THE YOUNG PANIZZI

M. R. D. FOOT

A N T O N I O P A N I Z Z I was born on i6 September 1797 in Brescello, a small town at thejunction of the Po and the Enza, a town so insignificant that it does not appear at all inthe current Michelin guide to Italy. It lies in the fertile, but flat, Lombard plain. Theplace must have had some influence on his character: a townsman, yet in a predominantlyrural area; and, at that, a townsman in an enclave, because Brescello was part of one thenindependent duchy - Modena - but surrounded by the territory of another, Parma; andwas constantly quarrelling over details with its still smaller immediate neighbourBoretto. Movement and controversy were all round him from the start.

The date matters as much as the place: it was still a time when few things moved fasterthan a galloping horse. Not only was there neither telegraph nor television, there wereno trains; not only were there no submarines, there were no steamships; and in Italy,until the year before he was born, not only was there no freedom of discussion but therewas no kind of parliament.

Italy had moved from the excitements ofthe Renaissance into a rut of conformity fromwhich it had just been shaken loose. The pohtical kaleidoscope was constantly shifting;and shifting, unlike the waters of the Po and the Enza, in various directions. Italy, inMetternich's cruel but memorable phrase (of as late as 1849), was simply 'a geographicalexpression', and within it everything seemed to be in flux. Panizzi was brought up amongscenes of frequent, inconstant change.

His parents when they married were the subjects of Hercules III, the last male heirofthe great house of Este, dukes of Modena, whose ancestors included Lucrezia Borgia.Modena, to which Brescello was then subject, was an entirely independent dukedom -in international law; but had in fact become a client state, subordinate to the greatHabsburg empire ruled from Vienna. Though Hercules had but one child, his daughterMaria Beatrice, he married her well: her husband was Archduke Ferdinand vonHabsburg, third son of the Empress Maria Theresa, younger brother of the EmperorsJoseph II and Leopold 11.^ This brought Modena fully into the Habsburg orbit, muchas Czechoslovakia or Hungary revolved in the Soviet orbit during the Cold War.

Yet in 1797 the French Revolution was still a recent, vivid memory: 'Bliss was it inthat dawn to be alive', as Wordsworth put it later, in 1809. Moreover the Frenchexample might be followed elsewhere; as Aldous Huxley once wrote, 'from being almost

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or completely unthinkable, revolution suddenly became not only thinkable but actable'.^in a campaign on the other side ofthe Po in 1796-1 quote the Annuai Register for thatyear:

The French were commanded by General Buonaparte... a native of Corsica born, as it were, acommander, and uniting the intrepidity of an ancient Roman, with the subtlety and contrivanceof a modern Italian; and both these fortified and improved by a liberal, as well as militaryeducation.

When Buonaparte had shattered the armies of Habsburg Austria and reached Milan, hehad proclaimed the end of Austrian dominance and of feudal regimes; and in October1796 revolutionaries in Modena too expelled its duke and declared the duchy part of anew Cispadane Republic, along with Reggio nelFEmilia, Bologna, and even Mantuawhich lay beyond the Po. Next year, under the treaty of Campo Formio, signed whenthe mfant Panizzi was a month old, the Cispadane Repubhc was subsumed into a muchlarger Cisalpine Repubhc, which ran from the Simplon pass on the Swiss border to theAdriatic near San Marino (which remained, as it remains, independent).

The Cisalpine Republic in turn was not set in stone. It was suppressed by Austria in1799, though Buonaparte reimposed it next year, after his victory at the Battle ofMarengo. When he became the Emperor Napoleon in 1804, he looked after his family.His brother Joseph became King of Naples, and was then promoted to be King of Spain;his brother-in-law Murat took over Naples instead. The Cisalpine Republic became theKingdom of Italy, with the French emperor himself as its king; his stepson Eugene deBeauharnais was his viceroy. His sister Elisa became Princess of nearby Lucca in 1805,and ruled it with force and success. Eugene's subjects too had many benefits from hismodernizing and resolute regime; but that also did not last. When Napoleon fell in 1814,the kingdom of Italy fell with him; and was not revived during the hundred days of 1815.

Hercules had been fobbed off with the duchy of Breisgau, in compensation for the lossof Modena; Breisgau passed to his son-in-law Ferdinand when he died in 1803;Ferdinand in turn died in 1806, leaving a son, Francis IV. Francis was ambitious, notonly to regain Modena - as he did, under the terms ofthe Treaty of Vienna (signed, soconfident were its makers, a few days before the Battle of Waterloo confirmed Napoleon^sdownfall) - but to outdo one of his numerous first cousins, Ferdinand III, Grand Dukeof Tuscany. Francis meant to be, like his uncle Joseph II, a benevolent despot; as sooften happens, he turned out more despotic than benevolent. Richard Garnett indeedwent so far as to call his 'the worst of all the petty Italian tyrannies ofthe epoch'.^ Hewas at least energetic, so that he busied himself with no end of details in his duchy; andheard of a promising student from Brescello, the young Antonio Panizzi.

Panizzi had gone on from primary school at Brescello to secondary school at ReggioneirEmilia, not far away. As a schoolboy, brought up from ancient family habit in theRoman Catholic Church, he served at the altar. What is it about being an altar boy thatseems to initiate the young into the clandestine life.̂ There have been enough examplesto make it noteworthy: for instance, the once celebrated Californians codenamed the

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Fig. I. The young Antonio Panizzi; engraved from the sketch by Ambrogio Berchet. 'ACollection... relating to Sir A. Panizzi', assembled by E. E. Stride, 1859-84; BL, C.i33.e.i

Falcon and the Snowman, who spied for the Soviet Union ;̂ the more recent and yetmore scandalous case of Aldrich Ames, for nine years a Russian agent close to the heartofthe CIA; those still unforgotten monsters Heydrich and Himmler; had all been altarboys in their early teens.

Panizzi too turned clandestine, but in a different way. Like several of my owncontemporaries, crazed by the spell of far Muscovia, who thought that by serving Stalin- of whose tyranny little was known abroad - they were serving humanity, Panizzibelieved that by joining a secret society he could serve humanity, and serve Italy. He didso after he had graduated at Parma - in a different duchy from Modena, but the bestuniversity to be found at all close to home - where he qualified as a doctor of law in 1818.

Exactly which secret society he joined is still not perfectly clear. The largest, locally,

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at the time was that ofthe Carbonari, to which he often and emphatically denied havingbelonged; as perhaps he should have done, according to the oaths he swore on joining,had he really been a Carbonaro, but in this case I am happy to follow his best biographer,Edward Miller, and assume he was admitted to the Sublimi Maestri Perfetti in March1820. Six months later. Duke Francis decreed that membership of any such body wasa capital offence; though he himself is strongly suspected of having belonged to another,the Concistoriali, founded by the cardinal-secretary to Pope Pius VII to drive theAustrians out of northern Italy.^

The Sublimi Maestri formed a small but senior society, who saw it as their task tosupervise the rest, the Carbonari especially, in the general interests of human and ofItalian freedom. As late as the eighteen-seventies, the exceptionally well-informedDisraeli wrote in his novels of the immense influence of the secret societies in earlynineteenth-century Europe, and John Roberts wrote one of his best books to explain howmuch real influence they exercised, and what vast extra weight was given to them by theharassed security authorities of Vienna, Paris and the lesser courts of Germany andItaly."

The Concistoriali provide an example of how senior some of their members were; justas the Freemasons, from whom many of their rituals derived, had (as they still have)many senior members in the British royal family. Then as now, political society swungfrom time to time and place to place between enthusiasm for such bodies, and more orless irrational hatred of them.

Hatred seems to have been Duke Francis's line, as he turned despot. No doubt he setaside, in private, his own connexion with the Concistoriali as something quite separate.He had a vigorous secret police to enforce his wishes, and on the whole a compliantpopulation: one of the awful features of tyrannies is the tendency they encourage inordinary people to spy on their neighbours. In the short run, repression put the societiesdown in Modena, and drove Panizzi into exile; in the longer run, the Risorgimento droveFrancis IV's son and successor into exile and created the united Italy of which thesocieties had dreamed. Panizzi meanwhile had had to bolt.

Till old age, he was a workaholic; his talents for organization were deployed early atBrescello, where he was a sort of town clerk and inspector of schools, while he establisheda practice as an attorney and looked after his aged father, who was the town pharmacist(his mother died late in 1820). He had only one sibling, a sister five years younger thanhimself. He belonged - this was normal - to a dense network of cousins and in-laws,most of whom were happy to adhere to the ducal regime. His closest friends were not,and three of his closest friends he admitted, in a ceremony in his family home, as SublimiMaestri Perfetti.

Benjamin Franklin was quite right: 'Three may keep a secret, if two of them aredead.'^ Word got out. It would be impertinent to try to improve on Edward Miller'saccount of how word seeped back to Panizzi that the ducal authorities had become awareof what must have appeared as his duplicity. He had taken a precaution or two: he hada little cash laid by, and he had a boat hidden on the bank of the Po.

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DEI PROCESSI

DELLE SENTENZECONTRA

GU imputatidi Lesa-Maesta e di aderen%a alleSetle proscritle negUStatidi Modena

NOTIZIEScritte da Antonio PANIZZI

K pubblicate da

Exsequi sentenlias Imnd instiiui, nisiiasignes, pev honestum, aut noLa-hlli dedecore : quod prs&cipuummunus annaliura reor, ne virlutessileanlur, utque pravis dictis faclls-que es posleritaie el infamia moetussit.

TACIT. Annal. \\i. ^S.

MADRIDPer ROBERTO 7\

Reggenle !a SlamperU deU' Unwersal$

E 6i U'ovu iii luUi L Paesi Ilberi.

1823.

Fig. 2. The title-page of Panizzi's first book, with the false Madrid imprint. BL, C.44.d.i

I I I

On 22 October 1822 he rowed across the river; into Austrian territory, not into safety.He was wary enough to evade the Austrian pohce, and had money enough to travel tothe Swiss border, where he found safety for the moment at Lugano.

Going mto exile is always a shock; for Panizzi it was also a relief. In Switzerland hewas in a free country, he could speak and write as he chose; and he at once wrote a book.Only two copies of it are known to survive; one is in the British Library, given by Panizzito his friend and first biographer Fagan (fig. 2).' He gave it a false imprint, at Madrid;in fact a few copies were run off by a printer in Lugano. He put his name to it; he wasthen proud of it - most people in the literary world are proud of their first books -though later he did his best to secure copies of it and suppress them.

For It did him immediate harm: it was at once noticed by an Austrian police spy. InIt he roundly denounced Modena, Austria's satellite, as a duchy in which there was noreal justice to be had; describing in revolting detail the barbarous practices to whichprisoners were subjected, before as well as after trial, the degree of corruption thatprevailed in the judiciary, and abuses practised by the Roman Catholic Church. Austrianpressure on the canton made it too hot to hold him, and he went to Geneva. Geneva toosuccumbed to pressure from the Austrian and the French governments; he took asteamer down the Rhine, and reached London. A permanent black mark was put againsthis name by the Austrian security authorities; as late as the middle 1850s he still couldnot venture onto Italian soil.

By the time he reached London he was all but penniless, and the city was crowdedalready with Italian refugees. He got introduced to Ugo Foscolo, whom the Italians allrevered, but whose life was too irregular for Panizzi's taste; chance or advice led him onto Liverpool, where his luck changed.

He came under the wing of William Roscoe, and started to teach Itahan for a living;a task he heartily detested, but - like every task he undertook - one he did thoroughly.In Roscoe's drawing-room he met Liverpool society. There was plenty of vivacity, andnot much provincialism, about it; and he met there too a more influential patron thanRoscoe, Henry Brougham the radical lawyer who at that moment was the most famouscommoner in the country (fig. 3).

Ot Brougham, that master of sarcasm, later Lord Chancellor, it has been saidsarcastically that 'if he had known a little law he would have known a little ofeverything.'^"^ He was a Scot, nephew of William Robertson the historian, and apolymath, if a superficial one; an originator of the Edinburgh Review^ famous for hisenergetic and successful defence of Queen Caroline on her trial for adultery before theHouse of Lords.

Whether an extra link of friendship was forged between Brougham and Panizzithrough Brougham's freemasonry it would be interesting to know; but the present writerhas not been able to establish one. In any case, a close link was formed between themin the spring of 1827. Brougham, who then went the northern circuit, prosecuted atLancaster Edward Gibbon Wakefield - who later helped to found New Zealand - on thecharge of abducting a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, who had been a pupil of Panizzi's.

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Fig. J. Henry Brougham; after the portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence

Panizzi's advice on continental marriage law helped Brougham to win this case, and hefelt grateful. When he set about founding the University of London, afterwardsUniversity College, as a non-sectarian rival to the Anglican Oxford and Cambridge, heremembered the anti-clerical Panizzi, and had him made Professor of Italian.

It turned out that the salary was low, and the professor's duties still included thatteaching of Italian from the start that Panizzi had so much disliked in Liverpool; butBrougham rescued him again. For in 1830, at the formation ofthe first Whig governmentfor two decades, the only way of keeping Brougham quiet was to make him LordChancellor; in which post he was a Principal Trustee ofthe British Museum. He thussecured Panizzi a post as assistant librarian, and set him on course for the rest of hiscareer.

This paper was delivered at the Commemoration of Friends ofthe British Library at the British Museumthe bicentenary of Panizzi's birth held by the and British Library, 16 Sept. 1997.

1 See the useful family tree in EncyclopaediaBritannica, n t h edn (London, 1910), vol. xii, p.790.

2 Beyond the Mexique Bay (1934; repr. Harmonds-worth, 1963), p. 68.

3 In Dictionary of National Biography, vol. xliii(1895), p. 179, s.v. Panizzi.

4 They were United States navy cipher clerks,who sold secrets to the U.S.S.R. in the middle ofthe Cold War; see R. Lindsey, The Falcon andthe Snowman: a true tale of espionage andfriendship (London, 1980).

5 Prince of Librarians (London, 1967), pp. 25-6,33-4-

6 Ibid., p. 52.7 J. M. Roberts, The Mythology of the Secret

Societies (London, 1972).8 Poor Richard's Almanack (Philadelphia, 1735).9 DEI PROCESSI I E / DELLE SENTENZE j

CONTRA I CU imputati di Lesa-Maesta e diaderenza alle / Sette proscritte negli Stati diModena / NOTIZIE / Scritte da AntonioP^A'/ZZ/(Madrid: per Roberto Torres, 1823);BL, C.44.d.i.

10 DNB, vol. lxi (1886), p. 456b.

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