L’UOMO FATALE
If there were any free speech or free action in matters political permitted in what is known as Free Italy, it would be at once interesting and useful to ask of its Government under what régime they govern? Is it under a constitutional monarchy, a dictatorship, a military despotism, or what? The reply would probably be that it is still a constitutional monarchy with popular parliamentary representation. But the counter reply would be: Then why are all the restraints limiting a constitutional sovereign broken through and all the privileges appertaining to, and creating the purpose of, parliamentary representation violated or ignored? When the king of a constitutional Italy violated the Constitution in refusing the Zanardelli Cabinet because it did not promise acquiescence in his own views, the country should have protested, and insisted on the Zanardelli Cabinet being placed in power for the sake of the constitutional principle therein involved. It was the first step towards absolutism. If it had been promptly stopped and punished there would have been no more similar steps. It was allowed to pass unchastised, and the result has been that every succeeding week which has since passed has seen worse and continual violations of the Constitution and the Code.
‘L’uomo fatale,’ as the Italian people call Crispi, was summoned to rule, and the result has been, what everyone cognisant of his character knew would be inevitable, namely, the abolition of all liberties and safeguards of the body politic, and the substitution of secret, irresponsible, and absolutely despotic, tribunals, and secret agencies, worked by the will of one man. The revolutionary movement has been crushed by military force with a brutality and injustice which, were the scene Russia or Austria, would cause monster meetings of indignation in London. Led by The Times, The Post, and other journals, English opinion is deaf and blind to the tyrannies which it would be the first to denounce in any other nation. English opinion does not choose to understand, and does not desire to be forced to understand, that Italy is at the present time as completely ruled by an unscrupulous despotism, and by sheer use of the sabre and musket, as is Poland at this hour, or as Austrian Venetia was earlier in the century; and that Italy presents the same spectacle of prisoners, purely political, being hustled through the towns manacled by handcuffs and chained to one another by a long iron fetter; lawyers, landowners, merchants, editors, men of education, probity and honourable life being yoked with the common criminal and the hired bravo. It is difficult to comprehend how and why this shameful outrage upon decency and liberty is viewed with indifference by the rest of Europe. That it may give pleasure to the foes of Italy is easily understood; but how can it fail to give pain and alarm to her friends? How is it that unanimous protest and unanimous censure do not arise from all those who profess to recognise the necessity of freedom for national well-being?
The extreme gravity of the fact that the Italian sovereign chooses and caresses a minister who is permitted to set aside at will all ordinary provisions and protections of the law, does not appear to excite any astonishment or apprehension outside Italy. In Italy itself the people are paralysed with fear; the steel is at their throats, and the army, which they have been ruined to construct and maintain, crushes them into silence and exhaustion.
Let the English people picture to themselves what would have been the verdict of Europe if England had dealt with Ireland as Sicily has been dealt with; let them imagine Lord Wolseley acting like General Morra; let them imagine a cordon drawn around the whole island, ingress and egress forbidden under pain of arrest, telegrams destroyed, approaching vessels fired upon, the whole population forcibly disarmed, no news—save such as might be garbled by superior order—permitted to be despatched from the interior to the world at large, thousands of men thrust into prison on suspicion whilst their families starved, absolute secrecy, absolute darkness and mystery covering irresponsible despotism; let the English public imagine such a state as this in Ireland, and then ask themselves what would be the verdict of Europe and America upon it. Sicily contains two millions of persons, and this vast number has been given over to the absolute[absolute] will of a single brutal soldier, who is screened by ministerial protection from any ray of that daylight of publicity which is the only guarantee for the equity of public men.
We are told that the island is pacified. So is a garotted and blindfolded creature pacified; so is a murdered corpse pacified. The most merciless reprisals have followed on the attempts of the peasantry to save themselves from the grinding extortions of their usurers and the pitiless taxation of their communes; and the reign of terror which has been established is called tranquillity. The same boast of ‘peace when there is no peace’ is made in the Lunigiana.
There is not even the gloss of affected legality in the countless arrests which have filled to overflowing the prisons of Italy. The charges by which these arrests are excused are so wide that they are a net into which all fish, big and little, may be swept. The imputation of ‘inciting to hatred between the classes’ is so vague that it may include almost any expression of social or political opinion. It is an accusation under which almost every great writer, thinker or philosopher would be liable to arrest, and under which Jesus Christ and Jean Jacques Rousseau, Garibaldi and John Milton, Washington and Brahma, Tolstoï[Tolstoï] and St Paul would be all alike condemned as criminals.
Equally vague is the companion accusation of inciting to civil war. As I pointed out in my article of last month, Italy owes her present existence entirely to civil war. Civil war may be a dread calamity, but it may be also an heroic remedy for ills far greater than itself. What is called authority in Italy is so corrupt in itself that it cannot command the respect of men, and has no title to demand their obedience. The creator itself of civil war and disturbance, such authority becomes ridiculous when draping itself in the toga of an intangible dignity. Moreover, it is now incarnated in the person of a single unscrupulous opportunist. Why should the nation respect either his name or his measures? The King of Italy, always servilely copying Germany, has decreed the name and measures of the lawyer Crispi sacred, as Germany has sent to prison many writers and printers for having expressed opinions hostile to the acts or speeches of German public men. Under the state called piccolo stato d’assedio military tribunals judge civil offences, or what are considered offences, and pass sentences of imprisonment varying in duration from six months to thirty years. The infamous sentence of twenty-three years’ imprisonment, of which three are to be passed in solitary confinement, passed on the young advocate Molinari, for what is really no more than an offence of opinions, has forced a cry of surprise and disgust even from the German press. The monstrous iniquity of this condemnation has made even the blind and timid worm of Italian public feeling turn writhing under the iron heel which is crushing it, and this individual sentence is to be carried for appeal into the civil courts, where it is fervently to be hoped it may be altered if not cancelled.[[G]] Hundreds of brutal sentences have been passed for which there is no hope or chance of appeal, and vast numbers of men, in the flower of youth or the prime of manhood, are being flung into the hell of Italian prisons, there to be left to rot away in unseen and unpitied suffering, till death releases them or insanity seizes them. Insanity comes quickly in such torture as Italian prison-life is to its victims.
A journal called L’Italia del Popolo contained a spirited and eloquent article proving that Crispi was neither courageous nor honest, as a Socialist deputy had in a moment of flattery called him: this perfectly legitimate and temperate article caused the confiscation of the paper! ‘If Crispi be Almighty God, let us know it!’ said the Secolo of Milan, a courageous and well-written daily newspaper which has itself been frequently confiscated for telling the truth.
As specimens of other sentences passed in the month of February of the present year, take the following examples:
In Siena the proprietor of the journal Martinello del Calle was condemned to thirty-five days of prison for having called the deputy Piccarti ‘violent and grotesque.’
The journal Italia del Popolo was seized because it contained quotations from the Memoirs of Kossuth.
The Secolo of Milan was seized for protesting against the condemnation to twenty years’ imprisonment of the soldier Lombardino, although he had completely proved his innocence of the offence attributed to him.
The barber, Vittorio Catani, having been heard, in the Piazza S. Spirito of Florence, to say that the revolts in Sicily were due to hunger and distress, was condemned to three months’ imprisonment and fifty francs fine.
At San Giuseppe, in Sicily, an old peasant surrendered one gun; confessed to having a better one, and showed where he had put it; he was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment.
A day-labourer, Stefano Grosso, went to visit his father who was dying; a revolver being found in the cottage, during his visit, he was condemned to six months of prison for owning it, although there was no proof of his ownership.
The brothers Di Gesù, herdsmen, accustomed to sleep in a building where many other persons slept also, were sentenced to a year and a half of prison because an old rusty gun, quite useless, was found in a cupboard, although there was no evidence whatever that they owned, or knew of its existence.
These are a few typical instances of sentences passed by the hundred, and tens of hundreds, at the present hour in the unhappy kingdom of Italy. Everyone suspected however slightly, accused however indirectly, is arrested and removed from sight. Oftentimes, as in Molinari’s case, the sentence embraces periods of solitary confinement, that infernal mental torture under which the strongest intellect gives way. What is the rest of Europe about that it views unmoved such suffering and such tyranny as this? Let it be remembered that the vast majority of these prisoners have no crime at all on their consciences. Molinari, sentenced in his youth to twenty-three years of prison, has committed no sin except that of being a Socialist. The term Anarchist is constantly used by the tribunals to describe men who are merely guilty of such opinions as are held by your Fabian Society in England.
There has been no actual coup d’état, but there has been what is worse, because less tangible, than a coup d’état, namely, the insidious and secretive alteration of a constitutional Government into a despotic one, the unauthorised and illegitimate suppression of free discussion and of lawful measures, and the substitution for them of arbitrary methods and secret-police investigation. The change has been quite as great as that which was wrought in Paris by the canon of the Tenth of December, but it has been made by means more criminal, because less open and as yet unavowed. The King of Italy, having mounted the throne under an engagement to hold inviolate the Constitution, has violated it as violently as Louis Napoleon his oath to the French Republic; but he has done so more insidiously and less courageously, having never dared to announce to his people his intention to do so. His decree postponing the assembling of the Chambers because ‘public discussion would be prejudicial’ was a virtual declaration that parliamentary government was at an end, but the fact was covered by an euphemism. In like manner, Crispi has said that he will ‘ask’ for irresponsible powers to be given him, but he defers the day of asking, and ad interim takes those powers and uses them as he chooses. The Italian Chambers are to be allowed to meet, but it is intimated to them that unless they vote for the ‘full powers’ they will be dissolved, and a more obedient Parliament elected under the military law of the existing reign of terror. ‘La camera sapra quelle che si deve sapere,’ Crispi stated the other day; that is, he will tell them as much as he chooses them to know. The amount of the financial deficit is to be put before the Chambers as one half only of what it really is. If there be any exposure made, or hostility shown, he has his weapon ready to his hand in dissolution. A new chamber elected under his docile prefects and his serried bayonets will not fail to be the humble spaniel he requires. If the present deputies, when the decree proroguing their assembly was proclaimed, had all met in Rome, and, without distinction of party or group, had insisted on the opening of Parliament, and compelled the monarch to keep his engagement to the Constitution, it is possible that both he and his minister would have submitted. But Italian deputies are poor creatures, and the few men of mark and strength who are amongst them are swamped under the weight of the invertebrate numbers. Hence we are scandalised by the spectacle of a whole body of the elected representatives of a nation being muzzled and set aside, and their discussion of opinion and action declared prejudicial to the interests of their country. It would be simpler and more candid to sweep away Parliament and Senate altogether than to make of them a mere mechanical dummy, pushed aside as useless lumber whenever there is any agitation or danger before their country. Umberto of Savoia would hesitate to proclaim himself an absolute sovereign, but de facto, though not de jure, he has made himself one. The text of the Treaty of the Triplice has never been made known to the country. Rumours have been heard that there are private riders attached to it which personally bind the House of Savoy to the House of Hohenzollern, and cause the otherwise inexplicable, and in every event culpable, obstinacy of the Italian sovereign in insisting on the inviolability of the military cadres. Be this as it may, the engagements of the treaty are kept a profound secret, and such secrecy is probably one of the clauses. Now, if the will and signature of one man suffice to pledge a nation in the dark to the most perilous obligations none can predict the issue, what is this except an absolute monarchy? What pretence can there still be of a constitutional Government?
Let the English nation figure to itself their Queen binding them secretly to the most onerous engagements which might cause in the end the total exhaustion and even extinction of their country, and they will then comprehend what Italians are enduring, and have long endured, from the secret pact of their sovereign, of which they have no means to measure the dangers or the responsibilities, although the burden and terror of these lie upon them. It is only by means of the military gag that the sovereign can keep mute the popular anxiety, curiosity and alarm.
The only reforms which would be of the slightest practical use would be the abolition of the hated gate-tax, and salt-tax,[[H]] and the reduction of the military and naval expenditure. There is no ministry of any party who dares propose these, the only possible, alleviations of the national suffering.
The formation of the Kingdom of Italy has been aggrandisement, gain and rejoicing to the Piedmontese and Lombard States, but it has been only oppression, loss and pain to the country south of the Appenines. Even in the Veneto, if the gauge of felicity be prosperity, the province must miserably regret the issue of its longed-for liberation. ‘Piû gran’ miseria non c’è sulla terra che n’ l’è la nostra,’ says a gondolier of Venice to me in this ninety-fourth year of the century. The magnificent and hardy race of gondoliers is slowly and wretchedly perishing, under the grinding wheels of communal extortion, and the ignoble rivalry of the dirty steamboats and the electric launches. But there is greater misery still than theirs, such misery as makes the worst hell of Dante’s heaven by comparison—the misery of the children in Sicily, little white slaves sold for a hundred, or a hundred and fifty francs each, to brutal blows, smarting wounds, incessant labour, and absolutely hopeless bondage.
Court-martial is substituted for civil law at the mere will of the monarch and his minister. There has been nothing in the recent events which can justify the establishment of it, and its abominable and irresponsible decrees, in which the torture of solitary confinement so largely figures. Local dissensions and jealousies find vent in accusations and condemnations, and the barbarity of the soldier and the gendarme to the civilian is regarded as a virtue and rewarded. What can be said of a Government which confounds the political writer with the brigand of the hills, the peaceful doctrinaire with the savage assassin, the harmless peasant with the poisoner or strangler, and chains them all together, and pushes them all together into prison-cells, fœtid, pestilent, wretched, already overcrowded? What will be done with all these thousands? What will be made of all this loss and waste of life? Miserable as is the existence of Italian felons, they must eat something, however scanty. The cost to the country of their useless, stagnant, fettered lives will be immense, whilst their own anguish will be unspeakable. Many of them, I repeat, are guilty of no offence whatever except of desiring a republic, or professing Socialist doctrines. I have no personal leaning towards Socialism, and regard it as unworkable, and believe that it would be pernicious if it could be brought to realisation. But it is no crime to be a Socialist. Socialism is an opinion, a doctrine, a creed, an idea; and those who hold it have every right to make a propaganda when they can. It is monstrous that, at the pleasure of a monarch or a minister, an idea can be treated as a capital crime. The young advocate Molinari is guilty of nothing except of inculcating revolutionary doctrines. What sin is this? It is one shared by Gautama and Christ.
Maxime du Camp has just died, a member of the Academy of France. He was once one of the Thousand of Marsala. What is now bringing intellectual and gifted youths to the felon’s dock in Italy is precisely such a creed as drove the late Academician to enrol himself under Garibaldi. Who shall affirm that there may not be in these young men, thus infamously judged and sentenced to-day, such brilliant intelligence and critical acumen as have made Maxime du Camp the admired of all who can appreciate scholarship, style, perception and true philanthropy, whether they may or may not agree with his arguments or endorse his deductions?
It would be impossible for any generous or unselfish nature not to burn with indignation before the poverty entailed on Italy by military madness, and the suffering caused to the poor and harmless by the fiscal and municipal tyrannies and the hired spies and extortioners of the Government.[[I]] Jules Simon said the other day that pity is the mark of great souls. In Italy it is considered the mark of the malefactor. A young nobleman of the Lunigiana, Count Lazzoni, has now a price set upon his head because he has espoused and taught the doctrines of Mazzini. He was rich, gifted, fortunate; his family insisted that he should give up either his doctrines or themselves, and, with themselves, his estates and title. He chose to abandon the last, not without great personal affliction, because he was tenderly attached to his relatives. This young hero is now being hunted by soldiery, and when found will be tried by court-martial under the convenient charge of ‘exciting to class-hatreds.’ Yet what are such young men as these but the very salt and savour of a country? It is not they who are the criminals, but the egotists who dance and dine, and gamble and smoke, and bow at the Quirinale, and the Vatican, and pay court to the favourites of the hour, and care nothing what ruin hangs over their country, nor what suffering is entailed on their countrymen, so long as they get a rosette for their buttonhole, or rear the favourite for a race in their stables. They are the true criminals; not the youths, like Molinari and Lazzoni, not the men like De Felice and Barbato, who think and feel and dare.
Why are not the young Princes of the House of Savoy amongst the suffering peasantry of Sicily, seeing with their own eyes, hearing with their own ears, doing something to aid, to mitigate, to console, instead of spending their lives in leading cotillons, driving tandem, trying on new uniforms, and shooting in all seasons of the year? Why do they not go and live for a month in the sulphur-mines, carry the creels of sulphur on their bare backs, and feel the stinging smart of it in their blinded eyes and dried-up throats and excoriated lips? They would then, at least, know something of how a portion of their people live and die. It would be more useful than dressing up in plumes and armour to amuse William of Prussia.
Lockroy, in writing to the French newspaper L’Eclair, says that Italy is served well by her public servants, and possesses unlimited resources and marvellous genius. In what way is she well served by her public servants? She is stripped bare by all who pretend to serve her, and everyone who enters her service, high and low, seeks only to advantage and enrich himself. Corruption, like dry-rot in a tree, permeates the whole public organisation of Italy, from the highest to the lowest official. All the municipalities are rotten and rapacious. Nothing is done without mancia; or, as it is called further East, backsheesh. The law courts are swarming hotbeds of bribery and perjury.
Her natural resources may be great, but they are so burdened by impost and tax, so strained, fettered, prematurely harvested and spent, that they are exhausted ere they are ripe. Of her genius there is but little fruit in these days; there is no originality in modern Italian talent; in art, literature, science, architecture, all is imitation, and imitation of an ignoble model; the national sense of beauty, once so universal, so intense, is dead; the national grace and gaiety are dying; the accursed, withering, dwarfing, deforming spirit of modernity has passed like a blast over the country and made it barren.
In the people there are still beauty of form and attitude, charm and elegance of manner, infinite patience, infinite forbearance, infinite potentialities of excellence as of evil. But they need a saviour, a guide, a friend; they need a Marcus Aurelius, a Nizahualcoytl, a St Louis, a Duke Frederic of Montefeltro, a ruler who would love them, who would raise them, who would give them food bodily and mental, and lead them in the paths of peace and loveliness. Instead of such, what have they? Men who set their wretched ambition on the approving nod of a Margrave of Brandenburg; who deem it greatness to turn a whole starving peasantry into a vast ill-ordered, ill-equipped, and ill-fed army; who, for pomp, parade, and windy boast seize the last coin, the last crust, the last shirt; who find a paltry ideal in an American machine-room, an elevated railway, and an electric gun; and who deem an ignoble vassalage to the German Emperor meet honour and glory for that Italy which was empress of the earth and goddess of the arts when the German was a forest-brute, a hairy boor, a scarce human Caliban of northern lands.
As events have moved within the last few weeks it is wholly within the bonds of possibility, even of probability, that if the Crown and its chief counsellor see greater danger to themselves threaten them in the coming year, they may appeal for armed help to their ally, who is almost their suzerain, and a fence of Prussian bayonets may be placed around the Quirinale and the House of Assembly. Who shall say that the secret and personal treaty does not provide for such protection?
So far as a public opinion can be said to exist in Italy (for in a French or English sense of the words it does not as yet exist), it is stirring to deep uneasiness and indignation at the subserviency of the tribunals to the ferocity of the Government in what is compared to the Bloody Assize of the English Jeffreys. It is becoming every day more and more alarmed at the absolutism of a King, all criticism of whose acts is made penal, yet whose personal interference and obstruction is every day becoming more obvious, more galling, and more mischievous. A new place of deportation for the condemned of Massa-Carrara is being prepared on the pestilential shore of the Southern Maremma. This new ergastolo may prove not only a tomb for those confined in it; but it may very possibly become a pit in which the Italian monarchy will be buried. If the next election should return, as it may do, two hundred of the Extreme Left, ‘l’uomo fatale’ may be the cause of a revolution as terrible as that of 1789.
Foreign speakers and writers of the present hour predict the success of Crispi. What is meant by the word? What success is there possible? The enforced acceptance of additional taxation? The placing of the last straw which breaks the camel’s back? The quietude which in the body politic, as in the physical body, follows on drainage of the blood and frequently presages the faintness of death? The reduction of parliamentary representation to a mere comedy and formula? The passive endurance of martial tyranny by a frightened nation, whose terror is passed off as acquiescence? The increase of debt, the enlargement of prisons, the paralysis of the public press?
These are the only things which can be meant by the success of Francesco Crispi, or can be embodied in it.
He is the brummagen Sylla of an age of sham, but he has all the desire of Sylla to slay his enemies and to rule alone.
In this sense, but only in this sense, he may succeed. Around the sham Sylla, as around the real Sylla, there may be laid waste a desolated and silent country, in which widows will mourn their dead, and fatherless children weep for hunger under burning roofs. Such triumph as this he may obtain. Italy has seen many triumph thus, and has paid for their triumph with her tears and with her blood.
March 1894.