Chapter XIX: Ineffectual Struggles

[Sidenote: [1815-1848 A.D.]]

In the plenitude of his despotic authority, Napoleon had destroyed all the former order of things. He had trampled down the ancient republics, and obliterated even the names of the most time-honoured principalities. The queenly splendour of Venice had not saved the most glorious of republics from his iron grasp. Lucca had found no safety in those republican institutions, the origin of which is lost in the obscurity of remote antiquity. Imperial Rome herself had attracted no respect to the throne of the vicegerent of heaven upon earth. The pontiff, from whose hands Napoleon had received the chrism that gave him the sacred character of an anointed king, was carried away a prisoner under an escort of French dragoons.

No national government was left. In the worst days of foreign invasion the pontiff, with bitter truth, said to the doge of Venice, “There is nothing Italian left in Italy except my tiara and your ducal hat.” Under the dominion of Napoleon, both the tiara and the ducal hat were gone. The pope was a prisoner in France, and Venice was a province of the emperor’s Italian kingdom. The only remnant of Italian nationality--and, placed on the head of a stranger, it could scarcely be said to belong to Italy--was the Lombards’ iron crown. Such was the condition of Italy with which the sovereigns at Paris, and in the congress of Vienna, had to deal.[b]

[Sidenote: [1815-1818 A.D.]]

The restoration of the legitimate dynasties, partially effected in 1814, was completed the following year; and all the most important relations of the Italian states were fixed in the course of that period, by successive acts of the congress of Vienna.

The house of Austria received its ancient territories of the Milanese and Mantua; but to these were added Venice and all its mainland provinces, together with those districts which Napoleon had taken from the Grisons. In this manner, profiting by deeds of spoliation which he had professedly taken up arms to avenge, the emperor Francis became master of all Lombardy, as far westward as the Ticino, and as far south as the Po: and on the 7th of April, 1815, he proclaimed the erection of these territories, extending eastward to the mountains forming the right bank of the Isonzo, into a monarchical state called the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom.

The king of Sardinia [Victor Emmanuel I], who still retained his insular dominion, received back Piedmont and Savoy; while in addition to these, by a resolution which excited deep indignation in Italy, and was charged against the English government as a violation of express pledges, were given all the provinces of the Genoese Republic, which their new ruler erected into a duchy. The female line of the house of Este, represented by Francis, grandson of the last duke Ercole, and son of the archduke Ferdinand of Austria, received, as an independent ducal state, the principalities of Modena, Reggio, and Mirandola, to which Massa-Carrara was soon added.

Lucca, proclaimed a duchy, passed to the infanta Maria Louisa, formerly queen of Etruria: but, the court of Madrid having protested against the resolution which disallowed the claims of that princess to the principality of Parma, a new arrangement was concluded in 1817. By the original plan, Parma, with Piacenza and Guastalla, had been bestowed as an independent duchy on the ex-empress of the French, Marie Louise [Napoleon’s wife], with the remainder to her son, the young duke of Reichstadt: the subsequent treaty provided that, on the death of the former, the ex-queen of Etruria or her heirs should receive Parma and its annexed provinces, giving up Lucca to be incorporated into Tuscany.

The archduke Ferdinand returned to that Tuscan duchy which he had inherited from his father Leopold; and, besides the isle of Elba, and some trifling extensions of frontier, he now received uncontrolled possession of the garrison-state.

The pope was confirmed in his sovereignty over the states of the church as far north as the Po, and including the Neapolitan districts of Benevento and Pontecorvo; but his French provinces were not restored.

To the old king of Naples were given his dominions in their former extent;[25] and on the 8th of December, 1816, he declared himself, by the title of Ferdinand I, the founder of a new dynasty, whose realm, embracing both the mainland provinces and the island, was named the united kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The petty San Marino was formally recognised as the last surviving representative of the Italian republics; and a French peer, who possessed Monaco, an imperial fief on the coast near Nice, had influence enough to preserve for his lands the nominal rank of an independent state.

In styling himself merely king of Lombardy and Venice, the emperor Francis assumed a title which expressed the real amount of his power much less properly than it would have been denoted by that more ambitious name which Napoleon had given to a monarchy embracing but a few more Italian provinces. Without any further condition Austria was mistress of the half of Italy. Naples alone was left to dispute with the pope about his claims of feudal homage, which were finally compromised in 1818, for an annual payment of 12,000 crowns to Rome. The dangers, however, which encompassed the restored sovereigns were made the pretence for conferring on the Austrians a temporary right of interference far more active than any ancient privilege. They were allowed to garrison Piacenza during the reign of Marie Louise, and Ferrara and Comacchio permanently; while the king of Naples accepted as a favour, and agreed to subsidise largely, a German army which was to protect him from his own subjects during a fixed term of years.[d]

MARRIOTT ON THE RESTORATION

Looking no longer to the past but to the future, the most interesting feature of the Restoration still remains to be noticed. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the dukes of Savoy had acquired Piedmont, and thus succeeded in straddling the Alps. Their geographical position, as the prince de Ligne had cynically said, did not permit them to behave like honest men. Consequently by rather tortuous, but in the main successful, diplomacy they managed in the eighteenth century to add the royal crown of Sardinia to the ducal crowns of Piedmont and Savoy; and never was a European war concluded, however remote the principal combatants might be, but the house of Savoy was able to acquire several of the towns of Lombardy, stripping it, as the saying goes, like an artichoke, leaf by leaf. Their position was still further strengthened in 1815 by the acquisition of the annihilated republic of Genoa.

Such was the Italy of 1815, little if at all better than Metternich’s “geographical expression.”[26] But for all that the Italy of 1815 was not the Italy of the ante-Napoleonic days. Strive as they might, the diplomatists of Vienna could not set back the hands of time, nor erase from the minds of the Italian people the newly awakened recollection of their ancient fame; they could not stifle, strive as they might, their newly conceived but none the less passionate longing for the realisation of their national identity. A more accurate or more eloquent expression of this feeling could hardly be found than in the letter addressed, thirty years afterwards, by Mazzini nominally to Sir James Graham, really to the English people:

“There are over there (in Lombardy) from four to five millions
of human creatures gifted with an immortal soul, with powerful
faculties, with ardent and generous passions; with aspirations
towards free agency, towards the ideal which their fathers
had a glimpse of, which nature and tradition point out to
them; towards a national union with other millions of brother
souls in order to attain it; from four to five millions of
men desiring only to advance under the eye of God, their only
master, towards the accomplishment of a social task which they
have in common with sixteen or seventeen millions of other men,
speaking the same language, treading the same earth, cradled in
their infancy in the same maternal songs, strengthened in their
youth by the same sun, inspired by the same memories, the same
sources of literary genius. Country, liberty, brotherhood, all
are wrested from them; their faculties are mutilated, curbed,
chained, within a narrow circle traced for them by men who
are strangers to their tendencies, to their wants, to their
wishes; their tradition is broken under the cane of an Austrian
corporal; their immortal soul feudatory to the stupid caprices
of a man seated on a throne at Vienna, to the caprices of the
Tyrolese agents; and you go on indifferent, coolly inquiring
if these men be subject to this or that tariff, if the bread
that they eat costs them a halfpenny more or less! That tariff,
whatever it is, is too high; it is not they who have had the
ordering of it; that bread, dear or not, is moistened with
tears, for it is the bread of slaves.”[e]

ERRORS OF THE MONARCHY

[Sidenote: [1815-1816 A.D.]]

The condition of Italy, in 1815, was one in which old things struggled with new. Her soldiers, after having served with credit under Napoleon, were either hastily disbanded, or called upon to transfer their allegiance to powers against which they had often been arrayed. The transition from war to peace is apt to bear hardly upon men whose services are no longer required, and whose career is brought to a close. Where feelings of good-will and mutual confidence exist, such hardships are felt, but do not rankle. From the restored governments of Italy the veterans of Napoleon’s armies obtained little sympathy. Their case was not generously or wisely considered, and their feelings, as well as claims, were disregarded. Distinction, whether military or civil, obtained under the French Empire, was viewed with narrow-minded aversion. At a crisis when the greatest delicacy was required, the generous confidence and noble forbearance which win the allegiance of the heart were wanting; and the prejudices of retrogradist counsellors were allowed to prevail. At Milan, disgust was excited by the presence of a German army, and by the employment of foreign officials. At Turin, and still more at Naples, royalist factions were allowed to monopolise and abuse the powers of the state.

Thus peace, which had been hailed with so much joy, was robbed of its sweetness; the exactions of the French were forgotten, and the impartiality of their administration began to be regretted. Then it was that the Carbonari became dangerous, not only by their alliance with the resuscitated embers of Jacobinism--smothered, but not extinguished, by Bonaparte--but by the strength which they derived from a general feeling of disappointment.[f]

The civil and political reforms which had been instituted at the end of the last century were abandoned. The Jesuits were restored; many suppressed monasteries were re-established; and the mortmain laws were repealed. Elementary education was narrowed in its limits, and thrown into the hands of the clergy. Professors suspected of liberal views were expelled from the universities, and the press was placed under the most rigid supervision. All persons who had taken part in the Napoleonic governments, or who were known to entertain patriotic opinions, found themselves harassed, watched, spied on, and reported. The cities swarmed with police agents and informers. The passport system was made more stringent, and men were frequently refused even a few days’ leave of absence from their homes. The Code Napoléon was withdrawn from those provinces which had formed part of the Italian kingdom, while, in the papal states, the administration was placed again in the hands of ecclesiastics.

This political and spiritual reign of terror, which had for its object the crushing of Italian liberalism, was sanctioned and supported by Austria. Each petty potentate bound himself to receive orders from Vienna, and, in return for this obedience, the emperor guaranteed him in the possession of his throne. The Lombardo-Venetian kingdom, powerfully defended and connected with Austria by land and sea, became one huge fortress, garrisoned with armed men in perpetual menace of the country. Under these conditions the Italians were half maddened, and thousands of otherwise quiet citizens, either in the hope of finding redress and protection, or only from a feeling of revenge, joined secret revolutionary societies; for it must not be supposed that the Revolution had left the Italians as passive as it found them.

A new spirit was astir, which was not likely to be checked by the arrangements of the European congress--the spirit of national independence. During the convulsions caused by Napoleon’s conquest of Italy the allied powers had themselves fostered this spirit, in order to oppose French rule. The Austrians, the English, and Murat, in turn, had publicly invited the Italians to fight for their national independence. And now the people, who relied upon the proclamations and expected the fulfilment of so many promises, found themselves by the consent of Europe delivered over, tied and gagged, to a foreign oppressor. To take but one example: Ferdinand, when he quitted Naples in May, 1815, addressed a proclamation to his subjects, solemnly engaging to respect the laws that should in his absence be decreed by a constitution. In June he pledged himself at Vienna to introduce into his kingdom no institutions irreconcilable with those which Austria might establish in her own dependencies. Accordingly in 1816 he put an end to the Sicilian constitution of 1812.[g]

Among the means which were effective in first rousing Italy from her lethargy, and in fostering the will to acquire her independence at all costs, the secret society of the Carbonari[27] undoubtedly occupies the front rank. The Carbonari acted in two ways; by what they did and by what they caused to be done by others who were outside their society, and perhaps unfavourable to it, but who were none the less sensible of the pressure it exercised. The origin of Carbonarism has been sought in vain; as a specimen of the childish fables that once passed for its history may be noticed the legend that Francis I of France once stumbled on a charcoal burner’s hut when hunting “on the frontiers of his kingdom next to Scotland,” and was initiated into the rites similar to those in use among the sectaries of the nineteenth century. Those rites referred to vengeance which was to be taken on the wolf that slew the lamb; the wolf standing for tyrants and oppressors, and the lamb for Jesus Christ, the sinless victim, by whom all the oppressed were represented.

The Carbonari themselves generally believed that they were heirs to an organisation started in Germany before the eleventh century, under the name of the Faith of the Kohlen-Brenners [charcoal burners], of which Theobald de Bri, who was afterwards canonised, was a member. Theobald was adopted as patron saint of the modern society, and his fancied portrait figured in all the lodges. The religious symbolism of the Carbonari, their oaths and ceremonies, and the axes, blocks, and other furniture of the initiatory chamber, were well calculated to impress the poorer and more ignorant and excitable of the brethren. The Vatican affected to believe that Carbonarism was an offshoot of freemasonry, but, in spite of sundry points of resemblance, such as the engagements of mutual help assumed by members, there seems to have been no real connection between the two. The practical aims of the Carbonari may be summed up in two words: freedom and independence.

A Genoese of the name of Malghella, who was Murat’s minister of police, was the first person to give a powerful impetus to Carbonarism, of which he has even been called the inventor, but the inference goes too far. Malghella ended miserably; after the fall of Murat he was arrested by the Austrians, who consigned him as a new subject to the Sardinian government, which immediately put him in prison. Whatever was truly Italian in Murat’s policy must be mainly attributed to him. As early as 1813 he urged the king to declare himself frankly for independence, and to grant a constitution to his Neapolitan subjects. But Malghella did not find the destined saviour of Italy in Murat; his one lasting work was to establish Carbonarism on so strong a basis that, when the Bourbons returned, there were thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Carbonari in all parts of the realm. The discovery was not a pleasant one to the restored rulers, and the prince of Canosa, the new minister of police, thought to counteract the evil done by his predecessor by setting up an abominable secret society called the Calderai del Contrapeso (Braziers of the Counterpoise), principally recruited from the refuse of the people, lazzaroni, bandits, and let-out convicts, who were provided by government with 20,000 muskets, and were sworn to exterminate all enemies of the church of Rome, whether Jansenists, freemasons, or Carbonari. This association committed some horrible excesses, but otherwise it had no results. The Carbonari closed in their ranks, and learned to observe more strictly their rules of secrecy.

[Sidenote: [1816-1821 A.D.]]

From the kingdom of Naples, Carbonarism spread to the Roman states, and found a congenial soil in Romagna, which became the focus whence it spread over the rest of Italy. It was natural that it should take the colour, more or less, of the places where it grew. In Romagna, where political assassination is in the blood of the people, a dagger was substituted for the symbolical woodman’s axe in the initiatory rites. It was probably only in Romagna that the conventional threat against informers was often carried out. The Romagnols invested Carbonarism with the wild intensity of their own temperament, resolute even to crime, but capable of supreme impersonal enthusiasm. The ferment of expectancy that prevailed in Romagna is reflected in the _Letters and Journals of Lord Byron_, whom young Count Pietro Gamba made a Carbonaro, and who looked forward to seeing the Italians send the barbarians of all nations back to their own dens, as to the most interesting spectacle and moment in existence. His lower apartments, he writes, were full of the bayonets, fusils, and cartridges of his Carbonari cronies: “I suppose that they consider me as a dépôt, to be sacrificed in case of accidents. It is no great matter, supposing that Italy could be liberated, who or what is sacrificed. It is a grand object--the very poetry of politics. Only think--a free Italy! Why, there has been nothing like it since the days of Augustus!” The movement on which such great hopes were set was to begin in the kingdom of Naples in the spring of 1820.[h]

THE INSURRECTIONS OF 1820-1821

In 1820 and 1821 the discontents of the people, and the disappointment of many in the educated classes, broke out into insurrection, first at Naples, and then in Piedmont. There were no symptoms of concert, even between the Neapolitans and the Piedmontese; and the plots which arose elsewhere seem to have been produced by causes altogether local. But the immediate encouragement of the Italian revolt was furnished by the revolution in Spain,[28] and by the principle of non-intervention, which the allied sovereigns had adopted in reference to that country. The Italians vainly hoped that the same rule would be followed in their case.

On the 2nd of July, 1820, there broke out a mutiny among the troops. The insurgents were headed by two or three subaltern officers, who were Carbonari; and the whole army, having deserted the king, placed itself under its own generals. The revolt was joined by the people from all the provinces, and a remonstrance was sent to the government, demanding a representative constitution. The old king deposited his power in the hands of the crown prince Francis, as vicar, having first, however, promised to grant the nation their request, and to publish the charter in eight days. Unfortunately, the ultra-party, who were at this stage in possession of all the power, came forward instantly with a demand that the constitution should be that of the Spanish cortes, first published in 1812, and recently reinstituted. The prince-vicar acceded to this proposal.

A new difficulty soon arose. The Sicilians revolted and demanded a separate constitution and parliament, which the government refused to grant. Bloody disturbances took place at Palermo, which the Neapolitans suppressed by sending across an armed force.

The Neapolitan parliament was opened on the 1st of October, 1820, by the king in person, in the large church of the Spirito Santo. In the same month the three crowned heads who formed the Holy Alliance, attended by ministers from most of the other European powers, met at Troppau. The sovereigns of Russia, Austria, and Prussia resolved to violate their own late precedents of non-intervention, and to put down the Neapolitan constitution by force of arms. The weak monarch was easily convinced that his promises had been extorted and therefore were not binding, and the Neapolitans did not learn their danger until the Germans, 43,000 strong, were within a few days’ march of the frontier. A skirmish took place near Rieti, on the 7th of March, 1821; and next morning Pépé’s army had melted down to a few hundreds. The war was at an end.

On the 15th of May the king returned to Naples; and the Austrians left him strong garrisons, both on the mainland and in Sicily. The promise of complete amnesty, which had made part of his message to the parliament, was instantly forgotten. Courts-martial and criminal juntas were set down everywhere; a hundred persons at least were executed, among whom were Morelli and Silvati, two of the officers who had headed the first mutiny. Carrascosa and Pépé escaped; and Colletta, and two other generals, were allowed to live under surveillance in remote provinces of Austria.

The Neapolitan constitutionalists had hardly dispersed, when another military insurrection broke out in Piedmont. It was headed by several noblemen and officers of rank, and secretly favoured by Charles Albert, prince of Carignano, a kinsman of the royal family, who later became king of Sardinia.

[Sidenote: [1821-1824 A.D.]]

On the 10th of March, 1821, several regiments simultaneously mutinied. On the 12th the insurgents seized the citadel of Turin, and on the 13th the king abdicated in favour of his absent brother, Charles Felix, appointing the prince of Carignano regent, who next day took the oaths to the Spanish constitution. On the 16th the new king, Charles Felix, repudiated the acts of the regent; and in the night of the 21st Charles Albert fled to the camp of the Austrians. On the 8th of April the German army joined the royal troops at Novara, and beat the insurgents; the junta dissolved itself on the 9th; and on the 10th the king was in possession of Turin and of the whole country.

While these stormy scenes were acting in the two extremities of the peninsula, no district of Italy remained altogether undisturbed.

Arrests took place in several quarters of the papal state, but most of all in the eastern provinces. In the Lombardo-Venetian kingdom, the government professed to have discovered dangerous plots, as to which we know nothing with certainty except the existence of an association of well-educated and high-principled men at Milan, who laboured in the cause of education by instituting schools, and attempted to aid public enlightenment by a periodical called the _Conciliatore_, which the Austrians speedily suppressed. Those members of this society who became best known to the world were the counts Porro and Confalonieri, and the poet Silvio Pellico. These with many others were seized, and several were condemned to die. None of them were actually put to death, but whatever may have been the political offences of those unfortunate Milanese who, like him and Pellico, pined or died in the dungeons of Spielberg, it is at least certain that there was no truth whatever in most of the charges which the Austrians at the time allowed their journals to propagate against them.

THE REVOLUTIONS OF 1831

[Sidenote: [1821-1832 A.D.]]

The effect produced by those abortive revolutions was very disastrous to Italy. They introduced over the whole country a hateful system of espionage, caused by suspicion in the rulers and dislike in the subjects, which was not soon relaxed, and has still left painful traces. However, the measures of this sort which were adopted, with some which occasionally removed causes of complaint, were effectual in keeping the people tolerably quiet for about ten years. In Sicily a conspiracy broke out in 1822, and in 1828 a weak insurrection at Salerno was suppressed. Tuscany and Lombardy remained tranquil under a mild despotism and thirty thousand Austrian bayonets; but the French Revolution of 1830[29] gave an example which was followed next year by the states of the church, by Modena, and by Parma.

We may be assisted in discovering causes for the insurrection in the papal states, by examining one or two of the principal acts of the government after the death of Pius VII, which took place in 1823. On the 5th of October, 1824, the new pope Leo XII issued a _motu-proprio_ which annihilated at a blow the charter of 1816. The administration both of Leo and his successor, Pius VIII, was conducted in accordance with the spirit thus indicated. The arbitrary proceedings of the police became a universal pest; the administration of criminal justice was again secret, irresponsible, and inhumanly tedious; and, both in that department and in civil causes, the judges were openly charged with general venality. Besides all the old burdens, some new or obsolete ones were imposed, especially the _focalico_, a tax on every hearth, which weighed very heavily on the peasantry; and the customs were increased exorbitantly, while the government-monopolies were extended.

In Modena, it seemed to have been resolved to sweep away every vestige that the French had left behind them. The old laws of the Este had been re-enacted, but were every day infringed by edicts of the prince, and by special commissions of justice. The taxes were raised to nearly five times their amount under Napoleon; and for the elective functionaries of the communes, the sovereign substituted young noblemen, chosen by himself.

The insurrection began in Modena, where, in the night of the 3rd of February, 1831, a body of conspirators were arrested in the house of Ciro Menotti. The people rose, and the duke fled to Mantua. On the 4th, being just two days after the election of Pope Gregory XVI, Bologna was in open revolt. The rebellion spread over the greater part of the Roman state. At the same time, the ex-empress Marie Louise fled from Parma, which was likewise in tumult. The subjects of the papal provinces declared openly against the temporal sovereignty of the pope, and on the 26th of February, deputies from all the revolted states united in proclaiming a new republic. The allied sovereigns did not lose a day in putting down the insurrection. On the 9th of March the duke of Modena with an Austrian army retook his capital; and, after some resistance, the Germans, before the end of the same month, had restored to the holy see all its possessions. In Modena, Menotti and Borelli, the leaders of the revolt, were hanged, and more than a hundred others were imprisoned for life. In Parma, Marie Louise acted mercifully, and voluntarily redressed some of the grievances of which her subjects, perhaps with less reason than their neighbours, had complained. In the papal states no executions took place, but many men were condemned to imprisonment for longer or shorter periods.

The leading powers of Europe interposed to recommend concessions by the pope to his subjects; and, on the 5th of July, 1831, the holy father issued a _motu-proprio_, which, for the third time since 1814, altered the administration. It resumed much of the charter of 1816, retaining the division into delegations, and the subdivision of these into districts; but it narrowed greatly the functions of the congregations, which were merely to have a consultative voice. And the new act did not give to the people even that share in election which, as to the communal boards, the decree of Consalvi had bestowed on them.

The subjects of the papal state did not conceal their disappointment at the pretended reforms. In January, 1832, the eastern districts were again in insurrection; and the slaughter of forty inhabitants of Forlì, men, women, and children, drove the people of the country nearly mad. Before the end of the month, the revolt was again suppressed by the Austrian grenadiers. This new interposition, however, at length aroused the French king, Louis Philippe, probably a little ashamed of the part he had already acted. On the 22nd of February, 1832, a French squadron, anchoring off Ancona, landed troops, which seized the town and citadel. Austria and its satellites professed high indignation at this interference; but the act seems to be quite defensible on diplomatic grounds, in the position which France occupied as a guarantee of the papal kingdom. In the kingdom of Naples, Francis, the prince-vicar of 1820, succeeded his father, and ruled feebly but not unkindly for a few years, after which his throne devolved on his son, Ferdinand, then a youth of twenty-one.[d]

Thus the enterprise of 1831, though extensively supported, had been undertaken without any fixed plan and, as we have seen, ended in complete discomfiture. The scattered and persecuted _sette_ [societies], when once more rallied and united, carried on their operations under a new name; and the ill-starred faction, which was destined to mislead and vitiate the national impulse of 1848, assumed the title of Young Italy. “Austria,” says Gualterio, “acquired in this society a new ally.”

[Sidenote: [1831 A.D.]]

In 1831, a young Genoese, Giuseppe Mazzini [born in 1808], obtained celebrity by the publication of a letter in which he exhorted Charles Albert, who had just succeeded to the throne, to undertake the liberation of Italy. The boldness and self-confidence displayed in this production was admired by the _cervelli bollenti_ of the day; and the exiles and refugees, whose disappointment was recent and who were smarting under persecution, were predisposed towards one whose counsels were uttered with oracular authority, and who cheered them with new and undefined hopes.

Mazzini soon became the acknowledged centre of the new sect, of which the establishment was contemporary with that of “Young France” and “Young Germany,” and which was intended to transform and assimilate those already in existence, and to give them unity of purpose and command.[30][f]

SASSONE ON MAZZINI AND “YOUNG ITALY”

(1808-1872)]

To reconstruct a nation torn and bowed down under the most enervating of clerical and monarchal despotisms requires first of all the creation of citizens and the organisation of a large and strong association based on national right. An association depending on the entire people and opening up to them at the same time a larger horizon than the miserable position they had occupied in the peninsula--such was the generous idea which fermented in the head of Mazzini, that great exile of Italian independence, when he took up at Marseilles his idea already elaborated during his captivity at Savona and founded the society and paper of “Young Italy.” It was under the influence of the same principles, and driven by his unshakable faith in the future of Italy, that he, with several friends devoted like himself to the popular cause, undertook to develop the intelligence of poor Italian workmen in London.

The statutes of the new society destined to replace the Carbonari, and created by Mazzini and a group of exiles, was based on national law and accessible to all Italians. By its strong popular organisation it was destined to keep the Austrian forces in perpetual check over the whole peninsula until the day of help. And thus by the simplicity of its resources it would defy the surveillance of a most vigilant police. Religious ideas and patriotic thoughts were blended and confounded in the thoughts of this apostle of Italian liberty. They might be summed up in two words--_Dio e popolo_.

The object of Young Italy was inscribed on its national banner of red, green, and white: on one side it bore the words, “Liberty, Equality, Humanity;” on the other, “Unity, Independence.”

All initiates into Young Italy were obliged to pay into the society’s funds a monthly contribution of fivepence, or more, if they were able.

When initiated each new associate had to pronounce the following promise in the presence of the initiator:

“In the name of God and Italy; in the name of all the martyrs
of the holy Italian cause who have fallen under the blows of
foreign or native tyranny: by the duties which bind me to
my country, to the God who created me, and to the brothers
God has given me; by the innate love in all men for the spot
where his mother was born and her children have lived; by
the shame I feel before citizens of other nations in having
neither the name nor the rights of a citizen, neither national
flag nor fatherland; by the memory of ancient power; by the
consciousness of present abjection; by the tears of Italian
mothers over sons dead on the scaffold, in dungeons, or
in exile; by the misery of Italian millions: believing in
a God-sent mission to Italy and the duty of every Italian
born man to contribute to its accomplishment; convinced that
wherever God has wished a nation to be there the necessary
forces exist to create it--that the people are the depositary
of this force, and in the guiding of this force by the people
and with the people rests the secret of victory--I adhere to
Young Italy, an association of men holding the same faith, and
I swear:

“To devote myself entirely and forever to constituting a
national Italy, one, independent, free, and republican; to help
in every way my associated brothers; now and forever (_Ora e
sempre_); I also swear, calling on my head the anger of God,
the horror of men, and the infamy of perjury, if ever I venture
to betray all or part of my oath.”

The arrangement of degrees was as simple as possible. Rejecting the interminable hierarchy of Carbonarism, the society had only two degrees: initiator and initiated. A central committee resided abroad to league themselves together as much as possible with democratic foreign elements, and generally to direct the enterprise. Signs of recognition between the affiliated were suppressed as being pre-eminently dangerous. The order word, a cut card, a special handshake, sufficed to accredit those travelling for the central committee to provincial committees and reciprocally. These signs of recognition were renewable every three months. A cypress branch (in memory of martyrs) was the symbol of the society. The general word of order, _Ora e sempre_, alluded to the constancy necessary to the vindication of Italian rights.[j]

FYFFE’S ESTIMATE OF MAZZINI

At a time not rich in intellectual or in moral power, the most striking figure among those who are justly honoured as the founders of Italian independence is perhaps that of Mazzini. Exiled during nearly the whole of his mature life, a conspirator in the eyes of all governments, a dreamer in the eyes of the world, Mazzini was a prophet or an evangelist among those whom his influence led to devote themselves to the one cause of their country’s regeneration. No firmer faith, no nobler disinterestedness, ever animated the saint or the patriot; and if in Mazzini there was also something of the visionary and the fanatic, the force with which he grasped the two vital conditions of Italian revival--the expulsion of the foreigner and the establishment of a single national government--proves him to have been a thinker of genuine political insight. Laying the foundation of his creed deep in the moral nature of man, and constructing upon this basis a fabric not of rights but of duties, he invested the political union with the immediateness, the sanctity, and the beauty of family life. With him, to live, to think, to hope, was to live, to think, to hope for Italy; and the Italy of his ideal was a republic embracing every member of the race, purged of the priestcraft and the superstition which had degraded the man to the slave, indebted to itself alone for its independence, and consolidated by the reign of equal law. The rigidity with which Mazzini adhered to his own great project in its completeness, and his impatience with any bargaining away of national rights, excluded him from the work of those practical politicians and men of expedients who in 1859 effected with foreign aid the first step towards Italian union; but the influence of his teaching and his organisation in preparing his countrymen for independence was immense; and the dynasty which has rendered to united Italy services which Mazzini thought impossible, owes to this great republican scarcely less than to its ablest friends.[k]

SYMONDS ON THE PROBLEMS AND THE LEADERS

Though the spirit infused into the Italians by Mazzini’s splendid eloquence aroused the people into a sense of their high destinies and duties, though he was the first to believe firmly that Italy could and would be one free nation, yet the means he sanctioned for securing this result, and the policy which was inseparable from his opinions, proved obstacles to statesmen of more practical and sober views. It was the misfortune of Italy at this epoch that she had not only to fight for independence, but also to decide upon the form of government which the nation should elect when it was constituted. All right-thinking and patriotic men agreed in their desire to free the country from foreign rule, and to establish national self-government. But should they aim at a republic or a constitutional monarchy? Should they be satisfied with the hegemony of Piedmont? Should they attempt a confederation, and if so, how should the papacy take rank, and should the petty sovereigns be regarded as sufficiently Italian to hold their thrones?

These and many other hypothetical problems distracted the Italian patriots. It was impossible for them, in the circumstances, first to form the nation and then to decide upon its government; for the methods to be employed in fighting for independence already implied some political principle. Mazzini’s manipulation of conspiracy, for instance, was revolutionary and republican; while those who adhered to constitutional order, and relied upon the arms of Piedmont, had virtually voted for Sardinian hegemony. The unanimous desire for independence existed in a vague and nebulous condition. It needed to be condensed into workable hypothesis; but this process could not be carried on with the growth of sects perilous to common action.

The party of Young Italy, championed by Mazzini, was the first to detach itself, and to control the blindly working forces of the Carbonari movement by a settled plan of action. It was the programme of Young Italy to establish a republic by the aid of volunteers recruited from all parts of the peninsula. When Charles Albert came to the throne, Mazzini, as we have seen, addressed him a letter, as equal unto equal, calling upon the king to defy Austria and rely upon God and the people. Because Charles Albert (who, in spite of his fervent patriotism and genuine liberality of soul, was a man of mixed opinions, scrupulous in his sense of constitutional obligation, melancholy by temperament, and superstitiously religious) found himself unwilling or unable to take this step, the Mazzinisti denounced him as a traitor to 1821, and a retrogressive autocrat.

[Sidenote: [1831-1846 A.D.]]

In his exile at Geneva, Mazzini now organised an armed attempt on Savoy. He collected a few hundred refugees of all nations, and crossed the frontier in 1833. But this feeble attack produced no result beyond convincing Charles Albert that he could not trust the republicans. Subsequent attempts on the king’s life roused a new sense of loyalty in Piedmont, and defined a counter-body of opinion to Mazzini’s. The patriots of a more practical type, who may be called moderate liberals, began, in one form or another, to aim at achieving the independence of Italy constitutionally by the help of the Sardinian kingdom. What rank Sardinia would take in the new Italy remained an open question.

(1810-1861)]

The publication of Vincenzo Gioberti’s treatise, _Il Primato morale e civile degli Italiani_, in 1843, considerably aided the growth of definite opinion. His utopia was a confederation of Italian powers, under the spiritual presidency of the papacy, and with the army of Piedmont for sword and shield. This book had an immense success. It made timid thinkers feel that they could join the liberals without sacrificing their religious or constitutional opinions. At the same date Cesare Balbo’s _Speranze d’Italia_ exercised a somewhat similar influence, through its sound and unsubversive principles. In its pages Balbo made one shrewd guess, that the Eastern question would decide Italian independence.

Massimo d’Azeglio, who also was a Piedmontese; the poet Giusti, the baron Ricasoli, and the marchese Gino Capponi in Tuscany; together with Alessandro Manzoni at Milan, and many other writers scattered through the provinces of Italy, gave their weight to the formation of this moderate liberal party. These men united in condemning the extreme democracy of the Mazzinisti, and did not believe that Italy could be regenerated by merely manipulating the insurrectionary force of the revolution. On political and religious questions they were much divided in detail, suffering in this respect from the weakness inherent in liberalism. Yet we are already justified in regarding this party as a sufficient counterpoise to the republicans; and the man who was destined to give it coherence, and to win the great prize of Italian independence by consolidating and working out its principles in practice, was already there.

The count Camillo Benso di Cavour had been born in 1810, two years later than Mazzini. He had not yet entered upon his ministerial career, but was writing articles for the _Risorgimento_, which at Turin opposed the Mazzinistic journal _Concordia_, and was devoting himself to political and economical studies. It is impossible to speak of Mazzini and Cavour without remembering the third great regenerator of Italy, Giuseppe Garibaldi. At this date he was in exile; but a few years later he returned, and began his career of popular deliverance in Lombardy.

Mazzini the prophet, Garibaldi the knight-errant, and Cavour the statesman, of Italian independence, were all natives of the kingdom of Sardinia. But their several positions in it were so different as to account in no small measure for the very divergent parts they played in the coming drama. Mazzini was a native of Genoa, which ill tolerated the enforced rule of Turin. Garibaldi came from Nice, and was a child of the people. Cavour was born in the midst of that stiff aristocratical society of old Piedmont which has been described so vividly by D’Azeglio in his _Ricordi_. The Piedmontese nobles had the virtues and the defects of English country squires in the last century. Loyal, truthful, brave, hard-headed, tough in resistance, obstinately prejudiced, they made excellent soldiers, and were devoted servants of the crown. Moreover, they hid beneath their stolid exterior greater political capacity than the more genial and brilliant inhabitants of southern and central Italy.

Cavour came of this race and understood it. But he was a man of exceptional quality. He had the genius of statesmanship--a practical sense of what could be done, combined with rare dexterity in doing it, fine diplomatic and parliamentary tact, and noble courage in the hour of need. Without the enthusiasm, amounting to the passion of a new religion, which Mazzini inspired, without Garibaldi’s brilliant achievements, and the idolatry excited by this pure-hearted hero in the breasts of all who fought with him and felt his sacred fire, there is little doubt that Cavour would not have found the creation of United Italy possible. But if Cavour had not been there to win the confidence, support, and sympathy of Europe, if he had not been recognised by the body of the nation as a man whose work was solid and whose sense was just in all emergencies, Mazzini’s efforts would have run to waste in questionable insurrections, and Garibaldi’s feats of arms must have added but one chapter more to the history of unproductive patriotism.

While, therefore, we recognise the part played by each of these great men in the liberation of their country, and while we willingly ignore their differences and disputes, it is Cavour whom we must honour with the title of the maker of United Italy.

POPE PIUS IX AND HIS LIBERAL POLICY

[Sidenote: [1846-1848 A.D.]]

From this digression, which was necessary in order to make the next acts in the drama clear, we now return to the year 1846. Misrule had reached its climax in Rome, and the people were well-nigh maddened, when Gregory XVI died and Pius IX was elected in his stead.[31] It seemed as though an age of gold had dawned; for the greatest of all miracles had happened. The new pope declared himself a liberal, proclaimed a general amnesty to political offenders, and in due course granted a national guard, and began to form a constitution. The Neo-Guelfic school of Gioberti believed that their master’s utopia was about to be realised.

Italy went wild with joy and demonstrations. The pope’s example proved contagious. Constitutions were granted in Tuscany [February 11, 1848], Piedmont [March 4th], and Rome [March 14th]. The duke of Lucca fled, and his domain was joined to Tuscany. Only Austria and Naples declared that their states needed no reforms. On the 2nd of January, 1848, a liberal demonstration at Milan served the Austrians for pretext to massacre defenceless persons in the streets. These Milanese victims were hailed as martyrs all over Italy, and funeral ceremonies, partaking of the same patriotic character as the rejoicings of the previous year, kept up the popular agitation. On the 12th of January Palermo rose against King Ferdinand II, and Naples followed her example on the 27th. The king was forced in February to grant the constitution of 1812, to which his subjects were so ardently attached.[g]

FOOTNOTES

[25] [With regard to Naples there was an interminable and difficult debate about the documents which were found in Paris, and which clearly proved the treacherous thoughts of Gioacchino [Joachim Murat] against the allies. The final result was that even Austria which had upheld him detested Murat, and on the 10th day of April declared war against him as we have seen. After these proceedings there was nothing to prevent the congress of Vienna from taking possession of Naples also. It was again adjudged to King Ferdinand IV. He was already in possession of the kingdom when the congress restored it to him.[c]]

[26] [Stillman calls it still less--only a “diplomatic expression.”]

[27] [Literally “charcoalers,” charcoal-making being a prominent industry in the wilds of the Abruzzo and Calabria where Carbonarism found its refuge. The ritual of the organisation was founded on charcoal-makers’ terms, thus meetings were called _vendite_ or “sales.” The idea spread to France, where La Fayette was a prominent member. See volume XIII, chapter I.]

[28] [The Spanish Revolution, which originated in Cadiz in 1819, resulted in the establishment of a constitution accepted by the king, and sworn to by the king of Naples himself as an infante of Spain. This event was full of interest to the Neapolitans, who felt their own need of a similar guarantee.--WRIGHTSON.[f]]

[29] [The influence of French politics on Italy has been remarkable. We have seen the effect of the spirit of 1793 and the Napoleonic idea. The French revolutions of 1830 and 1848 had like influence.]

[30] [Shortly after the July Revolution of 1830 Mazzini, having been entrapped by a government spy into the performance of some trifling commission for the Carbonari, was arrested and imprisoned in the fortress of Savona on the western Riviera. “The government was not fond,” so his father was informed, “of young men of talent, the subjects of whose musings were unknown to it.” After six months’ imprisonment Mazzini was acquitted of conspiracy, but was nevertheless exiled from Italy.--MARRIOTT.[e]]

[31] [“Pius IX had a heart and mind of sufficient calibre to comprehend the line of conduct he must follow in the midst of these circumstances. He hoped to realise gradually in his own territory and to second elsewhere all that the present asked for, but not to let himself be dragged further. “It will take ten years,” he said, “for the national and political spirit to penetrate the masses.” He worked for this end from the first day with his minister Gizzi. He called upon the municipal and ecclesiastical bodies for the best means of inspiring popular education; he established commissions to investigate the condition of all branches of the administration, but he took care to meddle with nothing that directly concerned politics. The respect and sympathy of popular opinion encouraged Pius IX’s work. Following his example the other sovereigns took up reforms. But what Pius IX lacked was promptitude of resolution and the assistance of men practical enough to carry out the aspirations of his heart.”--ZELLER.[l]]