Condition of Italy—The Revolution of 1831—Young Italy—Its principles: belief in Italy; inspiration of duty; social reform—Its political system: Republicanism; Italian Unity; war with Austria—Secret societies.

The governor of the prison at Savona had allowed him to read the Bible, Byron, and Tacitus, innocently thinking that they contained no revolutionary material. Out of these and Dante sprang Young Italy. Italy was ripe for the teaching of the epoch-making society. The country was "a geographical expression." Conquerors, whose appetites had been tempted by the Southern land, had carved it into appanages for themselves. Austria held Lombardy and the lands of the Venetian republic; the King of Piedmont ruled the North-West, and Sardinia, and Savoy across the Alps; the Bourbons of Naples had the South; the Pope, the grand-duke of Tuscany, the petty dukes of Modena, Parma, and Lucca divided up the Centre. Nor had there been any serious demand for unity. History and character sundered North and South; the great medieval cities still cherished their independence too dearly to wish to sink it in a common country. Napoleon, while he ruled, had gone far to unite the land both in form and substance; and the aspirations he did so much to create survived him. Weak though they still were, practical grievances were ever enforcing the argument for unity; and Italians were chafing more and more against the artificial barriers, which stopped the circulation of the nation's life. The customs-lines, that met the trader on the confines of each state, strangled commerce. Literature circulated with difficulty, and the Genoese could hardly get access to books published at Florence or Leghorn, a hundred miles away. In the smaller states at all events, the area was too small to offer any field for enterprise, and every lawyer and engineer and civil servant was cribbed by the restrictions, that confined his activities to a handful of towns. Through all the peninsula there was a more or less intolerable misrule. Political disabilities allowed no voice in legislation, no control of taxation or the executive, no rights of public meeting or association, small liberty of speech or writing. There were more present grievances in the discouragement of education, in the clerical tyranny, in the obsolete and partial legal system. And the misgovernment had its yet more evil and intimate aspect in the power of the police, which threatened each man's home and honour and career. Governments, that breathed and moved in chronic dread of revolution, sought safety in a system of covert terrorism. The police had their spies everywhere,—in the streets, in men's households, in the churches, in the universities,—to scrape up any idle word or act, that seemed to mark a possible critic of government. There were mitigations of the misrule in Piedmont, Tuscany, and the Austrian territories. But in the Pope's states and Naples there was little or nothing to relieve the crying corruption and incompetency; and everywhere there was more or less a vexatious intolerance and oppression, that showed the blacker after the relative liberty and progress of Napoleon's rule.

The Carbonari had voiced somewhat fitfully the national protest. And just at this time they made their final attempt at revolution. Early in February 1831,—just before Mazzini was released from Savona,—the insurrection broke out in Modena, and spread at once to Parma and the Papal province of Romagna. In three weeks the greater part of the Pope's dominions were free, and the insurgent army was marching towards Rome. The leaders knew that, however easy it was to upset the rule of the Pope and Dukes, they could make no effective resistance to an Austrian attack; but they counted on the promised backing of France to ward off invasion. "Non-intervention,"—the European equivalent of the Monroe Doctrine,—was one of the formulas of the July Monarchy, and by it Austria had no right to interfere in the domestic concerns of an Italian state. The French government had assured the Carbonari, that, if she violated the principle, it would declare war against her. But only a section of the ministry was sincere in the promise, and Louis Philippe saw that a war in the name of nationality might easily slide into a revolutionary movement, which would shake his own unsure throne. His government let Metternich know that non-intervention was a phrase that stopped at words. By the end of March, despite some fine fighting by the Italian levies, the Austrians had stamped out the ephemeral insurrection. Its feebleness courted failure. Not that the programme of the leaders wanted breadth and boldness. Mazzini's after criticism that it was neither nationalist nor democratic was exaggerated and unjust. During their few weeks of rule, the chiefs had showered projects of social reform. Some of them at all events wished to make Romagna the centre of a great national rising, and aimed at an independent federation of all Italy with Rome for its capital. But they made two irreparable mistakes. They did not face the facts; they failed to win the people. They were for the most part, like the rest of the Carbonaro leaders, middle-aged professional men, out of touch with the masses, possessed by the dread that popular imprudences might scare the diplomatists, on whom they built their hopes. Under an inspiring chief, the people would have fought perhaps, as they fought seventeen years later, when they drove the Austrians in confusion from Bologna. But the leaders were not the men to touch their enthusiasm. They had, in fact, miscalculated what the movement meant. These comfortable men of peace flinched from the fact that Austria must be fought and beaten. They had no stuff for a desperate guerilla fight, that meant the wasting of the country, privation and disease and death, for an uncertain hope that France might come eventually to the rescue. Still less were they prepared to launch on a forlorn enterprise, where friends were none and immediate disaster certain, that they might be precursors of their children's victories.

Their failure, so consonant with all the later Carbonaro policy, confirmed Mazzini in his belief that a new organisation was needed and new men to lead it. As usual, he saw only one set of facts. He exaggerated the mistakes of the revolutionary governments, and left out of his reckoning the unreadiness of the people. The insurrections had failed, he convinced himself, simply because they had been badly led. In the main, indeed, he was right. The revolution had been in the wrong hands. The Carbonaro chiefs kept at arm's-length younger men, whose energy might have made up for their own unforwardness. If the next revolution was to fare better, it must have these younger men to captain it, men of confidence and enthusiasm and fresh ideas, men with a message that would nerve "those artisans of insurrection, the people and the young." Mazzini had at this time a supreme faith in his generation; he had already written in the Antologia of "this young Italy of ours," so vigorous and cultured and warm-hearted, that no new movement, however bold and difficult, was beyond its powers. "Place," he said now, "the young at the head of the insurgent masses; you do not know what strength is latent in those young bands, what magic influence the voice of the young has on the crowd; you will find in them a host of apostles for the new religion. But youth lives on movement, grows great in enthusiasm and faith. Consecrate them with a lofty mission; inflame them with emulation and praise; spread through their ranks the word of fire, the word of inspiration; speak to them of country, of glory, of power, of great memories." They had been muzzled in the past; they must not be again. So rigidly did he insist on this, that the rules of Young Italy excluded from membership, except in special cases, all who were over forty years. Mazzini had no diffidence to curb the magnificent egotism of a design, in which he consciously destined for himself the leading part. As one of his closest friends of those days said, "his confidence in men was great and in himself unlimited." "All great national movements," he wrote in later years, "begin with unknown men of the people, without influence except for the faith and will, that counts not time or difficulties." It is worth noting that Camillo Cavour, five years younger still, was at this same time writing to a friend that "he would one fine morning wake up Prime Minister of Italy."

When we disentangle Mazzini's ideas from the superfluous verbiage that sometimes wraps them, two leading principles are found to differentiate them from those of earlier movements,—the principles, that, with his trick of making watchwords, he summed up in the phrase, "God and the People." The new movement must have the inspiration and power of a religion. Italy needed something that would shake her from the hopelessness of disillusion and defeat, something that would prove she "had a strength within her, that was arbiter of facts, mightier than destiny itself." Action must be roused by action, energy by energy, faith by faith,—the faith that made Rome great and inspired Christianity and sent forth the armies of the Convention, the faith that makes the weak strong in the knowledge they are carrying out God's will. Mazzini had two arguments to persuade his countrymen to this believing and conquering patriotism. He hoped to fire them with his own superb faith in Italy and her destinies. He called up "that old name of Italy, hung round with memories and glory and majestic griefs, that centuries of mute servitude could not destroy." Twice had she been queen of the world; many times had she, the land of Dante and Vico, of the Papacy and the Renaissance, inspired European thought. "Italy," he said, "has been called a graveyard; but a graveyard peopled by our mighty dead is nearer life than a land that teems with living weaklings and braggarts." Her task was not yet done; she had still to speak to the nations "the gospel of the new age, the gospel of humanity." He pointed Italians to "the vision of their country, radiant, purified by suffering, moving as an angel of light among the nations that thought her dead." Rightly he judged that men, who shared his faith, would never despair of their country. But he had a more sounding note to strike. He had the genius to see that he who would have men rise to high endeavour, must appeal to their unselfish motives, that only when some great principle calls, will they lift themselves to heroism and sacrifice of all that makes life dear. The effort to make Italy meant the loss of thousands of lives, meant exile and imprisonment and poverty, the blighting of homes and the misery of dear ones; and men would only face it at the call of duty. The Carbonari had no call; they came of a school that appealed to interested motives, and the appeal inevitably broke down in the day of disappointment and defeat. Mazzini offered his countrymen "a national religion"; Young Italy was no mere political party, but "a creed and an apostolate"; it taught that victory came "by reverence for principles, reverence for the just and true, by sacrifice and constancy in sacrifice." As individuals and as a nation, they had a mission given them by God. God's law of duty bade them follow it; God's law of progress promised them accomplishment.

The other principle of Young Italy was social reform. Earlier liberal movements had thought or attempted little for the masses, though at all events the recent rising in Romagna aimed higher than Mazzini gave it credit for, and had more of a democratic tendency than contemporary movements in France and England. Mazzini exaggerated the revolutionary impatience of the masses in 1821 and 1831; but it was true that such enthusiasm as they had, had been cooled by the disappointment of their hopes. Revolutions, as he said, had been Dead Sea apples to them. They would be slow to stir again, till they saw that the liberation of their country had tangible social results in store. The gospel of duty would rouse the cultured middle classes, but at this time he seems to have thought that the uneducated, down-trodden, priest and official-ridden masses could not respond to the higher call, and must be won by some visible prospect of relief from present evils. Pope Julius' cry of "Out with the barbarian" would not touch men, who did not see how every social injustice leant in the last resort on Austria, how dear food, conscription, all the petty tyranny, were fruits of the foreign domination, that sheltered the princes who misgoverned them. Till the masses felt this, there was no hope of a successful war of liberation. "Revolutions," he said, "must be made for the people and by the people, and so long as revolutions are, as now, the inheritance and monopoly of a single class, and lead only to the substitution of one aristocracy for another, we shall never find salvation." The cry of the poor, unheard by most Italian statesmen from his time, down to yesterday, was ever with him. "I see the people pass before my eyes in the livery of wretchedness and political subjection, ragged and hungry, painfully gathering the crumbs that wealth tosses insultingly to it, or lost and wandering in riot and the intoxication of a brutish, angry, savage joy; and I remember that those brutalised faces bear the finger-print of God, the mark of the same mission as our own. I lift myself to the vision of the future and behold the people rising in its majesty, brothers in one faith, one bond of equality and love, one ideal of citizen virtue that ever grows in beauty and might; the people of the future, unspoilt by luxury, ungoaded by wretchedness, awed by the consciousness of its rights and duties. And in the presence of that vision my heart beats with anguish for the present and glorying for the future." That they would rise in insurrection, he had no doubt. Once make them see whence sprang their wretchedness, where stood its remedies, once make them feel that "God is on the side of the down-trodden," the people of Italy would be again what they had been in the days of the Lombard League and the Sicilian Vespers.

Out of these principles,—social reform as the immediate end of revolution and duty as its inspiration,—Mazzini built up an elaborate political programme. He loved system-making and hardly apologised for it. You cannot have unity or harmony without it, he urged, and to a certain extent he had practical justification. It were better, as he said and as subsequent events proved, that the nationalists should argue out their differences before the time for action came, and not paralyse themselves by quarrels in front of the enemy. It was this want of a positive programme, that was, he thought, largely responsible for the failure of the Carbonari. Their policy had hardly gone beyond the overthrow of the existing governments; and they had mustered under their flag royalists and republicans, conservatives and liberals, with the inevitable result that after their first successes they split their ranks and fell an easy prey. It were wiser, so Mazzini pleaded, to be few but united. "The strength of an association depends not on its numbers but on its homogeneity." But the principle was necessarily an intolerant one. It barred many a true patriot, who could not swear to the whole Mazzinian doctrine. For such he had no pity. In his view it was only fear, "the Almighty God of most politicians," that prevented the Moderates from accepting his position. "There can be no moderation," he said at a later date, "between good and evil, truth and error, progress and reaction." Unluckily truth to him too often meant adhesion to his own theories; and he could never forgive men, who, starting from his premisses, could not follow his logic to the end, though, like most men who pride themselves on being logical, he was often singularly incapable of accurate reasoning. It was this intolerance that wrecked so much of his after life, that made him waste his splendid powers in fighting men, by whose side he ought to have been working.

However, for better or worse, Mazzini required from his fellow-workers implicit acceptance of his theories,—theories which embraced every sphere of national life, religion and politics, literature and art. His chief political doctrines were republicanism and Italian Unity. How he pieced republicanism on his general theory of things, is the subject of another chapter. It is sufficient here to note that he was a republican, chiefly because he thought that democratic legislation was impossible under any form of monarchy. The belief was natural enough at the time. Few had been the popular reforms under any European crown, while the one genuine series of democratic laws had been passed by the French Republic or while the French monarchy was tottering to its fall. Mazzini may be pardoned, if at that time he sharply sundered monarchies and republics, and failed to see how imperfect was the classification. In Italy, Mazzini saw special circumstances that made for a republic. Her great memories were republican, though even he must have recognised how little the republics of medieval Italy had in common with his ideal polity. At Venice and his own Genoa the republican tradition was still dear. Italian republicanism was free from any recent memory of outrage and proscription, such as tarnished the name in France. And above all, he urged, there was no possible king for a united Italy. Each prince was pledged to Austria, each had proved his sympathy with reaction. Monarchy in Italy had "no splendid annals, no venerable traditions," no powerful nobility to buttress it. Two princes only had an army, which could help in the war of liberation; and neither the King of Piedmont nor the King of Naples would submit to the other without a bitter civil struggle. And the antipathies of North and South, though they might bow to the principle of a common republic, would never allow the Neapolitan to take a king from Piedmont. History has proved how wrong was his diagnosis, and temporarily and reluctantly he had glimpses of his error. More than once in after life, as we shall see, he alternated his republicanism with fits of half-belief in the Piedmontese monarchy.

His advocacy of Italian Unity rests on a surer bottom. That the country was fated to stagnate till the foreigner had gone, was common ground with every school of patriots. But when the Austrians had been driven out, was Italy to be a federation of states or one united country? Mazzini pleaded that the point at issue between him and the federalists was mainly one of practicability. This hardly took sufficient account of the school, which looked to Switzerland and America for its types, and preferred a federation on its own merits. But on the whole his contention was right. Every argument that told for federation, told yet more forcibly for unity. The strength of the federalist movement lay in the belief that unity was impossible. As yet, though Napoleon had foretold that unity must come, only a handful of Italians had dared to speak of it as a possible ideal. The great majority doubted whether Italy even wished to be united, whether, if she did, the facts of the European polity made it possible, whether unity could permanently stand the strain of the old provincial animosities. It was easy for them to adduce a host of facts,—the differences of race and temperament and tradition, the various habits formed by dissimilar systems of law and land tenure and education, the jealousies, still far from dead, that sundered province from province and city from city. Mazzini himself had felt the force of their arguments, and there was a moment, when even he had been shaken in his faith. He had little tangible reasoning to back his confidence. But he had the prophetic assurance of a great possibility, and his contagious faith made it a reality. He saw, when hardly another of his contemporaries saw it, that Italian Unity was a practicable ideal; his teaching informed the national resolve, that changed the seemingly impossible into a fact. To few men has it been given to create a great political idea; to fewer still to be not only the creator, but the chief instrument in realising it. Mazzini was both, and it gives him title to rank among the makers of modern Europe.

But there could be no unity, no republic, no political advance of any kind, till the inevitable war with Austria had been fought and won. She would not surrender her Italian provinces, unless by force of arms. She could not tolerate free institutions side by side with her own despotic rule. She had crushed the Neapolitan and Piedmontese risings ten years before; she had done the same in Modena and Romagna yesterday. "She robs us," said Mazzini, "of life and country, name, glory, culture, material well-being." As Giusti said more pointedly a few years later, the Italians "ate Austria in their bread." Mazzini and many another patriot knew that any peaceful solution was utopian. "The destinies of Italy," he preached, "have to be decided on the plains of Lombardy, and peace must be signed beyond the Alps." Mazzini rather welcomed war in a just cause. It would redeem the torpid, disillusioned Italian, who was brave enough, as Napoleon's campaigns had proved, but required much to nerve him to effort. It would give Italy again her national self-respect, her claim to the esteem of other peoples. "War," he said, "is the eternal law, that stands between the master and the slave who breaks his chains." But Mazzini in his saner moods saw the futility of any local or ill-prepared rising. In words, that condemn only too eloquently much of his after action, he declared that only victory could justify a rising against Austria. It was only when the great mass of the people had been won to the nationalist cause, that the patriots "might stretch their hand to Lombardy and say, 'There are the men who perpetuate your servitude,' towards the Alps and say, 'There stand your confines.'" Mazzini's plan of campaign was guerilla fighting. It was, as he said, the natural resource of an insurgent people, that had to win its freedom against disciplined armies,—the method chosen by the Dutch against Philip II., by the American colonists against England, by the Spaniards and Greeks in more recent times. Had he lived now, he might have added another illustrious example. Italy, with her long chain of mountains that no enemy could hold in force, had special fitness for the strategy. "Italians," he cried, "look to your mountains, there stand strength and infallible victory."

In the meantime the work of Young Italy was to organise and educate; and the only possible organisation was that of the secret society. Mazzini did not see its inherent weaknesses. Young Italy soon became as much the quarry of the spy and police agent as the Carbonari had been; and to the end of life Mazzini was the victim of informers, who won his easy confidence. The society developed an uncontrolled and irresponsible leadership, and its chief, eager as he was and sincerely eager to disclaim any desire to dictate, was too impatient, too self-confident to allow fair play to other men's convictions. As a means of preparing for war, it failed disastrously; and it proved an ill school for the parliamentary politics of later days. But in a country, where any open expression of liberal sentiment meant prison or exile, if not the scaffold, there was no alternative; and as an educating influence it came to be the greatest of the forces that made Italy. Its writings, smuggled into every corner of the land, moved many a young thinker to a passionate resolve, that bore its fruit in after times. At this stage, however, Mazzini was hardly looking to the slow results of political education. The hour of insurrection, he confidently believed, was near; the European revolution was threatening, and Italy must not be behind the sister nations. He was certain of success. Whatever difficulties might come to a nationalist movement without a backing from the native governments, however much Italians might distrust their own unaided strength, there was "no real obstacle for twenty-six millions of men, who wished to rise and fight for their country." Austria, he calculated, could at the best put two hundred thousand men into the field; he fondly counted on four million Italian volunteers. A people, that even under the leading of the Carbonari had made three revolutions in ten years, would rise again more readily and more victoriously at the inspiration of a nobler faith.