Anti-Catholicism and the Culture War in Risorgimento Italy [PDF]

10 Anti-Catholicism and the Culture War in Risorgimento Italy Manuel Borutta

The culture wars of the nineteenth century affected all aspects of European societies:· politics and religion; .media, arts and science; private and public sectors; urban and rural areas; upper and lower classes; men and women; and adults and children. What was at stake in these conflicts was the place and meaning of religion: while liberals strove to differentiate between politics and religion in public and private spheres, democrats and radicals wished to replace faith by knowledge. Various religious denominations - Protestant, Jewish and Catholic - fought against secularization and for the political and public character of the Church and religion, asserting the supremacy thereof over state and science. As Europe's public religion par excellence, Catholicism was at the heart of these debates: the pope incarnated the fusion of temporal and spiritual power. Catholic rituals and symbols dominated public space, and ultramontanism openly challenged the rationalist project of modernity. 1 In Italy, this conflict was particularly fierce. Not only did it cause a culture war, but also a 'real' war between the nation and the papal state, and it divided society into secularist (bourgeois, male, urban) and Catholic (clerical, female, rural) blocks. These divisions have been preserved in two scholarly worlds which until today remain largely distinct from each other. 2 Ironically, for a long time neither camp perceived the Italian case as a proper culture war. 3 The anti-]esuit campaign of the 1840s, the conflict between state and Church in Piedmont after 1848, and the Risorgimento's struggle for Rome, were considered independently of another, and not as elements of one culture war (perpetuated after 1870). The latter was understood as an exclusively Prussian or German phenomenon and identified with Bismarck's fight against the Catholic church after 1871. 4 Anti-Catholicism was an important feature of the Italian culture war. But due to various reasons among which the country's image and selfperception as essentially Catholic, it was underestimated and, to some extent, hidden by the term anticlericalism'. 5 Recent interventions have dramatized the Italian culture war and demonized the Risorgimento's 1

191

192 Manuel Borutta

anti·Catholicism. By exaggerating the violence of the conflict, 6 reproducing anti~Masonic conspiracy theories and confining the Risorgimento to a teleology, which stretches from Reformation intolerance to the totalitarianism of the twentieth century/ they continued the culture war of the nineteenth century and, therefore, did not succeed in changing the dominant para· digm. 8 Against these tendencies to disregard or mystify the phenomenon, I want to suggest an analytical use of the term 'anti-Catholicism'. In this chapter, I will reconstruct the radicalization of the Italian culture war and explain the anti-Catholic turn of the Risorgimento after 1848. 1 will highlight the anti-Jesuitism of the 1840s, the culture war in post-revolutionary Piedmont, the representation of the Catholic clergy in different media and the Risorgimento's battle for Rome.

Anti-Jesuitism in Italy, 1843-1848 In the beginning, the Risorgimento seemed to live in harmony with Catholicism. There was 'a powerful, liberal Catholic movement in the Italian Church, partly influenced by the French reformer de Lan1menais and led by theorists like Rosmini and Lambruschini. They argued for reforms in Church-state relations and (in Lambruschini's case) the introduction of religious liberty'.9 Many men1bers of the clergy supported the project of national unification. 10 The abbe Vincenzo Gioberti's Del prirnato morale e civile degli italiani (1843), a neo-Guelph vision of an Italian confederation under the presidency of the pope, was the most popular text of the Risorgimento. For Gioberti, 'a union of eighteen centuries' had brought Italy and the Holy See together as a family: just as the pope lived physically in Italy so diet Italy 'live spiritually in the pope'. 11 When the new pontiff, Pius IX, introduced liberal refonns in the Papal States, he seemed to incarnate these neo-Guelph aspirations and encouraged the hope of a symbiosis of the Italian nation and the Catholic religion. 12 Then, however, Gioberti's Prima to was criticised by prominent Jesuits like Luigi Taparelli d'Azeglio, and the nation became 'the subject of a vigorous debate within Catholic intellectual circles [ ... J about the respective roles of Church and nation as the principal source of political sovereignty'. 13 In this debate, Gioberti depicted the Jesuits as the most dangerous enen1ies of the Italian nation and Catholic religion. In the second edition of his Primato (1845), he described the Society of Jesus as a source of evil that negated bourgeois values and male virtues, incarnated the antithesis of friendship, tnarriage, fa1nily and fatherland, and destroyed the human species. 14 To Pier Dionigi Pinelli (later Piedmont's minister of the interior), Gioberti wrote: l hope, my dear Pierino, that we will crush the Fathers in every way. This hope keeps me alive. I hate the Jesuits (in a political way) like Hannibal hated the Romans. ls

Culture War in Risorgimento Italy

193

Anti-jesuit sentiment was easy to mobilize in nineteenth-century Europe because since the Enlightenment there had been a strong popular and elite tradition of suspicion and scapegoating of the Society. 16 During his exile, Gioberti had witnessed successful anti-jesuit campaigns in Brussels, Paris and SwitzerlandY In Il Gesuita moderno (1846), a tract of five volumes totalling approximately 3000 pages, whose second edition saw a print run of 12,000 copies, he attacked the Jesuits as a political sect that wanted to destroy both Italy and Catholicism. Gioberti called them 'bodily sisters' of Austria and warned his readers about an 'Austro-jesuitical faction'. He bor· rowed notions from botany and epidemiology to describe the Society of Jesus as a threat to the nation, one that had to be eradicated. 18 In 1848, Gioberti travelled to Rome three times in order to persuade the pope to suppress the order. But in April, his battle was lost: Pius IX rejected the prospect of a papal presidency over a federation of Italian states and refused to wage war against Austria. 19 A year later, Gioberti's writings were put on the Index librorum prollibitorurn, together with those of Antonio Rosmini and Gioacchino Ventura. Liberal Catholicism was marginalized within the Church.20 Yet outside the Church, Gioberti's anti-jesuit campaign had already been joined by journalists, novelists and cartoonists who depicted the Fathers as enen1ies of progress, civil society, nation and mankind. 21 In January 1848, the Jesuit Francesco Pellico, a brother of the Risorgimento writer Silvio Pellico, wrote to the Piedmontese king, Carlo Alberto: 'Journals and libels [libelli] wage war against us'. He demanded the tightening of censorship and the banning of a new edition of Gioberti's Gesuita, but without success. 22 After a series of anti-Jesuit manifestations and riots during the revolution of 1848-49, the Society of Jesus was expelled from most parts of Italy and formally banned from the kingdom of Sardinia. 23 The anti-Jesuit law, extended to Italy in 1866 and to Rome in 1873, violated important principles of the Piedmontese constitution (religious freedom, inviolability of property). 24 It was, however, both emancipatory and repressive at the same time. The banishment was also legitimated with ideals of individual freedom: it was depicted as a 'liberation' of the Jesuits from their strict obedience. 25 According to the ex-seminarist Aurelio Bianchi-Giovini, they could render themselves useful as priests, professors or missionaries and get in touch with human society without blushing. 'They would not be Jesuits any more, but human beings'. 26

Anticlericalism in Piedmont, 1850-55 Since anti-Jesuitism worked with conspiracy theories and metaphors of infec. tion, it seemed logical to extend the aggression towards other religious orders and the clergy in general. An important step from anti-Jesuitism to anticlericalism was the culture war in the kingdom of Sardinia. Pre-revolutionary

194 Manuel Bortttta

Piedmont has been called a 'modern theocracy'. 27 In February 1850, the relation between state and church changed fundamentally. The minister of justice, Giuseppe Siccardi proposed a bill for the suppression of the separate system of church courts and the legal immunity enjoyed by the clergy, and the extension of state control over certain ecclesiastical property. Breaking with tradition/ Siccardi did not try to gain the approval of the Holy See for this action. 28 The Siccardi Laws provoked massive protests by the Catholic clergy and press. Il Giovinetto cristiano depicted Siccardi as a 'minister of the devil'. Yet Siccardi did not see himself as anti-Catholic, but 'just/ defined Catholicism differently: as a merely spiritual affair- an understanding that was/ however, not shared by most Catholics. 29 They caused a break between the liberals and Catholic moderates, but were cheered by the liberal and democratic press as a turning point in Piedmont's history. Cartoonists showed the minister as a modern Hercules who smashed the clerical hydra and a bourgeois Jupiter/Moses whose Tablets of the Law struck the clergy like a lightning bolt ('Let there be light!'), associating this light with the Genesis and with the Enlightenment at the same time. 30 In the years that followed, anticlericalism became a mass movement in Piedmont. 31 The press was the driving force behind this developtnent. Piedmont's rnost important daily, La Gazzetta del Popolo, established a column called 'Black Sack' (Sacco Nero), that reported stories of clerical misconduct in Italy/ Europe and the world on a daily basis. The clerical sins were many. In the year 18541 they included: fake miracles; violent repressions against believers, atheists and people of different faiths; crimes against the state; theft; sexual excesses, and capital crimes such as the abandonn1ent, sexual abuse and murder of children. The paper reported rumours, charges, arrests, criminal proceedings and convictions, but never acquittals of clerics. Local anticlerical groups used this information to encourage verbal slander and attacks on individual clerics. 32 In October 1852 the bishops forbade the reading of La Gazzetta del Popolo because it was 'intended to corrupt the morality and faith of believers', 33 but it was too late: Genoa/s radical satirical magazines -La Strega, La 1\1aga, Fra Burlorze, L'Inferno and Il Dinvolo Zoppo had already joined the campaign. In these magazines, the transition between anticlericalism and antiCatholicism was fluid: public and emotional forms of piety, such as processions/ miracles and Marian apparitions, were interpreted as expressions of superstition, clerical manipulation and fanaticism. 34 The pope's antinational turn of 1848 was also responsible for this anti-Catholic turn. For example/ La Gazzetta del Popolo had taken up a neo-Guelph position before, but when journalists realized that the pope/s denial of the nation was definitive, they started to distinguish between 'liberals/ and 'Catholics/ and to attack Catholicism. They supported the anticlerical policy of the Piedmontese government/ campaigned for the partial separation of state and Church, the introduction of civil marriage, the military recruitment 1

Culture War in Risorgimento Italy

195

of seminarists, the secularization of schools and the abolition of religious orders. Religion was recast as a private affair, and public forms of Catholic piety were attacked as idiocy. 35 The cholera epiden1ic of 1854-5 in Genoa, in which 6,500 fell ill and 3,500 died, generated further arguments against Catholicism. First, the measures taken to deal with the epidemic were the subject of a controversy involving representatives of religion, science and the media. While conservative priests interpreted the cholera as a divine punishment for liberal church policy, 36 the Gazzetta tried to disperse popular suspicion against physicians, and declared the battle against the errors concerning cholera to be a 'sacred war'. Due to their 1ignorance' many sick people avoided medical help. 'Free and Protestant countries', the Gazzetta claimed, had not been troubled by the cholera. The paper's editors, Alessandro Borella and Giovanni Battista Bottero, were physicians, and they mobilised contagionist and miasmatic theories against Catholic rituals, warning against church meetings, as they presented environ1nents where there was excessive heat and 'unclean air'. They also blamed the epidemic on the barefoot believers of Naples, who undertook processions and scourged themselves. 37 Pietro Betti, who coordinated the cholera defence in Livorno, later supported the hypothesis that there was a connection between collective religious rituals and the increase of the cholera. An epidemiologist argument against Catholic processions was born. 38 After the climax of the epidemic, the aggression of the press turned towards the monasteries. Like anti-Jesuitism, antimonasticism was a radical undercurrent of anticlericalism. The question of religious houses also had a longer history in Italy. 39 For those who vilified them, the attack could be part of a general campaign for modernization and efficiency. From a progressive viewpoint the monastic life seemed to be harmful in two ways: it inhibited the economic and demographic growth of the nation, because the members of the order neither reproduced (apart from illegally) nor worked (in a bourgeois sense). 40 In order to arouse the anger and the envy of the people, La Maga contrasted 'the house of the poor' with the convents, depicting a desperate father with his ill mother, his wife in childbed and two scared children, while monks and nuns were gorging, drinking and loafing (Figure 10.1). The Gazzetta proposed transforn1ing the monasteries into hospitals, and in the summer of 1854 Minister of Justice Urbana Rattazzi evacuated some of them. When the epidemic subsided, the Gazzetta suggested the confiscation of convents whose land had been usurped by 'useless inhabitants who were doing harm to useful jnhabitants'.41 In November 1854, Rattazzi and Cavour presented a draft law for the suppression of religious orders 42 that provoked a bitter debate in parliament. The left criticized the exceptions for orders that provided public education or charitable assistance, while the conservatives opposed the bill as a 'communist' and 'revolutionary'

196 Manuel Borutta

Figure 10.1

'The house of the poor I The monasteries', La Maga 16.8.1854

interference in ecclesial structures. Sessions were disturbed by tun1ults and interrupted by calls to order. Meanwhile, outside parliament thousands of people prayed in the churches for the continuity of the orders. The exiled archbishop of Turin, Luigi Fransoni, condemned the government's hatred of the clergy. Pius IX threatened the supporters of the law with excommu~ nication.43 The chamber received petitions with around 100,000 signatures against the law (this in a country where only 54,000 people had voted in the elections). Yet according to Cavour, these opponents were only 'persons, masses', who were not represented legally: willing tools of the clergy who only served to demonstrate how necessary the law really was.44 Following this line of argument, Il Fischietto published a cartoon depicting a Jesuit using a child's hands to sign a petition (although the Jesuit order had been banned in 1848!). 45 Despite the resistance of the court, the law was passed by the chamber in March 1855 and - like the Jesuit law of 1848 - extended to Italy in 1866 and Rome in 1873. 46 The Piedmontese abolition of orders has been attributed to the state's lack of money, 47 to legal traditions 48 and to Cavour's alleged Machiavellianism. 49 It cannot be ignored, however, that the prime minister was also driven by anti~monastic feelings: in 1828,. during his 'conversion' to rationalism, he becan1e aware of the story of a monk charged with murder who hid in a

Culture War in Risorgimento Italy

197

convent in Ventimiglia, and after one month of siege, had to be released due to a legal error. After this experience, Cavour started to collect newspaper articles on clerical offences: he called the monasteries a 'source of ignorance, superstition and poverty' or 'leprosy'. 50 In parliamentary debates, he pointed out that the 'immobile', 'useless or harmful' orders hindered progress in science, the arts, industry and agriculture, because, instead of educating, they preserved 'old traditions' and circulated 'legends', driving the poor to beg. With rcga rd to Protestant and Catholic states in Europe, Cavou r appl icd a 'mathematical formula' saying that the economic prosperity of these societies was inversely proportionate to their number of monks. 5 1 Not all liberals agreed: Cavour's elder brother, Gustavo, rejected the suppression of the orders as illiberal. 'True liberalism', he stated, would tolerate different lifestyles, 52 but after this plea for tolerance, Gustavo Cavour no longer belonged to the liberal camp. The overwhelming majority of the liberals saw no contradiction between liberal principles and the banning of orders. On the contrary, like the anti-Jesuit law, the abolition of the orders was interpreted as liberation of the friars and sisters, enabling them to return to a natural way of life.

Anticlerical media and representations Anticlerical media - including novels and pamphlets, daily newspapers, satirical magazines and cartoons -were a crucial agent of the Italian culture war. 53 The opponents of the anti-Monastic law in Piedmont called the papers Risorgimento, Opinione, Unione, Voce, Diritto, Espero and Gazzetta del Popolo the 'new power holders' of the kingdom. 54 And, indeed, these newspapers had influenced parliamentary debates and decisions. Some of them were even personally represented in the chamber. Lorenzo Valerio, the editor of the left liberal Concordia, said that he was in possession of numerous letters fr01n monks and nuns begging the legislator for deliverance, and he summoned his colleagues: 'Make them human beings, make them citizens!'55 The radical left priest Giuseppe Robecchi justified the suppression of the orders with all the 'crimes that you know'; he accepted t]le information in the newspapers' crime registers as given. When he described nuns as being 'buried alive' and wishing for nothing but 'resurgence' in 'the society and in the family', he referred to the 'traitor of Monza'. According to Robecchi, the counter-petitions of the nuns just proved the 'moral violence' that was used against these 'miserable creatures'. For him, the nuns had no chance to express their free will as long as they lived in a convent. 56 When Gustavo Cavour also referred to Manzoni's novel by praising Padre Cristo{oro as a positive counterexample, Angelo Brofferio, the editor of the Messaggiere Torinese, hit back with accounts of the 'horrible deeds' of the 'real' criminal Padre Marengo, offering a synthesis of the contemporary anticlerical discourse. According to Brofferio, 'individual acts' of clerical virtue were nothing

198

Manuel Borutta

compared to the 'indecent and infamous acts' of the clergy. Clerical education was 'poison' because it opposed progress, the fatherland and freedom: Brofferio demanded the eradication of the 'vicious, infected plant' from its 'root', called the convents eternal enemies of 'Italian freedom', denounced the papacy as an obstacle to Italian unity, and urged the expropriation of the church. 57 Due to its omnipresence in the media, anticlericalism was not confined to short-tern1 can1paigns, but became a constant companion of Italian politics and society. Risorgimento anticlericalism operated within a much longer tradition. 58 Yet it also combined a set of relatively new secular values and liberal-democratic principles that were shared by all forces of the Risorgimento: the belief in the nation and in universal progress, ideals of individual autonomy, a bourgeois work ethic and generative heterosexuality as the natural way of life. The media was instrumental in circulating these values . The genres and models, themes and stereotypes, narrative, visual and discursive strategies of anticlerical representation were transferred from other countries, especially from France. Denis Diderot's La Religieuse (1760) coined the modern European genre of the convent novel; Eugene Sue's Le fuif errant (1845) created a model for anticlerical serial novels; while Grandville's (1803-47) anticlerical cartoons, published in satire magazines like Le Charivari (1832), influenced cartoonists throughout Europe. 59 The appearance of new media also influenced the ways in which the culture war was waged: while the ages of Enlightenment and Romanticism had been don1inated by novels, the 1840s were governed by pamphlets and tracts. After 1848, anticlerical representations appeared regularly in daily newspapers and weekly journals read by middle class males; satirical magazines and cartoons also reached the illiterate. They touched upon questions of everyday life, such as the confessional, spiritual welfare, the education of children, marriage and burial and portrayed the clerics as hypocrites, idle and lascivious - always willing to break self-imposed rules and incapable of morality. A traditional -medieval and Christian - mode of anticlerical representation was profanation, which accused the ministri del culto of living by double standards, by breaking their vows and committing capital sins. For example, If Fischietto of Turin represented the temporal power as 'Pandora's new box'. Priests, monks, Jesuits, bishops, and the pope were depicted as the incarnation of the seven deadly sins: envy (invidia), lust (lussuria), wrath (im), gluttony (gola), sloth (accidia), pride (superbia), and greed (avarizia) (Figure 10.2). While such profanation simply inverted traditional Christian virtues and clerical rules, anticlerical representations also referred to modern principles. An important 'political' theme was the autonon1y of the subject and the clerical 'influence' on children, pious women and the masses. Clerics were described as perfect manipulators of the human mind and soul. In 1855 La

Culture War in Risorgimento Italy 199

Figure 10.2 'Open the new box of Pandora, and the seven capital sins will come out!', AQ IJ Fischietto 104 (1862), in: Giovanni Spadolini, Le Due Rome. Chiesa e Stato fra '800 e Ple '900, Firenz&h975, figure 23.

eh• wh

th( nu is

Maga from Genoa showed a fanatical monk preaching to women and children from a pulpit. His teeth are those of a preying beast, he has the eyes of a zealot, and his loud and violent flood of words incites the audience against the Risorgimento. 60 A frequent target of attacks was the confessional. According to anticlerical rhetoric, the father confessor violated the intimacy of the penitent and invaded the private sphere, even after the confession: female penitents were expected to execute clerical orders in their respective families. In 1872, the Roman daily newspaper La Capitale warned its male readers about marrying pious women: Any tnan, who marries such a woman, marries her confessor. And one immediately senses his presence in the home. You will not be able to eat what you want; you will have terrible fights every Friday and Sunday about fasting. (...] You will have no more secrets; your wife's confessor will know everything that goes on in your house [...] he will even know what you do ... in your bedroom! 61

cm

200

Manuel Borutta

Another n1ajor- also classical- theme of the media was clerical sex crimes.62 Priests, monks and nuns were regularly accused of breaking the vow of chastity. Novels, pamphlets, romanzi d'appendice, daily newspaper chronicles and cartoons displayed clerical sexuality of all kinds including heterosexuality and hmnosexuality, onanism, sadism, sodomy and paedophilia. Since women were supposed to be under the influence of the clergy, priests were portrayed as living in a paradise of endless sexual opportunities without obligations. Convents were depicted as prisons that violated human nature and produced sexual deviation and madness. Gender differences were important here: while monks appeared as monsters, who were unable to improve, nuns were imagined as victims who should be liberated and transformed into 'useful' mothers and wives. The well-established topic of the unhappy lives of nuns63 was updated in La Monaca di Monza, the most popular character of Alessandro Manzoni's novel, I Promessi Sposi (1827- 40). Although the author - who in 1810 had 'converted' from an agnostic to a Jansenist, liberal form of Catholicism had left out the liaison dangereuse between the abbess Gertrude, distraught by her involuntary life of monasticism, and the critninal Egidio - a story described in detail in the original version, Fermo e Lucia (1823)- he had provided enough information to stimulate the imagination of a public that was already familiar with convent novels, a favoured genre of the Enlightenment and the Romantic, which narrated the decline of individual clerics into melancholy, madness, murder and suicide.64 La Monaca di Monza soon became a favoured subject of painters, novelists, criminologists and psychoanalysts. 65 The monacazione forzata (forced monasticism), a common social practice in nineteenth-century Italy,66 was also visualized in cartoons. In 1853, La Maga portrayed a sad young lady who was forced by her heartless family to take the veil (Figure 10.3). Even more sophisticated was the /body language' of anticlerical cartoons. The manifold types of clerics were represented in stereotypical ways: Jesuits appeared as sinister, tall and thin; monks as fat and dull; young nuns as lovely, and old nuns as careworn and imperious (see figures 1-4). In general, the clerical way of life was represented as unnatural, and deleterious to civil society and individual clerics. The vows and practices of obedience, poverty, celibacy, asceticisrn, contemplation and enclosure were depicted as violations of human nature that inevitably lead to abnormal physiognomies and deviant, perverted or mad behaviour. In this way, the media also tried to define human nature and to enforce a bourgeois way of life.

Anti-Catholicism as Orientalism Prominent liberals were aware of the consequences when they declared Rome the capital in 1861. The 1Roman Question', according to Cavour, 1Stirred 200 million Catholics, I would say: the whole world'. 67 The Risorgimento's claim

Culture War in Risorgimento Italy 201

Figure 10.3 'Spontaneity of certain Monacazioni', La Maga 21.7.1853

on Rome and the pope's insistence on maintaining his temporal power played crucial roles in radicalizing the Italian culture war. The 'Roman Question' was the unique peculiarity to this conflict, as it connected the struggle for the place and meaning of religion with the territorial aspects of building a nation-state. The curia responded to its de-territorialization with a dogmatic and political counter-attack. In the Syllabus of 1864, Pius IX condemned liberalism and other modern 'errors'; in 1870, the dogma of "Papal Infallibility" was promulgated; after the loss of Rome, the pope depicted himself as the 'prisoner of the Vatican'. In 1874 he forbade Italian Catholics to take part in national elections. 68 The Risorgimento's decision to make Rome the national capital was not self-ev.ident, as Italy, the land of the cento citta, had no obvious power centre and federalism remained an option among democrats and liberals until the 1860s.69 The obsession with Rome has, thus, often been explained by reference to a national myth of the city, which was traced back to the Middle Ages. 70 In teality, this myth was a mainly modern and transnational phenomenon that arose from asymmetric power relations between Europe and 'subaltern' Italy. Edward Said's Orientalism71 has often been criticised for drawing a monolithic ('Occidentalist') image of the West. 72 However, the book has also

202

Mam~el Borutta

inspired historians to analyse asymmetric relations within 'the West'. This is especially true for Roman Catholicism and for Italy, both of which have been 'orientalized' by European writers since the Enlightenment: excluded from the universal process of history and civilization, and explicitly associated or identified with 'the Orient' albeit with qualifications.7 3 The European orientalization of Rmne began during the Enlightenment. French travellers like Charles de Montesquieu, Fran~ois Petit-Radel and Charles Dupaty depicted the Papal States as a stronghold of begging and indolence, superstition and pomp, promiscuity and malaria. They attributed these defects to the popes' temporal power and described the dominium temporale as despotic and anachronistic, similar to that of Asian autocracies. Many authors argued for a radical reform or dissolution of the Stato Pontificio.l4 The Enlightenment critique of the Papal States had an anti-Catholic bias insofar as Catholicism was considered to be a static religion incapable of development - in contrast to dynamic Protestantisn1. Catholicism was also made responsible for the alleged 'amorality' of the Italian people. ln his extremely influential Histoire des republiques italiennes du moyen-age (1807-18), the Genevan scholar Simonde de Sismondi explained Italy's decline with the influence of casuist Catholicism that had feminized and corrupted the national character.75 Sismondi's Histoire prepared the ground for the longMlasting tropes of the 'baneful effects' of Roman Catholicism and the 'lack' of a Protestant Reformation in Italy. 76 By contrast, European Romantics, such as Lord Byron and Alphonse de Lamartine, recast this Orientalist discourse by celebrating Rome as a museum, ton1b and ruin. They conceived the city- like Catholicism- as a fascinating other of modernity. 77 [n this period, the Roman ruins also became the object of intense scientific research and aesthetic reflection: thus, Rome was not allowed to change. Meanwhile, the cultural and religious life of the 'indigenous' inhabitants was ignored, described with colonial categories or simply perceived as annoying. In a letter to Goethe, Wilhelm von Hurnboldt, the Prussian representative at the Holy See, ironically threatened to leave Rome if there ever was a good pope.78 Italian patriots were forced to confront this Orientalist image of their nation when they lived in exile or travelled abroad. 79 In his book, Delle Speranze d'Italia (1844), the moderate liberal Cesare Balbo summed up Europe's two options for Italy in this way: 'From outside we were confronted with two extreme claims: to change everything, and to preserve everything'. 80 So, how did Italian patriots react to this contradictory call to action? And, how did they try to regain the power of defining the past, present and future of their own nation? In his novel, Clelia (1870), Giuseppe Garibaldi offered an answer to this question. The hero, ll Patriota, encounters an English lady who is moaning about the current state of the country: 'Italy, formerly known as the home of glory, is now a puddle of corruption. Italy, the garden of the world, has

c.:ulture War in Risorgimento ltalr

203

become a scrapheap!' The ltalian patriot agrees: 1A dishonoured nation is a dead nation. I- even I - despair of the future of such a nation'. Later on, in a public speech, he turns the image of Italy as a dead nation against those who are its gravediggers: Death to the priests! [ ... ] Who deserves to die more than this wicked sect which has turned Italy into un paese di morti (Lamartine), into a cemetery?[ ... ] I feel disgusted by the blood!! But I don't know if Italy will ever free itself from its tyrants of body and soul without destroying them, without annihilating the very last scion! 81 Garibaldi's reference to Lamartine exemplifies the Risorgimento's creative handling of the Orientalist discourse on Italy. Recently, 'the patriots' partial acceptance or internalization of certain stereotypes of Italy's inhabitants that had been circulating in Europe at least since the mid-eighteenth century' has been stressed: 'Italian patriots intensely felt the burden of outsiders' representations and often spoke with parameters that were not their own making'. 82 Yet the European orientalization of Italy also offered options for nationalist action. Italian patriots turned this discourse not only against Southern Italy after 1848, 83 but also against papal Rome. Like Italy as a whole, the Eternal City was excluded from the process of history and from the progress of modern civilization. In this discourse, Rome was often perceived as a kind of Pars pro toto of the nation: static and unable to develop. Since Italy was pronounced dead in Rome, the national ris01ximento (resurrection, regeneration) 84 had to take place there. By demanding the city of the pope, the patriots tried to refute Italy's orientalization. They hijacked the Orientalist discourse on Italy, turned it against papal Rome and transformed the European diagnosis Rorna e morta into the nationalist slogan Roma o morte.

Giuseppe Mazzini made what was probably the most effective use of these topoi (ruin, grave, and cemetery) in the European discourse on Rome. His idea of a Third Rome' (Terza Rorna) of the People, which would supersede the 1 Rome of the Caesars' and the 1 Rome of the Popes', re-sacralized the secularist discourse on Rome. In his appeal, Ai Giovani d'Jtalia (1859), Mazzini portrays Rome as the grave of a glorious past from which a subterranean murn1ur of life can be ·h eard. He also describes generations who are awaiting a mighty fiat to resurrect themselves and repopulate the abandoned places. He then summons Italian youth to kneel down before, and adore, Rome, the heart of their nation.ss Mazzini's idea of a modern 1 Rome of the People' that succeeded 'medieval' papal Rome responded to the European orientalization of Italy. Since Italy had been declared dead in Rome, it had to regenerate in Rome in order to prove its national agency. Thus, Europe's orientalization of Italy was turned against papal Rome, while the myth of Rome inspired many Italians to join 1

204

Marwel Borutta

the national movement. 86 As triumvir for the Roman Republic, Mazzini sent approxirnately a thousand soldiers to their deaths in 1849- they were outgunned by the French troops. Later, he justified this sacrifice by claiming that he had wanted to restore the Italians' belief in (the future of) Rome: The Italians had almost Jost the religion of Rome, they began to call it a grave, and so it seemed like one. [...] Doomed and contemplating the future, we had to offer up our morituri te salutant for Italy from Rome.87 The sacrifice was seen as such: the dead became national martyrs, and the Eternal City was transformed into a primary object of national desire. The image of 'dead' Rome also helped to delegitimize the Papal States in international politics. At the Congress of Paris in 1856, Piedmont's prime minister, Cavour, declared the papal regime incapable of reforming itself and vulnerable to revolutions. He proposed a separation of the Stato Pontificio into a secular and a religious territory on the grounds that the pope's regime posed a constant threat of disorder and anarchy. 88 After the Mortara affair of 1858, which further weakened the reputation of the Patrimonium Petri in Western public opinion, 89 French pamphlets disputed the legitimacy of the pope's temporal power. The attacks were relentless: Edmond About compared th e Papal State!:> to a Pharaoh's grave, suffocating everything underneath. Arthur de La Gueronniere alleged that the pope's regime was incapable of reforming due to the rigidity of Catholic dogma.90 English attacks on the papal temporal power were driven by a fervent antiCatholicism that strongly influenced diplomatic relations with Italy.91 In Italy, the progressive press portrayed the culture war as a struggle between anachronistic and ridiculous, Catholic forces and the forces of light, nature and time: cartoons showed clerics trying to stop locomotives, the symbols of progress. The papal railways that had been established by the same pope in 1856 were absent from these pictures. The fundarnental change and 'selective modernity' of the (new Catholicism',92 which also changed Rome by transforming the city into the global centre of Catholicism, were ignored. In 1868 Milan's Spirito Folletto published a caricature of a train heading for a donkey cart. The donkey- a metaphor for the people- is wearing blinkers: the cart is surrounded by a flock of sheep- a metaphor for the believers. We can see the pope in the cart trying to stop the train with the insignia of his power (the tiara and the papal cross) and the banner of the Vatican Council. On the locomotive we see a female allegory of the liberal arts and a worker holding a banner with 'Science - Progress - Future' written on it. He is shouting at the pope: ,Go away! Clear off, for I cannot divert the train!' Here, progress was imagined as a natural force that would inevitably sweep away the church and its believers. Time, itself, seemed to be on the side of modernity (Figure 10.4).93

Culture War in Risorgimento !tal)'

205

Figure 10.4 'Go away! Clear off, for I cannot divert the train!', Lo Spirito Folletto 381 (1868)

A closer look reveals the 'pope' as a straw man with Jesuits hiding behind

it. In this way, anti-Jesuit conspiracy theory was used to explain the antilib-

eral 1 turn' of Pius IX - and the blind obedience of the faithful. The papal regime was also associated with Oriental tyranny. The Babylonian captivity of the Israelites in Giuseppe Verdi's opera Nabucco, which premiered in 1842 in Milan, was understood as an allegory of despotic 'foreign' (Austrian, papal and Bourbon) rule over Italy. Temistocle Soclera, the neo-Guelph librettist of Nabucco, had depicted Zaccaria, the 'high priest of the Jews', as an inflexible religious leader. After the suppression of the Rimini revolt in 1845, Massimo D'Azeglio denounced the treattnent of political prisoners by papal courts, accusing the pope of condemning his subjects to backwardness and poverty.94 Goffredo Mameli versified about Rome: 'Where once upon a time the Caesars had a universa l Empire, the priests hold hun1an thought in slavery.' 95 In 1861, Cavour compared the pope's personal union of temporal and spiritual power with that of Constantinople. 96 The freethinkers' organ called papal Rome not only the 'new So do m', but also 'Babylon'.97 The Kabyle uniforms of the papal Zouaves gave occasion to associations between Catholicism with Islam. 98 In 1855 Il Fischietto, from Turin, cited a fictional dialogue between two Piedmontese soldiers, who remark that veiled 'Turkish ladies, if you look at their clothes, are all nuns, but less bigoted'. 99

206 Manuel Borutta

The message of these texts and images was clear: there was an anachronistic regime and foreign power at the heart of the nation, alien to Italy and to the Occident1 a regime that had to be eliminated to liberate the nation and to guarantee the universal progress of mankind. As the radical freethinker and republican, Alberta Mario, remarked in 1867: A disarmed Church is not a dead Church. It has to be decapitated in Rome. Therefore, freedom of conscience and war against the enemy! Constant, irreconcilable, mortal war, for the c1vilization of Italy, for the civilization of the worldJI 00 Even if Mario's wish was not granted, the liberation of Rome from papal rule became one of the main objectives of the Risorgirnento, uniting democrats and liberals, radicals and moderates, and republicans and monarchists. Legitimated by Orientalist discourse and exalted by the vision of a Third Rome, the papal state, the oldest state in Europe, was reduced to the Vatican City. However, the decision to make the Eternal City the future capital of the nation-state exacerbated the conflict with the Catholic Church and became a heavy burden for liberal Italy after 1870.

Conclusion The culture war in Risorgimento Italy has been disregarded by historians for a long time. The anti-jesuit campaign of the 1840s, the conflict between state and Church in post-revolutionary Piedmont, and the Risorgimento's struggle for Rome cannot be considered independently of one another: they must be seen as elements of one culture war. This culture war started within Catholicism as a conflict between liberal Catholics and Jesuits over the meaning of religion and over the relationship between the nation and the Catholic religion in particular. After the pope's antinational turn in 1848, the patriots' aggression turned against the Catholic Church and religion . The progressive press started to attack the Catholic clergy and specific forms of Catholic piety. The mutual hostility was radicalized by the Piedmontese culture war in the 1850s and the struggle for Rome, causing a series of con· flicts between Italy and the papacy after 1860. Although the conflict was moderated on various - private, local, informal - levels, it split the country into clerical and secularist blocks and was not resolved officially unti] 1929 when the Church finally recognized the nation state in the Lateran Treaties. Anti-Catholicism was increasingly important in this conflict. 101 It may be true that most patriots were of Catholic confession and did not consider themselves as anti-Catholic, even if they clashed with the Church. The Risorgimento's attack on the papal temporal power was ~upporteci by liberal conceptions of Catholicism as a private or spiritual affair. Liberal

Culture War in Risorgimento Italy 207

Catholics argued that the loss of the Papal States could also liberate the pope and the Church, enabling them to concentrate on 'spiritual' affairs. Yet despite these important nuances, the well-established term {anticlericalism' (including anti-curialism, anti-Jesuitism and anti-monasticism) is both too narrow and too general for the phenomenon under consideration, for several reasons. First, like Sismondi and other enlightened and progressive European intellectuals, many Italian patriots tended to see Catholicism as a general obstacle to Italy's economic and cultural development. By contrast, they portrayed Protestantism as a dynamic confession that was compatible with freedom, progress and modernity. Second, many Italian democrats and liberals did not attack the religion and the clergy of other (e.g. Jewish, Anglican or Waldensian) denominations, but turned themselves almost exclusively against the Catholic clergy. In this sense, they were neither anticlerical nor antireligious, but anti-Catholic. 102 Third, conspiracy theories and metaphors of infection produced a slippage between anticlericalism and anti-Catholicism. Since the media depicted the Catholic Church as a vertical organization, with the Jesuits and the pope on top, bishops, priests, and monks in the middle, and the believers on the lowest level receiving their orders from above, Catholicism appeared as a machine of clerical command and laical obedience. Recent studies have shown that this image did not conform to the complex reality of Catholicism. Rome was never able to control everything, and the 'new' Catholicism of the nineteenth century was influenced by numerous initiatives from the peripheries and from below. 103 Yet the faithful were often represented as dull or fanatic executors of clerical will. Catholic rituals were suspected of hiding political clerical intentions and subverting the order of the new liberal state. During the cholera epidemic in Genoa, processions and Holy Masses were depicted as contagious, and the people were warned not to attend. Central aspects of the Catholic religion -miracles, processions and apparitions- were attacked as expressions of superstition, clerical manipulation and fanaticism. In this way, Italian anticlericalism was intrinsically linked to anti-Catholicism. Therefore, the latter has to be taken more seriously in both Catholic and secularist Risorgimento historiography, and is far too important to be left to revenant culture warriors.

Notes I wish to thank the editors of this volume and the anonymous referee for their comments of earlier versions of this article. T am also grateful to Kate Maye-Saidi for editing the text. 1. C. Clark and W. Kaiser (eds), Culture Wars. Secular-Cat11olic Conflict in NineteenthCentury Europe (Cambridge, 2003); M. Borutta, Antikatholizismus. Deut.schland und Italie11 im Zeitalter der europaischen Kulturkamp{e (GOttingen, 2010), 13-16.

208

Manue/ Borutta

2. On this div~de, see L. Riall, 'Martyr cults in nineteenth-century Italy', Journal of Modern History, Vol. 81 (2010), 256. Recent studies by historians of Catholic Italy include G. Formigoni, L'Italia dei cattolici. Fede e nazione dal Risorgimento alia Repubblica (Bologna, 1998); A. Acerbi (ed.), La Clliesa e f'llalia. Per ww storia dei toro rapporti negli ultimi due secoli, (Milan, 2003); F. Traniello, Religione cattolica e stato nazionale (Bologna, 2007). For the secularist camp, see, for example, E. Tortarolo, Jl Laicismo (Rome, 1998). 3. The title of R. Lill and F. Traniello (eds), ll 'Kulturkampf' in Italia e nei paesi di lingua tedesca (Trento, 1993), is misleading insofar as the Italian contributors of this volume do not consider the Italian conflict as a proper culture war. The first synthesis of the Italian culture war emphasizes the limits of the conflict: see M. Papenheim, 'Roma o morte: culture wars in Italy', in Clark and Kaiser, Culture Wars, 202-26. For a different interpretation, see Borutta, Antikatholizismus. 4. The 'Iron Chancellor' was mythologized as a 'titan' who challenged the papacy. F. Chabod, Storia de/la politica estera italiana dal 1870 al 1896 (Bari, 1962), 232. See Ibid., 228, 255. Left-wing libeJ:'als admired 'his' Kulturkampf, but rejected a similar operation at home. G. Verucci, 'Anticlericalismo e laicismo negli anni del "Kulturkampf'", in Lill and Traniello, Kulturkampf, 60-3. In contrast to this 'sublime' original, the Italian 'epigones' appeared trivial. For instance, Giovanni Battista Varnier wrote that while Bismarck and Garibaldi both waged a battle against the church, the latter did not represent the culture war, but a 'low pro~ file' anticlericalism. Varnier, Aspetti della politica ecclesiastica ilaliana negli anni del consolidamento dello Stato unitario, in Ibid., 222. 5. Italian anticlericalism was often interpreted as a marginal phenomenon of radical groups, separate from mainstream liberalism. Yet, despite this tradition, the latter only dissociated itself from anticlericalism after 1900, when socialists and anarchists took over their domain. Before, anticlericalism was a common denominator for all progressive forces of Liberal Italy, whether bourgeois or popular, democratic or liberal, moderate or radical. The anticlerical campaigns of radicals and rationalists, freethinkers and socialists contributed to Italy's partial secularization after 1848. See G. Verucci, L'Italia laica prima e dopa l'unita (1848-1876). Anticlericalismo, libero pensiero e ateismo ne/La sociela italiana (Rome, 1996 edn)i A. Lyttelton, 'A n Old Church and a New State. Italian Anticlericalism 1876-1915', European Studies Review, Vol. 13 (1983), 225-48; ].-P. Viallet, Anticlericalisme en Italie, 8 vols., (Paris, 1991); Manuel Borutta, 'La "natura" del nemico. Rappresentazioni del cattoliceslmo nell'anticlericalismo dell'ltalia liberale', Rassegna storica del Risorgimento, Vol. 58 (2001), 117-36. 6. The ex-marxist historian Ernesto Galli della Loggia maintains, first, that Italian nation-building was unique because it was directed against the Church, which ignores the culture wars of the Iberian Peninsula. Second, he states that Italian collective identity was defined by the incompatibility of nation and religion this, however, does not hold true for Catholic concepts of the nation. Third, he maintains that there was a '"real" civil war' between Catholics and non-Catholics, which disregards the fact that there was very little bloodshed in 1870, and that the Papal States were mainly defended by transnational volunteers. Galli della Loggia, 'Liberall, che non hanno saputo dirsi Cristiani', Il Mulino, Vol. 42 (1993), 855-66. 7. A. Pellicciari, Risorgimento da riscrivere. Liberali e massoni contra la Chiesa (Milan, 1998); eadem, L'Altro Risorgimento. Una guerra di religione dimenticata (Casale Monferrato, 2000); eadem, Risorgimento anticnttolico. La persecuzione del/a Chiesa /Zelle Menzorie di Giacomo Margotti (Casale Monferrato, 2004).

Culture War in Risorgimento ltaly

209

8. Against recent attempts to continue the culture war of the nineteenth century and to attack the Italian concept of 'laicita', see F. Traniello, F. Bolgiani and F. M. Broglio (eds), Stato e Chiesa in Italia. Le radici di una svolta (Bologna, 2009). 9. Riall, Cults, 264. On liberal Catholicism, sec F. Traniello, Da Gioberti a Moro. Percorsi di una cultura politica (Milan, 1990); Formigoni, Ttalia, 23-9; Papenheim, Roma, 202-4. 10. E. Francia, '"ll nuovo Cesare e la patria''. Clero e religione nellungo Quarantotto italiano', in A. M. Banti and P. Ginsborg, I/ Risorgimento (Turin, 2007), 423-50. 11. Excerpt from Del primato morale e civile degli Italiani (1843), in A. M. Banti, !I Risorgimento italiano (Turin, 2004), 192-3. 12. A. Ara, 'La fase liberale e riformatrice di Pia IX (1846-1848)', in T. Heydenreich (ed.), Pius IX. unci der Kirchenstaal in de11 fahrm 1860-1870 (Erlangen, 1995), 9-25; Banti, Risorginzento, 92. 13. Riall, Cults, 264. On the Gioberti-Taparelli debate see Traniello, Religione, 71-88i Gioberti, 43-62. On the general role of the Jesuits in the Risorgimento, see D. Menozzi, 'I gesuiti, Pio IX e la nazione italiana', in Banti and Ginsborg, Risorgimento, 451-78. 14. V. Gioberti, Prolegomeni del primato morale e civile degli italiani (Brussels, 1845), 143. 15. A. Monti, La Compagnia di Ges~i nel territorio del/a provincia torinese, vol. 5 (Chieri 1920), 41.

16. There is no up-to-date study of modern Italian anti-Jesuitism. For eighteenth century France and Germany, see the respective chapters in Geoffrey Cubitt, Tl1e Jesuit Myth. Conspiracy Theory and Politics in Nineteenth-Century France, Oxford 1993 and R6isin Healy, The Jesuit Specter in Imperial Germany, Boston 2003. 17. See V. Gioberti, If Gesuita moderno, 5 vols (Lausanne, 1846-7), vol. 1, 371-417. On some of these campaigns, see G. Candeloro, Storia dell'Italia nzoderna, 11 vols (Milan, 1974), vol. 2, 387-9, vol. 3, 93-S. 18. Gioberti, Gesuita, vol. 3, 1-69, 526, 588; vol. 4, 104- 6, 378-380, 385. On the number of copies, seeP. Stella, 'Cultum e associazioni cattoliche tra la Restaurazione e il 1864', in Levra, Storia, 513. 19. The Papal Allocution is published in D. Mack Smith (ed.), The Making o( Italy, 1796-1866 (London, 1988), 151-2. On the pope's anti-liberal and antinational 'turn', see G. Martina, Pio IX (1846- 1850) (Rome, 1974), 225-54; G. Rumi, Gioberti (Milan, 1999), 61-78. 20. Martina, Pio IX, 180-9, 547-8. 21. See Vemcci, Italia, 13-4; Stella, Cultura, 512. 22. Cited in A. Monti, La Compagnia di Gesu nelterritoriu del/a provi11cia torinese, vol. 5, (Chieri, 1920), 78. 23. G. Griseri, 'Soppressioni 1848'1 in Dizionario degli Istituti di Per(ezione [DIP], vol. 8 (Rome, 1988), 1862-1865. 24. Nevertheless, the Jesuit order continued to operate in the Kingdom of Italy and remained powerful within the church. The Statuto Albertino proclaimed

that Catholicism was the religion of the state, but tolerated other cults. On the emancipation of religious minorities in Italy see G. L. Voghera, 'Italian Jews', in R. Liedtke and S. Wendehorst, The emancipation of Catholics, Jews and Protestants: minorities and the nation state in nineteenth-century Europe (Manchester, 1999), 169-187; G. P. Romagnani, 'Italian Protestants', in Ibid., 148-68. 25. Atti del J>arlamento Subalpino [APS} Discussioni 8.6.1848, 125 (Leopoldo Bixio), 17.7.1848, 372-3 (Alessandro Bottone), 18.7.18481 378 (Francesco Sulis),

210 Manuel Borutta

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34.

35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

20. 7.1848, 410 (Lorenzo Valerio). On the parliamentary debate, see also Pellicciari, Risorgimento, 16-20. Bianchi Giovini, Prediche, vol. 1, 14. G. Zaccaria, Die Genesis von Cavours Forme/ Ubera Chiesa in libero Stato (Aarau, 1919), 34. Briacca, Rossi, 59-90. G. Briacca, Pietro de Rossi di Santa Rosa- Giuseppe Siccardi- Camillo Benso di Cavour. Cattolici riformatori tm regalismo e liberalismo (Verona, 1988), 60 fn. 5. La Strega 13.4.1850; Fra Burlone 4.3.1850. R. Romeo, Cavour e il suo tempo, 3 vols, (Rome and Bari, 1977-84) vol. 2/2, 440; Verucci, Italia, 37. Gazzetta del Popolo [GdP] 26.1., 15.2., 4.3., 7.3., 17.3., 23.3., 27.3., 29.3., 31.3., 10.4., 21.4., 28.4., 8.5., 11.5., 18.5., 21.5., 26.5., 18.6., 24.6., 30.6., 2.7., 6.-7.7., 9.7., 7.9., 1854. S. Ferrari, Legislazione ecc/esiastica e prassi giurisprudenziale. Gli abusi dei ministri di culto tra laicizzazione della normativa e confessionismo della magistratura (Padova, 1977), 72 fn. 124. Fra Burlone 29.3., 5.4., 15.4., 19.4., 22.4.1850; La Strega 6.10.1849, 20.4., 6.6., 27.6., 16.7., 25.7., 27.7., 10.9., 8.10., 12.10., 5.11., 28.11.1850; La Maga 26.2., 13.3., 25.3., 13.4., 19.6., 5.8., 11.8., 13.11., 20.11., 16.12.1852, 27.1., 3.3., 31.5., 16.6., 19.7., 8.4., ll.4., 13.4., 20.6., 23.6.1 853, 27.6., 6.7., 11.7., 15.7., 22.7.1854; Fra Burlone 29.3., 5.4., 15.4., 19.4., 22.4., 2·6.4., 29.4., 9.5 .1850; ll Diavolo Zoppo 17.5.1850; I:Inferno 12.6., 14.6., 19.6., 21.6., 21.7.1850. B. Gariglio, 'La "Gazzetta del Popolo" e l'anticlericalismo risorgimentale', in Anticlericalismo, pacifismo, cultura cattolica nella publicislica tra i due secoli (Turin, 1984), 20-1; G. Talamo, 'Stampa e vita politica dal1848 al1864', in U. Levra (ed.), Storia di Torino, vol. 6, La citta neT Risorgimento (1798-1864) (Turin, 2000), 569. Vgl. GdP 9.7., 21.7., 1.8.1854. GdP 1.8., 5.8., 24.8., 26.8.1854. P. Betti, Sui eo/era asiatico che contristo la Toscana durante l'invasione colerica degli anni 1854-55, voL 5, Firenze 18-58, 87-8, 91, 117-8, 141, 217-8, 219, 705. In Venetia, for example, the Republic had waged an intermittent struggle against them, culminating in the Tron reforms of the 1760s (the most radical anticlerical reforms of eighteenth-century Europe). Both the Austrians and the French satellite municipality made further attacks on the orders, and then all religious houses were closed by Napoleon and Bovara in 1810. I thank the anonymous referee for drawing my attention on these earlier events. In 1850, La Strega thus proposed making 'a clean sweep of all the dormitories, refectories and purgatories' and suggested opening the monasteries. According to the magazine, virgi.ns were praying for redemption from their 'useless' lives behind the convent gates. These 'doves' actually only wanted to see their home again and to bear children. All monks and nuns should 'go home' and look for a husband or a wife. La Strega 8.10.1850. GdP 13.9., 20.12.1854. APS Documenti, vol. 3, 1631-1640. R. Romeo, Vita di Cavour (Rome and Bari, 1984), 293. Pellicciari, Risorgimento, 161. ll Fischietto 17.3.1855. G. D'Amelio, Stato e Chiesa. La legislazione ecclesiastica fino al 1867 (Milan, 1961), 100-6; G. Griseri, 'Soppressoni 1855', in DIP, vol. 8 (Rome, 1988), 1865-9; G. Martina, 'Soppressioni 1866', in Ibid., 1872-5.

Culture War in Risorgimento Italy 47. 48. 49. SO.

51. 52. 53. 54. SS. 56. 57. 58.

59.

60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65.

66.

67. 68.

69. 70. 71.

211

P. Stadler, Cavour. It-aliens liberaler Reichsgriinder (Munich, 2001), 97-8. D'Amelio, Stato. Romeo, Cavou.r, vol. 212, 792. Ibid., vol. 1, 302-3, vol. 212, 788; Pellicciari, Risorgimento, 108; D'Amelio, Stato, 45 -6. APS Discussioni, 17.2.1855, 2574-6, 2864-6. Ibid., 9.1.1855, 2590-1. On the following, see also Borutta, Natura; Antikatholizismus, 155-239. APS Discussioni, 9.1.1855, 2590-1, 2594 (G. Cavour); 11.18SS, 2616 (De Spine). Ibid., 23.2.1855, 2952-4. Ibid., 22.2.1855, 2940-2. Ibid., 10.1.1855, 2598-2601. On medieval and early modern anticlericalism in Italy, see Silvana SeideiMenchini, Characteristics of Italian Anticlericalism, in: Peter Dykema I Heiko A. Oberman (ed.), Anticlericalism ill late medieval and early modern Europe, Leiden 1993, 271-281; Ottavia Niccoli, Rinascimento anticlericale. Infamia, propaganda e satira in Jtalia tra Quattro e Cinquecento, Roma 2005. For the anticlericalism of the German Reformation, see Bob Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation, Cambridge 1981; Hans-Jurgen Goertz, Antiklerika/ismus und Reformation. Sozialgesclzichtliche Untersuchungen, Munchen 1995. On anticlericalism as a transnational phenomenon, see Wolfram Kaiser, 'Clericalism - that is our enemy!' European anticlericalisnz and the culture wars, in: Clark I Kaiser, Culture Wars, 47-76. La Maga 6.12.1855. La Capitale 4.12.1872. A tradition of bawdy and pornographic writing in Italian dates back far further than Aretino's sixtheenth century accounts of rampant sexual activity in a convent. Nineteenth century propagandists fused these older traditions of anticlerical rhetoric with contemporary anxieties and prejudices. I thank the anonymous referee for drawing my attention on this point. See, for example, Galerana Barrotti [Arcangela Tarabotti], La semplicita ingallnata (Leida 1654). For more on this genre, see E. Frenzel, Motive der Weltliteratur. Ein Lexikon dichtungsgeschichtlicher Langssch11itte (Stuttgart, 1992 edn), 419-34. A. M. Tonucci, 'Virgina-Gertrude tra storia e romanzo. Fascino e fortuna di un personaggio', in Vita e Processo di Suor Virgillia Maria de Leyva Monaca di Monza (Milan, 1985), 873-924. An autobiographic account, influenced by literary models, was Misteri del chiostro napoletano. Memorie di Enrichetta Caracciolo de'Principi di Forino, ex-Monaca Benedettina (Florence, 1864 edn). 11. Bastgen (ed.), Die Romische Frage, Dokumente und Stimmen (Fre iburg 1917-1919), vol. 2, 114. The literature on the Roman Question is abundant. A recent account is G. Seibt, Roma o morte. La lotta per la capitale d'Italia (Milan, 2005). C. Levy (ed.), Italian Regionalism. History, Identity and Politics (Oxford, 1996). A. Giardina and A. Vauchez, ll mito di Rorna. Da Carlo Magna a Mussolini (Rome, 2000). Edward W. Said, Orientalism. Western Conceptions o{ the Orient (London, 1.995 edn).

212 Manuel Bomtta 72. ]. M. MacKenzie (ed.), 'The Orientalism Debate', Orientalism. History, Theory, and the Arts (Manchester, 1995), 1-19. 73. On this see, S. PatTiarca, 'Indolence and Regeneration. Tropes and Tensions of Risorgimento Patriotism', in American Historical Review, Vol. 110 (2005) 380-408; Borutta, Antikatholizismus, chapter A. 74. E. Garms and]. Garms, 'Mito e realta di Roma nella cultura europea. Viaggio e idea, immagine e immaginazione', in C. De Seta (ed.), Storia d'Italia. Annali, vol. 5, 11 paesaggio (Rome 1982), 561-662. 75. jean Charles Leonard Simonde de Sismondi, Histoire des republiques italiennes au moyen-age, 18 vols (Zurich and Paris, 1807-1818). 76. S. Patriarca, ltalian Vices. Nation and Character from the Risorgimento lo lhe Republic (Cambridge, 2010), 69. See also Ibid., 37-9, 169; eadem, Indolence, 397-8. 77. Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and other romantic Poems (New York, 1936), 163-4; A. de Lamartine, Meditations (Paris, 1968), 215. 78. W. Rehm, Europi:iische Romdichtung (Munich, 1960), 196. 79. On the general importance of exile for the intellectual formation of Italian patri· ots, see M. Isabella, Risorgimento in Exile. Italian Emigres and the Liberal International in the Post-Napoleonic Em (Oxford, 2009). 80. C. Balbo, Delle Speranze d'Ita/ia (Turin, 1844), 10. On Balbo's internalization of Italy's Orientalization, see also Patriarca, Indolence, 392-4. 81. Giuseppe Garibaldi, Cle/ia. Il Governo dei Preti (Turin, 1973), 229. 82. Patriarca, Indolence, 382-3. 83. ]. Schneider, Italy's 'Southern Question'. Orientalism in one Country (New York, 1998); ]. Dickie, Darkest !tal)'. The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 18601900 (New York 1999); N. Moe, The View from Vesuvius. Italian Culture and the Southern Question (Berkeley, 2002). 84. On the term 'Risorgimento', see Banti, Risorgimmto, VIII-XI; L. Riall, Risorgimento. The History of Italy from Napoleon to Nation State (London, 2009), 37-41. 85. Giuseppe Mazzini, Ai giovani d'ltalia, stn edition (London, 1860), 27-8. 86. Mazzini's syncretistic conception of religion was not conform with Roman Catholicism. See E. F. Biagini, 'Mazzini and Anticlericalism. The English Exile', in C.A. Bayly and E. F. Biagini (eds), Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalisation of Democratic Nationalism 1830-1920 (Oxford, 2008), 144-66, esp. 165 . On the political religion, invented by Mazzini, seeS. L. Sullam, 'Maaini and Nationalism as Political Religion', in Ibid., 107-24. 87. Giuseppe Mazzini, Scritti e ricordi a/ltobiografici, edited by A. Donati (Milan, 1912), 198. 88. Cavour e l'lnghilterra. Carteggio con V. E. d'Az.eglio, vol. 1, Jl Congresso a Parigi (Bologna, 1933), 384-9. 89. D. l. Kertzer, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Morl(lra (New York, 1997). 90. E. About, La Question romaine (Brussels, 1859); A. de La Gueronniere, Le Pape et le Congres (Paris, 1859). 91. C.T. Mclntire, England against Papacy 1858-1861. Tories, Liberals, and the Overthrow of papal Temporal Power during the Italian Risorgimento (Cambridge, 1983). 92. C. Clark, 'The new Catholicism and the European Culture Wars', in Clark and Kaiser, Wars, 11-46. 93. For earlier and later examples of this motive, see G. Spadolini, L'Opposizione cattolica da Porta Pia al '98, 2 vols (Florence, 1991), vol. 1, figure 4; Le Due Rome. Chiesa e Stato fra '800 e '900 (Florence, 1975 edn), figure 67. 94. M. D'Azeglio, Degli llltimi casi di Romagna (Lugano, 1846).

Culture War in Risorgimento Italy 213

95. Chabod, Storia, 197 fn. 1. 96. T. Amato (ed.), Stato e Chiesa da Locke alle 'Guarantigie', vol. 2, Firenze 1975, 563. 97. 11 Libero Pensiero 10.10.1867, 643. 98. For example, I1 Lampione 27.9.1860. 99. 11 Fischietto 14.6.1855. 100. A. Mario, La questione religiosa di ieri e di oggi (Florence, 1867), 49. 101. Since anti-Catholicism has been neglected by Risorgimento historiography, I have highlighted only this side of the culture war. By doing so, I do not mean to suggest that Catholicism was a passive 'victim' of this war. On Catholic attacks on the Risorgimento, see L. Riall, Garibaldi. The Invention of a Hero (London, 2007), 378-84, On the Vatican's politics of conversion, sec A. Lang, Converlinx a Nation. A Modem Inquisition and the Unification of Italy (New York, 2008). 102. As in other contexts, 'hostility to Catholicism in the nineteenth century could engender greater sympathy for Jews'. T. Verhoeven, Transatlantic AfltiCatlzolicism . France and the United States in the Nineteenth Century (New York 2010), 11. 103. See Clark, Catholicism.