withdrawn’s Reviews > Risorgimento: The History of Italy from Napoleon to Nation State > Status Update

158

The question of causality (what caused national unification?) is not entirely resolved by the move to representations and meaning, however fruitful this latter analysis is proving to be. Even now, we know comparatively little about what happened to transform a vibrant cultural movement of nationalism into a clearly more compromised political programme.

“... Gramsci's identification of the Risorgimento with a failed bourgeois revolution cannot be sustained. He relies on a model of national development that fundamentally distorts the locally and regionally based nature of social conflict, and his analysis underestimates the problems of creating a revolutionary movement with truly national appeal....

« That is, by dissolving the connections between society and politics, this approach has loosened the causal link between middle class and Risorgimento, and the corresponding centrality of the Risorgimento for middle-class Italy has also been downgraded. As a result, it seems impossible to explain the Risorgimento by using a class- based analysis. »

Calls for Italian unity were, if anything, undermined by recourse to the past: ancient Rome was glorious but was characterised by civil war and factionaliom (the Republic), or by repression and decadence (the Empire). The medieval age of communal independence was heroic, but was also a period of political fragmentation and civil conflict.