THE GROWING DESIRE FOR LIBERTY
If the great desire of Italy at the end of the eighteenth century was incontestably to become a nation, a desire all the more ardent because it was so recent, since it dated back only forty years, was she ready to take action and undertake her own government? It is doubtful. Not that the Italian middle-class educated in the school of French philosophers and convinced of the principles of ’89 was not thenceforth capable to assume the power, and even to obtain the adhesion of the rural masses to the new ideas, in spite of their ignorance and submission to the clergy; but because a nation cannot exist without a leader—and there was no leader. Under the successive domination of so many foreign tyrannies, all these noble towns, each of which had formerly been a small state and had astonished the world with its magnificence, had fallen, one after the other, to the rank of prefectures without moral authority and without credit. As she had borne the burden of her cosmopolitism for three centuries, Italy was now about to expiate, during a shorter period, but still severely, this hatred of all concentration which had been, since the fall of the Roman Empire, the strongest and most constant of her passions. The municipal spirit of antiquity, which had inspired all the towns of the peninsula during the whole of the Middle Ages, had been, even more than the Catholic and universal spirit of papacy, the rock on which the modern principle of national unity had been wrecked. The Ghibellines had incarnated this principle in the house of Hohenstaufen, and the Guelfs for many years in the house of Anjou, but it had been overthrown in Italy at the very moment when it was triumphing over all the rest of Europe. And hence it doubtless was that arose the incomparable lustre of Italian civilisation at the dawn of the Renaissance, that universal blossoming of literature and art even in the most humble towns where there was then more intellectual culture than in the greatest cities of Germany, of England, or even of France. But from the same cause also arose that marvellous and fruitful intensity of individual and municipal life, that phenomenon, almost unique in history, of a nation repulsing the idea of unity, similar to a nebula refusing to take form. The law of development carried into effect by the various states of Latin Europe had been the successive agglomeration of all the elements of the same or similar origin round a central nucleus, their crystallisation round a concrete sovereignty, and if the expression may be allowed, one soul in common. But Italy had systematically evaded this law of centralisation, a law not only historical but physical, which in politics as in nature is the indispensable condition of all progress. She was therefore at the end of the fifteenth century the hydra with a hundred heads. Then the hundred heads fell one after the other under the blows of the great French, German, and Spanish invasions; the nation itself had almost perished. And now that the nation had slowly formed again she sought for a head in vain. If she wished to live, and she wished it with invincible passion, she in turn must realise what all the other nations of Europe had accomplished so many centuries ago, and, forsaking her past, she must set to work to take a central sovereignty. Nationality is unity, and unity can only be formed round a common centre.[j]