Antonio Mordini

Antonio Mordini (Barga, 31 May 1819 – Montecatini, 14 July 1902) was a longstanding Italian patriot and, after 1861, a member of the Parliament of the Kingdom of Italy. In 1869, he served as Minister of Public Works of the Kingdom of Italy, a member of the third Menabrea government.

Biography Provenance and early years Antonio Mordini was born overnight on 31 May / 1 June 1819 at Barga, a long established hill town north of Lucca in northern Tuscany, where his father served for a number of years as "Podestà" (leader of the municipal government). A scion of the aristocratic Mordini family, his early education, provided by private tutors under the direction of his father, had a strongly conservative and religious character, He emerged four years later with a degree "in utroque iure" (in both civil and church law). In 1838, he teamed up with a number of other young lawyers, including Robustiano Morosoli to form a "philonomic" legal partnership. In the increasingly animated political and cultural spirit of Pisa at that time, Mordini was drawn to the re-emerging democratic and republican ideas that would ignite the 1848 uprisings across Italy. In 1843, Mordini, relocated to Florence the intellectual and political centre of the Grand Duchy. In September 1847, the Grand Duke was persuaded to create a National Guard ("Guardia Civica"), and Antonio Mordini immediately enlisted. On 20 December 1847, he was elected to the rank of captain within it. It was a sign of the times that on the very same day Giuseppe Mordini, his father, joined Tuscany's National Guard with the same rank. The legion consisted principally of university students, most of them from Padua, but numbers were subsequently greatly increased by democrat-republican volunteers from other universities, most notably Rome and Bologna. A few weeks later Mordini was appointed Captain Instructor with the legion. In Venice, he was a founder member of the "Circolo italiano" and was committed to republican ideals and the necessity of sustaining the war against Austria in order that Lombardy–Venetia might become the embryo from which a liberal and democratic unified Italian state might develop. Inspired by Giuseppe Mazzini, the circle drew moral sustenance from Giuseppe Mazzini and from the political slogans of the time such as "People's War" ("Guerra di popolo") and "Italian constitution ("Costituente italiana"). In the context of the political and military situation in northern Italy during the weeks following the Armistice of Salasco, the circle's ambitions can be seen as, at best, optimistic. They were nevertheless widely shared in Venice. On 1 October 1848, Antonio Mordini and Giuseppe Revere joined to draft a document, intended for circulation throughout Italy, which was highly critical of Daniele Manin, the de facto head of government in the Republic of San Marco. The paper accused Manin of having frittered away the revolutionary momentum of the previous months, and of not having been effective in combatting government corruption. Leopold hoped that Montanelli, who was known to be popular with the protesters on the street, might be able to use his influence to calm the situation. Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi, appointed Minister for the Interior, quickly emerged as the most important member of the government. Mordini, meanwhile, became a leading member of the so-called "Popular Circle" ("Circolo popolare"), of which shortly afterwards he assumed the presidency. He closely followed political developments in Piedmont to the north and in the newly established Roman Republic to the south. He urged that Grand Duke Leopold should send a delegation of deputies to the Roman Congress convened on 5 February 1849. He believed that the presence of deputies from Tuscany could transform the Roman congress into a national Italian congress, especially once-revolutionary governments from Sicily and Venice had also seen the direction of travel and determined to send their own deputies. Mordini's was a characteristically ambitious vision, which some might have thought fanciful, but with continuing pressure on the streets for "independence" and "republican democracy", the vision was powerful enough to alarm the Grand Duke. During January 1849, Mordini's vision turned up as a parliamentary bill, accepted by the Montanelli-Guerrazzi government, and sent to Leopold for his signature. Leopold, who on 30 January 1849, had unexpectedly relocated his court to Siena, refused to sign the bill into law. Instead, overnight on 7/8 February, he fled Siena and headed for Porto Santo Stefano on the coast. On 21 February 1849, he embarked for Gaeta where he arrived on 23 February 1849. Here, under the protection of King Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies, he evidently felt himself sufficiently distanced from the turmoil on the streets of Florence.

Minister The constitutional position for a Grand Duchy without a constitution in which the Grand Duke had gone missing being far from clear, Giuseppe Montanelli and Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi formed a provisional government together with the law professor (and committed democrat) Giuseppe Mazzoni. Antonio Mordini, after entrusting "La Constituente" to the editorship of Leonida Biscardi, accepted an invitation from the triumvirate to join the government as Minister for Foreign Affairs. This was the best opportunity he would get to try and make a reality of his vision for a united independent Italian republic. On 13 February 1849, following the resignation of Mariano d'Ayala, responsibility for the Ministry for War was added to Mordini's portfolio. and was openly critical of the position taken by Mazzini in respect of it. In military terms, it was a less uneven contest than might have been anticipated, since the Sardinian-Piedmontese army was joined by a well-equipped French army of approximately 170,000. In the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, this development was greeted with enthusiasm by republican and democratic activists impatient for a lifting of the burden of Austrian "influence". The Grand Duke's government was unable to prevent numbers of young Tuscan volunteers from heading north to join the Franco-Piedmontese forces. Leopold II came under seemingly irresistible pressure for Tuscany to join the war alongside the armies of the Sardinian-Piedmontese and their French allies. After several days of dithering, the Grand Duke complied with the growing demands on the city streets and on 27 April 1859, abdicated in favour of his son. In reality, father and son both fled to Austria, leaving Tuscany administered by another provisional government, this time under the leadership of Ubaldino Peruzzi, Vincenzo Malenchini and Alessandro Danzini. On 3 May 1859 the provisional government revoked Mordini's exile, opening the way for him to return to the family home at Barga. He was still arguing in favour of such a development as a member of the "Tuscan Assembly", to which he was elected in August 1859, urging that diplomatic procrastination be set aside and that the Assembly itself might decide the matter. In the end, the annexation of Tuscany to the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont was deferred till the next year, taking place at the same time as the annexation of other parts of central Italy, and only with the backing of a referendum, which was held on 12 March 1860. After that, in the election of (in Tuscany) 25 and 29 March 1860, he was elected to parliament by the voters of the electoral college for Borgo a Mozzano. He was also an admirer of Mordini's skills as a political operator. The conquest of Sicily was accomplished during the summer. On 20 June 1860, Garibaldi promoted Mordini to rank of lieutenant colonel and appointed him the presidency of the "War Council" ("Tribunale militare" or, sometimes, "Consiglio di guerra"), based in Palermo. Further promotion followed. On 3 September 1860, he was appointed "auditore generale militare" (loosely, "army auditor general") which came with membership of Garibaldi's "general staff" team.

The Sardinia-Piedmont government leader Cavour was impatient for the immediate incorporation of Sicily into a united Italy. Giuseppe Garibaldi was as committed to Italian unification as anyone, but his republican ideals were far removed from Cavour's pragmatic statist vision. His instinctive mistrust of the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont had been confirmed and intensified by the sacrifice of Nice/Nizza. He felt no urgent need to follow Cavour's choreography. In strategic terms, there are suggestions that he may have sensed that by taking a few more months to consolidate his hold on the southern end of the Italian peninsular, he might find a way to open up opportunities to conquer Rome and the Papal States from the south. Pressure for progress came not just from Cavour, however. Popular pressure for unification with the rest of Italy was widespread across Sicily itself. Mordini accordingly came up with a plan to convene an elected Sicilian assembly, which would be tasked with discussing conditions for such an annexation, including the harmonisation of Sicilian laws with the "Statuto albertino" (constitution) of Sardinia-Piedmont (on which the constitution of Italy would be based). Elections were set for 1 October 1860. The plan became impractical shortly afterwards because of a decision by Giorgio Pallavicino, the "prodittatore" in Naples (and an appointee of Cavour's) to announce a unification plebiscite for 21 October 1860. Garibaldi and Mordini found themselves unable to resist the pressures to follow suit in respect of Sicily.

On 19 October 1860, two days before the plebiscite, he nevertheless implemented a suggestion from his friend, the liberal historian Michele Amari and appointed a Council of State, comprising 38 members, and chaired by Gregorio Ugdulena. A few days later the Council convened in the aftermath of the plebiscite and drafted a report to be sent to the future National Parliament. In it they advocated a decentralised structure for the Italian state that would ensure a powerful measure of regional political and administrative autonomy for Sicily, together with the safeguarding of Sicilian traditions more broadly. He would continue to sit as a member of the Chamber of Deputies (lower house of parliament) without a break until 1895. He is identified in some sources between 1861 and 1867 as a parliamentarian from the "extreme left", though there are indications that by 1861, his "extremist" tendencies were already rather less on show than they had been before unification.

The first and probably most significant indication that Mordini had come to see himself as a force for moderation came in August 1862, when he teamed up with fellow parliamentarians Nicola Fabrizi and Salvatore Calvino, to make the trip to Sicily in order to dissuade Garibaldi from setting out on his ill-fated "liberation expedition" towards Rome. The intention, on the part of the passionately anti-papal Garibaldi, was to drive the pope from Rome, but Garibaldi and his men would be intercepted in Calabria, and never came close to Rome. Mordini failed to dissuade Garibaldi from setting out. Furthermore, he was himself suspected of being caught up in his charismatic former comrade's "mischief making". On 27 August 1862, Mordini and the other two members of his three-man parliamentary delegation were arrested in Naples. The three of them were incarcerated in the Castel dell'Ovo for more than six weeks, released only in the context of a wider amnesty granted by the king to Garibaldi and his companions in respect of the failed "liberation expedition".

The following November, addressing the Chamber of Deputies, Mordini denounced government prevarication in an effective speech which contributed to the fall of the Rattazzi government. There was no indication of any change to his now unwavering faith in Italy's constitutional monarchy, and there was no departure from his continuing belief in the possibility of a closer co-operation between Garibaldi and the king. It was precisely this which led him, during 1863 and 1864, to weave a network of connections with a number of Hungarian and Polish expatriates, and to support the insurrection that broke out in Poland in January 1863. In Mordini's judgement, the conditions were ripe for a successful intervention by another Garibaldi-led volunteer army. He saw a possibility the a successful insurrection in Poland could lead to further territorial losses by the hated Austrian empire involving Hungary and - of particular significance to Italian nationalists - the Veneto region which, despite its Mediterranean history and heritage, remained under Austrian control till 1866. These machinations and hopes turned out to be all in vain. They became intertwined with Mordini's attempts to persuade Garibaldi to accept the leadership of a political party with a "constitutional democratic stamp": he pursued his ideas with Garibaldi in April 1864, during a triumphal visit the men undertook to London (where Italian unification was viewed as a matter for much celebration by the political class, and Garibaldi enjoyed hero status).

During the later 1860s, as the idea of an informal "third party" finally took shape (albeit only as a parliamentary grouping of members from several different moderate parties: never with any organisational structure), Mordini was widely acknowledged as the group's leader. His name began to be discussed in the context of possible ministerial appointments. The hypothesis became reality on 13 May 1869, when he was appointed Minister for Public Works in a new government established under the leadership of Luigi Federico Menabrea. However, the government fell on 11 December 1869, before Mordini had had time to implement any memorable policy initiatives as a government minister. Two years later, on 28 November 1871, as a vice-president of the chamber, it was to Antonio Mordini that the honour fell of presiding over the first session to be held following the transfer of the parliament to Rome, which had become the capital of Italy early in February of that year.

Later years By 1872, Antonio Mordini was for most purposes aligned with the political right. On 11 August of that year, he was appointed prefect for Naples. He continued to serve as a member of the Chamber of Deputies without a break through this decade and the next. The election of October/November 1882, left the centre-left groupings still in the majority. The voting age and taxable income voting requirement had both been substantially lowered, so that the number of voters had increased from just over 620,000 in 1880 to just over 2,000,000 in 1882. Mordini initially retreated into opposition from the political right, but subsequently mellowed a little in his attitudes, as he recognised something of his own earlier centrist ambitions in the moves towards constructive parliamentary collaboration - sometimes termed the "Trasformismo" movement - negotiated between Depretis and the economist-statesman Marco Minghetti of the moderate right. During the later 1880s, he gradually distanced himself from the daily grind of active politics. In 1884, he turned down an offer from Depretis that he should take on the presidency (or 'speakership') of the Chamber of Deputies. In 1890, he was offered the job of foreign minister by Francesco Crispi but turned it down. He turned the same offer down again the next year when, in the context of intensifying political crisis, Crispi repeated it. a parliamentary commission set up to investigate the Banca Romana scandal. The resulting report, which Mordihi drafted, was highly critical of the roles played by a number of leading left-wing politicians, including Crispi himself.

Honors Knight of the Grand Cross decorated with the Great Cordon of the Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus Knight of the Grand Cross decorated with the Great Cordon of the Order of the Crown of Italy Knight of the Order of the White Eagle (Empire of Russia)