RODOLPH, MARCHESE D'AFFLITTO.
ON the last Sunday of the past July, there was a funeral and interment at Naples of a man who has left his mark in recent Italian history, more deeply, perchance, than any politician except Cavoar. "Si monumentum quceris, circum- spice," might be said of him almost as truly as of the builder of St. Paul's Cathedral. Without the aid of special events and circumstances, indeed, Rodolph, Marquis d'Affiitto, de Monte Ealcone, and de Frignano Maggiore, Duke de Castropignano, de eampomele, and d'Apropoli, Prince de Durazzano, Patrician of Amalfi, Grandee of Spain of the First-Class, would never have become what men call him to-day, the Maker of the Neapolitan Revolution. But this is only saying that Revolu- tion itself must have its reasons, and there was no student of history, no observer of the necessary tendencies of political influences, who would at any time during the quarter- century which preceded the expulsion of the Neapolitan Bourbons have hesitated to say that the condition_ of affairs which existed in Neapolitan Italy, as in Papal Italy and Austrian Italy, mast sooner or later, and sooner rather than later, find a peaceful or violent remedy. Rodolph, Marquis d'Affiitto, was one of those observant students, and a foremost of them, who saw that an anachronism must cease to be an anachronism or must die, and who, moreover, succeeded in carrying out in action what he beheld so clearly in prevision.
Rodolph d'Afflitto was not always a Revolutionist, but he was always a Progressist, and revolution is only the forlorn hope of the soldiers of liberty and progress. He ended his days a subject of Victor Emmanuel, but if judicial blindness had not sealed the sight of the heirs of Don Carlos, it was not the fault of the Marquis d'Affiitto that Italian union did not conquer the idea of Italian unity, and Pio Nono's broken dream of a confederation of constitutional Princes bee ome the State system of the Peninsula. Born in 1809; at Ariano, in Apulia, he was still a very young man when he entered the public service as a Referendary of the Consulta, a post obtained not by family influence, but by public competi- tion, to which he remained attached down to the year 1840. In that year his proved abilities led to his promotion to an office of more independence, anzl he successively became Sub- intendant and Intendant at various cities in Sicily and on the mainland, and finally at Naples. He was at Naples when the Revolution of 1848 broke out. During his administrative career he had been brought into close but not corrupting contact with the frightful abuses which were ingrained in the whole system of the Neapolitan Government, and he was now among the leading spirits who hailed with enthusiasm and hope the promise of constitutional freedom, and national independence. When the reciprocal ex- cesses of the revolutionary and reactionary extremes had thrown back the control of affairs into the hands of the par- tisans of the old condemned system, the Marquis d'Affiitto signalised himself by a display of proud and indomitable determination, which was destined to become the turning-point in his whole career. The farce of the petition to King Ferdinand to withdraw the constitution to which he had sworn had been set on foot to cover the monarch's fatal resolution to violate his pledge. The procedure by which the farce was carried on is familiar to timid despotisms. The superior officials especially were in- structed to procure the signatures of their subordinates to the precious document which besought his Majesty, out of consideration for the welfare of his people, and in conformity with the promptings of his royal and paternal heart, to take back those naughty liberties which his erring subjects only knew how to misuse. The pretence that the King was no party to this pitiful device allowed D'Affiitto to make a reply that was at once perfectly respectful towards the royal dig- nity as the royal dignity ought to be, and full of crushing and unanswerable rebuke to the guilty personages, whoever they might be. "It does not belong to me, a subject of my Sovereign," said the Liberal noble, "to give to the King counsels which he does not ask, and above all, to counsel him to commit the perjury which this petition proposes." But Ferdinand II., any more than our own Charles I., was not the monarch to be moved by the remonstrances of a Falkland or a Hampden. Like the obstinate and ill-starred Stuart, the auto- crat of Naples kept his honour to his familiars, and restricted his fidelity to the circle of his family. After a personal inter- view, in which D'Afffitto repeated to his Sovereign the sub- stance of his reply to that Sovereign's agents, the future Presi- dent of the "Committee of Order," which drove Francis II. beyond the Volturno, was informed that sentiments so disloyal could not be tolerated in a public functionary. Rodolph d'Affiitto was dismissed from the public service. It was not in the power of Court or Court sycophants to dismiss him from public life. It should not be forgotten that another distinguished Neapolitan, the Archbishop of Naples, Cardinal Riario Sforza,—the patriot prelate who had given two of his own horses towards the war against Austria—was a com- panion of D'Affiitto in the repudiation of the poor trick of the petition. It was not without warning that the House of Bourbon was running to its doom. Our limits will not allow us to enter into any detailed review of the activity of the Marquis d'Affiitto during the dread pause, the stagnation that was so full of tremendous vitality, which intervened between the events of 1848 and the Franco-Sardinian war against Austria. It must suffice to say that constitutional reform, though not coupled with the expulsion of the House of Bourbon, but only with the expulsion of the German tyrant, the hated Tedesco, continued to be the goal
of all his aspirations and of all his exertions. But constitu- tional reform was as far off as ever, and the Princes of Italy refused to take sides with the nation against the foreigner. Austria, firmly planted in Venetia and Lombardy by that Treaty of Vienna which consecrated so many infamies, had gradually extended her dominions by treaty or encroachment, until Piedmont and Naples alone were outside the circle of her thralls. The Duchies of Central Italy were so many Venetias. Austrian garrisons held the Romagna with as little practical regard for the Papal sovereignty as is now shown by the governors of the King of Italy. From time to time the Pope uttered feeble protests, but when the time for action came, when the time for taking sides came, when the time for death or victory came, the Roman Pontiff was only able to remember that he was the "common father of the faithful," and ordained an absolute neutrality. The common father of the faithful should not have forgotten, if he meant to continue a temporal sovereign as well, that a temporal sovereign has temporal duties, and that the place of an Italian monarch, be he com- mon father of the faithful five hundred times over, was in the front rank of the twenty-five millions of the great, the gifted, the down-trodden, but imperishable Italian people. It was not by irrelevant references to their spiritual office that the mediasval Popes had made themselves the champions of Italian freedom in the long wars against the German Emperors and the French Kings.
A fatalist would say what was to be was to be. The war of 1859 stirred every heart in Italy which could beat for in- dependence. The Peace of Villafranca, which left Austria in the Quadrilateral, that is to say in as strong a position as be- fore, at the same time destroyed the last chances in favour of confederation. A Confederation was not enough of a unity to confront the assault that was certain to be renewed. Of the two independent Italian States, Piedmont had alone raised the national standard, and even Rodolph d'Affiitto saw that Piedmont alone possessed the shadow of a right to keep it. His resolution once taken, his action was direct. When, in the paroxysm of terror superinduced by the Garibaldian invasion, Francis II. condescended to offer the premiership to D'Affiitto, the words of the long-enduring patriot were, "It is too late." D'Affiitto was no friend to the wilder views of Garibaldi, and on this account he was pursued by the bitter hatred of some of the Ultra journals. He was above all things, however, an Italian statesman and administrator, endowed with the Italian political instinct, and as he was neither before nor behind his age, he had the happiness to see the realisation, if not of what he believed to be the best, at least of what he recognised to be the best possible.
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