Indolence and regeneration: Tropes and tensions of risorgimento patriotism

American Historical Review

Volumn 110, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 380-408

  Patriarca, Silvana ^a  

^a FORDHAM UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33749678416     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/531319     Document Type: Review

References (235)

1. For a comprehensive account of Risorgimento political currents in this mode, see Giorgio Candeloro, Storia dell'Italia moderna, Vol. 2, Dalla Restaurazione alla rivoluzione nazionale (Milan, 1958).
2. There is a wealth of research on the individual political currents (see, for example, the studies on the moderates by Sergio La Salvia and Umberto Carpi and the studies on the democrats by Franco Della Peruta). Denis Mack Smith has also strongly emphasized conflict: see his Cavour and Garibaldi, 1860: A Study in Political Conflict (Cambridge, 1954).
3. For a recent overview informed by wider concerns, see Adrian Lyttelton, "The National Question in Italy," in The National Question in Europe in Historical Context, Mikulás Teich and Roy Porter, eds. (New York, 1993), 63-105.
4. The influence of Gramscian preoccupations and categories on postwar historiography (such as the issue of the moderates' hegemony) is partly responsible for this emphasis. Gramsci's Prison Notebooks which contained his reflections on the Risorgimento were published in 1948-1951. An English version of some of his writings on the Risorgimento is in Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York, 1971), 52-120.
5. For a critical review of the historiography on the Risorgimento, particularly in the post-1945 period, see Lucy Riall, The Italian Risorgimento: State, Society, and National Unification (New York, 1994).
6. Alberto M. Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento: Parentela, santità e onore alle origini dell'Italia unita (Turin, 2000), 53. Banti's innovative study has shown the presence of similar cultural symbols and an ethnic conception of the nation across the political divide, but the author has focused his analysis exclusively on Italian texts without considering the significant role played also by other Europeans in the construction of Italy.
7. "Regeneration" was the term most commonly used during the "revolutionary triennium" (1796-1799) when the influence of French republicanism was at its strongest. The two terms coexisted in the first half of the nineteenth century, but "Risorgimento" became the favorite term in the second half of the century: see Erasmo Leso, Lingua e rivoluzione: Ricerche sul vocabolario politico italiano nel triennio rivoluzionario 1796-1799 (Venice, 1991), 153-54.
8. For a recent innovative account of this sympathy among the British middle class, see Maura O'Connor, The Romance of Italy and the English Political Imagination (New York, 1998).
9. For an analysis of the very important presence of this construct in European political thought, see Roberto Romani, National Character and Public Spirit in Britain and France, 1750-1914 (Cambridge, 2002).
10. Exceptions are Giulio Bollati (who was, not by accident, a literary historian), "L'Italiano," in Storia d'Italia, Vol. 1, I caratteri originali (Turin, 1972), 949-1022,
11. now in Bollati, L'Italiano: Il carattere nazionale come storia e come invenzione 2nd edn. (1983, Turin, 1996), 34-123;
12. and Giovanni Aliberti, La resa di Cavour: Il carattere nazionale italiano tra mito e cronaca, 1820-1976 (Florence, 2000), whose analysis, however, is not as conceptually rigorous and systematic as one would like it to be.
13. Emilio Gentile, La Grande Italia: Ascesa e declino del mito della nazione nel ventesimo secolo (Milan, 1997), refers to the importance of national character, but does not analyze it in a systematic way.
14. Ideas of national character are still very common fare in contemporary Italian journalism and popular culture: I have examined this issue in "National Identity or National Character? Old Paradigms and New Vocabularies," in Making and Remaking Italy: The Cultivation of National Identity around the Risorgimento, Albert R. Ascoli and Krystyna von Henneberg, eds. (New York, 2001), 299-319;
15. and in "Italian Neo-Patriotism: Debating National Identity in the 1990s," Modern Italy 6, no. 1 (2001): 21-34.
16. For both political and scholarly reasons Italian research on Italian nationalism and national identity was very limited in the post-1945 period. It resumed vigorously in the 1990s, but with few exceptions (notably Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento;
17. and Alberto M. Banti and Roberto Bizzocchi, eds., Immagini della nazione nell'Italia del Risorgimento [Rome, 2002])
18. it has been concerned primarily with the period after unification and with issues of nation building and memory: see, for example, Simonetta Soldani and Gabriele Turi, eds., Fare gli italiani: Scuola e cultura nell'Italia contemporanea (Bologna, 1993);
19. Giovanni Spadolini, ed., Nazione e nazionalità in Italia: Dall'alba del secolo ai giorni nostri (Rome, 1994);
20. Mario Isnenghi, ed., I luoghi della memoria, 3 vols. (Rome, 1996-1997).
21. I have examined some features of this return in "Italian Neo-Patriotism." Throughout this essay, when I refer to Risorgimento nationalism I will be generally using the term patriotism in order to be faithful to the vocabulary of the period and not because of an intrinsic difference between patriotism and nationalism. Some have argued that patriotism as conditional "love of country" historically preceded nationalism, which claims unconditional identification with the national entity. See, for example, Maurizio Viroli, For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism (Oxford, 1995).
22. Bollati, L'Italiano (1996), 41.
23. I have offered a more detailed analysis of Bollati's views in my essay "National Identity or National Character?"
24. I am borrowing Sander L. Gilman's term: see his Jewish Self-Hatred: Antisemitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore, 1986).
25. am not, of course, assuming an equivalence between the two cases but only using the term for heuristic purposes. On the internalization of stereotypes, see also Seamus Deane's introduction to Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson and Edward W. Said, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis, 1990), 3-19.
26. Nelson Moe has helped me think about this transnational dynamic in the cultural creation of Italy: see Moe, The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question (Berkeley, Calif., 2002), chap. 1.
27. The expression comes from Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York, 1992), 6, who uses it to refer to the "space of colonial encounter" or "colonial frontier."
28. It should be clear that I am not constructing a Saidian argument here even though my terminology and my attention to representations have been inspired by Edward Said's fundamental contribution to the study of the representation of the Other. No Italians and arguably no other European peoples were subjected to the type of colonialism that Westerners reserved to peoples overseas, nor did the discourses on them have such an immediate political relevance as those of Orientalists. Some would argue that certain European peoples were "ideologically colonized" (see, for example, Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford, Calif., 1996).
29. Jane Schneider has pointed to Italy's weak player position in nineteenth-century Europe as providing the basis for the establishment of a kind of "neo-orientalist" discourse on the peninsula that has persisted to this day. See "Introduction: The Dynamics of Neo-Orientalism in Italy (1848-1995)," m Italy's "Southern Question": Orientalism in One Country, Jane Schneider, ed. (New York, 1998), 1-23.
30. In this essay, I avoid broad generalizations that may run the risk of generating a new binary and focus my analysis on the complex uses that "insiders" make of images that have often an "outside" origin. Michael Herzfeld has explored this dynamic extensively in the case of Greece: see especially his Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State (New York, 1997);
31. and "Performing Comparisons: Ethnography, Globetrotting, and the Spaces of Social Knowledge," Journal of Anthropological Research 57, no. 3 (2001): 259-76.
32. For this conceptualization, see in particular John Dickie, Darkest Italy: The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiomo, 1860-1900 (New York, 1999);
33. and Moe, View from Vesuvius.
34. See also Marta Petrusewicz, Come il Meridione divenne una questions: Rappresentazioni del Sud prima e dopo il Quarantotto (Soveria Mannelli, 1998).
35. This essay is based on the first chapter of a book that I am currently writing on the discourse of Italian character tentatively titled Italian Vices: The Discourse of National Character from the Risorgimento to the Present, c. 1815-2000.
36. The work of Roger Chartier (see especially Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations [Oxford, 1988])
37. has provided some important guidelines for my understanding of representations as an integral part of the social fabric, along with the work of feminist scholars such as Mary Poovey, who sees representations as vehicles of ideology but also sites of contestation (Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England [Chicago, 1988]);
38. and Joan W. Scott, who maintains, after Michel Foucault, the constitutive power of discourse (Gender and the Politics of History [New York, 1988]).
39. With regard to this conception, however, see the judicious remarks by Kathleen Canning, "Feminist History after the Linguistic Turn: Historicizing Discourse and Experience," Signs 19, no. 2 (1994), 368-404.
40. The literature on nationalism has grown vastly in the last twenty years. Probably the most influential book in renovating the study of nationalism in a cultural direction has been Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; London, 1991).
41. For a useful collection of essays that includes both theoretical analyses and empirical studies, see Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds. Becoming National: A Reader (New York, 1996),
42. in particular the essay by Prasenjit Duara that contests the modernist assumptions of Anderson ("Historicizing National Identity, or Who Imagines What and When," 151-77). I will refer to studies of nationalism in single countries in some of the notes below.
43. The best and most approachable text (by linguists) that makes the case for this role of metaphors is George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago, 1980).
44. Since the onset of what is called the "linguistic turn," historians have been paying more attention to the role of narratives and tropes in discourse: the pioneer in this field has been of course Hayden White. See especially his Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, 1978).
45. One, however, does not have to follow White all the way (especially in his troubling relativistic conclusions, which I do not subscribe to) to recognize the importance of rhetoric in patterns of thought. For a discussion of the linguistic turn, see the relatively old, but still useful essay by John Toews, "Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience," AHR 92, no. 4 (1987): 879-97;
46. for a more recent introduction, see Susan A. Crane, "Language, Literary Studies, and Historical Thought," in Companion to Western Historical Thought, Lloyd Kramer and Sarah Maza, eds. (London, 2002), 319-36.
47. By language here I have in mind both the general meaning of the term (system of signs) and the more specific notion of language as elaborated by J. G. A. Pocock in his studies of political thought: see in particular Pocock, "Introduction: The State of the Art," in Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1985), 1-34. I have, however, some reservations about the excessive insistence on the recovery of authorial intention and the radical contextualism of this approach.
48. Feminist historians of Italy have called attention to the issue of gender for some time, but they focused at first mainly on the political exclusion of women in post-unification Italy (see, for example, Judith Jeffrey Howard, "Patriot Mothers in the Post-Risorgimento: Women after the Italian Revolution," in Women, War, and Revolution, Carol R. Berkin and Clara M. Lovett, eds. [New York, 1980], 237-58)
49. and more recently on women's participation in the Risorgimento: see Christiane Veauvy and Laura Pisano, Paroles oubliées: Les femmes et la construction de l'Etat-nation en France et en Italie (1789-1860) (Paris, 1997);
50. Simonetta Soldani, "Donne e nazione nella rivoluzione italiana del 1848," Passato e presente 17 (1999): 75-102;
51. and the first issue of Genesis: Rivista della Società italiana delle storiche 1 (2002)
52. devoted to this topic. Banti applies a gender perspective to the analysis of narratives and symbols (see La nazione del Risorgimento, 83-102),
53. as do Lucy Riall with the figure of Garibaldi ("Storie d'amore, di libertà e d'awentura: La costruzione del mito garibaldino intorno al 1848-49," in Banti and Bizzocchi, Immagini della nazione, 157-74)
54. and Steven C. Hughes with the theme of dueling ("Deadly Play: Napoleon, Dueling and the Rearmament of Honor in Italy," Rivista Napoleonica, Revue Napoléonienne, Napoleonic Review: RNR 2 [2001]: 27-58).
55. For relevant studies on other countries, see in particular the issue of Feminist Review devoted to "Gender. Nationalisms, and National Identities," no. 44 (1993);
56. and Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Hall, eds., Gendered Nations: Nationalism and the Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (New York, 2000). References to other studies can be found in several of the notes below.
57. This is ignored, however, by Romani, National Character, and by the scholarship on Italian national character mentioned in note 6.
58. For a work that takes gender into consideration, see David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680-1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), chap. 5.
59. On representations of Ireland, see C. L. Innes, "Virgin Territories and Motherlands: Colonial and Nationalist Representations of Africa and Ireland," Feminist Review, no. 47 (1994): 1-14;
60. Roberto Romani, "British Views on Irish National Character, 1800-1846: An Intellectual History," History of European Ideas 23 (1997): 193-219.
61. On Eastern Europe and the Balkans, see Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, Calif., 1994);
62. Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York, 1997);
63. Dušan J. Bjelić and Obied Savić, eds., Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation (Cambridge, Mass., 2002).
64. For a lucid review of the literature on the Balkans, which has relevant implications also for thinking about other cases, see K. E. Fleming, "Orientalism, the Balkans, and Balkan Historiography," AHR 105, no. 4 (2000): 1218-33.
65. On the "purification" of the Greek classical heritage to fit the European image of Greece, see Effie F. Athanassopoulou, "An 'Ancient' Landscape: European Ideals, Archaeology, and Nation Building in Early Modern Greece," Journal of Modern Greek Studies 20, no. 2 (2002): 273-305.
66. On the images of the Greeks around the time of the war of independence, see Helen Angelomatis-Tsougarakis, The Eve of the Greek Revival: British Travellers' Perceptions of Early Nineteenth-Century Greece (New York, 1990);
67. Thomas Gallant, Experiencing Dominion: Culture, Identity, and Power in the British Mediterranean (Notre Dame, Ind., 2002), chap. 2. The greater "degeneration" of the Greeks was conceived as deriving from the long-term contact with the Turkish rulers and thus from an "oriental contamination."
68. See Gregory Jusdanis, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Literature (Minneapolis, 1991),
69. and Gourgouris, Dream Nation.
70. On Philhellenism, see C. M. Woodhouse, The Philhellenes (1969; Rutherford, N.J., 1971).
71. There are, however, some works that examine the relationships between the Italian and the Greek national movements: see, for example, Antonis Liakos, L'unificazione italiana e la Grande Idea: Ideologia e azione dei movimenti nazionali in Italia e in Grecia, 1859-1871 (Florence, 1995).
72. These terms are connected in particular to the work of Immanuel Wallerstein. For their application to Southern Europe, see his "The Relevance of the Concept of Semiperiphery to Southern Europe," in Semiperipheral Developments: The Politics of Southern Europe in the Twentieth Century, Giovanni Arrighi, ed. (Beverly Hills, 1985), 31-39.
73. On the relational nature of identity, see especially the essays collected in Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, eds., Questions of Cultural Identity (Thousand Oaks, Calif., 1996).
74. For the importance of the relation to an "Other" in the constitution of national identity, see Ulf Hedetoft, Signs of Nations: Studies in the Political Semiotics of Self and Other in Contemporary European Nationalism (Aldershot, 1995), chaps. 2 and 3.
75. Linda Colley's Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven, Conn., 1992), makes a strong case for the relational construction of British identity in the eighteenth century during the confrontation with the French.
76. For early examples of negative representations of Italians, see John Peter Colella, "Anti-Italian Attitudes in Medieval and Renaissance England" (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1989);
77. and Henry Heller, Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France (Toronto, 2003).
78. do not intend to imply that all negative representations were stereotypes, nor that stereotypes were all negative. For a useful analysis of the notion of stereotype especially in terms of its relation to the concept of the Other, see Michael Pickering, Stereotyping: The Politics of Representation (New York, 2001).
79. For a comprehensive account of European views of Italy and the Italians in a variety of writings - including diplomatic dispatches, travel literature, and historical accounts - from the end of the seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, see Franco Venturi, "L'Italia fuori d'Italia," in Storia d'Italia, Vol. 3, Dal primo Settecento al'Unità (Turin, 1973), 985-1481.
80. For a more specific focus on travelogues, see Carlo Bernari et al, L'Italia dei grandi viaggiatori, Franco Paloscia, ed. (Rome, 1986);
81. and Jeremy Black, Italy and the Grand Tour (New Haven, Conn., 2003), which focuses on the private correspondence of British grand tourists.
82. For an analysis of specific stereotypes, see Andrew Canepa, "From Degenerate Scoundrel to Noble Savage: The Italian Stereotype in Eighteenth-Century British Travel Literature," English Miscellany 22 (1971): 107-46;
83. and Joseph Luzzi, "Italy without Italians: Literary Origins of a Romantic Myth," MLN 117 no. 1 (2002): 48-83.1 refer to other relevant works throughout my notes.
84. On English romantic views of the Italians, see the old study of C. P. Brand, Italy and the English Romantics: The Italianate Fashion in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1957), chap. 1.
85. For a more recent and much more sophisticated treatment see O'Connor, The Romance of Italy, esp. chap. 2, which also analyzes some French views.
86. Cesare de Seta, "L'Italia nello specchio del 'Grand Tour,' " in Storia d'Italia, Annali 5, Il paesaggio, de Seta, ed. (Turin, 1982), 135.
87. Cited in Franco Venturi, "The Enlightenment in Southern Italy," in Italy and the Enlightenment: Studies in a Cosmopolitan Century, Stuart Woolf, ed. (London, 1972), 209.
88. Carlantonio Pilati, Di una riforma d'Italia ossia dei mezzi di riformare i più cattivi costumi e le più perniciose leggi d'Italia, 2nd edn. (Villafranca, 1770),
89. in Illuministi italiani, Vol. 3, Riformatori lombardi, piemontesi, e toscani, Franco Venturi, ed. (Milan-Naples, 1958), 587.
90. Pilati's book was translated into French and German and had various Italian editions. According to Franco Venturi, partly due to the diffusion of Enlightenment ideas among the intelligentsia of the peninsula, the reaction against foreigners' harsh portrayal of Italian character did not translate into a chauvinist rejection: see Venturi, "L'Italia fuori d'Italia," 999. On Italian Enlightenment intellectuals as intransigent critics of national customs (albeit within the problematic of the "public spirit" and not of the nation), see also Massimo Rosati Il patriottismo italiano: Culture politiche e identità nazionale (Rome, 2000), 109.
91. I borrow the notion of the "solar" pole of the stereotype from Bollati, "L'Italiano," 34.
92. Giuseppe Maria Galanti, Nuova descrizione storica e geografica dell'Italia, 2 vols. (Naples, 1782),
93. now partly in Illuministi italiani, Vol. 5, Riformatori napoletani, Franco Venturi, ed. (Milan-Naples, 1962). All translations are mine.
94. Stefano Nutini, " 'Rigenerare' e 'rigenerazione': Alcune linee interpretative," in Idee e parole nel giacobinismo italiano, Eluggero Pii, ed. (Florence, 1990), 49-63.
95. See also Leso, Lingua e rivoluzione.
96. Vincenzo Cuoco, Platane in Italia, Fausto Nicolini, ed. (1804-1806; Bari, 1928), 259.
97. Giomale italiano, no. 164 (1805), review of Le vite de' famosi capitani d'Italia.
98. In his preface to Vincenzo Gioberti, Del primato morale e civile degli italiani (Milan, 1938), ix, Ugo Redanò claims that "it reached" 80,000 copies, but does not specify the exact time period.
99. S. J. Woolf points to the many reprints that followed the first edition (Woolf, A History of Italy, 1700-1860: The Social Constraints of Political Change (London, 1979), 343.
100. Vincenzo Gioberti, Del primato morale e civile degli Italiani, Giuseppe Balsamo-Crivelli, ed., 3 vols. (Turin, 1920), 2: 147. This edition is based on the second revised edition published in 1844 (the original edition was published in Brussels by Meline in 1843). I will be citing from the 1920 edition. No recent critical edition is available.
101. On Gioberti's life, see Dizionario biografico degli italiani, s.v. Gioberti, Vincenzo;
102. and Giorgio Rumi, Gioberti (Bologna, 1999).
103. As noticed by Bollati, "L'Italiano," 106-108.
104. Gioberti, Primato, 3: 200-201.
105. I would like to thank Jeffrey Freedman for helping me understand the meaning of "voluntary decline."
106. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "Political Camp or the Ambiguous Engendering of the American Republic," in Blom, Hagemann, and Hall, Gendered Nations, 271.
107. For a gendered analysis of Machiavelli's work, see Hanna F. Pitkin, Fortune is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolò Machiavelli (Berkeley, Calif., 1984);
108. and Wendy Brown, Manhood and Politics: A Feminist Reading in Political Theory (Totowa, N.J., 1988).
109. On the gendered discourse of French Republicanism, see Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988).
110. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France, chap. 5.
111. Moe has recently called attention to the north-south axis in Montesquieu that is at times conflated with the more notorious Europe versus Asia opposition (View from Vesuvius, 23-27).
112. He also points out that by the nineteenth century Montesquieu's name became almost synonymous with the climatic theory. And this in spite of the fact, we should add, that Montesquieu's writings contained a rather more complex view of the factors shaping human institutions and the character of peoples: on this complexity, see Jean-Patrice Courtois, "L'Europe et son autre dans L'Esprit des Lois," in L'Europe de Montesquieu: Actes du Colloque de Gênes (26-29 mai 1993), Alberto Postigliola and Maria Grazia Bottaro Palumbo, eds. (Naples, 1995), 309-28.
113. On this process, see Gregory Hanlon, The Twilight of a Military Tradition: Italian Aristocrats and European Conflicts, 1560-1800 (New York, 1998). According to the author, Piedmont was the only exception to this trend.
114. Cited in Venturi, "L'Italia fuori d'Italia," 1128;
115. on the French views of the Italians as effeminate, see also M. G. Broers, "Noble Romans and Regenerated Citizens: The Morality of Conscription in Napoleonic Italy, 1800-1814," War in History 8 no. 3 (2001): 249-70. The lack of a military ethos in the nobility and the influence of the Catholic Church were seen as the main roots of the trait.
116. Madame de Staël, Corinne, or Italy, Sylvia Raphael, trans. (Oxford, 1998), 97.
117. It is worth recalling that this text was used as a guidebook by many European travelers to Italy in the early nineteenth century. Even more damning observations on the Italians can be found in de Staël's essay De la litérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (1800; Paris, 1998), chap. 10.
118. On the impact of de Staël among Italian Romantics (liberal and patriotic almost by definition), see John C. Isbell, "The Italian Romantics and Madame de Staël: Art, Society and Nationhood," Rivista di Letterature Moderne e Comparate, n.s., 50 (1997): 355-69.
119. De Staël is also given credit for the indirect diffusion of Montesquieu's ideas at a time when his thought received less attention than in the eighteenth century: see Domenico Felice, Modération et justice: Lectures de Montesquieu en Italie (Bologna, 1995), 93.
120. On the gender aspects of Corinne, see also O'Connor, Romance of Italy, 27-32;
121. and Glenda Sluga, "Gender and the Nation: Madame de Staël or Italy," Women's Writing 10, no. 2 (2003): 241-51.
122. De Staël, Corinne, 102.
123. O'Connor, The Romance of Italy, esp. chap. 2.
124. O'Connor, The Romance of Italy, 47.
125. See Fernando Mazzocca, "L'iconografia della patria tra l'età delle riforme e l'Unità," in Banti and Bizzocchi, Immagini della nazione, 89-111.
126. See Giacomo Leopardi, Canti, Niccoló Gallo and Cesare Garboli, eds. (Turin, 1993), 3-10.
127. For a discussion of the growing importance and changing meanings of the notion of indolence from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, see Willard Spiegelman, Majestic Indolence: English Romantic Poetry and the Work of Art (New York, 1995).
128. Steven C. Hughes has also noticed the mostly negative meanings of the term in nineteenth-century Italy: see "The Theory and Practice of Ozio in Italian Policing: Bologna and Beyond," Criminal Justice History: An International Annual 6 (1985): 89-103.
129. Cesare Balbo, Pensieri ed esempi (Florence, 1854), 347-78.
130. See Heather Ingman, "Machiavelli's 'ozio' and Montaigne's 'oysiveté,' " French Studies Bulletin 30 (1989): 7.
131. At the very beginning of the Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius, Machiavelli lashed out at the "evils caused by the proud indolence which prevails in most of the Christian States" (I am quoting from The Prince and the Discourses, Christian E. Detmold, trans. [New York, 1950], 104) and reserved very harsh words of condemnation for the "effeminizing" influence of the Christian religion "interpreted according to the promptings of indolence rather than those of virtue" (see esp. book 2, chap. 2, 285-86).
132. Cesare Balbo, Le Speranze d'Italia, Achille Corbelli, ed. (Paris, 1844; Turin, 1925), 205.
133. On Balbo's admiration for Montesquieu, see Felice, Modération et justice, 99-100;
134. and Maria Fubini Leuzzi, "Introduzione," in Cesare Balbo, Storia d'Italia e altri scritti editi e inediti, Maria Fubini Leuzzi, ed. (Turin, 1984), 15.
135. See for an example of this conversation the dialogue entitled "Lo straniero" (The foreigner) in Balbo, Pensieri ed esempi, 347-78;
136. and Balbo, Pensieri sulla storia d'Italia: Studi (Florence, 1858), 549-54. Both works were published posthumously but were written before Delle speranze d'Italia.
137. Francesco Traniello, "Incunaboli d'imperialismo europeo: Cesare Balbo, l'Occidente e il Mediterraneo," Contemporanea: Rivista di storia dell'800 e del'900 1 (1998): 263-79.
138. Cesare Balbo, Pensieri sulla storia d'Italia, 513.
139. Balbo, Pensieri ed esempi, 106.
140. See Ettore Passerin d'Entrèves, La giovinezza di Cesare Balbo (Florence, 1940), 55-62.
141. Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento, 139-48.
142. Giacomo Durando, Della nazionalità italiana: Saggio politico-militare (Paris, 1846), 249.
143. Augusto Aglebert, "Italiani!" L'Italiano (April 20, 1847).
144. Giuseppe Mazzini, "D'alcune cause ehe impedirono finora lo sviluppo della libertà in Italia. Articolo 2," in Interessi e principii, Michele Rago, ed. (Milan, 1944) 77
145. (orig. in La Giovine Italia, 1832).
146. Giuseppe Montanelli, Memorie sull'Italia e specialmente sulla Toscana dal 1814 al 1850, in Opere politiche 1847-1862, Paolo Bagnoli, ed., vol. 2, part 1 (Yuri, 1853; Florence, 1997), 13.
147. Montanelli, Memorie, 29.
148. Gioberti, Primato, 3: 168.
149. Gioberti, Primato, 3: 182-84.
150. Moe, View from Vesuvius, 119.
151. Balbo, Speranze, 34.
152. Cesare Balbo, "Della società in Italia," in Lettere di politico e letteratura: edite e inedited; Precedute da un discorso sulle rivoluzioni (1823; Florence, 1855).
153. Cesare Balbo, "Del naturale de' Piemontesi," in Lettere di politico, 238-62. As for the democrats, Mazzini and his followers denied the relevance of the argument about internal diversity, and even democratic writers of federalist conviction such as Carlo Cattaneo played down regional distinctions when they responded to the foreigners' commonplaces about the Italians.
154. Although Italians accepted certain traits of the southern stereotype, the climatic theory of national character found a skeptical reception in the peninsula: the Venetian Enlightenment thinker Francesco Algarotti, for example, found sounder arguments in David Hume, who questioned naturalistic accounts of national character in his essay "Of National Character" (1748). The Italian Jacobin Melchiorre Gioia rejected political relativism based on climatic theories of national character in 1796 (see Domenico Felice, "Note sulla fortuna di Montesquieu nel giacobinismo italiano, 1796-1799," in Idee e parole nel giacobinismo italiano, 14-15)
155. and later attacked the arguments put forward by Charles-Victor Bonstetten (a member of Madame de Staël's circle) about the influence of climate in shaping the "homme du Nord" (northern man) and the "homme du Midi" (southern man): see Gioia's review of Bonstetten in Annali universali di statistica 5 (1825): 245-301.
156. On this, see also Moe, View from Vesuvius, 27-31.
157. On Sismondi's life, see Jean R. de Salis, Sismondi, 1773-1842, 2 vols. (Paris, 1932).
158. For a more recent and more detailed study of the period to 1800, see Paul Waeber, Sismondi. Une biographie, Vol. 1, Les devanciers et la traverse de la Révolution: Chroniques familiales 1692-1800 (Geneva, 1991).
159. Roberts Bizzocchi, "Cicisbei: La morale italiana," Storica 3 (1997): 63-90.
160. J. L. C. Simonde de Sismondi, Histoire des Républiques Italiennes du Moyen Age, 5th edn., vol. 8 (1807-1818; Brussels, 1839); see esp. chap. 14, "What are the causes that have changed the Italian character after the subjection of their Republics." All translations are mine.
161. Alessandro Manzoni immediately mounted a defense of Catholicism in his Osservazioni sulla morale cattolica (Observations on Catholic Morals, 1819).
162. On the presence of an evangelical sensibility in the ranks of Italian patriots, particularly in northern Italy, see Giorgio Spini, Risorgimento e protestanti (1956; Torino, 1998), esp. chap. 3.
163. Perhaps thanks also to Sismondi's decision to expunge the most direct criticism of the Catholic Church (and indeed the whole last chapter) from the shorter version of his work published in 1832. On the reception of Sismondi during the Risorgimento, see Giuseppe Galasso, "Le Repubbliche italiane del Sismondi e il Risorgimento," in Le passioni della storico: Studi in onore di Giuseppe Giarrizzo, Antonio Coco, ed. (Catania, 1999), 221-42;
164. and Adrian Lyttelton, "Creating a National Past: History, Myth, and Image in the Risorgimento," in Ascoli and von Henneberg, Making and Remaking Italy, 27-74.
165. Sismondi, Histoire des Républiques, vol. 8.
166. Sismondi, Histoire des Républiques, 8: 383-84.
167. In explaining the historical origins of the Italian character, Sismondi relied on another national stereotype by then also well consolidated, the stereotype of the Spaniards. Southern and Catholic like the Italians, the Spaniards shared many of the vices of the Italians only compounded by those that they acquired as holders of imperial power: besides laziness and an excessive sense of honor and pride, their negative traits included a tendency to be violent and cruel (probably a legacy, among others, of the "black legend"); that Spaniards were the product of a mixing of "races" was also held against them: see J. N. Hillgarth, The Mirror of Spain 1500-1700: The Formation of a Myth (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2000), esp. chaps. 8 and 16.
168. Sismondi, Histoire des Républiques, 8: 384.
169. For the eighteenth century, see in particular James Boswell, Boswell on the Grand Tour: Italy, Corsica, and France 1765-1766, Frank Brady, ed. (New York, 1955), 17-19;
170. and Tobias Smollett, Travels through France and Italy (1766; Fontwell, 1969).
171. See also Black, Italy and the Grand Tour, 123-26.
172. For an early nineteenth-century example, see John Forsyth, Remarks on the Antiquities, Arts, and Letters during an Excursion in Italy in 1802 and 1803, 2nd edn., (London, 1816), 377, 411-12.
173. Poet Ugo Foscolo responded to Forsyth's description of cicisbeismo and particularly his unflattering portrayal of Italian women in an article entitled "The Women of Italy" published in London Magazine in 1826 (now in Scritti vari di critica storica e letteraria, 1817-1827, Ugo Foscolo, Umberto Limentani, and John Lindon, eds. [Florence, 1978], 417-69), where he explained the phenomenon sociologically as a result of feudal customs still dominating in the Italian aristocracy, and linked it to the political degeneration of the Italians. Stendhal famously referred to Italian cicisbei at the very beginning of the Charterhouse of Parma (1839): "In the Middle Ages the republicans of Lombardy had given proof of a valour equal to that of the French, and had deserved to see their city razed to the ground by the German Emperors.
174. Ever since they had become loyal subjects their main business had been the printing of sonnets upon little handkerchiefs of rose-colored taffeta on the occasion of the marriage of some young lady belonging to a rich or a noble family. Two or three years after that great event in her life, this young lady would select a cavalier servente : the name of the cicisbeo chosen by her husband's family sometimes occupied an honorable place in the marriage contract. It was a far cry from such effeminate manners to the deep emotions aroused by the unexpected arrival of the French army." I cite from the translation by Margaret R. B. Shaw, Penguin edition (1958), 19.
175. See, for example, Marzio Barbagli, Sotto lo stesso tetto: Mutamenti della famiglia in Italia dal XV al XX secolo (Bologna, 2000), 331-36.
176. Bizzocchi, "Cicisbei," 67-69.
177. Bizzocchi, "Cicisbei," 77.
178. Carla Pellandra Cazzoli, "Dames et sigisbées: Un début d'emancipation feminine?" Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 193 (1980): 2028-35;
179. Luciano Guerci, La discussione sulla donna nell'Italia del Settecento: Aspetti e problemi (Turin, 1987), chap. 3.
180. On Parini and more generally on the attacks on the culture of the nobility in the eighteenth century, see Mario Domenichelli, Cavaliere e gentiluomo: Saggio sulla cultura aristocratica in Europa (1513-1915) (Rome, 2002), chaps. 9-11.
181. Gioberti, Primato, 1: chap. 3.
182. Gioberti, Primato, 1: 149.
183. Balbo, Speranze, 205.
184. Balbo, Speranze, 189.
185. Cesare Balbo, Sommario della storia d'Italia, in Storia d'Italia e altri scritti editi e inediti, 734. This work first appeared in the Nuova Encyclopedia Popolare, F. Predari, ed. (Turin, 1846), and was published in the same year as a separate volume; the first uncensored version came out the following year.
186. Balbo, Speranze, 62-70;
187. Balbo, Sommario, 738.
188. Balbo, Sommario, 735-36.
189. Balbo had words of high praise for Sismondi's work: "I do not know if there ever was another [history] as rapidly and as much read as [Sismondi's History of the Italian Republics],
190. and which passed as much into the blood of a nation." Balbo, Pensieri sulla storia d'Italia, 469. He appreciated Sismondi's skills as a historian and his fairness, but he also declared that true national histories could be written only by native historians.
191. Balbo, Sommario, 623-24.
192. Montanelli, Memorie, 14.
193. Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone di pensieri, Anna Maria Moroni, ed., vol. 2 (Milan, 1983), 741.
194. Mazzini, "D'alcune cause," 32-33.
195. Luigi Mariotti [Antonio Gallenga], Italy: Past and Present, 2 vols. (London, 1848), quotes from 1: 419, 421.
196. On Gallenga, see Toni Cerutti, Antonio Gallenga: An Italian Writer in Victorian England (London, 1974).
197. L'Italia rigenerata: Giornale di politica, scienze, letteratura, teatri, arti e commerci was a liberal-democratic biweekly published in Milan in April-July 1848.
198. Mariotti [Gallenga], Italy, 392.
199. Giuseppe Mazzini, "I collaboratori della 'Giovine Italia' ai loro concittadini," in Scritti politici editi e inediti (Imola, 1907), 2: 72
200. (orig. in La Giovine Italia, 1832).
201. Giuseppe Mazzini, "Della guerra d'insurrezione conveniente all'Italia," in Scritti politici editi e inediti, 2: 230
202. (orig. in La Giovine Italia, 1833; reprinted as a pamphlet with an appendix of instructions in 1849).
203. Alberto M. Banti and Marco Mondini have noted also this "moral" meaning that war assumed for the Italian patriots: see "Da Novara a Custoza: Culture militari e discorso nazionale tra Risorgimento e Unità," in Storia d'Italia, Annali 18, Guerra e pace, Walter Barberis, ed. (Turin, 2002), 419.
204. Mazzini, "Alla gioventù italiana," in Scritti politici editi e inediti, 2: 381
205. (orig. in La Giovine Italia, 1834).
206. Mariotti [Gallenga], Italy, 1: xxiv.
207. Mariotti [Gallenga], Italy, 2: 426, 427.
208. Durando, Della nazionalità italiana, 254, 255.
209. Gioberti, Primato, 1: 92-93.
210. Balbo, Speranze, 10.
211. See Lucia Re, "Passion and Sexual Difference: The Risorgimento and the Gendering of Writing in Nineteenth-Century Italian Culture," in Ascoli and von Henneberg, Making and Remaking Italy, 155-200.
212. See Balbo, "Lo straniero. Dialogo primo," in Pensieri ed esempi, 356.
213. See George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe (Madison, Wis., 1985);
214. and Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York, 1996);
215. see also the interdisciplinary collection Andrew Parker et al., eds., Nationalisms and Sexualities (London, 1992).
216. On women's participation in the Risorgimento, see works cited in note 20 and also Laura Guidi, "Patriottismo femminile e travestimenti sulla scena risorgimentale," Studi storici 41 (2000): 571-86.
217. Balbo, Speranze, 195-96. He also invited the youth to travel to distant lands and volunteer in the "beautiful wars of Christian conquest."
218. Mosse has called attention to the phenomenon in The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991), 28.
219. For a detailed study, see Daniel A. McMillan, "German Incarnate: Politics, Gender and Sociability in the Gymnastics Movement, 1811-1871" (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1997).
220. See John Rosselli, "The Self-image of Effeteness: Physical Education and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Bengal," Past and Present, no. 86 (1980): 121-48.
221. On the establishment of the first gymnastic societies in Turin and Florence in 1844, see Patrizia Ferrara, L 'Italia in palestra: Storia, documenti e immagini della ginnastica dal 1833 al 1973 (Rome, 1992), 29-47.
222. It is interesting to note that in the same year Balbo published Le Speranze d'Italia where he encouraged deer hunting and alpine walks. For the period after unification, see Gaetano Bonetta, Corpo e nazione: L'educazione ginnastica, igienica e sessuale dell'Italia liberale (Milan, 1990).
223. Balbo, Speranze, 196.
224. See Caterina Franceschi Ferrucci, Degli studi delle donne (Turin, 1853), 359.
225. On this and other women writers in nineteenth-century Italy, see the relevant essays collected in Letizia Panizza and Sharon Wood, eds., A History of Women's Writing in Italy (Cambridge, 2000).
226. See especially Mazzini, Dei doveri dell'uomo (Naples, 1860), chap. 6, "Duties to the Family." In the Mazzinian ranks, however, there were also women such as Anna Maria Mozzoni who espoused both patriotism and feminism.
227. Guidi, "Patriottismo femminile e travestimenti."
228. A selection of the writings of Korais and Kapodistrias is in Richard Clogg, ed., The Movement for Greek Independence 1770-1821: A Collection of Documents (London, 1976).
229. For Greece, see Gerasimos Augustinos, Consciousness and History: Nationalist Critics of Greek Society 1897-1914 (Boulder, 1977).
230. On the importance of the theme of regeneration (but not of gender) in Italian nationalism, see Gentile, La Grande Italia.
231. This is a central theme of what is probably Villari's most famous article: "Di chi è la colpa. O sia la pace e la guerra" [Who is to Blame? Or, Peace and War], Il Politecnico, September 1866 (now in Pasquale Villari, I mali dell'Italia. Scritti su mafia, camorra e brigantaggio, Eugenio Garin, ed. [Florence, 1995], 143-95), but it also appears in many of his subsequent writings on social and political issues.
232. On the pessimism about the new Italy that characterized the attitudes of many intellectuals, see Alberto Asor Rosa, "La Cultura," in Storia d'Italia, Vol. 4, Dall'Unità a oggi (Turin, 1975), 821-39.
233. For an analysis of this masculinist rhetoric, see Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy (Minneapolis, 1996).
234. On the fascist obsession with remaking the Italian character, see Gentile, La Grande Italia, chap. 9,
235. and Aliberti, La resa di Cavour, chap. 6.