Rienzi: The Last of the Roman Tribunes - Edward Bulwer-Lytton (week 1)

Rienzi (aka Cola di Rienzo, 1313-1354) was a 14th-century Italian politician and leader who styled himself the "tribune of the Roman people." In his lifetime, he advocated for the unification of Italy and the abolition of temporal papal power, serving as a model and inspiration for the Risorgimento in the 19th century. He is the subject of an ode by Petrarch, an opera by Wagner, and the novel Rienzi (1835) by Edward Bulwer-Lytton.

Today, Lytton is ingloriously remembered for the opening line "It was a dark and stormy night." But he was a literary luminary in his time, credited by Edgar Allan Poe with enkindling "the wildest passions of our nature, the most profound of our thoughts, the brightest visions of our fancy, and the most ennobling and lofty of our aspirations."

Poe's review of Rienzi considered it Lytton's best novel, calling it "a profound and lucid exposition of the morale of Government — of the Philosophies of Rule and Misrule — of the absolute incompatibility of Freedom and Ignorance — Tyranny in the few and Virtue in the many." Its democratic message is "something akin to direct evidence that ... in a nation's self is the only security for a nation — and that it is absolutely necessary to model" government "upon the character of the governed."

Week 1 (July 20): Books I - II
Week 2 (August 3): Books III - X

Rienzi:

• Kindle
• Gutenberg
• Google books
• Archive

Supplemental:

• Rienzi opera by Wagner (1842)

Trivia:

• Rienzi is dedicated to Alessandro Manzoni, the author of The Betrothed.

Extracts:

• "... we’ve struck for liberty, and liberty we’ll have! I’m your tribune, boys; I’m your Rienzi. The Commodore must keep his word." (White-Jacket, 54)

This meetup is part of the series The Risorgimento.