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In the 20th century, and especially since the end of World War II, the received interpretation of Italian unification, the ''Risorgimento'', has become the object of historical revisionism. The justifications offered for unification, the methods employed to realise it and the benefits supposedly accruing to unified Italy are frequent targets of the revisionists. Some schools have called the ''Risorgimento'' an imperialist or colonialist venture. Some revisionists tend to negatively re-evaluate key characters of Italian national unity, such as Camillo Benso di Cavour, Giuseppe Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel II of Savoy. They grafted in this way in the debate on the causes of so-called Southern Question (''Questione Meridionale''), and say that the Risorgimento was a true work of colonization, followed by a centralizing policy of conquest, because of which the Italian Mezzogiorno would have fallen into a state of backwardness still manifest. Others consider that the policies of tax, toll and industry implemented in the southern regions by the Savoy government since 1861, together with endogenous factors, have further depleted the area or they have affected its development. ==Background and historical basis of revisionism on the Risorgimento== The ideas behind the revisionist movement already began to awaken and strengthen in the years immediately following the events that led to the Kingdom of Sardinia to become the Kingdom of Italy, even before the birth of a historical debate on the subject. The first doubts about the reasons behind the foreign policy of the House of Savoy were raised by Giuseppe Mazzini, one of the theorists and supporters of Italian unification. In this regard Mazzini suggested in his paper "''Italy of the people''" that the government of Cavour was not interested in the principle of a united Italy, but simply to push the boundaries of the Savoy state. Even once Italy was unified, Mazzini returned to attack the Government in respect of the new nation: Statements of Mazzini are precursors of the dispute on the ideal unification process, which began already during the 20th century, as a continuation of the contentious debate between the moderate and democratic parties of Risorgimento. The first criticism of the hagiographic reconstructions came by the same liberal leaders, who had enthusiastically promoted any political activity that would have contributed to the national cause. Among the main targets, there were contentious politics of the new centralized unitary state, defined negatively by the neologism of "''piemontesizzazione''" (homologation to Piedmont). Parallel to the abovementioned political and ideal dispute, across the late 19th century began to appear the first historiographical contributions alternative to the mainstream historiography on the Italian Risorgimento. These works furnished the substrate on which the later revisionist theories were built. A prime example was the writer Alfredo Oriani, which put into question the outcome of the events of the Risorgimento in his work ''The political struggle in Italy'' (1892), which examined the conflict between federalism and unitarianism. Oriani criticized the "royal conquest" as a unilateral action to create a new state, assuming that without the support of a strong democratic movement, it would prove to be weak in its foundations. This work is considered the prototype of the first modern revisionist historiography on Italy, alternately to apologetic historiography of Savoy. Criticisms against the interpretation of the Risorgimento events were also moved by Francesco Saverio Nitti, who in his works ''North and South'' (Nord e Sud)(1900) and ''Italy at the dawn of the twentieth century'' (L'Italia all'alba del secolo XX) (1901), analyzed the consequences of the national Unity from a framework illustrating the political and economic situation in the pre-unification states. According to Nitti, the benefits of the national unification process were not equitably distributed throughout the country, facilitating further development of northern Italy at the expense of the South. Oriani's ideas influenced the thinking of the liberal Piero Gobetti who in 1926 criticized the liberal ruling class in his collection of essays ''Risorgimento without heroes'' (''Risorgimento senza eroi''). According to Gobetti, the Risorgimento was the work of a minority who resigned to pursue a deeper social and cultural revolution. From this "failed revolution" a state unable to meet the needs of the masses was born. In the same vein of political and cultural connotations, but with more openly Marxist-style, is part of the revisionist and anti-apologetic analysis of Antonio Gramsci. In his book ''Prison Notebooks'' (Quaderni del carcere), published posthumously only after 1947, he describes the Risorgimento as a "passive revolution" suffered by the peasants, the poorest social class of the population. The Southern question, Jacobinism, the construction of the revolutionary process in Italy are the central themes of his analysis on the basis of which he reinterprets the Italian Risorgimento as a process of socio-political transformation began in 1789 with the French Revolution, passively transposed in Italy, and hesitated in the collapse of the Ancien Régime. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Revisionism of Risorgimento」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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