Le Insorgenze controrivoluzionarie nella storiografia italiana: Dibattito scientifico e scontro ideologico (1799–2012), by Massimo Viglione

Abstract

The 1790s were marked, in Italy and many other parts of Europe, by a series of disturbances which were, in one way or another, a response to the French Revolution. The most striking example in Italy was no doubt the Santa Fede movement, led by Cardinal Ruffo, which helped to overthrow the Neapolitan republic in 1799, but this was by no means an isolated occurrence. Contemporary commentators and historians have offered differing explanations of the origins, character and long-term significance of these disturbances. The book under review, by Massimo Viglione, is both a critical survey of the developing explanation of the Italian disturbances which have traditionally been understood as a response to, and the culmination of, the so-called triennio rivoluzionario of 1796–9, and a contribution to the debates about what drove the insurgents and the larger importance of what they were about. The book comprises three chapters. The first deals with the historiography prior to the recent bicentennial celebrations and discusses the contributions of Vincenzo Cuoco, the first (contemporary) historian of the Neapolitan revolution, Giuseppe Mazzini and others, before turning to Benedetto Croce. According to Viglione, the Risorgimento authors were relatively muted on the subject of the insurgencies, but with Croce (and to some extent Antonio Gramsci) we see the beginning of Viglione’s bugbear and target, what he identifies as the ‘storiografia filogiacobina’. This interpretation sees the (Neapolitan) republicans as the founding fathers of the Risorgimento and of Italian liberalism. According to Viglione, the triumph of this view in the years after the establishment of the Italian republic was closely related—as were so many of the developments in the historiography before and after 1948—to political developments in Italy. The second chapter opens with a discussion of the development of a ‘storiografia filoinsorgenta’, whose contributors include Viglione himself, before turning to the way in which the bicentennial celebrations of the 1990s stimulated new research and publication work but also a restatement of the pro-Jacobin approach which, always according to Viglione, was the official historiographical orthodoxy after 1948. The reassertion of this latter view was, above all, associated with the collection of essays, edited by Anna Maria Rao (identified by Viglione as head of the pro-Jacobins), Folle controrivoluzionarie: Le insorgenze popolari nell’Italia giacobina e napoleonica (2001), a collection which, for Viglione, represented an unreasonably sharp (even, one is tempted to say, in his view vicious) attack of the old school on the new.