Antonio
Capece Minutolo,
founder of the Calderai.
"A
surging, seething, murmuring crowd of beings that are
human only in name,
for to the eye and ear they seem naught but savage
creatures,
animated by vile passions and
by the lust of vengeance and of hate."
Ah!
—the opening lines from Baroness Orczy's tale of
heroic English aristocrat Sir Percy Blakeney, a rich and
useless feather-head during the day, but who ventures
forth at night to cross the Channel and save innocent
bluebloods from the French Revolution and Lady
Guillotine. The only ones to know his true identity are
members of his secret society, the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel.
(If that sounds like Batman —what can I say? The book is
from 1905 and is often cited as the forerunner of modern
"masked avenger"-type fiction: Zorro, Batman, The Lone
Ranger, etc.)
Secret Societies. What follows is not about
secret societies. I know nothing, for example, about
Freemasonry, other than that 15 Freemasons control the
world from their secret mountain cave high in the
Himalayas, Andes, or Alps (no one knows). Their cave is
next to another cave where 15 Jewish bankers control the
world and just down the pike from a small lodge where 15
Illuminati
control the world. All have secret handshakes and
decoder rings, and they know who really killed JFK. On
weekends they gather for brewskis and to write next
week's episode of that piece of TV drivel called Alias.
This is not even about the most famous secret
society on the Italian peninsula of the early 1800s, the
Carbonari,
the revolutionary forerunner of the Italian risorgimento
and the stalking horse for the "-isms" that characterize
the nineteenth century: egalitarianism, republicanism,
socialism, and communism. What follows is about other
secret societies in southern Italy in the few years
following the Congress of Vienna, which in 1815 restored
"legitimate" power in Europe after Napoleon was done.
In southern Italy, in spite of the historical
claim to legitimacy of the restored Bourbon monarchy, the restored
noble classes were well aware of the schemings of
revolutionary and liberal secret societies such as the Carbonari and set
out to combat them with their own counter-revolutionary
secret societies —real life versions of the Scarlet
Pimpernel, defenders of the old order of nations based
on crowned heads and Church. There were three prominent
anti-liberal secret societies: the Concistoriali, the Sanfedisti,
and the Calderai.
The Concistoriali. Named for "consistory,"
the ecclesiastical senate in Roman Catholicism, in which
the Pope presides over the body of cardinals and
deliberates the affairs of the church. The society was
powerful and, as the name indicates, involved a number
of Catholic clergy, who, if not members themselves, at
least knew of the society and protected it. Some sources
claim that even Pope Pius VII was involved with the
group, and perhaps even Victor Emanuel I, the father of
the future first king of united Italy. The group was
founded in 1815 in the Vatican States. Besides combating
pan-Italian liberalism, the group was specifically
concerned with how the Italian peninsula was to remain
divided —that is, what monarchs would get what
territory. For example, it favored expanding the Vatican
States to include Tuscany.
The Sanfedisti
were named for Cardinal Ruffo's
Army of the Holy Faith, which retook the Kingdom of
Naples from republican forces in 1799. The society was
founded in 1818 and operated freely in the regions of
Romagna and The Marches until as late as 1850. If one
believes their own propaganda, the Sanfedisti were a
particularly bloodthirsty group of
counter-revolutionaries. They urged (in one of their
pamphlets) "killing all who are even suspected of
sympathy towards the infamous sect of liberalism,
without regard to their origins, nation, sex, rank,
fortune or faith, and without pity even in the face of
the cries of infants and the pleas of the aged." (If you
substitute "aristocratism" for "liberalism," that sounds
an awful lot like the Reign of Terror following the
French Revolution. Masked Avenging with a vengeance, I
suppose, but not exactly the Scarlet Pimpernel.)
The Calderai
(Boiler Makers) was a group founded by Antonio Capece Minutolo,
Duke of Canosa and member of the royal government of the
Kingdom of Naples before it was overthrown by the
republicans and the French in 1799. His was one of the
oldest noble families in the kingdom. He was a true
aristocrat, one of those who formed what was called in
France the "second estate," an intermediate noble class
that (potentially) served to curb absolutism on the part
of the monarch. As such, Minutolo did not follow his
king into exile in 1799, but stayed behind and tried to
broker a deal with the French to set up an ill-defined
"aristocratic republic." For his efforts, he was
sentenced to five years in prison for insubordination by
the Bourbons when they returned a few months later. He
was released early and found favor once again with his
King, Ferdinand I, and was made governor of the islands
of Ponza, Ventotene and Capri. When the French invaded
again in 1806 he directed anti-French resistance against
the decade-long Bonapartist kingdom of Murat.
After the second restoration (1815),
Minutolo became the chief of police for the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies,
an extremely powerful position. He then founded his Calderai. The name
is said to derive from the fact that a large number of
boiler-makers from Palermo (who had fled the island of
Sicily for Naples) were members, using as their symbol a
boiler shown burning charcoal (carbone). The Carbonari (charcoal
makers), of course, were on the other side of the
ideological divide, so "burning charcoal" for both
groups can be read as a symbol for "destroying the
enemy." Minutolo filled the group —according to his
detractors— with the dregs of prison, released for the
express purpose of continuing their murderous ways in
the name of an ideology —protecting "legitimism", the
monarch, and the church. Minutolo went to great ends to
deny that accusation in a book he wrote in 1836, shortly
before his death. It is true, however, that the
society was so violent that even the Bourbon monarch
outlawed it and dismissed Minutolo as police chief in
1821.
In fairness, Minutolo was an educated and
eloquent spokesman for the old order. He wrote
passionately on what he felt was the decadence of the
monarchy due to absolutism, a tendency that was
destroying the traditional relationships of monarchy,
aristocracy, nation and church. And he was not a
hypocrite; he put his own fortune into organizing
resistance against liberalism and the two French
invasions of Naples. He was a master propagandist and
urged the use of satire as a tool against liberalism. He
was the author of an anti-liberal play entitled The Isle of Thieves, or
The Savage Constitution. He died in 1838. By
that time, the last successful stand of absolutism in
Italy —the suppression of the revolutions of 1848— was
still a bit in the future, but Minutolo no doubt saw the
handwriting on the wall. The only societies with a
future were the revolutionary ones, those advocating a
united Italy, and they would not remain secret much
longer.
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