Marseilles
1831-1834. AETAT 25-28
At Marseilles--Spread of Young Italy--Letter to Charles
Albert--The Army Plot in Piedmont--At Geneva--The Savoy
Raid.
When Mazzini arrived at Lyons, he found an unhopeful plan in
preparation for raiding Savoy. Some 2000 Italian refugees, many of
them Piedmontese who had fled through Genoa ten years before and
stirred his boyish enthusiasm, were ready to march under the hardly
concealed protection of the French government. It was still in the
early days of the July monarchy, when it had yet not quite forgotten
its revolutionary origin. But before the expedition could start, Louis
Philippe's swift lapse into conservatism, which had already made him
break his promises to the Romagnuols, abruptly ended the patronage of
the authorities. The would-be raiders were scattered, and Mazzini
joined a small party of republicans, who were starting for Corsica, on
their way to join the insurgents in Romagna. The Corsicans were still
Italian in sentiment as well as race, and the Carbonaro influence was
strong in the island. Two thousand men offered themselves for service
with the insurgents, but no funds were forthcoming to pay their
passage, and before arrangements could be made the news arrived that
the rising had collapsed.
Mazzini returned to Marseilles, and found himself among the refugees
who had escaped from Central Italy. He recruited a few young patriots
among them, and with their help he began to give body to his schemes.
In a small room at Marseilles the young Titans started, with nothing
but their own sincerity and daring, to revolutionise Italy. "We had no
office, no helpers," he wrote of them in after years. "All day, and a
great part of the night, we were buried in our work, writing articles
and letters, getting information from travellers, enlisting seamen,
folding papers, fastening envelopes, dividing our time between
literary and manual work. La Cecilia was compositor; Lamberti
corrected the proofs; another of us made himself literally porter, to
save the expense of distributing the papers. We lived as equals and
brothers; we had but one thought, one hope, one ideal to reverence.
The foreign republicans loved and admired us for our tenacity and
unflagging industry; we were often in real want, but we were
light-hearted in a way, and smiling because we believed in the
future."
In later life Mazzini looked back longingly to the freshness and
enthusiasm of those days, before failure had disillusioned him or
misunderstanding estranged him from his friends. When he was well and
happy, all the charm of his nature--his radiant idealism, his
warm-hearted friendship, his contagious unselfishness--made him the
beloved inspirer of the little band that worked under his orders. "He
was," said an Italian of him at this time, "about 5 feet 8 inches high
and slightly made; he was dressed in black Genoa velvet, with a large
"republican" hat; his long, curling black hair, which fell upon his
shoulders, the extreme freshness of his clear olive complexion, the
chiselled delicacy of his regular and beautiful features, aided by his
very youthful look and sweetness and openness of expression, would
have made his appearance almost too feminine, if it had not been for
his noble forehead, the power of firmness and decision that was
mingled with their gaiety and sweetness in the bright flashes of his
dark eyes and in the varying expression of his mouth, together with
his small and beautiful moustachios and beard. Altogether he was at
that time the most beautiful being, male or female, that I had ever
seen, and I have not since seen his equal."[4] But sometimes even now
overwork and impatience told on him, and he felt ill and exhausted. In
such moods he must have been a trying man to be much with--irritable,
exacting, requiring absolute submission from his fellow-workers, angry
if they thought well of men whom he disliked.
For two years the little band worked on, sowing the seeds of
revolution. It was a heroic enterprise. A few young men, without birth
or wealth to help them, and, except for their leader, of no great
ability, were planning to change the future of their country and
preparing for war with a great military empire. To an outsider it must
have seemed a madman's dream. But their masterful chief had taught
them his own faith; and they, and thousands of their countrymen after
them, found in it the power, to which few things are impossible. They
worked with remorseless energy, month after month, corresponding with
sympathisers all over the peninsula, planting lodges of Young Italy
wherever a chance opened, drawing together the threads of conspiracy.
They found abundant backing in Italy. Mazzini appealed to his
followers there to work among the people by every road that the
despotism left open, to bring children to school and teach them, to
hold classes for men in the country districts, to circulate pictures
and pamphlets and almanacs, which would insinuate patriotic ideas
without exciting the suspicions of the police, to carry the cross of
fire from town to town and village to village. "Climb the hills," he
asked of them, "sit at the farmer's table, visit the workshops and the
artisans, whom you now neglect. Tell them of their rightful liberties,
their ancient traditions and glories, the old commercial greatness
which has gone; talk to them of the thousand forms of oppression,
which they ignore, because no one points them out." His appeal found a
ready response. Hundreds of young Italians, fired by his own passion,
gave themselves to the dangers and toils and the thousand small
annoyances of a conspirator's life. It was no light call. "I know of
no existence," said one of them in later life, "which requires such
continual self-abnegation and endurance. A conspirator has to listen
to all sorts of gossip, to soothe every variety of vanity, discuss
nonsense seriously, feel sick and stifling under the pressure of empty
talk, idle boasting, and vulgarity, and yet maintain an unmoved and
complacent countenance. A conspirator ceases to belong to himself, and
becomes the toy of anyone he may meet; he must go out when he would
rather stay at home, and stay at home when he would rather go out; he
has to talk when he would be silent, and to hold vigils when he would
rather be in bed." And behind these petty vexations, which meant more
to the Italians of that day than to a generation trained in
strenuousness, lay the knowledge that discovery meant prison or exile,
perhaps death. But they faced it with the courage of men who believed
that the "wear and tear was smoothing the way, inch by inch, towards a
noble and holy end," who looked to the day when through their labours
their country would be lifted from the slough of misgovernment and low
ideals. Life and everything they were ready to give for that. "Here
are we," said Jacopo Ruffini to his fellow-conspirators at Genoa,
"five young, very young men, with but limited means, and we are called
on to do nothing less than overthrow an established government. I have
a presentiment that few of us will live to see the final results of
our labours, but the seed we have sown will shoot forth after us, and
the bread we have cast upon the waters will be found again."
Mazzini might well be sanguine, with men like these behind him. He
looked to his literature to do the rest. The journal of Young Italy
was, as he described it, "a collection of political pamphlets," each
of the infrequent and irregular numbers consisting of a hundred to two
hundred pages, badly printed on bad paper. Later on, it was set up by
French compositors, who knew no Italian, and whose misprints gave him
infinite concern. He himself did most of the writing. It was terribly
diffusive often and wanting in precision, but his articles redeem
their literary defects by the glow of noble purpose, that made them
thrill their readers, and gave them a potency, that perhaps no other
political writings of the century attained to. Most of the remaining
articles came from his fellow-workers. Mazzini tried to persuade
Sismondi to contribute, but the historian, though sympathetic, was too
opposed to some of his teaching to respond. Louis Napoleon, drawn by a
fellow-feeling for conspiracy and scenting a chance to preach
Bonapartism, sent an essay on Military Honour, with the thesis that
soldiers are not bound by their oath to act against a revolution.
Mazzini consented to insert it with many emendations, which apparently
left little of its Bonapartist intention; but for some reason that
does not appear, it was not published. The journal had a small
circulation, and only reached a limited number of young educated men;
it was indeed too literary for popular consumption. There seems to
have been a larger demand for rules and instructions and popular
tracts written by Gustavo Modena, afterwards to become one of the most
famous Italian tragedians of his day. At all events there was a
considerable contraband of printed matter, smuggled to Genoa or
Leghorn or across the passes into Piedmont, inside barrels of pitch
and pumice stone or bales of drapery or packages of sausages. So great
became the demand, that secret presses were set up in Italy and the
Ticino to supplement the output from Marseilles.
The results surpassed even Mazzini's sanguine hopes. The first lodges
of Young Italy were planted at Genoa and Leghorn, and they spread
thence to a good many towns of North and Central Italy. The chief
strength of the society lay at Genoa, where the nationalist and
anti-Piedmontese parties made common cause, and men of every class
came in--nobles and commoners, lawyers and civil servants and priests,
seamen and artisans. Outside Genoa the working men seem to have kept
aloof as a rule; years had yet to pass before Mazzini's social
teaching reached them. The recruits came chiefly from the young men of
the middle classes, sons of the men who had had their importance under
the French rule and had been cribbed and kept under since the
restoration. Here and there a young noble joined; in Piedmont and at
Genoa at all events there was a sprinkling of older professional and
business men; a few priests welcomed a movement, which bore so strong
a religious imprint. Everywhere the scattered remnants of the
Carbonari enrolled themselves. Buonarrotti, _doyen_ of the
conspirators, descendant of Michelangelo, friend of Robespierre and
Baboeuf and Napoleon, attached his society of the _Veri Italiani_.
Early in 1833 Mazzini, it is impossible to say with what accuracy, put
the number of affiliates at fifty or sixty thousand. Many a man, who
came to the front in the later nationalist movement or in the first
Italian parliaments, began his political life as a member of Young
Italy. Garibaldi, a young sailor who wrote verses, just promoted to be
captain in the Genoese mercantile marine, whose fearlessness and charm
of manner made him the idol of the men under him, and who had already
learnt from Foscolo a belief in the destinies of Italy as ardent as
Mazzini's own, met the chief at Marseilles and joined the society.
Gioberti, who was teaching a transcendental and literary patriotism to
the novices in the Archbishop's seminary at Vercelli, sent warm words
of encouragement to the cause of God and the People.
All Mazzini's preparations centred round Piedmont and Genoa. He
realised, with the bulk of patriots of whatever school, that though
the other provinces might play a secondary part, Piedmont must take
the lead. It was the only state that possessed the military training
and traditions, essential in a war; it was the natural base for an
invasion of Lombardy; Alessandria and Genoa were two all-important
strategic points, and if the Italians were defeated in the plains,
they could fall back on the Alps and Apennines. There were few
republicans among the Piedmontese, but they were nationalists with all
their race's tenacity of purpose. The Genoese were zealots for the
cause, all the more if it were under a republican flag; in Savoy there
was a strong strain of liberalism, and its position made it a
connecting link with sympathisers in France. Mazzini's first public
act--some three or four months after he left Italy--was to write an
open letter to the king. Charles Albert had just ascended the throne
of Piedmont; and expectation ran high, as it had run ten years before,
that he would lead the nationalists. This time there was small bottom
for the hope. Charles Albert had had his phase of liberalism; in his
youth he had relations with the Carbonari, and encouraged the
Piedmontese conspirators of 1821 to look to him to lead the army to a
war for Lombard independence. Had he had the courage, he would have
stood by his word. But as he was then, so was he now, a moral coward,
buffeted by irreconcilable ambitions. He was still a nationalist, but
no liberal. Liberalism had come to loom before him as a spectre of
Revolution, to be fought and crushed without pity. But priest-ridden
absolutist as he was, he never quite forgot his patriotic faith, he
always had some vision, faint though it often was, of an Italy
untrodden by the foreign soldier. It is probable that even now, in his
worst years, he was waiting dubiously for the distant day, when he
would measure himself with the enemy. But he knew that as yet this was
impossible. He had a saner view than Mazzini of the possibilities of
the time, when France--on the high road to the _juste-milieu_--would
give no help, and a single-handed fight with Austria was foredoomed to
defeat. He would have scorned an offer of Mazzini's guerilla bands;
but had he been as ready to welcome the volunteers, as his son was
twenty-eight years later, they had little prospect of existence at
this time outside Mazzini's visionary hopes.
Such was Charles Albert, when Mazzini appealed to him to lead the
nationalist movement. What was the exact purpose of the letter, will
probably never be known. In after life Mazzini denied that there was
any serious intention in it; he pleaded that he expressed the hopes of
others rather than his own, and wrote it in the certainty that its
appeal would not be heard. At the time he disclaimed, though not so
emphatically, any hope of a response, and suggested that its object
was to disillusion the Piedmontese of any belief in their king. There
is some reason for thinking that the disclaimers must not be taken
quite literally. When he wrote twenty years and more afterwards, he
was anxious to prove that he had never lapsed from his republican
faith. His earlier commentary was in a letter to a man, whom he did
not know, and to whom he was not likely to express himself
unreservedly. There are indications that he had not quite escaped the
glamour that Charles Albert threw over the liberals, had not entirely
abandoned all hope of winning him. The secret instructions of Young
Italy, written a few months later, accepted the possibility of a
monarchy as a "system of transition"; and in the subsequent army plot
Mazzini intended to offer the King the leadership of the revolution.
One would fain believe that his own interpretations do him injustice,
that he did not write his glowing prose in utter insincerity. Were it
otherwise, we must bow the head and sadly own a stain upon that noble
life.
The letter, it must be confessed, was hardly calculated to make a
convert. Threats alternate with overdone praise; the assumption of
political omniscience, the claim of the young exile to speak for
Italy, the magniloquent parade of the obvious, must have, like much
else of his earlier writings, offended Italian common-sense and been
extremely irritating. Much of it reads like a declamatory school essay
on the duties of a constitutional king. But the lesson was true enough
on its negative side. Charles Albert could find no safe foothold
outside popular government; coercion, administrative reform, the
support of Austria or France--none would permanently content or
overawe his people. And if Charles Albert had retorted that to grant a
constitution meant war with Austria, Mazzini would have welcomed the
corollary. The King was right and Mazzini was wrong as to the
inopportuneness of a national rising at the moment. But for the policy
of another day, the letter has passages that speak like a trumpet
call. "Sire, there is another road, leading to true power and a
glorious immortality; another ally, safer and more strong than
Austria or France. There is a crown more brilliant and sublime than
that of Piedmont, a crown that waits the man, who dares to think of
it, who dedicates his life to winning it, and scorns to dull its
splendour with thoughts of petty tyranny. Sire, have you never cast an
eagle glance upon this Italy, so fair with nature's smile, crowned by
twenty centuries of noble memory, the land of genius, strong in the
infinite resources that only want a common purpose, girt round with
barriers so impregnable, that it needs but a firm will and a few brave
breasts to shelter it from foreign insult? Place yourself at the head
of the nation, write on your flag, 'Union, Liberty, Independence.'
Free Italy from the barbarian, build up the future, be the Napoleon of
Italian freedom. Do this and we will gather round you, we will give
our lives for you, we will bring the little states of Italy under your
flag. Your safety lies on the sword's point; draw it and throw away
the scabbard. But remember, if you do it not, others will do it
without you and against you."
The letter was published in May or June 1831, and a few copies found
their way into Italy. Mazzini thought he had evidence that the King
read it. At all events his police did, and ordered the writer whose
anonymity did not conceal him, to be seized, if he crossed the
frontier. Whatever Mazzini's hopes may have been, this proved that the
letter had failed in its ostensible object, and he threw himself
feverishly into his preparations for a revolt in Piedmont. His
detailed scheme shows that he had not yet planned or had abandoned for
the time the strategy of guerilla fighting, and intended to rely on
the Piedmontese army. Charles Albert was, if possible, to be
persuaded to lead the revolution, and the army was to be mobilised for
an immediate advance on Lombardy. Should the King decline the offer, a
provisional directorate at Genoa would assume the government. Mazzini
had better ground for his hopes than often afterwards. The army had
not forgotten that it had led the constitutional and nationalist
movement ten years before. Many a soldier, who had served in the
_Grande Armée_, cherished the democratic sentiment that clung to it
all through, and was eager to avenge himself on the enemy, whom he had
routed in old days. These feelings were especially strong among the
non-commissioned officers. Many of them were men of the middle classes
of good standing and education, for in many, if not all, of the
regiments commissions could be held only by those of noble birth, and
no bourgeois, whatever his capacities, could rise above the ranks. A
few officers joined the society, and a general or two promised to
throw in his lot, if the movement proved successful. At Alessandria
and Genoa, the two chief garrison towns, the society had a
considerable strength. The government, though quietly tracking the
civilian conspirators, seems to have had no suspicion of the army
plot; and had the revolt broken out early in 1833, it would have had
its chance of success at home, though the inevitable disaster must
have come, when the little army faced the Austrians.
But the conspirators waited too long, and late in the spring an
accident led to the discovery of the plot. The government cautiously
followed up the clue, till it possessed itself of every detail of the
conspiracy. Then it threw itself on its prey with a savage vengeance,
that outside the Austrian provinces has had no parallel in Italy since
the days of Fra Diavolo. Charles Albert, pitiless with fright,
surrendered himself to the reactionary court party and fed their
thirst for blood. Moral, sometimes physical, torture was inflicted on
the victims to extort confession of their own or their confederates'
guilt. Jacopo Ruffini, given the choice between execution and the
betrayal of his friends, committed suicide in prison. Ten soldiers and
two civilians were shot; fourteen more only escaped by flight; numbers
were sent to longer or shorter imprisonment. Italy still execrates
those courts-martial. Not all Charles Albert's later patriotism has
purged his memory from their indelible shame; and while yet he
reigned, the Genoese erased from their city every record of the brutal
general who was his worst instrument. The humble lawyers and sergeants
whom he shot, have a deathless homage from their country. "Ideas ripen
quickly," said Mazzini, "when nourished by the blood of martyrs." It
was the memory of these and other victims of tyranny, that helped to
nerve Italian arms and send Italians to die in the battles that won
their country's liberty.
* * * * *
Meanwhile, since the previous August, Mazzini had been driven into
hiding at Marseilles. The French government decreed his banishment and
broke up his press. Mazzini eluded both blows. He started a secret
press and got French compositors to work it. He himself found refuge
in the house of a French sympathiser, Démosthène Ollivier, father of
Louis Napoleon's last premier, under whose roof he remained "a
voluntary prisoner." Twice only in the year he passed its threshold,
and then only at night, disguised as a woman or a _garde national_. It
was at this time that the French government, whether maliciously or
itself deceived, brought against him a false charge of encouraging
assassination, for repeating which in after years Sir James Graham
wore sackcloth.[5] Mazzini was still at Marseilles, when the news of
the Genoese executions came; and so terrible was his anguish, for in
Jacopo Ruffini he had lost his dearest friend, that his health and
mind nearly broke down. The devotion of a noble woman, whom he
loved,[6] saved him from insanity or death.
About the beginning of July 1833 he moved to Geneva. He came there to
be on the spot for a new plan of insurrection. The failure of the army
plot only impelled him more feverishly into his fixed idea of a rising
in Piedmont. He wished no doubt to punish Charles Albert, and well may
he have been maddened by the savagery, which had sickened Europe. He
wanted to "moralise" his party by proving that the terrorism had no
fears for him and striking back at the victorious and brutal enemy. He
thought that, if he was to keep his following together, he must make
his cast now or never. Once allow the fire to slack down, and it would
be beyond his power to rekindle it. He believed that half Europe was
on the brink of revolution, that a republican movement in Italy would
be the signal for republican risings in France and Spain and Germany.
It was probably a fantastic dream; but he had surer ground for
thinking that a revolt would fire the tinder throughout Italy.
Exaggerated as his hopes were even here, the revolutionary spirit,
that Young Italy created, had sunk deep. In the Genovesate and Savoy,
in the Papal States and parts of Naples there was a good deal of
material ready for an insurrection; and Mazzini had assured himself
that on the appointed day guerilla bands would take to the mountains
in several districts. The chances of success, indeed, were not bright
at the best; but the raid was not quite the unpardonable playing with
brave lives, that it seems at first sight. Mazzini, taking up a plan
of the Carbonari at Paris, chose Savoy for the starting-point of the
insurrection. He expected that the troops there would join the
insurgents, and the revolutionary army would cross the Alps into
Piedmont, while another band would land in the Riviera and rouse the
Genoese country.[7]
By the autumn of 1833 several hundred exiles had been enrolled in
Switzerland. Many of them were Poles and Germans, a few were French;
and Mazzini welcomed assistance, which he hoped might cement an
international alliance of democrats, and develop into a "Young
Europe," which would do elsewhere what Young Italy was doing for his
own country. He had the help of several officers, Bianco di San
Jorioz, author of a clever book on guerilla warfare, which had much
influenced him, and Manfredo Fanti, the future organiser of the
Italian army. They saw the importance of giving the command to an
experienced officer, and the Savoyard conspirators insisted that the
choice should fall on a certain General Ramorino, a cosmopolitan
adventurer of Savoyard birth, who had fought under Napoleon, and had
an undistinguished command in the Polish rising of 1831. Mazzini's
slender preparations were completed by October, and about eight
hundred men were armed and ready to march. There were plans of
simultaneous risings at Genoa and Naples, in the Marches and the
Abruzzi; and Garibaldi enlisted in the Piedmontese navy in the
quixotic hope of bringing it over to the revolution. But what chance
there was of success was spoilt by Ramorino. He had no real interest
in the expedition; perhaps he was paid by the French government to
wreck it. At all events he lingered at Paris, squandering much of the
war-fund, that Mazzini had collected with infinite labour. Every week
added to the difficulties. The foreign governments put pressure on the
Swiss to break up the volunteers. Buonarrotti, suspicious of the whole
design, did his best to discredit Mazzini among his own men. When
Mazzini at last insisted that the volunteers must wait no longer, the
conspirators in Savoy refused to cooperate unless Ramorino came.
Mazzini worked desperately to undo the mischief, and at last, in
January, Ramorino arrived. It was too late. The Swiss authorities
harassed the volunteers, and on February 1 only a small body of the
raiders could gather on the frontier near St Julien. Ramorino marched
them aimlessly about. Probably he saw from the first how desperate
were the chances, and wished to spare a useless loss of life. On the
4th, before hardly a shot had been exchanged, he disbanded his men,
and the insurrection was still-born.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] This description was given to, and published by Mr W. Shaen. There
is reason for thinking it was written by Enrico Mayer, the Tuscan
educationalist.
[5] See below, p. 104.
[6] See below, p. 68.
[7] For Gallenga's plot to assassinate the King, see below, c. ix.