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Discovering Politics: Action and Recollection in the First Mazzinian Generation

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The Risorgimento Revisited

Abstract

The rereading of the Italian national movement that has taken place in the past ten years has highlighted the need to investigate the making of the Risorgimento through a focus on ordinary men and women and especially the youthful protagonists in the political movements of the time. Within this new historiographical sensibility, the themes of youth and political movements in the Italian nineteenth century, of young men and their political emotions, have proved fruitful areas of research.1

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Notes

  1. Some suggestions are to be found in Balzani, ‘Nati troppo tardi. Illusioni e frustrazioni dei giovani del post-Risorgimento’, in Angelo Varni (ed.), Il mondo giovanile in Italia tra Ottocento e Novecento (Bologna, 1998), 69–85, and ‘I giovani del Quarantotto: profilo di una generazione’, Contemporanea III (2000), 403–16. See also the articles in Cheiron 1, 2008. Influenced by sociological studies on industrial and mass societies, Italian historians have focused increasingly on the movements, cultures and choices of young people in the twentieth century. For some of the most recent results, see the special issue of Memoria e ricerca 25 (May–Aug. 2007), ed. by M. Fincardi and C. Papa, on ‘Movimenti e culture giovanili’, and Patrizia Dogliani (ed.), Giovani e generazioni nel Mondo contemporaneo. La ricerca storica in Italia (Bologna, 2009). On France, see the useful collection by L. Bantigny and I. Jablonka (eds), Jeunesse oblige. Histoire des jeunes en France, XIXème–XXIème siècle (Paris, 2009), and in particular Bantigny’s methodological remarks in ‘Le mot jeune, un mot de vieux? La jeunesse du mythe à l’histoire’, 5–18. For nineteenth-century categories, see J.-C. Caron, ‘La jeunesse dans la France des notables. Sur la construction politique d’une catégorie sociale (1815–1870)’, Ibid., 21–35.

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  2. We are thinking above all of Franco Della Peruta’s pioneering work on the democratic party, F. D. Peruta, Mazzini e i rivoluzionari italiani. Il partito d’azione’ 1830–1845 (Milan, 1974), S. Mastellone, Mazzini e la ‘Giovine Italia’ (1831–1834) (Pisa, 1960), 2 vols, and A. Galante Garrone, ‘In Francia agli inizi della Giovine Italia’, in A. Galante Garrone, Mazzini e il mazzinianesimo. Atti del XLVI Congresso di Storia del Risorgimento (Rome, 1974), 193–238, but also to some degree Clara M. Lovett’s investigation of the democratic leadership in C. M. Lovett, The Democratic Movement in Italy, 1830–1876 (Cambridge, MA-London, 1982).

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  5. From the title of W. Barberis, Il bisogno di patria (Turin, 2004).

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  6. Quoted in L. Pepe, ‘Leopoldo Pilla scienziato e volontario’, in L. Pepe (ed.), Universitari italiani del Risorgimento (Bologna, 2002), 7. Pilla’s journal, Notizie storiche della mia vita quotidiana a cominciare dal primo Gennaro 1830 in poi, is edited by Massimo Discenza (Venafro, 1996).

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  7. This is the result of what Luca Mannori calls ‘the “second” Italian nationalism’, a shift which takes place around 1830. See L. Mannori, ‘Alla periferia dell’Impero. Egemonia austriaca e immagini dello spazio nazionale nell’Italia del primo Risorgimento (1814–1835)’, in M. Bellabarba, B. Mazohl, R. Stauber and M. Verga (eds), Gli imperi dopo l’Impero nell’Europa del XIX secolo, (Bologna, 2008), 339. On Italian national discourse see A. M. Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento. Parentela, santità e onore all’origine dell’Italia unita (Turin, 2000).

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  8. Giovanni Berchet’s poetry was largely responsible for promoting a common patriotic sensibility, as shown by the success of his ode inspired by the Greek struggle for freedom, ‘I Profughi di Parga’, which was hand-copied and spread clandestinely by young people. See A. Arisi Rota, Il processo alla Giovine Italia in Lombardia 1833–1835 (Milan, 2003), 59.

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  9. G. Mazzini, Edizione nazionale delle Opere, Scritti Editi e Inediti (SEI), 94 vols. (Imola, 1907), vol. II, Politica, 1–14. See the comments by L. M. Migliorini, ‘Problema nazionale e coscienza europea da Aquisgrana all’Unità (1748–1861)’, in G. Galasso and L. Mascilli Migliorini (eds), L’Italia moderna e l’unità nazionale (Turin, 1998), 605–8, and F. Della Peruta, ‘I ‘giovani’ del Risorgimento’, in Varni, Il mondo giovanile in Italia tra Ottocento e Novecento, 42–3.

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  12. Letter XVI to Quirina (Turin, 2 May 1836), in Silvio Pellico, Opere scelte, ed. by C. Curto (Turin, 1964), 170–1.

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  15. S. N. Eisenstadt, ‘Generations, Sociology of’, in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 9, (Amsterdam, 2001), 6,057. Eisenstadt’s idea of ‘youth consciousness’ appeared in his seminal 1956 work and was linked to European romantic ‘semi-political’ movements (S. N. Eisenstadt, Giovine Europa From Generation to Generation. Age Groups and Social Structure (London, 1964 edn, 171). What Giovine Italia offered in terms of a generational identity — its programme, solemn oaths, rules etc — might seem to recall the African societies described by Eisenstadt: ‘Thus we find here a particular type of specialization: on the one hand, an inclusive ‘secret’ society; on the other, specialization of political and ritual functions vested in particular groups, which also regulate the entire membership of the ‘secret society’. This specialization entails a definitive transition from the family and permanent segregation of political roles from those of the kinship units; not only the symbolical and temporary segregation of all initiation ceremonies, but a more real and permanent one’ (214).

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  20. Although it did play a role of some kind, as in the case of the Lombard-Venetian kingdom, shown by Marco Meriggi’s work on public services, see M. Meriggi, Il Regno Lombardo-Veneto (Turin, 1987), chapter 3, ‘Le classi sociali’. According to M. Isnenghi and E. Cecchinato, the students’ political dissent may have turned into action because of social and professional frustration, economic dynamism and cultural vitality (‘La nazione volontaria’, in Banti and Ginsborg, Storia d’Italia, 699).

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  21. Quoted in T. Massarani, Illustri e cari estinti. Commemorazioni ed epigrafi scelte, ordinate e postillate da Raffaello Barbiera (Florence, 1907), 263.

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  22. A. De Musset, La confessione di un figlio del secolo (Milan, 1958), 13.

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  23. ‘Sensibilities are not organized in archives and conveniently visible for research purposes; they are almost never the explicit topics of the primary documents we use. We need a concept that lets us dig beneath the social actions and apparent content of sources to the ground upon which those sources stand: the emotional, intellectual, aesthetic and moral dispositions of the persons who created them. That concept is sensibility.’ (D. Wickberg, ‘What is the History of Sensibilities? On Cultural Histories, Old and New’, The American Historical Review, Vol. 112, No 3 (June 2007), 669); see also D. Wickberg, ‘Sensibilità, sympathy e personalità nella storia moderna’, Contemporanea XI. 2 (2008), 284–91). Pioneering remarks on the subject are to be found in P. N. Stearns and C. Z. Stearns, ‘Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards’, American Historical Review, Vol. 90, No 4 (October 1985), 813–36; see also B. H. Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’, American Historical Review, Vol. 107, No 3 (June 2002), 821–845.

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  24. D. Westen, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation (New York, 2007), 147.

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  25. Quoted by G. Monsagrati in ‘Riflessioni sull’europeismo di Mazzini prima e dopo il’48’, in F. Guida (ed.), Dalla Giovine Europa alla Grande Europa (Rome, 2007), 31.

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  26. P. Harro Harring, Mémoires sur la ‘Jeune Italie’ et sur les derniers événements de Savoie par un témoin oculaire (Paris, 1834), 60.

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  27. The letters of Mazzini but also Pecchio’s letter to Lord Brougham: Giuseppe Pecchio, Scritti politici ed. by P. Bernardelli (Rome, 1978), 511–21. An exile since 1821, Pecchio had published his letter in London in 1824, to thank Brougham for his defence of Italy in the Westminster parliament and he outlined the peninsula’s misfortunes since the fall of the Napoleonic Kingdom. On Pecchio and exile, see M. Isabella, Risorgimento in Exile. Italian Émigrés and the Liberal International in the Post-Napoleonic Era, (Oxford, 2009).

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  28. G. Mazzini, A Carlo Alberto di Savoja, 22. Similar ideas are expressed by Gianfranco Bettin Lattes: ‘Young people are social actors with a very high level of potential life, so they can afford to invest their energies in a radically innovative political project’ (G. B. Lattes, ‘Sul concetto di generazione politica’, Rivista italiana di scienza politica, XXIX 1 (1999), 35).

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  29. ASM, PP box 152 bis, no. 3,327; Mazzini sets out his basic patriotic discourse in his 1826–1827 essay Dell’amor patrio di Dante (see M. Viroli, Per amore della patria. Patriottismo e nazionalismo nella storia (Rome-Bari, 1995), 143–147).

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  30. G. Ricciardi, Memorie autografe d’un ribelle (Paris, 1857), 241.

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  31. See R. Balzani, ‘La concezione del tempo: passato, presente e futuro’, in P. Sorcinelli and A. Varni (eds), Il secolo dei giovani. Le nuove generazioni e la storia del Novecento, (Rome, 2004), 9.

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  33. See M. Halbwachs, Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (Paris, 1925).

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  35. In English, see G. O. Griffith, Mazzini Prophet of Modern Europe (London, 1932) and R. Sarti, Mazzini: A Life for Religion of Politics (London, 1997). For a different approach, see S. L. Sullam, ‘The Moses of Italian Unity: Mazzini and Nationalism as Political Religion’, in C. A. Bayly and E. F. Biagini (eds), Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalisation of Democratic Nationalism 1830–1920 (Oxford, 2008), 107–124.

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  38. A. Bocchi, ‘Mazzini e il commento foscoliano alla Commedia’, Belfagor LXII (2007), V. 519–526, quotation on 520.

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  39. Quoted in A. M. Ghisalberti, Orsini minore (Rome, 1955), 31.

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  40. On this subject, see F. Della Peruta, I democratici e la rivoluzione italiana (Milan, 1958).

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  44. Quoted by I. Grassi, ‘Il primo periodo della “Giovane Italia” nel Granducato di Toscana (1831–1834)’, Rivista storica del Risorgimento italiano, (Turin, 1897), II, 946.

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  46. A. Caggioli, Un anno di prigione in Milano. Reminiscenze politiche segrete (Bergamo, 1866). Lucy Riall has recently suggested comparison between the emotional styles of youth and those of old age as a potentially fruitful area for further research (L. Riall, ‘Leggere la nuova storia del Risorgimento’, 104).

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  48. See P. Aroldi, ‘Di generazione in generazione’, in P. Aroldi and F. Colombo (eds), Successi culturali e pubblici generazionali (Milan, 2007), 26.

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  49. See Arianna Arisi Rota’s study of the young Giovine Italia militants as members of a political generation with different individual destinies: A. Arisi Rota, I piccoli cospiratori. Politica ed emozioni nei primi mazziniani (Bologna, 2010).

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Authors
  1. Arianna Arisi Rota
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  2. Roberto Balzani
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Fordham University, New York, USA

    Silvana Patriarca (Professor of History) (Professor of History)

  2. Birkbeck, University of London, UK

    Lucy Riall (Professor of History) (Professor of History)

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© 2012 Arianna Arisi Rota and Roberto Balzani

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Rota, A.A., Balzani, R. (2012). Discovering Politics: Action and Recollection in the First Mazzinian Generation. In: Patriarca, S., Riall, L. (eds) The Risorgimento Revisited. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230362758_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230362758_5

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

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