Southern rebels against Italian unification: the Great Brigandage in the province of Capitanata

This article explores counter-revolutionary brigandage in Southern Italy after 1860 (also known as Great Brigandage). Working from archival sources, the article offers a new interpretation of the interactions between the political, social and criminal aspects of the guerrilla war against the Risorgimento. Notwithstanding the plurality of the individual motives leading single actors to fight, it is argued that brigandage was an essentially political phenomenon and that the alliances between common bandits and loyalist forces were made possible only in the macro-political setting of the collapse of the Neapolitan monarchy, the difficulties facing Italian state-building, and the emergence of popular legitimist sympathies after 1860.     

Aristocratic Liberalism and Risorgimento: Cesare Balbo and Piedmontese Political Thought after 1848

The paper discusses the political thought of Cesare Balbo (1789–1853), a leading Risorgimento moderate liberal and politician, in the context of the efforts by the Piedmontese political elite to support and legitimise the constitutional regime introduced by King Charles Albert in 1848. Revising current interpretations of Risorgimento moderate liberalism as backward and provincial, it seeks to locate the political thought of Balbo and his colleagues at the heart of contemporary European, and particularly French, debates regarding liberty and aristocracy. In particular, it argues that the views of Balbo and more broadly Piedmontese moderate liberals on centralisation, the importance of a social elite to defend freedom, and equalisation, were conversant with the ideas of Guizot, Chateaubriand, Burke and Tocqueville. Their harsh condemnation of republican virtue, on the other hand, rendered their liberalism peculiar in the Italian context, where Tuscan moderate liberals continued to resort to the language of civic humanism after 1848 to defend their political and social model.     

Duties and rights in the thought of Giuseppe Mazzini

Abstract

In the Mazzinian sense, duties are not commandments. Duty means dià logos, dialogue. It posits a dialectical approach that welcomes different points of view, recognizes the dignity and legitimacy of diversity, is determined to understand the reason of ‘others’ for the sake of peaceful coexistence, and to oppose institutions and governments that trample on fundamental human rights. Duties in the Mazzinian sense are ethical guidelines, to be examined and applied personally on a daily basis, keeping in mind the consequences of one's actions. This definition of duty is the premise for the Mazzinian concept of republican solidarity, which rises from the awareness that everyone and everything has an assigned role and a dignity of its own, and is therefore in direct or indirect relationship with the rest.     

A Round Table discussion of The Risorgimento Revisited. Nationalism and Culture in Nineteenth Century Italy (edited by Silvana Patriarca and Lucy Riall)

Based on the Round Table discussion held at the Remarque Institute, New York University, in November 2012, this paper consists of comments on the volume of essays The Risorgimento Revisited. Nationalism and Culture in Nineteenth Century Italy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), edited by Silvana Patriarca and Lucy Riall, followed by the editors' responses.     

Between cosmopolitanism and nationhood: Italian opera in the early nineteenth century

The revival of interest in music evident in recent historiography has led to an investigation of the specifically transnational nature of musical languages and practices. This article explores the possibility of re-reading in a transnational perspective the classical theme of the relationship between the Risorgimento and opera. It focuses on two different points of view: on the one hand, the construction of the librettos as a delicate balance between European romantic narratives and dramatic themes evoking nationalistic sentiments; on the other, the fact that ideas and practices of the theatre as a vehicle of political mobilisation developed in a broad international context where Mazzini and many other nationalists found inspiration in multinational political experiences and discourses. The article concludes by saying that the meanings of terms such as cosmopolitanism and nationalism need to be carefully weighed when we look at nineteenth-century opera production. Only in the closing decades of the century did genuine competition between national traditions arise, which led in Italy to a veritable ‘obsession’ with ‘Italianness’ in music.     

Old wine in new bottles: civic nation‐building and ethnic nationalism in schooling in Piedmont,ca. 1700–1861

ABSTRACT. Gellner (1983 : 35) equates nationalism with ‘the organisation of human groups into large, centrally educated, culturally homogeneous units’. As the theorist of nationalism argues, and as recent and not so recent historical research shows, the modernisation of schooling is a defining moment in this process. The objective of this article is twofold: first, to show that during the Risorgimento schooling in Piedmont became nationalist; and second, to explain why that was the case. In doing so, it is argued that: (a) the modernisation of schooling reflected the rise of laissez faire liberalism, industrialisation and the enfranchisement of the middle class; and (b) the leadership of the Risorgimento revived pre‐modern ethnic symbols of patriotism to legitimate inequality and state formation under conditions of individualism.     

25 April 1994 – 17 March 2011: symbolic dates of the past and Italy's transition

The twenty-year political period on which this paper focuses opened and closed with two highly symbolic commemorations. On 25 April 1994, just a few weeks after the electoral victory of the political alliance led by Silvio Berlusiconi (Pole of Liberty), more than 500,000 people took to the streets to commemorate the anti-Fascist foundations of the post-war Italian Republic: this was a timely reaction that ran counter to the climate of disaffection that since the 1980s had marked the annual celebrations of the Liberation. The second commemoration was on the night of 11 March 2011, when thousands of citizens took part in the ‘All Night Tricolor’ parties that marked the start of the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of Italian Unification. The scale of popular participation was in part a response to President Ciampi's commitment to re-launching a sense of ‘civil religion’, to the variety of ways in which the event was turned into a spectacle and the work of the organizing committee. But it also reflected the ways in which the significance of the commemoration of the distant founding of the Kingdom of Italy was considered to be ‘above’ (even ‘anti’) party politics. Both commemorations were rooted deeply in Italian history but took place in very different institutional circumstances: this essays compares the two commemorations and how they illustrate the changing political cultures in the time of the Italian transition.     

Challenging intellectual hierarchies. Hegel in Risorgimento political thought: an introduction

ABSTRACT

The introduction to this special issue rethinks Italy’s liberal tradition and nineteenth-century Italian political thought in transnational perspective, with particular focus on the role of Italian Hegelianism during the emergence of the modern Italian nation state. Starting from an attempt to recast the transnational dimension of the Risorgimento, this co-authored article relates existing studies of Italian Hegelianism to wider trends in intellectual history elsewhere in Europe. Introducing the different contributions to this special issue, our approach challenges notions of centre and periphery in the history of intellectual flows, and helps to free the history of the Risorgimento from self-incurred exceptionalism.     

Spying in the British Post Office,Victorian Politics and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White

In 1844, the British public learned that the government was secretly opening exiled Young Italy leader Giuseppe Mazzini’s private letters and sharing information with continental authorities. For outraged citizens, espionage in that quintessential liberal institution, the reformed British Post Office, appeared un-English, despotic and criminal, the makings of a Gothic plot. Representations of the Post Office Scandal in Parliament and print predict the revision of the Gothic into the sensation novel that occurred with the publication of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White. Attention to the fields of Anglo-Italian studies, mid-Victorian print culture and the development of narrative form in the mid-nineteenth century illustrates the historical and political implications of letter-opening for the emergence of a new fictional genre. The Post Office Espionage Scandal and The Woman in White share a central place in a mid-Victorian moment of evolution in the mutually constitutive relationship between Italian and British national identities, producing and reflecting a crisis in Britishness focused on the secret tyrannies concealed beneath the surface of Victorian liberalism. The letter-opening scandal reveals a crisis in Victorian liberalism in the political realm and the media, while The Woman in White translates this Victorian crisis of confidence into a literary genre defined by exposing the sordid undercurrents of British society: sensation fiction. Together, the espionage scandal and Collins’s novel respond to and generate a challenge to Victorian complacency that emerged out of the collision of British and Italian politics and culture in the mid-nineteenth century.     

Echoes of tradition: Liang Qichao’s reflections on the Italian Risorgimento and the construction of Chinese nationalism

This paper examines how Liang Qichao viewed the Italian Risorgimento, with the focus on his reflections on its meanings in the historical contexts of Chinese politics and tradition. It will identify and analyze the many forces and ideas that influenced Liang as he formulated his reflections, especially the timing around the turn of the twentieth century and the discourses of nascent nationalism in Japan where Liang lived in exile. The way Liang created – or recreated – the Italian story demonstrated that the Chinese had finally begun to realize a crucial point about the building of a modern nation. While Britain, the United States, and France were able to build a modern nation by starting from the grass roots and more closely observing Enlightenment ideals, China did not have the luxury or the time to follow the same path. In the age of high imperialism, the weak would simply be weeded out quickly. Without national salvation, there could be no modern nation. National salvation, as exemplified by the Risorgimento, involved maintaining and glorifying the country’s own traditions and core values, which would in turn unify different social segments. Liang and his fellow reformers realized the importance of having simultaneously a national cause, a single political party, and a single leader, instead of having to take separate steps toward awakening. Liang’s awakening paved the way for the unfolding of the great Chinese revolutions of the twentieth century, led first by the Kuomintang and then by the Communists. Following Liang’s track of thinking, they both strived to build – or rebuild – a political centralism.