Alessandro Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi, translated in English as The Betrothed, is a book some Americans are likely to have encountered as Vol. 21 of the (fabulously successful) Harvard Classics series, aka the Five Foot Shelf of Books. In Italy, Manzoni’s novel is billed as a masterpiece and one of the most important works of Italian literature, yet if you were to ask ten random Anglophone literati to name their favorite Italian authors, they would probably name Dante, Bocaccio, Petrarch, Machiavelli, Italo Calvino, Elena Ferrante, Giacomo Leopardi, Lampedusa’s The Leopard and perhaps a dozen or so more before Manzoni’s name would ever come up. (It has even been said that commenting on the novel’s lack of success in the English-speaking world is itself a cliché—whoopſ!)

Yet I Promessi Sposi has had numerous admirers beyond the patriotic Italian and random Five Foot Shelf-reader: Goethe called the novel “perfect,” Edgar Allan Poe cast it as superior to the works of Scott and called it “equal in matter to any two of [James Fenimore] Cooper’s novels, and executed at least as well,” while the critic and philosopher Benedetto Croce deemed it “one of the greatest masterpieces of Italian literature.” (Alas, I cannot read Croce’s full-length study of Manzoni, having no Italian in me.) While some scholars have alleged that the novel’s cold reception from English-speaking audiences is due to “anti-Catholic bias,” the earliest English-language review which I could find – from 1827 in the Foreign Quarterly Review – pans the novel for its “inartificial management of the plot, and the unnecessary and tedious minuteness of the historical notices with which it is interspersed.”

I narrowly agree with the 1827 reviewer that I Promessi Sposi contains moments of tedium in its occasionally lengthy descriptions of the outward political situation in Italy and the unnecessary inclusion of excerpts of official documents—but I have to flatly disagree with the reviewer’s claim that the book is “an indifferent novel”; when Manzoni is depicting the complex web of corruption and moral dissolution in Italian society, and the grim results that occur when selfishness and superstition collide with a pandemic, the novel has surprising potency and relevance to our present day political situation in the United States. There are also certain vigorously narrated scenes and masterful psychological portraits of minor characters like Gertrude, Father Christopher, and The Unknown, that make comparisons of this novel with works by other great 19^th century realists like Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Stendhal not entirely without merit.

The Plot to Stop a Marriage

The book begins in Lecco, a small northern Italian town on the shores of Lake Como. Renzo Tramaglino and Lucy Mondella (Lorenzo and Lucia in the original Italian) are two young lovers wanting to get married. However, as the novel begins the local priest, Don Abbondio, is confronted in the road by two bravos – a kind of 17^th century mafiosi thug. Manzoni’s decription of these bravos is quite picturesque:

They wore upon their heads a green network, which, falling on the left shoulder, ended in a large tassel, from under which appeared upon the forehead an enormous lock of hair. Their mustachios were long, and curled at the extremities; the margin of their doublets confined by a belt of polished leather, from which were suspended, by hooks, two pistols; a little powder-horn hung like a locket on the breast; on the right-hand side of the wide and ample breeches was a pocket, out of which projected the handle of a knife, and on the other side they bore a long sword, of which the great hollow hilt was formed of bright plates of brass, combined into a cypher: by these characteristics they were, at a glance, recognised as individuals of the class of bravoes.

As is now a long Italian literary tradition, Manzoni extracts humor from the corruption rampant in Italian society, quoting at length from a number of proclamations targeting the bravos and joking, “One would suppose that at the sound of such denunciations from so powerful a source, all the bravoes must have disappeared for ever.”

Much of the historical content of the novel – the reference made to wars and factional rivalries, serve as a comment on how the leaders of the warring Italian cities were more wily in fighting with foreigners and each other than they ever were in dealing with the bravos. For Manzoni’s Italian readers in 1827, the historical situation would have mirrored their present situation, when in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars once again Italy was partly under foreign domination, and partly a divided spoil among the privileged few. The condition of the poor masses would not have been altogether very different from what it was in the seventeenth century.

On this occasion, these bravos are in the employ of the local bigwig Don Roderick, who has taken a shine to Lucy and demands that Don Abbondio stop the impending marriage or else. No problem: this Don Abbondio “was not endowed with the courage of a lion,” and he regarded his position as that of “an animal, furnished with neither tusks nor talons, at the same time having no wish to be devoured.” Manzoni’s description of how a roguish Don Roderick defies the law is quite sophisticated, and shows how the factionalism in Italy aided in the corruption:

The proclamations were efficient, it is true, in fettering and embarrassing the honest man, who had neither power in himself nor protection from others; inasmuch as, in order to reach every person, they subjected the movements of each private individual to the arbitrary will of a thousand magistrates and executive officers. But he, who before the commission of his crime had prepared himself a refuge in some convent or palace where bailiffs never dared to enter; or who simply wore a livery, which engaged in his defence the vanity or the interest of a powerful family; such a one was free in his actions, and could laugh to scorn every proclamation.

When people league together into a faction, the faction becomes a source of strength and protection, and loyalty to the faction can become more important than impotent morality:

The man who acts with violence, or who is constantly in fear of violence from others, seeks companions and allies. Hence it happened that, during these times, individuals displayed so strong a tendency to combine themselves into classes, and to advance, as far as each one was able, the power of that to which he belonged. The clergy was vigilant in the defence and extension of its immunities; the nobility, of its privileges; the military, of its exemptions; the merchants and artisans were enrolled in companies and fraternities; the lawyers were united in leagues, and even the physicians formed a corporation. Each of these little oligarchies had its own appropriate power,–in each of them the individual found the advantage of employing for himself, in proportion to his influence and dexterity, the united force of numbers. The more honest availed themselves of this advantage merely for their defence; the crafty and the wicked profited by it to assure themselves of success in their rogueries, and impunity from their results.

There are certain groups in our own society who this latter observation describes quite well. We can also identify many people in positions of middling authority – society’s middle managers and minor decision-makers – who have adopted something like Don Abbondio’s amoral philosophy of “prudence,” which twists morality into a shape which agrees with whatever corrupt power happens to currently be at the helm:

According to his creed, the poor fellow who had been cudgelled had been a little imprudent; the murdered man had always been turbulent; the man who maintained his right against the powerful, and met with a broken head, must have been somewhat wrong; which is, perhaps, true enough, for in all disputes the line can never be drawn so finely as not to leave a little wrong on both sides.

With this sort of cowardice in his character, Don Abbondio departs from the bravos to return to his church. The reader is then introduced to Renzo, a young man from the village who asks Don Abbondio if soon he and Lucy will finally be able to marry. When Don Abbondio refuses to carry out the wedding, claiming to be “indisposed,” Renzo shows some of the craftiness and headstrong nature which will define his story arc over the course of novel; he interrogates Don Abbondio’s caretaker Perpetua, and gets her to divulge that some nobleman has threatened Don Abbondio, then returns to Don Abbondio to extract the name of Don Roderick from him.

Full of anger at being blocked from marrying Lucy, Renzo’s thoughts turn in the direction of violence. Renzo is meant as a stand-in for the Italian everyman, who upon having his happiness blocked by the corruption and perfidy of the powerful, might do something rash like, oh I don’t know, fight back. To Manzoni’s point of view, however, this is the very opposite of what we should want.

Those who injure others are guilty, not only of the evils they commit, but also of the effects produced by these evils on the characters of the injured persons. Renzo was a quiet and peaceful youth, but now his nature appeared changed, and his thoughts dwelt only on deeds of violence. […] He then imagined himself placed behind a hedge, with his arquebuss in his hand, waiting till Roderick should pass by alone; rejoicing internally at the thought, he pictured to himself an approaching footstep; the villain appears, he takes aim, fires, and he falls; he exults a moment over his dying struggles, and then escapes for his life beyond the confines!

Whereas in Heinrich Kleist’s novella Michael Kohlhass (1808), a sentiment like the protagonist was a perfectly nice guy, but then the world decided to screw with him becomes the launchpad for said protagonist to embark on a violent career of revenge against the powerful and corrupt, in Manzoni’s novel Renzo is instead interdicted by voices of peace and moderation.

And Lucy? This name recalled his wiser and better thoughts: he remembered the last instructions of his parents; he thought of God, the Holy Virgin, and the Saints; and he tremblingly rejoiced that he had been guilty of the deed only in imagination.

In this passage is contained the microcosm of the larger message of I Promessi Sposi: Sure, you could take action against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them; but no, that is not the way to get into heaven, or to capture the heart of a pure Christian woman like Lucy. God and the Church, likewise, would frown upon meeting force with force; and in any case, it won’t even work. (There is however a whole alternate reading of this novel that I don’t quite find persuasive; more on that below.)

The latter point – the futility of seeking temporal solutions – is demonstrated to the reader through two attempts Renzo goes through to try and solve the problem himself. When Renzo arrives at the home of Lucy and her mother Agnes and tells them what has transpired. Lucy tells of the encounter she had with Don Roderick which set everything in motion, and how she sought out the help of Fra Cristoforo (Father Christopher in my translation), who told her to try to get married as soon as possible and stay out of the sight of Don Roderick. (And I will just observe that this is the first in a series of very wise-seeming advices Father Christopher dispenses throughout the novel – almost none of which actually solves the problem! – a point I borrow from the book’s above-mentioned panning in Foreign Quarterly Review.) Father Christopher’s initial guidance being insufficient – a point Manzoni does not dwell on – Agnes sends Renzo to speak with the august Doctor Azzeca Garbugli in Lecco. (Manzoni evocatively compares the plight of Renzo, Lucy, and Agnes to three chickens which Renzo carries to the doctor, “whose heads became conscious of sundry terrific shocks, which they resented by pecking at one another,–a practice too frequent with companions in misfortune.”)

The Doctor turns out to be a splendid parody of a learned hack, with “a large bookcase of old and dusty books,” and walls decorated with portraits of the twelve Caesars. He talks over Renzo’s head but in a solicitous manner, thinking him a bravo in need of protection for some crime, offering a worldly “rhapsody” of mob lawyer advice like, “If you wish to pass smoothly—money and obedience!” and “He who utters falsehoods to the doctor is a fool who will tell the truth to the judge. It is necessary to relate things plainly to the lawyer, but it rests with us to render them more intricate.” But when Renzo corrects him – he is not a bravo, but a simple man seeking justice – the doctor’s demeaner turns on a dime and he throws Renzo out.

Later we see the doctor seated at Don Roderick’s table, supering with him, the Podesta (mayoy) of the town, Don Roderick’s cousin Count Attilio, and “two obscure guests, of whom our story says nothing beyond a general mention of their toad-eating qualities.” The clear message of this assemblage is that every figure of authority in Lecco is in the pocket of Don Roderick; resisting him with earthly power would be futile. What is needed (the whole of the novel suggests) in faith in God, who will put things right in the end and exact justice on the vulgar authority figure who abuses power like Don Roderick.

Father Christopher: The (Annoying) Conscience of the Novel

The figure in I Promessi Sposi who Manzoni most seems to want readers to admire and to follow the guidance of – indeed, one unsubtle message of the novel is if only Renzo had followed his guidance! – is Father Christopher. He is a symbol of redemption and holiness through his backstory, in which he was a haughty son of a merchant named Ludovico, who once killed a member of a wealthy family in a duel. Rather than allowing the situation to end in more bloodshed, Father Christopher took up the religious orders and bowed down to the family of those who had wanted to kill him, and he received their forgiveness together with a holy sacrament. He also himself sometimes felt shades of his former defiant nature, and a feeling of compassion toward the victims of injustice which sets him up as a good priest in contrast to Don Abbondio’s example of a bad priest.

Father Christopher arrives to meeting Lucy, Renzo, and Agnes, and he implores them to let him work on the problem and have faith in God. Once again though, Manzoni doesn’t seem to credit the idea that Father Christopher’s advice is rather useless, and amounts to, “Do nothing and hope something good happens.” Well, that doesn’t give Father Christopher quite enough credit … he does go to talk Don Roderick out of his designs on Lucy.

At the aforementioned dinner at the castle of Don Roderick, Father Christopher is brought before the group, who proceed to make fun of him and banter about politics and urbane nonsense having nothing to do with their abuses of power – in the manner of the aristocracy of all times. Father Christopher patiently endures their jibes like the holy man he is, and then when finally allowed to get a word in edgewise, demands that Don Roderick leave Lucy alone; Don Roderick responds with a kind of Trumpian contempt for all decency, and Father Christopher can stand it no more:

“Don Roderick, do not say No to me; do not keep in anguish the heart of an innocent child! a word from you would be sufficient.”

“Well,” said Don Roderick, “since you think I have so much in my power, and since you are so much interested—-”

“Yes!” said Father Christopher, anxiously regarding him.

“Well, advise her to come, and place herself under my protection; she will want for nothing, and no one shall disturb her, as I am a gentleman.”

At such a proposal, the indignation of the friar, which had hitherto been restrained with difficulty, loudly burst forth. All his prudence and patience forsook him: “Your protection!” exclaimed he, stepping back, and stretching forth both his hands towards Don Roderick, while he sternly fixed his eyes upon him, “your protection! You have filled the measure of your guilt by this wicked proposal, and I fear you no longer.”

“Dare you speak thus to me?”

“I dare; I fear you no longer; God has abandoned you, and you are no longer an object of fear! Your protection! this innocent child is under the protection of God; you have, by your infamous offer, increased my assurance of her safety. Lucy, I say; see with what boldness I pronounce her name before you; Lucy—-”

“How! in this house—-”

“I compassionate this house; the wrath of God is upon it! You have acted in open defiance of the great God of heaven and earth; you have set at naught his counsel; you have oppressed the innocent; you have trampled on the rights of those whom you should have been the first to protect and defend. The wrath of God is upon you! A day will come!”

This is stirring stuff; and yet, what we are left with after this admittedly satisfying fulmination against Don Roderick is the same weak admonition Father Christopher has been offering all along: “A day will come!” When? When God wills it (inshallah! to use a word I just learned); endure and have faith.

Renzo, being a man action rather than patient endurance, meanwhile hatches a plan without telling Father Christopher to trick Don Abbondio into witnessing a marriage between himself and Lucy; and the plan necessarily does not work, both because (thematically speaking) Father Christopher the man of patient faith needs to be right and Renzo the man of impetuous action needs to be wrong, but also because Lucy, a Christian girl of purest heart and morals and a pronounced skeptic of the whole plan, ultimately fails to say the necessary words to carry out the scheme in the crucial moment. Lesson: God doesn’t reward trickery. Moreover, by being the sort of man who thinks tricks rather than faith are the answer to injustice, Renzo fails to be worthy of Lucy’s purity – and therefore Manzoni needs to separate the two, almost till the end of the novel, to teach the protagonist his lesson.

The Malevolence of Signora Gertrude

After the failure of Renzo’s too-clever marriage plot, Father Christopher directs the three of them to flee to alternate places, with Renzo being sent to nearby Milan to find another priestly friend of Father Christopher’s. and Agnes and Lucy sent to a convent at Monza to seek the protection of a powerful signora who is also a nun. This woman is Gertrude, who occupies about a chapter and a half of the novel that constitutes a miniature masterpiece of psychological portraiture on the level of some of the stories within stories found in Dostoyevsky. The 1827 reviewer who calls this section tedious has not the faintest clue what he is talking about; Edgar Allan Poe admired the Gertrude story in his review of the book, and found in it an unprecedented, authentic analysis of the life of a Catholic nun:

[Manzoni] has withdrawn a curtain, behind which we had never been permitted to look. We had guessed, and we had read the guesses of others; but we never knew precisely what was there. The moral coercion, more cruel than bodily torture, by which a poor girl, the victim of the heartless pride of her parents, without command, without even persuasion, (for both it seems are forbidden) is driven to the cloister, that her brother may have more ample means to uphold his hereditary honors; this was a thing inscrutable and inconceivable to us. […] We turn to the scene exhibited in this work, and we know it to be real life. We would gladly grace our pages with it.

For a fuller analysis of Gertrude’s function in Manzoni’s larger scheme, I recommend Marion Facinger Freidson’s essay, “The Meaning of Gertrude in ‘I Promessi Sposi’”; but I will say that this exploration of every aspect of Gertrude’s life is much more effective than simply unexplained malevolence. There is, as Poe identifies, a critique of the Catholic church which shows how repressing a woman’s ambitions on one side could cause her to take out her frustrations in other ways.

New and strange emotions arose in the mind of Gertrude: her vanity had been cultivated in order to make the cloister desirable to her; and now, easily assimilating itself with the ideas thus presented, she entered into them with all the ardour of her soul. She replied, that no one could oblige her to take the veil, without her own consent; that she could also marry, inhabit a palace, and enjoy the world; that she could if she wished it; that she would wish it, and did wish it. The necessity of her own consent, hitherto little considered, became henceforth the ruling thought of her mind; she called it to her aid, at all times, when she desired to luxuriate in the pleasing images of future felicity.

Gertrude’s willfulness and frustration make her a strong female character – I think calling her depiction proto-feminist is a bit much – but strong in the way that Lady MacBeth’s frustration and ambition are strong, and the Duchess of Malfi’s. Of course female strength and non-passivity can only result in mischief – I take this to be Manzoni’s subtext – and the end result is that Gertrude allows Lucy to be abducted by another fascinating character in his own right, the shadowy warlord known only as The Unknown.

The Unknown

The Unknown is outwardly a ridiculous character who lives in a remote castle high in the mountains. Here is how Manzoni explains him:

All, however tyrannical themselves, had been obliged to choose between the friendship or enmity of this tyrannical man, and it fared ill with those who dared resist him. It was in vain to hope to preserve neutrality or independence; his orders to do such or such a thing, were arbitrary, and resistance was useless. Recourse was had to him on all occasions, and by all sorts of people, good as well as bad, for the arrangements of their difficulties; so that he occasionally became the protector of the oppressed, who could not have obtained redress in any other way, public or private. [Ed. note: Like Don Corleone.] He was almost always the minister of wickedness, revenge, and caprice; but the various ways in which he employed his power impressed upon all minds a great idea of his capability to devise and perform his acts in defiance of every obstruction, whether lawful or unlawful. The fame of ordinary tyrants was confined to their own districts, and every district had its tyrant; but the fame of this extraordinary man was spread throughout the Milanese.

But however ahistorical and romantic the Unknown’s description may seem – I would like to hear from some #twitterstorians about if he has any direct historical parallels – his psychological depiction as a repentant sinner has the effect of humanizing the character and at the same time making his treatment more sublime, a villain of classical stature.

In looking back from year to year, from enterprise to enterprise, from crime to crime, from blood to blood, each one of his actions appeared abstracted from the feelings which had induced their perpetration, and therefore exposed in all their horrible deformity, but which those feelings had hitherto veiled from his view. They were all his own, he was responsible for all; they comprised his life; the horror of this thought filled him with despair; he grasped his pistol, and raised it to his head—but at the moment in which he would have terminated his miserable existence, his thoughts rushed onwards to the time that must continue to flow on after his end.

In looking beyond the past and the immediate present, in having the Unknown stare into the abyss of an uncertain future, Manzoni humanizes this man and makes him to sympathetic to readers who have themselves been have been in a situation, that distraught moment when we have no idea what the future could even look like.

He imagined himself conducting [Lucy] to her mother, “And then, what shall I do to-morrow? what shall I do for the rest of the day? what shall I do the day after, and the next day? and the night? the night which will so soon return? Oh, the night! let me not think of the night!” And, plunged in the frightful void of the future, he sought in vain for some employment of time, some method of living through the days and nights. Now he thought of abandoning his castle, and flying to some distant country, where he had never been heard of; but, could he fly from himself?

I am somewhat at a loss, however, to comment on the scenes of the Unknown’s conversion by the famous Charles Borromeo, who appears in such haloed fashion one needs almost to drop religious skepticism altogether to be fully convinced by his character. To Manzoni and his readers, Borromeo is literally a saint, the equivalent of dropping Superman into your story and having him fix everything, including dressing down Don Abbondio for failing to defend Renzo and Lucy from the depredations of Don Roderick. As with Father Christopher’s down-dressing of Don Roderick, this moment is both emotionally satisfying and not really a convincing plan of action to right what’s wrong in the world.

Manzoni’s Fear of the Masses

What is curious about I Promessi Sposi is that Manzoni, born of the aristocracy, also understands and even has some sympathy for the crowd,  the democratic power which stands to overthrow aristocracy – and the immediate historical experience for Manzoni would have been the overthrow of the French monarchy and the rise of Napoleon, of whom he wrote a famous poem – but perhaps because of this recent experience (and perhaps because of writing in the years immediately following the Congress of Vienna in 1827), Manzoni sees the crowd more as a threat than a solution, more a source of chaos than of liberty, and he illustrates this fear of the roaring crowd in two famous scenes in which the populace of Milan first riots over the provision of bread during the famine, and then at the novel’s end, when the populace loses its collective sanity during the Great Plague of 1630.

Both scenes are dramatic and well-done, and are likely what has prompted comparison between Manzoni and writers like Stendhal and Tolstoy. The first scene shows Renzo, arriving at Milan, getting caught up in crowds of riots over bread; the rioters illustrate the anarchic nature of the crowd, ransacking bakeries, threatening to exact vigilante justice on a government official, and allowing Renzo to escape when he is apprehended by the law. It is not an altogether negative picture. However Manzoni is a writer who at times speaks through symbols, as in the aforementioned vignette of the hanging chickens or in this passage where the generational fate of a single statue speaks of changing attitudes towards authority.

The multitude passed through the short and narrow street of Pescheria, and thence by the crooked arch to the square de Mercanti. Here there were very few, who, in passing before the niche that divides towards the centre the terrace of the edifice then called the College of Doctors, did not give a slight glance at the great statue contained in it of Phillip II., who even from the marble imposed respect, and who, with his arm extended, appeared to be menacing the populace for their rebellion.

This niche is now empty, and from a singular circumstance. About one hundred and sixty years after the events we are now relating, the head of the statue was changed, the sceptre taken from its hand, and a dagger substituted in its place, and beneath it was written Marcus Brutus. Thus inserted it remained perhaps a couple of years, until one day, some person, who had no sympathies with Marcus Brutus, but rather an aversion to him, threw a rope around the status, pulled it down, and reducing it to a shapeless mass, dragged it, with many insulting gestures, beyond the walls of the city. Who would have foretold this to Andrea Biffi when he sculptured it?

This vignette seems very apropos today, when we are experiencing our own protests (and some riots) for social justice, the Black Lives Matter movement, and how we recently saw some protestors so caught up in such an enthusiasm – or mania – for iconoclasm (statue destruction) that they began destroying statues of people they had no grievances with, like women’s rights leaders and 19^th century abolitionists. Manzoni’s metaphorical argument, which has something to it, is that once the spirit of Phillip II (the majestic autocrat) was transmuted into that of Marcus Brutus (the democratic insurrectionist), all respect for authority was lost and even the more heroic leaders were destroyed by a revolution which devoured its own.

The extensive portrayal near the novel’s end of the Milan’s 1630 plague was to me one of the most striking parts of the novel in part because of the pandemic we are now experiencing. I reverted to Pericles’ pleas to the people of Athens as I reflected that there can be hardly any leadership challenge more difficult than leading people through a pandemic; here is something which does not obey any of the rules and constructs of daily life which our busy citizenry has set for itself; it follows its own logic, not yours, operates according to its own timeline, not that of the average person and most certainly not that of the business cycle. Moreover, because the plague is invisible, people are naturally prone to consider it a conspiracy by some unnatural force rather than a predictable consequence of not altering our behavior, and this kind of conspiratorial thinking is especially rife in an environment of corruption, where the leaders are untrustworthy or see opportunity in inventing a scapegoat.

The echoes of contemporary circumstances are truly eerie: Here again there are warnings by respected experts – “Ludovico Settala, a physician distinguished so long ago as during the former plague, announced to the Tribunal of Health, by the 20^th of October, that the contagion had indisputably appeared at Lecco,” – but these experts were ignored in favor of quack doctors like “a physician of Como, who, most unaccountably, upon the report of an old barber of Bellano, announced that the prevailing disease arose merely from the autumnal exhalation from the marshes.” As reports continued to spread of the plague, finally the authorities are induced to close the gates of Milan. But then the governor (lord save us from these idiotic governors!) “published a decree, prescribing public rejoicings on the birth of Prince Charles, the first son of Philip IV., without troubling himself with the danger which would result from so great a concourse of people at such a time.” (Sounds like a Trump rally.) After denouncing this governor, Ambrose Spinola, Manzoni turns to castigate the masses:

But that which diminished our astonishment at his indifference is the indifference of the people themselves, of that part of the population which the contagion had not yet reached, but who has so many motived to dread it. The scarcity of the preceding year, the exactions of the army, and the anxiety of mind which had been endured, appeared to them more than sufficient to explain the mortality of the surrounding country. They heard with a smile of incredulity and contempt [emphasis mine] any who hazarded a word on the danger, or who  even mentioned the plague. The same incredulity, the same blindness, the same obstinacy, prevailed in the senate, the council of ten, and in all the judicial bodies.

There then follows depictions of the hysteria which overtook the populace, the witch hunts of those deemed to be poisoners who were made scapegoats for the plague, a story which Manzoni takes up in much more detail in a companion piece to I Promessi Sposi, the Historia della columna infame (History of the Column of Infamy), which tells in great detail the story of how two men were accused as poisoners, were subjected to prolonged torture by the authorities and by the populace, and were finally put to death in a gruesome manner suitable to the times, and afterwards the authorities razed the two men’s houses and put up a Column of Infamy to denounce their alleged crimes, but which Manzoni describes as now a symbol of the tyrannical passions of the people and the perfidy of their leaders.

Sincere and Alternate Interpretations of the Novel

This is one of the hooks on which Italian crime writer Leonardo Sciascia and other critics have claimed that far from being an optimist about humanity – as for a century and a half had been the traditional reading of the novel when it was treated as a national epic and standard school text – in fact, Manzoni was a pessimist. They go on to claim (rather boldly) that Don Abbondio is the true protagonist of the novel, who is meant to be a stand-in for countless authority figures in Italian life who fail to stand up to corruption, wanting to avoid confronting any trouble or rocking any boats.

This alternate reading of the novel is very interesting; and part of what may have impelled it is that the traditional reading of the novel – as all about Renzo’s transformation into a good Catholic and God essentially removing his obstacles and smiting Don Roderick – just seems a little too pat. It is too much redolent of the deux ex machina, to resolve all of the story’s plot conflicts by having a literal saint swoop in to make Don Abbondio into a right man, and then plague come along and wipe out Don Roderick, an irony which Don Abbondio himself laughs about at the end of the book:

“Ah!” thought Don Abbondio when he returned home, “if the pestilence acted everywhere with so much discrimination, it would be a pity to speak ill of it. We should want one every generation.”

There is a strong temptation to laugh with Don Abbondio and say: That’s not how things actually work! The real drama, we want to say, is the drama of practical, cynical men like Don Abbondio and lines like this seem to suggest that Manzoni himself might not take his ending completely seriously, he himself might not be quite convinced by the myopia his ending offers to readers – look at that! Renzo learned to be a good Christian, God took care of all the bad Christians who were standing in his way, and now our young lovers can live happily ever after! (And since it is often the repentant monk Father Christopher who is delivering these homilies, his initially appealing character turns into the annoying messenger for this myopic philosophy.) Meanwhile, much of the penetrating analysis of human nature in I Promessi Sposi suggests that perhaps a necessary reckoning is in the offing, a Dostoyevskian struggle with our flawed human natures, if not in this book, then somewhere down the road.

But in spite of these glimmerings of skepticism, the broad thrust of the novel seems to me idealistic and sincere, and the main problems with that sincerity are that the solutions Manzoni offers – rooted perhaps in his Catholicism, but more particularly in organized Christianity generally – are inadequate to deal with the problems he so effectively illustrates. The fact that the so-called “School of Manzoni,” as one English language reviewer termed it, surveying recent Italian literature in an 1838 article for the Westminster Review, was so quickly overtaken in the 1830s by a school of more martial figures like Guerrazzi and Mazzini, signals that Manzoni’s passive, let-God-sort-it-out prescription dealing with the problems of the time was largely rejected by those fighting for a unified Italy during the Risorgimento.

This certainly does not make the likes of Guerrazzi a better writer than Manzoni. (I dipped into one of Guerrazzi’s books and found that while his prose could be vigorous and stirring, his characters were wooden and two-dimensional; but I will give Guerrazzi another chance to win me over.) Manzoni is a writer of such power and psychological acuity that even when his conclusions are bad, the quality of storytelling and the enduring thematic resonance of I Promessi Sposi win out and force me to agree that this book is indeed a classic.

Ed. Note: This review was based on the 1834 translation signed “A.N.” and typically attributed to Andrews Norton. The translation has been criticized by Augusta Polatta for compressing Manzoni’s diction and resorting in places almost to paraphrase, and is not based on the 1840 edition of the book, for which Manzoni has said to have tweaked the language of virtually every line to create a new prose style in Italian. This 1840 edition, which can be read here courtesy of the HathiTrust, also was the first to contain the History of the Column of Infamy, as well as numerous illustrations from which I clipped the ones shown here.