THE CARBONARI AS A DECENTRALIZED NETWORK AGAINST ABSOLUTISM
ORIGINS AND ORGANIZATION
The Carboneria, or Society of the Charcoal-Burners, emerged in southern Italy around the turn of the nineteenth century. Its precise origins obscured by the secrecy inherent to its purpose. It utilized the organizational models of Freemasonry and the traditions of earlier Italian sects. The Carbonari constituted a decentralized network of local cells called vendite (shops), each operating with considerable autonomy. Members were initiated through elaborate rituals replete with Christian symbolism: references to Christ’s Passion, the imagery of purification by fire, and the language of brotherhood and sacrifice. The movement’s very name invoked the charcoal-burners of the Apennine forests, humble artisans who labored in obscurity, as a fitting metaphor for clandestine brothers who worked to ignite the flame of liberty.
The Carbonari flourished most vigorously between approximately 1800 and 1831, spreading from their Neapolitan heartland northward into the Papal States, the Romagna, Piedmont and the duchies of central Italy. Context to consider, is that their membership was socially diverse, encompassing army officers, lawyers, landowners, students, merchants, and even minor clergy as a cross-section of the educated and professional classes who had tasted the civic possibilities of the Napoleonic period and found the Restoration order intolerable.
GOALS AND IDEOLOGICAL RANGE
The Carbonari’s goals, though united by a common opposition to Restoration absolutism, varied considerably from region to region. In the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the movement’s primary aim was to force the Bourbon monarchy to grant a constitution, specifically the Spanish Constitution of 1812, which had become a talisman of liberal aspirations across southern Europe. In Piedmont, constitutionalist sentiment mingled with a nascent Italian patriotism that looked to the House of Savoy as a potential leader of national liberation. In the Papal States and the Romagna, Carbonari cells agitated against the Pope’s temporal government, which was widely regarded, even by moderate Catholics, as among the most oppressive and anachronistic administrations in Europe.
Some factions leaned toward republicanism, while others envisaged a federated Italy under constitutional monarchs. What united them all was the rejection of absolutism, the demand for popular participation in government, and the conviction that foreign domination, above all Austrian hegemony, must be overthrown.
The philosophy of the Carbonari expanded upon the legacy of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic reforms, which had introduced civil codes, abolished feudal privileges, and demonstrated that rational governance was possible. Yet most Carbonari were not Jacobins. They rejected the Terror’s extremism and the radical atheism of certain French revolutionary currents. Their movement retained a deeply Christian character, meaning many Carbonari were devout Catholics who objected not to religion itself but to the Pope’s exercise of temporal sovereignty and the Church hierarchy’s alliance with reactionary monarchs. Anticlericalism, in this context, meant opposition to the political power of the clergy, not hostility to Christian faith.
The American Minervan 
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