"This exceptional book shows the tight relationship between political action and belief, and the wider impact of high and low culture. Positioning Italian culture and political thought transnationally, and harnessing overlooked sources in an innovative and exciting fashion, Körner shows brilliantly how Italy responded to America as part of a wider European engagement and introduces Anglophone readers to significant Italian thinkers."--David Laven, University of Nottingham

"America in Italy looks at how Risorgimento thinkers and Italian nationalists perceived the American experiment in federalist democracy and how they applied the U.S. political model to their own project of unifying Italy into an independent state. This meticulously researched book places itself within the growing debates of the broader transnational and international aspects of the Italian Risorgimento and offers up a careful analysis of Italian political thinkers generally unavailable to English-reading scholars."--Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Brown University

America in Italy

The United States in the Political Thought and Imagination of the Risorgimento, 1763–1865

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

America as History

Fratricide and Civil War

"'Kill him! Kill him!' ... The maledictions, the imprecations, the execrations of the multitude, were horrible. ... The cries, the howling, the menaces, the violent din of bells, still sounding the alarm, increased the confusion and the horrors of these moments." With these words the Italian historian Carlo Botta re-created the Boston massacre of 5 March 1770. The passage forms part of his monumental History of the War of Independence of the United States of America, first published in France in 1809. Most probably a piece of fictional writing, the quote describing the scene was frequently picked up by later Italian historians of the United States. For Italian readers the episode came to symbolize the brutality associated with the North American colonies' noble quest for independence. Although Botta never set foot in the United States, his book became one of the most successful histories of the American War in any language, followed by numerous reprints, translations, and new editions. It was the first book on the country's history to be widely read among educated Italians, a standard work on the war on both sides of the Atlantic, held in high regard even by surviving protagonists of the conflict itself.

Most Italians writing about the American War of Independence found the brutality of a war dividing spouses, brothers, and entire families deeply unsettling. Making full use of the emotional register that characterized the literary as well as the political language of the Risorgimento, these authors described the War of Independence and the American Revolution as a "civil war," a term used by William Robertson in his 1777 History of America, by that time widely available also in Italian translation. The use of the term contrasts dramatically with the enthusiasm for America's struggle for independence among many of the French philosophes, who considered American freedom the political realization of Enlightenment ideals.

The Wyoming massacre of July 1778 (Viomino in Italian) is reported in almost all Italian accounts of the American War of Independence and serves to illustrate the Italians' emphasis on factional violence. In an effort to gain control over the Hudson River, British troops recruited American Loyalists as well as Native Iroquois to seize a stronghold of revolutionaries in the fertile Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania. In Botta's words, "this little country presented in reality the image of those fabulous times which the poets have described under the name of the Golden Age." During its seizure several hundred revolutionaries were killed in combat; and many dozens more, including women and children, were massacred after the battle was over, their houses set on fire, their fields devastated, and their cattle killed. While many English-language accounts of the war do not mention these events at all, Italian descriptions of the massacre go into almost unbearable detail. Botta describes how a Loyalist, "whose mother had married a second husband, butchered her with his own hand, and afterwards massacred his father-in-law, his own sisters, and their infants in the cradle. Another killed his own father, and exterminated all his family. A third imbued his hands in the blood of his brothers, his sisters, his brother-in-law, and his father-in-law." The description of these scenes contrasts dramatically with Mazzini's idea of the nation as a community of blood, when he described the family as "the patria of the heart." For any reader the images evoked by Botta's accounts are deeply disturbing. The fact that the family occupied such a prominent role in allegories of the Italian nation added a further semantic dimension to the horror. Another Italian historian, Carlo Giuseppe Londonio, writing a few years after Botta, explains that "not barbarians or foreigners, but brothers against brothers, sons against their parents, all turned to iron parricide." Similar the emphasis of Giuseppe Compagnoni, writing in the early 1820s: "warriors, old or young, women, everybody ... perished, some tortured in horrendous carnage, others burned alive. They were colonists and fellow citizens, who in such manner treated their own fellow citizens and colonists who were their equals."

In most accounts the depiction of the bloodshed continues over several pages. Botta concludes his account with an apocalyptic image of total devastation: "They cut out the tongues of the horses and cattle, and left them to wander in the midst of those fields lately so luxuriant and now in desolation, seeming to enjoy the torments of their lingering death." As the first Italian to describe the Wyoming massacre, Botta, in his own words, "long hesitated whether we ought to relate particular instances of this demonic cruelty; the bare remembrance of them makes us shudder. But on reflecting that these examples may deter good princes from war, and citizens from civil discord, we have deemed it useful to record them." Botta makes it obvious that no people should follow the Americans suit. Trying to overcome the mental barrier that distances his Italian readers from this almost inconceivable barbarity, Londonio offers a psychological explanation for the unfolding levels of violence. Describing the descent of a once happy community from paradise to hell, he resorts to an almost poetic register of language to expound what happened: "The contest with England brought about two parties unequal in strength, but equal in obstinacy." Those made to leave returned with the British troops. "[Their] thirst for revenge, for a long time repressed by a feeling of impotence, became ever more ferocious, comparable to a river, which, long restrained by its banks, suddenly breaks over the borders and releases itself with full strength over the planes, destroying woods, fields, cattle and villages. As a consequence, the revenge of these exiles came late but ever more sinisterly and frighteningly."

While Italian historiography about the American War of Independence cannot be reduced to a phantasmagoria of devastation and fratricide, its emphasis on the conflict as civil war (rather than the aspect of a war against British oppression), and the stress on brutal bloodshed and uncontrolled passion, has been largely overlooked by later generations of historians. The war's violent impact on civil society, as depicted in these accounts, seems to make it crucially different from traditional military conflicts, such as the recently ended Seven Years' War. The experience of war in these accounts also appears strongly gendered, presenting men enacting the historical change associated with the War of Independence on the back of women as victims. These gender divisions contrast dramatically with female allegories of the nation in mid-nineteenth-century Italy, which tended to represent the nation's strength and purity, or alternatively, the nation in dignified gestures of mourning. Although recent historiography on women in the American War of Independence challenges the conventional distinction between male agents and female victims, early Italian attempts to historicize the events employ these gender roles as an idiosyncratic aspect of the war. For comparable images of civil ruin Europeans had to turn to the Greek War of Independence. For instance, Eugène Delacroix's Scène des massacres de Scio, painted for the Paris Salon of 1824, depicted the hopeless suffering of victims, rounded up for enslavement. The scene is set in a landscape of complete desolation.

In Delacroix's painting the contrast between aggressor and victim opposes Ottomans and Greeks, Orient and Occident, understood as the contrast between civilization and barbarity. In the case of the Italian descriptions of the American War of Independence the authors are perplexed by a war between brothers, dividing one nation. The brutal destruction of the American paradise in Wyoming Valley becomes a metaphor for American men entering historical consciousness, a process that contrasts most strikingly with the innocence of prewar life in the colonies' natural world. Meanwhile, the Italian narratives confront us with a sharp distinction between the process of American nation building and Italians' idea of their own nation as it emerged in literary tropes during the period of the Risorgimento — an image of kinship, honor, and sanctity, analyzed by Alberto Banti in La nazione del Risorgimento. While Italy's struggle for independence freed the nation from an ethnic foreigner, the American War of Independence was a war between brothers. In his Theory of Moral Sentiments Adam Smith distinguishes between the "animosity of hostile factions" and "that of nations." It is the emphasis on this distinction with which Italians explain the American Civil War's atrocious nature.

This chapter examines how Italians have written the history of the American War of Independence, frequently in contrast to ideas of their own nation. With references to a wider range of Italian authors, at the forefront of this analysis are three substantial historical accounts of the war — Botta, Londonio, and Compagnoni — written during the first few decades of the nineteenth century, when Italians were attracted to the subject by its novelty, but also by the confrontation with experiences of political and social change at home, in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Furthermore, this chapter will demonstrate how subsequent commentators on these works, during later stages of the Risorgimento, have occasionally used this body of historiography to provide empirical evidence to support a different political agenda. Despite the abhorrent brutality of the saga depicted by Italy's early historians of the United States, within the changing political context of the Risorgimento American experiences helped some Italian political thinkers to outline an Italian path toward Unification. In teleological fashion, those thinkers read their own political ideas back into earlier histories of the American War of Independence. It was this process that suddenly allowed the later protagonists of the Italian Risorgimento to turn these histories into blueprints for Italy's road to independent statehood. While this reading of American history became influential during the later course of the Risorgimento, my chapter argues that it had little in common with the authors' original intentions. Moreover, their views always represented only part of the political spectrum.

Histories and the Politics of Reception: Carlo Botta

Carlo Botta was born in San Giorgio Canavese, north of Turin, in 1766 and died in Paris in 1837. Initially trained as a medical doctor, in the early 1790s he became involved in anti-Sabaudian and republican activity, was briefly arrested, and then spent some time in Switzerland, before joining the French army as a medical officer. After moving to Lombardy, he started a career as political commentator and collaborator on various periodicals. Following an expedition to Corfu (then still part of the Venetian Republic) he published Storia naturale e medica dell'isola di Corfù in 1798. That year he briefly joined the provisional government of the short-lived Piedmontese Republic, before it was absorbed by France. Like other Italian Republicans, Botta grew increasingly hostile toward the French administration and was among the first signatories of a petition in favor of Italian unification (Consiglio dei cinquecento, July 1799). After various positions in the French administration in Piedmont, he became a member of the French legislative assembly (1802 to 1809) and settled permanently in Paris. During those years, with easy access to France's best research libraries, he wrote most of his History of the American War of Independence. Following Napoleon's defeat, he was appointed rector of the Academy of Rouen (1817–22) and later lived from his writings. Readmitted to the Académie in Paris, he was made a Chevalier de la legion d'honneur in 1834.

History, and in particular the history and geography of the New World, fascinated more than one generation of the Bottas. During a short stay as doctor in Grenoble, still in the 1790s, Botta had married Antonietta Viervil, with whom he had three sons. The eldest, Paul-Émile, originally followed his father's career as a doctor but then became an explorer and archaeologist, and later a diplomat in the Middle East. Admired by the young Benjamin Disraeli, he worked closely with the diplomat and fellow archaeologist Austen Henry Layard, who was well connected to the Italian exile community in London. Unlike his father, Paul-Émile visited the New World and then wrote up his impressions, but he is mostly associated with discoveries concerning the Assyrian civilization and the first excavations of Khorsabad and Nineveh. Carlo translated his son's book of travels to the New World into Italian.

Carlo Botta was the best-known Italian historian of his generation, a household name even among intellectuals outside Italy. His weighty History of the American War of Independence is divided into four volumes and fourteen books. The original Italian edition was printed in France in 1809, followed by editions published in Parma between 1817 and 1819, and a Milanese edition in 1819. There are four more Italian editions printed before 1856. The first French translation appeared in 1812, the first American translation in 1820–21. In addition to the History of the American War of Independence, Botta's major historical works were a Storia d'Italia dal 1789 al 1814, published in 1824, and Storia d'Italia continuata da Guicciardini fino al 1789, originally published in 1832. Within the Risorgimento's political debates, after his early republicanism, Botta emerged as a moderate Liberal, who was disillusioned with the French experiences in Northern Italy and perceived Napoleonic rule as a form of despotism. He shared his feelings about the French occupation with famous writers such as Count Vittorio Alfieri and Ugo Foscoli. Botta's interest in American history served as a contrast to these European experiences. As he explains in the first chapter of his book, the American concept of national independence was rooted in a social model that favored the notion of civil liberty: "Everything ... in English America was based on an unusually broad context of social life; tended to favour and develop civil liberty; everything appeared to lead towards national independence." For Botta "the intellects of the Americans" were "perfectly free," not just in matters of religion, but "especially upon the affairs of the government," contrasting with the situation he had experienced prior to the Revolution in Piedmont. It was on this basis that in America "the republican maxims became a common doctrine" and that social hierarchies disappeared: "The composition of society in the English colonies rendered the inhabitants averse to every species of superiority, and inclined them to liberty. Here was but one class of men; ... opulence, and hereditary honours, were unknown amongst them." What he explains to his readers is not an abstract concept of political liberty, but one that had developed out of the very specific conditions of the historical relationship between Britain and its American colonies, out of its religious, political, and economic context. "Finding all his enjoyments in rural life, [the American] saw spring up, grow, prosper, and arrive at maturity, under his own eyes, and often by the labour of his own hands, all things necessary to the life of man; he felt himself free from all subjection, from all dependence; and individual liberty is a powerful incentive to civil liberty."

The circumstances under which this very specific notion of American liberty emerged could not be more different from those in Botta's home country, where social, economic, and political life had been based on the division of labor and social hierarchies for centuries. Rather than presenting a critique of social conditions at home, what he explains here are the specific circumstances of life in the New World. This image of American life was not free of romanticized idealizations: "As they lived dispersed in the country, mutual affection was increased between members of the same family, and finding happiness in the domestic circle they had no temptation to seek diversion in the resorts of idleness, where men too often contract the vices which terminate in dependence and habits of servility. ... It is therefore evident that in America the climate, the soil, the civil and religious institutions, even the interest of families, all concurred to people it with robust and virtuous fathers, with swarms of vigorous and spirited sons."

Botta's emphasis on the connection between climatic and social conditions suggests a debt to eighteenth-century reports on America as exemplified in the writings of Constantin-François Volney. Long sections of Botta's book deal with descriptions of land and people and the political and economic relations between the colonies and the mother country, as well as with detailed accounts of political and military developments. Botta's view of American life is easily read in the context of recent European events. For instance, his description of George Washington's virtuous character serves as a contrast to Napoleon Bonaparte, without needing to mention the latter. Similarly, the principles behind the American Revolution are described in opposition to the recent experience of the French Revolution. Without becoming more explicit, Botta's outline of these entanglements starts from French motives for supporting the American Revolution, a "desire for vengeance, the hope of retrieving its losses, the remembrance of ancient splendour, the anguish of recent wounds." Although Botta admits that love of liberty also played a role in stimulating the French to side with the Americans, hatred of the British was their main motive.