Giuseppe Mazzini

From Philosopedia

Mazzini, Giuseppe (22 June 1805 - 10 March 1872)

Mazzini was a revolutionary Italian patriot whose secret society Giovine Italia (Young Italy) campaigned for Italian unity under a republican government. Educated at Genoa University and a practicing lawyer, he worked in 1828 to free Italy from Austrian dominance and the temporal power of the Pope.

A supporter of Giuseppe Garibaldi’s expedition to Sicily, Mazzini like Garibaldi was a member of the Masonic Lodge, an organization disapproved of by the Vatican because of its being a secret lodge that was non-theistic and pro-deistic.

He joined the Carbonari in 1830 and was expelled from Italy under sentence of death if he returned. He was expelled from Switzerland in 1838, where he had continued his work, founding "Young Italy." When the Pope fled Rome in 1848, Mazzini returned to become one of the leaders of the brief republic. A constitution was adopted shortly before the new republic fell to occupation in 1849, led by French soldiers fighting at the behest of the Pope. Mazzini settled in England where he was welcomed and where he wrote and published his ideas of a "third Rome."

A strong deist, Mazzini rejected Christianity and believed in Thomas Paine's "religion of humanity." Carlyle called Mazzini, the deist, “a man of genius and virtue, a man of sterling veracity, humanity, and nobleness of mind.” Joseph McCabe, rather than emphasizing Mazzini’s deism, said Mazzini praised Christ, criticized Christian doctrines, and had an emphatic belief in a deistic God.

{BDF; CE;FFRF; JM; RE; Denis Mack Smith, Mazzini, 1995}