ABSTRACT
We have already seen that there was a fermentation of opinion in Italy very dangerous to all the governments established there. National sentiment and the feeling that Italy, which had once been the great home of centralisation, should achieve unity and centralisation again, had taken possession of the minds of a large part of the educated classes and had vaguely permeated also the rest of the population. Balbo, in his history of Italy, had shown how the land had been enslaved to the barbarian, and had held up the hope of liberation. Gioberti, in his remarkable book, Del Primato morale e civile degli Italiani (1843), had pointed to the Papacy as the power which had given a special character to Italy’s place in Europe and by reorganising the states in a Confederation might lead her once again to primacy in Europe; and Mazzini had preached nationalism in alliance with democracy in a manner which made him feared as a revolutionary force, dangerous to the constitution of society as well as to the established governments. There was, however, no sign of any great change. Metternich ruled in Italy as completely as in Vienna, and there seemed little likelihood that the country would cease to be that ‘geographical expression’ which he had called it in 1815. Yet the first step in the movement of revolution came from this land of despotism, and from the part of it which seemed most wedded to the ideas of the past—the Papacy itself.
