Mazzini dreamed of a federal Europe while plotting Italian revolutions from exile
Sentenced to death in his absence, expelled from Switzerland and jailed in Paris, Giuseppe Mazzini spent years in poverty in London firing off letters to agents across Europe and South America. His uprisings kept failing, yet his vision of a united Italian republic inspired Garibaldi, and later figures as varied as Gandhi, Nehru and Sun Yat-sen.
Mazzini was born in Genoa on 22 June 1805, soon after the city was absorbed into Napoleon's empire. His father was a professor with Jacobin sympathies, his mother a fervent Jansenist. He entered university at 14, qualified in law in 1826 and worked as a lawyer for the poor while dreaming of writing novels; his first essay was on Dante's patriotism. Newspapers he wrote for kept being shut down by the authorities.
He joined the secret Carbonari in 1827, was arrested in 1830 and chose exile over confinement. In Marseille he founded Young Italy, a secret society with the motto God and the People and a single aim: one free, independent, republican nation, sparked by a popular uprising that would ignite revolution across Europe. By 1833 it claimed some 60,000 members. That year's planned insurrection was discovered before it began; 12 participants were executed, his closest friend Jacopo Ruffini took his own life, and Mazzini was condemned to death. A second attempt in 1834, with the newly recruited Giuseppe Garibaldi, was easily crushed.
Undaunted, he founded Young Europe in Bern that spring with a dozen Italian, Polish and German refugees. Its premise was that 1789 had enlarged individual liberty and a new revolution must now secure national liberty, and Mazzini hoped free nations might one day form a loose federal Europe with a shared assembly. It lacked money and support and soon faded, though decades later it inspired the Young Turks. Settling in London in 1837, he revived Young Italy in 1840, opened a school for poor Italians and befriended Thomas Carlyle.
Historians remain divided on his methods. Reliance on secret cells and risings brought repeated failure and repression, and his refusal to compromise with the monarchy arguably slowed his goal. Still, his ideas shaped the Italian constitution and European republicanism, and he is remembered as the Prophet of Italian Nationalism. He died on 10 March 1872.
Source: Giuseppe Mazzini
