1860 Italian plebiscites

The 1860 Italian plebiscites were the formal popular endorsement of political unification, but their meaning in the account of Donnafugata is inseparable from the question of whether a vote can represent its electorate when dissent is expected, discouraged, or erased. The nationwide result helped authorize a new kingdom; the local tally of unanimous support instead exposes the difference between official consent and the opinions people actually held.

Background and national purpose

The votes followed the Risorgimento, the movement to unify the Italian peninsula. In 1860, after Giuseppe Garibaldi’s campaign in Sicily and southern Italy, plebiscites were held across the peninsula. Every state agreed to join the new kingdom except the Papal States, which remained outside it under the occupation of troops sent by Napoleon III, shaped by internal French politics. The votes thus gave the unification project a public, formal expression while leaving a significant political exception unresolved.

The revolutionary phase did not end without further conflict. In 1862 Giuseppe Garibaldi tried to force the issue of Rome by marching toward it, but his men were routed by Piedmontese troops on the slopes of Aspromonte in Calabria, and he was wounded. The action ended the revolutionary phase of the Risorgimento; Rome was declared the capital of Italy in 1870. The sequence places the plebiscites within a longer transition in which popular authorization, military force, and state consolidation all shaped unification.

The vote at Donnafugata

In Donnafugata, Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, entered the plebiscite with misgivings but had advised those who sought his counsel to vote yes. He considered acceptance of the new national reality necessary, and feared that a negative vote might bring difficulties to the people who cast it. Yet the consultations had not persuaded everyone. From the opinions he heard, and from his sense that many electors had never come to the palace, he estimated that about forty voters in the small electorate would vote no.

The voting day offered public signs of a campaign but little evidence that the residents’ views were being openly aired. Groups of youths circulated with yes papers in their hats. Visitors from Girgenti spoke in the tavern about the progressive future of a Sicily united with Italy, while peasants listened in silence. Don Fabrizio went to the Town Hall with Father Pirrone and Don Onofrio Rotolo. He cast a yes vote; Father Pirrone did not vote, having avoided registration as a resident, and Don Onofrio gave the affirmative answer Don Fabrizio had expressly asked of him.

That evening Don Calogero Sedàra announced the official figures from the Town Hall balcony: 515 voters, 512 voting, 512 yes votes, and no votes. The report presented complete agreement among those recorded as voting. It sharply contradicted Don Fabrizio’s expectation of roughly forty negative votes and left the apparent unanimity in need of explanation. The celebratory announcement and its formal numbers did not, by themselves, establish that every voter had freely supported annexation.

Dissent and the official record

Don Ciccio Tumeo later told Don Fabrizio that he had voted no, and that his opinion had been changed in the Town Hall tally. He objected not only to the falsification but to being treated as though his political judgment did not exist. His account turned the zero recorded no votes from a sign of unanimity into evidence that the count had excluded dissent. Don Fabrizio, who had himself urged a yes vote, now understood that the issue was not simply whether the new state would prevail: an individual vote could have been recorded honestly without changing the overall result.

The official presentation also obscured who could participate. Before the tally was announced, several women appeared in the square wearing tricolour ribbons to protest their exclusion from voting. They were jeered at and driven away. Four days later, a newspaper account represented the women as demonstrating their faith in the new national future amid patriotic acclamation. The discrepancy shows how the public story of the plebiscite could turn both exclusion and protest into evidence for a consensual national celebration.

Political meaning and aftermath

For Don Fabrizio, the suppressed no vote clarified the moral cost of the plebiscite. He saw the immediate injury not as a change in the balance of power, since the dissenting votes would not have prevented the result, but as the destruction of good faith: the new political order had begun by denying people an honest account of their own choices. The scene contrasts the old regime’s overt command with a newer form of pressure that could present compliance as a choice already made by the person affected.

The contrast also gives the plebiscites their significance in the novel’s account of social change. Don Fabrizio’s family and political world were already encountering the rise of new power, including Don Calogero’s influence and the changes he associated with the revolution. The vote makes that transition concrete: a new national legitimacy is announced through popular numbers, while the local count conceals disagreement and women remain outside the electorate. Unification advances, but the spectacle of unanimous consent cannot erase the unequal conditions under which it was produced.