California Italian Studies

This article aims to reconstruct the origins of the carboneria order in the Kingdom of Naples, identifying them in the context of Europe-wide republican conspiracy. In this way the substantial political-ideological continuity after 1815 between Freemasonry and the carboneria emerges into view. To better understand this phenomenon from the inside, this essay examines the individual experience of a significant, though now almost unknown, figure in the Neapolitan carbonaro world of the early nineteenth century and the document trail that he produced, now held in French and Neapolitan archives. Giuseppe Basile de Luna, maternal uncle of Carlo Pisacane, was at once a carbonaro, Bourbon secret service spy, and secret informer for Austria and France. The pages that follow will attempt to show how the carboneria was born in Naples from the complex political, sociological and ideological processes through which southern Italian republicans, after their defeat in 1799, turned their attention to the masses in order to lure them away from Sanfedism in support of the nationalist cause.