10 March: Boreham on Giuseppe Mazzini

Vindication of Patriotism
In his lifetime, Giuseppe Mazzini—the anniversary of whose death we mark today—was hunted from pillar to post, expelled from one country after another, imprisoned and degraded, reduced to starvation and driven to the verge of suicide; yet, a few years after his death, his name was most revered where at one time it had been most abhorred. The tide turned very quickly. In his Italica, William Roscoe Thayer points out that, as soon as Mazzini died, his foes conceded his eminence. Those who had execrated him as a monster hailed him as a martyr. "The wise instinct of the world," says Mr. Thayer, "has long since admitted Mazzini into the company of its really great men. He would certainly be included in any group of ten outstanding representatives of the nineteenth century." This is lofty praise, as anyone will discover who attempts to compile a list of the ten mightiest spirits of the age in which Mazzini figured. Yet nobody who has carefully taken the measure of the man will feel inclined to challenge Mr. Thayer's dictum.

Mazzini holds the admiration of thoughtful men on many grounds, but, conspicuously among these, stand the clarity of his ideal and the fidelity with which he pursued it. He saw his goal as plainly at sixteen as he did at sixty, and he never for a moment swerved from his determination to achieve it. No country in the world has been more loved than Italy, and no Italian has loved Italy more devotedly than Mazzini. Yet he was not, in the ordinary sense, a political agitator. He had every sympathy with those who strove to increase wages, reduce prices, and generally, to improve the lot of their fellowmen. But he never disguised from himself the fact that such reforms would not ameliorate the conditions that he deplored or hasten the consummation for which he incessantly laboured. He was not concerned, he said, about the cost of corn and cabbages. "What I do care for is that Italy shall be great and good, fulfilling the splendour of her mission in the world." He was no iconoclast, no breaker of idols, no reckless destroyer. He was a rebel, it is true, but he was the most constructive rebel that Europe has ever known.

Truth For Ever On The Scaffold, Yet—
He was, moreover, a rebel by means of whose rebellion every country in the world has been enriched. He smashed a few windows, but he only smashed them to let a little fresh air into the stuffy atmosphere that, in his time, all the nations were breathing. An intense admirer of Dante, he was profoundly impressed by Dante's combination of purest poetry with practical patriotism. He gloried in the way in which Dante sweetened and sublimated the life of Italy, and, modelling himself on so classic a master, he set himself to do in the nineteenth century what the illustrious Florentine had done in the fourteenth. This was his ideal; did he realise it? Up to the time of his death there was little evidence of his having done so. There were times in which his pitiful failure unnerved him and he seriously doubted the justice of his cause. Had he any justification for prompting good men to suffer and die for a dream that seemed chimerical? As he reflected on the stalwarts who had laid down their lives in following him, and of the women and children desolated by their deaths, he felt, he tells us, like a criminal, and was filled with a terrible remorse. The only comfort that he could find at such times lay in the fact that he was seeking no guerdon for himself. He had nothing to gain and everything to lose by adhering to his self-imposed programme.

If his comrades suffered, so did he. He was thrown into prison, and, later driven from the country under the threat of a disgraceful death if he dared to return. Austria, France, and Switzerland denied him hospitality. Go where he would, he was harried by the authorities. The Marchesa Rice Pareto Magliano some time ago contributed to the Contemporary Review a memory of her childhood. Mazzini, a fugitive under sentence of death, sought refuge in her father's home. One afternoon they saw a posse of police approaching. "Mazzini took from his pocket a bundle of the tiny missives which he was always writing—the little sheets by which his teachings were propagated—and gave them to my mother, who slipped them into her bodice. He then rushed to his hiding-place, a box in the ironing room. The housemaid, who was ironing, conceived the ingenious idea of arranging on the box one of my father's starched shirts. The police searched the house in vain." The incident is typical of the phase in his experience through which he was then passing.

Condemned In Life, But Crowned In Death
An outcast in Europe, London was, of course open to him, and to London he went. But he says that the "hell of exile" on the Continent was never so dreary as his life in the English capital. His poverty was of the most disgusting and degrading kind. He was compelled to herd with the lowest of the low, and on Saturdays would often pawn the clothes off his back to buy enough food to carry him over the weekend. Margaret Fuller describes him as prematurely old; all the vital juices seemed exhausted; his eyes were bloodshot; his skin orange; flesh he had none; his hair was mixed with white; his hand was painful to touch. At last, assuming the name of Giorgie Brown, he crept back to Italy to die.

His funeral was the first indication of the impression he had made. Eighty thousand people followed his body to the grave. Even his opponents began to realise that there was something reasonable and lofty in his contentions. The heresies of one generation often become the orthodoxies of the next. Never was this exemplified so strikingly as in the case of Mazzini. Cities that had threatened him with death if he dared to enter their boundaries, erected statues to his memory. A new crop of orators and authors echoed his sentiments and won world-wide applause by uttering truths that had brought him to noisome dungeons. Fifty years after his death the nations that had exiled and banished him vied with each other in heaping their tributes on his honoured name.

F W Boreham

Image: Giuseppe Mazzini