Stendhal was a bonapartist who ensured that the style of The Charterhouse was plain and unromantic by reading a few pages of Napoleon’s civil code each morning before writing. He claimed the emperor had ‘rudely transformed’ Milan, turning a city ‘hitherto renowned for nothing save over-eating into the intellectual capital of Italy’; he also claimed, in 1818, that Milan and Florence were mourning Napoleon, though feelings of bereavement were seldom evident outside the liberal circles he frequented. Yet although he was in the anti-Austrian camp, he did not pretend that Italians were suffering under rule from Vienna, and he admitted that people were happier and freer in Milan than they were in Rome or papal Bologna. Novels and operas that would have been banned in Turin could be published and performed in the Habsburg capitals of Venice and Milan. At La Scala in 1845 Giuseppe Verdi encountered no problems with his opera Giovanna d’Arco, but in Rome the censors stripped poor Joan of Arc of her name and even of her nationality so that eventually she appeared before audiences as Orietta of Lesbos, a Genoese heroine leading Greek islanders against the Turks.
Generations of European schoolchildren were taught that Napoleon had brought the idea of unity to Italy, that his defeat had led to a dismal interlude of oppression and reaction, and that Italy’s destiny had finally been fulfilled by the heroic endeavours of its patriots. Yet the determinist theory is completely unhistorical. Italy was no more preordained to unite than Scandinavia, Yugoslavia or North America. Equally mistaken are the ideas that Naples was a foul despotism deserving of destruction, that Lombardy-Venetia was a monument to foreign tyranny and that Piedmont was the liberal knight predestined to rescue Italy and lead her to glory and to unity. Two of the most distinguished Piedmontese of the era – both of them future prime ministers in Turin – realized that the propaganda was all nonsense. Count Cavour knew the truth about Habsburg rule in Lombardy but admitted that in his journalism of the 1840s he was ‘obliged to be over-patriotic and cry out against Austria along with everyone else’. As for the Marquess d’Azeglio, a more genuine patriot than Cavour, the propaganda seemed to him grotesque. ‘To call the present rulers of Italy tyrants,’ he wrote in 1846, ‘would be a childish absurdity.’39
6
Revolutionary Italies
ROMANTIC ITALY
Massimo d’Azeglio might have been a character from The Charterhouse of Parma. He was a romantic figure, tall and handsome and blue-eyed, and he possessed the aristocratic charm and sexual appeal of the novel’s protagonist, Fabrizio del Dongo. Irreverent and unreserved (unusual qualities in Piedmont), he could talk to anyone from dancing girls to countesses, from bandits and wagoners to colonels and cardinals. A painter and a writer by profession, his amateur skills included music, swimming, riding and fencing. Perhaps his talents were too diffuse for him to be really good at anything, even politics, although in 1849, at the age of fifty, he became prime minister of Piedmont. Azeglio seldom bothered to conceal his rather frequent boredom, and in old age he regretted the invention of l’homme sérieux in France. He also deplored the fact that ‘the most tedious of the seven [deadly] sins – pride, envy and avarice – [had] got the better of the other four’: a Friend of Pleasure (another rare species in Piedmont), he saw nothing very reprehensible about sex, eating, laziness and occasional wrath. He enjoyed a good number of love affairs and tolerated two bad marriages.
Massimo was born in 1798, the fourth son of a noble Piedmontese family, the Taparelli d’Azeglio. After an agreeable childhood in Florence, he studied painting in Rome, leaving the city each summer to paint in the hill villages of the Castelli Romani, staying in carters’ inns and finding himself on easy terms with peasants and local brigands. Later he lived in Milan, where he exhibited his pictures at the Brera. He never liked Turin, which he found boring and oppressive, a philistine capital without art galleries or a good opera, a city permeated with a religious atmosphere that gave him a feeling of ‘moral suffocation’. Florence was a far more congenial abode; so was Milan where, in the capital of the Austrian ‘oppressors’, this Italian patriot could ‘breathe freely’ and publish his books.1
Apart from his matrimonial misfortunes, the only blight on Azeglio’s life was the sense of shame he felt at being an Italian in that era. He admitted he was so ‘morbidly sensitive’ about the condition of Italy and felt so humiliated that part of it remained under a ‘foreign yoke’ that he chose not to make friends with foreigners in case they mocked him.2 For him the only cure for this national and personal inferiority complex was independence for the whole peninsula – independence, but not unity. Azeglio knew mid-century Italy, its land and its peoples, better than other politicians, and he was more realistic than they about the potential difficulties of unification. His priorities were the expulsion of the Austrians, the reform of native governments and some kind of unity for the north.
As an artist and writer, Azeglio nursed his ‘feeling of humiliation’ by trawling the past in search of heroic episodes which he could then transform and publicize through his art. One glorious subject for a canvas was the Battle of Legnano, Barbarossa’s defeat by the Lombard League in 1176. Another was the so-called Challenge of Barletta, a much mythologized event from the early sixteenth century at which thirteen Italian knights in Apulia, outraged by a slur on the Italian character, challenged thirteen French knights to a duel and were victorious. While working on this canvas, Azeglio realized the subject could also be used for a patriotic novel, one that might ‘be understood in the streets and marketplaces’. He duly wrote Ettore Fieramosca and got it past the Austrian censor even though the hero (Ettore) declares that foreigners are the obstacle to Italian unity. Encouraged by its success, both financial and patriotic, he wrote a second novel, this time about the siege that destroyed the Florentine Republic in 1530, and began a third on the Lombard League, which he did not complete. By then, the mid-1840s, this many-sided man had decided that his patriotism required two new professions, that of soldier (in his youth he had served briefly in the Piedmontese army) and that of politician. Presumably he had realized by this time that as a novelist he was not in the same league as his father-in-law, Alessandro Manzoni.
Other Italians were equally ashamed of Italy’s decline. Although the composer Gioacchino Rossini was not much of a patriot, he liked to thank God for the Spanish: ‘If there were no Spaniards,’ he once observed, ‘the Italians would be the last people in Europe.’3 What made decadence so galling was the consciousness that, while Italians had for centuries been recognized as the most prosperous and civilized people on the continent, they were now regarded by foreigners as lazy, effeminate and rather comical. Italians were and are frequently rude about Italy – Dante called it a ‘brothel’ in Inferno and a ‘desert’ in Purgatorio – but they weren’t and aren’t happy when foreigners say similar things. Goethe described Italy as ‘the shadow of a nation’ while the French poet Alphonse de Lamartine termed it a ‘land of the past … where everything sleeps’, its people too fond of ‘sensual pleasures’ to be able to fight properly. Disparaged as a ‘trivial poet’ for these opinions, Lamartine made the mistake of challenging his Italian detractor and was badly wounded in a duel.
Italians could hate both the condescension of foreigners and the reasons why visitors wanted to come to Italy. Some of them could even resent Stendhal because he adored what they detested, the Italy of love and music and hospitality, Italy the giant antique shop and innkeeper of the world, Italy the land of limitless ruins and the domicile of effete dilettanti. Many Italians were convinced that their dignity could not be restored without the recovery of masculinity and martial ardour. Vittorio Alfieri, the Piedmontese poet-prophet of unity who wrote ‘An exhortation to free Italy from the barbarians’, was especially concerned with the question of virility, a recurrent concern for future builders or rebuilders of the nation up to and including Mussolini. When, according to Alfieri, Italians recovered the virility of their ancient ancestors and discarded the manners of the cosmopolitan present, they would again be abl
e to lead Europe.
Numerous patriots joined Azeglio in quest of a past to be proud of. They also searched for heroes who had fought valiantly against invaders and who had been prepared to sacrifice their lives for the sake of Italy. As they could not find such figures in recent centuries, they had to rummage through the more distant past. Ancient Rome was not an ideal model partly because it had not been a nation and partly because Napoleon had very recently appropriated its glory, making himself a Caesar and his son the King of Rome. The idea of Italian Davids standing up to northern Goliaths seemed a more promising source, yet it became so difficult to unearth suitable examples that patriotic artists often found themselves writing, painting and composing music about the same event: I lombardi alla prima crociata (The Lombards on the First Crusade) was an epic poem by Tommaso Grossi, an early opera by Verdi and the subject of several pictures by Francesco Hayez. Another drawback was that certain selected episodes, the Battle of Legnano excepted, were not fully appropriate: while the Sicilian Vespers of 1282 (exalted by the historian Michele Amari and again painted by Hayez and set to music by Verdi) might conceivably be portrayed as an uprising against a foreign invader, the incident – in which thousands of Frenchmen in Palermo were slaughtered after one of them pestered a Sicilian woman – might also be regarded as a grotesque reprisal. A third defect was that the paintings of these events – huge, hideous, sub-Delacroix expanses – belong to the most unfortunate period in the history of Italian art. A dispiriting though representative sample of this genre can be examined today in the Museo Civico of the Tuscan town of Pistoia. The walls are covered by canvases depicting scenes such as ‘the Pazzi Conspiracy’ and ‘other rebellions against tyranny’, the murder of Francesco Ferruccio (a hero of the Florentine Republic) and the riot instigated by Balilla, the Genoese boy who inspired a mob to chase the Austrians out of his city in 1746. The most ghastly exhibit of all is another vast painting of the Sicilian Vespers, this time by Giulio Piatti, an infernal and almost lunatic composition of people brandishing knives and staring insanely.
The literary equivalents of this art were the books of Azeglio and the poetry of Giovanni Berchet, but the only novel of the era that has truly lasted is Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (The Betrothed), a work that acquired the status of a monument soon after its publication and transformed its author into a national prophet, a patriarchal fount of moral and patriotic wisdom. In fact the Milanese Manzoni, who was a poet as well as a novelist, deserved this reputation less for his masterpiece than for his contribution to the making of the language* and perhaps also for the nationalistic sentiments of a patriotic ode claiming that the Italians were a single people between the Alps and the sea, a people united by blood, heart, arms, language, memories and Catholicism. Of course he knew this was an exaggeration, that at the time of writing (1821) Italians shared little of these things except the same Church, but he used poetic licence to attack the idea of ‘diversity’, a word he believed was insulting to Italy because it summed ‘up a long history of misfortune and humiliation’.4
Yet Manzoni had his defects as both a patriot and a prophet. Indifferent to the medieval past of the communes, he defended the papacy’s historic role and believed in its contemporary national relevance. The Betrothed, a saga of tyranny eventually vanquished, may have become a canonical text for the patriotic movement, but the idea that it foreshadowed a struggle for national liberation is far-fetched. Its seventeeth-century heroes are not heroic – they display Christian resignation; the villains are not foreign – Don Rodrigo is a home-grown tyrant with a Spanish name, not a recognizable caricature of a Bourbon or Habsburg overlord; and the plot is melodramatic and Manichaean. The pervading aura of divine providence at work certainly seems at odds with the patriotic belief that Italians could only become free if they themselves removed their shackles. Perhaps the success of the novel owed something to the fact that there were few Italian competitors at the time.
The figure who most closely combined romantic culture with revolutionary politics was Giuseppe Mazzini, the sad-eyed ascetic who in the early 1830s appealed for a revival or resurgence of Italy, a ‘risorgimento’, and connected this idea to the project of unifying the peninsula politically. For him a nation was a ‘universality of citizens speaking the same tongue’, a definition that was not of course applicable to Italy. Yet Mazzini pretended that it was. Born in Genoa in 1805, his sense of mission was fixed early in life, and he dressed always in black in mourning for what he regarded as his lost fatherland. He read widely in literature and history, and from his reading he absorbed ideas that he adapted and exploited to further his cause. Inspired by the works of Dante, by the history of Rome and by the example of the Lombard League, he appropriated suitable passages and details and incorporated them into a programme that was obviously neither communal nor imperial. For the goal that he and his democratic followers aimed for was simply an Italy that would be both independent and undivided. Only a unitary state, they believed, would liberate Italy from its age-old rivalries.
Other ideologues believed the opposite, that only regard for those rivalries would allow Italians to respect each other’s differences and live together in harmony: a unitary state could never conceivably work in so diverse a country. The foremost federalist was the brilliant Milanese intellectual Carlo Cattaneo, who considered ‘the ancient love of liberty in Italy’ to be more important than ‘the cult of unity’. Like Guicciardini 300 years earlier, he believed that Italy had prospered from competition between the cities and argued that a political system that failed to take the communal spirit into account would not succeed. In his eyes this spirit was far from being a medieval irrelevance: it was alive – as it still is, remaining a vital component of the national identity even today. Cattaneo did not greatly exaggerate when he claimed, ‘The communes are the nation: they are the nation in the most innermost sanctuary of its liberty.’5
Cattaneo was no romantic nationalist. Indeed he believed that nationalism was essentially illiberal – an unusual credence in those days – and he suspected with some reason that this would be the case with Piedmont. As a Milanese historian, he was aware of the old Piedmontese custom of grabbing and annexing bits of Lombardy, and he was rightly apprehensive about the ambitions of the Savoia monarchs in his own time. As a Lombard, he was also aware of his region’s ancient trading relationships beyond the Alps and recognized that there could be advantages, administrative and economic, in becoming a self-governing part of the Habsburg Empire. Such advantages would obviously disappear if Lombardy were to be annexed by Piedmont.
Piedmontese patriots understandably disagreed. In 1843 Vincenzo Gioberti, a theologian from Turin, published a book called Del primato morale e civile degli Italiani (Of the Moral and Civil Pre-eminence of the Italians), a work whose title alone was calculated to improve morale. Earnestly and verbosely, Gioberti told Italians that pre-eminence had been theirs and would be so again if only they could stand up and seize it. Readers, who had been led to believe that they were actually inferior to other nations, were naturally pleased by the message, although few of them were enthusiastic about the formula Gioberti suggested for their salvation: a federation of Italian states under the presidency of the pope (currently the elderly and reactionary Gregory XVI), who would be allowed to retain his temporal power over the Papal States. This was an even more dramatic divergence from Mazzini’s ideology than the views of Cattaneo. Mazzini and his supporters followed Machiavelli in believing that the papacy had been one of the chief obstacles to Italian unity in the past; no Italy of their dreams would concede to the pope an ounce of political power.
After the appearance of Primato, Azeglio persuaded his cousin, Cesare Balbo, to write another book on Italian possibilities, Delle speranze d’Italia (On the Hopes of Italy), another anti-Mazzinian work with another optimistic title written by another prominent Piedmontese. Balbo agreed with Gioberti that a federal solution was essential, but he argued that a confederation under the Piedmontese monarchy w
ould be preferable to one under the pope. Independence from Austria (or any other power) was also vital: one couldn’t achieve pre-eminence without first attaining parity, and the way to achieve parity with independent nations was to gain independence for oneself. Political unity, by contrast, was unimportant, indeed a ‘childish’ idea because a confederation was clearly the system ‘most suited to Italy’s nature and history’.6
In the mid-1840s Piedmont did not seem a very promising candidate for leadership of a pan-Italian confederation. It was still governed by a conservative, authoritarian monarch, Charles Albert, who had savagely crushed an attempted coup in 1833. Yet the king was also a member of the Savoia dynasty who had inherited ancestral urges to continue the expansion of the realm. As the obstacle to the fulfilment of such desires was now Austria, it seemed logical for him to give at least tacit support to moderates in the national movement, to those at any rate who were not republican or democratic or in any way radical. As his country possessed the best army in the peninsula, he believed he would without difficulty dominate the patriotic side in any war against Austria.
The Pursuit of Italy Page 19