“L’invasione giacobina” di Silvio Vitale was translated with permission from L’Alfiere: Pubblicazione Napoletana Tradizionalista, Numero Uno, Gennaio, 1961, pp. 3-7.
The Jacobin Invasion
by Silvio Vitale
Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies appeared as something solitary in Italy. Under the ancient Romans, it had been Greek; under the new Romans, it had been Saracen, Norman, German, French, and Spanish. The medieval world of factions, civic rivalries, and petty tyrannies had not breached its borders. Instead, it had absorbed the chivalric spirit from beyond the Alps (1), which had taken firm root in its institutions and customs, more than elsewhere on the peninsula, preserving a feudal character.
For centuries, the southern nobility, disregarding any effort to form itself into an organized and united class, had preferred to devote itself to martial virtues, going off to fight even in distant lands by inner vocation, while glory and sacrifice remained obscure (2).
Later, especially after the end of the Spanish viceroyalty, it had become a courtier class.
The people, in their middle and lower classes, far from feeling any kind of class antagonism toward other social groups, sang in their folk memory the deeds of Conradin and Tancred. If they had ambitions, they sought to satisfy them not by elevating their own class, but by aspiring to the higher ones (3). From small trade and a thousand expedients, they sought only enough to live, so much so that Chateaubriand exclaimed: “The Neapolitan refuses to work as soon as he has earned the coin that suffices for his daily bread. He spends half his life immobile in the sun’s rays, unconcerned with the future (4).”
In the provinces, peasants divided their lives between the countryside and the mountains, the former generous and fertile, the latter enticing with adventure and danger, summed up in the proverb shrewdly reported by Croce: “Better two years as a bull than a hundred as an ox (5),” the path of brigandage.
From the capital to the remotest hamlet, it was a mark of respectability not to involve oneself in public life (6), to humbly mind one’s own business. To claim the right to pontificate on major political questions seemed sheer madness. Moreover, the State did not present itself as a singular authority demanding solutions to unified problems, at least not to the common people. Rather, the State distributed its imperium among multiple authorities belonging to sufficiently autonomous groups—feudal, municipal, corporative, ecclesiastical, academic—through which the individual could express himself concretely and directly.
Therefore, we find Croce’s thesis—that the lack of public spirit cannot be attributed to the Neapolitan people of the time—insufficient, because historical judgments should focus on the active element, namely the small revolutionary intellectual class, which certainly did concern itself with politics (7). The absence of “public spirit” should not be blamed, because at that time, such a spirit, as moderns conceive it, would have been something improvised and likely fruitless.
The avenues through which the people came to have more weight in domestic affairs, and even in international ones (not in the modern sense, but in dealings among various sovereigns and foreign orders), were the clergy and the legal profession—wrongly seen, in our opinion, as agents of discord and division. These orders were also open to the nobility, and those who entered them shed the bonds of their original class—bonds which, in any case, were far less binding than today’s ideological, quasi-religious class divisions; back then, they were merely social distinctions (8). These individuals acquired a new awareness of their place in society.
The legal profession, wrongly judged by Colletta (9) as merely greedy and quarrelsome—a fault attributable only to the lower-level clerks—had indeed taken an erudite part in the dynastic disputes of various centuries. The clergy, given the vassalage relationship between the Kingdom and the Pope, had divided itself between partisans of the throne and partisans of the Papacy. Yet all this did not undermine what had been—and still was—a spiritual unity and, if not pedantically understood, a cultural one in the South: the awareness among various groups and classes of a shared moral norm, descending from a universally accepted religion—the Catholic faith—and from a political power legitimate in both its hierarchical structure and divine foundation. Disputes and controversies, even in their most brutal forms, did not touch the essential substance of things.
In the Kingdom of nearly three thousand towns, of which only two hundred were not feudal, the capital itself, sweet in its natural abundance and the cordiality of its inhabitants, not truly a metropolis but a charming village (10), gathered around its King as both master and father. Ferdinand IV did not disdain to leave the palace and mingle with his subjects, just as the rural nobles did. Salvatore Di Giacomo, drawing on perhaps fanciful tales from a novelist like Dumas, even reports a King who amused himself selling fish and macaroni to the lazzari of Posillipo (11). But this cannot be judged through the eyes of moderns, who laugh at what they do not understand, avoiding the essential realization: this was a patriarchal world. And beyond that, we must consider the very character of the southern Italians—Neapolitans in particular—for whom an authority that “puts on a fierce face” provokes laughter more than obedience. Continue reading
Footnotes:
(1) Chateaubriand, F.R.: Viaggio in Italia
(2) Blanch, L.: Scritti storichi, Vol. I, Laterza ed.
(3) bid.
(4) Chateaubriand, F.R.: Ibid.
(5) Croce, B.: Storia del Regno di Napoli
(6) Ibid.
(7) Ibid.
(8) Lomonaco, G.: Del foro napoletano, etc. – Accad. Pontaniana
(9) Colletta, P.: Storia del Reame di Napoli
(10) On the 18th-century capital, see Doria, G.: Storia di una capitale, Ricciardi ed.
(11) Di Giacomo, S.: Luci ed ombre napoletane