Giuseppe Mazzini (22 June 1805-10 March 1872) was an Italian revolutionary, journalist, and politician during the Risorgimento period. He was a staunch supporter of anti-clerical republicanism, and his views inspired his contemporary Giuseppe Garibaldi during his quest to unify Italy under republican rule.
Biography[]
Giuseppe Mazzini was born in Genoa, French Empire in 1805, the son of a Jacobin university professor. He worked as a lawyer before joining the Carbonari in Tuscany in 1827, and he went into exile in Switzerland in 1831 due to his political activism. He founded the Young Italy society and promoted the establishment of a united, republican Italy, and it had grown to 60,000 adherents by 1833. He was forced to flee to France and then to London due to his revolutionary activities, and he was discouraged by several failed insurrections, especially that of Attilio and Emilio Bandiera in Bologna in 1844. In 1848, he travelled to Milan amid the First Italian War of Independence, and he travelled to Rome when the Roman Republic was established. After the French Army crushed the uprising in Rome, Mazzini fled to London, and he opposed the Sardinian-Austrian alliance during the Crimean War and continued his nationalist activism from London. He later spoke out against the military unification of the country under the Kingdom of Italy, and he refused a seat in the Chamber of Deputies in 1867. In 1870, he was imprisoned at Gaeta after failing in his attempt to start a rebellion in Sicily. He died in Pisa in 1872 at the age of 66.