Book review: The Risorgimento Revisited: Nationalism and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Italy, by Silvana Patriarca and Lucy Riall (eds.)

Abstract

Silvana Patriarca and Lucy Riall (eds.) The Risorgimento Revisited: Nationalism and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Italy, Palgrave: Basingstoke, 2012, 320 pp: 9780230248007, 60 [pound sterling] (hbk) Drawing on a rich tradition of opera, poetry and music to supplement the obligatory military parades, the lavish celebrations that marked last year's 150th anniversary of Italian unification spoke to something altogether deeper than the political and economic contiguity of a nation state. Today's historians are looking beyond high politics, and beyond materialism, to illuminate the narrative of Italian unification: if the high unemployment rate in Habsburg-ruled Italy in the mid-19th century furnished Italian nationalism with a reserve army of disaffected youth, this cannot fully account for the singular vibrancy that characterised the Risorgimento ('resurrection', 'regeneration')--the long revolutionary struggle that culminated in the expulsion of Austria from the Italian states and the unification of Italy. As Silvana Patriarca explains, we must move beyond the so-called 'excess of young men' thesis in order to understand what motivated young men and women to join the nationalist cause: 'Without tackling the moral/emotional side of patriotic discourse, one misses the psychic force on which not only nationalism, but ideologies of all kinds, rely for their impact.' In this volume, Patriarca and ten other historians guide us through the cultural dimension of a political struggle. To the extent that the Risorgimento period overlapped with a Romanticist zeitgeist, the essentially emotional character of the revolutionaries' yearning for glory might be said to have been a thing of its time. In the correspondence of the Anglo-Italian Mazzinian couple, Nina Craufurd and Aurelio Saffi, Paul Ginsborg traces the inflection of personal romance with love of country in a register redolent of Romanticism: the men and women of the Risorgimento linked the natural beauty of their peninsula with the glory of the nation to come. That vital inspiration--described by Coleridge as a 'bottom wind' found expression in a new idea of the sublime: to Schiller, the sublime meant 'confusion'; to Coleridge, a religious universalism; and to the Italians, it meant Italy. But the cult of glory that pervaded the movement, most notably in the heroic lionisation of Giuseppe Garibaldi, also had its roots in a much older tradition. As Adrian Lyttleton explains, the idealisation of primitive and natural simplicity was as much neoclassical as Romantic: classical stereotypes would have exercised a strong attraction for a public whose education was still bound up with the cultural heritage of ancient Rome. Nonetheless, the anti-authoritarian ethic of Romanticism provided a rallying point for Italian patriots, for whom the cause of independence was inseparable from the struggle for liberty: it provided 'a common language and tone for those who rebelled against subservience and conformity in the name of the new ideals of the century'. Anxious not to repeat the errors of the French Revolution, Italian patriots looked to build their movement around a strong collective identity. Theirs was, perhaps inevitably, a very different kind of army: Garibaldi's volunteers were citizens-in-arms, eroding the customary boundaries between soldier and civilian--and, by extension, between state and citizen. The theme is picked up by Lucy Riall, who describes how Garibaldi's followers evoked the flamboyance of duelling heroes rather than the rigid uniformity of professional soldiers. Though long-haired, sensual and close to their mothers, a peculiarly adapted discourse of masculinity pervaded their sense of mission. Patriotic agitators provocatively co-opted the stereotyping narratives of Italy's foreign detractors to shame their countrymen into action: during the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, the peninsula had become a battlefield for foreign powers, with the Italians reduced to hostages or reluctant participants. …