ERRORS OF THE MONARCHY
[1815-1816 A.D.]
The condition of Italy, in 1815, was one in which old things struggled with new. Her soldiers, after having served with credit under Napoleon, were either hastily disbanded, or called upon to transfer their allegiance to powers against which they had often been arrayed. The transition from war to peace is apt to bear hardly upon men whose services are no longer required, and whose career is brought to a close. Where feelings of good-will and mutual confidence exist, such hardships are felt, but do not rankle. From the restored governments of Italy the veterans of Napoleon’s armies obtained little sympathy. Their case was not generously or wisely considered, and their feelings, as well as claims, were disregarded. Distinction, whether military or civil, obtained under the French Empire, was viewed with narrow-minded aversion. At a crisis when the greatest delicacy was required, the generous confidence and noble forbearance which win the allegiance of the heart were wanting; and the prejudices of retrogradist counsellors were allowed to prevail. At Milan, disgust was excited by the presence of a German army, and by the employment of foreign officials. At Turin, and still more at Naples, royalist factions were allowed to monopolise and abuse the powers of the state.
Thus peace, which had been hailed with so much joy, was robbed of its sweetness; the exactions of the French were forgotten, and the impartiality of their administration began to be regretted. Then it was that the Carbonari became dangerous, not only by their alliance with the resuscitated embers of Jacobinism—smothered, but not extinguished, by Bonaparte—but by the strength which they derived from a general feeling of disappointment.[f]
The civil and political reforms which had been instituted at the end of the last century were abandoned. The Jesuits were restored; many suppressed monasteries were re-established; and the mortmain laws were repealed. Elementary education was narrowed in its limits, and thrown into the hands of the clergy. Professors suspected of liberal views were expelled from the universities, and the press was placed under the most rigid supervision. All persons who had taken part in the Napoleonic governments, or who were known to entertain patriotic opinions, found themselves harassed, watched, spied on, and reported. The cities swarmed with police agents and informers. The passport system was made more stringent, and men were frequently refused even a few days’ leave of absence from their homes. The Code Napoléon was withdrawn from those provinces which had formed part of the Italian kingdom, while, in the papal states, the administration was placed again in the hands of ecclesiastics.
This political and spiritual reign of terror, which had for its object the crushing of Italian liberalism, was sanctioned and supported by Austria. Each petty potentate bound himself to receive orders from Vienna, and, in return for this obedience, the emperor guaranteed him in the possession of his throne. The Lombardo-Venetian kingdom, powerfully defended and connected with Austria by land and sea, became one huge fortress, garrisoned with armed men in perpetual menace of the country. Under these conditions the Italians were half maddened, and thousands of otherwise quiet citizens, either in the hope of finding redress and protection, or only from a feeling of revenge, joined secret revolutionary societies; for it must not be supposed that the Revolution had left the Italians as passive as it found them.
A new spirit was astir, which was not likely to be checked by the arrangements of the European congress—the spirit of national independence. During the convulsions caused by Napoleon’s conquest of Italy the allied powers had themselves fostered this spirit, in order to oppose French rule. The Austrians, the English, and Murat, in turn, had publicly invited the Italians to fight for their national independence. And now the people, who relied upon the proclamations and expected the fulfilment of so many promises, found themselves by the consent of Europe delivered over, tied and gagged, to a foreign oppressor. To take but one example: Ferdinand, when he quitted Naples in May, 1815, addressed a proclamation to his subjects, solemnly engaging to respect the laws that should in his absence be decreed by a constitution. In June he pledged himself at Vienna to introduce into his kingdom no institutions irreconcilable with those which Austria might establish in her own dependencies. Accordingly in 1816 he put an end to the Sicilian constitution of 1812.[g]
Among the means which were effective in first rousing Italy from her lethargy, and in fostering the will to acquire her independence at all costs, the secret society of the Carbonari[27] undoubtedly occupies the front rank. The Carbonari acted in two ways; by what they did and by what they caused to be done by others who were outside their society, and perhaps unfavourable to it, but who were none the less sensible of the pressure it exercised. The origin of Carbonarism has been sought in vain; as a specimen of the childish fables that once passed for its history may be noticed the legend that Francis I of France once stumbled on a charcoal burner’s hut when hunting “on the frontiers of his kingdom next to Scotland,” and was initiated into the rites similar to those in use among the sectaries of the nineteenth century. Those rites referred to vengeance which was to be taken on the wolf that slew the lamb; the wolf standing for tyrants and oppressors, and the lamb for Jesus Christ, the sinless victim, by whom all the oppressed were represented.
The Carbonari themselves generally believed that they were heirs to an organisation started in Germany before the eleventh century, under the name of the Faith of the Kohlen-Brenners [charcoal burners], of which Theobald de Bri, who was afterwards canonised, was a member. Theobald was adopted as patron saint of the modern society, and his fancied portrait figured in all the lodges. The religious symbolism of the Carbonari, their oaths and ceremonies, and the axes, blocks, and other furniture of the initiatory chamber, were well calculated to impress the poorer and more ignorant and excitable of the brethren. The Vatican affected to believe that Carbonarism was an offshoot of freemasonry, but, in spite of sundry points of resemblance, such as the engagements of mutual help assumed by members, there seems to have been no real connection between the two. The practical aims of the Carbonari may be summed up in two words: freedom and independence.
A Genoese of the name of Malghella, who was Murat’s minister of police, was the first person to give a powerful impetus to Carbonarism, of which he has even been called the inventor, but the inference goes too far. Malghella ended miserably; after the fall of Murat he was arrested by the Austrians, who consigned him as a new subject to the Sardinian government, which immediately put him in prison. Whatever was truly Italian in Murat’s policy must be mainly attributed to him. As early as 1813 he urged the king to declare himself frankly for independence, and to grant a constitution to his Neapolitan subjects. But Malghella did not find the destined saviour of Italy in Murat; his one lasting work was to establish Carbonarism on so strong a basis that, when the Bourbons returned, there were thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Carbonari in all parts of the realm. The discovery was not a pleasant one to the restored rulers, and the prince of Canosa, the new minister of police, thought to counteract the evil done by his predecessor by setting up an abominable secret society called the Calderai del Contrapeso (Braziers of the Counterpoise), principally recruited from the refuse of the people, lazzaroni, bandits, and let-out convicts, who were provided by government with 20,000 muskets, and were sworn to exterminate all enemies of the church of Rome, whether Jansenists, freemasons, or Carbonari. This association committed some horrible excesses, but otherwise it had no results. The Carbonari closed in their ranks, and learned to observe more strictly their rules of secrecy.
[1816-1821 A.D.]
From the kingdom of Naples, Carbonarism spread to the Roman states, and found a congenial soil in Romagna, which became the focus whence it spread over the rest of Italy. It was natural that it should take the colour, more or less, of the places where it grew. In Romagna, where political assassination is in the blood of the people, a dagger was substituted for the symbolical woodman’s axe in the initiatory rites. It was probably only in Romagna that the conventional threat against informers was often carried out. The Romagnols invested Carbonarism with the wild intensity of their own temperament, resolute even to crime, but capable of supreme impersonal enthusiasm. The ferment of expectancy that prevailed in Romagna is reflected in the Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, whom young Count Pietro Gamba made a Carbonaro, and who looked forward to seeing the Italians send the barbarians of all nations back to their own dens, as to the most interesting spectacle and moment in existence. His lower apartments, he writes, were full of the bayonets, fusils, and cartridges of his Carbonari cronies: “I suppose that they consider me as a dépôt, to be sacrificed in case of accidents. It is no great matter, supposing that Italy could be liberated, who or what is sacrificed. It is a grand object—the very poetry of politics. Only think—a free Italy! Why, there has been nothing like it since the days of Augustus!” The movement on which such great hopes were set was to begin in the kingdom of Naples in the spring of 1820.[h]