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GIUSEPPE MAZZINI AND THE ORIGINS OF FASCISM
Copyright © Simon Levis Sullam 2015
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-51458-5
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DOI: 10.1057/9781137514592
Acknowledgments ix
Notes 121
Select Bibliography 179
Index 195
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Acknowledgments
Founding Fathers
One should not underestimate the fact that the symbolic appropri-
ation of Mazzini was made both in the name of revolution and in
that of order. In other words, Mazzini’s myth functioned at times
in contradictory ways, not unlike that of other founding figures:15
Napoleon, Washington, and Lincoln, for instance, or, in the case
of Italy, Garibaldi. These figures have been represented as political
INTRODUCTION 7
the writings of the German thinker have been made the object of
“projections” and “selection” processes through their insertion
or “anchoring” in new contexts, with “eclectic” and “syncretistic”
results. As has been observed with regard to Nietzsche, a special
affinity is to be found between Mazzini and “post-liberal moods”
and atmospheres. Both figures, each in his own context, offered
the possibility to “express a mounting political dissatisfaction” in
the name of “protest” and the “reform” of the system. No doubt,
both contributed to engendering—through their reception, but
also through certain characteristic aspects of their thought—“ill
defined” ideologies. This again raises the question of the influence
the two thinkers had upon the genesis of fascism as an ideology
wavering between right and left, revolution and reaction.23
In his book Ventiquattro cervelli, Giovanni Papini recalls the
episode of the encounter between the aged Mazzini and the young
Nietzsche, and observes:
I
“ intend to speak to you of your duties. I intend to speak to you,
according to the dictates of my heart, of the holiest things we
know: to speak to you of God, of Humanity, of the Country, of the
Family.” On April 23, 1860, only a few weeks before Garibaldi’s
ships set sail from Quarto for the Expedition of the Thousand, and
only 11 months before the first government of unified Italy was
established, Mazzini was dedicating and ideally entrusting “to the
Italian working men” and to Italy his upcoming book The Duties
of Man.1 This text, Mazzini’s most famous work, 2 brings together
some central and recurrent themes in his thought. The original core
of the book was already to be found in some articles Mazzini had
published in Apostolato popolare in London in the years 1841–42.
In 1851 these articles were issued in Genoa as On the Duties of Man ,
the title by which they were committed to posterity one decade
later in their final expanded version. 3 At the center of the work
lies the concept of “Duty”: not just the most crucial of Mazzini’s
fundamental ideas but also—as some interpreters have argued—
“the greatest claim to originality of [his] political philosophy,”
which thus set s “duties above rights.”4 This concept had reached
full development in Mazzini’s thought by the early 1840s; yet it had
first been foreshadowed, a few years earlier, in his 1835 essay Faith
and the Future. 5 Already in this text one could read that “right is
12 GIUSEPPE MAZZINI AND THE ORIGINS OF FASCISM
Have you ever had the chance to read a small book by a Pole entitled
Livre d’un pélerin Polonais? It is a masterpiece, and a very poor Italian
translation of it is now being published. It is by a poet by the name of
Mickiewicz, who, in my opinion, is the leading poet of our age [ . . . ]
This book of a Polish pilgrim is of the sort of that other French book
GIUSEPPE MAZZINI AND THE RELIGION OF THE NATION 17
The book similar to Paroles and the Livre des pélerins, which
Mazzini had in mind, was to be Foi et Avenir.
Giuseppe Mazzini’s political thought concerning nationhood,
which acquired definition in the 1830s not least through these
combined influences, thus occupies a very peculiar place in the
democratic and liberal thought of nineteenth-century Europe.
In the context of European nationalist political cultures—which
first emerged, chiefly in France and Germany, in the early nine-
teenth century—Mazzini may be credited with having made the
most explicit attempt to turn nationalism into a system of beliefs
that, according to the forms and modes of a political religion, fully
pervades collective existence so as to bring about a revolutionary
change leading to the establishment of a new national communi-
ty. 36 I would describe this strongly faith-driven and irrationalist
thought as a religion of the nation , since, through what has been
termed the “transfer of the sacred,”37 it establishes the nation as a
new deity (albeit without completely replacing the old one): as the
object of a new form of worship, not unlike the one paid by the
French Revolution to Reason and the ideals of liberty, fraternity,
and equality. 38
and of Italy,” but even in the very definition of the nation’s genesis,
of the bond uniting the individual to it, and of the role the nation is
called to fulfill:
By the duties which bind me to the land wherein God has placed me,
and to the brothers whom God has given me [ . . . ] believing in the mis-
sion entrusted by God to Italy, and the duty of every Italian to strive to
attempt its fulfilment; convinced that where God has ordained that a
nation shall be, He has given the requisite power to create it; that the
people is the depository of that power.44
Chaque nation, comme chaque individu, a reçu une mission qu’elle doit
remplir. La France exerce sur l’Europe une véritable magistrature, qu’il
seroit inutile de contester, dont elle a abusé de la manière la plus coup-
able. Elle étoit surtout à la tête du système religieux, et ce n’est pas sans
raison que son Roi s’appeloit très-chrétien.51
(Every Nation, like every individual, received a mission that it
should accomplish. France exercises over Europe a true primacy,
which it is usless to dispute, and of which she has abused most guilt-
ily. She was especially at the head of the religious system, and it is
not without good reason that the French King was called “the most
Christian.”)
He then adds:
Mais la nationalité est autre chose encore.
La nationalité c’est la part que Dieu fait à un peuple dans le travail
humanitaire. C’est sa mission, sa tâche à accomplir sur la terre, pour que
la pensée de Dieu puisse se réaliser dans le monde: l’œuvre qui lui donne
droit de cité dans l’humanité: le baptême qui lui confère un caractère et lui
assigne son rang parmi les peuples ses frères.
(But nationality is something else still.
Nationality is the role assigned by God to the People within the
humanitarian travail. It is a people’s mission, their task to accomplish on
earth so that God’s thought may be realized in the world. Nationality is
the work that gives a people its right of citizenship within humanity. It is
the baptism which gives character to a people and designates their rank
among their brother peoples.)
Finally, he concludes:
Quand Dieu met un peuple dans le monde, en lui disant: Sois Nation! Il ne
lui dit pas: isole-toi; jouis de ta vie come l’avare de son trésor . . . il lui dit:
marche, la tête levée, parmi les fréres que je t’ai donnés, libre et sans con-
trainte, comme il convient à celui qui porte en son sein ma parole [. . .]
Or, ce nom, cette garantie, ce signe que Dieu place au front de chaque
peuple, c’est la nationalité; cette pensée qu’il est appelé à développer dans le
monde, c’est encore sa nationalité. C’est pourquoi elle est sacrée. 55
(When God places a people in the world and says to them: Be a Nation!
He does not say: isolate yourself; enjoy your life as a miser with his
treasure. He says: March, your head raised, among the brothers I gave
you, free, without constraints, as is fitting for the one who carries my
word in his chest.
Now, this name, this guarantee, this sign, placed by God on the
face of each people, is its nationality; the thought that [each people] is
caused to develop in the world, is again its nationality. This is why it
is sacred.)
The use of formulas and symbols was therefore crucial for Mazzini,
who turned to the Saint-Simonian movement as a model. Mazzini
often explicitly insisted on the function of “words” in his thought and
for his Giovine Italia project, particularly at the beginning of his polit-
ical career. In the autumn of 1831 he wrote to a Parisian follower and
correspondent:
desperately [. . .] Now, if not Liberty, what will this word be? Just
Independence?63
In 1833, while discussing the flag and the “symbol” of the associa-
tion with Luigi Melegari, Mazzini once again emphasized the role of
“words,” stating:
You already know that the only motto I regard as fit for our flag is
God and the People! This cry epitomises our symbol and that of the
future [. . .]
However, I believe it is essential, vital—not least for the reasons that
you yourself have mentioned without going into the consequences—to
add another word to the three. On the one side [of the flag] let us place
Unity, Independence, and Liberty; on the other, Equality. Make no
mistake: without including this word, we would be reverting to the
past. The mark of the age, of the revolutions of the 19th century, is that
of Equality. This is all the People knows—and we must give the People
a word. As concerns Unity, we cannot do without it—precisely for the
value attached to the two words.64
“We must give voice to the people,” Mazzini thus declared. The pre-
vious year, in his essay Di alcune cause che impedirono lo sviluppo della
libertà in Italia (“On some of the causes hindering the development of
freedom in Italy”) he had written:
And there is one word that the people everywhere understands, and
in Italy more than in other places; a word that to the multitudes
sounds like a definition of their rights, a whole political science in
sum, a plan for free institutions. The people has faith in this word,
seeing it as a guarantee of improvement and influence—since the
very sound of the word speaks of the people and vaguely reminds it
that it if it ever enjoyed any power or prosperity this was thanks to
that word written on the banner guiding it. The centuries may have
taken away the people’s awareness of its own strength, its sense of its
own rights, and everything else, but not its fondness for that word—
possibly the only one capable of lifting it out of the mire of inertia in
which it lies and lead it to prodigious feats.
That word is REPUBLIC.65
This prophetic and priestly dimension, and some of the features of the
religion of the nation, were soon to elicit discontent and criticism in
the very ranks of Mazzini’s followers. Starting from the early 1850s,
the paternalistic and authoritarian aspects of Mazzini’s thought, stem-
ming from its theistic components and educational-prescriptive con-
ception of politics, attracted criticism from important followers of his.
Carlo Pisacane, for instance, wrote of Mazzini’s religious ideas and his
“despotism”: “Mazzini does not seek the fate of a nation in the social
and international relations from which wars, conquests and revolu-
tions arise but, leaving the earth, searches for it in heaven.” Regarding
the nature of Mazzini’s political project and his religious doctrine of
“duties,” Pisacane drew the following conclusions:
God and the People, Mazzini says, means: law, and the people as the
interpreter of the law, so first of all he is inferring that the people is not
26 GIUSEPPE MAZZINI AND THE ORIGINS OF FASCISM
the legislator. So far, this law is unknown . . . Who shall reveal it? The
best by wisdom and virtue, Mazzini replies. So we must entrust them
with the guardianship of our souls. From whatever point, whatever
principle of the doctrines in questions we set off from, we are inex-
orably led to sheer despotism, an inevitable pitfall for anyone wish-
ing to acknowledge an absolute truth and right by which duties are
imposed.74
The usual phrases; the usual formula: the Rome of the people
replacing the Rome of the pontiffs and the Rome of the Caesars,
to unite and free Italy and renew humanity! A vague and mystical
formula like all those of Mazzini’s. And it is not true that he has any
well defined religious or economic or political system: he is only
constant, or rather obstinate, in this idea that Italy should form a
single state, with Rome as its capital, by means of a revolution, a
war, a popular government.
You are a republican. You say so; I believe you. But you are not of the
same stuff as those republicans of the Convention who refused to treat
with the King [ . . . ] But you, in 1860 as in 1831, as also in 1848 and in
1859, always insisted that form should be sacrificed before that great
idol of the unity of a complete nation.82
Aside from the 1831 letter to Charles Albert, Crispi also mentioned
the letter Mazzini had sent to Pius IX on September 8, 1847. Here
Mazzini had written to the Pope:
We will make a nation to rise up around you whose free and popular
development you will preside over for your lifetime. We will found a
unique Government in Europe which shall destroy the absurd divorce
between spiritual and temporal power and in which you will be chosen
GIUSEPPE MAZZINI AND THE RELIGION OF THE NATION 29
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 [ . . . ]. Lastly, [Mazzini’s] is [the] typical reli-
gion of all dogmatic and absolute spirits, the passion for uniformity
that they call unification and that is really the tomb of liberty.
Giosuè Carducci, bard of the Third Italy and the leading Italian poet
of the 1870–1900 period (he would later also be the first Italian recipi-
ent of the Nobel prize for Literature in 1906), placed at the center of
his Risorgimento epos the reconciliation of political and even reli-
gious contrasts of the unification process. He has been described
as a “a deliberate conciliator [ . . . ] of the classical world with the
Christian world, of the cult of form with the popularity of contents, of
renewal and tradition, of revolution and conservation, of national and
foreign.”43 Moreover, this reconciliation would spread from the con-
text of poetry to that of political ideology. Carducci was the interpreter
of the great patriotic myths, and his poetry and public stance were
often informed by the national public spirit in the various historical
phases.44 His entire work and his public persona were dominated by a
kind of national faith often characterized by a Mazzinian component.
According to Croce, despite the ideological and political contradic-
tions in Carducci’s work, it is pervaded by an aspiration to the “great-
ness of Italy”45 that would be monarchist, pro-Crispi, or colonialist
according to need.
Carducci’s patriotism has a pronounced mythical and symbolic
trait rather like the one characterizing Mazzini’s patriotism: his
vision of politics as a faith with irrational and aesthetic elements
recalls Mazzini’s religion of the nation. Although Risorgimento
ideals were transformed, if not superseded, in his public adherence
to the monarchy, we also find a continuity in Carducci’s devotion
to the myths and figures deriving from the Mazzinian tradition
and from its more recent developments, like the myth of the Third
Rome or the figure of Crispi. Mazzini himself was symbolically
seen by the poet as a figure engendering patriotic ideals. In this
way Carducci gave rise to a patriotism that is aesthetic, tradi-
tional, and populist, offering the Italian collective consciousness
a national ideology that is wavering and inconsistent—both pagan
FROM POETRY TO PROSE 39
The aim of Carducci’s civic poetry was thus to “reunite the father-
land” and this took place with the people as subject, or as driving force
(the “energy”), and with the monarchy as means, or rather, as “form.”
The term “form” also suggests the poet’s adherence to the aesthetic
element represented by the reigning house, which was also not indif-
ferent to the use of “force.”
When explaining the reasons for his tribute to Queen
Margherita in 1878 47—generally considered to represent his con-
version to the monarchy—Carducci repeatedly declared himself to
be a Republican, mentioning his recent turning down of the cross
for civic merit awarded to him by the queen. At the same time he
again emphasized the aesthetic impact of the figure of the queen:
“a romantic image” (“with a rare purity of line”; “with a simple and
truly superior elegance”). When she appeared before a crowd, this
figure sparked an emotional response verging on the religious: the
sovereign and his queen “must have touched the hearts of believ-
ers with trust in the fate of the monarchy tied to the fate of the
country.” According to Carducci “for many people [the queen
represented] an ideality that has been fulfilled.”48 In this way he
stressed the function of the rulers as a symbol embodied in liv-
ing people, again emphasizing the formal and aesthetic (“plastic”)
dimension sought by those contemplating the sovereigns: “Thanks
40 GIUSEPPE MAZZINI AND THE ORIGINS OF FASCISM
Let them not deny us the ideal, deny us God. O Wretches! So great
was the ideal that had accumulated in the souls of our fathers and in
our souls that its mere release [ . . . ] was capable of renewing a nation,
42 GIUSEPPE MAZZINI AND THE ORIGINS OF FASCISM
political influence (as well as for his indirect impact on the historiog-
raphy of the time), which culminated in his being labeled a precursor
of fascism.62
Alfredo Oriani’s encounter with Mazzini took place in two phases:
an initial phase of historicization and historical judgment at the end of
the 1880s, followed by a political reworking in the changed context of
the early 1900s. Oriani tended to examine the history of modern Italy
by means of heroic figures, which lead Antonio Gramsci to refer to his
historiographical “titanism.”63 According to the writer from Faenza
the first demiurges of the nation were the dramatist Vittorio Alfieri
(1749–1803), the promoter of the “third Italian epoch” (a formula
already evoking Mazzini),64 and the poet Ugo Foscolo (1778–1827).65
Oriani initially included Mazzini in his Lotta politica as a political
writer, a figure mediating between the spiritual tendencies of the
Catholic novelist Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1873) and the material-
ist strivings of the democratic writer and patriot Francesco Domenico
Guerrazzi (1804–1873):
His word would spread like an infection, his religious purity would illu-
minate the national soul, the heroism of his utopia would lead towards
victory after martyrdom, his faith would defeat all doubts, the logic of
his republican argument, ultimately contradicted by the presence of
the Savoy monarchy, would defeat the [idea of an Italian] federation by
means of [his ideal of] unity, and reduce the monarchic principle to a
mere accessory to the democratic idea.71
This claim summed up some aspects of the role that Mazzini would
continue to play in Oriani’s thought and in his political vision of the
new Italy. The writer, scion, and influential interpreter of liberal
FROM POETRY TO PROSE 45
“ideal meaning in the world”, a cause for “glory” but now also for a
“new responsibility [to rule] an empire.”78
Oriani’s vision therefore comprised both a spiritual definition of
the fatherland based on ideals and duties, and the racial elements that
contributed to determining it79 while also imposing new imperial
obligations, which could be invoked in the form of Mazzini’s precept:
“Be strong to become great, that is your duty.”80 Ultimately, however,
Oriani’s elitism would prevail along with his scorn for the fate of
democracy, the ideal of a “new aristocracy” cutting across the classes,
based on moral example yet also on the suspicion toward the crowd.81
His vision was increasingly leaving behind its Mazzinian origins and
following the Zeitgeist of the new century toward Nietzschean ideals.
3
facts had by now proven that “the unity of the Fatherland could
be obtained without those struggles and the forms constituting
part of Mazzini’s propaganda.”6 Clearly, in early twentieth-century
Italy, it was still necessary for the Mazzinian “initiative” and the
Republic to be put to the side.7 The Socialists, therefore, and Claudio
Treves, one of their leaders, in particular, attacked the adoption of
Mazzini’s Doveri, which they considered to be a “morally conserva-
tive tool”: “No apotheosis of mystical and authoritarian morals has
ever been written with greater passion or has therefore ever repre-
sented such a terrible snare for the freedom of conscience, and, as
a repercussion, for civic freedoms.” The Republican and renowned
social scientist Napoleone Colajanni replied denying that “the God
of the great revolutionary [Mazzini] could be confused with the
lying, cheating swindler god of the Catholic Church”8
Other readings from the early 1900s emphasize the religious
component of Mazzini’s thought, idealizing rather than criticizing
it, and reinterpreting it in a new light. Writing some years later,
the historian and antifascist exile in the United States, Gaetano
Salvemini believed that Catholic modernists were among those
responsible for the “revitalization” of Mazzini’s religious ideas at
the beginning of the century, claiming that their theories “had
much in common with those of Mazzini, even sharing some of the
same traits.”9 According to this historian, one of the most “vibrant”
commemorations of the Genoese politician—“despite its excessive
Christianization, [a description that] understands, loves and exalts
[him] in his intimate mystical religiosity”—was written in 1904 by
Tommaso Gallarati Scotti, a leading figure in the nascent modern-
ist movement. Gallarati held Mazzini to be a “singular Christian
who was not only unaware of it but even denied it, much more
Christian than those who are Christian merely in name and appear-
ance”; someone who could have been a “fervent apostle [ . . . ] of a
Catholicism free of political concerns and brought back to purity
and poverty.”10 The young modernist idealized—and transformed—
Mazzini’s faith along with his patriotism, which he placed in equi-
librium between the “national problem” and, with a pronounced
Christian emphasis, “the universal ‘communion’ of men.”11 Here,
too, we find a tendency to offset, for both religious and political
reasons, the excessively political aspect of Mazzini, demoting his
republicanism to “secondary.”12 What mattered most to Gallarati
Scotti, the reason why he considered Mazzini to be the “driving
52 GIUSEPPE MAZZINI AND THE ORIGINS OF FASCISM
force behind the rebuilt nation” and the “precursor of Italian great-
ness” were once again “those two words: God and people, which
are the distillation of our energies.”13 However, the manner and
contents distinguishing Gallarati’s participation in the religion of
the nation were not unique in modernist circles, and were shared
and approved of by the novelist and Nobel Prize candidate, Antonio
Fogazzaro (1842–1911), one of the figureheads of the movement.
Just as he was putting the finishing touches to his 1905 novel Il
Santo (The Saint), which would later be banned by the Church, he
wrote a letter to Gallarati informing him that he had read the text of
his conference “with extreme interest [ . . . ] with great approval.”14
In fact, Fogazzaro had long-standing ties with Mazzini and his
thought: around a decade earlier, in a meeting of the town council
in Vicenza, his home town, Fogazzaro had voted in favor of paying
homage to Mazzini, recalling him as a “great spiritualist thinker,
who inscribed the name of God on his banner, a mystic in short.”15
By his own admission, Fogazzaro’s Christian and Catholic support
for Mazzini the “mystic” grew out of what he termed his “idealiza-
tion” of the patriot. At the time the novelist wrote to a friend: “I
recognized that history may judge many of his actions harshly, but I
believed that the passing of time would allow us to idealize his fig-
ure.” The patriot Mazzini thus appealed to and inspired keen par-
ticipation even in those searching history or literature for religious
figures and examples outside the traditional bounds of faith.16
Also idealizing Mazzini at the beginning of the century was the
famous poet Giovanni Pascoli, known for his intimate poetry but
also for his patriotic engagement, in the name of which he partic-
ipated in the construction of the national discourse. In the years
running up to the birth centenary of the Genoese (1905), and imme-
diately afterward, Mazzini’s “shadow” was always “immanent” in
the speeches given by Pascoli,17 who was a sort of national bard
between the twilight of Giosué Carducci and the dawn of Gabriele
D’Annunzio. Pascoli not only recalled the patriot’s “solitude” and
his “dialectical” role within the process of unification, but also
expressed his own “faith in a unitary mysticism,” as well as the
contrasts that had characterized the events of the Risorgimento.18
However, Pascoli’s faith actually gravitated in a rather different
direction, toward what he called “patriotic socialism,”19 causing him
to make the rallying cry: “Workers of the world, unite!”, while add-
ing: “one should want to be both nationalist and internationalist,
MAZZINI IN THE NEW CENTURY 53
Italy had to do, in the wake of her old mission, to fulfil her new mis-
sion in the world; someone, ladies and gentlemen, said these words
long before us, using a very different tone:—North Africa must belong
to Italy!
[ . . . ] And the man who gave that order was Giuseppe Mazzini.29
even realize that his republic was the perfect antithesis to the mod-
ern State and to democracy itself,” and coming to the even more
radical conclusion that Mazzini “lack[ed] the idea of the modern
State and [was] driven towards a theocracy.”38 The emphasis that
Missiroli laid on the religious dimension of Mazzini’s thought coin-
cided with Sorel’s interests; they also shared an awareness of the
antidemocratic aspects of Mazzini. In a later letter to Missiroli, Sorel
mentioned Ernest Renan’s belief that Mazzini only desired “the res-
urrection of Italy in order to rule in the name of a new imaginary
papacy”: this judgment, however hasty, focused on the theocratic or
at least the religious and hierarchical nature of Mazzini’s project. 39
But what role was Sorel attributing to Mazzini and what in particu-
lar motivated his interest in the patriot? As suggested above, Sorel
also interpreted Mazzini through the Renanian concept of “God’s
witness,” which he transferred from the spiritual life of the indi-
vidual to the history of religious movements, as he wrote in 1914 in
the preface to Matériaux: “I believe in particular that the sentiment
of the divine presence invigorated Mazzini’s politics, at a time when
governments believed that his politics were merely the dream of
fanatics.”40 Sorel was particularly struck by the religious efferves-
cence of Mazzini’s thought and its impact upon the masses. In fact,
Sorel’s most famous and influential work, Reflections on Violence,
contained a significant reference to Mazzini in his illustration of the
theory of myths in the chapter on the “proletarian strike”:
In recent times Mazzini pursued what the wise men of his time called
a mad chimera. But we cannot deny that without Mazzini Italy would
never have become a great power and that he did more for Italian unity
than Cavour and all the politicians belonging to his school.41
redeem Italy, himself, and the world in a prose that is often streaked
with a Mazzinian language, as well as pervaded by an apocalyptic
spirit originating from a variety of sources ranging from the Gospels
to Nietzsche. According to Giuseppe Prezzolini, Papini’s friend and
colleague, Papini was “slightly . . . converted” not by Nietzsche, whom
they both admired, but by Mazzini, because both writer and patriot
were all about “duty, duty, duty.”48 Nonetheless, Papini’s mention
of Mazzini (in the period from 1903 to 1907 in which he edited the
periodical Leonardo) was more specifically referred to the search
for a new “risorgimento” that would finally complete and even sur-
pass Italy’s resurgence, that had concluded with Unification:49
I asked myself about Italy’s role, its mission in the world. And I could
not find the answer. It was then that I began, with a Mazzinian poor
timing, my campaign for a reawakening through force [ . . . ] I wanted
Italians to free themselves from the rhetoric of the past resurgences
[risorgimenti] and to set themselves a great common cause. After 1860
there was no longer any national Italian feeling or common thought. It
was time to set off on a new path. A nation lacking a messianic passion
is destined to collapse.50
fascinating for Papini as for Sorel before him—but could still have
learned a lesson about “revolutionary spirit” from “men such as
Mazzini and Kossuth” (the leader of the 1848 revolution in Hungary).54
The birth in late 1907 of a “Partito dell’Anima,”55 the planned Party
of the Soul, arose from that contrast—“One should make a ‘New
Testament’ as opposed to the Communist Manifesto,” wrote Papini to
Prezzolini.56 Two years earlier, Papini had announced his intention of
leading the “Giovane Italia” in Mazzini’s name. During their prepara-
tions for the new party and a periodical, Papini wrote to his friend,
telling him of the hopes that the Genoese apostle gave him: “Studying
Mazzini, I am filled with faith. We need to do something that makes
it worth being born.”57
Ardengo Soffici (1879–1964) prominent writer, artist, and fellow
traveler working with Prezzolini and Papini on the Florentine mag-
azines, shared his friend’s enthusiasm: “I have also started reading
Mazzini and I am glad to have found in him a genius I did not in the
least expect, as well as a sacred base for our future mission.” He went
on to suggest that they call themselves “Mazzinians,” or “Unitary
Democracy, Social Unity and ‘association of intellects’—which are
all Mazzinian titles and concepts.” He believed that after overcoming
their pessimism, egoism, and individualism, they needed to follow
the lesson of “this great master” and rediscover that kind of faith.58
Not long before, Papini had written to Prezzolini, telling him about
the need to write a “New Testament” that would “cause spiritual
life to prevail in the world,” as well as about the need to “return to
the crowd,” as he was intending to do with an upcoming lecture on
Mazzini.59 Some weeks later “[Soffici’s] reading of the two books by
Mazzini [apparently sent to him by Papini] had filled him with faith
and good will and trust in men or in the best of Humanity.” Soffici
himself concluded: “So one thing is certain: that we are all Mazzini’s
men!”60 Yet, the Mazzinian “Partito dell’Anima” never went beyond
this brief correspondence; the political dream that could have resus-
citated the religion of the nation in terms of patriotic regeneration
and antisocialist reaction was destined to remain on paper.61
In a letter written after World War I about the beginning of what was
to be a lifelong passion, Gaetano Salvemini (1873–1957) described his
introduction to Mazzini and the origins of his interest in this figure: “I
MAZZINI IN THE NEW CENTURY 61
petty bourgeoisie and working classes spilled blood, and the mod-
erates ruled, and democracy was once again subjected to the same
oppressions and the state of sieges carried out by the Austrians.
The only democrat who proved to have any sense has now been forgot-
ten by all. Realizing where Italy was heading and refusing to let him-
self be exploited, Carlo Cattaneo decided to go to Switzerland instead;
quite unlike Mazzini who was always inviting his followers to fight
beneath the Savoy banners and was periodically condemned to death
for it. Morally this may be heroism, politically it is cretinism.69
Two great themes lay at the heart of Salvemini’s Il pensiero religioso, polit-
ico, sociale di Giuseppe Mazzini (The Religious, Political and Social Thought
of Giuseppe Mazzini): Mazzini’s reflection on the national question and
his attitude toward socialism and the social question. Running through
the entire work was Salvemini’s attempt to define the religious nature of
Mazzini’s thought, and his insistence upon this aspect was one of the great-
est innovations introduced by Salvemini’s interpretation: according to the
historian, although Mazzini did belong to democracy, he needed to be
placed in that “vast wave of mysticism” that had characterized European
thought in the first half of the nineteenth century.75 Mazzini held that a
new religious epoch would dawn, surpassing Christianity and replacing
Christ with a “Messaiah people.”76 “God and Humanity” were to be the
two poles of the “new faith” and God was to be the seat of sovereignty.77
There would be no radical separation between State and Church: instead,
the Church—not the Catholic one, but a new Church—was to harmonize
with the State, and even direct it, despite the absence of both priesthood
and papacy, which were to be replaced with a “Council of Humanity.”78
Salvemini’s initial definition of Mazzini’s political program was “in fact”
that of a “religious republic and [that of] a political republic.”79 The his-
torian described the particular location of Mazzini’s thought in the bed
of democratic theories, defining the occasionally paradoxically syncretic
nature of his sources of inspiration in the following terms: “Among them
are many democratic ideas that belong to our own time, embodied in a
Utopian theocratic system resembling those in which medieval scholas-
ticism was so prolific: a fusion of Dante’s De Monarchia with Rousseau’s
Contrat Social and the doctrines of Saint-Simon,80 achieved by a revolu-
tionary nineteenth-century Italian patriot.”81 Salvemini was aware of the
dangers implicit in the fusion of this corpus of conceptions:
It was natural, therefore, that Mazzini’s ideal of God and the People—
wrote Salvemini—should seem a dangerous return to obsolete tradi-
tions, an incomprehensible rejection of all the most precious and most
painful achievements of the historical experience, of the most steadfast
and beneficial tendencies of modern civilization. 82
Salvemini believed that the greatest threat came from the “people’s
interpretation of the Divine Will”: “These are dangerous maxims,
which might well lead to the abolition of all liberties.”83 The hybrid
and composite nature of Mazzini’s thought led the historian to make
important remarks on the complex, and sometimes contradictory
reception—and different uses—being made of Mazzinian concep-
tions: his observations were clearly provoked by the reactions of
Mazzini’s heirs and critics, whose polemic Salvemini himself had wit-
nessed and on occasion participated in:
Each one took what he liked from the mass of the Master’s writings and
neglected or failed to understand the rest. Unity, republic, the people,
God, duty, Italy’s mission, the Third Rome, taken singly and apart
from their context, were repeated by his followers in a sense that dif-
fered from, or was entirely opposed to, that of the original doctrine.84
the first term of the couplet evoked by Vajna may have been “liberty,”
what actually prevailed here was discipline. Frequent appeals to Mazzini
were made during the interventionist campaign preceding the war: for
example, the socialist and Italian patriot Cesare Battisti (1875–1916),
who died as a martyr in the war, believed that this symbolic figure played
a seminal role in his own career from the beginning of the century in
the irredentismo movement (which aimed at the unification with Italy of
Trento and Trieste and their regions). And after his death on the scaffold,
Battisti himself would be compared to the “apostle” in the patriotic cata-
log of martyrs.4 Also democratic interventionism tended to appropriate
Mazzini as one of its symbols.5 Later, there would be frequent men-
tions of the patriot in trench magazines, particularly in 1918,6 when the
dream of Italy’s complete political unification seemed to be on the verge
of becoming reality. For example, the Voce del Piave responded to the
“collapse” of the Habsburg Empire with the following words: “Soldier of
Italy, you too are experiencing your glory days. It is thanks to you that the
dream of Giuseppe Mazzini, of our martyrs from [18]21 onwards, of the
most elect spirits, who quivered and yearned for freedom, for the inde-
pendence and unity of our entire Country [has become reality].”7 In the
war propaganda, Mazzini, together with “Garibaldi, the soldier-king and
the unknown soldier” became “symbolic personages,” protagonists of the
national discourse for the masses, whose “key factors” had now become:
“Order and primacy, class re-organization and national discipline, civi-
lizing expansion and firm military boundaries.”8 Mazzini reinterpreted
through the filter of the war could clearly support all these elements. As
an “inexhaustible producer of mystical sounding slogans,”9 the patriot
was one of the most frequently quoted authors in the letters and post-
cards supplied to troops by the “Case del Soldato,” centers founded by
the military chaplain, Don Giovanni Minozzi, to provide soldiers with
support and a place to relax while away from the trenches. Looking
back many years later, even the fascist regime’s future official historian,
Gioacchino Volpe, who had been among those responsible for creating
propaganda during the Great War, made ironical comments about the
“daily, universal, ultimately nauseating rehashing of Mazzini” in prowar
rhetoric.10
One of Mazzini’s readers and admirers during the war years was the
soldier Benito Mussolini. But he had not always been of among them.
THE NATION’S DUTIES BETWEEN WAR AND POSTWAR 71
There were no leaders; there were no few to guide the many, there were no
men strengthened by faith and sacrifice to grasp the quivering concept of
the masses—capable of understanding the consequences at a glance—who,
afire with all the generous passions, would distill them into one single pas-
sion for victory—who would calculate all the diffused elements, finding
the watchword of life and order for all—looking ahead, not behind them-
selves—pushing between the people and obstacles with the resignation of
men condemned to fall victim to both; inscribing on their banner Victory
or Death, and keeping that promise.
The need for a fascist doctrine was therefore linked to the legacy of
Mazzinian idealism, an aspect strongly emphasized by the intellectual
and ideological role that the philosopher Giovanni Gentile would play
in fascism.33 Again in 1921, Mussolini declared, “There is a need for
[ . . . ] preaching and for a practice that I would define as Mazzinian,
one capable of conciliating, and one that must conciliate right with
duty.” On September 20, 1922, in an important speech given in
Udine, which foreshadowed the atmosphere and ideals of the coming
“march,” Mussolini repeatedly numbered Mazzini among his inspir-
ers, along with Garibaldi, of the Risorgimento myth of Rome, which
fascism intended to elevate to “the city of our spirit,” while also evok-
ing Mazzini for his supposed acceptance of the “monarchical pact of
Italian unity.”34 In 1924 he appealed to a Mazzini who “did not distin-
guish between rights and duties, considering them terms of an insepa-
rable pair: the right ensues from a fulfilled duty.” And again in 1926,
with an explicit reference to the symbolic Mazzinian language resusci-
tated by fascism: “The fundamental principle that fascism asserted is:
there are no rights without duties.”35 The theme of Mazzinian duties
reemerged at the beginning of the fascist dictatorship,36 increasingly
representing a call to order and discipline. Economic Mazzinianism
also acted as a radical contrast to liberal democracy. At the fascist Party
congress in June 1925, Mussolini said (bringing together Mazzini and
the by now old influence of Sorel’s revolutionary syndicalism, which
had already converged in the young Benito’s review of Reflections on
Violence):
I have no fondness for the liberal state and I believe I was the first to attempt to
codify a structure drawing upon the real power of the organized production
forces rather than upon the anachronistic impotence of Parliamentarism,
which I stopped believing in as soon as I started thinking for myself.48
His mother, on the other hand, had socialist sympathies, and intro-
duced him to Pisacane. Thus “the idols of [his] adolescent life were
Giuseppe Mazzini, [the revolutionary] Carlo Pisacane, [the socialist]
Andrea Costa, and [the nationalist] Alfredo Oriani.”56 Even before
war broke out, Grandi identified with “national radicalism”57 and
from 1913, he invoked the ideals of
We are not prejudicially against the Party, what we are against is the
party failing to reflect the ideals and aims of our movement, which can
be summed up in just three words: liberty, nation and syndicalism . . .
Fascism, a movement of democracy, must prepare to become the soul and
conscience of the new national democracy faced with the great task of
causing the masses to adhere to the State.
It was to have been the link between the liberal century and the socialist
century, but it was killed by Mussolini when, after exalting it, he realized
that the corporatist system was propelling the Italian people towards free-
80 GIUSEPPE MAZZINI AND THE ORIGINS OF FASCISM
dom. From that moment on, he transformed it into a mere tool of the party
dictatorship.63
In order to win, fascism must eliminate old privileges rather than cre-
ating new ones.
This means overturning the old formula of equal rights by introducing
equal duties. Not producing in order to live, but living to produce.
[ . . . ] An idea without force is nonsensical; the ridiculous fate of
disarmed prophets. Today’s liberals are living caricatures, shadows
fighting for a shadow. But force without an idea is equally monstrous.
From this point of view, as a supporter of action, I will never forget
Mazzini.65
affirmed the superiority of the Mazzinian idealism that had given rise
to the theory of “free productive group organizing” (associazionismo
libero produttore) proposed by Balbo. Balbo believed in the “capitalist
classes” that needed to “open their hearts to the sufferings of the work-
ing classes” and paternalistically “comprehend their needs, accompa-
nying them on the path to redemption.” The working classes needed
to replace the class struggle and claims for rights with new means and
ideals: “the concept of duty must be a religion for all citizens; this alone
must give rise to the solution of the social problem.”69
Few of these libertarian and pro-worker positions would survive in
the years of the regime, with the exception of mere evocations of the
Mazzinian tradition. In 1932, when Balbo’s diary from ten years ear-
lier was about to be published, Mussolini called for the elimination of
a phrase—“Like me, many fascists openly sympathize with Mazzinian
ideas”70—considering it to be a reference that could contradict the
conservative framework imposed by the regime. The appropriation of
Mazzini, along with the influence of Sorel’s revolutionary syndicalism,
had given rise to a seam of ideas that would run through the next two
decades, founding corporatism within a national tradition that stretched
back to the Risorgimento and, in particular, to Mazzini’s legacy.
classified as war literature,” at the time he wrote that he had pursued his
studies of Mazzini “because of [his] desire to learn lessons from the writ-
ings of this great Italian, which might prove edifying in the tremendous
times that are at hand.”75 Levi’s critique of Mazzini would also have a
lasting influence on his cousins Carlo and Nello Rosselli (the prominent
antifascist activists), whom he guided and inspired: as we shall see, they
too embraced the myth of the Genoese politician, admiring his ethical
and patriotic figure, though not his thoughts or ideology.76 Levi’s book,
based on rigorous philological research, was pervaded by a profound
piety and sympathy for Mazzini while, at the same time, revealing the
distance between the socialist reformist orientation of its author and
the views of the patriot, especially in socioeconomic matters. Many
years later, Levi would write that he “was not a Mazzinian with regard
to religion or politics” and that he “had never wished to conceal, for
the convenience of his personal beliefs or opinions, either the religious
foundations of all of Mazzini’s ideas or the often profound divergence
from so many views” that Levi defended.77
A key chapter in the work was dedicated to Sovereignty, Government
and Democracy, and touched upon one of the core concepts of Mazzini’s
political theory, throwing new light on the authoritarian component
of Mazzinianism. Here Levi revealed how Mazzini’s thought contra-
dicted the ideals of the French Revolution, and how his action contra-
dicted the Revolution’s legacy: “As a believer and politician, the main
aim of his actions was to free European democracy from the influence
of the ideas of the French Revolution, which he held to be harmful.” 78
Levi claimed that the democratic and revolutionary Mazzini wished to
found a new authority, supporting his opinion with quotations from
works of the Genoese: “the Authority is sacred . . . and constituting it is
the problem of the century.” He went on to say: “we live by Authority:
democracy’s task is to replace the exhausted threadbare authority with
a new authority [ . . . ] not to destroy the principle of authority.” And
Levi added: “The source of authority can only be sought in God.” 79
Thus the philosopher began to define Mazzini’s peculiar position in
the political thought of European democracy:
Giuseppe Mazzini did not theorize or seek new liberties but a new authority.
The peculiar nature of his political philosophy does not arise from a doctrine
of rights, of individual guarantees against political and religious power, but
on the contrary from the passionate and ceaseless search for a principle that
is higher than that right, for an aim [ . . . ] transcending the sphere of political
rights as well as the sovereignty of the State and the people.
THE NATION’S DUTIES BETWEEN WAR AND POSTWAR 83
Without in any way restricting his political belief that the sole master on
the earth was the people [ . . . ] he stated that the true sovereign was not
the people but God, and that the people was merely the bearer, the rep-
resentative, the interpreter of that sovereignty, and that its authority was
only legitimate to the extent that it represented subjection to divine will,
compliance with God’s law.82
justice and liberty during the clash between the European nations.
Rodolfo Mondolfo (1877–1976) wrote in Salvemini’s Unità that each of
them had to carry out its own mission “with an awareness of the equal
rights of all nations and of the need for liberty for all.”92 Some years
later, Mondolfo, a historian of philosophy who was soon to become a
militant antifascist93 (like his brother Ugo Guido, who was the editor
of the major socialist journal Critica sociale for many years), would
produce an exacting parallel study titled Mazzini e Marx, published
in Critica Sociale in 1923 and later collected in a new edition of his
own Sulle orme di Marx. This comparison highlighted profound dif-
ferences between the thoughts of the two men, as well as a number of
affinities that came to the fore in the across-the-board sensitivities of
the postwar political scene. Using Francesco De Sanctis’s analysis as
his starting point, Mondolfo reflected on the “pedagogy of action” in
Mazzini, adopting an approach influenced by the recently published
texts of Giovanni Gentile94 dwelling on the Mazzinian interpreta-
tion of “insurrectional action” that “through the dangers it entails,
and through the sacrifice it often leads to, educates the character and
forms the conscience.”95 Mondolfo also saw an affinity between the
“pedagogy of action” theorized by Marx and Engels in the Communist
Manifesto and the “Mazzinian concept of struggle”: “insurrections rep-
resent the same thing for an oppressed nation according to Mazzini
as strikes do for the proletariat according to Engels.”96 In this context,
Mondolfo also advanced a genealogy stretching from Mazzini and
Marx to Georges Sorel: “The pedagogy of action, so often considered a
brilliant intuition of Sorel, was therefore a concept common to Mazzini
and the two Dioscuri of historical materialism.”97 This meant that even
in a democratic environment, it was possible to conceive of an activ-
ist reading of Mazzini—reinterpreted in the light of Sorel—potentially
leading to burdensome consequences. But there was also a profound
rift between Mazzini and Marx: Mazzini was “a deeply religious and
mystical spirit”; for Marx “the driving force behind history is man.”98
Mondolfo dwelt at length on the nature of Mazzini’s religious thought,
pointing out that for him “the cause is God, whose prophet and instru-
ment is humanity, which receives its fate from him like a mission law.”
He went on to write “Mission and not a demand of men, duty, not right
or mere aspiration.” He concluded with the following reflection on the
sacrificial nature of Mazzini’s thought: “thus the sacred character of
the obligation incumbent upon all, individuals and collectivity, of the
dedication and self-sacrifice for the mission entrusted to them by God
86 GIUSEPPE MAZZINI AND THE ORIGINS OF FASCISM
Mazzini [who] is one of Italy’s most religious thinkers, and the great
prophet of the new Italy. At his side we find Gioberti, despite the youth-
ful vagaries of his thought. And overlooking them, Manzoni, who was
not a man of action but one of the most fervent instigators of the unity
and independence of the fatherland; as well as Rosmini, a spirit of great
moderation, moderate too in his liberal aspirations, yet also collabo-
rating in the great national endeavour of 1848. They are accompanied
by numerous minor figures: Balbo, Tommaseo, Lambruschini and by
a host of neo-Guelphs.2
another philosopher who, only a few years later, would give the famous
rallying cry Workers of the World Unite! in reference to another uto-
pia, [Gioberti] would call upon all Italians to unite, princes together
with the federation, and princes with their peoples through reforms.”3
Swept away by the political fervor and the patriotic atmosphere of
World War I, at the end of the conflict Giovanni Gentile too would
assume an active role in the nation’s political life, a role that he would
never cast off. And in a seminal reflection titled Filosofia e politica
(Philosophy and Politics) in 1918, he would explicitly refer to Marxism
as a “philosophy with a huge historic importance precisely because it
was also political.”4
But Gentile’s entrance upon the political scene was marked above
all by his return to the tradition of the Italian Risorgimento and his
rediscovery of its “prophets.” In 1919, the philosopher published a
new study on Gioberti and two essays on Mazzini in the national-
ist periodical Politica, soon to be collected in the volume I profeti del
Risorgimento italiano, which was brought out in 1923 when Gentile
was already a minister in Mussolini’s first cabinet. In those essays he
examined the figures of the two patriots side by side, while attribut-
ing the dominant role, definitively, to Mazzini. Although Gioberti’s
thought was superior to Mazzini’s conceptions in philosophical and
historical terms, they shared close spiritual and intellectual origins,
and similar aims. According to Gentile, Gioberti was “a deeply reli-
gious soul, with a mystical-Jansenist education and inspirations.” Like
Mazzini he was “initially influenced by Rousseau and Saint-Simon,”
later developing “strong sympathies for Lamenais.” Moreover “he also
sought a kind of Christianity” and “like Mazzini, [felt] the need to
extend this Christian spiritualist conception [ . . . ] to social and politi-
cal life, to promote the renewal of society driven by its real spiritual
strengths.”5 Although Gioberti’s religion was the “same as Mazzini’s,”
“it was raised to the level of philosophy,” above all, of a “Catholic
philosophy.”6 Moreover, by returning to Risorgimento thought at this
point in his life, Gentile was forced to rethink a number of underlying
political categories that had assumed new meanings in the wake of the
postwar political and cultural debate, and which he now reinterpreted
in a different light, that is, by filtering them through the philosophical
system of his own so-called actual idealism, which had acquired its
definitive form at least by 1912. During the course of the war, Gentile
had found himself drawn to Mazzini in particular, rediscovering his
religious dimension while working on a series of reviews of various
90 GIUSEPPE MAZZINI AND THE ORIGINS OF FASCISM
Embattled against this State, Fascism took its strength from its idea,
which attracted a rapidly growing number of the young because of the
fascination that comes from any religious idea that calls for sacrifice. It
became the party of the young—just as Mazzini’s Young Italy grew out
of a similar political and moral need after the events of 1831. That party
also had its Hymn of Youth, which Fascists sung joyously from an exul-
tant heart. And like Mazzini’s Young Italy, Fascism became the faith of
all Italians who were offended by the past and eager for renewal.20
In the same way that the Giovine Italia formula God and People made
the imperative and absolute value of ideal rights, or of the demands of
the people, depend upon a religious concept, that is, upon the vision
of the people as a living revelation of God, the fascist concept of the
national State or of the Fatherland superior to all classes, groups and
individuals [ . . . ] is the concept of something absolute that comprises
the end in itself and is therefore divine.22
But the mistreatment of the doctrine and history in that writing [the
Manifesto] palls beside its abuse of the word “religion”; because if
those intellectual fascist gentlemen are to be believed, we are now to
be delighted by a religious war in the name of a new gospel and a new
apostleship against an old superstition.
Croce went on to add that he did not intend to “abandon [his] old faith”:
[The] faith, which has been the very life of modern, resurgent Italy for
two and half centuries. In this faith are welded together love of truth,
desire of justice, generosity towards men and civilization, zeal for intel-
lectual and moral education, care for freedom, and a guarantee of all
real progress.29
ideals and duties, Croce certainly did not consider Mazzini a political
thinker, continuing to be dismissive of his role in this sphere.
this man [ . . . ] has to offer us.”57 Rosselli therefore founded his rejection
of Mazzini’s thought on the criticisms of Salvemini and Levi. Like his
teacher Salvemini, Nello Rosselli would study Mazzini passionately and
rigorously—working at length on preliminary research for a biography
that he would never complete—looking above all at Mazzini the man
as a model and source of inspiration. Although he was dismissive of
Mazzini’s “quasi-doctrine” (which he called a “ dottrinetta”) and a “cer-
tain indeterminacy” in Mazzini’s writings, he also had this to say: “We
need [ . . . ] to draw closer to a man who won no victories yet emerged
from his defeats with an even more determined idea and tempered for
action. This may prove useful to those who are forced to submit to the
unfair yet fleeting victory of others with immobility or a mere appear-
ance of movement.”58 Mazzini’s example could therefore offer comfort
to those who found themselves forced to face fascism with an unjust
political immobility, and we cannot ignore the fact that their relation-
ship with the Nathan and Rosselli families meant that Mazzini was also
a family myth for both Carlo and Nello. Carlo would evoke these family
ties to Mazzini when he was placed on trial in Savona in 1927, together
with Ferruccio Parri (1891–1981, future prime minister of Italy in 1945),
for having assisted the socialist leader Filippo Turati in his escape from
Italy.59 In Giustizia e Libertà circles, for example, Mazzinian references
were often made by those with a family history linked to Mazzinianism
(e.g., Parri’s father was a republican introduced to the Mazzinian faith
by the republican Alberto Mario60); Mazzini and his biography could be
evoked as models of life, or even for spiritual or ideal comfort based on
biographies or correspondence. For example, Ernesto Rossi wrote to his
mother from prison: “It would give me great pleasure if you too were to
read [Mazzini’s letters]: Maria M[azzini, Giuseppe’s mother] would be
more than a sister to you, and you could take the same comfort in her
that I did.”61
Writing about Giuseppe Mazzini’s programs and doctrine, Nello
Rosselli maintained that he was personally not “among those retain-
ing that Mazzini’s program held the entire solution to the social pro-
gram,” believing rather that “this program alone was not capable of
informing a true working party.” Mazzianism lacked the revisionism
experienced by marxism, this was the “clearest evidence of its failure.”62
Back in 1924, Nello Rosselli had made the following remarks on the
historical level but in ways that nonetheless seem to express his adhe-
sion to the criticism expressed by Mazzini’s followers, who at the time
were distancing themselves from his thought:
100 GIUSEPPE MAZZINI AND THE ORIGINS OF FASCISM
They have tired above all of that uniform mysticism [ . . . ], of that veil
of mystery, of that constant haze enshrouding Mazzini; his reasoning
is so complex, his premises so confused, his entire system such a tangle
of logic and sentiment that simple healthy brains can neither compre-
hend nor follow it.63
You are right to say that the Mazzini who wrote Doveri dell’uomo is still
relevant today. For us he will always be alive and present among us as the
greatest spiritual builder of that Italy, in which we continue to believe—
despite everything. I consider those few dozen pages as one of the great-
est books ever written, and it never fails to move me deeply whenever
I read it.
Just a few lines further down, though, Rossi adopted a more psy-
chological approach:
A few lines later he went on: “[Mazzini] does not consider Italy’s
past in terms of something that should be restored, [ . . . ] but as an
incitement, a good omen offering hope that we can drag ourselves out
of the mire and set about reconstructing Italy”.90 His reading recast the
possible ideological incorporation of Mazzini by antifascism followed,
soon after, by the Resistance, while the Repubblica Sociale Italiana
(the RSI or Republic of Salò) would soon resuscitate another fascist
version of Mazzini.91 But Salvatorelli’s interpretation was unable to go
beyond its limited, unstable Partito d’Azione context or really affirm
itself, other than in restricted circles, in democratic Italy. Only a few
years earlier, as Europe was poised on the brink of a new world war,
Ernesto Rossi who had once been so moved by Mazzini, admiring him
profoundly for both his ideals and ethics while maintaining a certain
critical distance, had reflected bitterly on the difficult Mazzinian heri-
tage and its unpredictable, tragic degenerations, composing a kind of
leave-taking from Mazzini:
“Today, at the moment of expiation of its own sins and of the crimes
of its leaders, the Italian people should ponder the reasons for its
fall and its opportunities for redemption in the pages of Mazzini.”
In 1945, it was with these solemn words that Luigi Salvatorelli ended
his introduction to a small collection of Mazzini’s writings published
shortly after Italy’s liberation from Fascism and from the Nazi occu-
pation.1 This two-fold legacy of crisis and possible redemption passed
down by Mazzini somehow encapsulated the complex question of the
fortunes of one of the fathers of the Italian nation: controversial ideo-
logical inspirer of different political currents, including Fascism in
the last quarter of the century, and later, a possible source of new
political experiences capable of producing new democratic promises.
But was it effectively possible, indeed had it ever been possible, to
return to Mazzini?
My reconstruction ends here with a synthetic reflection on the
absence of a democratic civil religion in Italy,2 asking questions
about the failed role, the weaknesses, and even the negative role of
Mazzinianism in this absence. I realize that neither a history of his
ideas nor a reconstruction of the political uses of Mazzini’s thought
and writings can fully explain the impact that Mazzini’s legacy had
upon national matters, patriotic sentiment, and the political imagina-
tion, given that a large part of this legacy was entrusted to the appeal of
Mazzini’s figure, which was largely symbolical rather than theoretical
or ideological. The first step to studying how a civil religion developed
108 GIUSEPPE MAZZINI AND THE ORIGINS OF FASCISM
vision, an aspect that would come under fire in the lasting analyses
of Mazzini’s thought—whether the more severe scrutiny of Gaetano
Salvemini, or the more sympathetic stance of Luigi Salvatorelli—which
were all critical of the “popular theocracy” in his political project. As he
wrote in 1864 in his Note autobiografiche, Mazzini considered the for-
mula “a free Church in a free State” to be an “empty” one: first, because
he could not tolerate the presence of the Catholic Church in Rome and
in the new Italian State, and, second, because he believed that State and
Church—temporal and spiritual power—needed to be unified. In 1849,
during the Roman Republic, Mazzini wrote:
“Render the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things which are
God’s.” Can they tell you anything, which is not God’s? Nothing is Caesar’s
except in so far as it is such in conformity with the divine law. Caesar—that
is, the temporal power, the civil government—is nothing but the mandatory,
the executor, so far as its powers and the times allow, of God’s design. 13
Introduction
14. For all these quotes and their context, see chapter 5, part 3 in this book.
15. Raoul Girardet, Mythes et mythologies politiques, Paris: Seuil, 1986, p. 73.
16. See Jean Tulard, Le mythe de Napoléon, Paris: Armand Colin, 1971; Lucy
Riall, Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero, New Haven, CT and London: Yale
University Press, 2006; Mario Isnenghi, Garibaldi fu ferito. Storia e mito
di un rivoluzionario disciplinato, Rome: Donzelli, 2007; Dino Mengozzi,
Garibaldi taumaturgo, Manduria: Lacaita, 2008; Barry Schwartz, George
Washington: The Making of an American Myth, New York: Free Press,
1987; Schwartz. Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. One might also want to
consider the—no doubt rather different—case of the appropriation of
literary authors and icons: see, for instance, Rodney Symington, The
Nazi Appropriation of Shakespeare: Cultural Politics in the Third Reich,
Lewinston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005.
17. This parallel was first drawn by Carducci in a speech on Mazzini’s death,
quoted in “Per la morte di Giuseppe Mazzini” (1882) in Giosue Carducci,
Confessioni e battaglie, Second series, Rome: Sommaruga, 1883, p. 219.
On Napoleon as Prometheus, as well as a “demigod,” “messiah” etc., see
Tulard, Le mythe de Napoléon, passim.
18. Mazzini was described as “the Christ of the [19th] century” by Jessie
White Mario in her biography of the Genoese; a parallel with Christ and
Socrates is drawn in Giovanni Bovio, Mazzini, Milan, Sonzogno, 1905,
p. 40. Both references may be found in Alessandro Levi, La filosofia
politica di Giuseppe Mazzini, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1917, p. 311. The myth
of Mazzini as Christ also raises the more general question of his role as
a martyr-hero or “sad hero” (particularly famous are his melancholy
portraits and his “face that never laughed,” to quote the poet Giosue
Carducci). On this, see Alberto Mario Banti, “La memoria degli eroi,” in
Storia d’Italia. Annali 22, Il Risorgimento, ed. Alberto Mario Banti and
Paul Ginsborg, Turin: Einaudi, 2007, pp. 641–645.
19. Girardet, Mythes et mythologies, pp. 78–80. However, one should also
take account of the “legislator” variant (ibid., pp. 77–78), with reference,
for instance, to Mazzini’s Duties of Man.
20. Girardet, Mythes et mythologies, p. 83.
21. See Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990,
Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1992, pp.
1–16, from which the subsequent quotes have been drawn. With regard to
Italy, see Domenico M. Fazio, Il caso Nietzsche. La cultura italiana di fronte a
Nietzsche, 1872–1940, Milan: Marzorati, 1988 and Mario Sznajder, “Nietzsche,
Mussolini and Italian Fascism,” in Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? On the
Uses and Abuses of a Philosophy, ed. Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Wistrich,
Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002, pp. 235–262.
22. Different views on this issue emerge from the aforementioned volume
Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism?
124 NOTES
23. This issue has been raised—albeit without taking into account the influ-
ence of Mazzini, which fascism openly embraced—first of all by Zeev
Sternhell, Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, trans. David
Maisel, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986 (orig. ed. Paris,
1983), and by Gentile, The Origins of Fascist Ideology. By contrast, it does
not seem to me that Mazzini’s thought can easily be associated with the
so-called totalitarian democracy Jacob Talmon has studied, even less
used to explain—on account of its alleged Jacobin origin—the veer-
ing of maximalist socialists, starting from Mussolini himself, toward
stances that eventually led to the emergence of fascism (as has indeed
been argued by Giovanni Belardelli, “Il fantasma di Rousseau: Il fascismo
come democrazia totalitaria,” in Belardelli, Il Ventennio degli intellettuali:
Cultura, politica, ideologia nell’Italia fascista, Rome and Bari: Laterza,
2005, pp. 245–246 and 252–254; and, more recently, Belardelli, Mazzini,
Bologna: Il Mulino, 2010, p. 244; see also Roberto Vivarelli, Il fallimento
del liberalismo: Studi sulle origini del fascismo, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1981,
p. 137; Vivarelli, Storia delle origini del fascismo: L’Italia dalla grande
guerra alla marcia su Roma, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991, vol. II, pp. 396–
398). Again with reference to Talmon, we might say that Mazzini was an
exponent not of “totalitarian democracy” in the tradition of Rousseau
and the Jacobins, but rather of the later “romantic messianism” (see Jacob
Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, London, 1952; Talmon,
Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase, New York and Washington:
Praeger, 1960, pp. 256–277 focusing on Mazzini). If the invoking of
Mazzini led to fascism, or at any rate was used to justify it, this is precisely
because of the markedly antisocialist component of his thought and his
criticism of the French revolutionary tradition. What is an altogether dif-
ferent matter is the adoption on the part of Mazzini (as we shall see),
and later of fascism, of the “political style” of the French Revolution—as
has been studied, partly through an engagement with Talmon, by George
L. Mosse, “Political Style and Political Theory: Totalitarian Democracy
Revisited” (1984), in Mosse, Confronting the Nation: Jewish and Western
Nationalism, Hanover and London: University Press of New England for
Brandeis University Press, 1993, pp. 60–69; see also Mosse, “Fascism and
the French Revolution” (1989), in Mosse, The Fascist Revolution. Toward
a General Theory of Fascism, New York: Howard Fertig, 1999, pp. 69–93.
24. See Giovanni Papini, 24 cervelli (1912), 4th ed., Milan: Studio Editoriale
Lombardo, 1918, p. 163 (originally published as “Preghiera per Nietzsche”
in La Voce, II, 6, January 20, 1910, pp. 247–248). The episode in ques-
tion is described in slightly different terms by a first-hand witness,
namely the philosopher’s sister: see Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, The Life
of Nietzsche I: The Young Nietzsche, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici, New
York: Sturgis and Wolton, 1912, pp. 143–144. Later, in his Italian period,
Nietzsche visited Mazzini’s grave at Staglieno: see Förster-Nietzsche, The
NOTES 125
Life of Nietzsche II: The Lonely Nietzsche, trans. Paul V. Cohn, New York:
Sturgis and Wolton, 1915, p. 116.
25. Benito Mussolini recalled the episode of the encounter between Mazzini
and Nietzsche in an article from 1930, “Itinerario nietzschiano in Italia”
(a review of Guido De Pourtalès’ book Nietzsche en Italie, Paris: Grasset,
1929, which was published anonymously in Popolo di Roma, January
4, 1930: see Benito Mussolini, Opera Omnia, vol. XXXV, Florence: La
Fenice, 1962, pp. 89–91). This article ends, however, in the name not of
Mazzini but of Nietzsche: “Oggi la ‘volontà di potenza’ in Europa è rap-
presentata soltanto dal fascismo.” (“The ‘will to power’ in Europe today
is only represented by fascism.”)
1. I have used the following English translation: Joseph Mazzini, The Duties
of Man, London: Chapman & Hall, 1862.
2. For the many Italian editions of Duties printed in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries and on their popularity worldwide, see
Terenzio Grandi, Appunti di bibliografia mazziniana: La fortuna dei
“Doveri,” Mazzini fuori d’Italia, la letteratura mazziniana oggi, Turin:
Associazione Mazziniana Italiana, 1961.
3. On the genesis and complex texual development of Duties, see Vittorio
Parmentola, Doveri dell’uomo: La dottrina, la storia, la struttura, in
Mazzini e i repubblicani italiani: Studi in onore di Terenzio Grandi nel
suo 92° compleanno, Turin: Palazzo Carignano, 1976, pp. 355–420. On
the more philological aspects of the text, see the edition published on the
centennial of the author’s death, ed. Guglielmo Macchia, Rome: Camera
dei Deputati, 1972.
4. See Alessandro Levi, La filosofia politica di Mazzini (1922), Naples:
Morano, 1967, p. 101.
5. Already before then, for instance, Mazzini had written the following
words in “Ai lettori Italiani: Un esule” (1832), Giuseppe Mazzini, Scritti
editi ed inediti, Edizione Nazionale (henceforth quoted as SEI, followed
by the Roman numeral of the specific volume), vol. II, pp. 241–251. “Find
therefore unity and make it preceed all attempts of reform. Present your-
self to your nation with the table of duties and rights. Preach using words,
that the masses will understand: [those will be] the moral principles pre-
siding over regeneration. Religion will sanction those rights, those duties,
those principles.” Besides, one should bear in mind the introductory for-
mula used for the oath of Giovine Italia: “In the name of God and of Italy
/ In the name of all the martyrs of the holy Italian cause who have fallen
beneath foreign and domestic tyranny / By the duties which bind me to
the land wherein God has placed me, and to the brothers whom God has
126 NOTES
given me,” see Istruzione Generale per gli Affratellati nella Giovine Italia
[1831], in SEI, vol. II, pp. 54–55 (italics mine).
6. Quoted in Levi, La filosofia politica, pp. 106–107 (English translation from
Joseph Mazzini, Essays: Selected from the Writings, Literary, Political and
Religious, trans. E. A. Venturi, London: Walter Scott, 1887, pp. 37–38).
Again, not long after Faith and the Future, Mazzini wrote the following
words about “duties” (connecting them to Christianity and Jesus’ teaching):
“You must reform, change and somewhat transform these men; you should
teach them not only their rights, but their duties; [ . . . ] This is the work of
principles, of beliefs, of religious thought, of faith. This was the work of
Christ.” See Giuseppe Mazzini, “Des intérêts et des principes,” La Jeune
Suisse, December 30, 1835, January 2 and 9, 1836, SEI, vol. VII, p. 186.
7. See Parmentola, Doveri dell’uomo: La dottrina, la storia, la struttura, p.
363, note 22.
8. See Nicola Abbagnano, “Dovere,” in Grande Dizionario, 4th ed., Turin:
UTET, 1986, pp. 911–912, on Fichte’s concept of “Duty.” Still Mazzini
would not appear to have had any first-hand knowledge of Fichte, pace
Otto Vossler, Il pensiero politico di Mazzini, Florence: La Nuova Italia,
1971 (orig. ed. Munich and Berlin, 1927).
9. See Dei Doveri degli Uomini: Discorso ad un giovane di Silvio Pellico da
Saluzzo, Venice: Tipografia di Paolo Lampato, 1834 (cf. Levi, La filosofia
politica, p. 103; see, too, Parmentola, Doveri dell’uomo, pp. 361–362).
10. See Opuscoli inediti di Fra Girolamo Savonarola, Paris: Delaforest, 1835,
later known as Niccolò Tommaseo, Dell’Italia: Libri cinque.
11. Mazzini, for instance, wrote the following words to his mother about
Pellico’s Duties as soon as he had finished reading the work: “I have found
it very mediocre indeed. Why on earth did Pellico decide he wanted to
be a new Thomas à Kempis? The old one was enough. But there are two
or three chapters on love and women that are most delicate and square
very well with my own sensibility” (Bern, April 7, 1834, SEI, IX, p. 283, in
Parmentola, Doveri dell’uomo, p. 361). Generally speaking, Mazzini criti-
cized liberal Catholics for being resigned and quietistic, branding them
with the (in his view) disparaging label of “Christianisme à la Manzoni”
(Christianity Manzoni-style): this is how he described Tommaseo’s “idées
bien arrêtées” (fixed and conservative ideas) in a letter to Giuditta Sidoli,
Bienne, April 2, 1834, in SEI, vol. IX, p. 277.
12. See Felicité Lamennais, Le livre du Peuple, Paris: Delloye et Lecou, 1838,
chapters IX–XIV. This model for Duties has largely been overlooked by
scholars of Mazzini and is only mentioned by Levi, La filosofia politica,
p. 103 (who claims to be following [Ernesto Nathan], “Cenni e proemio al
testo” in Scritti editi ed inediti di Giuseppe Mazzini, edizione Daelliana,
vol. XVIII, p. LX). See also the recurrent references made to Lamennais
in Mazzini’s letters from the years 1838–1839, which is to say the period
just before his first articles for Apostolato Popolare, leading up to Duties.
NOTES 127
of Nations, Oxford and Cambridge MA: Blackwell, 1993, and esp. Chosen
Peoples.
54. Mazzini had strongly been influenced in the formulation of this defi-
nition by which a few years earlier had been proposed by the Saint-
Simonian and later nationalist Catholic Philippe Buchez. See Buchez’s
articles “De la nationalité,” L’Européen, December 31, 1831, pp. 67–68;
January 21, 1832, pp. 113–114; February 4, 1832, pp. 145–148 (also quoted
by Mastellone, Mazzini e la “Giovine Italia,” vol. I, p. 321. See also Franco
Venturi, “L’Italia fuori dall’Italia,” in Storia d’Italia, vol. III: Dal primo
Settecento all’Unità, Turin: Einaudi, 1973, p. 1248).
55. See “Nationalité: Quelques idées sur une Constitution Nationale,” La
Jeune Suisse, 24, 25 and 27, 19, 23 and 30, September 1835, SEI, VI, pp.
125, 127, and 133. Further down in the text the aim of each nation is
described as “the accomplishment of the task which God assigned to it in
the world” (p. 135).
56. See Gaetano Salvemini, Mazzini, trans. I. M. Rawson, Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1957, p. 62 (This translation was partly altered from the
original Italian by the same Salvemini). Strangely enough, no allowance
is made for God in the definition of “voluntaristic nation” illustrated—
largely by reference to Mazzini’s conception—in Federico Chabod, L’idea
di nazione (1943), ed. Armando Saitta and Ernesto Sestan, 13th ed., Rome
and Bari: Laterza, 2002, especially pp. 70–72.
57. On the notions of “constituent power” and the “absolute sovereignty of
the nation” in the French Revolution, see Pietro Costa, Civitas: Storia
della cittadinanza in Europa. 2. L’età delle rivoluzioni (1789–1848), Rome
and Bari: Laterza, 2000, pp. 16–17.
58. This coincides with the passage from “monarchical sovereignty” to
“national sovereignty” described by Pierre Nora, “Nation,” in Dictionnaire
critique de la Révolution Française: Idées, sous la direction de François
Furet et Mona Ozouf, Paris: Flammarion, 1992, pp. 354 and 351. On the
transcendence or negation of the idea of a “contractual foundation of
sovereignty” on the part of De Maistre and De Bonald, see Costa, Civitas,
pp. 175 and 179–180.
59. Foi et Avenir, SEI, VI, pp. 209–290.
60. Ibid., pp. 278–279 (footnote).
61. Giuseppe Mazzini to Luigi Amedeo Melegari, [November 1836], SEI, XII,
p. 230 (italics mine).
62. Giuseppe Mazzini to Luigi Amedeo Melegari, [January 1, 1837], ibid., pp.
268–269 (italics mine).
63. Mazzini to Ippolito Benelli, Paris, Marseilles, October 8, 1831, SEI, V,
p. 55. In the same letter we read: “Throw amid the crowds that old
term—as old as the world: national sovereignity, popular revolution,
republic: rewaken all those memories that people from Bologna, from
Tuscany, from Genoa connect to it—and you will then see.”
NOTES 133
64. Mazzini to Luigi Amedeo Melegari, Geneva, October 1, 1833, SEI, IX,
pp. 95–96.
65. Di alcune cause che impedirono finora lo sviluppo della libertà, p. 203.
66. See George L. Mosse, “Political Style and Political Theory: Totalitarian
Democracy Revisited” (1984), in Mosse Confronting the Nation: Jewish
and Western Nationalism, Hanover and London: University Press of
New England for Brandeis University Press, 1993, pp. 67 and 61. See also
Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass
Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars to the Third Reich,
New York: Howard Fertig, 1974.
67. Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution, Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984, pp. 24 and 26 (but
see esp. the chapter “The Rhetoric of Revolution,” pp. 19–51). Neither
Hunt nor her sources, however, refer explicitly to the concept of “cha-
risma of speech” which Max Weber had invoked when studying the
transformations of “charismatic power”: see Max Weber, Economia e
società (1922), vol. IV, 2nd ed., Milan: Comunità, 1980, p. 238. On the role
of language in the political transformations of the French Revolution, see
also Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France, pp. 169–197.
68. Jean Vidalenc, “Les techniques de la propagande saint-simonienne à la
fin de 1831,” Archives de sociologie des religions, 10, July–December 1960,
pp. 3–20.
69. I first grew aware of the emphasis placed on rites, as well as of symbols,
particularly in relation to the religious and political transformations
brought about by secularization, when reading Clifford Geertz, “Ritual
and Social Change: A Javanese Example,” (1957), in Id., The Interpretation
of Cultures, New York: Basic Books, 1973, pp. 142–169.
70. I am borrowing the expression “religious revolution” from Tocqueville’s
writings about the French Revolution. Tocqueville first came up with
this formula when reflecting on religion in American democracy: see
Alexis De Tocqueville, La democrazia in America (1835–40), ed. Giorgio
Candeloro, 3rd ed., Milan: Rizzoli, 2002, pp. 293–296, and Tocqueville,
L’Antico Regime e la Rivoluzione (1856), ed. Giorgio Candeloro, ibid., 2nd
ed., 1989, pp. 48–51. The expression might come from Edgar Quinet,
“De l’avenir de la religion” [June 1831], in Quinet, Allemagne et Italie.
Philosophie et Poésie, Bruxelles: Société Belge de Librairie. Hauman et
Ce, 1839, vol. II, pp. 15–27. It is also to be found in Jules Michelet, Le
peuple, Paris: Hachette & Pauline, 1846, esp. in Part III, chapters VI–IX
(the work is dedicated to Quinet).
71. Giuseppe Mazzini, Note autobiografiche, ed. Roberto Pertici, Milan:
Rizzoli, 1986, p. 137 (the English translation is drawn from Life and
Writings of Joseph Mazzini, vol. II: Critical and Literary, London: Smith,
Elder, 1890, pp. IV–V).
72. Perkins, Nation and Word, p. 131.
134 NOTES
73. See Giovanni Pirodda, Mazzini e Tenca: Per una storia della critica
romantica, Padua: Liviana, 1968, pp. 31–39 and 71–73 (esp. with refer-
ence to Mazzini’s essays “Faust: Tragédie de Goethe,” Indicatore livor-
nese, May 11 and 18, 1829, SEI, I, pp. 127–151, and “Letteratura poetica
della Boemia,” Giovine Italia IV, [1833], ibid., pp. 377–381). On Mazzini’s
notion of “Genius,” see also Anna T. Ossani, Letteratura e politica in
Giuseppe Mazzini, Urbino: Argalìa, 1973, pp. 7–57.
74. See Carlo Pisacane’s Saggi storici-politici-militari sull’Italia, penned
between 1851 and 1855, but posthumously published between 1858 and
1860, and quoted in Franco della Peruta’s introduction to Carlo Pisacane,
La rivoluzione, 2nd ed., Turin: Einaudi, 1976, p. XLIV (the italics are
in the original text). As one of the fiercest left-wing critics of Mazzini’s
thought in the 1850s we should also mention Felice Orsini: Memorie polit-
iche di Felice Orsini scritte da lui medesimo e dedicate alla gioventù itali-
ana, Quarta edizione aumentata di un’appendice per Ausonio Franchi,
London: A. Suttaby, 1859, pp. 301–309.
75. Ausonio Franchi is the pseudonym adopted by the Ligurian priest
Cristoforo Bonavino (1821–1895) after he was suspended a divinis in
1849 and left the priesthood to embrace rationalist theories. He taught
Philosophy at Pavia University and the Accademia Scientifica in Milan.
Toward the end of his life he reverted to Catholicism and became a priest
again. See the entry for him in Maria Fubini Leuzzi, Dizionario biogra-
fico degli Italiani, Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia italiana, 1969, vol. and
Ausonio Franchi, La religione del secolo XIX, Lausanne: n.p., 1853.
76. Pisacane, La rivoluzione, p. 217 (the English translation is drawn from:
Carlo Pisacane, La rivoluzione, trans. R. Mann Roberts, Leicester:
Matador, 2010, p. 186); and more generally pp. 214–223. No mention is
made of the source of this quote from Mazzini.
77. Ibid., p. 219.
78. See Nicola Raponi, “Farini, Luigi Carlo,” in Dizionario biografico degli
italiani, vol. 45, Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia italiana, 1993, pp.
31–42.
79. Luigi-Carlo Farini, The Roman State from 1815 to 1850, trans. W. E.
Gladstone, London: John Murray, 1852, vol. III, p. 304.
80. Alberto Mario to Francesco Campanella, May 5, 1863, quoted by Fulvio
Conti, “Alberto Mario e la crisi della Sinistra italiana dopo Aspromonte:
fra rivoluzione nazionale e rivoluzione democratica,” in Alberto Mario
e la cultura democratica italiana dell’Ottocento, Atti della Giornata
di Studi (Forlì, May 13, 1983), ed. Roberto Balzani and Fulvio Conti,
Bologna: Boni, 1986, pp. 87–88. Mario expressed awareness of the fun-
damental matrix of Mazzini’s political and religious though, adding “his
current theories are ill-determined and draw from the Globe, published
in Paris before 1830 and by J. Reynaud; that is they are fragments of
Saintsimonianism.”
NOTES 135
81. Alberto Mario, “Appendice” in Id., Teste e figure: Studii biografici, Padua:
Fratelli Salmin Editori, 1877, pp. 529–539 (the quotes are from pp. 529–530).
Partly referring to these pages of his, a few years later Mario talked about
the “need to exclude [God] from the teaching of ethics” in schools (see
Id., “Il catechismo e la scuola, Dio e la morale,” La Lega della Democrazia,
Rome, October 25, 1880, now in La repubblica e l’ideale: Antologia degli
scritti, ed. Pier Luigi Bagatin, Lendinara: n. p., 1984, p. 272).
82. Repubblica e Monarchia: A Giuseppe Mazzini: Lettera di Francesco Crispi,
Deputato, 2nd ed., Turin: Tipografia V. Vercellino, 1865, pp. 10 and 27
(the English translation is drawn from: W. J. Stillman, Francesco Crispi:
Insurgent, Exile, Revolutionist and Statesman, London: Grant Richards,
1899, pp. 229 and 267).
83. Ibid., p. 61 (cfr. Stillman, Francesco Crispi, p. 267).
84. Ibid., p. 11 (cfr. Stillman, Francesco Crispi, p. 230).
1. Crispi’s republicanism and even his unitarism were both post 1848 and
of Mazzinian origin. Mazzini also converted Crispi to the unitary ideal
causing him to gradually turn his back on his Sicilian independentism,
see Eugenio Artom, “L’uomo Francesco Crispi,” Rassegna storica toscana,
XVI, 1, 1970, p. 14; see also Arturo Carlo Jemolo, Crispi (1922), Florence:
Le Monnier, 1972, p. XV.
2. Artom, “L’uomo Francesco Crispi,” p. 14, identifying Mazzini and
Bismarck as Crispi’s principal “masters and models.”
3. The quote is taken from a parliamentary speech of July 1, 1861, quoted in
Umberto Levra, Fare gli italiani: Memoria e celebrazione del Risorgimento,
Turin: Comitato dell’Istituto per la storia del Risorgimento Italiano,
1992, p. 316.
4. The erection of the monument on the Aventine Hill, promoted by a bill
already in 1890, did not take place until 60 years later, in 1949, follow-
ing a protracted controversy regarding Mazzini’s commemoration, see
Jean-Claude Lescure, “Les enjeux du souvenir: le monument national à
Giuseppe Mazzini,” Revue d’histoire moderne e contemporaine, XL, 2,
April–June 1993, pp. 177–201.
5. Ferdinando Martini, Confessioni e Ricordi (1859–1892), Milan: Treves,
1928, p. 151, quoted in Christopher Duggan, Francesco Crispi 1818–1901:
From Nation to Nationalism, Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 2002, p. 436.
6. Levra, Fare gli italiani, pp. 307 and 328.
7. Ibid., from an undated note, p. 311.
8. On collaboration between the classes and “Mazzini’s hostility to class
struggle” in Crispi, ibid., p. 341.
136 NOTES
20. From a note by Crispi, n.d., in Levra, Fare gli italiani, p. 312, which insists
upon the “split from the original Mazzinian conceptual model” (ibid.,
p. 314).
21. From a speech to the Chamber on March 6, 1890, ibid., p. 316.
22. For a reflection on this same link inspired by the same citation, but
without reference to the Mazzinian model, Adorni, Francesco Crispi,
pp. 157–158.
23. Duggan, Francesco Crispi, p. 233.
24. Artom, L’uomo Francesco Crispi, p. 15.
25. See Gugliemo Ferrero, La reazione, Turin: Olivetti, 1895, cited in Luisa
Mangoni, Una crisi di fine secolo: La cultura italiana e la Francia fra Otto
e Novecento, Turin: Einaudi, 1985, p. 188, which places these pages within
a contemporary Italian reflection on “Crispism” as “Caesarism.” A few
years later Ferrero would place Mazzini among the “modern Messiahs”
in his celebrated L’Europa giovane: Studi e viaggi nei paesi del Nord,
Milan: Treves, 1898, p. 367. A year earlier, Scipio Sighele, his sociologist
colleague and future militant nationalist, had similarly placed Mazzini
among the “apostles who stirred up the soul of the crowd” in La delin-
quenza settaria. Appunti di sociologia, Milan: Treves, 1897, p. 94.
26. For a comprehensive interpretation of Crispi’s politics laying par-
ticular emphasis on its Garibaldian roots and its alliance-shifting and
Bonapartist tendencies, as well as for the subsequent evolution of the
Crispi political myth, see Francesco Bonini, Francesco Crispi e l’unità:
Da un progetto di governo un ambiguo “mito” politico, Rome: Bulzoni,
1997.
27. Garibaldi’s support to the house of Savoy dated from 1854, when it was
first proclaimed by the general in a letter to Mazzini (see on this point,
Giuseppe Monsagrati, “Garibaldi, Giuseppe,” in Dizionario Biografico
degli Italiani, vol. 52, Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1999,
p. 322).
28. Pietro Finelli, “È divenuto un Dio”: Santità, Patria e Rivoluzione nel “culto
di Mazzini” (1872–1905), in Storia d’Italia. Annali 22, Il Risorgimento, ed.
Alberto M. Banti and Paul Ginsborg, Turin: Einaudi, 2007, pp. 665 and
667 (the citation was taken from a newspaper of the time).
29. Martini, Confessioni e Ricordi, p. 71.
30. Examples and observations on the marginalization of Mazzini in the offi-
cial memory of the Risorgimento in the early post-unification decades,
and on his later, gradual reintegration through an increasingly conser-
vative key, can be found in Massimo Baioni, La “religione della patria”:
Musei e istituti del culto risorgimentale, Treviso: Pagus, 1994.
31. Finelli, “È divenuto un Dio,” p. 670. I briefly described the criticisms by
Mario, supra, chapter 1, part 5.
32. Letters referring to a “clearly partisan idolatry [ . . . ], Mazzini worshipped
as a demigod” and to the clerical press that “mocks these stories” dated
138 NOTES
Mazzini, see Id., I radicali in Italia (1849–1925), 2nd ed., Milan: Garzanti,
1978.
36. La corrispondenza di Marx e Engels con italiani, 1848–1895, ed. Giuseppe
Del Bo, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1964, p. 22 (the English translation is taken
from The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels: Letters
1844–1895, vol. 44, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2001, p. 64).
37. Among the critical commemorations written on the occasion of
Mazzini’s death a particularly authoritative one by Giovanni Bovio was
published as a pamphlet titled Poche parole del professore Giovanni Bovio
alla memoria di G. Mazzini, Naples: Fratelli Testa, 1872. Even though he
had extolled Mazzini as a “propagator of civilisation,” Bovio considered
his political message to be exhausted, claiming that the Genoese had died
“when his God withdrew from nature and history” (in Alfonso Scirocco,
“Bovio, Giovanni,” in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, vol. XII, Rome:
Istitituo dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1971, p. 553). See also the fragment of
a posthumous work which analyses aspects of Mazzini’s thought on the
link between “God and People,” published in the year of the centenary of
his birth: Giovanni Bovio, Mazzini, foreword by Carlo Romussi, Milan:
Sonzogno, 1905.
38. M.[ikhail] Bakounin, La théologie politique de Mazzini et l’Internationale,
Neuchatel: Commission de Propagande Socialiste, 1871, pp. 3–4. See also
Id., Il socialismo e Mazzini: Lettera agli amici d’Italia, October 19–20,
1871, only published in 1886, now in Michele Bakounine et l’Italie, 1871–
1872, ed. Arthur Leining, vol. II, Leiden: Brill, 1963, pp. 1–49. For the
context, see also Nello Rosselli, Mazzini e Bakunin: Dodici anni di movi-
mento operaio in Italia (1927), Turin: Einaudi, 1982.
39. Francesco De Sanctis, La letteratura italiana nel secolo XIX. II. La scuola
liberale e la scuola democratica, ed. Franco Catalano, Bari: Laterza, 1953,
especially pp. 355–371. For the context, see Sergio Landucci, Cultura e
ideologia in Francesco De Sanctis, 2nd ed., Milan: Feltrinelli, 1977, pp.
442–458, which goes to the point of theorizing an influence of, or at least
a convergence with Bakunin’s critique (ibid., pp. 453 and 458).
40. Jessie White Mario, Della vita di Giuseppe Mazzini, Milan: Sonzogno,
1886. Like her previous biography of Garibaldi (1885), Mario’s highly cel-
ebratory and apologetic work on Mazzini was written in close collabora-
tion with and under the watchful eye of Giosue Carducci. See Cosimo
Ceccuti, “Le grandi biografie popolari nell’editoria italiana del secondo
Ottocento,” in Il mito del Risorgimento nell’Italia unita, special issue of Il
Risorgimento, XLVII, 1–2, 1995, pp. 110–123 (I cited p. 118). It should be
noted that Sonzogno brought out several editions of Mario’s biography
in the following decades, at least seven until 1933. Another biography
that was extremely successful, but more accurate in historiographic and
scientific terms (placing it in a different phase of the biographical recon-
struction of Mazzini), was written by the English historian Bolton King;
140 NOTES
49. This political project can be placed among the anti-Giolitti nationalist
currents defined as belonging to “national radicalism” in Gentile, Il mito
dello Stato nuovo, pp. 5–9.
50. Papini, Un uomo finito, in Adamson, Avant-Garde, p. 22.
51. Papini to Soffici, September 9, 1905, in Giovanni Papini-Ardengo Soffici,
Carteggio. I. 1903–1908. Dal “Leonardo” a “La Voce,” ed. Mario Richter,
Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1991, p. 78.
52. According to Roberto Ridolfi, Vita di Giovanni Papini, Milan: Mondadori,
1957, pp. 38–39 (from which I have also taken the quotes).
53. Ibid., p. 41, quotation taken from Papini’s Passato remoto (1948).
54. See the unpublished fragment “Il dominio del gregge (Il socialismo)”
dated March 1902, in Giovanni Papini, Il non finito. Diario 1900 e scritti
inediti giovanili, ed. Anna Casini Paszkowski, Florence: Le Lettere, 2005,
pp. 182–183. But the formula and underlying theory of this text are taken
up again in Gian Falco [pseudonym of Giovanni Papini], “Chi sono i
socialisti,” Leonardo, I, 5, February 22, 1903, in La cultura italiana del
‘900 attraverso le riviste, ed. Delia Frigessi, vol. I, 2nd ed., Turin: Einaudi,
1960, pp. 120–128.
55. See Mario Richter, Papini e Soffici: Mezzo secolo di vita italiana (1903–
1956), Florence: Le Lettere, 2005, pp. 24–26.
56. Papini to Prezzolini, November 10, 1907, in Carteggio, pp. 730–731.
57. Papini to Soffici, November 17, 1907, ibid., p. 156.
58. Soffici to Papini, November 19, 1907, ibid., pp. 156–157.
59. Papini to Prezzolini, November 10, 1907, Carteggio, p. 731.
60. Soffici to Papini, December 5, 1907, in Carteggio, pp. 161–162. Soffici
would later write to Papini telling him about his patriotic emotion upon
reading Ricordi dei fratelli Bandiera (1843) by Mazzini (August 19, 1908,
ibid., p. 316) and about having shared his enthusiasm for Mazzini with
Miguel de Unamuno, who had written telling him of his attraction for
Mazzini’s “concepciòn mística de la patria” (December 12, 1908, ibid., p.
453, and Soffici’s reply of December 16, 1908, ibid., p. 458).
61. A couple of decades later, Papini, who had in the meantime undergone his
conversion to Catholicism, dismissed Mazzini, writing, “[He] was one of
the many lay prophets emerging after the French Revolution, immersed
in a rather pedantic yet possibly sincere evangelism, a romantic, and
ultimately unsuccessful follower of Lamennais—who did not live to see
either the Republic or the Third Rome, and died while the monarchy
was consolidating itself and Pius IX was beginning to appear a saint-like
figure” (See Piero Bargellini-Giovanni Papini, Carteggio 1923–1956, ed.
Maria Chiara Tarsi, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2006, p. 49,
letter to Bargellini, August 31, 1928).
62. See also the contemporary recording: “I have just been reading all of
Mazzini’s works [ . . . ] This year I have only been reading works from the
Italian Risorgimento. After so much Middle Age, a little contemporary
148 NOTES
74. Salvemini to Ettore Rota, March 23, 1919, in Salvemini, Carteggio 1914–
1920. This part of the letter is also mentioned by Giarrizzo, Gaetano
Salvemini: la politica, pp. 18–19, who interprets the genesis of Salvemini’s
work as a response to the polemic with the Republican Napoleone
Colajanni, with regard to Minister Nasi’s initiative (ibid., p. 20).
75. See Gaetano Salvemini, Il pensiero religioso politico sociale di Giuseppe
Mazzini, Messina: Libreria editrice Antonio Trimarchi, 1905, pp. 1–3. For
reasons of contextualization I refer here to the first edition of Salvemini’s
Mazzini and mostly translate directly from there (though I have used also
Mazzini, trans. I. M. Rawson, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957).
76. Ibid., pp. 34–35.
77. Ibid., p. 40.
78. Salvemini quotes this phrase of Mazzini’s: “One would say that no one
has glimpsed the only reasonable solution to the problem, a transfor-
mation of the Church that would harmonize with the State, guiding it,
gradually and without tyranny, onto the path of good” (ibid., p. 41). And
Salvemini also mentions Mazzini’s criticism of Cavour’s formula: “The
men who reduce the problem to the triumph of the formula ‘free Church
in free State’ are either afflicted by a fatal, despicable cowardice, or they
do not have a single spark of moral faith in their soul” (ibid.).
79. Ibid., p. 42.
80. Identifying Saint-Simon’s decisive influence upon Mazzini’s religious
thought would lead Salvemini to a radical conclusion: “Four-fifths of
Mazzini’s ideas are Saint-Simonist in origin” (Salvemini, Il pensiero reli-
gioso, politico, sociale, p. 123).
81. Ibid., pp. 65–66. Below he explicitly mentions an “excessively heteroge-
neous mixture of liberalism and authoritarianism” (ibid., p. 82).
82. Ibid., pp. 79–80.
83. Ibid., p. 82.
84. Ibid., p. 110.
85. See “Italia e questione balcanica,” L’Unità, I, no. 47, November 2, 1912, in
Gaetano Salvemini, Come siamo andati in Libia e altri scritti dal 1900 al
1915, ed. Augusto Torre, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1963, pp. 257–258.
86. See at least Alessandro Galante Garrone, Prefazione to Umberto Zanotti-
Bianco, Carteggio 1906–1918, ed. Valeriana Carinci, Rome and Bari:
Laterza, 1987, pp. VII–VIII, XI, and XV.
87. Zanotti-Bianco to Salvemini, July 18, 1913, and Salvemini to Zanotti-
Bianco, July 21, 1913, in Alessandro Galante Garrone, Zanotti-Bianco e
Salvemini: Carteggio, Naples: Guida, 1983, p. 69.
88. Ibid., pp. 29–31; Id., Salvemini e Mazzini, Messina-Firenze: D’Anna, 1981,
pp. 174–179.
89. Gaetano Salvemini, “La Dalmazia,” Il Secolo, Milan, November 9, 1914,
in Id., Come siamo andati in Libia, pp. 370–373. Against the nationalist
propaganda that “attributes to Mazzini ideas that he never had,” see also
Id., “Ripresa,” L’Unità, III, no. 37, December 14, 1914, ibid., p. 397.
150 NOTES
90. To this effect, from 1905 onward, Salvemini had written: “Today, after
thirty-five years of an inglorious national history, there are not many
who would have the nerve to echo Mazzini’s claim that God assigned
Rome and Italy a mission to begin a new era of human civilization” (see
Salvemini, Le idee religiose politiche sociali, p. 153).
91. This is a passage from Salvemini’s lecture, “Le idee sociali di Mazzini,”
for the third conference at the Università Popolare of Florence in 1922,
quoted in Barbara Bracco, Storici italiani e politica estera: Tra Salvemini e
Volpe, 1917–1925, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1998, pp. 172–173.
92. Galante Garrone, Salvemini e Mazzini, p. 450. On Salvemini’s extraneous-
ness to the Mazzinian tradition, in response to the reading proposed by
Galante Garrone, Roberto Vivarelli, “Salvemini e Mazzini,” Rivista storica
italiana, XCVII, I, 1985, pp. 42–68. Following in the footsteps of Salvemini
himself, Vivarelli underlinined Mazzini’s distance from the modern con-
cept of liberty and from that of popular sovereignty (see also the response
of Alessandro Galante Garrone, Mazzini e Salvemini, ibid., pp. 69–81).
93. Salvemini to Zanotti-Bianco, July 3, 1923, in Galante Garrone, Zanotti
Bianco e Salvemini, pp. 50–51 (the first quotation is based on Galante
Garrone’s reconstruction).
94. Gaetano Salvemini, L’Italia politica nel secolo XIX (1925), now in Id.,
Scritti sul Risorgimento, pp. 189 and 409–410.
95. These are Salvemini’s formulas, quoted by Galante Garrone, Salvemini e
Mazzini, p. 242.
96. Ibid., p. 239.
97. Ibid., pp. 242 and 383 (from a note dating to the early 1920s).
1. See Adolfo Omodeo, Momenti della vita di guerra: Dai diari e dalle let-
tere dei caduti, 1915–1918 (1935), Turin: Einaudi, 1968, p. 110, referring
to Gian Paolo Berrini, Ai fanciulli, ai giovani, agli uomini della sua terra,
Milan: Gruppo d’azione per le scuole del popolo, 1929. On Omodeo’s
Mazzinian interests, see infra, p. 168, note 85.
2. Ibid., pp. 62 and 142–143. After reading Omodeo’s book and his accounts
a few years later while in prison, Vittorio Foa wrote in a letter to his fam-
ily (October 16, 1938) that, while not underrating Mazzini’s “idealistic
patriotism” and his legacy, “the Mazzinianism of very young political
virgins was different, it was the Mazzinianism of I Doveri dell’Uomo, a
book widely read at the front, not for what it taught, but because sol-
diers found their ideas in it” (see Vittorio Foa, Lettere della giovinezza:
Dal carcere 1935–1943, ed. Federica Montevecchi, Turin: Einaudi, 1998,
pp. 484–485; on the Giustizia e Libertà movement’s stance on Mazzini,
see infra, chapter V, part 3).
NOTES 151
he was writing for La Voce and was later shaped by his contact with revo-
lutionary syndicalism.
17. See Benito Mussolini, Il mio diario di guerra. MCMXV–MCXVII, Rome:
Libreria del Littorio, 1930, pp. 29 and 33 (September 19, 1915). These
phrases are partially quoted in Paul O’Brien, Mussolini in the First World
War: The Journalist, the Soldier, the Fascist, Oxford and New York: Berg,
2005, p. 70, the first work to identify a “Mazzinian” Mussolini during the
world war.
18. Mussolini also referred to this text by Mazzini in his 1932 conversations
with the German writer Ludwig: “That letter is one of the most beau-
tiful documents ever to have been written,” see Emil Ludwig, Colloqui
con Mussolini (1932), trans. Tommaso Gnoli, 5th ed., Milan: Mondadori,
1970, pp. 70–71.
19. Mussolini, Il mio diario di guerra, pp. 170–171 (May 3, 1916, italics in the
original), quoted in part in O’Brien, Mussolini in the First World War,
p. 95, which draws attention to the fact that Mussolini’s Mazzini was also
filtered through his readings of Nietzsche and of his Superman theory
(see also ibid., pp. 44 and 185). I have already mentioned the dual refer-
ence to Mazzini and Nietzsche in an article of 1930 by Mussolini, supra,
foreword, note 25.
20. Benito Mussolini, Il dovere d’Italia, lecture held in Genoa on December
28, 1914, in Benito Mussolini, Opera Omnia, ed. Edoardo and Duilio
Susmel, vol. VII, Florence: La Fenice, 1951, p. 102 (partially quoted in
O’Brien, Mussolini and the First World War, p. 37).
21. Benito Mussolini, “Dopo l’adunata,” Il Popolo d’Italia, January 28, 1915,
in Benito Mussolini, Opera Omnia, vol. VII, pp. 152–153 (see O’Brien,
Mussolini and the First World War, p. 44, which only focuses on this
last quotation, neglecting to mention the reference to De Ambris and
the importance of the new ideological synthesis. In fact, Mussolini
subsequently underlines “the need for this demolition and reconstruc-
tion of doctrines” as the “arduous task paving the way for new socialist
criticism”).
22. See Benito Mussolini, “Il monito di Oriani,” Il Popolo d’Italia, March 14,
1915, in Benito Mussolini, Opera Omnia, vol. VII, pp. 253–255.
23. Benito Mussolini, “L’ideale di Marcora,” Il Popolo d’Italia, March 24,
1915, ibid., p. 275 (see O’Brien, Mussolini and the First World War, p. 72).
24. Benito Mussolini, “L’adunata di Roma,” Il Popolo d’Italia, April 7, 1918,
in Id., Opera Omnia, vol. X, p. 435. See also Benito Mussolini, “Politica
estera: O con Metternich o con Mazzini,” Il Popolo d’Italia, August 17,
1918, ibid., vol. XI, p. 281.
25. Benito Mussolini, “Osanna! E’ la grande ora!,” Il Popolo d’Italia,
November 4, 1918, ibid., p. 458.
26. See Mario Girardon, “La chiave del segreto di Mussolini” (1937), trans.
Livia De Ruggiero, in Benito Mussolini: Quattro testimonianze, ed. Renzo
NOTES 153
53. See Angelo O. Olivetti, Lineamenti del nuovo stato italiano, Rome: Libreria
del Littorio, 1930, cited in Giuseppe Parlato, “Il mito del Risorgimento
e la sinistra fascista,” in Il mito del Risorgimento nell’Italia unita, con-
ference proceedings, Milan, November 9–12, 1993, speacial issue of Il
Risorgimento, XLVII, 1–2, 1995, p. 252. Parlato’s essay should be referred
to for Mazzini’s revival in the writings of Corporatists in the early 1930s,
as well as in the fascist left of Berto Ricci, and even in the context of the
School of Fascist Mysticism (ibid., pp. 252–258). For a broader treatment,
see Giuseppe Parlato, La sinistra fascista.
54. Giuseppe Bottai also came from a family of Mazzinian traditions on both
his father’s and his mother’s side—moreover his uncle, Alfredo Bottai,
was a militant Mazzinian who went from fascism to the Republic of
Salò, in 1943–1945, in the name of Mazzini, see Giordano Bruno Guerri,
Giuseppe Bottai, un fascista critico, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976, pp. 19 and
22. After World War II, Giuseppe Bottai claimed that he had convinced
Mussolini to read Mazzini (ibid., p. 40 note; the Introduction supra also
includes an account of this, although with a different reconstruction).
For Bottai’s evocation of Mazzini as a precursor of corporatism, see the
lecture Il pensiero e l’azione di Giuseppe Mazzini, held in Genoa on May
4, 1930, and promptly published in Giuseppe Bottai, Incontri, Rome:
Libreria del Littorio, 1930, pp. 41–96 (see also some further details infra,
chapter Five, footnote 24).
55. See Dino Grandi, Il mio paese: Ricordi autobiografici, ed. Renzo De Felice,
Bologna: Il Mulino, 1985, p. 21. Another Republican from Romagna who
became a fascist was Carlo Cantimori (father of Delio, the well-known
historian of early modern heresy), author of Saggio sull’idealismo di
Giuseppe Mazzini, Faenza: Tipografia G. Montanari, 1904, an essay that
made a relevant contribution to the debate on Mazzini in the early twen-
tieth century. Cantimori, who had already encountered Gentile’s reinter-
pretation of Mazzini as early as 1922 (its profound influence is apparent
in a new edition of his book), left republicanism to become a fascist for
two decades, and would even become a supporter of the Repubblica
Sociale Italiana in 1943–45, see Roberto Pertici, Mazzinianesimo, fas-
cismo, comunismo: l’itinerario politico di Delio Cantimori (1919–1943),
special issue of Storia della storiografia, 31, 1997, pp. 5–18.
56. Grandi, Il mio paese, p. 25.
57. The formula, referred to earlier, was first coined by Emilio Gentile, Il
mito dello stato nuovo: Dal radicalismo nazionale al fascismo, 2nd ed.,
Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1999.
58. This is the summary by Paolo Nello, Dino Grandi: La formazione di un
leader fascista, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1987, p. 27.
59. Grandi, Il mio paese, pp. 62–63.
60. Ibid., p. 75 (the letter is dated October 17, 1914).
61. See Nello, Dino Grandi: La formazione di un leader, pp. 82–84.
NOTES 157
chosen to refer here to the second edition rather than the 1967 edition
used above).
75. See Prefazione alla prima edizione and Prefazione alla seconda edizione,
respectively, ibid., pp. VII and X.
76. See my Foreword to Alessandro Levi, Ricordi dei fratelli Rosselli (1947),
Florence: Centro Editoriale Toscano, 2002.
77. Alessandro Levi, “Asterischi mazziniani,” Rivista di filosofia XIII, 3,
July–September 1921, pp. 264–265 (this article also contained a stern
response to the nationalistic and imperialistic interpretation of Mazzini
put forward by Giovanni Gentile, ibid., pp. 262–271).
78. Ibid., p. 116 (also for the following quotation).
79. Ibid., p. 139.
80. Ibid., p. 117.
81. Especially Filippo Masci, “Il pensiero filosofico di Giuseppe Mazzini,”
Atti dell’Accademia di Scienze Morali e Politiche di Napoli, XXXVI, 1905,
pp. 162–283. Levi had the following to say about Salvemini’s interpreta-
tion in this context: “God and the people will [ . . . ] always be a theocracy;
in fact, as it was rightly defined, it will be a ‘popular theocracy’ ” (see
Levi, La filosofia politica, p. 135).
82. Ibid., p. 120.
83. Ibid., pp. 117 and 124.
84. Ibid., p. 136 (also for the previous quotation).
85. Ibid., p. 89.
86. Ibid., p. 90.
87. Ibid., pp. 93–94 and 102.
88. Ibid., p. 99 (the quotation refers directly to a page in On the Duties of
Man).
89. Bari: Laterza, 1928.
90. Alessandro Levi, Giuseppe Mazzini, Milan: Unione italiana dell’educazione
popolare, 1922 (I quote from pp. 111–117). Levi would confirm his criti-
cal opinion 30 years later when completing his final biographical work,
Mazzini, Florence: Barbera, 1953.
91. Although only an occasional contributor to this debate, Antonio
Gramsci must also be included among the Marxists critical of Mazzini
during World War I. At the time he made ironic remarks specifically
about the heirs of Mazzini “who grope in the dark, [ . . . ] isolated from
all the battles and from life overall,” and, generally, about the orthodox
heirs of every doctrine: “Who will save us, O Christ, O Marx, O Mazzini,
from your pure and undefiled disciples?” (see Antonio Gramsci, “Piccolo
mondo antico,” Avanti! March 11, 1916, in Antonio Gramsci, Sotto la
Mole, 1916–1920, 3rd ed., Turin: Einaudi, 1972, pp. 69–70). In a series
of articles in Avanti! on the inauguration of a monument to Mazzini in
Turin, Gramsci criticized the exploitation and manipulation of Mazzini’s
thought, which was “diminished, distorted, and unilaterally described
NOTES 159
20. See Giovanni Gentile, “Manifesto degli intellettuali italiani fascisti agli
intellettuali di tutte le nazioni” (1925), in Gentile, Politica a cultura, ed.
Hervé A. Cavalleva, vol. II, Florence: Le Lettere, 1990, p. 7.
21. See Giovanni Gentile, “Caratteri religiosi della presente lotta politica,”
Educazione politica, March 1925, now in Gentile, Politica e cultura, vol. I,
pp. 136–137.
22. See ibid., pp. 137–138.
23. Emilio Gentile was the first to underline Mazzini’s function in the origins
of the political religion of fascism in his The Sacralization of Politics in
Fascist Italy, trans. Keith Bosford, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard
University Press, 1996 (ed. orig. Rome and Bari, 1993), pp. 3–6 and 21.
24. In his interpretation of Mazzini, Giuseppe Bottai explicitly mentioned
the “political and civil religion” of fascism (adding “without excluding,
on the contrary, integrating the ecclesiastic religion, and imbuing it with
a profound vitality”). Bottai criticized the statolatric interpretation of
Mazzini proposed by Gentile, praised the anti-French Mazzinian democ-
racy (a rereading giving it a slant of “authority” and “order”) and did not
exclude the possibility of a Mazzini with a “conciliatorist” stance with
regard to the Church. Lastly, he considered Mazzini a precursor of both
fascist imperialism and, above all, of corporativism: see Giuseppe Bottai,
Il pensiero e l’azione di Giuseppe Mazzini. Speech given in the Teatro
Politeama in Genoa on May 4, 1930—VIII, in Giuseppe Bottai, Incontri,
Rome: Libreria del Littorio, 1938, pp. 41–96. For Bottai’s interpretation of
Fascism as a political religion and for the relationship that he established
with Catholicism, see Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics, pp. 20 and
72–73.
25. See the broad survey by Paolo Benedetti, “Mazzini in ‘camicia nera,’ ”
Annali della Fondazione Ugo La Malfa, XXII, 2007, pp. 163–206; XXIII,
2008, pp. 159–184.
26. See Massimo Baioni, Risorgimento in camicia nera: Studi, istituzioni,
musei nell’Italia fascista, Turin and Rome: Comitato dell’Istituto per la
storia del Risorgimento italiano, Carocci, 2006.
27. For Croce’s itinerary, see Giuseppe Galasso, Croce e lo spirito del suo
tempo, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2002.
28. The antifascist Giovanni Amendola responded to Gentile’s interpretation
of Mazzini in the “Manifesto” with a writing dated April 23, 1925: “The
invocation of Mazzini in this manifesto jars and offends like a profana-
tion: and it takes all the rigid actualism of the ‘Solon-in-chief’ to compare
Giovane Italia, which was made up of martyrs thirsting for freedom, to
the squadrist movement that uses billy clubs to bring about inner persua-
sion, to use Gentile’s philosophical expression,” see Giovanni Amendola,
L’intellettualità di un manifesto, in Amendola, L’Aventino contro il fas-
cismo: Scritti politici (1924–1926), Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1976,
p. 286. For the role of Mazzini in the definition of “religious democracy”
NOTES 163
by the young Amendola at the beginning of the last century, although also
through theosophical and modernist influences, see Alfredo Capone,
Giovanni Amendola e la cultra italiana del Novecento (1899–1914), vol. I,
Rome: Elia, 1974, pp. 128 and 140–143.
29. See “La protesta contro il ‘Manifesto degli intellettuali fascistici,’ ” La
Critica, XXIII, 1925, pp. 310–312. Originally published in the newspaper
Il Mondo, it was republished anonymously in Croce’s journal under the
general heading Documenti della presente vita italiana (“Documents of
Italy’s present life”) which collected various stances and criticisms of fas-
cism by Croce in the course of that year.
30. Cited in Francesco Capanna, Le religione in Benedetto Croce: Il momento
della fede nella vita dello spirito e la filosofia come religione, Bari: Edizioni
del Centro Librario, 1964, pp. 51–52.
31. Fede e programmi (1911), cited in Giuseppe Tognon, Benedetto Croce alla
Minerva: La politica scolastica italiana tra Caporetto e la marcia su Roma,
Brescia: La Scuola, 1990, pp. 145–147.
32. See Benedetto Croce, Per la rinascita dell’idealismo (1908), in Croce,
Cultura e vita morale, Naples: Bibliopolis, 1993, pp. 34–36.
33. See Benedetto Croce, Frammenti di etica, Bari: Laterza, 1922, pp. 181–182.
34. We must not forget that Croce remained in favor of the teaching of
the Catholic religion in elementary schools introduced by the Gentile
reform, writing in its defense: “Catholic education [must] be supplied to
everyone in State schools, including Jews, for the very good reason that
the constitution establishes that the State religion is Catholic, and they
are citizens of the Italian state.” See Benedetto Croce, Sull’insegnamento
religioso nella scuola elementare (1923), in Croce, Cultura e vita morale:
Intermezzi polemici, Bari: Laterza, 1926, p. 257.
35. The Church immediately placed this book on the Index of Forbidden
Books in 1932, and Croce’s complete opus and the work of Giovanni
Gentile were both condemned by the Holy Office in 1934. The mat-
ter clearly reveals how the religion of liberty and Gentile’s fascist reli-
gion—or rather, their philosophical sources represented by Crocian
idealism and actualism—were perceived by the Church as rivals to be
feared. Croce and Gentile had also both expressed criticism of the recent
Italian Concordate, albeit for different reasons and in different forms. It
should be noted, however, that the condemnation of Gentile’s work had
no negative impact upon the widespread grateful recognition within the
Church hierarchy of the philosopher’s role in defending Catholic educa-
tion. For this matter and its implications, see Guido Verucci, Idealisti
all’Indice: Croce, Gentile e la condanna del Sant’Uffizio, Rome and Bari:
Laterza, 2006, pp. 140–201.
36. See Luigi Russo, Dialogo con un lettore di “Belfagor” (1947), in Russo, De
vera religione: Noterelle e schermaglie, 1943–1945, Turin: Einaudi, 1949,
pp. 174–175.
164 NOTES
37. See Benedetto Croce, Francesco De Sanctis e i suoi critici recenti (1898), in
Croce, Una famiglia di patrioti ed altri saggi storici e critici, Bari: Laterza,
1919, cited in Vittorio Stella, Croce e Mazzini, in Mazzini nella lettera-
tura, Rome: Bulzoni, 1975, p. 113 (this essay should also be read for other
opinions and quotes on Mazzini scattered across Croce’s work).
38. Benedetto Croce, A History of Italy, 1871–1915, trans. Cecilia M. Ady,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929 (ed. orig. Bari, 1927), p. 74.
39. Benedetto Croce, History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Henry
Furst, London: Allen & Unwin, 1934 (orig. ed. Bari, 1932), pp. 116–118.
40. A letter written by Antonio Gramsci contains what may be one of the
clearest definitions of the “religion of liberty” in Croce: “It merely means
faith in modern civilization, which does not need transcendence and
revelations but contains its own rationality and origin. It is therefore
an anti-mystical, and, if you wish, anti-religious formula,” see Gramsci
to Tania, June 6, 1932, in Antonio Gramsci, Lettere dal carcere, Turin:
Einaudi, 1948, p. 192. See also Antonio Gramsci, Croce e la religione, in
Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, ed. Valentino Gerratana, vol. 2, 2nd ed.,
Turin: Einaudi, 2001, p. 1217 (The notebook in question is Quaderno 10:
La filosofia di Bendetto Croce, and was written in 1932–1935).
41. Croce, History of Europe, p. 39.
42. The Crocean formula “religion of liberty” makes its first appearance in
his study Ciò che è vivo e ciò che è morto della filosofia di Hegel, Bari:
Laterza, 1907, p. 178. It originates in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of
Religion from 1824 and 1831.
43. As he wrote in a letter to Gentile on July 11, 1903, asking him for a review
of Bolton King’s biography of Mazzini, see Giovanni Gentile, Lettere a
Benedetto Croce, ed. Simona Giannantoni, vol. II, Florence: Sansoni,
1974, p. 119 note.
44. Croce, History of Italy, p. 73.
45. Croce, History of Europe, pp. 116 and 118.
46. See Carlo Levi, “Piero Gobetti e la ‘Rivoluzione Liberale,’ ” Quaderni di
Giustizia e Libertà, II, 7, 1933, pp. 33–47, now in Carlo Levi, Scritti politici,
ed. David Bidussa, Turin: Einaudi, 2001, pp. 86–88.
47. See Piero Gobetti, La filosofia politica di Vittorio Alfieri (1923), in Gobetti,
Risorgimento senza eroi (1926), now in Gobetti, Scritti storici, filosofici,
letterari, ed. Paolo Spriano, Turin: Einaudi, 1969, p. 128.
48. In fact, it is possible that Gobetti had in turn acquired the formula
“religion of liberty,” possibly without realizing it, from Mazzini him-
self. In fact, it appears, albeit en passant, in Mazzini’s writing Ricordi
dei fratelli Bandiera, published in the national edition of his writings
that came out in 1921, just before the period when Giobetti began to
prepare his thesis on Alfieri. See Giuseppe Mazzini, Ricordi dei fra-
telli Bandiera (1844), in Mazzini, Scritti editi ed inediti, vol. XXXI,
Imola: Cooperativa Tipografico-Editrice Paolo Galeati 1921, p. 72.
NOTES 165
The volume is also in the writer’s personal library, in the Centro Studi
Piero Gobetti, Turin.
49. Paolo Bagnoli, Il Risorgimento eretico di Piero Gobetti, in Bagnoli, L’eretico
Gobetti, Milan: La Pietra, 1978, pp. 95–96, 98–100, and 116–117.
50. Francesco Traniello, Gobetti, un laico religioso, in Cent’anni: Piero
Gobetti nella storia d’Italia, ed. Valentina Pazé, Turin: Centro Studi Piero
Gobetti—Milan; Milan: Franco Angeli, 2004, pp. 44–63.
51. Both quotations from ibid., p. 46 (see Piero Gobetti, “Per una società
degli apoti,” Rivoluzione liberale, October 25, 1922; Gobetti, I miei conti
conl’idealismo attuale, ibid., January 18, 1923).
52. Cited in Pietro Piovani, “Gobetti e Mazzini,” Critica sociale, nos. 4–6,
1972, pp. 9–10 of the offprint with no editorial notes (see Piero Gobetti,
Scritti politici, ed. Paolo Spriano, Turin: Einaudi, 1960, p. 36; Gobetti, “I
repubblicani,” La Rivoluzione liberale, April 1923, ibid., p. 490).
53. Piero Gobetti, La rivoluzione liberale: Saggio sulla lotta politica in
Italia (1924), 2nd ed., Turin: Einaudi, 1964, pp. 4 and 28. The English-
language edition is Piero Gobetti, On Liberal Revolution, ed. Nadia
Urbinati, London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Also in
Risorgimento senza eroi (published posthumously in 1926), Gobetti criti-
cized “Mazzini’s foggy Messianism” (see Scritti storici, letterari, filosofici,
p. 32, cited in Piovani, Gobetti e Mazzini, p. 20).
54. On De Ruggero, see the entry by Renzo De Felice in Dizionario biogra-
fico degli italiani, vol. 39, Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1991,
pp. 248–258 and De Felice’s introduction to Guido De Ruggero, Scritti
politici (1912–1926), Bologna: Capelli, 1963.
55. Guido De Ruggero, Storia del liberalismo europeo, Bari: Laterza, 1925,
pp. 342–346 (from chapter IV, “Il liberalismo italiano”). Originally pub-
lished at a difficult time (June 1925, after the definitive establishment
of the fascist dictatorship), it enjoyed renewed success with new edi-
tions in 1941, and after July 25, 1943 (see Avvertenza alla terza edizione,
September 1943, which also appeares in the Feltrinelli edition, Milan,
1962, p. 1).
56. See the reference to the respective works in the bibliography of the first
edition, p. 506 (Alessandro Levi’s study is not mentioned however).
57. The articles are both in Salvo Mastellone, Carlo Rosselli e “la rivoluzione
liberale del socialismo”: Con scritti e documenti inediti, Florence: Olschki,
1999, pp. 105 and 109.
58. See Uno del Terzo Stato (pseudonym of Nello Rosselli), Zanotti-Bianco
e il suo Mazzini, unpublished work from 1926, now in Nello Rosselli,
Uno storico sotto il fascismo: Lettere e scritti vari, ed. Zeffiro Ciuffoletti,
Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1979, pp. 178–180, cited in Gianni Belardelli,
Nello Rosselli, 2nd ed., Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2007, pp. 70–71
(see also more generally for Rosselli’s interests and research into
Mazzini).
166 NOTES
59. See Carlo Rosselli, Lettera al giudice istruttore (August 1927), in Rosselli,
Socialismo liberale e altri scritti, ed. John Rosselli, 2nd ed., Turin: Einaudi,
1973, pp. 493 and 500.
60. In 1921 Fedele Parri (under the pseudonym Sordello) published Giuseppe
Mazzini e la lotta politica, Rome: Libreria Politica Moderna, 1922 [but
1921], in which he defended an orthodox Republican reading of Mazzini
(which was also extremely patriotic in response to the climate of impend-
ing war), criticizing the interpretations of both Gaetano Salvemini and
Giovanni Gentile, although he appreciated the latter’s religious reevalua-
tion of the Genoese thinker (see ibid., pp. 76–82). Twenty years later, Parri
would publish a slim monograph titled Il pensiero sociale ed economico
di Giuseppe Mazzini, Turin: L’Impronta, 1942, which was probably writ-
ten with the help of his son Ferruccio (see the biographical information
in Ferruccio Parri, Scritti 1915–1975, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976, p. 11 and
various mentions by Luca Polese Remaggi, La nazione perduta: Ferruccio
Parri nel Novecento italiano, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004, pp. 22–23).
61. See Ernesto Rossi, “Dieci anni sono molti.” Lettere dal carcere 1930–39,
ed. Mimmo Franzinelli, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2001, p. 41, letter of
March 10, 1931. Vittorio Foa and Massimo Mila, Rossi’s cellmates, refer
in their letters to Gwilyn O. Griffith, Mazzini: Prophet of Modern Europe,
Bari: Laterza, 1935, to Bolton King’s biography, as well as to Mazzini’s let-
ters to his mother collected in the volume, also cited by Rossi, La madre
di Giuseppe Mazzini, ed. Alessandro Luzio, Turin: Bocca, 1919 (see
Vittorio Foa Lettere della giovinezza: Dal carcere 1935–1943, ed. Federica
Montevecchi, Turin: Einaudi, 1998, p. 123, July 10, 1936; Massimo Mila,
Argomenti strettamente famigliari: Lettere dal carcere 1935–1940, ed.
Paolo Soddu, Turin: Einaudi, 1999, pp. 534 and 540, September 23, and
October 9, 1938). On other occasions, Foa mentions Mazzini’s “idealis-
tic patriotism” (p. 484, October 16, 1938); while Mila also underlines his
“authoritarian tendencies” (p. 619, April 16, 1939).
62. See Nello Rosselli, “Repubblicani e socialisti in Italia,” La critica politica,
July 25, 1926, in Rosselli, Saggi sul Risorgimento, 2nd ed., Turin: Einaudi,
1980, pp. 262–263. This essay was entirely dedicated to the historic
motives for the crisis and inadequacy experienced by Mazzinianism after
1860.
63. Nello Rosselli, “La prima ‘Internazionale’ e la crisi del mazzinianismo,”
Nuova Rivista Storica, 1924, ibid., p. 258. These reflections are rooted in
the genesis of Rosselli’s book (originally his dissertation with Salvemini)
on Mazzini e Bakunin: Dodici anni di movimento operaio in Italia (1860–
1872), published in 1927, see also the review by Ferruccio Parri, published
in 1933 in Nuova rivista storica in Parri, Scritti, pp. 74–98.
64. See Andrea (pseudonym of Andrea Caffi), “Appunti su Mazzini,”
Giustizia e Libertà, March 29, 1935, reprinted in L’Unità d’Italia. Pro e
contro il Risorgimento, ed. Alberto Castelli, Rome: edizioni e/o, 1997,
NOTES 167
pp. 23–27. See also Marco Bresciani, La rivoluzione perduta: Andrea Caffi
nell’Europa del Novecento, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2009, pp. 190–197. Despite
his admiration for the figure of Mazzini, Caffi’s political criticism took
shape at least two decades earlier through his exchanges with Umberto
Zanotti-Bianco during World War I (ibid., pp. 51–52).
65. See Gianfranchi (pseudonym of Franco Venturi), “Replica a Luciano,”
Giustizia e Libertà, May 3, 1935, reprinted in L’Unità d’Italia, pp. 48–49.
See also Franco Venturi, “Sul Risorgimento italiano,” Giustizia e Libertà,
April 5, 1935, ibid., pp. 28–33.
66. Luciano (pseudonym of Nicola Chiaromonte), “Sul Risorgimento,”
Giustizia e Libertà, April 19, 1935, ibid., p. 38.
67. See Curzio (pseudonym of Carlo Rosselli), “Discussione sul Risorgimento,”
Giustizia e Libertà, April 26, 1935, in Carlo Rosselli, Scritti dell’esilio, ed.
Costanzo Casucci, vol. II, Turin: Einaudi, 1992, pp. 153 and 157.
68. Letter of December 13, 1934, cited in Alessandro Galante Garrone, I
fratelli Rosselli (1985), in Galante Garrone, Padri e figli, Turin: Albert
Meynier, 1986, p. 99 (see I Rosselli: Epistolario familiare di Carlo, Nello,
Amelia Rosselli 1914–1937, ed. Zeffiro Ciuffoletti, Milan: Mondadori,
1997, p. 576).
69. Lussu, who was inspired by the leninist theory of insurrection, drew
attention to the weakness of Mazzini’s military considerations, claim-
ing that Mazzini “lacked an insurrection theory,” or rather that “the
construction of the theory was compromised because based on flawed
premises.” However, at the same time, he acknowledged the “great politi-
cal value” of Mazzini’s insurrection theories and their eventual applica-
tion for antifascist purposes. See Emilio Lussu, Teoria dell’insurrezione:
Saggio critico, Rome: De Caro, 1950, pp. 47–55 (the first edition is by
Edizioni di Giustizia e Libertà, Paris, 1936).
70. See Rossi, Nove anni sono molti, pp. 67–68 (in this same letter Rossi
recalls reading Mazzini to his soldiers in the trenches in World War I,
“explaining to them that our war had to continue the struggle hoped for
by Mazzini to save the principles of liberty and justice”).
71. Ibid., pp. 367–369 (letter of March 8, 1935). On this occasion too Rossi
recalled his experiences in the war: “On the few occasions that I spoke to
my soldiers at the front it seemed that the only word responding to the
tragic circumstance was the one that had explained to Italians brutalized
by centuries of slavery the reasons why they had to be willing to face prison
or the scaffold if they did not wish to give up their dignity as men.”
72. See Ercoli (pseudonym of Palmiro Togliatti), “Sul movimento di
‘Giustizia e Libertà,’ ” Lo Stato Operaio, V, 1931, cited by Claudio Pavone,
Le idee della Resistenza: Antifascisti e fascisti di fronte alla tradizione del
Risorgimento (1959), in Pavone, Alle origini della Repubblica: Scritti su
fascismo, antifascismo, continuità dello Stato, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri,
1995, pp. 35–36.
168 NOTES
73. For the judgments cited, see in particular the notebook Risorgimento ital-
iano for 1934–1935, now in Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, ed.
Valentino Gerratana, vol. III, 2nd ed., Turin: Einaudi, 2001, pp. 2047 and
1988; but see, in general, vol. IV.
74. The new edition of Levi’s La filosofia politica di Giuseppe Mazzini
appeared in 1922, and Salvemini’s Mazzini is from 1925. The highly
sympathetic interpretation expressed by the young Tancredi (Duccio)
Galimberti in Mazzini politico (unpublished for many years and pub-
lished posthumously decades later) remained a minority position in
antifascist circles. This work was consigned in 1924 to the Republican
deputy Oliviero Zuccarini for publication, and was not published until
1963 (thanks to the initiative of the Associazione Mazziniana Italiana,
ed. Vittorio Parmentola). Nor should we forget the fascist apologist
interpretation of Mazzianism carried out by Duccio’s mother, a lec-
turer and translator, in her 1930 essay, Luci mazziniane nel sindacal-
ismo nazionale, Rome: Cooperativa Pensiero e Azione, n.d. (see Silvio
Pozzani, “Un saggio mazziniano di Alice Schanzer Galimberti,” Il pen-
siero mazziniano, LXII, 2, May–August 2007, pp. 44–48). Antifascist
political readings of Mazzini from a democratic viewpoint represent a
small underground stream in the course of two decades, especially in
the die-hard antifascist republican circles represented by Zuccarini or
Alessandro Schiavi. We should also mention the philosopher and peda-
gogue Ugo Della Seta, who was already writing works critical of the
conservative and authoritarian readings of Mazzini in the World War
I period. At the beginning of the century he had authored a weighty
tome of 611 pages on Giuseppe Mazzini pensatore: Le idee madri, Rome:
Tipografia Forzani, 1909, while his antifascist interpretation of Mazzini
emerges strongly from a posthumously published work written in the
1930s, Antimazzinianesimo di G. Mazzini, Naples: Tipografia Trani,
1962, which demolishes Giovanni Gentile’s interpretation, branding it
as “antimazzinian.”
75. Some years later, Angelo Tasca countered fascist nationalism with the
nation and liberty couplet, which he traced back to Mazzini, in Nascita e
avvento del fascismo (1938), 4th ed., Bari: Laterza, 1972, p. 565. The work,
started in 1934, first appeared in France.
76. See Luigi Salvatorelli, “L’Antirisorgimento,” La Stampa, July 27, 1924,
cited in Alessandro Galante Garrone, “Risorgimento e Antirisorgimento
negli scritti di Luigi Salvatorelli,” Rivista storica italiana, LXXVIII, 3,
1966, p. 523. Shortly afterwards, this formula was taken up by Giovanni
Amendola, who wrote: “The progenitors of all the tendencies repre-
sented in the Opposition committees took part in the Risorgimento
struggles; but none of the progenitors of fascism! Who by now embody,
by indirect admission of the Prime Minister, the anti-Risorgimento!” (see
Giovanni Amendola, “Tra le parole e le idee,” August 5, 1924, in Giovanni
NOTES 169
Between 1943 and 1946, after the fall of Fascism, Omodeo would be
among the most enthusiastic proponents of Mazzini’s pro-Europe demo-
cratic conceptions, see Adolfo Omodeo, Libertà e storia: Scritti e discorsi
politici, Turin: Einaudi, 1960.
86. Salvatorelli, Il pensiero politico italiano, p. 231.
87. “Of course, Mazzini’s idealism is not radically monist. He explicitly
affirms: God and Humanity; God is God, and Humanity is his prophet.
[ . . . ] He does not recognize the self-construction (“autoctisi”) of the thought:
he believes that humanity does not create, but discovers, advances on the
path assigned to it by God” (ibid., pp. 234–235, my italics indicate the
author’s reference to Gentile).
88. Salvatorelli returned to his interpretation of Mazzini, developing it in
greater depth in his ample introduction to the collection of writings and
letters by Mazzini, which he edited in two volumes for the Rizzoli pub-
lishing house in 1938–39: these volumes led to the renewed circulation of
Mazzini’s work among the intellectual elite and to his democratic inter-
pretation in antifascist circles. The introduction was also collected under
the title Mazzini pensatore e scrittore (1938) in Luigi Salvatorelli, Prima
e dopo il Quarantotto, Turin: De Silva, 1948, pp. 36–62. In the spring of
1943, Leone Ginzburg wrote a letter to Einaudi from his political con-
finement, requesting a copy of this collection, which proved to be “out of
stock”: see his Lettere dal confino 1940–1943, ed. Luisa Mangoni, Turin:
Einaudi, 2004, p. 226 (letter of May 14, 1943). At the time Ginzburg
was working on his essay La tradizione del Risorgimento, which was
to remain unfinished and published posthumously in 1945 (see Leone
Ginzburg, Scritti, ed. Domenico Zucàro, 2nd ed., Turin: Einaudi, 2000,
pp. 114–130).
89. For the influence of this work on “the young intellectual cadre of the
Resistance (not only Partito d’Azione-oriented),” see Pavone, “Le idee
della Resistenza,” pp. XI and 48; Claudio Pavone, A Civil War: A History
of the Italian Resistance, trans. Peter Levy and David Broder; ed. Stanislao
Pugliese, London-New York: Verso, 2013 (orig. ed. Turin, 1991), p. 319.
An authoritative contemporary appraisal adopting an ethical-political
rather than a historical approach was written by Adolfo Omodeo for
Critica in 1943 (later collected in his Difesa del Risorgimento, 2nd ed.,
Turin: Einaudi, 1955, pp. 531–533). For the appraisal by Leone Ginzburg
and Eugenio Curiel, see Gabriele Turi, “Luigi Salvatorelli, un intellettuale
attraverso il fascismo,” Passato e Presente, 66, 2005, pp. 108–109.
90. Luigi Salvatorelli, Pensiero e Azione del Risorgimento, Turin: Einaudi,
1943, pp. 111–112.
91. See in this regard Pavone, A Civil War, p. 319, which underlines that
while conflicting political readings of the Risorgimento were no nov-
elty, “because of the civil war, 1943–45 saw the the final breakdown of
the unity of the Risorgimento tradition.” On the rediscovery of Mazzini
NOTES 171
1. See Giuseppe Mazzini, Fede e avvenire e altri scritti, ed. Luigi Salvatorelli,
Rome: Einaudi, 1945, p. XVII.
2. Returning once more to Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion, trans. George
Staunton, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006 (orig.
ed. Roma-Bari, 2001), and to the proposed definitions and distinctions
between democratic “civil religions” resulting from the American and
172 NOTES
America and France. The literature is extensive but see as a starting point
the classic analysis by Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America” (1967),
in The Robert Bellah Reader, pp. 225–245, as well as, for example, Jean
Paul Willaime, “La religion civile à la française et ses métamorphoses,”
Social Compass, 40, 4, 1993, pp. 571–580. A recent comparative study is
Marcela Cristi and Lorne L. Dawson, “Civil Religion in America and in
Global Context,” in The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, ed.
James A. Beckford and N. J. Demerath III, Los Angeles, London, New
Delhi, and Singapore: SAGE, 2007, pp. 267–292.
7. On the far-reaching roots of the revival of these tendencies in recent
decades see, for example, Gian Enrico Rusconi, Se cessiamo di essere una
nazione: Tra etnodemocrazie regionali e cittadinanza europea, Bologna: Il
Mulino, 1993. On aspects of the evolution of regionalism during fascism,
see Stefano Cavazza, Piccole patrie: Feste popolari tra regione e nazione
durante il fascismo, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997.
8. On the prodromes of Mazzini’s criticism of the unitary State as a divid-
ing factor, see Giovanni Belardelli, “Una nazione senz’anima: La critica
democratica del Risorgimento,” in Due nazioni: Legittimazione e delegit-
timazione nella storia dell’Italia contemporanea, ed. Loreto Di Nucci and
Ernesto Galli della Loggia, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003, pp. 41–62. But the
critical function of the reference to Mazzini in the early twentieth cen-
tury was already identified in the form of “national radicalism” by Emilio
Gentile, Il mito dello stato nuovo: Dal radicalismo nazionale al fascismo,
2nd ed., Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1999, pp. 3–7.
9. See for the context Claudio Pavone, Civil War: A History of the Italian
Resistance, trans. Peter Levy, London: Verso, 2013 (ed. orig. Turin, 1991).
10. On the nature and influence of these two factors in the postwar politi-
cal discourse, and on the intervention by the Church next to them, see
Emilio Gentile, La Grande Italia: The Myth of the Nation in the Twentieth
Century, trans. Suzanne Dingee and Jennifer Pudney, Madison and
London: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009 (orig. ed. Rome and Bari,
2006). On the creation of civil rituals at the origins of Republican Italy,
also influenced by the thorny presence of Mazzini, see Yuri Guaiana,
Il tempo della repubblica: Le feste civili in Italia (1946–1949), Milan:
Unicopli, 2007, pp. 167–173 in particular. For the analysis of a local case,
see David I. Kertzer, Comrades and Christians: Religious and Political
Struggle in Communist Italy, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1980.
11. Rusconi has explained the absence of a civil religion through the joint
influence, or possibly the historic succession, of a “religion-of-the-Cath-
olic-Church,” of Gioberti’s neo-Guelphism, and the “sometimes dazed
mysticism of Mazzinianism.” They were ultimately overtaken—causing
every other possibility to be overcome—by the fascist “political religion”:
see Gian Enrico Rusconi, Patria e repubblica, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997,
174 NOTES
pp. 21–22. In Possiamo fare a meno di una religione civile?, pp. 48 and 55,
however, the same author identifies “Italian liberal Catholicism of the mid-
1800s”—the tradition therefore of Gioberti, Manzoni, Tommaseo—as a
possible inspiration for a civil religion, favorably underlining the “role
of civil-religious substitution played by the ‘religion-of-the-Church.’ ”
Rusconi’s historic theory was preempted by Altan, Italia: Una nazione
senza religione civile, p. 57, who alluded to the negative influence upon
the development of a civil religion in Italy by the “historic succession of
symbolic images” of “Mazzini’s ‘God and People,’ Gioberti’s ‘People of
God,’ and Mussolini’s ‘Fascist people’ ” (lastly adding the “ ‘People-God’
[ . . . ] reinterpreted from a marxist perspective”).
12. In an article published in L’Italia del Popolo, cited in Ivanoe Bonomi,
Mazzini triumviro della repubblica romana, 2nd ed., Turin: Einaudi,
1940, pp. 67–71 (English translation from Joseph Mazzini, The Pope in
the Nineteenth Century, London: Charles Gilpin, 1854, p. 31), see also for
the previous reference (and see Giuseppe Mazzini, Note autobiografiche,
ed. Roberto Pertici, Milan: Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 1986, p. 330).
According to Bonomi, Mazzini’s “religious reform” was “compromised
by the formula drawn up by Quirico Filiopanti” that was included in
Article 2 of the 1849 Constitution: “The Roman pontiff will have every
guarantee needed for the independent exercise of his spiritual power”
(ibid., p. 71).
13. See Giuseppe Mazzini, Doveri dell’uomo, par. II Dio, in SEI, LXIX, p. 31
(as mentioned, this chapter was first published in the early 1840s). The
English translation is taken from Joseph Mazzini, The Duties of Man,
London: Chapman & Hall, 1862, p. 44.
14. Giuseppe Mazzini, Dal Concilio a Dio (1870) in SEI, LXXXVI, pp. 241–
283 (in particular pp. 249, 276–277, and 282 for the quotation).
15. Luigi Meneghello, I piccoli maestri (1964), 3rd ed., Milan: Mondadori,
1986, p. 41 (I draw the English translation from Id., The Outlaws, trans.
Raleigh Trevelyan, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967, p. 42). The
Mazzini mentioned is the essay on “war of armed bands” (“guerra per
bande”).
and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. On the role of Mazzini
in the education to democracy in his own times, Arianna Arisi-Rota, I
piccoli cospiratori. Politica ed emozioni nei primi mazziniani, Bologna: Il
Mulino, 2010.
2. Norberto Bobbio, “L’utopia capovolta,” La Stampa, June 9, 1989, collected
in the volume by the same title, Bobbio, L’utopia capovolta, Turin: La
Stampa, 1990.
3. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), New York:
Meridian Books, 1958, p. 159.
4. See most recently Mazzini e il Novecento, ed. Andrea Bocchi and Daniele
Menozzi, Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2010.
5. For a recent assessment of the study of ideology see: The Oxford Handbook
of Political Ideologies, ed. Michael Freeden and Marc Stears, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013 (in which Emilio Gentile refers to Mazzini
as a precursor of “total ideologies,” although guaranteeing “individual
liberty,” pp. 63–64).
6. Apart from Alberto M. Banti’s work, which I discuss in detail below, this
literature includes: Silvana Patriarca, Italian Vices: Nation and Character
from the Risorgimento to the Republic, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010; The Risorgimento Revisited: Nationalism and Culture in
Nineteenth-Century Italy, ed. Silavana Patriarca and Lucy Riall, New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012; Manlio Graziano, The Failure of Italian
Nationhood: The Geopolitics of a Troubled Identity, New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010 (orig. ed. Rome, 2007); Suzanne Stewart Steinberg, The
Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians, 1860–1920, Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 2007.
7. See the influential Alberto M. Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento:
Parentela, santità e onore alle origini dell’Italia unita, Turin: Einaudi,
2000; this was followed by Banti’s Europe-wide exploration L’onore della
nazione: Identità sessuali e nazionalismo in Europa dal XVIII secolo alla
Grande guerra, Turin: Einaudi, 2005. Banti’s work has contributed to ini-
tiating a cultural turn in the study of Italian nationalism well represented
in the collective volume he coedited with Paul Ginsborg, Storia d’Italia:
Annali 22, Il Risorgimento, Turin: Einaudi, 2007.
8. Alberto M. Banti, Sublime madre nostra: La nazione italiana dal
Risorgimento al fascismo, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2011.
9. Ibid., p. 201.
10. Ibid., pp. 160–161.
11. Ibid., p. 50.
12. Ibid., p. 60.
13. Banti also admits that Mussolini’s use of terms such as “stock” and “race”
was often “congruent” and “not exclusive,” ibid., p. 155.
14. See Pasquale Stanislao Mancini, “Della Nazionalità come fondamento del
Diritto delle Genti,” Inaugural Lecture at the University of Turin, January
176 NOTES
35. Silvio Trentin, Stato, nazione, federalismo, Milan: La Fiaccola, 1945, pp.
70–73. At the same time, like all antifascists (as we have seen), Trentin
could claim their “spiritual relation”(“parentela spirituale”) to Mazzini,
which he referred in particular to Carlo Rosselli after his violent death,
see the article “L’ostacolo,” Giustizia e Libertà, July 23, 1937, in Trentin,
Antifascismo e rivoluzione: Scritti e discorsi 1927–1944, ed. Giannantonio
Paladini, Venice: Marsilio, 1985, p. 338.
36. For the origins of this parallel, see my essay “The Moses of Italian
Unity.”
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SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 187
role in relation to the State, 34 people, conception of, 4, 17, 18, 20,
as source of duty, 13, 83, 84 21–3, 26, 83, 93, 95
as source of sovereignity, 21, 119 political style, 24, 29, 124
word frequency, 14 popular myth, 37, 44–5, 69, 129,
“God and Humanity” (slogan), 64, 135, 139
169 religion; conception of, 24–5
“God and the People” (slogan), 16, religion of the nation, 17, 24, 38, 41,
17, 21, 23, 24, 26, 27, 35, 50, 52, 49, 52, 54, 60, 73, 93–4, 108,
59, 65, 71, 92–3, 100, 117, 118, 109, 130, 171
129, 138, 158, 173 religiosity, 15, 24, 50, 64, 83, 85, 86,
historicized, 61, 63, 99, 100, 103, 90, 169
140, 148 criticized, 25–7, 36, 94, 95, 100,
humanity, conception of, 13, 14, 15, 102, 119, 134
26, 34, 64, 85, 105, 168 praised, 43–4, 51, 52, 56, 57, 60,
ideological appropriation, 5, 49, 67, 97, 105, 118
65, 73, 80, 81, 91–3, 102, 103, republic, conception of, 14, 21, 23,
107, 119 27, 28, 29, 64, 113, 127, 132, 145
insurrection, theory of, 43, 85, republicanism, 27, 28, 44, 51, 53, 57,
101, 166 64, 105, 109, 127
Italian initiative, theory of, 66 censored, 49–51, 109
language, 54, 59, 74, 122, 143 revolution as education, 15, 127
liberalism, relation to, 5, 62, 64, 83, religious, 24, 133
90, 95, 104 right, conception of, 13, 14, 83, 84,
liberty, conception of, 13, 14, 23, 27, 109
33, 50, 56, 100, 104–5, 117, 149 ritual, role in thought, 24
“Liberty and Association” (slogan), Rome, role in thought, 26, 36, 66,
75, 77 110, 149
monarchy, conception of, 28, 29, 62 slogans, use of, 4, 17, 22, 70
as moral hero, 84, 99, 101, 102, social question, conception of, 32,
119, 168 64, 84, 85, 99
nation, conception of, 17–21, 91, socialism, attitude towards, 15, 27,
117; transformed by followers, 44, 64, 118, 124, 137
34, 91, 92 sovereignty, conception of, 5, 83,
“Nation and Humanity” (slogan), 105, 109, 110, 119, 149
34, 46 State, conception of, 57, 90, 100,
national mission, conception of, 19, 116, 119, 161, 171
32, 65, 103, 132, 149 State-Church relations (see State)
transformed by followers, 32–4, symbolic appropriation, 6, 7, 107
54, 54, 65, 85, 103, 109 symbols, conception and use of, 5,
nationality, conception of, 5, 17, 22–3, 24, 73, 74
19–20, 65, 66, 84, 90, 100, 104, theoretical indefiniteness and
106, 115, 131, 174 (see also contradictions, 4, 44, 95, 100,
nationalism) 102, 113, 119
Nietzsche, parallel with, 7–8 “Thought and Action” (slogan),
Paris Commune (1870), criticism of, 24, 59, 74, 80, 90, 91–2, 96,
35–6, 138 105, 117
202 INDEX
Savonarola, Girolamo, 12, 27, 126 relationship with the Church, 171,
Schiavi, Alessandro, 168 172
Schwartz, Barry, 123 relationship with the Church
Segré Claudio G., 157 according to Mazzini, 64, 105,
Sella, Quintino, 103 109–10, 113–14, 120, 148, 162
Sereni, Umberto, 154 see also Crispi, Francesco; De
Sestan, Ernesto, 148 Ambris, Alceste; Gentile,
Shakespeare, William, 123 Giovanni; Mazzini, Giuseppe;
Sidoli, Giuditta, 126 Oriani, Alfredo
Sighele, Scipio, 137 Stears, Marc, 174
Simonini, Augusto, 152 Steinberg, Suzanne Stewart, 175
Sismondi, Simonde de, 27 Stella, Vittorio, 163
Slataper, Scipio, 69 Stern, Fritz, 121
Smith, Anthony, 130, 132 Sternhell, Zeev, 119, 121, 124, 144,
Soave, Francesco, 127 154, 177
socialism, 52, 59, 72, 73, 76, 80, 95, Stillman, William J., 135
138, 143, 155 Stirner, Max, 59
critique of Mazzini, 51, 71, 143, Stoppino, Mario, 122
144 Susmel, Duilio, 152
relationship to fascism, 119 Susmel, Edoardo, 152
see also Mazzini, Giuseppe symbolic appropriation
Socrates, 7, 12, 123 see Mazzini, Giuseppe
Soddu, Paolo, 166 symbols
Soffici, Ardengo, 59, 147 see Mazzini, Giuseppe
as interpreter of Mazzini, 60 Symington, Rodney, 123
Solari, Gioele, 96 syndacalism, 73, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 81,
Sonzogno (publishing house), 139 86, 117, 118, 152, 154, 155, 176
Sorel, Georges, 3, 55, 60, 74, 75, 81, Sznajder, Mario, 121, 123, 144, 154,
85, 86, 109, 118, 145, 146, 160, 177
169
as interpreter of Mazzini, 55–8, Talmon, Jacob, 23, 124, 128
109, 146 Tarquini, Alessandra, 176
see also Croce, Benedetto Tarsi, Maria Chiara, 147
sovereignty Tasca, Angelo, 168
see God; Mazzini, Giuseppe Tasso, Torquato, 71
Spaventa, Bertrando, 55, 138, 159 Thomas à Kempis, 126
Spencer, Charles, 46 Tipton, Steven M., 172
Spinelli, Altiero, 171 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 133
Spriano, Paolo, 164, 165 Togliatti, Palmiro, 102, 167
squadrismo, 91, 92, 152 Tognon, Giuseppe, 163
St. Augustine, 7 Tommaseo, Niccolò, 12, 16, 88, 126, 173
St. Paul, 105 Torre, Augusto, 149
Stanislaw, Elie, 128 totalitarian democracy, 123–4
State totalitarianism, 113, 116, 130, 171
Italian, 26, 29, 33, 49, 105, 108, 110, see also fascism
119, 121, 139, 163 Traniello, Francesco, 164
206 INDEX