entry
Jan. 2010
Passanante,
Savoia di Lucania,
Action & Reaction
A modern mural by an unknown artist
of the attempt on the life of Umberto I
There is a long list of heads of state
and members of royalty assassinated by anarchists in the
last half of the 19th century and first years of the
20th century. The list includes Czar Alexander I (1881),
French President Carnot (1894), Empress Elizabeth of
Austria (1898), US president McKinley (1901) and King
Umberto I of Italy (1900). Failed attempts were also
many and included two against the life of Napoleon III
(1855 and 1858) and two earlier attempts against Umberto
I (1878 and 1897). The first of the two failed attempts
against Umberto is the subject of this entry. The
episode involving the would-be assassin, Giovanni
Passanante (also spelled in some sources as Passannante), took
place in Naples and is of extreme interest mainly
because of how the young united Italian state reacted to
an, admittedly, foul deed.
The attempt on
Umberto's life is straight-forward. On November 22, 1878,
the royal family is on a visit to Naples and is proceeding
by open carriage through a throng of, one imagines, mostly
well-wishers. The king and his consort, Queen Margherita,
are accompanied in the coach by Italian prime minister,
Benedetto Cairoli. At a certain point, 28-year-old
Giovanni Passanante, from Salvia (near Potenza) and a cook
by profession, springs onto the step of the carriage and
lunges at the king with a knife. The assailant has
withdrawn the knife from a scarf on which is later found
to be inscribed "Death to the king! Long live the
universal republic," and as he attacks he is heard to
shout "Long live Orsini!" (the assailant in the 1858
attack on Napoleon III). The king is wounded slightly in
the arm and the attacker is restrained by Cairoli and then
knocked to the ground by a sword stroke from a guard on
horseback. The entire affair lasts a few seconds and, as
attempted murders go, winds up as relatively minor affair
—except for the aftermath.
The next day
in Florence an anarchist bomb goes off in a crowd that
has gathered to celebrate the survival of Umberto; four
persons are killed, including a young girl. About a
dozen others are injured. The newspapers scream of the
"anarchist plot." Failed assassin, Passanante, is tortured (!) into a
confession of such a plot, although it later becomes
clear that a plot does not exist and that he has
confessed only to make the pain stop. A few weeks later,
the Cairoli government collapses. The right-wing in the
government demands limitations on freedom of the press
and more control over what should be taught in Italian
schools. The left responds in the words of Minister of
Education, Francesco De Sanctis, who says eloquently: "When
reaction comes calling, it doesn't announce itself by
saying, 'I am reaction.' It says, 'We need
true freedom, but to do this we must reconstitute the
moral order'." A fiery, young poet, Giovanni
Pascoli, then writes an ode to Passanante containing the
lines, "We shall make a flag of the cook's cap!"
Pascoli goes to jail for that but is eventually
released, a far better fate then what happens to
Passanante and, indeed, to his entire family.
Passanante was
held mentally competent to stand trial for the
attempted murder of the king. The trial was in Naples
in March, 1879, and had its moments of high-flying
lawyerese: The prisoner's counsel, one Leopoldo
Tarantini, declared that his client was the victim of
a corrupt state of society, that his mind was
unsettled by the unlimited freedom of speech (!) that
had reached its climax in the Cairoli administration,
and that if his client was given the opportunity to
recognize his error he would be the first to cry "Viva il Re!".
That brought applause from
those in the courtroom, but did not affect the verdict.
Death. Wait! said some nimble legal mind —the death
penalty can be applied only if the king actually dies from an assault. Thus, for better
or worse, Passanante's life was spared and he was
sentenced to life in prison. And it was
worse than death. He was held for three years in an
underground dungeon at Portoferraio on the isle of Elba.
The quarters were too small for him to stand, and there
was no light or toilet; he was held in absolute solitary
confinement with weighted chains on his legs. Even his
guards were under orders not to speak to him when they
brought food. He lived in his own excrement for three
years and simply went insane. Appeals by some
journalists and members of parliament, aghast at the
barbaric treatment, got Passanante moved to an asylum
for the criminally insane, where he lived the rest of
his life. He died in 1910. An ultimate insult was the
decapitation of his corpse so that the head might be
sent to the institute of Cesare
Lombroso where his disciples (Lombroso died in
1909) would try to examine the skull and brain in order
to find the place where anarchy resides. (Let's just say
that criminology has come a long way since 1910.)
Passanante's head would not be reunited with the rest of
his remains until 2007, when they were all interred in
his home town.
Passanante's family —his
76-year-old mother, two brothers and three sisters—
guilty of being related to a would-be regicide, were not
only expelled from their home in Salvia, but they were
imprisoned in the Aversa asylum for the criminally
insane. One brother managed to escape. The others died
in the asylum.
Passanante's home town of
Salvia is not on any map of Italy. You have to look for
Savoia di Lucania. In is near Potenza in the Basilicata
region Italy, a few hours inland and south of Naples on
the modern autostrada
that passes nearby. Within days of the attempted
assassination of the king by one of their townspeople,
the Salvia city council petitioned to change the name of
the town to Savoia in honor of the dynastic name of the
king ('Savoy,' in English); thus, they sought to expunge
the shame brought upon the community by Passanante.
There is currently a small struggle in the town between
those who want to change the name back to Salvia and
those who want retain the name Savoia.
I cannot account for
the discrepancy in the most commonly cited Italian
versions of the fate of Passanante's family and a
report on a visit by king Umberto to the area of
Passanante's hometown shortly after the attempt on his
life.
A report from the New York Times cites an English
source as saying that the king inquired if any members
of Passanante's family still lived in "Salvia"
[although the name of the town would have been changed
by then]. When told that, yes, the aged mother still
lived there and was not well-off, the king arranged to
have 500 lire delivered to her "at her home."
My gut rates that
NYT report at about 2 on a 1-10 scale of plausibility.
It seems to me that Ye Olde Royal Press Corps was
cranking out fodder for the international press in order
to hype the image of the Re Buono —the Good King. (Umberto's
detractors continued to refer to him as the Re Buono a nulla—the
Good-for-Nothing King.) In any event, Umberto stayed out
of the political fracas that followed in the wake of the
attempt on his life; when asked directly about it, he
simply joked that "you have to be careful of cooks."
There is no debate about the treatment of Passanante. He
was, quite bluntly, tortured to death. The Neapolitan
historian and philosopher, Benedetto Croce, said that
even in the most brutal Bourbon prisons of the Kingdom
of Naples before the unification of Italy, prisoners
were allowed to read. That remark was cited from a
reprinted letter-to-the editor in The Daily News
(London) about the general mistreatment of political
prisoners in Italy. The writer says, further, that
"Authority, society, government may have the right to
take the life of a murderer. This is not a question to
be discussed here; it is absolutely certain that
government, society, and authority have no right to
reduce even a murderer by torment to insanity or
idiocy."
sources:
—Fruttero, Carlo and
M. Gramelli. (2010). La Patria, Bene o Male, Mondadori,
Milan, pp.47-48.
—Petacco, Arrigo. (1974). L'anarchico che venne dall'America,
Mondadori, Milan, p.124.
—*NYT. The New York Times,
[1] Jan 19, 1879; [2] March 7, 1881; [3]
Nov. 27, 1898
Of
related interest
The following is excerpted from an article
in the Washington
Post of February 6, 1910:
Many
Prisoners Go
Insane
Solitary
Confinement in an Italian Prison Has Direful
Results.
Life-Termers Prefer Death to Spending Five Years
in Cellular Segregation.
Rome Feb 5 —According to the Italian
penal code which abolished capital punishment, the
first five years of every life sentence are to be
spent in solitary confinement. The prisoner is
left in a cell alone watched day and night lest he
should commit suicide, is not allowed to see any
human being, not even the guards, is not allowed
to talk to himself or read, is fed only a bowl of
vegetable soup and a loaf of bread daily, and
allowed two hours exercise daily in a courtyard
surrounded by high walls. That form of punishment,
which in Italy is considered more humane than a
death penalty invariably leads to insanity and
prisoners serving a life sentence prefer death and
strive to commit suicide before they lose their
reason completely...
There is a special madhouse for criminals at
Montelupo near Florence, and the majority of its
inmates are convicts sentenced to life
imprisonment. Recently, the institution was
visited by a party of medical students who furnish
details about the condition of the two regicides
Accianto and Passanante who are both insane.
Accianto who attempted the life of King Humbert in
1887 believes that he is the King of Italy and
that Victor Emanuel is a usurper. Five years of
solitary confinement made him forget entirely that
he was an anarchist and a sworn enemy to all
Kings. Passanante, who stabbed King Humbert in
1878 has one hand entirely paralyzed and is
afflicted
with imbecility...
Whenever a secret of the criminal madhouse is made
public, Italians realise the cruelty of cellular
segregation and a reform is invoked in parliament.
Deputy Di Nicola has now taken the matter up and
is striving to bring about the abolishment of
cellular segregation which he qualifies as being
even more hateful than the pain of death.
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