Georges Sorel, the most influential thinker of fin de siècle France, insightfully noted in Reflections on Violence (1908) that Mazzini, while apparently pursuing a ‘mad chimera’, confirmed the importance of myth in revolutionary processes. ‘Contemporary myths lead men,’ Sorel affirmed, ‘to prepare themselves for a combat that will destroy the existing state of things.’ Reviewing Sorel’s book in Benedetto Croce’s Italian translation, a young socialist called Benito Mussolini was even more to the point: Mazzini had given Italians a myth that ‘impelled them to take part in conspiracies and battles’.
The War on Bourgeois Mediocrity
Mussolini wrote his review while Mazzini’s messianic thinking experienced a revival across Italy in the early twentieth century. His myths were originally a product of the religious mood of the early nineteenth century, the desire for an unreachable ideal that can be sensed in the writings of Novalis, H?lderlin, Byron and Shelley. They inevitably came to feed, as did German infatuation with the Volk in the second half of the century, on widespread feelings of frustration.
For the reality of United Italy failed to match up to the sonorous rhetoric that had heralded it. The nation achieved after manifold battles with foreign occupiers had degenerated into political corruption; the great disappointment intensified the messianic tendencies of all those who followed in Mazzini’s wake. The developmentalist ideology pioneered by the Germans, and given a pseudo-scientific gloss by Positivism, had also reached Italy. But, as one bitter failure followed another in the late nineteenth century, Mazzini’s successors in Italy, like many others, became convinced that only a war and imperial expansion by a powerful state could redeem his vision.
The Mazzini-inspired patriots aspired to the rank of ‘sixth great power’ of Europe; but, as Bismarck tactlessly pointed out, ‘Italy has a large appetite, but poor teeth.’ The country simply lacked the economic and technical resources to achieve that status. There were vast natural differences between the north and south. Italy had no long-established government like Britain’s, or a monarchy worthy of being idealized. The democratic revolutionaries of the Risorgimento had upheld popular sovereignty against the papacy; but parliament, modelled on Westminster, turned out to be a shoddy thing, a byword for venality and unaccountability.
Industrialization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries concentrated wealth in the hands of a tiny minority, accentuating the contradictions of an incomplete modernization. Heavy taxation made unification an economic burden on the poorest; hundreds of thousands emigrated to the United States. Some who stayed joined protests. These ranged from apocalyptic outbursts, such as the Lazzaretti in Tuscany, to peasant revolts and brigandage. Young men disillusioned with Mazzini’s republicanism found Marx’s proletarian revolution too impractical for a peasant country; they were attracted, however, by the anarchist doctrines of Bakunin. Incontestably, Bakunin, feuding with both Marx and Mazzini, achieved his greatest influence in Italy in the 1870s. His followers included Errico Malatesta, a beacon to anarchists across Europe until his death in 1932, and Italy’s pioneering feminist, the Russian-born Anna Kuliscioff, who between them launched several uprisings.
These revolts, lacking popular support, inevitably flopped – the ageing Bakunin travelled to witness one fiasco in Bologna in 1874. Failure forced the young anarchists to turn away from public movements and grow more conspiratorial and self-aggrandizing; the idea of ‘propaganda by the deed’ – now manifest universally in video-taped, live-streamed and Facebooked massacres – grew naturally from the suspicion that only acts of extreme violence could reveal to the world a desperate social situation and the moral integrity of those determined to change it.
A series of murderous bomb attacks in 1878, including an unsuccessful one on Italy’s new king, Umberto I, inaugurated a Continent-wide surge in propaganda by the deed. Assaults were aimed at the German emperor and the king of Spain. In March 1881 a group called the People’s Will assassinated the Russian Tsar, Alexander II. This successful strike inspired a meeting in London of Europe’s leading anarchists, including Malatesta and the Russian Peter Kropotkin. Much emphasis was now placed on acquiring the right technical skills for making bombs. And while the leaders held conferences and published theoretical works, small cells of terrorists sprang up all over Europe and even America. Over the next quarter of a century heads of states, including the presidents of France (Carnot) and the United States (McKinley), the king of Italy (Umberto I), the empress of Austria (Elisabeth) and the prime minister of Spain (Canovas), were murdered.
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Nevertheless, messianic supremacism remained the dominant ideology in Italy, largely because the extravagantly promised nation seemed stuck in a limbo of development. And it was the country’s best-educated men, especially writers, who railed most stridently at the meanness of post-Risorgimento Italy, for which they blamed its bourgeois ruling classes.
The writer and editor Giovanni Papini wrote in 1905 that the post-Risorgimento generation had created a bureaucracy, laid down laws, built railroads, even raised economic standards, but ‘failed to give national life that content, those attitudes and ideals which are the expression of a great culture’. Papini himself moved from a flirtation with Max Stirner’s philosophical egoism to Mazzini’s millenarian nationalism, since, as he wrote, ‘a nation lacking a messianic passion is destined to collapse’:
I feel – like a Mazzinian of the old days – that I can have a mission in my country … Rome has always had a universal, dominating mission … [It] must become once again the centre of the world and a new form of universal power take its seat there … The Third Rome, the Rome of the ideal, must be the fruit of our will and our work.
Giosuè Carducci, the first Italian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and Alfredo Oriani, a popular novelist, deepened Mazzini’s nationalist ideology based on forms and symbols. Carducci lamented that the Risorgimento had promised an imperious ‘Rome’ but instead saddled Italy with a venal ‘Byzantium’. Oriani made it seem that all roads leading to the Third Rome had to be bloody:
War is an inevitable form of the struggle for existence, and blood will always be the best warm rain for great ideas … The future of Italy lies entirely in a war which, while giving it its natural boundaries, will cement internally, through the anguish of mortal perils, the unity of the national spirit.