‘Friends of moderate opinions’: Italian political thought in 1859 in a British Liberal mirror

Abstract

This comment on Romani (above) emphasizes the degree to which British reactions to events in Italy in 1859 were widely conditioned by the similarities leading Liberals identified with the Glorious Revolution of 1688. These included an emphasis on monarchy, despite a distrust of Piedmont's dynastic and military alliance with Napoleon III, and on the leading part of an enlightened aristocracy, promoting constitutional liberty as an alternative to both revolution and absolutism. In this perspective, the Italian moderates were widely appraised as true 'sons of England'. This brief comment seeks to set the political thought of the Italian moderates against a British Liberal background at a period when there were unique and intriguing linkages between the two countries. In doing so it will highlight those elements of thought and action in the Italian moderates which successfully evoked a sympathetic reaction in Britain. By the end of 1859, as Parry has suggested, this had created in the minds of Liberals such as Lord John Russell, an Italy which 'seemed to mark a victory for English political values much more than a victory for nationalist ones' (Parry 2006: 231).Firstly, at the heart of moderate political thought lay the transition from the 'Risorgimento' from below to that of conservative revolution from above, as part of which the primacy of the masses was replaced by that of the monarchy, despite the strong fear, as in the case of Gioberti, that monarchies were loyal to their dynasties rather than their nations (Romani 2012). Many Liberals in Britain were ready to agree with Gioberti that in theory republics might be desirable, but in the context of Britain in the 1850s there seemed no point in striving for a republic partly because its benefits were uncertain, partly because the mores of the people in Britain were deemed anti-republican. This therefore sits very neatly with the moderate paradigm with its suggestion that the Italian model should be that of the Revolution of 1688 in Britain, with an overt Journal of Modern Italian Studies 17(5) 2012: 608-611Journal of Modern Italian Studies