Risorgimento’s Class Character: Poets and Scholars - Lampedusa and Denis Mack Smith
Risorgimento’s Class Character: Poets and Scholars - Lampedusa and Denis Mack Smith
(January 4, 2011)
Garibaldi promised southern Italian peasants a new life – they got it!
“Orientialism” in southern-Italian Americana...The northern Italian tourist industry in de facto collusion with Italian American bourgeoisie and literati is still assaulting the remnants of the southern Italian culture in America today - hence the hysteria about the Sopranos, the exuberance for AP Italian, and deafening silence about the complete absence of anything to do with southern Italian history and culture in the education system.
Where thoughts of Poets and Scholars intersect
Is as close to Truth
One may expect
The poet Lampedusa:
“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”
The scholar D.M. Smith:
“The landed classes emerged from the revolution of 1860 stronger than ever.”
Introduction
This essay posits some ideas about the class character of the Piedmontese southern Italian conquest (aka Risorgimento) presented in the works of Italy’s great modern literary artist, the Sicilian Giuseppe di Lampedua, and the great English language historian of Italy Denis Mack Smith.
However, this essay is not abstract historiography! The class character thesis has real relevance to present day southern-Italian American culture; for without history there is no culture.
For example, in the Rochester, NY metro-area there are approximately 180,000 people of south-Italian descent. In the Fall semester of 2010, the community college that services that population offered six Intro. to Italian language courses. However, in the 50-year history of that school, it has never offered a single course in southern-Italian or southern-Italian American history, literature, and culture - ditto: same story at all the other area colleges and public schools.
The history and culture of southern Italy is being systematically obliterated from the minds of southern-Italian Americans and replaced with northern Italian illusions of our culture.
The former New York State governor of Italian descent was beaming at the AP Italian victory celebration. But in his eight years as governor he did nothing to bring about curriculum changes, in the public and state university education systems he oversaw, promoting the history and culture of the people whose votes he so assiduously sought as a fellow pisan - classic “Orientalism” (i.e. attitudes about the South shaped by the North while exploiting the South – see: Schneider et al’s brilliant Italy’s “Southern Question”- Orientialsm in One Country”)
Northern Conquests
There are two conquering themes of Risorgimento Italian unification history:
1) the North’s military conquering of the South;
2) the Northern/Southern bourgeoisie financial conquering of the southern Aristocracy.
Both conquests served to impose the northern civilization on the southern.
As Smith observed:
“The difference between North and South was fundamental. A peasant from Calabria had little in common with one from Piedmont, and Turin was infinitely more like Paris and London than Naples and Palermo, for these two halves were on quite different levels of civilization. (Italy: Modern History p. 3 emp.+)
In both conquests, the southern peasant ancestors of southern-Italian Americans played no part except suffering exploitation and ultimately northern provoked, encouraged and facilitated mass migration. Smith:
“Because the risorgimento was a civil war between the old and new ruling classes, the peasants were neutral except in so far as their own perennial social war became accidentally involved...
They certainly had no love for United Italy, and probably no idea what the term signified until it came home to them in higher prices, taxes, and conscription...
The peasants had the worst of both worlds: whatever the law might say, the peasant still labored at the corvée; his family could still be the virtual property of the landlord, kept in a state of personal dependence by armed campieri and mazzieri who wore their lord's livery” (Modern History p. 39-40 emp +)
Consider Sicily as just one example of how the whole South was affected by the Piedmontese conquest. Smith:
“Peasants began desperately to leave in search of food and work; and for a people so attached to their families, this was a remarkable fact...By 1900, Sicily was becoming one of the chief emigration regions in the world. Altogether, one and a half million Sicilians found it necessary to leave the country before the world war put a stop to this way of escape.
Here is one of the most prodigious facts in all Sicilian history.
This huge exodus was a terrible exposure of Sicilian poverty and the growing imbalance, which the government had encouraged between north and south Italy. ” (Modern Sicily p503 emp. +)
Military Conquest Theme
If an invader seeks only immediate material wealth with no plans for permanent occupation (e.g. “rape and pillage” a la Attila the Hun), the invader has no need for moralizing propagandistic justifications.
However, when an invader has plans for permanent occupation and exploitation (as in “The sun never sets on the British Empire”), then it is necessary to win over the “hearts and minds” of the conquered masses. The intent of the Piedmontese conquering of southern Italy and Sicily in 1860 was permanent occupation and exploitation; accordingly a need for populous support.
For example, when Garibaldi landed in Sicily in May of 1860 he had only a thousand men of which only 40 were Sicilians. Arrayed against him was a Bourbon army of 25 infantry battalions, and several artillery and cavalry regiments.
If he was going to defeat the vastly larger, better equipped and trained Bourbon Army he had to have the military support (“hearts and minds”) of the Sicilian peasant masses. He accomplished this by promising them marvelous political and economic reforms. Smith writes:
“Garibaldi convinced them that he came to redeem Sicilians from centuries of ill-treatment. Deliberately appealing to a peasants’ war, he abolished the macinato [Grist tax] and promised eventual grants of land to the poor and those who took arms.
Many who had never heard the words ‘Piedmont’ or ‘Italy’ could easily comprehend this program, and gladly took a chance to resolve many accumulated personal grudges and many vendettas against authority. With savage fanaticism they swept away the last relics of Bourbon government. (Smith, Modern Sicily p. 436 emp. +)
Having used the Sicilian peasants to defeat the Bourbon army and create the conditions for, in contemporary parlance, ‘regime change’, the question was what would be the characteristics of the new regime. The question was answered, as it always had been for 2,500 years, quickly and violently.
In The Leopard, the Garibaldi supporter Pietro Russo reassures the Prince:
“There will be a day or two of shooting and trouble, but Villa Salina [the Prince’s estates] will be safe as a rock...It will be as it was before”
Garibaldi’s Lie!
The promises of peasant liberation and prosperity were ephemeral and soon forgotten. Smith writes:
“Thousands of country folk had been deprived by both big and middling landlords of any rights in the land, and when Garibaldi promised to redress this kind of wrong there took place a spontaneous movement to occupy portions of the old latifondi.
“One such outbreak, at Bronte [an estate of the British Lord Admiral Nelson’s family], was put down with exemplary severity by Garibaldi including executions and deportations. (Modern Sicily p. 439-40)
“Garibaldi had at first played for peasant support, and his early decrees cleverly promised land distribution and cheaper food. But he soon found that his sole chance of permanent political victory lay in the support of the landlords who alone were interested in enforcing law and order, and many of whom by this time were interested in little else. So he altered course and executed the "communists" on the Nelson estates at Bronte. This was the price the landowners demanded in exchange for backing the nationalist revolution. (Modern Italy p. 41-42 emp.+)
Thus, peasants who believed Garibaldi [and seemingly read Das Kapital] felt perfectly justified in taking land owned by British aristocrats. But, “it was to be as it was before...” the “Red Shirts” that were to liberate the Sicilian peasants and give them land to farm if the peasants would help defeat the Bourbon army, unleashed their violence on the them and protected the aristocrats.
Bronte was not an isolated incident:
“The peasants had hoped - and did not get from Garibaldi - an immediate relief from the grievous conditions to which they were forced by the landowners. They revolted in several localities...
These peasants soon realized that Garibaldi was no longer a rebel on their side, but rather represented a new and yet more oppressive government. (Modern Italy p. 42 emp.+)
Bourgeoisie financial conqueringtheme
Aristotle posits:
“Poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of universals, whereas those of history are singulars. (Poetics chapter 9 1451b)
The truth of this proposition is demonstrated when comparing Lampadusa and Smith’s writings on the transition of the political economy of southern Italy after 1860.
Smith the masterful historian provides the facts and minutia of the bourgeoisie eclipsing the aristocracy in terms of wealth and political power in southern Italy and Sicily. After reading him one understands in great detail the events.
However, if one wants to understand the psychological aspects of the old and new classes, then they should also follow Aristotle's advice and read poets like Lampadusa. The Leopard provides universal insights into the psychology of the members of the respective classes. Don Fabrizio is not a single individual person; he is the very essence (universal) of the aristocracy; all their values, beliefs, life style, etc. are embodied in Lampadusa's character.
For example, Father Pirrone’s monologue to the sleeping Don Pietrino gives us insight into the psychology and character of the nobles:
“The ‘nobles’ aren’t so easy to understand. They live in a world of their own created by themselves during centuries of highly specialized experiences of their own worries and joys; they have a very strong collective memory, and so they’re put out or pleased by things which would not matter at all to you and me, but to them seem vitally connected with their heritage of memories, cast, hopes, fears.”
These are the observations of a poet that the historian, no matter how steeped in ‘source documents’, would never come to know.
Similarly, Don Fabrizio’s antagonist (in the literary sense) Don Calogero is the quintessential representative of the emerging bourgeois middle class businessman.
“Hearing Don Calogero comments about the price of the palace décor ('They don’t make things like this nowadays, with gold leaf at its present price') and the ‘price of cheese’; the Prince felt a loathing for him; it was to the rise of this man and a hundred others like him [universal], to their obscure intrigues and their tenacious greed and avarice, that was due the sense of death which was now, obviously, hanging darkly over these palaces...”
Compare these ‘poetic expressions’ of the same ideas written by the scholar; full of facts but lacking passion:
“Before the risorgimento, the ruling classes had consisted of a landowning aristocracy whereas by 1861 a professional and mercantile element, allied to a new middle class of landed gentry, was much more prominent.
Finally, in Lampadusa the peasant class is virtually nonexistent reflecting the reality of their role in the bourgeoisie revolution. When he writes: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change”, he means that things change for the bourgeoisie and aristocracy, and the universal conditions for the peasants "stay as they are".
Similarly Smith:
“The risorgimento was, as one would expect, a movement not of the populace but of an elite. In Garibaldi's Thousand there were no peasants, but rather students, independent craftsmen, and litterati. (Modern Italy p36)
Conclusion
In sum, the history and culture of southern-Italian Americans is rooted in the peasantry of southern Italy. However, it is a 'sure money bet' that a random sample of the 17 million Americans of southern-Italian descent will show they know little or nothing about their history and the origins of their culture. It’s not taught in public schools, colleges and universities.
One wonders - What exactly were all those people smiling about at the AP victory celebration?
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