DINO COFRANCESCO 

Tra Salvemini e l'«Idea Nazionale». 

La vicenda del «Risorgimento»

N.4/1986

Summary — During the first months of 1912 some dissident members of the editorial staff of Gaetano Salvemini’s "Unitą" found a new review " Il Risorgimento " which, although going to have a short life (only eight issues were published, two of which double) remains emblematic as an attempt to aggregate spiritual and political forces whose irreducible diversities would emerge only years after around the Fascism/anti-Fascism ridge. In the new periodical three cultural components cohabit — the catholic, nationalist and laical (this last one meant as loyalty to the values of 1789) — which seem to find a secure ground for convergence: a) in a political strategy with the purpose of mediating between nationalism and Salvemini’s democracy, in the name of a firm anti-transformistic (namely anti-Giolittian) commitment; in a political philosophy, even in nuce, determined to take away illuminism from freedom, materialism from democracy, chauvinism from nationalism, clericalism from religiousness, empiricism from realism. And yet no one of the privileged interlocutors of "Il Risorgimento ", neither the nationalists, nor Salvemini’s followers, nor the labour movement... showed any interest in its difficult task of " sewing again ". Times were pressing and within the new political — internal and international —climate foreboding war storms and profound social rendings, the recall to a humane nationalism, stemming from the Italian Risorgimento, could not satisfy either the "strong spirits" of the nationalist (and imperialist) Right, or the champions of a re-foundation of the Italian political system, even in an authentically democratic and liberal sense. Incapable of working out its antinomies (between the liberal and the catholic soul, between the deep feeling for the democratic institutions and the great attraction exercised by the nationalist vanguards, between realism and idealism), " Il Risorgimento " exhausts its short season within a year, witness to the insuperable difficulties facing in the age of imperialism those who wanted to elaborate a " philosophy of civil nationalism ".