SOURCE: “Manzoni After 1848: An ‘Irresolute Utopian’?” in Modern Language Review, Vol. 87, No. 4, October, 1992, pp. 847-57.

[In the following essay, Davie explores Manzoni's relationship to Italian nationalism in the nineteenth century.]

When Manzoni was asked in 1848 to stand as a candidate for the Piedmontese parliament, he wrote to his proposer declining the invitation, and explaining why he considered himself unsuitable for the task:

Un utopista e un irresoluto sono due soggetti inutili per lo meno in una riunione dove si parli per concludere; io sarei l'uno e l'altro nello stesso tempo. Il fattibile le più volte non mi piace, e dirò anzi, mi ripugna; ciò che mi piace, non solo parrebbe fuor di proposito e fuor di tempo agli altri, ma sgomenterebbe me medesimo, quando si trattasse, non di vagheggiarlo o di lodarlo semplicemente, ma di promoverlo in effetto, e d'aver poi sulla coscienza una parte qualunque delle conseguenze.¹

Many readers of I promessi sposi would endorse Manzoni's typically self-deprecating verdict. For all the novel's mordant social satire, so that it has accurately been described as ‘from one point of view […] all a searching critique of the ancien régime’,² its political and social message remains ambivalent. In a world where injustice is rife, any attempt by its humble protagonists to assert their rights proves misguided and counter-productive, and the patient submission to Divine Providence which it appears to enjoin has always struck some readers as glib and unconvincing. The much-quoted strictures of Settembrini³ echo the comment made by Pietro Giannone as early as 1832: ‘Nelle circostanze e ne' tempi che corrono, la virtù della rassegnazione non è quella che occorre alla nostra povera patria.’⁴

What is more, Manzoni himself, during the twenty years in which he was occupied with the writing and revision of I promessi sposi, apparently followed the example of the characters in his novel, remaining aloof from political involvement. This followed the disappointments of 1815 and 1821, when he had twice greeted what he took to be the dawn of Italy's liberation with an enthusiastic poem, only for his hopes to be rapidly dashed; on both occasions the poems remained unpublished.⁵ It was not until the dramatic events of 1848 that he was again provoked into a public expression of support for rebellion against an oppressive government.

It is puzzling, therefore, to read the account by Manzoni's wife Teresa Borri of a scene during the Milan insurrection of March 1848. An enthusiastic crowd gathered outside their house, shouting ‘Viva Manzoni!’. Manzoni went out onto a balcony and responded, ‘No! No! Viva l'Italia e chi combatte per lei! Io non ho fatto nulla!’. ‘No! No!’, came the reply from the crowd, ‘Lei ha fatto assai! Ha dato l'iniziativa a tutta Italia! Evviva! Evviva Manzoni campione dell'Italia!’ A spokesman then added, ‘Chiediamo a Manzoni un inno per la Liberazione dell'Italia!’, to which Manzoni responded in some embarrassment, ‘Lo farò! Lo farò quando potrò!’.⁶ According to another witness, Manzoni protested that he was no longer ‘buono a far versi’, but promised none the less ‘che pure qualche cosa farebbe, dando in luce qualche sua poesia inedita’, and this was in fact his response to the request: he published the poems of 1815 and 1821 with the title Pochi versi inediti, with the proceeds being donated to the relief of refugees from Austrian repression in the Veneto.⁷

On what grounds did the Milanese crowd acclaim Manzoni as ‘campione dell'Italia’? It is true that Tommaseo, as early as 1825, had acclaimed his Adelchi as a tragedy whose hero was the Italian people, and in the immediate popular success of I promessi sposi on its publication in 1827, a few critics had welcomed it as a sign of national renewal.⁸ But only from the late 1840s, and consistently only in the 1850s, was there any public discussion of the novel as an indictment of Italian demoralization under foreign occupation.⁹ The crowd outside Manzoni's house seems to have been at least as alert as the critics to the book's potential as a patriotic text.

Surprising though the crowd's acclamation may have been, and embarrassing though Manzoni may have found it, he accepted the invitation to identify publicly with the nationalist cause by publishing the Versi inediti. Later in 1848 he went further, publishing a polemical article in the Turin journal La Concordia.¹⁰ Prompted by a report that the merchants of Prague had petitioned the Austrian government not to give way to pressure for Italian independence because of the damage it would do to trade, he asserts that if Italians thought they were being kept subject to the empire to protect its trade they would respond by boycotting its goods. But first he has this to say about the manifest injustice which Austrian occupation in Italy had become:

Pur troppo, in certi tempi, e forse in ogni tempo, certe ingiustizie paiono così naturali, che nè a chi ne gode, nè a chi ne patisce non viene neppure in mente che debbano cessare. Ma viene un momento in cui questa o quella ingiustizia comparisce così chiaramente ingiustizia, che non può più sostenersi contro la negazione di tutte le menti, contro la riprovazione di tutti gli animi, diventa odiosa e ridicola insieme, e (mi perdonino gli astuti se rimando loro la parola che adoprano come la più tremenda delle ingiurie) diventa un'utopia. Ora la dominazione austriaca in qualsiasi parte d'Italia è una di quelle ingiustizie per le quali un tal momento è venuto.¹¹

The impression of Manzoni nailing his colours to the nationalist mast in this essay is undermined by the accompanying letter with which he submitted it through a friend, insisting firmly on ‘il più stretto incognito’.¹² But it is a striking passage none the less, especially for its use of the word utopia, and the parenthesis with which he draws attention to it. The essay was submitted on 13 September 1848, and published two days later—less than a month before he wrote declining to stand for parliament on the grounds that he was ‘un utopista e un irresoluto’. The irony of the latter remark is sharpened by the fact that he had so recently gone out of his way to stress that it was now the defenders of the status quo who were the utopisti, who were out of touch with political reality. Manzoni may still not have seen himself as a practical politician, but that did not prevent him from seeing Italian independence as a matter of practical politics.

Not that it was easy to see, in September 1848, how independence was to be achieved; the months since the Milanese cinque giornate had seen Carlo Alberto's Lombard campaign end in defeat and Austrian authority re-established. Manzoni himself relapsed, after the brief anonymous outburst of the Concordia article, into his customary public silence on political questions. But this did not mean that he was not exercised by the dilemma which remained after the unsuccessful campaigns of 1848-49: given that the status quo was manifestly unjust, what action was it legitimate to take to overcome that injustice? In particular, in what circumstances was it permissible to rebel against an established government?

For Manzoni, as for many of his contemporaries, the focus of such questions was the French Revolution of 1789; the outcome of his prolonged reflections on the Revolution and its consequences is an unfinished historical essay of some 250 pages: La rivoluzione francese del 1789 e la rivoluzione italiana del 1859: Osservazioni comparative.¹³ Planned, as the title indicates, as a comparative study in the light of the successful achievement of Italian independence in 1859-60, and written probably between 1862 and 1864,¹⁴ the text does not fulfil the promise of the title; the comparative element is almost wholly lacking, and what remains is a detailed account of political events in France in the single year from August 1788 (the summoning of the Estates General) to 26 August 1789 (the adoption by the National Assembly of the Declaration of the Rights of Man). Anecdotal evidence confirms Manzoni's lifelong interest in and detailed knowledge of the revolutionary period,¹⁵ and a letter of February 1850 asking his stepson to obtain for him a copy of Meillan's Mémoires ‘per un passo del dialogo che sto terminando’¹⁶ suggests that he was already thinking about the theme of the essay at this time. So although they were written in the early 1860s, the Osservazioni seem to reflect his concerns of a decade earlier, and the body of the text makes virtually no reference to the events of 1859-60, which should have provided the final vindication for his long-standing support of the Italian national cause. This gives the Osservazioni an oddly one-sided character, for which it hardly seems an adequate explanation to say that Manzoni left the work unfinished because his narrative became bogged down in excessive detail. The author of I promessi sposi knew, after all, how to handle a long and complex narrative.

Starting from the premise that ‘la grandissima maggioranza della popolazione francese […] volesse delle riforme nel suo governo, e avesse delle ragioni più che giuste di volerle’ (I, 1, p. 323), Manzoni asks how this justifiable demand for reform led ‘in pochissimo tempo, a uno sconquasso, quale è attestato dalla storia’ (I, 23, p. 328). His conclusion, spelt out at length in Chapter IV of the Osservazioni, is that the subsequent sconquasso was the inevitable consequence of the act of usurpation whereby the Third Estate, in June 1789, declared itself unilaterally to be the ‘National Assembly’ without reference to the crown or the other two Estates (IV, 3, p. 353); that single act of lawlessness opened the way for all the rest. In an appropriately tortuous passage he paraphrased the implications of such a declaration (IV, 40, p. 360); later in the chapter he made the same point much more succinctly, commenting on the phrase ‘la nazione illuminata’ which the Assembly had used of itself: ‘La formula poi di nazione illuminata non esprime, che una contradizione: tutti, vale a dire alcuni’ (IV, 189, p. 396). The Third Estate's action met none of the conditions under which it might—politically no less than legally—be justified: it was not necessary in order to bring about reform; it produced a greater evil than it abolished, because it destroyed a government without putting anything in its place; those responsible had neither a popular mandate for their action nor popular approval for the result (IV, 280, p. 418).

At first sight this is little more than a standard conservative critique of the Revolution, saying nothing of substance which had not been said by Edmund Burke within a year of the events themselves. Both Manzoni's fundamental reasons for declaring the Third Estate's actions illegitimate were equally clearly set out by Burke: that the monarchy, far from being incapable of reform, had already moved to initiate it,¹⁷ and that the self-styled National Assembly had no legal standing, having subverted the basis of its own authority.¹⁸ So, too, was his conviction that the horrors of the Revolution followed inexorably from the Assembly's initial act of rebellion.¹⁹ Given this strongly negative judgement of the French Revolution, it is not surprising to learn from the memoirs of Manzoni's stepson, Stefano Stampa, that he was dismayed when he read a draft of the essay, and urged Manzoni to write an introduction explaining how the Italian case was different. Otherwise, Stampa told him, ‘la parte che riguarda la Rivoluzione francese ed il principio d'autorità, sarà sfruttato dal partito clericale-gesuitico, per abbattere appunto e per rovinare la rivoluzione italiana: e tu invece di giovarle le avresti portato il più gran danno’.²⁰ Manzoni complied, with an introduction which seeks to show how the Italian ‘revolution’ was legitimate precisely because it had avoided the usurpation of power which had taken place in France.

The result is to make the work even more forthright in its condemnation of the 1789 revolutionaries. Manzoni spells out the two disastrous results of their action: ‘L'oppressione del paese, sotto il nome di libertà; e la somma difficoltà di sostituire al governo distrutto un altro governo; che avesse, s'intende le condizioni della durata’ (Introduction, 3, p. 309). The first consequence was simply the culmination of ‘il sopravvento di forze arbitrarie e violente’ which had been present from the outset, while the second was apparent from the fact that France had had ten different constitutions in the sixty-one years between 1791 and 1852 (6-9, pp. 309-10). In Italy, on the other hand, neither of these ‘tristissimi effetti’ had ensued; where France had succumbed to oppression and anarchy, Italy had achieved liberty:

La libertà davvero, che consiste nell'essere il cittadino, per mezzo di giuste leggi e di stabili istituzioni, assicurato, e contro violenze private, e contro ordini tirannici del potere, e nell'essere il potere stesso immune dal predominio di società oligargiche, e non sopraffatto dalla pressura di turbe, sia avventizie, sia arrolate.

(10-11, pp. 310-11)

Where no French government in the aftermath of the Revolution had achieved stability, in Italy ‘ai governi distrutti poté sottentrare un novo governo, con un'animatissima e insieme pacifica prevalenza e quasi unanimità di liberi voleri’. The reason was that Italy's liberators had observed, while the revolutionaries of 1789 had failed to observe, ‘una condizione, non meno imposta dall'equità, che richiesta […] dalla prudenza’:

Che la distruzione del governo, o de' governi esistenti prima della Rivoluzione, fosse un mezzo indispensabile per ottenere un bene essenziale e giustamente voluto dalle rispettive società rette da loro: in altri termini, che que' governi fossero irreformabilmente opposti al bene e alla volontà delle società medesime.

(12-14, p. 311)

While this could not be said of the government of Louis XVI, in Italy the very multiplicity of states was intrinsically unjust, simply because they stood in the way of national unification: ‘Erano ugualmente irreformabili, per il loro esser molti’ (22, p. 313).

This last sentence abruptly broadens the argument to justify not only the expulsion of the Austrians from Lombardy but the overthrow of all the other governments of the peninsula in the course of unification under the Piedmontese crown. Such a large leap in his normally scrupulous step-by-step argument is indicative of Manzoni's uncritical approach to the recent events in Italy, in marked contrast to his observations on the events of 1789. And although he confidently claimed that the second part of the Osservazioni, dealing with Italy, would be straightforward and uncontroversial (Introduction, 19, p. 312), it remained unwritten. Indeed, his difficulty in formulating his position is reflected in the existence of at least two abandoned drafts of the introduction, and there is evidence that he continued working on it as late as July 1869, some time after he had given up any idea of completing the Osservazioni themselves.²¹ Could it be that the Italian case proved on reflection to be less straightforward than he originally thought?

The first of his conditions for justifying revolution—that a government should be overthrown only when it was clearly beyond any hope of reform—is at least acknowledged by the assertion already quoted, that ‘erano ugualmente irreformabili, per il loro essere molti’. But what of the second—that those who claims to act in the name of the nation should have a clear legal mandate to do so? Here another passage in Chapter IV of the Osservazioni is relevant.

Manzoni comments on the moment, in the dense sequence of events of June 1789, when the King summoned a joint meeting of the three Estates, thereby reconstituting the Estates General which had effectively been dissolved by the earlier unilateral action of the Third Estate: ‘E il re al quale solo apparteneva per consenso universale (qual titolo più legittimo?) la facoltà di convocare gli Stati Generali, era naturalmente il solo che potesse avere quella di ristabilirli’ (IV, 184, p. 395). The parenthesis in this sentence contains a point of major importance, as he acknowledges a few pages later. The King's declaration added that ‘se gli Stati Generali lo avessero abbandonato nella impresa, avrebbe fatto egli solo il bene dei suoi popoli, e solo si sarebbe riguardato come il loro vero rappresentante’, and Manzoni underlines the significance of this last phrase:

Erano, in bocca di un Re di Francia, parole nuove, che prenunziavano e accettavano un tempo nuovo, erano una rinunzia, implicita ma irrepugnabile a quella massima tanto solenne in Francia fino allora, che il re tenesse il suo potere direttamente e immediatamente da Dio, e che, per conseguenza, questo potere fosse independente da ogni sindacato, e inamissibile.

(IV, 211-13, pp. 401-02)

Once it is conceded that the King acts ‘per consenso universale’, as the ‘representative’ of the people, it becomes possible for their consenso to be withdrawn, or transferred to some other body. Indeed, when on 30 June the King and the nobility and clergy submitted to the demands of the Third Estate, Bailly asserted that the popular acclamation which followed confirmed the validity of their actions; Manzoni translates from his Mémoires:

Questi segni di soddisfazione da parte dei nostri commettenti […] sono prove della saggezza della nostra condotta, e stabiliscono la base su di cui si appoggiava l'autorità della Assemblea Nazionale; c'era l'espressione della volontà generale; la forza era nel popolo, che ci osservava.

(IV, 257, p. 412)²²

Manzoni sees the contradiction into which his argument has led him: having appealed to ‘consenso universale’ as the source of the King's authority (leaving aside the question of how such consenso might be expressed or measured), how can he now deny its validity as the authority for the Third Estate? He answers this objection from an imaginary interlocutor by pointing to another contradiction. He does not deny a people's right to overthrow a government which no longer promotes the common good (IV, 260, p. 413), but ‘nemmeno un popolo può avere il diritto di convalidare un equivoco’, which was the implication of the Third Estate's attempt to limit the King's power while still retaining the monarchy. ‘Ma il potere assoluto e il governo crano uniti e come compenetrati nella persona del re’; the only person who could limit the King's power without fatally weakening his authority was the King himself. ‘Ed era per l'appunto ciò che aveva tentato di fare lo sventurato Luigi’, in the declaration which the Third Estate had rejected on 23 June (IV, 261-65, pp. 413-14).

Manzoni's argument once more echoes Burke's, and reaches ostensibly the same conclusion. But when Burke concludes, ‘A state of contempt is not a state for a prince: better get rid of him at once’,²³ his tone is heavily ironical; the very brutality of the conclusion encourages the reader to recoil from it. Where Burke firmly believed in the principle of heredity (and so had to fudge the issue when he discussed the English ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688),²⁴ Manzoni is sufficiently a child of the revolution to believe that a king's power does derive ultimately from popular consent; for all his sympathy with Louis XVI, his discussion never has the instinctive revulsion with which Burke contemplated the possibility of his being deposed. The result was that Manzoni in his turn had to fudge when it came to discussing the role of the House of Savoy in the unification of Italy, stressing the ‘consenso universale’ which they enjoyed among their subjects.

The stimulus to do so was provided by an invitation which came to Manzoni in the last months of his life: to contribute to a collection of autographs of ‘uomini delle diverse province che in vario modo cooperarono virtualmente all'indipendenza nazionale’ which was being formed by the city of Turin. With an energy remarkable in a man of eighty-eight, he responded by embarking on an account of the events of 1848-49 and the progress they represented towards Italian unification: the essay Dell'indipendenza dell'Italia.²⁵

Not surprisingly, in view of the occasion which prompted it, the essay underlines the leading role played by Piedmont in achieving unification; it had, Manzoni declared, been his conviction ‘da più d'un mezzo secolo’ that ‘da codesta parte d'Italia dovesse, potesse, un giorno, venire il risorgimento della, purtroppo, più vasta parte del rimanente’ (I, 2, p. 681). The phrase ‘da più d'un mezzo secolo’, taken literally, dates his faith in Piedmont back to the abortive officers' revolt which had inspired his poem Marzo 1821. This may well be what he had in mind, for the episode marked the first hesitant appearance on the political scene of the young prince Carlo Alberto, and the greater part of the essay is a highly sympathetic account of Carlo Alberto's role as King of Piedmont in the events of 1848-49.

After briefly praising his military campaigns in Lombardy and commiserating with his lack of success, Manzoni concentrates on the constitutional Statuto which Carlo Alberto had granted in February 1848, which had been preserved in his son Vittorio Emmanuele's negotiations with Austria after his defeat in 1849, and which had survived to form the basis of the constitution of the new Kingdom of Italy in 1860. This was the source of Piedmont's political strength:

Infatti, al Piemonte era rimasta una forza che lo distingueva da tutti gli altri Stati d'Italia […]: la forza che nasceva dalla stima e dalla fiducia reciproca del Re e del paese, da un sentimento concorde, e riguardo ai sacrifizi da farsi, e riguardo alla dignità da mantenersi.

(III, 6, p. 688)

The Statuto was too eloquent a testimony to the advantages of freedom and independence for Austria to remain indifferent to it:

Lo Statuto, il solo che desse indizio di poter prendere radice in Italia, perché il solo voluto concordemente e sinceramente dal principe e dal paese, era un mezzo permanente di combattere il predominio straniero, sia col propalarne, per mezzo della tribuna e della stampa, i dolorosi effetti sull'altre parti d'Italia, sia col mantener vivo in quelle il sentimento dell'indipendenza.

(III, 20, p. 691)

In a discarded draft for the next chapter Manzoni returned to this theme again:

Si vide in codesta parte d'Italia stabilito in fatto ciò che la grandissima maggioranza degl'Italiani aveva desiderato e vagheggiato per tutta l'Italia; voglio dire uno Statuto con cui erano assicurate e regolate […] le libertà, e pubbliche e individuali.

He concedes that Carlo Alberro was not the first Italian ruler to grant a constitution in 1848, but then continues,

Ma, (e fu questo l'avvenimento novo,) l'esito della guerra venendo a interpretar le carte che avevano celato il vero, costrinse le menti a riconoscere nel fatto del Piemonte, una differenza essenziale dagli altri. Apparve sincero. E ciò per la ragione naturalissima, che era tale.²⁶

So central, indeed, was this theme that even before he embarked on writing the essay, Manzoni had responded to the invitation from Turin with an open letter of thanks, explaining his fear that the essay he had in mind ‘sarebbe stata fastidiosamente prolissa per l'Onorevole Comitato a cui era diretta’, and giving the essence of what he wanted to say in a single sentence:

Che la concordia nata nel 1849 tra il giovane Re di codesta estrema parte della patria comune, e il suo popolo ristretto d'allora, fu la prima cagione d'una tale indipendenza, poiché fu essa, e essa sola, che rese possibile anche il generoso e non mai abbastanza riconosciuto aiuto straniero; e essa sola che fece rimaner privi d'effetto gli sforzi opposti della Potenza allora prevalente in Italia, e fatalmente avversa a questa indipendenza.²⁷

(Italics original)

However he rephrased it, Manzoni's claim rested on subjective judgements which by their nature could not be substantiated: ‘la stima e la fiducia reciproca del Re e del paese’; ‘un sentimento concorde’; ‘voluto concordemente e sinceramente’; ‘Apparve sincero […] per la ragione naturalissima, che era tale’. It is true that he had a well-placed informant in his son-in-law Massimo d'Azeglio, Prime Minister of Piedmont in 1849-52, whose letters he was able to quote as evidence of the firm stand which he took in the armistice negotiations with Austria.²⁸ But it is clear that the King did not share d'Azeglio's commitment to constitutionalism,²⁹ and in any case Manzoni's motives for stressing the popular support for the Piedmontese monarchy are plain: in Carlo Alberto he saw a monarch who succeeded, where Louis XVI had failed, in reaching a constitutional agreement with his subjects; this in turn gave Carlo Alberto's son the legitimacy to justify his annexation of the rest of Italy in 1859-60.

In a letter to d'Azeglio in May 1850, Manzoni had joked that his support for the monarchy was purely opportunistic, unlike that of Stefano Stampa, who had always been a convinced monarchist:

E io, vecchio come sono, ho dovuto confessargli che aveva avuta più ragione di me; e ora com'ora la penso come lui; me se spuntasse qualcosa che promettesse di meglio (per ora non pare), volto subito casacca; e allora state freschi: vi farò tanto male, quanto bene vi fo ora, che è una cosa immensa.³⁰

He never did ‘turn his coat’; on the contrary, as I have shown, he claimed at the end of his life to have looked to Piedmont as the source of Italy's renewal for more than half a century. Certainly by 1850 his mind was made up; from then onwards, far from being irresoluto, he seems to have been surprisingly ready to brush any doubts aside in his eagerness to identify with a potential national saviour.

The same readiness to commit himself to a position and thereafter to ignore any difficulties it might raise is apparent in his attitude to another controversial aspect of Italian unification: the position of the Papacy. This is the most surprising implication of his cavalier dismissal of all the governments of Italy except Piedmont as ‘ugualmente irreformabili, per il loro essere molti’; where, for a Catholic like Manzoni, did this leave the Papal State?

As early as 1819-20 he had concluded that the French Church had benefited spiritually from its loss of temporal power at the Revolution:

M'ingannerò, ma credo che quando la Religione fu spogliata in Francia dello splendore esterno, quando non ebbe altra forza che quella di Gesù Cristo, poté parlar più alto, e fu più ascoltata; e almeno coloro che sono disposti a pigliare le parti degli oppressi, ebbero contro di essa un pregiudizio di meno.³¹

It would be reasonable to assume that he extended this principle to the temporal power of the Papacy, and the memoirs of several of his acquaintances record remarks which he made to this effect,³² but he was careful not to commit himself to such a view in print. Again, however, the events of 1848 obliged him to translate the principle into a specific political choice.

The conflict of loyalties between his Catholicism and his patriotism was sharpened by the fact that his friend and mentor, Antonio Rosmini, played a central part in the attempt to enlist the support of Pius IX for a federation of Italian states.³³ In May 1848, at the critical juncture after the Pope's Allocution dissociating his state from the war against Austria, Rosmini wrote to Cardinal Castracane urging him to commit the Papacy unequivocally to the Italian national cause. He made it clear that he started from the orthodox premise that the Pope could not renounce his temporal power:

Non v'ha dubbio che il Sommo Pontefice dee adempire i doveri ad un tempo di Principe temporale e Capo della Chiesa; e sarebbe un manifesto errore il pretendere che gli uni siano inconciliabili cogli altri. Questo è quello che vogliono i tristi, quelli che macchinano di spogliare la Chiesa de' suoi Stati temporali: Pio IX ha giurato di conservarli alla Chiesa; e però dee dimostrare col fatto che quelle due specie di doveri sono conciliabili, che egli sa realmente adempirli nella loro pienezza. Questo principio dee indubitatamente regolare la condotta del Pontefice: non credo che su di ciò possa cadere alcun dubbio.³⁴

Rosmini sent a copy of this letter to Manzoni, asking for his comments; Manzoni replied on 23 May:

Costretto a portare un giudizio, e un giudizio sommario, dico che la lettera mi pare, in tutti i punti essenziali, concludentissima. […] Avrei poche osservazioni minute, e risguardanti piuttosto la forma che la sostanza.

Characteristically, he suggested toning down Rosmini's more forthright expressions; where Rosmini had written that if he failed to support the Italian cause, ‘il Papa perderà tutta la sua riputazione, l'Italia lo esecrerà come Principe temporale’, Manzoni commented that e'secrerà ‘forse è troppo forte’. His other suggestion was even more restrained:

E anche, ma questo forse per mio interesse, quel tristi […] che pare applicabile anche a chi creda che la soluzione definitiva, e probabilmente lontana, possa portare la separazione del poter temporale, per vie e con compensi preparati dalla Provvidenza, e con l'assentimento dello stesso Pontefice.³⁵

Mild though this is (Manzoni clearly counted himself among those whom Rosmini labelled tristi) he makes his own position quite plain, and once more he refuses to be deflected from supporting what he has concluded is the best hope of national unification.

A rare glimpse of the real strength of his feelings about the Papal State is provided by his daughter Vittoria's account of his reaction to the news of Garibaldi's occupation of the Romagna, in September 1860:

Quando in settembre arrivarono le notizie della spedizione di Romagna, papà non stava più in sé dalla contentezza: piangeva, rideva, batteva le mani, gridando ripetutamente: ‘Viva Garibaldi! Viva Garibaldi!’ Nessuno l'aveva mai visto prima, nè lo rivide mai più dopo, in un tale stato di gioiosa eccitazione.

She goes on to give an accurate summary of the view he had expressed in the Morale cattolica:

Papà era convinto che la perdita del potere temporale dovesse essere una misura provvidenziale per la Chiesa, la quale, liberata da ogni cura terrena, avrebbe potuto—credeva lui—meglio esercitare il suo dominio spirituale, e meglio uniformarsi ai precetti del suo Divino Fondatore.

But she then chooses to stress both the unorthodoxy of this position, and—certainly more than Manzoni himself would have done—the strength of his anti-clericalism:

Era nel giusto papà? S'ingannava? Ai posteri … ! Egli stesso, visto l'atteggiamento preso più tardi da Pio IX, dopo il '70, non osava più parlare dello scottante argomento. Ma clericale non fu mai, e ritenne sempre che nessuno meno dei clericali s'ispirasse al Vangelo di Gesù Cristo.³⁶

Manzoni was always more circumpsect. But even if the scottante argomento was taboo, his actions were unequivocal. From 1848 onwards he was committed to the allegiance which led him to accept a Senatorship in the new kingdom in 1860, and four years later to attend the Chamber for the only time in order to vote for the removal of the national capital from Turin to Florence, as a necessary step on the road to Rome:³⁷ even more strikingly, in 1872 to accept the freedom of the city of Rome (in recognition, he wrote, of ‘le aspirazioni costanti d'una lunga vita all'indipendenza e all'unità d'Italia’)³⁸ at a time when many Catholics believed that the capture of the Eternal City had been an act of sacrilege. There is good reason to believe that the year in which Manzoni described himself as ‘un utopista e un irresoluto’ was the year in which he ceased to be either.

Notes

1. Letter of 7 October 1848 to Giorgio Briano; no. 867 in A. Manzoni, Lettere, ed. by C. Arieti, II (Tutte le opere, VII) (Milano: Mondadori, 1970), p. 462.

2. K. Foster, ‘The Idea of Truth in Manzoni and Leopardi’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 53 (1967), 243-57 (p. 246).

3. ‘Ma nel 1827, nel tempo più scuro e feroce della Reazione, quando i preti spadroneggiavano, l'Austria incrudeliva nel Lombardo Veneto, e i nostri tirannelli infuriavano a straziarci, scrivere e pubblicare un libro che loda i preti e i frati, e consiglia pazienza sommessione perdono, significa (il Manzoni certamente non volle questo, ma questa è la conseguenza necessaria del libro) consigliare la sommessione nella servitù, la negazione della patria e di ogni generoso sentimento civile, significa che Dio vuole l'Austria nella Lombardia e nella Venezia, il Duca a Modena, il Papa a Roma, i Borboni a Napoli, e che li vuole per suoi fini che noi non dobbiamo cercare, e li vuole per nostro bene, per farci sofferire e acquistar merito per una vita migliore’ (L. Settembrini, Lezioni di letteratura italiana, 2nd edn, 3 vols (Napoli: Morano, 1877), III, 313).

4. Quoted in A. Cottignoli, Manzoni fra i critici dell'Ottocento (Bologna: Boni, 1978), p. 68. On this Pietro Giannone (1792-1872), see G. Mazzoni, L'Ottocento (Storia Letteraria d'Italia, IX), 2nd edn (Milano: Vallardi, 1934), pp. 726-28; his criticism of Manzoni was published in the Paris journal L'Esule, I (1832), 262-302.

5. ‘Il proclama di Rimini’, on Joachim Murat's proclamation of an independent kingdom of Italy in March 1815, and ‘Marzo 1821’, prompted by the short-lived promise by the young Carlo Alberto of a liberal constitution in Piedmont.

6. N. Ginzburg, La famiglia Manzoni (Torino: Einaudi, 1983), p. 242.

7. See the note to ‘Marzo 1821’ in A. Manzoni, Poesie e tragedie, ed. by F. Ghisalberti (Tutte le opere, I) (Milano: Mondadori, 1957), pp. 854-56.

8. N. Tommaseo's review of the Adelchi in Il nuovo raccoglitore, I (April-June 1825), was reprinted in E. Bellorini, Discussioni e polemiche sul Romanticismo (1816-1826), 2nd edn, 2 vols (Bari: Laterza, 1975), II, 217-61. The first appreciations of the civic virtues of I promessi sposi are expressed in private letters rather than in print: for example, P. Giordani: ‘Gl'impostori e gli oppressori se ne accorgeranno poi (ma tardi) che profonda testa, che potente leva è, chi ha posto tanta cura in apparir semplice, e quasi minchione […]. Oh perché non ha Italia venti libri simili!’ (letter to F. Testa, 25 December 1827); and even Sismondi: ‘Il y avait du génie dans ses Promessi sposi, il y avait en même temps l'exemple du genre de lecture, qui peut, en dépit de la censure, faire l'impression la plus générale et la plus utile sur le public italien’ (letter to C. Ugoni, 11 September 1829, both quoted in G. Sforza, ‘Le prime accoglienze ai Promessi sposi’, in Brani inediti dei ‘Promessi sposi’, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Milano: Hoepli, 1905), II, xxxii-xxxiii, lvi).

9. For the change in published criticism of the novel from the late 1840s onwards, see Cottignoli, pp. 65-82 (‘I Promessi sposi e la critica patriottica’).

10. Published with the title ‘Indipendenza politica e liberismo economico’, in A. Manzoni, Saggi storici e politici, ed. by F. Ghisalberti (Tutte le opere, IV) (Milano: Mondadori, 1963), pp. 707-11; also as no. 862 in Lettere, II, pp. 453-58.

11. ‘Indipendenza politica …’, 5-6; in Saggi storici e politici, p. 708.

12. Letter of 13 September 1848 to Gabrio Casati; no. 861 in Lettere, II, pp. 452-53.

13. Published in Saggi storici e politici, pp. 307-677 (text, pp. 307-567; drafts and fragments, pp. 571-677). From Chapter IV, 25 (p. 358) onwards the text is based on Manzoni's unrevised draft, and is therefore occasionally unclear or inelegant, as well as containing inconsistencies of spelling. References in the discussion which follows are to chapter, paragraph, and page number in this edition.

14. See Saggi storici e politici, pp. 764-68.

15. ‘Della Rivoluzione di Francia nessuno conosceva i più minuti particolari meglio di lui. Non v'era piccolo accidente, ch'egli non sapesse a memoria. Non v'era persona che vi avesse avuta parte, della quale non avesse cercato di penetrare le più intime pieghe dell'animo’ (R. Bonghi); ‘Forse non ci fu opera o opuscoletto sulla rivoluzione francese ch'egli non avesse meditato, al punto che sapeva a memoria il nome di tutti i membri della Convenzione’ (S. Stampa, both quoted in Saggi storici e politici, p. 764).

16. Letter to Stefano Stampa, no. 920 in Lettere, II, pp. 509-10 (12 February 1850). This letter appears to have been overlooked by Ghisalberti in his note on the date of the Osservazioni: ‘Nell'epistolario peccato non si trovi cenno di un antico proposito di scrivere sul grande avvenimento, soprattutto quando il Manzoni ripiegò la mente sua alla considerazione dei grandi fenomeni della storia. […] Il Manzoni ebbe quindi soltanto dopo gli avvenimenti politici che portarono alla unità della nazione italiana, suo sogno antichissimo, l'impulso a fare un esame filosofico, per dirlo illuministicamente, dei due grandi momenti storici’ (Saggi storici e politici, pp. 764-66). Clearly the two ‘grandi momenti storici’ could not be compared until the second had happened, but it is clear that he had studied the events of 1789 some time before 1859.

17. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, edited by Conor Cruise O'Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), pp. 230-31: ‘Is it then true, that the French government was such as to be incapable or undeserving of reform; so that it was of absolute necessity the whole fabric should be at once pulled down, and the area cleared for the erection of a theoretic experimental edifice in its place? All France was of a different opinion in the beginning of the year 1789.’

18. Reflections, pp. 275-76: ‘I can never consider this assembly as anything else than a voluntary association of men, who have availed themselves of circumstances, to seize upon the power of the state. […] They do not hold the authority they exercise under any constitutional law of the state. They have departed from the instructions of the people by whom they were sent; which instructions, as the assembly did not act in virtue of any antient usage or settled law, were the sole source of their authority.’

19. Reflections, p. 126: ‘They have seen the French rebel against a mild and lawful monarch, with more fury, outrage, and insult, than ever any people had been known to rise against the most illegal usurper, or the most sanguinary tyrant. Their resistance was made to concession; their revolt was from protection; their blow was aimed at a hand holding out graces, favours, and immunities. This was unnatural. The rest is in order. They have found their punishment in their success.’

20. S. S[tampa], Alessandro Manzoni, la sua famiglia, i suoi amici (Milano: Cogliati, 1885), p. 440; quoted in Manzoni, Saggi storici e politici, p. 769.

21. See the accounts given by R. Bonghi and G. Rossari of visits to Manzoni in October 1868 and July 1869 respectively, quoted in Saggi storici e politici, pp. 769-70; the discarded drafts of the introduction are printed at pages 571-98.

22. For the original, see Mémoires de Bailly, 3 vols (Paris: Baudouin, 1821-22), I, 261 (entry for 30 June 1789).

23. Reflections, p. 322.

24. Reflections, p. 101: ‘Unquestionably there was at the Revolution [of 1688], in the person of King William, a small and a temporary deviation from the strict order of a regular hereditary succession; but it is against all genuine principles of jurisprudence to draw a principle from a law made in a special case, and regarding an individual person. Privilegium non transit in exemplum. If ever there was a time favourable for establishing the principle, that a king of popular choice was the only legal king, without all doubt it was at the Revolution. Its not being done at that time is a proof that the nation was of opinion it ought not to be done at any time.’

25. Saggi storici e politici, pp. 681-702; for the circumstances in which it was written, see page 808.

26. Saggi storici e politici, pp. 820-21.

27. Letter to Pio Celestino Agodino, in two drafts, letters 1579 and 1580, in Lettere, III, pp. 424-25 (11 February 1873); published in La Gazzetta Piemontese, 13 February 1873. Manzoni then drafted several versions of an ‘Avviso al lettore’ to preface the finished essay, reproducing the substance of this statement (Saggi storici e politici, pp. 815-17), but in the end did not use any of them.

28. ‘L'uomo che, meglio di qualunque altro, poteva conoscere qual fosse, in un tale affare la volontà determinata del re, poiché ne era l'interprete ufiziale, dico il presidente del suo Consiglio, scriveva, nel forte delle trattative, a un amico di confidenza: “Lavoro per convincer l'Europa, che siamo capaci di fare qualunque pazzia [to defend the Statuto]”’ (III, 4, p. 688). The ‘amico di confidenza’ was another of Manzoni's sons-in-law, Giovanni Battista Giorgini; d'Azeglio's letters to him are quoted again in III, 16-17, and 22, pp. 690-91.

29. See the documents cited in D. Mack Smith, The Making of Italy, 1796-1866, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 166-71.

30. Letter to d'Azeglio, no. 937 in Lettere, II, pp. 526-27 (2 May 1850).

31. Osservazioni sulla morale cattolica, ed. by R. Amerio, 3 vols (Milano and Napoli: Ricciardi, 1966), II, 456-57 (Part II, I, 110). Part II of the Morale cattolica was unpublished in Manzoni's lifetime, but Amerio concludes that it was substantially written at the same time as Part I, published in 1819 (Morale cattolica, I, xviii-xxi). In any case Manzoni expressed similar views on the desirability of the Church's shedding its temporal power in letters to Canon Tosi in December 1819 and April 1820 (nos 126 and 133 in Lettere, I, pp. 188-90, 205-08).

32. See, for instance, N. Tommaseo, Colloquii col Manzoni (Firenze: Sansoni, 1929), pp. 160-64, 204; Stampa, Alessandro Manzoni, pp. 146-47, 168-69; and the discussion in F. Ruffini, La vita religiosa di Alessandro Manzoni, 2 vols (Bari: Laterza, 1931), II, 416-40. The relevant extracts are collected in Manzoni, Opere, ed. by M. Barbi and F. Ghisalberti, 3 vols (Milano: Centro Nazionale di Studi Manzoniani, 1942-50), III, 669-77.

33. See K. Foster, ‘Rosmini in 1848-49’, in God's Tree (London: Blackfriars, 1957), pp. 93-101.

34. Rosmini to Cardinal Castracane, 17 May 1848, in Carteggio fra Alessandro Manzoni e Antonio Rosmini, ed. by G. Bonola (Milano: Cogliati, 1901), pp. 95-105 (p. 96).

35. No. 853 in Lettere, II, p. 447 (23 May 1848).

36. M. Scherillo, Manzoni intimo. 1: Vittoria e Matilde Manzoni. Memorie di Vittoria Giorgini-Manzoni (Milano: Hoepli, 1923), p. 138.

37. No doubt Manzoni was also influenced by his belief in the linguistic pre-eminence of Florence (see Tommaseo, Colloquii col Manzoni, pp. 130-31), but that he hoped and expected Florence eventually to give way to Rome is made clear in a letter from Giorgini to his wife, Manzoni's daughter Vittoria, when he accompanied Manzoni to Turin for the Senate vote. D'Azeglio and others were irritated by Manzoni's insistence on recording his vote, and hinted that Giorgini should have dissuaded him, but, Giorgini wrote, ‘Si vede proprio che questi signori conoscono poco Pappà, che ne hanno un concetto molto inferiore a quello che merita, e che per conseguenza si esagerano grandemente il potere della mia influenza su di lui. Dovrebbero sapere che egli è ben chiaro e ben fermo nelle sue idee e nei suoi propositi, e che poche idee ha più chiare e più ferme di quella di volere che si vada a Roma. Per lui è evidente che l'andare adesso a Firenze significa incamminarsi sulla via di Roma, e non saremmo certo capaci nè io, nè Massimo [d'Azeglio], nè Donna Costanza [Arconati], nè altri, di fargli cambiar rotta: ha in testa più fitto che mai il chiodo di Roma, ed è sempre pieno di fiducia che a Roma ci potremo andare col pieno consenso della coscienza cattolica’ (5 December 1864; in Manzoni, Opere, III, 670-72).

38. Letter to the Mayor of Rome, no. 1559 in Lettere, III, p. 412 (28 July 1872).