1

Perpetual peace: relationships between Kant’s

political thought and the Italian political context in the

Nineteenth Century

1. A utopian project?

When the essay For perpetual peace was published for the first time, the

success with the public was rapid and widespread. The first copies were soon

out of stock, and this allowed an immediate reprinting and a further edition in

which appeared the famous “secret article”. In the very next years the book was

translated and distributed in France and Great Britain, while in homeland it

received expressions of approval. In his famous review, Fichte expressed his

admiration for the Kantian project, sharing the assumption that an authentic

idea of peace can only be founded on a legal base, and that it must relate

necessarily to international relationships.

The appreciation of the readers for that brief essay didn’t mean, however,

that they trusted its contents; in the Europe of the late Eighteenth Century,

upset from war against France, the prospect of a stable and durable peace

seemed decisely uncertain. Moreover, the main objective of the work, that is

the description of a new international political order based on a federation of

republican states, found for sure very bad conditions for its realization on the

continent, ruled by the paradigm of the absolut and despotic state. The

following events met the exacerbation of such conditions; the republican

France on which Kant had directed his hopes had already turned its war of

resistance in an expansion war, and its process of “republicanizations” of the

Italian peninsula absolutely didn’t reflect what Kant expected in the second

definitive article of For perpetual peace. Because of these reasons the

reviewers of the opera found in it only an interesting philosophical project and

some morally sharable hopes, but nothing more. The gap between the rational

value of the project and the political context it was addressed to seemed

unbridgeable. By using the Kantian terminology, what seemed to be impossible

to reconcile was the distance between theory and practice. But it’s right here

that the sense of the opera is hidden, it’s right here that the Kantian

2

argumentation shows larger prospects, that goes beyond the circumstances of

the European scene of the end of the century.

No doubts that the practice can’t reduce or nullify in any way the

effectiveness of the theory, as the philosopher declares in his essay On the old

saw: that may be right in theory, but it won’t work in practice, and that is not

absolutely rejected in For perpetual peace. Peace is a duty imposed by reason,

the republican constitution is the only one capable of achieving this goal, and

the global federation is the transposition of these aims on the international

context. Surely this level is much more complex than the individual one, where

the commands of reason can impose an immediate authority. Kant shows the

obstacles that opposes the fullfilment of rational peace precisely in the famous

and controversial second definitive article. Among them, the most important is

that concept of absolute sovereignity that characterized the European idea of

power.

Kant denounces the wickedness of this idea, but he doesn’t overstep it.

For the philosopher, the sovereignity of a state is in any case irresistible, and it

couldn’t admit the obligation of a superior juridical order, as it would happen

within a federation. However, Kant doesn’t intend to elude the principles of

criticism, and for this reason in the conclusive passages he affirms anyway that

«for states viewed in relation to each other, there is no other way, according to

reason, on emerging from that lawless codition but to condescend to public

coercive laws and to found in this way a state of peoples»1. The unsteadiness of

Kant regarding this point is today still subject matter, and many other

interpretations have been proposed to solve the seeming contradiction. But this

is not the place where I’ll discuss on the coherence of the Kantian solution of

the second definitive article. All that must emerge here is, as said before, the

sense of the Kantian proposal of peace, that can’t be anything but

transcendental. There is no other way to ensure international peace but the

foundation of a federation of republican states. This is what is valid according

to reason. And we all know that reason can allow a gradual fulfillment of its

commands, but never a dispensation. The transcendental meaning of the

Kantian project maybe was misunderstood by many of them who considered it

utopian, but it represents the true innovation in the field of international peace

1 VIII, 357.

3

theories, because it doesn’t exclude the possibility of a perpetual peace only

because of the difficulties of the moment. Another strong point of he Kantian

project is the assumption that the objective of perpetual peace is the final aim

of the doctrine of right, and it must be achieved through a juridical procedure,

and not by the the arbitrary (and unlikely) initiative of a king. In this way, by

excluding the possibility of an immediate change of the international political

system, Kant addresses his project to history. The Nineteenth Century will get

this inheritance, and it will see the comparison between the principles of

Kantian theories and the renovated political, cultural and social conditions.

2. Peace, federalism and republicanism

With the beginning of the Congress of Vienna, the biggest concern was,

for sure, to create a new international order, able to establish a steady solution

due to twenty years of wars and to facilitate the interests of the various powers

involved. The challenge was surely arduous. The rallying cry was

“legitimacy”: everything which would have been established, had to be

according to the Christian and absolutist tradition of the European monarchies

and in respect of the king’s role as emissaries of Providence.

However, the most careful and clear headed protagonists of the Concert

of Europe were already aware that something new had penetrated in the

conscience of the European people. First of all, the divine origin of power had

been questioned by the Napoleon’s self coronation. Althought the ceremony

summoned the ancient forms of divine legitimacy of imperial power, no

superior authority had put the crown on the French leader’s and his wife’s

head. A man had become emperor without boasting noble ancestries or being

subordinate to the papal authority, which caused distress to a tradition that

lived for a thousand years. Another bitter observation, as result of past wars,

was that secular dominations could be erased and replaced by democratic

governments, and not only by other despotic powers. This is what happened in

Italy with the foundation of pro-French republics; although is out of question

that their institution was in any case a result of a conquest war, nevertheless

their birth received the approval and the militant support of many intellectuals

and Italian political thinkers. This republican experience, forced and imperfect,

had only an ephemeral existence, but caused effects that will avoid the

4

following repressions which accompanied the return of the old dispotic powers.

It will no longer be forgotten, and it will constitute the starting point for

formidable events that will upset the peninsula for the successive fifty years.

Only a few, among the protagonists of the Concert of Europe, realised

that something had changed so as to make not possible a return to the

principles of ancien régime. What had suddenly become fragile was not the

balance of forces between states, or the diplomatic relations between the

European courts, but the concept of absolutist power. Kant, although not

intending to overstep it, was one of the responsible of its fall. The power of his

thought put at the core of attention the man and the right, it redefined the

freedom as the faculty of obey only to the law that is possible to accept as our

own. Althought he admitted the absoluteness of kingship, he accused the rulers

of his time of raising their authority only on the number of men ready to fight

for their wars. War of kings. Personal conflicts. Moreover, Kant firmly denied

the right to resistance, but he however divided the field of political act from the

moral one, so in this way he denied to the European rulers the prerogative of

being judges of the subject’s conscience too. All this led to precise

conclusions: no monarch can have his subjects as instruments, no divine calling

can legitimate any political authority, that under no circumstances is limitless

and prerogative of a single man. The Kantian political reflection, which

develops across all his writings, laid down the circumstances for the

improvement of the concepts of sovereignty, as for state and for international

relationships. These concepts were recognised and interpreted by the political

debate of the Nineteenth Century; a debate that was liberal, revolutionary,

progressive. The more the concept of absolutism showed its inadequacy, the

more that debate became increasingly richer and burning. The aim to establish

and guarantee peace was strictly connected to these arguments, an intent which

the absolutist governments missed repeatedly and disastrously. It required

therefore radically different premises.

The necessity of a decisive transformation of the European civil and

political culture became soon widespread, nourishing itself with theories and

proposals coming from representatives of different social extractions. This

necessity was not any more connected neither to the activity of individual

intellectual associations, nor relegated in the pages of few writings published

5

by isolated personalities. It was a pervasive experience. The various currents of

thought that opposed the plans of the Concert of Europe shared the awareness

that political life of governments had to be participated, and it had necessarily

to model itself on the will of the people. In addition, it had to be expressed by a

system of delegation, and no longer interpreted (or ignored) by the monarch.

Whole works had to lead to a deep redefinition of the idea of state, its

organisation, and its involvement in international affairs. The suggestions were

various. Many of them tried to find the meaning of the unity of the state in the

idea of nation, in other words a cultural and ideological heritage which

develops the identity of a community and precedes consequently any political

power. Others considered the theoretical construct of federalism as the

overcoming of the monarchical centralism, which based its authority on the

supremacy over dissimilar people.

The two biggest currents of thought of the Nineteenth Century acted

under similar premises which agreed on many dimensions, but this didn’t lead

beyond the common aversion to the old dispotic regimes, the unanimous

necessity of a patriotism connected to a concrete national identity, and an

initial democratic inspiration of their plans. They were only general analogies.

It’s important to highight that the terms “nationalism” and “federalism”

themselves were almost unknown at the time, and often included projects

widely different from each other, therefore not easy to associate to precise

assiological characteristics. However these characteristics clearly emerged

precisely from the comparison between the two prospects, a comparison that

often took the form of a declared clash. While nationalism focused on the

consolidation of a political, geographical and cultural unity of the state,

federalism aimed to preserve local realities. While nationalism established the

idea of a strong centralising government as an indispensable requirement to

support unity, federalism denounced the risks and the excessive affinity of this

system for the regimes of the past. While, in conclusion, nationalism exalted

the rhetoric of the strong and independent state, federalism didn’t forget that

the struggle for indipendence doesn’t necessarily mean, in hegelian meaning, to

fight for its affirmation on the international context. These differences are

intended for getting worse as the nationalistic model imposes itself as

dominant, leading to the inevitable result of a permanent condition of

6

antagonism among states that will have serious consequences for the rights of

the citizens of every government. Federalism will preserve its democratic

orientation, its predilection for the republican constitution and, above all, its

cosmopolitan sense. Nationalism will gradually leave behind the firts two, and

won’t ever truly embrace the third one.

As said before, the federalist model gathered a variety of theories, which

this doesn’t prevent to say that it was in any case connected to the necessity of

perpetual peace and to the idea of a form of government that had to be

necessarily representative. When the three principles of federalist structure, of

peace, of delegation have made their appearance into opportune social and

political contexts, they always seemed to get involved with each other. The

legacy of Kantian philosophy can’t be ignored: what man, who is able to

express a judgment on formidable initiatives as the beginning of a conflict,

would ever decide to self-inflict the pain of a war?

One of the first Nineteenth Century projects for perpetual peace has the

signature of C. H. de Saint-Simon. It was presented in the famous essay on the

reorganisation of European society developed and published in the critical

months of the Congress of Vienna. The work’s cornerstones, that was destined

to an initial success and then to fall into oblivion for over a Century, inserted

themselves into the best philosophical tradition on the theme of war and peace.

The peaceful international coexistence must arise from a juridical order that

has to be superior to the jurisdiction of every single state, which has to accept

its authority as a result of a joint participated decision, whose effectiveness is

in any case irresistible and super partes. In this field, that is the concept of a

juridical order that has to be instituted with assent, but above individual

interests, Saint-Simon discloses to be in debt with Kant and Russeau. The same

thing is for the decision of underlining the importance of public opinion in the

determination of the general will of nations; here the author interprets the new

democratic conscience that was arising inside of every European society, and

that would have never stopped to grow. In the essay appear also signs about the

political structure that every state should guarantee to make real the possibility

of an international understanding, a structure that should base itself on a

representative government. The close interdependence between intranational

and international politics was an assumption that appeared also in the theories

7

of Saint-Simon’s predecessors, and this will constitute a considerable landmark

for the following studies on the topic. But at this point, the French philosopher

becomes vague, and he postpones the discussion about the best form of

government for every state. In the essay of 1814 it’s possible to find some

references to a generic national parliamentary system that must take into

account the representatives of population, but that can also take the form of a

monarchy. Focusing on the organization of the European parliament, that is the

main object of the discussion, the author explicitly point out that a king must

lead the new European society, and that this office has to be inherited.

According to the principle of the interdependence between intranational and

international politics, the same conditions could be expected for the individual

states. Therefore, the republican model, that is fundamental in Kant, is not

considered.

It wasn’t easy, for the theorists of perpetual peace in the first years of the

Nineteenth Century, to leave behind the system of absolutism. For many of

them, it was an idea ahead of its times. Its principles, that are republicanism

and federalism, were already at the center of a debate that was getting wider,

but that wasn’t able to get away from simple abstract formulations. We have to

remember that such theories considered a gradual realisation of their goals,

which seemed there appeared to exist the premises. However, this process still

seemed to be strictly connected to the arbitrary initiative of the monarchs of

every single state. To ensure the future realisation of the goal of the perpetual

peace, Kant evoked the unconditionality of the authority of reason, while Saint-

Simon called into question history as an inevitable and irreversible sequence of

aggressive and peaceful societies; but none of them were able to go beyond the

concept of absolut sovereignity.

As a consequence, federalism of the beginning needed to distance itself

from the field of abstract speculation and to venture into the examination of

concrete social and political conditions within the European context. The

perspective of a radical turning point had to build on more solid basis than the

Enlightenment trust in a natural transformation of the political traditions of the

European continent. The transcedental setting of the Kant’s project had

allowed the idea of perpetual peace to resist to the test of history, avoiding to

be overshadowed completely by the dramatic events that marked the beginning

8

of the Nineteenth Century.. Such idea was not only survived, but it also

inspired a new generation of political thinkers. It was time to confront with

reality crystallising thinking into concrete measures.

During decades following the Congress of Vienna, the European

continent will become an arena of political ideologies. There will be no

government in which the clash between the immovable reactionary institutions

and the new revolutionary fringes won’t degenerate into a bloody succession of

revolts and repressions. Almost never the battle will have among only two

factions; when a government toppled to the pressure of an insurrection and its

king was forced to flee, the concept of power became suddenly prey to the

most various interpretations. In this context, Italy represented an exceptional

scene because of the variety of alliances involved and the harshness of the

struggle between the rulers and the ruled; in other words between the heirs of a

world in decline and the protagonists of a new, dynamic, multiform cultural

awareness. In particular, the debate upon federalism, republicanism and peace

was enriched by intense ideas and experiences despite the adverse

circumstances, and it continued even when the unification of the peninsula had

assumed formulas, myths and language of nationalism. The events of Italian

republicanism are usually associated to the figure of Giuseppe Mazzini,

pursuant to the European relevance of his theories. Yet, other political thinkers

and activists were able to understand the federalist and cosmopolitan sense of

the revolutionary events in Italy, demonstrating a consistency that Mazzini

often missed. One of the most illustrious was Giuseppe Ferrari, who met

Mazzini and shared with him, at least at the beginning, the hope to see realised

in Italy a republican future. These relationships, however, were irremediably

interrupted when Mazzini’s propaganda assumed nationalistic tones and goals.

3. The Italian scene

During his life, Ferrari was ever aware of the fundamental phases of the

dialectic between revolution and reaction in Italy. He was born in Milan in

1811, the city that had been the capital of Italian Republic established by

Napoleon until 1805, and of the Kingdom of Italy until 1814. The following

year Milan became the capital of the new Lombardo-Veneto Kingdom, whose

borders were drawn by the Austrian Empire during the agreements of Vienna.

9

The post-Congress Italy was divided into seven kingdoms, which essentially

restored the map previous the Napoleon’s campaign. The ancient dynasties of

the Italian states preceding the French domination regained the palaces that

were abandoned almost twenty years before. Everywhere, the return to the

status quo was marked by the abrogation of the Napoleonic Code, or rather of

everything that still remained of the just ended republican parenthesis. The

aspiration of the Concert of Europe of reviving the stable political, religious,

cultural and economic traditions of the past was pursued with particular zeal in

the peninsula, because every reactionary government could count on the

military support of the Asburgic Empire and on the spiritual legitimisation of

the pope, that had reconquered his dominions and his authority. Under the

military control of the Empire and the spiritual tutelage of Church, the mosaic

of states that formed Italy of the time seemed the safest ground where to build

the majesty of monarchic absolutism.

Therefore, Milan suffered the strange fate of being the core of the

republican experience in the peninsula, althought under the aegis of

revolutionary France, before representing the outpost of the military and

political influence in Italy of the Asburgic Empire, or rather of the Concert of

Europe. This fate was substantially shared by all the Italian cities, which saw

the alternating of representative governments and absolutist regimes in the

time-frame of only twenty years. All this, it’s essential to notice, on account of

the intervention of foreign powers. Was it still possible for the Italian peoples

to develop an independent common conscience? Was it still possible to recover

the experience of medieval communes, which represented the emblem of a

representative government able to emancipate from both imperial and papal

authority? And whenever possible, under what form was supposed to reappear

this experience? The peninsula wasn’t neither autonomous, conscious, nor

Italian in its courts, which were supported by the Austrian troops and the

blessing of Holy See; but there was someone that imagined it might, someone

who believed that an Italian country could concretely exist.

It was in those formidable years that Ferrari brings to completion his

maturation. By spending time with cultural associations in Milan, he met the

philosopher and jurist Gian Domenico Romagnosi, who was the catalyst of a

circle of intellectuals that, despite the Austrian censorship, bravely debated and

10

spreaded ideas taken from French culture. Among them there was also Carlo

Cattaneo, that was one of the greatest spokespeople of the republican and

federalist culture in Italy, and also a Ferrari’s close friend. In Milan, as in other

Italian cities, Saint-Simon’s theories were well known and they were often

subject matter in the circle of Romagnosi. Focusing on the Frech philosopher,

Ferrari will enhance his cosmopolitic point of view of the political, economic

and social studies. The studies on the philosopher Giambattista Vico instead,

on which he will apply also after his transfer in France, will educate him about

a consideration of history as an evolution path of peoples and of their

consciousness. According to Vico’s doctrine, the historical process is uniquely

the result of the human endeavour, and it has to be interpreted analyzing

minutely the social and political dynamics of the states and of their mutual

relationships. Therefore, history turns into science. Nothing determines it but

human action, there is no trascendental principle that indicates its destination,

and there is no mythical origin that can favour a people over another one.

Ferrari’s thought was being formed as an adversary either of every metaphysic

of man and history, and of every nationalism. The first one leads inevitably to a

concept of truth as revealed, that naturally can only be imposed to conscience,

causing serious and well known political repercussions. The second one leads

to a misunderstanding of the sense of progress, because it drags the conscience

in the past and makes impossible its confrontation with other realities. So, the

first one implicates the dogma, the second one the exaltation. Not a

coincidence that Kant, with his critical philosophy, intended to lash out against

both.

The evidence that Kant and Ferrari’s theories have had considerable

polemic targets in common shows a lot about the peculiar relationship that the

Italian philosopher established with criticism, a relationship made by important

recognitions and strong critics. The German philosopher is a significant point

of reference, even if not the only one, that frequently appears within Ferrari’s

works written during his stay in France. An emblematic example is the essay

De l’erreur, published in 1840, in which Ferrari reviews all the history of

occidental thought, that is history of the search for truth. His intention is to

prove that such history has to deal with an undeniable characteristic of human

progress: the fallibility. The mistake, Ferrari says, is intrinsic to the search of

11

truth, as all the greatest philosophers have proved since the classic age. No

matter if we consider it as an obstacle, a limit, a simple probability, or an

ineradicable fact; above all, it is something that have to admonish man about

the prospect of thinking a truth that is eternal and infallible, since it will be

always bound to the world of phenomena. So, it’s always potentially illusory.

As we know, in each of his wiritings, Kant pleads for the cause of a truth that

has never to be intended as a possession, but only as a constant research that

has to be conducted in community. The critic of reason itself is a method, not a

predetermined direction. The philosopher’s aversion to those who believe they

can boast an exclusive access to the truth turns into direct polemic in some of

his major works; his targets are, within the essay What is orientation in

thinking?, the Schwärmer, or the philosophers of intuition, and the dogmatists

within the first Critique. These writings are plentiful of considerations on the

risks of a dogmatic reason and its arrogant pretensions, which leads it to

generate conflict. If in Kant this discourse originates in the theoretical field and

then, quite late, get into the political one, in Ferrari such fields are always in

close contact. So, dogmatists turn into Italian reactionaries and neoguelfs,

Schwärmer turn into nationalists and zealots of an idea of homeland that only

very few enlightened people can understand and realise.

So far, the echo of criticism is clear. The esteem for Kant is great, Ferrari

doesn’t hide it. The scepticism to which gradually arrives has many of the

premises of the skeptical method of Kantian critique. The conclusions,

however, will be decisively different, and so it will be the context to which this

scepticism will be addressed. Right in those years the Italian question was

exploding with all its criticality, and it was involving all the major intellectuals

of the period. At an early stage such question concerned that need felt strongly

troughout the continent, which the institutions of reaction seek to whittle away

in whatever way. The concept of power and its exercise had to be redefined in

the light of events of the last twenty years. The dialectic between nationalism

and federalism was kindled also in Italy, and gave birth to a new debate that

extended its bounds to the whole peninsula. The nationalist theory saw

obviously the future of Italy in the overcoming of its geographical division and

in the foundation of a strong unitary state. In this sense, the first obstaclethat

had to be overcome was the Austrian oppression. Those peculiarities

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guaranteed to the idea of a united and nationalist Italy a growing success,

supported by the rethoric of the fight against the foreign domination and of the

defense of a common cultural identity. The federalist Ferrari couldn’t avoid to

denounce the inconsistency of this common identity. The situation was far

different, the one he described in his article De la littérature populaire in Italie

published in two parts between 1839 and 1840. It was, in summary, the

situation of a plurality of peoples and cultures. Presuming to obtain a unity

from such plurality meant evidently erasing a part of this richness, refusing, in

other words, that patriotic tradition which nationalism intended to exalt. Such

unity, furthermore, had to find a political center, capable of fusing together the

existing states. During those years had been printed Le speranze d’Italia of

Cesare Balbo, and Sul primato morale e civile degli italiani of Vincenzo

Gioberti, two essays that will make the history of Risorgimento. In the first

work the success of national unification was indicated in the resistance against

the Asburgic Empire and in the leadership that Kingdom of Sardinia had to

assume; in the second one the fundamental base of the rejoining of the Italian

peoples was founded in their common catholic conscience, of which the pope

had to become the spiritual and political guide. Ferrari immediately came into

conflict with both concepts. In them he saw appearing again the same

contradictions which had belonged to metaphysic in the theoretical field. The

research of a unitary principle that is superior to reality always implicates an

alienation from the experience, and this happens both in the field of knowledge

and the field of politics. So, the risk that this principle reduces itself only to a

rational construction without fundament is considerable. Such principle,

furthermore, always constitutes under itself a system that legitimates it, and

such system is usually within the reach of few, which are the chosen ones that

have to diffond and spread it. The idea of an Italian nation was already

snatched to the understanding of people that had to built it. That idea was

already entrusted to the hands of a king or a pope. It was clear that many of the

formulas of the absolutist logic that was necessary to fight with the war against

Austrian Empire, were appearing again in homeland in disguise.

Returning to the post-Congress Italian scene, in the tenth volume of The

New Cambridge Modern History, in chapter eighth, it’s written: «Italy’s

liberals and patriots were perhaps the most hard-headed to be found anywhere

13

in Europe during those difficult years of revolution and counter-revolution»2.

Such obstinacy was perhaps the result of the rapid succession of despotisms

and democratic governments in the same territories, and in a too short time-

frame. The conscience of the Italian people could not remain forever passive

and indifferent while the internal organization of each state, its borders, its

institutions changed abruptly. One day all were citizens, the next day were

subjects. For these reasons the building of the Concert of Europe, which in

Italy should have to be more stable, began very early to show evident cracks.

While the European powers met in Vienna, in Italy the resistance to

foreign domination and to the return of absolutism was already alive, and it

strenghtened thanks to the activity of secret associations. Sectarianism took on

the peninsula various forms, names and rituals. The plans of the lodges were

similar to each other, but also independent. Their secret propaganda was

directed mostly to the military and bureaucratic circles, and the objectives to be

achieved were broadly similar, despite of the variety of movements: the

establishment of representative and constitutional governments, sovereignty

and national independence, civil rights such as freedom of press and

association. Only a few were aimed to the establishment of republican

governments. Their work led to the uprisings of 1820-21, which involved the

Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the Kingdom of Sardinia, with minor impacts

on other states. The dynamics of those initiatives followed common stages: an

insurgency led by the military, limited to a few cities, and moved with the

intention of persuading the king to grant a number of important reforms. The

insurgent’s motto was emblematic: “Long live the King and the Constitution!”.

The consequences, unfortunately, were the same everywhere. King Ferdinando

I of the Two Sicilies immediately gave in to pressure, and signed a constitution

on the Spanish model of 1812, and so did Carlo Alberto, who had became

regent while the King of Sardinia, Carlo Felice was busy elsewhere. Shortly

after, both constitutions were suppressed by the decision of those same kings

who were unable to oppose the revolutionaries, and in both cases with the

essential military intervention of the Austrian troops. Once the order was

2 BURY, J. P. T., The New Cambridge Modern History – Vol. X The Zenit of European Power

(1830-1870), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1960, p. 201 (Online), available from:

https://archive.org/stream/iB_CMH/10#page/n0/mode/2up (accessed 7th August 2016).

14

restored, processes and dramatically executions marked the return to the status

quo. It was not different the fate of the 1830-31 riots, which swept in perhaps

the most reactionary state of all Europe, that is within the confines of the papal

government. Once again the operations were organized and managed by the

secret associations, not without an initial success. Once again, the

revolutionary forces were quickly isolated, unable to cope with the new descent

of the imperial troops. The sentences were harsh, police controls and

censorship became more and more rigid. But during the next fifteen years, this

only served to make the Italian situation more explosive; and so other revolts

broke out and went out in the 40s.

As we said, the revolutionaries and liberals of the peninsula were perhaps

the most willful and passionate, but similar events were taking place across all

the continent. It was evident that the concept of absolutist power that had long

been in crisis, was no longer able to hold the field. But it was also evident the

continuous failure of the riots, especially in Italy, where the reolutionary

attempts were numerous and widespread in every state. Certainly it was on the

peninsula that the control of the guarantors of the Concert of Europe was more

cast-iron, but the causes of so many dramatic endings were also others.

Ferrari, with the lucidity and the polemical tone typical of his writings,

was able to identitìfy them with great precision. The opening of the first

chapter of La federazione repubblicana, published in 1851, is a good example

of his style. Here, the author denounces: «we persists in believing that the

intrigues of a court, or of a secret society, or the successful ending of an

expedition, could be enough to free Italy and improvise a nationality»3. The

first error, then, is to have confided in the success of a single event, and in the

action of a few men, in order to proclaim the birth of an entire nation. The

activities of the secret associations could be capillar, but not organic. The

uprisings were orchestrated in secret, driven by a handful of men chosen

mostly among army officers, with the claim that all this could be enough to

form and lead a nation of millions of people. Many of these were concluded

without any popular participation. The harsh criticism of Ferrari is directed

especially against Mazzini, one of the leading protagonists of those years of

3 FERRARI, G., La federazione repubblicana, in GHIBAUDI, S. R., Scritti politici, Torino, Utet, 1973, p. 274.

15

tensions. His strategy has failed since it claimed to found the idea of a united

nation, without admitting that this could arise from the full consciousness of

the Italian people. In the essay of 1851 Ferrari writes: «He is a leader, so he is a

dictator; he conspires, so he constitutes an authority without discussion; he is at

the head of a secret society, so his propaganda is secret itself; it has to free the

population suddenly and give it an unexpected homeland»4. So, even a plot

aimed to upset a despotic power risked to become despotic itself, when it

entrusted the success of its objectives on the leadership of a single man and

unrelated to the participation of a community wider than a few hundred men.

As mentioned before, it was hard to leave behind the absolutist logic of

power, even in the context of the struggle against absolutism itself. The fate of

peoples not only from Italy, but of all Europe, wasn’t able to escape this logic,

based on a paternalistic concept of power in which a few, or even just one, has

the task of being the interpreter and the guardian of general will. It’s not

surprising, then, that revolutions in Italy made a second fatal error, which is to

wait until a constitution was granted from above, with the consent and under

the patronage of the monarchical or papal authority. In this, the distance

between Ferrari and Kant becomes broader. The Italian philosopher had

esteemed the German philosopher regarding the idea of republic and the

necessity of instituting it with the consent and the participation of its members,

but he couldn’t stop, as he did, in the face of the concept of absolute

sovereignity. Kant affirmed, in the famous letter on the meaning of

Enlightenment, the necessity for the human being to come out of the condition

of minority in which others think in his place. But he suspended this process in

the face of the authority of the monarch. We need to consider that the concept

of sovereignity had taken in Italy peculiar characteristics, since each of the

states of the peninsula was ruled by several degrees of authority. The majesty

of each king was flanked by the authority of the Emperor of Austria, and often

the last one overstepped the first one. They were also supported by the moral

patronage of the Church, which exercised an influence on the consciousness of

Italians no less strong. Let’s compare the Kantian political theory with the

scenario offered by Italy in the Nineteenth Century. The great fear of Kant,

namely that a revolution must necessarily be followed by a state of anarchy, it

4 FERRARI, G., La federazione repubblicana, p. 342.

16

would not have been valid for the Italian context: each government overthrown

by a revolution had been immediately restored by a higher power. His great

hope, namely that of a transformation process of each order by the sovereign

initiative, would have been equally unfounded: each constitution that was

granted, under pressure, by a king, had been later suppressed by the will of the

powers of the Holy Alliance.

As we know, Kant's theory was transcendental, and reposed trust in a

spontaneous and gradual transformation of the concept of power. This theory,

called to the comparison with the Nineteenth Century, had had to take note of

the crisis that the idea of absolute sovereignty was going through. As

transcendental, the conclusions of that theory remained still valid; and indeed,

everywhere in Europe peoples claimed the right to be citizens and to participate

to the domestic and foreign political life of the state. However, it was

impossible to expect any longer that this right was granted from above. The

theory of Ferrari, instead, was closely bound to the social and political

circumstances, even if it was not limited in these. This allowed him to overstep

Kant, and to argue that what should have been made spontaneously, should

have follow other paths. The liberation from the logic of absolutism could not

be guaranteed by those who had more interest to maintain it, but by the will of

those that had suffered it longer. And this couldn’t have happened but through

a revolution.

Despite all, the mistakes of 1820-21 were not overstepped. The tension in

the peninsula pwas expanding, which should have to increase the distance

between subjects and kings. Instead, all that happened was an ambiguous

convergence of intents, in which the rallying cry were “independence” and

“national unity”. The fight for freedom which had to burn up in every city in

order to upset every single dispotic government, turned instead into a

unification war of the peninsula against Austrian domination. In other words, a

war of kings. We finally get closer to 1848, the year of the great passions and

bitter disappointments.

The sign of change, against all odds, came from the core of Habsburg

Empire. In March, the streets of Vienna were invaded by a large crowd that

demanded the ratification of the Constitution and the recognition of the

autonomy of the various nationalities on which the Empire extended its rule,

17

including the Lombardo-Veneto. In the weeks before, throughout Italy were

gathered constituent assemblies under the pressure of a new wave of

revolutionary movements. Even the Papal States, led by the liberal Pius IX, had

to give up. The conditions to break down once and for all the building of the

ancien régime were taking place everywhere, and with a simultaneity that no

secret society could have ensured. The core of the Concert of Europe

threatened to fall apart under the pressure of separatists and constitutional

movements that were flaring up in various regions of the Empire. This call to

territorial autonomy and to participation of the people to the government had

necessarily to find echo among the Italian democratic and liberal forces.

No surprise that the keystone was still Milan. Austrian troops stationed in

and around the city were on high alert for weeks, but the worsening of the

situation in Austria had put also the army in crisis. This time, it was not only a

few hundred men poured into the squares and streets, but an entire population.

Artisans, students and bourgeois fought side by side on the barricades with

liberal aristocrats and progressive priests. Cattaneo took the leadership of the

insurrection together with other republicans. In a series of articles on the fateful

"Five Days of Milan", he will place great attention on the details of life, social

and professional extraction of those who took part on it, often sacrificing

themself. The fight for freedom had finally become popular, it was no longer a

matter of a few chosen ones to be conducted in secret. In the same days it had

been arose Venice, with a sudden, massive uprising, and without bloodshed. A

few days later it was proclaimed the Republic of San Marco, while in Milan a

provisionally military committee took office, waiting to determine which

direction would have taken on the new free government of Lombardy and

Veneto. In April, Sicily declared its autonomy and assumed the Italian tricolour

as flag, with the traditional symbol of Trinacria in the middle. It was a way of

saying that autonomy did not mean indifference to the fate of the other peoples

of Italy, to which Sicily claimed to be still tied.

Italy’s redemption had taken yet the revolutionary road, and by this way

it was going to leave behind all the rhetoric of the nationalism, all the idols

inherited from the absolutist tradition. Ferrari writes in his La federazione

repubblicana: «unity melt various states in one, revolution is the work of every

single state; unity imposed itself, abstracting from the principles, and it can be

18

imperial or papal, monarchical or republican; revolution comes directly from

the principles, stops itself when all the states are free and let them separated»5.

In april of 1848 Milan was free, Venice was autonomous and republican, Sicily

was independent and ruled by a Constitution. In their fight for freedom, all of

them had hoisted the tricolour. We are certainly far from the thought of Kant,

according to which it is not possible to consider resistance to established power

as legitimate; yet, the design of a federation of republican states, which had

been the ultimate goal of the essay For perpetual peace, was gradually and

spontaneously realizing throughout the peninsula. Italy was about to get out of

its minority status.

However, once again, attempting to get out of the logic of absolutism

proved to be a too arduous challenge. The Kingdom of Sardinia, under the

leadership of King Carlo Alberto, had already mobilized the army to take

advantage of the situation and declare war on Austria. He proposed to drive the

insurgents and to stand up in defense of the Italian nation, relying on successful

rhetoric of the struggle against foreign domination. The Piedmontese liberals

welcomed him as a liberator, and at that point the war that had been

revolutionary became unequivocally royal. The other Italian sovereigns, driven

by the aversion to Austria, or by the fear of a Piedmontese hegemony on the

peninsula, lined up together in what has gone down in history as the First

Italian War of Independence. The revolutionary spirit that had freed Milan,

Venice, Sicily, died soon to make way to renewed confidence in the king and

the pope. Mazzini himself, back to Milan in April, refrained from revolutionary

propaganda in order to accept the plan of Carlo Alberto, provided that the

unification of Italy succeded. To no avail the meeting that Cattaneo and Ferrari

took with Mazzini to convince him to take the leadership of the revolutionary

party, and to take a stronger stance against Carlo Alberto. With the suffocation

of the impetus of the revolution, faded also all republicans projects, all

prospects of an Italy Federal. «In one word», Ferrari says, «the King imposes

himself in place of the Emperor, his armies take the places of the Radetzky’s

ones; the King advances where the Emperor retreats; and where the Empire

advances, the King backs down»6.

5 FERRARI, G., La federazione repubblicana, p. 336. 6 FERRARI, G., La federazione repubblicana, p. 306.

19

Military failures caused the first defections among the Italian armies.

Pope Pius IX retreated after only a month, the troops of the Kingdom of the

Two Sicilies were recalled shortly after. Soon the war was lost, and Carlo

Alberto was forced to come to terms with the Austrian. The idea shaped in the

hands of kings, but snatched to the people, turned out to be a fictitious

construction. Cattaneo wrote about: «it had to be done a revolution, it had to be

made war with the past; and at the head of the venture was an aristocracy

adorer of all the past things, with an absolute king and a pope»7. The subjects

of the King Carlo Alberto had at least the good fortune to preserve the

Constitution granted a few months before, while on the rest of the peninsula the

paradigm of absolute power was again restored. Between the end of 1848 and

the first months of 1849, we can say that all of Europe had now left behind

every republican and federative project. This wasn’t however enough to ensure

stability within each state, since the arising of movements and insurrections to

force the sovereigns to grant a constitution continued unabated throughout the

rest of the century. But these movements had now assumed the logic and

language of nationalism, which fits gradually as the dominant perspective in

the whole continent.

Federalism maintained its role as an alternative to nationalism, but ended

up abandoning the scene of regional autonomy. The federalist debate in Italy

never ceased, but had no longer the prestige it had with Ferrari and Cattaneo,

and in France it remained tied mostly to the name of Proudhon. But in the field

of international relations, and of prospects for peace between states, its work

continued with renewed vigor. Just on to end of the century the first leagues

and associations for the promotion of international peace arose on the

continent, with the contribution of the greatest intellectuals of the time. Many

of these initiatives took explicitly inspiration from the theories of Kant, as the

International League of Peace and Freedom led by Charles Lemonnier, which

in September 1867 organized in Geneva his first Congress. The Kantian

project, therefore, continued to be a landmark in the renewed debate on

7CATTANEO, C., Dell’insurrezione di Milano nel 1848 e della successiva guerra, Lugano,

Tipografia della Svizzera italiana, 1849, p. 12 (Online), available from:

http://www.150anni.it/webi/_file/documenti/risorgimento/movimentivalorilibri/libri/libri_m

odifiche/Dell_insurrezione_di_Milano_nel_1848_e_d.pdf (accessed 27th July 2016).

20

international relations, which just from the end of the Nineteenth Century was

enriched by the contribution of scholars from various fields of knowledge. On

the intranational level and in particular on the evolution of republicanism, that

project had been close to be realized across the continent, even though he had

suffered a temporary setback with the prevailing of the nationalist ideology. In

Europe will therefore continue the debate about republicanism, federalism,

perpetual peace, and the will be enriched by contributions from new fields of

investigation, even when the events between Nineteenth and Twentieth

Century will lead mankind in the opposite direction. It will once again be the

transcendental essence of the issues raised by Kant's theory to allow this debate

to survive the history. Man had now become aware of the need to make the

political life of the state and of international relations public and shared, and

can no longer ignore this assumption.

21

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Classical texts

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1883.

FERRARI, G., La federazione repubblicana, in Scritti politici, edited by

GHIBAUDI, S. R., Totino, Utet, 1973.

FERRARI, G., Filosofia della rivoluzione, in Scritti politici, edited by

GHIBAUDI, S. R., Torino, Utet, 1973.

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FERRARI, G., Machiavelli giudice delle rivoluzioni dei nostri tempi, in Scritti

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LOVETT, C. M., Giuseppe Ferrari and the Italian Revolution, Chapel Hill,

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BOBBIO, N., Il terzo assente, Milano, Edizioni Sonda, 1989.

ALBERTINI, M., Il federalism, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1993.

BONANATE, L., Guerra e pace, Milano, FrancoAngeli, 1994.

SCHIATTONE, Alle origini del federalismo italiano, Bari, Edizioni

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BOBBIO, N., Il problema della Guerra e le vie della pace, Bologna, Il

Mulino, 1997.

VILLARI, L., Bella e perduta. L’Italia del Risorgimento, Bari, Laterza &

Figli, 2009.

22

SOLARI, G., VIDARI, G., Introduzione a KANT, I., Scritti politici, cura di

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ANGELINI, G., Nazione democrazia e pace, Milano, FrancoAngeli, 2012.

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CATTANEO, C., Dell’insurrezione di Milano nel 1848 e della successiva

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http://www.150anni.it/webi/_file/documenti/risorgimento/movimentivaloril

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