|
|
 
"Italians, your First King is Dead"
Italia: "My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar, and I must pause till it come back to me."--Shakespeare.
This Harper's Weekly
cartoon by Thomas Nast mourns the loss of King
Victor Emmanuel, the first constitutional monarch of a modern, united Italy, who
died in Rome on January 9, 1878.
In 1815, the Congress of Vienna, which settled the Napoleonic Wars, left Italy
divided into several states, a few independent and the rest under the authority of Austria, France, or the
Vatican. The revolutionary and nationalist fervor of the nineteenth
century, however, included a movement for the complete independence and unification of
Italy. In 1848, a series of revolutions throughout Western Europe intended to bring about constitutional government,
but ended largely in failure.
In the Italian kingdom of Sardinia, though, Victor Emmanuel II was elevated
to the throne in 1849, and he oversaw the development of parliamentary
government, economic reforms, military reorganization, and the sale of
properties owned by the Roman Catholic Church. He was also a committed
supporter of Italian independence and unification.
In 1859, with the assistance of France, Victor Emmanuel's troops drove back
the Austrian invasion of Piedmont, allowing him to add Lombardy to his kingdom. The next year, two-thirds of the Papal States voted to unite with
Sardinia. In 1861, after Guiseppe Garibaldi, the military hero of Italian
independence, ousted France from control of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies,
Victor Emmanuel was proclaimed king of Italy.
Following the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 (or Seven Weeks' War), during which
Italy sided with the eventually victorious Prussians, Austria ceded Venice to
Italy. In 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War, France withdrew its troops
from Rome, and the city voted for union with the rest of Italy. In 1871,
Rome became the capital of a unified Italy.
In 1860, illustrator Thomas Nast was sent
to England by Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper to cover the
championship boxing match between J. C. Heenan and Thomas Sayers. After
completing that assignment, Nast ventured to Italy, where he met Garibaldi,
traveled with his troops, and sketched the Italian War for Independence (or
Unification) for the New York Illustrated News and the London
Illustrated News. The artist returned to the United States in February
1861.
To Nast, Victor Emmanuel and
Garibaldi were great heroes of liberal, secular, constitutional
government. In this cartoon, bordered in funereal black, Italia, the
female symbol of Italy, mourns the death of King Victor Emmanuel. The
quotation from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar expresses the grief that Nast
believed most Italians felt. The quotation on the monument's
pedestal--"Those whom the state hath joined together, let no church put
asunder"--is a parody of the declaration in the marriage ceremony. It
recognizes the separation of church and state enacted when Victor Emmanuel came
to power in Italy, and it reflects Nast's intense opposition to the Roman
Catholic Church.
Robert C. Kennedy
|
|
|
