The Italian unification also called the Risorgimento, led by Kingdom of Piemont-Sardinia (Savoy monarchy) and supported by Great Britain and France was a true work of colonization, followed by a centralizing policy of conquest, because of which the Italian Mezzogiorno, Sicily and Napolitania, at the time a sovereign state called Kingdom of Two Sicilies, would have fallen into a state of backwardness still manifest, actually these two nations are still internal colonies, subordinated to Italian state and controlled by a corrupted ruling class and organized crime syndicates. A clear radicalization in mid-twentieth century, after the fall of the Savoy monarchy and fascism, for which the Risorgimento was considered a intangible myth.
The changed political conditions allowed the emergence of a group of scholars which began re-examining the value of the House of Savoy work, and made largely negative reviews in that respect. The members of this group also took up the arguments of criticism, charging in particular to the process of national unification the cause of most problems of Napolitania and Sicily. The founder of this new culture is generally considered Carlo Alianello, who in his first novel, The Ensign (l'Alfiere) (1942) expressed a serious indictment to the creators and unification policies of the kingdom of Sardinia.
The review of the historical facts concerning the Italian unification is also studied by some academic authors, in most cases of foreign origin, such as Denis Mack Smith, Christopher Duggan, Martin Clark and Lucy Riall. There are many topics developed by revisionists. These include undeclared invasion of independent states, the role of the masonic lodges and foreign powers (Great Britain and France in particular), suspected violation of the plebiscites, the controversial repression of brigandage and the origin of the so-called Southern Question (Questione Meridionale).
The brigandage was not a criminal phenomena, but a resistance war against an occupation power, supported by foreign powers , the brigands were Neapolitans partisans. The repression of brigandage resulted in a really genocide, a hidden genocide against the Neapolitans by the Italian state, most of the victims were innocent civilians, entire villages and towns were destroyed, like on August 14, 1861, when the towns of Pontelandolfo and Casalduni were sacked and torched by the Piedmontese military during the so-called "war against brigandage" in Napolitania. On the orders of General Enrico Cialdini, one of the heroes of the Italian Risorgimento, the towns were reduced to rubble and townspeople indiscriminately slaughtered in retaliation for the death of 41 soldiers at the hands of partisan loyalists.
Notes written by Piedmontese soldiers who fought the "brigands" describe the shooting of unarmed men and bayoneting of groveling women. The survivors were left homeless and without means of survival. Dispatched by Cialdini, Colonel Pier Eleonoro Negri telegraphed his superior to report on the carnage: "At dawn yesterday justice was done to Pontelandolfo and Casalduni. They are still burning."
Sadly, Pontelandolfo and Casalduni were not the exception. In the first 14 months after the conquest of Kingdom of Two Sicilies, the towns of Guaricia, Campochiaro, Viesti, San Marco in Lamis, Rignano, Venosa, Basile, Auletta, Eboli, Montifalcone, Montiverde, Vico, Controne, and Spinello all suffered a similar fate. Arbitrary arrests and summary executions were common. By 1864 over 120.000 troops, nearly half the Italian army, were deployed in the Napolitania to “pacify” the insurrections.
Despite attempts to prove otherwise (so they could politically justify Piedmontise atrocities) the insurrection was not the work of common criminals and brigands, but was in fact a popular revolt by former Bourbon soldiers, loyalists and desperate peasants against the Northern invaders. These resistance fighters were protecting their homes and families. As many as 80.000 Neapolitans were imprisoned for political reasons, in concentration camps, like Fenestrelle in Piedmont. The war against brigandage started the mass immigration, it was only after decades of mass immigration after "unification" and the depopulation of large parts of Napolitania and Sicily that the Italian violence against Neapolitans and Sicilians began to wane. Unfortunately, the exact number of Neapolitans and Sicilians killed during the "war against brigandage" will never be known, but at the time, a roman catholics news paper from that time, Civiltà Cattolica, wrote about 1 million victims, maybe a more realistic number of victims is about 700.000 Neapolitans directly massacred by the occupation power and indirectly killed by the consequences of this war and the application of Law 1409 of 1863, known as the law Pica. Anyway the number of victims for the repression period 1861 to 1871 is very high even if we will considerate the lowest number of victims, about 100.000, it will be 27 Neapolitans killed every day no stop for 10 years, more than 1 per hour for a decade.
It is a shame that the Neapolitan Genocide is unrecognized neither internationally nor of Italy, especially after that Italian Parliament and the international public opinion has recognized other genocides like the Libyans’ perpetrated by Italian fascists during WWII and the Armenians’ perpetrated by the Ottomans during the Great War.
In the present Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 2, UN General Assembly, 9 December 1948, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
For the Neapolitan Genocide covers points a,b and c, so it is without doubt a genocide.
What made Italian unification happen? Why did Francis II of Naples, with his 443 million gold lire, just roll over
for Victor Emmanuel II of Piedmont, with his hardly 27 million gold lire? Two reasons: Lord Palmerston and Napoleon III. Where did exiles such as Mazzini and Garibaldi find their backers? Not in Pompeii, that’s for sure.
The unification of Italy was an event in the 19th century’s great struggle between liberalism and reaction. The international liberal movement of the 20th century, in which a figure such as Carl Schurz could go from German revolutionary in 1848 to Civil War general in 1861, was the clear precursor of today’s “international community” or also called "the empire" as Toni Negri and Micheal Hardt call it in their book "Empire" (http://bit.ly/cqdcTs). And once again, nowadays we see it playing the same predatory role: conquering and destroying in the name of liberation and independence, the same empire established under 19th century’s.
The British historian Desmond Seward wrote in "Naples: A Travellers’ Companion":
"In size and number of inhabitants she ranks as the third city of Europe, and from her situation and superb show may justly be considered the Queen of the Mediterranean,’ wrote John Chetwode Eustace in 1813. Until 1860 Naples was the political and administrative centre of the Kingdom of The Two Sicilies, the most
beautiful kingdom in the world. Consisting of Southern Italy and Sicily, it had a land mass equal to that of Portugal and was the richest state in Europe… For five generations — from 1734 till 1860 —
it was ruled by a branch of the French and Spanish royal family of Bourbon who filled the city with monuments to their reign…
The ‘Borboni’ as their subjects called them, were complete Neapolitans, wholly assimilated, who spoke and thought in Neapolitan dialect (indeed the entire court spoke Neapolitan)… Until 1860, glittering Court balls and regal gala nights at the San Carlo which staggered foreigners by their opulence and splendour were a feature of Neapolitan life… In 1839 that ferocious Whig Lord Macaulay was staying in the city and wrote, ‘I must say that the accounts I which I have heard of Naples are very incorrect. There is far less beggary than in
Rome, and far more industry… At present, my impressions are very favourable to Naples. It is the only place in Italy that has seemed to me to have the same sort of vitality which you find in all the great English ports and cities. Rome and Pisa are dead and gone; Florence is not dead, but sleepeth; while Naples overflows with life.”
The Borbone’s memory have been systematically blackened by historians of the regime which supplanted them, and by admirers of the Risorgimento, by the fanaticism of the fascism’s myth of italianity. They have had a particularly bad press in the Anglo-Saxon world. Nineteenth-century English liberals loathed them
for their absolutism, their clericalism and loyalty to the Papacy, and their opposition to the fashionable cause of Italian unity. Politicians from Lord William Bentinck to Lord Palmerston and Gladstone, writers such as Browning and George Eliot, united in detesting the ‘tyrants’; Gladstone convinced himself that their regime
was ‘the negation of God.’ Such critics, as prejudiced as they were ill informed, ignored the dynasty’s economic achievement, the kingdom’s remarkable prosperity compared with other pre-unitary Italian states, the inhabitants’ relative contentment, and the fact that only a mere handful of Sicilians and Neapolitans were opposed to their government. Till the end, The Two Sicilies was remarkable for the majority of its subjects’ respect for, and knowledge of, its laws — so deep that even today probably most Italian judges, and especially successful advocates, still come from the south. Yet even now there is a mass of blind prejudice among historians. All too many guidebooks dismiss the Borbone as corrupt despots who misruled and neglected their capital. An entire curtain of slander conceals the old, pre-1860 Naples; with the passage of time calumny has been supplemented by ignorance, and it is easy to forget that history is always written by the victors. However Sir Harold Acton in his two splendid studies of the Borbone has to some extent redressed the balance, and his interpretation of past events is winning over increasing support — especially in Naples itself.
Undoubtedly the old monarchy had serious failings. Though economically and industrially creative, it was also absolutist and isolationist, disastrously out of touch with pan-Italian aspirations. Beyond question there was political repression under the Bourbons — the dynasty was fighting for its survival — but it has been magnified out of all proportion. On the whole prison conditions were probably no worse than in contemporary England, which still had its hulks; what really upset Gladstone was seeing his social equals being treated in the same way as working-class convicts, since opposition to the regime was restricted to a few liberal romantics among the aristocracy and bourgeoisie. The Risorgimento was a disaster for Naples and for the south in
general. Before 1860 Napolitania and Siciliy was the richest part of Italy outside the Austrian Empire; after it quickly became the poorest. The facts speak for themselves. In 1859 money circulating in The Two Sicilies amounted to more than that circulating in all other independent Italian states, while the Bank of Naples’s gold reserve was 443 million gold lire, twice the combined reserves of the rest of Italy. This gold was immediately confiscated by Piedmont — whose own reserve had been a mere 27 million — and transferred to Turin.
Neapolitan excise duties, levied to keep out the north’s inferior goods and providing four-fifths of the city’s revenue, were abolished. And then the northerners imposed crushing new taxes. Far from being liberators, the Piedmontise administrators who came in the wake of the Risorgimento behaved like Yankees in the post-bellum Southern States; they ruled The Two Sicilies as an occupied country, systematically demolishing its institutions and industries. Ferdinand’s new dockyard was dismantled to stop Naples competing with Genoa (it is now being restored by industrial archeologists). Vilification of the Borbone became part of the school curriculum. Shortly after the Two Sicilies’ enforced incorporation into the new Kingdom of Italy, the Duke of Maddaloni protested in the Italian Parliament: ‘This is invasion, not annexation, not union. We are being plundered like an occupied territory.’ For years after the “liberation”, Neapolitans were governed by northern padroni and leech, to nowadays, and the internal colonialism has been more and more unsupportable.
References:
========= RASSEGNA STAMPA=========
*FRANCESCO FARANDA Archivio storico del Corriere Della Sera
http://archiviostorico.corriere.it/1998/maggio/24/libro_nero_dei_Savoia_co_0_9805246494.shtml
* PAOLO MIELI direttore del Corriere Della Sera parla del lager di Fenestrelle
http://archiviostorico.corriere.it/2004/ottobre/11/Quei_borbonici_rinchiusi_torturati_Fenestrelle_co_9_041011073.shtml
* MASSIMO NOVELLI giornalista di Repubblica
http://www.sissco.it/index.php?id=1291&tx_wfqbe_pi1%5Bidrassegna%5D=8783
* AMELIA CRISANTINO archivio di La Repubblica
http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2009/01/18/la-prigione-che-racconta-le-ombre-del.html
*MARISA INGROSSO La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno
http://www.lagazzettadelmezzogiorno.it/GdM_dallapuglia_NOTIZIA_01.php?IDCategoria=273&IDNotizia=275665&selectedhtml&save=1
*RAPHAEL ZANOTTI La Stampa
http://www.lastampa.it/redazione/cmsSezioni/cronache/200910articoli/48152girata.asp
*PAOLO GRANZOTTO Il Giornale http://www.ilgiornale.it/parola_lettori/i_lager_sabaudi_lato_oscuro_risorgimento/05-10-2009/articolo-id=388341-page=0-comments=1
*TERNI MAGAZINE
http://www.ternimagazine.it/7055/cronache/grandi-notizie/il-volto-nascosto-della-storia-ditalia-austhwitz-macche-soldati-meridionali-deportati-e-sterminati-nella-fortezza-di-fenestrelle-in-piemonte.html
INTERESTING FROM EUROPE.; NEWS BY THE AFRICA. THE REVOLUTION IN SOUTHERN ITALY - July 21, 1860
Published: July 21, 1860
Reinforcements for Garibaldi. The Crisis in Naples and Rome. DEBATES IN THE BRITISH PARLIAMENT.
(source: http://www.nytimes.com/1860/07/21/news/interesting-europe-africa-revolution-southern-italy-reinforcements-for-garibaldi.html?pagewanted=print)
No movement is reported either in Sicily or on the mainland.
GARIBALDI, in a letter to the Italian Committee in London, points out the urgent need he has for a flotilla, and suggests that they might possibly procure for him a couple of steamers armed with Armstrong guns.
A Naples telegram of the 2d inst., says:
"The state of siege has been raised; the Constitution of 1848 has been proclaimed, the Press laws of 1848 and 1849 have been reestablished, the Chambers are convoked for the 10th of September, and the National Guard has been provisionally reestablished. Naples is tranquil.
Signor FRESCOBALDI, the representative of the Duke of Tuscany, has taken down the escutcheon of the Grand Duchy."
It is asserted that the most violent pressure was being exercised by the French Emperor on both the Courts of Naples and Turin, for the enforcement of a confederation equally repugnant to the one and the other.
The semi-official Opinione, of Turin, in reference to the proposed alliance with Naples, says:
"The Ministry firmly adheres to the national principle, and refuses to enter into any engagement which might carry them away from the line of policy they have always followed. It is necessary to temporize, in order to neutralize the activity of diplomatists, who think that Piedmont, to save the Neapolitan dynasty, should adhere to the proposed alliance. Such an alliance is inadmissible on account of the opposition of public opinion."
The Independence Belge says that Piedmont has placed conditions on the acceptance of the alliance with Naples, which are equivalent to a refusal. For instance, the Government has demanded that the Neapolitan Government not only recognize the annexation of Romagna, but the probable annexation of the Marches and of Umbria. The relations between the Court of Naples and the Holy See renders such a course impossible.
Le Nord states that the conditions which the Court of Turin desire to impose on Naples were as follows: 1. The Government of Naples shall definitively break with Austria. 2. It shall give, and cause to be accepted at Rome, the counsels which itself has received and accepted. 3. It shall adopt a line of policy tending to the complete independence of Italy. 4. Promised reforms shall be really effected.
A letter from Genoa says the Sicilian loan of 45,000,000 francs was almost concluded. It would be issued at 85, and to be reimbursed in fifteen years by annual drawings.
Provisions, arms and camp materials were being continually sent off to Sicily, and as to men, Genoa contained quite an army of volunteers from all parts.
The French Consul at Genoa had refused to sign the papers of a captain of a French steamer who had engaged to convey volunteers to Palermo. There were 4,000 volunteers ready at Genoa to depart.
A telegram dated Naples the 5th announces that a Commission had been appointed to draw up laws on the following subjects: The National Guard, Administrations, Council of State and Ministerial responsibility.
Naples was tranquil, and the Constitutional party was described as more consolidated.
A telegram dated Naples, July 5, announces that GARIBALDI had marched against Messina.
A rumor was current that a movement of Roman troops towards the Neapolitan frontiers had taken place.
The reforms which the Papal Government had decided upon granting were to be promulgated shortly in a motu proprio. Among other concessions the Pope grants to the Consulta of State a deliberative vote on all financial questions, in which, until now, it had only a consultative vote; but these reforms are to be granted on condition of the integrity of the patrimony of St. Peter being guaranteed.
The state of affairs in Southern Italy had been the subject of debate in both Houses of the British Parliament.
The Russian Ambassador at Paris had officially notified the French Government of the adhesion of Russia to the proposition for the assembling of a European Conference at Paris on the Savoy question.
It is confirmed that the Neapolitan Minister at Paris had sent his resignation to Naples.
Killed Brigands:
