Giuseppe Mazzini

Giuseppe Mazzini was the prophet of Italian unification, founder of Young Italy in Marseilles exile in 1831, organiser of a dozen failed risings, ruler of the Roman Republic for a few months in 1849, and for forty years the conscience of European nationalism from a London lodging. He held that nations were the units through which humanity would fulfil its duties, and that Italy’s making was a religious cause. Byron and Goethe, the essay of 1839 the Harvard Classics print, weighs the two poets as the voices of individual and objective genius, and prefers Byron’s restlessness as the sign of an age that had not yet found its faith.