Abstract
Giovanni Gentile’s encounter with the Risorgimento dated back to the late nineteenth century. The philosopher, future minister of Mussolini’s first government, and fascist ideologue was born in the small Sicilian town of Castelvetrano in 1875 and died in Florence during the Italian civil war in 1944. He began his studies into the history of nineteenth-century Italian thought looking at Gioberti and then Mazzini. In the immediate postwar period, the two founding figures of the Risorgimento would play a key role in the intellectual and political process that would lead Gentile to make his decisive contribution, in the 1920s and early 1930s, to the formation of the ideology and political religion of fascism. From the time of his graduate thesis at the Normale di Pisa, published in 1898 with the title Rosmini e Gioberti. Saggio storico sulla filosofia italiana del Risorgimento (Rosmini and Gioberti: A Historical Essay on Italian Philosophy of the Risorgimento), Gentile dedicated himself to the tradition of Catholic liberal thought, represented in politics by Gioberti, which would provide the starting point for what should have been the onward journey of Italian philosophy.1
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Notes
For Gentile’s intellectual and political itinerary, see Gabriele Turi, Giovanni Gentile, Florence: Giunti, 1995.
See Giovanni Gentile, Rosmini e Gioberti (1898), 2nd ed., Florence: Sansoni, 1955, p. 26. For Gentile’s position on the Risorgimento, see Augusto Del Noce, L’idea di Risorgimento come categoria filosofica in Giovanni Gentile (1968), in Noce, Giovanni Gentile: Per un interpretazione filosofica della storia contemporanea, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990, pp. 123–194, and Gennaro Sasso, Le due Italie di Giovanni Gentile, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998, in particular, pp. 505–564. For his relationship with Mazzini, see Roberto Pertici, “Il Mazzini di Giovanni Gentile,” Giornale critico della filosofia italiana, LXXVII, I–II, 1999, pp. 117–180, in Pertici, Storici italiani del Novecento, Pisa and Rome: Istituti editoriali e poligrafici internazionali, 2000, pp. 105–158. I examined the relationship between Gentile’s interpretation of Mazzini and the philosopher’s subsequent adhesion to fascism in “Pensiero e Azione: Giovanni Gentile e il fascismo tra Mazzini, Vico (e Sorel),” Annali della Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, XXXV, 2001, pp. 193–217, referred to in some places in this chapter.
See Giovanni Gentile, “Vincenzo Gioberti nel primo centenario della sua nascita” (1901), in Gentile, Albori della nuova Italia (1923), 2nd part, 2nd ed., Florence: Sansoni, 1969, p. 37.
See Giovanni Gentile, “Politica e filosofia,” Politica, August 1918, later collected in Gentile, Dopo la vittoria (1920), ed. Hervé A. Cavallera, Florence: Le Lettere, 1989, p. 154. Gentile came to Marx very early on in La filosofia di Marx. Studi critici (1899), ed. Vito A. Bellezza, Florence: Sansoni, 1979. The importance of Gentile’s articles for the journal Politica was first pointed out by Del Noce, Giovanni Gentile, pp. 358–367.
See Giovanni Gentile, “Gioberti,” Politica, 1919, then in Gentile, I profeti del Risorgimento italiano (1923), 3rd ed., Florence: Sansoni, 1944, pp. 70–72.
Ibid., pp. 75–76 and 83.
See Giovanni Gentile, review of Gaetano Salvemini, Mazzini, Catania 1915, La Critica, 1915, then in Gentile, Albori della nuova Italia: Varietà e documenti (1923), First Part, Florence: Sansoni, 1968, pp. 215–218. The volume also contained a contemporary review of several volumes of Mazzini’s Scritti editi e inediti, and Gentile’s first rather detached and critical review concerning Mazzini (to Bolton King’s biography), also appearing originally in La Critica in 1903 (see ibid., pp. 195–214 and 223–229).
The letter was published in Giovanni Gentile, Il fascismo al governo della scuola (novembre ’22–aprile ’24). Discorsi e interviste, Palermo: Sandron, 1924, p. 143. This concept was further explored in an article marking the first anniversary of the March on Rome: Giovanni Gentile, “Il mio liberalismo,” Nuova politica liberale, October 28, 1923, then in Gentile, Che cos’è il fascismo, Vallecchi, Florence 1925, now collected in Gentile, Politica e cultura, ed. Hervé A. Cavallera, vol. I, Florence: Le Lettere, 1990, pp. 113–116.
See Giovanni Gentile, Il fascismo nella cultura (1925), now in Gentile, Politica e cultura, vol. I, pp. 102–104.
See Giovanni Gentile, “Manifesto degli intellettuali italiani fascisti agli intellettuali di tutte le nazioni” (1925), in Gentile, Politica a cultura, ed. Hervé A. Cavalleva, vol. II, Florence: Le Lettere, 1990, p. 7.
See Giovanni Gentile, “Caratteri religiosi della presente lotta politica,” Educazione politica, March 1925, now in Gentile, Politica e cultura, vol. I, pp. 136–137.
ibid., pp. 137–138.
Emilio Gentile was the first to underline Mazzini’s function in the origins of the political religion of fascism in his The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy, trans. Keith Bosford, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1996 (ed. orig. Rome and Bari, 1993), pp. 3–6 and 21.
In his interpretation of Mazzini, Giuseppe Bottai explicitly mentioned the “political and civil religion” of fascism (adding “without excluding, on the contrary, integrating the ecclesiastic religion, and imbuing it with a profound vitality”). Bottai criticized the statolatric interpretation of Mazzini proposed by Gentile, praised the anti-French Mazzinian democracy (a rereading giving it a slant of “authority” and “order”) and did not exclude the possibility of a Mazzini with a “conciliatorist” stance with regard to the Church. Lastly, he considered Mazzini a precursor of both fascist imperialism and, above all, of corporativism: see Giuseppe Bottai, Il pensiero e l’azione di Giuseppe Mazzini. Speech given in the Teatro Politeama in Genoa on May 4, 1930—VIII, in Giuseppe Bottai, Incontri, Rome: Libreria del Littorio, 1938, pp. 41–96. For Bottai’s interpretation of Fascism as a political religion and for the relationship that he established with Catholicism, see Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics, pp. 20 and 72–73.
See the broad survey by Paolo Benedetti, “Mazzini in ‘camicia nera,’” Annali della Fondazione Ugo La Malfa, XXII, 2007, pp. 163–206; XXIII, 2008, pp. 159–184.
See Massimo Baioni, Risorgimento in camicia nera: Studi, istituzioni, musei nell’Italia fascista, Turin and Rome: Comitato dell’Istituto per la storia del Risorgimento italiano, Carocci, 2006.
For Croce’s itinerary, see Giuseppe Galasso, Croce e lo spirito del suo tempo, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2002.
The antifascist Giovanni Amendola responded to Gentile’s interpretation of Mazzini in the “Manifesto” with a writing dated April 23, 1925: “The invocation of Mazzini in this manifesto jars and offends like a profanation: and it takes all the rigid actualism of the ‘Solon-in-chief’ to compare Giovane Italia, which was made up of martyrs thirsting for freedom, to the squadrist movement that uses billy clubs to bring about inner persuasion, to use Gentile’s philosophical expression,” see Giovanni Amendola, L’intellettualità di un manifesto, in Amendola, L’Aventino contro il fascismo: Scritti politici (1924–1926), Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1976, p. 286. For the role of Mazzini in the definition of “religious democracy” by the young Amendola at the beginning of the last century, although also through theosophical and modernist influences, see Alfredo Capone, Giovanni Amendola e la cultra italiana del Novecento (1899–1914), vol. I, Rome: Elia, 1974, pp. 128 and 140–143.
Cited in Francesco Capanna, Le religione in Benedetto Croce: Il momento della fede nella vita dello spirito e la filosofia come religione, Bari: Edizioni del Centro Librario, 1964, pp. 51–52.
Fede eprogrammi (1911), cited in Giuseppe Tognon, Benedetto Croce alla Minerva: La politica scolastica italiana tra Caporetto e la marcia su Roma, Brescia: La Scuola, 1990, pp. 145–147.
See Benedetto Croce, Per la rinascita dell’idealismo (1908), in Croce, Cultura e vita morale, Naples: Bibliopolis, 1993, pp. 34–36.
See Benedetto Croce, Frammenti di etica, Bari: Laterza, 1922, pp. 181–182.
We must not forget that Croce remained in favor of the teaching of the Catholic religion in elementary schools introduced by the Gentile reform, writing in its defense: “Catholic education [must] be supplied to everyone in State schools, including Jews, for the very good reason that the constitution establishes that the State religion is Catholic, and they are citizens of the Italian state.” See Benedetto Croce, Sull’insegnamento religioso nella scuola elementare (1923), in Croce, Cultura e vita morale: Intermezzi polemici, Bari: Laterza, 1926, p. 257.
The Church immediately placed this book on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1932, and Croce’s complete opus and the work of Giovanni Gentile were both condemned by the Holy Office in 1934. The matter clearly reveals how the religion of liberty and Gentile’s fascist religion—or rather, their philosophical sources represented by Crocian idealism and actualism—were perceived by the Church as rivals to be feared. Croce and Gentile had also both expressed criticism of the recent Italian Concordate, albeit for different reasons and in different forms. It should be noted, however, that the condemnation of Gentile’s work had no negative impact upon the widespread grateful recognition within the Church hierarchy of the philosopher’s role in defending Catholic education. For this matter and its implications, see Guido Verucci, Idealisti all’Indice: Croce, Gentile e la condanna del Sant’Uffizio, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2006, pp. 140–201.
See Luigi Russo, Dialogo con un lettore di “Belfagor” (1947), in Russo, De vera religione: Noterelle e schermaglie, 1943–1945, Turin: Einaudi, 1949, pp. 174–175.
See Benedetto Croce, Francesco De Sanctis e i suoi critici recenti (1898), in Croce, Una famiglia di patrioti ed altri saggi storici e critici, Bari: Laterza, 1919, cited in Vittorio Stella, Croce e Mazzini, in Mazzini nella letteratura, Rome: Bulzoni, 1975, p. 113 (this essay should also be read for other opinions and quotes on Mazzini scattered across Croce’s work).
Benedetto Croce, A History of Italy, 1871–1915, trans. Cecilia M. Ady, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929 (ed. orig. Bari, 1927), p. 74.
Benedetto Croce, History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Henry Furst, London: Allen & Unwin, 1934 (orig. ed. Bari, 1932), pp. 116–118.
A letter written by Antonio Gramsci contains what may be one of the clearest definitions of the “religion of liberty” in Croce: “It merely means faith in modern civilization, which does not need transcendence and revelations but contains its own rationality and origin. It is therefore an anti-mystical, and, if you wish, anti-religious formula,” see Gramsci to Tania, June 6, 1932, in Antonio Gramsci, Lettere dal carcere, Turin: Einaudi, 1948, p. 192. See also Antonio Gramsci, Croce e la religione, in Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, ed. Valentino Gerratana, vol. 2, 2nd ed., Turin: Einaudi, 2001, p. 1217 (The notebook in question is Quaderno 10: La filosofia di Bendetto Croce, and was written in 1932–1935).
As he wrote in a letter to Gentile on July 11, 1903, asking him for a review of Bolton King’s biography of Mazzini, see Giovanni Gentile, Lettere a Benedetto Croce, ed. Simona Giannantoni, vol. II, Florence: Sansoni, 1974, p. 119 note.
See Carlo Levi, “Piero Gobetti e la ‘Rivoluzione Liberale’,” Quaderni di Giustizia e Libertà, II, 7, 1933, pp. 33–47, now in Carlo Levi, Scritti politici, ed. David Bidussa, Turin: Einaudi, 2001, pp. 86–88.
See Piero Gobetti, La filosofia politica di Vittorio Alfieri (1923), in Gobetti, Risorgimento senza eroi (1926), now in Gobetti, Scritti storici, filosofici, letterari, ed. Paolo Spriano, Turin: Einaudi, 1969, p. 128.
In fact, it is possible that Gobetti had in turn acquired the formula “religion of liberty,” possibly without realizing it, from Mazzini himself. In fact, it appears, albeit en passant, in Mazzini’s writing Ricordi dei fratelli Bandiera, published in the national edition of his writings that came out in 1921, just before the period when Giobetti began to prepare his thesis on Alfieri. See Giuseppe Mazzini, Ricordi dei fratelli Bandiera (1844), in Mazzini, Scritti editi ed inediti, vol. XXXI, Imola: Cooperativa Tipografico-Editrice Paolo Galeati 1921, p. 72.
Paolo Bagnoli, Il Risorgimento eretico di Piero Gobetti, in Bagnoli, L’eretico Gobetti, Milan: La Pietra, 1978, pp. 95–96, 98–100, and 116–117.
Francesco Traniello, Gobetti, un laico religioso, in Cent’anni: Piero Gobetti nella storia d’Italia, ed. Valentina Pazé, Turin: Centro Studi Piero Gobetti—Milan; Milan: Franco Angeli, 2004, pp. 44–63.
ibid., p. 46 (see Piero Gobetti, “Per una società degli apoti,” Rivoluzione liberale, October 25, 1922; Gobetti, I miei conti conl’idealismo attuale, ibid., January 18, 1923).
Piero Gobetti, La rivoluzione liberale: Saggio sulla lotta politica in Italia (1924), 2nd ed., Turin: Einaudi, 1964, pp. 4 and 28. The English-language edition is Piero Gobetti, On Liberal Revolution, ed. Nadia Urbinati, London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Also in Risorgimento senza eroi (published posthumously in 1926), Gobetti criticized “Mazzini’s foggy Messianism” (see Scritti storici, letterari, filosofici, p. 32, cited in Piovani, Gobetti e Mazzini, p. 20).
On De Ruggero, see the entry by Renzo De Felice in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, vol. 39, Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1991, pp. 248–258 and De Felice’s introduction to Guido De Ruggero, Scritti politici (1912–1926), Bologna: Capelli, 1963.
Guido De Ruggero, Storia del liberalismo europeo, Bari: Laterza, 1925, pp. 342–346 (from chapter IV, “Il liberalismo italiano”). Originally published at a difficult time (June 1925, after the definitive establishment of the fascist dictatorship), it enjoyed renewed success with new editions in 1941, and after July 25, 1943 (see Avvertenza alla terza edizione, September 1943, which also appeares in the Feltrinelli edition, Milan, 1962, p. 1).
The articles are both in Salvo Mastellone, Carlo Rosselli e “la rivoluzione liberale del socialismo”: Con scritti e documenti inediti, Florence: Olschki, 1999, pp. 105 and 109.
See Uno del Terzo Stato (pseudonym of Nello Rosselli), Zanotti-Bianco e il suo Mazzini, unpublished work from 1926, now in Nello Rosselli, Uno storico sotto il fascismo: Lettere e scritti vari, ed. Zeffiro Ciuffoletti, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1979, pp. 178–180, cited in Gianni Belardelli, Nello Rosselli, 2nd ed., Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2007, pp. 70–71 (see also more generally for Rosselli’s interests and research into Mazzini).
See Carlo Rosselli, Lettera al giudice istruttore (August 1927), in Rosselli, Socialismo liberale e altri scritti, ed. John Rosselli, 2nd ed., Turin: Einaudi, 1973, pp. 493 and 500.
In 1921 Fedele Parri (under the pseudonym Sordello) published Giuseppe Mazzini e la lotta politica, Rome: Libreria Politica Moderna, 1922 [but 1921], in which he defended an orthodox Republican reading of Mazzini (which was also extremely patriotic in response to the climate of impending war), criticizing the interpretations of both Gaetano Salvemini and Giovanni Gentile, although he appreciated the latter’s religious reevaluation of the Genoese thinker (see ibid., pp. 76–82). Twenty years later, Parri would publish a slim monograph titled Il pensiero sociale ed economico di Giuseppe Mazzini, Turin: L’Impronta, 1942, which was probably written with the help of his son Ferruccio (see the biographical information in Ferruccio Parri, Scritti 1915–1975, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976, p. 11 and various mentions by Luca Polese Remaggi, La nazione perduta: Ferruccio Parri nel Novecento italiano, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004, pp. 22–23).
See Ernesto Rossi, “Dieci anni sono molti.” Lettere dal carcere 1930–39, ed. Mimmo Franzinelli, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2001, p. 41, letter of March 10, 1931. Vittorio Foa and Massimo Mila, Rossi’s cellmates, refer in their letters to Gwilyn O. Griffith, Mazzini: Prophet of Modern Europe, Bari: Laterza, 1935, to Bolton King’s biography, as well as to Mazzini’s letters to his mother collected in the volume, also cited by Rossi, La madre di Giuseppe Mazzini, ed. Alessandro Luzio, Turin: Bocca, 1919 (see Vittorio Foa Lettere della giovinezza: Dal carcere 1935–1943, ed. Federica Montevecchi, Turin: Einaudi, 1998, p. 123, July 10, 1936; Massimo Mila, Argomenti strettamente famigliari: Lettere dal carcere 1935–1940, ed. Paolo Soddu, Turin: Einaudi, 1999, pp. 534 and 540, September 23, and October 9, 1938). On other occasions, Foa mentions Mazzini’s “idealistic patriotism” (p. 484, October 16, 1938); while Mila also underlines his “authoritarian tendencies” (p. 619, April 16, 1939).
See Nello Rosselli, “Repubblicani e socialisti in Italia,” La critica politica, July 25, 1926, in Rosselli, Saggi sul Risorgimento, 2nd ed., Turin: Einaudi, 1980, pp. 262–263. This essay was entirely dedicated to the historic motives for the crisis and inadequacy experienced by Mazzinianism after 1860.
See Andrea (pseudonym of Andrea Caffi), “Appunti su Mazzini,” Giustizia e Libertà, March 29, 1935, reprinted in L’Unità d’Italia. Pro e contro il Risorgimento, ed. Alberto Castelli, Rome: edizioni e/o, 1997, pp. 23–27. See also Marco Bresciani, La rivoluzione perduta: Andrea Caffi nell’Europa del Novecento, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2009, pp. 190–197. Despite his admiration for the figure of Mazzini, Caffi’s political criticism took shape at least two decades earlier through his exchanges with Umberto Zanotti-Bianco during World War I (ibid., pp. 51–52).
See Gianfranchi (pseudonym of Franco Venturi), “Replica a Luciano,” Giustizia e Libertà, May 3, 1935, reprinted in L’Unità d’Italia, pp. 48–49. See also Franco Venturi, “Sul Risorgimento italiano,” Giustizia e Libertà, April 5, 1935, ibid., pp. 28–33.
Luciano (pseudonym of Nicola Chiaromonte), “Sul Risorgimento,” Giustizia e Libertà, April 19, 1935, ibid., p. 38.
See Curzio (pseudonym of Carlo Rosselli), “Discussione sul Risorgimento,” Giustizia e Libertà, April 26, 1935, in Carlo Rosselli, Scritti dell’esilio, ed. Costanzo Casucci, vol. II, Turin: Einaudi, 1992, pp. 153 and 157.
Letter of December 13, 1934, cited in Alessandro Galante Garrone, I fratelli Rosselli (1985), in Galante Garrone, Padri e figli, Turin: Albert Meynier, 1986, p. 99 (see I Rosselli: Epistolario familiare di Carlo, Nello, Amelia Rosselli 1914–1937, ed. Zeffiro Ciuffoletti, Milan: Mondadori, 1997, p. 576).
Lussu, who was inspired by the leninist theory of insurrection, drew attention to the weakness of Mazzini’s military considerations, claiming that Mazzini “lacked an insurrection theory,” or rather that “the construction of the theory was compromised because based on flawed premises.” However, at the same time, he acknowledged the “great political value” of Mazzini’s insurrection theories and their eventual application for antifascist purposes. See Emilio Lussu, Teoria dell’insurrezione: Saggio critico, Rome: De Caro, 1950, pp. 47–55 (the first edition is by Edizioni di Giustizia e Libertà, Paris, 1936).
See Ercoli (pseudonym of Palmiro Togliatti), “Sul movimento di ‘Giustizia e Libertà,’” Lo Stato Operaio, V, 1931, cited by Claudio Pavone, Le idee della Resistenza: Antifascisti e fascisti di fronte alla tradizione del Risorgimento (1959), in Pavone, Alle origini della Repubblica: Scritti su fascismo, antifascismo, continuità dello Stato, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1995, pp. 35–36.
For the judgments cited, see in particular the notebook Risorgimento italiano for 1934–1935, now in Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, ed. Valentino Gerratana, vol. III, 2nd ed., Turin: Einaudi, 2001, pp. 2047 and 1988; but see, in general, vol. IV.
Some years later, Angelo Tasca countered fascist nationalism with the nation and liberty couplet, which he traced back to Mazzini, in Nascita e avvento del fascismo (1938), 4th ed., Bari: Laterza, 1972, p. 565. The work, started in 1934, first appeared in France.
See Luigi Salvatorelli, “L’Antirisorgimento,” La Stampa, July 27, 1924, cited in Alessandro Galante Garrone, “Risorgimento e Antirisorgimento negli scritti di Luigi Salvatorelli,” Rivista storica italiana, LXXVIII, 3, 1966, p. 523. Shortly afterwards, this formula was taken up by Giovanni Amendola, who wrote: “The progenitors of all the tendencies represented in the Opposition committees took part in the Risorgimento struggles; but none of the progenitors of fascism! Who by now embody, by indirect admission of the Prime Minister, the anti-Risorgimento!” (see Giovanni Amendola, “Tra le parole e le idee,” August 5, 1924, in Giovanni Amendola, L’Aventino contro il fascismo: Scritti politici (1924–1926), ed. Sabato Visco, Milan and Naples, 1976, p. 73).
See Luigi Salvatorelli, Nazionalfascismo, Turin: Gobetti, 1923 (article in La Stampa January 2, 1923), cited by Galante Garrone, Risorgimento e Antirisorgimento, p. 522.
Luigi Salvatorelli, Irrealtà nazionalista, Milan: Corbaccio, 1925, pp. 175–176, ibid., pp. 517–518.
On the importance of the eighteenth century for Salvatorelli’s interpretation of the Risorgimento, see Galante Garrone, Risorgimento e Antirisorgimento, pp. 530–531 and Leo Valiani, “Salvatorelli storico dell’unità d’Italia e del fascismo,” Rivista storica italiana, LXXXVI, 4, 1974, p. 726.
Luigi Salvatorelli, Il pensiero politico italiano dal 1700 al 1870, Turin: Einaudi, 1935, p. 198.
A similar historical approach—from the history of Christianity to that of the Risorgimento—was adopted by Adolfo Omodeo, a pupil of Gentile, who later worked closely with Croce on La Critica. However, Omodeo’s history of Mazzini reveals the profound influence of Gentile, especially with regard to this philosophy and historiography. Omodeo’s interpretation of Mazzini, which was religious and apocalyptic, also showed the distant influence of Sorel, as well as the pull exercised upon the historian by reactionary and Restoration thought. Omodeo described Mazzini as being animated by a visionary religious fervor that caused him to await Italian unification like a “revelation” or “divine creation” (see Adolfo Omodeo, La missione religiosa e politica di Giuseppe Mazzini (1934), in Omodeo, Difesa del Risorgimento, 2nd ed., Turin: Einaudi, 1955, pp. 74–85. See also the reconstruction by Roberto Pertici, “Preistoria di Adolfo Omodeo,” Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, series III, XXII, 2, 1992, pp. 513–615, now in Roberto Pertici, Storici italiani del Novecento, Pisa and Rome: Istituti editoriali e poligrafici internazionali, 2000, pp. 57–104). However Omodoeo had also criticized Mazzini’s “inflexibility lacking political nous,” his “simplistic tactics,” his eschewing of “diplomacy,” and the failure of his religious preaching at popular level. Further, he recognized Mazzini’s role as an inspirer of ideals and actions: “This faith,” wrote Omodeo, “armed many with the courage to act, exalting them on to martyrdom, rather than dismaying them with an objective reckoning of facts.” (See the chapter on Mazzini by Adolfo Omodeo, L’età moderna e contemporanea, Messina: Principato, 1925, pp. 340–341, a work better known for its subsequent editions under the title L’età del Risorgimento italiano, the first of which appeared in 1931.) Between 1943 and 1946, after the fall of Fascism, Omodeo would be among the most enthusiastic proponents of Mazzini’s pro-Europe democratic conceptions, see Adolfo Omodeo, Libertà e storia: Scritti e discorsi politici, Turin: Einaudi, 1960.
Salvatorelli returned to his interpretation of Mazzini, developing it in greater depth in his ample introduction to the collection of writings and letters by Mazzini, which he edited in two volumes for the Rizzoli publishing house in 1938–39: these volumes led to the renewed circulation of Mazzini’s work among the intellectual elite and to his democratic interpretation in antifascist circles. The introduction was also collected under the title Mazzini pensatore e scrittore (1938) in Luigi Salvatorelli, Prima e dopo il Quarantotto, Turin: De Silva, 1948, pp. 36–62. In the spring of 1943, Leone Ginzburg wrote a letter to Einaudi from his political confinement, requesting a copy of this collection, which proved to be “out of stock”: see his Lettere dal confino 1940–1943, ed. Luisa Mangoni, Turin: Einaudi, 2004, p. 226 (letter of May 14, 1943). At the time Ginzburg was working on his essay La tradizione del Risorgimento, which was to remain unfinished and published posthumously in 1945 (see Leone Ginzburg, Scritti, ed. Domenico Zucàro, 2nd ed., Turin: Einaudi, 2000, pp. 114–130).
For the influence of this work on “the young intellectual cadre of the Resistance (not only Partito d’Azione-oriented),” see Pavone, “Le idee della Resistenza,” pp. XI and 48; Claudio Pavone, A Civil War: A History of the Italian Resistance, trans. Peter Levy and David Broder; ed. Stanislao Pugliese, London-New York: Verso, 2013 (orig. ed. Turin, 1991), p. 319. An authoritative contemporary appraisal adopting an ethical-political rather than a historical approach was written by Adolfo Omodeo for Critica in 1943 (later collected in his Difesa del Risorgimento, 2nd ed., Turin: Einaudi, 1955, pp. 531–533). For the appraisal by Leone Ginzburg and Eugenio Curiel, see Gabriele Turi, “Luigi Salvatorelli, un intellettuale attraverso il fascismo,” Passato e Presente, 66, 2005, pp. 108–109.
Luigi Salvatorelli, Pensiero e Azione del Risorgimento, Turin: Einaudi, 1943, pp. 111–112.
See in this regard Pavone, A Civil War, p. 319, which underlines that while conflicting political readings of the Risorgimento were no novelty, “because of the civil war, 1943–45 saw the the final breakdown of the unity of the Risorgimento tradition.” On the rediscovery of Mazzini in the public imagination and in the propaganda of the Resistance and republican fascism, see the entries “Mazzini” and “Risorgimento” the same volume’s index. For the fascist appropriation in the RSI, see Giuseppe Parlato, “Il mito del Risorgimento e la sinistra fascista,” in Il mito del Risorgimento nell’Italia unita, conference proceedings, Milan, November 9–12, 1993, special issue of Il Risorgimento, XLVII, 1–2, 1995, pp. 271–276. Mussolini, for example, evoked Mazzini from the very beginning and during the course of the Social Republic: see “Il primo discorso dopo la liberazione” (broadcast on Radio Munich on September 18, 1943) and “Il discorso al ‘Lirico’ di Milan” (December 16, 1944), in Mussolini, Opera omnia, XXXII, pp. 4 and 131.
Letter to his mother, February 19, 1939, in Rossi, Nove anni sono molti, pp. 769–770. In his conclusion Rossi, although the quotation was originally written by Franz Grillparzer, quotes a phrase from Franz Werfel, Nel crepuscolo di un mondo, Milan: Mondadori, 1937 (English edition: Twilight of a World, New York: Viking Press, 1937), a work that inspired him to write these reflections. Soon after Rossi’s observations on the obsolescence of “nationality” would lead him to jointly develop the Ventotene Manifesto with Altiero Spinelli, a project which layed some of the philosophical basis to the European unification and was to some extent influenced by Mazzini’s pro-Europe stance. For the presence of this concept from 1937 in the development of the reflection that would give rise to the Manifesto, see the reference to Mazzini (and his request for advice on the matter from Nello Rosselli) in Rossi’s letter to his mother, April 30, 1937 (ibid., p. 572). Spinelli’s skepticism with regard to Mazzini is clarified by a statement that he made some years later: “My search for a thought that was clear and precise meant I was not attracted by the foggy, convoluted and rather inconsistent ideological federalism like that of Prudhon or Mazzini […] but by the clean, exact, antidoctrinal thought of the English federalists […] who proposed to transplant the great American political experience to Europe” (cited in Norberto Bobbio, “Il federalismo nel dibattito politico e culturale della Resistenza,” in Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi, Il manifesto di Ventotene, reprint ed. Sergio Pistone, Turin: Celid, 2001).
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© 2015 Simon Levis Sullam
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Sullam, S.L. (2015). Fascism, Antifascism, and the Religion of the Nation. In: Giuseppe Mazzini and the Origins of Fascism. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137514592_6
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