Giuseppe Mazzini

Giuseppe Mazzini was the leading prophet of Italian unity, a Genoese conspirator and writer who spent most of his life in exile plotting for a single, free and republican Italy. His secret societies and uprisings mostly failed, and unification was finally achieved by a monarchy he distrusted, but his ideas of nationhood, duty and democracy inspired the unification of Italy and nationalist movements across the world.

Mazzini was born in Genoa on 22 June 1805, when the city had just been annexed by Napoleonic France. His father was a university professor of Jacobin sympathies and his mother a devout Jansenist. He entered university at fourteen, qualified in law in 1826 and wrote literary criticism in the Romantic spirit, while the liberal newspapers he wrote for were shut down by the authorities. In 1827 he joined the Carbonari, a secret revolutionary society. Arrested in Genoa in 1830, he chose exile in early 1831.

In Marseille in 1831 Mazzini founded Young Italy, a secret society pledged to make the peninsula's states into "one, free, independent, republican nation", under the motto "God and the People". By 1833 it claimed some 60,000 members. His first planned rising in Piedmont that year was discovered before it began; twelve conspirators were executed and Mazzini was sentenced to death in absentia. A second attempt in 1834, involving the young Giuseppe Garibaldi, was easily crushed. That year in Bern he founded Young Europe, hoping that free nations might one day form a federal Europe in place of the order imposed by the Congress of Vienna.

Expelled from Switzerland and France, Mazzini settled in London in 1837, often in poverty. He revived Young Italy there, ran a school for poor Italian children and wrote ceaselessly to agents across Europe and South America. When it emerged that the British government had opened his letters and passed information to foreign governments, the scandal won him sympathy among British liberals. The uprisings he inspired, such as the landing of the Bandiera brothers in Calabria, ended in executions.

During the Revolutions of 1848 Mazzini hurried to Milan, which had risen against Austria, but his insistence on a republic rather than union with Piedmont made him unpopular. In February 1849 a republic was proclaimed in Rome after the pope fled, and on 29 March Mazzini became one of its three triumvirs and its effective leader. French troops sent to restore the pope overcame its defence, led by Garibaldi, and in July 1849 Mazzini went back into exile.

Further risings in Mantua, Milan and the south in the 1850s failed and badly damaged his movement. Leadership of the national cause passed to King Victor Emmanuel II and his prime minister Camillo Cavour, who called Mazzini "chief of the assassins". The Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in 1861 under the House of Savoy, which Mazzini opposed. He published his moral and political creed, The Duties of Man, in 1860, refused a seat in parliament in 1867 and was jailed in 1870 after trying to start a revolt in Sicily, being released when Italy took Rome. He died at Pisa on 10 March 1872; some 100,000 people attended his funeral in Genoa.

Mazzini combined fierce nationalism with a cosmopolitan vision of cooperating nations, a religious sense of patriotic duty, support for women's equality and concern for workers. He rejected class struggle, condemning both the Paris Commune and Karl Marx, who mocked him in turn. Admirers ranged from Woodrow Wilson and David Lloyd George to Gandhi, Nehru and Sun Yat-sen, while Italian Fascists later also claimed his legacy.

Our 1815 map shows the divided Italy of his youth, and the 1878 map shows the unified Kingdom of Italy that he helped inspire but never accepted.