Sicilian independence

Sicilian independence is the recurring ideal of political self-government for Sicily, sharpened by the island’s experience of foreign intervention, constitutional change, and Bourbon centralization. The book presents it not as a settled program but as a contested ambition: at different moments it is embodied in a constitution, a revolutionary government, a purchase of rifles, a popular refusal to surrender, and finally the exile of those who had continued to advocate it. Its history turns on the distance between the language of freedom and the political and military means available to achieve it.

Historical Background

The ideal takes shape amid the upheavals that repeatedly brought the politics of the mainland into Sicily. In 1799, the Neapolitan Jacobins rebelled against the Bourbon monarchy and established the Neapolitan Republic. Ferdinand IV and Maria Carolina were forced to take refuge in Palermo, returning to Naples in 1802 after the republic had been crushed in fierce repression. The episode made Palermo a refuge during a revolution centered elsewhere, while demonstrating how precarious political change could be.

A second rupture came when Napoleon’s victories altered the balance of power in southern Italy. After Napoleon proclaimed himself emperor in 1804 and won at Austerlitz in 1805, he sent forces to Naples and placed his brother Joseph on its throne. Ferdinand again fled to Palermo under British protection, though he continued to reign over Sicily. Sicily’s political position was therefore bound to a shifting contest among the Bourbons, French power, and British interests; protection from one power did not itself amount to Sicilian self-government.

In 1812, a revolt broke out over income tax imposed by Ferdinand IV. The Sicilian government promulgated a constitution drafted according to the Westminster system. It sharply curtailed the Bourbon king’s power, provided for the abolition of fiefdoms, and envisaged reform of government institutions. The aim was both to modernize Sicilian society and to strengthen the island’s connection with Britain, which had an interest in keeping Sicily independent. Constitutional government gave the independence question an institutional form, but it was also entangled with the strategic calculations of a foreign ally.

That experiment was overturned in 1816. Ferdinand united the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily under one crown, assumed the title Ferdinand I, King of the Two Sicilies, and annulled the 1812 constitution. Sicily was treated as a colony and subjected to a harsh tax regime. From December 1816, Neapolitans administered state offices and customs and held military commands; Palermo lost its power and independence, while heavier taxes, restrictions, and constraints on trade compounded the damage. The political loss was thus registered in the daily administration of the island as well as in the abolition of its constitutional settlement.

The Revolution of 1848 and the Independence Project

The revolutions of 1848 reopened the possibility of self-government. In the book’s account, advocates sought to revive the 1812 constitution, and the revolutionary movement proclaimed a Kingdom of Sicily. The effort lacked a secure political center: it could not find a king willing to accept the crown, including the son of Carlo Alberto, Duke of Genoa. Vincenzo Florio tells Giulia that Britain, despite its earlier interest in an independent Sicily, opposed a separation from the Bourbons. He also describes the previous March’s parliamentary elections as a charade that selected four noblemen and wealthy men, leaving the constitutional project without a convincing point of reference.

The movement’s material needs made the independence ideal a practical and perilous commitment. Acting on behalf of the revolutionary committee, Vincenzo bought a large consignment of rifles from England. He feared that he might regret the decision, particularly as Casa Florio’s ships had already been requisitioned and he had effectively been forced to lend to the revolutionary cause. In this episode, the cost of political commitment is measured in commercial assets and obligations: the family’s shipping and credit become bound up with a government whose authority and prospects remain uncertain.

The revolutionary cause then fractured under pressure. With its fate already compromised, a delegation of prominent Palermo citizens met Carlo Filangeri, commander of the Bourbon army, at Caltanissetta and handed over the city’s surrender. The people did not accept that decision. They rose, erected barricades against the city guard, and rejected concessions to the Bourbons; hunger did not overcome their hostility to Neapolitan rule. Their resistance exposed the gap between an elite act of capitulation and the popular desire not to return quietly to Bourbon control.

That resistance was left without effective leadership. The heads of the government fled, including Ruggero Settimo and Giuseppe La Masa, while aristocrats shut themselves away in country villas and courtyards. Palermo was left disordered, starving, exhausted, destroyed, and burning. Vincenzo went to the city hoping that the king, as Filangeri had promised, would grant a general amnesty. The independence struggle had moved from constitutional claims and armed preparations to the immediate risks of a city abandoned by its political leaders.

Defeat, Exile, and Political Survival

The defeat did not end the argument over independence; it changed who could speak for it and at what cost. Pasquale Calvi rejects the noble title addressed to him, insisting on his political convictions rather than aristocratic rank. He describes the movement’s aspiration as a free Sicily, an independent land confederated to Italian states, and condemns the political and aristocratic leaders for failing to believe in that ideal or to arm and fight. With his name on the exile list, he is forced to leave his country and sees that fate as the consequence of others’ fear. His accusation makes exile both a personal punishment and a political consequence of the failed revolution.

Vincenzo answers Calvi by cutting off his proclamations and invoking the possibility that Calvi might otherwise have been imprisoned in Ucciardone fortress. The exchange does not resolve their disagreement: Calvi speaks for the ideal and the sacrifice it demanded, while Vincenzo speaks from a position entangled in the risks and consequences of the revolutionary collapse. The phrase Mors tua vita mea, placed after the confrontation, gives their opposing positions a stark shape: political survival and political defeat have become inseparable.

After 1848, Ferdinand II sought to restore unity in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. He imposed a heavy national debt and suspended the constitution promulgated by the Sicilian Parliament in March 1848. Weary of prolonged instability, people and local administrations accepted the taxes; aristocrats distanced themselves from rebellion, and the uprisings that continued were isolated, chiefly rural, and without real resonance in the cities. British pressure to reduce the taxes and ease repression did little to change the political atmosphere. The return of centralized rule was sustained not only by coercion but also by exhaustion, accommodation, and the withdrawal of powerful local groups from open rebellion.

The Bourbon order remained reactionary and hindered the south’s economic and social progress. When Francesco II succeeded his father in 1859, he inherited a political environment shaped by those tendencies and by an aristocracy protective of its privileges. Yet the patriotic energy of the exiles did not disappear with the defeat. It persisted in writings and political interventions by Giuseppe La Masa, Ruggero Settimo, and Francesco Crispi, a young lawyer from Ribera near Agrigento. Exile displaced the independence cause from the island’s revolutionary institutions into continued advocacy beyond the moment of military defeat.

Significance

Sicilian independence is presented as a recurring collision between a claim to political autonomy and the institutions that repeatedly curtailed it. The 1812 constitution offered a concrete model of reform and limited monarchy; its annulment in 1816 made centralization visible in taxation, customs, military command, and trade. In 1848, the movement again reached for constitutional government, but the absence of a willing king, Britain’s opposition to separation, uncertain parliamentary legitimacy, and the seizure of commercial resources exposed its dependence on unstable alliances and scarce material means.

The narrative also distinguishes popular resistance from the conduct of elites. Palermo’s people reject surrender and build barricades, while government leaders flee and aristocrats retreat behind the walls of their estates. Calvi’s exile accusation gives this contrast a human cost, and Vincenzo’s purchase of rifles shows how political choices could implicate a merchant’s business even when the revolutionary outcome was uncertain. Independence therefore appears not as an abstract slogan alone, but as a contested project whose price was paid in lost autonomy, endangered property, urban devastation, and forced departure—and whose persistence depended on those who continued to write and act for it after defeat.