Elena Bacchin’s Italofilia is a wide-ranging survey of recent attempts to explain the fascination that the Risorgimento exercised on mid-Victorian Britain from the revolutions of 1848 to Garibaldi’s visit to London in 1864. She begins by setting the protagonists of the pro-Italian movement in Britain, the exiles and their British supporters, in their respective political coteries; Mazzinians, republicans, radicals on one side, moderates (and a clutch of diplomats) on the other. Turning to the numerous pro-Italian associations that came into being in these years, the essay explores how the pro-Italian campaigns were promoted, underlying the importance of public oratory and meetings and the strong support for the Italian cause in the provinces as well as the metropolis. A comparison follows of the contrasting outcomes of the attempts by the moderates (including the Piedmontese ambassador in London in the 1850s, Emanuele D’Azeglio) and their radical counterparts to influence the press and government policies. The final chapters focus on the multiplicity of different currents, from Romanticism and anti-Catholicism, to liberal emancipationist sympathies, radicalism and Mazzini and democratic republicanism that all contributed to the prominence of the pro-Italy movement in Britain. In concluding, Bacchin opts for the argument that popular Italofilia was driven primarily by emotions, on which the advocates of the pro-Italy movement played skilfully by deploying a wide repertoire of communication techniques from rhetoric, the press and representations to commodification to portray the Italian cause as a clear-cut conflict between good and evil.
Yet Garibaldi’s visit of 1864, the emotional high point of Italofilia with which this essay closes, revealed more divisive forces at work and indicates that even at this moment of enthusiasm, popular Garibaldi-mania could not eclipse, never mind bridge, the political divisions that characterised the British friends of Italian emancipation. In 1864 these assumed sufficiently alarming proportions for the government to curtail the visit to avoid the risk of political upheavals in the provinces. For reasons that Bacchin covers well, in the period between the end of Chartism and the Second Reform Act Italian emancipation provided a proxy battlefield for political conflicts and realignments that were essentially domestic. Even among core activists Italofilia waxed and waned, and most of the pro-Italy associations and fundraising projects surveyed in this essay were fragmentary, partisan and short-lived. Nonetheless, while memories of Garibaldi quickly faded until they were resurrected half a century later by G. M. Trevelyan, Mazzini’s political and intellectual imprint was more long lasting.
There is certainly more room for debate, but Elena Bacchin’s clearly written and generally well balanced essay offers an excellent bibliographical and historiographical guide to the literature, and without overlooking the contribution of many older studies she shows how more recent transnational and cultural perspectives have breathed new life into the field. The extensive use of primary sources and memoirs helps capture the enthusiasms of the time, and the essay has the added merit of bringing together in one place the often bewildering proliferation of actors and organisations, exiles and their respective British supporters.
Danilo Raponi’s book starts chronologically where Bacchin’s closes, beginning with a closely documented survey of the recent revival of interest in the role of religion in nineteenth-century politics. Tracing how these perspectives have influenced approaches to Risorgimento nationalism, mid-Victorian British liberalism and labour politics, Ireland and the Irish Question, Catholicism and anti-Catholicism, empire and cultural imperialism, Raponi takes his cue from the links between Union with Ireland, Catholic Emancipation, the resurgence of the Irish Question and the introduction of the Catholic hierarchy (the ‘Papal Aggression’) and virulent forms of anti-Catholicism and anti-Popery that infused British politics and culture in the age of the Risorgimento. These twin antipathies, he argues, shaped British perceptions of Italy in the Risorgimento, linking popular and elite support for Italian independence and defining the objectives of British policies toward Italy. To reinforce the causal relationship, Raponi invokes Edward Said to claim that in the British case anti-Catholicism and anti-Popery combined with Orientalism to form an imperial discourse that projected Catholic Italy as a ‘European India’ waiting to be converted and reformed.
Raponi acknowledges that Said’s formulation has its critics, but in choosing not to address these he leaves himself with the thankless task of sustaining an unsustainable thesis. While the place of religion in both domestic and foreign politics is overdue for fresh consideration, historians of Britain and Italy have not neglected either anti-Catholicism or anti-Popery in Britain in these years. Nor is there any question that for most English, Scots, Welsh and Irish Protestants, the struggles for Italian independence were primarily and explicitly a struggle against the Papacy, Popery, Catholicism and Catholic Austria. That was the starting point for the brilliant essay by Giorgio Spini (first published in 1956), in which he acknowledged the force of British anti-Catholicism and anti-Popery but concluded that these rarely if ever translated into effective political actions or interventions (Spini Reference Spini1989). Raponi does well to pay Spini’s essay the overdue attention it deserves, but he would have been well advised to have heeded its conclusions.
In looking to measure the impact of popular anti-Catholicism he initially follows closely in Spini’s footsteps, tracking the attempts by the British missionary societies to convert Italians in the 1860s and 1870s. His account pays less attention to the many other European and American Protestants and missionaries who were trafficking translations of the Bible and New Testament in the same vineyard, but essentially confirms Spini’s findings. However, in moving into the 1870s Raponi does come up with the unexpected discovery that more copies of the Bible (translated into Italian) were being sold in Italy at that time than of Alessandro Manzoni’s Betrothed. An interesting digression, although the author seems uncertain what to make of it.
As Spini had discovered, despite the involvement of a sequence of major English political figures, including Lord Shaftesbury, Palmerston and Gladstone, the missionaries’ attempts to convert Italians not surprisingly met with little success and often provoked violent resistance. Insisting that it was the intent that mattered, Raponi then devotes two chapters to foreign policy that relentlessly catalogue the often extreme anti-Catholic and anti-papal credentials of British statesmen and diplomats. The intent is well mapped, but as with the missionaries the practical consequences fall well short of the guiding thesis. Time and time again British governments shrank away from interventions that might make them openly complicit in depriving the pope of his temporal powers, for reasons that have been well explored in the literature on the Roman Question, and which in Britain’s case were in addition complicated not only (and always) by Ireland, but also by Malta and, as Miles Taylor has shown, by the growing Catholic presence in many different parts of the empire (Taylor Reference Taylor2000). Struggling to keep the thesis afloat Raponi concedes that religion played a ‘predominant’ role in British policies towards Italy in the late 1860s and 1870s. Few would disagree, but this is a far cry from the thesis from which the book sets out, as is the curious and seemingly disconnected claim that the British had been right all along and that Italy would have been a better place had the Protestant reform project succeeded.
Raponi does a thorough job of documenting the religious convictions, passions, hatreds and fantasies that fired British anti-Catholicism and anti-Popery and the constant connections between the Irish and the Italian Questions, although with 1,308 notes, 61 pages of footnotes and a select bibliography that omits secondary sources, this is not a reader-friendly text. It is unfortunate too that it is burdened by a mono-causal thesis that over-simplifies the complex relationship between intent and political action and is not supported by the cases it explores. Notwithstanding the strength of British anti-Catholicism, public opinion and foreign policy simply did not march single-mindedly to the lockstep of a shared discourse. On this Elena Bacchin gets the balance right, as did Giorgio Spini.
