Körner - America in Italy: the United States in the political thought and imagination of the Risorgimento, 1763-1865

AMERICA IN ITALY

America in Italy

THE UNITED STATES
IN THE POLITICAL THOUGHT
AND IMAGINATION OF THE
RISORGIMENTO, 17631865

Axel Krner

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON & OXFORD

Copyright 2017 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press,
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In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,
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Jacket art: Giovanni Battista Tiepolo,Apollo and the Continents, 175253, fresco, 1900 3050 cm. Stairwell of the Wrzburg Residence Bayerische Schlsserverwaltung, Andreas Grindel, Schwarzach.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Krner, Axel, 1967 author.

Title: America in Italy : the United States in the political thought and imagination of the Risorgimento, 17631865 / Axel Krner.

Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016035758 | ISBN 9780691164854 (hardback : acid-free paper)

Subjects: LCSH: ItalyRelationsUnited States. | United StatesRelationsItaly. | United StatesForeign public opinion, Italian. | ItalyPolitics and government17891815. | ItalyPolitics and government18151870. | Political scienceItalyHistory18th century. | Political scienceItalyHistory19th century. | IntellectualsItalyHistory18th century. | IntellectualsItalyHistory19th century. | ItalyIntellectual life. | BISAC: HISTORY / Europe / Italy. | HISTORY / Americas (North, Central, South, West Indies). | POLITICAL SCIENCE / History & Theory. | POLITICAL SCIENCE / Government / International. | PHILOSOPHY / Political.

Classification: LCC DG499.U5 K67 2017 | DDC 320.94501dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016035758

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Miller

Printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

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CONTENTS

PREFACE

WHAT DID EUROPEANS KNOW about colonial America and the United States? What role did the emergence of the new nation play in the old continents political thought and in the cultural imagination that informed the European experience of societal change throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?

Ever since the Seven Years War and the American Revolution, Europeans had taken a keen interest in the political and civic institutions that developed across the Atlantic. This widespread curiosity cannot be reduced to blind admiration. Many foreign observers were receptive to American ideas, but rather than being used as blueprints to fashion the political future, these ideas became the sounding board for the assessment of a wide range of political experiences at home. Contrary to views widely held in the United States, Europeans did not necessarily think that the United States had to teach them lessons. They were confident in relating what they observed in America to their own constitutional histories, often to note that things across the Atlantic were not just very different, but sometimes also objectionable. In America, utopia and dystopia seemed to live side by side. As a consequence, references to American political institutions became discursive instruments in complex political and societal debates, where the United States often served as a positive, but not infrequently also as a negative matrix. With reference to the United States, Europeans were able to support progressive as well as reactionary causes.

This is a book on Italian ideas about the United States, but not only. Almost always debates about the United States passed through multiple transnational channels, where information about America arrived from one country and was assessed with reference to a different national school of thought, to then influence political opinion in a third country. Italian authors writing about the American Revolution shaped French political thought during the Napoleonic period; English pamphlets were translated into French and then read in Milan, Florence, or Naples. The American constitution was compared to those of the United Provinces, Switzerland, or the Holy Roman Empire, and assessed against the experience of Italys own medieval city-republics as well as classical authors. Concepts derived from Montesquieu, Rousseau, or Vico served to evaluate what people discovered about the New World. What Europeans heard about the Americans domestic manners was picked up in literature, became the object of operatic plots, or figured in political satire. Analyzing political ideas in relation to Italys wider cultural imagination is one of this books objectives.

In Italy awareness of political developments across the Atlantic dramatically increased at the time of the emerging conflict between Britain and its American colonies at the end of the Seven Years War, coinciding with the spread of political ideas inspired by the European Enlightenment, in which Italian thinkersAntonio Genovesi, Gaetano Filangieri, Cesare Beccaria, to name but a fewplayed a prominent (and sometimes underestimated) role. After 1789, and during the years of Napoleonic rule, what Italians knew about the American Republic informed discussions on the political reorganization of the peninsula and was then debated by the different factions of the nascent Italian national movement, as well as its opponents. This long period of engagement with American democracy assumed a very different character with Italys political unification in 1861, which coincided with the outbreak of the American Civil War. The constitutional parameters of the Italian nation-state were suddenly set; and within the new political climate hitherto pro-American voices could hardly present a nation torn by civil war as a political model.

Until then, American experiences had helped to foster arguments in favor of federal solutions to Italys national question, but also to assess the potential risks involved in such choices. Democratic Republicans as well as constitutional monarchists used the example of the United States to argue their case. Debates on slavery, and on its implications for the American constitution, resulted in critical reflections on the inner coherence of the Italian nation. Emphasizing the transnational flow of ideas, where references to the United States appear alongside pride in Italian republicanism and a keen interest in the Swiss model of federalism, my book questions concepts of center and periphery in global history, while also connecting cultural and intellectual history in novel ways. Italians engagement with the United States shows how abstract political ideas were reflected in their cultural imagination during a period most Italians experienced as a dramatic moment of change in historical time.

The origins of this book go back to a collaborative research project at University College London, funded by the United Kingdoms Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), investigating images of the United States in Europe and Latin America during the second half of the nineteenth century. My own research for this project started during a membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, during which I became increasingly aware that Italian interest in the United States cannot be reduced to admiration for American modernity in the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of Italian mass migration to the United States around 1900. I therefore turned my attention to the eighteenth century, noticing that an increased engagement with the political and societal changes across the Atlantic predated the American Revolution to then accompany political debates in the Italian peninsula throughout the Risorgimento period.