'Adelchi' and 'Attila': the barbarians and the Risorgimento

Ian Nicholas Wood

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'Adelchi' and 'Attila': the barbarians and the Risorgimento

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• Publié par: icepixyc
• Nombre de lectures: 86
• Langue: English

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‘Adelchi’ and ‘Attila’: the barbarians and the Risorgimento Ian Wood    The historiography of the barbarian invasions lies behind some of the most important intellectual and political revolutions of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries 1 Michel Foucault Marx commented to Engels in 1882: ‘YouAccording to . know very well where we found our ideas of class struggle; we found it in the work of the French historians who talked about the race struggle.’ What he had in mind, again according to Foucault, were the debates about the nature of the barbarian take-over of the West Roman Empire. In fact Foucault, rather suggestively, misremembered the date, the recipient of the letter and the quotation: what Marx actually wrote in 1852 to Weydemeyer was that ‘these gentlemen should study the historical works of Thierry, Guizot, John Wade, and others in order to enlighten themselves as to the past “history of classes”. 2 explicit as Foucault remembered in placing the origins of is not quite as ’ Marx the notion of the class struggle in an argument over the Frankish Conquest of Gaul. Nevertheless, Foucault was unquestionably correct in seeing French historians of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as having a crucial role to play in the development of the notions of both class and racial conflict. 3  For Foucault himself, it was this same discussion that lay at the heart of the new historico-political discourse which transformed the way Europeans came to think about the State, sovereignty, the Nation and race. 4

                                                  1 This paper forms part of a project on ‘The use and abuse of the Barbarian Migrations from 1750 to 2000’, for which I held a British Academy Research Readership in 2004-6: much of the work for the paper was carried out while I was Balsdon Fellow at the British School in 2006. I should very much like to thank the staff of the British School, and also Alberto Tarquini, for their support. I am also indebted to those who heard versions of the paper, which were delivered at the universities of Leeds and Edinburgh: in particular I am indebted to David Laven, and to the readers ofPSBR.   2 M. Foucault,Society must be defended, trans. D. Macey (London, 2003), 79: the correct quotation is supplied on p. 85, n. 6. The text is to be found inKarl Marx-Friedrich Engels Gesamtausgabe,Dritte Abteilung,Briefwechsel(Berlin, 1987), V, 75. 3 On race, see M. Seliger, ‘Race thinking during the Restoration’,Journal of the History of Ideas 273-82.19 (1958), 4 Foucault,Society must be defended, 49, and passim.

 

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Foucault was perhaps more aware than most of the importance of debates about the barbarian migrations. Yet he is by no means alone in noting the significance of the study of the Middle Ages to nineteenth-century discussions of nationalism. Eric Hobsbawm, Benedict Anderson, Anthony Smith, Adrian Hastings, and, most recently, Joep Leerssen have all commented in one way or another on the use of medieval past. 5    None of them, however, is or was first and foremost a medievalist, even less an early medievalist. As a result their observations did not include any discussion of the historiography of the Early Middle Ages in its own right. A few, but only a few, specialists in early medieval history have addressed the question of the use of the Migration Period (from the fourth to the eighth century) in nineteenth-century political debate. 6 used in some of the great socio-political Yet just as early medieval history was debates of the Modern Period, so too those debates themselves profoundly affected the way that the Early Middle Ages were and are understood. This is a matter that deserves a great deal more recognition than it usually gets. And it leads to some unexpected conclusions: however great Gibbon’sDecline and Fallmight be, it is nowhere near the heart of the historico-political discourse identified by Foucault. 7  Marx was, as so often, right when he identified French historians as having a central role to play in the developing notion of the class struggle – though in fact English historians had already made some comparable points, but in discussing 1066 rather than

                                                  5 J. Leerssen, cultural historyNational Thought in Europe: a(Amsterdam, 2006), 13-22 provides a useful overview of the issues, while he makes more use of discussion of the Middle Ages than have most of those who have contributed to the debate. 6 The two most significant works are P.J. Geary, the MedievalThe Myth of Nations: Origins of Europe(Princeton, 2002), and W. Goffart,Barbarian Tides: the Migration Age and the Later Roman Empire While(Philadelphia, 2006). I have learnt much from both authors, my own emphases are rather different. For France there are also major contributions from specialists in Ancient History and historiography, C. Nicolet,La fabrique d’une nation: La France entre Rome et les Germains(Paris, 2003), and F. Hartog, cas Fustel de Coulanges LeLe XIXe siècle et l’histoire.(Paris, 2001). 7 in the context of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuryFor Gibbon’s work historiography of the Fall of the Roman Empire, I.N. Wood, ‘The Fall of the Roman Empire in the Eighteenth and Nineteeth Centuries’, in S. Barton and P. Linehan (eds.), Cross, Crescent and Conversion: Studies on Medieval Spain and Christendom in Memory of Richard Fletcher(Leiden, 2008), 327-47.

 

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the coming of the Anglo-Saxons. 8  Yet it is neither France nor England that concerns me here, but rather Italy, which has its own particular historiography, although, as is well known, it drew directly on French models, and beyond them on English. 9  Scholars working on nineteenth-century Italy have, of course, noted the significance of the Middle Ages in the imagination of the Risorgimento, though they have tended to treat the medieval period as a single unit, and have concentrated on the great episodes of the High Middle Ages, not least the Battle of Legnano and the Sicilian Vespers. 10  In so doing they have doubtless reflected Risorgimento interests, but they have arguably underestimated the extent to which the barbarians of the fifth to eighth centuries presented a particularly interesting field for debate in Italy, as elsewhere in western Europe. 11  My concern is to look specifically at the use of the Early Middle Ages, and to do so largely through an examination of the sources for two theatrical works, Manzoni’sAdelchiand Verdi’s Attila, both a which are included in Alberto Banti’s list of works of literature, of art, and of opera, which he termed thecanone risorgimentale. 12  I hope to address specialists both of the nineteenth century and of the Migration Period. Because I have two audiences in mind I will, at times, have to spell out some points which will already be familiar, either to medievalists or modernists, but not to both.

                                                  8 Augustin Thierry, ‘Autobiographical Preface’,The Historical Essays(Philadelphia, 1845), vii-xix. 9 provided by A.M. Banti, ‘Le invasioni barbariche e le originiA recent discussion is delle nazioni’, in A.M. Banti and R. Bizzocchi (eds.),Immagini della nazione nell’Italia del Risorgimento(Rome, 2002), 21-44. 10 See, for example, C. Duggan, aThe Force of Destiny: history of Italy since 1796   (London, 2007), 96-8. 11 The volumes onI luoghi della memoria, edited by M. Isnenghi (Rome, 1996-7) have notably less on early-medieval figures and sites in Italy than do their French counterparts, Les lieux de mémoire, edited by P. Nora (Paris, 1984-92), although the latter collection arguably underestimates the importance of the Early Middle Ages for French identity. 12 A.M. Banti,La nazione del Risorgimento: Parentela, sanità e onore alle origini dell’Italia unita Banti’s, 2nd ed. (Turin, 2006), 45. notion of a set of texts and paintings which can be seen as central expressions of the ideology of the Risorgimento provides a fundamental point of departure for any consideration of this material: in particular, see above n. 9, but also below, n. 30, together with A.M. Banti,L’onore della nazione: Identità sessuali e violenza nel nazionalismo europeo dal XVIII alla Grande Guerra   (Turin, 2005).