a primato morale e civile, to guide the other nations on the road of civilisation, to initiate a new epoch for the peoples. But—apart from the fact that (at that stage in his thought) the one looked to an Italian confederation, the other to a revolutionary unification—Mazzini and Gioberti differed in the form of their vision. Mazzini saw Italy the initiator of a republican Europe, the leader and inspiration of all nationalities struggling for liberty and self-determination; Gioberti saw the future Italy as a great democratic power in our modern sense of the word, with the part pertaining to her in the counsels of Europe, with a national army, a common navy to defend her ports and guard the liberty of her seas, and the acquisition of colonies in various parts of the globe. I may add that, while Mazzini would carry the boundaries of Italy up to the Alps and eastwards as far as to include Fiume, Gioberti went farther, and declared that the whole eastern coast of the Adriatic with its islands, where not Greek, should be Italian.
Unlike Mazzini, Gioberti did not live to see the unification of Italy. But, in 1851, in the days that followed the disaster of Novara, he left to the nation with his last breath a greater book than his previous Primato: the Rinnovamento civile d'Italia. It was the completion and rectification of the Primato. Let Italians no longer look to a confederation or to revolutionary conspiracies, but to the hegemony of Piedmont, rallying round the young king, Victor Emanuel. Let conservatives and democrats, monarchists and republicans, unite in the national idea, and each party, laying aside
31
