The Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy

Derek Beales, Eugenio F. Biagini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317878568
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Italienische Geschichte

This book introduces the reader to the relationship between the Italian national movement, achieved by the Risorgimento, and the Italian unification in 1860. These themes are discussed in detail and related to the broader European theatre. Covering the literary, cultural, religious and political history of the period, Beales and Biagini show Italy struggled towards nation state status on all fronts.

The new edition has been thoroughly rewritten. It also contains a number of new documents. In addition, all the most up to date research of the last 20 years has been incorporated.

The Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy

remains the major text on nineteenth century Italy. The long introduction and useful footnotes will be of real assistance to those interested in Italian unification.

CHAPTER 1

THE BEGINNING OF THE RISORGIMENTO, 1748–1815

The age of reforms

The question of the ‘origins’ of the Risorgimento is a contested one, with left-wing historians focusing on the impact of the French Revolution, especially from 1796, and conservatives stressing 1815 as the real starting point. In this book we differ from both lines, arguing that it is useful to begin the political story in 1748, when the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle brought to an end the War of the Austrian Succession and inaugurated nearly fifty years of peace in Italy. It is not a new interpretation – indeed it was first proposed in the nineteenth century by the Risorgimento poet Giosué Carducci (1835–1907). It is based on the priority of the international dimension, and insists on the importance of Enlightenment reformism as a preparation for the Risorgimento (though not necessarily for Italian nationalism), and the changes that would take place over the following century and a half.

From 1748 for almost fifty years, until the first French invasion in 1796, Italy lived through a period of peace and stability without parallels since the sixteenth century. During this period there were eleven sizeable independent states in the peninsula (Map I), excluding enclaves, tiny principalities and the Republic of San Marino. Easily the largest state was formed by the two kingdoms of Naples and of Sicily, held jointly by a member of the Spanish royal family (a branch of the Bourbons), but separately from Spain. Hence Charles III of Naples, when he succeeded to the throne of Spain in 1759, gave up his Italian kingdoms. One other kingdom was fairly extensive and largely Italian, that of Sardinia. This state comprised the island of Sardinia and a compact territory on the mainland straddling the modern Franco-Italian border. It included the original home of the dynasty, the Duchy of Savoy, which was French-speaking and since 1860 has mostly belonged to France. By the mid-eighteenth century the heart of the kingdom was the area in Italy known as Piedmont. The island of Sardinia, from which the state derived its [15] name and its ruler the title of king, had been added only in 1718–20. By the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle the Kingdom of Sardinia acquired also a slice of the Duchy of Milan. There still survived three ancient republics of importance: Venice, ruling a considerable empire on the eastern shores of the Adriatic and a large territory, known as the Veneto, on the mainland of Italy; Genoa, which until 1768 governed the island of Corsica; and Lucca. The Papal State included much of central Italy. Then there were five significant duchies. Of these, the two most important were ruled by members of the Austrian royal House of Habsburg: Milan direct from Vienna, and Tuscany separately. The Duchy of Parma and Piacenza was under a Spanish Bourbon, but could not be united either with Spain or with Naples and Sicily. The Duke of Modena and the Duchess of Massa and Carrara represented Italian dynasties.

Politically, then, Italy was fragmented. The identity of Italy was further weakened by the extra-Italian focus of the politics of some of the rulers: half the states were governed by kings or dukes who already occupied, or hoped soon to inherit, the thrones of non-Italian countries. More than half the peninsula had received new dynasties since 1700: Naples and Sicily, the island of Sardinia, Milan, Tuscany, Parma and Piacenza. Italy was the laboratory of dynasticism. Venice (which controlled part of the coast of the Balkans and the Ionian Islands) and the Kingdom of Sardinia had dominions outside the geographical borders of the Italian peninsula. The Papacy had worldwide ecclesiastical concerns. Thus the peninsula was not merely divided; the boundaries and interests of its states ignored its natural frontiers. The obvious parallel is with Germany, which was much more fragmented, into over three hundred states. However, in some respects the Italian situation seemed even less favourable to national aspirations than the German. The Holy Roman Empire gave some semblance of political unity to an area corresponding roughly with Germany, whereas Italy had no political meaning at all. Further, Italy displayed a unique range of constitutions, with the Papal State presenting a special problem.

Then there were geographical obstacles to unification. According to Prince Metternich, Austrian Chancellor in the early nineteenth century, Italy was, if nothing more, at least a ‘geographical expression’. Though her natural frontiers are exceptionally well-defined, geography divides her internally. As we have already said (p. 8 above), the chief physical feature is the Apennine range, which makes communication across the peninsula difficult throughout its length. Most of the rivers are of little use for navigation, being torrents in the winter and trickles in the summer. There is a broad contrast between the only large area of plain in the country, the Po valley, and the mountainous remainder. The coastline is enormously long, and in most places a narrow fertile belt near the sea gives way quickly to barren hill inland. These divisions, it will be noticed, do not match the state boundaries of the eighteenth century. Genoa is manifestly distinct from Corsica, and Piedmont from the island of Sardinia. Less obviously, within the Papal State the area east of the Apennines, and particularly the northern part near the delta of the Po, which was known interchangeably as ‘the Romagna’ or ‘the Legations’, was the natural associate of the Veneto, rather than of Rome and its environs. It was no doubt partly for geographical reasons that Romagnuol opposition to the rule of the popes was to be important in nineteenth-century Italian history. To make things even more complicated, within some states there were enclaves belonging to others. Within all there were numerous customs barriers, hindering trade for the sake of fiscal advantage. In 1750 there were 498 such impediments in Piedmont alone.¹ Italy was a geographical expression of limited significance only.

Furthermore, differences of outlook corresponded with neither political nor geographical divisions. Sicilians felt the bitterest antagonism against Neapolitans, and clearly the reasons were mainly historical. Sicily had been politically separate from Naples and Italy for much of its history. It pre-served the oldest parliament in Italy and one of the two which survived into the eighteenth century (the other one was in Sardinia). The government at Naples tended to treat Sicily as a colony, economically as well as politically. The Sicilians reacted by obstructing the policies of their rulers. Quite often they broke into open revolt. The particularism of Sicily was even more important in nineteenth-century Italian history than that of the Romagna. In the North, the inhabitants of the Veneto believed themselves to be exploited by the government of the Republic based in Venice. Yet, it was not these comparatively large-scale clashes that were necessarily the most significant. The British traveller in Italy, accustomed to something approaching uniformity of style in the architecture of his own country at any given period of its history, is astonished by the contrasts between the buildings, say, of thirteenth-century Pisa, Siena and Florence, which are only fifty miles apart. This observation points to the extraordinary wealth and vitality of the medieval and Renaissance city-states, wealth and vitality that were reflected, not only then but also later, in the fact that the patriotism of many was focused on their city, rather than their country or even their region. It is what Italians call campanilismo – literally, pride in the church bell tower or campanile – a politicized form of ‘parochialism’ (Docs 6 and 13).² In this context it is also important to point out that cities – rather than the countryside – had traditionally been the centres of political action and initiative: they continued to be so in the nineteenth century, and especially in the revolutionary crises of 1799, 1848–49 and 1860.

As we have already indicated, anything that can properly be called Italian nationalism was lacking in the mid-eighteenth century. In the sixteenth century there had been some evidence of it. Machiavelli had denounced the Papacy as the principal obstacle to Italian political unity, and urged some secular prince to work to that end. Since his time the cry had scarcely been heard. Educated persons remained conscious of the literary tradition of the Italian language and were aware of being Italians, but the church worshipped and administered, and the universities taught, in Latin. It was probably a factor delaying the growth of Italian national feeling that Italians annexed to their own history that of classical Rome. The country was characterized by what historians describe as ‘cultural policentrism’ – that is, the existence of competing centres of culture. Throughout the nineteenth century there was no society or newspaper catering for the whole of Italy (though there were many regional ones, all published in Italian). While there were many ancient universities (including Europe’s oldest, Bologna), none of them provided a real national focus for Italian cultural life. There was no recognized social centre for the education of the aristocracy, though most of them went to church schools (Jesuit or Dominican) and then to a local university or military school. When academies were founded, as they were in great numbers in the eighteenth century, they were locally based. When the arts prospered, it was in a particu-lar state, usually because of the patronage of the court: opera in Naples under Charles III, architecture in Piedmont in the early years of the century, and in Rome later; the commedia dell’arte and painting in Venice. For the uneducated Italy had no political meaning. Italian was the language of the upper classes, the intellectuals and the government (see chapter 4, below).

If nationalism could not be found in the Italy of the mid-eighteenth century, reformism, and a dash of liberalism – including the dream of establishing parliamentary, constitutional government – could. Republicanism (with related notions of participatory citizenship and municipal liberties) was deeply rooted, even at a popular level, in various parts of the peninsula, including Venice and Genoa and their territories, Milan, Lucca, Florence and the rest of Tuscany, the Romagna and Umbria. Some of these attitudes had been strengthened by the Italian Enlightenment (Illuminismo), which, as Franco Venturi has shown, was very influential throughout the peninsula and especially in the main cities. The Kingdom of Naples was one of the few effectively independent states, and its capital retained a deserved cultural prestige. Together with Florence and Milan, it was one of the three main centres of Illuminismo. As early as the 1680s, encouraged by a Spanish viceroy, what was called a ‘new civilization’ flowered in Naples.³ When Charles III became King of Naples and Sicily in 1735 he set about improving his state, trying to reduce the power of church and nobility, to codify and reform the law, to reduce taxation and to encourage learning. But even in his case the more effective work was done after 1748.1twasin 1754 in the University of Naples that the first Chair of Political Economy in Europe was created, again by Charles III. It was held by Antonio Genovesi (1713–69), who was the first teacher in his university to lecture in Italian, rather than Latin.

In the North the best-known representative of Illuminismo was the Milanese Cesare Beccaria (1738–94). His treatise Dei delitti e delle pene (Of Crimes and Punishments), published in 1764, became one of the textbooks of the campaign to abolish the death penalty and mitigate the severity of the criminal law all over Europe. Others who deserve special notice are the brothers Pietro (1728–97) and Alessandro Verri (1741–1816), also of Milan, whose journal Il Caffé (1764–66) became the main focus of the north-Italian Illuminismo.⁴ However, it was Parma in the 1760s, when French influence was very strong there, which became a model state of the Enlightenment: the abolition of the Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jesuits (1764) were followed by a series of reforms, some of which were inspired by Etienne de Condillac (1715– 80). The most radical achievements of the period, both in thought and in action, were those patronized in Florence by the Grand Duke of Tuscany Peter Leopold (1765–90), in Milan by his mother and brother, Maria Theresa and Joseph II, and in Naples by Charles III of Spain and his son, Ferdinand IV (later, inconsiderately, known as Ferdinand I). By contrast, the Republics of Genoa and Venice and, more understandably, the Papacy were affected only slightly by the political reformism of the Illuminismo. Piedmont, except for the island of Sardinia, was a well-run state by eighteenth-century standards. It was a Mediterranean Prussia in the vision of its rulers, most of whom were resolutely militarist, but, unlike the Prussians, decidedly obscurantist (Doc. 1). They pursued efficiency without the aid of secularist theory.

When from the sphere of culture we move to that of ‘material life’, the balance is less encouraging. Eighteenth-century Italy was plagued by fragmentation (which delayed economic growth and prevented the creation of a national market) and backwardness. This was in contrast with the situation in previous centuries. Between the years 1000 and 1600, much of the peninsula had been comparatively rich and populous, and its economy uniquely advanced in Europe. There had existed a large number of flourishing towns, with a vigorous communal life. The laity had played a much greater part in political and cultural development than in other European countries. However, from the French invasion in 1498 the Italian states had been unable to compete with the new national monarchies of Western Europe, and their country had become the battlefield and the prize in the struggles between the royal houses of Valois, Habsburg and Bourbon. Around 1750 Italy was still relatively populous and urbanized, but she was by no means exceptionally rich. Not only had other countries progressed more rapidly, but the Italian economy had become absolutely depressed. Communal life had decayed, and the laity was probably less influential than in most other parts of Europe, even Roman Catholic Europe.

Italian economic development had at times followed the same course as English or French. Broadly, the late fourteenth century was a period of decline, the late sixteenth century one of advance, but from the seventeenth century decline seemed unstoppable. General factors operated against Italy. Since Columbus’s exploration of the western Atlantic in 1492, the exploitation of ocean trade by those countries with an Atlantic coastline had been followed by the irruption of their ships into the Mediterranean. Italian industries had been undercut by those of Britain and the Netherlands: as Immanuel Wallerstein has shown,⁵ highly paid, skilled Venetian and Florentine artisans lost growing slices of an expanding market to the coarser but cheaper manufacturers of the north. The problem was compounded by the wars fought in Italy in the early sixteenth century and the early eighteenth century, which disrupted trade, diverted resources and stifled demand. Wars brought with them effective loss of sovereignty on the side of many of the Italian states, and loss of power for the mercantile bourgeoisie who had spearheaded economic achievements in the previous centuries. Finally, Spanish cont...