British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalization of Democratic Nationalism 1805-2005
Abstract
Anticlericalism and the Mazzinian tradition
E. F. Biagini, Cambridge
Several speakers in this conference have explored the ‘religious’
dimension of Mazzini’s thought. However, as Colin Barr has pointed out
in his study of Irish Catholic opposition to republicanism, this
religiosity could go hand in hand with virulent anticlericalism, a
phenomenon with which Mazzini’s contemporaries would have been well
acquainted. While Mazzini’s supporters in Wales and industrial England
found it easy to reconcile anticlericalism with their own –
predominantly Nonconformist – approach to Christianity, anticlericalism
was an explosive and revolutionary component of the democratic project
in countries where the Roman Catholic Church was the established
denomination. In Rome and the papal states, where the Pope reigned as a
temporal and absolute monarch with the help of foreign powers and their
armies, this clash led to a revolution and the short-lived Mazzinian
Republic of 1849, and then again to the forcible annexation of the city
to the Italian Kingdom in 1870. From then on the clash between
republican democracy and Roman Catholicism remained a recurrent feature
of Italian politics. This paper reconstructs aspects of this dimension
of the Mazzinian tradition and its international echoes from 1849 to the
debates over the republican Constitution which Italy received a century
later, in the aftermath of the Second World War.