Nationalists who Feared the Nation

The Venetian Revolution of 1848 began when popular protest forced the Austrian authorities to release two distinguished political prisoners: Daniele Manin and Niccoló Tommaseo. Manin needs no introduction, but not so Tommaseo. At the time he was much the better known of the two, but, after Unification, Tommaseo’s brand of multi-national nationalism did not sit comfortably with prevailing nationalist beliefs and he was simply written out of the heroic scripts of the Risorgimento. In this splendid book, Dominique Reill not only rescues this strange and often quirky protagonist from the relative neglect of posterity, but also brilliantly sets his ideas and their evolution in context. Born in the Dalmatian town of Ŝibenik in 1802 to an illiterate Slavic-speaking mother and an Italian-speaking shopkeeper father, Tommaseo’s biography is the microcosm of early nineteenth-century nationalism. Trapped in a despairing search for personal salvation and tortured by the mental and physical consequences of the sins of the flesh that he was incapable of resisting, as for so many others of his generation it was Romanticism that led him first to the prospect of collective redemption and then to nationalism. But, although a democrat, Tommaseo quickly rejected Mazzini’s brand of ‘one-nation’ nationalism and found inspiration instead in the openness and diversity of southern Slav cultural nationalism

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