Mazzini, GIUSEPPE (English, JOSEPH), Italian patriot and republican, was born at Genoa, 22d June 1805. A clever, precocious boy, he began to study at the university of his native town when only thirteen, and before he was nineteen was practising as an advocate. In April 1821 his heart was deeply stirred and his imagination fired through seeing refugees from the unsuccessful rising in Piedmont, and from that moment he conceived the idea of the liberation of his country. At first he assailed the domination of the classical school of literature, and its 'monarchical' tyranny of rule and prescription. But the earnestness of his nature soon pushed him on to make 'the first great sacrifice of his life,' by renouncing 'the career of literature for the more direct path of political action.' In 1829 he joined the Carbonari (q.v.), although he mistrusted their aims, their methods, and the character of their organisation. He was betrayed in July 1830 to the Sardinian police, and imprisoned in Savona. In his prison cell he matured those thoughts which became the ruling principles of his life and work, and shortly after his release, early in the following year, organised at Marseilles the Young Italy Association. The first and last duty of its members was to labour to create a free, independent, and united nation of Italians. The great mass of the people were to be educated to understand their rights, and taught to obtain them, if need were, through insurrection. But Italy must first be freed from the yoke of the foreigner. Nothing but a republic could serve her political needs in the future. Once Italy were regenerated, she 'was destined to arise the initiatrix of a new life, and of a new and powerful unity to all the nations of Europe'—the selfsame rôle that Heine and Young Germany assigned to regenerated Germany. The ultimate goal was the governance of the world by the moral law of progress, through the effective agencies of association, man with man and nation with nation. 'The labour to be undertaken was not merely political, but above all a moral work; not negative, but religious.' It was essentially the practice of a faith, the living of a creed, a religion. It was in this spirit that Mazzini laboured to his life's end—unwaveringly, disinterestedly, through the bitterest humiliations of exile, and at the cost of the greatest personal sacrifices.
Shortly after Charles Albert ascended the throne of Piedmont (April 1831) Mazzini addressed to him a manly appeal, urging him to put himself at the head of the struggle for Italian independence, and to grant needful concessions to his people's cry for liberty. His answer was a sentence of perpetual banishment, Metternich having forced the new king to take a commission in the dragonades of reaction. Further, in August 1832 the French authorities expelled him from the country. But he outwitted them, and lay hidden at Marseilles. From this time he led for more than twenty years 'a life of voluntary imprisonment within the four walls of a little room.' But no confinement could quell his spirit or restrain his activity. Henceforward he was the most untiring political agitator in Europe, the man most dreaded by its absolute governments; with Lassalle he was one of the most conspicuously successful of the century. He wrote incessantly, in a strain of such fervid eloquence, and with such an intensity of conviction, that his words kindled in the hearts of those that read them the enthusiasm to do and dare all things. Though by nature frank, open, and bold, no man perhaps learned to understand better the tortuous arts of secret conspiracy. He was driven to adopt this underground method of warfare by the power and vigilance and unscrupulous character of the enemies he contended against, and the close and united front they presented to every revolutionary assault. In 1834 he organised an invasion of Savoy, which failed ignominiously, chiefly through the lukewarmness, if not treachery, of the soldier placed at its head. The next two years Mazzini spent in Switzerland, incessantly active, extending his organisation throughout Italy, instigating his countrymen to insurrection, and scattering broadcast through Europe the bursting seeds of republican revolt. In the year of the Savoy fiasco he drew up, at Bern, for Young Europe—i.e. Young Italy, Young Germany, and Young Poland united—the Pact of Fraternity, a code of abstract doctrines dictating to humanity a faith and rules of life. Being in the last days of 1836 banished from Switzerland, he found a refuge in London. Although for some years (1841-48) he struggled hard against poverty, he nevertheless contrived to help his poorer, ignorant countrymen, the organ-boys of London, by gathering them round him in night-classes and teaching them and civilising them. In 1844 he charged the English government with opening his letters, and communicating their contents to the rulers in Italy, and made good his accusation. This raised a great storm of indignation throughout the country, and drew from Carlyle a spirited testimonial to Mazzini in The Times. Sir James Graham, the Home Secretary, even felt constrained to apologise in the House of Commons for having publicly repeated the calumnies of his enemies.
On the outbreak of the Lombard revolt in 1848 Mazzini hastened to throw himself into the thick of the struggle. The king of Sardinia sought to win him over by the promise to make him first minister in the new Piedmontese-Lombard state, and to grant him as large a share as he might desire in the framing of a constitution for it. But Mazzini's aims were not of personal ambition, and he would be no party to the aggrandisement of the dynasty of Savoy at the expense, or to the detriment, of a united Italy. After Milan capitulated, he tried with Garibaldi to keep the war alive in the valleys of the Alps; but, when he saw that all was over in Lombardy, he made his way to Tuscany. Leghorn received him with wild enthusiasm on 8th February 1849, the day before the republic was proclaimed at Rome, and elected him her deputy to the republican assembly in the papal city. On 29th March Mazzini, Saffi, and Armellini were appointed a triumvirate with dictatorial powers; they chose as their motto 'God and the People.' But on 25th April the French arrived before the city to reinstate the pope, and after a tough struggle were admitted within the walls. The republic fell, and the triumvirs indignantly resigned on the last day of June. Mazzini made his way back to London. Not however to rest: he planned the attempted risings at Mantua (1852), Milan (1853), Genoa (1857), and Leghorn (1857). Meanwhile in London he had founded, along with Kossuth and Ledru-Rollin, the European Association, and with them issued in September 1855 its republican manifesto. The Society of the Friends of Italy was organised about this time in England. In 1859 Mazzini condemned the alliance Piedmont had made with Napoleon III.; and the cession of Savoy and Nice to France not only justified his prophetic warning, but filled him (and Garibaldi) with the patriot's sorrowful indignation.
He supported Garibaldi in his expedition against Sicily and Naples with all his influence and all his resources; and when Piedmont stepped in to reap the fruits of the soldier's heroic exertions, and even scattered his followers and took him prisoner at Aspromonte (1862), Mazzini broke finally with the monarchical party. The king replied to his fulminant by again passing sentence of death upon him—the third time. But this did not deter him from stigmatising the Convention of September (see ITALY) as a base compromise. In 1866-67 Messina in protest elected him its deputy to the Italian parliament four times in succession. Two years later he was again expelled from Switzerland, and in the following year (1870) was arrested at sea, whilst on his way to Sicily, and carried prisoner to Gaeta. After being detained two months he was set at liberty. He settled at Lugano, but died at Pisa, 10th March 1872, and was buried in his native city, mourned by the entire nation he had done so much to create.
Although from one point of view a utopian idealist and political dreamer, the apostle of the new democratic evangel, and from another point of view a restless demagogue, a dark conspirator, and disturber of the peace of Europe, Mazzini must be acknowledged by both parties alike to have been a man of immense energy and resource, and of great organising power, who unquestionably had the full courage of his convictions, and was consistent and thoroughly sincere and disinterested in his aims. His temperament and the constitution of his mind made him feel impatience and scorn of the moderates, the calm, cautious watchers and waiters for opportunities. He was averse to nibbling advantage after advantage, and had no sympathy for the compromises and half-measures of statesmen and diplomatists. His was the spirit that burns the bridges behind it, stakes all on one critical throw, and puts forth all its energy to bring about a decisive and final result. Cavour was of an opposite temperament: he was essentially the cautious, calculating statesman. Hence the fundamental antagonism between the two men. Cavour was a man of aristocratic birth and training, and the levelling doctrines of the new republicanism were in the highest degree repugnant to him. No wonder then that he disliked Mazzini, the ardent apostle of equality, fraternity, and humanity, the uncompromising enthusiast of action. And no wonder too that Mazzini failed to sympathise with the methods of Cavour: he saw in them no ruling principle beyond advantaging the House of Savoy, no desire to labour for the people, no plan, no promise for their progress, and nothing like faith in their future. Nevertheless, on more than one critical occasion he abstained from embarrassing the Sardinian government, even when he did not approve of its proceedings. His own ability to govern is best evidenced in his successful organisation of the difficult forces of secret insurrection; his brief tenure of office at Rome was beset by so many untoward conditions as to effectually preclude him from showing his real mettle. Mazzini has been called the prophet of Italian unity, Garibaldi its knight-errant, and Cavour the riveter of the bolts that finally united the disjecta membra of the nation together. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that Mazzini prepared the soil, sowed the seed, and fostered the growing plants, that Garibaldi did the work of gathering in the ripe fruit, but it was Cavour who gained the final advantage of the harvest.
All Mazzini's writings are, like Heine's, desultory in character, some few literary and critical, but most of them political, germane to the questions of the hour. His longest productions are On the Duties of Man, a noble outline of ethical theory, and Thoughts upon Democracy in Europe, a discussion of the prominent schools of economics and socialism. Apart from his eloquence, the features of his writing that most forcibly arrest attention are his manly, outspoken tone, his candid fairness—except sometimes when he is speaking of the moderates—his sterling love of justice and of freedom, but above all things else his keen and accurate insight into the historical tendencies of modern Europe.
The best source for Mazzini's life and works is the collected edition of his Scritti, Editi ed Inediti, 16 vols., the first eight (1861-74) prepared for the press by Mazzini himself, the last eight (1877-89) by Aurelio Saffi, his brother triumvir at Rome. An English edition (6 vols. 1864-70; new ed. 1890-91) has been selected from the first eight vols. of the Scritti. See also Memor by E. A. Vinturi (2d ed. 1877); Marriott, Makers of Modern Italy (1889); and Clarke, Selected Essays of Mazzini (1887).