Sensibilities of the Risorgimento: Reason and Passions in Political Thought 9004360913, 9789004360914

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Sensibilities of the Risorgimento

Studies in the History of Political Thought Edited by Terence Ball (Arizona State University) Annelien de Dijn (University of Amsterdam) Jorn Leonhard (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg) Wyger Velema (University of Amsterdam) Advisory Board Janet Coleman (London School of Economics and Political Science, uk) Vittor Ivo Comparato (University of Perugia, Italy) Jacques Guilhaumou (cnrs, France) Jöhn Marshall (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, usa) Markku Peltonen (University of Helsinki, Finland)

volume 12

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ship

Sensibilities of the Risorgimento Reason and Passions in Political Thought By

Roberto Romani

leiden | boston

Cover illustration: Patriotic flag (1848), with the inscription: ‘Italy be free – God wants it’. Source: italia150.it The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov lc record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2017057517

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1873-6548 isbn 978-90-04-35916-1 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-36091-4 (e-book) Copyright 2018 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Acknowledgements vii List of Abbreviations viii Map ix Introduction 1 1 Against the Passions of Revolution: Making the Moderate Sensibility, 1815–1848 26 2 Grand Vision, Minor Demands: The Themes and Sources of 1840s Moderatism 87 3 The Truths of the Heart: Passions, Sentiments, and Faith from Mazzini to Nievo 146 4 The Reason of the Elites: Constitutional Moderatism in the Kingdom of Sardinia, 1849–1861 192 Conclusion 245 Bibliography 253 Index 299

Acknowledgements This book was conceived, and much of the research behind it was carried out, while I was the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. The term I spent there in 2014 enabled me to think and write to the best of my ability – it is difficult to imagine a more congenial and stimulating place to work. The themes of this book were presented at a meeting of the ias Modern History Workshop, and I owe thanks to all participants for valuable insights and advice. In particular, I owe a special debt of gratitude to Jonathan Israel, who vigorously discussed and supported my project. The finishing touches to it were put during a stay of a few months in Berlin, for which I thank Irwin Collier and Marco Di Domizio. The Faculty of Political Sciences of the University of Teramo generously granted the scholarly leaves which made the sojourns in Princeton and Berlin possible. Some parts of this book were first set forth in article form, thus benefiting from perceptive comments by the journal referees. Chapter 4 includes the substance of ‘Reluctant Revolutionaries: Political Thought in the Kingdom of Sardinia, 1849–1859’, Historical Journal, 55 (2012), 45–73, and it also incorporates text from Sections 1 and 2 of ‘Political Thought in Action: The Moderates in 1859’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 17 (2012), 592–607. Chapter 4, h ­ owever, features substantial new material, such as a section on Cavour. I also drew from another article of mine, ‘Liberal Theocracy in the Italian Risorgimento’, ­European History Quarterly, 44 (2014), 620–50, when writing Section 8 of ­Chapter 2. I thank the copyright holders for permission to reproduce this material. I was fortunate to partecipate in the conference on the political thought of the Risorgimento, organized by Maurizio Isabella in London in 2010, as well as in the workshop on democracy in the Mediterranean 1750–1860, held in Pisa in 2013 and coordinated by Joanna Innes, Mauro Lenci, and Mark Philp. The addresses given on those occasions, and the lively discussions developing in their wake, sharpened my perspective. The final manuscript also benefited significantly from three anonymous reader reports which the Press arranged for. I am glad to recognize the help I have received during my work on this book from Eugenio Biagini, Maddalena Carli, Antonio Chiavistelli, Michael Drolet, Giulia Fermani, Massimo Carlo Giannini, Christopher Hamlin, Kaja HarterUibopuu, Colin Heydt, Joanna Innes, Maurizio Isabella, Richard Whatmore, Yücel Yanikdağ, Carlo Zappia, and Marian Zelazny. Finally, I would like to thank the library staff at the Institute for Advanced Study, at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, and at the Library of the University of Teramo. The book is dedicated to D.

List of Abbreviations amto ccdp ccts daru data dbi

dso jmis seim

Alessandro Manzoni, Tutte le opere, ed. Alberto Chiari et al. (6 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1954–1991). Camillo Cavour, Discorsi parlamentari, ed. Adolfo Omodeo et al. (15 vols., Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1932–73). Camillo Cavour, Tutti gli scritti, ed. Carlo Pischedda and Giuseppe Talamo (4 vols., Turin: Centro studi piemontesi, 1976–8). Massimo d’Azeglio, Scritti e discorsi politici, ed. Marcus de Rubris (2 vols., Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1931). Massimo d’Azeglio, Scritti politici e letterari, ed. Marco Tabarrini (2 vols., Florence: Barbèra, 1872). Dizionario biografico degli italiani (82 vols., Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia italiana, 1960-). Page numbers are not supplied as references are to its electronic version; see . Francesco De Sanctis, Opere, ed. Carlo Muscetta et al. (24 vols., Turin: ­Einaudi, 1951–75). Journal of Modern Italian Studies. Giuseppe Mazzini, Edizione nazionale degli scritti: Scritti editi e inediti (100 vols., Imola: Galeati, 1906–43).

Map 1

Political map of Italy, 1815–1859. Source: Wikimedia Commons; licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution – Share Alike 3.0 Unported.

Introduction Aucun pays n’est moins fait que l’Italie pour être livrée au gouvernement populaire, car la première condition pour l’existence de ce genre de gou­ vernment manque aux Italiens; ils n’ont dans le caractère ni le sérieux ni la tenue necessaires; en un mot ce n’est point un peuple. klemens von metternich 1

∵ 1

Moralising Political Argument

Patriotic sentiment took various and disparate forms during the Italian Risor­ gimento, as censorship made the overt expression of opinions impossible. ­Literature became the chief vehicle of Italians’ aspirations, through the works of Vittorio Alfieri, Ugo Foscolo, Alessandro Manzoni, Massimo d’Azeglio, Fran­ cesco Domenico Guerrazzi, and others.2 There was a wealth of poems, novels, histories, and even opera librettos with political and patriotic overtones. Con­ temporaries spotted an ‘Italian’ meaning in, say, a historical essay extolling the Italian republics of the Middle Ages, or in an opera chorus in which the Jews in Babylonian captivity yearned for a ‘lost country’.3 An economic journalism inspired by the will to emulate the most developed countries flourished, and the idea of modernity it disseminated led to suspicious requests like free trade among the Italian states and the construction of a railway network on the peninsula. It was only in the 1840s that a platform of administrative reforms – known as the ‘moderate’ programme – could become public, taking advantage both of a relaxation of censorship and the timidity of its demands. The confines of Risorgimento political thought, therefore, are difficult to delimit. Besides, its fuzziness entailed its peculiarity, in the sense that it was 1 Metternich to Anton von Apponyi, 8 Jan. 1833, quoted in Guillaume de Bertier de Sauvigny, Metternich et son temps (Paris, 1959), 172. 2 See Luigi Derla, Letteratura e politica tra la Restaurazione e l’Unità (Milan, 1977). Throughout the book, the term ‘patriotism’ and its variants (‘patriot’, ‘patriotic’) will refer not only to the advocacy of independence from the Austrians, but also to a demand for political reform; the two issues went together. 3 It is the chorus ‘Va, pensiero’ in Giuseppe Verdi’s Nabucco (1842).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004360914_002

2

INTRODUCTION

unsystematic, situated, and poor in theoretical content. Most of Giuseppe Mazzini’s writings, which circulated clandestinely, were poignant but short, and hardly exhaustive from a theoretical point of view; while the afore­ mentioned moderatism of the 1840s intricately mixed political arguments with historical reconstructions, grand philosophical visions, and eulogies of ­Catholicism. A  full-scale treatise on representative government, penned by Gian ­Domenico Romagnosi, appeared in Switzerland in 1815, and was followed by other works, written by émigrés and published abroad, on constitutional matters; but the subject was taken up again on the peninsula only after the revolutions of ­1848–9 (and only in Piedmont, the sole regional state where the constitution promulgated in 1848 was maintained). It is obvious that the patriotic beliefs would have been differently expressed, had censorship not been in place. But another reason, relative to the substance of Risorgimento culture, helps account for the peculiarity of political thought – for the variety of its forms and the rarity of abstract analysis. Moral arguments were sistematically grafted on to political reflection. The years between 1815 and 1848, in particular, witnessed a unique emotional climate, to the effect that each of the two major political positions (Mazzinian r­ epublicanism and ­moderatism) went with the construction of a specific ‘sentimental universe’.4 Their programmes for the emancipation of Italy included pleas for certain ­attitudes and virtues, in the belief that a new type of ‘man’ was, at the same time, the driving force and the outcome of the national resurgence. The heavy moralisation of the political discourse followed, first, from the centrality of religion to both moderates and Mazzinians. Religion imparted legitimacy and content to the struggle, although it meant different things to the two camps. The moderates d’Azeglio, Vincenzo Gioberti, and Cesare ­Balbo regarded the Risorgimento as the decisive step towards a new Christianisa­ tion (or, more precisely, Catholicisation) of Europe, while Mazzini advo­ cated a ‘religion of humanity’, a church of the free and equal with no popes, clergy, or laity. A second reason for the relevance of the ethic element lies in the fact that Italians demanded not only greater freedoms, but also the fulfil­ ment of nationhood after centuries of foreign oppression. In the age of Ro­ manticism, nationhood had a transcendent foundation, taking the form of a comprehensive national epic in which the people’s aspirations were morally and culturally validated. Third, patriots were aware that a broad cultural, so­ cial, and economic revival should accompany the expulsion of the Austrians. 4 The expression is in Luigi Mascilli Migliorini, ‘Vita civile e storia nazionale: Tommaseo e i moderati toscani’, in Roberta Turchi and Alessandro Volpi (eds.), Niccolò Tommaseo e Firenze (Florence, 2000), 12.

Introduction

3

An author all read, Machiavelli, had warned of the dangers of introducing liberty to a country whose citizens lacked public spirit. The vices of the inhab­ itants of the peninsula, and of the upper classes in particular, were regularly pointed out and denounced during the Risorgimento, especially by moder­ ates. The national renaissance required overcoming indolence, servility, selfindulgence, and effeminacy.5 Moralising political argument has not been exclusive to Risorgimento writ­ ers, of course. Take republicanism for example. An all too protean concept in intellectual history, it can be apprehended as a language, a paradigm, or an ideology (in Geertz’s sense), but a moral argument was in any case one of its essential components.6 To avoid speaking in generalities, and with reference to modern history, in France the eighteenth century witnessed several ‘republican’ writers combining the promotion of liberty (variously intended) with the view that martial courage, public spiritedness, and frugality were needed to d­ efend it against absolutism and the corruption it entailed. Mably and Rousseau – of the latter, Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne and Projet de constitution pour la Corse are especially relevant – come immediately to mind.7 The framers of the American constitution held a pessimistic notion of ‘man’, indi­ cating the opportunity of certain precautionary devices against the abuses of power: ‘what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?’, Madison wondered.8 When a ‘republican sensibility’ arose in France with the Revolution, the shaping of a ‘new man’ impervious to monarchical vices was the revolutionaries’ ‘central dream’, in Mona Ozouf’s words.9 John Stuart Mill, too, devised a political sensibility, as evidenced by his ad­ vocacy of ‘individuality’ in On liberty and of duty and ‘the sentiments’ in the St. Andrews address. Mill’s many-sided individuals felt the need to shift involve­ ments between the public and the private spheres, coupling self-cultivation

5 Silvana Patriarca, Italian Vices: Nation and Character from the Risorgimento to the Republic (Cambridge, 2013), Ch. 1. 6 On the various meanings of republicanism, see Daniel T. Rodgers, ‘Republicanism: The ­Career of a Concept’, Journal of American History, 79 (1992), 11–38. 7 Roberto Romani, National Character and Public Spirit in Britain and France, 1750–1914 ­(Cambridge, 2002), 37–46, 53–7. 8 Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison, The Federalist, ed. George W. Carey and James McClellan (1787–8; Indianapolis, 2001), 269 (n. 51). 9 Mona Ozouf, ‘La Révolution française et la formation de l’homme nouveau’, in id., L’homme régénéré: Essais sur la Révolution française (Paris, 1989), 116–157, quot. at 125; David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 140–168.

4

INTRODUCTION

with participation in communal life.10 A further example is the development of liberal demands within non-political voluntary associations in nineteenthcentury Germany and Austria. The members of artisans’ societies, charitable and educational associations, and the like articulated shared concerns about public issues in moral terms. In Leipzig, for instance, the founders of the gym­ nastics club forged the ideal of a liberal ‘new man’, suited to participation in a constitutional state.11 The starting point of this book is the acknowledgement that political thought as usually intended – the discussion on government, liberty, rights, etc. – inextricably merged with musings about virtues and character, during the phase of the Risorgimento ending with 1848. Two coherent psychological and characteriological wholes are distinguishable, one conveyed by modera­ tism and the other by Mazzinianism. Before proceeding to specify subject mat­ ter and historiographical context of the book, it is fitting to sketch the main events and ideas of the Risorgimento in the next two sections. 2

The Risorgimento in a Nutshell

The restoration sanctioned in Vienna in 1815 found its major challenge in the Italian peninsula.12 Revolutions in the kingdoms of the Two Sicilies and 10 In The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. John M. Robson et al. (Toronto and L­ ondon, 1963–91), see On Liberty (1859), xviii, 213–309, and Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of St. Andrews (1867), xxi, 217–57. See Nancy L. Rosenblum, Another Liberalism: Romanticism and the Reconstruction of Liberal Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), 138–40; Michael Freeden, ‘Liberal Passions: Reason and Emotion in Late- and Post-Victorian Lib­ eral Thought’, in Peter Ghosh and Lawrence Goldman (eds.), Politics and Culture in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 2006), 141. 11 Páll Björnsson, ‘Liberalism and the Making of the “New Man”: The Case of Gymnasts in Leipzig, 1845–1871’, in James Retallack (ed.), Saxony in German history: Culture, Society, and Politics, 1830–1933 (Ann Arbor, mi, 2000), 151–65. More generally, see Thomas Nipperdey, ‘Verein als soziale Struktur in Deutschland im späten 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert’, in id., Gesellschaft, Kultur, Theorie: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur neueren Geschichte (Göttingen, 1976), 174–205; Hanns Haas, ‘Politische, kulturelle und wirtschaftliche Gruppierungen in Westösterreich’, in Adam Wandruszka, Helmut Rumpler, and Peter Urbanitsch (eds.), Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848–1918 (Vienna, 1973–2016), vol. viii, Part i, pp. 227–395. It can be added that a Risorgimento author of democratic leanings, Giuseppe Ferrari, posited that all systems of thought were ‘harmoniously supported’ by corresponding ‘sentiments’; see Giuseppe Ferrari, Essai sur le principe et les limites de la philosophie de l’histoire (Paris, 1843), 34–40, and below Ch. 3, Sect. 5. 12 For an overview of the history of the period, see Luigi Mascilli Migliorini, ‘Problema na­ zionale e coscienza europea da Aquisgrana all’Unità (1748–1861)’, in Giuseppe Galasso

Introduction

5

Piedmont-Sardinia in 1820–1 established short-lived constitutional govern­ ments; in 1830–1 there were uprisings in central Italy. Patriots called for ‘liberty’, representative monarchies, and the reform of the judiciary and the army. In Piedmont, an ‘Italian’ war to liberate Lombardy was plotted. The Carboneria was the most prominent of the secret societies that organised these upheavals. The liberal element, encouraged by the French constitutional experiments of 1814 and 1830, and the democratic element, feeding on the legacy of the Ital­ ian Jacobinism of 1796–9, attempted a problematic coexistence at the helm of the movement. The Spanish constitution of 1812 – strongly limiting royal pre­ rogatives through a single elective chamber – was adopted both in Naples and Turin. The debate on constitutional issues lacked doctrinal content, however, even in Naples, where the revolution lasted for nine months.13 These coups were crushed either directly by the Austrians, or with their decisive help. The Genoese Mazzini, a former Carbonaro, founded Giovine Italia (Young Italy) in Marseille in 1831. Doing away with Carboneria’s gradualism and ob­ scurity concerning ends, Giovine Italia had a programme advocating a united, democratic, and republican Italy. The society’s clandestine propaganda met with remarkable success, which dwindled in the wake of a series of doomed uprisings and expeditions Mazzini organised in 1834–7. The patriots who re­ jected his insurrectional tactics in favour of peaceful means managed to put forward a public programme of reforms, labelling it ‘moderate’ rather than liberal, by exploiting the enthusiasm raised by Gioberti’s Del primato morale e civile degli italiani (1843). Historians have continued to use the terms ‘moder­ ates’ and ‘moderatism’, which in fact indicate the prudent character of these patriots’ demands. Moderatism’s chief authors were three Piedmontese: the philosopher Gioberti, the historian Balbo, and the novelist and pamphleteer d’Azeglio, all bent on infusing their writings with the themes and spirit of Catholicism. Gioberti advocated an Italian confederation under the spiritual guidance of the pope; the established ruling houses were to be preserved, and consultative, rather than deliberative, assemblies were called for. The end of censorship figured prominently in the moderates’ plan of civil reforms, which was cautious because, as pointed out by Balbo in Delle speranze d’Italia (1844),

13

and Luigi Mascilli Migliorini, L’Italia moderna e l’unità nazionale (Turin, 1998), 495–640; ­Derek Beales and Eugenio F. Biagini, The Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy ­(Harlow, uk, 2002). Werner Daum, ‘Die Verfassungsdiskussion in Neapel-Sizilien 1820–1821’, in Martin Kirsch and Pierangelo Schiera (eds.), Denken und Umsetzung des Konstitutionalismus in Deutschland und anderen europäischen Ländern in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1999), 242–4. For context, see John A. Davis, Naples and Napoleon: Southern Italy and the European Revolutions, 1780–1860 (Oxford, 2006), 295–330.

6

INTRODUCTION

the independence of Italy from foreign control should take priority over po­ litical change. The moderates’ ‘neo-Guelph’ programme was widely endorsed, mobilizing sectors of opinion that Mazzini had never reached.14 It seemed that God was watching over Italy as Giovanni Maria Mastai Fer­ retti, who chose the name of Pius ix, was elected pope in 1846. He soon steered the Roman state toward reforms, raising enthusiasm and expectations of more to come. In 1846–7, under the pressure of public opinion, economic and ad­ ministrative reforms were conceded throughout Italy in a climate of patriotic zeal. The moderates’ programme of gradual amendments in each regional state appeared to be on the right track. Then, the eruption of a revolution in Sicily in January, 1848 was followed by widespread uprisings and disturbances, lead­ ing to the granting of constitutions in the kingdoms of Sardinia and the Two Sicilies, in the Papal States, and in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. All documents laid out a representative system in which significant power was ascribed to the monarch. The Piedmontese charter, the Statuto, was a particularly conservative document. In March, successful revolutions took place in Venice, where a re­ public was declared, and in Milan, which Mazzini reached from exile in L­ ondon in April. The war waged by the kingdom of Sardinia against Austria ended in failure: an armistice had to be signed in July, and the resumption in hostilities in 1849 led to a conclusive defeat at Novara. The democratic groups gained the upper hand over the moderates in Rome, and, when the minister of jus­ tice Pellegrino Rossi was assassinated, the pope fled the city (November, 1848). The new republican government, with Mazzini as one of its leaders, e­ nacted a progressive constitution establishing universal male suffrage and an extensive set of rights.15 Rome held out against an expeditionary force dispatched by the French republic until July, 1849, while Venice resisted until August. 14

15

To make an example, moderatism and Giobertism in particular worked in Naples as a catalyst for the amalgamation of political and philosophical groups, previously separated; see Guido Oldrini, La cultura filosofica napoletana dell’Ottocento (Bari, 1973), 246–56; id., ‘L’apprendistato filosofico prequarantottesco di De Sanctis’, in Carlo Muscetta (ed.), Francesco De Sanctis nella storia della cultura (Bari, 1984), i, 20–7. On a federal organization as the preferred outcome before 1848, notwithstanding Mazzini’s propaganda, see Franco Della Peruta, ‘La federazione nel dibattito politico risorgimentale: 1814–1847’, in id., Conservatori, liberali e democratici nel Risorgimento (Milan, 1989), 311–39. The Guelphs were the citizens of the Italian city-states who supported the pope against the Holy Roman emperor in the Middle Ages. For the constitutions of 1848–9, see Eugenio F. Biagini, ‘Citizenship and Religion in the Italian Constitutions, 1796–1849’, History of European Ideas, 37 (2011), 211–17; Pier Luigi Bal­ lini, ‘Élites, popolo, assemblee: Le leggi elettorali del 1848–49 negli stati pre-unitari’, in id. (ed.), 1848–49: Costituenti e costituzioni. Daniele Manin e la Repubblica di Venezia (Venice,

Introduction

7

The patriotic movement was in disarray at the end of the revolutionary bien­ nium, and not only because of military defeat. The moderates, already alarmed by the spectre of socialism materializing in Paris, feared the increasing influ­ ence of the democrats and were weakened by regional rivalries. The plan of an Italian confederation was discredited, as the princes and the pope reneged on their concessions as soon as Austria re-imposed its hegemony by force of arms. Many patriots, furthermore, regarded the reluctance of the Piedmontese army to enlist volunteers from other regions, and the haste with which the annexation of Lombardy had been carried out, as proof that the dynasty of Savoy was merely pursuing its traditional policy of territorial aggrandisement in northern Italy. As for the left, Mazzini’s leadership was challenged from various quarters in the aftermath of the revolutions, in spite of the great prestige that the heroic defence of the Roman republic had gained him. Influential republicans like the Milanese Carlo Cattaneo and Giuseppe Ferrari denounced his willingness to compromise with the Piedmontese monarchy, and proposed, in contrast with his unitarianism, the creation of a federation of democratic republics reflect­ ing Italy’s diverse political and cultural traditions. Both Mazzini and his critics wanted to empower the people (popolo), but he opposed socialism and class struggle while Ferrari and others stressed the necessity of a social revolution besides the political one.16 On the practical plane, Mazzini’s reputation was tarnished by further cases of useless bloodshed. First a failed insurrection in Milan (1853), and then a disastrous expedition to Sapri in southern Italy, led by Carlo Pisacane (1857), confirmed how mistaken Mazzini’s tactics was. Im­ pressed by Camillo Cavour’s skill, Daniele Manin, the leader of the Venitian revolution, renounced the republic as a precondition for his support of Pied­ mont’s ‘Italian’ policy. Manin, together with some former Mazzinians, helped found the Società nazionale italiana (Italian national society), committed to unification under the house of Savoy, in July, 1857. Manin’s letter to The Times (1856), taking issue with the allegedly Mazzinian ‘theory of the dagger’ – his endorsement of political assassinations, that is – speaks volumes about the new climate.17 The crisis of the left also owed much to Napoleon iii’s rise to

16 17

2002), 107–224. The constitution of Venice, too, was progressive in sanctioning universal male suffrage and equality of rights for all citizens regardless of religion. Franco Della Peruta, I democratici e la rivoluzione italiana (1958; Milan, 1981). See Alessandro Levi, La politica di Daniele Manin (Milan, 1933), 75–124; Angelo Ventura, ‘L’opera politica di Daniele Manin per la democrazia e l’unità nazionale’, in Ballini, 1848–49: Costituenti e costituzioni, 271–97. Felice Orsini, a Mazzinian until 1857, tried to

8

INTRODUCTION

power, an event which, by putting an end to the republic in France, made the possibility of its advent in Italy highly unlikely for the time being. The moderate movement regrouped in the kingdom of Sardinia, the only state where parliamentary government, and a measure of freedom with it, had survived. Piedmont became a magnet for Italians fleeing from the other states, including many prominent intellectuals. The region previously labelled as the ‘Boeotia of Italy’, with reference to the part of Greece that was p ­ roverbial for the stupidity of its inhabitants, then enjoyed a decade of remarkable c­ ultural production and intense political discussion.18 Journalism flourished and pub­ lic opinion developed, in parallel with the growing importance of parliament in decision-making processes. With the brief interlude of a government led by Gioberti, who had turned democratic, at the beginning of 1849, the m ­ oderate liberals were uninterruptedly in charge. A parliamentary alliance ­between ­Cavour’s centre-right and Urbano Rattazzi’s centre-left formed at the end of 1852, strengthening Cavour’s power. A comprehensive programme of ­reforms was implemented: the privileges enjoyed by the Catholic Church were r­ educed, free trade was put into effect, and the state was modernized. M ­ oderatism turned constitutional, adopting Burke and the French Doctrinaires as lodestars. A sequence of events, ultimately leading to the creation of an Italian state, was set in motion in the wake of Piedmont’s participation in the Crimean war (1854–6). Once the Piedmontese and French armies defeated the Austrians in the war of 1859, and Lombardy was annexed to Piedmont, universal-suffrage plebiscites were held in central Italy to legitimise its union with Piedmont. Between May and July, 1860, the kingdom of the Two Sicilies was conquered by Giuseppe Garibaldi and his ‘Thousands’, thus reviving the prestige of the democratic initiative. Garibaldi, however, refused to challenge the Piedmon­ tese as some democrats suggested, and surrendered his conquests to king Vic­ tor Emmanuel II. Another plebiscite ratified the annexation of the south to the Piedmontese monarchy. The deputies of the first Italian parliament were as­ sembled in Turin in February, 1861, and on 17 March the parliament proclaimed Victor Emmanuel king of Italy. Rome was declared the capital of the new state, even though it had remained under the rule of the pope. The Italian state was not recognized by Pius ix, who in 1868 forbade Catholics to vote.19 By doing so,

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assassinate­ Napoleon iii in January, 1858, causing the death of eight people; the ensuing wave of indignation further damaged Mazzini’s programme. See Marco Meriggi, ‘Torino e il Piemonte visti dal Regno lombardo-veneto’, in Umberto Levra (ed.), Il Piemonte alle soglie del 1848 (Rome, 1999), 707–21. The policy of abstaining from the polls in parliamentary elections was promulgated through a decree of the Holy Penitentiary. The prohibition did not apply to communal

Introduction

9

‘he dealt a devastating blow’ to the legitimacy of the new state, as Italians had to choose between conflicting loyalties.20 3

Risorgimento Political Thought: Introductory Remarks

The events just recounted went with a fervid intellectual production. To intro­ duce the readers to it, this section comments on three major themes. The first is the relationship between the ideas of the Risorgimento and the p ­ olitical cultures of Enlightenment and Napoleonic Italy. That relationship was ­complex, hence general statements are elusive. Yet, there was a strand of the Enlightenment that both moderates and Mazzinians opposed: that fostering u ­ tilitarianism, materialism, and individualism, and ­disseminating ­irreligiosity.21 As regards the moderates in 1815–48, they hardly referred to m ­ ajor philosophes like P ­ ietro Verri or Cesare Beccaria, probably because of their adherence to some of Helvétius’s or Bentham’s ideas. What is more, many moderates established a link between the Napoleonic regime in Italy, which had oppressed and ha­ rassed the Church, and that radical current of the ­Enlightenment. Not only did they regard the patriots running the republics in 1796–9 as genuine Jacobins, but even a writer in the spirit of Burke like ­Vincenzo Cuoco, who in 1801 had criticised the Neapolitan revolutionaries’ abstractedness, was largely ignored. He had held major posts in the administrative systems of Napoleonic Italy.22 The moderates believed the Risorgimento to be not in continuity with it but in opposition to it, although they acknowledged the progress represented by the

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21

22

political bodies. See David I. Kertzer, ‘Religion and Society, 1789–1892’, in John A. Davis (ed.), Italy in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2000), 191–6. Lucy Riall, The Italian Risorgimento: State, Society, and National Unification (London and New York, 1994), 79. For an overview, see John Pollard, Catholicism in Modern Italy: Religion, Society and Politics since 1861 (Abingdon, uk, 2008). See Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity (Oxford, 2001); id., Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750–1790 (Oxford, 2011), 326–73. Manzoni, however, was a friend and admirer of Cuoco. The author of I promessi sposi had personal connections with central figures of the Enlightenment: Beccaria was Manzoni’s maternal grandfather, and a younger brother of Verri’s was his natural father. During the years he spent in Paris in the first decade of the century, he moved in the circle of the Idéologues. See Piero Floriani, ‘Manzoni, Alessandro’, dbi, lxix, 2007. The reference to Cuoco (1770–1823) concerns his Saggio storico sulla rivoluzione napoletana del 1799, ed. Nino Cor­ tese (Florence, 1926).

10

INTRODUCTION

adoption of the French legal codes on almost the whole peninsula, as well as the creation of an ‘Italian’ army. Mazzini’s perspective was different, in that he interpreted the eighteenth century as the phase in which individual liberties were affirmed and estab­ lished, thus opening the way for the revolutionaries of the following century to fight for social goals. But, since ‘liberty destroys rather than create’, he too did not feel any closeness to the Enlightenment.23 Mazzini was too imbued with Romanticism to appreciate eighteenth-century rationalism. A Risorgimento writer who unreservedly drew inspiration from the Italian Enlightenment was Cattaneo, and another was the proto-socialist Pisacane in the 1850s. Gener­ ally speaking, the Italian past was acknowledged selectively by patriots. Some proudly asserted their kinship with specific writers of various epochs: Balbo had a youthful fascination with Alfieri and penned a book on Dante A ­ lighieri, Ferrari wrote at length on Vico and Romagnosi, the Catholic Aufklärer and moderate Antonio Rosmini praised Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Mazzini idol­ ized Foscolo, etc. The second theme concerns the European dimension of the political thought of the Risorgimento. Neither the fragmentation of Italy, nor the na­ tionalism with which authors were imbued, made for insularity. Gioberti es­ poused the myth of the primacy of Italian civilization in his Primato, a book meant to stimulate national pride, but no other major pieces of chauvinism are on record.24 Patriots usually depicted the Italian resurgence as an episode within Europe-wide historical processes, like re-Christianisation or democrat­ ic revolution. In the 1850s, the explicit gist of Cavour’s activities was to put the peninsula back on the path of European progress. Europe meant France, to a significant extent, and it could hardly be otherwise, in consideration not only of Napoleonic rule but also of the impact of the French revolutions of 1830 and 1848, and of the alliance resulting in the war of 1859. All educated Ital­ ians spoke French, and many patriots lived in France in exile at some point.25 There resulted a love-hate relationship with all things French, including ideas. Although not a few Italians declared their dislike of French politics and cul­ ture (especially in the 1830s and 1840s), French thought retained a special 23 24

25

Mazzini to Luigi Amedeo Melegari, 2 Oct. 1833, quoted in Alessandro Levi, La filosofia politica di Giuseppe Mazzini, ed. Salvo Mastellone (1916–22; Naples, 1967), 115. See Luigi Salvatorelli, Il pensiero politico italiano dal 1700 al 1870 (1935; 6th rev. ed., 1959; Turin, 1975), 276–8. Possibly, the Francophobic Gioberti was reacting to Guizot’s, ­Michelet’s, and other French writers’ assertions that the civilization of France was unsurpassed. In the kingdom of Sardinia, French was learned as first language by the aristocracy, and was used at court. It was the second language of the upper classes in the rest of Italy.

Introduction

11

authoritativeness and relevance to all of them. Guizot and Lamennais (the lat­ ter in all his incarnations) were particularly influential, as the following chap­ ters will show. Instead, the acquaintance with German and British authors was selective.26 The moderates’ blend of liberal demands with Catholicism had counter­ parts, although in general terms only, in France, Belgium, Ireland, and Poland. Moderatism was one of the European movements testing the Church – which, pace Pius ix’s signals before 1849, identified with political reaction – in the first half of the nineteenth century.27 The moderate camp featured two writers who had remarkable success outside Italy during their lifetime, Manzoni and Silvio Pellico – the latter recounted his long detention in an Austrian jail – and one who has received increasing international recognition since his death in 1855, the philosopher Rosmini. But no other Risorgimento author was of ­greater ­international renown than Mazzini, in his time and beyond. The founder not only of Giovine Italia but also of Giovine Europa (1834–6), Mazzini was the interlocutor of Marx and Bakunin, Carlyle and Stuart Mill, Louis Blanc and Proudhon.28

26

27

28

Haller, Kant, and Reid were duly read by the moderates, who also knew well Burke and the Whig tradition, Walter Scott, and the German historians Leo and Savigny. Hegel was the dominant influence over a small group of Neapolitans, including Francesco De Sanctis and the Spaventa brothers, who were active in Piedmont in the 1850s. British and German Romantics from Byron to Schlegel, and perhaps Carlyle, helped shape Mazzini’s vision, which was affected by the circumstances of the class struggle in England. The political evolution of French intransigents, the alliance between liberals and Catho­ lics in Belgium, and similar developments in Ireland and Poland undermined ‘throne and altar’ government all over Europe after the July Revolution. See Nicholas Atkin and Frank Tallett, Priests, Prelates, and People: A History of European Catholicism since 1750 (Oxford, 2003), Ch. 3. Although the encyclical Mirari vos (1832) disbanded the movement grouped around Lamennais’s l’Avenir, in France the years 1844–7 witnessed a major campaign for liberty of education carried out by a large coalition of Catholic forces, whose leader was Montalembert. See Georges Weill, Histoire du Catholicisme libéral en France, 1828–1908 (Paris, 1909), 71–90. On the waves of anticlerical legislation in Spain, where the clergy was politically polarised and a ‘liberal Catholic’ current failed to gain ground, see José Manuel Cuenca Toribio, ‘Il cattolicesimo liberale spagnolo: I motivi di un’assenza’, in Ettore Pas­ serin d’Entrèves et al., I cattolici liberali nell’Ottocento, tr. Antonio Dimino (1974; Turin, 1976), 103–112; Stanley G. Payne, Spanish Catholicism: An Historical Overview (Madison, wi, 1984), 71–121. C.A. Bayly and Eugenio F. Biagini (eds.), Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalisation of Democratic Nationalism 1830–1920 (Oxford, 2008). The case of Garibaldi, who already in the 1850s was an international celebrity, is not relevant here for he was a man of action only.

12

INTRODUCTION

Italians felt and thought like Europeans, but their attitude to foreigners was sentimentally complicated, and unexpectedly so, given the problematic nature of any Italian identity during the Risorgimento.29 Italians were well aware that generations of northern travellers and observers had regarded them – their acceptance of decadence, basically – as the moral conundrum of the conti­ nent.30 Granted that Italians’ dialogue with European and especially French culture was constant and fruitful, that dialogue, far from being morally and emotionally neutral, fed on strong feelings going from an inferiority complex to fierce national pride. To the moderates, in particular, the twin feelings of honour and shame, often perceived in relation to the foreign nationals’ ‘con­ demnatory gaze’, acted as chief motivations for action. They endeavoured to build feelings of self-respect and dignity out of the celebration of past glories through history and literature.31 The third remark is that the Risorgimento was a movement of intellectu­ als, in a twofold sense. First, few of the major writers failed to play important political roles. Gioberti, Balbo, and d’Azeglio had spells as prime ministers in Piedmont; Cavour was a brilliant economist before turning to parliamentary politics; and on the left, too, combining political participation with intellec­ tual production was the rule, as Mazzini, Pisacane, Guerrazzi and many others show. Manzoni was an exception, while Rosmini and Cattaneo limited their involvement to a few crucial months in 1848–9. Second, both moderatism and democratism ascribed the leadership of the movement to the intellectuals, on the grounds of their understanding of the laws of progress. Gioberti and Ferrari

29 30

31

On the emerging cult of Garibaldi, see Lucy Riall, Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (New Haven, 2007). See Albert R. Ascoli and Krystyna von Henneberg (eds.), Making and Remaking Italy: The Cultivation of National Identity around the Risorgimento (Oxford, 2001). See e.g. Germaine de Staël, Corinne ou l’Italie, ed. Simone Balayé (1807; Paris, 1985), bk. i, Ch. 5, pp. 46–8; bk. iv, Ch. 3, pp. 98–107; Johann W. Goethe, Italienische Reise (1816–29; Leipzig, 1914), 217–18 (13 Mar. 1787), 350–7 (28 May 1787); Heinrich Heine, Reisebilder: Nachträge (1826–31), ed. Alfred Opitz, in id., Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werk (Hamburg, 1975–97), vol. vii, Part i, pp. 64–6. On foreigners’ perplexity, see Owen ­Chadwick, ‘The Italian Enlightenment’, in Roy S. Porter and Mikuláš Teich (eds.), The ­Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge, 1981), 92; Nelson Moe, The View from ­Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2002), ­14–19; Maurizio Isabella, Risorgimento in Exile: Italian Émigrés and the Liberal International in the Post-Napoleonic Era (Oxford, 2009), 186–212. For an introduction to the grand tour, see Cesare De Seta, L’Italia del Grand Tour: Da Montaigne a Goethe (Naples, 2001). Silvana Patriarca, ‘A Patriotic Emotion: Shame and the Risorgimento’, in Silvana Patriarca and Lucy Riall (eds.), The Risorgimento Revisited (Basingstoke, uk, 2012), 134–51.

Introduction

13

in particular insisted on this, in the belief that philosophical reason provided the rationale for the national resurgence. Apropos philosophy, its proximity to political thought is remarkable. Both Gioberti and Rosmini put forward intri­ cate philosophical systems before tackling political issues; in the 1850s, dem­ ocrats like Ferrari, Ausonio Franchi, and Bertrando Spaventa believed that a novel philosophy had the potential to inflame the young generation.32 The fact that thinking and acting were closely linked certainly reflected a low degree of social differentiation, and, possibly, the limited size of the groups ­directing the national movement.33 But it also reflected the features of the pub­ lic sphere of the times, shaped by the written word. A new, ‘philosophical’ jour­ nalism in the style of the British reviews gradually developed throughout Italy – especially in Milan, Florence, and Naples – between 1815 and 1848, tackling literary, scientific, and economic subjects. The press also promoted the forma­ tion of a network of Italian scientists, holding regular meetings between 1839 and 1847. Journalism managed to create a ‘national’ public inasmuch as readers all over the peninsula became united by similar cultural interests, going from Dante or Vico to political economy. Cultural production, that is, generated a sense of fellow feeling and kinship. In giving new substance to the ancient no­ tion of Italy as a cultural entity, journalists conveyed a patriotic subtext which prepared the readers for more explicit political messages. If writing was a political action, intellectuals were self-conscious political leaders.34 32 33

34

Another prominent moderate, Terenzio Mamiani, was one of the foremost philosophers of the times. Stressing the intellectuals’ role does not entail challenging the recent claim that the ­Risorgimento, far from being an elite movement, saw the involvement of the masses; see Alberto M. Banti and Paul Ginsborg, ‘Per una nuova storia del Risorgimento’, in id. (ed.), Storia d’Italia: Annali, 22, Il Risorgimento (Turin, 2007), pp. xxiii–iv [henceforward referred to as Il Risorgimento]. That claim had already been made in Paul Ginsborg, Daniele Manin and the Venetian Revolution of 1848–49 (Cambridge, 1979), 369–71. On the press, see esp. Alessandro Galante Garrone and Franco Della Peruta, La stampa italiana del Risorgimento (Bari, 1979); Kent R. Greenfield, Economics and Liberalism in the Risorgimento: A study of Nationalism in Lombardy 1815–1848 (1934; Baltimore, 1965); Valerio Castronovo (ed.), La nascita dell’opinione pubblica in Italia: La stampa nella ­Torino del Risorgimento e capitale d’Italia (1848–1864) (Bari, 2004). Carlo Cattaneo’s review Il politecnico (1839–1844) has been re-published with the editorship of Luigi Ambrosoli (Turin, 1989); previously, Cattaneo had contributed to the Annali universali di statistica, a review informed by Romagnosi’s philosophical and economic outlook. On the scien­ tific congresses, see Giuseppe Carlo Marino, La formazione dello spirito borghese in Italia (Florence, 1974); Carlo Fumian, ‘Il senno delle nazioni: I congressi degli scienziati italiani dell’Ottocento’, Meridiana, 8 (1995), 95–124. On the national public, see Marino Berengo, Intellettuali e librai nella Milano della Restaurazione (Turin, 1980); Beales and Biagini,

14 4

INTRODUCTION

Two Sensibilities

This study aims to capture the nexus between the political and the moral, with reference to the two chief programmes, moderatism and Mazzinianism. The two facets of each will be distinguished in the following chapters for the sake of analysis, and the moral side will be called, for want of a better word, ‘sensi­ bility’. It refers to a specific attitude to life, both public and private; it consisted of value judgements, but also of feelings and emotions; and it crystallised into sets of personality traits. Each of the two programmes called for its own sen­ sibility, and not as a corollary but as one of its integral parts. The sensibili­ ties were more normative than descriptive, basically suggesting the shape of the Italian self to come. A most apparent difference between them concerned the role of ‘passions’ (passioni), which to the moderates had to be checked in favour of reason, whereas to the Mazzinians they should be cultivated, be­ ing indispensable to spur people into action. The dichotomy between reason and passions is so clear-cut, and so fundamental, that it structures the whole subject matter of the book. (‘Emotion’ is today used in preference to ‘passion’, but emotion, emozione in Italian, was not in common use during the Risorgi­ mento. Writers referred chiefly to passions, which, according to Barbara Rosen­ wein and Thomas Dixon, meant more or less what we mean by an emotion nowadays. Passions were powerful feelings like love, joy, sorrow, anger, etc.).35 The two sensibilities concerned men, not women, in essence because all the writers of the Risorgimento considered in the book were men, most of whom content with the traditional gender roles.36 This book is an essay in intellectual history, entailing that no attempt has been made to verify the congruence between the sensibilities traced in the texts and patriots’ actual behaviours. This amounts to a major differ­ ence with the recent historiography exploring the history of ‘emotions’ and

35

36

The Risorgimento, Ch. 4; Antonio Chiavistelli, Dallo Stato alla nazione: Costituzione e sfera pubblica in Toscana dal 1814 al 1849 (Rome, 2006); Luca Mannori, ‘Il dibattito istituzionale in Italia al tornante degli anni quaranta’, in Maria Luisa Betri (ed.), Rileggere l’Ottocento: Risorgimento e nazione (Rome, 2011), 63–76. Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, ny, 2006), 3–5; Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge, 2003), Ch. 3. But on mothers’ ‘outpouring of emotion’ for their sons involved in the struggle, see Marina d’Amelia, ‘Between Two Eras: Challenges Facing Women in the Risorgimento’, in Patriarca and Riall, The Risorgimento Revisited, 120. See also, in the same volume, Lucy Riall, ‘Men at War: Masculinity and Military Ideals in the Risorgimento’, 152–70. For biographical essays on patriot women, see Claudia Galimberti et al., Donne del Risorgimento (Bologna, 2011).

Introduction

15

‘sensibilities’.37 William Reddy, Rosenwein, and other historians have in fact aimed to go beyond culture to actual behaviours; to borrow the title of a fa­ mous essay by Lucien Febvre, their goal has been ‘to reconstitute the emo­ tional life of the past’.38 They have strived to assess the meaning of ‘all the words, gestures, and cries that signify feelings – or the absence of feelings’.39 On the contrary, this book is concerned with texts only, and only with those contributing to public discourses; correspondence is referred to occasionally. The sensibilities this study depicts include more than feelings and emotions (or passions), as indicated above, for sensibilities are regarded as elements of situated political idioms, and, in particular, as models and ideals, regardless of the extent to which patriots lived up to their own high standards. Daniel Wick­ berg’s approach is similar to that adopted in this book in an important respect: to him a ‘sensibility’ is a broad concept, integrating ‘ideas, emotions, beliefs, values, and perceptions’. ‘The problem with the history of emotions’, Wickberg writes, ‘is its tendency to separate emotion from cognition, to treat emotions as if they were a discrete realm rather than seeing them as linked to larger characteriological patterns involving modes of perception and thinking as well as feeling’.40 If the apprehension of Risorgimento sensibilities as literary arti­ facts ignores the issue of patriots’ actual adherence to them, it has a distinct 37

See Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction, tr. Keith Tribe (2012; Oxford, 2015). 38 Lucien Febvre, ‘Sensibility and History: How to Reconstitute the Emotional Life of the Past’ (1941), in id., A New Kind of History, ed. Peter Burke and tr. Keith Folca (London, 1973), 12–26. 39 Rosenwein, Emotional communities, 26. Discussion has revolved around the most effec­ tive way to conceptualize the relationship between emotions and society. To indicate the fact that certain feelings and certain modes of emotional expression are valued in a ­society to the detriment of others, Reddy has advanced the concept of ‘emotional regime’, while Rosenwein has postulated the existence of ‘emotional communities’; in the 1980s, Peter and Carol Stearns proposed ‘emotionology’, which refers to ‘the attitude or stan­ dards that a society … maintains toward basic emotions and their appropriate expression’. See William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge, 2001); Barbara Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’, American Historical Review, 107 (2002), 821–45; id., Emotional communities; Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, ‘Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Stan­ dards’, American Historical Review, 90 (1985), 813–36. 40 Wickberg makes the example of Lionel Trilling, who assessed liberalism as a tempera­ ment and a set of dispositions, and that of Clifford Geertz, who, like Trilling, was after ‘a history of the moral imagination’. See Daniel Wickberg, ‘What is the History of Sensibili­ ties? On Cultural Histories, Old and New’, American Historical Review, 112 (2007), 667–8, 670, 677, 682; Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society

16

INTRODUCTION

advantage, though. It highlights the fact that a comprehensive idea of politics was needed to mobilise Italians – a politics which gave patriots identity, pro­ posed a model personality, and fed on moral values. Inspiration for this study has been drawn from the line of research on Risorgimento nationalism inaugurated by Alberto Mario Banti in 2000. In ac­ cordance with histoire culturelle, Banti has showed that the discourse on the nation drew upon a set of ‘deep images’, connected with basic or ‘primary’ re­ alities like birth, death, love, and sexuality. Powerful narrative devices, feeding on the languages and symbols of religion, honour, and kinship, were built on this material. The eulogy of martyrdom for the fatherland was a prominent example.41 In the wake of Banti’s book, many historians have come to agree that the key to the Risorgimento lies in the emotional baggage leading Ital­ ians to risk their lives and liberty through participation in the struggle.42 Most recently, a collection of essays edited by Silvana Patriarca and Lucy Riall has brought together some of the protagonists of the ‘new research’, tackling the ways in which the private emotions of family, love, and friendship interacted with the public passions for liberty and the patria.43 This approach has iden­ tified a most fascinating aspect of the Risorgimento, combining a peculiarly Italian dimension with the spiritual climate of Romantic Europe. Maurizio Isabella has taken issue with Banti and Paul Ginsborg’s claim that the patriots’ ‘political style’ had more to do with emotions, symbols, and myths than with rationality and thought. Deep images, Isabella has contended, should not be separated from ‘the ideological languages and political categories that

41

42

43

(New York, 1950); for Geertz, see e.g. ‘Found in Translation: On the Social History of the Moral Imagination’, The Georgia Review, 31 (1977), 788–810. Alberto M. Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento: parentela, santità e onore alle origini dell’Italia unita (Turin, 2000). On martyrdom, see Lucy Riall, ‘Martyr Cults in NineteenthCentury Italy’, Journal of Modern History, 82 (2012), 255–87. A major product of this line of analysis is Banti and Ginsborg’s Il Risorgimento. For discus­ sions of this volume, see Gianluca Albergoni, ‘Sulla “nuova storia” del Risorgimento: Note per una discussione’, Società e storia, 30 (2008), 349–66; Luca Mannori, ‘Il Risorgimento tra “nuova” e “vecchia” storia: Note in margine ad un libro recente’, ibid., 367–79; and the contributions of Daniela Maldini Chiarito, Paolo Macry, and Banti collected by Simonetta Soldani in ‘Le emozioni del Risorgimento’, Passato e presente, 26 (2008), 17–32. For a re­ cent survey of historiography, see Maurizio Isabella, ‘Rethinking Italy’s Nation-Building 150 Years afterwards: The New Risorgimento Historiography’, Past and Present, 60 (2012), 247–68. Patriarca and Riall, The Risorgimento Revisited. A special issue of Modern Italy is devoted to emotions in Italian history, but the Risorgimento is only tangentially touched on; see Penelope Morris, Francesco Ricatti, and Mark Seymour, ‘Introduction: Italy and the Emo­ tions’, Modern Italy, 17 (2012), 151–6.

Introduction

17

had been developing from the time of the French Revolution onwards’.44 This book, which attempts something akin to the co-mingling Isabella argues for, differs from Banti’s line of analysis in three respects. First, the subject of the ­following chapters is the discourse of liberty – in its political and moral modes – instead of the imagery and pathos of the nation. Although the demand for political change and that for national independence went together, to a large extent that discourse did not call for that imagery. That Italy was viewed as a community of kinship, for example, or that stories of rape, perpetrated by the enemies of the nation, featured in many nationalist narratives, did not really affect the construction of sensibilities, which were representations of the ethi­ cal attitude suited to the achievement of liberty and independence. Second and relatedly, no search for ‘deep images’ is carried on here, as the focus is on a comprehensive moral and sentimental sphere. Mazzini's obsession with death, however, is a major exception. Third, while Banti has claimed that the moderate and the democratic camps were inspired by the same images of the nation, the present research has identified a sharp dissimilarity as regards their respective sensibilities.45 5

Dramatis Personae

As the revolutions of 1848–9 were a wathershed in the course of the national struggle, so were they in the evolution of sensibilities. Both the moderate and the Mazzinian brands took shape before the revolutionary biennium, and both became less important within their respective paradigms afterwards. There were attempts to dilute the Mazzinian sensibility in the 1850s, by replacing pas­ sions with ‘sentiments’, while the moderates paid less attention to sensibility once agitation from below gave way to the policies of the Piedmontese state. Moderate thinking became more theoretical and less obsessed with morality in the 1850s, but its polemic against passions – viewed as the matrix of the ‘revolutionary spirit’ – was more vehement than ever. The book deals, first of all, with the political authors who were most influ­ ential at the time. It also examines the contributions to the sensibilities made by poets and novelists – both major ones like Alfieri, Foscolo, or Manzoni, and minor ones like Guerrazzi or Ruffini. The heavily moralized a­ tmosphere of 44

45

Maurizio Isabella, ‘Emotions, Rationality and Political Intentionality in Patriotic ­Discourse’, Nations and Nationalism, 15 (2009), 428; Banti and Ginsborg, ‘Per una nuova storia’, xxiv. This side of Banti’s approach is called into question by Albergoni, ‘Sulla “nuova storia” del Risorgimento’, 362–3, and by Macry in Soldani, ‘Le emozioni’, 26.

18

INTRODUCTION

the peninsula hardly affected the émigrés who left Italy first in 1814, and then following the revolutionary wave of 1820–1; hence they figure briefly in the book.46 The moderates are given more space than Mazzini and his followers, in view of historians’ little interest in the former after Rosario Romeo’s biog­ raphy of C ­ avour (1969–84) and Sergio La Salvia’s comprehensive essays (1987 and 1996).47 Conversely, Mazzini’s political thinking as well as the e­ motional attitude he inspired have been carefully researched in recent years. The Mazzinians’ quest for ‘existential engagement’, profoundly imbued with reli­ gion and Romanticism, has smoothly lent itself to interpretations in terms of Banti’s deep images. The young Mazzinians’ ‘passions’ have been analysed, in the belief that a specific ‘emotional regime’ motivated them into action.48 On

46 47

48

They have been the subject of detailed study of late; see Isabella, Risorgimento in Exile. Rosario Romeo, Cavour e il suo tempo (Bari, 1969–84); Sergio La Salvia, ‘Il moderatismo in Italia’, in Umberto Corsini and Rudolf Lill (eds.), Istituzioni e ideologie in Italia e in Germania tra le rivoluzioni (Bologna, 1987), 169–310; id., ‘Il dibattito tra i moderati (1849–1861)’, in Sergio La Salvia et al., Verso l’Unità 1849–1861 (Rome, 1996), 199–275. Another significant contribution is Giampietro Berti, ‘I moderati e il neoguelfismo’, in Storia della società italiana, ed. Giovanni Cherubini et al. (Milan, 1981–99), xv, 227–58. More recently, Francesco Traniello has published some important essays. Scattered remarks on what, in this study, is termed moderate sensibility are in Alessandro Volpi, ‘Linguaggi simbolici nel 1848: Ap­ punti vari sull’idea e sull’immagine della moderazione’, in Romano Paolo Coppini (ed.), Università, simboli, istituzioni: Note sul 1848 italiano (Pisa, 2000), 110–120. On the scant at­ tention paid to moderatism, see Isabella, ‘Rethinking Italy’s Nation-Building’, 257–8. The literature on Antonio Rosmini, however, has markedly increased in Italy and elsewhere in recent decades. The expression ‘existential engagement’ is used in Arianna Arisi Rota and Roberto B ­ alzani, ‘Discovering Politics: Action and Recollection in the First Mazzinian Generation’, in Pa­ triarca and Riall, The Risorgimento Revisited, 80; Reddy’s ‘emotional regime’ is referred to in Patriarca, ‘A Patriotic Emotion’, 144. On Mazzinian passions, see esp. Alberto M. Banti, Il Risorgimento italiano (Bari, 2004), 62–7; Arianna Arisi Rota, I piccoli cospiratori: Politica ed emozioni nei primi mazziniani (Bologna, 2010); Riall, ‘Martyr Cults’. For the revival of Mazzinian studies in general, see esp. Bayly and Biagini, Giuseppe Mazzini; Simon Le­ vis Sullam, L’apostolo a brandelli: L’eredità di Mazzini fra Risorgimento e fascismo (Bari, 2010); Stefano Recchia and Nadia Urbinati (eds.), A Cosmopolitanism of Nations: Giuseppe Mazzini’s Writings on Democracy, Nation Building, and International Relations (Princeton, 2010); Nadia Urbinati, ‘Mazzini and the Making of the Republican Ideology’, jmis, 17 (2012), 183–204. A detailed study of Mazzini’s activities in England, and in particular a contextualization of his Thoughts upon Democracy in Europe (1846–7, revised 1850–53), has led Salvo Mastellone to depict Mazzini as a political writer of European stature; see Salvo Mastellone, La democrazia etica di Mazzini (1837–1847) (Rome, 2000), and Giuseppe Mazzini, Pensieri sulla democrazia in Europa, ed. and tr. Salvo Mastellone (Milan, 1997).

Introduction

19

the other hand, there have been only a few attempts to connect the ‘cultural system’ of nationalism with moderate thought.49 There is another reason for focusing on moderatism, considering that the relationship between sensibility and religion lies at the core of this book. Mazzini’s religion was idiosyncratic, boiling down to a celebration of ­humanity and its progress inspired by Saint-Simon. Mazzini aimed to instil ‘faith’ in his followers – he thought that it was the strongest kind of passion – but his brand of religion was a philosophical artifact merging with his political programme, which he wanted to have the holiness, beyond-time value, and emotional power of religions. The moderates, on the contrary, were earnest and orthodox­ Catholics. They found everything in Catholicism: the basis on which to con­ struct full-scale philosophies, the reasons for cautious and gradual reforms, the source of consolation and moral strength, and also, to use Rosenwein’s expression, a ‘system of feeling’. Yet, religion remained distinct from politics. The moderates’ religion was an established one, centuries-old, and transcen­ dent in nature – they did not envisage for a moment that the Roman Church could identify with a political programme. It ensued that Catholicism inspired a more intriguing form of sensibility than Mazzini’s political religion did. If the revolution was a religion, it was logical for Mazzini to expect his followers to become professional revolutionaries, living for the cause and if necessary dying for it; instead, an unlimited commitment to the struggle was alien to the moderate sensibility, which is therefore closer to a culture suspicious of all totalitarianisms like our own.50 Additionally, the moderate sensibility proves more complex and fascinating, for its roots went down to a combination of Christianity and Stoicism, which was an ancient pattern of ethical thinking. The sources of Mazzini’s emotional stance, such as Lamennais and various Ro­ mantics, were much more recent, and more obvious. 6

Cattaneo, Moderatism, and Philosophical Catholicism

Two preliminary tasks need to be carried out. The first is to explain why Cat­ taneo does not figure prominently in this study. He was the most brilliant mind 49

50

For an analysis of biblical imagery in Gioberti’s texts, see Francesca Sofia, ‘Le fonti bibli­ che nel primato italiano di Vincenzo Gioberti’, Società e storia, 26 (2004), 747–62; id., ‘The Promised Land: Biblical Themes in the Risorgimento’, jmis, 17 (2012), 574–86. See also Francesco Traniello, ‘Ermeneutica giobertiana del Quarantotto’, in Giuseppe Riconda and Gianluca Cuozzo (eds.), Giornata giobertiana (Turin, 2000), 69–88. On the new figure of the professional revolutionary, see Michael Broers, Europe after ­Napoleon: Revolution, Reaction and Romanticism, 1814–1848 (Manchester, 1996), 75–7.

20

INTRODUCTION

of the Risorgimento, in the judgement of many historians. The range of his intellectual interests was wide, as testified to by historical, economic, linguis­ tic, philosophical, and geographical contributions. An empiricist philosopher, he believed in the power of liberty and the sciences, making no concessions to metaphysics and religion. As Norberto Bobbio and many others after him have pointed out, to Cattaneo liberty was the engine of civilisation; and liberty, defined as ‘the exercise of reason’, thrived on the contrast of ideas, classes, and institutions.51 Politically, Cattaneo inspired those who, after 1848, questioned Mazzini’s leadership of the democrats on the basis of a federalist vision of liberty and governance. The stress he placed on civil liberties and the conse­ quence of conflict – it has been argued by Nadia Urbinati – marks Cattaneo out from the political culture of the Risorgimento.52 The reason why he figures briefly in the book is exactly that – he was different. The tone of his writings is cold and scientific, at least by the standard of the Risorgimento; he displayed an ‘anti-Romantic spirit’, coupled with little propensity for political activism; nor did he aim to remake Italians, for he was satisfied with the disposition of the inhabitants of his beloved Lombardy.53 All this prevented him from being concerned with sensibility themes. Add that he thought until 1848 that it was possible to steer the Austrian government towards concessions and reforms – he was very far, that is, from sharing the ‘Italian’ enthusiasm of most protago­ nists of the Risorgimento.54 51

52 53 54

Norberto Bobbio, ‘Stati Uniti d’Italia’ (1945), in id., Una filosofia militante: Studi su Carlo Cattaneo (Turin, 1971), 3–55 at 12–13; id., ‘Carlo Cattaneo e le riforme’, in Carlo G. Lacaita (ed.), L’opera e l’eredità di Carlo Cattaneo (Bologna, 1975), i, 11–35. For recent literature in English, see Martin Thom, ‘ “Liberty and Truth” or “the Sovereignty of Reason”: Carlo Cattaneo and the Place of Politics in the Modern World’, jmis, 6 (2001), 178–94; Carlo G. Lacaita and Filippo Sabetti, ‘Carlo Cattaneo and Varieties of Liberalism’, in Carlo Cat­ taneo, Civilization and Democracy: The Salvemini Anthology of Cattaneo’s Writings, ed. Carlo G. Lacaita and Filippo Sabetti (Toronto, 2006), 3–52; Filippo Sabetti, Civilization and Self-Government: The Political Thought of Carlo Cattaneo (Lanham, md, 2010) (to Sabetti, Cattaneo put forward ‘a new science of politics’); Axel Körner, America in Italy: The United States in the Political Thought and Imagination of the Risorgimento (Princeton, 2017), 121–38. Nadia Urbinati, ‘Carlo Cattaneo, un contemporaneo di John Stuart Mill’, Rivista di filosofia, 81 (1990), 211–36. The quoted words are in Bobbio, ‘Stati Uniti d’Italia’, 12. See e.g. Cesare Correnti’s memoir in Luigi Ambrosoli (ed.), La insurrezione milanese del marzo 1848 (Milan and Naples, 1969), 5–52 at 18–19 and n.; Clara Maria Lovett, Carlo Cattaneo and the Politics of the Risorgimento, 1820–1860 (The Hague, 1972), esp. 28–32, 118–26. Manin, too, favoured legal agitation before 1848; see Levi, La politica, 9–16.

Introduction

21

Cattaneo’s two memoirs of the Milanese revolution of 1848, the only occa­ sion on which he accepted being drawn into practical politics, were admittedly passionate.55 Here a great pride in all things Lombard, including the Milanese people’s valiant fighting, combined with anger at the betrayal of the victorious insurgency by the Piedmontese moderates and king Charles Albert in particu­ lar. The two feelings were closely linked, for he depicted the Piedmontese (and the Austrians) as ‘barbarians’ attempting to subdue Europe’s most civilised re­ gion. Not for a moment did Cattaneo concede that the stance of the Milanese aristocrats siding with the Piedmontese was legitimate: they had just been foolish accomplices in a murky conspiracy to seize the riches of Lombardy.56 These two memoirs are a burst of indignation on the part of a writer who was immune to the contemporary moralization of politics, and who, for this reason and in spite of his activities in 1848, seems almost unpolitisch in the context of the Risorgimento. The second task is to introduce a degree of terminological precision with respect to the moderate camp. The platform of the moderate movement, which took shape between Gioberti’s Primato and 1848, went with a set of heterogeneous arguments that cannot be called liberal, as will be argued at length in Chapter 2. On the other hand, the concession of the constitution in the kingdom of Sardinia determined the formation of a political culture that can legitimately be termed liberal. There was of course significant continu­ ity between the 1840s and the 1850s – in both periods, for instance, a fear of revolution was paramount – but it is important not to obscure the evolution of moderatism occurring in tune with institutional developments. The differ­ ence between the two phases has not always been taken into full account by historians, however, while the celebrations for the 150th anniversary of unifi­ cation in 2011 tended to be uncritical and overpraising, in accordance with the re-discovery of national pride during the presidency of Carlo Azeglio Ciampi (1999–2006).57 Calling the moderates of the 1840s liberals leads implicitly to 55

56

57

Actually, Cattaneo also spent a month in Naples in 1860 as an adviser of Garibaldi, but failed to have an impact. See Ernesto Sestan, ‘Cattaneo, Carlo’, dbi, xxii, 1979; Franco Della Peruta, Carlo Cattaneo politico (Milan, 2001). Carlo Cattaneo, Dell’insurrezione di Milano nel 1848 e della successiva guerra: Memorie (1848–9), in id., Opere scelte, ed. Delia Castelnuovo Frigessi (Turin, 1972), iii, 13–283; id., ‘Considerazioni sulle cose d’Italia nel 1848’ (1850), ibid., iii, 285–330. The ‘Considerazioni’ was an appendix to the first volume of Archivio triennale delle cose d’Italia, a three-volume collection of documents on the events of 1847–9 that Cattaneo edited; the volumes ap­ peared in 1850, 1851, and 1855. President Ciampi fostered Italian patriotism in order to counter the propaganda of the Lega Nord, a party advocating the separation of the northern regions; the successive

22

INTRODUCTION

overemphasise the impact on the Risorgimento of liberal politics – namely, of civil and political rights and a limited, accountable, and representative government – and liberal values – such as individuality, rationality, tolerance, progress, and change.58 On the same grounds, the moderatism of the 1840s

58

president Giorgio Napolitano (2006–15) continued this policy. See Rosario Forlenza and Bjørn Thomassen, ‘Resurrections and Rebirths: How the Risorgimento Shaped Modern Italian Politics’, jmis, 22 (2017), 291–313. The Catholic Church did support the celebrations in 2011; see Francesco Maria Greco, ‘La storia unisce la Chiesa e l’Italia’, Corriere della sera, 27 Sep. 2011, 14 (Greco was the Italian ambassador to the Holy See). For the lively debate among historians, see e.g. Mario Isnenghi, ‘Forza e disincanto del 17 marzo’, Storicamente [online journal], 7 (2011) , accessed Jan. 2013; Fabio Grassi Orsini, ‘Rivalutare il Risorgimento: un confronto critico con il revisionismo’, L’Occidentale [online journal], 19 Feb. 2012 , accessed Dec. 2012; Massimo Baioni, ‘Considerazioni a margine di un anniversario controverso’, Passato e presente, 30 (2012), 83–93. For Banti’s critical position, see Alberto M. Banti (ed.), Nel nome dell’Italia: Il Risorgimento nelle testimonianze, nei documenti e nelle immagini (Bari, 2010), pp. v–xvii; see also ‘Banti: Il Risorgimento è lontano, celebriamo la costituzione’, dire [online news agency] , accessed Dec. 2012. For an Austrian viewpoint, mildly questioning Italian nationalism and its Erfolgsgeschichte, see Brigitte Mazohl, ‘Das Kaisertum Österreich und die italienische Einheit’, Giornale di storia costituzionale, 22 (2011), 19–38. For the moderates as ‘liberals’, see e.g. Guido De Ruggiero, The History of European Liberalism, tr. Robin G. Collingwood (1925; Boston, 1961), 275–323 (but De Ruggiero speaks of an ‘arrested liberalism’, 305); Maria Fubini Leuzzi, ‘Introduzione’, in Cesare Balbo, Storia d’Italia e altri scritti, ed. Maria Fubini Leuzzi (Turin, 1984), 49–50, 59–61; Umberto Allegretti, Profilo di storia costituzionale italiana: Individualismo e assolutismo nello stato liberale (Bologna, 1989); Mario d’Addio, ‘Introduzione’, in Antonio Rosmini, Filosofia della politica, ed. Mario d’Addio (Rome, 1997), 35–6; Fulvio Cammarano, ‘Il declino del mod­ eratismo ottocentesco: Approccio idealtipico e comparazione storica’, in Fulvio Camma­ rano et al., Les familles politiques en Europe occidentale au XIXe siècle (Rome, 1997), 205–17; Narciso Nada, ‘I liberali moderati’, in Levra, Il Piemonte, 341–60; Martin Clark, The Italian Risorgimento (2nd ed., Abingdon, uk, 2009), pp. xxii, 5, 46–7; Marco Meriggi, ‘Liberali/ Liberalismo’, in Alberto M. Banti et al. (eds.), Atlante culturale del Risorgimento: Lessico del linguaggio politico dal Settecento all’Unità (Bari, 2011), 101–14; and see ‘I movimenti politici: Il liberalismo’, www.150anni.it [the official website of the 150th anniversary celebrations for the birth of the Italian state] , accessed Dec. 2015. In a brilliant contribution, Raffaele Romanelli deals with the Italian ‘liberal opinion’ before 1848, but only to argue that, as liberalism calls for representa­ tive government, that opinion did not belong to European liberalism; see his ‘Nazione e costituzione nell’opinione liberale avanti il ’48’, in Pier Luigi Ballini (ed.), La rivoluzione liberale e le nazioni divise (Venice, 2000), 271–304. A cautious use of the term ‘liberal’ is recommended by Francesco Traniello in ‘Il “mondo cattolico” piemontese prima del ’48’,

Introduction

23

should not be termed ‘liberal Catholicism’. The expression is commonly used by historians, but it often serves to indicate a diverse cultural field rather than a political movement.59 Another distinction needs to be made, that between 1840s moderatism – in this book represented by Gioberti, Balbo, and d’Azeglio – and earlier texts by Rosmini, Manzoni, Pellico, and Niccolò Tommaseo. The authors of the latter group will be bracketed together as ‘philosophical Catholics’. The two groups had much in common, for both deemed Catholicism the indispensable frame­ work for the adaptation of certain basic liberties to the Italian circumstances. The philosophical Catholics were politically moderate, in the twofold sense that they espoused gradualism and prudence, and that they adhered to the moderate programme in the 1840s, but politics was not the focus of their work. Texts like Manzoni’s moral treatise Sulla morale cattolica (1819), Rosmini’s pam­ phlets censuring eighteenth-century impiety (1822–8), and Pellico’s memoir Le mie prigioni (1832) gave rise to the moderate sensibility, which the moderates of the 1840s endorsed and developed in the light of the themes and arguments substantiating their political vision. Thus, no distinction between the two groups is appropriate as far as sensibility is concerned, and it is necessary­to

59

in Levra, Il Piemonte, 402–4; see also Giuseppe Galasso, ‘Le forme del potere, classi e ger­ archie sociali’, in Storia d’Italia Einaudi (Turin, 1972–6), i, 536–9. For liberal Catholicism as a ‘constellation’, see Francesco Traniello, ‘La rottura liberale: I cattolico-liberali nell’Italia del Risorgimento’, in Alberto Melloni (ed.), Cristiani d’Italia: Chiese, società, stato, 1861–2011 (Rome, 2011), 197. Traniello discounts the political implica­ tions of the term, stressing instead the religious, doctrinal ones; see Francesco Traniello, ‘Le origini del cattolicesimo liberale’, in id., Da Gioberti a Moro: Percorsi di una cultura politica (Milan, 1989), 11–24; yet, see the chapter entitled ‘Teorie e modelli costituzionali nella cultura cattolico-liberale’ [Constitutional theories and models in Catholic-liberal culture] in Francesco Traniello, Religione cattolica e stato nazionale (Bologna, 2007), 125–55. With reference to Rosmini and his followers, Traniello has spoken of cattolicesimo conciliatorista to connote the encounter between philosophical reason and faith; see his Cattolicesimo conciliatorista: Religione e cultura nella tradizione rosminiana lombardopiemontese (1825–1870) (Milan, 1970), esp. 27–33, 71–84, 130–6. For surveys of the debate, see Carlo Fantappiè, ‘L’eredità del giansenismo e le radici del “cattolicesimo liberale” in Italia’, in Carlo Fantappiè et al., Libéralisme chrétien et catholicisme libéral en Espagne, France et Italie dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle (Aix-en-Provence, 1989), 21–37; Pietro Domenico Giovannoni, ‘Tra neoguelfismo e riforma religiosa: Il cattolicesimo liberale italiano nella prima metà dell’Ottocento’, in Maria Paiano (ed.), Cattolici e unità d’Italia ­(Assisi, 2012), 123–54. The use of the term ‘liberal Catholicism’ was first questioned by ­Arturo Carlo ­Jemolo in 1958, on the grounds that it failed to capture the advocacy of Church reform, lying at the core of religious renewal in Italy, allegedly; see his ‘Il catto­ licesimo liberale dal 1815 al 1848’, Rassegna storica toscana, 4 (1958), 239–250.

24

INTRODUCTION

add that Tommaseo wrote a volume on the political, religious, and moral future of Italy (Dell’Italia, 1835), while Rosmini’s philosophical system included a po­ litical branch, as evidenced by Filosofia della politica (1839). Nevertheless, it has seemed necessary to spotlight the moderatism of the 1840s, for three reasons. First, Gioberti’s, Balbo’s, and d’Azeglio’s texts were meant to shape and stir pub­ lic opinion, whereas those of the philosophical Catholics, written when the public sphere was inaccessible, were not political but moral in nature. They addressed individuals’ conscience, suggesting a mode of feeling in tune with the will to stand firm at a time of oppression. Second, the importance of the agitation of the 1840s within the Risorgimento requires a focus on the ideas of its protagonists. Gioberti’s Primato really heralded a new phase, marked by the possibility of confrontation in the open after a little less than thirty years dur­ ing which insurrections orchestrated by secret societies were the only option. Third, a point of reference as distinct as possible is indispensable in order to appreciate the evolution from moderatism to 1850s liberalism. The study proceeds as follows. Moderatism is the subject of Chapters 1 and 2, dealing with sensibility and 1840s political thought, respectively. Although a subdivision of the subject matter has proved necessary in practice, no sepa­ ration between the two sides of moderate culture is intended. Chapter 1 de­ scribes how the moderate sensibility took shape over the years 1815 to 1848. First Rosmini and the other philosophical Catholics, and then the 1840s mod­ erates are dealt with. The chapter has also sections tracing the sources of that sensibility, beginning with the diffusion of Stoic themes in Europe since the Renaissance, and paying special attention to Muratori and the Italian Catholic Aufklärung. Chapter 2 examines the political thought of Balbo, Gioberti, and d’Azeglio. A comparison with Constant, Guizot, and the Italians who endorsed political and cultural pluralism is advanced. Chateaubriand and the ultramon­ tane feature as the three moderates’ chief inspirations. Taken together, the first two chapters demonstrate that moderatism fed on some of the currents lying at the basis of European thinking. Chapter 3 is divided into two parts. The first one explores the sensibility Mazzini preached, places it in the context of French democratic thought, and reviews the attempts that were made by Giuseppe Ferrari and Ausonio Franchi to relax the imperatives of Mazzini’s ‘duty’. The second part is devoted to the philosopher Bertrando Spaventa, the literary critic Francesco De Sanctis, and two novelists, Giovanni Ruffini and Ippolito Nievo. This diverse group of irreligious and ‘social’ liberals, who were active in the 1850s, illustrates how the two sensibilities faded in the face of new circumstances and new intellectual currents. The final chapter is devoted to the Piedmontese ‘elite’ liberalism of the 1850s. Besides providing a paradigm summarising its features, and assessing Cavour’s liberalism, the chapter shows

Introduction

25

how the contrast between reason and passions underpinned the arguments in favour of a government of the few as well as of a national resurgence carried out in the name of the house of Savoy. The conclusion brings together the main threads of the book, and suggests a standpoint from which to gauge the moral argument in unified Italy.60 60

A few practicalities should be settled before starting. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. As a rule, I have retained each author's usage of the Christian/Catho­ lic terminology in the relevant passages; to the moderates, at any rate, the two terms were in practice synonymous. Throughout this book ‘Piedmont’ and ‘Piedmontese’ refer to the whole kingdom of Sardinia.

chapter 1

Against the Passions of Revolution: Making the Moderate Sensibility, 1815–1848 The moderate sensibility, encapsulating the marriage between monarchical patriotism and Catholicism, was set forth before 1848. This chapter begins by tracing the origins of that sensibility back to eighteenth-century moral philosophy, and in particular to the Italian Catholic Aufklärung of Muratori and Genovesi. The bearing of Stoic arguments on these authors is pointed out. Sections 2 and 3 are devoted to Rosmini, who, through a denunciation of revolutionary and Romantic passions, laid the groundwork for the moderate sensibility. The chapter next examines the contributions of Manzoni, Pellico, and Tommaseo. These ‘philosophical Catholics’ advocated fortitude and endurance, but also argued that Catholics should fight for justice by peaceful means. Sections 5 and 6 deal with the moderates of the 1840s, namely Gioberti, d’Azeglio, and Balbo. They condemned passions and Machiavellianism, and emphasised virtue and rational self-possession. The chapter then returns to the issue of sources, by considering the impact of Alfieri and the Doctrinaires on the moderate sensibility (Sect. 7).

…

STOÏCISME. Est impossible. flaubert1

∵ 1

The Stoic Revival, the Catholic Aufklärung, and the Revolution

The theme of the ‘origins’ of Risorgimento is hardly dealt with nowadays, probably because it was a favourite subject of nationalist and Fascist historiographies. For decades during the twentieth century, the search for the causes and the spiritual roots of Risorgimento was aimed at denying that the French 1 Gustave Flaubert, Le dictionnaire des idées reçues, ed. E.L. Ferrère (Paris, 1913), 92.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004360914_003

Against the Passions of Revolution

27

Revolution had decisively ignited Italian patriotism.2 For instance, the establishment­historian Gioacchino Volpe claimed in the late 1920s that Italy had been a ‘spiritual unity’ for centuries, and that during the Risorgimento the process of nation-building had only become more self-conscious; the Fascist movement eventually perfected it.3 The theme of origins is nevertheless important, and not only from a historiographical point of view. In twenty-first-century Italy, a significant percentage of electors votes for a party, the Lega Nord, which purports to unmake the national state created in 1861 – the Risorgimento, that is, has been called into question, and quite sensationally. Renewed civil and political overtones, therefore, seem to warrant a fresh wave of studies on the issue of how deep the seeds of Risorgimento were planted in Italian culture before 1815. The sources of the religious underpinning of moderatism, in contrast, have never stopped attracting the interest of historians. In accordance with a ­nationalist perspective on Italian history, Ettore Rota in 1907 and Giovanni Gentile in the 1920s posited the Italian Jansenist current as one of the main ­matrices of Risorgimento in general and moderatism in particular.4 The import of Jansenism on the peninsula, its relationship with ‘liberal Catholicism’, and the viability of such a label were discussed at length in the following d­ ecades. Giorgio Candeloro, for instance, concluded in 1961 that Jansenism had provided the open-mindedness, moral rigour, and the pinch of doctrinal heterodoxy that were needed to combine Catholicism with liberalism, M ­ anzoni being the chief trait d’union.5 The terms of the debate were altered by a book by Émile Appolis (1960), singling out a ‘third party’ betweeen Jansenists and conservatives (the zelanti, often of Jesuit allegiance) in eighteenth-century European Catholicism. It was a reformist and ‘moderate’ movement, climaxing with the

2 On historiography see John A. Davis, ‘Rethinking the Risorgimento?’, in Norma Bouchard (ed.), Risorgimento in Modern Italian Culture: Revisiting the Nineteenth-Century Past in History, Narrative, and Cinema (Madison, nj, 2005), 27–53; for the French Revolution in particular, see Anna Maria Rao, ‘Lumières et revolution dans l’historiographie italienne’, Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 79 (2003), 83–104. 3 Gioacchino Volpe, L’Italia in cammino (1927; Bari, 1991), 19, 32. See Giovanni Belardelli, ‘Introduzione’, in Volpe, L’Italia, p. xviii; Francesco Perfetti, ‘Introduzione’, in Gioacchino Volpe, L’Italia moderna (1958; Florence, 2002), vol. i, pp. xviii–xx. 4 Ettore Rota, ‘Il giansenismo in Lombardia e i prodromi del Risorgimento italiano’, in Ettore Rota et al., Raccolta di scritti storici in onore del prof. Giacinto Romano (Pavia, 1907), 363–626; Giovanni Gentile, Gino Capponi e la cultura toscana nel secolo decimonono (1922; Florence, 1973), 9–10, 21–22, 51–5, 84–5; id., ‘Manzoni e il giansenismo’ (1925), in id., Frammenti di storia della filosofia (Florence, 1999), ii, 1044–5. 5 Giorgio Candeloro, Il movimento cattolico in Italia (1961; Rome, 1982), 24–8.

28

chapter 1

pontificate of Benedict xiv (1740–58). Its Italian branch differed from Jansenism because of a practical attitude, leading to open-mindedness and optimism. To Appolis, Muratori had been a central figure in the third party, while Manzoni and Rosmini­were among its nineteenth-century heirs.6 The wider perspective introduced by Appolis made it possible for Bernard Plongeron (1970) and Ettore Passerin d’Entrèves (1974) to point to a set of ‘enlightened Catholics’, including Muratori and the sympathizers of various jansénismes, as a major source of inspiration­to the ‘liberal Catholics’ of the Risorgimento.7 Since then, the idea of a diverse Catholic Aufklärung – expressing cultural dynamism, voicing a criticism of ‘baroque’ forms of devotion, and advocating a return to an idealized primitive church – has gained a firm foothold in Italian historiography.8 As regards Muratori specifically, Francesco Traniello made brief reference to the affinities between his religiosity and Rosmini’s in an important study of the latter (1966), and, thirty years later, Fulvio De Giorgi (1995) has substantiated Traniello’s point.9 An exclusive focus on Jansenism is in fact misplaced, and not only because Manzoni’s adherence to it has repeatedly been questioned.10 The portroyalistes aimed to counter papal authority, the Curia, and the Jesuits. This agenda unavoidably took up political significance – in Lombardy and Tuscany in particular, Jansenism allied itself with ‘enlightened’ absolutism – yet 6 7

8 9

10

Émile Appolis, Entre jansénistes et zelanti: Le ‘tiers parti’ catholique au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1960), 122–3, 530–7. Bernard Plongeron, ‘Questions pour l’Aufklärung catholique en Italie’, Il pensiero politico, 3 (1970), 30–58; Ettore Passerin d’Entrèves, ‘Le origini del cattolicesimo liberale in Italia’, in id., I cattolici liberali, 96–102. For surveys, see Traniello, ‘Le origini’; Fantappiè, ‘L’eredità del giansenismo’, esp. 26–30. According to Nicola Raponi, developing a point first made by Ettore Passerin d’Entrèves, the roots of ‘liberal Catholicism’ lay in the reaction of Catholic culture to revolutionary and Napoleonic authoritarianism; see Nicola Raponi, ‘La resistenza al dispotismo rivoluzionario e napoleonico e le radici del cattolicesimo liberale’, in id., Cattolicesimo liberale e modernità (Brescia, 2002), 25–40. See e.g. Mario Rosa, ‘The Catholic Aufklärung in Italy’, in Ulrich L. Lehner and Michael Printy (eds.), A Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe (Leiden, 2010), 215–50. Francesco Traniello, Società religiosa e società civile in Rosmini (Bologna, 1966); Fulvio De Giorgi, La scienza del cuore: Spiritualità e cultura religiosa in Antonio Rosmini (Bologna, 1995). See Francesco Margiotta Broglio, ‘Sul “giansenismo” del Manzoni’, in Francesco Margiotta Broglio et al., Chiesa e spiritualità nell’Ottocento italiano (Verona, 1971), 359–82; Luciano Parisi, ‘Manzoni, il Seicento francese e il giansenismo’, Modern Language Notes, 118 (2003), 85–115; Rosa, ‘The Catholic Aufklärung’, 241–2. The spiritual counsellors of Manzoni and his family were either Jansenists, like Eustachio Degola and Gaetano Giudici, or were suspected of having sympathy with Jansenism, like Luigi Tosi.

Against the Passions of Revolution

29

Jansenism­was first and foremost a spiritual and theological movement before 1789, in Italy focusing on issues like the reorganization of parishes and the teaching of catechism.11 The concerns of both the philosophical Catholics and the moderates of the 1840s were different, and, what is more, both very rarely challenged the authority of Rome for all things doctrinal. Another current of the Italian Aufklärung, embodied by Muratori and Antonio Genovesi, was deeply civil in character instead. These writers were thorough reformers, tackling theological, socio-economic, and moral issues. Their legacy was not lost on the men of the Risorgimento, as this chapter and the next one will substantiate. As for this section, its goals are, first, to show that the dualism of reason and passions, shaping the moderate sensibility, was a major thread running through European philosophy. The proper context of that sensibility was Europe-wide, and extended back to the Renaissance at least. Second, this section highlights the Muratorian current of the Italian Aufklärung as especially important to the making of the moderate sensibility. To repeat, the moderate sensibility rested on the view that reason must subjugate the passions, regarded as the causes of misdeeds. The reason/passion dichotomy had informed both the Stoic and the classical Christian analyses of the mind, in which the passiones featured as a pernicious power – although it is not certain that the dichotomy was as stark as commonly believed until recently.12 The proper starting point of an exploration which, in view of the magnitude of the topic, will be sketchy of necessity, is the Renaissance. It witnessed a revival of classical culture and in particular a widening of philosophical horizons, with Platonism, Stoicism, and Pyrrhonian scepticism as the foci of interest. The possible accommodation of the first two to Christianity, already attempted during the Middle Ages, continued to fascinate. The similarities between Christianity and Stoicism are especially striking, with respect, for instance, to the understanding of God, the universe, and virtue.13 11

Ernesto Codignola, Illuministi, giansenisti e giacobini nell’Italia del settecento (Florence, 1947), pp. vii–viii. 12 Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 1–25; Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 32–56. Needless to say, another important part of the Christian tradition saw a positive role for the sympathetic affections (affectiones) of love, compassion, and joy, when these did not entail arousal or perturbation of the soul; see Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, Ch. 2. 13 The Stoa thinkers saw the universe as activated by divine purpose, which could take the form of a wise and omnipotent Providence. The divinity had designed the universe in the interests of mankind, which alone shared in the divine gift of reason, whose development required the elimination of all emotional disturbance. Like Christianity, Stoicism subscribed to the doctrine of four cardinal virtues: prudence (or wisdom), justice (or fairness), temperance (or restraint), and courage (or fortitude). Christian philosophers

30

chapter 1

The contrast between reason and passions became a major philosophical theme over the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. On the one hand, the passions were depicted as functional characteristics necessary to psychological flourishing; on the other, ‘the litany of complaint and lamentation’ about the ravages passions brought to personal and collective life created the impression that they were ‘an unmitigated burden’.14 In France for example, Descartes’ Les passions de l’âme (1649) dealt with strategies for controlling them, whereas Montaigne, although influenced by Lipsius and the ancient Stoics in other respects, rejected the equation of passion with vice.15 Massillon’s celebrated sermons revolved around passions in general and amour propre in particular, in the belief that they font tous nos malheurs by inescapably leading to vice.16 As for the Jansenist Pascal, he posited in Pensées that ‘the inner war between reason and passions’ was an ineradicable and defining characteristic of the human condition; passions, however, were not evil in themselves but only if reason let them dominate.17 In eighteenth-century Scotland, Hutcheson’s brand of Christian Stoicism was adopted by Edinburgh literati of ‘moderate’ leanings like Ferguson and Blair. True happiness, according to Blair, came only from virtue and the sense of inner peace and self-respect that virtue invariably engendered. In his words, ‘to a virtuous man … to discharge his part with integrity and honour is his chief

14 15

16 17

also appreciated the Stoics’ moral seriousness, their recommendation of forbearance in the face of adversity, and their contempt of wordly goods. See Sarah Hutton, ‘Platonism, Stoicism, Scepticism, and Classical Imitation’, in Michael Hattaway (ed.), A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture (Oxford, 2010), 44–57; Elaine Fantham, ‘Introduction’, in Seneca, Selected Letters (Oxford, 2010), pp. vii–xxxiv. Ancient Stoicism, especially in its Roman variety, was very much a public philosophy, addressing issues like wealth, poverty, war, government, and slavery. It elicited participation, not passivity; see Malcolm Schofield, ‘Epicurean and Stoic Political Thought’, and Christopher Gill, ‘Stoic Writers of the Imperial Era’, both in Christopher Rowe and Malcolm Schofield (eds.), The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought (Cambridge, 2000), 435–56, 597–615. Susan James, Passions and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford, 1999), 10. See Tom Sorell, Descartes (Oxford, 1987), 100–103; Jerry C. Nash, ‘Stoicism and the Stoic Theme of Honestum in Early French Renaissance Literature’, Studies in Philology, 76 (1979), 203–17. Jean-Baptiste Massillon, ‘Sur le malheur des grands qui abandonnent Dieu’ (1718), in id., Sermons et morceaux choisis (Paris, 1848), 64–76 at 66. Blaise Pascal, Pensées (1669), in id., Œuvres complètes (Paris, 1858), vol. i, pp. 235–419 at art. viii, pp. 1–3; art. xxiv, p. 57; art. xxv, p. 104; see also id., ‘Discours sur les passions de l’amour’ (1652–3), ibid., i, 467–75.

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aim. If he has done properly what was incumbent on him to do, his mind is at rest; to Providence he leaves the event’.18 The Scottish philosophers concerned themselves first and foremost with the cultivation of character and the inculcation of a sense of obligation to others. Reid, whose philosophy Rosmini and Gioberti analysed in depth in their writings of the 1830s, made the sense of duty the pillar of morality. In order ‘to fortify our minds against every temptation to deviate from [duty]’, Reid recommended getting into the habit of subjecting passions to reason and imploring the aid of God. ‘Man’ being a social creature, ‘the practice of every social virtue’ was the reason for his existence.19 Stoicism influenced Reid and Shaftesbury; to the latter, happiness derived from the psychic balance generated by virtue. On the other hand, Hume was perceived by the literati as an Epicurean, lacking warmth in the cause of virtue; he had argued against Stoicism.20 In France, Montesquieu’s fascination with Stoicism – that secte admirable – is well known. He agreed with the Edinburgh literati that happiness lay in virtue, and depicted Stoicism as the best possible school of citizenship and altruism.21 It is remarkable that all the major irreligious writers of the times – Hobbes, Bayle, Spinoza, Mandeville, and Hume – rejected the dichotomy, in some cases going as far as condemning reason in favour of the passions.22 ‘Nothing is more 18

19 20

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22

Quoted in Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1985), 184; on Christian Stoicism in Scotland, see James A. Harris, ‘Introduction: The Place of the Ancients in the Moral Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment’, Journal of Scottish Philosophy, 8 (2010), 1–11; Sher, Church, 175–86. Thomas Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of Man, ed. Knud Haakonssen and James Harris (1788; Edinburgh, 2010), 294, 300. Christopher Brooke, Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and Political Thought from Lipsius to Rousseau (Princeton, 2012), 111–24; James Moore, ‘Utility and Humanity: The Quest for the Honestum in Cicero, Hutcheson, and Hume’, Utilitas, 14 (2002), 376; M.A. Stewart, ‘The Stoic Legacy in the Early Scottish Enlightenment’, in Margaret J. Osler (ed.), Atoms, Pneuma, and Tranquillity: Epicurean and Stoic Themes in European Thought (Cambridge, 1991), 273–96. See by Montesquieu: Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence, ed. Jean Ehrard (1734; Paris, 1968), Ch. 16, p. 125; ‘Dialogue de Xantippe et de Xénocrate’ (uncertain date), in Œuvres complètes, ed. Roger Caillois (Paris, 1949–51), ii, 508–12 at 511; De l’esprit des lois, ed. Victor Goldschmidt (1748; 1757 ed.; Paris, 1979), vol. ii, bk. xxiv, Ch. 10, p. 146. Another major political thinker, Samuel Pufendorf, had subscribed to the Stoic rules for cultivating the self and restraining the passions; see his The Whole Duty of Man, according to the Law of Nature, ed. Ian Hunter and David Saunders, tr. Andrew Tooke (1673–91; Indianapolis, 2003), bk. i, Ch. 5, Sects. iv–viii. Amy M. Schmitter, ‘Natural Passions, Reason and Religious Emotion in Hobbes and Spinoza’, in Ingolf U. Dalferth and Michael C. Rodgers (eds.), Passions and Passivity

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usual in philosophy’, Hume wrote in a famous section of the Treatise of human nature, ‘than to talk of the combat of passion and reason, to give the preference to reason, and to assert that men are only so far virtuous as they conform themselves to its dictates’. Hume proceeded to explain why ‘reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them’.23 While Bayle had regarded as a fact that reason was unable to govern passions, Hume put forward a new theory of the human mind making the dichotomy irrelevant to moral practice.24 Hume helped, perhaps decisively, identify the road that the moderates would not take, namely, that leading to a society of purely self-interested individuals, driven by their passions, and bereft of the psychological support that some conception of divine Providence could provide. Not by chance, Albert Hirschman’s interpretation of the intellectual matrix of capitalism features Hume, alongside Hobbes and Spinoza, as an advocate of the argument that one passion (that for personal gain) could function as the counterpoise to another (that for power).25 Hume’s moral psychology was in sharp contrast to Kant’s, whose implications were in accordance with the Christian tradition. The Prussian philosopher recommended ‘moderation in affects and passions, self-control, and sober reflection’. To Kant reason commanded what one should do – it could determine the will – and, in Die Metaphysik der Sitten (1797), he showed how inner freedom was threatened by affects and passions. He even applauded ‘apathy’, that ‘entirely correct and sublime moral principle of the Stoic school’, albeit he did not emphasise insensibility but rather the possibility of using feelings in ways that were compatible with morality. ‘The true strength of virtue is a tranquil mind with a considered and firm resolution to put the law of virtue into practice’.26 (Tübingen, 2011), 49–68. On Spinoza and the Stoics, see Jonathan I. Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford, 2006), 457–70. 23 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Lewis A. Selby-Bigge and Peter H. Nidditch (1739–40; Oxford, 1978), 413, 415. 24 Hume, A treatise, 296, 413–54 (‘The very essence of virtue … is to produce pleasure, and that of vice to give pain’, 296); Pierre Bayle, ‘Ovid’, in id., Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697–1702; Paris, 1820–4), vol. xi, n. h, pp. 302–6. See Harris, ‘Introduction’; id., ‘Answering Bayle’s Question: Religious Belief in the Moral Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment’, Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy, 1 (2003), 229–53; Moore, ‘Utility’; Stewart, ‘The Stoic Legacy’. 25 Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (1977; Princeton, 1997), 24–6, 53–5, 65–6. 26 See the following works by Immanuel Kant: Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. and tr. Allen W. Wood (1785; New Haven, 2002), 10; Metaphysics of Morals (1797), in

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Augustine had been a critic of Stoicism on the grounds of its overestimation of the ability of people to act in accordance with reason and virtue, but he too had denounced the evil power of passions (pathê).27 The Augustinian Malebranche’s moral thought is particularly important for the similarities it has with Muratori’s. In Traité de morale (1684–1707), Malebranche provided a more straightforward analysis of passions than that, nuanced and complex, he put forward in his celebrated De la recherche de la vérité (1674–5). He denounced the senses, the imagination, and the passions. The third were ‘movements of the soul and the bodily spirits’ caused by the first two; human beings necessitated passions like fear, sexual attraction, or desire for material goods in order to live, but they were also the origins of sin, as they ‘corrupt our hearts’. Passions ‘fill the whole capacity of esprit and heart when they are excited’, tied as they were both to bodily motions and impulses of the will. To moderate passions is very difficult, Malebranche argued, for they manage to mask their ‘criminal designs’ before reason by appealing to the very virtues they are fighting against, and, above all, through the sensual pleasures accompanying them. To resist the passions, one should subdue imagination and strengthen reason by following certain practical rules, but any effort would be vain without recourse to prayer. Ultimately, only God as ‘the Author of grace’ can overcome the pleasure accompanying passions and hence lead ‘man’ to virtue, consisting in ‘the habitual and dominant love of the unchangeable Order’.28 The historian, philosopher, and economist Ludovico Antonio Muratori (1672–1750) was the champion of the Italian Catholic Aufklärung. His European­

Practical­ Philosophy, ed. and tr. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge, 1996), 353–604 at 534–7; Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, ed. and tr. Robert B. Louden (1798; Cambridge, 2006), 152. See Allen W. Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge, 1999). 27 Brooke, Philosophic Pride, pp. xiv–v. To Augustine the passions were good if oriented towards God, but were evil if oriented towards the world, according to Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 50–1. For Augustine’s ‘intricate’ relation to the Stoics’ stance on passions,­ see Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation (Oxford, 2002), Chs. 24–6. 28 Nicolas Malebranche, Traité de morale, ed. Henri Joly (Paris, 1882), 136–42; also id., De la recherche de la vérité, ed. Geneviève Rodis-Lewis, in Nicolas Malebranche, Œuvres complètes (Paris, 1958–84), vols. i–iii, at vol. ii, bk. v, Ch. 4, pp. 164–6. On Malebranche’s view of passions, see James, Passions, 108–123; Sean Greenberg, ‘Malebranche on the Passions: Biology, Morality, and the Fall’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 18 (2010), 191– 207. Gioberti regarded Malebranche as ‘the greatest philosopher of France’; see Vincenzo Gioberti, Introduzione allo studio della filosofia (1839–40; Capolago, 1849), ii, 114.

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stature is still to be fully acknowledged.29 Muratori, a clergyman, published in 1735 a treatise in moral philosophy which ‘would remain a true point of reference for the entire field of Catholic reformism and for a great part of Italian culture during the Enlightenment’.30 The work amounts to a lengthy argument for the subjugation of passions by reason as the single way to achieve peace of mind (tranquillità), which was the closest to happiness one could come in this world. To him, reason was an innate faculty, given by God, enabling ‘man’ to discern causes and effects as well as to distinguish between good and evil; and a passion was an affection occasioned by an external object and excited by the bodily spirits. Passions were love, hate, desire, hope, rage, etc.31 Granted that passions were an integral and ineradicable part of human nature, Muratori insisted on their force, hence on the pervasiveness of evil. ‘It is only too easy for passions’, he wrote, to go to extremes, and consequently ‘to blind our intellect by unsettling it, to tyrannize reason, to corrupt judgement, and to lead 29

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The son of an artisan, Muratori was born in Vignola, near Modena. He took holy orders in 1694. After five years at the Ambrosian Library in Milan, he was appointed archivist and librarian in Modena’s Ducal library (1700), which position he held until his death in that city. The chief product of his untiring work on the sources for a history of Italy was the epoch-making Rerum italicarum scriptores, published in twenty-eight volumes in Milan from 1723 to 1738. See Girolamo Imbruglia, ‘Muratori, Ludovico Antonio’, dbi, lxxvii, 2012. On his voluminous correspondence, see Alphonse Dupront, L.A. Muratori et la société européenne des pré-lumières: Essai d’inventaire et de typologie d’après l’ ‘Epistolario’ (Florence, 1976); for Muratori’s influence in Germany, and his collaboration with Leibniz, see Sergio Bertelli, Erudizione e storia in Ludovico Antonio Muratori (Naples, 1960), 175–223, and Fabio Marri and Maria Lieber, Ludovico Antonio Muratori und Deutschland (Frankfurt, 1997); for his impact in Austria and other countries, see Giuseppe Ricuperati et al., La fortuna di L.A. Muratori (Florence, 1975). For appraisals in English, see Eric Cochrane, ‘Muratori: The Vocation of a Historian’, Catholic Historical Review, 51 (1965), 153–72; Chiara Continisio, ‘Governing the Passions: Sketches on Lodovico Antonio Muratori’s Moral Philosophy’, History of European Ideas, 32 (2006), 367–84. For the European dimension of the Aufklärung, see Helena Rosenblatt, ‘The Christian Enlightenment’, in Stewart J. Brown et al. (eds.), Cambridge History of Christianity (Cambridge, 2006–09), vii, 283–301; David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestant, Jews and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton, 2008); Lehner and Printy, A Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment. Vincenzo Ferrone, The Intellectual Roots of the Italian Enlightenment: Newtonian Science, Religion, and Politics in the Early Eighteenth Century, tr. Sue Brotherton (1982; Amherst, ny, 1995), 176. Ludovico Antonio Muratori, La filosofia morale esposta e proposta a i giovani (1735; Verona, 1737), 53–4, 83–4, 176–83. For the Stoic matrix of Muratori’s view of happiness, see Alberto Vecchi, ‘Il Muratori e la filosofia del suo tempo’, in Alberto Vecchi et al., Miscellanea di studi muratoriani (Modena, 1951), 326; Continisio, ‘Governing the Passions’, 380–1.

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us to take a thousand disordered actions’.32 Following the dictates of reason is what virtue consists in, and reason is also the means by which we can grasp the ‘divine order’, given that our lives take meaning only through compliance with God’s design.33 Muratori, who explicitly rejected Locke’s empiricism, challenged his view of ‘uneasiness’ as the cause of desire by arguing that it was actually desire that caused uneasiness. Muratori strongly opposed what he considered the implication of Locke’s theory of knowledge, namely a subjective and utilitarian morality. What is useful to humanity is necessarily also ‘honest’, he contended.34 As mentioned, Malebranche’s moral philosophy was an important influence on Muratori’s. The Italian, too, attributed the passions to the interrelations between body and soul, and, in tune with the Augustinian revival of the seventeenth century, stressed the intensity of the passions’ grasp. But whereas Malebranche had opposed Stoicism, Muratori’s Filosofia morale was imbued with it. The influence of the Stoa philosophy is unmistakable (in spite of the fuzziness of its boundaries), and shapes Muratori’s picture of this world.35 He was familiar not only with the ancient Stoics but also with Lipsius’ ‘civil’ and ‘Christian’ brand, meant to educate the monarch.36 Virtue, being an expression of natural dispositions that lay latent within us, did not require the overcoming of human nature in Muratori’s view. Virtue was the means of achieving a Stoic tranquillity – to the extent that this was possible on earth – in the face 32 Muratori, La filosofia morale, 174–5, 179. See also, e.g., id., Della pubblica felicità, oggetto de’ buoni prìncipi (Modena, 1749), 3–5. 33 Muratori, La filosofia morale, 201–16. 34 Ibid., esp. 83–6, 157–8, 264–6. Muratori argued for a middle way between innatism and empiricism, viewing reason and truth as innate categories. See Vecchi, ‘Il Muratori e la filosofia’, 326–9, and, on the importance Muratori ascribed to the senses, Bertelli, Erudizione, 376–9. 35 In a remarkable letter to Giovanni Artico di Porcia (10 Nov. 1721), Muratori recalled his early fascination with Stoicism. I am unrepentant about it, he wrote, for Stoicism has plenty of maxims that are useful to a Christian philosopher, although eventually Christianity only can provide a barrier against passions; see Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Epistolario, ed. Matteo Campori (Modena, 1901–22), v, 2136 (the whole letter is at 2131–54). See Gian Francesco Galeani Napione, ‘Vita di Lodovico Antonio Muratori’, in id., Vite ed elogi d’illustri italiani (Pisa, 1818), iii, 147–65 at 150–1; Chiara Continisio, Il governo delle passioni: Prudenza, giustizia e carità nel pensiero politico di Lodovico Antonio Muratori (Florence, 1999), 113–23. Muratori, in agreement with Augustine and Malebranche, held that the Stoics had been too ‘proud’; see La filosofia morale, 189. 36 On Lipsius’ Politica, see Michel Sénellart, ‘Le stoïcisme dans la constitution de la pensée politique: Les Politiques de Juste Lipse (1589)’, in Jacqueline Lagrée (ed.), Le stoïcisme aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Caen, 1994), 109–130.

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of a world that was ‘sick’, repleted with injustice and violence. The sage bore pain and tribulations with relative serenity for the habit of self-mastery, the essential Stoic virtue, ‘prepared him for everything’. The core (nerbo) of moral philosophy, he also remarked, is the virtue of mortification (mortificazione), teaching how to resist one’s own desires. Prudence (prudenza) is also important, as it prescribes that reason should be abided by even amidst the hurdles of passions, thus avoiding ‘extreme’, intemperate behaviour.37 Like doxa to the Stoics, opinione to Muratori was always uncertain and often led to wrong or evil actions; the sage should strive to attain truth through ‘science’, resulting from the exercise of reason. Muratori, in accordance with Lipsius, imparted an activist turn to Stoicism. His ethics led to a concern for others, also in the form of service to the fatherland, so much so that citizens should be ready to sacrifice their life and property to the advantage of the polity.38 Stoic virtue, however, was not self-sufficient. Muratori combined it with religion, providing consolation and reassurance. Christianity made earthly life meaningful by rewarding its trials in the hereafter – to follow reason, to follow nature, and to follow God came to one and the same thing for the sage. Needless to say, there was more than solace in religion. Muratori anticipated Rosmini in advocating the exercise of charity (carità) as the essence of the imitation of Christ, hence as the duty of all faithful. He went as far as recommending donating to the poor to the detriment of parishes, convents, and holy places. Muratori’s Della carità cristiana, in quanto essa è amore del prossimo (1723) was a manifesto for a religiosity that was operational and social rather than abstract and private. To him, belonging to the Church entailed a commitment to co-operate in the construction of the Christian republic.39 Muratori was critical of the morality prevailing in his time. His Della pubblica felicità (1749) featured dozens of pages censuring Italians’ failings, like indifference to the public interest and lack of enterprise. He focused on the vices of the aristocracy, and in particular on its laziness, ‘Epicureanism’, and that cicisbeismo that would enrage Balbo and the other moderates.40 The virtues 37 Muratori, La filosofia morale, 10, 188–94, 281–94, 310–11, 338–60. 38 Ibid., 14, 85, 93–96, 111–119 (on opinion), 208–10, 242–4, 368–9. See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass., 2007), 115–16 ff. 39 Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Della carità cristiana, in quanto essa è amore del prossimo (Modena, 1723). See Alberto Vecchi, ‘L’itinerario spirituale del Muratori’, in Alberto Vecchi et al., L.A. Muratori e la cultura contemporanea (Florence, 1975), 205–10; Continisio, Il governo, 295–316. For Rosmini, see in particular the posthumous Costituzioni dell’Istituto della carità, ed. Dino Sartori (1828–55; Rome, 1996). 40 Muratori, Della pubblica felicità, 35–40, 229–30, 238–9 (on laziness); 50–1 (on indifference); 209–10, 214–19 (on enterprise); 316–20 (on cicisbeismo); 413–17 (on Epicureanism).

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Catholicism prescribes are the best antidotes to all these moral shortcomings, he contended.41 A better morality was to him an indispensable condition for the various economic and administrative reforms he recommended. Muratori had a clear idea of Italy as a ‘cultural nation’, namely, as the seat of a distinctive civilization. With the twofold aim of promoting and reforming it, he called upon Italian intellectuals to form a national academy, a ‘literary republic’ challenging the Scholasticism of universities in the name of useful knowledge and ‘experimental philosophy’.42 The Italian Aufklärung witnessed another major treatise on moral philosophy besides Muratori’s, abbot Antonio Genovesi’s Diceosina (1767–71).43 Like Muratori, whom he deeply admired, Genovesi referred to a divine and natural ‘order’ as the normative framework of individual actions. Happiness in this life amounts to eschewing pain, he wrote, and virtue is the means through which we strengthen ourselves in order to achieve that goal. In other words, the practice of the cardinal virtues – prudence, fortitude, justice, and temperance – leads to ‘peace of mind’, to be enjoyed in good and bad times, and eventually deriving from being in harmony with the divine design – here he cited the Stoic Epictetus. Genovesi’s perception of the fate of ‘man’ on earth was not as sombre as Muratori’s, for self-love was balanced with ‘sympathy’, a natural inclination towards compassion and benevolence.44 As for passions, the ‘false’ ones

41 42

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Cicisbeismo referred to a recognized and overt tie between a married woman and a man who was not her husband. For Balbo on cicisbeismo, see below, Sect. 6. Ibid., 58–64. The project of the Italian academy is in Lamindo Pritanio [Ludovico Antonio Muratori], I primi disegni della repubblica letteraria d’Italia (1703), in Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Opere (Arezzo, 1767–73), viii, 1–35. See also Muratori’s defence of Italian culture against French critics in Perfetta poesia italiana (1706; 2nd rev. ed., 1724), in Opere, vol. ix, parts i–ii. See Ferrone, The Intellectual Roots, 89–92; Volker Kapp, ‘Muratori e l’idea della repubblica letteraria d’Italia’, Romanische Forschungen, 114 (2002), 191–205. See Niccolò Guasti, ‘Antonio Genovesi’s Diceosina: Source of the Neapolitan Enlightenment’, History of European Ideas, 32 (2006), 385–405 (but it is questionable whether Diceosina really was ‘a text of an almost revolutionary cultural and political capacity in the Italian context of those years’, 397). Ferrone complains about Genovesi’s ‘insistence on evangelical teachings’, entailing a rejection of ‘the model of a secular, utilitarian society’ which Bayle and Locke had proposed; see his The Intellectual Roots, 256–60. A priest since 1737, Genovesi (1713–69) was a professor at the University of Naples. His philosophical and theological writings of the 1740s got him into trouble with the ecclesiastical hierarchy; in the 1750s he turned to political economy, as the first European chair of that subject was created for him. See Maria Luisa Perna, ‘Genovesi, Antonio’, dbi, liii, 2000. Antonio Genovesi, Della Diceosina o sia della filosofia del giusto e dell’onesto (1766–71; Venice, 1795), esp. i, 6, 11, 13 (approving of the Stoic virtues of prudence and temperance),

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were those deviating from the moral order, and those should be restrained by reason. Genovesi agreed with the Stoics, Augustine, and Muratori that mistaken judgements produced the harmful passions, rather than the r­ everse – ‘only the sage is free’, as the Stoics used to say. His ethics was participatory: the wise and virtuous should do their best to help and benefit the patria. The Stoics had taught frugality, and Genovesi advocated an agrarian law, which was meant to eschew the conflicts and crimes resulting from ‘greed’. Genovesi, like Muratori, equated the useful with the honest.45 The Camaldolese Benedictine Isidoro Bianchi was not as famous a philosopher as Muratori and Genovesi, but his moral treatise Meditazioni su varj punti di felicità pubblica, e privata (1772–4) had a remarkable success with reprintings and translations.46 The extent of the overlapping between Bianchi’s brand of Catholicism and Stoicism is striking; whole chapters could have been written by Seneca or Epictetus. Besides the discipline of passions by reason, Bianchi preached the duty to accept whatever happened serenely, for calamities strengthened reason and were therefore ‘useful’, as the ‘pagans’ had already understood. To achieve peace of mind, the Christian should place himself or herself ‘beyond the reach of fate’ (al di sopra della fortuna) by reducing needs and deepening self-knowledge – Genovesi had argued along the same lines.47 Virtue amounted to caring for all our fellow human beings for the sake of it, and not with the goal of being rewarded. Genovesi and Bianchi denounced Deists, materialists, and all ‘unbeliever philosophers’ for leading society to anarchy by giving passions free rein; Muratori and Bianchi embraced the dream 17–21, 23, 63, 105–6 (referring to Epictetus). For Genovesi’s agreement with the Stoics on passions, in spite of his acknowledgment of the problematic feasibility of apatheia, and for the centrality of temperance or ‘moderation’, see also his Delle scienze metafisiche per li giovanetti (1767), in id., Logica e metafisica (Milan, 1835), 295–756 at 430–1, 706, 734–5. On sympathy, and on the numerous similarities between Genovesi and Muratori, see Paola Zambelli, La formazione filosofica di Antonio Genovesi (Naples, 1972), 112–63, 787–9. 45 Genovesi, Della Diceosina, i, 10–11, 45, 63, 66, 97, 106, 128–35 ff., 139–42; ii, 5–9; Muratori, La filosofia morale, 112–13. For the Stoics on frugality, see Christopher J. Berry, The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation (Cambridge, 1994), 64–5. 46 The book was first published in Palermo, where Bianchi held a chair in logic and metaphysics at the Monreale seminary. The Lombard Bianchi (1731–1808) dialogued with major figures of the Enlightenment like Pietro Verri, Gian Rinaldo Carli, and Beccaria; in the 1780s he supported the modernizing policies carried out by Joseph ii in Lombardy. See Franco Venturi, ‘Bianchi, Isidoro’, dbi, x, 1968; Antonio Trampus, Storia del costituzionali­ smo italiano nell’età dei Lumi (Bari, 2009), 164–7. 47 Isidoro Bianchi, Meditazioni su varj punti di felicità pubblica, e privata (1772–3; 2nd rev. ed., Palermo, 1774), 172, 237; Genovesi, Della Diceosina, i, 130–1 and n.

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of a Platonic republic of the sages. All three believed that, in practice, ‘philosophers’ could and should advise the prince, on the grounds of their knowledge of the natural and divine laws – they knew ‘the truth’, not mere ‘opinion’.48 The pessimistic, Augustinian anthropology defining Jansenism made ample room for the power of passions and self-love over reason, as the leader of the movement in Tuscany, Scipione de’Ricci, helps to demonstrate.49 A sensibility that can be termed vaguely Stoical was far from absent even on the fringe of the Aufklärung, as especially indicated by a polemic on Stoicism ­occasioned by Francesco Maria Zanotti’s remarks on Maupertuis (1754). Zanotti’s stance was that the Stoics’ honestum amounted to ‘the very God whom we w ­ orship’. Casto Innocente Ansaldi replied by arguing that religion only could relieve the ­unhappiness experienced in this life through the vision of a future one; ­thenceforth, several other writers intervened. Themes like the contrast ­between reason and passions, the errors of Epicureanism, the search for ­tranquillità, and the role of honestum and virtue recurred in the discussion.50 The Savoy-born Giacinto Sigismondo Gerdil (1718–1802) was a significant figure in the Church as theologian, bishop, and, from 1777, cardinal. He taught moral philosophy at the University of Turin (1749–59), and was the tutor of the prince of Piedmont, afterwards king Charles Emmanuel iv. Appolis includes this follower of Descartes and Malebranche in the tiers parti.51 Gerdil, who studied under Zanotti in Bologna and was deeply influenced by Muratori, absorbed the two authors’ 48 Bianchi, Meditazioni; Muratori, Della pubblica felicità, 41–6, 50–1, 71–3, 85–6, 181–6; Genovesi, Della Diceosina, i, 10–11, 63, 97–8; iii, 49. 49 A rare political text by a Jansenist, de’Ricci’s ‘Istruzione pastorale su i doveri dei sudditi verso il sovrano’ (1784), in Scipione de’Ricci et al., Atti e decreti del Concilio diocesano di Pistoja dell’anno 1786: Appendice (Pistoia, n.d.), 97–107, warned that passions could impair the unquestioning obedience people owed to the prince. 50 Francesco Maria Zanotti, La filosofia morale secondo l’opinione dei peripatetici ridotta in compendio, con un ragionamento sopra un libro di morale del sig. Maupertuis (1754; Parma, 1843), 215–61, quot. at 249; Casto Innocente Ansaldi, Lettera al signor dottore Francesco Maria Zanotti in risposta ai tre discorsi da quest’ultimo stampati contro la Difesa del signore di Maupertuis (Venice, 1755). These and other contributions to the debate were collected in Raccolta di trattati di diversi autori concernenti alla religion naturale e alla morale filosofia de’ Cristiani, e degli Stoici (Venice, 1756–7). See Franco Venturi, Settecento riformatore (Turin, 1969–90), i, 390–403; for background, see Christopher Brooke, ‘How the Stoics Became Atheists’, Historical Journal, 49 (2006), 387–402. Maupertuis’s text is Essai de philosophie morale (Berlin, 1749). 51 See Appolis, Entre jansénistes et zelanti, 200–1, 410–11; Marco Ciardi and Luigi Guerrini, ‘Dalla filosofia morale alla filosofia naturale: La scienza di Giacinto Sigismondo Gerdil’, Studi settecenteschi, 19 (1999), 208–09; Pietro Stella, ‘Gerdil, Giacinto Sigismondo’, dbi, liii, 2000.

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concern with Stoicism. His dissertation on the origin of moral sense abounded with references to Cicero, Seneca, and Epictetus, often aimed at countering Epicureanism. Gerdil influenced Rosmini as well as a Piedmontese religious group, the Amicizia cristiana (1775–1811), which was the forerunner of Amicizia cattolica (1817–28), a ramified organization to which Rosmini collaborated, and which was led by d’Azeglio’s father, the marquis Cesare.52 Something more than the bare bones of a ‘Christian philosophy’, informed by the themes of a ‘moderate’ Enlightenment, emerged therefore towards the end of the century. The title of an address given in Rome in 1778 by the abbot Giovanni Cristofano Amaduzzi is revealing: La filosofia alleata della religione [The alliance between religion and philosophy]. It is a tribute to the growth of reason from Bacon to Montesquieu, and to its scientific and political applications.53 The dichotomy between reason and passions shaped the political thought of Nicola Spedalieri (1740–95), a priest close to Pius vi who endorsed popular sovereignty and natural rights in De’ diritti dell’uomo (1791). To him despotism consisted in a ruler giving free rein to ‘his’ passions and ignoring reason. He put forward a bleak depiction of the social and economic conflicts resulting from the unregulated self-love (amor proprio) of all ‘men’, self-love being an umbrella term for all passions. Christianity featured as the only antidote to this state of affairs, thanks to the moderation, patience, and fortitude it prescribed, eventually leading to the tranquillity the Stoics had been vainly looking for. Christianity, therefore, was a ‘natural-born enemy of despotism’.54 This reformist and ‘philosophical’ Christianity, with its powerful Stoic overtones, antagonised the radical programmes of the Enlightenment, put forward by republicans like Rousseau or atheists like Helvétius. They were not among the sources of moderatism, of course, but it is nevertheless necessary to expound at least Rousseau’s stance.55 It was commonly perceived at the time that 52

53

54

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Giacinto Sigismondo Gerdil, ‘Della origine del senso morale’ (1755), in id., Opere scelte (Milan, 1836), iii, 6–127. See Giuseppe Ricuperati, ‘Ludovico Antonio Muratori e il Piemonte’, in id., La fortuna, 61–155 at 79–80. Giovanni Cristofano Amaduzzi, La filosofia alleata della religione (Leghorn, 1778); id., Discorso filosofico sul fine ed utilità delle accademie (Leghorn, 1777). See Mario Rosa, ‘Introduzione all’Aufklärung cattolica in Italia’, in id. (ed.), Cattolicesimo e lumi nel Settecento italiano (Rome, 1981), 1–48 at 37–42; id., Settecento religioso (Venice, 1999), 176–84. Nicola Spedalieri, De’diritti dell’uomo libri vi (Assisi, 1791), esp. 36–7, 106–10, 255, 347–52, 356. On sovereignty, see also id., Ragionamento sopra l’arte di governare (Rome, 1779), pp. vii–xii. Spedalieri’s Catholic democracy will be briefly addressed in the next chapter, Sect. 7. Helvétius’s utilitarian philosophy set pleasure and pain as the moving forces of passions, which determined behaviour. The kind of incentives established by government

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the Genevan expressed a new type of sensibility, and, by and large, historians have concurred with the contemporaries’ impression: he ‘precipitated an affective revolution’.56 Rousseau appeared to ‘encourage persons to dramatize themselves against their environment, as individuals unique in feeling’.57 A sensibility of this kind, emphasising one’s capacity for feeling, flew in the face of the Christian-Stoic tradition with its stress on self-mastery and rationality. Rousseau combined a model character with political argument, not unlike the patriots of the Risorgimento. Since the common person was good by nature, his/her inner sense of goodness became the sole criterion of virtue, on which political reform was to rest.58 Rousseau had been so unrestrained in Émile to praise fanaticism (fanatisme) as a ‘great and strong passion, which ennobles the heart of man’.59 His account of the sources and functions of passions was hardly straightforward – it revolved around amour propre, amour de soi-même, and compassion (pitié) – but texts as different as Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne and La nouvelle Héloïse showed that passions could win over ‘the hearts’ of people. In the public sphere, the management of passions served to establish the laws, while, in the private sphere, it served to gain the love and loyalty of relatives, servants, and employees. Human beings were not governed by reason: ‘all human institutions are based on the human passions and preserved by means of them’. For instance, the idyllic household of Julie in La nouvelle Héloïse provided a small-scale model of games, public honours, celebrations, and spectacles intended to ‘make’ honest servants and contented

56 57

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determined­whether virtuous or vicious passions were practised; see Claude-Adrien Helvétius, De l’esprit (1758), in id., Œuvres complètes (Hildesheim, 1967–9), vols. i–vi at vol. iv, discours 3, Chs. 9–16. ‘Only another passion can triumph over a passion’, he wrote at ii, 245. Helvétius influenced the Italian Enlightenment and notably Beccaria and Gaetano Filangieri, whose assessments of passions, in turn, were known to the democratic authors of the 1850s (see Ch. 3, Sect. 5). Emmett Kennedy, A Cultural History of the French Revolution (New Haven, 1989), 112. Peter J. Stanlis, Edmund Burke: The Enlightenment and Revolution (Brunswick, nj, 1991), 187. On eighteenth-century ‘sentimentalism’, see e.g. Maurice Cranston, The Romantic Movement (Oxford, 1994), 1–20; David Denby, Sentimental Narrative and the Social Order in France 1760–1820 (Cambridge, 1994); Timothy O’Hagan, ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778): The Novel of Sensibility’, in Michael Bell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to European Novelists (Cambridge, 2012), 89–106; Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 154–72. During the Revolution, and especially the Terror, if one acted according to his/her heart’s dictates acted patriotically; see Carol Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue (Ithaca, ny, 1986); Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 173–210. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile ou de l’éducation, ed. Michel Launay (1762; Paris, 1966), bk. iv, pp. 408–9 n.

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peasants. The secret of Julie and Wolmar was ‘the language of heart’, consisting of good examples, humanity, and a sensitive handling of passions.60 The Revolution made the passions a burning issue, chiefly because it became customary in the anti-revolutionary camp to describe it as an eruption of unconstrained cravings. Burke considered the sensibility Rousseau had spread as the emotional foundation of the Revolution. By enthroning private moral feeling, Rousseau had instituted a new mentality which was destructive to personal restraint and the established moral codes. ‘Adopting the sentiments of Rousseau’, Burke went on, has obliterated ‘grace and manners’. La nouvelle Héloïse in particular, that ‘famous work of philosophic gallantry’, has made love coarse and has subverted the principles of domestic trust, while an ‘inordinate vanity’ has replaced humility, ‘the basis of the Christian system’. In short, what Burke complained about was that Rousseau’s recognition of private impulses had fostered both social equality and moral anarchy.61 Burke, in tune with the Catholic-Stoic sensibility, restated that politics should be the preserve of responsible and prudent ‘men’, granted that liberty required the subjugation of passions through religion and traditional customs. Rousseau’s sensibility, in contrast, was that of a ‘Romantic’, an individual asserting the strength and uniqueness of his affections. Germaine de Staël was renowned in Italy at the turn of the century, as the author of Corinne ou l’Italie (1807), as the host of the salon at Coppet, and for an intervention in favour of Romanticism appearing in a Milanese review in 1816. Staël changed her mind between De l’influence des passions sur le bonheur des individus et des nations (1796) and her later writings. She initially maintained that politics amounted to the management of the citizens’ passions, government being equated with ‘reason’ exerting restraint on them. All ‘impetuous sentiments’ ultimately caused political disruption by inducing an imbalance between desires and the capacity to meet them; therefore, the more effective 60

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See the following texts by Rousseau: Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne (1771), in Discours sur l’économie politique, ed. Barbara de Negroni (Paris, 1990), 161–261; Julie ou la nouvelle Héloïse, ed. Michel Launay (1760; Paris, 1967), esp. Part iv, letter 10, pp. 339–52; Part v, letter 7, pp. 456–62. The quoted sentence is in Lettres écrites de la montagne (1764), in Les rêveries d’un promeneur solitaire (Paris, 1935), 103–302 at letter 1, p. 131. See Robin Douglass, Rousseau and Hobbes: Nature, Free Will, and the Passions (Oxford, 2015), 149–88. Edmund Burke, A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791), in id., Further Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Daniel E. Ritchie (Indianapolis, 1992), 29–72 at 46–55; see Stanlis, Edmund Burke, 159–92. But to Burke passions in the abstract were not the ultimate cause of the French Revolution. He insisted on the complexities of French society and the Enlightenment philosophers’ mistaken approach; see Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Leslie G. Mitchell (1790; Oxford, 1993).

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the government’s checking action, the purer liberty could be.62 Later on, she devoted three chapters of De l’Allemagne (1813) to l’enthousiasme, which was not to be equated with fanaticism but rather to be viewed as the only antidote to self-interest and cynicism.63 According to Reddy, in France the new century brought a refusal to come to grips with the ‘sentimentalism’ of the late eighteenth century. There prevailed a desire to relegate the emotions to the spheres of art and private life, while public virtue ‘was regarded as an outgrowth of the exercise of the will, guided by reason, aimed at disciplining passions’.64 Two examples suffice to confirm Reddy’s assessment. The Idéologues, whose circle the young Manzoni joined in Paris between 1805 and 1810, believed that passions were a hindrance to comprehension and, in the public sphere, to the achievement of a rational social order.65 The ultramontane literature systematically viewed passions as antithetical to natural and divine laws. ‘The passions of man’ resisting the ‘natural constitution’ of society and government – ce combat entre l’homme et la nature – are ‘the single cause of unrest’, Bonald wrote.66 To conclude this section, it has emerged that the Revolution set the Christian tradition of thought about passions sharply against Rousseauesque Romanticism, in terms of a contrast between moderation and reform, on the one hand, and extremism and revolution, on the other. A Christian philosopher and an implacable enemy of the French Revolution, Rosmini elaborated on that contrast, laying the foundations for a Catholic perspective on politics. 62

Germaine de Staël, De l’influence des passions sur le bonheur des individus et des nations, in id., Œuvres complètes (Paris and Brussels, 1820–1), iii, 5–240, esp. at 10–15, 35. The influential Mably held similar views; see Romani, National character, 54–7. 63 Germaine de Staël, De l’Allemagne, ed. Simone Balayé (1810–13; Paris, 1968), vol. ii, Part iv, Chs. 10–12, pp. 301–16. See Rousseau, Julie ou la nouvelle Héloïse, Part iv, letter 12, p. 370, on the achievements of the âmes de feu and the impotence of froide raison. Cousin traced enthusiasm back to reason and God; see Victor Cousin, Cours de l’histoire de la philosophie (1830; Paris, 1841), ii, 429–40. 64 Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 216. 65 See e.g. Nicolas de Condorcet, ‘Tableau general de la science qui a pour objet l’application du calcul aux sciences morales et politiques’ (1795), in id., Œuvres, ed. by François Arago and Alexandrine Condorcet O’Connor (Paris, 1847–9), i, 539–73 at 542–3; Destutt de Tracy, Élémens d’idéologie (1801–15; Paris, 1805–18), iv, 446–7. 66 Louis de Bonald, Théorie du pouvoir politique et religieux dans la société civile (1796; Paris, 1854), 101–2. See Jeremy Jennings, Revolution and the Republic: A History of Political Thought in France since the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2011), 45–7. Maistre was convinced that Paul the Apostle’s teaching of the gospel in Rome had been a chief influence on Seneca, a writer he thoroughly liked; see Joseph de Maistre, Les soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg, ed. Jean-Louis Darcel (1821; Geneva, 1993), ii, 473–84 (entretien ix).

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Rosmini on the Restlessness of the Impious

Antonio Rosmini-Serbati (1797–1855) lived between the northern region of Trentino, Milan, and Piedmont. He entered the priesthood in 1821, and founded the Institute of Charity in 1828. His spirituality drew in an original way on Philip Neri, Muratori, Alphonsus Maria de Liguori, and orthodox (that is nonJansenist) Augustinianism.67 His phenomenal literary output numbers more than eighty volumes on every aspect of philosophy and theology. Rosmini, who had welcomed the election of the ‘liberal’ pope Pius ix, went to Rome in 1848 as an envoy of the Piedmontese government. He became an influential adviser to the pope but, in the new situation created by the assassination of the Roman prime minister and the consequent flight of the pope to the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Rosmini fell into disfavour with the Curia. In June 1849, the Congregation of the Index placed two of his works on the list of forbidden books, a sanction which he duly accepted, albeit with great sorrow. He had endorsed constitutionalism during the revolutionary biennium as the climax of a long intellectual evolution.68 Rosmini aimed to restore the cultural status of Catholicism in northern Italy. He adopted a twofold strategy: a series of philosophical treatises were meant to devise a new gnoseology going beyond Kant and Reid, not to mention Locke and Condillac, while shorter and polemical essays targeted specific authors and theories which he deemed dangerous. Rosmini laid the philosophical and psychological foundations for the moderate sensibility – Manzoni and Pellico were the public moralists who helped propagate it, while Gioberti, Balbo, and d’Azeglio made it the background of the political programme of the 1840s. In this section, after an outline of the basics of Rosmini’s philosophy, full consideration will be given to his criticism of Melchiorre Gioja and Foscolo. His politico-psychological theory will be focused on in the next section. In the field of philosophy Rosmini’s chief target was Condillac, whose sensism had depicted ‘men’ like ‘brutes’, whereas the ‘philosophy of Christianity’ 67 68

De Giorgi, La scienza del cuore. For biographical accounts, see Fulvio de Giorgi, Rosmini e il suo tempo: L’educazione dell’uomo moderno tra riforma della filosofia e rinnovamento della Chiesa (1797–1833) (Bre­ scia, 2003); Markus Krienke, Wahrheit und Liebe bei Antonio Rosmini (Stuttgart, 2004). On Rosmini’s activities in 1848, see Antonio Rosmini, Della missione a Roma negli anni 1848–49: Commentario, ed. Luciano Malusa (1881; Stresa, 1998); Luciano Malusa (ed.), Antonio Rosmini e la Congregazione dell’Indice: Il decreto del 30 maggio 1849, la sua genesi ed i suoi echi (Stresa, 1999). Many of Rosmini’s works have been translated into English; see especially the twenty-one volumes published by the Rosmini House in Durham, uk, between 1988 and 2007, with Denis Cleary and Terence Watson as chief translators.

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Rosmini put forward was designed to prepare ‘men’ for faith and ­worship. ­Rosmini contended, in introducing his Nuovo saggio sull’origine delle idee (1830), that a return to ‘true philosophy’ was necessary to overcome the moral and intellectual disruption of the previous century: ‘it is true that the subject of this book is very abstract … but when evil lies deep, its roots should be looked for in depth’.69 He aimed to reduce innatism to a minimum. Knowledge originated from every person’s certain cognition of the idea of being, which was a completely indeterminate ‘pure form’, existing objectively. ‘I begin with a simple, very obvious fact … we think of being in a general way. This fact, no matter how we explain it, cannot be called into doubt … To deny that we can direct our attention to being as common to all things, while ignoring or rather abstracting from all their other qualities, contradicts what is attested by ordinary observation of our own actions’.70 Every individual had sensations that were occasions for forming all other ideas as determinations of the pure idea. The eventual source of any mental operation lay in God. The innate presence of the idea of being to the human intelligence testified to an eternal light of intellect which was prior to the soul, making this spiritual and immortal. Rosmini thought that he had managed to give knowledge an ‘objective’ foundation, in opposition to Reid, Kant, and the Italian Pasquale Galluppi, who, although hostile to sensism, had nurtured ‘scepticism’ by holding a theory of truth ruling out reference to an ideal being independent of ‘man’.71 In 1836, Rosmini accused Gian Domenico Romagnosi, too, of gnoseological scepticism. The most important secular thinker at the time of the publication of Nuovo saggio, Romagnosi was a philosopher and jurist of sensistic and materialist leanings whom Cattaneo and the other writers of Annali universali di statistica revered as a master. Rosmini held that Romagnosi’s understanding of certainty was purely subjective – amounting to an individual judgement that did not change and in which the mind acquiesced – and that it could not be otherwise, because to Romagnosi knowledge of the supersensual was unattainable. Such

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Antonio Rosmini, Nuovo saggio sull’origine delle idee (1830; Turin, 1851–2), vol. i, pp. xlii, xlv–xlvii. Manzoni, too, challenged Condillac; see his unpublished text ‘Esame della dottrina del Locke e del Condillac sull’origine del linguaggio’ (1836–40), in amto, vol. v, Part i, pp. 317–57. 70 Rosmini, Nuovo saggio, ii, 16. For a recent summary of Rosmini’s gnoseology in English, see Brian P. Copenhaven and Rebecca Copenhaven, ‘The Strange Italian Voyage of Thomas Reid: 1800–60’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 14 (2006), 607–12. 71 Rosmini, Nuovo saggio, ii, 423–7; iii, 8; see also id., ‘Della divina Providenza’, in id., Opuscoli filosofici (Milan, 1827–8), i, 3–116 at 89–92.

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an approach leads smoothly to moral scepticism, Rosmini wrote, as confirmed by Romagnosi’s (mild) utilitarianism.72 Romagnosi was not the only embodiment of the empiricist and utilitarian tradition of the Enlightenment. A former priest, the philosopher and economist Melchiorre Gioja (or Gioia, 1767–1829) was based in Milan like Romagnosi.73 In his view Bentham’s utilitarianism could be applied to all aspects of social life – ‘virtue is the eldest daughter of pleasure’, he boldly affirmed.74 Gioja’s political economy was characterised by exhortations to lead a life of comfort and pleasure, as increasing consumption was a necessary condition for development. There was an element of naivety and extremism in Gioja’s positions that made him an ideal target to Rosmini; the two engaged in ferocious exchanges from 1824 to 1828. To Rosmini, Gioja’s utilitarianism meant the denial of altruism and all moral constraints, entailed the impossibility of good government, and undermined obedience to the authorities. The only possible rule of social interaction is that might is right, he wrote, once the pursuit of pleasure becomes people’s single concern. Napoleon’s ruthless ambition proved the point – he had been the perfect utilitarian. Furthermore, the moral corruption (mollezza) resulting from a life of pleasures could easily convert into rage and violence.75 72

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Antonio Rosmini, Il rinnovamento della filosofia in Italia proposto dal C.T. Mamiani della Rovere (1836; Rome, 2007), vol. ii, bk. iii, Chs. 24, 33–36; id., ‘Saggio sulla dottrina religiosa di G.D. Romagnosi’ (1837), in id., Sulla felicità: Saggi su Foscolo, Gioia, Romagnosi, ed. Pier Paolo Ottonello (Rome, 2011), 287–305. See Traniello, Società religiosa, 150–60. Yet it has been argued that contemporaries did not perceive Rosmini’s and Romagnosi’s perspectives as antithetical; see Traniello, Cattolicesimo conciliatorista, 118. Romagnosi had died a year before Rosmini’s attack; on his thought, see Ch. 2, Sect. 1. During the short-lived Cisalpine Republic (1796–9), Gioja participated enthusiastically in political life and wrote a famous treatise advocating democracy and the political unification of Italy; see Melchiorre Gioja, Dissertazione sul problema dell’amministrazione generale della Lombardia: Quale dei governi liberi meglio convenga alla felicità dell’Italia (1796), in Armando Saitta (ed.), Alle origini del Risorgimento: I testi di un ‘celebre’ concorso (1796) (Rome, 1964), ii, 1–130. He subsequently supported the Napoleonic regime, and after 1815, like Romagnosi, he earned a living as a journalist and writer. Gioja wrote books on a wide spectrum of subjects, especially statistical and economic, but also on republican manners (1802), divorce (1803), sensistic philosophy (1818), and merit and rewards (1818–19). See Roberto Romani, L’economia politica del Risorgimento italiano (Turin, 1994), 48–73; Francesca Sofia, ‘Gioja, Melchiorre’, dbi, lv, 2001. Melchiorre Gioja, Teoria civile e penale del divorzio (1803), in id., Opere minori (Lugano, 1832–7), ix, 3–260 at 73. See the following works by Rosmini: ‘Saggio sulla definizione della ricchezza’ (1827), in Opuscoli politici, ed. Gianfreda Marconi (Rome, 1978), 13–45 esp. at 27; ‘Breve esposizione della filosofia di Melchiorre Gioja’ (1828), in Opuscoli filosofici, ii, 353–490 (the point on

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Rosmini devoted two lenghty essays to censure Gioja’s manual on manners, the Nuovo galateo (1802), stressing its mistaken praise of fashion.76 The consumption of, and desire for, new goods did not induce people to work harder, as Gioja believed; instead it corrupted the lower classes’ morals by prompting conceit and triggering social mobility, which was a bad thing. The craving for luxury brought ruin to well-to-do families as well.77 The French ultramontane were making similar arguments in attacking the ‘epicureanism’ characterizing post-revolutionary society. Une cupidité extrême, une soif insatiable de l’or dominates France, Lamennais maintained, as restless individuals yearn for enjoyment avec une sorte de fureur.78 To Rosmini, economic growth did not entail moral corruption if, and only if, it was accompanied by education and virtue, both supplied essentially by Christian teachings.79 Step by step, Rosmini developed an anthropology aimed at capturing the post-revolutionary malaise. His essay on the poet and novelist Ugo Foscolo (1778–1827) – the author of an epistolary novel, Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, inspired by Goethe’s Werther – addressed the understanding of happiness that Foscolo allegedly shared with Gioja, Diderot, and other esprits forts.80

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77 78 79 80

mollezza is at 433); on Napoleon, see Panegirico alla santa e gloriosa memoria di Pio settimo (Modena, 1831), 108–114. For Gioja, see his Nuovo prospetto delle scienze economiche (Milan, 1815–17), esp. i, 257; iii, 232–5; iv, 58–77. On the clash between Gioja and Rosmini, see Gioele Solari, ‘A. Rosmini, le “Memorie” di Modena e la polemica col Gioia’, in id., Studi rosminiani (Milan, 1957), 223–264; Pietro Piovani, La teodicea sociale di Rosmini (Padua, 1957), 53–96; Piero Barucci, Il pensiero economico di Melchiorre Gioia (Milan, 1965), 160–7; Traniello, Società religiosa, 83–91. ‘Esame delle opinioni di Melchiorre Gioja in favor della moda’ (1824), and ‘Galateo de’ letterati: All’occasione d’una risposta inurbana dell’autore del Nuovo galateo’ (1828), both in Rosmini, Opuscoli filosofici, ii, 105–68, 169–303. See Melchiorre Gioja, Il nuovo galateo (1802), in id., Opere minori, vols. xvi–xvii. Rosmini, ‘Esame delle opinioni’, 108–110, 123–4; id., ‘Saggio sulla definizione’, 41–2. Félicité de Lamennais, De la religion considérée dans ses rapports avec l’ordre politique et civil (1825–6), in id., Œuvres complètes (Paris, 1836–7), vii, at 19–21, 25–6, 28. Rosmini, ‘Esame delle opinioni’, 121–2. Foscolo, a native of the Ionian island of Zakynthos, then part of the Venetian republic, moved with his family to Venice in 1792. His early enthusiasm for Napoleon turned to disillusionment when Venice and the Venetia were handed over to Austria in 1797. Foscolo’s very popular Ortis (1798–1802) contains a bitter denunciation of that transaction. After serving in the Italian and French armies (1799–1807), he was appointed to the chair of Italian eloquence at Pavia, but the chair was abolished after a few months. Dei sepolcri (On sepulchres), a patriotic poem in blank verse, appeared in 1807. When the Austrians returned to Milan, Foscolo refused to take the oath of allegiance and fled first to Switzerland and then to England (1816). On Rosmini’s attack on him, see Umberto Carpi, ‘Rosmini,­la

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The natural tendency to happiness was thwarted in irreligious people by searching for it in material things, whereas ‘God is the object that man’s heart is looking for’.81 Fearful of looking inside themselves, Foscolo and his ilk arrogantly expected to be ‘great and happy’ irrespective of God. But since they did not feel happy in the present, they projected happiness in the future, turning it into expectation and aspiration. This attitude induced a constant spiritual agitation (agitazione), a perpetual state of anxious excitement. It also nurtured a vivid imagination, for, the hope of being happy proving always wrong, new hopes were to be envisaged recurrently. Happiness came therefore to be regarded as an illusion, although an ever-tempting one.82 Rosmini was denouncing what the philosopher Charles Taylor has termed ‘self-sufficing humanism’: Foscolo inhabited a secular world in which it was possible to locate ‘the place of fullness’ within human life, and not necessarily beyond it as before.83 The feeling of despair lying at the bottom of the esprits forts was contrasted with the true happiness resulting from Catholicism – Rosmini in fact drew a comparison between two opposite characters. Restlessness was the key feature of the sons of the Enlightenment, for the satisfaction of a desire prompted the quest for a new one; the ‘passions’ of ‘pride and lust’ dominated their souls, nourishing an unrealistic feeling of greatness; but any pleasure was spoilt by fear, as an ‘inner voice’ whispered words of remorse, which eventually led the esprits forts to ‘hate’ God and religion.84 Incredulity left unsatisfied an essential need of ‘man’, that for ‘the whole truth’, and the ensuing disposition engendered ‘convulsions’ in society. As Rosmini also put it, individuals who were at war with themselves could not fail to be at war with society. The rebellious attitude engendered by this psychological model led to ‘furies’ and ‘human beasts’ subverting societies and governments. In short, the esprit forts held extreme political beliefs for they were the slaves of passions, like the most uncouth of ‘plebeians’.85 Rosmini applied this character pattern not only to philosophes moda di Gioia, gli errori di Foscolo’, in Maurizio Martirano (ed.), Le filosofie del Risorgimento (Udine, 2012), 113–30. 81 Antonio Rosmini, Della speranza: Saggio sopra alcuni errori di Ugo Foscolo (1822), in id., Sulla felicità, 31–121 at 50. 82 Rosmini, Della speranza. See also id., ‘Beniamino Constant’, in id., Frammenti di una storia della empietà (Milan, 1834), 1–103. For a comment, see the still useful essay by Giuseppe Ferrari, ‘La philosophie catholique en Italie’, Revue des deux mondes, 15 Mar. and 15 May 1844, 956–94, 364–96 at 366–9. For Rosmini on the dangers of imagination, in relation to Tommaseo’s attitude, see De Giorgi, La scienza del cuore, 301–4. 83 Taylor, A secular age. 84 Rosmini, Della speranza, esp. 52, 68, 73–5, 82. 85 Ibid., 44, 69, 80, 102; Rosmini, ‘Beniamino Constant’, 27; id., Nuovo saggio, vol. i, p. lvi.

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and revolutionaries but also to Protestants – who had rebelled against the Church – as was common in ultramontane literature.86 The persons who embraced true religion, by contrast, experienced inner happiness. Its chief feature was ‘peace of mind’, for only Catholicism brought about a state of fulfilment (appagamento). The ‘unstable’ nature of ‘man’, who was prone to flee from himself, in fact required the direction that only religion could provide. It bestowed ‘order’ and ‘harmony’ on the soul by shifting its focus from material goods and earthly ambitions to love of an external entity. Thus, the Catholics’ achievement of inner peace (quiete) was juxtaposed with the impious’ unavoidable restlessness. The personality that Catholicism shaped was ‘calm’ and harmonious, ‘tender’ and content, ‘amiable’ and supportive of others. In accordance with the Gospel, the believer was docile (mansueto) and concerned primarily with duty rather than pleasure. Yet, Rosmini added, Catholics can also be brave and strong ‘like lions’, as no earthly power frightens them. Their calmness and contentment, as well as their morality, rest on the awareness that ‘man’ has a place within the divine order. Hence Catholics are the best friends of order – Rosmini invited monarchs to act on this fact.87 Rosmini’s critique is to be viewed within a broad European context. First, he was inspired by the French ultramontane’s interpretation of the Revolution. Maistre had famously ascribed the Revolution to ‘a vicious pride’, for the French, by refusing to declare Catholicism the state religion, had in effect attempted to emancipate humanity from the will of God guiding government and civilization. To Maistre, the French had conceitedly rebelled against God, in the name of self-determination and self-assertion.88 Second, Rosmini’s philosophical enterprise arguably owed something to Maine de Biran’s and especially Cousin’s analyses of the self (moi). In reaction to Condillac, the two philosophers had postulated a self existing before sensory experience, on the grounds that, in the words of a historian, ‘repairing the self’ was ‘the linchpin in the project of the post-revolutionary stabilization of France’. Cousin, who was explicit about linking his psychology to politics, pointed to the weakness, the anxiety, and especially the moral relativism associated with sensistic 86 Rosmini, Della speranza, 102–3 and n. 87 Ibid., 42–3, 105–9; Rosmini, ‘Breve esposizione’, 435–7; id., Nuovo saggio, vol. i, pp. xliv–v. 88 See Emile Perreau-Saussine, Catholicism and Democracy: An Essay in the History of Political Thought (Princeton, 2012), 13, 21; more generally, see Geoffrey Cubitt, ‘God, Man and Satan: Strands in Counter-Revolutionary Thought among Nineteenth-Century French Catholics’, in Frank Tallett and Nicholas Atkin (eds.), Catholicism in Britain and France since 1789 (London, 1996), 135–50.

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psychological­fragmentation, and argued that, in contrast, his concept of self led to an intimate conviction of certain universal and absolute truths.89 Third, it is apparent that Rosmini, like Burke, targeted the Romantic personality. Rosmini re-affirmed human finitude in the face of the indeterminate and insatiable nature of the Romantic subject’s passions; by contending that the self’s infinite longings could not be satisfied on earth, he pointed to the destructive tendencies inherent in the drive for self-sufficiency.90 3

Rosmini on Desires, Passions, and Fulfilment

Rosmini’s Filosofia della politica (1839) featured a full-scale application of psychology to politics, in the belief that character was key to good government. In his words, ‘civil philosophy’ rested on the firm ground provided by the ‘science of man’.91 A contrast between the supporters of ‘movement’ and those of ‘resistance’ (he borrowed the terms from parliamentary politics under the July monarchy) shapes political debate, he contended. The former regard a state of perpetual desire as the necessary stimulus to progress, whereas the latter cherish ‘fulfilment’ and peace of mind as crucial conditions for a stable society, which is the ultimate goal of politics from their perspective.92 Rosmini aimed to identify a middle course, by detecting the type of desires that could safely be satisfied. The fundamental error of ‘the system of movement’, he stated, is to value a ‘perpetual movement’ of society as such, regardless of its side-effects – Gioja well exemplifies such a standpoint. Arousing artificial needs that cannot be met causes misery, a surge in criminality, and social envy. Furthermore, the social mobility that sets in is far from beneficial, for there are only a few places at the top of the ‘social pyramid’ and the most violent and cunning are likely to attain them. A wise government should therefore act to reduce artificial­needs

89 Jan Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self: Politics and Psyche in France, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), Ch. 3, quot. at 157. 90 John E. Toews, ‘Church and State: The Problem of Authority’, in Gareth Stedman Jones and Gregory Claeys (eds.), The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge, 2013), 603–48. 91 Antonio Rosmini, Filosofia della politica, ed. Mario d’Addio (Rome, 1997), 357–8. This book consists of two essays: Della sommaria cagione per la quale stanno o rovinano le umane società (57–117), which was published separately in 1837, and La società ed il suo fine (121–514), appearing in 1839. 92 Ibid., 419–20.

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if income is shrinking for some reason, and a religion-supported morality is the only means of achieving that reduction.93 Rosmini, remindful of Vico, applied this line of argument to the early history of humanity. Western nations cyclically went through four ‘social ages’ in ancient times, he contended, and each of them was characterized by certain passions and desires. In the first age, when nations were founded, simple mores and ‘natural goodness’ predominated; a phase of craving for power and glory followed; then peoples developed a lust for wealth, regardless of the morality of the means of obtaining it; and in the last age society broke up in consequence of a general pursuit of pleasure.94 Ancient peoples trod this path of gradual corruption in the attempt to achieve complete psychological fulfilment; the cycles were eventually broken by the advent of Christ. Granted that progress is possible in Christian societies only, still it is neither necessary nor straightforward.95 (In Vico’s ‘new science’ of history, the cycles of corsi and ricorsi did not come to an end with Christianity).96 Rosmini, in fact, set out to account for ‘corruption and unhappiness’ in Christian peoples. True religion had made ‘man’ capable of desiring ‘an infinite good’, and accordingly ‘immensity of desire’ was the most visible feature of Christian nations.97 But, he argued, ‘passions’ may hamper the faithful’s happiness by presenting finite objects as if they were the infinite good that Christians are actually seeking. ‘Man’ then becomes a slave of passions, although a willing one. To Rosmini, following the classical Christian model and Augustine in particular, the origin of evil lay in the will formulating the wrong judgments on which passions were based.98 Passions had four basic forms – relating to physical pleasures, wealth, power, and glory – and several sub-species. 93

Ibid., 430–50. The view that human misery resulted from an imbalance between desires and faculties had been put forward, of course in a different context, by Rousseau in Émile, bk. ii, pp. 93–100. 94 Rosmini, Filosofia della politica, 251–55 ff. Oriental societies differed, for they did not experience the second phase, at 265–72. 95 Ibid., 261, 299–300, 421–5. 96 Giambattista Vico, La scienza nuova, ed. Manuela Sanna and Vincenzo Vitiello (1725–44; Milan, 2012). 97 Rosmini, Filosofia della politica, 453–4. 98 For Rosmini on will as the source of moral evil, see ibid., 494–5; Nuovo saggio, vol. i, pp. xlii–xlvi; iii, 229–32; ‘Della divina Providenza’, 27. As human beings chose to be sinful, they fully deserved Providential retribution; see De Giorgi, La scienza del cuore, 288–92. For the classical model, see Sorabji, Emotion; Dixon, From passions to emotions, Ch. 2. In City of God (426), ed. David Knowles, tr. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth, uk, 1972), 14.6, Augustine wrote that ‘in general, as a man’s will is repelled or attracted in accordance with

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He proceeded to list all of them, being one hundred and twenty-nine in total. They made up a ‘topographic map of the human heart’, which he invited governments to take into full consideration.99 Rosmini detailed the political and social harm done by the predominance of passions. For instance, those who fell prey to the passion for wealth regarded material abundance as the single legitimate goal of the polity. More generally, people striving for an illusory form of fulfilment, hence lacking peace of mind, recklessly valued ‘movement’ at its fastest possible pace, whereas ‘reason’ would recommend a slower march. These passionate people, Rosmini remarked, are devoured both by an ‘indefinite hope’ to become happy thanks to ever new goods and passions, and a ‘constant rage’ for those hopes are regularly frustrated. They end up embarking on ‘furious ventures’ like the French Revolution. Living in a self-centred universe, they feel entitled to change society and government in accordance with their own passions and interests.100 Clearly enough, Rosmini’s analysis of passions condemned the system of movement, but he also aimed to differentiate his position from the system of resistance, namely, from the ultras’ perspective. There was indeed a kind of social progress which was natural and legitimate, and which was set off when the government promoted the desires (for specific and concrete goods) that were ‘moral’, and that it was possible for people to satisfy. Granted that ‘the fulfilment of souls is the great end of all societies’, Rosmini warned that even an improvement in the material and moral conditions of citizens was unacceptable if associated with a more than proportional rise in expectations – with an ever higher ‘capacity for desire’. The role of Catholicism in prompting moderate and ‘virtuous’ desires was, needless to say, all important.101 Rosmini devised his ethics through a dialogue with Stoicism, a philosophy which, in his opinion, had not only posited all the relevant problems but had also given them the best possible solutions from a pre-Christian viewpoint. Furthermore, the Stoics had effectively criticised Epicureanism.102 Rosmini believed that ‘the maximum good (bene) of human nature and the single good of each person’ lay in ‘moral virtue’, which, besides causing a state of bliss, revealed the existence in human souls of a ‘natural will’ for the ‘absolute good’.

the varied character of different objects that are pursued or shunned, so it changes and turns into feelings of various kinds’. 99 Rosmini, Filosofia della politica, 453–89. 100 Ibid., 489–93. 101 Ibid., 495–512, quot. at 496. 102 Antonio Rosmini, Storia comparativa e critica de’sistemi intorno al principio della morale (Milan, 1837), esp. 150–60, 308–52; id., Filosofia della politica, 200–2.

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A ‘man’ was virtuous if his will was in accordance with the natural will. Of all philosophers, the Stoics had formulated this view of morality most clearly through Epictetus’s ‘splendid’ argument that only the virtuous were free. Rosmini commented on it thus: ‘man has a natural will commanding him to be virtuous, but passions may corrupt him … and lead him to do what he does not want to do, so to speak’.103 Liberty, he added in 1849, is the opposite of passion, in the sense that liberty amounts to keeping passions in check – ‘man’ was free when he followed reason and God, and was a brute when he revelled in pleasures.104 Other parts of this influential Filosofia della politica shed further light on Rosmini’s politico-psychological outlook. Two topics will be briefly dealt with: parties and equality. To him parties were ‘worms that devour the f­abric of ­society’, for they pursued group power and disregarded the true goals of ­government, namely justice and virtue. Whether originating from opinions or passions or economic interests, parties always challenged natural progress, which was insane to base on the antagonism between parties – an ­‘implacable war’ making fulfilment impossible.105 Rosmini devoted several pages to a ­critique of Bentham’s principle of the greatest good for the greatest number, on the grounds that it was the theory of choice of ‘radicals’ advocating egalitarianism. Rosmini argued that minorities should not be sacrificed to majorities; that equal distribution may reduce the total net quantity of utility (he actually spoke of quantities of ‘good’, bene) existing in society (but he did not explain why); and that nature dictated that virtuous individuals received a larger share of utility than wicked ones did. Egalitarianism results from sensism, he wrote, and more precisely from the idea that all ‘men’ have the same predisposition to pleasure, hence an equal right to it; but a right of this kind is legitimate only if the duty not to infringe other people’s rights to fulfilment is observed by all, which is not. Consequently, significant ‘moral inequalities’ among citizens emerge. Equality in front of the law and free economic competition were the proper means of social justice, in Rosmini’s view.106 103 Rosmini, Filosofia della politica, 384–7. 104 Antonio Rosmini, ‘Il comunismo e il socialismo’ (1849), in Opuscoli politici, 81–115, at 91. 105 Rosmini, Filosofia della politica, 231–7. Seemingly, Manzoni held the same view of parties; see Stefano Stampa, Alessandro Manzoni, la sua famiglia, i suoi amici (Milan, 1885), i, 356–7. 106 Rosmini, Filosofia della politica, 393–412. The book did not feature a significant treatment of property, which played nevertheless a central role in Rosmini’s later social and political thought. Then he came to argue that only property holders should enjoy the rights of citizenship; see esp. Antonio Rosmini, Filosofia del diritto, ed. Rinaldo Orecchia (1841–5; Padua, 1967–9), v, 1231–7. See Alberto Mingardi, ‘A Sphere Around the Person: Antonio Rosmini on Property’, Journal of Markets and Morality, 7 (2004), 63–97.

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Before leaving Rosmini, his unique place in the political thought of the period 1815–48 needs appreciating. Filosofia della politica differed from the writings by Gioberti, Balbo, and d’Azeglio that mobilized public opinion in the 1840s by virtue of its theoretical, abstract nature. They dealt with disparate themes like the Italian primacy in various fields, the bearing of Providential design on civilization, certain episodes of Italian history, heartening geopolitical visions, the ill-advised recent uprisings, philosophical disputes, and the necessity of a moral regeneration. In this sense, the books of the 1840s did not converse with, say, Burke, Guizot, or Tocqueville.107 Instead Rosmini’s Filosofia della politica, together with a later political treatise of his, Filosofia del diritto (1841–5), tackled the issues that were at the centre of European debate – individual rights, equality, civil society, property, the legitimacy of revolt, etc. – in theoretical terms. He came close to a justification for representative government in Filosofia del diritto (a work which did not address psychological themes and for this reason is considered only cursorily here).108 More generally, Rosmini’s approach was not the 1840s moderates’, because, first, he distanced himself from practical politics; second and relatedly, the scope of his political thought was universal more than national; and, third, to him political reform was intimately linked to a scheme of Church renewal, which he formulated in Delle cinque piaghe della santa Chiesa (written in 1832–3, published in 1848). Rosmini’s perspective was ultimately eschatological, meaning that the quest for earthly good was seen as part of the faithful’s quest for the kingdom of God.109 On the other hand, Rosmini’s perspective was similar to that of Gioberti, Balbo, and d’Azeglio in three important respects, closely linked to each other. First, they all shared an anti-revolutionary and anti-radical intent. Second, Catholicism provided both Rosmini and those moderates with a set of arguments which, without conceding anything to extremism, could justify cautious reform. A religion-informed Risorgimento would remain within the limits of reasonableness. Third, the political dimension combined inextricably with the

107 Romanelli, ‘Nazione e costituzione’; Carlo Ghisalberti, ‘Lo statuto albertino e il costitu­ ziona­lismo europeo della prima metà dell’Ottocento’, in id., Stato nazione e costituzione nell’Italia contemporanea (Naples, 1999), 25–49. 108 See Ch. 2, Sect. 6, for further remarks on this book. 109 Antonio Rosmini, Delle cinque piaghe della Santa Chiesa, ed. Clemente Riva (Brescia, 1971). See Traniello, Società religiosa, 193–246; De Giorgi, La scienza del cuore, 307–15; Ettore Passerin d’Entrèves, ‘La fortuna del pensiero del Rosmini nella cultura del Risorgimento’, in id., Religione e politica nell’Ottocento europeo (Rome, 1991), 271–87.

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moral and psychological ones. As Rosmini put it, ‘the health of society eventually rests on the probity … of the individuals composing it’.110 A politics of the soul was deemed necessary by all four authors as a foundation of politics proper – however cautious the demands of moderatism were in practice, the movement included a quest for a profound and multifaceted moral reform. To Rosmini, government should act to counter materialism (as embodied by Gioja) and the Romantic sensibility (as personified by Foscolo). Passions, with their revolutionary associations, were the evil to be exorcised. 4

Manzoni, Pellico, and Tommaseo

The Dalmatian journalist, novelist, and linguist Niccolò Tommaseo (1802–74) was a staunch Catholic and a political maverick. He was one of the leaders of the 1848–9 Venetian revolution.111 A close friend and admirer of Rosmini, Tommaseo eulogised his character, and the ‘calm harmony’ of his faculties in particular, in a long obituary (1855). There was nothing excessive or vulgar in Rosmini, he remarked; his attitude was modest, benevolent, and tranquil, arrogance being ruled out in a man aware of the presence and majesty of God. Rosmini was moderate in the scientific as well as in the political field, a posture which to Tommaseo (and all moderates) meant that he had been ‘above parties’. Rosmini’s independence aroused their hatred, continued Tommaseo with the Jesuits’ recurrent attacks in mind, but his unyielding love of truth made him bear the mud hurled at him with calm fortitude and hope – ‘peace and concord of the soul lead to a docile greatness’.112 (Yet, even Tommaseo had to admit that Rosmini sometimes had hardly been charitable, as he engaged unreservedly in heated controversies, especially in the 1820s and 1830s. A passionate­

110 Rosmini, Filosofia della politica, 236. 111 On this complex figure see the different viewpoints of Ferrari, ‘La philosophie catholique’, 377–9; Ettore Passerin d’Entrèves, ‘Tommaseo e il Risorgimento italiano’, in Ettore Passerin d’Entrèves et al., Primo centenario della morte di Niccolò Tommaseo 1874–1974 ­(Florence, 1977), 161–79; Dominique Kirchner Reill, Nationalists Who Feared the Nation: Adriatic Multi-Nationalism in Habsburg Dalmatia, Trieste, and Venice (Stanford, ca, 2012), esp. 47–80. 112 Tommaseo’s ‘Antonio Rosmini’, which first appeared in the Turinese review Rivista contemporanea, is available at Progetto Manuzio [online library] , accessed Mar. 2014. See Chs. 32, 39, 41, quot. at p. 74.

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polemicist, he took full advantage of the adversary’s weak points and regularly questioned his morality and veracity).113 The relevance of Tommaseo’s obituary lies in its being an application of the moderate sensibility, which had emerged in the previous years. Tommaseo drew on a set of images and personality traits – the composure, the independence, the benevolence, and the tranquillity of the sage who carried out ‘his’ duty under difficult circumstances – which Rosmini himself had helped establish, and whose Stoic flavour is unmistakable. This section considers the philosophical Catholics other than Rosmini, namely Manzoni and Pellico besides Tommaseo. All were public moralists, teaching their compatriots that no authority could intrude on a just conscience. The prestige of the Milanese novelist, poet, philosopher, and historian Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1873) was huge during the Risorgimento, and not only in Catholic and moderate circles. His artistic talent, the patriotic overtones of the tragedies Il conte di Carmagnola (1820) and Adelchi (1822), and the compassionate religiosity permeating his masterpiece, the novel I promessi sposi (1827), gave Manzoni the aura of the man embodying the aspirations of a nation to be.114 Rosmini and Tommaseo, who were among his most intimate friends, eulogized his moral and religious commitment. Rosmini contrasted Manzoni with Foscolo, Alfieri, Byron and Goethe, whose subjects were ‘unhappiness and crime’; instead, Manzoni’s art was an ‘expression of Providence’, for he considered the world in relation to God and posited a moral ideal.115 To Tommaseo, I promessi sposi was an attempt to ‘dissect the human heart’ – an interpretation with which Manzoni agreed in some way, as he contended that literature should be viewed ‘as a branch of the moral sciences’. He wrote a friend that the best literature stemmed from the ‘painful sentiment’ aroused by the contrast between what is and what ought to be.116 Manzoni wrote a moral treatise, Sulla morale cattolica (1819–20), in order to counter the remarks on Catholicism made by Sismondi in Histoire des 113 Tommaseo, ‘Antonio Rosmini’, Chs. 23, 27. Rosmini maintained that the vehemence of his polemics was justified by the necessity to stop the diffusion of unbelief; see Eugenio Garin, Storia della filosofia italiana (Turin, 1966), iii, 1111–12; Gaetano Messina, ‘Introduzione’, in Rosmini, Il rinnovamento, i, 11–63 at 15 and n. 114 For a concise portrait, see Cranston, The Romantic Movement, 109–16. 115 Antonio Rosmini, ‘Sull’idillio e sulla nuova letteratura italiana’, in id., Opuscoli filosofici, i, 303–406 at 374–80, 405–6; Filosofia della politica, 491–2 n. 116 Niccolò Tommaseo, ‘I promessi sposi’, in Alessandro Manzoni, I promessi sposi (Milan, n.d.), 18; Alessandro Manzoni, Materiali estetici (ms), in amto, vol. v, Part iii, p. 20; Manzoni to Claude Fauriel, 9 Feb. 1806, quoted in Giuseppe Langella, Amor di patria: Manzoni e altra letteratura del Risorgimento (Novara, 2005), 36.

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­républiques italiennes du Moyen Age (1807–18). This multi-volume work was a tribute to the liberty and patriotism brought about by republican governments, and, in highlighting a glorious phase of Italian civilization, was a fundamental source of inspiration for all Italian patriots. But, in one of the final chapters, Sismondi claimed that Catholicism had spoiled Italian character through a lack of moral rigour. Grown up in Protestant Geneva, Sismondi lived in Tuscany for years and was a member of the Coppet circle.117 Manzoni reacted to what he regarded as a provocation. Sulla morale cattolica is an odd reply, however, as he concentrated on demonstrating the superiority in principle of Catholic teachings on morality, only to concede that ‘abuses’ of them had been committed in Italy and elsewhere.118 He complained that the reforming Catholics, namely those admitting the reality of abuses, were the favourite targets of the two ‘extreme parts’: the enemies of religion, and those within the Church taking advantage of abuses.119 Both groups, overcome by party spirit, failed to bring sensible judgement to the crucial issue of the times, which was the legacy of the Enlightenment; erroneously, this was either approved of or condemned en bloc.120 Manzoni’s book made a twofold case, in view not only of Sismondi’s remarks but, more generally, of the accusations frequently levelled at Italians’ morality by northern European travellers and observers since the seventeenth century. First, Italians too could, and did, have a deeply felt religious faith and practise the strict morality it entailed. To Manzoni, religion was both an indispensable source of consolation in a world of woe, and a commitment to charity and love. The compassion for the 117 Simonde de Sismondi, Histoire des républiques italiennes du Moyen Age (Paris, 1815–18), xvi, Ch. 127, pp. 407–60. Other members of the Coppet circle linked the poor state of Italy to Catholicism; see e.g. Germaine de Staël, De la littérature, ed. Gérard Gengembre and Jean Goldzink (1800; Paris, 1991), 186–93. On Sismondi and Italy, see Francesca Sofia (ed.), Sismondi e la civiltà toscana (Florence, 2001); Adrian Lyttelton, ‘Sismondi, the Republic and Liberty: Between Italy and England, the City and the Nation’, jmis, 17 (2012), 168–82. 118 Manzoni’s work consists of a first part, which appeared in Milan in 1819, and a second part, written in 1819–20 and posthumously published. In what follows no references are made to the final and revised edition of 1855. According to Giuseppe Langella, Manzoni poeta teologo (1809–1819) (Pisa, 2009), 149, Manzoni tacitly agreed with Sismondi’s strictures on the Inquisition, the alliance between throne and altar, and the hardening of the Church’s attitude towards hierarchical organization and the role of the laity. 119 Alessandro Manzoni, Sulla morale cattolica, in amto, iii, 1–576 at 489–90. 120 Manzoni, Sulla morale, 509–13. For Manzoni’s philosophical concerns, see ‘Lettera a Victor Cousin’ (1829–30), in amto, iii, 581–690; in this unpublished essay, utilitarianism, scepticism, the foundation of authority, and the relationship between religion and philosophy were dealt with in a spirit similar to Rosmini’s.

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unfortunate­and the ‘humble’ informing I promessi sposi fed on a heightened sense of the limitations of human nature. Second, Catholicism was not to be identified with obscurantism. Sulla morale cattolica amounts to a eulogy of Catholicism bereft of ultramontane reactionarism, and as such it was a chief text of philosophical Catholicism.121 Religion had ‘the ability to influence men regardless of politics’, according to Manzoni. By giving rise to duties without corresponding rights – the duty of charity but not the right to assistance, for example – religion made the weak scorn rebellion and the powerful practise ‘justice’. Catholicism is in accordance with ‘all sentiments, actions, and institutions that are just, useful, generous, and favouring social improvement’, he maintained; religion prepares for the everyday ‘fight’ between enjoyment and the quest for justice.122 He specified that that quest had to be informed by moderation. If oppressed by an unjust government under circumstances ruling out forms of resistance in accordance with the Gospel, Catholics should endure it. Far from weakening the moral fibre, ‘patience’ strengthened the faithful’s souls and prepared them for future struggles.123 Manzoni’s religion was public besides being private, in the belief that a good Catholic could not ignore the evil around him/her, but, unlike ­Rosmini’s, Manzoni’s Catholicism was not meant to impinge directly on the political sphere. As the most sublime form of morality, religion was above politics, as justice also was. Neither Manzoni nor Pellico was a political thinker, in spite of the vast politico-patriotic impact their writings had; they were religious moralists stressing, for the time being at least, endurance and fortitude. A ‘calm courage’, not servility, arises out of religion, Manzoni wrote. It is the courage of those who disobey the authorities when their command clashes with that of their conscience, and that for this reason ‘suffer alone, suffer tranquilly, and with the single comfort of suffering for justice’.124 ‘Passions’ lead man to moral corruption and radical beliefs, Manzoni argued. Passions are always extreme, and therefore are subject to sharp reversals of fortunes, as the oscillations of ‘enthusiasm’ during the French Revolution demonstrated. A religion-informed reason had the task of identifying and 121 On the momentous significance of the book, see Ettore Passerin d’Entrèves, ‘Il cattolicesimo liberale in Europa ed il movimento neoguelfo in Italia’, in Ettore Passerin d’Entrèves et al., Nuove questioni del Risorgimento e dell’Unità d’Italia (Milan, 1961), i, 572 (the work was ‘the first important manifesto of cultural patriotism linked to Catholicism’); La Salvia, ‘Il moderatismo’, 286–90; Giulio Bollati, L’italiano: Il carattere nazionale come storia e come invenzione (1983; Turin, 1996), 80–93. 122 Manzoni, Sulla morale, 388–97, 534–6. 123 Ibid., 518. 124 Ibid., 513–14.

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overcoming passions – Catholicism taught far-sightedness and composure by putting worldly matters in perspective.125 Manzoni’s historical essay ‘Storia della colonna infame’, investigating the trials of some alleged plague-spreaders during the epidemic of bubonic plague in Milan in 1630–2, focused on the reasons for the judges’ determination to condemn the ‘anointers’, lack of evidence notwithstanding. The prevailing view ascribed those barbarous trials and executions to scientific ignorance and a customary reliance on torture to extract confessions, whereas Manzoni pointed to the judges’ ‘passions’ – fear, hatred, and malignity – as the root of their tragic decisions. Circumstances, harsh as they were, did not dictate them; evil was always ‘personal’ and ‘voluntary’.126 Manzoni discussed utilitarianism on several occasions, eventually adding a lengthy appendix on it to the 1855 edition of Sulla morale cattolica. His criticism aimed to demolish the foundations of an influential philosophy which was contrary to religion, and was particularly deceptive because its applications to jurisprudence and political economy often resulted in ‘correct remarks’ and ‘good judgments’.127 Manzoni emphasised that justice, and not utility, was the criterion for morality, but he also argued that the divine revelation had disclosed the ‘concord’ existing between them. Justice was the means of achieving ‘perfect happiness’, which was also the state of maximum possible utility. There was a proviso, however: the calculation of utility and disutility should include the rewards and penalties of the afterlife – this is the most important estimate to be made, he added. As Manzoni also put it, happiness on earth required the perspective of immortality after death, hence religion only could bestow true happiness. In general agreement with Rosmini, Manzoni regarded socialism as a coherent application of the utilitarian, that is materialistic, principle.128 Utilitarianism was moderates’ bête noire, for it was also decried by Gioberti, Rosmini, Gino Capponi, Terenzio Mamiani, and Tommaseo.129 125 Ibid., 354, 505. 126 Ibid., 353, 503–6; id., ‘Storia della colonna infame’ (1840), in amto, vol. ii, Part i, 677–785 at 677–84. See Elena Gabbuti, Il Manzoni e gli ideologi francesi (Florence, 1936), 288–9; Stanley B. Chandler, ‘Passion, Reason and Evil in the Works of Alessandro Manzoni’, Italica, 50 (1973), 551–65. 127 Manzoni, Sulla morale, 296–9, 516–18 (with the 1855 appendix at 197–250); id., ‘Lettera a Victor Cousin’, 585–8, quot. at 587; id., ‘Dell’invenzione: Dialogo’ (1850), in amto, iii, 691–762 at 746–9 (here Manzoni challenged Mirabeau’s utilitarian dictum that la petite morale tue la grande). See Pier Cesare Bori, ‘ “Star basso”: L’antropologia religiosa di Alessandro Manzoni’, in Melloni, Cristiani d’Italia, 169–81. 128 Manzoni, Sulla morale, 216–221, 247–50; Rosmini, ‘Il comunismo’. 129 See Niccolò Tommaseo, Dell’Italia, ed. Gustavo Balsamo-Crivelli (1835; Turin, 1921), i, 71– 3; Gino Capponi, ‘Lettura quinta’ (1836), in id., Scritti editi e inediti, ed. Marco Tabarrini

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That an attitude reminiscent of Stoicism formed the basis of the sensibility displayed by moderate patriots, especially before the 1840s, is s­ ensationally confirmed by Silvio Pellico’s story. After his arrest as a carbonaro in October, 1820, Pellico (1789–1854) was sentenced to fifteen years in the Spielberg prison; he recounted the barbarous treatment inflicted to inmates in a book that gained European recognition, Le mie prigioni (1832). Pellico was content with writing a journal from which political issues were excluded (a cause of the book’s impact probably lies here). He discovered the soothing power of religion during imprisonment, which eventually viewed as an act of Providence. I needed ‘loneliness, time, and pain’, he remarked in 1840, to keep my passions in check and accept God.130 He managed to strengthen and calm himself by means of a truly Stoic ‘expedient’: each morning, he imagined every possible event which could affect him during the day, ‘from the dearest visit to that of the executioner’. Pellico associated the ‘constant calm’ he aimed at with ‘moderation in ideas’ and a philosophical and Christian attitude to life, whereas ­inquietude and anger indicated ‘exaggerated ideas’ and psychological weakness. Moderation was necessary to achieve not only ‘greatness of soul’ but also ‘justice’, at a time when a ‘true epidemic’ of hatred prejudiced it. Pellico referred to hatred for this or that aspect of society, or for some other fellow citizens, the underlying point being that hatred substantiated atheism, as suggested by the character of fellow inmate Giuliano, whose impiety fed on transports of pride and rage.131 After his liberation, Pellico wrote a tragedy on the Latin philosopher Boethius, the sixth-century follower of Plato and the Stoics who was imprisoned and executed on charges of conspiracy to overthrow king Theoderic. Boethius was portrayed, implicitly, as a predecessor of Pellico himself: a Christian who, being a victim of political persecution, found strength and consolation in religion and philosophy.132

­(Florence, 1877), i, 402–21 at 408–16; id., Pensieri sull’educazione (Lugano, 1845), 46, 52–3; Vincenzo Gioberti, ‘Discorso preliminare’ (1850), in id., Teorica del sovranaturale (1838; 2nd ed., Capolago, 1850), i, at 121–9; Terenzio Mamiani, ‘Lettera prima’ e ‘Lettera seconda’, in Terenzio Mamiani and Pasquale Stanislao Mancini, Fondamenti della filosofia del diritto e singolarmente del diritto di punire (1841; Turin 1853), 1–47. 130 Quoted in Rosario Diana, ‘Autobiografia “filosofica” di un detenuto politico: Le mie prigioni di Silvio Pellico’, in Martirano, Le filosofie, 88. See Roberto Pertici, ‘Nazione e religione in Silvio Pellico’, Società e storia, 26 (2004), 686–704; Isabella, Risorgimento in Exile, 206–7. 131 Silvio Pellico, Le mie prigioni, ed. Angelo Jacomuzzi (Milan, 1986), 60–1, 92–108. 132 Id., Boezio, in Ilario Rinieri, Della vita e delle opere di Silvio Pellico (Turin, 1901), iii, 177–268.

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Pellico gave up any political radicalism he may have entertained, and resort to violence with it, after his release in 1830, but he did not abjure patriotism and public spirit. In a later and very successful book on moral duties, he remarked that religion was not for the lower classes only, as some philosophers had argued. ‘Heaping scorn on religion and good mores is incompatible with true patriotism’, which also ruled out violence, rage, and revenge, as well as the endorsement of ‘factions and their systems’. The good patriot was the ‘virtuous man’, practising moderation, endurance, and fortitude. Do your best as a responsible citizen, Pellico continued in a vein challenging Mazzini’s model of militancy, and then ‘let things go the way they go’. A moral life begins with the familial duties, and leads to a calm soul (quiete d’animo).133 Probably not to Manzoni’s surprise, Pellico came under attack both by the ultramontane questioning his conversion, and the Mazzinians challenging his tameness.134 The theme of the purifying effects of suffering, harking back to Bossuet, runs through the whole of Risorgimento Catholicism, beginning with Manzoni’s Sulla morale cattolica and culminating with Pellico’s Le mie prigioni.135 Tommaseo, too, illustrates this facet of the moderate sensibility. The leitmotif of his novel Fede e bellezza (1840) was remorse: a woman who had lapsed into sensual pleasure and the ensuing despair, finally achieved moral regeneration through a long process of repentance.136 ‘Pleasure is a cause of trouble more often than anguish [dolore] is’. Tommaseo viewed anguish both as a key to ‘the secrets of God’ and the reason for worthwhile action, namely, he posited as a historical principle that the stimulus of anguish was necessary for humanity to advance, and, in particular, for Italians to improve their moral and political education. He linked inextricably the national emancipation to a moral resurgence under the aegis of Catholicism, regarded as the religion of duty and humility teaching how to resist ‘the impetus of pleasure’. Liberty, 133 Silvio Pellico, Dei doveri degli uomini (Turin, 1834), 13, 20–22, 37–9, 60, 66, quot. at 38, 66. 134 See the chapters added by Pellico to a French translation (1843) of Le mie prigioni, in Silvio Pellico, Le mie prigioni e altri scritti scelti, ed. Egidio Bellorini (Milan, 1907), 188–9. 135 Bossuet’s Sermons sur la Providence (1662–5) are in Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, Œuvres, ed. Yvonne Champailler and Bernard Velat (Paris, 1936), 690–742; Manzoni, Sulla morale, 420–3; see also Vincenzo Gioberti, Del buono e del bello (1841–3; Florence, 1850), 183. On sacrifice for the patria following Christ’s example, see Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento, 124–5 ff. 136 Niccolò Tommaseo, Fede e bellezza, ed. Ferruccio Ulivi (Milan, 1978). The novel was ridiculed by Cattaneo; see his ‘Fede e bellezza di Niccolò Tommaseo’ (1840), in Cattaneo, Opere scelte, ii, 89–100.

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he contended, entails a decrease in the number of desires, not an increase.137 Tommaseo’s moral framework also found expression in a historical novel of his (1837), recounting the revolt of the Florentines against the despotic Walter vi, the Duke of Athens, in 1343. Tommaseo highlighted, through graphic scenes of the Florentines exacting a terrible revenge on prisoners, the hatred and the cruelty animating the mass of the people once the day was won. The clergy had warned the Florentines that freedom and independence required concord, the moderation of passions, and justice to flourish – but to no avail.138 5

The Moderates of the 1840s on Reason and Passions

The moderate movement of the 1840s is represented in this book by its most influential writers: the Piedmontese Balbo, d’Azeglio, and Gioberti. The first two were cousins, belonging to prominent aristocratic families, while the third was a priest of humble origins. Gioberti (1801–52) had been attracted to heterodox doctrines – deism, pantheism, and even Mazzinianism – in his youth, and especially between 1828 and 1833. Arrested in 1833, he lived in Brussels and Paris as an exile until 1848. He devised a system of Catholic philosophy informed by Plato, Kant, and Reid in 1838–40.139 As the son of a top-ranking Savoyard officer, Balbo (1789–1853) held various positions under the Napoleonic empire from 1808 to 1814. After a spell at the Piedmontese embassy in Madrid (1816–19), Balbo joined the army. His closeness to the leaders of the 1821 revolution was punished with two years of exile and two of confinement. He was recognised as a skilled historian before the 1840s.140 D’Azeglio (1798–1866), who married one of Manzoni’s daughters, published the highly successful novel­

137 Niccolò Tommaseo, review of Cesare Balbo, Storia d’Italia, in Antologia, 44 and 47 (Nov. 1831 and Sep. 1832), 84; id., Dell’Italia, i, 71–3, 153, 240; ii, 88–9; id., Studii filosofici (Venice, 1840), ii, 6. See Alessandro Volpi, ‘Morale, lingua e scrittura in Niccolò Tommaseo: La politica in cerca di aiuto’, Società e storia, 26 (2004), 731–46. For Tommaseo on passions and the will, see Studii filosofici, i, 5–6; ii, 7, 10–11. 138 Niccolò Tommaseo, Il Duca d’Atene: Narrazione (Paris, 1837). 139 Francesco Traniello, ‘Gioberti, Vincenzo’, dbi, lv, 2001; Marcello Mustè, ‘Gioberti, Vincenzo’, in Il contributo italiano alla storia del pensiero: Filosofia [online book] , accessed Aug. 2015. Gioberti reminded Pellico of ‘the noblest of savages’, his soul being replete with ‘love and indignation, truth and courage’; see Pellico to Filippo Artico, 27 Feb. 1844, quoted in Luigi Chiala, ‘Breve saggio delle condizioni presenti del Cattolicismo in Italia’, Rivista contemporanea, 8 (1856), 321. 140 Ettore Passerin d’Entrèves, ‘Balbo, Cesare’, dbi, v, 1963.

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Ettore Fieramosca in 1833. He acted as liaison between Charles Albert, Pius ix, and the patriots of central Italy in the 1840s – d’Azeglio was ‘the soul of the moderate movement’.141 This section and the next one deal with the sensibility these three authors promoted. What follows lays the groundwork by pointing out their condemnation of passions, while the subsequent section delineates the chief traits of the sensibility. The programme of the 1840s was both political and moral, as Balbo explained most clearly in an article intended to clarify the meaning of ‘moderation, moderate opinion, and moderate part’ (1847). This famous text provided a normative portrait of the attitude suiting the forthcoming age of Pius ix. Opposed to all parties, a moderate patriot favoured a middle position ‘between those who do not want to change anything and those who want to change a lot’; as Balbo also put it, he/she wanted that the needs and circumstances of both the rulers and the ruled were taken into account. Moderation was also a public virtue, implementing the principle of law-abidingness (legalità), and resting on ‘conscience’, namely a sound morality of religious origin. True moderation, he wrote, is ‘the daughter of Christian charity’. The present surge in moderate opinion, Balbo continued, dates to Gioberti’s Primato and the advent of Pius ix, this pope being ‘the best model one can imagine of an Italian prince who is liberally and compassionately moderate’.142 Gioberti and d’Azeglio agreed with Balbo that political moderation inherently called for religion. To the former, the moderate approach stemmed from the universality of Catholicism, prompting a synthesis of the good elements of each position after considering all demands and all needs. Catholicism had the power to temper the monarchs’ hearts and, at the same time, instil public virtues in the people. To the latter, the moderate patriots should not be impatient to achieve political change, which needed everybody’s moral reform as a necessary preliminary; this reform, aimed at instilling public virtues, was certain for it was in accordance with the steady march of Christianity.143 141 Walter Maturi, ‘Azeglio, Massimo Taparelli d'’, dbi, iv, 1962. On his marriage, see Natalia Ginzburg, La famiglia Manzoni (Turin, 1983), 112–52. 142 Cesare Balbo, ‘Dell’uso delle parole moderazione, opinione moderata, e parte moderata’ (1847), in id., Lettere di politica e letteratura (Florence, 1855), 452–466 at 453, 455–6, 465–6. See also by Balbo: ‘Dell’utilità presente di una storia generale d’Italia’ (1832), in Storia d’Italia, 85–102 at 99; Le speranze d’Italia, ed. Achille Corbelli (1843; Turin, 1944), 2–12 (‘Dedica seconda’). 143 See the following works by Gioberti: Introduzione, i, 28–30; Del buono, 182–3; Lettre sur les doctrines philosophiques et politiques de M. de Lamennais (1841; Brussels, 1843), 88–9; Delle condizioni presenti e future d’Italia (‘London’, 1848), 31–2. For d’Azeglio, see e.g. ‘Lettera al professor Francesco Orioli’ (1847), in daru, i, 133–59 at 154–5. Gioberti’s Delle condizioni

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Before being a political platform, moderation was a state of mind, a spiritual attitude, as strikingly demonstrated a contrario by count Santorre di Santarosa (1783–1825). He played a major role in the Piedmontese revolution of 1821, and his story is relevant here because the moderates regarded it as a parable about the futility of insurrections and secret societies. Santarosa’s diary reveals a tormented personality of the Romantic kind, feeding on Rousseau, Foscolo, and Alfieri. In the words of his intimate friend Balbo, Santarosa was ‘a passionate, an extremely passionate and blind lover of the Italian patria’. He experienced acute feelings of humiliation and shame for the inane absolutism of the Piedmontese government acting in accordance with Vienna, which he uncompromisingly hated.144 Yet Santarosa was politically moderate, as he favoured a government on the English model, opposed popular sovereignty, aimed to combine patriotism with Catholicism, and even advocated a political role for the pope in Italy.145 He embarked on the military coup even if he knew that the chances of success were minimal, prompted, seemingly, by an insuppressible emotional urge. While Santarosa denounced the citizens who had failed to take sides, the very idea of violent rebellion was anathema to, say, Balbo and Manzoni – ‘brothers have killed brothers’ was the latter’s comment in a poetical drama of his recounting the story of a fifteenth-century condottiere fighting against fellow Italians.146 ‘Immoderate spirits are apparently bold’, Gioberti wrote, ‘but in fact they are weak, for they defy legitimate obedience and become hooked on the senses, imagination, and habits’.147 After being exiled, Santarosa joined the Greek revolutionaries and died in battle near Navarino in May, 1825.148

is Ch. 3 of Vincenzo Gioberti, Apologia del libro intitolato ‘Il gesuita moderno’, ed. Rinaldo Orecchia (1848; Padua, 1974). 144 Cesare Balbo, ‘Memorie sulla rivoluzione del 1821 in Piemonte’ (ms., 1822), in Eugenio Passamonti (ed.), Cesare Balbo e la rivoluzione del 1821 in Piemonte (Turin, 1923), 185–245 at 210; Santorre di Santarosa, Ricordi 1818–1824 (Torino, Svizzera, Parigi, Londra), ed. Marco Montersino (ms.; Florence, 1998). See Ettore Passerin d’Entrèves, La giovinezza di Cesare Balbo (Florence, 1940), 126–49. 145 Santorre di Santarosa, Della rivoluzione piemontese del 1821 (1823; Genoa, 1849); id., Delle speranze degli italiani, ed. Adolfo Colombo (ms.; Milan, 1920). See Carlo Carini, ‘La cultura politica di Santorre di Santarosa’, Il pensiero politico, 3 (1970), 59–90. 146 Santarosa, Della rivoluzione, 57, 122, 141; Carini, ‘La cultura politica’, 66; Alessandro Manzoni, Il conte di Carmagnola (1820), in amto, i, 277–538 at 337 (from the coro of act ii, line 87). 147 Gioberti, Introduzione, ii, 244. 148 The circumstances of his death, coupled with the publication of his letters in France, turned Santarosa into a model of heroism of international stature; see Isabella, Risorgimento in exile, 85–9.

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The dichotomy between passions and reason was conspicuous in the writings of the moderates of the 1840s. Like Rosmini or Manzoni, they considered the passions as vehicles for all that was wrong in private and public life. In the belief that reason was God’s gift to humanity to grasp the divine plans, any departure from them was ascribed to people’s low instincts, their ‘passions’, which manifested the wicked side of human nature. Passions had an inherent tendency to become extreme and uncontrollable.149 Gioberti defined them as ‘disordered affections’ (affezioni disordinate), resulting in ‘the blinding of intellect and the distortion of heart to the detriment of equity, moderation, and justice’.150 Balbo, who often referred to ‘evil passions’ in Speranze d’Italia (1844), argued in the 1850s that ‘a good passion is impossible in the political realm’, since the very term referred to extreme beliefs and behaviour. To Luigi Carlo Farini, parties were dangerous for they were motivated by ‘imagination, sentiments, and passions’.151 Passions took possession (so to speak) of the individuals who experienced them, ruling out objectivity and good sense. Resisting passions and being governed by reason were the essential conditions of an upright character, and such a character only could produce political good. Catholicism was regarded as the antidote to the dominance of passions, entailing that reform had to be implemented by ‘men’ imbued with a moral attitude deriving from C ­ atholicism in order not to go overboard. Catholicism had always fought passions, ­according to Gioberti, in conjunction with the influence of ‘the senses’ and ­‘fantasy’. ­Prevailing over them, and thus strengthening the will, was what virtue amounted to. He thought that all Christian heresies had been originated by their ­fomenters’ ‘corruption of the heart’, instigating passions like pride.152 Ironically, the Italian ultramontane agreed with the moderates’ view of the effects of 149 This judgement drew them nearer to the Stoic ideal of eradication of passions than to Aristotle’s call to moderate them; see Sorabji, Emotion, 195–210. 150 Gioberti, Del buono, 92, 100–3; id., Del primato morale e civile degli italiani, ed. Ugo Redanò (1843; Milan, 1938–9), i, 184. 151 Balbo, Speranze, e.g. 84, 121, 264; id., Della monarchia rappresentativa in Italia (posthumous; written 1849–53), in id., Della monarchia rappresentativa in Italia: Saggi politici (Florence, 1857), 5–407 at 99; Luigi Carlo Farini, ‘Dei nobili in Italia e dell’attuale indirizzo delle opinioni italiane’ (1847), in data, i, 180. Farini (1812–66), a renowned physician, was born near Ravenna in the Papal States. Exiled in 1843, he was in Rome in 1848–9, taking sides with the moderate prime minister Pellegrino Rossi. In the 1850s Farini became a chief collaborator first of d’Azeglio and then of Cavour. He played a central role in the annexation of the Duchies to Piedmont in 1859. See Nicola Raponi, ‘Farini, Luigi Carlo’, dbi, xlv, 1995. 152 Gioberti, Introduzione, iv, 52, 77; id., Del buono, 97. See Volpi, ‘Linguaggi simbolici’, 111–12, 117.

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passions, but to them the root of social dissolution lay in those characterising ‘liberalism’, of which moderatism was the Italian variant in their opinion.153 The contrast between reason and passions was politicised since Rosmini’s early writings, but it became a weapon in the battle against the left only in Piedmont in the 1850s. It was only then that the ruling moderates, having lost any hope of rallying all Italians under their banner, explicitly and systematically associated reason with a government of the elite and passions with democracy, which for that reason led to utter chaos, and eventually tyranny. The moderates of the 1840s were more guarded, in spite of the precedent set by Rosmini. Considering that a unanimous patriotic movement, engaged in achieving Gioberti’s federalist programme, looked like a concrete possibility, to brand temporary dissenters as disturbed personalities of sorts would be unwise. This changed after 1848–9, when Piedmontese moderate opinion became institutionalised somewhat, and the contrast between reason and passions turned into an element of a propaganda offensive on Mazzinianism and democracy. While the kingdom’s governments aimed for universal, non-partisan goals whose righteousness was guaranteed by public opinion as the expression of Providential reason, democratic leaders like Mazzini were motivated by lust for wealth and power. The masses they controlled had a potential for savage violence that equally stemmed from the dominance of instincts over reason – the Terror of 1793–4 continued to reverberate to the 1850s.154 Regardless of the moderates’ polemic, it was true that Mazzini embraced ‘burning’ and ‘stormy’ passions for liberty or equality. His language was consciously aimed at ‘arousing passions, directing them towards great things, and teaching how to sanctify them by positing a social goal’. He expected passions to transform consciences to the point of being carried away – passions had the power of ‘making you a saint or a criminal, a giant or a pygmy’.155 In Mazzini’s writings, passions often took the comprehensive form of an ‘enthusiasm’ for, or a ‘faith’ in, the principles of duty, equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, republic, association, and humanity. He urged young republicans to be overwhelmed by those principles, whose abstractedness was a guarantee of their radicality. Enthusiasm was ‘the secret means that brings about millions of defenders of a cause’; it prompted a ‘purified’ youth to rise as if ‘pushed by a force of progress

153 See Ch. 2, Sect. 8. 154 See Ch. 4 for a full account. 155 Giuseppe Mazzini, ‘Della Giovine Italia’ (1832), in seim, ii, 85–113 at 95; id., ‘De l’art en Italie’ (1835), in seim, iv, 120–53 at 142.

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and movement’.156 The principles informing Mazzini’s programme, in other words, were to be lived out as consuming passions, and this involved accepting their consequences in full, scorning compromise. Militants were expected to suffer martyrdom for the sake of testimony.157 Needless to say, the loss of selfpossession he prescribed flew in the face of the moderates’ ideals of tranquillity and fortitude. 6

Inner Reform and Political Participation in the 1840s

It was a staple of moderate doctrine that Italians had undergone a process of demoralization during centuries of foreign oppression, and that the aristocracy, in particular, had given up the duties attached to social pre-eminence.158 The theme of the poor moral state of Italians – widely discussed in the eighteenth century – went back to Machiavelli. An early advocate of an independent and unified Italy, the Florentine had famously warned about Italians’ moral decline in terms that became almost an obsession to Gioberti, Balbo, and d’Azeglio: in introducing ordini liberi to a country used to despotism, the depressed state of public spirit was to be taken into account.159 Three centuries after Machiavelli, Alfieri’s great influence on the Piedmontese youth rested on the association he had established between the proud advocacy of the ‘national genius’ and the necessity of a moral revolution.160 And then there was Macaulay’s unforgettable portrayal of the Italian statesman of Machiavelli’s time – Macaulay’s Essays was one of Balbo’s livres de chevet, and it is a fair guess that d’Azeglio, too, knew it well. Two opposite systems of morality have prevailed in Europe, Macaulay argued: in the north, ‘the excesses of haughty and daring spirits’ have 156 Mazzini, ‘Della Giovine Italia’, 107–8; id., ‘D’alcune cause che impedirono sinora lo sviluppo della libertà in Italia’ (1832), in seim, ii, 147–224 at 156–7. 157 See Ch. 3, Sects. 2–3 for a full account. 158 In addition to Balbo, Gioberti, and d’Azeglio, see Gino Capponi, ‘Progetto di giornale’ (1819), in id., Lettere di Gino Capponi e di altri a lui, ed. Alessandro Carraresi (Florence, 1882–90), v, 93–112 at 100, 102–103; Tommaseo, Dell’Italia, e.g. i, 74–6, 134, 237. See Patriarca, Italian Vices, Ch. 1. 159 Niccolò Machiavelli, Il principe (1513), in id., Opere, ed. Mario Bonfantini (Milan, 1954), pp. 3–86 at Chs. 12, 24, 26; id., Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio (1513–21), ibid., pp. 87–420 at bk. i, Chs. 17–18, 20; bk. iii, Ch. 1. On the quarrel between Samuel Sharp and Giuseppe Baretti (1768–9), and the debate on Italians’ moral decadence in general, see Franco Venturi, ‘L’Italia fuori d’Italia’, in Ruggiero Romano and Corrado Vivanti (eds.), Storia d’Italia (Turin, 1972–6), iii, 945–1481. 160 See Sect. 7 below.

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often been regarded with indulgence, whereas in Italy it is ‘those crimes which require self-command and address, quick observation, fertile invention, and profound knowledge of human nature’ that have been made light of. The Italian character is complex, he continued, as indicated by the typical Renaissance statesman who was ‘black with the vices which we consider as most loathsome, traitor, hypocrite, coward, assassin’, and at the same time had an ‘exquisite’ sensibility to art, a sincere devotion to truth in philosophical studies, and the keenest enjoyment of wit and eloquence.161 Macaulay’s essay, disturbing as it was to Italian readers, exemplifies the background against which the moderates considered patriotic politics. The 1840s moderates regarded the national emancipation as a process of comprehensive regeneration, in which a moral redemption was paramount. The Risorgimento they envisaged included sound patterns of private behaviour, especially in the family, as its basis. The dissolute and irresponsible mores,­ which in their view had prevailed in Italy during the previous two centuries, aroused feelings of shame and anger. Balbo, for instance, was especially incensed by the eighteenth-century custom of cavalier servente or cicisbeo, namely the indolent male friend or lover accompanying married women in society.162 This section will show that public and private morality merged, and perhaps it could not be otherwise: religion, as the great moralizing force, was called to inform all human activities by pointing out the proper means and ends. Italians’ characters were to be completely re-moulded by it. For the sake of exposition only, in this section the moderates’ arguments concerning inner reform will be distinguished from their treatment of civic virtues. The spiritual world of the 1840s moderates had Stoic overtones (in G ­ ioberti’s and Balbo’s cases taken in first-hand). D’Azeglio insisted on the power of ­Catholicism to strengthen the inner life, as Pellico in particular had done. Religion only, d’Azeglio remarked, can make sense of tragic circumstances, to the point that one may even rejoice in suffering. Since happiness on earth is actually a ‘ghost’, the idea of a reward in the afterlife is necessary to bear

161 Thomas B. Macaulay, ‘Machiavelli’ (1827), in id., Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to the ‘Edinburgh Review’, ed. Francis C. Montague (London, 1903), i, 65–109 at 84–6. The idea that Italians were unfit for liberty was widespread in northern Europe; see e.g. Wolfgang Altgeld, ‘Il movimento italiano per l’indipendenza e l’unità prima del 1848, visto dai liberali tedeschi’, in Rudolf Lill and Nicola Matteucci (eds.), Il liberalismo in Italia e in Germania dalla rivoluzione del ’48 alla prima guerra mondiale (Bologna, 1980), 347–74. 162 See Roberto Bizzocchi, A Lady’s Man: The Cicisbei, Private Morals and National Identity in Italy (London, 2014).

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oppression,­injustice, or exile.163 Gioberti agreed with d’Azeglio on the impossibility of happiness in this world, earthly life being a test of moral worth, a short period of apprenticeship. We had been created to ‘vigorously hope and take action [operare]’, but the reward of virtue would be reaped only in the next world; that reward made one endure the trials and tribulations of existence, and accept death.164 To Gioberti, writing in a genuinely Stoic mood, the sage should care only about virtue regardless of fame and fortune, because virtue only was a reality to the eyes of God. The true and only accomplishment God and Christians care about, he observed, is in fact that of virtue, springing from one’s soul independently of external circumstances. Hence Christianity, entailing the primacy of duty, is ‘the religion of the strong’.165 In his early philosophical writings, Gioberti regularly depicted himself as the lonely thinker regenerating philosophy and religion, but who was bound to be ignored by contemporaries relishing the present corruption. He was familiar with Stoic philosophy, as indicated by a letter of 1832 in which he embraced the idea of a ‘philosophical religion’, which, as far as ethics was concerned, should amount to Stoicism ‘made perfect’. He pursued an ethics resilient to ‘ill fortune and bad men’, and moving Italians to do lofty deeds for the love of patria.166 Balbo, too, portrayed himself in a Stoic fashion. He stated again and again that political moderation – a minority position among immature peoples – met with the masses’ incomprehension and attracted the extremists’ hatred. It entailed practical marginalisation and emotional frustration. This is why being a moderate necessitates a stronger disposition than that required by extreme stances, he remarked; its only reward is the self-respect stemming from bearing denigration in a manly, firm, and stubborn way. Accordingly, Balbo prided himself on an autonomous character, obeying only the dictates of his own conscience. The noblest expression of one’s morality consists in faithfulness to his/ her convictions in adversity, he contended.167 This self-image originated from

163 Massimo d’Azeglio, Niccolò de’Lapi ovvero i Palleschi e i Piagnoni (1841; Milan, 1872), 288–92, 412, 750–5. 164 Gioberti, Del primato, 85; id., Il gesuita moderno (Lausanne, 1846–7), iii, 275–303. 165 Gioberti, Introduzione, iv, 87–8, 122; id., ‘Considerazioni sopra le dottrine religiose di Vittorio Cousin’ (1840), in id., Introduzione, iv, 167–332 at 326–7. 166 Gioberti to Carlo Verga, 14 Nov. 1832, in Vincenzo Gioberti, Ricordi biografici e carteggio, ed. Giuseppe Massari (Turin, 1860–2), i, 198. 167 Balbo, ‘Dell’utilità presente’, 99–100. See also by Balbo: Speranze, 2–12; Pensieri ed esempi (partially published, 1832–3; Florence, 1856), 301–2; and, on Stoicism, ‘Della civiltà in generale e in particolare dei costumi nel mondo antico e nel moderno’ (ms., 1836), in Lettere, 95–120 at 106–8.

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his experience during and after the Piedmontese revolution of 1821, when he was accused of betraying both his friends who were implicated in it, and the government which, as an army officer, he was expected to serve. Balbo and d’Azeglio stated the ultimate rationale behind the moderate sensibility, that public behaviour ought to have followed the principles of private conduct. Balbo made the practice of private virtues the prerequisite for national independence in his most influential book, Speranze d’Italia, by rejecting the difference between the two spheres. A moral domestic life was the proper breeding ground for national emancipation not only because of the limited possibility of practising the public virtues in Italy, but because every activity and every task demanded acceptance of responsibility, self-possession, hard work, and sacrifice. In Ireland, Father Mathew’s temperance movement had advanced the struggle for independence.168 Italian mores have remarkably improved since the eighteenth century, Balbo went on, and those of women more than those of men.169 The moderates agreed that one of Christianity’s greatest contribution to civilization had been the moralization of family life and, in particular, the enhancement of women’s dignity, through the imposition of monogamy and the prohibition of divorce. By assigning housekeeping to women, furthermore, Christianity had acknowledged their true nature.170 Women should not be educated excessively and should not pursue a career, Balbo argued, but they have their own important activities (operosità) to carry out, consisting in managing the home, looking after the children (in collaboration with their husbands), and practising charity. Basically, it was women’s tending to the needs of others that made a moral household. Women were ‘by 168 Balbo, Speranze, 166–99; id., Della politica nella presente civiltà (posthumous), in Balbo, Della monarchia, 409–521 at 423–8 ff.; Massimo d’Azeglio, Degli ultimi casi di Romagna (1846), in daru, i, 5–94 at 30–3; id., ‘Lettera al signor N.N.’ (1846), in daru, i, 97–122 at 115. The necessity of principled behaviour in the family permeated Balbo’s Novelle (1829–47; Turin, 1857), a middle-brow collections of short stories which amounted to a sort of lay sermons for the popolo. Interestingly, even the private life of the (relatively) flamboyant d’Azeglio, who was a painter and a novelist, followed bourgeois patterns; see Umberto Levra, ‘Il cavalier Massimo d’Azeglio’, in Maria Luisa Betri and Duccio Bigazzi (eds.), Ricerche di storia in onore di Franco Della Peruta (Milan, 1996), i, 178–93. 169 Balbo, Speranze, 190–5 ff. 170 Balbo, ‘Della civiltà in generale’, 108–9; Gioberti, Introduzione, iii, 92–4. Later on, Gioberti changed his mind about the proper place of women, in tune with his gradual abandonment of moderatism in favour of an idiosyncratic form of democracy; see Delle condizioni presenti, 10–13, where he argued for women’s involvement in the struggle. In Del rinnovamento civile d’Italia, ed. Fausto Nicolini (1851; Bari, 1911–12), iii, 8–11, Gioberti likened women to the popular masses because sentiment and instinct predominated in both.

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nature’ wellsprings of qualities the moderates prized, like, in Balbo’s words, ‘moderation, gentleness (dolcezza), and tranquillity’.171 It ensued from all this that the moderate man’s type of civil heroism was that of everyday dignity and honesty, underpinned by religious faith; its proper environment was not a piazza crowded with protesters or a secret society gathering, but an affectionate household created by the calm tenderness of a woman. That marriage and family life were the spiritual foundation for a citizen’s ability to engage in public affairs was a common view among German-speaking liberals.172 The moderate sensibility of the 1840s included feelings and arguments warranting one’s involvement in public life.173 In this respect, it differed from the sensibility put forward by Manzoni and Pellico, who, in writing before a moderate policy became feasible, had emphasised patience and endurance. Their works were not political in character but were substantiated by a religious drive. The relationship between politics and religion they posited was a loose one: Manzoni and Pellico just implied that religion could justify a ‘moderate’ kind of patriotism, granted that the faithful should not turn their backs on mundane concerns. Gioberti took a step forward in his first work of relevance, Introduzione allo studio della filosofia (1839–40). He first depicted Catholicism as alien to political extremes thanks to the unparalleled certainty and solidity of its doctrine, and then linked it inextricably, as cause and effect, to ‘temperate liberty and a civil monarchy’ (meaning a consultative or representative one).174 The link between reform and religion was thus made stronger, and more specific. Significantly, Balbo and d’Azeglio advocated forms of ‘resignation’ (rassegnazione) which, contrary to the usual meaning of the word, referred somehow to a willingness to take action. Resignation was ‘the virtue of the unhappy but strong’ to Balbo, the virtue of those who ‘acknowledge that it is impossible to change [certain facts] through virtuous means, but only to pursue more effectively what they can, and ought to, change through them’.175 In affirming that each individual’s reform was indispensable because political independence would be achieved only if deserved, d’Azeglio called for a 171 Balbo, Pensieri, 315–17; see also Gioberti, Introduzione, iii, 92–4; d’Azeglio, Niccolò de’Lapi, 175–80. 172 Deborah R. Coen, Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life (Chicago, 2007), 46–7, 56–7; Pieter M. Judson, ‘Early Liberalism in Austrian Society’, in Helmut Reinalter and Harm Klueting (eds.), Der deutsche und österreichische Liberalismus (Innsbruck, 2010), 111–12. 173 See La Salvia, ‘Il moderatismo’, 274–6. 174 Gioberti, Introduzione, esp. i, 28–30. 175 Balbo, Speranze, 198–200.

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period of ‘industrious (operosa) resignation’ – entailing plenty of ‘suffering’, and a ‘manly’ toughening of the will – which could redeem Italy in imitation of Poland and Ireland.176 The moderates disagreed with Montesquieu’s famous dictum that virtue characterized republics only. Actually, Balbo remarked, ‘political virtue is necessary to government whatever its form’.177 As the makeover of Italy seemed impending in the 1840s, Balbo, Gioberti, and d’Azeglio either supplemented the virtues of religious origin with others, calling for Italians’ energy and courage, or elaborated on the Christian ones to that effect. There resulted a peculiar set of public virtues which was bereft of the apocalyptic tones Mazzini liked, although Gioberti’s claims on Italians were admittedly quite demanding. The moderates also excluded what the republican leader urged, namely, a total involvement in the national struggle, interdicting all other aspects of a patriot’s life. If Mazzini was a professional revolutionary, Balbo, d’Azeglio, and Gioberti were not, and all three chose to limit their political involvement at some point in the 1850s.178 There were differences between the three writers’ approaches, but they agreed that assuming political responsibilities should not lead to a betrayal of the ideal of virtue, and especially a forfeiture of self-possession. First of all, the moderates of the 1840s took up the theme of ‘justice’. It had been raised in particular by Manzoni, maintaining that Catholicism had revealed what earthly justice consisted of. Fighting injustice was among the duties of Catholics, in Balbo’s view, and foreign domination was its worst instance. Italian independence is a just venture par excellence, he maintained, for it is in accordance not only with the rationale of Italian history, but also with the Providence-led march of Christianity eastwards (Balbo envisaged that Austria could be compensated with territory in the Balkans for the loss of the Italian provinces); now, the moderates’ task is to tilt public opinion in favour of just means.179 D’Azeglio wrote in a memorable letter to his Jesuit brother Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio that ‘love for justice’ had moved him to engage in the 176 D’Azeglio, Degli ultimi casi, 9–10, 22–3; id., [‘Discorso su la moderazione’] (1847), in daru, i, 129–30; ‘Lettera al professor Francesco Orioli’, 154–5. D’Azeglio’s autobiographical memoir, I miei ricordi, ed. Alberto M. Ghisalberti (posthumous, 1866; Turin, 1971), has been compared to Cicero’s De officiis for its concern with character and duty and its eulogy of political participation; see Langella, Amor di patria, 162–3. 177 Balbo, Pensieri, 8; id., Speranze, 185. 178 That remains true although Balbo died in 1853, and Gioberti, having left Turin in 1849, died in Brussels in 1852. 179 Balbo, Speranze, 77–8, 100, 152, 162, 166, 268–70.

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struggle. Speaking the truth about bad government in the Papal States, as he had done in Degli ultimi casi di Romagna (1846), meant siding with the victims of an injustice ‘that is intolerable by now’.180 Pius ix had come ‘to embody justice’, since his reforms aimed to protect the weak against the oppression of the strong.181 Catholicism should become Italians’ ‘practical rule of life’ (professione operativa della vita), in Gioberti’s view, and above all it should substantiate their ‘civil virtues’. Religious faith only could give rise to the spirit of sacrifice and the ‘pious enthusiasm’ needed by the patriotic struggle – here Gioberti, who had had sympathy for Giovine Italia in the early 1830s, was treading on typically Mazzinian ground, but in fact Constant and Staël had said similar things about the force of religion.182 Unsurprisingly for an admirer of the Stoics, Gioberti acknowledged the ancient Greeks’ and Romans’ moral strength and courage, and accordingly recommended a system of state education which, in imitation of the Greek city-states, ‘made citizens’ by fostering ‘moral energy’ and ‘spiritual vigour’. In the late 1840s, he praised the educational potential of military service.183 Previously, he had cautiously admitted that civil virtues were enhanced by the grant of political rights.184 Opposing the diffusion of French culture was, in his opinion, a necessary condition for moral renewal. That meant rejecting the doctrine of popular sovereignty – a manifestation of sensism and the primacy of force – and that of progress French-style – shifting endlessly the goal of history, it enthroned ‘fashion’ and denied eternal truths.185 Gioberti’s civil virtues were in effect close relatives of those which ought to inform private life; a single morality, that of Catholicism, presided over both spheres. Religion prescribes in all possible situations, he wrote, ‘the dominance of morality over facts, namely of law over force, of duty over what is merely useful, of virtue over pleasure, of spirit over flesh, and of what is eternal over what is transitory’. 180 The letter, dated 8 Jun. 1846, is in Massimo d’ Azeglio, Scritti postumi, ed. Matteo Ricci (Florence, 1871), 149–56. 181 Massimo d’Azeglio, ‘Della emancipazione civile degl’israeliti’ (1847), in data, i, 351–410 at 398–401, 402 n., 408–9. 182 Gioberti, Teorica del sovranaturale, ii, 284–8, 307–9. Gioberti had published a letter-essay in the Mazzinian review La Giovine Italia in 1834, and Cattaneo reprinted it in 1849 with a pointed, polemical preface; see Vincenzo Gioberti, Della repubblica e del cristianesimo: Lettera ai redattori della Giovine Italia (Italia [but Lugano], 1849). For enthusiasm in Staël, see Sect. 1 above; for Constant, see his De la religion (Paris, 1824–31), i, ‘Préface’, esp. pp. xx–xliv. 183 Gioberti, Il gesuita moderno, iii, 204–5; id., Delle condizioni, 70. 184 Gioberti, Introduzione, i, 158–62, 195–206; iii, 91–2. 185 Ibid., i, 48–52.

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It also ordains endurance, the acceptance of pain, and love and support for the poor and the weak. Gioberti was no pluralist: if the morality of the Gospel was ignored, selfishness and the war of all against all would dominate.186 In sum, Gioberti’s activist interpretation of Catholicism was the antidote to Europe’s moral corruption – the French légèreté was undermining determination and commitment – through a renewed emphasis on virtue. With childish arrogance, Gioberti thought that only his own philosophy could substantiate the impending reconquest of the European mind. The clergy, both in Italy and France, were expected to be the avant-garde of a natural aristocracy (the socalled ottimati) countering both democracy – which amounted to the rule of ignorance, materialism, and violence – and absolutism. In Italy, Gioberti appealed to the younger generation to recognize the dire state of the peninsula and take a stand against it. The youth had been left a legacy of religious incredulity, political extremism of either type, moral corruption, servility to foreign mores, and literary mediocrity, but now they had the chance to ‘revitalise the moral condition of society’ through a fresh endorsement of religion as the indispensable condition for ‘moderate liberty’.187 The Piedmontese nobility in general, and the Balbo family in particular, had a long tradition of service to the Savoyard monarchs. (The Piedmontese case was unique in Italy, where the aristocracies had an adversarial relationship, to varying degrees, with the central government; they regularly sought to safeguard the privileges they enjoyed in the local communities from its intrusions).188 Not surprisingly then, Balbo put forward a eulogy of public life for the upper classes, and, curiously, he made much of ‘republican’ suggestions.189 He cultivated the ideal of a Cincinnatus-like nobleman living in the morally healthy countryside, busy with agricultural improvements, and always

186 Gioberti, Teorica del sovranaturale, ii, 269–71; id., Introduzione, iii, 116; id., Del buono, 179, 273–4. 187 Gioberti, Introduzione, i, 46–52, 81–104, 120–3 ff., 157–70 ff. See Marcello Mustè, La scienza ideale: Filosofia e politica in Vincenzo Gioberti (Soveria Mannelli, 2000), 193–6. 188 See Anthony L. Cardoza, Aristocrats in Bourgeois Italy: The Piedmontese Nobility, 1861–1930 (Cambridge, 1998). For the regions ruled by Austria, see Marco Meriggi, Amministrazione e classi sociali nel Lombardo-Veneto (1814–1848) (Bologna, 1983); for Tuscany, see Thomas Kroll, La rivolta del patriziato: Il liberalismo della nobiltà nella Toscana del Risorgimento (1999; Florence, 2005); for Naples, see Giovanni Montroni, Gli uomini del re: La nobiltà napoletana nell’Ottocento (Rome, 1996). 189 Balbo, Speranze, 185–200; id., Pensieri, 248–54; id., Della politica, 423–31. See Maurizio Isabella, ‘Aristocratic Liberalism and Risorgimento: Cesare Balbo and Piedmontese Political Thought after 1848’, History of European Ideas, 39 (2013), 1–23.

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ready to serve the monarch as soldier or statesman.190 Balbo approximated this ideal, although he was ostracised from the court and service to the Piedmontese dynasty for many years before 1848. Yet as late as February, 1847, that is in the middle of a process of change taking Italy by storm, Balbo wondered whether his participation in the political debate was appropriate, since the sovereign had not ‘called’ him to do so.191 In agreement with the republican tradition in general and Machiavelli in particular, he insisted on the necessity of military service to strengthen the moral fibre, especially of the aristocracy. Balbo was influenced by the English example, and in fact remaking the Italian aristocracy on the English model was a main concern of his. The nobility of the peninsula was idle, corrupt, and ignorant in his opinion, while the English aristocracy was religious and prided itself on agricultural innovations and service to the fatherland.192 A ‘Stoic’ brand of courage substantiated Balbo’s notion of civic virtue. He outlined a moderate counterpart to the model of bravery associated with ­secret societies and armed insurrection: ‘civil courage’ (coraggio civile). It entailed first and foremost the courage of one’s convictions, as Robert Peel’s clashes with his own ‘part’ had magnificently shown. To oppose a popular uprising is a most valiant form of civil courage in these democratic times, Balbo contended. He probably knew Burke’s remarks on the ‘deep courage’ needed to remain moderate when ‘the voice of multitudes … passes judgement against you’, a voice regularly leading to ‘splendid and perilous extremes’. Even one’s love of the fatherland, Balbo observed with Santarosa in mind, should not take precedence over faithfulness to his/her beliefs. Clandestine politics, with its successive levels of secrecy, is likely to put at risk moral integrity in this sense – and in many others, of course.193 D’Azeglio, too, made much of ‘civil courage’ in his pamphlets. To him, it consisted in speaking up against injustice and oppression – it was a ‘holy duty’.194 190 Cesare Balbo, Pensieri, 112–28. Participation in non-agricultural economic activities, on the contrary, would distract the aristocrats from their duties to the prince and the fatherland. 191 Cesare Balbo, ‘Lettere politiche al signor D***’ (partially published, 1846–7), in id., Lettere, 319–452 at 401–3. 192 Balbo, Pensieri, 105–28. 193 Balbo, ‘Lettere politiche’, 370–83 (Santarosa is tacitly referred to at 378). On the moral dangers of secret societies, see Balbo’s short story ‘L’ufficiale in ritiro’, in Balbo, Novelle, 263–93. For Burke, see ‘Letter to Charles-Jean-François Depont’ (1789; first published 1844), in Burke, Further reflections, 5–17 at 16. 194 D’Azeglio, Degli ultimi casi, 9–10, 90; id., I lutti di Lombardia (1848), in daru, i, 425–97 at 452.

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His two historical novels – re-inventing the national past in ways that pleased a patriotic public – stressed martial courage instead, commemorating Italy’s long-forgotten military bravery. D’Azeglio recounted the stories of Italian medieval warriors who were virtuous, ill-fated, and anachronistically patriotic, but who were, above all, determined and strong in every respect.195 While Niccolò de’Lapi (1841) included a polemic against the ‘parts’ and ‘sects’ muddying the ‘Italian’ cause, Ettore Fieramosca (1833), going through eight editions in one year, was more straightforward. It recounted how thirteen Italian knights – displaying a historically dubious awareness of their national identity – defeated as many French in Barletta in 1503.196 Interestingly, the novel had Cesare Borgia as one of its protagonists; Machiavelli had praised him for his conquests of large territories in Italy, for those conquests, although achieved through ­murders and frauds, could be a prelude to Italian independence.197 The ­Machiavellian pattern of politics, with its indifference to means, was obviously antithetical to moderatism, and d’Azeglio’s novel rammed the message home. Borgia featured as the story villain, a quintessence of evil who raped and killed the woman whom the hero Ettore loved. Further evidence that public and private virtues coalesced is provided by the moderates’ advocacy of enterprise (operosità), meant to counter Italians’ laziness and listlessness. To Balbo, practising operosità meant setting up manufactures, exploiting commercial routes, building railways, exploring distant places, and more generally engaging in the kinds of activities that would set Italians in tune with the needs of civilization – even waging wars for national independence was given as an example of enterprise.198 As the Italians’ laziness was ‘anti-Christian’, so the great operosità displayed by other peoples (notably the British) was ‘Christian’. Operosità is, Balbo wrote, ‘Providence’s new road’, since material interests promote ‘all good political, moral, and religious causes’. Balbo believed, in particular, that the course of civilization would soon 195 See Langella, Amor di patria, 201–5; Federica Bruinori Degan, ‘History, Literature and National Identity in Massimo d’Azeglio’s Ettore Fieramosca, or the Challenge of Barletta’, in Salvatore Bancheri (ed.), Manzoni and the Historical Novel (Ottawa, 2009), 163–78. 196 Massimo d’Azeglio, Niccolò de’Lapi; id., Ettore Fieramosca o la disfida di Barletta (1833; Milan, 1844). On war and Italian identity, see Riall, ‘Men at War’. 197 Machiavelli, Il principe, Ch. 7. 198 Cesare Balbo, Sommario della storia d’Italia (1846; 10th ed., 1856; Milan, 1927), 62; id., Meditazioni storiche (partially published, 1842; Florence, 1855), 524; id., Pensieri, 313. On o­ perosità, see Fubini Leuzzi, ‘Introduzione’, 29–34; Roberto Romani, ‘L’economia politica dei moderati, 1830–1848’, Società e storia, 28 (2006), 34–40.

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lead to the independence of Italy, in the context of the expansion of Christendom across the globe.199 Gioberti, d’Azeglio, Mamiani, and Leopoldo Galeotti also gave work and enterprise a significant place in Italians’ spiritual­regeneration, although they placed less emphasis on the religious characterization of those virtues than Balbo did.200 7

Proximate Sources of the Sensibility of the 1840s: Alfieri and the Doctrinaires

It is worth pausing at this point. It has been argued that a distinct sensibility characterised monarchical patriotism, meaning both the philosophical Catholics and the moderates of the 1840s. This sensibility stemmed from two exigencies: refuting the irreligious moral identity originating from the Revolution, and reforming Italians’ mores. Rosmini provided the foundation of the sensibility through a critique of the revolutionary and Romantic personality; Manzoni’s moral brand of Catholicism informed moderate patriotism at times in which the public sphere was inaccessible; Pellico dramatized and popularised a religiosity of virtue, endurance, and moderate feelings; and the authors of the 1840s brought the issue of national character to the fore. It should be stressed, however, that the two exigencies – challenging the revolutionary sensibility and re-moralising Italians – were closely related to all these writers, although each dealt with either to varying degrees. The espousal of reason over passions entailed a focus on self-mastery, inner calm, prudence, and endurance; the need for participation called for the courage of one’s convictions, a sense of justice, moral vigour, and enterprise. There were ‘Stoic’ elements in this sensibility: personal virtue was cultivated as both an answer to the suffering caused by isolation and impotence, and a reaction to Italians’ poor morality.

199 Balbo, Speranze, 264, 266–7; id., Meditazioni, 22; id., ‘Della grandezza delle capitali: Al conte Ludovico Sauli’ (ms., 1840s), in id., Lettere, 201–20 at 208. See Giovanni Battista Scaglia, Cesare Balbo: Il Risorgimento nella prospettiva storica del ‘progresso cristiano’ (Rome, 1975), 287, 316–17, 322–3. 200 Gioberti, Del primato, i, 264–6; id., Ai genovesi (1848), in id.,, Operette politiche (Capolago, 1851), 77–81 at 79–80; d’Azeglio, Degli ultimi casi, 85–6; Terenzio Mamiani, Nostro parere intorno alle cose italiane (1839), in id., Scritti politici (Florence, 1853), 5–46 at 22–5, 29, 45; Leopoldo Galeotti, Della sovranità e del governo temporale dei papi (Paris, 1846), 247–51.

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This section returns to the theme of sources, and to those of the moderates’ ‘Stoicism’ in particular. The wide diffusion of Stoic themes in eighteenthcentury­European philosophy, and especially in the writings of ‘enlightened’ Italian Catholics like Muratori and Genovesi, warrants that using the label ‘Stoic’ does not imply that inspiration was drawn directly from the texts produced by the Stoa school. The concern with virtue, the self-possession, the heroic endurance, the quest for peace of mind, and the willingness to contribute to the polity characterised the Italian Catholic Aufklärung, which is not to be viewed as a self-contained current but as an intersection of various European traditions, attitudes, and stances.201 Of course there were differences alongside the affinities, because, for instance, the moderate sensibility included a polemical and uncompromising side – exemplified by Rosmini and Gioberti – which had no counterpart in the Aufklärung. The world of Muratori or Genovesi was that of the revival of Tridentine reform under Innocent xi and Innocent xii, and, subsequently, Benedict xiv, while the moderates, reacting to Voltairianism and Napoleonic de-Christianization, were involved in a confrontation that was a veritable Kulturkampf, according to some historians.202 Granted that the themes and perspectives surveyed in Section 1 made up the general context of the moderate sensibility, specific channels of influence can also be identified. Rosmini was pivotal in this respect, because he absorbed essential­themes directly from the Aufklärung, while divesting it of any possible association with either rationalism or rebellious Jansenism. Muratori contributed decisively to his spirituality, as indicated especially by Rosmini’s anti-Jesuit Augustinian rigorism, advocacy of ‘moderate’ forms of devotion shunning­superstition, emphasis on the virtue of charity, and the ideal of peace of mind as the outcome of love of God. (It is possible, furthermore, that Muratori inspired Rosmini’s book on Church reform, Delle cinque piaghe della santa Chiesa. Rosmini also appreciated Genovesi’s middle-of-the-road theology).203 201 This is how the Aufklärung is regarded by most interpreters, and in particular by Mario Rosa; see e.g. his Settecento religioso. 202 Vecchi, ‘L’itinerario spirituale’; Michael Broers, The Politics of Religion in Napoleonic Italy: The War against God, 1801–1814 (London, 2002); Martin Papenheim, ‘Roma o morte: Culture Wars in Italy’, in Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser (eds.), Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, 2009), 202–26; Manuel Borutta, ‘Anti-Catholicism and the Culture War in Risorgimento Italy’, in Patriarca and Riall, The Risorgimento Revisited, 191–213. 203 Vecchi, ‘L’itinerario spirituale’; De Giorgi, La scienza del cuore, 97–150; id., Rosmini e il suo tempo, 15–66; Traniello, Società religiosa, 194–7, 211–12. For Rosmini on Jansenism, see his memo to bishop Carlo Emanuele Sardagna (1831), in Pietro Stella (ed.), Il giansenismo

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It is hardly surprising, then, that major themes of Muratori’s ethics featured in Rosmini’s. From a different viewpoint, Rosmini’s attack on the Romantic personality,­with its political features, fitted neatly into the conservative reaction to Rousseau’s sensibility, above exemplified in Burke. All of Muratori’s and Genovesi’s writings were re-published between 1815 and the 1850s. Yet the moderates of the 1840s did not refer to the Aufklärer’s spiritual and moral thought – neither did so the priest Gioberti, who had certainly first-hand knowledge of it. The standing of Muratori, who had been suspected of Jansenism by the Catholic establishment, was possibly also limited by his jurisdictionalism, at a time when the moderates sought the pope’s support; Genovesi, another jurisdictionalist, as a political economist may have ­suffered from an apparent closeness of his to the utilitarian and materialistic currents of the Enlightenment. Manzoni termed Muratori ‘immortal’, but for his historical œuvre, and, in his capacity of architect of the neo-Guelph historiography, challenged Muratori’s favourable depiction of the Langobard kingdom in Italy.204 Balbo maintained in Sommario della storia d’Italia (1846) that there had been only two great writers in Italy from the end of the seventeenth century to 1814, Vico and Muratori, but the latter’s glory was said to lie in his historical works; Gioberti referred to the ‘great Muratori’ as the most indefatigable of archive explorers in the Primato; and d’Azeglio drafted a novel on the basis of the documents Muratori had edited.205 Over the 1840s, the only authors the moderates frequently referred to were giants such as Dante, Machiavelli, and in Italia (Bari, 1972), 150–3. Tommaseo, too, read Muratori; see Tommaseo, ‘Rosmini’, 26, 67–8; De Giorgi, La scienza del cuore, 312. 204 Manzoni, Discorso sopra alcuni punti della storia longobardica in Italia (1822), in amto, iv, 185–254 at 207. On Muratori’s historiography, which brought to Italy the exacting standards of the Benedictines of St. Maur, see Bertelli, Erudizione. Manzoni pointed to the lack of comprehensive interpretive theses in Muratori’s historical work, too focused on discrete events, and alluded to his anti-papal prejudice due to his connections to the House of Este, then quarrelling with the Holy See; see Discorso, 207–11, 233–4. In Sulla morale, 488, Manzoni praised Muratori’s stance against superstition, but, in ‘Storia della colonna infame’, 778–9, he criticised Muratori’s all-too cryptic judgement of the trials of alleged plague-spreaders. On the moderates’ history, see also Ch. 2, Sect. 5. 205 Balbo, Sommario, 484–7; Gioberti, Del primato, ii, 103, 128; d’Azeglio, La Lega lombarda (c.1844), in id., Scritti postumi, 3–145. Muratori’s historical talent was ‘unmatchable’ ­(inarrivabile) according to Balbo, who nevertheless thought that it was now necessary to update his work; see Balbo, ‘Dell’utilità presente’, 88–91, and id., ‘Studi da farsi sulla storia d’Italia’ (1832), in Balbo, Storia d’Italia, 107–127 at 110–111; see Fubini Leuzzi, ‘Introduzione’, 19–20, 47.

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Montesquieu. Yet, Muratori’s ideas on religion, history, literature, educational reform, and, via Gerdil, politics and philosophy had had a momentous impact in the Piedmontese kingdom during the eighteenth century. It is known, in particular, that Muratori’s key text from the standpoint of sensibility, Filosofia morale, was widely read at the time of its publication.206 It is safe to argue, all in all, that the themes of the Aufklärung were in the air in northern Italy, thanks chiefly to Rosmini and his numerous followers, but also to Manzoni’s Sulla morale cattolica, which anticipated Rosmini’s denunciation of passions and pointed to the duties of Catholics in public life.207 Other, more proximate sources were also likely to contribute to the Stoic flavour of Gioberti’s, d’Azeglio’s, and Balbo’s ethics. Vittorio Alfieri (1749–1803) and the Doctrinaires will be considered in the rest of this section; Section 1 was not the proper place for that, because of Alfieri’s un-classifiable vision and unique role in Piedmontese culture, and because of the necessity of elaborating on the Doctrinaires’ influence. Alfieri’s writings – his prose and some of his tragedies – were a source of Italian patriotism and love of liberty to all those who were born between the 1770s and the turn of the century, including Foscolo, Manzoni, and the moderates of the 1840s.208 A wealthy Piedmontese count, in 1778 Alfieri renounced his citizenship and left the country in voluntary exile, making his persona the epitome of a moral rebellion against autocracy and a dispiriting cultural atmosphere.209 He cultivated the republican ideal of living out virtue to the benefit of patria, lamenting at the same time that under a despotic government ‘there is no patria’ (Foscolo would adopt a similar stance in Ortis). Alfieri denounced the demoralization brought about by tyranny in a roughly republican idiom, but, what is more from the standpoint of moderate sensibility, he also explained how a ‘honest man’ could live under it ­without betraying his principles. The first rule was to stay away from the monarch 206 See Ricuperati, ‘Ludovico Antonio Muratori e il Piemonte’ (for Muratori’s Filosofia morale, see 48–9); Dino Carpanetto and Giuseppe Ricuperati, Italy in the Age of Reason 1685–1789, tr. Caroline Higgitt (London, 1987), 91–3, 145–6, 298–303, 312–14; Carlo Calcaterra, ‘L’azione ideale del Muratori nel Risorgimento italiano’, in Vecchi, Miscellanea, 48–50. Muratori advised on the reorganization of higher education carried out in the kingdom between 1720 and 1729. 207 On the formation of a Rosminian school in northern Italy, and on its relationship with Gioberti’s disciples, see Traniello, Cattolicesimo conciliatorista. 208 Langella, Amor di patria, details the influence of Alfieri on Manzoni (21–40) and d’Azeglio (155–79). 209 See Alfieri’s autobiography, first published in London in 1804: Vita scritta da esso, ed. Luigi Fassò (Asti, 1951). See Mario Fubini, ‘Alfieri, Vittorio’, dbi, ii, 1960.

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and the court, while another was to spread ‘truths’ as a writer. When virtuous action was impossible, the writer who placed literature at the service of humankind embarked upon the pursuit of ‘glory’, as literature was more powerful than despotism in the long term. You will be hated and despised by the ambitious­slaves surrounding the tyrant, Alfieri wrote, but you will be ‘pure’, a free man in a servile nation.210 The Stoic postures Alfieri assumed conveyed the existential suffering of living under despotic rule. In the first years of the nineteenth century, he was idolized by the young Balbo and his aristocratic friends – Carlo Vidua, Luigi Provana, and Luigi Ornato, among others – resenting the Napoleonic yoke. In a Romantic spirit, and relying on Giuseppe Parini and Foscolo besides ­Alfieri, they argued for Italian independence, a ‘wise liberty’, and the cultural ­italianità of Piedmont offsetting the corrupting influence of French thought. In Provana’s retrospective words, he and his friends were ‘Christians and Stoics who loved the patria for they loved what was true, just, and honest’.211 Alfieri had promoted another upright exile, Dante, ‘as his privileged model of self’, and it was probably no coincidence that Balbo published a biography of the Florentine poet in 1839.212 Balbo, always preoccupied with morality, was positive that Parini’s and Alfieri’s satires had helped improve Italian mores, adding that Alfieri had also contributed to that outcome by setting an example of independence from the powerful, determination to achieve great things, and resolute upholding of principles. Gioberti went further, as he stated that Alfieri had restored Italians’ national awareness, the denunciation of France’s cultural

210 Vittorio Alfieri, Della tirannide: Libri due (written 1777, published 1800), in id., Scritti politici e morali, ed. Pietro Cazzani (Asti, 1951–84), i, 1–110 at 43, 89–91; La virtù sconosciuta (1789), ibid., i, 255–84 at e.g. 271; Del principe e delle lettere (1789), ibid., i, 111–254 (featuring a Machiavelli-inspired manifesto for an Italian resurgence, at bk. iii, Ch. 11, pp. 249–53). For patria in Foscolo’s Ortis, see Joseph Luzzi, Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy (New Haven, 2008), 38. 211 Passerin d’Entrèves, La giovinezza di Cesare Balbo, 3–38, quot. at 14–15. In the four-part poem Il giorno (1763–1801), the Lombard priest Parini (1729–99) gave an ironic and satirical representation of the aristocracy of his time. Its idleness, arrogance, and immorality were encapsulated in cicisbeismo and a snobbish Francophilia. Parini’s work was regarded by younger poets as a lesson in morality and freedom of thought; Foscolo portrayed him in both Ortis and Dei sepolcri. See Giuseppe Nicoletti, ‘Parini, Giuseppe’, dbi, lxxxi, 2014. 212 Luzzi, Romantic Europe, 125, and the whole Ch. 5. For Dante as a model of Stoic and patriotic virtue to Alfieri, Foscolo, and Leopardi, see Andrea Ciccarelli, ‘Dante and Italian Culture from the Risorgimento to World War I’, Dante Studies, 119 (2001), 125–54.

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domination being an integral part of it.213 Yet the moderates’ admiration­was mixed with substantial reservations. Alfieri was a born rebel, eager to experience and commend strong passions, and disparaging religion in general and Catholicism in particular. Consequently, to the mature Balbo Alfieri was a ‘generously unreasonable poet’, who, like Dante, had given vent to rage (ira) and had been the victim of his ‘imagination’; his political views were useless to the younger generation.214 As Alfieri has regularly been pointed to as a source of the moderates’ patriotism, so have been the French Doctrinaires with respect to political opinions. It has seemed obvious to historians that juste-milieu writers like Guizot and Royer-Collard influenced the moderates of the 1840s, in the light of the traditional prominence of French culture in Italy in general and Piedmont in particular, and because the moderates, like the Doctrinaires, occupied the middle ground. The account of moderatism provided in Chapter 2, however, suggests qualifying the extent of the Doctrinaires’ influence. Most of the issues that were central to them – like sovereignty, democracy, the danger of social dissolution, or administrative centralization – were not such to the moderates, who concerned themselves with those themes only over the 1850s, when in effect the Doctrinaires became a chief source of inspiration. In the 1840s, besides the general suggestions coming from the French representative experiment, of which the Doctrinaires were major protagonists and interpreters, their influence concerned the moral background of politics. In the words of historian Michael Drolet, Gérando, Maine de Biran, and Guizot disseminated Reid’s values associated with political moderation, namely ‘intellectual honesty, integrity, self-control, and prudence’, while Royer-Collard argued in favour of ‘Stoic qualities’ like self-possession, duty, and tranquillity.215 More generally, the spiritual atmosphere of the French Restoration provides a clue to the emotive inspiration lying at the basis of moderatism. In spite 213 Balbo, Pensieri, 110; Gioberti, Introduzione, i, 170–80. Gioberti endorsed Alfieri’s criticism of Piedmontese society and government, contrary to Balbo. 214 Passerin d’Entrèves, La giovinezza di Cesare Balbo, 188–9; Cesare Balbo, ‘Alfieri’, in id., Frammenti sul Piemonte, ed. Guglielmo Stefani (Turin, 1851), 152–67, esp. 156–8. Rosmini and Tommaseo had no hesitations in denouncing Alfieri; for the former see Filosofia della politica, 478–81, 491 ff., and for the latter see Roberta Turchi, ‘Dalle recensioni alla Storia civile nella letteraria: Gli articoli per l’Antologia di Niccolò Tommaseo’, in Turchi and Volpi, Niccolò Tommaseo, 145–6. 215 Michael Drolet, ‘Carrying the Banner of the Bourgeoisie: Democracy, Self, and the Philosophical Foundations to François Guizot’s Historical and Political Thought’, History of Political Thought, 32 (2011), 668, 672–3, 680.

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of his erroneous philosophical approach, Gioberti conceded, Théodore Jouffroy is a virtuous man.216 A disciple of Cousin who was politically close to the Doctrinaires, Jouffroy was the author of a famous article, ‘Comment les dogmes finissent’ (1825), giving voice to the generation that had come of age after 1815. The old world has crumbled, he averred, and the society taking its place is bereft of meaning and faith as it rests on private self-interest only. It is ruled by men who are ‘clever, corrupted, and hypocritical’, showing ‘indifference to means’. But we have ‘a need to believe, because we know that truth exists’; we are ‘Stoic characters’ moved by love for virtue and truth.217 These feelings were widespread in France, and not only among the liberals – it was the ultras who deplored most forcefully the loss of shared values. It is arguable that Italians overcame a comparable spiritual anxiety by joining the struggle for national independence. A religion-imbued patriotism gave meaning and discipline to both moderates and Mazzinians, equally striving for answers to the moral relativism allegedly characterizing the age. The dichotomy between reason and passions informing moderatism becomes, seen from this angle, one between the sought-after universal values and the individual’s egotistic drives. The moderates were influenced by French thought, willingly or ­unwillingly, but a vein of Francophobia ran through their writings. Alfieri had written its manifesto, the Misogallo (1793–9), which was a violent satire on the Revolution.218 The moderates were exasperated with a century of irreligious 216 Gioberti, Introduzione, ii, 111–12. 217 The article was published in Le globe on 24 May 1825; see it, edited by Jean-Jacques Goblot, at Athena e-texts [online library, University of Geneva] , accessed Dec. 2015. See Alan B. Spitzer, The French Generation of 1820 (Princeton, 1987), 113–16, 190–1; Reddy, Navigation of feeling, 232–7. 218 The Misogallo began with these expressive lines of verse about the French people: Sempre insolenti Coi Re impotenti Sempre ridenti Coi Re battenti. Talor valenti; Ma ognor serventi, Sangue-beventi, Regi stromenti. [Always insolent/ when kings are impotent/ always in a good humour/ when kings are hitting./ Sometimes brave;/ but always slave/ bloodthirsty/ tools of kings.] See the text at Biblioteca dei classici italiani [online library] , accessed Jul. 2016. To Alfieri, neither the French would ever be free, nor any people should count on them to became free. Alfieri sought his literary

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esprit, with the French intellectual dictatorship over continental Europe, and especially with the recent occupation of almost the whole peninsula at the hands of the Grande Nation. Unafraid to add insult to injury, the French had arrested both pope Pius vi and his successor, Pius vii. (The popes’ opposition to Napoleon demonstrated the truth of the neo-Guelph interpretation of Italian history, according to the moderates; a ‘myth of Pius vii’ as defender and martyr of religious and national liberty built up).219 The moderates’ feeling of national identity was angst-ridden: although buttressed by a proud re-affirmation of the uniqueness of Italian civilization, their patriotism was mixed with humiliation in the face of recent history. Anti-Gallicism took various and even curious forms, like the wicked behaviour of French characters in Balbo’s novels, or Gioberti’s disparaging comments on French intellectuals, comments which actually turned an inferiority complex upside down – Cousin was a favourite target of his for the légèreté with which he had distorted the Christian doctrine.220 In advancing the idea of an expanding Christian civilization in which France played of course a major role, Balbo felt compelled to devote a few pages to a rebuke of that ‘prejudice’, Francophobia. Gioberti too, he complained, has subscribed to it in the Primato. But Balbo fails to convince, inadvertently giving many good reasons for retaining Francophobia.221 Gioberti reiterated in 1848 that the Risorgimento, being religious and moderate, amounted to a ‘denial of French ideas’.222

identity through a process of de-Frenchification (disfrancesarsi), namely, by overcoming the sway of all things French. A suspicion of France was pervasive among the educated classes, not only of moderate leanings; Foscolo, for one, lamented that a ‘French style’, contrasting with the study of the classics, had become prevalent in Italy. See Luzzi, Romantic Europe, 74, 87–9; Angelo Fabrizi, ‘Alfieri e Pindemonte dinanzi alla rivoluzione’, in id., Manzoni storico e altri saggi sette-ottocenteschi (Florence, 2004), 131–74. 219 Passerin d’Entrèves, ‘Il cattolicesimo liberale in Europa’, 566. 220 Balbo, Novelle; Gioberti, Introduzione, ii, 107–38; id., ‘Considerazioni’. 221 Balbo, Speranze, 116–22. See Fubini Leuzzi, ‘Introduzione’, 38–40. 222 Gioberti, Delle condizioni presenti, 52–3. Perceptive remarks on the French influence are in Francesco De Sanctis, ‘L’Italia e Murat’ (1855), in dso, xv, 54–64 at 60–2: before 1848, ‘the memory of having been subject to their rule was humiliating … Since a confused instinct told us that we could not make Italy if we did not make Italians first, the French influence was the greatest danger … Our lives have been a constant attempt to de-Frenchify us, as Manzoni, Leopardi, Giusti, Botta, d’Azeglio, Balbo, Gioberti, the poets, the writers, the philosophers, and the historians have shown with one accord’.

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Concluding Remarks

A moral posture emphasising virtue and rational self-possession, often with a Stoic inflection, combined with a moderate and anti-revolutionary political stance. A denunciation of passions, pessimism apropos the possibility of happiness, and a quest for inner peace through the practise of private and public morality characterised the Risorgimento moderates’ spiritual world. The Stoic tenet that freedom lay in morality had great consolatory potential to them, especially in conjunction with the cultural identity, countering demoralization and shame, provided by Catholicism. That identity had the advantage of being universally recognisable and at the same time peculiarly Italian, granted the special place of Catholicism in the history and culture of the peninsula. The moderate sensibility reacted against both Rousseau’s ‘sentimentalism’, culminating with the Revolution, and the dispiriting opinion that the Italian character was unsuitable for liberty, and in particular for a policy of gradual reforms.223 The Aufklärer had stressed the civil role and responsibility of Christian ­philosophers – they should be characterised, in Muratori’s words, by ‘a love of the true, the honest, the just, and of moderation’.224 In taking up that tradition, the moderates of the 1840s emphasised that no alleged historical ­necessity, no reason of state could justify a breach of the code of individual morality, which in fact did not differ from that of public life. The policy of virtue, it was contended, is always the best both for individuals and peoples – the end does not justify the means, even in the land of Machiavelli. D’Azeglio had some revealing pages on the corruption of Italian mores induced by rulers’ blind self-interest, dissimulation, immorality, and indifference to principles.225 Manzoni characteristically wrote that, for public figures, ‘a whole life of good deeds is not enough to compensate for a single act of violence’.226 Catholicism provided the moderates with a moral style of politics, meant to be radically alternative to that that had prevailed on the peninsula over the centuries, and which had come to connote Italians to the eyes of foreigners. The moderates relativised, and sanitised, the demands of politics on the individual by 223 Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 154–210. 224 Muratori to Artico di Porcia, 2150; see also 2144–5, 2149–54. 225 Massimo d’Azeglio, Proposta d’un programma per l’opinione nazionale italiana (1847), in data, i, 260–314 at 286–96. 226 Manzoni, Sulla morale, 327–8; also id., ‘Dell’invenzione’, 747–9. See Langella, Amor di patria, 21–3; Bori, ‘ “Star basso” ’. Pellico argued along the same lines in Dei doveri, 37.

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placing them alongside those of religion. Adherence to Christian values lends dignity and elevation to their model of politics – qualities which would resurface only rarely in the following decades, characterised by acrimonious conflicts between government and opposition parties, and by not a few instances of cunning and duplicity in statecraft.

chapter 2

Grand Vision, Minor Demands: The Themes and Sources of 1840s Moderatism This chapter addresses the political moderatism of the 1840s. Yet, the chapter begins with an account of Romagnosi’s constitutional project (1815), in order to indicate that, in principle, monarchical patriotism might have organised around an alternative cultural perspective, feeding on the ways of thinking of the Enlightenment. Sections 2 and 3 deal with Gioberti’s, Balbo’s, and d’Azeglio’s thought, focusing on their peculiar blend of cautious reformism and grand philosophical vision, as well as on their suspicion of parties and pluralism. In Section 4, their liberal credentials are compared with those of Constant, Guizot, Cattaneo, and other Italians. Section 5 reviews the three moderates’ interpretation of the republican communes of the Middle Ages. The chapter next examines how moderatism evolved over the 1840s; basically, it became less prudent and more confrontational as the broad consensus following the publication of Gioberti’s Primato and the election of Pius ix broke down. The chapter concludes with two sections exploring the sources of political moderatism, highlighting Chateaubriand in Section 7, and the ultramontane authors in Section 8.

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Liberty is a right that is exclusive to truth. antonio rosmini1

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A Catholic priest wanders along as if the sky belonged to him; instead, a Protestant pastor goes about as if he had leased it. heinrich heine2

∵ 1 ‘La libertà non è che un diritto esclusivo della verità’: Antonio Rosmini, Delle cinque piaghe della Santa Chiesa, ed. Clemente Riva (written 1832–33, published 1848; Brescia, 1971), 164. 2 Heine, Reisebilder, 168. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004360914_004

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The Road Not Taken: Romagnosi’s Constitution

In the same year that the territorial settlement of Italy was determined by the European powers meeting in Vienna, an anonymous treatise entitled Della ­costituzione di una monarchia nazionale rappresentativa was published in ­Lugano, Switzerland. The book, presupposing the partial unification of the ­peninsula brought about by Napoleonic rule, put forward a constitution scheme for Italy. Its author was the famed jurist and philosopher Gian D ­ omenico ­Romagnosi (1761–1835), who had held major positions in the a­ dministrative and educational systems of the French-backed kingdom of ­Italy.3 This work represents a missed opportunity, for it might have passed some essential themes of eighteenth-century political culture on to the R ­ isorgimento writers of a monarchical and temperate persuasion, but they ignored Romagnosi’s contribution and the advocacy of a constitution with it.4 Not only were the moderates suspicious of the Enlightenment, but they a­ ctively denounced it from various angles. As has been shown in the previous chapter, Rosmini’s series of attacks on its legacy began as soon as the dust of real battles settled. Expounding Romagnosi’s approach is a necessary preliminary to a thorough appreciation of moderatism – it is important, in fact, not to give the impression that there was only one paradigm around which could suit monarchical patriotism. Romagnosi claimed to adhere to the analytical methods of Galilei, Newton, Bacon, Locke, and Charles Bonnet. Like Montesquieu or Tracy, Romagnosi aimed to discover ‘the nature of things’, an expression implying that the 3 Romagnosi, who was born in Salsomaggiore near Parma, was professor of law at Parma, ­Pavia, and Milan during the Napoleonic regime. With the return of the Austrians he lost his university position in Milan; in 1821 he was tried for treason, but was acquitted. He began writing on political economy in the Milanese review Annali universali di statistica in 1827. He was revered as a master all over Italy in the 1820s and 1830s, chiefly by virtue of the comprehensive theory of civilization (incivilimento) he formulated after 1815. Cattaneo was among his pupils. On Romagnosi’s early years, see Robertino Ghiringhelli, Idee, società ed istituzioni nel Ducato di Parma e Piacenza durante l’età illuministica (Milan, 1988); for an introduction to his thought, see Robertino Ghiringhelli and Franco Invernici (eds.), Per conoscere Romagnosi (Milan, 1982). 4 The circulation of Romagnosi’s constitutional treatise was limited, also because the copies that the Lombardo-Venetian authorities managed to find were seized in 1817. While Part i of the work (‘Teoria generale’) was published in 1815, Part ii (‘Teoria speciale’) appeared in Turin as late as 1848; see Federico Patetta, ‘Introduzione’, in Gian Domenico Romagnosi, Della costituzione di una monarchia nazionale rappresentativa, ed. Guido Astuti (Rome, 1937), vol. i, pp. v–cxxxii. In this edition, Part ii begins at i, 197. On the book, see Fulco Lanchester, ­‘Romagnosi costituzionalista’, Giornale di storia costituzionale, 23 (2012), 77–97.

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development of society and politics followed laws not unlike those ruling the natural world, namely objective and independent of human actions and will. However, Romagnosi also endorsed Bentham’s utilitarianism. The basic problem a constitution should address, he argued, is the ‘fallible’ and ‘covetous’ nature of ‘men’, all too often resulting in politicians’ and administrators’ unremitting pursuit of their own private interests. The constitution should therefore rest on ‘a real antagonism of powers and interests’, disciplining the ‘passions’ for wealth, power, and public appreciation.5 He rejected nevertheless the division of powers, so that only the monarch and his/her ministers had the power to introduce bills. Bearing a close resemblance to the senate of the Napoleonic kingdom of Italy, Romagnosi’s parliament was composed of representatives of landownership, commerce, the army, and science.6 Its chief function was to oversee the government, in collaboration with ‘people’s advocates’ active in each local community. The parliament was also tasked with appointing the members of a senate called to judge controversial issues, like those that could arise between government and parliament concerning taxation. Since the judiciary could be unequal to the mission of protecting individual rights – judges could be biased and jurors passionate – political institutions should monitor its workings with the help of brave lawyers embodying public opinion. Publicity in the operations of the government and the assemblies as well as freedom of expression were necessary elements of Romagnosi’s political system.7 Romagnosi’s view of passions was influenced by philosophes like Helvétius and Gaetano Filangieri. To him, passions were ‘the single spurs of humanity’. The energy of great statesmen is indispensable to a people, he contended, especially at a time when commercial society engenders dependence and obedience. Leadership feeds on an ambition for self-aggrandisement, and this ambition becomes wrong only if associated with dishonest means or put before duty. Romagnosi argued therefore for ‘a moderate excitement of passions’ as

5 Romagnosi, Della costituzione, i, 23. See Salvatorelli, Il pensiero politico, 158–60. For Bentham on how to check abuses of power, see the work that Romagnosi probably drew from: Jeremy Bentham, Traités de législation civile et pénale, ed. Étienne Dumont (Paris, 1802), iii, 159–90. 6 In the kingdom of Italy, representation consisted in a consultant senate appointed by ­Napoleon, who chose from candidates designated by three distinct electoral colleges, respectively composed of landowners, learned professionals, and traders; see Luca Mannori, Uno stato per Romagnosi (Milan, 1984), i, 495–573. It has been argued that, in Italy throughout the nineteenth century, the ‘liberals’ viewed suffrage as a function of the social elite, rather than as a right of individuals; see Raffaele Romanelli, Importare la democrazia: Sulla costituzione liberale italiana (Soveria Mannelli, 2009), 149–60. 7 Romagnosi, Della costituzione, i, 62–82.

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a permanent state of society. Basically, he feared the growing uniformity and the repression of exceptional personalities that civilization induced. States can collapse because of an excess of social discipline, he maintained.8 Yet, ‘checking a passion through another’ by means of a complicated institutional structure was not sufficient to generate good government. Romagnosi stressed that ministers, civil servants, and deputies should know the nation’s ‘true interests’ arising from natural laws.9 This is why the learned, i dotti, were so important in his plan, and why he insisted on opinion as the most effective of powers. The social goal being ‘maximum utility’, he argued, no proper opposition to useful reforms can exist unless deriving from ignorance of the ends and means which are dictated by nature; hence ‘true liberty’ results from an enlightened opinion. This consisted of ‘knowledge’ in the ruling classes and ‘sentiment’ in the people. He devised two agencies – a centralized ‘state board’ (consulta di stato) and a series of decentralized ‘political institutes’ – aimed at conserving and developing ‘political doctrines’.10 Faithful to the example set by Napoleon, Romagnosi viewed religion as instrumentum regni, meaning that priests were requested to spread the simple ideas needed to secure the masses’ ‘reasonable obedience’.11 In short, the necessity to dévoiler la nature des choses led to a central role of philosophers in the political system, following in the footsteps of Idéologues like Condorcet and Tracy.12 Romagnosi’s constitution hardly meets the standards of today liberalism. In his project all classes but the wage earners participated in public life (including leaseholders, who had a voice in local affairs, and artisans, who helped 8

Ibid., i, 139–42. See Helvétius, De l’esprit, iv, 152–3: ‘The virtuous man is not he who sacrifices his pleasures, habits, and strongest passions to the public interest, for it is impossible that such a man can exist; but it is he whose strongest passion is so conformable to the general interest, that he is almost constantly necessitated to be virtuous’. See also Paul-Henry T. d’Holbach, Systême de la nature (1770; Geneva, 1973), i, 147; id., La politique naturelle (1773; Hildesheim, 1971), i, 173–4. As for Filangieri, he dealt at some length with the passions in La scienza della legislazione, ed. Antonio Trampus et al. (1780–91; Mariano del Friuli, 2003–4), vol. v, bk. iv, Part ii, pp. 268–336. Relying on Rousseau, Beccaria, and Helvétius, Filangieri deemed them not only unavoidable but also very useful to the polity, on condition that the government encouraged the citizenry’s love of country and glory. 9 Romagnosi, Della costituzione, i, 32. 10 Ibid., i, 124–9, 132. 11 Ibid., esp. i, 156, 171–8. 12 On the influence of the French Idéologues in Italy, see Sergio Moravia, ‘Vichismo e idéologie nella cultura italiana del primo Ottocento’, in Sergio Moravia et al., Omaggio a Vico (Naples, 1974), 419–82. For a concise treatment of Idéologue political thought, and of Tracy’s in particular, see Martin Staum, ‘Individual Rights and Social Control: Political Science in the French Institute’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 48 (1987), 411–30.

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managing a public institute for insurance against work accidents), but chiefly as a way to identify the right opinions and mores rather than as a way to form the political will.13 The sovereign ruled with the aid of ministers of his/her choice; as large assemblies were allegedly always conflict-ridden, they were unfit to decide on state affairs; elections, which occurred on a corporate basis, were clearly a minor affair; and all political ‘associations’, and even collective petitions, were forbidden.14 Romagnosi’s goal was a ‘moderate’ (but not a mixed) government, with moderation stemming from a balancing of social and economic interests in the light of a ‘superior will that is external to parts’.15 The ‘love of liberty’ characterizing the ancient republics is not essential to the modern constitutional polity, he argued, for its place has been taken by knowledge of the necessary course of civilization (incivilimento).16 It is worth stressing, however, that the interests the government had the task of mediating were genuinely conflicting, and that progress occurred through their clash, as Romagnosi pointed out in this Della costituzione and in greater detail in subsequent writings. There were three major interests – culture, wealth, and the army – and each of them not only regularly attempted to gain dominance over the other two but was split between a progressive and a reactionary tendency.17 Thus, a peculiar form of pluralism went with a belief in deterministic laws of development. Historians have stressed Romagnosi’s outmoded perspective, arguably closer to the experience of enlightened absolutism or Napoleonism than to the logic of representative government (and in effect he disparaged the July monarchy, for example).18 Yet there was an element in Della costituzione that was pivotal and came straight from the Revolution. Sovereignty belonged to ‘the nation’, which gave the monarch the commission to rule. This entailed, 13 Romagnosi, Della costituzione, i, 189–94. 14 On assemblies, see ibid., i, 364–7. The election of landowners was symptomatic, for each municipality elected a representative, but those who would actually win a seat would be annually chosen from the elected through the drawing of lots (i, 52–8). In the posthumous treatise Istituzioni di civile filosofia (Florence, 1839), Romagnosi relinquished corporate representation in favour of individual representation, and attached great importance to local communities (the comuni) as links between administrative power and society; see Mannori, Uno stato, i, 585–639; Francesca Sofia, ‘In margine al diritto pubblico di Roma­ gnosi’, Clio, 23 (1987), 481–2. 15 Romagnosi, Della costituzione, i, 235–6. 16 Ibid., i, 209–12. 17 Ibid., i, 235, 260–2, 330–1, 340–1; Gian Domenico Romagnosi, Dell’indole e dei fattori dell’incivilimento con esempio del suo risorgimento in Italia (1832; Florence, 1834), 99. 18 Salvatorelli, Il pensiero politico, 158–60; Mannori, Uno stato, i, 410–11, 554.

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first, that any substantial change in the constitution could be decided only by ‘estates-general’ composed of deputies elected by all households heads; and, second, that the nation had the right of armed resistance to governments attempting to infringe the constitution. Resistance, Romagnosi argued, is to be viewed as an exceptional occurrence, but it is also the necessary foundation of all institutions intended to check corruption and misrule.19 People should be taught to fight and a national guard, taking orders from the senate, should be created with landowners as officers. It would effectively counter the government’s standing army.20 Like Filangieri, Condorcet, Sieyès, or the Jean-Baptiste Say of De l’Angleterre et des Anglais (1815), Romagnosi was highly critical of the English constitution.21 To him it was a political system rife with corruption, and dominated by a rapacious aristocracy that was still feudal in character and was aggressively pursuing power externally; incoherently, a few ‘modern’ parts had been grafted on to its basically medieval structure.22 In later years, writing in the Annali universali di statistica, Romagnosi confirmed this judgement, adding a denunciation of Britain’s appalling social injustices, high tariffs, and ‘monopolies’. In Italy before 1846 opinions concerning the political and economic condition of Britain tended to be critical (in agreement with French views), but the repeal of the Corn Laws converted many. Richard C ­ obden’s triumphal tour of the peninsula in 1847 revealed that Italian opinion in general, and the moderate patriots in particular, were warmly embracing both free trade and Anglophilia. Britain’s social peace in 1848, contrasting with the socialist revolution in France, reinforced the new attitude.23 19 Romagnosi, Della costituzione, i, 151–6; ii, 789–92, 798–9 ff. 20 Ibid., i, 117–22, 183–9, 330–1. 21 For Filangieri, see La scienza della legislazione, vol. i, bk. i, Ch. 11, pp. 104–22. Filangieri, sensitive to republican stances, criticised Britain’s mixed government. On the French writers, see David Williams, ‘French Opinion concerning the English Constitution in the Eighteenth Century’, Economica, 10 (1930), 295–308; Richard Whatmore, Republicanism and the French Revolution: An Intellectual History of Jean-Baptiste Say’s Political Economy (Oxford, 2000). Melchiorre Gioja, too, denounced the English constitution. 22 Romagnosi, Della costituzione, i, 181–2, 258–60; ii, 533–5. See Patetta, ‘Introduzione’, pp. xxxvii–xlviii. 23 See Roberto Romani, ‘Political Economy and Other Idioms: French Views on English Development, 1815–1848’, European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 9 (2002), 359–83; id., ‘Gli economisti risorgimentali di fronte allo sviluppo inglese, 1815–48’, Il ­pensiero economico italiano, 10 (2002), 43–73; id., ‘The Cobdenian Moment in the Italian Risorgimento’, in Anthony Howe and Simon Morgan (eds.), Rethinking ­Nineteenth-Century

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Contemporaries took little notice of Romagnosi’s constitutional framework. With political discussion banned in all regional states, in the 1820s and 1830s the nationalistic and liberal aspirations found indirect forms of expression, as mentioned in the Introduction. The word ‘constitution’ disappeared from sight in Italy (but outside of it many exiles engaged in constitutional debates), only to resurface during the revolutionary attempts of 1820–1 and 1831.24 But even in the more auspicious circumstances of the 1840s and 1850s Della costituzione was hardly referred to, possibly because it was irritatingly detailed, but esp­ ecially – it is a fair guess – because the moderate patriots’ demands came to be expressed in a politico-religious idiom that was radically different from Romagnosi’s, who was the heir to eighteenth-century sensism and rationalism. Yet an essential feature of this treatise would characterize most of Risorgimento thought, be it moderate, Mazzinian, or socialist: the central role of intellectuals, called to guide Italy along the path of civilization.25 Before leaving Romagnosi, his unique status in Italian culture after 1815 is worth pointing out. Regarded as an inspirational figure by Cattaneo, F­ errari, and the other writers of the Annali, his prestige as a leading philosopher and economist was outstanding all over the peninsula, reaching a peak in the 1830s.26 Qua economist, he recommended free trade and denounced British industrialization in dozens of articles appearing in the Annali between 1827 and 1835. To him, Britain’s extreme economic inequalities demonstrated the dominance of the aristocracy, which hindered what ‘a universal law’ dictated, namely, that in society opposing forces eventually reached a fair level of equilibrium.27 Qua philosopher, he defended the empiricist tradition against Kant’s ‘abstractions’, but his reputation rested above all on the comprehensive theory

24

25 26 27

Liberalism: Richard Cobden Bicentenary Essays (Aldershot, uk, 2006), 117–40. For a different interpretation, asserting the Italians’ fascination with the ‘British model’ of constitution after 1815, see Carlo Ghisalberti, ‘Il sistema costituzionale inglese nel pensiero politico risorgimentale’, Rassegna storica del Risorgimento, 66 (1979), 25–37. In the 1820s and 1830s the émigrés discussed the adaptation of foreign models to the conditions of Italian society. Foscolo, Pellegrino Rossi, Giuseppe Pecchio, Guglielmo Paladini, GianBattista Marochetti, and Francesco Salfi figured prominently in those debates; see Isabella, Risorgimento in exile, esp. 137–46. For a reference to Romagnosi’s treatise by a moderate, see Anonimo lombardo [Luigi Torelli], Pensieri sull’Italia (Paris, 1846), 18 n. On the Annali see Sergio La Salvia, Giornalismo lombardo: Gli ‘Annali Universali di Statistica’ (1824–1844) (Rome, 1977). Gian Domenico Romagnosi, Collezione degli articoli di economia politica e statistica civile (Prato, 1839). See Romani, ‘Gli economisti risorgimentali’.

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of incivilimento he formulated in 1829–32.28 Incivilimento referred to economic, political, and moral progress as a whole; it followed definite laws, and its main factors were agriculture, economic competition, religion, government, and the learned’s ‘opinion’. Although religions had helped shape civilization, a supernatural Providence played no role in Romagnosi’s philosophical history – religious beliefs suit the masses, he averred, but not ‘the reasoning classes’.29 Romagnosi, who harshly criticised Vico for relying on ‘fables’ and postulating similar historical cycles, appeared to many contemporaries to have successfully updated Vico’s ‘ideal eternal history’.30 Romagnosi’s treatment fully justified the patriots’ ambition to gain a higher status among European peoples, for he showed, from a ‘scientific’ standpoint, that civilization had flourished in Italy for centuries after the fall of Rome, although discontinuously. 2

The Moderatism of the 1840s: Introduction

Tommaseo’s Dell’Italia (1835) set a momentous precedent as far as the political use of Catholicism was concerned. Written and published in Paris, the book was introduced into Italy under a false title – Opuscoli di frate Girolamo Savonarola – to trick the censors. Savonarola was chosen, Tommaseo would write in 1867, for the Dominican friar too had aimed to blend religion with liberty.31 Not all ideas contained in the book were moderate, for Tommaseo was one of a kind: he had republican sympathies, and the well-being of the lower classes was a major concern of his.32 Yet, this intimate friend of Manzoni, Rosmini, and 28

See in particular Gian Domenico Romagnosi, ‘Esposizione istorico-critica del kantismo e delle consecutive dottrine’ (1828–9), in id., Opuscoli filosofici, ed. Renato Fondi ­(Lanciano, 1919), 65–125. See Sergio Moravia, ‘Introduzione: Dall’Emilia alla Lombardia’, in Gian ­Domenico Romagnosi, Scritti filosofici (Milan, 1974), i, 7–52. 29 Romagnosi, Dell’indole; id., Vedute eminenti per amministrare l’economia dell’incivilimento (1834), in id., Scritti filosofici, ii, 345–77 at 372–3. 30 Gian Domenico Romagnosi, ‘Osservazioni sulla Scienza Nuova di Vico’ (1821), in id., Opuscoli filosofici, 23–42. Since the early years of the nineteenth century the praises of Vico had been often sung by Italian intellectuals, keen on reminding their compatriots of past glories; see Maria Ada Benedetto, Vico in Piemonte (Turin, 1952); Francesco Brancato, Vico nel Risorgimento (Palermo, 1969); Moravia, ‘Vichismo’. 31 Niccolò Tommaseo, ‘Girolamo Savonarola’, in id., Dizionario estetico (1840; 2nd ed., Florence, 1867), cols. 904–40 at col. 904. 32 On Tommaseo’s book, see Gentile, Gino Capponi, 178–212; on his social thought, see ­Marina Versace, ‘Aspetti del pensiero sociale di Tommaseo nel libro secondo di Dell’Italia’, in Francesco Bruni (ed.), Niccolò Tommaseo: Popolo e nazioni (Rome, 2004), i, 157–75.

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­Capponi prefigured 1840s moderatism by explaining at length why Catholicism should permeate the Italian ‘revolution’. To Tommaseo, Italy needed first of all a moral reform, civic education, and common principles, all of which were unthinkable outside of Catholicism. In both the past and the present, he claimed, everything great happening on the peninsula has been due to religion.33 Liberalism on the British and French examples is inadequate, he continued, as constitutions have failed to deliver justice and check greed; the reason is that rights cannot be divorced from Christian duties.34 Tommaseo recommended a ‘complete transformation’ through a process of education in the truths of the Gospels, a process which was feasible since the people, and the peasants in particular, were sincere believers seeking guidance from their priests. The Christian nature of the national emancipation would guarantee against ‘rash innovations’. A mass movement fighting in the open, rather than a few men plotting coups, should be the agent of change.35 Three years later, Gioberti published Teorica del sovranaturale (1838), the work in which he planted the seeds of his politico-philosophical vision. The moderate movement had its inception in 1843, when Gioberti published Del primato morale e civile degli italiani, enjoying astonishing success. He espoused the myth of Italy’s primacy, resulting from the civilizing role that papal Rome had played over the centuries. To achieve the national resurgence, Gioberti advocated an Italian federation headed by the pope, with the established ruling houses converted to the cause of civil reform. It seemed that the impasse in which Italian history had been for centuries could suddenly be resolved by implementing Gioberti’s plan. Delle speranze d’Italia (1844) and Sommario della storia d’Italia (1846) by Balbo, as well as Degli ultimi casi di R ­ omagna (1846) and Proposta d’un programma per l’opinione nazionale italiana (1847) by d’Azeglio developed Gioberti’s programme and equally won instant acclaim. These books were nevertheless different in content and approach. Balbo’s and d’Azeglio’s works were more concrete and practical than Gioberti’s visionary essay. The Primato was all-encompassing, mixing politics up with religion, philosophy, history, and even odd racial arguments. Balbo’s Speranze was a geo-political treatise centred on the civilizing mission of Christianity (and not wanting a substantial dose of daydreaming), while his Sommario was a history of Italy since pre-Roman times brimming with patriotism. D’Azeglio’s 33 Tommaseo, Dell’Italia, i, 66, 164; ii, 32. 34 Ibid., i, 5, 8–9, 169–73, 239–41. See Ettore Passerin d’Entrèves, ‘Ideologie del Risorgimento’, in Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Sapegno (eds.), Storia della letteratura italiana (Milan, 1965–9), vii, 317–24. 35 Tommaseo, Dell’Italia, i, 70–1, 86–9, 91; ii, 212.

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Ultimi casi poignantly depicted political and economic oppression in the Papal States, and his Proposta was a pamphlet listing the moderates’ requests to the Italian princes. Add that Gioberti was a philosopher – ever tackling nothing less than the fate of civilization – while Balbo was chiefly a historian – striving to substantiate the moderate platform in the years before 1848 – and d’Azeglio was an essayist, a novelist, and a painter – his theoretical apparatus seems somewhat improvised in comparison with those of the other two. A moderate network encompassing the whole peninsula was quickly set up. The neo-Guelph programme raised great enthusiasm even in the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, where the cultures of the Enlightenment had remained strong among the secular intelligentsia and Rosmini’s influence was limited among the clergy.36 In 1846–7, governments bent to the pressure of a public opinion mesmerised by the election of Pius ix. Most remarkably, an extensive amnesty to political exiles and prisoners was granted in the Papal States in July, 1846, and, in 1847, an advisory council composed by laymen (Consulta di stato) and a civic guard were established; censorship was relaxed in Florence and Rome in the spring of 1847; and in the autumn several administrative reforms were conceded in the kingdom of Sardinia, including some easing of censorship. The reform movement displayed remarkable concord; real political distinctions and alternative platforms did not emerge before 1848. The movement rested on a series of propositions which Balbo had already formulated in the early 1820s. First, a monarch’s refusal to concede a ‘moderate liberty’ had the effect of invigorating the extremes of right and left. Second, reforms were not a matter of negotiation but the ‘gift’ of the monarch to the people. Third, the coups orchestrated by secret societies, which were ‘naturally democratic’, led to ‘plebeian tyranny’. And fourth, what was needed in Italy was not a revolution but ‘improvements’ respectful of the established dynasties and of property, and aimed at cementing the concord between the sovereign, the aristocracy, and the people.37 In short, the moderates meant to control and circumscribe the process of liberalization that had begun in 1789 – to adopt Chateaubriand’s effective phrase, they wondered how ‘to eradicate [extirper] the Revolution’ from the course of national emancipation.38 Moderatism was innovative in two respects. First, it was public, thus breaking for the first time the monopoly over patriotic action held by secret societies from 36

37 38

See e.g. Rosario Romeo, Il Risorgimento in Sicilia (1950; Bari, 1982), 256–316; Oldrini, La cultura filosofica, esp. 256–62; Fulvio De Giorgi, ‘La questione del Mezzogiorno: Società e potere’, in Melloni, Cristiani d’Italia, 551–62. Balbo, ‘Memorie sulla rivoluzione’. François-René de Chateaubriand, De la monarchie selon la Charte (Paris, 1816), 89.

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1815 until then. Not all those societies had republican or democratic goals, but certainly many had, and their very nature excluded full and positive cognizance of their aims. Second, Gioberti’s plan seemed feasible with a minimum of dislocation – the existing dynasties and the pope were not threatened and neither war nor foreign intervention was needed – and in fact the pressure of public opinion proved sufficient for rulers to concede reforms once Mastai Ferretti became pope.39 Arguably, a chief reason for moderatism’s success did not lie in its political core as such. Moderatism was a fuzzy, situated, and unsystematic body of thought, blending religious, philosophical, historical, and economic themes. A timid advocacy of negative liberties coexisted with emotional issues and powerful myths – like the pre-eminence of Italian civilization, or Pius ix as a portent of Providential design – meant to convince Italians to join the national struggle. The moderates appealed to pride in all things Italian and a sense of justice, but, basically, moderatism worked for it resonated with deep-rooted opinions and feelings associated with Catholicism. More precisely, the moderate writers attempted to make Catholicism Italian by combining the cultural traditions of the elite – whose identity fed on the wonders of Italian civilization from ancient Rome to the Renaissance – with that of the population at large, Catholicism.40 In Gioberti’s words, to Italians Catholicism was ‘a mother’ linking their past to their future and the nation to be to mankind.41 And, as Catholicism was a conservative force par excellence, its alliance with moderate patriotism assured the privileged classes that no traumatic break was on the cards. Yet moderatism contained a radical vein, inasmuch as it put forward a grand vision, calling for a profound transformation of European civilization in accordance with Catholicism. Gioberti waxed eloquent on Italians’ religious and cultural pre-eminence, Italy being the moving force in the forthcoming moral regeneration of Europe as a whole.42 Balbo devised an implausible ‘Christian civilization’, meaning that the progress of European peoples was shaped by divine will, which, in particular, prescribed the expansion of Christendom; this vision entailed the feasibility of inorientamento, namely that Austria could be persuaded to accept losses in Italy in return for a strengthening of its position

39 Clark, The Italian Risorgimento, 46–8. 40 Mascilli Migliorini, ‘Problema nazionale’, 617–18. 41 Gioberti, Lettre, 90. 42 Gioberti, Del primato; see Bruce Haddock, ‘Political Union without Social Revolution: Vincenzo Gioberti’s Primato’, Historical Journal, 41 (1998), 705–23.

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in the Balkans.43 In his Proposta, d’Azeglio made the impending emancipation of Italy the manifestation of a new, ‘evangelical’ political morality based on justice and compassion. The view that the Risorgimento was in accordance with Providential design was agreed on by all moderates, this being the most effective and resilient of moderate myths. Whether the moderatism of the 1840s belonged to the family of European liberalisms is debatable, however loose a definition of liberalism is adopted. Whiggism à la Burke and juste milieu à la Guizot certainly inspired the moderates, who were motivated by a distinct will to steer the regional states of Italy in the direction taken by post-revolutionary Europe. Yet, the highly idiosyncratic features of their thought are apparent. Liberal arguments of French and British origin did not set the tone of their vision, which was informed by religion; key components of liberalism as is usually understood, like a constitution, were not subscribed to; and the moderates disparaged the individualistic and rationalistic traditions of thought underpinning it. Abstract, theoretical political thinking was rare and unsystematic in the moderate camp, meaning that moderatism did not find expression in fully-fledged treatises analysing free government before the 1850s.44 Although Balbo and Gioberti had endorsed representative government in previous writings, consultative assemblies only were demanded in the 1840s.45 The failure to call for constitutional monarchies when France and Belgium had long established their own speaks volumes about the moderates’ cautious attitude. The text detailing their requests, d’Azeglio’s Proposta, focused on administrative uniformity, economic liberalization, and reforms fostering the rule of law, making no mention of constitutional arrangements (yet d’Azeglio hinted at a Europe-wide trend towards ‘a representative system’).46 A negative 43 Balbo, Speranze. 44 See Ghisalberti, ‘Lo statuto albertino’; Romanelli, ‘Nazione e costituzione’; Mannori, ‘Il dibattito istituzionale’. 45 Balbo advocated a government on the English model in unpublished manuscripts dating back to the 1820s; see Passerin d’Entrèves, La giovinezza di Cesare Balbo, esp. 212–59; Francesco Traniello, ‘Politica e storia nella formazione di Cesare Balbo’, in Gabriele De Rosa and Francesco Traniello (eds.), Cesare Balbo alle origini del cattolicesimo liberale (Bari, 1996), 13–60. For Gioberti, see Introduzione, iii, 58–9, 119–23. 46 D’Azeglio, Proposta, 299–300, 304–5. See Raffaele Ciasca, L’origine del ‘Programma per l’opinione nazionale italiana’ del 1847–’48 (Milan, 1916). Another major exponent of moderatism, the Florentine Capponi, likewise did not call for a representative constitution; see Gino Capponi, ‘Lettera sulla costituzione di Pietro Leopoldo, scritta nel 1847’ (ms.), in id., Scritti, ii, 415–21. See Thomas Kroll, ‘Gino Capponi nel 1830: Progresso civile e autoamministrazione locale’, in Paolo Bagnoli, ed., Gino Capponi: Storia e progresso nell’Italia

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judgment on Italians’ ability to operate free institutions with the necessary prudence informed the moderate programme; Gioberti, Balbo and d’Azeglio agreed that Italians were not prepared for ‘political liberty’ but only for ‘civil liberty’. Balbo had probably Montesquieu in mind when he wrote that the form of government always depended on the peculiar circumstances of each country; d’Azeglio, a critic of Italian character, insisted on the necessary correspondence between reforms and the ‘moral’ condition of the people; and Gioberti claimed in 1848 that the political prudence of the Primato had been justified by Italians’ faint-heartedness.47 The moderates condemned demonstrations but placed a great deal of faith in public opinion, possibly in the belief that a free press would lead to representative government in due course. Perhaps they had in mind the campaign of 1827 against the re-introduction of censorship in France, when Chateaubriand had stated that, to a people new to representative government, freedom of the press was what the entire charter amounted to; and Royer-Collard had pointed to free expression as the single ‘political institution’ which could protect society from the encroachments of government.48 To Balbo, public opinion had the potential to reconcile not only the princes with their peoples but also the regional identities with the national one. D’Azeglio believed that the dissemination of moderate ideas would succeed in winning the support of the major social ‘interests’ as well as that of the princes. To Gioberti, too, public opinion was all-important; it should be orchestrated by the governments, the clergy, and an intellectual class made ‘homogeneous’ by adherence to the Catholic world-view.49 The moderates were fully aware of the power of the written word, inasmuch as their very existence as a group rested on it. dell’Ottocento (Florence, 1994), 243–62. The aristocrat Capponi (1792–1876) helped found, and wrote extensively in, two major Florentine reviews, Antologia (1821–33) and Archivio storico italiano (1842-). He had a short tenure as prime minister in Tuscany in 1848. As a historian his reputation rests chiefly on Storia della Repubblica di Firenze (Florence, 1875). See Piero Treves and Carlo Pazzagli, ‘Capponi, Gino’, dbi, xix, 1976. 47 Balbo, Speranze, 256; d’Azeglio, Proposta, 275; Gioberti, Delle condizioni presenti, 32–3. For d’Azeglio on Italians’ poor ‘moral sense’, see Proposta, 286–98. 48 François-René de Chateaubriand, Du rétablissement de la censure par l’ordonnance du 24 juin, 1827 (Paris, 1827), 42; Royer-Collard’s 1827 speech is in Prosper de Barante (ed.), La vie politique de M. Royer Collard (Paris, 1861), ii, 129–38 at 133. 49 For Balbo, see Mauro Ceretti, ‘Per una rivisitazione critica di Cesare Balbo’, Rassegna storica del Risorgimento, 94 (2007), 513–19; for d’Azeglio, see Proposta, 274, and Domenico Maria Bruni, ‘Opinione pubblica e lotta politica nella riflessione di Massimo d’Azeglio a cavallo del 1848’, in Betri, Rileggere l’Ottocento, 111–27; for Gioberti, see Del primato, i, 123–9, 245–6; ii, 278–9, 294–308.

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It was essential that the regional states’ censorship boards did not prohibit their books, which could thus attract wide attention. According to Balbo, the toleration of Gioberti’s Primato in most states marked the beginning of a new phase, in which a reading public – a public opinion – could finally form.50 3

On Christian Civilization, Parties, and Pluralism

Gioberti, Balbo, and d’Azeglio agreed to make religion the philosophical, cultural, and emotional bedrock of the movement. The view that Christianity (meaning Catholicism for all practical purposes) was the permanent source of progress was a crucial tenet of theirs, entailing that civilization moved onwards insofar as the laws and precepts ordained by God were obeyed. This section documents how religion shaped the moderates’ political thought, beginning with their interpretation of civilization and focusing on parties and pluralism. To Gioberti, the regeneration of Italy was in order since Italy was the Catholic nation par excellence and Catholicism was the spring of civilization. ‘Any programme for Italian emancipation is nil unless it has Catholicism as its cornerstone’, he argued, for civilization consists in ‘the application of some theoretical and fundamental statements, which can be found in religion only’.51 Everything that was good came from Christianity: science, art and literature, social discipline, peaceful mores, political moderation, etc. Liberty too was a product of religion, with the qualification that Gioberti distinguished between the impious, individualistic, and unconstrained liberty resulting from Luther and Descartes and the prudent, ‘holy and Italian’ liberty represented by the Roman Church.52 In accordance with the Bible but in contrast to the philosophers postulating a savage stage, Balbo maintained that mores had been uncorrupted in the primeval age of humanity. This heavenly state gradually decayed, but the sacrifice of Jesus marked the beginning of progressive civilization. After the fall of the Roman empire, Europe only managed to avoid moral corruption and political 50

Ceretti, ‘Per una rivisitazione’, 519. See, on the Tuscan case, Chiavistelli, Dallo Stato alla nazione, 119–79. On censorship, see Domenico Maria Bruni (ed.), Potere e circolazione delle idee: Stampa, accademie e censura nel Risorgimento italiano (Milan, 2007); id., ‘Con regolata indifferenza, con attenzione costante’: Potere politico e parola stampata nel Granducato di Toscana (1814–47) (Milan, 2015). 51 Gioberti, Del primato, i, 18, 95. 52 Ibid., i, 37–9, 93–5; Gioberti, Lettre, 14–15. See Antonio Anzilotti, Gioberti (Florence, 1922), 37–9.

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absolutism by virtue of a morality of divine origin.53 With universal history amounting to ‘the contemplation of Providence’, Balbo pointed to the collapse of feudalism, the stimulus to work and enterprise, and the enlargement of civil liberties as the most significant hallmarks of God’s agency in recent times. The resurgence of Italy was consequently to be viewed in the context of the development of ‘Christian civilization’, which was not only expanding geographically but was becoming uniform as Protestants now felt that revelation, rather than rationalism, was Christianity’s proper foundation.54 Delle speranze d’Italia explained that Italian independence would be certainly achieved for it was ‘in the interest of Christianity’; Ireland and Poland demonstrated that ‘Christian nations cannot die’. As Balbo put it in December, 1847, ‘the Italian Risorgimento is certain, great, and holy … God wants it, God wants it; God gave it to us and we shall thwart those who want to spoil it’.55 In agreeing with the famous dictum that opinion is the real master of the world, d’Azeglio specified that in fact opinion was an expression of God’s will. He made the examples of the free trade movement in Britain and the potato blight in Ireland, the latter being a Providential occurrence whose impact on opinion was so strong that the English aristocracy was forced to relax its iron grip on the country. ‘God unleashes it [opinion] against iniquities as He likes’.56 Robert Peel’s advocacy of a ‘sober, well-considered and rational liberty’, differing sharply from demagogues’ aspirations to an ideal perfection, testified to the advance of ‘Christian civilization as a whole, which supports us and takes us forward with it’.57 All the political principles that Christian peoples should follow – justice, order, the primacy of right over might, and ‘true liberty’– are in the Gospels, he stated. Pius ix validates this fusion of religion and politics, for, contrary to some of his predecessors, he is not the man of a ‘party’ but the ‘man of God’. He is also God’s ‘gift’ to Italy, a sign that He forgives Italians for their sins after ‘four centuries of penance’. The loss of independence is Italians’ 53 Cesare Balbo, ‘Della civiltà in generale’, 100–11; id., Meditazioni, 9–25, 56–69. 54 Balbo, Speranze, 241–4, 248–52. Guizot, for one, had pointed to the moral revolution accomplished by Christianity, a revolution eventually undermining feudalism and culminating in the proclamation of civil equality in 1789; see François Guizot, Histoire de la civilisation en Europe depuis la chute de l’Empire Romain jusqu’a la Révolution Française (1828–30; Paris, 1856), 56–8 (lecture 2). 55 Balbo, Speranze, esp. 108–110, 114, 234–8 ff.; id., ‘Programma’, Il Risorgimento, 15 Dec. 1847, 1. For a similar outburst, see Cesare Balbo, Studii sulla guerra d’indipendenza di Spagna e Portogallo (written 1817–18; first published 1847; Turin, 1848), 205–6. 56 D’Azeglio, Degli ultimi casi, 72–4. 57 D’Azeglio, ‘Lettera al professor Francesco Orioli’, 154–8. The phrase on liberty is by Peel and is quoted by d’Azeglio.

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major fault reflecting a lasting corruption of ‘moral sense’, but the national character has recently improved, especially since the election of Pius ix.58 Political participation had to be peaceful and prudent. To Gioberti, revolutions were morally wrong – sovereign power was ‘inviolable’ – and always led to anarchy. Peace, happiness, and justice could not result from the violence and dislocation characterising revolutions, even if successful. Luckily, ‘democracy’ and all ‘tumultuous’ opinions were alien to Italians, as the ‘extreme doctrines’ originated in Britain and naturalised in France.59 To Balbo, revolutions belonged to previous, more backward phases of civilization; in 1846–7, he recommended avoiding demonstrations, which in his view were always directed by secret societies.60 D’Azeglio wrote Degli ultimi casi di Romagna to explain why the uprising in Rimini (September, 1845) had been a mistake per se, regardless of its failure to provoke the rebellion of other parts of the Papal States. Italian independence could not be the business of a violent minority but the outcome of national opinion, boosted by the citizenry’s improving ‘political education’.61 Balbo’s political agenda was distinctive. He argued forcefully that independence from Austria should be the paramount goal of the national movement, and that reform and liberty issues should be brought in only after its achievement. Discussing them at an initial stage, in fact, would cause divisions and discord and therefore impair the struggle for independence.62 This approach of Balbo’s, although somewhat extreme in the moderate camp itself, related to the conception of politics characterising moderatism: divides were thought to have destructive tendencies. In his view political ‘parts’ were legitimate only if informed by ‘moderation’ (rather than ‘exaggeration’); the moderates, like the juste-milieu liberals in France, should assign themselves the task of containing ‘extreme’ parties. The contemporary rapprochement in the name of Pius IX was a Providential deed.63 In endorsing representative government after 58

See the following works by d’Azeglio: ‘Della emancipazione’, 401–2, 406; ‘Lettera al signor N.N.’, 98; I lutti di Lombardia, 432–3; Proposta, 286–8, 310–13. 59 Gioberti, Del primato, i, 72–4, 201–4. 60 See e.g. Balbo, ‘Lettere politiche’, 359–65. 61 D’Azeglio, Degli ultimi casi, esp. 5–7, 89–93. 62 Balbo claimed to have been inspired by Spanish history. In his opinion, the Spaniards had always put national independence before liberty, and, when they reversed priorities in the final years of the war against Napoleon, they failed to achieve a lasting liberty and were lucky to preserve independence (Studii sulla guerra, 201). Balbo, who worked at the Piedmontese embassy in Madrid in 1816–19, discussed the military aspects of that war in a manuscript which he later published, with copious notes, as Studii sulla guerra. 63 Cesare Balbo, ‘Dell’uso delle parole’. See Traniello, ‘Politica e storia’, 50–1.

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1848–9, the Anglophile Balbo recommended two parliamentary parties representing ‘moderate’ views together with the repression by force of the extreme factions.64 D’Azeglio’s position was more drastic. He stated in 1846 that all differences among parties should disappear in favour of a single coalition advocating the tenets of moderate opinion, which to him was so widely accepted to warrant the label ‘Italian national opinion’.65 In 1849, when unanimity was out of the question, and despite the setting up of a representative system in the kingdom of Sardinia, d’Azeglio still argued that there was only one legitimate party, composed of honest and intelligent men ruling in the interest of all and in accordance with the constitution – apart from it there were only ‘sects’, ‘factions’, and ‘the despotism of minorities’.66 Gioberti posited a fundamental similarity between Catholicism and moderatism: both were predicated on a healthy distance from ‘factions’, typically upholding extreme stances.67 Still in April, 1848, he claimed that the Italian movement was supported by all but ‘barbarians’ and ‘sectarians’, for it was in tune with the course of civilization; no real ‘radical’ party existed in Italy, but only a few impatient individuals.68 In the early 1850s Gioberti warned against parties as they were of necessity ‘quarrelsome’, ‘intolerant’, ‘extreme’, and ‘self-concerned’.69 The moderates’ distrust of parties is to be put into context. All three writers failed to provide definitions of either party (or ‘part’) or faction (or ‘sect’). Seemingly, Gioberti and d’Azeglio did not distinguish between the two terms – and unsurprisingly so. For centuries in Western thought, parties had been viewed as equivalent to factions, and condemned accordingly, in the b­ elief that the goal of both was to impose a special interest on the polity.70 Burke only had managed to disentangle with relative neatness the two ­concepts, and Balbo’s appraisal probably owed much to his analysis. Whereas factions carry out ‘a mean and interested struggle for place and emolument’, 64 Balbo, Della monarchia, 299–301, 324–66. For an unreservedly favourable judgement of ‘legal [i.e. constitutional] parties’, see another posthumous work of his, Della politica, 504–6. 65 D’Azeglio, ‘Lettera al signor N.N.’, 121; id., Proposta, 262. 66 Massimo d’Azeglio, ‘Ai suoi elettori’ (1849), in data, ii, 109–60. D’Azeglio’s target was the short-lived ‘democratic’ government headed by Gioberti. 67 Gioberti, Introduzione, i, 28–30. 68 Gioberti, Delle condizioni presenti, 8–9, 34–5. 69 Gioberti, Del rinnovamento, i, 192. See Volpi, ‘Linguaggi simbolici’, 119–21. 70 Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Party Systems: A framework for Analysis (1976; Colchester, uk, 2005), 3–12; Mario A. Cattaneo, Il partito politico nel pensiero dell’Illuminismo e della Rivoluzione francese (Milan, 1964).

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Burke wrote, parliamentary parties pursue the national interest and are therefore an essential instrument of free government. Writing almost a century after the settlement of 1688–9, Burke presupposed a broad consensus on the constitution, meaning that party struggle was unlikely to be disruptive and that factions could be identified with the groups that were fighting over the spoils of government.71 However, Burke’s insights were fully grasped only many decades later. In particular, French political culture, which was the moderates’ chief source of inspiration, continued to denounce parties. In particular, French authors confirmed the long-standing idea that parties stemmed from passions and interests, and were therefore opposed to reason. Staël depicted the Jacobin Terror as the eruption of esprit de parti, which was an ideological frenzy, an uncompromising resolve to impose one’s own idea. To her, party spirit characterized both the aristocrats’ and the Jacobins’ stances. The clash of contrasting, but equally radical, party visions gives rise to an abstract fervour and eventually to a loss of contact with reality, Staël observed.72 (In the 1850s the Piedmontese moderates remarked that Mazzini’s plots resulted from the irresponsible vanity of a man who had lost contact with reality).73 Cousin’s parallel between philosophy and politics may have swayed d’Azeglio’s and Gioberti’s positions. Since ‘exclusive doctrines’ in philosophy are the counterparts of parties in politics, he maintained, and since eclecticism is the synthesis of those partial philosophies, it corresponds to adherence to the constitution and the general interest.74 As for Guizot, he insisted on the necessary harmony between society and a government considered as the embodiment of reason – a view that, it has been argued, ruled out parties alternating in government unless society changed radically.75 71

Edmund Burke, Thoughts on the Present Discontents (1770), in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. Paul Langford et al. (Oxford, 1981–2015), ii, 241–323 at 314–22; Sartori, Parties, 9. Hume too might have shed some light on the inevitability of parties in a free government, but his Essays were not in the moderates’ reading list; see esp. ‘Of the Parties of Great Britain’ (1741), in David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, 1987), 64–72. 72 Staël, De l’influence des passions, 129–58, 236–7. 73 See e.g. Nicomede Bianchi, Vicende del mazzinianismo politico e religioso dal 1832 al 1854 (Savona, 1854). 74 See George A. Kelly, The Humane Comedy: Constant, Tocqueville, and French Liberalism (Cambridge, 1992), 150–1. 75 See Alan Kahan, ‘Guizot et le modèle anglais’, in Marina Valensise (ed.), François Guizot et la culture politique de son temps (Paris, 1991), 219–31; but see also Aurelian Craiutu, Liberalism under Siege: The Political Thought of the French Doctrinaires (Lanham, md, 2003),

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As regards Italian writers, Rosmini’s view that parties were ‘worms that d­ evour the fabric of society’, for they pursued their own interests and ignored what was morally right, has been already brought up (Ch. 1, Sect. 3). Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio, a Jesuit philosopher who in Section 8 below will be portrayed as the missing link between the ultramontane and the moderates, gave the issue of parties serious consideration and drew conclusions similar to Rosmini’s. To Taparelli parties were a hindrance to government by deliberative bodies because of their tendency to make interests rather than justice the rationale for laws, granted that favouring the greatest number was not identical with justice – two points one could find in the celebrated Federalist n. 10 for example.76 As regards Mazzini, the British parties were just factions to him, defending narrow sectional interests.77 In the end, French and Italian writers alike agreed that the pursuit of parties’ particular goals was to be constrained to moderate and adapt itself to superior exigencies. The realisation that diversity and dissent could be compatible with political order had not entered into common parlance on the Continent, the British example notwithstanding – but some Italians were not afraid of political controversy, as will be indicated in the next section. If the moderates’ denunciation of parties can hardly be regarded as an anomaly in the juste-milieu camp, it had peculiar causes nevertheless. The moderates’ interpretation of the Risorgimento as a manifestation of transcendental and deterministic forces stood in the way of a view of parties as embodiments of alternative visions legitimately struggling for supremacy. Parties became synonymous with ruinous divisions, as Rosmini had first argued, once moderatism was equated with the Italian movement. To Farini, the proper political distinction was that between the moderates, who wanted to unite (they were Unitori), and those who wanted to separate (Disunitori); the former pursued a national policy, the latter vested interests.78 ‘We are a NATION! 222–3. For Tocqueville, see De la démocratie en Amerique (1835–40), in id., Œuvres, papiers et correspondances, ed. Jacob-Peter Mayer et al. (Paris, 1951-), vol. i, Part i, pp. 178–84 (parties were ‘a necessary evil in free governments’). For the German liberals’ criticisms of parties, see James J. Sheehan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1978), 17–18, 59–62, 98–100 ff. 76 Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio, Saggio teoretico di dritto naturale appoggiato sul fatto (1840–43; Leghorn, 1845), 375–7; Hamilton, Jay, and Madison, The Federalist, 42–9 (n. 10). To Madison too parties were ‘activated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest’, 43. 77 Isabella, Risorgimento in Exile, 128. 78 Farini, ‘Dei nobili in Italia’, 192, 194–5. On the moderates’ claim to represent ‘a universal viewpoint’, and on the ensuing view of conflict as a cause of disorder and insecurity, see La Salvia, ‘Il moderatismo’, 171, 240; see also De Ruggiero, The History, 300–1.

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NATION! NATION!’, d’Azeglio exclaimed in March, 1848, in countering Austrian propaganda labelling the Lombard insurgents as ‘a sect’. We are a nation which has been finally ‘reconciled with God’, he continued, a nation which, after a series of ill-advised attempts, has found a virtuous and peaceful way to claim its rights in agreement with its princes. The Austrian rulers of Lombardy are the real ‘sect’, actually, for they are a minority pursuing a murky agenda through sinister means – while we are ‘redeemed’, they have an exterminating angel stamped on their foreheads.79 Pluralism was out of the question once all three writers heralded the divine origin of both the national ideal and civil liberty, under the umbrella of a Providential interpretation of history. If Gioberti went as far as to endorse the divine roots of sovereignty in the Primato, Balbo came very close to do the same after 1848.80 According to a historian, Balbo still adhered to a ‘medieval concept of liberty’, meaning that it could only be conceded by the king; Gioberti remarked that, since a minority of Italians only felt the need for political freedom, ‘civil liberty’ would suffice.81 But the civil liberties themselves were advocated timidly. Publicity of governmental operations was regarded as a sufficient condition for delivering the modicum of control from below that was demanded.82 Freedom of the press was duly insisted on, as already indicated, but an apprehension about its possible ‘excesses’ never waned – after 1848 d’Azeglio erupted against the ‘arcane power’ of Piedmontese journalism.83 In the economic field the moderates, who advocated free trade among the Italian states and the construction of a railway network on the peninsula, deserved better marks.84

79 D’Azeglio, I lutti di Lombardia, 436–47. See Maria Teresa Pichetto, ‘La “congiura al chiaro giorno” di Massimo d’Azeglio’, in Bruni, Potere, 107. To Banti the hostility to parties, which was shared by moderates and democrats alike, followed from the fact that either camp spoke in the name of the same image of the nation, hence the adversaries were viewed as manipulators or even traitors; see Banti, La nazione, 201–5. 80 To Gioberti, rulers drew their legitimacy from an original act of God creating society and establishing the laws of incivilimento; see Del primato, ii, 76–8, 81–4, and, for a comment, Mustè, La scienza ideale, 198–9. For Balbo, see Ch. 4, Sect. 3. 81 Gioberti, Del primato, i, 85, 263; for Balbo, see Walter Maturi, Interpretazioni del Risorgimento (Turin, 1962), 141, and Balbo, Studii sulla guerra, 202. 82 Balbo, Speranze, 157–60; see Ceretti, ‘Per una rivisitazione’, 518. 83 Maurizio Isabella, ‘Freedom of the Press, Public Opinion and Liberalism in the Risorgimento’, jmis, 17 (2012), 551–67. See Massimo d’Azeglio, ‘Del giornalismo’ (c.1850), in id., Scritti postumi, 235–44; Balbo, Della monarchia, 404. 84 Romani, ‘L’economia politica dei moderati’.

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Religious liberties were crucial, of course. The moderates were certainly not religious pluralists, as blatantly confirmed by Balbo’s and Gioberti’s prediction, of ultramontane origin, that Protestants would soon repent and reunite with the Roman Church.85 In an essay by d’Azeglio recommending the civil emancipation of Jews, the point at issue was their ‘toleration’, not the establishment of pluralism of belief.86 Both d’Azeglio and Balbo, qua novelists, featured Jewish characters who in due course decided to convert to Catholicism.87 Tolerance was in fact a thorny issue to moderates and philosophical Catholics alike, as Rosmini, Gioberti, and Tommaseo adhered to a confrontational and monistic brand of Catholicism, while Balbo never stopped advocating a civilised form of the crusades. In his early writings, Rosmini shared the ultramontane position that tolerance entailed the sin of being agnostic about truth and error; he became more broad-minded as decades wore on, but he never accepted religious freedom.88 Even Manzoni, a cosmopolitan intellectual whose religiosity was hardly militant, confessed his surprise that utilitarianism did prompt sound views and behaviour.89 Lack of pluralism helps account for the fact that the sentiment of charity was not always put into practice. The violence of Gioberti’s strictures on Cousin, Lamennais, and Ferrari, and especially those of Tommaseo’s against Foscolo, who had died some twelve years before, blatantly contradicted the gentleness, rationality, and Stoic composure of the moderate sensibility.90 85

For Balbo see n. 54 above; Gioberti, Del primato, i, 186–8; id., Prolegomeni del 'Primato morale e civile degli italiani', ed. Enrico Castelli (1845; Milan, 1938), 48–9. See also d’Azeglio, ‘Della emancipazione’, 405; Tommaseo, Dell’Italia, ii, 23–5, 100–3. 86 D’Azeglio, ‘Della emancipazione’. If Gioberti was in favour of emancipation, Capponi was against it; see Valerio De Cesaris, ‘I cattolici, gli ebrei e l’ “ebreo”: Note su antigiudaismo e filogiudaismo in Italia’, in Marina Beer and Anna Foa (eds.), Ebrei, minoranze, Risorgimento (Rome, 2013), 163–76. 87 D’Azeglio, Niccolò de’Lapi; Cesare Balbo, ‘L’ebrea’, in id., Novelle, 201–24. 88 For an example of Rosmini’s early stance, see Della speranza, 77 n., 112. 89 Manzoni, ‘Lettera a Victor Cousin’, 585–8. 90 For Gioberti, see ‘Considerazioni’; Lettre; ‘Réponse à un article de la Revue des deux mondes’ (1844), in Vincenzo Gioberti, Degli errori filosofici di Antonio Rosmini (1841; 2nd ed., Capolago, 1846), iii, 341–71. Tommaseo wrote that the ‘ignoble’ (ignobile) Foscolo had been a ‘vain’ character and a ‘liar’; being very prone to debt, he had exploited financially his lovers; and his patriotism was a joke or worse. My comments, he added, are inspired by ‘respect and mercy’. The evidence Tommaseo relied on was questionable, with the exception of Foscolo’s getting into debt in Britain, but evidence was immaterial as he performed a true character assassination. Mazzini replied indignantly, but to no avail. At some point Tommaseo explained that Foscolo’s fault had been ‘to have assaulted on the religion of the land he called his fatherland, this religion which in fact is its last reason for

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On Liberalism: Constant, Guizot, and the Italian Pluralists

In this section, moderatism will be assessed against the background of contemporary instances of ‘liberalism’. The adjective ‘liberal’ began to be used in a political sense in the wake of the French Revolution. The reformers in the Cádiz Cortes, which passed the Spanish constitution of 1812, called themselves liberales, and in 1814 Louis xviii promised to give the French une constitution libérale.91 The problem is that ‘no term within the vocabulary of politics is more difficult to define than liberalism’, according to historian James Sheehan, and in fact the term fractures into several types and competing visions.92 It will be argued in Chapter 4 that the moderates who were active in Piedmont in the 1850s can legitimately be called liberals by virtue of their adherence to the constitution, incorporating the idea of pluralism; but they were ‘elite liberals’ like the Doctrinaires, sharing little with a liberal like, say, Stuart Mill, with his utilitarian background and social concerns. The terms ‘liberal’ (liberale) and ‘liberalism’ (liberalismo) were not in common use in Italy over the first half of the nineteenth century. On the one hand, Rosmini and Gioberti aimed to differentiate their political philosophies from the ‘liberal’ experiences of France and Britain. Gioberti seemingly never used ‘liberal’ in significant contexts before the Rinnovamento of 1851, while Rosmini contrasted socialism with his own ‘true liberalism’, based on individual rights and liberties, only in 1849.93 On the other hand, ‘liberal’ was a term of opprobrium among the ruling elites of the regional states, and it was probably for this reason that Balbo and d’Azeglio were careful not to use it to denote their viewpoint. To Balbo, the adjective ‘liberal’ meant generous and open-minded – he frequently defined free trade

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pride [dignità]’. See Niccolò Tommaseo, Dizionario estetico, 378–9; id., Studi critici (Venice, 1843), i, 136–44, esp. 141, 143–4, 320; id., Intorno ad Ugo Foscolo: Lettere due (Prato, 1847); Giuseppe Mazzini, ‘Articolo premesso all’edizione di Lugano degli scritti politici inediti di Ugo Foscolo’ (1844), in seim, xxix, 159–80. See Benedetto Croce, Storia della storiografia italiana nel secolo decimono (Bari, 1947), i, 194. Jörn Leonhard, ‘Europäische Liberalismen: Zur komparativen Differenzierung eines historischen Phänomens’, Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, 121 (2004), 327–8, 330. Quoted in Craiutu, Liberalism, 287. See e.g. Alan S. Kahan, Aristocratic Liberalism: The Social and Political Thought of Jacob Burckhardt, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueville (Oxford, 1992), 135–45 ff.; Gerald Gaus, Shane D. Courtland, and David Schmidtz, ‘Liberalism’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. spring 2015 , accessed Aug. 2016. Rosmini, ‘Il comunismo’, 87–8, 96, 114. Gioberti had a footnote on the etymology of liberale in Del rinnovamento, i, 154.

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as a ‘liberal policy’ – with the twist that a liberale was a person who wanted to liberate Italy from foreigners. The expression ‘liberal Catholicism’ was also very rare in Italy at the time.94 Some say that it is impossible to reach an extensive agreement on the defining traits of liberalism. The historians who have termed the moderates liberals have not cared much, perhaps, about definitions; the problem is that that label lends the moderates a flavour of modernity, which is misplaced.95 To the present writer, the acceptance of diversity and pluralism is the essential component of liberalism.96 It follows that, even if one ascribes the moderates’ refusal to demand a representative government to tactical considerations, and takes into account that not a few maitres à penser were suspicious of parties, the moderates were not liberals because of a lack of cultural pluralism. It might be retorted that even the British liberal idiom was deeply moral and religious, with divine Providence being frequently invoked to justify the constitution. The chief function of religion was, in Jonathan Parry’s words, to substantiate a ‘national moral community’ balancing economic concerns.97 But no real parallel with moderatism can be drawn, as in Italy religion shaped the political message itself, while in Britain it was called upon to provide a morality to a secularized, burgeoning laissez faire liberalism. To eschew assessing past thinkers anachronistically, it is important to emphasise that there were writers appreciating pluralism in the first half of the century, both in France and Italy. The stances of two French writers whom the moderates knew well, Constant and Guizot, will be recalled first. According to Lucien Jaume, the former was a champion of libéralisme du sujet – concerned with individual rights – and the latter of libéralisme élitaire – a form of liberalism through the state, and not against it.98 Whereas the moderates believed that in Italy the public spirit was too weak to warrant certain liberties and institutions, Constant was positive that it could grow only through the exploitation of all opportunities for participation and 94 Balbo, Speranze, 29; but see id., ‘Dell’uso delle parole’, 466. D’Azeglio even spoke of secret societies created by ‘liberals’ and ‘the liberal party’ in Proposta, 273 n.; but he referred to the moderate movement as ‘Italian liberalism’ in ‘Della emancipazione’, 403 n. 95 See Introd., Sect. 6. 96 On the ability to assimilate ‘change and diversity’ as liberals’ greatest asset, see Michael Freeden, ‘European Liberalisms: An Essay in Comparative Political Thought’, European Journal of Political Theory, 7 (2008), 28. 97 Jonathan Parry, The Politics of Patriotism: English Liberalism, National Identity and Europe, 1830–1886 (Cambridge, 2006), 90–1. 98 See Part i of Lucien Jaume, L’individu effacé ou le paradoxe du libéralisme français (Paris, 1997).

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discussion. ‘Patriotism’ developed out of a free press, the responsibility of ministers, parliamentary debates, the mingling of social classes during elections, trial by jury, sound institutions of local government, and religious freedom.99 According to a historian, Constant thought that political liberty was necessary to preserve civil liberties.100 In the same vein, Constant denounced the SaintSimonians’ advocacy of a ‘beneficial domination’ exercised by les hommes éclairés. He first questioned the idea that certain persons were endowed with lumières supérieures – ‘what proves it? Who acknowledges that s­ uperiority?’ – and then eulogised what the Saint-Simonians deplored, namely the so-called ‘moral anarchy’ of free societies. The desirable moral state of a society was exactly that in which each citizen used his/her faculties freely and independently.101 The difference with moderatism could hardly be more marked, as exemplarily demonstrated by Constant’s castigation of the elitist and paternalist principle Gioberti would later adopt, that ‘everything should be done for the people but nothing by them’. Before and after 1848, in particular Gioberti among the moderates invoked ‘the wisdom of the best’ as the necessary guide of government, on the grounds of an equivalence between reason and the ‘divine Idea’ which should inform power.102 Possibly, the moderates borrowed from Constant the view that a government reflecting and ‘obeying’ public opinion naturally pursued gradual reforms, hence was moderate.103 Balbo, Gioberti, and d’Azeglio were certainly closer to Guizot than to Constant, both politically and intellectually. For example, Guizot opposed political equality in the light of the varying capacité politique of citizens, meaning that not all were so educated and independent to be allowed to vote – a view which became a staple of the moderate idiom in the 1850s.104 Yet, Guizot made the pluralism of values and institutions the secret of European liberty and 99

Benjamin Constant, Principes de politique (1815), in id., Écrits politiques, ed. Marcel Gauchet (Paris, 1997), 305–588 at e.g. 393, 404–7; id., De l’esprit de conquête et de l’usurpation (1814), ibid., 118–302 at 164–71; id., ‘Des accusateurs de la France’, La Minerve français, 7 (1819), 154–60. 100 Andrew Jainchill, ‘The Importance of Republican Liberty in French Liberalism’, in Raf Geenens and Helena Rosenblatt (eds.), French Liberalism from Montesquieu to the Present Day (Cambridge, 2012), 73–89. 101 Benjamin Constant, ‘De M. Dunoyer et de quelques-uns de ses ouvrages’ (1826), in id., Écrits, 654–78 at 674–8. 102 Benjamin Constant, Commentaire sur l’ouvrage de Filangieri (Paris, 1822–4), i, 4, 29, 42; Gioberti, Del primato, ii, 86; id., Prolegomeni, 245–6. More on this side of Gioberti’s and other moderates’ thought in Ch. 4, Sect. 3. 103 Constant, Commentaire, ii, 289. 104 See Ch. 4, Sect. 3.

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civilization. ‘Modern Europe’, he famously argued, ‘was born out of the struggle between the various classes of society’, each of them conceding some ground. In vindicating the English and French revolutions, this interpretation established that the coexistence of, and competition among, all rights, interests, and opinions were the conditions for liberty in contemporary France.105 In contrast, to the moderates it was only a matter of time before all social classes and political groups recognised the truth of moderatism and rallied to it. Here lies a critical reason why they regarded parliamentary government as dispensable, at least temporarily: its very raison d’être, namely the necessity to balance divergent interests through formal procedures, was irrelevant to their monistic vision of politics. Other themes mark Guizot out from the moderates. His political position was progressive during the Bourbon Restoration (much less so after 1830, when he became a pillar of the Orleanist establishment), inasmuch as he judged that the stage of development attained by French society, now informed by middleclass interests, warranted a fully liberal government.106 Guizot and the other Doctrinaires believed in written constitutions establishing the division of powers, and favoured local autonomies, viewed as a school of politics. To them representation was a mechanism through which the individuals following reason, justice, and truth – ‘the superiorities’ – were selected from all social classes, at least in principle. Granted that the Doctrinaires entrusted themselves with the ability to discern the concrete expressions of those values, Guizot also argued that no individual or political group could rightfully pretend to entirely represent them. They ‘do not reside anywhere on earth in a complete and infallible form’, and therefore any sovereignty was to be limited. In other words, neither a power created by the Charte nor the king or the people were sovereign, for only the Charte was. The Doctrinaires’ advocacy of civil liberties was unwavering during the Restoration. Guizot, who came from a Huguenot family and was proud of it, in 1821 championed the ‘absolute separation’ between church and state – to him, the mere tolerance of non-Catholic religions was insufficient.107 105 Guizot, Histoire de la civilisation en Europe, esp. 34–41, 209–10, 406–8. See Larry Siedentop, ‘Introduction’, in François Guizot, The history of civilization in Europe, ed. Larry Siedentop, tr. William Hazlitt (London 1997), pp. vii–xxxvii. 106 François Guizot, Des moyens de gouvernement et d’opposition dans l’état actuel de la France (Paris, 1821). 107 See by Guizot: Du gouvernement de la France depuis la Restauration, et du ministère actuel (Paris, 1820), 201; Des moyens, 196–203; ‘Du Catholicisme, du Protestantisme et de la philosophie en France’ (1838), in Méditations et études morales (Paris, 1852), 55–86 at 66. See Luigi Lacchè, La libertà che guida il popolo: Le tre Gloriose Giornate del luglio 1830 e le ‘Chartes’ nel costituzionalismo francese (Bologna, 2002), 155–64.

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Actually, historians disagree as to the amount of pluralism Guizot endorsed. Alan Kahan has argued that un seul parti carried the banner of reason at any given moment, so that in practice the function of parliamentary opposition was to influence the party in power but not to supplant it. Instead, Aurelian Craiutu has stressed Guizot’s view that ‘true freedom can survive only in a pluralist society’.108 That Guizot did not carry his theory of history over to the political realm is unquestionable, but that theory certainly opened up vistas about a politics of diversity and institutional struggle within the boundaries of representative government. Kahan admits that an alternation of parties in power was legitimate in the long run, if it was needed to preserve the harmony between society and government – an essential condition for liberty in Guizot’s opinion. There are pages in the oft-cited Des moyens de gouvernement et d’opposition (1821) praising the fruitful confrontation between government and opposition, and envisaging the possibility of the latter’s rise to power. Yet, it is necessary to add that at the time of writing Guizot was one of the leaders of the opposition, struggling against the reaction which was at its height in consequence of the murder of the duke of Berry.109 All in all, Guizot can be labelled liberal in the crucial sense of a concern with pluralism, combined with an unwavering support for constitutional rule. If pluralism and conflict were foreign to the moderates, they were not so to other thinkers of the Risorgimento. The examples of Alfieri, Foscolo, Giuseppe Pecchio, Romagnosi, Cattaneo, and Michele Amari will be brought up in the rest of this section. Foscolo and Pecchio were exiles – leaving Italy in 1816 and 1821 respectively – who had first-hand knowledge of the British political system. They belonged to a group of émigrés whose writings formed an original current of liberal constitutionalism, feeding on the British and Spanish experiences, in the 1820s and 1830s.110 In contrast with the moderates of the 1840s, who in practice rejected the legacy of the Italian Enlightenment, these five authors felt like they were its heirs. Alfieri and Foscolo stressed the positive role of parties. Alfieri pointed out that in Britain the disagreement between the ministry and the opposition was ‘invigorating’, rather than destructive, because neither of the two parties had interests permanently opposed to the good of the whole. Foscolo, drawing

108 Kahan, ‘Guizot’, 223–6; Craiutu, Liberalism, 275. 109 Guizot, Des moyens, 304–11. 110 Isabella, Risorgimento in Exile.

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inspiration from contemporary Britain and ancient Rome, identified ‘parts’ as the means through which the natural discord between citizens could be made conducive to the well-being of the whole nation. Parties differed about the best way to rule but were unanimous in their observance of the constitution, whereas ‘factions’ pursued ‘secret interests’.111 The Milanese Pecchio (1785–1835) settled in England in 1823, becoming close to the Whig circles and Holland House in particular. Among the exiles of the 1820s, he was probably the most widely read on the peninsula; some of his books, like for instance the travel diary A Picture of Greece in 1825, were international bestsellers.112 Pecchio admired the British political system and described it in two books (1826 and 1831), first published in Italian in Lugano. He was astounded by the bustling and tumultuous election days, when the ordinary people suddenly stepped onto the political stage. Pecchio drew a parallel between the England of his days and the Italian medieval republics: administration was defective and social unrest was widespread in both cases, but the spirit of liberty – namely free discussion, publicity of government, a proud and independent citizenry, and enterprise bringing about rising wealth – overcame all hindrances.113 In the British parliament the opposition party fulfilled an essential moderating function in everyday business, while, in the longer term, its countervailing force prevented the government from turning into a tyranny. ‘In a free government, the clash of two parties, and the apparent discord, are in reality only a contest which will render the fatherland happy’. Following the same logic, Pecchio argued that 111 Alfieri, Della tirannide, 61–2; Ugo Foscolo, Discorsi della servitù d’Italia (1815–16), first published in id., Prose politiche (Florence, 1850), 186–253 at 195–205; id., ‘Stato politico delle Isole Ionie’ (ms., 1817), in id., Prose politiche e apologetiche (1817–1827), ed. Giovanni ­Gambarin (Florence, 1964), i, 3–37. See De Ruggiero, The History, 282–3, 288, 294–5; Della Peruta, ‘La federazione’, 316–19; Eugenio Biagini, ‘Liberty, Class and Nation-Building: Ugo Foscolo’s “English” Constitutional Thought, 1816–1827’, European Journal of Political Theory, 5 (2006), 41; Isabella, Risorgimento in Exile, esp. 70–5. Alfieri, who had a long affair with the wife of the pretender Charles Edward Stuart, visited England four times between 1767 and 1791. 112 See Giuseppe Pecchio, James Emerson, and W.H. Humphreys, A Picture of Greece in 1825 (London, 1826). For biographical information, see Paolo Bernardelli, ‘Prefazione’, in Giuseppe Pecchio, Scritti politici, ed. Paolo Bernardelli (Rome, 1978), pp. vii–xci; Elena Riva, ‘Pecchio, Giuseppe’, dbi, lxxxii, 2015. On Pecchio’s critical essay on Foscolo (1830), which caused an uproar, see Luigi Derla, ‘La critica romantica in Italia: Giuseppe Pecchio’, Nuova antologia, 503 (1968), 386–9. 113 Giuseppe Pecchio, Un’elezione di membri del Parlamento in Inghilterra (Lugano, 1826); id., L’anno mille ottocento ventisei dell’Inghilterra (Lugano, 1827), 104–111.

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the plurality of Churches boosted the emulation of good deeds and supported all liberties.114 As shown in Section 1, the aim of Romagnosi’s constitutional scheme was to harmonize the conflicting interests of classes and groups, granted that ‘the clash of interests and powers’ was ‘the vital spirit of society’.115 Romagnosi’s disciple Cattaneo developed this line of analysis, most brilliantly in an essay of 1844. He postulated the rule that ‘the more civilised a people is, the more numerous its moving principles are’, such as ‘the army and the clergy, landownership and trade, or privilege and the masses’. Each of these ‘forces’, Cattaneo continued, strives to dominate the others but does not succeed; their conflict is in fact the engine of progress and justice. In European history, reforms have always resulted from a compromise between competing interests. If ‘variety’ and contrasts generate ‘life’, ‘unity’ causes ‘death’ and decadence. With Rosmini and Gioberti in mind, Cattaneo claimed that all this could not be grasped through an empty and arrogant metaphysics of Being (l’ente), which i­nterpreted all ­differences as contradictions to be subsumed within a superior unity.116 This approach translated into a political judgement: according to Cattaneo, the ­ultimate reason for the defeat of 1848–9 was the patriots’ misguided concern with concord, leading them to overlook Charles Albert’s ruse.117 Lastly, a pluralist type of government became the focus of a peculiar discourse of liberty in Sicily. The forms of political representation implemented on the island in the past were regularly invoked to legitimise Sicily’s right to liberty and independence from Naples. Thus the charter of 1812, approved by the Sicilian parliament when the island was in effect a temporary protectorate of Britain, was not viewed as a breakthrough but as an evolution of the estates representation dating back to the Middle Ages. Sicily’s traditions of liberty and self-government were celebrated most successfully by Michele Amari (1806–89) in a historical survey whose political implications were obvious. ‘The ancient plant of the Norman constitution’, he wrote, was reformed by the revolution of the Vespers carried out by the popolo in 1282, leading to centuries 114 Giuseppe Pecchio, Osservazioni semiserie di un esule sull’Inghilterra, ed. Giuseppe Nicoletti (1831; Milan, 1976), 80–8, 201–3. See Maurizio Isabella, ‘ “Una scienza dell’amor patrio”: Public Economy, Freedom and Civilization in Giuseppe Pecchio’s Works (1827–1830)’, jmis, 4 (1999), 157–83; id., Risorgimento in Exile, 123–9. 115 Gian Domenico Romagnosi, Introduzione allo studio del diritto pubblico universale (1803; Milan, 1825), ii, 23. 116 Carlo Cattaneo, ‘Considerazioni sul principio della filosofia’, in id., Opere scelte, ii, 345– 68, esp. 355–62. See Alessandro Levi, Il positivismo politico di Carlo Cattaneo (Bari, 1928), 88–90. 117 Cattaneo, Dell’insurrezione di Milano, 144.

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of good government and prosperity.118 Intellectually speaking, Amari was far from moderatism – he subscribed to a rationalist worldview, and regarded the people as a regenerative force – but he endorsed the moderate programme in 1846–7 as a tactical move. Amari demanded a representative government then, in order to check the executive and sanction individual rights.119 5

The Moderates Assess the Medieval Communes

Political thought as usually intended and sensibility arguments combine inextricably in this section. It deals with the 1840s moderates’ interpretation of the medieval republics, from the standpoint of the civil virtues which were famously associated with them. The theme of the communes was unavoidable somewhat, because the moderates, who were eager to base their claims on history, were equally eager to reject all things republican. The Risorgimento witnessed an effort to re-write Italian history in a patriotic fashion, addressing controversial issues to which a political meaning came invariably to be attached. As an interpreter has put it, Manzoni, Balbo, Carlo Troya, Capponi, and others strove ‘to establish the primacy of Catholicism’ in Italian history.120 The moderates’ essential task was to counter Machiavelli’s famous view of the papacy as an obstacle to national independence and unity, a view that Sismondi endorsed in Histoire des républiques italiennes. In particular, Machiavelli had initiated a historiographical current blaming the popes for opposing the Langobards, who were supposedly in the process of unifying the whole peninsula.121 The moderates countered by maintaining that the Latin populations had not merged with the northern barbarians, in fact, and that exactly this 118 Michele Amari, La guerra del Vespro siciliano, ed. Francesco Giunta (1842; Palermo, 1969), 626. An outstanding historian of Sicily under the Arabs, Amari was a protagonist of the 1848 revolution in Sicily. Subsequently he collaborated with Mazzini, and with Garibaldi in 1860. He served as minister of education after unification. See Romeo, Il Risorgimento in Sicilia, 295–316; Francesco Gabrieli and Rosario Romeo, ‘Amari, Michele Benedetto Gaetano’, dbi, ii, 1960. 119 [Michele Amari], ‘Introduzione’, in Niccolò Palmieri, Saggio storico e politico sulla costituzione del Regno di Sicilia infino al 1816 con un’appendice sulla rivoluzione del 1820 (Lausanne, 1847), pp. v–lix at pp. xi–xii. 120 La Salvia, ‘Il moderatismo’, 301. For a survey, see Croce, Storia, i, 120–60; for the moderates’ disregard of Roman history, see ibid., i, 109–112. 121 Machiavelli, Discorsi, bk. i, Ch. 12; id., Istorie fiorentine (1520–5), in id., Opere, pp. 563– 980 at bk. i, Ch. 11. See Giorgio Falco, ‘La questione longobarda e la moderna storiografia ­italiana’, Rivista storica italiana, 63 (1951), 265–78; Mauro Moretti, ‘Sismondi: Storiografia

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circumstance had permitted an Italian identity to take shape. It was peculiar within Europe and was characterised by the influence of the Roman Church. Thus Manzoni, relying on Thierry’s notion of the ‘two races’, argued in 1822 that the popes had actually saved Italian civilization from the threat of disintegration under the Langobards; while Balbo, who called himself ‘a Guelph’, thanked Providence for thwarting the creation of an Italian kingdom under German emperors.122 From the moderate standpoint the medieval republics were a disturbing theme. Sismondi had considered them as both a potential nucleus of an Italian nation, and a model of freedom. In Sismondi’s admiring, albeit not uncritical, portrayal, their ‘democratic liberty’ resulted from the energising clash of powers and passions.123 Add that the communes had been a splendid manifestation of Italian civilization, unquestionably, but the popes had not hesitated to plot with foreigners to subdue them. A popular novel by a Tuscan republican, Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi, denounced exactly that in 1836.124 The moderates did their best to neutralise the impact of the Italian republican moment on the patriotic mind. In the moderates’ reconstructions, the republics came to illustrate a fervent approach to public life, ultimately thwarting national independence. The communes were free, Balbo admitted, and as a consequence their citizens were enterprising (operosi) in a number of fields, in particular producing artistic and intellectual masterpieces. But their liberty was ‘disordered’, that is ‘exaggerated’ and troubled with internecine conflicts carried out by devious, Machiavellian means. Discord among these city-states made the pursuit of Italian e riflessione costituzionale’, Contemporanea, 1 (1998), 129–38. Muratori, Pietro Giannone (1676–1748), and Romagnosi followed in Machiavelli’s footsteps. 122 Manzoni, Discorso; Cesare Balbo, Vita di Dante (Turin, 1839), ii, 41–2, 54–6. Manzoni drew inspiration from a series of articles published by Thierry in 1820; see Gian Paolo Romagnani, Storiografia e politica culturale nel Piemonte di Carlo A ­ lberto ­(Turin, 1985), 237–8. On Balbo’s historiography, see Laura Moscati, Da Savigny al ­Piemonte: Cultura storicogiuridica subalpina tra la Restaurazione e l’Unità (Rome, 1984), 139–48; F­ ubini Leuzzi, ‘Introduzione’, esp. 49–50; Romagnani, Storiografia, 250–63. For other moderates on the Langobards, see Carlo Troya, Della condizione de’ Romani vinti da’ ­Longobardi (1841; Milan, 1844); Gino Capponi, ‘Sulla dominazione dei Longobardi in Italia: Lettere al prof. Pietro Capei’ (1844–59), in id., Scritti, i, 54–196. 123 Sismondi, Histoire des républiques, e.g. ii, 78–9; iv, 20–1, 225. For the privileged status of the Middle Ages in the patriotic narrative, see Adrian Lyttelton, ‘Creating a National Past: History, Myth and Image in the Risorgimento’, in Ascoli and von Henneberg, Making and Remaking Italy, 27–74. 124 Guerrazzi’s novel was L’assedio di Firenze; see below, Ch. 3, Sect. 3.

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independence impossible, and decadence eventually ensued as a result of foreign invasions.125 The republics’ hostility to the aristocracy proved especially ruinous, Balbo continued, for it entailed recourse to mercenary armies whose chieftains often turned into tyrants. For the same reason, the military virtues which, in his opinion, were unsurpassed for their capability to form character, had been gradually lost on the peninsula, with the exception of Piedmont.126 Balbo’s biography of Dante Alighieri (1839) amounted to a denunciation of the Florentine parties (parti), regarded as the outcome of envy and family feuds. The passionate, ‘ferocious’ Dante lacked the most important political virtue – ‘moderation’. In a review, Cattaneo mocked Balbo’s apparent fear of the propagation of Dante’s passions to the present, which Balbo imagined being ‘full of Guelphs and Ghibellines’.127 Basically, the medieval republicans failed for lack of moderation and morality. This conclusion was effectively conveyed by d’Azeglio in Niccolò de’Lapi (1841), a novel of his recounting the siege of Florence at the hands of an Imperial and Spanish army in 1529–30. D’Azeglio admired those republicans for bravely fighting for the fatherland against foreigners, and also for understanding the necessity of combining liberty with religion.128 But in the final page of the book he answered the question whether the Florentines deserved to be free in the negative. Florence had oppressed the Tuscan towns under its control to enrich and strengthen itself, so that the towns were reluctant to defend the capital when the crucial moment came. Moreover, the enemies won the 125 Balbo, Sommario, esp. 286–8, 313–14, 494–5, and 346–8 on Machiavelli’s Principe, ‘that immoral book’; id., ‘Lettere politiche’, 432–3. For Balbo on the communes, see Fubini Leuzzi, ‘Introduzione’, 51–3; La Salvia, ‘Il moderatismo’, 305–6; and for a different view, stressing the importance of the republics for Balbo’s espousal of representative government, see Veit Elm, Die Moderne und der Kirchenstaat: Aufklärung und römisch-katholische Staatlichkeit im Urteil der Geschichtsschreibung vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Postmoderne (Berlin, 2001), 80–3, 222. For Balbo on Machiavelli, see Alberto Clerici, ‘La storia e la morale: Machiavelli nel giudizio di Cesare Balbo’, Storia e politica, 3 (2011), 64–83. 126 See by Balbo: Vita di Dante, 211–13; Sommario, 313–14, 383–9, 404; Pensieri, 52–4, 68–9, 72; ‘Lettere politiche’, 433–4, 447–9. 127 Balbo, Vita di Dante; Carlo Cattaneo, ‘Vita di Dante di Cesare Balbo’ (1839), in id., Opere scelte, i, 305–21 at 317. On Dante’s partisan passions, see also Carlo Troya, Il veltro allegorico di Dante (Florence, 1826), e.g. 188–9. Instead, Tommaseo was an admirer of Dante, who to him was the protype of the engaged intellectual. For the commentary on the Divina Commedia Tommaseo wrote in 1837, see Valerio Marucci, ‘Il Commento alla Commedia: Il mito di Dante e le forme letterarie della politica nell’esperienza di Tommaseo’, in Bruni, Niccolò Tommaseo, i, 177–91. 128 D’Azeglio, Niccolò de’Lapi, 406–7.

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day because a ‘part’ eventually betrayed the common patria.129 Gioberti’s assessment of the communes was in a similar vein. They had soon turned into either ‘wicked [torbide] democracies or small despotic kingdoms’ – thus failing to become the seeds of the Italian nation through an alliance with the always patriotic popes – because of both the Emperor’s intrigues and their own internecine struggles.130 On the theoretical plane, in the 1850s Balbo, Mamiani, and Domenico C ­ arutti explained at length why they disapproved of the participatory liberty of the ancients, thus siding with the moderns in the famous contrast set forth by Constant (see Ch. 4, Sect. 3). Yet, authors urging a moral renaissance could not but admire the medieval republicans’ iron will, dedication to freedom and patria, religious faith, and valour in battle. Gioberti praised their ‘vigour, enterprise, and power’, in contrast with the lack of ‘activity and energy’ of contemporary Italians; Balbo was more cautious.131 The novel already referred to indicates d’Azeglio’s great reverence for the Florentines’ virtues. The moral strength displayed by the positive characters often took the form of immoderate passions, like wrath or thirst for revenge, but d’Azeglio seems oblivious to this fact. He admitted only occasionally that, as ‘men of a part’, they were moved by a vested interest feeding on extreme passions – the main character Niccolò, for instance, felt a ‘horrendous hatred’ for the Medici. But d’Azeglio rather blamed the ­moderns for their pleasure-seeking lives – their lack of faith and commitment – and even claimed that the ancient Florentines had managed to keep ‘passions’ in check.132 Some emotional balancing occurred through Niccolo’s daughter Laudomia, who, in a momentous scene, reminded the bloodthirsty male characters of the value of forgiveness and charity.133

129 Ibid., 836–7. See also d’Azeglio’s unfinished novel La Lega lombarda, dealing with the struggle between the comuni and the Emperor in the twelfth century. Here too the republics were depicted as ‘proud’, ‘bloodthirsty’, and always ‘envious’ of their sister towns, but, by fighting the Emperors, they sowed the seeds of Italian patriotism; see La Lega lombarda, esp. 119–20, 133. Two other novels by monarchical patriots were set in the Italian communes, Tommaseo’s Il Duca d’Atene and Cesare Cantù’s Margherita Pusterla (Rome, 1838). Both texts blamed divisions and advocated Italians’ unity of purpose against foreigners; see Langella, Amor di patria, 212–21. 130 Gioberti, Teorica del sovranaturale, ii, 291–4; id., Introduzione, iii, 73–6. 131 Gioberti, Del primato, i, 264–5; for Balbo, see e.g. Sommario, 286, 314, 494–5. 132 D’Azeglio, Niccolò de’Lapi, 291–2. Mazzini was so enthusiast for the novel that he wrote his mother: ‘Niccolò is my hero’ (letter of 8 Dec. 1841, in sei, xx, 382–7 at 385). Mazzini published an extract from it in his paper Apostolato popolare. 133 D’Azeglio, Niccolò de’Lapi, 19, 174–80.

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When d’Azeglio faced republican uprisings in Leghorn and Genoa in 1848–9, he violently condemned them. To reply to those who had accused him of inconsistency, he distinguished sharply between the republicans he had praised in Niccolò de’Lapi and those then active in Italy. The latter were a ‘sect’ of ‘political crooks’ exploiting people’s ‘passions’, and in fact craving for the spoils of government; the former were moral characters comparable to Miltiades, M ­ ichele di Lando, or Washington, who had sacrificed themselves and their party to the superior interests of the fatherland.134 Not unexpectedly, the p ­ articipatory side of moderatism became more marked in the heat of revolution and war. D’Azeglio in 1848 came to recommend civic guards composed of property owners to guarantee order against socialists, on the grounds that ‘neutrality in civil conflicts is a crime’ – Santarosa was eventually vindicated.135 The Tuscan Capponi’s position on the republican past differed from that held by the other moderates. He entertained a nostalgia for the meaningful life that, in his opinion, was led in medieval and Renaissance Florence, where shared aims and social cohesion had made the citizenry feel ‘civil life in its whole authenticity’.136 Capponi, who was a thorough reader of Royer-Collard and Tocqueville, was acutely aware of social dissolution in the wake of the French Revolution; he therefore hankered after common values, solid institutions, unquestionable norms, and even ‘public passions’. Italy was in need of reforming itself through education, but one based on the cultivation of the heart rather than on cold pedagogical theories which ‘do not target the whole of man’. Catholicism could supply moral education, but not the ‘civil’ one, which was also hampered by the problematic identification of patria: was it to be found in the regional state, in Italy, in the ‘Christian family’, or in humanity?137 Capponi’s stance is remarkable within moderatism for he did not espouse a naive optimism about the course of Christian civilization – the single powerful

134 Massimo d’Azeglio, ‘Non dispotismo nè di trono nè di piazza’ (1848), in daru, ii, 27–36; id., Timori e speranze (1848), in data, ii, 53–108 at 53. Michele di Lando was the leader of the wool carders who sparked off the popular revolt known as dei Ciompi in Florence in 1378. 135 D’Azeglio, Timori, 93–4. On the necessity that everybody contributed to the war effort, see Vincenzo Gioberti, I due programmi del ministero Sostegno (Turin, 1848), 20, 24–5. 136 Capponi, ‘Lettura quinta’, 408–10. For Capponi’s debt to the civic humanist tradition, see Kroll, ‘Gino Capponi’, 255–61. Capponi, who acknowledged the nobility of Stoicism and appreciated Marcus Aurelius, followed Augustine in condemning the Stoics’ ‘pride’; see his ‘Studi sopra le lettere di Cicerone’ (1860), in Capponi, Scritti, i, 30–53 at 31–2, 42; id., ‘Introduzione all’istoria civile de’papi’ (ms., 1840s), ibid., ii, 229–346 at 344–6. 137 Capponi, Pensieri, 29, 50–1, 83–88.

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faith of the age was equality in his view, hence the benevolence and respect informing class relations in medieval Florence were problematic to revive.138 To conclude about the communes, the moderates strove to debunk their myth, probably with Sismondi’s Histoire in mind. The vicissitudes of the republics acted as a warning about the danger of civil discord, invariably resulting from intense passions. Over the course of the centuries, it was argued, internecine conflicts have always ended in invasions by foreign armies and therefore in the loss of independence for all Italians. Hence a prudent and gradual Risorgimento, calling for unanimity about a few minimal demands, is the only possible way out of the cycle of invasions. As for political participation, it was not good in itself but only if accompanied by discernment and certain moral attitudes and virtues, and some of those – such as courage as intellectual coherence, composure, or enterprise – could typically grace only the few (see Ch. 1, Sect. 6). Accordingly, the communes’ democratic or quasi-democratic political life was a sufficient cause of perennial instability. Such an assessment preluded to the identification of democracy with unbridled passions occurring in the 1850s. The moderates’ depiction of the republics flew in the face of those who, like Cattaneo, advocated a federalist democracy; Cattaneo then replied by imputing the discord within each republic and among them to the lack of a federal bond, as well as to the intrigues of the emperors, the popes, and the aristocracy.139 6

Moderatism Becomes Less Moderate

The moderates’ caution in advocating political reform was a tactical move to a certain extent. The fact that representative government was not demanded in their crucial texts – Gioberti’s Primato, Balbo’s Speranze d’Italia, and d’Azeglio’s Proposta d’un programma – did not result from a principled opposition to it. Although lacking much of a truly liberal culture, they were too familiar with European history and politics not to understand that parliaments on the models of Britain, France, and Belgium should be eventually created in the Italian states. Balbo had been a keen admirer of the British constitution since his youth. Gioberti had upheld representative monarchy as an expression of natural aristocracy in Introduzione allo studio della filosofia (1839–40) – characteristically, there he also espoused the divine origin of sovereignty and society, challenged Luther and Descartes who had originated the doctrine of popular sovereignty, 138 Capponi, ‘Lettura quinta’, 408–21. 139 Cattaneo, ‘Considerazioni’, 325; see Bobbio, ‘Stati Uniti d’Italia’, 16–24 ff.

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and advocated a return to the ‘Christian civilization’ of the Middle Ages. Needless to say, ‘true’ representative government featured as an effect of Christianity well understood.140 The growth of the patriotic movement was so rapid after the appearance of the Primato that Gioberti felt free to give up his previous prudence. As early as a few months after the publication of that book, he began writing his correspondents that its political programme had been consciously designed to galvanise a particularly apathetic people, and to appease Rome and Vienna (in contrast, the primacy of Italian civilization was never denied). Judging that Italians were learning the mores of political participation quickly, Gioberti declared himself in favour of representative government in Prolegomeni del ‘Primato’ (1845). (He added that he had not really changed his mind between the treatise of 1839–40 and the Primato, the former being abstract in character while the latter practical and situated). He confirmed the advocacy of a constitutional regime in Apologia del libro intitolato ‘Il gesuita moderno’ (1848).141 Gioberti also decided that it was time to carry the battle within the Church. The Prolegomeni marked the beginning of an acrimonious polemic against the Society of Jesus, which he accused of being a ‘sect’ aiming to destroy both Italy and Catholicism. Gioberti’s attack culminated with Il gesuita moderno (1846–7), a five-volume pamphlet which the ecclesiastical censorship did not prohibit and which sold thousands of copies. The tour from Turin to Rome he went on in the spring of 1848, amidst adoring crowds, evidenced the exceptional standing he enjoyed on the peninsula.142 If Gioberti soon adopted a less cautious agenda, Balbo lacked the chutzpah of his fellow moderate. A loyal servant of his king, his stance evolved in tune with institutional change in the Piedmontese kingdom. The Sommario della storia d’Italia (1846) included a few sentences alluding to the virtues of representative government, but Balbo explicitly endorsed it only in the ninth edition of 1852. Here he admitted that liberty could become a vehicle for 140 For Balbo, see n. 45 above; Gioberti, Introduzione, iii, 58–9, 119–23. 141 Gioberti, Prolegomeni, 328–9; as regards Apologia, see the chapter separately published as Delle condizioni presenti, 32–4, 47, 68–9, 76 n. Gioberti publicly admitted that his advocacy of an Italian federation headed by the pope was just a piece of inspiring mythology in Del rinnovamento, i, 36–7. On Gioberti’s ‘conception of institutions as mere means’, see Traniello, ‘Ermeneutica giobertiana’, 76–7; on his ‘tactical dissimulation’, see Salvatorelli, Il pensiero politico, 287–8; Haddock, ‘Political Union’, 712–3, 719–21. 142 Gioberti’s chief argument against the Society was to have spread a ‘mystic’ and a-­ historical version of Catholicism, confining religion to the private sphere. On Gioberti’s tour, see Marco Manfredi, ‘Risorgimento e tradizioni municipali: Il viaggio di propaganda di ­Vincenzo Gioberti nell’Italia del 1848’, Memoria e ricerca, 44 (2013), 7–23.

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independence, whereas previously he had preached that making reform issues a priority would weaken the anti-Austrian front. Balbo specified that he valued parliamentary government in spite of ‘many foolish and unhappy recent attempts’ at it – he probably thought that, in Italy in 1848–9, most charters had been hastily concocted, and conceded, only to appease the mob.143 An overlong and convoluted treatise, Filosofia del diritto (1841–5), was the intermediate step between Rosmini’s La società ed il suo fine, examined in the previous chapter, and a book on constitutional issues, appearing in 1848. ­Filosofia del diritto is ‘still almost unknown’, Rosmini lamented in 1848; in it I identified ‘the natural and rational rights of man’ which no government must encroach on.144 More precisely, Rosmini argued that both the ‘rational jurisprudence’ originating from the Gospels, and the example of the primitive Church as a society of the free, made it possible to distinguish between ruling over rights, which amounted to despotism for they were inviolable, and ruling over their practical application (their modalità) only.145 These rights, which were of natural and divine origin, included those to property and economic association, those relating to civil equality, and those safeguarding the citizens’ quest for a moral and religious existence. Representative institutions were endorsed somewhat obliquely in Filosofia del diritto, but Rosmini remarked that ‘more freedom should be granted to those individuals and peoples that demand it’.146 The interests of minorities should always be taken into account, for, if they were not, the majority would turn into a ‘party’ tyrannizing the other citizens – the force of numbers had nothing to do with justice. To Rosmini political struggle was temporary: once a society acknowledged the universal value of rights and established civil equality, a ‘political uniformity’ and hence ‘the an­ nihilation of parties’ would follow. The goals of civil society did not differ from those of religion, which were truth, virtue, and happiness.147 In 1848, even an utter intellectual like Rosmini became involved in patriotic politics. Convinced by Gioberti, then a minister, the Piedmontese government 143 Balbo, Sommario, 194–6; see Berti, ‘I moderati’, 246 n. 144 Antonio Rosmini, La costituzione secondo la giustizia sociale (1848), in id., Progetti di costituzione, ed. Carlo Gray (Milan, 1952), 3–239 at 87. 145 Rosmini, Filosofia del diritto, v, 1223, 1283–5, 1289, 1349–52 ff. See Traniello, ‘Politica e religione in Antonio Rosmini’, in id., Da Gioberti a Moro, 25–42 at 36, 39–40. 146 Quoted in Francesco Traniello, ‘Letture rosminiane della Rivoluzione francese’, in Giorgio Campanini and Francesco Traniello (eds.), Filosofia e politica: Rosmini e la cultura della Restaurazione (Brescia, 1993), 151. For Rosmini’s cursory remarks on representative government, see Filosofia del diritto, v, 1296; for an uncritical survey of Rosmini’s view of it, see Giorgio Campanini, Antonio Rosmini fra politica e ecclesiologia (Bologna, 2006), 91–102. 147 Rosmini, Filosofia del diritto, iii, 778–808, 815; iv, 896; v, 1391–5 (esp. 1394), 1406.

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sent him to Rome, where he became a close adviser to the pope. He also offered comprehensive suggestions to the Roman cardinals who were tasked with writing a constitution.148 In that very year, he published both his book on Church reform and La costituzione secondo la giustizia sociale, a short treatise detailing his own constitutional project – Rosmini was the only major writer of the moderate camp to show an interest in constitutional matters before the 1850s.149 In La costituzione he came close to accepting religious pluralism when discussing the non-Catholics’ right to run for office, but eventually he refrained from endorsing it.150 Before concluding this section, it is necessary to highlight certain aspects of the revolutionary biennium 1848–9. The moderate programme proved unable to cope with the emergence of more advanced platforms once patriotic enthusiasm mounted, but there was a moment when moderatism seemed destined to succeed. It is significant that the Society of Jesus reacted cautiously to the movement, and that some prominent members like Taparelli sympathized with it.151 In a quasi-official reply to Gioberti’s strictures against Jesuitism, father Carlo Curci was content with reaffirming the Society’s exclusive concern with spiritual matters.152 Even the Jesuits, that is, could not ignore that the climate of the years 1846–8 was almost palingenetic. A good example is Gioberti’s address to Pius (March, 1847), envisaging the certain and forthcoming reconciliation between Catholics and Protestants as a consequence of the pope’s recognition of modern civilisation. In both religion and politics, Gioberti wrote, ‘sects and factions’ are bound to disappear, as the European peoples are beginning to understand that the religious principles the pope embodies are necessary to strengthen the ‘nascent institutions’ and heal the wounds caused by previous revolutions.153 148 Rosmini, Della missione a Roma; see Luciano Malusa, Antonio Rosmini per l’unità d’Italia (Milan, 2011). 149 Yet Gioberti discussed the composition of the senate with reference to the Roman charter; see Delle condizioni presenti, 82–5. 150 Rosmini, La costituzione, 215–16; see Traniello, Società religiosa, 299–303; id., Cattolicesimo conciliatorista, 144–5, 166–7. 151 See Gabriele De Rosa, I gesuiti in Sicilia e la rivoluzione del ’48 (Rome, 1963); id., Storia del movimento cattolico in Italia (Bari, 1966), i, 42–55; Giovanni Aliberti, ‘Nazione e stato nei federalisti cattolici del Risorgimento: Balbo, Taparelli, D’Ondes Reggio’, Ricerche di storia sociale e religiosa, 45 (1994), 127–45. 152 Carlo Curci, Fatti ed argomenti in risposta alle molte parole di Vincenzo Gioberti intorno ai Gesuiti nei ‘Prolegomeni del Primato’ (Lausanne, 1846). 153 Vincenzo Gioberti, Allocuzione a Pio ix p.o.m. (Bologna, 1847), esp. 8 (extracted from Il contemporaneo, Rome, 6 Mar. 1847).

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The constitutional texts that were adopted in 1848–9 were based on the French and Belgian model. Its acceptance came suddenly and unexpectedly, for, until approximately February, 1848, most local notables (the patriziato) of moderate sympathies in northern and central Italy were in favour of a territo­ rial rather than a ‘national’ representation. Namely, the state was viewed as a pyramid of ever more territorially comprehensive local bodies (whose members were not always to be chosen by popular election), and the prevailing idea was that the elected members should represent their territory of provenance, not the whole nation. This is a reason why consulte di stato, rather than modern constitutions, were demanded.154 The conclusion that historians have drawn is that the patriziato adhered to the national programme not out of liberal or ­patriotic belief, but to regain their privileges against the ­regional states’ centralizing strategies.155 The likely reasons for the change of mind which suddenly intervened were, first, the acceleration induced by the ­‘national’ charter granted in Naples at the end of January; second, a widespread fear that the mounting democratic movement would impose, over time, more advanced charters on the basis of local institutions; and, third, a series of articles by ­Cavour, appearing between January and February, which endorsed constitutional government on the European model and criticised territorial r­ epresentation, besides warning about the democratic danger.156 Eventually, the constitutions that were granted were short documents focusing on the prerogatives of the monarch, who shared the legislative power with a lower house of elected deputies and an upper house of appointed senators. The franchise was very restricted.157 Only the Sardinian constitution, the Statuto, octroyée in March, 1848, 154 Luca Mannori, ‘Le Consulte di Stato’, Rassegna storica toscana, 45 (1999), 347–79; Chia­ vistelli, Dallo Stato alla nazione, 181–237. 155 See Marco Meriggi, ‘Società, istituzioni e ceti dirigenti’, in Giovanni Sabbatucci and Vittorio Vidotto (eds.), Storia d’Italia (Bari, 1994), i, 119–228; id., ‘Prima e dopo l’Unità: Il problema dello stato’, in Betri, Rileggere l’Ottocento, 41–8; Kroll, La rivolta del patriziato. 156 Romanelli, ‘Nazione e costituzione’, 288–9; Chiavistelli, Dallo Stato alla nazione, 243–9. See the following articles by Cavour appearing in the Turinese newspaper Il Risorgimento, and now collected in ccts, iii: [Legge elettorale: 1. Diritto politico e diritto amministrativo], 12 Feb. 1848, 1089–93; [Legge elettorale: 2. Del numero dei deputati], 19 Feb. 1848, 1094–8; ‘Legge elettorale: [3.] Della circoscrizione elettorale’, 22 Feb. 1848, 1099–1101; [Legge elettorale: 4. L’elettorato attivo], 23 Feb. 1848, 1104–09. The titles and part of titles in square brackets did not feature in the original texts but have been added by the editors of ccts. 157 Antonio Chiavistelli, ‘Tra identità locale e appartenenza nazionale: Costituzioni e parlamenti nell’Italia del 1848’, in Annamari Nieddu and Francesco Soddu (eds.), Assemblee rappresentative, autonomie territoriali, culture politiche (Sassari, 2011), 491–502.

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survived the revolutionary biennium. If Gioberti and d’Azeglio were quick to shift to constitutionalism, while Balbo was slower, overall they did not indulge in backward-looking municipalism.158 The events of 1848–9 made the moderates’ pursuit of unanimity out of the question. Granted that in the 1850s they would aggressively refute democracy, republicanism, and socialism, d’Azeglio exhibited the new approach early and pungently. As already pointed out, he ‘curse[d]’ the ‘obscure political adventurers’ who had orchestrated that ‘monument to patriotic shame’ – the Leghorn uprising of September, 1848 against the Florentine moderate government – by exploiting the people’s passions. A few months later, he denounced the very idea of parties and Mazzini’s Giovine Italia in particular – a bunch of self-­interested coffee-shop revolutionaries – while complaining about Italians’ poor public spirit.159 Among the examples of ‘democratic governments’ d’Azeglio censured there was also that, lasting for three months only (from December, 1848 to February, 1849), headed by none other than Gioberti. I­ mpressed by the ‘social’ revolution in Paris in June, Gioberti had in fact come to espouse the cause of the people. D’Azeglio stressed a point on which the whole moderate camp, including Rosmini and Cavour, agreed: 1848 had witnessed the forging of a formidable and worrying connection between the struggle for the republic and that for social and economic equality.160 Rosmini’s critique of socialism (1849), which he ascribed to a ‘satanic inspiration’, focused on its moral ­‘fatalism’. The denial of personal responsibility postulated by Owen and Fourier entailed the rejection of spiritual, and hence political, liberty and the enthronement of ‘passions’. Under socialism they ruled people unchallenged, for it was only through the exercise of moral liberty that ‘man’ could curb them. More generally, this essay of Rosmini’s, building on La società ed il suo fine, reiterated at a crucial juncture that a democrat was a slave of passions, hence ‘he’ would of necessity bring tyranny to the polity.161

158 A reorganization of local institutions, to be formed via ‘popular election’, was d­ emanded in d’Azeglio’s Proposta, 304, albeit very succinctly. For Balbo, see Ceretti, ‘Per una ­rivisitazione’, 509–13; for Gioberti, see his criticism of localism (municipalismo) in Delle condizioni presenti, 97–103. Balbo and d’Azeglio, members of an aristocracy loyal to the dynasty, never deemed the state to be a hostile power encroaching on local prerogatives. 159 D’Azeglio, ‘Non dispotismo nè di trono nè di piazza’; id., Timori e speranze; id., ‘Ai suoi elettori’. 160 See e.g. d’Azeglio, Timori e speranze, 87–108. 161 Rosmini, ‘Il comunismo’, 88–95, 104–7, 113.

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Catholicism and Moderate Politics, from Muratori to Chateaubriand

This section and the following one deal with the intellectual origins of the political moderatism of the 1840s. Its peculiarity entails that its sources were many and diverse, as historians have often acknowledged. To Franco Venturi, who noted ‘the lack of a central inspiration’, moderatism had been informed by the Italian reformers of the eighteenth century as well as by Sismondi, the authors of the French Restoration, and the political economy of free trade.162 In agreement with Carlo Morandi, Walter Maturi regarded the Italian reformist elites of the eighteenth century as the antecedents of both the moderates and the democrats. To Maturi, the ‘rationalist mentality’ and exclusive concern with civil liberties of Pietro Verri, Genovesi, Antonio Radicati di Passerano, and others developed into the historicism and the quest for political liberty characterising the following century.163 Luigi Salvatorelli made the origins of moderatism lie in both Doctrinarisme and the rationalist philosophies of the previous century – in spite of the ton of criticism the moderates had levelled at the latter, he added. In his view Gioberti’s philosophy was idiosyncratic, however.164 These historians’ genealogies are unsatisfactory, because they are too vague and general, and too roughly delineated. This section focuses on the sources of the association of Catholicism with a ‘moderate’ pattern of politics; the writers considered are Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Chateaubriand, and Muratori. With the exception of Muratori, these authors have already been pinpointed by a major historian of moderatism, Ettore Passerin d’Entrèves, but with exclusive reference to Balbo’s formative years.165 If it is unquestionable that Machiavelli, Montesquieu, and Chateaubriand influenced the moderates of the 1840s, who occasionally made explicit reference to them, the case of Muratori is different for they never mentioned his political thought. As indicated (Ch. 1, Sect. 7), Rosmini circulated his approach to ethics and spirituality, but, prima facie, nothing of the kind occurred with respect to his political perspective. Yet, first, 162 Franco Venturi, ‘La circolazione delle idee’, Rassegna storica del Risorgimento, 41 (1954), 213, 216, 220. De Ruggiero and Jemolo mentioned only the juste milieu ideas of the French Restoration as the inspiration behind 1840s moderatism; see De Ruggiero, The History, 294; Jemolo, Scritti, 406–8. 163 Walter Maturi, ‘Partiti politici e correnti di pensiero nel Risorgimento’, in Passerin d’Entrèves, Nuove questioni, i, 39–45; in support, Maturi refers to Carlo Morandi, ‘Il pro­ blema delle riforme nei risultati della recente storiografia’, in id., Problemi storici ­italiani ed europei del xviii e xix secolo (Milan, 1937), 81–109. 164 Salvatorelli, Il pensiero politico, 264. 165 Passerin d’Entrèves, La giovinezza di Cesare Balbo.

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morality had political consequences to both Muratori and Rosmini; and, second, the link Muratori established between religion and political moderation was momentous on the Italian scene, but it was built with traditional materials, which the moderates themselves would use – it has been shown above, for instance, that they argued for the power of religion to improve the monarch’s character (Ch. 1, Sect. 5), a power Muratori had made much of. Bringing Muratori in serves to give depth and perspective to the moderates’ Catholicisation of politics – their dream had been Muratori’s, one hundred years before.166 In other national contexts, the relationship between the Catholic Aufklärung and ‘liberalism’ has been a major focus of interest for decades, especially to the historians of the Habsburg monarchy. An early protagonist of that debate, Eduard Winter, was curt: Spätjosephinismus ist Frühliberalismus, he wrote in 1968.167 The moderates paid heed to Machiavelli in spite of his notorious ­immorality, which at any rate the Florentine review Antologia ascribed to the wickedness of the times rather than to the nature of the man.168 In absorbing his lesson about prudenza – the art of making appropriate choices – the moderates stressed especially the point about the necessity for the prince to be in tune with the times.169 This translated into a view of public opinion as all-powerful: whereas the ultras are attempting to stop the march of progress and the republicans to quicken it, it was argued, public opinion reflects the stage civilization has reached and therefore it is both forceful and ‘just’.170 Machiavelli’s prudence was regarded as a form of moderation. It was related to a vision of the future of Italy as a whole, a vision which stemmed from sincere patriotism and not from the special interest of a faction, in spite of the denunciation of the role of the papacy. He was also among the writers who had brought a concern with the morality of the citizenry to the forefront of political 166 On Muratori embodying the relationship between intelligentsia and reform that the Ri­ sorgimento moderates would later upheld, see Sergio La Salvia, ‘La “costruzione della nazione”: Il contributo della tradizione moderata’, in Umberto Levra, ed., Nazioni, nazionalità, stati nazionali nell’Ottocento europeo (Turin, 2004), 129–72. 167 Eduard Winter, Frühliberalismus in der Donaumonarchie: Religiöse, nationale und wissenschaftliche Strömungen von 1790–1848 (Berlin, 1968), 13. See, more recently, Klaus Koch, ‘Frühliberalismus in Österreich bis zum Vorabend der Revolution 1848’, in Dieter Langewiesche (ed.), Liberalismus im 19. Jahrhundert: Deutschland im europäischen Vergleich (Göttingen, 1988), 64–70; Franz L. Fillafer, ‘Die Aufklärung in der Habsburgermonarchie und ihr Erbe: Ein Forschungsüberblick’, Zeitschrift für historische Forschung, 40 (2013), 35–97. 168 Alessandro Volpi, ‘Medici versus Machiavelli: Temi rinascimentali nell’Antologia di Giovan Pietro Vieusseux’, Rivista storica italiana, 113 (2001), 195–218. 169 See esp. Machiavelli, Discorsi, bk. iii, Ch. 9. 170 See e.g. Gioberti, Il gesuita moderno, iii, 197.

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thinking – Montesquieu was another one. However, with all their admiration for Machiavelli’s tactics and Italian patriotism, the Principe remained a nefarious book to the moderates. Prudence and moderation as forms of ‘temperance’, one of the cardinal virtues, had been extolled within Christianity since the early theologians. The association between political moderation and religion was also age-old, as indicated by Proverbs, 25:15: ‘Through patience a ruler can be persuaded, and a gentle tongue can break a bone’. Montesquieu and Muratori re-proposed that association, blending new arguments with traditional ones. Montesquieu is commonly regarded as the epitome of moderatism by virtue of passages like this: ‘I say it, and it seems to me that I have written this work [the Esprit des lois] only to prove it: the spirit of moderation should be that of the legislator; the political good, like the moral good, is always found between two limits’.171 Besides viewing moderation as a virtue especially appropriate to the aristocracy (a point Balbo and d’Azeglio certainly appreciated), Montesquieu linked moderate government, and a moderate monarchy in particular, to Christianity and Catholicism in particular. He praised the douceur of Christianity, a religion of love and charity making people of all ranks participate in the same ceremonies, and prompting a sense of civic duty; Christianity was diametrically opposed to despotism with the immoderate cruelty it involved. The link between monarchical government and Catholicism was accounted for on the grounds that both were ruled by a chef visible, and that a monarchy suited the character traits that he deemed typical of southern Europe, where Catholicism prevailed, better than a republic did.172 Furthermore, once the whole of Esprit des lois is considered, there emerges an argument for moderation in terms of natural law. Montesquieu famously stated that climate, mores, religion, and the established laws and principles of government made up the esprit général, which was the true basis for legislation. Whatever the form of government, rulers should avoid interfering with esprit général and, when forced to do so, should act slowly and with the utmost care.173

171 See the passage in Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, ed. and tr. Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller, and Harold S. Stone (Cambridge, 1989), bk. xxix, Ch. 1, p. 602. See e.g. Aurelian Craiutu, A Virtue for Courageous Minds: Moderation in French Political Thought (Princeton, 2012), 33–68; Céline Spector, ‘Was Montesquieu Liberal? The Spirit of the Laws in the History of Liberalism’, in Geenens and Rosenblatt, French Liberalism, 57–72. 172 Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois, vol. i, bk. iii, Ch. 4, pp. 146–7; bk. xix, Ch. 18, p. 471; vol. ii, bk. xxiv, Chs. 3–5, pp. 141–3. 173 Romani, National Character, 22–31.

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If Montesquieu claimed to be writing with the detachment of a political s­ cientist, Muratori addressed the relationship between Christianity and moderation in a reformist spirit. In his economic treatise Della pubblica felicità, ‘moderation’ featured as the proper glory of the prince. His greatness consisted in having the possibility to do evil (imposing rapacious taxes, waging unprovoked wars, and the like), but choosing not to, thus demonstrating his acceptance of the fact that he, too, was subject to laws, whether divine or positive. By prescribing the implementation of ‘justice’, ‘concord’ (a feeling of social togetherness), and ‘compassion’ or love of others (carità), Catholicism acted as a necessary constraint on the prince’s potentially wild passions, hence as a guarantee of moderation in government – the only one for that matter.174 Muratori, who never hinted at any change in the mechanisms of power, did not question the prince’s autocracy, whose legitimacy lay in the ‘happiness’ he bestowed on the subjects. In view of Muratori’s solidarity with the weak and defenceless, and of his awareness of widespread injustice and misery, there resulted an ambiguous stance, eliciting tensions in his political attitude.175 For example, Della pubblica felicità concluded with a short chapter in which, on the one hand, Muratori recommended ‘patience’, ‘resignation’, and ‘humility’ in the face of a bad prince in general and one waging an aggressive war in particular, but, on the other hand, he protested vehemently against the evils of misrule. Eventually, he merely reminded the prince that God placed him at the helm to pursue the good of subjects.176 It is fair to deduce that the prince’s degree of compliance with religious precepts determined the worth of his rule. Like Muratori, most Italian philosophes of the second half of the century refrained from discussing forms of government, as they focused on the economy and the law instead.177 174 Muratori, Della pubblica felicità, 47–8, 86–7, 122–6; id., La filosofia morale, 273–4. Muratori’s remark on the sovereign’s merit of not doing the evil which was in his or her power to do was probably drawn from Ecclesiasticus (or Sirach) 31: 8–10, a passage quoted by Aquinas in De regno ad regem Cypri (1267), ed. Roberto Busa and Enrique Alarcón, bk. i, Ch. 10, in Corpus Thomisticum [online library] , accessed Jul. 2016. 175 Muratori, La filosofia morale, 152–4. 176 Muratori, Della pubblica felicità, 457–60; also 22–23. 177 Filangieri, on whom discussion has been lively in recent times, was a major exception. See Vincenzo Ferrone, La società giusta ed equa: Repubblicanesimo e diritti dell’uomo in Gaetano Filangieri (Bari, 2003), where Filangieri is depicted as a republican advocating human rights, and Carlo Capra, ‘“Repubblicanesimo dei moderni” e “costituzionalismo illuministico”: Riflessioni sull’uso di nuove categorie storiografiche’, Società e storia, 25 (2003), 355–71, challenging Ferrone’s interpretation.

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It adds significantly to the interest and novelty of Della pubblica felicità that it was not embedded in the mirror-for-princes tradition, although it featured some elements of it, but adopted the idiom of political economy.178 Concerned about Italian decadence and backwardness, Muratori engaged in several battles for rationalizing society and the Church. His reformist programme included the advocacy of a ‘moderate’ model of devotion, denying, for instance, the reality of witchcraft; a struggle for the reduction of liturgical holy days of obligation; an effort to modernize academies, freeing them from the vacuity of Scholastic philosophy; a protest against the abuses of civil jurisprudence; and a strategy for economic development and administrative reorganization, feeding on political economy. He was a protagonist of a long conflict over jurisdictional rights between his prince, duke Rinaldo i of Este, and the pope (1708–25).179 Muratori strove to put into practice the Stoic and participatory ethics he formulated, an ethics making the sage pursue what was rational – namely ‘useful’ to the community – in agreement with a ruler practising moral self-restraint. Clearly enough, Muratori’s political stance was not as progressive as Montesquieu’s, considering that the Frenchman took the English constitution as model. With respect to the spectrum of political attitudes expressed by Catholicism in eighteenth-century Italy, Muratori steered a middle course. On the conservative end of the spectrum there was Alfonso Maria de Liguori (1696–1787), the Neapolitan theologian and bishop who, with his opposition to rigorism, his mysticism, and his fervent Mariology put forward a model of devotion that was in sharp contrast to Muratori’s.180 What marks Della pubblica felicità out from 178 Muratori also had in mind the anti-Machiavellian treatises aimed at instructing rulers which, in the wake of the Council of Trent, the Holy See arranged to be published; see Raymond Darricau, ‘Le prince chretien dans la pensée de Lodovico Antonio Muratori’, in Ricuperati, La fortuna, 331–47. 179 For Muratori’s battle against false miracles and ‘excesses’ in the cult of the Virgin Mary, see Arturo Carlo Jemolo, Il giansenismo in Italia prima della Rivoluzione (Bari, 1928), 229–37, and Pietro Stella, ‘Preludi culturali e pastorali della Regolata divozion de’ cristiani’, in Vecchi, L.A. Muratori, 241–70; on his regalist polemic against curial claims, for which he narrowly escaped excommunication, see S.J. Barnett, ‘The Temporal Imperative: Criticism and Defence of Eighteenth-Century Roman Theocracy’, History of Political Thought, 22 (2001), 472–93. 180 Liguori replied to Muratori’s strictures on the Marian cult in Glorie di Maria (1750; Rome, 1839), ii, 585–607; see Giuseppe Cacciatore, ‘Alfonso Maria de Liguori, santo’, dbi, ii, 1960. Liguori’s moral theology was espoused by Piedmontese ultramontane circles after 1815; see De Rosa, Storia, i, 28–32. Gioberti denounced the Jesuits’ appropriation of his figure and perversion of his doctrines, which at any rate lacked profundity in his opinion; see Il

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Liguori’s La fedeltà de’ vassalli verso Dio (1777) is that Muratori did not present the prince as divinely inspired, but as a capricious individual needing guidance by the wise to fulfil his task – thus coming close to a pre-­revolutionary form of the consultative monarchy the moderates would advocate. Both Aquinas’s view that tyrants were ordained by God to punish evil peoples, and Liguori’s argument that the struggle against non-Catholics was the chief assignment of rulers, were foreign to Muratori.181 On the progressive end of the spectrum, the aforementioned Spedalieri stands out. Even if he condemned the Revolution as the product of philosophes’ and Freemasons’ hatred for religion, Spedalieri envisaged a ‘civil society’ originating from a ‘social contract’ warranting sovereignty to the people. There ensued the legitimacy of revolt if the ruler betrayed ‘his’ pledge to bring about the happiness of citizens. The task of the ‘mixed government’ he recommended was to uphold their natural rights.182 Spedalieri’s perspective was clearly different from that of the moderates, although he may have influenced Rosmini’s concern with rights. The moderates rather followed in Muratori’s footsteps, in the sense of seeing politics as an eminently moral venture, of equating morality with moderation, and of believing that Catholicism could imbue the polity with it. A difference was that Muratori had been chiefly concerned with the moderation of the prince, while the moderates addressed that of the people as well. According to Balbo, the eighteenth century had witnessed a slow but real progress on the peninsula – reforms were peacefully introduced from above, he implied approvingly – but the revolutionary wave disrupted it. Napoleon’s armies brought ‘the two extreme parts’ to Italy, whose civilization had been marked by ‘moderation’ until then.183 The seemingly irredeemable divorce between Catholicism and liberty was probably the most momentous legacy of the years 1796–1815 to the moderates. The waves of anti-clericalism and Napoleon’s control of the Church seemed to legitimise the ultramontane stance, whose fortunes in Italian religious circles were in fact remarkable. Yet there was a book, written by a man who was an ultraroyaliste for some years, which corroborated the link between religion, liberty, and moderation. By re-­inventing Christianity in the wake of the Revolution, Chateaubriand’s 1802 Génie du gesuita moderno, ii, 469–73. Gioberti condemned the Marian cult in general and the immaculate conception in particular in posthumous texts, written in the 1850s; see Mustè, La scienza ideale, 268. 181 Aquinas, De regno, bk. i, Ch. 11; Alfonso Maria de Liguori, La fedeltà de’ vassalli verso Dio li rende fedeli anche al loro principe (1777; Turin, 1827), 8–9, 19–28. 182 Spedalieri, De’ diritti dell’uomo. 183 Balbo, Speranze, 10–11.

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Christianisme provided lasting inspiration to all Risorgimento moderates, revelling in a eulogy of Christianity imbued with a Romantic sensibility which, unlike Rousseau’s, was politically safe.184 Chateaubriand contended that Europe owed its civilization to religion, and in particular to the morality it had spread. The political evolution of Europe had been ‘natural’ and ‘divine’, with the clergy playing a moderating role in the états généraux of the various countries, and with the popes safeguarding the weak (the slaves, for instance) and implanting mildness (douceur) in the hearts of rulers. The popes had been the single power countering the kings. So far there is little, if any, that a Maistre or a Bonald would not have approved of. The book is devoid of any criticism of Christianity, whether of its dogmatic, organizational, or political aspects. But contrary to the aforementioned writers, who at the turn of the century were reasserting the divine origin of supreme power, Chateaubriand was silent about sovereignty, so crucial an issue after 1789. Rather, he defined representative government as ‘one of those three or four discoveries that have created a different universe’, and claimed that Evangelical morality had inspired it.185 He owed his admiration for the British constitution to Montesquieu, with whom he shared many other stances, such as the antithesis between Christianity and arbitrary rule.186 Thus Chateaubriand, exactly like the moderates, unreservedly traced civilization back to Christianity while viewing a measure of liberty as one of its distinctive contemporary manifestations. To him the Revolution could not be identified with the Terror, and, at any rate, it was a fait accompli. Chateaubriand helped shape the moderate sensibility, too. He belonged to the Rousseauesque strand apropos passions, meaning that to him Christianity itself was une sorte de passion, with ‘its transports, its ardour, its sighs, its joys, its tears, its love of society and of solitude’.187 Génie is a ‘poetic eulogy’ of Christianity, he claimed, a guise which suits the Zeitgeist. He later recalled that the goal of the book had been to counter Voltaire on his own ground: the salon society moulding l’opinion du monde.188 Chateaubriand made Christianity fashionable, so to speak, by taking it out of the cloisters and into the literary 184 Passerin d’Entrèves, La giovinezza di Cesare Balbo, 79, 102, 203–4, 207–9, 216. 185 François-René de Chateaubriand, Génie du Christianisme (Paris, 1836), iv, 55–64, 69–70, 88. In 1814 he confirmed that ‘representative government was born out of Christian institutions’; see his ‘Réflexions politiques’, in id., Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1836), v, 29–84 at 48–51. 186 Chateaubriand, Génie, iv, 60, 63. 187 Ibid., ii, 89. See Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 205. 188 François-René de Chateaubriand, ‘Défense du Génie du Christianisme’, in id., Génie, iv, 149–82 at 158.

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world. A Romantic taste was not alien to the moderates, who were avid readers of Manzoni, wrote historical novels, and were suspicious of l’esprit raisonneur et philosophique pretending to base society on the clash of private interests. Of course, they moralized any Romantic suggestion they came across, but Chateaubriand’s book could hardly be improved in this respect. He was at pains to sanitise the massive dose of emotional warmth that came with his view of Christianity as a passion shaping history and art. Chateaubriand endorsed doctrinal orthodoxy, penned a Maistre-like panegyric on the papacy, and argued that Christianity had transformed all passions by curbing pride and exalting charity (charité) and humility. In the case of patriotism, for example, religion had taught that it ought to take second place to justice. Religious faith came from the heart – the province of sentiments and passions, in contrast with the coldness of reason – yet he was careful to remind the reader that ‘a thing is good … only if it includes a moral purpose’.189 Apropos reason, he did not concede anything to critics of religion. He contended that Christianity ‘stands the test of reason perfectly’, and even argued, like Pascal, that it was the proper culte des philosophes.190 Sublimating the passions through religion, cultivating morality, and establishing a free government: Chateaubriand’s blend of Montesquieu with ultramontanism was key to the moderates. He had demonstrated that some of the arguments spread by Maistre or Bonald – most remarkably, that Christianity was the mainspring of civilization – could be combined with a (mildly) progressive agenda. There was also a militant note in Génie which the moderates certainly were sympathetic to. Chateaubriand had not only made public virtues stem from the conviction that only religious faith could give, but had also hinted at a mission awaiting the post-revolutionary Church. This degenerate world requires ‘a second preaching of the Gospel’, he claimed, in order to heal spiritual wounds and restore the harmony between ‘man’ and God.191 Some of Chateaubriand’s stances would be taken up by Constant and especially by Staël – the advocacy of representative government, the praise of British institutions, and the view that liberty was necessarily sustained by religious sentiment – but they doubted that Catholicism was compatible with liberty, whereas in their opinion Protestantism definitely was.192

189 Chateaubriand, Génie, i, 75–8, 202; ii, 59–60, 256. 190 Ibid., i, 9; iv, 86, 94–5. 191 Ibid., i, 76–8; iv, 35. 192 Germaine de Staël, Considérations sur la Révolution française, ed. Jacques Godechot (1818; Paris, 1983); see Jennings, Revolution and the Republic, Ch. 7.

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A further aspect of the relationship between moderation and Christianity needs to be focused on before concluding this section. Both the philosophical Catholics and the moderates of the 1840s were doctrinally orthodox and respectful of Roman authority in all things theological. Granted that they were favourable to some kind of Church reform, the issue remained rather subterranean over the 1840s, with the exception of Gioberti’s denunciation of the Jesuits from 1845 onwards. Rosmini, who clashed with the Jesuits over philosophical matters between 1839 and 1843, wrote a treatise on Church renewal in 1832–3, but published it only in 1848.193 Likewise, neither Muratori nor Genovesi had challenged the core system of beliefs of Catholicism, and both had acknowledged the Roman theological authority. Yet, the Aufklärer can be regarded as the initiators of a ‘moderate’ approach to religious matters that Rosmini and Gioberti would continue, and transpose first from religion to philosophy and then from philosophy to politics. Muratori’s De ingeniorum moderatione in religionis negotio (1714) argued forcefully in favour of the thesis that the non-dogmatic part of Catholicism could, and should, be examined by rational analysis. Not only should ecclesiastical history be scrutinised, but also 193 Rosmini’s Delle cinque piaghe della Santa Chiesa levelled various criticisms at the worldliness of the Church and the decay of the priestly ideal. He recommended a reform of the education of the clergy, the participation of the laity in the election of bishops, the renunciation of the Church’s earthly advantages, and, more generally, a return to the spirit of early Christianity. In Dell’Italia as well as in other lesser known writings, Tommaseo denounced temporal power and advocated a comprehensive reform in the organization of the Church; see Gentile, Gino Capponi, 206–7; Guido Verucci, ‘Il cattolicesimo liberale e sociale di Niccolò Tommaseo’, in Turchi and Volpi, Niccolò Tommaseo, 19–35. A posthumous essay by Gioberti, written in the early 1850s and appearing in 1856, argued for radical changes, such as the abolition of clerical celibacy and temporal power, and even a limitation of papal theological authority; see Vincenzo Gioberti, Della riforma cattolica della Chiesa: Frammenti, ed. Giuseppe Massari (Turin, 1856); id., I frammenti ‘Della riforma cattolica’ e ‘Della libertà cattolica’, ed. Gustavo Balsamo-Crivelli (Florence, 1924); for a comment, see Mustè, La scienza ideale, 259–83. Gioberti had already argued against temporal power in Del rinnovamento, ii, 259–304. The Tuscan priest Raffaello Lambruschini (1788–1873) questioned basic doctrinal points along quasi-Protestant lines, but the public expression of his views occurred only in a few articles appearing in the paper La Patria of Florence between 1847 and 1848. See his Dell’autorità e della libertà: Pensieri d’un solitario, ed. Angiolo Gambaro (Florence, 1932). Latitudinarian and evangelical motifs, inspired by Sismondi, de Gérando, and Constant, were introduced into Tuscany by the journalist and publisher Giovan Pietro Vieusseux (1779–1863), who was of Genevan origin; see Giorgio Spini, Risorgimento e protestanti (1956; Turin, 1998), esp. 72–9, 107–15, 145–59; Marco Manfredi, ‘Religiosità civile nell’Europa di Vieusseux’, in Maurizio Bossi (ed.), Giovan Pietro Vieusseux: Pensare l’Italia guardando all’Europa (Florence, 2013), 59–80.

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the justifications for dogmas and their forms of expression were proper subjects of intellectual debate. Muratori, who believed that fanaticism and ‘inerudite zeal’ had often harmed the Catholic cause, went as far as affirming that the popes had occasionally made mistakes in these matters.194 Genovesi similarly aimed to minimise the dogmatic part of Christianity by identifying precisely the doctrines that were impervious to reason; he, too, did not approve of the cult of the Virgin Mary preached by his fellow Neapolitan Liguori.195 Rosmini and Gioberti developed the Aufklärer’s approach. They devised a ‘philosophical religion’ in tune with the progress of reason – taking issue with Condillac, Kant, Reid, Cousin, etc. – while also giving due weight to the ‘revealed element’. As philosophers, Gioberti and Rosmini engaged in a heated exchange (1839–46), but in fact their middle-of-the-road systems were remarkably similar: the common goal was to provide Catholicism with an updated gnoseological foundation, through which the faithful could secure a moral and psychological identity suitable for the post-revolutionary world.196 As they also put it, reason was the most powerful weapon in the fight against deism and atheism, and therefore ‘an irrefutable system of truths’ should be built through philosophical reasoning, but taking the Revelation as a basis.197 (Balbo’s concept of ‘Christian civilization’ equally combined reason, in the form of historical analysis, with faith). In this respect the moderates differed from the ultramontane, who had eschewed philosophical confrontation with the irreligious. At the same time, Gioberti denounced Lamennais’s attempt to explain religious dogmas through rational analysis – the abbé had turned ‘pantheist’ in the 1840s, in his view – on the grounds that ‘mystery’ and ‘miracle’ were the substance of religion.198 Political moderatism, most obviously in the cases of 194 Lamindi Pritanii [Ludovico Antonio Muratori], De ingeniorum moderatione in religionis negotio (Paris, 1714). According to Ferrone, Muratori’s approach was congruent with Galilei’s plan of a clear-cut separation between science and faith; see The intellectual roots, 102–5. 195 Giuseppe Galasso, ‘Il pensiero religioso di Antonio Genovesi’, Rivista storica italiana, 82 (1970), 803–4. 196 Traniello, Cattolicesimo conciliatorista, 31–3; id., ‘Il “mondo cattolico” ’, 403–6. On the clash between Gioberti and Rosmini, see Garin, Storia della filosofia italiana, iii, 1109–11. 197 Traniello, Cattolicesimo conciliatorista, 54–7, quoting Michele Tarditi’s sentence. For the boundaries Rosmini drew between reason and faith, see Traniello, Società religiosa, 194– 200. For Manzoni’s view that faith was a form of submission that reason called for, see Massimo Petrocchi, ‘Note sulle idee di spiritualità manzoniana’, in Francesco Margiotta Broglio, Chiesa, 383–92. 198 Gioberti, Teorica del sovranaturale, i, 355–6; id., ‘Lettre’, 23–31. The subtitle of Teorica is: ‘A treatise on the relationship of revealed religion to the human mind and the civil progress of nations’.

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Rosmini’s La società ed il suo fine and Gioberti’s Primato, fed on this kind of philosophical work, inasmuch as reform stood on the shoulders of a religious orthodoxy turned into a balanced and up-to-date form of knowledge. 8

All-Encompassing Religion: The Influence of Ultramontanism

The divide between the moderates and the ultramontane (also called ‘intransigents’) has always seemed obvious to historians.199 The recognition that the ‘liberal Catholicism’ of individual figures – notably Rosmini – evolved out of intransigentism has not led to a consideration of the influence of that paradigm on moderate culture as a whole.200 Actually, historians have failed to acknowledge the very existence of an ultramontane paradigm in Italy, in the widespread belief that the ‘theoretical content’ recognizable in reactionary authors was ‘extremely scarce’, whereas it was just unoriginal.201 Granted 199 But some have hinted at a more complex scenario; see Anna Maria Battista, ‘Aspetti del tradizionalismo italiano nell’età della Restaurazione’, in Anna Maria Battista et al., La Restaurazione in Italia: Strutture e ideologie (Rome, 1976), 249; Traniello, ‘Le origini’, 19–20; Guido Verucci, L’Italia laica prima e dopo l’Unità 1848–1876 (Bari, 1996), 4. More recently, David Laven has pointed out that ‘divisions between patriot and non-patriot, radical and reactionary’ were often blurred; see his ‘Why Patriots Wrote and What Reactionaries Read: Reflections on Alberto Banti’s La nazione del Risorgimento’, Nations and Nationalisms, 15 (2009), 419–26. This section of the chapter is a revised and abridged version of pp. 622–7 of Roberto Romani, ‘Liberal Theocracy in the Italian Risorgimento’, European History Quarterly, 44, (2014), 620–50. 200 On Rosmini’s ultramontane phase, see Traniello, Società religiosa, 57–91; for Balbo, see Passerin d’Entrèves, La giovinezza di Cesare Balbo, 203–11, 221–2, 227, 245. 201 Salvatorelli, Il pensiero politico, 196, 206. That the ultramontane lacked a theory has also been maintained by Venturi, ‘La circolazione delle idee’, 219–20; Guido Verucci, I cattolici e il liberalismo dalle ‘Amicizie cristiane’ al modernismo (Padua, 1968), 43; Sandro Fontana, La controrivoluzione cattolica in Italia (1820–1830) (Brescia, 1968), 92; Ettore Passerin d’Entrèves, ‘I conservatori e i contro-rivoluzionari dalla Restaurazione all’Unità’, in Ettore Passerin D’Entrèves et al., Bibliografia dell’età del Risorgimento (Florence, 1971–7), i, 121; Nicola Del Corno, Gli ‘scritti sani’: Dottrina e propaganda della reazione italiana dalla Restaurazione all’Unità (Milan, 1992), 19–25; id., La formazione dell’opinione pubblica e la libertà di stampa nella pubblicistica reazionaria del Risorgimento, 1831–1847 (Florence, 1997), 19, 87–9. For a contrary view see Mario Sancipriano, Lamennais in Italia: Autorità e libertà nel pensiero filosofico-religioso del Risorgimento (Milan, 1973), esp. 139, 143. A reason for ignoring the ultramontane paradigm lies in historians’ proclivity to bracket the ultramontane with other conservatives who did lack a theoretical inspiration, like the prince of Canosa or Paride Zajotti.

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that the political divorce between moderatism and intransigentism was sharp, the cultural one was in fact nuanced. The chief element of continuity was the pervasiveness of the religious viewpoint, called to account for every facet of civilization. Even the moderatism that re-formed in Piedmont in the 1850s, which might have been immune because of the kingdom’s secularizing policies, featured a Providence-centred approach (see Ch. 4, Sect. 3). A survey of the Italian ultramontane’s chief arguments, including Taparelli d’Azeglio’s, will be followed by a paragraph detailing the common ground with the moderates. The ultramontane movement rested on several reviews evenly spread across the peninsula.202 Chief among them were Enciclopedia ecclesiastica (Naples, 1821–2), L’amico d’Italia (Turin, 1822–9), Memorie di religione (Modena, 1822– 55), Giornale ecclesiastico at the time of Gioacchino Ventura’s contributions (Rome, 1825–6), and La voce della ragione (Pesaro, 1832–5). In accordance with the militant character of these reviews, contributors did not claim originality and were happy to borrow their political thought from lodestars like Maistre, Bonald, Haller, and Lamennais. Two figures stand out: Ventura (1792–1861) and Monaldo Leopardi (1776–1847). The former was a Sicilian Teatin priest who, after editing Enciclopedia ecclesiastica, moved to Rome where exerted some influence on pope Leo xii; turning democrat in the 1840s, Ventura eventually left for France in disgrace (1849).203 Count Leopardi, based in the Marche region, became famous for a series of dialogues making fun of liberalism (1831), and subsequently created and edited La voce della ragione.204 Ultramontanism was prominent in Piedmont, chiefly thanks to the efforts of the marquis Cesare d’Azeglio – the father of both Massimo and Luigi Taparelli 202 On Italian ultramontanism see esp. Raffaele Colapietra, La Chiesa tra Lamennais e Metternich: Il pontificato di Leone xii (Brescia, 1963); Verucci, I cattolici e il liberalismo; Fontana, La controrivoluzione; Francesco Leoni, Storia della controrivoluzione in Italia (1789–1859) (Naples, 1975); Francesco Leoni, Domenico De Napoli, and Antonio Ratti, L’integralismo cattolico in Italia (1789–1859) (Naples, 1981); Angelo Ara, ‘Le correnti conservatrici in Italia’, in Umberto Corsini and Rudolf Lill (eds.), Istituzioni e ideologie in Italia e in Germania tra le rivoluzioni (Bologna, 1987), 95–126. 203 On Ventura, see Mario Tesini, Gioacchino Ventura: La Chiesa nell’età delle rivoluzioni (Rome, 1988); Eugenio Guccione (ed.), Gioacchino Ventura e il pensiero politico d’ispirazione cristiana dell’Ottocento (Florence, 1991). For a depiction of Ventura as a liberal conservative, see Paolo Pastori, ‘La diffusione del pensiero di padre Gioacchino Ventura nell’Italia della Restaurazione’, in Robertino Ghiringhelli and Oscar Sanguinetti (eds.), Il cattolicesimo lombardo tra Rivoluzione francese Impero e Unità (Pescara, 2006), 99–127. 204 On Leopardi, the father of the poet Giacomo, see Del Corno, Gli ‘scritti sani’, 106–25; Nada Fantoni, ‘Introduzione’, in id. (ed.), ‘La voce della ragione’ di Monaldo Leopardi (1832–1835) (Florence, 2004), pp. xi–cxv.

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d’Azeglio – who edited L’amico d’Italia. Furthermore, the Savoyard aristocrat Maistre was a magistrate and minister of state in Turin from 1818 to his death in 1821, and in those years he put the finishing touches to Du Pape, De l’Église gallicane dans son rapport avec le Souverain Pontife, and Les soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg.205 The Italian ultramontane were reactionary rather than conservative. They regularly accused the governments of the regional states of being soft on liberals, and criticized the policy of amalgamation (amalgama) of absolute rule and Napoleonic administration they pursued. These intransigent Catholics advocated a fully-fledged counter-revolution, namely a return to a society imbued with religion and governed by rulers by divine right – in practice, if not in intention, ultramontanism was subversive.206 Lamennais, rather than Maistre or Bonald, inspired this attitude. To Bonald for instance, religion ‘constitutes’ the state but ‘the clergy must obey the state’, which had authority over them. Lamennais, a critic of Gallicanism, put forward a stronger view of the Church’s primacy. The divine principles are ‘the first need of nations’ and ‘the reason for their existence’, he affirmed, so that ‘all proper [véritable] legislation emanates from God’; the state would be reduced to a mere arena for the clash of private interests if the divine prescriptions were neglected. ‘To the extent that truth [i.e. religion] fades out from politics, laws, and mores, the state weakens’, and society eventually reaches a stage in which ‘either everything dies or everything revives’.207 It is not paradoxical, then, that the ultramontane reviews shared the fate of the progressive ones, as three of those mentioned were closed by order of governments, while Ventura had to leave the Giornale ecclesiastico after a few months (the Memorie, based in a citadel of reactionarism like the duchy of Modena, was the exception).208

205 On Cesare d’Azeglio see Verucci, I cattolici e il liberalismo, 52–62; Candido Bona, Le ‘Amicizie’: Società segrete e rinascita religiosa (1770–1830) (Turin, 1962); De Rosa, Storia, i, 27–35. For an example of the recent Maistre renaissance, see Carolina Armenteros, The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and His Heirs, 1794–1854 (Ithaca, ny, 2011). There were differences among the Italian ultramontane groups, differences that are neglected in the following treatment but are stressed in Battista, ‘Aspetti’. 206 For a similar judgement apropos French ultramontanism, see Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford, 2001), 156. 207 Louis de Bonald, Législation primitive (Paris, 1802), ii, 116; Félicité de Lamennais, Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion (1817–23), in id., Œuvres complètes, vols. i–iv at vol. i, pp. 309, 326, 339. 208 Verucci, I cattolici e il liberalismo, 20–2.

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The foundation stone of Italian ultramontane thought was a vision of society as ordained by divine will. Society is a natural artefact which has existed since the beginning of time, it was argued, since humans cannot live outside it and never did. It necessitates various forms of authority – such as patriarchs, teachers, priests, and rulers – and therefore power too comes from God, who not by chance made individuals unequal in strength, determination, and intelligence.209 Hobbes and especially Rousseau were relentlessly countered on these grounds. Ventura was careful to point out that society had not formed by the union of different families but by the multiplication of individuals belonging to a single family, an interpretation excluding people’s choice and consent. Social authority, therefore, was seen as an extension of household authority. Leopardi specified that the establishment of sovereignty had occurred before the formulation of laws, which could not be made by individuals who were not bonded with each other by authority.210 The issue of legitimate sovereignty was the focal point of intransigentism. The theory of social contract, making the people the ultimate source of power, was thought to encapsulate the essence of ‘liberalism’. Two sentences from Paul, Romans, 13:1, were frequently quoted: non est potestas nisi a Deo and qui resistit potestati, Dei ordinationi resistit. The reason for obedience to human power lies in its godly origin, it was maintained; in fact, people somehow acknowledge a moral authority – a divine element – behind legitimate government. When both subjects and rulers are constrained by Catholic precepts, the former are obedient and the latter just and benevolent.211 On the contrary, liberal governments rest on force only, for liberals have expunged God from human society and put ‘man’ in its place. ‘Passions’ are then given free rein, and, as a consequence, stricter laws are needed. The representative assemblies set up in order to apply popular sovereignty are a farce, Leopardi contended. 209 See e.g. Pietro Cavedoni, ‘Risposta al sacerdote dell’Emilia che stampò in Rimino una ­lettera su gli avvenimenti politici nello Stato Pontificio nel febbrajo 1831’, Memorie di religione di morale e di letteratura, 18 (1831), 629–30; Luigi Ugolini, Catechismo contro-­ rivoluzionario (Fossombrone, 1836) (this book is a popularization of Haller’s Restauration der Staatswissenschaften, which was translated into Italian in 1840). In view of the great number of texts in which the same points are made, most references to the ultramontane literature should be intended as mere examples. 210 Gioacchino Ventura, ‘Saggio sul potere pubblico secondo i principj del Cristianesimo’, Giornale ecclesiastico di Roma, 4 (1825), 116–17; Monaldo Leopardi, [Editorial note], La voce della ragione, 1 (1832), 342. 211 Cavedoni, ‘Risposta’, 587–8; Ugolini, Catechismo, 261; [Antonino De Luca], ‘Considerazioni su i danni provenienti all’Italia dalla eccessiva diffusione e lettura de’giornali politici di Francia’, La voce della ragione, 1 (1832), 18–19.

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With the French example in mind, he pointed to limited suffrage, low turnout, and the rarity of elections, while nothing guaranteed that majorities were right; as the bishop Luigi Ugolini put it against Rousseau, ‘the will of a majority should not be confused with the general will’.212 Add that in a constitutional regime the monarch became ‘the servant’ of parliament, and the ensuing struggles regularly put social peace at risk.213 Subjects did not have the right to judge their ruler, for, if they did, s­ overeignty would be split. Revolution was never right, not even as a reaction to a sovereign altering the fundamental laws of the state, since these did not constrain his/ her absolute power. The Church only held title to judge a ruler and declare him/her deposed if proved a tyrant.214 Yet in the 1830s, in the face of liberal regimes in France and Belgium, it was argued by Leopardi and others that defying a government infringing religion and divine laws was legitimate.215 In full agreement with Lamennais’s Essai sur l’indifférence, the Italian ultramontane staunchly opposed both freedom of the press and religious toleration, on the grounds that ‘error’ should not be disseminated. The realm of ideas was too important to be left unguarded, considering that religious doctrines shaped all facets of human life. Equipped with the political philosophy just sketched, the Italian ultramontane embarked on a war of the worlds. To them ‘liberalism’ amounted to the ‘revolutionary spirit’ – aimed at both legitimate governments and Catholicism – that had broken loose in 1789. Liberalism, that is, was inextricably associated with Terror and the havoc wrought by Napoleon on Italy and the Papal States in particular.216 Inspired not only by Maistre and Lamennais but also by Bossuet’s controversy with Pierre Jurieu, these writers regarded the Protestant 212 Cavedoni, ‘Risposta’, 631; Monaldo Leopardi, ‘Il viaggio di Pulcinella’, in id., Raccolta di dialoghi e altri scritti (Malta, 1845), 87–132 at 116–19; Ugolini, Catechismo, 258. 213 Cosimo Andrea Sanminiatelli, Invalidità ingiustizia improvidezza del moderno statuto costituzionale della Spagna (Fossombrone, 1836), 31–2. For the sources of the arguments expounded in this paragraph, see esp. Bonald, Théorie du pouvoir politique, and Joseph de Maistre’s Essai sur le principe générateur des constitutions politiques (1814) and Étude sur la souveraineté (written 1794–6, first published 1870), both collected in Joseph de Maistre, Essai sur le principe générateur des constitutions politiques (Lyon, 1924), 1–85, 89–333. 214 Monaldo Leopardi, ‘Concordia fra le garanzie dei popoli e il potere assoluto dei re’, La voce della ragione, 2 (1832), 265–78; id., ‘Catechismo filosofico’, in id., Raccolta, 273–345 at 310–13. 215 Leopardi, ‘Concordia’, 270–1; Cavedoni, ‘Risposta’, 598; Stanislao Gatteschi, ‘I riformatori del mondo’, La voce della ragione, 4 (1833), 151–62 at 158; Cosimo Andrea Sanminiatelli, La costituzione la filantropia e la politica (Bologna, 1835), 18. 216 Cesare d’Azeglio, ‘Liberalismo: Patto sociale’, L’amico d’Italia, 1 (1822), 104. For an interpretation of the Napoleonic regime in a Providential light, see Gioacchino Ventura, Elogio funebre di Pio Settimo Pontefice Massimo (1823), in id., Elogi funebri (Milan, 1852), 1–50.

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r­ ebellion against authority as the root of evil. ‘The present revolution is nothing but Protestantism fully developed’, Ventura maintained, as Protestantism has paved the way for popular sovereignty by enthroning individuals’ opinion in every sphere of life.217 Authority loses its true foundation once neither duties nor rights emanate from ‘an inner principle’, and passions gain the upper hand when a person is morally independent.218 However, it was generally believed that the religious schism was about to end as a growing number of Protestants were returning to Catholicism. Haller’s conversion in 1821, which caused the greatest sensation across Europe, was heavily reported and discussed in the Italian ultramontane press. The link between moral depravation and liberalism was inextricable. As Leopardi put it, ‘a liberal is nothing but the slave of every guilty passion’.219 Conversely, to Ventura echoing Chateaubriand, the moral principles guiding European civilization reflected Catholic doctrine and had been first applied by the popes: protecting the weak, abolishing slavery, restraining peoples and rulers, establishing peaceful relations among nations, and so on.220 The intransigents were positive that Catholicism was the indispensable requirement of both morality and progress; but the latter was limited to non-moral sciences and material advancements, meaning that the real well-being of a society was moral in nature, and rested on allegiance to Catholic precepts. The progressive conception of history was rejected, in the belief that society had actually degenerated in the wake of both the Protestant schism and 1789, in spite of growing wealth.221 Leopardi went as far as suggesting that steam-powered 217 Gioacchino Ventura, ‘Della disposizione attuale degli spiriti in Europa’, Memorie di religione di morale e di letteratura, 7 (1825), 395. On the interpretation of Protestantism see Daniele Menozzi, La Chiesa cattolica e la secolarizzazione (Turin, 1993), 14–71 ff.; Danilo Raponi, Religion and Politics in the Risorgimento: Britain and the New Italy, 1861–1875 (Basingstoke, uk, 2014), 97–110. 218 Gioacchino Ventura, ‘Sullo stato attuale della religione cattolica in Europa’ (first published in Enciclopedia ecclesiastica, 1821), in id., Opere (Naples, 1856–64), xii, 412–33 at 428. 219 Monaldo Leopardi, [Editorial note], La voce della ragione, 1 (1832), 307. For the link between ‘philosophical liberty’ and subservience to ‘passions’ as posited by the early counterrevolutionaries, see Luciano Guerci, Uno spettacolo non mai più veduto al mondo: La ­Rivoluzione francese come unicità e rovesciamento negli scrittori controrivoluzionari italiani (1789–1799) (Turin, 2008), 121–37. 220 Gioacchino Ventura, ‘Spirito pubblico religioso: La Francia nel suo rapporto col Cristia­ nesimo’, Giornale ecclesiastico di Roma, 3 (1825), 201–2, 217–20. 221 D.P.M.O., ‘Sull’opera Du Pape del sig. Conte De Maistre’, L’amico d’Italia, 3 (1823), 150–2; Gioacchino Ventura, ‘La società e la politica’, Giornale ecclesiastico di Roma, 3 (1825), 68; U.P., ‘Riflessioni sopra i metodi degli studi’, Continuazione delle memorie di religione, di morale e di letteratura, 1 (1832), 24–5.

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machinery was ordained by God to cause unemployment and hence the downfall of an arrogant and sinful society.222 The intransigent paradigm was not utterly monolithic.223 On occasion, the reviews featured articles that can be labelled as Burkean rather than Lamennaisian. For instance, the first volume of La voce della ragione (1832) contained a series of heterodox statements, some of which amended in editorial footnotes: freedom of the press was acceptable in representative governments; wealth was the ‘life spring’ (umore vitale) of society; feudalism led to tyranny; peoples and laws existed before governments; the divine origin of power applied to the Hebrew nation only; and reforms were welcome if cautious, partial, and slow.224 It is significant that the ultramontane’s judgement of Britain was mixed. Leopardi oscillated between a denunciation of Britain’s low morals resulting from both liberalism and Protestantism, and an acknowledgment that British liberalism was different from the Jacobinical variety prevailing in France, to the effect that in Britain social discipline and hierarchies were upheld.225 Conclusive evidence that ultramontanism could evolve is provided by Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio’s Saggio teoretico di dritto naturale (1840–3). With this bulky treatise, Taparelli (1793–1862), a Jesuit priest of unusual talents, gave European Catholicism original philosophical substance by re-formulating the theory of transcendent authority in neo-Thomistic terms.226 He confirmed some central tenets of intransigentism, such as that sovereignty came from God, that civilization was created by Christianity, and that the Reformation set in motion the intellectual attitude leading to liberalism. But he also took the post-­revolutionary Zeitgeist into account, admitting that a public system 222 Monaldo Leopardi, ‘Le strade di ferro e le carrozze a vapore’, La voce della ragione, 12 (1835), 357. 223 Traniello, ‘Il “mondo cattolico” ’, 401. 224 See in La voce della ragione, 1 (1832): [De Luca], ‘Considerazioni’, 9, 32–5; Monaldo Leopardi, [Editorial note], 255–6; Cosimo Andrea Sanminiatelli, ‘Legittimità politica e diritto divino’, 342–4. 225 Monaldo Leopardi, ‘Alcune costumanze dell’Inghilterra’, La voce della ragione, 4 (1833), 201–14; id., ‘Sulla politica amalgamatrice’ (dialogue 2), in id., Raccolta, 133–94 at 189–190. 226 On this figure see Giampaolo Dianin, Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio (1793–1862) (Milan, 2000); Thomas C. Behr, ‘Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio, S.J. (1793–1862) and the Development of Scholastic Natural-Law Thought as a Science of Society and Politics’, Journal of Markets and Morality, 6 (2003), 99–115. In the latter half of the nineteenth century neo-Thomism came into its own as the official theology and philosophy of the Catholic Church; for an introduction, see Fergus Kerr, ‘Thomism’, in Ian A. McFarland et al. (eds.), The Cambridge Dictionary of Christian Theology (Cambridge, 2011), 505–508.

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of e­ lementary education should be set up, that trial by jury may work, and that the privileged orders too should be judged by ordinary tribunals.227 He welcomed economic development and, in contrast to most ultramontane writers and to Bonald in particular, he recommended free trade.228 An important concession Taparelli made to liberalism is buried among dozens of pages challenging the theories of a social pact. In a perfunctory treatment, he seems to approve of ‘constitutional’ governments resulting from a ‘temperate’ kind of contract. Sovereignty, that is, always belonged to the one (or the few) who had a de facto superiority reflecting the Providential plan, but the free and independent members of the community could negotiate with ‘him’ the conditions of their obedience.229 Taparelli also distanced himself from ultramontanism through a theory of social progress – to him, incivilimento was a dictate of God’s. While material and intellectual improvement was potentially ‘boundless’, even the ‘moral sense’ could grow, leading to an ever fuller grasp of the ‘supreme good’. Moral progress would certainly occur if presided over by the ‘eternal authority’ of the Church, he added.230 Taparelli backed Gioberti’s programme, and even after the latter’s strictures on the Society of Jesus he continued to entertain the hope of achieving some kind of Italian federation under the aegis of Catholicism. An obedient soldier of the Church, after the revolutionary biennium Taparelli played a major role in the elaboration of the uncompromising intransigentism of the Jesuit review Civiltà cattolica (founded in 1850).231 However, his activities in the 1840s testify to, first, the power of attraction of the moderate message (ostensibly supported by the pope in 1846–8), and, second, the fact that moderatism and ultramontanism could converge, in theory and in practice. Although the moderates of the 1840s did not endorse the ultramontane’s rejection of progress, both groups shared a conception of religion as synonymous with civilization. Balbo and Gioberti were especially vocal on this. Nothing was beyond the boundaries of religion for it did not have any – the world was suffused with the divine will, entailing that everything could be explained 227 Taparelli d’Azeglio, Saggio, 315, 407, 410–11. 228 Ibid., 438–40. For Bonald, see ‘De la famille agricole, de la famille industrielle, et du droit d’ainesse’ (1824), in Louis de Bonald, Œuvres complètes (Paris, 1864), vol. ii, cols. 235–58 at col. 237; id., ‘De la richesse des nations’ (1810), ibid., vol. ii, cols. 307–18 at col. 314. 229 Taparelli d’Azeglio, Saggio, 233–4. 230 Ibid., 535–65. 231 For his political evolution, see Pietro Pirri (ed.), Carteggi del p. Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio della Compagnia di Gesù (Turin, 1933); Robert Jacquin, Taparelli (Paris, 1943), 68–104; De Rosa, I gesuiti in Sicilia; Daniele Menozzi, ‘I gesuiti, Pio ix e la nazione italiana’, in Banti and Ginsborg, Il Risorgimento, 451–78.

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in accordance with it. If the ultramontane stressed especially the godly nature of society and sovereignty, the moderates insisted on the fact that the Italian resurgence was divinely ordained.232 The moderates, however, endorsed more specific elements as well. Balbo put forward a theory of sovereignty positing God as the source of legitimacy in the 1850s.233 Gioberti borrowed heavily from intransigentism especially in the first phase of his reflection, ending with the Primato. Yet in that work he subscribed not only to the divine origin of sovereignty, but also to the view that religion and the Church had the ­power to confer legitimacy on usurpers. He also claimed that the most effective means of restraining the rulers and the subjects was the spread of religious beliefs, rather than a balancing of powers.234 Gioberti ascribed popular sovereignty to philosophy from Descartes to Kant, in turn imputing that philosophy to ­Protestantism – the very train of thought, condemning three centuries of ­European culture, which the ultramontane had revived.235 Rosmini was ­warier about making Protestantism the origin of the philosophical errors of the ­eighteenth-century, and over the 1840s the focus on individual rights – a staple of the Enlightenment – shifted his system away from that causal link.236 9

Concluding Remarks

A final word on the moderatism of the 1840s is in order, after reviewing its moral and political sides in this and the previous chapter. Pointing to the ­borrowings of moderatism from intransigentism, or arguing for the inappropriateness of the term ‘liberal’ to denote moderate thought, does not entail ­postulating an Italian backwardness in comparison with, say, French 232 Not by chance then, the constitutional texts of 1848 asserted the confessional nature of the state. See Biagini, ‘Citizenship and Religion’; see also Traniello, ‘La rottura liberale’, 205. Even the part of the clergy that was sympathetic to the patriots’ struggle opposed religious pluralism; see Giuseppe Battelli, ‘Clero secolare e società italiana tra decennio napoleonico e primo Novecento’, and Daniele Menozzi, ‘I vescovi dalla rivoluzione all’Unità’, both in Mario Rosa (ed.), Clero e società nell’Italia contemporanea (Bari, 1992), 43–124, 125–80. 233 Balbo, Della monarchia rappresentativa, 177–186. 234 Gioberti, Del primato, ii, 76–8, 81–4, 95; see Mustè, La scienza ideale, 198–201; Giovannoni, ‘Tra neoguelfismo e riforma’, 142. 235 Gioberti, Introduzione, iii, 58–9, 63–4, 76–7; id., Lettre, 14–15, 77–8, 82–3. 236 An unambiguous formulation of that link has not been traced in the works by Rosmini referred to in this book, but, in view of the vastness of his œuvre, its presence cannot be denied altogether.

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­ octrinarisme or B D ­ ritish utilitarianism. Moderatism was idiosyncratic but it was not a ­provincial ­phenomenon, inasmuch as Gioberti, Balbo, and d’Azeglio engaged in a fervid dialogue with European culture. To a significant extent, their stance was what the circumstances warranted. Inventing a national ­politics after c­ enturies of foreign domination was no easy task, which the moderates accomplished by bringing religion in. To imbue the struggle for independence with a r­ eligious afflatus made it possible for monarchical patriots to speak for the whole ­peninsula, drawing on time-honoured layers of meaning which, it was b­ elieved, constituted the only possible national identity.237 The moderates’ understanding of the Risorgimento as a national redemption implied that Italy was set on its traditional path of progress after a long lapse, and, more specifically, after the parenthesis represented by Napoleon’s ­blasphemous regime. Besides, M ­ anzoni’s and Pellico’s works demonstrated that the Catholic tradition still worked intellectual and spiritual wonders in ­Italy – far from b­ eing a legacy of the past, Catholicism continued to be the moving essence of civilization. The nexus b­ etween politics and the Roman religion also served as a pledge of o­ rdered progress against revolution and ­democracy. ­Moderatism’s other ­essential characteristic, in fact, was the pursuit of a very cautious ­policy. ­Independence and the dose of gradual reforms it entailed were acceptable only if the political process remained under the elites’ strict control. In ­retrospect, the moderates’ hope of a unanimous movement which, as representative of morality and r­ eligion, was above the very idea of party struggle, partook of the nature of dreams. Moderatism lost its innocence in 1848–9, and afterwards it became obsessed with the enemies within. In the 1850s, a toughened liberalism developed out of the anti-pluralist attitude characterising the ­moderatism of the 1840s. As will be shown in Chapter 4, the pretensions of constitutional ­liberalism to being the only legitimate agent of Risorgimento led to immoderate outcomes.

237 See Francesco Traniello, ‘La Chiesa e la nazione fino al 1848’, in Levra, Nazioni, 173–94 at 182–8. Arguably, the country that trod a special path – a Sonderweg – towards representative government was England, rather than Italy, Spain, France, or Germany.

chapter 3

The Truths of the Heart: Passions, Sentiments, and Faith from Mazzini to Nievo This chapter, consisting of two parts, examines the sensibility put forward by the democratic and r­epublican camp. The first part comprises Sections 1–5, and the second part Sections 6–8. The first three sections are devoted to Mazzini; his fascination with death, and the ensuing centrality of martyrdom in the sensibility he preached, is emphasised. Section 4 places the Mazzinian sensibility in the context of French culture, pointing in particular to the influence of Lamennais and Saint-Simon. The chapter then looks at the development of that sensibility at the hands of Ferrari and Franchi, who advocated both ‘sentiments’ (rather than passions) and philosophical reason (Sect. 5). In the second part of the chapter, Section 6 deals with the philosopher Spaventa, who appropriated Hegel’s reason for the left; Section 7 describes De Sanctis’s ‘faith’ as the outcome of his engagement with Romantic literature; and Section 8 considers two novels, one by Ruffini and the other by Nievo, testifying to the definitive demise of the Mazzinian sensibility.

...

…bursting with vices and virtues, I praise reason, but hurry where my heart likes: death only will give me fame and rest. ugo foscolo1

∵

1 ‘…di vizi ricco e di virtù, do lode/alla ragion, ma corro ove al cor piace:/morte sol mi darà fama e riposo’: Sonetto 7 (1802), in Ugo Foscolo, Poesie e Sepolcri, ed. Donatella Martinelli (Milan, 1989), p. 98, ll. 12–14.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004360914_005

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Part One 1

Mazzini: Introductory Remarks

The Genoese Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–72) grew up in a household imbued with a Jansenist spirit. He left Italy in 1831, after being jailed for two months on charges of being a carbonaro. He spent most of his remaining life in e­ xile – in Switzerland, in France, and, from 1837 onwards, in London. The Giovine Italia was founded in 1831, and the Giovine Europa, attempting to coordinate what he saw as an emergent pan-European struggle, in 1834. The former was a ­success – its followers were between 50,000 and 60,000 in 1833 – but the failure of the i­nsurrections and guerrilla operations Mazzini organised in 1833–4 sparked a crisis.2 The Giovine Italia was revived in the 1840s, but the death of the ­Bandiera brothers in the course of a failed coup in Calabria in June, 1844 prompted many, across the political spectrum, to censure his allegedly reckless leadership. Arrived in Milan in April, 1848, Mazzini’s position seemed too favourable to Piedmont to prestigious republican leaders like Cattaneo and Enrico ­Cernuschi. Then Mazzini was invited to join the Roman republic, proclaimed in January, 1849, and was elected to its executive body, the ‘­triumvirate’. As ‘the main democratic experiment of the Risorgimento’, in the words of Eugenio Biagini, the republic adopted a statute that was advanced on a European scale.3 Once a French expeditionary force overthrew the republic, Mazzini returned to L­ ondon. The foundations of his political thought were laid in the 1830s – ­according to Luigi Salvatorelli, in the years from 1831 to 1833 only – when e­ specially Saint-Simon and Lamennais helped shape his vision. As a young man, he had been a keen reader of Dante, Alfieri, Goethe, Foscolo, ­Byron, and of S­ ismondi’s Histoire des républiques italiennes du Moyen Age. Herder, Lessing, and especially Condorcet were lasting influences with respect to the interpretation of the course of civilization.4 Moderatism and Mazzinianism shared a number of features, resulting from a common hostility to, or at least remoteness from, individualism and 2 Roland Sarti, Mazzini: A Life for the Religion of Politics (Westport, ct, 1997), 64. 3 Biagini, ‘Citizenship and Religion’, 217. 4 Salvatorelli, Il pensiero politico, 242; Giuseppe Berti, I democratici e l’iniziativa meridionale nel Risorgimento (Milan, 1963), 16–22; Sarti, Mazzini, 5–46; Massimo Scioscioli, Giuseppe Mazzini: I princìpi e la politica (Naples, 1995), Ch. 2; Giuseppe Monsagrati, ‘Mazzini, Giuseppe’, dbi, lxxii, 2008.

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utilitarianism. Both camps viewed a dangerous ‘moral anarchy’ as a salient trait of the times. The Genoese censured sensual pleasures, which he regarded as hindrances­to militants’ full devotion to the cause.5 His religious faith was intense, albeit idiosyncratic. Inspired by Saint-Simon, he formulated his own brand of religion sanctifying humanity and progress and dispensing with the hierarchy and the pope. To him, too, the course of progress followed Providential­laws. The state he envisaged, far from being agnostic, should embody a ‘religious principle’.6 As regards the form of government, he favoured a ‘representative republic’, but he did not go into details.7 Mazzini aimed to enthrone ‘democracy’, but sovereignty did not belong to the people or any actual political actor. The legitimacy of political decisions derived from their conformity with an ideal superstructure, variously called ‘the moral law’, ‘God’, or even ‘the tradition of humanity’.8 It ensued, among other things, that liberty was not an end in itself but a means to the achievement of a comprehensive emancipation. ‘Liberty destroys rather than create’, Mazzini wrote, meaning that the national and social ideals could not arise from it.9 The individual’s 5 In Mazzini’s idiom, ‘if material interests are the single stimulus of a people, martyrdom becomes an act of folly’; see ‘Interessi e principii’ (1836), in seim, xii, 208–25 at 212. Throughout the chapter, authorless references are intended to be by Mazzini. 6 For Mazzini on religion, see Levi, La filosofia politica, 143–8; Salvatorelli, Il pensiero politico, 256–61; Eugenio F. Biagini, ‘Mazzini and Anticlericalism: The English Exile’, in Bayly and Biagini, Giuseppe Mazzini, 145–66. Mazzini’s programme has recently been interpreted as a ‘political religion’, namely, ‘a system of myths, symbols, and rituals’ which subordinated the significance and aim of individual and collective existence to the nation as a ‘supreme entity’; see Simon Levis Sullam, ‘The Moses of Italian Unity: Mazzini and Nationalism as Political Religion’, ibid., 107–24. For Mazzini’s suggestion of a national institution tasked with the dissemination of ‘fundamental truths’, see Thoughts upon Democracy in Europe (1846–7), in seim, xxxiv, 91–246 at 105–6. 7 ‘Dell’unità italiana’ (1833), in seim, iii, 261–335 at 292. See Levi, La filosofia politica, 152–4. Mastellone, La democrazia, 49–51, specifies that Mazzini favoured administrative decentralization. For Mazzini’s contribution to the republican tradition, and in particular to its adaptation to a constitutional regime, see Urbinati, ‘Mazzini’; Stefano Recchia and Nadia Urbinati, ‘Introduction: Giuseppe Mazzini’s International Political Thought’, in id., A Cosmopolitanism of Nations, 1–30. Throughout the chapter, the terms ‘republican’ and ‘democrat’ are used interchangeably to refer to the leftist camp. As a rule, the patriot who wanted a republic was also in favour of democracy, and the reverse. 8 See e.g. ‘Guizot on Democracy’ (1839), in Recchia and Urbinati, A Cosmopolitanism of Nations, 66–79 at 74–7; Doveri dell’ uomo (1841–60), in seim, lxix, 3–147 at 92–3, 101. See Levi, La filosofia politica, 127–35. Mazzini, like the moderates, denounced ‘parties’ as instruments of personal ambitions; see Salvatorelli, Il pensiero politico, 247. 9 Mazzini to Luigi Amedeo Melegari, 2 Oct. 1833, quoted in Levi, La filosofia politica, 115; Thoughts upon Democracy, 100. See Salvatorelli, Il pensiero politico, 235–6.

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civil and political rights were certainly fostered within his framework but they were not insisted on, on the grounds that, first, it had been the task of the previous century, and of the French Revolution in particular, to achieve them, and, second, that the creation of a humane society demanded the carrying out of duties rather than the exercise of rights. At any rate, the rights the egalitarian Mazzini espoused were much more wide-ranging than those supported by liberals at the time, in including those to ‘physical comfort’ and education, universal suffrage, and the emancipation of women.10 As far as sensibility is concerned, Mazzini differed profoundly from the moderates. He single-handedly created, in the words of Arianna Arisi Rota and Roberto Balzani, an extremely influential ‘emotional ground’ and a ‘new existential horizon’, with the aim of motivating young Italians into revolutionary action. Banti’s thesis that certain ‘deep images’ substantiated the nationalist discourse in Italy applies well to Mazzini’s texts, intended ‘to make the heart beat faster, to make blood boil, to inspire passion, to bring tears, and to press people into action’. By assembling materials of various provenance, Mazzini crafted a peculiar emotional universe as an integral part of his political doctrine, or rather, his political call ‘was shaped and worked according to the emotional sphere’.11 To him political participation had to be so comprehensive and demanding as to absorb private life completely, whereas the moderates, in spite of the grandiosity of their historical and philosophical constructions, were careful to delimit the boundaries of political involvement. The centrality of passions to the Mazzinian sensibility has been already pointed out (Ch. 1, Sect. 5); the full picture will be provided in the following three sections, taking advantage of historians’ recent revival of interest in him. 2

Mazzinian Sensibility

Individuality was antithetical to the principles of Giovine Italia. In spite of his frequent evocations of the central role of ‘genius’ in history, individual 10

11

On individual rights, see Foi et avenir (1835), in seim, vi, 211–91 at e.g. 246–7, 268; Doveri dell’uomo, 93–5; on welfare, see ‘Sismondi’s Studies of Free Constitutions’, in seim, xvii, 221–92 at 256; on women, see Doveri dell’uomo, 71–5, 145. For comments, see Franco Della Peruta, ‘La Rivoluzione francese nel giudizio dei democratici italiani del Risorgimento’, Annuario dell’Istituto storico italiano per l’età moderna e contemporanea, 23–4 (1971–2), 357–69; Mastellone, La democrazia, 6; Sarti, Mazzini, 47–70; Christopher Duggan, ‘Giu­ seppe Mazzini in Britain and Italy: Divergent Legacies, 1837–1915’, in Bayly and Biagini, Giuseppe Mazzini, 203. Arisi Rota and Balzani, ‘Discovering Politics’, 78, 82; Banti and Ginsborg, ‘Per una nuova storia’, xxvii.

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excellence was in a sense fictitious to Mazzini, who believed that the powers of each person resulted from the labours of previous generations. The progress of humanity had established a comprehensive ‘tradition’ – consisting of moral, social, and scientific capabilities – shaping minds and characters for the ­better. Hence individual lives should be tempered with the life of the species, with the ‘common elements’.12 Mazzini’s holistic philosophy aimed to grasp ‘the law of the life of humanity’ and detect a ‘common belief’ which could unite it. His was the age of ‘social principles’, ‘collective thoughts’, and ‘holy causes’. The e­ ducated should become part of the people (il popolo), which was the embodiment of a ‘social faith’; it was a ‘progressive thought acting’. Outside of participation in the democratic movement there was only an individualist, sensationalist, and materialistic way of life.13 Differences of opinion or attitude were suspicious to Mazzini. A founding document of Giovine Italia stated that its strength would not rest on a large number of adherents but on their ‘homogeneity’ concerning tactics and purpose. ‘Heterogeneity’ could perhaps be tolerated during the revolution, but not in its aftermath, when ‘discord’ would imperil social reconstruction. Mazzini, whose dictatorial style was notorious, evoked the image of a serried ‘phalanx’ to describe Giovine Italia. To characterise the movement’s social and political leadership, Mazzini, like the moderates, at times resorted to the idea of the ottimati. ‘The best for intellect and virtue’, he remarked, are the most apt to implement a previously discovered ‘Truth’.14 Mazzini insisted on the necessity to instil a sense of one’s duties to patria and humanity. ‘Man’ had to become better than he was through a ‘purification’ of his ideals and a loftier self-respect. The people have to deserve liberty and democracy, he contended. Those who embark on ‘the crusade of humanity’ are expected to forsake all affections, pleasures, and petty calculations, and to put ideas in practice regardless of consequences – ‘you must act as well as speak’. The harmony between principles and actions Mazzini invoked meant that the former had to shape the latter utterly, to the point that the patriots should ‘embody’ the social truths.15 The revolutionary attempts Mazzini organized, and always failed badly, in his view were nevertheless useful as 12 13 14

15

‘On the Works of Thomas Carlyle’ (1843), in seim, xxix, 59–142 at 100, 137–8. For the function of geniuses in history, see Berti, I democratici, 18–20. ‘La loi humanitaire et les doctrines sociales’ (1836), in seim, vii, 355–67 at 358; ‘De quelques doctrines sociales: École fouriériste’ (1836), in seim, vii, 371–437 at 405–6, 423–4. ‘Istruzione generale per gli affratellati nella Giovine Italia’ (1831), in seim, ii, 45–56 at 46; ‘Sull’enciclica di Papa Pio ix agli arcivescovi e vescovi d’Italia’ (1849), in seim, xxxix, 349– 75 at 369–70. ‘D’alcune cause che impedirono finora lo sviluppo della libertà in Italia’ (1832), in seim, ii, 147–221 at 148–50. See also ‘Istruzione generale’, 51–2; Doveri dell’uomo, 11–17, 98–102, 138–42; Thoughts upon Democracy, 107; ‘On the Works of Thomas Carlyle’, 130.

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testimony to Italians’ faith in principles. Insurrections, that is, were educational­ devices; the youth ‘yearn for pure sacrifice’, whose prize was ‘a gravestone’.16 Political participation included all dimensions of experience, as shown by the terms Mazzini used to describe it: it was a ‘mission’, a ‘duty’, and a ‘religion’, and also a ‘poem of action and life’ – this ‘free, total, and powerful’ experience led to a ‘frenzy of joy’.17 Conversely, pursuing moderate politicies had the effect of repressing all that was noble in the human soul. The moderates in general and the Doctrinaires in particular were infamous to Mazzini for their ‘smallminded and cold politics of the individual’, oblivious to the ‘great social hopes’ that the July revolution had aroused.18 Mazzini and the members of Giovine Italia reacted to the moral anarchy supposedly informing the age by espousing patriotic politics as a religion and ‘an existential agenda’.19 Feeding on Foscolo and Lamennais, Mazzini’s doctrine upheld a dark form of ‘enthusiasm’, leading militants to forget themselves in the heat of the struggle. Bisogna fare, one must act: this is the ultimate outcome of the sensibility Mazzini constructed. Knowing the truth about the progress of humanity obliged one to participate in the fight and even to make the extreme sacrifice if necessary. Doing no evil did not justify a life. As Mazzini preached a complete shake-up of Europe, so the duty his followers were expected to carry out was boundless, granted that nations could be regenerated ‘through either virtue or death’, and the struggle would be ‘extreme, decisive, and terrible’. Mazzini had no qualms about acting as the prophet of the ‘virtue of sacrifice’, the ‘religion of martyrdom’, and the ‘right to revenge’.20 In texts that, especially over the 1830s, were marked by a constant evocation of death, he sang the praises of an ideal ‘man’ making the sufferings and faults of his country his own, and who, as a ‘voluntary victim’, accepted death or exile for the cause of humanity.21 The young were expected to raise the flag of revolution, and he explicitly addressed them. Sincerity, fervour, courage, disinterest, and a disposition towards extreme forms of love and hate were the traits of the young he cherished. 16 17 18 19 20

21

‘D’alcune cause’, 152–3, 162–5, 167–8. Ibid., 170–3, 177–8. ‘Della Giovine Italia’ (1832), in seim, ii, 85–113 at 90–1; ‘D’alcune cause’, 170. For a comprehensive criticism of moderatism, see ‘Sismondi’s Studies’. Arisi Rota and Balzani, ‘Discovering Politics’, 79. ‘Della Giovine Italia’, 99–100; Doveri dell’uomo, 40. See Alberto Mario Banti, ‘Sacrality and the Aesthetics of Politics: Mazzini’s Concept of the Nation’, in Bayly and Biagini, Giuseppe Mazzini, 59–74. Thomas Mann was enraged by Mazzini’s ‘horrendous’ f­ ormula: ‘a ­principle – and its consequences’; see his Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (1918; ­Berlin, 1920), 393. ‘Pensieri: Ai poeti del secolo xix’, in seim, i, 349–74 at 367.

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Mazzini’s sensibility rested on ‘enthusiasm’ and ‘faith’. There are remarkable affinities with the enthusiasm detected by John Pocock in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, eventually taking the form of the French revolutionaries’ ‘unchecked intellectual and political energy, existing of and for itself’, applying a principle to its extreme consequences.22 A professional revolutionary, utterly déraciné, Mazzini was intellectually abstract to the point of mysticism; he was driven by purely moral and philosophical needs. His untiring devotion to the cause is testified to by the 100-plus thick volumes of his works – he certainly partook of the French revolutionaries’ ‘sovereignty of discourse’, with the proviso that it was not the reason of philosophes what he aimed to enthrone. Like those militants, Mazzini was a voluntarist – individuals had the power to overcome objective hindrances by sheer force of will – and viewed politics as all-explaining and omnipotent.23 Pocock has also dealt with a related form of enthusiasm, which was religious in nature, and which Hume and Gibbon challenged. It consisted in a belief in personal inspiration, claiming ‘absolute freedom’ in the pursuit of religious truth.24 Lamennais, once turned a millenarian radical in the 1830s, was certainly enthusiast in this sense, and Mazzini, too, presented himself as the voice of God. To a greater degree than Lamennais’s, his religion was of his own making, coalescing entirely into a political doctrine. The kind of enthusiasm he looked for in the members of Giovine Italia was that of Christ’s apostles: imbued with a moral sense of duty and self-sacrifice, they were to become preachers of their master’s teachings, and also, like Jacopo Ortis, public witnesses to political oppression and moral anarchy. 3

Mazzini, Romantic Literature, and the Patriotism of Death

This section first sketches the early sources of Mazzinian sensibility, which were predominantly literary, and then deals with a very successful novel, 22

23

24

John G.A. Pocock, ‘Edmund Burke and the Redefinition of Enthusiasm: The Context as Counter-Revolution’, in François Furet and Mona Ozouf (eds.), The Transformation of Political Culture 1789–1848 (Oxford, 1989), 31–2. Haim Burstin, Révolutionnaires: Pour une anthropologie politique de la Révolution française (Paris, 2013). Mazzini did not rely on concrete forces and tendencies – say, the worsening of people’s living conditions Marx prophesied – as means to the revolutionary end. Only a change in people’s minds could lead to the next phase in the development of humanity. Pocock, ‘Edmund Burke’, 25–6; id., ‘Enthusiasm: The Antiself of Enlightenment’, in Lawrence E. Klein and Anthony J. La Vopa (eds.), Enthusiasm and Enlightenment in Europe, 1650–1850 (San Marino, ca, 1998), 7–28.

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Guerrazzi’s­ L’assedio di Firenze (1836), to indicate the large diffusion of a highly charged way of transmitting the patriotic message. Foscolo was a Romantic character if ever there was one, and as such he was much loved by all restless spirits. (He thought nevertheless that the ancient Latins and Greeks still supplied the models on which Italian literature should rely). Mazzini admired the patriotic and civil nature of Foscolo’s art, his independence from the powerful, the correspondence he upheld between thought and action, and his commitment to moral norms. In short, Foscolo could be pointed out to the Italian youth as ‘an uncontaminated [incontaminato] soul’ – and plenty of evidence shows that preserving moral purity was Mazzini’s life goal.25 Although Foscolo’s world-view smacked of the disliked eighteenth century, it was a chief inspiration for the sensibility Mazzini preached. To the Ionian poet passions were an ineradicable part of human nature, for, allied to ‘illusions’, they prompted ‘man’ to pursue ever new desires and activities, granted that ‘once movement has ceased, life has ceased’. To the youth in particular, Foscolo wrote, ‘life consists of illusions and sentiments’. Literature had the task to educate the ‘useful passions’, such as patriotism.26 Foscolo’s character of Jacopo Ortis committed suicide for he got carried away by passions, private and public: an impossible love for a married woman coupled with the humiliation and rage of the patriot confronted with the servitude of Italy. A feeling of desperation gives Foscolo’s epistolary novel its peculiar tone, and Mazzini’s gloomy model of militancy was in tune with Jacopo’s anguish. It is tempting to argue that Mazzini’s vision was not really designed to win the war against despotism and Austria, but to provide a meaning and a rationale to the death of the many Jacopos to come; it was as if Mazzini suggested that martyrdom, which he thoroughly theorised and invoked, was the proper response to Jacopo’s existential issues.27 As already pointed out, he was recurrently accused of inspiring and organising revolts which had no chance of success, and ended with many deaths and arrests. 25

26 27

‘Orazione di Ugo Foscolo a Bonaparte’ (1829), in seim, i, 163–73; ‘Articolo premesso all’edizione di Lugano’. On being incontaminato, see ibid., 163, and ‘Orazione’, 173; on Mazzini’s ideal of innocent fervour, see ‘D’una letteratura europea’ (1829), in seim, i, 177–222 at 221. Mazzini edited Foscolo’s comment on the Divina Commedia as well as a volume collecting his political writings; see Ugo Foscolo, La Commedia di Dante Allighieri [sic] illustrata (London, 1842–3); id., Scritti politici inediti (Lugano, 1844). Mazzini knew the Ortis by heart. Ugo Foscolo, ‘Dell’origine e dell’offizio della letteratura’ (1809), in id., Prose varie (Milan, 1864), 133–64 at 145–7, 151, 163–4. Romantic heroism, with its ‘flirtation with death’, is ‘expressive, not purposive’, according to Rosenblum, Another Liberalism, 20–2.

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Foscolo made much of the relationship between Italy’s living and dead. In his famous poem Dei sepolcri (1807) he depicted Florence’s basilica of Santa Croce – housing the tombs of Michelangelo, Galileo, Machiavelli, and other great Italians – as a national pantheon, to which future generations would make virtue-inspiring pilgrimages. Foscolo later acknowledged that his intent in the poem had been political, in that the sepulchers of the Italian greats were in fact the seeds of the future nation.28 Mazzini celebrated the members of Giovine Italia who had died in insurgency attempts in a similar spirit, answering in this way those who were questioning those attempts. The first part of his twofold strategy was to portray the dead as willing martyrs. The Bandiera brothers had the ‘clear purpose to die’, for, being ‘men of action’, they were ‘impatient to bear witness’. Jacopo Ruffini, a close friend of his who probably committed suicide in jail in 1833, had always had ‘the smile of a victim’; in spite of ‘sad presentiments’, Ruffini refused to flee once warned about his imminent arrest.29 Second, Mazzini embarked on a eulogy of martyrdom. He wrote, in an English text, that ‘the list of the martyrs of the free thought of Italy, commenced by Dante, has been regularly continued even to now’. The insurgents who died were ‘apostles’, and ‘it matters little that they have not succeeded’, because martyrdom, far from being sterile, was both the highest expression of one’s mission and the best means of appraising the truth of a cause. Italians should learn how to die in order to learn how to live, given that happiness, pleasure, and glory were mere illusions.30 Mazzini himself sought emotional support from the martyrs. In an inspired page evoking Ruffini, he pleaded with him to strengthen his soul so that he could live and die incontaminato, faithful to the cause of God and humanity.31 Mazzini was familiar with contemporary literature, a subject he dealt with in several articles published before and after his arrest. Besides Foscolo, he had a predilection for Byron. In Italy, the controversy on Romanticism was 28

29

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See by Foscolo: Dei sepolcri, in Poesie e Sepolcri, 125–82; Lettera a Monsieur Guill … [Guillon] su la sua incompetenza a giudicare i poeti italiani (1807), in Scritti letterari e politici dal 1796 al 1808, ed. Giovanni Gambarin (Florence, 1972), 503–18 at 518. See Cranston, The Romantic Movement, 100. ‘The Martyrs for Italian Liberty: I. Attilio and Emilio Bandiera’ (1846), in seim, xxxiv, 27–48 at 40–2; ‘The Italian Martyrs: ii. Jacopo Ruffini (1833)’ (1846), in seim, xxxiv, 71–87 at 75, 77–8, 84. See Mastellone, La democrazia, 37. ‘The Martyrs for Italian Liberty’, 27–9, 41; ‘Ricordi dei fratelli Bandiera e dei loro compagni di martirio in Cosenza’ (1844), in seim, xxxi, 17–81 at 20–1, 41, 48, 73–7. See Riall, ‘Martyr Cults’, 266–8. ‘Ricordi’, 18; see also ‘Orazione’, 163–4. For Mazzini’s success in constructing a shared vision of the past, based on a cult of Giovine Italia martyrs, see Arisi Rota and Balzani, ‘Discovering Politics’, 85–9.

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sparked by Staël, who, in an article carried in a Milanese review (January, 1816), reproached Italian writers for their provincialism and conservatism. The imitation of past models, she argued, has led to a rhetorical style coupled with a lack of ‘thought and meaning’. Italians should now study foreign literatures to liberate themselves from pedantry.32 The Italian Romantic movement was imbued with patriotism from its very inception – or rather, Romanticism was the first vehicle for patriotism after 1815, as demonstrated by the Milanese periodical Il Conciliatore (1818–19), which advocated a new form of literature as a means to a national identity in tune with European progress.33 Mazzini would be unthinkable outside of European Romanticism, of course, as many of his themes echoed Schiller’s, Byron’s, or Heine’s. Suffice it to say that death was the subject of Byron’s Manfred; ‘reason is a torch in a dungeon’, wrote Schiller, who feared the analytical, all-dividing intellect; and Heine, like Schiller, eulogised enthusiasm (his Begeisterung was a flammende Liebe), and appealed to the young, who still believed and hoped. ‘Old man! ’tis not so difficult to die’, Manfred told the Abbot at the end of the poem.34 A celebrated pamphlet by the Milanese poet Giovanni Berchet, written to support Staël’s plea, featured arguments that preluded to Mazzini’s sensibility and vision.35 The public of Romantic literature, Berchet argued, is the popolo, consisting of all those who are neither Ottentoti (Hottentots) nor Parigini (­Parisians). The former are the poor plebs lacking anything approaching a proper emotional life, whereas the latter are the persons who are too rational, inquisitive, and sophisticated to feel the calls of the heart. The popolo amounts 32 33

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Germaine de Staël, ‘Sulla maniera e la utilità delle traduzioni’, Biblioteca Italiana, 1 (1816), 9–18. This short-lived journal was the leading voice of Romanticism in Italy before the revolutions of 1820–1, which caused the literary controversy to come to an abrupt end. Like other periodicals in subsequent years, Il Conciliatore was suppressed by the censors because of the patriotic and liberal implications of the literary and economic articles it featured. Among its collaborators were Pecchio, Pellico, Romagnosi, Sismondi, Giovanni Berchet, Pietro Borsieri, Federico Confalonieri, and Ludovico di Breme. See Gennaro Barbarisi and Alberto Cadioli (eds.), Idee e figure del ‘Conciliatore’ (Milan, 2004). For Schiller, see Philosophische Briefe (1786), 107–29 at 112, and Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (1794), 309–412, both in Friedrich Schiller, Werke, ed. Benno von Wiese et al. (Weimar, 1943–67), xx. See Heine, Reisebilder, 200–1; George G. Byron, Manfred (1817), in id., Poetical Works, ed. Frederick Page (Oxford, 1970), 390–406 at 406. For the relevance of Byron to patriots of all persuasions, regarding him as a nationalist hero, see Arnold Anthony Schmidt, Byron and the Rhetoric of Italian Nationalism (Basingstoke, uk, 2010). As a carbonaro involved in the conspiracy of 1820–1, Berchet (1783–51) fled Milan in 1821 and spent twenty-four years in exile. He sided with the Piedmontese during the Milanese revolution of 1848. See Giuliano Innamorati, ‘Berchet, Giovanni’, dbi, viii, 1966.

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to those who ‘think, read, write, weep, quiver with rage [fremono], and feel all the passions’. Poetry, the passions’ ‘ardent daughter’, is inseparable from them, of which it recounts the ‘vagaries’. Patriotism is ‘the most poetic’ of passions. By dealing with contemporary subjects, by deflating Italians’ unreasonable pretensions to literary self-sufficiency, and by teaching how mistaken a blind acquiescence to authority and tradition is, Romantic literature effects the moral improvement of the popolo, Berchet averred.36 From the viewpoint of Mazzini’s sensibility, Berchet’s text was significant not only for it pointed to patriotism as a passion of the heart, but also for the implicit view that passions were the stuff of moral authenticity and value. Berchet and the other Italian Romantics believed in the emotions as channels of truth; Mazzini made this view the foundation stone of his political sensibility. L’assedio di Firenze, a historical novel by the Tuscan Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi (1804–73), is a good example of passionate and patriotic literature. Guerrazzi was a maverick of republican leanings (at least until 1848), who briefly associated himself with Giovine Italia (1831–2); he headed, with Giuseppe Montanelli, the Tuscan ‘democratic’ government of 1848–9.37 The novel, appearing in Paris in 1836, recounts the struggle of republican Florence against an Imperial and Spanish army backed by pope Clement vii, born ­Giulio de’Medici. The republic being defeated despite the valour of its citizens, the Medici family became hereditary dukes of Florence, and ruled Tuscany until 1737. (See Ch. 2, Sect. 5, for d’Azeglio’s novel Niccolò de’Lapi, narrating the same events from a moderate viewpoint). Guerrazzi’s book was widely read in spite of its insane length and of what, to present-day readers at least, looks like an over-emphatic and sometimes obscure style.38 He explicitly aimed to establish the Florentine republicans as the last heroes of Italian patriotism and liberty, hence as the examples contemporary Italians should follow. Guerrazzi pursued subjects that, in his words, ‘were capable of rousing t­ opical passions in readers’ souls’, especially in those of ‘the ebullient [fremente] youth’.39 36

In Giovanni Berchet, Opere edite e inedite, ed. Francesco Cusani (Milan, 1863), see: ‘Sul cacciatore feroce’ e sulla ‘Eleonora’ di Goffredo Augusto Bürger: Lettera semiseria di Grisostomo (1816), 207–63, esp. 213–27, 256; ‘Saggio sul dramma indiano La Sacontala’ (1819), 269–304 at 276; ‘Poesie scelte castigliane’ (1819), 354–76 at 371. 37 Zeffiro Ciuffoletti, ‘Guerrazzi, Francesco Domenico’, dbi, lx, 2003. 38 The edition used here totals some 1,000 pages; see Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi, L’assedio di Firenze (Florence, 1859). On the fortunes of the book, see Giovanna Rosa, Il romanzo melodrammatico: F.D. Guerrazzi e la narrativa democratico-risorgimentale (Florence, 1990), 2, 6. Later on, De Sanctis demolished Guerrazzi’s style; see Francesco De Sanctis, ‘Beatrice Cenci: Storia del secolo xvi di F.D. Guerrazzi’ (1855), in dso, iv, 477–91. 39 Guerrazzi, L’assedio, i, 9–10. See Rosa, Il romanzo melodrammatico, 24–45.

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Characters lack any depth in Guerrazzi’s novel. It even lacks a proper plot besides the page of history it recounts. He reconstructed momentous dialogues between historical figures – the pope, the emperor Charles v, the commander of the Florentine army Malatesta Baglioni, or the republican captain Francesco Ferrucci – as a way to express the patriotic message he cared about, while the fictional characters he introduced played a secondary role only. Guerrazzi’s concern with patriotism was all-pervading and today seems almost fanatical; he subscribed to some typical tenets of republican patriotism, such as a selfless devotion to the polity, the belief that liberty was to be acquired through each citizen’s participation and not as a ‘gift’ from the monarch, military courage, a denunciation of greed and commerce, and even a plebeian disparagement of philosophers and scientists, allegedly bent on concealing oppression and trumpeting an illusory progress.40 Guerrazzi’s love of the fatherland was dark and oppressive, its refrain being that the glory of the past had gone, leaving only spiritual ruins behind it. He waxed indignant for dozens of pages about the stark contrast between the past and the present of Italy. Centuries of tyranny and foreign domination had demoralised and corrupted the people, to the point that a true patriot, seeing that a change was unlikely, should prefer ‘a beautiful death’ in battle to life. The Stoics’ patience and insensitivity are out of the question, Guerrazzi wrote, for passions are the natural stuff of ‘men’. Italians, stirred by hatred and a desire for revenge, ‘holding death in their right hand’ [nella destra la morte], should be eager to fight even if the struggle will not bring them happiness but only, and for a short time, ‘the bitter pleasure of domination’. As the Florentine warriors put it, what counts is that ‘our sepulchre will be splendid’ for we have fought for the patria.41 Yet Guerrazzi was ambivalent about the future, in some passages hinting at the possibility that ‘the blood shed by the martyrs of liberty’ would spark a successful revolution in due course. In his view, L’assedio di Firenze was both a ‘battle’ and an ‘agony’.42 40

On commerce, see Guerrazzi, L’assedio, i, 401–2, 426–8; ii, 289; on philosophy and science, see i, 193–4; ii, 254–9. 41 Ibid., i, 3–12, 22–3, 299; ii, 300–1. Carlo Bini (1806–42), a friend of Guerrazzi’s, confirms the centrality of the theme of death among democrats in these years. Bini argued at length for the right to suicide, an act which ‘a moderate man’ usually avoided by accepting compromises, but one which was performed by ‘superior men’ when they could not live up to their principles; see Carlo Bini, Manoscritto di un prigioniero, ed. Gino Tellini (1833; Palermo, 1994), 78–89. See Maria Fubini Leuzzi, ‘Bini, Carlo’, dbi, x, 1968. 42 Guerrazzi, L’assedio, i, 63; ii, 117–19; 146–8. In the concluding remarks, Guerrazzi struck an optimistic note; see ii, 447–53. See Arisi Rota, I piccoli cospiratori, 104–8.

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Guerrazzi, who had met Byron in Pisa, was influenced by ‘Gothic’ writers like Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis, and Charles Maturin.43 Gruesome scenes abounded in L’assedio di Firenze, pervaded as it was with the idea and the depiction of death – ‘on earth, everything indicates death’. Religion provided no consolation, even if Guerrazzi often used religious images and suggestions, in a way reminiscent of Lamennais’s Paroles d’un croyant. This is a (shortened) example, likening political emancipation to the restoration of the dead to life: sitting on a hill, I will see the last battle of men, and we shall win; then the celestial harmonies will be revealed to me, the spirit of prophets will pervade me, and a hymn of resurrection celebrating God’s glories will be sung.44 In Guerrazzi’s story the references to God amounted to appeals to an ultimate court of justice, basically. But in this world, where force was the ruling principle, priests were good on condition that they incited the Florentine people to fight. In a long review, Mazzini enthused about the novel. The contrast it featured between ‘sublime virtues’ and ‘heinous crimes’, against the background of the people’s ‘power of sacrifice’ for the cause, made it an effective ‘political action’. But he also lamented Guerrazzi’s lack of faith, for the lives of Italians could become something other than ‘a run to death’, to use the novelist’s words, if patriotism was informed by ‘religious conviction’ and a feeling of duty towards humanity.45 Guerrazzi replied by observing that at the time of writing he was overwhelmed by private and public grief; that ‘treasury of pain’ then erupted like lava from a volcano, with the aim of ‘exciting the sensibility of the fatherland, descended into a miserable lethargy’.46 4

Mazzini’s French Sources

Mazzini’s sensibility was in tune with a political and cultural atmosphere that was peculiarly French. During the 1830s and 1840s, in Edward Berenson’s words, ‘virtually everyone who considered himself a socialist claimed to be inspired by Christianity or even by Catholicism itself’.47 Either French radicalism 43 Ciuffoletti, ‘Guerrazzi’. 44 Guerrazzi, L’assedio, ii, 451–2. 45 ‘Frammento di lettera sull’Assedio di Firenze’ (1840), in seim, xxi, 345–67; Guerrazzi, L’assedio, i, 4. 46 Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi, A Giuseppe Mazzini: Intorno all’ ‘Assedio di Firenze’ (­Bastia, 1848), 96–8. 47 Edward Berenson, ‘A New Religion of the Left: Christianity and Social Radicalism in France, 1815–1848’, in Furet and Ozouf, The Transformation, 543; see also Franck Paul

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was religious in nature, as in Lamennais’s case, or it made a purified Christianity the source of a truly egalitarian order. Accordingly, at the election of May, 1849, the coalition called démocrates-socialistes won the peasants’ vote through a propaganda based on a populist conception of Catholicism.48 Much of the left-wing religiosity was due to the huge success of two books by Lamennais: Paroles d’un croyant (1834), which Pierre Leroux defined la Marseillaise du Christianisme, and Le livre du peuple (1837).49 Lamennais strengthened crucial views of Mazzini’s, who praised him at length in the work which is perhaps his best, Doveri dell’uomo: Lamennais was ‘the best apostle of the cause for which we are brothers’.50 Paroles d’un croyant was a millenarian catechism for the people, abounding with prayers, parables, and vignettes. It stated that salvation on earth was possible, but it required winning a deadly struggle between ‘the people that has the sign of Christ on its heart’ and the kings and the powerful, who were in fact ‘sons of Satan’.51 Two aspects of Lamennais’s extraordinarily evocative work need briefly pointing out. The first is the radicality of its message. Good was juxtaposed with evil as sharply and dramatically as possible, and of course compromise was out of the question. The world of darkness – represented by the rich and powerful worshipping le Serpent – was impeding the progress of the world of light – embodied by le peuple, the angels, and the just inhabiting the city of God. The typical rhythms of doctrinal manuals concocted a call

48 49 50

51

Bowman, Le Christ des barricades, 1789–1848 (Paris, 1987); Jennings, Revolution and the Republic, 388–418. Edward Berenson, Populist Religion and Left-Wing Politics in France, 1830–1852 (Princeton, 1984). For the commanding influence of Lamennais, and for Leroux’s definition, see Berenson, ‘A New Religion’, 548–50. Doveri dell’uomo, 14–15, and also 76, 95–6. See ‘Lamennais’ (1839), in seim, xvii, 345–96, for an unblemished portrait. On the importance of Lamennais to Mazzini, see Denis Mack Smith, Mazzini (New Haven, 1994), 68–70; Levis Sullam, L’apostolo, 4–9. Levis Sullam also touches on the influence of Adam Mickiewicz’s Livre des pélerins polonais (1832; Paris, 1833) on both Lamennais and Mazzini. This book, setting out a messianist metaphor of Poland as the ‘Christ of nations’, was replete with biblical language and imagery; like Lamennais’s books, it aimed to reach non-sophisticated readers. See Anna Tilysinska, ‘La religione della patria in Mickiewicz e Towianski: Influenze polacche sul Risorgimento italiano’, Società e storia, 26 (2004), 763–79. Félicité de Lamennais, Paroles d’un croyant, in id., Œuvres complètes, xi, 5–160 at e.g. 7–9. As regards Le livre du peuple (Paris, 1837), it contained views Mazzini was in full agreement with (like the central role of duty, the effectiveness of association, the link between duty and religion, etc.). But this book lacked the millenarism, the parables, and the sense of urgency of Paroles d’un croyant.

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to arms: you, the people, tell ‘those who take advantage of the servitude of their brothers’ that their God is Satan, whereas yours is the one who defeated Satan, and tell them that you will fight them restlessly, even if they shed your blood ‘like water from fountains’.52 Lamennais confirmed Mazzini in the belief that religion could supply a rationale for an all-out confrontation, an imminent lutte à mort. In the Genoese’s view, the proper party of republicans was not political but religious in nature, a party complete with faith, dogmas, and martyrs, and entailing duties rather than rights. (Of course, Mazzini’s religion was different from Lamennais’s: if the former devised a philosophy of history and a moral doctrine as an idiosyncratic form of religion, the latter returned to early Christianity, in accordance with the contemporary Christocentric turn in Catholic faith). To Mazzini religion was superior to any possible political theory for two reasons. First, it could be shared by all by virtue of its universal message; religion was in fact the ‘conscience’ of humanity, namely the most comprehensive manifestation of the stage of civilization humanity had reached. Second, whereas politics took ‘men’ as they were, religion (and art) transformed them by turning ideas into passions and thought into action. What was needed was a ‘burning belief’ encompassing the whole life and canceling out all irrelevant aspects of it. ‘Believe and act’, he thundered, for those who are not prepared to die do not really have faith in God.53 The second aspect of Paroles d’un croyant that is germane to Mazzinianism is a tendentious, metaphorical, and impressionistic style. Actually, a highly charged language characterised many writings produced by the leftist camp in France. If the whole of Paroles d’un croyant was made up of short vignettes or episodes, even a writer as different from Lamennais as Michelet displayed a wealth of rhetorical devices. To give a faint idea, Michelet made ample use of Biblical language and imagery, turning patriotism into a religion; he sang enthusiastic hymns to France, on the grounds that ‘France is a person’; in Histoire de la Révolution française he imagined that he was re-living the episodes he was writing about (j’étais au pied de la Bastille, je prenais la forteresse…), for, in a sense, he ‘experienced’ history; and Le Peuple, which opened with a poignant history of his family and himself, was presented as ‘more than a book; it 52 Lamennais, Paroles, e.g. 84–5, 130. 53 Foi, 228, 260–3, 273–4, 289; Note autobiografiche (1861–6), in seim, lxxvii, 3–397 at 89. On nineteenth-century nationalism as ‘a driving and proselytizing passion, as religious passions had once been’, see Federico Chabod, L’idea di nazione (Bari, 1961), 47–58; Levis Sullam, ‘The Moses of Italian Unity’.

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is myself’.54 Mazzini was receptive to this ‘French’ style because some German writers he was familiar with – notably Herder and Lessing – had provided earlier examples of evocative prose in history and philosophy. An emotional tone – a feeling of indignation and a sense of anguish – ­permeated all of Mazzini’s texts. In some, it was fully worked up. He replicated Lamennais’s textual devices in Foi et avenir (1835), which had many characteristics of a catechism. Here Mazzini addressed the reader directly (voyez, souvenez-vous, marchez, ne craignez rien, etc.), the same words were repeated in series of questions and answers, and moving, often gloomy images (l’enfer, Satan, le tombeau, le poignard, etc.) recurred. At the end of the book he recounted Galileo’s trial, taking the famous phrase ‘and yet it moves’ to symbolise the unstoppable march of truth.55 In the 1830s, Mazzini sometimes gave political apostolate a quasi-narrative form. ‘Une nuit de Rimini en 1831’, blaming the French for failing to help the Italian insurgents, was constructed as a theatrical piece. After describing the patriots’ death in battle with plenty of lugubrious images of corpses and graveyards, Mazzini depicted their weeping mothers, and finally burst into cries of vengeance and curses on the French leadership.56 Another example is ‘Ai poeti del secolo xix’ (1832), which opened with an emphatic narrative first of the birth of Napoleon ii in Paris and then of his death as an Austrian duke, and which concluded with a passionate appeal to the Italian youth. In the essay, the lives of Napoleon i and Byron were taken to represent the climax of the age of the individual.57 Mazzini’s resort to an emotionally charged prose was, in part, conscious tactics, for he agreed with Saint-Simon on the practical force of art. To the Frenchman, imagination and the emotions were the causes of action, and the arts had the power to passionner public opinion through their management – this

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Jules Michelet, Histoire de France, ed. Paul Viallaneix (bks. i–ii, 1833; Paris, 1974), 383; id., Le peuple, ed. Lucien Refort (1846; Paris, 1946), 11–25. See Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973), 135–62; Lionel Gossman, ‘Michelet and the French Revolution’, in Furet and Ozouf, The Transformation, 639–63; Alain Pessin, Le mythe du peuple et la société française du XIXe siècle (Paris, 1992), 99–126; Pierre Rosanvallon, Le peuple introuvable: Histoire de la représentation démocratique en France (Paris, 1998), 57–8. The phrase, which Galileo allegedly uttered after being forced to recant his claim that the earth moves around the sun, is in Foi, 290; Lamennais is referred to at 288. See Salvatorelli, Il pensiero politico, 236; Levis Sullam, L’apostolo, 13–16. ‘Une nuit de Rimini en 1831’ (1831), in seim, ii, 3–14. ‘Pensieri: Ai poeti’.

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is why eloquence was ‘the primary form of art’.58 Mazzini often insisted on the need for a new literature reflecting the ‘social’ stage humanity had achieved and the struggles it entailed. Since the development of ‘social man’ depends on arousing certain passions, he maintained, literature has the duty to cultivate them, inflaming people’s feelings about social progress – Foscolo and Berchet had argued along similar lines. By singing the ‘generous passions’ of oppressed peoples, he continued, literature becomes a source of enthusiasm, effective to the point of inducing patriots to grab ‘the sword, the pen, or the dagger’, ready for self-sacrifice. Philosophy has a merely critical function instead, because its focus is on the individual. Actually, intellect and enthusiasm, reason and heart should fuse: in the near future, the writers most in tune with the Zeitgeist would be ‘philosophers holding the lyre of poets in their hands’.59 Mazzini upheld, albeit obliquely, the typically Romantic argument in favour of the harmony of all faculties, of a spontaneous unity of reason and feeling.60 Granted that Mazzini and Saint-Simon agreed that passions and sentiments were necessary to prompt change, that view served a different purpose to each of them. Saint-Simon and his disciples, probably inspired by Adam Smith, argued that les sentiments kept society together by linking each citizen with the others; sentiments were the antidote to egoism, individualism, and un froid calcul.61 Saint-Simon’s Nouveau christianisme (1825) posited religious sentiments as the substance of a more generous public morality, which was needed to improve the conditions of the greatest number.62 Mazzini instead promoted passions as the sources of beaux gestes, of exemplary actions. Passions, which to him were a sort of heightened sentiments, led to a feverish condition, whereas 58

Quoted in Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, Saint-Simon: L’utopie ou la raison en actes (Paris, 2001), 474. For Mazzini on Saint-Simonism, see Thoughts upon Democracy, 159–83. 59 ‘Pensieri: Ai poeti’, 362–3; ‘D’una letteratura’, 220. See Levi, La filosofia politica, 32–5, 60–1. Mazzini also wrote about the ‘social purpose’ of classical music; see ‘Filosofia della musica’ (1836), in seim, viii, 119–65. 60 Taylor, A Secular Age, 313–16. Coleridge had written in 1801 that ‘deep thinking is attainable only by a man of deep feeling … all truth is a species of revelation’; see his Collected letters, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford, 1956–71), ii, 388. 61 Charles-Henri de Saint-Simon, Histoire de l’homme: Premier brouillon (Paris, 1810), Part ii, p. 17; [Émile B. Bazard et al.], Doctrine de Saint-Simon: Exposition. Première année 1828– 1829 (1830; Paris, 1831), 253, 267–76. The distinction between passion and sentiment was not spelled out by Saint-Simon, arguably because the two terms were synonymous to him for all practical purposes; see e.g. his ‘Adresse aux philanthropes’ (1821), in Charles-Henri de Saint-Simon, Du système industriel (Paris, 1821), 268–310. 62 Charles-Henri de Saint-Simon, Nouveau Christianisme (1825), in id., Œuvres choisies (Brussels, 1859), iii, 317–82.

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Saint-Simon was concerned with the ways in which ordinary feelings of solidarity could strengthen the social fabric. Moreover, Saint-Simon’s appeal to the heart, coupled as it was with a view of the impending advent of industrialisme, had an optimistic, eighteenth-century tone that Mazzini’s religion of duty and sacrifice lacked altogether. Mazzini had mixed feelings about the eighteenth century. It had been a time of liberation for humanity, but its individualism and materialism had spoiled the European moral fibre. Take Condorcet and his Esquisse for example. The vision of a progressive civilization it featured was fundamental to the young Mazzini, yet the differences between his approach and Condorcet’s are striking, and illuminating. Mazzini’s texts were organized around inextricable links between the key terms of God, humanity, progress, people, faith, and duty. In the rare cases in which a definition of one of them was provided, it was circular: for instance, religion being described as faith in humanity, religious belief featured nonetheless as one of the constituent elements of humanity.63 Within his system history was driven by abstractions, and the goals its course was supposed to lead to were likewise philosophical artefacts – the liberation of Italy was just a transitional achievement on the way towards the transformation of Europe into a ‘social’ and truly religious democracy.64 As happens with religions, Mazzini’s system called for an act of faith as a preliminary to rational understanding.65 In contrast, the history of civilization put forward in the Esquisse was verifiable and calculable, or at least Condorcet thought so. It was based both on a sensationalist gnoseology developed out of Lockean philosophy, and the natural and social sciences underpinned by mathematical methods. Another difference concerns happiness. To Condorcet, ‘nature links together truth, happiness, and virtue by an indissoluble chain’, whereas to Mazzini happiness was impossible on earth, and virtue consisted in making one’s life testimony to truth.66 If Condorcet had had individual fulfilment in view (among other things), and he had regarded it as a real possibility in due course, Mazzini was positive that a serene enjoyment of life was out of the question. He wrote approvingly of Carlyle’s notion of life instead, a life devoted to ‘the pursuit of duty, and not to that of happiness’, and even devoted to, 63 64

See e.g. ‘Pensieri: Ai poeti’, 362, 364. Human society ought to be, Mazzini typically wrote in Thoughts upon Democracy, 95, ‘in the likeness of the divine society, in the likeness of the heavenly country, where all are equal, where there exists but one love, but one happiness for all’. 65 Mastellone, La democrazia, 100–2. 66 Nicolas de Condorcet, Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (1795), in id., Œuvres, vi, 1–276 at 263.

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in Carlyle’s words, ‘the worship of sorrow and renunciation’. To Mazzini life was ‘a conflict and a march’, but it was also ‘a curse’ to the sensitive individual.67 To summarise the sensibility Mazzini embodied and advocated, it amounted to a sublimation of individuality into political action. It presupposed a complete dedication to the cause, and revolved around an enthusiastic determination­to act. Passions coalesced into a faith which was, in principle, totalitarian; eventually, the sensibility he spread was one of self-annihilation. Looking back on the fighting of 1848–9, Mazzini was pleased that ‘our youth have learned how to die’.68 Martyrdom gave meaning and authenticity to the young patriots’ lives, which, as Jacopo Ortis had taught, were not worth living under despotism. Therefore private life was not only irrelevant from a patriotic viewpoint, but was a positive hindrance. Abandoned and wretched, mothers and fiancées were frequently evoked in Mazzini’s writings as symbols of what patriots should leave behind. Weird as this sensibility may seem, it fed nevertheless on arguments and attitudes that were widespread in Romantic Europe, and which Mazzini adapted to the circumstances of insurrection on the peninsula. The contrast with the moderate sensibility, and especially with that of Manzoni and Pellico emphasising fortitude and patience, could hardly be greater. If Mazzini valued the strong emotions that prompted people to take action regardless of the consequences, the moderates viewed the elite’s self-control and prudence as qualities testifying to its leading role in public life. Not only were insurrections bound to fail, according to the moderates, but they entailed the expression of stormy passions negating the individual’s composure and discernment. These traits were warranted by the moral strength Catholicism gave – humble in front of God, Pellico accepted suffering as a dictate of Providence, and did not lose dignity under prison duress. Mazzini’s titanic and narcissist attitude went as far as to depict himself as a victimised Christ.69 5

Sketching a Theory of Sentiments: The Anti-Mazzinians of the 1850s

The Milanese Giuseppe Ferrari (1811–76) studied philosophy under Romag­ nosi.70 He moved to France in 1838, and soon began writing on Italian politics and culture in the prestigious Revue des deux mondes. Having passed the exam 67 68 69 70

‘Pensieri: Ai poeti’, 360; ‘On the Works of Thomas Carlyle’, 135; Thoughts upon Democracy, 154–5. See Levi, La filosofia politica, 101–3. Quoted in Della Peruta, I democratici, 12. Foi, 289. Carmelo D’Amato, ‘La formazione di Giuseppe Ferrari e la cultura italiana della prima metà dell’Ottocento’, Studi storici, 12 (1971), 693–717.

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for the doctorat in philosophy, Ferrari obtained a teaching position at the university of Strasbourg in October, 1841; but, accused of being an atheist and a socialist by the conservative establishment of the town, he was forced to quit the job, and a promising career with it, at the beginning of next year.71 In 1848 he was in Milan, siding with Cattaneo’s group opposing the aristocracy, the Piedmontese, and Mazzini. His stay lasted only two months, though, after which he returned to France. He then attempted to form a republican and federalist rassemblement, with a new review as its voice, in order to challenge Mazzini’s unitarianism; but the project aborted, probably because of Cattaneo’s refusal to take part (1851).72 Ferrari returned to Italy for good in 1859, serving as an mp from 1860 onwards. His federalist, democratic, and socialist beliefs were expounded chiefly in La federazione repubblicana and Filosofia della rivolu­ zione, both published in 1851. One of the threads running through his œuvre concerns the limits of sensualism and utilitarianism, an issue which proved the starting point of a re-consideration of sensibility themes. Ferrari was foremost among those, of republican and democratic leanings, who strove to go beyond ­Mazzini’s emotional universe. Condillac, Helvétius, and Romagnosi are wrong to overlook ‘passions’ and ‘sentiments’ (sentimenti), Ferrari wrote in 1835. Having assumed that some basic functions of the mind existed prior to experience, à la Kant, he argued that sensations were elaborated on by the intellect only if they affected the ‘magnetic’ and ‘magic’ sphere of passions and sentiments. There is in fact, he contended, a ‘special attraction’ between certain sensations and that sphere, as, for instance, the sight of a beautiful woman produces a forceful impression whereas that of a tree does not. (Ferrari seems to have thought that sensations aroused sentiments and passions by triggering pleasure or pain). As for passions specifically, they accounted for all deeds clashing with self-interest – like fighting in battle, enduring torture, or just purchasing expensive luxury goods – and, since those deeds were necessary to the polity, passions fostered progress and prosperity.73 A word of warning: Ferrari’s texts are all more or less obscure, because of a paucity of definitions and plenty of vague wording. 71

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Ferrari was reinstated to the Strasbourg post in March, 1848, but was again dismissed in December. He taught philosophy at the lycée in Bourges until June, 1849, when he was sacked from public employment for good. See Clara M. Lovett, Giuseppe Ferrari and the Italian Revolution (Chapel Hill, nc, 1979), 25–43. Della Peruta, I democratici, 207–50. Giuseppe Ferrari, La mente di Giandomenico Romagnosi (Milan, 1835), 103–109, 144–9. ‘Sentiments’ actually featured in Romagnosi’s fairly empiricist gnoseology as an (unexplained) manifestation of the mind; he spoke of the sentiment of pleasure or pain, of certainty, of approval or disapproval, and the like; see Gian Domenico Romagnosi, Vedute fondamentali sull’arte logica, ed. Lorenzo Caboara (1832; Rome, 1936). See Rober-

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Ferrari felt it necessary to analyse the relationship between reason and feeling that Mazzini, sharing the Romantics’ postulation of their harmony, had taken for granted. His Sorbonne thesis (1840) formulated a gnoseology based on two statements. First, sentiment was not independent of sensations – ­desire, love, or hate call for specific objects, he remarked. Second, sentiment was the necessary middle element between sensation and judgement, on the grounds that any sensation entailed at least the individual’s feeling of his/her existence. Taken together, the three elements constituted ‘thought’. The thesis was entitled De l’erreur, as Ferrari aimed to identify the cause of wrong judgements; in his view, they resulted from an erroneous combination of those three elements, each of which, taken separately, was always correct by definition. An interesting offshot of this argument was that passions – which, seemingly, were a close relative of sentiments – were not the cause of error. Ferrari took on Rosmini for ascribing both logical error and religious sin to the will, misled by passions.74 Ferrari developed this theory of cognition in a book of 1843 devoted to the philosophy of history. He put forward a tripartite vision consisting of sensations (the world of nature), sentiments (the world of art and morality), and ideas (the world of abstract knowledge). Sentiments featured as the selective filters through which sensations became ideas; sentiments were not innate but resulted from one’s circumstances. Yet definitions were not Ferrari’s forte, as he carelessly introduced passions, ‘imagination’, and ‘emotions’ besides sentiments without even attempting to explain them. His analysis shifted all too easily from sentiments as an element of the cognitive system to their being manifestations of cœur and also, because of their relation to the will, motives to action.75 The gist of the argument, however, was that sentiments substantiated­a ‘moral law’ which was a necessary complement to self-­interest,

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tino Ghiringhelli, ‘Romagnosi e Ferrari’, in id., Modernità e democrazia nell’ ‘altro’ Risorgimento (Milan, 2002), 179–96. Giuseppe Ferrari, De l’erreur (Paris, 1840), 32–7, 60–4. See Silvia Rota Ghibaudi, I percorsi della politica: Teoria e realtà (Milan, 1996), 75–8. Giuseppe Ferrari, Essai sur le principe et les limites de la philosophie de l’histoire (Paris, 1843), 25–30, 43. It would be wrong, however, to insist on Ferrari’s ambiguities, as the emotional sphere lent itself to overcomplicated and sometimes confused treatments over the centuries; see Amy M. Schmitter, ‘17th and 18th Century Theories of Emotions’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. spring 2014 , accessed Jun. 2015. Hume’s treatment, remarkably, was similar to Ferrari’s in that he grouped passions and sentiments among the perceptions of the mind, with passions and sentiments serving as motivations for acting and even for reasoning; see id., ‘Hume on the Emotions’, ibid., ed. winter 2016 , accessed Jun. 2017; and see above Ch. 1, Sect. 1. 76 Ferrari, Essai, pp. v–vii, 34–40, 300, 333–8. 77 Ibid., 296–300. Cf. Saint-Simon, ‘Adresse aux philanthropes’, 284–96. 78 Auguste Comte, Discours sur l’ensemble du positivisme (Paris, 1848), 11–16, 36–7, 69–70, 88–9, 214, 218, 269; id., Système de politique positive (1851–4; Paris, 1912), i, 92–3, 100–1, 670–1; see also id., Cours de philosophie positive, ed. Michel Serres et al. (1830–42; Paris, 1975), i, 856–8; ii, 178–80. Sentiment, this ‘supreme engine’ of society, is embodied by the ‘feminine element’, Comte argued in Discours, 198–250. 79 Comte, Discours, 315.

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making it impossibile to appreciate the force of love and altruism as well as the foundations of politics and jurisprudence.80 Leroux based this claim on a comprehensive rebuttal of the eclectic psychology of moi and non-moi, a rebuttal which was quite confused (especially in a first version appearing in Encyclopédie nouvelle in 1837), but which had enough theoretical substance to appeal to a professional philosopher like Ferrari. Cousin, on his part, felt compelled to write an article against ‘mysticism’, a product, he argued, of the subordination of reason to sentiments.81 In his book against eclecticism, the Milanese called for a thicker morality than that advocated by Cousin. Ferrari radicalised his previous stance by arguing that ‘sentiment precedes, and reason follows; sentiment drives reason wherever it wants; it puts reason to work and brings it under control by directing its attention’. Therefore, the case for duty and sacrifice, the feeling of justice, and the sense of personal liberty rested on le cœur and not on esprit.82 Both Ferrari and Leroux failed to provide a straightforward and univocal definition of sentiment, which at any rate referred to the sphere of altruistic affections. Sentiments counter indifference and egoism – they claimed in agreement with Saint-Simon – and this is why a true philosopher, according to Leroux, is ‘a thought inspired by a sentiment’.83 It was no accident that the centrality of sentiment arose from a denunciation of Cousin, the philosophical representative of juste milieu, for sentiment turned out to be the cognitive underpinning of democracy and socialism.84 80

Pierre Leroux, Réfutation de l’éclectisme (1839; Paris, 1841), esp. 265–76. See also id., De l’humanité (Paris, 1840), i, 121–56. 81 Victor Cousin, ‘Du mysticisme’, Revue des deux mondes, 11 (1845), 469–86. Mysticism was the view that sentiments offered a direct link to the spiritual realm; but sentiment, Cousin wrote at 472, is only a feeble ‘echo of reason’. For background, see Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 220–4; Goldstein, The post-revolutionary self; and on Cousin’s teacher, the Idéologue Laromiguière, who discussed sentiments in the 1810s, see Martin S. Staum, ‘“Analysis of Sensations and Ideas” in the French National Institute (1795–1803)’, Canadian Journal of History, 26 (1991), 393–413. 82 Ferrari, Les philosophes salariés, 53–6, quot. at 54. 83 Leroux, Réfutation, 247, 249, 251–2. In his entry on ‘Conscience’ in Encyclopédie nouvelle, ed. Pierre Leroux and Jean Reynaud (Paris, 1834–41), iii, 795–815, Leroux gave seven or perhaps eight different definitions of sentiment. The definition he insisted on was this: sentiment is the relationship between moi and non-moi, at 803. 84 Add that, in 1851, Cousin praised the Piedmontese government, whereas Ferrari, like his friend Cattaneo, was a harsh critic of all things Piedmontese; see Victor Cousin, Discours politiques (Paris, 1851), 340–2. See Salvo Mastellone, Victor Cousin e il Risorgimento italiano (Florence, 1955), Ch. 2.

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After 1849, Louis Blanc, George Sand, and Leroux broke with Mazzini. They questioned both the Genoese’s mania for insurrection whatever the circumstances, and his authoritarian, quasi-religious ideal of political organization.85 Ferrari elaborated on the moral issues behind the schism. In Filosofia della r­ ivoluzione he stressed the conflict between self-interest and duty, in the belief that both held sway over the soul of ‘men’. If self-interest led individuals to pursue exclusively one’s own advantage, duty made persons choose ‘ascetism’, ‘self-sacrifice’, and even ‘martyrdom’ in order to obey the moral imperative. Although Mazzini was not mentioned, Ferrari was positing a moral dilemma which clearly involved the Genoese as the sternest champion of duty.86 Ferrari depicted two human types, ‘the man of interest’ and ‘the man of duty’. The former was life-loving, ironical, realistic, and prone to compromise; the latter was ‘sad as a martyr’, irascible, poetry-loving, and strong-hearted. Voltaire and Rousseau, respectively, incarnated the two specimens. Ferrari asserted that all great leaders, ‘the men of action’, had displayed the features of both types, thus cherishing intellect and faith, science and piety, self-interest and justice. The example of Socrates, intent on challenging Greece’s established gods, was made by Ferrari to demonstrate that martyrdom did not result from faith only but from ‘intelligence’ as well – to be meaningful, martyrdom ‘must point to a new organization of life’.87 Philosophy is impotent without faith, he wrote, and ‘faith arises from moral action when duty battles with interest’; Leibnitz and Locke were therefore wrong to condemn ‘enthusiasm’. Reason is unable to explain faith (as was Ferrari, incidentally), which is nevertheless a fact of life. It characterises the actions of ‘soldiers, martyrs, philosophers, founders of religions, and the men of revolution’. When, as in revolutionary epochs, two opposing systems confront each other, people may be doubtful about which side to support; sentiment only can suggest the right answer.88 La federazione repubblicana applied a vaguely Hegelian interpretation of history to the Italian situation. The real struggle is not between nationalities or parties, he argued, but between revolutionary reason and conservative religion – here Ferrari came to appropriate reason unreservedly to the republican camp, doing away with Mazzini’s Sturm und Drang politics. In his 85

86 87 88

Anne-Claire Ignace, ‘Giuseppe Mazzini et les démocrates français: Débats et reclassements au lendemain du “printemps des peuples”’, Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle, 36 (2008), 133–47. On Mazzini’s intellectual debt to Leroux, see Leonardo La Puma, Giuseppe Mazzini democratico e riformista europeo (Florence, 2008), 31–71. Giuseppe Ferrari, Filosofia della rivoluzione (London [but Capolago], 1851), i, 118–31. Ibid., ii, 122–6. Ibid., ii, 128–30, 133–6.

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reconstruction,­the moderates were ‘the men of independence’ fighting ‘the social idea’, and France, which Ferrari charged with the task of liberating Italy, was ‘the living revolution’. He wrote tellingly that ‘the social revolution is nothing but a revolution of philosophers … Philosophy is the future of the world’.89 To Ferrari, pursuing radical policies meant implementing abstract principles; such a stance was confirmed a contrario, in his opinion, by eclecticism’s deliberate lack of a credo. In 1858, Ferrari read fourteen centuries of Italian history through the lens of ‘the mission of democracy to crush the patriciate’ by ‘social war’.90 If Ferrari was looking for a way out of Mazzini’s sensibility, the record is mixed. As drives of a different political morality, sentiments had a significant advantage: being milder than passions, namely more restrained and judicious, sentiments could combine with reason and self-interest. Ferrari’s emphasis on the intellectual as the necessary supplement of the emotional was no small improvement in comparison with Mazzini’s stance; yet Ferrari found it too difficult to state what Cattaneo believed, that one could legitimately refuse to die for the cause. Ferrari did not abjure the sequence faith, action, and martyrdom, but he intellectualised it, and, in the process, he marked the philosopher out as the key revolutionary figure. If many authors of the Risorgimento who planned to write treatises ended up writing pamphlets, the reverse happened to Ferrari. His attempt to ‘rationalise’ Mazzini’s sensibility resulted in a philosophy of history making the development of ideas the engine of progress, to the effect that people’s side-taking merely reflected the current clash of ideal systems. The national histories became elements of an ‘eternal and ideal history’ destined to bring about ‘the association of humanity’.91 Ferrari did not contribute a new sensibility, but a theoretical argument assuring patriots that they were on the right side of history. Needless to say, the fact that Ferrari was an exile by choice, and a philosopher by profession, helps explain the abstractedness of his eventual stance. 89

Giuseppe Ferrari, La federazione repubblicana (London [but Capolago], 1851), 28, 47, 154, 173. ‘The revolution is the triumph of philosophy called upon to rule humanity’, he wrote at p. v. See Berti, I democratici, 100–10; Luigi Derla, ‘Introduzione alla filosofia politica di Giuseppe Ferrari (1844–1852)’, Belfagor, 30 (1976), 490–1. 90 See by Ferrari: ‘La rivoluzione e le riforme in Italia’ (1848), in Opuscoli politici e letterari (Capolago, 1852), 369–429; Les philosophes salariés, pp. v–vi, 162; Histoire des révolutions d’Italie (Paris, 1858), i, 268. See Nicola Tranfaglia, ‘Giuseppe Ferrari e la storia d’Italia’, Belfagor, 24 (1970), 23–4; Maurizio Martirano, Filosofia rivoluzione storia: Saggio su Giuseppe Ferrari (Naples, 2012), 130–8. 91 Ferrari, Filosofia, i, 360–72. See Lovett, Giuseppe Ferrari, 104–5.

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Although many early adherents did not wait until the 1850s to give up militancy, the crisis of Mazzinianism became acute in the wake of a doomed insurrection in Milan in February, 1853. In the republican camp there developed a sharp contrast between Mazzini, who continued to believe in insurrectional violence, and those, like Cattaneo, who thought that the time of ‘ideas’ had come.92 Cattaneo had nothing to do with the Mazzinian sensibility of total commitment. It is significant that, before 1848, his chief concern was the social and economic progress of Lombardy, rather than its liberation from A ­ ustrian rule. What prompted Mazzini’s followers to espouse the national ideal – a sense of obligation, or an existential vacuum – did not affect him. Once exiled to Switzerland after the revolutionary biennium, he denounced the Piedmontese policy in heated memoirs (see introduction, Sect. 6), yet he regularly turned down his friends’ requests for a more thorough involvement in politics. Elected to the Italian parliament in March, 1860, he never attended sessions. Clearly enough, Cattaneo had the temperament of an intellectual and a teacher, not that of a politician. He was content with being the intellectual mentor of a group which criticised Mazzini’s policy in the 1850s, a group including Ferrari, Montanelli, Mauro Macchi, and Ausonio Franchi. They believed that the post-1848 phase called for the dissemination of ideas first and foremost. The task now facing republicans, Cattaneo maintained, is to create a sympathetic public opinion by unmasking the lies diffused by princes – opinion is key to military might, he wrote Mazzini in 1850. At the same time, a public discussion to identify the ‘general principles’ arising out of the events of 1848–9 is needed, with reference to, first, the causes of defeat in Italy and France, and, second, the issues raised by socialism.93 Ferrari, Franchi, and also Carlo Pisacane, in spite of his final choice of martyrdom, were instances of this approach. As for sensibility issues, while Mazzini continued to preach total commitment, Cattaneo’s group implicitly postulated a break in the psychological pressure of the struggle. If the new political phase was one of retrenchment and intellectual re-consideration, reason was to be paramount, to the detriment of the passions eliciting action. Ferrari was at pains to overcome the inflexibility of that dichotomy, as shown, and Franchi followed in his footsteps. The Genoese philosopher and former priest Franchi (1821–95) was the editor of an important weekly, La Ragione, appearing in Turin from October, 1854

92 93

Della Peruta, I democratici, 416–17; Bianca Montale, ‘La crisi dei democratici’, in La Salvia, Verso l’Unità, 283–311. Della Peruta, Carlo Cattaneo, 97; Carlo Cattaneo, ‘Filosofia della rivoluzione’ (1851), in id., Opere scelte, iii, 335–46 at 343.

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to May, 1858.94 By denouncing Mazzini’s ‘monomania for action’, Franchi sided with his friend Macchi in the discussion about the relative importance of ideas and arms.95 A stern critic of Catholicism, and in particular of Gioberti’s and Rosmini’s philosophies, he took science and liberty as guiding principles. (But Franchi, who held Auguste Comte in high regard, aimed in fact to turn ‘rationalism’ into a doctrine which, like Christianity in the Middle Ages, would bring ‘unity’ to society. He lamented not only the existence of different ‘parties’ but even of different ‘opinions’).96 Challenging Catholicism was essential, according to Franchi, for it was a vehicle for hypocrisy and unbelief. Its grotesque mysteries and metaphysical nature, being in sharp contrast to the scientific Zeitgeist, demoralized the youth, with the result that their instinctive hope and enthusiasm were replaced by self-interest and the pursuit of pleasure. ­Franchi’s goal was to formulate a philosophy that could inspire a new generation of Italians, a philosophy blending reason with faith, namely, science with religion and virtue.97 The difference with Ferrari lay in the Milanese’s irreligious viewpoint. Franchi’s quest culminated in a book on ‘sentiment’ as a source of knowledge. He believed that the Catholic philosophers he was waging war against – notably Rosmini – had neglected sentiment and for this reason had depicted ‘man’ as a ‘naked intellect’ and ‘an abstraction’.98 There are two forms of cognition, Franchi argued: that through the intellect, and that through the senses. The first consists in the elaboration of ideas and is ‘mediated’, while the second 94

Ausonio Franchi was the nom de plume of Cristoforo Bonavino. A defiant priest from 1844 to 1849, Franchi returned to the Church at the end of the 1880s, and was ordained again in 1893. La Ragione became a daily in December, 1857; Franchi quit the editorship in the early spring of the following year. See Maria Fubini Leuzzi, ‘Bonavino, Cristoforo’, dbi, xi, 1969; Carlo G. Lacaita, ‘Carlo Cattaneo, Ausonio Franchi e il “socialismo risorgimentale”’, Rivista storica del socialismo, 6 (1963), 505–59. 95 Mauro Macchi, Le armi e le idee (Turin, 1855); Ausonio Franchi, ‘Le armi e le idee’, La Ragione, 2 (1855), 364–6; id., ‘Le armi e le idee di Mauro Macchi’, La Ragione, 2 (1855), 412–14; see also id., Religione del secolo xix (Lausanne, 1853), pp. viii–ix. For Franchi’s criticism of other aspects of Mazzini’s agenda, see his ‘Bandiere e programmi’, La Ragione, 5 (1856), 94–9, and ‘A Giuseppe Mazzini’, La Ragione, 7 (1857), 193–205, 217–29. The Milanese Macchi (1818–80) had collaborated with Cattaneo since the first series of Il Politecnico. 96 Ausonio Franchi, ‘Condizioni della società moderna’, La Ragione, 1 (1855), 9–14, esp. 11–14; id., ‘Il passato e il presente’, La Ragione, 1 (1855), 23–7. Yet Franchi had a liberal side too, insofar as he valued, and argued for, civil and political rights. 97 Franchi, Religione, pp. v–vii, 367–9, 492–5; id., La filosofia delle scuole italiane (1852; Florence, 1863), 10–11, 193, 496–7; see also id., Appendice alla filosofia delle scuole italiane (Genoa, 1853), 174–5, 182–4. 98 Ausonio Franchi, Studj filosofici e religiosi: Del sentimento (Turin, 1854), 6.

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is ‘immediate, direct, spontaneous, and instinctive’. Yet knowledge also originates from sentiments, which somehow provide a refined, ‘ideal’ version of the knowledge obtainable from the senses. ‘Man’ has an intuition of ‘the Good, the Beautiful, and the True’ through the sentiments, and Kant’s moral imperative too is a sentiment, namely ‘a natural inspiration’. The task of reason is to develop and systematise the insights which sentiments bring. ‘The highest and profoundest’ of sentiments, Franchi continued, is that of ‘infinity’, inasmuch as all others derive from it. It amounts to an ‘indefinite ideal’ of unlimited force and perfection which all people feel. The gist of Franchi’s argument was that all religions had elaborated on the natural sentiment of infinity, and therefore sentiments linked the human nature to God. Atheism is impossible because you ‘feel’ God, Franchi maintained, although you cannot either define the divinity or demonstrate its existence.99 If Constant’s De la religion comes immediately to mind, the view that religion derived from the ‘sentiment’ of God’s existence had been more recently put forward by Leroux and even by the non-believer Proudhon. Schleiermacher’s Über die Religion was probably a key influence on all the mentioned writers, including Franchi: to the German philosopher, religion was based on an intuition or feeling of the universe.100 Franchi’s conclusion was that science and faith needed each other, for science per se was too abstract, while faith had to harmonise with truth. Since sentiments could not be deceptive by definition, they were the foundation of all knowledge. In short, Franchi advocated ‘reason soaring on wings of sentiment’.101 The Neapolitan Carlo Pisacane (1818–57) led an audacious life as an officer and a revolutionary in France and Italy. A self-taught writer on history, politics, and military issues, Pisacane shared Ferrari’s denunciation of religion as well as his programme of combining the struggle for independence with a social revolution.102 Pisacane, too, ruminated on passions and reason, but from a viewpoint which differed from that of the authors considered so far. He was not concerned with sensibility as a rationale for one’s involvement in the patriotic struggle, or as a depiction of a new type of Italian; rather, he wondered 99 Franchi, Studj, 85, 100–4, 232–5. 100 Leroux, Réfutation, 249–50; id., De l’humanité, i, 226–36; Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, ­Système des contradictions économiques, ou philosophie de la misère (Paris, 1846), i, 426– 8, 435; Friedrich Schleiermacher, Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern, ed. Günter Meckenstock (1799; Berlin, 1999). 101 Franchi, Studj, 235–6, 315–20; id., La filosofia, 253. Franchi defied those who viewed his ‘rationalist’ religion as too abstract to be appreciated by the people; see his ‘La religione del popolo’, La Ragione, 7 (1857), 409–16. 102 For an introduction to his thought, see Aurelio Lepre, ‘Nel centenario di Carlo Pisacane’, Belfagor, 12 (1958), 140–61.

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how the masses, and the poor peasantry in particular, could be motivated to revolt. Since the answer lay in the satisfaction of material wants, at least in an initial phase, nothing peculiarly Italian, or anything moral, characterised the hoped-for revolution. Yet, it testifies to the pervasiveness of the contrast between passions and reason that Pisacane adopted it, albeit peculiarly.103 Pisacane distinguished between two stages in the course of the revolution. Its outbreak was to be triggered by exploiting the passions, which, drawing on Beccaria, he defined as desires that constantly reproduced themselves. The desire the masses are permanently confronted with, Pisacane argued, is that for material well-being. The revolutionaries should make the most of it by spreading the patriotic and social messages in a simplified form, centred on the material advantages that would accrue to the people. Every militant should ‘become a Socrates’ in the square or at the carpenter’s workshop, leading step by step ‘those rough minds’ to ‘the discovery of truth’. In the second stage of the revolution, the informed, rational consensus of the people was necessary to set up new institutions: ‘if the people fail to achieve a clear understanding of what they must demand, uprisings are fruitless’.104 Probably with Mazzini in mind, he advised ‘the masses’ not to blindly follow a leader, for they should exercise reason, not ‘faith’.105 Italians are progressing to an awareness of the ‘social revolution’ by trial and error, Pisacane remarked, and eventually they will model their beliefs on the natural laws upheld by Tommaso Campanella, Francesco Mario Pagano, Filangieri, and Romagnosi. Pisacane, like Ferrari, hailed the role of ‘civil philosophers’, tasked with devising a new ‘social covenant’.106 103 Pisacane’s revolutionary strategy was gradualistic on paper, as will be documented immediately below, but in practice he embraced the Mazzinian doctrine that the ‘propaganda of the deed’ could ignite the masses’ passions. In the course of an expedition to the Neapolitan kingdom, Pisacane was killed by the peasants he intended to unshackle. See the ‘political will’ (‘Testamento politico’, dated 24 Jun. 1857) he penned before embarking on the coup attempt, in Carlo Pisacane, Guerra combattuta in Italia negli anni 1848–49, ed. Luigi Maino (1850; Rome, 1906), 333–5. 104 Pisacane, Guerra combattuta, 48, 167, 315–17, 324; id., Saggi storici-politici-militari sull’Italia. Primo saggio: Cenni storici (Genoa, 1858), 34; id., La rivoluzione, ed. Aldo Romano (1860; Casalvelino Scalo, 2002), 210–12. On passions see Leonardo La Puma, Il pensiero politico di Carlo Pisacane (Turin, 1995), 30–5. For Beccaria on passions, see Cesare Beccaria, Ricerche intorno alla natura dello stile (1770–1809; Milan, 1833), 126–52; on sentiments as passions at an initial stage (‘subordinate passions’) in particular, see ibid., 143–4, and on enthusiasm see at 153–8. 105 Pisacane, Guerra combattuta, 324–6. 106 Pisacane, La rivoluzione, 18–19, 244–5; see Adolfo Noto, ‘Le fonti culturali di Carlo Pisacane’, Trimestre, 30 (1997), 45–86. The Dominican friar Campanella (1568–1639) was imprisoned in Naples for several years for heresy and sedition; his early utopian work

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Despite the reflections documented in this section, a new, full-scale sensibility replacing Mazzini’s did not emerge. In addition to the perspective adopted by Cattaneo’s group, two reasons accounted for that. First, the patriots’ moral attitude was not a pressing concern to republicans in the 1850s. Whereas Balbo’s Della monarchia rappresentativa depicted Italians in 1848–9 as easy victims to republican demagogues because of their political immaturity, republican opinion was unanimous in praising ‘the people’ (il popolo) and ascribing the defeat to the princes’ and the moderates’ deceitful policies. Cattaneo’s­ authoritative Dell’insurrezione di Milano nel 1848 was a case in point. Others Milanese democrats like Cesare Correnti, Pietro Maestri, and Agostino Bertani similarly extolled the heroism, determination, and ‘generous sentiments’ of their fellow citizens.107 The Venetians and the Romans, on their part, had epically fought in their cities under siege. Even in the southern kingdom, in which the Church had substantial control over the lower classes, the peasants in the provinces had been sympathetic to the constitutional revolution (but the Neapolitan lazzaroni had remained loyal to the Bourbons).108 The second cause lay in a major shift in the political landscape. Napoleon iii’s coup, in sanctioning that the march of democracy was halted for an unforeseeable period of time, dealt a harsh blow to the hopes of Italian republicans. Exactly when universal suffrage promised to deliver democracy to France, history repeated itself. Napoleon’s seizure of power directed republicans’ attention to the primacy of sheer force over the laws of progress (at least in the short term), hence to the necessity of re-assessing the Italian case in the context of European power politics. The advent of socialism, too, challenged the vision of Risorgimento as a cultural, moral, Romantic, and peculiarly Italian­ La città del sole described a theocratic society where goods, women, and children were held in common, and where manual labor enjoyed full citizenship. The Neapolitan jurist Pagano (1748–1799) was a student of Genovesi’s and a friend of Filangieri’s. His work Saggi politici (1783–85) was inspired by Vico, Rousseau, and Beccaria; it argued against torture and capital punishment and advocated more benign penal codes. Pagano, who adhered to republican and democratic principles, played a major role in the Neapolitan republic established with the help of the French. He was executed by hanging in October, 1799. See Dario Ippolito, ‘Pagano, Francesco Mario’, dbi, lxxx, 2014. 107 In Ambrosoli, La insurrezione, see the memoirs by Correnti (3–53, esp. 23–7, 37, 47), Maestri (63–87), Carlo Clerici (99–105), Bertani (111–19), and Antonio Fossati (125–49). For Balbo, see Ch. 4, Sect. 3. 108 Giorgio Candeloro, Storia dell’Italia moderna (Milan, 1956–86), iii, 229–32, 236. The lazzaroni were a section of the lower class which, by acting collectively as mobs, played a significant role in the social and political life of the city. Both the lazzaroni and the peasantry had been instrumental in the downfall of the republic in 1799.

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affair. As Pisacane helps understand, a social revolution was neither Italian nor moral in nature, calling for a new focus on the economic instead. Thus, if republican politics amounted to a gloomy quest for personal identity in the 1830s and 1840s, with Mazzini inciting the youth to show the stuff they were made of, in the 1850s new and momentous circumstances required a radically different approach. Granted that nothing similar to Mazzini’s tightly-knit emotional universe materialised, a trend towards the combination of heart and mind is detectable. It occurred through the attention paid to (non-utilitarian) sentiments. Sentiments lacked any taint of extremism and militancy, and were therefore well suited to a political phase ruling out military action. As Leroux and Comte among others had argued, sentiments were inherently social and collective, hence they could underpin the vision of a future society based on universal brotherhood and equality. Sentiments were a versatile tool, equally helping the atheist Ferrari to overcome the dominance of self-interest and the deist Franchi to conceive religion in accordance with rationalism. To both writers, sentiments appeared the much-needed link between two worlds, that of patriotism and political involvement, on the one hand, and that of private life, self-interest, and cold reason, on the other. They implicitly acknowledged that duty could not subsume all other affections, thus taking a significant step away from the Mazzinian moral universe.



Part Two

It is possible to view Mazzinianism and moderatism as two sides of the same coin. They displayed the cultural mainstream of the Risorgimento: both were informed by religion, were heavily moralised, and, as far as foreign influences are concerned, were affected first and foremost by French ideas. The revolution of 1848 was a watershed after which it became more difficult to point to a mainstream trend in political culture, in parallel with the fact that politics lost much of its previous association with morality and identity, national and personal. Mazzini did not feel it necessary to alter his message in any way, but others did. The philosophical Catholicism which had opened the way to political moderatism came to an end, chiefly because of Rosmini’s choice to remain silent, while the moderate paradigm changed remarkably in the 1850s, dropping much of its prior religious foundation. On the left, as the federalists strove to articulate and substantiate their message in opposition to Mazzini, there formed a Hegelian school innovating on the Italian philosophical tradition.

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The intellectual scene widened and enriched, becoming more diverse in the process. The second part of the chapter deals with four writers whose work went beyond the pre-1848 mainstream – they did not dialogue with either Mazzinianism or moderatism, unlike Ferrari or Franchi. The authors considered are a professional philosopher (Spaventa), a literary critic (De Sanctis), a novelist (Ruffini), and a novelist-cum-garibaldino (Nievo). Should a common label be picked to define en gros their political outlook, perhaps that of social liberalism would do. They approached political activity in different ways, but in the 1850s the involvement of them all was mediated by their intellectual specialisation. They were fervent patriots who, nevertheless, regarded politics with a measure of philosophical distance (Spaventa), weariness (De Sanctis), irony (Ruffini), and bitterness (Nievo). Nothing like a new sensibility could emerge from their writings, of course; their contribution in this respect lay in the revelation that the sensibility of the years from 1814 to 1848 was over. 6

Reason Enthroned: Bertrando Spaventa

Cousin’s eclecticism was the philosophy of choice in Naples in the 1830s, blending smoothly with the indigenous tradition of philosophical history inaugurated by Vico. Cousin’s system was a patchwork, combining Hegelian elements with others, coming mainly from the Scottish common sense tradition. Hegel, however, was never explicitly referred to, while dialectics was rejected. A more consistent and philologically sounder perspective was introduced by Ottavio Colecchi (1773–1847), who promoted the knowledge of Kant’s system through private teaching and several articles published in the review Il progresso from 1836 on.109 Thanks chiefly to Colecchi a younger generation of Neapolitan intellectuals, who had been born between 1817 and 1822, became familiar with German philosophy. Eventually, some of them embraced Hegel’s idealism, thus taking a significant step away from the Italian ‘spiritualist’ tradition. Gioberti and Rosmini had sternly denounced the Germans’ ­rationalistic ‘pantheism’, which they viewed as a quintessential result of the Reformation they abhorred. Not to mention that, especially after 1848, the existence of a link between Hegelianism and socialism was regularly argued for all over Europe.110 The Neapolitan group included the brothers Bertrando and 109 See Oldrini, La cultura filosofica, 154–62 ff.; Roberto Grita, ‘Colecchi, Ottavio’, dnb, xxvi, 1982. 110 See Giovanni Rota, ‘La “circolazione del pensiero” secondo Bertrando Spaventa’, Rivista di storia della filosofia, 59 (2005), 655–86. For instances of the moderates’ hostility to

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Silvio Spaventa (1817–83 and 1822–93, respectively), Francesco De Sanctis (1817–83), and Angelo Camillo de Meis (1817–91). In the wake of 1848 Silvio Spaventa and De Sanctis were jailed, while Bertrando and de Meis were exiled. They eventually reunited in Turin in the course of the 1850s, with the exception of Silvio, who regained liberty in 1859 only. In Piedmont this small circle of émigrés was active in teaching and journalism; politically, they watered down gradually the democratic and even socialist sympathies they had entertained in the immediate aftermath of the revolution.111 This section deals with ­Bertrando Spaventa, and the next with De Sanctis. Spaventa, who became the leader of an influential idealist school after unification, was a fairly talented philosopher.112 He, too, emphasised the power of ideas and portrayed philosophers as the guiding lights of humanity. ‘What Italy needs first and foremost is philosophers’, who, by harmonising Italian spiritualism with German idealism, would turn philosophy into ‘a living principle’ informing all aspects of collective life.113 The categories he focused on were Hegel’s reason and Geist, and not passions or sentiments. Spaventa’s philosophy featured sentiment as a means of knowing the reality of Being, a means intermediate between perception, which apprehended only its multiplicity, and speculative thought, which had the potency to appreciate its ‘absolute unity’; sentiment provided a mere ‘intuition’ of the unity of Being because it Hegelianism,­see Gioberti, Introduzione, i, 11–14; id., Del rinnovamento, i, 142–7 ff.; Capponi, ‘Sulla dominazione dei Longobardi’, 139–41, 148–9; for Rosmini, see Markus M. Krienke, ‘Denken und Sein: Zur Hegelkritik Antonio Rosminis’, Theologie und Philosophie, 80 (2005), 56–74. The Roman secretary of state Luigi Lambruschini defined Hegelianism as an ‘un-Christian’ philosophy; see Rota, ‘La “circolazione del pensiero”’, 660. On the struggle against Hegelianism in France, see Guido Oldrini, Hegel e l’hegelismo nella Francia dell’Ottocento (Milan, 2001). 111 See Paola Zambelli, ‘Tradizione nazionale italiana e sovranità etica razionale nell’ideologia degli hegeliani di Napoli’, in Paola Zambelli et al., Problemi dell’Unità d’Italia (Rome, 1960), 521–72; Oldrini, La cultura filosofica, 334–54. For documents, correspondence, and memoirs, see esp. Francesco de Sanctis, La giovinezza, ed. Gennaro Savarese = dso, i; Silvio Spaventa, Dal 1848 al 1861, ed. Benedetto Croce (Naples, 1898). 112 See Fernanda Gallo, Dalla patria allo Stato: Bertrando Spaventa, una biografia intellettuale (Bari, 2012). 113 Bertrando Spaventa, ‘Una riunione dell’Accademia di filosofia italica’ (1851), in id., Opere, ed. Giovanni Gentile (Florence, 1972), iii, 765–9 at 768. See Italo Cubeddu, ‘Bertrando Spaventa pubblicista (giugno-dicembre 1851)’, Giornale critico della filosofia italiana, 17 (1963), 46–93 (the articles that appeared in the Turin daily Il Progresso in 1851 are reproduced at 66–93). For Silvio Spaventa’s similar views, see Oldrini, La cultura filosofica, 188–90.

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ignored its phenomenology.114 Spaventa’s criticism of Mamiani’s philosophical system was in these terms: Mamiani had ‘the sentiment of truth, but not the concept of it’, and sentiment ‘was always individual and inexplicable, lacking as it did that really universal, necessary, and intelligible element characterising science’.115 Spaventa actually neglected the complexity of Hegel’s assessment of sentiments, and in particular the importance of patriotism and citizenship within his political philosophy – an odd neglect for a man of the Risorgimento.116 At any rate, to Spaventa history was shaped by reason, and sentiment (as well as ‘faith’) was just a step towards that most perfect means of knowledge. The religious apprehension of God occurred through sentiment, and, accordingly, it was a pre-rational and subjective form of apprehension. Granted that the idea of a transcendent God standing apart from mankind is ‘evanescent’, Spaventa observed, the worship of such a divinity cannot but follow from a mere ‘mystical intuition’ on the part of isolated individuals. It is an arbitrary and capricious way to approach God. In contrast, he continued, the Protestant schism sanctioned spiritual freedom, and by doing so it adumbrated that a ‘rational, absolute, and divine’ element was immanent in the law, the state, the family, the sciences, and all other manifestations of life. ‘Man’ too becomes one of the seats of spirit.117 Pantheist or not, Spaventa’s Hegelian representation of religion was revolutionary in the Italian context. It entailed that religion and morality were always in the making, in accordance with the progress of spirit. Spaventa specified that ‘religion is not an imposture’ for it had roots in the human soul, but, as sentiment was bound to turn into thought sooner or later, so religion was destined to evolve into philosophy – ‘philosophy is more than religion, for it is religion’s thinking consciousness’.118 114 See Spaventa’s 1851 articles re-published by Giovanni Gentile under the title ‘False accuse contro l’hegelismo’, La critica, 18 (1920), 315. 115 Bertrando Spaventa, ‘L’Accademia di filosofia italica e Terenzio Mamiani’ (1855), in id., Rinascimento, Riforma, Controriforma (Venice, 1928), 305–25 at 318–19. For Mamiani, a moderate who attempted to blend empiricism with Platonism, and who has been referred to in passing in Chs. 1 and 2, see Ch. 4, Sect. 3. 116 For Hegel, see Hans Friedrich Fulda, ‘The Rights of Philosophy’, in Robert B. Pippin and Otfried Höffe (eds.), Hegel on Ethics and Politics, tr. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, 2004), 21–48; Lydia L. Moland, Hegel on Political Identity: Patriotism, Nationality, Cosmopolitanism (Evanston, il, 2011); Andrew Buchwalter, Dialectics, Politics, and the Contemporary Value of Hegel’s Practical Philosophy (New York, 2012), 155–80. 117 Spaventa, ‘False accuse’, 316; id., ‘Del principio della riforma religiosa, politica e filosofica nel secolo xvi’ (1855), in id., Rinascimento, 241–91 at 252, 273–8, 286. See Italo Cubeddu, Bertrando Spaventa (Florence, 1964), 77–80, 106–9. 118 Spaventa, ‘False accuse’, 316.

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To Spaventa, politics was an upshot of philosophy. German idealism was to be understood as a complement to the two other ‘traditions of liberty’, the French and the English. Reason, ‘the actual sovereign of the world’, realised itself as liberty, yet reason also led to democracy; it ensued that the Piedmontese constitution (the Statuto) was only a ‘form’ that liberty had temporarily assumed and not its perpetual embodiment.119 It is significant, however, that Spaventa neither became involved in practical politics nor fought for Italy on the battleground. His patriotism expressed itself in a programme of philosophical renewal, which in practice amounted to the reformulation in idealistic terms of Italian philosophy from Giordano Bruno and Campanella to Gioberti. ­German idealism can gain acceptance on the peninsula, he remarked, only by becoming an indigenous product somewhat.120 He eschewed any idea of Italian primacy. A moral bond connects all nations, he wrote, and each of them has ­co-operated in its own peculiar way in the philosophical enterprise, although everybody should acknowledge the present superiority of the Germans.121 Spaventa embarked in 1854–6 on a quarrel with the Jesuit review Civiltà cattolica. He challenged the Fathers on several issues of political philosophy, and in particular he brought evidence to demonstrate that the sixteenth-century Jesuit theorists had favoured popular sovereignty, the very doctrine which the review detested so much. In arguing for the authority of the state on moral issues against the monopolistic claims of the Church, Spaventa of course relied on the Hegelian concept of the state.122 Spaventa appropriated reason for the left, but within a philosophical framework excluding that sensibility could remain an issue. Bent on pinning down the course of reason in history, Spaventa belittled religion, French ideas, and the topoi of passions and sentiments in the process. His approach testifies to the process of normalization of political culture characterising the 1850s. As the Sardinian government took charge of the Risorgimento, unavoidably reducing its scope and ambitions, intellectual work became professionalised 119 Bertrando Spaventa, ‘Studii sopra la filosofia di Hegel’, Rivista italiana, 1 (1850), 537; id., ‘La libertà d’insegnamento’ (1851), in id., Opere, iii, 673–763 at 742–3, 753–5; Cubeddu, ‘Bertrando Spaventa’, 89. 120 Spaventa re-interpreted the Italian tradition in several texts; see e.g. ‘Carattere e sviluppo della filosofia italiana dal secolo xvi sino al nostro tempo’ (1860), in Bertrando Spaventa, La filosofia del Risorgimento: Le prolusioni (Naples, 2005), 69–106. See Gallo, Dalla patria allo stato, 101–2; Eugenio Garin, ‘Filosofia e politica in Bertrando Spaventa’, in Spaventa, La filosofia del Risorgimento, 13–42. 121 See e.g. Spaventa, ‘False accuse’, 317–18. 122 Bertrando Spaventa, La politica dei Gesuiti nel secolo xvi e nel xix, ed. Giovanni Gentile (Milan, 1911). See Sergio Landucci, ‘L’hegelismo in Italia nell’età del Risorgimento’, Studi storici, 6 (1965), esp. 614–28.

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in Piedmont through journalism and teaching. Public intellectuals could now circumscribe their musings to the sphere of abstract ideas, if so they wished – rallying Italians to patriotism, devising its platform, and acting as the movement’s front men was not up to them any longer. Neither was the construction of a new human type. 7

De Sanctis’s Secular Faith

If Spaventa solved the dilemma between reason and sentiment by espousing wholeheartedly Hegel’s philosophy, De Sanctis had no ready-made solutions, in spite of the substantial inspiration he drew from Hegel’s aesthetics. A gifted literary critic, in the 1850s De Sanctis penned a series of essays on writers ranging from Dante to Lamartine, laying the foundations for his celebrated Storia della letteratura italiana (1870–1).123 These essays (which appeared in Turinese reviews) had a rich subtext begetting a fresh viewpoint about sensibility. Through Hegel’s concept of ‘Romantic art’, De Sanctis reflected on the common sentimental and intellectual attitude behind the works of Schiller, Goethe, or Leopardi.124 As far as political creed is concerned, De Sanctis was neither a democrat nor a moderate. He termed himself a ‘liberal’, and in the 1850s he rallied to the kingdom of Sardinia for, in his view, it had become a ‘neutral territory’ on which all parties could reconcile. In 1860 he collaborated very effectively with Garibaldi, and subsequently he was education minister under Cavour and Bettino Ricasoli (from March, 1861, to March, 1862).125 123 On the essays, see Marziano Guglielminetti and Giuseppe Zaccaria, ‘Francesco De Sanctis e la cultura torinese (1853–1856)’, in Muscetta, Francesco De Sanctis, i, 57–87. For an appreciation of the Storia della letteratura, see René Wellek, History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950 (1955; London, 1966), iv, 97–124 (De Sanctis ‘wrote what seems to me the finest history of any literature ever written’, at 124). 124 For De Sanctis on Hegel, see esp. the lectures of the 1840s collected in dso, iii, 1187–92, 1348–422, 1641–65 (this volume consists wholly of lectures from the 1840s). For a comment, see Oldrini, ‘L’apprendistato filosofico’. Yet De Sanctis rejected two elements of Hegel’s aesthetics, namely the ‘death of art’ thesis and the separation between form and content; see Wellek, History, iv, 120–2; Oldrini, ‘L’apprendistato filosofico’, 31–4. Hegel’s relevant work is Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, tr. T.M. Knox (1835; Oxford, 1975). See Robert Wicks, ‘Hegel’s Aesthetics: An Overview’, in Frederick C. Beiser (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (Cambridge, 1993), 348–77; Stephen Houlgate, An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth and History (Oxford, 2005), 211–40. 125 For De Sanctis’s political stance, see the articles of 1855 collected under the title ‘La polemica sul murattismo’, in dso, xv, 52–75, esp. 62. See Carlo Francovich, ‘Itinerario politico di Francesco De Sanctis’, in Carlo Francovich et al., Francesco De Sanctis a Torino (Turin, 1984), 21–30; Alessandro Galante Garrone, ‘Francesco De Sanctis e gli esuli meridionali a

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De Sanctis strove to define the spiritual atmosphere with which the Romantics were imbued in an essay written a few weeks before being arrested. Schiller, he maintained, is an example of ‘pantheism of spirit’, meaning that the ­artist creates his own ideals of beauty, truth, and good, although only as ‘illusions’ – Rosmini had denounced exactly that with reference to Foscolo. The Romantic artist is an ‘individualist’, in the sense that the free and moral self is taken to be the beginning and the end of all things. The melancholy, the anguish, and the despair displayed by Romantics originate from their radical divorce from reality and ‘life’.126 A perception that there were no undisputable principles any longer, so that no limitation on one’s feelings made sense, accounted for the Romantic condition.127 Leopardi was another case in point. He was aware, De Sanctis argued, that the ideals his ‘heart’ proposed were illusions, and this ‘contradiction’ gave rise to ‘bitter memories’, ‘a painful irony’, and a deep sentiment of his own, and humanity’s, unhappiness. Leopardi indicates that today poetry reflects on itself – De Sanctis maintained with Hegel’s aesthetics in mind – so that beauty occurs alongside rational thinking. This is unsurprising in view of the scepticism informing the age, making ‘pure poetry’, like ‘pure religion’, impossible. De Sanctis then showed how Leopardi’s dry ‘philosophical system’ could nevertheless combine with ‘sentiment’, which was the single source of poetry.128 The gap between the real and the ideal characterising Romantic art, De Sanctis contended, expresses a ‘social illness’ affecting ‘the present generations’. Implicitly but clearly, he depicted the Romantic malaise as politically induced, the spiritual consequence of tyranny and coercion. In retrospect, he was positive that it had arisen from a sense of political impotence.129 The ideas

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Torino’, ibid., 11–19; Attilio Marinari, ‘De Sanctis, Francesco’, in dbi, xxxix, 1991. De Sanctis is depicted as a republican and a democrat in Mario Mirri, Francesco De Sanctis politico e storico della civiltà moderna (Messina, 1961), 53–131. Francesco De Sanctis, ‘Delle Opere drammatiche di Federico Schiller’ (1850), in dso, iv, 229–46, esp. 229–32. This portrayal has echoes of Hegel’s ‘beautiful soul’, namely, the person who flees from contact with reality to preserve the purity of his/her heart; see Georg Wilhelm F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, ed. John N. Findlay, tr. Arnold V. Miller (1807; Oxford, 1977), Ch. 6.C.e, paras. 219–22. Francesco De Sanctis, ‘Il Giornale di un viaggio nella Svizzera durante l’agosto del 1854 per Girolamo Bonamici’ (1856), in dso, iv, 537–46 at 541–2. Francesco De Sanctis, ‘Alla sua donna: Poesia di Giacomo Leopardi’ (1855), in dso, xiii, 397–416 at 400–5; dso, iii, 1038–42, 1306–15. On sentiment as an antidote to the destructive philosophy of the eighteenth-century, see dso, iii, 1135–51. On poetry and rationality, see also id., ‘Delle Opere drammatiche’, 237–8; dso, iii, 1024–6, 1036–8, 1304–6. De Sanctis, ‘Alla sua donna’, 405; id., ‘L’Armando’ (1868), in dso, xiv, 245–73 at 253.

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of liberty, progress, and that of the primacy of reason have become ‘the religion, the faith, the character, and even the soul of our epoch’, he averred, and brute force only has curbed their triumph so far.130 When Gervinus criticised Alfieri and Foscolo for their classicism and political inspiration, De Sanctis replied that they had been in tune with the times. Namely, they had not created the call for liberty, dignity, and patria but had just reflected and expressed it, and without any loss in artistic quality. As for Foscolo in particular, De Sanctis exclaimed, carefully using the verb tenses, that ‘to us, Foscolo does not represent either a political system or a consistent arrangement of ideas. He was a poetical manifestation of our inner sentiments, [he was] the Italian heart to the utmost of its power. Through him, we feel idealised’.131 De Sanctis partook in the Romantic atmosphere just described in peculiar circumstances, which left an enduring mark on his notion of the sensibility that the Risorgimento called for. Although very young, from 1838–9 to 1848 De Sanctis ran one of the private schools that the Bourbon regime then tolerated, enjoying a remarkable success. The ‘spiritual communion’ with his students (which he spoke of in a memoir) had a quasi-religious character, suffused as it was with the belief that life was a mission in quest of the beautiful, the good, and the true. Leopardi being ‘idolised’ at the school, students and teacher went together on a ‘pious pilgrimage’ to his grave. The best of his students, Luigi La Vista, was executed by a firing squad during the combat in the city on May 15, 1848.132 In 1850, De Sanctis recalled that the interaction with his students had been ‘the light of my soul’. ‘I loved them so much!’, and ‘how happy we were! Our days passed in celestial harmony’.133 As a university professor first in Zürich (1856–60) and then in Naples, De Sanctis continued to invite his students to form a ‘single family’ with him, a family pursuing, through the study of literature, ‘all generous ideas’. Literature, in fact, served to enhance personal morality in a materialistic century. ‘What is the point of abstract moral precepts, if your heart is cold? Let us begin by educating the heart’.134 Needless to say, the Romantic artists’ attitude was not exactly a recipe for patriotic action. De Sanctis argued nevertheless that Schiller had always made 130 Francesco De Sanctis, ‘Giudizio del Gervinus sopra Alfieri e Foscolo’ (1855), in dso, vii, 236–48 at 244–5; id., ‘Schopenhauer and Leopardi’ (1858), in dso, xiii, 417–67 at 421–2. 131 De Sanctis, ‘Giudizio del Gervinus’, 243–7, quot. at 247. 132 Francesco De Sanctis, La giovinezza (ms.), in dso, i, 3–219 at 142, 164–88; id., ‘L’ultima ora’ (1863), in dso, xv, 15–19. The subjects taught at the school were grammar, literature, aesthetics, and philosophy. De Sanctis was the only teacher. 133 De Sanctis, ‘Delle Opere drammatiche’, 235. 134 Francesco De Sanctis, ‘Ai miei giovani: Prolusione letta nell’Istituto Politecnico di Zurigo’ (1856), in dso, vii, 5–16 at 5–9; id., ‘Lavori da scuola’ (1856), in dso, iv, 547–54 at 554.

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the young characters of his dramas advocate lofty ideals, while Leopardi, who had asserted the impossibility of virtue, progress, patriotism, or beauty, curiously obtained the opposite effect of instilling a thirst for those ideals in his readers – had he been alive, De Sanctis wrote, he would have sided with us in 1848.135 Yet, he could not fail to acknowledge that an ingredient was missing in the Romantics’ world-view: ‘faith’ (fede) in ‘man’ and humanity. The function of faith was to link thought to action or, as he also put it, ‘reason’ to ‘passion’ and aspirations to hopes; the fate of ‘man’ was to be immersed in the enthusiasms, illusions, and hopes of life, accepting the possibility of disenchantment and eventually despair.136 Faith and ‘life’ were his answers to the existential dilemmas of his generation. As late as 1857, De Sanctis declared that he had not lost faith, for his heart was still young.137 The similarities with Mazzini’s sensibility are superficial only. De Sanctis’s point was that one should accept life in all its facets, rather than sublimating personal anxieties through militancy, and should embrace ideals even if their fulfilment was not warranted by any divine force. De Sanctis’s faith referred to a moral belief in a better future for ‘man’, a belief devoid of any millenarian fervour. The pursuit of martyrdom had no base whatsoever. De Sanctis believed in the emancipating power of reason, not in God. A poem of his, written during detention, celebrated the progressive march of humanity in the spirit of the Enlightenment. Suffering and misery magnified exertion and strengthened determination to succeed. ‘You can kill me, but you will never tame me’, Prometheus had told Zeus; Christ, whose word changed the world, had been a man, not the son of God; and, De Sanctis concluded, all oppressors will soon yield to the progressive force of ‘thought’. In presenting the poem to the Piedmontese public in 1853, he contrasted his faith in ‘man’ with Catholicism, that ‘corrupted’ and ‘bloody’ religion. He also criticised Leopardi, who had failed to understand that human suffering was the ‘seed of liberty’.138 De Sanctis’s faith developed out of reflection and rational conviction – in his words, it involved a quest after ‘truth’. The problem with the 135 De Sanctis, ‘Delle Opere drammatiche’, 235; id., ‘Schopenhauer’, 465–6; id., ‘Epistolario di Giacomo Leopardi’ (1849–56), in dso, xiii, 385–95 at 395. On Leopardi’s two canzoni on national themes, All’Italia and Sopra il monumento di Dante, see Cranston, The Romantic Movement, 107–8. 136 Francesco De Sanctis, ‘Cours familier de litterature par M. de Lamartine’ (1857), in dso, vii, 249–71 at 253;‘Delle Opere drammatiche’, 245–6. 137 De Sanctis, ‘Ai miei giovani’, 7. 138 Francesco De Sanctis, ‘La prigione: Versi di un Italiano’ (1851–3), in dso, iv, 5–16. Reason ‘presides over history, and moves it forward in a progressive direction’, in dso, iii, 1665.

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moderates and Gioberti in particular, he contended, is their habit of labelling just and true what in fact is merely useful, opportune, or feasible, thus contributing to the dominant scepticism. Italians need ‘stable convictions’, and not Gioberti’s sharp changes of mind (in 1851 the Piedmontese priest subscribed to democratism and censured the pope). The consequences of the moderates’ Machiavellianism were the fading of faith, the weakening of characters, the turning of truth into a matter of might, and eventually materialism. In a moral climate of this kind, he warned, peoples die.139 De Sanctis’s analyses of Dante and Manzoni help put his conception of faith into perspective. He depicted Dante as a man of violent passions, erupting freely and impetuously. Unquestionably, the Florentine exile had ‘faith’ – in God, virtue, love, the fatherland, and the destiny of humanity – and for this reason he never felt old. He was a man of thought and action, a real ‘soldier of truth’. He lived in a state of mystic exaltation, of ‘enthusiasm’, which ennobled his passions. But De Sanctis’s portrait was not flawless. First, Dante was so extreme in his feelings that politics ‘took possession’ of him: ‘there was too much rage in his truth, and too much passion in his justice’. Second, and relatedly, according to De Sanctis passions needed enthusiasm not to be mere ‘animal instincts’ (expressing one’s interests, prejudices, craving for revenge or power, and the like), and not always Dante was so inspired not to give vent to the mean side of passions. Although De Sanctis acknowledged a fascination with Dante’s ‘soul of fire, which reflects all aspects of life’, he was far from proposing him as a model. Dante’s character was a distinctive product of the Middle Ages.140 De Sanctis liked Manzoni, too, whom he portrayed as the antithesis of Leo­ pardi’s despair and Dante’s wrath. Manzoni, ‘a rare example of a simple and healthy spirit’ in a sick age, had ‘the calm and serenity of the unitary [intero] man’, in contrast with Leopardi’s split self. To De Sanctis, who thought that beliefs, hopes, and sentiments were a defining feature of humanity, Manzoni and the other writers of the ‘religious school’, like Chateaubriand or Lamartine, were expressing a genuine need in attempting to re-adjust the balance between scepticism and faith.141 Manzoni managed to harmonise reality with 139 De Sanctis, ‘Alla sua donna’, 400–1; Francesco De Sanctis, ‘Memorie sull’Italia e specialmente sulla Toscana dal 1814 al 1850 di Giuseppe Montanelli’ (1856), in dso, xv, 30–43 at 35. 140 Francesco De Sanctis, ‘Carattere di Dante e sua utopia’ (1856), in dso, v, 547–60; at 550–1, De Sanctis challenged the image of Dante as a ‘lovely and kind dove’ which, in his view, Balbo had proposed in Vita di Dante. The theme of passions recurred in the lectures on Dante De Sanctis gave in Turin and Zürich in the 1850s; see them in dso, v, 1–350, 387–522. 141 See dso, iii, 1315–19.

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principles, and thought with action, thanks to a religious faith that was not an abstract and thoughtless belief but a reasoned and practical ethics, involving an attitude of charity and self-sacrifice. Clearly enough Manzoni shared very little with Dante, as shown for instance by his patriotic poem Marzo 1821, envisioning what, at the time of writing, seemed an imminent war between Piedmont and Austria. De Sanctis stressed that the poem – a war hymn, actually – lacked any reference to hate or rage, or a desire for revenge. In a cosmopolitan spirit, resting on the brotherhood of all peoples in front of God, Manzoni depicted the Italian people as bravely and firmly determined to achieve the nation that Providence intended to be its own.142 De Sanctis’s plea for faith was a product of the atmosphere of the Risorgimento, but it had particularly visible European roots – a Romantic unease was a sign of the times all over the Continent. In Italy, of course, defying scepticism was specially important because of the patriotic struggle. Yet, the reader of De Sanctis has sometimes the impression that his faith was a moral obligation, an ‘ought’ rather than an ‘is’. Perhaps it is just an impression, due to the fact that De Sanctis’s faith originated from a dialogue with the Romantic artists, hence their disbelief and despair somehow remained the horizon of his moral experience. Perhaps De Sanctis did not really regard faith as the solution to the dilemmas lying at the basis of the Romantic crisis, simply because they were not susceptible to solution in the abstract. Faith was the spiritual attitude that the crucial experiences of his life – the teaching in Naples, the imprisonment, and the love for literature – had taught him. As regards the teaching, De Sanctis believed that there was an emotional strength in the youth, which he called faith, and which endowed them with innocence and hope. He committed himself not to forgetting or betraying what the youth represented. Thirtythree months in jail did not break him; the aforementioned poem on progress is striking proof of the fortitude that cherished beliefs gave him. Finally, the irreligious De Sanctis thought that literature above all provided ideals and principles in an age which badly needed them. As a literary critic, reconstructing the ultimate meaning of writers and, by extension, of historical epochs, he felt that moral values were the ultimate subject matter of his work.

142 Francesco De Sanctis, ‘L’ebreo di Verona di padre Bresciani’ (1855), in dso, iv, 498–527 at 505–6; id., ‘Ai miei giovani’, 9–15. See also the lectures in dso, iii, 1286–9, 1315–19, 1334–48. See Luigi Blasucci, ‘Manzoni nella critica desanctisiana’, Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 150 (1973), 549–615; Carlo Muscetta, Studi sul De Sanctis (Rome, 1980), 87–146. Manzoni’s poem (written 1821, published 1848) is in amto, i, 115–18.

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Two Novels: Ruffini and Nievo

The spell of Mazzini’s sensibility vanished to a large extent in the 1850s. The failed coups and the consolidation of constitutional government in the kingdom of Sardinia certainly contributed to that outcome, yet in Arisi Rota’s reconstruction the fascination with Mazzinianism was first and foremost a generational affair, affecting those who were young in the 1830s. Hence, many early believers rejected Mazzini simply because their existential problems had found a ­solution – they had made the transition to maturity.143 A semi-­autobiographical novel, Giovanni Ruffini’s Lorenzo Benoni or Passages in the Life of an Italian, published in English in Edinburgh in 1853, is evidence of this spiritual and emotional emancipation. The Genoese Ruffini (1807–81) looked back on his friendship and collaboration with Mazzini with affectionate detachment, despite the fact that his brother Jacopo had died for the cause. The book, set in Genoa, first recounted the years Benoni spent in primary instruction, c­ ollege, and university, and then it dealt with his quixotic love for the capricious Lilla. The narrative culminated with Benoni’s participation in a Mazzinian conspiracy, eventually leading to the death of his brother and his escape to France. Condemned to death in absentia in 1833, Ruffini lived in France, Switzerland, and England until 1848. Then he voluntarily settled in London, renouncing ­politics after a short spell as Piedmontese ambassador in Paris (1849).144 The character representing Mazzini in the novel was Fantasio, a ‘noble lad’ who ‘was quite irresistible’. Ruffini stressed his charismatic qualities – never troubled by doubts, he had unlimited confidence in himself – and his seriousness and moral purity – for instance, he did not tolerate ‘wanton jests’. The seductive Fantasio’s burning passion soon infected Benoni and his friends, who affiliated themselves first with the Carboneria and then with Fantasio’s own secret society. Benoni was the only one ‘who hazarded some objections, or started some doubts’, which Fantasio had no difficulty refuting.145 As a conspirator, Benoni was thrilled by the secrecy, the name-dropping, and the mysterious aura surronding the emissaries visiting Genoa. Ruffini looked back 143 Arisi Rota, I piccoli cospiratori. 144 A friend (ed.) [Giovanni Ruffini], Lorenzo Benoni or Passages in the Life of an Italian (1853; New York, 1857). On Ruffini’s life and critical fortunes, see Allan Conrad Christensen, A European Version of Victorian Fiction: The Novels of Giovanni Ruffini (Amsterdam, 1996), 9–40; on Ruffini as a ‘cultural mediator’ between Italy and England in the 1850s, see Raffaella Antinucci, ‘“An Italy Independent and One”: Giovanni (John) Ruffini, Britain and the Italian Risorgimento’, in Nick Carter (ed.), Britain, Ireland, and the Italian Risorgimento (Basingstoke, uk, 2015), 104–26. 145 [Ruffini], Lorenzo Benoni, 148–9, 174.

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with indulgent irony on all this, as shown for instance by the depiction of the highest level of Carboneria as ‘a something crowned with clouds charged with thunder’. But Benoni also discovered how boring, tiresome, and ‘miserable’ the everyday life of a militant could be. ‘A conspirator ceases to belong to himself’, Ruffini remarked, for he must comply with the others’ demands on him, like ‘holding vigils when longing to be in bed’.146 Ruffini’s compassionate selfmockery was that of a mature person recalling his childish self. The novel fits well into Arisi Rota’s analysis. Ruffini viewed his generation’s infatuation with Mazzinianism as stemming from a Romantic attitude and ‘a plethora of enthusiasm, which found no object on which to expend itself’. After his induction into Carboneria, Benoni exclaimed: ‘my life has now an aim!’.147 On the other hand, Ruffini relativised Benoni’s political activities by narrating them alongside other aspects of his life, like a passion for literature and opera, an interest in ‘the beauty of my lovely countrywomen’, his affection for family and friends, and the conversations with the wise and prudent uncle John.148 Benoni was too enamoured of life to be Mazzini’s ideal activist. The thickness of the moral environment, the seriousness with which values were lived out, and most patriots’ imperviousness to realism were remarkable before 1848 – but in the 1850s a light touch became possible, to the effect that those sombre, albeit fervid years came to resemble a long dream or, better, a passionate drama about love and death. This novel testifies to the width of the gap separating the two periods. Ruffini’s detachment was remarkable – he wrote as if the events he recounted, with their tragic outcome, had happened at a much earlier time than the 1830s, and to somebody else. The literary quality of Ippolito Nievo’s Confessioni d’un Italiano is much higher than that of Ruffini’s Lorenzo Benoni. Nievo, who was born in Padua in 1831, finished his novel in August, 1858, a few months before joining Garibaldi first in the war in Lombardy and then in the expedition of the Thousand. The novel was posthumously published (1867), as he died in a shipwreck in March, 1861. Nievo, who adopted Ruffini’s Fantasio as his journalistic nom de plume, balanced a Romantic inspiration (owing much to Manzoni and Sand) with a comic and wry note (owing much to Sterne, Heine, and Giuseppe Giusti).149 146 147 148 149

Ibid., 196, 288–9. Ibid., 198, 209, 221. Ibid., 199. For an example of Nievo’s sardonic vein, see his unpublished novel of 1851, Antiafrodisiaco per l’amor platonico, ed. Armando Balduino (Venice, 2011), which was a satire on the Romantic, Ortis-like type of love. For a comment, see Folco Portinari, Ippolito Nievo: Stile e ideologia (Milan, 1969), 5–25. Giusti (1809–50) was a Tuscan poet whose political satires, bitter and elegant, were acclaimed by patriots, notably by Manzoni.

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The Confessioni was the fictional autobiography of Carlo Altoviti, a subject of the Venetian republic, aged eighty-three. As soon as the Napoleonic army arrived in Venice and its territory, the life of Carlo intertwined with the changing political landscape of the peninsula, through the upheavals between the late eighteenth century and the revolutions of 1848. Carlo was a committed patriot, but a sober one, painfully aware of Italians’ pusillanimity after centuries of misgovernment and oppression.150 All too often Italians had been mere ‘spectators’ of the revolutions, a fact throwing doubt on their willingness to become free – Nievo insisted especially on the cowardice of Venetians in 1796–9. The portrait of Foscolo, whom Carlo met first in Venice in 1797 and then in Milan, was affectionate but critical. The poet featured as an over-enthusiast republican (in spite of worrying oscillations in his beliefs), and one always ready to declaim quotes from the classics. Actually Foscolo was ‘the oddest and most comic kind of citizen’, a self-appointed model of civic virtue bent on admiring himself – ‘a snarling and impossible republican teddy bear’. He projected ‘the excesses of his soul’ on to politics, despising and censuring everybody for not being democratic enough.151 Nievo summed up the meaning of Carlo’s life for the patria in the conclusion of the novel. Carlo did not regret anything, but he did not glorify the struggle, either. His story was no pedagogy. After briefly declaring his confidence in the impending success of the national movement, he made a plea for ‘justice’: the best ‘man’, Nievo wrote, is he who is just towards himself and others. Peace and happiness result from a just conscience, regardless of what other people think and do. Nievo, who emphasised the tranquillity and lack of fear with which Carlo was approaching death, was striking a Stoic note here.152 Such a stance was prepared by several previous passages, indicating that the ultimate goal of Carlo’s life was to combine ‘the Stoics’ firmness’ with evangelical charity. He wished to subdue his ‘passions’ through the practice of virtue, in the belief that existence was ‘a strain’ and hope ‘a ghost’.153 Nievo was a moralist through and through, but he was also painfully aware of the weak foundation of the values 150 Ippolito Nievo, Confessioni d’un Italiano, ed. Paolo Ruffilli (Milan, 1988), e.g. i, 394–401 ff., 453; ii, 505. Recently, the novel has been made available unabridged in English; see Ippolito Nievo, Confessions of an Italian, tr. Frederika Randall (London, 2014). 151 Nievo, Confessioni, i, 444–5; ii, 591–2, 659. 152 Ibid., ii, 909–11. 153 Ibid., i, 53–5, 74–5. The greatest happiness stems from the moderation of passions and desires occurring through unpretentious conversations within a group of friends, Nievo wrote in Le Maghe di Grado: Note d’un pellegrinaggio estivo (1856), in Ippolito Nievo, Novelle, ed. Marinella Colummi Camerino (Venice, 2012), 67–111 at 100–1. On the place of morality in the Confessioni, see Arnaldo Di Benedetto, Nievo e la letteratura campagnola (Bari, 1975), 38–41.

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he held dear. ‘[Religious] faith is better than science if one wants to be happy’, but Carlo believed in neither. He was taught ‘not only without the beliefs of the past, but also without faith in the future’, considering that science could not, at least for the time being, lend meaning to life. What is left, Nievo continued, is only the idea of justice: I point this out, as a ‘word of faith’, to all those who feel their impotence but still need to find a virtue they can trust.154 Carlo’s ‘Stoic’ moral pledge smoothly converted into Nievo’s recipe for I­ taly. Corrupt, complacent mores were the cause of impotence, individualism, utilitarianism, and grandiloquence, making the success of the national project highly doubtful in spite of the likely victory on the battleground. Foscolo, his talent notwithstanding, was an example of those Italian vices. A ‘struggle against passions’ should therefore be carried out, enthroning reason and strength of character in the public mind. Nievo called for earnestness, perseverance, and concord as the only means of turning words and aspirations into facts.155 Nievo, a garibaldino and an unbeliever, had no qualms about espousing a sensibility of virtue and restraint, thus testifying to a fading of the previous dichotomy between the two personality patterns.156 9

Concluding Remarks

Mazzini was not among the clercs Benda explicitly denounced in his famous book on their betrayal (1927). Its thesis was that the intellectuals’ involvement in politics had changed nature in the twentieth century: it had become a ‘passion’. To Benda, both the essence and the purpose of western culture were to bear witness to abstract values in a world focused on utilitarian issues; as regards political matters in particular, the intellectuals’ task was to ‘preach’ the masses (‘the laity’) a critical and rational attitude. But the clerics have betrayed their mission, Benda argued, for they have yielded to political passions. These entail ‘the tendency to action, the thirst for immediate results, the exclusive preoccupation with the desired end, the scorn for argument (argument), the 154 Nievo, Confessioni, i, 76, 352. 155 Ibid., i, 53–5, 74–6, 350–1. 156 For Nievo’s criticism of the elitist nature of the Risorgimento, and for his proposals for bridging the gap between the rural masses and the liberals, see a celebrated manuscript of his, Frammento sulla rivoluzione nazionale (c.1860), in Ippolito Nievo, Scritti politici e storici, ed. Gianni Scalia (Bologna, 1965), 158–77. This concise, lucid, and relatively dispassionate text indicated what the priorities of the new state should have been, had a really liberal ruling class been at the helm. See Elsa Chaarani Lesourd, Ippolito Nievo: Uno scrittore politico (Venice, 2011), 148–52.

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excess (outrance), the hatred, and the fixed ideas’.157 Benda stressed especially the havoc wrought on civilization by the national passion, thus adapting centuries-old denunciations of passions to the Blut und Boden nationalism of his time. His book helps situate Mazzini in the evolution of nationalism. As a p ­ olitical doctrine proper, Mazzinianism was universalist inasmuch as he ­upheld the progress of all nations. Mazzini, who did not root nationalism in ethnicity, was no chauvinist – in spite of the mystic turn of his thought, he was neither Treitschke, nor Barrès, nor D’Annunzio. But, as a sensibility, Mazzinianism prepared the ground for Benda’s passionate nationalism. Its ­precondition was the predominance, even the divinisation of politics which, in Benda’s opinion, had occurred in the twentieth-century. Politics was partout and toujours, and was overpowering.158 As shown, Mazzini provided a rationale for a total politicisation of life, resting on the force of passion and faith. Once apprehended in retrospect, from Benda’s viewpoint, Mazzini’s unrestricted advocacy of passions seems particularly reckless. To repeat: Benda posited that an intellectual who had passions, in the sense expressed by the quotation above, contradicted the very nature of his/her trade – to him, a masse passionelle always turned into a tissu de haine. (One can say, however, that the Genoese was a politician as well as an intellectual, to the effect that, as a member of the ‘laity’, he was entitled to passions within Benda’s framework). ‘The demon of irony’, to use Dostoyevsky’s phrase, was an essential element in Ruffini’s and Nievo’s narratives. Irony was an obvious antidote against the cumbersomeness of Mazzinian sensibility, but it was literature itself – the act of writing to Ruffini and Nievo, the reflection on it to De Sanctis – that testified to the advent of a new moral climate. The Risorgimento became an object of sentimental reconstruction in the 1850s, as if it had been already over – in fact the phase which had begun with the revolutions of 1820–1 had come to an end in 1848. The Piedmontese solution to the Risorgimento was welcomed (to a varying extent) by the four authors considered in the second part, but all strove to put some distance between themselves and the dawning new world. They cast into doubt the previous certainties and allegiances, and certainly that was liberating, at least for a while. Perhaps these individuals experienced a moment when, like Musil’s main character, they believed in morality without believing in a specific ethical code. Morality is neither compulsion nor wisdom, Ulrich averred, but ‘fantasy’ (Phantasie), namely, ‘the unending ensemble of the possibilities of living’.159 157 Julien Benda, La trahison des clercs (Paris, 1975), 132. 158 Ibid., 107–15. 159 Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, ed. Adolf Frisé (1930–43; Hamburg, 1952), 1050–1.

chapter 4

The Reason of the Elites: Constitutional Moderatism in the Kingdom of Sardinia, 1849–1861 In the 1850s the Piedmontese liberals created a peculiar political culture, suited to the twofold task of strengthening representative institutions at home and justifying the state’s ‘Italian’ mission abroad. The first section is introductory, and is chiefly devoted to historiographical issues. Section 2 deals with the economists’ contribution to political culture, a contribution amounting to a eulogy of the role of liberty in history meant to counter socialism. Section 3 identifies a moderate paradigm, which can in fact be constructed for Gioberti, Balbo, Carutti, Mamiani, and Boncompagni shared five critical arguments. Their goal was to defend elite government and counter democracy, drawing inspiration from the Whig tradition and, above all, from the Doctrinaires. Section 4 consists in an assessment of Cavour’s liberalism relying on his journalism and his parliamentary speeches. Section 5 relates the moderate paradigm to the issues that the Piedmontese state was confronted with, such as ecclesiastical policy and war in northern Italy. In the concluding remarks, attention is paid to the consequences of the fact that the moderates were led to portray everybody who was either on the right or the left of their camp as a ‘sectarian’, hence an enemy. 1

Introduction

After the disastrous experience of 1848–9, the kingdom of Sardinia became the ‘laboratory’ for the Italian Risorgimento.1 The movement for liberty and nationality regrouped and reorganised itself under the umbrella of the constitution, which, among the Italian states, only Piedmont had retained. In the years from 1849 to 1859, when Austria declared war on the kingdom, the moderates led by Camillo Cavour gradually managed to strengthen the representative institutions and achieve bureaucratic modernisation, while accepting

1 An earlier, and much shorter, version of this chapter was published as ‘Reluctant Revolutionaries: Political Thought in the Kingdom of Sardinia, 1849–1859’, Historical Journal, 55 (2012), 45–73.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004360914_006

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responsibility­for the ‘Italian’ struggle.2 Historians used to call the 1850s ‘the decade of preparation’ for this reason. The moderates occupied the political centre ground, and as the decade progressed, they appeared to speak not just for the majority of the kingdom’s citizens but also for the majority of Italian patriots. On 8 February, 1848, king Charles Albert announced that a constitution (the Statuto) would be granted. The French charters of 1814 and 1830 served as models for a document that made the king the head of the executive and provided for the creation of a two-chamber parliament. The upper chamber was composed of life peers appointed by the king, while the lower chamber was elected according to a narrow franchise resting on literacy and the ownership of property.3 The letter of the Statuto was unquestionably very moderate – it dealt cursorily with rights, made Catholicism the religion of the state, and denied civil equality to the non-Catholics – but its spirit would be modified during the Cavour years as the king’s ministers formed themselves into a responsible cabinet.4 After Gioberti’s ‘democratic’ premiership from December, 1848 to February, 1849, the moderate liberal side ruled the kingdom uninterruptedly, first under the leadership of d’Azeglio (1849–52) and then of Cavour. Balbo too had a short spell as head of government. A liberal culture updating pre-1848 moderatism developed in parallel with the new setting of practical politics. The framework of the 1850s, borrowing its main themes from French and British liberal thinking, differed in critical respects from that of the 1840s, which, as shown in Chapter 2, had been an idiosyncratic intellectual phenomenon, lacking essential attributes of liberalism. In particular, Gioberti, Balbo, and d’Azeglio embraced the idea 2 Beales and Biagini, The Risorgimento, Ch. 4. For the post-1848 rapprochement in Europe, so that Piedmont’s political and administrative innovation was representative of a Continental trend, see Christopher Clark, ‘After 1848: The European Revolution in Government’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 22 (2012), 171–97. 3 Under the Piedmontese electoral system 87,000 citizens were qualified to vote, that is little more than 1.5 per cent of the population. The English suffrage after 1832 was much broader as 15–20 per cent of adult males were qualified to vote, while in France during the July monarchy 2–3 per cent of adult males were; see Alan S. Kahan, Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe: The Political Culture of Limited Suffrage (Basingstoke, uk, 2003), 37. As pointed out in Chiavistelli, ‘Tra identità locale e appartenenza nazionale’, 497, men’s passive suffrage was very broad in Piedmont. 4 Candeloro, Storia, iii, 130–5; Beales and Biagini, The Risorgimento, 105; Biagini, ‘Citizenship and Religion’, 215; Carlo Ghisalberti, Storia costituzionale d’Italia 1848–1948 (Bari, 1996), 19–86; Silvano Montaldo, ‘Dal vecchio al nuovo Piemonte’, in Umberto Levra (ed.), Cavour, l’Italia e l’Europa (Bologna, 2011), 44–6.

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of constitutional monarchy, thus conforming to the new political trend. And if before 1848 moderatism had not find expression in fully-fledged treatises analysing free government, and abstract, theoretical political thought was rare and unsystematic (with the exception of Rosmini’s La società ed il suo fine and Filosofia del diritto), in the ensuing years treatises were written and theories were put forward. With reference to the recent historiographical debate on the many variants of nineteenth-century liberalism, it is arguable that in the 1850s the Piedmontese set up a version of European ‘elite’ liberalism, whose main contention was that political participation should be granted only to the individuals who had the capacity to exercise it without bringing on revolution or reaction.5 It will emerge that a ‘moderate’ spirit informed the kingdom’s liberal idiom as well; for this reason, the term ‘moderatism’ will be retained in what follows to refer to Piedmontese elite liberalism. Political reflection remained situated and militant, yet its subject matter was circumscribed, frequently in accordance with disciplinary boundaries reflecting the creation of new chairs at the universities of Turin and Genoa. These were often filled by patriots fleeing Naples, Rome, or Palermo. Full-scale treatises advancing systematic arguments seemed more powerful than emotional appeals – the works that had so effectively raised patriotic enthusiasm before 1848 were of little use once the Risorgimento had become an affair of state, and the backing of the Church for modernization proved impossible. Domenico Carutti in Del governo libero (1852) and Balbo in Della monarchia rappresentativa (1857) analyzed representative government in great depth. Commentaries of the constitution, such as Luigi Amedeo Melegari’s Sunti delle lezioni di diritto costituzionale (1857) and Ludovico Casanova’s Del diritto costituzionale (1859–60), marked the birth of constitutional law as an academic discipline in Italy. Pasquale Stanislao Mancini’s Della nazionalità (1851) and Terenzio Mamiani’s D’un nuovo diritto europeo (1859) covered the international implications of a future Italian emancipation from a ‘scientific’ standpoint. The relationship between Church and state in the kingdom was historically considered in Pier Carlo Boggio’s La Chiesa e lo stato in Piemonte (1854). Even the shortcomings of Giuseppe Mazzini’s strategy became the subject of a long volume, Nicomede Bianchi’s Vicende del mazzinianismo (1854). As the single social science of the

5 On ‘aristocratic’ or ‘elite’ liberalism see Kahan, Liberalism. For the existence of various strands of European liberalism in the nineteenth century, see Jaume, L’individu effacé; Annelien de Dijn, French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville: Liberty in a Levelled Society? (Cambridge, 2008), esp. 1–10.

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times, political economy too transmitted a political message, which will be reconstructed in the next section.6 The focus of this chapter is the foundations of elite, or moderate, l­ iberalism. Given that the most important liberal writers – Gioberti, Balbo, Mamiani, Carutti, and Carlo Boncompagni – had certain themes and approaches in ­common, it is possible to draw from this a paradigm summing up the core of ­moderate thought. Its essential aim was to circumscribe the implications of ­constitutional government. It will also be shown how political thought proper, its relative ­professionalisation notwithstanding, continued to mix with sensibility themes. In particular, the moderates emphasised the wicked nature of republicanism and democratism, allegedly due to the predominance of passions over reason in their leaders’ character. Moderatism, however, did not exhaust Piedmontese liberalism. The kingdom witnessed a lively political debate in the decade, and not only because the democratic opposition was sizeable, both in parliament and in the major towns. The émigrés from other Italian states – perhaps 100,000 of them – were instrumental in making the Piedmontese new freedom a reality. Since they were detached from the local ruling classes’ regional concerns, their political perspective was more open-minded and their patriotism more genuine. Many of them were involved in journalism, helping to turn public opinion into an effective force. Thirteen daily papers were printed in Turin in 1854, and 117 periodicals were published in the kingdom four years later.7 Clearly enough, the Piedmont Alfieri had shunned for the blind despotism of its rulers and the poverty of its cultural life was experiencing a remarkable transformation. Thus, if moderatism – the paradigm just mentioned – was the establishment’s parlance, it was not the single brand of liberalism around. This chapter also considers two more progressive variants, Cavour’s and the economists’, with the important proviso that both were neither comprehensively developed nor systematized. According to his biographer Rosario Romeo, Cavour’s culture was different from that of the moderates of the 1840s in his adherence to secularism,

6 All these intellectuals were convinced that their work was ‘in the direction of history’, according to Romeo, Cavour, iii, 111. According to La Salvia, ‘Il dibattito tra i moderati’, 200, the decade witnessed ‘a disregard for theoretical themes’. 7 Galante Garrone and Della Peruta, La stampa, 468; Gian Paolo Romagnani, ‘La censura nel Regno di Sardegna 1814–1859’, in Bruni, Potere, 211. Yet the democratic press was regularly harassed by the government.

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individualism,­and the other values underpinning modern economies.8 The usual corollary, drawn by many historians, is that in the 1850s Cavour managed to attract the more conservative liberals’ support and therefore informed Piedmontese politics with his advanced brand of liberalism, especially in the field of ecclesiastical policy.9 It is true that his struggle against the involvement of the Church in civil matters was quite uncompromising, while his control of parliament was remarkable, although never complete, over the decade. However, the principle of separation between Church and state was shared by many moderates independently of Cavour, and, what is more, his liberalism was similar to theirs in important respects.10 Cavour subscribed to the spirit, if not to the letter, of elite liberalism; not only did he fail to shape Piedmontese moderatism, but the reverse probably occurred, from 1848 onwards. The fact that he did not pen substantial writings over the decade, but only newspaper articles and parliamentary speeches, helps explain why the nature of his liberalism may be differently assessed.11 Historical analysis has neglected the 1850s compared with the 1840s. Yet the 1850s constituted the true ‘golden age of the Risorgimento’, in Guido De Ruggiero’s opinion, for then ‘the boys of 1848 grew into men’.12 Above all, the elite liberalism of the age has received little attention, with almost no literature on the 8

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Rosario Romeo, Dal Piemonte sabaudo all’Italia liberale (Turin, 1964), 262–3; id., Cavour, i, 279–300; see also Galasso, ‘Le forme del potere’, 538–9, 542. De Ruggiero, The History, 310–12, had previously argued along the same lines. See e.g. La Salvia, ‘Il moderatismo’, 175–8; Antonino De Francesco, ‘Ideologie e movimenti politici’, in Giovanni Sabbatucci and Vittorio Vidotto (eds.), Storia d’Italia (Bari, 1994–9), i, 324; Luciano Cafagna, Cavour (Bologna, 1999), 171–4; Antonio Chiavistelli, ‘Moderati/ Democratici’, in Banti, Atlante culturale, 129–30. Cavour’s liberalism, as interpreted by Romeo, has been referred to in order to argue for the liberal credentials of the whole Risorgimento, without mentioning any other writer, in Roberto Vivarelli, ‘L’eredità liberale del Risorgimento dopo l’unità’, Rivista storica italiana, 106 (1994), 118–19. For the separation between Church and state, see Arturo Carlo Jemolo, Chiesa e stato in Italia negli ultimi cento anni (Turin, 1955), 121–240, with pages on Boncompagni, Boggio, Farini, Melegari, and others; Carutti and Mamiani too would deserve mention. The ‘Siccardi laws’ (1850), limiting the privileges of the Church and in particular abolishing separate law courts for the clergy, were enacted by a true-blue moderate like d’Azeglio, who subsequently attempted to introduce civil marriage. In view of the intransigence of the Church, it was clear that its power needed limiting as a step towards the consolidation of parliamentary institutions; see Beales and Biagini, The Risorgimento, 99. The contrast between Romeo’s and Mack Smith’s biographies of Cavour is dwelt upon in Sergio Romano, ‘Cavour and the Risorgimento’, Journal of Modern History, 58 (1986), 669–77; references are to Romeo, Cavour, and Denis Mack Smith, Cavour (London, 1985). De Ruggiero, The History, 318, 320.

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thought of influential figures like Carutti and Boncompagni, while ­Mamiani’s theoretical writings of the 1850s have been largely neglected.13 Overall, the conservatism of the Piedmontese liberals has certainly been pointed out, but in elusive terms. Their disparaging of individualist, middle-class values has been recently ascribed to a lasting Catholic inspiration – but if this may be true for the 1840s, the moderatism of the 1850s was a more composite p ­ uzzle.14 Religion continued to inform political thought, but often in combination with Doctrinarisme and Burkeanism; its previous all-pervasiveness – the view of a human universe in which everything could be accounted for in religious terms – was gone. The task facing the kingdom in the 1850s was formidable. The Italian policy required subverting the European balance of power, and probably the pope’s temporal power, without unleashing democracy, or worse still socialism in either Piedmont or Italy. But the moderates of the 1850s held a view of the Risorgimento differing remarkably from that they had previously held, for the revolutionary biennium had taught them a twofold lesson. On the one hand, the palingenetic perspectives of the 1840s faded, as nobody now regarded the Risorgimento as the solution to philosophical dilemmas or the paradoxes of Italian history; the struggle for independence had become a matter of state diplomacy and power. On the other hand, the hope of unanimity was lost. After the Mazzinian republic in Rome and the democratic government of Montanelli and Guerrazzi in Tuscany, the moderates realised that significant portions of the public sentiment in Italy were outside their control. Since an alliance with democrats of any persuasion was out of the question, as will be indicated, the achievement of national unity became an acrimonious, conflict-ridden process.

13

14

But see Carlo Ghisalberti, Stato e costituzione nel Risorgimento (Milan, 1972), 189–248; Luca Borsi, Storia nazione costituzione: Palma e i ‘preorlandiani’ (Milan, 2007); Luca Mannori, ‘Il governo dell’opinione: Le interpretazioni dello Statuto albertino dal 1848 all’unità’, Memoria e ricerca, 35 (2010), 83–104. As for Mamiani, two recent volumes on his political activities have little on the works of the 1850s; see Antonio Brancati and Giorgio Benelli, Divina Italia: Terenzio Mamiani Della Rovere cattolico liberale e il risorgimento federalista (Pesaro, 2004); id., Signor conte … Caro Mamiani: Volle il mio buon genio che io sedessi a lato del Conte di Cavour (Pesaro, 2006). Brancati and Benelli take issue with the belittling portrait of Mamiani made by Romano Ugolini, ‘Mamiani e Cavour nel decennio di preparazione’, Studia Oliveriana, 5 (1985), 55–95. For a collection of Mamiani’s writings, see Marcella Pincherle (ed.), Moderatismo politico e riforma religiosa in Terenzio Mamiani (Milan, 1973). Meriggi, ‘Liberali/Liberalismo’, 113.

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Political Economy as Philosophy of Liberty

Political economy had been the chosen idiom of modernity in Italy before 1848. Focusing on the material progress taking place in northern Europe, it proposed a social model to imitate which had indirect political implications.15 Political economy became a straightforward form of political discourse, albeit a peculiar one, in the 1850s. The Italian economists who gathered in Piedmont engaged in a spirited defence of private property and capitalism against socialist denunciations – a task imposed by the shock of the social revolution in France – and challenging socialism entailed championing free government. Italian economists owed this approach to their French counterparts, who, in criticising the Ateliers nationaux created in 1848, had advocated the free exercise of the faculties with which people were endowed – more ‘liberty’, in a word – as the the only progressive solution to the social question. Frédéric Bastiat, Charles Dunoyer, and Michel Chevalier had been at the forefront of the campaign against the socialistic measures. As the influential Bastiat put it, ‘political economy precedes politics’, because ‘political economy determines whether the interests of human beings are harmonious or antagonistic’; he thought that they were harmonious, on condition that the state did not intervene in the economy.16 Cavour rephrased the point by contending that, after the French revolution of 1848, the socio-economic issues had become more momentous than the political ones. Hence the crucial function that political economy – ‘the most important’ of all moral sciences – was called to fulfil: to investigate the causes of ‘the relative conditions of the various classes of society’.17 Such a kind of economic knowledge, so heavily politicised, constituted the most advanced form of Piedmontese liberalism. For reasons of space, full consideration will be given only to the Sicilian Francesco Ferrara, who wrote celebrated introductions to the economic works 15 Greenfield, Economics. 16 Frédéric Bastiat, La loi (Paris, 1850), 71 n., 77. See Évelyne Laurent and Luc Marco, ‘Le Journal des économistes ou l’apologie du libéralisme (1841–1940)’, in Luc Marco (ed.), Les revues d’économie en France: Genèse et actualité (1751–1994) (Paris, 1996), 79–120; Philippe Steiner, ‘Say et le libéralisme économique’, in Philippe Nemo and Jean Petitot (eds.), Histoire du libéralisme en Europe (Paris, 2006), 381–404; Jaume, L’individu effacé, 473–83 ff. 17 Camillo Cavour, ‘Corso di economia politica professato dal signor Francesco Ferrara’ (1849–50), in id., Scritti di economia 1835–1850, ed. Francesco Sirugo (Milan, 1962), 447–65 at 447. On political economy in Piedmont see Romani, L’economia politica, 162–200; Marco E.L. Guidi, ‘Economia politica ed economia sociale nelle riviste moderate piemontesi di metà Ottocento (1838–1860)’, in Massimo M. Augello, Marco Bianchini, and Marco E.L. Guidi (eds.), Le riviste di economia in Italia (1700–1900) (Milan, 1996), 233–63.

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comprising the series ‘Biblioteca dell’economista’. Surprising as it may seem, the bulk of Ferrara’s introductions were devoted to explaining the rationale for liberty, challenging socialism, analysing the progress of civilization, and assessing the demerits of the French compared with the merits of the English and Americans. A radical advocate of both free trade and laissez-faire, he elaborated a fully-fledged philosophy of history around the opposing concepts of liberty and despotism.18 For Ferrara, liberty amounted to the unconstrained interaction of individuals with nature, whereas despotism was anything that limited liberty in this sense and shielded individuals from the consequences of their choices. Infringements on liberty included tariffs, subsidies, incentives, state banking, public education, the need to have a degree to enter a profession, and copyrights.19 From the advocacy of an extreme laissez-faire economy Ferrara went on to formulate a vision of progress in the spirit of Romagnosi’s incivilimento. In his view, the search for satisfaction of ever higher needs, in combination with the spur to action represented by the Malthusian law, was the progressive principle lying at the basis of all events in human history. That principle needs individual freedom to bring about incivilimento, Ferrara wrote, but freedom has been regularly imperilled by the forces of ‘privilege’ and ‘monopoly’ – from feudal lords to absolute monarchs, from state-sponsored companies to socialists – perpetrating violent interference in the order of nature. Political economy is nothing but an argument in favour of liberty, or, more precisely, it is ‘the new formula that all over the world has been adopted in order to assess the struggle between the principle of emancipation and that of despotism’. Political economy is therefore ‘the truest of all philosophies of history’.20 Like many contemporaries, Ferrara was shocked by the events of 1848 in  France. He consequently attempted to expunge from political economy 18 Romani, L’economia politica, 131–61. On the ‘Biblioteca’, see Massimo M. Augello and Marco E.L. Guidi, (eds.), L’economia divulgata: Stili e percorsi italiani (1840–1922) (Milan, 2007), iii. The exiled Ferrara (1810–1900) taught political economy at the university of Turin from 1849 to 1858. He also wrote extensively in the press, supporting first Cavour and then Urbano Rattazzi. Eventually, as a committed federalist, Ferrara grew out of tune with Piedmontese politics. See Riccardo Faucci, L’economista scomodo: Vita e opere di Francesco Ferrara (Palermo, 1995). 19 Ferrara’s depiction of the Anti-Corn Law League’s agitation was enthusiastic to say the least: its leaders were ‘prophets’, ‘giants’, and ‘demigods’, who, by the sheer force of ideas, had managed to destroy ‘the most complete system of monopoly ever usurped by a privileged caste’; see Francesco Ferrara, ‘Bastiat, Garnier, Stuart Mill’, in id., Opere complete, ed. Bruno Rossi Ragazzi et al. (Rome, 1955–2001), iii, 369–521 at 390–1. 20 See the following texts by Ferrara: ‘Importanza dell’economia politica e condizioni per coltivarla’ (1849), in Opere, xii, 599–629 at 629; ‘G.B. Say’ (1855), in Opere, ii, 445–568 at 564.

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(as elaborated by Ricardo in particular) all the theories that the socialists had exploited, notably the labour theory of value and the theory of differential rent.21 Within Ferrara’s theoretical framework, class struggles were not bound to worsen as socialists contended, since the value of labour increased over time in relation to the value of capital.22 He also put forward a theory of property built on two statements. First, everybody owned at least his/her body, and, second, all present properties implied work done in the past – propositions meant to counter the socialist picture of property-less workers in opposition to fat-cat capitalists.23 To him socialism was the most extreme version of a general statist approach resulting from misguided economic theories, to the effect that the difference between, say, the protectionist Thiers and the socialist Blanc was only one of degree. In Ferrara’s reconstructions, economists became a sort of apostles, preaching the gospel of liberty to rulers and peoples who, more often than not, failed to listen. In recent decades, he remarked, the drama of the clash between liberty and privilege has been staged most clearly in France. It was Ferrara’s favourite context, with heroes like Turgot, Jean-Baptiste Say, Dunoyer, or Bastiat challenging despots such as the Bourbon kings or the two Napoleons. The ultimate reason why the French state multiplied its functions was people’s ‘cowardice’, namely their lack of self-reliance, energy, and selfrespect; the French of all classes preferred to rely on the state because theirs was a country lacking ‘a sense of liberty’.24 Granted that there was no grievance in the nation for which the French government did not make itself responsible, any failure to meet the demands produced discontent and possible revolution. The English and Americans, on the contrary, were suited to both a free government and a laissez-faire economy.25 Ferrara’s insistence on the role of national character was very much part of the ongoing political debate, as will be shown below. Two comments are in order. First, the liberal intelligentsia who were active in Piedmont were in the main Anglophile. Romagnosi’s denunciation of Britain had persuaded many Italians, but the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 as well as the country’s social peace in 1848 converted most liberals to both 21 Romani, L’economia politica, 135–9. In Europe and America after 1848, many economists were re-formulating the science to counter socialism; Bastiat and Dunoyer in France, Henry Carey in the United States, and Ferrara in Italy were at the forefront. 22 Francesco Ferrara, ‘McCulloch, Carey’ (1853), in id., Opere, iv, 9–89 at 50–1. 23 Ibid., 82–3; Francesco Ferrara, ‘Sismondi, Destutt de Tracy, Droz’ (1854), in id., Opere, ii, 367–442 at 425–40. 24 Francesco Ferrara, ‘Carlo Dunoyer’ (1859), in id., Opere, v, 359–497 at 405. 25 Romani, L’economia politica, 189–91.

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free trade and Anglophilia. By 1851, Britain’s rejection of other evidence of ‘a vested-interest state’ definitely brought about a change in the nation’s image. Appreciation on the part of Piedmontese liberals was further strengthened by the interpretation of the Crimean war as a fight for justice against brute aggression prevalent in British opinion, an approach which foreshadowed a similar attitude towards a future patriotic war in Italy.26 The second comment concerns the relationship between Cavour’s economic policies and Ferrara’s stance. Although a believer in free trade and laissez-faire as general rules, and granted the impressive degree of liberalization of the kingdom’s economy that he achieved, as a policy-maker Cavour could not come anywhere near Ferrara’s extreme recommendations. Therefore, the latter soon became a stern critic of the former, especially in relation to banking policy. However, by emphasising economic liberty, Ferrara and the other economists bolstered Cavour’s view that free trade was ‘the highest and most concrete expression of the liberals’ progressive policies’.27 A view of the course of history similar to Ferrara’s was put forward by the Neapolitan Antonio Scialoja and the Genoese Gerolamo Boccardo. Scialoja sketched a history of the twin processes of the emancipation of work and the formation of the middle class, processes clashing with the opposing forces of political privilege. The ‘mission’ of the middle class is to promote work and economic freedom, he argued, making possible both an ‘orderly liberty’ and the ‘harmony of interests’. But in France the progress of civilization came to a halt during the July monarchy, when the ruling middle class pursued policies of economic privilege (or ‘monopoly’) that made the few richer at the expense of the many. A struggle between the government and the wealthy, on the one hand, and the poor on the other, began. With the middle class betraying its traditional values of enterprise and independence, the French became accustomed to relying on the state, to the effect that the socialist experiment of 1848 extended state protection to the workers – like Ferrara, Scialoja regarded socialism as protectionism for the masses. Both Scialoja and Boccardo extolled Britain and the Anglo-Saxon character in contrast with France and the French. They argued that Britain, unlike France, had benefited from the teachings of political economy, as demonstrated by the repeal of the Corn Laws. In Scialoja’s view, political economy was effectively influencing the attitudes of the middle class in Piedmont, too.28 Scialoja and Boccardo, like Ferrara, strove to purify 26 Parry, The Politics of Patriotism, 58, 218. 27 Romeo, Cavour, ii, 516-19, 685–7, quot. at 703. See Faucci, L’economista scomodo, 97–154. 28 Antonio Scialoja, ‘Prolusione alla prima parte del corso di economia e di diritto commerciale’ (1853), in id., Opere, ed. Gabriella Gioli et al. (Milan, 2006), iii, 283–94. For Boccardo,

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political economy by refuting head-on the theories that authors like Proudhon or Blanc had borrowed from the classical economists.29 Cavour, who shared these views on France and Britain, equally considered political economy as a chief bulwark against socialism. He dealt with Malthus’s principle of population in a series of articles in Il Risorgimento, agreeing with Ferrara, Boccardo, and Scialoja that Malthus was basically right. But in Piedmont (and elsewhere since the 1830s) the economists expunged the bleak implications from the principle, as they contradicted the reassuring image of an unlimited incivilimento once the forces of privilege were defeated. Cavour, for example, clarified that the population was not bound to exceed the amount of food available at any given moment, thanks to both the foreseeable improvement of agricultural techniques and the rise in the amount of capital invested in agriculture; furthermore, the effectiveness of Malthus’s ‘preventive checks’ increased with income, and data confirmed that the birth rate declined as the standard of living rose. The principle of population was therefore to be understood as a mere tendency, and one effectively countered.30 Boccardo drew the conclusion that Malthus’s lesson was a moral one, heralding the need for the working classes to be thrifty and far-sighted since ‘the chief causes of pauperism lie in the poor themselves’. Ferrara re-formulated Malthusianism in ‘progressive and humanitarian’ terms by depicting population pressure as a welcome stimulus to effort.31

29

30

31

see the following entries in his Dizionario della economia politica e del commercio (Turin, 1857–61): ‘Centralità e centralizzazione’, i, 498–503; ‘Europa’, ii, 179–86; ‘Francia’, ii, 358– 65; ‘Inghilterra’, ii, 498–518. Scialoja (1817–77), who had taught political economy at the ­university of Turin from 1846 to 1848, was jailed in Naples until October, 1852 for his major role in the revolutionary government of 1848. Once exiled, he returned to Turin where he collaborated with Cavour; see Gabriella Gioli, Il pensiero economico di Antonio Scialoja (Pisa, 1989). A lawyer, a journalist, and a writer of economic and historical textbooks, Boccardo (1829–1904) collaborated with Mamiani in founding a philosophical academy in Genoa; see Massimo M. Augello and Giovanni Pavanelli (eds.), Tra economia, politica e impegno civile: Gerolamo Boccardo e il suo tempo (1829–1904) (Genoa, 2005). For Scialoja, see a course of lectures recently published as Lezioni di economia politica presso la Camera d’Agricoltura e di commercio di Torino (1853), in Scialoja, Opere, iii, 273–482; for Boccardo, see Trattato teorico-pratico di economia politica (1853; Turin, 1869), and L’economia politica e gli interessi materiali nel secolo xix (Turin, 1858). Cavour, ‘Corso di economia’, 448, 452–65. The first series of the newspaper Il Risorgimento (1847–52) was Cavour’s mouthpiece in the years preceding his first premiership. It had been founded by Balbo and Cavour himself. See by Boccardo: Trattato, i, 153–86; ‘Beneficienza’, in Dizionario, i, 327–38, quot. at 334; ‘Popolazione’, in Dizionario, iv, 78–125; for Ferrara, see ‘McCulloch’, 70–2. For Scialoja on Malthus, see Lezioni, 352–69.

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The texts just discussed strengthened moderate culture, namely mainstream liberalism, by updating the old idea that progress was certain. Political economy guaranteed that the march of ‘orderly liberty’ was ineluctable even in the face of military defeat and the rise of socialism. Evoking the authority of science, economists demonstrated that liberty was the precious outcome of historical development; that poverty was to be ascribed to the forces opposing economic freedom, and eventually to the Malthusian principle; that socialists were wrong; and that mercantile and stable Britain, rather than statist and revolutionary France, was the proper model. This Bastiat-style political economy, together with the Doctrinaires’ concept of reason and the belief in Providence, heartened the moderates in calamitous times – whereas Mazzini’s followers were as impatient as ever, liberals regrouped and waited for more propitious circumstances, which surely lay ahead. As for socialism in particular, Piedmont’s ruling classes were certainly frightened by its spread in neighbouring France, but they knew well that it was not a pressing danger in their state. It would probably become such in the immediate future, however, so that it was apposite to kill socialism in its cradle by challenging it on the intellectual plane. The compelling logic of economic science served to depict the status quo as the culmination of a beneficent course of history, rather than as the outcome of class exploitation. The economists’ cult of liberty, their eulogy of the middle class, and the individualistic and utilitarian foundations of their science were not shared by the moderate writers, tough. It is significant that a treatise by the philosopher Vito D’Ondes Reggio – a Sicilian teaching at the university of Genoa – was criticised by Gustavo Cavour, Camillo’s very moderate brother, on account of its utilitarian spirit. Like Ferrara, D’Ondes Reggio combined a natural law framework with an emphasis on needs as the foundation of society; he owed much to Bentham, Locke, and Genovesi. D’Ondes Reggio, a devout Catholic, strove to divorce utilitarianism from an exclusive concern with material goods, but even a hint of eighteenth-century ‘materialism’ was anathema to the prevailing spiritual culture, whether of Catholic or ‘eclectic’ origin.32

32

For D’Ondes Reggio’s concept of ‘all-encompassing utility’ (utilità onnicomprensiva), see his Introduzione ai principî delle umane società (Genoa, 1857), 1–31 ff.; for the discussion with Gustavo Cavour, see ibid., 397–420. See Traniello, Cattolicesimo conciliatorista, 234–7, and, on the influence of Cousin’s eclecticism in Piedmont, see Mastellone, Victor Cousin, Ch. 2.

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A Moderate Paradigm

Balbo and Gioberti stood out in the 1850s as they had done in the 1840s. The influence of the former, who died in 1853, was substantial as his books were re-published (by the Florentine publishing house Le Monnier) and some new writings appeared posthumously. Prominent among these was Della monarchia rappresentativa in Italia, a treatise which, besides re-formulating all the crucial themes of the Risorgimento, focused on the relationship between representative institutions and ‘public spirit’, as Tocqueville had done. As the head of government, Gioberti aimed to implement ‘democratic politics’, meaning a focus on the material and spiritual well-being of the p ­ eople.33 But the ascendancy of left-wing liberalism did not last, and eventually Gioberti left for voluntary exile in Paris. His Del rinnovamento civile d’Italia was published in Turin a few months before Louis Napoleon’s coup. The book as a whole was unpalatable to the moderates. Gioberti asserted the unavoidable advent of ‘democracy’, recommended the involvement of the masses in the national struggle, and favoured, although in principle only, a republican rather than a monarchical form of government. However, other views of Gioberti’s were very much in tune with the emerging moderate consensus, not to mention that he recommended precisely the course of action that Cavour would carry out: granted a ‘Piedmontese hegemony’ over the national movement, an alliance with France would set in motion a process of gradual unification of the peninsula. Since the author of the Primato enjoyed the status of a hero, the moderates criticised Gioberti’s interpretation of specific episodes of 1848–9, but maintained silence on his republican and democratic opinions. The Rinnovamento was avidly read in Piedmont – two editions sold out in a few months – and even the king himself appreciated the book, in spite of the critical remarks about his predecessor Charles Albert.34 Gioberti died in October, 1852. 33 Romeo, Dal Piemonte sabaudo, 114–18. 34 De Ruggiero, The History, 324; Antonio Anzilotti, Gioberti (Florence, 1922), 408–24; Vittorio Cian, ‘Vincenzo Gioberti e l’on. abate Giovanni Napoleone Monti’, Rassegna storica del Risorgimento, 22 (1936), esp. 813–37; Giuseppe Talamo, ‘Stampa e vita politica dal 1848 al 1864’, in Umberto Levra et al. (eds.), Storia di Torino (Turin, 1997–2002), vi, 562. For Gioberti on democracy, see Traniello, Religione cattolica, 179–92; for an insightful perspective on the Rinnovamento, see Traniello, ‘Ermeneutica giobertiana’. To an extent, the success of the Rinnovamento was due to its consonance with the programme then carried out by disillusioned republicans led by Giorgio Pallavicino and Daniele Manin, a programme blending the acknowledgement of the Savoy monarchy with democratic demands. In 1857 Pallavicino and Manin formed the Società nazionale italiana, soon absorbed into Cavour’s coalition. See Romano Ugolini, ‘La via democratico-moderata

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The moderate paradigm consisted of five theses recurring in the writings of Gioberti, Balbo, Carutti, Mamiani, and Boncompagni, albeit to different degrees. These theses were: i. natural and divine laws were both the ultimate source of right and wrong in politics (as in morality) and the guarantee of gradual progress; ii. the brightest citizens should rule; iii. ‘democracy’, that is popular sovereignty and universal suffrage, was inherently wrong; iv. citizens’ attitudes played an important role in politics; and v. moderatism was imbued with Burkeanism, meaning that it endorsed a realistic, prudent approach to politics, that much was made of Piedmontese history and traditions, and that mere constitutional machinery was to be disdained. The overall goal shaping Piedmontese moderatism was to justify elite government, at a time when demands for political equality were relentlessly voiced. How to defend limited suffrage, in particular, was a theme of immediate practical concern in view of the adoption of universal male suffrage in France since 1848. The first three theses were interwoven, as Carutti’s Dei principii del governo libero clearly showed.35 This book, tackling all the major issues characterising 1850s moderatism, deserves close analysis. It included an advocacy of natural rights reminiscent of Rosmini’s Filosofia del diritto, yet Carutti argued not only for civil equality, freedom of expression and association, and property rights, but also, as a former democrat, for free elementary education provided by the state and the poor’s right to assistance. Social progress amounted to implementing these rights, which were ‘inviolable and holy’ in consideration of their divine origin. The superiority of Christian civilization over pagan societies, he wrote, in fact lies in regarding individuals as ends, rather than means to the greatness of the polity. Carutti made the protection of individual rights the condition for the legitimacy of government, countering the two opposite theories of divine right and social contract.36 As for the pace of social improvement, it depended on the degree to which citizens made reason prevail over passions. These were the products of the senses unshackled from reason, which was the

35

36

all’unità: Dal “Partito nazionale italiano” alla “Società nazionale italiana”’, in Romano Ugolini et al., Correnti ideali e politiche della sinistra italiana dal 1849 al 1861 (Florence, 1978), 185–219. In 1852, when he published his treatise, the Piedmontese Carutti (1821–1909) was a junior official at the ministry of foreign affairs; he reached the highest echelons later in the decade. Carutti extolled the monarchy of Savoy in historical books; see his Storia del regno di Vittorio Amedeo ii (Turin, 1856) and Storia del regno di Carlo Emanuele iii (Turin, 1859). See Maria Fubini Leuzzi, ‘Carutti di Cantogno, Domenico’, dbi, xxi, 1978; Ghisalberti, Stato e costituzione, 202–7; Borsi, Storia, 221–8. Domenico Carutti, Dei principii del governo libero (1852; Florence, 1861), 23–5, 36–97.

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link between ‘man’ and God. Decadence occurred when the physical senses – our ‘animal istinct’ – dominated spirit.37 At this point Carutti shifted to a mix of Guizot and Maistre. Citizens’ obedience to positive laws rests on their being ‘an emanation and an interpretation’ of divine laws, he argued. Rulers are mere delegates of ‘supreme justice’; their power amounts to ‘a deputyship [luogotenenza] of the creator of the moral order’.38 Granted that sovereignty proper belongs to the divine law, those who are in charge of government should pay heed to the will of the people – to public opinion – besides putting God’s design into effect. Only the combination of the two elements limits rulers’ power, Carutti continued, whereas Rousseau’s system leads to absolutism by positing assembly majorities as the single source of sovereignty. Reference to divine sovereignty guarantees justice, because religion determines ‘the nature of good and evil’. In the light of this, it is difficult to imagine how public opinion could legitimately differ from divine laws. And in fact Carutti specified that the task of parliament and government was to comply with divine intentions by interpreting and administering ‘supreme justice’, not to follow the changing and unconstrained will of individuals and groups.39 All human beings know the dictates of natural law by virtue of ‘reason’ bestowed by God, Carutti went on, but some with greater clarity than others. In practice therefore, sovereignty belonged to the ottimati, from the Latin word optimates, used to refer to the conservative senatorial majority of the Roman republic. Carutti envisaged a natural aristocracy of the brightest citizens, to be elected to parliament by those who had Guizot’s capacité politique; conversely, the masses had to be excluded from political participation on the grounds of their limited intelligence and knowledge. The ottimati’s task was to interpret the opinions and interests of the people in the light of transcendental principles.40 Carutti maintained that, as government by the greatest number, 37 38 39 40

Ibid., 17–23. Ibid., 105–9. Ibid., 108–17. Ibid., 112–19, 142–5, 164–7. Yet Carutti was in favour of universal eligibility; see ibid., 166–7. For the opposite view that political capacity followed political participation, see Luigi Amedeo Melegari, Sunti delle lezioni di diritto costituzionale (Turin, 1857), ii, 24–8, 219–20. Melegari (1805–81) was a former Mazzinian from Parma who had been appointed a law professor at the university of Turin in 1848. Elected to parliament in 1849, 1851, and 1853, Melegari was politically close to Rattazzi. On his constitutional thought, see Claudia Sartoretti, ‘La scienza del diritto costituzionale in Italia nella seconda metà dell’Ottocento: Le Lezioni di Luigi Amedeo Melegari’, Diritto e società, 23 (1996), 67–105. Melegari’s stance on capacity was also Constant’s (see above Ch. 2, Sect. 4), and, according to Sabetti, Civilization, 151–79, Cattaneo’s.

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‘democracy’ put ignorance in charge. But the consequences of democracy were worse than a government lacking knowledge and sagacity. The masses were often victims of demagogues who flattered them by preaching equality and ended up seizing the wealth of the rich; nothing short of ‘communism’ resulted therefore from the principle of political equality. With the Mazzinians in mind, he argued violently against the ‘revolutionary spirit’. To Carutti revolution was legitimate if the government betrayed the covenant – an unsurprising stance in view of the kingdom’s ‘Italian’ mission – but he was keen to circumscribe that right, which for instance did not hold in the case of free governments.41 Carutti thus set the advocacy of individual rights within a framework of natural and divine laws. Civil rights and political liberty were presented from the top down, namely, with almost exclusive reference to the Providential design they were part of, rather than as demands of civil society.42 In c­ ontinuity with the 1840s, Catholicism was deemed necessary to warrant ­liberty. ­Carutti, who was fearful of the effects of secularization on morality and ­politics, stressed that rights and duties were ‘empty’ unless sanctioned by a superior principle. The ‘radical fault’ of social contract theory lay in the belief that men and women were self-sufficient moral entities, with the consequence that the greatest number, that is the greatest force, decided about good and evil. The Jacobin Terror – a direct effect of Rousseau’s thought – illustrated the point.43 There was a clear ultramontane side in Carutti’s system, possibly because the rationale for elite power seemed too weak without a religious underpinning – calling for limited suffrage in combination with the civil rights of all individuals was theoretically problematic. An ultramontane and a liberal, Carutti also gave due weight to institutional and procedural checks, such as the division and limitation of powers, an independent and responsible judiciary, and the publicity of government.44 Correlations similar to that posited by Carutti between a natural order and rule by the few who understood its laws, figured neatly in Mamiani, Boncompagni, and Casanova. To Mamiani sovereignty belonged to the ‘moral law’, which was ‘eternal and divine’ as it was based on both ‘God and reason’; it

41 Carutti, Dei principii, 120–1, 145–51, 162–76, 248–58. On communism as the certain consequence of popular sovereignty see Balbo, Della monarchia, 129. 42 But for a reference to ‘social needs’ validating the constitution, see Carutti, Dei principii, 235. 43 Ibid., 39, 43–6. The same point on moral self-sufficiency had been made by Guizot in ‘De la démocratie dans les sociétés modernes’, Revue française, 3 (15 Oct. 1837), 203–12. 44 Carutti, Dei principii, 76–8, 129–34, 182–8, 204–7.

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should inform positive laws.45 The ottimati should rule because they were the interpreters of the moral law, to which they were exclusively responsible, pace the electors. He added that at present the ottimati could not grant complete liberty to the people because of their manifest ignorance and unbridled passions, but sooner or later they would do so since the people grasped the moral law with ever greater clarity – in due course universal suffrage, for example, was bound to be conceded. To Mamiani, the course of history was a manifestation of a benevolent Providence.46 Boncompagni, too, regarded the human world as ruled by natural laws mirroring God’s will.47 In his view, the aim of government was to guarantee natural, that is civil, rights. Only a slow political progress, resulting from a gradual evolution of ideas, was feasible and legitimate. Public opinion is the ultimate ruler, he argued, yet in a democracy it cannot but be ‘vulgar’ as most people lack both knowledge and independence. To make opinion enlightened, namely informed by ‘reason’, suffrage should therefore be limited to those who, because of their position in society, are supposed to understand political matters.48 The jurist Casanova’s framework was very similar. He ascribed sovereignty to natural law, and held that democracy was tyrannical, since the masses neither knew the natural order nor were they independent. Hence a restricted suffrage was necessary to ‘allocate power in accordance with the corresponding capacity’, to be understood as ‘the faculty

45

46

47

48

Terenzio Mamiani, ‘Discorsi sulla origine natura e costituzione della sovranità’ (1850–3), in Mamiani and Mancini, Fondamenti, pp. v–xxxix; see Salvatorelli, Il pensiero politico, 271–2. The Pesaro-born Mamiani (1799–1885), who had been exiled in 1831, headed two short-lived governments in Rome in 1848. Subsequently, he taught philosophy of history at the university of Turin, and was first elected to Parliament in 1856. In 1860 he was appointed minister of education by Cavour. See Antonio Brancati, ‘Mamiani della Rovere, Terenzio’, dbi, lxviii, 2007. Mamiani, ‘Discorsi’, pp. xliv–vi, lxiii; id., ‘Prolusione aprendosi la nuova cattedra di filosofia della storia’, Rivista contemporanea, 11 (1857), 305–18. In justifying the 1859 war, Mamiani criticized the theory of the divine right of rulers; see his D’un nuovo diritto europeo (Turin, 1859), 66–73. On natural laws, see Carlo Boncompagni, ‘Sulle dottrine religiose della filosofia moderna’, Rivista contemporanea, 6 (1856), 343–50. The Turinese Boncompagni (or Bon-Compagni, or Bon Compagni, 1804–80) was minister of education in 1848, minister of justice in 1852– 3, president of the lower house in 1853–6, and ambassador to Tuscany from 1857 to 1859. See Francesco Traniello, ‘Bon Compagni di Mombello, Carlo’, dbi, xi, 1969; Ghisalberti, Stato e costituzione, 193–8. Carlo Boncompagni, Della monarchia rappresentativa (Turin, 1848), 12–13, 25–31, 65–76, 101–5.

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of acting in accordance with reason’.49 The Doctrinaires’ concept of capacity served the moderates well, as it opportunely linked the sphere of human action to the natural order, bridging the gap between positive laws and natural jurisprudence.50 By presenting themselves as the interpreters of natural laws and objective reason, the moderates ruled out all other possible positions as the outcome of sinister motives, as will be corroborated below. The content of the natural laws which the moderates so often invoked was never really specified – it was often made explicit, on the other hand, that the Statuto had brought genuine liberty to the kingdom. As for Gioberti’s Rinnovamento, the advocacy of democracy was diluted by the leadership attributed to the ottimati, who had intellectual power (­ ingegno). Democracy amounted to ‘the predominance of the people’ (popolo), but the people consisted of the ‘plebs’ (plebe) and the educated; the latter, as both writers and politicians, should interpret the Italian masses’ ‘confused instincts’ and lead them to the achievement of nationality and liberty. More precisely, as the ottimati were endowed with reason and the plebs only with ‘sentiment’ and ‘intuition’, the former’s task was to elevate the latter’s obscure vision of progress to the level of ‘ideas’.51 Gioberti added that the people was ‘a whole’ embracing all ideas and all interests, and for this reason it was opposite to sects, always partisan and exclusive.52 Sovereignty belonged to ‘the nation’ but not straightforwardly to the greatest number, for, like the Doctrinaires, Gioberti believed that reason was the supreme ruler and therefore the ‘general will’ was to be subordinated to the ‘absolute and eternal’ values of morality and justice. In other words the people – gradually refined by the dynamics of commercial society – were sovereign only insofar as their decisions were informed by ingegno.53 Gioberti was in favour of universal suffrage, but he wanted to amend it

49

Ludovico Casanova, Del diritto costituzionale (Genoa, 1859–60), ii, 21–4, 157–62, 201–5, 271–2. Casanova’s definition of capacity (at ii, 202) is actually Guizot’s. Casanova (1799– 1853) held a chair at the university of Genoa; see Borsi, Storia, 264–75; Mannori, ‘Il go­ verno’, 96–7. For a discussion of capacity in relation to the kingdom’s electoral law, see Ercole Ricotti, Della rappresentanza nazionale in Piemonte (Turin, 1848). 50 Pierre Rosanvallon, Le sacre du citoyen: Histoire du suffrage universel en France (Paris, 1992), 232. The notion of capacité is ‘the most beautiful [belle] and useful goal we have achieved over the last fifteen years. The principle of political capacity has effectively displaced anarchy’, Guizot said in 1831; quoted in Pierre Rosanvallon, Le moment Guizot (Paris, 1985), 96. 51 Gioberti, Del rinnovamento, iii, 3–11, 34–5. See Mustè, La scienza ideale, 234–47. 52 Gioberti, Del rinnovamento, iii, 241. 53 Ibid., i, 147–52; iii, 35.

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so that intellectual capacity could emerge.54 Religion was not all-pervading in the Rinnovamento, but he continued to base his recommendations on ‘the momentous laws presiding over human vicissitudes’. It followed that the emancipation of Italy consisted in ‘the rational and natural orders … replacing the artificial ones’ established at the congress of Vienna, with the corollary that the ascendancy of reason and nature was synonymous with that of religion.55 The ‘sovereignty of thought and ingegno’, as Gioberti put it in 1848, had been a regular feature of his œuvre since the late 1830s.56 During the 1840s all moderates, including Rosmini, had shared this contention, albeit to different degrees, and chiefly in the form of an emphasis on public opinion. Then their transcendental view of the Risorgimento harmonised effortlessly with the primacy of intellectuals, while invoking the ottimati in the 1850s served prima facie to counter democracy. Ideas were crucial in both decades, however, as they always are in times of change. All patriots, even those with connections with the Turinese court, posited the Risorgimento as a battle for an ideal, not an interest. This, and the stress placed on social harmony, excluded that a particular section of the population could be singled out as the vanguard of the movement. Moderatism lacked a sociology, not only in the sense that the classes or groups tasked with the national resurgence were never identified, but in the more radical sense that the issue was never formulated. Two open letters on the Italian aristocracy (1847) by Farini and d’Azeglio might be seen as an exception, but in fact the authors’ goal was to rebuke a criticism of the aristocracy’s historical role appearing in the Revue des deux mondes, while pleading for the necessity of hierarchies and social concord.57 In practice, the very intellectuals who put forward the patriotic ideal were the first to attempt to realise it. It is difficult to mention a moderate writer (or a democratic one, for that matter) who did not participate in political activities, usually as a leader (only Manzoni, an artist, comes to mind). In 1850s Piedmont, Balbo was suspicious of ‘pure’ intellectuals – namely those who distinguished themselves for knowledge but 54 55 56 57

Ibid., iii, 34–45. Ibid., i, 11; ii, 179, 193–5. See e.g. Gioberti, Introduzione, iii, 100–1; id., Delle condizioni presenti, 68. See Ch. 1, Sect. 6 above. Farini’s letter, ‘Dei nobili in Italia’, is especially relevant; it was first published, like d’Azeglio’s reply, in the Turinese review Antologia italiana. Both are in data, i, 174–96 and 197–217. On the weakening of aristocratic power in the kingdom after 1848, see Anthony L. Cardoza, Aristocrats in Bourgeois Italy: The Piedmontese Nobility, 1861–1930 (Cambridge, 1997), Ch. 2. On bourgeoisie and aristocracy in the Risorgimento, see Riall, The Italian Risorgimento, 29–38.

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were homines novi – for their lack of social roots. But he agreed to admit them to the kingdom’s senate as part of the country’s ‘political aristocracy’.58 Clearly enough, the Doctrinaires were a major influence on the moderates contributing to the paradigm. In regarding reason as the single principle legitimising power, and la capacité politique as the ability to follow its precepts, the Doctrinaires had argued that the supériorités in this sense should rule. According to Pierre Rosanvallon, their rationalism conceded little to the intrinsic rights of the individual, whose liberty was limited to obeying the dictates of reason.59 As for religion, reason was a manifestation of ‘the divine law’ to Guizot. ‘The only sovereign that is legitimate by nature and in all eternity is reason, truth, and justice’, he maintained, and their source is the ‘unchanging Being’.60 Two authors who were close to the Doctrinaires, Cousin and Jouffroy, had contended that religion and philosophy were just different forms of the same body of truths, and that a Providential ‘moral government’ determined history.61 Apart from the sway of the Doctrinaires in particular, it has been argued that the ‘discourse of capacity’ was the liberal elites’ common parlance all over Europe in the nineteenth century, inasmuch as it allowed them to counter the claims made by the two opposite discourses of divine right and universal political rights.62 Balbo was influenced more by the Burkean tradition than by the Doctrinaires. Therefore, in his case the first three theses of the paradigm took the shape of, respectively: i. a philosophy of history, already described in Chapter 2, centring around the progressive destiny of Christian nations, a destiny now requiring the setting up of representative monarchies; ii. the view that a natural aristocracy (or notabilità) characterised by wealth and learning had to play a crucial role in politics; and iii. a denial that sovereignty belonged to the nation – if it did, political turmoil would be the rule.63 Regarding sovereignty, Balbo’s objective of countering social contract theory led him to buttress two principles usually supporting absolute power, namely, that all authority ultimately came from God, and that all authority was intended for the good of all subjects. 58 Balbo, Della monarchia, 262–3. 59 Rosanvallon, Le moment Guizot, 91. See above Ch. 2, Sect. 4. 60 Quoted in Craiutu, Liberalism, 130. 61 Victor Cousin, Introduction à l’histoire de la philosophie (1828; Paris, 1861), 158; Paul Dubois, Cousin, Jouffroy, Damiron: Souvenirs (Paris, 1902), 132. See Jaume, L’individu effacé, 459–72. 62 Kahan, Liberalism. 63 Balbo, Della monarchia. For Burke’s view of the relationship between ‘the people’ and ‘a true natural aristocracy’ as ‘the leading, guiding, and governing part’ of society, see Edmund Burke, ‘An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs’ (1791), in id., Further reflections, 73–201 at 156–70 ff.

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He claimed, in a Burkean and Maistrean spirit, that no nation had really created its government, for all governments ‘originate from previous authorities and sovereignties, even if the most complete revolutions occurred’. He felt it necessary to admit that these principles, although true, had been sometimes ‘exaggerated’ in practice.64 It was not contradictory that Balbo was in favour of ‘quasi-universal’ suffrage, for he had learned from the ultramontane that the popular vote would elect conservative majorities – a theory validated by the French election of May, 1849. The passive suffrage, conversely, should be limited by the ownership of property and the ‘political capacities’; he judged the requirements set by the Piedmontese electoral law too broad in this respect.65 Balbo died before writing book three of Della monarchia rappresentativa, entitled ‘On the use and development of our liberties’, but a rough outline of the planned chapters helps trace his opinion about the implementation of civil rights in the kingdom. He intended to discuss whether religious liberty or religious tolerance befitted a country in which Catholicism was the religion of the state; it seems that he favoured the latter. Balbo in fact was against the separation between Church and state. As an mp, he argued for retaining distinct law courts for the clergy, opposed the introduction of civil marriage, and, in February, 1849, he defended the pope’s temporal power. In the outline of the chapters, as well as in a parliamentary speech of 1851, Balbo recommended full freedom of education, with private institutions competing with the public ones – thus giving a free hand to the Church, his parliamentary critics remarked. Balbo disapproved of centralization on the French model, advocated free trade, and pointed to the advantages of trial by jury. He pointed to the excesses of freedom of association during the revolutionary biennium, as well as to the harm the freedom of the press was doing, chiefly because it had been precipitously granted.66 Carutti and d’Azeglio too were critical of Piedmontese 64 Balbo, Della monarchia, 177–86, quot. at 183. See Salvatorelli, Il pensiero politico, 270; Scaglia, Cesare Balbo, 532–6. 65 Balbo, Della monarchia, 273–4, 277–8. See Ceretti, ‘Per una rivisitazione’, 497–8, 521. Balbo used the term ‘democracy’ to refer to the popular element in a mixed government, so that, for example, the Whig party in Britain represented democracy; instead, he called ‘pure democracy’ the democracy of Rousseau and Robespierre, based on the primacy of the number; see Balbo, Della politica, 447–51, 504–5 ff. See Francesco Traniello, ‘Politica e storia’, 38–52. 66 Balbo, Della monarchia, 403–5; Atti del parlamento subalpino: Discussioni della Camera dei Deputati, IIa Legislatura, Ia Sessione 1849 (Turin, 1860), 257–60; ibid., iv Legislatura, Sessione 1851 (Florence, 1866), vol. iv, Part II-A, pp. 1386–7. For Boncompagni’s identical assessment of education policy, see his ‘Sulla libertà d’insegnamento’, in Gerolamo Boccardo (ed.), Saggi di filosofia civile (Genoa, 1852–7), i, 417–39.

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journalism, which, instead of giving voice to public opinion ‘when it is just and reasonable’, had become ‘a power’ pretending to make and unmake governments.67 Before passing on to the last two elements of the moderate paradigm – the importance of character and Burkeanism – the critique of democracy warrants further attention. It drew on other arguments besides that of the rule of the ignorant, in fact, and two of them are particularly interesting. Carutti, Balbo, and Mamiani found little to commend in the liberty of the ancients, siding with the moderns in the famous contrast put forward by Constant. They remarked that the ancients’ popular government had been regularly associated with both political instability, often erupting into civil wars, and an inadequate concern with national independence. Furthermore, in the nineteenth century states had to be bigger than cities to attain ‘civil greatness’, and consequently popular participation should give way, in Mamiani’s words, to the provision of more effective ‘security, order, discipline, and authority’, in the context of a ‘perfect legal equality’. Popular participation in the ancient republics was made possible by slavery, according to Carutti, while Balbo stressed that their governments had been aristocratic rather than democratic.68 Basically, the moderates aimed to challenge the well-established association of ancient democracies with lofty ideals and heroic deeds. A second argument against popular government was that it led to utter mayhem, hence was bound to turn into tyranny, because ‘passions’ predominated. The contrast between reason and passions substantiated an anthropological difference between moderatism and democracy, namely, reason and virtue were associated with a government of the elite, while the low passions characterized popular rule. Democracy came to evoke the unleashing of criminal yearnings, with Carutti, for example, bringing up to date old images of the Terror of 1793–4. The ‘revolutionary spirit’ informing Mazzini’s sect creates ‘angels of evil’ smelling blood, he wrote, it leads a ‘furious throng’ (or even a ‘horde of cannibals’!) in the streets, and eventually triggers an ‘infernal storm’.69 The sources of the politicisation of the dichotomy were predominantly French, with the Doctrinaires being particularly influential in this respect as well. Maine de Biran contended that ‘the sovereignty of the people ­corresponds 67 Carutti, Dei principii, 8–9; d’Azeglio, ‘Del giornalismo’; id., ‘In tema di stampa’ (parliamentary speech, Jul. 1852), in daru, ii, 353–8. 68 Terenzio Mamiani, ‘Dell’ottima congregazione umana e del principio di nazionalità’ (1854–5), in id., D’un nuovo diritto, 359–443 at 365–9; Carutti, Dei principii, 97–9, 156–7, 194–8; Balbo, Della monarchia, 43–5, 49–51, 156–8. 69 Carutti, Dei principii, 23, 248–58.

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in politics to the supremacy of sensations and passions in philosophy or ethics’, and Guizot developed the point. He contrasted reason and the ‘divine law’, on the one hand, with passions, self-interest, and ignorance, on the other, associating reason with a government of the middle classes and passions with both absolutism and democracy.70 Once he was thrown out of power, Guizot reiterated that democracy and the ‘social war’ it brought about were the outcome of ‘bad passions and bad principles’. Within the ultramontane literature, Lamennais for one had stressed in Essai sur l’indifférence that democracy entailed the dominance of passions. In Considérations sur la Révolution française, Staël had recounted graphic scenes of Jacobin frenzy that, together with Burke’s image of the revolutionaries’ ‘cannibal appetites’, may have inspired Carutti.71 Tocqueville’s Ancien régime confirmed the link between passions and revolution, even if passions were not of necessity bad to him; he actually called all the emotional currents in eighteenth-century France ‘passions’, showing that a commendable ‘passion for liberty’ had developed alongside a more problematic ‘passion for equality’. Most worryingly to the moderates, Tocqueville had a chapter on that preliminary to the Revolution, ‘irreligion as a passion’.72 One wonders whether these French, and the moderates for that matter, were acquainted with the passage in Burke’s A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791) positing the subduing of passions as precondition for liberty. Here Burke provided, in a nutshell, a depiction of an anti-revolutionary and moderate sensibility. ‘Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites’, he maintained. It was necessary that ‘love to justice’, ‘soundness and sobriety of understanding’, and being ‘disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good’ overcame, respectively, ‘rapacity’, ‘vanity and presumption’, and ‘the flattery of knaves’. The conclusion was that ‘men of intemperate minds cannot be free’ because ‘their passions forge their fetters’.73 As mentioned, Balbo’s Della monarchia rappresentativa elaborated on the view that the institutions of free government needed certain civic virtues to thrive. The Piedmontese moderates were convinced of this, in accordance not only with a series of major writers going from Montesquieu to Tocqueville and 70 Drolet, ‘Carrying the Banner’; Maine de Biran’s words are quoted at 679. 71 Guizot, De la démocratie en France (Paris, 1849), esp. 7–30; Lamennais, Essai sur l’indifférence, i, 289–92 ff.; Staël, Considérations, 272–87 ff.; Burke, Reflections, 143. 72 Alexis de Tocqueville, L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution (1856), in id., Œuvres, vol. ii, bk. iii, Ch. 2. See Claude Lefort, ‘La Révolution comme religion nouvelle’, in Furet and Ozouf, The Transformation, 391–9. 73 Burke, A Letter, 69.

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Stuart Mill, but also with an Italian tradition of thought beginning with Vincenzo Cuoco’s reaction to the revolutionary triennium 1796–9.74 More topically, an explanation of the French turmoil of 1848–51 in terms of the population’s want of civic attitudes was widespread in Britain, as Walter Bagehot’s Letters on the French Coup d'État of 1851 exemplified, and it was espoused in Piedmont by the economists dealt with in the previous section.75 In Balbo’s view, the revolutions of 1848–9 had revealed a deficiency in Italians’ ‘political education’ due to the fact that, unlike the English, they could not gradually develop, over the course of centuries, the virtues required by representative government. Italians lacked a practical mind – they were ‘poets’ – and shared with the French that most serious of political flaws, an inclination to extremism, namely an eagerness for revolutions that was incompatible with the spirit of liberty. This was ultimately based on reverence for the law, as not only the English, but also the Americans demonstrated. What happened in 1848–9 was that Italians’ excessive enthusiasm and childish conceit (superbia) led to unachievable propositions, such as republican governments or national unity. The main cause of the debacle, in other words, lay in the ‘republican dream’, meaning a concern with liberty when independence, its necessary stepping stone, was still to come.76 D’Azeglio similarly ascribed the blunders made in the biennium to Italians’ insufficient understanding of the duties required by liberty.77 He resumed the sensibility of the 1840s as he distinguished between true and false ‘liberalism’ on moral grounds. A true liberal was calm, independent, and steadfast, and cherished justice; the false one was childish, vain, and 74 Romani, National Character, 93–121; Luigi Biscardi and Antonino De Francesco (eds.), Vincenzo Cuoco nella cultura di due secoli (Bari, 2002). 75 Walter Bagehot, Letters on the French Coup d’État of 1851 (1852), in id., Collected Works, ed. Norman St John-Stevas (London, 1965–86), iv, 29–84. 76 Balbo, Della monarchia, 32–5, 59–62, 69–70, 81–2, 147–59, 387. Although electoral laws are seriously deficient in Britain, parliaments have always been ‘good, wise, strong, useful, happy, glorious, and immortal’, Balbo wrote in Della monarchia, 267–8. He applauded the United States, which he regarded as an aristocratic, rather than a democratic, republic, displaying the virtues of the English character; see Körner, America in Italy, 90–3. For Carutti on the link between liberty and respect for authority and the law, see Dei principii, 99–104. 77 D’Azeglio, ‘Ai suoi elettori’, 114–15, 128, 142–3; see Daniela Maldini, ‘L’Italia malgrado gli Italiani: Massimo d’Azeglio’, in Mario Isnenghi et al. (eds.), Gli italiani in guerra (Turin, 2008), i, 296–303. With reference to the events of 1848–9, Gioberti complained at length in the Rinnovamento about both the narrow-mindedness of the local elites (the municipali), incapable of comprehending the national interest, and the uncompromising attitude of Mazzini’s republicans (the puritani); see Del rinnovamento, i, 211–372.

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full of revengeful fury. The former made sacrifices for the cause, whereas the latter hankered after personal advantages.78 Ironically, the argument that Italians were demonstrating their political and moral maturity, namely an ability to marry the advocacy of reform with a respect for authority, had been a staple of moderatism in the few years going from the election of Pius to the outbreak of the revolution. There was an exception to Balbo’s problematic portrayal of the Italian character. He believed that the Piedmontese – the inhabitants of the region, that is – were ready for liberty, as demonstrated by their (relatively) calm behaviour in 1846–9. Crude as they undeniably were, the Piedmontese were not deceived by the intrigues of republicans, and were loyal to the house of Savoy. This is why, Balbo claimed, Piedmont is ‘almost the Switzerland of monarchy’. Since obedience was the virtue Balbo most appreciated in the masses, he could have confidence in the Piedmontese, for it was traditionally agreed that ‘you cannot find a people that is more in accord with order’, in the words of the Savoyard Maistre. As for the Piedmontese aristocracy, in 1832 Balbo had enthused about its military prowess, loyalty, and stubbornness.79 Piedmontese Burkeanism consisted chiefly in a concern with continuity and prudence, but there was no lack of denunciations of ‘paper constitutions’, either. Historians pointed to the Stati Generali of the Middle Ages as the peculiar parliamentary experience testifying to the antiquity of liberty in the kingdom. Echoing Staël, Guizot, and Thierry, Federico Sclopis claimed that in Piedmont too despotism was modern and liberty was ancient.80 Balbo’s Della monarchia rappresentativa abounded with statements, reminiscent of Whig authors, on the value of unwritten constitutions ‘grown step by step, the product of the times and the national spirit, and embedded in laws and mores’, in contrast with constitutions suddenly ‘invented’ by a king or an assembly.81 78

D’Azeglio, ‘Giacinto Collegno’ (1856), in data, ii, 291–304; id., ‘Pietro Ferretti’ (1858), ibid., 305–30. 79 Balbo, Della monarchia, 167–8, 388; id., ‘Del naturale de’ Piemontesi’ (1832), in id., Lettere, 238–62; [Joseph de Maistre], Lettres d’un royaliste savoisien à ses compatriotes (n.p., 1793), 82–4. 80 Federico Sclopis, Degli Stati Generali e d’altre istituzioni politiche del Piemonte e della Savoia (Turin, 1851), 5. See Gian Savino Pene Vidari, ‘Federico Sclopis (1798–1878)’, Studi piemontesi, 7 (1978), 160–72; Romagnani, Storiografia, 189–234; Antonello Mattone, ‘I miti fondatori del parlamentarismo italiano’, in Luciano Violante (ed.), Storia d’Italia: Annali, 17, Il Parlamento (Turin, 2001), 18–23 [henceforward referred to as Il Parlamento]. Sclopis, a senator from 1849, was a historian, jurist, and magistrate; he contributed to the writing of the constitution. 81 Balbo, Della monarchia, 82; for an account of the workings of the English constitution, see 190–201 ff. See Raymond Grew, ‘The Paradoxes of Italy’s Nineteenth-Century Political

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Carutti argued that the constitution of a state should not be drafted in the abstract, but should correspond to the people’s degree of ‘culture, entrepreneurship, and intelligence’. He invoked a ‘law of continuity’, allegedly put forward by Montesquieu and Burke, in order to demonstrate that a republic should not be introduced in a country used to monarchical rule. In Carutti’s view, Britain proved that reforms required both moderation and respect for national history and traditions – Italians are well suited to this mix of conservative and progressive politics, he remarked, as contemporary Piedmont, after ancient Rome and Venice, has demonstrated.82 As for the transition from absolutism to liberty, it is ideally carried out by a wise and prudent king, freely acknowledging the existing ‘social needs’, peacefully expressed by the people (here Carutti was certainly referring to Charles Albert’s octroi of 1848, but things had not gone that smoothly). Religious teachings – an essential element of tradition – are necessary to instil deference to social hierarchies among the masses, Carutti continued; even well-devised institutions fail if the citizens do not comply with ‘moral and religious duties’.83 Boncompagni criticised both the democrats and the advocates of absolute rule for regularly carrying out hasty and a priori reforms. Both disregarded the power of opinion, expressing the slow but certain evolution of ideas. Any attempt to accelerate the process of reform is misplaced, Boncompagni contended, for the ideas and attitudes prevailing in a given country determine the performance of its institutions.84 The hereditary aristocracy above all should champion gradualism; its special role in political life depends on the unquestioned reverence with which people regard those who are on the upper rungs of the social ladder.85 The house of Savoy attracted the greatest amount of praise from the moderates. The 1850s witnessed the early works of the so-called sabaudisti: historians who depicted the dynasty as having pursued an anti-Austrian, pro-Italian mission since the sixteenth century.86 The more the international order was challenged by Cavour’s foreign policy, the more these historians stressed its Culture’, in Isser Woloch (ed.), Revolution and the Meanings of Freedom in the Nineteenth Century (Stanford, ca, 1996), 221–31. 82 Carutti, Dei principii, 124–6, 232–4, 241–8. 83 Ibid., 101–4, 229–31, 235, 263. 84 Boncompagni, Della monarchia, 101–12. 85 Ibid., 78–80. In Considerazioni sull’Italia centrale (Turin, 1859), 27–9, 47, 52, Boncompagni argued that hereditary monarchy commanded ‘universal and spontaneous obedience’. For similar views in France, see George A. Kelly, ‘Liberalism and Aristocracy in the French Restoration’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 26 (1965), 509–30; de Dijn, French Political Thought. A Burkean approach circulated widely in Europe; see Stefan Collini, Donald Winch, and John Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century I­ ntellectual History (Cambridge, 1983), esp. 14–21. 86 The noun and adjective sabaudista refers to what has to do with the house of Savoy.

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continuity with the past conduct of the house of Savoy. In the hands of the sabaudisti – Ercole Ricotti, Luigi Chiala, Bianchi, and Carutti – history became a powerful instrument of political legitimization, benefiting from the willingness of the government to open state archives when a historical enterprise promised to pay off.87 For instance, in the crucial year 1859 Bianchi published some papers by Maistre in order to show the similarity between the views of this famous conservative and Cavour’s strategy.88 The glorification of Charles Albert – depicted as a patriotic and brave, albeit unfortunate, warrior – had already begun, contributing to the legend around the dynasty. There are plenty of Burkean and ultramontane arguments in Boncom­ pagni’s texts, and one which he insisted on was the necessary alliance between religion and government. By sanctioning ‘the principle of authority’, religion grafted it on to mores, which thus became the most effective pillar of government – as Maistre had put it, rulers could not do without Catholicism’s ability to enchaîner les passions et neutraliser les vices. Boncompagni knew that it was impossible to set the clock back, but he did fear the consequences for political stability of modern philosophy in general and free examination in particular.89 He shared the ultramontane’s interpretation of Protestantism as the root of social dissolution in the modern world. By debunking the authority of tradition, the Protestant heresies had given rise to ‘a diversity of moral and religious opinions, which has been growing day by day, and which significantly detracts from the beneficent influence of Christianity on modern civilization’. Eighteenth-century philosophy, although praiseworthy in some respects, had enthroned scepticism and exacerbated the challenge to authority, tradition, and the idea of a divine revelation. Both private and public life needed fixed thruths, which Catholicism could supply. Boncompagni’s religion, allegedly resting on Rosmini’s analysis, aimed to be in accordance with progress, reason, and modern philosophy, yet in his view it would be politically dangerous to submit its core dogmas to philosophical inquiry.90 87

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See Maturi, Interpretazioni, 194–302; Umberto Levra, ‘Storiografia e politica: Gli storici “sabaudisti” tra il 1848 e la fine dell’Ottocento’, Rivista di storia contemporanea, 21 (1992), 417–55. [Nicomede Bianchi (ed.)], La maison de Savoie et l’Autriche: Documents inédits extraits de la correspondance diplomatique du comte Joseph de Maistre (Turin, 1859). Bianchi (1818– 86), a citizen of the duchy of Modena, settled in Nice as a teacher in late 1848. See Maria Fubini Leuzzi, ‘Bianchi, Nicomede’, dbi, x, 1968. Boncompagni, ‘Sulle dottrine’, 323 ff.; id., Della monarchia, 121–2; Joseph de Maistre, Du pape (1819; Paris, 1867), 258. Carlo Boncompagni, ‘Degli uffici civili della filosofia’, in Boccardo, Saggi, i, 392–417; id., ‘La politica piemontese, la questione italiana e l’Europa’, Rivista contemporanea, 7 (1856),

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The foundations of the moderate paradigm were laid between 1848 and 1853, when major writings by Boncompagni, Carutti, Gioberti, and Mamiani appeared. In those years the preservation of representative government could hardly be taken for granted, as most glaringly indicated by the ‘proclamation of Moncalieri’ of November, 1849, in which the king threatened the abrogation of the constitution if the coming election did not return a majority willing to approve the peace treaty with Austria. But the Piedmontese representative system was strengthened by the connubio, the parliamentary alliance between Cavour’s centre-right and Urbano Rattazzi’s centre-left, formed at the end of 1852.91 As a result, the two parliamentary extremes found themselves increasingly isolated; moderatism became much more confident and assertive from then on. The Italian policy of Cavour’s governments grew, whereas Mazzini’s plots failed and republican nationalism weakened. Intriguingly, the moderates were silent on Louis Napoleon’s regime, whose ‘democracy without liberty’ was harshly denounced in Britain instead.92 Apart from obvious tactical reasons, the moderates were probably ambivalent about a government that had done away with revolution but rested on seven million votes. 4

Calling the Tune: Cavour as Journalist and Politician

A series of economic essays, appearing between 1845 and 1847, were Cavour’s most thorough writings. They were brilliant, well-informed, and analytically

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p. xxxi; id., Sulla potenza temporale del Papa (Turin, 1861), 186, 206–7, 232. For further evidence of the diffusion of Burkean themes in the Piedmontese kingdom, see Emerico Amari’s critique of the abstract rationalism informing French politics in his Critica di una scienza delle legislazioni comparate (1857; Palermo, 1969), e.g. i, 229–31; see also D’Ondes Reggio’s praise of British institutions, combined with a denunciation of France’s centralization and perpetual oscillation between ‘democracy’ and despotic rule, in his Introduzione, e.g. 246–7, 311 ff., 365–7. On Cavour’s advice D’Ondes Reggio translated Hallam’s Constitutional History of England into Italian, adding an introduction stating the superiority of representative monarchies over democratic republics; see Vito D’Ondes Reggio, ‘Discorso sul reggimento politico in Europa dalla conquista barbarica allo stabilimento della feudalità’, in Enrico Hallam, Storia costituzionale d’Inghilterra dal cominciamento del regno di Enrico vii alla morte di Giorgio ii, tr. Vito D’Ondes Reggio (Turin, 1854), i, 17–77. On both the Moncalieri proclamation and the connubio see Romano Paolo Coppini, ‘Il Piemonte sabaudo e l’unificazione (1849–1861)’, in Sabbatucci and Vidotto, Storia, i, 336–48, 367–82. Benedetto Croce, History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, tr. Henry Furst (1932; New York, 1933), 204. By raising fears of a reactionary wave in Europe, Louis Napoleon’s coup accelerated Cavour’s pursuit of the connubio; see Coppini, ‘Il Piemonte’, 369.

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distinctive, as he was one of the few Italians who endorsed Ricardo’s theory of differential rent.93 These essays also revealed his consonance with the moderate movement. Cavour elaborated on the benefits that Italy, and northern Italy in particular, would reap from moderatism’s central economic demands, namely the construction of a railway network and the adoption of free trade. Furthermore, he openly adhered to the political programme put forward in Balbo’s Speranze d’Italia, meaning that he cherished independence, kept silent over liberty issues, praised the existing princes, and even spoke of ‘Christian civilization’ and the certain ‘aid of Providence’ to Italians. Cavour stressed the ‘moral effects’ of economic development: he expected it, and especially the railways, to instil national ‘dignity’ and solidarity while countering the passions orageuses of revolution and municipal interest.94 He turned to political journalism once the freedom of the press was granted (1847). A member of the commission named for the drawing up of the electoral law, Cavour was first returned to parliament in June, 1848. This section deals with his liberalism – expressed in dozens of articles in Il Risorgimento and hundreds of parliamentary speeches – in relation to the moderate paradigm. The sources of Cavour’s political culture were peculiar in the Piedmontese setting, at least in two respects. First, he carried out an extensive reading of Bentham and the classical economists in his formative years; second, his attitude to religion was influenced by the Protestant milieu of Geneva, where he had relatives among the Calvinist aristocracy. His early adherence to ‘Bentham’s system’ entailed the dismissal of the ‘system of natural law’, which instead the moderates unreservedly endorsed.95 Political economy was an essential component of Cavour’s liberalism; he was a great believer in it, to the point of deeming its laws to be as certain as those of the natural sciences. They indicated the course of progress, basically, free trade being the best example. Yet, he added in an essay of 1845, the advantages of commercial liberty are obvious to l’élite de la société but are denied by sectional interests, which often manage to deceive les masses. Deeply ignorant, they are convinced by the most superficial arguments and the most vociferous party.96 The Smithian concept of the market possibly prepared him to sympathise, in the early 1830s, 93 Romani, L’economia politica, 183–7. 94 ‘Des chemin de fer en Italie’ (1846), in Scritti di economia, 225–48. Throughout the section, authorless references are intended to be by Cavour. The article titles in square brackets are by the editors of ccts. 95 Romeo, Cavour, i, 287–90. 96 ‘De la question relative à la législation anglaise sur le commerce des céréales’ (1845), in Scritti di economia, 156–209 at 158–9, 162–3.

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with Guizot’s idea that the free interaction of ‘all rights, all interests, all opinions, and all forces’, namely their ‘coexistence within the legal framework’, led to the restraint of each of them and hence to an ordered and progressing polity.97 A significant influence of Guizot and the other Doctrinaires has regularly been signalled by historians.98 As for religion and the Swiss connection, Cavour underwent a ‘rationalistic crisis’ in circa 1828, at eighteen, to the effect that he found it impossible to believe any longer. He nevertheless recognised both the importance of Christianity to the course of civilization and the existence of a religious need in ‘man’, in accordance with Constant’s ‘religious sentiment’.99 Cavour shared certain stances with the moderates, the principal one being a passionate rejection of democracy and revolution. In spite of his careful reading of Tocqueville, he never came to terms with the idea that the masses were eventually bound to rule. Democracy, not to mention socialism or Mazzinianism, irretrievably clashed with liberty and all the values civilization promoted. It was therefore urgent for the European elites – and for the aristocracies in particular – to determine how to preserve leadership in the face of the looming diffusion of the democratic movement from France to the neighbouring countries. The February revolution confirmed Cavour (and the moderates) in a long-held fear: the militancy, the enthusiasm, and the passions of 1789–94 had created a new human type, which was the reason why all subsequent attempts to terminer la Révolution had failed.100 Napoleon iii managed to put out the blaze, but only temporarily. Cavour’s elitism was uncompromising; it rested on a view of the lower classes as prey to blind ‘passions’, and led to a ferocious determination to ‘fight against the popular waves’.101 He did not hold a similarly inflexible attitude to the Catholic right, which, he came to believe over the 1850s, would possibly have evolved into a constitutional alternative to his own parliamentary majority.102 Cavour wrote an essay on the state of Ireland (1844) which is emblematic of his concerns. I have decided to tackle this subject, he argued, to redress 97 Romeo, Cavour, i, 298–9, quoting from a manuscript of book excerpts. 98 In Turin, Cavour had frequent conversations with the Doctrinaire Prosper de Barante, who was French ambassador to the Sardinian kingdom in 1830–5. 99 Romeo, Cavour, i, 300–2; Adriano Viarengo, ‘La formazione intellettuale di Cavour’, in Levra, Cavour, 21–3. 100 Burstin, Révolutionnaires, Chs. 11–13. 101 Romeo, Cavour, i, 312–13, 512–20, 577–8; ii, 296–302, 417 ff.; Massimo L. Salvadori, ‘Il libe­ ralismo di Cavour’, in Levra, Cavour, 78–86, 98–100. For a different interpretation, see La Salvia, ‘Il moderatismo’, 177–8. 102 ccdp, xiv, 26–8 (30 Dec. 1857); xv, 542–3 (9 Apr. 1861). See Salvadori, ‘Il liberalismo’, 96, 100–102.

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the wrong that the two extreme parties – writing in a Genevan review, he had France in mind – have done to England by depicting its rule in Ireland as invariably tyrannical. Extremists hate England for it is a bulwark of liberty and moderatism, and exploit the case of Ireland to predict the imminent fall of the ‘magnificent framework of the British constitution’.103 Thus Cavour, after doing his best to excuse the misdeeds of William iii and queen Anne, set about praising the English administration since the Act of Union. Rather than attempting to repeal it, the Irish should support the policy of gradual reforms – economic, administrative, and educational – that the British government had initiated under Melbourne. Cavour recommended abolishing the system of entail in order to create a Catholic aristocracy. The only alternative to ‘the fertile seeds of progress and liberty embedded in the English constitution’, he concluded, is a ‘social revolution’, namely a bloody and suicidal redistribution of land by law.104 Cavour’s and the moderate writers’ stern opposition to the ‘spirit of revolution’ reflected a mindset characterizing the Piedmontese ruling class. Historians agree that Charles Albert and his advisers were most reluctant to grant the constitution, and ultimately did it out of fear. Since freedom of the press had already been conceded, it was believed that retaining an autocratic form of government would put the state and the dynasty at risk. Failure to give in then meant the necessity ‘to give in with ignominy and to accept humiliating conditions’ later on.105 In those days, Cavour demanded the creation of a 103 ‘Considérations sur l’état actuel de l’Irlande et sur son avenir’ (1844), in ccts, ii, 747–811, esp. 749–51, 775, 791. 104 ‘Considérations’, 766, 791, 797–9, 810–11. A different viewpoint on Ireland’s distress was adopted by Cattaneo in the same year that Cavour published his essay. Cattaneo concentrated on the dreadful state of agriculture, and ascribed it to the persistence of beliefs contrary to agricultural enterprise in both the peasantry and the landlords, interacting with a deficient institutional framework; see Carlo Cattaneo, ‘Su lo stato dell’Irlanda nell’anno 1844’ (1844), in id., Scritti economici, ed. Alberto Bertolino (Florence, 1956), ii, 425–62. 105 The phrase is by Ottavio Thaon di Revel, and is cited in Alberto Caracciolo, Stato e so­ cietà civile: Problemi dell’unificazione italiana (Turin, 1960), 105. On the concession of the charter, see Giorgio Falco (ed.), Lo Statuto albertino e la sua preparazione (Rome, 1945), containing the proceedings of the kingdom’s Conseil de Conférence (at 173–255); Caracciolo, Stato, 101–5; Adriano Viarengo, ‘Alle origini della Sinistra subalpina: L’azione politica di Lorenzo Valerio alla vigilia del 1848’, Rivista storica italiana, 106 (1994), 305–92. For a comparison with the Prussian case, see Marco Meriggi, ‘Die Revolution von 1848 und die Entstehung der Nation: Preussen-Deutschland und Piemont-Italien im Vergleich’, in Martin Kirsch and Pierangelo Schiera (eds.), Verfassungswandel um 1848 im europäischen Vergleich (Berlin, 2001), 323–35.

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state council on similar grounds: there was the danger that ‘exaggerations’ and ‘popular passions’ came to inform public opinion if governmental activities remained secret, since the press alone could not bring about a healthy ‘political education’.106 It is arguable that not only the Statuto but all liberal developments were viewed as a lesser evil in the kingdom. Cavour regularly alleged that dire consequences at the hands of either of the two extreme parties would ensue, if the bills that he and his ‘party of the nation’ had introduced were not approved. Half political blackmail and half persuasive tactics, such a threat characterised Cavour’s and many others’ parliamentary speeches and journalism. It became, arguably, a forma mentis. The Piedmontese were reluctant liberals, an attitude which reflected on the governments’ circumspection on individual rights. Foreign policy, too, was shaped by a determination to contain the left, as will be substantiated in the following section. To make a single instance, one of the reasons for the war in 1848 was to avoid the creation of a republic in Lombardy, while its resumption in 1849 was regarded as a way to end Gioberti’s ‘democratic’ government.107 If it is difficult to assess how concrete the risk of regime change was, it is worth recalling that the parliamentary left suffered a major setback in consequence of the connubio, and that all democratic papers closed down between 1850 and 1851, while the strength of the clerical party did not emerge before the elections of 1857.108 Cavour’s pieces in Il Risorgimento cover the period from December, 1847, to August, 1850, and can be grouped into two categories. The first collects the articles devoted to counter the left, and the second those devoted to counter the right. In the first respect, he defended the constitution against democratic critics, and argued against a multi-member constituency system, which in his view would favour the left.109 Universal suffrage was rejected as ‘one of the most dangerous sophistries’ resulting from natural jurisprudence.110 Cavour also put his knowledge of political economy to work in order to oppose­progressive­

106 [Stampa e Parlamento], 15 Jan. 1848, in ccts, iii, 1046–9. See Adriano Viarengo, Cavour (Rome, 2010), 147–53. 107 Viarengo, Cavour, 158–9, 178, 499. 108 Ibid., 254, 263. Republicanism was ‘a purely mythical spectre’ according to Denis Mack Smith, Cavour and Garibaldi 1860: A Study in Political Conflict (1954; Cambridge, 1985), 246–7. 109 See esp. ‘Legge elettorale: [3.] Della circoscrizione elettorale’, 22 Feb. 1848, in ccts, iii, 1099–101; [Critiche allo Statuto], 10 Mar. 1848, ibid., 1113–16; [La legge elettorale piemontese], 21 Mar. 1848, ibid., 1127–31. See also ccdp, i, 7–8 (4 Jul. 1848), and 23–7 (9 Jul. 1848). 110 [Legge elettorale: 4. L’elettorato attivo], 23 Feb. 1848, in ccts, iii, 1104–9.

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taxation and exorcise the socialist revolution in Paris.111 He mocked one of the leaders of the democratic opposition in parliament, Angelo Brofferio, for his empty advocacy of ‘revolutionary means’ to cut the budget deficit: it was because Brofferio lived in a world of his own that he could ignore the harsh realities of the Piedmontese financial situation, requiring patience and gradualness to be successfully tackled.112 In the pages of Il Risorgimento, the intransigent denunciation of everything leftist was coupled with a firm commitment to the spirit of the Statuto. The charter had effectively set the boundaries of Piedmontese liberalism, in Cavour’s view, in the sense that it guaranteed against the risk of a radicalisation of liberties. The Statuto does a good job, he argued, for it makes the judiciary independent, and sanctions individual liberties, freedom of the press, and civil equality; it can be altered, if necessary, but only by the king acting in conjunction with parliament. The single issue Cavour was unsatisfied with was religious freedom, which the charter failed to acknowledge. He was confident, however, that that freedom would soon become reality in practice, if not in principle – between February and June, 1848, the Protestant Waldensians and Jews were granted civil and political emancipation through ordinary legislation.113 To oppose the ultramontane party, Cavour put forward countless times that the Turinese parliament was truly representative of the nation, that constitutional monarchy was the form of government encapsulating the legacy of 111 See e.g. [La rivoluzione parigina del giugno 1848], 30 Jun. 1848, in ccts, iii, 1281–4; [Contro l’imposta progressiva], 2 Dec. 1848, in ccts, iii, 1350–6. 112 ‘I mezzi rivoluzionari: Teoria del sig. Brofferio’, 16 Nov. 1848, in ccts, iii, 1345–9 (this article, although certainly inspired by Cavour, probably was not written by him); see also ccdp, i, 116–19 (11 Nov. 1848). On Brofferio (1802–66), see Maud Tyler, ‘A Dissenting Voice in the Risorgimento: Angelo Brofferio in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Piedmont’, Historical Journal, 33 (1990), 403–15. 113 [Critiche allo Statuto]. But in [Libertà di coscienza e libertà di culto], 18 May 1848, in ccts, iii, 1225–6, Cavour declared that emancipation by legislation was insufficient, and that the principle of religious freedom should be included in the charter. Some restrictions on Protestants and Jews remained throughout the decade. Religious minorities were not large in the kingdom of Sardinia, yet religious tolerance was obviously a crucial issue because of its wide implications. See Spini, Risorgimento e protestanti, 213–92; Raponi, Religion; Biagini, ‘Citizenship and Religion’; id., ‘Libertà’, in Banti, Atlante culturale, 298–314 at 306. On the possibility to amend the charter, see Francesco Soddu, ‘Lo Statuto albertino: Una costituzione “flessibile”?’, in Anna Gianna Manca and Luigi Lacchè (eds.), Parlamento e costituzione nei sistemi costituzionali europei ottocenteschi (Bologna and Berlin, 2003), 425–33.

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the French and British experiences, that the Statuto secured the place of the kingdom within the course of European civilization, and that political opinion was the ultimate power. He stated that the practice of liberty – the vote, a free press, and the parliamentary debates – was an irresistible means of progress, so that abuses would be overcome, the Jesuits’ ploys would be defeated, and personal dignity and public spirit would be boosted.114 He praised Britain, ‘the classic land of liberty’, for its steadfast upholding of rights. Robert Peel embodied the strategy he aimed to implement, that of being ‘at the same time conservative and reformist, determined and moderate, a staunch supporter of order and a sincere believer in liberty’.115 I am under no illusions, Cavour wrote in February, 1848: representative government unavoidably gives rise to parliamentary parties. They are led by ‘men’ of strong passions – of ‘firm opinions, ardent spirits, and determination’ – differing from more ordinary mps – those endowed with ‘a composed mind’, ‘a practical attitude’, and the willingness to be useful to all. If the number of deputies of the latter type is insufficient, he observed, it is impossible for a government to pursue sensible policies for long. He made the example of the Belgian parliament, which failed to deliver moderate policies because it was split between ‘ultra-Catholics’ and ‘ultra-liberals’.116 Clearly enough, parties were bad and related to a characteriological divide, as it had been in the 1840s – all responsible and disinterested men were on Cavour’s side, namely, were moderate. In Romeo’s opinion, Cavour assumed that there were only the two extremes aiming for a regime change besides a ‘party of government’, comprising those who wished to preserve the national institutions.117 Needless to say, he was duly influenced by the ideal of a juste milieu. Guizot’s famous words are worth quoting: ‘we, the three constitutional powers’, he said in 1842 while sitting on the government benches, ‘are the single legitimate and legal (réguliers) organs of national sovereignty. There is nothing but usurpation or revolution 114 [Il Risorgimento italiano e le Rivoluzioni inglese, francese e spagnola], 4 Feb. 1848, in ccts, iii, 1080–4; [Legge elettorale: 1. Diritto politico e diritto amministrativo], 12 Feb. 1848, in ccts, iii, 1089–93; [Legge elettorale: 4. L’elettorato attivo]; [Il regolamento della Camera dei deputati], 6 May 1848, in ccts, iii, 1203–6. 115 [Cartismo e libertà politica in Inghilterra], 17 Apr. 1848, in ccts, iii, 1175–7; [La morte di Robert Peel], 8 Jul. 1850, in ccts, iii, 1557–61. See Romeo, Cavour, ii, 454–6. 116 [Legge elettorale: 2. Del numero dei deputati], 19 Feb. 1848, in ccts, iii, 1094–8; [Dopo il proclama di Moncalieri], 28 Nov. 1849, in ccts, iii, 1441–4; [Dopo le elezioni], 13 Dec. 1849, in ccts, iii, 1445–7 (attribution is uncertain). See also ccdp, xiv, 441–3 (1 Jun. 1858). 117 Romeo, Cavour, i, 538–40; see also Salvadori, ‘Il liberalismo’, 95–6.

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beyond us’.118 During the preparation for the war of 1859, Cavour wrote triumphantly his correspondents that les partis ont disparu.119 The themes and stances characterising Cavour’s journalism recurred in his parliamentary speeches. In the first half of the decade he often remarked that, to consolidate the constitutional regime, it was imperative to contain the extremes through a programme of substantial reforms. Guizot’s failure to satisfy the demand for reforms was contrasted with Grey’s and Peel’s enlightened policies.120 The spectres of revolution, republic, and socialism were regularly raised to push the desired measures through parliament. For instance, Cavour came out for administrative decentralisation in July, 1850, on the grounds that centralisation was ‘the mother of socialism’. ‘A true liberal system’ required that the citizenry participated in public affairs in all parts of the country, and not only in the capital; the lack of political life in the countryside would entail an overall dominance of the left, which was strong in towns.121 The house of Savoy’s Italian policy was depicted by Cavour as a conservative undertaking, meant to counter Mazzini’s influence. Since the ‘spirit of revolution’ would not be eradicated from the peninsula until the just grievances of Italians would be met, Piedmont was behaving as a ‘physician’, not as an instigator of evil ‘passions’.122 Cavour spoke at length about the conservative nature of the kingdom’s Italian venture on 16 October, 1860, emphasising the principles of order, law, and morality which had inspired it and which had avoided the rise of ‘those factions that did so much harm in Italy in 1848’.123 Whatever influence the reading of Bentham may have had on Cavour, it apparently vanished as time went by. He neither referred to utilitarianism in articles or speeches, nor adopted anything similar to the felicific calculus to assess concrete issues. (This writer has failed to trace references to Bentham or utilitarianism in Cavour’s economic essays as well. There his leading lights were Smith, Ricardo, and Cobden). Pace Bentham, Cavour regarded the nature of the Piedmontese state’s task as eminently moral, and not in a eudemological sense. Very often he took the high moral ground in parliament, ascribing an ethical value to the post-1789 civilization in general and to the Risorgimento, as 118 François Guizot, Histoire parlementaire de France: Recueil complet des discours prononcés dans les Chambres de 1819 à 1848 (Paris, 1863–4), iii, 681 (18 Aug. 1842). See Romeo, Cavour, ii, 245, 296. 119 Epistolario, ed. Carlo Pischedda et al. (Bologna and Florence, 1962–2008), xvi, 122, 124. 120 ccdp, ii, 75–9, 83–4 (7 Mar. 1850). 121 ccdp, i, 23–7 (9 Jul. 1848), 155–8 (22 Aug. 1849), 334–9 (10 Jan. 1850); ii, 185 (2 Jul. 1850). 122 See e.g. ccdp, xiv, 214–15 (21 Apr. 1858). 123 ccdp, xv, 404–15 (16 Oct. 1860). See Mack Smith, Cavour and Garibaldi, pp. xiv, 437.

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an essential part of it, in particular. It is a law of modern history, he once told his fellow deputies, that major political events are preceded by a deepening of the moral fibre; in our case, the sacrifices for liberty, the participation in the Crimean war, and the determination to fight revolution have had an impact on European opinion, which is now in favour of the kingdom’s Italian mission. The power of Piedmont-Sardinia on the international scene is measured by this ‘moral treasure’, rather than by its territorial boundaries.124 Cavour’s use of the moral argument was tricky, however, in view of the competing claims of the Church. Many right-wingers accused him of adopting a Jacobinical attitude in the field of ecclesiastical policy, and he was at pains to deny it. He piled up arguments to demonstrate that the suppression of certain religious orders and the appropriation of their assets, which he proposed as prime minister in 1854, was not a ‘revolutionary’ measure. It is not, he said, because it makes provision for the dispossessed clergy, it does not violate property rights, it is not imposed by the mob, etc. Carried out ‘with the utmost moderation’, the measure will actually pacify the country by relieving the taxpayers’ burden and by gratifying the left, which is incensed at the money the state pays to the clergy; hence this reform, by making ‘revolutions’ more unlikely, is ‘deeply conservative’. ‘Pass the bill and you will get peace’, he concluded.125 The reform of the relationship between Church and state was the most important domestic issue of the decade, and Cavour had several occasions to use a coherent series of arguments, which he probably drew from Guizot. He claimed, first, that a free and independent Church would be more influential and respected than one embroiled in temporal disputes; and, second, that its separation from the state would result in a growth of religious sentiment, as had occurred in other European countries. Unfortunately, he continued, the dominance of the ultras party in Rome has imposed a blind policy resisting change, whereas in previous centuries the Church demonstrated its willingness to evolve with the times. Extremist and ‘aggressive’ stances prove disruptive at the Papal court as elsewhere, besides being ‘opposed to the true spirit of Catholicism’.126 Cavour 124 ccdp, xi, 247–50 (6 Feb. 1855); xiv, esp. 171–2 (16 Apr. 1858), 209–10 (21 Apr. 1858). 125 ccdp, xi, 311–18 ff., 325–6 (17 Feb. 1855), 527–30, 538–44 (25 Apr. 1855). 126 See e.g. ccdp, ii, 78–80 (7 Mar. 1850); v, 271–4 (5 Feb. 1852); vi, 366–70 (16 Dec. 1853); xi, 319–22 (17 Feb. 1855). Cavour quoted Montalembert on the beneficial effects of liberty on the progress of the ‘Catholic interest’; see ccdp, vi, 369–70 (16 Dec. 1852). For Guizot, see esp. ‘Du Catholicisme, du Protestantisme et de la philosophie en France’ (1838), in id., Méditations et études morales (Paris, 1852), 55–86; here Guizot argued that the Catholic religion was a necessary source of authority and ‘submission’, and that a complete separation of Church and state, as well as a full freedom of conscience, would be ‘favourable to the progress of faith’ (at 70–3).

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was among those who believed that the competition between secular and religious schools would improve the quality of education. I am not an oppressor of the Church as the Austrian Joseph ii was, he shrewdly remarked.127 Cavour was positive that the progress of civilization needed two ‘moral powers’, religion and liberty, and he regretted that they conflicted in Piedmont. He envisaged a reformed Catholicism retaining its traditional social influence, but turned into a bulwark of constitutional conservatism.128 Cavour had praised Pius ix and made reference to Providential designs during the 1840s, in tune with the prevailing climate; at another crucial juncture, namely in introducing a bill sanctioning Victor Emmanuel as king of Italy (26 February, 1861), he had no qualms about saying that the house of Savoy had been destined by ‘Divine Providence’ to overcome the Italian centuries-old divisions. He agreed that the official documents of the new state began with the formula that the king’s right to rule derived from divine Providence besides the will of the nation.129 One wonders whether, of the two moral powers just mentioned, Cavour viewed liberty as the proper inspiration of the elite and religion as that of the masses. The answer is in the negative. He thought that liberty – religious equality and freedom of the press, in particular – enhanced the strength of the religious message, as testified to by two countries he admired, Switzerland and Britain, whose ruling classes were deeply religious.130 Religion was not a thing of the past to him, a relic destined to disappear as civilization advanced – quite the contrary. Cavour’s liberalism differed from the moderates’ for he was more confident in the force of liberty to foster progress, yet on occasions he accepted their idea that both the Piedmontese constitutional experiment and the Risorgimento were, if not divinely inspired, at least religiously-charged ventures. This argument was the most representative feature of Risorgimento political thought, and, seemingly, it was too potent to be ignored altogether. It entailed that, although the Piedmontese Church had fallen prey to ‘party passions’, Catholicism properly understood was the ‘indivisible complement to true liberty and order’.131 Cavour was in tune with moderatism in another defining respect, 127 ccdp, i, 243 (17 Oct. 1849); xi, 361–2 (23 Feb. 1855); xi, 542–3 (25 Apr. 1855). 128 ccdp, ii, 81 (7 Mar. 1850); xiv, 27–8 (30 Dec. 1857). See Francesco Traniello, ‘Stato, Chiesa e laicità in Cavour’, in Levra, Cavour, esp. 134–7. 129 ccdp, xv, 442 (21 Feb. 1861). The agreed formula was ‘king of Italy by the grace of God and the will of the nation’; see Alberto Caracciolo, Il Parlamento nella formazione del Regno d’Italia (Milan, 1960), 47–50; Christopher Duggan, The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy since 1796 (Boston, 2008), 232–4. 130 ccdp, v, 271–3 (5 Feb. 1851). 131 [La morte di Pietro di Santa Rosa], 8 Aug. 1850, in ccts, iii, 1606–9; [Lettera all’Armonia sulla morte di Pietro di Santa Rosa], 26 Aug. 1850, in ccts, iii, 1610–13.

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a refusal to recognise the legitimacy of different platforms. This attitude had momentous consequences: all rival stances being portrayed as the outcome of sinister interests, and all adversaries as enemies, the final phase of the Risorgimento was carried out in a climate of suspicion and fear. 5

Moderate Thought in Action

Unsurprisingly in such a small country, there was a considerable osmosis between political theory and practice. Except for Casanova, all the authors considered so far were involved in politics at the very highest levels of government. It followed that, while Piedmontese and Italian matters were regularly referred to in the contributions of a theoretical nature considered in Section 3, the arguments making up the moderate paradigm often surfaced in texts discussing topical issues, such as official documents or pamphlets. This section reviews the topical literature, relative to both domestic reforms and Italian policy, in search of connections with the paradigm.132 The claim to be the interpreters of reason and the divine order matched with the view that moderatism was the only legitimate political position. Before 1848, the moderates had come to identify their platform with the general interest by presenting themselves as the only force energised by the twin powers of public opinion and Providence. After 1848, their approach did not alter, although the challenge did not come from secret societies any longer but from parliamentary groups and public associations. The failure of 1848–9, which the moderates ascribed to the democrats, arguably strengthened their determination not to recognise those who were beyond the pale of elite liberalism. They continued to be suspicious of parties, regularly equated with ‘sects’ inimical to order. The moderates frequently quoted a dictum by Foscolo, contained in a manuscript first published in 1850: ‘in order to remake Italy we have to unmake the sects’. Actually, Foscolo distinguished between sects and parties in that text: the former had ‘secret interests’ to foster, whereas the latter pursued the common good. Yet the distinction failed to gain acceptance.133 D’Azeglio’s attack on Gioberti’s government for representing ‘sects’ or ‘parts’, imbued with ‘greed and secret ambitions’, is significant – it was ironical that Gioberti

132 This section incorporates material from pp. 593–9 of Roberto Romani, ‘Political Thought in Action: The Moderates in 1859’, jmis, 17 (2012), 592–607. 133 Foscolo, Discorsi, 195–205.

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­himself denounced parties in the Rinnovamento.134 In advocating two parliamentary parties only, Balbo specified that both should represent ‘moderate’ views, as the extreme parties should not only be excluded from parliament but repressed by force.135 In principle, Carutti deprecated ‘circles’, namely the permanent groups acting as a sort of alternative parliament, but welcomed the parliamentary ‘parts’; in practice, the latter were not necessary, for, as he wrote in 1849, there were no substantial differences between the government and the ‘right-minded part’ of the opposition, hence a large coalition was advisable.136 Most famously, Cavour’s connubio amounted to a practical denial of the legitimacy and necessity of parties. Historians have discussed, and not without animosity, whether the connubio was the only way to save the constitution in the face of strong anti-liberal pressure, or rather it was the beginning of a political ‘transformism’ divesting the Italian parliament of its functions, and ultimately leading to Mussolini’s dictatorship.137 All those who were outside the moderate camp, either on the right or the left, were depicted as sectarians, consequently as revolutionaries. The goal of the moderates’ polemic against sects was greater than combating Mazzinianism, however. The Sardinian government described its conflict with Austria – in memorandums, pamphlets, or in the press – as conservative in nature, a struggle for order against chaos. It was regularly maintained that Piedmont merely aimed to strengthen the European balance of power, put at risk by Austria’s expansionism and the permanent mayhem its dominance caused on the peninsula. It was remarked, for example, that republican radicalism was roused by foreign rule; that the administration of Lombardy-Venetia showed a cavalier attitude to property rights, as exemplified by the confiscation of the assets of the exiles in 1853; and that Austria was the protector of the Neapolitan government, whose barbarous repression of the liberal movement made a 134 D’Azeglio, ‘Ai suoi elettori’; Gioberti, Del rinnovamento, i, 192. See Maria Serena Piretti, Le elezioni politiche in Italia dal 1848 a oggi (Bari, 1995), 17–23. 135 Balbo, Della monarchia, 299–301, 324–6. For the moderates' view of parties before 1848, see Ch. 2, Sect. 3 above. 136 See by Carutti: Dei principii, 71–4, 222–8; ‘Il ministero e l’opposizione dopo Novara’ (1849), in Dei principii, 267–303 at 297–300; ‘Dopo la pace di Milano’ (1849), ibid., 304–30 at 315. General Alfonso La Marmora (1804–78) denounced the ‘sects’ directing the revolt of Genoa (1849), which he bloodily repressed. Besides being an mp (1849–74) and minister of war (1848–59, with short interruptions), La Marmora held the premiership from July, 1859, to January, 1860. See Ettore Passerin D’Entrèves, ‘Figure e correnti del liberalismo piemontese fra il 1848 e l’unificazione’, in id., La formazione dello stato unitario (Rome, 1993), 49–66 at 55–8; Paola Casana Testore, ‘Ferrero della Marmora, Alfonso’, dbi, xlvii, 1997. 137 For a review of the debate see Salvadori, ‘Il liberalismo’, 90–5.

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moderate writer define it as ‘the apostle of disorder’ and ‘the demagogical entity par excellence’.138 In short, Austria behaved like a sect, for it fuelled extremism and fought the demand for liberty stemming from the course of civilization itself. Cavour used these arguments in many important memorandums.139 He also exploited on many occasions the reputation of the Romagne region for political vendettas and sectarian violence – a perfect example of that ardeur méridionale that could set Europe ablaze.140 In contrast, a ‘Piedmontese hegemony’ over the Italian movement was a guarantee of both monarchical order and compliance with a moderate approach to social progress. A few examples of this contention will suffice. In 1848, the Savoyard diplomacy informed the major powers, including Austria, that the goal of the impending military intervention in Lombardy was to avoid the establishment of a republic in Milan in the wake of the city’s insurrection.141 Farini reminded William Gladstone of the fact that ‘the constitutional monarchy of Savoy is the single conservative force on the peninsula’, considering that absolute governments fuelled the revolutionarism of republicans.142 Boncompagni was at pains to depict the patriotic struggle in Italy as a ‘conservative’ kind of revolution – like the English one of 1688 – aiming to restore rather than to innovate, with both the reforms of the eighteenth century and the liberties brought by Napoleon as the achievements in need of restoration. (The Doctrinaires had similarly used the example of 1688 to devise a conservative interpretation of the July revolution).143 Some critics regard our foreign policy 138 Giuseppe Massari, I casi di Napoli dal 29 gennaio 1848 in poi: Lettere politiche (Turin, 1849), 275. 139 In ccts, iv, see e.g. [L’Austria nei Balcani e la questione italiana], 29 Dec. 1855, 1866–8; ‘Note sur la Romagne’, 27 Mar. 1856, 1908–13; ‘Notes sur les affaires d’Italie’, 16 Apr. 1856, 1924–8; [Memorandum sardo per il Governo britannico], 1 Mar. 1859, 2008–16; [Memorandum sulla spedizione nelle Marche e nell’Umbria], 12 Sep. 1860, 2060–4. 140 See e.g. Cavour, ‘Notes sur les affaires’, 1926. 141 Nicomede Bianchi, Storia documentata della diplomazia europea in Italia dall’anno 1814 all’anno 1861 (Turin, 1865–72), v, 172–4. 142 Luigi Carlo Farini, Al Signor William Gladstone, Londra (Turin, 1858), 11. See also id., ‘Lettera al Signore Guglielmo Gladstone a Londra’ (1852), in id., Lo Stato romano dall’anno 1815 al 1850, ed. Antonio Patuelli (1850–3; Rome, 1986), 831–53 at 847. Gladstone had published two pamphlets (1851) to denounce political repression in the Bourbon kingdom, causing a stir; see Moe, The View from Vesuvius, 131–9. Gladstone also translated Farini’s history of the Papal States; see Luigi Carlo Farini, The Roman State from 1815 to 1850 (London, 1851–4). 143 Boncompagni, ‘La politica piemontese’, pp. vi–vii, xxxii–viii. See also Boncompagni, Sulla potenza temporale, pp. v–viii ff. On the Doctrinaires and the Glorious Revolution, see Luigi Lacchè, La libertà che guida il popolo: Le tre Gloriose Giornate del luglio 1830 e le ‘Chartes’ nel costituzionalismo francese (Bologna, 2002), 107–110.

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as ‘revolutionary’, Chiala argued in 1858, but they should not, because ‘the house of Savoy has been heading for Milan and Lombardy for four centuries’. The moderates organised the discourse on the Risorgimento in such a way that diverging positions were excluded on principle. There was no scope for other viewpoints as the moderates were, at the same time, revolutionary and conservative, while, on the philosophical plane, their mission was in accordance with God, reason, and nature. In November, 1859, d’Azeglio interpreted the war that had broken out between a Franco-Piedmontese army and the Austrians as a clash between, respectively, the principe chrétien and the principe païen. Civil equality, freedom of conscience, compassion, and the sentiment of nationality originated from the former, whereas the pagan principles of force, conquest, and slavery informed Austria’s policies. The war was an opportunity, ordained by Providence, to extend the boundaries of ‘Christian jurisprudence’.144 And in the same year, when ‘wonderful events’ were happening on the peninsula, Mamiani judged that the coming into being of the Italian nation implemented the ‘rational order’ prescribed by the moral law.145 This vision of Mamiani’s was prepared by an essay on the concept of nation which Mancini penned, and which soon became a compulsory reference to the moderates. Its relevance stemmed neither from Mancini’s depiction of nations as the outcome of factors that were both natural and ‘moral’ (geography, ‘race’, language, mores, etc.), nor from the view that people’s ‘awareness of nationality’ was a necessary complement to those factors. The essay was in tune with the moderate consensus for it aimed to turn nationalism from a ‘vague aspiration’, a ‘generous desire’, or even a ‘mysterious passion’ into a command of natural law. Dispelling the Italian nation’s literary and sentimental image, especially cultivated by the democrats, and turning nationalism into a natural yearning, subject to rational analysis, meant passing from the stormy sphere of emotions to the calm contemplation of an objective order. The concept of nation became a ‘scientific truth’ – to be placed at the heart of the discipline of international law – as nations were ‘a necessity of moral nature’, originating from a sphere superior to that of humankind. Denying that necessity brought about injustice and ‘error’.146 144 Luigi Chiala, Une page d’histoire du gouvernement représentatif en Piémont (Turin, 1858), p. xli; Massimo d’Azeglio, La politique et le droit chrétien au point de vue de la question ita­ lienne (1859), in data, ii, 332–449 at 339–408. 145 Mamiani, D’un nuovo diritto, 84–6, 351–5. 146 Pasquale Stanislao Mancini, Della nazionalità come fondamento del diritto delle genti, ed. Erik Jayme (1851; Turin, 2000), 24–5, 38–9, 51. Mancini (1817–88) had been a lawyer and a journalist in Naples before settling in Turin in late 1849. He was appointed to a chair in

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The dichotomy between the ‘factions’ and a nation identified with moderatism was put to use on a large scale during the war of 1859. A series of statements­ by Cavour, Marco Minghetti, and other moderates, as well as Victor Emmanuel ii’s appeal to the ‘peoples of Italy’, specified that the only goal of the war they were about to fight was ‘Italian independence’. Little, if any, consideration was given to Italy’s liberal and constitutional development.147 As regards Cavour in particular, in February he wrote Giuseppe La Farina (the leader of the Società nazionale, Cavour’s agent of revolution in northern and central Italy) that the demonstrations to be fomented in Tuscany should be based more on ‘ideas of nationality and independence’ than on ‘principles of liberty’; he paid only lip service to the twin principles of liberty and nationality in the parliamentary speech on the war loan; and in the memorandum to Britain (dated 1 March), he stated that the Lombard-Venetians’ discontent depended only on their being ruled by foreigners, while the establishment of liberal institutions in central Italy was advisable, but only as a means of avoiding ‘the danger of revolution’.148 If the Italian populations’ call for freedom, whatever that could mean, was not taken into account, there followed that parties of any sort had no role to play. Significant sections of public opinion in northern Italy, and in Lombardy in particular, subscribed to an advanced brand of liberalism and were suspicious of Piedmontese expansionism. But they proved impotent. An analysis of the proceedings of the assemblies of Tuscany, Romagna, and the Duchies – all with provisional rulers of moderate leanings – reveals a successful attempt to exclude dissent and therefore political discussion on the grounds of the emergence of a single ‘party of the nation’. No assembly was set up in Lombardy, with the excuse that the treaty of 1848 annexing it to the kingdom of Sardinia was still in force. Everywhere in northern and central Italy, the local moderates, following the guidelines spread by the Società nazionale, claimed that they were ruling in the name of ‘public opinion’, and that parties had lost their raison d’être once the war of independence had begun. This argument relied on the strength of the national idea, and gained credibility from the democrats’ international law at the Turinese university the following year. Mancini put his juridical expertise at the service of the governments of the decade, and in 1860–1 he played a major role in the extension of the Piedmontese penal and ecclesiatical laws to the Neapolitan kingdom; see An., ‘Mancini, Pasquale Stanislao’, dbi, lxviii, 2007. 147 Raymond Grew, A Sterner Plan for Italian Unity: The Italian National Society in the Risorgimento (Princeton, 1963), 139–66; Beales and Biagini, The Risorgimento, 118. In April the constitution was suspended in the kingdom and Victor Emmanuel was granted a wartime dictatorship. 148 See by Cavour: Epistolario, xvi, 1, 141–2; ccdp, xv, 28 (9 Feb. 1859); [Memorandum sardo], 2010–11, 2015.

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failure to put forward an alternative game plan in those crucial months. As the official newspaper of the Romagne put it, ‘here there are no longer republicans and supporters of the constitution, moderates and enthusiasts, half-hearted liberals and extremists, for here there are either Italians who love Italy or its enemies’.149 The key terms of political discourse in 1859 were ‘concord’ and ‘order’. The local moderates congratulated themselves, first, on the unanimity with which affairs were settled and annexation to the kingdom of Sardinia was demanded, and, second, on the fact that no breakdown of law and order occurred despite the regime changes. The peaceful transitions were regarded as definitive evidence that Italians were now ready for liberty.150 Farini, then ‘dictator’ of the Romagne, argued on various occasions that the prevalence of concord and order testified to Italians’ new political attitudes, developed by experiencing adversity and reflecting on the example of Piedmont. The days of discord, revenge, and misplaced ardour are gone, he remarked, inasmuch as the Italian peoples are displaying ‘discipline’ at last.151 The enemies of concord became indistinguishable from the enemies of Italy as a logical consequence. For instance, La Farina voiced his anger at the journalists of the Milanese daily Il pungolo, who refused to divorce unification from liberty, as well as at the federalists Cattaneo and Ferrari, who sowed ‘discord’ and were therefore ‘traitors’ to the fatherland. The Società nazionale, in contrast, was ‘the holy phalanx of independence and unification’.152 Clearly enough, the sacrifice of liberty in 1859 can be seen as a tactical move, justified by the necessity of patriotic cohesion during the war, and to a certain extent it was so. The point, however, is that it smoothly harmonized with the monistic and intolerant core of moderate political culture. To return to 1850s Piedmont, moderate politics was informed by a cautious approach to reform, inspired by the British experience. Robert Peel was a revered model, because he had been ‘the minister of the whole nation, not of a 149 Quoted in Isabella Zanni Rosiello, ‘Note intorno al giornalismo politico bolognese degli anni 1859–1860’, in Isabella Zanni Rosiello et al., Convegno di studi sul Risorgimento a Bologna e nell’Emilia (Bologna, 1960–1), ii, 1227. 150 See the proceedings of the assemblies of Tuscany, Romagna, and the Duchies in Camera dei deputati (ed.), Assemblee del Risorgimento (Rome, 1911), vols. i, iii. 151 Farini’s statements are in Camera dei deputati, Assemblee, i, 429, 531, 560, 658. See also d’Azeglio’s and Cavour’s declarations, respectively in ibid., 354–5, and in [Memorandum sulla spedizione], 2061. 152 See the articles published in La Farina’s monthly Piccolo corriere d’Italia in 1859–60, and collected in Giuseppe La Farina, Scritti politici, ed. Ausonio Franchi (Milan, 1870), ii, 235–40 ff.

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part of it’.153 Chiala commented at length on the connubio in terms of Cavour’s Peel-like flexibility meant to ‘preserve and progress’ at the same time (Burke had spoken of ‘a disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve’).154 The institutions of Piedmont are certainly to be reformed in accordance with the principle of liberty, Domenico Berti averred, but its application should take circumstances into account, and more often than not this entails that the government should be content with achieving the possible rather than the optimum. In the case of university reform, considering that a deficiency in the spirit of association rules out the creation of secular private universities, a system of higher learning managed by the state is required. If liberty in education on the English model was sanctioned, a monopoly of the religious institutions would ensue.155 When the Roman secretary of state violently attacked d’Azeglio, then prime minister, for enacting the Siccardi laws, the reply was the quintessence of moderatism. On the one hand, d’Azeglio complained that the government of the Church behaved like a passion-driven ‘political sect’. On the other, he justified his actions in the usual way: if we had refused to present the bill the opposition would have taken the initiative, with the likely result of passing more radical measures, and probably not without some unrest.156 The moderates’ stance on the relationship between Church and state was in principle similar to the Doctrinaires’, who had argued that the two should be distinct but ‘allied’.157 In practice, the Savoyard state’s attempt to limit the sphere of Church influence led to an all-out confrontation. But, as even the unbeliever Cavour demonstrates, the moderates could not dispense with religion, 153 Emilio Broglio, Dell’imposta sulla rendita in Inghilterra e sul capitale negli Stati Uniti: Lettere al conte di Cavour (Turin, 1856), i, 30. Guizot published a laudatory study of him in 1856; see François Guizot, Sir Robert Peel: Étude d’histoire contemporaine (Paris, 1856). 154 Chiala, Une page, esp. 135–8; Burke, Reflections, 157. See also Cavour, [La morte di Robert Peel]. 155 Domenico Berti, ‘Relazione intorno al progetto Melegari’, in Domenico Berti and Luigi Amedeo Melegari, Studi e proposte intorno alla pubblica istruzione in Piemonte (Pinerolo, 1851), pp. iii–xlviii at pp. xix–xxvi. The point is made in greater detail in Domenico Berti, Della libertà d’insegnamento e della legge organica dell’istruzione pubblica (Turin, 1850), 20–8. Berti (1820–97) was a professor at the university of Turin with an expertise in the organization of higher education. See a review of the debate on university reform in Ida Ferrero, ‘La Facoltà legale di Torino e i progetti di riforma dell’insegnamento universitario nel Regno di Sardegna risorgimentale’, Rivista di storia dell’Università di Torino [online journal], 5 (2016) , accessed Sep. 2017. 156 Massimo d’Azeglio, ‘Il governo di Piemonte e la corte di Roma’ (1851), in data, ii, 166–76. 157 See Royer-Collard’s position in Barante, La vie politique, i, 238–59.

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and not only because the reference to a supernatural dimension was critical to the paradigm, of course. The moderates stressed the importance of the social and political functions religion fulfilled, aware as they were of the limited appeal of their programme to the masses, and afraid of being viewed as a sort of atheists. To Boncompagni, Catholicism was a pillar of the throne for its traditional task of recommending obedience. Bianchi, Carutti, and Farini argued that the masses were willing to fight for liberty and independence only if Catholicism taught them the virtues of sacrifice and duty – individuals guided by self-interest only would follow anybody promising to fill their stomachs.158 Carutti’s recipe for the political education of the masses was pure Maistre: the only ideas to be inculcated were that the law was ‘holy’, that society ‘came from God’, and that the principle of authority not only was divine in origin but also led to God.159 Farini attacked Mazzini’s ‘religion of humanity’ because, by making each man in some way divine, it justified popular sovereignty, hence all passions; eventually these reduced to ‘envy’, bringing about a never-ending cycle of seditions and revolutions since ‘nobody will ever manage to satisfy human desires once these are not checked by religion, morals, and duty’. The liberals, Farini continued, should not pose as irreligious rationalists and should either be, or purport to be, good Catholics – otherwise a crucial connection with the masses would be lost.160 The bearing of Catholicism on the making of the principles of equality, liberty, and nationality was also drawn attention to. Bianchi did his best to counter­ the attempt, allegedly carried out by both Mazzinians and some wrong-headed ‘liberals’, to Protestantise Italians. It is not true, he maintained, that Protestantism is historically linked to liberty and tolerance and Catholicism to despotism and persecution; in particular, the theory of the divine origin of sovereignty was first put forward by Protestants. Bianchi’s conclusion was that proselytising the Piedmontese meant siding with Austria.161 In reiterating that the course of history had a Providential nature, Mancini pointed to individual rights as a product of Christian teachings, while Boggio ascribed liberty, equality, and ‘true civilization’ to them – he did so in a book advocating the separation of

158 Boncompagni, ‘Sulle dottrine’, 324, 333–4; id., ‘La politica piemontese’, p. xxxi; Bianchi, Vicende, 281–8; Carutti, Dei principii, 101–4; Farini, ‘Lettera al Signore Guglielmo Gladstone’, 852. See also Pier Carlo Boggio, La Chiesa e lo Stato in Piemonte (Turin, 1854), ii, 86–8. 159 Domenico Carutti, ‘Di alcuni libri politici ad uso del popolo’ (1850), in id., Dei principii, 389–96. 160 Farini, ‘Lettera al Signore Guglielmo Gladstone’, 851–2; id., Lo Stato romano, 624. 161 Bianchi, Vicende, 289–310.

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Church and state in Piedmont.162 Not only did Bianchi agree with Mancini and Boggio, but he attributed all the past glories of Italy to the strength of religious faith, and all the subsequent calamities to its corruption. All moderates relentlessly claimed that the separation between Church and state as pursued in the kingdom would not limit but rather amplify the Church’s prestige, and that its doctrine would become purer and milder once the political element in it would be relinquished. Thus, one way or another, religion had to provide ‘the foundation’ for the moderate programme.163 The kind of Catholicism the moderates endorsed, however, could not be that of Pius ix, who had embraced ultramontanism after 1849. To borrow a sentence referring to French Restoration liberals, the moderates aimed to establish ‘a juste milieu of faith’ between eighteenth-century materialism and ultramontanism.164 The Jesuit polemicists’ violent language and the calumnies they regularly utter against opponents, Chiala remarked, have nothing to do with the true spirit of Catholicism, which is moderate. It is significant that Chiala was at pains to demonstrate that the late Gioberti’s attitude towards Catholicism was ‘pure orthodoxy’, in spite of evidence to the contrary.165 Unsurprisingly then, when the kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in March, 1861, ministers and mps claimed that the protection of God over the house of Savoy had been a crucial factor in the process of national unification. History is not a casual series of events, it was argued, but ‘the work of Providence, which clearly manifests itself in the general government of the world’.166 Over the 162 Pasquale Stanislao Mancini, ‘De’progressi del diritto nella società, nella legislazione e nella scienza durante l’ultimo secolo in rapporto co’principj e con gli ordini liberi’ (1858), in id., Diritto internazionale: Prelezioni (Naples, 1873), 117–62 at 145–7; Boggio, La Chiesa, ii, 11, 86. See also Boncompagni, Sulla potenza temporale, 184. Even Melegari, who was on the left end of the moderate spectrum, argued that by sanctifying work Christianity had paved the way for its emancipation, hence for all liberties; furthermore, the establishment of Christian churches on a territorial basis had helped form the modern nations; see Me­ legari, Sunti, vol. i, pp. x–xi, lxxxiii–v; vol. ii, pp. 20–1. The Turinese Boggio (1827–66) wrote extensively in Cavour’s Il Risorgimento between 1847 and 1848, but afterwards he opposed the connubio. He became professor of constitutional law at the university of Turin in 1861. 163 Bianchi, Vicende, 284–8; Boggio, La Chiesa, ii, 90–3; Boncompagni, ‘Sulla libertà’, 419–22. 164 Kelly, The Humane Comedy, 139. 165 Luigi Chiala, ‘Breve saggio delle condizioni presenti del Cattolicismo in Italia’, Rivista contemporanea, 8 (1856), 297–377, esp. 351. For Gioberti, see Ch. 2, n. 193. 166 The words in quotes are from Raffaele Conforti’s speech (11 Apr. 1861), in Camera dei De­putati, Assemblee, i, 801–2; Conforti, an mp who had fled Naples in 1849, was the spokesperson for the commission set up to decide the formula to be used on official documents after the king’s name. Pius ix had no qualms about excommunicating Victor

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whole Risorgimento, the moderates did not believe for a moment that liberalism was theoretically and politically self-sufficient. 6

Concluding Remarks

From the publication of Gioberti’s Primato up to 1848, moderatism was a sui generis form of political thought. It built on the Catholic tradition and the glorious past of the peninsula, included a sensibility, and refrained from demanding the creation of representative governments. But in the 1850s, with the kingdom of Sardinia turned into a constitutional state, moderatism became a variant of European elite liberalism. The decade witnessed the making of a political culture which, taking the Statuto as a point of reference, was more theoretical in approach and circumscribed in content than before. This culture challenged democracy and advocated a gouvernement des meilleurs. The glories of the house of Savoy were stressed together with the virtues of realism and prudence – an approach that made much of widespread doubts about Italians’ readiness for free government. Catholicism continued to be regarded as an essential source of political legitimacy, although the moderate narrative did not focus any longer on grandiose celebrations of ‘Christian civilization’. Political economy provided the arguments needed to oppose socialism and reaffirm the certainty of gradual progress. Constitutional moderatism lacked indigenous sources and models, although it was often acknowledged that the French-dominated regimes of the Napoleonic era had set a precedent by establishing civil equality, security of property rights, and a rational administration. Little of use could be found in Muratori and the Catholic Aufklärung, but the Italian Enlightenment too had not much to offer, considering that its moderate wing hardly concerned itself with constitutional government.167 Essential ingredients of constitutional theory were thus imported from France and Britain.

Emmanuel as the monarch of a kingdom that was ‘a denial of God’; see John A. Davis, ‘L’Antirisorgimento’, in Isnenghi, Gli italiani in guerra, i, 753–69. 167 But on Pietro Verri’s manuscripts on constitutionalism (1789–91), see Carlo Capra, ‘The Rise of Liberal Constitutionalism in Italy: Pietro Verri and the French Revolution’, jmis, 17 (2012), 516–26. Other historians have pointed to a current of pre-revolutionary constitutionalism, represented by granduke Peter Leopold’s constitutional project for Tuscany (1779) and Filangieri’s Scienza della legislazione; see Antonio Trampus, Storia del costituzio­nalismo italiano nell’età dei Lumi (Bari, 2009).

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The moderatism of the 1850s was imbued with an intolerant attitude, stemming from a Manichean perspective. While a government of the juste milieu type was regarded as a manifestation of a divine and natural will, democracy, not to mention socialism, was considered as a sort of empire of evil. This approach had a series of implications, such as: a view of reform as necessarily gradual, in accordance with nature’s workings; social and political elitism, justified by the idea of a natural aristocracy mediating between the divine design and the people; a difficulty in accepting pluralism and conflict; a shaky appreciation of individual rights, taking second place to the alleged imperatives of Providential history; and the constant agitation of the democratic danger, to the point that changing the map of Europe and countering an ever-present spirit of revolution became one and the same thing. Liberty was upheld, yet it could be either conceded or taken away at the ottimati’s will. If to the philosopher Gioberti liberty was just a ‘means’ to the end of intellectual and moral civilization, to the politician Farini the ends were the house of Savoy’s ‘national mission’ and ‘the power of the state’.168 The political instability of France in the nineteenth century, according to Rosanvallon, resulted from the simultaneous occurrence of both a liberal and a democratic revolution in 1789. In England, political evolution occurred gradually.169 On the peninsula too a liberal phase, coinciding with the Risorgimento and the 1850s in particular, preceded the democratic one. The ­Piedmontese moderates did not have to deal with a real challenge from the democratic movement, which lacked unity and direction, as the 1850s progressed.170 Nevertheless, the danger it posed was constantly emphasized. Was democracy perhaps ‘inscribed in the social order’, as Royer-Collard and Tocqueville perceived it to be in France? It is safe to answer in the negative, as Piedmontese society was not egalitarian, respect for the authority of the aristocracy and the local notables was high, and the sway of religious precepts among the masses 168 Gioberti, Del rinnovamento, i, 153–5; Luigi Carlo Farini, ‘Discours à propos du projet de loi sur les conspirations contre les souverains’ (1858), in id., Lettres sur les affaires d’Italie (Paris, 1860), 313–36 at 324–6. See Berti, ‘I moderati’, 228–31. An unpublished memoir by Boncompagni (c.1857) reveals a distrust of parliamentary discussions as well as a cavalier attitude towards the right of association; see Maria Cristina Morandini (ed.), Educazione, scuola e politica nelle ‘Memorie autobiografiche’ di Carlo Boncompagni (Milan, 1999), 66, 76, 84–5. 169 Rosanvallon, Le sacre du citoyen. 170 On the weakness of the democratic movement in the 1850s, see e.g. Adriano Viarengo, ‘I democratici italiani e la sinistra subalpina: Un carteggio fra Giuseppe Montanelli e Lorenzo Valerio (1849–1859)’, Rivista storica italiana, 98 (1986), 247–307; Montale, ‘La crisi dei democratici’.

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substantial.171 The spectre of democracy took indigenous guises – the memory of 1848–9, a decreasingly belligerent parliamentary opposition, and the Mazzinians’ quixotic attempts at insurrection – but its relevance in Piedmont was chiefly a reflection of its topicality in France. If stressing the democratic threat was clearly a strategy meant to rally public opinion, the moderates’ anxiety was genuine. France, where liberals were confronted with a strong democratic discourse of rights in 1848–51, was perceived by the Piedmontese as the proper context for their reflections.172 There was the feeling that, almost out of necessity, political developments in France would soon cross the Alps, either in the form of armies or ideas. (France’s proselytizing spirit in the name of abstract principles had been part and parcel of its customary image well before Napoleon Bonaparte’s campaigns).173 This disquieting feeling mixed with an awareness that the very logic that had led to representative government and elitist liberalism would lead to democracy. The unstoppable march of equality was a staple of ultramontanism, constantly reiterated over the 1850s by a number of sources, like the lively Piedmontese groups led by Giacomo Margotti, the Roman-based review Civiltà cattolica, or Donoso Cortés’s Essai sur le Catholicisme, le libéralisme et le socialisme (1851).174 Once sovereignty has passed from the throne to society, they claimed, nothing can impede the dominance of number granted that all citizens were born equal and free. The fragility of the moderate paradigm in this respect was also highlighted by Bertrando Spaventa, challenging Il Risorgimento on the elusiveness of the ‘supernatural essence’ which, according to the moderates, 171 See Romeo, Cavour, ii, 77. Genoa was an exception, as evidenced by the democratic uprising of 1849 and the riots of 1857. There were disturbances in Sardinia as well. For the French context, see Kelly, The Humane Comedy, 26; Craiutu, Liberalism, 104–12; and, for Tocqueville’s shifting stance on the definition of democracy, in the terms suggested by the title, see Melvin Richter, ‘Tocqueville and Guizot on Democracy: From a Type of Society to a Political Regime’, History of European Ideas, 30 (2004), 61–82. 172 The peculiar relevance of French events in Piedmont is frequently pointed out in Romeo, Cavour. On nineteenth-century intellectuals’ fascination with foreign models of modernization, models to be adapted to the backwardness of the peninsula, see Bollati, L’italiano, esp. 95–6; Silvana Patriarca, ‘National Identity or National Character? New Vocabularies and Old Paradigms’, in Ascoli and von Henneberg, Making and Remaking Italy, 299–319. 173 In 1856, Tocqueville reiterated that France was ‘the most brilliant and the most dangerous of European nations’; see L’Ancien Régime, 249. 174 Juan Donoso Cortés, Essai sur le Catholicisme, le libéralisme et le socialisme (Brussels, 1851). On the Piedmontese ultras, see Bianca Montale, ‘Lineamenti generali per la storia dell'Armonia dal 1848 al 1857’, Rassegna storica del Risorgimento, 43 (1956), 475–84; Arturo Carlo Jemolo, Scritti vari di storia religiosa e civile, ed. Francesco Margiotta Broglio (Milan, 1965), 321–74; Giuseppina Lupi, ‘Margotti, Giacomo’, dbi, lxx, 2008.

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was the foundation of justice. ‘Reason leads to democracy’, Spaventa observed, and ‘faith to theocracy’, but the moderates presume to circumvent logic. Hence they lack a compelling theory of sovereignty, and take the status quo – ‘circumstances, opportunities, and good luck’ – as their only point d’appui.175 On the one hand, the moderates of the 1850s were aware of the thin ice they found themselves on. On the other, they believed that the dose of liberalism and patriotism they subscribed to was in tune with the course of ­European civilization after the turmoil of 1789–1814. As a buffer state between France and Austria, the kingdom of Sardinia had struggled for survival for centuries; annexed to France by Napoleon in 1799, it was reconstituted in 1814, and since then the younger generation acknowledged the irresistible strength of the ideas set in motion by the French Revolution – liberty was inevitable, so to speak.176 Emblematically, Cavour welcomed the constitution granted by Charles Albert as a document in which ‘all the great principles proclaimed by the French nation in 1789’ were frankly endorsed.177 Rejecting them was not an option; both the natural laws and the rule of reason so often invoked in the 1850s were nothing but the philosophical representation of this perception. As Mancini put it: in this century, setting up a free government is an ‘inescapable necessity’. ‘Living in tune with modern civilization’ was therefore the moderates’ guiding principle, entailing political and economic progress along the lines of the northern European countries. The corollary was that the struggle of the Risorgimento did not stem from ‘revolutionary passions’ but from ‘the principles of civilization universally agreed on’.178 Romeo has written that the new state was born ‘on a foundation of true liberalism’, inasmuch as Cavour always believed in ‘the essential function of parliament’.179 This is questionable, in view of substantial evidence indicating 175 Spaventa, ‘La libertà d’insegnamento’, 741, 743, 745. 176 See e.g. Passerin D’Entrèves, La giovinezza di Cesare Balbo. On the perceived fragility of the kingdom, and on the Italian policy as a means of strengthening it, see Viarengo, Cavour, 7–16. 177 Cavour, [Critiche allo Statuto]. See Romeo, Dal Piemonte sabaudo, 103. As is well-known, an eagerness to catch up with Britain and France laid at the origin of Cavour’s thought and action. A well-established interpretive tradition ascribes the whole Risorgimento to a ‘European inspiration’; see Luigi Salvatorelli, Pensiero e azione nel Risorgimento (1943; Turin, 1974), 23. 178 Mancini, ‘De’progressi’, 152; Boncompagni, ‘La politica piemontese’, pp. xii–xiii, xxiv, xxvii. 179 Romeo, Cavour, iii, 824–5; see also Ettore Passerin d’Entrèves, ‘L’eredità trasmessa da Cavour alla Destra storica nel momento della unificazione dello Stato italiano’, in Rudolf Lill and Nicola Matteucci (eds.), Il liberalismo in Italia e in Germania dalla rivoluzione del ’48 alla prima guerra mondiale (Bologna, 1980), 375–402. That Cavour’s politics was

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that to him parliament was a passive instrument which he fully controlled and called into play when needed, rather than an active force in the constitution. Overall, his premiership lasted for a total of eight years and ten months, but during that period parliament was in session for two years and eight months only (and commentators were unanimous in regarding the session of ­1855–6 as distinctly fruitless).180 Like in other countries at the time, in Piedmont many deputies owed their election to governmental manoeuvring, hence to the prime minister, who for this reason enjoyed a predominant power in parliament; most glaringly, about ten per cent of the elected deputies, all of clerical leanings, were excluded in 1857 by finding excuses, so that Cavour managed to maintain an ample majority.181 Denis Mack Smith has argued that his deft parliamentary management, based on the connubio, resulted in a system that not only obstructed the formation of organic parties, but blocked the discussion of all issues that, albeit crucial, could split the majority.182 Whether all this is enough to deny that Cavour was a ‘true liberal’ who chose to ‘encounter his enemies in public debate’ (in Mack Smith’s words) is questionable, but it is unquestionable that his uncontrolled personal authority thwarted the effective workings of the parliamentary system.183 The weakness of Piedmontese liberalism emerged in full after 1861, when the needs of the patriotic venture could not be brought up as excuses for authoritarian measures. The political heirs of Cavour – the Destra storica – ruled Italy with an iron fist, exposing a siege mentality.184 A centralised administrative­ ‘genuinely liberal’ has also been argued by Alberto Caracciolo, on the grounds of Cavour’s struggle against the king’s prerogatives; see Caracciolo, Stato, 106. Sergio La Salvia draws a sharp contrast between Cavour’s liberalism, on the one hand, and Rattazzi’s, the king’s, and Garibaldi’s authoritarian proclivities, on the other; see his La rivoluzione e i partiti: Il movimento democratico nella crisi dell’unità nazionale (Rome, 1999), 3–50, 285–316 ff. According to La Salvia, Cavour aimed to ‘represent conflict through the institutions and procedures of parliament’, at 302. 180 Montaldo, ‘Dal vecchio al nuovo Piemonte’, 44; Viarengo, Cavour, 349. 181 Ghisalberti, Storia costituzionale, 77. See also Gian Savino Pene Vidari, ‘Parlamenti preunitari e Parlamento subalpino’, in Violante, Il Parlamento, 59–61. 182 Mack Smith, Cavour, 121–4. When Cavour returned to premiership in January, 1860 after the interlude of La Marmora’s government, he quite understandably did not repeal the fundamental laws (organizing state education and local administration, issuing the legal codes, etc.) that La Marmora had enacted taking advantage of emergency powers; see Passerin D’Entrèves, ‘Figure’, 64–5; Romeo, Cavour, iii, 828–31. 183 Mack Smith, Cavour and Garibaldi, 260; id., Cavour, 191–2. 184 On Cavour’s ‘besieging syndrome’, see Salvadori, ‘Il liberalismo’, esp. 97–8. The moderates asserted a full continuity between the Savoyard kingdom and the Italian state. The Piedmontese legislation was quickly extended into the rest of Italy, a fact ruling out the

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structure was set up, and a repressive policy towards popular unrest was adopted – coercion, rather than consent, was the means of government the Destra storica had recourse to. The criminal code, which aimed at the anticipation of crimes, placed severe restrictions on personal and political freedom, while the government exercised complete control over the judiciary.185 It was normal practice for prefects, the state administrative executives, to dissolve municipal councils and political associations if inimical to the central government. Church properties were confiscated and all religious orders were suppressed. High taxation was imposed. This was the so-called ‘Jacobinical style’ of the Destra storica.186 A proper party system did not develop; the liberalconservative camp ruled through fluctuating parliamentary majorities, based on informal personal groupings and the exchange of favours, until the advent of Mussolini’s fascism. A dozen governments succeeded each other in the ten years after 1861. Essential laws were enacted through emergency powers, bypassing the parliament (in April, 1859 and in 1865–6). Elections were regularly rigged, especially in the south. On the cultural plane, an inferiority complex towards northern Europe arose after 1861, and one which waited for the first opportunity to turn into its opposite, as the history of Italian nationalism shows.187 Both moderates and Mazzinians had envisaged the Risorgimento as the beginning of a new historical epoch, with Italy as its pivot, but a national unification achieved through mortifying international negotiations brought disillusionment and frustration. The war of 1866 and the defeat in Africa in 1896, perceived as national humiliations, were essential to the build-up of Italians’ sense of abasement.

creation­of an Italian ‘constitutional assembly’, as demanded by democrats. Most blatantly, Victor Emmanuel did not renumber himself after assuming the new royal title. See Caracciolo, Il Parlamento, 233 ff.; Mascilli Migliorini, ‘Problema nazionale’, 636–40. 185 John A. Davis, Conflict and Control: Law and Order in Nineteenth-Century Italy (Atlantic Highlands, nj, 1988). 186 On Rattazzi’s ‘Jacobinical style’, see Romeo, Cavour, ii, 786–7. On the Destra’s ‘obsession’ with the solidity of the new state, see Roberto Ruffilli, ‘Lo Stato liberale in Italia’, in Lill and Matteucci, Il liberalismo, 498. Marco Meriggi, ‘Soziale Klassen, Institutionen und Nationalisierung im liberalen Italien’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 26 (2000), 208–10, d­ iscusses whether or not the ruling classes after unification were ‘liberal’. According to Fulvio Cammarano, Storia politica dell’Italia liberale: L’età del liberalismo classico 1861–1900 (Bari, 1999), 19–29, the Jacobinical style was a ‘distortion’ of moderatism, which had exhibited an ‘individualist’ culture, ‘tolerance’, and faith in the power of liberty before and after 1861. 187 For a genealogy of nationalism in unified Italy, see Silvio Lanaro, Nazione e lavoro: Saggio sulla cultura borghese in Italia (1870–1925) (Venice, 1979).

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To conclude, moderatism was extreme and divisive in the 1850s, its name notwithstanding, as one of its principal features was an obsessive denunciation of its domestic enemies. A world of opposites was built on the contrast between moderate reason and democratic passions: between order and disorder, prudence and recklessness, stability and instability, religion and atheism, concord and conflict, and between a spirit of service and the pursuit of vested interests. The national political idiom featured, at its very inception, an almost anthropological distinction between ‘we’ and ‘them’, legitimising a mutual lack of respect and fair play, and, not rarely, a ferocious resolve to crush opponents. De Sanctis put the lasting damage in this way in 1865: Cavour’s programme justified ‘the excesses of the principle of authority’, meaning state officials’ abuses of power, an ‘exclusive and partisan spirit’, and a determination to fight the democrats which turned into ‘personal fury’.188 Many decades later, Mack Smith observed that, in contrast to Cavour, Mazzini and Garibaldi proved ­flexible as regards alliances, and that ‘Italy would have been more solidly built had [Cavour] known how to be more friendly to other people who were fighting in the van of the national movement’.189 188 Francesco De Sanctis, ‘Il suo programma elettorale del 1865’ (1865), in dso, xv, 220–8 at 222. De Sanctis pointed to the conservative aspects of Cavour’s strategy in other texts as well; see e.g. ‘La politica del ministero Rattazzi’ (parliamentary speech, Nov. 1862), ibid., 154–82 at 158–9, and ‘La situazione politica alla metà del 1864’ (parliamentary speech, Jun. and Jul. 1864), ibid., 183–219 at 205–6. 189 Mack Smith, Cavour and Garibaldi, 241–2.

Conclusion 1

The Perspective

Both Mazzinianism and pre-1848 moderatism were comprehensive projects for a political, moral, and religious resurgence. A purely political framework, therefore, does not capture their complexity. This book has identified the ‘­sensibilities’ associated with each of the two programmes, in the belief that sensibilities encapsulated the moral and religious core of Risorgimento thinking. The patriots’ quest for the ideal ‘man’, suited to the task of a new ­Italian renaissance, has been the chief thread of the study. That quest started with a choice between the opposite drives allegedly lying at the root of personality, namely reason and the passions; subscribing to one or the other involved a specific series of affections and character traits. The moderates’ espousal of reason entailed composure, prudence, and a public morality informed by Catholicism, while Mazzini’s advocacy of passions led to ‘enthusiasm’ and a total commitment to the cause. The contrast between reason and the passions rested on a thick cultural bedrock, dating back to Stoicism and the Catholic Aufklärung, and passing through Rousseau and the Revolution. Pointing to the moral dimension of Risorgimento is hardly original, granted that the reading of any text by Pellico, Mazzini, Manzoni, or Balbo is sufficient to appreciate its depth and pervasiveness. The relationship between religion and patriotism – the chief source of the moralization of Risorgimento­politics – has been studied for decades. Fresh insights into the emotional and ethical content of the nationalistic idiom have been gained since Banti’s path-breaking volume; and, in particular, an interpretation of the young Mazzinians in terms of the passions they experienced has been recently put forward. Nevertheless, three claims of novelty can be made for this book. First, sensibilities are an original standpoint, especially, as just implied, with respect to the moderates. That the patriots were critical of Italians’ past and present attitudes is not a new finding, but the existence of ‘affirmative’ sensibilities complementing that criticism is. Second, this book is an essay in intellectual history, whereas Banti’s work as well as the substantial literature it has inspired are in the spirit of cultural history. No attempt has been made in the preceding chapters to assess whether the Mazzinians were as enthusiast as their leader wanted them to be, or whether the moderates really did not distinguish between the morality of public and private life. The book unearths genealogies of ideas and affections, within a European context. The author’s expertise and inclination help explain

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004360914_007

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the nature of the study; another reason is the existence of large gaps in the intellectual history of the Risorgimento. This leads to the third element of novelty of the volume. Three chapters out of four are devoted to the moderates, who, in spite of being the ‘winners’ of the Risorgimento, have not attracted historians’ attention of late (with the exception of Rosmini), whereas Mazzini and his followers have. The Genoese’s democratic thought has seemed worth rescuing – the inclusion of sensibility themes in the analysis suggests otherwise – and the dark images he spread (martyrdom, for example) have been taken to substantiate Banti’s account of nationalism. Yet, the complexity and richness of moderate culture was remarkable, as especially Manzoni and Rosmini demonstrated, while an intense religiosity lent a lofty note to its political manifestations before 1848. All this elicited a sensibility of virtue and self-mastery which is more intriguing today than the ethic of feverish enthusiasm Mazzini advocated. A re-assessment of moderatism has also been called for by the recurrent equation of it with liberalism. Invoking public opinion and advocating some civil liberties, as the moderates did in the 1840s, should not be enough for them to be termed liberal, granted the modernising implications of the word. Moderatism consisted in an idiosyncratic set of arguments, which, furthermore, changed significantly over the decades. To introduce a degree of precision, a distinction between the ‘philosophical Catholics’ (who laid the foundations for the moderate sensibility), the 1840s moderates (who linked it to a political programme), and the constitutional moderates of the 1850s (who endorsed an elitist form of liberalism) has been proposed. The rest of this conclusion will briefly elaborate on some of the themes addressed in the book: the nature of moderatism, the difference between the 1840s and the 1850s, the roles of religion, and the intellectual exchange with Europe. The study ends with a glance at the moral argument in unified Italy. 2

The Core Themes

Moderatism. The moderate thinking of the 1840s played a crucial role in the history of Risorgimento. Balbo, Gioberti and d’Azeglio put forward a body of literature which managed to mobilise Italian opinion, however odd those texts may seem to present-day readers. A series of cautious measures, which only d’Azeglio cared to spell out, were then demanded, but what counted was their discoursive context. A system of cultural reassurances, so to speak, was formulated. The patriotic movement was finally taking up the centuries-long thread

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of Italian civilization; the revolutionary and Napoleonic trauma could be overcome (expiated, to be precise) by combining patriotism with Catholicism; and a new type of Italians, reflective and deeply moral, would carry the banner of the movement. Only the eternity of the Church, it was thought, could balance the unwelcome acceleration of history represented by the French Revolution. Catholicism provided souls with a firm foundation, leading to virtue and self-control, whereas the Revolution had originated a frantic personality, ready to embark on ever new ventures in a desperate search for happiness. Not only were the moderates not pluralist enough to warrant the liberal label in the 1840s, but their espousal of a ‘moderate’ style is also questionable in certain respects.1 Their vision of a forthcoming re-Christianisation of Europe and the world was too grand, and too partisan, to be moderate; useful for mobilisation purposes, this sort of prophecies was neither middle-of the-road in content, nor cautious methodologically. If it is possible to make a foray into actual sensibilities, it is also plain that Gioberti’s temperament did not resemble that he recommended to Italians. To counter his critics, from Rosmini to the Jesuits, he wrote multi-volume works – the reader of Gioberti has the impression that he was moved to write by an insuppressible urge, leading him to draw conclusions that were perhaps logical but also extreme. The superiority of Italian civilization in the Primato, entailing the denunciation of France, was a case in point. As for the constitutional moderates of the 1850s, their discoursive strategy rested on a depiction of the rival democratic stance as morally tainted. Having posited ‘concord’ in all public domains as an invaluable source of strength, they regarded the ‘revolutionary spirit’ spread by democratic sects as its antithesis; dominated by passions, the democrats thrived on disorder, and looting was their ultimate goal.2 The common struggle for the fatherland not only did not lead the moderates to collaborate with the left, but it was not even conducive to sympathetic feelings, albeit vague. This attitude, which was fraught with future disasters, conflicted with the equanimity, the tolerance, and the sense of justice one may intuitively associate with moderate politics. 1 According to historian Aurelian Craiutu, who has explored the idea of political moderation in France from Montesquieu to Constant, moderation should not be seen primarily as the quest for a juste milieu between extremes, but as a virtue and ‘a distinct political style’. It stands in close connection with scepticism, pluralism, and tolerance, and is opposed to ‘a “politics of faith” and of absolute ends’. Craiutu’s moderatism looks like an idealised image of liberalism, in this writer’s view; see Craiutu, A virtue, esp. 5, 14–15, 238. See also Michael Drolet, ‘French Political Thought: Its Untapped Traditions’, Perspectives on Politics, 12 (2014), 160–7. 2 ccdp, xv, e.g. 375 (2 Oct. 1860), 404–7 (16 Oct. 1860), 520 (27 Mar. 1861).

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Two decades. The programme of a Risorgimento from below – gradual, unanimous, and supported by public opinion in each of the regional states – eventually proved unworkable. But the years between the Primato and 1848 exert a fascination which the 1850s do not. The Risorgimento lost its innocence after the revolution of 1848–9, one is tempted to say, as cultural and identity politics gave way to power politics and the Risorgimento turned into a business of the Sardinian state. Gradual policies, peaceful methods, appreciation of regional diversities, and an effort not to demonise other Italians whatever their stances made for a programme which, in comparison with Cavour’s, was spontaneous and harmonious. It was also culturally rich, and peculiarly Italian. The early moderates’ elaboration of a sensibility was part of their attempt to rethink Italian history and identity, for, almost of necessity, a non-revolutionary­ emancipation of the nation required a search for its roots, discriminating between the good and the bad in the common past. The movement of the 1840s was an invention of intellectuals betting on the awakening of civil society; as such, it could not survive the pope’s volte-face, the Piedmontese intervention, and the ensuing military confrontation. In the 1850s, the only past that ­counted for the present was that of the Savoy dynasty, extolled for its traditional Italian mission. Religion. The history of Risorgimento, needless to say, accords with the interpretive current questioning teleological accounts of secularization. The ­thesis that the progress of modernization leads invariably to a decline in religious faith is too facile and ideological.3 Religion was obviously of paramount importance in the moderate camp, yet a critical difference between the two decades has emerged. A sincere belief in the feasibility of a renewed model of Catholic society (perhaps d’Azeglio was a bit less sincere than Balbo, Gioberti, or Rosmini), turned into the old-time view of religion as instrumentum regni. Even at the height of the conflict between Turin and Rome, elite liberals were unwilling to discard Catholicism because of its sway on the masses. Religion was also a component of Mazzini’s tightly-knit universe. The God he preached on manifested itself in the progress of each people and of humanity, so that to him, too, the course of history took a Providential character. Mazzini’s model of politics was totalitarian for it covered all dimensions of life, militancy being an imperative rooted in ethics and religion. The moral duty of ­insurrection 3 See C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914 (Oxford, 2014), 325–65; Ira Katznelson and Gareth Stedman Jones (eds.), Religion and the Political Imagination (Cambridge, 2010). On the development of a ‘Catholic modernity’ in Italy, see Rosario Forlenza and Bjørn Thomassen, Italian Modernities: Competing Narratives of Nationhood (Basingstoke, uk, 2016), 56–90.

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caused an inner­anxiety – Mazzinianism was about life and death, no less – which could be relieved once the militants’ ‘enthusiasm’ transfigured into a ‘faith’, resting on a belief in the eventual harmony of the universe. It is somewhat ironical that the Italian state was not recognized by Pius ix: should a single characteristic of Risorgimento political thought be spotlighted, this would certainly be the critical functions religion performed. Borrowing from Europe … The sources of inspiration for the various writers have been traced with some meticulousness throughout the book. It was a necessary task, given the intention to situate the ideas of the Risorgimento in a broad context; add that the origins of moderatism have been identified only vaguely by historians. A set of well-ingrained idioms of continental relevance informed moderatism throughout its evolution. The themes composing its sensibility can be traced back to the Italian Catholic Aufklärung and to Alfieri, and were later revamped by the Doctrinaires; the sources of its political vision were Montesquieu, Chateaubriand, and the ultramontane in the 1840s, and the Doctrinaires and Burke in the 1850s. The cultural project behind the platform of the 1840s – making Catholicism the engine of reform, with the sage in charge – had already been advanced in Italy by the Aufklärer and above all by Muratori. These are complex lineages, involving lasting philosophical discourses, and lending some credibility to the moderates’ claim that their movement answered to the long-term issues of Italian history. The roots of Mazzini’s thought seem less deep in comparison. It was one of the forms Romanticism took in the political realm, fusing the emotions nurtured in poems and novels with the political appeals of nationalism. Byron, Foscolo, and Lamennais were most significant sources. Mazzini’s Romanticism entailed an ambivalent attitude to the eighteenth century, which was probably important in determining the qualified fortunes of the Italian Enlightenment, and of a culture of rights with it, in the decades to come. … and giving back to it. The exchange of ideas with Europe was two-way, as some Risorgimento authors gained continental recognition. Manzoni, whose fame benefited from Goethe’s interpretive work, was universally regarded as one of the greatest poets and novelists of the times; Pellico’s Le mie prigioni was a European best seller; and Tommaseo was a household name in Dalmatia and Illyria by virtue of his work on the popular cultures of those areas.4 The fortunes of Rosmini, moreover, have been growing on a global scale since his death. His unique spirituality was diffused by the Institute of Charity, which gained remarkable beachheads in England before 1848. Instead, the moderatism­that 4 Werner Ross (ed.), Goethe und Manzoni: Deutsch-italienisch Beziehungen um 1800 (Tübingen, 1989); Kirchner Reill, Nationalists Who Feared the Nation.

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developed in the 1840s (the thought of Balbo, Gioberti, and d’Azeglio) was too idiosyncratic to meet with a significant response abroad. A writer who was acclaimed by Catholics all over the world in his time was the Jesuit philosopher Taparelli d’Azeglio, the re-discoverer of Aquinas. The remarkable international influence of Mazzini – he spoke with an unmistakable voice – has been ­recently highlighted.5 Émigrés like Foscolo, Pecchio, Ferrari, Ruffini, and many others integrated successfully into the cultural life of the countries h ­ osting them. A general argument can be set out, although one which is probably all too banal: the study has considered the Italian variant of a body of ideas, affections, and attitudes that was a common European legacy. 3

After 1861

The Risorgimento was an exceptional phase in the history of the peninsula, and therefore it is no surprise that the two sensibilities faded out after 1861. The moral argument did not disappeared with them, however. A feeling of disappointment and discontent became widespread since the dishonouring conduct of the 1866 war, leading public intellectuals to complain about Italians’ individualism and moral indifferentism, which, it was argued, were the bottom reason for the serious difficulties the process of nation building was encountering.6 The debate in unified Italy adopted two viewpoints which marked it out from the reflection on sensibilities. First, the Risorgimento writers had been concerned with the moulding of individual personalities, expected to assume leading roles in the patriotic movement. After 1861, shaping the character of the elite took second place to the diffusion of relational virtues like industry, honesty, and respect for others among the masses. The necessity of coordination and cooperation in society was emphasised, since what counted now was the performance of the economy, the public administration, and the army. Second, the public moralists of unified Italy tended to condemn the national culture en bloc. It was commonly held, in fact, that only the pattern of public spirit displayed by northern European peoples was suitable for the complex network of mutual obligations and services characterising modern life. The Italian intellectuals’ customary inferiority complex resumed in a new form, as an allegedly objective yardstick for public morality resulted from a comparison between the backwardness of Italy and the miracles of efficiency, 5 Bayly and Biagini, Giuseppe Mazzini. 6 Romani, L’economia politica, 201–41; id., National Character, 327–34; Patriarca, Italian Vices, Ch. 2.

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social cohesion,­and power worked north of the Alps.7 Now there was no need to go back in time to find inspiration, as Spencer, Buckle, or Taine sufficed – the Catholic tradition, which had substantiated the moderate sensibility, was rejected by many for political and, with the rise of positivism, cultural reasons. An example of the changed concerns aptly concludes this study. The pedagogue, positivist philosopher, and political thinker Aristide Gabelli (1830–91) was a native of the northern part of the Veneto region.8 He imputed Italians’ low ‘civil education’ to Catholicism, for, in contrast to Protestantism, Catholicism induced individual irresponsibility and moral apathy through an education instilling the primacy of abstract thought over observation, and of exterior behaviour over the shaping of character. As a result, Italians took their undisciplined selves rather than the external world as the gauge of behaviour.9 This attitude was exemplarily reflected by their deficient work ethic. Italians seem condemned to take up their jobs by a hostile destiny, Gabelli argued, as if their true occupations should be totally different. When you ask for a stamp at the post office, ‘you have to wait for the employee to finish an animated conversation about hunting with his three or four colleagues, a conversation which of course makes it impossible to assist you’. The waiter at the caffè seems absorbed in business other than that which you, ‘relying on appearances’, think proper to him. Office clerks, railway staff, shop assistants, cabmen, and the like seem 7 The reasons for the flawed national character were focused on. For instance, the Hegelian philosophers Augusto Vera and Raffaele Mariano ascribed it to the failure of the Protestant Reform to affect the peninsula, while De Sanctis and the historian Pasquale Villari pointed to the moral shortcomings of the Renaissance. For Vera and Mariano, see Alessandro Savorelli, ‘Fiorentino, Croce, e il nesso “Rinascimento/Riforma”’, in Francesca Rizzo (ed.), Filosofia e storiografia: Studi in onore di Girolamo Cotroneo (Soveria Mannelli, 2005), 407–23. For De Sanctis and Villari, see Francesco De Sanctis, ‘La scienza e la vita’ (1872), in dso, xiv, 316–40; Pasquale Villari, Niccolò Machiavelli e i suoi tempi (1877–82; Milan, 1895–7), esp. iii, 375–87; id., ‘Di chi è la colpa? o sia la pace e la guerra’ (1866), in id., Le lettere meridionali ed altri scritti sulla questione sociale in Italia (Florence, 1878), 229–52; see also Denis Mack Smith, ‘Francesco De Sanctis: The Politics of a Literary Critic’, in John A. Davis and Paul Ginsborg (eds.), Society and Politics in the Age of the Risorgimento: Essays in Honour of Denis Mack Smith (Cambridge, 1991), 251–70. 8 Giuseppe Sircana, ‘Gabelli, Aristide’, dbi, li, 1998. On Villari and Gabelli as exponents of the early phase of Italian positivism, see Eugenio Garin, ‘Metodo e concezione del mondo nel positivismo’, in Eugenio Garin et al., Cultura e società in Italia nell’età umbertina (Milan, 1981), 163–88; Nadia Urbinati, Le civili libertà: Positivismo e liberalismo nell’Italia unita (Venice, 1990), esp. 208–13. This paragraph is drawn from Romani, National Character, 305–6. 9 See esp. by Gabelli: La questione religiosa in Italia (Milan, 1864); ‘L’educazione vecchia e la nuova principalmente nei collegi’ (1868), in L’istruzione in Italia: Scritti, ed. Pasquale Villari (Bologna, 1891), i, 3–48; ‘Metodo di insegnare in relazione colla vita’ (1873), ibid., 85–117.

252

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‘in contemplation of a less unjust fortune’ which ought to have made them bankers or professionals. Hence a buoyant carelessness and thoughtlessness: when a Roman says ‘I am coming’, you have to wait for half an hour. People are everywhere beautiful, good, and nice, but they seem to repeat ‘do not bother me’. The problem is, Gabelli commented, that a modern society is a complex arrangement where everybody is linked to everybody else in a number of ways, and therefore it cannot do without the predictable and ordered cooperation of its citizens. Everywhere in the civilized world, ‘living of unconscious feelings and fugitive impressions with the soul in the eyes and without any forethought’ has disappeared, thanks to stricter laws, a hard life of work and order, and a greater need for steadiness and thrift – but the Italians have remained ‘the good-time guys [buontemponi] of Europe’.10 The moral argument changed in tune with historical circumstances, meaning that the Stoic Catholics imbued with philosophical wisdom were replaced by reluctant post-office clerks, and the passionate, willing martyrs by lazy waiters and cabmen. The interpretation of the Risorgimento soon became a political battleground, but there also grew a nostalgia for those heroic times, when it seemed that the world was ruled by principles, and Italians could become anything they wanted to. 10

Gabelli, ‘Metodo di insegnare’, 88–95; id., Roma e i romani (Rome, 1881), p. xviii.

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Index Alfieri, Vittorio 1, 10, 17, 56, 64, 67, 147, 183, 195, 249 and liberalism 112 Misogallo 83 and the moderate sensibility 80–2 Amaduzzi, Giovanni Cristofano 40 Amari, Michele: and liberalism 114–15 Anglophilia 200–1 Anglophobia 92–3 Amicizia cattolica 40 Amicizia cristiana 40 Amico d’Italia, L’ 137 Annali universali di statistica 45, 92 Anne, queen of Great Britain 222 Ansaldi, Casto Innocente 39 Antologia 127 Appolis, Émile 27–8, 39 Aquinas, St Thomas 131, 250 Arisi Rota, Arianna 149, 187–8 aristocracy 210 Piedmontese 74 Aufklärung, Catholic 24, 28–9, 33, 37, 39–40, 78–80, 85–6, 127, 134–5, 238, 245, 249 Augustine, St 33, 38 Azeglio, Cesare d’ 40, 137 Azeglio, Massimo d’ 1–2, 5, 12, 23–4, 44, 54, 67–73, 77, 79–80, 85, 95–6, 98–100, 103–4, 106, 108, 110, 120, 125, 128, 145, 156, 193, 210, 212, 215, 229, 235 biographical note 62 on Christian civilization 101–2, 232 on civil courage 75–6 Ettore Fieramosca 76 on moderatism 63 Niccolò de’Lapi 76, 117–19 See also moderatism, 1840s; moderatism, 1850s Bacon, Francis 40, 88 Bagehot, Walter 215 Baglioni, Malatesta iv, Italian condottiere 157 Bakunin, Mikhail 11

Balbo, Cesare 2, 5, 10, 12, 23–4, 36, 44, 54, 65, 67–72, 79–82, 95, 98–9, 102–3, 106–8, 110, 115, 118, 120–2, 126, 128, 131, 135, 143–5, 175, 193–5, 205, 210, 220, 230, 245–6, 248, 250 biographical note 62 on Christian civilization 100–1 on civil courage 75 on civil rights 212 on enterprise (operosità) 76–7, 116 on the medieval communes 116–17 on moderatism 63–4, 96–7 Della monarchia rappresentativa in Italia 175, 204, 211–16 on national character 214–16 on public life 74–5 on sovereignty 211–2 on women 70–1 See also moderatism, 1840s; moderatism, 1850s Balzani, Roberto 149 Bandiera brothers (Attilio and Emilio) 147, 154 Banti, Alberto Mario 16–18, 149, 245–6 Barrès, Auguste-Maurice 191 Bastiat, Frédéric 198, 200, 203 Bayle, Pierre 31–2 Beccaria, Cesare 9, 174 Benda, Julien 190–1 Benedict xiv, pope 28, 78 Bentham, Jeremy 9, 46, 89, 203, 220, 226 Berchet, Giovanni 155–6, 162 Berenson, Edward 158 Bertani, Agostino 175 Berti, Domenico 235 Biagini, Eugenio Federico 147 Biblioteca dell’economista 199 Bianchi, Isidoro 38–9 Bianchi, Nicomede 194, 218, 236–7 Blair, Hugh 30 Blanc, Louis 11, 169, 200, 202 Bobbio, Norberto 20 Boccardo, Gerolamo 201–2 Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus, Roman philosopher 60 Boggio, Carlo 194, 236–7

300 Bonald, Louis de 43, 132–3, 137–8, 143 Boncompagni di Mombello, Carlo 195, 197, 205, 207, 217, 219, 231, 236 on natural laws 208 on religion 218 See also moderatism, 1850s Bonnet, Charles 88 Borgia, Cesare, Italian condottiere 76 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne 61, 140 Brofferio, Angelo 224 Bruno, Giordano 180 Buckle, Henry Thomas 251 Burke, Edmund 8, 9, 50, 54, 75, 98, 217, 235, 249 on parties 103–4 on sensibility 42, 214 See also moderatism, 1850s Byron, George Gordon 56, 147, 154, 158, 161, 249 Campanella, Tommaso 174, 180 Candeloro, Giorgio 27 Capponi, Gino 59, 95, 115 on the medieval communes 119–20 Carlyle, Thomas 11, 163–4 Carutti, Domenico 118, 194–5, 197, 212–14, 218–9, 230, 236 Dei principii del governo libero 205–7, 217 See also moderatism, 1850s Casanova, Ludovico 194, 207–8, 229 Catholicism: liberal 11, 22–3, 27–8 philosophical 23–4, 85–6 Cattaneo, Carlo 10, 12, 45, 93, 112, 117, 120, 147, 165, 170, 234 in 1848 21, 175 and liberalism 114 and Mazzini 7, 20, 171 sensibility 19–21 Cavour, Camillo Benso di 7–8, 10, 12, 18, 124–5, 181, 192–3, 201, 203–4, 217–18, 230–1, 233, 235, 241–2, 244, 248 as economist 198, 202, 219–20 historiography 195–6, 241–2 on Ireland 221–2 as journalist 223–6 his liberalism 222–6 parliamentary speeches 226–9

Index on parties 225–6 and revolution 221–2 ecclesiastical policy 224, 227–9 sources of political culture 220–1, 226 Cavour, Gustavo Benso di 203 Cernuschi, Enrico (Henri) 147 Charles V, Holy Roman emperor 157 Charles Albert, king of Sardinia 21, 63, 114, 193, 204, 217–18, 222, 241 Charles Emmanuel iv, king of Sardinia 39 Chateaubriand, François-Auguste-René de 24, 96, 99, 126, 141, 185, 249 influence on moderatism, 1840s (Génie du Christianisme) 131–3 Chevalier, Michel 197 Chiala, Luigi 218, 232, 235, 237 Ciampi, Carlo Azeglio 21 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 40 cicisbeismo 36, 68 Cincinnatus, Lucius Quinctius, Roman patrician 74 Civiltà cattolica 143, 180 Clement vii, pope Cobden, Richard 92, 226 Colecchi, Ottavio 179 Comte, Auguste 167, 172, 176 Conciliatore, Il 155 Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de 44–5, 49, 135, 165 Condorcet, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat de 90, 92, 147 and Mazzini 163 Constant, Benjamin 24, 108, 118, 213 type of liberalism 109–10 on religion 73, 133, 173, 221 constitutional texts 124–5 See also Statuto Correnti, Cesare 175 Cousin, Victor 49, 83–4, 104, 107, 135, 167–8, 177, 211 Craiutu, Aurelian 112 Cuoco, Vincenzo 9, 215 Curci, Carlo 123 D’Annunzio, Gabriele 191 Dante Alighieri 10, 13, 79, 81–2, 117, 147, 154, 181, 185–6 De Giorgi, Fulvio 28

301

Index De Meis, Angelo Camillo 178 democracy See Guizot; moderatism, 1850s De Ruggiero, Guido 196 De Sanctis, Francesco 24, 177–8, 191, 244 biographical note 181 on Dante 185 faith 183–6 on Manzoni 185–6 on Romanticism 182–3 Descartes, René 39, 100, 120, 144 on passions 30 Destra storica 242–3 Destutt de Tracy, Antoine-Louis-Claude  88, 90 Diderot, Denis 47 Dixon, Thomas 14 Doctrinaires 8, 111, 151, 192, 203, 213, 221, 231, 249 on capacity 209, 211 on religion 211, 235 on sensibility 82–3 See also Guizot Donoso Cortés, Juan 240 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 191 Drolet, Michael 82 Dunoyer, Charles 197, 200 Enciclopedia ecclesiastica 137 Enlightenment 34, 48, 57, 79, 96, 112, 144, 184, 249 moderate 40, 238 radical 9–10, 46, 88 See also Aufklärung, Catholic Epictetus 37, 38, 40, 53 Farini, Luigi Carlo 210, 231, 234, 236, 239 on passions 65 on parties 105 Father (Theobald) Mathew 70 Febvre, Lucien 15 Ferguson, Adam 30 Ferrara, Francesco 201–3 on liberty and despotism 198–200 Ferrari, Giuseppe 10, 12–13, 24, 93, 107, 171–4, 177, 234, 250 biographical note 164–5 and Leroux 167–8 and Mazzini 7, 169–70

on philosophers 169–70 on sentiments 165–9, 170, 176 Ferrucci, Francesco, Florentine captain 157 Filangieri, Gaetano 89, 92, 174 Foscolo, Ugo 1, 10, 17, 44, 47–8, 55, 56, 64, 80–1, 107, 146–7, 151, 162, 182–3, 189–90, 229, 250 inspiration to Mazzini 153–4, 249 and liberalism 112–13 Fourier, François-Marie-Charles 125 Franchi, Ausonio (Cristoforo Bonavino) 13, 24, 171, 177 on sentiments 172–3, 176 Francophobia 10–11, 83–4 Gabelli, Aristide 251–2 Galeotti, Leopoldo 77 Galilei, Galileo 88, 154, 161 Galluppi, Pasquale 45 Garibaldi, Giuseppe 8, 181, 188,244 Geertz, Clifford 3 Genovesi, Antonio 126, 134–5, 203 Diceosina 37–8 influence on moderatism 78–80 on philosophers 38–9 and Stoicism 38 See also Aufklärung, Catholic Gentile, Giovanni 27 Gérando, Joseph-Marie de 82 Gerdil, Giacinto Sigismondo 39–40, 80 Gervinus, Georg Gottfried 183 Gibbon, Edward 152 Ginsborg, Paul 16 Gioberti, Vincenzo 2, 8, 10, 12–13, 21, 23, 31, 44, 54, 59, 65, 66, 67–9, 71–2, 77, 79–81, 83–4, 96–9, 102–4, 106–8, 110, 114, 118, 120–3, 125–6, 134–6, 143–5, 172, 177, 185, 193, 195, 205, 219, 223, 229–30, 237–9, 246–8, 250 after the Primato 121, 204 biographical note 62 on Christian civilization 100 on civil virtues 73–4 on moderatism 63–4 Del primato morale e civile degli italiani 5, 24, 63, 95 Del rinnovamento civile d’Italia  204, 209–10

302 Gioberti, Vincenzo (cont.) See also moderatism, 1840s; moderatism, 1850s Gioja, Melchiorre 44, 46–7, 50, 55 Giornale ecclesiastico 137 Giusti, Giuseppe 188 Gladstone, William Ewart 231 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 47, 56, 147, 181–2, 249 Grey, Charles (2nd Earl Grey) 226 Guerrazzi, Francesco Domenico 1, 12, 17, 116, 153, 197 L’assedio di Firenze 156–8 Guizot, François-Pierre-Guillaume 11, 24, 54, 82, 98, 108–9, 216, 227 on parties and pluralism 104, 110–12, 211, 220–1, 225–6 on capacity 110, 206 on democracy 214 See also Doctrinaires Haller, Karl Ludwig von 137, 141 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 177–9, 181 Heine, Heinrich 87, 155, 188 Helvétius, Claude-Adrien 9, 40, 89, 165 Herder, Johann Gottfried 147, 161 Hirschman, Albert O. 32 Hobbes, Thomas 31–2, 139 Hume, David 152, 167 on passions and reason 31–2 Hutcheson, Francis 30 Idéologues 43 Innocent xi, pope 78 Innocent xii, pope 78 intellectuals, See Risorgimento Isabella, Maurizio 16–17 Italy, national character See national character Jansenism 39, 78–9 historiography 27–9 Jaume, Lucien 109 Joseph ii, Holy Roman emperor 228 Jouffroy, Théodore 83, 211 journalism 1, 13, 195, 212–3 See also Cavour, Camillo; moderatism, 1850s Jurieu, Pierre 140

Index Kahn, Alan 112 Kant, Immanuel 44–5, 62, 93, 135, 144, 165, 167, 173, 177 on virtue 32 La Farina, Giuseppe 233–4 Lamartine, Alphonse de 181, 185 Lamennais, Hugues-Félicité-Robert de 11, 19, 47, 107, 135, 137–8, 140, 151–2, 214, 249 Paroles d’un croyant 158–61 La Salvia, Sergio 18 La Vista, Luigi 183 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von 169 Leo xii, pope 137 Leopardi, Giacomo 181–5 Leopardi, Monaldo 137, 139–42 Leroux, Pierre 159, 167–9, 173, 176 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 147, 161 Lewis, Matthew Gregory 158 liberalism: in the Risorgimento 24, 65–6, 90–1, 95, 99, 127, 139–43, 241 use of the term 108 varieties of 109–15, 177, 195–6, 198, 203–4, 215–16, 229, 233, 240, 242 See also Cavour, Camillo; moderatism, 1840s; moderatism, 1850s Liguori, Alphonsus Maria de 44, 130–1, 135 Lipsius, Justus 30, 35–6 Locke, John 35, 44, 88, 169, 203 Louis Napoleon See Napoleon iii Luther, Martin 100, 120 Mably, Gabriel Bonnot de 3 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 67–8 Macchi, Mauro: and Mazzini 171–2 Machiavelli, Niccolò 3, 76, 79, 85, 126, 154 on Italian history 115 on public spirit 67–8, 75 and moderatism, 1840s 127–8 Mack Smith, Denis 242, 244 Madison, James 3 Maestri, Pietro 175 Maine de Biran, François-Pierre-Gontier 49, 82, 213–14 Maistre, Joseph de 132–3, 137–8, 140, 206, 216, 218, 236

Index on the French Revolution 49 Malebranche, Nicolas 35, 39 on passions 33 Malthus, Thomas Robert: principle of population (Malthusianism) 199, 202–3 Mamiani della Rovere, Terenzio 59, 77, 118, 179, 194–5, 197, 205, 213, 219, 232 on the moral law 207–8 See also moderatism, 1850s Mancini, Pasquale Stanislao 194, 236–7, 241 on the concept of nation 232 Mandeville, Bernard de 31 Manin, Daniele 7 Manzoni, Alessandro 1, 11, 12, 17, 23, 43, 44, 61, 62, 64–5, 71, 77, 80, 85, 94, 107, 133, 145, 164, 185–6, 188, 245 biographical note 56 and Jansenism 27–9 on the Langobards 79, 115–16 sensibility 56–9 (Sulla morale cattolica) on utilitarianism 59 Margotti, Giacomo 240 Marx, Karl 11 Massillon, Jean-Baptiste 30 Maturi, Walter 126–7 Maturin, Charles 158 Maupertuis, Pierre-Louis-Moreau de 39 Mazzini, Giuseppe 2, 5, 6–7, 10, 12, 24, 61, 72, 104–5, 125, 150, 158, 165–7, 170, 174–6, 184, 187–8, 194, 203, 213, 219, 226, 236, 244, 245, 248–50 biographical note 147 and Condorcet 163–4 criticised 169, 171–2 and the Enlightenment 10, 147–9 on enthusiasm 151–2 historiography 18–19, 246 and Lamennais 159–61 and literature 152–6, 161–2 on martyrdom 151, 154 and moderatism 147–9 on passions 66–7, 149 religion 147–8, 152 fame 11 and Saint-Simon 161–3 sensibility 149–52, 164, 246

303 and La traison des clercs 190–1 Melegari, Luigi Amedeo 194 Memorie di religione 137 Metternich, Klemens von 1 Michelangelo Buonarroti 154 Michelet, Jules 160–1 Mill, John Stuart 3, 11, 108, 215 Minghetti, Marco 233 moderatism, 1840s: in 1848–9 123–5 and Alfieri 80–2 on the Catholic Church 134–6 on civic virtues 71–7, 102 on Christian civilization 100–2 civil rights 106–7 and the Doctrinaires 82–3 and the Enlightenment 9–10 and Francophobia 83–4 historiography 18–19, 21–4, 27–8, 136–7 on inner reform 68–71 introductory remarks 95–8 on justice 72–3 and liberalism 21–3, 98, 108–9, 246–7 on the liberty of the ancients 118 on the medieval communes 115–20 origins and influences 126–36 on parties and pluralism 102–7 and public opinion 99–102 on reason and passions 65–6, 246 and representative government 98–9 and the Risorgimento 248 and Rosmini 54–5 and Stoicism 68–70, 75, 77–8, 85–6 and ultramontanism 143–4 moderatism, 1850s: and the 1859 war 233–4 Burkeanism 197, 213, 216–18 on Church and state 235–8 and democracy 206, 209, 213, 239–41 historiography 196–7 and liberalism 193–4, 238–9 as a paradigm 204–19 on parties and sects 229–31 on reason and passions 66, 205–6, 213–14 and the Risorgimento 230–2, 247–8 See also Doctrinaires

304 Montaigne, Michel de 30 Montanelli, Giuseppe 156, 171, 197 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat de 40, 72, 80, 88, 99, 126, 130, 132–3, 214, 217, 249 and moderatism, 1840s 128 on Stoicism 31 Morandi, Carlo 126 Muratori, Ludovico Antonio 10, 24, 28, 33, 38, 39, 40, 85, 126–8, 134–5, 238, 249 on charity 36 Filosofia morale 33–6 influence on moderatism, 1840s 78–80, 129–31 on Italy 36–7 Della pubblica felicità 129–31 on philosophers 38–9 and Stoicism 35–6 See also Aufklärung, Catholic Musil, Robert 191 Mussolini, Benito 230, 243 Napoleon i 46, 84, 90, 131, 140, 145, 161, 231, 240–1 Napoleon ii, son of Napoleon i 161 Napoleon iii 7, 175, 200, 204, 219, 221 national character French 200–1,  215 Italian 57, 67–8, 71–2, 77, 85, 99, 101–2, 175, 201, 250–2 Piedmontese 216 See also Balbo Neapolitan Hegelians  177–8 Neri, Philip, St 44 Newton, Isaac 88 Nievo, Ippolito 24, 146, 177, 187, 191 Confessioni d’un Italiano 188–90 Ondes Reggio, Vito D’ 203 Ornato, Luigi 81 Owen, Robert 125 Ozouf, Mona 3 Pagano, Francesco Mario 174 Parini, Giuseppe 81 Parry, Jonathan 109 Pascal, Blaise 133 on passions 30 Passerin d’Entrèves, Ettore 28, 126

Index Patriarca, Silvana 16 Paul, St 139 Pecchio, Giuseppe 112, 250 and liberalism 113–14 Peel, Robert 75, 101, 226, 234–5 Pellico, Silvio 11, 44, 56, 58, 68, 71, 77, 145, 164, 245, 249 Le mie prigioni 23, 60 on patriotism 61 Piedmont See Sardinia, kingdom of Pisacane, Carlo 7, 10, 12, 171, 176 on passions 173–4 Pius vi, pope 40, 84 Pius vii, pope 84 Pius ix, pope 6, 8, 11, 44, 63, 73, 96, 97, 101–2, 123, 228, 237, 249 Plato 60, 62 Plongeron, Bernard 28 Pocock, John Greville Agard 152 political economy 13, 46, 92, 106, 130, 220, 223–4, 250 in the 1850s 198–203 See also Cavour, Camillo Progresso, Il 177 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 11, 173, 202 Provana, Luigi 81 public opinion See journalism; moderatism, 1840s Pungolo, Il Radcliffe, Ann 158 Radicati di Passerano, Antonio 126 Ragione, La 171–2 Rattazzi, Urbano 8, 219 Reddy, William 15, 43 Reid, Thomas 31, 44–5, 62, 135 republicanism 3, 213 Revolution, French, 1789–99 17, 52, 58, 111, 119, 149, 152, 241, 247 see also Maistre revolution, French, 1848 10, 125, 171, 175, 198–201, 203, 221 Riall, Lucy 16 Ricardo, David 220, 226 Ricasoli, Bettino 181 Ricotti, Ercole 218 Ricci, Scipione de’ 39 Risorgimento: main events 4–9

Index and intellectuals 12–13, 210–11 origins 26–7 Risorgimento, political thought of: and the Enlightenment 9–10 in the European context 10–12, 249–50 and France 10–11 introductory remarks 9–13 and morality 1–4, 245–6, 250–2 and religion 19, 248–9 Romagnosi, Gian Domenico 2, 10, 45–6, 112, 164–5, 174, 200 Della costituzione di una monarchia nazionale rappresentativa 88–93, 114 on England 92 on incivilimento 93–4 fame 93 Romanticism 154–6 See also De Sanctis Romeo, Rosario 18, 195, 225, 241 Rosanvallon, Pierre 211, 239 Rosenwein, Barbara 14–15, 19 Rosmini-Serbati, Antonio 10, 11, 12–13, 23–4, 31, 36, 40, 43, 55–6, 58, 65, 66, 77–80, 87, 88, 94, 96, 107–8, 114, 125–7, 131, 134–6, 144, 166, 172, 176–7, 194, 205, 210, 218, 246–9 and moderatism, 1840s 54–5 biographical note 44 Delle cinque piaghe della santa Chiesa 54, 78 La costituzione secondo la giustizia sociale 122–3 on equality 53 Filosofia del diritto 54, 122 Filosofia della politica 50–4 on Foscolo 47–8 on Gioja 46–7 and Jansenism 28 Nuovo saggio sull’origine delle idee  44–6 on parties 53, 105 on passions and fulfilment 47–53 on progress and corruption 51–2 and Stoicism 52–3 Rossi, Pellegrino 6 Rota, Ettore 27 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 3, 64, 85, 132, 139–40, 167, 169, 206–7, 245

305 on sensibility 40–2 Royer-Collard, Pierre-Paul 82, 99, 119, 239 Ruffini, Giovanni 17, 24, 177, 250 Lorenzo Benoni or Passages in the Life of an Italian 187–8 Ruffini, Jacopo 154, 187, 191 Salvatorelli, Luigi 126, 147 Sand, George (Amantine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin) 169, 188 Santarosa, Santorre Annibale de Rossi di Pomarolo 64, 75 Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri de Rouvroy de 19, 110, 148, 167–8 influence on Mazzini 161–3 Sardinia, kingdom of: house of Savoy 217–18, 237, 248 intellectual life in the 1850s 8, 180–1, 193–5 political circumstances in the 1850s  192–3, 197, 219, 234–5, 239–41 Savonarola, Girolamo 94 Say, Jean-Baptiste 92, 200 Schiller, Friedrich 155, 181–3 Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst 173 Scialoja, Antonio 201–2 Sclopis, Federico 216 Seneca 38, 40 sensibilities passim in the 1850s 17 definition 14 and historiography 14–17 sentiments 133, 162–3, 167–8, 176, 178–81, 182–3, 209 See Ferrari; Franchi Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury) 31 Sheehan, James 108 Sieyès, Emmanuel-Joseph 92 Sismondi, Jean-Charles-Léonard Simonde de 56–7, 115–16, 120, 126, 147 Smith, Adam 162, 167, 226 socialism 7, 59, 108, 125, 171, 198–203, 221, 226 See also revolution, French, 1848 Socrates 169, 174 Spaventa, Bertrando 13, 24, 177, 240 reason 178–81 Spaventa, Silvio 178

306 Spedalieri, Nicola: on passions and government 40 on sovereignty 131 Spencer, Herbert 251 Spinoza, Baruch 31–2 Staël-Holstein, Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker de 133, 214, 216 on parties 104 on passions 42–3 and Romanticism 154–5 Statuto (the Piedmontese charter) 6 and Cavour 222–4 Sterne, Laurence 188 Stoicism 31 and Christianity 19, 29, 30, 33, 38–40 and the moderate sensibility 60, 245 and Nievo 189–90 See also Aufklärung, Catholic; Genovesi; moderatism, 1840s; Muratori; Montesquieu; Rosmini Taine, Hippolyte 251 Taparelli d’Azeglio, Luigi 72, 123, 137–8, 250 on parties 105 Saggio teoretico di dritto naturale 142–3 Taylor, Charles 48 Theoderic the Great, ruler of Italy 60 Thierry, Augustin 116, 216 Thiers, Louis-Adolphe 200 Tocqueville, Charles-Alexis de 54, 119, 204, 214, 221, 239 Tommaseo, Niccolò 23–4, 59, 107, 249 Fede e bellezza 61–2 Dell’Italia 94–5 on Rosmini 54–5

Index Traniello, Francesco 28 Treitschke, Heinrich Gotthard von 191 Troya, Carlo 115 Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques de 200 Ugolini, Luigi 140 ultramontanism: in France 43, 47, 138, 212, 214 in Italy 65–6, 131, 137–43, 207, 218, 240 See also moderatism, 1840s Urbinati, Nadia 20 utilitarianism 9, 46, 89–90, 107, 147–8, 165, 203, 226 See also Manzoni Ventura, Gioacchino di Raulica 137–9, 141 Venturi, Franco 126 Verri, Pietro 9, 126 Vico, Giambattista 10, 13, 51, 79, 94, 177 Victor Emmanuel ii, king of Sardinia 8, 228 Vidua, Carlo 81 Voce della ragione, La 137 Volpe, Gioacchino 27 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)  132, 169 war of 1859 233–4 Wickberg, Daniel 15 William iii, king of England 222 Winter, Eduard 127 Zanotti, Francesco Maria 39