God and the People: Mazzini’s Divine Ideal, the Carbonari Networks, and the Republican Struggle Against Monarchism and Theocracy

A “THIRD REPUBLIC” OF THE PEOPLE

PHILOSOPHICAL AND SPIRITUAL VISION

The philosophical and spiritual ideas that animated the Italian republican movement may be synthesized around several interconnected propositions. The first and most fundamental was that republican government was the only political form consonant with divine moral law and human dignity. Mazzini’s God was a God of progress, association, and liberty — a God whose purposes were fulfilled not through the submission of subjects to kings but through the free self-governance of equal citizens. Monarchy, by interposing hereditary privilege between God and the people, violated the moral order of the universe. The republic was therefore not merely a political preference but a theological imperative.

The second proposition was that popular sovereignty constituted a sacred trust, not a mere political arrangement. When the people governed themselves, they exercised a faculty implanted in them by God: the capacity for moral self-determination. Self-governance was not license but responsibility; it demanded the cultivation of civic virtue, the acceptance of sacrifice, and the subordination of private interest to the common good. In this sense, Mazzini’s republicanism was profoundly conservative, and not in the partisan sense, but in its insistence that freedom was inseparable from moral discipline.

The third proposition was that the nation was a divinely ordained instrument for human progress and moral education. Each people possessed a distinctive character, a unique mission to contribute to the civilization of humanity. The fragmentation of Italy into petty states ruled by foreign princes and domestic tyrants was not merely a political misfortune; it was a sin against divine providence, a frustration of God’s plan for the Italian people. National unification was therefore a religious duty.

THE THIRD ROME IN THE PHASES OF ROME

Mazzini’s vision of a “Third Rome” crystallized these ideas into a single powerful image. The first Rome was the Rome of the Caesars, and it had given the world the idea of universal empire, of a single political order embracing all peoples. The second Rome, the Rome of the Popes, had given the world the idea of universal spiritual authority, of a single faith uniting all Christendom. Both had been necessary stages in human development, but both were now exhausted. The Third Rome, or the Rome of the People would transcend both empire and theocracy, inaugurating an epoch of free nations federated in brotherhood, each contributing its distinctive genius to the progress of humanity. This was not merely a political program; it was a prophecy, a vision of historical destiny that invested the Italian republican cause with the grandeur of a sacred mission.

DUTY, SACRIFICE AND BROTHERHOOD

As has been introduced, the moral foundations of this vision rested upon the ethic of duty, sacrifice, and brotherhood. Where kings demanded obedience and popes demanded submission, the republic demanded something more exacting: the willing assumption of responsibility for the common good. Republican citizenship, in Mazzini’s conception, was not a passive status but an active vocation. The citizen was called to educate the ignorant, defend the oppressed, sacrifice personal comfort for national liberation, and subordinate selfish interest to collective well-being. This ethic of duty distinguished Mazzini’s republicanism from the rights-based liberalism of the Anglo-French tradition and gave it a distinctively communitarian and spiritual character.

The republicans framed their cause as one of moral regeneration: not the destruction of religion but its purification; not the rejection of authority but its relocation from kings and popes to the sovereign people; not atheism but the separation of spiritual from temporal power. They sought to regenerate and express a rich intellectual heritage — the civic virtue celebrated by the Roman Republic, the civic humanism of Renaissance Florence, the anti-theocratic arguments of Enlightenment thinkers such as Pietro Giannone, and the revolutionary constitutionalism of 1789 — and fused these elements into a distinctive political theology that was at once modern and rooted in Italian tradition.

LEGACY OF ITALIAN REPUBLICANISM IN THE RISORGIMENTO

TENSION BETWEEN IDEAL AND REALITY

The story of Italian republicanism in the Risorgimento is, in one sense, a story of failure unfortunately or, more precisely, of a triumph so deeply compromised as to constitute, for the republicans themselves, a bitter disappointment. Italy was unified in 1861, but as a constitutional monarchy under the House of Savoy, not as the republic that Mazzini had spent his life advocating.

The unification was achieved not by popular insurrection and moral awakening — the methods Mazzini prescribed — but by Cavour’s diplomatic maneuvering, Piedmontese military power, and the alliance with Napoleon III. The new Kingdom of Italy was a liberal state, governed by a constitution and a parliament, but it was also a monarchy, and a monarchy that incorporated the very compromises Mazzini had spent his career denouncing: a restricted franchise, an aristocratic Senate, and a sovereign who retained significant prerogatives in foreign policy and military affairs.

Mazzini himself refused to accept the settlement. He never entered the Italian Parliament, declined to swear an oath to the monarchy, and spent his final years in exile and semi-clandestine existence, continuing to agitate for the republic he believed Italy must eventually become. He died in Pisa in March 1872, under an assumed name, just months after the capture of Rome had fulfilled one part of his dream — the end of papal temporal power, while leaving the other part (the republic) unrealized. His funeral became a massive public demonstration of the reverence in which he was held, even by an Italy that had not adopted his political program.

THE LONG AFTERMATH

Mazzinian republicanism survived as a political tradition within unified Italy, though it was increasingly marginalized by the rise of mass politics, socialism, and the transformative forces of industrialization. The Italian Republican Party (Partito Repubblicano Italiano, or PRI), founded in 1895, preserved the Mazzinian legacy but remained a minority force. Under Fascism, the republican tradition was suppressed along with all other forms of democratic politics, and many republicans joined the anti-Fascist resistance.

ITALIAN MONARCHY IS ABOLISHED

The vindication of Mazzini’s vision came at last on 2 June 1946, when the Italian people, voting in a national referendum, chose to abolish the monarchy and establish a republic. The margin was narrow, the country divided, and the new Italian Republic owed more to the catastrophe of Fascism and the Second World War than to the direct influence of Mazzinian ideology. Yet the symbolic resonance was profound. The Italian Republic, enshrined in the Constitution of 1948, realized the aspiration that Mazzini, the Carbonari, Garibaldi, and the martyrs of 1820, 1831, and 1849 had fought and died for: a sovereign nation governed by its people, free from the twin tyrannies of hereditary monarchy and theocratic authority.

ENDURING LEGACY OF MAZZINI

The enduring significance of the Italian republican tradition lies not only in its political outcomes but in its philosophical and moral vision. Mazzini offered a conception of politics as moral vocation and a vision in which self-governance was inseparable from self-improvement, in which the nation was not an idol but an instrument of human progress, and in which duty to the common good took precedence over the assertion of individual rights. His was a moral, duty-based alternative to both monarchy and theocracy that shaped the radical edge of the Risorgimento and left a lasting imprint on European republican thought.

In an age when the relationship between religion and politics, between nationalism and democracy, and between individual rights and collective duty remains as contested as ever, the ideas of Mazzini and the struggles of the Carbonari retain a striking and instructive relevance. Their vision of a republic grounded not in mere procedural democracy but in moral conviction and civic duty. This is the vision of a republic in which, as Mazzini would have it, God and the People are reconciled through the free exercise of human conscience and continues to challenge and inspire the people.

RECOMMENDED READINGS

Giuseppe Garibaldi, Autobiography of Giuseppe Garibaldi, Translated by A, Werner, 3 vols, London: Walter Smith and Innes, 1889.
Giuseppe Mazzini, The Duties of Man and Other Essays, Translated by Ella Noyes, London: J,M, Dent and Sons, 1907.
Giuseppe Mazzini, “Istruzione generale per gli affratellati nella Giovine Italia” [General Instructions for the Members of Young Italy], 1831, In Scritti editi ed inediti di Giuseppe Mazzini, vol, 2, Imola: Cooperativa Tipografico-Editrice Paolo Galeati, 1907.
Giuseppe Mazzini, Life and Writings of Joseph Mazzini, 6 vols, London: Smith, Elder and Co,, 1864-1870.
Giuseppe Mazzini, “To the Italians,” In Scritti editi ed inediti di Giuseppe Mazzini, Edizione nazionale, 106 vols, Imola: Cooperativa Tipografico-Editrice Paolo Galeati, 1906-1943.
Silvio Pellico, Le mie prigioni [My Prisons], Turin, 1832, Translated by Thomas Roscoe as My Prisons: Memoirs of Silvio Pellico, London: Henry Colburn, 1833.
Pius IX, Syllabus Errorum [Syllabus of Errors], Rome: Vatican, 1864.
Stringfellow Barr, Mazzini: Portrait of an Exile, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1935.
Derek Beales and Eugenio F, Biagini, The Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy, 2nd ed, London: Routledge, 2002.
John A, Davis, ed, Italy in the Nineteenth Century, 1796-1900, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Christopher Duggan, The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy Since 1796, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008.
E,E,Y, Hales, Mazzini and the Secret Societies: The Making of a Myth, London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1956.
Harry Hearder, Italy in the Age of the Risorgimento, 1790-1870, London: Longman, 1983,
Maurizio Isabella, Risorgimento in Exile: Italian Émigrés and the Liberal International in the Post-Napoleonic Era, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Denis Mack Smith, Mazzini, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.
Denis Mack Smith, The Making of Italy, 1796-1870, New York: Harper and Row, 1968,
R, John Rath, “The Carbonari: Their Origins, Initiation Rites, and Aims,” American Historical Review 69, no, 2 (January 1964): 353-370.
Stefano Recchia and Nadia Urbinati, eds, A Cosmopolitanism of Nations: Giuseppe Mazzini’s Writings on Democracy, Nation Building, and International Relations, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.
Lucy Riall, Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007,
Lucy Riall, The Italian Risorgimento: State, Society, and National Unification, London: Routledge, 1994.
Roland Sarti, Mazzini: A Life for the Religion of Politics, Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997,
Denis Mack Smith, Victor Emanuel, Cavour, and the Risorgimento, London: Oxford University Press, 1971.
Margaret C.W. Wicks, The Italian Exiles in London, 1816-1848, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1937.