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 . 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 - - 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 , of Modena, whose ancestors included . Modena, to which Brescello was then subject, was an entirely independent dukedom - in international law; but had in fact become a , 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 and declared the duchy part of a new , along with Reggio nelFEmilia, , and even which lay beyond the Po. Next year, under the , 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 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 in 1804, he looked after his family. His brother Joseph became King of Naples, and was then promoted to be King of ; his brother-in-law Murat took over Naples instead. The Cisalpine Republic became the , 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 , 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 Pius VII to drive the Austrians out of .^ 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 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). He had only one sibling, a sister five years younger than himself. He belonged - this was normal - to a dense network of cousins and in-laws, most of whom were happy to adhere to the ducal regime. His closest friends were not, and three of his closest friends he admitted, in a ceremony in his family home, as Sublimi Maestri Perfetti. Benjamin Franklin was quite right: 'Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.'^ Word got out. It would be impertinent to try to improve on Edward Miller's account of how word seeped back to Panizzi that the ducal authorities had become aware of what must have appeared as his duplicity. He had taken a precaution or two: he had a little cash laid by, and he had a boat hidden on the bank of the Po. no DEI PROCESSI

DELLE SENTENZE

CONTRA

GU imputatidi Lesa-Maesta e di aderen%a alle Setle proscritle negUStatidi Modena

NOTIZIE Scritte da Antonio PANIZZI K pubblicate da

Exsequi sentenlias Imnd instiiui, nisi iasignes, pev honestum, aut noLa- hlli dedecore : quod prs&cipuum munus annaliura reor, ne virlutes sileanlur, utque pravis dictis faclls- que es posleritaie el infamia moetus sit. TACIT. Annal. \\i. ^S.

MADRID Per ROBERTO 7\ Reggenle !a SlamperU deU' Unwersal$ E 6i U'ovu iii luUi L Paesi Ilberi. 1823.

Fig. 2. The title-page of Panizzi's first book, with the false Madrid imprint. BL, C.44.d.i

III On 22 October 1822 he rowed across the river; into Austrian territory, not into safety. He was wary enough to evade the Austrian pohce, and had money enough to travel to the Swiss border, where he found safety for the moment at Lugano. Going mto exile is always a shock; for Panizzi it was also a relief. In he was in a free country, he could speak and write as he chose; and he at once wrote a book. Only two copies of it are known to survive; one is in the British Library, given by Panizzi to his friend and first biographer Fagan (fig. 2).' He gave it a false imprint, at Madrid; in fact a few copies were run off by a printer in Lugano. He put his name to it; he was then proud of it - most people in the literary world are proud of their first books - though later he did his best to secure copies of it and suppress them. For It did him immediate harm: it was at once noticed by an Austrian police spy. In It he roundly denounced Modena, Austria's satellite, as a duchy in which there was no real justice to be had; describing in revolting detail the barbarous practices to which prisoners were subjected, before as well as after trial, the degree of corruption that prevailed in the judiciary, and abuses practised by the Roman Catholic Church. Austrian pressure on the canton made it too hot to hold him, and he went to Geneva. Geneva too succumbed to pressure from the Austrian and the French governments; he took a steamer down the Rhine, and reached London. A permanent black mark was put against his name by the Austrian security authorities; as late as the middle 1850s he still could not venture onto Italian soil. By the time he reached London he was all but penniless, and the city was crowded already with Italian refugees. He got introduced to Ugo Foscolo, whom the Italians all revered, but whose life was too irregular for Panizzi's taste; chance or advice led him on to Liverpool, where his luck changed. He came under the wing of William Roscoe, and started to teach Itahan for a living; a task he heartily detested, but - like every task he undertook - one he did thoroughly. In Roscoe's drawing-room he met Liverpool society. There was plenty of vivacity, and not much provincialism, about it; and he met there too a more influential patron than Roscoe, Henry Brougham the radical lawyer who at that moment was the most famous commoner in the country (fig. 3). Ot Brougham, that master of sarcasm, later Lord Chancellor, it has been said sarcastically that 'if he had known a little law he would have known a little of everything.'^"^ He was a Scot, nephew of William Robertson the historian, and a polymath, if a superficial one; an originator of the Edinburgh Review^ famous for his energetic and successful defence of Queen Caroline on her trial for adultery before the House of Lords. Whether an extra link of friendship was forged between Brougham and Panizzi through Brougham's freemasonry it would be interesting to know; but the present writer has not been able to establish one. In any case, a close link was formed between them in the spring of 1827. Brougham, who then went the northern circuit, prosecuted at Lancaster Edward Gibbon Wakefield - who later helped to found New Zealand - on the charge of abducting a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, who had been a pupil of Panizzi's. 112 Fig. J. Henry Brougham; after the portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence

Panizzi's advice on continental marriage law helped Brougham to win this case, and he felt grateful. When he set about founding the University of London, afterwards University College, as a non-sectarian rival to the Anglican Oxford and Cambridge, he remembered the anti-clerical Panizzi, and had him made Professor of Italian. It turned out that the salary was low, and the professor's duties still included that teaching of Italian from the start that Panizzi had so much disliked in Liverpool; but Brougham rescued him again. For in 1830, at the formation ofthe first Whig government for two decades, the only way of keeping Brougham quiet was to make him Lord Chancellor; in which post he was a Principal Trustee ofthe British Museum. He thus secured Panizzi a post as assistant librarian, and set him on course for the rest of his career.

This paper was delivered at the Commemoration of Friends ofthe British Library at the British Museum the bicentenary of Panizzi's birth held by the and British Library, 16 Sept. 1997. 1 See the useful family tree in Encyclopaedia 6 Ibid., p. 52. Britannica, nth edn (London, 1910), vol. xii, p. 7 J. M. Roberts, The Mythology of the Secret 790. Societies (London, 1972). 2 Beyond the Mexique Bay (1934; repr. Harmonds- 8 Poor Richard's Almanack (Philadelphia, 1735). worth, 1963), p. 68. 9 DEI PROCESSI I E / DELLE SENTENZE j 3 In Dictionary of National Biography, vol. xliii CONTRA I CU imputati di Lesa-Maesta e di (1895), p. 179, s.v. Panizzi. aderenza alle / Sette proscritte negli Stati di 4 They were United States navy cipher clerks, Modena / NOTIZIE / Scritte da Antonio who sold secrets to the U.S.S.R. in the middle of P^A'/ZZ/(Madrid: per Roberto Torres, 1823); the Cold War; see R. Lindsey, The Falcon and BL, C.44.d.i. the Snowman: a true tale of espionage and 10 DNB, vol. lxi (1886), p. 456b. friendship (London, 1980). 5 Prince of Librarians (London, 1967), pp. 25-6, 33-4-

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