The Spanish Constitution of 1812 and the Mediterranean Revolutions (1820- 25)

Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies Journal of the Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies Volume 37 Issue 2 Special Issue: Global Horizons and Local Article 7 Interests in the Era of the Constitution of Cadiz 2012 The pS anish Constitution of 1812 and the Mediterranean Revolutions (1820-25) John Davis University of Connecticut, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.asphs.net/bsphs Part of the European History Commons, Political History Commons, and the Social History Commons Recommended Citation Davis, John (2012) "The pS anish Constitution of 1812 and the Mediterranean Revolutions (1820-25)," Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies: Vol. 37 : Iss. 2 , Article 7. https://doi.org/10.26431/0739-182X.1132 Available at: https://digitalcommons.asphs.net/bsphs/vol37/iss2/7 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies. It has been accepted for inclusion in Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies by an authorized editor of Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Spanish Constitution of 1812 and the Mediterranean Revolutions (1820- 25) JOHN DAVIS University of Connecticutt The bicentenary of the Constitution of Cadiz has come at a good moment. After a long period of neglect Italian historians have begun to take new interest in the revolutions in Naples, Sicily and Piedmont of 1820-21. This in turn reflects new ways of thinking about and studying Italy’s Risorgimento, in particular new emphasis on the need for broader transnational understanding of the history of the 19 th century Italian nationalist movements. If the history of Italy’s Risorgimento spans much of the century before Unification in 1860, there was arguably no moment that was more transnational than the revolutions of the early 1820s. Yet no period of the Risorgimento has been less studied. When we turn to Spain we find too that while the impact of the Trienio Liberal on Spanish America has been studied quite intensely, its resonances in Europe - especially in Italy and the movement for Greek independence - have by contrast until recently been curiously neglected.1 There are many reasons why historians and contemporaries chose to forget the liberal revolutions that started in Naples and Sicily (July 1820) and in Piedmont (March 1821) in response to Rafael Riego’s pronunciamento in Cadiz in January 1820 and the promulgation of the Spanish Constitution of 1812. The revolutions all failed and the next generation of nationalists and political activists were unsure how to interpret their significance. The revolutions had followed paths that had much in common, yet were very different from the now classical model of the French revolution of 1789. While all of the liberal revolutions had given rise to potentially ruinous divisions between moderates and radicals, all had fallen victim to foreign intervention and not to internecine strife (although that had not been absent). But they had also all been marked by a sense of international solidarity, a distinguishing feature that would never again be repeated, not even in the revolutions of 1848-9 that would adopt goals that were more nationalist than internationalist. The international solidarities of the liberal 1 Maurizio Isabella, Risorgimento in Exile: Italian Émigrés and the Liberal International in Post- Napoleonic Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). revolutions were not immediately extinguished, however, and would – as Maurizio Isabella has recently argued – provide the post-1821 (in the case of Italy) and post-1825 (in the case of Spain) generation of exiles with the essence of their political project – a project that sought to democratize the Mediterranean world. 2 Italian liberals sought refuge first in Spain and Portugal, before being forced northwards like their Spanish and Portuguese companions to Paris or London. Some, like Giuseppe Pecchio and Santorre Santarosa, would join in Greek insurrections in 1825. Others, like the Neapolitan Guglielmo Pepe, chose to support the cause of Greek independence not with their swords but with their pens. But in their writings and in their appeals to the sanctity of the cause of emancipation of the peoples subject to foreign tyranny, the liberals of the 1820 revolutions joined together to invoke ancient liberties and envisage new forms of Mediterranean democracy across an area stretching from the Atlantic to the Black Sea, from the Tagus to the Balkans. Did this constitute what José Luis Comellas termed the “liberal international”?3 The idea cannot be completely dismissed, and the liberal revolutions of the early 1820s reveal unusually strong transnational features. Unlike those of 1830 and 1848 the revolutions were the result not only of planning but of international planning. There had been close contact between members of the Italian secret societies (the Carbonari and Filadelfi) and Spanish freemasons in 1819. The Carbonari lodges in southern Italy had formally adopted the Constitution of Cadiz as their political program in the same year. They followed similar patterns and in Spain, Naples and Piedmont the revolutions all began as military pronunciamentos . The revolutions varied in length – three years in Spain, nine months in Naples and Sicily, less than a month in Piedmont – but they shared a common political program. The inspiration for that program was the Spanish Constitution of the 1812 Cortes of Cadiz. Although when it came to Greece adherence to the Spanish constitution was a matter for individual leaders, the “liberal international” of the early 1820s found in the Spanish Constitution the template for a democratic project that was both transnational and Mediterranean. Given the unusual coherence of the political objectives of the “liberal international” why did so little trace remain after the revolutions collapsed? The two questions are interlinked because the failure of the revolutions played a large 2 ibid . 3 José Luis Comellas, El Trienio Constitucional (Madrid: Ediciones Rialp, 1963), 397. See also Marion Miller, “A Liberal International? Perspectives on Comparative Approaches to the Revolutions of the 1820s in Spain, Italy, and Greece,” in Greece and the Mediterranean , ed. Richard W. Clement, Benjamin F. Taggie, and Robert G. Schwartz (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1990), 61-68; and Isabella, op.cit . part in ensuring their subsequent neglect not only by historians but also by the next generation of political activists. After the event some of the most outspoken critiques of the liberal revolutions came from the political émigrés , many of whom devoted their careers in exile to endless polemics to justify their own positions and condemn the tactics of their opponents.4 Some blamed their fellow liberals, others blamed the Spanish Constitution – described later by the Piedmontese writer Cesare Balbo as “the worst of all forms of Monarchy and of all forms of Republic: the form of representative government least in accord with the precepts of the science of political representation.” 5 Others took up the criticisms of the Spanish constitution that had been raised when it was first adopted – especially in Sicily, where there was strong preference for the earlier Sicilian bicameral Constitution granted during the British tutelage of the island in 1812. 6 In Italy, the most damaging criticism came from Mazzini, for whom the federalist features of the Constitution of Cadiz were anathema - a hostility reinforced by the constitution’s Spanish origins. Indeed, when Mazzini founded Young Italy in 1832 its manifesto roundly rejected all the principles on which the liberal revolutions of the previous decade had been based. In place of the Constitution’s federalist inflections and its project of constitutional monarchy, Mazzini advocated the democratic Republic “one and indivisible.” When the Mazzinian projects faltered during the revolutions of 1848-49 no one looked back to the Spanish Constitution of 1812, not even committed federalist republicans like Carlo Cattaneo, Francesco Ferrara and Michele Amari.7 By the 1830s the only part of the experience of the trieno liberal that seemed still of interest for the Italian radicals was the idea of the popular war: the guerrilla and the guerra della bande which found in the Piedmontese writer Carlo Bianco de Saint-Jorioz an early champion whose ideas were taken up first by Mazzini and after 1848 by Carlo Pisacane.8 By the 1830s Italian moderates had gravitated away from the Spanish constitution of 1812 as well, adopting instead the French model, the “chartre octroyée” of the July Monarchy and example of moderate British reformism set by the Great Reform Act of 1832 and the administrative revolution that followed. 4 Isabella, op.cit . 5 Andrea Romano, “L’influenza della carta gaditana nel costitucionalismo iberoamericano y latino,”in La Constitución de Cádiz de 1812: hacia los orígenes del constitucionalismo iberoamericano y latino , in ed. Asdrúbal Aguiar (Caracas: Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, 2004), 369. 6 Antonio de Francesco, La Guerra di Sicilia: il distretto di Caltagirone nella rivoluzione del 1820-21 (Catania: Bonanno Editore, 1992). 7 Amelia Crisantino, ed., Introduzione agli “Studi su la storia di Sicilia della metà del XVIII secolo al 1820” di Michele Amari (Palermo: Associazione no profit “Mediterranean”, 2010). 8 Miller,

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