Annexation of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies

The annexation of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies appears in the novel not as a clean transfer of allegiance but as a contested political birth. At Donnafugata, a plebiscite publicly authorizes union with the Kingdom of Sardinia; its official figures announce unanimity, while the events around the vote disclose that dissent has been removed from the record. For Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, the national change is real, but the ceremony that should establish its legitimacy also marks the death of good faith.

Background and the transfer of power

The transition follows Giuseppe Garibaldi’s landing at Marsala and the upheavals that have begun without the old governing class being consulted. In a later conversation with Cavaliere Aimone Chevalley di Monterzuolo, Don Fabrizio describes the new government’s request that he serve as a senator. He distinguishes between supporting the emerging Italian state and participating in its work: the first may be necessary, he tells Chevalley, but he will not lend his authority to changes already made without Sicilian consent. He regards much of what has been done as harmful, yet his refusal is not a defence of a simple return to the old order. He sees himself as belonging to a generation caught between two political worlds and unable to guide either with conviction.

His distrust of political succession has an earlier counterpart in his dealings with the Bourbon monarchy. Recalling audiences granted by Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies, he remembers the contrast between elaborate royal surroundings and the administrative congestion behind them. The King moves from familiar attention to questions about political opinion in Sicily, and Don Fabrizio avoids acting as an informant about the Lieutenant-General. Leaving the audience, he wonders whether a successor government from Turin would differ in substance from the Neapolitan monarchy or merely replace its dialect and personnel. The annexation therefore arrives amid his suspicion that a change of rulers may leave the underlying distribution of power largely intact.

The new authorities nevertheless offer a different institutional promise. Chevalley presents the Senate as a chamber that would examine and debate laws, and as a place where Sicily could be represented alongside other parts of the Kingdom. Don Fabrizio understands that the invitation carries symbolic weight as well as public duties. His later refusal makes the annexation’s tension explicit: the new state seeks legitimacy and expertise from the old elite even as its transformation has proceeded without that elite’s participation.

The plebiscite at Donnafugata

Before voting, Don Fabrizio had urged people who came to him for advice to vote yes. He believed there was little practical alternative, whether the vote was treated as a theatrical confirmation of an accomplished change or as a necessary step toward a new national reality. Yet he did not believe the apparent consensus would be complete. From those who consulted him, and from the larger body of electors who had not visited the palace, he estimated that about forty votes would be negative.

The voting day is marked by a grey, windy atmosphere and competing displays of political feeling. Young men move through the town with yes papers attached to their hats, while visitors from Girgenti speak of Sicily’s progressive future to peasants who listen in silence. Don Fabrizio goes to the Town Hall in the company of Father Pirrone and Don Onofrio Rotolo. The Prince submits a yes vote to Don Calogero Sedàra; Father Pirrone does not vote because he has not registered as a resident, while Don Onofrio casts his vote at the Prince’s request. The sequence places the Prince’s own public assent beside the private misgivings he has already sensed among the townspeople.

Women are excluded from voting. Several appear in the square wearing tricolour ribbons to protest that exclusion, but they are jeered at and forced away. Four days later, a newspaper in Palermo presents the incident as a demonstration of patriotic enthusiasm greeted with public acclaim. The contrast between what happens in the square and what the report claims anticipates the larger falsification of the plebiscite: political appearances are made to stand in for the voices and choices that the process has suppressed.

That night, Don Calogero appears at the Town Hall balcony and announces the official return: 515 voters, 512 voting, 512 yes votes, and no votes recorded. The announcement is followed by applause, speeches, and fireworks; Angelica Sedàra claps from her balcony. The celebration lasts only a short time, and the town is soon dark again. The figures give the new national order an image of complete consent, but the vote’s silence is not evidence that dissent was absent.

The erased vote and the cost of unanimity

After the announcement, Don Ciccio Tumeo tells Don Fabrizio that he voted no. He explains that the Town Hall’s officials swallowed his opinion and recorded its opposite, making it appear that he had never expressed a choice. His protest resolves the Prince’s uncertainty about the unexpectedly unanimous tally. The official count does not merely differ from Don Fabrizio’s estimate; it excludes the dissent he had expected and converts a real vote into its contrary.

Don Fabrizio’s response is recognition rather than surprise at the political outcome. He concludes that what has been killed in Donnafugata, and in other places that night, is good faith: the confidence that a person’s declared will will remain their own in the public record. The distinction matters to him even though the negative votes would not have changed the result. In his view, counting them honestly could have made the victory more meaningful while avoiding the injury inflicted by pretending that opposition did not exist.

The episode also sets two forms of pressure against one another. Don Fabrizio recalls the former regime’s blunt threats, but imagines them giving way to a smoother demand backed by obligations and paperwork: people may be told that they agreed because the documents say so. The change in political language does not, in his judgment, ensure that ordinary people gain control over their choices. Don Ciccio’s account makes that danger concrete. His vote is erased, while Don Calogero, whom Don Fabrizio associates with a rising and influential class, stands at the centre of the official announcement.

Annexation and its aftermath

Don Fabrizio sees the result as the birth of Italy in a small, overlooked town, as much as in Palermo or Naples. He does not reject the new state outright; he hopes it will endure, because he believes any alternative may be worse. But the public celebration cannot settle the private unease left by the vote. The annexation is both a historical solution and a moral loss, its national promise accompanied by the destruction of trust in the procedure that expresses it.

The subsequent Senate proposal extends that contradiction. Chevalley presents Don Fabrizio as a candidate whose antiquity, scientific reputation, and conduct during recent events could lend distinction to the new institutions. Don Fabrizio declines. He says that his connection to the Bourbon regime and his lack of faith in his own ability to guide others make him unsuitable; the Senate, he argues, needs younger men able to work within the new order. He recommends Don Calogero instead, identifying his practical power and political usefulness as better suited to the role. The recommendation links the local plebiscite to the national redistribution of influence: the old aristocrat withdraws, while the rising local notable is advanced as a representative of the new Italy.

The annexation thus changes the state without resolving Don Fabrizio’s deeper doubts about Sicily’s relation to power. His account to Chevalley describes a long history of rule by outsiders and a society in which doing, rather than merely doing something badly, provokes resistance. The plebiscite gives that diagnosis a public form: the nation is declared through a modern vote, yet one recorded choice is reversed and women’s protest is excluded. Its decisive consequence is not simply that the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies is joined to a new political order, but that the official account of consent begins by denying the limits of its own unanimity.