Abstract
“Today, at the moment of expiation of its own sins and of the crimes of its leaders, the Italian people should ponder the reasons for its fall and its opportunities for redemption in the pages of Mazzini.” In 1945, it was with these solemn words that Luigi Salvatorelli ended his introduction to a small collection of Mazzini’s writings published shortly after Italy’s liberation from Fascism and from the Nazi occupation.1 This two-fold legacy of crisis and possible redemption passed down by Mazzini somehow encapsulated the complex question of the fortunes of one of the fathers of the Italian nation: controversial ideological inspirer of different political currents, including Fascism in the last quarter of the century, and later, a possible source of new political experiences capable of producing new democratic promises. But was it effectively possible, indeed had it ever been possible, to return to Mazzini?
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Notes
See Giuseppe Mazzini, Fede e avvenire e altri scritti, ed. Luigi Salvatorelli, Rome: Einaudi, 1945, p. XVII.
Returning once more to Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion, trans. George Staunton, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006 (orig. ed. Roma-Bari, 2001), and to the proposed definitions and distinctions between democratic “civil religions” resulting from the American and French revolutions, and the authoritarian “political religions” typical of totalitarian forms of government (although some elements or premises are already present in Mazzini’s religion of the nation), I consider a democratic civil religion to be a system of beliefs, myths, symbols, and rites that melds identification with and participation in the national community with voluntary democratic form, guaranteed by a clear separation between State and Church.
See the broad picture proposed by Maurizio Ridolfi, “Feste civili e religioni politiche nel ‘laboratorio’ della nazione italiana (1860–1895),” Memoria e Ricerca, III, 5, July 1994, special issue Le trasformazioni della festa, ed. Marco Fincardi and Maurizio Ridolfi, pp. 83–108; Ridolfi, Le feste nazionali, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003.
Ilaria Porciani, La festa della nazione: Rappresentazioni dello Stato e spazi sociali nell’Italia unita, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997; Catherine Brice, “La Monarchia e la ‘religione della patria’ nella costruzione dell’identità nazionale,” Memoria e Ricerca, 11, 13, May–August 2003, pp. 140–147 and Brice, “La religion civile dans l’Italie liberale: petits et grands rituels politiques,” in Rituali civili: Storie nazionali e memorie pubbliche nell’Europa contemporanea, ed. Maurizio Ridolfi, Rome: Gangemi, 2006, pp. 97–114.
The groundbreaking essay by Robert N. Bellah, The Five Religions of Modern Italy, in The Robert Bellah Reader, ed. Robert N. Bellah and Steven M. Tipton, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006, pp. 51–80 (originally in Il caso italiano, ed. Fabio Luca and Stephen R. Graubard, Milan: Garzanti, 1974, pp. 439–468) paved the way for a later ample discussion of this issue over the past 20 years. See the following in particular: Carlo Tullio Altan, Italia: una nazione senza religione civile: Le ragioni di una democrazia incompiuta, Udine: Istituto editoriale veneto friulano, 1995; Gian Enrico Rusconi, Possiamo fare a meno di una religione civile?, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1999; the special issue “Identità nazionale e religione civile in Italia,” of Rassegna italiana di sociologia, XL, 2, April–June 1999; the special section “Religione civile e identità nazionale nella storia d’Italia: Per una discussione,” of Memoria e Ricerca, 11, 13, May–August 2003; Rituali civili: Storie nazionali e memorie pubbliche, ed. Ridolfi; see also Rusconi’s recent work Non abusare di Dio, Milan: Rizzoli, 2007, chapter II “‘La religione degli italiani’: Un surrogato di religione civile,” pp. 36–55. Lastly, see Maurizio Viroli, Come se Dio non ci fosse: Religione e libertà nella storia d’Italia, Turin: Einaudi, 2009, even though it includes experiences that are ideologically, culturally, and historically different under the same formula of Benedetto Croce’s “religion of freedom.”
The separation between State and Church was held to be an essential precondition for the development of a democratic civil religion in the two countries considered paradigmatic for this type of experience from their late eighteenth-century revolutions onwards: the United States of America and France. The literature is extensive but see as a starting point the classic analysis by Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America” (1967), in The Robert Bellah Reader, pp. 225–245, as well as, for example, Jean Paul Willaime, “La religion civile à la française et ses métamorphoses,” Social Compass, 40, 4, 1993, pp. 571–580. A recent comparative study is Marcela Cristi and Lorne L. Dawson, “Civil Religion in America and in Global Context,” in The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, ed. James A. Beckford and N. J. Demerath III, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore: SAGE, 2007, pp. 267–292.
On the far-reaching roots of the revival of these tendencies in recent decades see, for example, Gian Enrico Rusconi, Se cessiamo di essere una nazione: Tra etnodemocrazie regionali e cittadinanza europea, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993. On aspects of the evolution of regionalism during fascism, see Stefano Cavazza, Piccole patrie: Feste popolari tra regione e nazione durante il fascismo, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997.
On the prodromes of Mazzini’s criticism of the unitary State as a dividing factor, see Giovanni Belardelli, “Una nazione senz’anima: La critica democratica del Risorgimento,” in Due nazioni: Legittimazione e delegittimazione nella storia dell’Italia contemporanea, ed. Loreto Di Nucci and Ernesto Galli della Loggia, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003, pp. 41–62. But the critical function of the reference to Mazzini in the early twentieth century was already identified in the form of “national radicalism” by Emilio Gentile, Il mito dello stato nuovo: Dal radicalismo nazionale al fascismo, 2nd ed., Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1999, pp. 3–7.
See for the context Claudio Pavone, Civil War: A History of the Italian Resistance, trans. Peter Levy, London: Verso, 2013 (ed. orig. Turin, 1991).
On the nature and influence of these two factors in the postwar political discourse, and on the intervention by the Church next to them, see Emilio Gentile, La Grande Italia: The Myth of the Nation in the Twentieth Century, trans. Suzanne Dingee and Jennifer Pudney, Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009 (orig. ed. Rome and Bari, 2006). On the creation of civil rituals at the origins of Republican Italy, also influenced by the thorny presence of Mazzini, see Yuri Guaiana, Il tempo della repubblica: Le feste civili in Italia (1946–1949), Milan: Unicopli, 2007, pp. 167–173 in particular. For the analysis of a local case, see David I. Kertzer, Comrades and Christians: Religious and Political Struggle in Communist Italy, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
Rusconi has explained the absence of a civil religion through the joint influence, or possibly the historic succession, of a “religion-of-the-Catholic-Church,” of Gioberti’s neo-Guelphism, and the “sometimes dazed mysticism of Mazzinianism.” They were ultimately overtaken—causing every other possibility to be overcome—by the fascist “political religion”: see Gian Enrico Rusconi, Patria e repubblica, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997, pp. 21–22. In Possiamo fare a meno di una religione civile?, pp. 48 and 55, however, the same author identifies “Italian liberal Catholicism of the mid-1800s”—the tradition therefore of Gioberti, Manzoni, Tommaseo—as a possible inspiration for a civil religion, favorably underlining the “role of civil-religious substitution played by the ‘religion-of-the-Church.’” Rusconi’s historic theory was preempted by Altan, Italia: Una nazione senza religione civile, p. 57, who alluded to the negative influence upon the development of a civil religion in Italy by the “historic succession of symbolic images” of “Mazzini’s ‘God and People,’ Gioberti’s ‘People of God,’ and Mussolini’s ‘Fascist people’” (lastly adding the “‘People-God’ […] reinterpreted from a marxist perspective”).
In an article published in L’Italia del Popolo, cited in Ivanoe Bonomi, Mazzini triumviro della repubblica romana, 2nd ed., Turin: Einaudi, 1940, pp. 67–71 (English translation from Joseph Mazzini, The Pope in the Nineteenth Century, London: Charles Gilpin, 1854, p. 31), see also for the previous reference (and see Giuseppe Mazzini, Note autobiografiche, ed. Roberto Pertici, Milan: Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 1986, p. 330). According to Bonomi, Mazzini’s “religious reform” was “compromised by the formula drawn up by Quirico Filiopanti” that was included in Article 2 of the 1849 Constitution: “The Roman pontiff will have every guarantee needed for the independent exercise of his spiritual power” (ibid., p. 71).
See Giuseppe Mazzini, Doveri dell’uomo, par. II Dio, in SEI, LXIX, p. 31 (as mentioned, this chapter was first published in the early 1840s). The English translation is taken from Joseph Mazzini, The Duties of Man, London: Chapman & Hall, 1862, p. 44.
Luigi Meneghello, I piccoli maestri (1964), 3rd ed., Milan: Mondadori, 1986, p. 41 (I draw the English translation from Id., The Outlaws, trans. Raleigh Trevelyan, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967, p. 42). The Mazzini mentioned is the essay on “war of armed bands” (“guerra per bande”).
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© 2015 Simon Levis Sullam
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Sullam, S.L. (2015). Conclusion. In: Giuseppe Mazzini and the Origins of Fascism. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137514592_7
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