Week 69

 

It has been frequently noted that the Italian national movement – or rather more broadly the parallel idea of national sentiment – remained limited for a long time to a narrow cultural and administrative elite, and only begun to spread to larger sectors of the (urban) population during the early decades of the XIX Century. This view appears substantially true; but one needs to be careful with an overly schematic application of such pattern.

First, there is the obvious bias in favor of cultural and literary expression. Second there is a natural tendency and inclination in the subsequent historiographical research to look for expression of conscious, and systematic “national” intellectual production – that is of that kind of production that the Italian historiographers could see under the light of a sentimental affinity – and therefore to exclude, overlook or even disregard as inadequate, incomplete, less valuable or, to use an unfortunate expression of A. Omodeo, “completely devoid of historical value”, those less organic, less noble, less inspired expressions, whose fragmentary legacy nonetheless testifies to some decree of appropriation of the national ideas of the elite by the masses – and the use of those ideas for the masses' own, often inscrutable, purposes. In this sense, when a popular sentiment of the nation first surfaces through the sparse evidence (or appears to), one should avoid taking the same approach of the newly formed Italian leadership and reject it as insufficient, in need of correction, of guidance, of education. Thankfully, the reader – unlike the first (and maybe subsequent) generations of unitary leaders – is dispensed from the task of “making the Italians”. Even historically speaking.

So it's with no special urgency that I am putting together these pieces of our “national puzzle” - while I await for the foundation of the first Fascio di Combattimento, in Milan, to take place – which comes even more conveniently since, given the aforementioned intellectual character of the original national feelings and the complex and controversial nature of their spread to the population, it would appear almost counterintuitive to artificially separate them from the other forms of cultural expression that developed and operated in contiguity, albeit often in opposition, with them: the Catholic political thought and the Socialist one.

If this approach seems conductive of a certain degree of chaos, and certainly destined to piece together distinct ideas apparently difficult to reconcile in a “national” context, it has at least the advantage of adhering to what the experience of the protagonists of those times might have been. And we may imagine to find our Marquis Cesare D'Azeglio – the man behind the Catholic periodical Amico d'Italia and one of the main inspirators of the Amicizia Cattolica in Turin – in a similar state of puzzlement at the end of the 1820-21 Piedmontese revolution, when he realized that, of the three out of eight sons his wife had given him who reached majority, one had chosen to become a painter, another a priest, and the third one a rebel (it might have been of some consolation for him to know that the painter was going to be Prime Minister, and the priest a relevant theologian and political thinker).

During the restoration, and especially in the first years of1821-25, D'Azeglio attempted to evolve his organization, in origin a smaller group mostly confined to the activities of local notables, into somewhat of a wider Catholic movement, by appealing not only to the more reactionary forces (among the contributors to the periodical, besides truly distinguished, if reactionary, Catholic thinkers like Lamennais, there were also those of the lesser kind, like the Prince of Canosa and Joseph's son, Robert de Maistre) but also to men of more liberal, or “progressive” attitude. Including two that are generally regarded as founders of the Italian liberal-Catholic movement: Antonio Rosmini and Alessandro Manzoni.

This effort – not detracting from the generally high esteem enjoyed by the Piedmontese nobleman even outside of his circle – was certainly limited by the ultimate nature of D'Azeglio's perspective on religious, social and political matters: conservative, if not fully committed to the reactionary sentiments of the time; and by his adherence to political models (those of the Kingdom of Piedmont) that had begun to appear dated even within the comparatively backwards cultural climate of the Kingdom. Furthermore a realistic evaluation of his action certainly drove his Italian intellectual relations to see not only the ideological weakness of his position, but also to realize that any “progressive” transformation of it under a more liberal influence would have resulted in a clash with the reactionary and substantially a-cultural inclinations of the old King Carlo Felice (it is certainly true that most of the Piedmontese, and even more Italian, reformers had lost their initial confidence in the possibility of changing the minds of the Savoy rulers – as showcased by the reluctance encountered by Massimo D'Azeglio in his efforts in favor of the King's leadership of the national movement during the preparation of the 1848 attempt). A sentiment which led to a progressive marginalization of the Amico d'Italia - something which increased when Catholic movements themselves, and their new political formulations, begun to appear a threat to the state's stability, with the rise of the conflict between Lamennais and the French ultras (even if D'Azeglio disagreed on various points of the French religious philosopher) and the suspicions cast by the Russian diplomatic office over any sort of “religious-political” group following the Decembrist uprising of 1825 – and eventually resulted in the choice to cease publication in 1829.

Meanwhile, in its first and more active years, D'Azeglio's Amico d'Italia had taken part to the literary debate over the new spread of romantic ideas, siding with the classicists against the romantics – in what appeared to many as a sort of sublimation of the antithesis between liberal ideas and conservation. Even so, the debate had created a certain degree of vivacity within the Italian intellectual environment, which even the more conservative production could not ignore. For this reason, D'Azeglio had sought to establish regular collaborations with a few well regarded intellectuals, who could not be considered – by any means – as reactionary.

Cesare D'Azeglio and Alessandro Manzoni had both experienced a conversion in their early twenties, from religious “indifference” - as one might have said at the time, even if Manzoni had certainly felt stronger the influence of the enlightenment ideas – to active religious faith. And they kept good relations until the older Piedmontese nobleman passed in 1830; in fact, had he lived one year longer, he would have seen his son (Massimo, the painter and Prime Minister) marry Manzoni's firstborn daughter. But their views on romanticism, on liberalism, on religion were in fact quite different. Even their conversion had come under different circumstances: for D'Azeglio, within the context of the Amitie Chretienne, heavily influenced by the Jesuit doctrine – for Manzoni, who had married the daughter of a Calvinist family, with a strong Jansenist imprint; and while this last influence may have been exaggerated (either to credit Manzoni of a supposed distance from the Holy See during the unification process, when he was made into a living monument of Italian literature – or to blame him for his personal and heterodox religious views, according to the opposite side) it is certain that Manzoni's religious faith remained more of a private and personal necessity than a matter of public activity, also coherently with the great novelist's reserved and shy nature.

During 1823, within the context of the romanticism debate, D'Azeglio had invited the Milanese author to write on his periodical (in a somewhat regular fashion). The result of their divergent views on the matter – sparked by a few critical observations made by D'Azeglio – was a long (and courteous) reply in which Manzoni explained his reasons to decline the offer (it's worth noting anyways that Manzoni had not written for the liberal group of the Conciliatore either). The letter, not meant for publication, was nonetheless published twenty five years later and then reworked by Manzoni to revisit or expand on a few ideas, and became known as his “letter on romanticism” - marking a moment of extreme significance in his literary trajectory and in the history of Italian romanticism and national literature. It's also relevant since it hints at least at a few points of dissonance between the political-religious views of the moderate supporters of restoration policies, and those which would be later summarized with the expression of liberal-Catholicism. Therefore, while one should keep in mind that Manzoni is examining first and foremost a literary matter, the more general imprint of this examination is revealing (the private nature of the correspondence actually works in favor of this exposition) of Manzoni's view on the role of religion and of the way to find a conciliation between religious and social and political matters.