Insights and context on the betrayal of the Risorgimento (Italian unification) and the Carbonari networks, leading into Fascism and its alliance with conservative-monarchist forces that built on eighteenth-century conspiracy to influence mass counter-enlightenment sentiment against republican revolutionary networks. Italian republicanism in the Risorgimento was never a single doctrine but a battlefield of competing visions. Some revolutionaries imagined a unified, centralized nation forged by moral duty and popular sovereignty; and others defended a federal Italy rooted in local liberties and civic autonomy. Between these poles, of Mazzini’s spiritual nationalism and Cattaneo’s secular federalism, the republican tradition took shape, shaping not only the revolutions of 1848 but the political imagination of modern Italy.
This is a complete companion guide to Italian Republicanism and the Transatlantic Indictment of the Early U.S. Republic. This series specifically deals with each section introduced in that essay and introduces more.
- INTRODUCTION: THE ITALIAN INDICTMENT OF EARLY U.S. REPUBLIC — Introduction to the history and betrayal of Italian Republicanism.
- FROM THE CARBONARI TO MORAL REPUBLICANISM AND THE DUTIES OF MAN — tracing the transformation from reactive conspiracy to affirmative moral philosophy grounded in Doveri dell’Uomo.
- THE CATTANEO-MAZZINI DIVERGENCE ON FEDERALISM AND SLAVERY IN AMERICA — expanded treatment of how both men condemned American slavery from different structural angles (unitary vs. federal republicanism), with Cattaneo’s surgical argument that slavery was a royalist remnant, not a federal defect.
- LAJO KOSSUTH’S AMERICAN TOUR AND CONFLICT WITH ABOLITIONISTS — exploration of forgotten moment in American diplomacy on Lajo Kossuth’s cynical refusal to denounce slavery during his 1851-52 American tour vs. Mazzini’s unwavering moral consistency, and what that fault line revealed about European revolutionary movements.
- THE ITALIAN STAGE ON THE HYPOCRISY OF A MODERN SLAVEHOLDING REPUBLIC — on Rota’ Bianchi e neri, Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, satirical journalism, and how Italian audiences laughed at America’s pretensions to freedom.
- GARIBALDI, A HERO OF SOUTH AMERICAN REVOLUTIONS: PRACTICALITY OF REPUBLICAN INTERNATIONALISM — the multi-racial, internationalist context of the Guerra Grande.
- THE TRANSATLANTIC CIRCUIT INFLUENCE ON AMERICAN ABOLITIONIST STRATEGY — Garrison-Mazzini parallels, Fuller’s Roman dispatches, Timothy M. Roberts’s research on Mazzini’s influence on John Brown, and the pathway into Black Republican political thought.
- ITALY’S DIARCHY AND FASCISM’S BETRAYAL DESTROYS REPUBLICAN INHERITANCE — the Rosselli assassinations, the outlawing of Masonic networks, and how the monarchist-conservative line triumphed over the Mazzinian tradition.
- LOST CIVIC FAITH FROM WASHINGTON TO MAZZINI: REPUBLICANISM AS DIVINE IDEAL — describing the philosophical displacement of republicanism in the world, why Washington and Mazzini refer to republicanism as a divine ideal entrusted to the association of peoples, its fight against theocracy, and the argument that this republicanism is foundational, not foreign, necessitates revival, and belongs most urgently to those for whom its promise was most violently betrayed.
- CONTEST OF PRINCIPLES: REPUBLICANISM VERSUS PIEDMONTESE MONARCHISM — The Revolutions of 1848, the Roman Republic of 1849, and the monarchist triumph’s long shadow.
- CONCLUSION: AFFIRMATION OF THE YOUNG ITALY IDEAL AND ITS NECESSITY FOR RENEWAL — Young Italy and the Republican Vision — Affirmation of the Ideal and the Necessity of Its Renewal.
- REFERENCES — refer to Conclusion on The Young Italy.
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“Your first duties — first as regards importance — are, as I have already told you, towards Humanity. You are men before you are either citizens or fathers. If you do not embrace the whole human family in your affection; if you do not bear witness to your belief in the Unity of that family, consequent upon the Unity of God, and in that fraternity among the peoples which is destined to reduce that Unity to action; if, wheresoever a fellow-creature suffers, or the dignity of human nature is violated by falsehood or tyranny — you are not ready, if able, to aid the unhappy, and do not feel called upon to combat, if able, for the redemption of the betrayed and oppressed — you violate your law of life.”
— Giuseppe Mazzini, Dei Doveri dell’Uomo (On the Duties of Man), 1860.
INTRODUCTION: THE ITALIAN INDICTMENT OF AMERICA
There is a stubborn myth in American political culture, so deeply embedded as to function almost as civil religion, that the United States invented republican government for the modern world and that its constitutional order represents the highest expression of the republican idea. This myth survived the compromise with chattel slavery written into the Constitution itself. It survived the three-fifths clause. It survived the Fugitive Slave Act. It survived a century of racial terror that followed formal emancipation. It survived because the myth was never seriously challenged from within on its own philosophical terms, not in ways that could not be dismissed, deflected, or absorbed.
But from without, from the vantage point of Italian republican philosophy in the nineteenth century, the challenge was devastating, and it was philosophically irrefutable.
The argument of this essay is that the most coherent, morally rigorous, and structurally complete definition of republicanism produced in the nineteenth century was not American but Italian. It was the work, above all, of Giuseppe Mazzini, who through Dei Doveri dell’Uomo (On the Duties of Man) and the manifestos of Giovine Italia (Young Italy) transformed what had been a reactive, conspiratorial, internally contradictory, and loosely defined republicanism, one defined merely in opposition to monarchy, into an affirmative moral architecture grounded in universal human duty. This systematization made it structurally impossible to claim republican legitimacy while excluding any portion of the human family from its protections. The U.S. slaveholding republic was not merely imperfect in Mazzini’s framework. It was disqualified.
What makes this argument more than an exercise in intellectual history is its consequences. The Italian republican indictment of American slavery was not confined to philosophical treatises. It was staged in theaters, debated in newspapers, performed in ballets, dissected in political correspondence, and most critically absorbed into the political visions of Black Americans who recognized in Mazzini’s universalism and the Enlightenment era’s scientific racist reconfiguration of classical notions to justify the slave trade, a weapon that the American constitutional republican tradition, with its original compromises, could never provide. The transatlantic circuit connecting Garibaldi to South America and Mazzini’s Rome to Garrison’s Boston to the freedmen’s political organizations of the Reconstruction era is one of the most consequential and least understood intellectual networks of the nineteenth century. This history has been adapted into a narrative of the “International Left,” or within the frameworks of Socialism, Marxist-Leninism, Communism, etc. The narrative depicts Mazzinite republicanism as a failure to the delight of Marx and Engels, which absorbed the failure of 1848 republicanism as a necessary prelude to the rise of Socialism and eventually Communism.
The “Old Right” of the nineteenth-century such as the monarchists, clerical conservatives, landed elites, and reactionary liberals, though for different reasons, wanted all revolutionary currents to fail, whether they were Mazzinian republicans, Marxists, socialists, or communists.
To trace that circuit, we must begin where previous essays have ended: with the Carbonari and the secret societies that preceded Mazzini, and with the profound transformation Mazzini brought upon their inheritance.
This is a shortened companion to Italian Republicanism and the Transatlantic Indictment of the Early U.S. Republic but also is a guide to The Carbonari Movement: Its Revolutionaries and the Birth of Italian Republicanism and God and the People: Mazzini’s Divine Ideal, the Carbonari Networks, and the Republican Struggle Against Throne and Altar.
