A Book That Shook an Empire

Extract

When a hundred years ago Sivio Pellico published his Le Mie Prigioni, the description of his ten years’ imprisonment in an Austrian fortress, it was with no political purpose. Partly, one may guess, as the result of those terrible years, and partly because, before the intensity of his religious experience during those same years, all else paled and became insignificant, on his release he turned away from politics, and all his writings henceforth would be on religious and moral themes. And if he published the story of his sufferings, it was at the instance of his parish priest, with the sole aim, as he says,

of helping to comfort the unhappy by showing the evils I suffered and the consolations that attended on the worst misfortunes; to show that through myi long torment I did not find humanity so wicked, so unworthy of indulgence, so poor in noble souls as it is often made out to be; to invite noble hearts to love much, to hate no one .... and to repeat a truth well-known but often forgotten: that Religion and Philosophy create strong wills and calm judgments, and that without these united conditions there can be no justice nor dignity nor sure principle.’

When an eminent Protestant told him that he had been converted to Catholicism by an eloquent passage in praise of confession, Silvio Pellico felt he had not written it in vain. That his book should seize the imaginations of Europe and do more than any other to shake the Austrian domination in Italy, was neither in his expectations nor intentions.