The Working Class Took Over Naples in 1647, July 7.

This demonstrates why the oppressor class is so extremely frightened of the working class.

I just started reading this fascinating book. Here’s an extract from it about an event I had not heard of before:

NAPLES, 1647 On July 7, 1647, a Neopolitan fisherman named Masaniello led a protest by the market women, carters, porters, sailors, fishermen, weavers, silk winders, and all the other poor, or lazzaroni, of the second- or third-largest city in Europe.17 The rebellion began in the marketplace of Naples, where producers rural and urban discovered that the Spanish viceroy had levied a new gabelle, or tax, on the city’s fabled fruit (Goethe believed that the Neapolitans had invented lemonade).18 The rebels turned the world upside down: galley oarsmen became captains, students were given books, prisons were opened, and tax records were burned. Nobles were forbidden to wear expensive garments, while their palaces were marked for destruction and their furnishings burned in the streets. “These Goods are got out of our Heart’s Blood; and as they burn, so ought the Souls and Bodies of those Blood-suckers who own them, to fry in the Fire of Hell,” cried one of the insurgents.19 The rebels decreed that anyone caught looting might be executed, so “that all the World may know, we have not enterpris’d this businesse to enrich ourselves but to vindicate the common liberty.” The price of bread fell to rates consistent with a moral economy. This was the essence of the revolt, which Masaniello expressed in “savage eloquence.” His preferred figure of speech, however, was not to be found in the rhetorical handbooks of the Renaissance; rather, it was the price list: “Look ye here, my Lads, how we are ridden, Gabel upon Gabel, 36 Ounces the Loaf of Bread, 22 the Pound of Cheese,” et cetera, et cetera. “Are these things to be endured? No, my Boys; Get my Words by Heart, and sound them thro’ every Street of the City.”

Although it lasted only ten days, the revolt of Naples in July 1647 marked the first time that the proletariat of any European city seized power and governed alone. Michelangelo Cerquozzi, the baroque painter, recognized the gravity of the event and painted The Revolt of Masaniello (1648) as a battle scene. Amid the tents and booths of the crowded market, the traffic of commerce, the herded livestock, the great barrel on the water wagon, that the hundreds of people have begun to take action is shown by new gestures of men bending for rocks, of bare arms raised, of pointed fingers. His is a sober assessment of an urban insurrection, equally without condescension or heroism.20 An eighteenth-century historian raised his eyebrows and gasped, “After Ages will hardly believe what Height of Power this ridiculous Sovereign arrived to, who, trampling bare-foot on a throne, and wearing a Mariner’s Cap instead of a Diadem, in the space of four Days, raised an Army of above 150,000 Men, and made himself Master of one of the most populous Cities in the worlde.”21

Masaniello’s story had special importance for the centers of European seafaring, England and Holland. English merchants had recently eclipsed their Italian counterparts in Levant shipping and now sent as many as 120 ships and three thousand sailors to Naples each year, with attendant desertions and turnovers. Sailors were a major source of information about the revolt. Less immediately effective but more lasting were the medallions struck in Amsterdam, the drama surreptitiously produced in London, and the translations of the first history of the uprising.22 In 1649 T. B. published a play entitled The Rebellion of Naples or the Tragedy of Massenello commonly so called: but rightly Tomaso Aniello di Malfa Generall of the Neapolitans. Written by a Gentleman who was an eye-witness where this was really acted upon the Bloudy Stage, the Streets of Naples. In 1650 James Howell, an entrepreneur, a royalist, and literary man with connections to the Levant Company, translated Alexander Giraffi’s An Exact History of the Late Revolutions in Naples; and of Their Monstrous Successes, and in the same year The Second Part of Masaniello . . . The End of the Commotions.23 These were dedicated to the governor of the Levant Company with the reminder that,

The people is a beast which heads hath many England of late shew’d this more than any.

Power and solidarity were themes of the play The Rebellion of Naples. On the frontispiece of its published text appeared an illustration of Masaniello himself, bare-legged and bonneted, overlooking a sky with a bare forearm hurling thunderbolts at a squadron of warships; Neptune raises his trident as squares of pikemen fail to prevent a few mariners from hauling the entire city of Naples from the sea to the beach. In his first monologue, Masaniello compares himself to a galley oarsman. The first words from the crowd, meanwhile, are the sailor’s abiding principle of solidarity and the particular cry heard during the mutinies of 1626: “One and all, One and all, One and all.”24 Alluding to the English Levellers and John the Baptist (whose June feast day had been canceled in Naples for fear of tumult), Masaniello’s adviser promises to “level the high walls of government with the earth they stood on: The Axe is already laid to the root.” The Spanish viceroy refers to the furious beast with many heads and shamelessly asks, “How will you make your sauces, if you will not squeeze your Oranges? Or Wine, if you will not presse the Grape?”

Slavery, Africa, and the women of Naples were major concerns both of the play and of the translated history. One of Masaniello’s advisers had been a slave in Algeria for nineteen years, and another had been a galley slave. The slave of a duke, a Moor, was freed. Masaniello had a daughter who was a blackamoor, who sang a song in praise of blackness. During the summer-festival ritual that actually provided the flashpoint of the insurrection, Masaniello led a group of teenagers masked in blackface who attacked a mock fort in the middle of the mercato. Giraffi compared the armed women and girls of Naples and their decisive street-fighting skills to so many Amazons. Masaniello’s own wife was imprisoned for failing to pay the gabelle. The women vowed “they would burn the City, and themselves and Children along with it, before they would be Beasts of Burden any longer, and bring up their Children to be Slaves and Pack-Horses to a proud and haughty Nobility.” T. B. compared the women to Ursula, the symbol of disorder in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair. An old woman observing the black daughter suggested that she and the white daughter stop scrutinizing one another and instead look elsewhere, to “see what becomes of all the Money, and all the Land.” Cui bono.

[There’s a picture here in the text captioned: “Masaniello and his army of fisherman capturing Naples. T.B., The Rebellion of Naples, or the Tragedy of Massenello . . . (1649). Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Yale University.”]

The Rebellion of Naples combined persons, events, and ideas from both Naples and London, demonstrating a circulation of the experience of insurrection and suggesting a unity of class conflicts in a diversity of locations. The people had discovered their own strength; this was an autonomous insurrection whose force and power had to be respected—it could not be laughed off the stage. It remained a source of fear to the emerging politics of the bourgeois state; it also remained an example of hope for actual proletarians searching for justice, such as Thomas Spence, as we shall see later. In a notebook, Spinoza portrayed himself in the guise of the fishmonger.25 John Locke sported with Masaniello to ridicule the divine right of kings. His friend James Tyrrell argued that even when the mobile, or urban mob, murmured at grievous taxes, it could not be justified in revolting because that inevitably led to vast spoilage of property, as Masaniello had proved.26 Authorities in Maryland, New York, Massachusetts, Virginia, and London used the name of Masaniello to tar political opponents. Tom Paine feared the name, but the soldiers, sailors, and commoners of the English Revolution did not. In November 1647, only a few days after the debates at Putney, a speaker in London said, “The same business we are upon is perfected in Naples, for if any person stand up for monarchy there, he is immediately hanged at his door.”27