CHAPTER IV
'YOUNG ITALY' 1831-1844
Accession of Charles Albert—Mazzini's Unitarian Propaganda—The Brothers Bandiera.
On 27 April 1831, Charles Albert came to the throne he had so nearly lost. His reconciliation with his uncle, Charles Felix, had been effected after long and melancholy preliminaries. To wash off the Liberal sins of his youth, or possibly with a vague hope of finding an escape from his false position in a soldier's death, he joined the Duc d'Angoulême's expedition against the Spanish Constitutionalists. His extraordinary daring in the assault of the Trocadero caused him to be the hero of the hour when he returned with the army to Paris; but the King of Sardinia still refused to receive him with favour—a sufficiently icy favour when it was granted—until he signed an engagement, which remained secret, to preserve intact during his reign the laws and principles of government which he found in force at his accession. If there had been an Order of the Millstone, Charles Felix would doubtless have conferred it upon his dutiful nephew; failing that, he presented to him for signature this wonderful document, the invention of which he owed to Prince Metternich. At the Congress of Verona in 1822, Charles Albert's claims to the succession were recognised, thanks chiefly to the Duke of Wellington, who represented England in place of Lord Londonderry (Castlereagh), that statesman [ [Pg.57] having committed suicide just as he was starting for Verona. Prince Metternich then proposed that the Prince of Carignano should be called upon to enter into an agreement identical with the compact he was brought to sign a couple of years later. In communicating the proposal to Canning, the Duke of Wellington wrote that he had demonstrated to Prince Metternich 'the fatality of such an arrangement,' but that he did not think that he had made the slightest impression on him. So the event proved; baffled for the moment, the Prince managed to put his plan in execution through a surer channel.
With the accession of Charles Albert appears upon the political scene a great actor in the Liberation of Italy, Giuseppe Mazzini. Young and unknown, except for a vague reputation for restlessness and for talent which caused the government of Charles Felix to imprison him for six or seven months at Savona, Mazzini proposed to the new King the terms on which he might keep his throne, as calmly as Metternich had proposed to him the terms on which he might ascend it. The contrast is striking; on the one side the statesman, who still commanded the armed force of three-fourths of Europe, doing battle for the holy alliance of autocrats, for the international law of repression, for all the traditions of the old diplomacy; on the other, the young student with little money and few friends, already an exile, having no allies but his brain and his pen, who set himself, certain of success, to dissolve that mighty array of power and pomp. All his life Charles Albert was a Faust for the possession of whose soul two irreconcilable forces contended; the struggle was never more dramatically represented than at this moment in the person of these two champions.
Mazzini's letter to Charles Albert, which was read by the King, and [Pg.58] widely, though secretly, circulated in Piedmont, began by telling him that his fellow-countrymen were ready to believe his line of conduct in 1821 to have been forced on him by circumstances, and that there was not a heart in Italy that did not quicken at his accession, nor an eye in Europe that was not turned to watch his first steps in the career that now unfolded before him. Then he went on to show, with the logical strength in developing an argument which, joined to a novel and eloquent style, caused his writings to attract notice from the first, that the King could take no middle course. He would be one of the first of men, or the last of Italian tyrants; let him choose. Had he never looked upon Italy, radiant with the smile of nature, crowned with twenty centuries of sublime memories, the mother of genius, possessing infinite means, to which only union was lacking, girt round with such defences that a strong will and a few courageous breasts would suffice to defend her? Had it never struck him that she was created for a glorious destiny? Did he not contemplate her people, splendid still, in spite of the shadow of servitude, the vigour of whose intellect, the energy of whose passions, even when turned to evil, showed that the making of a nation was there? Did not the thought come to him: 'Draw a world out of these dispersed elements like a god from chaos; unite into one whole the scattered members, and pronounce the words, "It is mine, and it is happy"?'
Mazzini in 1831 was twenty-six years of age. His father was a Genoese physician, his mother a native of Chiavari. She was a superior woman, and devoted more than a mother's care to the excitable and delicate child, who seemed to her (mothers have sometimes the gift of prophecy) [Pg.50] to be meant for an uncommon lot. One of the few personal reminiscences that Mazzini left recorded, relates to the time and manner in which the idea first came to him of the possibility of Italians doing something for their country. He was walking with his mother in the Strada Nuova at Genoa one Sunday in April 1821, when a tall, black-bearded man with a fiery glance held towards them a white handkerchief, saying: 'For the refugees of Italy.' Mazzini's mother, gave him some money, and he passed on. In the streets were many unfamiliar faces; the fugitives from Turin and Alessandria were gathered at Genoa before they departed by sea into exile. The impression which that scene made on the mind of the boy of sixteen was never effaced.
Owing to his delicate health, Mazzini's early education was carried on at home, where the social atmosphere was that of one of those little centres in a provincial capital which are composed of a few people, mostly kindred, of similar tastes, who lead useful and refined lives, content with moderate ease. The real exclusiveness of such centres exceeds any that exists in the most aristocratic sphere in the world. The Mazzinis were, moreover, Genoese to the core; and this was another reason for exclusiveness, and for holding aloof from the governing class. Mazzini was born a few days after Napoleon entered Genoa as its lord. He had not, therefore, breathed the air of the ancient Republic; but there was the unadulterated republicanism of a thousand years in his veins.
When he grew to manhood his appearance was striking. The black, flowing hair, the pale, olive complexion, the finely-cut features and lofty brow, the deep-set eyes, which could smile as only Italian eyes can smile, but which could also flash astral infinitudes of scorn, the [Pg.60] fragile figure, even the long, delicate, tapering fingers, marked him for a man apart—though whether a poet or an apostle, a seer or a saint, it was not easy to decide. Yet this could be said at once: if this man concentrated all his being on a single point, he would wield the power, call it what we will, which in every age has worked miracles and moved mountains.
Mazzini became a Carbonaro, though the want of clear, guiding principles in Carbonarism made him misdoubt its efficacy, and its hierarchical mysteries and initiatory ordeals repelled him by their childishness. Then followed his arrest, and his detention in the fortress of Savona, which was the turning-point in his mental life. Before that date he learnt, after it he taught. From his high-perched cell he saw the sea and the sky—with the Alps, the sublimest things in Nature. The voices of the fishermen reached his ears, though he could not see them. A tame goldfinch was his companion. Here, in a solitude and peace which he remembered with regret in the stormy and sorrowful years that were to come, he conceived his message and the mission, in which he believed to the last day of his life.
He resolved to found a new association on broader and simpler lines than the secret societies of the past, which should aim not only at the material freeing of Italy from her present bondage, but at her moral and religious regeneration. To aim at material progress of any kind, without at the same time aiming at a higher moral progress, seemed to Mazzini absurd; to attempt to pull down without attempting to build up seemed to him criminal. Thus he accused the Socialists of substituting the progress of humanity's kitchen for the progress of humanity. He believed that Italy, united and redeemed, was destined to [Pg.61] shed through the world the light of a new moral unity, which should end the reign of Scepticism, triumphant among discordant creeds. Mazzini's religious belief was the motor of his whole being. The Catholicism in which he was outwardly brought up never seems to have touched his inner nature; he went through no spiritual wrench in leaving a faith that was never a reality to him. The same is true of innumerable young Italians, who, when they begin to read and study, drift out of their childhood's religion without a struggle or a regret. But thought and study brought Mazzini what it rarely brings to these young men—the necessity to find something in which he could believe. He had not long to seek for a basis to his creed, because he was one of the men from the prophets of old to Spinoza, from Spinoza to Gordon, to whom the existence of God is a matter of experience rather than an object of faith. Starting from this point, he formed his religion out of what he regarded as its inevitable deductions. If God existed, his creatures must be intended for perfection; if this were the Divine scheme, man's one business was to carry it out. He considered the idea of duty separated from the idea of God to be illogical. Either the development of human things depended on a providential law, or it was left to chance and passing circumstance, and to the dexterity of the man who turned these to most account. God was the sole source of duty; duty the sole law of life. Mazzini did not denounce Catholicism or any other religion as false. He saw in it a stepping-stone to purer comprehension, which would be reached when man's intellect was sufficiently developed for him to be able to do without symbols.
GIUSEPPE MAZZINI
The conscience of humanity is the last tribunal. Ideas, as well as [Pg.62] institutions, change and expand, but certain fundamental principles are fixed. The family would always exist; property would always exist. The first, 'the heart's fatherland,' was the source of the only true happiness, the only joys untainted by grief, which were given to man. Those who wished to abolish the second were like the savage who cut down the tree in order to gather the fruit. In the future, free association would be the great agent of moral and material progress. The authority which once rested in popes and emperors now devolved on the people. Instead of 'God and the King,' Mazzini proposed the new formula 'God and the People.' By the people he understood no caste or class, whether high or low, but the universality of men composing the nation. The nation is the sole sovereign; its will, expressed by delegates, must be law to all its citizens.
By degrees certain words acquired more and more a mystical significance in Mazzini's mind; the very name of Rome, for instance, had for him a sort of talismanic fascination, not unlike that possessed by Jerusalem for the mediæval Christian. When he spoke of the people or the republic he frequently used those terms in an ideal and visionary sense (as theologians use the Church) rather than in one strictly corresponding with the case of any existing nation, or any hitherto tried form of government. This does not alter the fact that his theories, which have been briefly summarised, are not hard to comprehend, as has been said by those who did not know in what they consisted, nor, taken one by one, are they novel. What was new in the nineteenth century was the appearance of a revolutionary leader, who was before all things a religious and ethical teacher. And though Mazzini never founded the Church of Precursors, of which he dreamt, his influence was as surely due to his belief in his religious [ [Pg.63] mission, as was the influence of Savonarola. The Italians are not a mystical people, but they have always followed mystical leaders. The less men are prone to ideal enthusiasm the more attracted are they by it; Don Quixote, as Heine remarked, always draws Sancho Panza after him.
Mazzini had a natural capacity for organisation, and the Association of Young Italy which he founded at Marseilles, the first nucleus being a group of young, penniless refugees, soon obtained an astonishing development. Up to the time of his 'Letter to Charles Albert,' his exile had been so far voluntary that he might have remained in Piedmont had he agreed to live in one of the smaller towns under the watchful care of the police, but he declined the terms, and the first effect of the 'Letter' was a stringent order to arrest him if he recrossed the frontier. He was not surprised at that result. Mazzini's attitude towards the Sardinian monarchy was perfectly well defined. Republican himself, even to fanaticism, he placed the question of unity, which for him meant national existence, above the question of the republic. He did not believe that the House of Savoy would unite Italy, but if unity could only be had under what he looked upon as the inauspicious form of monarchy, he would not reject it. He was like the real mother in the judgment of Solomon, who, because she loved her child, was ready to give it up sooner than see it cut in two.
Apart from personal hereditary instincts and predilections, Mazzini thought that he saw in the glorious memories of the Italian republics a clear indication that the commonwealth was the form of government which ought and would be adopted by the Italy of the future. But, [Pg.64] unlike most politicians, he laid down the principle that, after all, when free, the nation must decide for itself. 'To what purpose,' he asks, 'do we constantly speak of the sovereignty of the people, and of our reverence for the national will, if we are to disregard it as soon as it pronounces in contradiction to our wishes?'
He did not succeed in making the majority of his countrymen republicans, but he contributed more than any other man towards inspiring the whole country with the desire for unity. Herein lies his great work. Without Mazzini, when would the Italians have got beyond the fallacies of federal republics, leagues of princes, provincial autonomy, insular home-rule, and all the other dreams of independence reft of its only safeguard which possessed the minds of patriots of every party in Italy and of nearly every well-wisher to Italian freedom abroad?
In 1831, most educated Italians did not even wish for unity, and this is still truer of the republicans than of the monarchists. Some, like Manzoni, did wish for it, but, like him, said nothing about it, for fear of being thought madmen. A flash of the true light illuminated the mind of Giro Menotti, but that was extinguished on the scaffold. Then it was that Mazzini came forward with the news that Italy could only be made free and independent by being united; unity was the ruling tendency of the century, and, as far as Italy went, no Utopia, but a certain conclusion. This was repeated over and over again, wherever there were Italians, over the inhabited globe. By means of sailors, 'Young Italy' spread like lightning. Giuseppe Garibaldi was made a member by a sailor on the shores of the Black Sea.
With the masses, unity proved the wonder-working word which Confalonieri had said was the one thing needful—a word yet fitter to [Pg.65] work wonders than 'War to the Stranger.' Among the cultivated classes, it was much slower in gaining ground, and particularly among statesmen and diplomatists. But in the end it was to convert them all.
'"Young Italy,"' writes Mazzini, 'closed the period of political sects, and initiated that of educational associations.' 'Great revolutions,' he says again, 'are the work of principles rather than of bayonets.' It was by the diffusion of ideas that 'Young Italy' became a commanding factor in the events of the next thirty years. The insurrectional attempts planned under its guidance did not succeed, nor was it likely that they should succeed. Devised by exiles, at a distance, they lacked the first elements of success. The earliest of these attempts aimed at an invasion of Savoy; it was hoped that the Sardinian army and people would join the little band of exiles in a movement for the liberation of Lombardy. The revolution of 1821 had evidently suggested this plan to Mazzini, but it was foredoomed to misfortune. The Piedmontese authorities got wind of it, and a hunt followed for the members of 'Young Italy'; most severe measures were taken; there were eleven executions, and numberless sentences to long terms of imprisonment. Jacobo Ruffini, the younger brother of the author of Dr Antonio, and Mazzini's most beloved friend, committed suicide in prison, fearing to reveal the names of his associates. The apologists for Charles Albert say that if he had not shown the will and ability to deal severely with the conspirators, Austria would have insisted on a military occupation. Whatever were his motives, this is the saddest page of his unhappy reign.
Checked in 1833, the descent on Savoy was actually attempted in 1834, [Pg.66] with Mazzini's consent, though not by his wish. An officer who had won some celebrity in the Polish revolution, General Ramorino, a Savoyard by origin, was given the command. Ramorino was a gambler, who could not be trusted with money, but Mazzini's suspicion that on this occasion he played the part of traitor is not proved. However that may be, the expedition ended almost as soon as it began. Ramorino crossed the frontier of Savoy at the head of the column, but when he heard that a Polish reinforcement had been stopped on the Lake of Geneva, he retreated into Switzerland, and advised the band to follow him.
After these events, Mazzini could no longer carry on his propaganda in France. He took refuge in England, where a great part of his life was to be passed, and of which he spoke, to the last, as his second country. The first period of his residence in England was darkened by the deep distress and discouragement into which the recent events had plunged him; but his faith in the future prevailed, and he went on with his work. His endeavours to help his fellow-exiles reduced him to the last stage of poverty; the day came when he was obliged to pawn a coat and an old pair of boots. These money difficulties did not afflict him, and by degrees his writings in English periodicals brought some addition to the small quarterly allowance which he received from his mother. It seems strange, though it is easily explained, that it was in London that he first got to know the Italian working classes. He was surprised and gladdened by the abundance of good elements which he found in them. No country, indeed, has more reason to hope in her working men than the land whose sons have tunnelled the Alps, cut the most arduous railway lines in America and India, brought up English ships from the deep, laid the caissons (a [Pg.67] task of extreme danger) which support the great structure of the Bridge of the Firth of Forth, and left their bones to whiten at Panama. 'It is the universal testimony,' writes a high American authority, 'that no more faithful men have come among us.' What was the cause of the slaughter of the Aigues Mortes? That the Italians worked too well.
Mazzini wrote for his humble friends the treatise on The Duties of Man, in which he told them that he loved them too well to flatter them. Another work that occupied him and consoled him was the rescue and moral improvement of the children employed by organ-grinders, and he was the first to call attention to the white slavery to which many of them were subjected. He opened a school in Hatton Garden, in which he taught, and which he mainly supported for the seven years from 1841 to 1848.
The enterprise of the Brothers Bandiera belongs to the history of 'Young Italy,' though Mazzini himself had tried to prevent it, believing that it could only end in the sacrifice of all concerned. Nor, at the last, did the actors in it expect anything else. They had hoped for better things; for a general movement in the South of Italy, or at least for an undertaking on a larger and less irrational basis. But promises failed, money was not forthcoming, and it was a choice between doing nothing or a piece of heroic folly. Contrary to Mazzini's entreaties, they chose the second alternative.
Attilio and Emilio Bandiera were sons of the Austrian admiral who, in 1831, arrested Italian fugitives at sea. Placed by their father in the Austrian navy, they renounced every prospect of a brilliant career to enter the service of their down-trodden country. When they deserted, [Pg.68] strong efforts were made by the Archduke Rainieri, through their mother, to win them back, but neither the offers of pardon nor the poor woman's tears and reproaches turned them from their purpose. Another deserter was with them, Lieutenant Domenico Moro, a youth of great charm of person and disposition, who had been employed with a mixed force of Englishmen and Austrians in the Lebanon, where he formed a warm friendship with Lieutenant, now Admiral, Sir George Wellesley, who still preserves an affectionate remembrance of him. Nicola Ricciotti, a Roman subject who had devoted all his life to Italy, and Anacarsi Nardi, son of the dictator of Modena, were also of the band, which counted about twenty.
The Bandieras and their companions sailed from Corfu for the coast of Calabria on the 11th of June 1844. 'If we fall,' they wrote to Mazzini, 'tell our countrymen to imitate our example, for life was given to us to be nobly and usefully employed, and the cause for which we shall have fought and died is the purest and holiest that ever warmed the heart of man.' It was their last letter. After they landed in Calabria one of their number disappeared; there is every reason to suppose that he went to betray them. They wandered for a few days in the mountains, looking for the insurgent band which they had been falsely told was waiting for them, and then fell into an ambush prepared by the Neapolitan troops. Some died fighting; nine were shot at Cosenza, including the Bandieras, Mori, Ricciotti and Nardi. Boccheciampi the Corsican, whom they suspected of treason, was brought up to be confronted with them during the trial; when asked if he knew who he was, Nardi replied: 'I know no word in my divine Italian language that can fitly describe that man.' Boccheciampi was condemned to a nominal imprisonment; when he came out of prison he wrote to a [ [Pg.69] Greek girl of Corfu, to whom he was engaged, to join him at Naples, that they might be married. The girl had been deeply in love with him, and had already given him part of her dowry, but she answered: 'A traitor cannot wed a Greek maiden; I bear with me the blessing of my parents; upon you rests the curse of God.'
The martyrdom of the Bandieras made a great impression, especially in England, where the circumstance came to light that their correspondence with Mazzini had been tampered with in the English Post Office, and that information as to their plans had reached the Austrian and Neapolitan Governments through the British Foreign Office. The affair was brought before the House of Commons by Thomas Duncombe. The Home Secretary repeated a calumny which had appeared many years before in a French newspaper, to the effect that the murder of an Italian in Rodez by two of his fellow-countrymen was the result of an order from the Association of Young Italy. Sir James Graham had to apologise afterwards for 'the injury inflicted on Mr Mazzini' by this statement, which he was obliged to admit was supported by no evidence, and was contrary to the opinion of the Judge who tried the case.
The Times having observed in a leading article that the gravity of the fact in question, the violation of private correspondence in the Post Office, was not affected by the merits or demerits of Mr Mazzini, of whom it professed to 'know nothing,' Thomas Carlyle wrote next day a letter containing words which may be quoted as some of the best and truest ever written about the great Italian: 'I have had the honour to know Mr Mazzini for a series of years, and, whatever I may think of his practical insight and skill in worldly affairs, I can with great [Pg.70] freedom testify that he, if I have ever seen one such, is a man of genius and virtue, one of those rare men, numerable unfortunately but as units in this world, who are worthy to be called martyr souls; who in silence, piously in their daily life, understand and practise what is meant by that.' [[2]]