Young Italy
1831-1833. AETAT 25-27
Condition of Italy--The Revolution of 1831--Young Italy--Its
principles: belief in Italy; inspiration of duty; social
reform--Its political system: Republicanism; Italian Unity;
war with Austria--Secret societies.
The governor of the prison at Savona had allowed him to read the
Bible, Byron, and Tacitus, innocently thinking that they contained no
revolutionary material. Out of these and Dante sprang Young Italy.
Italy was ripe for the teaching of the epoch-making society. The
country was "a geographical expression." Conquerors, whose appetites
had been tempted by the Southern land, had carved it into appanages
for themselves. Austria held Lombardy and the lands of the Venetian
republic; the King of Piedmont ruled the North-West, and Sardinia, and
Savoy across the Alps; the Bourbons of Naples had the South; the Pope,
the grand-duke of Tuscany, the petty dukes of Modena, Parma, and Lucca
divided up the Centre. Nor had there been any serious demand for
unity. History and character sundered North and South; the great
medieval cities still cherished their independence too dearly to wish
to sink it in a common country. Napoleon, while he ruled, had gone far
to unite the land both in form and substance; and the aspirations he
did so much to create survived him. Weak though they still were,
practical grievances were ever enforcing the argument for unity; and
Italians were chafing more and more against the artificial barriers,
which stopped the circulation of the nation's life. The customs-lines,
that met the trader on the confines of each state, strangled commerce.
Literature circulated with difficulty, and the Genoese could hardly
get access to books published at Florence or Leghorn, a hundred miles
away. In the smaller states at all events, the area was too small to
offer any field for enterprise, and every lawyer and engineer and
civil servant was cribbed by the restrictions, that confined his
activities to a handful of towns. Through all the peninsula there was
a more or less intolerable misrule. Political disabilities allowed no
voice in legislation, no control of taxation or the executive, no
rights of public meeting or association, small liberty of speech or
writing. There were more present grievances in the discouragement of
education, in the clerical tyranny, in the obsolete and partial legal
system. And the misgovernment had its yet more evil and intimate
aspect in the power of the police, which threatened each man's home
and honour and career. Governments, that breathed and moved in chronic
dread of revolution, sought safety in a system of covert terrorism.
The police had their spies everywhere,--in the streets, in men's
households, in the churches, in the universities,--to scrape up any
idle word or act, that seemed to mark a possible critic of government.
There were mitigations of the misrule in Piedmont, Tuscany, and the
Austrian territories. But in the Pope's states and Naples there was
little or nothing to relieve the crying corruption and incompetency;
and everywhere there was more or less a vexatious intolerance and
oppression, that showed the blacker after the relative liberty and
progress of Napoleon's rule.
The Carbonari had voiced somewhat fitfully the national protest. And
just at this time they made their final attempt at revolution. Early
in February 1831,--just before Mazzini was released from Savona,--the
insurrection broke out in Modena, and spread at once to Parma and the
Papal province of Romagna. In three weeks the greater part of the
Pope's dominions were free, and the insurgent army was marching
towards Rome. The leaders knew that, however easy it was to upset the
rule of the Pope and Dukes, they could make no effective resistance to
an Austrian attack; but they counted on the promised backing of France
to ward off invasion. "Non-intervention,"--the European equivalent of
the Monroe Doctrine,--was one of the formulas of the July Monarchy,
and by it Austria had no right to interfere in the domestic concerns
of an Italian state. The French government had assured the Carbonari,
that, if she violated the principle, it would declare war against her.
But only a section of the ministry was sincere in the promise, and
Louis Philippe saw that a war in the name of nationality might easily
slide into a revolutionary movement, which would shake his own unsure
throne. His government let Metternich know that non-intervention was a
phrase that stopped at words. By the end of March, despite some fine
fighting by the Italian levies, the Austrians had stamped out the
ephemeral insurrection. Its feebleness courted failure. Not that the
programme of the leaders wanted breadth and boldness. Mazzini's after
criticism that it was neither nationalist nor democratic was
exaggerated and unjust. During their few weeks of rule, the chiefs had
showered projects of social reform. Some of them at all events wished
to make Romagna the centre of a great national rising, and aimed at an
independent federation of all Italy with Rome for its capital. But
they made two irreparable mistakes. They did not face the facts; they
failed to win the people. They were for the most part, like the rest
of the Carbonaro leaders, middle-aged professional men, out of touch
with the masses, possessed by the dread that popular imprudences might
scare the diplomatists, on whom they built their hopes. Under an
inspiring chief, the people would have fought perhaps, as they fought
seventeen years later, when they drove the Austrians in confusion from
Bologna. But the leaders were not the men to touch their enthusiasm.
They had, in fact, miscalculated what the movement meant. These
comfortable men of peace flinched from the fact that Austria must be
fought and beaten. They had no stuff for a desperate guerilla fight,
that meant the wasting of the country, privation and disease and
death, for an uncertain hope that France might come eventually to the
rescue. Still less were they prepared to launch on a forlorn
enterprise, where friends were none and immediate disaster certain,
that they might be precursors of their children's victories.
Their failure, so consonant with all the later Carbonaro policy,
confirmed Mazzini in his belief that a new organisation was needed and
new men to lead it. As usual, he saw only one set of facts. He
exaggerated the mistakes of the revolutionary governments, and left
out of his reckoning the unreadiness of the people. The insurrections
had failed, he convinced himself, simply because they had been badly
led. In the main, indeed, he was right. The revolution had been in the
wrong hands. The Carbonaro chiefs kept at arm's-length younger men,
whose energy might have made up for their own unforwardness. If the
next revolution was to fare better, it must have these younger men to
captain it, men of confidence and enthusiasm and fresh ideas, men with
a message that would nerve "those artisans of insurrection, the people
and the young." Mazzini had at this time a supreme faith in his
generation; he had already written in the _Antologia_ of "this young
Italy of ours," so vigorous and cultured and warm-hearted, that no new
movement, however bold and difficult, was beyond its powers. "Place,"
he said now, "the young at the head of the insurgent masses; you do
not know what strength is latent in those young bands, what magic
influence the voice of the young has on the crowd; you will find in
them a host of apostles for the new religion. But youth lives on
movement, grows great in enthusiasm and faith. Consecrate them with a
lofty mission; inflame them with emulation and praise; spread through
their ranks the word of fire, the word of inspiration; speak to them
of country, of glory, of power, of great memories." They had been
muzzled in the past; they must not be again. So rigidly did he insist
on this, that the rules of Young Italy excluded from membership,
except in special cases, all who were over forty years. Mazzini had no
diffidence to curb the magnificent egotism of a design, in which he
consciously destined for himself the leading part. As one of his
closest friends of those days said, "his confidence in men was great
and in himself unlimited." "All great national movements," he wrote in
later years, "begin with unknown men of the people, without influence
except for the faith and will, that counts not time or difficulties."
It is worth noting that Camillo Cavour, five years younger still, was
at this same time writing to a friend that "he would one fine morning
wake up Prime Minister of Italy."
When we disentangle Mazzini's ideas from the superfluous verbiage that
sometimes wraps them, two leading principles are found to
differentiate them from those of earlier movements,--the principles,
that, with his trick of making watchwords, he summed up in the phrase,
"God and the People." The new movement must have the inspiration and
power of a religion. Italy needed something that would shake her from
the hopelessness of disillusion and defeat, something that would prove
she "had a strength within her, that was arbiter of facts, mightier
than destiny itself." Action must be roused by action, energy by
energy, faith by faith,--the faith that made Rome great and inspired
Christianity and sent forth the armies of the Convention, the faith
that makes the weak strong in the knowledge they are carrying out
God's will. Mazzini had two arguments to persuade his countrymen to
this believing and conquering patriotism. He hoped to fire them with
his own superb faith in Italy and her destinies. He called up "that
old name of Italy, hung round with memories and glory and majestic
griefs, that centuries of mute servitude could not destroy." Twice had
she been queen of the world; many times had she, the land of Dante and
Vico, of the Papacy and the Renaissance, inspired European thought.
"Italy," he said, "has been called a graveyard; but a graveyard
peopled by our mighty dead is nearer life than a land that teems with
living weaklings and braggarts." Her task was not yet done; she had
still to speak to the nations "the gospel of the new age, the gospel
of humanity." He pointed Italians to "the vision of their country,
radiant, purified by suffering, moving as an angel of light among the
nations that thought her dead." Rightly he judged that men, who shared
his faith, would never despair of their country. But he had a more
sounding note to strike. He had the genius to see that he who would
have men rise to high endeavour, must appeal to their unselfish
motives, that only when some great principle calls, will they lift
themselves to heroism and sacrifice of all that makes life dear. The
effort to make Italy meant the loss of thousands of lives, meant exile
and imprisonment and poverty, the blighting of homes and the misery of
dear ones; and men would only face it at the call of duty. The
Carbonari had no call; they came of a school that appealed to
interested motives, and the appeal inevitably broke down in the day of
disappointment and defeat. Mazzini offered his countrymen "a national
religion"; Young Italy was no mere political party, but "a creed and
an apostolate"; it taught that victory came "by reverence for
principles, reverence for the just and true, by sacrifice and
constancy in sacrifice." As individuals and as a nation, they had a
mission given them by God. God's law of duty bade them follow it;
God's law of progress promised them accomplishment.
The other principle of Young Italy was social reform. Earlier liberal
movements had thought or attempted little for the masses, though at
all events the recent rising in Romagna aimed higher than Mazzini gave
it credit for, and had more of a democratic tendency than contemporary
movements in France and England. Mazzini exaggerated the revolutionary
impatience of the masses in 1821 and 1831; but it was true that such
enthusiasm as they had, had been cooled by the disappointment of their
hopes. Revolutions, as he said, had been Dead Sea apples to them. They
would be slow to stir again, till they saw that the liberation of
their country had tangible social results in store. The gospel of duty
would rouse the cultured middle classes, but at this time he seems to
have thought that the uneducated, down-trodden, priest and
official-ridden masses could not respond to the higher call, and must
be won by some visible prospect of relief from present evils. Pope
Julius' cry of "Out with the barbarian" would not touch men, who did
not see how every social injustice leant in the last resort on
Austria, how dear food, conscription, all the petty tyranny, were
fruits of the foreign domination, that sheltered the princes who
misgoverned them. Till the masses felt this, there was no hope of a
successful war of liberation. "Revolutions," he said, "must be made
for the people and by the people, and so long as revolutions are, as
now, the inheritance and monopoly of a single class, and lead only to
the substitution of one aristocracy for another, we shall never find
salvation." The cry of the poor, unheard by most Italian statesmen
from his time, down to yesterday, was ever with him. "I see the people
pass before my eyes in the livery of wretchedness and political
subjection, ragged and hungry, painfully gathering the crumbs that
wealth tosses insultingly to it, or lost and wandering in riot and the
intoxication of a brutish, angry, savage joy; and I remember that
those brutalised faces bear the finger-print of God, the mark of the
same mission as our own. I lift myself to the vision of the future and
behold the people rising in its majesty, brothers in one faith, one
bond of equality and love, one ideal of citizen virtue that ever grows
in beauty and might; the people of the future, unspoilt by luxury,
ungoaded by wretchedness, awed by the consciousness of its rights and
duties. And in the presence of that vision my heart beats with anguish
for the present and glorying for the future." That they would rise in
insurrection, he had no doubt. Once make them see whence sprang their
wretchedness, where stood its remedies, once make them feel that "God
is on the side of the down-trodden," the people of Italy would be
again what they had been in the days of the Lombard League and the
Sicilian Vespers.
Out of these principles,--social reform as the immediate end of
revolution and duty as its inspiration,--Mazzini built up an elaborate
political programme. He loved system-making and hardly apologised for
it. You cannot have unity or harmony without it, he urged, and to a
certain extent he had practical justification. It were better, as he
said and as subsequent events proved, that the nationalists should
argue out their differences before the time for action came, and not
paralyse themselves by quarrels in front of the enemy. It was this
want of a positive programme, that was, he thought, largely
responsible for the failure of the Carbonari. Their policy had hardly
gone beyond the overthrow of the existing governments; and they had
mustered under their flag royalists and republicans, conservatives and
liberals, with the inevitable result that after their first successes
they split their ranks and fell an easy prey. It were wiser, so
Mazzini pleaded, to be few but united. "The strength of an association
depends not on its numbers but on its homogeneity." But the principle
was necessarily an intolerant one. It barred many a true patriot, who
could not swear to the whole Mazzinian doctrine. For such he had no
pity. In his view it was only fear, "the Almighty God of most
politicians," that prevented the Moderates from accepting his
position. "There can be no moderation," he said at a later date,
"between good and evil, truth and error, progress and reaction."
Unluckily truth to him too often meant adhesion to his own theories;
and he could never forgive men, who, starting from his premisses,
could not follow his logic to the end, though, like most men who pride
themselves on being logical, he was often singularly incapable of
accurate reasoning. It was this intolerance that wrecked so much of
his after life, that made him waste his splendid powers in fighting
men, by whose side he ought to have been working.
However, for better or worse, Mazzini required from his
fellow-workers implicit acceptance of his theories,--theories which
embraced every sphere of national life, religion and politics,
literature and art. His chief political doctrines were republicanism
and Italian Unity. How he pieced republicanism on his general theory
of things, is the subject of another chapter. It is sufficient here to
note that he was a republican, chiefly because he thought that
democratic legislation was impossible under any form of monarchy. The
belief was natural enough at the time. Few had been the popular
reforms under any European crown, while the one genuine series of
democratic laws had been passed by the French Republic or while the
French monarchy was tottering to its fall. Mazzini may be pardoned, if
at that time he sharply sundered monarchies and republics, and failed
to see how imperfect was the classification. In Italy, Mazzini saw
special circumstances that made for a republic. Her great memories
were republican, though even he must have recognised how little the
republics of medieval Italy had in common with his ideal polity. At
Venice and his own Genoa the republican tradition was still dear.
Italian republicanism was free from any recent memory of outrage and
proscription, such as tarnished the name in France. And above all, he
urged, there was no possible king for a united Italy. Each prince was
pledged to Austria, each had proved his sympathy with reaction.
Monarchy in Italy had "no splendid annals, no venerable traditions,"
no powerful nobility to buttress it. Two princes only had an army,
which could help in the war of liberation; and neither the King of
Piedmont nor the King of Naples would submit to the other without a
bitter civil struggle. And the antipathies of North and South, though
they might bow to the principle of a common republic, would never
allow the Neapolitan to take a king from Piedmont. History has proved
how wrong was his diagnosis, and temporarily and reluctantly he had
glimpses of his error. More than once in after life, as we shall see,
he alternated his republicanism with fits of half-belief in the
Piedmontese monarchy.
His advocacy of Italian Unity rests on a surer bottom. That the
country was fated to stagnate till the foreigner had gone, was common
ground with every school of patriots. But when the Austrians had been
driven out, was Italy to be a federation of states or one united
country? Mazzini pleaded that the point at issue between him and the
federalists was mainly one of practicability. This hardly took
sufficient account of the school, which looked to Switzerland and
America for its types, and preferred a federation on its own merits.
But on the whole his contention was right. Every argument that told
for federation, told yet more forcibly for unity. The strength of the
federalist movement lay in the belief that unity was impossible. As
yet, though Napoleon had foretold that unity must come, only a handful
of Italians had dared to speak of it as a possible ideal. The great
majority doubted whether Italy even wished to be united, whether, if
she did, the facts of the European polity made it possible, whether
unity could permanently stand the strain of the old provincial
animosities. It was easy for them to adduce a host of facts,--the
differences of race and temperament and tradition, the various habits
formed by dissimilar systems of law and land tenure and education,
the jealousies, still far from dead, that sundered province from
province and city from city. Mazzini himself had felt the force of
their arguments, and there was a moment, when even he had been shaken
in his faith. He had little tangible reasoning to back his confidence.
But he had the prophetic assurance of a great possibility, and his
contagious faith made it a reality. He saw, when hardly another of his
contemporaries saw it, that Italian Unity was a practicable ideal; his
teaching informed the national resolve, that changed the seemingly
impossible into a fact. To few men has it been given to create a great
political idea; to fewer still to be not only the creator, but the
chief instrument in realising it. Mazzini was both, and it gives him
title to rank among the makers of modern Europe.
But there could be no unity, no republic, no political advance of any
kind, till the inevitable war with Austria had been fought and won.
She would not surrender her Italian provinces, unless by force of
arms. She could not tolerate free institutions side by side with her
own despotic rule. She had crushed the Neapolitan and Piedmontese
risings ten years before; she had done the same in Modena and Romagna
yesterday. "She robs us," said Mazzini, "of life and country, name,
glory, culture, material well-being." As Giusti said more pointedly a
few years later, the Italians "ate Austria in their bread." Mazzini
and many another patriot knew that any peaceful solution was utopian.
"The destinies of Italy," he preached, "have to be decided on the
plains of Lombardy, and peace must be signed beyond the Alps."
Mazzini rather welcomed war in a just cause. It would redeem the
torpid, disillusioned Italian, who was brave enough, as Napoleon's
campaigns had proved, but required much to nerve him to effort. It
would give Italy again her national self-respect, her claim to the
esteem of other peoples. "War," he said, "is the eternal law, that
stands between the master and the slave who breaks his chains." But
Mazzini in his saner moods saw the futility of any local or
ill-prepared rising. In words, that condemn only too eloquently much
of his after action, he declared that only victory could justify a
rising against Austria. It was only when the great mass of the people
had been won to the nationalist cause, that the patriots "might
stretch their hand to Lombardy and say, 'There are the men who
perpetuate your servitude,' towards the Alps and say, 'There stand
your confines.'" Mazzini's plan of campaign was guerilla fighting. It
was, as he said, the natural resource of an insurgent people, that had
to win its freedom against disciplined armies,--the method chosen by
the Dutch against Philip II., by the American colonists against
England, by the Spaniards and Greeks in more recent times. Had he
lived now, he might have added another illustrious example. Italy,
with her long chain of mountains that no enemy could hold in force,
had special fitness for the strategy. "Italians," he cried, "look to
your mountains, there stand strength and infallible victory."
In the meantime the work of Young Italy was to organise and educate;
and the only possible organisation was that of the secret society.
Mazzini did not see its inherent weaknesses. Young Italy soon became
as much the quarry of the spy and police agent as the Carbonari had
been; and to the end of life Mazzini was the victim of informers, who
won his easy confidence. The society developed an uncontrolled and
irresponsible leadership, and its chief, eager as he was and sincerely
eager to disclaim any desire to dictate, was too impatient, too
self-confident to allow fair play to other men's convictions. As a
means of preparing for war, it failed disastrously; and it proved an
ill school for the parliamentary politics of later days. But in a
country, where any open expression of liberal sentiment meant prison
or exile, if not the scaffold, there was no alternative; and as an
educating influence it came to be the greatest of the forces that made
Italy. Its writings, smuggled into every corner of the land, moved
many a young thinker to a passionate resolve, that bore its fruit in
after times. At this stage, however, Mazzini was hardly looking to the
slow results of political education. The hour of insurrection, he
confidently believed, was near; the European revolution was
threatening, and Italy must not be behind the sister nations. He was
certain of success. Whatever difficulties might come to a nationalist
movement without a backing from the native governments, however much
Italians might distrust their own unaided strength, there was "no real
obstacle for twenty-six millions of men, who wished to rise and fight
for their country." Austria, he calculated, could at the best put two
hundred thousand men into the field; he fondly counted on four million
Italian volunteers. A people, that even under the leading of the
Carbonari had made three revolutions in ten years, would rise again
more readily and more victoriously at the inspiration of a nobler
faith.