1. In Eric Hobsbawm’s autobiography, Interesting Times, the chapter entitled “Among the Historians” opens with a question regarding how history had changed in the course of his lifetime. The answer paints a picture filled with light and shadow. It begins with the long battle between innovators (Hobsbawm calls them “modernizers”) and traditionalists which began c. 1890 and climaxed in the mid–twentieth century. For a while the innovators called themselves “social historians,” a vague expression with which Hobsbawm does not fully identify. Their target was “the traditional bias of conventional historians in favour of kings, ministers, battles and treaties, i.e. top-level decision-makers both political and military.”1 Hobsbawm explains how the innovators achieved an ever more authoritative standing on the international scene: “. . . around 1970 it seemed reasonable to suppose that the struggle for the modernization of historiography that had begun in the 1890s had been won.”2 But during the i970s the panorama suddenly changed, and it is clear that for Hobsbawm this was not progress. To illustrate this transformation he cites, on one hand, Braudel’s The Mediterranean (1949), and on the other, “the brilliant tour de force of ‘thick description,’ ” Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cock-Fight, by Clifford Geertz (1973), a great book and a brief essay which symbolize, respectively, the study of “structure” and of “culture.” “There was a shift away,” Hobsbawm continued, “from historical models or ‘the large why questions,’ a shift from ‘the analytical to the descriptive mode,’ from economic and social structure to culture, from recovering fact to recovering feeling, from telescope to microscope—as in the enormously influential little monograph on the world-view of one sixteenth-century eccentric Friulian miller by the young Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg.”3 In a note Hobsbawm observed that I benandanti, the earlier (and, in his opinion, “more interesting”) of my books, which he promptly reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, “curiously . . . had not then attracted attention.”4
Almost forty years have passed. This no longer young historian recalls that generous review with gratitude, and, before that, the strong impression made on him by Hobsbawm’s writings.5 But today Hobsbawm sees in my work an example of that regrettable historiographical turning point which has endangered the positive effects of the innovators. I do not entirely recognize myself in this characterization. For example, I think that I have always kept my distance from description, pure and simple, but this is beside the point. What interests me are Hobsbawm’s observations on the state of historical writing today, and what they imply. According to him, historiography’s cognitive ambitions have been weakened by the new directions of the social movements that emerged in the ’60s: “More history than ever is today being revised or invented by people who do not want the real past, but only a past that suits their purpose. Today is the great age of historical mythology.” The desire to be recognized coming from women, from ethnic or gender minorities, and from still others has run up against the pretense of history to formulate potentially universal discourse. What has been undermined is “the belief that historians’ investigations, by means of generally accepted rules of logic and evidence, distinguish between fact and fiction, between what can be established and what cannot, what is the case and what we would like to be so.”6
I share fully Hobsbawm’s concern on this last point: much of what I have written in the last twenty years deals precisely with this topic.7 About his earlier remarks, there would be much to say. Even his liquidation of postmodernism as a fashion that has only marginally touched history seems to have been reached too hastily.8 Generally, it seems to me that we must distinguish between questions and answers: it is a lesson that I learned from someone who has been important for Hobsbawm as well. Antonio Gramsci’s prison notebooks grow out of the awareness that Fascism had won out because it had been able to give ready answers, albeit reactionary ones, to questions which were not reactionary.9 This observation has profound implications, even for the work of historians. It is one thing to reject decadent or irrelevant responses on the intellectual level; it is quite another to reject the questions which generated them.
In December 2004, Le Monde Diplomatique, under the title “Manifeste pour l’histoire,” published the text of a lecture Hobsbawm had given a month earlier at a conference on Marxist historiography organized by the British Academy. The French version contained a passage (one which did not appear in the original text) in which Hobsbawm once again observed that contemporary historical writing had passed from a quantitative to a qualitative perspective, from macrohistory to microhistory, from analysis of structures to narratives, from the history of society to the history of culture.10 In this series of antitheses I find that I am always on the wrong side. But when Hobsbawm writes that the greatest immediate political danger for historiography is “antiuniversalism”—namely, the conviction that “my truth” is as worthy as yours, independent of the evidence proffered—then I am in complete agreement.
One can wage this battle using different tactics. In the case analyzed in this chapter, I have tried to oppose, using a microscopic scale, the postmodernist tendency to abolish the distinction between history and fiction. In other words, I have met my adversary on his own terrain, starting out from his own questions; but I have arrived at totally different answers.
2. “ ‘Has not Israël Bertuccio got more character than all those noble Venetians?’ said our rebellious plebeian to himself [notre plébeien revolté].”
The speaker is Julien Sorel, the protagonist of The Red and the Black. Stendhal wrote his novel in a mad frenzy between 1828 and 1830, completing the correction of the proofs just after the July Revolution. The sentence I have just quoted is from one of the most extraordinary chapters in the book. Julien Sorel accompanies Matilde de la Môle to a ball of high Parisian society. The narration, in the third person, is continually interrupted by the private thoughts of the characters.11 The reader views the ball especially through the eyes of Julien, the peasants’ son who regards with hate and contempt the high society to which he does not belong and which he dreams of destroying. He mentally compares Venetian nobility, which goes back to a.d. 700, to Parisian aristocracy, which is much newer, and concludes to himself: “Well, in spite of all those noble Venetians whom birth makes so great, it is Israël Bertuccio whom one remembers.”
Who is this Israël Bertuccio with whom Julien Sorel, “rebellious plebeian,” identifies himself? Stendhal himself clarifies the matter: “It happened that Julien had seen the day before Marino Faliero, a tragedy by Casimir Delavigne.”12 It is a seemingly factual reference, but, as we shall see, misleading.
Delavigne’s Marino Faliero was performed in Paris at the theater of Porte Saint-Martin on 30 May 1829.13 The play had been preceded, on the seventh of the month, by a parody, a vaudeville of Varner and Bayard entitled Marino Faliero à Paris, interspersed with popular songs that went: “Machine! Ce qui domine/C’est cela; Machine/Le siècle est là.”14 Even in Delavigne’s tragedy references to the present were not lacking, but there were also many pertaining to a future that the Parisian public of 1829 must have imagined to be imminent. The speech of the old doge Marin Falier to the conspirators presages a society in which “only work will produce wealth, talent will give power and virtue will bestow nobility”—in other words, a bourgeois society.15 The majority of the plotters is made up of fishermen, artisans, and gondoliers led by Israël Bertuccio, who is described as “un homme du peuple . . . un patron de galère.”16 There is a scene in which the gondolier Pietro lays his hand familiarly on the doge’s shoulder and, when the latter reacts indignantly, exclaims, astonished, “Among equals!” This may have inspired Julien Sorel to reflect: “A conspiracy annihilates all titles conferred by social caprice.”17 But here Delavigne’s Bertuccio, who reproaches the gondolier Pietro, reaffirming the authority of the doge, is a colorless character, just as Delavigne’s play Marino Faliero is a pale imitation of the original, Lord Byron’s Marino Faliero, written in 1820. Aside from the banal idea of transforming the wife of the old doge into an adulteress, whom Byron portrays as the imperturbable victim of a calumny, Delavigne feebly followed his model, claiming an originality that was not really there.18 This was noted even by Stendhal, who, in an anonymous article in the New Monthly Magazine, spoke coldly of the play by Delavigne, a writer whom he did not esteem.19 Stendhal, as he often does, misleads his readers: his own views differ from those of his protagonist, Julien Sorel, and the specific mention of Delavigne in the article conceals an implicit reference to Byron.
Stendhal had known Byron in Milan between 1816 and 1817. Many years later Stendhal recalled him perpetually “agitated . . . by some passion or other”: he saw him beset, without cease, in turn, by the genius of the poet, the fatuity of the aristocrat, and a vanity pushed to the extremes of madness.20 But when Stendhal surrendered to one of his infantile whims, he would list the three greatest men he had ever met: Napoleon; invariably accompanied by Lord Byron; followed by, depending on the circumstances, Antonio Canova or Gioacchino Rossini.21 As long as Byron was alive, Stendhal awaited his writings impatiently. In December 1820 he wrote to a friend asking him to send a copy of the second edition of Byron’s Marino Faliero (the first was already out of print), providing that the book did not cost too much.22 Sooner or later Stendhal would have read it. I shall try to explain the identification of Julien Sorel with Israël Bertuccio in the light of this likely reading. But first something needs to be said about the plot of Byron’s Marino Faliero.23
In the very title Byron announced that the play would have notes to substantiate the historical truth of various details. The notes were followed by an appendix reproducing passages from a number of chroniclers and historians concerning the story of Marin Falier. In the chronicles, at least in some of them, the antiaristocratic conspiracy of 1355 was described as the reaction to a twofold offense which had victimized, respectively, the old doge Marin Falier, derided as a cuckold in the placards concocted by some young noblemen, and Israël Bertuccio, head of the Arsenal, who had been struck a blow by one of them after a frivolous altercation. Byron takes up this parallelism: the destinies of the two men, seemingly so distant, merge in the course of the events of one night. The conspirators are ready. The next morning, 15 April, the doge will sound the great bell, the warning of impending danger (in fact, there is a war on with Genoa). The nobility will rush to the ducal palace, where they will be massacred, followed by the sacking of their residences. But one of the conspirators betrays the plan, the plot is uncovered, and its leaders—Israël Bertuccio and Filippo Calandra, who are not of aristocratic birth—are hanged; the old doge is beheaded.
For Byron, as well as for his readers, the contemporary echoes of this episode were obvious. This has been stated repeatedly.24 Byron wrote Marino Faliero in 1820, in Ravenna, where he was living with Teresa Guiccioli (but the idea for it went back three years earlier). Through Guiccioli’s family Byron had come into contact with the underground political movement of the Carbonari. To be sure, what was good for Italy was not necessarily good for Great Britain. In 1820, for example, Byron vigorously condemned the Cato Street conspiracy, which intended to assassinate a number of ministers. His reaction supports the traditional view that Marino Faliero should be read in an autobiographical key: in the uncertainty of the old doge, who hesitates before the prospect of the slaughter of the Venetian nobility, Lord Byron was projecting his ambivalence due to his own aristocratic birth.25
These hypotheses, all of them plausible, take us to the beginning of the work. Byron substantially followed the traditionally recognized history, but parted from it (as he indicated in the preface) where he presented the plot as already formed. In his tragedy the doge joins an existing conspiracy, whereas in reality it had been he, together with Israël Bertuccio, who had set it in motion. The desire to construct a tragedy modeled on Aristotelian unity, thereby avoiding the irregularity that constituted a weak point in the English theater, prompted Byron to situate Israël Bertuccio at the center of the action.26 Critics have missed the importance of this structural choice, even those who have shown how Byron, at the same time that he was rejecting Shakespeare in the name of Aristotelian unity, was writing a tragedy rich in echoes from Shakespeare, especially Macbeth.27 It has been noted that Marino Faliero’s dependence on this play is marked by a bloody trail. After Banquo’s assassination, Macbeth, torn with guilt, exclaims: “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather / The Multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red.”28 Here incarnadine is used as a verb. In Marino Faliero the word returns to being an adjective: “When all is over,” the doge says to Israël Bertuccio, “you’ll be free and merry, / and calmly wash those hands incarnadine.”29 The analogy between the two passages brings out their difference. Macbeth is rent by remorse for what he has done; the doge, for that which he is about to do—the slaughter of the nobles who will be summoned to the palace. The contrast between the tormenting indecision of the doge and the implacable firmness of Israël Bertuccio repeats the contrast between the irresolute will of Macbeth and the ferocious determination of Lady Macbeth. But Byron rereads and rewrites Shakespeare while looking back at the French Revolution and, contemporaneously, forward to an approaching future. Israël Bertuccio incarnates a new reality: the pitiless innocence of the revolutionary. In a dialogue in which solidarity and class hate violently oppose each other, the doge, turning to Israël Bertuccio, blurts out: “You are a patriot, a plebeian Gracchus.”30 It is with this “plebeian Gracchus” that Julien Sorel, plébéien révolté, identifies himself: a Jacobin outside his time, whose desperate energy erupts tragically, wretchedly, in an act of personal violence.31 And like Israël Bertuccio, Julien Sorel, who also rebuffs the priest sent to visit him before his execution, does not feel any pangs of guilt. This, too, may have been one of his “atrocious” traits which shocked even such an intelligent and somewhat cynical reader as Prosper Mérimée.32
Byron’s writings appeared scandalous as well (not to mention the author himself). In 1822 a harsh critic of his Cain, who concealed himself under the pseudonym “Philo-Milton,” suggested that invented works (“fiction”) were much more dangerous than essays and books of history, because they were sold more cheaply and were accessible to a much larger public. In the case of works that on the whole were harmful, wrote “Philo-Milton,” their circulation had to be impeded at all costs.33 This had happened, just the year before, with Marino Faliero, performed on Drury Lane in London in a mutilated version. The copy of Byron’s tragedy owned by the Huntington Library shows that the censor had suppressed half the text, focusing especially on the exchanges between the doge and Israël Bertuccio.34 A play like Marino Faliero was doubly dangerous in the eyes of the censors, because it combined the dangers of history with the attractions of invention. For us, the personages created by Stendhal, Delavigne, and Byron belong to the world of literary fiction. For Byron it was a different matter: in the preface to Marino Faliero he observed that with the exception of Angiolina, the wife of the doge, all the personages were “strictly historical,” and, as far as “real facts” were concerned, he invited readers to look closely at the texts published in the appendix.35
Let us do just that. Byron’s principal source for the conspiracy was Marin Sanudo’s multivolume Vite dei dogi, which he cited from the edition in Muratori’s Rerum Italicarum Scriptores.36 In the Sanudo text used by Byron we find Israël Bertucci: “Thiey sent for Filippo Calendario, a seafaring man and one of great consequence, and for Bertucci Israello, engineer and a most astute man.”37 There are two problems with this. The first, apparently negligible, is the reversal of the name: Bertucci Israello instead of Israël Bertuccio (or Bertucci, as we might expect). The second has to do with the profession: engineer instead of admiral, as we read in Byron’s play. The latter difficulty has an easy solution. The “ancient chronicle” copied by Sanudo recounts, in the paragraph preceding the just-quoted passage, that a nobleman of the Barbaro family had struck the admiral of the Arsenal, who then had gone to the doge to protest this affront. Byron combined the two passages, tacitly identifying the admiral with Israël Bertuccio. But the first difficulty is more serious. If we compare the passage in Sanudo quoted in the appendix of Marino Faliero with the corresponding passage in the Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, we discover that Byron’s transcription (or that of whoever copied it for him) is incorrect. The text published by Muratori speaks of a “Bertucci Isarello, Engineer and most astute man.”38
Israello or Isarello? This is not a trivial choice. If we opt for “Isarello,” the possibility or probability that we might have been dealing with a Jew vanishes (and, for that matter, could a Jew in fourteenth-century Venice become, though certainly not an admiral, even an “engineer,” or whatever the exact meaning of this term is?). We need to look at the texts more closely. Today the edition of the Vite dei dogi in the Rerum Italicarum Scriptores seems wholly unreliable, an Italianized version full of lacunae and errors.39 Comparing the printed text with a manuscript copy of the corresponding passage of the Vite dei dogi (the second volume of Sanudo’s original autograph has been lost), the name “Isarello” emerges once again.40 But we need to press further. One of the oldest pieces of evidence concerning the conspiracy of Marin Falier is provided by the incomplete Latin chronicle of Lorenzo de’ Monaci, chancellor of Crete, written shortly after 1420 but not printed until 1758. Among the events reported in this work we find the blow struck by a nobleman (here identified as Giovanni Dandolo) against a “Bertucium Israelo” of San Basilio, an affluent man among mariners (“notabilis conditionis inter marinarios”), perhaps a ship owner or shipbuilder. In the index of names to Lorenzo de’ Monaci’s chronicle we find a reference to “Bertuccius Israel rebellis,”41 the very name recorded (perhaps independently) in the appendix to Byron’s Marino Faliero. Is this the actual designation for the person whose tracks we are following? Or is this a humanistic disguise transforming “Isarello” into “Israelo”? And if this was an act of dissimulation, who was responsible? Lorenzo de’ Monaci, or the eighteenth-century erudite who published his work? The manuscripts of de Monaci’s Chronicon de rebus Venetis may provide an answer. Kristeller’s Iter Italicum records a seventeenth-century copy housed in the British Library.42 But the remaining questions would persist.
This long discussion takes us far from the notion (shared by Byron—not a historian) that chronicles contain “real facts,” things as they really happened. To untangle the contradictions among these accounts we must try to read them critically, by inserting them into a broader documentary context. In effect, we have to go backward, retracing our steps along a path that, by following the name of Israël Bertuccio, brought us from a literary romance to a tragedy (two in fact), and from there to the chronicles. But before moving on to the next stage, it might be useful to clarify the overall significance of this journey.
We began from the literary echoes of Marin Falier’s conspiracy; by dint of retrogressing we came to the conspiracy itself. Numerous studies deal with aspects of this subject, some of them excellent, but there is no satisfactory comprehensive and comparative overview; this is highly desirable in view of the extraordinary nature of the event and of Venetian history itself. For the moment, at any rate, we need to question an interpretation, put forward in the last few decades by reliable scholars, that the conspiracy of Marin Falier was a clash between aristocratic parties or factions.43 This view seems to be definitely incompatible with the participation in the plot, along with the doge, of persons belonging to the well-to-do populace (“populares pinguis conditionis,” as they were dubbed by Lorenzo de’ Monaci).44 The detailed descriptions (later developed by the literary tradition) of the insult inflicted contemporaneously on the doge and on a person of the popular classes obviously are an attempt to explain anecdotally the anomalous social alliance behind the conspiracy.
Can we suppose that in some cases these anecdotes reworked a real event, expanding it? Vittorio Lazzarini, who contributed the most to our knowledge of the Falier conspiracy, has not ruled this out. In one of his admirable, erudite pieces of research from the end of the nineteenth century and finally collected in a volume in 1963, Lazzarini analyzed that page from Lorenzo de’ Monaci’s chronicle which discussed the blow the nobleman Giovanni Dandolo was said to have inflicted on Bertucci Isarello.45 (Actually, de’ Monaci, as we saw, spoke of a Bertuccio Israelo—a variant form not recorded by Lazzarini.) In succeeding chronicles the episode was repeated and expanded. The names of the protagonists change: in the so-called Barbaro chronicle it is Marco Barbaro who administers the slap, and the person receiving it is Stefano Giazza nicknamed Gisello, admiral of the Arsenal, who says to Marin Falier: “Meser lo dose, le bestie maligne se liga, e se ne le se pol ligar le se ammazza” (“My Lord, doge, we tie up malignant beasts, and if we cannot tie them up, we butcher them”). Lazzarini comments: “We suspect that the two different accounts are the reports of a single fact, and, anyway, we accept the one that refers to Dandolo and to Bertuccio Isarello, because it is narrated by a chronicler who is almost contemporary, as is the case with de’ Monaci, and because Giovanni Dandolo was at the time sopracomito and councillor of the capitano da mar and Bertuccio Isarello is a historical person, whereas Stefano Giazza never appears in contemporary documents and chronicles.. . .”46
“Bertuccio Isarello is a historical person”: the statement is supported by careful research conducted on Venetian notarial documents. Of the five texts discovered by Lazzarini, it suffices to mention two, both conserved in the fondo Grazie in the Venetian State Archives. From the first, dated 13 July 1330, it emerges that Bertuccio Isarello was at the time a nauclero, the master of a vessel, together with Jacobello Lambardo.47 The second, dated 22 February 1345, reveals that Bertuccio Isarello was sentenced to a fine equal to half the value of a cargo of pepper.48
This is the name of the man who is supposed to have participated, with his father-in-law Filippo Calendario, in Doge Marin Faliero’s conspiracy. In a fine essay Lazzarini refuted the tradition which identified Filippo Calendario as the architect of the ducal palace.49 In the documents Filippo is always referred to as “taiapiera” (“stone cutter”), except in the aforementioned “ancient chronicle” transcribed by Sanudo, which speaks of a “Filippo Calendaro seafarer and man of great consequence and . . . Bertuzzi Isarello engineer and a most astute man.”50 Lazzarini shrewdly supposes that in this passage the professions of the father-in-law and of the son-in-law were reversed: Bertuccio Isarello would have been the “seafarer and man of great consequence.”51 To grasp the significance of this last point it will suffice to recall how the conspiracy was supposed to have unfolded. Nicolo Trevisan, who at the time sat on the Council of Ten, wrote in his chronicle that “Philippo Calendario with all those of the castle, namely the seafaring men, that very night [of the conspiracy] were to rush to shore.”52 Of the ten men hanged by the neck as participants in the conspiracy, five were variously described as “seafaring men.”53 Four other “seafaring men, who were principal actors and traitors in said betrayal,” managed to escape and were declared outlaws.54 Only in-depth research may be able to tell us what drove “the seafaring men,” after the Genoese victory at Porto Longo, to support Marin Falier’s attempt to make himself “sovereign” of Venice. To be sure, the conspirators were not isolated figures. The four magistrates appointed by the Council of Ten to deal with the situation acted with extreme dispatch. They had to set an example, impede the contagion from spreading: “The earth was set in motion,” a contemporary chronicle cryptically mentions.55
The sentences reveal a symbolic hierarchy. At the summit we find Bertuccio Isarello and Filippo Calendario. On 16 April, a day after the discovery of the conspiracy, they were hanged by the neck “with iron gags (sparange) over their mouths,” presumably to prevent them from haranguing the crowd.56 None of the other condemned men received this macabre treatment. On 17 April the doge’s cap was cast to the ground and he was decapitated.
3. Our journey backward from libraries to archives, from Julien Sorel to the conspiracy of Marin Falier, has been highly discontinuous. Between Israël Bertuccio and Bertuccio Isarello there is more than the divide separating fiction from historical reality. In the continuous variation of the contexts, everything—from names to social status—dissolves. An aphorism from the eighteenth-century satirist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg comes to mind: “If I first change the blade and then the handle of my knife, do I still have the same knife?”
One of Lichtenberg’s devoted readers invites us to examine the question differently. I refer to Ludwig Wittgenstein and to his notion of “family resemblances.” Wittgenstein began from the “composite portraits” of Francis Galton, images created by the superimposition of photographs of members of the same family, or of a determinate social group.57 Earlier Wittgenstein had used Galton’s “composite portraits” to illustrate the possibility of isolating a common element, running like a red thread (a metaphor borrowed from Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities) within a determinate whole. Later, Wittgenstein, in writings published after his death with the title Philosophische Untersuchungen, returned to Galton’s experiment, but now suggesting a totally different point of view. The shaded contours of the “composite portraits,” the result of partial intertwining and superimpositions, suggested a different, nonessentialist notion of family resemblances. The metaphor of the red thread running the length of the fiber was replaced by a much more complex web. In a series of perceptive essays the British anthropologist Rodney Needham identified the historical precedents of Wittgenstein’s idea, demonstrating that the eighteenth-century botanist Michel Adanson had already worked out a similar classification. The series which Needham called “polythetic” can include components characterized by distinctive traits of the type aba, bcb, dcd.. . . In a case of this sort, the first and last elements in the series do not have any trait in common.58
4. The long shadow thrown over the centuries by Bertuccio Isarello is a fictional shadow, the shadow of someone else. His voice, suffocated on the scaffold, has not come down to us. But precisely because it is important to distinguish between reality and fiction, we must learn to recognize when one becomes joined to the other, each transmitting something that we might call “energy”—that word so dear to Stendhal.59