Sorel’s eclecticism (or unity) of thought gave him a bigger reputation in Italy than in his native France; many of his books first appeared there, and their eager students were to include Gramsci as well as Mussolini and Marinetti. He also had many influential disciples in Germany, including the writer Ernst Jünger, who would see the First World War through Sorelian lenses, as ‘the forge in which the world will be hammered into new limits and new communities’ – a project of building unity and fraternity through bloodshed that was later applied by Hitler to life at large. In Italy, however, Sorel immediately found a favourable intellectual climate.
Early in the century, Italian prophets of Futurism had started to advertise their fascination with violence, modern technology, insane acts and pageants. Unlike the Impressionists or Cubists, the Futurists were political artists, who saw themselves as creating a revolutionary style for heroic violence. They actually competed with Italian imperialists in the new century in uttering bombast about communion with the savage forces of life. Marinetti hailed war as the ‘breeder of morals’. Papini spoke of the necessity of ‘cleansing of the earth … in a warm bath of black blood’. Even the liberal Salvemini, opposed to imperialism, conceded that the national unity brought by war was not to be belittled.
Arguing that France’s domestic instability necessitated Napoleon’s warmongering and imperialism, Madame de Sta?l had wondered whether a nation could be ‘oppressed in the interior without giving it the fatal compensation of ruling elsewhere in its turn?’ North Africa, which Napoleon invaded early in his career, was also the site where Italians in the early twentieth century sought to avenge their setbacks and humiliations.
A cult of Rome and Roman imperialism became common among diplomatic as well as artistic circles. Amid general enthusiasm, Italy went to war with the Ottoman Empire, invading the Ottoman territory of Libya in 1911. Sorel hailed it as ‘Italy’s greatest day’. Marinetti marvelled in the second Futurist Manifesto at ‘the remarkable symphony of the lead shrapnel’ and the ‘sculpture wrought in the enemy’s masses by our expert artillery’. The Italian assault on Libya was ferocious, stirring sympathy for its Muslim victims and anger against Western imperialists as far as Malaya. But Marinetti, who travelled to Libya as a newspaper correspondent, deplored the government’s lack of ruthlessness; he thought that military operations were undermined by ‘stupid colonial humanitarianism’.
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The ravaging of Libya, which suffered the world’s first aerial bombing in 1912, confirmed that the emerging New Man, theorized by Nietzsche and Sorel, and empowered by technology, saw violence as an existential experience – an end in itself, and perpetually renewable. D’Annunzio, in exile in France since 1910 from his creditors and out of literary favour, returned to the fray with war songs, each meant to fill a whole page in the Corriere della Serra. As early victories gave way to Arab resistance, and diplomatic compromise, Papini thought D’Annunzio’s war songs were too feeble. ‘The future needs blood,’ he argued. ‘It needs human victims, butchery. Internal war, and foreign war, revolution and conquest: that is history … Blood is the wine of stronger peoples, and blood is the oil for the wheels of this great machine which flies from the past to the future.’
Italy’s subsequent intervention in the First World War, in which it was initially neutral, came to be cheerled by a broad social coalition, socialists as well as anarchists, on the grounds that war would act as a sort of detergent. Among its champions was Mussolini, who had opposed the Libyan adventure, but was now fiercely interventionist, and actually had been expelled from the Socialist Party for his warmongering. He was on his way to found the myth that would goad men to transcend their mediocre selves and become supermen.
As Italy went to war in May 1915, he wrote:
If the revolution of 1789, which was both a revolution and a war, opened up the world to the bourgeoisie after its long and secular novitiate, the present revolution, which is also a war, seems to open up the future to the masses and their novitiate of blood and death.
Over four years later, Gabriele D’Annunzio’s occupation of Fiume offered the socialist apostate a fresh template for arousing the masses: black uniforms, stiff-armed salutes, military parades, war songs, and the glorification of virility and sacrifice. Mussolini later encouraged the writing of a biography of D’Annunzio entitled The John the Baptist of Fascism. He clearly fancied himself as the Messiah. But Mazzini, the true Messiah, had already come and gone, leaving a large imprint on the modern world.
Reading Mazzini in Shanghai and Calcutta
Mazzini would have been appalled by the degeneration of his dream of humanizing man through democratic nationalism into romantic imperialism. For Gandhi was not wholly wrong to see the Italian as ‘a citizen of every country’, who believed that ‘every nation should become great and live in unity’. Nor was Mazzini unjustified in thinking that a good society should be based on duties rather than individual rights.
Gandhi together with Simone Weil was among many twentieth-century thinkers who questioned the emphasis on rights – the claims of self-seeking possessive individuals against others that underpinned the expansion of commercial society around the world. They, too, said that a free society ought to consist of a web of moral obligations. But Mazzini’s messianism cancelled his good ideas; and he failed to anticipate that his desired Third Rome might require high levels of brutality, and that Europeans, not to mention Ethiopians and Libyans, might resist it.
One early perceptive critic of Mazzini was the Russian anarchist Bakunin. They met at the home of their mutual friend Herzen in London in the early 1860s. Bakunin had good reason to be grateful to the Italian, who had defended him from Marx’s harsh attacks. The Russian anarchist ought also to have thrilled to Mazzini’s call for ‘insurrection of the masses’, for the ‘holy war of the oppressed’. But he wrote disparagingly of Mazzini as a ‘great priest of religious, metaphysical and political idealism’ and enumerated his blunders: ‘It is the cult of God, the cult of divine and human authority, it is faith in the messianic predestination of Italy, queen of all the nations, with Rome, capital of the world.’ Bakunin criticized, too, Mazzini’s ‘passion for uniformity that they call unification and that is really the tomb of liberty’.