Felice Orsini

Felice Orsini (Italian pronunciation: [feˈliːtʃe orˈsiːni]; 10 December 1819 – 13 March 1858) was an Italian revolutionary and leader of the Carbonari who tried to assassinate Napoleon III, Emperor of the French.

Felice Orsini was born at Meldola in Romagna, then part of the Papal States. He was encouraged to become a priest, but he abandoned that lifestyle and became an ardent liberal, joining the Giovane Italia, a political society founded by Giuseppe Mazzini.

Orsini was arrested in 1844 along with his father, implicated in revolutionary plots and condemned to imprisonment for life. The new pope, Pius IX set him free, and he led a company of young Romagnols in the First War of Italian Independence in 1848, distinguishing himself in the engagements at Treviso and Vicenza.

Orsini was elected member of the Roman Constituent Assembly in 1849, and after the fall of the revolutionary republic in Rome he conspired against the papal autocracy in the interest of the Mazzinian party. Mazzini sent him on a secret mission to Hungary, but he was arrested in 1854 and imprisoned at Mantua. He escaped a few months later using a tiny saw to cut through two grids of bars, climbed out of the window 100 feet above ground and slid down using a rope he had made of bedsheets. Passing as a sympathetic peasant, he managed to get past the Austrian guards.

In 1856, he briefly visited Great Britain and received a favorable welcome. The daily news had published the first English translation of his tale of escape. He published The Memoirs and Adventures of Felice Orsini in 1856. In 1857, he also published an account of his prison experiences in English under the title of The Austrian Dungeons in Italy, which led to a rupture between him and Mazzini. Then he began to negotiate with Ausonio Franchi, editor of the Ragione of Turin, which he proposed to make the organ of pure republicans.

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