Thus, the chasm between pretence and reality yawned wider in Italy than in Germany; and the Risorgimento never managed to bridge it. The peasant masses remained indifferent to Mazzini’s plans for a ‘Third Rome’; the urban proletariat was insignificant; local loyalties and traditions were stronger than the idealism peddled by students and bourgeois intellectuals, who were nearly all drawn from the propertied classes, and, like Mazzini and Garibaldi, often lived abroad.
Military unpreparedness brought repeated failures on the battlefield. In the end, scattered uprisings and the stirring rhetoric of republicans like Mazzini and Garibaldi failed to bring a united Italy into being. Diplomatic intrigue by the liberal-conservative Camillo Cavour and much assistance from a monarchy helped found Italy; and the new country consolidated itself largely through the ill-luck and losses of its foreign occupiers. Despite these failures and disappointments of the Risorgimento, one of its leading activists managed to turn romantic nationalism into a religion worldwide while also specifying its theological basis.
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A true disciple of Mickiewicz and Lamennais, Mazzini hoped through sheer will and rhetoric to unite a hopelessly fragmented and geographically scattered country and raise it to a summit of cultural and political excellence. As Gandhi put it in his first eulogy to Mazzini in 1905, he was one of the ‘few instances in the world where a single man has brought about the uplift of his country by his strength of mind and his extreme devotion during his own lifetime’. Italy was like India, whose people, Gandhi wrote, ‘owed allegiance to different petty states’. Thanks to Mazzini, Italians were now ‘regarded as a distinct nation’.
In actuality, Mazzini failed repeatedly and disastrously as a political activist. But this remained obscure to the me-too nationalists everywhere who responded to Young Italy, the organization of self-sacrificing patriots that Mazzini created in 1831, with Young China, Young Turkey and Young India. Perhaps even accurate knowledge of his failures would not have dispelled Mazzini’s aura in Asia. For this fervent reader of Ossian was the perfect prophet for an early generation of emulous nationalists – in India and China as well as Ireland and Argentina – who despaired over their own somnolent and unenlightened masses, and their inability to summon them to concerted action.
Mazzini, closely following Lamennais, spoke of ‘Duties to Man’ rather than Rights of Man. The French Revolution had helped entrench, he argued, an arid bourgeois individualism; ‘the cold doctrine of rights, the last formula of individualism’ was now ‘degenerating into sheer materialism’. He offered a new, ostensibly more virtuous vision of the modern individual, one who can find fulfilment in surrendering his immediate interests to the well-being of the nation.
It left ominously unclear how individual duties were to play against the seemingly legitimate pursuit of individual interests. Nevertheless, this shift in emphasis to individual duties was welcome to intellectuals in countries that were not independent and where the notion of individual rights seemed a bit moot. Duty there could be turned into an obligation to wrest liberty, as Mazzini wrote, ‘by any means from any power whatever which denies it’. These intellectuals could hearken to Mazzini’s praise of martyrs who ‘consecrate with their blood an idea of national liberty’ and ‘sacrifice all things, and needs be life also’ since ‘God provides elsewhere for them.’
Educated men in countries with intensely religious populations could only approve when, after a botched invasion of Italy in 1834, Mazzini brought God back into the political frame, identifying Him with national sovereignty: ‘We must convince men,’ he wrote, ‘that they are all sons of one sole God, and bound to execute one sole law here on earth.’ Mazzini openly scorned the Catholic Church, but in the name of a more effective, useful and ambitious religion. ‘Ours was not a sect but a religion of patriotism,’ he clarified. ‘Sects may die under violence; religions may not.’
The religious view of politics naturally turned into a demand for all aspects of life to be subordinated to politics, and subsumed into a militant total faith. Nationalism, as Mazzini conclusively defined it for many, was a system of beliefs that pervades collective existence, and encourages a spirit of self-sacrifice, in order to bring about a revolutionary community. Education – or indoctrination of the masses, the ‘people’ – was deemed crucial to this end. And a large popular following, he believed, could only be achieved by appropriating the vocabulary and practices of Catholicism: God, faith, duty, preaching, martyrdom and blood. It was a short step from the interpenetration of religion and politics – a competitor to the French deities of liberty, fraternity and equality – to cultural supremacism.
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Mazzini blithely revised history: the Roman Empire, he claimed, had been the ‘most powerful nationality of the ancient world’. And he unapologetically conferred the role of world saviour on Italy: in the Third Rome, after the First and second Romes of the Caesars and the Church, Italy would give a ‘new and powerful Unity to all the nations of Europe’.
This confederation of European states would ‘civilize Asia’, sweeping away the Ottoman ‘papacy’ along with the Roman one, and create a ‘council of mankind’. ‘There flashed upon me, as a star in my soul, an immense hope,’ Mazzini claimed, ‘Italy reborn, at one bound the missionary to Humanity of a Faith in Progress and in Fraternity more vast than that of old.’
The liberal critic Gaetano Salvemini described Mazzini’s political system as a ‘popular theocracy’. Gramsci would dismiss his thought as ‘hazy claims’ and ‘empty chatter’. One of Mazzini’s own comrades, Luigi Carlo Farini, was accusing him of incoherence as early as 1851. But such criticisms missed the fact that Mazzini was an exponent of political style, an artist depending on the incantatory effect of words like ‘God’, ‘people’, ‘republic’, ‘thought’ and ‘action’ – terms that demanded submission rather than cogitation.
Pushkin and Mickiewicz had first linked poetry with prophecy in the nineteenth century; Mazzini deepened the connection by repeatedly speaking of the artistic, poetical and political Genius who gives voice to the ‘people’. Combining aesthetic with religious experience, he first showed that potent symbols in politics were more important than a clear doctrine or specific project. The grand but vague style of course left a lot of ideological wriggle room. A nationalist, in Mazzini’s schema, could be a monarchist as well as colonialist, pagan and Catholic. However liberal or cosmopolitan Mazzini’s nationalism in theory, it left a large space for utopian fantasy of both the left and the right.