ITALIAN RISORGIMENTO. — The very term “Risorgimento” recalls the literary and academic aspirations of the late eighteenth century, in which, however, the premises of the national movement are not yet elaborated, even within the sphere of culture. The cultured class of the eighteenth century, protagonist of Enlightenment reformism, ignores the romantic national patriotism which, nevertheless, draws nourishment from the same rich cultural tradition. On the other hand, regional patriotism, which grows stronger in the age of reforms, already develops elements that will gradually dissolve the “patriae” of the smaller states and exclusive municipalism, resistant to any more modern order. To this contributes the anti-feudal polemic, 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; in Italy too, the “good parish priest” is idealized as a civilizing and “patriotic” figure (who is thought to be more faithful to the temporal sovereign than to the Papal See). But in Italy, Enlightenment and jurisdictionalist currents are counterbalanced by a persistent attachment to Catholic unity, by the resurgence of strong traditions of Christian natural law, and by a “Catholic Enlightenment” which still takes as its model the pre-Enlightenment thought of Muratori.
The boldest developments of Enlightenment thought in Italy occur on the concrete terrain of economic and social problems (A. Genovesi, F. Galiani, P. Verri), of juridical-institutional or educational problems (G. Filangieri, C. Beccaria) within a rationalism refined by pre-historicist and pre-romantic exigencies, though the tendency towards utilitarianism and “social individualism” (L. Salvatorelli) still prevails. The polemic against “reason of State” always attenuates the sensitivity of these reformers to certain problems of force and political power. The revolutionary crisis, suddenly bringing new problems to light, reveals the limits of enlightened despotism and reform from above. The so-called Italian Jacobinism, which is a not very original reflection of French doctrines and practice, brings a sense of living struggle, hitherto 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 its own forces, a solid political organism capable of overcoming regionalism and provincialism.
The distance that irreparably separates the middle classes and progressive aristocracy from the common people is revealed precisely in the three-year republican period (1796–98) and in the year of reactions (1799), which sees the sacrifice of the “patriots” of Naples.
It is then that Cuoco discovers a new politics, beyond the ideals of the Enlightenment and beyond the contradictions of the “passive revolution”: a politics which, however, justifies the redemption of the enslaved peasant masses through the evidence of feudalism, which seems to him far more urgent than legislative reform projects, republican propaganda, etc., because “the people do not move for reasons but for needs,” and because “the ideas of the Neapolitan revolution might have been popular, had one wished to draw from the very depths of the nation.” This nationalism, more cultural than political, also constitutes the limit of Vincenzo Cuoco’s much vaunted 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 he exercises a first apostolate of patriotism in a national sense with the Milanese Giornale italiano; he is supported by the leading political figure 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), does not entirely exclude the possibility of an open development of national exigencies, even apart from opposition to 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, the former Papal provinces, and the Mezzogiorno, where there is strong brigandage). Secret societies also arise (anti-French resistance begins as early as 1799 with the Società dei Raggi or Lega Nera, 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 Jacobin patriots continues to carry, through Napoleonic laws and administrative methods, through the experience (even if somewhat domesticated) of political assemblies initially invested with certain responsibilities (the Lyonnais Comitia of 1801), through conscription and the formation of an army composed of Italians and commanded in part by Italians, elements that will later be present in all the movements for independence, teaching a great political effort more European than French, which was to awaken infinite energies, giving a whip-crack (M. d’Azeglio) to all the young besieged by the desire for action and “romantic” glory.
The crisis of 1814 appears, at once, as a decisive moment and as a catastrophic one, revealing that in the game of 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 exigencies seems to occur: the liberal-moderate and legislative tendency, modeled on English and French constitutional doctrines, appears to return within the sphere of reformism directed by paternal monarchies and limited to the narrow boundaries of regional States, which re-emerge almost unchanged after the storm; secondly, legitimist ideology defends, with reasons entirely opposed to the spirit of reformism, traditions, historical rights, and even wholly irrational customs. Romantic culture is also influenced by this extreme form of counter-revolutionary spirit, but in Italy romanticism, national in politics, is rather the offspring of the pre-romantic eighteenth century of Alfieri and Rousseau, or of the Italian-Swiss Sismondi (who stands behind the most lively choice of state liberalism), than of the political mysticism of certain French or German legitimist theorists.
A strange ambiguity of the patriotism born in the Napoleonic years permits idealistic attitudes towards the restored sovereigns and, at the same time, veiled nostalgias for a “liberal Bonapartism” fleetingly perceived in 1815; or admiration for the military laurels gathered in the wars of the Empire, and at the same time veneration for the “national resistance” of the Spanish against Napoléon, so much so that one can idealize guerrilla warfare against the foreigner and the desperate defenses of besieged cities (thus the same moderate Cesare Balbo, in his Studies on the War of Independence of Spain and Portugal, written in 1817 but published thirty years later; in a different sense, with more radical ideological premises, the Spanish war is pointed to as a model by Bianco di Saint-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 womb of the revolution, but in that of the counter-revolution,” because “the foreigner against whom Italy first posed the problem of its personality, its national ego, was not the German, but the French. Thus, an alliance was struck between the partisans of the past and the apostles of the future... Who first gave an 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 demands, sometimes even egalitarian, that were linked to the Jacobin experience and that resurfaced in the Italian patriotic conspiracies of 1820 and 1821, precisely with the symbol of the Spanish Constitution; this made it impossible for an aristocratic class to survive through any form of distinct representation (hereditary House of Peers). Meanwhile, what we have is rather a coexistence and a concordant discord, rather than a conscious blending of doctrines, between republican-radical patriotism—often linked to revolutionary internationalism (F. Buonarroti, L. Angeloni)—and monarchical-legislative patriotism. Before 1830, the conservative internationalism of the Holy Alliance seems to prevail over revolutionary internationalism, but it stimulates, by contrast, 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 nonetheless found in germinal form in the writings of French democrats around 1830, or in avant-garde newspapers like the Globe in its second phase, and even in its first, through an expansion of the ideals of legitimist liberalism.
Already in *Il Conciliatore* (1818–19), which is the highest voice of the movement renewing Italian culture after the Restoration, Enlightenment motifs—linked to 18th-century utilitarianism and empiricism—are mingled with new motifs drawn also from German Romanticism, through Staël and Brenne (the latter proposing a “Christian-European poetry”), while Borsieri defines “the idea of spiritualism, of Christianity, and of chivalric genius” as “the three principal elements of Romanticism.” In reality, the great polemic of the Italian Romantics constantly transcends the boundaries of old literary disputes, focusing on the content of the new literature and on the very concept of civilization: but it does not resolve at all the speculative contrasts to which reference has been made. Only at the end of the second decade of the 19th century does Rosmini undertake the great enterprise of a “philosophical restoration” to defeat sensism. There is, however, no Italian equivalent in the field of culture and political action of the French Catholic movement of those years, so that Italian disciples of Lamennais appear as isolated theorists, whether they adopt the counter-revolutionary ideas of his “first manner” (as did Cesare d’Azeglio) or share the hopes of *L’Avenir* after 1830. Italian liberal Catholicism coexists with the secular culture of Enlightenment derivation, amid agreements and disagreements.
Italian romantic Left asserts itself more vigorously through the writings and actions of Mazzini, without having initially drawn from sources other than those from which moderate liberals drew: from Cuoco’s first “cultural nationalism,” from the religious democraticism of certain revolutionaries of the Rossinian school, from the spirit of renewal of the Encyclopedists. The reading of *I Promessi Sposi* induces Mazzini, around 1827, to abandon Foscolian pessimism (D. Bulferetti). Mazzinian Europeanism inserts itself into those currents of political culture that, drawing especially from advanced French liberalism and democracy (A. Thierry, H. de Saint-Simon, P. Leroux, etc.), dream of a Europe altogether different from that shaped by the hands of diplomats with the “politics of Congresses,” and conceive the various European nations as great collective individuals called to cooperate in a common civilizing mission. The concept of civilization is then filled, like that of “progress”—which is always intertwined with it—with an ethical-religious content: from the first compromises between spiritualism and empirical utilitarianism, characteristic of the school of the Ideologues (and in Italy find correspondence in the doctrines of a Romagnosi), one passes to an extreme moralism, which in left-wing Romanticism is associated with a mystique of active apostleship. Where the “democratic school” intends to break the dikes, to create a new morality and a new social and political edifice, since the old appears radically corrupt, moderatism instead insists on a slow preparation of a reform of popular education, which, moreover, moves even Mazzini at a certain point: but the forced reconciliations and ambiguous compromises to which one often has to yield mean that the intransigent Ligurian thinker accuses moderates of opportunism or even of “political atheism.”
Mazzini’s detachment from certain revolutionary traditions, from the egalitarian socialism with an ethical backdrop of a Buonarroti, has a social motivation in the need to attract to himself the cultured middle classes, the only possible support of the national revolution in Italy; it has a deeper cultural motivation in the historical sense of enchantment, which almost the entire “democratic school” he founded shares. Even revolutionary action is conceived as an interpretation of the grand design traced by historical Providence, which stands in opposition to the transcendent Providence of Christians.
The Romantic cult of creative spontaneity, applied both to the individual and to collective individualities, brings democrats—think of Mazzini’s refutation of French primacy—close to Christian spiritualists, who also believe in a progress that is a creative work, and bring man almost to vie with the Divinity (Gioberti). But in the “Christian doctrine of progress” there is a pantheistic temptation often rejected: suffice it to recall the controversies between Rosmini and Gioberti on this point, and it is noteworthy that in Italy the analogous discussions between Catholics and laity in France were followed with interest, as evidenced by the translation published in Milan in 1850 of E. Maret’s *Essay on Pantheism in Modern Societies*. In Mazzini’s concept of progress, defined as a “moral law” but in a certain sense deterministic—especially when incarnated in the incorruptible community symbolized in the “Third Rome”—the pantheistic inclination finds no limit, no point of arrest.
In stark contrast to the speculative and practical tendencies of Mazzinian apostleship, but not without some notable points of contact, the Catholic Gioberti, after 1840, attempts to leverage the “cultured laity,” i.e., the liberal bourgeoisie, for a restoration alien to any violence and any illegal action; since legality itself appears to moderates as a guarantee of morality and underpins their entire polemic against the corrupting and violent “sects.”
The “Piononoist” movement, which sprang up suddenly from the contact between deep-rooted Catholic traditions and the national-liberal aspirations between 1846–48, with the first reforming initiatives of the new Pope, brought back into the fold of Catholicism many of the impatient claims of Italian liberalism and even of democracy. Recently authoritative lay scholars have noted the European scope of the opinion movement that took its origin from the idealization of the work of the mythic Pontiff: so much so that they have concluded that from it was born the most powerful impulse to the European revolution of 1848. Without doubt, the ideas of fatherland and of religion were then, for a time, fused and almost confused together (Salvatorelli) and the
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**LONG LIVE ITALIAN INDEPENDENCE**
**LONG LIVE VICTOR EMMANUEL**
**LONG LIVE GIUSEPPE GARIBALDI**
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**THE ECCLESIASTICAL UNITARY COMMITTEE**
**of Naples**
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**PROGRAMME**
- **Italian, industrious, Catholic, with power and prerogatives** that addressed every Christian generation, that addressed every Christian generation, that addressed every Christian generation, that addressed every Christian generation, that addressed every Christian generation, that addressed every Christian generation, that addressed every Christian
- **The Roman Army of the Forty-Eight Revolution is** drawn, in Italy, by the establishment of democratic, republican governments founded on the principle of popular sovereignty, from which is also deduced the necessity of a national Constituent Assembly and of partial constituent assemblies
- **The Roman Army of the Forty-Eight Revolution is** drawn, in Italy, by the establishment of democratic, republican governments founded on its own system, socialist, studied by popular, and for a certain practical moderation in the face of controversies, and