His efforts helped bring about the independent and unified Italy in place of the several separate states, many dominated by foreign powers, that existed until the 19th century.

His father Giacomo Mazzini, originally from Chiavari, was a university professor who had adhered to Jacobin ideology, while his mother Maria Drago was renowned for her beauty and religious Jansenist fervour.

[9] The group's motto was God and the People,[12] and its basic principle was the unification of the several states and kingdoms of the peninsula into a single republic as the only true foundation of Italian liberty.

Mazzini's political activism met some success in Tuscany, Abruzzi, Sicily, Piedmont, and his native Liguria, especially among several military officers.

The repression was ruthless: 12 participants were executed, while Mazzini's best friend and director of the Genoese section of the Giovine Italia, Jacopo Ruffini, killed himself.

A group of Italian exiles were to enter Piedmont from Switzerland and spread the revolution there, while Giuseppe Garibaldi, who had recently joined Young Italy, was to do the same from Genoa.

Denis Mack Smith writes: In the spring of 1834, while at Bern, Mazzini and a dozen refugees from Italy, Poland, and Germany founded a new association with the grandiose name of Young Europe.

Its basic, and equally grandiose idea, was that, as the French Revolution of 1789 had enlarged the concept of individual liberty, another revolution would now be needed for national liberty, and his vision went further because he hoped that in the no doubt distant future free nations might combine to form a loosely federal Europe with some kind of federal assembly to regulate their common interests.

... His intention was nothing less than to overturn the European settlement agreed in 1815 by the Congress of Vienna, which had reestablished an oppressive hegemony of a few great powers and blocked the emergence of smaller nations.

On 30 April 1840, Mazzini reformed the Giovine Italia in London, and on 10 November of the same year, he began issuing the Apostolato popolare ("Apostleship of the People").

A succession of failed attempts at promoting further uprisings in Sicily, Abruzzi, Tuscany, and Lombardy-Venetia discouraged Mazzini for a long period, which dragged on until 1840.

[15] From London he also wrote an endless series of letters to his agents in Europe and South America and made friends with Thomas Carlyle and his wife Jane.

The First Italian War of Independence, started by the Piedmontese king Charles Albert to exploit the favourable circumstances in Milan, turned into a total failure.

He was appointed, together with Carlo Armellini and Aurelio Saffi, as a member of the triumvirate of the new republic on 29 March, becoming soon the true leader of the government and showing good administrative capabilities in social reforms.

In July he founded the association Amici di Italia ("Friends of Italy") in London, to attract consensus towards the Italian liberation cause.

From this moment on, Mazzini was more of a spectator than a protagonist of the Italian Risorgimento, whose reins were now strongly in the hands of the Savoyard monarch Victor Emmanuel II and his skilled prime minister, Camillo Benso, Conte di Cavour.

On 21 February 1859, together with 151 republicans, he signed a manifesto against the alliance between Piedmont and the Emperor of France which resulted in the Second War of Italian Independence and the conquest of Lombardy.

Unlike his contemporary Giuseppe Garibaldi, who was also a republican, Mazzini refused to swear an oath of allegiance to the House of Savoy until after the Capture of Rome.

[21] Mazzini also rejected the classical liberal principles of the Age of Enlightenment based on the doctrine of individualism, which he criticized as "presupposing either metaphysical materialism or political atheism".

[26] In 1871, Mazzini condemned the radical, anti-religious and revolutionary socialist revolt in France that led to the creation of the short-lived Paris Commune.

[32] While Il Gazzettino Rosa praised Mazzini as "the 'saviour' and teacher of Italy", it insisted: We have no more idols, we don't accept abstruse, incomprehensible formulas.

[32]According to Lucy Riall, "the emphasis by younger radicals on the 'social question' was paralleled by an increase in what was called 'internationalist' or socialist activity (mostly Bakuninist anarchism) throughout northern and southern Italy, which was given a big boost by the Paris Commune."

He came out entirely in favour of the Paris Commune and internationalism, and his stance brought him much closer to the younger radicals, ... and gave him a new lease on political life.

[33] Christopher Bayly wrote that Mazzini "had arrived at similar conclusions", referring to "the Saint-Simonian ideas of association and Charles Fourier's 'law of attraction'", but "through an emotive process that owed little to rationalisation".

[38] In Socialism: National or International, first published in 1942, Franz Borkenau described Mazzini as "that impressive Genoese" and "leader of the Italian underground democratic and unitarian movement".

After advocating interventionism in World War I and enlisting, Mussolini "found himself immersed in a patriotic atmosphere permeated by Mazzinian references".

A deist who believed in divine providence, Mazzini described himself as a Christian and emphasized the necessity of faith and a relationship with God while vehemently denouncing atheism and rationalism.

Although some of his religious views were at odds with the Catholic Church and the Papacy, with his writings often tinged with anti-clericalism, Mazzini also criticized Protestantism, stating that it is "divided and subdivided into a thousand sects, all founded on the rights of individual conscience, all eager to make war on one another, and perpetuating that anarchy of beliefs which is the sole true cause of the social and political disturbances that torment the peoples of Europe".

After his many encounters with political philosophers in England, France and across Europe, Mazzini had decided that the principle of equality between men and women was fundamental to building a truly democratic Italian nation.

[52] A plaque on Laystall Street in Clerkenwell, London's Little Italy during the 1850s, also pays tribute to Mazzini, calling him "The Apostle of Modern Democracy".