Blood of Patriots & Tyrants

ORSINI: TKE STORY OF A CONSPIRATOR (313 pp.)--Michael St. John Packet-title, Brown ($5).

The modern tourist, wandering through a united Italy with camera and sunglasses, rarely remembers how dark the dismembered peninsula looked to sightseers a century ago. Regarding the Papal States, where the study of political economy was banned as strictly as "free trade, vaccination, railways, gas power and light, the telegraph." Thomas Macauley pronounced the verdict: "[They] are, I suppose, the worst governed in the civilized world." In like condition were Piedmont ("a complete military despotism") and Modena, whose duke governed by the axiom: "God has made Hell, and the godliest prince is he who makes the hangman his Prime Minister."

This wretched, suffering Italy, much of it under foreign rule, was united in one respect alone--each state bred its quota of fanatics, nationalist revolutionaries and assassins. Felice Orsini (born in 1819) was a blend of all three, and British Historian Packe has chosen him as the central figure in what is not so much a biography as a first-rate history of the 19th century Italian struggle for liberty and unity.

With Chains. Felice Orsini* was initiated into his career at the age of nine, when his father took him to the opera for the first time. Lost in the wonder of it all, the little boy hardly heard at first a "scuffling and clattering of chains" nearby. Then he looked and saw his father and a friend being dragged off, with fetters hanging from their wrists. "His mother rose, tightlipped, white of face, hustling her children out. To their frightened questions and their tears she gave a single bitter answer. It was for political reasons, they must understand."

Felice Orsini understood. At school he became a liberal, sporting the red-white-green colors that today compose the flag of Italy. He bought a rusty old pistol; loading it one day for surreptitious target practice, he fatally wounded one of his uncle's manservants, received the mild sentence of "six months' detention in convent." There, Jesuit teachers tried in vain to convert the young zealot to a career of "militant evangelism." At 22 he followed a different kind of evangelist--Patriot Giuseppi Mazzini, who was then organizing the secret Young Italy movement.

From that point. Orsini's story leads in and out of jails, to Mazzini's short-lived Roman republic (in whose Assembly Orsini was a deputy), on to service in Garibaldi's ragged patriot army, fighting against the French and Austrians. When Italy's national movement was crushed, the U.S. legation opened its doors to fleeing republicans, and when the victorious French came to "examine" the building, the U.S. consul defied them "at the head of the stairs with a sword in one hand and the Stars and Stripes in the other."

With Eggs. For the rest of his life, Felice Orsini was one of Europe's most wanted men, trailing from country to country, spying, mounting fantastic plots and making sporadic forays into his homeland. In London, where he was rapturously welcomed, Orsini let his vanity drive him to his last, most hare-brained exploit--an attempt on the life of France's Emperor Napoleon III. It was a crazy choice, because the Emperor had declared himself ready to fight for the cause of Italian independence. But, Orsini argued, if only Napoleon were removed, all other thrones in Europe would topple.

Orsini's bombs were custom made for him by a respectable British firm, paid for by a sympathetic British crackpot. By the beginning of 1858, Orsini and three Italian fellow conspirators had arrived in Paris with their cargo of "what looked like a clutch of monstrous birds' eggs, spiny and fantastic." On the appointed night Orsini and his friends joined the crowd in the Rue Lepelletier, down which Louis Napoleon and Empress Eugenie were about to drive to the opera.

With Blood. In the opera house, the master of ceremonies had just murmured to a friend, "The policing of the streets is perfect," when three heavy explosions brought down most of the windows and a candelabra. Outside, the imperial carriage collapsed and the blood of an escorting general spurted over the Empress' dress. Shaken but only slightly scratched, Louis Napoleon and Eugenie stepped from the remains of their carriage into a scene of carnage. One doctor alone reported 156 innocent casualties, including eight dead and three blinded.

Felice Orsini went to the guillotine in March 1858. crying "Viva l'Italia! Viva la Francia!" To show his love of Italy, Louis Napoleon would have liked to pardon him; instead, thirteen months later, he led an army of 200,000 over the Alps and defeated the Austrians at Solferino and Magenta. It was the beginning of the end of foreign rule in Italy. The new Kingdom of Italy, established seven years later, would have to decide whether Felice Orsini was a hero or an inept killer, or both. As to his bomb-throwing predilections, he might have answered with the famous line Empress Eugenie is said to have spoken as she stepped from her wrecked, blood-spattered carriage: "C'est le metier [It's all in the day's work]."

* No kin to the ancient Orsini family (TIME, Feb. 10), credited with having produced 18 saints, five Popes and 40 cardinals.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.