Nationalists Who Feared the Nation by Reill Dominique Kirchner;

Author:Reill, Dominique Kirchner;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press

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1848: A Rupture in Experience

March 23, 1848

March 23, 1848, marks the day residents of the Adriatic began to experience a significant rupture in the regional ties connecting them. To the west of the Adriatic, the forty-four-year-old lawyer Daniele Manin announced Venice’s official separation from the Habsburg Empire and the formation of a new government calling itself the “revived” Republic of San Marco. To the east, the forty-seven-year-old Illyrian patriot and military commander Colonel Josip von Jelačić was named ban (viceroy) of Croatia by the Habsburg imperial government. Venice under Manin declared its autonomy in the name of the Italian national movement. Croatia under Jelačić declared its loyalty to the Habsburg monarch and asserted Croatia’s right to sovereignty in the name of the Illyrian movement. Both states considered the Adriatic within their sphere of influence. Some within Venice’s separatist campaign proclaimed its hegemony over the Adriatic Sea and the peoples who had lived under her rule before the Napoleonic Wars. Croatia declared the reinstatement of the medieval Triune Kingdom of Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia, suggesting an annexation of Dalmatia to the Croatian Kingdom.

All of these events were set into motion by the same incident: the forced resignation of Prince Klemens von Metternich from his post as Habsburg imperial minister. Both Venice and Croatia took advantage of this moment of Habsburg weakness to realize their state aspirations. Adriatic residents were caught between these two poles. The lives of Niccolò Tommaseo, Pacifico Valussi, Francesco Dall’Ongaro, Medo Pucić, Ivan August Kaznačić, and Stipan Ivičević were all indelibly marked by 1848, as were the communities in which they lived. This chapter demonstrates how the 1848–49 rupture in regional ties was not produced by the catalysts for revolution along the Adriatic. Instead, networks splintered as a result of profoundly disparate experiences during the revolutions themselves. With the seeming breakup of the Habsburg Empire and the diametrically opposed aspirations of the states to the west and the east, residents of Venice, Trieste, and Dalmatia began to set their sights on new geopolitical units of alliance and association.

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