Martyr Cults in Nineteenth-Century Italy

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In June 1848, at the height of the revolutionary struggles in Europe, a funeral service was held in the Cathedral of Prato in Tuscany. Its purpose was to honor a group of volunteers killed in the battle of Curatone and Montanara, near Mantua, as they fought in vain to hold back a larger Austrian army. In his haste to sanctify those fallen in the struggle as martyrs of the fatherland, Giuseppe Arcangeli, the funeral orator, ignored Pope Pius IX’s recent condemnation of the war with Austria and the pope’s rejection of what he called “the formation of some sort of novel republic of the whole Italian people.” Instead, Arcangeli stressed the union of nation and religion in Italy along with the myth, then hugely popular, of Pius IX as reforming pope and leader of Italy’s national “Resurrection” (Risorgimento).1 Arcangeli’s oration typifies the mix of religious and revolutionary metaphors that defined the nationalist movement in Italy. The fatherland, he told the congregation, was a “religion,” and the fallen soldiers were “our brothers” who should be called “Saints” and “Martyrs.” Their blood was “sacred” and their glory “eternal.” They were young “Citizen Martyrs” with their future before them, and they loved their families: “they had loving mothers, they had sisters, they had wives,” but they left all behind “because under the threat of foreign invasion they loved the fatherland above all else.” In battle, they had fought “like lions” against the enemies of Italy, and their deaths were proof that freedom could be won only through blood. Arcangeli called upon the congregation to follow their example. He told them to heed from the grave the voices of their dead brothers and to “run” to the battlefield and show the world