Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Felice Orsini and the Construction of the Pro-Italian Narrative in Britain

  • Chapter
Britain, Ireland and the Italian Risorgimento

Abstract

Felice Orsini is a central figure in the history of the Risorgimento. His attempt on the life of the French emperor Napoleon III (January 1858) and his pre-execution appeal to Napoleon to ‘deliver my country’ heralded a new interventionist phase in French imperial policy towards the Italian question. Orsini’s name is also familiar to British historians: parliamentary opposition to the Conspiracy to Murder Bill (February 1858), introduced in response to the attentat (the Orsini plot had been prepared in England), led to the fall of the Palmerston ministry.

February 16, 1858, was a memorable day for me. It was my birthday, and I was eighteen … That afternoon I was walking with my father in Regent Street. Before us was a placard at a shop-door, saying ‘portrait of Felice Orsini. Admission one shilling’. My father suggested that we should go in. We were conducted to a room in the basement, totally dark, but arranged so that light should fall upon one object only — the picture. … It represented Orsini in prison, with fetters upon his hands, a man in the prime of life, of a most splendid and handsome appearance; looking out of the darkness, in a full light, the face and figure appeared almost life-like. Upon me at the most impressionable age, the most impressionable moment, the effect was instantaneous and indelible (Harriet Hamilton King, Letters and Recollections of Mazzini, 1912).2

I am very grateful to Nick Carter for comments that helped me clarify and improve the chapter.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Hardcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Notes

  1. H. Hamilton King (1912) Letters and Recollections of Mazzini (London: Longmans), pp. 4–5.

    Google Scholar 

  2. See L. Riall (2007) Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (New Haven: Yale).

    Google Scholar 

  3. On the construction of the Orsini myth see M. Finelli (2012) ‘Felice Orsini e l’internazionalizzazione della questione italiana’, in R. Balzani and A. Varni (eds) La Romagna nel Risorgimento. Politica, società e cultura al tempo dell’Unità (Rome-Bari: Laterza), pp. 459–71.

    Google Scholar 

  4. For a recent short biography of Orsini see R. Balzani (2013) ‘Orsini, Felice’, in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, vol. 79, available at: http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/felice-orsinI_(Dizionario-Biografico)/, accessed 22 January 2014.

    Google Scholar 

  5. E. Royle (1974) Victorian Infidels. The Origins of the British Secularist Movement, 1791–1866 (Manchester: Manchester University Press), p. 2.

    Google Scholar 

  6. M. C. Finn (1993) After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848–1874 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 161–2;

    Google Scholar 

  7. M. O’Connor (1998) The Romance of Italy and the English Imagination (Basingstoke: Macmillan), pp. 57–92;

    Google Scholar 

  8. R. Pesman (2006) ‘Mazzini in esilio e le inglesi’, in I. Porciani (ed.) Famiglia e nazione nel lungo Ottocento. Modelli, strategie, reti di relazioni (Rome: Viella), pp. 55–82.

    Google Scholar 

  9. J. Vernon (1993) Politics and the People. A Study in English Political Culture, c. 1815–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 281–2.

    Google Scholar 

  10. P. Hollis (ed.) (1974) Pressure from Without in Early Victorian England (London: Edward Arnold), p. viii.

    Google Scholar 

  11. On the pro-Italian platform in Britain see E. Bacchin (2011) ‘Il Risorgimento oltremanica. Nazionalismo cosmopolita nei meeting britannici di metà Ottocento’, Contemporanea, XVI, pp. 173–201.

    Google Scholar 

  12. F. Orsini (1857) Memoirs and Adventures, Written by Himself (Edinburgh: Thomas Constable), p. 182.

    Google Scholar 

  13. See also F. Orsini (1858) Memorie politiche scritte da lui medesimo e dedicate alla gioventù italiana (Turin: Degiorgis), p. 306. The Italian version of this letter is different. Mazzini wrote: ‘di queste e di certe altre cose che desidero sapere su te e altrui avremo campo a parlare … aspetto con desiderio i particolari che tu dici stampare’ (Lettere edite e inedite di Felice Orsini, G. Mazzini, G. Garibaldi, e di F.D. Guerrazzi intorno alle cose d’Italia (1861), vol. II (Milan: Sanvito), pp. 152–3). The idea to publish his story was probably already in Orsini’s mind when he arrived in London, but Mazzini pushed him to do so.

    Google Scholar 

  14. E. F. Richards (ed.) (1922) Mazzini’s Letters to an English Family, 1855–1860, vol. II (London: John Lane), p. 38, letter to Emilie Ashurst, 21 May 1856.

    Google Scholar 

  15. G. Mazzini (1930) Scritti editi e inediti, vol. LVI (Imola: Galeati), p. 241, letter to William Shaen, 26 May 1856.

    Google Scholar 

  16. G. J. Holyoake (1909) Sixty Years of an Agitator’s Life, vol. II (London: Fisher Unwin), p. 26.

    Google Scholar 

  17. A. M. Ghisalberti (ed.) (1936) Lettere di Felice Orsini (Rome: Vittoriano), p. 202, letter to Carlo Arrivabene, 10 June 1856;

    Google Scholar 

  18. R. P. Onnis (1935) ‘Battaglie democratiche e Risorgimento in una carteggio inedito di Giuseppe Mazzini e George Jacob Holyoake’, Rassegna storica del Risorgimento, XXII, p. 901.

    Google Scholar 

  19. Daily News, 14 July 1856; C. Arrigoni (1951) ‘La fortuna editoriale delle “memorie politiche” di Felice Orsini’, Risorgimento, III, pp. 89–105, 98–9.

    Google Scholar 

  20. Glasgow Herald, 15 October 1856; E. A. Daniels (1977) Posseduta dall’angelo. Jessie White Mario la rivoluzionaria del Risorgimento (Milan: Mursia), pp. 55–7. A second edition was published in 1859.

    Google Scholar 

  21. J. White Mario (1909) The Birth of Modern Italy, Litta Visconti-Arese (ed.) (London: Fisher), p. 256; Ghisalberti, Lettere di Felice Orsini, p. 203, letter to Arrivabene, 28 June 1856.

    Google Scholar 

  22. A. Arisi Rota and R. Balzani (2012) ‘Discovering Politics: Action and Recollection in the First Mazzinian Generation’, in S. Patriarca and L. Riall (eds) The Risorgimento Revisited. Nationalism and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Italy (Basingstoke: Palgrave), pp. 77–96 (pp. 87–9).

    Google Scholar 

  23. Orsini, Memorie politiche, p. 313; F. Venosta (1862) Felice Orsini. Notizie storiche (Milan: Barbini), p. 99.

    Google Scholar 

  24. Orsini, Memorie politiche, p. 318. See also F. Moscheles (1899) Fragments of an Autobiography (New York: Harper), pp. 251–2.

    Google Scholar 

  25. Orsini, Memorie politiche, p. 461, letter to Franchi, 2 November 1857. Orsini was in contact with, and received subsidies from, the Piedmontese minister in London, Emanuele D’Azeglio (A. Colombo (ed.) (1920) Carteggi e documenti diplomatici, vol. II (1831–1854) (Turin: Edizione fuori commercio), p. 169, letter to his mother, 20 January 1858). However, it is difficult to verify Denis Mack Smith’s claim that Cavour gave secret service funds to Orsini as ‘one of Mazzini’s enemies’, and not as part of a programme of general financial assistance to poor exiles.

    Google Scholar 

  26. D. Mack Smith (2000) Mazzini, L’uomo, il pensatore, il rivoluzionario (Milan: Bur), p. 173.

    Google Scholar 

  27. J. McCarthy (1899) Reminiscences. ‘From the Table of my Memory’, vol. I (London: Chatto and Windus), p. 118.

    Google Scholar 

  28. Riall, Garibaldi, pp. 13, 162; L. Riall (2008) ‘The Politics of Italian Romanticism: Mazzini and the Making of a National Culture’, in C. A. Bayly and E. F. Biagini (eds) Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalization of Democratic Nationalism, 1830–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 183.

    Google Scholar 

  29. Leeds Mercury, 18 October 1856; Newcastle Courant, 24 October 1856. 77. M. Isabella, ‘Italian Exiles and British Politics Before and After 1848’, in S. Freitag (ed.) (2003) Exiles from European Revolutions, Refugees in Mid-Victorian England (New York and Oxford: Berghahn), p. 62;

    Google Scholar 

  30. M. Isabella (2009), Risorgimento in Exile, Italian Émigrés and the Liberal International in the Post-Napoleonic Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

    Book  Google Scholar 

  31. E. F. Biagini (2008) ‘Mazzini and Anticlericalism: The English Exile’, in Bayly and Biagini (eds) Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalisation, pp. 145–66;

    Google Scholar 

  32. L. Riall (2012) ‘Anticattolicesimo e rinascita cattolica: la Gran Bretagna, l’Irlanda e gli Stati pontifici, 1850–1860’, in Balzani and Varni (eds) La Romagna nel Risorgimento, pp. 5–23.

    Google Scholar 

  33. S. Patriarca (2005) ‘Indolence and Regeneration: Tropes and Tensions of Risorgimento Patriotism’, American Historical Review, 110, pp. 350–79;

    Article  Google Scholar 

  34. M. Petrusewicz (1998) Come il Meridione divenne una Questione. Rappresentazioni del Sud prima e dopo il Quarantotto (Soveria Manelli: Rubettino), pp. 142–58;

    Google Scholar 

  35. E. Bacchin (2014) Italofilia. Opinione pubblica britannica e Risorgimento italiano, 1847–1864 (Rome: Carocci).

    Google Scholar 

  36. A. M. Banti (2008) ‘Sacrality and the Aesthetics of Politics: Mazzini’s Concept of the Nation’, in Bayly and Biagini (eds) Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalisation, pp. 72–3;

    Google Scholar 

  37. A. M. Banti (2005) L’onore della nazione. Identità sessuale e violenza nel nazionalismo europeo dal XVIII secolo alla Grande Guerra (Turin: Einaudi).

    Google Scholar 

  38. A. M. Banti (2000), La nazione del Risorgimento. Parentela, santità e onore alle origini dell’Italia unita (Turin: Einaudi);

    Google Scholar 

  39. A. M. Banti (2008) ‘Deep Images in Nineteenth-Century Nationalist Narrative’, Historein, 8, p. 55.

    Google Scholar 

  40. Liverpool Mercury, 1 May 1857; Lettere edite e inedite di Felice Orsini, vol. II, pp. 159–182; G. U. Oxilia (1914) ‘Lettere inedite di Felice Orsini’, Bollettino storico-bibliografico subalpino, III, p. 21;

    Google Scholar 

  41. A. M. Ghisalberti (1955) Orsini minore (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo), pp. 228–41;

    Google Scholar 

  42. A. Luzio (1914) Felice Orsini: saggio biografico con 10 illustrazioni (Milan: Cogliati), pp. 4–6, 279.

    Google Scholar 

  43. C. Sorba (2006) ‘To Please the Public: Composers and Audiences in Nineteenth-Century Italy’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XXXVI, pp. 595–614.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  44. E. Bauer (1989) Konfidentenberichte über die europäiche Emigration in London 1852–1861. Herausgegeben von E. Gamby (Trier: Karl-Marx Haus), p. 204, Bericht XII, vor dem 9 Maerz 1857.

    Google Scholar 

  45. Liverpool Mercury, 19 January 1858; Daily News, 20 January 1858; Birmingham Daily Post, 20 January 1858. Orsini’s involvement in the attentat also ‘embarrassed’ the Italophile William Gladstone, who had taken tea with Orsini in May 1857. Richard Shannon (2007) Gladstone: God and Politics (London: Continuum), p. 114.

    Google Scholar 

  46. See also H. C. G. Matthew (ed.) (1978) The Gladstone Diaries. Volume V: 1855–1860 (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p. 227;

    Google Scholar 

  47. H. C. G. Matthew (1986) Gladstone, 1809–1874 (Oxford: Clarendon Press), pp. 80–1;

    Google Scholar 

  48. R. Shannon (1982) Gladstone (London: Hamish Hamilton), p. 326.

    Google Scholar 

  49. Liverpool Mercury, 10 April 1858; Standard, 29 March 1858; Manchester Times, 19 June 1858; L. Riall (2010) ‘Martyr Cults in Nineteenth-Century Italy’, Journal of Modern History, 82, pp. 255–87.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  50. H. W. Rudman (1940) Italian Nationalism and English Letters: Figures of the Risorgimento and Victorian Men of Letters (London: George Allen), pp. 242–8; poem by William Kelly, March 1858, Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums, Newcastle, Joseph Cowen papers, A/594.

    Google Scholar 

  51. L. Finigan (ed.) (1920) The Life of Peter Stuart, the ‘Ditton Doctor’ (London: Books Limited), p. 34; Vernon, Politics and the People, pp. 256–8. A number of British newspapers printed Orsini’s will in full. See, for example, the Birmingham Daily Post, 6 April 1858.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Authors
  1. Elena Bacchin
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Australian Catholic University, Sydney, Australia

    Nick Carter

Copyright information

© 2015 Elena Bacchin

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Bacchin, E. (2015). Felice Orsini and the Construction of the Pro-Italian Narrative in Britain. In: Carter, N. (eds) Britain, Ireland and the Italian Risorgimento. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137297723_4

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137297723_4

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-349-67130-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-137-29772-3

  • eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation