The Diary of a Spy. Conspiracy and "Public Feeling" in Southern Italy, 1820s

The connection between the political socialization and sectarianism was a peculiar feature of the "new politics" that originated in the revolutionary age of the late XVIII century. It was particularly spread in the Southern Risorgimento, as recent and less recent historiography has highlighted. The language and cultural features of the democratic culture have been deeply analized, so as to show how Christian culture and democratic/revolutionary political messages were intertwined. The paper looks at the practice of conspiracy (rituals and languages of the affiliation, proselytism and the organization of the political upheaval) in the decade subsequent to the fall of the Constitutional regime in 1821. It questions the interaction between secret conspiracy and the intelligence operations, aiming at analyzing how the languages of the secret became integral part of the political socialization and of the institutional culture.