1
‘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 According to Michel Foucault Marx commented to Engels in 1882: ‘You
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 Marx is not quite as explicit as Foucault remembered in placing the origins of
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 of PSBR.
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 in Karl 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 19 (1958), 273-82.
4
Foucault, Society must be defended, 49, and passim.
2
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 Yet just as early medieval history was used in some of the great socio-political
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’s Decline and Fall might 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, National Thought in Europe: a cultural history (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 Myth of Nations: the Medieval
Origins of Europe (Princeton, 2002), and W. Goffart, Barbarian Tides: the Migration
Age and the Later Roman Empire (Philadelphia, 2006). While 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, Le XIXe siècle et l’histoire. Le cas Fustel de Coulanges (Paris, 2001).
7
For Gibbon’s work in the context of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
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.
3
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’s Adelchi and 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 the canone 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
A recent discussion is provided by A.M. Banti, ‘Le invasioni barbariche e le origini
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, The Force of Destiny: a history of Italy since 1796
(London, 2007), 96-8.
11
The volumes on I 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, 2nd ed. (Turin, 2006), 45. Banti’s 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).
4
One of the peculiarities of the Italian tradition was that one of its mainsprings was
a work intended to accompany a play, written in 1822: the drama was Alessandro
Manzoni’s Adelchi, 13 its historical introduction the Discorso sopra alcuni punti della
storia longobardica in Italia. 14 Of course, the Hunnic invasion of 452, as well as the
Ostrogothic and Lombard invasions of Italy, and the kingdoms which emerged out of
them, had attracted the attention of earlier writers, and had been used in political
discourse. 15 Machiavelli had argued that the Lombards would have contributed much to
Italy had they not been prevented from uniting the peninsula by the papacy. A papal
case, on the other hand, was put by Baronius, who saw the workings of Providence in the
collapse of heretics and persecutors of the Church. 16 But it was Manzoni’s Discorso
which placed the history of the Lombard invasion at the heart of the historico-political
discourse which would feed directly into the Risorgimento. 17
Manzoni’s Adelchi deals with the end of Lombard rule in Italy in 774: it opens
with the return to Pavia of the Lombard king Desiderio’s daughter, following her
repudiation by Carlo (Charlemagne). In the sources she is nameless, but Manzoni calls
her Ermengarda. Desiderio wants to avenge the insult, but his son Adelchi advises
caution. He proposes the return land to the Romans and making peace with Adriano
(Pope Hadrian). For her part Ermengarda wishes only to retire to a nunnery. Alcuino,
who has just been to Rome, arrives and delivers an ultimatum from Carlo: return the
13
Ed. M. Martelli and R. Bacchelli, Alessandro Manzoni, Tutte le Opere (Florence,
1973), I, 165-227. There is a convenient translation in F.B. Deigan, Alessandro
Manzoni’s The Count of Carmagnola and Adelchis (Baltimore, 2004).
14
Ed. Martelli and Bacchelli, Alessandro Manzoni, Tutte le Opere II, 1981-2070.
15
G. Falco, ‘La questione longobarda e la moderna storiografia italiana’, Atti del 1o
Congresso internazionale di Studi longobardi (Spoleto, 1952), 153-66: R. Toppan, ‘La
revanche du barbare: evolution du concept de “barbare” en Italie de Macchiavel à
Manzoni’, in J. Schillinger and P. Alexandre (eds.), Le barbare. Images phobiques et
réflexions sur l’alterité dans la culture européenne (Bern, 2008), 117-33.
16
Falco, ‘La questione longobarda e la moderna storiografia italiana’ (above, n. 14), 1545.
17
A particularly useful discussion of Risorgimento historiography of the Middle Ages is
S. Soldani, ‘Il Medioevo del Risorgimento nello specchio della nazione’, in E.
Castelnuovo and G. Sergi (eds.), Arte e storia nel Medioevo, IV, Il Medioevo al passato e
al presente (Turin, 2004), 149-86. See also Banti, ‘Le invasioni barbariche e le origini
delle nazioni’ (above, n. 9).
5
lands of St Peter or fight. Desiderio chooses war, a decision which is not welcomed by
all the dukes.
In the second act – the opening of which is a fanciful dramatisation of the entry
for the year 773 of the Annales Regni Francorum 18 – Carlo, whose army has been
blocked in the Val di Susa, is thinking of returning home. However a Roman deacon
from Ravenna, Martino, 19 offers to lead a group of soldiers to outflank the Lombards. He
does so, and as a result the Lombards flee, leaving the Franks to comment on their
cowardice. Adelchi, who has managed to find Desiderio, decides to organise Lombard
resistence from the vantage point of the cities. A Chorus comments on the reactions of
the Italian peasantry, as they note that their masters are in disarray.
In Brescia Ermengarda is dying. She insists that she holds no rancour against
Carlo, but clearly resents his abandoning her for another woman. Her life, death and
salvation are celebrated in a second Chorus. Adelchi, besieged in Verona, decides to
escape to Byzantium and to organise opposition from there. Meanwhile Desiderio tries to
negotiate with Carlo for his son, saying that Adelchi has often opposed his father’s
policies. News arrives, however, that a group of men have been killed or wounded while
trying to escape the city. The dying Adelchi is brought in: he laments the past injustices
of the Lombards towards the people of Italy, asks that his father be well treated in
captivity, and dies.
At first sight the story is unexceptionable. There are only a few hints that it rested
on a radical rereading of Italian history. Crucial is Adelchi’s suggestion that Desiderio
make peace with Adriano and return land to the Romans:
sgombriam le terre de’Romani; amici
siam d’Adriano. (I, 1, ll 190-1)
let us return
The lands to the Romans; let us be friends with Hadrian. 20
Also important is Martino’s emphasis on his appearance:
18
Annales Regni Francorum, s.a. 763, ed. F. Kurze, Monumenta Germaniae Historica,
Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum separatim editi (Hannover, 1895).
19
The choice of name is interesting. One wonders whether Manzoni had in mind Martin
of Tours, a saint who was very much in Charlemagne’s mind.
20
Trans. Deigan (above, n. 16), 221.
6
la breve chioma, il mento ignudo
l’abito, il volto ed il sermon latino,
Straniero ed inimico. (II, 3, ll. 158-60)
My shaved chin and short hair, my face, my garments,
My Latin tongue, all would have easily
Given me away as a foe amidst their crowd. 21
There is the sustained Chorus, describing the reaction of the Italian peasants to the defeat
of their Lombard masters (III 9), 22 and a comment on the oppression wrought by the
Lombards even creeps into the elegy for Ermengarda (IV 1, ll. 97-102). 23 A furthr
example of Manzoni’s emphasis on the division between the Italians and their overlords
can be found in Adelchi’s final condemnation of the unjust rule of the Lombards.
Una feroce
forza il mondo possiede, e fa nomarsi
dritto: la man degli avi insanguinata
seminò l’ingiustizia; i padri l’hanno
coltivata col sangue; e omai la terra
altra messe non dà. (V 8, ll. 354-9)
A fierce and dire force governs the world;
Men call it law! With blood-stained hands our
Forefathers cast the seeds of injustice;
Our fathers manured it with blood
And the land does not yield other harvest.24
Adelchi thus comes to understand that the Lombard state was destined to collapse
because it was created as a result of conquest and oppression.
Manzoni’s underlying vision was set out separately, and more explicitly, in his
Discorso sopra alcuni punti della storia longobardica in Italia of 1822. His chief
contention in this work is that during the Lombard period there were essentially two
nations in Italy, which were in no way assimilated: two peoples with different names,
21
Trans. Deigan, 239.
Trans. Deigan, 267-9.
23
Trans. Deigan, 281.
24
Trans. Deigan, 306.
22
7
language, dress, interests and law: it was the same throughout the post-Roman world: si
trovò quasi tutta l’Europa, dopo l’invasioni e gli stabilimente de’Barbari. 25 Machiavelli
and others, including Muratori, on whose collection of source material Manzoni was
dependent, had argued that there was relatively quick integration: 26 in Machiavelli’s
words Si convertirono in paesani; non ritenevano di forestieri altro que il nome: ‘They
changed into people of the country: they retained nothing foreign except their name.’ 27
Manzoni denies this. Instead, in his view the Roman population was simply dispossessed
and enslaved – hence the depiction of the peasantry in the first Chorus of the Adelchi, and
the protagonist’s own awareness of injustice. 28
It is not difficult to see how this interpretation might relate to the situation in Italy
in the early nineteenth century, where foreign powers controlled much of the territory.
Manzoni’s Adelchi, and its accompanying Discorso, were in tune with Risorgimento
hostility to the presence of foreign powers in Italy, even though the author himself was
keen to emphasise the virtue of suffering patiently, as demonstrated by the behaviour of
Ermengarda. 29 But the idea of two separate peoples, one oppressing the other, did not
come out of Italian tradition. Indeed, the Italian scholars listed by Manzoni in the
Discorso largely held the views which began with Machiavelli. Rather, Manzoni had
borrowed a model from French historiography, and imposed it on the documentation of
Lombard history. 30
Although it is not apparent from the text of the Discorso, Manzoni’s central idea
seems to have been inspired primarily by Augustin Thierry, whom he encountered when
25
Ed. Martelli and Bacchelli, Alessandro Manzoni, Tutte le Opere, II, 1987.
See, for instance, Falco, ‘La questione longobarda e la moderna storiografia italiana’
(above, n. 13), 156-7, 159.
27
Machiavelli, Istoria Fiorentina, I, cited by Manzoni, Discorso sulla stora
longobardica, 1988.
28
On the importance of the chorus in Adelchi, see Banti, ‘Le invasione barbariche e le
origini delle nazioni’ (above, n. 9), 37: Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento, 39: Duggan,
The Force of Destiny, 95.
29
Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento, 105, 132.
30
Not that he was alone in drawing on French scholarship: Falco, ‘La questione
longobarda e la moderna storiografia italiana’ (above, n. 14), 162: P. Finelli and G.L.
Fruci, 'Il “momento risorgimentale” nel discorso politico francese (1796-1870)’, in A.M.
Banti and P. Ginsborg, Storia d'Italia, Annali 22, Il Risorgimento (Turin, 2007).747-76.
26
8
he was in Paris, where his mother was living, in the course of 1819-20. 31 For Thierry,
according to his own autobiographical essay, 1820 was the year in which he turned his
mind to ‘the original historians of France and the Gauls’. 32 Certainly it was the year in
which he published ‘a series of letters on the History of France’ which caused something
of a scandal. Although the first of the essays was published in July, which was the very
time that Manzoni left Paris, it is clear that the Italian was well aware of Thierry’s
ideas. 33 Most important here is a letter of Manzoni written on 17th October 1820 to his
close friend Claude Fauriel, to whom he had just dedicated his first play, Il Conte di
Carmagnola. 34 Indeed he talks of the sources on which Thierry was working as
‘indispensibles non seulement pour les rapports immédiats de l’histoire de Charlemagne
avec celle des Lombards, mais aussi pour attraper quelques indications sur les
établissemens des conquérans barbares qui tous se ressemblent fort’. 35
Thierry was a good deal younger than Manzoni, but was already coming to
prominence as the historian who gave a voice to the underclass, the rotouriers. For
Thierry, France had up until the Revolution essentially been made up of two classes: the
nobility, who were the descendents of the Franks, and the Tiers État, who derived from
the indigenous Gallo-Roman population. The former, having conquered Gaul, enslaved
and oppressed the Gallo-Romans, and this injustice formed the bedrock of the social
structure of France, although it was challenged already in the Middle Ages in the towns,
above all by the communes.
Thierry himself, in the autobiographical preface he attached to his Historical
Essays of 1834, claimed that the origins of this interpretation came from what he learnt
31
Cesare de Lollis, Alessandro Manzoni e gli storici liberali francesi della restaurazione
(Bari, 1926), 47: Banti, ‘Le invasioni barbariche e le origini delle nazioni’ (above, n. 9),
21-3: Deigan, Alessandro Manzoni’s The Count of Carmagnola and Adelchis, 13-14. On
this phase of Manzoni’s life see also G.P. Bognetti, Manzoni giovane, ed. M. Cataudella
(Naples, 1972).
32
Thierry, ‘Autobiographical Preface’ (above, n. 8), xi.
33
See, most recently, Banti, ‘Le invasioni barbariche e le origini delle nazioni’ (above, n.
9).
34
Manzoni, ep, 137, ed. A. Chiari and F. Ghisalberti, Tutte le opere di Alessandro
Manzoni, VII, Lettere I (Milan, 1970), 212-7: de Lollis, Alessandro Manzoni e gli storici
liberali francesi, 47.
35
Manzoni, ep, 137 (above, n. 34), 216.
9
about the Norman Conquest and its impact on the political and social structure of
England from Hume, from the English historians and also from Walter Scott (especially
Ivanhoe), and indeed in 1825 he would write an important book on 1066. 36 In fact,
however, his argument fitted into a well-established French debate on the Frankish
settlement in Gaul, which began with the writings of the Comte de Boulainvilliers, both
in the work he did for the government-sponsored État de la France, published in 1727,
and in a series of short works published posthumously in the 1730s. 37 Boulainvilliers
developed the idea that the Franks conquered and enslaved the Gallo-Romans and that
this conquest was the basis of the rights and privileges of the nobility, who were
descended from the conquerors. According to Boulainvilliers, however, the monarchy,
originally of no greater status than the nobles, made common cause with the descendants
of the Gallo-Romans, thus overturning the nobility’s rights. As a member of an ancient
noble family he wanted to see a revival of the power and influence of the aristocracy.
Boulainvilliers’ argument was soon challenged by the abbé Du Bos, in his
Histoire critique de l’établissement de la monarchie françoise dans les Gaules, where he
denied that there had been a conquest, and argued that there had been complete
integration of Gallo-Romans and Franks. 38 This remarkable work was based on a
meticulous reading of the sources, but Du Bos was regarded, with only slight justice, as a
mouthpiece for the monarchy, and as such was attacked by Montesquieu and then by
Mably. 39 Although not intending to reassert the nobiliaire claims of Boulainvilliers, they
went some way towards creating a deformed version of his argument. They
36
See Thierry, ‘Autobiographical Preface’ (above, n. 8), xi: Banti, ‘Le invasioni
barbariche e le origini delle nazioni’ (above, n. 9). 24-30.
37
Foucault, Society must be defended, 144-65. For Boulainvilliers in general, see R.
Simon, Henry de Boulainviller: historien, politicien, philosophe, astrologue, 1658-1722
(Gap, 1940), and H.A. Ellis, Boulainvilliers and the French Monarchy (Ithaca, 1988).
38
More accessible is the revised edition: J.-B. Du Bos, Histoire critique de
l’établissement de la monarchie françoise dans les Gaules, 3 vols. (Amsterdam, 1735).
See Wood, ‘The Fall of the Roman Empire in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’,
(above, n. 7), 337-43. On Du Bos, A. Lombard, L’Abbé Du Bos. Un initiateur de la
pensée moderne (1670-1742) (Paris, 1913).
39
Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, De l’Esprit des Loix (1748), books 30 and
31, ed. J. Brethe de la Gressaye, IV (Paris, 1961). G.B. de Mably, Observations sur
l’histoire de France, 3 vols., ed. G. Brizzard, Collection complete des Oeuvres de l’Abbé
de Mably (Paris, 1794/5), I, 141.
10
acknowledged that there was a conquest, and indeed that the Gallo-Roman population
was subjugated, though at the same time they were excited by the notion of Germanic
egalitarianism to be found in Tacitus. A more logical reaction to the model developed by
Boulainvilliers was that of the abbé Sièyes, who proposed that the nobles should all be
sent back to the marshes and forests of Germany, where they belonged. 40 There was,
therefore, a well-established debate about the Frankish conquest and subsequent
oppression of the native population of Gaul. Indeed, the subject matter had become a
battle-ground over which the issues of noble rights, sovereign power, and equality for the
members of the Tiers État were debated. It was at the very heart of what Foucault
described as the emerging historico-political discourse of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Even though Thierry claimed that it was the Norman Conquest which really
sensitised him to the issues of conquest and oppression, he could have situated his
writings on the Merovingians firmly within a French tradition: he seems to have
deliberately decided not to do so – in placing himself in a line of English historiography
he set himself apart. Perhaps what he learnt most from Scott was how to write narrative
history for a literary audience. What he himself added to the debate was essentially the
voice of the oppressed rotouriers.
Thierry was not the only scholar writing in French to attract Manzoni’s attention.
In his letter to Fauriel the Italian had asked,
Or je voudrais que vous eussiez la bonté de m’indiquer quelque ouvrage moderne
(à part les plus connus) de ceux qui, bien ou mal, ont voulu débrouiller le chaos de
ces établissemens dans le moyen âge, et qui surtout ont parlé de la condition des
peuples indigènes subjugués et possédés, qui est le point sur le quel l’histoire est
le plus pauvre, puisque pour ce qui regarde les Lombards on ne trouve presque
pas une mention des italiens dans leur histoire, qui cependant s’est faite en
Italie. 41
No doubt the writings of Du Bos were among the best-known books mentioned by
Manzoni, for he cited him directly. Among the new works that Manzoni was to read was
40
E.J. Sieyès, Qu’est-ce le Tiers État?, ed. R. Zapperi (Geneva, 1970), 128. It was first
published in 1789.
41
Manzoni, ep, 137 (above, n. 34), 216.
11
the first volume of Simonde de Sismondi’s Histoire des Français, which appeared in
1821 42 – as Thierry was later careful to point out, a year after the publication in the
Courier Français of the first of his own letters on the history of France. 43 It is a work
that Manzoni refers to in the Discorso sopra alcuni punti della storia longobardica in
Italia. 44
Historians of the Risorgimento, when they discuss Sismondi, tend to concentrate
on his Histoire des Républiques italiennes du moyen âge, first published in 1807-9.
Indeed, it was called ‘il nostro codice, il nostro vangelo’ by de Santis,45 and has recently
been described as the ‘onnipresenti Repubbliche di Sismondi’. 46 The Histoire des
Républiques italiennes even underpinned Thierry’s view of the French communes as
centres of freedom against the feudal oppression established by the aristocracy in the
countryside. The work was to appear in English and Spanish (in 1832 and 1837
respectively), but an Italian translation had already been published in 1817-9, and there is
an undated edition that may have appeared yet earlier. It was already reviewed by Pietro
Borsieri in Il Conciliatore on 18th October 1818. 47 Manzoni cited the Storia delle
Repubbliche italiane in 1819. Coming from Geneva Sismondi did not share Manzoni’s
reverence for the Catholic Church: a point that is made clear in his interpretation of the
Italian Communes. Manzoni’s Osservazioni sulla morale cattolica of 1819 was
explicitly written ‘a difendere la morale della Chiesa cattolica dall’accuse che le sono
fatte nel Cap. CXXVII della Storie delle Repubbliche Italiane del medio evo’. 48
Sismondi’s protestant critique of the Church was too much for Manzoni, but the Italian
42
For the complete history, J.C.L. Simonde de Sismondi, Histoire des Français, 18 vols.
(Brussels, 1846).
43
Thierry, ‘Autobiographical Preface’ (above, n. 8), xvii.
44
Manzoni, Discorso sopra alcuni punti della storia longobardica, 1984, 2029.
45
R. Bizzocchi, 'Una nuova morale per la donna e la famiglia', in Banti and Ginsborg
(eds.), Storia d'Italia, Annali 22, Il Risorgimento, 69-96, at p. 84.
46
I. Porciani, 'Disciplinamento nazionale e modelli domestici', in Banti and Ginsborg
(eds.), Storia d'Italia, Annali 22, Il Risorgimento, 97-125, at p. 102. See also Finelli and
Fruci, 'Il “momento risorgimentale” nel discorso politico francese’ (above, n. 30), 75860, and Duggan, The Force of Destiny, 96-8.
47
Il Conciliatore. Foglio Scientifico-letterario, ed. V. Branca (Florence, 1948-54), I,
223-34.
48
Ed. Martelli and Bacchelli, Manzoni, Tutte le opere, II, 1335-1461, especially at pp.
1335 and 1497.
12
clearly felt that he had to engage with his Swiss contemporary. Since he went out of his
way to attack Sismondi’s History of the Italian Communes it is, perhaps, no surprise that
Manzoni read the first volumes of the Histoire des Français soon after their publication.
It is important to note that even in Italy Sismondi was more than a historian of the
Italian republics. He was an economist of note: his Nouveaux principes d’économie
politique, ou de richesse dans ses rapports avec la population received particular
attention in a three-part review by Giuseppe Pecchio in Il Conciliatore in 1819. 49 He
argued that the creation of wealth should be for the use of all, and not just for the
enrichment of the few. This was a theme that he pursued in a number of historical works,
which are of considerable importance and were highly regarded well into the twentieth
century, with some justification. For the early medievalist his major work is perhaps his
Histoire des Français, which was translated into English in 1851. He also wrote a
History of the Fall of the Roman Empire, which apparently appeared first in English in
1834, and then, a year later in French, as the Histoire de la chute de l’Empire romain et
du déclin de la civilisation, de l’an 250 à l’an 1000. An Italian version by Cesare Cantù
appeared in 1836: but there is also an undated edition which claims to be the prima
versione italiana. In the History of the Fall of the Roman Empire, though without
mentioning him by name, Sismondi seems to have been intent on undermining some of
Gibbon’s central ideas, above all the idea that the Roman Empire represented a Golden
Age – which might account for the work’s early English publication. 50 His
interpretations in all these historical works were underpinned by his economic views. He
restated the French interpretation of the barbarian invasions as leading to the enslavement
of the Gallo-Romans, but did so in economic rather than political terms. And he also
argued that the Roman Empire itself had been built on a similar pattern of conquest and
exploitation. Cantù, writing in 1865, thought that Sismondi had contributed significantly
to the understanding of two major issues in Italian history: ‘la condizione de’natii sotto i
49
Il Conciliatore. Foglio Scientifico-letterario, ed. V. Branca, II, 727-31, III, 34-40, 5060.
50
Wood, ‘The Fall of the Roman Empire in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’
(above, n. 7), 332.
13
Barbari, e l’origine de’Comuni’. 51 It is, therefore, not surprising that the Histoire des
Français provided Manzoni with an economic interpretation of the effect of the barbarian
invasions to go alongside the class-based reading proposed by Augustin Thierry.
The Adelchi and the Discorso sopra alcuni punti della storia longobardica in
Italia followed almost directly after Manzoni’s return to Italy. And they applied the
French model of barbarian conquest, and the subsequent enslavement and exploitation of
the indigenous population, exactly. They, and indeed the French and Swiss scholarship
on which they were based, had an immediate impact on Italian historiography of the
Lombard period. Above all there was Carlo Troya’s Storia d’Italia del Medio-evo of
1839-59. In particular part 5 of the first volume – in fact a freestanding book in its own
right – De’ populi barbari avanti la loro venuta in Italia: Delle condizione de’ Romani
vinti da’ Longobardi of 1841 restates Manzoni’s basic interpretation with occasional
revision. Troya, like Manzoni himself, goes back to the earlier French debates, citing
Boulainvilliers, Du Bos and Montesquieu. 52 In addition to his great work of
interpretation, between 1852 and 1855 he also published the first major edition of
Lombard charters, the Codice diplomatico longobardo dal 568 al 774. 53 Troya, it should
be remembered, was not only one of the key intellectuals of the Risorgimento. He was
also an important politician: for a brief period in 1848-9 he was even Prime Minister of
the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.
Nor was he the only Risorgimento idealist and politician to write about the
Lombard conquest. Cesare Balbo began writing a Storia d’Italia sotto ai Barbari, the
first two volumes of which were published posthumously in 1856. Balbo’s approach
differed somewhat from that of Manzoni: in particular in deciding between two
51
C. Cantù, Storia della letteratura italiana (Florence, 1865), 674-5. I am indebted to
David Laven for drawing my attention to this quotation.
52
C. Troya, Storia d’Italia del Medio-evo, I, pt. 5, Della condizione de’ Romani vinti
da’Longobardi e della vera lezione d’alcune parole di Paolo Diacono intorno a tale
argomento (Naples, 1841), vi. Falco, ‘La questione longobarda e la moderna storiografia
italiana’ (above, n. 14), 162, 165: Soldani, ‘Il Medioevo del Risorgimento nello specchio
della nazione’ (above, n. 17), 160-1]
53
Interestingly and perhaps typically, Duggan in The Force of Destiny, 157, simply
presents him as a historian of the conflict between the papacy and the empire, although
early medieval historians would probably rate the Codice diplomatico as one of the major
scholarly achievements of the century.
14
divergent readings in Paul the Deacon, which had concerned both Manzoni and Troya, he
opted for the less extreme: ‘e cosi all’interpretazione la quale concorda con tutto
l’addolcimento della conquista narrata da Paolo.’ 54 He did admit, however, that there
was more oppression under the Lombards than there had been under the Goths.
Another, rather younger, figure of the Risorgimento, Pasquale Villari also showed
an interest in the barbarians. Born in Naples in 1826, Villari threw himself into the
abortive revolution which was suppressed on 15th May 1848. In exile, he moved to
Rome, where he published his first historical work in the journal Il nazionale in 1849. 55
According to Ermenegildo Pistelli, in the biographical preface attached to the collection
of Villari’s works made for his ninetieth birthday in 1916, the intellectual influences on
him at this stage were Sismondi, Guizot, Thierry, (Heinrich) Leo and ‘nostri
cinquecentisti’: 56 thus a mixture of French writers, two of whom we have already met, a
German legal historian of the Italian comuni, and author of a highly regarded history of
Italy, as well as Italian historians of the Renaissance.
François Guizot deserves a comment here. He was a major political player in
France in the first half of the nineteenth century. 57 He held posts in the ministries of the
interior and of justice under Louis XVIII. More important, under Louis Philippe he was
minister for public instruction from 1832-7 and was the leading figure in government
from 1840-8, after which he spent a brief period of exile in England. He was also,
however, a noted historian, being appointed to a chair at the Sorbonne as early as 1812.
Much of his historical writing was concerned with the early modern period, not least the
English Revolution, but his Histoire de la civilisation en Europe of 1828 and his Histoire
de la civilisation en France of 1830, covered a much broader span of history. Both were
based on sets of lectures, and were translated into English by Hazlitt in 1846. It was
probably these works which most influenced the young Villari: the Storia generale della
civiltà in Europa appeared in Italian as early as 1841 in a translation by Antonio
54
C. Balbo, Storia d’Italia (Turin, 1830), II, 101. Falco, ‘La questione longobarda e la
moderna storiografia italiana’ (above, n. 14), 162: Soldani, ‘Il Medioevo del
Risorgimento nello specchio della nazione’ (above, n. 17), 160, 162, 174.
55
P. Villari, L’Italia e la civiltà (Milan, 1916), x.
56
Villari, L’Italia e la civiltà, x.
57
R. Tombs, France 1814-1914 (London, 1996), 68-70, 366-76.
15
Zoncada, but there is another version, the Storia generale dell’incivilimento, that claims
to be the prima versione italiana. Guizot’s interest in the Middle Ages, however, was
first apparent in his translation of Gibbon into French in 1812. 58 Although references to
the Early Middle Ages are scattered throughout the two histories of civilisation, perhaps
more important for an early medievalist – and certainly more consistently focused on the
early period – are his Essais sur l’Histoire de France (pour servir de complement aux
Observations sur l’Histoire de France de l’abbé de Mably) of 1823. 59 Here, while
acknowledging that there was a Frankish conquest of Gaul, he argued for a more complex
pattern of social development than simple exploitation by the victors. He saw the Franks
as lacking the wherewithal to control the people they had conquered, and argued that the
resulting need for multiple associations led to the rise of feudalism, and thus to the
establishment of local despots whole dominated a servile population. As a result the
monarchy had to embark on a further conquest of the aristocracy. 60
Guizot, like Sismondi and Thierry, was an obvious author for Villari to consult in
the 1840s. As for the Italian’s later career, after his brief sojourn in Rome he moved
north to Tuscany. There he threw himself into the study of Tuscan culture. As a scholar
he would go on concentrate on the Florentine Renaissance, notably on Savonarola and
Machiavelli. This perhaps hardened the differences between his interpretation of the
barbarians and that of Manzoni. These are already visible in 1849, 61 and also in the short
L’Italia, la civiltà latina e la civiltà germanica of 1861. Here he initially appears to take
a position similar to Manzoni’s: ‘Le genti latine e germaniche in sul principio del Medio
Evo, mantengono l’Europa in un moto così disordinato e così incomposto d’uomini e
d’eventi, che altro non possiamo osservare, se non che due razzi si agitano su questo
mobile terreno, l’una vinta, l’altra vincitrice’. But he then continues: ‘Dopo qualche
tempo però la scena del mondo comincia a mutare e gli uomini pare che trovino più
58
Wood, ‘The Fall of the Roman Empire in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’
(above, n. 7), 329-31.
59
F. Guizot, Essais sur l’Histoire de France (pour servir de complement aux
Observations sur l’Histoire de France de l’abbé de Mably) (Paris, 1823).
60
Guizot, Essais sur l’Histoire de France, 347-51.
61
Duggan, The Force of Destiny, 91.
16
stabile dimora sulla terra’. 62 Villari would go on to play a significant role in Italian
politics in the second half of the nineteenth century: he was a member of the legislative
chamber from 1867-82 and Minister of Education from 1889-92. Towards the end of his
life, when he returned to consider the barbarian invasions, the distinction between his
interpretation and that of Manzoni was yet more apparent. In Le invasione barbariche in
Italia of 1901 he argued that the population of Italy was always ethnically mixed, and he
rejected the argument that the Lombards enslaved the Italians. 63 Indeed, in a very
nuanced interpretation that fully acknowledged the problem of interpreting the sources,
he saw the incomers as bringing some relief to the native population and found no
evidence that they suppressed Roman institutions or law. 64
But to return to the first half of the nineteenth century: as we have seen Manzoni
played a significant role in the introduction of French historiography on the Frankish
invasion into Italian history-writing. In applying the French model to the source material
of the Lombards, however, he transformed an argument which was first and foremost
about class into one about the presence of foreigners on Italian soil. Thus, while the
French debate had contributed to the intellectual origins of the Revolution, and in the
liberal writings of Thierry to a critique of Napoleonic imperialism and its ideological
supporters, that in Italy fed directly into the hostility towards the presence of foreign
powers in Italy, in particular that of Austria in the North.
By 1848 Manzoni’s interpretation of the Lombards, developed as it had been
around the story of Adelchi, was widespread in Italian intellectual circles. 65 But already
the reading of another figure of the history of the Fall of the Roman Empire had come to
play a role in Risorgimento politics: that of Attila. Premiered at La Fenice in 1846,
Verdi’s Attila was immediately acclaimed by the Venetians. 66 And one of the phrases
sung by the Roman general Ezio, or Aetius – ‘Avrai tu l’universo, resti l’Italia a me’
(‘You take the universe, but leave Italy to me’) – became one of the catch-phrases of the
62
P. Villari, L’Italia, la civiltà latina e la civiltà germanica (Florence, 1861), 22-3.
The work was translated almost immediately into English: P. Villari, The Barbarian
Invasions of Italy (London, 1902), especially II, ch. 2, 291.
64
Villari, The Barbarian Invasions of Italy, 339-46.
65
Falco, ‘La questione longobarda e la moderna storiografia italiana’ (above, n. 14), 1602.
66
C. Osborne, The Complete Operas of Verdi (London, 1969), 135.
63
17
Risorgimento. 67 So obviously open to patriotic interpretation is the line that
musicologists have wondered why on the earth the Austrian censors failed to insist on its
removal. 68 Perhaps they would have been less surprised had they known more about the
cumbersome workings of censorship in Venice under the Austrians.69 But another
answer to the question lies in the complex history of the source material on which Verdi
and his librettists were drawing – a history which intersects with and adds to that of the
relationship between Manzoni, Thierry and Sismondi.
Verdi’s opera begins with the sack of Aquileia. Attila is astonished to find a
group of warlike women led by Odabella, the daughter of the duke of the city, still
determined to fight. Impressed, he gives Odabella his sword, which she sees as a weapon
with which to avenge the death of her father. At this point Ezio arrives, and offers to
make a deal with Attila, allowing him a free hand everywhere except Italy, which he
wants for himself. Attila naturally rejects the offer.
The scene changes to the Venetian lagoon, where the population of Aquileia have
fled, led by Foresto, Odabella’s betrothed. They prophesy the foundation of a new city.
Odabella, however, is ensconced in Attila’s camp, where Foresto finds her: he thinks that
she has betrayed him, but she compares herself with Judith, the killer of Holofernes.
Meanwhile Attila is dreaming: he has a vision of being turned away at the gates of Rome
by an old man, who tells him that he, the king, is only the scourge of mankind, not of the
territory of the gods. Attila is terrified, all the more so when the figure of his dream,
67
G. Martin, ‘Verdi and the Risorgimento’, in W. Weaver and M. Chusid, A Verdi
Companion (London, 1980), 13-41, at p. 22. On the patriotism of Verdi, see C. Sorba, ‘Il
Risorgimento in musica: l’opera lirica nei teatri del 1848), in Banti and Bizzocchi (eds.),
Immagini della nazione nell’Italia del Risorgimento, 133-56, at pp. 143, 148: on the
question of the extent to which the image of Verdi as ‘vate del Risorgimento’ is an
oversimplification, C. Abbate and R. Parker, ‘Introduction: On Analyzing Opera’, in
Abbate and Parker (eds.), Analyzing Opera: Verdi and Wagner (Berkeley, 1989), 1-24,
at pp. 11-12. Also, R. Parker, The New Grove Guide to Verdi and his Operas (Oxford,
2007), 30.
68
Osborne, The Complete Operas of Verdi, 135.
69
D. Laven, Venice and Venetia under the Habsburgs, 1815-1835 (Oxford, 2002), 17592. For the rather different situation in Rome, A. Giger, ‘Social control and the
censorship of Giuseppe Verdi’s Operas in Rome (184-1959)’, Cambridge Opera Journal
11, 3 (1999), 233-66.
18
Leone (or pope Leo), arrives surrounded by a choir of virgins, and repeats the words the
king has just heard.
Ezio and Foresto plot to kill the Hunnic king. Their plan, however, is foiled at the
banquet, by Odabella, who is determined to kill him herself. But she does insist on being
granted Foresto as a reward for saving Attila. To this the king agrees, but adds that as a
further reward he will also marry her. Foresto naturally is convinced of her faithlessness,
and hatches another plot to kill Attila during the wedding ceremony. Odabella returns,
haunted by the ghost of her father. She tries to convince Foresto that she is still true to
him. Attila hears their exchange, and denounces her for returning to her lover. At that
moment they hear the sounds of the Roman attack on the Hunnic camp. Finally Odabella
kills Attila.
Certainly only a small portion of this is historical. Attila did sack Aquileia, and
the people of the city may well have fled for safety to the Venetian lagoon, thus indirectly
contributing to the foundation of Venice. Aetius was the leading West-Roman general –
though he seems to have done little to oppose Attila’s Italian campaign. Attila did
advance on Rome, but turned back following an encounter with an embassy which
included pope Leo. 70 According to Priscus, he did indeed die in the night following his
last marriage, 71 while according to Marcellinus comes he was stabbed to death by his
wife. 72 Odabella and Foresto are, of course, nothing but literary creations – despite
Julian Budden’s strange description of Foresto as ‘a historical character’. 73
The libretto of Attila was begun by Thermistocle Solera and completed by
Francesco Maria Piave. They, or Verdi, were responsible for some of the invention: for
70
Prosper, Epitoma chronicon, s.a. 452, ed. T. Mommsen, Monumenta Germaniae
Historica, Auctores Antiquissimi IX, Chronica Minora I (Berlin, 1892). The best recent
narrative account of Attila is to be found in P. Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: a
new history (London, 2005), 300-84: the best introduction to the Huns is probably still
that of E.A. Thompson, A History of Attila and the Huns (Oxford, 1948), reprinted with
additional material as The Huns (Oxford, 1996).]
71
Priscus, fr. 24, ed. R.C. Blockley, The Fragmentary Classicising Historians of the
Later Roman Empire: Eunapius, Olympiodorus, Priscus and Malchus, II (Liverpool,
1983), 317-9.
72
Marcellinus comes, s.a. 454, ed. T. Mommsen, Monumenta Germaniae Historica,
Auctores Antiquissimi XI, Chronica Minora II (Berlin, 1894).
73
J. Budden, The Operas of Verdi, I, From Oberto to Rigoletto (London, 1973), 247.
19
instance the scene in the lagoon, which must have been included to please the Venetians
– though, as we shall see, the story had a broader signficance, for the foundation of
Venice was of considerable importance for Sismondi, in his reading of the origins of the
Italian city-states. The majority of the structure, however, and some of the detail of
Verdi’s opera was taken from a German play, Attila, König der Hunnen, written by
Zacharias Werner in 1807. Werner is a figure of importance in the German Romantic
movement, and for a while was looked upon as a successor to Goethe. Indeed, he was
briefly a protégé of Goethe, though they fell out over religion. The latter was infuriated
by Werner’s comparison of the moon to a communion wafer, and cast him from his
circle. 74
Werner originally came from Prussia, and held a post in the Prussian bureaucracy,
but following the Napoleonic intervention in Germany he moved south to Weimar, where
he encountered Goethe in 1807. From there he travelled to Switzerland, where he was
welcomed to the circle of Mme de Staël – of whom more anon. From Switzerland he
went to Rome, where he converted to Roman Catholicism. He was ordained priest, and
then went on to establish a religious reputation for himself in Austria. His sermons
attracted a good deal of attention during the Congress of Vienna. Thereafter in 1816 he
moved to Podalien, before returning to Vienna in 1819. He died in 1823.
Attila, König der Hunnen is an immensely complex play. 75 Like Verdi’s libretto,
which was derived from it, it begins with the sack of Aquileia. Attila, der Geißel Gottes,
the sourge of God, as he is regarded by all parties in the play, is hailed by his druids.
Hildegunde, a Burgundian princess held hostage at Attila’s court – who is transformed by
Verdi’s librettists into the Roman Odabella – wishes to avenge the death of her betrothed,
Walther, at the hands of Attila. For the time being she hides her intentions, asking to be
allowed to kill some of the refugees. Attila is more merciful, stating that enough blood
has been shed already: and he kills a Hun who protests. The first act ends with a
remarkable court scene, in which Attila is shown dispensing justice.
74
H. Watanabe-O’Kelly (ed.), The Cambridge History of German Literature (Cambridge,
1997), 250. Watanabe-O’Kelly’s account of Werner, ibid., 248-60, provides one of the
few recent assessments of him as a writer.
75
The text is reprinted in Zacharias Werner, Dramatische Werke, V (Bern, 1970).
20
Werner, unlike Verdi or his librettists, then turns his attention to Rome, and first
to Honoria, who has been unjustly deprived of her inheritance by her brother,
Valentinian, in implicit contrast with Attila’s justice. As a result, she has appealed
secretly to the Hunnic king. Leo, the pope, realises that she is in love with Attila, whom
he too regards as the scourge of God, and therefore an agent of Providence. Valentinian
meanwhile plays dice, and Aetius mopes in the corner, because no one is paying any
attention to his advice. Valentinian’s mother, Placidia (whose life Werner has
prolonged), 76 is alarmed that no truce has been arranged with Attila. And her anxiety is
shown to be well founded when a messenger announces (quite unhistorically) that
Ravenna has fallen. Leo arrives and urges repentance on all, and Placidia responds by
blaming Honoria for their troubles, has her sent to prison, and names Aetius as dictator.
In the next act we find Aetius in Attila’s camp, waiting to speak to the king. He
reveals his own ambition for the throne. Attention switches to Attila. He briefly
comments on the plight of Honoria, before punishing those involved in the sack of
Ravenna, which had not been sanctioned. Hildegunde meanwhile is embroidering. The
king asks forgiveness for his treatment of her and her Burgundian people, but he further
offends her by commenting on the sad state of Honoria. To make up, Attila proposes
marriage.
Aetius, who is an old friend of Attila, arrives. Left alone with the Hunnic king,
the scale of the Roman’s ambition becomes clear, as he proposes that the two of them
divide the world between them:
Ich, Du! Wir sind die Welt! …
Die Erd’ ist groß, sie reicht wohl für uns Beide!
Behalte was Du hast: – (Du hast schon viel! – )
Mir laß den Rest – doch, bei dem Gott in mir,
Den muß ich haben! 77
I, you! We are the world …
The earth is large: it is enough for both of us!
76
This dramatic licence becomes an established feature of popular versions of the Attila
story, and can be found in the 1954 Franco-Italian film, Attila, il flagello di Dio or Attila,
fléau de Dieu.
77
Werner, Attila, 97.
21
Keep what you have: – (you already have plenty!)
Leave me the rest – yes, with God in me,
I must have it.
The words are an almost exact parallel to those sung by Ezio, which so stirred Italian
audiences. Attila thinks that Aetius must be unwell, but Aetius reiterates his request:
Sieb Roma frei und theil’ mit mir den Erdball! 78
Let Rome be free, and divide the world with me!
The Hun refuses: he must pursue his destiny.
Aetius decides to support a plot to poison Attila, but Hildegunde is determined
that she alone will kill him, and so intervenes to prevent him from drinking from the
poisoned cup. Aetius admits his knowledge of the plot: Attila magnanimously lets him
go free, but announces his intention to destroy Rome tomorrow.
At dawn Attila calls for the sword of Wodan and launches the attack on the city.
Within the walls Leo calls on the Romans to repent their sins, and announces his
intention himself to visit Attila. He tells Valentinian and Placidia to forgive Honoria, and
then sets out for the camp of the Angel of Death, the Würgeengel.
Fighting is already underway. Attila himself disarms Aetius, but will not kill him,
because he is his Waffenbruder (an idea which Budden states is ridiculous, 79 but which is
not so preposterous, given that Aetius in his youth had been a hostage among the
Huns). 80 Odoacer, however, enters and – rather to the surprise of anyone who knows the
history – dispatches Aetius. At that moment a procession comes through the gates. Leo,
who is carried on the shoulders of men in white, is mistaken by the druids as Wodan. He
announces to Attila that Honoria has been restored to her rights, and also that God, who
gave the Hunnic king the sword of Fate, has decreed that the city will not fall.
Hildegunde wants to kill the old man, but is miraculously prevented from doing so.
Attila himself is overcome by the vision he has had of spirits protecting the city. He
knows that his mission is accomplished. He arranges peace with Leo.
78
Werner, Attila, 98.
Budden, The Operas of Verdi, I. 244.
80
Amédée Thierry, Histoire d’Attila et de ses successeurs jusqu’à l’établissement des
hongrois en Europe suivie des legends et traditions, 2 vols. 3rd ed. (Paris, 1865), I, 45:
P. McGeorge, Late Roman Warlords (Oxford, 2002), 9.
79
22
Attila now insists on going ahead with his marriage to Hildegunde, that very
evening. She recognises Attila’s virtues, but is determined to take vengeance, and to do
so with the axe of her dead lover, Walther – there is surely a deliberate echo of
Clytemnestra. Meanwhile in Rome, Placidia and Valentinian have broken their promises,
and Honoria has been taken back into confinement, where Leo visits her. He realises that
Rome is lost after all. Honoria herself has decided to become a nun, but asks if she may
see Attila. Leo promises to take her to him.
In the Hunnic camp the wedding ceremony has started, but mysteriously Attila is
unable to light the marriage torch. The ceremony is further disrupted when Odoacer
announces the renewed mistreatment of Honoria. Attila says he will attack Rome again,
but notices that his sword is broken. He retires to bed with his new bride.
Leo and Honoria enter the camp. The pope wakes Attila to tell him that
Hildegunde plans to kill him. The king says that, since she once saved his life, he will do
nothing. Leo praises his stance and pronounces the forgiveness of sins. He then brings
Honoria forward. Attila sees in her the angel of death. Leo tells him that love overcomes
death. At that moment Hildegunde comes in: she has already killed Attila’s son Irnak.
She now kills the king, who dies with the name Honoria on his lips. Odoacer condemns
Hildegunde to be burned. She reiterates her love for Walther, which prompts Leo to
comment that love can exist in hell as well as heaven. The play closes with the Huns
acknowledging Odoacer as their king.
Summarising Werner’s play scarcely does justice to the range of ideas within it –
many of which seem to have been lifted directly by Wagner. 81 The historical oddities
also obscure the remarkable awareness of the sources which the play seems to presuppose
– and casts favourable light on the historical knowledge to be found among the Prussian
bureaucrats even before the arrival of Barthold Georg Niebuhr, the Danish classicist who
joined the government in Berlin in the very year that Werner left it. While on the one
hand Werner wrongly presents the chronology of the lives of Placidia, Aetius and Irnak,
there are plenty of echoes of early traditions relating to Attila and his simple tastes
81
Budden, The Operas of Verdi, I, 243-4 notes the similarities with Wagner, without
stressing the fact that Werner was a generation older.
23
(attested by Priscus), 82 his association with the sword of Mars (recorded by both Priscus
and Jordanes), 83 his killing of the king of the Burgundians (noted in Paul the Deacon’s
Romana), 84 and his death following a wedding feast. 85 Even the story of Honoria’s
proposal to Attila in based on early evidence, being reported by Priscus and repeated by
Jordanes. 86 Hildegunde may be a complete fabrication, but her name indicates that she is
a combination of of Attila’s last wife, Ildico, 87 and the Burgundian Hiltgunt, a heroine of
medieval German epic. 88 Werner’s awareness of at least one version of Hiltgund’s
legend is confirmed by the fact that her lover, like Hildegunde’s betrothed, is called
Walter. Moreover, the Burgundian past is entirely apposite, since the Huns did indeed
destroy their kingdom. As a result of this back-story, Hildegunde’s behaviour is a good
deal more plausible than is that of the Roman Odabella in Verdi. 89 As for the position of
Odoacer, while his acclamation as king by the Huns is certainly unhistorical, it does act
as a symbolic statement of his real role in the ending of the West Roman Empire, for it
was he who deposed the last emperor, Romulus Augustulus. Further, Werner’s attempt
to show Attila dispensing justice seems to stem from an awareness of Germanic, though
not of course Hunnic, law. Finally, the repeated emphasis on the king’s reputation as the
flagellum Dei was well-known by the early nineteenth century. Amédée Thierry,
Augustin’s brother, writing in 1856, thought the idea originated at some point between
82
Priscus (above, n. 71), fr. 13, 282-7.
Priscus, fr. 12, 280-3: Jordanes, De origine actibus Getarum, 35, § 183, ed. F. Giunta
and A. Grillone, Fonti per la storia d’Italia (Rome, 1991).
84
Paul the Deacon, Historia Romana, XIV, § 5, ed. A. Crivelluci, Fonti per la storia
d’Italia (Rome, 1914).
85
Priscus (above, n. 71), fr. 24.
86
Priscus, fr. 17, 20, § 3, 21 § 2: Jordanes, Getica, 42, § 223-4.
87
Priscus, fr. 24.
88
Her story is known from several medieval sources: B. Murdoch, Walthari: a verse
translation of the medieval Latin Waltharius (Glasgow, 1989), 13-17. Werner cannot
have known the fullest version of it, the Waltharius of Gaeraldus, ed. A.K. Bate
(Reading, 1978), since it was not published until 1838.
89
Odabella is discussed by both Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento, 323-6, and S.
Chiappini, ‘La voce della martire. Dagli “evirati cantori” all'eroina romantica, in Banti
and Ginsborg (eds.), Storia d'Italia, Annali 22, Il Risorgimento, 289-328, at p. 322. But
neither comment on the problems caused by the fact that Verdi and his librettists have
changed Odabella into a Roman.
83
24
the fifth and eighth centuries, 90 and pointed to the fact that Isidore of Seville associated
the Huns with the words of Isaiah X, 15, ‘quomodo si elevetur virga contra elevantem se’
(‘as if the rod should shake itself against him that lifts it up’), 91 while in the second Life
of Lupus of Troyes the Hunnic king proclaims ‘Ego sum Attila, rex Hunnorum, flagellum
Dei.’ 92 Clearly Werner’s presentation of events, for all its oddities, depended on a
knowledge, whether direct or indirect, of the contents of late antique and early medieval
accounts of the Hunnic invasion.
Verdi too was no slouch. Having decided to tackle Attila he wrote to Piave on
12th April 1844:
Eccoti lo schizzo della tragedia di Verner. Vi sono delle cose magnifiche e piene
d’effeto. Leggi l’Alemagna della Staël. …
A me pare che si possa fare un bel lavoro, e se studierai seriamente farai il tuo più
bel libretto. Ma bisogna studiare molto. Ti manderò l’originale di Verner fra
pochi giorni, e tu devi fartelo tradurre, perchè vi sono squarci di poesia
potentissimi. Insomma serviti di tutto, ma fa una gran cosa. Leggi sopratutto
l’Alemagna della Staël, que quella ti darà dei grandi lumi. Se tu trovi l’originale
di Verner a Venezia, mi levi un gran fastidio. Sappiamelo dire.
Ti raccomando di studio multo questo soggetto ed avere bene in mente tutto:
l’epoca, i caratteri, ecc. ecc. … Poi fa lo schizzo, ma distesamente, scena per
scena, con tutti i personaggi; insomma, che non vi sia che da verseggiare, e così
farai minor fatica. Leggi Verner, sopratutto nei cori che sono stupendi.93
Osborne, in his account of Verdi’s operas, edited and altered the order of the composer’s
sentences, but essentially conveyed the gist of the letter:
‘I shall send you the original Werner play in a few days, and you must have it
translated, for there are passages of tremendous power in it. Read also Madame de
90
Thierry, Attila, II, 238-59.
Thierry, Attila, II, 240: Isidore, Historia Gothorum, 29, s.a. 457, ed. Mommsen,
Monumenta Germani Historica, XI, Auctores Antiquissimi II: trans. G. Donini and G.B.
Ford, Isidore of Seville’s History of the Kings of the Goths, Vandals and Suevi (Leiden,
1966).
92
Thierry, Attila, II, 242: Vita Altera Lupi, IV, § 45, Acta Sanctorum, 29th July, VII
(Paris, 1868), 90.
93
I Copialettere di Giuseppe Verdi, ed. G. Cesari and A. Luzio (Milan, 1913), 437-8.
91
25
Staël’s De l’Allemagne, which will throw great light on it for you. I advise you to study
the subject thoroughly and to keep everything well in mind; period, characters, and so
on.’ 94
So Piave was to do his research – though Verdi’s notion of historical research was
not exactly ours: he sent Vincenzo Luccardi to do a sketch of Raphael’s painting of
Attila and pope Leo, to discover what Hunnic costume and hairstyle looked like. 95 But
one name in the instructions to Piave is crucial, and it is reiterated in the letter: Madame
de Staël. De Staël is well known among historians of nineteenth-century Italy, largely
because of her influential novel, Corinne ou l’Italie of 1807. 96 But just as it is important
to look beyond Sismondi’s Repubbliche, so too one should note that Italians were reading
more of de Staël’s work than Corinne. For an understanding of Verdi’s Attila De
l’Allemagne is vital. Originally published in 1810, it appeared in an Italian translation as
L’Alemagna, in 1814 – an English edition was published a year earlier and a German one
a year later. 97
Anne-Louise-Germaine, Baroness de Staël-Holstein, was among the most
influential figures of the early nineteenth century, and was even regarded as being
responsible for Napoleon’s fall. 98 She was the daughter, in Manzoni’s words the celebre
figlia, 99 of Louis XVI’s minister, Necker, whose exile precipitated the fall of the Bastille.
Her mother was famous for the salon she maintained, which numbered among its
habitués Buffon and Diderot. She herself was a figure of some influence in the world of
the Revolution. Her partner, Narbonne, became Minister for War in 1791, and her own
salon played a role in the formulation of the constitution of that year. She was exiled in
1795, but returned with the establishment of the Directoire. She saved Talleyrand from
inclusion in the list of emigrés, but was herself exiled again as a critic of Napoleon from
94
Osborne, The Complete Operas of Verdi, I, 133.
I Copialettere di Giuseppe Verdi, 441.
96
See, for instance, the recurrent discussions in Banti and Ginsborg (eds.), Storia d’Italia,
Annali 22, Il Risorgimento, 83-4, 184, 192, 289-90, 758, 777-8, 784. By contrast there is
only one page of discussion (486) of De l’Allemagne.
97
J.C. Isbell, The Birth of European Romanticism: Truth and Propaganda in Staël’s ‘De
l’Allemagne’, 1810-1813 (Cambridge, 1994).
98
Isbell, The Birth of European Romanticism, 6.
99
A. Manzoni, La Rivoluzione Francese del 1789 e la Rivoluzione Italiana del 1859, ed.
Martelli and Bacchelli, Tutte le Opere, II, 2132.
95
26
1803-14. Much of her exile was spent at her chateau of Coppet, outside Geneva, and it
was there that she welcomed Werner.
In De l’Allemagne de Staël essentially used her imaginative reconstruction of
Germany to critique Napoleon’s France. 100 And to define Germany she resorted to an
analysis of its culture, not least of its drama. One of the dramatists she analysed (or
rather distorted) in greatest detail was Werner, and above all his Attila. 101 Her
interpretation of Werner’s work involved the suggestion that the character of Attila was a
portrait of Napoleon himself. In one draft of De l’Allemagne she even attributed traits to
Werner’s Attila which are not to be found in the play at all, but which were certainly true
of Napoleon: Il [Attila] ne fait que la guerre et cependant le luxe et les Beaux Arts lui
plaisent comme ses conquêtes. 102 ‘He did nothing but make war: however, luxury and
the Beaux Arts delighted him as much as his conquests.’ This has no echo in Werner’s
play, but is obviously applicable to the emperor. The analysis of Attila which appears in
De l’Allemagne 103 had already been printed in a pirated edition under the title Portrait
d’Attila. This excerpt so incensed Napoleon that he ordered the pulping of all copies of
De l’Allemagne in 1810. 104 It is, in fact, highly unlikely that Werner intended Attila to be
a portrait of Napoleon: the Hunnic king is certainly the hero of the play: he is
magnanimous and just: he is regarded by everyone (pope Leo included) as the scourge of
God, and he is even saved spiritually by the love of a Christian woman at the end of the
play. This is scarcely the Napoleon whose intervention in Germany led to Werner’s
departure from Berlin. Nevertheless, de Staël’s reading of Werner’s work helped to
make it a central text of the early nineteenth century. Perhaps Napoleon III remembered
de Staël’s critique of his namesake and role-model when in 1857, having read Amédée
Thierry’s Attila, itself a major piece of historical interpretation, he asked the author to
identify the site of the Hunnic defeat, outside Châlons. 105 Did he have in mind the
100
Isbell, The Birth of European Romanticism.
Mme De Staël, De L’Allemagne, ed. La comtesse J. de Pange and Mlle S. Balayé
(Paris, 1959), III, 141-9.
102
De Staël, De L’Allemagne, III, 144, n. L. 14: Isbell, The Birth of European
Romanticism, 70.
103
De Staël, De L’Allemagne, III, 141-9.
104
Isbell, The Birth of European Romanticism, 5, 71, 91.
105
Thierry, Attila, II, 428-37.
101
27
creation of a monument which would imply that the French were the descendents not of
the Huns, but of the victorious followers of Aetius? 106
Before leaving de Staël we should note one other leading figure of her salon in
exile: our old friend Simonde de Sismondi. Not only was he a frequent visitor to
Coppet, but he also accompanied de Staël to Italy in 1804-5, and to Austria and Germany
in 1808-10. Given the appearance of an Italian version of his Fall of the Roman Empire
in 1836 – with the possibility that this was not the earliest – one wonders if this work of
Sismondi was among those consulted by Solera and Piave. It is worth noting that
Sismondi’s account of Attila in his Fall of the Roman Empire has a certain amount in
common with Werner’s portrait, including an emphasis on the Hun’s personal virtues,
and on his role as the scourge of God: but Sismondi also saw the Huns as purveyors of
‘Tartar barbarism’ and ‘Russian civilisation’. 107 Equally, like Verdi, he saw in the
plundering of northern Italy the origins of Venice:
‘The extent of his [Attila’s] ravages, and the certainty of having no mercy from
the barbarian, produced an effect upon the people of Italy that led to the erection of a
splendid monument, which has perpetuated to our days the memory of the terror he
inspired. All the inhabitants of that part of Italy which is situated at the mouths of the
great rivers, and called Venetia, took refuge in the low lands, upon the islands, almost
covered with water, which choke the mouths of the Adige, the Po, the Brenta, and the
Tagliamento. There they sheltered themselves under huts made of branches, and
transported thither a small part of their wealth. In a short time they constructed more
commodious habitations, and several cities were seen to rise as it were out of the waters.
106
When he erected the monument to Vercingetorix at Alesia in 1865, Napoleon III was
certainly intent on outdoing the Hermannsdenkmal of Ernst von Bandel, which was under
construction from 1838-75 – the Alise-Ste-Reine inscription by Viollet-le-Duc reads La
Gaule unie/Formant une seule nation/Animée d’un même esprit,/Peut défier l’Univers.
See the chapters by M. Struck ‘The Heilige Römische Reich, Deutscer Nation and
Herman the German’, and A. King ‘Vercingetorix, Asterix and the Gauls’ in R. Hingley
(ed.), Images of Rome: Perceptions of Ancient Rome in Europe and the United States in
the Modern Age (Portsmouth, RI, 2001), 91-112, 113-25. After 1870 Attila would have
German overtones in the iconography of the Panthéon in Paris: I.N. Wood, ‘The
Panthéon in Paris: lieu d’oubli’ (forthcoming).
107
J.C.L. Simonde de Sismondi, A History of the Fall of the Roman Empire, Comprising
a View of the Invasion and Settlement of the Barbarians (London, 1834), I, 156, 162.
28
Such was the origin of Venice; and that haughty republic justly called herself the eldest
daughter of the Roman empire. She was founded by the Romans while the empire was
yet standing, and the independence which characterised her early years was still inviolate
to our own time.’ 108
In Sismondi’s grand scheme the foundation of Venice, which could be traced
back to the time of Attila, was a sine qua non of the rise of the Italian republics, and thus
of the development of European liberty. Not surprisingly he had already described the
origins of Venice in similar terms in his Histoire des Républiques italiennes, though there
the picture is perhaps a little less poetic, and the stress is as much on the economic
foundations of the city as on Venetian independence. 109
Certainly not everything in the libretto of Attila is taken from Werner. But the
line that is most obviously central to a Risorgimento reading of the opera, Ezio’s Resti
l’Italia a me is, as we have seen, an almost direct translation from Werner’s play. Yet,
whereas Ezio’s words have reasonably been seen as a challenge to Habsburg rule,
Werner’s Attila, far from being anti-Austrian, was regarded, ever since de Staël’s De
l’Allemagne, as an attack on Napoleon. Further, it was not only de Staël who had thought
highly of the work. Beethoven had considered setting it as an opera, and there was at
least one Italian version before Verdi’s: Francesco Malipiero’s Ildegonda di Borgogna,
which was first performed in Venice under the title L’Attila in 1845 – a few months
before Verdi’s work was premiered. 110 Moreover, in Verdi, as in Werner, Ezio or Aetius
is definitely not a laudable character, but rather an ineffectual and over-ambitious plotter.
And, despite de Staël’s reading, the hero of both the play and the opera is unquestionably
Attila himself. 111 He is honourable, and if he is a force for destruction, he is divinely
ordained in that role. Moreover, from the viewpoint of some members of the Habsburg
aristocracy he was an ancestral figure. The Esterhazy family claimed descent from him,
108
Sismondi, A History of the Fall of the Roman Empire, I, 163-4.
J.C.L. Simonde de Sismondi, Histoire des Républiques italiennes du Moyen Age I,
chapter 5: I have consulted the fifth edition (Brussels, 1838), where the main discussion
is on pp. 188-90.
110
Budden, The Operas of Verdi, vol. 1, 244.
111
On the dignity of Attila in Verdi: Martin, ‘Verdi and the Risorgimento’, 31.
109
29
and proclaimed the fact on the facade of their palace at Eisenstadt. No wonder the
Habsburg censors in Venice failed to see the inflammatory possibilities of Verdi’s opera.
Verdi’s Attila and Manzoni’s Adelchi have both been seen as items in the canone
risorgimentale. 112 They were also complex and, in certain repects, learned responses to
the early medieval past. Manzoni knew his Carolingian source material, and Werner
would seem to have had access to good information on the fifth century. Above all the
intellectual world that underpinned the plays of Manzoni and Werner, and Verdi’s
libretto, was international. The chain of transmission that we have been considering has,
after all, involved not just Italians, but a Prussian, two French in exile in Switzerland, and
any number of other Frenchmen, including Boulainvilliers, Du Bos, Montesquieu, Mably
and Thierry – behind whom one can also see Walter Scott and Hume. Verdi, Solera and
Piave had added a layer to Werner’s play, which had already been (mis)interpreted by
Madame de Staël, and perhaps they had done so having read their Sismondi. And it is
worth noting how many of the historians we have considered had significant careers in
politics, not least there were Guizot, Troya and Villari.
Of course the early part of this chain of intellectual transmission includes writers
who took radically opposed views. Among the more recent figures, Manzoni did not
always agree with Sismondi. Nor did Balbo or Villari follow Manzoni’s hard line on the
Lombards. Verdi may have called Manzoni a saint, and he certainly composed the
Requiem in his memory. Even so the two had their differences, notably over matters
ecclesiastical. Leone in Attila is unusual amongst Verdi’s religious authority figures: the
sinister Grand Inquisitor in Don Carlos and the High Priest Ramphis in Aida are more
representative.
Just as social tension in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France led scholars to
concentrate their attention on the arrival of the Franks in Roman Gaul, so too the
presence of foreign rulers influenced Manzoni’s Adelchi, and its accompanying Discorso,
with their insistence on a class of foreign oppressors and an oppressed indigenous
population. The political discontents of the Risorgimento helped to force a reading of
oppression onto the sources, and to confirm an interpretation of Italian history as a long
sequence best epitomised by Thomas Hodgkin under the title Italy and her Invaders.
112
Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento, 45.
30
Within that sequence, the Early Middle Ages was a crucial phase, with its own debates,
the historiography of which is not simply an appendage to that of the more famous
conflicts of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, even if many of those who wrote about it
wrote about the later history as well. The Migration Period and its immediate aftermath,
during the Risorgimento as today, was of interest in its own right, and not just to
historians. It involved scholars and intellectuals – politicians and cultural figures – from
across much of western Europe.