THE CARBONARI.
The Freemasons, silenced after the defeat of Napoleon, took a new form in the notorious Carbonari, a secret society whose branches were spreading throughout every part of the peninsula. They were called Carbonari, which signifies charcoal-burners, because they held their assemblies in places called Vendite or places for selling coal. Their object was the overthrow of all organized government both in Church and State, and they swore their oaths with the most bloody promises under the most revolting penalties. Like all secret societies they had many degrees, their lowest being formed of young unsuspecting candidates, who were lured into the horrors of the higher grades by professions of loyalty to religion and the promise of quick and certain wealth.
The younger portion of Italy, quickly caught by the bait, was bound by oaths the infraction of which meant death, and finally led on to associations in which revolution and plunder formed the means and end. Pope Pius VII. issued an Encyclical directed against their insidious and dangerous doctrines, which was followed by another from Pope Leo XII. Both documents were enforced throughout the Papal States, and effected some little relief; but the disease had gained too great a headway, and even in secret continued to make its progress felt in various centres of the country.
POPE LEO XII.
The efforts of the secret societies in Italy became more pronounced during the pontificate of Pope Gregory XVI., when the Carbonari were united with a new association, the Young Italy of Mazzini.
MAZZINI AND YOUNG ITALY.
Joseph Mazzini, born at Genoa in 1810, began to express his revolutionary doctrines in 1830, in the Genoese Indicator, and in the Leghorn Indicator. He was arrested and expelled from Genoa, whence he fled to Marseilles. There he met with three Piedmontese: Bianchi, Santi, and Rimini. These three conspirators furnished him with the idea of a new branch of secret societies, which they called Young Italy. To this nascent association Mazzini gave the motto "For God and the People," giving it to be understood that between God and the people there was to be no intermediary, neither political nor religious.
In accord with the Carbonari in making war upon Catholicism, and inspired by their title, they refused admission into their society to anyone over forty years of age. At first the unity of the peninsula was their apparent end, to which they added hatred of ecclesiastical government, and made the dagger and revolution the means for attaining those purposes.
The Republic appeared to them the only possible mode of government. Nevertheless that preference was not so exclusive but that they could consent to a monarchy as they actually did when they promised to Charles Felix, in 1831, that they would not molest a monarch who would agree to be a protege of the revolution and of the lodges.