Italian Republicanism, State and Nation, 1861-1946

Abstract

In the Italian history, the republican tradition, at least since the medieval communes, had been consolidated the idea of independence and self-government, through conjugation of power with human laws. The republican tradition, defeated and minority party in the Savoy’s Italian monarchy, rested heavily on the myth of the Roman Republic of 1849. Emerging the peculiar factors of the «Italian tradition»: the centrality of secular values but also the moral matrix of political action, a civil religion of duty, the perspective of an autonomic and federal power. These were the principles of the «republican project»; that was kept alive by the late nineteenth century until the work of the Constituent Assembly of the years 1946-1947, when the republican tradition was realized in the Republic of Italians.