What were the goals of Giuseppe Mazzini?
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What were the goals of Giuseppe Mazzini?
Transcribed Image Text:**Giuseppe Mazzini: Young Italy**
In 1815, Italy was a fragmented nation. Hapsburg Austria ruled Lombardy and Venetia in the north, and a Bourbon king sat on the throne of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in the south. The duchies of Tuscany, Parma, and Modena were ruled by Hapsburg princes subservient to Austria. The papal states in central Italy were ruled by the pope. The House of Savoy, an Italian dynasty, ruled the Kingdom of Piedmont, which became the cornerstone of Italian unification.
Inspired by past Italian glories—the Roman Empire and the Renaissance—Italian nationalists demanded an end to foreign occupation and the unification of the Italian peninsula. As in other lands, national revival and unification appealed principally to intellectuals and the middle class.
A leading figure in the Risorgimento—the struggle for Italian nationhood—was Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872). Often called the “soul of the Risorgimento,” Mazzini devoted his life to the creation of a unified and republican Italy; he believed that a free and democratic Italy would serve as a model to the other nations of Europe. In 1831, he founded Young Italy, a society dedicated to the cause of Italian unity. The following reading includes the oath taken by members of Young Italy.
**Young Italy is a brotherhood of Italians who believe in a law of Progress and Duty, and are convinced that Italy is destined to become one nation,—convinced also that she possesses sufficient strength within herself to become one, and that the ill success of her former efforts is to be attributed not to the weakness, but to the misdirection of the revolutionary elements within her,—that the secret of force lies in constancy and unity of effort. They join this association in the firm intent of consecrating both thought and action to the great aim of reconstituting Italy as one independent sovereign nation of free men and equals. . . .**
*Joseph Mazzini: His Life, Writings, and Political Principles,* trans. and ed. Emilie Ashurst Venturi, intro. William Lloyd Garrison (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1872), pp. 62, 69, 71–74.
Transcribed Image Text:**Page 2**
**Young Italy is Republican...**
Republican—Because theoretically every nation is destined, by the law of God and humanity, to form a free and equal community of brothers; and the republican is the only form of government that insures this future.
The means by which Young Italy proposes to reach its aim are—education and insurrection, to be adopted simultaneously, and made to harmonize with each other. Education must ever be directed to teach by example, word, and pen the necessity of insurrection. Insurrection, whenever it can be realized, must be so conducted as to render it a means of national education.
Insurrection—by means of guerrilla bands—is the true method of warfare for all nations desirous of emancipating themselves from a foreign yoke. This method of warfare supplies the want—inevitable at the commencement of the insurrection—of a regular army; it calls the greatest number of elements into the field, and yet may be sustained by the smallest number. It forms the military education of the people, and consecrates every foot of the native soil by the memory of some warlike deed.
Each member will, upon his initiation into the association of Young Italy, pronounce the following form of oath, in the presence of the initiator:
In the name of God and of Italy;
In the name of all the martyrs of the holy Italian cause who have fallen beneath foreign and domestic tyranny;
By the duties which bind me to the land wherein God has placed me, and to the brothers whom God has given me;
By the love—innate in all men—I bear to the country that gave my mother birth, and will be the home of my children;
By the hatred—innate in all men—I bear to evil, injustice, usurpation and arbitrary rule;
By the blush that rises to my brow when I stand before the citizens of other lands, to know that I have no rights of citizenship, no country, and no national flag;
By the aspiration that thrills my soul towards that liberty for which it was created, and is impotent to exert; towards the good it was created to strive after, and is impotent to achieve in the silence and isolation of slavery;
By the memory of our former greatness, and the sense of our present degradation;
By the tears of Italian mothers for their sons dead on the scaffold, in prison, or in exile;
By
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