In the aftermath of Congress of Viennawhich in 1815 he deluded himself into putting an end to the uninterrupted wars once and for all revolutions which from 1789 toNapoleonic age they had shocked the’Europathey swarmed everywhere secret societies committed to fighting the restoration of the Old Regime, to wave independence flags, to organize riots and insurrections. It was a European ferment, present with varying vigor in many countries, with roots in Masonry but capable of equipping itself with innovative structures, the precursor of modern political parties and movements, whose action was decisive in the revolutionary movements which spread between 1820 and 1831.
Giuseppe Mazzini, united Italy as a moral prophecy
by Stefano Folli
The Carboneria it is the best known of the clandestine associations that operated in the peninsula at the origins of Risorgimento. But in reality it was a dust of different acronyms that animated the political struggle in those years: an important universe, therefore, but very intricate and difficult to know in depth precisely because of itslatomic dimension, which excludes the presence of archives, or rather it borders on those of the police, evidently tainted by their institutional purposes.
There are therefore many problems Luca Addante had to face to trace the origins of the sItalian secret societies which arose under the pressure of the traumatic French events of 1989 and beyond, from the Neapolitan conspiracy of 1792-94 to the Piedmontese secret society.
Starting from the conquest of Milan in 1796, in which the Italian Jacobins, it was above all Napoleon’s triumphant campaigns that breathed new air even on this side of the Alps, where for the first time one could experience freedom of the press, of speech, of association, of political participation. It was then, in the so-called republican three-year period of 1796-99, that the scattered groups and Jacobin movements that arose in the various state realities found many common elements, and developed a unitary and independent program which leads us to see in them the beginning of the Risorgimento.
Anniversaries. Giuseppe Mazzini, the inconvenient father of everyone’s rights
by Corrado Augias
Even more so because for the first time in Italian history a movement capable of fighting was born through the foundation of societies and newspapers spread from one end of the peninsula to the other. But that program did not exhaust, rather it integrated a political project based on republican, constitutional, democratic principles, aimed at guaranteeing everyone the rights of freedom and social justice which would have slow, contested and sometimes failed realization in the following two centuries.
Initially welcomed as a liberator, the French government soon became perceived as authoritarian and oppressive, while famine, hunger and inflation pushed the crowds in Paris to revolt against the Directory, where in May 1996 Gracco Babeuf he had promoted the Society and the conspiracy of Equals by proclaiming that “the land belongs to no one, the fruits belong to all”. Starting mainly from Milan, theJacobin wave it did not take long to spread throughout the peninsula to vindicate the principles of freedom and democracy that arose in the most radical season of the French Revolution.
It was from this combative Italian Jacobinism which gave rise to the first secret society of the Risorgimento, the Society of the Rays, of which this book documents the affiliation from a previous company named le Columns of democracy. From here, from the Colonne and then from the Raggi – and with their own protagonists – the most famous secret societies of the Risorgimento arose, the Carboneriathe Philadelphia, the Society of centresthe Sublime perfect masters and others, destined to act at least until the uprisings of 1830-31.
The wealth of news collected by is impressive and full of news Luca Addantewhich contains in this book an intensive analysis that allows us to define its 400 or more pages as a true micro-history essay, centered on a “tight chronology”, little more than a year, and “sometimes daily, […] because – he writes – when faced with a movement that operated sensationally in public but at the same time in the darkest secrecy, it is necessary to look at a very close distance, so as to be able to grasp clues and evidence even in the interstices of events, speeches, practices ».
An entirely methodological micro-history therefore, made up of meticulous and acute research among sources which at the time were often numerous and sparse, multiple and elusive, sometimes made difficult to decipher by the same secret codes of their transmission, «clues, traces, signals, even apparently secondary or entirely untied”, which however concerns a historical problem of great importance such as that of origins of the Risorgimento. It was in fact in that “constellation of practices and ideals”, in those “columns of democracy” that we can find the “first vast Italian political movement that had an extraordinary importance in our history and beyond”, by virtue of its significant European branches .
The book
The pillars of democracy Jacobinism and secret societies at the roots of the Risorgimento by Luca Addante (Laterza, 472 pages, 28 euros)
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– 2024-03-29 06:08:05
