By Manuel González Prada,

Hours of Struggle

Ladies and Gentlemen:

     It has been one year since I have made use of the word in this very institution, and to commemorate the very anniversary of that talk: I thank the Italian Masons for honoring me by soliciting my collaboration for the second time.

     Stella d’Italia builds a tribune here that calls us together, the seculars, without drawing a boundary on the emission of ideas. There is nothing more laudable or more opportune today when fanaticism in Lima worsens, today when the clerical inundation grows unceasingly.

     There is no denying that there is a reactionary religious force that fights to make us regress. And, who puts up resistance? The occasional solitary fighter, but no organization since the conferences organized in the League of Freethinkers were violently abolished by the snazzy ally of the Liberal Party. Those called to raise their voices are silent out of convenience or out of fear. Newspapers are clericalist, or they pretend to be in order to mold themselves to the mentality of their two audiences —women and neutrals.¹ Parliament continues to debate the Church’s interests with factional passion. They conserve tradition since national congresses never represented the winds of regenerative ideas. Government, if it does not openly lead the retrograde movement, secretly favors it, or looks kindly upon it. Using every power at its disposal it conveniently foments Catholicism, that doctrine of resignation and degradation.

     The times of inquisitorial immolations may have ended; the cycle of religious struggles has not. The fighting is everywhere, and with more fierceness in Catholic nations, as in France, where verbal controversies turn into violent acts. And not only the mediocre and vulgar fight; people of the caliber of Berthelot, Haeckle, Sergi, and Salmerón brandish weapons… Who are those who claim that religious matters have become unfashionable, belonging to the relics of the eighteenth century? Almost always those melded into a single block would not feel the weight that a Haeckle or a Berthelot does.

     A religion we supposed buried under Voltaire’s sarcasm and Renan’s ironies has not descended into the tomb. We see it palpitate in our surroundings, hanging on to dominate consciences. Some, although freethinkers, breathe it in the atmosphere of their houses, sniff it in the plates at their table, feel it in their bed pillows. Science and Religion perform the perpetual swing of a scale; if one goes up, the other goes down.

     No one can deny that Science continues to ascend. Catholicism descends and in civilized nations it does not live a glorious life. However, we must hit it with continuous blows to accelerate its death. Even if we see it reduced to a cadaver, let us continue hitting it; there are dead people that we must kill one and one hundred times.

     Stubbornly clinging to life, the Church boss continually offers testimony face to face with the government of Italy. Given the date that we celebrate, it is advisable to offer some words about the current relations between both powers.²

I

     The literary triumvirate of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, the men who determined the national language during the Renaissance, must be contrasted with the political triumvirate of Garibaldi, Cavour, and Mazzini, the men who in the nineteenth century contributed the most to the realization of Italian unity.

     Shaking the yoke of Austria, forming a great and homogenous state from fractious and antagonistic reigns, erasing the petty hate between towns and even between families, to substitute it with the siamo fratelli of Manzoni; these are the ideas that germinated in the brains of the Italian thinkers for centuries, these are the ends that Garibaldi pursued with the sword, Cavour with diplomacy, Mazzini with the pen.

     The petty monarchs and the grand dukes overthrown, the legendary feats of the Thousand achieved, much remained before achieving independence and unity: Austria blocked the path. Defeating it and disarming its national energies were not enough: sacrifices, revolutions, heroisms, all had been useless. Traditional cohesion had become so lax in Italy that the henchmen and executioners of the people did not always come from foreign legions. Since foreign cooperation was necessary, many emissaries or apostles went from nation to nation and court to court looking for friends and allies of the Italian emancipation. Politicians achieved a feat of skill and cunning —the alliance of Victor Emmanuel and Napoleon III.³ When the work of Cavour is considered, the figures of Talleyrand and Metternich seem small.

     Having defeated Austria in Magenta and Solferino, having reclaimed possession of Venice, the Italian people ask for more: their yearning crystalizes into the following formula: Italy is one with its capital Rome. Remembering the foreign invasions provoked by Papal ambition and criminality, recognizing with Machiavelli that the papacy in Italy is like iron in the wound, the revolutionaries ask for the abolition of “Temporal Power”; they clamor for the consolidation of their nationality with the reintegration of the Papal States.

     But the Emperor of France, stopping in the middle of the road, proclaims Rome “intransgressible” and aims that the Mazzinis, the Cavours, and the Garibaldis accept the inviolability of the territory under the Church’s control. Why? A libertine old man lies close to a sanctimonious old woman, and many great imperial catastrophes originate from ridiculous influences in the bedroom. Napoleon III was married to a young countess, who, shy of having the virtues of a saint, possessed the fanaticism of a Spanish woman. We should not find it odd, then, that a garrison of French soldiers who represented the double role of Praetorian guards and altar boys subsisted until 1870 in Rome. The volunteers who discharged their rifles at the monarchic armies at the end of the eighteenth century pointed their barrels at the followers of Garibaldi and Mazzini in the nineteenth century. Mentana succeeds Valmy.

     Inexorable fury thus boils in Italian bosoms against the man who today serves as their ally in the war with Austria, and tomorrow obliges them to remain immobile under the sandal of Pius IX. In France itself the Emperor’s illogical and ambiguous behavior incites recriminations and protests. As happens to the obliging and friends of the middle ground, Napoleon earns general recrimination and hate: Catholics treat him like a supporter of Garibaldi, the supporters of Garibaldi accuse him of being a papist. If some attack him in the press for sustaining a garrison in service to an inquisitor and rifle-ridden pope, others accuse him in the Legislative Body, not only of “letting himself be ensnared by the Italian guile,” but also of “favoring a revolution assisted by England.”

     The Franco-Prussian war erupts, and the tremendous catastrophe of the French people ends up benefitting the Italian people. When Napoleon III’s throne collapsed, it dragged with it the temporal seat of Pius IX. Almost at the same time the man of Sedan leaves France never to return, Víctor Emmanuel enters Rome to shout out the phrase of MacMahon in Sebastopol to the Catholic world: “Here I am and here I stay.”

II

     But, upon possessing Rome, have the desires and ambitions of Italy been fulfilled? The voice of irredentism never ceases to reverberate. If before Italians clamored for Venice and the Papal States, today they clamor for Trentino and Trieste, confessing that national unity cannot be considered fact until the day natural borders are acquired or repossessed. Today Istria and Dalmatia are thought of, perhaps, as future provinces of a more extended and powerful Italy; today, the annexation of Albania is perchance fancied to achieve control of the Otranto Canal and convert the Adriatic into a Latin sea. At the same time the Francophobia ignited by Crispi and Bismarck subsides, the hate of the German, the traditional enemy, is reborn. The Triple Alliance does not prevent the Italian people from condemning Francisco José and abhorring Austria.⁴ In Innsbrück, the very capital of the Austrian Tyrol, a resounding “death to the Germans” is heard.

     Lombroso claims that “Italy is one, but it is not unified, (that) while some sections of the peninsula advanced towards political unity, many have remained stationary or have regressed.” The monarchy of 1870 was accompanied by excessive centralization, the development of a member at the expense of the rest: on the one hand, congestion, on the other, bleeding. The multitudes gained little because political transformations are not worth much when not accompanied by social improvement. The people’s sovereignty is a bloody derision when it suffers from the tyranny of the belly. Upon taking the vote in one hand, one should have bread in the other. Those who benefitted from Italy’s political unity were the regents of Sardinia, the courtiers, the public men, and the financiers. The humble and the small received the usual: like bees that build honeycombs so that others enjoy the honey, the humble sow so that the arrogant reap, the little ones fight and die so that the big ones obtain power and glorification.

     Italy boils and agitates: some, following Crispi’s footsteps, tend to form an aggressive, conquering power, with overtones of Germanic imperialism; others, remembering Mazzini’s humanitarian preaching, are inclined to found a peaceful republic without permanent armies, ruled by institutions of the purest democracy. Political boiling is countered by social fermentation: as in all civilized nations, strikes break out like preludes to a great future revolution. The tariff war with France, the disastrous colonial adventures, and excessive taxes derived from grand armaments caused many miseries, many sacrifices, and many tears. From time to time the popular waves, those tremendous waves rising from hunger, surge from the nation to crash against the walls of the Quirinal.⁵ More than once, the bullet and the saber responded to the cries for work and bread; more than once, the blood of workers and even women and children, reddened the land in Naples, Milan, and Sicily.

     No one could see in the Italy of the twentieth century a field in ruins, “a land of the dead” as Lamartine said. The abundance of blood, the profusion of national life is revealed by the immigrant capacity or the impulse to leave and create nations or found colonies. Consider England. Decadent and exhausted peoples confine themselves within their borders; they tenaciously enroot themselves to the land of their grandparents and, as they lull themselves with the legends of a glorious past, they extinguish themselves darkly and miserably. He who lives spreads life, moves, and transforms. For this reason, the Italian realizes an evolution: he stops being the brutal soldier of old Rome to become the fecund and laborious immigrant of the towns of the Americas. He expands and populates the eastern nations of Spanish America. For his adaptation to the environment, for his ability to assimilate, at any rate, for his colonizing and prolific virtue, the Italian deserves to be called a creator of nationalities, a realizer of races.

     However, his historical mission is not reduced to making distant lands greater, forgetting his country and his siblings. That virile and generous spirit that, in Antiquity and the Renaissance, made a great people out of Italy, has not degenerated in the modern age: where the Gracchi were born, great avengers, fearsome enforcers of justice, now arise. Sages and artists, civilizers by way of truth and beauty, also appear. Greece having disappeared, Italy became the intellectual granary of the world. What can it not achieve tomorrow with the privileged talent of its children? Men who were capable of discovering the battery like Volta, probing the firmament like Secchi, chiseling marble like Cánova, harmonizing notes like Rossini, polishing stanzas like Leopardi, thinking like Gioberti, and writing prose like Giordani, will be capable of converting into a new market of riches the beautiful land where the vineyards of Horace bloom and the bees of Virgil murmur.

III

     We all turn our eyes to Italy today as we turned them to France yesterday because Humanity has a right to appropriate great dates. The 14th of July and the 20th of September belong to the entire civilized world: they signify the disappearance of the old regime and the sinking of theocratic power. The French, who in 1789 demolished the Bastille, the Italians, who in 1870 opened the breach at Porta Pía, may have believed that they were serving only the good of their respective nations when, in reality, they fought for the interests of Humanity. The 20th of September commemorates more than the political unity of Italy: the Quirinal opposite the Vatican symbolizes Reason’s constant defiance to Faith.

     In one of Heine’s ballads, Emperor Henry IV of Germany, vanquished and humiliated by Pope Gregory VII, dresses in the sackcloth of a penitent, walks barefoot and recites the Lord’s Prayer, signaling submission and repentance; but he suppresses his anger, secretly swears vengeance, and deep in his interior, prophesizes that in his faithful and loved Germanic land, a man would be born destined to wield the axe and overthrow the implacable hydra of Rome. ⁶

     And the prophecy becomes reality. If Austria’s defeat caused Italy’s unification, Prussia’s triumph took temporal power from the Popes, turning them into mere neighbors of the Eternal City. But, no, we exaggerate by expressing ourselves in this way: the Pope is not humbled, nor does he evaporate into a simple unit in the census of Rome; he stands out as an adversary that blazons elevated moral interests, while the King personifies base material interests.

     In the dissensions between governments and the Church, only two attitudes are suitable: submit unconditionally or rebel without inhibitions. When, instead of cutting the cord and establishing an essentially secular government, one venerates tradition and drifts toward the middle ground, an interminable series of infuriating, puerile, and ridiculous matters remain. The founders of Italian unification committed a grave error or, to be more precise, they hypocritically abolished temporal power and replaced it with a Statute that recognizes Catholicism as the religion of the State.

     He who declares himself a son of the Church has to recognize the Supreme Pontiff as father. Victor Emmanuel designs himself as a sui generis son and revolutionary. He humiliates his father and immediately demands his blessing; he incarnates an impious movement and dies clamoring for the assistance of Religion. Umberto follows, more or less, his father’s footsteps, although a violent death keeps him from having an end like Victor Emmanuel’s. The current monarch, son of a very pious mother, appears to be so faithful to his mother’s teachings, that he does not marry without demanding his bride enter the Catholic communion.⁷ We lament, then, that Italians did not have someone like Henry VIII without vices. We lament, even more, that the assault of Rome in 1870 was not the result of a purely republican and popular revolution like the one in 1848. Garibaldi would have given the problem a radical and definite solution.

     Of the situation created by doubtful politics, a sad and comical circumstance is born: the Pope, unarmed and defeated, continues to be not only an accusation but an obstacle and a threat; while the Government of Italy, obligated to concede or compromise, plays the role of a light boat, forced to navigate with sails of lead and having to tow a heavy old ship.

     Ever since emperors and kings gave away territories as if giving away furniture and arranged men as if arranging cattle, Popes regarded the Papal States as a family inheritance, legally passed from predecessor to successor. There they exercised the most absolute of powers, so much so that the Papal government was to the political order as the Pontine Marshes are to the physical order. They dream of reclaiming this power to keep it until the end of time. Neither do they admit the expiration of their rights nor a limit to the means of reclaiming what has been lost.

     Regarding themselves emissaries of heaven and responsible only before God, the Pontiffs do not acknowledge a homeland and do not accept civic duties; when besieged by their neighbors and subjects, they do not hesitate a single instant to appeal to foreign powers. Who did Pius IX call the day that Romans forced him to escape to Gaeta? The Spaniards, the Austrians, and the French. Even today, if the restoration of the temporal Holy See were to depend on a “foreign crusade,” Pius X would turn to the king of England, who is Protestant, the Czar, who is Orthodox, and Loubet, who is a freethinker. Nor would he reject even the Sultan, a Muslim, red from head to toe with Armenian and Macedonian blood. Hands soaked in Christian blood do not frighten a Pope when they add a silver coin to the treasury of Saint Peter, or when they bear a gun to shoot the enemies of the Church in the heart.

     In the minds of the infallible, any error is eternally ossified. “Non possumus!” cried Pius IX. “Non possumus!” babbled Leon XIII, and “Non possumus!” their irreducible successors will repeat as Pius X already repeats it. And they will not use evangelical meekness, believing themselves to possess the power to throw lightning. It would deserve ridicule, if it did not inspire pity, that morbid irritation of the Supreme Pontiffs when they see themselves deprived of their soi-disant divine right. But one understands them and even forgives them when pondering the traditional atmosphere of the Vatican and the mental process of its residents. Not only Rome; Italy, Europe, and the whole world belong morally and politically to the legitimate heir of Saint Peter. The Popes always considered the Earth the feudal legacy of God; they did not see in people more than a crowd of mindless beings or children, obligated, by reason or force, to live or die under the tutelage of the Roman Curia. The Catholic ideal is summarized in this way: the throne in Rome, the Supreme Pontiff on the throne, the Universe at the feet of the Supreme Pontiff.

1905