Rebels and Reformers: Biographies for Young People

by Baron Arthur Ponsonby Ponsonby; Dorothea Ponsonby

The war continued. The Austrians gained victories and Milan was occupied. Mazzini shouldered a rifle and served in a small force under Garibaldi. Meanwhile, in Central Italy, the Pope had fled and Rome was declared a republic. Three men were appointed to take over the government with supreme powers. Of this triumvirate Mazzini was a member. The opportunity had come for him to display his powers as a ruler, and to put into practical form the theories about which he had written and preached so much; but it proved to be short. Nevertheless, he managed to deal with a difficult situation with the utmost skill, showing wisdom and moderation, erring, if anything, on the side of leniency toward his enemies. He adopted none of the pomp and ceremony of a ruler, but lived with austere simplicity, unguarded, and accessible to all who wished to approach him. By this mild authority he maintained order in the city, and he might have succeeded in setting up good government in a permanent form, had it not been for the intervention of France. The attack on the Romans by Louis Napoleon has been described as one of the meanest political crimes, and indeed there was no excuse for it. The siege lasted nearly a month, and the city fell. The victors entered Rome. Garibaldi with three thousand followers refused to surrender and retreated. Mazzini fled the country. So ended his brief experience as a ruler.

He could not remain in Switzerland; he therefore returned to London. The death of his mother in 1852 came as a great blow to him. He had seen her in Milan and had always kept in close correspondence with her. “I have now no mother on earth except my country,” he wrote, “and I shall be true to her as my mother has been true to me.” She left him a small annuity, so that although he was poor, he was not in the desperate state of want he had been in formerly. He had to live very simply, however, his cigars being his only luxury. His most constant companions were his tame linnets and canaries, which perched about on his head and shoulders and hopped about among his papers in the thick, smoky atmosphere of his one room. He was very much appreciated and respected by many prominent men of the time, and his endeavor to enlist English sympathy for his political schemes was not unsuccessful.

It was perhaps a pity that Mazzini did not devote the remainder of his days to literary work, for as a writer he would certainly have made a great mark. His work as an agitator ceased to be useful or even helpful. The course of events showed that if Italian Unity was to be won it must be under the leadership of Victor Emmanuel, who had succeeded Charles Albert as King of Piedmont and Sardinia, and was prepared to come forward as the leader of the movement. Gallant little Piedmont continued to be the leading spirit of the States of Italy. Cavour, the statesman, a man of very different stamp from Mazzini, worked slowly and patiently in the one direction in which he saw success was possible. He despised Mazzini and his doctrines, and probably regarded him as a nuisance. The practical, capable, hard-headed man of affairs found no use for the enthusiast and the agitator, and did not even recognize the great services which the idealist had rendered in preparing and educating the mind of the people. Mazzini, on the other hand, suspected Cavour and mistrusted him, and doggedly refused to abandon his hope of a republican form of government. He thought a united Italy would succeed best if monarchy were abolished; and in this belief perhaps he may only have been rather in advance of his times. All the time he overestimated the strength of his own following and ignored the true state of affairs. This was partly due to his enforced exile, which kept him out of contact with the movements in Italy. With Garibaldi, the great man of action, his relations were also strained. They never saw eye to eye, and constantly differed as to the best course to take. Garibaldi believed in the King. Mazzini could never get over his engrained prejudice against monarchy. Garibaldi was irritated with Mazzini and called him “the great doctrinaire.” But although they so often found it impossible to act together, they became reconciled in the end, and each recognized the other’s great talents and services.

Mazzini was accused of encouraging political assassination. Many charges were brought against him which were absolutely false, and he was wrongly suspected of being at the back of various plots which were discovered for the assassination of Victor Emmanuel and Louis Napoleon. He had indeed said that exceptional moments might arise when the killing of a tyrant might be the only means of putting an end to the intolerable oppression. In his early days, too, a young man came to him with a plan for the assassination of the King, Charles Albert. Mazzini, having failed to dissuade him, helped him on his journey and sent him a dagger. But in late life he not only vigorously discouraged plots of this sort, but actually stopped them. It is true, however, that his attempts to justify violence on certain occasions, and the arguments he used, came sadly below the noble ideas he held as to the sacredness of human life.

Napoleon III he hated as much as he did the Austrians. For a moment he was hopeful, after the French victory of Solferino in 1859, and thought the Austrian domination of Italy was at an end. But when the peace of Villafranca came, by which Venetia was abandoned to the enemy, and Cavour resigned, he voiced the feeling of his country when he denounced the betrayal and treachery of the French Emperor. He hurried out to Florence, but the people dreaded any repetition of his unsuccessful risings, and he found he was powerless. Cavour became chief minister again, and Garibaldi began to lay his plans for the action which was to be eventually the determining factor in the liberation of Italy. Mazzini welcomed Garibaldi’s leadership, and was ready to keep himself in the background. But his suspicion of Cavour, his want of proper information, and his occasional untimely interference made him useless at this period of the struggle. He kept on dividing opinion at a time when united action was the one obvious means of achieving success. “Even against your wish you divide us,” said one of Garibaldi’s followers to him at Naples, where he was trying to make the people insist on an Italian National Assembly drawing up a new Constitution under the King. At last, worn out in mind and body, he left Naples after having a friendly interview with Garibaldi. It was not his jealousy of successful rivals that made Mazzini so difficult to work with in these critical times. It was his fear that others could not carry out the great object in view unless they worked on his lines and shared his distrust of the rule of kings and the intrigues of statesmen. He refused to see that the royalists were as seriously bent on unity as he was himself. He became a broken and disappointed man, believing he had failed, and despondent as to the future.

Unity was not yet complete: Rome and Venetia were still to be won. On his return to England in 1860, Mazzini was content to suspend any open republican agitation, but he kept up a good deal of secret correspondence. His health began to break down, but his will-power was still very strong. “It is absurd to be ill,” he said, “while nations are struggling for liberty.” Victor Emmanuel had some private communications with him, for, curiously enough, the two men had a certain fascination for each other. The King shared the great agitator’s hatred of Austria and his impatient desire to see the nationalities of Eastern Europe set free. But nothing came of this. Victor Emmanuel, who was now the figurehead of the whole movement, was a rough, good-natured, rather stupid man, who by his qualities as a soldier won the loyalty and devotion of his people. He was essentially a man of action, and military fame attracted him more than anything else. When Garibaldi visited England he had an enthusiastic reception from the public. Mazzini conferred with him, collected money for him, and went as far as Lugano with the intention of supporting him when the volunteers crossed from Sicily for the march on Rome. But he went no further.

There was fighting again in 1866. The Italians were defeated, and Napoleon III concluded a peace by which the Austrians ceded Venetia to him, and he handed it over to Italy. This was rather a humiliating conclusion of this part of the struggle, and Mazzini resented it. In spite of the failure of so many of his efforts, he appeared to many of his fellow-countrymen as a distant and rather wonderful figure, surrounded by an atmosphere of mystery, with the one thought of his beloved country ever in his mind. Their confidence and respect for him were shown by the fact that forty thousand people signed the petition for his amnesty—that is to say, his return to Italy; but when at last it was granted he refused to take his seat as a deputy in Parliament, for although he had been duly elected by Messina he would not take the oath of allegiance to the monarchy.

The republic now came to be a more important object to him than unity. He plotted and schemed, and went so far as to intrigue with Bismarck in order to get the help of Germany in what would have been a civil war. He admired Bismarck’s tremendous determination, and he believed in German unity, but he added, “I abhor the Empire and the supremacy it arrogates over Europe.”

Here is a description of the Italian political idealist by one of the secret committee of Genoa, where each man came to the meeting armed with a revolver: “A low knock was heard at the door, and there he was in body and soul, the great Magician, who struck the fancy of the people like a mythical hero. Our hearts leaped, and we went reverently to meet that great soul. He advanced with a child’s frank courtesy and a divine smile, shaking hands like an Englishman and addressing each one of us by name, as if our names were written on our foreheads. He was not disguised; he wore cloth shoes and a capote, and with his middle, upright stature he looked like a philosopher straight from his study, who never dreamed of troubling any police in the world.”

All his plots broke down, and again he was imprisoned at Palermo. Here he read a great deal, smoked incessantly bad cigars, and laid the schemes of fresh books. When Rome was captured he was released. Italian unity was accomplished, but because Italy was not republican, Mazzini felt his dream was spoilt.