Giuseppe Mazzini (22 June 1805 – 10 March 1872) was an Italian politician, lawyer, journalist, philosopher, and political activist who worked for the unification of Italy (Risorgimento) and was a major leader of the Italian revolutionary movement. His efforts helped bring about the independent and unified Italy in place of the several separate states, many dominated by foreign powers, that existed until the 19th century. An Italian nationalist in the historical radical tradition and a proponent of a republicanism of social-democratic inspiration, Mazzini "helped define the European movement for popular democracy in a republican state." He is widely known as the "Prophet of Italian Nationalism".
Mazzini's thoughts influenced the Italian and European republican movements, the Constitution of Italy, and Europeanism, as well as later political leaders including Benito Mussolini, who was later the Fascist leader of Italy, former U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, former U.K. Prime Minister David Lloyd George, Indian independence movement figures such as Subhas Chandra Bose, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the founder of Hindutva. His ideas also influenced Sun Yat-sen, former President of the Provisional Government of the Republic of China (1912–1913), and founder of the Three Principles of the People (also known as Tridemism). In addition, Giuseppe Garibaldi, one of his most devoted followers, was deeply inspired by Mazzini's revolutionary vision and later played a decisive role in the Risorgimento through his military campaigns.
However, Mazzini's methods were often criticised, as his reliance on secret revolutionary groups and uprisings led to repeated failures and repression. Some historians also argue that his refusal to compromise with the monarchy made his goals harder to achieve, even though his ideas ultimately inspired the success of Italian unification.
Mazzini was born in Genoa, which had recently been annexed by the First French Empire. His father Giacomo Mazzini, originally from Chiavari, was a university professor who had adhered to Jacobin ideology, while his mother Maria Drago was renowned for her beauty and religious Jansenist fervour. From a very early age, Mazzini showed good learning qualities as well as a precocious interest in politics and literature. He was admitted to university at the age of 14, graduating in law in 1826 and initially practised as a "poor man's lawyer". Mazzini also hoped to become a historical novelist or a dramatist and in the same year wrote his first essay, Dell'amor patrio di Dante ("On Dante's Patriotic Love"), published in 1827, and inspired by feelings of Romanticism. In 1828–1829, he collaborated with the Genoese newspaper L'Indicatore Genovese which was soon closed by the Piedmontese authorities. He then became one of the leading authors of L'Indicatore Livornese, published at Livorno by Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi, until this paper was closed down by the authorities.
An admirer of Foscolo and Byron, he was part of a circle of Romantic writers, participating in the debate of the time against the classicists.
In 1827, Mazzini travelled to Tuscany, where he became a member of the Carbonari, a secret association with political purposes. On 31 October 1830, he was arrested at Genoa and interned at Savona. In early 1831, he was released from prison, but confined to a small hamlet. He chose exile instead, moving to Geneva, Switzerland.
In 1831, Mazzini went to Marseille, where he became a popular figure among the Italian exiles. He was a frequent visitor to the apartment of Giuditta Bellerio Sidoli, a Modenese widow who became his lover. In August 1832 Giuditta Sidoli gave birth to a boy, almost certainly Mazzini's son, whom she named Joseph Démosthène Adolpe Aristide after members of the family of Démosthène Ollivier, with whom Mazzini was staying. The Olliviers took care of the child in June 1833 when Giuditta and Mazzini left for Switzerland. The child died in February 1835.
Mazzini organized a new political society called Young Italy. It was a secret society formed to promote Italian unification: "One, free, independent, republican nation." Mazzini believed that a popular uprising would create a unified Italy, and would touch off a European-wide revolutionary movement. The group's motto was God and the People, and its basic principle was the unification of the several states and kingdoms of the peninsula into a single republic as the only true foundation of Italian liberty. The new nation had to be "One, Independent, Free Republic".
Mazzini's political activism met some success in Tuscany, Abruzzi, Sicily, Piedmont, and his native Liguria, especially among several military officers. Young Italy counted about 60,000 adherents in 1833, with branches in Genoa and other cities. In that year Mazzini first attempted insurrection, which would spread from Chambéry (then part of the Kingdom of Sardinia), Alessandria, Turin, and Genoa. However, the Savoy government discovered the plot before it could begin and many revolutionaries (including Vincenzo Gioberti) were arrested. The repression was ruthless: 12 participants were executed, while Mazzini's best friend and director of the Genoese section of the Giovine Italia, Jacopo Ruffini, killed himself. Mazzini was tried in absentia and sentenced to death.
Despite this setback, whose victims later created numerous doubts and psychological strife in Mazzini, he organized another uprising for the following year. A group of Italian exiles were to enter Piedmont from Switzerland and spread the revolution there, while Giuseppe Garibaldi, who had recently joined Young Italy, was to do the same from Genoa. However, the Piedmontese troops easily crushed the new attempt. Denis Mack Smith writes:
In the spring of 1834, while at Bern, Mazzini and a dozen refugees from Italy, Poland, and Germany founded a new association with the grandiose name of Young Europe. Its basic, and equally grandiose idea, was that, as the French Revolution of 1789 had enlarged the concept of individual liberty, another revolution would now be needed for national liberty, and his vision went further because he hoped that in the no doubt distant future free nations might combine to form a loosely federal Europe with some kind of federal assembly to regulate their common interests. ... His intention was nothing less than to overturn the European settlement agreed in 1815 by the Congress of Vienna, which had reestablished an oppressive hegemony of a few great powers and blocked the emergence of smaller nations. ... Mazzini hoped, but without much confidence, that his vision of a league or society of independent nations would be realized in his own lifetime. In practice, Young Europe lacked the money and popular support for more than a short-term existence. Nevertheless, he always remained faithful to the ideal of a united continent for which the creation of individual nations would be an indispensable preliminary.
On 28 May 1834, Mazzini was arrested at Solothurn, and exiled from Switzerland. He moved to Paris, where he was again imprisoned on 5 July. He was released only after promising he would move to England. Mazzini, together with a few Italian friends, moved in January 1837 to live in London in very poor economic conditions.
On 30 April 1840, Mazzini reformed the Giovine Italia in London, and on 10 November of the same year, he began issuing the Apostolato popolare ("Apostleship of the People").
A succession of failed attempts at promoting further uprisings in Sicily, Abruzzi, Tuscany, and Lombardy-Venetia discouraged Mazzini for a long period, which dragged on until 1840. He was also abandoned by Sidoli, who had returned to Italy to rejoin her children. The help of his mother pushed Mazzini to create several organizations aimed at the unification or liberation of other nations, in the wake of Giovine Italia: "Young Germany", "Young Poland", and "Young Switzerland", which were under the aegis of "Young Europe" (Giovine Europa). He also created an Italian school for poor people active from 10 November 1841 at 5 Greville Street, London. From London he also wrote an endless series of letters to his agents in Europe and South America and made friends with Thomas Carlyle and his wife Jane. A half century later, the "Young Europe" movement also inspired a group of young Turkish army cadets and students who named themselves the "Young Turks".