A Corsican of noble birth who left his country after it fell
under the rule of France, and whose influence was used with
Alexander to encourage him in a Liberal policy.
"He congratulated me on the fact that circumstances had
spared me the tremendous ordeals usually undergone; and
seeing me smile at this, he asked me severely what I should
have done if I had been required, as others had been, to fire off
a pistol in my own ear, which had been previously loaded before
my eyes. I replied that I should have refused, telling the
initiators that either there was some valve in the interior of
the pistol into which the bullet fell—in which case the affair
was a farce unworthy of both of us—or the bullet had really
remained in the stock: and in that case it struck me as somewhat
absurd to call upon a man to fight for his country, and
make it his first duty to blow out the few brains God had vouchsafed
to him."—Life and Writings of Mazzini, Vol. I.
As an instance of his way of carrying out this idea may be
mentioned his feeling to Savoy. He felt that in race, language,
and possibly in sympathy, Savoy might naturally gravitate towards
France, while its geographical position and the modes of
life of its inhabitants might naturally connect it with Switzerland.
He therefore desired that by the deliberate vote of an elected
Assembly, not by a fictitious Napoleonic plebiscite, Savoy should
decide the question of its connection with Italy, France, or
Switzerland. Mazzini expressed a hope that it would decide in
favour of Switzerland.
I feel that some explanation is needed for the rejection of
what was once one of the most deeply-rooted traditions among
all Liberals who interested themselves in the politics of this
period. I must, therefore, state that my chief authority for my
account of the paralysis of the Austrian Government in the
Galician insurrection, and their consequent innocence of any
organized massacre, is Dr. Herbst, the well-known leader of the
German Liberals in the Austrian Reichstag, who was in Galicia
at the time of the insurrection.
This petition must be given at length in order that students
of the Revolution may realize the peculiar character of the
Bohemian movement, since this is the only one of the March
risings in which the claim of an oppressed people to live in
peaceable equality beside their former oppressors was, for the
time, successfully established.
Rakoczi is still to a great extent a national hero among the
Magyars, as is shown by the name of the Rakoczi March, which
is given to one of the national airs; for the Magyars, in the
seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries, were
willing to risk the separation of Transylvania from Hungary if
thereby they could secure an independent background to their
struggles for liberty against Austria, much as the Venetians in
1859 were thankful for the liberation of Lombardy from Austria,
though it involved the loss to Venetia of fellow-sufferers under
Austrian oppression.
English readers may be reminded by this scene of that fiery
debate on the Grand Remonstrance, when the members of the
House of Commons would "have sheathed their swords in each
other's bowels, had not the sagacity and great calmness of Mr.
Hampden, by a short speech, prevented it."
Out of the various efforts of the Roman Catholics to bring
back the Greeks to the Roman Church, there had arisen a community
called the United Greeks, which acknowledged the power
of the Pope while maintaining the Greek ritual.
To avoid needless controversy, I may add that I am perfectly
aware of the tyranny exercised by Milan over Lodi and other
small towns; but the fact remains that the real force of the
Lombard League, in its struggle against Barbarossa, lay in the
equal union of the greater towns of Lombardy.
It must be admitted that a protest was made by some of the
members against Radetzky's restoration of the Duke of Modena;
but then the Duke of Modena was not subject to the Viennese
Parliament, and Radetzky, in restoring him, had acted without
their authority.
It is also worth noting that the first production of the freed
Press of Vienna in March, 1848, was a poem by L. A. von Frankl,
in praise of the services of the students to the cause of liberty;
but, though this poem gained some celebrity at the time, it does
not as easily lend itself to translation as the one translated above.
I must admit that my estimate of Görgei is, in many
respects, lower than that of men whose opportunities of observing
the facts, and whose general candour of judgment entitles their
opinion to great respect. I can only plead that the severest
judgments which I have passed upon him are founded upon his
own memoirs; that is, partly upon the facts narrated in them,
and partly upon the tone in which they are written.