Giuseppe Mazzini
Revolutionary of the Italian Risorgimento (Genoa, 1805-Pisa, 1872).After studying law briefly, Giuseppe Mazzini devoted himself to the fight against the order established by the Congress of Vienna (1815).His activism would have a double objective: it was a nationalist struggle for the unity of Italy and the elimination of foreign influence on the peninsula; and also a liberal and republican struggle against the monarchical absolutism of the Restoration.
Giuseppe Mazzini
In 1828 he entered the secret society of the Carbonari , who had starred in the unsuccessful insurrection of 1821; He was discovered and imprisoned in 1830.But he became convinced of the ineffectiveness of his sporadic conspiracies and decided to found a mass organization of national scope: with it he would carry out intense propaganda work among the young generations, from whose patriotism he expected the "resurgence" of Italy without counting on the help of foreign powers (hence the motto L'Italia farà da sè, with which he founded the Young Italy in 1831).
Disrupted by the Piedmontese police in an attempted insurrection that he organized in 1832, Mazzini was sentenced to death and had to flee Italy, establishing his base in Marseille and, from 1837, in London.At that time he came into contact with exiled revolutionaries from other countries and in 1834 he founded with them in Bern the Young Europe , another secret society that aspired to complete national emancipation with a great revolutionary movement to unite all Europe under a republican confederation.
At the outbreak of the 1848 revolutions, he moved to Milan, where he fought for liberation against the Austrians.Then he collaborated in the insurrectionary movement launched by his supporters in Rome against Pope Pius IX and was one of the triumvirs who ruled the subsequent Roman Republic of 1849.
The combined action of the Austrian, French and Neapolitan armies and Spaniards ended the Roman experiment in that same year; and, little by little, repression was imposed throughout Italy, causing many nationalists and liberals to be disappointed about the possibilities of the radical Mazzinian route.In the following years, the supporters of Italian unification under a liberal regime relied more on the moderate option represented by King Victor Emmanuel II of Savoy and his minister the Count of Cavour, who would finally achieve the unification of the Kingdom of Italy towards 1860.
Mazzini did not renounce his republican ideals and was limited to the leadership of small opposition circles and to be a symbol of moral rigor, personal austerity and ideological coherence, as a precursor of democracy.The voters of Messina elected him deputy several times, seeing such a result annulled by the monarchical authorities.From exile, he encouraged his followers to participate in multiple failed plots, as well as in the founding of the International Workers Association.In 1869 he returned to Italy incognito to die in his country.
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