The Sex Lives of Italian Patriots

Abstract

The family is a powerful way of imagining the nation as an organic community, united by the ties of blood, history and emotion, and its particular importance to Italian national identity has long been recognised. During the Risorgimento, a close correspondence between family and nation was created, with the roles of father, mother, brother and sister all being used to evoke a range of relationships and models of behaviour across the political spectrum. 1 On one side, the metaphor of the family as a form of collective belonging remained central to representations of Italy’s monarchies and played a crucial role in the nineteenth-century Catholic revival; on the other, Italian revolutionaries relied heavily on an appeal to the family to promote their call to arms. And if, for the latter, the political and iconographical legacy of the French Revolution was the obvious point of reference, in practice left and right alike mixed a newer, democratic vision of kinship relations with a traditional sense of family hierarchies. Both patriots and their opponents created an image of the Italian nation that incorporated paternal authority and maternal compassion. They also made appeal to the bonds of fraternity and they emphasised the need for loyalty, solidarity and parity among men and, to an extent, among men and women as well. 2 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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