Italy in the Age of the Risorgimento 1790 - 1870

Harry Hearder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138150300
• eBook ISBN: 9781317872054
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Established as a standard work - covers the whole of Italy not just the Risorgimento itself.

PART ONE

The conflict of interpretations and the sources

The first accounts of historical movements or periods of history are usually written immediately after the events, by the protagonists themselves, as assessments of success or failure, and often as recriminations against opponents or rivals. Thus both democrats and moderates who had taken part in the revolutionary movements of 1848–9 in Italy wrote their post mortems. The work of a socialist democrat, Carlo Pisacane, is considered, in another context, in Chapter 14. Among the apologists for the moderates was Filippo Antonio Gualterio who published his Gli ultimi rivolgimenti italiani (‘The recent Italian upheavals’) in 1850–1.¹ Born into a family of the papal nobility at Orvieto in 1819, Gualterio had been educated by the Jesuits, but influenced by more liberal Catholic writers. He fought in the war of 1848 against Austria, and eventually settled in Turin with so many other exiles from all over Italy. It was in Turin that he wrote ‘The recent Italian upheavals’, which made him a champion of the moderate party of Cavour, but hated alike by clerical reactionaries and democrats. His heroes were the political figures who were both devout Catholics and Italian nationalists, like Cesare Balbo, or anti-clerical and liberal nationalists, like Massimo d’Azeglio – two men whose impact on Italian history is considered in Chapter 8. Historians, like Gualterio, who believed themselves to be ‘moderates’, also believed themselves to be ‘realists’, and for that reason gave Cavour a central position in the history of Italian unification. Gualterio insisted that economic factors were vitally important, and in this he was in complete agreement with Cavour, whose interest in economics, and specifically the railways, led him into an interest in the Italian national question. In their conviction that economic issues were fundamental Gualterio and Cavour were in agreement, paradoxically, with Marx, but their spiritual companions were, of course, rather the Manchester School in England. Gualterio, however, mixed with his respect for material forces a Catholic piety. Thus Carlo Alberto, a devout Catholic who took up arms against Austria in 1848, was one of Gualterio’s heroes, if a tragic hero. On the whole these early ‘moderate’ interpreters of the Risorgimento would have accepted Mussolini’s later exclamation: ‘C’è di tutto!’ (‘There is everything in it!’). Revolution, diplomacy, war, regicide, every species of political activity, went to make up the Risorgimento. And so the interpretation emerged that all the participants in the movement had contributed to some glorious national synthesis. Such an interpretation, which became something of an orthodoxy, undermined early attempts to make a serious analysis of the forces at work in nineteenth-century Italy, and gave later scholars the difficult task of disentangling truth from mythology.

Of the four volumes of Gualterio’s publication of 1850–1 two had been printed documents. He thus started a tradition in the historiography of the Risorgimento – that of supporting interpretations with published documents, documents selected inevitably with a bias, although not always a conscious bias. In the nineteenth century the editors of documents usually supported the moderate or pro-Cavour interpretation. Only in the mid twentieth century was a more deliberately impartial approach adopted. The first editors of relevant documents after 1861 were usually either Piedmontese, or exiles from other Italian states who had settled in Piedmont. The editor of a very early, yet impressive, collection of documents was Nicomede Bianchi, who was born in Reggio Emilia in 1810, and actually went to Vienna to study in 1844, but to study medicine, not history. Sympathizing with the Piedmontese cause in 1848, he escaped to Turin as an exile in 1849, and took Piedmontese citizenship in 1850. After 1870 he was principally responsible for founding and organizing the State Archives in Turin, archives which are still important for any student of the international history of the Risorgimento. This formidable scholar did much to give Piedmont and Cavour dominant roles in the historiography of Italian unification. His eight volumes of diplomatic documents, embedded in a commentary, the Storia documentata della diplomazia europea in Italia dall’anno 1814 all’anno 1861, were published in Turin over the years 1865 to 1872. In other words he had started to publish them even before Venice and Rome had become part of the kingdom. At the time he was accused of publishing documents written by, or intimately concerning, people who were still alive, or, like Cavour, had very recently died. To this he replied that it was better for friends of the people concerned to edit their writings rather than to leave the task to insensitive editors of the future. His argument unintentionally indicated that his approach was far from impartial. The collection of documents put Cavour in the best possible light, and the Bourbons of Naples in the worst possible light. By printing some passages of documents and suppressing others, Bianchi depicted Ferdinando II as a monster. Nor was he any kinder to Mazzini. He had available the correspondence between Mazzini and his mother, intercepted by the police and kept in the Turin archives, but refrained from publishing letters which would have illustrated the honesty and integrity of Mazzini. In his translation of documents from the French, Bianchi also made elementary mistakes. Yet his eight volumes were accepted as an indispensable source by several generations of historians, and even in the 1950s were still regarded as a starting-point for students of the diplomatic history of the unification of Italy.

The early interpretations, which depicted Cavour and the Piedmontese monarchy after 1852 as being almost infallible, but Mazzini and the republicans as being always misguided and subversive, were the work not only of Piedmontese historians, but also of men from other parts of Italy who had settled in Piedmont and felt a debt of gratitude for their new homeland, which had treated them sometimes with suspicion but more often with generosity. Gualterio and Bianchi fell into this category, as did Massari, who will be considered in a moment. Luigi Chiala was a native of Piedmont. Born in Ivrea, in the far north-west of Italy, in 1834, he was to live into the twentieth century, but he had known Cavour and was to do great services for the Piedmontese statesman by his writings and editorship. He fought in the war of 1859, and was a deputy in the Italian parliament from 1882 until 1902, when he was made a senator, and sat in the senate for the last two years of his life, from 1902 to 1904.

Like Bianchi’s, Chiala’s editorship of documents is slanted by the judicious omissions which he makes. Between 1884 and 1887 Chiala published six volumes of Cavour’s letters, Le lettere edite e inedite di Cavour,² preceded by an introduction which was in effect a sizeable biography of Cavour. Since Cavour died so suddenly, aged only fifty-one, and at the peak of his political struggle, he had no time to write his own memoirs nor, probably, any inclination to do so. There is therefore no parallel with Bismarck’s long and elegant, if acrimonious, reminiscences. Cavour’s early death meant that his reputation had to depend on writers who had known him, worked with him, and admired him. They certainly did not fail him.

One last friend of Cavour, Giuseppe Massari, who left copious records and writings, must be mentioned. Massari, a Neapolitan, was born in 1821. His first hero was Gioberti, of whom he published some correspondence and biographical memoirs in 1860. Exiled in France and then in Turin, Massari became a close associate and apologist of Cavour. Perhaps his most important work was La vita e il regno di Vittorio Emanuele II, primo re d’Italia, published in Milan in 1878.³ Already in 1875 he had published his life of Cavour, Il conte di Cavour. Ricordi biografici.⁴ Both works fall well short of the standards of scholarship adopted even by Bianchi or Chiala. Massari is quite happy to give verbatim reports of conversations which he did not hear, nor does he bother to give any indication of his sources for such accounts. For the historian, Massari’s most interesting publication is his own diary, a diary which provides great detail on the activities of Cavour, Vittorio Emanuele II, the British minister in Turin, Sir James Hudson, and countless others, during the culminating years of Italian unification, 1858–60. For many years historians had to content themselves with a very inadequate and inaccurate edition of this massive work, but in 1959 a fine Italian scholar, Emilia Morelli, produced an excellent edition which she entitled Diario dalle cento voci (‘Diary from a hundred voices’) 1858–1860.⁵ Chiala had on the whole limited himself to praising his own party – the Piedmontese moderates – without attacking their Italian republican enemies. Massari, on the other hand, makes Mazzini, in Dr Morelli’s words, ‘enemy number one’. Two eminent Italian historians, Adolfo Omodeo and Luigi Salvatorelli, both judged Massari to have a mediocre intelligence, and it is certainly as a diarist rather than as a historian that Massari has value, but his detailed day-to-day account of activities in Turin did much to support the picture of Cavour as the controlling mind during these two vital years.

Those English-speaking historians of the Risorgimento who wrote in the nineteenth century were inevitably influenced by the powerful pro-Piedmontese school which had preceded them, but they were also by temperament prepared to accept an interpretation favouring a moderate, quietly constitutional, tradition. However, they liked to see the history of the Risorgimento as a romantic epic, which contrasted with the somewhat prosaic nature of the history of Victorian England. Epics have heroes and villians, and are not improved if the heroes are sometimes noble but sometimes misguided or self-centred, nor if the heroes have complex disputes among themselves. The Victorian historians were on the whole prepared to see the Risorgimento as a struggle between good and evil forces, a struggle in which the good forces eventually triumphed. One of the more influential English historians was H. Bolton King, who wrote at the end of the nineteenth century. He published his History of Italian Unity in 1899, a work translated first into French and then into Italian. After graduating at Balliol College, Bolton King had worked for eight years at Toynbee Hall. For ten years, from 1888 to 1898, he worked on the extensive Risorgimento material in the British Museum, the material collected mainly by Sir Antony Panizzi, the Italian émigré who had been appointed director of the museum by Gladstone, and who had been largely responsible for the creation of the splendid Reading Room. The positive and original feature in Bolton King’s history is his awareness of the social question. He quotes, with approval, Cavour’s perceptive comment: ‘To harmonize the North with the South is more difficult than to fight Austria or to struggle with Rome.’ But so far as his interpretation of the political history of unification is concerned, his work established in Britain the pro-Piedmontese tradition which was not to be seriously revised until after the Second World War. His avowed intention in writing his two-volume history was to encourage Italians to return to what he believed to have been the liberal democratic tradition of the Risorgimento, instead of pursuing the reactionary tendencies of the end of the century or the chauvinism which, in 1896, had led them into disaster in Africa. Italy needed, according to Bolton King, ‘another Cavour, wise, honest, and a lover of freedom’.

In addition to his History of Italian Unity Bolton King wrote a study of Mazzini of considerable depth and understanding.⁶ He recognized the sincerity and selflessness of Mazzini, and pointed out that the not uncommon impression that Mazzini was simply a fanatical conspirator was absurdly superficial. Bolton King stresses that Mazzini was a ‘puritan’, and this is intended as high praise. Another of Bolton King’s principal heroes – Ricasoli – is also considered to be a puritan, as, in some respects, he was. Bolton King is perfectly aware of Mazzini’s failings and yet, by concentrating on his virtues, and at the same time considering Cavour an honest lover of liberty, he gives a misleading picture, a picture which understates the conflicts between Italians at the culminating moment of the creation of Italy.

If Bolton King was the first serious English historian of the Risorgimento, the first to have a great impact on the reading public was without doubt George Macaulay Trevelyan. The grandson of Macaulay, Trevelyan was born in 1876, and was to live until 1962. No longer a young man at the time of the First World War, Trevelyan formed a remarkable link between the Victorians and the immense historiographical activity which followed the Second World War. His career thus bridged several generations of historical writing. He inherited from his brilliantly successful grandfather a felicity of literary style which carried his books far beyond a purely academic readership. In the Second World War in the tiny libraries of British army units all over the world Trevelyan’s books were always prominent, and always read. So fluent is Trevelyan’s prose that the reader can easily forget the precise and painstaking research on the primary sources which Trevelyan had carried through before writing his elegant narrative. He chose Garibaldi for his earliest works because, he says in his autobiography, ‘his life seemed to me the most poetic of all true stories’.⁷ But having selected his topic for a romantic reason, he carried through an exhaustive programme of research on it. His famous trilogy on Garibaldi, Garibaldi’s Defence of the Roman Republic, Garibaldi and the Thousand, and Garibaldi and the Making of Italy were published by Longmans, Green and Company in 1907, 1909, and 1911 respectively. He believed them to be his best works, because their inspiration was a poetic one. He visited Garibaldi’s battlefields outside Rome and in Sicily, and interviewed many survivors of the Risorgimento. He was perfectly aware of the bitterness of the conflict between the moderates and the democrats, between Cavour and Garibaldi, yet in his total interpretation he seems to understress it. He argued that if Cavour had been able to annex Sicily to Piedmont in the summer of 1860 the Great Powers would have prevented him from taking Naples, while if Garibaldi had marched on Rome in the autumn Napoleon III would have intervened against Italy. Although the two points are probably valid ones, by linking them in a single argument Trevelyan was reinforcing the familiar interpretation of the movement of unification according to which apparently conflicting forces were in effect complementary as though Cavour and Garibaldi needed each other without realizing it. The argument has a certain seductive elegance about it, but it underestimates the fundamental contrast between the aims of the moderates and those of the democrats.

After the First World War Trevelyan wrote one more work on the Risorgimento – Manin and the Venetian Revolution of 1848.⁸ Although less impressive than the great Garibaldi trilogy, Trevelyan’s book on Manin had less success than it deserved. But by today’s standards and today’s interests it is inevitably dated. It is interesting to contrast it with a book written by a young English historian, and published in 1979 – Paul Ginsborg’s Daniele Manin and the Venetian Revolution of 1848–49.⁹ While Ginsborg gives a sympathetic picture of Manin, he is far more aware of Manin’s limitations than was Trevelyan. Ginsborg is also interested in the peasant movements on the Venetian mainland, movements with which Trevelyan did not deal. But if Trevelyan’s view of the Risorgimento seems today dated, if not a little quaint, his three books on Garibaldi will surely remain respected classics, very much as the works of Macaulay have done.

The thought of several writers in the democratic or socialist tradition, writers who played a role in the political movements of the mid nineteenth century – Giuseppe Ferrari, Carlo Cattaneo, Carlo Pisacane – are considered later in the book. They were already starting to criticize the essentially political arguments of the pro-Piedmontese moderates, and to suggest that social and regional questions, as well as the purely national one, should be co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of maps
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• PART ONE The conflict of interpretations and the sources
• PART TWO The states and regions before unification: political developments, the economy and the conditions of life
• PART THREE The creation of the nation-state
• PART FOUR The culture of nineteenth-century Italy
• Maps
• Index