Il patriottismo di guerra napoletano, 1861-1866

Abstract

The war of ideas of Bourbon Legitimism was fought between 1861 and 1866, by Neapolitan writers and polemicists who worked out a mystical elaboration of duo-Sicilian resistance and, simultaneously, an innovative representation of lost Nation, during the final crisis of the reign. The authors have modified their patriotic identity to get a desperate revenge, completely failed from the political and military point of view, but able to offer to fighters, polemicists, exiles the awareness of the dramatic battle for the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty and the independence of the Reign. The war of ideas was closely connected to the experience of defeat, to the armed resistance and to his memory. Neapolitan resistance had produced a harsh and mobilizing rhetoric. Books, pamphlets, documents, posters, proclamations were marked by their categorical imperatives of a state of war. The study of the war of ideas offers this perspective, analysing the theoretical and intellectual tools that legitimists used to justify the resistance to the new State, producing an original culture of the vanquished and a new Bourbon patriotic identity: different from the old «historical and political personalities» that was among the founding reasons of the Kingdom of Naples.