Geographies of Federalism during the Italian Risorgimento, 1796–1900 by Federico Ferretti

Author:Federico Ferretti
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030961176
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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 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.

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