Britain, Ireland and the Italian Risorgimento

N. Carter, N. Carter

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137297723
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Italian History
• Index: History

This book offers a unique and fascinating examination of British and Irish responses to Italian independence and unification in the mid-nineteenth century. Chapters explore the interplay of religion, politics, exile, feminism, colonialism and romanticism in fuelling impassioned debates on the 'Italian question' on both sides of the Irish Sea.

1

A Cosmopolitan Nationalism: Young Ireland and the Risorgimento

Michael Huggins

For many years, since the pioneering work of historians such as Kevin Nowlan, it was assumed that Mazzinian nationalism had a direct and potent impact upon the romantic nationalist movement that emerged in the 1840s around the Young Ireland movement and its mouthpiece, the Nation newspaper. In 1960, Nowlan, Robert Dudley Edwards and Thomas Desmond Williams published a series of lectures under the title Ireland and the Italian Risorgimento. In the introduction to the volume, Edwards stated bluntly that the Irish movement ‘had been strongly influenced by the ideas of Mazzini and their gospel of Irish Nationalism was largely based on his theories’. While positing a more qualified relationship between Mazzinian ideas and Young Ireland in the 1840s, Nowlan nevertheless averred that ‘the Young Irelanders in their newspaper, the Nation, came close enough to Mazzini’s position’.¹

In a 1973 article on the relationship between Irish and European romantic nationalism, Giovanni Costigan made a similar point, noting that Mazzini sometimes wrote of Italy in ‘language almost identical with that of the Nation [about Ireland]’. Costigan also listed some of the characteristics of romantic (or Mazzinian) nationalism: the development of a ‘powerful mystique of the nation’, a sense of history and idealisation of ‘folk culture’, an enthusiasm for the revival of ancient languages, an emphasis on the need for blood sacrifice, a cult of the hero (in the Irish case, Tone and Emmet were most often deployed to this end), the personification of the nation (often as a forlorn, suffering female), the importance of virtue, and a predilection for failure.²

It should also be noted that this political culture, as Paul Ginsborg has recently suggested, owed much to European romanticism. Ginsborg’s claim that the anthropocentric perspective on the natural world of Italian nationalists ‘often translated into a heightened love and awareness of the physical features of the Italian homeland’, might just as easily have been made in relation to the regular evocation of the Irish landscape in the pages of the Nation. Ginsborg has identified other motifs derived by Italian nationalists from romanticism – a view of the past as more harmonious than the present, an emphasis on self-sacrifice and admiration for individual heroism – that might also be applied to Young Ireland’s journalistic mouthpiece.³

As this chapter will show, most of these characteristics can be detected in the narratives of Ireland published in the Nation between 1842 and 1848. This is not to say that Mazzini was solely responsible for such narratives: the failure motif, for example, was a common enough romantic trope, while the influence of Herder’s thought on fostering the volksgeist through education might be detected in Mazzini as well as Thomas Davis and Charles Gavan Duffy, two of the Nation’s founders. More specifically, Eva Stöter has suggested that the Grimm brothers’ demand for a national folkloric German literature was an important influence on Davis. It is more profitable to see both Mazzini and Young Ireland as part of a Europe-wide cosmopolitan cultural and intellectual matrix that developed after the revolutionary years of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. As Nowlan noted, Young Ireland was ‘inspired by the new trends in thought which inspired nationalists in other lands’.⁴

However, in a recent essay, Colin Barr has questioned the extent of Mazzinian influence on Young Ireland. According to Barr, ‘Young Ireland had precious little to do with Young Italy in particular or continental concerns in general’. Barr argues that Archbishop Paul Cullen’s crusade during the early 1850s against the ‘Mazzinian’ Nation newspaper and its editor, Duffy, was wrongly premised: ‘Duffy was no disciple of Mazzini; Young Ireland was not Young Italy’. In fact, ‘Duffy had ... taken the lead within the ranks of Irish nationalism in condemning any expression of sympathy for, or agreement with, Mazzini’. Cullen, however, who had lived in Rome from 1820 to 1850 and had witnessed first-hand the Roman Republic of 1848–49, ‘was unable to see Irish politics without Italian lenses’: radical Irish nationalism was indelibly linked in his mind to anti-clerical Mazzinianism.⁵

Barr’s characterisation of Young Ireland is somewhat awry. After the failure of the Irish rebellion in July 1848, Young Ireland was effectively moribund, and its formal political organisation, the Irish Confederation, ceased to exist. The Nation also closed, albeit temporarily. When Duffy re-launched the paper in late 1849, it bore little political resemblance to the strident romantic nationalism espoused by Duffy and its two principal writers, Davis and John Mitchel, during its first phase. ‘I greatly mistake if his views are not wholly altered, or altering, in regard to all manner of Anglo–Irish questions’, wrote Thomas Carlyle of his friend Duffy in a letter to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Clarendon, shortly before the paper’s reappearance. As for the new Nation, this would be ‘very different indeed from what the late one was’. After the paper resumed publication, Carlyle wrote enthusiastically to Duffy in praise of its contents.⁶

This chapter argues that to gain a fuller and more accurate picture of the influence of Mazzinian thought on Young Ireland it is essential to examine the movement between 1842 and 1848, rather than the period of political realignment and relative inertia following the Irish Confederation’s demise. Through the pages of the Nation in that critical period, the chapter will consider two dimensions to the relationship between Risorgimento or Mazzinian nationalism and Young Ireland. The first of these requires an examination of the generic similarities between the two, and the second involves some attention to the concrete evidence of Risorgimento connections and empathies in the ideas of the Young Irelanders. The similarities between Mazzinian concepts and those developed in the Nation will become clear.

Barr attempts to enlist Nowlan for his perspective by citing him selectively. While Barr quotes Nowlan as suggesting that ‘the Young Irelanders had little interest in Mazzini’s personal philosophy or ... with the more violent aspects of the “Young” movements on the continent’, he does not quote the remainder of the sentence: ‘yet the Irish movement did deserve its name’. Nowlan thus cannot be recruited for a perspective that disconnects Young Ireland from broader currents in romantic nationalism. What is perhaps curious here is that Nowlan suggests the Young Irelanders were not interested in Mazzinian thought, while suggesting that Young Ireland deserved its name. This chapter demonstrates that Young Ireland was not only generically a Mazzinian movement but also that its most important voices empathised with and admired the Italian, most significantly during the formative period of radical Irish nationalism in the 1840s: there was, in other words, an ideological connection between Young Ireland and Young Italy.⁷

The long-term significance of this in the development of radical Irish nationalism is suggested in an article by Jennifer O’Brien on Irish attitudes to the creation of Italy, which argues that Irish Catholic responses to Italian nationalism were complex and that there were cross-currents within those responses. Importantly, O’Brien acknowledges that the efforts of Cullen and the church to link its hostility to the Risorgimento with an anti-revolutionary position in Ireland failed, a failure demonstrated by the growth of Fenianism in the 1860s. Fenians such as Charles Kickham attempted to combine loyalty to Rome with militant nationalism (and Patrick Maume has outlined the case of a former papal soldier who became a Fenian). One of the Nation’s co-founders, John Blake Dillon, was a Catholic but remained highly critical of the papacy during the period of the Roman Republic and found a kindred spirit in Mazzini’s envoy to the United States. It is important to acknowledge that a radical tradition developed in Irish nationalism that absorbed ideas from beyond the loyally Catholic version of Irishness developed by O’Connell. This radicalism had its origins in the engagement of Young Irelanders in the 1840s with a wider, cosmopolitan vision of the nation that bore generic similarities to Mazzini’s vision of nationality, as well as a specific empathy with the Italian movement and its exiled figurehead during the same period.⁸

Young Ireland had its origins in the founding of the weekly Nation newspaper by Duffy, Davis and Dillon in October 1842. The group of young friends, who at this time were all members of Daniel O’Connell’s Repeal Association, had a different vision of Irishness from O’Connell. While this may be partially accounted for by the presence of Protestants among the group’s leaders (Thomas Davis and, later, Mitchel being the two most important examples), Richard Davis has suggested that Thomas Davis’s travels in Europe may have exposed him to romantic nationalism and the influence of anti-clerical thought. While O’Connell’s repeal politics were developed during the 1830s in the realpolitik of a parliamentary alliance with the Whigs, which he hoped would result in a series of ameliorative measures for Ireland, the Nation ‘exalted Irish nationalism as “a spiritual essence”’, in a romantic conception of the nation that invites comparison with Mazzini’s vision of italianità.⁹

‘Young Ireland’ was a label that the men around the Nation in the 1840s did not choose but did accept. It is often assumed that the term was first used by Daniel O’Connell, in May 1845, when he spoke dismissively of the existence of a ‘Young Ireland party’ within the Repeal Association in an internal debate over proposals for non-denominational education. In fact, the term ‘Young Ireland’ was in use before this. Richard Davis claims that Young Ireland was ‘christened’ in 1844, while Oliver MacDonagh’s biography of O’Connell suggests that Daniel Owen Madden, a journalist and convert from Catholicism to Protestantism, had earlier used the term in a critical survey of O’Connellite politics published in 1843, for which he incurred the lasting hatred of the mainstream repealers. The name ‘Young Ireland’ also appears in the Nation itself at least as early as August 1843, in a poem of the same name. It is clear, therefore, that many of those active in Irish political and cultural life in the 1840s made the connection between this new political current and the Mazzinian movement. There were diverse views within the movement (which led, for example, to a major split between Mitchel and Duffy in late 1847) and the leaders moved in very different directions after its defeat in 1848. Some of the Young Irelanders were less enthusiastic democrats than Mitchel during the revolutionary era (and Mitchel was only explicitly a democrat during the spring of 1848), yet there was a consensus about the founding principles of Irish nationality espoused by the Nation during those critical years, 1842–8.¹⁰

In the pages of the Nation there is much that can be described generically as Mazzinian. Like Mazzini, Young Ireland saw the nation in political terms, striving to overcome historic disunity through the forging of a new political present. Similarly, Young Irelanders did not take particular care to define the nation precisely, allowing discursive flexibility – or opportunism – in the identification of what constituted the nation. While language, territory and ethnicity might all indicate the existence of a nation, these required integration in a polity that conferred citizenship, constitutional government and formal equality on all. Both Mazzini and Young Ireland were acutely aware...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Britain, Ireland and the Italian Risorgimento
• 1  A Cosmopolitan Nationalism: Young Ireland and the Risorgimento
• 2  The ink of the wise: Mazzini, British Radicalism and Print Culture, 18481855
• 3  Felice Orsini and the Construction of the Pro-Italian Narrative in Britain
• 4  An Italy Independent and One: Giovanni (John) Ruffini, Britain and the Italian Risorgimento
• 5  An Italian Inferno in Ireland: Alessandro Gavazzi and Religious Debate in the Nineteenth Century
• 6  Conforming to the British Model? Official British Perspectives on the New Italy
• 7  Italian Women in the Making: Re-reading the EnglishwomansReview (c.18711889)
• 8  Italy and the Irish Risorgimento: Italian Perspectives on the Irish War of Independence, 19191921
• Index