Revolutions of 1848

The Revolutions of 1848 are presented as an earlier high point in the Italian unification movement and as a political precedent that later generations invoke, distrust, or reinterpret. Rather than narrating the revolutions themselves in detail, the book uses their memory to measure the ambitions of the 1860 upheaval against the older order’s expectation that new political forms may leave social power largely intact.

Place in the Unification Movement

The movement for Italian unification had gathered strength after the Napoleonic Wars, during the Austrian occupation of northern Italy, and had already reached a major crisis in 1848. The book’s historical framing places that earlier culmination within a longer struggle, not as an isolated episode: a decade later, leadership had shifted chiefly to the Kingdom of Sardinia, while the Bourbon government in the south was approaching its end.

That sequence gives 1848 the force of a remembered threshold. The political world described in the novel still bears the marks of dynastic rule, but the movement for unification has already tested its strength once. By 1860, the prospect of another rupture arrives in a Sicily whose governing class has had time to absorb, and to become wary of, the earlier failure or unfinished promise.

A Precedent Recalled by Revolutionaries

The events of 1848 recur as a standard against which revolutionary purpose is judged. At Aspromonte, Colonel Pallavicino distinguishes the volunteers who landed with Giuseppe Garibaldi at Marsala from later followers whom he describes as believing that Italy could be made by repeating 1848. In his account, the earlier precedent belongs to a sincere but potentially misplaced hope: that national unity might be achieved by reviving the methods and expectations of the previous revolutionary wave.

This recollection complicates the meaning of the later national movement. Pallavicino says that Giuseppe Garibaldi understood his intervention at Aspromonte as a means of separating the General from followers whose actions, however generous in intention, threatened the new state. The reference to 1848 therefore marks a fault line between revolutionary aspiration and the political calculations of a kingdom trying to preserve its unity.

The Old Order’s Skeptical View

For Don Fabrizio, the memory of earlier upheaval supports a guarded reading of political change. As he leaves an audience with King Ferdinand, he wonders what will succeed the monarchy and suspects that a Piedmontese government may differ from the Neapolitan one chiefly in its language and capital. His doubt does not establish that the revolutions of 1848 caused the later transfer of power; rather, it shows how an old aristocrat interprets change through the likelihood of continuity.

That skepticism sharpens when Don Fabrizio considers the local liberals’ ambitions. He reads their rise not as a wholesale social transformation but as an effort by new men to take the positions of the old, with limited disruption to established arrangements. The image of political change as a rearrangement of classes, rather than the destruction of hierarchy, makes the earlier revolutionary precedent part of the book’s larger question: whether a national upheaval can alter who governs without changing the habits of rule.

Political Memory and Social Change

The contrast between revolutionary ideals and the practical consolidation of power runs through the later episodes. Don Calogero Sedàra’s growing wealth and political influence, his marriage plans for Angelica, and Don Fabrizio’s proposal that Sedàra be considered for the Senate all show new wealth moving into institutions and alliances previously associated with the aristocracy. Tancredi’s marriage to Angelica further joins old status to new resources; the restoration of Villa Falconeri is overseen by Don Fabrizio and financed by Don Calogero.

The Senate episode makes that transfer explicit. Don Fabrizio refuses the proposed appointment, describing himself as caught between the old world and the new and unable to serve a political order whose effective participants must combine private interests with public ideals. He recommends Don Calogero instead, and the narrative later confirms that Sedàra does enter the Senate. Against this outcome, the Revolutions of 1848 function less as a fully recounted historical event than as a remembered measure of revolutionary expectation: the political landscape changes, while influence passes through accommodation, marriage, money, and office as well as through revolt.