experience and that resurfaced in the Italian patriotic conspiracies of 1820 and 1821, precisely under the symbol of the Spanish Constitution; this made impossible the survival of an aristocratic class through any form of distinct representation (hereditary Chamber of Peers). Meanwhile there is rather a coexistence and a concordant discord, than a conscious blending 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 seems to prevail over revolutionary internationalism, but by contrast it stimulates 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 present in germinal form in the writings of the French democrats around 1830, or in avant-garde journals such as the Globe, in its second phase, and even in its first, through a broadening of the ideals of legitimist liberalism.

Already in the Conciliatore (1818-19), which is the loftiest voice of the movement renewing Italian culture after the Restoration, Enlightenment motifs, linked to eighteenth-century utilitarianism and empiricism, are mingled with new motifs, drawn also from German romanticism, through Staël, and de 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 principal elements of the Romantic »). In reality, the great polemic of the Italian romantics continually carries beyond the boundaries of the old literary disputes, bearing on the content of the new literature and on the very concept of civilization: but it does not at all resolve the speculative contrasts mentioned above. Only at the end of the second decade of the nineteenth century does Rosmini undertake the great enterprise of a « philosophical restoration », in order to defeat sensism. Yet in the field of culture and political action there is no Italian equivalent of 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 lay culture of Enlightenment descent, amid agreements and disagreements.

The Italian romantic Left asserts itself more vigorously with the writings and the action of Mazzini, not without having initially drawn on the same sources from which the moderate liberals had drawn: on the first « cultural nationalism » of Cuoco, on the religious democratism of certain revolutionaries, of the Rousseauian school; on the renewing spirit of the encyclopedists. The reading of the Promessi Sposi leads

Mazzini to abandon, around 1827, Foscolo's pessimism (D. Bulferetti). Mazzini's Europeanism fits into those currents of political culture which, linking themselves above all to the most advanced French liberalism and democratism (A. Thierry, H. de Saint-Simon, P. Leroux, etc.), dream of a Europe altogether different from the one that emerged from the hands of the diplomats, with the « policy of the Congresses », and conceived the various European nations as great collective individualities, called to cooperate in a common mission of civilization. The concept of civilization then fills up, like that of « progress », which is always interwoven with it, with an ethico-religious content: from the first compromises between spiritualism and empirical utilitarianism, which are characteristic of the schools of the French ideologues (and in Italy find correspondence in the doctrines of a Romagnosi) one passes to an extreme moralism: this is associated, in left-wing romanticism, with a mystique of active apostolate. Where the « democratic school » intends to break the dikes, to create a new custom and a new social and political edifice, since the old appears radically corrupt, moderatism is content instead with a slow preparation of a reform of popular education, which moreover moves Mazzini himself, at a certain point: but the forced conciliations and the ambiguous compromises to which one must often indulge bring it about that the intransigent Ligurian thinker accuses the moderates of opportunism or even of « political atheism ». Mazzini's detachment from certain revolutionary traditions, from the socialistic-tinged egalitarianism, but with an ethical background, of a Buonarroti, has a social motivation, in 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. Even revolutionary action is conceived as an interpretation of the great design traced by historical providence, which is opposed to the transcendent Providence of Christians.

The romantic cult of creative spontaneity, which applies as much to the single individual as to collective individualities, brings the democrats closer — one thinks of Mazzini's confutation of French primacy — to the Christian spiritualists, believers also in a progress that is a creative operation, and leads man almost to compete with the Divinity (Gioberti). But in the « Christian doctrine of progress » there is a pantheistic temptation often rejected: it suffices to recall the polemics between Rosmini and Gioberti on this point, and it is noteworthy that in Italy the analogous discussions carried on between Catholics and laymen in France were also followed with interest, as proves the translation published in Milan, in 1850, of the Saggio sul panteismo nelle società moderne, 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 its incarnation is the incorruptible community symbolized in the « third Rome », the pantheistic inclination finds instead no limit, no point of arrest.

In full contrast with the speculative and practical tendencies of Mazzini's apostolate, but not without some notable points of contact, the Catholic Gioberti attempts after 1840 to leverage the « educated lay class », that is, the liberal bourgeoisie, for a r. alien to all violence and all illegal action; since legality itself appears to the moderates as a guarantee of morality and grounds their entire polemic against the corrupting and violent « sects ».

The "Pio Nono movement," which arose suddenly from the contact between deeply rooted Catholic traditions and national-liberal aspirations, between 1840 and 1848, with the first reforming initiatives of the new Pope, brings many of the impatient demands of liberalism and of Italian democratism itself back into the fold of Catholicism. Recently, authoritative lay scholars have noted the European scope of the movement of opinion that originated from the idealization of the gentle Pontiff's work: so much so as to lead to the conclusion that from it was born the most powerful impulse toward the European revolution of 1848. Without doubt, the ideas of homeland and of religion were then, and for a certain time, fused and almost confused together (Salvatorelli), and the

The painful separation between worldly and religious ideals seemed to lead outright to a "religious crisis" in Italian public opinion (S. Jacini). On closer inspection, the terms of the crisis had long existed in the speculative and ethico-religious contrasts that divided Italian and European culture internally, and often broke the coherence of even the most sincere individual attitudes (v. NEOGUELPHISM).

If the halting reform initiatives of the Italian princes interest us as an extreme effort of the regional States to adapt to the needs of the times, far more do the heartfelt and spontaneous manifestations of will and political conscience among the various Italian populations interest us. A defect of organization, of experience, of a sense of unity vitiates the whole effort that culminates in the "federal war." Pius IX himself, though distrusting the "Italian fever" for what it contained of the exclusive, of the worldly absolute and of the religiously contingent, comes to make the Italian cause his own even after the famous Allocution of Apr. 29, 1848, which disappoints the supporters of the neo-Guelph "crusade": in the letter sent through Corboli-Bussi to the Emperor of Austria he still consecrates the principle of nationality, beyond any recourse to violence, appealing to the sovereign's piety, that he renounce his Italian possessions.

The extreme point of the revolution of '48 is reached, in Italy, with the establishment of democratic, republican governments founded on the principle of popular sovereignty, from which is likewise deduced the necessity of a national Constituent Assembly and of partial constituent assemblies elected by universal suffrage: but this establishment of democracies occurs only in Florence, Venice and Rome, and only in Rome are all, or nearly all, the ideological consequences of the principles theoretically elaborated deduced. On the other hand, doctrinal premises are not sufficient to qualify a regime: the Roman Republic interests us above all for certain social transformations, studied by Demarco, and for a certain practical motivation in the face of the Catholic convictions of the great majority.

After the catastrophe of '48 there is, on the part of the greatest and best patriots, an examination of conscience that sometimes takes on, for the historian, a particular value: one thinks of Cattaneo's Archivio triennale, of Gioberti's Rinnovamento, of Tommaseo's writings, etc. But in such writings the "ideals of '48" still often appear normative: there still persists a sort of political "prophetism," especially in Mazzini and Gioberti. The times are truly ripe for the hegemony, or for the dictatorship that the latter entrusts to the Piedmontese State, but not for revealing in the historical process that "omnipotence of ideas" which is his worldly faith; nor does Mazzini's messianic people arise. It is, instead, the hour of Cavour's ingenious possibilism, sustained moreover by a liberal ethic: he utilizes the scattered elements of an Italian program of action: Savoy dynastic policy, the Napoleonic ideas of Napoleon III, the legacy of Albertism among the moderates of various regions, the crisis of particularism, by now perceptible even in the Bourbon Mezzogiorno, at least among the educated, who not infrequently find themselves, as exiles, sharing the Piedmontese constitutional experience. But to be wholly Italian, Cavour's program must precisely, willy-nilly, accept a confrontation with the intransigent national prophetisms: and there occurs the encounter between royal war and people's war - where a small minority represents the future "people" - in 1860. An encounter well in keeping with the traditions of the R., somewhat like the proclamation of Rome as capital in fieri, which is Cavour's last Risorgimento gesture.

Ettore Passerin