Giusseppe Mazzini – Italian republican
Mazzini was an Italian journalist and politician. Born in Genoa in 1805, he organized the “Young Italy” secret society, whose aim was “One Independent Free Republic”. He led insurrections in 1833 and 1834, being sentenced to death in absentia. Exiled from Switzerland, he fled to Paris and then, in 1837, to London. In London he sought to coordinate a network of republican organisations – Young Germany, Young Poland, Young Switzerland, collectively grouped with Young Italy as “Young Europe”. He sought to organise a series of insurrections and riots in Italy, while befriending a number of leading English liberals, winning support when it was revealed that the British government was interfering with his correspondence, which they passed on to the Austrian and Neapolitan governments, which was seen as a breach of traditional British values.
In 1848, Mazzini travelled to Milan before joining Garibaldi in Switzerland and founded the Action Party as Italy’s first political party. In February 1849, with Rome declared a republic and the Pope forced out of the city, Mazzini was appointed one of three triumvirs to administer the new republic, together with Aurelio Saffi and Carlo Armellini. The Pope called in French troops who retook Rome in July, with Mazzini fleeing first to Marseille and then to Switzerland. Returning to London in 1850, he founded a new society – the “Friends of Italy”. He founded a journal and continued to collaborate with English liberals Peter Taylor, James Stanfeld, Joseph Cowen and the Ashurst family and wrote his classic republican text on the “Duties of Man” in 1860 before returning to Italy in 1862. He then joined Garibaldi in an unsuccessful attempt to free Rome from the papacy so it could join the new Piedmont-based Kingdom of Italy. Refusing a seat in the Italian parliament, he stayed in London, apart from an attempt to start a rebellion in Sicily, for which he was arrested before being amnestied when the Italian nationalists captured Rome in 1870. He died in Pisa in 1872.
As a republican, Mazzini was opposed to the leadership of the Italian risorgimento by the House of Savoy, which explains his refusal to participate in the Italian government. He was essentially a Christian democrat and was opposed to both utilitarianism and the Marxian interpretation of socialism. As a “great man of exile”, he joined Ledru-Rollin and Kossuth in the London-based Central Republican Committee. Though throughout his political career he organized nationalist insurrections, in contrast with Garibaldi, he opposed the Paris commune as revolutionary socialist and anti-religious, and he was attacked for this stance by both Marx and Bakunin. Mazzini, however, had his supporters amongst the late Chartists such as George Jacob Holyoake and W E Adams, as well as some members of the International. W J Linton’s English Republic was largely derived from Mazzini’s values, and Linton later published an uncritical memoir of Mazzini and his colleagues. Mazzini had collaborated with Linton to establish in London the Peoples International League, which sought to influence the British government’s foreign policy. Mazzini’s internationalism was, however, based on supporting different nationalisms – for Mazzini, your duty was to your own country, and he had no interest in the notion of an international socialism.
“I believe in Association as the sole means we possess of accomplishing Progress, not only because it multiplies the action of the productive forces, but because it brings into closer relations all the various manifestations of the human soul, and puts the life of the individual into communion with the collective life… I believe that man ought to be able to eat and live without having all the hours of his existence absorbed by material labour; that he ought to have time for developing his superior faculties.”
“To secure the unity and freedom of your country is your duty; and it is also a necessity… The amelioration of your social condition can only result from your participation in the political life of the nation. Without the franchise, you will never find true representatives of your aspirations and needs. That day in which, following the example of the French socialists, you should separate the social from the political question and should say: We can emancipate ourselves whatsoever may be the form of constitution which rules the country, you would yourselves seal the perpetuity of your social servitude.”
Further Reading
Mazzini, Giuseppe Duties of Man (London: Dent 1907)
Ledru-Rollin, Alexandre; Kossuth, Lajos and Mazzini, Giuseppe Manifesto of the Republican Party (London 1855 )
Suttcliffe, Marcella Pellegrino Victorian Radicals and Italian Democrats (Woodbridge: Boydell Press 2014)
Finn, Margot After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics 1848-1874 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004)
Biagini, Eugenio, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992)
Linton, W. J. English Republic (1851)
Linton, W J Recollections of European Republicans: Mazzini and his Friends (London 1892)
Claeys, Greg. Mazzini, Kossuth and British Radicalism 1848-54 in Journal of British Studies July 1989.
King, Bolton Mazzini (London 1902)
Roberts, William Prophet in Exile: Joseph Mazzini in England 1837-1868 (New York 1989)
Smith, Dennis Mack Mazzini (New Haven 1996)
Mastellone, Salvo Mazzini and Marx: Thoughts upon Democracy in Europe (Westport: Praeger 2003)
Recchia, S and Urbanati, N A Cosmopolitanism of Nations: Giuseppe Mazzini’s Writings on Democracy, Nation Building and International Relations (Princeton 2009)