Intervention de :
Congrès : Session n°64: Political Prisoners in 19th-Century Europe: Comparative and Transnational Histories
Date : 7 janvier 2022
Lieu : La Nouvelle-Orléans, États-Unis
Organisation : American Historical Association, Elena Bacchin, Robert J. Goldstein, Padraic J. Kenney, Steven C. Soper
Présentation de l'intervention
Quite unknown to international opinion until the mid-19th century, Carlo Poerio’s fame increased throughout the 1850s due to the media coverage, by a large fraction of the European liberal and democratic press, of his imprisonment. As a former Neapolitan minister during the 1848 revolution, he was imprisoned after the collapse of the revolution and gave rise to an extensive international media campaign aimed at organizing support for this figure considered emblematic of the cause of political prisoners in European authoritarian monarchies. In this paper, I intend to question the media constructions invoked to justify this support: by reference to the Christian figures of martyrdom and in continuity with analogies increasingly mobilized in the first half of the 19th century, Poerio is presented as a martyr of freedom. Such a quality, affirmed by his supporters and questioned by his detractors, is based on an emotional repertoire centered around the expressions of suffering, the capacity for indignation of contemporaries and the charitable constructions that they can provoke. By associating these emotions with Carlo Poerio’s case, his supporters sacralize his suffering by presenting it as exemplary. The moral portrait of the prisoner and the regular monitoring of his health that the press developed and used to contribute to these constructions which culminate, after Poerio’s amnesty in 1859, in the marks of devotion that are returned to him in the societies where his reception in exile was considered. For some of his contemporaries, he appears as a « living martyr, » a paradoxical lay figure forged on the figure of the living saint of the Christian universe. But for the opposing opinion, this qualification as a martyr appears representative of the increasingly numerous instrumental uses that liberal movements would make of images and notions borrowed from the religious universe, for the needs of mass politicization.
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