by Lucy Riall
In Britain, historians have noted the emergence of leader cults, of ‘democratic leading men’ like Ernest Jones, Feargus O'Connor, John Bright and William Gladstone, who sought to become ‘romantic heroes in a political melodrama of their own scripting’.32 The process was reciprocal. That is, in this period, the whole spectacle of politics – elections, revolutions, mass demonstrations and political leaders – along with the police, the law, crime and trials, was tapped by writers and dramatists as a colourful and popular source for fiction and poetry.33 At the same time, the wide spread of political information, and especially the use of photography and biography to promote a cult of political celebrity, could induce feelings of intimacy and indeed ‘voyeurism’ in the public in relation to its leaders.34 Thus publishing and theatre, and especially the new methods and genres of mass-circulation literature and drama, helped create a new ‘community’ of political leaders and their public. It is not surprising that, as part of this transformation of political culture, political events like Italian unification became occasions for mass entertainment. Conflict in the Italian peninsula was re-narrativised as popular melodrama, and the main protagonists were recast to resemble the heroes and villains of historical and adventure novels.
An Italian reading public?
Unfortunately for our purposes, much less is known about reading in Italy during this period. One probable reason for this lacuna is that Italy lagged behind northern Europe in terms of both literacy and public education, so that at the time of unification rates of illiteracy were still high (around 75 per cent of the total population), and there was a considerable and apparently increasing regional variation (53 per cent in Lombardy–Venetia and more than 86 per cent in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1861; 22 per cent in Lombardy and 79 per cent in Calabria forty years later). Women, moreover, had much higher rates of illiteracy than men (76 per cent compared to 62 per cent in 1871, with over 90 per cent illiteracy in the rural South).35 Although efforts had been made by the pre-unification states to educate the population, with some positive results especially in Austrian Italy, it was only in 1859 that the principle of general public education was established in law, with the Piedmontese legge Casati, which became an Italian law after unification. Even then there was political disagreement about the value of mass education, there was a lack of trained teachers and there were no clear provisions for making education compulsory.36
Still, perhaps the most obvious and serious obstacle of all to the creation of an Italian reading public was that most people spoke a series of regional dialects which could (for instance, in parts of southern Italy) be very different from literary Italian. French or the local dialect were more widely spoken than Italian in Piedmont (both Cavour and the Piedmontese king spoke much better French than Italian). According to one estimate, there were around 600,000 Italian speakers at the time of unification, that is, about 2.5 per cent of the total population.37 Nevertheless, these figures should be treated with some scepticism. Dialects spoken in central Italy, and in Tuscany and parts of the Papal States in particular, were very similar to literary Italian, so that the actual figure for ‘Italian’ speakers may be closer to three million people, or between 10 and 12 per cent of the population. In much of Italy, moreover, Italian was the official administrative language; the 1861 edition of a Baedeker guide to northern Italy also advised tourists that in order to profit from their stay, it was ‘essential to familiarise yourself at least a bit with the Italian language’.38 Hence the presence of Italian as a language, especially in urban areas, means that a larger percentage of people would have understood Italian when spoken and read aloud to them.39
It is evident that many of the conditions that produced mass-media print elsewhere were relatively lacking in much of Italy.40 High internal and external barriers to trade impeded the arrival and development of new print technology, publishers were slow to embrace techniques of mass production, modern transport networks (notably railways) developed only bit by bit, and the traditionally rigid division – and thus lack of contact – between city and countryside persisted right through the nineteenth century. For all these reasons, reading and the formation of public opinion in Italy was a more regionally based and elitist affair than in many parts of northern Europe. These restrictions had a clear impact on the spread of a sense of imagined community within the peninsula.
Nonetheless, the publishing industry in Italy was at the forefront of political change. Despite the closed markets maintained during the Restoration era, publishers (print-capitalists) challenged press censorship, pressed for the dismantling of internal barriers to trade, and sought government measures which would create a national market in Italy as a means of increasing demand for their goods and boosting their profits. For the same reasons, and even if their distribution networks were circumscribed, publishers were also probably one of the first groups in Italy to establish a more or less national network of contacts.41 Furthermore, writers, journalists and editors – along with some artists and scientists – effectively constituted a good part of the ‘public sphere’ in Restoration Italy. From the eighteenth century onwards, it was they who had negotiated new public spaces and established a degree of autonomy for themselves from the centres of political power. After 1815, and despite the harsh constraints of press censorship, it was through the associations and publications of such autonomous intellectuals, scientists and artists that ideas of liberalism and national identity were first circulated and debated. Many of them (Vieusseux, Gioberti, Cattaneo) were publishers as well as writers. Publishing companies in Florence and especially Milan produced a large number of newspapers and periodicals;42 and in Milan there was also a fairly substantial sector devoted to women's magazines.43 Radicals were not idle either. As we know, Mazzini was a writer and journalist in Genoa before he became involved in politics, and a constant part of his and his followers' activity consisted in establishing publishing offices and printing presses, and engaging with the practical business of publishing, editing, selling and distributing newspapers, periodicals and books.
Thus, while there may have been no national, liberal public sphere in pre-unification Italy comparable to that in parts of northern Europe, this problem was recognised by nationalists and liberals and resolving it became a political objective which united all sections of progressive opinion.44 Equally, there was a growing, if still restricted, middle-class market for books in nineteenth-century Italy, and there were publishing ‘crazes’ in Italy as there were elsewhere. For instance, some political books – Gioberti's Primato, Balbo's Speranze – became instant sellers, with large numbers of editions being produced in a short period of time. Banned books – Mameli's poems, General Pepe's memoirs – could become cult classics; while other works – the novels of Guerrazzi, D'Azeglio and Manzoni, the poetry of Foscolo – were constant sellers throughout the whole period. Young educated Italians, men and women, read just as voraciously as their counterparts in northern Europe. As Alberto Banti has sought to show, much of their preferred literature was of a ‘national–patriotic’ inspiration, and the reading of it united this generation and created among them a sense of imaginary community.45 Publishing and reading, in other words, helped to create and define the Risorgimento.
If the creation of an Italian reading public was difficult before unification, there was a vibrant associational culture. From the end of the 1830s gentlemen's clubs began to open their doors to a wider public and were joined by a plethora of other associations, such as reading clubs, scientific and statistical societies, agrarian associations, arts and craft organisations and traditional coffee houses. Such clubs were concentrated in the cities of northern and central Italy and they were still quite exclusive institutions: unlike the salons of the eighteenth century, they did not admit women; and often they were not interested in philanthropic activities and did little to reach out to the poor and uneducated. Nevertheless, they constituted a public sphere of sorts. They provided a space where male members of the new elite and
the traditional nobility could meet, socialise, read and talk, and they helped to form the basis of a new political class.46
Equally, the importance and popularity of cultural activities which were less restrictive than reading or joining clubs should not be underestimated. Theatre, and in particular opera, played precisely the kind of ‘nationalising’ role otherwise largely lacking in Risorgimento Italy. The popularity of opera and melodrama led to a wave of theatre construction in major cities and small towns, and these theatres created a recognisable and uniform public architecture across Italy. Theatres could become alternative civic spaces where a diverse and otherwise segregated public could mingle, or at least could come closer to doing so. The music itself was a powerful vehicle for the popularisation of romantic themes such as oppression, betrayal, struggle and redemption and – most obviously in the Verdi operas – these could be linked to episodes or moments in Italian history. And, whatever the composer's original intentions, during the 1840s and thereafter a section of the liberal public seized on and publicised such music as an example of the growing patriotic spirit in Italy. In this way, both the theatres themselves and the performances in them helped construct an imagined Italian community. Theatrical performances provided a space where people could share responses to the same experience, and not just in one theatre but in repeat performances in theatres throughout the Italian peninsula.47
A great deal also changed in Italy during, and as a result of, the 1848–9 revolutions, and subsequently during the 1850s. Partly through the publication of newspapers, the revolutions had given a great boost to the formation of national and nationalist public opinion in Italy. In the aftermath, the nationalist publishing boom continued through the proliferation of memoirs and the appearance of pamphlets and other polemics in print. The centre of public opinion also shifted. As the only Italian state not to reimpose press censorship, and with the only government committed both to dismantling barriers to trade and to improving the transport infrastructure, Piedmont – especially the cities of Turin and Genoa – began to assume the cultural hegemony in Italy previously enjoyed by Milan and Florence. The expansion of cultural life in Turin manifested itself in an unprecedented proliferation of art, literature, clubs, music and theatre, which gave the royal capital an openness and vitality it had hitherto largely lacked. But this expansion was most obvious, and most clearly political, in the publication of numerous newspapers and periodicals. In the fluid and rapidly changing political circumstances of 1850s Piedmont, it was through newspapers, as much as – if not more than – in parliament, that political affiliations were created, altered and maintained. The offices and printing works of daily papers and other periodical and ephemeral publications provided political meeting places and a space to make political contacts, and it was in the pages of these publications that political debate was carried out, and public opinion was formed and kept informed. An added stimulus, and a new national character, to the publishing industry in Piedmont was provided by the influx of political exiles from elsewhere in Italy, many of whom were writers, journalists and/or publishers seeking contacts and gainful employment in their new home; and these people were partly responsible for invigorating cultural life there during the 1850s.
No paper in Piedmont had a large circulation. The daily with the biggest sales, La Gazzetta del Popolo, had a maximum of 10,000 subscribers in the early to mid-1850s; La Concordia closed due to financial problems in early 1850 with only 1,500 subscribers; and the explicitly Mazzinian Italia e Popolo had under 1,000 subscribers. But the sheer number of titles produced suggests that the sector was dynamic in cultural terms. An estimated 117 periodicals were published in Piedmont in 1853, of which fifty-three were in Turin and eighteen in Genoa; in 1854, some thirteen daily papers were published in Turin alone. These figures are all the more worthy of note if compared to those in the other states in the Italian peninsula: in 1857–8, Lombardy–Venetia produced sixty-eight periodicals, Tuscany produced twenty-seven, Rome only sixteen and the whole of the South around fifty.48 The expansion of the reading public and the publishing industry in Piedmont provided a very vivid contrast to the situation prevailing in the rest of Italy. The openness of Piedmont could be compared to the closed conditions in the Papal States and the South, where the Bourbon government's determination to control and isolate its subjects from the effects of liberalism was equated to enclosing them within a ‘Great Wall of Naples’, and press censorship was likened to a form of collective imprisonment.49
Italy in public opinion
Despite the elitist character of the reading public in Piedmont, the press affirmed and strengthened Piedmontese leadership in the nationalist struggle. Just as nationalists looked increasingly to the Piedmontese government and army for practical help in the 1850s, so nationalist discourse permeated political debate by identifying itself with the moderate liberal or Piedmontese leadership. Nationalists sought ever greater contact with a broader reading public and in the 1850s the political impact of Italian nationalism grew ever greater, thanks largely to a series of carefully orchestrated press campaigns in Piedmont and elsewhere. Yet, although the public sphere became more nationalist, nationalism itself became more moderate. The political meaning of nationalism was transformed, even as its metaphors, symbols and rituals remained apparently the same; at least part of the discourse became less revolutionary, more respectable and more associated with material progress and the Piedmontese monarchy. Here the Italian experience provides a striking contrast to that of Britain (and the USA), where the broadening of the public sphere led to diversification and radicalisation.
At the centre of this nationalist transformation were the press campaigns organised by the National Society, which was itself born out of writing, publishing and other associational activities. Its two leaders, Daniele Manin and Giorgio Pallavicino, had been brought together by press activity aimed at raising the profile of the nationalist question. Campaigns included the ‘one hundred cannons’ subscription to raise money for the fortifications of Alessandria (on the Lombard–Piedmont border); an attack on the presence of Swiss mercenaries in Naples; and a protest against anti-Italian stereotypes in George Sand's La Daniella.50 During 1856, from his base in Paris, Manin developed contacts with some thirty Italian newspapers and saw to it that articles with a nationalist slant or which discussed national issues were published; these were then cross-published and/or commented on in other papers. With Pallavicino, and especially with Pallavicino's money, he began to publish flyers and pamphlets containing their letters and essays in print runs of between 300 and 3,000 copies. From Turin, these publications were posted to friends, sold in shops or simply left at café tables, clubs and theatres; they found their way in large numbers to Tuscany and the Papal States, and they were also circulated in Lombardy–Venetia, among exiles in Switzerland, Belgium and England; they even reached readers in the USA, Algiers and Malta. In 1857, Pallavicino and Manin acquired direct control of a newspaper – Giuseppe La Farina's Il Piccolo Corriere d'Italia – whose news items became dedicated entirely to promoting the issue of national unification and to persuading nationalists outside Piedmont of the necessity of endorsing Piedmontese leadership.51
It was this coordination of press activity and journalistic production which led directly to the formation of the National Society in August 1857. Thereafter, Il Piccolo Corriere assumed a vital role as the crux of the party's operations; as Grew puts it, ‘the life of the National Society was centred in the written word’.52 The Society's secretary Guiseppe La Farina published instructions for the formation of local committees in the paper, as well as more sensational articles attacking the Austrians and papal misrule. He also gave considerable space to Orsini's anti-Mazzinian letters and statements. A significant portion of each issue was devoted to stories from outside Piedmont which emphasised how bad life was in the rest of Italy. Complaints about the repression in Modena, rumours of the wealth of Cardinal Antonelli in Rome, revelations of the abuse of Jewish children by cle
rics (notably the notorious Mortara affair)53 and, most common of all, details of the atrocities in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies were all regular items in Il Piccolo Corriere and became part of the accepted narrative of moderate Italian nationalism. The Society also continued to publish pamphlets, which stressed more than ever the benefits of unification for Italy and the need for every Italian to be a nationalist.
Although the evidence is relatively scarce, the Society's message seems to have been widely advertised. Il Piccolo Corriere reached a circulation of 4,000 and about 12,000 copies of La Farina's Credo Politico were circulated; the latter was incorporated into student songs in Pavia. More broadly, the Society's activities – the circulation of pamphlets, posters and printed images; the promotion and reporting of patriotic slogans and public demonstrations – seem to have contributed significantly to the wave of nationalist (and anti-Austrian) enthusiasm which swept the towns and cities of the Italian peninsula in early 1859. Through its publishing activities, in other words, the National Society played a crucial part in creating and maintaining a common nationalist outlook among its members and adherents, and in presenting ‘a simple picture of Italy on the threshold of unity, preparing to fight beside Piedmont’.54 It was to have a central organisational and propaganda role in the events of 1859–60.
