On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Italy’s unification in 1861, the Italian ambassador to Malta Luigi Marras and university rector Juanito Camilleri hosted a top level symposium last Monday featuring five eminent speakers from Paris, Vienna, Perugia, Cambridge and Valletta. Three resident ambassadors − Daniel Rondeau of France, Caroline Gudenus of Austria, and Louise Stanton of Britain, attended. The guest professors assessed the impact that Italy’s unification had had on relations with the rest of Europe and beyond. One of the speakers, Professor HENRY FRENDO, who recently edited a two-volume work entitled “The European Mind: Narrative and Identity”, takes a critical look at the conclusions reached
Italian unification has been commemorated in Italy and indeed worldwide. Some weeks ago I attended one such occasion − a concert of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony at the Teatro Municipale in Reggio Calabria, with the Italian colours, a backdrop to the orchestra, lighting up the stage. Last Monday it was the turn of our university’s Aula Magna in Valletta, packed to capacity, to assist at a memorable thought-provoking event on this historic occasion. Five different but complementary perspectives of the unification were offered.
The making of Italy
Very briefly, after a series of revolts and a foiled attempt to create a Roman republic in 1848-1849, Italy became a unified nation state through the “Risorgimento” movement inspired and led in various ways mainly by Mazzini, Garibaldi and Cavour between 1859 and 1871. Through Franco-Piedmontese connivance in a war with Austria, there was first the addition of Lombardy to Piedmont – alias the Kingdom of Sardinia – followed by revolutionary assemblies in Tuscany, Parma, Modena and Romagna, which opted for similar unifications. In 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi, a charismatic adventurer and fighter revered for his emancipatory exploits in Latin America no less than on the Italian peninsula, landed his famed “thousand” red shirts in Sicily and with Napoleonic flair marshalled his growing forces to take Naples. In the name of Italian unification, Garibaldi conceded these newly liberated territories to Cavour, whereby Italy was declared a united nation-state under the “Sardinian” king Vittorio Emmanuele II in 1861. After Austria’s defeat at Prussia’s hands in 1866, Venetia was added and, when Prussia beat France in 1870, Rome, which French troops had “defended”. Rome thus became the new Italy’s capital (a state the papacy would not recognise until 1929). This skeletal overview belies many implications, turns of event and consequences, which are open to varying insights and interpretations from different perspectives.
The Italian
perspective
PROF. ROMANO
UGOLINI (Perugia)
Whereas after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1814 the “Great Powers” in Paris and Vienna had sought largely to rehabilitate the monarchical, dynastic and territorial status quo ante, national movements for independence on the continent, starting in Greece and Belgium, had made “the principle of nationality” a new factor to consider in the maintenance of a European equilibrium, Professor Ugolini stressed. The Italian Risorgimento epitomised this.
Following the refusal by Habsburg Emperor Francis Joseph and Pope Pius IX of an Anglo-Russian initiative for a congress to try and solve “the Italian question”, a series of wars ensued, with a French eye to supplanting Austrian power in Italy, at the same time that Prussia flexed its muscles at both Austria’s and France’s expense. Piedmont made the most of the spoils until Garibaldi’s push, starting in May 1860, released the Bourbon-ruled Kingdom of the Two Sicilies to the insurgents. The Generale was admired as well as feared, particularly by Cavour and Victor Emmanuel II lest he displace them from their own “northern” seats of power. Garibaldi was clever and patriotic enough to avoid that.
The principle of nationality, thus triumphant in an internal equilibrium between tradition and modernity, with Italy emerging as a secular and liberal but constitutional and monarchical state, it inspired other unifications whereby cultural identity resulted in sovereign statehood.
THE Austrian perspective
PROF. ANDREAS GOTTSMANN (Vienna)
According to this view, Austria was not unduly concerned by the proclamation of a Kingdom of Italy to its south, as relations with Piedmont had been strained since 1857 when, during a visit to Milan, Francis Joseph had been met by tirades of anti-Austrian press abuse and vilification, which even called for his assassination.
Like France a Catholic country, Austria was more concerned with retaining cordial diplomatic relations with the Holy See than bothering unduly with this newly proclaimed State, the successful and viable survival of which most Austrians were intensely sceptical. It was the continued French military presence in Rome, purportedly to protect the Pope that annoyed Austria more. The Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Antonelli, objected to any replacement of French troops by Piedmontese ones and rejoiced, Prof. Gottsmann noted, when Austria initially determined not to recognize the new Italian state. Until the Prussian-Austrian war of 1866, the Prussian ambassador there represented Austrian diplomatic interests in Piedmont; afterwards his role was taken by the Belgian ambassador. After its defeat in 1866, Austria entered into a peace agreement with Italy, extending cultural and scientific cooperation, and indeed undertaking, at least formally, “to throw a veil over the past”.
These two historically rather hostile neighbours became “amici nemici”, as it were. Unresolved questions relating to delineation of frontiers, particularly the Trentino, were kept off the boil even if they simmered still. It seems that Austrian politicians did not fully take in the potential impact of the Risorgimento on other incipient nationalisms within their empire. (Most strident of all was the Hungarian one, led by Louis Kossuth, a Mazzinian kindred spirit and fellow traveller.) Man would no longer be a subject but a citizen, hence reinforcing the state of right. Not patriotism and national pride but the revolutionary ideology of the likes of Mazzini and Kossuth were the main enemies of the Habsburg state. Hence a willingness to compromise with the Italian state, where indeed Garibaldini and Mazziniani, republican and anticlerical militants, came to be seen as enemies of the state.
Differences however persisted. Whereas Francis Joseph was emperor “by the grace of God”, Victor Emmanuel was king “by the will of the nation”. Contrary to a Risorgimento-driven historiography, in time mutual geo-strategic interests would prevail, Italian anti-Austrian sentiments being more literary than political.
The French perspective
Prof. Giles
Pecout (Paris)
The Risorgimento, Professor Pecout held, was “an international adventure not just an Italian one”. There was a patriotic dimension as well as a universal one. Photography at the 1856 Congress of Paris after the Crimean War, in which Cavour’s Piedmont had participated on the Anglo-French side, showed how diplomacy began to make use of publicity. Popular manifestations in Italy exerted a veritable hegemony on French public opinion. Leading authors such as Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo were influenced, as was popular song. The refrain of Charles Gides “La Sicilienne” ran thus: “alle armi popoli forti!” (But surely an echo, too, of the Enlightenment and of French Revolution itself, harbinger of the doctrine of popular sovereignty, and indeed of the Marseillaise – “aux armes, citoyennes”.)
What might be called the Risorgimento spirit made people – including Sardinians, Tuscans, and Sicilians − empathise with and contribute to similar liberation movements, from Greece to Portugal. Mediterranean islands – Corfu Malta, Jerba – no less than Bastia and Athens, Geneva and London and Paris, were “laboratories of action”. Cavour repeatedly visited London and more so Paris; the poet Lamartine offered to help Carlo Alberto.
The bloody battles at Magenta and Solferino, near Milan, in 1859, in which the Austrians had been defeated, were widely known in France, as was the consequent cession of Nice and Savoy to France in return for her (albeit interrupted) help. It was in Paris a year earlier that the Mazzinian conspirator Felice Orsini, a member of Giovine Italia, had very nearly assassinated Napoleon III for having suppressed the Roman Republic (in which Mazzini was one of the triumvirs) in 1849. This “papist” French intervention also constituted a problem for French public opinion, putting French diplomacy into question.
In thus inspiring patriotic pride and self-identity, the Risorgimento also “invented a new national heroism”, best personified in Garibaldi. Its resonance in France was remarkable. Truly and mythologically, the Risorgimento was as much Italian as it was European. Italian unification was “an aspect of “globalisation”.
The British perspective
PROF EUGENIO
BIAGINI (Cambridge)
Italy’s consolidation was a blessing for Gladstone and Palmerston, argued Professor Biagini, who has been lecturing at the University of Cambridge for 25 years and is a well-published author on British and Irish history. It was believed that there could be no justice without freedom. There was no stability without liberty; nor therefore, without these factors, could there be economic progress. As a leading military and commercial power, Britain, especially the Liberals, had an interest in fostering the Risorgimento’s progress and success. They would much rather see British influence in a new Italy than a French or Austrian one.
Britain was also much concerned about the state of the Church in Ireland, which harboured a Protestant minority of some 25 per cent. These practically all supported Garibaldi, as did many others in England. Much the same was the case in the USA, where Protestants barracked for Garibaldi, seeing the Risorgimento as a continuation of their own War of Independence.
Until 1861 Mazzini, a nationalist republican unifier, was a hero to Americans but this changed when the civil war erupted between North and South. On the whole, Italians supported the United States of America, even sending munitions to Washington, with Garibaldi as some kind of recruiting agent.
The general view in Britain was that political liberation would lead to economic progress. (And most Catholic Irish would have agreed.) The English were also concerned about the protection of rights of religious minorities; there were some Protestants also in Italy.
Anti-Catholicism having been integral to English nationalism for centuries, Garibaldi’s anti-papist and indeed anti-Catholic stance was a factor that enhanced his tremendous popularity in England, as was amply made plain during his visit in 1864.
The Maltese perspective
PROF. HENRY FRENDO (Valletta)
I outlined an internal contradiction in the impact that Italian unification had on Anglo-Italian relations with regard to Malta, which as we know was the British Empire’s main naval station in the Mediterranean, a stone’s throw away from the Italian peninsula. Given the geographical proximity and the British liberal approach to the Risorgimento, scores of Italian exiles, mostly Mazzinians, converged on Malta as refugees but also as agitators and militant insurgents. These included some leading figures of the Risorgimento – Nicola Fabrizi, Adriano Lemme, Ruggero Settimo, Francesco Crispi, etc. Italian having been Malta’s language of communication in public affairs at least since the 15th century, Bishop Scicluna warned his faithful to beware these Italians − republicans, anti-clericals especially anti-Jesuits, Freemasons – particularly as they spoke “your language”. But Malta, a British colonial possession aspiring to autonomy, had her own elite who were in direct contact with several exiles and empathized with their fight for freedom from despotism and occupation. From Gabriele Rossetti in the 1820s to Garibaldi himself in the 1860s, such a movement could not but have an impact on Maltese liberals and nationalists culturally as well as politically, if not perhaps ideologically.
Once Italy became a unified nation-state in 1870 however, Britain became more wary of the Maltese Italian-rooted spiritual-cultural patrimony which it began to associate with Italia Irredenta – wrongly, because this was North not South directed at that time.
Thus, while the Risorgimento gave an impetus to the Italianate cultural and political presence and influence in Malta, as expressed in the formation of a so-called “pro-Italian” nationalist party in the late 1870s, at the same time and for that reason it also led to a policy of systematic Anglicisation, which in turn provoked further resistance. Until 1901, when Anglo-Italian relations were still good, and in deference to them, following sustained Italian indignation − from Ricciotti Garibaldi to the king himself − Britain withdrew its deadline to replace Italian by English in the courts and everywhere else in Maltese life.
By the mid-1930s, it was again Anglo-Italian relations which determined and intensified British assimilationist drives in Malta, this time however in an opposite direction. As my forthcoming volume Europe and Empire: Culture, Politics and Identity in Malta and the Mediterranean (c. 900 pp) being launched by Midsea in October will show, the wished-for metamorphosis in the traditional Maltese patrimony − from the Italian/Mediterranean nexus to the British/Imperial one - had not much of an escape route this time. Perceptions as to whose “Mare Nostrum” ours was conflicted badly. Anglo-Italian relations were at their worst ever, due to British opposition to Italian expansion especially in Ethiopia, so the opportunity to get rid of Italian and everyone and everything associated with it was grabbed with both hands through a variety of repressive measures. Very briefly, the Italian influence, which had helped enkindle Maltese anti-colonial nationalism, was now the instrument for its attempted elimination. English with its growing functional utility generally took over, Maltese with British support becoming better entrenched as the vernacular and “national” language.
As if that were not enough, the first country to be attacked by Mussolini on entering the war on Germany’s side in June 1940 was none other than Malta – the first bombs ever to fall on us from the air were Italian ones.
Fences started being mended after the war until Italo-Maltese relations once again became friendly, even close, in the 1960s; these only risk being strained today mainly by the phenomenon of mass illegal immigration to southern Europe especially through Libya, itself an Italian colony from 1911 to 1943, in spite of a common EU membership.
Some notable Italian strains in Maltese attachments and sentiments from religion to television, from music to football, nevertheless remain pronounced. The impressive response to this very event last Monday must be indicative of a residual interest and affinity.