Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Anarchism in Italy arose under the influence of the Russian revolutionary Bakunin, triumphed over Marxism as the dominant form of early Italian socialism, and supplanted Mazzinianism as Italy's revolutionary vanguard. After forming a national federation of the Anti-Authoritarian International in 1872, the Italian anarchists attempted several insurrections, but their organization was suppressed. By the 1880s the movement had become atomized, ideologically extreme, and increasingly isolated from the masses. Its foremost leader, Errico Malatesta, attempted repeatedly to revitalize the anarchists as a revolutionary force, but internal dissension and government repression stifled every resurgence and plunged the movement into decline. Even after their exclusion from the Italian Socialist Party in 1892, the anarchists remained an intermittently active and influential element on the Italian socialist left. As such, they continued to be feared and persecuted by every Italian government.
Originally published in 1993.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691603339 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #271 |
| Pages: | 342 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Italian Anarchism, 1864â?"1892
By Nunzio Pernicone
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1993 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05692-0
CHAPTER 1
BAKUNIN AND THE ITALIANS, 1864–1870
The Socialist Precursor: Carlo Pisacane
Students of Italian history have debated endlessly whether the Risorgimento, the movement of national resurgence that culminated in political unification, was a genuine success or a failed revolution—a rivoluzione mancata. Virtually none, however, dispute the fact that after national unification, "legal Italy" and "real Italy" were separated by an abyss. Millions of peasants, artisans, and laborers, deprived of voting rights and other forms of legal redress, remained desperately poor and exploited, even by mid-nineteenth-century standards. Nor could it have been otherwise. The conservative liberals who supported the House of Savoy were triumphant in their cause and ruled exclusively in the interests of Italy's economic and social elite. The democratic followers of Mazzini and Garibaldi, on the other hand, decried the results of unification, but their principal grievance was with the monarchy and its initial failure to acquire Rome and Venetia, not the unresolved social question. A transformation of property relations amounting to social revolution was never on Italian democracy's agenda. A socialist movement did not exist at this time, so a more radical alternative was unavailable. The Risorgimento produced few thinkers and activists whose views were genuinely socialistic: Vincenzo Cuoco, Vincenzo Russo, Giuseppe Montanelli, Giuseppe Ferrari, and Carlo Pisacane, to mention the best known. And perhaps only Pisacane conceived of the Risorgimento as a potential socialist revolution.
Carlo Pisacane, former chief-of-staff of Mazzini's Roman republican army of 1849 and martyr of the Sapri expedition of 1857, is generally considered the precursor to Italian socialism. Influenced chiefly by the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Italian federalists Carlo Cattaneo and Giuseppe Ferrari, Pisacane believed that the national and social questions were inseparable. The struggle had to be waged not only against the Austrians and the Bourbons, but against the rich and propertied classes as well, and success could only be achieved by a mass uprising of Italian peasants spurred by a socialist vanguard. Private property, which he considered the source of all inequality and suffering, would be swept away together with institutional religion and the state. A federation of free communes would guarantee the individual complete freedom of action as well as the fruits of his labor. Ultimately, all of European society would be organized according to the formula "Liberty and Association."
These mechanisms and goals—the revolutionary overthrow of private property, religion, and the state—would later constitute the core philosophy espoused by the Italian anarchists and their Russian mentor Michael Bakunin. Because a few of Bakunin's associates—notably Giuseppe Fanelli and Attanasio Dramis—had previously been followers of Pisacane, the two leading historians of early Italian socialism, Aldo Romano and Richard Hostetter, have advanced arguments for Pisacane as the true fountainhead of modern Italian socialism and perhaps the source of Bakunin's doctrines as well. More recent scholarship has established that Pisacane's political writings and socialist ideas were unknown even to his closest comrades, and that Bakunin's anarchist philosophy had independent roots.
Pisacane's political theories may not have contributed directly to the development of socialist ideology in Italy, but his conception of how the masses must be spurred to revolt was central to the anarchists' revolutionary strategy in the mid and late 1870s, when his works were rediscovered. In the Testamento politico, written on the eve of the Sapri expedition, Pisacane advanced the theory of "propaganda of the deed":
Propaganda of the idea is a chimera, the education of the people is an absurdity. Ideas result from deeds, not the latter from the former, and the people will not be free when they are educated, but will be educated when they are free. The only work a citizen can do for the good of the country is that of cooperating with the material revolution: therefore, conspiracies, plots, attempts, etc., are that series of deeds through which Italy proceeds toward her goal.
Pisacane's theory presumed that the Italian masses, especially the peasants of the Mezzogiomo, were instinctively revolutionary and capable of spontaneous rebellion; all they required was a push from an insurrectionary band of elite conspirators. The Sapri expedition of 1857 was Pisacane's own attempt to use propaganda of the deed to rouse the Calabrian peasantry against the Bourbon monarchy. But the ill-conceived venture resulted only in the slaughter of his small band at the hands of the very peasants he had hoped to liberate. Pisacane himself took his own life rather than be captured, thereby ending any possible linkage between social and national revolution in Italy. Mazzini and Garibaldi, the real chieftains of the nationalist struggle, had no intention of stimulating a wave of peasant rebellion to obliterate private property and the state. It was not until the arrival of Bakunin that Mazzini's ideological domination of the Italian left was seriously challenged and a revolutionary socialist philosophy widely disseminated.
Michael Bakunin
Michael Alexander Bakunin was already a renowned revolutionary when he crossed the Italian frontier on January 11, 1864. The aristocrat turned apostle of creative destruction had played impromptu roles as a leader of the Prague uprising in June 1848 and of the Dresden rebellion in May 1849, activities for which he spent more than a year in prison. Handed over to the Russian authorities, Bakunin languished for another six years in the dungeons of the Peter-and-Paul and Schlüsselburg fortresses, his body wracked by scurvy but his defiant spirit unbroken. In 1857, family petitions gained Bakunin's release and exile to Siberia. Four years later he escaped and made his way to the United States and then to London, where he resumed contact with many of Europe's most notable revolutionaries. His last revolutionary adventure before visiting Italy was an aborted attempt to join the Polish insurrection of 1863.
The Italian sojourn has been viewed traditionally as a transitional phase bridging the revolutionary nationalism of Bakunin's middle years with the revolutionary anarchism of his maturity. In reality the years spent in Italy represent the critical period during which Bakunin laid the foundation of his anarchist philosophy. Because of his twelve-year isolation, Bakunin arrived in Italy still espousing many of the ideas he had acquired from various European leftists in the 1840s: the German radicals Arnold Ruge and Georg Herwegh, the German communists Wilhelm Weitling and Karl Marx, the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and an assortment of Slavic nationalists and democrats, such as the Pole Joachim Lelewel.
Bakunin had learned much from Marx at a time when his own socialism, he admitted, was "purely instinctive." But Marx's authoritarian communism, like Weitling's before him, impressed Bakunin as the negation of freedom, and he rejected it completely. Proudhon's contribution, in contrast, was crucial. Reading one of Proudhon's works, Bakunin exclaimed: "This is the right thing!"—that is, freedom was attainable only through abolition of the state. Proudhon, more than any other political thinker, was responsible for transforming Bakunin's instinctive rebelliousnous against authority into a formal anarchist credo.
The antistatism derived from Proudhon in the 1840s remained latent, however. Revolutionary pan-Slavism was at the heart of Bakunin's political philosophy in this period. Yet he did not consider nationalism intrinsically important; it was a useful vehicle for revolutionary purposes, and by late 1848 social revolution was becoming preeminent for Bakunin, as evident in the drafts of his Appeal to the Slavs. The federation of free Slav republics he saw arising from the ashes of the Habsburg and Romanov empires would be created through social revolution. By 1864, however, the failure of the Polish insurrection the previous year dispelled his faith in national liberation movements as a social revolutionary force. Thereafter Bakunin believed that socialist revolution had to take place on an international scale.
At no time, however, did Bakunin envisage entrusting the social revolution to the bourgeoisie. The behavior of middle-class liberals during the revolutions of 1848–1849—shifting from instigators of rebellion to supporters of reaction whenever workers threatened to radicalize the situation—had convinced him that the bourgeoisie was a counterrevolutionary class that had to be overthrown along with its political institutions, parliamentarism and constitutional democracy. The destruction of existing society would be carried out instead by the working class. But unlike Marx, who considered the industrial proletariat of advanced nations the only true revolutionary class, Bakunin believed that the landless peasantry of economically backward nations like Russia, Italy, and Spain would constitute the decisive revolutionary force. Joining the peasants in revolt would be city workers and artisans, declasse intellectuals and students, the Lumpenproletariat of the urban slums, the unemployed, vagrants, and bandits—virtually every oppressed and disaffected element in society.
During his Italian sojourn, Bakunin would refine his internationalism and federalism, embrace atheism and antistatism, designate a special role for the revolutionary elite, and elevate freedom to the apex of social requirements. These ideas, together with those retained from his revolutionary pan-Slavist period, would constitute the essence of Bakunin's mature anarchism.
Bakunin in Florence and Naples
Bakunin considered the Italians natural allies of the Slavs in their struggle against the Teutons. In 1862 he tried to convince Mazzini to organize an agrarian revolt in Italy, hoping that an Italian rising would incite conflagration throughout the Habsburg realm. But Mazzini conceived of revolution primarily in terms of urban insurrection and had no interest in stirring up the Italian peasants. Bakunin also proposed an Italian-Slavic alliance to Garibaldi that year, but the general's defeat at Aspromonte on August 29, 1862, attempting to seize Rome, dashed Bakunin's immediate hopes. In his dreams of the future, however, Bakunin continued to link the Italian and Russian revolutions.
Revolution in Russia was still Bakunin's foremost concern when he settled in Florence in January 1864. The temporary capital of Italy, Florence hosted a sizable colony of political emigrés and an active circle of Tuscan democrats into whose ranks Bakunin gained entry thanks to local Freemasons. Many important Italian democrats, including Garibaldi, were Freemasons, and the Italian Masonic lodges became hotbeds of political discussion when Pope Pius IX promulgated the Syllabus of Errors on December 8,1864, condemning liberalism and modern learning. A member of the Order of Freemasonry since his days in Paris (1840), Bakunin tried to capitalize on this ferment and, under the guise of Masonic reform, he presented the Florentine lodge with a program that was atheist, federalist, and socialist. Italian Freemasonry, however, was more anticlerical than revolutionary, and Bakunin's formulas were rejected as too radical.
Bakunin, meanwhile, had met with Karl Marx in London on November 3,1864, to discuss what activities he might undertake in Italy on behalf of the International Workingmen's Association (IWA), which had been founded two months earlier. Marx did not suspect that Bakunin would one day become his principal ideological opponent and archrival for leadership of the International. At their meeting he was impressed with the ideological progress Bakunin had made since they last met in 1848, and he hoped the Russian could subvert Mazzini and recruit "some live Italians" for the International. Back in Florence, Bakunin reported to Marx that his work was progressing slowly. Potential recruits, "demoralized by the complete fiasco and errors of the political-unitarian-centralist school of democracy, have become excessively skeptical and indifferent.... Only passionate, energetic, and coherent socialist propaganda can restore life and will to this country."
Bakunin neglected to tell Marx that his recruitment campaign was being conducted not for the International but for the International Revolutionary Brotherhood. Unlike Marx, who sought to build a large-scale organization of workers and socialist intellectuals that would function openly, Bakunin was committed to the idea that serious revolutionary activity must be conducted secretly, by an elite. He had previously organized a handful of exiles and friends in Florence into a secret society called the Florentine Brotherhood. Later, during a short visit to Sweden prior to his meeting with Marx, Bakunin laid plans for a European secret society called the International Revolutionary Brotherhood, which was to be inspired by his own program of federalist, revolutionary, and antistatist ideas. Because the IWA was still composed mainly of Mazzinians, Proudhonians, and English trade-unionists, Bakunin considered his own organization far more likely to stimulate revolution. Marx would have considered Bakunin's activities a betrayal, and when he eventually discovered the existence of Bakunin's secret society (later metamorphosed into the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy) the rift between the two revolutionaries became unbridgeable.
Bakunin tried to vitalize the Florentine Brotherhood after his return to Italy, but Florence proved barren soil for the secret society, and its members became inactive after he moved to Sorrento, near Naples, at the end of May 1865. Bakunin immediately established contact with the local democrats associated with Il Popolo d'Italia, a Mazzinian organ. His initial impressions were favorable. "You were not wrong about Naples," he wrote to one of his Florentine followers, "there is infinitely more energy and genuine political and social life than in Florence. At last, I have found some men.... There is very much to be done here. It is fertile ground worth cultivating."
Naples was the ideal environment for Bakunin's revolutionary schemes. Democrats in the Mezzogiorno were more disillusioned with the outcome of the Risorgimento than their northern comrades. From the southerners' perspective, Italian unification had amounted to little more than the imposition of Piedmontese administration, law, and taxation, which antagonized virtually every class. The introduction of Piedmont's free-trade policies, moreover, wreaked havoc upon formerly protected industries and caused severe economic dislocation and depression throughout the south.
Southern democrats, like all who rejected the "royal conquest" by the House of Savoy, still looked to Mazzini for direction. But Mazzini had nothing new to offer. Inflexibly committed to his mystical formula of "Dio e Popolo," he saw the social question as completely subordinate to political revolution and the establishment of a "Third Rome." The problems oppressing the Italian masses would be resolved in the fullness of time—perhaps centuries. Meanwhile, Mazzini would do nothing to risk antagonizing the middle classes from which he drew his main support.
Militant democrats still remained faithful to the nationalist objectives of the Risorgimento and were ready to fight for Venetia and Rome whenever Garibaldi gave the call to arms. Mazzini's obstinate refusal to adopt a social program, however, was beginning to create dissension, especially in the south, where federalist, egalitarian, and libertarian tendencies were gaining support. The dissident democrats were typified by Attanasio Dramis of the Il Popolo d'Italia group, who refused to head Mazzini's movement in the south because he believed the Prophet's program could no longer win the support of the masses. Nevertheless, before Bakunin's arrival in Naples, none of the dissident democrats had formulated their ideas into a coherent alternative program. Nor had they dared defy Mazzini openly. Their influence on the mainstream of Italian democracy was negligible and their following among Mazzinian worker societies virtually nonexistent. Consequently, as of 1865, Mazzini's tired formulas and shibboleths continued to represent the only comprehensive challenge to both the liberal (Cavourian) monarchist government known as the Historical Right and the former republicans who composed the parliamentary opposition known as the Historical Left.
Bakunin was the only man in Italy who possessed the intellect, charisma, and audacity necessary to challenge Mazzini and convert his disenchanted disciples to the cause of social revolution. Bakunin's first attempt came in the fall of 1865, when he wrote five letters to Il Popolo d'Italia, warning democrats against the deceptions of Mazzini and Garibaldi, who one day might follow the example of Crispi and other ex-republicans and betray Italian democracy by supporting the monarchy in the name of political expediency. These letters, published under the pseudonym "A Frenchman," articulated for the first time the themes that were central to Bakunin's emerging anarchism: exaltation of liberty, federalism, antistatism, social revolution, democratic propaganda among the people, the inherently democratic and revolutionary instincts of the masses, and the concept of the heroic revolutionary elite.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Italian Anarchism, 1864â?"1892 by Nunzio Pernicone. Copyright © 1993 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Abbreviations xiii
Introduction 3
Part 1 Bakunin and the Origins of Italian Anarchism
Chapter 1 Bakunin and the Italians, 1864-1870 11
Chapter 2 The Rise of the International in Italy, 1870-1872 33
Part 2 The Italian International
Chapter 3 The Italian Federation of the IWA, 1872-1874 57
Chapter 4 Insurrection and Repression, 1874-1876 82
Chapter 5 Resurgence and Insurrection, 1876-1877 106
Chapter 6 The Twilight of the Italian International, 1877-1878 129
Chapter 7 The Suppression of the Italian International, 1878-1880 147
Part 3 Crisis, Transformation, and Decline
Chapter 8 The Defection of Andrea Costa, 1879-1882 165
Chapter 9 Crisis and Metamorphosis, 1879-1883 179
Chapter 10 Struggling to Survive, 1883-1885 201
Chapter 11 Too Little, Too Late, 1885-1890 217
Chapter 12 Malatesta and Resurgence, 1889-1891 244
Chapter 13 Descent into Isolation, 1891-1892 258
Epilogue: 1892-1900 282
Bibliography 295
Index 309
What People are Saying About This
"[This book] fills a conspicuous gap in the histiography of both anarchism and nineteenth-century Italy. . . . Pennicone writes with an eye for the apt quotation and telling detail, and has organized a complex subject into a coherent and effective narrative."—Paul Avrich, Queens College, City University of New York