The Nation of the Risorgimento: Kinship, Sanctity and Honour in the Origins of Unified Italy

"For many reasons—Alberto Mario Banti was my supervisor for my PhD, but that is not the main one! This book came out in Italian in 2000 and the English translation has recently been published by Routledge (2020). It really is a seminal book that has changed the narrative regarding the Risorgimento. If we look at the decades from the 1950s to the end of the 20th century, we see that the Risorgimento was neglected by scholars or, to put it better, scholars tended to focus on its socio-economic aspects and to ignore nationalism and the national patriotic narrative. Marxist scholars, unsurprisingly, really focused on this idea of the Risorgimento as a failed bourgeois revolution, building on Gramsci’s interpretation. They explicitly argued that nationalism was not an important factor in this process. We must remember that republican Italy didn’t find it very easy to deal with the legacy of fascism, especially when it came to defining the roots and nature of Italian nationalism and discussing its development. In the 1990s the conversation had become quite stagnant. Alberto Banti’s book shook it up and gave it new life, partly thanks to a new methodological approach, but also because the times had changed, not only in Italy, but internationally. There was a new interest in nationalism and the origins of nationalism dating at least from the 1980s/1990s, with a vigorous international debate among historians and sociologists. Taking inspiration from international scholarship, Banti refocused the conversation about the Risorgimento on nationalism . Of course, he did not do so by going back to the hagiographic narrative that was typical of the second part of the 19th century, in which the Risorgimento and the martyrs to the cause of the unity and independence of the nation were glorified. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter His proposition was to use the tools of cultural history to take the national patriotic narrative very seriously and to understand why it was so appealing at the time, so much so that many—men mainly, but also women—decided to give their lives for this cause. Through his research, he’s trying to understand the reasons why this narrative could (and did) change people’s lives. In the book, Banti identifies key texts that form, in his opinion, the ‘canon’ of the Risorgimento and proceeds to the deconstruction of the national patriotic narrative through the analysis of the intertextual connections and morphological similarities. These are mainly literary texts—poetry, novels, opera libretti and songs. In particular, he identifies the presence of what he calls ‘deep figures’—kinship, sanctity and honour—as the core structure of an intrinsically gendered national patriotic narrative. Just to give a quick example, if we look at the structure of the national patriotic narrative, we see that the nation is portrayed as a family, whose members share common lineage. This image has an immediate pre-rational appeal and creates an emotional connection to the national patriotic narrative. And at the same time, it evokes the nation as a genealogical, biological community. This aspect of Banti’s approach was very innovative at the time. The more traditional paradigm, endorsed particularly from the 1940s onwards, told us that, actually, the nation of the Risorgimento’s legacy was a civic, voluntarist definition of Italian identity, with almost no ethnic, racial or biological elements. Banti has convincingly and successfully managed to reverse this paradigm. Absolutely. Banti claims that the Italian national patriotic narrative is based not only on the idea that Italians share a language, culture and common memories, but really very deep biological connections. This book is so important because it revamped the discussion surrounding Italian nationalism. Unsurprisingly it was received very well by some scholars and very badly by others. For both supporters and critics it has opened new paths of research on Italian nationalism. Its publication produced a consensus that it was time to reappraise Italian nationalism. Yes, he is being deliberately provocative, for sure, although I wouldn’t say that ‘honour’ is an unbourgeois value. I guess it all depends on how we define it. If we go back to George Mosse’s studies on the connections between nationalism and sexuality and on the key role respectability had in the self-fashioning of the bourgeoisie, it is evident that a very specific definition of honour related to socially accepted sexual behaviours was in fact typically bourgeois. As concerns ‘sanctity’, Banti has in mind the continuous and omnipresent religious references in the national patriotic narrative that bear a strong and undeniable connection to Christianity. Very good examples are the concepts of sacrifice and martyrdom, that come from religion although they are not only religious concepts. Both are crucial to the structure of the national patriotic narrative and to its gendered nature. All men are called to sacrifice their lives for the fatherland, and by doing so they become martyrs that will enjoy eternal life. Yes, he is, although this is a point that can be quite controversial because it opens the very complex question of reception. How can we analyse how these texts and images were in fact received and interpreted by contemporaries? We cannot forget that the overwhelming majority of Italian people could not read at all at the time and did not even speak Italian. Tullio De Mauro, an important Italian linguist, argued that, at the time of the unification in 1861, only about 2% of Italians actually spoke Italian. Only the TV managed, in the 1950s, to achieve the linguistic unification of the country. Having said that, we certainly need to distinguish between urban and rural contexts. Banti came back to the thesis that the Risorgimento was not an elite phenomenon in an important book that he co-edited with Paul Ginsborg, a British scholar based in Florence. This is volume 22 of the ‘Annali’ of the ‘Storia d’Italia’ published by Einaudi in 2007. Yes."