Levis Sullam, Simon - Giuseppe Mazzini and The Origins of Fascism (2015)

GIUSEPPE MAZZINI
AND THE ORIGINS

OF FASCISM
Simon Levis Sullam
S T U D I E S
A M E R I C A N
I T A L I A N
A N D
I T A L I A N
Italian and Italian American Studies
Stanislao G. Pugliese
Hofstra University
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REBECCA WEST JOSEPHINE GATTUSO HENDIN

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Giuseppe Mazzini and the Origins of Fascism
Simon Levis Sullam
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Giuseppe Mazzini and the
Origins of Fascism
Simon Levis Sullam
Palgrave
macmillan
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
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Levis Sullam, Simon.
[Apostolo a brandelli. English]
Giuseppe Mazzini and the origins of fascism / Simon Levis Sullam ;
[translated by Sergio Knipe and Oona Smyth].
pages cm.—(Italian and Italian American studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Mazzini, Giuseppe, 1805–1872—Political and social views.

2. Mazzini, Giuseppe, 1805–1872—Influence. 3. Fascism—Italy—History.
4. Nationalism—Italy—Religious aspects—History—19th century.
5. Civil religion—Italy—History—19th century. 6. Democracy—
Italy—History—19th century. 7. Revolutionaries—Italy—Biography.
8. Statesmen—Italy—Biography. 9. Italy—Politics and government—
1815–1870. 10. Italy—Politics and government—1914-1945. I. Title.
DG552.8.M3L4813 2015
320.53⬘3092—dc23 2015016215
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: The Appropriation of Mazzini’s Thought and

the Crisis of Italian Democracy 1
Translated by Sergio Knipe
1 Giuseppe Mazzini and the Religion of the Nation 11
2 From Poetry to Prose 31
Translated by Oona Smyth
3 Mazzini in the New Century 49
4 The Nation’s Duties between War and Postwar 69
5 Fascism, Antifascism, and the Religion of the Nation 87
Conclusion: A Religion of the Nation without a
Civil Religion 107
Afterword: Mazzini, the Risorgimento, and the Origins of
Fascism 113
Notes 121
Select Bibliography 179
Index 195
This page intentionally left blank
Acknowledgments
D uring the course of my research I have on numerous occasions dis-

cussed the themes and problems involved in my work with many
people who have given me information and suggestions. I would like
to extend special gratitude to Alberto M. Banti, David Bidussa, Piero
Brunello, Francesco M. Cataluccio, Alberto Cavaglion, Enzo Cervelli,
Marcello Flores, Saul Friedlä nder, Carlo Ginzburg, Luisa Mangoni,
Gilles Pécout, Francesca Sofia, and Enzo Traverso. Mario Isnenghi has
read two versions of this text, and has, as always, been generous with his
encouragement, criticism, and advice. The first draft benefited from the
broad vision and encouragement offered by Stuart Woolf, who gener-
ously supported me in subsequent stages of my work. The final result
and everything I have written remain my sole responsibility.
I would like to thank the following for their warm welcome and the
support they have given me in recent years: David Freedberg, director
of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia
University, New York, and Ramon Marimon, former director of the Max
Weber Postdoctoral Program at the European University Institute, Fiesole;
for the opportunity to take part in an extraordinary research and teaching
experience, Barbara Spackman and Albert Ascoli, from the Department
of Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley; for his intellec-
tual and moral support, David N. Myers, from the Department of History
at the University of California, Los Angeles. I would also like to remem-
ber all my friends and colleagues in these stimulating places of study and
work, including everyone involved in the PhD program in European Social
History at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.
My thanks also go to the Società e Storia editorial staff and everyone at
Franco Angeli Editore; to editors Alberto M. Banti and Paul Ginsborg, and
to the Einaudi publishing house for permission to reproduce partly rewrit-
ten material in the first chapter of this book based on my essays: “Fate
della rivoluzione una religione: Aspetti del nazionalismo mazziniano come
religione politica (1831–1835),” Società e Storia, 17, 106, 2004, pp. 705–730
(a special issue I edited on “Risorgimento italiano e religioni politiche”);
x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“ ‘Dio e il Popolo’: La rivoluzione religiosa di Giuseppe Mazzini,” in Il

Risorgimento, volume 22 of the Annali of the Storia d’Italia (Turin: Einaudi,
2007), pp. 401–422. Finally, I am grateful to Oona Smyth and Sergio Knipe
for their hard work on and commitment to the English translation.
This book would not have been possible without the support and affec-
tion of my parents; of my sister, Silvia Levis Morpurgo; and of my dear
friend, Francesca Zorzetto. Nor would it have been written without the
constant love of my wife, Giulia Albanese.
Introduction
The Appropriation of Mazzini’s

Thought and the Crisis of
Italian Democracy
Translated by
Sergio Knipe
The Apostle in Shreds
Often, upon the publication of the hundred-odd volumes of the

national edition [of Giuseppe Mazzini’s writings], I have found the
Duce at Palazzo Venezia engrossed in its dense pages. Or rather, as
if to stab them, he would plunge his metal paper knife into them—
and pull out shreds of Mazzini. Now anti-French shreds, now an anti-
Enlightenment shred, now an anti-British or anti-Socialist one, and so
on. In shreds, never whole, in his lively, multifaceted and indeed varied
personality.1
On October 14, 1943, in the tragic season of the Italian Social

Republic (RSI), Giuseppe Bottai evoked this scene in his journal,
under the title Ripresa mazziniana? According to Bottai, Mazzini
was a relatively recent discovery for the Duce: “I have already writ-
ten about Mussolini’s fundamental, almost physiological, organic
and temperamental ‘antipathy’ towards the great Genoese.” 2 The
Duce had turned to Mazzini only when the world war was about
to break out. A few years earlier, on May 31, 1939, Bottai had writ-
ten: “For the first time I have heard Mussolini speak sympatheti-
cally about the Apostle, his political sensibility, and his prophetic
2 GIUSEPPE MAZZINI AND THE ORIGINS OF FASCISM
intuitions.”3 One year later, during another hearing at Palazzo

Venezia, Mussolini had a volume of the national edition before him
and “pointed to some underlined sentences. He read a few which
resounded with the Genoese proudly calling for Italy to embrace
a higher moral life [ . . . ] In a contemptuous voice he threw the
Apostle’s words in the face of a hypothetical contradictor [ . . . ] The
message was clear: Mazzini was being called to the rescue against
the enemies of the Axis.”4
This Mazzini “in shreds, never whole”—as captured in one of the
gloomiest moments in the history of Italy—sheds light on some of
the central aspects of Mazzini’s influence and standing in twenti-
eth-century Italian political thought: the many interpretations, new
readings, and political uses made of Mazzini, and his periodic recur-
rence or resurfacing, especially in periods of cultural and political
crisis. The pages from Bottai’s journal also raise the specific ques-
tion of Mazzini’s role in Italian fascism: his role in the definition of
fascism developed by figures such as Mussolini, Bottai, and partic-
ularly—as we shall see—Giovanni Gentile; the constant appeal to
Mazzini made at the beginning of the fascist movement by people
such as Italo Balbo and Dino Grandi, or by political trends such as
the syndicalist, from Fiume to corporatism; and finally his reemer-
gence in the twilight phase of Salò. Mazzini is equally known to
have featured in antifascist literature, frequently in connection with
figures and works such as those of Gaetano Salvemini and Nello
Rosselli; Mazzini’s name is often associated with the inspiring prin-
ciples of the movement Giustizia e Libertà; and Garibaldi, Mazzini,
and Risorgimento democracy, more broadly, were often invoked as
symbols during the Resistance.
The underlying questions this book seeks to address are the
following: How can Mazzini have been present in such a variety
of ways in the political thought and struggles of Italy, beyond his
unifying role as father of the country? How can Mazzini’s legacy
have generated opposing political stances—especially as regards
the contrast between fascism and antifascism—which continued to
appeal to his thought? What have been the ideological and political
consequences of these contrasting readings? I shall answer these
questions by reconstructing certain central aspects of Mazzini’s
thought and by examining certain examples of the high regard in
which he was held. I will show how these can shed light on the
emergence of antidemocratic tendencies in Italian political thought
INTRODUCTION 3
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, leading to the

rise of fascism.
Besides, if, in the case of Germany, studies have been undertaken
of the outgrowth of Nazism from the ideological traditions of the
German nineteenth century, 5 why was this not done in the case
of Italy and fascism? Along with the proximate origins of fascism
in European and Italian thought (e.g., Nietzsche, Le Bon, Sorel,
or, in the case of Italy, D’Annunzio and early-twentieth-century-
Florentine magazines), and despite the decisive impact of the First
World War in terms of the renewal of political cultures,6 in the case
of Italy too it seems necessary to take account of more long-term
ideological influences. Inherited from the Risorgimento,7 these
were passed down to liberal Italy and finally drawn upon by fas-
cism as a source of inspiration. This kind of appeal—and particu-
larly perhaps the invoking of Mazzini—is generally acknowledged
to have possessed an ideological character, in a derogatory sense
(and in what follows I shall be exploring what I mean by the ideo-
logical reading and use of ideas of the past). Still—to return to the
parallel with the German experience—we should bear in mind that
even the fathers of German nationalism, Herder and Fichte, were
made the object of interpretations, new readings, and uses after the
unification of Germany 8 without this preventing the historiogra-
phy on the origins of Nazism from assessing their long-term legacy
and responsibility, so to speak.
In a sense, the issue of the relation between the Risorgimento and
fascism has rarely been approached for the same reason that fascist
culture and intellectuals were not studied for a long time. That is,
because fascism has been depicted as being “anti-Risorgimento”—to
quote an expression first used by Luigi Salvatorelli—just as much
as it has been regarded as being “anti-culture.” Similarly, the utter
foreignness of fascism to previous Italian history was affirmed,
without really investigating the nature of the political thought of
the Risorgimento, including its democratic currents, the charac-
teristics of Italian liberalism in the late nineteenth and early twen-
tieth centuries (from Mazzini to, say, Gioberti), and the survival
of certain aspects of this thought in fascist ideology—and not
just in terms of their instrumental and ideological use. The pres-
ent research, therefore, aims instead to explore the question of the
most remote roots of the crisis of Italian democracy by focusing on
one of its most controversial aspects: the relation between Mazzini,
one of the leading representatives and theorizers of Risorgimento

democracy, and the fascists—those who most staunchly claimed
to be his heirs, original interpreters, and torchbearers in the twen-
tieth century, albeit in the name of principles that were often dif-
ferent from, or even contrary to, those which Mazzini himself had
preached.
While it is true that most of the political readings and appropria-
tions of Mazzinian thought were based on the toning down, subordi-
nation, complete forgoing or, possibly, censoring of its central aspects
(whether republicanism, its religious component, or its original
democratic overtones), it must be noted that most of these appropria-
tions between 1870 and 1945 were informed by an authoritarian and
antidemocratic perspective. One might also reconstruct the criticism
that, from the 1850s, was leveled at Mazzinian thought by men of his
own time, from within his own ranks, on account of its conservative
or authoritarian components. Finally, one might examine how this
criticism was carried on at crucial moments of Mazzini’s popularity
at the hands of those people who most contributed to passing down
and rekindling his memory: for instance, the historian of literature
Francesco De Sanctis in the aftermath of Italian unification, or the
historian Gaetano Salvemini in the early twentieth century. This
criticism laid the foundation for a strong distancing from Mazzini
on the part of democrats and especially antifascists, often through a
downright theoretical and political rejection of his thought.
Mazzini the Fascist and Mazzini the Antifascist
Certainly, the theoretical indefiniteness and formulaic nature of

Mazzini’s writings, filled as they are with highly evocative yet ill-
defined slogans and mottoes, favored—and contributes to explain-
ing—the various appropriations that have been made of Mazzinian
thought. Suffice it to think of terms such as “people” or “mission,” or
of formulas such as “thought and action,” which may be interpreted in
democratic and progressive terms just as much as in antidemocratic,
reactionary, or even violent ones, as was ultimately the case with fas-
cism. Yet we know from reception theory how contexts influence the
reading of texts and discourses and how every reading also consti-
tutes an appropriation.9 With respect to the reception and fortune
of Mazzini, and the politically opposite readings he has been made
the object of, I shall be drawing a distinction in this book between
INTRODUCTION 5
ideological appropriation (on the fascist side) and symbolic appropria-

tion (by the antifascists).
I define ideological appropriation as the reinterpretation of
Mazzini’s thought and its inclusion within a given ideological dis-
course, project, or vision. What I mean by ideology is, on the one
hand (in nonevaluative terms), a series of cultural and conceptual
elements that define a given political project or tendency; on the
other hand, it is a vision that (according to the original Marxian
conception of ideology) contains a distorting element, since it is
used—or so that it may be used—to serve a specific political vision
or program.10 Ideological appropriation still draws upon intrin-
sic elements of Mazzinian thought, such as, for instance, the con-
cepts of nation, deity, and people. Such appropriation, moreover,
can—and often does—operate in a partial and selective manner:
by emphasizing certain elements and downplaying, or even disre-
garding, others. I believe that most ideological appropriations of
Mazzini and his thought in the closing decades of the nineteenth
century and in the early twentieth century were of an authoritarian,
conservative, and, often markedly, antidemocratic sort. No doubt,
this political tendency was the result of an ideological transfor-
mation engendered by a change in political and cultural contexts,
whereby new or different meanings came to be assigned to estab-
lished terms and concepts. I would nonetheless argue that these
conservative and authoritarian readings of Mazzini did not simply
stem from a distortion of his thought, but rather were also based on
a patriotic language Mazzini had indeed formulated. This was the
expression of a preceptive and paternalistic ideological core with
authoritarian streaks that Mazzini conveyed through an irratio-
nalist political style based on the use of symbolic terms and for-
mulas aimed at eliciting subordination and submission.11 Mazzini’s
thought belongs to the history of European liberalism and was
originally founded upon the humanitarian and irenic concept of
nationality—which is to state the idea that each nation possesses
distinctive features which each people has the right to uphold, in
harmony with the features and rights of neighboring peoples. This
thought, however, also contains elements that partially contradict
the premises of the liberal conception: for it partially neutralizes
the revolutionary aspect of the French voluntaristic idea of nation
by attributing sovereignty to God as well as to people, thus weak-
ening the concept of popular sovereignty; it is founded on a harsh
critique of the French Revolution, stressing duties over rights; and

last but not least, it calls for an irrationalist and monistic adherence
to the nation.12 Many of these elements were strongly emphasized
in the antidemocratic appropriations of Mazzini, which would pre-
vail on the Italian political scene and in Italian public discourse in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
What I instead call the symbolic appropriation of Mazzini is a kind
of reading and interpretation that turns to Mazzini as a symbol—as a
patriot, hero, or ethical figure, for instance—without any references
to his thought and indeed by generally rejecting its political con-
tent as authoritarian, theistic, and antidemocratic. This reading is
found in embryonic form in the critical analyses made by De Sanctis
and Bakunin, and was already partly foreshadowed by Mazzini’s fol-
lowers (from Pisacane to Mario). It later took the form of an often
radical or even destructive criticism of Mazzinian thought in the
interpretations of Gaetano Salvemini, Alessandro Levi, Guido De
Ruggero, and Benedetto Croce. Finally, it became central to anti-
fascism, in its various components: from the socialist to the liberal,
from the Marxist to Giustizia e Libertà and to the Partito d’Azione.13
In his Prison Notebooks, in the mid-1930s, Antonio Gramsci—in
the wake of the quarrel that almost a century earlier had broken out
between Mazzini and Marx—described Mazzinian thought as “hazy
claims” and “empty chatter.” And already by the early 1920s Piero
Gobetti had opened his work La rivoluzione liberale (“On Liberal
Revolution”) with the words: “If they ask us for symbols: we prefer
Cattaneo to Gioberti, Marx to Mazzini.” Beyond the Marxist tradi-
tion, in 1926 even Carlo Rosselli—who was an heir to the Mazzinian
tradition for family reasons and who later continued to refer to
Mazzini as a symbol of patriotism and heroism—explicitly distanced
himself from the man: “We are not followers of Mazzini, we do not
accept his system.”14
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
heroes, founding fathers, and saviours of the nation. As such, they

have been evoked and claimed by different political sides at differ-
ent times, often in ways that contrast with their actual profiles and
historical accomplishments.16 The parallel drawn with the myth of
Napoleon might seem incongruous, but is in fact revealing in terms
of how symbols work. Like Napoleon, Mazzini has variously been
depicted as a Prometheus,17 Christ, or a Socrates-like figure:18 for
he embodies a fundamental type that may be identified in national
political mythologies, namely that of the “saviour,” in its prophet
variant.19 Particularly well known is the parallel between Mazzini
and Moses, which was first drawn by De Sanctis: just as Moses led
the chosen people into the Promised Land without being able to
enter it himself, so did Mazzini disappear just after Italy’s unifica-
tion, banished and kept under surveillance (if not openly perse-
cuted) by a monarchy that stood for the very opposite of the republic
he had dreamt of. We can therefore apply to Mazzini and his con-
texts of appropriations what has been written about Napoleon:
Marked and conditioned by the context of the events in which it

develops, a myth can thus appear . . . as a sort of ideological indi-
cator, the reflection of a system of values or way of thinking. It is
enough to follow the posthumous destiny of the Napoleonic leg-
end to detect in the Napoleon of the romantics, that of the men
of 1848 and that of the literary youth of the fin de siè cle one of the
privileged images for crystallising the ambitions, drives, phan-
toms and certainties of each generation, in all of their diversity and
contradictoriness. 20
Likewise, Mazzini’s myth in Italy crystallized the phantoms, as

well as the ambitions and ideals, of different political sides, at differ-
ent moments and with different motivations.
Another possible parallel which has been drawn in different and
often opposite manners and contexts is that between Mazzini and
Nietzsche, who stands half way between a symbol and an intel-
lectual father figure. 21 Without wishing to compare Nietzsche’s
intellectual stature to that of Mazzini, the case of the philosopher
may be seen to illustrate the simultaneously symbolical and politi-
cal appropriation of a thinker who is reckoned among the inspir-
ers of fascist ideologies. 22 As with Mazzini, the protean and pithy
nature of Nietzsche’s thought has been stressed, which makes it
open to decontextualized redeployments: like Mazzini’s writings,
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:
Who would have imagined to see Mazzini crossing the life of

Nietzsche—the man of men’s duties and the moral mission with
that of bodily rights and the reversal of values? [ . . . ] In 1871
Nietzsche crossed the Gotthard Pass on his way to Lugano. On his
coach he met an old man and struck up a conversation with him.
The two grew enthused and found themselves in agreement about a
number of things. The old man cited one of Goethe’s finest maxims
to Nietzsche: Sich des halben zu entwohnen und in Ganzen, Vollen,
Schönen, resolut zu leben [Free yourself from compromise and reso-
lutely live out what is complete, full and beautiful]. Nietzsche was
never to forget either this thought or the man who had mentioned it
to him. That old enthusiast was Mazzini. Nietzsche was later to say
[ . . . ]: There is no man I worship as much as Mazzini. And he was
being sincere: let this reconcile those who would claim that a clear
discord exists between the two heroes. 24
Thinking back about that encounter on the Gotthard, we might ask

ourselves: Was this a way of passing on the torch from the religious
spirit of nineteenth-century nationalisms to the irreligious demon
of those of the twentieth century, or was it rather the meeting of two
idols of modern politics, an unwitting foreshadowing of their later
success in fascist regimes? As unstable and incoherent intellectual
influences and political symbols, Mazzini and Nietzsche certainly
contributed—not least through appropriations and reinterpreta-
tions25 —to the formation and later crises of the national ideologies
INTRODUCTION 9
of their own countries. In the case of Italy, analyzing the genesis of

Mazzinian thought, and the fortune and influence of the “Apostle,”
can help shed light on the continuity and changes in Italian politics
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as on the
weakness of certain defining features of Risorgimento democracy,
and on the most remote roots of the ideological development from
which fascism eventually arose.
1
Giuseppe Mazzini and the

Religion of the Nation
The Duties of Rising Italy
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
the faith of the individual. Duty is the common collective faith.

Right can but organize resistance; it may destroy, it cannot found.
Duty builds up, associates, and unites; it is derived from a general
law; whereas Right is derived only from human will.”6 According to
Mazzini’s vision, the concept of “Duty”—a term he was to turn into
one of his symbols—constitutes therefore one of the foundations of
communities, societies, and ultimately nations.
Mazzini quotes over 30 famous authors in his Duties: from
Socrates and Savonarola to Jesus and Machiavelli, from Moses to
Gioberti. Alongside these are some foundational works such as the
Bible, Gospels, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man.7 In its mod-
ern formulation, the category of “Duty” may be traced back to Kant.
Mazzini, however, shows no direct familiarity with the philosopher,
either here or anywhere else. He appears to be close not so much
to Kant’s notion of rationally founded “Duty”, as to Fichte’s trans-
formation of this notion “into a genuine metaphysics.” 8 Among
the authors who influenced Mazzini with regard to his theory of
duties one should not forget Silvio Pellico, with his 1834 Duties of
Men,9 and Niccolò Tommaseo, whose 1834 Dell’Italia featured a
chapter on Duty.10 The fact that Mazzini had read these two works
can be evidenced in detail from his letters. He quickly dismissed
them, although Pellico’s My Prisons was a work he had been deeply
engrossed by only a few years earlier, like many other readers in
1830 Europe.11 Still a decisive influence on Mazzini’s conception of
his Duties was exercised by a French author: Felicité de Lamennais,
who Mazzini and his mother both referred to as “the Saint” in the
letters they exchanged in the late 1830s. In his letters Mazzini would
transcribe whole pages from the Breton abbot’s work Le livre du
Peuple, which no doubt served as his model.12 Lamennais, whom
Mazzini had been reading since his youth in Genoa, had started off
as an authoritarian Catholic and had made his name with the work
Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion (1817–1823); he had
then converted to liberalism and a democratic strand of Catholicism
with an apocalyptic streak, as best illustrated by his text Paroles d’un
croyant (1835)—another decisive influence on Mazzini, as we shall
see, and a work that elicited much interest throughout Europe—and
by the periodical L’Avenir, which Lamennais founded and edited.13
Lamennais had been the first to write: “It is not enough that you
know your rights, you must also know your duties; because the
practice of duty is no less necessary than the enjoyment of right to
GIUSEPPE MAZZINI AND THE RELIGION OF THE NATION 13
the preservation of God’s order, beyond which there is nothing to

hope for on earth.”14 By addressing the “hommes de travail”, the
“laboreurs,” and “proletaires”—just as Mazzini was later to address
“workers”—the liberal abbot had established duties as the foundation
of a “changeless and universal religion” which implied a “common
faith”: an indispensable precondition for the existence of society, of
the human race, and of people’s drawing together toward a divine
“common centre.” Within a society founded on the mutual asso-
ciation and collaboration among classes—like that Mazzini was to
preach in Duties—Lamennais drew a distinction between “general
duties”, such as “justice” and “charity”, and “particular duties”, such
as those “towards one’s family” and “towards one’s country”, the lat-
ter being key concepts in Mazzini’s Duties as well.
Historically, in European political theory and debate, the issue
of duties had been interwoven with that of rights at least since the
French Revolution.15 From his very first writings Mazzini had criti-
cized the individualism and doctrine of rights stemming from the
Revolution: in Foi et Avenir (Faith and the Future), for instance, he
had written about the “the cold doctrine of rights, the last formula
of individualism, now degenerating into sheer materialism.” Later,
regarding Guizot’s work De la démocratie en France, he noted that
democracy “has far outstripped the narrow and reactionary idea of
Right [ . . . ] The word Duty has sprung up to broaden the issue and
charge it with all the holiness of a religious source” (we shall later
see what an important function the “words” of politics have for
Mazzini’s thought). For this reason, it has been argued that with
his Duties of Man Mazzini “essentially wished to establish a coun-
terpart to democracy’s declarations of the rights of man , which at
the time were still drawing upon the French Revolution.”16
The Duties of Man centers on what Mazzini always described as
his loftiest ideals and symbols, which are here illustrated through
specific paragraphs: “God,” “Law,” “Humanity,” one’s “Country,”
one’s “Family,” “Liberty,” “Education,” “Association,” and the “union
of capital and labour.” With the intermediate paragraph “Duties to
Yourself,” and without the introduction and conclusion, the work
constitutes a genuine Decalogue. The source of duties connected
to one’s nation and to national sovereignty (as we shall see) is
identified with God: from God issues the Law, the national mis-
sion, progress, association, and humanity. An analysis of the word
frequency distribution in Duties 17 reveals that “God” is the most
often mentioned term (207 times), followed by “humanity” (150),

and “men” (146); “right(s)” (mentioned 139 times) comes just
before “duty/duties” (130), followed by “liberty” (122), “labour”
(121), “law” (114), and “fatherland” (“patria”) (105). The term
“nation(s)” occurs 60 times (“nationality”, a term typically associ-
ated with Mazzini’s reflections, just thrice), while “Italy” is only
mentioned 34 times. The word “republic” only appears twice; 18 the
term “democracy”, by contrast, is nowhere used. In relation to a
doctrine and language in which the repetition of single terms has
such great importance, word frequency distribution is clearly of
significance.
Mazzini’s most famous work possesses a markedly educational and
paternalistic character:19 focused on the notion of one’s duties toward
a series of ideal points of reference, it preaches the union of capital and
labor, censuring the idea of class struggle, and laying particular stress
on the concept of education:
Education, I have said, and my whole doctrine is included and

summed up in this grand word. The vital question in agitation at
the present day, is a question of Education. [ . . . ] We have therefore
to seek a Principle of Education [ . . . ] capable of guiding mankind
onwards, towards their own improvement, of teaching them con-
stancy and self-sacrifice [ . . . ] This principle is Duty. We must con-
vice men that they are all sons of one sole God, and bound to execute
one sole law here on earth. 20
Even “democracy”—which in Duties is not given much room in

itself—much like the idea of “revolution” later, in reaction to the Paris
Commune,21 was seen by Mazzini as a “question of education.” From
this educational conception of the principles of politics also derived
the primacy of “duties” over “rights.” “Democracy,” Mazzini wrote
in an important series of articles published from 1846, “is above all
an educational problem”—one on which “the whole future of democ-
racy” depends.
The problem whose solution we seek is an educational problem: it is the

eternal problem of human nature. [ . . . ] We wish man to be better than
he is. [ . . . ] When men will have closer relations through their fami-
lies, property, the exercise of a political function in the state, as well
as through education, then the family, property, nation and humanity
will become more honoured than they are now.22
The pages of Duties of Man may therefore be seen to condense

Mazzini’s message and the legacy of his political and social thought on
the eve of the Italian unification: criticism of the French Revolution,
a paternalistic and educational conception of democracy, duties over
rights, the origin of these duties and (as we shall see) of the nation in
God, a rejection of class struggle, and a condemnation of socialism and
communism. These ideas of Mazzini about the nation, as well as his
unique political style, had already started to take shape 30 years earlier,
at the beginning of his exile in France.
The Formation of Mazzini’s Thought
What proved crucial for the formation of the religious dimension

of Mazzini’s thought was his encounter—at the beginning of his
exile in France (i.e., after his arrival in Marseilles in 1831)23—with
Saint-Simonianism, a pseudo-Hegelian doctrine blending reaction-
ary and proto-socialist elements which flourished in France in the
early 1830s.24 As has long been noted, from this doctrine Mazzini
derived not just his philosophy of history, but also the formulas and
myths that most influenced his thought with regard to the idea of
nationhood.25 Mazzini remained relatively indifferent to the social
and economic aspects of Saint-Simonianism, while he embraced
its worldview and its ideal and conceptual framework, which he
applied to his own political project. “Creed,” “apostleship,” “mis-
sion,” “preaching,” “God’s law,” “religion,” “association,” “univer-
sal association,” and “humanity”: such formulas—which abound
throughout Mazzini’s writings, giving them their distinctive char-
acter—are all of Saint-Simonian origin and helped introduce terms
and concepts in Mazzini’s thought that were destined to exercise a
considerable impact upon his own view and later that of his follow-
ers. Saint-Simonianism enabled Mazzini to envision and sketch the
future dawning of a new age in which political, religious, and social
ideas would come together to create a “new religion,” which is to say
a unitary and organic system of beliefs that would lay the founda-
tions for a new political community.
Saint-Simonianism, however, was not the only source of inspira-
tion for Mazzini’s thought: two essential readings for him, in the
early years of his exile, were the works of Félicité de Lamennais (as
previously mentioned) and of the Polish poet and thinker Adam
Mickiewicz, to which we should add various other writings and
political programs by Polish émigrés in France. 26 Particularly

crucial were Lamennais’s Paroles d’un croyant, the publication of
which in 1834 raised quite a stir in Europe. This clearly emerges
from Mazzini’s famous work Foi et Avenir, which was published
in Switzerland in the autumn of 1835. Mazzini’s text was a vision-
ary political manifesto drafted in the name of the “Holy Alliance
of Peoples,” which upheld the values of liberty, equality, “nation-
ality,” and “country”; it was steeped in a religious language and
outlook. Clearly inspired by the writing of the Breton abbot
Lamennais, Mazzini’s tone was prophetic and eschatological.
While the text also echoed the Saint-Simonians, the predominant
influence it betrayed was that of Lamennais’s apocalyptic work:
as a kind of religious history of humanity, it heralded the advent
of a revolutionary “Kingdom of God” and of an age in which the
rights would be affirmed of martyr-peoples and the Catholic sister
nations of Poland, Ireland, and Italy. 27 Right from the start of his
exile, Mazzini had delved into the periodical L’Avenir, founded by
Lamennais. 28 Indeed, he even drew the formula “Dieu et la liberté ”
from it, 29 changing it to his famous couplet “God and the People”
(as adumbrated in a letter to Tommaseo). 30 Even later, while pro-
gressively distancing himself from Lamennais, Mazzini never
ceased to pay homage to the French author and to express gratitude
toward him. 31
Lamennais’s Paroles had in turn been inspired by another politi-
cal and religious work that had recently been published: Adam
Mickiewicz’s Livre de pélerins polonais, the foundational text of Polish
nationalism. The Livre had been published in Paris in 1833 in a French
translation by Charles de Montalembert. As an appendix, this edi-
tion featured a Hymne à la Pologne by Lamennais himself.32 Here, too,
nationalist and religious language and symbolism contributed toward
the shaping of a prophetic reading of Poland’s destiny as a Christlike
nation that would rise through suffering and sacrifice.33
In a letter to his mother, Mazzini draws a parallel between Paroles
and the Livre des pélerins.34 In another he asks:
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
[Paroles] which you have seen—indeed, it is its source in a way, since

it is prior to it by date. Perhaps a similar one will soon be published
in Italian, so that everyone may have his own and we will not con-
tinue having all genres exhausted by foreigners—when I say similar,
I mean of the same genre, since it would be difficult for it to be of
equal merit. 35
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
God and Nation
The defining elements of Mazzini’s religion of the nation and of his

political program are expressed in the form of lapidary and symbolic
slogans: “The people . . . the whole of our religion condensed into a
single principle”;39 “GOD—and the PEOPLE—here is the programme
for the future.”40 And again: “Tell the people . . . God is with you”;41
“In the name of God and Country, rise and be great”;42 “Salute the
flag of the people because the people has been chosen by God to ful-
fil his law.”43 The divine element is a constantly recurring feature in
Mazzini’s language, one that is already invoked in the Giovine Italia
oath—and not just in the opening invocation “In the name of God
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
Right from the start, then, Mazzini’s definition of nation—which is

no doubt of a voluntaristic sort, remotely based as it is on Rousseau’s
model (“The Nation is the universality of Italians, united by agree-
ment and living under a common law,” we read in the Instructions)—
envisages the nation within a providential plan where the factors
defining the national community are seen to derive from God. These
factors are the very existence of the nation (“where God has ordained
that a nation shall be, He has given the requisite power to create it”);
the individual’s bond with his/her national territory and its inhabit-
ants (“the duties which bind me to the land wherein God has placed
me, and to the brothers whom God has given me”); and finally the
historical function assigned to the nation (“the mission entrusted by
God to Italy” and “the duty of every Italian to strive to attempt its
fulfilment”).
Mazzini’s God, too, like many of his formulas and concepts, is of
Saint-Simonian origin.45 According to the Doctrine de Saint-Simon,
the “deux grandes bases de tout édifice religieux ” (“the two great
foundations of every religious construction”) are “Dieu et un plan
providentiel” (“God and a Providential Plan”).46 In Doctrine.
Deuxiéme année we also read that “God is one. God is everything
that exists: everything is within him. God [is]the eternal being, uni-
versal, expressed in his living and active unity.”47 Finally, Doctrine.
Deuxiéme année ends with a description of the “religious develop-
ment of humanity,” which passed from fetishism to polytheism and
then Jewish and Christian monotheism, despite the attempts made in
“critical ages,” that is, “irreligious” ones, to “banish God.”48 We find a
resurfacing here of some themes and motifs of counterrevolutionary
thought:49 indeed, the most distant origins of the Saint-Simonian God,
especially with regard to the role attributed to the deity in national life,
would appear to stretch back to Joseph De Maistre.50
In his 1796 Considération sur la France De Maistre had written:
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.”)
The Savoyard thinker had derived his concept of “mission” from

the Bible and the Old Testament in particular: for, in Exodus, Israel
is the people God has chosen among nations, the consecrated peo-
ple. But while Israel is the recipient of salvation, its mission is to
share this with other peoples: national calling thus leads to reli-
gious universalism, 52 through a dialectic between universality and
particularity that would appear to resurface in Mazzini’s humani-
tarian nationalism (whereas his followers later tended to revert to
particularism and to De Maistre’s notion of chosen people). Still,
it is worth noting that the concept of national “mission,” which
implies that of “chosen people,” has frequently been associated with
nationalism: in France, in Britain, and in Germany, for instance.
First introduced by De Maistre, it was therefore part of the political
culture of nationalism in early nineteenth-century Europe.53
Mazzini further stressed the role of God in his idea of nation when
he set out to more clearly define his concept of nationality in Jeune
Suisse in September 1835 (given the importance of that text, it is worth
quoting it at length). First Mazzini writes:
Une nationalité est une pensée commune—un principe commun—un

but commun; tels en sont les élémens essentiels.
Une nation est l’association de tous les hommes qui, groupés, soit
par le langage, soit par certaines conditions géographiques, soit par
le rôle qui leur a été assigné dans l’histoire, reconaissent un mê me
principe, et marchent, sous l’empire d’un droit uniforme, à la con-
quête d’un seul but defini. 54
(Nationality is a common thought—a common principle—a common

aim; these are its essential elements.
A nation is the association of all men who—grouped by language, or
by certain geographic conditions, or by the role assigned to them by his-
tory—acknowledge a common principle, and march, under the empire
of a common right, toward the conquest of a defined and only aim.)
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.)
As we shall, among the scholars of Mazzini Gaetano Salvemini

was the first, in the early twentieth century, to present God as the
primary “basis of belief ” of Mazzini’s thought, ultimately describing

his political system as a “popular theocracy.” Salvemini suggested
that “Mazzini’s national, unitary democratic republic is essentially a
religious organisation. Its source of sovereignity, as in Catholic the-
ocracy, is God. ‘God alone is supreme’. ‘God alone is ruler.’”56 While
Mazzini’s nation, therefore, is indeed of a voluntaristic sort, not
only does it derive its sovereignty from God, but what engenders
the nation itself—what makes it possible, so to speak, and defines
its function—is a higher principle, identified with the deity. We may
ask ourselves, then, not least given the remote reactionary influ-
ences we have referred to with regard to Mazzini’s thought, whether
his idea of nation differs from the French revolutionary one: for the
nation in his view stems not from any “general” or “national” will,57
but rather from God’s mind. Its existence primarily depends on
God; sovereignty, as well as the historical role the nation is called to
fulfill, rest with the people but spring from God: they stem not from
below, so to speak, as had been argued since 1789, but rather from
above. Mazzini’s nation—with its idea of “God and the People”—
partially neutralizes one of the most radical and innovative aspects
of the French revolutionary view of the nation, which is to say the
replacement “of a power from above with a power from below”:58
to some extent, it reasserts the divine origins of the nation and of
sovereignty.
A New Political Style
A footnote to Mazzini’s text Foi et Avenir59 provides an important

hint as to how Mazzinian political and religious thought is to be
understood:
Ceci n’est pas un exposé de doctrine, ce sont des points de croyances

isolés et simplement énoncés, mais qui, tels qu’ils sont, suffisent à indi-
quer notre point de départ religieux et philosophique. Nos croyances
politiques n’en sont que des conséquences, plus ou moins directes, plus
ou moins évidents.60
(This is not the exposition of a doctrine, these are isolated beliefs,
simply enounced. But as they are, they suffice in pointing to our
religious and philosophical point of departure. Our political beliefs
are nothing else than their consequences, more or less direct, more
or less evident.)
The reference made to an “exposé de doctrine” suggests that what

Mazzini had in mind as a model was precisely Doctrine de Saint-
Simon. Exposition. What is most significant here, though, is the clue
provided by the author regarding how his thought is to be viewed
and interpreted: this consists not of a system, but of “points de croy-
ance isolés” and “simplement énoncés,” where enunciation itself is
enough to elicit political zeal and initiatives (a little further on in
the text Mazzini stresses again “le seul fait de la proclamation”, the
mere fact of the proclamation [of the beliefs]). Mazzini’s religious
words are not concepts as much as slogans, evocative formulas, and
symbols that stir up faith and action. Reflecting upon the crisis of
Giovine Europa, in a letter Mazzini suggested—on account of the
gesture’s evocative power, like an act of artistic creation—to raise
the “symbol” of the three initiator peoples, the “core of the great
people formed by those proscribed, a new people, the first and
providential religious manifestation of the humanitarian age—and
so forth, with all the poetry implied by this concept of alliance.”61
He also suggested to revert precisely to religious formulas, as the
Saint-Simonians had done:
Meanwhile, everything that can show we are at work, everything that

can spread—even in a disorderly fashion—our principles, or even just
our formulas, our words, will be of help. The need for a new religious
synthesis—for a new religious expression, if you like—they shall call it
as they please—[the defining of] politics, philosophy, religion as one
and the same—the era of exclusive individuality come to an end—
France’s mission as the initiator extinguished—the dawning of the
social era—the three peoples, the German, Polish and Italian, initi-
ating the era—the Proscribed people invested with the apostleship of
the new faith—these things ought to be driven home again and again,
as the Saint-Simonians used to do with their formulas—and the press
flooded.62
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:
We need the masses now: we need to find a word powerful enough

to create armies for us, with men determined to battle at length,
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
Building on the intuitions and discoveries he had presented in

his work The Nationalization of the Masses, when discussing Jacob
Talmon’s Origins of Totalitarian Democracy George Mosse stressed
how important it is for analyzing nationalism to center one’s
reflection not so much on thought as on “political style.” According

to Mosse, the transformation of politics sparked by the French
Revolution—with the masses bursting on the scene and the rise of
a “new politics”—ushered in an age of the “spoken word,” leading
to the affirmation of an “iconographical language.”66 In the wake of
François Furet and Mona Ozouf ’s research, Lynn Hunt has focused
on the function of language in the Revolution as a means of political
transformation and a new location for charisma.67 Mazzini’s religion
of the nation may also be interpreted in this light: far from being
a systematic political doctrine theoretically defined and tested, it
represents a new political style relying on words and symbols—one
that turns words into symbols, into powerfully evocative and engag-
ing signs. As was the case in the Saint-Simonian churches that were
fast spreading at the beginning of Mazzini’s exile in France,68 his
own political language—the style of his thought—was based on the
use of individual symbolic words that would be pronounced in a
ritualized form, emphatically enunciated and repeated. Mazzini’s
religion of the nation was thus founded on ritual as well as symbolic
thought and language,69 revolving around pairs of terms such as
“God and the People” or “Thought and Action.” These engendered
a kind of permanent fluctuation between two mutually attracting or
repelling terms, and were aimed at provoking a kind of irrational
and faith-based adherence to Mazzini’s patriotic message. The very
couplet “Thought and Action” symbolically and ritually evokes the
idea of a constant exchange between symbols and rites, ideals and
actions, political concepts and deeds constituting the foundation of
Mazzini’s “religious revolution.”70
Many years later, the aesthetic and psychological function of reli-
gious thought and its symbols were made explicit by the Genoese in
his Autobiographical Notes. Drawing a parallel between the function
of “Religion” and that of “Art,” Mazzini stated:
Religion seizes upon [the Thought of the epoch], relinks it to heaven,

gives it the consecration of a divine origin and of a future; then, setting
it on high as the supreme law and aim of human action, transforms the
world through it.
The ministry of art is similar. Art seizes upon the idea lying inactive
in the mind, to instil it into the heart, confides it to the affections, and
converts it into a passion which transforms man from a thinker into
an apostle.
[ . . . ] The highest condition of art is when it interrogates the Thought

of the epoch in the nation and in humanity, translates it in symbols
and images, and clothes it in forms that stimulate the heart, the fancy,
and the affections, to make it a part of their own life, and ensure its
triumph.71
The parallel drawn between religion and art—which “seizes upon

the idea lying inactive in the mind, to instil it into the heart, confides it
to the affections, and converts it into a passion which transforms man
from a thinker into an apostle” and translates “the Thought of the
epoch” in symbols and images—recalls the link drawn in European
romantic and nationalist culture between poetry and prophecy, where
“religious experience, aesthetic theory and the search for a unifying
philosophical principle were combined.”72 This conception more gen-
erally recurs in Mazzini’s literary and aesthetic thought, starting from
the reflections presented in his early essay on Goethe’s Faust with
regard to the idea of a “Genius,” who runs ahead of his times, inspires
a creative idea that pervades and lends unity to artworks, and rouses
strong feelings. This was an artistic, poetical, and increasingly politi-
cal Genius—after the example of Byron and Foscolo—who in the years
of Mazzini’s exile became the “voice” of the people and of its national
poetry.73 A new blend of rhetoric, aesthetics, and politics was thus to
convey the thoughts of the nation and of its prophets or high priests.
Followers and Critics: Pisacane, Mario, Crispi
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
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
In the final chapter of his posthumously published work La

Rivoluzione (“Revolution”), Pisacane sets out to demolish Mazzini’s
formula “God and the People” by drawing upon the analysis—a
“splendid refutation”, as he described it—which Ausonio Franchi
had developed in La religione del secolo XIX (“The Religion of the
Nineteenth Century,” 1835), showing all its obscure points, internal
contradictions, and inconsistencies.75 The quotes from Mazzini (bor-
rowed from Franchi’s work) chiefly focus on the notion of the deity
and its role in Mazzini’s perspective, as illustrated, for example, by
the following definition: “The source, the moral sanction of the law
resides in God, i.e. in an inviolable, eternal, supreme sphere encom-
passing the whole of humanity and free from arbitrariness and error
and from any blind, transitory force. More precisely, God and law are
identical terms.”76 Mazzini’s formula “God and the People”—Pisacane
sarcastically remarked by drawing directly upon La religione del secolo
XIX—“is republican on Mazzini’s flag, just as it would be theocratic
on that of Pius IX.”77
Luigi Carlo Farini, whom Mazzini had appointed to lead the insur-
rection in Romagna in 1844, had soon distanced himself from Mazzini,
to the extent of becoming one of his bitter opponents.78 Evoking the
first speech Mazzini had delivered before the parliament of the Roman
Republic of 1849, Farini wrote in 1851:
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.
Farini laid particular stress on the instability, inconsistency, and

incoherence of Mazzini’s religious and political thought (although
Farini’s writings also reflect his profound political disagreement with

Mazzini and the personal resentment he harbored toward the man):
In theology Mazzini is a Deist, a Pantheist, and a Rationalist by turns;

or a compound of all. He might seem a Christian, but none can tell
whether Catholic or Protestant, or of what denomination. At one time
he appeared in every thing to copy Lamennais; another man without a
system. He was not always a Republican, or did not show it, at any rate
when in 1832 he invited King Charles Albert to act the Liberator. If
Republican he were, it was a strange kind of Republic that he fancied,
when in 1847 he exhorted Pius IX “to have faith,” and thought him
capable of every national, nay humanitarian, effort. At another time
he wrote against the theories of what is called Socialism: then, when
the wheel went round, he concocted a fresh essay, and allied with the
Socialists of all nations.79
Years later, in the immediate aftermath of Unification and of

the Battle of Aspromonte—as part of the controversy over whether
to remain loyal to the republic or to accept the monarchy—Alberto
Mario, by now a leader of the far Left, was to criticize Mazzini for his
philosophical and religious eclecticism:
I would always find myself in disagreement with Pippo. Besides, he hardly

agrees with himself as concerns the ideas he professes. As you know,
first he was eclectic, then spiritualistic (see his Letters to Sismondi)—
distinguishing between body and soul, like Aristotle; now he is panthe-
istic and says that the only life is that progressively unfolding on moons
and planets and stars. First he claimed to be a heir to the men of ’93 (see
Giovine Italia 1833) and found the formula Liberty-Fraternity-Equality
most excellent; then he took as his starting point the rights of man; now
he says that this is an atheistic formula, that it must be replaced by God
and the People, which he took from friar Savonarola, and that duties
must be established as the source of rights.80
As late as 1877 (after the Genoese’s death), as part of a polemic with

the unitary republicans, who had remained orthodox Mazzinians,
Mario conducted a critical survey of Mazzini’s conceptions on the
matter of religion, once again emphasizing their links with Saint-
Simonianism. According to Mario, “Mazzini’s philosophical and
political system rigorously follow from his theological postulates [. . .]
If we remove God from the formula, the major premise of the syl-
logism disappears.” Mario also polemically alluded to the possible
intermingling of Mazzini’s God with that of the Catholics, noting that

“the triumvirs Mazzini, Saffi and Armellini had their God displayed
as a sacrament in St Peter’s in the Vatican to beg for his help for the
victory of the Roman Republic, and at Easter invited the Constituent
Assembly to worship him through the holy sacrifice of the mass.”81
After Unification, and the subsequent choices that had to be made
between monarchy and republic, Mazzini’s apparently unquestionable
republicanism became yet another aspect of his political thought to
face criticism even from his own followers: for his stance on the mat-
ter was regarded as a wavering and often contradictory one. As early
as 1863 Mazzini was accused of having laid greater stress on the issue
of unification than on that of republicanism, or indeed democracy, by
Alberto Mario, who refused to accept the compromise made with the
monarchy. The following year, in 1864, Francesco Crispi addressed an
open letter to Mazzini, not long after he had made his famous declara-
tion to the parliament: “Monarchy unites us, the Republic would divide
us.” In his letter, Crispi writes:
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
Crispi also added:
I know; I have never forgotten it, and have repeated it frequently in

the Chamber, that you are the precursor of unity. The idea of the
nation Dante set forth in his immortal writings became an apostle-
ship to you. Nevertheless, I know also that you held complete unity
above all forms, and that to it you sacrificed several times the tri-
umph of democracy.83
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
to represent the principle to which the men called to represent the

nation will make the application.
Regarding the events of 1848–49, the Sicilian deputy and future

Prime Minister somewhat harshly wrote:
The honour of Rome’s resistance to the French is due in great measure

to yourself. The Roman Republic is not due to you, as it was proclaimed
twenty-five days before you arrived in the Eternal City. You certainly
cannot say that from 1848 to 1849, during the War of Independence,
your republican heart did not believe for an instant in monarchy for
the redemption of Italian unity.84
Had Mazzini not ultimately accepted the 1859 plebiscites and

Garibaldi’s 1860 formula “Italy and Victor Emmanuel”? Indeed, repub-
licanism for Mazzini had not been a specific constitutional project or
clearly defined political theory, but rather a principle and symbol, as
might be expected from his political style. In many cases, Mazzini’s
critics then found themselves in the position of having to justify their
choice in favor of the monarchy. Still, the influence and charisma of
Mazzini’s religion of the nation had long been waning: it now stood in
need of new interpretations, functional to the new context of unified
monarchical Italy—a young state yearning to acquire a strong govern-
ment and assert itself among other nations.
2
From Poetry to Prose

Crispi’s Third Italy
One of the foremost heirs to Mazzini’s tradition in the Third Italy

was Francesco Crispi, the former Mazzinian and garibaldino who
became prime minister. Under his guidance, Mazzini’s legacy,
opportunely reinterpreted, went from the democratic opposition
during the Risorgimento to the summit of power and to the leader-
ship of united Italy. Crispi considered himself to be a torchbearer
of Mazzini’s ideals, which he continued to evoke even after aban-
doning his republican stance, proving that this was the ideal and
political legacy that had formed him.1 He would continue to go
back to Mazzini, putting a new slant on his thoughts in response
to the new political climate. Though he was not a theorist (nor was
Mazzini for that matter), Crispi kept faith with some of Mazzini’s
defining principles: “the ideal of the united fatherland, [the] con-
cept of the duty of the individual towards the Nation, [the] ele-
vation of the idea of Nation to the supreme goal of politics.” 2 In
1861 he defended Mazzini before the first Italian parliament, criti-
cizing its failure to concede an amnesty to “the only Italian still
proscribed” and mentioning Mazzini in the same breath as Dante
and Machiavelli. 3 Some years later, after becoming prime minister,
Crispi would honour Mazzini’s memory by proposing to erect a
monument to him in Rome.4 In 1880, asked for his opinion on the
key players in the Risorgimento, Crispi would praise “the mind,
the soul, learning, the steadfastness, the sacrifice and prophetic
intuition of the Genoese.” He also added: “Mazzini, Mazzini, the

greatest of all. In a hundred years time, those who write our history
will call our age the century of Mazzini.”5
Inevitably, Crispi did not merely hand over “Mazzini’s postulates”
but also reinterpreted them. 6 This tendency is particularly apparent
in his political language, where we can often find Mazzinian for-
mulas or mottoes embedded in new contexts and often also adapted
to new contents: a recurrent theme in Crispi’s rhetoric was his call
to “duties” and to the national “mission”—with the latter concept
soon taking on new meanings in the early phase of Italian colonial-
ism. Elsewhere we find an ideological continuity, as in the case of
the social issue, which sees Crispi openly stating: “Giuseppe Mazzini
overturned the social formula of the French Revolution. He replaced
the rights of men with the duties of men. And he was right to do
so”;7 or when Crispi seeks a compromise in the face of the growing
demands of the workers’ movement, writing: “In 1848 the French
proclaimed the right to work,” before adding: “Mazzini believed
that formula to be mistaken, countering it with another: the duty to
work. I believe that both formulas can be reconciled.” This conclu-
sion is still in line with the concept of class collaboration proposed
and promoted by Mazzini.8 On the matter Crispi had this to say:
“The true social formula is as follows: the association of work with
capital so that both may participate in profits in proportion to their
respective values.”9
In the political sphere, Crispi, Prime Minister of a country now cel-
ebrating “National unity with the Monarchy” (from the title of one
of his speeches),10 employed Mazzinian language to endorse—as well
as to some extent reconcile himself with—the new reality, describing
the sovereign not as a man, but as a “principle”—the ideal or prin-
ciples always prevailed in Mazzini—and laying particular stress on his
“duties” to the people:
Let it be known though that in governments of freedom the king is

not a man, and much less than a dynast. He is a principle, the leading
magistrate of the nation.
He is a principle of cohesion and strength; he is a magistrate for the
wellbeing and greatness of his country. His ends, his aims, his duties
are all for the people, and he is their leader and providence.11
However, by that time, for Crispi, unlike for Mazzini, “unity”

now joined by “strength”—a particularly recurrent term in Crispi,
FROM POETRY TO PROSE 33
and one typical to him—was guaranteed by “fatherland and king”:

a fatherland that “rose and continued to advance in the people’s
estimation, and which bore the responsibility for undertaking a
mission of civilisation and humanity among the nations.”12 But
Crispi’s “mission” though mitigated by his evocation of “human-
ity” was no longer the one invoked by Mazzini, even if it can ulti-
mately be traced back to him. It had become the national mission
of a great power that was now a colonial power, on whose behalf
Crispi continued to invoke Mazzini’s ideals: “Wherever Italy’s
influence may be effective, it should bring about the triumph of
the principles that caused it to become a great European power—
Liberty and Nationality.”13 Crispi and his followers and supporters
rallying around the newspaper La Riforma tended to “emphasise
Mazzini’s nationality in a nationalistic sense.”14 They believed that
the new “mission” of the Third Rome was to guide and rule the
Mediterranean, once again in the name of that Mazzini who had,
in his later works, laid claim to Tunis on behalf of Italy, recall-
ing that “after the defeat of Carthage, the banner of Rome flew
from the peaks of the Atlas mountains, and the Mediterranean
was known as Mare Nostrum.”15 Thus Crispi’s so-called conver-
sion to “Africanism” and his vision of the Mediterranean as “Our
Sea” were affirmed, in linguistic terms at least, in continuity with
Risorgimento aspirations. But what had changed was the context,
as emerged on the occasion of the inauguration of a monument
dedicated to Garibaldi:
An Italy huddling within her borders [ . . . ] cannot be the Italy aspired

to by Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Victor Emmanuel. Every nation must
have its mission in the world, and we who undertook it with our states-
men, our philosophers, our captains, must not abandon it now that we
have formed a united State.16
Before even becoming a national power, Crispi’s nation was a State.

According to the Sicilian statesman, one of the contributing factors
was the interpretation of plebiscites as a sort of Mazzinian “national
pact”: the difference being that while Mazzini’s pact had created a
revolutionary dictatorship, Crispi’s interpretation of the pact led to
a “revolutionary monarchy.” He would again evoke and lay claim to
Mazzini’s ideals when describing how the monarchy had contributed
“with us [to] unification and abolished with us the temporal power of
the popes.”17
In Crispi’s nation we see Mazzini’s voluntaristic concept gradu-

ally being left behind, and the emergence, from 1870 onwards, of
naturalistic and even racial elements, along with a greater emphasis
on the first term in Mazzini’s couplet “nation and humanity.”18 A
closer look should be taken at the way Crispi linked the idea that “the
Italian nation had an existence that was independent of the will of
the people” to the vision of the Partito d’Azione, and to the fact that
its origins were to be found in Mazzini’s conception of the nation as
a “timeless entity.”19 Also frequently overlooked is the role played
in Crispi’s vision of the nation—alongside popular suffrage—by an
aspect that I have identified as central to Mazzini’s conception of the
nation: by which I mean the divine element. Crispi writes: “The exis-
tence of the nation, or its negation, cannot depend upon the vote of a
people. The nation exists because God has created it.”20 This theistic
or even theocratic element recurs in particular in Crispi’s definition
of the State: “When the State represents the nation, it acquires a life
that is not granted by laws, but by God, and this is the case of Italy.” 21
Following Mazzini’s example, Crispi links this concept to the con-
cept of national mission, now a mission of international grandeur.22
As we know this mission had by now given rise to a nation, which
could respond to any dispute or attack by taking “any action that
was felt to be necessary for [its own] defence” and which could there-
fore “conflict with freedom.” 23 It also gave rise to a State that would
put up “strong resistance to anyone [ . . . ] wishing to threaten” its
authority.24
Toward the end of the century, the young writer and sociologist
Guglielmo Ferrero, a student and future son-in-law of the famous
criminologist Cesare Lombroso, found himself reflecting upon
the “reaction” that seemed to have ended the revolution of the
Risorgimento, when he concluded bitterly: “The dictatorship of
Francesco Crispi marks the utter exhaustion of the old generation
that brought about the political revolution [ . . . ] What remains of
the magnificent plan evoked by men of thought and action, from
Cavour to Garibaldi, from Cattaneo to Mazzini, to call the Italian
people to war?”25 Although rooted in ideals derived from Mazzini,
Crispi’s Third Italy did not correspond entirely to the Italy dreamt
of by the Genoese;26 however, this did not stop Crispi from claiming
to be inspired by Mazzinian principles and ideas, albeit adapted to
the new context.
Criticizing and Reappraising Mazzini
While the Italian Unification—with Rome as capital—did not take

place quite as envisaged by Mazzini, it did come about with the sup-
port of his former followers and of former garibaldini who had chosen
the monarchy.27 A few months later Mazzini had died in Pisa under a
false foreign name, condemned to a kind of paradoxical internal exile.
The reaction of the new State’s institutions to the death of the patriot
verged on indifference: the Chamber of Deputies passed a laconic
order of the day, while the Prime Minister sat “cold and impassive on
his chair” before parliament, and did not even allow an official delega-
tion to attend the funeral.28 As might be expected, in monarchist and
ultramoderate circles Mazzini’s name was “rarely mentioned unless
preceded by an insulting adjective or followed by abuse.”29 Given the
harsh criticism from moderate and Catholic quarters, the task of cel-
ebrating Mazzini’s memory fell mainly to the Left,30 particularly the
Extreme Left (the so-called Estrema) where his most orthodox follow-
ers could be found: despite everything, in his commemoration Alberto
Mario called Mazzini “a Saint.”31 And the Extreme Left immediately
started a true cult32 that even extended to Mazzini’s body, which
was embalmed and petrified before being ceremoniously carried to
Staglieno cemetery in his native Genoa.33
On an ideological level, Mazzini’s influence had long been waning.
As we have seen, the first critical signs emerged among his immedi-
ate followers in the 1850s, and Garibaldi’s epic deeds in the 1860s rel-
egated Mazzini to the sidelines.34 Mazzini died at the beginning of a
decade, the 1870s, marking the final crisis of his thought in the ranks
of the workers’ movement, which was converting en masse to social-
ism.35 In a letter to Carlo Cafiero dated July 1, 1871, Friedrich Engels
wrote from London: “as you say time has passed quickly and ‘God and
the people’ is no longer the slogan of the Italian working class.” 36 Also
attesting to both the sharp decline of Mazzini’s message and to the
harsh criticism levelled at its authoritarian character and theoretical
weakness are two analyses written by two extremely different men of
the time—Mikhail Bakunin and Francesco De Sanctis. 37
After 1870, Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876), the Russian founder
of Anarchism who had come to Italy in the early 1860s, attracted by
Garibaldi’s military success and by the democratic prospects of the
Risorgimento struggle, had not forgiven Mazzini for condemning
the Paris Commune. In the context of a polemic with the Italian

patriot that lasted almost a decade (that is, from the time of the First
International), he described Mazzini as the “last great priest of reli-
gious, metaphysical and political idealism” listing his ideal errors:
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.
Bakunin concluded, stating: “Mazzini reproaches us for not believ-

ing in God. We in turn reproach him for believing in Him.”38
In his lessons held in the winter of 1874 on the “democratic school”
Francesco De Sanctis (1817–1883), the Risorgimento patriot and ini-
tiator of modern Italian literary history, who would also serve as
Minister of Education in united Italy, paid homage to Mazzini as the
man who had identified the foundations of “Europe’s cosmopolitan-
ism and future federation” in “the reconstitution of national unifi-
cations” and made “action the keystone of the national thought” as
well as “the means to national redemption.” However, De Sanctis’s
Mazzinian origins did not prevent him from levelling rather harsh
criticisms against Mazzini the thinker and politician, writing him off
with the lapidary words: “he created an ideal Italy for himself, and by
working on that ideal he deluded himself with regard to the means
to be used.” He also described Mazzini as the creator of a “religious
reform” lacking “concrete ideas,” so that his role as national educator
remained unfulfilled, because it was based on an instrumental use of
religion:
Basically, De Sanctis claimed, religious words were being used for

political ends, to speed up national unification rather than bring about
religious regeneration. The sad consequence was that Italy remained
exactly where she had been before—once political unity had been
achieved, the intellectual and moral unity based on religious unity was
still lacking.39
Mazzini’s “political God” was to be considered a “fault intrin-

sic to his system. If you lack faith and feeling, why use these words
for political ends?” As we shall see, the destructive criticism of De
Sanctis would weigh heavily upon the way Mazzini was evaluated
by intellectuals—from the historian and antifascist activist Gaetano

Salvemini to the philospher Benedetto Croce—in the coming
century.
By the 1880s, with the livelier political clashes now a thing of
the past, Mazzini was gradually beginning to be reintegrated in the
national consciousness, although we need to distinguish between
the still-cautious attitude of the institutions—even though the so-
called historic Left (Sinistra storica) was in power—and of the vari-
ous political parties (with the Extreme Left always leading the way
in commemorations), and the diffusion of the myth of Mazzini on
a popular level. With regard to the latter, the 1880s were marked by
two editorial events destined to have a wide-ranging and long-lasting
impact: the first was the publication, in the tenth year after Mazzini’s
death (1882), of one of the most celebrated and most frequently repub-
lished biographies of Mazzini, written by Jessie White Mario, who
had undertaken to “make not only the Apostle’s actions but also [ . . . ]
his complex theoretical system digestible to the stomachs of the petit
bourgeoisie.”40 The second was the inclusion of a chapter on Mazzini
in the hugely popular childrens’ novel Cuore (Heart) published in 1886
by Edmondo De Amicis (1846–1908), writer, journalist, and national
pedagogue. De Amicis’s novel, the story of an exemplary patriotic stu-
dent in post-Risorgimento Turin, full of moral parables told to his
fellow schoolboys, would become and remain a best seller for Italian
bourgeois youth between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Mazzini’s appearance in Cuore shows how the patriot’s figure could
only be reintegrated in the national popular consciousness after being
partially stripped of its political meaning and dehistoricized:41and
these processes, which are typical of the construction of national
historical myths, would be particularly evident in the new proposals
and readings of Mazzini in the decades following the patriot’s death
and the end of the Risorgimento. Thus in Cuore, while Cavour and
a monarchist Garibaldi were celebrated as the protagonists of the
Risorgimento epos, Mazzini was squeezed in between a chapter on
the death of the mother of the protagonist Garrone and another chap-
ter on the civic merits of a boy who had saved a friend from drowning
in a river: essentially the Genoese owed his inclusion to his filial love
for his mother, and was simply mentioned to cheer up the orphaned
Garrone.42
But it would fall to the poet Giosuè Carducci, and later to the writer
and amateur historian Alfredo Oriani, to play a key role in replacing
Mazzini in the national pantheon. In the meantime Italy’s father founder

had felt the effects of the transformation of Risorgimento democ-
racy following national unification. And in this context a new read-
ing of Mazzini’s legacy developed, which Carducci and Oriani would
hand on to the new century through their complex and influential
reinterpretations.
Carducci: Aesthetics and National Faith
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
and Catholic, republican and monarchist—based on outward forms

rather than on specific ideals. And although the poet’s patriotism
grew out of new historical and cultural experiences, it is akin to the
syncretic and aesthetic elements present in Mazzini’s ideology.
From 1859 onwards, Carducci was repeatedly called upon to
explain his tributes, if not his closeness, to the monarchy. At that
time he provided an explanation that sheds greater light on the ori-
gin and development of his leanings. Describing his poem Alla Croce
di Savoia (“To the Cross of Savoy”) in a letter to a friend that year,
he writes:
In this canto I intended to versify the story of two different principles

that have come together in the aim of reuniting the fatherland; the two
principles I refer to are popular and monarchist: the current movement
takes its energy from the former, and its form from the latter; the former
is represented by the glorious Tuscany born from the civilisation of the
Communes, while the latter is embodied by Piedmont, which derives all
its force from the Monarchy.46
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
to the plastic tendency of human animals, who personally create

their own idealities in order to be able to adore or revile them as
they like, the head of the Savoy family represents Italy and the
State. So long live Italy!”49 The political and institutional process of
“representing” becomes a “representation,” followed by an aesthetic
subordination engendering spontaneous adherence. Carducci
explained that the origins of the institution of the monarchy lay
in the “vision” and “recognition” of an enduring core combining
“form,” symbol and functions. “The Latin rex , he who rules [ . . . ]
arises from election, the people sees and recognises the form and
aim of rule, law and fatherland.”50
In the 1890s Carducci wrote a series of tributes to Prime Minister
Francesco Crispi, linking him to the Mazzinian tradition. In 1895
he traced back Crispi’s concept of unity to its origins in Mazzini’s
thought: “Crispi clearly and firmly intended Italian unity to be built
and strengthened by means of revolution in the south, in accordance
with the glorious Mazzinian idea.”51 According to Carducci, respond-
ing to the polemic around the figure of Crispi without despising his
use of force, the Sicilian statesman could be described as a “mega-
lomaniac”: “Francesco Crispi is a megalomaniac just like Giuseppe
Mazzini, like Victor Emanuel, like Giuseppe Garibaldi, who all
yearned for a strong and respected Italy.”52 Although his direct evoca-
tions of Mazzini tended to coincide with celebrations of the anniver-
saries of the patriot’s death or birth, 53 his most celebrated tribute was
contained in verses written almost prophetically a month before the
death of the patriot. Here Mazzini became the visionary who with
“Gracchus’ heart” (the Republican tradition of ancient Rome), “and
Dante’s thought” (the literary concept of an Italian nation), “[saw]
glimmering in heaven the third Italy,” leading to her the “dead people
[of the peninsula].” Most importantly, he was responsible for kindling
the ideal (in the words of his poem: “‘Ideal,’ thinks he, ‘thou alone art
true.’”),54 and it was his visionary power that created a link between
the possibility of seeing the nation as a discovery and as object of
contemplation that was also aesthetic (an aesthetic truth), and of dis-
covering and mediating a virtuous ideal and inner ethic (a true ethic
glimpsed with “fixed eyes” and a “face that [ . . . ] ne’er did smile,” in
Carducci’s famous portrayal of Mazzini’s somber appearance). Like
his adherence to the monarchy, Carducci’s discovery of the nation
took place through a conception of politics that was fundamentally a
contemplation and veneration of forms.
Later Carducci would also invoke Mazzini to justify his adherence

to the monarchy, by referring to the priority he had given to Mazzini’s
ideal of unity, and by explaining how after 1848 the Republican unity
had already revealed itself to be “defective in its form”: yet another
reference to politics as “form,” in the celebrated and influential con-
text, by now politically conservative, of his popular literary anthology
Letture del Risorgimento italiano.55 In the early 1890s, in a state-
ment released to the newspaper Il Resto del Carlino, Carducci stated:
“Despite my traditional Republican education and habits, through a
constant process of political and historical comparison, I have experi-
enced a new attraction and naïve and sincere conversion to the monar-
chy, which I strongly believe to be the only way of keeping Italy united
and strong.”56 The use of the terms “conversion” and “I believe” was
not casual (nor was his reference, in the final years of Crispi’s rule,
to a “strong” Italy). From the early 1890s onwards, we begin to see in
Carducci’s patriotism the elements of a religious interpretation that is
increasingly similar to the language and symbolism of Mazzini’s reli-
gion of the nation: for example, the poet defines Guglielmo Oberdan
(1852–1888), a famous Italian political activist, executed for his patri-
otic deeds by the Austrians who still ruled in his native Trieste, as “a
confessor and a martyr of the religion of the fatherland.”57 In Carducci’s
commemoration of the Bolognese scholar Giuseppe Regaldi, his teach-
ings to the young were summed up in “three ideals” clearly inspired
by Mazzini: “God, Fatherland, Humanity.” The latter two terms were
actually encapsulated in the first, that is, in the deity, which is the
object of prayer and worship.58 Like Mazzini, Carducci believed that
the “ideal” made Italy, but his ideal assumed an increasingly tradi-
tional religious connotation causing him to evoke the “eternal idea
of Italy” as “a deeply national and humanly Catholic idea.” In the
same period the poet responded to the anticlerical commemorations
of Giordano Bruno by drawing his students’ attention to “a God far
greater” than Bruno’s materialist God, which lacked “the moral ele-
ment” and the “faith of action.” This ideal proves to be divine and
is capable—in a Mazzinian manner—of awakening Italy, the “dead
people” in his verses for Mazzini. Thus Carducci reacted to the mate-
rialists, saying:
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,
revealing a people to itself, marking the destiny of a history. The God

of Love and of Sacrifice, the God of Life and of the Future, the God of
the Peoples and of Humanity is in us, with us and for us.59
In the mid-1890s, Carducci, who had been invited to preside over

the inauguration of the new Palace of the Republic of San Marino,
found his republican heart beating again, this time in the name of
a religious interpretation of the republican faith crowned by “God,
the highest vision to which the peoples can aspire in the strength
of their youth.” On this occasion the poet explained—that just like
all the great men of history, from Dante to George Washington, he
had invoked God, and that his own God was the God of Mazzini, the
inspiring principle of new cities and new states: “God spoke to the
sound and steady soul of Giuseppe Mazzini in the prison of Savona,
leading the Ezekiel of Italy to the Campidoglio [the Capitoline Hill
in Rome]. Wherever and whene’er the divine idea shines unfalter-
ingly and steadfast, cities rise and flourish [ . . . ]. God was there at
the birth of our Republic, O citizens.”60 By celebrating the “perpetual
liberty” of San Marino and blending it with the liberty of the Italian
Risorgimento, so as to throw more light on each, Carducci considers
the Republic to be born of the union of religion and politics, later
claiming to have “affirmed God with Mazzini.” 61 The Mazzinian God
would therefore help Carducci shape a new national faith inspired by
Mazzini’s religion of the nation.
Alfredo Oriani and Mazzini’s Nation
The reinterpretation of Mazzini in the national public discourse

between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was not only the work
of statesmen and poets, but was also developed by historians and polit-
ical writers. The most influential of these was Alfredo Oriani (1852–
1909), who began his career as a novelist in the last two decades of the
nineteenth century, but only enjoyed a posthumous fame thanks to
his late discovery by Benedetto Croce. In subsequent decades Oriani
too would be the object of new readings and political uses, in which
the Mazzinian element of his thought and work certainly played a role.
This conservative writer, who would become very popular in the 1920s
and 1930s especially for his pseudo-historical works—like his 1892 La
lotta politica in Italia—features in our narrative both as an original
and passionate reader and interpreter of Mazzini, and by virtue of his
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):
To those who would not sacrifice Catholicism to the revolution, and

those who declared liberty incompatible with religion, the noble
Giuseppe Mazzini, struggled to bring together these two opposing
tendencies, preaching insurrection in the name of the right and mar-
tyrdom in the name of a religion that accepted virtually all that was
essential in Christianity.66
In this brief assessment, Oriani already identified in the figure of

Mazzini aspects of both liberation (“insurrection”) and self-subju-
gation (“martyrdom”). These contrasting tendencies also character-
ized Oriani’s emphatic portrait of the Genoese, which unhesitatingly
defined Mazzini as the “most original political and literary figure of
the century in Italy,” recognizing the overwhelming impact of the
Mazzinian epic, but also aware of the patriot’s complex relations with
the revolutionary tradition. On the one hand, Mazzini had recognized
the need for the French Revolution: “Italy either shall not exist or it
shall be involved in and for the French revolution,” and on the other
he claimed that the revolutionary individualist ideal was obsolete and
that the “supreme formula of right” had become “that of social duty”:
a collective ideal that would reemerge in Oriani’s political propos-
al.67 The distinguishing feature of Mazzini’s message as interpreted
by Oriani was the religious aspect that put God back at the center of
the political program: “God is in the revolutionary consciousness,

because God is eternal, and the French revolution perished because it
forgot this.” Thus politics and religion entwined: “The new society is
therefore political and religious: the revolution must be preceded by a
reform; education will be both means and aim, because the moral per-
sonality is the first and last limit of history and of life.” Oriani referred
here to a “preceptive and moral deism.”68 In some places Oriani
seemed to be drawing attention to Mazzini’s subtle, almost invisible
ties not just to Christianity but also to Catholicism: for example, the
patriot was described as being appalled by socialism’s “expulsion” of
the “Catholic God.”69 Oriani concludeed by suggesting that Mazzini’s
“mystical tone” corresponded to the “religiosity of the Christian reac-
tion following the revolution,”70 thus hinting at the shadow of the
counter-revolution and at Mazzini’s debt to the tendencies of the age
of Restoration.
His Lotta politica in Italia also offered a historical verdict,
whereby Oriani underlined the ideological contradictions present in
Mazzini’s thought and the elements of irreality that they produced;
but also, paradoxically, the cohesion that they could engender.
Oriani did however recognize that these contradictory elements gen-
erated fragility (“The antinomies of his religious and revolutionary
nature erode an already weak position”), and that Mazzini possessed
a “mysticism rather empty of moral and religious formulas.” Despite
his distance from the masses, Mazzini was nevertheless the first to
“talk of people with the people” and to “preach a democracy that
could only triumph among the masses.” Finally, Oriani concluded
that it was also for this reason that “[Mazzini’s] popularity would be
so immense” and that his message survived to inform the spirit of
the nation:
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
Italy, had himself witnessed and participated in the waning of the

Risorgimento ideals and in the transformation of the national heroes
into icons. When Mazzini’s name crops up in his letters, it is usually in
reference to the affixing of plaques, to a commemorative lecture, or to
a visit to the patriot’s tomb in Staglieno cemetery. Oriani recalled such
visit by dwelling on the echoes and memories of a time now past, on a
Mazzini now forgotten by younger generations, and describing what
he believed to be the final decline of Mazzini’s project: “His doctrine
could not have been a religion, and lacked true believers: his politics
had the omnipotence of the ideal, and by going beyond the reality in
which they would have been accomplished and then declined, they
became little more than a dream; his words evoking heroes and mar-
tyrs soared too high, terrifying listeners instead of consoling them.” 72
Yet, a decade earlier, after receiving an invitation to participate in a
commemoration for Mazzini, Oriani had claimed to be eager to recall
the “Great Man” in public, even though—he wrote—he was neither
Mazzinian nor did he approve of interpretations or criticisms with
a “party bias.” He wanted Mazzini to be commemorated by means
of a “truly patriotic” event and, referring to his own historical work
(Lotta Politica), he claimed that the moment had come “for a scientific
analysis, for a heroic acknowledgement.”73 In the same way that he
mingled historical verdict with a sort of glorious resurrection in his
titanistic historiography, here—in his “heroic acknowledgement”—we
can catch a first glimpse of his tendency to present an ideal vision of
Mazzini in a patriotic light that was supposedly unbiased, but actually
both a revision and a new political fate.
The times had changed. In his Rivolta ideale —written during
Oriani’s most explicitly political phase at the turn of the century—
Oriani illustrated his project to renew Italy. This project hinged
not only on the Italian people’s recognition of its own individual-
ity; on a rediscovery of authority, of the duties toward family and
fatherland; but also on national pride and colonial expansionism.
Oriani hoped that this new Italy would be led by a new aristoc-
racy cutting across the classes and that it would be based on merit
and example, which would restore the country to the greatness of
the heroic age of the Risorgimento. Some elements or, rather, some
of the guiding principles of this transformation were rooted in
Mazzini’s legacy, one of the sources of its core ideology. However,
as we have seen in the sections dealing with Crispi and Carducci,
these principles would evolve in a new context influenced by factors
unknown to Mazzini, but held to be essential by Oriani, such as

race and imperialism. The Mazzinian tradition was only one of the
sources of inspiration converging in Oriani’s political vision, and
was rarely made explicit; in fact, it was often mediated or surpassed
by a more philosophically engaged Hegelianism, when not over-
whelmed by different intellectual influences ranging from Spencer
to Nietzsche.74
However, if we analyze all the key factors contributing to Oriani’s
historical and political vision, we will experience no difficulty in iden-
tifying Mazzini’s influence. Oriani’s definition of the nation, of the
fatherland, and State was a spiritual one; the nation also revealed a
historically determined primacy, as in the Mazzinian conception of
nationality and of the national mission (although one could also detect
echoes of the Catholic nationalist Vincenzo Gioberti, 1801–1852). The
Mazzinian couplet “Nation and Humanity” was now joined by the ele-
ment of race—though still defined in preeminently spiritual terms:
“Every race has a consciousness and original thought [ . . . ] Race thus
represents the first moment of individuality of a people.” The high-
est expression of the nation and fatherland was now the State, the
realm—according to Hegelian principles—of morality through law.75
Oriani also affirmed, similar to Mazzini and to the thinkers that had
inspired him (like Lamennais, for example, and more indirectly, De
Maistre), that the role of “authority” was superior to that of “liberty”:
“in social life, the issue is usually one of authority more than liberty.”
In this Oriani saw an analogy between religion and politics: “Politics
only exists to the extent established by laws like religion through
dogmas, causing its organs to express authority. [ . . . ] In politics as
in action, everything follows from authority.” 76 And in the chapter of
Rivolta ideale dedicated to “liberty” Oriani’s reflections also dwelt on
the duties of an individual toward the family or fatherland, akin to
those preached by Mazzini: “We must love and respect our parents
[ . . . ] in the same way that we must remain subject to our fatherland.”
At the same time he was also introducing new motives, unknown to
the currents of Risorgimento democracy: “because the fatherland is
the historic personality of the race, without which our personality as
individuals could never have taken shape.” 77 Nonetheless, Oriani also
believed that the individual continued to be “a product of the father-
land more than of race” and that “modern patriotism” would be “more
spiritual than the old [form of patriotism].” It would have led, follow-
ing Mazzini’s example, to the affirmation by the “Third Italy” of an
“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
Mazzini in the New Century

Between Censorship and Idealization
From the early twentieth century onward, Mazzini’s thought was

increasingly appropriated, ideologically transformed, and reinter-
preted from spiritualist, irrationalist, authoritarian, and even colonial-
ist points of view. Appropriation involved diminishing or neutralizing
part of Mazzini’s political thought while emphasizing or idealizing
other aspects. These processes not only affected individual readings
of the patriot’s writings, but were also involved in the diffusion of
Mazzini’s most well-known work in public schools—in the latter case,
the State itself would be responsible for selecting or even censoring
features of his thought. Yet in the same period precisely these authori-
tarian and irrationalist facets of his thought would undergo dissec-
tion, criticism, or rejection by writers, thinkers, and scholars whose
historical and political analyses would have a lasting influence.
The adoption of Mazzini’s text I doveri dell’uomo (On the Duties
of Man), proposed in 1902 by Nunzio Nasi, the Minister of Public
Instruction, and involving the introduction of an edition stripped
of its antimonarchist and republican contents, sheds light on the
construction of a conservative interpretation of Mazzini’s thought
imposed by the State during Italy’s Liberal era. It shows, more gener-
ally, the mechanisms of selective ideological appropriation, through
partial readings of Mazzini, which affected the religion of the nation,
notably from an authoritarian point of view. In his announcement of
the proposed introduction of the Doveri into schools, Minister Nasi
called on Mazzinian terminology to underline the general function
of schools, which was to “nourish sentiment and duty together with

that [sic] for the Fatherland and God.”1 Later, in the circular to the
education superintendents accompanying the new edition of the
Doveri and replacing Mazzini’s original dedication to the Italian
workers, the Minister illustrated the ideals that had given birth to
the work: “This book is the fruit of a great faith: faith in God, in
the Family, in the Fatherland, in the fate of Humanity.” Particular
emphasis was given to aspects regarding faith in God, and family
and patriotic values, underlining the fact that “the achievement of
liberty and national unity” were present in Mazzini’s work “in the
form of a distant ideal,” because they “were soon attained thanks
to the unanimous wish of Princes and Peoples.”2 It was necessary
therefore to reconcile the message of the Doveri and Mazzini’s his-
torical function with the actual political developments of the uni-
fication process. The censored edition provoked a lively debate in
parliament, and the Minister came under particularly strong attack
from the Republican Deputy Carlo Del Balzo. Responding to a flurry
of criticisms from all sides following the adoption of the work, also
because of its “religious” content, Nasi said: “In the eyes of some, this
work may suffer from the fault or excess of being informed by reli-
gious beliefs (Interruptions [by members of Parliament]). As we all
know, Giuseppe Mazzini was a deist. [ . . . ] I once claimed, and I will
repeat it again, that the thought of God cannot be removed from the
school, in the same way that it cannot be be removed from life.”3
Del Balzo’s reaction was intended to defend Mazzini’s thought
and criticize the distortions caused by the elimination of several
passages in the censored version of the work. According to the
Republican Deputy, this suppression gave Mazzini’s message an
authoritarian slant: “His thought was complex, and can be summed
up in the formula God and the people. You have done everything
possible to suppress the people, leaving only God.”4 Del Balzo listed
a series of censored aspects including Republicanism, matters con-
cerning equality (“You left God at the summit: [ . . . ] but you were
disturbed by that people of equal and free citizens at the base so
you got rid of it”); the role of the “whole nation as legislator” (while
laws are now only passed by “a fraction of the citizens”); and lastly,
Mazzini’s attack upon privileges and his support for universal
suffrage. Del Balzo concluded: “The mutilations do not just con-
cern the Monarchy and the King, they concern the very essence
of national sovereignty.”5 According to Minister Nasi, though, the
MAZZINI IN THE NEW CENTURY 51
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
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,
or [ . . . ] socialist and patriotic!”20 Yet, whenever Pascoli made an

explicit reference to Mazzini in his speeches, he, too, tended to
politically neutralize him: Mazzini’s figure and his ideals were rec-
onciled with monarchic ideals and principles that were not actually
implemented but interiorized in people’s consciences.
In the centenary year, while commemorating Antonio Mordini,a
former follower of Mazzini and garibaldino, Pascoli further dis-
mantled the Mazzinian ideal that had failed to become reality: the
republican ideal, “the other table of Mazzinian law, the most sacred”
together with that of unification. In the words of the poet, neither
“Republic” nor “Liberty” were any longer at stake (“which, sieges
apart, can be enjoyed under this loyal monarchy”), and people
needed to aspire to a moralized political ideal enacted in interi-
ore homini: “Each of us may or rather should proclaim the sacred
republic within our own souls. Because the republic of Mazzini
means being for one’s self, and feeling oneself to be a part of a whole,
having imperscriptible rights and undeclinable duties, strongly
defending the former and calmly honoring the latter.”21 In another
speech, given during the fifty-year celebration of Italy’s Unification
(1911), the shadows of the fathers of the fatherland all yearned for
the same thing, even the Piedmontese king of the house of Savoy
Carlo Alberto (leading figure of the monarchical Risorgimento) and
Mazzini “resemble[d]” each other: “You hated each other, yet shared
the same thoughts.”22 According to Pascoli, the sovereign himself
could have explained Mazzini’s doctrine because both believed in
the role of divine will: “‘God and the People’ was the concise and
sacred formula of Mazzini. Anyone seeking an explanation can refer
to [King] Carlo Alberto who claimed that whenever an entire peo-
ple was joined in a single desire, God’s will was expressed through
them and with them.” Both royal and popular will, therefore, had
divine origins. For Pascoli, the diffusion of schooling alone—the
Mazzinian “education”—represented the realization of the Genoese
politician’s ideals: “The people gradually educates itself, schools
multiply, instruction is diffused. Your ideal republic is beginning
to take shape in Italy, even though there is a king,” were the words
he addressed to Mazzini’s shadow.23 Even the celebration of the fif-
tieth year of the fatherland—in the religious terms in which it was
imagined by the poet—evoked distant Mazzinian echoes that could
have healed the conflicts lacerating young Italy (conflicts once pro-
foundly opposed by Mazzini himself):
We are celebrating the rite of the religion of the Fatherland. [ . . . ] Today

the sentiment of patriotism is what unites us the most and unites the
most; it can therefore be considered a religion; a religion that follows
and accompanies even those who would deny it [ . . . ] This religious
sentiment is what will be the great reliever. During the bitter, harsh
struggle between work and capital, between class and class, between
category and category.24
Elements of the religion of the nation, the formulas, and, in par-

ticular, the “mission” invoked by Mazzini were now shaped by the
new duties imposed by the times: colonial duties (the year marking
fifty years of Unification was also the year of the war on Libya).
Back in 1901, the Italian people was ready “now and always [accord-
ing to the formula of the oath of Giovine Italia], to put up its sons on
our Alps and on our Sea!” 25 and in 1908 Pascoli could address the
young nation, demanding: “Calmly, seriously, silently send some
ships to the Red Sea. Embark your cannons and men, [ . . . ] then
make the announcement: ‘Be free! We are not here to oppress you.’”
Italy’s new mission seemed to tread a difficult line between guid-
ing the peoples of the colonies, on the one hand, and supporting
them on the other hand: “This has always been and continues to be
our Country’s duty. This is what Mazzini thought, what Garibaldi
strived for, what Victor Emanuel dreamt and what Carducci
affirmed. Italy was to draw her strength from the love and from the
natural and spontaneous alliance of the weak.” 26 Every dialectic
of the parties, at least in foreign policy, seemed to be cancelled by
Italy’s “humanitarian” mission. Even Pascoli’s celebrated speech,
La grande proletaria si è mossa (The Great Proletarian [Nation]
has Stirred ), given at the height of the fighting for the conquest of
Libya, with its mentions of the “great martyr of the nations,” duty
and the “third era,” contained an allusion to Mazzini’s patriotic
language. 27
In the spring of 1911, that allusion was made more explicit by
an even stauncher supporter of the colonial war: Enrico Corradini
(1865–1931), founder and leader of the early-twentieth-century Italian
nationalist movement.28 He ended his speech “Proletariat, emigration,
Tripoli,” with the following solemn declaration:
Long before the question of Tripolitania arose, before the liberation

of Italy and her constitution as a nation; someone who held the past
and future of Italy in his magnanimous heart; someone aware of what
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
Early Twentieth-Century Readers:

Georges Sorel and Giovanni Papini
The encounter with Italian culture made by Georges Sorel (1847–

1922), the theorist of revolutionary syndicalism whose ideas would
be so influential for the birth of Fascist ideology, 30 was not just
the result of Italian interest in the French thinker, marked by the
seminal translation of his Reflections on Violence promoted by
Benedetto Croce with the publisher Laterza. Sorel himself revealed
great curiosity and interest (not always given due consideration by
historians) in Italian philosophical thought and politics. Already
in 1896 Sorel had published a detailed study on Vico in the journal
Devenir social , returning to the subject in a more concise manner
in his 1906 work Le systéme historique de Renan. At the beginning
of the century he also proposed a political reading of the Vichian
theory of “ricorsi ”—the cyclical return to a primitive state of the
collective soul leading to recourse to violence—in a preface to
the volume Matériaux pour une théorie du proletariat dated 1905,
touching upon it more briefly in his Réflexions sur la violence
(1908). 31 Although Italian neo-idealism largely owed its awareness
of Vico to Francesco De Sanctis and Bertrando Spaventa, and their
Vichian interests, Sorel may also have contributed to the rediscov-
ery of the eighteenth-century Neapolitan philosopher. However,
Sorel’s interest in recent Italian history, and in Mazzini in particu-
lar, has remained relatively unknown.
The first mention of Mazzini in George Sorel’s correspondence to
Italians can be found in a letter written to Benedetto Croce in 1897,
in which he praised Mazzini’s role in the history of Italian patrio-
tism.32 Later Sorel explicitly linked Mazzini’s name to that of Vico in
another letter to Croce in 1912, in which he compared the Genoese
patriot and the philosopher. After complaining to Croce that “many
Italians today fail to see the educational value of Vico,” Sorel noted:
“The time has come to consider Mazzini as a historical figure and
to study his philosophical position.”33 Two years later, the French
thinker returned to Mazzini, claiming that he was still not suffi-

ciently known, or rather understood by Italian culture. 34 He insisted
that Croce’s intervention was required: “It would be useful for Italy
if some philosopher were to explain Mazzini’s ideas. This would be
a magnificent subject for you; no one could do it justice like you.” 35
Croce’s letters to Sorel have not survived, but we do know—as will
become clear in Chapter 5—that Croce’s overall opinion of Mazzini
was rather detached, and that he held his philosophical ideas in very
low esteem, meaning that Sorel’s suggestion would fall by the way-
side. Sorel was probably not familiar with the writings of De Sanctis
on Mazzini, nor with the more recent work of Salvemini. However,
he had been particularly impressed by Mario Missiroli’s treatment of
Mazzini in La monarchia socialista, which contained a chapter that
he held to be of the “utmost importance.” Writing to Missiroli, Sorel
wondered “what Croce would have said about your [Missiroli’s] view
on the idea of God in Mazzini,” adding: “Like you, I believe that for
Mazzini God exists outside of humanity; in particular, he may be
that witness requested by [Ernest] Renan.”36
In the chapter on Mazzini’s dissidence the influential journal-
ist and writer Mario Missiroli (1886–1974), the future director of
Il Messaggero and Il Corriere della Sera in the post–World War II
period, proposed a reading of Mazzini focusing on his religious
thought, and reflected on the nature of his political thought, which
he held to be essentially authoritarian. Though critical of Mazzini’s
unrealistic assessment and failure to understand the post-1848
Italian politics, Missiroli believed that it was thanks to him that Italy
had been offered an opportunity for moral and religious reform that
had long been absent from her history. According to the Bolognese
journalist, “the more he lost his feel for the current effective politi-
cal situation [ . . . ] the more the need for a new moral and religious
conscience grew [in Mazzini],” a need for a “spiritual regeneration
that he had conceived and indicated as the highroad to a new Italian
primacy.”37 However, Sorel was above all impressed by Missiroli’s
reflections on Mazzini’s God, which dwelt on the religious dimen-
sion of Mazzinian thought and on how this placed him at odds with
his time. Missiroli believed that this had caused Mazzini to formu-
late his antidemocratic thought: “He is unfamiliar with the mod-
ern conception of liberty”—a remark that would also crop up in
Benedetto Croce’s writings—adding that Mazzini “had become so
cut off from the history and thought of his times that he did not
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
According to Sorel, Mazzini’s example confirmed the function of

myths and political utopias in revolutionary processes, and there was
a parallel between Mazzini’s preaching, that of the early Christians,
and the modern socialist movement veined by religious fervor.
Although Benedetto Croce took note of Sorel’s remarks on the
religious nature of political movements (as well as of his use of the
Vichian theory of the “ricorsi ”),42 he did not yet seem to realize
that Sorel’s interests already placed him on the road to irrational-
ism, activism, and antidemocracy.43 In fact, a quarter of a century
would go by before the philosopher would express his regrets for
having offered the fascists a “breviary” with the Italian translation of

Reflections on Violence.44 Sorel’s reference to Mazzini also attracted
the attention of another important contemporary reader, who wrote
the following words in his review of the translation:
According to Sorel, great ideas have triumphed in the world because

they affect the hearts of the crowd like myths, in other words, like
representations of action in the form of battles that will result in
the triumph of their cause. The apocalypse with the final defeat
of Satan is a Christian myth, the reform, the French revolution,
the Mazzinian saga are all myths. The Giovane Italia [movement]
founded by the great Genoese exile acted upon the hearts of Italians
like a representative myth that impelled them to take part in con-
spiracies and battles.
Unlike Croce, this particular reviewer—Benito Mussolini—seemed

to understand and appreciate the radical, sectarian, and violent direc-
tion in which Sorel was moving and toward which these myths were
leading him. Mussolini described this process by quoting directly from
the Reflections: “Contemporary myths lead men to prepare themselves
for a combat that will destroy the existing state of things.”45
Playing a very special role among the readers of Mazzini thirsting
for irrationalism, while promoting cultural and political projects for
the refoundation of the new Italy was Giovanni Papini (1881–1956),
one of the most celebrated authors and editors of the early-nine-
teenth-century-Florentine magazines, and later a prominent Fascist
writer. For a very short time, Papini considered Mazzini a possible
inspirer of the future refoundation.46 Although intense, his passion
would prove to be fleeting, soon to be superseded by other more
urgent pursuits, as was so often the case with Papini’s intellectual
interests, which peaked and declined in the space of a few articles
or a handful of letters. In fact, the writer’s career was constellated
by swift conversions culminating in his most radical and defini-
tive conversion to Catholicism in the early 1920s. However, leafing
through the autobiography written by Papini at the age of 30—Un
uomo finito, 1913 (translated into English in 1924 as A Failure and
as A Man—Finished)—it becomes clear that his encounter with
Mazzini was not entirely occasional, like the one that caused him to
“weep on top of the simple bare life of Mazzini,”47 the biography of
the Genoese politician written by the English historian Bolton King.
In Un uomo finito Papini documents his self-attributed mission to
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
Although “not understood by the Italians nor understanding

much of them himself,” Mazzini was an important touchstone for the
intellectual who would write a letter with Mazzinian undertones, to
his friend Ardengo Soffici, expressing his desire “to truly become—I
may now confess to you—the spiritual guide of the young, extremely
young and future Italy.”51 Actually the writer’s first encounter with
Mazzini had not been fueled by a wish for spiritualism, but had taken
place early on, in his family environment, under the guidance of his
father, ex-garibaldino and Republican. By the end of the nineteenth
century, the future Gian Falco (the pseudonym that Papini would
take) had already joined the young Republican Fascio in Florence
where he met “the last pure Mazzinians,” leaving their ranks shortly
afterward when the faction identifying itself with the motto “God
and People” prevailed over the faction upholding “Thought and
Action” (which he as an “atheist” obviously preferred).52 Thus the
young Papini traveled from “the Republic of Mazzini to the Anarchy
of [Max] Stirner”;53 later however he would return under the sway
of Mazzini, the religious spirit and patriot.
This journey was also motivated by Papini’s rejection of socialism,
a movement that may have been endowed with “religious forms”—as
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
Gaetano Salvemini as Historian and Critic of Mazzini
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
first became interested in Mazzini when living in Lodi, in the winter of

1900. I had just finished my work on Magnati e Popolani. I knew noth-
ing of the history of the Risorgimento.”62 Salvemini wrote of his need to
take a break from his medieval studies as well as of his wish to find out
whether the “class phenomena” identified in communal Florence could
still be found centuries later in the country’s most recent history. He also
recalled being strongly motivated by his political and moral revolt against
the brutal repression of the 1898 riots, which had seen the police crack-
ing down on Socialist demonstrations throughout Italy. These episodes
had culminated in Milan where General Fiorenzo Bava Beccaris even
ordered his troops to fire on and to bomb the crowd.63 This had con-
tributed in sparking the historian’s inspiration: “At that time we were all
republicans,” Salvemini noticed. That initial stimulus would lead him to
make his first forays into the area of what we now call contemporary his-
tory, with his writings “Le origini della reazione” for Critica sociale and
the 1899 booklet I partiti politici milanesi nel secolo XIX. On that occa-
sion Salvemini would rediscover Carlo Cattaneo64—who soon became
his intellectual hero—and Mazzini. From the very start the historian’s
relationship with the latter was characterized by a profoundly ambiva-
lent attitude: “That was when I discovered Mazzini, and began to wor-
ship him and, at the same time, occasionally wanted to . . . strangle him.
Morally he fascinated me, intellectually he irritated me.”65
Salvemini’s essays represented a complete novelty in the field of con-
temporary Italian historiography, by going beyond the conventional
narratives in order to historicize all the forces of the Risorgimento in
their respective roles, and to trace the origins of the recent authori-
tarian turn taken by the unification process. Salvemini identified
Garibaldi as the protagonist of the Risorgimento democracy,66 while
also highlighting the weaknesses of the democratic faction: the isola-
tion of the federalists Giuseppe Ferrari and Carlo Cattaneo; the inex-
tricable “logical and practical contradictions” of Mazzini in forging
Italy’s unity. While recognizing that the higher aims of unification
had required compromise, Salvemini judged the patriot very harshly
for his practical complicity with the antidemocratic plan—which had
just become topical again—of the monarchy and the moderate ruling
class:
In this way [Mazzini] became an unwitting accessory to the deception

practiced upon democracy, of which we are still victims; Garibaldi
fought, [King] Victor [Emanuel] reigned. The republicans of the
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.
He gradually began to reach a negative political assessment of

Mazzini, despite the historical need for his function: “There was no
alternative,” concluded Salvemini, “[ . . . ] Mazzini with his illogicity
forced the monarchy to resolve the question of independence.”67 In
a polemic with an orthodox republican activist and writer from the
same period, the historian again insisted upon the “deception” of the
democrats: after stirring them up against the monarchy for 20 years,
when the insurgence came, Mazzini “left them at the mercy of the
monarchic illusion.”68 He would return to the theme of Mazzini’s
“milk-and-water liberalism” on repeated occasions over the com-
ing years. Even then he had a clear preference for Cattaneo, praising
him in a letter in which he favorably compared his qualities with the
shortsighted opportunism of the Genoese politician:
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
According to Salvemini, it was necessary to distinguish between

Mazzini’s “revolutionary” function in the national unification move-
ment, which guaranteed the support of the workers for the “bourgeois
revolution” (while protecting them from “socialist contamination”),
and the “totally conservative” nature of Mazzini’s theory.
In a letter by Salvemini to the socialist deputy Leonida Bissolati,
written in 1903, we can see the radical criticism of Mazzini’s thought
gradually taking shape, a stance that would characterize Salvemini’s
interpretation from then on. At the time the historian had reached
the following conclusion: “If we consider him in the light of the
great European scientific and social movement, [Mazzini] is back-
ward, he is a conservative: his philosophy is the philosophy of
Chateaubriand and of the Holy Alliance.” Never had a democrat
expressed such a radical, almost paradoxical opinion of Mazzini.
But Salvemini expressed his evaluation on several levels, beginning
with “that declaration of duties with which Mazzini counters the
declaration of rights proclaimed by the French Revolution,” going

on to list his faults:
Mazzini detests that admirable eighteenth–century intellectual move-

ment in every way, he has an invincible dislike for the French Revolution;
he is a follower of the mystical philosophy that was defeated in the
eighteenth century [ . . . ]; he is unitary, while European democracy is
federalist; he preaches peace among the social classes, while Karl Marx
prepares the Communist Manifesto.70
As mentioned above, this intense criticism arose in the context of the

debate that followed the adoption of the Doveri dell’Uomo as a school
text. In the same letter, Salvemini asked the following question: “Will
the nebulous and impalpable Mazzinian God, without a paradise, and,
above all, without a hell, have any greater success in the struggle against
the proletarian class than the old Catholic God [ . . . ]? Will Mazzinian
duties suffocate the rights gushing forth from the reinvigorating allure
of triumphant industrialism?”71 The early-twentieth-century polemic
between the different political factions who were either continuing to
lay claim to Mazzini, or attacking him, convinced Salvemini of the need
to define Mazzinian thought in full, historicizing it.72 From then on,
albeit somewhat sporadically, the historian embarked upon his study
of Mazzini’s thought, which would appear in various editions over the
coming decades, accompanied by a project that never came to frui-
tion for a wider-reaching work on Mazzini’s youth or a full biography.
In a letter written to his colleague, the historian Ettore Rota, in 1919,
Salvemini recalled the genesis of this study:
I first had the idea of writing a work on Mazzini in 1903 when

Enrico Ferri in Romagna accused him of being . . . bourgeois.73 The
Republicans and Socialists involved in that debate strove to outdo
each other in their exaggerations: no one really knew who Mazzini
was. In my hometown [Molfetta] a group of the local youth asked
me to give a talk on Mazzini. So that was how I began to collect
ideas, in 1903.
Many months later, a rather more challenging occasion laid the

foundations for the concise yet dense Mazzinian monograph: “In
November 1904, I got a horrendous opening speech for the University
out of that early sketch and in 1905 I managed to get a volume out of
the speech.”74
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:
Would not the People, too—imbued, according to Mazzini, with the

spirit of the God he has wrested from the Christian churches and from
the monarchies, with their claims to Divine Right—become for this
very reason, like the Popes and Kings, an infallible idol? [ . . . ] Mazzini’s
national democratic republic, emanating from a deified people, must
have seemed to them simply a new theocracy, likely to have been even
more oppressive than the old, precisely because it was to have a demo-
cratic and elective basis.
Salvemini’s final judgment was therefore unequivocal: the

Mazzinian scheme dangerously contradicted fundamental achieve-
ments made by modern political thought.
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
An increasingly central issue in Salvemini’s vision and concerns was

the question of nationalities and their defense in the name of Mazzini, as
emerges from his articles in L’Unità (the newspaper that he had founded
and directed from 1910, after his departure from the socialist party: not
to be mistaken for the communist daily founded by Antonio Gramsci in
1924) and from the space dedicated to the matter in subsequent editions
of his Mazzini appearing from 1915 onward, as well as in other speeches
and lectures in the early years of Fascism. The turning point came after
the war in Libya, which saw Salvemini defending the nations oppressed
by the Ottoman Empire; later the question returned to the fore with
World War I and the redrawing of the map of Europe after the war.
In November 1912, Salvemini wrote the following words in
L’Unità:
Thank God! In the fatherland of Mazzini, Garibaldi and Cavour there

is also room for we backward old believers in equal rights for all peo-
ples. And we cannot but recognize the deep similarity between the
current war that the Balkan States are fighting against Turkey, and the
wars in which our own nation painfully came into being.85
Also playing an important role in turning Salvemini’s attention to

Mazzini the defender of nationalities was his encounter and subsequent
relationship with Umberto Zanotti-Bianco (1889–1963), future antifas-
cist and, after World War II, celebrated meridionalista, or “southernist,”
and environmentalist, who was initially drawn to Mazzini because of
his own modernist Catholic religious interests and his closeness to the
Greek, Balcanic and eastern European worlds and the national ques-
tions involved.86 Zanotti-Bianco was responsible for the second edition
of Salvemini’s Mazzini, which he decided to republish in his “Giovane
Europa” series, and he wrote to Salvemini: “Couldn’t you give me your
Mazzini that I am so fond of for my collection? [ . . . ] What we are try-
ing to do is promote Mazzini’s legacy, the Giovane Europa [Young
Europe]. And you are too good-hearted to tease us.” And Salvemini
promptly replied: “I’d be more than glad to give you my Mazzini. It
could not appear in a more beautiful collection than yours.”87 Less than
two years later these shared interests led them to volunteer to join the
army and to support democratic interventionism, also in the name of
the principles of Giovine Europa, at the same time criticizing national-
istic interpretations of Mazzini.88
In the autumn of 1914, Salvemini responded to nationalist claims by
refuting the “legend that Giuseppe Mazzini [had] assigned Dalmatia
to Italy in the reorganization of Europe.”89 Later, in his 1922–1923
lectures at the Università Popolare of Florence, the historian drew
attention to “a misfortune” that had struck Mazzini’s theory of the
“Italian initiative”: “The nationalists and imperialists here in Italy laid
claim to this part of Mazzini’s thought; and isolating it from the rest of
Mazzini’s ideas, they made Mazzini one of their own: because Mazzini
made Italy and Rome into the center of humanity.”90 This was a “bla-
tant falsification that risks enjoying great success in our country’s
terrifying historical and political wasteland”: given that “when the
national right that [Mazzini] claims for his people is claimed by other
peoples, he never denies nor mutilates it nor does he ever contest it.”91
It was therefore Salvemini’s belief that Mazzini’s thought could not be
used for expansionist ends or to perpetrate injustices with regard to
the national rights of other peoples.
At the same time, Salvemini continued to criticize the divine ori-
gin of the nations in the Mazzinian conception, which he now termed
Mazzini’s “democratic theocracy,” and the risk that it would degener-
ate into “brutality” and “oppression”; lastly Salvemini also declared
his own “unwillingness to accept Mazzini’s religious construction.”92
So when Zanotti-Bianco sent him an open letter in 1923 under

the heading Why we are not fascists distinguishing between “the
Mazzinian conception and the new politics” of fascism, Salvemini
replied: “I hardly need to remind you that your ideas are also mine:
if anything we could argue about the shape that they take, because
you are pro-Mazzini and I am pro-Cattaneo.” 93 In an essay written
in 1925, the historian bitterly pointed out the two “great illusions”
of Mazzini: “The illusion that peoples everywhere were ready and
determined to rise up against despotic regimes; and the illusion that
peoples everywhere were inspired by God with sentiments of univer-
sal justice.” In fact, as Salvemini pointed out “The reality was very
different”94: and although he was specifically referring to Mazzini’s
historical situation, those observations must have contained a reflec-
tion on his own present situation. However, Mazzini continued
to represent a symbol for Salvemini: an inspirer, “instigator,” and
“consoler.”95 In his lectures during the 1920s, Salvemini wrote of his
admiration for Mazzini’s “religious faith. Anyone wishing to have an
effect upon other men [ . . . ] needs to be sustained by religious faith.”96
He concluded, “The true help that Mazzini can and must give us does
not concern our intellectual constructions, but our moral practice.”97
This was an important distinction that would have a lasting influ-
ence: it was possible to subject Mazzini to an intellectual and political
critique without denying his important role as a source of practical
inspiration and incentive to act.
4
The Nation’s Duties between

War and Postwar
Mazzini in the Trenches
The intensely patriotic atmosphere of the war saw Mazzini’s resurrection

in the public discourse, in propaganda, in soldiers’ reading, and in private
correspondence. The allusion to the Genoese politician—which intensi-
fied in times of the nation’s cultural and political crisis—now supported
the ideology of war, offering motivations and explanations for those who
found themselves having or choosing to fight. Many years later, the his-
torian Adolfo Omodeo (who was particularly aware of the Mazzinian
tradition as a student and follower of the philosopher Giovanni Gentile,
whom he would later abandon in favor of Benedetto Croce) described
the decision made by a young volunteer who enlisted in June 1915 and
died in the summer of 1917, on the Bainsizza Plateau: “As soon as he
obtained his high school diploma, he enlisted in the 5th Alpini Regiment.
In his knapsack he placed a copy of Mazzini’s Doveri dell’Uomo, which
had taught him the need to give before asking, that one’s dedication must
be unlimited, and that one’s first right is to do one’s duty; then he set off.”1
Many Italian soldiers had a copy of Mazzini’s Doveri in their backpacks.
Reading the letters of the fallen, Omodeo noted the frequent presence
of Mazzini, as confirmed by the writings of the Garrone brothers or of
Scipio Slataper.2 In the agitated climate of the war even a young Catholic,
Eugenio Vajna, was driven to write: “What is most pressing is neither the
armed violence class or of the nation, but the other, all-too-neglected
term of the couplet germinating in [Mazzini’s] Duties: education.”3 While
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
Mussolini and Mazzini
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
At the beginning of the century, Mussolini, a socialist, had clashed

with the Mazzini of the republicans in his own homeland, Romagna.
At the time he preferred Marx, and wrote in 1910: “Mazzini and Marx
are two figures that cannot be compared,” adding “Whenever you
wish to [ . . . ] sing the praises of Mazzini the economist and socialist to
me, I reply: No. Socialism has not been influenced by Mazzini in any
way.”11 Mussolini, who was particularly opposed to Mazzini’s “sanc-
tification,” had this to say about the republicans: “They adore their
saint and insult the heretics. Just like the priests used to do.”12 He con-
tinued, “It has now become acceptable to discuss Christ, Mohammad,
St Augustine, Dante, Tasso, Foscolo, Carducci, and we Socialists can
discuss Marx, but no one is allowed to touch Mazzini.”13 Mussolini
attacked the religious Mazzini in particular, for example mentioning
Bakunin’s pamphlet (The Political Theology of Mazzini) during a rally:
according to one report he said that “religion [was] the opium of the
people and that the socialist formula was ‘Neither God nor Master,’”14
a formula evidently intended to counter Mazzini’s “God and People.”
After becoming an interventionist and following his enlistment,15
Mussolini soon found himself immersed in a patriotic atmosphere
permeated by Mazzinian references. Following his departure from the
socialist party he had gone from social revolution to national revolu-
tion, a transition in which he was accompanied if not actually guided by
Mazzini.16 His war diary noted the Mazzinian tones of the war rhetoric
during his early experiences in the trenches: his company commander
would urge on his troops telling them, “You are here to accomplish
the most sacred and the harshest duty of a citizen towards his father-
land.” And the captain of another company, encountering Mussolini,
addressed him and his comrades in the following terms: “This, dear
Mussolini, is a terrible war. [ . . . ] But—turning to include the others—
take heart, and remember, religion of duty above everything!”17 Some
months later a soldier gave him a volume with Mazzini’s writings, and
Mussolini copied a number of passages: “I devoured the Letter to Carlo
Alberto. I had read it as a student. There is something prophetic in this
piece of writing by Mazzini.18 I copied the following words into my
notebook: ‘The only possible war for France is a national war; based on
the passions of the multitudes, nourished by the enthusiasm communi-
cated to the 32 million souls forming the country.’” He followed this by
reading and copying passages from Mazzini’s essay Di alcune cause che
impedirono lo sviluppo della libertà in Italia (“On Some Reasons that
Prevented the Development of Freedom in Italy”):
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.
Thus, Mussolini’s Mazzini was someone who invoked the function

of the leaders who drew upon their “faith” to guide the masses toward
“sacrifice” and “victory,” capable of inspiring “life” and “order” by
means of his “word.” The entry in Mussolini’s diary ended as follows:
“Do these passages not prophesy current events? What a wonderful
‘viaticum’ Mazzini’s writings are for a soldier!”19
But prior to the outbreak of hostilities, when Mussolini decided to
declare his support for the war, he attacked in Mazzini’s name “the neu-
tral egoism,” the “sacred egoism of Salandra,” saying: “Even Mazzini,
urging Italian generations to war, knew full well that this meant sacri-
fice, blood, ruin, and destruction. He also knew that each generation
faces ineluctable duties.”20 Mazzini seems to have played an important
role in the future dictator’s ideological redefinition: both in his depar-
ture from socialism and during his interventionist phase and the war,
thanks also to the influence of figures such as Alceste De Ambris. In an
article for Il Popolo d’Italia, Mussolini quoted from the speech given by
De Ambris at the first congress of the Fasci in Bologna, precisely because
of the synthesis of Marxism and Mazzinianism it proposed: “[De
Ambris] said that a single Gospel may suffice for a church of believers,
but not for a collective of free thinkers. There is much truth in ‘Marxist’
criticism, but so is there in the Mazzinian ideology.” And again refer-
ring to De Ambris (whose role in the postwar rebirth of Mazzinianism,
starting with Fiume, will be examined later), Mussolini invoked the
“freedom to disavow Marx, if Marx is aged and exhausted; the freedom
to return to Mazzini if Mazzini utters the word to our waiting souls
that elevates us to a higher plane of our humanity.”21 Mussolini also
considered the nationalist writer Alfredo Oriani to be another media-
tor of the Mazzinian message: in his La lotta politica in Italia (“Political
Struggle in Italy,” 1892) he found the Mazzini who assigned a “mission”
and an “aim” to the Italian people, recalling the anti-Triple Alliance
stance and the rediscovery of the “Mazzinian warning: to support the
development of the Slav nationalities.” In the rumblings of the war,

Mussolini asked himself: “Did Italy follow the prophesy of Mazzini and
Oriani?”22 He ended by recalling the Carduccian Mazzini “who never
left the Italian people ‘in peace,’ to idle in sloth, that is,” a people whom
the poet Giosué Carducci described in the following terms (quoted by
Mussolini): “Behind him a dead people on he drew.”23 The final months
of the war were again marked by various references to the Genoese:
“At this time we feel the spirit of Mazzini to be all-powerful. Politics
inspired by the Prophet of the people’s right cannot fail.”24 And so on
until the victory celebrations gave the lie to Carducci’s “popol morto”
(“dead people”): thus “Mazzini would have recognized himself in what
appeared to be a ‘dead people’ although he secretly possessed the font
of an unquenchable vitality.”25
According to one account, even the name of the newspaper founded
by Mussolini in 1914 had Mazzinian origins. One of his collaborators
wrote in his memoirs: “We reviewed all the names of the old newspa-
pers founded in Italy in times of political fervor, because we wanted
to choose a name recalling the glorious and idealistic atmosphere of
the Risorgimento.”26 Inspired by Mazzini’s journal, this same col-
laborator put forward the name L’Italia del Popolo (“The Italy of
the People”): Mussolini took up his suggestion, inverting the terms
to create the formula Il Popolo d’Italia (“The People of Italy”): this
newspaper would become the official mouthpiece of Mussolini and
fascism throughout the Ventennio. In spring 1918, when he returned
to the editorship of the newspaper, Mussolini transformed the sub-
heading “Socialist newspaper” to “the newspaper of combatants and
producers”:27 the formula also referred to the Mazzinian economic
ideals revived by syndicalism. In other words, between the war and the
postwar period, Mussolini appropriated Mazzini’s symbolic thought,
and some of the elements of Mazzini’s religion of the nation—from his
“duties”, to his “mission” and “sacrifice”—eased his transition from
Socialism to interventionism, contributing to the ideological context
that would give rise to Fascism. In fact, in late 1920, Mussolini wrote in
Il Popolo d’Italia: “We have been busily striving to transform Giuseppe
Mazzini’s aspiration into reality: to give Italians ‘the religious concept
of their own nation.’”28 Mazzini lingered on in Mussolini’s rhetoric
in the course of the 1920s if not later,29 especially with regard to the
theme of “duties” opposing or prevailing over “rights”;30 but also in
the moments when Mussolini, just before his rise to power, attempted
to define the very concept of fascism.31 A note added to the entry
Fascismo in the Enciclopedia Italiana (drawn up by Giovanni Gentile,

and revised and signed by Mussolini), which appeared in a separate
volume in 1933, quotes a letter of August 27, 1921, from Mussolini to
Michele Bianchi in which he writes:
Italian fascism, on pain of death or rather of suicide, must provide itself

with a “body of doctrines” [ . . . ] Furnishing the mind with doctrines and
sound convictions does not mean disarming, but strengthening our power
of action, and making it increasingly aware. [ . . . ] Fascism can and must
take for its own Mazzini’s couplet: Thought and Action.32
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 am an old syndicalist. I believe that fascism should direct most of its

energies towards the organization of the working masses, also because
someone is needed to bury liberalism. Syndicalism is the gravedigger
for liberalism.
[ . . . ] Syndicalism must be carried out without demagogy. We need a

selective educational syndicalism, a Mazzinian syndicalism if you will,
that never neglects the duties that must be fulfilled whenever rights are
referred to.37
Mussolini therefore used both Mazzinian and Sorelian syndicalism

to organize the masses and bury liberalism.
Fiume and Early Fascism
After World War I, syndicalism, producer economy, community orga-

nizing, cooperativism and the economy of corporations played a deci-
sive role in the reemergence and revival of Mazzinian thought as well
as in its transmission to and transformation within fascism.38 Fiume,
the Charter of Carnaro and the society that should have developed
from there were to prove seminal experiences in this context.39 The
prime mover in these political and ideological matters was Alceste De
Ambris (1874–1934), a leading figure in early-twentieth-century revo-
lutionary syndicalism. When he drew up the Charter of Carnaro—
later amended by Gabriele D’Annunzio—he not only introduced a
Mazzinian element into the planned Republican structure of Fiume
(which D’Annunzio wished to define as a “regency”), but above all into
its economic organization based on corporations. In the version by De
Ambris, Article 13 of the Charter, under the heading On Corporations,
read as follows:
The citizens contributing to the material prosperity and civil advancement

of the Republic by means of continuous manual and intellectual labor are
considered to be productive citizens and shall be enrolled in one of the fol-
lowing categories, each representing a corporation.40
Some time later, illustrating what he termed “the social concept of

the Constitution,” De Ambris explained the corporative structure as
follows:
If there is one formula capable of summarizing the principle inspiring the

Legislator then it is the Mazzinian formula, Liberty and Association. At the
end of the day, this is also the formula of modern syndicalism [( . . . ) which
tends] to create a higher ethic that makes members of all social classes aware
of their duties, elevating them to willing individual heroism for the salva-
tion and triumph of the collectivity to which that individual belongs.41
In the same paragraph, De Ambris—who was already dealing with

the increasingly antidemocratic interpretations that were being attrib-
uted to syndicalism—was swift to clarify, “This is authentic syndicalism
which we are speaking about, not one of its grotesque degenerations.”
Alceste De Ambris first discovered Mazzini as a young man, in
Lunigiana (a highly politicized area between Liguria and Tuscany),
in the mid-1890s, and, like his fellow travelers, would soon leave
him behind to embrace Socialism.42 But in 1914,43 influenced by the
renewed ideals, patriotic imperatives, and spirit of solidarity emerg-
ing as the world war became imminent, he returned to Mazzini.44 The
words of Luigi Campolonghi, a long-standing friend and companion in
political battles, applied equally to De Ambris: “My spiritual formation
has purely Mazzinian origins, traces of which lingered on in my sub-
sequent evolution towards socialist ideas.”45 In fact, several years after
his return to Mazzini, De Ambris said: “We do not deny the truth con-
tained in Marxist criticism of bourgeois society. It lives on, mighty and
unfaltering, in the unavoidable fate of the class struggle. But the nega-
tion of the philosopher from Trier only makes sense if it is integrated
with the constructive morals of Mazzini.”46 Besides, as De Ambris
recalled many years later, by the time he was appointed secretary of the
Parma Chamber of Labor in 1907 and had espoused the revolutionary
syndicalist theories, “without realizing it and without wishing to [he]
had already entered Mazzini’s moral sphere.”47
In a letter written in 1934, shortly before his death, in which he com-
pared his own conception of Corporatism with its transformation under
the fascist regime, De Ambris firmly declared that his interpretation of
the “corporative state”—unlike the interpretation of Fascism—was “in
liberty and with liberty, because I believe in no other interpretation.” A
short time before he had pointed out: “today liberty seems to have lost
much of its appeal for the majority [ . . . ] Nonetheless—or perhaps for
this very reason—I remain desperately true to liberty.” According to De
Ambris, various premises underpinned fascism: “I have no reason to
believe that fascism can return to its republican, libertarian and syn-
dicalist origins. On the contrary, I can see that the entire governmen-
tal policy is moving in the opposite direction, according to a rationale
that I find unacceptable, adopting methods that I cannot identify with.”
Moreover, in referencing those origins, he indirectly recognized the
partly anti-democratic—and certainly anti-parliamentary—nature of
the Fiume episode, despite its Mazzinian ideological core. For this rea-
son, when reconstructing the context and spirit of the times, he wrote
the following reflection about himself:
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
De Ambris was referring to a clash similar to the one between

authority and liberty that we encountered with Mazzini, a liberty that
he confessed to having temporarily limited at Fiume. Fifteen years
after that experience, writing from his antifascist exile, he described
his intentions: “When drawing up the constitution of Fiume, I sought
to affirm the widest possible concept of liberty, while at the same time
explicitly admitting the dictatorship as a transitory need.”49 In Fiume
this contradiction had proved impossible to resolve, later causing De
Ambris to link corporatism and liberty, although he admitted that he
had wished to replace parliamentarism with corporatism, allowing a
transitory period of dictatorship in order to do so.
In the postwar period and in the 1920s, other converts to revolu-
tionary syndicalism inspired by Mazzini’s syndicalist teachings reached
very different political conclusions. They included the likes of Angelo
Oliviero Olivetti (1874–1931), who had enthusiastically espoused fas-
cism before becoming one of the thinkers behind fascist corporatism
in the second half of the 1920s. In 1921, clearly referring to De Ambris,
Olivetti explained how Mazzini’s teachings could be modernized and
turned into reality by syndicalism: “Syndicalism takes up and expands
the Mazzinian formula “Liberty and Association.”50 The ideal refer-
ence was explicitly to the Charter of Carnaro—attributed entirely to
D’Annunzio here—and its Mazzinian roots:
When proclaiming the free productive association recognized by

Giuseppe Mazzini as originating from a moral law to the people, Gabriele
D’Annunzio gave it a far broader reach, presenting it as a political neces-
sity, thus concluding the cycle of the national tradition beginning with the
Commune of the Arts [ . . . ] and culminating in the Charter of Carnaro,
the definitive expression of the national genius.51
Following in the footsteps of the poet, Olivetti also reconstructed

an ancient national tradition. In this same article he wrote: “All hier-
archical concepts are by definition anti-syndicalist: union-nation-lib-
erty are terms that are inseparable from the new conception of social
life.” However, Olivetti’s syndicalism gradually acquired increasingly
elitist and authoritarian overtones. He joined the Commission of the
Fifteen for the reform of the State presided over by Giovanni Gentile,
later advising Mussolini and the minister of Justice Alfredo Rocco, on

syndicalist matters in the second half of the 1920s.52 In 1930, at the end
of a process of ideological evolution accompanied by Mazzini’s ideas,
Olivetti, who was now one of the leading theorists of fascist corporat-
ism, expressed the following opinion on corporations: “Foreseen by
Giuseppe Mazzini, forged as a tool for the class struggle—firstly for the
defense of the working classes, then for attacks by the political parties—
this instrument [the corporations] was to be the base of the true social
revolution, which is what the fascist revolution is and must be.”53
Two of the figures close to Mussolini from the early 1920s and
remaining by his side until the end of the regime came to politics as
followers of Mazzini. They were Dino Grandi (1895–1988) and Italo
Balbo (1896–1940).54 In his memoirs Grandi, a future fascist ambassa-
dor and minister, would later recall the veneration that his father, who
still considered himself to be a monarchist, had for Mazzini, and his
own extensive exploration of the patriot’s writings, which he associated
in his youth with the very idea of political militancy:
In Romagna every family is involved in politics. My father claimed to be a

monarchist but adored Mazzini. The Galeati printworks in Imola printed
the national edition of the works of Giuseppe Mazzini in crisp Bodoni
font, volumes that my father the monarchist had lovingly bound as soon as
they came of the presses. I believe that it was thanks to him that I was one
of the few Italians to have read, or at least leafed through, all of the many
volumes making up the corpus of Mazzini’s works.55
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
Social solidarity rooted in Mazzini, syndicalist community organizing

inspired by patriotic ideals and the bourgeois work ethic, economic justice
based on Liberism, the intransigent opposition to moderatism and social-
ist subversion. [ . . . ] Again in the wake of Mazzini, [Grandi] identified
intellectual and spiritualist youth to be the subject of a new “apostleship”
among the masses to promote national education.58
In his memoirs, Grandi recalled the mobilizing myth that the

First world war represented for his generation who saw it as the “final
unpostponable act of the Risorgimento” that fulfilled “the legacy

of Mazzini [ . . . ] that had yet to be taken up.”59 After the meeting
that voted to expel Mussolini from the socialist party, Grandi, who
had attended as the correspondent of the daily newspaper Resto del
Carlino, carried out what was to be one of his most momentous politi-
cal actions before Italy’s entry into war by writing a letter to the future
Duce. In it he expressed the ideals that he saw embodied in Mussolini,
declaring: “You fight in the name [ . . . ] of the new generation of men
in their twenties who will be in the front-line in the trenches, and
who faithfully and proudly identify with their first brothers of the
Risorgimento. [ . . . ] I therefore hope that you will be the first soldier
of the last national war.”60 War broke out followed by the episodes of
Fiume and the Charter of Carnaro, repeatedly referenced by Grandi in
the context of the rising fascist movement of the early 1920s,61 whose
left wing he initially represented. During that period Grandi invoked
the constitution of a national syndicate, which he believed had the
capacity to prevail over the newly formed party:
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.
For Grandi this “solution” would “only be possible if fascism jettisoned

its old liberal and socialist conceptions and [transformed itself] into the
driving force behind a national syndicalism.”62 However, shortly after
making these declarations, Grandi began to become “parliamentarize[d],”
abandoning the barricades: not only was it necessary to construct a party,
it was also necessary to build a new State. In his memoirs Grandi recalled:
“The revolutionary had now become a politician. In my mind, Mazzini
was replaced by Cavour.” Nonetheless, he wished to stress that he had
still participated in the introduction of the term “corporations” into the
statutes of the fascist party, that is, he gave his support to an economic
and social instrument that, looking back, he believed had been radically
changed by the regime:
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-
dom. From that moment on, he transformed it into a mere tool of the party
dictatorship.63
The discovery of Mazzini, made at his political debut, followed by

his ideological appropriation of the Genoese, marked the beginning of
Dino Grandi’s fascist career.
Grandi singled out Italo Balbo from the “republicans” and “syndical-
ists” who believed in “the cult of Mazzini, Pisacane, [and the futurist]
Corridoni” in the early 1920s: “Together with him, and with his support
alone, I was able to organize the first national unions of workers and
farm workers in the areas of Bologna and Ferrara.”64 Italo Balbo’s diary
begins on January 1, 1922—the year in which Grandi wrote his com-
ment —with a reference to Mazzini. Alongside the name of the Genoese
we find all the Mazzinian themes of early Fascism: that of duties over
rights; the society of producers; the ideas that, according to the “thought
and action” formula, informed action and now also force:
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
Also Balbo had encountered the Mazzinian tradition at home,

through his brother Fausto, who was a scholar with all of Mazzini’s
works on his bookshelf. Italo had joined the Republican Party as a very
young man and hesitated for a long time before deciding to leave to join
the fascist party in 1921.66 Like many of his generation he interpreted
Mazzinianism as “a ‘state of mind,’ a sense of complete rebellion against
reality, a permanent protest against the current state of things.”67 Balbo
saw no conflict between fascism and his Mazzinian ideals: “especially
with regard to the Fatherland, socialism and the agrarian question,”
as he wrote in his letter of resignation from the Republican Party on
February 12, 1921.68 A year earlier, when graduating from the Istituto
Cesare Alfieri in Florence, he wrote his thesis on Mazzini: Il pensiero
economico e sociale di Giuseppe Mazzini (“Mazzini’s Economic and
Social Thought”). The work was a critique of the socialist doctrines and
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.
Democratic Critics: Alessandro Levi and Rodolfo Mondolfo
One of the most important democratic interpretations of Mazzini dates

to the period of World War I. Developed by the philosopher and mili-
tant socialist Alessandro Levi (1881–1953), it would lead him to write the
work titled La filosofia politica di Giuseppe Mazzini (“Giuseppe Mazzini’s
Political Philosophy”).71 Levi approached Mazzini as a scholar, but
was also inspired to read his work for family reasons. In fact, his wife,
Sarina Nathan, was the niece of Ernesto, custodian of Mazzini’s manu-
scripts and tireless promoter of the memory of the patriot (Mazzini had
been acquainted with the Nathan family since the period of his exile
in London, and died while living in their house in Pisa under a false
name).72 The climate of war would impel Levi to finally conclude the
work he had started some years earlier.73 As he wrote in the preface to
the first edition: “As my studies into Mazzini continued [ . . . ] and inten-
sified, I felt that I was not distancing myself too much from the cur-
rent political situation. [ . . . ] I believed then, and still do now, that the
lightning flashing in His prophetic pages continues to illuminate the
present.”74 Although he would later claim “this book [ . . . ] cannot be
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.
Levi concluded: “The spiritual and ethic-religious nature of

[Mazzini’s] political thought causes it to differ radically from lib-
eral democratic thought.”80 Moreover, Levi recognized that this
thought was also “radically” distinct from the thoughts of the pro-
ponents of divine right, because Mazzini believed that “duties” not
“rights” came from God. At the same time, the focus on the divine
element, or rather the theistic component of Mazzini’s thought,
caused Levi to reconsider—following the example of Salvemini and
other interpreters81—the nature of sovereignty in the thought of the
Genoese. Levi thus revealed that although Mazzini considered the
people to be sovereign, he also held that sovereignty to proceed from
God, to whose will the people was subjected:
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
Alessandro Levi concluded that “Mazzini’s entire political philoso-

phy was the search for a balance between these two terms: authority
and people,” and that he was to be considered a “theorist of author-
ity [ . . . ] more than of freedom.”83 It was the theocratic component in
particular that led Levi to define the Mazzinian ideal as a “religious
democracy”: “Mazzini’s democracy placing sovereignty in God is-
and this seems to me to be the unique principle underpinning his
entire political philosophy—a religious democracy.” And he describes
the underlying difference between most of the democratic regimes in
the following terms:
The entire Mazzinian apostleship can basically be summarized in the fol-

lowing formula: [( . . . ) “The problem of democracy is the religious problem
of education”] The application of the usual principle—duty—replaced, or
rather, underlay the other—right—on which all other democratic systems,
with only few exceptions, were based.84
In the previous chapter of his Filosofia politica di Giuseppe Mazzini,

the linchpin on which the organization of the work hinged, Levi iden-
tified the theory of duty as “the most original concept in Mazzini’s
political philosophy.”85 He repeatedly underlined the fact that the
“source of duty resides in God and his law,”86 and proffered a long
series of quotations confirming the precedence of duty over right,

the disintegrating function of the latter, and the constructive func-
tion of the former.87 The jurist explicitly wrote: “There is no doubt
that Mazzini’s basic intent in writing On the Duties of Man was to
offset democracy’s declarations on the rights of men.” He concluded
by identifying the function of the theory of duty for Mazzini who
“felt the need to ‘find an educating principle’ superior to the theory
of rights and wellbeing; this principle, which descends from God
himself, is Duty.”88 Levi accompanies this detailed analysis of the pre-
scriptive religious aspects with authoritarian tendencies present in
Mazzini’s work with a favorable analysis of the differences between
Mazzini’s theory of nationalities and the evolution of modern nation-
alisms, right up to the extreme variant of imperialisms; like others,
he criticized the nationalistic interpretations of Mazzini, in particu-
lar by Giovanni Gentile. He then dwelled at great length on Mazzini’s
interest in the social question, pointing out his solidarity-oriented
approach at odds with socialist ideals. Levi also drew attention to the
progressive and humanitarian aspects of Mazzini’s doctrines, again
contrasting with conservative interpretations of Mazzini. Some years
later, though certainly not a convert to Salvemini’s brand of empiri-
cism (despite repeated mentions of Salvemini’s contribution to his
studies of Cattaneo and of their friendly collaboration), Levi dedicated
himself to the political positivism of Carlo Cattaneo in the book of the
same title,89 revealing a marked preference for Cattaneo’s historicist
and materialist approach, and constructing a profile of the Lombard
thinker that contrasted with his profile of Mazzini. This preference, as
we will see, would be noted by Levi’s antifascist readers and followers,
and his analysis of Mazzini’s political thought interpreted as a radical
criticism. In the conclusion to a publication intended for popular edu-
cation that came out after World War I, which was explicitly dedicated
to “the moral teaching of Mazzini,” Levi wrote: “maybe he was not a
hero in terms of thought, [ . . . ] maybe he was not a hero in terms of
action, but there is no doubt that he was a hero in terms of character.”
However, Mazzini’s thought “[did] not rest on a sound philosophical
base”: the patriot therefore had to be presented to the “people” as a
“Master of a moral life, [ . . . ] not of a religious or political doctrine.”90
These comments by Levi contributed to shaping Mazzini’s reception
within the ranks of the antifascist movement.
In the incandescent atmosphere of war, another socialist—with
Marxist leanings91—was to invoke Mazzini’s name and his ideals of
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
in history.”99 Despite the glaring differences between their economic

and social conceptions, Mondolfo wished to underline that for both
Mazzini (for whom the concept and ideal of nation prevailed over that
of class) and Marx, social and political questions were “reciprocally
implicated.”100 Nevertheless, like Salvemini before him, the Marxist
philosopher could not help but recognize the growing importance in
Mazzini’s work “after ’48,” of the “solidarity of a joint action by all the
classes,” lastly concluding that the Genoese was inspired by a concept
that was “more syndicalist than socialist.”101 So while Mondolfo was
undoubtedly sympathetic to Mazzini, his Marxist perspective required
him to distance himself from the patriot’s thought. Like Alessandro
Levi, Mondolfo found his analysis derailed by Mazzini’s mystical and
theocratic element, and his ideology of sacrifice. As well as perceiving
Mazzini’s affinities with Sorel, Mondolfo found his interest piqued by
what he defined the “pedagogy of action” in Mazzini, that so fascinated
his political antagonists in the rising fascist movement. With regard
to some aspects, therefore, in the early 1920s, a somewhat activist and
irrationalist Mazzini seemed to exert a kind of fascination, or even
influence, that crossed the traditional divisions between left and right.
5
Fascism, Antifascism, and the

Religion of the Nation
Giovanni Gentile and Mazzini: From Risorgimento

Philosophy to Fascist Religion
Giovanni Gentile’s encounter with the Risorgimento dated back

to the late nineteenth century. The philosopher, future minister of
Mussolini’s first government, and fascist ideologue was born in the
small Sicilian town of Castelvetrano in 1875 and died in Florence dur-
ing the Italian civil war in 1944. He began his studies into the his-
tory of nineteenth-century Italian thought looking at Gioberti and
then Mazzini. In the immediate postwar period, the two founding
figures of the Risorgimento would play a key role in the intellectual
and political process that would lead Gentile to make his decisive con-
tribution, in the 1920s and early 1930s, to the formation of the ideol-
ogy and political religion of fascism. From the time of his graduate
thesis at the Normale di Pisa, published in 1898 with the title Rosmini
e Gioberti. Saggio storico sulla filosofia italiana del Risorgimento
(Rosmini and Gioberti: A Historical Essay on Italian Philosophy of the
Risorgimento), Gentile dedicated himself to the tradition of Catholic
liberal thought, represented in politics by Gioberti, which would pro-
vide the starting point for what should have been the onward journey
of Italian philosophy.1 Gentile was particularly concerned with the
rebirth of religious sentiment in the nineteenth century, which was
becoming part of the national conscience, and with the various figures
contributing to this process, including
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
At the time Gentile’s particular focus was the Catholic renaissance

intertwining with the new national sentiments and projects. At the
beginning of the twentieth century, after joining his older peer, the
future antifascist éminence grise, Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) in
his efforts to shape a new culture and renewed national conscience
through the periodical La Critica, one of the first major tasks await-
ing both thinkers was the reconstruction of the movements, figures,
and works that had characterized Italy’s most recent intellectual his-
tory, her cultural tradition, and the journey toward the spiritual and
political unification of the nation. At the same time Gentile gradually
developed his own philosophical reflection based on a new interpreta-
tion of idealistic thought that he traced back, following in Croce’s foot-
steps to the Italian tradition stemming from Vico, in which religion
and pedagogy played a key role. From the early 1920s onward—after
the epoch-making transition of the Great War, which turned Gentile
into a militant intellectual—these elements received a concrete politi-
cal application, in the field of education in particular, when the phi-
losopher became Minister of Public Instruction in Mussolini’s first
government in the fall of 1922.
At the beginning of the century, Gentile had turned once again to
Gioberti, studying the complex position of the Piedmontese thinker in
an essay written for the first centenary of his birth. Although initially
considering him to be a kind of paradoxical “reactionary Jacobin,”
he examined Gioberti’s evolution through his relations with Mazzini
and Giovine Italia, his adhesion to Rosmini’s Catholic philosophy,
and finally his discovery of ontological philosophy, on the one hand,
and the theory of Italian “primacy,” which he famously defined in
his most influential treatise Del primato morale e civile degli italiani
(published in 1843), on the other hand. Gentile continued to consider
the Turinese abbot a militant philosopher, even proposing a surpris-
ing parallel presenting him as a kind of Italian Catholic Marx: “Like
FASCISM, ANTIFASCISM, AND THE RELIGION OF THE NATION 89
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
volumes of the national edition of Mazzini’s writings and of Gaetano

Salvemini’s book on Mazzini, which led him to identify in the “apostle
of the faith of the unity of Italy” the origin of the “actual force” which
had united Italy.7 By the end of the conflict Mazzini had become a key
figure in Gentile’s increasingly political and modernizing interpreta-
tion of a Risorgimento that anticipated the forces and ideals inspiring
Italy’s new political direction of that time.
Examining and criticizing the democratic interpretations of
Mazzini put forward by Gaetano Salvemini and Alessandro Levi
(which we have dealt with in previous chapters), Gentile showed
that Mazzini’s nation was “action, creation of a historic reality”
and “militia, [and] sacrifice.” He underlined the unique position of
Mazzini’s nation in the context of European liberalism, pointing out
that it was “far-removed from the utopian and natural-law-based
democratic doctrine,”8 in the same way that “[it was] neither really
the elective French nationality nor the natural (or racial) nationality
of the Germans.”9 Mazzini’s politics and indeed his very existence
were animated by his “religious faith”: “[Mazzini] tells us that life is
apostleship and sacrifice. Apostleship as faith (the affirmation of a
divine value) that is not mere thought but action.”10 In the light of
Gentile’s actualism, the Mazzinian couplet of “thought and action”
came to imply a spiritualization of action: “If those ideas or prin-
ciples are to translate into deeds, they must of necessity already be
an action, an act of faith or affirmation of our moral personality.”11
And according to Gentile’s scheme the supreme principle translated
into deeds was now his very “Ethical State”: even Mazzini’s vision
would be realized—according to Gentile’s interpretation and despite
the fact that Mazzini had dedicated very little space to a reflection
on the State—in the State “strictly considered as the power of the
community upon the individual.”12 Mazzini himself now became
“one of the most strenuous asserters of the immanent value of the
State conceived as law and liberty.”13 Gentile opened his joint volume
of essays on Gioberti and Mazzini published in February 1923 with
a dedication to Benito Mussolini, “pure-blooded Italian, worthy of
listening to the voice of the prophets of the new Italy.” Only a few
months later, Gentile accepted his ad honorem membership of the
fascist party, writing to Mussolini that “in Italy, the liberalism of
liberty in the law, and therefore in the strong state and in the state
conceived as an ethical reality, is no longer represented by the liber-
als who are more or less openly against you, but by you.”14
During the course of fascism, by now a dictatorship, Gentile made

two contributions enshrining Mazzini’s role in his formulation of the
ideological and political definition of the political movement that had
become a regime: the first was Che cosa è il fascismo (“What is fas-
cism?”), a lecture given on March 8, 1925, and the second was L’essenza
del fascismo (“The Essence of Fascism”), an essay published in 1927,
which was republished and widely distributed by the Istituto Nazionale
Fascista di Cultura from 1929 onward as part of a new edition titled
Origini e dottrina del fascismo (“Origins and Doctrine of Fascism”).
In his lecture Gentile examined Italian history, contrasting the indi-
vidualistic and skeptical Italy of the Renaissance with the militant and
religious Italy of the Risorgimento, which had begun to take shape in
Vico, found a precursor in Alfieri, and emerged in Cuoco with the
reawakening of the national consciousness, before reaching its realiza-
tion with Mazzini. Gentile now considered Mazzini “the supreme and
most true prophet of the Risorgimento, the Ezechiel of the new Italy.”
Most importantly, he described the “Mazzinian Gospel” as “the fascist
gospel,” “the faith of the youth of 1919, of 1922, of today.” According
to the philosopher, this represented the return of fascism to the spirit
of the Risorgimento, its recovery of the Mazzinian concept of nation
as “moral reality,” “mission [and] sacrifice.” After justifying squadrist
violence in the name of Vico’s “recurrent barbarism,” Gentile’s talk
reached its climax with the fascist celebration of the State: “From our
Mazzinian consciousness of the sanctity of the nation, as a reality that
comes about through the State, we draw the reasons of that exaltation
which we usually consecrate to the State.”15
In Origini e dottrina del fascismo, a Mazzini increasingly transfig-
ured by a highly ideologized interpretation became the positive dialec-
tical principle underpinning all recent phases of Italy’s history right up
to fascism, considered the triumph of “Mazzinians.” Mussolini himself
was seen as a “Mazzinian with the sincerity that Mazzinianism always
found in Romagna”16 and the Mazzinian vision, in Gentile’s interpreta-
tion, informed the “totalitarian character of the doctrine of fascism.”
“[Mazzini’s] conception may well be a political conception,” wrote the
philosopher, “but [it is a conception] of integral politics, which does
not distinguish itself from morality, from religion, and from every
conception of life to the extent that it cannot affirm itself separately.”17
“Fascism,” claimed Gentile, “takes its most rigorous significance from
the Mazzinian truth of thought and action, identifying the two terms
to make them coincide perfectly, and to avoid attributing any value to
thought that is not already translated or expressed in action.”18 Gentile’s

Mazzini therefore informed and underpinned the integral and totali-
tarian conception of fascist ideology, and even the activism—the exal-
tation of action through its spiritualization—that characterized every
aspect of fascist politics, including its violent implications.
Addressing the Congress of Fascist Culture in Bologna in 1925,
Gentile claimed: “As we fascists look back to seek our model in the his-
tory of this Italy that is our ardent passion, we feel as though the aus-
tere figure of Giuseppe Mazzini represents the purest, most luminous
form of our faith and our ideal.”19 And in the passage of his Manifesto
degli intellettuali italiani fascisti—written by the philosopher after the
congress and revised by Mussolini himself—underlining the “religious
character of fascism,” he also drew a parallel between Mazzinianism and
fascism, and even between Giovine Italia and the squadrist movement:
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 “Caratteri religiosi della presente lotta politica (“Religious

Characters of the Current Political Fight”),” an article written in the
same period, Gentile had put forward similar concepts, underlining
the “purely religious character of the fascist spirit” and the “mystical
side” expressed by Mussolini, and again pointing out:
In this aspect, Mussolini’s temperament coincides with that of Mazzini,

and the fascist youth rushing to join the fasci and the militia is ani-
mated by a similar religious sentiment to that of the members of the
Giovine Italia, which was the most powerful leaven of the Italian revo-
lution for independence and unity.21
Moreover, Gentile also maintained that “in fascism” the Mazzinian

concept of the nation “became far more concrete and closer to histori-
cal development.” He thus returned to the heart of Mazzini’s thought,
proposing an authoritarian ideological reading, which reinterpreted
the couplet “Dio e il popolo” (“God and People”):
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
The appropriation and reinterpretation proposed by Gentile trans-

formed Mazzini’s religion of the nation into the fascist religion.23 Many
currents and figures in fascism would draw upon Mazzini during the
two following decades24 in order to justify and back up their support
for the movement, or to legitimize the “fascist revolution,”25 and fas-
cism would mobilize the Risorgimento and its myths in the definition
of the historic sense of the movement and the regime, and, therefore,
in the construction of the consensus of the masses.26
Toward the Religion of Liberty: Benedetto Croce
Already by 1925, Benedetto Croce27 had responded to Gentile’s

interpretation of a fascist mazzinian religion, harshly criticizing the
Manifesto degli intellettuali fascisti28 (“Manifesto of fascist intellectu-
als”) and commenting in particular:
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
But what was the concept of religion used by Croce to counter

Gentile and—given its contextualization in Italy’s recent history—
what relationship (if any) did it have with Mazzini’s religion of the
nation? Croce believed that religion comprised at least three con-

cepts: a “philosophia inferior,” or system of thought with mythological
elements (as he wrote in 1908 and in 1911);30 a “moral faith” tran-
scending religion and affecting action by melding the links joining
the individual to the community represented by “family, fatherland,
and humanity”;31 and philosophy itself, especially idealism, which
was “negation of every form of transcendence and belief.”32 Later, in
1922, Croce placed “faith and religiousness” before religion, writing
in his Frammenti di etica (“Fragments of Ethics”): “The philosopher
only denies religion in so far as it is mythology, but not as faith or
religiosity.” He also reassessed what he called “a human religion, a
pure faith and religious spirit born of thought,” which “placed God
in the hearts of men” and which was therefore “not only humanity’s
religion, but man’s religion.”33 Croce would contrast this religiosity
of thought with Gentile’s religion,34 and this religiosity—essentially
Croce’s idealism itself—would gradually acquire an increasingly
political hue, until in the early 1930s it resulted in what he defined as
a “religion of liberty,” a formula underpinning his Storia d’Europa nel
secolo XIX (“History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century”).35 Many
years later, in a changed context, the formula “religion of liberty”
would be considered a “a phrase imbued with a Mazzinian style and
spirit,” even though Croce’s thought had absolutely “nothing of the
Messianic, illuminist, redeeming grace of Mazzinian thought.” 36 But
was the origin of Croce’s formula really Mazzinian? And above all,
what was Croce’s position with regard to Mazzini?
Croce had always been deeply skeptical verging on negative with
regard to Mazzini. Already by the end of the nineteenth century, he
quoted the view of Francesco De Sanctis, essentially making it his,
describing Mazzini in the following terms: “His lack of interior religi-
osity prevented him from being a religious reformer; as a philosopher,
he never achieved anything substantial; he had no true political genius;
and though broad, his cultural background was superficial.”37 Croce
further clarified this negative view, with regard to the political sphere
in particular, in his 1927 Storia d’Italia (“History of Italy”), reaching
conclusions contrasting strongly with the reassessment recently pro-
posed by Gentile, and dwelling in particular on the failure of Mazzini’s
preaching:
[Mazzini] shut himself up in a kind of organized Utopia, derived from

Saint-Simon, invoking with quasi-religious prayers and exhortations
an imaginary being called the People. So he found himself forsaken

by men of culture who judged his ideas vague and obsolete and for-
saken also by the reality underlying his “People”, that is by the working
classes, who turned in preference to socialism, and by the real Italians
forming his people, that is, the workers.38
The theoretical analysis contained in Croce’s Storia d’Europa nel

secolo XIX was even more uncompromising. Croce claimed that if one
leaves aside Mazzini the inspirer of ideals, “all the rest, in the complex
of his ideas, is either not his own or else is secondary or vague or erro-
neous.” In short, Croce placed Mazzini outside the liberal tradition and
reached the following philosophical and political conclusion: “A lack of
speculative depth and historical sense prevented [Mazzini] from theo-
retically formulating and deducing the concept of liberty. And indeed
theoretically he compromised it, and almost disowned it.”39 According
to Croce, Mazzini had therefore “almost” disowned the concept of lib-
erty, and “compromised” it on a theoretical level. This harsh judgment
maintaining that the religion of liberty was neither Mazzinian in origin
nor historically identifiable with Mazzinianism also emerges from his
Storia d’Europa, 40 where Croce counterposed it to the “opposing reli-
gious faiths,” including Catholic, absolutist, and communist ideals, as
well as democratic and republican ideals.41 The religion of liberty was
basically liberalism in politics, idealism in philosophy; and according
to Croce liberalism had definitely “surpassed” democrats and republi-
cans “in both philosophy and politics,” “even leading to many conver-
sions in their ranks.” The real inspirer of the “religion of liberty”—as of
most of Croce’s thought—was therefore not Mazzini, but Hegel.42
Again following in the wake of De Sanctis, Croce considered the
Mazzini that he esteemed as “primarily an educator.”43 His Storia
d’Italia describes a Mazzini who had seen “clearly enough that the
problem of modern society, as indeed of society at all times, is moral
education, and not only moral but religious; and that it is therefore a
problem of religious revival or reformation.”44 In his Storia d’Europa,
Mazzini was capable of “awaken[ing] in man the sentiment of the
universal, the ideal [ . . . ], [the sentiment] of duty”; the “apostle who
lives what he believes and operates equally with the illuminating and
inflaming word and with his example.” Lastly, Mazzini was, above all,
the great inspirer of “a common European consciousness,”45 which was
the philosopher’s only real acknowledgment with regard to Mazzinian
thought. While recognizing his generic role as educator and admiring
his consistency in terms of ideals and actions, his ability to inspire
ideals and duties, Croce certainly did not consider Mazzini a political
thinker, continuing to be dismissive of his role in this sphere.
The Antifascists Facing Mazzini
In 1933, in a profile dedicated to Piero Gobetti (1901–1926), Carlo Levi

(1902–1975) writer and political activist, and future author of Christ
stopped at Eboli (1945), placed this Turinese intellectual—a young but
very influential antifascist leader, who would die in exile following
a fascist beating—among Italian religious reformers and politicians:
“It could be suggested that [Gobetti] himself, with his life and work,
enacted the religious reform that so many people at the time were
discussing in abstract terms.” Shortly after the publication of Storia
d’Europa, Levi added: “The underlying principle is what [Gobetti]
himself—before Croce turned this into a familiar term—called reli-
gion of liberty,” referring readers to La filosofia politica di Vittorio
Alfieri (“Vittorio Alfieri’s Political Philosophy”) published by Gobetti
in 1923, and which introduced (according to Levi’s interpretation) the
formula later consecrated by Croce.46 According to Gobetti, Alfieri
had thus inspired the “religion of liberty.”
The main focus of Gobetti’s work on the writer from Asti—originally
his dissertation with the philosopher of law Gioele Solari and part
of a broader research project into the Piedmontese origins of the
Risorgimento—were Alfieri’s “morals and metaphysics of liberty,” “reli-
gion,” and “politics.” In one passage, though, Gobetti linked Alfieri’s
religious action (in which “there was no distinction between thought
and action”)—his “religion of liberty”—to that of another, closer and
clearly more central figure in the Italian Risorgimento, who was, in
Gobetti’s opinion, surpassed by Alfieri, as he made clear when he wrote
the following:
The resulting unity of apostleship anticipates Mazzini’s work. And a

touch of Mazzinianism is also present in the theoretical premises of
this form of religiousness; but it is a Mazzinianism without Jansenist
or mystical elements, and continues to be superior to Mazzini because
it is expressed in a precursory moment, while there is something
outdated in the theoretical Mazzini. In Alfieri there is an obscure
dialectical conception of liberalism. Mazzini, on the other hand, suc-
cumbs to the incoherencies of the mighty myth of action that he has
introduced.47
Gobetti, therefore, also considered Mazzini firstly and foremost as

an “instigator of action” yet an inconsistent theorist.48
Although his position on Mazzini was always rather ambigu-
ous, Gobetti’s concept of “religion” was undoubtedly influenced by
Giovanni Gentile, who drew extensively upon Mazzini’s religiosity.
In fact, Gentile’s influence has even been noted in Gobetti’s Filosofia
politica di Alfieri, filtered through Gentile’s essays on the “history of
culture in Italy” published in La Critica, in particular his 1921 essay La
cultura piemontese (“The Culture of Piedmont”).49 Gentile’s presence
also emerges strongly from Gobetti’s definition of his religious inter-
ests, specifically in the blend of philosophy, religion, and politics that
is a driving force behind his historical studies on the Risorgimento.50
However, while he may have read and admired the work of the actual-
ist philosopher since 1918 if not earlier—by 1922 he was writing: “For
some time we have been of the opinion that the religion of actualism
is a small sect that has renounced all the seriousness of Croce’s teach-
ing.” It was not long before he began to “come to terms with actual
idealism,” recognizing his debts as well as underlining his distance
from this philosophy.51 Gobetti’s attitude to Mazzini obviously fluc-
tuated considerably if he could write the following words in January
1919 about Doveri dell’uomo: “Certainly I know of no other book with
a greater Italianness and humanity that is at the same time so sim-
ply and openly popular.” Yet some years later, during his revolution-
ary phase, Gobetti claimed that the Doveri was “an immoral book for
offering workers an ideal that did not spring from their heart, per-
suading them to betray themselves and their entire class, in order to
act in the rhetorical atmosphere of the democratic palingenesis and
of petit-bourgeois virtue.”52 He would return to this position, to some
extent endorsing it in his 1924 work La rivoluzione liberale (“On Liberal
Revolution”). In fact, the book opens with an explicit declaration that
was to have a lasting impression upon the Gobettian antifascists: “If
we are asked for symbols: Cattaneo instead of Gioberti, Marx instead
of Mazzini.” Gobetti concluded his work with an explicit contrast:
“Mazzini, romantic, flimsy, vague; Marx clear, inexhorable, realistic,”
stressing a Mazzini who “remains in a generic rhetorical apostleship,
suspended in an ideological vacuum.”53
The mid-1920s saw the publication of another, even more negative
critique of Mazzini, this time by Guido De Ruggero (1888–1948), an
intellectual who had begun his career in the school of Gentile before
becoming a follower of Croce and assiduous collaborator of Croce’s
journal La Critica.54 In what is possibly his most celebrated and endur-

ing work, prepared during the early 1920s and published in 1925, De
Ruggero described Mazzini as “the founder of Italian democracy,” at
the same time drawing attention to the failure of his preaching and his
ignorance of the needs of the Italian people. This historian of philoso-
phy defined Mazzinian thought as a “religious-political mysticism”
whose central tenet would fall on deaf ears: “The formula “God and
the people” was intended [ . . . ] to join the body of Italian formulas, but
failed to resound in the hearts of the people” (also adding that “God
and the people” did not represent “an element of Mazzinian thought
that could be considered separately from all the rest, rather the center
of a system”). That thought seemed to De Ruggero like a “doctrine”
imposed in a declamatory prescriptive form: “Mazzini’s democ-
racy was completely out of touch with Italian reality, seeking vainly
to impose itself upon this reality as a doctrine of duties, yet failing
because these duties, which did not arise from any spontaneous need,
were fated to remain a dead letter.” “It is for this reason that merely
reading Mazzini’s writings is so irritating.”55 De Ruggero’s proposed
reading of Mazzini took into account Gentile’s interpretation (at one
point he defined the Genoese thinker as an “ineffective preacher [ . . . ]
of the ethical State”), as well as drawing upon Salvemini’s demolition
of him,56 which dismissed the mystical character of his thought and
noted the failure of his preaching.
Carlo Rosselli (1899–1937), the economist and celebrated antifascist
leader, who would die at the hand of fascist hired assassins in France
together with his historian brother, Nello (1900–1937), and who was
among those followers of Gobetti actively involved in politics, alternated
praise of Mazzini with harsh criticism. It is important to remember
that while Carlo Rosselli admired Mazzini above all as a symbol, as an
inspirer of noble moral and political actions, he rejected his thought and
refused his political doctrine. For example, in an article that appeared
in Quarto Stato in June 1926, Rosselli wrote: “I believe that all social and
political movements can benefit from the moral teaching underpin-
ning the thought and action of Mazzini, but it must be remembered that
the more modern, efficient forms of Republican propaganda all stem
from Cattaneo, not Mazzini.” And in these same pages, in an article
titled “Mazzini,” on October 30, 1926, he wrote: “We are not followers of
Mazzini, we do not accept his system. The criticism of Gaetano Salvemini
and Alessandro Levi is quite clear in this regard. [ . . . ] Yet at the same
time we also feel that it is useless to seek out elsewhere the teaching that
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:
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
The partially actualizing political criticism of Mazzini revived by

Carlo and Nello Rosselli would later be taken up in the political move-
ment founded by Carlo during his exile in France. In fact, less than ten
years later, a famous debate took place in the Giustizia e Libertà move-
ment dedicating considerable attention to Mazzini. The Russian-born
writer and political activist Andrea Caffi (1887–1955), who opened or
reopened the debate, would take a particularly harsh stance against
Mazzini. Although Caffi shared the belief that it was right to “venerate
the man and the peerless example of his ascetic dedication,” he also felt
that it was impossible to deny “the rigid narrowness, not to say [the]
pettiness of Mazzinian doctrine” as well as the “lack of substance of
Mazzini’s economic notions.” If “the duties of man” had “regimented
[the individual] in the State,” “any exhumation of a formula such as
‘God and People,’ unproductive even at the time of its conception,
would have been artificial.”64 Franco Venturi (1914–1994), the histo-
rian of the Enlightenment, came out in defense of Mazzini, or rather, of
his complete historicization, recalling in particular “the way in which
Mazzini synthesized the ideals of liberty and nationality between 1829
and 1831,” adding: “It is mistaken therefore to confuse this idea of
nation with current nationalisms.”65 These reflections also represented
the young historian’s reply to Nicola Chiaromonte (1905–1972), the
writer and journalist who, under the pseudonym Luciano, had made
the following claim: “The national impetus [inspired by Mazzini] is
forcing Italians to accept [king] Carlo Alberto and abandon the idea
of a true revolution: amidst shouts of ‘Italia, Italia,’ we are forgetting
to abolish the latifondo system, to deal with the social question or to
put into place the legal guarantees for a true freedom.”66 In conclu-
sion, Carlo Rosselli, who had invited Italians to take a stand “against
the official, scholastic, Piedmontese Risorgimento; and for the popu-
lar, revolutionary Risorgimento,” believed that it was possible to act
“like Mazzini, or better than Mazzini, turning [national sentiment]
into a force in a European sense, a necessary term of change, educa-
tion, and construction, stripping it of every tie to a mystic, national-
istic, imperialistic state tradition and to the Mazzinian illusion of
primacy.”67 Rosselli was not only thinking of the more extreme forms
of contemporary interpretations of the “national sentiment,”—also in

the name of a Mazzinian primacy—but also of the historical excesses
of Mazzini himself: in any case he was once again distancing himself
from Mazzini. A few months earlier, after learning of Nello’s plans to
write a biography on the patriot, Carlo had written to his mother—
evidently also in the wake of the debate raging in the ranks of Giustizia
e Libertà: “Nello needs to keep the pragmatic practical spirit of the new
generation in mind. The Mazzini who can attract you is the fighter, the
reaction to the Saint, to the religious spirit.”68
In the 1930s, just as the writer Emilio Lussu (1890–1975), also a
prominent member of Giustizia e Libertà, was rediscovering the
Mazzinian theories of insurrection through guerrilla bands during
his exile in France,69 the ranks of the GL movement also produced the
economist, journalist, and political activist Ernesto Rossi (1897–1967),
who spent this period either in fascist confinement (“confino”) or in
prison. An antifascist reader most sympathetic to Mazzini, Rossi had
a great admiration for his ideals—reading from Mazzini’s works to his
soldiers when he was an officer in the trenches in World War I (“how
falsely the words of a Carducci or D’Annunzio would have rung on
that occasion,” he wrote); yet at the same time he also made the dis-
tance between their positions very clear. On August 18, 1931, he wrote
to his wife:
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.
Already on that occasion though, Rossi mentioned that he had

often found Mazzini “the sociologist and economist” to be “vague,
contradictory and inconclusive,” adding: “So noble and generous is
his thought that that many of his dogmatic formulations and many
of his pontifical attitudes that would normally inspire ridicule from a
critical un-religious spirit such as myself slide into second place and
are accepted as an integral part of his personality.”70
Rossi made his position very clear in a letter written to his mother
from Regina Coeli that was inspired by Griffith’s Mazzini: Prophet of
Modern Europe, in which he distanced himself further from Mazzini,
while remaining sympathetic to him on an emotional level:
In many ways I feel very distant from Mazzini. My forma mentis is

nothing like his, and had I ever met him, I would probably have quar-
reled with him before the day was up. He would have excommunicated
me as a “positivist,” as an “atheist,” or as a “materialist.” And I could
not have borne his mystical fervor, his pose as a messianic prophet, the
inconsistencies and fogginess of his thought [ . . . ]. Nor do I believe that
my essentially individualistic conception of “liberty” could have been
reconciled with his conception, which I would term “catholic.”
Just a few lines further down, though, Rossi adopted a more psy-
chological approach:
And yet . . . every time I approach Mazzini I feel as though warmed by a

generous spring sun. His word constantly accords with my sentimental
life, and strengthens those moral values that are the non-logical though
necessary premise of my entire political activity. [ . . . ] And what is even
more important to me is that his word is an example of life, which is
why his entire thought, even those aspects conflicting with my critical
mentality, assumes a vastly superior significance to that of other writ-
ers who are closer to me temperamentally.71
The Communist front—in open disagreement with Rosselli and

Giustizia e Libertà—was far more radical in its criticism or attacks on
Mazzini. In an extremely hard-hitting article published in Lo Stato
Operaio and defining the “Risorgimento” (in quotation marks in the
original) as “a forced, limited, stunted movement,” Palmiro Togliatti
(1893–1964), leader of the Italian Communist Party, even claimed: “If
he were still alive, Mazzini would applaud corporative doctrines [of
fascism] and would have no difficulty in identifying with Mussolini’s
arguments on ‘Italy’s role in the world.’”72 This stance was obviously
influenced by both the debate going back to the time of Mazzini and
Marx and their direct clash, as well as, and above all, by the nature
of Mazzinian thought and the perception of the appropriation of
Mazzini by fascism. During that same period, an incarcerated Antonio
Gramsci—who was already critical, as we have seen, of Mazzini and
his followers at the start of the political struggle around 1915—had no
qualms about identifying Mazzini as one of the weaknesses of the dem-
ocratic Risorgimento, and drawing attention to the uncertain nature
of his project and political guidance, as well as the emptiness of his
theoretical positions. He wrote, for example, that the patriot—whom
he compared to Carlo Pisacane with regard to theory and practice—
had “merely [offered] foggy claims and philosophical suggestions that
many intellectuals [ . . . ] must have perceived as so much empty chat-

ter.” Gramsci often associated Mazzini’s name with that of Gioberti,
underlining the moderate nature of his conceptions, and focused
on the “verbal and rhetorical myth” of the “mission of Italy,” locat-
ing Mazzini in a genealogy reaching down to D’Annunzio. “These
myths,” wrote the Marxist theorist, “have always been a ferment of all
Italian history, even her most recent history, from Q.[uintino] Sella to
Enrico Corradini, and D’Annunzio.”73 The rejection of Mazzini by the
Italian communists would prove lasting (until his historiographical
reassessment by marxist historiography in the late 1950s), despite the
later rehabilitation of the Risorgimento as an attempted revolution by
the left-wing Resistance: a revolution and rehabilitation, however, in
the name of Giuseppe Garibaldi, not Mazzini.
The turnaround in antifascist interpretations of Mazzini—with
the exception of democratic historical readings like Salvemini’s and
Alessandro Levi’s differently critical interpretations of Mazzini in the
1920s—74would come, in historiographical quarters at least, with Luigi
Salvatorelli’s work Il pensiero politico italiano dal 1700 al 1870 (“Italian
Political Thought from 1700 to 1870”), the first title in the Biblioteca
di cultura storica series brought out by the newly founded publishing
house Einaudi. The work represented a clear reaction to Gentile’s inter-
pretation of the Risorgimento, and, more in general, to the political
climate of denied liberties during the years of the regime.75 We must
not forget, however, that Salvatorelli had planted the seeds of this reac-
tion over a decade, also by defining fascism as “anti-Risorgimento.”
This formula grew out of the realization that the “nationalists, teacher
of fascism [ . . . ] [had] attempted to deny that Risorgimento values had
any form of lasting value.” This same school of nationalist thought had
even reached the point of considering “liberty” and “democracy” as
“mere concomitant conditions, occasional means.”76 Salvatorelli had
begun the attack on the political interpretation of the Risorgimento
proposed by Giovanni Gentile (who defined fascism as a “new liberal-
ism”), with the following words: “A pseudoidealistic thought is align-
ing itself with nationalist absolutism, [ . . . ] claiming to speak of ‘new
liberal policies,’ and referring to Gioberti in order to strengthen its
denial of the highest moral conscience of the Risorgimento: Giuseppe
Mazzini.”77 Although Gentile’s more radical political distortions
of Mazzini’s thought were still to come—as mentioned, they can be
encountered in his writings from 1925 onward—and Salvatorelli had
yet to become the historian of the Risorgimento, these journalistic
and political contributions nevertheless contain the fundamental

intuitions underpinning Salvatorelli’s interpretation based on the link
between the Risorgimento and freedom. Writing in 1924 about the
contrast between nineteenth-century ideals of nationality and twenti-
eth-century nationalism, Salvatorelli affirmed: “While the nineteenth
century was the century of nationalities and rights of different peoples,
the early twentieth century was the period of nationalism and impe-
rialism. We went from Mazzini to Maurras and Kipling.” Salvatorelli
considered this transformation to be both a “logical process” and a
“deviation,” noting also that “Rather than developing into the United
States of Europe and into a universal humanity, Mazzini’s nationali-
ties subside into a bristly nationalism.”78
In an attempt to acquire a greater understanding of continuities and
hiatuses, and seek the remote roots of what he described as “nation-
alfascism” (nazionalfascismo) in the mid 1920s, Salvatorelli became a
historian of the Risorgimento, leaving behind his origins as a scholar of
Christianity, yet bringing with him formulas and intuitions acquired
in his study of phenomena of spiritual life. As he explained in the pref-
ace to his book in 1935, he intended to focus in particular on thinkers
whose “contributions to fundamental political problems remain valid
today,” first and foremost, Mazzini. One of the distinctive features
of Salvatorelli’s interpretation of Mazzini was the way he traced the
roots of Mazzini’s early political thought back to eighteenth-century
thought,79 or rather to what Salvatorelli defined as an “eighteenth-cen-
tury carbonari liberalism”80 with lingering individualistic and cosmo-
politan traits, unlike the other leading interpreters from Salvemini to
Gentile who linked Mazzini’s thought to the Restoration. According
to Salvatorelli, this link would never be completely severed and would
contribute to building the essential foundation of Mazzinian thought:
that is, the key role of “liberty” as a “means to equality,” and the rela-
tionship that Mazzini established between fatherland or nation and
liberty (about these concepts Salvatorelli wrote: “they are inseparable
terms for [him] [ . . . ] involving an intimate relationship between love
of the fatherland and freedom of the individual”).81 This interpreta-
tion was clearly at odds with Gentile’s interpretation of Mazzini, and
in some respects even exceeded Salvemini’s criticisms. Salvatorelli’s
further clarifications reveal that this reading was partly inspired by his
current political concerns and by a desire to challenge present condi-
tions: “Nor does liberty remain a generic postulate for Mazzini: some
years later he described in detail the rights of liberty that must be

protected, including individual liberties, press freedom and freedom
of association.”82 Other passages give rise to actualizing readings
with an antifascist slant, like the section where the historian writes:
“Mazzini holds that every country has two nations: the sham nation
of the tyranny, which dominates and is more visible from the outside,
and the true nation of liberty and association, which is still budding
and concealed”;83 or where he recalls the “sacred nature” of liberty for
Mazzini with regard to the new Italian state, his condemnation of “gov-
ernment acts that damage individual rights” and of “Caesarism.”84
The historian of Christianity (Salvatorelli drew attention to the
similiarities between Mazzini and the thinking of Joachim of Fiore,
St Paul, or the Gospels) recognized the nature of the “new faith” of
the Mazzinian project,85 and of the new society that it prefigured.
Outlining Mazzini’s conceptions, Salvatorelli wrote: “This new society
will be political and religious, there will be correspondence between
the heavens and the earth, and it will be inspired by a complete and
unitary faith. Morality will correspond to faith and will be enacted
through politics. The State will be the Church, and the Church the
State.”86 While Salvatorelli did not disdain the definition of “theoc-
racy” (originally proposed by Salvemini) and underlined the way
that the Mazzinian conception invoked an identity joining State and
Church, he insisted upon distinguishing Mazzini’s conception from
the “Roman-Catholic” conception and from the monism of Gentile’s
ethical State.87
Some years later, Salvatorelli would propose a new synthesis of his
interpretations in a book (published in the spring of 194388) that was
destined to become the antifascist breviary of the Partito-d’Azione-
led Resistance (which had its direct roots in Rosselli’s Giustizia e
Libertà).89 It was a thoroughly Mazzinian work—beginning with
the title Pensiero e azione nel Risorgimento italiano (“Thought and
Action in the Italian Risorgimento”)—in which Mazzini acted as foil,
goad, or inspiration throughout the events of Italian independence
and beyond. Once again the key tenets of Salvatorelli’s interpreta-
tion were Mazzini’s concept of liberty, his republicanism, the ideal
of “humanity” (remembering that at the time this ideal “place[d] an
insuperable banner, a veritable abyss, between Mazzinianism and
every other doctrine of nationalistic ethnicism”), national and popu-
lar sovereignty countering “politics [ . . . ] embodied by dominant indi-
viduals.” Salvatorelli was probably seeking signs of a not-too-distant

future when he wrote:
The concept of popular initiative, self-action and national self-govern-

ment is fundamental for Mazzini, and could be described as the alpha
and omega of his political system. This organicist and dynamic con-
cept of the Italian nation as popular self-creation is one of Mazzini’s
most important contributions to an ideal and practical Risorgimento
process.
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:
So much for Mazzinian idealities on the liberation of the peoples! [ . . . ]

It would be absurd to attribute the consequences that we see today [ . . . ]
to Mazzini or to the others who fought and suffered for those idealities.
It is up to us to distinguish the different substance beneath the identity
of the form and name. Some of the principles that burgeoned with spir-
itual life yesterday have become a cause of decadence and death today.
We need to cast them off without fail to avoid being swept away by a
current that would take us further and further from our destinations.
“From humanity, through nationality, to bestiality” [ . . . ] But nation-
ality was a milestone we had to reach in order to move forward.92
Conclusion
A Religion of the Nation

without a Civil Religion
“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
or failed to develop should probably involve taking a look at the rituals

as well as the symbols of the Mazzinian tradition, and their diffusion
in Italian society and politics (festivals, celebrations, anniversaries) in
order to assess their reception, weakness, or effectiveness, which would
nevertheless prove to be largely limited to the geographical areas or
short periods of influence of republican political culture in the Italian
peninsula.3 Analyses of the formation and function of national civic
rituals, and of the various institutional subjects watching over them
in the liberal age (monarchy, army, State) have, however, underlined
the limits to an effective participation and popular adhesion to such
rituals.4 I can merely allude here to other decisive factors preventing
the development of a democratic civil religion in Italy:5 firstly, the per-
sistent influence of Catholicism and the Church6 in the formation of a
collective Italian consciousness, which weakened the identification of
Italians with a national State community built up through voluntary
adhesions and through democratic participation. Secondly, the hurdle
thrown up by the continuous influence of local identities, the fragmen-
tation of cultural, and sometimes even of linguistic and religious tradi-
tions within Italian politics and society. 7
If one looks specifically at the influence and role—or failed role—
of Mazzini’s religion of the nation, it becomes clear that they have
assumed different connotations and should be associated with different
motivations. First and foremost, Mazzini’s legacy was never an effective
element of ideal unification for Italian political cultures between 1870
and 1945. 8 In this regard, I would like to mention the heated debates
that sprang up in the early 1900s concerning the adoption in schools
of Mazzini’s Doveri dell’uomo, and the differing positions that emerged
with respect to this work and its meanings; or later, the fierce criti-
cal discussions about the Risorgimento and the figure of Mazzini that
took place in antifascist circles in the 1930s. Lastly, the failure of the
unifying function of the reference to Mazzini would be confirmed by
the contrasting readings of the “apostle” by the Resistance and by the
Fascism of the Republic of Salò during the civil war of 1943–1945.9
With these premises, even in a post–World War II Italy transformed
into a Republic by Constitutional Referendum, it would prove impos-
sible for Mazzini and his religion of the nation to represent an element
of shared identification: obviously, by this stage, fascism’s extensive
exploitation of Mazzini and of the national and nationalist rhetoric
would have also played a role. Post-1945 Italy was dominated by other,
more loaded and influential references put forward by the two main
CONCLUSION 109
constructors of political identity of the time: the persistent reference

to the Church and Catholicism by the Christian Democrat movement;
the revolutionary internationalist reference by the Italian Communist
party. Though aware of the theme and symbol of the nation, both par-
ties pressed for a sense of supranational or universal identification.10
As mentioned above, between 1870 and 1945, the public discourse
was dominated by the authoritarian elements of Mazzini’s religion of
the nation, and there was a tendency to exalt the antidemocratic com-
ponents identified in Mazzini’s original political project: his criticism
of the French Revolution; the role of the deity in the definition of the
nation (at the expense of a univocal affirmation of popular sovereignty);
his paternalistic-pedagogical conception of politics; and the preemi-
nence of duties over rights. At the same time, other aspects, such as his
republicanism in particular, were played down or even suppressed. In
the 1880s and 1890s, Crispi, Carducci, and Oriani were charged with
reinterpreting Mazzini’s inheritance in the name of a unity guaranteed
by the monarchy and by the new national “faith” which did not scorn
the use of force both within and without its frontiers. Pascoli, for exam-
ple, called for a new national “mission” for Italy, which now had aspi-
rations to becoming a colonial power. In the same period, the icon of
Mazzini and his religious-political message fascinated those like Sorel
and Papini, who attempted to relaunch them from an irrationalist per-
spective. Lastly, Mazzini’s religion of the nation would play a key role
in the migration of socialists and republicans to Fascist ranks between
World War I and the post war period, becoming the nucleus of the
Fascist political religion during the years of the regime through a pro-
cess of further ideological transformation and radicalization.11 Various
aspects of its original ideological nucleus, as well as the way in which
it was appropriated and transformed meant that Mazzini’s religion of
the nation could not become the basis of a democratic civil religion or
transmit its ideals, symbols, and myths.
Another aspect that had a decisive influence upon Mazzini’s political
vision and its ideological heritage was the sometimes-blurred separa-
tion between Church and State in Mazzini’s thought. Obviously, this did
not concern his failure to separate the State from the Catholic Church,
since Mazzini was and remained a fierce anticlerical, although he did
have occasional lapses: for example, when he paid homage to Pius IX
in 1847; or insisted upon maintaining the Church’s spiritual authority
and ritual during the 1849 Roman Republic. What mattered was the
avowed unification of political and religious authorities in Mazzini’s
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:
National sovereignty is the remedy universally accepted for preserving soci-

ety from the total absence of authority, from anarchy. The sovereignty of the
Church—and by the Church we understand the people of believers—must
preserve society from the absence of all religious principle and authority.
Constituent Assembly and Council: [considered by Mazzini to be the
founding organisms and guide for the future Italian State] these are the
prince and pope of the future.12
In his Doveri dell’uomo Mazzini commented again on the separa-

tion—or its absence—of powers, or rather, on the role of God with
respect to temporal power, criticizing the evangelical formula:
“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
In one of his last, most detailed writings on the question of reli-

gion, a pamphlet addressed to the members of the Vatican Council that
came out in 1870 under the title Dal Concilio a Dio (“From the Council
to God”), Mazzini firmly underlined the obsolescence, or rather the
end of Catholicism and of the function of the Catholic Church. At the
same time, he also confirmed his deism—given that the pamphlet also
attacked materialists—and once again placed sovereignty in God, con-
demning the “dualism of spiritual and temporal power.”14 This compo-
nent of Mazzinian thought, which limited popular sovereignty, made
his religion of the nation a weak premise for the development of a civil
religion, which would of necessity have had to be founded on a clear
separation between State and Church.
CONCLUSION 111
Returning to the pages written by Mazzini, as I have done in this

book—and as suggested by Salvatorelli in 1945, who considered his
work a source of both blame and hope—and to their changing for-
tunes has, meant redefining his heritage, sometimes drastically, and
reflecting on the features, weaknesses, and limits of Risorgimento
democracy, and its burdensome legacy. Thus did the protagonist of
Luigi Meneghellos’s novel I piccoli maestri (in English The Outlaws)
set in the Italian Resistance movement: a partisan who had redis-
covered Mazzini while fighting fascims and nazism. Pondering over
Mazzini back in 1943–1945, the years in which the Italian democracy
was struggling to emerge, the partisan not only found present inspi-
ration and future hopes, but also some of the responsibilities of the
founding fathers—and above all of their heirs—murmuring to him-
self: “When I re-read Mazzini [ . . . ] it makes me gnaw my fingers.
There it all is already.”15
Afterword
Mazzini, the Risorgimento, and

the Origins of Fascism
I n this book I have aimed at demonstrating Giuseppe Mazzini’s influ-

ence on the origins of fascist ideology in Italy. The most disturbing
question underlying this historical process lies in the fact that this was
the final development of a political thought aimed at liberating Italy,
spreading freedom, and creating a democratic republic. In the nine-
teenth century Mazzinianism was, indeed, an ideology, incarnated in
a political movement, which successfully contributed to liberating men
and inspiring their ethical lives.1 In the twentieth century, however,
Mazzini’s ideas were subjected to different interpretations and applica-
tions, not entirely without analogies to Marx’s ideas, which the Italian
philosopher Norberto Bobbio, looking at the fate of communism in the
last century, described as the “utopia capovolta” or overthrown uto-
pia.2 In the twentieth century, as pointed out by Hannah Arendt in The
Origins of Totalitarianism, it may be the fate of ideologies—given their
nature as political weapons and not theoretical doctrines—to change,
at least in part, their content as they come into contact with political
life.3 While taking into account the uses of Mazzini in the twentieth
century4 —according to the original marxian definition, an essential
aspect of ideology concerns its instrumental and political uses, and
aims5—I have also focused on undefined or contradictory aspects of his
thought, tendencies, and weaknesses already present and perceived by
his contemporaries, such as the authoritarian dimensions of Mazzini’s
thought, the central role of God, of a spiritual power coming from above
in the very creation and, to some extent, even in the ruling of the nation,
as well as the absence of a separation between political and religious
authorities which, according to the Italian patriot, should have been

unified. Although democratic in its aims, the Risorgimento itself, as a
cultural, intellectual, and political movement, has come recently under
the scrutiny of historians who have explored the inner nature and life of
Italian nationalism and suggested links between nineteenth- and twen-
tieth-century nationalism in Italy, and even direct connections between
the Risorgimento and Fascism.6 While sharing some of the concerns of
this approach, my own interpretation also considers aspects of such an
analysis potentially anachronistic or at least teleological. In this book I
have therefore attempted to make a distinction between Mazzini in his
times and his successive political uses, although the two questions are
not unrelated, and Mazzini’s thought clearly shaped Italian nationalism
during the last two centuries in complex and at times ambiguous ways.
Looking for Continuities between Risorgimento

Nationalism and Fascism
In recent years the historian Alberto M. Banti has intensively exam-

ined the political and cultural discourse of the Risorgimento in new
and original ways, identifying what he calls the “figure profonde”
(deep tropes) of the Italian nationalist discourse: descent, sanctity,
and honor, all figure in the writings of major protagonists of the
Risorgimento literary and political canon.7 This analysis has helped
shed light on recurrent narratives and literary figures repeatedly crop-
ping up in Risorgimento literature and serving as mobilizing myths
for Italian patriots and for political action in the nineteenth cen-
tury. Banti’s attention has also been captured by the presence in the
Risorgimento political and literary canon of references to ethnicity,
descent, and blood: for example, in the Catholic neoguelph Vincenzo
Gioberti’s Primato morale e civile degli italiani (1843), which cel-
ebrated the ethnic, moral, and civil primacy of Italians, descending
from the country’s religious primacy as the main seat of Catholicism.
More recently, Banti has also attempted to show the continuity of
the Risorgimento “deep tropes” in the Italian nationalist discourse
between Unification (1870) and Fascism, right up to the fascist “racial
laws” of 1938.8 According to this interpretation “the fascist nation
harshens the elementary tropes of the original [Risorgimento] discur-
sive matrix, pushing it to an extreme. Descent and blood are turned
from metaphors to projections of a racist ‘knowledge’ and common
sense, which colonial and racial laws then make tragically operative.” 9
AFTERWORD 115
These tropes, which appear recurrently in Mussolini’s speeches and

writings, from as early as the early 1920s, together with the concepts of
“stock” (stirpe) and race (razza), are used to “draw [ . . . ] the contours
of the national community.”10 Therefore—Banti concludes—the “dis-
cursive morphology that animates Risorigimento nationalism contin-
ues to structure the entire nationalist discourse to follow.”11
The main limit of this analysis lies in the absence of contextualiza-
tion: blood and race clearly do not have the identical meaning, either
in Italy or elsewhere, in 1848 as in 1938. Banti admits that “the relative
absence of contextualisation [in his analysis] may be disturbing.” But,
he claims “this is a method that allows for a clearer observation of
the intertextual coherences defining a discursive network that can be
traced back, with reasonable certainty, to its ‘Urtext,’ the oath of the
members of [Mazzini’s] Giovine Italia.”12 Although I am in principle
sympathetic to this conclusion, I am also concerned about the relative
neglect of the different historical (and discursive) contexts in which
the Mazzinian discourse and tropes appeared. I would also insist upon
the syncretic nature and definition of Mussolini’s nationalism before
1938, which, like the Risorgimento, interwove spiritual and naturalis-
tic, even ethnicist, definitions of the Italian nation, often in incoher-
ent ways.13 At the same time, like Banti, I am aware of the presence of
a racial discourse in Mazzinian interpretations of nationalism in the
nineteenth century, including influential definitions of the term and
category of “nationality,” usually considered one of the cornerstones of
Mazzinian voluntaristic and spiritualistic nationalism. For example,
in his celebrated 1851 definition of the “principle of nationality,” the
jurist and future minister of foreign affairs in post–Unification Italy,
Pasquale Stanislao Mancini wrote:
Race, as an expression of identical origin and blood, is another impor-

tant constitutive factor of the Nation [ . . . ] Where several races coex-
isted or violently overlapped, one did not, and could not, obtain a
single Nationality, if not after their slow fusion. [ . . . ] We are forced to
believe in the enduring persistence of certain characteristics transmit-
ted through race, and to admit the fact that they certainly inform the
national spirit.14
Other recent interpretations of Mazzini and of Risorgimento

nationalism have emphasized, echoing Emilio Gentile, the roman-
tic nature of Italian nationalism: Lucy Riall, for example, examin-
ing Mazzini’s nationalist culture has suggested that it belonged to a
nationalist “political religion.”15 Again in the wake of Gentile, she has

also suggested that nineteenth-century nationalism anticipated ele-
ments of the “sacralization of politics” that took place in the next cen-
tury.16 Similarly, Christopher Duggan has placed Mazzini in the strand
of “European romantic nationalism,” emphasizing how Mazzini’s
nation was “the focus of a new secular religion.”17 And examining fas-
cist and particularly Mussolinian conceptions of the nation, Silvana
Patriarca has more generally underlined “the structural continuity
with the discourse of national character that was a distinctive mark
of Italian nationalism since the Risorgimento.”18 According to Manlio
Graziano, who follows Gian Enrico Rusconi, the search for an Italian
“civil religion” was a Mazzinian project that was emblematic of the
post-Unification period epitomized by the failed attempts to bring this
about by Prime Minister Francesco Crispi, “the most Mazzinian poli-
tician of the new Italy.”19 A. James Gregor has on his part reassessed
fascism (and nazism) as totalitarianisms descending from the longer
intellectual lineage of a political religion going back to Hegel and, in
Italy, to Mazzini, in particular, and to the political reading of Mazzini
made by Giovanni Gentile.20 Finally, Emilio Gentile himself, while
detailing his previous positions, insisted upon the existence of a break
between the Risorgimento and the fascist nation. While acknowledg-
ing that—as the antifascist claimed—Mazzini “had nourished a mystic
conception of the national State,” Gentile affirms the existence, since
the time of the Libyan war (1912), of an “ideologization of the nation,”
whereby the Italian nation was no longer a common motherland for
all, as in the Risorgimento, but became “the monopoly of one political
movement against others.”21
Mazzinian Influences and the Fascist Mazzini
As I have suggested in this book, Mazzini’s influence and uses in the

origins of fascism operated on many levels and in different phases of
the rise of fascist ideology and of the making of the fascist movement.
During World War I and its immediate aftermath, this influence
would prove decisive, or certainly of great help, in causing so many
to give their political and intellectual support to the conflict, and in
the ideological transition toward fascism. This was especially true, as
we have seen, for Benito Mussolini, who read Mazzini in the trenches.
But also for Giovanni Gentile, who reread Mazzini during the war and
wrote about him in its immediate aftermath in the nationalist journal
AFTERWORD 117
Politica. Mazzini was also instrumental in inspiring early fascists and

the founding figures of Fascism such as Italo Balbo, Dino Grandi,
and, to some extent, Giuseppe Bottai—who all came from families
with a Mazzinian background or an interest in or even veneration
for the Genoese patriot—to abandon Republicanism for Mussolini’s
new political movement. Later, when he was already a member of
Mussolini’s first cabinet, Giovanni Gentile published I profeti del
Risorgimento (1923), a work that saw him beginning to appropriate
Mazzini as a precursor of the new political situation and movement,
and as a symbol which allowed the philosopher to popularize his own
version of idealism. Mazzini’s couplets “Dio e il Popolo” (“God and
the People”) and “Pensiero e Azione” (“Thought and Action”) were
soon used by Gentile to vulgarize actualism and to historically and
symbolically justify the spiritualization of fascist action, including
political violence. A further area of Mazzinian influence in the ori-
gins of Fascism was corporatism: first, in the drafting of the Carta del
Carnaro by Alceste De Ambris at Fiume, later (until the second half of
the 1920s at least) in the development of the fascist corporativist doc-
trine by figures such as Angelo Oliviero Olivetti, 22 and by Bottai him-
self as one of the inspirers of the Carta del Lavoro.23 Mazzini would
remain a constant source of inspiration for fascist syndacalism,24 for
fascist republicans, 25 and even for the writings of the Scuola di Mistica
Fascista in the early 1930s.26
Mazzini’s direct or more often genealogical influence on fascist
ideas can be identified on various levels: providing antecedents to
the fascist revolution in the Risorgimento and in counterposition to
the French Revolution, both through the duties versus rights divide,
and through an explicit critique of the Revolution and its democratic
legacy (democracy is itself a word that had always aroused Mazzini’s
suspicions). Equally relevant for fascism was the recovery of Mazzini’s
critique of class struggle, in favor of cooperation, as well as of Mazzini’s
attack on communism, which dated back to the Genoese’s political
clashes with Marx. More generally, Mazzini was at times explicitly
invoked in the search for authority as opposed to liberty, while he
had a more indirect influence—for example, through the mediation
of Alfredo Oriani—in the call for a sovereign power from above, as in
the formula “God and People.” A Mazzinian influence can be found in
the spiritualistic and idealistic conception of the nation promoted by
fascism, since Mazzini’s nation, as Giovanni Gentile pointed out, was
neither the French voluntaristic nor the German naturalistic one. The
impact and mediation of a Hegelian and, especially, of a neo-idealistic

Crocean and particularly Gentilean conception of the State, of society,
and history was essential for such aspects, and much of Mazzini’s last-
ing impact on Fascism was indeed initiated and mediated through the
movement’s encounter with neo-idealism.27 This neo-idealistic influ-
ence was present, for example, in the case of Mussolini himself at the
beginning of the last century (at least from the time of his collabo-
ration with Giuseppe Prezzolini’s journal La Voce28) and it was due
especailly to the towering role of Giovanni Gentile in the definition
of Fascism, and more generally to his wide, if articulated, impact on
Italian culture at large.29
Moreover, Mazzini had a fundamental influence upon the defini-
tion of Fascism as a political religion, both as a direct predecessor in
the search for a civil religion for the Third Italy, and through his role
as a symbol and precursor in the religious interpretation of Fascism
by Giovanni Gentile and Giuseppe Bottai. Bottai was actually perhaps
the first to literally call fascism a “political religion.” In an impor-
tant lecture of 1930 Bottai throroughly addressed “The Thought and
Action of Giuseppe Mazzini,” delineating his interpretation of the
Genoese patriot. Although he began by criticizing the constant search
for and concern with ideological precursors, to which he preferred the
notion of “mystic contemporaneity,” Mazzini appeared to him “alive
and present in our time, not an artificial precursor, but active Master
[operoso Maestro].” Mazzini was one of the inspirers (who ranged
“from Dante to Mussolini”) of fascism as a “political and civil reli-
gion, which did not exclude, but integrated the ecclesiastical religion”
and was thus “the religion of Italy.”30 Bottai’s Mazzini was the founder
of a national revolution, counterposed to the French revolution, based
on duties as opposed to rights, and on freedom as a means and not
an end. Religion and “national education” were as central to Mazzini
as to Fascism: the same is true for both the Mazzinian and the fas-
cist “cults of action.” Thus Bottai ideologically reinterpreted Mazzini’s
thought, insisting upon the conciliation between his religiosity and
Catholicism; reconfiguring the couplet “God and the People” as “God
and Rome”; and even elaborating upon a Mazzinian “imperialism.”
According to Bottai, also as a reaction to Socialism, Mazzini was—
more than Sorel—the inspirer of fascist syndacalism and corpora-
tivism, of a “true democracy” lying “outside and above the so-called
‘popular sovereignity.’” Bottai thus provides—together with Giovanni
Gentile, whose reading of Mazzini we have examined at length—an
AFTERWORD 119
exemplary fascist interpretation of Mazzini that historically chal-

lenges (together with the support of the materials and reconstructions
provided in this book), both the interpretations tying the origins of
Fascism to socialism,31 and the interpretation of Zeev Sternhell who
has placed particular emphasis upon the role of Sorel in these origins32
(not to mention interpretations which consider fascism a modernist
phenomenon).33 Sorel’s influence was indeed present and relevant,
mediating aspects of the thought and political experience of Mazzini
(as we have shown for the first time). But Italian Fascism already had
a “third way” in its own history: and this was represented precisely by
Mazzini and his ideas.34
Still, as we have seen, the antifascists admired Mazzini as the
founding father of united Italy, and as a heroic and ethical figure, but
were also aware and concerned about his theoretical inconsistencies,
and in particular about the authoritarian potential of his definition
of the nation, of a national sovereignity descending from God, of his
attack on the French Revolution principles, and of Mazzini’s criticism
of a democracy based on rights. They were obviously also aware of the
ideological interpretation and political uses that Fascism—beginning
with its foremost idéologue Gentile—was making of Mazzini. There
was a long-established line that was critical of Mazzini, beginning, as
we have seen, with Francesco De Sanctis and Mikhail Bakunin (not
to mention Karl Marx) before being codified by Gaetano Salvemini
at the beginning of the last century, and later by Croce. Piero Gobetti,
Carlo Rosselli, and, before them, Gramsci all dismissed Mazzini on
theoretical and political grounds, criticizing what one of their com-
mon masters, Salvemini, had called Mazzini’s “popular theocracy.”
Sharing their stance was Silvio Trentin (1885–1944), the jurist, fed-
eralist thinker, and antifascist exile in France, who wrote in 1940, in
his book Stato, nazione, federalismo (first published as a clandestine
and posthumous edition in March 1945) that Mazzini had turned his
thought into a “religion” and had “allowed the adoration of the nation
as a mystical entity, an individuality, an ethical and social will, intol-
erant of any breach and entirely converging toward a single focus.”
Mazzini’s ideas, according to Trentin, were strongly Hegelian, and he
had reached a compromise with the Italian monarchy allowing “the
enthronement of the great centralizing State.”35
Fascism’s exploitation of Mazzini along with the harsh criti-
cism from antifascist quarters—combined with the inner con-
tradictions and indefinite nature of Mazzini’s own thinking (e.g.,
concerning the separation between religious and political power)—

meant that Mazzinianism, which had aimed at becoming a secular
religion for the Italian nation, would never become Italy’s civil reli-
gion. Mazzini was thus confined to the pantheon of the founding
fathers, often seen as an ambiguous inspirer of fascism, and his “face
that never laughed” (il volto che gimmai non rise, from the famous
line by Carducci) never really “resuscitated” (to continue borrowing
from the poet’s verses) or animated the Italian people, contemplating
it from afar, as he did with Italy. The new nation was thus a prom-
ised land which Mazzini, like Moses, had helped create, only to be
barred entry from after finally reaching it.36 In the following decades,
however, Mazzini’s thought would contribute to the genesis of fascist
ideology, becoming an instrument of the transition of Italian politics
toward Fascism.
Notes
Introduction
1. Giuseppe Bottai, Diario 1935–1944, ed. Giordano Bruno Guerri, Milan:

Rizzoli, 1982, p. 468.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., p. 149.
4. Ibid., p. 186 (April 15, 1940).
5. Reference should first of all be made to the classic studies by George L.
Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third
Reich, New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964; and Fritz Stern, The Politics
of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of Germanic Ideology, 2nd ed.,
Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1974.
6. On Italy, see Mario Isnenghi, Il mito della grande guerra, new ed., Bologna:
Il Mulino, 1997 and, for greater detail, Emilio Gentile, The Origins of
Fasicst Ideology, 1918–1925, trans. Robert L. Miller, New York: Enigma
Books, 2005 (orig. ed. Bologna, 1996). Gentile emphasizes the appeal to
Mazzini in critiques of the liberal and Giolittian state in the context of
what he refers to as “national radicalism” (“radicalismo nazionale”) in Id.,
Il mito dello Stato nuovo: Dal radicalismo nazionale al fascismo, 2nd ed.,
Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1999, pp. 5–9.
7. Gentile recalls these remote influences, yet with respect to the way Fascism
appealed to them, and not in terms of their actual direct or historical
influence. See Gentile, The Origins of Fasicst Ideology. They are examined
as one of the myths of Fascism by Pier Giorgio Zunino, L’ideologia del
fascismo. Miti, credenze e valori nella stabilizzazione del regime, Bologna:
Il Mulino, 1995. By contrast, these roots of fascism have definitively been
underestimated by Zeev Sternhell, Mario Sznajder, and Maia Asheri, The
Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution,
trans. David Maisel, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994 (orig.
ed. Paris, 1989).
8. See Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, pp. 276–282. On the origi-
nally humanitarian bent of Herder’s nationalism, however, see F. M.
Barnard, Herder’s Social and Political Thought: From Enlightenment to
Nationalism, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967, pp. 88–108. Concerning
122 NOTES
Fichte’s cosmopolitan vision, see Hans Kohn, “The Paradox of Fichte’s

Nationalism,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 10, 3, June 1949, pp. 319–
343. This contrasts with Fichte’s later popularity as a nationalist: see H. C.
Engelbrecht, Johann Gottlieb Fichte: A Study of His Political Writings with
Special Reference to His Nationalism, New York: Columbia University
Press, 1923, pp. 160–190.
9. On the way the term “nation,” for instance, is conveyed and decoded, see
Umberto Eco, La struttura assente, 2nd ed., Milan: Bompiani, 1983, p. 94.
Eco echoes the observations on the “ideological” use of the word made by
Roland Barthes, Mythologies, Paris: Seuil, 1957, p. 247. On the “appropri-
ation” of “discourses,” see Michel Foucault, Che cos’è un autore? (1969),
in Id., Scritti letterari, ed. and trans. Cesare Milanese, 3rd ed., Milan:
Feltrinelli, 2004, p. 9 (English translation: “What is an author?,” in The
Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, New York: Pantheon Books, 1984,
101–120).
10. For an initial overview of the concept of ideology, see Mario Stoppino’s
entry in Dizionario di politica, 3rd ed., Turin: UTET, 2004, 487–499.
11. It is useful to refer here to the methodological suggestions made by
John G. A. Pocock, according to whom not only texts are historical
“events,” but languages are the “matrices” within which texts as events
occur. Texts, Pocock explains, “have readers and outlive their authors.
The author, in creating the text, creates the matrix in which others will
read and respond to it.” Mazzini’s words and language, therefore, were
not just historical events in their own time, but linguistic matrices that
contributed to establishing a “continuity of discourse” and meanings
which, aside from being objects of interpretation in themselves, also
fostered other interpretations. With regard to Mazzini’s texts, we might
say then—quoting Pocock—that they “surviv[e] in language matrices
that modify the actions performed with them but that they continue to
modify through their surviving capacity to act in themselves as matrices
for action.” See John G. A. Pocock, “Texts as Events: Reflections of the
History of Political Thought” (1987) in Id., Political Thought and History:
Essays on Theory and Method, New York: Cambridge University Press,
2009, 106–119 (especially pp. 114 and 116).
12. On this point, see chapter 1 in this book.
13. As we shall see, the roots, if not the onset, of the democratic appropria-
tion of Mazzini, based on a new historiographical interpretation, are
probably to be found in the publication of Luigi Salvatorelli’s work Il pen-
siero politico del Risorgimento italiano, Turin: Einaudi, 1935 (although
the previous interpretations by Gaetano Salvemini and Alessandro Levi
also represent important precedents). Prior to that, in the 1920s and early
1930s, democratic political readings of Mazzini—or, to be more exact,
democratic ideological appropriations of his thought—played an utterly
marginal role in antifascist theory and discourse.
NOTES 123
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 Giuseppe Mazzini and the Religion of the Nation
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
In these letters Mazzini also expresses his intention to compose a work

on, or inspired by, Lamennais (see SEI, XIV–XV, ad indicem).
13. See Adolfo Omodeo, Studi sull’età della Restaurazione, 2nd ed., Turin:
Einaudi, 1974, pp. 105–115 and 135–145; Guido Verucci, Félicité
Lamennais: Dal cattolicesimo autoritario al radicalismo democratico,
Naples: Istituto italiano per gli studi storici, 1963.
14. Lamennais, Le livre du Peuple, p. 96.
15. An Italian pioneer of the reflection on “duties” was the Catholic poly-
graph and educator Francesco Soave. His Trattato elementare dei doveri
dell’uomo e della società was first issued in 1803 and reprinted through-
out the nineteenth century. However, Mazzini does not seem to have
known this text, or for that matter to have used it. Joseph Mazzini, Essays:
Selected from the Writings, Literary, Political and Religious, trans. E. A.
Venturi, London: Walter Scott, 1887, p. 41 (the translation was partly
modified).
16. See Levi, La filosofia politica, p. 104 (pp. 107–108 for the previous
quotes).
17. Word frequency distributions for Duties of Man may be checked at the
following address: http://www.intratext.com/IXT/ITA1290/_INDEX.
HTM (last accessed in December 2014).
18. The second time it appears in the sentence: “The republic is the only
legitimate and logical form of government.”
19. On this, see Alberto Asor Rosa, Scrittori e popolo. Il populismo nella let-
teratura italiana contemporanea (1965), Turin: Einaudi, 1988, pp. 35–36;
Giulio Bollati, L’italiano. Il carattere nazionale come storia e come inven-
zione, Turin: Einaudi, 1983, pp. 61–62 and 108–110; and Nicola Merker,
Filosofie del populismo, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2009, pp. 87–97.
20. Giuseppe Mazzini, Dei doveri dell’uomo (1860), SEI, vol. LXIX, pp. 16–17
(Mazzini, Duties of Man, pp. 18–19).
21. “Every Revolution is a question of Education which replaces the previous
one”: “La réforme intellectuelle et morale di Ernesto Renan” (1872), SEI,
vol. XCIII, p. 236, quoted by Levi, La filosofia politica, p. 152.
22. Joseph Mazzini, Thoughts upon Democracy in Europe, SEI, vol. XXXIV,
p. 112 and 107, quoted by Salvo Mastellone, Mazzini scrittore politico in
inglese: “Democracy in Europe” (1840–1855), Florence: Olschki, 2004, pp.
162–163 (the full paragraph is drawn and translated from the Italian ver-
sion: Giuseppe Mazzini, Pensieri sulla democrazia in Europa, ed. Salvo
Mastellone, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1997, p. 89). See also Salvo Mastellone, La
democrazia etica di Mazzini (1837–1847), Rome: Archivio Guido Izzi,
2000, esp. pp. 99–110 and 173–180.
23. On the first stage of development of Mazzini’s thought, see Salvo
Mastellone, Mazzini e la “Giovine Italia” (1831–1834), Pisa: Domus
Mazziniana, 1960; Franco Della Peruta, Mazzini e i rivoluzionari ital-
iani: Il “partito d’azione” 1830–1845, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1974. Broad
128 NOTES
biographical profiles have recently been drawn by Jean-Yves Fretigné,

Giuseppe Mazzini: Père de l’unité italienne, Paris: Fayard, 2006; Roland
Sarti, Mazzini: La politica come religione civile, trans. Annalisa Siboni,
Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2000 (orig. ed. Westport, CT, 1997); and Dennis
Mack Smith, Mazzini, trans. Bettino Betti, Milan: Biblioteca Universale
Rizzoli, 2000 (orig. ed. New Haven and London, 1993).
24. On Saint-Simonism, see Sébastien Charlety, Histoire du Saint-Simonisme
(1825–1864), 2nd ed., Paris: Hartmann, 1931; Georg Iggers, The Cult of
Authority: The Political Philosophy of the Saint-Simonians, 2nd ed., The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970; Robert B. Carlisle, The Proffered Crown:
Saint-Simonianism as the Doctrine of Hope, London: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1987. For the influence of Saint-Simonianism dur-
ing the Risorgimento, see Renato Treves, La dottrina sansimoniana nel
pensiero italiano del Risorgimento (1931), Turin: Giappichelli, 1973; and
Francesco Pitocco, Utopia e riforma religiosa nel Risorgimento: Il sansi-
monismo nella cultura toscana, Bari: Laterza, 1972.
25. See esp. Gaetano Salvemini, “Mazzini” (1925), in Id., Scritti sul
Risorgimento, ed. Piero Pieri and Carlo Pischedda, Milan: Feltrinelli,
1973, p. 223; Franco Venturi, “La circolazione delle idee,” Rassegna Storica
del Risorgimento, XLI (II–III) April–September 1954, p. 17 (of the off-
print); Alessandro Galante Garrone, “Mazzini in Francia e gli inizi della
Giovine Italia,” in Mazzini e il mazzinianesimo, Atti del 46° Congresso di
Storia del Risorgimento (Genoa, September 24–28, 1972), Rome: Istituto
Italiano per la Storia del Risorgimento, 1974, pp. 231–232. See also Jacob
Talmon, Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase, London: Secker &
Warburg, 1960, p. 263.
26. See Andrzej Walicki, Philosophy and Romantic Nationalism: The Case
of Poland, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982; and Stanislaw Elie, Literature
and Nationalism in Partitioned Poland, 1795–1918, London and New
York: Macmillan and St. Martin, 2000. I have examined Mazzini’s
relations with Polish émigrés, and especially the historian and patriot
Lelewel (as well as Mickiewicz, of course), in “Costruire un nazionalismo
e un ‘gran convegno de’ popoli’: Giuseppe Mazzini tra Europa e Polonia,”
in L’eredità di Giuseppe Mazzini: La democrazia tra coscienza nazionale
e coscienza europea, ed. Giampietro Berti, Padua: Il Poligrafo, 2006, pp.
49–64 (with further bibliographical references).
27. Felicité de Lamennais, Paroles d’un croyant, Paris: Renduel, 1834.
28. See L’Avenir, 1830–1831: Antologia degli articoli di Félicité-Robert
Lamennais e degli altri collaboratori, ed. Guido Verucci, Rome: Edizioni
di Storia e Letteratura, 1967. The very title of Mazzini’s 1835 pamphlet,
Foi et Avenir, recalls that of Lamennais’ periodical.
29. Mazzini also explicitly refers to Lamennais’ “Dieu et liberté” in his text
“Intorno all’Enciclica di Gregorio XVI, Papa: Pensieri ai preti italiani,”
Giovine Italia, V, 1833, SEI, III, p. 139.
NOTES 129
30. In September 1834, Mazzini wrote to Nicolò Tommaseo from Lausanne,

also stressing the difference between his own views and those of
Lammenais: “You should render at least this justice to me, since [ . . . ] I
was the first to give shape to the revolutionary symbol in two words: God
and the People; these were much more comprehensive words than the call
of the Catholic school, claiming in L’Avenir for: Dieu et la liberté (God
and Liberty)” (quoted in Angiola Ferraris, Letteratura e impegno civile
nell’ “Antologia,” Padua: Liviana, 1978, pp. 169–170).
31. See the two articles by Mazzini titled “Lamennais” in The Monthly
Chronicle, April 1839, SEI, XVII, pp. 345–396; and in Apostolato Popolare,
July 25, 1841, SEI, XXV, pp. 61–68.
32. Livre des pélerins polonais, traduit du polonais d’Adam Mickiewicz par
le Comte Ch. De Montalembert; suivi d’un hymne à la Pologne par F. De
La Mennais, Paris: Eugene Renduel, 1833. On the relations and mutual
influences between Lamennais and Mickiewicz, see Manfred Kridl,
“Two Champions of a New Christianity: Lamennais and Mickiewicz,”
Comparative Literature, 4, 3, Summer 1952, pp. 239–267.
33. On Mickiewicz’s life and work, see Le Verbe et l’Histoire: Mickiewicz, la
France et l’Europe, sous la direction de François-Xavier Coquin et Michel
Maslowski, Paris: Institut d’études slaves, Paris 2002. On his reception
in France: Adam Mickiewicz aux yeux des Français, ed. Zofia Mitosek,
Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, Paris: CNRS, 1992.
34. “I read Mickiewicz’s Pélerin Polonais—it is written in the same style [as
Lamennais’ Paroles]—perhaps it is less intense, but with a different beauty
equally valuable—Lamennais mimicked the Prophets; while the other
took as model the New Testament” (July 6, 1834), quoted by Giovanni
Maver, “Le rayonnement de Mickiewicz en Italie,” in Adam Mickiewicz,
1798–1855: Hommage de l’UNESCO à l’occasion du centième anniversaire
de sa mort, Paris: Gallimard and UNESCO, 1955, p. 113.
35. See Giuseppe Mazzini to Maria Mazzini, November 18, 1834, in Maver,
Le rayonnement de Mickiewicz en Italie, p. 113.
36. I am drawing here upon the definition of “political religion” proposed
by Emilio Gentile, who describes it as “a system of beliefs, myths, rituals,
and symbols that interpret and define the meaning and end of human
existence by subordinating the destiny of individuals and the collectivity
to a supreme entity,” see Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion, trans. George
Staunton, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006 (orig.
ed. Rome and Bari, 2001), p. XIV. In our case, the “supreme entity” is
the nation. The interpretation I am offering, however, differs from that
of Gentile—who draws a distinction between the “civil religion” of
democracies and the “political religion” of totalitarian regimes—insofar
as I believe that Mazzini’s ideology, his religion of the nation, foreshad-
owed certain aspects of twentieth-century religions (especially the fas-
cist), or at any rate may be regarded as an indispensable precondition
130 NOTES
for them, on account of its absolutely faith-based dimension. I have

outlined this interpretation in my article “The Moses of Italian Unity:
Mazzini and Nationalism as Political Religion,” in Giuseppe Mazzini and
the Globalisation of Democratic Nationalism 1830–1920, ed. C. A. Bayly
and Eugenio F. Biagini, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
2008, pp. 107–124. Gentile himself has acknowledged Mazzinianism
to be one of the roots of the religious politics of fascism—the endpoint
of the “search for a civil religion for Third Italy”—in his book 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. Maurizio Ridolfi has instead spoken in terms of
“religione politica mazziniana,” especially with reference to the wor-
ship of Mazzini and rituals performed to keep the memory of him alive
among his followers and heirs: see Maurizio Ridolfi, Interessi e passioni:
Storia dei partiti politici italiani tra l’Europa e il Mediterraneo, Milan:
Bruno Mondadori, 1999, pp. 182–188. Among recent studies linking the
emergence of nationalism to changes in religion and religiosity, see Mary
Ann Perkins, Nation and Word, 1770–1850: Religious and Metaphysical
Language in European National Consciousness, Aldershot and Brookfield:
Ashgate, 1997; Anthony Smith, Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National
Identity, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003; David A.
Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800,
Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2001. For an
attempt to apply the category of “political religion” to nationalist move-
ments in nineteenth-century Europe, see Michael Burleigh, Earthly
Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe, from the French
Revolution to the Great War, New York: HarperCollins, 2006; this label is
applied to nationalism in general by Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Nazionalismo.
Storia, forme, conseguenze, trans. Marica Tolomelli and Vito Francesco
Gironda, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2002 (orig. ed. Munich, 2001), pp.
62–72. On the application of the “political religion” category to totali-
tarian regimes, from a comparative perspective (often based on a mark-
edly conservative political outlook), see Totalitarianism and Political
Religions: Concepts for the Comparison of Dictatorships, ed. Hans Maier
and trans. Jodi Bruhn, London and New York: Routledge, 2004 and 2007,
2 vols. (orig. ed. Paderborn, 1996 and 1997).
37. This expression was first used by Mona Ozouf, La festa rivoluzionaria,
1789–1799, Bologna: Patron, 1982 (orig. ed. Paris, 1976). On early ante-
cedents of this process, see Ernst H. Kantorowicz, “Pro Patria Mori in
Medieval Political Thought,” American Historical Review, 56, 1951,
pp. 462–492, reprinted in Kantorowicz, Selected Studies, New York:
Augustin, 1965, pp. 308–324.
38. See the pioneering, classic studies by François-Alphonse Aulard, Culte
de la raison et culte de l’être supréme (1793–1794), Paris: Alcan, 1892; and
NOTES 131
Albert Mathiez, Les origines des cultes révolutionnaires (1789–1792), Paris:

Bellais, 1904. For a recent take on the topic, see Lynn Hunt, “The Sacred
and the French Revolution,” in Durkheimian Sociology: Cultural Studies,
ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander, 2nd ed., Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1990, pp. 25–43.
39. “D’alcune cause che impedirono finora lo sviluppo della libertà in Italia,”
Giovine Italia, I and II, [June and November 1832], SEI, II, p. 189.
40. Ibid., p. 194.
41. Ibid., p. 202.
42. Ibid., p. 208.
43. Ibid., p. 219.
44. Istruzione Generale per gli Affratellati nella Giovine Italia [1831], SEI, II,
pp. 54–56 (italics mine).
45. On the Saint-Simonian idea of God, see Paul Bénichou, Les temps des
prophètes. Doctrines de l’âge romantique, Paris: Gallimard, 1977, pp. 277
and 281.
46. Doctrine de Saint-Simon. Exposition: Première année, 1829, ed. Charles
Bouglé and Elie Halévy, Paris: Rivière, 1924, pp. 404–406.
47. Doctrine saint-simonienne (Nouveau Christianisme): Exposition par
Bazard au nom du Collége: Deuxième Année (1829–1830), in Oeuvres de
Saint-Simon & d’Enfantin, vol. XLII, Paris: Leroux, 1877, pp. 293–294.
48. Doctrine de Saint-Simon: Exposition: Première année, p. 484.
49. See Iggers, The Cult of Authority, p. 38. See also Bouglé and Halévi’s
detailed notes to Doctrine de Saint-Simon: Exposition: Première année.
50. The origin of the concept of “mission” in De Maistre and its influence
on Mazzini were noted by Adolfo Omodeo, “Primato francese e inizia-
tiva italiana” (1929), in Adolfo Omodeo, Difesa del Risorgimento, 2nd
ed., Turin: Einaudi, 1955, p. 19. On De Maistre’s idea of the divine origin
of the nation, see also by the same author Un reazionario. Il conte J. De
Maistre, Bari: Laterza, 1939, pp. 87 and 95.
51. Considérations sur la France par M. le Comte J.ph De Maistre [1796],
Nouvelle édition, Lyon: Rusand, Libraire, Imprimeur du Roi; Paris:
Librairie Ecclésiastique de Rusand, 1829, p. 10 (see, more generally,
ch. II, “Conjectures sur les voies de la providence dans la révolution
française”).
52. See Joseph Perron and Pierre Grelot, “Mission,” in Vocabulaire de théol-
ogie biblique, sous la direction de Xavier Léon-Dufour et alii, 7th ed.,
Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1991, coll. 772–778.
53. See Perkins, Nation and Word, chapter 9, “Revelation and Mission,”
chapter 10, “Chosen Nations,” and chapter 11, “The Nation as Messiah.”
On the presence of the idea of “chosen people” “in all variants of nation-
alism,” see also Wehler, Nazionalismo: Storia, forme, conseguenze, p.
63. One might also refer to the biblical patterns to be found in various
forms of nationalism, as revealed by Anthony Smith, The Ethnic Origins
132 NOTES
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).
2 From Poetry to Prose
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
9. For both citations see Francesco Crispi, “Programma sociale,” May

15, 1886, in Id., Scritti e discorsi politici (1849–1890), Rome: Unione
Cooperativa Editrice, 1890, pp. 551 and 552. A few years earlier the “great
mission” of the democratic party was to “eliminate class differences, and
gather the people into one sheaf [fascio]” see Id., Il riordinamento del
partito democratico, Palermo, September 10, 1882, ibid., p. 509.
10. “L’Unità nazionale con la monarchia” was the title under which the Rome
speech of March 23, 1884, and the Palermo speech of April 2, 1884, were
published in Crispi, Scritti e discorsi politici.
11. Ibid., pp. 445–446.
12. Ibid., p. 451.
13. From a thought, n.d., cited in Jemolo, Crispi, p. 122.
14. Federico Chabod, Storia della politica estera italiana dal 1870 al 1896,
3rd ed., Bari: Laterza 1965, vol. I, p. 227; for this evolution in general,
pp. 222–227.
15. Ibid., p. 328, note 47, from Mazzini’s 1871 text, Politica internazionale,
SEI, XCII. See also Daniela Adorni, “Presupposti ed evoluzione della
politica coloniale di Crispi,” in Adua. Le ragioni di una sconfitta, ed.
Angelo Del Boca, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1997, pp. 59–60, note 9, who
found Mazzini’s citation in a publication originating in Crispi’s circles,
[Un italiano], La colonia italiana in Africa e F. Crispi, il Parlamento ed il
Paese, Rome: Tipografia Voghera, 1896, pp. 171–172.
16. Speech in Milazzo, on July 20, 1897, cited in Adorni, Presupposti ed
evoluzione, p. 62, note 21 (p. 37 for the “conversion” and his vision of
the Mediterranean). “We are also carrying out a civilizing mission in
Africa: this mission belongs to Italy and we cannot abandon it,” said
Crispi in 1888 (from a speech to the Senate of December 6, 1888, ibid.,
p. 43).
17. On the distinction between the Mazzinian “Risorgimento dictatorship”
and “revolutionary dictatorship,” see the following, even though it is not
entirely convincing with regard to the historical semantics of the two
concepts, Cesare Vetter, Dittatura e rivoluzione nel Risorgimento italiano,
Trieste: Università di Trieste, 2003. For the interpretation of the plebi-
scites as a Mazzinian “national pact” and for Crispi’s citation, from an
undated note, see Levra, Fare gli italiani, p. 328. Later, according to Levra,
Crispi would continue to draw upon his “old Mazzinian background”
when expressing a desire for convergence within the State, born of the
plebiscites and to be defended from socialist demands for a “national”
and a “social” (ibid., p. 343).
18. Chabod, Storia della politica estera italiana, pp. 61 and 57; but also Levra,
Fare gli italiani, pp. 312–313.
19. See Duggan, Francesco Crispi, pp. 233, where he underlines the relations
with Mazzini’s conception and from which I also took the previous cita-
tion, from a speech given by Crispi to the Chamber on June 29, 1863.
NOTES 137
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
April 11, 1872, in Antonio Labriola, La politica italiana nel 1871–1872:

Corrispondenze alle Basler Nachrichten,” ed. Stefano Miccolis, Naples:
Bibliopolis, 1998, p. 121. On Labriola’s sympathetic attitude to Mazzini,
see Stefano Miccolis, “Giuseppe Mazzini nella vicenda intellettuale di
Antonio Labriola,” Archivio Trimestrale, 3, July–September 1981, pp. 431–
437. Labriola was later able to support Italian colonization in Africa in the
form of a “practical socialist experiment” entrusted to poor farmers, also
in the name of Mazzini’s “semisocialism” (in an article in the Florentine
Risveglio, taken up by Il Messaggero, March 15, 1890, in Roberto Battaglia,
La prima guerra d’Africa, Turin: Einaudi, 1958, p. 489).
33. On this matter and its wider implications, see Sergio Luzzatto, La mum-
mia della Repubblica: Storia di Mazzini imbalsamato 1872–1946, Milan:
Rizzoli, 2001. But this also gave rise to Mazzini’s appropriation, from a
conservative point of view, by the Freemasons: see Fulvio Conti, “Mazzini
massone? Costruzione e fortuna di un mito” in Conti, Massoneria e reli-
gioni civili: Cultura laica e liturgie politiche fra XVIII e XX secolo, Bologna:
Il Mulino, 2008, pp. 187–211.
34. Toward the end of the 1860s, Bertrando Spaventa polemically associ-
ated the spiritual obscurantism of Mazzini’s followers and Catholics,
invoking a Hegelian “philosophical, religious, moral inner liberty” writ-
ing with bitter irony that “We need it because we have in our house, as
our thing or person, our greatest enemy, the enemy of the free spirit, the
infallible spiritual authority (Pope Pius, Pope Mazzini)!” See his letter to
Angelo Camillo De Meis, Paolottismo, positivismo, razionalismo (1868),
in Bertrando Spaventa, Unificazione nazionale ed egemonia culturale, ed.
Giuseppe Vacca, Bari: Laterza, 1969, p. 229. Moreover, this stance docu-
ments Spaventa’s evolution, from his political beginnings to his republi-
can and democratic beliefs, which remained unwavering until the early
1850s. Besides, in mid-1860s Naples, there were still some in his circles
who followed Hegel in philosophy and Mazzini in politics, despite the fact
that Mazzini himself polemicized with the Hegelism of the University of
Naples (see Giuseppe Vacca, Politica e filosofia in Bertrando Spaventa,
Bari: Laterza, 1967, pp. 50–51).
35. For insights into the shifts typical of this crisis, which led not to social-
ism but to radical democracy, through a study of Felice Cavallotti and his
political area, see Alessandro Galante Garrone, Felice Cavallotti, Turin:
Utet, 1976 (especially certain ironic verses about Mazzini composed soon
after his death by the politician who began his career as a Scapigliatura
poet, pp. 279–280). The radical area, which began to distance itself from
Mazzini from the time of his condemnation of the Paris Commune, also
included those like Agostino Bertani, who would continue to be the
guardians of a kind of Mazzinian orthodoxy, despite having accepted
a compromise with the liberal monarchist state. For the various shifts
taking place throughout this area and the respective attitudes toward
NOTES 139
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
Barbera published five editions of the Italian translation between 1903

and 1926.
41. See Ceccuti, “Le grandi biografie,” pp. 121–122. On the “decontextualisa-
tion” of Mazzini, in the name of a “Mazzinian spirit” that was depoliticized
when not openly censored, I have already referred to Finelli, “È divenuto
un Dio,” pp. 682–684. See also Dante Della Terza, “L’eroe scomodo e la
sua ombra: L’immagine di Mazzini e la letteratura del Risorgimento,” in
Terza, Letteratura e critica tra Otto e Novecento: Itinerari di ricezione,
Cosenza: Edizioni Periferia, 1989, pp. 9–44.
42. Edmondo De Amicis, Cuore: libro per i ragazzi, Milan: Treves, 1886. For
the context, see the essay by Gilles Pécout, “Le livre Cœur: éducation, cul-
ture, nation dans l’Italie libérale,” in Edmondo De Amicis, Le livre Cœur,
Paris: Éditions Rue d’Ulm, 2001, pp. 357–483.
43. Alberto Asor Rosa, Carducci e la cultura del suo tempo, in Carducci e
la letteratura italiana: Studi per il centocinquantenario della nascita di
Giosue Carducci, Bologna: Conference Proceedings, October 11–13,
1985; Padova: Antenore, 1988, p. 23.
44. It has been remarked that Carducci had always loved to “echo the myths
of the majority,” see Luigi Russo, Carducci senza retorica (1957), 3rd ed.,
Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1999, p. 97.
45. Benedetto Croce, Giosue Carducci: Studio critico, Bari: Laterza, 1920, p. 45.
46. Carducci to Silvio Giannini, October 25, 1859, in Russo, Carducci senza
retorica, p. 93.
47. See Alla regina d’Italia, November 20, 1878, in Odi barbare, then in Poesie
di Giosue Carducci (1855–1900), 20th ed., Bologna: Zanichelli, 1937, pp.
888–890; “Eterno femminino regale,” Cronaca Bizantina, January 1,
1882, in Prose di Giosue Carducci, 1859–1903, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1925,
pp. 865–885.
48. Ibid., pp. 872–874.
49. Ibid., p. 877.
50. Ibid., pp. 874–875.
51. Al direttore della “Gazzetta dell’Emilia,” February 1, 1895, in Opere, ed.
Naz., vol. XIX, p. 376.
52. Francesco Crispi, June 29, 1893, ibid., p. 368.
53. For example, “Un anno dopo,” Alleanza and Voce del Popolo, Bologna,
March 10, 1873, in Ceneri e faville, Serie seconda, 1871–1876, Bologna:
Zanichelli, 1923, pp. 19–20. “Decennale della morte di Giuseppe Mazzini,”
Cronaca Bizantina, March 1, 1882, in Ceneri e faville, Serie terza e ultima,
1877–1901, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1902, pp. 3–13.
54. Giuseppe Mazzini (February 11, 1872), in Giambi ed Epodi (1882),
and in Poesie (English translation in A Selection from the Poems of
Giosuè Carducci, translated and annotated by Emily A. Tribe, London:
Longmans, Green, 1921, p. 10). “Per la poesia e per la libertà: Speech
to the voters in the Lugo district,” November 19, 1876, in Confessioni e
NOTES 141
Battaglie, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1890, pp. 327–328. “Discorso al popolo nel

Teatro Nuovo di Pisa,” May 20, 1886, in Confessioni e battaglie, p. 482.
“Aurelio Saffi,” Resto del Carlino, April 15, 1890, in Confessioni e batta-
glie, Serie seconda, 2nd ed., Bologna: Zanichelli, 1921, p. 365.
55. Del Risorgimento italiano (1896), in Poesia e storia, Bologna: Zanichelli,
1905, pp. 177 and 180–181.
56. The statement, made on May 11, 1893, is cited by Russo, Carducci senza
retorica, pp. 95–96.
57. “XVIII dicembre” (1882), in Opere, ed. Naz., vol. XIX, p. 191.
58. “Al feretro di G. Regaldi” (1883), in Ceneri e faville, Serie terza e ultima,
1877–1901, Zanichelli: Bologna, 1902, pp. 312–313.
59. “Agli studenti di Padova,” Il Veneto, June 12, 1889, in Confessioni e batta-
glie, Serie seconda, 2nd ed., Bologna: Zanichelli 1921, pp. 337–339.
60. “La libertà perpetua di San Marino,” Speech to the Senate and to the
People, September 30, 1894, in Studi, saggi e discorsi, Bologna: Zanichelli,
1898, pp. 330–332.
61. “La libertà perpetua,” p. 339. See also the clarifications added in 1896 to
the preface to the San Marino speech, published in Confessioni e batta-
glie, Serie seconda, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1921, pp. 425–427. Shortly before
the San Marino speech Carducci also reflected in private on the religios-
ity of the Italian people and on the existence of God which he wished to
“believe in even more.” He felt Christian but not Catholic (see a letter
dated September 1, 1894, cited in Laura Fournier Finocchiaro, “Carducci
et l’anticléricalisme,” in L’Italie menacée: Figures de l’ennemi du XVI au
XX siècle, Id., Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004, p. 85. Some years later in La
chiesa di Polenta (1897) he would celebrate the Church’s civic role, a role
of moral unification (see ibid., p. 88).
62. On Oriani, see above all Oriani e la cultura del suo tempo, ed. Ennio
Diriani, Longo: Ravenna, 1985; Vincenzo Pesante, Il problema Oriani: Il
pensiero storico-politico, le interpretazioni storiografiche, Milan: Franco
Angeli, 1996; Massimo Baioni, Il fascismo e Alfredo Oriani: Il mito del
precursore, Ravenna: Longo, 1988.
63. See Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, ed. Valentino Gerratana, vol.
III, 2nd ed., Turin: Einaudi, 2001, p. 2196.
64. Alfredo Oriani, La lotta politica in Italia: Origini della lotta attuale
(476–1887) (1892), vol. I, 3rd ed., Florence: Libreria della Voce, 1917, pp.
261–262.
65. Ibid., pp. 353–354.
66. Ibid., vol. II, p. 61.
67. Ibid., pp. 76–77.
68. Ibid., pp. 77–78.
69. Ibid., p. 80.
70. Ibid., p. 85.
71. Ibid., pp. 79–87.
142 NOTES
72. “A Staglieno,” Il Resto del Carlino, December 2, 1900, in Alfredo Oriani,

Fuochi di bivacco, Bologna: Cappelli, 1927, p. 143.
73. Alfredo to Giacomo Oriani, February 1894 (but 1892), in Id., Le lettere,
ed. Piero Zama, Bologna: Cappelli, 1958, pp. 102–104.
74. See Pesante, Il problema Oriani: Il pensiero storico-politico, passim.
75. Alfredo Oriani, La rivolta ideale (1906), Bari: Laterza, 1918, pp. 108–109.
76. Ibid., pp. 148–149.
77. Ibid., p. 95.
78. Ibid., pp. 154–158.
79. Oriani goes to the point of prophesying the day in which the “religion of
the White Race” would prevail in the East, even asking his readers the
rhetorical question: “Can you imagine a Jewish Garibaldi and Mazzini?”
(See “I deicidi,” L’attualità, January 31, 1904, in Oriani, Fuochi di bivacco,
p. 254). He also stated that “Goethe and Bismark, Napoleon and Garibaldi
could not have been Jewish” (see “La testa di Bismark” in Alfredo Oriani,
Ombre di occaso, Bologna: Cappelli, 1927, p. 207).
80. Id., La rivolta ideale, p. 258.
81. Ibid., p. 346.
3 Mazzini in the New Century
1. See Terenzio Grandi, Appunti di Bibliografia Mazziniana: La fortuna

dei “Doveri” e Mazzini fuori d’Italia, Turin: Associazione Mazziniana
Italiana, 1961, p. 37.
2. Ibid., pp. 38–39.
3. Ibid., p. 41.
4. Ibid., p. 42. Unorthodox Republican Arcangelo Ghisleri instead criti-
cized the adoption of the Doveri, considering it to be “too theological
and too dogmatic” (cited in Napoleone Colajanni, Preti e socialisti contro
Mazzini (1903), Rome: Libreria Politica Moderna, 1921, p. 16). For the
complicated evolution of the Ghisleri’s attitude toward Mazzini, which
was critical of the theistic aspects and against the contemporary nation-
alistic interpretations of the war in Libya; then democratic intervention-
ist also in Mazzini’s name; and finally defender of the factory councils
in the 1919 turmoils of the so-called biennio rosso (the two-year “red
period” of factory occupations inspired by contemporary events in the
Soviet Union), and against the bourgeoisie and the government, in the
name of a Mazzinian “education” of the workers, see Aroldo Benini, Vita
e tempi di Arcangelo Ghisleri (1855–1938), Bari: Lacaita, 1975.
5. Grandi, Appunti di bibliografia mazziniana, p. 44.
6. Ibid., p. 46.
7. Two years later, though, a decree signed by the king, Victor Emanuel III,
and by Prime Minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando gave orders for the
NOTES 143
publication of a national edition of the works of Mazzini, now recog-

nized—in view of the centenary of his birth—as “the apostle of unifica-
tion.” See Michele Finelli, Il monumento di carta: L’Edizione Nazionale
degli Scritti di Giuseppe Mazzini, Villa Verrucchio (Ravenna): Pazzini,
2004, pp. 59–70.
8. See Colajanni, Preti e socialisti, p. 22 (also for the citation of Treves), which
responded to the Socialists’ harsh criticisms of the Doveri dell’Uomo and
of the adoption of the text in schools. Colajanni’s pamphlet contains a
reconstruction of the lively debate for and against Mazzini in this period.
There is no mention of Preti e socialisti in the wide-ranging study by Jean-
Yves Fretigné, Biographie intellectuelle d’un protagoniste de l’Italie liberale:
Napoleone Colajanni (1847–1921), Rome: École Française de Rome, 2002.
9. Gaetano Salvemini, Mazzini (1925), in Gaetano Salvemini, Scritti sul
Risorgimento, ed. Piero Pieri and Carlo Psichedda, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1973,
pp. 200–201. As mentioned, I usually refer here to the English-language
translation, Mazzini, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957, trans. I. M.
Rawson, revised and enlarged by the author, with some changes of my own.
10. Tommaso Gallarati Scotti, Giuseppe Mazzini e il suo idealismo politico e
religioso: Discorso, Milan: Cogliati, 1904, pp. 37 and 47.
11. Ibid., p. 18 (quotation marks in original).
12. Ibid., pp. 9–10.
13. Ibid., pp. 5–6.
14. See Antonio Fogazzaro, Lettere scelte, ed. T. Gallarati Scotti, Milan:
Mondadori, 1940, p. 533, letter of July 21, 1904.
15. Fogazzaro to Elena, June 26, 1893, ibid., p. 283. For the context of the
exchange with Gallarati Scotti and a hint of Fogazzaro’s admiration for
Bolton King’s biography of Mazzini, see Paolo Marangon, Il modernismo
di Antonio Fogazzaro, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998, pp. 89–90.
16. Among those drawn to Mazzini in the early 1900s, also through a mod-
ernist reading, was the young Giovanni Amendola (see infra ch. 5, note
28).
17. The main evocations of Mazzini in Pascoli’s verses are, on the occasion
of the centenary of his birth, Inno secolare a Mazzini (this poem, with
a strong Carduccian inspiration, appeared in Il Marzocco in June 1905,
and was later collected in Pascoli’s Odi e Inni, 1906) and, in 1911, two
episodes of the Poemi del Risorgimento, an incomplete work published
posthumously in 1913. See Mazzini nella poesia, ed. Terenzio Grandi,
Pisa: Domus Mazziniana, 1959, pp. 192–201 and 272–281.
18. I follow and cite Mario Isnenghi, Le campagne di un vate di campagna:
Fra mandati sociali e autorappresentazioni degli intellettuali, in Pascoli e
la cultura del Novecento, ed. Andrea Battistini, Gianfranco Miro Gori,
and Clemente Mazzotta, Venice: Marsilio, 2007, pp. 13–18.
19. See Una sagra, speech given at the University of Messina, June 1900, in
Giovanni Pascoli, Pensieri e discorsi. MDCCCXCV–MCMVI, Bologna:
144 NOTES
Zanichelli, 1906, p. 216. In 1908 he would speak of “Latin socialism” (see

Isnenghi, Le campagne di un vate, p. 16).
20. L’eroe italico, speech read at Messina, June 2, 1902, in Pascoli, Pensieri e
discorsi, p. 261.
21. Antonio Mordini in patria, speech read at Barga, 1905, in Pascoli, Pensieri
e discorsi, p. 371–372.
22. “IX gennaio: Nel cinquantenario della patria,” in Patria e Umanità (1914),
in Isnenghi, Le campagne di un vate, p. 20.
23. Ibid., p. 12. And he added: “But the king is our national right, the king of
our plebiscites, the king of our revolution.” It should be noted that Crispi
used the formula “revolutionary monarchy” (see above, chapter 2, para-
graph 2 in this book).
24. Ibid., pp. 13–14.
25. “L’eroe italico,” in Isnenghi, Le campagne di un vate, p. 22.
26. “Nell’Università di Bologna: Un’uomo di pensiero e un uomo d’azione,”
1908, in Giovanni Pascoli, Patria e umanità: Raccolta di scritti e discorsi,
ed. Maria Pascoli, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1914, p. 24.
27. See “La grande proletaria si è mossa . . . ,” Barga, November 26, 1911, in
Pascoli, Patria e umanità, p. 238. It should not be forgotten that Pascoli
considered Mazzini one of the greatest sources of inspiration, if not the
founder of modern Italian eloquence, although the context in which
Mazzini’s legacy was inherited had by now changed: “Along with many
other things, our literature lacked eloquence. Afterwards, and to some
extent in his time, eloquence did finally emerge! The eloquence of
Giuseppe Mazzini [ . . . ] In any case Mazzini is the precursor, the baptizer,
the prophet; and I am speaking of the third Italy that he announced and
created but in which he did not live” (see “In morte di Giosue Carducci,”
Il Resto del Carlino, February 17–18, 1907, in Pascoli, Patria e umanità,
p. 79).
28. On nationalism as a “modern variant of Mazzinian Italianism,” which
did however “alter its original spirit,” see Emilio Gentile, Il mito dello
Stato nuovo: Dal radicalismo nazionale al fascismo, 2nd ed., Rome and
Bari: Laterza, 1999, p. 9.
29. See Enrico Corradini, Discorsi politici (1902–1923), Florence: Vallecchi,
1923, p. 134. It should be remembered that Corradini, before Pascoli, had
in that same year described Italy as a “proletarian nation,” speaking of
the people’s “love of their fatherland” and of the “national conscience”
as a “religion” and as a “school of discipline and duty” (Id., Le nazioni
proletarie e il nazionalismo, January 1911, ibid., pp. 105 and 114). With
the exception of these echoes of Mazzini’s religion of the nation, there
are relatively few direct references to Mazzini in Corradini’s political
writings.
30. See in particular Zeev Sternhell, Mario Sznajder and Maia Asheri, The
Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution,
NOTES 145
trans. David Maisel, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994

(orig. ed. Paris, 1989); Emilio Gentile, The Origins of Fasicst Ideology,
1918–1925, trans. Robert L. Miller, New York: Enigma Books, 2005 (orig.
ed. Bologna, 1996).
31. See Georges Sorel, “Étude sur Vico,” Devenir Social, II, 1896, pp. 783–817,
906–941, and 1013–1046; Georges Sorel, Préface (1905) to Matériaux
d’une théorie du proletariat, Paris: Rivière, 1919; Id., Considerazioni sulla
violenza, trans. Antonio Sarno and foreword by Benedetto Croce, Bari:
Laterza, 1909 (orig. ed. Paris, 1908).
32. Sorel to Croce, August 7, 1897, in Georges Sorel, Lettere a Benedetto Croce,
ed. S. Onufrio, Bari: De Donato, 1980, p. 43. A few months earlier (May
14, 1897) Antonio Labriola wrote a letter to Sorel mentioning the friction
between Mazzini and Marx and Engels, who had challenged Mazzini’s
idealistic formula “la patrie et Dieu,” in Antonio Labriola, Socialisme et
Philosophie (Lettres à G. Sorel), Paris: Giard et Brière, 1899, p. 58.
33. Sorel to Croce, January 27, 1912, in Sorel, Lettere a Benedetto Croce,
p.184.
34. Already at the beginning of the century Sorel had written a letter to
Napoleone Colajanni, probably at the time of the debate on the adoption
of the Doveri dell’uomo in schools: “It was with the greatest pleasure that
I read your wonderful text in support of Mazzini. How can the Socialists
be so ungrateful to the man who honored his country like no other in
the nineteenth century and who so many worthy judges consider to be
one of the greatest men in history?” (see the quotation from a letter to
Colajanni, n.d., placed in exergue to Colajanni, Preti e socialisti contro
Mazzini, p. 9).
35. Sorel to Croce, March 20, 1914, in Sorel, Lettere a Benedetto Croce, p.
200.
36. Sorel to Missiroli, April 1, 1914, ibid., p. 200 note (Georges Sorel, Lettere
a un amico d’Italia, Bologna: Cappelli, 1963, p. 113).
37. Mario Missiroli, La monarchia socialista: Estrema destra, Bari: Laterza,
1914, pp. 34–35.
38. See the entire chapter “Il dissidio di Mazzini,” ibid., pp. 31–51 (the quota-
tions are on pp. 42, 49, 50). This conclusion probably contains an echo of
Salvemini’s interpretation that Missiroli was probably aware of, even if he
does not cite it in his bibliography. His assessment of Mazzini’s antidem-
ocratic slant was not linear because he also underlined the Mazzinian
dream of a “universal democracy,” which Missiroli still defined as “mys-
tic republic” at one point (ibid., pp. 33 and 50).
39. See Sorel to Missiroli, April 18, 1915 (in Sorel, Lettere a un amico, p. 162),
which again emphasized Italians’ failure to understand Mazzini, as well
as the value of his “philosophy.” Sorel would return to Mazzini one last
time in his correspondence with Croce on September 15, 1918, asking
himself (in response to an article by Paolo Orano) “what [was] the true
146 NOTES
reason for Mazzini’s frequent hostility to the French Revolution” (Sorel

to Croce, in Sorel, Lettere a Benedetto Croce, p. 270 and note).
40. See Sorel, Matériaux d’une theorie du proletariat, p. 11.
41. Considerazioni sulla violenza, p. 93.
42. Benedetto Croce, Cristianesimo, socialismo e metodo storico (“A prop-
osito di un libro di G. Sorel,” La Critica, V, 1907, pp. 317–330. This was an
essay on Sorel based on his work Le système historique de Renan (Paris,
1906) and which Croce would republish the following year as the intro-
duction to the Italian translation of Réflexions sur la Violence). On Croce
and Sorel, Stefano Miccolis, “Il ‘sorelismo’ di Croce,” Nuovi studi politici,
XV, 3, July–September 1984, pp. 29–42; Sergio Romano, “Georges Sorel
et Benedetto Croce,” in Georges Sorel et son temps: Sous la direction de
Jacques Juillard et Shlomo Sand, Paris: Seuil, 1985, pp. 249–262.
43. On this process, revolving around the concept of myth, see Zeev
Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, chapter I “Georges Sorel,” part
Antirationalism and Activism, pp. 55–71. On the irrationalist, anti-in-
tellectualist, activist, and heroicizing nature of the myth in Sorel, see S.
P. Rouanet, “Irrationalism and Myth in Georges Sorel,” The Review of
Politics, 26, 1, January 1964, pp. 45–69. See also, Jack J. Roth, The Cult
of Violence: Sorel and the Sorelians, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London:
University of California Press, 1980.
44. Croce to Vossler, August 25, 1933, in Jack. J. Roth, “The Roots of Italian
Fascism: Sorel and Sorelismo,” Journal of Modern History, 39, 1, March
1967, p. 43.
45. See Benito Mussolini, “Lo sciopero generale e la violenza,” Il Popolo, June
25, 1909, which I quote from Scritti politici di Benito Mussolini, ed. Enzo
Santarelli, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1979, p. 116. On Mussolini and Mazzini, see
infra chapter IV, part 2.
46. See Walter Adamson, Avant-Garde Florence: From Modernism to
Fascism, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press,
1993, pp. 64–79 in particular; Id., “Fascism and Culture: Avant-Gardes
and Secular Religion in the Italian Case,” Journal of Contemporary
History, 24, July 1989, pp. 411–435. See also mentions by Gentile, The
Sacralization of Politics, p. 13, although mainly focused on Prezzolini
and La Voce.”
47. Giovanni Papini, Un uomo finito (1912), ed. Anna Casini Paszkowski,
Florence: Ponte alle Grazie, 1994. p. 112 (An English translation is The
Failure, New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1924).
48. Papini to Prezzolini, August 18, 1905 (concerning his emotional response
to Bolton King’s biography of Mazzini), and Prezzolini to Papini, January
9, 1906 (who had also “read the King [book]”), see Giovanni Papini-
Giuseppe Prezzolini, Carteggio. I. 1900–1907. Dagli “Uomini Liberi” alla
fine del “Leonardo,” ed. Sandro Gentili and Gloria Minghetti, Rome:
Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2003, pp. 424 and 515.
NOTES 147
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
age will do me good,” Salvemini to Arcangelo Ghisleri, [after April 18,

1899], in Gaetano Salvemini, Carteggio (1894–1902), ed. Sergio Bucchi,
Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1988, p. 216.
63. See Marino Berengo, “Salvemini storico e la reazione del ‘98,” in Atti
del Convegno su Gaetano Salvemini, Florence, November 8–10, 1975, ed.
Ernesto Sestan, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1977, pp. 69–85, although no men-
tion is made of Salvemini’s interest in and works on Mazzini.
64. Salvemini’s interest in Cattaneo culminated, on the editorial level, in
the editing of the book Le più belle pagine di C. Cattaneo, ed. Gaetano
Salvemini, Milan: Treves, 1922. On his close ideal, methodological and
political relationship with Cattaneo, see Norberto Bobbio. “La non-filo-
sofia di Salvemini,” in Bobbio, Maestri e compagni, Florence: Passigli,
1984, pp. 39–40.
65. Gaetano Salvemini to Ettore Rota, March 23, 1919, in Gaetano Salvemini,
Carteggio 1914–1920, ed. Enzo Tagliacozzo, Rome and Bari: Laterza,
1984, p. 457.
66. Mazzini is hardly ever cited, while Garibaldi is a political hero, in Un
travet [pseudonym of Gaetano Salvemini], “Le origini della reazione,”
Critica sociale, July 1, and August 1, 1899, in Id., I partiti politici milanesi
nel secolo XIX, Milan: Linea d’ombra, 1994, pp. 173–196.
67. Ibid., pp. 121–122. The text was originally published separately, as a small
volume.
68. Rerum Scriptor [pseudonym of Gaetano Salvemini] “Giuseppe Mazzini
nel 1848,” L’Educazione Politica, March 31, 1900 in Id., Scritti vari, ed. G.
Agosti and A. Galante Garrone, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978, p. 213; Giuseppe
Giarrizzo, “Gaetano Salvemini: la politica,” in Gaetano Salvemini tra polit-
ica e storia, ed. Gaetano Cingari, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1986, p. 20.
69. Salvemini to Novello Papafava, August 13, 1899, in Salvemini, Carteggio
(1894–1902), p. 236. Some lines earlier in the same letter, he wrote, “I do
not have a great opinion of Mazzini—in terms of his political judgement”
(ibid., p. 235).
70. Salvemini to Leonida Bissolati, March 17, 1903, in Gaetano Salvemini,
Carteggio 1903–1906, ed. Sergio Bucchi, Manduria (Taranto): Lacaita,
1997, p. 47.
71. Ibid., p. 50. These worries and criticisms bring Salvemini closer to the
position of Claudio Treves (mentioned favorably in the letter) who had
on that occasion defined the Doveri as “a conservative moral tool.” For
Treves Mazzini was “too much of a priest, too much of a prophet” (in
Giarrizzo, Gaetano Salvemini: la politica, p. 21).
72. On the “finally historicized” Mazzini of Salvemini, while he had pre-
viously been a “divinity” for his “followers and admirers,” see Ernesto
Sestan, “Lo storico,” in Gaetano Salvemini, Bari: Laterza, 1959, p. 19.
73. There is a contemporary mention of another writing on Mazzini by
Ferri in a letter from Salvemini to Enrico Leone, December 22, 1903, in
Salvemini, Carteggio 1903–1906, pp. 199–200.
NOTES 149
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).
4 The Nation’s Duties between War and Postwar
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
3. Omodeo, Momenti della vita di guerra, p. 160, which refers to Eugenio

Vajna De’ Pava, La democrazia cristiana italiana e la guerra, Bologna:
Democrazia cristiana italiana, 1919.
4. See Stefano Biguzzi, Cesare Battisti, Turin: Utet, 2008, pp. 102–103, 322,
and 589.
5. See, for example, Francesco Ruffini, L’insegnamento di Mazzini, Milan:
Treves, 1917. The speech in question was given in Turin by the then
Minister of Public Instruction to mark the inauguration of a monument
dedicated to the patriot.
6. On the pervasive presence of Mazzini, particularly in the last year of the
war, see Giovanni Sabbatucci, “La grande guerra e i miti del Risorgimento,”
in Il mito del Risorgimento nell’Italia unita, conference proceedings,
Milan, November 9–12, 1993, special issue of Il Risorgimento, XLVII, 1–2,
1995, p. 221.
7. “Il crollo,” La Voce del Piave, October 27, 1918, in Mario Isnenghi, Giornali
di trincea (1915–1918), Turin: Einaudi, 1977, p. 172.
8. Isnenghi, Giornali di trincea, p. 178.
9. Ibid., p. 24.
10. Gioacchino Volpe, Il popolo italiano tra la pace e la guerra, Milan: Ispi,
1941, p. 78, in Sabbatucci, La grande guerra e i miti del Risorgimento,
p. 221.
11. Benito Mussolini, “Marx, Mazzini e . . . Paoloni: Dedicato al Pensiero
romagnolo,” La lotta di classe, April 9, 1910, in Benito Mussolini, Opera
omnia, vol. III, Florence: La Fenice, 1952, p. 67.
12. Benito Mussolini, “In tema di santità,” La lotta di classe, September 24,
1910, ibid., p. 297.
13. Benito Mussolini, “Note polemiche,” La lotta di classe, August 20, 1910,
ibid., p. 167.
14. The report is cited by Mussolini himself in Benito Mussolini, “Il contrad-
ditorio di Voltre,” La Lotta di Classe, July 2, 1910, ibid., p. 137.
15. On the transition toward interventionism, albeit of the democratic
stream (“interventismo democratico”) of another socialist, also through
a rereading of Mazzini, see Claudia Baldoli, “La classe e la nazione: La
‘guerra democratica’ di Leonida Bissolati,” in Gli italiani in guerra, vol.
III, t. I, La Grande Guerra: Dall’intervento alla “vittoria mutilata,” ed.
Mario Isnenghi and Daniele Ceschin, Turin: Utet, 2008, pp. 395–396.
16. Also underlining Mazzini’s influence in this transition are Gianni
Belardelli, Il fantasma di Rousseau: Il fascismo come democrazia totali-
taria, in Gianni Belardelli, Il Ventennio degli intellettuali: Cultura politica,
ideologia nell’Italia fascista, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2005, pp. 254–255,
followed by Paolo Benedetti, “Mazzini in ‘camicia nera,’ ” Annali della
Fondazione Ugo La Malfa, vol. XII, 2007, in particular pp. 174–175, which
draw attention to the fact that even before he became an interventionist,
Mazzini’s influence upon Mussolini had already begun to emerge when
152 NOTES
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
De Felice, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1976, pp. 168–169. The episode is

also alluded to by Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario (1883–
1920), 2nd ed., Turin: Einaudi, 1995, p. 276 note 1.
27. Augusto Simonini, Il linguaggio di Mussolini, 2nd ed., Milan: Bompiani,
2004, p. 89.
28. Quoted in Paolo Benedetti, “Mazzini in ‘camicia nera,’ ” p. 185, which
refers to Benito Mussolini, “Il Popolo d’Italia nel 1921,” Il Popolo d’Italia,
December 7, 1920, in Benito Mussolini, Opera omnia, vol. XVI, pp.
44–46. This excerpt is also quoted by Giovanni Belardelli, Il fantasma di
Rousseau, p. 255.
29. Simonini, Il linguaggio di Mussolini, pp. 88–99.
30. As reconstructed by Benedetti, Mazzini in “camicia nera,” in particular
in pp. 202–203, the theme of Mazzinian “duties” was even appropriated
by the fascist squads: the newspapers and promotional materials pub-
lished in this area of fascism contain numerous references to the Genoese
thinker and to the “duties of man.” Squadrismo’s myth of youth—later
taken over by fascism—also had distant Mazzinian roots: see Michael
A. Ledeen, L’internazionale fascista, trans. Jole Bertolazzi, Rome and
Bari: Laterza, 1973, pp. 15–16 and 32 (see Michael A. Ledeen, Universal
Fascism: The Theory and Practice of the Fascist International: 1928–1936,
New York: Fertig, 1972).
31. Even after the move to dictatorship and again in the ten-year anniversary of
the March on Rome, Mussolini mentioned Mazzini in important speeches
on the genesis of Fascism as a revolutionary movement: see Maurizio
Degl’Innocenti, L’epoca giovane: Generazioni, fascismo e antifascismo,
Manduria, Bari, and Rome: Lacaita, 2002, p. 130 note referring to Benito
Mussolini, “Il primo tempo della rivoluzione,” Gerarchia, June 1925 and
to Benito Mussolini, Primo discorso per il decennale, in Benito Mussolini,
Scritti e discorsi dal 1932 al 1933, vol. VIII, Milan: Hoepli, 1934, p. 119.
32. See Benito Mussolini, La dottrina del fascismo (1933), in Mussolini, Scritti
e discorsi, p. 89 note 1.
33. See infra, chapter Five, part 1.
34. Long excerpts from the speech are included in the Appendix to Antonino
Répaci, La Marcia su Roma, 2nd ed., Milan: Rizzoli, 1972, pp. 689–690.
For the context see Giulia Albanese, La marcia su Roma, Rome and Bari:
Laterza, 2006.
35. Simonini, Il linguaggio di Mussolini, part Ideologia sacrificale, pp. 92–93.
The quotations (apart from the 1922 quote) are taken from Benito
Mussolini, Discorso a Bologna, April 3, 1921, in Id., Opera Omnia, vol.
XVI, p. 243; Agli operai di Dalmine, October 27, 1924, ibid., vol. XXI, p.
125; Al popolo di Reggio Emilia, October 30, 1926, ibid., vol. XXII, p. 246.
36. As well as mentioning its presence in early fascism, Benedetti, Mazzini
in “camicia nera,” p. 203, also refers to its adoption by Alfredo Rocco in
1925 and by Giuseppe Bottai in 1930.
154 NOTES
37. Benito Mussolini, “Intransigenza assoluta,” speech published in Il

Popolo d’Italia, June 23, 1925, in Benito Mussolini, Opera Omnia, vol.
XXI, p. 359.
38. A call for Mazzinian solidarism, free associations and the fatherland as
a “vast solidarity of interests” can also be found, in the same period, in
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Democrazia futurista: Dinamismo politico
(1919), in Id., Teoria e invenzione futurista, ed. Luciano De Maria, Milan:
Mondadori, 1968, pp. 368–369 and 336.
39. Although dedicated to syndicalism, chapter Four, “The Socialist National
Synthesis,” does not dwell on the evocation of Mazzini by the syndicalist
movement, in Sternhell, Sznajder, Asheri, Nascita dell’ideologia fascista;
while the influence of Mazzinianism on De Ambris and Olivetti is under-
lined in Mario Sznajder, “The ‘Carta del Carnaro’ and Modernization,”
Tel Aviv Jahrbuch für Deutsche Geschichte, XVIII, 1989, pp. 439 note 1 and
458 and note 69. See also Paolo Benedetti, “Mazzini in ‘camicia nera’ ” II,
Annali della Fondazione Ugo La Malfa, XXIII, 2008, pp. 168–184. For a
broader view, see David D. Roberts, The Syndicalist Tradition and Italian
Fascism, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979 and Giuseppe
Parlato, La sinistra fascista: Storia di un progetto mancato, Bologna: Il
Mulino, 2000.
40. La Carta del Carnaro nei testi di Alceste De Ambris e di Gabriele
D’Annunzio, ed. Renzo De Felice, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1973, p. 44.
41. La Costituzione di Fiume: commento illustrativo di A. De Ambris ([Fiume]
1920), in La Carta del Carnaro, Appendix 2, pp. 99–100. For D’Annunzio,
the corporative structure dated back to “communal liberties” and it was
only in this sense—without any evident reference to Mazzini—that it was
described by the poet as being “entirely Italian [ . . . ] in spirit and form”
(see De Felice, Introduzione to La Carta del Carnaro, p. 20, which con-
tains declarations by D’Annunzio published in the Bollettino Ufficiale
of the Fiume Command on April 13 and 21, 1920). It is worth underlin-
ing D’Annunzio’s apparent extraneousness to the figure and influence of
Mazzini, which were probably at odds with the poet’s Nietzschean inspi-
ration and rather different brand of spiritualism, one that was decadent
and essentially atheist. Mazzini’s name never crops up in D’Annunzio’s
speeches between the “radiant days of May” of 1915 and Fiume, or, for
example, in his correspondence with De Ambris or with Mussolini.
Confirmation of this missed encounter can be found in what is proably
the only mention of Mazzini in the D’Annunzian verses: “L’esule smorto,
tutto fronte e sguardo,/il fuoruscito senza Beatrice” (“The wan exile, all
brow and burning gaze, / the refugee lacking a Beatrice” (see “Canzone
del Sangue” from Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Canzoni di guerra of 1912,
published for the first time in the Corriere della Sera, October 22, 1911,
excerpts of which are included in Mazzini nella poesia, ed. Terenzio
Grandi, Pisa: Domus Mazziniana, 1959, p. 285). An echo of Mazzini
NOTES 155
reverberates in the title of D’Annunzio’s Libro ascetico della giovane

Italia, Milan: L’Olivetana, 1926.
42. Among those slowly turning their backs on Mazzini to embrace social-
ism prior to the outbreak of the world war we must include Pietro Nenni,
future socialist leader, who entered politics as a militant republican in
Romagna. On his youthful Mazzinianism, which included an essay writ-
ten at the age of 17 on Mazzini the economist, published in installments
in Faenza’s Republican newspaper Il Popolo in 1908, see Enzo Santarelli,
Pietro Nenni, Turin: Utet, 1988, especially pp. 4–5 and 12.
43. Mazzinian echoes can be found in his speech to the Milanese Syndical
Union (USM), published as Alceste De Ambris, “I sindacalisti e la
guerra,” L’Internazionale, August 22, 1914, in Gian Biagio Furiozzi,
Alceste De Ambris e il sindacalismo rivoluzionario, Milan: Franco
Angeli, 2002, p. 73.
44. This is the reconstruction made by Umberto Sereni, Il prometeo apuano
(A proposito di Alceste De Ambris), in Alceste De Ambris, Lettere
dall’esilio, ed. Valerio Cervetti and Umberto Sereni, Parma: Biblioteca
Umberto Balestrazzi, 1989, pp. 30–36.
45. See ibid., p. 32, citing the autobiography of Luigi Campolonghi, Una
cittadina italiana fra l’800 e il ‘900 (Ritratto in piedi), Milan: Edizioni
Avanti, 1962.
46. Alceste De Ambris, Mazzini: torna l’ombra sua: Conferenza agli operai
parmensi, March 10, 1922, in Un sindacalista mazziniano: Alceste De
Ambris, Turin: Associazione Mazziniana Italiana, n.d. [1959], p. 18.
47. Ibid., p. 15. In this talk De Ambris explored his return to Mazzini, reach-
ing the “sacred banks of the Carnaro” in the company of the “warrior
poet and legislator” D’Annunzio (ibid., p. 17).
48. In a message of 1921, while still accepting the offer to run as member
of parliament made to him by a syndicalist republican committee, De
Ambris underlined his “revulsion [ . . . ] towards parliamentary action”
(ibid., p. 20).
49. The letters written by De Ambris to his niece Irma between January
and March 1934 appear in Renzo De Felice, “Gli esordi del corporativ-
ismo fascista in alcune lettere di Alceste De Ambris” (1964), in Renzo
De Felice, Intellettuali di fronte al fascismo: Saggi e note documentarie,
Rome: Bonacci, 1985, pp. 259–276 (pp. 269–274 for the quotes).
50. Angelo O. Olivetti, “Manifesto dei sindacalisti,” Pagine libere, April–May
1921, in Angelo O. Olivetti, Dal sindacalismo rivoluzionario al corpora-
tivismo, ed. Francesco Perfetti, Rome: Bonacci, 1984, p. 217.
51. Angelo O. Olivetti, “Da Gian Giacomo Rousseau alla Carta del Carnaro,”
La Patria del Popolo, November 2, 1922; Pagine Libere, November 1922,
ibid., p. 237.
52. Francesco Perfetti, Introduzione to Angelo O. Olivetti, Dal sindacalismo
rivoluzionario, pp. 79, 85, and 90.
156 NOTES
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
62. Grandi’s speech at the national fascist congress held in Rome on

November 7, 1921, is quoted in Grandi, Il mio paese, p. 153.
63. Ibid., pp. 155–156.
64. From a page in Grandi’s diary, October 3, 1922, ibid., p. 165. During the
events leading up to the march on Rome, Grandi records his clash with
Balbo who, together with the party’s leadership, chose the insurrectional
approach.
65. Italo Balbo, Diario 1922, Milan: Mondadori, 1932, p. 18 (January 1,
1922).
66. Claudio G. Segrè, Italo Balbo: Una vita fascista, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1988,
p. 23.
67. Sergio Panunzio, Italo Balbo, Milan: Imperia, 1923, pp. 8 and 27.
68. Published in La Voce Repubblicana, December 4, 1924, cited in Segré,
Italo Balbo, p. 59.
69. For all quotations see Giordano Bruno Guerri, Italo Balbo, Milan:
Vallardi, 1984, pp. 53–54, who quotes from Italo Balbo, Il pensiero eco-
nomico e sociale di Giuseppe Mazzini, MA thesis, Istituto Cesare Alfieri
di Firenze, 1920, thesis director Niccolò Rodolico.
70. Guerri, Italo Balbo, p. 116.
71. On Alessandro Levi, see the entry by Alberto Cavaglion in Dizionario
Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 64, Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana,
2005, pp. 746–749; and accounts collected in In ricordo di Alessandro
Levi, Critica Sociale, 66, supplement to Issue No. 1, January 1974.
72. See Alessandro Levi, Sulla vita e sui tempi di Ernesto Nathan, Florence:
Le Monnier, 1927.
73. The patriotic atmosphere of the colonial conflict at the time of Italy’s war
on Libya led Levi to accept the “imperialism of civilization,” and to rec-
ognize that a nationalism that was not “excessive” could be a “good her-
ald of energies as long as it proclaimed the rights and legitimate interests
of the nation (and nation is a democratic concept)”; at the same time he
exposed the “crisis of democracy” and faithfully affirmed the Mazzinian
democratic concept of nationality, distinguishing it from nationalism.
See Giulio Cianferotti, Giuristi e mondo accademico di fronte all’impresa
di Tripoli, Milan: Giuffrè, 1984, pp. 23–24, which mentions Alessandro
Levi, “La crisi della democrazia,” speech given on November 5, 1911, at
the ceremony marking the start of studies at the University of Ferrara,
in Alessandro Levi, Scritti minori storici e politici, Padua: Cedam, 1957,
pp. 17–32, p. 31 in particular. In the same context, several passages from
Mazzini’s writings were given a nationalist and expansionist slant by
another reader and interpreter of the works of the Genoese: see Ugo Della
Seta, Il pensiero religioso di Giuseppe Mazzini, Rome: Associazione itali-
ana dei liberi credenti, 1912.
74. Alessandro Levi, La filosofia politica di Giuseppe Mazzini (1917), 2nd ed.,
Bologna: Zanichelli, 1922, p. IX (for reasons of contextualization I have
158 NOTES
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
by means of partial and well-disposed reminiscences.” However, he also

recalled the page by Bertrando Spaventa in which the philosopher sarcas-
tically attacked “Pope Mazzini and Pope Pius IX.” See Antonio Gramsci,
“Briciole mazziniane,” Avanti! July 26, 1917, in Antonio Gramsci, La città
futura, 1917–1918, ed. Sergio Caprioglio, Turin: Einaudi, 1982, p. 262;
Raksha (pseudonym of Antonio Gramsci), “Abbruciamenti,” Il Grido
del Popolo, July 21, 1917, ibid., p. 256 (the reference is to Spaventa’s letter
to Carlo De Meis on “paolottismo, positivismo, razionalismo”—bigotry,
positivism, and rationalism—of 1868).
92. See Rodolfo Mondolfo, “Imperialismo e libertà,” L’Unità, VII, 1, 1918,
in La cultura italiana del ‘900 attraverso le riviste, vol. V, ed. Francesco
Golzio and Augusto Guerra, Turin: Einaudi, 1962, p. 546. A patriotic
Mazzini presented in an interventionist, anti-Austrian light emerged
during the course of the conflict from the pages by Felice Momigliano
collected in his Mazzini e la guerra europea, Milan: Società editoriale
italiana, 1916. Momigliano also wrote: “More than every other precur-
sor, the thoughtful apostle of the Third Italy is close to those of us who
accept, want and bless this war. It was a spark of his faith that spurred the
new young Italy to take part in a holy crusade that would enact his doc-
trine teaching that Italy is entitled to the borders laid down by Dante and
by God.” And he concludes “Nationalism is the new civil religion that
found in Mazzini its most convinced and passionate apostle and martyr”
(see ibid., pp. 14–15). In any case this work too contained a spiritualist
definition of Mazzini’s nation, distinguished by Mazzini from its nation-
alist degenerations, as reconstructed by Momigliano in his leading work,
published in the centenary year of Mazzini’s birth, Mazzini e le idealità
moderne, Milan: Libreria editrice Lombarda, 1905 (see also his later work
Scintille del roveto di Staglieno, published in Florence in 1920 and as a
new edition by Nuova Italia, in Venice in 1928). Momigliano’s version
of Mazzinianism, which was veined by Jewish modernist tendencies and
Tolstoyan sympathies, was essentially unique to him and cannot really be
found elsewhere—certainly not among his immediate counterparts like
Salvemini and Ghisleri who were far more sceptical admirers of Mazzini:
see Alberto Cavaglion, Felice Momigliano (1866–1924): Una biografia,
Bologna: Il Mulino, 1988.
93. On Mondolfo see Eugenio Garin, Rodolfo Mondolfo (1979), in Garin, Tra
due secoli: Socialismo e filosofia in Italia dopo l’Unità, Bari: De Donato,
1983, pp. 204–234, as well as Norberto Bobbio’s essay introducing Rodolfo
Mondolfo, Umanismo di Marx: Studi filosofici, 1908–1966, 2nd ed., Turin:
Einaudi, 1975, pp. XI–XLVIII, and his Umanesimo di Rodolfo Mondolfo
(1977), in Noberto Bobbio, Maestri e compagni, Florence: Passigli, 1984,
pp. 77–101.
94. Mondolfo was harshly critical of Gentile with regard to other important
aspects: in particular with regard to the theory of nationality in Mazzini,
160 NOTES
“misunderstood and little known in terms of its informing spirit” by the

philospher of actualism, “when he sees in it an imperialistic doctrine,
which makes right coincide with conquest” (see Rodolfo Mondolfo,
Sulle orme di Marx, 3rd ed. entirely reorganized in two volumes, vol. II:
Lineamenti di teoria e di storia della critica del marxismo, S. Casciano-
Trieste, Bologna and Rocca: Cappelli, 1923, p. 95 note, italics in origi-
nal). Elsewhere, following the example of Alessandro Levi and implicitly
contrasting the accepted interpretations, he defined Mazzini as the
“proud enemy of Caesarism” (ibid., p. 109, italics in original).
95. Ibid., p. 75.
96. Ibid., pp. 77–78.
97. Ibid., p. 79.
98. Ibid., pp. 81 and 86.
99. Ibid., p. 85.
100. Ibid., p. 123.
101. Ibid., p. 137 and 151 (italics in original).
5 Fascism, Antifascism, and the Religion of the Nation
1. For Gentile’s intellectual and political itinerary, see Gabriele Turi,

Giovanni Gentile, Florence: Giunti, 1995.
2. See Giovanni Gentile, Rosmini e Gioberti (1898), 2nd ed., Florence:
Sansoni, 1955, p. 26. For Gentile’s position on the Risorgimento, see
Augusto Del Noce, L’idea di Risorgimento come categoria filosofica in
Giovanni Gentile (1968), in Noce, Giovanni Gentile: Per un interpretazi-
one filosofica della storia contemporanea, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990, pp.
123–194, and Gennaro Sasso, Le due Italie di Giovanni Gentile, Bologna:
Il Mulino, 1998, in particular, pp. 505–564. For his relationship with
Mazzini, see Roberto Pertici, “Il Mazzini di Giovanni Gentile,” Giornale
critico della filosofia italiana, LXXVII, I–II, 1999, pp. 117–180, in Pertici,
Storici italiani del Novecento, Pisa and Rome: Istituti editoriali e poli-
grafici internazionali, 2000, pp. 105–158. I examined the relationship
between Gentile’s interpretation of Mazzini and the philosopher’s sub-
sequent adhesion to fascism in “Pensiero e Azione: Giovanni Gentile e
il fascismo tra Mazzini, Vico (e Sorel),” Annali della Fondazione Luigi
Einaudi, XXXV, 2001, pp. 193–217, referred to in some places in this
chapter.
3. See Giovanni Gentile, “Vincenzo Gioberti nel primo centenario della
sua nascita” (1901), in Gentile, Albori della nuova Italia (1923), 2nd part,
2nd ed., Florence: Sansoni, 1969, p. 37.
4. See Giovanni Gentile, “Politica e filosofia,” Politica, August 1918, later
collected in Gentile, Dopo la vittoria (1920), ed. Hervé A. Cavallera,
Florence: Le Lettere, 1989, p. 154. Gentile came to Marx very early
NOTES 161
on in La filosofia di Marx. Studi critici (1899), ed. Vito A. Bellezza,

Florence: Sansoni, 1979. The importance of Gentile’s articles for the
journal Politica was first pointed out by Del Noce, Giovanni Gentile,
pp. 358–367.
5. See Giovanni Gentile, “Gioberti,” Politica, 1919, then in Gentile, I pro-
feti del Risorgimento italiano (1923), 3rd ed., Florence: Sansoni, 1944,
pp. 70–72.
6. Ibid., pp. 75–76 and 83.
7. See Giovanni Gentile, review of Gaetano Salvemini, Mazzini, Catania
1915, La Critica, 1915, then in Gentile, Albori della nuova Italia: Varietà
e documenti (1923), First Part, Florence: Sansoni, 1968, pp. 215–218. The
volume also contained a contemporary review of several volumes of
Mazzini’s Scritti editi e inediti, and Gentile’s first rather detached and
critical review concerning Mazzini (to Bolton King’s biography), also
appearing originally in La Critica in 1903 (see ibid., pp. 195–214 and
223–229).
8. See Giovanni Gentile, “Mazzini,” Politica, 1919, then in Gentile, I profeti
del Risorgimento, pp. 25–26.
9. Ibid., p. 30.
10. Ibid., p. 57.
11. Ibid., p. 56.
12. Ibid., p. 49.
13. Ibid., p. 55.
14. The letter was published in Giovanni Gentile, Il fascismo al governo della
scuola (novembre ‘22-aprile ‘24). Discorsi e interviste, Palermo: Sandron,
1924, p. 143. This concept was further explored in an article marking
the first anniversary of the March on Rome: Giovanni Gentile, “Il mio
liberalismo,” Nuova politica liberale, October 28, 1923, then in Gentile,
Che cos’è il fascismo, Vallecchi, Florence 1925, now collected in Gentile,
Politica e cultura, ed. Hervé A. Cavallera, vol. I, Florence: Le Lettere,
1990, pp. 113–116.
15. Giovanni Gentile, Che cosa è il fascismo (1925), in Gentile, Politica e cul-
tura. Excerpts of this lecture are included in Gentile, Origins and Doctrine
of Fascism, with Selections from Other Works, trans., ed., and annotated
A. James Gregor, New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers,
2002. I partly rely on this translation for this as well as for the following
essay by Gentile, Origini e dottrina.
16. See Giovanni Gentile, Origini e dottrina del fascismo (1927), now in
Gentile, Politica e cultura, vol. I, p. 391 (see for the English: Gentile,
Origins and Doctrine of Fascism, which I only partly rely upon here).
17. Ibid., p. 395.
18. Ibid., p. 397.
19. See Giovanni Gentile, Il fascismo nella cultura (1925), now in Gentile,
Politica e cultura, vol. I, pp. 102–104.
162 NOTES
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
Amendola, L’Aventino contro il fascismo: Scritti politici (1924–1926), ed.

Sabato Visco, Milan and Naples, 1976, p. 73).
77. See Luigi Salvatorelli, Nazionalfascismo, Turin: Gobetti, 1923 (article in
La Stampa January 2, 1923), cited by Galante Garrone, Risorgimento e
Antirisorgimento, p. 522.
78. Luigi Salvatorelli, Irrealtà nazionalista, Milan: Corbaccio, 1925, pp. 175–
176, ibid., pp. 517–518.
79. On the importance of the eighteenth century for Salvatorelli’s inter-
pretation of the Risorgimento, see Galante Garrone, Risorgimento e
Antirisorgimento, pp. 530–531 and Leo Valiani, “Salvatorelli storico
dell’unità d’Italia e del fascismo,” Rivista storica italiana, LXXXVI, 4,
1974, p. 726.
80. Luigi Salvatorelli, Il pensiero politico italiano dal 1700 al 1870, Turin:
Einaudi, 1935, p. 198.
81. Luigi Salvatorelli, Il pensiero politico italiano, p. 207.
82. Ibid. See also p. 223, where these liberties are again enumerated.
83. Ibid., p. 211.
84. Ibid., p. 223.
85. A similar historical approach—from the history of Christianity to that of
the Risorgimento—was adopted by Adolfo Omodeo, a pupil of Gentile,
who later worked closely with Croce on La Critica. However, Omodeo’s
history of Mazzini reveals the profound influence of Gentile, especially
with regard to this philosophy and historiography. Omodeo’s interpreta-
tion of Mazzini, which was religious and apocalyptic, also showed the
distant influence of Sorel, as well as the pull exercised upon the historian
by reactionary and Restoration thought. Omodeo described Mazzini as
being animated by a visionary religious fervor that caused him to await
Italian unification like a “revelation” or “divine creation” (see Adolfo
Omodeo, La missione religiosa e politica di Giuseppe Mazzini (1934),
in Omodeo, Difesa del Risorgimento, 2nd ed., Turin: Einaudi, 1955, pp.
74–85. See also the reconstruction by Roberto Pertici, “Preistoria di
Adolfo Omodeo,” Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, series
III, XXII, 2, 1992, pp. 513–615, now in Roberto Pertici, Storici italiani del
Novecento, Pisa and Rome: Istituti editoriali e poligrafici internazion-
ali, 2000, pp. 57–104). However Omodoeo had also criticized Mazzini’s
“inflexibility lacking political nous,” his “simplistic tactics,” his eschew-
ing of “diplomacy,” and the failure of his religious preaching at popular
level. Further, he recognized Mazzini’s role as an inspirer of ideals and
actions: “This faith,” wrote Omodeo, “armed many with the courage to
act, exalting them on to martyrdom, rather than dismaying them with
an objective reckoning of facts.” (See the chapter on Mazzini by Adolfo
Omodeo, L’età moderna e contemporanea, Messina: Principato, 1925,
pp. 340–341, a work better known for its subsequent editions under the
title L’età del Risorgimento italiano, the first of which appeared in 1931.)
170 NOTES
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
in the public imagination and in the propaganda of the Resistance

and republican fascism, see the entries “Mazzini” and “Risorgimento”
the same volume’s index. For the fascist appropriation in the RSI, see
Giuseppe Parlato, “Il mito del Risorgimento e la sinistra fascista,” in Il
mito del Risorgimento nell’Italia unita, conference proceedings, Milan,
November 9–12, 1993, special issue of Il Risorgimento, XLVII, 1–2, 1995,
pp. 271–276. Mussolini, for example, evoked Mazzini from the very
beginning and during the course of the Social Republic: see “Il primo
discorso dopo la liberazione” (broadcast on Radio Munich on September
18, 1943) and “Il discorso al ‘Lirico’ di Milan” (December 16, 1944), in
Mussolini, Opera omnia, XXXII, pp. 4 and 131.
92. Letter to his mother, February 19, 1939, in Rossi, Nove anni sono molti, pp.
769–770. In his conclusion Rossi, although the quotation was originally
written by Franz Grillparzer, quotes a phrase from Franz Werfel, Nel cre-
puscolo di un mondo, Milan: Mondadori, 1937 (English edition: Twilight
of a World, New York: Viking Press, 1937), a work that inspired him to
write these reflections. Soon after Rossi’s observations on the obsoles-
cence of “nationality” would lead him to jointly develop the Ventotene
Manifesto with Altiero Spinelli, a project which layed some of the philo-
sophical basis to the European unification and was to some extent influ-
enced by Mazzini’s pro-Europe stance. For the presence of this concept
from 1937 in the development of the reflection that would give rise to the
Manifesto, see the reference to Mazzini (and his request for advice on the
matter from Nello Rosselli) in Rossi’s letter to his mother, April 30, 1937
(ibid., p. 572). Spinelli’s skepticism with regard to Mazzini is clarified by
a statement that he made some years later: “My search for a thought that
was clear and precise meant I was not attracted by the foggy, convoluted
and rather inconsistent ideological federalism like that of Prudhon or
Mazzini [ . . . ] but by the clean, exact, antidoctrinal thought of the English
federalists [ . . . ] who proposed to transplant the great American politi-
cal experience to Europe” (cited in Norberto Bobbio, “Il federalismo nel
dibattito politico e culturale della Resistenza,” in Altiero Spinelli and
Ernesto Rossi, Il manifesto di Ventotene, reprint ed. Sergio Pistone, Turin:
Celid, 2001).
Conclusion A Religion of the Nation without a Civil Religion
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
French revolutions, and the authoritarian “political religions” typical of

totalitarian forms of government (although some elements or premises
are already present in Mazzini’s religion of the nation), I consider a dem-
ocratic civil religion to be a system of beliefs, myths, symbols, and rites
that melds identification with and participation in the national commu-
nity with voluntary democratic form, guaranteed by a clear separation
between State and Church.
3. See the broad picture proposed by Maurizio Ridolfi, “Feste civili e reli-
gioni politiche nel ‘laboratorio’ della nazione italiana (1860–1895),”
Memoria e Ricerca, III, 5, July 1994, special issue Le trasformazioni della
festa, ed. Marco Fincardi and Maurizio Ridolfi, pp. 83–108; Ridolfi, Le
feste nazionali, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003.
4. Ilaria Porciani, La festa della nazione: Rappresentazioni dello Stato e spazi
sociali nell’Italia unita, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997; Catherine Brice, “La
Monarchia e la ‘religione della patria’ nella costruzione dell’identità nazi-
onale,” Memoria e Ricerca, 11, 13, May–August 2003, pp. 140–147 and
Brice, “La religion civile dans l’Italie liberale: petits et grands rituels poli-
tiques,” in Rituali civili: Storie nazionali e memorie pubbliche nell’Europa
contemporanea, ed. Maurizio Ridolfi, Rome: Gangemi, 2006, pp. 97–114.
5. The groundbreaking essay by Robert N. Bellah, The Five Religions of
Modern Italy, in The Robert Bellah Reader, ed. Robert N. Bellah and
Steven M. Tipton, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006,
pp. 51–80 (originally in Il caso italiano, ed. Fabio Luca and Stephen R.
Graubard, Milan: Garzanti, 1974, pp. 439–468) paved the way for a later
ample discussion of this issue over the past 20 years. See the following
in particular: Carlo Tullio Altan, Italia: una nazione senza religione
civile: Le ragioni di una democrazia incompiuta, Udine: Istituto editoriale
veneto friulano, 1995; Gian Enrico Rusconi, Possiamo fare a meno di una
religione civile?, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1999; the special issue “Identità
nazionale e religione civile in Italia,” of Rassegna italiana di sociologia,
XL, 2, April–June 1999; the special section “Religione civile e identità
nazionale nella storia d’Italia: Per una discussione,” of Memoria e Ricerca,
11, 13, May–August 2003; Rituali civili: Storie nazionali e memorie pub-
bliche, ed. Ridolfi; see also Rusconi’s recent work Non abusare di Dio,
Milan: Rizzoli, 2007, chapter II “ ‘La religione degli italiani’: Un surrogato
di religione civile,” pp. 36–55. Lastly, see Maurizio Viroli, Come se Dio
non ci fosse: Religione e libertà nella storia d’Italia, Turin: Einaudi, 2009,
even though it includes experiences that are ideologically, culturally, and
historically different under the same formula of Benedetto Croce’s “reli-
gion of freedom.”
6. The separation between State and Church was held to be an essential
precondition for the development of a democratic civil religion in the
two countries considered paradigmatic for this type of experience from
their late eighteenth-century revolutions onwards: the United States of
NOTES 173
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”).
Afterword Mazzini, the Risorgimento, and the

Origins of Fascism
1. See the recent interpretation and anthology: A Cosmopolitanism of

Nations: Giuseppe Mazzzini’s Writings on Democracy, Nation Building,
and International Relations, ed. Stefano Recchia and Nadia Urbinati,
Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009. For a broader
picture see Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalisation of Democratic
Nationalism, 1830–1920, ed. C. A. Bayly and Eugenio F. Biagini, Oxford
NOTES 175
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
22, 1851, in Mancini, Diritto internazionale: Prelezioni con un saggio sul

Machiavelli, Naples: Marghieri, 1873, pp. 31–33. In these pages Mancini
still considered “races” as “natural varieties of one unique and originary
species” (emphasis in the original). He also insisted on the prevalence of
the “conscience of Nationality” (ibid., pp. 35–37). I draw this quote from
Simon Levis Sullam, “I critici e i nemici dell’emancipazione degli ebrei,”
in Storia della Shoah in Italia: Vicende, memorie, rappresentazioni, ed.
Marcello Flores, Simon Levis Sullam, Marie-Anne Matard Bonucci, and
Enzo Traverso, vol. 1, Turin: UTET, 2010, p. 40.
15. Lucy Riall, “The Politics of Italian Romanticism: Mazzini and the Making
of a Nationalist Culture,” in Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalisation
of Democratic Nationalism, pp. 167–186. I had examined this theme
at length using a similar approach not only in “ ‘The Moses of Italian
Unity’: Mazzini and Nationalism as Political Religion,” in the same vol-
ume, pp. 107–124, but also in my earlier articles: “ ‘Dio e il Popolo’: la riv-
oluzione religiosa di Giuseppe Mazzini,” in Storia d’Italia: Annali 22, Il
Risorgimento, pp. 401–422, and especially in “ ‘Fate della rivoluzione una
religione’: Aspetti del nazionalismo mazziniano come religione politica
(1831–1835),” Società e Storia, XXVII, 106, October–December 2004, pp.
705–730, both now included in revised form in the present volume.
16. Lucy Riall, “Martyr Cults in Nineteenth-Century Italy,” The Journal
of Modern History, 82, 2, June 2010, p. 259. According to the reading
of Riall and Patriarca, Banti himself follows in the wake of George L.
Mosse by “conceptualiz[ing] nationalism in terms of a ‘political reli-
gion’ ” (see Silvana Patriarca and Lucy Riall, Introduction: Revisiting the
Risorgimento, in The Risorgimento Revisited, p. 6).
17. Christopher Duggan, The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy since 1796,
London: Allen Lane, 2007, p. 130.
18. Patriarca, Italian Vices, p. 134.
19. Graziano, The Failure of Italian Nationhood, pp. 137–139. Rusconi’s work
on the absence of an Italian civil religion was referred to in the conclu-
sion in this book.
20. A. James Gregor, Totalitarianism and Political Religion: An Intellectual
History, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012.
21. Emilio Gentile, Italiani senza padri: Intervista sul Risorgimento, ed.
Simonetta Fiori, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2011, pp. 68, 50, and 32.
22. Angelo O. Olivetti, Il sindacalismo come filosofia e come politica:
Lineamenti di sintesi universale, Milan: Alpes, 1925.
23. See La Carta del Lavoro illustrata da Giuseppe Bottai, Rome: Edizioni del
“Diritto del Lavoro,” 1927.
24. See, for example, Edoardo Malusardi, Elementi di storia del sindacal-
ismo fascista, prefazione di Giuseppe Bottai, 3rd ed., Lanciano: Carabba,
1938.
NOTES 177
25. Armando Lodolini, La repubblica italiana: Studi e vicende del mazzin-

ianesimo contemporaneo, 1922–1924, Milan: Alpes, 1925 (“Biblioteca di
coltura politica,” ed. Franco Ciarlantini). The volume collects documents
and writings of the pro-fascist Unione Mazziniana.
26. Marco Aurelio Bocchiola, L’eredità di Giuseppe Mazzini, 2nd ed., Milan:
Scuola di Mistica Fascista Italico Mussolini, 1933 (“Quaderni della
Scuola di mistica fascista ‘Italico Mussolini’ ”).
27. This encounter was first described by Emilio Gentile, The Origins of
Fascist Ideology, 1918–1925, trans. Robert L. Miller, New York: Enigma
Books, 2005 (orig. ed. Bologna, 1996), pp. 281–293 in particular.
28. Mussolini e “La Voce,” ed. Emilio Gentile, Florence: Sansoni, 1976.
29. Alessandra Tarquini, Il Gentile dei fascisti: Gentiliani e antigentiliani nel
regime fascista, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2009.
30. Giuseppe Bottai, “Il pensiero e l’azione di Giuseppe Mazzini,” a speech
given at Genoa on May 4, 1930, published in Giuseppe Bottai, Incontri,
Milan: Mondadori, 1938 (a second, enlarged edition of the volume was
published in 1943).
31. See 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,
vol. II, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991, pp. 396–398. Vivarelli is followed by
Giovanni Belardelli, Il Ventennio degli intellettuali: Cultura, politica,
ideologia nell’Italia fascista, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2005, pp. 245–246 and
252–254.
32. As noticed above, reference to Mazzini is extremely limited in Zeev
Sternhell, Mario Sznajder, and Maia Asheri, The Birth of Fascist Ideology:
From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, trans. David Maisel,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994 (orig. ed. Paris, 1989),
which also insists on the “gulf that divided Corradini from Mazzini” (p.
9), that is, nineteenth-century from twentieth-century Italian national-
isms. Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France,
trans. David Maisel, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986
(orig. ed. Paris, 1983) does not mention Mazzini.
33. Only the post-risorgimento “palingenetic climate” (with no mention of
Mazzini) is of interest to Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The
Sense of Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler, New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007, pp. 195–199.
34. A recent critique of Sternhell on Italian Fascism is David D. Roberts, “How
Not to Think about Fascism and Ideology, Intellectuals Antecedents and
Historical Meaning” in Id., Historicism and Fascism in Modern Italy,
Toronto-Buffalo-London: University of Toronto, 2007, who incidentally
also calls for a reconsideration of Fascism’s “serious reassessment of the
legacy of Giuseppe Mazzini” (p. 197).
178 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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Index
Abbagnano, Nicola, 126 Balbo, Fausto, 80

actualism, 89, 90, 97, 117, 163, 169 Balbo, Italo, 2, 78, 156
Adamson, Walter, 146 as interpreter of Mazzini, 80–1,
Adorni, Daniela, 136 117, 157
Agosti, Giorgio, 148 Baldoli, Claudia, 151
Albanese, Giulia, 152 Balzani, Roberto, 134
Alexander, Jeffrey C., 131 Banti, Alberto M., 114, 123, 174,
Alfieri, Vittorio, 43, 91, 96, 164 175, 176
Alighieri, Dante, 28, 31, 40, 42, 71, Barbera (publishing house), 139
118, 159 Bargellini, Piero, 147
Altan, Carlo Tullio, 172, 173 Barnard, Frederick M., 121
Amendola, Giovanni, 143, 162, 168 Barthes, Roland, 122
antifascism Battaglia, Roberto, 138
attitude towards Mazzini, 6, 84, Battisti, Cesare, 70, 151
96–106, 108, 122, 162, 157, 159, Battistini, Andrea, 143
160, 162, 164, 165, 168, 169, Bava Beccaris, Fiorenzo, 61
170, 177 Bayly, Christopher A., 130, 174
Arendt, Hannah, 113, 172 Beckford, James A., 172
Arisi Rota, Arianna, 172 Belardelli, Giovanni, 124, 151, 152,
Armellini, Giuseppe, 28 165, 172, 177
Art Bell, David A., 130
Mazzini’s conception of, 24–5 Bellah, Robert, 172
Artom, Eugenio, 135, 137 Bellezza, Vito A., 160
Aschheim, Steven E., 123 Benedetti, Paolo, 152, 153, 154
Asheri, Maia, 12, 144, 154, 177 Bénichou, Paul, 131
Asor Rosa, Alberto, 127, 140 Benini, Aroldo, 142
Associazione Mazziniana Italiana, 168 Berengo, Marino, 148
Aulard, François-Alphonse, 130 Berrini, Gian Paolo, 150
Bertani, Agostino, 138
Bagatin, Pier Luigi, 135 Berti, Giampietro, 128
Bagnoli, Paolo, 164 Biagini, Eugenio, 130, 174
Baioni, Massimo, 28 Bianchi, Michele, 74
Bakounin, Mikhail, 6, 35 Bible, 19
criticism of Mazzini, 36, 71, 119, 138 Mazzini influenced by, 12, 19
Balbo, Cesare, 88 Biguzzi, Stefano, 151
196 INDEX
Bismarck, Otto von, 135, 142 religiosity, 41–2, 141

Bissolati, Leonida, 62, 148, 151 republicanism, 39, 41, 42
Bobbio, Norberto, 113, 148, 159, 174 Carnaro, Charter of (1919), 75, 77, 79,
Bocchi, Andrea, 174 117, 154, 155
Bocchiola, Marco Aurelio, 177 Casini, Anna Paszkowski, 146
Bollati, Giulio, 127 Castelli, Alberto, 166
Bonald, Louis de, 132 Casucci, Costanzo, 167
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 7, 122, 123, 142 Catalano, Franco, 139
Bonavino, Cristoforo. See Franchi, Catholicism, influence of, 108, 109,
Ausonio 110, 113, 118, 126, 129, 141, 147,
Bonelli, Ippolito, 132 162, 164
Bonini, Francesco, 137 Cattaneo, Carlo, 6, 34, 61, 62, 67, 84,
Bonomi, Ivanoe, 173 97, 148
Bonucci, Marie-Anne Matard, 176 Cavaglion, Alberto, 157, 159
Bottai, Giuseppe, 1–2, 117, 118, 154, Cavallera, Hervé A., 160, 161
156, 162, 177 Cavallotti, Felice, 138
Bouglé, Charles, 131 Cavazza, Stefano, 172
Bovio, Giovanni, 123, 139 Cavour, Camillo Benso, 34, 37, 57,
Bracco, Barbara, 150 65, 79
Brice, Catherine, 171 Ceccuti, Cosimo, 139
Bruno, Giordano, 41 Cervetti, Valerio, 155
Bucchi, Sergio, 148 Chabod, Federico, 132, 136
Buchez, Philippe, 132 Charles Albert (king of Italy), 27, 28,
Burleigh, Michael, 130 53, 71, 100
Byron, George, 25 Charlisle, Robert B., 128
Chateaubriand, Renée de, 62
Caesarism, 105, 137, 160 Chiaromonte, Nicola, 100, 167
Caffi, Andrea, 100, 166 Christian Democracy, 109
Cafiero, Carlo, 35 Church
Campanella, Francesco, 13 influence of, 108, 109, 110, 118, 141,
Campolonghi, Luigi, 76, 155 149, 163, 173
Candeloro, Giorgio, 133 influence on Mazzini, 64, 105
Cantimori, Carlo, 156 see also State, relationship with the
Cantimori, Delio, 156 Church according to Mazzini
Capanna, Francesco, 163 Cianferotti, Giulio, 157
Capone, Alfredo, 162 Cingari, Gaetano, 148
Caprioglio, Sergio, 159 Ciuffoletti, Zeffiro, 165, 167
Carducci, Giosuè, 37, 38, 45, 52, 54, 71, civil religion, 129, 159, 171, 172
73, 101, 109, 123, 139, 140, 143 in Italy, 107–11, 116, 118, 120, 172,
aesthetic and political theories, 174, 177
39–41 civil war (Italian, 1943–45), 108, 111, 170
as heir to and interpreter of Colajanni, Napoleone, 51, 142, 145, 149
Mazzini’s ideals, 38–42, 123 communism, 113
monarchy, attitude towards, 39–41 see also Mazzini, Giuseppe
poetry about Mazzini, 40, 73, 120, Communist party, 109
123, 140 interpretation of Mazzini, 102–3
INDEX 197
Conti, Fulvio, 134, 138 De Pourtalès, Guido, 125

Coquin, François-Xavier, 129 De Ruggero, Guido, 6, 97–8, 165
corporatism, 75–8, 79, 81, 102, 117, De Sanctis, Francesco, 4, 6, 7, 35, 36,
154, 156 55, 85, 94, 95, 139, 163
Corradini, Enrico, 54–5, 103, 144, 177 criticism of Mazzini, 36, 56, 85, 94,
Corridoni, Filippo, 80 95, 119
Costa, Andrea, 78 Degli Innocenti, Maurizio, 152
Costa, Piero, 132 Del Balzo, Carlo, 50
counter-revolution Del Bo, Giuseppe, 139
influence on Mazzini, 18, 44, Del Noce, Augusto, 160
131, 132 Della Peruta, Franco, 128, 133
Crispi, Francesco, 31, 34, 38, 40, 41, Della Seta, Ugo, 157, 168
45, 109, 116, 135, 136, 137 Della Terza, Dante, 140
cult by Carducci, 40 Demerath III, Nicholas J., 172
dispute with Mazzini (1864), 28–9, democracy
134 see Mazzini, Giuseppe
as heir to and interpreter of democratic interventionism (in the
Mazzini, 31–4, 135, 136 First world war), 66, 70, 151,
nation, conception of, 34 159
republicanism, 135 Di Nucci, Loreto, 173
State, conception of, 33, 34, 136 Diriani, Ennio, 141
Cristi, Marcela, 171 Doveri dell’uomo
Critica, La, 88, 97, 98, 146, 161, 162, see Duties of Man, On
169, 170 Duggan, Christopher, 116, 135, 136
Croce, Benedetto, 6, 37, 38, 42, 55, 69, Duties of Man, On
88, 96, 97, 140, 145, 162, 163, see Mazzini, Giuseppe
164, 169, 172 duty
correspondence and relationship see Mazzini, Giuseppe
with George Sorel, 55–8, 144,
146 Eco, Umberto, 122
as interpreter of Mazzini, 56, 93–6, Einaudi, Giulio, 169
119, 163 Einaudi (publishing house), 103
Cuoco, Vincenzo, 91 Engelbrecht, Helmuth C., 122
Cuore (novel, 1886), 140 Engels, Friedrich, 35, 85, 139, 145
treatment of Mazzini, 37
Curiel, Eugenio, 170 Farini, Luigi Carlo, 26, 134
fascism
D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 3, 52, 75, 77, as anti-Risorgimento, 3, 103, 168
101, 103, 154, 155 attitude towards Mazzini, 2, 67,
Dawson, Lorne L., 173 73–5, 78–81, 86, 90–3, 106,
De Ambris, Alceste, 72, 75–7, 117, 152, 108, 109, 116, 117, 121, 123,
154, 155 152, 168, 170
State, conception of, 76, 77 conception of youth, 92
De Amicis, Edmondo, 37, 140 Manifesto by fascist intellectuals
De Felice, Renzo, 153, 154, 165 (1925), 93, 162
De Meis, Angelo Camillo, 138, 159 as “new liberalism,” 103
198 INDEX
fascism—Continued Carducci’s interpretation of, 40

as political religion, 87, 92–3, 109, as character in Cuore, 37
118, 129, 162, 163, 172 as founding figure, 6
Scuola di Mistica Fascista, 117, 177 Mussolini’s interpretation of, 73
as “third way,” 119 myth of, 2, 123
as totalitarianism, 91–2, 116, 130 Oriani’s interpretation of, 142
Fazio, Domenico M., 123 Pascoli’s interpretation of, 54
Ferrari, Giuseppe, 61 presence in the First world war, 70
Ferraris, Angiola, 129 presence in the Italian Resistance,
Ferrero, Guglielmo, 34, 137 103
Ferri, Enrico, 63, 149 Salvemini’s interpretation of, 61,
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 3, 12, 121, 65, 148
122, 126 Garin, Eugenio, 159
Fincardi, Marco, 171 Garrone, brothers, 69
Finelli, Michele, 143 Gentile, Emilio, 115, 116, 121, 124,
Finelli, Pietro, 137 129, 144, 146, 156, 162, 173,
Fiori, Simonetta, 175 174, 177
Fiume, exploit by D’Annunzio, 72, Gentile, Giovanni, 2, 69, 74, 77, 84, 85,
75–7, 79, 117, 154 97, 105, 160, 163, 164, 169
Flores, Marcello, 175 as interpreter of Mazzini, 87–93, 97,
Foa, Vittorio, 151, 166 103, 104, 116, 117, 118, 158, 159,
Fogazzaro, Antonio, 52, 143 160, 161, 162, 168, 169
Foscolo, Ugo, 25, 43, 71 Gentili, Sandro, 146
Foucault, Michel, 122 Germany
Fournier, Laura Finocchiaro, 141 referred to by Mazzini, 22
Franchi, Ausonio (pseudonym of Gerratana, Valentino, 167
Cristoforo Bonavino), 26, Ghisleri, Arcangelo, 142 148, 159
134 Giannantoni, Simona, 164
Franzinelli, Mimmo, 166 Giarrizzo, Giuseppe, 148
Freeden, Michael, 174 Ginsborg, Paul, 123
freemasonry, 138 Ginzburg, Leone, 170
Fretigné, Jean-Yves, 128, 143 Gioberti, Vincenzo, 3, 6, 12, 46, 87–9,
Frigessi, Delia, 147 90, 97, 103, 160, 173
Furet, François, 24, 132 Giovine Europa (movement), 22, 66
Furiozzi, Gian Biagio, 155 legacy, 66
Giovine Italia (movement), 17, 22, 54,
Galante Garrone, Alessandro, 128, 58, 92, 93, 115, 125, 162
138, 148, 149, 167, 168 Girardet, Raoul, 123
Galasso, Giuseppe, 162 Girardon, Mario, 152
Galimberti, Alice Schanzer, 168 Giustizia e Libertà (movement), 2,
Galimberti, Duccio, 167 99–102, 105, 164, 166, 167, 177
Gallarati Scotti, Tommaso, 51, 143 Gobetti, Piero, 98, 164, 165
Galli Della Loggia, Ernesto, 173 criticism of Mazzini, 6, 96–7, 119
Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 11, 29, 31, 34, God
35, 137 see Mazzini, Giuseppe
biography of, 139 Goethe, Wolfgang, 25, 134, 142
INDEX 199
Golomb, Jacob, 123 jacobinism, 124

Gori, Gianfranco Miro, 143 Jansenism, 89, 96
Gospels, 59, 105, 129 Jemolo, Arturo Carlo, 135, 136
Gracchus, Caius, 40 Jesus Christ, 7, 12, 64, 71, 123, 126,
Gramsci, Antonio, 43, 65, 141, 164, 167 158
criticism of Mazzini, 6, 102–3, Joachim of Fiore, 105
119, 158
Grandi, Dino, 2, 78–80, 156, 157 Kant, Immanuel, 12
as interpreter of Mazzini, 78–80, 117 Kantorowicz, Ernst H., 130
Grandi, Terenzio, 125, 142, 155 Kertzer, David I., 172
Graubard, Steven A., 172 King, Bolton, 58, 139, 146, 161, 164, 166
Graziano, Manlio, 116, 174, 177 Kipling, Rudyard, 104
Gregor, James A., 116, 161, 176 Kohn, Hans, 121
Gregory XVI, pope, 128 Kossuth, Lajos, 60
Grelot, Pierre, 131
Griffin, Roger, 177 Labriola, Antonio, 137
Grillparzer, Franz, 170 Lambruschini, Raffaello, 88
Guaiana, Yuri, 172 Lamennais, Felicité de, 12–13, 16, 89,
Guerrazzi, Francesco Domenico, 43 128, 147
Guerri, Giordano Bruno, 156, 157 influence on Mazzini, 12–13, 15–17,
Guizot, François, 13 27, 46, 126, 128
Landucci, Sergio, 139
Halévy, Elie, 131 Le Bon, Gustave, 3
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Ledeen, Michael A., 152
influence of, 46, 95, 116, 117, 119, Leining, Arthur, 139
137, 138, 164 Lelewel, Joachim, 128
Herder, Johann Gottfried, 3, 121 Léon-Dufour, Xavier, 131
Hunt, Lynn, 24, 131, 133 Leone, Enrico, 148
Lescure, Jean-Claude, 135
ideological appropriation Leuzzi, Maria Fubini, 134
see Mazzini, Giuseppe Levi, Alessandro, 6, 90, 98, 123, 124,
ideology, 5, 8, 38, 113, 122, 174 126, 157, 158, 165
Iggers, Georg, 128, 131 as interpreter of Mazzini, 81–4, 90,
imperialism, 46, 47, 54, 55, 66, 100, 98, 99, 103, 122, 157, 158, 160,
104, 109, 118, 136, 137, 167
157, 159 Levi, Carlo, 96, 164
Ireland Levis Sullam, Simon, 175
referred to by Mazzini, 16 Levra, Umberto, 135, 137
irredentismo, movement, 70 liberalism. See Mazzini, Giuseppe
Isnenghi, Mario, 121, 123, 143, 151 liberty, 42, 43, 46, 53, 56, 70, 76, 77,
Italy 79, 85, 90, 95, 96, 100, 102, 103,
fiftieth anniversary (1911), 53 117, 129, 137, 167, 168, 174
international role according to see also Mazzini, Giuseppe
Crispi, 33–4 Libya
myth of Third Italy, 40, 43, 46, 54, Italy’s war on (1911), 54, 65, 116,
129, 143, 159 (see also Rome) 142, 157
200 INDEX
Lincoln, Abraham, 6 communism, attitude towards, 15,

Lodolini, Armando, 176 117
Lombroso, Cesare, 34 Council of Humanity, theory of,
Luca, Fabio, 172 64, 110
Lussu, Emilio, 101, 167 cult by Extreme Left, 35, 37
Luzzatto, Sergio, 138 death, 35, 40, 137, 138
decline of influence, 35, 45
Mack Smith, Denis, 128 dehestoricized, 37, 53
Macchia, Guglielmo, 125 democracy, conception of, 14, 15,
Machiavelli, Niccolò, 12, 31 28, 83, 117, 162
Maier, Hans, 130 dictatorship, conception of, 136
Maistre, Joseph De, 18–19, 46, 131, 132 Duties of Man (Doveri dell’uomo),
Malusardi, Edoardo, 176 11–15, 83, 97, 110, 123, 125,
Mancini, Pasquale Stanislao, 115, 175 126, 127, 151, 158, 174
Mangoni, Luisa, 137, 170 censored school edition (1905),
Manzoni, Alessandro, 43, 88, 126, 49–51, 63, 108, 141, 143, 144
173 criticized, 97, 141, 142, 148
Margherita (queen of Italy), 39, 139 popularity, 69, 125, 141, 151, 152
Mario, Alberto, 6, 99, 134 praised, 97, 101
criticism and praise of Mazzini, 27, duty, conception of, 11–13, 14, 63,
28, 35 83, 84, 109
Mario, Jessie White, 37, 123, 139 criticized, 25
Martini, Ferdinando, 135 praised, 46, 73, 74
Marx, Karl, 6, 63, 71, 72, 76, 85, 86, editions of writings, 78, 90, 142,
88–9, 97, 102, 117, 118, 139, 164, 169, 170
145, 151, 158, 160 education, conception of, 14, 83, 95,
marxism, 99 118, 127, 143
Masci, Filippo, 160 Europeanist ideals, 36, 95, 104, 168,
Maslowski, Michel, 129 171
Mastellone, Salvo, 127, 132, 165 fatherland, conception of, 14, 31,
Mathiez, Albert, 131 50, 104
Maurras, Charles, 104 Foi et Avenir (Faith and Future), 11,
Maver, Giovanni, 129 13, 21, 126, 128
Mazzini, Giuseppe formulaic style, 4, 15, 22
aesthetic theories, 25 as founding figure, 6–7
anticlericalism, 109 French Revolution, 6, 13, 15, 21, 27,
art, conception of, 24–5 32, 43, 63, 82, 84, 109, 117, 118,
authoritarianism criticized, 6, 25, 124, 145, 162
35, 49, 51, 56–7, 82, 84, 119, genius, conception of, 25, 134
148, 166 God, conception of, 17–18, 28, 36,
authority, conception of, 46, 77, 41, 43–4, 50, 51, 56, 57, 63, 64,
82–3, 110, 117 82, 85, 110, 113, 125, 135, 144,
biographies, 37, 58, 63, 99, 101, 123, 149, 158, 159, 169, 175
139, 143, 146, 158, 161, 164 role in relation to the law, 26
centenary of birth (1905), 52, 139, role in relation to the nation,
143, 159 18–20, 34, 66, 83, 109, 131, 149
INDEX 201
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
Mazzini, Giuseppe—Continued Montalembert, Charles de, 16, 129

Thoughts upon Democracy in Montevecchi, Federica, 151
Europe, 127 Mordini, Antonio, 53
unity, conception of, 23, 28, 41, 44, Moses, 7, 12, 120, 177
50, 65, 90, 109, 125 Mosse, George L., 23, 121, 124, 133
words, role in thought, 14, 15, 22–3, Mussolini, Benito, 1–2, 58, 70–5, 79,
24, 65, 122, 125, 127, 132 81, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 102, 115,
see also antifascism; fascism; 118, 123, 125, 146, 151, 152,
Communist party; counter- 154, 173, 175
revolution; Germany; Ireland; as interpreter of Mazzini, 1–2, 70–5,
modernism; nationalism; 92, 116, 152, 170
Poland; republican movement;
Saint-Simonianism; socialism; Nasi, Nunzio, 49–50, 149
war; individual authors and Nathan, Ernesto, 81, 126
thinkers for their influence on Nathan, family, 99
or interpretation of Mazzini Nathan, Sarina, 81
Mazzini, Maria, 37, 99, 126, 129, 165 nation
Mazzotta, Clemente, 143 see Mazzini, Giuseppe; nationalism;
Mediterranean, 33, 136 nationality
Meneghello, Luigi, 111, 174 national radicalism, 78, 121, 147, 172
Menozzi, Daniele, 174 nationalism
Meker, Nicola, 127 as civil religion, 158
messianism, 102, 123, 124, 131, 136, 165 and concept of “chosen people,”
Metternich, Klemens von, 152 19, 131
Miccolis, Stefano, 138 as European political culture, 17,
Michelet, Jules, 133 19, 24, 116, 129, 130
Mickiewicz, Adam German, 121, 122; relationship to
influence on Mazzini, 15–17, 128, 129 Nazism, 3
Mila, Massimo, 166 Italian (Twentieth-century
Minghetti, Gloria, 146 movement), 54–5, 103, 144
Minozzi, Giovanni, 70 nationalist discourse, 114–15
Missiroli, Mario, 145, vs. nationality according to
as interpreter of Mazzini, 56, 145 Mazzini, 84, 100, 104, 157, 159
Mitosek, Zofia, 129 as political religion, 116, 130, 175
modernism nationality
appreciation of Mazzini, 51, 66, 143 see Mazzini, Giuseppe; nationalism
Mohammed, 71 nazism, 107, 111, 116
Momigliano, Felice, 159 Nenni, Pietro, 155
monarchy, 7, 27, 29, 35, 44, 50, 53, 61, Nello, Paolo, 157
108, 109 neo-idealism, 88, 89, 94, 95, 118, 163,
Carducci’s conception of, 38–41 164
Crispi’s conception of, 28, 32, 33, 143 Nietzsche, Elizabeth Förster, 124
Mondolfo, Rodolfo, 158 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 3, 7–8, 46, 47, 59,
as interpreter of Mazzini, 85, 158, 123, 124, 152, 154
160 see also Mazzini, Giuseppe; Papini,
Mondolfo, Ugo Guido, 85 Giovanni
INDEX 203
Nora, Pierre, 132 Perfetti, Francesco, 155

Perkins, Mary-Anne, 130, 131
Oberdan, Guglielmo, 41 Perron, Joseph, 131
O’Brien, Paul, 152 Pertici, Roberto, 156, 160, 173
Olivetti, Angelo Oliviero, 77, 117, 154, Pesante, Vincenzo, 141
155, 156, 177 Pieri, Piero, 143
Omodeo, Adolfo, 69, 127, 131, 150, Piovani, Pietro, 164
151, 169, 170 Pirodda, Giovanni, 134
Orano, Paolo, 145 Pisacane, Carlo, 6, 78, 80, 102,
Oriani, Alfredo, 37, 38, 72, 73, 78, 109, 134
141, 152 criticism of Mazzini, 25–6
as heir to and interpreter of Pischedda, Carlo, 143
Mazzini, 42–7, 72, 117 Pistone, Sergio, 171
State, conception of, 46 Pitocco, Francesco, 128
Oriani, Giacomo, 142 Pius IX (pope), 27, 28, 109, 159
Orlando, Vittorio Emanuele, 143 plebiscites
Orsini, Felice, 134 see Mazzini, Giuseppe
Ossani, Anna T., 134 Pocock, John G. A., 122
Ozouf, Mona, 24, 130, 132 Poland
Polish nationalism’s influence on
Paladini, Giannantonio, 178 Mazzini, 15–16, 128
Panunzio, Sergio, 157 referred to by Mazzini, 16, 22
Papafava, Novello, 148 political religion, 17, 129, 130, 171
Papini, Giovanni, 58, 109, 146, 147 see also fascism; nationalism
as interpreter of Mazzini, 58–60, Popolo d’Italia, Il, 72, 73
109 Pozzani, Silvio, 168
recalls Mazzini-Nietzsche Prezzolini, Giuseppe, 59, 60, 118, 147
encounter, 8, 125 Prometheus, 7, 123
Parlato, Giuseppe, 154, 156, 170 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 171
Parmentola, Vittorio, 125, 126, 168 Pugliese, Stanislao, 170
Parri, Fedele, 99, 164, 165
Parri, Ferruccio, 99, 165 Quinet, Edgar, 133
Partito d’azione
antifascist, 105–6, 170 Rabinow, Paul, 122
mazzinian, 34 racial theories, 46, 47, 114–15, 142,
Pascoli, Giovanni, 144 175
as interpreter of Mazzini, 52–4, radical, movement, 138
109, 143 Raponi, Nicola, 134
Pascoli, Maria, 143 Recchia, Stefano, 174
Patriarca, Silvana, 116, 174, 176 Regaldi, Giuseppe, 41, 141
Pavone, Claudio, 167, 170, 172 religion
Pazé, Valentina, 164 see Mazzini, Giuseppe
Pécout, Giulle, 140 religion of liberty, 94–5, 96, 163,
Pellico, Silvio, 12, 126 164, 172
people Renan, Ernest, 55, 56, 57
see Mazzini, Giuseppe Répaci, Antonino, 152
204 INDEX
Repubblica Sociale Italiana (RSI), 1, see also Mazzini, Giuseppe; republic

106, 108, 156, 170 Rosmini, Antonio, 87, 160
republic Rosselli, Carlo, 82, 105, 158, 164, 167,
Roman (1849), 28, 29, 109, 110, 173, 177
174 as interpreter of Mazzini, 6, 98–101,
see also Mazzini, Giuseppe 119
republican movement, 59, 61, 95, 108, Rosselli, family, 99, 167
117 Rosselli, Nello, 2, 82, 98, 139, 158
cult of Mazzini, 71, 117, 130, 164, 176 as interpreter of Mazzini, 99–100,
rituals, 108, 129 164, 166, 171
symbols, 108 Rossi, Ernesto, 99, 166, 167, 170, 171
republican party, 50, 51, 62, 63, 71, 80, as interpreter of Mazzini, 101–2,
99, 109, 142, 148, 155, 156, 165, 106
167, 168 Rota, Ettore, 63, 148
republicanism Roth, Jack J., 146
see Carducci, Giosué; Crispi, Rouanet, Sérgio P., 146
Francesco; Mazzini, Giuseppe Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 18, 64, 89,
Resistance, Italian (1943–45), 103, 124, 151, 155
105, 106, 108, 111, 170 Ruffini, Francesco, 151
revolution Rusconi, Gian Enrico, 116, 172
American, 171, 172 Russo, Luigi, 163
French, 24, 124, 130, 132, 133, 147,
171, 172 Sabbatucci, Giovanni, 151
see also Mazzini, Giuseppe Saffi, Aurelio, 28, 140
Reynaud, Jean, 134 Saint-Simonianism
Riall, Lucy, 115, 174, 175 doctrine, 15, 16, 128, 130
Ricci, Berto, 156 influence on Mazzini, 15, 16, 22, 24,
Richter, Mario, 147 27, 64, 89, 94, 128, 134, 148
Ridolfi, Maurizio, 171, 172 Salandra, Antonio, 72
Ridolfi, Roberto, 147 Salvatorelli, Luigi, 3, 168, 169, 170
Risorgimento as interpreter of Mazzini, 103–6,
interpretations of, 96, 100, 101, 102, 107, 110, 111, 122, 168, 169, 171
103–4, 108, 114, 115, 166, 167, Salvemini, Gaetano, 2, 4, 6, 37, 51, 84,
168, 169, 170 86, 90, 128, 132, 143, 148, 149,
new Risorgimento, invoked by 159, 166
Papini, 59 analysis of Mazzini’s thought, 20–1,
ritual 51, 56, 64–5, 119, 148
civic, 108, 173 defines it “theocracy,” 64, 66,
see also Mazzini, Giuseppe 105, 110, 119, 158
Roberts, David D., 154, 177 as interpreter of Mazzini, 60–7, 86,
Rocco, Alfredo, 78, 154 90, 98, 99, 103, 104, 110, 119,
Rome 122, 158, 161, 165, 167
ancient, 40 San Marino, republic, 42, 143
fascist, 74, 118 Santarelli, Enzo, 146, 155
myth of Third Rome, 33, 38, 65, 73, Sarti, Roland, 128
147, 149 Sasso, Gennaro, 160
INDEX 205
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
Trentin, Silvio, 119, 177 Volpe, Gioacchino, 70, 150, 151

Treves, Claudio, 51, 147, 148 Vossler, Otto, 126, 146
Treves, Renato, 128
Tulard, Jean, 123 Walicki, Andrzej, 128
Turati, Filippo, 99 war
Turi, Gabriele, 160, 170 First world war, 60, 65, 65, 75,
78, 79, 84, 88, 89, 109, 150, 151,
Unamuno, Miguel de, 147 159
Unione Mazziniana, 176 Mazzini’s presence in, 69–73,
Unità, L’, 65, 85 81–2, 89, 101, 109, 116, 158,
Urbinati, Nadia, 164, 174 159, 167, 168
Second world war, 1–2, 106, 107,
Vacca, Giuseppe, 138 108, 156
Vajna, Eugenio, 69, 70, 151 Washington, George, 6, 42, 123
Valiani, Leo, 168 Weber, Max, 133
Ventotene, Manifesto (1944), 171 Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, 130, 132
Venturi, Franco, 100, 127, 132, 166 White, Jessie. See Mario, Jessie
Verucci, Guido, 128, 163 White
Vetter, Cesare, 136 Willaime, Jean Paul, 172
Vico, Giambattista, 55, 57, 88, 91, 145, Wistrich, Robert S., 123
160 words
Victor Emanuel II (king of Italy), 29, see Mazzini, Giuseppe
33, 49, 54, 61
Victor Emanuel III (king of Italy), 70, Zama, Piero, 142
142 Zanotti-Bianco, Umberto, 66–7, 149,
Vidalenc, Jean, 133 165, 166
Viroli, Maurizio, 172 Zucàro, Domenico, 170
Vivarelli, Roberto, 124, 150, 176 Zuccarini, Oliviero, 167, 168
Voce, La, journal, 118, 124, 146, 152, 176 Zunino, Pier Giorgio, 121

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GIUSEPPE MAZZINI

AND THE ORIGINS

REBECCA WEST JOSEPHINE GATTUSO HENDIN

Simon Levis Sullam

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

1. Mazzini, Giuseppe, 1805–1872—Political and social views.

Introduction: The Appropriation of Mazzini’s Thought and

D uring the course of my research I have on numerous occasions dis-

“ ‘Dio e il Popolo’: La rivoluzione religiosa di Giuseppe Mazzini,” in Il

The Appropriation of Mazzini’s

The Apostle in Shreds

Often, upon the publication of the hundred-odd volumes of the

On October 14, 1943, in the tragic season of the Italian Social

intuitions.”3 One year later, during another hearing at Palazzo

in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, leading to the

one of the leading representatives and theorizers of Risorgimento

Mazzini the Fascist and Mazzini the Antifascist

Certainly, the theoretical indefiniteness and formulaic nature of

ideological appropriation (on the fascist side) and symbolic appropria-

critique of the French Revolution, stressing duties over rights; and

heroes, founding fathers, and saviours of the nation. As such, they

Marked and conditioned by the context of the events in which it

Likewise, Mazzini’s myth in Italy crystallized the phantoms, as

Who would have imagined to see Mazzini crossing the life of

Thinking back about that encounter on the Gotthard, we might ask

of their own countries. In the case of Italy, analyzing the genesis of

Giuseppe Mazzini and the

The Duties of Rising Italy

the faith of the individual. Duty is the common collective faith.

the preservation of God’s order, beyond which there is nothing to

often mentioned term (207 times), followed by “humanity” (150),

Education, I have said, and my whole doctrine is included and

Even “democracy”—which in Duties is not given much room in

The problem whose solution we seek is an educational problem: it is the

The pages of Duties of Man may therefore be seen to condense

The Formation of Mazzini’s Thought

What proved crucial for the formation of the religious dimension

political programs by Polish émigrés in France. 26 Particularly

[Paroles] which you have seen—indeed, it is its source in a way, since

God and Nation

The defining elements of Mazzini’s religion of the nation and of his

Right from the start, then, Mazzini’s definition of nation—which is

In his 1796 Considération sur la France De Maistre had written:

The Savoyard thinker had derived his concept of “mission” from

Une nationalité est une pensée commune—un principe commun—un

(Nationality is a common thought—a common principle—a common

As we shall, among the scholars of Mazzini Gaetano Salvemini

primary “basis of belief ” of Mazzini’s thought, ultimately describing

A New Political Style

A footnote to Mazzini’s text Foi et Avenir59 provides an important

Ceci n’est pas un exposé de doctrine, ce sont des points de croyances

The reference made to an “exposé de doctrine” suggests that what

Meanwhile, everything that can show we are at work, everything that

We need the masses now: we need to find a word powerful enough

Building on the intuitions and discoveries he had presented in

reflection not so much on thought as on “political style.” According

Religion seizes upon [the Thought of the epoch], relinks it to heaven,

[ . . . ] The highest condition of art is when it interrogates the Thought

The parallel drawn between religion and art—which “seizes upon

Followers and Critics: Pisacane, Mario, Crispi

In the final chapter of his posthumously published work La

Farini laid particular stress on the instability, inconsistency, and

Farini’s writings also reflect his profound political disagreement with