Risveglio Nazionale
 Image from the cover of Risveglio Nazionale's April 1922 issue, by Pierre Brissaud | |
| Editor | Maria Caracciolo |
|---|---|
| Categories |
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| Frequency | Monthly |
| Circulation | 500.000 |
| Founder | Maria Caracciolo |
| First issue | November 1908 |
| Final issue | March 1939 |
| Country | Alscia |
| Based in | Etra, Alscia |
| Language | Italian and French |
Risveglio Nazionale (Italian: "National Awakening"; Gylic transcription: Risvelio Naţionale) was an Alscian magazine of politics and culture, published between 1908 and 1939. Its animating personality was Maria Caracciolo, who founded it and served as editor-in-chief throughout its existence.
Famed for its ambition to reflect the province and provide an intellectual foundation for nation-building and state-building, Risveglio Nazionale became one of Alscia's most successful and influential magazines. It featured some of the greatest writers, editors, illustrators, and cartoonists of its time. Its political orientation was progressive and liberal, and it was considered the main publication of Donatellism.
History
Risveglio Nazionale was founded in 1908 by Maria Caracciolo. Relocated to Alscia after its establishment, she considered Alscia the first step towards Gylian revival and liberation from Xevden, and sought to provide a solid theoretical underpinning for the province as a nation-building and state-building project.
Maria took a conceptual approach as editor-in-chief: she left practical administration to her colleagues, set the magazine's tone, and leveraged her connections to secure contributions from Alscia's best journalists, academics, and artists. Her ambition to capture the "hurried province" in print and guide its course was responsible for the magazine's success.
Risveglio Nazionale quickly established itself as one of Alscia's leading magazines. At its height, it had a circulation of circa 500.000, and great influence on public opinion. Its influence was demonstrated by Maria receiving the title of Duchess by UOC in 1922.
The magazine was broadly liberal in its politics, and reflected the progressive and reformist agitation of the province, allying itself with many reform and social movements. Maria sought to have it reflect Alscia's political diversity and serve as a national salon. It featured guest contributions and printed debates between the province's leading liberals, socialists, communists, conservatives, radicals, and anarchists. Although Maria was unconvinced by anarchism, she recognised the anarchists' contribution to Gylian resistance and treated them as seriously as other ideologies.
The gradual shift to the left in the FPP opened a gap with the magazine, which remained firmly liberal. Over time, Maria's commitment to the "hurried province" led her away from Gylian nationalism. She criticised the Alscian Border War as a distraction from development. She shifted from seeing Alscia as a first step to Gylian liberation to simply arguing that Alscia should simply annex Xevden and absorb Gylians into the existing province.
Her relations with the left grew more agitated; her social corporatism made her perceive trade unions as a participant in state-building rather than an autonomous labour movement defending workers' interests.
How far Risveglio Nazionale had traveled from the Alscian mainstream was made clear during the dissolution of the Cacertian Empire. It supported independence in personal union with Cacerta in the Alscian sovereignty referendum, against the overwhelming popularity of joining the Free Territories, which won by a landslide. The writer Anaïs Nin later commented that, with the referendum, Maria had gone "from Donatella Rossetti's second-in-command to Beatrice Albini".
The magazine made its final issue a special one dealing with the upcoming transition, and was closed with Alscia's entrance to the Free Territories.
Content and style
The contents of Risveglio Nazionale touched on many aspects of life in Alscia. The magazine featured intellectual theorising, political debates and analysis, magazine and book reviews, commentary on world events, activist journalism, and serialised fiction.
It put more emphasis on commentary than reporting, but benefited from close links with Alscian media, helping draw attention to and reinforce investigative journalism. Maria was a practitioner of government by journalism, seeing the media as a driving force for Alscian social activism and the eradication of social ills.
The magazine boasted lavish illustrations from Alscia's best-known artists, mainly in the Art Nouveau and Art Deco styles that achieved widespread popularity. Pierre Brissaud and Tamara Łempicka were two of the most prolific illustrators. Tamara famously sent her illustrations directly to the magazine for it to write articles around, rather than the opposite.
It was published in Italian and French — the former the official language of Alscia, the latter the main lingua franca among Gylians. Although the magazine was supportive of the Gylic languages and standardisation efforts, it avoided the code-switching that came to characterise Gylian multilingualism, and contributed to a perception of Italian and French as prestige languages.
The magazine made one notable contribution to Gylian political culture through its 1920 profile of Lucretia Pecunia Mercator. While the profile was positive and aided Lucretia's popularity, it also presented her to the public mainly as a charmingly eccentric figure, emphasising her personality over her market anarchism. It thus rendered market anarchism a marginal presence in Alscian politics, while setting the precedent for market anarchists' adoption of an image of decadent glamour and acceptance as a harmlessly eccentric presence in Gylian politics.
Contributors
Notable contributors have included Maria Caracciolo, Dæse Şyna, Anaïs Nin (pseudonymously), Şio Etes, Hannah Edelstein, Hildegard Riese, Edda Grolli, Taeko Asakura, and Herta Schwamen.
Legacy
In many ways, Risveglio Nazionale lived up to its ambition of being Alscia's "national magazine". Its wide coverage of Alscian life, accessible presentation of intellectual theorising, and broad readership gave it significant influence on public opinion, and went a long way towards reflecting the atmosphere of the "hurried province" within its pages.
Its eventual fate shows how the magazine's devotion to Alscia turned from a strength to a liability. Without the radical and revolutionary instincts that animated the left and grew in popularity, it diverged from Gylian nationalism towards a more Alscian form, supporting the preservation of Alscia and its absorption of the Gylian territories under Xevdenite rule. This paternalistic and centralising "Mother Alscia" view brought ridicule and a period of "embarrassed dismissal" in the Free Territories, which achieved the creation of Gylias in a more anarchist and pluralist manner.
Risveglio Nazionale remains respected for its achievements, and identified with the "hurried province". Its close ties with Donatellism have been extensively studied and commented upon. Economist Leále Tiekat's book The Magazine and the State helped reassess the previous view of the magazine as largely a submissive "house organ of Donatellism", and it is credited today with helping realise a comprehensive and coherent worldview out of Donatella's largely pragmatic instincts.
Although the "national salon" model fell out of favour in the Gylian media in favour of openly politically-aligned outlets, the ambition, presentation, and quality of Risveglio Nazionale have been cited as inspiration by various outlets, including The Democrat, L'Petit Écho, Silhouette, The Travelling Companion, and Gylias Review. One publication that explictly positioned itself as a successor, The National Observer, evolved from monthly magazine to a daily liberal newspaper.
The memory of the magazine, and of the province as a whole, continues to shape regional identities in Arxaþ and Alţira — a topic explored in Rasa Ḑeşéy's documentary The Hurried Province.