Abstract
One of the foremost heirs to Mazzini’s tradition in the Third Italy was Francesco Crispi, the former Mazzinian and garibaldino who became prime minister. Under his guidance, Mazzini’s legacy, opportunely reinterpreted, went from the democratic opposition during the Risorgimento to the summit of power and to the leadership of united Italy. Crispi considered himself to be a torchbearer of Mazzini’s ideals, which he continued to evoke even after abandoning his republican stance, proving that this was the ideal and political legacy that had formed him.1 He would continue to go back to Mazzini, putting a new slant on his thoughts in response to the new political climate. Though he was not a theorist (nor was Mazzini for that matter), Crispi kept faith with some of Mazzini’s defining principles: “the ideal of the united fatherland, [the] concept of the duty of the individual towards the Nation, [the] elevation of the idea of Nation to the supreme goal of politics.”2 In 1861 he defended Mazzini before the first Italian parliament, criticizing its failure to concede an amnesty to “the only Italian still proscribed” and mentioning Mazzini in the same breath as Dante and Machiavelli.3 Some years later, after becoming prime minister, Crispi would honour Mazzini’s memory by proposing to erect a monument to him in Rome.4
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Notes
Crispi’s republicanism and even his unitarism were both post 1848 and of Mazzinian origin. Mazzini also converted Crispi to the unitary ideal causing him to gradually turn his back on his Sicilian independentism, see Eugenio Artom, “L’uomo Francesco Crispi,” Rassegna storica toscana, XVI, 1, 1970, p. 14; see also Arturo Carlo Jemolo, Crispi (1922), Florence: Le Monnier, 1972, p. XV.
The quote is taken from a parliamentary speech of July 1, 1861, quoted in Umberto Levra, Fare gli italiani: Memoria e celebrazione del Risorgimento, Turin: Comitato dell’Istituto per la storia del Risorgimento Italiano, 1992, p. 316.
The erection of the monument on the Aventine Hill, promoted by a bill already in 1890, did not take place until 60 years later, in 1949, following a protracted controversy regarding Mazzini’s commemoration, see Jean-Claude Lescure, “Les enjeux du souvenir: le monument national à Giuseppe Mazzini,” Revue d’histoire moderne e contemporaine, XL, 2, April–June 1993, pp. 177–201.
Ferdinando Martini, Confessioni e Ricordi (1859–1892), Milan: Treves, 1928, p. 151, quoted in Christopher Duggan, Francesco Crispi 1818–1901: From Nation to Nationalism, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 436.
For both citations see Francesco Crispi, “Programma sociale,” May 15, 1886, in Id., Scritti e discorsi politici (1849–1890), Rome: Unione Cooperativa Editrice, 1890, pp. 551 and 552. A few years earlier the “great mission” of the democratic party was to “eliminate class differences, and gather the people into one sheaf [fascio]” see Id., Il riordinamento del partito democratico, Palermo, September 10, 1882, ibid., p. 509.
Federico Chabod, Storia della politica estera italiana dal 1870 al 1896, 3rd ed., Bari: Laterza 1965, vol. I, p. 227; for this evolution in general, pp. 222–227.
Ibid., p. 328, note 47, from Mazzini’s 1871 text, Politica internazionale, SEI, XCII. See also Daniela Adorni, “Presupposti ed evoluzione della politica coloniale di Crispi,” in Adua. Le ragioni di una sconfitta, ed. Angelo Del Boca, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1997, pp. 59–60, note 9, who found Mazzini’s citation in a publication originating in Crispi’s circles, [Un italiano], La colonia italiana in Africa e F. Crispi, il Parlamento ed il Paese, Rome: Tipografia Voghera, 1896, pp. 171–172.
See Gugliemo Ferrero, La reazione, Turin: Olivetti, 1895, cited in Luisa Mangoni, Una crisi di fine secolo: La cultura italiana e la Francia fra Otto e Novecento, Turin: Einaudi, 1985, p. 188, which places these pages within a contemporary Italian reflection on “Crispism” as “Caesarism.” A few years later Ferrero would place Mazzini among the “modern Messiahs” in his celebrated L’Europa giovane: Studi e viaggi nei paesi del Nord, Milan: Treves, 1898, p. 367. A year earlier, Scipio Sighele, his sociologist colleague and future militant nationalist, had similarly placed Mazzini among the “apostles who stirred up the soul of the crowd” in La delinquenza settaria. Appunti di sociologia, Milan: Treves, 1897, p. 94.
For a comprehensive interpretation of Crispi’s politics laying particular emphasis on its Garibaldian roots and its alliance-shifting and Bonapartist tendencies, as well as for the subsequent evolution of the Crispi political myth, see Francesco Bonini, Francesco Crispi e l’unità: Da un progetto di governo un ambiguo “mito” politico, Rome: Bulzoni, 1997.
Garibaldi’s support to the house of Savoy dated from 1854, when it was first proclaimed by the general in a letter to Mazzini (see on this point, Giuseppe Monsagrati, “Garibaldi, Giuseppe,” in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 52, Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1999, p. 322).
Pietro Finelli, “À divenuto un Dio”: Santità, Patria e Rivoluzione nel “culto di Mazzini” (1872–1905), in Storia d’Italia. Annali 22, Il Risorgimento, ed. Alberto M. Banti and Paul Ginsborg, Turin: Einaudi, 2007, pp. 665 and 667 (the citation was taken from a newspaper of the time).
Examples and observations on the marginalization of Mazzini in the official memory of the Risorgimento in the early post-unification decades, and on his later, gradual reintegration through an increasingly conservative key, can be found in Massimo Baioni, La “religione della patria”: Musei e istituti del culto risorgimentale, Treviso: Pagus, 1994.
Letters referring to a “clearly partisan idolatry […], Mazzini worshipped as a demigod” and to the clerical press that “mocks these stories” dated April 11, 1872, in Antonio Labriola, La politica italiana nel 1871–1872: Corrispondenze alle Basler Nachrichten,” ed. Stefano Miccolis, Naples: Bibliopolis, 1998, p. 121. On Labriola’s sympathetic attitude to Mazzini, see Stefano Miccolis, “Giuseppe Mazzini nella vicenda intellettuale di Antonio Labriola,” Archivio Trimestrale, 3, July–September 1981, pp. 431–437. Labriola was later able to support Italian colonization in Africa in the form of a “practical socialist experiment” entrusted to poor farmers, also in the name of Mazzini’s “semisocialism” (in an article in the Florentine Risveglio, taken up by Il Messaggero, March 15, 1890, in Roberto Battaglia, La prima guerra d’Africa, Turin: Einaudi, 1958, p. 489).
On this matter and its wider implications, see Sergio Luzzatto, La mummia della Repubblica: Storia di Mazzini imbalsamato 1872–1946, Milan: Rizzoli, 2001. But this also gave rise to Mazzini’s appropriation, from a conservative point of view, by the Freemasons: see Fulvio Conti, “Mazzini massone? Costruzione e fortuna di un mito” in Conti, Massoneria e religioni civili: Cultura laica e liturgie politiche fra XVIII e XX secolo, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2008, pp. 187–211.
Toward the end of the 1860s, Bertrando Spaventa polemically associated the spiritual obscurantism of Mazzini’s followers and Catholics, invoking a Hegelian “philosophical, religious, moral inner liberty” writing with bitter irony that “We need it because we have in our house, as our thing or person, our greatest enemy, the enemy of the free spirit, the infallible spiritual authority (Pope Pius, Pope Mazzini)!” See his letter to Angelo Camillo De Meis, Paolottismo, positivismo, razionalismo (1868), in Bertrando Spaventa, Unificazione nazionale ed egemonia culturale, ed. Giuseppe Vacca, Bari: Laterza, 1969, p. 229. Moreover, this stance documents Spaventa’s evolution, from his political beginnings to his republican and democratic beliefs, which remained unwavering until the early 1850s. Besides, in mid-1860s Naples, there were still some in his circles who followed Hegel in philosophy and Mazzini in politics, despite the fact that Mazzini himself polemicized with the Hegelism of the University of Naples (see Giuseppe Vacca, Politica e filosofia in Bertrando Spaventa, Bari: Laterza, 1967, pp. 50–51).
For insights into the shifts typical of this crisis, which led not to socialism but to radical democracy, through a study of Felice Cavallotti and his political area, see Alessandro Galante Garrone, Felice Cavallotti, Turin: Utet, 1976 (especially certain ironic verses about Mazzini composed soon after his death by the politician who began his career as a Scapigliatura poet, pp. 279–280). The radical area, which began to distance itself from Mazzini from the time of his condemnation of the Paris Commune, also included those like Agostino Bertani, who would continue to be the guardians of a kind of Mazzinian orthodoxy, despite having accepted a compromise with the liberal monarchist state. For the various shifts taking place throughout this area and the respective attitudes toward
Mazzini, see Id., I radicali in Italia (1849–1925), 2nd ed., Milan: Garzanti, 1978.
La corrispondenza di Marx e Engels con italiani, 1848–1895, ed. Giuseppe Del Bo, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1964, p. 22 (the English translation is taken from The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels: Letters 1844–1895, vol. 44, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2001, p. 64).
Among the critical commemorations written on the occasion of Mazzini’s death a particularly authoritative one by Giovanni Bovio was published as a pamphlet titled Poche parole del professore Giovanni Bovio alla memoria di G. Mazzini, Naples: Fratelli Testa, 1872. Even though he had extolled Mazzini as a “propagator of civilisation,” Bovio considered his political message to be exhausted, claiming that the Genoese had died “when his God withdrew from nature and history” (in Alfonso Scirocco, “Bovio, Giovanni,” in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, vol. XII, Rome: Istitituo dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1971, p. 553). See also the fragment of a posthumous work which analyses aspects of Mazzini’s thought on the link between “God and People,” published in the year of the centenary of his birth: Giovanni Bovio, Mazzini, foreword by Carlo Romussi, Milan: Sonzogno, 1905.
M.[ikhail] Bakounin, La théologie politique de Mazzini et l’Internationale, Neuchatel: Commission de Propagande Socialiste, 1871, pp. 3–4. See also Id., Il socialismo e Mazzini: Lettera agli amici d’Italia, October 19–20, 1871, only published in 1886, now in Michele Bakounine et l’Italie, 1871–1872, ed. Arthur Leining, vol. II, Leiden: Brill, 1963, pp. 1–49. For the context, see also Nello Rosselli, Mazzini e Bakunin: Dodici anni di movimento operaio in Italia (1927), Turin: Einaudi, 1982.
Francesco De Sanctis, La letteratura italiana nel secolo XIX. II. La scuola liberale e la scuola democratica, ed. Franco Catalano, Bari: Laterza, 1953, especially pp. 355–371. For the context, see Sergio Landucci, Cultura e ideologia in Francesco De Sanctis, 2nd ed., Milan: Feltrinelli, 1977, pp. 442–458, which goes to the point of theorizing an influence of, or at least a convergence with Bakunin’s critique (ibid., pp. 453 and 458).
Jessie White Mario, Della vita di Giuseppe Mazzini, Milan: Sonzogno, 1886. Like her previous biography of Garibaldi (1885), Mario’s highly celebratory and apologetic work on Mazzini was written in close collaboration with and under the watchful eye of Giosue Carducci. See Cosimo Ceccuti, “Le grandi biografie popolari nell’editoria italiana del secondo Ottocento,” in Il mito del Risorgimento nell’Italia unita, special issue of Il Risorgimento, XLVII, 1–2, 1995, pp. 110–123 (I cited p. 118). It should be noted that Sonzogno brought out several editions of Mario’s biography in the following decades, at least seven until 1933. Another biography that was extremely successful, but more accurate in historiographic and scientific terms (placing it in a different phase of the biographical reconstruction of Mazzini), was written by the English historian Bolton King; Barbera published five editions of the Italian translation between 1903 and 1926.
See Ceccuti, “Le grandi biografie,” pp. 121–122. On the “decontextualisation” of Mazzini, in the name of a “Mazzinian spirit” that was depoliticized when not openly censored, I have already referred to Finelli, “À divenuto un Dio,” pp. 682–684. See also Dante Della Terza, “L’eroe scomodo e la sua ombra: L’immagine di Mazzini e la letteratura del Risorgimento,” in Terza, Letteratura e critica tra Otto e Novecento: Itinerari di ricezione, Cosenza: Edizioni Periferia, 1989, pp. 9–44.
Edmondo De Amicis, Cuore: libro per i ragazzi, Milan: Treves, 1886. For the context, see the essay by Gilles Pécout, “Le livre Cœur: éducation, culture, nation dans l’Italie libérale,” in Edmondo De Amicis, Le livre Cœur, Paris: Éditions Rue d’Ulm, 2001, pp. 357–483.
Alberto Asor Rosa, Carducci e la cultura del suo tempo, in Carducci e la letteratura italiana: Studi per il centocinquantenario della nascita di Giosue Carducci, Bologna: Conference Proceedings, October 11–13, 1985; Padova: Antenore, 1988, p. 23.
It has been remarked that Carducci had always loved to “echo the myths of the majority,” see Luigi Russo, Carducci senza retorica (1957), 3rd ed., Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1999, p. 97.
Benedetto Croce, Giosue Carducci: Studio critico, Bari: Laterza, 1920, p. 45.
On Oriani, see above all Oriani e la cultura del suo tempo, ed. Ennio Diriani, Longo: Ravenna, 1985; Vincenzo Pesante, Il problema Oriani: Il pensiero storico-politico, le interpretazioni storiografiche, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1996; Massimo Baioni, Il fascismo e Alfredo Oriani: Il mito del precursore, Ravenna: Longo, 1988.
See Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, ed. Valentino Gerratana, vol. III, 2nd ed., Turin: Einaudi, 2001, p. 2196.
Alfredo Oriani, La lotta politica in Italia: Origini della lotta attuale (476–1887) (1892), vol. I, 3rd ed., Florence: Libreria della Voce, 1917, pp.261–262.
Ibid., pp. 353–354.
Ibid., vol. II, p. 61.
Ibid., pp. 76–77.
Ibid., pp. 77–78.
Ibid., p. 80.
Ibid., p. 85.
Ibid., pp. 79–87.
“A Staglieno,” Il Resto del Carlino, December 2, 1900, in Alfredo Oriani, Fuochi di bivacco, Bologna: Cappelli, 1927, p. 143.
Alfredo to Giacomo Oriani, February 1894 (but 1892), in Id., Le lettere, ed. Piero Zama, Bologna: Cappelli, 1958, pp. 102–104.
Alfredo Oriani, La rivolta ideale (1906), Bari: Laterza, 1918, pp. 108–109.
Ibid., pp. 148–149.
Ibid., p. 95.
Ibid., pp. 154–158.
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Sullam, S.L. (2015). From Poetry to Prose. In: Giuseppe Mazzini and the Origins of Fascism. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137514592_3
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