The Two Faces of Daniele Manin. French Republican Celebrity and Italian Monarchic Icon (1848-1880)

Owing to its profile of an (inter)national political process with a global audience, the Italian Risorgimento represents an extraordinary laboratory for the ‘great media transformation’, or the ‘graphic revolution’, which pervades Europe in the nineteenth century and as a consequence, it is a privileged experimental field of celebrity politics. Through a plural set of printed and iconographic sources, the article analyses the mediatisation and peopolisation process which involves the figure of Daniele Manin, the president of the Republic of Venice of 1848, dying in exile in Paris in 1857, and the romantic adventures of his ‘martyr family’. In particular, the aim of this contribution is firstly to study the construction of Manin’s double face: the Frenchified or French republican celebrity and the Italian monarchic icon. Secondly, it highlights the tensions of the transnational media dynamics which involve an appropriation by the French imaginary and a re-discovery by the Italian imaginary, specifically focusing on the revealing episode of the Franco-Italian monument to Manin inaugurated in Turin on March 1861