The Life of Mazzini

by Bolton King

It was not however till the summer or autumn of 1839,[14] that he decided to return to active political work "with an almost fierce resolve." At first he had no definite plan, except to accentuate the popular side of his programme and appeal more than he had yet done to the working classes. He had at present little means of reaching those at home, but he could do something among the Italian population in London, the shopkeepers and organ-grinders and hawkers of terra-cotta casts. Hitherto he had been little in contact with his working-class compatriots; now in the whirl of a foreign city he came to know them. It began with his intense feeling for suffering, that for the remainder of his life made him happiest when relieving individual cases of misery. About this time, going out one winter morning, he found a young girl on the doorstep worn out with cold and hunger. With the sympathy for forlorn womanhood, which he had in common with the greatest of English statesmen, he took her in and put her in his landlady's charge. When the girl afterwards married, and was deserted by her husband, he undertook the education of her children, and for many years devoted to it a large share of his scanty income. The same charity now drew him to the waifs of his own land. Talking to the Italian organ-boys, who went about the streets of London with a barrel-organ and its squirrel or white rat, speaking a patois half Comasque half English, he learnt the details of the "white-slave traffic," how a few Italians living in London brought over poor peasant-boys under contracts, which promised high pay and good living, but which had no validity in England; how when the boys got there, they were beaten and half-starved and cowed. He brought the worst offenders to justice, and did something to frighten the masters into better treatment of their victims. But he cared more to influence the boys themselves. In 1841 he opened a school at 5 Hatton Garden (afterwards removed to 5 Greville Street, Leather Lane), where the boys came in the late evenings to learn the three Rs and some elementary science, and on Sundays had lessons in drawing and Italian history. The school was very dear to Mazzini, and the boys, says an English observer, "revered him as a god and loved him as a father." One of them, returning to Italy, travelled to Genoa expressly to tell Madame Mazzini what her son had done for him. Italian and English friends (Joseph Toynbee among them) taught gratuitously, and the annual supper was a great event for him and his circle. Mario and Grisi sang at concerts to help the school's finances. The school flourished in spite of the noisy opposition of a neighbouring Italian priest,—an opposition, which Mazzini repaid by his first angry attack on the Papacy.

Already, before the school was opened, he had started a political society for the Italian workmen in London, and was publishing a paper, the Apostolato Popolare, which came out at intervals till 1843. In it he makes his appeal to the working-men of Italy. He felt more strongly even than in his Marseilles days that a revolutionary movement must depend for its main support on the working classes and have their good for its ultimate goal. English life had brought him into touch with the social thought of the time, and he felt that political movements were dwarfing beside the question of the condition of the masses. He began to speak of the Italy to-be as the "Italy of the People." It was the people, he wrote, who suffered most from her dismemberment and misrule. While other classes had their compensations, there were no distractions for the unknown poor, no true home life, no intellectual interest. He tried to rouse them from their provincialism, their self-absorbed indifference to politics. He appealed to them to be patriots and republicans, proud of their country's glorious past, working for its future and their children, and remember that God would judge them not by what wages they earned but by what they had done for their fellows. But however much he laid stress on the democratic side of his agitation, on working-class organization and social reform, he was careful to safeguard Young Italy from becoming a class movement. It was at this time and in his papers for working men, that he first began the crusade against socialism, which he continued, sometimes with less discernment, to the end of life.

Chapter VI
The Revolution
1843-1848. Aetat 37-43

Politics in Italy—The Bandieras—The Post-Office scandal—The People's International League—Life in 1845-47—Letter to Pio Nono—Attitude towards the royalists—The Revolution of 1848—At Milan.

While Mazzini was watching from England in discouragement, and the waves seemed to gain no painful inch, in Italy the main came flooding in. How far exactly the sudden tide of national impulse owed itself to his teaching, is perhaps an insoluble problem. But when one remembers how wide had been the influence of Young Italy, how many of the men who were now coming to the front had been its members, it seems unlikely that the impetus could have come without him. Young University men who treasured secretly at home his pamphlets or numbers of the Apostolato Popolare, artisans who had fingermarked his or Gustavo Modena's tracts, were pondering his teaching and waiting for the times to ripen. But Mazzini's influence, even if the most powerful, was not the only one. Traditions still lived on, handed down from the Carbonaro revolutions; the old belief in Charles Albert was flickering into life again; the mild Catholic nationalism, that came from Manzoni and his school, flowed strong; and all the time the daily witness of oppression and misrule was there to preach against the Austrians and the native tyrants. And though there were many currents in the swelling crowd of nationalists, at two points all moved together. Austria must go, and there must be some guarantee for good government.

In spite of censors and police, the rising spirit showed itself in literature. "The shade of Dante, the poet of the regenerated nation, began to brood above the speech and silence of the land." Students, in the footsteps of Foscolo and Gabriel Rossetti, drew all the reading world of Italy to the great national seer, who more than five centuries before had pleaded for unity. Dramatists and historians and novel-writers spoke of the ancient glories of their country. Social reformers came in to swell the liberal movement, founders of schools and savings banks, agricultural pioneers, builders of railways that would "stitch the boot." Their interest in politics was a secondary one, and such political sympathies as they had, were generally with the Moderate politicians, just rising to a prominence, which was soon to eclipse Mazzini's waning light. Gioberti had already published his Moral and Civil Primacy of the Italians, which, while it echoed Mazzini's faith in Italy and Rome, banned democracy and unity, preached federalism and half-hearted liberalism, and looked for salvation to Charles Albert and a reforming Pope. Cesare Balbo in Piedmont was pleading for the same mild policy, without its faith in the Papacy. Theirs was an easy creed beside Mazzini's. They had little of his religious faith, none of his passionate democracy, his demand for sacrifice and martyrdom. It was a creed for the doubting and half-hearted, for the royalist and Catholic, for the courtier and the rich man and the priest; and also for the level-headed man of the world, who turned from Mazzini's fancies and idealism, who laughed at Italy's mission to humanity but cherished a more modest hope for her own regeneration. But at all events the teaching had two notes in common with his own. It strove to lift the nation to healthy ambition and strenuous effort; it cried as earnestly as he did for the expulsion of the Austrian. And so it made the complement of his work. Less noble in its spirit, more halting in its patriotism and uninspiring of great deeds, yet it marshalled for the cause a host, that would never have swelled the thin ranks of Young Italy. It supplied the common movement with qualities that Mazzini conspicuously lacked,—a political sense of the possible, and, among its better exponents, a patience and tolerance, a comprehensiveness that prejudged no class and welcomed all, who, gladly or reluctantly, offered themselves for the great task.

One of the sources of the Moderate movement was the impatience at the little insurrections, that only led to useless loss of life and an embittering of the tyranny. One of its postulates laid down that there should be no revolt against the better native princes, and that the fight with Austria should be waged by regular armies. But the traditions of revolt could not die out at once, indeed were all the stronger for the new spirit of hope that was abroad. All Central Italy was alive with plots. Mazzini, though he was coming partially to recognize the futility of these petty risings, still had a standard of preparation that was pitifully inadequate. He was elaborating a scheme for a rising in the Papal States, to be followed by movements in the North and South and supported by the exiles. He was still persuaded that a few small guerilla bands would draw the people after them, that daring and a clear programme were the only necessary conditions of victory. He found few men and less money for his plot. Among the handful, who put themselves at his disposal, were two young Venetian nobles, Attilio and Emilio Bandiera, officers in the Austrian navy, which was chiefly manned by Italians and Dalmatians. They were high-minded lads, and, one is bound to add, sentimentalists and prigs, naively self-conscious and immature; but with the supreme virtue that they were ready to take their lives in their hands. Mazzini wished to use them for his designs in Central Italy; but there were police agents of the governments around them, who had their ear and sent them with a handful of followers, including a man in the pay of the police, to help an imaginary rising in Calabria. The English government, too, had opened their correspondence with Mazzini, and put the government at Naples on its guard. Thus they went, as they foreboded, to their death. The trap was ready for them; and when they landed near Cosenza, they were captured easily and shot.

The ignoble action of the English government brought Mazzini into English political life. He suspected that his correspondence had been tampered with in the post, and careful experiments proved to him that his letters had been opened, sealed with new wafers, and the postmark altered. He put the matter into the hands of Thomas Duncombe, the member for Finsbury; and the storm of indignation, that followed Duncombe's disclosures in the House of Commons, showed how angrily the better English opinion felt it, that the government had violated elementary ethics and "played the spy" in the interests of continental tyranny. Shiel and Macaulay denounced it in parliament. Carlyle wrote to the Times that "it is a question vital to us that sealed letters in an English post-office be, as we all fancied they were, respected as things sacred; that opening of men's letters, a practice near of kin to picking men's pockets, and to other still viler and far fataler forms of scoundrelism, be not resorted to except in cases of very last extremity." The government tried to ride out the storm with quibbles and constructive falsehoods, which proved, as Mazzini said, that they adopted different standards of honour for their public and their private lives. Sir James Graham repeated the stale charge that Mazzini had promoted assassination in France, and honourably withdrew it, when he knew the facts. But public feeling was too heated to let the matter rest there; and secret Committees of enquiry were appointed by both Houses. They reported that letters had been constantly opened at the Post-Office, at all events since 1806; that even letters of members of parliament had been tampered with; that in this case the government had issued a warrant to open Mazzini's letters (his letters had in fact been opened several months before the date of the warrant), and had sent information extracted from them to "a Foreign Power." It is true that this information seems to have been of a general character, but that did not affect the ignominy of the whole business or the fact that an English government had sent a warning to the Bourbons, that helped them to entrap the hapless patriots.

The incident gave Mazzini a welcome opportunity to appeal more directly to English opinion on behalf of Italy. He had a supreme contempt for English foreign policy, which "opposes everything that introduces a new fact in the European polity, and is the first to recognize it when it shows its strength." It was an unfair criticism, at least of Canning and Palmerston, tied though the latter's hands were by court and colleagues. England was still on the whole the champion of the cause of men. But it was true that the Foreign Office gave small attention to the great nationalist movements that were maturing in Europe. The wise policy for England, as he urged, was to encourage these movements, and win the gratitude of the rising nationalities, not necessarily by armed intervention (he expressly disclaimed asking for that), but by her moral backing. Perhaps it was partly owing to the seeds he sowed at this time, that Palmerston afterwards did for Italy so much of what he asked for. We may regret that he never gave a generous recognition to the great Foreign Secretary's policy.