On 17 March our neighbouring country, Italy, will commemorate the 162nd anniversary since its proclamation as a united nation. This was the result of a series of socio-political movements and conflicts in the XIX century on the peninsula otherwise known as the Risorgimento. Around the same time south of Italy, on our island of Malta, a nationalistically conscious movement was entering mainstream politics. Due to the historical, geographical and cultural ties Malta has with Italy, it was only natural that the Risorgimento in Italy would echo in the local nationalist movement.
What exactly was this echo one might ask?
Between 1804 and 1860, a group of Italian nationalists found themselves exiled in Malta. These were writers, journalists and political agents who transformed the written word into a patriotic armament. Among these we find Raffaele Poerio, Gabriele Rossetti, Michele Carascosa, Guglielmo Finotti, Camillo Mapei, Tomaso and Ifigenia Zauli Sajani, Francesco Orioli, Lorenzo Borsini, Luigi Settembrini, Giuseppe Regaldi, Nicola Fabrizi and many others. These individuals not only contributed to the Italian Risorgimento movement but also spread in Malta the sensibilities that the island also had to find. Hence here we may find the birth of modern nationalism in Malta.
In 1848 Nicola Fabrizi founded the Circolo Maltese, which was a combined Maltese-Italian force. This community was immediately identified as a threat to the established order on the island who also accused them of identifying the Italian cause with the Maltese one. In around 1889, a former Risorgimento exile in Malta, Francesco Crispi enacted a law as Premier of Italy which allowed Maltese to Italian nationality the right to vote as well as the right of employment, a sort of "thank you" to his hosts. Crispi was expelled from the island by the British out of fear that he was spreading nationalist ideals to the locals.
A group of Maltese elite were also influenced by the ideas of one of the protagonists of the Risorgimento, Giuseppe Mazzini, who would utter sentiments such as "o my brothers, love your Country! Our Country is our Home, a house God has given us, placing therein a numerous family that loves us, and whom we love; a family with whom we sympathise more readily and whom we understand more quickly than we do others; and which from its being centred round a given spot, and from the homogeneous nature of its elements, is adapted to a special branch of activity. Our Country is our common workshop ... the fulcrum of the lever we have to wield for the common good ... Before men can associate with the nations of which Humanity is composed, they must have a national existence". No doubt these particular Maltese elites shared these sentiments and wished to proclaim the first moves towards liberal democracy without falling foul with the Catholic Church as some Italian nationalists did and ended up in exile, a number of which here in Malta.
One can note the influence of such people through what Herbert Ganado later wrote about them in the 20th century where he describes the exiled Italian nationalists as "people who were combatting and suffering exile for the political liberties of their country, who necessarily influenced our forefathers so that they too fight in order to gain political liberties from the British colonial government".
In 1880 a dissenting Anti-Riformista party was formed whose first paper was called Il Diritto di Malta, stressing the right of the Maltese to oppose that which the British were proposing. This new party considered Malta in her Latin Mediterranean identity rather than as a colonial fortress of a foreign power. Anti-assimilationist nationalism was born through deriding the imperialist rhetoric of spreading civilisation and liberty as hypocritical. This has echoes of Mazzini who despised hypocrisy and lauded sincerity and integrity as virtues to be upheld.
Furthermore, we can also see the typical Mazzinian discourse in what the new Maltese party's leader Fortunato Mizzi had said about the people who, according to him, "were not governed by might but through affection: where the former supplanted the latter, slaves may be had but not subjects - slaves in whose heart there rankles a hate against their oppressors, whose yoke they endure only so long as they want the strength and the opportunity to shake it off".
Fortunato's son, Enrico Mizzi set up a youth organisation in Valletta and called it La Giovane Malta in 1901, again we see echoes of Mazzini's La Giovane Italia. The main ideological protagonists were Arturo Mercieca and Fortunato Mizzi. In continuation, Enrico Mizzi saw Italy and the concept of Italianita' as a gateway to Europe and Latin Civilisation. The idea was that the language which reminded Europe that Malta was a civilised Latin country was the Italian language and that without it the British coloniser would start to view the Maltese on par with third world countries and without a rich history. This was a sentiment which had and still has a lot of truth in it. Therefore, the defenders of the traditional official language of Malta, Italian, were the ones labelled as nationalists as they sought to conserve the country's cultural justification for nationhood which the British wanted to eliminate through the introduction of English. Hence an issue which began as a linguistic problem, because respect towards the language of a country is a characteristic of Romanticist and Risorgimental thought, quickly transformed into the resistance of the colonised against the coloniser.
The whole notion of Patria was predicated on Risorgimento ideals. In fact the motto of the nationalists in Malta was Religio et Patria, meaning Religion and Homeland, which was most probably inspired by Mazzini's Dio e Popolo. The Catholic nature of the local nationalist movement however may put it closer to the ideas of another Risorgimento figure, Vincenzo Gioberti. Gioberti, unlike Mazzini, did not advocate for a Republican Italy, rather he proposed a confederate Italy with the Pope as its head, as for him the Italy of the Renaissance spearheaded by the Pope served as an inspiration. In fact, the Mazzis in Malta had once referred to the Maltese people as, Giobertiani, probably an allusion to their fidelity to the Church and their neo-Guelphist tendencies. Unlike the nationalists of Italy, most nationalists in Malta had preferred not to enter into masonic lodges out of allegiance to the Catholic Church. In fact, nationalist thought in Malta was many times a hybrid between the Catholic ideals as expressed in Pope Leo XIII's Encyclical Rerum Novarum and Mazzinian principles of liberty and social justice, however the Christian ideal, as expressed by the Catholic hierarchy, took supremacy.
Ultimately it was this nationalism which began in the 19th century which would eventually lead to Malta obtaining her self-government in 1921 and eventually Independence in 1964.
To conclude, it may be said that Maltese nationalism was a style of nationalism derived from the principles of the Risorgimento but applied to its own socio-political context. It was liberal in the political sense, yet it sought to preserve Maltese traditions. In Malta, nationalists needed the Church on their side both for political and ideological reasons. Maltese nationalism was Roman Catholic but often butted heads with the Curia on political issues. It emphasised our Italic nature because of our cultural and geographic proximity to Sicily, our entry point into Europe.
I will end with a quote from the patriot Vincenzo Maria Pellegrini: "What is Nationalism?...Nationalism is a sacred calling because it looks after and has as its sole principle the redemption of the Patria and it's well-being."