'YOUNG ITALY' 1831-1844
Accession of Charles Albert--Mazzini's Unitarian Propaganda--The
Brothers Bandiera.
On 27 April 1831, Charles Albert came to the throne he had so nearly
lost. His reconciliation with his uncle, Charles Felix, had been
effected after long and melancholy preliminaries. To wash off the
Liberal sins of his youth, or possibly with a vague hope of finding an
escape from his false position in a soldier's death, he joined the Duc
d'Angoulême's expedition against the Spanish Constitutionalists. His
extraordinary daring in the assault of the Trocadero caused him to be
the hero of the hour when he returned with the army to Paris; but the
King of Sardinia still refused to receive him with favour--a
sufficiently icy favour when it was granted--until he signed an
engagement, which remained secret, to preserve intact during his reign
the laws and principles of government which he found in force at his
accession. If there had been an Order of the Millstone, Charles Felix
would doubtless have conferred it upon his dutiful nephew; failing
that, he presented to him for signature this wonderful document, the
invention of which he owed to Prince Metternich. At the Congress of
Verona in 1822, Charles Albert's claims to the succession were
recognised, thanks chiefly to the Duke of Wellington, who represented
England in place of Lord Londonderry (Castlereagh), that statesman
having committed suicide just as he was starting for Verona. Prince
Metternich then proposed that the Prince of Carignano should be called
upon to enter into an agreement identical with the compact he was
brought to sign a couple of years later. In communicating the proposal
to Canning, the Duke of Wellington wrote that he had demonstrated to
Prince Metternich 'the fatality of such an arrangement,' but that he
did not think that he had made the slightest impression on him. So the
event proved; baffled for the moment, the Prince managed to put his
plan in execution through a surer channel.
With the accession of Charles Albert appears upon the political scene
a great actor in the Liberation of Italy, Giuseppe Mazzini. Young and
unknown, except for a vague reputation for restlessness and for talent
which caused the government of Charles Felix to imprison him for six
or seven months at Savona, Mazzini proposed to the new King the terms
on which he might keep his throne, as calmly as Metternich had
proposed to him the terms on which he might ascend it. The contrast is
striking; on the one side the statesman, who still commanded the armed
force of three-fourths of Europe, doing battle for the holy alliance
of autocrats, for the international law of repression, for all the
traditions of the old diplomacy; on the other, the young student with
little money and few friends, already an exile, having no allies but
his brain and his pen, who set himself, certain of success, to
dissolve that mighty array of power and pomp. All his life Charles
Albert was a Faust for the possession of whose soul two irreconcilable
forces contended; the struggle was never more dramatically represented
than at this moment in the person of these two champions.
Mazzini's letter to Charles Albert, which was read by the King, and
widely, though secretly, circulated in Piedmont, began by telling him
that his fellow-countrymen were ready to believe his line of conduct
in 1821 to have been forced on him by circumstances, and that there
was not a heart in Italy that did not quicken at his accession, nor an
eye in Europe that was not turned to watch his first steps in the
career that now unfolded before him. Then he went on to show, with the
logical strength in developing an argument which, joined to a novel
and eloquent style, caused his writings to attract notice from the
first, that the King could take no middle course. He would be one of
the first of men, or the last of Italian tyrants; let him choose. Had
he never looked upon Italy, radiant with the smile of nature, crowned
with twenty centuries of sublime memories, the mother of genius,
possessing infinite means, to which only union was lacking, girt round
with such defences that a strong will and a few courageous breasts
would suffice to defend her? Had it never struck him that she was
created for a glorious destiny? Did he not contemplate her people,
splendid still, in spite of the shadow of servitude, the vigour of
whose intellect, the energy of whose passions, even when turned to
evil, showed that the making of a nation was there? Did not the
thought come to him: 'Draw a world out of these dispersed elements
like a god from chaos; unite into one whole the scattered members, and
pronounce the words, "It is mine, and it is happy"?'
Mazzini in 1831 was twenty-six years of age. His father was a Genoese
physician, his mother a native of Chiavari. She was a superior woman,
and devoted more than a mother's care to the excitable and delicate
child, who seemed to her (mothers have sometimes the gift of prophecy)
to be meant for an uncommon lot. One of the few personal reminiscences
that Mazzini left recorded, relates to the time and manner in which
the idea first came to him of the possibility of Italians doing
something for their country. He was walking with his mother in the
Strada Nuova at Genoa one Sunday in April 1821, when a tall,
black-bearded man with a fiery glance held towards them a white
handkerchief, saying: 'For the refugees of Italy.' Mazzini's mother,
gave him some money, and he passed on. In the streets were many
unfamiliar faces; the fugitives from Turin and Alessandria were
gathered at Genoa before they departed by sea into exile. The
impression which that scene made on the mind of the boy of sixteen was
never effaced.
Owing to his delicate health, Mazzini's early education was carried on
at home, where the social atmosphere was that of one of those little
centres in a provincial capital which are composed of a few people,
mostly kindred, of similar tastes, who lead useful and refined lives,
content with moderate ease. The real exclusiveness of such centres
exceeds any that exists in the most aristocratic sphere in the world.
The Mazzinis were, moreover, Genoese to the core; and this was another
reason for exclusiveness, and for holding aloof from the governing
class. Mazzini was born a few days after Napoleon entered Genoa as its
lord. He had not, therefore, breathed the air of the ancient Republic;
but there was the unadulterated republicanism of a thousand years in
his veins.
When he grew to manhood his appearance was striking. The black,
flowing hair, the pale, olive complexion, the finely-cut features and
lofty brow, the deep-set eyes, which could smile as only Italian eyes
can smile, but which could also flash astral infinitudes of scorn, the
fragile figure, even the long, delicate, tapering fingers, marked him
for a man apart--though whether a poet or an apostle, a seer or a
saint, it was not easy to decide. Yet this could be said at once: if
this man concentrated all his being on a single point, he would wield
the power, call it what we will, which in every age has worked
miracles and moved mountains.
Mazzini became a Carbonaro, though the want of clear, guiding
principles in Carbonarism made him misdoubt its efficacy, and its
hierarchical mysteries and initiatory ordeals repelled him by their
childishness. Then followed his arrest, and his detention in the
fortress of Savona, which was the turning-point in his mental life.
Before that date he learnt, after it he taught. From his high-perched
cell he saw the sea and the sky--with the Alps, the sublimest things
in Nature. The voices of the fishermen reached his ears, though he
could not see them. A tame goldfinch was his companion. Here, in a
solitude and peace which he remembered with regret in the stormy and
sorrowful years that were to come, he conceived his message and the
mission, in which he believed to the last day of his life.
He resolved to found a new association on broader and simpler lines than
the secret societies of the past, which should aim not only at the
material freeing of Italy from her present bondage, but at her moral and
religious regeneration. To aim at material progress of any kind, without
at the same time aiming at a higher moral progress, seemed to Mazzini
absurd; to attempt to pull down without attempting to build up seemed to
him criminal. Thus he accused the Socialists of substituting the
progress of humanity's kitchen for the progress of humanity. He believed
that Italy, united and redeemed, was destined to shed through the world
the light of a new moral unity, which should end the reign of
Scepticism, triumphant among discordant creeds. Mazzini's religious
belief was the motor of his whole being. The Catholicism in which he was
outwardly brought up never seems to have touched his inner nature; he
went through no spiritual wrench in leaving a faith that was never a
reality to him. The same is true of innumerable young Italians, who,
when they begin to read and study, drift out of their childhood's
religion without a struggle or a regret. But thought and study brought
Mazzini what it rarely brings to these young men--the necessity to find
something in which he could believe. He had not long to seek for a basis
to his creed, because he was one of the men from the prophets of old to
Spinoza, from Spinoza to Gordon, to whom the existence of God is a
matter of experience rather than an object of faith. Starting from this
point, he formed his religion out of what he regarded as its inevitable
deductions. If God existed, his creatures must be intended for
perfection; if this were the Divine scheme, man's one business was to
carry it out. He considered the idea of duty separated from the idea of
God to be illogical. Either the development of human things depended on
a providential law, or it was left to chance and passing circumstance,
and to the dexterity of the man who turned these to most account. God
was the sole source of duty; duty the sole law of life. Mazzini did not
denounce Catholicism or any other religion as false. He saw in it a
stepping-stone to purer comprehension, which would be reached when man's
intellect was sufficiently developed for him to be able to do without
symbols.
[Illustration: GIUSEPPE MAZZINI]
The conscience of humanity is the last tribunal. Ideas, as well as
institutions, change and expand, but certain fundamental principles
are fixed. The family would always exist; property would always exist.
The first, 'the heart's fatherland,' was the source of the only true
happiness, the only joys untainted by grief, which were given to man.
Those who wished to abolish the second were like the savage who cut
down the tree in order to gather the fruit. In the future, free
association would be the great agent of moral and material progress.
The authority which once rested in popes and emperors now devolved on
the people. Instead of 'God and the King,' Mazzini proposed the new
formula 'God and the People.' By the people he understood no caste or
class, whether high or low, but the universality of men composing the
nation. The nation is the sole sovereign; its will, expressed by
delegates, must be law to all its citizens.
By degrees certain words acquired more and more a mystical
significance in Mazzini's mind; the very name of Rome, for instance,
had for him a sort of talismanic fascination, not unlike that
possessed by Jerusalem for the mediæval Christian. When he spoke of
the people or the republic he frequently used those terms in an ideal
and visionary sense (as theologians use the Church) rather than in one
strictly corresponding with the case of any existing nation, or any
hitherto tried form of government. This does not alter the fact that
his theories, which have been briefly summarised, are not hard to
comprehend, as has been said by those who did not know in what they
consisted, nor, taken one by one, are they novel. What was new in the
nineteenth century was the appearance of a revolutionary leader, who
was before all things a religious and ethical teacher. And though
Mazzini never founded the Church of Precursors, of which he dreamt,
his influence was as surely due to his belief in his religious
mission, as was the influence of Savonarola. The Italians are not a
mystical people, but they have always followed mystical leaders. The
less men are prone to ideal enthusiasm the more attracted are they by
it; Don Quixote, as Heine remarked, always draws Sancho Panza after
him.
Mazzini had a natural capacity for organisation, and the Association
of Young Italy which he founded at Marseilles, the first nucleus being
a group of young, penniless refugees, soon obtained an astonishing
development. Up to the time of his 'Letter to Charles Albert,' his
exile had been so far voluntary that he might have remained in
Piedmont had he agreed to live in one of the smaller towns under the
watchful care of the police, but he declined the terms, and the first
effect of the 'Letter' was a stringent order to arrest him if he
recrossed the frontier. He was not surprised at that result. Mazzini's
attitude towards the Sardinian monarchy was perfectly well defined.
Republican himself, even to fanaticism, he placed the question of
unity, which for him meant national existence, above the question of
the republic. He did not believe that the House of Savoy would unite
Italy, but if unity could only be had under what he looked upon as the
inauspicious form of monarchy, he would not reject it. He was like the
real mother in the judgment of Solomon, who, because she loved her
child, was ready to give it up sooner than see it cut in two.
Apart from personal hereditary instincts and predilections, Mazzini
thought that he saw in the glorious memories of the Italian republics
a clear indication that the commonwealth was the form of government
which ought and would be adopted by the Italy of the future. But,
unlike most politicians, he laid down the principle that, after all,
when free, the nation must decide for itself. 'To what purpose,' he
asks, 'do we constantly speak of the sovereignty of the people, and of
our reverence for the national will, if we are to disregard it as soon
as it pronounces in contradiction to our wishes?'
He did not succeed in making the majority of his countrymen
republicans, but he contributed more than any other man towards
inspiring the whole country with the desire for unity. Herein lies his
great work. Without Mazzini, when would the Italians have got beyond
the fallacies of federal republics, leagues of princes, provincial
autonomy, insular home-rule, and all the other dreams of independence
reft of its only safeguard which possessed the minds of patriots of
every party in Italy and of nearly every well-wisher to Italian
freedom abroad?
In 1831, most educated Italians did not even wish for unity, and this
is still truer of the republicans than of the monarchists. Some, like
Manzoni, did wish for it, but, like him, said nothing about it, for
fear of being thought madmen. A flash of the true light illuminated
the mind of Giro Menotti, but that was extinguished on the scaffold.
Then it was that Mazzini came forward with the news that Italy could
_only_ be made free and independent by being united; unity was the
ruling tendency of the century, and, as far as Italy went, no Utopia,
but a certain conclusion. This was repeated over and over again,
wherever there were Italians, over the inhabited globe. By means of
sailors, 'Young Italy' spread like lightning. Giuseppe Garibaldi was
made a member by a sailor on the shores of the Black Sea.
With the masses, unity proved the wonder-working word which
Confalonieri had said was the one thing needful--a word yet fitter to
work wonders than 'War to the Stranger.' Among the cultivated classes,
it was much slower in gaining ground, and particularly among statesmen
and diplomatists. But in the end it was to convert them all.
'"Young Italy,"' writes Mazzini, 'closed the period of political
sects, and initiated that of educational associations.' 'Great
revolutions,' he says again, 'are the work of principles rather than
of bayonets.' It was by the diffusion of ideas that 'Young Italy'
became a commanding factor in the events of the next thirty years.
The insurrectional attempts planned under its guidance did not
succeed, nor was it likely that they should succeed. Devised by
exiles, at a distance, they lacked the first elements of success. The
earliest of these attempts aimed at an invasion of Savoy; it was hoped
that the Sardinian army and people would join the little band of
exiles in a movement for the liberation of Lombardy. The revolution of
1821 had evidently suggested this plan to Mazzini, but it was
foredoomed to misfortune. The Piedmontese authorities got wind of it,
and a hunt followed for the members of 'Young Italy'; most severe
measures were taken; there were eleven executions, and numberless
sentences to long terms of imprisonment. Jacobo Ruffini, the younger
brother of the author of _Dr Antonio_, and Mazzini's most beloved
friend, committed suicide in prison, fearing to reveal the names of
his associates. The apologists for Charles Albert say that if he had
not shown the will and ability to deal severely with the conspirators,
Austria would have insisted on a military occupation. Whatever were
his motives, this is the saddest page of his unhappy reign.
Checked in 1833, the descent on Savoy was actually attempted in 1834,
with Mazzini's consent, though not by his wish. An officer who had won
some celebrity in the Polish revolution, General Ramorino, a Savoyard
by origin, was given the command. Ramorino was a gambler, who could
not be trusted with money, but Mazzini's suspicion that on this
occasion he played the part of traitor is not proved. However that may
be, the expedition ended almost as soon as it began. Ramorino crossed
the frontier of Savoy at the head of the column, but when he heard
that a Polish reinforcement had been stopped on the Lake of Geneva, he
retreated into Switzerland, and advised the band to follow him.
After these events, Mazzini could no longer carry on his propaganda in
France. He took refuge in England, where a great part of his life was
to be passed, and of which he spoke, to the last, as his second
country. The first period of his residence in England was darkened by
the deep distress and discouragement into which the recent events had
plunged him; but his faith in the future prevailed, and he went on
with his work. His endeavours to help his fellow-exiles reduced him to
the last stage of poverty; the day came when he was obliged to pawn a
coat and an old pair of boots. These money difficulties did not
afflict him, and by degrees his writings in English periodicals
brought some addition to the small quarterly allowance which he
received from his mother. It seems strange, though it is easily
explained, that it was in London that he first got to know the Italian
working classes. He was surprised and gladdened by the abundance of
good elements which he found in them. No country, indeed, has more
reason to hope in her working men than the land whose sons have
tunnelled the Alps, cut the most arduous railway lines in America and
India, brought up English ships from the deep, laid the caissons (a
task of extreme danger) which support the great structure of the
Bridge of the Firth of Forth, and left their bones to whiten at
Panama. 'It is the universal testimony,' writes a high American
authority, 'that no more faithful men have come among us.' What was
the cause of the slaughter of the Aigues Mortes? That the Italians
worked too well.
Mazzini wrote for his humble friends the treatise on _The Duties of
Man_, in which he told them that he loved them too well to flatter
them. Another work that occupied him and consoled him was the rescue
and moral improvement of the children employed by organ-grinders, and
he was the first to call attention to the white slavery to which many
of them were subjected. He opened a school in Hatton Garden, in which
he taught, and which he mainly supported for the seven years from 1841
to 1848.
The enterprise of the Brothers Bandiera belongs to the history of
'Young Italy,' though Mazzini himself had tried to prevent it,
believing that it could only end in the sacrifice of all concerned.
Nor, at the last, did the actors in it expect anything else. They had
hoped for better things; for a general movement in the South of Italy,
or at least for an undertaking on a larger and less irrational basis.
But promises failed, money was not forthcoming, and it was a choice
between doing nothing or a piece of heroic folly. Contrary to
Mazzini's entreaties, they chose the second alternative.
Attilio and Emilio Bandiera were sons of the Austrian admiral who, in
1831, arrested Italian fugitives at sea. Placed by their father in the
Austrian navy, they renounced every prospect of a brilliant career to
enter the service of their down-trodden country. When they deserted,
strong efforts were made by the Archduke Rainieri, through their
mother, to win them back, but neither the offers of pardon nor the
poor woman's tears and reproaches turned them from their purpose.
Another deserter was with them, Lieutenant Domenico Moro, a youth of
great charm of person and disposition, who had been employed with a
mixed force of Englishmen and Austrians in the Lebanon, where he
formed a warm friendship with Lieutenant, now Admiral, Sir George
Wellesley, who still preserves an affectionate remembrance of him.
Nicola Ricciotti, a Roman subject who had devoted all his life to
Italy, and Anacarsi Nardi, son of the dictator of Modena, were also
of the band, which counted about twenty.
The Bandieras and their companions sailed from Corfu for the coast of
Calabria on the 11th of June 1844. 'If we fall,' they wrote to
Mazzini, 'tell our countrymen to imitate our example, for life was
given to us to be nobly and usefully employed, and the cause for which
we shall have fought and died is the purest and holiest that ever
warmed the heart of man.' It was their last letter. After they landed
in Calabria one of their number disappeared; there is every reason to
suppose that he went to betray them. They wandered for a few days in
the mountains, looking for the insurgent band which they had been
falsely told was waiting for them, and then fell into an ambush
prepared by the Neapolitan troops. Some died fighting; nine were shot
at Cosenza, including the Bandieras, Mori, Ricciotti and Nardi.
Boccheciampi the Corsican, whom they suspected of treason, was brought
up to be confronted with them during the trial; when asked if he knew
who he was, Nardi replied: 'I know no word in my divine Italian
language that can fitly describe that man.' Boccheciampi was condemned
to a nominal imprisonment; when he came out of prison he wrote to a
Greek girl of Corfu, to whom he was engaged, to join him at Naples,
that they might be married. The girl had been deeply in love with him,
and had already given him part of her dowry, but she answered: 'A
traitor cannot wed a Greek maiden; I bear with me the blessing of my
parents; upon you rests the curse of God.'
The martyrdom of the Bandieras made a great impression, especially in
England, where the circumstance came to light that their
correspondence with Mazzini had been tampered with in the English
Post Office, and that information as to their plans had reached the
Austrian and Neapolitan Governments through the British Foreign
Office. The affair was brought before the House of Commons by Thomas
Duncombe. The Home Secretary repeated a calumny which had appeared
many years before in a French newspaper, to the effect that the murder
of an Italian in Rodez by two of his fellow-countrymen was the result
of an order from the Association of Young Italy. Sir James Graham had
to apologise afterwards for 'the injury inflicted on Mr Mazzini' by
this statement, which he was obliged to admit was supported by no
evidence, and was contrary to the opinion of the Judge who tried the
case.
The _Times_ having observed in a leading article that the gravity of
the fact in question, the violation of private correspondence in the
Post Office, was not affected by the merits or demerits of Mr Mazzini,
of whom it professed to 'know nothing,' Thomas Carlyle wrote next day
a letter containing words which may be quoted as some of the best and
truest ever written about the great Italian: 'I have had the honour to
know Mr Mazzini for a series of years, and, whatever I may think of
his practical insight and skill in worldly affairs, I can with great
freedom testify that he, if I have ever seen one such, is a man of
genius and virtue, one of those rare men, numerable unfortunately but
as units in this world, who are worthy to be called martyr souls; who
in silence, piously in their daily life, understand and practise what
is meant by that.' [2]