Cuoco was caught
up in the spirit and times of late 18th–century Europe:
Enlightenment and Revolution. He was part of the
Neapolitan Enlightenment and part of the revolution that
gave birth to the Neapolitan
Republic of 1799. The Bourbons overthrew the
Republic after a few short months and punished Cuoco by
confiscating his property and sentencing him to 20 years
of exile. Then, when the French
took over the Kingdom of Naples in 1806, he
returned home and took an active part in the 10-year
French rule in Naples. At the second return of the
Bourbons in 1815, he was permitted to stay in Naples,
where he died in 1823, clouded by mental illness. At
least, the Bourbons had spared Cuoco's life in 1799, and
he lived to write the works he is remembered for.
The best known one
is Saggio Storico sulla Rivoluzione Napoletana nel
1799 (History of the Neapolitan Revolution of
1799). He published it anonymously in 1801 and under his
own name in 1806; it is the seminal work for those
interested in that episode of history and, though his
view is not the only one on why the revolution failed,
Cuoco is the first to deal with that question:
Since our revolution was a passive one, the only way for it to be successful would have been to gain the opinion of the people. But the view of the patriots was not the same as that of the people; they had different ideas, different customs, and even two different languages. The very same admiration for things foreign, which held back our culture as a kingdom, formed the basis for our republic and was the greatest obstacle to the establishment of liberty. The Neapolitan nation was split in two, separated over two centuries into two very different kinds of people. The educated classes were formed on foreign models and possessed a culture quite different from one that the nation needed, one that could come about only through the development of our own faculties. Some had become French, and some English; and those that stayed Neapolitan—most of the people—stayed uneducated.
[From Saggio Storico sulla Rivoluzione Napoletana nel 1799. The translation is mine.]
A lesser–known work,
the one I quote at the beginning of this entry, is Platone
in Italia (Plato in Italy), a bit of historical
fiction in which Cuoco claims to be merely translating a
manuscript written by Plato, himself. Of course, no one
believed that, and Cuoco knew that no one believed that,
but it gave him a vehicle for his ideas on just what was
wrong with society and how it could be remedied.
Platone in Italia
is a series of dialogues between Plato and his disciples
set in Italy during Plato's lifetime—that is,
approximately 400 b.c. Cuoco—speaking as Plato—reveals
his fascination with the ancient pre-Roman peoples of
Italy, especially the Etruscans and the Samnites, two
cultures older than Greece and which—much more so than
Greece—should serve as a model for modern Italy. Italy
really had nothing to thank the Greeks for, since the
Italic cultures were older than that of Classical
Greece. Modern Italians (meaning in the early 19th
century, when Cuoco was writing) had nothing to fear
from the ideas of confederation (like the Etruscans) or
a non-feudal system of land management—small farms owned
and worked by the citizenry (like the Samnites). After
all, none of this, says Plato/Cuoco, is new and
revolutionary; it goes way back to our own Italic roots.
The book is
actually amusing in that it has Plato sounding off on
various occasions about how backwards "we Greeks" really
are compared to the older and wiser peoples of Italy.
Cuoco, of course, is throwing this in the face of the
cliché that Italy (meaning the Romans) became educated
only after they had conquered Greece and absorbed some
wisdom. Platone in Italia did very well for a
number of years, perhaps in the afterglow of the French
Revolution, but it then drifted into obscurity. I was
reminded of all this when I passed the Vincenzo Cuoco
Liceo the other day. He might be happy to know that two
centuries later, there is a high school in Naples named
for him.
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