People and fates from the Risorgimento

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People and Fates from the Risorgimento are seven portrait sketches by Ricarda Huch , published in 1908 by Insel Verlag Leipzig under the title Das Risorgimento .

The Italian Spielberg prisoners Federico Confalonieri , Silvio Pellico , Piero Maroncelli , their two Austrian opponents Antonio Salvotti , Emperor Franz and Karl Albert of Savoy and the traitor Giorgio Pallavicino are portrayed . Karl Albert was the first Italian prince to revolt against the Austrians and Pallavicino was, more precisely, scolded traitors by a number of rightly angry Italian patriots. Ricarda Huch suggests to the reader in her profound character study: The betrayal could also have been the result of the prisoner's loquacity.

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Federico Confalonieri

Born in Milan in 1785 , the conservative aristocrat was not a revolutionary. He wanted a realm of Northern Italy - independent of the Austrians and French. Confalonieri possessed willpower and perseverance - qualities that Gino Capponi observed that many compatriots lacked at the time. The Confalonieri family was not ennobled until the end of the 17th century, but was already very well respected in Milan in the 18th century.

As an aristocrat with liberal ideas, Confalonieri cared little for Filippo Buonarroti's secret group . He liked Gino Capponi better. He hated the Viceroy of Italy Eugène de Beauharnais because he had approached his wife Teresa. Federico and Teresa had only one child who soon died.

Confalonieri's career as a politician was overshadowed by suspicion. It was said that he instigated the murder of Finance Minister Prina. After defending himself in writing against the accusation and thereby emphasizing his political independence, he was temporarily banished to his estates by Emperor Franz in 1815. Nevertheless, Federico Confalonieri was friends with the Commander in Chief of the Austrian troops in Lombardy, Field Marshal Bubna . The center of Italian efforts to promote cultural and technical progress in Lombardy was the house of Count Luigi Porro Lambertenghi from Milan. Confalonieri took care of the school education based on Pestalozzi's example and wrote for the magazine Il Conciliatore . The latter was banned by the Austrian censorship in 1819.

The Lombard nobility was largely fond of the Austrians. Confalonieri saw in the liberal-thinking Piedmontese Karl Albert (see below) a potential Italian opponent of the Austrians. In the autumn of the same year, the Austrians reacted to the revolutionary events in Naples in 1820 with the arrest and indictment of Piero Maroncellis and Silvio Pellico. Count Lambertenghi fled in April 1821. Giorgio Pallavicino, who was a messenger to Turin for Confalonieri , advised them to flee. Even Field Marshal Bubna wondered why the friend was not yet in Switzerland. Confalonieri stayed and was arrested on December 13, 1821 on the basis of incriminating statements by Pallavicino, who had already been arrested on December 4. Confalonieri had neither believed that the Austrian police would dare to approach him, nor that a friend could betray him. The Austrian investigative officer Salvotti sometimes interrogated up to ten hours a day in Milan. According to Austrian law, the threatened death sentence could only be imposed after the traitor had confessed. So silence was the best defense. Eventually the prisoner got weak and provided the missing evidence himself; quoted from a letter he wanted to have written to the Piedmontese San Marzano.

Teresa was not admitted to the emperor with her request to have the death sentence lifted. Nevertheless, the ruler let mercy go ahead; probably on the advice of his beloved wife, the empress . Attempts to escape from the Spielberg fortress in Brno , prepared and encouraged by friends, relatives and good-natured Austrians, were never carried out because Confalonieri absolutely refused to flee. In 1835, with the death of the emperor in Vienna, freedom came after twelve years of imprisonment. Federico Confalonieri had suffered from severe heart disease associated with epileptic seizures since 1821 . Rheumatism and dropsy were added during his imprisonment .

In America , Confalonieri was celebrated as a freedom hero. When he returned to Europe in 1837, he was not allowed to stay in France or Switzerland . In Vichy, Confalonieri and Pallavicino lived in the same hotel, but there was no reconciliation between the two. As Pius IX. In 1846 the Italian patriots finally pardoned, the seriously ill Confalonieri hurried home and died on the way at the beginning of December 1846 in Hospental am Gotthard .

Silvio Pellico

Silvio - the child of petty-bourgeois parents, who was born in Saluzzo in 1789 - had nine siblings, five of whom did not survive childhood. The one-year-old Silvio's limbs twisted. The child later had to walk on crutches. As a young man, Silvio was not a believer. He first made friends with Ugo Foscolo , adored the patriotic, writing doctor Giovanni Rasori and later met Lord Byron . Ricarda Huch portrays the penniless Pellico of the early years as an Italian Ludwig Tieck , whose "heyday" falls in his Milanese years 1815–1819 as an educator in the house of the rich Count Luigi Porro Lambertenghi.

Two works by Pellico have survived - his drama Francesca da Rimini - performed at the Teatro Re on July 18, 1815 , and the memoirs My Prisons (1832).

In 1818 Pellico wrote in Milan for Federico Confalonieri's political magazine Il Conciliatore against the Austrians and promptly had to answer to the police for his bold language. In 1819 the Carbonaro Piero Maroncelli came to Milan and promoted Pellico for the Carbonari. In 1820 both Carbonari were arrested. Maroncelli was first arrested in October and initially incriminated Pellico. In February 1821 Pellico was brought to Venice and there fell into the hands of the examining magistrate Antonio Salvotti. In 1830 Pellico was allowed to leave his prison, the Brno fortress Spielberg, after eight years in prison. Ricarda Huch describes the formerly “free-thinking, passionate young man” as a “ bigoted , old-young man who is devoted to the Jesuits ”. The younger revolutionaries honored him on the one hand in the 1848s as the "Martyr of Spielberg" and on the other hand despised him for his "dogmatic-Catholic sentiments". Declared by the Catholics as Carbonaro, Silvio Pellico died in Turin at the age of 65.

Piero Maroncelli

Ricarda Huch suggests that the mental derangement in which the "bizarre" life of the musician Piero Maroncellis, who was born in Forlì in 1795, ended in New York in 1846, was perhaps already observable in its beginnings, when Piero performed a long song in terzinen for the festival of Jacopo von Forlì - “cheeky and fearful at the same time” - and was imprisoned for a year in the summer of 1817. This work was seen as an attack on the papal government . Ricarda Huch also finds the circumstances under which Piero Maroncelli was arrested a second time in 1820 strange. During his music studies from 1810 in Naples he had become a carbonaro and was then able to advertise Silvio Pellico as a carbonaro in Milan in 1819. While Pellico had carelessly joined the Carbonari, Maroncelli knew from bitter experience that he was being watched by the police and still worked underground. After the second arrest, he was not released until July 26, 1830.

Like his friend Pellico, Maroncelli came across the examining magistrate Antonio Salvotti while he was in custody. Ricarda Huch writes: "If you read the long and numerous letters that Maroncelli wrote to Salvotti during his pre-trial detention, which are often outgrowths of exuberant love and admiration, one cannot help feeling peculiar." The latter reminds Ricarda Huch of the rascal, who hatched the song on Jacopo of Forlì. So it is not surprising that the sly Salvotti sent the prisoner unmoved to the Spielberg in Brno for years. Although - Salvotti, who survived Maroncelli, is said to have said in later years that both Pellico and Maroncelli had "stolen into his heart" at the time. Ricarda Huch can't help but get the impression that almost everyone who has had anything to do with Piero Maroncelli appears to be "funny". The story with the lost ring is alluded to. The small but precious souvenir of Maroncelli's Milanese lover Carlotta Marchionni had indeed disappeared, but the maudlin court president, Count Gardani, had given the irreplaceable item back to the prisoner. Another curiosity: Maroncelli, exiled by the Pope after his imprisonment, went to Paris and visited the sister-in-law of the Frenchman Alexandre Andryane, who was still imprisoned in Brno. Presented to the king in Paris , Maroncelli asked the ruler to put in a word with Emperor Franz for the patriots languishing on the Spielberg. That was a cardinal mistake, because Emperor Franz had strictly forbidden the slightest interference in Austrian affairs.

After Maroncelli's death in 1846, the bad gossip from the mouths of Italians did not stop. The dead should not only have betrayed Pellico, but even his own brother during his lifetime.

Antonio Salvotti

According to Alessandro Luzio, the Italians regard the Tyrolean, who was born in Mori in 1789 , as their compatriot, but accuse him of being a “dutiful Austrian civil servant”.

While studying law in Landshut in 1809, the "hardworking, clever, very educated" Salvotti was one of Savigny's favorite students . After graduating, the “pale” lawyer in Trento was helped by his “innate eloquence” in his career. Ricarda Huch writes that Salvotti “hated the revolution as the disorderly and insubordinate thing and, with full conviction, joined Austria, which at that time most powerfully represented the principles of the Holy Alliance , the restoration of the old order.” This led to his conviction that the prisoners on remand, in this case the Carbonari Pellico and Maroncelli deserved "according to the law after death". Nevertheless, the “art-loving” Salvotti brought the two books from his well-stocked private library and chatted “amicably” with the captured young readers about literary details.

Salvotti who could not prove guilty - such as Tullio Dandolo - he released from prison. However, for "contemptible characters" - such as the "wealthy, pleasure-addicted and superficial" later Spielberg prisoner Antonio Villa, betrayed by friends Marco Fortini - the "humorless" Salvotti showed no understanding.

The Spielberg prisoner Alexandre Andryane described Salvotti in his memorabilia in the trial against Federico Confalonieri as a “spiteful persecutor of the patriots and cruel devils”. The conscientious officer Salvotti wrote down the interrogation protocols mostly at night in “fine, clear handwriting”. In the case of promotions, Salvotti, the proven lawyer with Italian roots, would have been passed over by the emperor - presumably deliberately - in order not to further irritate the angry Italian subjects.

Salvotti died in Trento in 1866.

Emperor Franz

Emperor Franz, who was born in Florence in 1768, was described by his tutor, Count Colloredo , as “lazy, cowardly, stingy, gleeful, suspicious, suspicious, insincere, devious, hard-hearted and indifferent”. Ricarda Huch believes that Emperor Franz did not want to render his enemies, the Carbonari, harmless, but instead wanted to punish and reform them as godless people who they were. Imperial grace could only be expected after repentance was shown . To this end, he wanted to “physically and mentally break” the prisoners on the Spielberg. The Kaiser personally took care of the details of the execution of sentences on the Spielberg. Everything possible had to be personally approved by the emperor - for example, whether Maroncelli's ulcerated leg could be removed or whether the starving Antonio Villa could be helped with a changed diet, etc.

Emperor Franz was married four times . In any case, there was no more than nine months between the death of the current woman and the marriage of the next. With his cousin Maria Theresia - who was the second wife - the emperor had twelve children.

Charles Albert of Savoy

Karl Albert, born in Turin in 1798, lost his father early: The Italian Karl Emanuel , Prince of Carignan , died in 1800 at the age of thirty. The mother Charlotte Albertine von Sachsen-Kurland married a French prince in Paris in 1816. The couple settled on the Gallitzinberg in Vienna in 1824 . Karl Albert stayed in Italy and went to the Turin court in 1815. His childless uncle Viktor Emanuel I wanted to see the boy as heir to the throne. When the Carbonari rebelled in Piedmont , the uncle resigned on March 13, 1821 in favor of his brother Karl Felix and temporarily transferred the regency to the nephew. Karl Felix returned home with Field Marshal Bubna and the Austrian troops in the wake and put an end to the rule of the liberal Karl Albert. Those patriots who longed for a unified Italy in the form of a monarchy continued to see in Karl Albert the future - initially northern Italian - king, especially since he wanted to drive the Austrians out of Italy. In 1831, after the death of his uncle Karl Felix, who was also childless, Karl Albert became King of Sardinia again . The disappointment of young Italy , who had to watch how the new king - formerly Italy's great hope - had his revolutionary supporters persecuted and even sentenced to death, was immeasurable. However, on March 23, 1849, Karl Albert handed power to his son Viktor Emanuel . Previously, the patriotic King Karl Albert had introduced the constitutional monarchy on March 4, 1848 and declared war on the Austrians just three weeks later. On July 25th he lost the battle of Custozza . The fortunes of war remained on the opponent's side. After the lost battle at Novara , Karl Albert abdicated in favor of his son. The picture as a whole remains very ambivalent. Karl Albert, apostrophized above as patriotic, is said to have had an aversion to men like Mazzini , Garibaldi , but also to Cavour .

On July 28, 1849, Karl Albert died in a Porto monastery.

Giorgio Pallavicino

Born in Milan in 1796, Giorgio Pallavicino, the only son of the Marchese Pallavicino, lost his father at the age of seven. But the mother - Countess Anna Besozzi - and her second husband, the noble Giuseppe Vismara, made up for the adolescent's loss as best they could.

Hatred against Austria and exuberant admiration for Count Confalonieri drove the 25-year-old Giorgio to visit Karl Albert in Piedmont. A secret agreement was about a revolt against Austria. When his co-conspirator Castiglia was arrested after returning home, Giorgio went to the police and took the blame on himself. In vain - they let him go. However, he was arrested and charged a little later while visiting the theater. Count Confalonieri was arrested, probably as a result of careless statements made during Pallavicino's interrogation. Giorgio, trying to exonerate the revered Count, pretended to be insane; pretended to be a songbird; more precisely, a blackbird . That was not the case with the Austrian examining magistrate, who was washed with all hands. Pallavicino was first put in solitary confinement on the Spielberg because of his behavior. Giorgio's admiration for Confalonieri turned into hostility in Brno.

Giorgio Pallavicino asked to be transferred to another fortress. This was granted several times. The now 38-year-old Giorgio had survived his twelve years of imprisonment in surprisingly good health thanks to his iron constitution. After his imprisonment, he had to stay in Bohemia for six years before he was allowed to return to Milan with his young Prague wife Anna Koffmann in 1840.

The attempt at reconciliation with Count Confalonieri, initiated by friends, failed in the spring of 1846 due to Giorgio's rigid mind. Although Giorgio Pallavicino was more inclined to monarchy, from 1857 he became a loyal follower of the Republican Garibaldi. Ricarda Huch writes that Giorgio Pallavicino kept “Garibaldi unconditional loyalty”, “without ever becoming unfaithful to himself”. When Garibaldi wrested Sicily and Naples from the Spanish Bourbons, Pallavicino rejoiced because it was victories for Victor Emanuel II , the eldest son of the aforementioned Karl Albert. Of course, the Republican Garibaldi and his master, the monarch Victor Emmanuel II, disagreed on essentials. Also because Garibaldi knew exactly the history of Pallavicino's acquaintance with Victor Emanuel II, he used his henchman as a mediator with the king. Pallavicino failed with his difficult mission with the king. Garibaldi, not resentful, made Pallavicino the prodictator of Naples. Honors were hailed from both sides. When Victor Emanuel II moved into Naples, he decorated Pallavicino with the Order of Annunciation . However, the honoree later gave it back to the king on the occasion of one of his authoritarian decisions - the monarch had sentenced a patriotic corporal to death and did not pardon him.

Pallavicino, the freedom fighter banished abroad for years, still had a quiet triumph. When it came to dying in 1878, he spent the last few days on his estate in Casteggio - on Lombardy soil.

reception

  • In the text written between 1906 and 1908, Ricarda Huch did not distribute her sympathies equally among the Italian patriots. From the freedom fighters comes Giorgio Pallavicino, who actually made the greatest contribution to the comradely cohesion of the prisoners during the imprisonment on the Spielberg and who was the only one of the four - also because of his vitality, which was hardly damaged by the imprisonment - to unify Italy on April 17th March 1861, worst of all.
  • The vitae of some personalities from the two-volume work The Stories of Garibaldi , published a year earlier, would be “apparently dealt with objectively ” in this “portrait gallery” - a mixture of prose and history .

Book editions

  • Ricarda Huch: People and Fates from the Risorgimento. With an afterword and comments by Günter Adler. 276 pages. Insel, Leipzig 1978 (used edition)

literature

  • Marie Baum : Shining lead. The life of Ricarda Huch. 520 pages. Rainer Wunderlich Verlag Hermann Leins , Tübingen and Stuttgart 1950 (6th – 11th thousand)
  • Helene Baumgarten: Ricarda Huch. About her life and work . 236 pages. Hermann Böhlaus successor, Weimar 1964
  • Peter Sprengel : History of German-Language Literature 1900–1918. From the turn of the century to the end of the First World War. Munich 2004, ISBN 3-406-52178-9

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Baum, p. 518, 9th entry
  2. ↑ Ital. Teresa Casati
  3. ^ Italian Giuseppe Prina
  4. ^ Italian Luigi Porro Lambertenghi
  5. ↑ Ital. Il Conciliatore
  6. ↑ ital. Ermolao Asinari di San Marzano
  7. ↑ Italian Teatro Re
  8. ↑ Edition used, p. 70, 1. Zvo and 16. Zvo
  9. ↑ Ital. Jacopo da Forlì
  10. ↑ Edition used, p. 113, 6. Zvo
  11. ↑ Edition used, p. 121, 17th Zvu
  12. ↑ Edition used, p. 125, 17. Zvo
  13. ↑ Edition used, p. 124, 3rd Zvu See also: Wilhelm Graf Gardani in Österreichischer Beobachter of January 18, 1822, pp. 77-78
  14. ↑ French Alexandre Andryane
  15. ^ Italian Alessandro Luzio
  16. ↑ Edition used, p. 138, 7th Zvu
  17. ↑ Ital. Tullio Dandolo
  18. ^ Italian Antonio Villa
  19. ^ Italian Marco Fortini
  20. ↑ Alexandre Andryane (1837): The secrets of the Spielberg. Memories of an Austrian State Prisoner German edition Reclam, Leipzig 1839 (370 pages). Digitized from the BSB
  21. ↑ Edition used, p. 151, 2nd Zvu
  22. ↑ Edition used, p. 166, 12th Zvu
  23. ↑ Edition used, p. 174, 2nd Zvu
  24. ↑ Edition used, p. 177
  25. ↑ engl. Charles Emanuel of Savoy-Carignan
  26. ↑ Edition used, p. 198, 16. Zvo
  27. ↑ Ital. Gaetano De Castillia
  28. ↑ Edition used, p. 236, 10th Zvu
  29. ↑ Baumgarten, pp. 89-90 above
  30. ↑ Sprengel, p. 736, 1. Zvu
  31. ↑ Sprengel, p. 151, 24. Zvo