Action Party (Risorgimento)
행동당 (리소르지멘토)
A republican and democratic party founded by Giuseppe Mazzini in 1853 during the Italian unification movement (Risorgimento). It sought unification through popular insurrection, a republic instead of the monarchy and universal instead of restricted suffrage, and backed Garibaldi's expeditions. It opposed the Moderates around Cavour, who were allied with the House of Savoy, but lost the lead of unification to them, and Mazzini dissolved it after the defeat at Mentana in 1867. It is counted as the first organised party in Italian history and is distinct from the party of the same name of 1942–1947.
In depth
Mazzini's party
After the failure of the 1848 revolutions Mazzini's Young Italy became the Italian National Association, which Mazzini refounded as the Action Party in March 1853 with the pamphlet "To the Italians". Although the Milan rising of February that year had failed, he held that the tremor of emancipation had reached the masses and called for repeated armed action by bands to spark a popular insurrection across the peninsula. The Sapri expedition of 1857, in which Carlo Pisacane died, and the risings in Genoa and Livorno all failed.
Against the Moderates
The party supported Garibaldi's expeditions of 1859–1860 and in 1860 financed the creation of the Redshirts. At the same time it opposed the Moderates gathered around the House of Savoy and Cavour, rejecting the royal war, the plebiscites, the annexations and the "Piedmontisation" of Italy, and called for unification by popular insurrection and for universal suffrage. The Mazzinians created the first organisations of the Italian labour movement, workers' associations, mutual aid societies, cooperatives and popular schools, and in 1861 founded the newspaper L'Unità italiana. After the failed attempt to take Rome at Mentana in 1867 Mazzini dissolved the party. Its tradition later inspired the Italian Republican Party and the anti-fascist Action Party founded under the same name in 1942 (1942–1947).
Gramsci's analysis
In his Prison Notebooks Antonio Gramsci treated the Action Party as a key case of the problem of hegemony. In his view it was in fact led "indirectly" by Cavour and the King, and the Moderates continued to lead it even after 1870 and 1876. Unlike the French Jacobins, who drew in the peasants with an agrarian policy and so joined town and country, the Action Party failed to take up popular demands such as the land question in its programme and never joined with the peasant masses.