BRIGANDS IN ITALY, PAST AND PRESENT.
To confound the efforts of the Bourbonists in Southern Italy with the achievements of the brigands is about the same sort of mistake as to identify the followers of—say—Smith O’Brien with the members of Rockite or Whiteboy associations. And yet this is an error which the Italian government and the Italian press have often propagated—certainly not refuted.
Now, Bourbonism has not got a good name in Italy, whether deservingly or not, this is not the place to discuss; but, assuredly, there was no necessity to lay to its charge the frightful excesses and shocking cruelties of assassins by profession.
In the first place, brigandage is not a recent crime in Italy. It has existed for centuries. The journey from Rome to Naples, one of the most frequently made in the Peninsula, has never ceased to be perilous; just as the road from Bologna to Ancona, and from Bologna to Florence. Robbery has had its localities from which it has never been rooted out, and the spot whereon the diligence was rifled last week was not five hundred yards from where it was stopped last year, the year before that, and half a century ago. One of the reasons for this is, there never has yet been an efficient police force in Italy. Another is, the sympathies of the peasantry have been always with the brigand.
It is very difficult for an Englishman to “realise” to himself the indifference with which one of these events is treated by an Italian public. A very meagre paragraph in a newspaper will perhaps announce that the “malle post” was stopped last week on the Apennines, and all the passengers robbed—that the gendarmes are in pursuit of the “malandrini,”—“the knaves;” and, it is hoped, will come up with them.
No one inquires if violence were used, if resistance were attempted, if considerable property was stolen, or, in fact, asks any details of the incident, which would seem only to interest the actors or their immediate friends. Go where you will, none discuss, none allude to it. You will hear about the Pope, the French in Mexico, the Ballerina’s legs, or the war in America; but not one syllable on a topic which touches the very civilisation of the land, and threatens at this moment to endanger its actual existence as a nation. If brigandage was treated with silence so long as its evils were purely social, none can say that it has not avenged itself by publicity, now that a political character can be ascribed to it. From the day that Bourbon and brigand became convertible terms the press has occupied itself largely with the theme, and from one end of Europe to the other has it been proclaimed, that the only obstacle to a united Italy is an organised system of murder issuing from the Roman States, paid by the ex-King, and certainly not discredited by the French.
The attempts of the Royalists—for so the partisans of the ex-King continue to be called—in the south of Italy were necessarily such as a guerilla warfare only could compass. Limited to a mountain region, and acting with ill-armed and undisciplined forces, they could only look for success by surprises, by bold and sudden attacks, by daring and unexpected advances, far more calculated to harass and weary their opponents than to vanquish or overcome them. They looked, in fact, by perpetuating a system of disturbance and disorder, not alone to require a larger force to meet them, but to exhibit to the world of Europe the picture of a so-called chosen government exercising the most cruel sway and imposing severities greater than had ever been heard of in the land!
That France had no especial objection to this “politique” is not unfair to surmise. The French authorities in Rome were doubtless cognisant of many of the arrangements by which these forces were recruited, armed, and paid, and could, had they been so minded, have offered much opposition to their projects; but we have not yet seen any signs of such disfavour, and the Italian press has not been measured in their complaints and demands on this head. It is intelligible enough, that France should like to place the Italian question “in Chancery”—to prolong a litigation as to whose issue she has not yet fully made up her mind, and the solution of which either way cannot be wholly to her satisfaction.
If France did not desire to suppress brigandage, she had no wish to dignify or defend it. Secretly, indeed, the present Emperor might not be sorry to see the discredit thrown upon the cause of legitimacy by the invectives which coupled together the name of De Trassegnies with such fellows as Crocco, or Stoppa, just as he derived a compensation for his displeasure at the invasion of the Æmilia by witnessing the defeat and downfall of Lamoricière.
That the partisans of the Bourbon cause were driven, as all men in a guerilla war must be driven, to exactions and excesses which a regular soldiery need not practise, is not hard to understand. That they had to get what they could how they could, to associate with such as were willing to join them, and make companionship with many whose characters and acts they could not approve, are only the ordinary conditions of all such enterprises. Borjes has told us, in that curious journal he kept, that he had to witness acts of cruelty against which his nature revolted, but against whose perpetration he was totally powerless. It is far easier to blame men for engaging in such enterprises at all, than to point out how they should guide themselves when once in them. The more rigidly honourable and high-minded a man was in such a position, the more certain he would be to draw on him distrust and suspicion. Borjes himself was first regarded as a spy, and never to the very last did he possess the full confidence of the Italians. To attempt to dissuade men from cruelty, who knew that they would themselves be shot the moment they fell into the hands of the enemy; to argue against pillage with those whose whole aim and object were what they could rob; to enforce lessons of obedience and discipline amongst men who had, many of them, deserted just because of that very discipline and obedience, were amongst the tasks of