CARBONA'RI (literally "colliers" or "charcoal-burners"), the name of a secret politi cal society, first, in some degree, made known in 1820. The constitution, like time pre cise objects of the C., still remains in a great measure secret; though they have printed instructions, catechisms, statutes, rituals, etc., for their associates. The statements respecting the high antiquity of this secret confederacy are quite fabulous. There is every reason to believe that it originated during the last French regime in Naples. Botta, in his Storia d'Italia, states that, under Murat's government, the Neapolitan republicans, equally hating the French and king Ferdinand, escaped into the wild defiles of the Abruzzi, and here, naming themselves " C.," formed a secret society. It is said that their leader, Capobianco, had great powers of popular eloquence, and that their motto or war-cry was, " Vengeance for the lamb torn by the wolf." The peculiar phraseology of the C. is taken from the vocation of charcoal-burners. For instance, they are (or were) wont to speak of " clearing the forest of wolves." The "wolves" probably meant at first foreign tyrants; but in the course of time, after the restoration of the Neapolitan Bourbons, such symbolical expressions had reference to their despicable misrule. Among themselves the initiated were styled " good cou sins." The various societies do not seem to have possessed a common center, or to have been properly organized for combined action. A place of meeting was styled " a hut" (baracca); the external neighborhood " the forest;" and the interior of the hut was the vendita or "place for selling coal." A union of several of these huts formed a "repub lic." The superior buts (alte vendite) at Naples and Salerno, endeavored, but without success, to effect a centralization of the Carbonari. The society, soon after its institu tion, numbered 24,000 to 30,000 adherents, and increased so rapidly in Italy, that in Mar., 1820, it is said as many as 650,000 new members were initiated, including consider able numbers of the military and the clergy. The religious and Protestant character of the order is expressed in its statutes, which include the article: "That every carbonaro has the natural and unalterable right of worshiping God according to his own convic tions." Though carbonarism did not arise from the lodges of freemasons (as several
have supposed), it has borrowed many forms of masonry.
After the restoration of the Bourbons several secret political unions were formed in France, and in 1820 were confederated with the Carbonari. Paris, after the prosecu tions against the secret societies of Italy, was made the head-quarters of a carbonarism which, adopting all the symbolic phraseology, rules, and regulations of the Italian socie ties, received from the rapidly systematizing genius of the French, an organic character which it had never before possessed. The initiated styled themselves bons cousins, and spoke of the uninitiated as pagani (heathens). Written documents and communications were strictly prohibited by the heads of the union, and treachery was to be punished by assassination. After the close of the French and Spanish war, the C., whose activity in contriving plots had excited the terror of the French prefects, restricted its endeavors to the circulation of republican ideas, without direct attempts towards insurrection. After the July revolution, several of the leading French C. attached themselves to the new regime, and their society was gradually dissolved. In its place the new Charbon nerie Democratique was founded, having for its object the establishment of a republican government, founded on the principles of Babeuf (q.v.). The endeavor of these new C. to make Paris the center of all political movements, led to the secession of the Italian who associated themselves under the title " Young Italy." French carbonar ism is not known to exist at present, and it is possible that even in Italy the triumphs of constitutional patriotism during recent times have rendered its existence no longer necessary, but it certainly was alive at the commencement of the Franco-Sardinian war with Austria; and one of the rumors of the time was, that the French emperor— who, in his young republican days, had been a member of this society—had entered on the war of liberation, to conciliate his old associates, who had menaced him with the fate of a traitor.