The Young Panizzi
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THE YOUNG PANIZZI M. R. D. FOOT ANTONIO PANIZZI was born on i6 September 1797 in Brescello, a small town at the junction of the Po and the Enza, a town so insignificant that it does not appear at all in the current Michelin guide to Italy. It lies in the fertile, but flat, Lombard plain. The place must have had some influence on his character: a townsman, yet in a predominantly rural area; and, at that, a townsman in an enclave, because Brescello was part of one then independent duchy - Modena - but surrounded by the territory of another, Parma; and was constantly quarrelling over details with its still smaller immediate neighbour Boretto. Movement and controversy were all round him from the start. The date matters as much as the place: it was still a time when few things moved faster than a galloping horse. Not only was there neither telegraph nor television, there were no trains; not only were there no submarines, there were no steamships; and in Italy, until the year before he was born, not only was there no freedom of discussion but there was no kind of parliament. Italy had moved from the excitements ofthe Renaissance into a rut of conformity from which it had just been shaken loose. The pohtical kaleidoscope was constantly shifting; and shifting, unlike the waters of the Po and the Enza, in various directions. Italy, in Metternich's cruel but memorable phrase (of as late as 1849), was simply 'a geographical expression', and within it everything seemed to be in flux. Panizzi was brought up among scenes of frequent, inconstant change. His parents when they married were the subjects of Hercules III, the last male heir ofthe great house of Este, dukes of Modena, whose ancestors included Lucrezia Borgia. Modena, to which Brescello was then subject, was an entirely independent dukedom - in international law; but had in fact become a client state, subordinate to the great Habsburg empire ruled from Vienna. Though Hercules had but one child, his daughter Maria Beatrice, he married her well: her husband was Archduke Ferdinand von Habsburg, third son of the Empress Maria Theresa, younger brother of the Emperors Joseph II and Leopold 11.^ This brought Modena fully into the Habsburg orbit, much as Czechoslovakia or Hungary revolved in the Soviet orbit during the Cold War. Yet in 1797 the French Revolution was still a recent, vivid memory: 'Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive', as Wordsworth put it later, in 1809. Moreover the French example might be followed elsewhere; as Aldous Huxley once wrote, 'from being almost 107 or completely unthinkable, revolution suddenly became not only thinkable but actable'.^ in a campaign on the other side ofthe Po in 1796-1 quote the Annuai Register for that year: The French were commanded by General Buonaparte... a native of Corsica born, as it were, a commander, and uniting the intrepidity of an ancient Roman, with the subtlety and contrivance of a modern Italian; and both these fortified and improved by a liberal, as well as military education. When Buonaparte had shattered the armies of Habsburg Austria and reached Milan, he had proclaimed the end of Austrian dominance and of feudal regimes; and in October 1796 revolutionaries in Modena too expelled its duke and declared the duchy part of a new Cispadane Republic, along with Reggio nelFEmilia, Bologna, and even Mantua which lay beyond the Po. Next year, under the treaty of Campo Formio, signed when the mfant Panizzi was a month old, the Cispadane Repubhc was subsumed into a much larger Cisalpine Repubhc, which ran from the Simplon pass on the Swiss border to the Adriatic near San Marino (which remained, as it remains, independent). The Cisalpine Republic in turn was not set in stone. It was suppressed by Austria in 1799, though Buonaparte reimposed it next year, after his victory at the Battle of Marengo. When he became the Emperor Napoleon in 1804, he looked after his family. His brother Joseph became King of Naples, and was then promoted to be King of Spain; his brother-in-law Murat took over Naples instead. The Cisalpine Republic became the Kingdom of Italy, with the French emperor himself as its king; his stepson Eugene de Beauharnais was his viceroy. His sister Elisa became Princess of nearby Lucca in 1805, and ruled it with force and success. Eugene's subjects too had many benefits from his modernizing and resolute regime; but that also did not last. When Napoleon fell in 1814, the kingdom of Italy fell with him; and was not revived during the hundred days of 1815. Hercules had been fobbed off with the duchy of Breisgau, in compensation for the loss of Modena; Breisgau passed to his son-in-law Ferdinand when he died in 1803; Ferdinand in turn died in 1806, leaving a son, Francis IV. Francis was ambitious, not only to regain Modena - as he did, under the terms ofthe Treaty of Vienna (signed, so confident were its makers, a few days before the Battle of Waterloo confirmed Napoleon^s downfall) - but to outdo one of his numerous first cousins, Ferdinand III, Grand Duke of Tuscany. Francis meant to be, like his uncle Joseph II, a benevolent despot; as so often happens, he turned out more despotic than benevolent. Richard Garnett indeed went so far as to call his 'the worst of all the petty Italian tyrannies ofthe epoch'.^ He was at least energetic, so that he busied himself with no end of details in his duchy; and heard of a promising student from Brescello, the young Antonio Panizzi. Panizzi had gone on from primary school at Brescello to secondary school at Reggio neirEmilia, not far away. As a schoolboy, brought up from ancient family habit in the Roman Catholic Church, he served at the altar. What is it about being an altar boy that seems to initiate the young into the clandestine life.^ There have been enough examples to make it noteworthy: for instance, the once celebrated Californians codenamed the 108 Fig. I. The young Antonio Panizzi; engraved from the sketch by Ambrogio Berchet. 'A Collection... relating to Sir A. Panizzi', assembled by E. E. Stride, 1859-84; BL, C.i33.e.i Falcon and the Snowman, who spied for the Soviet Union ;^ the more recent and yet more scandalous case of Aldrich Ames, for nine years a Russian agent close to the heart ofthe CIA; those still unforgotten monsters Heydrich and Himmler; had all been altar boys in their early teens. Panizzi too turned clandestine, but in a different way. Like several of my own contemporaries, crazed by the spell of far Muscovia, who thought that by serving Stalin - of whose tyranny little was known abroad - they were serving humanity, Panizzi believed that by joining a secret society he could serve humanity, and serve Italy. He did so after he had graduated at Parma - in a different duchy from Modena, but the best university to be found at all close to home - where he qualified as a doctor of law in 1818. Exactly which secret society he joined is still not perfectly clear. The largest, locally, 109 at the time was that ofthe Carbonari, to which he often and emphatically denied having belonged; as perhaps he should have done, according to the oaths he swore on joining, had he really been a Carbonaro, but in this case I am happy to follow his best biographer, Edward Miller, and assume he was admitted to the Sublimi Maestri Perfetti in March 1820. Six months later. Duke Francis decreed that membership of any such body was a capital offence; though he himself is strongly suspected of having belonged to another, the Concistoriali, founded by the cardinal-secretary to Pope Pius VII to drive the Austrians out of northern Italy.^ The Sublimi Maestri formed a small but senior society, who saw it as their task to supervise the rest, the Carbonari especially, in the general interests of human and of Italian freedom. As late as the eighteen-seventies, the exceptionally well-informed Disraeli wrote in his novels of the immense influence of the secret societies in early nineteenth-century Europe, and John Roberts wrote one of his best books to explain how much real influence they exercised, and what vast extra weight was given to them by the harassed security authorities of Vienna, Paris and the lesser courts of Germany and Italy." The Concistoriali provide an example of how senior some of their members were; just as the Freemasons, from whom many of their rituals derived, had (as they still have) many senior members in the British royal family. Then as now, political society swung from time to time and place to place between enthusiasm for such bodies, and more or less irrational hatred of them. Hatred seems to have been Duke Francis's line, as he turned despot. No doubt he set aside, in private, his own connexion with the Concistoriali as something quite separate. He had a vigorous secret police to enforce his wishes, and on the whole a compliant population: one of the awful features of tyrannies is the tendency they encourage in ordinary people to spy on their neighbours. In the short run, repression put the societies down in Modena, and drove Panizzi into exile; in the longer run, the Risorgimento drove Francis IV's son and successor into exile and created the united Italy of which the societies had dreamed. Panizzi meanwhile had had to bolt. Till old age, he was a workaholic; his talents for organization were deployed early at Brescello, where he was a sort of town clerk and inspector of schools, while he established a practice as an attorney and looked after his aged father, who was the town pharmacist (his mother died late in 1820).