General Considerations

When, after exile, in 1799 Ferdinand IV re-entered Naples, among many thingsto do, he wanted to remove from the Carmine Masaniello’s remains.This is why today we do not find the seventeenth-century tombstone, butrather an inscription, on a nearby wall, which reads:

The king’s action did not snuff out the rebel’s memory. WithNaples still restive, the famous Capopopolo soon became ananti-Bourbon myth. The man who propelled this myth, in the period thischapter surveys, was Giuseppe Mazzini, who spoke of the seventeenth-centuryrevolt in his work on the 1799 revolution. Never finished, it was publishedonly fairly recently, by Lauro Rossi, in his Mazzini e larivoluzione napoletana del 1799. Ricerche sull’Italiagiacobina. But let us first survey what came to pass beforethat happened.

Against the Foreigners

For originality, Gian Maria Arrighi’s Saggio storico perservire di studio alle rivoluzioni politiche, e civili del regno diNapoli (1809), in its pages on the revolt has little sparkle.The author did not recruit Masaniello to champion liberty from the“foreigners”; the Saggio’s dedicationto Joachim-Napoléon Murat, Corsican-born ruler of Naples, helps tellwhy. Nevertheless, Arrighi did stoke thinking ill of the old SpanishVice-realm; that practice would go on. Some important novelties in theMasaniello myth’s adventure were introduced by an Irish writer, LadyMorgan (Sydney Owenson), the author of several works clearly inspired byGermaine de Staël: Woman, or Ida of Athens (1809)for instance, and O’Donnel (1814). Lady Morganachieved fame with Italy, a history Byron defined as“fearless and excellent.”