Geographies of Federalism during the Italian Risorgimento, 1796–1900 3030961168, 9783030961169

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Geographies of Federalism during the Italian Risorgimento, 1796–1900 f e de r ico f e r r e t t i

Geographies of Federalism during the Italian Risorgimento, 1796–1900 “Ferretti pushes the debate about the radical-democratic strands in Italian Unification (the Risorgimento) beyond the usual oppositions -republicanism v. socialism, centralism v. federalism - to consider how much the contentions of the time extended to consideration of authoritarianism, militarism, and colonialism rather than just administrative arrangements per se. In taking a fundamentally geographical approach to the debate, Ferretti not only provides a new perspective on the radical impulses in the Risorgimento but also contributes to the contemporary rethinking of nation-statehood, territorial sovereignty, and the possibilities of transnational federalism. Perhaps most importantly, this book shows that the form which Italian unification took was never a foregone conclusion. There is a broader lesson here.” —John Agnew, Professor of Geography, University of California Los Angeles, USA “This monograph was long overdue. Supported by an outstanding research, Ferretti’s highly topical publication successfully challenges dominant historiography on the outcome of the struggle for the Italian unification. It brings back to light the alternative ideas of nation promoted by federalist radicals during the Risorgimento, uncovering their anti-authoritarian and anti-colonial inspiration and their long-lasting influence on the subsequent development of libertarian and socialist thought. This groundbreaking work opens the door to a wide range of new paths of research on the history of Risorgimento and of nationalism more in general.” —Pietro di Paola, Modern History, Lincoln University, UK

Federico Ferretti

Geographies of Federalism during the Italian Risorgimento, 1796–1900

Federico Ferretti University of Bologna Bologna, Italy

ISBN 978-3-030-96116-9 ISBN 978-3-030-96117-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96117-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

I would first like to thank all those who shared with me tasty anecdotes on Risorgimento’s and International’s survivals in the memory of popular radicalism in Italy, especially Gianandrea Ferrari and the regretted Elio ‘Loré’ Secchiari (1933–2009), together with all the past and present goers of the FAI Malatesta Circle, located in such a magic place like Gragnana, where some of the stories that I tell in this book appear always living in popular songs and tales. I also thank historians and archivists of anarchism and early radicalism with whom I had fruitful conversations and exchanges of documents, especially Massimo Ortalli, Gianpiero Landi, Fiamma Chessa, Claudio Mazzolani, Franco Schirone and Giorgio Sacchetti. For inspiring conversations on these matters, special thanks to my Ireland-based friends Davide Turcato and José Antonio Gutiérrez and to Gaetano Bucci. I am also ideally indebted to two regretted scholars, Marc Vuilleumier (1930–2021), for his amazing anecdotes on the International, and Renato Risaliti (1935–2020). While alas, I did not have the time to meet personally this latter, his published translations of some previously lost Lev Meˇcnikov’s recollections helped me in my work on the ‘Tuscan Connection’. Great thanks to all the archivists who helped me to access collections in pandemic times, and especially Alessandra Pierattini (Forteguerriana Library), Maddalena Taglioli (Domus Mazziniana), Fabrizio Alberti (Central Museum of Risorgimento), Katia Cestelli and Silvia Nerucci (Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati) among several others whose names I could not note. Last but not least, many thanks to the v

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

anonymous referees for Palgrave Macmillan for their precious insights to improve my text, and to the editors Lucy Kidwell and Supraja Ganesh for their help and kindness during the editorial process.

Contents

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Introduction: Decolonial Imagination and Social Justice in Radical Risorgimento Print Sources Risorgimento Historiography and Plural Notions of Freedom For Freedom and Against Domination: Anarchism and Republicanism On Historiography: The Numerous Uses of Risorgimento Print Sources The Geographers’ Connection, and the ‘Right of Peoples’ Carlo Cattaneo, and Active Geographies A Federalist, Anticolonial and Antiracist Geography More-Than-Geographical Connections Three Maps, and Three Different Ways to Invent Italy Print Sources The Lombard Connection The 1848 Turn: Revolution! Exile Networking and Federalist Conscientisation Against the Organisation of a Kingdom (and of an Empire) Print Sources

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CONTENTS

The Tuscan Connection European Federalism Versus Monarchist Annexations A Federalist and ‘Social’ Journal in Florence A New Europe and an (Internal and External) Anti-colonialist Thought The ‘Inversion of the Formula’ Between Popular Garibaldianism and Libertarian Socialism Bakunin, and the International Brotherhood in Florence Print Sources

129 129 139

The Southern Connection From 1796 to 1849: The Art of Making Barricades (and Republics) Carlo Pisacane, the Antimilitarist Colonel What Pisacane Effectively Said The Thousand, and Some of Them Southern Question and Internal Colonialism International Workingmen’s Risorgimento Print Sources

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Heretic Connections, and the Other Garibaldians Republicans, Guerrillas and Subversives Angelo Umiltà and the United States of Europe Ghisleri, the Last of Risorgimento Geographers Print Sources

255 255 263 276 284

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Conclusion: Decolonising Europe, or the Subversive Roots of European Federalism Bibliography

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Index

150 164 187 194

199 208 216 230 233 240 250

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Archives and Acronyms

Italy ASF BCA BNCF BSG CLR DM FGM MCRR MRGB MRM SBI

Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Prefettura del Dipartimento Fiorentino (Archivio Segreto 1857–1864). Bologna, Biblioteca Comunale dell’Archiginnasio, Gabinetto dei Manoscritti, Saffi Papers; Book Collection. Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Gabinetto Vieusseux; Periodicals Reading Room. Pistoia, Biblioteca San Giorgio, Book Collections. Ravenna, Biblioteca Classense, Lucio Gambi Collection. Pisa, Domus Mazziniana, Dolfi Collection; Ghisleri Collection. Pistoia, Biblioteca Forteguerriana, Giuseppe Mazzoni Collection. Rome, Museo Centrale del Risorgimento, Correspondence Folders. Bologna, Museo del Risorgimento, Book Collection. Milan, Museo del Risorgimento, Cattaneo, Ferrari and Ghisleri Collections. Siena, Biblioteca degli Intronati, Periodicals.

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Switzerland AEN BGE BPUN ZZH

Neuchâtel, Archives de l’Etat de Neuchâtel, Angelo Umiltà Collection; University Archives, Dossiers des Professeurs. Geneva, Bibliothèque de Genève, Manuscripts; Book Collection. Neuchâtel, Bibliothèque publique et universitaire de Neuchâtel, Fonds de la Société de Géographie; Book collections. Zürich, Zentralbibliothek, Handschriftenabteilung, Gustav Vogt Papers.

Netherlands IISH

Amsterdam, International Institute of Social History; Fabbri Papers.

France BNF

Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits Occidentaux, Nouvelles Acquisitions Françaises.

Russia GARF

Moscow, State Archive of the Russian Federation [Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii], fondy P-6753, Nadjejda Vladimirovna Konceskaja.

Main Journal Collections NE LG

La Nuova Europa (Florence 1861–63). Libertà e Giustizia (Naples 1867).

ARCHIVES AND ACRONYMS

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Online Resources (Non-Exhaustive List) Milan Braidense National Library, Emeroteca Virtuale, http://emerot eca.braidense.it/ SEI—Scritti Editi e Inediti di Giuseppe Mazzini, https://www.associazi onemazziniana.it/giuseppe-mazzini/ Internet Culturale, https://www.internetculturale.it/ Google Books (e-books), https://books.google.it/ Liber Liber, https://www.liberliber.it/ Gallica, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ Hathi Trust, https://www.hathitrust.org/ Archive.org, https://archive.org/

Note on Sources, Bibliography and Citations This book does not pretend to any exhaustivity as for consulted sources or quoted literature, given the enormous amount of materials, including still unexplored archives, which exists on Risorgimento geographies and histories. It just aims at leading readers to the main resources which can help understanding the arguments that are developed in the book. Quotes from original sources and literature in Italian, French and Spanish were translated into English by the author.

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1

Fig. 1.2 Fig. 1.3 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2

Fig. 3.3

Fig. 3.4

Fig. 3.5

Rome: Vittoriano and Altare della Patria—The symbol of monarchist, colonialist and militarist Risorgimento [author’s photo, 5 May 2021] Mazzini’s statue in the central square of Colonnata (MS) [author’s photo, 31 July 2021] Anarchist marble plaque in the central square of Colonnata (MS) [author’s photo, 31 July 2021] F. Orsini, Geografia militare della penisola italiana—Cover Image La geografia a colpo d’occhio, ossia primarie nozioni di geografia, storia e statistica esposta in 16 tavole. Milan, F. Corbetta, 1853, Table 16 [C. Cattaneo], Mappa di popolazione della Lombardia. Il Politecnico: repertorio mensile di studi applicati alla prosperità e cultura (1839 gen, I, 1) [G. Ferrari], Carta figurativa delle guerre municipali d’Italia secondo la storia delle rivoluzioni guelfe e ghibelline [Milan, Editori del Politecnico, 1860] Detail of Fig. 3.4: the Longobard kingdom and its unmaking

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Decolonial Imagination and Social Justice in Radical Risorgimento

In Italian historiography, the memory of the historical period called Risorgimento has been and still remains incredibly contentious. Usually claimed by monarchist, fascist, antifascist and later democratic/constitutional narrations after 1945, and recently attacked by religious integralists, Risorgimento has been rarely valorised as an inspiration to think differently the idea of nation. For most of the mainstream narratives, in Italy, Risorgimento is still embodied in Fig. 1.1, representing the Vittoriano in Rome, a complex which includes a praiseworthy institution such as the Central Institute and Museum for the History of Risorgimento. Yet, that place is the usual scenario for militaristic celebrations taking place around the Altare della Patria such as the expensive aviation performances of the Frecce Tricolori. It is puzzling that the Italian Republic still confers the sacrality of one of its most important hauts-lieux to a complex that was built to celebrate a king, Vittorio Emanuele II, belonging to a royal family whose members were (although temporarily) banished from Italy in 1948 due to their complicity with fascism and responsibilities in matters such as the disaster of the Second World War and the infamous Racial Laws. One may add to this list the Italian colonial crimes in Libya and Eastern Africa, the First World War slaughters and the repression of workers’ movements including the famous massacre of 1898 in Milan. Yet, this family claimed the merit of having ‘unified’ Italy. What follows reinforces the views of all those who © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Ferretti, Geographies of Federalism during the Italian Risorgimento, 1796–1900, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96117-6_1

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Fig. 1.1 Rome: Vittoriano and Altare della Patria—The symbol of monarchist, colonialist and militarist Risorgimento [author’s photo, 5 May 2021]

have variously noted how partial and flawed these monarchist, militaristic, patriotic and unitary interpretations of Risorgimento were. Alternative visions of Risorgimento faced numerous challenges in making their way through historiography and society. Some new interpretative lenses were offered by Marxist critics during the twentieth century. It was especially the case with authors such as Antonio Gramsci and with the post-war political appropriations of the figure of Giuseppe Garibaldi by the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano, that entitled Garibaldi its partisan brigades during the 1943–1945 Resistance) and the PSI (Partito Socialista Italiano), following a long tradition of radical reception of Garibaldi’s figure (Di Mino and Di Mino 2011) that has been investigated by recent scholarship (Acciai 2021). Yet, whatever periodisation one considers valid to incapsulate Risorgimento, it can be argued that until the early decades of the twentieth century, there was no proper ‘Marxist’ political organisation in Italy, and Italian society was very far

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from the ‘ideal’ conditions for revolution that were traditionally preached by classical Marxism. Therefore, Marxist appropriations of Risorgimento occurred abundantly a posteriori and appeared to be rather motivated by the classical pretention of many Marxists of incorporating everything which is ‘socialist’ under their ideology than to the acknowledgement of a real role played by this ideology at that moment. Against that, I contend that the Italian laboratory of the Long Risorgimento exemplary exposes how the variety of socialisms, communisms and radicalisms (often with a federalist and republican characterisation) cannot be included under any overarching or pre-packaged umbrella. I would first argue that to understand the complexity of this ‘Other Risorgimento’ (Moos 1992), alongside history, one needs to consider geography, to be understood as both a scholarly discipline and a method to address the ‘spatial turn’ of human and social sciences considering spaces, places and mobilities (of people and ideas) as actors rather than mere sceneries of history. The first geographical shift to understand the stories that I am going to tell is exemplified by Figs. 1.2 and 1.3, moving the spatial focus from the Italian capital to the square of a small mountain village between Tuscany and Liguria, Colonnata (Province of MassaCarrara), where a statue of Republican Risorgimento leader Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872) faces a marble plaque that the Italian Anarchist Federation (FAI) placed as a tribute to ‘The anarchist comrades killed on the road of freedom’. These two images visually represent the plural tensions between different views that existed in the field of so-called ‘democratic’ Risorgimento, the first between republicanism and (libertarian) socialism and the second between (roughly defined) national unification and federalism. These tensions are also represented by the double anniversary that 2022 represents for these traditions. Indeed, 2022 marks at the same time the 150th anniversary of Mazzini’s death and of the Rimini Congress celebrated by the Italian Federation of the International Workingmen Association (hereafter, ‘the International’) in August 1872. On an international plan, the Rimini Congress was an important premise to the creation of the so-called Anti-authoritarian International, which took place at the Congress of Saint-Imier, in Switzerland, that was celebrated one month later (Masini 1964; Vuilleumier 2012). Although the Italian internationalist youth had just broken with Mazzini due to his ungenerous condemnation of the 1871 Paris Commune (Masini 1978; Malatesta 1947) and the Genoa ‘Prophet’ was traditionally criticised by

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Fig. 1.2 Mazzini’s statue in the central square of Colonnata (MS) [author’s photo, 31 July 2021]

Risorgimento federalists for his tendencies towards centralisation, these events were connected and the respective legacies continued to intersect in the twentieth century, for instance, during the Antifascist Resistance. One of my contentions is that multifaceted works of Risorgimento federalists should not be understood as mere claims for administrative decentralisation, but as deep political critiques to authoritarianism,

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Fig. 1.3 Anarchist marble plaque in the central square of Colonnata (MS) [author’s photo, 31 July 2021]

militarism and (internal and external) colonialism as represented by centralistic political forces and by the militaristic unification that was performed by the Savoias’ Monarchy. Claims for the autonomy of territories started from the autonomy of individuals, that is civil liberties, being variously associated with incipient socialism. Most importantly, many of these federalists were neither localists nor nationalists, as they targeted a ‘federation of free peoples’ that stood at the origins of later European and world federalisms. While federalist Risorgimento is normally considered to be represented by figures such as Carlo Cattaneo (1801–1869), Giuseppe Ferrari (1811– 1876), Gabriele Rosa (1812–1897), Enrico Cernuschi (1821–1896), Giuseppe Montanelli (1813–1862) and some of their epigones such as Arcangelo Ghisleri (1855–1938), Alberto Mario (1825–1883), Jessie White–Mario (1832–1906) and Napoleone Colajanni (1847–1921), this work shows that federalist ideas decisively contaminated the action of

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anarchism’s and socialism’s forerunners such as Carlo Pisacane (1818– 1857), Giuseppe Fanelli (1827–1877), Luigi Castellazzo (1827–1890), Celso Ceretti (1844–1909) and more loosely Giuseppe Mazzoni (1808– 1880) and Giuseppe Dolfi (1818–1869) alongside many others. It is also necessary to consider the roles that some eminent foreigners played in informing Italian Risorgimento through their physical presence or their direct or indirect influence over the circuits of exiled activists and intellectuals. Among others, it was the case with Alexander Herzen (1812–1870), Mikhail Bakunin (1816–1876) and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809– 1865). The latter was at the same time a strong denier of the political unification of Italy and a strong mentor of Italian exiles in France after the 1848–1849 revolts. The transnational dimension of these stories is also apparent in the plural directions that political exile took, from Italy or to Italy. This was exemplified by exceptional figures such as Russian Lev Meˇcnikov/Léon Metchnikoff (1838–1888), who took part in some of the most inspiring pages of the Italian Risorgimento, and Reggio Emilia Garibaldian Angelo Umiltà (1831–1893), who remained exiled in Switzerland due to lingering political persecution for decades after the unification of Italy. Exile and political persecution likewise characterised the biographies of some twentieth-century antifascist intellectuals who dealt with the memories of radical and federalist Risorgimento. Among many others, I am especially interested in works by anarchists Camillo Berneri (1897–1937) and Luigi Fabbri (1877–1935), ‘liberal-socialists’ Gaetano Salvemini (1873–1957), Carlo Rosselli (1899–1937) and Nello Rosselli (1900–1937), and the extensors of the 1941 Ventotene Manifesto. Yet, nothing is easy in these stories: the first idea that radical and federalist Risorgimento challenges is the possibility of doing big generalisations. From all possible standpoints, it would be impossible to have only one narrative, and it is especially the case with the most common assumptions that Risorgimento was about Italy’s ‘unification’. My book reinforces views arguing that Risorgimento was also about plenty of other (more) interesting things, including social justice, personal freedom, territorial and individual autonomy, antimilitarism, anticolonialism and internationalism. Italian unification was only one of these aspects and, I would contend, not necessarily the principal. In this sense, I argue that, among the ongoing debates that the history of Risorgimento can currently nourish, one should include those on anticolonialism and decoloniality. In fact, Risorgimento was also a movement

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for national liberation from Empire (namely the Austrian one), and many of its exponents expressed international solidarity to the other causes of national liberation ongoing in Eastern Europe, and sometimes overseas. This means that the colonialist turn that the new monarchist Italian state took from the 1880s and 1890s was literally a betrayal of the ideals of most Risorgimento activists, whose views were far from being reduced to the mere nationalism, given also the widely acknowledged transnational dimension of all sides of Risorgimento republicanism including Mazzinians (Urbinati 1990; Furiozzi 2008; La Puma 2008; Mazzini 2009). It is no coincidence that one of the most eminent scholars of nationalism and nation-building, Benedict Anderson (1991) has produced key works on anticolonial imagination analysing the cosmopolitan and transnational worldwide connections between anarchism, republicanism and anticolonialism at the Age of Empire (Anderson 2007, 2015). Like Anderson, I make this connection considering an established literature on transnational anarchism discussing the diverse articulations between the values of activists’ local identities and their internationalist values inspiring several forms of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ (Levy 2010; Bantman and Altena 2015; Turcato 2015; Di Paola 2013). In the same vein, the story of national liberation in Italy chimes with current attempts to connect the notion of ‘Southern Thought’ as elaborated by Italian philosopher Franco Cassano with ideas of the ‘Pluriverse’ (Romano 2019) akin to the Latin American collective Modernity–Coloniality–Decoloniality (Mignolo and Escobar 2010) and to pluralistic ideas of decoloniality (Kothari et al. 2019). This approach connects different ‘Souths’ in their respective resistances to the Western and Northern ‘imperative of unbridled expansion [and] commodification and the technical pervasiveness of all aspects of life’ (Cassano 2012, 53). Cassano’s works suggest that the cultural roots of the Mediterranean civilisation should be identified with pluralism rather than with the ancient Roman imperialism that was often associated with discourses on Italian unification. While contemporary decolonial ideas on the ‘pluriverse’ suggest, following the Zapatistas, that different worlds can coexist (Escobar 2018), radical federalists including Cattaneo and Rosa were strong advocates of the multiple roots of ‘civilization’, which included cultures that were generally despised at that time, such as the ‘oriental’ ones (Rosa 1880; Cattaneo 1957). Thus, notions such as anticolonialism and decoloniality allow for a better understanding of what was actually libertarian, in the

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etymological sense of the term, in Risorgimento plural legacies, challenging common militarist and nationalist readings of that phenomenon, that was intrinsically characterised by ideas of revolt against oppression and of insubordination towards authority. This book is located at the transdisciplinary intersection between intellectual history, geography and political science. During the era of the ‘invention of tradition’ (Hobsbawm 1983), wide use was made of geographical imageries and metaphors to claim legitimacy for the identities of numerous nations (Hooson 1994). In Italy, the geographical invention of the nation took place mainly through the production of maps and statistics suggesting the unity of the peninsula in the years preceding its political unification (Ferretti 2014). Yet, also federalists and radicals used geographical metaphors to suggest new ways of organising Italian societies and territories. In the case of anarchism, geography was the scholarly discipline per excellence that was practiced by the main exponents of this movement such as Elisée Reclus and Peter Kropotkin (Ferretti 2018). While the Risorgimento roots of anarchism are acknowledged by respected historiography (Lehning 1974), Reclus indirectly contributed to Risorgimento, creating views of Italy that were in line with the socialist and federalist components of the national liberation movement (Ferretti 2009), and directly inspired the anticolonialism of federalist geographer Arcangelo Ghisleri (Ferretti 2016). This book extends the aforementioned literature by investigating more in depth the republican and radical components of the geographical circuits that were organised by a relatively moderate Risorgimento activist such as Annibale Ranuzzi (Ferretti 2014). Yet, within these networks, radical republican tendencies were well represented, especially in Tuscany and Lombardy, confirming the strategic political roles that geographical knowledges can play even when geographers’ political engagement seems more implicit than explicit (Farinelli 1992; Minca 2007). Methodologically, I draw upon ideas of the spatial turn in social sciences and on contextual and spatial-sensitive readings of the localisations and circulations of the production of knowledge (Livingstone 2003; Secord 2004). I especially stress the need for avoiding big generalisations, by investigating complex phenomena such as Risorgimento through a plural focus addressing the different standpoints that are constituted at each time by the situated stories of individuals, which allow highlighting dissidence and nonconformism rather than general trends and alleged

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norms fitting predetermined theories. Assuming the empirical lessons of Cattaneo, who argued that one should ‘stop treating individuals as blind instruments of a particular time or culture’ (Lacaita and Sabetti 2006, 22), one can avoid traps such as constructing abstract ‘schools’ of thinking, including the often evoked ‘centralist’ (Mazzinian) and ‘federalist’ (Cattanean) schools. Archives and correspondences suggest that several levels of porosity always existed between these republican fields, especially around notions of municipal autonomy, which renders difficult Manichean distinctions between centralists and federalists, as well as between filo-socialists and anti-socialists. Situated stories also serve to extend the work established long ago by the Annales historical school against the histoire-bataille (Febvre 1957). As recently noted by historian of anarchism Davide Turcato, the tendency of making the history of social movements by only addressing their most visible facts still exists and sometimes impedes to appreciate the daily construction of ideas and networks that are indispensable to make sense of these movements (Turcato 2015). Thus, to overtake histories of Risorgimento that still refer to battles, kings and generals, I consider paramount empirical research over the rich (published and unpublished) archives related to the authors mentioned above. This implies a special focus on correspondences, networks and the study of personal relations, considering key actors in their places and contexts but also in the relational dimensions of their (often collective) accomplishments. All these materials can help shedding light on the political positionings of the protagonists of federalist and radical tendencies during the Long Risorgimento. Consistently with these methodological premises, the sources that I use for this research are mainly archives, original works of the authors mentioned above and their (published or unpublished) correspondences, including the systematic survey of press sources such as the journals La Nuova Europa (Florence) and Libertà e Giustizia (Naples). I worked both on well-known archival collections, such as the archives of the Milan Museum of Risorgimento, the National Library of Florence and the Rome Central Museum of Risorgimento, and on less explored ones such as the Dolfi and Ghisleri archives at the Domus Mazziniana in Pisa, the Umiltà collection at the State Archive in Neuchâtel and the Mazzoni archive at the Forteguerriana Library in Pistoia. I equally availed of the invaluable parts of the epistolary of Cattaneo, Ferrari, Pisacane, Garibaldi, Mazzini, Bakunin and Ghisleri that were published so far. In any case, given the incredible volume of archives, sources and literature existing on

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these matters, this book does not have any pretention of documentary exhaustivity but only discusses some original materials to highlight my key arguments. As for my periodisation, I broadly consider the period between 1796 and 1900, although mainly focussing on the decades between the 1840s and 1870s. The Republican (or Jacobin) Triennial 1796–1799 is generally recognised as the beginning of Risorgimento histories given that it was the earliest modern republican experiment in Italy and an occasion for some shy claims for national independence, although it took place in the context of French ‘Revolutionary’ imperialism. This period also inaugurated some notions that are still debated such as the ‘passive’ revolution first suggested by Vincenzo Cuoco and then elaborated by Gramsci (Cuoco 1913; Gramsci 2014). More original, and potentially more controversial, is my terminus ante quem, which is essentially symbolic as it corresponds to the 1900 attack of anarchist Gaetano Bresci who killed King Umberto I to vindicate the Milanese workers massacred two years before by the royal troops led by general Bava Beccaris. I would argue that this individual act (although its author was not an ‘individualist’ properly speaking) can be seen as the symbolic culmination of a century that was characterised by antimonarchist conspirations. Paradoxically, rather than being ‘typically’ anarchist as for widespread commonplaces, Bresci’s attack extended a republican tradition praising so-called ‘tyrannicide’ since the English Revolution or even the Antiquity (Turchetti 2013), which was also represented by the Mazzinian iconography of the dagger. Indeed, Bresci’s attack took place in the same years in which the radical Risorgimento nebula was progressively taking the shape of distinctly organised political parties or mass movements, including the anarchists, which further highlighted the distinctions among different political tendencies in that field despite the persistence of common ‘feelings’ (Papadia 2019). This way, I partially match ideas of the Long Risorgimento assuming that this period did not end with the formal unification of Italy (1861) as classically assumed by authors such as Denis Mack Smith (1999). It was the case with the 1770–1922 period defined by Gilles Pécout, identifying the culmination of that process in the year when the Fascists seized power. However, rather than in the processes of state-making, I am interested in the formation of ideas of social and territorial justice starting from concrete persons and historical events and discussions. As this is primarily a book of geography, it is not organised in a strictly chronological way,

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but rather around places and localised circuits that can make sense of cosmopolitan federalisms, theory and practice. In Chapter 2, I discuss theoretical ideas of republican and anarchist freedom in relation to the prevailing historiography of Risorgimento, and also explain how I fill lacunas that still exist in the field of political theory. In Chapter 3, I discuss the connections and networks of geographers committed to Risorgimento and the extraordinary heterogeneity of their circuits, that remain neglected and still deserve recognition beyond the mere acknowledgement of these scholars as contributors to national unification. In Chapter 4, I explore what I call the ‘Lombard connection’, highlighting the extraordinary ideas that were elaborated within the circuits that operated first in the city of Milan and later in the exile between France and Italian-speaking Switzerland, involving some of the most famous Italian federalists such as Cattaneo, Ferrari and Cernuschi. In Chapter 5, I explore the fascinating ‘Tuscan connection’, which was first established around the Florence journal La Nuova Europa founded by Montanelli and continued by Lombard and Venetian refugees such as Mario and Castellazzo, and then around circuits of popular Garibaldianism in which Bakunin made his first apparition in Italy, networking with amazing and still understudied figures such as Meˇcnikov, Mazzoni and Dolfi. In Chapter 6, I address the ‘Southern connection’, analysing works and archives of intellectuals such as Pisacane and Fanelli whose trajectories from the 1849 Roman Republic to the International are paramount to understand the shift from Risorgimento to (libertarian) socialism. In Chapter 7, I address what I call ‘Heretic connections’, rescuing the memory of unorthodox Garibaldians such as Umiltà and of other intransigent republicans such as Ghisleri to shed further light on the republican and subversive milieus whose members never accepted the monarchist and authoritarian turn of the Italian state in the decades that followed formal unification.

Print Sources Cattaneo, Carlo. 1957. Scritti storici e geografici, 4 vols. Florence: Le Monnier. Cuoco, Vincenzo. 1913. Saggio storico sulla rivoluzione napoletana del 1799. Bari: Laterza. Mazzini, Giuseppe. 2009. A cosmopolitanism of nations: Giuseppe Mazzini’s writings on democracy, nation building, and international relations. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rosa, Gabriele. 1880. Storia naturale della civiltà. Brescia: Malaguzzi.

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Bibliography Acciai, Enrico. 2021. Garibaldi’s radical legacy: Traditions of war volunteering in Southern Europe (1861–1945). Abingdon: Routledge. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso. Anderson, Benedict. 2007. Under three flags: Anarchism and the anti-colonial imagination. London: Verso. Anderson, Benedict. 2015. Life beyond boundaries. London: Verso. Bantman, Constance, and Bert Altena, eds. 2015. Reassessing the transnational turn: Scales of analysis in anarchist and syndicalist studies. New York: Routledge. Cassano, Franco. 2012. Southern thought and other essays on the Mediterranean. New York: Fordham University Press. Di Mino, Massimiliano, and Pier Paolo Di Mino. 2011. Il libretto rosso di Garibaldi. Rome: Purple Press Di Paola, Pietro. 2013. The Knights errant of anarchy: London and the Italian anarchist diaspora (1880–1917). Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Escobar, Arturo. 2018. Designs for the pluriverse. Durham/London: Duke University Press. Farinelli, Franco. 1992. I segni del mondo. Florence: La Nuova Italia. Febvre, Lucien. 1957. Combats pour l’histoire. Paris: Colin. Ferretti, Federico. 2009. Traduire Reclus : l’Italie écrite par Attilio Brunialti. Cybergeo. http://www.cybergeo.eu/index22544.html. Ferretti, Federico. 2014. Inventing Italy: Geography, Risorgimento and national imagination. The Geographical Journal 180 (4): 402–413. https://doi.org/ 10.1111/geoj.12068. Ferretti, Federico. 2016. Arcangelo Ghisleri and the ‘right to barbarity’: Geography and anti-colonialism in Italy in the Age of Empire (1875–1914). Antipode 48 (3): 563–583. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12206. Ferretti, Federico. 2018. Anarchy and geography: Reclus and Kropotkin in the UK. Abingdon: Routledge. Furiozzi, Massimo. 2008. La Nuova Europa (1861–1863). Milan: Angeli. Gramsci, Antonio. 2014. Quaderni del carcere. Turin: Einuadi. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1983. The invention of tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hooson, David, ed. 1994. Geography and national identity. Oxford: Blackwell. Kothari, Ashish, Ariel Salleh, Arturo Escobar, Federico Demaria, and Alberto Acosta, eds. 2019. Pluriverse, a post-development dictionary. New Delhi: Tulika Books and Authorsupfront. Lacaita, Carlo, and Filippo Sabetti, eds. 2006. Civilization and democracy: The Salvemini anthology of Cattaneo’s writings. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

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La Puma, Leonardo. 2008. Giuseppe Mazzini: democratico e riformista europeo. Florence: Olschki. Lehning, Arthur. 1972–1974. Michel Bakounine et le Risorgimento tradito. Bollettino del Museo del Risorgimento 17/19: 266–292. Levy, Carl. 2010. The rooted cosmopolitan: Errico Malatesta, syndicalism, transnationalism and the international labour movement. In Perspectives on anarchism, labour and syndicalism, ed. David Berry and Constance Bantman, 61–79. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholar Press. Livingstone, David. 2003. Putting science in its place, geographies of scientific knowledge. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Mack Smith, Denis. 1999. Il Risorgimento italiano. Rome/Bari: Laterza. Malatesta, Errico. 1947. Scritti scelti. Naples: RL. Masini, Pier Carlo. 1964. La Federazione Italiana della Associazione Internazionale dei Lavoratori. Atti ufficiali. Milan: Edizioni Avanti! Masini, Pier Carlo. 1978. Storia degli anarchici italiani da Bakunin a Malatesta. Milan: Rizzoli. Mignolo, Walter, and Arturo Escobar, eds. 2010. Globalization and the decolonial option. London: Routledge. Minca, Claudio. 2007. Humboldt’s compromise, or the forgotten geographies of landscape. Progress in Human Geography 31: 179–193. Moos, Carlo. 1992. L’altro Risorgimento, l’ultimo Cattaneo tra Italia e Svizzera. Milan: Angeli. Papadia, Elena. 2019. La forza dei sentimenti. Anarchici e socialisti in Italia (1870–1900). Bologna: Il Mulino. Romano, Onofrio. 2019. Mediterraneanism. In Pluriverse, a post-development dictionary, ed. Ashish Kothari et al., 237–240. New Delhi: Tulika Books and Authorsupfront. Secord, James. 2004. Knowledge in transit. Isis 95: 654–672. https://doi.org/ 10.1086/430657. Turcato, Davide. 2015. Making sense of anarchism, Errico Malatesta’s experiments with revolution. London: AK Press. Turchetti, Mario. 2013. Tyrannie et tyrannicide de l’antiquité à nos jours. Paris: Classiques Guarnier. Urbinati, Nadia. 1990. Le civili libertà: positivismo e liberalismo nell’Italia unita. Venice: Marsilio. Vuilleumier, Marc. 2012. Histoire et combats : Mouvement ouvrier et socialisme en Suisse 1864–1960. Geneva: Editions d’en bas.

CHAPTER 2

Risorgimento Historiography and Plural Notions of Freedom

For Freedom and Against Domination: Anarchism and Republicanism The case study of Risorgimento contributes to recent studies analysing the historical and ideal relations between anarchism and republicanism that are showing how libertarian socialisms have solid roots in a secular history of republican justice and freedom, independently from Marxism and any other ideology pretending to hegemonise the socialist field. Plural histories of collaboration between republicans and anarchists in antiauthoritarian struggles are discussed, among others, by works on Irish anticolonialism (Ferretti 2017; Gutiérrez and Ferretti 2020), on cultures of late Risorgimento exemplified by the collaboration between Ghisleri and Fabbri (Mangini 2006) and on the antifascist resistance, where the republican and ‘liberal-socialist’ movement Giustizia e Libertà was the best allied of the anarchists (Ferretti 2020). Philosophically, I would argue that this is due to common ideas on freedom as non-domination, extending recent scholarship in the field of anarchist studies (Kinna and Prichard 2019) that also connect anarchism with ideas of civic virtue and intransigence (Adams 2019). Key scholars in the field of republican and democratic freedoms identify authors such as Cattaneo as the ‘noble fathers’ of civil liberties in

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Italy (Bobbio 1971; Urbinati 1990). Equally, several anarchists considered Cattaneo and Ferrari as forerunners of their movement (Berneri 1992; Fabbri 1921). For Maurizio Viroli, freedom as non-domination means that liberty is not the mere absence of constraints, but the guarantee that no arbitrary power can be exerted on an individual. It should not be confused with mere liberty by absence of constraints. ‘The liberty of servants … consists in the absence of obstacles to pursue their finality. Conversely, the freedom of citizens consists in not being subject to the disproportioned or arbitrary power of someone else’ (Viroli 2012, xii). Importantly, the principle of non-domination opposes the exercise of arbitrary or excessive power even when those who exert it are democratically elected, constituting an important point of contact with the anarchist tradition, arguing that no individual should have the means to impose their whim to the others. Closely related to non-domination are notions of intransigence and civic virtue, meaning that citizens should adopt the highest ethical standards both in their daily conduct and in their constant control on those who carry out public mandates. This implies an association between the notion of liberty and the accomplishment of one’s duty that, importantly, should be a moral one, which ‘cannot be imposed’ (Viroli 2012, 116) by the state or by another individual. According to Viroli, non-domination is about basic individual rights and does not depend on the possibly ‘good’ intentions of those who exert power. Arbitrary power is always unjust even when it targets ‘justice’, and nobody should have the possibility of exerting it. This matches anarchist ideas of the need to refuse governmental responsibilities while targeting the abolition of governments, that is the principle of coherence between means and ends strongly asserted by Errico Malatesta (2014). While anarchism is traditionally concerned with both the behaviour of dominants and the responsibilities of dominated people in not revolting, republican virtues as described by Viroli ‘pretend that citizens are neither disposed to humbly serve nor to arrogantly dominate’ (Viroli 2012, 12). Here, Viroli refers to Etienne de la Boétie, an author who was likewise taken as an inspiration for anarchism, observing that ‘oppressed people are free’ (Viroli 2012, 26) as far as they are disposed to revolt, instead of flattering the power in place. In both traditions, opportunism and transformism are rejected on the grounds of ‘intransigence’, which means: ‘Not forgiving and not

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forgetting too lightly’ (Bobbio and Viroli 2003, 33). These principles were key in compacting the antifascist field in the twentieth century. Despite the important differences that exist between these traditions, for instance, around the principle of class struggle that is key for anarchists but unacceptable or at best secondary for republicans, an important historical intersection between anarchism and republicanism was their common commitment to struggles for national liberation. Crucially, this support was never uncritical and implied various criticisms to the notion of ‘homeland’, generally focussing on non-exclusive notions of nation and local identity. While anarchism rejects patriotism and nationalism, it also distinguishes between the state as a centralistic institution and the nation as a community that can be possibly organised from below (Gutiérrez and Ferretti 2020). Internationalism does not exclude that people could have a sense of pride for their local language or culture, on the condition that these feelings are not xenophobic and do not pretend civilisational superiority, matching the inspired definition of ‘rooted cosmopolitan’ (Levy 2010) that Carl Levy used about Errico Malatesta. Similarly, when it comes to patriotism, Viroli refers to ‘those political writers who deemed communal self-government as the deepest root of the true (and best) patriotism’ (Viroli 2020, ebook). It was the case with Cattaneo and with his teacher Gian Domenico Romagnosi (1761–1835), who considered the Commune as the first place for the exercise of political freedom on the model of the free commune of the Middle Ages, an experience that was also paramount in inspiring the anarchist notions of mutual aid and communal freedom (Kropotkin 1902, 2008). For Viroli, Cattaneo’s federalism was opposed ‘to unification [imposed from] above rather than to unity founded on everybody’s liberty and on free solidarity’ (Viroli 2020, ebook), based on the ‘self-government’ of each territory. Again, these principles were applied in the history of anarchist federalism and municipalism, namely during the 1936 Spanish Revolution, whose protagonists defined the geographical scales of ‘Libertarian Communism’ as: ‘The Individual, the Commune and the Federation’ (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo 1936). For Viroli, Cattaneo ‘hated any pretention of one nation’s or race’s hegemony over the others’, which clarifies a key distinction between historical Risorgimento and some of the numerous people who tried to appropriate it: ‘While Fascism proclaimed a nationalistic notion of homeland, Risorgimento affirmed a universalistic

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idea of it’ (Viroli 2020, ebook). Likewise, national liberation does not exclude internationalism, if one assumes that liberty is more important than the defence of a physical place: ‘Before being citizens of a specific homeland, we are human beings, and this implies that national barriers cannot be invoked to justify moral deafness. The voice of suffering people should be listened everywhere’ (Viroli 2020, ebook). This point is equally claimed by socialist internationalisms, obviously including anarchism. The classical Risorgimento idea that people should defend the ‘Republic’ as a principle of liberty rather than a physically localised state expressed by the notion of ‘nation in arms’ by Cattaneo, Pisacane and friends, was likewise used by early internationalists and pacifists. Among other associations, the International and the League of Peace and Liberty supported cosmopolitan claims for abolishing permanent armies. About Pisacane, Viroli notes that: ‘Fighting for the nation meant fighting for the freedom of all peoples against despotism and foreign domination, being aware that the freedom of each people needs that the equal right of all other peoples to liberty is stated’ (Viroli 2020, ebook). This highlights how a republican and left/libertarian view of Risorgimento should be connected with ideas of anticolonialism and decoloniality rather than nationalism. Therefore, reading decolonially the Risorgimento case through the lenses of republican and left/libertarian notions of non-domination, civic virtue and rooted cosmopolitanism allows arguing that, when nations fight for their liberation and are not yet recognised as states, the idea of nation can also be attractive to radicals whose aims go beyond the mere task of national liberation. Therefore, one should distinguish between Risorgimento as a struggle for (social and national) liberation and its eventual monarchist and centralist outcomes which disappointed many of its former fighters who lamented a Risorgimento tradito (betrayed Risorgimento) (Lehning 1972; Conti 1950) and whose subversive ideas will resurface in the following decades under the forms of radical republicanism, socialist and anarchist driven workers movements and anti-fascism.

On Historiography: The Numerous Uses of Risorgimento Quite neglected by English-speaking literatures with some notable exceptions as I detail below, Risorgimento remains an incredibly disputed and contentious matter in Italian public debates. Some of the classical discussions on Risorgimento’s contested memory resurfaced around

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the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of national unification that took place in 2011. It is worth noting that those discussions were not limited to claim some ‘noble ancestors’ for that or that other political party. Historically, this had been done by very heterogeneous political forces all along the twentieth century, from the Fascists to the Communists (Casalena 2010). More recently, the old ‘discursive formation of Antirisorgimento’ (Casalena 2013, 7) resurfaced to quite vocally dismiss Risorgimento legacies by drawing upon Far Right arguments over the Catholic identity of Italy. That is, a certain number of journalists or selfdeclared scholars pretended that Risorgimento was basically a freemasons’ and protestants’ conspiracy to get rid of the Roman Church. This seemed functional to the politics of current neo-integralist groups that oppose secular society, women’s emancipation, LGBTQ+ rights and so on. Yet, Antirisorgimento discourses were considered worthy of some historiographical response by a group of respected historians who produced a collective book on that phenomenon (Casalena 2013). These scholars analyse Antirisorgimento discourses criticising their instrumental use of arguments such as the problematic participation of Southern Italy to Risorgimento (De Benedictis 2013). With a good deal of humour, Luigi Ganapini deconstructs some commonplaces of Catholic historiography (Ganapini 2013). Overall, historians reject the classical pretention that the very Risorgimento was inspired by ‘foreign ideas’ (Casalena 2013, 237) coming from revolutionary France and Frenchinspired elites rather than by the ‘people’. In this vein, the introduction of ideas on social justice and civil liberties in Italy was often undermined under the label of ‘Jacobinism’, dis-considering the great complexity that surrounded the transfer of 1789 revolutionary ideas to Italy, as I discuss below. Historiography has also demonstrated that some traditional antiCatholic associations such as Freemasonry only acquired some importance after the 1861 unification (Cazzaniga 2006). Similar points can be made about several religious minorities, that generally took advantage of the increased religious tolerance that the raising of secularism implied in socalled ‘Liberal Italy’, but did not straightforwardly identify themselves with the newly unified nation as in the case of the Jewish communities (Sofia 2006). As for Protestantism, while some Risorgimento exponents expressed some sympathy for the Reformation, very few of them had effective links with the Reformed Italian Churches. Again, it was only after unification that democratic tendencies took a certain importance within

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these churches, also considering that most of them were afraid by ‘atheism’ and by ‘the anticlerical excesses’ (Novarino 2006, 271) that were expressed in popular milieus during Risorgimento struggles. However, the problem of how much Risorgimento was ‘popular’ and ‘endogenous’ remains a relevant and open question, one that is widely debated since the defeat (and bloody repression) of the 1799 Neapolitan Revolution as discussed by Vincenzo Cuoco. This idea was variously reformulated by Gramsci and in general by the theoreticians of the ‘passive’ or ‘failed’ revolution, arguing that the structural delays in the development of Italian capitalism hindered its development, according to the classical Marxist framework of the bourgeois revolution as the necessary premise for all further progresses (Riall 1994). While this shows again that classical Marxist analytical grids could hardly be accommodated to complex phenomena such as Risorgimento, it is worth mentioning a very significant (and somehow underplayed) historiographical contribution on these matters, that is, Valerio Evangelisti’s book (2005) on the Republican Triennial in Bologna. Evangelisti’s research shows how the empirical realities that can be reconstructed by archival research can challenge big generalisations and rigid theoretical frameworks, helping to understand the complexity of historical situations. For Evangelisti, commonplaces on the alleged ‘immaturity’ of Italian revolutionaries during the Republican Triennial did not consider people’s agency, that in cases such as Bologna and the surrounding provinces anticipated the imposition of republican and constitutional institutions by the French armies of Napoleon I. Conversely, Napoleonian administrators intervened to normalise the situation rather than to further a revolutionary process that had been already autonomously triggered by the local ‘plebeian, rudimental and violent Jacobinism’ (Evangelisti 2005, 37) that preceded the arrival of the French troops in 1796. This radicalism had clearly endogenous elements that can be connected to Risorgimento federalism, given the role that ancient Italian municipalist traditions played, even in Bologna, to foster the ‘myth of the free commune’ (Evangelisti 2005, 73). Communal pride was one of the first reasons for local political insubordination, far from the Napoleonian centralistic mindset. At that moment, Bolognese republicanism included a ‘plebeian sphere’ (Evangelisti 2005, 97), which problematise readings presenting the Republican Triennial, and by extension the entire Risorgimento, as an essentially elite movement that was even opposed by popular masses.

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As the Bologna case showed, Napoleon I was more concerned with countering popular insurgency to reassure the privileged classes than to radicalise a social revolution, even styling himself as ‘a sworn enemy … of the anarchists’ (Evangelisti 2005, 102). Therefore, it would be a mistake to seamlessly identify early Risorgimento with the French occupation of Italy, neglecting popular initiatives that linked ‘the social question to the political question’ (Evangelisti 2005, 109). These were expropriations, insurrections and attacks against the symbols of wealth, all facts that in Bologna, according to Evangelisti, continued well after the end of the Cisalpine Republic. Although understudied, this proletarian activism which periodically resurfaced all along Risorgimento cannot be limited to isolated cases. While associations such as the Carboneria had a numerous enrolment that also came by the lowest social strata in several regions (Cazzaniga 2006), one cannot ignore the proletarian participation in key facts involving the major Italian cities. It was the case, among several others, with the 1848 Milan Five Days, the 1849 Roman Republic, the 1848–1849 resistance of Venice (Brunello 2018) and the popular enthusiasm for Garibaldian expeditions that lasted after national unification (Umiltà 1866). This confirms Alberto Mario Banti’s and Paul Ginsborg’s contention that Risorgimento was ‘a mass movement’ (Banti and Ginsborg 2007, xiii), although not in the twentieth-century sense of the mobilisation of millions of people. Yet, for Banti and Ginsborg, Risorgimento mobilised some hundreds of thousands of people. This can be considered as notable in a relatively small country like Italy, especially considering a context that was characterised by high levels of illiteracy, big disconnections between the main cities and the countryside and the exclusion of the overwhelming majority of the population from the slightest political rights. This popular participation started to be underplayed since the earliest stages of what Maria Pia Casalena defines ‘Sabaudist historiography’ (Casalena 2010), which overemphasised teleological interpretations of Risorgimento as something that definitively culminated with Italy’s unification under the Savoia sceptre. Democratic historiography, first inspired by the protagonists of radical and federalist Risorgimento such as Cattaneo, Pisacane, Montanelli and Ferrari, was equally overshadowed by another kind of ‘militant historiography’ that, according to Casalena, became prominent after 1876, when Italian governments started to be populated by ‘former Garibaldians and Mazzinians who had accepted the parliamentary institution’ (Casalena 2010). This political choice of

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the so-called ‘Historical Left’ inaugurated readings of Risorgimento that are still current in Italian schools, putting together contrasting figures such as Mazzini, Cavour, Garibaldi and Vittorio Emanuele II, regardless of the fact that before this highly flawed historiographical paradigm became hegemonic, the irreconcilability between the respective programmes (Monarchy versus Republic, to give the most obvious example) was straightforward to everybody. As Casalena acutely observes, long after formal unification: ‘The disciplined Garibaldianism that found a mentor in [Francesco] Crispi, continued to be challenged by a subversive Garibaldianism, which increasingly identified itself with republicanism and with commitment to all oppressed nationalities’ (Casalena 2010). I would also mention the decisive commitment of numerous former Mazzinians and Garibaldians to the International and to early socialism and anarchism, as I detail in the following chapters. It is worth noting that even when these ‘subversive’ Garibaldians took distances from socialism, like in Alberto Mario’s case, they remained anyway inserted in a mood that can be defined as ‘late nineteenth century radicalism … rediscovering the lesson of Cattaneo’ (Casalena 2010) and strongly criticising the Piedmontese (that is monarchist) rule of Italy. As observed by Lucy Riall quoting Italian historian Luciano Cafagna, it was anarchist Francesco Saverio Merlino (1856–1930) who inaugurated, in 1890, ‘the idea of Risorgimento as a bourgeois revolution’ (Riall 1994, 28) arguing for the need of understanding the class relations involving peasantry, bourgeoisie and aristocracy. While this would nourish the already mentioned paradigms of the ‘passive revolution’ and later structural analyses, Riall also notes that the historiography of the last decades has overtaken former readings that were mainly based on structural economic approaches. Thus, numerous authors have tried to understand the role that nationalism played in culture, including the roles that the complex Italian territorialities may have played in terms of ‘administrative tensions between the centre and the periphery’ (Riall 1994, 23) and between city and countryside. In addition, works such as Piero Brunello’s studies about the Venetian countryside have further questioned ideas on ‘passive’ revolutions, showing that popular sociability contained elements of political consciousness and social subversion that also affected peasants. That is, diverse elements such as ‘the welcome given by Venetian peasants to the returning Austrians in 1849, or in the oppositional agitation that developed in Lazio

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in the local bars and osterie … the huge increase in land occupations during the revolutionary years of 1848–1849, and the welcome given by Sicilian peasants to Garibaldi … suggests that a political link between the peasants and the liberal-national leadership could have been established, had the political will existed’ (Riall 1994, 4). As this complexity renders problematic to ‘reach satisfactory conclusions about the relationship of social structures to national unification’ (Riall 1994, 47), several historians have placed less emphasis on the structural (true or supposed) elements that would have necessarily lead to national unification as a necessary outcome of ‘progress’ and ‘modernization’. Although the field of Risorgimento historiography remains contentious, the consciousness that Risorgimento was a political rather than structural phenomenon challenged ‘the teleology of previous approaches that linked the process of Risorgimento to that of national unification and to fascism’ (Riall 1994, 77). Then, most scholars started to work on the political construction of Risorgimento ideas, including collective rites and mentalities. According to Riall and Luciana Patriarca, this included a renewed interest for ‘the historical formation and elaboration of ideas and images of the Italian nation’ (Patriarca and Riall 2012, 2), that is the cultural construction of phenomena such as patriotism and nationalism, which impacted the complex, contradictory and plural processes of nation-making. Culture and the construction of discourses are key in these anti-teleological readings. In this vein, Banti and Ginsborg stress the need to address ‘the deep culture of Risorgimento’ including ‘mentality, feelings, emotions, life trajectories, political and personal projects’ (Banti and Ginsborg 2007, xxiii). Although these authors highlight the emphasis on individual heroisms that was inspired by Romanticism, they note how this cultural context was not in contradiction with the ‘mobilization from below’ (Banti and Ginsborg 2007, xxvi) that supported endeavours such as those of Garibaldi. Indeed, ideas of individual responsibility and sacrifice were a strong drive for voluntaristic mobilisation and were seamlessly reappropriated by the workers’ movements of the following century. About the relations between Risorgimento and Romanticism, I am especially interested in Ginsborg’s suggestion that Risorgimento’s romantic inspirations included that ‘disdain for subjection that Shelley identified as an intrinsic component of the republican and municipal Italian tradition’ (Ginsborg 2007, 62), that is notions of non-domination associated with federalist ideas of the free commune. My book contributes

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to these lines of study by addressing intellectuals’ networks, although I also consider their relations with the popular components of the movement, to rediscover the neglected aspects of the connection between Risorgimento and projects of libertarian and egalitarian social transformation. Authors such as Lucio Villari confirm how voluntaristic drives were key to lead the Italian youth to insurrection and how important were notions of ‘liberty as a means for opposition and change’ (Villari 2012, ix). Villari likewise argues that one should not neglect the ‘popular and less elitist component of those events’ (Villari 2012, 3), that is the ‘very strong rate percentage’ (Villari 2012, 10) of people who participated in Risorgimento as formerly suggested by authors such as Luigi Salvatorelli. Banti emphasises the voluntaristic components of Risorgimento movements beyond structural and economic conditions, observing how, since the arrival of the French ‘revolutionary’ armies in 1796–1799, a ‘very lively enlargement of the spaces for political debate’ (Banti 2004) occurred well before discourses on national unification became hegemonic. Thus, one can argue that debates on equality and freedom predated discourses on unification and independence. For Banti, it was mainly in the period between 1820 and 1847 that the earliest ‘intellectual elaboration of the national myth’ (Banti 2004, 47) started to foster concrete ideas of unification. Such ideas were associated with democratic models that were inspired by the Carboneria and by international examples such as the declaration of the Spanish Constitution in Cadiz in 1812, which inspired the insurrectional riots that occurred in Naples in 1820 (Banti 2004, 45). Transnationalism and heterogeneity were key characteristics of the Italian opposition movements, internal or exiled, all along Risorgimento. From 1816 to 1822, around 7000 people migrated from all over Europe (Arisi Rota 2019, 120), to support the Bolivarian anticolonial struggles of the new Latin American republics, including former Napoleonian officers several of whom were Italian republicans and liberals (Morelli and Venturoli 2021). Concurrently, in countries such as France and Switzerland, there were sects ‘of European character and communist inspiration organised by Filippo Buonarroti until his death’ (Banti 2004, 62) in 1837. These were an inspiration for both the Giovine Italia, founded in Marseille in 1831 by Giuseppe Mazzini, and the Giovine Europa that Mazzini founded in 1834 in Switzerland. It is worth noting that while the Mazzinian circuits rejected the notion of class struggle, preferring class collaboration based on cooperatives and workers societies, social concerns

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and claims against the ‘excessive accumulation of wealth’ (Banti 2004, 65) always remained part of the Mazzinian republican movement. The variety and importance of transnational frameworks and European political scenarios for Risorgimento are equally emphasised by Arianna Arisi Rota, who mentions the internal migration of political refugees settling in different pre-unification Italian states which were considered as more liberal and less repressive than others. This was the case with the 51,000 refugees that were recorded in the Kingdom of Sardinia in 1851 (Arisi Rota 2019, 216). Authors such as Nick Carter also emphasise the networks of international solidarity that supported Risorgimento leaders, especially in Britain where Mazzini was hugely popular among local public opinion. As Carter notes, this support was paradoxically weaker in Irish independentist milieus due to concerns of Hibernian Catholics about the fate of the Pope under a possible Italian Revolution. This arguably inspired ‘Mazzini’s rejection of Irish nationalism in the late 1840s’ (Carter 2015, 2), although one cannot neglect the anticolonial sympathies that several other protagonists of Risorgimento expressed to Ireland, especially among federalists and early anarchists as I detail below, highlighting again the interest of Risorgimento ideas for current decolonial debates. While Mazzini was one of the ‘adversaries’ of Risorgimento federalists after 1848–1849 due to his definitive choice in favour of national unification even at the cost of making an alliance with the Savoias, an heterogeneous array of federalist or municipal tendencies existed well before the most famous works of Cattaneo, Ferrari and friends were published. It was the case with the early elaborations of Florence-based Swiss intellectual Giovan Pietro Vieusseux as I detail in the chapter on the Tuscan Connection, and most importantly with the big competitors of the Mazzinians in the period preceding 1848, that is the Neo-Guelph mood inspired by Turin ecclesiastic Vincenzo Gioberti (1801–1852), supporting the creation of a federation of existing Italian states under the moral authority of the Pope. While Banti argues that after the 1848–1849 insurrections and the diffusion of the earliest socialistic pamphlets inspired by Proudhon, the federalist option started to scare the moderates, it is also worth noting that until the eve of the political unification of Italy, the various hypotheses of an Italian ‘confederation’ (Banti 2004, 105) were still discussed among top-level political actors such as Napoleon III and Camillo Cavour. That is, the idea of a federation was never so strange during the process of national liberation, confirming that there was

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nothing ‘necessary’ in national unification, beyond possibly the need of countering social insurgence as several authors have suggested. This book also extends early works of authors such as Gino Cerrito and Pier Carlo Masini investigating the so-called ‘heresies of the nineteenthcentury’, a work that is still in progress and carries huge potentialities to open future research perspectives. For Masini, authors who were considered ‘heretics’ at a certain moment, laid indeed the grounds for what he called ‘the secular, humanist and libertarian roots of Italian democracy’ (Masini 1978b). This was especially the case with the internationalists, the federalists and the ‘free-thinkers’. Beyond famous figures like Cattaneo, Masini advocated for the rediscovery of ‘minor’ figures in the Cattanean tradition such as Ghisleri and Rosa. Importantly, some of these figures directly connected Italian republican/federalist traditions with the incipient socialist internationalism of the 1870s, for instance, through Rosa’s collaboration with the internationalist journal La Plebe edited in Lodi (and then in Milan) by Enrico Bignami, another former Mazzinian who moved to socialism after national unification, together with former Garibaldian Osvaldo Gnocchi-Viani (Masini 1978a; Angelini 1987, 1994). Mainly addressing the Tuscan area, authors who promoted more recent attempts to explicitly connect anarchism and Risorgimento (Gregori and Sacchetti 2012) noted how figures such as Pisacane and his collaborator Fanelli: ‘Kept together for a long time their socialist and anarchist dimension with [their] Risorgimento activism’ (Bertini 2012, 21). As I detail below, these authors also mention the circuits that interacted with Bakunin in Florence. In this ‘connubium of democracy and anarchism’ (Giaconi 2012, 58), Andrea Giaconi especially addresses the figure of Giuseppe Mazzoni, one of the most radical figures of Risorgimento who was also a member of the International and of Bakunin’s secret societies ‘International Brotherhood’ and ‘International Alliance for Socialist Democracy’. Although Mazzoni, like his almost-homonymous Mazzini, took distances from Bakunin after the 1871 Paris Commune, the radicality and originality of his positions are unanimously acknowledged by the (although not numerous) works existing on this figure. In the area of Carrara, the early presence of anarchist-inspired internationalist groups emerging from Risorgimento activism is well documented. This also clarifies why, in that region, both anarchists and republicans continued to have a mass consensus well beyond the period

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covered by this book (Gregori 2012) and to share insurrectional practices in post-unification anti-monarchism and in the antifascist resistance (Finelli 2013). According to a local historian quoted by Michele Finelli, at the end of the nineteenth century, in Carrara, ‘anarchists, republicans and most of the collectivists even seemed to compete in showing the most of intransigence’ (Bernieri 1983, 146), especially regarding electoral abstentionism. Something similar occurred in another stronghold of Italian radicalism, that is the province of Livorno where, according to Gabriele Paolini, the republican insurrectional movement, very active since the revolts of 1849, was more akin to popular sociability than to bourgeois democracy. There, for Paolini, relevant figures of local Garibaldianism such as Apollonio Apolloni, Felice Francioni and the brothers Andrea, Jacopo and Pasquale Sgarallino were among the protagonists of the rising of the early internationalist movement, being constantly filed and watched by the police of unified Italy (Paolini 2012). Overall, according to Giorgio Sacchetti, one can conclude that ‘in certain regions, the connection between Risorgimento and social question was centre stage’ (Sacchetti 2012, 133), which contributes to further nuance readings based on Risorgimento as an exclusive or almost exclusive matter of the middle class. The proximity between Risorgimento and the anarchist tradition is further revealed by some twentieth-century anarchist readings of Risorgimento that were studied by Emanuela Minuto about such a crucial period as the years of the antifascist resistance preceding the proclamation of the Italian Republic in 1946. According to Minuto, in some areas of Tuscany, the resurgence of clandestine and later publicly organised anarchist groups and federations fostered a kind of ‘radicalism that presented visible sights of a local history that was almost never separated from the republican one until the recent times of the … Spanish War’ (Minuto 2013, 146). Even though this remark cannot be generalised, it is undeniable that numerous anarchists claimed the legacy of subversive Risorgimento, especially in antifascist milieus, when this countered official interpretations of ‘national heroes’. As Minuto acutely notes, a popular slogan such as ‘the aphorism of Republican [Giovanni] Bovio arguing that the evolution of humankind would have led to anarchy … since the late nineteenth century had exerted the function of a bridging myth’ (Minuto 2013, 153) between anarchist and republican traditions, resurfacing on these occasions.

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Although it would be impossible to ignore the differences between class struggle-based socialism and anarchism and those versions of republicanism that do not consider or underplay that factor, these radical connections, although relatively neglected by scholarship hitherto, provide relevant lenses to read radical Risorgimento histories. As I explain in the next chapter, the geographical networks to invent Italy started by complicating easy narratives on political belongings.

Print Sources Umiltà, Angelo. 1866. I volontari del 1866 ovvero da Milano alle Alpi Rezie, Memorie storiche documentate. Milan: Wilmant.

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Casalena, Maria Pia. 2010. Il Risorgimento nella storia d’Italia. Bologna: ArchetipoLibri. Casalena, Maria Pia (ed.). 2013. Antirisorgimento: Appropriazioni, critiche, delegittimazioni. Bologna: Pendragon. Cazzaniga, Gian Mario (ed.). 2006. La Massoneria, Annali della storia d’Italia 21. Turin: Einaudi. Confederación Nacional del Trabajo. 1936. Concepto confederal del comunismo libertario. Santander: CNT-AIT. Conti, Elio. 1950. Le origini del socialismo a Firenze (1860–1880). Roma: Edizioni Rinascita. De Benedictis, Angela. 2013. Infranta Costituzione, lesa nazione. In Antirisorgimento: appropriazioni, critiche, delegittimazioni, ed. Maria Pia Casalena, 27–44. Bologna: Pendragon. Evangelisti, Valerio. 2005. Gli sbirri alla lanterna: La plebe giacobina bolognese, 1792–1797 . Rome: Derive Approdi. Fabbri, Luigi. 1921. Introduzione. In Filosofia della rivoluzione, ed. Giuseppe Ferrari, 1–21. Milan: Casa Editrice Sociale. Ferretti, Federico. 2017. Political geographies, unfaithful translations and anticolonialism: Ireland in Élisée Reclus’s geography and biography. Political Geography 59: 11–23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2017.02.005. Ferretti, Federico. 2020. Transnational anarchism against fascisms: Subaltern geopolitics and spaces of exile in Camillo Berneri’s work. In Anti-fascism in a global perspective, ed. David Featherstone, Nigel Copsey, and Kasper Braskén, 176–196. Abingdon: Routledge. Finelli, Michele. 2013. L’edera e il marmo: 160 anni di mazzinianesimo a Carrara (1831–1992). Pisa: Pacini. Ganapini, Luigi. 2013. Non Praevalebunt. Ovvero qualche volta ritornano. In Antirisorgimento: appropriazioni, critiche, delegittimazioni, ed. Maria Pia Casalena, 221–236. Bologna: Pendragon. Giaconi, Andrea. 2012. Tendenze libertarie in Toscana: il caso Prato. In Elementi libertari nel Risorgimento livornese e toscano, ed. Giuseppe Gregori and Giorgio Sacchetti, 53–76. Prato: Pentalinea. Ginsborg, Paul. 2007. Romanticismo e Risorgimento: l’io, l’amore e la nazione. In Storia d’Italia, Annali, 22: Il Risorgimento, ed. Alberto Mario Banti and Paul Ginsborg, 5–68. Turin: Einaudi. Gregori, Giuseppe. 2012. Presenze libertarie nel risorgimento apuano. In Elementi libertari nel Risorgimento livornese e toscano, ed. Giuseppe Gregori and Giorgio Sacchetti, 77–86. Prato: Pentalinea. Gregori, Giuseppe, and Giorgio Sacchetti (eds.). 2012. Elementi libertari nel Risorgimento livornese e toscano: atti del Convegno di studi di Livorno, 26 marzo 2010 in memoria di Luigi Di Lembo. Prato: Pentalinea.

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Gutiérrez, José Antonio, and Federico Ferretti. 2020. The nation against the State: The Irish question and Britain-based anarchists in the Age of Empire. Nations and Nationalism 26 (3): 611–627. https://doi.org/10.1111/nana. 12584. Kinna, Ruth, and Alex Prichard. 2019. Anarchism and non-domination. Journal of Political Ideologies 24 (3): 221–240. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569317. 2019.1633100. Kropotkin, Peter. 1902. Mutual aid, a factor in evolution. London: Heinemann. Kropotkin, Peter. 2008. La commune, suivie de La Commune de Paris. Altiplano: Yenibosna. Lehning, Arthur. 1972–1974. Michel Bakounine et le Risorgimento tradito. Bollettino del Museo del Risorgimento 17/19: 266–292. Levy, Carl. 2010. The rooted cosmopolitan: Errico Malatesta, syndicalism, transnationalism and the international labour movement. In Perspectives on anarchism, labour and syndicalism, ed. David Berry and Constance Bantman, 61–79. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholar Press. Malatesta, Errico. 2014. An Errico Malatesta reader. London: AK Press. Mangini, Giorgio. 2006. Libero pensiero, repubblicanesimo, anarchismo. L’incontro Fabbri-Ghisleri. In Da Fabriano a Montevideo, Luigi Fabbri, vita e idee di un intellettuale anarchico e antifascista, ed. Maurizio Antonioli and Roberto Giulianelli, 39–76. Pisa: BFS. Masini, Pier Carlo. 1978a. Storia degli anarchici italiani da Bakunin a Malatesta. Milan: Rizzoli. Masini, Pier Carlo. 1978b. Eresie dell’Ottocento. Florence: La Nuova Italia. Minuto, Emanuela. 2013. Il Risorgimento degli anarchici italiani (1944–1946). In Quale Risorgimento? Interpretazioni a confronto tra fascismo, Resistenza e nascita della Repubblica, ed. Carmelo Calabrò and Mauro Lenci, 145–160. Pisa: ETS. Morelli, Federica, and Sofia Venturoli (eds.). 2021. Geografia, razza e territorio. Agostino Codazzi e la Commissione Corografica in Colombia. Bologna: Il Mulino. Novarino, Marco. 2006. Massoneria e protestantesimo. In La Massoneria, Annali della storia d’Italia 21, ed. Gian Mario Cazzaniga, 266–289. Turin: Einaudi. Paolini, Gabriele. 2012. Primi elementi libertari nel livornese. In Elementi libertari nel risorgimento livornese e toscano, ed. Giuseppe Gregori and Giorgio Sacchetti, 87–98. Prato: Pentalinea. Patriarca, Silvana, and Lucy Riall. 2012. Introduction: revising the Risorgimento. In Risorgimento revisited. Nationalism and culture in the 19th century Italy, ed. Silvana Patriarca and Lucy Riall, i–xi. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Riall, Lucy. 1994. The Italian Risorgimento: State, society and national unification. London: Routledge.

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Sacchetti, Giorgio. 2012. Un bilancio (provvisorio) delle tendenze libertarie nel Risorgimento. In Elementi libertari nel risorgimento livornese e toscano, ed. Giuseppe Gregori and Giorgio Sacchetti, 121–149. Prato: Pentalinea. Sofia, Francesca. 2006. Gli ebrei risorgimentali tra tradizione biblica, libera muratoria e nazione. In La Massoneria, Annali della storia d’Italia 21, ed. Gian Mario Cazzaniga, 244–265. Turin: Einaudi. Urbinati, Nadia. 1990. Le civili libertà: positivismo e liberalismo nell’Italia unita. Venice: Marsilio. Villari, Lucio. 2012. Bella e perduta: l’Italia del Risorgimento. Rome/Bari: Laterza. Viroli, Maurizio. 2012. La libertà dei servi. Rome/Bari: Laterza. Viroli, Maurizio. 2020. Per amore della patria. Patriottismo e nazionalismo nella storia (Kindle ed.). Rome/Bari: Laterza.

CHAPTER 3

The Geographers’ Connection, and the ‘Right of Peoples’

Carlo Cattaneo, and Active Geographies A pioneer of critical geographies in Italy in the decades around 1968 (Santini 2008), Lucio Gambi (1920–2006) argued that the roots of politically committed geographies could be found within Risorgimento, and especially in the works of Cattaneo, who had been already considered as a geographer by Giovanni Natali. Today, it might seem arbitrary to assign an author whose work was so rich, complex and multifaceted to a specific discipline. Yet, in the nineteenth century, scholarly disciplines did not have the identity that we know today after the institutional consolidation of academic departments. Natali argued that Cattaneo’s contributions did not refer to official geographical associations, that did not yet exist, but to a broader ‘Italian geographical culture’ (Natali 1916, 53). The same notion was expressed by Gambi in his masterpiece Una geografia per la storia, arguing that Risorgimento federalists extended the ‘Enlightenment’s ability in seizing the close links existing between science … and society’. It was especially the case with Cattaneo, with whose work, for Gambi: ‘Between 1835 and 1868, we had the main effort to make Italian geography (or for better saying: a scientific plan that we could identify with geography) an active discipline’ (Gambi 1973, 9). Thus, retrospective disciplinary definitions can exist latu sensu at the condition that they are not exclusive: we cannot pretend that Cattaneo was only a geographer, but we can contend that he was also a geographer. Furthermore, the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Ferretti, Geographies of Federalism during the Italian Risorgimento, 1796–1900, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96117-6_3

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part of his production that directly intersected with geographical themes was remarkable in quantitative terms: in editing the four big volumes of Cattaneo’s Historical and Geographical Writings, Gaetano Salvemini and Ernesto Sestan declared to have been deeply impressed by the quality and quantity of Cattaneo’s commitment to these fields (Salvemini and Sestan 1957). In his early writings challenging the descriptive and positivistic core of traditional Italian geography and proposing new definitions of geography as a proudly humanistic and socially committed discipline, Gambi defined Cattaneo as a pioneer of these notions. His ideas of putting an emphasis on human agency in constructing environments challenged old ideas of environmental determinism and participated in early endeavours for social and regional planning (Ferretti 2022). Additionally, in inaugurating a photographic exposition on the territorial history of the lowlands of his own province, the Larghe around Ravenna, Gambi made a significant comparison between the clever use of these lands’ canals and embankments by the partisans of the 1943–1945 antifascist Resistenza and the ‘similar ways used by the Sant’Alberto hiders of Garibaldi in 1849’ (Gambi 2008, 185). These were the local activists who helped General Garibaldi in his flight to avoid arrestation after the fall of the Roman Republic in the summer of 1849 (Carocci 2017). This meant that a radical thinker like Gambi, who had been a partisan in the Giustizia e Libertà circuits, acknowledged the political relevance of radical Risorgimento for making comparisons with his own present. Cattaneo had direct links with the experience that has been hitherto most studied among the contributions of geographers to Risorgimento. It was the Ufficio di Corrispondenza Geografica promoted in the 1840s by Bologna geographer Annibale Ranuzzi to prefigure the Italian nation by building geographical cultures beyond the borders of the pre-unification states (Ferretti 2014b; Galluccio 2012). These attempts paralleled the works of several participants to the earliest Italian Scientific Congresses, that Casalena considers as a key moment in the formation of Risorgimento cultures, highlighting how, among other sciences, geography was well represented (Casalena 2007). Indeed, the geographical sessions were attended by some of the most famous tenants of the discipline in Europe, such as Adriano Balbi (a Venetian who was based in France) and the German Carl Ritter. Beyond dealing directly with the works of Alexander von Humboldt as I discuss below, Cattaneo recalled implicitly one of the main notions fostered by Ritter on the necessary complementarity

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between history and geography that Cattaneo could have assimilated through Ritter’s original works or through Ranuzzi’s translations. In fact, according to Cattaneo: ‘The say of that who defined geography and chronology as the two focuses of all histories appears to have been wise’ (Cattaneo 1851, viii). While this idea will inspire famous aphorisms of authors who were likewise influential in Risorgimento cultures such as Jules Michelet and Elisée Reclus, it is worth noting the sharing of common concepts and authors of reference among Risorgimento geographers. While Ranuzzi’s networks have been studied in the aforementioned works, this chapter is the occasion to extend this scholarship following three relatively understudied lines. First, discussing more in depth Cattaneo’s contribution to the geographical studies in the first half of the nineteenth century. Second, having a closer look at the contents of Ranuzzi’s Annuario Geografico Italiano, the ephemeral journal of the Ufficio di Corrispondenza. Third, analysing the Risorgimento commitment of some other geographers who were involved in that circuit, such as the Tuscans Francesco Costantino Marmocchi (1805–1858) and Attilio Zuccagni-Orlandini (1784–1872), whose names are often quoted in histories of Italian geography, although without a full understanding of the political originality of their contributions. Indeed, while Ranuzzi could be considered as a politically moderate person, akin to Neo-Guelph tendencies, this judgement cannot be generalised to the remainder of his fellow Ufficio geographers, especially considering the direct links of Marmocchi and Zuccagni with some groups of radical Risorgimento as I detail below. Born in Milan in 1801 to a Catholic family of the local petty bourgeoisie and first educated in a religious school, Carlo Cattaneo graduated in Law at the Pavia Collegio Ghislieri in 1924. According to his biographer Giuseppe Armani, it was in the period between secondary school and university that Cattaneo abandoned religion. Later, none of his contemporaries ‘was more extraneous than him to any idea of religiosity’ (Armani 1997, 11) or metaphysics. Indeed, he never undertook the career of lawyer or of academic, and preferred to serve as a teacher in the municipal high-school in Milan, which left him enough time to attend the courses of his great mentor and inspirer Gian Domenico Romagnosi (1761–1835). A polymath who edited some of the most important journals for the Italian culture at that time, such as the Annali Universali di Statistica, Romagnosi fostered the use of sciences for civil purposes, including what

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Natali called ‘a new political and statistical geography’ (Natali 1915, 276) with practical aims. For Armani, Romagnosi’s thought inspired Cattaneo thanks to its ‘anti-metaphysical and anti-idealistic views, which were based on operational principles’ (Armani 1997, 22). Romagnosi was also a political opponent of the Austrian government that ruled Milan and Venice after 1815, akin to the Carboneria movement. The earliest surviving correspondences of young Cattaneo accounted for his pleasure when Romagnosi was freed after a prison term, as he wrote to his friend Giuseppe Montani in 1822. ‘The good old man is back … after a so useful holiday’ (Cattaneo 1949, 8; Cattaneo to Montani, March 1822), a sentence that also reveals Cattaneo’s typical irony against the silliness of political power. The reference above is taken from the commented edition of Cattaneo’s correspondence edited by Rinaldo Caddeo in the 1950s, which was the second published work of this kind after the first one edited by Jessie White Mario between 1892 and 1901. The third and potentially most complete published collection of Cattaneo’s correspondences, edited by the Swiss-Italian Committee for the works of Cattaneo is still unfinished. Some reservations were expressed by Caddeo about the excessive liberty with which White Mario meddled with Cattaneo’s original texts, that were substantially confirmed later by Carlo Agliati, one of the third series’ editors, arguing that: ‘The courageous Englishwoman was not animated by the preoccupation of offering philological unreproachable texts’ (Agliati 2001, xxii). For these reasons, to quote Cattaneo’s epistolary I use alternatively the second and the third of these three praiseworthy collections. While all biographers agree that, before 1848, Cattaneo never meddled explicitly with politics, it is undeniable that he already had the reputation of a republican and a political opponent, and his scholarly works already contained the ideas that grounded his federalism. As I discuss further in the following chapter, to understand Cattaneo it is indispensable to keep in mind that he always considered his writings and works as an editor and a cultural organiser as his own way to commit to politics. This was also one of the reasons for which he systematically refused all the political, governmental and parliamentary mandates that he was offered all along his career. Some aspects of this unruly attitude already emerged in the official reports concerning his work at the high-school. In 1835, with reference to some discussions that he had with his superiors, a note

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of Milan Austrian governor Hartig deplored the: ‘Animosity and insubordination [of Cattaneo], a teacher who dares to reject indignantly the admonitions that are made to him by the superiors’, and someone susceptible of acting as a ‘troublemaker’ (Cattaneo 1949, 42). Thus, Cattaneo’s rebel attitudes were already well known by the Austrian authorities. Familiar with a number of languages including Latin, Greek, German, French and English, young Cattaneo translated several works of history and geography. As a schoolteacher, one of his duties was editing geography handbooks ‘to be used in the Gymnasia’ (Cattaneo 2001, 12; Direzione Generale dei Ginnasi to Cattaneo). In 1835, he resigned from the high-school and started living off his publications and his work as a scientific advisor and an investor in projects such as the construction of the railway between Milan and Venice (Armani 1979). This occupation anticipated his future interest in the project of the trans-European railway which would have crossed the Gotthard in Switzerland. As Walter Barberis notes, while the free municipium is the core of Cattaneo’s political thinking: ‘The federal pact between civic places and free communities could well be grounded on a solid railway network’ (Barberis 2011, xviii). This helps in understanding the enthusiasm of Cattaneo in pleading militantly for the cause of railways: first, a railway network constituted the potential support of a federation which was not understood as political separation, but as unification on the grounds of free cooperation between towns and regions without a central power to impose it. Second, it represented a pioneering idea of voluntaristic geography: if organising spaces is essential to organise societies, then, studying territories to modify them for civil purposes in agriculture, urbanism or transportation was a key step for social transformation. These purposes informed one of Cattaneo’s most famous endeavours, that is the foundation of Il Politecnico, a journal that was published from 1839 to 1844 and then resumed from 1860 to 1865. A sort of encyclopaedic contribution to sciences for social progress, the journal also responded to concerns about popular education and the formation of a progressive and well-read public opinion. In one of the earliest issues, Cattaneo discussed the educational system in Lombardy arguing that progressive education should develop pupils’ autonomous capacities rather than ‘accumulating notions in memory’ (Cattaneo 1839, 185). Among the rich and varied interests of the journal’s collaborators, some broadly defined geography was always represented.

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Indeed, already in 1827, Giovan Pietro Vieusseux had asked Cattaneo to supply Vieusseux’s journal L’Antologia with some geographical articles, as he could ‘cultivate philosophically geographical sciences’ (Armani 1997, 32). One of Cattaneo’s friends, linguist Bernardino Biondelli (1804–1886), was one of the collaborators of Ranuzzi’s Annuario and put Cattaneo in touch with several geographers, including Iacopo Gråberg di Hemsö (1776–1847) a Swedish-born scholar who was based in Florence and likewise corresponded with Ranuzzi and Vieusseux. At that time, Gråberg attended the scientific congresses and was considered one of the most respected geographers alongside ‘elderly Adriano Balbi’ (Casalena 2007, 213), another of those whom Cattaneo tried to involve in the early Politecnico (Cattaneo 2001, 259; Balbi to Cattaneo, 14 October 1839). In 1839, Biondelli proposed to Cattaneo ‘an article of Count Gråberg on the latest progresses of geography that has been presented at the Italian Scientific Congress in Pisa and that you might include in Politecnico’ (Cattaneo 2001, 272; Biondelli to Cattaneo 4 April 1839). This article was immediately included, and most importantly Biondelli exposed to Cattaneo his political wishes about Politecnico, that should ‘succeed one day in giving a good direction to national studies and to annihilate all those rotten systems that the Jesuits have left’ (Cattaneo 2001, 327; Biondelli to Cattaneo 1 April 1840). That is, culture was considered as a way to secularise society countering metaphysics and clerical influences, a key point for republican and later socialist struggles in the long Risorgimento. Biondelli likewise endorsed Cattaneo’s commitment to constructing railways given that: ‘In Italy, we need to bring closer people, parties, opinions, municipia and dialects’. He matched Cattaneo’s polemics about ongoing fantasist projects to dig canals. For Cattaneo, connecting ‘the Adriatic with the Mediterranean counts less … than allowing for quick rides from city to city, which unify hundreds of little and powerless peoples in a strong operating and thinking body’ (Cattaneo 1949, 99; Cattaneo to Biondelli, 30 June 1840). While Biondelli had already noted that ‘railways should prevail over navigable canals’ (Cattaneo 2001, 378; Biondelli to Cattaneo 17 June 1840), in Cattaneo’s sarcasm against these projects one can already see the classical mistrust of humanistic geographers towards those who pretend to change the world through the stroke of a pen on a map, which will be later one of the main targets of the polemics successively carried out by critical geographers denouncing

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mapping as one of the instruments of armies, states and colonial empires (Ferretti 2007). As for Gråberg, he exchanged several letters with Cattaneo expressing his support for the Vieusseux’s circuits in Tuscany and recommending works in popular education such as the journal Guida dell’Educatore edited by Raffaello Lambruschini (1788–1873). While this can be considered as another example of intellectuals’ commitment to public betterment (Cattaneo 2001, 369; Gråberg to Cattaneo, 6 June 1840), Cattaneo seemed not to be a so strong Gråberg’s admirer as Biondelli. Cattaneo and the Swedish geographer had a long polemical correspondence on how geographical names on a Gråberg’s article on Central Asia should have been spelled in Politecnico. Too boring to be fully recounted here, this polemics was a good example to understand the kind of public that Cattaneo targeted for his journal. As he wrote to Ottavio Ferrario: ‘So big works, neither original nor popular, cannot interest that kind of mundane readers to whom the journal is destined’ (Cattaneo 1949, 93; Cattaneo to Ferrario, 23 April 1839). By the term ‘mundane’, Cattaneo identified the emerging middle and popular classes that were being progressively alphabetised and whose betterment and social agency were key in Cattaneo’s projects for social change, in which education preceded revolution. Politecnico published substantial commentaries to important books that were printed in Italy and abroad, to keep its readership constantly updated on the latest news in the main scientific disciplines. As Cattaneo confided to Biondelli, his objective was also to gather, ‘in two or three years … the literary and economic ingredients of a collection to represent us worthily in Europe’ (Cattaneo 1949, 97; Cattaneo to Biondelli, 26 March 1840), which showed his internationalist mentality and perspective. As for his polemic with Gråberg, Cattaneo concluded ironically, in another letter to Biondelli that: ‘With your old Scandinavian friend we had a bit of a quarrel, but now we made peace’ (Cattaneo 1949, 104; Cattaneo to Biondelli, July 1840). Furthermore, the publication of Cattaneo’s early correspondence, especially the letters that he received in the 1830s and 1840s, allows for assessing his direct relationship with Ranuzzi. Although Cattaneo never published in Annuario despite the repeated attempts of Ranuzzi to invite him, the Milanese scholar was directly involved in Ranuzzi’s Ufficio networks. While it seems quite odd to note that, seemingly, Cattaneo did not directly respond to the numerous solicitations that he received from Ranuzzi, this rather unilateral correspondence exposes how, even before

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he became famous due to the roles that he played in the 1848 Milan insurrection, Cattaneo was nationwide considered as a respected name in the field of geography. The surviving Ranuzzi’s letters were sent in 1844, when Cattaneo was already known for Politecnico, and was about to publish his Notizie Naturali e Civili della Lombardia. Ranuzzi started by asking Cattaneo to contribute something on Lombardy to ‘increasingly illustrating the study of our common homeland’ (Cattaneo 2005b, 402; Ranuzzi to Cattaneo, 28 January 1844), which explicitly revealed Ranuzzi’s political intentions to prefigurate geographically a national unification. Few months later, Ranuzzi insisted mentioning other possible contributors to the second volume of Annuario among Cattaneo’s closest collaborators including Biondelli, Antonio Litta and Elia Lombardini (Cattaneo 2005b, 436; Ranuzzi to Cattaneo, 7 March 1844). Later, Ranuzzi expressed to Cattaneo his concerns for having started this endeavour in a way that was maybe too ‘incautious’ (Cattaneo 2005b, 465; Ranuzzi to Cattaneo, 25 April 1844) and needed the support of everybody. Importantly, Ranuzzi announced to Cattaneo his wishes to organise a ‘chorographic institution’ (Cattaneo 2005b, 558; Ranuzzi to Cattaneo, 23 October 1844) that was expected to do in Emilia-Romagna what Notizie Naturali e Civili was doing in Lombardy. This means that Cattaneo’s works were considered as a major reference by the geographers who tried to constitute an early Italian geographical society with political purposes (Ferretti 2014b). Crucially, these efforts were not limited to prefigurating the future nation, but also focused on regions, anticipating ideas of an ‘active’ geography dealing with social planning. Cattaneo wrote a long and very positive review of Ranuzzi’s Annuario in Rivista Europea, which was later included in his Scritti Storici e Geografici. The editor of Politecnico expressed satisfaction for the international dimension of Ranuzzi’s endeavour, bringing to Italy international geographical scholarship such as works of Carl Ritter. He likewise endorsed Ranuzzi’s idea of publishing ‘a permanent series of local studies in all regions of Italy’ (Cattaneo 1957, vol. 3, 80), following the very model of Cattaneo’s Notizie. Cattaneo significantly endorsed Ranuzzi’s Ufficio di Corrispondenza Geografica as an endeavour that was more useful than any geographical session in the Italian Scientific Congresses, given that, for Cattaneo, scholarship had first to reach civil society to produce social and economic improvements beyond the walls of elites’

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circles. In this text, we find an occurrence of the term ‘Risorgimento’ (Cattaneo 1957, vol. 3, 96), that Cattaneo defined as a resurgence of geographical studies. It is noteworthy that geography was a federating label: if we compare the list of Annuario’s correspondents and the names of Cattaneo’s friends in the 1830s and 1840s, we find several correspondences, revealing the same kind of progressive political purposes behind the respective scientific works. While Ranuzzi can be considered as the first geographer who brought Ritter’s thought to Italy, Cattaneo can be likewise considered as an important cultural transferor of German-speaking scientific and geographical cultures. In 1840, through his friend Carlo Porro, he contacted German naturalist Lorenz Oken (1779–1851), a key exponent, alongside Friedrich Schelling, of the philosophical school of the Naturphilosophie, stating the consubstantiality and ceaseless dialectic relation of humankind and nature, which exerted a powerful influence over all European geography in the nineteenth century (Tang 2008). Oken effectively published an article on ‘The philosophical classification of the three kingdoms of nature’ for Politecnico in 1840, and also wrote to Cattaneo to congratulate him for the quality of the journal (Cattaneo 2001, 371; Oken to Cattaneo, 11 June 1840). Cattaneo also published a long review of Alexander von Humboldt’s key work Cosmos, where he expressed his enthusiasm for the works of the German geographer, starting from Humboldt’s effort to render geography useful for civic purposes. This was done by ‘describing one by one the branches of the scientific tree, arranging those which concern material things in one series, and those which belong to civil life in the other one’ (Cattaneo 1844, 583). For Cattaneo, this implied a legitimation of social sciences, alongside the natural ones, as being potentially applied and relevant knowledge. This chimes with later interpretations of Humboldt as an author who was committed to political progress in challenging the aristocracy during the Restoration by giving new scientific tools to the middle classes, that is performing geography as an implicit political strategy (Farinelli 1992; Ferretti 2011; Minca 2007). Cattaneo noted how Humboldt, through his reference to the Naturphilosophen, challenged the ‘scholastic orgies’ and the ‘grand ideal systems’ (Cattaneo 1844, 587) of metaphysics, Kantianism and idealism. For Cattaneo, these metaphysical philosophies were misleading scholars, as they tended to superimpose a theory to reality, which was then forced to

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adhere to aprioristic theories. Conversely, Cattaneo strongly and consistently supported the methods of an open-ended empirical and experimental science that, following authors such as Humboldt, ‘proceeds in a cautious and doubtful way, trying and retrying’ (Cattaneo 1844, 585). While this anticipated later critiques of what postmodernism called ‘metanarratives’, this had also remarkable political implications in declaring Cattaneo’s wariness of all dogmas and all definitive ‘truths’, as research should always be open and in-progress. Again, Cattaneo mentioned geographical works ongoing in Italy, such as Ranuzzi’s Annuario.

A Federalist, Anticolonial and Antiracist Geography The work that is considered as Cattaneo’s main contribution to geography, that is his Introduction to Notizie Naturali e Civili sulla Lombardia, was written in these years and in this context. Notizie was first commissioned to Cattaneo and to other Milanese scholars by the Municipality of Milan to illustrate ‘the physical, intellectual and moral condition of the province of Milan’ (Armani 1979, xxviii) to be used as a guide for the guests of the 1844 Italian Scientific Congress to be celebrated in Milan. Yet, the limits of the city and its surroundings as they had been dealt in the guides that had been published on the occasion of the former congresses seemed to Cattaneo too ‘narrow, with too many similarities and infinite repetitions’ (Cattaneo 1979, 4). The first matter that Cattaneo raised was authorial freedom in relation to the rigid frameworks that were imposed by a public client, which eventually corresponded to an authoritarian regime. The second was Cattaneo’s great geographical intuition, that was defined by Armani as the attempt to: ‘Embrace the entire reality of the region seizing its unifying aspects and putting them into mutual relationship’ (Armani 1979, xxxvi). From the standpoint of the philosophy and history of geography, this means that Cattaneo anticipated nothing less than the scholarly paradigm of regional geography. This idea will dominate the discipline from the end of the nineteenth century, when the French School of the Géographie humaine adopted the notion of region as a consistent entity to frame geographical studies (Robic et al. 2011), to the 1950s–1960s. At that moment, the ‘regional paradigm’ was challenged by the quantitative and critical approaches considering the notion of region as not enough ‘scientific’ (Cresswell 2013). Yet, this does not imply that ideas of region are

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today outmoded in geography, as they apply to geography and planning under several other forms such as ‘bioregionalism’, ‘territories in resistance’ and so on (Varengo 2020; Zibechi 2012). This only highlights the importance of Cattaneo’s intuitions and explains why his works were often quoted by geographers dealing with regional planning in Italy, such as Gambi and many others. In 1843, Cattaneo broke up with both the Municipality and the scholars who had to perform this task with him, and announced his decision to proceed alone leading a project of regional monograph embracing the entire Lombardy (Cattaneo 1949, 147; Cattaneo to IR Congregazione Municipale, 4 August 1843). Yet, he was still supported by a bunch of friends: from Cattaneo’s letters to one of them, hydrologist Elia Lombardini, we infer that Notizie naturali e civili should have consisted in annual volumes of around 600 pages each (Cattaneo 1949, 171; Cattaneo to Lombardini, 17 September 1844). This means that Notizie, of which only the first volume was published due to material difficulties, had actually to be a continuation of Politecnico, whose publication was meanwhile suspended due to a legal dispute between Cattaneo and publisher Luigi Pirola. The likewise puzzling correspondence between Pirola and Cattaneo reveals that Politecnico had 390 permanent subscribers ‘at a relatively high prize’ (Cattaneo 1949, 149; Cattaneo to Pirola), and other several hundreds of copies were sold by bookshops in Italy and abroad. This reveals a quite good circulation, considering that the journal published monthly issues of 100–200 pages, reaching more than 1000 pages for each annual volume. Notizie consistently extended Politecnico in expressing Cattaneo’s thinking, combining again scholarly geography and elements revealing its political purposes, for instance, the announcement that this work had to contribute to a conscientization of the ‘individual municipal homelands and of the common homeland’ (Cattaneo 1979, 6). On the one hand, this confirmed that, for Cattaneo, federalism and municipalism did not mean political division, but cooperation from below on voluntaristic grounds between different regions and municipalities. On the other, it would be wrong to see in that ‘homeland’ a call for an Italian state, as Cattaneo’s framework was far more complex, and referred first to Europe. While Ranuzzi imagined that regional monographs would have coherently covered all the regions of Italy, Cattaneo went well beyond this idea by setting Europe as his ideal horizon: ‘Thousands of scholars … could work on an edifice whose basis would be Europe’ (Cattaneo 1979, 7).

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Cattaneo also anticipated another future classical characteristic of the ‘French-style’ regional monograph that is the mobilisation of both natural and historical aspects of the studied region. In the Lombard plain, the artificial canals were traditionally used for both navigation and irrigation, being then defined by Cattaneo as ‘true rivers’ whose inclination was studied ‘to receive at each stage their unequal amounts of water, that irrigation progressively takes out’ (Cattaneo 1979, 101). This dynamic relation between the natural inclination of a piedmontal plain where waters flow quite abundantly, and the human historical labour that was needed to reach that equilibrium, resulted in ‘the plain of Lombardy [being] the most populous region in Europe’ (Cattaneo 1979, 108). There, ‘the poor receives a more generous share of help than elsewhere’ (Cattaneo 1979, 109). Thus, for Cattaneo, ‘progress’ did not mean mere human domination over nature, but human cleverness in reaching a sort of symbiosis with the natural elements which characterise each region, including social redistribution. Cattaneo’s historical discussion started from the Antiquity, using sources such as early Greek geographer Strabo and evoking historical examples of his idea of municipal and republican federalism. For instance, he quoted the so-called Etruscan Dodecapolis in Central Italy as ‘the twelve republics of Tuscany’ (Cattaneo 1979, 26), also calling them a ‘Hansa of the Antiquity’ (Cattaneo 1979, 27). In these few lines, Cattaneo touched a number of bases in his political thinking, namely republicanism, municipal autonomy and federations, of which historical examples such as the Hansa were key inspirations of other federalist geographers such as Elisée Reclus (Ferretti 2014a). Analysing the end of the Roman Empire and the following invasions up to the Middle Ages, Cattaneo dealt with another key notion for his political thought, that is the ‘nation in arms’. While the closest example of armed citizen militias was provided by the French Revolution, Cattaneo found examples of this idea in the history of medieval Italian Communes, calling their resistance against Hungarian invasions in the tenth Century: ‘The beginning of Risorgimento [when] each village built its walls, each family elevated a tower’ (Cattaneo 1979, 53)—an all-too-clear metaphor of his day’s resistance against Austrian domination. This resistance was not intended by Cattaneo as a chauvinistic defence of the ‘fatherland’, as one could infer from Viroli’s definition of republican patriotism quoted in the Introduction. Indeed, medieval communes were the protagonists of the: ‘Great transformation of servants in free

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peasants [as soon as] Italy became again the place of an armed population. The use of weapons woke up the sense of honour that was suffocated by the Byzantine and Longobard oppression … The true principle of the resurgence [Risorgimento] was in the legitimate use of popular militia’ (Cattaneo 1979, 55). As for resisting oppression, some parts of Notizie were unwittingly prophetic in anticipating the events of four years later, in 1848, when Cattaneo referred to facts of the thirteenth century, when the population of Milan insurged and: ‘Got rid of all the captains, going then land by land to conquer feudal castles’ (Cattaneo 1979, 55). It is worth noting that Cattaneo also celebrated local glories of Lombardy who were not military fighters, but fighters of free thought such as Cesare Beccaria, the figure symbolising the struggles against torture and arbitrary justice, who ‘was not only writer [and teacher] in social sciences, given that he sat, being respected, in public councils’ (Cattaneo 1979, 97). Finally, the opposition mentioned above between communal freedom and feudal oppression is key to understand another of the most famous geographical works of Cattaneo, ‘The city as the ideal principle of Italian histories’. While this text was written some 15 years after Notizie, in 1858, to respond to Cattaneo’s friend Giuseppe Ferrari who had published a book on the history of Italian revolutions, it should be considered as a logical follow-up to Notizie. As Armani observed, Cattaneo’s pamphlet ‘perfectly corresponded to his federalist thinking’ (Armani 1979, xlv) as it contended that the continuity in the municipia’s settlements since the Antiquity is the key geographical fact that allows understanding Italian histories. During the Roman period, Italian society was eminently urban, and the towns which had the rank of municipium were around 400. For Cattaneo, this constituted a peculiarity of the Italian situation where: ‘The city formed an inseparable body with its countryside’ (Cattaneo 1979, 120). Geographers such as Gambi noted that this idea anticipated key notions of human geography and anthropogeography such as ‘concepts of place and regionality’ as well as the ‘mutual dependence of city and countryside’ (Armani 1979, xlviii). For Cattaneo, the historical continuity of the municipium after the collapse of the Roman empire occurred as both a permanence of physical settlement and the maintaining of local identities that served to many towns to resist the dramatic political and environmental transformations of the early Middle Ages. While numerous municipia did not survive the destruction of the Roman territorial system, those which continued

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to perform urban functions during the Longobard domination demonstrated, according to Cattaneo, that: ‘The municipium was stronger than the conquest’ (Cattaneo 1979, 134). The new political leaders (the socalled ‘barbarians’), who were initially hostile to all urban societies, had to come to terms with the communal organisation and even accommodate their centres of power in correspondence to some former Roman municipia. Later, for Cattaneo (implicitly recalling what happened in 1848–1849), Venice managed to remain free during the occupation of Charlamagne thanks to the peculiar geography of her environment showing that ‘the City was stronger than the Kingdom’ (Cattaneo 1979, 140). This statement is really key to understand Cattaneo’s republican and federalist municipalism. In assessing Italian urban histories, Cattaneo anticipated another aspect of later left/libertarian readings of the free commune in the Middle Ages, whose great contribution to the history of human freedom was: ‘Spreading the sense of civil right and dignity to the lowest plebs, even overt[aking] ancient Athens whose gentle citizenship had anyway the barbarous ground of slavery’ (Cattaneo 1979, 166). This argument was variously repeated by Peter Kropotkin in his works on mutual aid, considering the Commune of the Middle Ages as one of the highest historical expressions of social and political emancipation (Kropotkin 1902), and by Kropotkin’s admirer Lewis Mumford, who likewise considered the walled city of the Middle Ages as the refuge of liberty against feudality (Mumford 1997). Another crucial point in Cattaneo’s prefigurative geography was the idea that these histories spoke to his own present by showing that: ‘States sharing a border are natural enemies. The only way to escape to this iron law is the federation’ (Cattaneo 1979, 153). This idea opened the way to a long history of republican and anarcho-socialist federalism as I discuss below. A contribution of Cattaneo’s geography to what I call decolonial Risorgimento was his exceptional capacity to exert empathy towards different peoples and, within all the possible limitations of a scholar of that time, the complete absence of civilisational arrogance and the refuse of all kinds of chauvinism. One of his first works dealing with different cultures than the Italian-Christian ones was an 1836 pamphlet known as the ‘Jewish Interdictions’, whose full title was Ricerche economiche sulle interdizioni imposte dalla legge civile agli israeliti (1836). Although the expression ‘antisemitism’ did not yet exist at that time, one can for sure consider Cattaneo as one of its early opponents and one of the earliest

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antiracist scholars. After the French Revolution had granted for the first time to the Jews the same rights of citizenship as everybody else, the 1815 Restoration had created a messy situation, in which contradictory laws existed in bordering states about the Jews’ rights. Cattaneo discussed the case of the Wahl brothers, two French citizens of Jewish religion, who were not allowed to purchase some land in the Swiss canton of Basel, as it was forbidden for Jews to own land in Switzerland. This triggered a legal dispute, as they should have been entitled to the right of ownership in Switzerland as French citizens. Barberis observes that Cattaneo’s defence of the Jews’ rights was first grounded on liberal pragmatism, given that the unequal access of citizens to property implied ‘a check to development’ (Barberis 2011, xv) and constituted an irrational feudal persistence hindering the free development of the economy. Yet, this attitude was also part of Cattaneo’s ‘universalistic message, extraneous to racial or ethnic borders, spacing from Europe to Mexico, from Japan to China, as diverse and alternatively important subjects of a basic cultural polycentrism’ (Barberis 2011, xx). As Barberis notes, the Interdictions were written in the same years in which Cattaneo conducted a public polemics against Catholic conservative Antonio Rosmini, who had attacked Romagnosi’s intellectual legacy making Cattaneo furious and ready to fight Rosmini’s ‘ideological obscurantist thinking, wishing to cage culture in a suffocating confessional framework’ (Barberis 2011, xvi). Therefore, the struggle in defence of ethnic and religious minorities was part of Cattaneo’s broader bet on the secular transformation of society against dogmas and religions. Significantly, Cattaneo’s Interdictions started by noting that, once progressive social reforms had been produced in a European nation, no interdiction was strong enough to impede that these innovations ‘trouble the old practices of neighbouring countries’ (Cattaneo 2011, 5), which would become a key point of European federalism as a community granting equal civil rights to everybody. Crucially, alongside economic arguments on the benefits of free trade, Cattaneo also justified his defence of the Jews’ rights on ethical and antiracist grounds. In countering the argument of Swiss conservatives that granting the Jews full property rights would have entailed a massive Jewish migration to Basel, Cattaneo argued that even in the unlikely case that this occurred, this would have only been beneficial to the economy. For Cattaneo, ‘a vineyard planted by a Jew in an uncultivated field’ (Cattaneo 2011, 11) will not give worse fruits than other plants. Therefore, ‘there is nothing to be afraid of in

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the peaceful coexistence of Jews and Christians on the same soil [while] the full enjoyment of human dignity and social consideration’ (Cattaneo 2011, 15) will become more important than mere money. Cattaneo’s idea that migrations are not something intrinsically detrimental should be reminded to all those who believe that the problems of today’s Europe are some bunches of poor people trying to flee hunger and desperation in crossing the Mediterranean. Cattaneo’s correspondences show that, writing the Interdictions, he gained popularity in Jewish intellectual circuits, but also raised political suspects among conservatives. In 1836, he wrote to Baron Salomon Rothschild that his pamphlet had been approved by the Austrian censorship but was still waiting for the authorization of the local government in Milan to be printed. Cattaneo wanted to ‘provide some new elements to this European discussion … only for the advancement of science and of the general interests of humankind’ (Cattaneo 1949, 56; Cattaneo to Baron Rotschild, 6 June 1836). In 1938, Cattaneo corresponded with Simon Bloch, editor of the journal La régénération, journal périodique destiné à améliorer la situation religieuse et morale des israélites , who had endorsed the Interdictions, expressing his position on the question of Jewish emancipation in very progressive political terms. For Cattaneo, the Jews, ‘one of the noblest and unluckiest peoples’ were destined to conquer their emancipation, but this did not necessarily mean having ‘a small homeland somewhere on the globe, to exert there the trivial right to rule themselves making tariffs, peace, wars and persecutions’ (Cattaneo 1949, 84; Cattaneo to Bloch, 13 March 1838). This note is very important to insert Cattaneo’s federalism in his internationalist anti-statism: already in the 1830s, he perceived how reductive would have been to resolve the problem of ‘persecuted peoples’ by simply creating new small (and potentially oppressive and militarist) states, as their emancipation was a wider and more complex phenomenon. Cattaneo seized all possible occasions to declare his sympathies for oppressed minorities. For instance, in his review of Ranuzzi’s Annuario, which included an article of Biondelli on linguistic minorities in Italy, Cattaneo added his personal remarks on another diasporic community that was traditionally persecuted and marginalised, that is the Armenians residing in Venice. ‘Among the foreign colonies, the noblest and most glorious … was created by the unlucky Armenian nation in a small island of the Venetian lagoon, where the best of her youth comes to receive teaching on sciences, on the traditions of better times and the hope for a

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glorious resurgence [Risorgimento]’ (Cattaneo 1957, vol. 3, 82). Again, nothing could be so far from Cattaneo’s open-minded generosity than nationalism or chauvinism: anticipating Viroli’s arguments, he deemed homeland the place of rights and freedoms, not the place in which someone had the hazard of being born. As Franco Della Peruta confirmed, Cattaneo was ‘always explicitly opposed to all forms of racial discrimination’, which included sarcastic commentaries such as arguing that those who discuss of races ‘can write the history of dogs or horses’ (Della Peruta 2001, 31), rather than human histories. This was associated with Cattaneo’s clear, unequivocal and publicly displayed anticolonialism, fully recognised by Della Peruta and quite transparent in some of his writings published in Politecnico and Rivista Europea since the 1840s and then collected in the Historical and Geographical Writings by Salvemini and Sestan. In his article ‘Dell’India antica e moderna’ (1845), Cattaneo provided one of the earliest critiques of British colonialism, using arguments that would have been developed few decades later by Elisée Reclus, who anticipated the necessity of the future decolonization due to the increasing demographic gap between small England and huge India (Ferretti 2013). Similarly, Cattaneo blamed the fact that few thousands of Britons: ‘Rule 150 million people [that is] a man is the judge of a million of men’ (Cattaneo 1957, vol. 2, 76). Cattaneo also dealt critically with the thorny question of some ‘indigenous’ oppressive institutions to which the colonisers pretended to substitute European ‘freedom’ in official colonialist narratives, such as, in India, the caste system or even the Sati. The principles stated by Cattaneo were those of conscientization and free will: that is, the emancipation of a nation from its own oppressive practices should not be brought from outside by conquerors or ‘savers’, but ‘should develop within that sense of free will that we believe is innate in any human nature’ (Cattaneo 1957, vol. 2, 77). These notes expressed at the same time the principle of human equality and the idea that emancipation should not be granted but always autonomously taken by the oppressed, which will explain some of Cattaneo’s controversial choices during the most heated phases of Risorgimento, as I discuss in the next chapter. Cattaneo was also interested in non-European cultures such as the Chinese one, and countered the commonplaces of his day that identified other cultures as ‘inferior’. Cattaneo first criticised the Europeans who, instead of making efforts to understand the Other, were only able, in the case of China, to send: ‘Intruders … avid soldiers and quarrelsome

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missionaries’ (Cattaneo 1957, vol. 3, 139). Like Reclus and the anarchist geographers, Cattaneo did not limit his discourse to a critique of the misdeeds of colonisation, but advanced the idea of the colonised peoples’ agency for self-emancipation. For Cattaneo, in India: ‘The germ of emancipation dates from the day in which the Brahmin’s slave could became prince’ (Cattaneo 1957, vol. 2, 78). Importantly, Cattaneo included the notion of female emancipation, mentioning the case of Princess Ahalia and arguing that, once seized power, she ‘announced to India for the first time the emancipation of her sex’ (Cattaneo 1957 vol. 2, 78). In a 1842 review of recent geographical writings, Cattaneo expressed his own views on the origins of civilization and on the genocide of first peoples. Commenting the French colonisation of North Africa, Cattaneo remembered the role that Arab culture played in the diffusion of techniques such as irrigation in Medieval Spain, from which the Muslims were later banished by the Christians. Cattaneo rhetorically asked: ‘Which of the two peoples will appear to history as the more generous?’ (Cattaneo 1957, vol. 1, 289). Conversely, Cattaneo noted how different and brutal had been the European conquest in the Americas, still implying ‘horrible violence that eradicates the indigenous from their native lands’, and emphasised their right of resistance by mentioning those ‘few Seminoles [who] bravely defend themselves in the marshes of Florida’ (Cattaneo 1957, vol. 1, 283). Importantly, Cattaneo’s criticisms were not limited to the imperialism of the ‘evil’ Anglo-Saxons, as he likewise blamed the imperialistic behaviour of nations such as France and was not limited to so-called ‘invaded colonies’ as it also applied to ‘settled colonies’. As for French Algeria, Cattaneo was horrified that such ‘bloody conquest’ (Cattaneo 1957, vol. 1, 290) was performed by the country that had formerly exported the Revolution, and stated again the right of resistance of the indigenous. ‘Algeria was filled with mobs compelled to make war for having lost land and cattle … A sacred war, because the right of property is sacred’ (Cattaneo 1957, vol. 1, 289). The denunciation of the spoliation of colonised peoples by European settlers and of related anticolonial resistance could not be expressed more clearly. Cattaneo’s ideas on the ‘right of resistance’ are further clarified by a letter surviving in a private archive and only included in his published correspondence through the 2005 Swiss-Italian edition. There, Cattaneo expressed deep sympathy for the leader of early Algerian resistance Emir Abdelkader (1808–1860), who was then fighting a difficult war against

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French occupation. ‘Personally, I have more sympathy for Abd-el-Kader, who defends his land and his God since ten years, than for that arrogant Christian, General Bugeaud. I feel for the brave Circassians what I don’t feel for the Cossacks, who go to their valleys to oppress them … The nineteenth century must embrace the entire humanity, and build a larger fraternity from the different nationalities and the discordant and raging religious, a fraternity that cannot be contained in the narrow sein of any religion. The churches are institutions of the Middle Ages. The Catholic ones are feuds of the Papacy, the protestant ones are communities of the bourgeois. None of them has enough large arms to embrace all their sons without violence’ (Cattaneo 2005a, 296; Cattaneo to Sagredo, 8 May 1841). Beyond the anticlericalism which also characterised the anticolonial critiques of the anarchist geographers blaming the role of churches ad missionaries in supporting the conquest and the genocide, it is worth noting the very early nature of Cattaneo’s anticolonial stances. In fact, 1841 abundantly predated the acme of colonialism in the ‘Age of the Empire’, and the successive decolonisation of Asian and African countries. Moreover, this further shows how abusive would be using Risorgimento as a justification for any kind of Italian nationalism, chauvinism or imperialism, given the kind of ideas that the most respected intellectuals of that movement expressed. Finally, Cattaneo also criticised what is called today internal colonialism, something that I will discuss when addressing federalist critiques to the conquest of the South by the Savoias’ Monarchy after 1860. In Cattaneo’s case, critiques to internal colonialism especially applied to the Irish case, on which he disposed of first-hand information thanks to his wife Anna Pyne Woodcock, an Englishwoman with Irish origins, and to his direct correspondences with British scholars such as liberal and humanitarian politician Richard Cobden. Cattaneo had the occasion to comment directly on the Great Famine. In 1847, one of the Famine’s worst years, he wrote a series of letters to British diplomat Robert Campbell to counter the idea that exporting to Ireland the irrigation techniques used in Lombardy, that some readers of Arthur Young believed could ‘produce the same effects in France or Ireland’ (Cattaneo 1847, 4), could bolster the island’s economy. Not only the physical conditions, but the history and the social conditions produced peculiar results that could not be replied elsewhere.

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Beyond physical geography, Cattaneo’s argument was that planning cannot be imposed from above, as it should be acted in collaboration with the interested populations, involving all relevant stakeholders. For Cattaneo, a government can decide to dig a canal, but cannot take for granted ‘the general consensus which is necessary to operate a revolution’ (Cattaneo 1847, 50). As for Ireland, Cattaneo identified latifundium, monoculture, the scarcity of a middle class and the ‘sad pacts through which the land is lent to the settlers’ (Cattaneo 1847, 81) as the main problems. For the Lombard thinker, full property should be granted to peasants to counter the sentiment that ‘the land was confiscated and usurped’ (Cattaneo 1847, 84), that is the effect of the colonial relations that Cattaneo has criticised about India and Algeria. In 1851, discussing with Giuseppe Ferrari on whether federalists should oppose ‘unification’ or ‘fusion’ in Italy, Cattaneo listed Ireland (included since 1798 in the same Crown as Britain) among the examples of ‘absurd fusion’ (Monti 1921, 98; Cattaneo to Ferrari, 12 September 1851). In 1860, Cattaneo claimed retrospectively how, in his 1844 Politecnico papers, he had already warned about a possible subsistence crisis in Ireland due to the people’s dependence on potatoes. Therefore, Cattaneo considered the famine as the effect of ‘voluntary and deliberate mistakes’ (Cattaneo 1860, 22). He also noted that ‘most of land ownership in Ireland had its nasty origin in the Normand conquest and in the usurpations of the Stuarts and of Cromwell’ and that ‘the entire isle was feuded to no more of 8,000 lords’ (Cattaneo 1860, 31), often absentees. Thus, Cattaneo’s argument was that there was no need of the ‘extermination of two millions poor people’ (Cattaneo 1860, 33) to realise that reforms were needed. Indeed, there was still room to talk about oppressors and oppressed: ‘The descendants of the oppressed and of the oppressors might one day … by way of a peaceful industry, recover partially or fully that ancestral land that they … contended to each other through usurpation and retaliation’ (Cattaneo 1860, 34). Writing to a Milanese journal, Cattaneo further clarified his thought: ‘While it is true that the English government helped three millions of hungry people, it is also true that it allowed other two millions perishing! As scholars could predict [the Famine], statesmen should have prevented it’ (Cattaneo 1954, 270; Cattaneo to La Lombardia, 29 January 1860). After the Famine, declarations of solidarity with the cause of Irish independence became quite common in the milieus of radical and federalist Risorgimento, as I discuss below.

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Finally, it is worth noting that, at the end of the 1830s, Cattaneo was already acquainted with the future President of the Italian Geographical Society, founded in 1867, Cristoforo Negri, but he never joined this association (Galluccio 2012), despite he was explicitly invited to help ‘our society’ (Cattaneo 1956, 636; Negri to Cattaneo, 10 October 1867). Among the possible reasons, one can consider Cattaneo’s strong antipathy for another of the Geographical Society’s early leaders, Cesare Correnti, who had taken side with the royalists during the 1848 Milan revolution. Cattaneo never forgave those Milanese conservatives who had falsely accused him of being an Austrian spy in July 1848, with the risk that he was ‘imprisoned on 2 August and left in Radetzky’s hand or deported to Fenestrelle’ (Cattaneo 2005a, 149; Cattaneo to Macchi, January 1850). In the aftermath of the insurrection, Cattaneo was furious about a letter of Correnti complaining that Cattaneo had published documents which were compromising for ‘those clowns to whom he miserably prostituted himself’ (Cattaneo 2005a, 149; Cattaneo to Macchi, January 1850). In terms of republican freedom and civil virtue, as noted above, intransigence exactly means ‘not forgiving or forgetting too lightly’ (Bobbio and Viroli 2003, 33). Moreover, the kind of statist and militarist geography that the Italian Geographical Society performed (Cerreti 2000) was not Cattaneo’s geography, as one can infer from his sarcasm about the advisory work that Negri did for the Piedmontese in the 1950s: ‘Why doesn’t he teach some geography to those dunces of the Military Command?’ (Cattaneo 1952, 195; Cattaneo to Cameroni, 26 October 1852). Arguably, and quite straightforwardly, this was also because Cattaneo could not take part in an aristocratic and royalist association whose members would have quickly turned into staunch supporters of Italian imperialism in Africa (Gambi 1991).

More-Than-Geographical Connections Recently, Roberto Balzani has discussed the roles that geography, geopolitics and mappings have played in the thought of Giuseppe Mazzini, the most famous figure of republican Risorgimento. Although Mazzini was a great collector of maps and of geographical information, showing sensitivity to the geographical imaginations of nation-building in Italy and Europe, Balzani notes that he did not actually produce maps or

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information that could be defined ‘geographical’ according to the standards of that time (Balzani 2020). Considering the two published issues of Ranuzzi’s Annuario allows understanding how the networks of early Italian ‘geographers’ were quite heterogenous as for the actual respective research interests, ranging from linguistics to statistics and from history to natural sciences. Focusing on some of these personalities also allows seizing the heterogeneity of their political sensitivities, beyond some displayed ‘unitarism’ and moderatism, at least in the materials that were published in Annuario. It is also worth noting that Ranuzzi’s journal was printed in Bologna, then part of the Papal State, that is one of the most reactionary of Italian pre-unification states, where existed a ferocious censorship on which Ranuzzi bitterly complained in his letters to Vieusseux (Ferretti 2014b). Annuario was first intended by Ranuzzi as a collection of geographical information on Italy to build a clear national image by bringing together the different pre-unification states into the imagined ‘natural frontiers’ of Italy whose prefigurative value towards a possible national unification has been already studied (Ferretti 2011, 2014b). Yet, the journal gathered heterogeneous contributions with diverse potential political impacts, from essays on the Italian Renaissance sailors by Gråberg to articles addressing pressing social matters on the industrialisation of Italian regions. It was the case with a paper by Ferdinando De Luca (1873– 1869) on the manufacture in the Kingdom of Naples, which was strongly informed by Saint-Simonian ideas on the need for technical and scientific progress to improve society. On the one hand, De Luca claimed that the Kingdom of Naples was not so ‘backward’ in relation to other Italian states, given that the first Italian railway was inaugurated there. On the other, he observed the lack of a proper system of technic (or polytechnic) education that would have allowed local manufacture to sustain ‘foreign competition’ (De Luca 1844, 60). Like Cattaneo, De Luca evoked international models, especially the French technical schools, as a support for industrialisation, which had obviously conferred geopolitical assets to the Italian states. The author of general geographical works and didactic atlases (De Luca 1843), De Luca was an interesting figure, and one of the protagonists of the constitutionalist movement in 1820–1821 in the Kingdom of Naples. Notably, he proposed the institution of an Italian Geographical Society in charge of redacting a national monograph of Italy (De Luca 1850). After the revolts of 1848 in Naples, he was arrested for his ideas wishing

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a ‘confederation of states’ and sentenced 8 years of jail to be then freed in 1852. Therefore, he was one of those activists who had paid a rude price for their ideas (D’Ambrosio 1990; Migliorini 1969). After the arrival of Garibaldi in Naples and the following formal unification of Italy, De Luca had to complain against the authoritarian politics of the new Kingdom of Italy in relation to the former scientific societies operating in Naples, and in which he was involved as a geographer. In particular he blamed the suppression of the Royal Society of Archaeology, Sciences and Fine Arts in a pamphlet that, beyond the occasion, reveals the classical frustration of the numerous Risorgimento activists and conspirers who were later repressed or marginalised by the newly unified monarchist state (De Luca 1861). In Bologna, a close collaborator of Ranuzzi was Carlo Frulli, who took likewise inspiration from Saint-Simonian ideas and authored studies on the construction of canals, ports and roads. In 1844, Frulli contributed to Annuario with some ‘Geological Notes on Italy’ that were a quite explicit attempt to define the ‘natural frontiers’ of Italy following the legacy of the Roman Empire. Frulli also matched widespread Romantic definitions such as ‘the beautiful country that is dived by the Apennine and surrounded by the sea and by the Alps’ (Frulli 1844, 117), based on the Alpine watersheds. This apparently easy exercise was confronted with difficulties such as the choice of the islands that could be considered as geologically belonging to Italy, or what should have been the criterion (such as maximum height of the mountains, hydrographic watershed etc.) to legitimate a mountain chain as a ‘natural’ frontier. Thus, Frulli’s was a classical exercise in the naturalisation of borders and the invention of territory for nation making, on which an abundant literature in critical border studies exists (Amilhat-Szary and Giraut 2015). After 1848, when he strove to propose a new regionalization for Italy (Castelnovi 2012), Frulli wrote a pamphlet on the Legazioni (that is the portion of the Papal State including Bologna and Romagna), somehow matching Cattaneo’s idea of region as a coherent entity defined at the same time by physical and cultural elements. Frulli invoked the: ‘Superior reasons of history, geography and ethnography’ (Frulli 1851, 11) to consider as a ‘natural’ unit any region that was consistently named and identified through dialects and historical borders. He advanced doubts on the separation of the ancient Regio Octava of Roman Italy, roughly corresponding to current Emilia-Romagna, in three distinct political entities, that is the Legazioni and the Dukedoms of Modena and Parma.

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The mobilisation of nature, and of the Roman legacy, seemed again an implicit critique to a regionalization that was still based on the ‘artificial’ borders of pre-unification states. The second issue of Annuario, published in 1845, included notes on the Apennine by Neapolitan Pisa-based geologist Leopoldo Pilla (1805– 1848), a figure of international standing in his discipline who will die during the battle of Curtatone (Sorbo 2003) fighting in the battalions of volunteers who tried to defend Lombardy against the Austrian counterattack that followed the Milan insurrection. As I discuss in the next chapter, these volunteers were likewise disliked by the Savoias’ Army, whose leaders were wary of their radicalism and independence. Another Neapolitan liberal, a Vieusseux’s correspondent and an acquaintance of Mazzinian leader Giuseppe Ricciardi (De Majo 1987), Matteo de Augustinis (1799–1845), wrote a paper on the social problems which hindered the population’s growth in the Kingdom of Naples (also known as Regno delle Due Sicilie). The author discussed the high mortality rate of people seasonally migrating to the plains of the Papal State as an effect of malaria, but also of the kind of work that these labourers did, invoking social reforms such as ‘suspending work in canicular hours … regulations on children’s work’ (De Augustinis 1845, 42). Basically, De Augustinis expressed some Cattaneo-like social sensitivity. In Annuario, one could not find any explicit political positioning as for the main competing ideological fields of Risorgimento, such as Monarchy versus Republic or Centralism versus Federalism. Yet, one cannot refrain from noting the collaboration of a quite famous figure of intellectual and politician, Sicilian Giuseppe La Farina (1815–1863), a former republican who moved then towards monarchist positions in supporting the Savoias, but was arguably still akin to the Mazzinian field in 1845 (Checco 2004), when he published a short note on the travels of Marco Polo. It is also intriguing to read the article of Oreste Brizi on the Republic of San Marino, not only because San Marino was never politically a part of Italy and it is still today an independent state, but also for a certain insistence of the author in putting emphasis on terms such as ‘Republic’ and ‘Republican’ in the description of the small state, which may reveal an implicit sympathy for republicanism (Brizi 1845). However, the two most interesting (and arguably politically radical) collaborators of Annuario were two Tuscans, Francesco Costantino Marmocchi and Attilio Zuccagni-Orlandini. Tuscany was a central place

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for the works and networks of pre-unification Italian geographers. Well before Ranuzzi’s initiative for the Office of Geographical Correspondence, there was in Florence an ephemeral ‘Tuscan Society of Geography, Statistics and Natural Homeland History’, funded in 1826 with the decisive contribution of Vieusseux. This latter had always offered ‘large hospitality’ (Natali 1915, 267) to geographical contributions in his journal Antologia—even requesting geographical contributions to Cattaneo, as noted above. The Tuscan Society was animated by local geographers such as Zuccagni and Emanuele Repetti, counted Cattaneo among its ‘foreign’ members but, like Antologia, that was closed by Grand-Duke Leopold II in 1833, was suspected of political dissidence and lived an ephemeral life (Galluccio 2012). Zuccagni contributed one of the key Annuario articles from the standpoint of the geographical invention of Italy, where he proposed an estimation of Italy’s geographical dimension as a surface of 96,179 square miles, contrasting with former estimations by Adriano Balbi (95,000 square miles) and by Danish-born French geographer Conrad Malte-Brun (86,496 square miles), the author of the famous Précis de Géographie universelle (Zuccagni-Orlandini 1845a). Although he only contributed smaller notes on Tuscany for Annuario, it was arguably Marmocchi the most interesting political figure in this bunch, for his proximity with some radical circuits of Risorgimento. Born in Poggibonsi to a relatively humble family, Marmocchi had a quite typical Mazzinian biography: after meeting young Giuseppe Mazzini who was travelling to Tuscany for a political mission in 1830, Marmocchi was one of the first Tuscans who joined the Giovine Italia in 1831 (Paolini 2008). Very active in making republican propaganda in the province of Siena and committed to involve the humblest social classes, he suffered the usual consequences of these activism under Leopold’s Tuscany: he was arrested in July 1831 and detained in the infamous fortress of Volterra, that in the following decades was used to detain socialists and anarchists in unified and ‘liberal’ Italy (Catanuto and Schirone 2009). He was then exiled in Naples and could come back to Tuscany in 1834, where he collaborated with Vieusseux and the local intellectual circuits (Manfredini 1858). A collection of letters that he exchanged with Vieusseux, surviving in the Central National Library in Florence, contributes to shed further light on this period of Marmocchi’s training as a geographer and his early political and intellectual networks.

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In 1829, responding to Vieusseux who had invited him to contribute to Antologia, Marmocchi exposed his programme for the renovation of geography, that ‘wonderful but neglected science … because it did not contain anything else than arid enumeration of places’,1 a sort of leitmotif of critical geographies of the following couple of centuries, challenging descriptive and mnemonic methods within the discipline. Marmocchi joined to his letter some pages of his earliest work Il regno animale (1829) in which he inaugurated his critical geographical agenda in chapter that was amazingly titled ‘Degli animali a sangue caldo: l’uomo’. In this youth work, Marmocchi put an emphasis on ‘the earth as transformed by men’,2 evoking a sort of harmonic relationship between humans and ‘nature’ that recalled elements of the Naturphilosophie. The geographer likewise stated ideas on civic virtue and rights of citizenship arguing that the aim of nations was ‘the respect of the citizen’,3 suggesting the idea of a republican geography based on principles of non-domination. Vieusseux’s responses confirmed the importance of transnational cultural circuits for the work of these innovators in Italian cultures, requesting that all Antologia authors keep ‘an eye that is worth defining as European’,4 which again shows how Risorgimento was far from being a phenomenon justifying chauvinism or narrow patriotisms. This correspondence shows Marmocchi’s commitment to open a popular library in Siena5 in the context of his educational inspiration. Indeed, several of his geography books of these years, such as Corso di Geografia Universale and Corso di Geografia Storica were organised as collections of short lessons to be used in schools and in popular education. Marmocchi also expressed sensitivity to the problem of providing educational experiences to women, who were excluded from most of the schools (Paolini 2014). Pedagogy was a key point for Risorgimento republicans from Cattaneo to Mazzini and later for anarchists and socialists. When Antologia was closed due to political repression, the

1 Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Vieusseux Archive (hereafter BNCF), A 61 153, Marmocchi to Vieusseux, 24 November 1829. 2 BNCF, A 61 153, 24 November 1829, Introduzione al regno animale, 2. 3 BNCF, A 61 153, 24 November 1829, Introduzione al regno animale, 4. 4 BNCF Vieusseux a Marmocchi, 122, 31 7 12 29. 5 BNCF, Marmocchi a Vieusseux A61, 156 23 11 30.

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Vieusseux’s circuit supported the journal Guida dell’Educatore edited by Raffaello Lambruschini, as a way to circumvent censorship. Political repression was an issue implicitly discussed by Marmocchi and Vieusseux. In an 1830 letter, Marmocchi insisted that he had ‘more than sufficient reasons’ to avoid signing some contribution with his name.6 In 1841, he requested urgently Vieusseux’s intervention with Marquis Ridolfi to obtain a pass for the Scientists’ Congress to be held in Florence, to which local authorities seemed to want to deny his access, which Marmocchi lamented as a serious problem given that he was ‘the only representative of universal geography’7 there. Finally, a 1844 letter suggests that it was Marmocchi the contact person of Ranuzzi to distribute Annuario in Florence8 despite the Bolognese geographer was already a Vieusseux’s correspondent since the previous decade (Ferretti 2011). In these years, Marmocchi’s scholarly production was especially abundant and significant under several aspects. Particularly relevant to understand his republicanism was his translation of Humboldt’s Ansichten der Natur (Quadri della Natura). This work shows Marmocchi’s early contribution to the agenda of Cattaneo and Ranuzzi, which consisted in bringing to Italy the progressive novelties that European science could provide for progressive social programmes (von Humboldt 1834). This inaugurated classical uses of science to foster secular culture in opposition to religious dogmas, to which Marmocchi was so committed that some authors noted his ‘pre-Darwinian’ evolutionism (Paolini 2008). It is worth noting that, when publishing this translation from the famous German scholar, Marmocchi had already been a republican political prisoner. According to Florence historian Gabriele Paolini, Humboldt’s lessons on empathy and respect for Amerindian civilisations, already noted by historians of Geography (Buttimer 2012), inspired the first volumes of Marmocchi’s mammoth collection Raccolta di viaggi dalla scoperta del Nuovo continente fino a’ dì nostri (Marmocchi 1840–47). In this work, Marmocchi showed to be: ‘Sensitive to pre-Columbian civilisations, on whose steps in development he insisted a lot, as well as on the struggles for

6 BNCF, Marmocchi a Vieusseux A61, 154 23 10 30. 7 BNCF, Marmocchi a Vieusseux A61, 157 12 9 41. 8 BNCF, Vieusseux, Marmocchi a Vieusseux A61, 159 7 6 44.

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their independence from Spanish domination’ (Paolini 2014, 111). While the interest of European republicans for early Latin American decolonisation in the first half of the twentieth century is well known, Paolini’s work contributes to discover the diverse and neglected field of European scientists who did not (or not completely) embrace the canons of Eurocentrism and racism. Eventually, Marmocchi praised the works of ‘Indians’ defender’ Bartolomé de Las Casas and blamed the brutality of the massacres perpetrated by the ‘Christians’ (Paolini 2014, 120), which clearly chimes with Risorgimento anticlericalism. Among several others, this case exposes the cultural sensitivity of the most radical and conscious intellectuals of Risorgimento, showing again that imperialism and chauvinism can be summoned on behalf of some parts of Risorgimento, but not of THE Risorgimento. One of the key conspirators of the Siena province (Cherubini 2012), Marmocchi played little-known but important roles in 1848–1849 Tuscany, which saw the fall of the Grand-Dukedom and the constitution of the provisional government provided by the triumvirate GuerrazziMontanelli-Mazzoni. Arrested for 32 days in the summer of 1848 and then released after a popular mobilisation in his favour, appointed as the secretary of the Tuscan democratic leader, Livorno lawyer Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi (1804–1873), Marmocchi was Minister of the Interior for the short-lived Provisional Government from February to April 1849. When the Austrian armies invaded Tuscany reinstalling the GrandDuke in his Florence palace, Marmocchi had to flee ‘disguised as a mendicant’ (Paolini 2008) to reach Rome, where he remained until the end of the Roman Republic in July 1849. Arrested by the French, he was allowed to go to Corsica, where he started the exile period that lasted until his death, in Genoa in 1855. The mammoth collection of the acts of the trial that the Florence Tribunal instructed against Guerrazzi, Montanelli, Mazzoni and some dozens of their collaborators is a precious source to understand what roles Marmocchi played in writing the Tuscan chapter of the history of Risorgimento. Additionally, some letters that he wrote to Mazzoni and that survive in this latter’s personal archives reveal how, before entering the Provisional Government, Marmocchi had already a confidential relationship with a key figure of radical Risorgimento such as Mazzoni. When Mazzoni was Minister of Justice, Marmocchi first recommended to him one Francesco Pecorari, whom he considered ‘like a brother’ for his help when Marmocchi was a prisoner ‘in the Volterra fortress in 1832–33’

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and in general for ‘the favours that he made to the political prisoners in the fortress, risking his own liberty’.9 In another letter to Mazzoni, Marmocchi evoked the need for having parishes administrated by priests who could match ‘the exigences of the new times and our views’.10 These references to problems with priests in the countryside are associated again with one of the key concerns of Marmocchi as a Risorgimento geographer, the need for countering ‘the enemies of freedom’ by ‘try[ing] to make the people come through that way from which the majorities of the priests tries instead to distract them’11 that is popular education. Again, archives reveal social, political and cultural purposes going well beyond ‘patriotism’ even in the hottest moments of Risorgimento fights. The tribunal sources are inevitably flawed by the need to condemn people in what was clearly a political trial. They confirm that, after 1849, Marmocchi was one of the first pubic enemies of restoration in Tuscany, and was sentenced to 15 years of jail. Marmocchi was accused of having decisively contributed ‘to the eviction of the Grand-Duke from Tuscany’ (Collezione Storica 1, 49) by exciting the turmoil in the towns of Siena and Grosseto together with Giuseppe Montanelli. He also was considered to ‘have contributed to maintain the revolutionary situation in the country, either with the armament of the plebs either with republican propaganda, exerted through the new functionaries of his Ministry’ (Collezione Storica 1, 50). As anticipated above, the ‘people in arms’ was a classical point of Risorgimento radicalism, and the allusion to propaganda shows how Marmocchi, even in his position as a state Minister, kept an eye on tasks such as popular education and republican conscientization. A particularly serious charge against Marmocchi was due to his work to impede that the Grand-Duke could come back to Tuscany through the Elba island, a task for which the Tuscan geographer ‘ordered to the Prefect of Grosseto to summon the Grand-Duke … to go away… approving the expenses for the two military expeditions to Elba and Maremma’ (Collezione Storica 1, 50), that Marmocchi entrusted to Mazzianin leader Giovanni La Cecilia (1801–1880) (Paolini 2008).

9 Museo Centrale del Risorgimento in Roma (hereafter MCRR), 436 18 1, Marmocchi to Mazzoni, 11 December 1848. 10 Pistoia, Biblioteca Forteguerriana, Corrispondenze Mazzoni (hereafter FGM), Marmocchi to Mazzoni, 31 January 1849. 11 MCRR, F.064 361 24 Marmocchi to Mazzoni, 17 January 1849.

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On Marmocchi’s exile and last years in Genoa, some information is provided by a small folder of letters that he wrote to republican activist Nicola Fabrizi (1804–1885), a key organisational figure in the transnational circuits of Mazzinian conspiration and one of the future promoters of Pisacane’s expedition. These letters are a sad reading as they reveal all Marmocchi’s pain for his condition of exile and especially his economic concerns for the fates of his family in Tuscany. Marmocchi had to ask Fabrizi’s help in selling books to face a situation in which he was feeling ‘very bad’12 also due to the silence of his Florentine publishers as for the payments of his former books. This situation compelled him to ‘work like a dog’13 for paying debts as he wrote in his last letter, a few weeks before his death. Yet, these letters also clarify some important features of Marmocchi’s political commitment. Indeed, they account for his staunch but not uncritical republican faith, a matter on which he reassured Fabrizi that he remained his ‘brave and perseverant comrade’.14 Marmocchi took position in the discussions that troubled the entire movement after the defeats of 1848–1849 and seemed to take some distance from Mazzini’s doctrine of the ‘attempts’, that is organised insurrections in certain places that were expected to trigger a wider insurrectional movement. An example was the revolt that took place in Milan in February 1853, turning in a complete disaster that triggered Cattaneo’s sarcastic critiques to Mazzini as I discuss in the next chapter. In October 1853, Marmocchi likewise criticised this strategy, writing to Fabrizi that: ‘A partial attempt in Italy seems to me very inopportune now. Guerrillas war? In the province of Modena? But this is the greatest of the idiocies. In all Italy this is impossible’.15 Alas, few years later Fabrizi and his friends did not listen to these wise words when they organised the disgraceful Sapri expedition, with the results that are well known. In the same letter, Marmocchi wrote a revealing remark about his geographical writings on Italy, advancing the self-critical suspect that his ‘geography of Italy [was] generally disesteemed … due to the violent partisan spirit that reigns in each of its pages’.16 This declaration of an 12 MCRR, 524 24, Marmocchi to Fabrizi, 13 MCRR, 524 24, Marmocchi to Fabrizi, 14 MCRR, 524 24, Marmocchi to Fabrizi, 15 MCRR, 524 24, Marmocchi to Fabrizi,

2 January 1852. 19 October 1855. 15 October 1853. 15 October 1853.

16 MCRR, 524 24, Marmocchi to Fabrizi, 15 October 1853.

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author of the ‘partisan’ intentionality of his own work is very significant if we consider that geographies written in this period were generally considered as ‘statistic’ and ‘descriptive’, and therefore of little epistemological or political interest by most historical works on Italian geography. After his Descrizione dell’Italia (1846) and Prodromo della storia naturale generale e comparata d’Italia that had been reprinted that same year (1853), Marmocchi was arguably referring to the two volumes of Geografia d’Italia published in Corsica in 1850, whose interest lies in the fact that it was a new attempt to write a synthetic national monograph of Italy, this time published by someone who lived in exile. Intriguingly, the Introduction to this overwhelmingly historical Geography of Italy announced the presence of a final chapter on ‘Italy in [Marmocchi’s] days’ (Marmocchi 1850), which was probably never printed. While it is not clear whether this incompleteness was the matter of censorship or was (most probably) due to economic problems, it is significant that still in the 1850s, the performative value of a geographical work whose author limited himself to quite generic political claims such as the need for ‘loving the homeland’ (Marmocchi 1850, iii) was perceived as politically prickly, to the point that Marmocchi was concerned for the possible consequences of his ‘partisan’ spirit. This raises again the matter of geography as an implicit political strategy, which helps in understanding the contribution of Marmocchi’s colleague, Zuccagni-Orlandini, likewise a Tuscan, who was less politically compromised than Marmocchi but fully participated in geographers’ Risorgimento. Born to a well-heeled family, Zuccagni-Orlandini enjoyed a less tormented biography than Marmocchi (Guarducci 2000). Yet, his contribution to Tuscan democratic circuits and to broader Risorgimento cannot be neglected. First, in the 1830s and 1840s, he participated in the geographical efforts to construct a prefigurative vision of Italy as a unified political entity through geographical descriptions. Eventually, between 1835 and 1845 Zuccagni published very big works such as a nineteenvolume Physical, Historical and Statistical Chorography of Italy and Her Islands (Guarducci 2020). Written before the 1848–1849 revolutions, this work had quite explicit political contents. In the Introduction, Zuccagni claimed that: ‘Physic[al geography] and history [are] inaccessible to the violence of the stronger’, therefore they ‘will grant us the incontestable right to consider Italy as an undivided state’ (ZuccagniOrlandini 1845b, vi). The prefigurative value of geography in matters of nation-building and its strategic role in granting authors freedom of

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speech could not be stated in a clearer way. Zuccagni even justified his use of the statistics on size, population and strength of all the small Italian states with the need of: ‘Rightly appreciating their material and political value [once] unified under one power’ (Zuccagni-Orlandini 1845b, vi). Key to these political claims was the naturalisation of the nation, that is the consideration of its allegedly ‘objective’ frontiers. How little objectivity could be contained in these discussions is revealed by Zuccagni’s polemics with French authors on what valleys and watersheds had to be considered as the natural borders between Italy and France on the Maritime Alps. Amazingly, Zuccagni included in his idea of physical (but one may say ‘moral’) Italy some territories that today it would seem strange to see associated with the Italian state. It was the case with Malta, defined as ‘English Italy’, with Corsica, defined as ‘French Italy’, and generally with ‘those territorial fractions that were detached [from Italy] with the force of arms’ (Zuccagni-Orlandini 1845b, 4), but which remained ‘Italian nonetheless’ (Zuccagni-Orlandini 1845b, 12). In a table summarising the territorial extension of the 17 regions that Zuccagni included in his ‘Italy’, the geographer also mentioned Istria (today divided between Slovenia and Croatia), the Republic of San Marino and, puzzlingly, the Canton Ticino defined as ‘Italian Switzerland’ (Zuccagni-Orlandini 1845b, 14). Indeed, although lying on the southern side of the main Alpine watershed, Canton Ticino had a long history of freedom associated with the Swiss Federation, and this inclusion in geographical ‘Italy’ clashed with the Risorgimento myth of ‘Swiss Freedom’ to which also Zuccagni was sensitive as I discuss below. However, Zuccagni showed a certain awareness of the concurrent elaborations of authors such as Cattaneo on early Italian municipal freedom, recollecting how: ‘Civil societies of the most populous cities proclaim[ed] their liberty’ against ‘the barbarians’ (Zuccagni-Orlandini 1845b, 119) and equally defining the emancipation of Italian cities as the greatest historical lesson of the Middle Ages. Zuccagni explicitly endorsed the legacy of ‘immortal Romagnosi’ in defining the methods of: ‘Civil [i.e. socially engaged] statistics’ (Zuccagni-Orlandini 1845b, 155). Finally, in his 1861 Dictionary of the Italian Communes, Zuccagni saluted Italy’s newly conquered ‘national independence’ (Zuccagni-Orlandini 1861, 1), even acknowledging the Monarchy for the role that it had played in the process of national unification. What follows can shed some more light on his political intentions that remain difficult to include under any of the current labels indicating the numerous ‘tendencies’ of Risorgimento.

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Since the 1820s, Zuccagni was inserted in Antologia circuits, and exchanged several letters with Vieusseux, to whom he recommended, in 1827, to look after ‘our cause’17 while Zuccagni was away from Florence for personal reasons. While that ‘cause’ was arguably referred to matters related to the newly constituted Tuscan Geographical Society rather than to any explicit political bid, it is clear that Zuccagni was actively part of the circuits of intellectual moderate reformists gathering around the Cabinet Vieusseux, with whom he exchanged atlases and geographical books,18 and news about works of common acquaintances such as Lambruschini.19 Among Zuccagni’s correspondents one also finds Vincenzo Salvagnoli, a lawyer who was arrested in 1833 due to his liberal positions and who later embraced moderate positions, with whom Zuccagni had a long intellectual an editorial collaboration as suggested by two letters, of 1833 and 1848, surviving at the Central Museum of Risorgimento in Rome.20 The name of Zuccagni does not appear in the minutes of the process against the republicans in which Marmocchi was implied, and there is no clear information on what his (probably moderate) attitude was in 1849. The only exception seems to be a letter to Vieusseux where Zuccagni complained about a defamatory ‘pamphlet’ that someone published against him in the circuit of the Georgofili Academy, of which he was one of the historical exponents, but it is not clear what exactly the reason of the dispute was.21 Yet, one finds an important indication on Zuccagni’s commitment to popular education and on his radical acquaintances consulting sources that referred to his late years, that is the collection of the daily newspaper La Nuova Europa, a journal published in Florence from 1861 to 1863, whose circuits gathered an impressive array of Risorgimento dissidents, federalists and proto-socialists, namely Montanelli, Mazzoni, Dolfi, Mario, Castellazzo, Martinati and Meˇcnikoff among others, as I detail in the chapter on the Tuscan connection. Browsing La Nuova Europa (hereafter NE) issues of 1862 and 1863, one finds reports and announcements of the popular school organised

17 BNCF, A 121 53, Zuccagni to Vieusseux, 6 October 1827. 18 BNCF, A 121 55, 57 Zuccagni to Vieusseux, 21 May 18 30; 15 July 1835. 19 BNCF, A 121 56 Zuccagni to Vieusseux, 9 December 1830. 20 MCRR, F. 064 390 37 1-2, Zuccagni to Salvagnoli, 16 March 1833; 13 February 1830. 21 BNCF, A 121 Zuccagni to Vieusseux, 15 September 1849.

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by the Artisan Brotherhood, one of the associations gravitating around the Democratic Society, which gathered a quite numerous consensus in Florence thanks to the charismatic leadership of Mazzoni and to Dolfi’s organisational efforts. In January 1862, the journal launched an appeal to ‘citizens’ generosity’ for opening a school that first aimed at the alphabetisation of working-class adults, anticipating later themes of radical pedagogies such as the idea that education should not mean teaching notions, but ‘educate hearths to the aspiration for beauty, truth, justice’. The disciplines that were taught at the Artisan Brotherhood School were ‘Geography and Statistics of Italy’ by Zuccagni-Orlandini, ‘Moral Philosophy’ by Antonio Martinati and ‘Universal History’ by Luigi Castellazzo.22 The fact that elderly Zuccagni was the only intellectual of some renown among the three teachers reinforces the idea that accepting this task implied having at least some republican sympathies, even more significant considering that this occurred during the crucial years 1862– 1863 when the rift between republicans and the government of newly unified Italy became increasingly deep as I detail below. Moreover, Castellazzo and Martinati, both political refugees from Lombardy and Veneto (like her friend Alberto Mario), were radical Garibaldians and future Internationalists, therefore this environment could not certainly be defined as politically neutral or simply philanthropic. Zuccagni attended the public ceremony for the inauguration of the School, where Martinati saluted him as ‘the man of European renown’ who so ‘generously offered to work for instructing people in geography’.23 The School’s political programme was clearly in line with the radical federalism of the journal’s editors: ‘Let’s finally stop to wait any providence from above, and remember the greatness for which Italy was once renowned – not centralisation of official teaching, but spontaneous movement of brotherhoods, communes and free schools’.24 In March 1862, Zuccagni published in NE the inaugural speech of his geographical course, which took some explicit political tones, for instance in praising the work of Garibaldi.25 Interestingly, this text on the ‘chorography of

22 La Nuova Europa (hereafter NE), 4 February 1862. Scuole della Fratellanza, 3. 23 NE 14 January 1862. Le scuole della Fratellanza Artigiana, 1. 24 Le scuole della Fratellanza Artigiana, 1. 25 NE, 20 March 1862. Preludio delle lezioni di corografia e statistica dell’Italia letto

dal Prof. Zuccagni-Orlandini nelle scuole della Fratellanza Artigiana, 2–3.

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Italy’ also addressed the history of Switzerland, a place that was defined as being ‘made delightful by the free regime of a national independence’.26 The country where Cattaneo lived at that time, Switzerland was considered as a model by republicans-federalists, and this was due to its organisation as a federal republic of 23 cantons, each one being ‘free and independent in the internal administration, but linked to all the others by very strong links when it comes to defending and preserving national freedom’.27 Highly mythised by the republicans, the history of Switzerland was summarised by Zuccagni as the result of brave struggles against the ‘evil tyranny of feudalism’, that was defeated by the people in arms, who also got rid of the Austrians, which constituted a clear comparison with the Italian struggle for national liberation. Although Zuccagni acknowledged the Monarchy for the obtention of national unity, he concluded his writing by evoking other classical topics of classical republicanism such as the appreciation for ‘Ancient Rome in the beautiful times of the Republic’ and the importance of artisans’ corporations in the Italian medieval communes, where one needed to know ‘an art to access the supreme charges of the Republic’.28 Therefore, the Tuscan geographer managed to list a significant deal of the classical keywords of republicanism even discussing of ‘chorography’. In1863, NE accounted for the continuation of these courses, announcing that on the 26 April: ‘Professor Zuccagni-Orlandini would resume his classes on Italian Chorography’,29 again paralleling Martinati’s ‘Moral Philosophy’.30 These classes took place all the weekends, on Saturday for Martinati and on Sunday for Zuccagni, to allow workers’ attendance. This militant application of critical geographies would seamlessly shift to workers’ movements and their popular schools, especially thanks to the commitment of geographers such as Reclus and Kropotkin to the international movement of anarchist schools or pedagogia libertaria (Codello 2005). Significantly, in Autumn 1862, NE published a list of books that some benefactors had offered to the library of the Artisan

26 Preludio, 3. 27 Preludio, 2. 28 Preludio, 3. 29 NE, 19 April 1863. Le scuole della Fratellanza Artigiana. 30 NE, 5 July 1863.

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Brotherhood, which included Marmocchi’s Atlas, Universal Geography and Historical Geography.31 Finally, it is worth mentioning a work of military geography that was not written by a ‘canonised’ scholar. Yet, its author was one of the most emblematic figures of insurrectional Risorgimento, Felice Orsini (1819– 1858). Very close to Mazzini for some years, Orsini tried to kill Emperor Napoleon III in 1858 using a device that appeared innovative in the many-centuries tradition of the tyrannicide, that is self-made bombs, then universally known as bombe alla Orsini (Venturi 2009). Alas, Orsini missed his target, killing innocent people who were walking around and ending his days under the guillotine. Yet, what is crucial here is that the son of a Napoleonian officer, Orsini was a leading military figure of the 1849 Roman Republic charismatically led by Giuseppe Mazzini, for which he served as a military commander to defend the Marche region from internal reaction and from the Austrian army. In this role, Orsini showed his Jacobin inspiration and his declared lack of humanitarian concerns, as exposed by letters where he announced that, in his operations against those who were called local ‘brigands’, he was willing to ‘shoot down all those I have on hand’ (Orsini 1936, 67). During the exile that followed the end of the Roman Republic, Orsini participated in the failed Mazzinian insurrectional ‘attempts’ in Lunigiana and Valtellina before breaking with Mazzini and going to Paris for organising his attack that, according to Balzani, was rather the fruit of an ‘altered personality’ than of a coherent political strategy (Balzani 2013). In 1852, Orsini published a Military Geography of the Italian Peninsula, a work in which he showed awareness of the Italian geographical works that had been published in the first half of the century, quoting Balbi’s Universal Geography and Marmocchi’s Description of Italy, alongside works of other military leaders of 1848–1849 such as Guglielmo Pepe and Carlo Pisacane. The declared ambition of this work was to serve as an handbook to ‘young officers’ (Orsini 1852, 15), everywhere in the peninsula, to have a first practical guide to military geography, an art that Orsini defined as ‘the specific description of all natural or artificial features of the terrain, considered in their relation to the art of making war’ (Orsini 1852, 7). Unlike works such as Pisacane’s, Orsini’s military geography was not referred to recent history or incoming political changes, although

31 NE, 4 October 1862, Fratellanza Artigiana, 4.

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its aim was to foster ‘liberty [and] independence’ (Orsini 1852, 16). Yet, this work also included pages making comments on economic, statistic and ethnic aspects of the different regions of Italy, which constituted a sort of embryonal attempt to follow the lesson of Annuario geographers wishing for a national monograph, of which Orsini’s geography can be considered as a sort of compendium. Orsini’s geography also matched works by Zuccagni and friends in comprising a quite huge portion of territory within the ‘natural frontiers’ of Italy as defined by the Alpine watersheds, so that, according to him, this natural border ran: ‘From Nice [currently in France] to the Saint-Gotthard [currently in Switzerland] … and from the Saint-Gotthard to Fiume [currently in Croatia]’ (Orsini 1852, 40). Orsini calculated the physical surface of Italy in 369,762 square kilometres, while the current surface of the Italian state is only 301,340 square kilometres, as it does not include some of the regions listed above. In any case, Orsini’s key argument was that, given the mountainous nature of the Northern Italian border and of most of the national peninsular body, occupied by the Apennines, Italy’s military defence was potentially easy once established a special corps of ‘men able and skilled in climbing difficult and rough mountains’ (Orsini 1852, 47). In Central and Southern Italy, the rough conformation of the territory would have allowed ‘scarce forces to resist numerous and well organized enemy troops’ (Orsini 1852, 85) as the guerrillas in Spain had demonstrated at the time of Napoleon’s occupation. Basically, Orsini wanted to demonstrate that, once the Austrians would have been thrown out, they would never come back. As I discuss below, Orsini’s military geography was substantially different from notions of ‘nation in arms’ by authors such as Cattaneo and Pisacane, who proposed a democratic and participatory model of popular militia that challenged permanent armies. Conversely, the ‘man of the bombs’ was clearly influenced by the centralist and militaristic mindset of Napoleonian ‘learned corps’ (Cuccoli 2012) well symbolised by his book’s cover image (Fig. 3.1). Yet, it would be an anachronistic to see an early Italian imperialism in Marmocchi’s, Zuccagni’s and Orsini’s pre-unification calculations of Italy’s surface given that national unity had still to be accomplished and these efforts to prefigurate a united nation mostly corresponded to an implicit political strategy rather than to a formal territorial claim. The fact that political frontiers could possibly diverge from the asserted natural ones was contested on the plan of physical geographers, but could

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Fig. 3.1 F. Orsini, Geografia militare della penisola italiana—Cover Image

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be also assumed as a quite normal condition. As I expose below, other were the main political stakes to understand the complex geographies of Risorgimento.

Three Maps, and Three Different Ways to Invent Italy At the end of this chapter on the pluralistic roles that geographers played in the construction of an image of Italy, the contrast between three maps can exemplify the complexity of the debates about what (diverse) models of Italy these committed scholars wanted in the decades preceding formal national unification. Today, geographers are well aware of the assertive power of maps and of ‘cartographic reason’ in anticipating political realities by conditioning the visions of the world that people have (Farinelli 2009; Olsson 2007). The first map (Fig. 3.2) is a classical iconographic cliché, that was reproduced and re-signified in several ways over the centuries and that eventually presents a ‘natural’ image of Italy, whose

Fig. 3.2 La geografia a colpo d’occhio, ossia primarie nozioni di geografia, storia e statistica esposta in 16 tavole. Milan, F. Corbetta, 1853, Table 16

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Southern orientation highlights its ‘natural’ unity. This figure can broadly represent the attempts of several geographers to anticipate a unified image of Italy taking advantage of the relative freedom of speech that geography and ‘science’ could grant under the political repression and the censorship that they experienced during the Restoration. Accompanying one of the most famous Cattaneo’s papers, the second map (Fig. 3.3) details the density of population in Lombardy to analyse its economy and society for political purposes such as progressive social planning. Beyond the banal difference between what current administrative definitions could consider a ‘regional’ and a ‘national’ scale, I would argue that the difference between these two images is the adoption of a completely different spatial grammar. In the first map, one summons ‘nature’ to justify a political situation—an argument that was later used to justify colonialism alleging the ‘natural’ inferiority of some countries and peoples in relation to others. In the second, the main emphasis is placed on human voluntaristic agency in building new geographies by productively interacting with environmental conditions. That is, the idea that the world should not be invented establishing borders through the stroke of a pen in diplomatic councils, as it is materially build from below, day by day, by the people’s work. Politically, this corresponds to the difference between authoritarian centralism and libertarian federalism. As I discuss in the next chapter, it is exactly in antiauthoritarianism that the relevance of figures such as Carlo Cattaneo stands today. The third map (Fig. 3.4) anticipated what is called today ‘thematic cartography’ (Zwer and Rekacewicz 2021), including the notion of ‘historical atlas’, and wishes to represent the physical axes around which municipal wars were fought during the Middle Ages, when Italy was taken between two transnational political poles, the Papacy in Rome and the Empire in Germany. This map was published as a supplement to the new Politecnico series when the journal was resumed by Cattaneo in 1860, accompanied by a 28-page brochure of explanations where Ferrari extended Cattaneo’s arguments on the centrality of municipia as bases of Italian histories. Yet, Cattaneo was initially unenthusiastic of the inclusion of ‘that enormous map’ (Cattaneo 1954, 281; Cattaneo to Daelli, 15 March 1860) in the brochure, arguing that it did not contain so much additional information in relation to the text. One can suppose that this was rather a matter of editorial difficulties than of contents, given the maniacal attention that Cattaneo famously paid to the slightest details

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Fig. 3.3 [C. Cattaneo], Mappa di popolazione della Lombardia. Il Politecnico: repertorio mensile di studi applicati alla prosperità e cultura (1839 gen, I, 1)

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Fig. 3.4 [G. Ferrari], Carta figurativa delle guerre municipali d’Italia secondo la storia delle rivoluzioni guelfe e ghibelline [Milan, Editori del Politecnico, 1860]

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of his journals, as it was well exemplified by his argument with Gråberg mentioned above. Yet, reading Ferrari’s brochure one can infer that this map had to be read first in comparison with the two smaller images that are contained in its top-right and bottom-left corners (Fig. 3.5), that is the territorial evolution of the Longobard Kingdom. Dominating Italy in the seventh and eighth century BC, the Longobards exerted a sort of unifying pressure on most of the Italian peninsula. While this was nothing comparable with the action of a modern territorial state, Ferrari argued that their ‘barbarous kingdom’ could not resist the ‘irresistible federation’ that was constituted by the outposts of the Byzantine Kingdom such as Naples, Ravenna, Rome, Sicily, Sardinia, that Ferrari considered to represent ‘civilization’ despite the lack of territorial continuity among them. For Ferrari, the characteristics of Italian territory likewise hindered the establishment of the central authority of the Longobard ‘King of Pavia’ given the ‘allonged shape of the peninsula and the Apennines’ cliffs’ (Ferrari 1860, 8). Dating the earliest ‘national Risorgimento’ to the Communes’ Middle Ages, Ferrari used an essentially geographical argument, claiming that communal rivalries happened when: ‘Each village transformed itself in a republic … Once carefully studied, they reveal the social and geographical conditions of Italian freedom’ (Ferrari 1860, 7). This constituted a sort of counterpoint to the geographical argument claiming unity on the grounds of the well-defined maritime and alpine borders of the peninsula. For Ferrari, coastal indentation, diversity of valleys, mountains and plains and the presence of a number of fortified villages, often on the top of a hill, implied that diversity and local autonomies were a crucial point to any understanding of Italy as a coherent concept. Indeed, what Ferrari opposed to centralist unification was the principle of ‘confederation’, arguing that, in the Middle Ages, this occurred with the communes after the evaporation of all centralising authorises. For Ferrari, in the medieval communal period, there was a: ‘Risorgimento Italy which, like ancient Greece, was based on symbols, religion, arts, on the free initiative of the necessarily sovereign cities and individuals, under a powerless Pontiff and an absentee Emperor’ (Ferrari 1860, 8). The absence of forced ties enhanced free cooperation and confederation among municipia, a notion that was not so far from contemporary definitions of libertarian municipalism (Varengo 2020). Additionally, geographical reflections on the productive interactions between lands and

Fig. 3.5 Detail of Fig. 3.4: the Longobard kingdom and its unmaking

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societies are currently deemed an alternative to the definition of territory as a portion of space that is subject to political power and delimited by linear (thus mappable) political boundaries (Elden 2013). Widely shared today, these ideas owe a lot to the works of these Lombard scholars, as I also discuss in the next chapter.

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Manfredini, Francesco. 1858. Francesco Costantino Marmocchi: cenni biografici [NI]. Migliorini, Elio. 1969. Ricordo di Ferdinando De Luca nel centenario della morte. Bollettino Della Società Geografica Italiana 10: 345–352. Minca, Claudio. 2007. Humboldt’s compromise, or the forgotten geographies of landscape Progress in Human Geography 31: 179–193. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/0309132507075368. Monti, Antonio. 1921. Un dramma fra gli esuli : da lettere inedite di G. Mazzini, C. Cattaneo, G. Ferrari, O. Perini ed altri patrioti. Milan: Casa Editrice Risorgimento. Mumford, Lewis. 1997. La città nella storia. Milan: Bompiani. Natali, Giovanni. 1915. La geografia in Italia nella prima metà del secolo XIX . Rome: Tipografia Unione. Natali, Giovanni. 1916. Carlo Cattaneo e la geografia. Rivista D’italia 19 (2): 45–70. Olsson, Gunnar. 2007. Abysmal: A critique of cartographic reason. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Paolini, Gabriele. 2008. Marmocchi Francesco Costantino. Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani. Treccani. https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/francesco-cos tantino-marmocchi_(Dizionario-Biografico). Paolini, Gabriele. 2014. La América latina de F.C. Marmocchi, geógrafo y patriota del resurgimiento. Cultura Latinoamericana 20 (2): 111–122. Robic, Marie-Claire, Jean-Louis Tissier, and Philippe Pinchemel, eds. 2011. Deux siècles de géographie française: une anthologie. Paris: CTHS. Salvemini, Gaetano, and Ernesto Sestan. 1957. Avvertenza. In Scritti storici e geografici, Carlo Cattaneo, vol. 1, vii–xii. Florence: Le Monnier. Santini, Chiara. 2008. Lucio Gambi et le concept de paysage, Démarche méthodologique et critique d’un géographe dérangeant. Projets de paysage, 1. http://www.projetsdepaysage.fr/fr/lucio_gambi_et_le_concept_de_paysage. Sorbo, Antonio. 2003. Leopoldo Pilla: un intellettuale nel Risorgimento. Isernia: Iannone. Tang, Chenxi. 2008. The geographic imagination of modernity: Geography, literature and philosophy in German romanticism. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Varengo, Selva. 2020. La rivoluzione ecologica: il pensiero libertario di Murray Bookchin. Milan: Zero in condotta. Venturi, Alfredo. 2009. L’uomo delle bombe: la vita e i tempi di Felice Orsini terrorista e gentiluomo. Milan: Hobby & Work. Zibechi, Raul. 2012. Territori in Resistenza: Periferie urbane in America latina. Rome: Nova Delphi. Zwer, Nepthys, and Philippe Rekacewicz. 2021. Cartographie radicale, explorations. Paris: La Découverte.

CHAPTER 4

The Lombard Connection

The 1848 Turn: Revolution! In 1848, everything changed. The European wave of what Eric Hobsbawm defined the ‘bourgeois revolutions’ (Hobsbawm 1996) despite they had strong popular bases, affected all the major European cities and shattered all Restoration regimes. In France, the Paris insurrection of February 1848 led to the proclamation of the Second Republic. This event raised an enormous emotion worldwide which is key to understand what happened in Italy in the following decades. In March 1848, it was the city of Milan that became one of the epicentres of liberation movements, getting rid of the Austrian Army led by Marshal Radetzky by fighting street by street. From 18 to 22 March, Cattaneo mentioned the presence of ‘700 to 1,000 barricades’ (Cattaneo 1849, 48), after which the popular militias, which initially counted only on volunteers, left the city to chase the enemies, who were retreating across the plains of Lombardy and Veneto. It was only several days later that the monarchist army of King Carlo Alberto, from Turin, crossed the river Ticino, starting officially what Italian historiography has called the ‘First War of Independence’. Yet, from an Italian standpoint, the victorious initial phase of this conflict was determined by the decisive agency of the proletariat, while the Savoias’ Army was protagonist of the defeat that, in August, allowed the Austrians entering again in Milan, compelling thousands of freedom fighters to flee into exile in Piedmont or Switzerland. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Ferretti, Geographies of Federalism during the Italian Risorgimento, 1796–1900, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96117-6_4

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The scholarly and political networks that I call the Lombard (or Lombard-Swiss) connection and that provided solid grounds to federalist thinking in Italy, produced strong critiques to the monarchist intervention in the liberation war. Figures such as Cattaneo, Ferrari, Cernuschi and Rosa were encouraged in their support to the idea of free municipality for having seen it in action, in 1848–1849 Italy, during the insurrections of the main Italian cities such as Milan, Brescia, Venice and Rome among several others. In Milan, Cattaneo, whose possible ‘deportation to Ljubljana’ (Armani 1997, 94) was considered by the Austrian authorities in the days preceding the revolt, was spontaneously recognised as the insurrection’s leader by the Milanese people. In Rome, the Roman Republic of 1849 is considered by historians such as Roberto Carocci as an anticipation of more famous examples of municipal socialism, eventually the 1871 Paris Commune. These remarks further highlight how each monarchist, or purely nationalist, reading of these events would be misleading. The day before the Milanese insurrection, Cattaneo wrote for the Cisalpino a programme for the creation of a free federation of independent nations, each one giving up ‘to each form of oppression over other peoples’ (Armani 1997, 99). What is absolutely key to consider is that such programme was inserted in a debate that did not even concern Italy, but the Austro-Hungarian Empire of which Lombardy and Veneto were part. That is, it was not a matter of independence or unification of Italy, but the proposal of a ‘free federation of the populations of the Hapsburg Monarchy’ (Della Peruta 2001, 48), that is, a European one. One cannot understand Cattaneo, or Risorgimento federalists, without considering their internationalism, cosmopolitanism and (almost) total absence of any form of chauvinism. To Cattaneo’s antiauthoritarian views, a centralised and authoritarian Italian government was not better than a centralised and authoritarian Austrian government, and the oppression of the Savoia was not better than the oppression of the Hapsburg. First published in France, where he sought refuge in August 1848, Cattaneo’s own recollections on that year’s revolt remain one of the most compelling sources to understand what happened in these months in Lombardy. His first target was the information released by the official sources of the Piedmontese Monarchy, which Cattaneo disdainfully defined as a ‘remain of French feudality’ (Cattaneo 1849, 8), whose supporters had managed to make Europe believe that in Italy: ‘Revolution was started by the Lords, to descend step by step to a servile and unconscious people’ (Cattaneo 1849, 9). Recommending to French publics the

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writings that Ferrari was publishing in the Revue des Deux-Mondes and the Revue Indépendante, Cattaneo contended that the Austrians reigned unchallenged over Italy because ‘the other [possible] governments were worse than theirs’, and that Italy was not ‘the slave of those fragile foreign armies, but of the wrong ideas of her rulers’ (Cattaneo 1849, 18). That is, the main problem with Italy was not the lack of national unity or independence, but the lack of civil liberties and social justice. For the Italian public, describing the exceptional spectacle of people’s spontaneous selforganisation on the Milan barricades, Cattaneo challenged all those who suggested that the Lombard people was instigated by exogenous (that is French) subversive forces. However, Cattaneo was not a simple witness of these events as, in the early days of the revolt, he led the early War Committee that organised popular resistance and endeavoured to attack the Austrian troops. According to a great scholar of radical Risorgimento, Franco Della Peruta, it was thanks to Cattaneo’s intransigent and ‘resolute intervention’ (Della Peruta 1973, 79) that the insurgents refused an armistice that Radetzky had opportunistically proposed to have the time for fortifying his positions and receiving help from Vienna. Instead, the imperial troops were thrown out, and the sword of the cruel Austrian general remained with Cattaneo as a war trophy. As denounced by Cattaneo and later confirmed by respected scholars, what happened at that point is that, for the Milanese aristocracy, the public enemy number one was no longer the Austrian emperor, but the people in arms. Then, led by Count Gabrio Casati (1798–1873) and ‘fear[ing] anarchy’ (Della Peruta 1973, 79), the wealthy classes started their own class struggle against the War Council led by Cattaneo, to stop at all costs ‘the republican degeneration’ (Arisi Rota 2019, 202) of the insurrection. Shifting the focus of the movement from the social to the national cause was the sole hope of the patriciate, which invoked the help of Carlo Alberto, a king who was already unpopular among the republicans for the role that he played in repressing the revolts of the 1830s, to transform the popular war into ‘royal war’ (Arisi Rota 2019, 206). Naively according to Della Peruta, but I would simply say honestly and loyally given the unprecedented emergency situation, Cattaneo accepted to collaborate with local aristocracy in the common effort to get rid of the Austrians. Namely, he accepted the formation of a provisional government chaired by Casati, delaying the matter of the political assets of the liberated territories to the end of the war. For contributing to the war effort

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once the phase of the urban guerrilla in just one city was over, Cattaneo called to the ‘armed federation of all the peoples of Italy’ (Cattaneo 1849, 61), whose task should have been temporarily limited to ‘expel the foreign enemy and the remains of slavery from all over Italy’ (Cattaneo 1849, 62). However, these were not little accomplishments, given the reaction that raged in almost all the other Italian states, as I detail below. In his 1848 recollections, Cattaneo clarified that he was well aware that this compromise with the aristocrats could only be a provisional arrangement. Talking about the wannabe King of Italy who crossed the Ticino one week after the people’s victory in Milan, Cattaneo did not have any illusion about: ‘That Prince, well trained in seducing and betraying. His tireless intrigants would have filled everything with discord and resentment, before an enemy who was used to resurge after his defeats’ (Cattaneo 1849, 63). While the official royalist propaganda argued that the Piedmontese army was indispensable to the cause of Italy, Cattaneo stated exactly the opposite, considering that the ‘new military doctrine of the barricades’ had shown that the people could get rid of the ‘permanent armies, which remain the sole obstacle to the freedom of peoples’ (Cattaneo 1849, 67). To this end, Cattaneo denounced the allegations pretending that the Austrians had fled from Milan on 22 March to escape from the Piedmontese army, which instead, according to Cattaneo: ‘Did not appear under our walls before the afternoon of the 26. The decision of declaring war to Austria was made only in the afternoon of the 23 March in Turin, as an effect of the popular turmoil …. That declaration of war was the first result of our victory, and not vice versa’ (Cattaneo 1849, 70). In the following years, Cattaneo always defended volunteer fighters, who were constantly undermined by the royal army first and by monarchist historiography later. The latest edition of Cattaneo’s correspondence shows how unfounded were historiographical commonplaces pretending that Cattaneo lost interest in the events after the end of the Five Days, as the archives are replete with orders and instructions that he sent to the militias fighting in the countryside. On March 23, he summoned the engineers to ‘be available for all works of fortification … and contribute to the directions of the barricades outside the city’ (Cattaneo 2005, 4; Cattaneo to Comitato di Guerra, 23 March 1848). Cattaneo insisted on the necessity of acting quickly to pursue the enemies while they retreated so to avoid giving them

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the time to recover, by ‘foster[ing] their disorganization’ (Cattaneo 2005, 8; Cattaneo to Comitato di Guerra, 23 March 1848). He also asked local fighters, and the volunteers coming from all the other Italian states and from neighbouring Switzerland, to establish relations with local populations to generalise the insurrection rather than bringing to them the revolution from above. According to the data gathered by the War Council, the city of Milan was not let alone by the countryside. Before the Piedmontese arrived: ‘Milan, Pavia, Como, Bergamo, Brescia, Cremona, the entire mountain: three quarters of Lombardy are free’ (Cattaneo 2005, 23; Cattaneo to Bianchi, 23 March 1848). Successful insurrections also occurred in small towns like Varese, whose inhabitants were congratulated by Cattaneo ‘for your brave accomplishments in disarming many hundreds of Croatians [the nationality of most Austro-Hungarian soldiers in Italy]’ (Cattaneo 2005, 23; Cattaneo to Comitato di Sicurezza di Varese, 23 March 1848). The fact that in 1848, the province was also active, and even provide Milan with arms and volunteers, counter commonplaces on the elitism of Risorgimento. Importantly, Cattaneo’s instructions to the troop exposed how far he was from any Jacobin idea of revolution as mere ‘Conquest of the Palace’. Writing to the brigades that had to attack Austrian Tyrol on the mountains passing through the Valcamonica and Valtellina, he recommended to ‘seek people’s friendship… offering your hand to our Trentino friends’ (Cattaneo 2005, 27; Cattaneo to Torelli, 24 March 1848). Nothing like an occupation army was farther from Cattaneo’s concept of people’s war, one that cannot be won only through military means but also through social action and conscientisation, Cattaneo also recommended that in all provinces, the councils that were instituted: ‘Second or at least do not hinder the wishes of people’ (Cattaneo 2005, 28; 24 March 1848; Cattaneo to Governo Provvisorio, 24 March 1848). This implies that the criteria for organising popular militias should not be limited to military efficiency, but must be intrinsically ethical: few weeks after the volunteers’ operations started, Cattaneo claimed that: ‘The behaviour of our fighters has been admirable: not even one prisoner was mistreated’ (Cattaneo 2005, 42; 10 April 1848). Cattaneo’s and Lombardini’s geographical studies on the Lombard plain were also an inspiration for resistance as Cattaneo wrote to his friend Cernuschi who was leading volunteer brigades around Mantova, that they should: ‘Trouble the enemy on his slow retreat … breaking

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the roads on his way’ (Cattaneo 2005, 30; Cattaneo to Cernuschi, 28 March 1848). Geography namely explained how to take advantage of the Po plain’s hydrological characteristics by: ‘Breaking bridges and inundating roads, stopping the water and making it inundate the fields … trapping the enemy within an artificial marsh’ (Cattaneo 1849, 73). While twentieth-century critical geographers argued that geography serves to make war, Cattaneo’s military geography even suggested early elements of non-human agency in this common endeavour of human and non-human actors to expel the tyrants. In defending the volunteers, Cattaneo denounced the misdeeds of Carlo Alberto’s troops, which he considered as a foreign occupation army exactly as the Austrians were. The Milanese scholar noted that already in early April, the volunteers (among whom young Carlo Pisacane) crossed the Garda Lake, that is, the frontier between Lombardy and Veneto, threatening the Austrian redoubtable fortresses of Peschiera and Verona. In early August, as Cattaneo sarcastically noted, volunteers were still defending these vanguard positions ‘when the magnanimous King had already fled to his own kingdom’ (Cattaneo 1849, 86) some hundreds of kilometres behind them. For Cattaneo, the defeat of the ‘royal war’ was easy to explain considering that the intentions of people like Carlo Alberto and Gabrio Casati were not to free portions of Italy from foreign domination but to counter the expansion of republican ideas after the fall of Louis-Philippe in France and the resignment of the infamous chancellor Metternich in Vienna. Thus, they did not have any interest in destabilising their fellow sovereigns Hapsburg. This international context is a key point to be considered. Cattaneo lamented that Carlo Alberto’s intervention prevented the further flow of Swiss republican volunteers, who refused to be confused with a Monarchy, and that he tried in all ways to counter the Italian volunteers (mostly republicans) who came to fight in Lombardy after having promoted local insurrections in the respective provinces. ‘As [Carlo Alberto] did not want any other army than his, he reduced the forces of a nation of 25 million people and her powerful friends to the regular militias of a small state… Not only his war was not European, but it was not even Italian’ (Cattaneo 1849, 154). The allusion to potential ‘powerful friends’ must be understood again in the European scenario and referred to one of the strongest myths of radical Risorgimento: republican France. As I explain below, this remark was not pure intellectual speculation, but referred to a concrete attempt that the federalists tried when other key leaders of the movement

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came to see Cattaneo in Milan in April 1848, although with very different aims. They were Giuseppe Ferrari and Giuseppe Mazzini. Based in France since a decade, Ferrari was an old Milanese acquaintance of Cattaneo since the 1830s, when social gatherings at Cattaneo’s home were attended by intellectuals such as Ferrari, Biondelli and hydrologist Lombardini (Agliati 2001). Interested in the historical thinking of Giovan Battista Vico, Ferrari quitted Italy, whose intellectual environment he considered too narrow and suffocating, and became a university teacher in Strasbourg. Like Cattaneo, Ferrari considered himself a Romagnosi’s disciple and attended his funeral in 1835 with Cattaneo (Armani 1997, 43). From France, Ferrari maintained an epistolary relationship with Cattaneo, expressing nostalgia for ‘our long conversations of 1937’ (Cattaneo 2001, 177; Ferrari to Cattaneo, 9 December 1838). He collaborated with him in the common aim of ‘defending our eminent friend’ (Cattaneo 2001, 239; Ferrari to Cattaneo, June 1839), that is Romagnosi, whose intellectual legacy was questioned by clericalist critiques as noted above. Yet, also in the country of the 1789 Revolution, Ferrari suffered political persecutions, being targeted by the most conservative religious circles as a propagandist of atheism and socialism (Della Peruta 2004). An adversary of Neo-Guelphism and an enthusiastic fan of the 1848 revolutions, Ferrari travelled from Paris to Milan on 6 April to agree a possible international action with Cattaneo and Cernuschi. Meanwhile, the compromise that Cattaneo had accepted in the name of unity, allowing Casati to form the Provisional Government, proved to be disappointing for the popular forces. The refuse of the Provisional Government to convoke a democratically representative Lombard Assembly, and the lack of transparency in the government’s acts, led Cattaneo to protest publicly and to request them to ‘publish the minutes’ of the commissions’ sessions (Cattaneo 2005, 41; Cattaneo to Governo Provvisorio, 9 April 1848). Writing to French diplomat Anatole Brenier, Cattaneo claimed the merits of the early War Council in refusing the armistice to Radetzky and in impeding that Carlo Alberto could seize the Iron Crown, the precious Longobard relic held in the Cathedral of Monza, ‘as initially he did not want to help us without being paid that prize’ (Cattaneo 2005, 42; Cattaneo to Brenier, 10 April 1848). Cattaneo could already see the inefficiency of the Piedmontese army as: ‘The heavy masses of a regular army that is not accustomed to war only could reach the enemy after two weeks’ (Cattaneo 2005, 43; Cattaneo to Brenier, 10 April 1848) and was concerned by the idea that Carlo Alberto could

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try to negotiate with Austria ‘a regular annexation [of Lombardy to his Kingdom], so that he will be legitimated to reign over us by divine right’ (Cattaneo 2005, 44; Cattaneo to Brenier, 10 April 1848). On the popular front, ‘in the middle of [Carlo Alberto’s] hesitations, Venice has proclaimed a federative republic’ [although Cattaneo was rather optimist in this judgement] and most importantly: ‘The barricades’ youth is not happy to have fought to change Spielberg with Fenestrelle’ (Cattaneo 2005, 44; Cattaneo to Brenier, 10 April 1848). While Spielberg was the infamous fortress where many opponents of the Austrian Empire including famous Italian conspirators such as Silvio Pellico and Federico Confalonieri had been detained, Fenestrelle was the equivalent place of detention of the Savoias’ Monarchy, where numerous prisoners from Southern Italy were famously deported in quite harsh conditions after 1860 (Barbero 2014). With his typical antiauthoritarian sarcasm, Cattaneo expressed all democrats’ mistrust in a Monarchy that was not less authoritarian or repressive than the Austrian one, as the history of the following century (war to brigands, colonialism, repression of workers movements, world wars, fascism etc.) would have demonstrated. Conversely, after the insurrection, Cattaneo noted that: ‘Here, we enjoy a freedom that maybe no other people ever had’ (Cattaneo 2005, 46; Cattaneo to Giordani, 21 April 1848). At that moment, this liberty was threatened by the domination of the Provisional Government and of the Savoias’ Army. Therefore, with Ferrari back to Milan, it was time to try some action. As confirmed by authors such as Paul Ginsborg, large segments of French public opinion were favourable to an armed intervention of the French Republic in favour of the insurged cities of Milan and Venice if only Milan and Venice had proclaimed the Republic and called France to their aid. Thus, Casati’s rule over Milan tarnished ‘the perspectives of international republican action’ (Ginsborg 2007, 170). Puzzlingly, this ambitious international republican programme was opposed by the most famous republican leader in Europe, Mazzini, who had already decided to support Carlo Alberto (Monti 1921, 12). Yet, given Mazzini’s great prestige, Cattaneo, Cernuschi and Ferrari tried to offer him a leading role in ‘the movement that had to provoke the fall of the provisional government, convoke the Lombard Assembly and call France to help’ (Monti 1921, 12). Their aim was explicitly exposed as freeing Italy: ‘From Austria and from Carlo Alberto’ (Monti 1921, 13). The substantial divergences that

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emerged between Mazzini and the federalists on this occasion were political but also ethical: for Cattaneo and friends, Carlo Alberto was a traitor, because he had first expressed some sympathy for the Carboneria riots of 1821 and then repressed the Mazzinian movements in 1834. Thus, Cattaneo came to say that he preferred: ‘The retour of the Austrians rather than having a traitor who rules Lombardy’ (Monti 1921, 16). Conversely, Mazzini ‘was in talks with Carlo Alberto’ (Monti 1921, 16) revealing for sure a bigger deal of unscrupulousness in comparison with the federalists—however without any concrete result for the republican cause. The federalists remained unaware of this Mazzini’s positioning before a ‘dramatic’ meeting that they had with him on 30 April, on which Ferrari redacted minutes in French that were published by Antonio Monti several decades later. Although Ferrari and Cattaneo chose not to publish these notes to avoid a too harsh public rupture with Mazzini, and simply declared that he refused to walk with them on that occasion, the meeting was effectively dramatic, and Mazzini’s refusal shocked deeply his interlocutors. Ferrari introduced the matter arguing pragmatically that in Italy, a Republic would not have resisted ‘more than one or two months without France’s aid’ (Monti 1921, 78). Thus, he pleaded for the need of continuing the February Revolution, given that the republican cause could only triumph internationally. For Ferrari, in that revolutionary year, ‘Europe was becoming republican’ (Monti 1921, 79), and therefore republicans should proclaim republics. The nationalist slogan arguing that ‘Italy will do it herself’ was simply nonsense to Ferrari, arguing that the key democratic issue was that the monarchists wanted ‘to resolve the problems of Lombardy without any Lombard Assembly’ (Monti 1921, 82). Crucially, as for France, a distinction was made by Ferrari between the hesitations of the Minister of Foreign Affairs Alphonse de Lamartine and the solidarity feelings of French republican masses, who were ready to take arms to aid their Italian comrades. When it comes to Risorgimento debates on ‘Francophilia’, it is always necessary to keep in mind this distinction between French people and French governments that some authors who were usually attacked as ‘Francophiles’ such as Ferrari always did. Yet, Ferrari’s proposals clashed with at least two of Mazzini’s own dogmas. The first, Mazzini’s stubborn opposition to the principles of federalism and municipalism (although Mazzinians were generally not opposed to a certain degree of administrative decentralisation), making

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him substantially unsensitive to ‘Lombard democracy’ (Monti 1921, 85), that he considered as a sort of archaism. Second, he was exactly one of those who were developing antipathy for ‘French influences’, in which he identified germs of atheism and socialism that were incompatible with his programme. At Mazzini’s refusal, Ferrari was astonished, as he realised that: ‘I was not with a friend: speaking, I realised that I was before an adversary’ (Monti 1921, 82). The same astonishment, mixed with anger, was shared by Cattaneo, who indicating Mazzini bursted out: ‘This man is corrupt [Cet homme est vendu]’ (Monti 1921, 85). Unluckily for the whole Risorgimento, and despite a few letters that Cattaneo exchanged with Mazzini in the following years, this rupture between Mazzinians and Federalists was never recomposed, although some porosity and significant overlappings between the two fields always existed, as I discuss below. Meanwhile, in Lombardy, also the military situation was degenerating. According to Cattaneo, the fact that the Provisional Government ‘did not want the people to meddle with the King’s war’ (Cattaneo 1849, 186) was one of the reasons for the bad outcomes of the campaign. Cattaneo also denounced how the official army wittingly ‘let massacre’ (Cattaneo 1849, 210) the brigades of volunteers coming from all over Italy in places like Curtatone. He especially fumed at the ‘horrible immorality’ (Cattaneo 1849, 218) of wars led by generals who make strategic considerations on which cities could be sacrificed, regardless of the presence of proud popular resistance inside and the repression that these people would have suffered from the returning enemy. Again, Cattaneo deconstructed sarcastically the arguments in favour of the efficiency and know-how of a regular army, deriding the incompetence of the Piedmontese generals in matters of military geography, as they ‘did not even have a look to our Notizie’ (Cattaneo 1849, 244). From that reading, they might have known that, to stop Radetzky’s counter-attack in the summer of 1848, it would have been sufficient to divert the waters of rivers such as the Oglio, and to inundate the fields, to impede the movements of the enemy. Even worse, Cattaneo denounced the political intention to give away Milan to Radetzky, as Carlo Alberto, ‘more hostile to the republican name than to his relatives in Austria’ (Cattaneo 1849, 249), took the control of the city to surrender it directly to the Austrians. For Cattaneo, the King’s main concern was to impede a void of power that would have led to another republican insurrection: ‘The King had to take [Milan], because he had to give it away’ (Cattaneo 1849, 265).

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Cattaneo denied that surrendering was justified by the real military situation, given the quantity of weapons and fighters that was still available to the local committees and the volunteers’ brigades. In Milan, where the populace was restarting to erect barricades: ‘One found as many arms as one wanted to distribute to the people’ (Cattaneo 1849, 270). Yet, the King had already arranged to flee from Milan through Porta Ticinese while opening access to the Austrians through Porta Romana on the opposite side, so that popular resistance would become impossible. Thus, thousands of citizens compromised with the insurrection had to go into exile, despite the attempts of Garibaldi and other volunteers to continue guerrilla resistance in the mountains. For Cattaneo: ‘The Austrian swords were back. [However] Porta Romana was not delivered to them by anarchy, but by Monarchy’ (Cattaneo 1849, 146). The political conclusion was that: ‘Who gives the task of defending freedom to the enemies of freedom, should expect to see it betrayed’ (Cattaneo 1849, 278). This shows how much the calumniations of the royalist propaganda trying to entitle the defeat to Cattaneo and his ‘republican mobs’ outraged Cattaneo while he was writing his Insurrezione. Again, the latest published volumes of Cattaneo’s correspondence show that still in August 1848: ‘He took part in the extreme attempts of resistance … as War Commissary for Lecco, Bergamo and Brescia, and in this capacity he talked with Garibaldi’ (Petroboni and Fugazza 2005, viii). On 2 August, he wanted Garibaldi to establish a northern defence line in the Pre-Alpine region closing the lowest access to the Alpine valleys to the Austrians, again with the help of local people to: ‘Support the defence works and the insurrectional spirit … to possibly isolate the superior region of Lombardy’ (Cattaneo 2005, 59; Cattaneo to Garibaldi, 2 August 1848). It was arguably too late for applying these ideas; yet, it is worth noting that while the royalists were retreating, Cattaneo and friends were still trying to organise a plan for Lombardy’s popular defence. Still on 5 August, the founder of Politecnico encouraged the defence committee to second the ‘brotherly efforts of that population’ highlighting that the Alpine part of Lombardy: ‘Has a border with free Switzerland, which is connected with free France. Remember that these mountains remained free for centuries after that the Romans had conquered all the plains’ (Cattaneo 2005, 70; Cattaneo to Comitato di Difesa, 5 August 1848). Although the myth of mountain’s freedom was a classical topos of Romanticism, the only help that mountain freedom gave to Lombard republicans was finally hospitality in Switzerland as exiles.

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Yet, for Cattaneo, the positive lesson of these events was that commoners learned about their force: ‘Milan did not know that she could wake up one morning and throw out 20,000 soldiers without arms … nor Venice that she was still master of her lagunes’ (Cattaneo 1849, 289). This meant that the conditions to continue the struggle were still in place, given that: ‘Italy is not the slave of the strangers, but of the compatriots’ (Cattaneo 1849, 293). This meant that the main task could not be only independence as: ‘One cannot reach independence, that is the national victory, if it is not by way of freedom’ (Cattaneo 1849, 298). For Cattaneo, the experience had shown that ‘we do not need Piedmont’ (Cattaneo 1849, 303) and finally: ‘We will have true peace when we will have the United States of Europe’ (Cattaneo 1849, 306). The internationalist mentality of Risorgimento federalists could not be expressed in a clearer and more performative way. Importantly, Cattaneo argued that the hostility or indifference of part of the popular classes for the following wars of national liberation was not due to their lack of consciousness or of ‘political maturity’, but rather to their full consciousness of the role that aristocracy had taken in controlling the movement. The result was that most of the Lombard peasants did not see a great difference between the Austrians’ rule and the Savoias’ one. During the Piedmontese retreat, in the Lombard Alps, ‘everywhere one heard the mountain dwellers cursing the King of the Lords’ (Cattaneo 1849, 262). Della Peruta has observed that these feelings did not mean popular estrangement from Risorgimento, but from the people who had eventually taken its political leadership (Della Peruta 1973). In his research on Lombard popular songs, folksinger Nanni Svampa noted that workers were wary of further ‘national’ endeavours because, after 1848, they had remained substantially alone in suffering the retaliations of Radetzky, who was satirically portrayed in popular sestets. In these popular songs, there were also expressions linking the cause of national liberation to the cause of social justice, such as: ‘Né a Marian né a Cantù/i todesch ghe tornen pu/e crepa i sciori’ [The Germans will never come back to Mariano or to Cantù, and death to the Lords] (Svampa 2007, 28). After analysing Cattaneo’s description of the 1848 events in Milan and Lombardy, it is worth spending some words on the parallel insurrection of Venice (Ventura 2017) which, although less central for this book’s arguments, was a key experience of popular Risorgimento. Magisterially addressed by authors such as Paul Ginsborg and Piero Brunello, the

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successful insurrection of 17 March 1848 that freed Daniele Manin (1804–1857) and Niccolò Tommaseo (1802–1874) from jail, and most of the Veneto region from the Austrian joke, was inspired by the ‘strong sense of identity’ (Ginsborg 2007, 98) of Venice, a city with a millenarian tradition of independence. While this matches Cattaneo’s arguments on the importance of the free commune as a revolutionary drive, Ginsborg notes that the substantially absolute (and almost dictatorial) leader of the Venetian experience, Manin, lacked much of Cattaneo’s radicalism and internationalism. Despite he was initially a ‘republican federalist’ (Ginsborg 2007, 102), Manin always had an ‘ambiguous relation with the lower classes’ (Ginsborg 2007, 101). Obsessed by order and by the ‘defence against anarchy’ (Ginsborg 2007, 106), Manin performed a rather moderate programme in agreement with the local bourgeoisie and, despite being a republican, he accepted to establish a formal ‘fusion’ with the Savoias’ Kingdom in exchange of Carlo Alberto’s promises of military help. As a consequence, on 4 July 1848: ‘With 127 votes against 6, Venice joined the Kingdom of Northern Italy’ (Ginsborg 2007, 122). Both geographically and politically, this sounded odd, considering that such Kingdom lacked a territorial continuity, given that the Austrians continued to control most of the Veneto hinterland, cutting any land connection between Venice and Turin. Anyway, the Piedmontese capitulation of the following month will cancel that annexation and return power to Manin. Intriguingly, Ginsborg mentions popular complaints about the 2000 Piedmontese soldiers who were sent to Venice, where they behaved like a colonial occupation army dealing with internal order rather than fighting the Austrians, and ‘spoke a substantially incomprehensible dialect’ (Ginsborg 2007, 292). Yet, for Ginsborg, a possible popular radicalisation also preoccupied Manin who, once recovered the power, moved to increasingly moderate positions and tried to reassure local middle classes about their ‘fear of communism’ (Ginsborg 2007, 259), limiting his social programme to some shy reforms. Manin also repressed the most radical Mazzinians and other republicans, mostly volunteers coming from other regions of Italy, who had harshly criticised him for the aforementioned fusion and even expelled some activists as a measure to marginalise ‘non-Venetian dissident elements in town’ (Ginsborg 2007, 311). Among these dissidents, even some early socialists were arrested to preserve ‘quietness’ (Ginsborg 2007, 353). An external observer such as Meˇcnikov, the Russian refugee who had lived for a while in Venice before

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joining the Expedition of the Thousand in 1860 and had listened to the recollections of local survivors, strongly criticised Manin for acting as a warrantor of the bourgeois social order. He also noted that Manin had maintained numerous men of the Austrian administration in their places, and ‘gave orders like a dictator’ (Meˇcnikov 2017, 44). This judgement has been recently echoed by Piero Brunello, who shows how the popular riots did not only take by surprise the Austrian regime. They also upset the democratic leaders like Manin for whom, in the first days of insurrection, it had not been easy to control the situation (Brunello 2018). At the end, in August 1849, isolated Venice had to surrender after the defeat of the Roman Republic. Italian revolutionaries could criticise Venice’s almost exclusive reliance on a urban revolution and consequent incapacity to involve the countryside and the smaller towns in the hinterland, that were soon reconquered by the Austrians. Yet, it is worth noting that Venice could resist more than everybody else in the Italian Revolution also thanks to her long tradition of municipal independence and to her geography, made of impenetrable lagoons, providing the history of urban resistance and freedom with an example that continued to nourish insurgent imaginaries.

Exile Networking and Federalist Conscientisation In Paris, Cattaneo resumed contacts with Mazzini in September 1848, to try some common effort to recover from the defeat and to support the resistance of localities such as Venice, and later Rome. Yet, the relationships between the two men remained cold: Cattaneo first wrote to Mazzini complaining about this latter’s: ‘Scarcity in providing us with … information. Our destiny depends on public opinion, we must cultivate it’ (Cattaneo 2005, 79; Cattaneo to Mazzini, 16 September 1848). Cattaneo continued his conversations with democrats who had remained in Italy such as his friend Enrico Cernuschi, who went to Rome to take advantage of the turmoil following the flee of the Pope in November 1848, when the young Milanese already sensed the spectacular developments that would have led to the proclamation of the Roman Republic. Cernuschi wrote to Cattaneo that: ‘From the popular circle something sensational might emerge: Roman Republic, Italian Constituent and so on’ (Cattaneo 1949, 457; Cernuschi to Cattaneo, 27 November 1848). On the other, Cattaneo’s trust in the French Republic started to fade since the election of Louis-Napoléon, ‘the nephew of the terrible uncle’, whom Cattaneo

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defined as ‘presidential plump child’ (Cattaneo 1949, 446) in some notes of December 1848 where he wondered if the new French President would have succeeded in destroying the Republic. Louis-Napoléon’s coup d’état of December 1851 to establish the Second Empire rendered sadly prophetic these Cattaneo’s notes. Between 1848 and 1852, several clarifications occurred in the Italian democratic field, putting the bases of Italian socialism, that was first inspired by thinkers like Proudhon and maintained a prevailing libertarian and federalist characterisation until the 1880s as even recognised by Marxist historians (Della Peruta 1973; Romano 1956). In France, where several Italian republicans were exiled, radical authors such as Proudhon ceaselessly criticised ‘the anti-socialist republicans such as Ledru-Rollin and the governmental [i.e. moderate] socialists such as Louis Blanc’ (Della Peruta 1973, 130). Concurrently, Ferrari matched these critiques, publishing the pamphlet Les philosophes salariés, that Della Peruta considered his first ‘Proudhonian’ work, endorsing Proudhon’s critiques to the principle of private property, sometimes even overtaking Proudhon as for radicalism. While Della Peruta defined this phenomenon as an ‘embryonal Italian socialism, from Ferrari to Pisacane, from Montanelli to the Proudhonians’ (Della Peruta 2004, 14), I would instead argue that this was much more than an embryo, and that the patrimony of ideas that these authors produced can still inspire political and scholarly debates. As I detail in the next chapter, one of the representatives of this tendence, exiled in Paris where he was acquainted with Ferrari and Cernuschi, was Tuscan lawyer Giuseppe Montanelli. Beyond Ferrari, Cernuschi and Montanelli (and possibly Pisacane) Della Peruta listed as representatives of ‘Risorgimento Proudhonism’ (Della Peruta 2004, 154) heterogenous activists such as, among others, Carlo Giuseppe Rusconi (1812–1889), Pietro Maestri (1816–1871), Carlo De Cristoforis (1824– 1859) and Enrico Guastalla (1826–1903). In any case, it would be misleading to read this categorisation as exclusive, as the positions of certain individuals and groups evolved over time and areas of porosity existed across several circuits. It was the case with the Genoa journal Libertà e Associazione, that for a while ‘oscillated between Mazzinianism and Proudhonism’ (Della Peruta 2004, 149). Yet, the opposition between Mazzini and those who embraced socialistic and federalist positions was very visible. Several activist were concerned that the authoritarian and centralistic attitudes of Mazzini in leading his own circle of admirers could be the prelude of a ‘dictatorship’ (Della Peruta 2004, 198) in the Italian

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republican movement. They had witnessed a similar process within the French Second Republic, showing that, to fight for freedom, it was not sufficient to declare themselves as republicans, because also ‘Cavaignac, who machine-gunned the [Paris] people in June’ (Della Peruta 2004, 232), was a republican. According to Della Peruta, while the early Mazzini’s endeavours of the 1830s were partially inspired by Filippo Buonarroti’s Jacobin perspective, which had a clear socialist connotation, when socialism started to be a concrete option the Genoa republican leader took distances from it. In the exiles’ milieus, Mazzini’s choice to make an alliance with Ledru-Rollin in the ‘Democratic European Central Committee’ (Della Peruta 2004, 22) was immediately read as an anti-socialist choice and challenged by the Italian ‘Proudhonians’ mentioned above. Mazzini’s approach also clashed with Cattaneo’s, despite the latter never joined the socialist field. According to Martin Thom, their substantial divergences depended on their respective notions of ‘human and divine geography’ (Thom 2007, 334), as the secular, rationalistic and anti-metaphysical method of Cattaneo clashed with the ‘unorthodox religiosity of Mazzini’, whose formula ‘God and People’ was considered ambiguous even in the republican field. On the political plan, Cattaneo and Ferrari explicitly refused Mazzinian conspirations, secret societies and scattered insurrectional ‘attempts’, first considering that these associations lacked transparency and internal democracy. Most importantly, Mazzini’s methods contradicted their principles refusing ‘the conquest of power from above’ (Thom 2007, 333), that they considered as ‘dictatorial, Caesarist, Napoleonian’ (Thom 2007, 365). This was clearly one of Cattaneo’s arguments that were rediscovered by Italian left/libertarians (Berneri 1992). While I will discuss more specifically the 1849 Roman Republic in the following chapters, Cattaneo’s attitude towards this experience, and the struggles that took place in Italy when he was already exiled in Paris, and later in Castagnola near Lugano, are especially revealed by his correspondences with Cernuschi. Born in 1821 to a relatively humble family, young Cernuschi became a sort of popular myth of the 1848 Five Days, when he led the Milanese people building barricades and obtained the surrender of the governor, becoming a member of the Council of War together with Cattaneo, who exerted a strong intellectual fascination on Cernuschi (Del Bianco 2006), who helped his mentor during the last desperate attempts

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to reorganise anti-Austrian resistance from 2 to 5 August 1848 (Della Peruta 1979). Exiled from Lombardy, Cernuschi went to Florence where he sympathised for the federalist programme of Giuseppe Montanelli, and then to Rome, where he foresaw the potentialities on which he wrote to Cattaneo. Although he rarefied his activism in his late years, after becoming a successful banker in the 1860s, Cernuschi always maintained his intransigent republicanism and liberal federalism, which led him to refuse the slightest collaboration with the Monarchy. He also continued to declare his anticlericalism with statements such as: ‘I am atheist’ and ‘I want [the Pope] to be slaughtered’ (Del Bianco 2006, 123). All along the duration of the Roman Republic, he was one of the staunchest opponents to any perspective of collaboration with Carlo Alberto (Del Bianco 2006, 65), before the latter’s kingdom finished ingloriously with the defeat of Novara in March 1849. Cernuschi’s correspondence with Cattaneo exposed Cattaneo’s own antiauthoritarianism and intransigence. Cernuschi repeatedly wrote to his mentor relating the exceptionality of the revolutionary processes ongoing in Rome, where: ‘We did it—the Republic’ (Cattaneo 1949, 472, Cernuschi to Cattaneo, 12 February 1849). Exalting the Romans as ‘the best people in the world’, Cernuschi insisted that it was time for Cattaneo ‘to come to Rome’ (Cattaneo 1949, 473; Cernuschi to Cattaneo, 12 December 1849). To entice his correspondent, Cernuschi added that: ‘Now, one does no longer conspire, the matter is transparent’ and that the programme to realise was ‘first to get rid of the King, then of the Stranger, then to arrange the political geography as we will wish’ (Cattaneo 1949, 473; Cernuschi to Cattaneo, 12 February 1849). While Cattaneo’s responses to these invitations were rather elusive and several authors have criticised the Lombard thinker for focussing on his studies rather than on active political struggle, I would instead argue that Cattaneo’s abstention from endeavours such as the Roman Republic was consistent with his federalist and antiauthoritarian inspiration. Cattaneo substantially disagreed with Cernuschi’s idea that he had to take the movement’s leadership, expressed through a musical metaphor exposing that, in Rome, they lacked ‘a Chapel Master’ (Cattaneo 1949, 457; Cernuschi to Cattaneo, 27 November 1848) or at least ‘an advisor’ (Cattaneo 1949, 475; Cernuschi to Cattaneo, 6 March 1849). It was the very notion of political leadership that clashed with Cattaneo’s federalist and antiauthoritarian principles. To match Cattaneo’s ideas, revolution in

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Rome should have been led by Roman people, not by someone else from Milan, or from Genoa, as Mazzini finally did taking a de facto lead of the Roman Republic as a triumvir (with Aurelio Saffi and Carlo Armellini). This appeared completely consistent with the idea of revolution that Cattaneo had exposed in his Insurrezione, arguing that: ‘Revolution is a fever, that does not abide by the orders of anybody in infecting an entire people. We must simply wait for it. And it will come back’ (Cattaneo 1849, 288). This means that Cattaneo was opposed to notions of revolutionary vanguards or to the idea that the elites can make revolution. Revolutions are made by the entire people: intellectuals, as well as organised political groups, can only try to orient the wider movement through a work of conscientisation, an idea that importantly prefigured the anarchist tradition. Therefore, it is paramount to note that Cattaneo’s refusal to enter directly the political arenas to which he was invited was not due to shyness or laziness, but to coherence with a longer strategy for deep social change based on antiauthoritarian ethics. The defeat of the Roman Republic, this time by way of the Republican French army which restored the Pope’s rule in the name of diplomatic equilibria was something shocking in the republican field. On the one hand, Mazzini’s lasting attempts to maintain the leadership of the national movement raised the sarcasm of Proudhon, who called him: ‘Former Dictator and wannabe Pontiff’ (Della Peruta 2004, 246). On the other, Milanese republican Mauro Macchi (1818–1880) wrote to Cattaneo wondering what to do: ‘If now also the Republic of France joined the Kings of the entire world again the peoples’ cause … Poor Cernuschi, in the hands of the Gallo-Croatians!’ (Cattaneo 1949, 487; Macchi to Cattaneo, 10 July 1849). While the definition of the ‘Gallo-Croatians’ was a bitter metaphor to fume at the objective support that the French government was giving to the Hapsburg Monarchy, Cernuschi was effectively detained for some six months in Civitavecchia as one of the military leaders of the Roman Republic where, like in Milan, he was a member of the commission in charge of organising barricades. From his jail, he wrote several letters to Cattaneo, expressing his anger about Mazzini’s wishes to organise resistance to the bitter end, showing complete insensitivity to the victims that such resistance would have costed to the generous people of Rome. According to a sarcastic Cernuschi, for Mazzini: ‘One victim per day proves that the cause has always ready martyrs’ (Cattaneo 1949, 498; Cernuschi to Cattaneo, 15 September 1849). In early 1850, Cernuschi was freed: in announcing his liberation to Cattaneo, he saluted the editor

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of Politecnico as the man ‘whom I have proclaimed my master’ (Cattaneo 1952, 440; Cernuschi to Cattaneo, 29 January 1850). Cernuschi settled then in Paris, where he would especially hang out with ‘Ferrari and Montanelli’ (Del Bianco 2006, 121), matching often the anti-Mazzinian tones of the former in arguing that the 1850 Manifesto of the Mazzinian Comitato Nazionale Italiano was so generic that: ‘D’Azeglio, [the King of] Savoia and Bomba [Ferdinand II King of Naples] could sign it’ (Cattaneo 1952, 449; Cernuschi to Cattaneo, 23 October 1850). In the following years, Cernuschi rarefied his political activities, although he continued to bring intransigent republican and federalist positions to the international debates. In the 1859–1861 period, he remained firmly opposed to unification wars and to the Monarchy, refusing to return to Italy as he would have ‘never sided with the Savoias’ (Del Bianco 2006, 177). He even wrote pamphlets against Cavour where he claimed that he remained ‘federalist by instinct and rational conviction’ (Del Bianco 2006, 145). A collaborator of the Crédit Mobilier founded by Saint-Simonian brothers Isaac and Emile Péreire and a businessman in the cooperative sector, Cernuschi became a rich banker in France in the 1860s and ceased political activities. Yet, he remained in touch with Cattaneo, Ferrari and their circuits, providing an example of federalist and republican intransigence and an early case of ‘brain-drain’ at the detriment of Italy, where still today bright people struggle to find jobs worthy of their skills due to provincialism and corruption, including in the academy (Gambetta and Origgi 2013).1 Meanwhile, the ideas of republicanism and socialism that circulated in French-speaking milieus during the Second Republic became key references for Italian Federalists and this would not serve them to make peace with Mazzini, as revealed by this latter’s stormy correspondences with Ferrari in 1849–1850. Mazzini tried first to reassure Ferrari, writing from Lausanne that he was not a chauvinist, and did not want to ‘remake the Misogallo’ (Monti 1921, 86; Mazzini to Ferrari, 2 October 1849), a piece by Vittorio Alfieri that was considered the symbol of Francophobes. However, Ferrari did not accept Mazzini’s programme and did not refrain from informing directly Mazzini that he considered him as: ‘The new Gioberti’ [some of an insult in republican milieus], blaming Mazzini’s attitude in 1848, when he: ‘Accepted the programme of the moderates

1 See also the website: https://www.trasparenzaemerito.org/.

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“Italy will do by herself” … sacrificing [the Republic] to unity’ (Monti 1921, 89; Ferrari to Mazzini, October 1850). In these years, Ferrari tried, in vain, to obtain Cattaneo’s support for organising a ‘Social[ist] and Federal Party’ provided with its own journal and public visibility (Della Peruta 2004, 379; Ferrari to Cernuschi, January/February 1851) on the grounds that: ‘You in Lugano, Cernuschi in Rome and me in Paris, we always were unanimous in judging the [Italian] revolution’ (Monti 1921, 90; Ferrari to Cattaneo, September 1851). This project would have included Giuseppe Montanelli and all those whom Mazzinian leader Gustavo Modena (1803–1861) defined with some worry the: ‘Some hundreds of Proudhons that we have’ (Della Peruta 2004, 155) among Italian political refugees. Several factors impeded the accomplishment of such political outcome, although exiled federalists organised quite effective transnational circuits around publishers, symbolic places such as Lugano and key figures that rendered their political option quite visible to the Italian and international public opinion at that time. It was between the Ticino and Paris that these discussions took place. Ferrari went to Lugano to convince Cattaneo to support his plans, that initially also included Manin, reporting to Cattaneo a conversation that he had with the Venetian leader: ‘You are Venice, Cattaneo will be Milan, the stronghold of the next revolution will be Northern Italy’ (Monti 1921, 99; Ferrari to Cattaneo, 20 September 1851). Nevertheless, in Paris, Manin was also in talks with the moderates and had some reservations on Ferrari’s project. Furthermore, Cattaneo and Ferrari had some disagreements about the terminology to use for attracting people to their cause. While Ferrari staunchly refused ‘unity’ and argued for ‘federation’, Cattaneo suggested to use terms that were less susceptible to frightening those who were hesitating. He proposed to counter ‘fusion’ rather than ‘union’ and to support ‘federal union or free union’ rather than ‘federation’ to clarify that ‘federation’ should mean ‘union of what is separated’ (Monti 1921, 97; Cattaneo to Ferrari, 15 September 1851) rather than fragmentation. While it seems clear that the two men were substantially expressing the same ideas under different terms as for federalism, the two substantial disagreements between them lied first in their assessment of socialism, that Cattaneo never embraced, disappointing Ferrari who considered it as a priority, and second in political strategy, as Ferrari was ready for political action, while Cattaneo was not.

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It can be argued that instead of Ferrari’s proposal to establish a sort of party, it was Cattaneo’s proposal to focus on publishing and cultural work for the ripening of a progressive public opinion in Italy that prevailed. The key place for this endeavour was a printing shop, the Tipografia Elvetica in Capolago, which was also the centre of a sustained international networking that rendered nationally and internationally visible Risorgimento federalisms. Capolago is a small village in Italian-speaking Switzerland (Canton Ticino) on the shores of the Lugano lake, few kilometres from the Italian border and from Castagnola, where Cattaneo lived from 1849 until his death in 1869. This was a land of traditional political migration of Italians, and where activities such as smuggling were a traditional occupation of local people on the two sides of the border. Within this tradition, the circulation of prohibited books for Italophone readerships continued from the first half of the nineteenth century to the Fascist dictatorship at least. In a letter to Cernuschi, Ferrari amazingly wrote that the success of one of his books that had been printed there ‘since several days … depends on the moon’ (Della Peruta 2004, 380; Ferrari to Cernuschi, February/March 1851), that is on the meteorological conditions allowing smugglers to make safely their nightly journeys to circulate the volumes! Two volumes praiseworthily edited by Rinaldo Caddeo in the 1930s contain huge documentation for reconstructing the history of this typographical and political experience. The printing shop was initially specialised in international literature, making known to Italian publics works by Edgar Quinet and Jules Michelet, which already had political value, given the popularity of these French authors among republican and anticlerical publics in Restoration Italy. The correspondence between Vieusseux and one of the Capolago publishers shows that, in 1843, there was still the need to complete the publication of works by a very famous Italian poet (atheist and republican), Giacomo Leopardi, beyond ‘everything that could be approved by Italian censorship’ (Caddeo 1934, 405; Vieusseux to Massa, 29 July 1843). This confirms Caddeo’s argument on the centrality of printing shops for Risorgimento struggles, as the enormous production of Capolago was only a part ‘of the immense clandestine production [that, from] London and Lugano, Bastia and Malta, Piedmont and Tuscany, Paris and Marseille, Zurich and Lausanne’, served to ‘forge paper bullets, more dangerous and deadly than the lead ones, to be thrown against the oppressors’ (Caddeo 1934, 13). While revolutionary movements have long discussed on what is more effective between paper

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and lead, this idea of fighting first in people’s heads and consciousness before than in the battlefield perfectly matched Cattaneo’s sensitivity. From 1847 to 1853, the printing shop was owned by Alessandro Repetti (1822–1890), a Cattaneo’s friend and future anti-slavery volunteer fighter in the American Civil War. Although Caddeo observed that, in 1845, the clandestine introduction of books in Italy ‘seemed to be already organised and very active’ (Caddeo 1931, 40), it was in Repetti’s years that, also thanks to the Elvetica, the Canton Ticino became ‘an essential part’ (Caddeo 1931, 45) of Risorgimento activities. After 1848, there was a flourishing of books telling the stories of the Italian revolution, whose political importance is also revealed by the fact that, according to Caddeo, the position of Italian refugees in Canton Ticino was far from being stable and safe, given the strong pressures that the Austrian government made on the Swiss federal government for expelling the exiles. In 1949, Cattaneo’s arrival fostered a radicalisation of local circuits. With friends including Repetti, Macchi, Luigi Daelli and Luigi Dottesio, Cattaneo started the endeavour of the Archivio Triennale delle cose d’Italia dall’avvento di Pio IX all’abbandono di Venezia, a series of annual collective volumes organised again following the periodical framework of Politecnico, but this time with an explicit political aim. That is, documenting the facts of the ‘Italian Revolution’ in the different regions to continue the work of countering monarchist propaganda that Cattaneo had started in Paris with Insurrezione (which was first printed in French and then in Italian in Switzerland). In Archivio, at the end of each yearly documentary tome, a chapter of final remarks by Cattaneo explained the federalists’ criticisms to the Italian revolution. The first volume contained a sharp critique of Mazzini’s Giovine Italia for its elitist character and for ‘speaking a language that was difficult for the plebs, and also for many who did not consider themselves as plebs. No! It was not popular, it did not enter in the people’s flesh’ (Cattaneo 2011, 141). While this note confirms that the need for massive popular action and for speaking a language that was understandable by the people was fully taken into consideration in federalist circuits, the story of Venice in 1848 confirmed to Cattaneo the falsity of the militaristic justifications of Carlo Alberto’s intervention. The Archivio’s editor noted that, in the so-called First War of Independence of 1848–1849, ‘the Kingdom who had millions of subjects fell twice’ while Venice resisted alone ‘until she had bread’ and denounced the immorality of those ‘who, together

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with Gioberti, derided the “petty republics” [repubblichette]’ (Cattaneo 2011, 152). Again, for Cattaneo, militarism and chauvinism expressed by nationalistic slogans such as ‘out the Barbarians’ were the true responsibility of the Italian defeat, as too many people had forgotten that 1848 was first a European popular movement. Indeed, the populace had insurged in Vienna like in Milan, and ‘barbarian can equally mean German, French or Italian … Italy can only be free within a free Europe … Against the alliance of few oppressors, we have to establish the almighty alliance of the oppressed’ (Cattaneo 2011, 157). Notions of non-domination, and Cattaneo’s antimilitaristic interpretation of the idea of popular militias, also inspired his antiauthoritarian critiques to the political developments in France, where no revolutionary radicalisation or limitation of governmental powers had occurred. ‘What was the obstacle to freedom? The soldiers: a nation that places 400,000 gladiators under the arbitrary command of one person or of few people, will be always the slave of someone else’s will … be he called LouisPhilippe [the former King] or Cavaignac [the French Prime Minister responsible for the repression of June 1848 in Paris] … he is always the man who has the telegraph and 400,000 armed slaves’ (Cattaneo 2011, 158). Conversely, in popular militias the rule was: ‘All militias and no soldiers’ (Cattaneo 2011, 158). The idea that militias could freely elect and revoke their officials constituted a form of political participation from below that, through the works of Cattaneo’s friend Pisacane, would have played a role in shaping further definitions of federalism and libertarian socialism. At that moment, internationalism and the ‘United States of Europe’ were indicated by Cattaneo as the solutions against war and barbarity. Alas, in those years, the most performing internationalism was that of political repression against Capolago and its activists. Operating right on the other side of the border, the Austrian police did not tolerate the flow of clandestine press to Lombardy and the other regions of Italy from Switzerland. Noting that in the Lombardo-Veneto region, the possession of a prohibited book was punished with 1–5 years of jail, Caddeo called this repression as the war of ‘an Empire against a printing shop’ (Caddeo 1931, 247). Unluckily, this was not a metaphor as this war also had its victims, eventually Elvetica collaborator Luigi Dottesio (1814– 1851), an organiser of the clandestine networks of press distribution. In 1851, Dottesio was arrested while crossing clandestinely the border with compromising documents and then hanged in Venice after a summary

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trial. The cruelty and exaggeration of this death sentence against someone who was only guilty of distributing prohibited books provoked great impression and strong concerns among the refugees about their safety. In fact, the political intentions of Dottesio’s murderers were perfectly described by Ferrari, who wrote to Cattaneo that Radetzky refused to pardon Dottesio ‘to place the gallows in front of Capolago’ (Monti 1921, 51; Ferrari to Cattaneo, 20 October 1851). Yet, it was not only Austria that repressed Capolago: the circulation of the Archivio was also forbidden in Piedmont, which led Cattaneo to note sardonically that: ‘We hear that, before being published, this volume has already the honour of being forbidden, even in Piedmont. Alas, with certain people, there is an indestructible fraternity of love and hatred for Italy’s enemy. We never had the illusion that they were smart enough to dissimulate it’ (Cattaneo 1851, x). The Savoias came to imprison people responsible for distributing such books in their territory. As Cattaneo recounted to Filippo de Boni, one notary Giovanni Cattaneo was jailed because he had sold Ferrari’s Filosofia della Rivoluzione (printed in Capolago without indication of the place and then clandestinely introduced into Italy) and risked ‘from 2 to 12 years of jail because that book is against the religion of the state. This is the philosophy that leads people to jail in Piedmont’ (Cattaneo 1952, 171; Cattaneo to De Boni, 6 August 1852). Puzzlingly, Ferrari and Cattaneo denounced also Mazzini’s pressures on his fellows in Switzerland to sabotage Capolago, to the point that Cattaneo could not print Pisacane’s book Guerra combattuta in Italia because he did not convince Repetti to ignore ‘Mazzini’s veto’ (Caddeo 1931, 303) over that book, suspected of socialistic inspirations. With his usual anti-Mazzinian sarcasm, Ferrari also confided to Montanelli his concerns for the work that ‘the supreme pontiff Mazzini’ was doing to isolate ‘the schism of Capolago’ (Caddeo 1934, 429; Ferrari to Montanelli, 1851). As Cattaneo concluded writing to liberal Piedmontese politician Angelo Brofferio (1802–1866): ‘With a bizarre unanimity, Capolago is cursed by D’Azeglio and by Radetzky, by the Company of Mazzini and by the Company of Jesus’ (Cattaneo 1949, 254; Cattaneo to Brofferio, August 1851). Repetti’s enterprise did not survive these political and economic difficulties and had to close in 1853. This loss was a harsh political blow to the Risorgimento cause that was well expressed by Caddeo’s metaphor of Capolago as a ‘dismantled trench’ (Caddeo 1931, 317). Yet, the presses of Capolago produced some of the everlasting works in the history of Italian radical political thinking.

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It was the case with two of Ferrari’s books, Filosofia della Rivoluzione and Federazione Republicana. Inserted in the post-1848 debates of the Italian democratic opposition in exile, these works played a role in what Della Peruta called Italian Proudhonism. To give an example of the reception of Ferrari’s work in the history of Italian socialism, one can mention the rediscovery and critical reappropriation of Filosofia della Rivoluzione by anarchist Luigi Fabbri in the 1920s, arguing that ‘anarchist, libertarian, autonomist an intransigent tendencies recall the memory of republican federalism’ (Fabbri 1921, 5). For Fabbri, Ferrari was a fan of ‘social revolution’ (Fabbri 1921, 4), one who: ‘Denied God and undermined bravely the principle of authority, putting under scrutiny the institutions that were considered as indispensable, that is religion and family, homeland and government’ (Fabbri 1921, 14). Although aware of the risks of anachronisms and of the need to read Ferrari’s text in its contexts, Fabbri concluded his preface to the 1921 edition of Filosofia della Rivoluzione by arguing that: ‘In this book, all the starting points of contemporary socialist and anarchist schools were already established’ (Fabbri 1921, 15). Arguably, Fabbri was impressed by the pages in which Ferrari denied philosophically the principles of religion and metaphysics. In this sort of radical humanism, it was by eliminating any dogma or theological hindrance to secular thinking and human will that political freedom could be built, given that, for Ferrari: ‘People’s sovereignty stems from human sovereignty’ (Ferrari 1873, vol. 2, 312). Free thinking and collective participation through the nation in arms were likewise the basic points of the other book, equally printed in Capolago and containing more explicit and shocking political proposals, that is the Republican Federation. As Salvatore Onufrio noted Ferrari’s idea of federation was based on the complex and articulated geographies of Italy that made it the ‘natural place for the federation’ (Onufrio 1969, 14). Therefore, the naturalistic arguments of those geographers who saw in the shape of Italy the image of its unity were upset to show instead the need for federalism. Crucially, these arguments exerted an important influence on the famous Proudhon’s writings of the 1860s in which the French philosopher criticised the very notion of Italian unity, as I discuss in the chapter on the ‘Southern connection’. Politically, one of the most original points of Federazione Republicana, and also one of the causes of its proscription, was the fact that Ferrari went well beyond his federalist fellows in denouncing the ‘internal enemies’ of Italy (alternatively the royalists, the moderates,

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the incoherent republicans and so on), in addition to the external ones, such as the Austrians. For Ferrari, the main enemy of Italian freedom was the Papacy, intended at the same time as a circuit exerting obscurantist influences in society and culture, and as a transnational network acting politically to condition all European governments, including the non-Catholic ones. For Ferrari: ‘The priest does not have homeland or family: he preaches a moral that does not belong to this world, he is a man against nature … In the opinion of the priest, the independence of reason is a crime’ (Ferrari 1969, 38). For Ferrari, temporal power and spiritual power were inextricably associated so that they had to be fought together. At the same time, a transnational adversary should be fought internationally. Ferrari argued that his idea of transnational resistance had historical and cultural roots that contradicted any form of Risorgimento chauvinism, ridiculing for instance the nationalistic disputes on whether the biggest names in the history of culture were Italian or French. For Ferrari: ‘In their delirium, the nationalists repudiate the genius of their own nations and insult the names that they believe they are opposing to the strangers’ (Ferrari 1969, 67). The author noted that the French Revolution had strong roots in a transnational phenomenon such as Italian Renaissance, rendering ridiculous the opposition of ‘Italian’ ideas to ‘French’ ideas. This refusal of every form of intellectual chauvinism inevitably talks to current discussions, in Europe and worldwide. While Ferrari’s analysis on the anti-revolutionary and anti-republican intentions that convinced Carlo Alberto to intervene in 1848 matched substantially Cattaneo’s arguments, Ferrari especially criticised the ‘theory of independence’. For Ferrari, limiting the Italian struggle for emancipation to the mere idea of national independence was only functional to the imperial ‘ambitions of the King of Sardinia [the Savoias]’ (Ferrari 1969, 73). This king ruled ‘the most retrograde state of Italy’ (Ferrari 1969, 89) as for lack of internal democracy. The Milanese federalist noted that, in 1849, the same royalist army that had capitulated before the Austrians cruelly repressed the republican revolts in Genoa. Together with the theory of independence, Ferrari refused the theory of unity, which he considered to have mislead republicans like Mazzini who supported Carlo Alberto in 1848 (and would support his successor in 1859–1861, one might add). ‘Unity … can be imperial, papal or monarchist. Revolution is republican; revolution only stems from principles and only stops

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when all the states are free’ (Ferrari 1969, 116). Another myth of unification Risorgimento, the conquest of Rome, was deconstructed by Ferrari noting the scarce real importance of the city of Rome, which ‘does not have the half of Naples’s population’ (Ferrari 1969, 117). Beyond his usual anti-Mazzinian tirades, the very substantial critique that Ferrari levelled to Mazzinianism was around the concept of ‘formalism’. According to Ferrari and other socialist and federalist republicans, formalism meant targeting a political revolution (for unification, independence or republic) without ‘saying a word of social revolution’ (Ferrari 1969, 137). For Ferrari, the key point was that the main accomplishment of Risorgimento should not be unification, or independence, or mere republic, but social justice—that is socialism. Ferrari’s socialism was not state socialism, as no state could be identified with ‘the poor’s revolution, claimed by the poor, the revision of the social pact, the new sharing of wealth’ (Ferrari 1969, 169), while Italy’s mere unity and independence could only have as a result: ‘The revolution of the rich’ (Ferrari 1969, 174). The political form of this socialist revolution was: ‘The republics [making] a republican federation’ (Ferrari 1969, 182). This wording implied that there should not be just one republic, but several ‘republics’, as Italy still was an abstract notion. In the new insurrectionary phase that Ferrari imagined, people would concretely deal with: ‘The republics of Lombardy, of Venice, of Tuscany, of Rome, of Naples, of Piedmont, of Parma, of Modena…’ (Ferrari 1969, 174). Only after the victory of the insurrectional movement one will ‘rediscuss the current political geography of Italy’ (Ferrari 1969, 181). While this idea of starting the revolution in the territorial framework of existing pre-unification states was one of the most criticised (and sometimes wittingly misunderstood) aspect of Ferrari’s prefigurative geographies, it is worth noting Ferrari’s preventive anticolonialism. Federazione Repubblicana stated that future Italy had to be ‘free from all preoccupation of territorial and colonial conquest’ (Ferrari 1969, 185), showing once more that radical and federalist Risorgimento is definitely an anticolonial definition. Like in the Archivio Triennale’s case, one can imagine the ‘unanimity’ in the criticisms of these Ferrari’s works printed and distributed through the Capolago networks. Especially interesting was the critique expressed by the Mazzinians in Italia e Popolo, accusing Ferrari to give arguments to those who considered the republicans as socialists and anarchists: ‘For our adversaries, anarchy in the field of the anarchists seemed to be the

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final version of the republican forms’ (Ferrari 1969, 197). The deep rift that was opened between Mazzinians and socialists in France in those years was also witnessed by the recollections of a future member of the Paris Commune and of the Anti-Authoritarian International, Gustave Lefrançais, who disdainfully portrayed Mazzini as someone who was: ‘Horrified by socialism, like all those who aspire to power’ (Lefrançais 1902, 196). On the other side, Mazzini was really horrified by new tendencies such as Proudhonism, of which he especially ‘fought the antiauthoritarian parts’ (Della Peruta 2004, 243), claiming again that as Republicans: ‘We are not anarchists’ (Della Peruta 2004, 244). Amazingly, the anarchists of the following century will consider people like Ferrari and Proudhon as their predecessors. As for Cattaneo, all available sources are unanimous in stating how he was personally and politically uncomfortable with the Parisian milieus of the exile. In the letters that he sent from Paris to his wife Anna in 1849, he expressed his wishes to come back to Castagnola as soon as possible after arranging the publication of Insurrezione, and that Ferrari was the only Italian whose company he liked there (Cattaneo 2005, 85; Cattaneo to Woodcock, 28 September 1848). Yet, from Castagnola, he remained at the core of a powerful network of relations that is revealed by his correspondence, through which he intervened in European debates exchanging with Cernuschi, Ferrari, Pisacane and hundreds of other activists, editors and intellectuals. With Cernuschi, he discussed the importance of the individual sphere as a crucial aspect of his federalism: ‘As it applies to states, the federal principle also applies to individuals. Everybody must conserve their individual sovereignty … Submitting themselves to others’ orders is for … the servants. Yielding is for the wretched or the swindlers’ (Cattaneo 2005, 242; Cattaneo to Cernuschi, August 1851). This obviously chimes with the notions of non-domination and (intransigent) civic virtue as discussed above, but also with twentieth-century definitions of anarchist federalism establishing the individual, the commune and the federation as the three scalar levels of a freed society (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo 1936). Through Ferrari and other friends, Cattaneo also indirectly intervened in international discussions on the competing political manifestos that the Italian democratic emigration was producing. With Ferrari, he redacted a collective response that they sent to the authors of the programme adopted by the so-called Latin Committee, more precisely Comitato Democratico Francese-Spagnuolo-Italiano. They were Montanelli, socialist

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catholic Felicité de Lamennais (1782–1854), radical republican and antislavery activist Victor Schoelcher (1804–1893) and others. While I will further discuss this text in the following chapter, it is worth noting Cattaneo’s and Ferrari’s endorsement of this internationalistic perspective (although limited to ‘Latin’ countries) and highlighting a couple of points, the first political, the second geographical, that they raised. The first was that: ‘The revolutionary movement must start from below. No longer redemptory pontiffs, no longer kings liberators, no longer dictators who will soon play the role of the pontiffs and of the kings’ (Cattaneo 2005, 245; Cattaneo and Ferrari to the Comitato, 24 August 1851). Although they were not named, it is clear that these sharp critiques were directed to three men who were presented in different ways as leaders of the 1848 movement: Pope Pio IX, King Carlo Alberto and Giuseppe Mazzini, this latter being arguably the most uncomfortable with the company of the other two. The second point, probably suggested by Cattaneo, addressed the geographical conformation of the three nations represented in that Committee, defined as: ‘Three nations that are homogeneous as for language, lying on an immense peninsula that is defended by the unique line of the Rhin, of Switzerland and of the Julian Alps’ (Cattaneo 2005, 250; Cattaneo and Ferrari to the Comitato, 24 August 1851). While this hypothetic ‘line of resistance’ of Southern Europe against the Empires constituted a sort of geopolitical internationalisation of the conflict between democracy and despotism (although this would have alimented some quite detrimental chauvinism in some ‘Latin’ socialist movements), Cattaneo and Ferrari restated that their internationalism went well beyond the cultural borders of the ‘Latin’ world, given also Cattaneo’s familiarity with German cultures. ‘Revolution must succeed materially and spiritually, proclaiming the reign of free science and universal fraternity’ (Cattaneo 2005, 250; Cattaneo and Ferrari to the Comitato, 24 August 1851). Another manifesto that triggered Cattaneo’s reaction was published by the Italian National Committee in London on 30 September 1851 by Mazzini and his disciples Aurelio Saffi, Maurizio Quadrio, Mattia Montecchi and Cesare Agostini to claim their hegemony over the national movement. Eventually, the Mazzinians violently attacked the idea of federalism, arguing that it meant ‘disaggregation’ (SEI 46, Politica 17, 127) and comparing it with the Monarchy, while republican revolution will be ‘unitary’ (SEI 46, Politica 17, 127), only recognising the municipality as administrative unit. Cattaneo replied observing the

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deeply hierarchic nature of their geography made of: ‘Silent and resigned provinces around a dominant and dictatorial city, departments that wait the daily impulsions of a mechanic and servile life from the voice of a prefect and the vibrations of the telegraph’ (Cattaneo 2005, 265; ‘Cattaneo and others’ to the Comitato Nazionale Italiano, October 1851). Cattaneo used a metaphor taken from the history of the transformation of ancient republican Rome in an empire, whose local districts reproduced the central model on smaller scale: Roman colonies ‘were made on the image of Rome, but resembled to her like a slave resembles to the queen’. For Cattaneo, once early Roman emperors exterminated the Etruscan Federation, ‘in the same moment in which Italy became the arbiter of the world, she was dead’ (Cattaneo 2005, 266; ‘Cattaneo and others’ to the Comitato Nazionale Italiano, October 1851). Interestingly, the same kind of metaphors on ‘mechanic life’ and ‘dead’ districts was used in the following years by anarchist geographer Elisée Reclus to criticise the departmental division of France, arguing with a sarcasm similar to Cattaneo’s that: ‘This absurd departmental division, only good for applicants to the role of deputy prefect … renders idiot those who practice it too much’.2 Also the key matter raised by Cattaneo anticipated some of Reclus’s ideas, namely when he warned Mazzini that liberty was not something that ‘descends from the heavens, first from a church of elected people to go gradually among demeaned multitudes … Freedom should … stem from the land, from the barricades, from the marshes, from the mountains, from the fields’ (Cattaneo 2005, 266; ‘Cattaneo and others’ to the Comitato Nazionale Italiano, October 1851). Again, geographical metaphors revealed their effectiveness in exposing anti-authoritarian concepts. Wary of these different committees, that he considered elitist and ineffective, Cattaneo only wished to resume his work as a cultural organiser and to support endeavours for concrete solidarity to ‘the young people migrating for cause of desertion to conscription, organising them to be useful to the Italian cause in better times’ (Cattaneo 1949, 504). To this end, Cattaneo and some friends contributed to a committee which had branches in Lugano and Genoa to help young deserters to migrate and to find jobs in the Mediterranean hubs of transnational exile such as: ‘Algiers, Smirne, Constantinople, Alexandria, Cagliari, Corsica, Barcelona, etc.’ 2 Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits Occidentaux, Nouvelles Acquisitions Françaises (BNF) 16798, Reclus to Pelet, 7 December 1884.

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(Cattaneo 1949, 505). This list gives an idea of the extension and spatial complexity of Risorgimento networks of solidarity and exile, forming a sort of Mediterranean periplus in which republicans like Fabrizi, based in Malta for a time, were instrumental in organising Pisacane’s endeavour. Yet, the blows of history would have shaken again the apparent quietness of Cattaneo’s Swiss exile.

Against the Organisation of a Kingdom (and of an Empire) The coup d’état of Louis-Napoléon on 4 December 1851 and the successive proclamation of the Second Empire were harsh blows for democrats, republicans and socialists all over Europe. For Italian activists this event closed the post-1848 period, opening a new period of uncertainty, especially for the exiles. Yet, in what Ferrari defined ‘the worst disgrace for the democrats’ (Monti 1921, 121; Ferrari to Cattaneo, January 1852), not everything was bad according to the Milanese thinker. First, the coup d’état got rid of electoral illusions and, as Ferrari noted quite cynically, it was a defeat of all moderate republicans and socialists targeting the conquest of political power. More concretely, given the peculiar characteristics of French Napoleonianism, Napoleon III would have killed the Republic but also impeded a monarchist restoration, keeping open all possibilities in case of anti-imperial revolt. ‘He cannot be legitimist, nor Orleanist, nor conservative, nor bourgeois’ (Monti 1921, 121; Ferrari to Cattaneo, January 1852). While Ferrari’s prognostic would have been only partially realised in 1870 when the Second Empire fell and the Third Republic was proclaimed—with a high cost in terms of human lives, Cattaneo also believed that some new openings could come from this new situation, given the international geopolitical scenarios. Eventually, a new Napoleon would have inevitably destabilised the balance of power among European empires, and a possible war involving Austria might have entailed interesting openings for the Italian cause, for which young and enthusiastic fighters should start to prepare, as Cattaneo wrote to Pisacane (Cattaneo 1952, 141; Cattaneo to Pisacane, 29 December 1851). Cattaneo’s forecast would be realised with the Second Independence War in 1959, although at that moment Pisacane was already dead and the outcomes of the campaign matched the most pessimistic scenario defined by the Federalists. That is, the establishment

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of a unitary and anti-socialist Monarchy, rather than a federal republic (possibly socialist or so). This was already clear to Ferrari, who published a pamphlet on ‘Italy after the coup d’état of 2 December 1851’, likewise printed in Capolago, clarifying that Italy should no longer trust in a French intervention but learn from that experience that: ‘Republic in itself is not enough’ (Ferrari 1852, 16). As for Cattaneo, the charge of being a ‘filo-Napoleonist’ coming from Mazzini’s circuits after these analyses of the international context that he shared with Ferrari, inspired a new jokingly metaphor that he submitted to his friend in Paris: ‘Stupid like a Mazzinian’ (Cattaneo 1952, 145; Cattaneo to Ferrari, 21 March 1852). Cattaneo clarified that his critique to imperial restoration in France was total, but that he first blamed the French people and the National Assembly for fully trusting Louis-Napoleon. ‘I am not astounded that the wolf committed perjury, but that the sheep had allowed him to swear’ (Cattaneo 1952, 157; Cattaneo to Tentolini, 24 April 1852). It was no surprise if Cattaneo contended that the very notion of Empire was the denial of all his ideals given that it was the personification of unity and centralism: ‘Empire is unity personified. Napoleonism, Mohammedanism and all other personalisms are the logical and unavoidable incarnations of Unity. [Empire is] continued dictatorship, social revolution without liberty. Liberty is republic, and republic is plurality, that is federation’ (Cattaneo 1952, 157; Cattaneo to Tentolini, 24 April 1852). One cannot refrain from wondering how the representatives of Fascism and Monarchy who proclaimed a colonial Empire in 1936 after their criminal war in Ethiopia could only vaguely claim for the legacy of the Risorgimento men. At least, one should clarify that they only referred to a well-defined part of them, the monarchist and militarist one, that is the adversaries of Cattaneo, Pisacane, Ferrari and their friends. Meanwhile, Cattaneo had found a job which satisfied him with the free time that is left for his research, that is teaching ‘philosophical and political disciplines’ (Cattaneo 1952, 176; Cattaneo to Cernuschi, 2 September 1852) at the high-school in Lugano. Amazingly, Cattaneo was also offered a post as the President of that institute, one that he refused to remain coherent with his antiauthoritarian principles, advocating his ‘natural and invincible aversion to exert any act of public representation or authority’ (Cattaneo 1952, 192; Cattaneo to Consiglio di Stato, 23 October 1852). However, a new historical blow came to question his

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own position there, eventually one of the numerous Mazzinian insurrectional ‘attempts’, which took place in Milan in February 1853. According to Della Peruta, Mazzini was desperately trying to avoid marginalisation and to vindicate the 1848 defeat. Milan was his ‘major attempt’ (Della Peruta 2004, 291) before the 1857 expedition of Sapri and was expected to be followed by other insurrections in different parts of Italy. Yet, the movement failed because the harsh repression that the Milanese insurrection encountered intimidated everybody else in the conspiration, which stopped suddenly. Cattaneo was not involved in the endeavour and was even strongly opposed to what he considered as the nth nonsense of those whom he had called the former year, writing to Pisacane: ‘The incorrigibles of London [who] foster the stupid and wicked doctrine of martyrdom’. Cattaneo namely stressed that one cannot create a revolution whenever the leader wishes as: ‘Revolutions … are not subject to individual’s command’ (Cattaneo 1952, 169; Cattaneo to Pisacane, 4 August 1852). Alas, few years later, going to Sapri, Pisacane did not follow Cattaneo’s advice, but Mazzini’s. In the aftermath of the failed insurrection, Cattaneo defined the 1853 attempt as ‘a shameful fiasco, which would be even ridiculous if we had not to mourn the loss of so many good people’ (Cattaneo 1952, 214; Cattaneo to Repetti, 12 February 1853). Yet, he praised the courage that the barabba [commoners] had shown in challenging again the Austrian army in Milan. Finally, despite the political distances between the Mazzinians and the ‘Capolago circuits’ were well and publicly known, several voices raised to complain about the presence of political refugees in Canton Ticino, so close to the Lombard border, pressuring Swiss authorities to deny hospitality to the Italian dissidents. As a retaliation against this welcoming policy, 6000 Ticinese citizens were expelled from Lombardy by Austrian authorities (Cattaneo 1952, 236; Cattaneo to Bertani, 14 April 1853), and it was in this tense situation that Repetti had to close definitively his printing shop. While the exile of Cattaneo in Switzerland (which became voluntary after 1860 as he never accepted the unification of Italy under the Savoias) was considered as a sort of hermitage by several of his contemporaries, authors such as Carlo Moos have rather focussed on the enriching aspects that Swiss milieus had for Cattaneo’s intellectual development (Moos 1992). It can be argued that in those relatively peaceful years, Cattaneo’s activities were far from being banal or inconsistent with his former occupations. As an early defender of the wide spreading of railway networks,

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he contributed there to Swiss and European debates on the itinerary of the transalpine railway that will be finally built after his death, following his advice to make it through the Gotthard rather than the Lucomagno. In the Swiss educational system, as a high-school teacher, Cattaneo was very active in promoting popular and secular education, even finding local resistances that were so strong to be defined, in a footnote by Caddeo: ‘The war of the conservatives and of the Catholics against Cattaneo’s philosophy, his collaboration to the secular reform of teaching and to the strong government established by the Liberals’ (Cattaneo 1952, 383). Significantly, in 1854, Cattaneo refused an offer to teach at the prestigious Zurich Polytechnic, arguing that he would not be useful there: ‘Here, I can imagine myself militating for the cause of liberty and reason. [There] I would have the impression of deserting’ (Cattaneo 1952, 325; Cattaneo to Pioda, 17 December 1854). This means that Cattaneo perceived his position as a combat place: only, he carried out this combat with the weapons of free-thinking and cultural organisation. In the following years, Cattaneo wrote proudly to his old friends to claim his political victories in the small republican canton where, as he triumphally announced to Cernuschi: ‘We have reached the civil marriage and the civil destitution of priests’ (Cattaneo 1952, 365; Cattaneo to Cernuschi, 30 July 1855). On these points, Cattaneo had public polemics with the local curate, to whom he wrote arguing that civil marriage was admitted by the Holy Scriptures: only, ‘your bad conscience’ does not want that the people read those texts, because the believers ‘would call you back from miserable mundane interests to your sacred duty’ (Cattaneo 1952, 398; Cattaneo to Codelaghi, 23 December 1855). Writing to Ferrari in 1857, Cattaneo humorously announced that: ‘Among the priests’ imprecations, we abolished the Colleges of the Benedictines, of the Somaschi, of the Servites. We opened a school of chemistry, physics and geology … we founded a library, a school for surveyors and foremen … we prepare the youth for the Zurich Polytechnic through the study of German and French. What a shame that this country is only one hundredth part of Italy’ (Cattaneo 1954, 3; Cattaneo to Ferrari, 16 January 1857). This is key to understand Cattaneo’s relation to Switzerland and more specifically with the Canton Ticino, a small Italian-speaking republic whose geographical dimensions Cattaneo considered enough manageable to locate there his social experiments through his educationist and pragmatic approach.

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This experience also reinforced Cattaneo’s arguments against those who derided the ‘petty republics’. When in 1855, some conservativeinspired riots against the liberal government of Canton Ticino occurred, Italia e Popolo, from Genoa, blamed those clashes of ‘Italians against Italians’. Cattaneo wrote to the Mazzinian journal that, again, mere ethnocentric and nationalistic readings could not explain anything of the situation. ‘Ticinese people are sieged by the Emperor’s gendarmes from outside and by the Pope’s gendarmes from inside. Whether they speak Italian, German or Croatian does not matter anything on the reasons of principle for which one fights. The friends of liberty are our brothers whatever most strange language they speak’ (Cattaneo 1952, 335; Cattaneo to Italia e Popolo, March 1855). Writing to Repetti, Cattaneo expressed his disappointment against those who used the 1855 events to blame the ‘petty republic’ of Italian-speaking Switzerland and wished that in terms of revolutionary accomplishments and civil liberties: ‘Shall the great [Mazzinian city of] Genoa do what small Canton Ticino did, and shall the great Piedmont do only the half. Stupid buffoons!’ (Cattaneo 1952, 336; Cattaneo to Repetti, 28 March 1855). In 1859, Cattaneo contributed with little enthusiasm to the debates on what the republicans’ position should be before the new war between the Austrian Empire and the Savoias’ Kingdom, this time supported by Napoleon III. Interestingly, several of his old friends who oscillated between federalism and Mazzinianism and had later roles in the Parliament, such as Agostino Bertani and Mauro Macchi, continued to closely correspond with Cattaneo to listen to his advice. How little this latter trusted in the new royal war and what moral consideration he continued to have about the Savoias was shown by a letter where he advised Bertani to avoid forming republican battalions within the army of Vittorio Emanuele II as they ‘would be assigned to the assault of all the breaches and batteries until complete extermination’ (Cattaneo 1954, 107; Cattaneo to Bertani, 24 February 1859). Yet, as Cattaneo wrote to Macchi, it was not bad that people willing to fight took the arms: ‘I see always with pleasure young people taking [arms]. The world will always talk with respect of an armed people’ (Cattaneo 1954, 115; Cattaneo to Macchi, 31 March 1859). Conversely, he continued to disapprove Mazzini’s talks with the Monarchy, writing to the Mazzianians in London that: ‘Your programme would no longer be unity and republic but unity and Monarchy … you trust more in the royal wars than in

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the popular ones’ (Cattaneo 1954, 132–135; Cattaneo to the Exiles in London, 1 May 1859). Basically, Cattaneo continued to place his hopes in popular initiatives, rejecting any role for leading parties or revolutionary vanguards. Cattaneo confided to French diplomat Anatole Brenier how much he was horrified by the brutality of official wars associated with chauvinism, as he always preferred the principles of humanity and solidarity, arguing for seeking dialogue with the rank-and-file soldiers of the other side before trying to kill them. ‘In Italy, there are not less than 60,000 Hungarians and a big mass of Polish. Is it necessary to machine-gun all these poor people who are actually the enemies of our enemies, before having tried all the possible to gain them to our cause’? (Cattaneo 1954, 140; Cattaneo to Brenier, May 1859). In the same anti-chauvinist vein, although well aware of the strategic importance of the Brenner corridor across the main Alpine watershed, whose control would have given forever a military advantage to Austria, Cattaneo did not demand the military conquest of that watershed as the most extreme Italian nationalists did during the First World War. Instead, he proposed a treaty for ‘the perpetual neutrality of the Tyrol’ (Cattaneo 1954, 141; Cattaneo to Brenier, May 1859) to preserve peace, and the transformation of the European countries around the Alps in an ‘enormous Switzerland’ by way of ‘free conventions’ establishing a ‘federal and flexible’ system (Cattaneo 1954, 142; Cattaneo to Brenier, May 1859). These notes amazingly anticipated early manifestoes for a federal Europe and later agreements for the elimination of physical frontiers. When Cattaneo saw that insurrectional movements were rising in regions such as Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna, where ‘public internal order was guaranteed for several months by the … National Guard, quickly resumed everywhere’ (Meriggi 2007, 552), he hoped that there would have been some different outcomes than the simple annexation of Italy to Piedmont, at least in terms of civil liberties. Then, he started to look with some sympathy to the irregular militias led by Garibaldi. Although he had already collaborated with Garibaldi in 1848 and considered him as someone very generous and skilled in mobilising people, but substantially incompetent on military strategy, what arguably interested Cattaneo was Garibaldi’s declared independence from Mazzini, and the appeal that his figure had on popular masses. When in Autumn 1859, the Piedmontese government wanted to stop an invasion of the Papal State that Garibaldi was endeavouring from

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Romagna with the support of the provisional governments of Tuscany and Emilia Romagna, Cattaneo wrote to Bertani, who was in Turin: ‘Shall Garibaldi keep the Piedmontese at bay … Shall the Romagna people prepare good fighters and good weapons, and when the moment comes, shall Garibaldi jump there to help the Germans and the priests to walk away as soon as possible’ (Cattaneo 1954, 199; Cattaneo to Bertani, 9 October 1859). While Cattaneo would collaborate with Garibaldi in the last part of the Expedition of the Thousand as I discuss in the chapter on the Southern Connection, a significant commentary on Garibaldian militias was contained in his successive letter to Bertani. ‘The key idea of Politecnico is armament … the Garibaldi column represents the sudden armament that, once made universal, would definitively resolve everything in a favourable moment’ (Cattaneo 1954, 230; Cattaneo to Bertani, 5 December 1859). Beyond the idea that armament should grant an experience of democratic participation to all the people, what elitist bands and secret societies could not do, the incredibly important news were that Cattaneo was resuming Politecnico, intended to be exactly a new weapon for the cause. Directed by Cattaneo in Castagnola and published in Milan by former Capolago collaborator Gino Daelli (1816–1882), with whom Cattaneo later argued, as he often did with his editors and publishers, the new series of Politecnico started in 1860. The militant nature of this project was exposed by Cattaneo to Daelli, explaining that, by resuming Politecnico, they could ‘serve the country’ (Cattaneo 1954, 252; Cattaneo to Daelli, 10 January 1860). Writing to Bertani, Cattaneo mobilised military metaphors: ‘Politecnico wants to be combative… and fulminating: the army should also have its ambulance’ (Cattaneo 1954, 254; Cattaneo to Bertani, 10 January 1860). In the opening ‘Manifesto’, Cattaneo confirmed the programme of the former series, that is fostering public knowledge of what was new in all sciences, with a special focus on what was also useful for social progress. He contested what may be called today ‘the primacy of politics’, claiming for the rights of so-called civil society: ‘Discussing on art and sciences does not mean distracting minds from the supreme matter of the honour and safety of the homeland’ (Cattaneo 1860, 5) but rather the opposite. Stressing again the importance of serving in popular militias as ‘right and duty of every citizen’ (Cattaneo 1860, 8), Cattaneo concluded that ‘the supreme national defence will always be free speech and the progress of public intellect’ (Cattaneo 1860, 19). The idea that the most powerful weapons lie in

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free thought and conscientisation remains a lesson from which social movements everywhere can still learn. Another lesson associated with Politecnico was Cattaneo’s systematic rejection of any public charge in newly unified Italy, as Politecnico was not an accessory, but exactly his own alternative to entering the political arena. Already in 1859, Cattaneo had refused an appointment as an adviser, which he also suspected to be a manoeuvre of conservative minister Urbano Rattazzi to ‘neutralise’ old revolutionaries by involving them in the administration. He explained to Brofferio that: ‘I was already told that Rattazzi considers me as a cannibal like Cavour does. [Anyway] I cannot accept any public function which does not come from the vote, I would almost say from the command, of citizens. But in your system, everything comes from above’ (Cattaneo 1954, 205; Cattaneo to Brofferio, 8 October 1859). However, also when Cattaneo was offered tasks that were ‘democratically’ mandated he always refused, even when the request came from an old friend of him like Gabriele Rosa, to whom Cattaneo responded in an open letter arguing with quite polemical tones that, instead of doing electoral propaganda, he wanted his friends to request ‘that the entire population is armed’, that is empowered to have their voice heard in public affairs. For Cattaneo, everything else was pointless as for politically progressive programmes, including the Parliament and the ongoing annexation of Central Italy to the Savoias’ Kingdom. ‘On my behalf, I do what I can with Politecnico until the masters let me do and the servants do not let me alone’ (Cattaneo 1954, 264; Cattaneo to Rosa, 28 January 1860). Cattaneo remained convinced that, with his journal, he could do ‘much more than what [he] could have ever done in the Parliament’ (Cattaneo 1954, 349; Cattaneo to Solera, 12 March 1860). Cattaneo’s letter to Rosa raised a certain emotion in Italian public opinion, and its author was invariably charged of being a Piedmont’s enemy. In his intransigence, Cattaneo was also let alone by Ferrari, who accepted a candidature and subsequently served as a Member of Parliament and later a Senator until his death. Writing to his old friend, Cattaneo confirmed that he did not have any interest in going to the Parliament, although respecting Ferrari’s choice. Only, Cattaneo noted how important, ‘for both of us, is to maintain continuity with the past without seeming one of the Seven Sleepers’ (Cattaneo 1954, 329; Cattaneo to Ferrari, 12 April 1860). In the following years, Cattaneo remained intransigent, and maintained his scepticism towards the work

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of the 20–30 republicans, Garibaldians and former revolutionary conspirators (such as Crispi, Bertani, Macchi, Ferrari, Friscia, Nicotera, Bixio, Guerrazzi and others) who entered an Assembly in which they were a small minority. On an occasion, Cattaneo noted bitterly that: ‘In the Parliament, liberty does not have vote and she will never have … the most serious discourse was that of [Giuseppe] Ricciardi, who wished he will be heresiarch and antipope’ (Cattaneo 1956, 61; Cattaneo to Lemmi, 10 July 1862). In the new Politecnico, Cattaneo applied his federalist and libertarian critiques to the institutions of the new Italian state, that is the old institutions of the Savoias’ state that were applied by will or by force to the rest of Italy. In July 1860, he published an Introduction to the second volume of Politecnico that has been recently reprinted by Barberis with the title ‘Against the organisation of the Kingdom’. In fact, Cattaneo promoted an early campaign to identify the dangers of centralisation. This discussion started by highlighting again the difference between popular militias and the masses of conscripts that were created since the first French Revolution. Without any democratic exercise or work of conscientisation, these armies turned into ‘a new source of strength for despotism’ (Cattaneo 2011, 213) especially for the empires and the big states, as Italy was about to become. Crucially, Cattaneo wrote these pages during Garibaldi’s Expedition of the Thousand, to support the Garibaldian voluntary corps as an alternative to the official army, in the continuing hope that the unification movement could take a federal turn. Concurrently, Cattaneo encouraged Sicily, where young Alberto Mario had founded a military school, to keep its autonomy from the Kingdom of Naples to avoid becoming a province subject to the Savoias—exactly what happened however. For Cattaneo, Piedmont exerted a ‘military hegemony’ that did not correspond to any ‘civic hegemony’, as for civil liberties, given that the institutions of the Kingdom of the Savoias were more retrograde than those of other Italian states, being ‘inferior to Tuscany in criminal law, to Parma in civil law, to Lombardy in communal organisation’ (Cattaneo 2011, 221). Cattaneo was astonished that after decades of struggles, old Austrian laws were substituted by Italian laws that were even worse. The most frightening example was death penalty that had been abolished in Tuscany but not in Piedmont, so that unification risked to make the organisation of justice regress to the ancient regime. This was unacceptable in the country of Cesare Beccaria, also given that Cattaneo

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had dedicated numerous studies to the progressive reformation of the carceral system, to get rid of the old hell-like prisons, by creating institutes that allowed prisoners ‘working, teaching and reading, with all the humanly possible conditions of health, quietness and I would say also individual dignity’ (Cattaneo 2011, 223). While astounding issues with human dignity are reported still today as for Italian prisons, the final argument of Cattaneo’s writing was the need for fostering pluralistic forms of unity by keeping the best of the former situation. The key fact to consider was that: ‘Centralisation does not yet exist’ (Cattaneo 2011, 225), as the new institutions were still to be built. Thus, one should have taken advantage of the situation to coordinate and delegate administrative functions rather than centralising these. Alas, also these words remained substantially unheard. In 1864, in the journal Il Diritto, Cattaneo discussed the organisation of municipalities and districts, noting how odd was defining 1859 Lombardy as a ‘freed’ land, given that, even before that the region could elect ‘her first deputation to the Parliament … a dictatorial power established the Piedmontese law there’ (Cattaneo 2011, 229). This law excluded the majority of population from the possibility of electing local administrators which formerly existed because the census requirements for the access to suffrage became stricter. Paradoxically, one would have expected an extension of citizens’ democratic participation once ended the Austrian tyranny. This was also due to the fact that Piedmont applied centralistic administrative laws of French origin, where: ‘The idea of the Commune was subverted and denied, because one did not consider that the commune is a spontaneous fact … like family’ (Cattaneo 2011, 236). Adopting hierarchic principles that subordinated completely the commune to the state and undermining the traditional communal autonomy which existed in Lombardy, the new Italian government was offending ‘the plurality of the nation’ (Cattaneo 2011, 237). Cattaneo provided detailed examples of the dysfunctionalities of centrally defining the physical and demographical size of municipalities, that Cattaneo wanted to remain free in defining their respective associations following their specific geography and peculiar needs in terms of economy, transportations and public services. At the end of this chapter, one might wonder about what finally Cattaneo was in political terms. While his complex and multifaceted work has been periodically appropriated by a number of (often unlikely)

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authors, I would focus on a couple of interpretations, that is, the ‘liberal’ and the ‘almost-socialist’ one. As for the first one, the editors of one of the rare collections of Cattaneo’s writings that were translated into English, Carlo Lacaita and Filippo Sabetti, discuss the famous definition, inspired by authors such as Umberto Bobbio, of Cattaneo as ‘the Italian [John Stuart] Mill’ (Lacaita and Sabetti 2006, 8). These authors contend that it would be problematic to make close comparisons between authors who worked in very different cultural, national and linguistic contexts, also stressing how ‘there is no commonly accepted definition of what liberalism is’ (Lacaita and Sabetti 2006, 6). They rightly emphasise the antidogmatic side of Cattaneo’s liberalism, strictly associated with federalism, which is for Cattaneo: ‘A theory of freedom in action, as it promotes liberty as a plant with many roots’ (Lacaita and Sabetti 2006, 29). It is also worth noting that they chose to edit the anthology of Cattaneo’s writings that was collected by Salvemini, who saw in Cattaneo’s thought an intellectual resource to shed some light on social thinking at the eve of Fascist obscurantism in Italy, one that helped Salvemini in remaining ‘resistant to every form of dogmatism, starting with Marxism’ (Lacaita and Sabetti 2006, 30). Most importantly, and I would match this Lacaita’s and Sabelli’s point, Cattaneo’s pluralistic ‘roots’ of freedom are still susceptible of growing and germinating, also considering their argument about the need of relativising judgements on the ‘failure’ of the Risorgimento federalist projects. The failure of one day could become success in the future. As for the second definition, in his Cattaneo politico, Franco Della Peruta rightly recognised how Cattaneo always took distance from definitions such as socialism and communism, and this was also the core of his divergences with Ferrari that hindered the project of constituting a Social[ist] and Federal Party in 1851. Yet, Della Peruta also noted that Cattaneo was far from being unsensitive to the problems of pauperism and of the working classes. Only, Cattaneo strongly opposed the authoritarian recipes of state socialism, including ‘legal charity’ (Della Peruta 2001, 24) and ‘philanthropic prisons’ (Della Peruta, 25) such as workhouses where the poor were substantially detained. In his writings, Cattaneo always considered the need for measures alleviating the conditions of the lower classes through fiscal and social policies, including more freedom for petty trades, education and also wider access to small land property. This way, he displayed an interest for the conditions of the rural poor that seemed

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even more advanced than the heavy focus on the industrial proletariat which characterised classical Marxism. Already in January 1848, Cattaneo wrote to Richard Cobden expressing interest in his ‘philanthropic and enlightened views of social welfare [inspiring] plans which I matured for execution … to alleviate and ameliorate the conditions of many classes of society’ (Cattaneo 1949, 222; Cattaneo to Cobden, 29 January 1848). In the 1860s, Cattaneo discussed the ongoing strikes in England by endorsing cooperatives and mutualistic experiences such as: ‘Workers’ associations targeting mutualistic aims or to favour arbitration in the contrasts between workers and entrepreneurs’ (Della Peruta 2001, 139). While these ideas belonged more to class collaboration than to class struggle, it is worth noting that, in the 1860s, discussions in the socialist field, that were led by members of the International and future French communards, included the cooperative principle as a way to socialism that was potentially less costly than barricades or long strikes starving worker’s families (Ferretti 2010). That is, a moderate principle, but still a socialistic one. It is also clear that, for Cattaneo, ‘liberalism’ did not mean unregulated markets: the Milanese federalist was strongly opposed to state and authoritarian/centralistic regulation, but clearly favourable to an economy that was efficiently regulated by a well-educated civil society following ethical and humanitarian principles. At the death of Proudhon, one of the initiators of mutualism, Cattaneo wrote to the new editor of Politecnico, Enrico Stamm, that he had at home ‘some works of Proudhon’ (Cattaneo 1956, 289; Cattaneo to Stamm, 10 February 1865) although he lacked the time to summarise the thought of the French anarchist for the journal. I would add that Cattaneo’s social action was not limited to writings or reviews, as he was also an active advisor of early Italian workers’ mutualistic association as demonstrated by his correspondence with Antonio Martinati that I quote in the next chapter. Finally, to these definitions suggested directly or indirectly by Lacaita, Sabelli and Della Peruta, I would add for Cattaneo the adjective ‘libertarian’, not in the sense of a socialist/communist anarchist (and even less in the North-American sense of ‘ultra-liberalist’), but in the sense of an antiauthoritarian and antidogmatic thinker, ethically intransigent, who was a staunch defender of individual rights and civil liberties without being unsensitive to the broader ‘social question’. That is, a matter that was key in the ‘Tuscan’ and ‘Southern’ Connections as I discuss in the next chapters, where Cattaneo’s name will inevitably resurface.

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Print Sources Cattaneo, Carlo. 1849. Dell’insurrezione di Milano nel 1848 e della successiva guerra: memorie di Carlo Cattaneo. Lugano: Tipografia della Svizzera italiana. Cattaneo, Carlo. 1851. Avviso al lettore. Archivio Triennale II: v–x. Cattaneo, Carlo. 1860. Manifesto. Il Politecnico 8: 5–8. Cattaneo, Carlo. 1949. Epistolario di Carlo Cattaneo 1: 1820–1849. Florence: Barbera. Cattaneo, Carlo. 1952. Epistolario di Carlo Cattaneo 2: 1850–1856. Florence: Barbera. Cattaneo, Carlo. 1954. Epistolario di Carlo Cattaneo III: 1857–1861. Florence: Barbera. Cattaneo, Carlo. 1956. Epistolario di Carlo Cattaneo IV: 1862–1869. Florence: Barbera. Cattaneo, Carlo. 2001. Carteggi di Carlo Cattaneo. Serie 2, Lettere dei corrispondenti, Vol. 1: 1820–1840. Florence: Le Monnier; Bellinzona: Casagrande. Cattaneo, Carlo. 2005. Carteggi di Carlo Cattaneo. Serie 1, Lettere di Cattaneo, Vol. 2 - 16 marzo 1848–1851. Florence: Le Monnier; Bellinzona: Casagrande. Cattaneo, Carlo. 2011. Una teoria della libertà: scritti politici e federalisti. Turin: Einaudi. Confederación Nacional del Trabajo. 1936. Concepto confederal del comunismo libertario. Santander: CNT-AIT. Ferrari, Giuseppe. 1852. L’Italia dopo il colpo di stato del 2 dicembre 1851. Capolago: Tipografia Elvetica. Ferrari, Giuseppe. 1873. Filosofia della rivoluzione. Milan: Manini. Ferrari, Giuseppe. 1969. La federazione repubblicana. Florence: Le Monnier. Lefrançais, Gustave. 1902. Souvenirs d’un révolutionnaire. Bruxelles: Les Temps Nouveaux. Meˇcnikov, Lev Il iˇc. 2017. L’unificazione dell’Italia: da Daniele Manin a Garibaldi. Florence: Toscana Nuova.

Bibliography Agliati, Carlo. 2001. Presentazione. In Carlo Cattaneo, Carteggi di Carlo Cattaneo. Serie 2, Lettere dei corrispondenti, Vol. 1: 1820–1840, xv–xxxviii. Florence: Le Monnier; Bellinzona: Casagrande. Arisi Rota, Arianna. 2019. Risorgimento: un viaggio politico e sentimentale. Bologna: Il Mulino. Armani, Giuseppe. 1997. Carlo Cattaneo: una biografia. Milan: Garzanti. Barbero, Alessandro. 2014. I prigionieri dei Savoia. La vera storia della congiura di Fenestrelle. Rome/Bari: Laterza. Berneri, Camillo. 1992. Il federalismo libertario. Ragusa: La Fiaccola.

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Brunello, Piero. 2018. Colpi di scena: la rivoluzione del Quarantotto a Venezia. Sommacampagna: Cierre. Caddeo, Rinaldo. 1931. La tipografia elvetica di Capolago: uomini, vicende, tempi [1830–1853]. Milan: Archetipografia di Milano. Caddeo, Rinaldo. 1934. Le edizioni di Capolago: storia e critica: bibliografia ragionata, nuovi studi sulla tipografia elvetica, il Risorgimento italiano e il Canton Ticino: documenti inediti. Milan: Bompiani. Confederación Nacional de Trabajo. 1936. Concepto federal del comunismo libertario. Zaragoza. Del Bianco, Nino. 2006. Enrico Cernuschi: uno straordinario protagonista del nostro Risorgimento. Milan: Angeli. Della Peruta, Franco. 1973. Democrazia e socialismo nel Risorgimento: saggi e ricerche. Rome: Editori Riuniti. Della Peruta, Franco. 1979. Cernuschi, Enrico. In Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani. Treccani. https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/enrico-cernus chi_(Dizionario-Biografico). Della Peruta, Franco. 2001. Carlo Cattaneo politico. Milan: Angeli. Della Peruta, Franco. 2004. I democratici e la rivoluzione italiana: dibattiti ideali e contrasti politici all’indomani del 1848. Milan: Angeli. Fabbri, Luigi. 1921. Introduzione. In Saggio sulla rivoluzione, ed. Giuseppe Ferrari, 1–21. Milan: Casa Editrice Sociale. Ferretti, Federico. 2010. Intellettuali anarchici nell’Europa del secondo Ottocento: i fratelli Reclus (1862–1872). Società e Storia 127: 63–91. Gambetta, Diego, and Gloria Origgi. 2013. The LL game: The curious preference for low quality and its norms. Politics, Philosophy & Economics 12 (1): 3–23. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470594X11433740. Ginsborg, Paul. 2007. Daniele Manin e la rivoluzione veneziana del 1848–1849. Turin: Einaudi. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1996. The age of revolution: 1789–1848. New York: Vintage Books. Lacaita, Carlo, and Filippo Sabetti. 2006. Civilization and democracy: The Salvemini anthology of Cattaneo’s writings. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Meriggi, Marco. 2007. Gli antichi stati crollano. In Storia d’Italia, Annali, 22: Il Risorgimento, ed. Alberto Mario Banti and Paul Ginsborg, 541–566. Turin: Einaudi. Monti, Antonio. 1921. Un dramma fra gli esuli : da lettere inedite di G. Mazzini, C. Cattaneo, G. Ferrari, O. Perini ed altri patrioti. Milan: Casa Editrice Risorgimento. Moos, Carlo. 1992. L’altro Risorgimento, l’ultimo cattaneo tra Italia e Svizzera. Milan: Angeli.

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Onufrio, Salvatore. 1969. Introduzione. In Giuseppe Ferrari, La federazione repubblicana, 1–32. Florence: Le Monnier. Petroboni, Margherita, and Mariachiara Fugazza. 2005. Presentazione. In Carlo Cattaneo, Carteggi di Carlo Cattaneo. Serie 1, Lettere di Cattaneo, Vol. 2 16 marzo 1848–1851, i–lxxvi. Florence: Le Monnier; Bellinzona: Casagrande. Romano, Aldo. 1956. Storia del Movimento Socialista in Italia, vol. 3. Rome: F.lli Bocca. Svampa, Nanni. 2007. La mia morosa cara: canti popolari milanesi e lombardi. Milan: Lampi di stampa. Thom, Martin. 2007. Europa, libertà e nazioni: Cattaneo e Mazzini nel Risorgimento. In Storia d’Italia, Annali, 22: Il Risorgimento, ed. Alberto Mario Banti and Paul Ginsborg, 331–378. Turin: Einaudi. Ventura, Angelo. 2017. Risorgimento veneziano: lineamenti costituzionali del governo provvisorio di Venezia nel 1848–49 e altri saggi su Daniele Manin e la rivoluzione del 1848. Rome: Donzelli.

CHAPTER 5

The Tuscan Connection

European Federalism Versus Monarchist Annexations In Florence, in the first half of the nineteenth century, the Scientific and Literary Cabinet founded by Giovan Pietro Vieusseux (1779–1863) in 1819 and publishing journals such as Antologia, Guida dell’educatore and Archivio Storico Italiano, was the reference for the intellectual Risorgimento of democrats, liberals and free thinkers in Tuscany and beyond (Porciani 1979). Born to a family of Swiss origin and Genevan protestant traditions, Vieusseux was one of the first in Italy who discussed federalism with a cosmopolitan spirit, although his quite moderate approach impedes to make very close comparisons with the radical elaborations discussed in the former chapter. Yet, some of his works show how ideas of decentralisation were nothing strange in intellectual Italian circuits even before 1848, the year in which Vieusseux published his Fragments of a Confederation Project. It was the reproduction of a long letter that he had sent to an Austrian Minister many years before, ‘after the unlucky attempts of 1821’ (Vieusseux 1848, 5) and the subsequent repression of the Carboneria movement, trying to convince him that the Hapsburg empire could not realistically hope to keep forever the control of a so complex and troubled country as Italy was. Interestingly, Vieusseux anticipated Cattaneo’s point on the opportunity that each region maintained the most favourable © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Ferretti, Geographies of Federalism during the Italian Risorgimento, 1796–1900, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96117-6_5

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legislation in terms of civil liberties: eventually, Vieusseux noted how Piedmont had ‘more vexatious and humiliating’ (Vieusseux 1848, 10) laws than the Lombardo-Veneto and of course than Tuscany, generally considered as the more ‘advanced’ Italian state during the Restoration. Regretting that Napoleon I did not consider the idea of an independent Italy, Vieusseux tried to convince his Austrian correspondent that: ‘A federal system [would be] the most sensible solution that one could try in the interest of peoples and their sovereigns’ (Vieusseux 1848, 15). This federation would have been composed of 9 states LombardoVeneto, Kingdom of Sardinia (Savoia), Dukedom of Parma, Dukedom of Modena, Kingdom of Naples without Sicily, Kingdom of Sicily, Papal State, Kingdom of Etruria including Lucca, Dukedom of Bologna and Ravenna including the three Legations. In this system, Rome would have served as a ‘federal city’ and while each state would have been granted internal autonomy, the common decisions on matters such as foreign politics would have been made ‘on large majority’ (Vieusseux 1848, 17). In Vieusseux’s views, a common customs system and the harmonisation of weights, measures and currencies would have fostered economic growth in a liberal sense, which was undoubtedly advanced in times of feudality’s restoration. While this programme, although federalist, was clearly not republican, in the middle of the 1848 turmoil Vieusseux could claim his former courage in proposing, 26 years before, and in a situation in which someone who had dared to contradict the stipulations of the 1815 Vienna Congress ‘would have been considered as a fool’ (Vieusseux 1848, 16), to separate Sicily from the Kingdom of Naples and the Legations of Bologna and Romagna from the Papal State. This latter proposal was practically a blasphemy, which suggests that Vieusseux’s perspectives were quite far from Neo-Guelphism, which is easy to understand considering his Protestant mindset. Importantly, these statements on the independence of Bologna and Romagna from Rome, and of Sicily from Naples, seemed to be inspired by voluntaristic considerations on the autonomist feelings existing in the population rather than by any dynastic or utilitarian matter. According to Paolo Bagnoli, who published the numerous letters that Montanelli wrote to Vieusseux between 1831 and 1860, the two men shared an ‘autonomist and federalist’ (Bagnoli 1995, xii) sensitivity together with the habit of ‘thinking at the European scale’ (Bagnoli 1995, 4) in Restoration Tuscany. Born in Fucecchio to a relatively humble

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family, Montanelli graduated in Law at the University of Pisa, where he served then as a Professor until 1849. In the early 1830s, when he was still a student, Montanelli joined Saint-Simonianism. As he noted in his recollections, this happened when he found: ‘The books of the SaintSimonian School, not yet condescending to the theocratic coarseness of Father Enfantin … Then, I attended the small Saint-Simonian cenacle that was gathering at the University of Pisa, and will later continue, with my comrades of study, the movement on the matters that were called social’ (Montanelli 1853, 84). This sentence, also quoted by Nello Rosselli who was one of the earliest rediscoverers of Montanelli’s intellectual legacy in the twentieth century, anticipates two important features of Montanelli’s whole career. First, his opposition to all ‘theocracy’, including the temporal power, made original his position given that he was a Catholic. Second, his interest in the ‘social question’, made him one of the pioneers of Italian socialism. According to Bagnoli, Saint-Simonianism influenced several Montanelli’s friends in Tuscany, such as Vieusseux, who corresponded with Michel Chevalier, and Lambruschini. Associated with their respective European networks, this interest for and personal acquaintance with Saint-Simonians was not occasional, as in 1840 Montanelli discussed with Vieusseux the difficulties that he encountered with censorship for publishing the work of Pierre Leroux (Bagnoli 1995, 140; Montanelli to Vieusseux, 10 March 1840). In 1860, Montanelli introduced to the elderly ‘patriarch of Tuscan liberalism’ the son of Edouard Charton (Bagnoli 1995, 204; Montanelli to Vieusseux, 9 September 1860). Both Leroux and Charton were SaintSimonians, and played key roles in inspiring the generation of French libertarian socialists, such as the Reclus brothers, who later joined the International (Ferretti 2010). The early interest of Montanelli for matters of social justice is confirmed by a letter that he sent to Vieusseux in 1835, fuming at the wealthy class whose members: ‘Get drunk at the theatre [while] many unlucky people do not have anything to dine’ (Bagnoli 1995, 130; Montanelli to Vieusseux, 11 May 1835). Bagnoli denies that Montanelli could be defined a Risorgimento socialist as authors such as Della Peruta did, and defines him as rather ‘an advanced democratic radical’ (Bagnoli 1995, 78). I would instead argue that, beyond the labels, what is important is to consider how the elements of federalism and socialism that appear in Montanelli’s work informed radical experiences such as NE and the ‘Tuscan connection’ of republicans and democrats in the 1860s, a part of whom would join the field

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of libertarian socialism in the following decade. Indeed, Bagnoli importantly notes that for authors such as Ferrari, Montanelli and Pisacane, ‘liberalism’ should be ‘understood as libertarianism’ (Bagnoli 1995, 84). Montanelli’s (and Cattaneo’s, and Ferrari’s) idea that civil liberties should not be subordinated to national independence (or unity) inspired the key notion of the ‘inversion of the formula’ that was publicly launched by Alberto Mario in NE after Montanelli’s death as I discuss below. Beyond his theoretical work, Montanelli took a relevant and active part in the Italian revolutions of 1848–1849, first by serving as a volunteer in Lombardy in Spring 1848, where he was detained for a while as a war prisoner by the Austrians. Coming back to Tuscany in Autumn 1848, he was strongly impressed by the popular republican insurrection of Livorno, one of the rebel cities per excellence in the history of the Italian workers’ movement. Commenting these events to Vieusseux, Montanelli expressed clearly his republican convictions: ‘The people shall govern’ (Bagnoli 1995, 198; Montanelli to Vieusseux, 5 September 1848). Invited to serve as the Prime Minister of the first democratic Tuscan government (where he appointed Guerrazzi as the Minister of Interior and Mazzoni as the Minister of Justice), Montanelli started campaigning for an Italian Constituent Assembly that had a certain consensus in the democratic field nationwide and provoked the fall of Grand-Duke Leopoldo II when he refused to sign the law on the Constituent and fled from Tuscany. Within the Provisional Government that followed, it was the ‘more cautious’ (Bagnoli 2002, 66) line of Guerrazzi that prevailed in the aforementioned triumvirate, while Montanelli seemed to have some more feeling with Mazzoni, who shared ideas such as ‘the epoch of privileged classes was finished, and the epoch of the peoples started’ (Spadolini 1962, 29), as Montanelli proclaimed to the people of Livorno. In that city, Montanelli’s propaganda for the Constituent had become so proverbial that some jokes circulated such as the saying that Costituente was his wife’s name. It was during his exile in Paris from 1849 to 1959 that Montanelli, still in touch with Mazzoni, started to collaborate with Cernuschi and Ferrari on the federalist projects that Ferrari was concurrently proposing to Cattaneo. Montanelli also had meetings with Manin to involve the Venetian leader in these networks (Bagnoli 2002, 69). Della Peruta noted that, in those years, Montanelli’s programme matched Ferrari’s and Proudhon’s explicit claims for socialism, for the need of a European revolution and for considering historical experiences such as the medieval free communes as inspirations for Risorgimento federalism

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(Della Peruta 2004). Italian politician and historian of republicanism Giovanni Spadolini identified in the figures of Cattaneo, Ferrari and Montanelli the ‘ideal triumvirate’ or ‘Risorgimento radicalism’ and ‘radical federalism’ (Spadolini 1962, 5). Spadolini emphasised what he called the ‘unactual’ side of Montanelli’s ideas, insisting on this latter’s romantic utopianism that Spadolini considered to be quite far from the practical solutions that were actually adopted, such as the annexation of Tuscany by the Savoias’ Kingdom in 1859, that Montanelli refused to vote. I would instead emphasise Montanelli’s consistent insertion, and his ideas’ impact, in contexts such as the federalist exile networks of the early 1850s, and the Tuscan federalist and internationalist circuits of NE and beyond. In Paris, as Spadolini recognised, Montanelli developed: ‘A libertarian socialism with almost communal accents of neat Proudhonian origin’ (Spadolini 1962, 43). This importantly implied that his socialism was never a statist one, as he preached an ‘overtaking of the state in the name of society’ (Spadolini 1962, 25), matching Cattaneo’s ideas on civil society mentioned above. Likewise, Montanelli was a far cry from any form of nationalism, militarism or chauvinism, being ‘never attracted by Scipio’s helmet’ (Spadolini 1962, 31) or by the myth of Rome, and opposed to all Jacobin notions of revolutionary dictatorship. The most revealing documents showing Montanelli’s federalist and socialist views of Risorgimento are his own major writings produced in the exile years, including his recollections, in which he stated a continuity between the ‘Lombard philosophical School’ that he considered being represented by Romagnosi, Cattaneo and Ferrari, and Proudhon’s socialism. Expressing great admiration for both Cattaneo ‘who discussed everything competently and wonderfully’ (Montanelli 1855, 206) and Ferrari ‘highly commendable between the two nations’ (Montanelli 1855, 206) for his work of cultural transferor between France and Italy, Montanelli identified three key points in their teaching. The first, it was not through the increase of governmental action that progress occurred, but: ‘Through increased citizens’ liberties … Second, from current Italy’s divisions no unity will resurge, if it is not in the free association of its parts … Third, Italy’s fortunes are indissolubly associated with those of the French revolution. Romagnosi constantly taught the doctrine of the government of the country by the country … a corollary of our ancient motto, the Commune: the doctrine that Proudhon tried to introduce in French socialism, tyrannized by the filo-governmentals,

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calling it with the terrible name of anarchy’ (Montanelli 1855, 206– 207). The definition of anarchy was evoked by Montanelli to scare ‘those dunces of the bourgeois’ and to overtake ‘Robespierre-like socialism’ (Montanelli 1855, 207). For Montanelli, ‘anarchy’ was nothing else than the idea of the free commune, something that contemporary anarchists may consider quite obvious. Yet, the fact that he saw continuity between Romagnosi, Cattaneo, Ferrari and Proudhon in defining a sort of libertarian municipalism ante-litteram indicated Montanelli’s strong sensitivity to the socialist and constructive characteristics of Proudhon’s federalist geographies. In this vein, two key writings were Montanelli’s book on the Italian revolution, and the Manifesto of the so-called ‘Latin Committee’ to which he collaborated in Paris. In the aftermath of the 1848–1849 movements, Montanelli claimed that the opinions that ‘prevailed within the provisional government of which I was part’ (Montanelli 1851, 4), such as Guerrazzi’s opposition to a union between Tuscany and the Roman Republic that would have meant declaring the Republic and the Constitution on the Tuscan soil, did not match his proposals. In these tasks, the Provisional Government failed, also because, in April 1849, Montanelli was sent to serve as the Tuscan ambassador in Paris. According to Spadolini, he was chosen for that task because he was the only member of the Tuscan government who had an international stature, but one can also hypothesise that this was done to move away from a radical and potentially prickly competitor for Guerrazzi. In his work on the Italian revolution, Montanelli discussed the perspectives of national liberation in Italy, matching some of Ferrari’s arguments that the Papacy was the first obstacle to revolution. ‘That indigenous prince, who is at the same time a cosmopolitan prince, is the major obstacle to the renovation of Italy’ (Montanelli 1851, 15). This reinforced the federalists’ convictions that ‘Italian revolution could not be reduced to a matter of borders’ (Montanelli 1851, 16), as it went ‘beyond the limits of nationality, involving a cosmopolitan theme’ (Montanelli 1851, 20). As a corollary, in the matter of religion, Montanelli distinguished between Catholicism and Catholic ‘clerocracy’ (Montanelli 1851, 42) advocating freedom of thinking. Given that he was a Catholic, this further shows how ridiculous are some ‘anti-Risorgimento’ pretentions to see Protestant plots behind this movement. One might add that, in Italian history, there have been enough reasons to oppose the Papacy without the need for the intervention of Luther’s or Calvin’s epigones.

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As for the Communes, Montanelli confirmed Cattaneo’s and Ferrari’s considerations of the medieval commune as the symbol of liberty against feudality, going so far as to attribute to Alexis de Tocqueville the idea that the federal organisation of the United States of America (then considered as a model for many federalists, alongside Switzerland) was nothing more than: ‘A genuine example of the communal Italian idea’ (Montanelli 1851, 67). How this municipalist inspiration corresponded to Montanelli’s antiauthoritarian beliefs is shown by his analysis of the incompatibility between revolution and dictatorship, that he called ‘conventual socialism’, arguing that a truly popular revolution should be ‘the exclusion of all authority’ (Montanelli 1851, 96). Here, Montanelli’s inspirations were Proudhon and Lamennais, exactly because they both ‘accepted socialism when the people took it as the symbol of revolution, but accepting it they established social principles that were completely different from those that the conventual socialists had taught’ (Montanelli 1851, 101). Starting likewise from the 1789 Revolution, Kropotkin would have extended this rift between Jacobinism and libertarian federalism to the irreconcilable opposition between authoritarian socialism (i.e. Marxism) and anarchism (Kropotkin 1909). To counter the small-mindedness of those Italian activists who refused socialism on nationalistic grounds, as they deemed it something like an imported product, Montanelli proposed a decalogue of Italian socialism. This included juridic equality and equal possibilities for everybody, suppression of the taxes on work and institution of taxes on ‘opulence and parasitism’; ‘Suppression of bank privileges, and institution of social banks’; Suppression of priests’ salary and instauration of ‘religious freedom’; ‘Absolute freedom of press, association and teaching’; ‘Free and mandatory education’; ‘Identification between the social principle and the republican form [of government]’; ‘Solidarity of European democracy’; ‘Revision of the civil and penal codes to erase all remains of barbarity from the laws regulating family, property, contracts, judgements and sentences’ (Montanelli 1851, 102). While the economic reforms suggested by this programme seemed less radical than most of the collectivist and communist principles that started to circulate in the nineteenth century, Montanelli’s thought was undoubtedly very advanced in terms of all kinds of possible liberty, including in daily life as exposed by the mention to family. Even more important than the contents of this programme was the method that Montanelli proposed to realise it, eventually through

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‘the instauration of the European Federation’. While for Montanelli, ‘Socialism is the ideal connection for this Federation, [this] does not mean that all European peoples should copy French Socialism’ (Montanelli 1851, 122). For Montanelli, within the framework of ‘European Socialism’ each nation should elaborate its own socialism ‘according to its peculiar conditions’ (Montanelli 1851, 122). There is no doubt that, in 1851, Montanelli did not mind being defined as a socialist, after writing statements such as: ‘From now on, we want to call ourselves socialists, because socialism has become the verb of revolution’ (Montanelli 1851, 124). As for Italy, whose inhabitants remained ‘slaves and divided, exactly because we subordinated the problem of revolution to the problem of unity’ (Montanelli 1851, 129), Montanelli’s method was based on the freedom of choice. If there should be a political union, this should be determined ‘by the consensus freely expressed by all those who are interested in uniting … I deny the right to impose oneself to free the people, under all pretexts’ (Montanelli 1851, 134). This corresponded exactly to Cattaneo’s principle on the need that all processes of liberation came from below, by the direct action of the interested people, without the intervention of external liberators, dictators in the people’s name or charismatic prophets. The Manifesto of the French-Spanish-Italian committee to which Ferrari and Cattaneo responded exposed similar principles, first by stating the internationalist principle of human unity for which the destinies of all nations were unescapably connected, as ‘the great law of solidarity connects all human orders like the organs of the same body’ (Comitato Democratico 1851, 1). Hence, the Committee argued for the need to oppose the solidarity of the oppressed to the ‘union of the oppressors’ (Comitato Democratico 1851, 2). As for the identification of Italy, France and Spain as the central geographical core of this programme, the Committee clarified some matters related to each of these three quite different situations. About France, the Committee argued that, after the proclamation of the Second Republic in 1848, the revolution remained incomplete, as it still had to address ‘the important matters that are called social [such as] the contrast between the extreme wealth and the extreme misery’ (Comitato Democratico 1851, 4). Obviously, the authors of the programme ignored that, in a few months, Louis-Napoléon’s coup d’état would have changed again (and definitively worsened) that situation. As for Italy, the Manifesto stated that to foster international solidarity, it was urgently needed that Italians ‘distinguish[ed] the [French]

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government from the nation’ (Comitato Democratico 1851, 8), given the anti-French feelings that the intervention of the transalpine army against the Roman Republic had raised in democratic public opinion. As for Spain, and similarly to what federalist authors made with Italian histories, the Manifesto defined the Spanish traditions of local autonomy such as the cartas and fueros as the bases for awakening an endogenous and deeply rooted ‘democratic conscience’ (Comitato Democratico 1851, 10). Finally, in calling for the solidarity of a unique human family, the signatories called themselves as ‘republicans socialists’ (Comitato Democratico 1851, 20). While these definitions were quite oscillating along the entire nineteenth century (when one finds multiple overlappings between polysemous definitions such as democrats, socialist, republicans, federalists, socialists and so on), the state of the art of these exile years for Italian federalists was well defined. Cosmopolitanism, republican intransigence, libertarianism and sometimes early socialism were key and recognisable features of radical and federalist Risorgimento. In France, another member of the Tuscan triumvirate, Mazzoni, spent most of his exile years, before moving to Spain in 1858 where he found a job as a private preceptor. Like Montanelli, he came back to Italy in 1859 when Leopoldo fell again and the sentences pronounced against the Tuscan democrats of 1848–1849 were cancelled. Born in Prato and son of a former Jacobin, Giuseppe Mazzoni was a lawyer, like Montanelli. Akin to the Giovine Italia in his youth, he likewise enrolled as a volunteer to fight in Lombardy in 1848, when his brigade was diverted to Modena, where Mazzoni tried in vain to proclaim the Republic. In 1849, like Montanelli, he was disappointed by Guerrazzi’s refusal to join the Roman Republic, and by the subsequent restoration of the Lorena regime. Although Mazzoni was initially closer than Montanelli to Mazzinianism, and there is no unanimity among his biographers on whether he can be labelled as a ‘federalist’ (Adami 1979, 22), Giacomo Adami has noted that, in his French years, Mazzoni developed sensitivity for ‘international democratic solidarity’ (Adami 1979, 7) and for individual liberty and municipal autonomy. Again, he was inspired by his acquaintance with Proudhon, and the latter’s ‘struggle against all kinds of centralising authoritarianism’ (Adami 1979, 17). His antiauthoritarian attitude led Mazzoni to take distances from Mazzini, and from whoever accepted to make alliances with monarchist Piedmont, even though this costed ruptures with former friends such as Atto Vannucci.

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When Mazzoni, then in Madrid, received a letter from his friend Giuseppe Dolfi informing him of the ‘peaceful revolution’ with which the Florentine people had got rid of Canapone (the popular nickname of the Grand-Duke) and that the new provisional government was promulgating a ‘general amnesty for political affairs, so that I hope to see you soon here’,1 Mazzoni remained quite cold. It was only three months later that he travelled back, responding to a call of his Prato fellow citizens, who had elected him to the new Tuscan Parliament. When the Assembly voted the annexation of Tuscany to the Kingdom of Piedmont, principled republican Mazzoni refused to vote for the annexation and for the moderate provisional government chaired by Baron Bettino Ricasoli, expressing his disappointment for what Rosselli called ‘the annihilation of Tuscan political individuality in the Piedmontese organism’ (Rosselli 1946, 68). Likewise back to Tuscany despite an attempt of local aristocrats to impede his return of the potential ‘negative effects’ of his presence (Rosselli 1946), Montanelli also refused to approve the annexation. For a while, Montanelli was attracted by the proposal of the French government to create an autonomous political body in central Italy, although Rosselli denied that he had any sympathy for Prince JérômeNapoléon Bonaparte (nicknamed Plon-Plon), whose name was considered for a sort of regency in Central Italy. For Rosselli, Montanelli only spoke explicitly ‘in an anti-Lorenese and anti-annexationist direction, and for the constitution of a strong political entity in Central Italy’ (Rosselli 1946, 88), an idea in which also Mazzoni was interested provided that it led to some democratic outcome. What is important, is that two members of the Tuscan triumvirate of 1849 refused to approve the annexation of Tuscany to the future Kingdom of Italy, and strongly criticised Guerrazzi and Mazzini for their respective accommodating politics towards Vittorio Emanuele II, who was substantially seizing Italy with the implicit approval of part of the republican field. The Tuscan circuits were among the staunchest opponents of these policies. Montanelli and Mazzoni resumed some hopes when Garibaldi’s Expedition of the Thousand showed the possibility of popular participation and the possibility of arming people independently from the royal official Army. From that moment, it was rather in popular Garibaldianism and in European democracy that the two men trusted. Significantly, the

1 FGM, Dolfi to Mazzoni, 30 April 1859.

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newspaper that they co-founded in Spring 1861 in the wake of the formal proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy, with the indispensable support of a popular leader and organiser such as Dolfi, was called Nuova Europa as a way to relaunch a federalist, social and internationalist discourse. After a monarchist unification that had disappointed most republicans, and that will disappoint more and more people after facts such as the armed repression of the Garibaldian expeditions of Aspromonte (1862) and Mentana (1867), the taxes on mills in 1868 and so on, keeping alive the flame of critical thinking was indispensable to avoid the extinction of radical ideas in Italy.

A Federalist and ‘Social’ Journal in Florence Although neglected in conventional narratives of Risorgimento, the role of NE was ‘far from being secondary’ (Furiozzi 2008) in shaping progressive public opinion in the years following formal unification, as noted by Massimo Furiozzi, and also in inspiring early socialist circuits as noted by Pier Carlo Masini (1978). While the early setup of the journal clearly recalled Montanelli’s ideas, Furiozzi identifies two periods in the NE life, the first (1861–1862) being inspired by Montanelli, and the second (1862–1863) being inspired by Alberto Mario, who took a leading editorial role after Montanelli’s death and the shock of Aspromonte in August 1862. I would instead argue that, rather than the personal influence of Mario or Montanelli (albeit important in both cases) the key factors that determined the NE’s (although pluralistic) political line was the evolving situation in the post-unification years and the insertion of this journal in popular circuits. In this process, key roles were played by Dolfi who endeavoured to provide free copies of the journal to commoners who could not afford its price, and by editors such as Martinati (the journal’s director), Castellazzo and Niccolò Lo Savio, all socialists or future members of the Italian anarchist section of the International. The Programme that was published in the first issue of the journal was a sort of summary of non-chauvinistic Risorgimento thinking. It is worth noting that, in the 1860–1870 decade, debates on nationality focused on the matters of Rome and Venice, whose territories had remained excluded from the Italian state, being the latter still occupied by the Austrians and the former still ruled by the Pope. One of the results was the Garibaldian attempts to take through popular mobilisation what the Monarchy had not been able to obtain for reasons of

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international diplomacy. NE provided a quite unorthodox voice in that moment, calling attention to the wider ‘European order’ and defining the sort of Rome as strictly associated with French politics, given that LouisNapoléon was the international warrantor of the survival of the Papal State. Thus, the NE editors stressed the need for resuming ‘the French Revolution’ through the autonomous agency of the ‘constituent people, not following the traditions of a Kingdom’.2 Given that Risorgimento had still to be accomplished, international solidarity with all nationalities that were fighting was still up to date for NE, involving countries such as: ‘Poland, Hungary, Greece, Ionian Islands [whose peoples] cried under the oppression hitherto, but were never won under the joke of brutal force’, also being linked to Italian democrats by ‘a common link of solidarity and brotherhood’.3 In this programme federalism, republicanism and internationalism continued to go hand in hand. It is worth noting that one of the NE’s first adversaries, although not immediately declared, was Mazzini who, in his letters to Dolfi, tried to convince the Florentine baker to keep away from Montanelli’s influence and to trust him rather than Garibaldi (Conti 1949). After receiving the first numbers of NE, Mazzini was disappointed with the visible presence of ‘French tendencies’, a euphemism under which he identified socialism, and behind which he saw the hand of Montanelli. ‘For love of Italy, please invigilate, and ask Mazzoni to invigilate, that French tendencies do not spoil a journal that can make a lot of good. These are more and more dangerous’ (Conti 1949, 164; Mazzini to Dolfi, 27 April 1861). Intriguingly, Mazzini counted on the support of Dolfi and Mazzoni to counter Montanelli’s influence in Tuscany. Unluckily for him, what follows shows that neither Dolfi nor Mazzoni were available to take orders from Mazzini, and the same will apply to Alberto Mario after Montanelli’s death. One might add that, on 1 June 1861, NE stipulated a formal editorial alliance with Cattaneo’s Politecnico, offering to readers a joint subscription which implied the possibility of receiving both the daily newspaper from Florence and the monthly journal from Milan. This clearly exposes NE’s insertion in the federal and internationalist field as also confirmed by Cattaneo’s correspondences mentioned below.

2 NE, 14 April 1861. Programma, 1. 3 NE, 14 April 1861. Programma, 2.

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Among NE’s early campaigns, the opposition to the extension of the Piedmontese administrative machine to Tuscany took an important place. Since the first issues, the journal denounced the de facto impossibility of the Italian National Assembly to deliberate on matters of administrative decentralisation, or in matters of civil liberty, as these were already stated by the Statuto Albertino, the constitutional Piedmontese chart that was being extended to all Italy. Therefore, the National Assembly was substantially powerless on a number of matters, unless it became a Constituent Assembly. As noted above, this was a key point for Montanelli, and also a matter of democracy given that, to put together different regions with different laws and different administrative organisation, one had to choose between a democratic (that is constituent) way and an authoritarian way, that is Piedmontese colonisation of the entire peninsula.4 Crucially, NE advocated universal suffrage for electing all of these assemblies, while in Piedmont and later in the Kingdom of Italy, suffrage remained strongly limited on census grounds, involving some 2% of the population in 1848 and around 9% in 1892 (Musso 2000). A series of articles titled ‘Disorder’ addressed the issues that legislative and administrative centralisation was provoking in various aspects of administration and civil life, making some irony on commonplaces that governmental ‘order’ was the way to avoid evils such as ‘demagogy’ and ‘anarchy’.5 NE denounced that: ‘Disorder is not in the places, but in the offices: the provinces are not governed, but ungoverned. Public servants … don’t comply with their duties, that should be to diligently serve the public, of whose sufferings one increasingly abuses’.6 The new situation was challenging the very accessibility of the public administration in Tuscany, where current business was ‘worse treated than in the saddest days [of despotism]: injustice, treacheries, abuses of power are done more overtly, as it is increasingly difficult to present appeals, because it is useless to send these to Turin, the place of the most monstruous bureaucracy’.7 The disdain of functionaries for the public is one of the indicators of authoritarianism according to principles of non-domination, where individual rights must not depend on the arbitrary whim of some functionary.

4 NE, 20 April 1861. L’autorità parlamentare e le questioni d’ordinamento, 1. 5 NE, 11 May 1861. Il disordine. Burocrazia amministrativa, 1. 6 Il disordine. Burocrazia amministrativa, 1. 7 Il disordine. Burocrazia amministrativa, 1.

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Mentioning further cases such as the bad organisation of public libraries or educational institutes, NE continued to denounce that, within unified monarchist Italy, the level of public freedom and civil rights did not improve. It even worsened due to inefficient centralisation of bureaucracy, which did not mean order, but ‘disorder and chaos’. These matters were addressed by one of the most known series of papers published in NE, that is Montanelli’s 1861 articles on the ‘Ordinamento Nazionale’, that were later collected in a volume as a tribute to Montanelli after his death in 1862. Funded by the Democratic Association of Florence whose charismatic leaders were Dolfi and Mazzoni, this book aimed at systematising the writings in which Montanelli had shown that: ‘In building [Italian] unity, a process that was opposed to the reality of things was followed’ (Montanelli 1862, vii). The key aim of these 20 articles was to question the law on regions proposed by Minister Marco Minghetti on juridical, historical and geographical grounds. While praising the idea of including the region as an administrative unit of the new state, Montanelli deemed Minghetti’s proposal ‘an abortion’ (Montanelli 1862, 2). The problem was not with the ways in which Italian regions were reshaped geographically, but with their authoritarian setup through which the Italian revolution risked to ‘sacrifice liberty to unity’ (Montanelli 1862, 3). Montanelli was not overtly contesting the principle of unity because, after the 1860 plebiscites, he had adopted a pragmatic approach. As he wrote to Mazzoni in 1862: ‘Like you, I am pessimistic, and more and more convinced that one had not to come to unity this way. But the people decided and we must respect their vote’ (Bagnoli 2002, 77; Montanelli to Mazzoni [1861]). Therefore, these NE papers did not demand the destruction of the newly constituted Kingdom of Italy but wanted to negotiate some more decent conditions during its making. For Montanelli, the fact of having a unique state rather than a federation did not imply to have uniformity at all levels, as constitutional unity did not necessarily mean ‘legislative unity’ (Montanelli 1862, 9). Norms can be tailored to being applied to the specific needs of certain regions. The key issue was the way in which decisions were made at the different local levels given that, if local administrators were exclusively appointed from above to only execute central orders, then local assemblies were just ‘reduced to academic consultancies’ (Montanelli 1862, 17). Montanelli derided those Piedmontese legislators who, after severely condemning the ‘Francophilia’ of republicans and socialists, did not find anything better than instituting French-style departments

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(the ‘Provinces’) ruled by prefects of royal nomination, what in France corresponded to Napoleonian despotism, where every instruction had to come from Paris. Following Ferrari, Montanelli noted how these provinces did not actually correspond to the geographies and histories of Italy, whose key scalar levels were the commune, the region and the nation. The administrator’s figure that was proposed in the Turin parliament, ‘the Minghettian governor of the region’ (Montanelli 1862, 26), did not help, given that this was another figure centrally nominated without any mandate from the citizens of that region. For Montanelli, this only served to ‘reinforce arbitrariness’ and to ‘reduce to nothing, under these powerful super-cops (sbirroni), the constitutional rule-of-law’, under ‘a Kingdom made by gendarmes, bureaucrats and spies’ (Montanelli 1862, 28). Importantly, Montanelli’s idea of decentralisation, which mainly meant avoiding a centralisation that was not yet accomplished, was not limited to the level of redrawing administrative limits on maps. Like in Cattaneo’s case, decentralisation meant that decisions should be taken from below. Countering centralisation meant countering authoritarianism and fostering citizen’s democratic participation at all levels, and this was exactly what the organisation of the new Kingdom of Italy was denying. As for the region, an alternative model was identified by Montanelli in the proposal for future regional organisation that the Sicilian Council had written before the annexation. Not only this document envisaged administrative autonomy of specific areas of interest for the economy and society of Sicily: it also stated the principle of the ‘representative region’ whose Assembly was elected by the citizens and had clear powers of control over the executive power. Puzzlingly, in Italy, this principle was only applied more than one century later, when the administrative regions were effectively activated in the 1970s. Montanelli’s last point was referred to the Italian history of ‘municipal autonomies’ (Montanelli 1862, 45), which should not be confused with municipal egoism, as it corresponded to: ‘The system of liberal and democratic ideas that gave origin to the Italian Commune and the Anglo-Saxon self-government’ (Montanelli 1862, 60). The autonomous commune, whose representatives had to be freely elected by the citizens, was an alternative to the Prefecture directed from above. Montanelli was trying to convince everybody that, even within the new Kingdom of Italy: ‘One can found without any danger the truly autonomous Commune like

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in America’ (Montanelli 1862, 82). If we read these texts in the context of Montanelli’s disappointment with the way in which unification was being done and his pragmatic choice to participate as a dissident in the discussions on the new administrative organisation, we realise that he was releasing quite radical concepts that, although expressed in moderate and polite ways, stood in clear continuity with his Proudhonian writings of the previous decade. Montanelli also supported another important initiative of the NE group, to which the journal gave constantly voice: the constitution of the Artisan Brotherhood and the related attempts to organise a national network of workers’ associations to connect the social question with the political question, although not yet with explicitly socialistic tones. Founded in December 1860 by a Committee which included Dolfi, Mazzoni and Montanelli among others, the Fratellanza Artigiana organised the Congress of Workers’ Societies that took place in September 1861 in Florence, with interventions of Dolfi, Montanelli and Mazzoni whose texts were published in NE. To understand the popular characteristic of this association and the peculiarity of the local Florentine networks which supported at the same time the Artisan Brotherhood, the NE and the Democratic Society, it is necessary to introduce the majestic figure of their actual leader and organiser, the baker, popolano and capo-popolo Beppe Dolfi (1818–1869). This man was able to provide material organisational ground for the NE and financial support for exiled (and sometimes penniless) intellectuals such as Mario, Martinati, Castellazzo, Lo Savio, and last but not least Bakunin. An old friend of Mazzoni, whose properties he administered when the Prato lawyer was exiled, Dolfi became an increasingly important figure for local republican networks in the years between 1849 and 1859, when his bakery in the popular San Lorenzo neighbourhood was a centre of subversive organisation and propaganda (Ralli 1991). Arrested in 1857 during the local insurrection ‘to support Pisacane’s expedition’ (White Mario 1899, 6), Dolfi was a protagonist of the ‘peaceful revolution’ of 27 April 1859, when the Grand-Duke abandoned definitively Florence. Pragmatically, Dolfi chose ‘not to refuse’ (White Mario 1899, 6) an alliance with Baron Ricasoli, the leader of the moderate and filo-Savoia liberals, prioritising the war against Austria and against the Pope to the definition of any internal settlement. Given the massive popularity that Dolfi had in the Florentine working class and petty bourgeoisie, this situation led in the following decade to an intriguing balance of power. While the

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political representation of Tuscany within the Kingdom of Italy was with aristocrats like Ricasoli, Dolfi represented a sort of popular grassroots counter-power, guaranteeing that political refugees and even parcels of weapons for Garibaldi’s insurrectional ‘attempts’ could transit unhindered in Florence and Tuscany, as I detail below. Dolfi was a charismatic figure on which there are amazing recollections from those who met him in the 1860s. Cattaneo, who met Dolfi at the Marios’ house during a journey to Florence that he did in 1867 to see some members of the parliamentary Left settled in the temporary capital, wrote to his wife that he was impressed by Dolfi’s charisma, which was also inspired by his imposing physical aspect: ‘A true giant, with a big belly and something of the American’ (Cattaneo 1956, 462; Cattaneo to Woodcock, 31 March 1867). Russian exile Lev Iliˇc Meˇcnikov (more known under the French spelling Léon Metchnikoff) (1838–1888), who fought with Garibaldi in 1860 and lived in Tuscany, alternatively in Florence, Siena and Livorno from 1860 to 1864, depicted humorously Dolfi’s figure as a representation of the Italian tradition of the capopolo, the insurrectional popular leader. Meˇcnikov compared Dolfi to the Roman popular leader Ciceruacchio (nickname of Angelo Brunetti, 1800–1849) (Risaliti 2017), noting how, to a foreign intellectual, Dolfi appeared as: ‘An interesting and picturesque variation of the Italian type of the capo-popolo, who did never disappear under the benevolent sky of this country since the time of the plebeians’ struggles against the patriciate. One saw this figure living again with Cola di Rienzo and Masaniello, and it resurfaced in 1848 with the figure of Ciceruacchio. With his Jupiter-like head … and his typical Florentine language, Dolfi did not try to wear the romantic cloak of the popular leader. [Yet], he exerted a strong influence on a great part of Florentine population’ (Metchnikoff 1898, 180). In the 1860s, Dolfi generously mentored the political exiles in Florence. Meˇcnikov’s gratitude appeared in the affectionate notes in which the Russian exile noted that, despite his popularity, Dolfi always refused power to remain heartily coherent with his own ideals. ‘When … leading a delegation of some men, he went to the palace of GrandDuke Leopold to propose that he quitted the city, [this latter] quietly went to Austria. However, Dolfi never expressed the slightest appetite for seizing power, for him or for his party: he preferred to stay in his bakery, that he loved’ (Metchnikoff 1898, 180). Having no sympathy at all for Baron Ricasoli, he supported that man ‘as un unavoidable evil, exactly

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like Garibaldi who accepted to have in his banner the Savoia Cross … leading legions that were mostly composed by republicans. Dolfi did not deal with theory … He was heartily republican and staunchly democrat: he called his son Guglielmo Tell’ (Metchnikoff 1898, 180), in honour of the myth of Swiss federal democracy. Dolfi’s intransigent republicanism and lack of personal interest were confirmed by Maurizio Ralli, noting that Dolfi had also ‘courteously but firmly refused’ the Cross of Saint Maurice that he had been offered by King Vittorio Emanuele II during his visit to Florence in 1861 (Ralli 1991). As noted by Meˇcnikov, the social programme of the Artisan Brotherhood was relatively moderate if compared to the anarchist positions that were taken by the Italian section of the International in the following decade. Yet, this association shared several characteristics of the same international networks which were developing socialist ideas, such as an interest in cooperation and mutualism, and played a role in the political radicalisation of the Italian workers’ movements by introducing the idea of a political positioning of workers’ societies. This proposal, carried out at the Ninth Congress of Italian Workers’ Societies, the first since the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy and carried out (not out of coincidence) in Florence in September 1861, shocked the moderates and led to very tense debates over the germs of radicalism that it could entail. Always strong in giving voice to radical positions, NE published the list of the almost 200 delegates to this Congress.8 Although a certain number of these delegates were not manual workers, but honorary members sent to represent workers’ societies, being lawyers, doctors, professors and so on, several crafts were anyway represented. For instance, the delegation of the Florentine Artisan Brotherhood was composed of two lawyers (Mazzoni and Montanelli) and two craftsmen (baker Dolfi and shoemaker Francesco Piccini). The territorial coverage of the delegations reflected the political and social issues of unification, as there was a quite capillary representation of Northern and Central Italy, and much fewer delegates from the South, despite one of the main aims of the Artisan Brotherhood was exactly a sort of unification of Italian working classes (Pellegrino 2012). Serving as the Provisional President, Dolfi pronounced an inaugural speech that contained significant references to the ‘Great Revolution of 8 NE, 26 September 1861. Elenco dei deputati effettivi ed onorari delle società operaie d’Italia per il IX Congresso Generale, 2–3.

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1789’9 and even anticipated themes that were later made famous by Bertolt Brecht, by noting that nobody has preserved the name of the slaves who built the great monuments of the Antiquity. ‘Nobody reminds to us the name of those who sculpted the capitals of the great columns that survive in the desert indicating that once stood Palmyra. We only know that, in Tyre, one weaved purple cloths to be worn by the tyrants. One said that the so-strong walls of Thebes were built by the Gods’.10 Not only this speech was an example of the importance of historical culture for self-educated workers such as Dolfi, but it explained the key line of the Tuscans in the Congress: merging working-class pride and economic claims with political elements, expressed by Dolfi’s reference to the French Revolution. In addition to the speeches of the Tuscan leaders (including Guerrazzi, likewise claiming that the task of workers’ societies should not be limited to ‘material matters’)11 NE also published a special issue reproducing the minutes of the final Congress session, that was presided by Mazzoni. Montanelli’s speech significantly argued for the need that mutualistic associations, although they were not political parties, could not ignore some eminently political matters. Evoking the statutes of the medieval corporations of the different crafts, a sort of myth for nineteenth-century associations, Montanelli stated the civic duty of workers’ ‘meddling with state affairs’12 and insisted on heated current affairs of his day, making examples such as the ‘political enthusiasm of commoners’13 without which Garibaldi’s endeavour in Sicily would have not been possible. The motion presented by Montanelli was approved with 72 votes versus 50, opening long polemics after the congress, as a group of moderate workers’ societies (especially, and significantly, from Piedmont) argued that the ‘politisation’ of the workers’ movement was a sort of

9 NE, 28 September 1861. Discorso inaugurale del presidente provvisorio Giuseppe Dolfi al Congresso degli Operai, 2. 10 Discorso inaugurale del presidente provvisorio Giuseppe Dolfi, 1. 11 NE, 29 September 1861. Discorso dell’Avvocato F.D. Guerrazzi pronunciato alla

prima seduta del Congresso degli Operai, 1. 12 NE, 1 October 1861. Discorso del Prof. Giuseppe Montanelli pronunciato alla prima seduta del Congresso degli Operai, 1. 13 Discorso del Prof. Giuseppe Montanelli, 2.

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republican ‘coup’. To oppose this line, they called a secessionist conference in the town of Asti that NE defined disdainfully ‘Asti Sonderbund’,14 by the name of the coalition of the Catholic and conservative cantons who were defeated in the 1845 Swiss civil war, a sort of symbol of clerical reaction for Risorgimento progressives. While these polemics around the mutualistic associations involved Mazzini, who supported the Florence democrats against the conservatives, it would be misleading to argue, as Nello Rosselli did, that the ‘battle’ of the Congress of Florence was made ‘around [Mazzini] and his principles’ (Rosselli 1967, 90). Indeed, Mazzini did not attend the Congress, and it would be odd to imagine people like Montanelli acting under his instructions. Against that, Montanelli’s unpublished correspondence with Dolfi shows how the Fucecchio lawyer had already clear ideas on how ‘the Artisan Brotherhood is a majestic accomplishment for democracy’15 and how he was endeavouring to convince his friends to create new workers’ associations in Livorno and elsewhere. After the Congress, Montanelli wrote to Dolfi suggesting that he requested assistance to Garibaldi, rather than to Mazzini, ‘against the shameful war that the moderates made against us’,16 confirming that the Tuscan republican networks remained for all that decade definitively closer to Garibaldianism than to Mazzinianism. Therefore, it can be argued that Mazzini rightly tried to gain consensus within the growing field of workers’ associationism, but that the drive towards democracy and republicanism that started to be discussed was destined to lead the movement well beyond his positions, with the Florentine association playing key roles in the process as I detail below. NE continued to give voice to all kinds of workers’ initiatives, such as a ‘Proletarian Society of Uncultivated Lands’ that was constituted in Turin by a group of surveyors. Significantly, their aim was to build the new Italian nation, that had remained until that moment ‘a mere geographical definition’ following the expression famously attributed to Metternich, by finding workers and funders to ‘buy, cultivate, rent and sell the uncultivated lands’.17 They esteemed that these lands were more than half of the 14 NE, 6 November 1861. Il Sonderbund astigiano. 15 Domus Mazziniana (herefater DM), Fondo Dolfi, E I c 22 6, Montanelli to Dolfi,

10 March 1861. 16 DM, Fondo Dolfi, E I c 22 3, Montanelli to Dolfi Giuseppe, 1861. 17 NE, 29 December 1861. Società proletaria delle terre incolte. Appello agli Italiani,

3.

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cultivable areas in the Peninsula’s plains, also due to the absenteeism of landlords in the latifundia. Geographically, these purposes matched Cattaneo’s claim to transform Italian geographies through patient and daily work for social purposes. Beyond the geographical lectures of Zuccagni-Orlandini mentioned above, it is worth mentioning the importance of the Saturday and Sunday Schools of the Florentine Artisan Brotherhood, where Martinati insisted on the need for workers’ instruction starting from basic literacy. Martinati tried to appeal to the pride of the working classes, noting that upon a time, ‘the worker was master of truth and legislator’,18 arguably a reference to the European revolutions that took place in the previous decades. Pedagogically, he used the method of ‘conversation’ like in the schools of Ancient Greece, rather than making classes ex-cathedra.19 In the Universal History courses given by Castellazzo, not devoid of humour, a special emphasis was given to secular education and the importance of modern science in challenging the dogmas of religions. ‘Today, certain false Vatican’s lightnings that served to light the fires of the Inquisition could at worst serve us to light our cigar; Franklin … a poor printer, has even disarmed the heavens of their true lightning’.20 The use of science and rationality for taking away workers from clerical influences was a leitmotif of most popular schools in the following decades. In addition to the School and Library for workers, the Artisan Brotherhood in Florence organised a network for the cooperative distribution of food and a sort of cooperative bank serving artisans (Ralli 1991). These initiatives followed international examples of mutualism that went from Proudhon’s 1849 Banque du Peuple to the English experiences of cooperation such as the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers. A series of papers by Jessie White Mario was published to explain the working of ‘English cooperative associations’ to the Italian public, arguing that they represented ‘a sort of practical socialism’21 to be imitated. Significantly, the term socialism was normally used not to indicate something that should be rejected, but as a

18 NE, 16 February 1862. A. Martinati, Discorso d’introduzione alle lezioni di filosofia morale de soci della fratellanza artigiana, 3. 19 Martinati, Discorso d’introduzione alle lezioni di filosofia morale, 2. 20 NE, 28 February 1862. L. Castellazzo, Discorso d’introduzione alle lezioni di storia

universale per le scuole della fratellanza artigiana, 2. 21 NE, 26 March 1863. J.W. Mario, Associazioni Cooperatrici Inglesi, 1.

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legitimate target. Jessie White developed the classical argument of the cooperators in contending the major efficacity of the cooperative solution in relation to strikes and all harder forms of class struggle. In summarising the story of the Rochdale association from 1844, White Mario exposed her belief that the strike, ‘although it often rightly damages the capitalists, ruins the workers’22 as strikers had to surrender after weeks or months of heroic mobilisations to avoid the death for the starvation of their families. As noted above, the French socialists who supported the mutualist experience of the Crédit du Travail led by Jacques Beluze, including the Reclus brothers, and Bakunin among the foreigners, used exactly the same arguments in favour of cooperation (Ferretti 2010). Therefore, the mutualism of NE and the Florence Artisan Brotherhood can be fully inserted in the history of European socialism, whose periodisation they perfectly matched. On the political side, White stressed how the Italian cause found strong support among Rochdale workers, who sent ‘a not negligible amount of money for the expeditions of Pisacane and Garibaldi’, noting with a certain sarcasm that ‘their discourses on Italian internal policy would astonish our speakers’23 arguably for their radicality. On the one hand, this highlights how mutualism was far from being politically ‘innocent’ or ‘unharmful’, as implicitly recognised by the Italian authorities, during the wave of anti-republican repression that followed Garibaldi’s Aspromonte expedition, tried (in vain) to suppress the Artisan Brotherhood.24 On the other, this shows how international and internationalist networking and solidarity were important for NE.

A New Europe and an (Internal and External) Anti-colonialist Thought From the beginning, NE included rich sections of international news and correspondence that constituted one of its main strengths. The editors were especially active in promoting international solidarity with movements for national liberation in Eastern Europe, that was overtly compared to ongoing (and unfinished) Italian struggles, and in which 22 Associazioni Cooperatrici Inglesi, 1. 23 Associazioni Cooperatrici Inglesi, 2. 24 NE, 12 September 1862. Notizie interne. Fratellanza Artigiana di Firenze.

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early elements of socialism were discussed alongside broader principles of civil rights and non-domination. This chimes with critiques to what was called ‘internal colonialism’, following arguments that Gramsci developed for Southern Italy and were then extended to several kinds of coloniality over regions and people that are not located overseas, but within the boundaries of a given state. These included regions of the Celtic Fringe (Hechter 1978) whose most representative case was then Ireland with her incipient struggles against the British rule, and current denunciations of the coloniality of power in Latin America, through the ongoing exploitation and discrimination of indigenous and Afro-descendant communities (Haesbaert 2021). In the 1860s, the claims for national liberation of a number of nations in Eastern Europe (Polish, Finnish, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Serbian, Greek, Bulgarian, Romanian to just mention the most numerous ethnic groups) against the empires of Moscow, Vienna and Constantinople were not only linked with the history of Risorgimento democrats (including the Mazzinians) but also to early internationalist socialism and anarchism, given the emphasis on bottom-up struggles for national liberations as potential triggers for social revolutions that early anarchist geographers Reclus, Kropotkin, Dragomanov and Meˇcnikov placed on liberation movements in Eastern Europe (Ferretti 2017). Poland was one of the cases to which NE paid the most attention, also thanks to the contacts that the editors had with some Russian dissidents and political opponents who supported the cause of Polish autonomy from the Russian empire. They were Alexander Herzen and the aforementioned Meˇcnikov/Metchnikoff, whose name was spelled in the most various ways in Italian journals and police reports (Menzicoff, Mecnikoff, Meniskoff, Merznikoff, Mezznikoff and so on). Born in Saint-Petersburg in 1838 to a bourgeois family from Kharkov, with Jewish origins from the maternal side, Meˇcnikov was a bright and boisterous adolescent. When he was sixteen, he fled from home to participate in the armed defence of Sebastopol during the Crimea War. Later, as a student of medicine in Kharkov, he was expelled for indiscipline and went to Saint-Petersburg, where he studied different disciplines including mathematics, arts and oriental languages, showing in all cases a special talent. In 1858, young Meˇcnikov was appointed as an interpreter for a diplomatic mission in Palestine and visited Constantinople, Mount Athos and Jerusalem, but he was soon sacked ‘following a duel and a disrespectful conduct towards the chiefs’ (Reclus 1889, 7). Penniless and lacking an official passport, Meˇcnikov lived in Beirut, then in Galati and in

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Venice, where he tried to resume his studies in painting. Yet, tracked by the Austrian police for his political activities in favour of Risorgimento endeavours in 1860, he fled to Tuscany, and then to Southern Italy, where he joined the Expedition of the Thousand, in which he served as a lieutenant. During this campaign, Meˇcnikov was seriously wounded at the Volturno battle, escaping almost miraculously to death and remaining then permanently lame. At the end of the campaign, Meˇcnikov moved from Naples to Florence, where his intellectual standing and his multilingualism rendered him: ‘The natural intermediary between the leaders of revolutionary parties … Garibaldi, Herzen, Bakunin [for whom he] accomplished dangerous missions in Italy and in Spain’ (Reclus 1889, viii). In Florence, Meˇcnikov was carefully watched by the Italian police, which registered his admission to the Democratic Society on 26 October 1863, at a session that was chaired by Dolfi.25 Few months later, his unwanted biographers drafted a short CV of the Russian refugee, labelling him as a ‘member of the Herzen political school’26 and of the Russian movement Land and Freedom (Zemlja i Volja, significantly merging political and social matters), as well as a not better defined ‘Russian Liberal Party’ which was suspected to pay Meˇcnikov for his activities in Italy. Meˇcnikov’s archives surviving at the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) in Moscow also contain evidence of his insertion in Tuscan democratic groups, such as the Democratic Circle in Siena,27 where he served as an editor for the short-lived journal Il Flagiello in Spring 1862 (Meˇcnikov 2011). An amazing anecdote reported by the Florentine police concerned Meˇcnikov’s alleged intention to try an attack against a Russian ‘princess’ who was visiting Florence (arguably Marija Nikolaevna Romanova, duchess of Leuchtenberg), as a protest against Russian repression in Poland, which proved to be a false rumour, as the exile indeed wanted to ‘demand a subsidy to the above commended Princess’.28 25 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Prefettura del Dipartimento Fiorentino (Archivio Segreto 1857–1864) (hereafter ASF), filza 21, fasc. 88, Rapporto riservato, 27 October 1863. 26 ASF, filza 23, Cenni biografici su Leone Mecnikoff, 13 Februray 1864. 27 Moscow, Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (hereafter GARF), fondy P-

6753, op. 1, khr 31, Fanelli to Metchnikoff, 17 February 1862. 28 ASF, filza 23, fasc. 154, Cenni biografici su Leone Mecnikoff, Rapporto riservato, 13 February 1864.

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Whatever the correct version of the facts could be, this proves that the Florentine police did not have very clear ideas on the exiles’ activities, given that the most recent works on Meˇcnikov’s Tuscan period confirmed that he was then living off his pen, sending articles to several Russian journals, more or less democratic (Risaliti 2017). In any case, Meˇcnikov was one of the earliest international collaborators of NE and of its internationalist campaigns in support of Poland and the oppressed nationalities in Eastern Europe. While Meˇcnikov’s acquaintance with Dolfi is well documented in his recollections, one can hypothesise that he had also been in touch with Montanelli before the latter’s’ death, considering an unpublished letter by Montanelli to Dolfi, few weeks before NE started publication, in which the lawyer expressed his sympathy for: ‘That excellent Russian democrat who went here to see me’.29 Given the date and the circumstances, it is very likely that it was Meˇcnikov. The Russian exile first contributed to NE through an ephemeral rubric called Slavic Letters, whose articles were not always signed, although Meˇcnikov’s authorship was well recognisable. His first Slavic Letter was introduced by a welcoming redactional note claiming that these letters were the first tangible example of the NE commitment towards the ‘brotherhood of all peoples’. They noted how significant was publishing the text of a Russian supporting Poland because, in Warsaw: ‘The Russians feel that the cause of their own freedom is raised’.30 Eventually signing as ‘A Russian Democrat’, Meˇcnikov first urged Italian people to ‘please separate the Russian people from their government, don’t put government and nation under the same responsibility’,31 recalling Ferrari’s notes on French politics mentioned above. Meˇcnikov’s text told the story of ‘Giovanni’ Papoff, a Russian officer who refused to open fire against the population of Warsaw. Papoff, to whom the NE wanted to dedicate a statue, starting to raise funds,32 was very often mentioned as a popular hero of desertion and insubordination for internationalist and anticolonial solidarity. In Italy, something similar would happen some decades later with Augusto Masetti (1888– 1966), an anarchist who shot his commander as a protest against the

29 DM, Fondo Dolfi, E I c 22 6, Montanelli to Dolfi, 10 March 1861. 30 NE, 25 April 1861. Lettere Slave, 1. 31 NE, 25 April 1861. Lettere Slave, 1. 32 NE, 3 March 1862. Colletta per un monumento a Giovanni Papoff, 1.

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departure of his battalion for the colonial war in Libya in 1911, being doubtlessly a more faithful continuator of popular Risorgimento than the judges and doctors who declared him ‘crazy’. As for Poland, Meˇcnikov concluded that the Russian aristocrats only represented themselves, rather than the people. In his second Slavic Letter, Meˇcnikov confirmed that all the ‘champions of democracy’ should fight ‘for the common cause’ without distinction of nationality, identifying the common enemy with the ‘privileged caste acting on behalf of Old Europe’ (clearly hinting at the NE title), while: ‘Our nationality is essentially democratic’.33 This repeated distinction between state and nation clearly anticipated anarchist themes: thus, it is no surprise that Meˇcnikov will be a Bakunin’s fellow in the Fédération jurassienne and a collaborator of Reclus and Kropotkin in establishing the bases of anarchist geographies (Ferretti 2014). Moreover, in NE, Meˇcnikov raised another matter that would be key for Bakunin’s proposals and in general for the Russian revolutionary dissidence known under Franco Venturi’s definition of ‘Russian populism’ (Venturi 1972): the issue of peasants’ access to land and the revolutionary potentiality of the countryside poor, then neglected by most of the socialistic schools in Western Europe. For Meˇcnikov, it was with ‘the agricultural populations [that] the heart of the New Europe beats’.34 In his following letter, Meˇcnikov raised another key matter for both Risorgimento and the revolts for national liberation from internal colonialism in Eastern Europe, as well as in Ireland: religious freedom. Discussing how many Polish people were rendered fanatics by the Catholic Church, Meˇcnikov argued that this was a result of their sufferings and should not be used as an argument to undermine their liberation struggle. In this sense, he made a comparison with Ireland where, only: ‘Few months ago, an image of Garibaldi was burnt; but before the well-natured world, these matters should never be used as excuses to [justify] the persecutions of the English Government against that unlucky people’.35 Here, in the name of cosmopolitanism and international solidarity, Meˇcnikov proposed an exercise of intercultural empathy that was not straightforward, that is understanding the oppression of

33 NE, 1 May 1861. Leone Merznikoff, Lettere Slave, 1–2. 34 NE, 1 May 1861. Leone Merznikoff, Lettere Slave, 1–2. 35 NE, 15 May 1861. Lettere Slave, 1.

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the Irish despite the Risorgimento cause found much less support in Ireland that in England. Indeed, the Pope enjoyed a certain popularity in the ‘Green Isle’, where someone had recently destroyed the image of Garibaldi, an almost-sanctified figure in Italy at that moment. Despite that, Meˇcnikov argued for solidarity and circulation of ideas among dissidents and unorthodox people regardless of their nationality or formal party belonging. During 1862, Meˇcnikov did not collaborate directly with NE, arguably due to his new duties in Siena with the Flagiello, but the Florentine journal continued to pay attention to Poland by publishing numerous materials from Herzen and his circuits of the London-based Russian journal Kolokol (The Bell ), exposing socialistic tendencies while supporting national liberation movements such as the Italian one. It was the case with a letter of the Kolokol editors giving ‘revolutionary solidarity’36 to the Polish Central Committee, and an appeal to the Russian officers serving in Poland to join the people’s cause.37 In early 1863, just on the eve of the main Polish insurrection of January 1863, NE translated a letter from another eminent Russian revolutionary, whom the editors would have met personally in Florence the following year, Mikhail Bakunin, recently escaped from Siberia (Carr 2002), who argued likewise for a Russian-Polish alliance ‘for freedom’.38 Meanwhile, Meˇcnikov resumed his collaboration with NE, publishing an article containing quite optimistic notes on the peaceful ‘Russian revolution’39 that was ongoing through the weakening of despotism that was represented by the emancipation of serfs proclaimed by Czar Alexander II, while the ‘agricultural commune [the mir] flourished again on its ashes’.40 The importance of the traditional communitarian institutions of the mir as a ground for further revolutionary developments was a classical point of anarchist and revolutionary socialist thought in Russia. Meˇcnikov also highlighted the respect for individual freedom that existed

36 NE, 6 November 1862. Solidarietà della rivoluzione’, 1. 37 NE, 7 November 1862. Lettera degli editori del Kolokol agli ufficiali russi che si

trovano in Polonia, 2–3. 38 NE, 9 January 1863. Democrazia europea, 1. 39 NE, 14 January 1863. Leone Mezznikoff, Democrazia europea. La rivoluzione russa

1. 40 Mezznikoff, La rivoluzione russa, 1.

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in this tradition, far from other quite totalitarian ideas of communitarian socialism such as Fourier’s. Yet, Meˇcnikov did not trust concessions from above or the mere resuming of popular traditions, as he argued that social change should come from popular awareness and agency, placing hopes in the ‘immense success that the political principles of Herzen and Mikhail Bakunin have with the Russian people’.41 Significantly, Meˇcnikov was already making propaganda for Bakunin’s principles even before getting acquainted and collaborating with him. Meanwhile, the ongoing Polish insurrection led NE to promote a very energic campaign to support that insurgent nation, including meetings, publication of materials such as a special supplement titled ‘Revolution in Poland’ and fundraising. The commentaries published by NE clarified that the journal’s aim was not limited to supporting brave fighters in a faraway country, but to participate in a common revolution that was concurrently ongoing all over Europe, not only for national liberation but for civil liberties and social justice. With the Polish revolt, ‘a new fighter entered war’.42 The Florentine mobilisation culminated with a big meeting that took place in Piazza Indipendenza and was attended by thousands of people, where the leaders of Tuscan democracy and the refugees based in Florence all spoke to support Poland and the general cause of freedom. It is no coincidence that, after the success of the event, NE returned to the polemics that they had in the previous days with the Florentine authorities on matters of ‘security’ and the possible risk of riots. Claiming how everything went well thanks to the people’s discipline, NE wrote: ‘Hurrah for the populace let to itself!’, stressing the pedagogical value of people ‘seeing what a public assembly is’.43 That is an exercise in practised democracy, challenging the repressive institutions of the new Kingdom of Italy. While several declarations in favour of Poland by Italian personalities, from Garibaldi to Ferrari, were published by NE in those days, a big emphasis was placed on the speeches of the 22 February. In his speech, Dolfi stressed the right of resistance of each individual before oppression: ‘If the first right of man is that of conquering and defending freedom, therefore his first duty is to help those who are still restricted in slavery

41 Mezznikoff, La rivoluzione russa, 1. 42 NE, 3 February 1863. Firenze, 2 febbraio, 1. 43 NE, 24 February 1863. Firenze, 23 febbraio, 1.

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and try to break their chains’.44 For Dolfi, whose popular style of speaking triggered the enthusiasm of the Florentine public, this call for internationalist solidarity was even more compelling as several Polishes had helped the Italian cause: ‘Should us forget that [hundreds of them] fought our battles, in the fields of Lombardy and the Two Sicilies? No perdio! People do not forget (thunderous applauses)’.45 Indeed, special visibility was given to foreign speakers then in Florence. After Dolfi, Meˇcnikov likewise received the applauses of Piazza Indipendenza by telling anew the story of Papoff who: ‘Rather than dirtying his sword with the blood of the defenceless patriots and the Polish martyrs, offered his chest to the lead of the tyranny’ like many others who ‘deserted the flag of autocratic despotism’.46 Other foreigners were Hungarian Count and Garibaldian volunteer Alexander Teleki (1821–1892), who again raised the enthusiasm of the public wondering why the oppressive governments were always ready to help each other while the oppressed remained closed in narrow nationalisms,47 and Spanish member of the Florentine Democratic Society and former extreme-left member of parliament at the Spanish Cortes, Eduardo Ruiz Pons (1819–1865), who argued for fostering the existing solidarity links between Spanish and Italian democrats. Police sources expose how the presence of these foreign refugees in a still relatively provincial city (although about to become the provisional capital of Italy from 1865 to 1870) like Florence raised some concerns with local authorities, preoccupied with possible ‘socialist’ radicalisations of the popular movement. In the Police reports, Pons was described as someone who ‘belongs to the sect of so-called free thinkers. In religion, like in politics, he follows the most advanced socialistic doctrines … He corresponds with Spanish journalist Fernando Garrido, equally émigré’.48 A Spanish radical republican exiled in Paris, Garrido will become a friend of Bakunin and of the Reclus brothers in the following years, accompanying Elie Reclus in his mission to document the Spanish democratic

44 NE, 25 February 1863. Discorso di Giuseppe Dolfi, 1. 45 Discorso di Giuseppe Dolfi, 1. 46 NE, 26 February 1863. Discorso di Leone Mecnikoff, Russo, 1. 47 NE, 26 February 1863. Discorso del colonnello Alessando Teleki, emigrato

ungherese, 1. 48 ASF, Filza 24, 154, Notizie sullo spagnolo Ruiz Pons, 28 July 1864.

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revolution in 1868–1869 (Nettlau 1969). Spain was one of the countries with which NE’s international networking was most active and even involved directly Garibaldi, who was asked by Dolfi whether he could recommend certain Spanish people who had contacted the Florentine baker on his behalf (Garibaldi 1991, 121; Garibaldi to Dolfi 22 July 1863). As the General did not know them, he suggested that Mazzoni, who was familiar with the country, went for a mission to consolidate contacts (Garibaldi 1991, 122; Garibaldi to Mazzoni, 2 August 1863), as he effectively did. Amazingly, Garrido never showed up in Florence, unlike Herzen whose short stay there was recorded in November 1863.49 Yet, the local police were so concerned with Garrido’s relationship with NE that they kept a file on him, noting that: ‘Due to his former acquaintance with Montanelli, he sent some articles for the journal Nuova Europa. From these articles, that were all seized [by us], one infers that he belongs to the most advanced school of Socialism. His writings claim for the destruction of the monarchist system and the proclamation of the European Federation’.50 While defining Garrido and Pons as socialists and bloodthirsty extremists can be considered as one of the exaggerations that are typical of Police sources, it is worth noting that, in the NE’s international correspondences, some elements of socialism clearly appeared, for instance through materials from Land and Freedom, claiming ‘the right of land for everybody’ that were periodically sent by Herzen and Ogarëv, whom the NE editors called ‘our co-religionaries’.51 On the side of overseas colonialism, even in a so early period such as the years 1861–1863, NE promoted critiques that can be fully defined as anti-colonial in denouncing the French intervention in Mexico of January 1862. The journal constantly supported the resistance war of Mexican republicans led by Benito Juarez, who managed to defeat Napoleon III’s troops in 1867, when Maximilian of Hapsburg, the Emperor that the Europeans wanted to impose to the Mexicans, was finally captured and sentenced to death. Already in 1861, the NE expressed interest in the federal formulas that were adopted by some Latin American republics, which gained their independence from Spain in the first half of the

49 ASF, Filza 21, 8 November 1863. 50 ASF, Filza 20, Cenni biografici su Fernando Garrido, 3 October 1863. 51 NE, 6 March 1863. Il Consiglio Centrale dell’Associazione Terra e Libertà, 1.

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century. A rubric titled ‘Rio de la Plata’ wished to inform the Italian public about the history of struggles for ‘the freedom of the Argentinian Republic’, remembering to everybody that it was fighting in Uruguay and Rio Grande do Sul that Garibaldi first became famous.52 Matching the analyses that would have been released to the French public by authors such as Elisée Reclus, the NE editors also considered the presence of Brazil, a nation that was decolonised but still ruled by an Emperor, and with slavery still in place, as a geopolitical threat for the Republics of the Southern Cone (Ferretti 2017). Some sensitivity was also shown towards the cause of the Amerindian peoples, victims of the ‘Iberian atrocities’ during the Conquista, as mentioned in an article on the history of religious intolerance. The anonymous author of that text quoted Bartolomé de Las Casas as a direct witness of the indigenous genocide, to contend that these massacres were not fatality but the result of criminal intentions: ‘It is said that, in only 30 years, 2 millions of indigenous were … slaughtered in the islands of … Cuba and Santo Domingo, while other 10 millions of Indians suffered the same fate … in Peru, Mexico, Jamaica, and other provinces of the American continent’.53 This shows what were the ideal grounds of NE’s anticolonialism applied to matters of that time, and the journal’s endorsement of the early decolonisation of South American republics expressed in specific rubrics on that region’s international politics.54 As for Mexico, the matter was quite straightforward for the NE editors: a federal republic was fighting for its independence against the aggression of an empire, and not the less harmful for Italian democrats, given that Napoleon III was the military defender of the Pope’s lasting temporal power on Rome. It is intriguing that, this time, freedom fighters were not white Europeans, given the presence of indigenous militias who were significantly mentioned and praised by NE, which first noted that, in Latin America: ‘Peoples that, by force of heroism … gloriously emancipated themselves from the joke of the Spanish Kings and of their overbearing and fierce representatives in the Americas, shout unanimously against Napoleon’s Frenchmen’.55 One should note the lucidity of this note’s

52 NE, 3 May 1861. Rio de la Plata, 1. 53 NE, 4 August 1861. L’intolleranza religiosa, 1. 54 NE, 26 March 1862. La politica internazionale e le repubbliche del Sudamerica, 1. 55 NE, 20 February 1862. L’America del Sud, il Messico e l’invasione francese, 1.

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author in placing the issue of the French intervention in Mexico in the framework of Latin American republican decolonisation, deeming this invasion a challenge to the liberties that these peoples had conquered by themselves. Therefore, supporting that resistance became a political priority. A meeting of the Florence Democratic Society, of which NE was a direct expression, released a statement endorsing the Mexican insurgents, under request of Castellazzo who was concerned by the rumours about a possible intervention of Italian troops to back the French, that Florence radicals would have considered ‘a violation of Italian honour’.56 Little more than one year after unification, Italian progressives had already opposed the intervention of Italian troops to second the strongest imperialisms of the day. NE also used a rhetorical figure that would have been often summoned in libertarian anticolonialism of the following decades by authors such as Reclus and Ghisleri (Ferretti 2016), that is sarcasm on terms such as the alleged ‘barbarity’ that European colonisers attributed to overseas people to expose the need for ‘civilising’ them. Publishing two letters of insurgent Mexican generals who argued ‘with pride and dignity’ for their rights and claimed their cultural roots in both the Spanish and the preColumbian (eventually ‘Aztec’) background, NE presented the text this way: ‘Here you are what are the barbarians that the “civilised” government of Napoleon … pretends to civilise’,57 denouncing at each time, in the following years, the imperialistic purposes of the ‘alleged civilisers of Mexico’.58 A correspondence sent on behalf of the republican students in Pavia by Osvaldo-Gnocchi-Viani, an activist who moved from radical republicanism to anarchist and internationalist socialism in the 1870s (Angelini 1987), denounced the Second Empire as adhering to the principle of ‘naked force … and to a tradition that was always an enemy to republican freedom’.59 The reference to republican freedom was especially significant as it was applied to a non-European cause. In fact, a classical argument of postcolonial and decolonial studies since Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (1950) was that Europe denied its liberal and democratic premises

56 NE, 6 July 1862. Società democratica, 2. 57 NE, 10 July 1863. Messico, 3. 58 NE, 11 June 1863. La guerra del Messico e il giornalismo del Perù, 1. 59 NE, 11 July 1862. Circolo Democratico degli Studenti in Pavia, 3.

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through its colonial criminal behaviour overseas. Early anticolonialism by European dissidents shows that this issue was much more complex and that it was not a matter of incoherence, but of the evils of domination, that some European radicals already opposed for both the internal and external ‘wretched of the earth’ to use a famous expression by Frantz Fanon. Beyond the denunciation of imperial wrongs, NE expressed interest in resistance and subaltern agency, which were documented by the Florence journal with the help of Spanish correspondents. Although NE ceased its publications in October 1863, which means that they had the time to follow only the first phases of the Mexican war—and arguably not the most important from their standpoint, some notes show that the idea of a possible defeat of the French was considered as a concrete possibility. NE even hypothesised that Mexico could have been the ‘Moscovia’60 of Napoleon III, given that ‘establishing a French colony in Central America’ was deemed not only unjust, but ‘very difficult’, as Puebla was heroically defended by its ‘natural owners’, erecting barricades like the Milanese did in 1848.61 The NE editors were well aware that global geopolitics mattered to the destinies of Italy, given Napoleon’s role as the ‘guardian’ of the Papal State, which was confirmed by the fact that the article on Puebla’s resistance costed the judicial seizure of the NE issue of 1 June 1863. Under the Kingdom of Italy, evoking a possible fall of the French Empire was enough to concern the authorities and have freedom of speech revoked.62 Yet, a few days later, this did not prevent the journal to publish a biographical article on Mexican president end ‘hero’ of Resistance Benito Juarez, whose author noted that Juarez was born from ‘indigenous parents’ and quoted Las Casas and Alexander von Humboldt as witnesses of the ‘loyalty, courage and coherence and the Mexican Indigenous’.63 These qualities were opposed to those of the French general Forey, who was defined as: ‘The Charlatan of the Empire’.64 The fact that authors

60 NE, 31 January 1863. Il Messico può essere la Moscovia di Napoleone III, 1. 61 NE, 1 June 1863. Inevitabile pericolo dei Francesi sotto Puebla, 1. 62 NE, 2 June 1863. Signor Direttore della Nuova Europa, 1. 63 NE, 7 June 1863. Cenni biografici di Benito Juárez, presidente della repubblica

messicana, 1. 64 NE, 13 July 1863. Puebla ed il ciarlatano dell’Impero.

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such as Humboldt and Las Casas were read as filo-indigenist references meant that the NE editors were aware of the importance of the indigenous elements in the Americas, but also that they had developed an early anticolonial consciousness thanks to their experience with struggles for Italian liberation combined with a cosmopolitan mindset. For them, the new Italian nation had first to refuse colonialism and imperialism, as they explicitly declared in an 1863 ‘Democratic Project’ for the new popular army: ‘The nation refuses all war of conquest’.65 In discussing their distinction between state as the exercise of power from above and nation as popular participation from below (Gutiérrez and Ferretti 2020), they claimed that they did no longer want states, that is: ‘Aggregations for the conquest of peoples who are different by attitudes and customs, but nations, that is gatherings of people who are strongly linked by mind and hearth, by tradition and science’.66 Again, Risorgimento was a far cry from colonialist, sovereignist and chauvinistic nationalisms. Another important campaign that showed the NE cosmopolitan, and eventually anti-racist, commitment was that against slavery during the North-American Civil War. Amazingly, the first series of these articles were inspired by the ‘wonderful writings’67 published by Elisée Reclus in the French journal La Revue des Deux Mondes, in which the anarchist geographer, who had witnessed slavery during his sojourn in Louisiana in the 1850s, served as a powerful megaphone of American abolitionists with European readerships (Reclus 2014). The NE editors expressed indignation for the fact that in a country like the USA, whose advanced and federal democracy was considered a model by many republicans, dreadful phenomena like the ‘shameful barbarity’68 of slavery persisted. Outrage for the ‘Black Code’ relegating human beings to the status of mere possessions on racial grounds was merged with even more impressive narrations of tortures and other extra-legal abuses of all kinds against slaves, leading to the early revolts of the Afro-Americans.69 The apparent legal mindset

65 NE, 19 March 1863. Disegno democratico di organizzazione militare. 66 NE, 25 April 1861. L’Italia nel moto dell’umanità, 1. 67 NE, 30 June 1861. Gli Stati Uniti d’America e la guerra civile III. Il codice nero e

gli schiavi, 1. 68 Il codice nero e gli schiavi, 1. 69 Il codice nero e gli schiavi, 1.

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of the author of the ‘Black Code’ series allows hypothesising that there might have been the hand of Montanelli in this text. This would mean that Montanelli was an early Reclus’s reader. In any case, the references to Reclus confirm the great attention that the NE editors paid to international debates and works of the most advanced authors, including the French circuits attended by Reclus in the 1860s, called ‘Red Republicans’ or ‘Democ-Soc’ (Ferretti 2014). While the North-American Civil War was further documented in 1863 by the series of Jessie White Mario’s papers ‘La schiavitù e la Guerra civile negli Stati Uniti d’America’, previously published on Cattaneo’s Politecnico (Furiozzi 2008), NE also celebrated the anniversary of the formal liberation of slaves in the British colonies on 1 August 1834. This was defined as the ‘day of the purest glory in England’s annals’, stressing that this accomplishment was not due to the Crown’s special benevolence, as it was the result of: ‘Fifty years of agitation and struggle’.70 NE fully seized the significance of this emancipation for a great mass of people to whom basic human rights were previously denied, claiming that ‘each one of the 800,000 African slaves could finally say: homo sum’.71 This homo was used as a synonymous with ‘belonging to the human species’ in the famous aphorism of Roman writer Terence, considered as an inspirer of a kind of humanism that is especially understood as humanitarianism. As noted above, this humanitarianism was not incompatible with conflict, including subaltern agency and resistance, given the presence of Italian volunteers fighting in the North-American Civil War on the abolitionist side. Most importantly, NE came to wish the raising of ‘a [Black] Spartacus at the head of the exuberant African race to pass on the oppressors’ bodies and run in Mexico’s aid’.72 While that adjective attached to the ‘African race’ (the original Italian was sfrenata) indicated essentialism and would be inadequate in today’s language, one cannot overlook the exceptionality of such a claim, connecting the cause of Mexico’s independence with that of the freedom of Afro-Americans, and indicating the tradition of slaves’ revolts represented by the figure of Spartacus as the way for both colonial and racial emancipation. Finally, one cannot refrain from noting that the name of Spartacus would be used

70 NE, 2 August 1863. Emancipazione degli schiavi nelle colonie inglesi, 1. 71 Emancipazione degli schiavi nelle colonie inglesi, 1. 72 NE, 23 January 1863. Firenze, 22 gennaio, 1.

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as a symbol of socialist and anarchist movements. All of this shows that the NE’s positionings on several matters that were concurrently addressed by future anarchists such as Reclus on cooperation, anti-colonialism and anti-racism, allows inserting NE into the world of the heterogeneous European progressive movements which were starting to embrace socialism, as the next section further shows.

The ‘Inversion of the Formula’ Between Popular Garibaldianism and Libertarian Socialism When Alberto Mario took over the place of Montanelli as the main NE’s ‘ideologue’ (although this definition should be taken with a certain cautiousness), an important rupture had occurred in the Italian public opinions. In the immediate aftermath of the 1860 Expedition of the Thousand, a significant part of the democratic and republican world had accepted national unification as a result for which the alliance with the Monarchy was something like a necessary sacrifice. Only a few circuits of dissidents, gathered around NE and Politecnico, had continued an intransigent critique of monarchism and centralisation. Yet, in 1862, a Garibaldian expedition that aimed at freeing Rome from the joke of the Pope, starting from Sicily as they did two years before, was stopped by force, in the Calabrian mountains of Aspromonte, by the Savoias’ Army under the responsibility of conservative minister Urbano Rattazzi, provoking a dozen of casualties. Wounded in the battle, Garibaldi was first arrested, with great outrage of the democratic press, and then compelled to return to his voluntary hermitage on the remote island of Caprera. The emotion was huge nationwide, enlarging again the rift between monarchists and republicans and leading many dissidents to join the field that I call ‘popular Garibaldianism’, that is a movement that organised an armed mobilisation for the immediate task of seizing Rome and Veneto, but whose participants represented heterogeneous kinds of radicalism and disappointment with the ruling classes and with the Monarchy. It was no coincidence that most of the animators of the International in Italy would come from these Garibaldian networks. NE enthusiastically documented Garibaldi’s 1862 expedition, and paid this attitude by falling under the lenses of censorship and political repression. Already in 1861, the journal’s proprietor Andrea Marubini had been trialled for ‘press offences to the Sacred Person of the King’, risking a prison term for an article that simply alluded to the indirect benefits

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that the sudden death of Camillo Cavour would have had for strengthening Vittorio Emanuele’s personal power.73 At the process, Marubini was acquitted also thanks to the brilliant defence of a legal team that was personally led by Montanelli, but it was after Aspromonte that the serious problems came. The suppression of the Mazzinian Associazione Emancipatrice by governmental order did not intimidate the NE editors, who significantly wrote that, as they had conspired clandestinely under the Austrians, they were ready to ‘conspire again’74 in the same way under the Savoias. Yet, the harsher blows to the journal were given by the periodic seizures, especially frequent after Aspromonte, which implied heavy economic losses for a newspaper that did not dispose of great funds. Already in October 1862, NE announced that the journal’s price to the public was raised from 5 to 7 cents due to the ongoing ‘difficulties and too frequent seizures’.75 These seizures occurred under the most varied pretexts: an issue was seized for having translated a letter from the French journal Le Temps , which had been regularly approved by the censorship of the Second Empire in France. About that, the NE editors sarcastically noted that: ‘The imitators are always worse than the originals’.76 In March 1863, NE suffered ‘four seizures in six days’, the last one for an article of Garrido proposing a democratic European Federation, which showed internationally that: ‘In Italy, freedom of press is a senseless word’.77 In April 1863, the journal denounced ‘4 seizures in 9 days’,78 of which one concerned the famous paper on the ‘inversion of the formula’ by Alberto Mario. Mario was also charged, again with Marubini, with ‘offenses to the Sacred Person of the King’ for an article in which Mario had refused a candidature to the Parliament as a protest against the Monarchy.79 The accused were acquitted again, and Mario’s incriminated paper was republished the

73 NE, 24 July 1861. Corte d’Assise di Firenze, 1. 74 NE, 21 August 1862. Lo scioglimento dell’Associazione Emancipatrice di Genova,

1. 75 NE, 15 October 1862. [Nota], 1. 76 NE, 11 September 1862. Firenze, 10 settembre, 1. 77 NE, 1 March 1863. Firenze, 28 febbraio, 1. 78 NE, 25 April 1863. Firenze, 24 aprile, 1. 79 NE, 27 April 1863. Firenze, 26 aprile, 1.

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day after in NE, but this did not prevent repression and related pressures that were among the causes of the journal’s closure in the following months. Meanwhile, Marubini passed away and NE had the occasion to recapitulate, in the necrology of that elderly republican and ‘veteran of freedom’, the 38 seizures and the numerous trials that he had endured during his work at the journal from April 1861 to July 1862, saluting this obscure collaborator as someone worthy of taking a place with other ‘wicked perturbators of social order’, which were eventually nothing less than: ‘Socrates and Christ’.80 The inventor of the ‘inversion of the formula’, Alberto Mario was born to a family of aristocratic origin in Lendinara, in a province that remained under Austrian rule until 1866, like the rest of Veneto. Thus, like Martinati and Castellazzo, Mario was an internal exile in the early years of unification. First based in Genoa, from which he was already corresponding with Dolfi and his friends on matters related to the Democratic Society,81 he moved to Florence in Autumn 1862. Mario had his first training as a revolutionary in 1848, when he was a student at the University of Padova (Bagatin 2000). Initially a sympathiser of Neo-Guelphism, he fought as a volunteer in Veneto and Lombardy and, after the definitive defeat of Piedmont and the decline of Neo-Guelphism, he became republican under Mazzini’s inspiration. In Genoa, he met Jessie Meriton White, whom he married and with whom he travelled to England. In 1859–1860 Alberto (not completely followed by Jessie) took distances from Mazzini over the latter’s accommodating attitude towards Vittorio Emanuele’s war and, in Lugano for a while, he met Cattaneo (Bagatin 2000), who exerted a strong influence on his later thought. From that moment, he was identified as a federalist and an intransigent republican—that is, one of those who, after the 1861 unification, consistently refused parliamentary places and all kinds of medals and prizes offered by the Savoias to increase their consensus. A fighter in the Expedition of the Thousand and later in the Garibaldian corps contributing to the 1866 War of Independence, as well as in the 1867 Mentana expedition, Mario acquired special visibility as an NE’s editor. His article of 16 April 1863, ‘The inversion of the formula’, had a

80 NE, 15 July 1863, Firenze, 14 luglio, 4. 81 DM, Fondo Dolfi, E I b 9 1, Mario to Dolfi, 25 November 1861; E I b 9 4, Mario

and Cuneo to Dolfi and Mazzoni, 19 April 1862.

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significant impact on expressing a very clear and synthetic concept. That is, while Mazzini had accepted collaboration with the Monarchy to have unification first, and only later it would have been possible to address the matter of liberty, Mario inverted these priorities: freedom should have been the priority of the democratic movement, to start claiming civil liberties and making the Republic, for Republicans stopping being the (unpaid) auxiliaries of the Savoias. While this idea was nothing new for anybody familiar with works by Cattaneo, Ferrari or Montanelli, Mario’s claims had a shattering effect in the context of the post-Aspromonte unrest of the Italian democratic movement. Obviously, that article strongly disappointed Mazzini, who understood that he was the main target of Mario’s harsh critiques of the royalist excesses of some republicans who had even ‘offered the dictatorship to the King’82 to have unity, substantially betraying the former principles of the Giovine Italia. Mazzini was also concerned as his position was increasingly difficult to defend after the numerous departures of his former acolytes either towards Monarchist collaboration, like most of those who entered the Parliament or towards several forms of radicalisation such as federalism, socialism or even Garibaldianism, considering that Garibaldi’s prestige and effective influence had become definitively superior to Mazzini’s. Also the NE group was ostensibly closer to Garibaldi than to Mazzini. Importantly, Mario’s paper was not something coming out of the blue. Cattaneo’s correspondence shows that Mario had previously discussed this definition with his Milanese mentor. In December 1862, arriving in Tuscany, Mario sent to Cattaneo a document of the Pisa students’ Democratic Association, explaining that: ‘These bright youngsters rebuilt the Association with a programme stating; “liberty first than unity”, as they cannot say overtly that to make Italy one must unmake the Monarchy, and elected you as honorary president. … I beg that you write to them a short letter to accept. A word said by you will encourage them more than hundred words said by others. One term of their programme, the principal, is yours – liberty. There are no monarchist pretexts, there are no ambiguities. Please help them’ (Cattaneo 1956, 610; Mario to Cattaneo, 25 December 1862). This shows that the Cattanean collaboration to NE, although quite discreet as it was limited to the republication of some

82 NE, 16 April 1863. L’inversione della formula, 1.

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series of Cattaneo’s writings on economic matters, was quite relevant, and could be synthesised in a Cattanean motto released by Mario: ‘The people in arms’ means liberty, but is incompatible with the Monarchy, therefore one cannot reach liberty with the Monarchy (Bagatin 2000). Cattaneo’s correspondence of his late years shows that he shared the indignation of the other republicans after Aspromonte. As he wrote to physician Carlo Matteucci, then a member of parliament in Turin, one could now claim publicly that the Savoias were even worse than the Austrians: ‘From 1814 to 1847, I had never seen the bayonets in the people’s chests’ (Cattaneo 1956, 73; Cattaneo to Matteucci, September 1862). In these difficult months, Cattaneo wrote to Mario, then in Florence, inquiring with a somehow concerned tone on whether Alberto and Jessie would have been allowed to remain there, and whether repression ‘would spare the press’ (Cattaneo 1956, 117; Cattaneo to Mario, January 1863). He also expressed his affection for the Mario couple requesting anxiously their news through common acquaintances during the Mentana expedition (Cattaneo 1956, 639; Nathan to WoodcockCattaneo, November 1867). Additionally, Cattaneo was also concerned for the fates of NE, of which he was not very enthusiastic in its early months but that he increasingly praised as the journal radicalised its positions. Cattaneo’s letters also give an idea of how prominent Mario was becoming, at least in Cattaneo’s mind, as an exponent of federalism. In December 1863, after a political crisis that saw a wave of resignments of republican members from the Parliament (including Saffi, Garibaldi and Bertani), Cattaneo wrote a letter to Bertani in which he benevolently teased him: ‘We will make you sit at the right hand of Alberto Mario; if I survive for some time, I am sure that I will see you all die federalists like Guglielmo Tell’ (Cattaneo 1956, 186; Cattaneo to Bertani, 20 December 1863). That ‘we’, indicates that, even after unification, the federalists perceived to be something like an active ‘party’, although it was not always visible as such. In friendly terms with Dolfi and Mazzoni, whom he defined ‘friends of liberty’ (Cattaneo 1956, 390; Cattaneo to Mario, December 1865), Cattaneo also corresponded with other members of the Florentine circuit around the matter of the workers’ associations. In a letter to Martinati, he suggested focusing on ‘savings, mutual aid and teaching’ (Cattaneo 1956, 197; Cattaneo to Martinati, 20 March 1864) as the pillars of workers’ associationism, and jokingly argued that artisans’ associations should

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‘simplify that interminable hierarchy (of art masters, Grand Masters and similar)’ and to consider also ‘agricultural classes, almost forgotten hitherto’ (Cattaneo 1956, 231; Cattaneo to Stampa, 9 May 1864). As for Mario, another point on which Cattaneo had a special feeling with him was secularism and anticlericalism, given their shared atheist and materialist sensitivities, something that distinguished them from Mazzini’s mysticism and ambiguous religiosity. In 1864, in a letter to Mazzinian leader Maurizio Quadrio, Cattaneo reiterated that Politecnico was not a merely scholarly journal but a militant endeavour. In the years in which all republicans expected some Garibaldi’s exploit to end with the Pope’s temporal power in Rome, Cattaneo contended that: ‘The war of science against supernaturalism is the war against the Pope’ (Cattaneo 1956, 259; Cattaneo to Quadrio, 28 August 1864). Mario matched these views embracing overtly the classical themes of anticlericalism, which included writing the history of the martyrs of free thought. For Mario, they were Giordano Bruno, who first challenged resolutely what Mario called ‘the catholic synthesis’ (Mario 1860, 24) stating the ‘equality of the earth and the heavens’ (Mario 1860, 26), Tommaso Campanella, whose project Mario deemed essentially patriotic, and Galileo who divorced definitively science from the Church. Perusing the history of the martyrs of the Inquisition, Mario found that ideas from Venetian dissident priest Paolo Sarpi supported the right of individual dissidence and resistance. In radical republican terms, following principles of civic virtue, the right of resistance is also a duty, when the power in place is wrong, corrupt or abusive. ‘The Pope is not God … Resistance to the misuse of the Supreme Keys is mandatory … passively accepting excommunication is … silly fear’ (Mario 1860, 67). Freeing thinking from dogmas, religions and metaphysics through science and rationality was therefore a common goal of Cattaneo and Mario. The two men also shared another especially controversial opinion. Unlike Ferrari, Rosa, Montanelli, Mazzoni, Pisacane and many other Risorgimento radicals and federalists, Cattaneo and Mario, although very interested in matters of social justice, refused to adopt the label of ‘socialists’ and the very principle of class struggle, as discussed above about Cattaneo. While this latter died in 1869, before the trauma of the Paris Commune which entailed a major breakup between Mazzinian and socialist-internationalist circuits, and therefore nobody can say what would have been his positioning there, Mario was still active in the 1870s. At that moment, he resolutely styled himself as an adversary of

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the International, criticising the Commune and the ‘exaggerations’ of Bakunin (who likewise developed a certain antipathy towards Mario in his Florence years). Yet, for both Mario and Cattaneo, this did not mean aversion to broad socialistic principles such as the need for a social organisation that got rid of poverty: Mario argued that, much more than the International, it would be through education and cooperative movements that one would come ‘to the triumph of socialism’ (Bagatin 2000, 221), which looks more like the declaration of a friend of socialism than of an adversary. Active until the early 1880s, Mario had also another generational advantage (although not a big privilege) in relation to Cattaneo, as he could witness the early political debates on the incipient Italian imperialism and the talks that the government had with France on Tunisia. Mario’s critiques can likewise be deemed anticolonial as he argued, in 1881, that Tunisia should have been ‘neither with France nor with Italy’ (Bagatin 2000, 315). This statement followed consistently Cattaneo’s positions of the 1860s, when the Lombard thinker started to oppose preventively the colonial appetites of the newly unified Italian state, responding to the journal Il Diritto, whose editors wondered whether the naval fleet would have obtained ‘some colony’ to Italy. ‘For God’s sake, don’t second the idea, disgracefully already alive, to find a Cayenne for burying there the agitated elements [i.e. the political dissidents]. Rather than threatening … peace, shall the fleet organise the merchant navy as the surest ground and school for [our] maritime defence … The sea cannot be a French or Italian lake’ (Cattaneo 1956, 434; Cattaneo to Il Diritto). While I have already discussed the grounds of Cattaneo’s cosmopolitanism and antimilitarism, it is worth noting his intuition about the potential danger of the colonies as a place to be used for political repression, sending their dissidents and prisoners on the French and English model. In the Florentine circuits, one of the places for the growing radicalisation of political debates was the aforementioned Florence Democratic Society. Substantially led by Mazzoni and Dolfi and regularly participated by Martinati, Castellazzo, Lo Savio, Mario and the other NE editors, this association was strictly connected to the journal, that regularly published the minutes of its meetings. With hundreds of formal members and a basin of influence of some thousands of people, the Democratic Society was arguably one of the strongest political associations in Tuscany in the 1860s, having as one of its local competitors one

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Mazzinian (and less radical) ‘Unitary Society’ (Adilardi 2016, 29) which seemed to have much less impact and volume of activities. The originality of the Democratic Society was its secular and almost-libertarian intransigence on some principles. For instance, while most democratic and artisan societies elected almost-deified figures such as Garibaldi as their honorary president, the Florence society refused this honour to either Garibaldi or Mazzini arguing publicly that the democratic movement should ‘stop making idols with persons or names’.83 If any, a bit of veneration was just granted to the figure of Montanelli after his premature passing, which raised a strong emotion among society members, who saluted him ‘as a meritorious supporter of freedom and science’.84 Noteworthily, these notions were mentioned well before Mario’s famous article. Reading the society’s Programme, which according to Adami was substantially redacted by Mazzoni, one finds proclamations for individual and public freedom that went even beyond mere principles of nondomination. ‘Our motto is freedom in everything and for everybody. Or, otherwise said, as for the moral order we do not admit any sanctions other than those of [individual] conscience, as for political, civil and economic order no authority outside justice and right’. The ‘sole true form of government’ that the Society admitted was the ‘Democratic’,85 and we already know that, under the control that the Kingdom of Italy exerted on the subversive press, this seemingly moderate statement was already risky. The 21 points of the society’s programme were published on the first page of NE in May 1863: although a bit less ‘socialistic’, most of these points directly recalled the democratic programme that was presented by Montanelli in 1851. Among the most qualified points one shall mention: ‘1. No religion is recognized by the state. 2. Seizure of the patrimonies of all Churches. 3. The expression of thought … is not subject to any special law [like] meetings and associations… 5. Inviolability of the person and of the domicile … 6. Abolition of death penalty. 7. Freedom of teaching. 8. Free and mandatory education … 9. Gradual abolition of the permanent army; permanent militia on Switzerland’s example. 10. Prohibition for the government to interfere with municipal and departmental affairs. 11.

83 NE, 25 April 1862. Associazione democratica, 2. 84 NE, 6 July 1862. Associazione democratica, 3. 85 NE, 28 August 1863. Società Democratica di Firenze, 1.

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Universal suffrage for all kinds of elections. … 13. People’s representatives are always accountable before their electors, and their mandates revokable … 14. Ministerial responsibility is clearly established through penal sanctions. 15. Magistrates are elective… 17. No longer titles of nobility. 18. Only one direct and proportional tax over any kind of income. … 20 Reduction of unproductive expenses. 21. Public assistance and right distribution of work are promoted by sensible economic laws’.86 While the ‘social’ points of this programme still looked quite shy, it is worth noting that some matters of radical democracy that were raised there, such as the secularity of the republic or the revocability and accountability of elected people still seem far to be accomplished in today Italy. Moreover, the point prohibiting all statal interferences in communal and regional affairs was a strong federalist statement, which is significant because the Florence Democratic Society did not attract much scholarly attention as a federalist group hitherto. Yet, to understand the context and further developments of this circuit, it is necessary to have a look at the networks of Tuscan democracy in the 1860s, on which a key source is the Dolfi Archive held at the Domus Mazziniana in Pisa, a very huge collection that still remains partially unexplored. This collection first accounts for the organisational roles that Dolfi played in supporting NE, fostering popular Garibaldianism and helping political refugees in Florence. Among them, one of the earliest Dolfi’s collaborators over Garibaldian endeavours was Antonio Martinati (1823–1899). A Venetian teacher interested in Pedagogy and in the Classics, he fought with the Vicenza volunteers in 1848 and escaped then in Tuscany, where he was imprisoned for most of the 1850s due to his conspiration work (Adilardi 2016). In 1860, he had organisational responsibilities with the Castel Pucci brigade, a battalion of Tuscan Garibaldians who had to help the Expedition of the Thousand by attacking the Papal State from the Northern side, given that Garibaldi’s target in 1860 was notoriously Rome. This was only one of the fronts on which Dolfi’s networks were mobilised to materially help Garibaldi, as shown by Dolfi’s direct involvement in providing material for a further expedition from Tuscany lead by

86 NE, 28 5 63. Società Democratica di Firenze, 1.

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Vincenzo Malenchini,87 that joined the main expedition also embarking international volunteers such as Meˇcnikov (2011). Initially supported by Baron Ricasoli, the Castel Pucci project was stopped by the intervention of the Turin government, which also intervened to stop Garibaldi between Naples and Rome. At the Tuscan level, this provoked a great disappointment with the Monarchy and the local aristocrats among Dolfi’s fellows (Ralli 1991), and inaugurated a leitmotif of popular Garibaldianism for all the 1860s: the conviction that the Savoias were unwilling to ‘free’ Rome and Venice and that a popular militia should have been organised to finish the job without the official army. As Jessie White told in her recollections on Dolfi, the Florentine democrats were always ‘ready to all events’ (White Mario 1899, 14) to invade the Papal State. All along the 1860s, Dolfi and his friends continued to see in these organisational activities a way to build new popular sovereignty from below (Balzani 2019). As Martinati’s letters to Dolfi show, the Florence Comitato di Provvedimento (local support committee) had strongly invested in the Castel Pucci attempt and was entitled to the restitution of money and materials.88 In November and December 1860, Martinati was also sent to Caserta to arrange financial businesses with Garibaldi. From Southern Italy, Martinati expressed again to Dolfi his disappointment for the end of the war operations and the departure of Garibaldi, after which the Italian army took the control of the situation and militias’ operations were no longer possible.89 Back to Florence, Martinati took the NE’s editorship, which represented his main source of revenue in this period. His successive correspondences with Dolfi stated the harsh living conditions of the ‘internal exiles’ based in Tuscany and showed how numerous were the ex-Garibaldians who contacted Dolfi through Martinati, to receive some subsidy.90 Among them Nicolò Lo Savio (1834–1911), an economist from Bari who lived then in Florence and was a close collaborator of the NE group, used to write to Dolfi complaining about the true misery in 87 DM, Fondo Dolfi, E I a 34 1, Malenchini to Dolfi, 8 June 1860; E I a 34 2, Malenchini to Dolfi and Tommasoni, 8 June 1860. 88 DM, Fondo Dolfi, D V c 2 7, Martinati to Comitato di Provvedimento, 3 March 1861; E I b 17 3, Martinati to Comitato di Provvedimento, 4 August 1860. 89 DM, Fondo Dolfi, E I b 17 8, Martinati to Dolfi, 29 November 1860. 90 DM, Fondo Dolfi, I b 17 21, Martinati to Dolfi, 9 September 1861; I b 17 46

Martinati to Dolfi, 17 March 1865.

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which he lived,91 a condition that he would only resolve in the following years thanks to a university appointment (Monsagrati 2006). What is significant about this survivors’ networking is that, despite the triumphal royalist propaganda that followed unification and the celebrations that were taking place at each anniversary, these Garibaldian fighters perceived themselves as being rather the losers than the winners of their own cause. Martinati was very active in both the Democratic Society and the Artisan Brotherhood, that he also represented in national meetings such as the assembly of workers’ societies held in Genoa in March 1862, where he had the mandate to contend that ‘politics is not extraneous’92 to workers’ mutualism. In 1864, Martinati directed the short-lived newspaper Il Progresso. Giornale Politico, tried for a few months to continue NE after its closure. After Dolfi’s death, Martinati, Piccini and other former members of the Artisan Brotherhood, founded the Società Democratica Internazionale in 1870 (Conti 1950b, 116), which was the prelude to the Fascio Operaio and to the Federazione Operaia Toscana which ‘supported the Bakuninist Jura Federation’ (Adilardi 2016, 192). Indeed, this was the Florentine section of the International (Musarra 2004), of which Martinati and Castellazzo were members for some years. Up to the 1870s, Martinati’s experience exemplified the classical steps of many Risorgimento fighters who, disappointed with monarchist unification, passed through popular Garibaldianism and then joined, at least for a while, the ranks of libertarian socialism—or of intransigent republicanism as I discuss below. The correspondence between Dolfi and Mazzoni can shed further light on the dilemmas that Dolfi had to face in 1859–1860. Already in late May 1860, much more disenchanted than Dolfi on the real perspectives of the Expedition of the Thousand, Mazzoni warned his Florentine friend over the dangers of collaborating with the monarchists: ‘Saying that Garibaldi fights for the cause of Italy’s freedom and unity, does not exclude that unity and liberty could be accommodated … to the whim of a monarch’.93 Mazzoni noted some Dolfi’s naivety in making his alliances: ‘As you decided to get allied with the malve [‘mallows’ was the despising term with which Risorgimento radicals indicated the

91 DM, Fondo Dolfi, E I a 17 3, 17 4, Lo Savio to Dolfi, nd. 92 NE, 30 March 1862. A. Martinati. Relazione intorno all’assemblea di Genova, 2. 93 DM, Fondo Dolfi D V c 18, Mazzoni to Dolfi, 26 May 1860.

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moderates], either you manage to obtain something now, either you send them to the hospital and resume immediately and seamlessly the job with other people’.94 Mazzoni perceived the distance between the political manoeuvres of the aristocrats and the people, who need: ‘Clear words and consistent facts’.95 In another letter, Mazzoni alerted again Dolfi on the ‘Lafarinian intrigues’, referring to Giuseppe La Farina, one of the ‘ex-republicans who embraced filo-Savoia positions’ (Banti 2004, 103), and on the risks that Dolfi could be instrumentalised and then marginalised after that he did ‘what the malve want’.96 Mazzoni’s was a quite lucid analysis of the opportunism of the Piedmontese leaders, who tried to seem extraneous to Garibaldi’s expedition when this did not match their interests before international diplomacies but exploited it for their aims. Mazzoni’s suggestion to not return Ricasoli’s money for the rifles of Castel Pucci seemed to have laid the ground for the creation, in Tuscany and other parts of Italy, of clandestine arsenals to continue the work that Vittorio Emanuele II did not want Garibaldi to finish. In any case, the Florentine baker strongly trusted the Prato lawyer and constantly consulted him asking for advice on what to do, whether it was on how to manage the funds that they collected for Garibaldi,97 or about NE business on behalf of Martinati and Castellazzo.98 He often requested Mazzoni to come urgently to Florence for discussing businesses that could not be dealt with by letter. After Aspromonte, Mazzoni wrote to Dolfi that, between the republicans and the monarchist government there could not be any other relations ‘than those that exist between two adversaries in the battlefield, armed the one against the other’.99 This position was evidently embraced by Dolfi, who wrote in NE explaining how ‘we have been cheated by the union with Piedmont’,100 signing an editorial as GDF (arguably ‘Giuseppe Dolfi Fornaio’). Celebrating the anniversary of Aspromonte, NE explained once more how those events 94 DM, Fondo Dolfi D V c 18, Mazzoni to Dolfi, 26 May 1860. 95 DM, Fondo Dolfi D V c 18, Mazzoni to Dolfi, 26 May 1860. 96 DM, Fondo Dolfi, D V c 17, Mazzoni to Dolfi [1860]. 97 FGM, Dolfi to Mazzoni, 24 November 1860. 98 FGM, Dolfi to Mazzoni, 3 November 1861. 99 DM, Fondo Dolfi, I b 42 10, Mazzoni to Dolfi, 7 February 1863. 100 NE, 1 January 1863. 1862–1863, 1.

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had: ‘Cancelled the last surviving line of the pact that tied us to the Monarchy: we … raise again the old republican flag’.101 This disappointment was well exemplified by a letter that Mario sent to Dolfi from Ferrara, on the shores of the Po River which marked the frontier with occupied Veneto. The Venetian federalist complained sarcastically that the Italian police: ‘Watches and spies me at each step as I had an army of volunteers to be launched on the other side of the Po. If I had, be sure I would launch them against another enemy, although more galantuomo of the one who is beyond the Po’.102 Mario evidently referred to one of the nicknames of Vittorio Emanuele II (re galantuomo) exemplifying how, for republicans, the first enemy was then the Italian Monarchy. Within the republican field, NE argued that: ‘In Aspromonte, the Partito d’Azione is dead as such’.103 Being this ‘Party’ identified with Mazzini, this also meant taking again distances from unification ‘formulas’. Furthermore, as Mazzoni wrote to Dolfi in 1864, the issue was not limited to monarchist unification, as the movement needed more social radicality and contact with the popular masses. ‘The Action Party ended as it had to end: powerlessly. [We] must become the Revolution Party’.104 Bakunin was already in Tuscany since some months. Yet, hopes that Garibaldi could storm Rome continued to exert popular attraction, and the organisation of volunteers was a way for keeping alive ideas on the ‘nation in arms’ among republicans. After the end of the NE publications, the Florentine Democratic Society published a short-lived ‘clandestine journal Roma o Morte’,105 timely recorded by the police sources, showing that Tuscan republicans were not afraid of fulfilling their promise to also conspire under the Savoias’ Monarchy. They did so for the entire decade of the 1860s collecting weapons for Garibaldi, an endeavour that, for a while, also seemed to include Mazzini, discussing with Dolfi matters such as ‘buying Enfields and Swiss carabines of the latest model’ (Conti 1949, 168; Mazzini to Dolfi, 28 September 1861). The publication of Garibaldi’s epistolary has further demonstrated

101 NE, 28 August 1863. Aspromonte, 1. 102 DM, Fondo Dolfi, E I b 9 43 Mario to Dolfi, 20 May 1864. 103 NE, 28 August 1863. Aspromonte, 1. 104 DM, Fondo Dolfi, E I b 42 15 Mazzoni to Dolfi, 14 July 1864. 105 ASF, Filza 21, 29 October 1863.

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what appeared already clear by perusing Dolfi’s archives, that is Dolfi was basically responsible of the Garibaldian arsenals in Tuscany. This was a role of national importance given the geographical proximity between Florence and the main Roman target. Moreover, given his strong popularity and the local ‘counter-power’ dynamics mentioned above, Dolfi could store arms with fewer risks than others, based in other parts of Italy. In 1862, in the weeks that preceded the ‘Sarnico facts’, Garibaldi wrote to Dolfi requesting that he delivered to the carrier of the letter: ‘My rifles that were stored with you’ (Garibaldi 1986, 78; Garibaldi to Dolfi, 26 April 1862). A village in the Lombard Alps close to Trentino, a region that was still occupied by the Austrians, Sarnico was the place for a sort of prelude to Aspromonte, as Garibaldi organised a brigade of volunteers to be infiltrated in the occupied territory using the classic Garibaldian tactics of mountain guerrilla to try to make the Italian people insurge in Trentino. This attempt was stopped by Italian authorities, and during the public protests that followed in Brescia there were some casualties, provoking a wave of emotion that started to exacerbate democratic public opinion, a few months before Aspromonte. Garibaldi’s letters show that in the summer of 1862, when he moved to Sicily to prepare his new expedition, he remained constantly in touch with Dolfi who helped the General, including sending Tuscan volunteers to join the expedition, such as Livorno republican sailor Jacopo Sgarallino (Garibaldi 1986, 194; 24 August 1862, Garibaldi to Dolfi). Form Genoa, Mario and other Garibaldians who had remained there to provide logistic support sent numerous instructions to Dolfi about ‘shipping arms to the Papal State’106 revealing that, like two years before, Dolfi was expected to organise columns to attack Rome from the North while Garibaldi advanced from the South. In this plan, Luigi (Bigio) Castellazzo had a precise role ‘in making the provinces insurge’107 when the attack was launched. Yet, while Mario wrote on 22 August that they had still to make decisions on ‘the Tuscan columns’ and on ‘sending your revolvers for Rome’,108 a few days later Garibaldi was stopped in Aspromonte, and

106 DM, Fondo Dolfi, E I b 9 14, Mario, Cuneo and Mosto to Dolfi, 7 June 1862. 107 DM, Fondo Dolfi, E I b 9 33, Mario, Bertani and Sacchi to Dolfi, 23 August

1862. 108 DM, Fondo Dolfi, E I b 9 30, Mario to Dolfi, 22 August [1862].

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therefore the ‘Tuscan’ plan cannot start due to the nationwide governmental repression. After the Aspromonte clash, it was Sgarallino that organised the transport of the wounded general to Pisa, where he had his surgery and was assisted financially by Sgarallino (Garibaldi 1991, 17; Garibaldi to Sgarallino, 18 January 1863) and Dolfi (White Mario 1899), before leaving again to Caprera. It is very significant that in a so delicate moment, the safe place where Garibaldi chose to be healed was close to his Tuscan friends rather than in other republican strongholds such as Genoa. The logistic stronghold of Garibaldi’s own organisation was clearly with Dolfi and his local circuits in those years. In 1863, Garibaldi supported the NE campaign for Poland and sent to Dolfi one Sigismondo Serneski asking that the Tuscan leader ‘put at his disposition all the arms that you can’ (Garibaldi 1991, 72; Garibaldi to Dolfi, 30 April 1863) to return the favour that Polish fighters had made to the Italian cause. In the same year, intense discussions took place on ‘projects’ (Garibaldi 1991, 112; Garibaldi to Dolfi, 7 July 1863) for buying arms. In September, Garibaldi sent one Nicolini to Dolfi with ‘860 rifles that you will keep at my disposition’ (Garibaldi 1991, 139; Garibaldi to Dolfi, 1 September 1863), as it had been announced by Mario during the summer.109 In October, Garibaldi recommended that Dolfi kept ‘the weapons in Florence, where it will not be difficult for you to find a safe place, inside or outside the city, to hide them’ (Garibaldi 1991, 159; Garibaldi to Dolfi, 1 October 1863). As I discuss below in relation to the 1870 ‘republican gangs’, it was quite amazing that, in the 1860s, Italian republicans formed what had all the characteristics of a clandestine armed organisation (that today would be called ‘terroristic’), and state repression was limited to intervene in some specific cases to stop the ‘attempts’ in the field, although everybody was arguably aware of that organisation. Given the popular unrest, they seemingly considered too risky to intervene against popular figures: the government could afford to censor some issues of NE, but could not arrest people like Dolfi without provoking riots. In the following years, sustained exchanges continued to take place between Florence and Caprera, as Dolfi received weapons from Garibaldi and sent amazingly in exchange his renowned Tuscan wine (Garibaldi 1997, 27; Garibaldi to Dolfi, 14 February 1865), ‘gooses and ducks’

109 DM, Fondo Dolfi, E I b 9 39, Mario to Dolfi, 31 July 1863.

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(Garibaldi 1991, 125; Garibaldi to Dolfi, 4 August 1863), and ‘excellent cigars’ (Garibaldi 2008, 143; Garibaldi to Dolfi, 29 December 1868). Yet, relaxation was reserved for short periods, and Dolfi’s precious logistic help was requested by Garibaldi again and again. On the occasion of the 1866 ‘Third War of Independence’, Dolfi had to steer volunteers to the ‘recruitment commission’ (Garibaldi 2002, 33; Garibaldi to Dolfi, 15 May 1866). At the end of that war, in October 1866, consistently with their internationalist premises, the two men agreed to send ‘the weapons that [Dolfi] had at disposition’ (Garibaldi 2002, 259; Garibaldi to Dolfi, 17 October 1866), to Candia via Livorno (arguably with the help of the Sgarallino brothers) in solidarity with the anti-Turkish rebellion, being the Greek cause equally important in Risorgimento imaginaries. The latest of the Garibaldian expeditions against the Papal State, in 1867, started in Tuscany, and again Dolfi’s role was central, including details such ‘buying the red shirts’ (Garibaldi 2008, 126; Garibaldi to Mario, 9 July 1867) for some hundreds of volunteers, that Mario took from Dolfi and brought directly to the village of Vinci where Garibaldi had established his base. This time, it was the French army that stopped the Garibaldians, with heavier losses than in Aspromonte, that is something like 150 casualties and more than 1000 prisoners on the democrats’ side, including Castellazzo, very close to both Garibaldi and Dolfi. Like Martinati, Luigi Castellazzo fought as a volunteer in 1848, and then he went to Rome to defend the Roman Republic in 1849. Imprisoned by the French first and then by the Austrians in 1852, under torture he revealed to them information on conspirations of which he was part that, for some historians, had compromised some members of his group, the so-called Martiri di Belfiore, who was hanged by order of Radetzky. While this fact was at the centre of a never completely resolved historiographic case, Castellazzo was always defended by influent people like Garibaldi, Bertani and the Marios from the suspect of betrayal (Scirocco 1978; Bono 1956). Nevertheless, that story resurfaced until the latest stages of Castellazzo’s career, as is also shown by the archives of Angelo Umiltà that I analyse below. Castellazzo likewise fought as an officer in the Expedition of the Thousand and joined the NE editorial committee in Florence in 1861. The author of historical novels with the pseudonym of Anselmo Rivalta and the co-president, together with Lo Savio, of the committee for

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providing material support to the Polish insurrection,110 Castellazzo was very close to Dolfi and married his daughter Serafina. His correspondence with the Florentine baker surviving at the Domus Mazziniana accounts for the early radicalisation of his ideas. In 1864, he wrote from Genoa that he had refused to collaborate with the Mazzinian journal Il Dovere as he ‘could not condescend to the ideas of these wimps’,111 requesting a journal’s issue, that had been seized, in which Mazzoni ‘confuted the programme of the [moderate] Società Costituzionale’.112 Castellazzo took part in the nationwide organisation of insurrectional attempts. In 1864, he asked Dolfi if he had any information on a group that ‘has already started to fight in Friuli’ arguing that, for any event, he was already coordinating ‘a certain number of volunteers’.113 He also informed Dolfi about a contact he had with an Orvieto committee which could have been useful ‘for further operations’ towards Rome.114 With Martinati, he likewise contributed to support the Greek insurrection of 1864, hoping that ‘Greek democracy finds help in Italian democracy’ rather than in Napoleon III,115 and participated in the 1866 war with the Garibaldian volunteers. When Castellazzo was imprisoned in Rome in 1867, Garibaldi and Dolfi often corresponded about his fates, barely consoled by the fact that ‘he was still alive, but with the life of a prisoner of the priests’ (Garibaldi 2008, 152; Garibaldi to Dolfi, 19 January 1869). Not very enthusiastic of the capture of Rome in September 1870 by the Savoias’ Army after that he was repeatedly denied that honour, Garibaldi could salute on that occasion the liberation of Castellazzo (Garibaldi 2009, 146; Garibaldi to Castellazzo, 4 October 1870). Immediately after his liberation, Castellazzo joined the Garibaldian volunteers fighting in the Franche-Comté to defend the French republic (Bizzoni 1871), being wounded in Dole. After the Paris Commune, he joined the field of anarchist socialism of which he was a propagandist in the 1870s (Conti 1950b; Masini 1978). Later, his attitude in favour

110 DM, Fondo Dolfi, D V b 17 4 Castellazzo and Lo Savio to Dolfi, 24 February

1863. 111 DM, Fondo Dolfi, D V b 112 DM, Fondo Dolfi, D V b 113 DM, Fondo Dolfi, D V b 114 DM, Fondo Dolfi, D V b

17 5, Castellazzo to Dolfi, 9 August 1864. 17 6, Castellazzo to Dolfi, 24 August 1864. 17 8, Castellazzo to Dolfi, 25 October 1864. 17 9, Castellazzo to Dolfi, 17 November 1864.

115 DM, Fondo Dolfi, D V b 17 7, Castellazzo to Martinati, 28 October 1864.

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of an agreement between republicans and socialists of different tendencies (shared by other Bakuninian internationalists such as Celso Ceretti), and his adhesion to the Freemasonry pushed him towards more moderate positions and he even entered the Parliament in the 1880s. Finally, Castellazzo’s experience was one of the best examples of the porosity and interchangeability between federalist and radical republicanism, popular Garibaldianism and libertarian socialism that characterised the second half of the nineteenth century and that inevitably complicates easy narrations of Risorgimento as mere unity or independence, as well as too rigid political classifications of its actors. In Tuscany, other examples of this porosity were the lives and works of the aforementioned brothers Andrea (1819–1887), Jacopo (1823– 1879) and Pasquale Sgarallino (1834–1912). Sailors and artisans from a proletarian Livorno family, took soon a republican political consciousness, and Jacopo was already arrested several times before 1848 when Andrea fought as a volunteer in Lombardy. The two elder brothers participated in the Livorno republican brigades that supported the Tuscan triumvirate in Florence in 1849, and when the Austrians invaded Tuscany to restore Leopoldo’s regime, all three of them participated in the extreme attempt of the subversive city to organise resistance (Petrizzo 2018). After a decade of exile, Andrea and Jacopo served as Garibaldi’s officers in the Expedition of the Thousand, and in the 1860s they acted as liaison officers for Garibaldi in Caprera, where confidential correspondence could be shipped by ‘dropping letters to Andrea Sgarallino, in Livorno, all Tuesdays,116 as Massa Marittima Garibaldian fighter Apollonio Apolloni wrote to Dolfi. This latter had some common business with the elder of the Sgarallinos for disembarking some not better described ‘tobacco’ (maybe again weapons) in Livorno.117 These networks committed to shipping arms to insurgent Poland through the all-Mediterranean networks of Jacopo, who had lived in Constantinople in previous years. In his recollections on his stay in Florence, Meˇcnikov told an amazing anecdote on his 1864 journey on a boat sailing from Livorno to Caprera. There, the Russian émigré believed to be in a secret mission that was only known by Garibaldi and Bakunin, when he was approached by someone speaking ‘with the strong accent of the Livorno neighbourhood which

116 DM, Fondo Dolfi, D IV d 21 73, Apolloni to Dolfi, 24 March 1864. 117 DM, Fondo Dolfi, E II a 16 1, Andrea Sgarallino to Dolfi, 3 December 1868.

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is called Venezia, inhabited by sailors and dockers’ (Metchnikoff 1898, 599), who told him that he knew that Meˇcnikov was a ‘Polish agent’ and introduced himself as [probably Pasquale] Sgarallino, whom Meˇcnikov knew by reputation as someone who was famous as a ‘brave sailor and a clever man’ (Metchnikoff 1898, 600). Quite disappointed that this man already knew more details of the plan than him, Meˇcnikov could anyway appreciate how the Mediterranean networks of Garibaldi were organised around people like the Sgarallinos, who were finally the effective leaders of that expedition. Some NE’s short articles also reveal that Jacopo Sgarallino was locally active in the Livorno Artisan Brotherhood, of which he had been vicepresident,118 and that someone of this family participated in the NE fundraising for erecting a Montanelli’s statue.119 Committed anew to the Garibaldian expeditions in the 1866 war, when Andrea and Jacopo commanded a warship on the Garda Lake, and in the 1867 Mentana affair, when Pasquale was wounded (Garibaldi 2008, 266), the Sgarallinos followed the same steps in political radicalisation as Martinati and Castellazzo. At the creation of the earliest Tuscan sections of the International, Jacopo became a member for some years. Out of his reputation as a man of action, Jacopo was implied in the process for an attack that someone had made in 1869 against general Franz von Crenneville and Nicola Inghirami, responsible for the repression of the 1850s, who were both stabbed—Inghirami to death (Paolini 2012). Imprisoned before being acquitted in the process, Jacopo received the active solidarity of Garibaldi, who strongly campaigned in his favour, even offering himself as a hostage in exchange for Jacopo’s liberation (Garibaldi 2009, 43; Garibaldi to Andrea Sgarallino, 14 February 1870). In the 1870s, when Jacopo Sgarallino, after the anarchist period, went to fight with the Garibaldian volunteers in Bosnia, Andrea remained in Livorno where he was the local reference for radical democracy. Surviving at the Central Museum of Risorgimento in Rome, his correspondence with former Garibaldian commander in France, republican and Freemason Timoteo Riboli accounts for Sgarallino’s commitment to support financially the publication of Mazzini’s works by finding subscribers in Tuscany, with the generous commitment of his entire family. While the

118 NE, 24 January 1862. Fratellanza Artigiana d’Italia, Comune di Livorno, 3–4. 119 NE, 6 January 1863. Monumento al Professore Giuseppe Montanelli, 1.

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chief editor Riboli was very satisfied with this work, sending congratulations such as ‘bravo, bravissimo, my dear Sgarallino’,120 this epistolary exchange confirms two important points of popular Garibaldianism, that will be inherited quite seamlessly by the Internationalists. First, is the importance of publishing books for popular diffusion and public education. Second, the intransigent attitudes (sometimes with some aristocratic accent), which were inspired by ideas of civic virtue, towards those who were considered opportunists, or potential betrayers. For instance, Sgarallino recommended Riboli not to send anything to one Becchi, from Pisa, whom he considered ‘unworthy’, being one of the ‘many intrigants who talk a lot and do nothing’.121 Another amazing example of Tuscan popular and radical Garibaldianism was the experience of Apollonio Apolloni (1831–1905) from Massa Marittima, in Southern Tuscany, not far from the future anarchosyndicalist stronghold of Piombino, from the mythic Maremma and from the hot border between Tuscany and the Papal State. Although not actually a proletarian, as he was a medical doctor, Apolloni represented well the popular vein of his region in fighting staunchly and intransigently for an idea, and the generation of those who were disappointed by new monarchist Italy. In his recollections, Meˇcnikov recounted his visit to Massa Marittima in May 1862, when he interviewed Apolloni for the Russian journal to which he was sending correspondences from Tuscany. Already acquainted with Apolloni and with most of his local friends as they had fought together in Capua in 1860, the Russian exile explained how people in Massa were very proud that, in 1849, Garibaldi had found hospitality there during his escape from Rome. According to them, in the 1860 Garibaldian army, there were: ‘More Massetani than Livornesi despite the population of Massa does not reach 1,500 people’ (Meˇcnikov 2011, 52). While it is not clear how this unlikely statistic was calculated, it well reflected some traditional (and generally joking and benevolent) Tuscan municipal rivalry. With a certain narrative talent, Meˇcnikov staged the scene of his meeting with Apolloni and the other 1860 survivors, in a local pub that had weak lighting but was opportunely provided with a fiasco of red wine and with cheese to celebrate a ‘resurrected dead’ by singing the

120 MCRR, 181, Riboli to Sgarallino, 7 January 1874. 121 MCRR, 181, Sgarallino to Riboli, 24 October 1873.

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‘Garibaldi anthem’ whose first lines exactly evoked that theme (Meˇcnikov had been seriously wounded in the Volturno battle and someone believed that he was really dead). The matter of the conversation were the rumours that Garibaldi was gathering volunteers to attack the Alpine border, and the impatience of disquiet local youth, as everybody complained about the lack of information and asked to be called to action. Apolloni, who evidently played the role of a senior leader despite he was little more than thirty, had to resort: ‘To all of his magniloquence trying to convince them to wait patiently … until one will know something definitive’ (Meˇcnikov 2011, 54). At that same moment, according to Meˇcnikov, Apolloni’s assistant entered the room bringing a message ‘from Florence, by one of the most famous capipopolo [needless to say, it was Dolfi]’ (Meˇcnikov 2011, 54), informing of the Sarnico facts, and of the defeat of that Garibaldian attempt. In the light of this anecdote, one can better understand the epistolary exchanges between Apolloni and Dolfi, especially some 1862 letters written by the Massa doctor in quite anxious and emotional tones. In August 1862, he expressed his concerns about the lack of instructions that he received about the requests of local youngsters who wanted to go fighting with Garibaldi, who was then in Sicily. This situation was rendering him ‘crazy’, because it was being used by local conservatives to deride Apolloni and to undermine his personal credibility.122 In those same weeks, Garibaldi had ordered to avoid sending more voluntaries and, if even Dolfi, responding to Apolloni, confided to his friend that he had similar leadership problems in Florence to contain the enthusiasm of young fighters who ‘travel by themselves’ (Badii 1912, 110; Dolfi to Apolloni, 8 August 1862) to join the General, one can understand that Apolloni was not exaggerating the difficulties. Additionally, despite Meˇcnikov’s enthusiastic description of the Massa Marittima’s radical circle, Apolloni’s letters stated a very tense local situation with the local malvoni, moderates of a national committee to which Apolloni was proud of ‘having never belonged to’.123 Yet, Apolloni had played roles in Dolfi’s early projects to make ‘operations in the Papal State’124 during

122 DM, Fondo Dolfi, D IV d 21 41, Apolloni to Dolfi, 2 August 1862. 123 DM, Fondo Dolfi, D IV d 21 1, Apolloni to Dolfi, 7 July 1860. 124 DM, Fondo Dolfi, D IV d 21 2, Apolloni to Dolfi, 9 April 1860.

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the 1860 expedition, receiving in Talamone a squad from Livorno led by Andrea Sgarallino (Badii 1912, 62). These activists of the Tuscan countryside had to face personally the repression of the Tuscan provisional government led by Ricasoli, who had ordered the prefecture of Grosseto to ‘impede departures of volunteers and new dispatches of arms with all means’,125 as Apolloni reported to Dolfi. The author of vivid first-hand notes on his experience in Castel Pucci and on an incipient mutiny against Ricasoli that was only impeded by the mediation of ‘that good man of Dolfi’ (Badii 1912, 75), Apolloni alerted Dolfi that, in Massa, local authorities were aware of his role as the chief of a local secret committee. Apolloni expressed to Dolfi perplexities similar to those exposed by Mazzoni on the dangerous alliances that they were stipulating with the monarchists: ‘I can sacrifice my republican principles for the homeland, but never betray them’.126 Finally, Apolloni left for joining Garibaldi’s expedition in the South with the materials that Dolfi had sent and was ‘disembarked without any inconvenient’,127 to be then wounded in the same battle as Meˇcnikov. In the following years, Apolloni sent constantly correspondences from Massa to NE, and asked Dolfi to admit him in the Artisan Brotherhood together with other ‘22 people’128 from Massa. Harshly polemical towards Ricasoli and towards the unwillingness of the government to ‘fulfil his debt through the complete rescue of the nation’,129 Apolloni organised public demonstrations in his town, reporting proudly to Dolfi that the presence of people demonstrating with banners claiming ‘Rome capital of Italy and down with the Pope-King’ had been: ‘A complete defeat for Monsignor, the priests, the friars and their fellows’.130 While these phrasings well matched the traditional Tuscan spirit of popular anticlericalism, Apolloni was also dealing with Dolfi about more material trades, such as a certain ‘discourse about rifles’131 and a request for

125 DM, Fondo Dolfi, IV d 21 4, Apolloni to Dolfi, 126 DM, Fondo Dolfi, IV d 21 4, Apolloni to Dolfi, 127 DM, Fondo Dolfi, IV d 21 5, Apolloni to Dolfi, 128 DM, Fondo Dolfi, IV d 21, Apolloni to Dolfi, 6

30 luglio 1860. 30 luglio 1860. 7 agosto 1860. ottobre 1861.

129 DM, Fondo Dolfi, IV d 21 14, Apolloni to Dolfi, 20 ottobre 1861. 130 DM, Fondo Dolfi, IV d 21 25, Apolloni to Dolfi, 3 febbraio 1862. 131 DM, Fondo Dolfi, IV d 21 17, Apolloni to Dolfi, 6 November 1861.

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sending arms also to Massa as he had heard that Dolfi was sending ‘carabines’ to Siena, likewise not far from the border.132 While the government was afraid of hitting Dolfi in Florence, repression was harsher in the countryside, as Apolloni, who feared that his letters were being seized,133 had a domiciliary perquisition with ‘a deployment of forces of 15 people’134 to seize arms, and was then arrested and compelled to quit Massa due to his ‘bad influence’ on local youth, despite his public protests published in NE.135 Based in the neighbouring villages of Porto Santo Stefano and later in Cecina and already acquainted with Castellazzo and Martinati since 1860 at least (Badii 1912), Apolloni continued to correspond with Dolfi and to supply NE with information. He fought both in the 1866 war and in Mentana. Between 1874 and 1876, he had a correspondence with Mazzoni, surviving at the Forteguerriana Library, that exemplifies matters of republican intransigence, radicalisation and sense of betrayal of previous fighters that characterised post-unification Italy. Apolloni was denied his job as a doctor in the Railways administration on the allegation that he was a member of the International. While he disdainfully denied this charge, writing to Mazzoni that he was only ‘the victim of evil people’s retaliations’,136 he identified his interlocutor as one of the last remaining survivors of the ‘old guard’137 of intransigent republicans who could possibly help. Several years after Italy’s unification, observing the opportunistic attitudes of many former republicans, Apolloni evoked the words of a friend who: ‘Predicted that I would have been jailed also under the republic, and I responded – nothing easier. Names do not make the felicity of people’.138 Apolloni guessed that, if the power was seized by corrupt republican politicians: ‘Republican handcuffs would tie my hands as the Savoias’ and Lorenas’ handcuffs did … I am a democrat but today’s

132 DM, Fondo Dolfi, IV d 21 35, Apolloni to Dolfi, 12 May 1862. 133 DM, Fondo Dolfi, IV d 21 35, Apolloni to Dolfi, 12 May 1862. 134 DM, Fondo Dolfi, IV d 21 44, Apolloni to Dolfi, 26 May 1862. 135 NE, 30 October 1862. Replica al sig. Ridolfi, 2. 136 FGM, Apolloni to Mazzoni, 20 January 1874. 137 FGM, Apolloni to Mazzoni, 12 February 1874. 138 FGM, Apolloni to Mazzoni, 20 June 1876. Petroliere o consorte?

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democracy causes me nausea and disgust’.139 While Apolloni denied any relation with the International, and therefore there is no ground to claim that he was its member, these statements allow locating his experience in the field of republican intransigence, which would have served also as an internal anti-monarchist and anti-parliamentarism opposition in the republican field after unification, as I explain below. As for Mazzoni, he knew very well the International, as he had been its member, and for some years a personal friend of Mikhail Bakunin.

Bakunin, and the International Brotherhood in Florence According to Elio Conti, the landing in Florence of Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) in 1864, would have been decisive in the local workers’ movement in its shift ‘from the democratic-republican phase to the anarcho-socialist one’ (Conti 1950b, 69). Recently evaded from Siberia, Bakunin arrived in Italy with the support of Mazzini and Herzen, and personally announced to Dolfi that he was joining there ‘[his] fellow citizen Metchnikoff’.140 It was indeed Meˇcnikov who received Bakunin after this latter’s stop/over to Caprera, where he ‘saw the General [Garibaldi] in good health and busy with preparing new endeavours’ (Metchnikoff 1898, 176; Bakunin to Meˇcnikov, 23 March 1864). In his journey to Florence, Bakunin was preceded by recommendation letters from the Gotha of Italian democracy, including Mazzini who wrote to Dolfi that: ‘You will see a Russian, a friend of mine whom I recommend warmly to you … As a friend, I demand that you do what he will say, and he will be thankful’ (Conti 1949, 175; Mazzini to Dolfi, 13 November 1863). A few months later, it was Agostino Bertani who wrote to the Florentine baker announcing the arrival of: ‘A renowned and enthusiastic apostle of social and political reforms’ (Conti 1950b, 122; Bertani to Dolfi, 18 January 1864). A few days later, the last word came from Garibaldi: ‘I recommend to you our Bakunin, whose name already honours the democrats of the entire world’ (Conti 1950b, 122; Garibaldi to Dolfi, 22 January 1864). Likewise a correspondent of Aurelio Saffi to whom he 139 FGM, Apolloni to Mazzoni, 20 June 1876. Petroliere o consorte? 140 Pisa, Domus Mazziniana, fondo Dolfi, Bakunin to Dolfi, 13 January 1864.

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had already anticipated his intention to go to Italy in 1862,141 Bakunin informed Bertani that, in his way to Florence, he could chat for some time with Guerrazzi in Livorno.142 That is, an outstanding part of the ‘big names’ of Italian Risorgimento welcomed and supported Bakunin’s move to Italy, arguably hoping to have a voice more claiming for a democratic republic. Notoriously, the outcomes were very different, as Bakunin’s presence inspired a part of the former Mazzinian and democratic movement in taking a socialistic and libertarian (therefore also federalist) turn. In his first steps in Florence, Bakunin was led by Meˇcnikov and princely welcomed by Dolfi. In his recollections, Meˇcnikov argued quite sardonically that, if Dolfi greatly venerated the mythic figure of Bakunin, it was also because he did not completely understand (or did not mind to understand) the social radicality of Bakunin’s revolutionary stances, which appears in humorous anecdotes told by the future geographer. ‘Dolfi asked his wife … to bring the best bottle of his old wine for Bakunin … More than once, his hands covered with flour opened his well-filled wallet for Bakunin. Thanks to Dolfi, Bakunin was quickly made aware of all the secrets of the Florence Democratic Society’ (Lehning 2002, 215). It is also worth noting that, in his early years in Italy, Bakunin used to speak French as he was not yet familiar with Italian, therefore only the foreigners and the Italian intellectuals familiar with French had initially full access to Bakunin’s conversation. Meˇcnikov also described the social nights organised by the Bakunins in their flat of Borgo Ognissanti, that were populated by a heterogenous set of international guests, from Swedish liberal Auguste Blanche, whom Bakunin introduced to Garibaldi (Conti 1950a), to German refugee and writer Ludmilla Assing (Risaliti 2016), the editor of Alexander von Humboldt’s letters to Vernhagen von Ense, which contained ‘scandalous’ critiques to the Prussian Court. Assing was also the biographer of Tuscan Mazzinian Pietro Cironi and a Mazzoni’s friend.143 The Italian Police continued to follow their activities, revolutionary and otherwise, not devoid of some involuntary irony: ‘On Friday night, a small meeting occurred in the house of the well-known Russian Mikhail Bakunin, to

141 MCRR, F.064 255 99, Bakunin to Saffi, 26 June 1862. 142 MCRR, 432 12 1, Bakunin to Bertani, 26 January 1864. 143 FGM, Assing to Mazzoni, 22 October 1865.

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discuss the next European war and the need for everybody’s collaboration to crush this monster whose name is Old Europe [a clear reference to how the definition New Europe continued to exert strong impression even after the end of the journal’s publication]. At 11 p.m., they walked in the street with Giuseppe Dolfi, enjoying the cool weather and finished the evening at the wine shop of the well-known [Vincenzo] Conti, nicknamed Barrel’.144 This popular winery, located in former via dei Contenti, in the very centre of Florence, was a typical place of popular sociability where the clashes that occurred between democrats and conservatives, possibly fostered by some previous glasses of wine, were periodically reported by the local press, including NE that published a letter of two republicans who were arrested after a duel motivated by discussions that followed a toast to Garibaldi at Conti’s winery.145 Yet, beyond the fascination of his folkloristic figure, Bakunin had difficulties in finding affordable fellows among Italian activists. According to Max Nettlau, the man who ‘most definitely joined Bakunin’s social ideas’ (Nettlau 1975, 15) was a worker, engraver Giuseppe Berti-Calura, who maintained an ill-documented relationship with Bakunin in the following years. Bakunin also had ‘a quite close personal relationship’ (Nettlau 1975, 15) with young Mazzinian Andrea Giannelli, likewise a close friend of Ludmilla Assing, while he had ‘total incompatibility of character and ideas’ with Mario (Nettlau 1975, 15). Together with Bertani, Mario was one of the exponents of Italian democracy that Bakunin would have derided some years later in a famous letter to his friend Celso Ceretti: ‘Bertani is not at all Mazzinian … Bertani is always the friend of everybody, but he never belonged to anybody. He is even a friend of Alberto Mario, who is too self-important to seek any other friend than himself, and of whom one can say what Desmoulins said about Saint-Just, that “he brings his head like a Saint Sacrament”. [Bertani] is federalist with … Mario, he is centralist with the Mazzinians and constitutionalist with the Parliamentary Left. In case, he may do internationalism and socialism with us’ (Nettlau 1975, 15). Yet, Bakunin’s problem with Mario was not personal, but political, and was in their different assessment of class struggle.

144 ASF, 7 March 1864. 145 NE, 4 November 1862. Pubblichiamo la seguente lettera, 4.

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Bakunin had found for a while someone who shared his ideas on the fact that the universal republican revolution should have been not only political, but had also to construct economic equality. It was a young academic, Angelo de Gubernatis, who was for some months an enthusiastic follower of Bakunin and an early member of Bakunin’s earliest secret society, the International Brotherhood, founded in Florence between 1864 and 1865. De Gubernatis’s recollections, depicting this association as a sect of bloodthirsty people performing crazy rites, are often quoted to ridicule Bakunin’s conspiration activities. Yet, already Conti noted that De Gubernatis wrote those pages after his personal rupture with the Russian exile, therefore this source should be taken with many precautions (Conti 1950b). Amazingly, De Gubernatis wrote that he was examined by Mazzoni, in Dolfi’s house, to certify his worthiness of entering Bakunin’s secret society. True or alleged, this episode accounts for Mazzoni’s reputation of integrity that has been defined ‘Catonian rigidity’ (Conti 1950a, 125). Mazzoni was indeed the main referent of Bakunin in Tuscany, and remained associated, at least formally, with Bakunin’s endeavours until 1870. The most qualified authors agree that, in Paris, Mazzoni had developed a ‘Proudhonian sensitivity’ (Adami 1979, 154) that predisposed him to welcome Bakunin’s ideas more than anybody else in Tuscany, at least after Montanelli’s death. Mazzoni was not only a member of the International Brotherhood founded in Florence, but he also entered the International Alliance of the Socialist Democracy, the second Bakunin’s secret society founded in Bern in 1868, and ‘the Geneva section of the International’ (Adami 1979, 153). Concerns with these Mazzoni’s attitudes were punctually expressed by Mazzini, who wrote to his close collaborator Federico Campanella in 1870: ‘I do not know what the Hell Mazzoni means by “social revolution”. If they can, let them do it. For me, I am already happy with a republican revolution’ (Conti 1950a, 127; Mazzini to Campanella, 11 March 1870). Here stands the originality of Mazzoni’s contribution—in seizing the need to avoid divorcing national question and social question in that moment of Italian Risorgimento. Yet, Mazzoni did not go to the extreme consequences of his reasoning, as his later (although gentle) rupture with Bakunin shows. While Masini and Cerrito argued that ‘it was not Mazzoni who came back to radical democracy but Bakunin who departed definitively from it’ (Cerrito and Masini 1950, 618), I would instead contend that these departures should be understood relationally within the reciprocal influences that

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these activists and circuits have played on each other. Bakunin started his sojourn in Italy sharing some key points of existing radical and federalist republicanism such as the ‘nation in arms’ as opposed to ‘permanent armies’, as he wrote in 1864 to Garibaldi (Conti 1950a, 123). Additionally, he campaigned for internationalist socialism, showing how Risorgimento and socialist traditions were imbricated. Even after taking political distances from Mazzoni when the latter decided to enter the Parliament, Bakunin maintained a distinction between the ‘regional federalists’ (Cerrito and Masini 1950, 619) such as Mario and Mazzoni and those who were trying to ‘resuscitate the dead’ (Cerrito and Masini 1950, 621). After Mazzini’s ungenerous condemnation of the Paris Commune in 1871, Mazzini became the main target of Bakunin’s polemic. As for Mazzoni, another of his disagreements with Bakunin concerned the role of Freemasonry. According to Fulvio Conti, despite Antirisorgimento commonplaces on alleged Freemasons’ plots behind Risorgimento, Freemasonry only started to be established and gained some influence after unification, therefore it played no especially decisive roles in the process. Other historians, such as Gian Mario Cazzaniga, confirm that the alleged Freemason origin of the Carboneria was never proved (Cazzaniga 2006). Importantly, Conti documents how the Freemasonry mainly expressed ‘the liberal-moderate elites in favour of the early unified state and of the Savoias’ Monarchy’ (Conti 2006, 580). Freemasonry had the ‘instrumental’ (Conti 2000, 190) adhesion of some radicals such as Garibaldi, and for a while also Bakunin, whose disappointment and harsh critiques to that institution are well known (Nettlau 1975). Other exponents of Bakunin’s Brotherhood took the same distance as De Gubernatis, still a Bakunin’s friend at that moment, refusing to join the Freemasonry on the ground that he deemed it ‘completely ineffective under the current circumstances’.146 Conversely, Mazzoni remained in the Freemasonry and even accepted national leading roles in the 1870s, which was another declared reason for Bakunin’s progressive estrangement from him. The Russian anarchist namely wrote to Mazzoni in 1871 that, to the Freemason religion, he preferred ‘the religion of liberty’, but: ‘You can do whatever you wish, that religion will never find any echo

146 DM, Fondo Dolfi, D V d 21 3, De Gubernatis to Dolfi [1865].

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in the temple of the [Grand Architect of Universe]’ (Cerrito and Masini 1950, 622; Bakunin to Mazzoni, 16 December 1871). From that moment, the Italian Section of the International progressively diverged from the republican field, although most of its early activists were people coming from radical Garibaldianism and the Risorgimento tradition. Republicans like Garibaldi were concerned by these divergences, which he tried to compose through his personal adhesion to the International. Indeed, his correspondences of 1870–1871 were increasingly filled with complaints about misery and expressions of sympathy for early socialism, including a letter to Bakunin that the Russian quoted proudly for Mazzoni, arguing that the General had written to him: ‘Keep strong, as I think it is time to work a lot for the cause of justice … The people’s camel is overburdened and shakes down the burden with which the privilege has overwhelmed him’ (Cerrito and Masini 1950, 622; Garibaldi to Bakunin, 23 November 1871). In Florence, Bakunin’s socialist propaganda had at least one indirect outcome, that is the publication, from August 1865 to January 1866, of the journal Il Proletario, giornale economico socialista per la democrazia operaia by former NE collaborator Lo Savio. Elio Conti has defined this journal as the first Italian periodical that can effectively be called socialist, being grounded on the ‘remarkable statement of the existence of an economic problem, independent from the political one’ (Conti 1950b, 83). Yet, Conti’s definition of the Proletario seems quite an understatement. A survey of the only (or at least the most complete) surviving collection of the journal at the Florence National Library shows that Lo Savio’s journal was not limited to be ‘the first in Italy which is explicitly dedicated to the social question’, as young Gnocchi-Viani wrote to the editors in congratulating tones.147 It was also a journal making propaganda for the early meetings of the International, blaming the fact that Italian workers’ societies were not yet represented in those international gatherings. Thus, Lo Savio called for participation in the next International’s meeting that was scheduled in Geneva in 1866, and took place when the journal had already ceased publications.148 Therefore, the Proletario clearly anticipated the internationalist turn that the Italian workers’ movement would have taken in the following years.

147 Il Proletario, 5, 17 September 1865. Caro Lo Savio, 2. 148 Il Proletario, 13, 12 November 1865. Associazione Internazionale degli Operaj, 1.

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However, these positions did not come out of the blue. While Bakunin’s propaganda was not explicitly mentioned, it clearly informed the journal’s aims and scopes as declared by Lo Savio, that is autonomous action of the working class, which should distrust politicians and governments (that is mere democracy) to focus on its own emancipation.149 Themes and collaborators of the Proletario recalled those of NE, as the main contributors who signed articles, beyond Lo Savio and Ferrara workingman Leone Cappello, were Martinati and Piccini. One of the local associations whose minutes and information were published was again the Florence Artisan Brotherhood, to whose constructive accomplishments the Proletario dedicated some pages under the rubric ‘Chronicles of the Socialist Movements’. The Proletario listed the interventions of the Artisan Brotherhood in granting associated workers with ‘subventions for sickness’ and noted the success of the aforementioned popular school, which continued to deliver classes in grammar and literacy, arithmetic, history and geography and whose library reached the number of 500 volumes thanks to the donations.150 All articles put a lot of emphasis on the movement of cooperatives, reporting international experiences such as the cooperative credit by Jacques Beluze,151 of which also Bakunin and the Reclus brothers were members. The journal also echoed some of the NE themes, such as the fight against slavery in North America, by celebrating: ‘The triumph of free work and federalism in America’.152 Therefore, in Lo Savio’s Proletario, a clear continuity appears between the NE circuits and the incipient experiences of Italian internationalist socialism. Finally, reading Garibaldi’s correspondence also gives the idea of how, at the end of the 1860s, an epoch was closing, also due to the loss of some of its protagonists. In 1869, on the popular side, Dolfi prematurely passed away after a short illness, which was commented by Garibaldi, writing to Mazzoni that he ‘loved [Dolfi] like a brother’ (Garibaldi 2008, 242; Garibaldi to Mazzoni, 2 August 1869). On the intellectuals’ side, also Cattaneo had passed away some months earlier, and it was again Garibaldi to propose an intriguing (and not straightforward) comparison between

149 Il Proletario, 1, 20 August 1865. N. Lo Savio, Alla democrazia operaia, 1. 150 Il Proletario, 4, 10 September 1865. Cronaca del Movimento Socialista’, 3. 151 Il Proletario, 3, 3 September 1865. La cooperazione in Francia, 3. 152 Il Proletario, 7, 1 October 1865. Cronaca del movimento socialista, 4.

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the two men: ‘They passed: Cattaneo, the liberal economist, the philosopher, the hero of the most glorious of the Lombard epochs; Dolfi, the personification of all civic virtues, the greatest of our tribunes’ (Garibaldi 2008, 243; Garibaldi to Barrili, 3 August 1869). As I discuss below with reference to Cattaneo’s short visit to Garibaldi in Naples in September 1860, the two men did never understand each other, but it can be argued that it was on the moral grounds of civic virtue and justice that it occurred to them to fight on the same side of the barricade.

Print Sources Bizzoni, Achille. 1871. Impressioni di un volontario all’esercito dei Vosgi. Milan: Sonzogno. Cattaneo, Carlo. 1956. Epistolario di Carlo Cattaneo IV: 1862–1869. Florence: Barbera. Comitato Democratico Francese-Spagnuolo-Italiano. 1851. Programma. Turin: Libreria Patria. Garibaldi, Giuseppe. 1986. Epistolario, vol. 7, marzo-dicembre 1862. Rome: Istituto per la Storia del Risorgimento Italiano. Garibaldi, Giuseppe. 1991. Epistolario. Vol. 8, 1863. Rome: Istituto per la Storia del Risorgimento Italiano. Garibaldi, Giuseppe. 2008. Epistolario. Vol. 13, 1868–1869. Rome: Istituto per la Storia del Risorgimento Italiano. Garibaldi, Giuseppe. 2009. Epistolario. Vol. 14, 1 gennaio 1870–14 febbraio 1871. Rome: Istituto per la Storia del Risorgimento Italiano. Mario, Alberto. 1860. La schiavitù e il pensiero: annotazioni. Torino: Tipografia del Diritto. Meˇcnikov, Lev Il iˇc. 2011. Sull’Italia risorgimentale, Moncalieri: CIRVI. Metchnikoff, Léon. 1898. Bakounine en Italie en 1864. Revue Socialiste, 27(1):175–181, 595–603. Montanelli, Giuseppe. 1851. Introduzione ad alcuni appunti storici sulla rivoluzione d’Italia. Turin: Tipografia Subalpina. Montanelli, Giuseppe. 1855. Memorie sull’Italia e specialmente sulla Toscana dal 1814 al 1850, vol. II. Turin: SEI. Montanelli, Giuseppe. 1862. Dello ordinamento nazionale. Florence: Tipografia Garibaldi. Petrizzo, Alessio. 2018. Andrea e Jacopo Sgarallino. Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani. Treccani. https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/andrea-e-jacopo-sga rallino_(Dizionario-Biografico). Reclus, Elisée. 1889. Préface. In Léon Metchnikoff, La civilisation et les Grands Fleuves Historiques, v–xxviii. Paris: Hachette.

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Reclus, Elisée. 2014. Histoire de la guerre de Sécession aux Etats-Unis. 1861–1865. Paris: Pocket. Vieusseux, Giovan Pietro. 1848. Frammenti sull’Italia nel 1822 e progetto di confederazione. Firenze: Dai Torchj della Galileiana. White Mario, Jessie. 1899. Cenni biografici sulla vita di Giuseppe Dolfi. Florence: Tipografia Elzeviriana.

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Montanelli, Giuseppe. 1853. Memorie sull’Italia e specialmente sulla Toscana dal 1814 al 1850, vol. I. Turin: SEI. Musarra, Natale. 2004. Antonio Francesco Riggio. In Dizionario biografico degli anarchici italiani, vol. 2, 428–429. Pisa: BFS. Musso, Franco. 2000. Il dibattito parlamentare sull’indennità di carica ai deputati (1848–1912). Il Politico 65 (2): 285–310. Nettlau, Max. 1969. La première Internationale en Espagne (1868–1888). Dordrecht: Redider. Nettlau, Max. 1975. Bakunin e la prima internazionale in Italia dal 1864 al 1872. Rome: Samonà e Savelli. Paolini, Gabriele. 2012. Primi elementi libertari nel livornese. In Elementi libertari nel risorgimento livornese e toscano, ed. Giuseppe Gregori and Giorgio Sacchetti, 87–98. Prato: Pentalinea. Pellegrino, Anna. 2012. Patria e lavoro. La Fratellanza Artigiana d’Italia fra identità sociale e pedagogia nazionale (1861–1932). Florence: Polistampa Porciani, Ilaria. 1979. L’Archivio storico italiano: organizzazione della ricerca ed egemonia moderata nel Risorgimento. Florence: Olschki. Ralli, Marcello. 1991. Giuseppe Dolfi. Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani. Treccani. https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/giuseppe-dolfi_(Dizion ario-Biografico). Risaliti, Renato. 2016. Due russi in missione da Garibaldi. Moncalieri: CIRVI. Risaliti, Renato. 2017. Lev Meˇcnikov su Garibaldi, Giusti, Guerrazzi, l’Italia risorgimentale e la Russia. Florence: Toscana Nuova. Rosselli, Nello. 1946. Saggi sul Risorgimento e altri scritti. Turin: Einaudi. Retrieved from: https://www.liberliber.it/online/autori/autori-r/nello-ros selli/saggi-sul-risorgimento/. Rosselli, Nello. 1967. Mazzini e Bakunin: Dodici anni di movimento operaio in Italia (1860–1872). Turin: Einaudi. Scirocco, Alfonso. 1978. Luigi Castellazzo. Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani. Treccani. https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/luigi-castellazzo_(Diz ionario-Biografico). Spadolini, Giovanni. 1962. Un dissidente del Risorgimento: Giuseppe Montanelli. Florence: Le Monnier. Venturi, Franco. 1972. Il populismo russo, vol. 1: Herzen, Bakunin, Cernysevskij. Turin: Einaudi.

CHAPTER 6

The Southern Connection

From 1796 to 1849: The Art of Making Barricades (and Republics) As discussed in the Introduction, the short-lived Neapolitan Revolution of 1799, bloodily repressed by the restored Bourbon Monarchy supported by the infamous mobs of the Sanfedisti, fanatic peasants led by figures such as Cardinal Ruffo, was an example of the alleged isolation of Italian progressive activists. Indeed, most of them were intellectual belonging to social elites, and ended for being assassinated by those mobs, even more cruel than the monarchs. This fostered the idea of ‘passive revolution’ first launched by Vincenzo Cuoco (1913) and then reinterpreted by Gramsci (Gramsci 2014). While the aforementioned works by Evangelisti and others contributed to nuance that historiographic judgement, the reception that was tributed across all Risorgimento to some protagonists of the Neapolitan Revolution shows that there was also an acknowledgment of some endogenous, and Southern, expressions of Italian Enlightenment and early Risorgimento. All were hanged in 1799 after trials that were celebrated outside any of what is called today ‘human rights’, Vincenzo Russo, Mario Pagano, Eleonora Pimentel Fonseca, Domenico Cirillo and others left works and life examples that were solid enough to form the grounds of later experiences whose protagonists claimed explicitly for their legacy.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Ferretti, Geographies of Federalism during the Italian Risorgimento, 1796–1900, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96117-6_6

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In the federalist and libertarian field, it was first the case with NE, which referred to the process against Mario Pagano as a case of ‘violation of the right of defence’, blaming the ‘horrible’ judge Speziali whose hands ‘dripped blood’1 in very emotional terms, despite 62 years had passed since those facts. An Enlightenment jurist claiming for the introduction of universal guarantees for all individuals before the law and a political persecuted even before the proclamation of the Neapolitan Republic in 1799, Mario Pagano (1748–1799) was the extensor of a draft project of Constitution for that Republic. This work costed him his life, as in summer 1799, when the Bourbons reconquered Naples, he was hanged with other republicans among whom was naturalist Domenico Cirillo (1739–1799). Significantly, in a 1903 conference, famous anarchist propagandist Pietro Gori, from Sicily, indicated ‘Mario Pagano and Carlo Pisacane’ (Bertini 2012, 37) as the forerunners of anarchism. While the inclusion of Pisacane was quite straightforward, it is intriguing that Gori mentioned there Pagano, given that, among socialists and anarchists, the most cited protagonist of the Neapolitan Revolution was Russo. As Gori was a lawyer, he was probably familiar with Pagano’s writings more than others. Yet, what is relevant is the attraction that the figures of the martyrs of 1799 continued to exert for both Risorgimento end early workers’ movement (socialist and anarchist). This is confirmed again by NE that, in 1861, advertised the recently reprinted edition2 of the most famous book of Vincenzo Russo (1770– 1799) Pensieri politici. Aldo Venturini defined this work as the earliest ‘spring of a proper socialism’ (Venturini 1984, 4) and also an inspiration for Francesco Saverio Merlino (1856–1930), a Neapolitan lawyer who was likewise a key figure of anarchism in Italy before his famous polemic with Malatesta in 1897 on the elections, although he never lost contact with the movement (Venturini 1984). The figure of Russo exerted doubtlessly a strong fascination in the imaginaries of Risorgimento and incipient social movements, also because he was hanged when he was only 29, which rendered him the prototype of the Romantic ‘martyr of the ideal’. Merlino dedicated to Russo one of his earliest works, defining him as ‘one of the generous men whose life is a continuous inspiration for better times’ (Merlino 1879a, 4). Yet, in addition to his romantic example,

1 NE 15 August 1861. Violazione del diritto di difesa criminale, 1. 2 NE 24 May 1861. Vincenzo Russo, Pensieri politici, 4.

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Russo had left a political essay that, according to Merlino, anticipated the anarcho-communist formula ‘to each one according to their needs’ (Merlino 1879a, 8) and the need of pursuing both ‘equality and freedom’ (Merlino 1879a, 10). Merlino especially highlighted the centrality of education in Russo’s thought, as the latter was well aware of the problems that were represented by ignorance, superstition and illiteracy for the involvement of the popular masses in any reformistic or revolutionary endeavour. For Merlino, ideas of internationalism and cosmopolitanism were already explicit in the more advanced expressions of the Enlightenment Republic of Letters, as ‘reason does not see nations in the humankind, but only men’ (Merlino 1879a, 11). Therefore, forgetting national adjectives and giving up any ‘conquest [that is] national murder’ (Merlino 1879a, 11) was key to gain international brotherhood. This shows how cosmopolitanism and early anticolonialism were not late or incidental within Risorgimento, as they were already part of its earliest premises. In his Pensieri, Russo called ‘popular republic’ (Russo 1798, 37) the sole possible social pact, akin to what Merlino considered as selfgovernment or (in today’s wording) ‘direct democracy’. Russo’s advanced social thinking appeared in his critique to the principle of heredity, in his statement of religious freedom and freedom of speech, and of equality among individuals and among nations. Russo’s critique to Montesquieu’s idea of ‘climatic fatality’ (Russo 1798, 109) seems also well inserted in his set of ideas pioneering later anticolonial critiques to environmental determinism as a justification to European imperialism overseas (Driver 2001). Russo contended that the principle of equality among individuals should be also applied to nations. ‘If a man does not have different rights than any other men, why should a nation have different rights than any other? Reason does not see stages in humanity, it only sees men’ (Russo 1798, 120). The influence of anticolonial Enlightenment as expressed by works of Diderot and Raynal (Muthu 2003) seems quite apparent there in denying the principle of a civilisational superiority. Furthermore, Russo exposed the principle of republicans’ international solidarity against the tyrants, clearly inspired by revolutionary France, stating the moral duty for everybody to ‘help anybody who cries and wiggles under the knees of a murderer … If we do not free that person, we are equally murderers. Murderer … is a nation that does not endeavour in all ways to help another nation that is tortured by the killer of millions of people, by a tyrant’ (Russo 1798, 125). In addition to Russo’s early

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social radicalism, what is significant is that in these elaborations of the Republican Triennial, a period that is almost universally acknowledged as the beginning of Risorgimento, the emphasis was not on unity or independence of Italy but on freedom, civil liberties, popular sovereignty and social justice. In that triennial, an experience that had a connection with the Neapolitan Republic was the Roman Republic of 1798–1799, where also some Neapolitan dissidents found sanctuary in 1798, and that was likewise defeated due to the lack of popular consensus of Italian liberals and Jacobins, mostly relying on French military support (Ambrosini 2013). Among the protagonists of this short-lived experience, Della Peruta mentioned one of those whom the historian defined as ‘pre-Mazzinian dissidents’, eventually Luigi Angeloni (1759–1842). Exiled in France after the restoration of the Pope, Angeloni was one of the opponents of the imperial turn that Napoleon I imposed to the French Revolution, and was one of the first thinkers who expressed advanced political views on Italy based on Italians’ autonomous agency. Eventually, he supported the idea that the Italian states had to form a ‘confederation modelled on the grounds of the constitution of the United States of America or of Switzerland’ (Della Peruta 1979) and remained in the republican circuits of the Italian exiles during the restoration, in touch with the Carboneria and with Filippo Buonarroti. This shows again how teleological readings of Risorgimento as a triumphal march towards national unification do not consider the complexity of a situation in which national unity was never straightforward before the events of 1860–1861, and in which Southern Italy played key, although contentious, roles. The precious works of Della Peruta on ‘pre-Mazzinian dissidents’ also showed that even before 1848, in the republican field, there were several activists taking positions that were closer to socialism than Mazzini’s, forming a sort of left-wing of the complex republican and democratic nebula. Among these ‘dissidents’, I would especially mention actor Gustavo Modena (1803–1861), who became quite famous for the use of theatre for political propaganda and popular conscientisation. Modena wanted to ‘deepen the revolution on the social plan more strongly than Mazzini, taking the road of egalitarian implications with a decidedly major conviction’ (Della Peruta 1979, 84). According to Della Peruta, in his late months, Modena got rather close to Cattaneo after being disappointed by the monarchist turn of the 1859–1861 unification process.

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Della Peruta also discussed the case of Neapolitan intellectual and Vieusseux’s correspondent Giuseppe Ricciardi (1808–1882), a protagonist of the 1848 riots in Naples whom Della Peruta considered as part of the ‘anti-Mazzinian dissidence’ (Della Peruta 1979, 161). Although accepting for a while political roles in post-unification Italy, Ricciardi was soon disappointed by the Savoias’ politics in Southern Italy, and carried out a ‘critique of Piedmontese centralistic tendences’ (Della Peruta 1979, 163) remaining faithful to his republicanism. Likewise, Venetian journalist Filippo de Boni (1816–1870) was akin to ‘left-wing dissidence in relation to Mazzinianism, showing also that he was not completely insensitive to Ferrari’s and Cattaneo’s federalism’ (Della Peruta 1979, 219). De Boni also contributed to the 1849 Roman Republic, for which he served as a diplomat in Switzerland. Indeed, the following Republics that were proclaimed in Italy would be in Venice in 1848, and in Rome in February 1849. Although Rome is not exactly located in the South, and the Northern borders of the Papal State did even correspond to the frontier with the Austrian-occupied territories on the Po River, the Roman Republic was instrumental in establishing early networks and putting grounds for the ‘Southern Connection’ that I address here. Beyond the Expedition of the Thousand, whose leader Garibaldi acquired an immense personal prestige in defending Rome and was even mythised after his legendary escape across Italy in the attempt to reach Venice, I mainly refer to Pisacane’s figure, whose fist acquired notoriety thanks to the Roman Republic. Pisacane is mainly known for the unlucky 1857 Sapri expedition, which is often caricatured as the prototype of the unrealistic endeavour that fails disastrously. I would contend that the most important and neglected Pisacane’s contribution to radical and federalist Risorgimento was not this tragic insurrectional ‘attempt’, but the pioneering ideas that the Neapolitan revolutionary launched in works such as Guerra Combattuta in Italia, Ordinamento e Costituzione delle Milizie Italiane, Saggio sulla Rivoluzione and Testamento Politico. These writings clearly prefigured libertarian socialism and confederal ideas of municipalism. Although fully belonging to the glorious story of European urban insurrections from 1848 to the 1871 Paris Commune, the Roman Republic, as Riall notes, was ‘unique among revolutionary governments of this period in its emphasis on the peasantry and on rural areas’ (Riall 1994, 40). Indeed, the revolutionaries who came to the Papal State from all Italy tried to address (although with scarce successes) the

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crux of all future Leftist critiques to Risorgimento, that is the implication of the rural masses. One of the most respected historians of the Roman Republic, Giuseppe Monsagrati, analyses the context in which this experience took place, starting from the big hopes that the seemingly progressive approaches of the new Pope, Pio IX, raised in Italian public opinion, rendering popular Gioberti’s Neo-Guelph approaches. Yet, after the 1848 events and the concession of a very moderate Constitution which excluded everything that could be ‘opposed to the Church’s canons’ (Monsagrati 2020, 25), it was clear to everybody that a ‘progressive pope’ was an illusion. In the Archivio Triennale, Cattaneo noted that: ‘Pio IX was made by others and destroyed by himself’ (Monsagrati 2020, 27). In November 1848, concerned by the popular unrest that followed the assassination of his minister Pellegrino Rossi, Pio IX fled from Rome to find sanctuary in Gaeta under the protection of Bourbon King Ferdinand II, and the Roman Republic was proclaimed in February 1849. Even in the historical capital towards which all the unitary proclaims converged, federalism was not unknown, given that the federalist option was considered as a matter of discussion in the proposed Italian Constituent Assembly. According to Monsagrati, the people from the middle and petty bourgeoisie that were broadly represented by capopopolo Angelo Brunetti/Ciceruacchio, whose son Luigi was suspected of being Pellegrino Rossi’s killer, ‘were imbued with municipalist spirit and mostly positioned on the side of Giobertian federalism’ (Monsagrati 2020, 31). It was exactly on how ‘municipalism’ had to be intended that relevant ruptures (or in some cases misunderstandings) took place in the progressive field all along the century. After the proclamation of the Republic, which was first requested by Garibaldi on the model of the ancient Roman Republic, other similar situations were fighting against the Austrians, the Bourbons and the Restoration kingdoms and dukedoms outside Rome. Among them, the Tuscan provisional government had a territorial contiguity with the Papal State, while the others were geographically isolated. It was the case with Venice, as mentioned above, and with Sicily, which was still fighting to maintain her autonomy from Naples, and whose local parliament ‘enthusiastically received’ the ‘Proposal of a Federative Italian Constituent’ (Musarra 2012, 99) that was originally launched by Montanelli, confirming the importance of local autonomy from the Northern to the Southern extremes of the Peninsula.

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In the following months, Mazzini claimed that the failed fusion of these experiences was the fault of the ‘silly ambition of 3 or 4 cities’ (Monsagrati 2020, 74), especially referring to Guerrazzi’s refusal to unify Tuscany and the Roman Republic and to Manin’s unwillingness to receive instructions from the Mazzinians in Venice. For Mazzini, these were the evils provoked by municipalism and federalism, that he deemed synonymous with selfishness and fragmentation. Amazingly, most of the federalists, including Montanelli, Mazzoni and Cernuschi, stood in favour of a republican alliance between Rome and Florence. Therefore, Mazzini’s problem was evidently the fact that not everybody was prone to his authority, consistently with his proclamations of the need of ‘a provisional dictatorial authority’ (Monsagrati 2020, 76). On the opposite side Cernuschi, who was among the rare dissident voices that one could then hear in Rome opposing the ‘unlimited powers’ (Monsagrati 2020, 77) of the triumvirate formed by Mazzini, Aurelio Saffi and Carlo Armellini (that he deemed a Mazzini’s personal dictatorship), denounced retrospectively the falsity of narratives giving a decisive role to Mazzini in the proclamation of the Roman Republic. Indeed, while Mazzini only reached Rome in March, when the Republic had been already proclaimed, Cernuschi noted that, initially, both Mazzinians and monarchists did not want this proclamation, preferring in principle to have a provisional government like in Florence. For Cernuschi: ‘The only ones who wanted the Roman Republic and built it were the people, the provinces and the federalist republicans’ (Cattaneo 1952, 450; Cernuschi to Cattaneo, 23 October 1850). The very synthetic Foundational Decree approved on 9 February evoked generically ‘pure democracy’ as the Roman Republic’s form of government, and the need of ‘keeping the relations that the common nationality imposes’ (Carocci 2017, 39) with the rest of Italy. Therefore, the Republic was inaugurated with a quite generic programme, neither unitary nor federalist, that arguably represented a mediation between different sensitivities in the democratic field. On the role of the people, a recent work by Roberto Carocci sheds important light on how popular unrest anticipated the circulation of radical ideas in Rome, matching Brunello’s argument that the people can overtake its leaders, as it happened in the earliest days of Venice’s insurrection in March 1848 (Brunello 2018). In the same year, in Rome, the Catholic press was afraid of ‘anarchy’ and ‘communism’ (Carocci 2017, 26) due to the ongoing popular manifestations of protest.

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After the Pope’s escape, the concerns of the moderates were amplified by the ‘anarchoid turn’ (Monsagrati 2020, 120) that popular mobilisation had taken, including the ‘apparition of the red flag’ (Monsagrati 2020, 121) in the demonstrations and the unchaining of spontaneous anticlericalism in a populace that had been oppressed by the clergy for centuries. This included episodes such as the picking of confessionals from the churches to use this furniture ‘for irreverent mock confessions in the streets, to be then set in fire or used for constructing barricades’ (Carocci 2017, 53). Cernuschi was completely immerged in this popular spirit, as he had been officially appointed to direct the republican commission looking after the most popular of revolutionary expressions, the barricades. Cernuschi well seized the completely democratic and proletarian nature of the practices of popular defence that were acted in Rome in those months. Fully reproduced by Carocci, the first communiqué published by the committee chaired by Cernuschi argued that: ‘The science of barricades is like the science of freedom: everybody is the master’ (Carocci 2017, 54). Therefore, Cernuschi and colleagues encouraged people to continue the job of mobilisation and self-defence from below that they had started: ‘Keep maintaining that order that they call anarchy, and the Republic has won’ (Carocci 2017, 54). Amazingly, this was one of the early affirmative claims for ‘anarchy’, following of only few years the earliest public statement of someone styling himself as an anarchist, that is the famous Proudhon’s ‘I am an anarchist’ dating to the first edition of Qu’est-ce que la propriété? (Proudhon 1840, 229). According to Carocci, some socialism ‘of Proudhonian origin’ (Carocci 2017, 8) already circulated in Roman intellectual milieus also thanks to figures such as the aforementioned Carlo Rusconi, likewise ‘akin to Proudhon’s socialistic ideas’ (Carocci 2017, 14) and future minister of the Roman Republic. Intriguingly, it was in Rome that, in January 1849, the journal Il Contemporaneo published Bakunin’s ‘Appeal to the Slavs’, that was ‘the earliest of Bakunin’s writings to be translated into Italian’ (Carocci 2017, 22). All this further indicates that socialist and anarchist ideas started to circulate, in limited but not uninfluential circuits, well before the classical steps in the development of the ‘forces of production’ that were deemed indispensable by teleological scholarship, and had significant impacts on famous people and events associated with Risorgimento.

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Among the social accomplishments of the Roman Republic, one can mention the abolition of the Tribunal of the Inquisition and of the censorship, the right for Jews to serve in the Civil Guard, and most importantly the project for the ‘expropriation of the enormous ecclesiastic properties’ (Carocci 2017, 42). The ‘repartition’ (Monsagrati 2020, 81) of these vacant properties located in the countryside was especially about to interest the peasants. The other big accomplishment had to be the Constitution, which was arguably the most socially advanced of that time, but it could only be approved on 1 July 1849, when the French occupation army was already in Rome and the Republic did no longer exist. This document established the principles of people’s sovereignty and juridical equality, adopting the motto of the French Revolution ‘freedom, equality, fraternity’. Refusing to recognise any title of nobility, the Roman Constitution wished to improve ‘the moral and material conditions of all citizens’ and most importantly stated the principle of cosmopolitanism and non-chauvinistic nationality, being surely more internationalist than the current Constitution of the Italian Republic. ‘The Republic looks at all peoples as brethren. It respects every nationality and supports the Italian one’ (Carocci 2017, 174). Although it was not explicitly federalist, this constitution exposed some principles of administrative decentralisation, which was informed by ‘the most possibly equitable distribution of local interests, in harmony with the political interest of the State’. While ‘the municipia have all equal rights, their independence is only limited by the general laws of the state’ (Carocci 2017, 214). Interestingly, Monsagrati notes that Mazzini was opposed to the approbation of an only Roman Constitution and argued for proclaiming an Italian Constitution. All this clearly indicated that, despite the prominence of Mazzini’s position in the Roman Republic, options that Mazzini considered as heresies such as federalism and municipalism existed within this experience. As noted above, the French military expedition that finished with killing the Roman Republic scandalised republicans all over Europe and also found some internal opposition in France, where Proudhon requested the official recognition of the Roman Republic and called for ‘soldiers’ desertion’ (Carocci 2017, 50) when the expedition was decided. Initially, it was not presented as an expedition against the Roman Republic or ‘in favour of the Pope’s temporal power’ (Monsagrati 2020, 86), but as a French military praesidium to watch Austrian armies, potentially aggressive in the Peninsula after they had definitively defeated Carlo Alberto’s

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troops in Novara. Yet, this compelled the Roman Republic to military self-defence. As noted above, among its military commanders there were Giuseppe Garibaldi and Carlo Pisacane. Interestingly, they represented two quite incompatible methods of fighting, as Garibaldi counted on the continuous movement of assault troops hitting the enemy in guerrillalike ways. Conversely, Pisacane wanted compact and well-organised troops moving following well-defined geo-strategies as Pisacane had learnt in the best military colleges. As I discuss below, Pisacane’s key innovation in relation to this military setup was the principle of the nation in arms based on consensus rather than authoritarian command. All that did not prevent Colonel Pisacane from considering General Garibaldi as an incompetent in matters of strategy (Rosselli 1977, 66).

Carlo Pisacane, the Antimilitarist Colonel In his work on Pisacane’s legacy, Luigi Fabbri noted that everybody knew ‘what [Pisacane] did and how he died; almost nobody knows what he thought’ (Fabbri 1904, 1). Despite the historiographical works that appeared in the twentieth century, this lacuna still needs to be completely filled. For Fabbri, if Pisacane was worthy of being considered as an initiator of libertarian thinking in Italy, it was not because he gave the example of someone who sacrificed his life for his own ideals (which was a notion shared by different political circuits in the context of Romanticism as noted by Ginsborg). Indeed, it was because Pisacane wrote: ‘The first words of our socialist and libertarian idea’ (Fabbri 1904, 3). Among the ‘noble fathers’ of Italian anarchism, Neapolitan Merlino even identified a direct genealogy between Pisacane and the International in Italy (whose first nucleus was in Naples): ‘Pisacane was an anarchist socialist, and Giuseppe Fanelli was one of the founders of the Neapolitan section of the International’ (Merlino 1879b, 132). Thus, it was only when Pisacane’s works were read in the socialist circuits some decades later that one started to break the silence around his highly mythised but hardly understood figure. In this section and in the following one, by analysing Pisacane’s works and networks, I show how Fabbri and Merlino were absolutely right in arguing that Pisacane was more important for his theoretical contributions than for the expedition of Sapri and extend their works accordingly.

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Carlo Pisacane was born to a noble Neapolitan family, which sent him to gain a military training at the prestigious military college of the Nunziatella that was at that moment one of the best places in Europe to acquire an elite instruction on theories and practices in the art of making war. It is worth noting that the Bourbons’ regime was relatively indulgent with the possible political unorthodoxy of the Nunziatella teachers, provided that they had internationally ‘recognized value’ (Rosselli 1977, 4) in their respective fields. Therefore, it was possible for the college’s pupils to meet former liberals and to do international readings that would have been impossible to access elsewhere in the Kingdom. In his earliest surviving letters to his commanders, young Pisacane expressed his strong interest and good preparation in matters of military geography. In these letters, Pisacane seemed to indirectly follow Cattaneo’s ideas on the need for a patient work to fully develop the possibilities that geomorphology provided. ‘Rivers, mountains and deserts are the natural defences that nature provides to a state … Strategy analyses these rough barriers and shows their vulnerable parts. Fortifications come second to correct nature’ (Pisacane 1937, 6; Pisacane to Filangieri 1844). After this remarkable mention of a ‘second nature’, broadly anticipating the language of twentieth-century critical geographies, Pisacane expressed another Cattanean (or Saint-Simonian) concept, that is the importance of constructing roads and railways matching the specific defence necessities of a given territory, related to the available military technics. Referring to the Kingdom of Naples, Pisacane seemed already akin to the idea of building new geographies for political purposes and far from the simple recognition of natural frontiers on mountains and seas. In 1847, his desertion from the Army and clandestine expatriation was almost unanimously depicted, by historians influenced by romantic myths, as a romantic escape with his lover and future life-long partner Enrichetta Di Lorenzo, a married woman who likewise abandoned her previous life to embark in an unknown adventure. Yet, following Pisacane’s correspondences lambasting obedience and conformism, it is also possible to see, in this action, the earliest political expression of the unruly and nonconformist attitude that always characterised Pisacane’s career. Moneyless and wanted by the Neapolitan police as adultery and desertion were both considered as serious crimes, especially for a professional officer of the Army, Pisacane decided to take advantage of his skills and enrolled in the French Foreign Legion in Algeria to earn his and his fiancée’s life.

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While Fabbri hypothesised that Pisacane, in Africa, was unhappy with ‘fighting with the Arabs, who finally also fought for their liberty’ (Fabbri 1904, 6), what is certain is that Pisacane’s African period was very short and characterised by his boredom for ‘spending all time lazing about under a tent’ (Pisacane 1937, 53; C. Pisacane to F. Pisacane, 23 February 1848). Once he heard about the insurrections of Palermo and Milan, Pisacane immediately endeavoured to repatriate. In late March 1848, he was already in Marseille, from which he announced to his brother Filippo that he was embarking to Milan, ‘where I hope to still find the time to share the dangers with my compatriots’ (Pisacane 1937, 55; C. Pisacane to F. Pisacane, 9 April 1848). The mere ‘romantic’ interpretation of his flight from Naples could not explain Pisacane’s hurry in joining the 1848 revolution. It is clear that Pisacane had already a political consciousness that was arguably fostered by the memories of the Neapolitan Republic and by the French literature to which Italian intellectuals had access at that time. In Milan, in April 1848, Pisacane first went to see Cattaneo, and although the latter could only give him some addresses, this meeting and their successive acquaintance were key in inspiring Pisacane’s thought. Wounded during a battle in Trentino, Pisacane did not have the time to make mirabilia in the 1848 war, but he revealed for sure his unruly and irreverent character. While he seemed to be already inspired by some Cattanean sarcasm in notes such as ‘Carlo Alberto is … unmatchable. 90,000 soldiers blocked on the River Mincio without any reason’ (Pisacane 1937, 55; C. Pisacane to F. Pisacane, 28 April 1848), he even dared, as a young officer, to send a memory to his superiors for expressing his tactical views on the ongoing war. This unruly behaviour was confirmed by Pisacane’s (somehow haughty) attitude during the Roman Republic in the following year, when he did not hesitate to contradict Garibaldi, and afterwards to deride French general Oudinot publishing a brochure that denounced the latter’s ‘military incapacity’ (Pisacane 1937, 88; Pisacane to Oudinot 1849). During the defence of the Roman Republic, Pisacane strongly contended that, although improvised, Roman militias had the military potentialities for defeating the less numerous French expedition troops. Yet, it was for political reasons that the Republic’s leaders, still hoping that the French government would not have attacked Rome, did not want to challenge directly Oudinot on the battlefield. They also trusted on the resistance of the city in case Oudinot approached, maybe conditioned by

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the myth of the invincible barricades that had been widespread after the Milan Five Days. This tactic was severely criticised, on moral grounds, by Cernuschi in his aforementioned letters to Cattaneo for the losses that this could have entailed among the population. Pisacane matched this judgement, as he wrote to the defenders of Bologna, sieged by the Austrians in April 1849. For Pisacane, when it comes to street combats, it is not non-resident troop, but the citizens themselves who have to organise the defence: ‘Keeping much troop within a city is complicated, and if the city is surrounded [by the enemy] it becomes useless’ (Pisacane 1937, 75; Pisacane to Preside di Bologna, 14 April 1849). Therefore, urban guerrilla and field military operations could coexist, but should not be confused. To understand Pisacane’s position in the military debates that were carried out among Risorgimento activists, it is worth recalling the idea of guerrilla that traditionally circulated in Mazzinian milieus and to which Pisacane sought to provide an alternative. Since the 1820s, also thanks to the participation of Italian volunteers in the 1820–1823 Spanish Constitutional Triennial (Sastre 2007), the resistance based on partisan bands that was deployed in Spain against Napoleon I from 1803 to 1814 became a myth. In the same years, something similar occurred in Italian regions like Calabria, whose anti-Napoleonian resistance was considered a ‘mainly popular war’ (Della Peruta 2004, 271) by Calabrian general Guglielmo Pepe, one of the ‘heroes’ of the defence of Venice. In those decades, several Italian authors discussed how the geomorphological conformation of the Italian peninsula, prevalently mountainous, would have favoured guerrillas, that they considered the privileged military way to national independence. It was first a Republican leader who had fought in Spain, Carlo Bianco di Jorioz, who wrote a book theorising the notion of Guerra per Bande, that is ‘partisan war as national war’ (Della Peruta 1979, 39), in 1830. Rather than by antimilitarist premises, these notions were inspired by the pragmatic argument that in Italy, at that moment, it was impossible to organise a regular army to fight against Austria. Therefore, guerrillas had the function to exhaust the enemy but did not question the idea that the future Italian nation needed to have a regular army. More original, for some aspects, was the book Alcune idee sull’Italia (1843) by Castelbolognese typographer Giuseppe Budini who, although strongly relying on Bianco’s work on the strategic side, argued that the partisan war should first involve the populace. A manual worker, Budini paid strong attention to social reforms, and interestingly proposed to make the movement

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start from Southern Italy, to take advantage of this latter’s geographical distance from Austria, and to possibly take position on the mountains to stop the enemy in the marshes. A key statement, in Budini’s work, was that: ‘With a population familiar with using arms, any tyranny becomes impossible’ (Della Peruta 1979, 147). This chimed with the idea of the nation in arms, which went beyond the merely military matter to become an instrument for people’s participation from below, as Pisacane discussed lengthy in his essays analysed below. Yet, after the 1848 examples of Milan, Paris, Vienna and all the cities that insurged against Restoration regimes, urban guerrilla based on people’s participation to make barricades, favoured by the urban geographies of city centres with narrow streets and big concentration of proletarian population, remained one of the most popular options among revolutionaries. As noted above, the main theorist of the art of making barricades was Cernuschi. In 1849 Rome, an amazing document that was released by the Barricades Committee (chaired by Cernuschi) as a big one-page poster to be displayed in all the city with instructions for making barricades, stated a strong link between this art and popular participation, that is the nation in arms. The document stated that once inhabitants are well determined to the defence: ‘Each city, each village, each house … can be considered as a proper fortress, before which the enemy should consider heavy losses … and that often he would not dare to occupy’ (Istruzione popolare). Cernuschi’s manifesto mentioned also nationwide characteristics of Italy that allowed extending this tactics to a number of centres. Due both to her history and physical characteristics, Italy had thousands of small fortified towns and villages, that were often located in places such as the top of a hill or the entry of a valley. For Cernuschi, these characteristics should have been cleverly used at each time for the needs of defence. As for the internal defence (and possible counter-attack) within a city, key was insuring that in case the enemy conquered a building, a street or a neighbourhood, ‘one can continue the defence in the other parts’ (Istruzione popolare). The document continued given detailed instructions on how to build barricades by gathering any kinds of stones, cobbles, beams and buildings’ furniture. It established some technical standards, such as barricades should: ‘Face the enemy with a rampart at least two meters tall’, being provided, in the internal part, of a pedestal large enough to allow: ‘One or two rows of defenders, when a third

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row charges arms for them from behind’ (Istruzione popolare). The barricade’s height should be limited enough to allow men in the first row ‘to be protected by the barricade up to their chest’ (Istruzione popolare). A trench should also protect the barricade that should be thick enough to resist the artillery. For the redactors of these popular instructions, ordnance was inefficient to disrupt a well-organised defence system in a big city like Rome. A couple of decades later, the massacres of the Bloody Week (21–28 May 1871), when the Versailles troop entered Paris and overwhelmed the heroic defence of the Parisian people on the barricades, showed that the experiences of 1848 could not be repeated. From the standpoint of mere military technics, as already guessed by Pisacane, it became an illusion to believe that an isolated city could resist a numerous and well-equipped army only thanks to barricades and urban guerrilla. Yet, beyond military technicalities, the key element in this instruction was the voluntaristic idea of fostering public participation from below: matching Pisacane’s views as I discuss in the next section, the nation in arms should be based on the strong voluntaristic convictions of the populace, which had also to raise sympathies among the rank-and-file soldiers in the opposite camp to incite their desertion. Importantly, popular participation in the Roman Republic saw the direct involvement of a certain number of women in constructing urban barricades. While Cernuschi explicitly encouraged Roman women to be ‘greedy of these treasures’ (Del Bianco 2006, 78), that is stones and other materials to be used in urban guerrillas, a poster displayed an appeal to Roman women to contribute to a ‘Women’s Association’ to support the military effort by assisting the wounded. On the one hand, this was a more traditional female duty, more compatible with patriarchy than fighting and meddling with politics. On the other, one finds the names of important female protagonists of Risorgimento, such as Cristina Trivulzio di Belgioioso and Enrichetta Di Lorenzo [nicknamed ‘Marietta Pisacane’] (Carocci 2017, 80) among the appeal’s signatories. Although a discussion on the understudied female agency within Risorgimento is beyond the scope of this book, it is worth noting that this agency was often associated with nonconventional women, sometimes ready to fight disguised as men. It was the case with Colomba Antonietti Porzi who died defending the Roman Republic (Monsagrati

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2020, 174), or Garibaldian fighter Antonia Masanello, to whom NE dedicated a moved necrology when she died in Florence in 1862.3 Countess Belgioioso was likewise an independent woman who had left her husband to go living in Paris, where she scandalised the traditionalists due to her emancipated habits (Brunello 2005). She went back to Italy to support the revolts of Milan in 1848 and Rome in 1849. As for Enrichetta Di Lorenzo, she was associated with an unconventional man, but she did not cease to appear as an unconventional women and to have played roles in Pisacane’s radicalisation. One of the earliest historians who paid attention to Pisacane (Romano 1931), Aldo Romano also dealt with ‘Pisacane’s sentimental life’, a quite odd definition to identify a work that actually discussed materials mostly related to Enrichetta. Although the sexist tone of Romano’s commentaries, arguing that Enrichetta stood away from politics ‘due to her feminine nature’ (Romano 1933, 80) is quite unbearable to any contemporary sensitivity, that paper provides important insights, first of all the possibility of hearing Enrichetta’s voice. In the letters that she sent to her mother, reproduced by Romano, Enrichetta claimed that hers had been the only way to gain the freedom of choice that she could have never enjoyed under a combined marriage and the laws ruling at that time in Naples. She confided to her mother how, before fleeing with Pisacane, she was constantly undermined and humiliated by her official husband, to the point that his ‘rude manners and gross dirtiness had become unbearable to me [as it was] to my highest disgust, having to approach this man, who treated me as the vilest of women’ (Romano 1933, 59). She concluded with a sarcastic note that Mr. Lazzari could stay: ‘With his horses … that he certainly likes more than me’ (Romano 1933, 61). While this was already a declaration of insubordination as a mean for self-emancipating, Enrichetta’s arguments became more explicitly politicised in some of her successive letters. In fact, she claimed that her personal experience should concern ‘all the women who hold in their arms a man without feeling what I feel for Charles [Pisacane]’. She defined this kind of marriages as ‘prostitution, and [a way to] be untrue to natural feelings’ (Romano 1933, 64), denouncing a system in which: ‘The wife is a slave who is sold to her husband’ (Romano 1933, 71). Interestingly, in the following decades,

3 NE 23 May 1862. Necrologia, 3.

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the argument comparing bourgeois marriage to prostitution would be released by early anarchists and feminists such as Louise Michel. Enrichetta’s points were echoed by Pisacane’s letters to his parents, defining conventional marriages as a ‘sale’ only differing in its terms, but not in its substance, from the businesses dealt by the ‘public women’ (Pisacane 1937, 24; Pisacane to his parents, 28 January 1847). Pisacane likewise gave a broader political signification to his individual act of revolt, claiming that he and Enrichetta were among the ‘elected’ people who had ‘horror for slavery … in their souls’ and had been brave enough to ‘break their chains … happy to have declared war to society’ (Pisacane 1937, 29–30; Pisacane to his parents, 28 January 1847). From Enrichetta’s letters, it appeared that she was absolutely not far from political concerns, as she commented on the feminist contents of French writer George Sand, whom she defined ‘the first modern author’, who likewise ‘broke the link that prostituted her’ (Romano 1933, 84). Enrichetta recommended to her brother to read works of her acquaintances during her sojourn in London, such as Mazzini and Louis Blanc ‘to understand the truth’ (Romano 1933, 85). Therefore, Enrichetta Di Lorenzo was far from the patriarchal model wanting resigned women, only listening to their fathers, brothers and husbands. Also Fabbri indicated the free union between Carlo and Enrichetta as an example of anarchist ideas of free love and women’s self-emancipation, as marriage meant that: ‘A women was thrown into the arms of a man, hardly known before that moment and never loved. Therefore, this woman had the right to revolt against a union who had been probably a market, to which she could not consent explicitly. Lady D[i Lorenzo] availed of this right and was then Carlo Pisacane’s partner … Our revolutionary showed with the example the superiority of the free union, determined by love, on the legal union that is based in interests that are extraneous to love’ (Fabbri 1904, 5). Thus, the idea that the story of the Pisacanes could provide insights for antiauthoritarian thinking also in the realm of personal life was evoked before Romano’s works. The point is that Romano, who according to Mauro Canali (2004) had been for a while a collaborator of the infamous OVRA (the Fascist political police) under the fascist dictatorship, and a Marxist after 1945, always refused to see in Pisacane anything else than Romantic immaturity and ‘impoliticity’. Matching the despising vocabulary used by orthodox Marxists to excommunicate dissidents and allegedly ‘primitive’ rebels (Hobsbawm 2017), Romano argued that Pisacane was ‘the prefect ideal

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of the Romantic man’ (Romano 1933, 51), which implicitly meant that his woman was on object of the narration rather than a legitimate subject. I would instead content that the lives of the Pisacanes were political acts in themselves, to be fully acknowledged and understood, since the earliest act of rebellion by Enrichetta and Carlo. That is, saying ‘no’ to an unliberal environment suppressing any individual freedom, through the first and essential act of rebellion—taken one’s freedom by direct action.

What Pisacane Effectively Said As for Pisacane’s synthesis of previous debates on partisan wars, nation in arms and urban guerrilla, this can be found in his main essays, of which the earliest was La Guerra Combattuta in Italia. As noted above, Pisacane discussed directly this book with Cattaneo, who several years later published in the new Politecnico the draft of a study that he had himself commissioned to Pisacane to address the problems of the Lombard army in April 1848. This indicates how Cattaneo had seized the brightness of the young Neapolitan and the contribution that he could bring to the armed struggle (Pisacane 1860). As noted by Della Peruta, the deep meaning of Pisacane’s military writings was antimilitarist, as his ‘final aspiration remained that of the abolition of armies’ (Della Peruta 2004, 281). Pisacane was well aware that permanent armies are inevitably deployed in defence of the capitalist status quo, and deny any principle of citizenship through the military philosophy of the unconditioned obedience. Finally printed in Genoa in 1851, Guerra combattuta was announced by Pisacane to Cattaneo as: ‘The first book of our [political] colour which collects all the elements of the latest insurrection’ (Pisacane 1937, 114; Pisacane to Cattaneo, 23 January 1851). The book started with a quite staunch antiauthoritarian statement, that is: ‘The new era … will reduce the huge and rotten governmental machine to its easiest expression; that is, the people will not delegate power or will. The only support of the government will be public opinion’ (Pisacane 1906, 7). This was exactly the situation of radical democracy that following Cattaneo, Pisacane attributed to the nation in arms. Then, Pisacane already showed to have an idea of the connection between national question and social question, noting that the movements preceding 1848 lacked a popular foothold and that also ‘nationality’ did not arise as a value in itself, but as the slogan unifying the varied instances of the anti-despotic struggle. ‘Austria continued to

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concentrate power … People from the Lombardo-Veneto understood that they were Italians after that Austria wanted them to be Germans. The term nationality travelled across Italy and the material needs of the people … were expressed by this word’ (Pisacane 1906, 9–10). Paralleling and complementing Cattaneo’s Archivio Triennale, Pisacane’s book provided the first documented and consistent interpretation of the 1848– 1849 insurrections in Italy as a revolution that failed for both the lack of revolutionary leadership and for the counterrevolutionary roles that were played by figures that many revolutionaries had wrongly considered as allies, such as Pio IX and Carlo Alberto. As for the case of Milan and Lombardy, in addition to his personal experience, Pisacane widely relied on Cattaneo’s Insurrezione, even going further in his critiques to the opportunistic roles that the Milanese aristocracy had played. In fact, Pisacane noted that in a city like Milan that after the insurrection, ‘only belonged to its people’ (Pisacane 1906, 36), too many democrats believed the lies of those who exaggerated the strength of the Piedmontese forces to convince Lombards to offer themselves to Carlo Alberto for defeating Austria. Pisacane’s critiques to the way in which Carlo Alberto conducted the war led him to the same conclusion as Cattaneo: either for incompetence of the military commanders, either for political calculation, the Piedmontese army did not want to win the war against Austria, but only the war against Milan and against the Republic. Pisacane paid special attention to what happened in the South of Italy, where insurrections and urban barricades in cities like Naples had likewise taken place, although without the same fortune as in Venice or Milan. Pisacane greatly praised the work of Neapolitan republican Giuseppe Ricciardi who (anticipating Garibaldi’s idea of 1860) went to Sicily to convince the Sicilian provisional government to organise an expedition in the continental part of the Two Sicilies Kingdom, ‘as there was no possible safety for them until despotism was triumphant in Naples’ (Pisacane 1906, 104). According to Pisacane, Ricciardi’s attempt was unsuccessful in Sicily, but had important outcomes in Calabria, where an insurrection that was potentially not less important than the Milanese one took place. In the city of Cosenza, ‘the first that insurged, a provisional government was constituted. Citizens were called to arms, and there were soon 7–8000 men. At the announcement of the Calabrese insurrection, the King [of Naples] sent three columns against it’, which found a strong resistance. ‘On 22 [June 1848], a royalist battalion showed up under Spezzano Albanese and was thrown away’ (Pisacane 1906, 104).

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Della Peruta confirmed that the popular insurrections that occurred in the Southern regions between 1847 and 1848 contained significant examples of social radicalism, including the idea of an ‘Italian confederation’ (Della Peruta 1973, 111) raised by Neapolitan radicals. Moreover, regions such as Basilicata and Calabria were among the few cases in which Risorgimento riots had found ‘some connections with the peasants’ masses’ (Della Peruta 1973, 121) claiming for the distribution of land. Had this movement reversed the King of Naples, one of the pillars of Restoration, ruling over the biggest Italian state as for surface, this could have had an impact on the events that were ongoing in the North of the Peninsula. Thus, Pisacane noted that the South was not a passive actor in these years of Risorgimento. Yet, for Pisacane, when the first enthusiasms were exhausted, the Southern movement faded for the lack of ‘conscience in the people, of military leaders and of revolutionaries who were up to the job. Since then, the axe of the hangman, the bayonet of the royalist soldier, the hardship of prison and exile resumed all their strength. From the Tronto River to the bottom of Calabria, and later to the Lilibeo Cape, they reconstituted that famous regiment in which every individual is slave, servile, coward with the most powerful to be tyrannic, arrogant and cruel with the weakest’ (Pisacane 1906, 105). That is, the permanent army as opposed to the citizens’ army became a metaphor to define life under despotism, within Pisacane’s very advanced analyses of the mechanisms of power. For Pisacane, the latter was the school of democratic participation and free citizenship, the former was instead the school of the worst degenerations, including the art of abandoning all civic virtues through the principle of forced obedience. Analysing the events of 1849, Pisacane drafted a geopolitical schema of the potential perspectives of the three democratic governments in Venice, Florence and Rome, arguing that: ‘In Italy, they could not coexist with the [neighbouring] monarchies. Their immediate enemies were Austria, Naples and Piedmont’ (Pisacane 1906, 168). Here, Pisacane matched arguments from Ferrari’s Federazione Repubblicana, a book whose reading strongly impressed the author of Guerra Combattuta, that the problem was not the occupation of Italy by the stranger. Indeed, only a few regions of Italy were formally occupied by the Austrian Empire, and the internal enemy, that is despotism, was the real matter. From these premises, Pisacane logically came to denounce the lack of radicalisation in

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these revolutionary processes, considering it a shame given that, at least for a while, all three of these governments had a strong popular consensus. Pisacane’s critiques focussed on the fact that in these revolutionary republics or almost-republics, ‘the governmental machine and the social status remained the same’ while these experiences, overall: ‘Did not express the will and the collective power of their peoples, but the intelligence and aspirations of their governments’ (Pisacane 1906, 169). The most original of Pisacane’s critiques concerned the Roman Republic. ‘Revolutionary as for its intentions, but lacking ideas and practices, the Roman government wanted to ground society on abnegation and brotherhood: instead of targeting this result with the arrangement of material interests, it wanted to use the end as a mean’ (Pisacane 1906, 169). This point is absolutely crucial to understand how Pisacane was an early socialist critic of Mazzinianism well before he wrote Testamento Politico and Saggio sulla Rivoluzione. Identifying the centrality of the social question, Pisacane highlighted the limitations of Mazzinian republicans who: ‘Fight against communism, are afraid of saying themselves socialists, advocate the Gospel: in a word, they want revolution but they deny it. What are the reforms that they desire? We do not know, they also ignore it and they pretend that, to conquer that unknown future, the people makes a revolution and wait that God transmits the Tables of the Law to a new Moses’ (Pisacane 1906, 322). This kind of sardonic remarks were implicitly directed to Mazzini’s mysticism and personal egocentrism, revealing clearly that his acquaintance with Cattaneo strongly marked young Pisacane. Matching Ferrari’s critiques to formalism, Pisacane showed his familiarity with the history of French socialism by mentioning the mythic 1833 revolts of the canuts , Lyon textile workers. ‘In Lyon, one could read on the people’s flag: Vivre en travaillant ou mourir en combattant [To live working or to die fighting], and then in June [1848] the same people were gunmachined because they wanted to live’ (Pisacane 1906, 323). That is, a formal republic was not the solution if this did not resolve the social question, as both the repression of the Parisian people in June 1848 and of the Roman Republic in July 1849 had been performed by the French Republic. Continuing his analysis of the 1849 events, Pisacane provided further arguments to justify his claim that the Savoias were enemies rather than allies, in noting the behaviour of the Turin government after the Novara defeat, which signed the armistice denying de facto any help

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to the insurrection of Brescia, popularly considered as one of the most heroic episodes of Risorgimento. Instead, in April 1849, the Piedmontese generals repressed the republican revolt of Genoa ordering: ‘A bombing that was as much cruel as useless, as Genoa was already defeated’ (Pisacane 1906, 194). For Pisacane: ‘One would not be very far from the truth in believing that Austria, the Piedmontese camarilla and the foreign diplomacies were all in agreement to sacrifice the honour of the nation and to oppress the people, to maintain the status quo’ (Pisacane 1906, 210). As for Sicily, Pisacane complained that for fourteen months ‘she was free, but not in the condition to defend that freedom’ (Pisacane 1906, 211), for the lack of ‘the concept of revolution … improving material conditions’ and for the inadequacy of the Sicilian government, which Pisacane deemed ‘the less revolutionary among all the Italian governments issued from the insurrection’ (Pisacane 1906, 211). Therefore, for Pisacane, the opposition was definitively between social revolution and despotism rather than between unity/independence and foreign domination. Pisacane’s critique of the Garibaldian Legion that fought around Rome is very significant as for Pisacane’s assessment of the Guerra per Bande and his notion of military organisation as something that had to respond to political and pedagogical matters rather than mere concerns with functional efficiency. While his critique to Garibaldi’s lack of military preparation is well-known, what was crucial in these notes is that Pisacane argued that: ‘In the organisation of that corps there was nothing new or purely republican, as everything emanated from the General, for whom [these men] practiced a cult, therefore a pure despotism’ (Pisacane 1906, 273). That is, the young people who followed Garibaldi responded exclusively to his orders rather than to those of the republican movement that should have been the expression of the people; Pisacane deemed charismatic personal leadership not less dangerous than lack of leadership at all. Pisacane wanted to shatter commonplaces considering guerrilla (Guerra per Bande) as a qualitatively different way of making war than the methods of regular armies. For Pisacane, guerrilla was: ‘Only the infancy of the military art. A partisan band can haunt the countryside to make the region insurge; yet, if it does not succeed in 8 days, it is better that it disbands: it would be more harmful than useful. What aim could have partisan bands in Valtellina, in Cadore, in Romagna? They will be a burden for inhabitants … Compelled to live off people’s contributions, they will push the populations to want the enemy to

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rescue themselves from their friends’ (Pisacane 1906, 303–304). Pisacane argued for the need of collective and transparent participation, of which guerrilla as conceived by the Mazzinians was an elitist denial, as it: ‘Generates individual cults, that are pernicious and shameful for a free people. Republic means substitution of collective interests and wishes to the individual ones; Republic means equality, while the guerrilla bands that want to be untied to the rest of citizens represent the privilege’ (Pisacane 1906, 305). Again, these judgements echoed Cattaneo’s critiques to the elitism of Mazzini’s conspirative organisations, anticipating key themes of twentieth-century anarchist organisation such as Malatesta’s notion of ‘method’ as coherence between means and ends. That is, one cannot pursue a libertarian and equalitarian programme with a vertical organisation that denies these final aims (Malatesta 2014). Pisacane discussed the idea of the nation in arms as an exercise of direct democracy and egalitarianism in his further books such as Ordinamento e Costituzione delle Milizie Italiane, ossia Come Ordinare la Nazione Armata. Like Cattaneo, Pisacane started from the example of the end of republican freedom in ancient Rome to define the republican and libertarian meaning of a citizens’ army as opposed to a permanent army. ‘When war becomes a profession, liberty is destroyed; and in direct relation to the gap between the citizen and the warrior, tyranny becomes harsher’. Hence, Rome ‘became slave when the praetorians took the place of citizen’s army’ (Pisacane 1901, 4). Yet, the Moderns had great advantages over the Ancients. For Pisacane, in ancient times, war requested warriors to have great physical strength and take harsh training, while: ‘Modern arms require order and collective virtue’ (Pisacane 1901, 5). At Pisacane’s time, it was sufficient to teach to everybody the easy use of a rifle to ‘transform citizens in warriors’ (Pisacane 1901, 12). While the use of arms was more democratic in his time than in ancient times, for Pisacane it was crucial to link army and society in this process of egalitarian democratisation. Although, in a battle, there are decisions that must be made very quickly, and therefore everybody has to trust the strategist who gives technical orders, for Pisacane, those who abide by these instructions should accept this out of trust and free will rather than imposition. Key was to have officers freely elected and freely revokable by citizens-fighters to whom Pisacane directly spoke in his books: ‘You have the inalienable right to choose the chiefs who will lead you to the battle’ (Pisacane 1901, 91).

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This solution had a pedagogical function, closing the ‘schools of prejudices’ (Pisacane 1901, 44) that were constituted by traditional armies. It also corrected the dysfunctionalities of a system for appointments and promotions that, in the army as in all branches of civil life, was based on everything but merit and competence. ‘Those who serve more humbly are the favourites, virtue and true merit are always detested … merit and experience succumb to intrigue, and the servile prevails’ (Pisacane 1901, 87, 89). Pisacane clarified that in what he called ‘democratic social order’, matters with public order and criminality should be dealt directly by citizens, with no professional police corps. ‘Gendarmery, called in some countries Carabinieri corps and dedicated to spy the private life of citizens … cannot exist in a society where people’s sovereignty and freedom are effective’ (Pisacane 1901, 125). This confirms how Pisacane’s idea of nation in arms was fundamentally antimilitarist and antiauthoritarian, anticipating anarchist notions of self-governed society. When Guerra combattuta was already on proofs, Pisacane had received Ferrari’s Federazione repubblicana and added an appendix to comment that work. Although Pisacane did not agree with all of Ferrari’s points, as noted above, he concluded anyway by contending that: ‘Italy does not have any other hope than the great social revolution, and in this I agree with the eminent author of Federazione Repubblicana’ (Pisacane 1901, 330). As for the contentious matter of Francophilia, Pisacane simply predicted that: ‘France will not need to send her armies, as far as ideas cross the Alps before the arms, and these will be enough to accomplish the Italian revolution’ (Pisacane 1901, 331). Pisacane’s and Cattaneo’s correspondence sheds light on the context in which these ideas were formed, being the result of collective exchanges and reflections that took place between Paris, Genoa and Lugano. In the months that followed the publication of Guerra Combattuta, Cattaneo promoted Pisacane’s book recommending it to his friends, from Mauro Macchi to whom he wrote that Pisacane’s work was ‘like a diamond’ (Cattaneo 2005, 218; Cattaneo to Macchi, 20 May 1851) to Ferrari, whom Cattaneo requested to ‘make [Pisacane’s book] known better in France’ (Cattaneo 2005, 253; Cattaneo to Ferrari, 28 August 1851). This letter also contained a very important remark, when Cattaneo confided to Ferrari that he believed that Pisacane: ‘Will soon be one of ours; therefore, you can give him our response to the Manifesto [of the Latin Committee]’ (Cattaneo 2005, 253; Cattaneo to Ferrari, 28 May 1851). This note is crucial to understand Pisacane’s political thinking

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and the importance that the exile networks played in informing both early socialism and Risorgimento federalism. While Pisacane is not often mentioned as a federalist, it is clear that Cattaneo’s thought constituted the ground of his works, where Pisacane used to claim for ‘decentring … the administration, and leaving to each province the responsibility to organize’ (Pisacane 1906, 47) militias, drawing on Cattaneo’s suggestions. Although the expedition of Sapri stood in contradiction with Cattaneo’s ideas, and even with the very critiques to the guerrilla tactics expressed by Pisacane in Guerra Combattuta, Pisacane’s daughter recollected that despite their contacts became less frequent in her father’s last years, Pisacane continued to admire Cattaneo as ‘the first among the Italians’ (Cattaneo 2005, 556; Note by Silvia Pisacane). Pisacane’s epistolary shows the frequency of his letters to Cattaneo in 1851, exactly while Ferrari tried to build a socialist and federalist party of which, according to Cattaneo, Pisacane could have been a member. At the beginning of the year, Pisacane wrote from Genoa encouraging Cattaneo to write some new essay as: ‘Something really indispensable to our homeland’ (Pisacane 1937, 113; Pisacane to Cattaneo, 1 January 1851). In the following months, he wrote again expressing his hope for some renewed revolutionary upsurge, as it seemed to him that: ‘Trust in princes has vanished and the word Republic has become popular’ (Pisacane 1937, 118; Pisacane to Cattaneo, 17 April 1851). These letters also show how Pisacane mistrusted Mazzini at that moment. According to Pisacane, even in one of his strongholds like Genoa, Mazzini’s reputation ‘has fallen among intelligent people, especially when one reads some long declaration where he speaks like someone inspired by God and a prophet’ (Pisacane 1937, 118; Pisacane to Cattaneo, 17 April 1851). In the following letters, Pisacane discussed with Cattaneo his response to Ferrari’s Filosofia della Rivoluzione, seeking the most diplomatic way to write that he disagreed on some points such as the assessment of the Pope’s role. This only confirms Pisacane’s willingness to maintain a relation with Ferrari through Cattaneo, as he ‘completely agree[d] with Ferrari in believing that Italy only can find redemption from socialism’ (Pisacane 1937, 120; Pisacane to Cattaneo, 22 May 1851) and that he had ‘the greatest esteem and admiration for [Ferrari’s] talents’ (Pisacane 1937, 124; Pisacane to Cattaneo, 17 June 1851). This means that, in 1851, socialistic ideas did not only circulate among exiles but also in Italy, especially thanks to the Capolago printing shop.

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Pisacane continued to share with Cattaneo his critiques to Mazzini and to the ‘party of the intolerants’, which he also discussed with their common friend Macchi in Genoa, likewise seeing the dangers of authoritarianism in a ‘party which has a man as its flag’, especially in case they seize power. ‘After its latest Revelation, the London Committee remained silent, and we all wait for the Lord’s word and the bread for our souls’ (Pisacane 1937, 127; Pisacane to Cattaneo, 8 July 1851). To complete his series of sarcastic comparisons between the Mazzinians and the Church, Pisacane imagined that the publication of Guerra Combattuta ‘will increase the M[azzinians’] hydrophobia. I think that they would be happy to send me before the Holy Office. I defined that party as disciplined people in peace, undisciplined in war. In fact, they are opposed to discussion and critiques, but once in war each one wants to fight on his own’ (Pisacane 1937, 129; Pisacane to Cattaneo, 31 July 1851). The fact that some years later, Pisacane trusted Mazzini, collaborating with him for the Sapri expedition, appears quite surprising at this stage, and can arguably be explained rather by biographical contingencies than ideological reasons. After Louis-Napoléon’s coup d’état, Pisacane felt likewise the need to discuss the events with Cattaneo. Trying to understand why France was then in the hands of ‘a brigand, chief of 300,000 paid and regimented brigands’, Pisacane was especially anxious to know: ‘What you [Cattaneo] think about that and what Ferrari thinks’ (Pisacane 1937, 133; Pisacane to Cattaneo, 15 December 1851). In the same letter, Pisacane continued to endorse the works of the two Lombard federalists. ‘I have read Ferrari’s Philosophy of Revolution and found completely developed what you drafted … I have read the second volume of the Archivio [Triennale] and agree with you’ (Pisacane 1937, 133; Pisacane to Cattaneo, 15 December 1851). Crucially, in this same letter Pisacane endorsed two ‘grand ideas’ that allow understanding his later works: ‘The suppression of the presidency, and finally that of the permanent army … We approach the only form of government that is right and secure: Proudhon’s anarchy’ (Pisacane 1937, 134; Pisacane to Cattaneo, 15 December 1851). In anarchist terms, Pisacane’s works even overtook Proudhon’s as for radicality, as I discuss below. In his reply, Cattaneo commented sarcastically the defeat of those French republicans who did not behave as republicans, in cases such as their expedition against Rome. Yet, like Ferrari, he believed that there still

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were hopes for relief, as France would not have lived forever under a dictatorship, because: ‘The one who is bored by the good, will be also bored by the evil’ (Cattaneo 1952, 138; Cattaneo to Pisacane, 29 December 1851). Cattaneo also noted how universal suffrage had been ineffective in saving the French Republic, as people had finally voted both for LouisNapoléon and for nominating the National Assembly, that Cattaneo called the ‘pigsty’. For republican federalists following the principle of ‘non-domination’, and later for left/libertarians, formal democracy is not enough to guarantee freedom. In the following years, the correspondence between the two men became less frequent, although Cattaneo managed to obtain a German edition of Guerra Combattuta noting that: ‘This is a honour that one rarely obtains’ (Cattaneo 1952, 167; Cattaneo to Pisacane, 4 August 1852). He was maybe also encouraged by Cernuschi who, after reading Pisacane’s book, wrote to Cattaneo that: ‘This friend of us has made great progresses’ (Cattaneo 1952, 472; Cernuschi to Cattaneo, 6 September 1851). It is intriguing that, until 1855, Pisacane continued to express critiques to guerrillas and insurrectional ‘attempts’, writing in 1852 to Cattaneo that: ‘I can guarantee that the theories of martyrdom and of the attempts are now discredited’ (Pisacane 1937, 148; Pisacane to Cattaneo, 14 August 1852). He was clearly not directly involved in the 1853 insurrection of Milan, year in which the Neapolitan exile was still criticising Mazzini as the exponent of the ‘principle of authority’ (Pisacane 1937, 155; Pisacane to Cattaneo, 17 January 1853) in his letters to Cattaneo. Still in July 1855, writing a letter to Mazzinian journal Italia e Popolo, Pisacane took publicly distances from Mazzini, arguing that ‘Mazzini considers me as one of the sceptics who mistrust the people’ (Pisacane 1937, 194; Pisacane to Italia e Popolo, 19 July 1855). Pisacane claimed that he likewise wanted national unification, but it should have been based on the ‘absolute freedom of the individual and of the Commune’, maintaining his critique to charismatic leaderships by arguing that: ‘Those who would like to have an entire people obeying to the voices of a leader do not understand revolution: they are old servants dressed with the republican tunic’ (Pisacane 1937, 195; Pisacane to Italia e Popolo, 19 July 1855). Yet, the fact that he chose this tribune to expose his ideas indicated that he already was willing to resume some links with Mazzini. Pisacane was especially concerned by some rumours about a possible coup d’état in Southern Italy to get rid of Ferdinand II restoring the descendants of Joachim Murat, the former Napoleonian viceroy of

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Naples, a hypothesis that scared the republicans from the South. This uncertainty over the destinies of his own land arguably amplified what Rosselli defined Pisacane’s ‘anguishing drama of conscience’ (Rosselli 1977, 168), that is his disappointment for being compelled, after 1849, to limit his activities to his own studies without any further political or professional perspective. When Pisacane decided that some action was needed, he found on his road Mazzini and the Naples secret committee which was starting conspiration to prepare a military expedition in Southern Italy, including people like Nicola Fabrizi, Giuseppe Fanelli and Luigi Dragone, who were interestingly all ‘unorthodox Mazzinians’ (Greco 1979, 9). In 1856–1857, Pisacane had a sustained correspondence with them, that has been almost integrally published by Giovanni Greco. To follow this way, Pisacane sacrificed some of the ideas that he had previously expressed, and most importantly his life, taken in July 1957 by a group of bigoted peasants, launched by local priests to fight against the republican expeditioners who wanted to give freedom to them. Another demonstration, if we want, that freedom should be taken directly by the interested people rather than imported from outside. Very impressed and saddened by the death of his friend, which he defined ‘a useless loss’, Cattaneo noted that, as for Pisacane’s attitudes, ‘it seems that the spleen of the exile had modified his feelings’ (Cattaneo 1954, 36; Cattaneo to Arduini, 13 August 1857). Indeed, Cattaneo could hardly come to terms with his anger and dismay that a so bright and generous person had perished in a so unrealistic insurrectional attempt. He especially highlighted the responsibilities of Mazzini, whom Cattaneo accused to continue to brainwash people to be sent to die. As he wrote to Cernuschi, it was dreadful that their 1848 friend had: ‘Allowed them seducing and sacrificing him like a young shepherd’ (Cattaneo 1954, 38; Cattaneo to Cernuschi, 1 September 1857). That is, Cattaneo was upset by the idea that one of his old friends could have been so naïve. Years later, he still inquired on the role that was possibly played by Bertani in that drama: ‘Since I saw the name of our poor Pisacane in that insanity, I immediately understood that he was lost, and I thought a thousand times of you. How could you do that?’ (Cattaneo 1954, 93; Cattaneo to Bertani, 11 January 1859). Bertani protested that he did not have any influence on Pisacane and that he and his friends ‘tried to oppose [that project] as long as we could, then we were put aside’ (Cattaneo 1954, 551; Bertani to Cattaneo, 2 February 1859). Available sources seem to

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confirm that Bertani was sincere in denying his responsibilities in that affair. Arguably, this was of little consolation for Cattaneo. While the story of the failed Sapri expedition is too well-known to be fully described here, it is worth addressing some of the easiest commonplaces about that story, which is considered as the prototype of the improvised, visionary and unrealistic endeavour. I would instead contend that the Sapri expedition was not improvised as it had been very meticulously prepared by a very committed network of conspirators. If it did not work, beyond some technical mistakes of the protagonists, it was simply because they had overestimated the insurrectional potential of both rural peasants and urban liberals in the Kingdom of Naples at that moment, and underestimated the capacity that the dying Bourbons’ regime still had to react. The abundant documentation collected by Greco shows that this endeavour was not at all taken lightly by its protagonists, who were all very aware of its risks and contingencies. This even led to retrospective polemics on whether some members of the local committee had ‘deserted’, as I discuss in the next section. As anticipated above, I also argue that the most important part of Pisacane’s legacy was not his personal sacrifice in Sapri, but in his ideas, that were fully released in two texts that were published posthumously and consistently followed Ordinamento and Guerra Combattuta, that is La Rivoluzione (also published as Saggio sulla Rivoluzione) and Testamento Politico. It was mainly about these works that Fabbri granted to Pisacane a primacy as the first thinker who ‘made a reasoned critique of the principle of authority and of … individual property … considering as inseparable the political question from the social one, saying that liberty cannot exist where privilege exists’ (Fabbri 1904, 16). An analysis of Pisacane’s Saggio and Testamento Politico easily shows why these texts were considered key by antiauthoritarians also as a political proposal. In his Saggio, Pisacane extended his arguments on the nation in arms as a sort of antimilitarist army to build his own general theory of revolution, that is ‘social revolution’ (Pisacane 1951, 25). Importantly, his idea of social emancipation was voluntaristic, as Pisacane questioned all ideas of linear, automatic and cumulative progress based on science, arguing that the increasing growth of ‘human knowledge [does not] equally expand everybody’s prosperity’ (Pisacane 1951, 13). This questioning did not mean that Pisacane had any belief in metaphysics, a field that, like Cattaneo, he completely denied, adding his own declaration of atheism based on a sort of ontological agnosticism. ‘Who did create the world?

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I don’t know. But, of all the hypotheses, the most absurd is that of supposing the existence of a God, and of a man created in his image. That is, as we cannot imagine this God, man created him in his own image, making him the creator of the world, so that a particle becomes the creator of the Whole’ (Pisacane 1951, 17). This would be a very important point for both republican secularism and anarchist anticlericalism, chiming with Bakunin’s claims that revolutionaries should deny God as an expression of the principle of authority (Bakunin 1974). An idea likewise informing both anarchism and European federalism, for what Pisacane has been rarely acknowledged, was internationalism. Nevertheless, Pisacane wrote that ‘humankind has a tendency towards planetary unit’ (Pisacane 1951, 20) and towards ‘a world language’ (Pisacane 1951, 21), confirming Rosselli’s remark that, during Risorgimento, internationalism was ‘the logical and ultimate goal’ (Rosselli 1977, 73) of the struggle for national liberation. With the future socialist and anarchist International, Pisacane also shared another qualifying point, that is his critique of ‘the right of property, which gives to the few the possibility to enrich to the detriment of the many’ (Pisacane 1951, 41). Here, Pisacane was evidently indebted with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who had famously argued that property is a theft, and whose works are often quoted in Pisacane’s Saggio, including when Proudhon claimed that: ‘Free trade, that is the free monopoly, is the Holy Alliance of the great feudatories of capital and industry; it is the monstrous power that has to … crush the minor industries and definitively submit the proletariat’ (Pisacane 1951, 47). This demonstrates that Proudhon’s influence over Risorgimento was not limited to migrants such as Ferrari and Montanelli, but also affected activists who were well close to the core of conspiration centres in Italy, like Pisacane. Other characteristics of libertarian socialism that Pisacane’s Saggio anticipated included wariness for the universal suffrage, considered as ‘a bitter deception for populace’ (Pisacane 1951, 48) matching Cattaneo’s commentary on the election of Louis-Napoléon in France. Importantly, Pisacane anticipated a future leitmotif of anarchist geographers and evolutionist socialist scholars (Colajanni 1898), that is the confutation of the principles of population established by Thomas Malthus, who theorised the inverse relation between the growth of population and the availability of resources such as food. While Malthus’s principles were notoriously used for naturalising poverty and justifying inequalities (Ferretti 2021), for Pisacane, ‘this fatal and terrible law does not exist’, as the problem

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was instead the ‘unjust distribution of wealth’ (Pisacane 1951, 53). This placed clearly Pisacane’s thinking in the line of socialist critiques to Malthusianism and liberal markets. As for liberty, Pisacane stressed the inescapable alternative between ‘free association and military despotism’ (Pisacane 1951, 57), expressing a libertarian and anti-Jacobin notion of the revolution discussing the mistakes of the French politicians who ruled Italy during the Napoleonian period by noting that: ‘[Ugo] Foscolo defined them: ancient slaves, new tyrants’ (Pisacane 1951, 144). Pisacane opposed authoritarian ways to transform society such as temporary dictatorships, directories of triumvirates (and also potentially what the Marxists will call the Dictatorship of the Proletariat) as: ‘Whoever pretends to rule me, and [mandates] that I conform to his ideas and habits, is a stupid tyrant’ (Pisacane 1951, 177). On this point, Pisacane referenced Proudhon’s famous aphorisms on the evils of the government, stating that: ‘Whoever puts his hand over me to govern me is an usurper, a tyrant, and I declare him my enemy’ (Pisacane 1951, 103). His declared final goal was called social and political ‘simplification, whose ultimate term is anarchy’ (Pisacane 1951, 105). In this system, ‘freedom cannot exist without equality: one of the two words is redundant’ (Pisacane 1951, 206), which established a couple that would be substantially recovered by the Neapolitan group of the Internationalists, who will edit with Bakunin a journal called Libertà e Giustizia where social justice was synonymous with equality. In his Political Testament, Pisacane concluded this discourse stressing the points that mostly scandalised the most pious Mazzinians: ‘My political principles are quite well-known; I believe that only socialism, but not those French systems that are grounded in the monarchist and despotic idea … I mean socialism as expressed by the formula “Freedom and Association”, is the only close future of Italy, and maybe of Europe’ (Pisacane 1951, 207). As Carocci rightly notes, a formula such as ‘Freedom and Association’ was Pisacane’s counterpoint to Mazzini’s ‘God and People’, also contradicting some Gramscian vulgates pretending that Pisacane was something like a ‘Jacobin’ (Carocci 2017, 66) and that were also contradicted by Pisacane’s own remarks on the effective use of authority under the Roman Republic, when the government’s orders were ‘executed without the need of any coercion’ (Carocci 2017, 153). Therefore, Pisacane’s principles went well beyond classical republican ideas of nondomination, contending that the absence of domination cannot exist without economic equality. That is, libertarian socialism.

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Finally, as noted above, historiography did not identify Pisacane’s federalism so easily as his socialism. This can only come from the misunderstanding of some pages of the Saggio where Pisacane argued that several authoritarian small states would not have been better than just one authoritarian central state. However, as demonstrated in the previous chapters, Cattaneo’s and Ferrari’s federalism was far from limited to matters on statal, regional or local scales, as it was overwhelmingly based on the principle of decentralising the ways in which decision are made, that is always from below rather than from above. Pisacane matched perfectly these points in his comparison between individual and communal freedom. ‘As all Italians must be free and independent, all Communes must also be. Like any hierarchy among individuals is absurd, this also applies among Communes. Each Commune can only be a free association of individuals, and the nation a free association of Communes’ (Pisacane 1951, 107). This nation and these communes had to work following the principle that would be called today direct democracy, where ‘laws cannot be imposed, but rather proposed to the nation’ (Pisacane 1951, 108). Here, Pisacane challenged all those who, ‘with Proudhon’s exception, persist in the serious mistake of pretending to start all reforms from top-down, imposing these to the people, rather than letting them surge spontaneously from bottom-up’ (Pisacane 1951, 119). In his comparison between unitary and federalist republicans, Pisacane interestingly noted that: ‘Federalists have clearer and neater political concepts, they are principled republicans; unitaries feel more strongly national dignity, but they are republicans only by form’ (Pisacane 1951, 130). Therefore, if we consider federalism as antiauthoritarian opposition to ‘formalism’ (in Ferrari’s sense), as administrative decentralisation and communal freedom, as Cattanean action for below and as Proudhonian stance for political liberty, we can definitively define Pisacane a federalist.

The Thousand, and Some of Them After the end of the 1859 ‘Second War of Independence’, the decisive move towards unification came from the famous Expedition of the Thousand (Mack Smith 1999; Riall 2007; Scirocco 1969). I will not summarise the history of that expedition, on which a huge literature is available, but just try to understand the attitude of federalists and early socialists in taking part to it. It is intriguing that, in his own

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recollections, a staunch federalist like Alberto Mario characterised strongly his figure and personality as that of a Red Shirt, that is in principle a fighter for unification. Although one can note that, in 1860, Mario was not yet a declared federalist and was still far from launching ‘the inversion of the formula’, his participation to Garibaldian endeavours continued until the Mentana attempt in 1867, when his convictions were already very explicit. Likewise, someone who did not like to travel like Cattaneo considered this event so important that he left from Lugano in September 1860 to serve as an advisor, although hardly listened, for Garibaldi. According to Jessie White, these men supported Garibaldi’s expedition because it matched their idea of ‘federation of patriots’ (Mario 1884, 52), that is a pluralistic approach to Risorgimento that could have put together different sensitivities and maybe got rid of the dissensions in the republican field. Indeed, the people who, like Cattaneo, joined Garibaldi in Naples when he was negotiating the delivery of Southern Italy to King Vittorio Emanuele II were effectively heterogeneous. Nevertheless, this did not entail any significant growth of Cattaneo’s influence over the events, and nobody could find a recipe to avoid the success of the royalist operation which was so defined by Alberto Mario in his recollections as a Red Shirt: ‘Cutting the wings of the eagle of Caprera’ (Mario 1875, 172). Mario had fought in the Expedition since the beginning and was among the numerous Garibaldians who were hostile to the intervention of the King. At that moment, Mario declared that he was already ‘a disciple and … a friend’ (Mario 1875, 181), of Cattaneo, and that he tried his best to facilitate his work with Garibaldi. Since June, Cattaneo was corresponding with the Marios to discuss the possible ways in which to make that Expedition serve for liberation rather than for annexation, and wrote to them, at that moment in Palermo: ‘It is necessary … that Sicily remains free as long as she can’ (Cattaneo 1954, 358; Cattaneo to the Marios, 9 June 1860). During the summer, Cattaneo pleaded for the same cause to an eminent Sicilian republican and Garibaldian, Francesco Crispi, encouraging him to: ‘Make your island a free port in the Mediterranean Sea … Each brother should be the master of his house’ (Cattaneo 1954, 373; Cattaneo to Crispi, 18 July 1860). While it is clear that autonomist impulsions in Sicily against the King of Naples were one of the factors that helped Garibaldi (Mack Smith 1999), it is worth noting the coherence with which Cattaneo advocated Sicilian federalism as the outcome of the Expedition of the Thousand, on which since the beginning he

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did not have a great enthusiasm, but considered his duty to contribute this way (Armani 1983). Once in Naples, his letters accounted for his first meetings with Garibaldi and with Mario, from which he was made aware of the (although unsurprising) ‘great dissensions between Garibaldi and Cavour’ (Cattaneo 1954, 392; Cattaneo to Woodcock, 21 September 1860). It was not even a matter with federalism or centralism, but just on the mere possibility of continuing the campaign by advancing towards Rome. Needless to say, Cattaneo advised Garibaldi to reject Cavour’s instructions. Since his first day there, in his letters to his wife, Cattaneo’s complained about the lack of activity, and about a feeling that Armani defined ‘being perceived as an extraneous element’ (Armani 1997, xxxi). Maintaining his coherence and intransigence was one of the key concerns for Cattaneo who did not want to accept compromises to maintain his status as an advisor. ‘Everybody encourages me to remain here, but I want to keep my freedom’ (Cattaneo 1954, 397; Cattaneo to Woodcock, 21 September 1860). How that moment was perceived as crucial is shown by the fact that Garibaldi was joined by the major leaders of both the Mazzinian and federalism field, who were trying to forget their old dissensions to condition the incoming events. ‘I saw Ferrari, Mazzini, De Boni and other friends’ (Cattaneo 1954, 397; Cattaneo to Woodcock, 23 September 1860). Yet, this bunch of old fighters ended with being a minority in Garibaldi’s headquarters: ‘Here, Cavourism penetrates everywhere … I increasingly confirm my feeling of disdain and hatred for the system which corrupts my homeland’ (Cattaneo 1954, 397; Cattaneo to Woodcock, 23 September 1860). Everybody perceived that the Monarchy’s priority was stopping Garibaldi, but the latter wanted to avoid a civil war and gave up his project to continue towards Rome. Cattaneo recounted how the General was very disappointed and envisaged to retreat instead of taking orders that he could not abide, being ‘very disheartened by the Piedmontese opposition and very willing to resign’ (Cattaneo 1954, 398; Cattaneo to Woodcock, 25 September 1860). Cattaneo also asked his wife to send some counterinformation to London to denounce that: ‘All the information that Cavour sends to the Times and to the Daily News on dissensions and crimes here [in Naples] are true lies’ (Cattaneo 1954, 413; Cattaneo to Woodcock, 4 October 1860). A very contentious matter was about the possibility, for the Southern provinces, to elect democratic assemblies to negotiate all the conditions of a possible national unification. This was firstly required

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by the Sicilians, who ‘are determined to nominate an assembly that will deliberate on everything should be done about their annexation to the whole of Italy (and not directly to Piedmont). The General would like the Neapolitans to do the same’ (Cattaneo 1954, 415; Cattaneo to Woodcock, 11 October 1860). The entire republican component supported this claim, including Mazzini and Crispi, which led Cattaneo to some sardonic commentaries on Mazzini starting ‘to become a Federalist’ (Cattaneo 1954, 415; Cattaneo to Woodcock, 11 October 1860). This further demonstrates how Cattaneo’s federalism was rather a libertarian method than a mere proposal to redraw the national map. Unsurprisingly, the Monarchy refused the election of the Assemblies and substantially imposed the unification through plebiscites. Cattaneo noted that the mistake of republicans and democrats have been again to trust the Savoias and the idea of formal unification. As he write to Jessie White in November, after the departure from Naples of a very angry Garibaldi, and anticipating the notion of ‘inversion of the formula’: ‘Mazzini, Garibaldi and all their friends have been expelled from Naples among joyful cries of unity. Unity means Cavour. If [only] they had started since the beginning with the unequivocal cry of liberty!’ (Cattaneo 1954, 415; Cattaneo to White, November 1860). Some months later, in a letter to Bertani, Cattaneo related in vivid tones a meeting where a strong argument took place between Garibaldi and the filo-monarchist representatives who wanted at all cost to impede that the meeting deliberated in favour of the Assemblies. When Garibaldi said: ‘If you do not want the Assembly, to the Hell the Assembly; I will come back to Caprera… nobody of the attendees made any remark. There was only me who refused, when Pallavicino offered to shake my hand’ (Cattaneo 1954, 490; Cattaneo to Bertani, 24 April 1861). When the army demobilised in November 1860, discomfort was also expressed by Mario, to whose eyes even the General was no longer the same figure. ‘I did not recognise in him the Garibaldi of Palermo or of the 1 October, but the Garibaldi lieutenant of the King … he executed an did not create. He was a generous steed humiliated between the axes of a barouche’ (Mario 1875, 232).

Southern Question and Internal Colonialism In recent decades, in Italian scholarship, politics and even popular culture, an increasingly strong attention had been paid to the phenomenon of the ‘brigands’, that is the first form of popular insurgency that has characterised the South of Italy after national unification. Considered for

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a long time as a reactionary movement inspired by the former King of Naples and by the Pope, this movement was compared to that of the Santa Fede infamously led by Cardinal Ruffo in 1799. Although effectively availing of material support from the former Kings of Naples and from clerical milieus (Ciconte 2018), the phenomenon of the brigands contained elements of popular and subaltern resistance against the worsening of their material conditions that were already noted by early meridionalists such as Gramsci and Salvemini (Gramsci 1966; Salvemini 1955). What is relevant to my arguments, is that among the first who protested against the violent repression of the brigand war and the extralegal massacres accomplished by the Piedmontese army in the region were federalists such as Cattaneo, Ferrari and Ghisleri. While one may note that these people were all from the North, one should also consider that that the South was the cradle of the early Bakuninian internationalist groups, and of their earliest insurrectional attempts such as the famous Banda del Matese (Masini 1978), that paradoxically revived the tradition of Mazzinian Guerra per Bande, but was also inspired by local traditions of popular insurgence, including the brigands. In a quite popular book, Il sangue del Sud, Giordano Bruno Guerri notes how, in the discourse of early unitary Italy, the major task for Southern Italy in 1860–1861 was: ‘Getting rid of both the Garibaldians and the brigands (the former being considered not less dangerous than the latter)’ (Guerri 2010, 77). According to historian Enzo Ciconte, the guiding criteria of the savage war that the newly unified Italian state fought in its Southern regions against the so-called ‘brigands’, was driven ‘by the same logic that will bring colonialism to perpetrate acts of unprecedented and unjustified violence in Africa and elsewhere’ (Ciconte 2018, 10). While the presence of groups of bandits in the countryside of Southern Italy was quite ancient and was previously fought by both the French occupants before 1814 and by the Bourbon Kings later, what characterised the war against brigands in the 1860s was the imposition of a generalised state of exception through the widespread use of martial laws and the state of siege. Historians like Giorgio Candeloro defined this war as based on: ‘A sort of military dictatorship on the entire continental South’ (Ciconte 2018, 12). An early meridionalist, Rosario Villari, also noted that: ‘We have made blood flow … but we did not think as much to radical remedies’ (Ciconte 2018, 3). These remedies would have been addressing the long-lasting conditions of poverty leading peasants in the countryside to claim ‘the distribution of land’ (Ciconte 2018, 123) in

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the context of a generalised ‘savage protest of misery’ (Ciconte 2018, 127), often instinctive and associated with very diverse degrees of social consciousness. Initially, a part of the republican field considered the war against the brigands, defined by Aurelio Saffi as ‘evil and inglorious’ (Guerri 2010, 91), as less the fault of the Italian state than of the external centres that encouraged and armed the brigands, from Rome or from the circuits of the exiled Bourbon kings. Yet, in the milieus of the political opposition, awareness of the responsibilities of the new Italian monarchs in what authors such as Guerri consider as something of a genocide rapidly raised. Ironically, among radicals, one of the earliest political critics of the war against the brigands in the South was a Milanese, Giuseppe Ferrari, who led some of the earliest enquiries on the field after he took a quite unexpected decision, that is entering the new national parliament in Turin, what Cattaneo and others republicans and federalists had indignantly refused as noted above. Before continuing this discussion, it is worth addressing shortly the reasons which pushed the author of the Federazione Repubblicana to this quite strange position. Ferrari’s parliamentary turn occurred after serious troubles of conscience, that he confided in his letters to Proudhon published by Della Peruta, as he believed that he was joining ‘a thoughtless gathering of genuine silly people and qualified rascals’ (Della Peruta 1961, 282; Ferrari to Proudhon, February 1860). Amazingly, despite the severe judgement of Luigi Fabbri arguing that joining the Parliament and even worse the Senate in his late days, Ferrari ‘felt asleep in the Italian retirement home’ (Fabbri 1921, 1), it was nobody less than the earliest declared anarchist, Proudhon, who encouraged Ferrari to join the Parliament, arguing that in that moment, this choice was the only way to have a tribune for the federalist school in Italy. Yet, Proudhon clarified that the Parliament was not the place for struggles, but only for the mere statement of principles, where: ‘Your duty is to keep calm’ (Proudhon 1875, 326; Proudhon to Ferrari, 6 June 1860). It is worth noting that, as I discuss below, parliamentarism had not been a big issue for early anarchists until the 1880s. During the Expedition of the Thousand, Ferrari had been less pessimistic than Cattaneo in identifying the openings that the fluid situation created in the South by the Garibaldians could imply for republican and federalists solutions. On the one hand, in his letters to Proudhon, Ferrari shared with the French tinker ‘a common indignation against the

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false revolution that shatters Italy’ (Della Peruta 1961, 279; Ferrari to Proudhon, 12 November 1859), referred to the 1859 annexations of Lombardy, Emilia and Tuscany to Piedmont. On the other, Ferrari’s views on the possible revolutionary perspectives changed the following year. As he wrote to his friend Michele Cavaleri, Ferrari saw for some weeks the possibility that Garibaldi’s arrival in Naples could trigger a popular revolution that could not be controlled by the Savoias, whose power was still weakly established outside Piedmont. ‘Do you understand now the strength of the federal idea? Just one step more and Naples overtakes Turin, the Revolution is Neapolitan and Italy is confederal’ (Monti 1925, 132; Ferrari to Cavaleri, 17 June 1860). In October 1860, even Giuseppe Montanelli, in a letter to Ferrari, expressed some cautious hope that the integration of the South in renewed Italy would not have been a Piedmontese annexation, but something like a league guaranteeing ‘the autonomy of regions’ (Monti 1925, 136; Montanelli to Ferrari, 11 October 1860) under a sort of formal sovereignty of Vittorio Emanuele. Ferrari, like Cattaneo, perceived the importance of having ‘a freed Sicily and Naples insurging’ (Monti 1925, 133; Ferrari to Cavaleri, 4 August 1860), also due to the strategic position of the island and the demographic weight of the city of Naples. Therefore, Milanese federalists would not have been scandalised at all in seeing the South leading the Italian revolution. Yet, the Monarchy had very different plans, of which Ferrari was one of the earliest denouncers, in his new role as a member of parliament. In the early 1860s, Ferrari’s fieldwork in Southern Italy paralleled and nourished the famous pamphlets La fédération et l’unité en Italie (1862) and Nouvelles observations sur l’unité italienne (1865) in which Proudhon took position against the unification of Italy, writing to Ferrari, already in 1859, that he was going to take inspiration from ‘your substance, arranging it in my way’ (Proudhon 1875, 169; Proudhon to Ferrari, 24 September 1859). In his writings, Proudhon followed the Italian federalists in mobilising geographical and historical arguments in favour of the variety and diversity of the Italian peninsula, and even derided the unitary argument mobilised by the Mazzinians, that Italy should be a unique state being well comprised within natural frontiers (Balzani 2020), arguing sarcastically that: ‘This would be like asserting a global Monarchy based on the roundness of the Earth’ (Proudhon 1868, 234). Crucially, beyond geomorphological arguments, the key criterion that Proudhon established to define frontiers was ‘the most complete freedom,

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the most absolute self-government’ (Proudhon 1868, 236). This means again that Risorgimento federalism, of which Proudhon was a key exponent also for his influence (sometimes reciprocal) on key thinkers like Ferrari and Montanelli, should not be considered as a cartographic matter of regionalisation, but as first an idea of locally based democracy from below. Most importantly, Proudhon was likewise an early critic of the colonial nature of the ‘Southern question’, first laughing at the Savoyard origins of King Vittorio Emanuele, whom Proudhon called, with an anti-imperialist metaphor: ‘The King of Italy like Maximilian is the Emperor of Mexico: a prince imported from abroad’ (Proudhon 1868, 237). Matching Cattaneo’s idea that Italy’s main territorial principle was ‘municipalism’ (Proudhon 1868, 243), Proudhon stressed how the history of Southern Italy was always characterised by political oppression, resulting in the people of regions such as Sicily and Calabria being: ‘Greeks who were forced, like many others, to learn Latin by the Roman domination’. There, one could not find anything of Italian beyond language, likewise ‘introduced by force’. In the same vein, Vittorio Emanuele ruled ‘by right of conquest’ (Proudhon 1868, 237). Interestingly, Proudhon’s pamphlets were distributed and advertised in Florence by NE.4 While Proudhon’s critiques of the newly achieved unity in Southern Italy drew upon information that he received from Ferrari stressing the government’s objective difficulties in ‘ruling Naples from Turin’ (Della Peruta 1961, 288; Ferrari to Proudhon, April 1861), Proudhon’s analysis on the whole of Italy revealed a classist approach that likewise echoed some works of his Milanese correspondent: ‘I think that Lombard peasants have cursed the [1859] war, the King and the liberal bourgeois … it was roughly the same in the Papal State and other localities’ (Proudhon 1875, 223; Proudhon to Ferrari, 7 November 1859). This analysis clearly indicated the distance between the mainstream movement of monarchist unification and the popular classes who remained extraneous to this movement also because they were excluded by any material benefit. In Turin, the earliest parliamentary speeches of Ferrari in October 1860 were dedicated to oppose the law on the annexation of Southern Italy, refusing the principle that the new government could make ‘freedom with arms, functionaries, ministers, generals and governors

4 NE 11 November 1862, 4.

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chosen in Turin’ (Ferrari 1860, 6). Drawing upon a municipalist analysis, Ferrari argued that, each time that a city takes a political supremacy over other urban centres of the same rank (being the case with Turin and Naples), this supremacy ‘becomes tyrannic, exerting a detested pressure on the subject nations and leading these to the insurrection’ (Ferrari 1860, 11). In the law under discussion, the ‘unconditional’ character of the annexation meant, to Ferrari, that Piedmont will be allowed ‘to destroy all Neapolitan laws to substitute them with all Piedmontese laws’ (Ferrari 1860, 11), that is the same process that Cattaneo and Montanelli were denouncing as for, respectively, Lombardy and Tuscany. Ferrari warned that social unrest will be an effect of the ‘impatient, hurried and tactless desire of the annexationists’ (Ferrari 1860, 15). That is, stating his belief ‘in federations’ (Ferrari 1860, 21) and calling to ‘confederate rather than confuse each other’ (Ferrari 1860, 27), Ferrari clearly foresaw the tragic consequences that an unification performed as a colonial occupation would have entailed for Southern Italy. Despite this speech was pronounced in the very wake of the Expedition of the Thousand, Ferrari already anticipated the disappointment of Garibaldian fighters for what would have been later called Risorgimento tradito (Lehning 1972–1974). ‘The revolutionary says: what? I insurged against Austria, against the Dukes, against the Pope, I spent long years in their prisons, I sacrificed my blood for the homeland … and whom I see coming? Extraneous people, men of government, men of command?’ (Ferrari 1860, 9). In his letters to Cavaleri, he confided how he was suffering from his isolation in the Parliament and from the attacks that he was receiving there, which only worsened after his 1861 journey in the South to carry out his inquiry on ‘brigandage’. Ferrari’s travel correspondences witnessed the generalised unrest and insecurity of Southern Italy, as a direct consequence of the fact that ‘Piedmontesism wants to conquer these lands reducing them to the state of [Piedmontese] provinces like Biella or Cuneo’ (Monti 1925, 158; Ferrari to Cavaleri, October 1861). Thus, where Ferrari could interview people: ‘The Piedmontese are strongly hated’ (Monti 1925, 159; Ferrari to Cavaleri, October 1861). After the massacres and summary executions operated by the official Army: ‘The soldiers are so feared by the people that, when they approach, the entire population comes in procession with the Saint Sacrament to avoid being massacred’ (Monti 1925, 162; Ferrari to Cavaleri, 6 November 1861). The levels of intimidation were so strong, according to Ferrari, that some Neapolitan Members of

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Parliament did not dare to protest publicly but, talking privately with their Lombard colleague, ‘they protest against the abuses and murders that the troop daily commits’ (Monti 1925, 163; Ferrari to Cavaleri, 15 December 1861). Therefore, Ferrari’s personal experience in the field confirmed how was wrong unifying the nation by force, as he tried to bring to public attention through his parliamentary speeches. Ferrari spoke to the Parliament about what he witnessed, like the ‘horrific spectacle of Pontelandolfo’ (Monti 1925, 161; Ferrari to Cavaleri, 6 November 1861). For the Lombard federalist, this tragic situation was first due to the pretention that Naples, ‘a city of 500,000 inhabitants, was reduced to a province … and obeys to a faraway centre [Turin], which is inferior to it’ (Ferrari 1861, 82) as for demographic importance, and whose rulers refused to know better the regions on which they wanted to make decisions. For Ferrari, it was the ‘revolution’ that had to get rid of banditry, as ‘the task to reform themselves falls on the recently annexed provinces, with our help’ (Ferrari 1861, 83), but without repression and authoritarianism. Therefore, the new Italian army was sent to: ‘Fight for a terrible cause … it had to proceed with terror, fight with rage … accept any suspicion and believe any retaliation to be justice’ (Ferrari 1861, 84). Bravely, Ferrari accused his fellows Members of Parliament of having refused to adopt his proposal of an inquiry on brigandage, to allow ‘a half of the nation fully knowing the other, so that the two parts of the peninsula can unite fraternally’. This lack of engagement in mutual understanding resulted in the massacre of Southern peasants, but also in the spread of: ‘The blood of our soldiers that you have always left in scarce number, in desperate positions’ (Ferrari 1861, 85). The remedies that were effectively proposed by his parliamentary interlocutors could not satisfy Ferrari. Indeed, a commission on brigandage was nominated. Sarcastically, Ferrari, who like other republicans refused the Order of San Maurizio e Lazzaro that he was offered by the King (Monti 1925, 185; Ferrari to Cavaleri, 6 June 1862), argued that the real task of that commission was: ‘To show the peasants’ corruption to authorise [General] Lamarmora to commit any atrocity’ (Monti 1925, 165; Ferrari to Cavaleri, December 1861). The same critiques were launched by NE, whose editor Mario was directly in touch with Ferrari (Monti 1925, 189; Mario to Ferrari, 28 July 1862) and published some excerpts of Ferrari’s discourses on brigandage, such as an 1862 speech where Ferrari addressed the monarchists saying: ‘If your moral sense does not tell you that you are walking on the blood,

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I don’t know how else to express it’.5 On the aforementioned Commission, NE echoed Ferrari’s sarcasm noting that, despite the rich wages of its members, the result of this commission’s work was that: ‘Brigandage continues’.6 Finally, it is worth noting that Cattaneo, in his article against the permanent army published in the new Politecnico, fumed at the atrocities that the Italian Army was committing in the South, where the government, that was ‘called by suffrage to accomplish a heroic act of liberation, wanted to give to it the nasty form of an act of conquest [They] found a wound and made a gangrene … engaging the Army in the part of Italy that was the most far from the frontiers that it should defend [while] Garibaldi kept the immense [city of] Naples during two months only with the National Guard’ (Cattaneo 1861, 712). Thus, one can argue that Italian and French federalists, such as Proudhon, Ferrari and Cattaneo were early and unanimous denouncers of the governmental mistakes in the repression of brigandage, anticipating later meridionalist and decolonial scholarship.

International Workingmen’s Risorgimento The raising of the International and the 1871 Paris Commune, which notoriously implied Mazzini’s breakup with the socialist world, was not saluted with special favour by the most famous tenants of the ‘federalist school’. While Cattaneo and Montanelli passed away in the 1860s and could not take part in these debates, Ferrari was quite cold in commenting on the Commune (Monti 1925), although, according to Fabbri, he had defended the International in one of his latest parliamentary speeches after the 1874 ‘Villa Ruffi affair’, when several Internationalists and Mazzinians were arrested with the charges of carrying out a common conspiration against the Monarchy. He also confided his ‘sympathies for the new movements’ to another exponent of the Extreme Left in the Parliament: ‘Internationalist Fanelli, the famous friend of Pisacane and Bakunin’ (Fabbri 1921, 19). A volunteer in 1848 Lombardy and 1849 Rome, Giuseppe Fanelli was in fact one of the persons who most directly served as links between Risorgimento republicanism and the socialist and

5 NE 5 December 1862. Discorso del deputato Ferrari, 2. 6 NE 8 March 1863. La commissione pel brigantaggio, 2.

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anarchist movements inaugurated by the International. At the same time, he was one of the closest Pisacane’s collaborators for the 1857 expedition, a member of the earliest Internationalist group animated by Bakunin in Naples in 1865–1867, and the mentor of some of the younger activists of the International in the 1870s such as Errico Malatesta. From 1855 to 1857, Fanelli closely corresponded with Pisacane, Mazzini, Fabrizi and the other protagonists of the insurrectional ‘attempt’ so tragically concluded in Sapri in June 1857, being responsible for the urban base of the expedition with the duty of organising the insurrection in Naples together with Luigi Dragone. Fanelli’s responsibilities in the failed insurrection of Naples were at the centre of a political, and later historiographic, case. Three years after Pisacane’s death, while participating in the Expedition of the Thousand, Fanelli was confronted with the accusations of one of the few survivors of Pisacane’s expedition group, Giovanni Nicotera (1828–1894). Just freed by the Garibaldians from a Bourbons’ jail, Nicotera accused Fanelli of being substantially a betrayer and indirectly a responsible of Pisacane’d death. Fanelli was defended by ‘Dragone, Fabrizi and few others’ (Greco 1979, 25) and, although quite mildly, by the earliest historian of the Sapri expedition, Garibaldian and future Senator Giacomo Racioppi (1827–1908). This latter noted how ‘lamenting betrayals and betrayers it is a natural habit of defeated parties’ (Racioppi 1863, 51). Yet, Fanelli was still (wrongly) treated as something like a coward in Nello Rosselli’s essay on Pisacane. It is worth making a short point on Fanelli’s position, to better understand the links between his involvement with Pisacane and his later collaboration with Bakunin and Malatesta. The archives of Nicola Fabrizi surviving at the Central Museum of the Risorgimento in Rome contain numerous letters from Fanelli, denouncing the strange way in which Nicotera’s campaign against him started. According to Fanelli, once freed from jail, Nicotera had met and embraced him fraternally and, from the following day: ‘Wrongly informed, he believed that I am an enemy … and denounced me to the General [Garibaldi] as a betrayer’.7 Facing such an accusation in the full of Garibaldi’s military campaign meant being in an uncomfortable situation, for both practical reasons and for the need of personal ‘honourability’

7 MCRR, 522/31, 14 June 1860, Fanelli to Fabrizi.

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that each activist needs to maintain in the context of political movements inspired by notions of ‘civic virtue’ as noted above. Therefore, Fanelli urged Fabrizi, who was better inserted than him in the leadership of the movement, to find documents in Malta that could discharge him from Nicotera’s accusations, and to ‘write to the General’.8 Although Garibaldi confirmed his trust in Fanelli, who continued the campaign and also participated in later expeditions such as the 1866 one, being elected to the Parliament in 1865, Fanelli’s letters to Fabrizi continued to reveal Fanelli’s complaints about the ‘injustice’ that he was suffering: ‘Why someone who can be very proud and admired for what he did should blush and apologise? … Why should they falsify history, which has its documents?’9 This situation continued for some years until Nicotera offered to Fanelli a public reconciliation, although this initiative was rather due to political opportunity than to a genuine clarification between the two men, according to Monsagrati (1994). However, a close reading of the Secret Committee correspondence edited by Greco and to Pisacane’s epistolary justifies quite straightforwardly Monsagrati’s observation that, at the time of the Sapri expedition, events went: ‘Beyond the intentions of Fanelli, who vainly warned on the opportunity to delay the action to more favourable times’ (Monsagrati 1994). In fact, still in April 1857, Fanelli clearly wrote to Mazzini: ‘Frankly, I tell you that I do not feel to be strong enough to lead this revolution alone … please do not count … on what I cannot accomplish’ (Greco 1979; 264–265; Fanelli to Mazzini, 30 April 1857). Conversely, Mazzini seemed to want his fellows to act immediately at all costs deeming all hesitation as a loss of time, and wrote to Fanelli: ‘I invite you to dare for us … In the name of Italy, accept! Now or never’ (Greco 1979, 272; Mazzini to Fanelli, 19 May 1857). Arguably, also Pisacane had strong responsibilities in pushing to immediate action, making pressures on Fanelli with numerous letters contending that: ‘Only initiative can save us’ (Pisacane 1937, 265; Pisacane to Fanelli, 15 May 1856). Pisacane abundantly instructed Fanelli on the ways to make Naples insurge, replying to the ‘difficulties enumerated’ (Pisacane 1937, 422; Pisacane to Fanelli, 12 May 1857) by Fanelli with sharp exhortations such as ‘please abolish conditionals’ (Pisacane

8 MCRR, 522/31, 16 June 1860, Fanelli to Fabrizi. 9 MCRR, 522/31, 8 July 1863, Fanelli to Fabrizi.

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1937, 379; Pisacane to Fanelli, 31 March 1857). According to these epistolary sources, two tendencies emerged in the Secret Committee: the cautious, including Fabrizi, Dragone and Fanelli, suggesting to delay action, and those who pushed for immediate action including Mazzini and Pisacane, as also noted by Leopoldo Cassese (1969). Thus, if Fanelli and Dragone could not make Naples insurge while Pisacane disembarked in the Cilento shores, it was arguably not out of ‘cowardness’ but because their local isolation rendered impossible the popular movement, as they repeatedly warned their fellow conspirators. It is worth noting that among the other cities where Mazzini expected simultaneous insurrections, also Genoa remained quiet, while only in Livorno there were riots, as also recognised by Rosselli (1977). Thus, one can understand the judgement of Merlino, who defended Fanelli arguing that he ‘was targeted by vulgar accusations, to which he responded giving numerous proofs of virtue and proudness’. Eventually, Merlino matched Cattaneo’s critiques to Mazzini’s responsibilities in the Sapri affair, arguing that the Ligurian ‘prophet’ ‘did not care so much for an happy outcome of that glorious endeavour’ (Merlino 1879b, 132). This helps understanding why a figure like Fanelli could serve as an intergenerational link between the Garibaldians, who were mostly born between the 1810s and the 1830s, and the Internationalists such as Malatesta, Costa and Merlino who were mostly born in the 1850s. Although they variously took distances from their early insurrectional tactics substantiated in the attempts of Bologna and Romagna in 1874 and the Banda del Matese in 1877 in the mountains of the South (Masini 1978; Tomasiello 2009), they could first see the ‘connection between Risorgimento insurrectionism and the new revolutionary perspective’ (Bertini 2012, 22). Beyond the myth of Pisacane, also brigandage was considered as an inspiration for these early revolutionaries who, namely in the Matese case, chose exactly the kind of places where anti-unification brigands were active in the former decade, finding some ideological justification in the appreciation of ‘Russian banditry’ (Della Peruta 1973, 266) that was suggested by Bakunin and other authors, to which also activists from Northern Italy like Andrea Costa were sensitive. This was a way to try to involve peasants, that is the most numerous part of the Italian proletariat, whose absence has been unanimously considered as a limitation for all revolutionary movements in the Peninsula. Indeed, according to the early Internationalists, this rural ‘bands’ were rather a mean of making propaganda by the example than the vanguards

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of an organised revolution and followed the example of the Mazzinian bands that tried, in 1870, to promote several insurrectional episodes in rural and mountainous environments from Calabria to the Swiss Alps (Pavone 1956; Pomelli 1911). Significantly, in a 1880 letter to Amilcare Cipriani, Malatesta defined the field of their allies as being potentially composed by: ‘Any single man of action, any serious man, either anarchist, humanitarian, Garibaldian or Mazzinian’ (Della Peruta 1973, 428; Malatesta to Cipriani, December 1880). Malatesta even proposed to take advantage of a possible republican unrest to trigger some new insurrectional attempt: ‘If it is true that the republicans wake up in Italy, would it be the case to organise some [insurrectional] band? We should seize the occasion’ (Della Peruta 1973; 431, Malatesta to Cipriani, 25 December 1880). While these attempts would not materialise, this clarifies how strong were the elements of continuity between early Italian anarchism and socialism and the republican traditions of Risorgimento, not only the federalist ones but also the Mazzinian and Garibaldian, while the note on ‘humanitarian’ was referred to the so-called ‘evolutionist’ anarchosocialism as I discuss below. Malatesta’s recollections also show how the Neapolitan group animated by Fanelli and other activists from regions of Southern Italy (Friscia, Tucci, Gambuzzi, Cafiero and others) was the ideal trait d’union between these traditions. On the one hand, Malatesta and his fellow youngsters looked with some disdain to the Mazzinian and Garibaldian past of Fanelli, because they first met him in 1871, when the rupture between Mazzini and the ‘Internationals’ over the Paris Commune occurred, and for ‘the tendence of young people to believe that history starts with them … underestimating the efforts that had been done before us’ (Malatesta 1947, 367). On the other, Malatesta understood that Fanelli, as an ‘old conspirator’, was already predisposed to receive Bakunin’s ideas and ‘already prepared to accept socialist libertarian ideas thanks to his contacts with Pisacane’ (Malatesta, 368). As noted above about the correspondence between Proudhon and Ferrari, even the appointment to the parliament of activists like Fanelli, and Sicilian Internationalist (former Garibaldian) Saverio Friscia (1813–1886), a medical doctor and Cattaneo’s correspondent (Cattaneo 1956) did not pose big problems. For Malatesta, in the 1860s and 1870s, being elected to the Parliament was still perceived as something like a private affair between these people and their few friends and electors, given that only a small percentage of the population had the right to suffrage, and the members of parliament

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were not waged. It was only in 1882 that the suffrage was extended to less than the 10% of the population, creating crises in both the republican and Internationalist fields, as former anarchists like Costa famously called for parliamentary struggle, an option that was rejected by most of his former friends (Masini 1978). Only in 1912, the (male-only) suffrage became almost universal and a full wage was granted to the elected (Musso 2000). Therefore, for Malatesta, it was only from the 1880s that ‘things changed’ (Malatesta 1947, 371), while formerly, Fanelli’s position was even useful for anarchist propaganda has he had the right to travel on all trains and ships without paying. In this sense, it was during Bakunin’s stay in Naples between 1865 and 1867 that one could first see an ‘endogenous process of maturation from Mazzinianism to libertarian socialism, through the recuperation of Pisacane’s thought’ (Ralli 1977, ix). In the Southern metropolis, with local Garibaldians disappointed with how things were going in the South after the unification, Bakunin found a more fertile terrain for his social ideas than in Florence (Carr 2002). In this process, one can argue that Bakunin was not only the inspirer of the radicalisation of local republicans, but was radicalised himself through his exposition to the ideas of radical Risorgimento. While the cause of national liberation in Italy and abroad was still mobilising, Marcello Ralli has rightly observed how Bakunin and his friends considered Risorgimento ‘as a failed and betrayed, but still rescuable, revolution’ (Ralli 1977, xxii). This means that the aim of the early Italian Internationalists was not to discard Risorgimento accomplishments in terms of civil rights and national independence, but to build upon these for further social conquests. This appeared clearly in the weekly journal Libertà e Giustizia (hereafter LG) published in Naples in 1867 by the internationalist group, which counted on ‘around thirty members’ (Ralli 1977, xlvii) who gathered in the house of Carlo Gambuzzi (1837–1902), one of the closest Bakunin’s friends until his late years. While most of the journal’s editors were still akin to Garibaldian circuits, such as Fanelli and Gambuzzi10 who were in touch with Dolfi to support the Mentana expedition, levelling critiques to Garibaldi and to Mazzini (who had just created the Universal Republican Alliance as a competitor to the International) was one of the leitmotifs of the journal.

10 Domus Mazziniana, D V e 16 1, Gambuzzi to Dolfi, 4 May 1867.

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In the Programme that they published in the first issue, they clarified that it was time to add social justice to civil liberties, through: ‘The emancipation of people not only in their rights, but with facts: we want the accomplishment of freedom and justice for the people’ (Ralli 1977, 6; LG, 17 August 1867). While the rest of the programme was not so dissimilar from that of groups such as the Democratic Society in Florence redacted by Mazzoni, the qualifying points, beyond the explicit claim for federalism and ‘complete administrative autonomy’ (Ralli 1977, 10; LG, 17 August 1867) were substantially those claiming for class struggle. ‘Emancipation of work from the conditions of social slavery, from the despotism of land possession and capital, through proletarian association and education against the organisation of people’s ignorance and the bank’s interest and privilege’ (Ralli 1977, 10; LG, 17 August 1867). In short, it was an anticapitalistic programme taking values such as federalism, secularism and juridic equality from the republican tradition. Importantly, LG was published in the same months in which Garibaldi prepared his last expedition to storm Rome. While most of the editors still were in the General’s circuits, and had even fought alongside him in the 1866 war in Veneto, the overall tones towards those endeavours were sceptical, considering Mazzinian and Garibaldian ‘attempts’ as unrealistic until they did not involve ‘workers and peasants’ (Ralli 1977, 33; LG, 24 August 1867). LG editors were especially thinking to the conditions of Southern Italy, where the Italian government had accustomed workers and peasants ‘to assist thousands times to the hateful spectacle of summary executions’ (Ralli 1977, 34; LG, 24 August 1867). The editors imagined what would have happened in case of a successful outcome of Garibaldi’s expedition to Rome. ‘The Romans will insurge, and may suffocate the horrible papal tyranny. And then? The empire will substitute theocracy. When will people rise to fight their revolutions for themselves?’ (Ralli 1977, 138; LG, 21 September 1867). Counting Alberto Mario among its correspondents (Ralli 1977, 180; LG, 5 October 1867), LG fostered ideas on cosmopolitan federalism in both interior and international matters. Indeed, the journal gave wide visibility to the participation of its representatives, namely Gambuzzi and Bakunin, to the two 1867 congresses of the International and of the Ligue of Peace and Freedom that took place respectively in Lausanne and Geneva, ‘the first to free the working people from the oppression of capital, the second to free the world from the oppression of force and privilege’ (Ralli 1977, 77; LG, 8 September

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1867). It is well-known that in these years, Bakunin tried to convince the League to join the International. After that this move was impeded by the majority of the bourgeois moderate that composed the League, Bakunin entered the International through a new secret society, the International Alliance for Socialist Democracy, a prelude to the Antiauthoritarian International inaugurated by the 1872 Saint-Imier Congress that formalised the rupture between Marxists and anarchists (Guillaume 1905–1910). What is significant is that LG tried to keep together the two aspects of the matter, the social and the political one, publishing the decisions of the League of Peace and Liberty Congress, stating classical points such as the opposition to permanent armies and the principle of the ‘cosmopolitan federation’ (Ralli 1977, 139; LG, 21 September 1867). In his speech to the Geneva congress, Gambuzzi argued that it was impossible to reach freedom until there will be ‘centralist, military and bureaucratic states, and these states will exist until people will understand that that the system which is more for to human nature … is federalism. Only with federalism, the interests of people can prevail over those of dynasties and privileged classes’ (Ralli 1977, 154; LG, 29 September 1867). Thus, federalism was not only ‘natural’ but also the condition for social justice linked with individual freedom. On the social side, GL published some of Bakunin’s letters to Alexander Herzen, arguing to overtake the mere claims for national liberation of the so-called ‘pan-slavists’ as ‘you are federalist, you are socialist, and I equally am’ (Ralli 1977, 63; LG, 31 August 1867). On the political side, LG also translated some writings of Proudhon pleading against the invention of natural frontiers by statist geographers and diplomats as a pretext for imperialist and militarist endeavours: ‘Among the most dangerous, and unluckily most fashionable, prejudices, one counts the delimitation of states traced e priori by geography’ (Ralli 1977, 207; LG, 13 October 1867). Finally, like NE, LG was short-lived due to constant repression: the 1 December, the editors lamented that, in four months, the journal had 6 issues seized by the censorship (Ralli 1977, 307; LG, 1 December 1867), and in one occasion the responsible was arrested. Again, so-called ‘Liberal Italy’ was not so liberal as for tolerance towards political dissent. However, like NE, the Neapolitan journal participated to the historical steps of the earliest socialist generations, showing interest in the movement of cooperation, as shown by the advertisement of the Almanac of the French journal La Coopération, an initiative animated among others

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by the Reclus brothers (Ralli 1977, 325; LG, 1 December 1867). On the other hand, the porosity between internationalist and republican circuits was also confirmed by an anecdote about Bakunin’s friend Meˇcnikov, who participated in 1868 to one of the propaganda expeditions that European revolutionaries organised to document the Spanish Revolution, where he met Fanelli and Elie Reclus, who were travelling there on behalf of Bakunin (Reclus 2007; Meˇcnikov 2018). Amazingly, while the Internationalists criticised Mazzini’s Universal Republican Alliance, it was with a letter of recommendation from that association, signed by Polish Louis Bulewski, that Meˇcnikov travelled to Spain.11 The connections between anarchist internationalism and republican Risorgimento can be finally appreciated in the famous 1872 letter from Bakunin to Celso Ceretti, which represents the inauguration of the Italian section of the International formally constituted that year at the Congress of Rimini (1872). Like Fanelli, Ceretti was a Garibaldian, participated in the Expedition of the Thousand and the 1870 campaign in France and was very close to the General, being at the same time one of the closest Bakunin’s referents in Northern Italy. In this letter, Bakunin exposed the tactics through which the Internationalists had to drain activists from the Mazzinian and Garibaldian ranks. Importantly, Bakunin started expressing a strong respect for Mazzini, who passed away a couple of weeks before the date of the letter, and for the moral integrity of most of his collaborators such as Saffi, Campanella and Quadrio. Yet, he defined their party as ‘the most authoritarian’, guessing that, after the death of the leader, the party would split up and ‘the most lively, the sincerest, the youngest will come with us’ (Bakunin 1989, 256). The key critiques that Bakunin made to Mazzinianism concerned its dogmatism, both on theoretical and practical terms, and the famous Mazzini’s slogan Dio e Popolo. ‘God is the dogmatic, aristocratic, extra-popular and therefore anti-popular thought, that they impose at all costs to the multitude so that it … becomes people. Mazzini’s people is a multitude that is hypnotised, sacrificed and easily represented … by men who do not do the people’s interests and want obedience’ (Bakunin 1989, 258). Conversely, for Bakunin, revolutionaries should not be prophets, but ‘obstetricians of the thought that is created in the very life of people’ (Bakunin 1989, 259) without pretending to teach these ideas to the popular classes, but rather taking inspiration from them.

11 GARF, fondy 6753, op. 1, khr 38, f 34.

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For Bakunin, the pretention of making revolution without the people was exactly the main limitation of Mazzinianism, and more broadly of Risorgimento, while his critique of centralism was magisterially expressed by his claim that: ‘Uniformity is death, diversity is life’ (Bakunin 1989, 273), meaning that social revolution should have necessarily been federalist and pluralist. Finally, Conti’s expression ‘Risorgimento tradito/betrayed Risorgimento’ (Conti 1950, 10), reproposed by Lehning, can be understood as the failed accomplishment of promises that were already included in a pluralistic and complex movement like Italian Risorgimento that ‘contained an aspect of social war [including] social revolts with strong anti-statist tendencies’ (Lehning 1972–1974, 275). While Lehning argued that Bakunin took soon distances from the cause of national liberation, I would instead contend that Bakunin already considered national liberation as a part of social liberation rather than something extraneous to it. This allows considering him one of the figures of Italian Risorgimento, given the ‘decisive influence’ (Lehning 1972–1974, 292) that his ceaseless networking had on the shift of local progressive movements from republicanism to anarchist socialism. Most importantly, this helps understanding why anticolonialism will be a key feature of most anarchist and socialist movements, given that they originated from struggles for national liberation like those that were fought in Italy and Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century. To introduce the next chapter, that addresses ‘heretic’ connections between people assuming different labels and political tendencies, Malatesta’s recollections on Mazzini can be especially enlightening. In 1922, the elderly anarchist wrote that: ‘Still very young, we dared to stand against the Giant and we proudly opposed [Mazzini] for his attacks against the International and the [Paris] Commune … but with calm spirit, we recognise that, in the depth of our spirit, in our sentiments, we were Mazzinians, and Mazzini was Internationalist. There were, and there still are, radical and substantial divergencies … but the animating spirit was the same. Love among men, brotherhood among peoples, justice and social solidarity, the spirit of sacrifice, the sentiment of duty. Then, the staunch and irreconcilable opposition to the monarchist institution … Mazzini will be worthily honoured when all together, true republicans, genuine socialists, communists and anarchists, we will be able to open the way to the future destroying tyranny’ (Malatesta 1947, 374). The date in which these lines were written is crucial: 1922 saw the affirmation of Fascism in Italy, which entailed the alliance of all progressive forces to

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counter it. It was no coincidence that, during the antifascist exile and the Resistance, the best ally of the anarchists was Rosselli’s movement Giustizia e Libertà, a name that was consciously inspired by Bakunin’s Libertà e Giustizia. Their common struggles in 1943–1945 Italy and 1936–1939 Spain are doubtlessly among the most wonderful outcomes of libertarian and internationalist Risorgimento and of applied civic virtue and related ‘duties’, terms that were well present in Malatesta’s language.

Print Sources Bakunin, Mikhail. 1974. Dio e lo stato. Pistoia: RL. Balzani, Roberto. 2020. Memoria e nostalgia nel Risorgimento, percorsi di lettura. Bologna: Il Mulino. Cattaneo, Carlo. 1861. L’Italia armata. Il Politecnico 10: 706–719. Cattaneo, Carlo. 1952. Epistolario di Carlo Cattaneo II: 1850–1856. Florence: Barbera. Cattaneo, Carlo. 1954. Epistolario di Carlo Cattaneo III: 1857–1861. Florence: Barbera. Cattaneo, Carlo. 1956. Epistolario di Carlo Cattaneo IV: 1862–1869. Florence: Barbera. Colajanni, Napoleone. 1898. Il socialismo. Milan: Sandron. Cuoco, Vincenzo. 1913. Saggio storico sulla rivoluzione napoletana del 1799. Bari: Laterza. Ferrari, Giuseppe. 1860. Discorsi di Giuseppe Ferrari sull’annessione delle due Sicilie 8 e 11 ottobre 1860. Turin: Botta. [Ferrari, Giuseppe]. 1861. Tornata del 2 dicembre 1861, 79–98. Atti del Parlamento Italiano. Guillaume, James. 1905–1910. L’Internationale: documents et souvenirs (1864– 1878), 4 vols. Paris: Société nouvelle de librairie et d’édition. Istruzione popolare per la difesa dei paesi dello Stato e arte di fare le barricate. Rome: A.A. [1849]. Malatesta, Errico. 1947. Scritti scelti. Naples: RL. Malatesta, Errico. 2014. The method of freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader. Edinburg: AK Press. Mario, Alberto. 1875. La camicia rossa. Milan: Sonzogno. Mario, Alberto, and Jessie. 1884. Carlo Cattaneo, cenni e reminiscenze. Rome: Sommaruga. Meˇcnikov, Lev. 2018. Viaggio in Spagna. Florence: NP. Merlino, Francesco Saverio. 1879a. Vincenzo Russo. Milan: Presso l’amministrazione della Plebe. Merlino, Francesco Saverio. 1879b. Carlo Pisacane. Milano: La Plebe. Pierre-Joseph, Proudhon. 1868. Œuvres complètes, vol. XVI. Paris: Dentu.

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Pisacane, Carlo. 1860. Del momentaneo ordinamento dell’esercito lombardo in aprile 1848, memoria inedita del colonnello Carlo Pisacane. Il Politecnico 8 (45): 270–274. Pisacane, Carlo. 1901. Ordinamento e costituzione delle milizie italiane ossia come ordinare la nazione armata. Milan: Sandron. Pisacane, Carlo. 1906. Guerra combattuta in Italia negli anni 1848–49, RomeMilan: Società Editrice Dante Alighieri. Pisacane, Carlo. 1937. Epistolario. Milan: Società editrice Dante Alighieri. Pisacane, Carlo. 1951. Saggio sulla rivoluzione. Milan: Universale Economica. Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. 1840. Qu’est-ce que la propriété. Paris: Brocard. Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. 1875. Correspondance, vol. 9. Paris: Lacroix. Reclus, Elías. 2007. Impresiones de un viaje por España en tiempos de Revolución, del 26 octubre 1868 al 10 de marzo de 1869 en el advenimiento de la República. Logroño: Pepitas de calabaza. Russo, Vincenzo. 1798. Pensieri politici. Rome: Presso il cittadino Vincenzo Poggioli.

Bibliography Ambrosini, Filippo. 2013. L’albero della libertà: Le repubbliche giacobine in Italia 1796–99. Turin: Edizioni del Capricorno. Armani, Giuseppe. 1983. Cattaneo e Garibaldi. In Garibaldi cento anni dopo: atti del convegno di studi garibaldini. Bergamo, 5–7 marzo 1982, ed. Aroldo Benini and Pier Carlo Masini, 159–177. Florence: Le Monnier. Armani, Giuseppe. 1997. Carlo Cattaneo: Una biografia. Milan: Garzanti. Bakunin, Mikhail. 1989. Opere complete, vol. 2. Catania: Anarchismo. Bertini, Fabio. 2012. Pisacane e l’anarchismo italiano. In Elementi libertari nel risorgimento livornese e toscano, ed. Giuseppe Gregori and Giorgio Sacchetti, 17–52. Prato: Pentalinea. Brunello, Piero. 2005. Introduzione. In Cristina di Belgioioso, Capi e popolo: il Quarantotto a Venezia. Santa Maria Capua Vetere: Spartaco. Brunello, Piero. 2018. Colpi di scena: la rivoluzione del Quarantotto a Venezia. Sommacampagna: Cierre. Canali, Mauro. 2004. Le spie del regime. Bologna: Il Mulino. Carocci, Roberto. 2017. La Repubblica romana: 1849, prove di democrazia e socialismo nel Risorgimento. Rome: Odradek. Carr, Edward. 2002. Bakunin, vita di un rivoluzionario che sognava l’impossibile. Milan: Rizzoli. Cassese, Leopoldo. 1969. La spedizione di Sapri. Bari: Laterza. Cattaneo, Carlo. 2005. Carteggi di Carlo Cattaneo. Serie 1, Lettere di Cattaneo, vol. 2–16 marzo 1848–1851. Florence: Le Monnier; Bellinzona: Casagrande.

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Ciconte, Enzo. 2018. La grande mattanza: storia della guerra al brigantaggio. Bari/Rome: Laterza. Conti, Elio. 1950. Le origini del socialismo a Firenze (1860–1880). Rome: Rinascita. Del Bianco, Nino. 2006. Enrico Cernuschi: uno straordinario protagonista del nostro Risorgimento. Milan: Angeli. Della Peruta, Franco. 1961. Lettere di Giuseppe Ferrari a Pierre-Joseph Proudhon 1854-1861. Annali dell’Istituto Giangiacomo Feltrinelli 4: 260– 291. Della Peruta, Franco. 1973. Democrazia e socialismo nel Risorgimento: saggi e ricerche. Rome: Editori Riuniti. Della Peruta, Franco. 1979. Democratici premazziniani, mazziniani e dissidenti. Turin: Einaudi. Della Peruta, Franco. 2004. I democratici e la rivoluzione italiana: dibattiti ideali e contrasti politici all’indomani del 1848. Milan: Angeli. Driver, Felix. 2001. Geography militant: Cultures of exploration and empire. Oxford: Blackwell. Fabbri, Luigi. 1904. Carlo Pisacane. La vita, le opere, l’azione rivoluzionaria. Rome/Florence: Serantoni. Fabbri, Luigi. 1921. Introduzione. In Filosofia della rivoluzione, ed. Giuseppe Ferrari, 1–21. Milan: Casa Editrice Sociale. Ferretti, Federico. 2021. A coffin for Malthusianism: Josué de Castro’s subaltern geopolitics. Geopolitics 26(2): 589–614. https://doi.org/10.1080/146 50045.2019.1583213. Gramsci, Antonio. 1966. La questione meridionale. Rome: Editori Riuniti. Gramsci, Antonio. 2014. Quaderni del carcere. Turin: Einaudi. Greco, Giovanni. 1979. Le carte del comitato segreto di Napoli: 1853–1857 . Naples: Storia di Napoli e della Sicilia. Guerri, Giordano Bruno. 2010. Il sangue del Sud: Antistoria del Risorgimento e del brigantaggio. Milan: Mondadori. Hobsbawm, Eric. 2017. Primitive rebels: Studies in archaic forms of social movement in the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries. London: Abacus. Lehning, Arthur. 1972–1974. Michel Bakounine et le Risorgimento tradito. Bollettino del Museo del Risorgimento 17/19: 266–292. Mack Smith, Denis. 1999. Il Risorgimento italiano. Rome/Bari: Laterza. Masini, Pier Carlo. 1978. Storia degli anarchici italiani da Bakunin a Malatesta. Milan: Rizzoli. Monsagrati, Giuseppe. 1994. Fanelli, Giuseppe Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Treccani. https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/giuseppe-fanelli_(Diz ionario-Biografico). Monsagrati, Giuseppe. 2020. Roma senza il Papa. La Repubblica Romana del 1849. Rome/Bari: Laterza.

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Monti, Antonio. 1925. Giuseppe Ferrari e la politica interna della destra; con un carteggio inedito di Giuseppe Ferrari. Milano: Risorgimento. Musarra, Natale. 2012. Rivoluzionari siciliani in Toscana alla vigilia dell’unità. In Elementi libertari nel risorgimento livornese e toscano, ed. Giuseppe Gregori and Giorgio Sacchetti, 99–120. Prato: Pentalinea. Musso, Franco. 2000. Il dibattito parlamentare sull’indennità di carica ai deputati (1848–1912). Il Politico 65 (2): 285–310. Muthu, Sankar. 2003. Enlightenment against empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pavone, Claudio. 1956. Le bande insurrezionali della primavera del 1870. Movimento Operaio 1–3: 42–107. Pomelli, Giuseppe. 1911. Aspromonte-Mentana e le bande repubblicane in Italia nella primavera del 1870. Como: Gagliardi. Racioppi, Giacomo. 1863. La spedizione di Carlo Pisacane a Sapri: con documenti inediti. Naples: Marghieri. Ralli, Marcello. Ed. 1977. Libertà e Giustizia: foglio settimanale democraticosociale, organo dell’associazione omonima, Napoli, 17 agosto-24 dicembre 1867 . Salerno: Laveglia. Riall, Lucy. 1994. The Italian Risorgimento: State, society and national unification. London: Routledge. Riall, Lucy. 2007. Garibaldi: Invention of a hero. New Haven/London: Yale University Press. Romano, Aldo. 1931. Contributo alla biografia di Carlo Pisacane: con documenti inediti, Florence: Vallecchi. Romano, Aldo. 1933. Nuove ricerche sulla vita sentimentale di Carlo Pisacane. Rassegna Storica Del Risorgimento 9: 51–92. Rosselli, Nello. 1977. Carlo Pisacane nel Risorgimento italiano. Turin: Einaudi. Salvemini, Gaetano. 1955. Scritti sulla questione meridionale: 1896–1955. Turin: Einaudi. Sastre, Isabel Maria Pascal. 2007. La circolazione di miti politici tra Spagna e Italia (1820–80). In Storia d’Italia, Annali, 22: Il Risorgimento, ed. Alberto Mario Banti and Paul Ginsborg, 797–824. Turin: Einaudi. Scirocco, Alfonso. 1969. I democratici italiani da Sapri a Porta Pia. Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane. Tomasiello, Bruno. 2009. La Banda del Matese 1876–1878. I documenti, le testimonianze, la stampa dell’epoca. Casalvelino Scalo: Galzerano. Venturini, Aldo. 1984. Alle origini del socialismo liberale. Francesco Saverio Merlino. Bologna: Boni.

CHAPTER 7

Heretic Connections, and the Other Garibaldians

Republicans, Guerrillas and Subversives In the months around the 1867 Mentana expedition, Libertà e Giustizia had clearly noted that the issue with Rome, still under the Pope’s rule with the protection of Napoleon III, could not be resolved without throwing out the governments that had agreed this situation, that is revolutionising the European order. If this precondition was not fulfilled, all Garibaldian attempts would have been vain. Indeed, the situation was only unblocked by the fall of Napoleon III following the disaster of the French-Prussian War, which allowed the occupation of Rome by the Italian Army, which entered the future capital though Porta Pia in September 1870, alongside the proclamation of the Third Republic in France. It is worth noting that, in the months that preceded these events, an intriguing and understudied last insurrectional attempt by the Mazzinians had taken place. In Spring 1870, several republican guerrilla bands tried to trigger popular insurrections in so diverse regions such as Calabria, EmiliaRomagna, Tuscany and Lombardy, taking advantage of the strong discontent for some very unpopular measures that had been imposed by the government, such as the new tax on mills (Rosselli 1967). According to Claudio Pavone, although with scarce organisation and coordination, most of these endeavours were promoted by elderly Mazzini in a last and vain attempt to exit the marginalisation in which he had fallen after the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Ferretti, Geographies of Federalism during the Italian Risorgimento, 1796–1900, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96117-6_7

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victory of the Monarchy, the draining of republican popularity towards Garibaldi and the rising International (Pavone 1956). Yet, the recollections of some members of these groups show that there was much more, and such ‘attempts’ were not always ascribable to any central political control. Giuseppe Pomelli, from Reggio Emilia, was part of the so-called Banda Manini, a group that was led by the sons of elderly Reggio Emilia Mazzinian leader Angelo Manini, Filippo and Secondo. While after the first clash that they had with the troop in the attempt of attacking a castle near Castelnuovo Monti, the Banda Manini disbanded, what is most interesting in Pomelli’s recollection chimes with what has been discussed above about the Garibaldian clandestine military organisation in Tuscany. That is, Pomelli argued that, after the 1860 Garibaldi expedition, clandestine armed groups were organised everywhere: in Reggio Emilia, there was the battalion ‘Crostolo’. These groups ‘did never gather, but were organized so that they could be ready to march in 24 hours’ (Pomelli 1911, 13 and were equipped with ‘Orsini-style bombs (bombe alla Orsini) … and wonderful Eiffeld carabines’ (Pomelli 1911, 57). In the case of Emilian provinces, the target of such military organisation (arguably tolerated by the authorities on the same grounds as in Tuscany) was not Rome, but the frontier with Veneto, which was closer to Reggio than today, as even Luzzara, south of the Po, was still under Austrian control until 1866. Yet, after that year, bombs and carabines arguably remained with the republicans. Thus, in 1868–1869, an occasion to try this clandestine military organisation was provided by the spontaneous revolts against the mill taxes, especially taking place in the countryside, in which the younger Maninis were so compromised that they had to flee, forming the aforementioned band. According to Pomelli, the insurrectional expedition ‘took a republican political connotation’ (Pomelli 1911, 118) mainly due to the political reputation of the Manini family, but was indeed one of the outcomes of several spontaneous riots which happened on economic grounds, taking a broad socialistic characterisation. After the disbandment, Pomelli sought refuge in Switzerland, where he immediately enrolled in the so-called ‘Nathan Band’, a new republican expedition that, crossing the Italian-Swiss border close to Lugano, marched to provoke an insurrection in Milan. Yet, after staying some weeks in the mountains, pursued by the Italian official army, they were likewise compelled to disband and needed to flee again to Switzerland to avoid arrestation. This expedition was also participated by Angelo

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Umiltà (Pomelli 1911, 138), who took then part, after Porta Pia, to another of the experiences that attracted young people who were thirsty of action and disappointed by how things were going in Italy. That is, the Garibaldian 1870 expedition in the Vosges, that fought to help the newly reconstituted French Republic and was an expression of the same mix of socialism and radical republicanism that lied at the origins of the 1871 Paris Commune and of the 1872 AntiAuthoritarian International. In a recent book by Giuseppe Sircana, the numerically weak but ‘visible and colourful’ (Sircana 2021, 5) presence of Italian volunteers in the Paris Commune is analysed as an outcome of the Vosges expedition. Crucially, this late Garibaldian endeavour can be considered as an expression of Risorgimento republican internationalism. At that moment, the detested French Empire had fallen and the ‘mythic’ French Republic, newly reconstituted, was under the threat of being crushed by the Prussians. Since October 1870, some thousands of ‘foreign volunteers, attracted by the charm and reputation of the Hero, rushed numerous: Polish, Hungarians, Spanish, Americans and mostly Italians [more than 3000]’ (Sircana 2021, 11). Among the most famous participants of the expedition one can find names that have been already cited, including some early Internationalists. While the boarding of volunteers from Livorno to Marseille was organised by ‘Pasquale Sgarallino and Ettore Socci’ (Sircana 2021, 11), this latter a future Internationalist in Florence (Cecchinato 2007, 165), among the names listed by Sircana there were: Celso Ceretti, Achille Bizzoni, Ernesto Pozzi, Luigi Castellazzo, Orlando Cardini, Filippo Erba, Giuseppe Cavallotti [brother of ‘Extreme Left’ Member of Parliament Felice Cavallotti], Cristiano Lobbia, Luigi Cecchini, Alceste Faggioli, Luigi Ciancio, Osvaldo Gnocchi-Viani, Aristide Tironi’ (Sircana 2021, 12). That is, a rather representative sample of diverse tendencies in Italian early socialism. It was unsurprising that the republican (but socially conservative) French government tried to marginalise the Garibaldians assigning them to a relatively decentred front, and doing all possible efforts to disarm and expel the volunteers at the end of the war. For Sircana, it did not matter that these people had offered their blood for the cause of the French Republic, as the problem was that: ‘Most of the bourgeoisie considered red shirts and red flags as the same, that is a threat’ (Sircana 2021, 27). This threat materialised in the participation, among many other international volunteers, of ‘215 to 300 approximately’ (Sircana 2021, 29)

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Italians to the Paris Commune. The most famous of them was Amilcare Cipriani (1844–1918), one of the most popular figures of early Italian socialism and republicanism, a man who was considered by ‘revolutionary socialists, syndicalists, republicans, anarchists … as the symbol of a coherent struggle against the Savoia dynasty and the ruling classes’ (Sircana 2021, 38), and was then deported to New Caledonia. Matching Leo Valiani’s arguments, Sircana notes that the return of the Vosges volunteers to Italy fostered the ‘new internationalist, socialist and anarchist creed’ (Sircana 2021, 88) that was initially encouraged by the same Garibaldi, who had joined the International. Even without being an example of political coherence, given his substantial collaboration with the Italian Monarchy in the former years, the General always claimed his internationalist membership and contributed to ‘transport Risorgimento democracy into socialism’ (Sircana 2021, 6). As noted by Eva Cecchinato, the internationalist commitment of the Vosges volunteers, whose repatriation also ‘raised concerns’ (Cecchinato 2007, 147) with the Italian authorities, continued in the 1870s with their participation to the national liberation war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, with ‘expectations of radical social transformations’ (Cecchinato 2007, 163). The participation of Internationalists such as Ceretti and Castellazzo in this expedition confirmed the transnational nature of Risorgimento, a movement that took place outside Italy for a not negligible part of its history (Isabella 2009). While it is widely recognised that 1871 was a watershed in the split between Mazzinians and Internationalists, it is worth noting that, in several situations, republicans and anarchist/internationalist circuits were not definitively separated. For some decades, certain figures served as a connection between these circuits at the level of both intellectual leadership and popular sociability, of which Cipriani was of course a famous example. As implicitly admitted by historians of the Republican Party such as Spadolini and Maurizio Ridolfi, Bakunin was not completely wrong in foreseeing that the republicans would have encountered some internal ‘balkanisation’ after Mazzini’s death. According to Ridolfi, who especially studied the history of Republicans in Romagna, one of their strongholds and a case with national relevance, it was ‘the very concept of [a political] party’ (Ridolfi 1989, 45) that was impossible to conceive in the republican nebula, still in the 1870s. This nebula only assumed the forms of a modern political party with the formal constitution of the PRI in 1895, before which it had been mostly organised around circles based on local grounds, on affinity, or on some charismatic leadership.

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As Spadolini discussed, the prevailing tendencies in the republican field were represented by the most ‘institutional’ republicans such as Bertani, some of whom were elected to the Parliament; the ‘pure’ Mazzinians such as Saffi, Quadrio and Campanella; the variegated kaleidoscope of the Garibaldians, and the federalists inspired by Mario, and later by Ghisleri. This latter was defined by Spadolini as: ‘The most modern figure of old republicanism, the bridge between Mazzinian liturgy and Cattaneo’s critique’ (Spadolini 1980, ix). Although I would contend that, with Ghisleri, one finds a lot of Cattaneo, but almost nothing like ‘liturgy’, religion or mysticism, what I consider interesting in Spadolini’s analysis is the idea that, in those decades, the main polarisation occurred between the ‘institutionalists’ and the intransigents. As for the ‘pure’ Mazzinians, Spadolini noted that, after the Unification, ‘the intransigence of the Mazzinians became major than that of Mazzini’ (Spadolini 1980, 1). In Spadolini’s wording, they pronounced an ‘electoral non expedit ’ (Spadolini 1980, 8) implying the refuse of all parliamentary appointment. Namely, being elected would have implied the obligation of swearing fidelity to the Monarchy, what most republicans considered as morally unacceptable, a breach of the duty of civic virtue. Puzzlingly, as noted above, several republicans who claimed to be more radical than Mazzini such as Ferrari, or even Bertani and Macchi (both Cattaneo’s friends), and future internationalists such as Fanelli, entered the Parliament. While this can be understood considering the aforementioned notes by Malatesta explaining that, even for the anarchists, parliamentarism was not a major issue until the end of the 1870s, what is relevant to my discourse is that, when the matter of parliamentarism was raised, intransigent voices were heard from the most radical sectors of both the anarcho-socialist and the republican field. For the anarchists, after the parliamentary turn of Andrea Costa and his friends that would have led to Costa’s election in 1882 and to the constitution of the Socialist Party in 1892, abstentionist intransigence meant avoiding to be compromised not only with the Monarchy, but with the ruling classes in general. For the Republicans, it mainly meant the refuse of ‘swearing’. For the anarchists, this choice was deeper and is still applied today under the Italian Republic. In both cases, this expression of civic virtue belonged both to a political strategy and to matters of personal coherence and honourability of every single activist. In the year of the first partial extension of suffrage, 1882, a congress of the Mazzinian Societies held in Genoa confirmed ‘the abstentionist

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choice’ (Ridolfi 1989, 93) by a majority despite some polemics and the possibilistic orientation of several national leaders. ‘Pure’ Mazzinians associated in the Pact of Brotherhood, such as the Nathans, ‘continued to claim political abstentionism until 1889’ (Finelli 2013, 29). Polemics among electoralists and anti-electoralists continued also after the formal creation of the PRI, with the 1895 Bologna Congress stating ‘the conditioned participation to administrative electoral struggles, and freedom of the diverse sections to participate [or not] to political elections’ (Spadolini 1980, 245), and some ‘resurfacing of the old intransigence’ (Spadolini 1980, 77) still happening in the Livorno Congress of the following year. Significantly, the suspicion towards political collaboration also affected political mandates in local administrations. Although no oath to the Monarchy was required to serve as local administrators, still in 1889, ‘elderly Federico Comandini… refused to serve’ as the Mayor of Cesena over ‘coherence with his principles’ (Ridolfi 1989, 174). Republican abstentionism resurfaced several times also in the following century, including a 1911 Ghisleri’s brochure that I discuss below. Abstentionism was not the sole point of contact between intransigent republicans and early anarchists following the principles of antimonarchist Risorgimento. They had also common enemies: despite their very tense relations after 1870, the Church and the Monarchy shared common feelings to contrast ‘anarchy’ as well as ‘republic’ (Spadolini 1980, 156– 157). These purposes were acted under the form of common political repression, like in the case of the arrestation of several republican leaders including Mazzini’s ‘bishop’ (Bertoni 2010) Aurelio Saffi, during a meeting in Villa Ruffi, in Romagna, in 1874, on the allegations that they were conspiring with the Internationalists, who had just tried their famous insurrection in the same region. While Saffi indignantly rejected these charges, it is worth noting that, in the 1870s and 1880s, the Universal Republican Alliance maintained a presence as a clandestine organisation, structured around small groups and ‘secret committees’ (Ridolfi 1989, 138), paralleling the public organisational structures of ‘official’ republicans. According to Ridolfi, this secret organisation gradually declined, becoming a receptacle of the last intransigents. Yet, still in the mid-1885s, there were rumours of a ‘well organised [republican] insurrectional movement’ (Ridolfi 1989, 136) revealing how the old habits of secrecy and conspiration were long lasting and determined the oscillation of Italian

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republicans ‘between clandestine struggle and legality’ (Ridolfi 1989, 122) for several decades after Italy’s unification. Still at the end of the century, with the repression of all social movements by the Crispi government (ironically, a former Garibaldian), the Republican Party had to celebrate a congress ‘in clandestine form’ (Spadolini 1980, 246) in Florence in 1897, and in Lugano in 1899, when the republicans, ‘compelled to meet in foreign land, denounce[d] the raging reaction’ (Spadolini 1980, 246). Thus, even after the watershed of 1871, ‘Republic’ and ‘Anarchy’ remained two concerning threats for monarchist and conservative milieus. Conversely, those wishing for ‘Socialism’, ‘Anarchy’ and ‘Republic’ mostly perceived themselves as subversives who were potentially exposed to political repression and to the possibility of having to take clandestine action. The perception that all of them were rather the continuators than the adversaries of activists of the former generation who fought in 1848, 1859–1860 and so on seemed to be quite clear. Authors such as Masini, and Giovanna Angelini, have analysed further cases of continuity and porosity between Risorgimento traditions and libertarian socialism after 1871, especially around the journal La Plebe, published in Lodi (and then in Milan) from 1868 to 1883, being edited by Enrico Bignami (1844–1921) and then by Osvaldo Gnocchi-Viani (1837–1917). Although explicitly dealing with the social question, that journal was first inserted in the panorama of Lombard republican press, to come in the following years to publish Bakunin’s articles to ‘conciliate Mazzinianism and socialism’ (Angelini 1994, 59). According to Angelini, the watershed of 1871 was not so ‘neat’ (Angelini 1987, 14) and the trajectories of early internationalists such as Gnocchi-Viani showed that it was possible ‘to shift from Mazzinianism to Socialism without too many traumas’ (Colombo 1987, 11). This last affirmation was partially contradicted by Masini’s work on the Italian section of the International, stating that the groups of Lodi and Milan, which edited La Plebe, had often to face polemics with other groups as they were considered quite ‘moderate’, and even overtly questioned the insurrectionist line of Malatesta, Cafiero, Costa and friends in the mid-1870s. More radical activists also considered Lombard Internationalists as too indulgent towards the example of parliamentary participation that was provided by German Marxists. Yet, I would contend that some of the contents of the Plebe group allow considering them as a key part in the construction of ideas on libertarian socialism, namely in its ‘educationist’ and ‘evolutionist’ components.

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On the one hand, Angelini noted a strong influence of Ferrari’s thought over Gnocchi-Viani’s ‘federalism and anti-statism’ (Angelini 1987, 46) as well as Bakunin’s inspiration in his rejection of the ‘Marxian strategy of the seizure of political power’ (Angelini 1987, 53). On the other, the official records of the Italian Federation of the International from 1871 to 1880 published by Masini account for the active role that was played by the Plebe group, inserted in the Federazione dell’Alta Italia in which Gnocchi-Viani was an increasingly prominent figure. This Federation took distance from the ideas exposed by the majority of the other internationalist sections that the social revolution was only possible through a violent breakup crushing the old society, and argued for the plurality of means through which one could transform society. It would be odd to see in these position their definitive departure from anarchism as most commentators suggests, given that the Lombard members exposed some principles that would inform social anarchism in the following decades, for instance, the idea that socialism was not limited to the emancipation of one class, the proletariat, as classical Marxism argued, but of all humankind. At an 1877 congress, GnocchiViani argued that, although ‘the working-class matters are essential for socialism, they are not all Socialism … Socialism does not want to empower a Fourth State … it wants to harmonize the human family through work, love and science’ (Masini 1964, 163). For Gnocchi-Viani, socialist solutions had to be plural as socialism adopted an experimental method, open to try solutions and to correct these if they did not work. Only someone unfamiliar with anarchist histories could not recognise here the anticipation of key debates that characterised the anarchist movement between the nineteenth and the twentieth century, where ‘evolutionist’ and ‘educationist’ tendencies considering popular education and humanitarianism as key points for emancipation and fostering notions such as secular knowledge, free thinking and mutual aid were clearly recognisable in the movement (Ferretti 2017; Masini 1965). In an 1876 appeal to Italian workers and youth, the Lombard Federation of the International endorsed federalism as ‘free disposition of themselves’ for all human groups, and ‘anarchy’ as ‘adoption of people’s rule instead of state reason’ (Masini 1964, 260). Still in December 1880, the Congress of the Alta Italia Federation, held in the Swiss village of Chiasso to avoid police repression, although not excluding electoral options indicated ‘anarchist communism [as their] ideal and target’ (Masini 1964, 214). Thus, activists and journalists such as Bignami,

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Gnocchi-Viani and the Plebe group, although with their specificities, should be considered as part of the history of libertarian socialism in Italy, in continuity with Risorgimento legacies. One of the Plebe collaborators was namely Angelo Umiltà.

Angelo Umiltà and the United States of Europe Born to a humble republican family in Montecchio, province of Reggio Emilia, in the middle of a region that is known as a classical stronghold of Italian workers’ movements, Umiltà was only alphabetized when he was 13 years old. Aware of the sufferings of the popular classes, he became a fierce fighter for the cause of national liberation, fighting as a volunteer in the key battle of San Martino in 1859 (Umiltà 1859) and then in 1866. After that occasion, he wrote a book of recollections on the Valtellina 1866 volunteers that can be considered as an exemplar document from popular Garibaldianism, relating day by day the life of volunteers and fully accounting for their mistrust in the official monarchist army. These selfinvited fighters were well aware of the ongoing efforts of the Monarchy to sabotage their endeavours, as conservatives were ‘scared by the massive enrolment’ (Umiltà 1866, I, 20) of elements who were politically suspect to the government, that had just been transferred from Turin to Florence. According to Umiltà, the ‘volunteer’ was a sort of human ideal type that resurfaced at different occasions in history, always and everywhere ‘lashing tyranny and seeing it … in everyone who holds power’ (Umiltà 1866, I, 13). This mistrust also included implicit and explicit charges of inefficiency and incompetence to the official commanders that Umiltà also expressed in geostrategic terms. He dedicated some of his pages to sarcastically criticise General Lamarmora, by arguing that Valtellina, an Alpine valley of more than 100 kms of length descending from the Stelvio Pass (at the frontier with Tyrol) to the Lake of Como, was not sufficiently protected by the Italian armies and could have been used by the Austrians as a corridor to break the front and menace directly Milan. Umiltà implicitly claimed that it was only thanks to the good will of the volunteers that such road had been closed to the enemy. Whatever could be the judgement of specialists of military strategy on this point, what is significant is that the volunteers perceived that they fought for liberating the last Italian regions that were under foreign domination, but they did not do that on behalf of the Savoias, who were instead suspected of wishing to betray that cause on the tables of

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diplomacy. Indeed, that war was not an example of efficiency for the Italian army, which obtained the annexation of Veneto only thanks to the armistice that Austria subscribed with Prussia, against which the Austrians were fighting on their Northern front. The volunteers like Umiltà proudly distinguished themselves considering to be ‘national guards’ (Umiltà 1866, I, 107), that is members of a citizen militia like those that were instituted by the 1789 French Revolution and would have defended Paris during the 1870 siege and the 1871 Commune, rather than the soldiers in a regular Army. The feeling of the volunteers that they were sabotaged and undermined by the government and the ruling classes was publicly expressed by Garibaldi, denouncing episodes of aggressions against volunteers by ‘the bourgeois’ (Garibaldi 1997; Garibaldi to the Ministry of War, 13 September 1866). He continued to encourage his men, who lacked even ‘the coats’ (Garibaldi 2002, 162; Garibaldi to the Volunteers, 9 August 1866) due to the wishes of the official commands to impede that they could distinguish themselves with successful campaigns, leaving them with insufficient equipment. Their pride was only enhanced by the fact that the Austrian officers publicly declared Italian Garibaldian volunteers as ‘a bunch of partisans without any law or faith’ (Umiltà 1866, II, 61). Yet, they were the only part of the Italian troops that recorded some substantial military successes at that stage. At the end of the campaign, the disappointment of the Garibaldians who were compelled to stop their march towards the strategic city of Trento after their victory in Bezzecca is too well known to be summarised here (Scirocco 2001). It is worth noting that the following step of national unification, that is taking Rome, would have ‘finally’ (Umiltà vol. II, 149) meant to Umiltà the end of the Papacy rather than the completement of national unification. Garibaldian volunteers expressed much more complex views than the mere patriotic task for which they were known to most of historiography. In the following years, Umiltà worked as a journalist and for a while as a functionary of the Minister of Interior in Milan, a job that he disliked but accepted out of necessity ‘in the interest of my mother and my younger brothers, given that my parents had sacrificed all their fortune to the cause of national independence’ (Umiltà 1873, 7). In 1868, he was one of the witnesses for a campaign of the progressive journal Gazzettino Rosa, edited by another future Vosges volunteer and Umiltà’s friend, Achille Bizzoni (Bizzoni 1871), to unmask an agent provocateur paid by the government to infiltrate republican milieus, one Franco Mistrali.

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What followed was an unbelievable story of persecution as, despite he was not the only witness for that dispute, Umiltà was later sentenced for defamation and (alleged) false testimony and had to found refuge in Switzerland to avoid being jailed. In the following decades, all his efforts to end this judiciary action, demasking it as a political persecution against him were vain, demonstrating how strong was the repression of dissident voices in early unified Italy, including people who had repeatedly fought for national independence (Bernabei 1994). After teaching two years in Lugano where he arguably met Cattaneo and participated in the 1870 insurrectional band led by Nathan (Vuilleumier 1970), Umiltà took part in the Vosges Garibaldian campaign, where he was appointed as lieutenant in an ambulance in October 1870.1 Considering Umiltà’s remarks on the 1866 campaign, it is very significant that, in the same weeks in which the official Italian army entered Rome, Garibaldian volunteers were instead preparing for going to France considering that, at that moment, the defence of a foreign republic was more compelling for them than the completion of Italian territorial unity. It is worth noting that, in the day of Porta Pia (20 September) ‘Mazzini was detained in the Gaeta prison [following that year’s insurrections] and Garibaldi confined in Caprera, watched by the Military Navy’ (Scirocco 2001, 350). This further exposes how plural and diverse causes, including the social one, paralleled the national struggle in the complex phenomenon called Risorgimento. Partially surviving in the Central Museum of Risorgimento in Rome and partially in the spectacular collection of the Umiltà Papers held at the State Archives of Neuchâtel, the lengthy correspondence between Umiltà and Timoteo Riboli, his hierarchic superior during this campaign and his intermediator to communicate with Garibaldi, clarifies some matters on the following part of Umiltà’s exile trajectory. It reveals for instance that, after the end of the campaign following the capitulation of February 1871 that disappointed both international volunteers and French republicans (Bizzoni 1871), Umiltà did not take part in the Paris Commune, as it was instead supposed by Aldo Romano. He did not miss the Parisian events to ‘take part in the communal movement in Lyon’ (Bernabei 1994, 19) as supposed by Mario Bernabei, but simply out of necessity. In fact, the international volunteers who remained in France in the first months of 1 Archives Etat Neuchâtel, Papier Angelo Umiltà (herefater AEN-U), 1 République française, 26 October 1870 [signed G. Garibaldi].

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1871 were the targets of all sorts of persecutions which compelled them to hide or to quit the country, with the result that those who could not come back to their countries of origin, such as Umiltà, had to face serious dilemmas about their future.2 As Umiltà wrote to Riboli in April 1871, some members of their battalion had been arrested following an ‘awful reaction’, who compelled Umiltà ‘to use great circumspection to avoid being arrested, as there is the order to arrest and expel all the Italians that are not provided with a laisse-passer’.3 Beyond his sarcastic notes on the French republican ingratitude, noting that the French government, during the Commune, saw ‘a Marat, a Robespierre in each Italian’,4 Umiltà reported to Riboli some news coming from Paris, relating that Cipriani had been captured by the Versailles people.5 He even expressed some wishes to move to Paris, where some of his friends were fighting (this was probably a reference to Reggio Emilia volunteer Gaetano Davoli, then in Paris), although wishing to serve rather as a journalist than as a National Guard.6 Yet, his numerous letters accounted for the impossibility to move freely within France for former Garibaldians, so that he had to quit Lyon and to find temporarily sanctuary in Chambery. Then, on 7 June, Umiltà wrote that he was again in Switzerland, in Geneva, where he was provisionally safe from political persecution but faced the serious issue of finding some way to earn his life in a city where he was an undocumented migrant and where he did not yet know anybody.7 In his early times in Geneva, Umiltà carried out effectively a clandestine life, hiding in the neighbourhood of Carouge in the house of one Schira, and only found some political support when he was introduced to the members of the League of Peace and Liberty, including German exiles and his future mentors in Switzerland, Armand Goegg (1820– 1897) and his wife Marie Goegg-Pouchoulin (1826–1899).8 Although it was in the League that Umiltà deployed most of his political activity from 2 MCRR 172, Umiltà to Riboli, 6 March 1871. 3 MCRR 174, Umiltà to Riboli, 21 April 1871. 4 MCRR 174, Umiltà to Riboli, 21 April 1871. 5 MCRR 173, Umiltà to Riboli, [April 1871]. 6 MCRR 174, Umiltà to Riboli, 26 May 1871. 7 MCRR 174, Umiltà to Riboli, 6 June 1871. 8 MCRR 173, Umiltà to Riboli, 24 July 1871.

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that moment until his death, Umiltà’s exile trajectory paralleled those of the exiled of the Paris Commune and of the international anarchists who made French-speaking Switzerland the cradle of the Antiauthoritarian International, of the Fédération jurassienne and of collective endeavours such as the Nouvelle Géographie universelle redacted by Reclus and the circuit of the anarchist geographers in the 1870s and 1880s (Ferretti 2014). As the correspondence surviving in Neuchâtel shows, Umiltà was acquainted with a number of these socialist and anarchist activists, actively participating in their transnational networks of solidarity among exiles. It was the case with Reclus, who wrote to Umiltà requesting recommendations for local academics in Naples, where he was going to stay for a few months to work on local libraries and archives,9 and Meˇcnikov, who wrote to Umiltà requesting him to help a French refugee to resolve problems with local authorities.10 After quitting Italy, Meˇcnikov was then one of the closest Reclus’s collaborators and a colleague of Umiltà at the University of Neuchâtel, where the Italian exile was one of the closest friends of the Russian, together with local liberals such as Aimé Humbert and Charles Knapp11 who were also the animators of the local geographical society founded in 1885 (Reubi 2011). Due to his friendship with Cipriani, Umiltà also received correspondence from the Commune deportees in New Caledonia on behalf of his friend,12 including one letter from the Commune heroine Louise Michel (1830–1905). From the remote Pacific island, Michel sent news of Cipriani, then imprisoned in Nouméa, that were collectively addressed to ‘my friends, my beloved brothers’.13 Umiltà also corresponded with another Commune survivor, Henri Rochefort (1831–1913), who had managed to escape from New Caledonia.14 Traces of contacts between Umiltà and Bakunin’s circuits are contained in the copy of a Bakunin’s subscription bulletin to the League of Peace and Liberty surviving

9 AEN-U, 8, Reclus to Umiltà [1877]. 10 AEN-U, 8, Metchnikoff to Umiltà, 22 June 1884. 11 Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire de Neuchâtel (hereafter BPUN), Fonds de la

Société de Géographie, Kontchewski to Knapp, 29 December 1890. 12 AEN-U, 8, Cipriani to Umiltà, 20 5 73; 28 4 187[…]. 13 AEN-U, 8, Michel to Umiltà, 4 April 1875. 14 AEN-U, 8, Rochefort to Umiltà, 28 January 1878.

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in Umiltà’s archives,15 and letters from close Bakunin’s friends such as Gambuzzi.16 In the 1870s, Umiltà was also a collaborator of La Plebe, for which he wrote several articles. There, although taking some distances from the (true or imaginary) ‘mandatory collectivism’ that he reproached to the Internationalists, he endorsed the very concept of socialism, arguing that this idea ‘was born with civilisation, it is even its synthesis because socialism is the same as progress’ (Angelini 1994, 221; Umiltà, Socialismo e reazione, La Plebe, 1873). In the Lombard journal, Umiltà even sketched the draft of a projected book on the ‘Revolution of the Nineteenth Century’, which had to contain 20 chapters defining his own version of humanitarian socialism. This kind of socialism was expected to go well beyond merely economic matters, by impacting all aspects and parts of society, which chimed again with the anarchist tradition, including ‘the role of women in this work of civil renovation’.17 For Umiltà, the instauration of republican freedom was a necessary premise to socialism, that should be inspired by cooperation and workers’ mutual aid, on the model of Rochdale. Through workers’ associationism everybody should become: ‘Equal in duties and [respecting] everybody’s rights, being all solidary, brothers to each other, without any distinction of castes, places, races and beliefs’.18 This programme, merging elements of internationalist socialism and republicanism, matched ongoing attempts to recompose the post-Commune ruptures and somehow reunify the entire ‘Italian democracy’. Interestingly, this notion of ‘democracy’ was quite loose, if one of the main promotors of this initiative was nobody less than Bakunin’s fiduciary Celso Ceretti. The former Garibaldian wrote to Umiltà that he was hoping to organise a general congress of ‘Italian democracy’ between 1873 and 1874, with the support of Garibaldi, encouraging his exiled ‘friend and brother’ to join ‘the committee for conciliation of which I am a fanatic supporter, without renouncing to my ideas of pure socialism … A Mazzinian, on the true equality I share Proudhon’s opinion declaring 15 AEN-U, 8, Bakunin, Subscription Bulletin. 16 AEN-U, 16, Gambuzzi to Umiltà, 16 April 1879. 17 La Plebe, 23 August 1873. A. Umiltà, L’era nuova ossia la rivoluzione del secolo

decimonono, 1. 18 La Plebe, 23 August 1873. A. Umiltà, L’era nuova ossia la rivoluzione del secolo decimonono, 1.

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that property is a theft’.19 The repression following the 1874 anarchist uprisings and the Villa Ruffi arrestations mentioned above hindered this (anyway difficult) reconciliation between the (internationalist) anarchists and the (Mazzinian) republicans. However, it remains intriguing to consider how, after decades of harsh polemics between the different sides of ‘democracy’, there were quite famous activists like Ceretti who could style themselves as being at the same time ‘Mazzinians’ and libertarian socialists. Both Ceretti and Umiltà wrote to La Plebe endorsing the conciliation: even though the journal supported the Internationalists in their polemics against the Mazzinians and even against some republican federalists opposing the International, as for Castellazzo’s responses to Mario,20 the editors replied that, although they did not support a ‘fusion’ of different groups, they approved ‘unity of action’21 of Internationalists and republicans on immediate and practical matters. The exile trajectory of Umiltà was an amazing example of these porosities and contaminations between the different political fields that claimed the legacy of radical Risorgimento. Another experience that Umiltà shared with the Internationalists in Switzerland in the 1870s was the hardship of police repression. In 1874, he was arrested in Geneva following a request of extradition from the Italian government due to his pending issues with Italian tribunals, despite the impressive amount of documentation and support letters from different personalities including Garibaldi that he had collected in his Memoir to the Swiss Federal Council (Umiltà 1873). Finally, Switzerland remained faithful to her tradition of a (relatively) safe harbour for political refugees, and Umiltà could continue living there, resolving also the problem of having a job since 1877, thanks to a teaching appointment at the newly founded University of Neuchâtel. This post was transformed in a permanent Chair in Italian Literature in the following years, that Umiltà kept until his death in 1893.22 Yet, he was no longer allowed to come back to Italy and it was only after taking Swiss nationality that he was definitively safe from any possible

19 AEN-U, 7, Ceretti to Umiltà, 12 December 1874. 20 La Plebe, 18 November 1873. L’Internazionale. Castellazzo ad Alberto Mario. 21 La Plebe, 11 March 1874. Due parole sulla lettera di A. Umiltà. 22 AEN, Dossiers des Professeurs, Angelo Umiltà.

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follow-up of his judiciary persecution. In the 1880s, it was Umiltà who helped other persecuted Italian radicals, eventually Francesco Saverio Merlino, who was compelled to exile and wrote to Umiltà enquiring about what conditions offered Switzerland as a safe harbour and a place where he could find any intellectual job there.23 Umiltà also took the defences of the late Castellazzo, who was still victim of polemics in Italy, in the 1880s, over the aforementioned Mantova affair.24 This means that links of solidarity among former Garibaldian and Internationalist activists facing exile and political persecution continued well beyond the periodisation classically establishing the unification of Italy, and well after the 1871 rupture between Mazzinians and Internationalists and any other possible scissions in the progressive field. Always claiming his intransigent republican faith, Umiltà corresponded with all of the most famous republican leaders in Italy in the 1870s and 1880s. Although to different degrees, these correspondences always showed that these activists considered their causes as unfinished business in so-called ‘Liberal Italy’, generally perceiving to be still subversives, and consequently passible of political repression. These kinds of republicans were rather competing with anarchists and socialists to have the lead of an anti-establishment movement in Italy, rather than considering to be something completely different from them. This was also revealed by Umiltà’s exchanges with his former Vosges comrade in arms Francesco Ajuti from Rimini, who claimed from Paris in 1884: ‘My God is truth and my man is justice. A principled republican, I have never surrendered my brain or my hearth, nobody on earth could never dominate me’.25 Therefore, antimonarchist exile continued under varied forms for several obscure fighters whose trajectories should still be investigated. Yet, Umiltà also corresponded with more ‘moderate’ republican leaders, including Mazzinians such as Maurizio Quadrio who solidarized with Umiltà over his judiciary peripeties,26 and Federico Campanella27 who argued for unifying the republican field. Significantly, after Campanella’s death in 1881, Umiltà published a substantial obituary 23 AEN-U, 16, Merlino to Umiltà, 26 June 1884. 24 AEN-U, 5, Castellazzo to Umiltà, 27 October 1883. 25 AEN-U, 5, Ajuti to Umiltà, 13 October 1884. 26 AEN-U, 16, Quadrio to Umiltà, 26 June 1872. 27 AEN-U, 16, Campanella to Umiltà, 1 July 1877.

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of the old Mazzinian presenting his figure as that of a fighter working for a democratic revolution that should have culminated in the ‘federation of free peoples’, a person who could ‘bring the pen … and the sword with the same braveness for the defence of everybody’s right’, like ‘Mazzini, Ledru-Rollin, Herzen, Louis Blanc, Mickiewicz, Victor Hugo, Cattaneo, Garibaldi’.28 Finding again a so diverse array of figures, including socialists and federalists, in Umiltà’s Pantheon, confirms how various forms of post-unification radicalism walked parallelly in the last decades of the long Risorgimento. This is apparent in one of the biggest folders surviving in the archive, which contains the lengthy correspondence between Umiltà and Forlì republican leader Aurelio Saffi (1819–1890) considered as one of the most orthodox continuators of Mazzini—and a supporter of female emancipation in association with his wife Giorgina Craufurd (1827– 1911) (Bertoni 2010; Gazzetta 2003). Umiltà also wrote to Saffi letters acknowledging his support for the exile’s bid to avoid extradition to Italy, which survive in Saffi’s personal folders at the Archiginnasio Library in Bologna.29 Saffi was a strong supporter of the League of Peace and Liberty,30 and likewise in touch with the Goeggs and with the League’s leader Charles Lemonnier (1806–1891), sharing their idea to merge pacifism and European federalism (Anteghini 2005; Gui 2017). In his letters, Saffi endorsed the activities of Umiltà for the League with quite mystical tones, evoking: ‘The virtue of the Honest … fighting the oppressors’ selfishness’, and wishing for: ‘The universal federation of peoples’.31 Being Saffi a staunch Mazzinian, that is an exponent of ‘centralist’ republicans, this raises the important matter of federations and (internal and international) federalism. Saffi’s folder in the Umiltà’s archive also contains some letters that Saffi addressed to Attilio Runcaldier from Ravenna, another republican refugee in Switzerland, Mazzini’s correspondent and Umiltà’s fellow in the pacifist movement (Vuilleumier 1970). In 1877, Saffi wrote to Runcaldier, who was curious about the polemics between centralists and federalists in

28 AEN-U, 16, Le Confédéré, Journal des Radicaux fribourgeois, 25 December 1881. 29 Biblioteca Comunale dell’Archiginnasio, Gabinetto dei Manoscritti (herefater BCA),

Carte Saffi, B44, Umiltà to Saffi, 5 November 1874. 30 AEN-U, 12, Saffi to Umiltà, 6 March 1874. 31 AEN-U, 12, Saffi to Umiltà, 19 October 1875.

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the Italian republican field, minimising the issue. ‘The matter to which you allude about Mario, that is between federalists and unitaries in Italy, to me, is more apparent than real. Cattaneo’s/Mario’s federalism … is a sort of unitary federalism, which will find its solution in the spontaneous harmony of national life in our country, once the conflicts and the issues generated by the forced unity of monarchist centralisation will be suppressed’.32 On the one hand, this looked more like a propaganda discourse styling the instauration of the republic as the panacea for all problems than a thorough account of the real situation, also considering the polemics that occurred between Mario and Saffi in those years (Bagatin 2000). On the other, it is noteworthy that, after the unification and after Mazzini’s death, the successors of the Genoa leader tried some pacification with republicans of other tendencies, including federalists, which contrasted with the harsh excommunications that Mazzini launched against the dissidents until 15–20 years earlier. This confirms that there was always people willing to bridge the divisions between different tendencies in the antimonarchist and radical opposition movements springing from Risorgimento at different levels, from intellectual networking to popular sociability. As for Umiltà, while he never really entered the internal Italian debates over centralism and federalism, admiring both Mazzini and Cattaneo as noted above, he took resolutely side for European federalism during his main political endeavour, that is his contribution to the League of Peace and Liberty. In that association, Umiltà served as the Secretary and Treasurer in his Geneva time, appointing several members from Italian republican and socialist milieus, including Cattaneo’s friend Mauro Macchi.33 He wrote also a rubric on Italian facts in the League’s journal Les Etats Unis d’Europe, denouncing corruption and police repression in Italy in the 1870s. While the very idea of a United States of Europe is very telling about the kind of federalist internationalism that inspired the initiative, it is worth noting that, in 1867, the earliest project to publish that journal had involved Bakunin, who proposed Elie Reclus as its director.34 In his

32 AEN-U, 12, Saffi to Runcaldier, 9 June 1877. 33 AEN-U, 16, Macchi to Umiltà, December 1879. 34 Zürich, Zentralbibliothek, Handschriftenabteilung (hereafter ZZH) Nachl. G. Vogt

10.54, Reclus to Vogt, 4 November 1867.

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rubric, Umiltà published a necrology of Mazzini in which he highlighted the cosmopolite nature of the organisations that he promoted such as the Giovine Europa and the Universal Republican Alliance, even defining Mazzini ‘a convinced socialist’35 consistently with his wishes to bridge different tendencies in the ‘democratic movement’. In Armand Goegg’s letters to Umiltà, this inclusive approach corresponded to the need for enlarging enrolment in the League, especially targeting a list of: ‘Some of our old friends such as Garibaldi … Macchi, Saffi, Gambuzzi’, all people who could have been useful to ‘make new acquaintances for our cause’,36 and who represented again both the republican and the anarchist fields. For that cause, Umiltà wrote his most substantial works, such as Paix ou Guerre (1891) and the posthumous Histoire d’une utopie (1911). Since his first recollections as a volunteer in the wars for national independence, Umiltà had written vivid accounts on the horrors of war massacres that ‘desolate families’ (Umiltà 1859, 31), in which he damned those who ‘pushed brothers against brothers’ (Umiltà 1859, 32). In his mature works, Umiltà’s radical pacifism was strictly associated with the ‘autonomy of the human person’ (Umiltà 1891, 1) and with the need of deconstructing the European system of nations in arms through ‘federations’ (Umiltà 1891, 3). These federations did not necessarily correspond to the classical models of Switzerland and of the United States that were classically evoked by most of Risorgimento federalists, as they implied the existence of a supernational level that ensured peace. Importantly, this level was not understood as the need for establishing an authority imposing a political status, but as the need for transnational corporations and agreements, which substantially applied the principles of Risorgimento federalism to the international scale. The main notion that Umiltà constantly repeated was that peace is not a condition to reach liberty and justice, but must be the result of liberty and justice through which peace must be reached. This entailed overtaking narrow ideas of homeland and nation. According to Umiltà: ‘There is no homeland without liberty … there is no liberty without equality of rights and of duties’ (Umiltà 1911, 151). Umiltà’s ethical denunciation of war as ‘organised brigandage’ and as something ‘bestial’ (Umiltà 1911, 53) well summarised his historical

35 Les Etats Unis d’Europe, 11 April 1872. Mazzini, 2. 36 AEN-U, 3, Goegg to Umiltà, 25 March 1875.

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analysis of the different theories of peace and war. Umiltà connected peace to the idea of equality, as peace ‘is incompatible with [the idea] of inferiority that derives from the concept of war’ (Umiltà 1911, 35), being strictly associated with the creation of a caste of professional ‘hangmen’ (Umiltà 1911, 185) despising manual work. Thus, the Italian exile argued for the abolition of permanent armies and for ‘national militias’ (Umiltà 1911, 86) referencing both the first French Revolution and the works of Immanuel Kant, who ‘admired that Revolution’ (Umiltà 1911, 82), on Perpetual Peace. Conversely, Umiltà opposed the adoption of international codes of war targeting its ‘humanisation’, as war ‘was and will remain an institution of barbarity’ (Umiltà 1911, 99): therefore, it should not be regulated, but abolished. On this point, Umiltà mentioned Voltaire’s sarcasm against supporters of war codes such as Hugo Grotius and Samuel von Pufendorf, as he considered ridiculous to introduce a ‘code of murder’ (Umiltà 1911, 99) instead of simply outlawing murders. Umiltà’s aim was defined as the ‘establishment of a republican federation of free peoples, on equitable and solid grounds’ (Umiltà 1911, 83) including a ‘European federal pact’ (Umiltà 1911, 85), which must be necessarily republican, as monarchies were the war makers for excellence, concepts on which Umiltà repeatedly quoted Cattaneo. While the notion of ‘republican federation’ clearly recalled Ferrari’s work, Umiltà’s reference to Reclus’s ‘grand federation of free peoples’ (Umiltà 1911, 184) suggested that the conceptual framework of this free federation could go also beyond Europe. This raises the matter of the limits of those cosmopolitanisms that remained possibly limited to a European framework, and of Umiltà’s approach to colonisation. The Italian exile addressed colonialism through studies on the Italians in Africa that were characterised by contradictions, including a sense of civilisational superiority towards peoples that were deemed to be in their ‘infancy’, alongside similar Eurocentric stereotypes (Umiltà 1887). Yet, this did not prevent Umiltà from being one of the early denunciators of colonial crimes and opponents to the armed conquest of colonies, being conversely in favour of the pacific migration of European workers overseas. For Umiltà, this latter was the only legitimate way to spread what he called ‘civilisation’, while colonial military conquest was nothing else than ‘barbarity’. Interestingly, Umiltà deemed the French occupation of Tunisia, ratified by the infamous 1885 Berlin Congress, as an act that scandalously

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contradicted the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, one that was performed by the same Republic that had launched that declaration and was instead ‘denying the rights of peoples’ by ‘militarily invading an independent state, under pretext of protecting it’ (Umiltà 1911, 104). Umiltà likewise blamed the presence of the Italian government at those conferences, wondering ‘what they went to do in that bunch’ (Umiltà 1911, 104), which implied that a nation that had recently fought for her own liberation should not join colonialist assemblies. Umiltà quoted French debates where some early anti-colonialists such as AS Morin questioned Prime Minister Jules Ferry on whether treating colonised people as ‘brothers [did mean] conquering, stripping and enslaving them’ (Umiltà 1911, 310). As for the British Empire, he noted the fact that Indian lands ‘were conquered by the sword and can only be defended by the sword’ as a colonisation made by ‘canons and bayonets’ entailed necessarily resistance and insurgence on the other side, threatening the existence of ‘a big Empire for whose possession one violates the Ten Commandments’ (Umiltà 1911, 308). This critique was not limited to extra-European conquests, as Umiltà noted that ‘insurging Ireland’ (Umiltà 1911, 106) was another big issue for the British Crown, matching the sensitivity to both external and internal colonialism that characterised radical Risorgimento activists. Umiltà was a neglected pioneer of cosmopolitan pacifism and European/internationalist federalism, also because the First World War represented a rude check to these ideas, that were amazingly resumed exactly in the period between the two world wars, as I discuss in the conclusion. Furthermore, Umiltà’s trajectory is an example of the continuity of Risorgimento experiences such as exile, conspiration and political persecution, in which several kinds of republicans participated in common solidarity networks with their anarchist and socialist counterparts. These people often shared the ‘same insurrectional spirit’ (Gazzetta 2003, 116) and the disappointment of dismissed Garibaldian fighters who became a ‘new proletariat [of] barefoot patriots’ (Umiltà 1911, 24) in the decades after unification. Among the contents of these interactions, one can consider intransigence and civic virtue, notions that were likewise strongly endorsed by another amazing exponent of late Risorgimento: federalist, republican and anti-colonialist geographer Arcangelo Ghisleri.

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Ghisleri, the Last of Risorgimento Geographers In one of the denunciation pamphlets that Umiltà was compelled to write in his own self-defence in Switzerland, the Italian refugee explained to international publics that, given the monarchist, authoritarian and centralist turn of the unification events, ‘in Italy there are no citizens, but subjects’ (Umiltà 1872, 14). There, the only rights that remained to Italian people were those of ‘crying, suffering and paying … unless they remember to have another inalienable right, that of making barricades’ (Umiltà 1872, 15). Although in different terms, Arcangelo Ghisleri expressed the same impossibility of coming to terms with the Monarchy and with centralization. Given that Ghisleri’s outstanding contribution as a federalist, a geographer and an anti-colonialist has been lengthy discussed by other works (Ferretti 2016a; Mangini 1985, 2006; Masini 1961, 1978), this section is limited to highlight the roles that Ghisleri played in building elements of continuity and connection between radical Risorgimento, intransigent republicanism and libertarian socialism. It is first worth noting that the enormous and only partially explored Ghisleri’s archives, surviving in three different collections at the Domus Mazziniana in Pisa, at the Public Library in Cremona and at the Museum of Risorgimento in Milan, account for his impressive activity in editing political and scholarly journals and networking with fellow intellectuals and activists. One of Masini’s ‘heretics’ of the nineteenth century, Ghisleri was the protagonist of what Masini defined a ‘Democratic Scapigliatura’ [term indicating a sort of political and literary Bohemia], and more precisely a ‘Lombard fellowship’ (Masini 1961, 13) that he formed in his youth with his two closest friends, future socialist leaders Leonida Bissolati (1857–1920) and Filippo Turati (1857–1932). All three men had been based in Cremona during their youth, and contributed to republican cultural and political journals such as Rivista Repubblicana and Cuore e Critica. In this quite forgotten work of Masini, I am especially interested in the periodisation 1875–1890, because Masini considered the 1890s as the years in which party political belongings started to prevail over these youngsters’ initial enthusiasm merging socialism, republicanism and anticlericalism, marking the fact that ‘youth was finished’ (Masini 1961, 14). Indeed, during that decade, the three friends took respectively side with the Socialist Party in the case of Bissolati and Turati and with the Republican Party in the case of Ghisleri, who maintained a socialistic inspiration but considered the republican principle as paramount, providing his own

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example of republican intransigence, in this case, associated to both federalism and socialism. Masini noted that, among the continuators of Cattaneo, whose legacy Ghisleri always strongly endorsed, Alberto Mario could be considered as the political ‘right’, due to his declarations against the International that, significantly, ‘Ghisleri did not approve’ (Masini 1961, 26). For Masini, the political ‘left’ of federalist republicans in the 1879s and 1880s was instead represented by Gabriele Rosa, a personal friend and collaborator of Cattaneo who sided with the Internationalists of the Plebe, to which he regularly collaborated placing himself in the field of educationist and evolutionist socialism (Angelini 2003). Likewise interested in historical and geographical studies, Rosa will also support Ghisleri’s anticolonial stances in his late days (Bertolotti 2017). For several years, Rosa acted as a sort of connection between different circuits, corresponding at the same time with the late Vieusseux37 and with Mario, whose regards he sent to Cattaneo on some occasions (Cattaneo 1956, 604; Rosa to Cattaneo 9 May 1862). In the following decades, Rosa corresponded with Ghisleri, pleading for constructing a ‘serious republican party in Italy’, that is the party that was characterised by ‘federal spirit’ (Masini 1961, 157; Rosa to Ghisleri, 17 January 1878). Rosa commented on early irredentism, the movement claiming the Italian-speaking provinces of Trento and Trieste that were subject to Austria until 1919, which initially took a left-wing orientation (Ferretti 2016a), considering it as part of ‘the European question. [That is] Trento and Istria should not be liberated through a royalist war, but through revolution in Berlin and Saint-Petersburg’ (Masini 1961, 158; Rosa to Ghisleri, 17 January 1878). Also in this case, the national cause would not have made sense if disjoined from wider struggles for social rights and civil liberties. Despite the attempts for a republican ‘conciliation’ noted above, Mario’s letters to Ghisleri over his collaboration with the Rivista Repubblicana exposed Mario’s continuing polemics against the centralists. This latter contended that Ghisleri’s journal should have been an exclusive tribune for federalists, and that its supporters and funders: ‘Can never be unitary people’ (Masini 1961, 158; Mario to Ghisleri, 18 February 1878). Mario also complained about republicans such as Campanella who

37 BNCF, A100, 8, Rosa to Vieusseux, 8 February 1862.

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always ‘repeat the same objections, which annoy me’ (Masini 1961, 154; Mario to Ghisleri, 7 March 1878). Amazingly, on the opposite side of the centralist/federalist ‘barricade’, also Saffi expressed to Ghisleri his appreciation for a journal that, although expressing a political line that he did not support completely: ‘Can only be seriously and respectfully written, [being] inspired by Alberto Mario, edited by you and dedicated to the memory of Carlo Cattaneo’ (Masini 1961, 245; Saffi to Ghisleri, 21 March 1878). It was exactly in the name of Cattaneo that Ghisleri tried to carry out his networking that, geographically speaking, can also be considered as a continuation of the ‘Lombard connection’ defined above. Anyway, Ghisleri’s list of contacts was national and international, as discussed below. Since the 1870s, one of the main tasks of Ghisleri, Rosa, Bertani and the Marios was editing ‘a complete collection of [Cattaneo’s] published and unpublished works’ (Masini 1961, 149; Mario to Ghisleri, 15 January 1876). While we know that such a titanic endeavour is still unaccomplished today, the early efforts of these epigones demonstrated at the same time how Cattaneo’s thinking was indispensable to keep ways open to antimonarchist intransigence in Italy, and how difficult it was to foster the memory of people whose works were concurrently (and hastily) forgotten by both mainstream governmental historiography and incipient Marxist literature. It is no surprise that the supporters of ‘scientific’ socialism have always tended to label as ‘bourgeois’, ‘childish’ or ‘utopian’ whatever came in the socialist field before or beyond the miraculous revelations of their own German apostles. In 1898, Ghisleri published an anthology dedicated to those whom he considered as the ‘prophets’ of republicanism in Italy (all passed away at that moment), that is Mazzini, Cattaneo, Ferrari, Rosa, Mario and Garibaldi (Ghisleri 1898). In the same year, Ghisleri’s own biography temporarily echoed that of Cattaneo, as he had to move for some years to Lugano for his own safety, given the persecutions that the government was making against anarchists, socialists and republicans. These retaliations followed the dreadful repression of the 1898 popular protests against the high costs of living in that took place in Milan and were stopped by ‘ferocious monarchist’ (Catanuto and Schirone 2009, 127) general Bava Beccaris, who ordered the troop to open fire on the crowd, killing several hundreds of unharmful people. In Lugano, very impressed by the Milan massacre, Ghisleri dedicated a plaque ‘to the Milanese workers, mindful of the great Lombard philosopher, leader of the 1848

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barricades who, foreseeing the United States of Europe, died faithful to the Peoples’ causes and never wanted to bend over to trust the Kings’ (Ghisleri 1901, 1). Therefore, the memory of the ‘noble father’ of federalism was not disjoined from working classes’ barricades in Ghisleri’s mind during his years of exile in the same place where his mentor lived as an exile in the previous decades. It was in these difficult years that Ghisleri had significant exchanges with the world of socialist radicalism, showed by the largely unexplored folders of his archive at the Domus Mazziniana, such as correspondence with Cipriani, writing from Paris that the French ‘bourgeois republic’ was not better than the Italian ‘reactionary Monarchy. Oppression and blood in France, blood and oppression in Italy’.38 In these years, Ghisleri also corresponded with Merlino, who was quitting the anarchist movement after his well-known polemics with Malatesta over parliamentarism (Malatesta 2011). Akin to the Socialist Party, Merlino maintained anyway critical positions about socialist leaderships and proposed to Ghilseri the organisation of ‘a general congress of democracy for a large discussion on the reforms to propose’,39 encouraging the Republican Party to support radical economic reforms. These purposes somehow recalled the ‘conciliation’ tried by Umiltà and Ceretti almost three decades earlier. Yet, Ghisleri’s most significant radical acquaintance of those years was an anarchist whose work has been already quoted above as for Ferrari and Pisacane, that is Luigi Fabbri. Both fans and correspondents of Elisée Reclus (Ferretti 2016b), Ghisleri and Fabbri got acquainted due to their common interest in the International Freethought Congress that took place in Rome in 1904, as discussed by Ghisleri’s scholar Giorgio Mangini (2006). While Fabbri’s letters to Ghisleri, accounting for a lengthy correspondence, were published by Roberto Giulianelli (Fabbri 2005), only few of Ghisleri’s responses, that were not dealt with by Mangini or Giulianelli, survive in the Fabbri Papers at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. Importantly, for that Congress, which gathered the European Gotha of anticlericalism, Fabbri defined his conversation with Ghisleri as a dialogue between ‘true anticlericals’, that is people who

38 DM, Fondo Ghisleri, Cipriani to Ghisleri, 17 September 1901. 39 DM, Fondo Ghisleri, Merlino to Ghisleri, 18 August 1901.

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were keen to reject the company of monarchist anticlerical groups in the name of the common antimonarchist prejudicial. Fabbri defined the common political area of himself and his interlocutor in a very telling way as for the arguments that I developed above: ‘Let’s define ourselves as the subversives (anarchists, republicans and socialists)’ (Fabbri 2005, 33; Fabbri to Ghisleri, 2 March 1904). This correspondence was based on mutual esteem, as young Fabbri strongly admired mature Ghisleri, but also this latter praised his interlocutor as ‘a wise and expert person’.40 Although with interruptions, these exchanges continued for almost twenty years, revealing attempts for recomposing former ruptures in the ‘subversive’ field, such as Fabbri’s proposal to include ‘our friend Saverio Merlino’ (Fabbri 2005, 43; Fabbri to Ghisleri, 6 September 1904) in a common editorial project, confirming that Merlino never lost his contacts with the anarchist movement. Fabbri and Ghisleri had also the occasion to meet in Lugano, where Fabbri was temporarily hiding after the insurrectional episode of the 1914 ‘Red Week’ in Central Italy and asked for Ghisleri’s help to find a teacher job there (Fabbri 2005, 79; Fabbri to Ghisleri, 16 September 1914). Again, places and solidarity networks bridged ideological gaps. The most significant of Fabbri’s letters are the 1921 ones when, during the emergency situation of early fascist violence, Fabbri was editing Ferrari’s Philosophy of Revolution in the context of an anarchist rediscovery of ‘Cattaneo, Ferrari and even Mazzini’. Fabbri’s conclusion, shared with Ghisleri, was that: ‘The libertarian and revolutionary tendence of socialism (not to be confused with reformism or dictatorial Bolshevism) is a strong derivation of the federalist tendency of republicanism’ (Fabbri 2005, 111; Fabbri to Ghisleri, 16 September 1921). For Fabbri, this was confirmed by the better relations that anarchists had with republicans than with communists or socialists in several localities. At a more intellectual level, this was confirmed by Ghisleri’s acceptance of Fabbri’s request to reread and correct Fabbri’s introduction to Ferrari’s Filosofia della Rivoluzione. In his responses to Fabbri surviving in Amsterdam, Ghisleri expressed his pride for having been ‘during several years, the only

40 Amsterdam, International Institute of Social History (hereafter IISH) Fabbri Papers, 7, Ghisleri to Fabbri, 7 February 1907.

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one’41 who quoted Ferrari and Cattaneo, and endorsed Fabbri’s text, only suggesting some minor edits. In any case, it was not the first time that some individual associated with anarchism requested Ghisleri’s bibliographic and intellectual advice, as it is shown by a letter of former Bakunin’s collaborator Saverio Friscia requesting works by Ghisleri and by: ‘Cattaneo, Rosa and [Jessie] Mario’.42 Even earlier, Gnocchi-Viani wrote to Ghisleri for discussing the exchange of copies that they agreed between the Plebe and one of the journals edited by Ghisleri, Il Preludio: ‘Glad that the federalist idea established a point of contact between the two journals, and wishing that the social question will get them increasingly closer’ (Masini 1961, 213; Gnocchi-Viani to Ghisleri, 40 April 1877). All this, including Fabbri’s declarations, confirms what had been discussed above about the intersections of anarchist and radical/federalist republican traditions around notions such as intransigence and non-domination. In the new century, Ghisleri likewise considered the rescue of Cattaneo’s ideas as a priority, and collaborated with Rosa’s and White Mario’s endeavours to publish Cattaneo’s writings and to give the best of his scholarly advise to the indefatigable Englishwoman.43 In 1911, publishing his own comments on Cattaneo’s trajectory as an example of intransigence, Ghisleri matched Umiltà’s ideas in highlighting the international aspects of Cattaneo’s wishes for the ‘solidarity of all peoples, associated … not through the material unity by domination, but through the moral principle of freedom and equality’, leading to the ‘United States of Europe’ (Ghisleri 1912, 8). Stressing Cattaneo’s ‘public struggle [for] his federalist republican politics’ (Ghisleri 1912, 17), his resistance against the Monarchy and his opposition to permanent armies, Ghisleri also praised Cattaneo’s attitudes of secularism and tolerance, noting that his idea of giving up metaphysics and hoping in science was a way to counter intolerance. Amazingly, this matched Cattaneo’s personal ability, witnessed by all his friends, to entertain his interlocutors expressing the most radical and intransigent contents with the most ‘good natured manners’ (Ghisleri 1912, 22). 41 IISH, Fabbri Papers, 88, Ghisleri to Fabbri 12 July 1921. 42 DM Fondo Ghisleri, Friscia to Ghisleri, 25 March 1884. 43 DM Fondo Ghisleri II e 1 19, White Mario to Ghisleri, 7 February 1898; B II e 1 22, White Mario to Ghisleri, 31 January 1901; B II e 1 23 White Mario to Ghisleri, 9 February 1901.

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Cattaneo’s idea of ‘positive’ science as a possible instrument for social betterment was shared by Ghisleri and by his friends and correspondents in the socialist/republican field. An emblematic example was Sicilian Napoleone Colajanni. Another fan of anarchist geographers Reclus and Meˇcnikov (Ferretti 2014), a correspondent of Umiltà,44 a former Garibaldian fighter in Aspromonte and Valtellina and a forerunner of the ‘Southern Question’ (Ganci 1982) as ‘former disciple’ (Angelini, Colombo and Gastaldi 2001, 94) of Cattaneo and Mario, Colajanni supported Ghisleri in his polemics against their fellow republican Giovanni Bovio. This latter had justified European domination over so-called ‘barbarians’, while Ghisleri maintained a consistent anticolonial activism even against his party (Ferretti 2016a). As a scholar, Colajanni shared with Ghisleri antiracist comments against the ‘paradoxical’ (Masini 1961, 195; Colajanni to Ghisleri, 11 April 1888) positions that were taken by the anthropologists that elaborated scientific racism in the late nineteenth century including the invention of the ‘Aryan race’. One of the last, but not less significant, examples of Ghisleri’s intransigence was his refusal of parliamentarism which led him to call several times for his fellows of the Republican Party to give up electoral competitions. Still in 1911 he wrote that: ‘Parliamentarism is the best instrument to make republicans forget the need of the Republic’ (Ghisleri 1912, 4). For Ghisleri, the very organisation of the PRI as a modern political party had been a sort of betrayal of the former networked nature of the republican movement, that was based on strong local and organisational autonomy and loose pacts of alliance. Although Ghisleri was not opposed to the very principle of political representation, that (unlike his friend Fabbri) he could admit, he argued that, for the Republicans, the moment had arrived to: ‘Come back to the principles’ (Ghisleri 1912, 104). For Ghisleri, the new projected universalisation of suffrage would only have ‘enlarged clientelism’ (Ghisleri 1912, 101), which amazingly echoed Malatesta’s remarks discussed above on the fact that, until suffrage was very restricted, parliamentarism was not a major issue for abstentionists. For Ghisleri, beyond the refusal of candidatures to public powers that had been done until that moment by individuals over ‘cases of conscience’ (Ghisleri 1912, 104) and the uncomfortable requirement of the oath to Monarchy, the substantial political problem was considering what could

44 AEN-U 19, Colajanni to Umiltà, 17 May 1885.

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be done by few republicans ‘in a monarchist chamber’ (Ghisleri 1912, 19). For Ghisleri, this did not help, ‘and even harmed’ (Ghisleri 1912, 80), because it pushed the party towards centralisation, rendering more acceptable administrative centralisation and even collaboration with the Monarchy on single matters such as colonialism, once the principle of collaboration was accepted. Ghisleri was quite right in his concerns, given that most of the PRI supported the Italian colonial aggression to Libya in 1911. On that, Ghisleri reminded provocatively to his fellows that, some decades earlier, republicans like Giuseppe Ferrari fought ‘against the annexation of the Two Sicilies’, let alone ‘the annexation of Eritrea and Cyrenaica’ (Ghisleri 1912, 11). This point is absolutely key in appreciating the connexion between the federalism of radical Risorgimento and the successive anticolonialism of anarchists, socialists and republicans in Italy and Europe. To be federated, countries and regions should stand on a plan of parity, and this applied to both ‘internal colonialism’ and overseas colonies. Yet, in the early decades of the twentieth century, intransigent activists like Ghilseri were already an exception in the fields of the Republican and Socialist Parties, already centrally organised and ready to collaborate with the Monarchy and its governments in their institutional work. Acts that were praised by Ghisleri like the choice of Colajanni, who resigned from Parliament as he ‘did no need to be a Member of Parliament to have influence in public opinion’ (Ghisleri 1912, 99), became increasingly rare. Also the anarchists, although remaining intransigently antimonarchist and antiparliamentary, endeavoured to constitute their own publicly recognisable and federally structured organisations, in a process of clear and increasing distinction from all other political parties that culminated in the constitution of the Unione Sindacale Italiana (1912) for the anarcho-syndicalists and the Unione Comunista Anarchica Italiana, then Unione Anarchica Italiana (1919–1920) for the anarcho-communists. It is for these reasons that my periodisation stops tentatively in 1900, which can be considered a symbolic watershed for the antimonarchist intransigence inherited from radical Risorgimento. Indeed, on 29 July 1900, anarchist Gaetano Bresci, a manual worker who had previously emigrated to America, killed in Monza King Umberto I, the son of Vittorio Emanuele II (Ortalli 2011). Importantly, Bresci did not match any of the clichés of the classical ‘individualist’, he did not act completely alone (Antonioli and Berti 2003) and his action was inserted in the

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long tradition of so-called ‘tyrannicide’ first belonging to radical republicanism (Brincat 2008). After that moment, also due to social and political transformation in the ‘Giolitti Era’ right after 1900, nothing was like before as for radical politics. Nonetheless, collaboration between ‘subversives’ (anarchists, republicans and socialists) pressingly returned to be relevant during the exile and antifascist resistance in the 1920s–1940s, when Risorgimento federal traditions were resumed in decisive ways for the sorts of Europe (Spinelli and Rossi 2006) as I discuss in the conclusion.

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Pomelli, Giuseppe. 1911. Aspromonte-Mentana e le bande repubblicane in Italia nella primavera del 1870. Como: Gagliardi. Reubi, Serge. 2011. Gentlemen, prolétaires et primitifs: Institutionnalisation, pratiques de collection et choix muséographiques dans l’ethnographie suisse, 1880–1950. Bern: Peter Lang. Ridolfi, Maurizio. 1989. Il partito della repubblica: I repubblicani in Romagna e le origini del PRI nell’Italia liberale, 1872–1895. Milan: Angeli. Rosselli, Nello. 1967. Mazzini e Bakunin: Dodici anni di movimento operaio in Italia (1860–1872). Turin: Einaudi. Scirocco, Alfonso. 2001. Garibaldi: battaglie, amori, ideali di un cittadino del mondo. Rome/Bari: Laterza. Sircana, Giuseppe. 2021. A Parigi! A Parigi! Italiani alla Comune. Milan: Biblion. Spadolini, Giovanni. 1980. I repubblicani dopo l’unità. 4. ed. accresciuta con una parte aggiuntiva sul PRI dalla sua costituzione al 1980. Florence: Le Monnier. Spinelli, Altiero, and Ernesto Rossi. 2006. Il manifesto di Ventotene. Milan: Mondadori. Vuilleumier, Marc. 1970. Les papiers d’Angelo Umiltà: Quatre lettres inédites de Mazzini à Attilio Runcaldier. Rassegna Storica Del Risorgimento 57: 234– 240.

CHAPTER 8

Conclusion: Decolonising Europe, or the Subversive Roots of European Federalism

Between the 1930s and the 1940s, the island of Ventotene was populated by a colony of political dissidents who were sentenced to the confino (confinement), a penalty that the Fascist Regime had enthusiastically inherited from so-called Liberal Italy. Indeed, in the early post-unification decades, anarchists, socialists and republicans were already sent to domicilio coatto (mandatory residence) in small islands or in isolated villages. In 1941, two of these internal exiles, both sympathisers of the Rossellis’ movement Giustizia e Libertà, Altiero Spinelli (1907–1986) and Ernesto Rossi (1897–1967) (Spinelli being a former member of the Communist Party, from which he resigned in polemic against Stalinism), wrote a draft manifesto called Per una Europa libera e unita, which became famous as The Ventotene Manifesto and was considered as one of the foundations of the very idea of a European Union. Although the protagonists of the stories that I told in this book were not explicitly named in that text, the reference to these people stands incredibly clear, as also assumed by one of the Manifesto’s collaborators, Eugenio Colorni, who noted that, although the idea of a European Federation ‘was not new in itself’ (Spinelli and Rossi 2006, 4) it acquired new strength in that context. In fact, that document firstly argued that the problem definitively revealed by the tragic world war then ongoing was the inadequacy of the organisation of Europe (and potentially of the world) around national states provided with full sovereignty and professional armies, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Ferretti, Geographies of Federalism during the Italian Risorgimento, 1796–1900, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96117-6_8

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which involved a state of permanent and reciprocal belligerence. The only solution stated by the authors was: ‘The definitive abolition of the division of Europe in national sovereign states’ (Spinelli and Rossi 2006, 26). For the authors of the Ventotene Manifesto, the principle of ‘absolute sovereignty’ (Spinelli and Rossi 2006, 12) associated with chauvinistic divinization of nationality and excluding nationalisms stood at the origins of Nazi-Fascism and of totalitarianisms. In their vision, the possible defeat of the Nazi-Fascists at the end of the war would have entailed outbursts of democracy whose results should have been consolidated in order to avoid having again these phenomena. On the one hand, such notions talk incredibly to the present need to resist the coming back of fascisms under the forms of xenophobia and racisms, often expressed as ‘sovereigntism’, a notion that, in Italy, belongs to a misreading of Italian histories and geographies as recently noted by John Agnew (2019). On the other, in the political context of the Ventotene Manifesto, which was written in a period when a numerically important portion of the Anti-Fascist forces (mainly socialists and communists) had rigidly classist positions, it was not straightforward to argue that economy and productive forces were not the only relevant matter to address. Yet, Rossi and Spinelli strongly argued that issues such as federalism and territorial organisation were not simple consequences or corollaries of the economy, but existed independently and had to be treated as substantial issues. Their effort was to demonstrate that peace and federalism needed to be autonomously addressed rather than considering them as only depending on objective structural conditions. In the previous century, this concept would have been straightforward for the likes of Cattaneo, Montanelli, Ferrari, Pisacane, Bakunin and Umiltà, whose plural political, ethical and intellectual legacies variously resurfaced (often implicitly) in some contributions of the European Federalist Movement animated by Spinelli, Rossi and others in the post-war. Importantly, in the Ventotene Manifesto, criticisms to states’ sovereignty did not imply that nations had to give up their power of selfdetermination under an overarching international authority. Spinelli and Rossi claimed that the ‘principle of liberty’ and the ‘ideology of national independence’ (Spinelli and Rossi 2006, 11) issued by Risorgimento and the other struggles for national liberation of the nineteenth century, had exactly the function of getting rid of petty localisms. For the Manifesto’s authors, each part of the European Federation should interact with the others on a plan of parity. Beyond the mere European dimension, the

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Ventotene Manifesto importantly restated links between federalism and anticolonialism saluting the fact that, in the middle of the war’s disasters, one could at least be pleased that: ‘England has now accepted the principle of Indian independence, and France has potentially lost … all of her empire’ (Spinelli and Rossi 2006, 27). Furthermore, the concept of biological race then adopted by Nazi-Fascism was deemed a scientific ‘absurdity’ (Spinelli and Rossi 2006, 16). In this sense, Spinelli and Rossi wrote: ‘The European Federation is the sole guarantee that our relations with Asian and American countries are carried out on the bases of peaceful cooperation, waiting for a farer future when the political unity of the whole Globe will be possible’ (Spinelli and Rossi 2006, 28). Independence, European federalism and cosmopolite internationalism continued to merge among the continuators of radical Risorgimento. While several authors have noted the continuities between federalisms of the long Risorgimento, the League of Peace and Liberty and the European Federalist Movement (Angelini et al. 2001; Berardi 2010; Gui 2017), generally understanding Cattaneo’s federalism as radical democracy and self-government rather than political fractioning (Cattaneo and Bobbio 2010; Urbinati 2010), I contend that one needs to go further in rediscovering the subversive and radical roots of today mainstream Europeist discourses. These legacies have been hidden by the fact that the current processes of European federalism led by the EU are rather oriented towards the interests of markets and businesses than those of the popular classes, which contradict the original inspiration of nineteenth-century federalists, even when they did not style themselves as ‘socialists’. Additionally, the current European system to control migration resembles rather to an enlargement of the perimetral walls of exclusion than to the cosmopolite and anticolonial internationalism of most of the thinkers who were mentioned in this book. In the same vein, the current situation would hardly match the wishes of the extensors of the Ventotene Manifesto, who argued for radical reforms towards social justice and were acquainted with all kinds of radical fellow persecuted in their trajectories through prisons, exile and confinement. These acquaintances included anarchists such as Camillo and Giovanna Berneri as highlighted by scholarship on Ernesto Rossi, noting as he was a fan of ‘Orsini, Pisacane, Mazzini, Bakunin’ (Vittori 2003, 14), and what may be called today a radical pacifist and a staunch anti-nationalist (Braga 2020).

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On a more theoretical level, this book has demonstrated that an important key for interpreting the political histories of Risorgimento, and of contemporary Europe, is the distinction, which sometimes becomes opposition, between nation and state that variously characterised federalists and radicals (Gutiérrez and Ferretti 2020). For most of them, national liberation and/or regional and communal autonomy were key causes, but did not suffice, and I would argue that this was not only for the need of considering the ‘social question’, but also for matters of equality and freedom in decision-making. When fighting nationalities became national states, which generally turned centralistic and militaristic, they lost most of their appeal for radicals. Indeed, according to Ferrari, Pisacane, Cattaneo and their likes, federalism should not be merely intended as a way for organising territories, but as a mean to ensure that decisions are taken from below, assuring the autonomy of communities as well as of individuals. It can be considered as strictly associated with the principle of non-domination, with antimilitarism and with antiauthoritarianism. Indeed, notions of radical and federalist Risorgimento can nourish current tendencies in critical geopolitics that question the pertinence of concepts such as state and bounded territory (Agnew 2010; Ince and Barrera de la Torre 2016) as the sole possible analytical framework, as well as the notion of resistant territories addressed by decolonial scholarship (Halvorsen 2019; Halvorsen et al. 2019). Long Risorgimento was (also) an anti-colonialist movement and included non-chauvinistic and inclusive ideas of nationality and municipality: those who lead today these political and scholarly debates should be aware of these stories. In the field of political theory, radical and federalist Risorgimento was a key case for the history of democracy and socialism, and especially for a couple of their declinations that are republicanism and anarchism. Risorgimento decisively allows for understanding how ideas on the right (and duty) of resistance and on civic virtue circulated in these political areas to resurface in important moments of resumed cooperation and solidarity between these diverging movements, like in the case of the antifascist resistance. Even Cattaneo’s and Pisacane’s geostrategic elaborations on how to order popular militias fits comfortably among the intellectual roots of pacifism and antimilitarism as these notions were later elaborated by Umiltà, Bakunin and the League of Peace and Liberty. Indeed, the denial of permanent armies and the attribution of the task of organising militias to the municipal level can provide inspiration for what we call today direct democracy.

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Stemming from the 1789 French Revolution and from anticolonial struggles like Risorgimento, the idea of nation in arms exactly means that, once defended the revolutionary accomplishments from oppression, the militias must disband and everybody come back to civil life. This principle matches what occurred with the partisans in 1943–1945 and overtly challenges the institutional organisation and monopoly of violence as it is understood in current permanent armies to which almost none of today states gave up. It was no coincidence that, when Risorgimento federalists were associated with socialism, this was libertarian socialism, and when they criticised it, they mostly referred to authoritarian versions of socialism, such as Fourierism, Jacobinism and, later, the Marxist idea of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. On a more historical level, this book has conformed with hypotheses by historians such as Giorgio Sacchetti, who suggested to anticipate the date of 1864, which is traditionally considered as the starting point of Italian socialism and anarchism, corresponding to Bakunin’s arrival in Italy (and amazingly to the concurrent foundation of the International in London). Beyond some eighteenth-century elaborations by authors such as Vincenzo Russo that clearly contained socialistic and libertarian elements, one can assume that, since the immediate aftermaths of the 1848–1849 revolutions, an entire movement of radicals and federalist such as Ferrari, Montanelli and Pisacane laid heterogeneously the groundwork for socialist and libertarian thought. Their inspiration were both Proudhon’s theoretical contributions and the practical lessons of events such as the people’s participation in Milan’s Five Days and in the Roman Republic. This challenges traditional Marxist interpretations considering the early libertarian and federalist bases of Italian socialism as the ‘immature’ and ‘unconscious’ prehistory of twentieth-century mass parties. The historical failure of those dogmatic schemas further demonstrates how current scholarship and activism should render to these early contributions all their dignity and listen to the insights that they can still provide for current reflections. Methodologically, this work has shown how contextual and spatialsensitive readings of the history of ideas help in making sense of how these ideas were constructed and received in given places and given times. Geography results as a central instrument to understand how (although diverse) prefigurative ideas of Italy and Europe were variously elaborated by engaged scholars, and to help considering how places, materialities and circulations of knowledge played roles in the shaping of local, national

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and transnational intellectual and militant circuits. The importance of considering trust and personal acquaintance in shaping these networks is revealed by correspondences and archives allowing to include places and contexts of an archaeology of the scholarly, social and political ideas that were expressed by these networks’ actors. Only by understanding these contexts and the radicality that the positions of many early federalists implied for their times we can have a full idea of what insights these examples can give to current debates. Finally, while Risorgimento is a polysemous word and an experience that was claimed for the most opposite and contrasting aims, so that it would be difficult to use this name without some adjective attached, these stories have shown that history is never so irenic and progressive as main narratives pretend, for instance as for the progressive fates of ‘Italian unification’. Instead, history is made of blood and sacrifices, and ‘progress’ (whatever we mean by that term) was not made by kings on white horses, or commanders in chiefs on a presidential aircraft, but by people struggling and participating from below to take their destinies in their hands.

Bibliography Agnew, John. 2010. Still trapped in territory? Geopolitics 15: 779–784. https:// doi.org/10.1080/14650041003717558. Agnew, John. 2019. Soli al mondo: The recourse to ‘sovereigntism’ in contemporary Italian populism. California Italian Studies 9: 1–13. https://doi.org/ 10.5070/C391042454. Angelini, Giovanna, Arturo Colombo, and Paolo Gastaldi. 2001. Poteri e libertà: Autonomie e federalismo nel pensiero democratico italiano. Milan: Angeli. Berardi, Silvio. 2010. L’Italia risorgimentale di Arcangelo Ghisleri. Milano: Angeli. Braga, Antonella. 2020. Contro il demone del nazionalismo: Ernesto Rossi tra guerra, pace e federazione europea. In Abolire la guerra: idee e proposte su guerra, pace, federalismo e unità europea, ed. E. Rossi, 13–81. Florence: Nardini. Cattaneo, Carlo, and Norberto Bobbio. 2010. Stati uniti d’Italia: Scritti sul federalismo democratico. Rome: Donzelli. Gui, Francesco. 2017. Charles Lemonnier e Les Etats-Unis d’Europe. Eurostudium 1: 80–106. Gutiérrez, José Antonio, and Federico Ferretti. 2020. The nation against the State: The Irish question and Britain-based anarchists in the Age of Empire.

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Nations and Nationalism 26 (3): 611–627. https://doi.org/10.1111/nana. 12584. Halvorsen, Sam. 2019. Decolonising territory: Dialogues with Latin American knowledges and grassroots strategies. Progress in Human Geography 43 (5): 790–814. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132518777623. Halvorsen, Sam, Fernandes Bernando, and Fernanda Torres. 2019. Mobilizing territory: Socioterritorial movements in comparative perspective. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 109 (5): 1454–1470. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/24694452.2018.1549973. Ince, A., and G. Barrera de la Torre. 2016. For post-statist geographies. Political Geography 55: 10–19. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2016.04.001. Spinelli, Altiero, and Ernesto Rossi. 2006. Il manifesto di Ventotene. Milan: Mondadori. Urbinati, Nadia. 2010. La federazione come principio di unità. In Stati uniti d’Italia: scritti sul federalismo democratico, ed. C. Cattaneo and N. Bobbio, vii–xxvi. Rome: Donzelli. Vittori, Rodolfo. 2003. Elogio dell’eresia. Ernesto Rossi e gli anarchici. Rivista Storica dell’anarchismo 10 (5): 5–48.

Index

A Abdelkader, Emir, 50 Adami, Giacomo, 137, 171 Adriatic, 38 Africa, 53, 234 Afro-Americans, 162, 163 Agliati, Carlo, 36 Agostini, Cesare, 111 Alexander II, Czar, 155 Alexandria, 112 Alfieri, Vittorio, 101 Algeria, 50, 52, 209 Algiers, 112 Alpine border, 184 Alps, 55, 118, 222 America, 144, 283 American abolitionists, 162 American Civil War, 104 Americas, 50, 159, 162 Amerindian civilisations, 59 Amerindian peoples, 159 Amsterdam, 279 Ancient Rome, 67 Anderson, Benedict, 7

Angelini, Giovanna, 261, 262 Angeloni, Luigi, 202 Annales , 9 Annali Universali di Statistica, 35 Anselmo Rivalta, 179 Anti-authoritarian International, 3, 110, 257, 267 Anticolonialism, 49 Antifascist Resistance, 4 Antirisorgimento, 19 Antisemitism, 46 Antologia, 57, 58 Apennine, 56, 69 Apolloni, Apollonio, 27, 181, 183–187 Arabs, 210 Archivio Triennale, 217 Armani, Giuseppe, 35, 36, 42, 232 Armellini, Carlo, 100, 205 Armenians, 48 Artisan Brotherhood, 66, 144, 146, 148–150, 174, 185, 193 Aspromonte, 139, 150, 164, 165, 168, 175–179, 282

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Ferretti, Geographies of Federalism during the Italian Risorgimento, 1796–1900, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96117-6

297

298

INDEX

Assing, Ludmilla, 188, 189 Associazione Emancipatrice, 165 Asti Sonderbund, 148 Athens, 46 Austria, 90, 92, 106, 113, 118, 144, 145, 211, 212, 216–218, 220, 238, 264 Austrian censorship, 48 Austrian domination, 44 Austrian Empire, 117, 218 Austrian(s), 22, 56, 67, 69, 83, 88, 91, 93–96, 108, 122, 139, 165, 166, 168, 177, 179, 181, 204, 211, 263 Austrian Tyrol, 87 Austro-Hungarian Empire, 84 B Bagnoli, Paolo, 130, 131 Bakunin, Mikhail, 6, 9, 11, 26, 144, 150, 152, 154–157, 170, 176, 181, 187–193, 206, 228, 229, 240, 241, 244–250, 261, 262, 267, 268, 272, 281, 290–293 Balbi, Adriano, 34, 38, 57, 68 Balzani, Roberto, 53, 68 Banda del Matese, 234, 243 Banda Manini, 256 Banque du Peuple, 149 Banti, Alberto Mario, 21, 23–25 Barberis, Walter, 37, 47, 121 Barcelona, 112 Bari, 173 Bartolomé de Las Casas, 60, 159 Basel, 47 Basilicata, 218 Bastia, 103 Bava Beccaris, Fiorenzo, 10, 278 Beccaria, Cesare, 45, 121 Beirut, 151 Belgioioso, Cristina Trivulzio di, 213, 214

Beluze, Jacques, 150, 193 Bergamo, 87, 93 Berlin, 277 Berlin Congress, 274 Bern, 190 Bernabei, Mario, 265 Berneri, Camillo, 6, 291 Berneri, Giovanna, 291 Bertani, Agostino, 117, 119, 121, 168, 179, 187–189, 226, 227, 233, 259, 278 Berti-Calura, Giuseppe, 189 Bezzecca, 264 Biella, 238 Bignami, Enrico, 26, 261, 262 Biondelli, Bernardino, 38–40, 48 Bissolati, Leonida, 276 Bixio, Nino, 121 Bizzoni, Achille, 257, 264 Black Code, 162, 163 Blanc, Louis, 97 Bloch, Simon, 48 Bloody Week, 213 Bobbio, Umberto, 123 Bologna, 20, 21, 55, 130, 211, 243, 260 Bolshevism, 280 Bonaparte, Jérôme-Napoléon, 138 Borgo Ognissanti, 188 Bosnia, 182 Bosnia-Herzegovina, 258 Bourbon Kings, 199, 200, 204, 209, 227, 234, 235, 241 Bovio, Giovanni, 27, 282 Brazil, 159 Brecht, Bertolt, 147 Brenier, Anatole, 89, 118 Brenner Pass, 118 Brescia, 84, 87, 93, 177, 220 Bresci, Gaetano, 10, 283 Britain, 25, 52 British Crown, 275

INDEX

British Empire, 275 Brizi, Oreste, 56 Brofferio, Angelo, 106 Brunello, Piero, 22, 94, 96, 205 Brunetti, Angelo, 204 Bruno, Giordano, 169 Budini, Giuseppe, 211, 212 Bugeaud, Thomas-Robert, 51 Bulewski, Louis, 248 Buonarroti, Filippo, 24, 98, 202 Byzantine Kingdom, 45, 75

C Caddeo, Rinaldo, 36, 103–106, 116 Cadiz, 24 Cadore, 220 Cafagna, Luciano, 22 Cafiero, Carlo, 244, 261 Cagliari, 112 Calabria, 211, 217, 218, 237, 244, 255 Calvin, 134 Campanella, Federico, 190, 259, 270, 277 Campanella, Tommaso, 169, 248 Campbell, Robert, 51 Candeloro, Giorgio, 234 Canton Ticino, 83, 86, 102–104, 115–117 Cantù, 94 Canuts , 219 Capolago, 103, 105–107, 109, 114, 115, 119 Cappello, Leone, 193 Caprera, 164, 178, 181, 187, 231, 233, 265 Capua, 183 Carboneria, 21, 24, 36, 91, 129, 191, 202 Cardinal Ruffo, 199, 234 Cardini, Orlando, 257

299

Carocci, Roberto, 84, 205, 206, 229 Carouge, 266 Carrara, 26 Carter, Nick, 25 Casalena, Maria Pia, 21, 22, 34 Casati, Gabrio, 85, 88–90 Caserta, 173 Cassano, Franco, 7 Cassese, Leopoldo, 243 Castagnola, 98, 103, 110, 119 Castelbolognese, 211 Castellazzo, Luigi, 6, 11, 65, 66, 139, 144, 149, 160, 166, 170, 174, 175, 177, 179–182, 186, 257, 258, 269, 270 Castelnuovo Monti, 256 Castel Pucci, 172, 173 Catholic Church, 154 Cattaneo, Carlo, 5, 7, 9, 11, 15–18, 21, 22, 25, 26, 33–59, 62, 64, 67, 69, 72, 83–106, 108, 110–124, 129, 132–136, 140, 143, 145, 149, 163, 166–170, 193, 194, 202–204, 209–211, 216, 217, 219, 221–228, 230–238, 240, 243, 244, 259, 265, 271, 272, 274, 277, 278, 280–282, 290–292 Cavaignac, 105 Cavaignac, Louis-Eugène, 98 Cavaleri, Michele, 236, 238 Cavallotti, Felice, 257 Cavallotti, Giuseppe, 257 Cavour, Camillo, 22, 25, 101, 120, 165, 232, 233 Cayenne, 170 Cazzaniga, Gian Mario, 191 Cecchinato, Eva, 258 Cecchini, Luigi, 257 Cecina, 186 Celtic Fringe, 151 Central America, 161

300

INDEX

Ceretti, Celso, 6, 181, 189, 248, 257, 258, 268, 269, 279 Cernuschi, Enrico, 5, 11, 84, 87, 89, 90, 96–103, 110, 116, 205, 206, 211–213, 225, 226 Cerrito, Gino, 26, 190 Césaire, Aimé, 160 Chambery, 266 Charlemagne, 46 Charton, Edouard, 131 Chevalier, Michel, 131 Chiasso, 262 China, 47, 49 Christians, 48, 50, 60 Church, 169, 224 Ciancio, Luigi, 257 Ciceruacchio, 145, 204 Ciconte, Enzo, 234 Cilento, 243 Cipriani, Amilcare, 244, 258, 266, 267, 279 Circassians, 51 Cirillo, Domenico, 200 Cironi, Pietro, 188 Cisalpine Republic, 21 Civitavecchia, 100 Cobden, Richard, 51, 124 Colajanni, Napoleone, 5, 282, 283 Colonnata, 3 Colorni, Eugenio, 289 Comandini, Federico, 260 Commune, 240, 264, 266 Como, 87 Company of Jesus, 106 Confalonieri, Federico, 90 Congress of Rimini, 248 Congress of Workers’ Societies, 144 Conquista, 159 Constantinople, 112, 151, 181 Constituent, 96, 141, 204 Constitution, 207 Constitutional Triennial, 211

Conti, Elio, 187, 189, 190, 192, 249 Conti, Fulvio, 191 Correnti, Cesare, 53 Corsica, 60, 63, 64, 112 Corso di Geografia Storica, 58 Corso di Geografia Universale, 58 Cosenza, 217 Cossacks, 51 Costa, Andrea, 243, 245, 259, 261 Crédit du Travail , 150 Cremona, 87, 276 Crimea War, 151 Crispi, Francesco, 22, 121, 231, 233, 261 Croatia, 64 Croatians, 87 Cromwell, Oliver, 52 Crostolo, 256 Cuba, 159 Cuneo, 238 Cuoco, Vincenzo, 10, 20, 199 Curtatone, 56, 92 Cyrenaica, 283 D Daelli, Luigi, 104, 119 Davoli, Gaetano, 266 D’Azeglio, Massimo, 101, 106 de Augustinis, Matteo, 56 de Boni, Filippo, 106, 203, 232 Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, 275 De Cristoforis, Carlo, 97 de Gubernatis, Angelo, 190, 191 de Lamartine, Alphonse, 91 de Lamennais, Felicité, 111, 135 Della Peruta, Franco, 49, 85, 94, 97, 98, 107, 115, 123, 124, 131, 132, 202, 203, 216, 218, 235 De Luca, Ferdinando, 54, 55 Democratic Association, 142 Democratic Circle in Siena, 152

INDEX

Democratic Society, 66, 144, 152, 157, 160, 166, 170–172, 174, 176, 188, 246 Desmoulins, Camille, 189 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 135 Diderot, Denis, 201 di Jorioz, Carlo Bianco, 211 Di Lorenzo, Enrichetta, 209, 213–215 Dodecapolis, 44 Dole, 180 Dolfi, Giuseppe, 6, 9, 11, 65, 66, 138–140, 142, 144–148, 152, 153, 156–158, 166, 168, 170, 172–181, 184–190, 193, 194, 245 Dottesio, Luigi, 104–106 Dragone, Luigi, 226, 241, 243 Dukedom of Modena, 130 Dukedom of Parma, 130 E Eastern Africa, 1 Eastern Europe, 150, 151, 153, 154, 249 Elba, 61 Elvetica, 104, 105 Emanuele, Vittorio, 236, 237 Emanuele II, Vittorio, 231 Emilia, 236 Emilia-Romagna, 40, 118, 119, 255 England, 49, 124, 155, 163, 166 English Revolution, 10 Enlightenment, 199–201 Ense, Vernhagen von, 188 Erba, Filippo, 257 Eritrea, 283 Ethiopia, 114 Etienne de la Boétie, 16 Etruscan Federation, 112 Europe, 39, 43, 47, 48, 53, 84, 90, 91, 108, 113, 156, 160, 189,

301

209, 229, 283, 289, 290, 292, 293 European, 58, 60, 159 European federalism, 47 European Federalist Movement, 290, 291 European Federation, 158, 165, 289–291 European Union, 289 Evangelisti, Valerio, 20, 21, 199 Expedition of the Thousand, 96, 121, 138, 152, 164, 166, 172, 174, 179, 181, 203, 230, 235, 238, 241, 248 F Fabbri, Luigi, 6, 15, 107, 208, 210, 215, 227, 235, 240, 279–282 Fabrizi, Nicola, 62, 113, 226, 241–243 Faggioli, Alceste, 257 Fanelli, Giuseppe, 6, 11, 26, 208, 226, 240–245, 248, 259 Fanon, Frantz, 161 Fascio Operaio, 174 Fascism, 114, 249 Father Enfantin, 131 Fédération jurassienne, 154, 267 Federazione Operaia Toscana, 174 Fenestrelle, 53, 90 Ferdinand II, 101, 204, 225 Ferrara, 176, 193 Ferrari, Giuseppe, 5, 9, 11, 16, 21, 25, 45, 52, 72, 75, 84, 85, 89–92, 97, 98, 101–103, 106–111, 113, 114, 116, 120, 121, 123, 132–136, 143, 153, 167, 169, 203, 218, 219, 222–224, 228, 230, 232, 234–240, 244, 259, 262, 274, 278–281, 283, 290, 292, 293 Ferrario, Ottavio, 39

302

INDEX

Ferry, Jules, 275 Finelli, Michele, 27 First War of Independence, 104 First World War, 1, 118 Five Days, 98, 293 Flagiello, 155 Florence, 9, 11, 26, 38, 57, 59, 60, 65, 66, 99, 140, 144–146, 148, 149, 152, 155–158, 160, 161, 166, 168, 170–173, 175, 177–179, 181, 184, 186–190, 192, 205, 214, 218, 237, 245, 246, 257, 261, 263 Florence Artisan Brotherhood, 150 Florida, 50 Fonseca, Eleonora Pimentel, 199 Foreign Legion, 209 Forey, Elie Frédéric, 161 Forlì, 271 Foscolo, Ugo, 229 Fourier, Charles, 156, 293 France, 11, 19, 24, 50, 51, 64, 69, 83, 84, 88–91, 93, 97, 110, 112, 133, 136, 143, 165, 170, 201, 207, 222, 224, 225, 228, 265, 266, 279, 291 Franche-Comté, 180 Francioni, Felice, 27 Francophilia, 142 Franklin, Benjamin, 149 Freemasonry, 19, 181, 191 French Empire, 161, 257 French-Prussian War, 255 French Republic, 219, 257 French Revolution, 47, 108, 121, 135, 140, 147, 202, 207, 264, 274, 293 Friscia, Saverio, 121, 244 Friuli, 180 Frulli, Carlo, 55 Fucecchio, 130, 148 Furiozzi, Massimo, 139

G Gaeta, 204, 265 Galati, 151 Galilei, Galileo, 169 Gambi, Lucio, 33, 34, 43, 45 Gambuzzi, Carlo, 244–247, 268, 273 Ganapini, Luigi, 19 Garda Lake, 88, 182 Garibaldian Legion, 220 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 2, 9, 11, 21–23, 34, 55, 66, 93, 118, 119, 121, 138, 140, 145–148, 150, 152, 154–156, 158, 159, 164, 167–169, 171–185, 187–189, 191–194, 203, 204, 208, 210, 217, 220, 231–235, 240–243, 245, 246, 248, 256–259, 263–266, 268, 269, 271, 273, 278 Garrido, Fernando, 157, 158, 165 Gazzettino Rosa, 264 Geneva, 190, 192, 246, 247, 266, 269, 272 Genoa, 3, 60, 62, 97, 98, 100, 108, 112, 117, 166, 174, 177, 178, 180, 220, 222–224, 243, 259, 272 Géographie humaine, 42 Geography of Italy, 63 Geological Notes on Italy, 55 Georgofili Academy, 65 Germany, 72 Ghisleri, Arcangelo, 5, 8, 9, 11, 15, 26, 160, 234, 259, 260, 275–283 Giaconi, Andrea, 26 Giannelli, Andrea, 189 Ginsborg, Paul, 21, 23, 90, 94, 95 Gioberti, Vincenzo, 25, 101, 105 Giovine Europa, 24, 273 Giovine Italia, 57, 137 Giulianelli, Roberto, 279 Giustizia e Libertà, 15, 34, 250, 289

INDEX

Gnocchi-Viani, Osvaldo, 26, 160, 192, 257, 261–263 Goegg, Armand, 266, 273 Goegg-Pouchoulin, Marie, 266 Gori, Pietro, 200 Gotthard, 116 Gråberg di Hemsö, Iacopo, 38, 39, 54, 75 Gramsci, Antonio, 2, 10, 151, 234 Grand Architect of Universe, 192 Great Famine, 51 Great Revolution of 1789, 147 Greco, Giovanni, 226, 227, 242 Greece, 140 Grosseto, 61 Grotius, Hugo, 274 Guastalla, Enrico, 97 Guerrazzi, Francesco Domenico, 60, 121, 132, 134, 137, 138, 147, 188 Guerri, Giordano Bruno, 234, 235 Guglielmo Tell, 168 Guida dell’Educatore, 39, 59 H Hansa, 44 Hapsburg, 84, 88, 100, 129 Hartig, Franz, 37 Herzen, Alexander, 6, 151, 152, 156, 158, 187, 247 Hobsbawm, Eric, 83 Holy Office, 224 Humbert, Aimé, 267 Humboldt, Alexander von, 34, 41, 42, 59, 161, 162, 188 Hungarian invasions, 44 Hungary, 140 I Il Diritto, 170 Il Dovere, 180

303

Il Flagiello, 152 Il Politecnico, 37 India, 49, 50, 52 Indians, 159 Inghirami, Nicola, 182 Inquisition, 149, 169, 207 International, 11, 18, 22, 26, 124, 131, 139, 146, 164, 170, 182, 186, 187, 190, 192, 208, 240, 241, 245, 246, 249, 256, 258, 261, 262, 269, 277, 293 International Alliance for Socialist Democracy, 26, 190, 247 International Brotherhood, 26, 190 International Freethought Congress, 279 Internationalists, 66, 183, 229, 240, 243, 248, 249, 258, 268, 269, 277 International Workingmen Association (‘the International’), 3 Ionian Islands, 140 Ireland, 25, 51, 52, 151, 154, 155, 275 Iron Crown, 89 Istria, 64, 277 Italian Anarchist Federation (FAI), 3 Italian Communes, 44 Italian Geographical Society, 53, 54 Italian Scientific Congress, 34, 38, 40, 42 Italy, 48, 52, 55, 133, 152 J Jacobinism, 19, 20, 135, 202, 293 Jamaica, 159 Japan, 47 Jerusalem, 151 Jesuits, 38 Jewish communities, 19 Jews, 47, 48, 207 Juarez, Benito, 158, 161

304

INDEX

Julian Alps, 111 Jura Federation, 174 K Kant, Immanuel, 274 Kharkov, 151 Kingdom of Etruria, 130 Kingdom of Naples, 54, 56, 121, 130, 227 Kingdom of Sardinia, 25, 130 Kingdom of Sicily, 130 King of Naples, 234 King Umberto I, 10 Knapp, Charles, 267 Kolokol (The Bell ), 155 Kropotkin, Peter, 8, 46, 67, 135, 151, 154 L Lacaita, Carlo, 123, 124 La Cecilia, Giovanni, 61 La Coopération, 247 La Farina, Giuseppe, 56 Lake of Como, 263 Lamarmora, Alfonso, 239, 263 Lambruschini, Raffaello, 39, 59, 65, 131 Land and Freedom, 152, 158 L’Antologia, 38 La Nuova Europa, 11 La Plebe, 26, 261, 268 La régénération, journal périodique destiné à améliorer la situation religieuse et morale des israélites , 48 Las Casas, 161, 162 Latin America/Latin American, 60, 159 Latin American republics, 24 Latin Committee, 110, 134, 222 Lausanne, 103, 246

Lazio, 22 Lazzari, Dionisio, 214 League of Peace and Liberty, 18, 246, 266, 267, 271, 272, 291, 292 League of Peace and Liberty Congress, 247 Lecco, 93 Ledru-Rollin, Alexandre Auguste, 97 Lefrançais, Gustave, 110 Legazioni, 55 Lehning, Arthur, 249 Lendinara, 166 Leopardi, Giacomo, 103 Leopold’s Tuscany, 57 Leopoldo II, 132, 137, 145, 181 Leroux, Pierre, 131 Les Etats Unis d’Europe, 272 Le Temps , 165 Levy, Carl, 17 Libya, 1, 154, 283 Liguria, 3 Lilibeo Cape, 218 Litta, Antonio, 40 Livorno, 27, 60, 132, 145, 148, 177, 179, 181, 182, 185, 188, 243, 257, 260 Ljubljana, 84 Lobbia, Cristiano, 257 Lodi, 26, 261 Lombard Assembly, 90, 91 Lombardini, Elia, 43 Lombardini, Elia, 40, 87, 89 Lombardo-Veneto, 130, 217 Lombardy, 8, 40, 43, 45, 51, 56, 72, 83, 84, 88, 91, 93, 94, 99, 105, 109, 115, 121, 122, 132, 137, 157, 166, 181, 217, 236, 238, 240, 255 London, 103, 115, 117, 215, 293 London Committee, 224 Longobard, 46, 75, 89 Longobard Kingdom, 75

INDEX

Longobards, 45 Lorenas, 186 Lo Savio, Niccolò, 139, 144, 170, 173, 179, 192, 193 Louis-Philippe, 88, 105 Lucca, 130 Lucomagno, 116 Lugano, 98, 102, 103, 112, 114, 222, 231, 256, 261, 265, 278, 280 Lunigiana, 68 Luther, 134 Luzzara, 256 Lyon, 219, 266

M Macchi, Mauro, 100, 104, 117, 121, 222, 224 Madrid, 138 Maestri, Pietro, 97 Malatesta, Errico, 16, 200, 221, 241, 243–245, 249, 250, 261, 279, 282 Malenchini, Vincenzo, 173 Malta, 64, 103, 113, 242 Malte-Brun, Conrad, 57 Malthus, Thomas, 228, 229 Malve, 174 Malvoni, 184 Mangini, Giorgio, 279 Manin, Daniele, 95, 96, 102, 132, 205 Manini, Angelo, 256 Manini, Filippo, 256 Manini, Secondo, 256 Mantova, 87 Marat Jean-Paul, 266 Marco Polo, 56 Maremma, 61, 183 Mariano, 94 Marija Nikolaevna Romanova, 152

305

Mario, Alberto, 5, 11, 22, 66, 121, 132, 139, 140, 144, 145, 164–170, 176–179, 189, 191, 231, 232, 239, 246, 269, 272, 277, 278, 282 Maritime Alps, 64 Marmocchi, Francesco Costantino, 35, 56–63, 65, 68, 69 Marseille, 24, 103, 210, 257 Martinati, Antonio, 65–67, 124, 139, 144, 149, 166, 168, 170, 172–175, 179, 180, 182, 186, 193 Martiri di Belfiore, 179 Marubini, Andrea, 164–166 Marxism, 123, 124, 135 Marxists, 215, 261 Masanello, Antonia, 214 Masaniello, 145 Masetti, Augusto, 153 Masini, Pier Carlo, 26, 139, 190, 261, 262, 276, 277 Massa-Carrara, 3 Massa Marittima, 181, 183–186 Matese, 243 Maximilian of Hapsburg, 158, 237 Mazzinian Societies, 259 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 3, 7, 9, 21, 22, 24–26, 53, 56–58, 62, 68, 89–92, 95–98, 100, 101, 104, 106, 108–112, 114, 115, 117, 118, 137, 138, 140, 148, 166, 167, 169, 171, 176, 182, 187, 190, 191, 202, 205, 207, 211, 215, 219, 221, 223–226, 229, 232, 233, 236, 240–245, 248, 249, 255, 258–261, 265, 269–273, 278, 280, 291 Mazzoni, Giuseppe, 6, 9, 11, 26, 60, 61, 65, 66, 132, 137, 138, 140, 142, 144, 146, 147, 158,

306

INDEX

168–171, 174–176, 180, 185–187, 190–193, 205, 246 Meˇcnikov, Lev Iliˇc, 6, 11, 95, 145, 146, 151–157, 173, 181–185, 187, 188, 248, 267, 282 Mediterranean Sea, 38, 48, 231 Mentana, 139, 166, 168, 182, 186, 231, 245, 255 Merlino, Francesco Saverio, 22, 200, 201, 208, 243, 270, 279, 280 Metternich, 88, 148 Mexican Indigenous, 161 Mexico, 47, 158–161, 163 Michelet, Jules, 35, 103 Michel, Louise, 215, 267 Middle Ages, 44–46, 51, 64, 72, 75 Milan, 1, 11, 26, 35–37, 42, 45, 48, 56, 62, 83–85, 87, 89, 90, 92–94, 100, 102, 105, 115, 119, 140, 210, 212, 214, 217, 225, 237, 256, 261, 263, 264, 276, 278 Milan Five Days, 21, 211 Mill, John Stuart, 123 Mincio, 210 Minghetti, Marco, 142 Minuto, Emanuela, 27 Mir, 155 Mistrali, Franco, 264 Modena, 55, 109 Modena, Gustavo, 202 Monarchy, 114, 117 Monsagrati, Giuseppe, 204, 242 Montanelli, Giuseppe, 5, 11, 21, 60, 61, 65, 97, 99, 101, 102, 106, 110, 130–144, 146–148, 153, 158, 163–165, 167, 169, 171, 182, 190, 204, 205, 228, 236–238, 240, 290, 293 Montecchi, Mattia, 111 Montecchio, 263 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis, 201

Monza, 89 Moos, Carlo, 115 Morin, A.S., 275 Moscovia, 161 Moscow, 151 Mount Athos, 151 Mumford, Lewis, 46 Murat, Joachim, 225 Muslims, 50

N Naples, 9, 24, 54, 55, 57, 75, 109, 130, 152, 173, 194, 200, 203, 204, 209, 214, 217, 218, 226, 231–233, 236–243, 245, 267 Napoleon I, 20, 21, 69, 130, 143, 202, 211 Napoleon III, 25, 68, 96, 97, 113, 117, 136, 140, 158–161, 180, 224, 228, 255 Natali, Giovanni, 33, 36 Nathan Band, 256 Nathans, 260 Naturphilosophie, 41, 58 Nazi-Fascism, 290, 291 Neapolitan Republic, 200, 202, 210 Neapolitan Revolution, 199 Negri, Cristoforo, 53 Neo-Guelphism, 89, 130, 166 Nettlau, Max, 189 Neuchâtel, 265, 267, 269 New Caledonia, 258, 267 Nicolini, 178 Nicotera, Giovanni, 121, 241, 242 Ninth Congress of Italian Workers’ Societies, 146 North Africa, 50 North America, 193 North-American Civil War, 162, 163 Notizie Naturali e Civili della Lombardia, 40

INDEX

Notizie Naturali e Civili sulla Lombardia, 42, 43, 45 Nouméa, 267 Nouvelle Géographie universelle, 267 Novara, 99, 208, 219 Nunziatella, 209 O Office of Geographical Correspondence, 57 Ogarëv, Nikolay, 158 Oglio, 92 Oken, Lorenz, 41 1799 Neapolitan Revolution, 20 1848 Milan insurrection, 40 Onufrio, Salvatore, 107 Order of San Maurizio e Lazzaro, 239 Orsini, Felice, 68, 69, 291 Orvieto, 180 Oudinot, Nicolas, 210 OVRA, 215 P Padova, 166 Pagano, Mario, 199, 200 Palermo, 210, 231 Palestine, 151 Pallavicino, 233 Palmyra, 147 Paolini, Gabriele, 27, 59, 60 Papacy, 51, 72, 134, 264 Papal State, 54, 55, 130, 140, 161, 172, 173, 179, 183, 184, 203, 204, 237 Papoff, 153, 157 Paris, 68, 83, 98, 101–103, 110, 114, 132–134, 143, 157, 212–214, 222, 264, 266 Paris Commune, 3, 26, 84, 110, 169, 180, 191, 203, 240, 244, 249, 257, 258, 265, 267

307

Parliament, 235, 259 Parma, 55, 109, 121 Partito Comunista Italiano, 2 Partito d’Azione, 176 Partito Socialista Italiano, 2 Patriarca, Luciana, 23 Pavia, 87, 160 Pavia Collegio Ghislieri, 35 Pavone, Claudio, 255 Pecorari, Francesco, 60 Pécout, Gilles, 10 Pellico, Silvio, 90 Pepe, Guglielmo, 68, 211 Péreire, Emile, 101 Péreire, Isaac, 101 Peru, 159 Peschiera, 88 Piazza Indipendenza, 156, 157 Piccini, Francesco, 146, 174, 193 Piedmont, 83, 103, 106, 109, 117, 118, 120, 121, 137, 138, 141, 147, 166, 175, 218, 236, 238 Pilla, Leopoldo, 56 Pio IX, 111, 204, 217 Piombino, 183 Pirola, Luigi, 43 Pisa, 9, 38, 56, 131, 167, 172, 178, 183, 276 Pisacane, Carlo, 6, 9, 11, 18, 21, 26, 62, 68, 69, 88, 97, 105, 106, 110, 113–115, 132, 144, 150, 169, 200, 203, 208–230, 240–245, 279, 290–293 Pisacane, Filippo, 210 Pistoia, 9 Plebe, 261–263, 277 Po, 88, 176, 203, 256 Poggibonsi, 57 Poland, 140, 151–156, 178, 181 Polish Central Committee, 155

308

INDEX

Politecnico, 38–41, 43, 49, 52, 72, 93, 101, 104, 119–121, 124, 140, 164, 169 Pomelli, Giuseppe, 256 Pons, Eduardo Ruiz, 157, 158 Pontelandolfo, 239 Pope, 25, 96, 100, 139, 144, 155, 159, 164, 169, 202, 204, 206, 207, 223, 234, 238, 255 Porro, Carlo, 41 Porta Pia, 255, 257, 265 Porta Romana, 93 Porta Ticinese, 93 Porto Santo Stefano, 186 Porzi, Colomba Antonietti, 213 Pozzi, Ernesto, 257 Prato, 137, 138, 144, 175 Prefecture, 143 Princess Ahalia, 50 Protestant, 130 Protestantism, 19 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 6, 25, 97, 100, 107, 110, 124, 132–135, 137, 149, 206, 207, 224, 228–230, 235–237, 240, 244, 247, 268, 293 Prussia, 264 Prussians, 257 Puebla, 161 Q Quadrio, Maurizio, 111, 169, 248, 259, 270 Quinet, Edgar, 103 R Racial Laws, 1 Racioppi, Giacomo, 241 Radetzky, Joseph, 53, 83, 85, 92, 94, 106, 179 Ralli, Marcello, 245

Ranuzzi, Annibale, 8, 34, 35, 38–41, 43, 54, 55, 57, 59 Annuario Geografico Italiano, 35, 38–42, 48, 54–57, 59 Rattazzi, Urbano, 120, 164 Ravenna, 75, 271 Raynal, Guillaume Thomas, 201 Reclus brothers, 131, 150, 157, 193, 248 Reclus, Elisée, 8, 35, 44, 49, 50, 67, 112, 151, 154, 157, 159, 160, 162–164, 248, 267, 272, 274, 279, 282 Red Week, 280 Reformation, 19 Reggio Emilia, 6, 256, 263, 266 Regio Octava, 55 Regno delle Due Sicilie, 56 Renaissance, 108 Repetti, Alessandro, 104, 106, 115, 117 Repetti, Emanuele, 57 Republican Party, 258, 261, 279, 282 Republicans, 258 Republican Triennial, 10, 20, 202 Republic of San Marino, 56, 64 Resistance, 250 Restoration, 47, 72, 83, 103, 130, 204, 212, 218 Revolution, 89 Rhin, 111 Riall, Lucy, 22, 23, 203 Riboli, Timoteo, 182, 183, 265, 266 Ricasoli, Baron Bettino, 138, 144, 145, 173, 175, 185 Ricciardi, Giuseppe, 56, 121, 203, 217 Ricerche economiche sulle interdizioni imposte dalla legge civile agli israeliti, 46 Ridolfi, Marquis, 59 Ridolfi, Maurizio, 258, 260

INDEX

Rienzo, Cola di, 145 Rimini Congress, 3 Rio de la Plata, 159 Rio Grande do Sul, 159 Ritter, Carl, 34, 40, 41 Rivista Europea, 49 Robespierre, Maximilien, 266 Rochdale, 150, 268 Rochdale Equitable Pioneers, 149 Rochefort, Henri, 267 Romagna, 55, 130, 220, 243, 258 Romagnosi, Gian Domenico, 17, 35, 36, 47, 64, 89, 133, 134 Roman Church, 19 Roman Empire, 44 Roman Italy, 55 Romano, Aldo, 214, 215, 265 Roman period, 45 Roman Republic, 11, 21, 60, 68, 96, 99, 100, 134, 137, 179, 203–208, 210, 213, 219, 229, 293 Romans, 93 Romanticism, 23 Roma o Morte, 176 Rome, 60, 65, 72, 75, 84, 96, 99, 100, 102, 109, 112, 130, 133, 139, 159, 164, 172, 173, 176, 177, 179, 180, 182, 183, 185, 203–207, 210, 212, 218, 220, 221, 224, 232, 240, 241, 246, 255, 256, 265, 279 Rosa, Gabriele, 5, 7, 26, 84, 120, 169, 277, 278, 281 Rosmini, Antonio, 47 Rosselli, Carlo, 6, 289 Rosselli, Nello, 6, 131, 138, 148, 226, 228, 241, 243, 250 Rossi, Ernesto, 289–291 Rossi, Pellegrino, 204 Rota, Arianna Arisi, 25 Rothschild, Baron Salomon, 48

309

Royal Society of Archaeology, Sciences and Fine Arts, 55 Runcaldier, Attilio, 271 Rusconi, Carlo Giuseppe, 97, 206 Russo, Vincenzo, 199–201, 293

S Sabetti, Filippo, 123, 124 Sacchetti, Giorgio, 27, 293 Saffi, Aurelio, 100, 111, 168, 187, 205, 235, 248, 259, 260, 271–273, 278 Saint-Imier, 3, 247 Saint-Just, Louis-Antoine, 189 Saint-Petersburg, 151, 277 Saint-Simonianism, 131 Salvagnoli, Vincenzo, 65 Salvatorelli, Luigi, 24 Salvemini, Gaetano, 6, 49, 123, 234 Sand, George, 215 Sanfedisti, 199 San Martino, 263 Sant’Alberto, 34 Santa Fede, 234 Santo Domingo, 159 Sapri, 62, 115, 203, 208, 223, 224, 227, 241–243 Sardinia, 75 Sarnico, 177, 184 Sarpi, Paolo, 169 Sati, 49 Savoia, Carlo Alberto di, 83, 85, 88–92, 95, 99, 104, 108, 111, 207, 210, 217 Savoias, 5, 21, 25, 51, 56, 83, 84, 90, 94, 95, 101, 106, 108, 115, 117, 120, 121, 133, 146, 164–168, 173, 175, 176, 180, 186, 191, 203, 219, 233, 236, 258, 263 Savoia, Umberto I di, 283

310

INDEX

Savoia, Vittorio Emanuele II di, 1, 22, 117, 138, 146, 165, 166, 175, 283 Schelling, Friedrich, 41 Schira, 266 Sebastopol, 151 Second Empire, 97, 113, 160, 165 Second Independence War, 113 Second Republic, 83, 98, 101, 136 Second World War, 1 Seminoles, 50 Serneski, Sigismondo, 178 Sestan, Ernesto, 49 Sgarallino, Andrea, 27, 181, 182, 185 Sgarallino, Jacopo, 27, 177, 181–183 Sgarallino, Pasquale, 27, 178, 181, 182, 257 Siberia, 155, 187 Sicily, 75, 121, 130, 143, 147, 164, 184, 200, 204, 217, 220, 231, 236, 237 Siena, 58, 60, 61, 145 Sircana, Giuseppe, 257, 258 Slavic Letter, 153, 154 Slovenia, 64 Smirne, 112 Smith, Denis Mack, 10 Socci, Ettore, 257 Socialist Party, 259, 279 Società Costituzionale, 180 Società Democratica Internazionale, 174 South, 51, 146, 236 Southern Cone, 159 Southern Italy, 69, 90, 152, 202, 212, 225, 231, 233, 234, 236–238, 244, 246 Spadolini, Giovanni, 133, 134, 258, 259 Spain, 50, 69, 136, 137, 152, 158, 211, 248, 250 Spanish Constitution, 24

Spanish Revolution, 17, 248 Spanish War, 27 Spartacus, 163 Spezzano Albanese, 217 Spielberg, 90 Spinelli, Altiero, 289–291 Statuto Albertino, 141 Stelvio Pass, 263 Strabo, 44 Strasbourg, 89 Stuarts, 52 Svampa, Nanni, 94 Swiss Alps, 244 Switzerland, 3, 11, 24, 47, 67, 69, 83, 87, 93, 103, 105, 106, 111, 115–118, 135, 171, 202, 265–267, 269, 271, 273, 276

T Talamone, 185 Teleki, Alexander, 157 Terence, 163 Thebes, 147 Third Republic, 113, 255 Thom, Martin, 98 Ticino, Canton, 64 Tipografia Elvetica, 103 Tironi, Aristide, 257 Tommaseo, Niccolò, 95 Trentino, 177, 210 Trento, 264, 277 Trieste, 277 Tronto, 218 Tucci, Alberto, 244 Tunisia, 170, 274 Turati, Filippo, 276 Turcato, Davide, 9 Turin, 83, 95, 119, 141, 143, 148, 168, 173, 219, 236–238, 263 Tuscan Geographical Society, 65 Tuscan Society, 57

INDEX

Tuscan Society of Geography, Statistics and Natural Homeland History, 57 Tuscany, 3, 8, 27, 39, 44, 56, 57, 60–62, 103, 109, 118, 119, 121, 129–134, 138, 140, 141, 145, 152, 167, 170, 172, 173, 175–177, 179, 181–183, 190, 205, 236, 238, 255, 256 Two Sicilies, 157, 217, 283 Tyre, 147 Tyrol, 118, 263 U Ufficio di Corrispondenza Geografica, 34, 35 Umiltà, Angelo, 6, 9, 11, 179, 257, 263–276, 279, 281, 282, 290, 292 Unione Anarchica Italiana, 283 Unione Comunista Anarchica Italiana, 283 Unione Sindacale Italiana, 283 United States of America (USA), 135, 162, 202, 273 United States of Europe, 94, 105, 263, 272, 279 Universal Republican Alliance, 245, 248, 260, 273 Uruguay, 159 V Valcamonica, 87 Valiani, Leo, 258 Valtellina, 68, 87, 220, 263, 282 Vannucci, Atto, 137 Varese, 87 Vatican, 149 Veneto, 83, 84, 88, 95, 105, 164, 166, 176, 246, 256, 264 Venezia (Livorno neighbourhood), 182

311

Venice, 36, 37, 46, 48, 84, 90, 94–96, 104, 109, 139, 152, 173, 203–205, 211, 217, 218 Ventotene Manifesto, 6, 289–291 Venturi, Franco, 154 Venturini, Aldo, 200 Verona, 88 Versailles, 213, 266 Vicenza, 172 Vico, Giovan Battista, 89 Vienna, 85, 88, 105, 151, 212 Vienna Congress, 130 Vieusseux, Giovan Pietro, 25, 38, 39, 54, 56–59, 65, 103, 129–132 Villari, Lucio, 24 Villari, Rosario, 234 Villa Ruffi, 240, 269 Vinci, 179 Viroli, Maurizio, 16–18, 44, 49 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet, 274 Volterra, 57, 60 Volturno, 152, 184 von Crenneville, Franz, 182 von Pufendorf, Samuel, 274 Vosges, 257, 258, 264, 265, 270 W Wahl brothers, 47 Warsaw, 153 White-Mario, Jessie, 5, 36, 149, 150, 163, 166, 173, 231, 233, 281 Women’s Association, 213 Woodcok, Anna Pyne, 51, 110 Y Young, Arthur, 51 Z Zuccagni-Orlandini, Attilio, 35, 56, 57, 63–67, 69, 149 Zurich, 103, 116