Denis Mack Smith

A study of the Italian leader's life from 3 viewpoints; his own with an autobiography, his contemporaries with eyewitness observations, and modern historians with objective appraisals.

First published in 1954, and now re-issued with a fresh preface, Cavour and Garibaldi remains the single most important contribution yet made by an English-speaking historian to the study of the Risorgimento. Devoted to seven crucial months in 1860, the work examines in detail the sequence of events between the Sicilian rebellion in April, and the absorption of all the south into the Italian kingdom of Victor Emmanuel in November. It shows, in the contrasting priorities of the two great leaders, the creative tensions that underlay the movement for Italian unification. Against Cavour's desire to extend to the rest of the peninsula the benefits of Piedmontese liberalism, the author juxtaposes Garibaldi's dream of a united Italy, achieved if necessary by force. The diplomat and political strategist is compared with the soldier and popular hero, and in the comparison it is Garibaldi who emerges as the realist, and Cavour as the inspired but dogmatic muddler.

Giuseppe Mazzini was one of the outstanding figures in the political history of nineteenth-century Europe. A vigorous proponent of nationalism, pre-eminent figure in the struggle for Italian independence and unity, and fascinating personality, his ideas were influential throughout Europe. Yet successive Italian governments, fearing the consequences of his belief in democracy and revolution, deliberately obscured his achievements: there have been few modern studies of Mazzini, and no biography in English since 1902. Denis Mack Smith's major new account re-examines Mazzini's ideological impact and his place in the political and intellectual world of the mid-nineteenth century. Based on profound scholarship and immense archival research, the book vividly re-creates Mazzini's long years of poverty and exile in London, and the networks of friends, associates and enemies that brought him into contact with the greatest European figures of the age, among them Marx, Carlyle, Mill, and Bakunin. Mazzini is revealed as an acute but largely unrecognised prophet of the idea of a European community: he saw nationalism as a step towards larger and more harmonious confederations. Adept at inspiring animosity, as well as admiration, Mazzini affronted the pope by his demand for religious reform, Karl Marx by his powerful critique of communism, and many of his less enlightened contemporaries by his campaigns on behalf of social security, universal suffrage, and women's rights. Yet he was universally venerated for his brilliance, humanity and wisdom, and even his critics agreed that he left an enduring mark on his time.

"This important new life of Mussolini by a talented new biographer draws on a vast range of fresh material to challenge the standard version of Italy's fascist dictator as either grotesque buffoon, hell bent on war in Europe (the liberal version), or tool of the bourgeoisie in its war with the working class (the Marxist version)." "To get power and hold it by and large bloodlessly through two decades, as Mussolini did until his disastrous alliance with Hitler, required much more than that. Such was the magnetism of the man Churchill called 'the Roman genius' and Pope Pius XI 'sent by Providence', and so strong the appeal of fascism, that the only honest verdict is that he ruled by popular demand." "Mussolini was as popular with women as men. Behind every great man, it is said, there is a woman. Behind this great dictator, who had 169 lovers according to one estimate, stood a nation of women. It was his politics they found most attractive. He did away with democracy but he did not use mass murder to stay in power. There was no need. To the bitter end, there was little resistance to him by Italians because support for him remained so strong." "His fatal error was his alliance with Hitler whom he despised. But this alliance was far from inevitable, the result more of Anglo-French incompetence and his fear of Hitler than a wild desire for war or world domination, let alone the extermination of the Jews. Indeed, once the Holocaust had begun he and his Fascists refused to deport Jews to the Nazi death camps thus saving thousands of Jewish lives." "This new biography also forces us to wonder whether Mussolini - a revolutionary Socialist who founded Fascism as an alternative left-wing revolutionary movement - had better vision than Marx. For whereas Communism appears terminally ill, Fascism's Third Way between Capitalism and Communism lives on, championed by standard bearers of the modern left such as New Labour." "To assume that Fascism was a phenomenon of the extreme right is to miss the point: Mussolini despised the bourgeois way of life - la vita comoda - above all else and he remained at heart a Socialist to his dying day."--BOOK JACKET.

Denis Mack Smith is the foremost English historian of modern Italy. In this volume, he collected, translated, introduced and commented upon key documents about Italian history, from the Napoleonic period through the risorgimento to the unification of Italy in the wake of her participation in the 1866 Austro-Prussian War. This is a model for the presentation of documentary evidence and commentary. I recall studying the unification of Italy as a subject many years ago: a text like this would have been ideal to move beyond the factual basis towards engagement with key source materials. Smith's commentaries are exemplary in calling attention to the issues without necessarily pointing the student too directly towards conclusions.