Mazzini and Cavour
1850-1857. AETAT 45-52.
The Piedmontese School--Mazzini and Cavour--The French
alliance--Mazzini and Manin--The theory of the
dagger--Conspiracies--The Genoese plot of 1857.
It is painful to turn from Mazzini in England, the great-hearted
friend, the prophetic thinker, the generous worker in the cause of
man, to his political action in Italy. Had he yielded to the advice of
some of his friends and left politics at this time for literature, his
fame were brighter and his life more fruitful in pure good. His work
for Italy was done; he had conquered it for more than half his creed.
Half its best men had been nurtured on his writings, had learned from
him to believe in independence and unity, though still they spoke of
unity in whispers, and he himself knew not how far opinion had
advanced. The day of conspiracy had passed; free Piedmont was slowly
marshalling the forces of the nation for another and decisive war. The
republic became impossible on the day, when Victor Emmanuel swore
loyalty to the constitution, and thereby proclaimed himself champion
of Italian aspirations. The one thing needful was to rally every
section of patriots to the one possible flag. To attack the monarchy
now only hurt the bigger issue, lost sight of the great goal in mists
of schism, brought bitterness and dissension where discipline was all
important for the day of trial. No one was more insistent than Mazzini
on the need of discipline, but in practice he conditioned it in these
years by being himself leader. One who found it so difficult to
compromise, could hardly follow.
Had Mazzini thought the republic the more important issue, his action
would at least have been consistent. But he had deliberately set unity
above it, and independence from Austria above either. A saner
politician would have been silent on the minor question. But Mazzini
could never long repress his republican teaching. It was partly that,
save in moments of comparative lucidity, he convinced himself that
Piedmont would never make a cast for unity, that the Austrians could
not be expelled but by a great rising of the people. Had he gauged
Italian sentiment more accurately, he would have spared himself the
error, would have lost his deep distrust in Piedmont and its king, his
bitter animosity to Cavour, his pitiable exaggeration of the strength
of his own party. But an exile lives in necessary half-knowledge. The
government of Piedmont, as exclusive and intolerant as himself, barred
from wholesome activity in his own land the man, who, had he been at
Turin in daily contact with men of other parties, would have been a
mighty force for good; and to them, more than to Mazzini himself,
belongs the pity of his wasted patriotism. Not but what in any
circumstances Mazzini found it hard to recognize new facts. The
prophet is by nature inflexible; and Mazzini's whole creed was a thing
of such passionate intensity, each part had twisted itself so
inextricably round the rest, that it cost a wrench to part with any
detail. "I may, of course, be mistaken," he wrote of his political
creed, "but mine is a matter of deep conviction, and it is impossible
for me to modify or alter it." He was incapable of taking advice; if
men differed from him, he assailed them bitterly instead of examining
the reasons for their dissent. And the partisan, that was always
latent in him, grew till it obscured the statesman. He who was so
insistent that no one had a right to set his own opinions above the
people's common sense, was the last to bow to the popular verdict,
when it declared against himself. Henceforth Mazzini was more foe than
friend to his own ideals. Much he still did to stir his countrymen to
strenuous and high-thinking patriotism. Though he aimed beyond their
ken, he shot more high than all the politicians. But in the great
march he broke the ranks, and made the task more difficult for men,
who, with a patriotism as true and with a saner strategy, had set
their faces for the same high goal.
Retirement was however impossible for a man of Mazzini's temperament.
He was too feverishly impatient for his country's salvation to only
stand and wait. Inaction seemed treachery to the cause of
righteousness. Both in public and private life he insisted that
"thought and action" must go hand in hand, that a man had no right to
confine his energies to literature and decline his part in practical
political work. He criticized intolerantly the men in Italy, who wrote
patriotic literature instead of plotting insurrection. "Actions," he
said, "are the books of the masses," especially in a country where
the majority were illiterate. He in fact, like every other patriot,
was maddened by the savage tyranny, with which the Austrians and the
Pope and the King of Naples were scourging his unhappy country,--"the
insolent triumph of brute force, the exile and death of our brothers
in two-thirds of Europe, the long weeping of their sisters and
mothers, the lying, the espionage, the corruption, the cry of the
oppressed masses, the teaching of those who fight and die in silence,
the shame that makes us blush for those who submit and sell themselves
in despair." "Such a state of things," he wrote to an English friend
after the Mantuan executions, "cannot last, must not last. It is far
better to die in a supreme glorious battle, fought under the eye of
God with our national banner unfurled, than to see the best of our
land falling one by one under the axe of the executioner." It were sin
to wait, and he saw no need for waiting. He was right of course in his
belief that a nation, which had once so nearly won its freedom, would
try for it again. "The dreams of violence," he said, "are brief, and
infallible the triumph of a people, that hopes and fights and suffers
for justice and holy liberty." He had persuaded himself that the
masses were only waiting for a signal to rise and throw themselves on
Austria. As so often in his logic, the thing ought to be and therefore
must be. He knew indeed that he could not count on the middle classes
for insurrection. The men, who had been the strength of Young Italy,
had gone over almost in mass to the Piedmontese School, and he did not
spare them his reproaches. But he hoped in the working men. While the
Moderates hardly noticed them, he saw what stuff lay in the despised
and misunderstood Italian artisans. But he exaggerated his influence
with them. "They are mine, devotedly mine, to blindness." Individuals,
indeed, among them he won, as he won men of every class, by his
simple, noble earnestness. But except in and round Genoa their numbers
at this time were few.
It was an impossible policy. It had nearly succeeded in 1848, when
Europe was in flames, but Mazzini would not see how radically
circumstances had changed. There was no serious hope now that a
general movement of European democracy would divide the forces of
Austria; and his efforts to bring together again the democrats of
different countries, especially of Italy and Hungary, had no results,
at all events till in after years. The resuscitation of Austria, the
evidence of her military strength, the Second Empire in France, the
resignation of Palmerston, the collapse of the German democrats had
killed any early hope of a successful war, even though all the armed
strength of the nation, regular armies and volunteers alike, were put
into it. It was true that the nation could win its freedom even now,
if it sought it at all cost, if it were willing to face the awful
sacrifice,--the mowing down of the undisciplined levies, the wasting
of the country,--and fight through defeat to victory. But Mazzini's
hopes shipwrecked on the fact,--and bitterly he came to recognize
it,--that the Italians, like most other peoples, were not a nation of
martyr-heroes, that the peasants had little active patriotism, that
thousands in other classes cared more for church than country, that
even among the rest there was little of the grim tenacity of
Americans or Dutch or of the fierce unconquerableness of Greeks and
Spaniards.
It was this that gave the Piedmontese party its justification. Timid
and conservative as it often was, it at all events recognized facts.
It saw that this undisciplined enthusiasm was not business, that in
the present condition of Europe another national rising meant another
and more terrible disaster, that each little revolt with its miserable
ending only tightened the tyranny and damped the patriots, that
Piedmont's first duty was to preserve its own liberty,--no light task
in itself,--that its next was to gather round it all the aspirations
of the country, discipline them and husband them, till the chance came
again to fight with a probability of victory. The Piedmontese had
learnt the lessons of 1848-49 very differently from their critic. To
them discipline was the one essential. Never again must dissension
about means paralyze the country in front of the enemy. And in the
interests of union they had small mercy for democratic theories, they
were prepared to be unfair to opponents and crush minorities. Victor
Emmanuel must be the figure-head of the movement and the Piedmontese
statesmen its leaders. Theoretically, of course, their policy was a
smaller one than Mazzini's. It had little of the poetry and idealism
of the movement, which he had helped to inspire. There was no majestic
vision of a people rising in its own spontaneous might and deciding
its destinies in a great national pact. It postulated encroachments on
democratic freedom. It was willing to buy alliances by concessions,
that abated the country's dignity. It veiled the great ideal of
Unity, and sought attainment by slow stages and crooked paths. But,
assuming that independence and unity were the great essentials,--and
on this the best men of the party were at one with Mazzini,--it was on
its main lines the only possible policy. And it was a sense of this,
that rallied the great mass of patriots to the flag of Piedmont, and
left Mazzini to protest almost alone, a leader without followers.
The antagonism of the two schools was typified in Cavour and Mazzini.
They were very different in temperament:--the one an aristocrat by
training, a genial hater of theories, an opportunist content to feel
his way by little steps, to wait patiently year after year rather than
risk failure, making success his object, with small scruple as to
means or personal honour, so his country stood to gain; the other a
man of greater nature and culture but less capacity, democrat of
democrats, distrusting king and nobles and middle classes, passionate
and outspoken in his friendships and his enmities, the uncompromising,
inflexible, restless apostle, who would conquer armies by a principle
of abstract righteousness, too dazzled by the future to see the
mundane obstacles and hard facts about his feet. Cavour had a
supercilious contempt for Mazzini and his doctrines; he probably
regarded him as a nuisance, and would have gladly seen him shot. His
business was to win Italy, if he could do so without risking overmuch;
but he was minister of a crown and would do nothing to endanger it. He
had convinced himself, save at moments of impatient optimism, that
only through a French alliance could Austria be driven out. For this
he was willing to humour Louis Napoleon, to stoop to trickery, to be
brutal to the republicans. He would use the revolutionaries if he
could, but it must be at their own risk and for the greater glory of
the monarchy. Cavour, hiding his ideals and working in mists of
diplomacy, chose to be misunderstood; and it is no wonder that Mazzini
generally read him on the surface, and refused to see how much their
programmes had in common. To him Cavour's slow patient policy came of
mere weakness and inconstancy of purpose. He thought of him as a timid
diplomatist, half-leagued with the despotisms, more careful of
convention than of right, incapable of aspiring to Italy and Rome. It
was only late in life, that he recognised his statesmanship. He hated
him as a truckler to Napoleon; he thought that he favoured Napoleon's
cousin, Lucien Murat, for the throne of Naples, that he held the
Emperor's friendship of more account than Italy. He never realised
that under the careful statesman lay a bold and eager spirit, that at
the fitting moment might be as revolutionary as himself.
Two men of such diverse character could probably have never worked
cordially together. But under other circumstances they might have
helped and supplemented one another. It was a cruel fate that, owing
to Mazzini's exile and the consequent impossibility of mutual
understanding, they should have wasted so much in a bitter and
unnecessary antagonism. Mazzini no doubt had much provocation for his
fixed hostility. He, who had given all for country, was an exile from
the land he loved, seeing it only in rare and secret visits, stealing
to his mother's grave by night "like a man bent on a crime," his
followers persecuted, his apologies suppressed. But he painfully
exaggerated the deficiencies of the rival school. When he asked the
Piedmontese government, "Are you with Austria or against her?" when he
branded the royalists as being, "next to Austria, the great obstacle
to Italian freedom," he showed a partisan's unwillingness or
incapacity to grasp the facts. His watch, in Giusti's phrase, had
stopped at 1848; and he could not see how radically Cavour and the new
King had changed the spirit of Piedmontese policy. Victor Emmanuel, he
confidently asserted, though "better than his ministers," "neither
wishes to be nor can be King of Italy"; it was "an absolute
impossibility" that he would try, unless compelled, to win Italian
freedom. Mazzini was on sounder ground, when he fulminated against the
French alliance. Others besides him foresaw the difficulty of
reconciling Louis Napoleon's timidity with Italian aspirations, the
recurring temptation to duplicity, if Italian statesmen had to quiet
his suspicions and fears. He well said that it stained the name of
Italy to seek salvation from the man who had crushed the Roman
Republic and made the _coup d'état_. But Mazzini never faced the hard
fact, that no otherwise could Austria be driven out. And his blindness
grew partly out of the sheer personal hatred of the Emperor, which he
did not attempt to conceal. Only in later years he came to see at all,
and never fully, that Louis Napoleon, however timidly, wished to
remodel Europe on his own principle of nationality. He never
understood how real was the Emperor's good-will to Italy, how far his
foreign policy outstripped his people's. He thought he had first-hand
information as to Napoleon's schemes, and the first-hand information
was always incomplete and misleading. Nor were his antipathies limited
to the Emperor. "My antagonism to the French," he writes in 1850,
"grows stronger every day." He had a bitter controversy with Louis
Blanc and the French socialists. But, strangely, he had no word of
condemnation for the French Catholics, who had prompted the expedition
to Rome and were ever pulling back Napoleon in his more generous
designs. At a later time, at all events, he quite underrated their
strength.
Was compromise with Piedmont impossible? Daniel Manin, the republican
Triumvir at Venice in 1849, whose rule there stands out with Mazzini's
own at Rome as one of the most brilliant pages in the history of the
century, founded in these years a National Society, with a unitarian
but royalist programme. He recognised with the Piedmontese politicians
the need of discipline, and that discipline could only come by
accepting Victor Emmanuel as nominal leader. But he conditioned his
conversion to royalism by the King's acceptance of Unity. "Make
Italy," he wrote to him, "and we are with you; if not, not." Manin
hoped to win Mazzini to his programme. He, like him, had been a
republican; he was a man of noblest private life, of sincerest
patriotism; he was striving earnestly for Unity; he fretted almost as
much as did Mazzini himself at Cavour's slow manoeuvring. Why should
not Mazzini abandon his impossible dream of the republic, and work
together for the bigger end with a man as democratic as himself?
Mazzini refused. All that he would offer was "the neutral flag" of
1848,--a promise to leave the settlement of the question between
monarchy and republic to a future Constituent of the freed nation. The
position was plausible enough, but there were fatal objections to it.
It encouraged the federalists to agitate; it must necessarily alienate
the King; it would make discipline more difficult than ever. And, when
the country, as Mazzini himself began to recognise, was declaring
unmistakably for the monarchy, to keep the question nominally open was
a homage more to the letter than to the spirit of popular sovereignty.
* * * * *
As a kind of appendix to the controversy, Mazzini had his famous
argument with Manin on "the theory of the dagger." In 1856 Manin wrote
an open letter, attacking the theory as "the great enemy of Italy." He
sent his letter to the _Times_, provoking Mazzini's retort that his
"sense of personal dignity and respect for his country should have
prevented him from writing to such a paper." Manin did not
specifically mention Mazzini, but the reference was understood, and
Mazzini indignantly replied. It is hardly necessary to-day to answer
the charge that Mazzini encouraged political assassination. He held
indeed that there were rare occasions when it was right,--"exceptional
moments in the life and history of nations, not to be judged by normal
rules of human justice, and in which the actors can take their
inspiration only from their conscience and God." Tyrannicide was
justifiable, when it was the only means, and the successful means, of
staying an intolerable oppression. It was a commonplace to glorify
Judith and Brutus and Charlotte Corday; it was hypocrisy, he said,
begging his own postulates, to condemn for the same actions the men
who tried to kill Louis Napoleon or Ferdinand of Naples.[21] In every
other case he "abominated" political assassination. It is, he says, "a
crime, if attempted with the idea of revenge or punishment; a crime
when there are other roads to freedom open; culpable and mistaken,
when directed against a man, whose tyranny does not descend into the
grave with him." When, for instance, Cavour charged him with plotting
to kill Victor Emmanuel, he indignantly replied that the King's life
was "protected, first by the existence of a constitution, next by the
uselessness of the crime." With one exception only, he was loyal to
his profession. Young Italy explicitly abandoned the Carbonaro
tradition of assassinating traitors, and so far as its founder could
control the society, it never sinned against the precept. The forged
charge of the French government in 1833 that he ordered the murder of
some spies at Rodez was amply exposed, when Sir James Graham repeated
it in 1845, though the Paris correspondent of the _Times_ was not
ashamed to drag the libel up again nineteen years afterwards. When
Triumvir at Rome, Mazzini vigorously repressed the assassinations
there and at Ancona. He was absolutely ignorant of Orsini's attempt to
assassinate Louis Napoleon, though he disdained to defend himself from
the suspicion of complicity, partly because he scorned the puny
libellers of the press, partly because "Europe needed a bugbear to
frighten it and his name would do as well as any other." The charges
that he was privy to Tibaldi's and Greco's plots against the Emperor
were certainly in the latter case, and almost as certainly in the
former, inventions of the French police. Late in life, he vigorously
discouraged plots to assassinate the Pope and Victor Emmanuel, and
stopped another to explode six bombs at a ball given at Venice by the
Austrian Viceroy. In one case only--in early life--Mazzini was in some
sense an accomplice in an assassination plot. In the midst of the
preparations for the Savoy raid, a young Corsican, Antonio
Gallenga,[22] who afterwards settled in England and was for some time
special correspondent of the _Times_ in Italy, came to him with a plan
to assassinate Charles Albert in revenge for the Genoese executions.
Mazzini tried to dissuade him, but at last persuaded himself that
Gallenga was an appointed agent of Providence "to teach despots that
their life may depend on the will of a single man." He gave Gallenga
the means of travelling to Turin and sent him a dagger; but he seems
to have given little more thought to the matter, perhaps concluding on
reflection that, as proved to be the case, Gallenga had no stuff in
him for the business.[23]
Manin's indictment aimed equally at the use of the knife in popular
insurrections. Mazzini's answer here was easier but less ingenuous in
its applications. It was cant, he properly replied, to call it no
murder, if a soldier shot an enemy with his rifle, and murder, if an
artisan conspirator stabbed an Austrian soldier with the only weapon
he possessed. Unfortunately he weakened his argument by extending this
theory of "irregular warfare" to cases, like those of Rossi or
Marinovich, where men had been killed treacherously in revolutionary
times for political or private vengeance. Perhaps he was defiantly
exaggerating, for before this he had strongly reprobated Rossi's
murder; probably he did not know the facts of Marinovich's case. It
would at all events be very hard to justify him, when he commissioned
Orsini to find men to surprise and kill the Austrian officers at Milan
as the first step in an insurrection. It was no lower in its ethics
than some established rules of war, but it came sadly below his own
more noble estimate of the sacredness of human life.
* * * * *
While Mazzini's theories kicked against the pricks, his political work
of these years is a pitiable tale of noble effort all in vain, of high
purpose spoilt by obstinacy and incapacity. In the autumn of 1850 he
founded a National Italian Committee, which claimed to be a kind of
legal successor to the Assembly of the Roman Republic. Practically,
though not ostensibly, it was a republican organisation. "The
manifesto is moderate," Mazzini wrote privately to Italy, "but behind
the manifesto am I, which means, I think, the republic." The ambiguity
doomed it from the start. The straiter republicans attacked it as
departing from the faith. The much vaster host of democrats, who were
learning to believe in the Piedmontese monarchy, held carefully aloof.
Others revolted at Mazzini's "intolerable dictatorship"; and the
charge was half a true one. He proudly and sincerely replied to the
taunt of personal ambition, but now, as always, he exacted an
impossible obedience from his fellow-workers. In Italy the society
found a certain following; and Mazzini boasted half-seriously to his
friends that the republican flag would be flying on the Quirinal next
year. But outside some of the Lombard towns the movement had little
real strength; its organisation was too loose to be effective; and one
by one the exiles on the Committee drifted away, till in 1853 it died
a natural death. The same fate befell a "National Loan," which he had
started with the ambitious hope of raising an adequate fund for
insurrection. He issued bonds, which were to be honoured by the future
Italian state. It was to be "the first act of a financial war, which
would prove that the few monarchical or aristocratic possessors of big
capitals can be matched by the collective power of the small capitals
of democracy." Apparently a good many of the bonds were taken up in
Italy, but the money they brought in seems to have been soon exhausted
in the expenses of agitation and conspiracy.
Up to this time Mazzini had been inclined to postpone insurrection,
till, at all events in his own judgment, it had a fair prospect of
success. Unluckily at this moment he was approached by a revolutionary
society among the artisans at Milan. He was hesitating whether to
encourage them to action, when the ruthless execution by the Austrians
of some conspirators at Mantua maddened the men, and they decided on
revolt whether he supported them or not. He was very anxious about the
scheme and far from hopeful, but he was too generous and impatient to
refuse help now. He did what he could to find them money and
sympathisers, and late in 1852 he went in disguise to Locarno to
complete the preparations. The rising was fixed for the Carnival on
February 6, and on the eve of it Mazzini was on the frontier at
Chiasso, ready to go on to Milan, as soon as the call came. Had the
rising been better organized, it had some small chance of success. As
it was, Mazzini learnt at Chiasso that it had smoked itself out in a
confused and bloody scuffle. The business was disastrous to him, and
he came out with reputation badly damaged. The responsibility was
fixed on him, and he accepted it, though he had only been drawn into a
plan that others made. His friends in Italy had published a
two-years-old appeal from Kossuth urging the Hungarian regiments in
the garrison to revolt, and whether or not Kossuth authorized its
publication now, had made unjustifiable alterations in the wording.
Mazzini was responsible, if at all, only in not taking precautions to
prevent the issue, but he did not make matters better, when he pleaded
that men, who were risking their lives for their country, were "not
amenable by strictly punctilious rules of normal times."[24] The
fatuousness and mismanagement of the whole business, the pity of the
wasted lives, a feeling that these ill-judged risings hindered the
cause and damaged it in the eyes of Europe, hastened the stampede from
his own party. He still kept a considerable though reduced hold on
the artisans in a few towns of the North, but among the middle classes
his following shrank to nearly nothing.
Even he almost despaired. He felt himself "accursed by all," the
"scapegoat on whom all the faults of Israel will be heaped with a
curse." The Piedmontese press loaded him with shameful scurrility; and
there seems to have been an attempt to assassinate him. He fretted
with the sense of failure, with something like remorse at the
sufferings of the conspirators under the Austrians' brutal vengeance.
But instead of taking the moral of the failure home, he broke into
invective against the Piedmontese, and only plunged more desperately
into schemes of insurrection. He had been misled into suspecting an
understanding between France and Piedmont to create French
protectorates in the South and Centre; and he was eager to checkmate
it by forcing on the movement for unity and a revolutionary war with
Austria. He had two main plans of operation. For one, the
revolutionising of South Italy, he could, though anxious for immediate
action, at present only sow the seed. The other was to organise
guerilla fighting in the Alps and Northern Apennines and encourage the
Lombard cities to revolt. He had persuaded himself that the
fast-maturing Eastern question gave a favourable chance of attacking
Austria. Her policy of see-saw between the Western Powers and Russia
had won her the ill-will of both sides, and she had been obliged to
denude her Italian garrisons to concentrate troops on the Russian
frontier. Mazzini had vague hopes, too, of help from America.
Kossuth's lecturing tour in the States in 1852 had excited an angry
feeling against Austria. The American government was irritated by the
unfriendly attitude of France and England, and perhaps had its designs
on Cuba; and Mazzini hoped that it would encourage the revolutionary
forces in Europe, in order to keep the Powers occupied at home. George
N. Sanders, the American Consul in London, gave a dinner to him and
Kossuth and Ledru Rollin, and healths were drunk to a future alliance
of America with a federation of the free peoples of Europe.[25]
Mazzini's hopes were high. He studied military maps with Kossuth and
Ledru Rollin at St John's Wood. He went to Paris and Italy in 1854 in
disguise, probably spending most of his time at Genoa, and perhaps on
his way paying a visit to Giuditta Sidoli, now silver-haired, and
sweet and gracious as ever. His movements worried all the police of
Italy and France and Switzerland, and his secret journeys had their
romance of clever disguises and audacious escapes. A popular rhyme of
the time, attributed to Dall'Ongaro, said:--
Where is Mazzini? Ask the pines
Upon the Alps and Apennines.
He is, wherever traitors cower
In terror for their fatal hour;
Where'er men wait impatiently
To give their blood for Italy.
Mazzini wrote home to England that the people were fretting for
action, and would have risen already, "had he not been exceptionally
prudent and calm"; in two months more he hoped to have sapped the
influence of the royalists, and then "the field will be mine." In
August he was in the Engadin, arranging for insurrection in the
Valtellin and the Como hill country. But the Swiss police broke up the
conspirators, and Mazzini narrowly escaped capture as he came by the
Julier diligence to Chur.
His hopes of Austrian isolation were soon dashed. Austria nominally
joined the Western alliance, and Piedmont followed her into it and
sent a contingent to the Crimea. He was bitterly disappointed, and
relieved himself in angry criticisms on English and Piedmontese
policy. Against Piedmont he turned with sheer passionate bitterness.
Cavour's adhesion to the alliance puzzled his own followers; and even
now it is not easy to be sure as to its wisdom, still less as to its
morality. But at all events everyone else recognised that the Crimea
was intended to be "the road to Lombardy." Mazzini, blinded by his
partisanship, saw only proof that Cavour's sympathies were more with
the oppressors than the oppressed.
For the moment all seemed to him a hopeless blank. His soul was
"wasting in a decline," and he longed to find mechanical work to drug
the pain, or break into some desperate action. "I am dreaming of,
raving, raging about action, physical action," he wrote. "I am sick of
the world and all its concerns, and want to _protest_." "Literally,"
he wrote to another friend, "life weighs on me. My feeling towards my
country, right or wrong, is intolerable. If I were younger, I would be
on a mountain to protest, with twenty or thirty more. As I am, I can
only eat myself away, and pretend to smile, to avoid torturing
others." Next year (1856) his hopes suddenly revived. There seemed a
chance that Cavour would secretly assist an insurrection against the
Duke of Modena in the Carrara country. Through this and the two
following years the premier had intermittent plans to foment a rising
there, which would lead to annexation of the borderland, or be twisted
into a _casus belli_ with Austria and force Louis Napoleon to send his
army across the Alps. He allowed Mazzini to visit Genoa, and carried
on communications with him there. What were the details of the plot,
we have no means of knowing; but at all events it was impossible to
come to terms. "The Piedmontese government," Mazzini wrote to England,
"are a plague. I am indirectly in contact with them and trying all
sorts of concessions, but it is of no use. My own position is
extremely delicate and difficult between their party and the extreme
men of our own. I have now sent a sort of ultimatum to them, which
will compromise them, if accepted, or leaves me free, if not." When
the rupture came, he turned to his plans for revolutionising the
South. For two years past he had been industriously connecting the
threads of conspiracy, that Crispi and others had laid in Sicily and
Naples. He had met Garibaldi in London, and discussed plans with him
for an expedition to the island; and Garibaldi had promised to go, if
the Sicilians revolted and Cavour was willing to cooperate. Again
there seemed a hope that the premier would secretly assist. Every
patriot saw the danger of Napoleon's fitful scheme to put his cousin,
Lucien Murat, on the throne of Naples; and Cavour, though he dared not
openly oppose, would gladly see the scheme checkmated, and he had his
own plans for adding Sicily to Victor Emmanuel's kingdom. He seems to
have promised funds for Mazzini's design, but again from some
unexplained cause he drew back. Mazzini refused to give up his
scheme, and indeed the Genoese conspirators were too impatient for
action to desist, whether he wished it or not. He went to England to
raise money for the project, and returned to Genoa to mature it. Carlo
Pisacane, his friend and fellow-exile, a Neapolitan duke with
socialist theories that little accorded with his own, was to seize a
steamer plying between Genoa and Sardinia, and make for Calabria,
there to join hands with the insurgents in the South and raise the
country in the name of Unity. The plot was linked to a more
questionable plan. It was proposed that the conspirators, who stayed
behind, should seize the forts at Genoa and Leghorn and obtain
munitions to send on to Pisacane. Mazzini realised the peril of the
business, the risk of civil war, the certainty that the movement would
be understood as one for the republic rather than for unity. But he
easily allowed himself to be persuaded into it. It would, he thought,
at all events prove the solidarity of North and South, force on a war
with Austria, and prevent the French alliance; and he had a hardly
avowed hope that the movement might after all make for a republic. So,
taking careful precautions to avoid reprisals on the Genoese
conservatives, and prevent if possible a conflict with the troops, he
threw himself into the mad plot. Pisacane seized the _Cagliari_, and
went to his doom. Mazzini, finding that the government had scent of
the design on the forts, tried to stop it at the last moment; but it
was too late, and the fatuous attempt ended in some street fighting
and a little loss of life. The government struck at its
fellow-conspirators of a few months back with a severity, that did
little credit to its honesty. It deliberately misrepresented the
movement as anarchist. Mazzini and five more, who escaped, were
sentenced in contumacy to death; others were sent to long terms of
imprisonment. Mazzini took refuge in the house of the Marquis Ernesto
Pareto, a relative of the minister of 1848, who concealed him
successfully, though the police searched his house and probed the
mattresses and the Marchioness' wardrobes with their swords. The story
went that Mazzini, disguised as a footman, opened the door to the
police-officer who proved to be an old school-fellow and probably
recognised him. Some days after he walked out of the house without
disguise, arm-in-arm with a Genoese lady, asked the sentry for a light
for his cigar, and drove away unsuspected to Quarto, where he remained
in safe hiding, till the news of Pisacane's disaster reached him.
FOOTNOTES:
[21] Walter Savage Landor wrote to one of Mazzini's friends, promising
£95 for the family "of the first patriot, who asserts the dignity and
fulfils the duty of tyrannicide."
[22] _Alias_ Luigi Mariotti, writer of Italian grammar books for
English schools.
[23] For some of the evidence on these cases, I may refer to my
_History of Italian Unity_, II. 385-387. See also Uccellini,
_Memorie_, 209-210; Mazzini, _Lettere ad A. Giannelli_, 301, 437.
Signor Dagnino tells me from his personal knowledge that in 1864
Mazzini stopped a plot to blow up the Austrian Viceroy of Venetia.
[24] Mazzini's and Kossuth's letters on the subject are in the _Daily
News_ of February 19, March 2 and 4, 1853. See also Mazzini,
_Scritti_, VIII. 283-4. He seems to have made a disingenuous use of
another proclamation by Kossuth later in the year: see Bianchi,
_Vicende del Mazzinianismo_, 85. I hardly think that Mr Stillman's
statement in his _Union of Italy_, p. 275, can stand against Kossuth's
plain statement in the _Daily News_. Mr Stillman too is wrong as to
Mazzini's share in the rising. I am inclined on the whole to think
that he was justified in using Agostino's name; see _Daily News_,
February 17 and 20, 1853.
[25] Mr W. R. Thayer has kindly ascertained for me that there is
absolutely nothing in Sanders' correspondence in the U.S.A. Bureau of
Rolls, that relates either to Mazzini or Kossuth; but Saffi, who tells
the story of the dinner, was present at it himself. See Mazzini,
_Scritti_, IX. xciv, 60.