Source: https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/the-risorgimento-myth/
The Risorgimento Myth
October 7, 2025
Gerald Warner
Many perceive Italy as a country divided between an economically
prosperous North and an impoverished, agrarian South. The origins of
this divergence lie in a 19th-century ‘black legend’ designed to
discredit the once-flourishing Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.Amen.
Historical ‘black legends’ are tenacious libels: they may influence
perceptions of social groups, cultures or entire nations, centuries
after the original misrepresentation was perpetrated. The enduring
distrust of Catholics in England, still constitutionally embedded in
the royal succession law and originating in the propaganda of Sir
Francis Walsingham under Elizabeth I, is just one example.
There is, however, a far more potent instance of historical
demonisation that, to this day, distorts the perception of a major
European nation and influences the interaction of such contemporary
bodies as the IMF and the World Bank with its government and economy.
Italy is a unique instance of the extreme distortion of cultural
heritage and economic history, due to the persistence of a black legend
deployed for cynical political purposes in the mid-19th century, and
still widely accepted today. Britain no longer subscribes to the
self-validating Whig Interpretation of History; but Italy, at official
level and in widespread public attitudes, clings to an equivalent
mythology, dating from and designed to legitimise the Risorgimento.
The image of modern Italy is of a country driven economically by its
prosperous northern regions – industrial, productive, modern and home
to globally famous fashion houses – contrasted with the South, regarded
as impoverished, agrarian and backward, despite a cultural heritage of
great beauty and antiquity. It is the constant complaint of the more
militant northern politicians, such as those belonging to the Lega
Nord, that the South is a burden to the developed North, which has
grown tired of subsidising Italy’s less enterprising regions.
This narrative is not, in the present day, false. It is borne out by
the economic realities of Italy’s divided heritage. The World Bank has
identified significant problems in the ‘Mezzogiorno’, as southern Italy
is known, including high unemployment, low productivity, inadequate
infrastructure and organised crime. The bank has highlighted regional
disparities, with the North having a higher percentage of its workforce
employed in industry and transportation, while the South has a greater
proportion employed in agriculture, reflecting a surplus agrarian
population.
The IMF, similarly, has identified the same issues in the South, as
well as a more markedly declining birth rate than in the North and low
female participation in the labour force (although, in social terms, if
women are creating stable family and domestic environments, that need
not be regarded as negative).
Overall, it is an established fact that, for generations, this
disparity between North and South has bedevilled Italian society. At
home and abroad there has been a general impression that this situation
is simply part of the natural order of things: that the Italian
peninsula has been divided immemorially between a naturally prosperous
North and an intrinsically poor South.
Yet this assumption has been challenged, with increasing vigour and
credibility, by a school of revisionist historians which contends that,
so far from being a natural state of affairs, this disparity is a
reversal of the original situation – an impoverished North and a
prosperous South – which was overturned by a war of aggression and the
ruthless despoliation of the South, accompanied by massacres on a scale
that might credibly be termed genocide.
This school of historians, known as the Neoborbonici, asserts that the
original driver of industrialisation and prosperity in the Italian
peninsula was the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, until its
violent overthrow by the economically backward, but militarily strong,
Savoyard Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, in the name of Italian
unification, at the time of the Risorgimento in 1860.
This interpretation runs counter to the entire received canon of
Italian history, which glorifies the Risorgimento and demonises Bourbon
rule in the South as reactionary and tyrannical. For 165 years, in
Italy and abroad, a painstaking narrative has been presented of
Savoyard rule supplanting the Bourbons and ‘liberating’ the peoples of
Naples and Sicily, admitting them to the benefits of citizenship in a
united Italy. The claims of the Neoborbonici have been strenuously
resisted by the Italian establishment, which is as heavily invested in
the mythology of the Risorgimento – on which it depends for its
legitimacy – as is the British state in the comparable myth of the
Glorious Revolution of 1688.
There is, in fact, a symbiosis between those two widely separated
historical events, since it was the English Whig-Liberal heirs to the
Glorious Revolution who first launched the Black Legend designed to
discredit the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies outside Italy, in concert
with the Carbonari and other subversive organisations inside the
peninsula, who sought the overthrow of the Bourbons.
Between 1850 and 1851, William Ewart Gladstone, at that time a leading
light of the Peelite rump of the Conservative Party, soon to merge with
the Liberals, visited Naples on a mission to improve his daughter’s
eyesight. The Bourbon kingdom was then recovering from the massive
upheaval of the European revolutions of 1848, which had brought down
Louis-Philippe’s ‘citizen’s monarchy’ in France and which the Habsburg
Empire had only barely survived. A revolt in Sicily and an uprising in
Naples had similarly threatened Bourbon rule. Naples, therefore, at the
time of Gladstone’s visit, was in an untypical state of confusion, its
prisons crowded with 2,000 captured rebels.
Gladstone, whose associates in Naples belonged to the liberal middle
and upper classes that had supported the uprising, became persuaded
that the treatment of these prisoners represented an abuse of human
rights. He published two Letters to the Earl of Aberdeen in April and
July 1851 denouncing the Bourbon government to the British Parliament.
In the first letter, with extravagant political hyperbole, he
anathematised the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies as ‘the negation of God
erected into a system of government’.
This rhetoric created a sensation across Europe. The Neapolitan
government responded with an official statement repudiating the
charges. In 1852 Gladstone attempted to answer his critics with a
further pamphlet: An Examination of the Official Reply of the
Neapolitan Government. He was forced to begin by admitting the
falseness of some of the charges he had levied. The liberal prisoner
Settembrini had not been tortured, nor put in double irons for life; 17
invalids had not been massacred in the prison of Procida; acquitted
prisoners had continued to be detained – but only for two days. The
‘between four and five hundred’ prisoners about to be tried at Naples
actually amounted to 46, the larger number reflecting an aggregate of
all trials across the kingdom.
Gladstone acknowledged he had been attacked by critics for the lack of
first-hand evidence in his account, which had been punctuated with ‘I
believe’, ‘I have heard’ and ‘It was stated to me’. He continued to
insist, on hearsay, that there were 20,000 political prisoners in the
Two Sicilies, though the returns of prisoners he had seen only amounted
to 2,000. Meanwhile, critics had hit back at Britain’s recent conduct
in the Ionian islands and in Ceylon, as disqualifying its political
leadership from any right to criticise abuses elsewhere.
The reality was that Britain had been spared the upheaval of 1848,
which convulsed the European continent, but any such insurrection on
British soil would have been just as severely punished: the retribution
following the Irish rebellion of 1798 had demonstrated that. Gladstone
had resigned as President of the Board of Trade in 1845, just as the
Irish potato famine manifested itself. Following a brief period as
Colonial Secretary from 1845 to 1846, despite not holding a seat in
either house of Parliament, he lent his support to the Whig prime
minister Lord John Russell, whose doctrinaire laissez-faire policies
did much to aggravate the effects of the famine.
In 1851, when Gladstone entered into his controversy over the Two
Sicilies, the Irish Famine was in its final stages and had resulted in
one million deaths and a further million emigrations, to the scandal of
Europe, where the obvious question was asked: how could millions of
British subjects be reliant on a single crop – the potato – for
survival? A critic observed that a million corpses lying unburied by
the roadsides in Ireland did not disturb Gladstone, but what did
concern him was that conditions in the political prisons of Naples
‘would make a decent man’s gorge rise’.
The charge he could not refute was that he had the opportunity in
Naples to bring his concerns to the notice of Ferdinand II and his
ministers but, instead, after he adopted his partisan crusade, had
actually cancelled his routine application for an audience with the
king. His demonisation of Bourbon rule was echoed by Italian
revolutionaries, who, after his forces had bombarded rebel-held
Messina, had christened the popular Ferdinand ‘King Bomba’, as a
propagandist ploy.
So, the Black Legend of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, propagated by
partisan liberals, gained traction. But what was the reality behind the
myth? Only in the 21st century have the Neoborbonici historians
supplied a comprehensive refutation, contradicting all received opinion
on the Risorgimento, with a formidable array of evidence so much at
odds with the previously prevailing orthodoxy as to constitute a major
revolution in Italian historiography.
The alleged backwardness of the Two Sicilies, at least in terms of high
culture, is easily refuted. The royal palace of Caserta, the Versailles
of Italy; the Teatro San Carlo, built in just 270 days; the
Archaeological Museum; the Botanical Gardens; the Astronomical
Observatory; the National Library; the world’s first Seismological
Observatory, at Vesuvius – all these institutions testified to the
advanced state of the arts and learning in Bourbon Naples. Detractors
sometimes claimed, weakly, that these were the amenities of the Ancien
Régime, not reflective of the conditions of the people.
The character, however, of the Bourbons of the Two Sicilies was well
described by Harold Acton in his two studies, The Bourbons of Naples
and The Last Bourbons of Naples. Though preserving their royal state,
they also mixed with easy informality among their subjects, speaking
the same Neapolitan dialect, rather than the classical Italian of
Tuscany. Apart from their distaste for bourgeois constitutions and the
venality of parliamentary governance, they were thoroughly modernising
rulers.
Some of the claims made on behalf of the Two Sicilies monarchy by the
Neoborbonici are borne out by evidence from outside the Italian
peninsula. For example, at the Exposition Universelle, in Paris, in
1855, just five years before the Piedmontese invasion, the Kingdom of
the Two Sicilies was declared the third most industrialised country in
Europe, after Britain and France. (Could anyone imagine the Mezzogiorno
today gaining such a trophy?) After the conquest of the Two Sicilies,
census data produced by the Piedmontese authorities showed that a total
of 1,595,359 people were employed in industry in the former kingdom,
compared with 1,170,859 in the whole of the rest of Italy.
The most crucial industrial infrastructure at that time was the railway
system. The first railway in Italy was opened in the Two Sicilies on 3
October 1839, running from Naples to Portici. Liberal detractors
sneered that it would be a toy for the king, but in his speech
inaugurating the line, Ferdinand II outlined an ambitious plan for a
complete railway network. By 1844 Nocera and Salerno had been linked,
as well as Caserta, Capua and Sparanise.
Where the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies excelled was in its merchant
marine. The Bourbon merchant fleet was the second largest in Europe,
exceeded only by that of Britain. By the end of the reign of Ferdinand
II, the Neapolitan fleet amounted to 9,848 ships of greatly varying
sizes, of which 17 were steamers. Neapolitan shipyards were scattered
around the Tyrrhenian, Adriatic and Ionian seas. This was the real
cause of British hostility, rather than pure ideological antipathy.
Britain, during the Napoleonic Wars, had been a strong ally of Bourbon
Naples; but now Neapolitan shipyards were building vessels that might
otherwise have been constructed in British yards and ships flying the
Bourbon flag were carrying cargoes that might otherwise have been
transported in British bottoms.
Ferdinand II was aware of British jealousy and tried to appease it by
giving it an effective monopoly on the sulphur trade in Sicily,
necessary for the manufacture of gunpowder. That, however, proved an
inadequate concession. Education was also advanced in the Bourbon
kingdom, dating from the first ruler of the dynasty, later Charles III
of Spain. From 1806, specialist educational institutions proliferated:
an Academy of Fine Arts, the School of Arts and Crafts, the Royal
Military Academy, the Polytechnic, the Naval Academy and schools for
the deaf, the arts, medicine and music.
From 1810, all municipalities instituted free primary schools, funded
by the local authorities. In secondary education there were 14
institutions in Naples alone. In higher education, Ferdinand II
established a further 16 professorial chairs for its university. Public
expenditure on education amounted to around one million ducats per
year. The publicly funded education system was abolished by the
Piedmontese regime after the conquest.
In medicine, the kingdom boasted 9,000 doctors for a population of nine
million – the most favourable per capita ratio in the Italian
peninsula, and the Two Sicilies had the lowest infant mortality rate in
Italy. It is significant that the reason for Gladstone’s visit to
Naples in 1850 was to secure expert medical treatment for his
daughter’s eyesight.
Factory employees worked an eight-hour day for wages sufficient to
sustain a family and there was even a pension system, based on two per
cent levies on wages. The kingdom developed the first gas lighting
system in Italy (and the first experimental electric lighting).
Neoborbonici historians also claim the kingdom instituted the first
municipal housing and free healthcare and had the highest number of
orphanages and old people’s homes in Italy, claims that, considering
the other evidence of modernity, seem credible, but would require
further research to verify.
However, in the context of any comparison of the material prosperity of
the Two Sicilies with the militarist state that conquered it,
Piedmont-Sardinia, there is one uncontested statistic that speaks
volumes. At the time of the overthrow of the Bourbon kingdom, the Two
Sicilies treasury held 443.2 million gold-lire, while the Piedmontese
treasury held a puny 27 million. The Two Sicilies national debt
amounted to just 411 million lire, but Piedmont’s was over a billion.
Those are the kind of fiscal statistics that do not lie and they
clearly demonstrate which of those two states was enterprising and
modern, and which was stagnant and backward. In Piedmont, the Prussia
of Italy, everything was subordinated to the needs of the army.
That policy paid off in 1860-61, when the Piedmontese-Sardinian forces
overran the southern kingdom. Francis II, the new young king who had
just succeeded Ferdinand II, and his wife Queen Maria Sophia (sister of
Empress Elisabeth of Austria), with 20,000 loyal troops, withstood a
siege in the fortress of Gaeta from 5 November 1860 to 13 February
1861, when they were obliged to capitulate. The young couple’s heroism,
especially Maria Sophia’s devoted nursing of the wounded, reinforced
the popularity of the departing Bourbon dynasty. The last Bourbon-held
fortress, Civitella del Tronto, fell on 20 March 1861.
That, however, did not end loyalist resistance: many of the population
resorted to guerrilla warfare against the invaders, sustaining their
resistance for at least seven years. The reprisals committed by the
Piedmontese troops amounted to atrocities. Concentration camps, the
invention of which is often attributed to the British during the Boer
War, were established to imprison those resisting, or suspected of
resisting, Piedmontese hegemony. The Savoyard king, Victor Emmanuel,
with his pantomime facial hair, became, by conquest, king of a united
Italy (Rome being taken in 1870).
It might be asked, why would a change of dynasty precipitate an
economic revolution, with the South suddenly impoverished? Why would
the progressive Savoyard government not simply preside over the most
prosperous region of the Italian peninsula, to its continuing
advantage? Because it had no intention of doing so, is the answer.
The 443.2 million gold-lire in the Two Sicilies treasury was
confiscated and taken north. The most important of the more than 5,000
factories that had created so much wealth and employment were
dismantled and similarly transported to Piedmont. Church property was
appropriated to an estimated total of 600 million lire and former state
property that the Bourbons had hypothecated to the benefit of the
peasantry raised a similar sum. Even two huge bronze mortars, the work
of Benvenuto Cellini, were moved to Turin, in an orgy of looting.
But it is the debate between the Neoborbonici historians and the
defenders of the orthodox narrative over the military repression of the
South that has generated most heat. The highest estimate of the number
of victims that has been proposed is 900,000, a figure that seems
insupportable. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the Savoyard
generals behaved as war criminals. The burning of entire villages was
routine, as was the massacre of their inhabitants if they failed to
escape into the hills.
General Pinelli extended the death penalty ‘to those who by word or act
insulted the arms of Savoy, the portrait of the king or the national
flag’. Meanwhile, liberal Europe – and Britain – was celebrating the
end of Bourbon ‘absolutism’. Details are well documented of the
massacres at Pontelandolfo and Casalduni. The diary of a Piedmontese
soldier who was present at Pontelandolfo survives, in which he
recorded: ‘According to our orders women, children and the sick were to
be spared. But you know how these things go once you are there.’
Foreign newspaper reports, which tended to downplay Savoyard
atrocities, recorded nevertheless that between September 1860 and
August 1861, 8,968 people were shot, 10,604 wounded, 918 houses burned,
12 churches ransacked and 1,428 municipalities razed. Since that was in
the very early stages of the repression, which intensified as time went
on, and the terror did not finally abate until 1871, that suggests a
very high casualty rate.
The debate among historians regarding the repression is likely to
continue for many years and is unlikely ever to achieve consensus.
However, the significant fact is that this controversy has changed from
downright denial on the part of those defending the Risorgimento myth,
to attempts to minimise the scale of the atrocities. Since the events
took place in the early photographic age, photographs have been
published of a town with corpses littering the streets, adding fuel to
the fires of controversy. The brutal and lawless behaviour of the
Savoyard government paved the way for Fascism in the 20th century.
What is incontrovertible is that the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was
the most prosperous part of Italy. Unemployment and emigration were
unknown. After Italian unification, the South succumbed to chronic
unemployment, mass emigration and organised crime.
Resentment against the North and the government in Rome, is endemic
among the population of the former Bourbon kingdom. For the present, it
may amount to no more than cultural disaffection; but if the European
Union were to be overtaken by economic disaster, or even to fragment
like the Soviet Union, then, on the model of the former Yugoslavia,
there is no guarantee that the Italian state would survive such a
seismic event. Historical fault lines run deep, and it is possible that
the Italian political class, deceived by its own mythology of the
Risorgimento, may be underestimating the potential for the dissolution,
under extreme pressure, of an artificial polity fabricated by force and
to the severe disadvantage of one half of the peninsula.
Gerald Warner is a
British author, commentator and journalist. He was Special Adviser to a
Cabinet minister in the Conservative government from 1995 to 1997 and a
speech writer for the then Prime Minister John Major. He is a regular
contributor to Reaction.life.
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