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Fisher of Men

Seventeenth-century revolutionary Masaniello’s marketplace rebellion Wikimedia Commons

A marketplace—with its bustling exchange of goods and ideas—is often understood as a potential site of philosophical contemplation, as with Socrates’s Agora, but it can also be where revolutions begin. Consider the Piazza del Mercato in seventeenth-century Naples, which had operated since the Middle Ages. This was not just where goods were sold but where a radical new politics would be briefly born. Before the humble-born Tommaso Aniello—who would come to be known as Masaniello—would foment his revolution of 1647 against Spanish Hapsburg rule, the Piazza del Mercato was where the fishermen sold squid and octopus for grilling, cuts of crimson tuna and delicate branzino, and small fillets of anchovies.

On a typical morning, the market overseen by the gothic facade of Sant’Eligio Maggiore and the bells of the Carmelite Santa Maria del Carmine mingled with the shouts and claps of the audience watching acrobats and commedia dell’arte performers with their puppets of the clown Pulcinella. Sellers and buyers would trade in creamy balls of Fior de latte and carafes of Lacryma Christi del Vesuvio made from grapes grown in the rich soil of the volcano looming over the city, spindly artichokes and astringent lemons from Campania, bundles of paccheri and ziti, rolls of braciole and beef tripe. Masaniello wouldn’t have just traded in fish, however, but also the rich stew of radical ideas that endured among the Italian underclass for centuries, from the mystical doctrines of the Joachimites to the revolutionary egalitarianism of the Franciscan heretics called the Fraticelli, all potential ingredients in the rebellion he led.

Recently, only a few years before Masaniello would trade in the apron of the fishmonger for the cap of the revolutionary, the lurid red tomato, fixture of Italian gastronomy, had begun to appear in Market Square. At the time, tomatoes would have been smaller and yellow, but their presence attests to how the city—a metropolis of a quarter-million people—was already embedded in a vast network of colonialism and globalization, as well as resistance to those forces. Tomatoes were introduced by the Spanish, colonial overseers of the once-independent Italian kingdom. Ruled over by the Hapsburgs, the Spanish colonial empire had grown incomprehensibly wealthy and powerful through Mexican gold and Peruvian silver. Naturally, such wealth was purchased in blood; in Peru, indigenous workers were dying in droves after just a few months of labor in the mines, poisoned by the mercury used to amalgamate the ore. Five million square miles, the Spanish empire encompassed the Low Countries and the Holy Roman Empire, the Philippines and Guam, almost all of South America and most of the North, as well as this bustling, crowded, fetid, and beautiful Italian city of Naples, something described by its own denizens as a paradise inhabited by devils. It was here that the most unlikely of revolutions—started by an illiterate and working-class fishmonger—would become the first proletariat anti-colonial resistance movement of the modern world; its failed leader’s thought expressed not in treatises but in practice. A fisherman’s politics, of which Victor Hugo would say more than two centuries later in Les Misérables that “revolt is Masaniello . . . revolt is a thing of the stomach.”

Masaniello was no vanguard, but the untutored, unlearned, uneducated son of a fisherman who was himself the son of a fisherman. Said to be born on Vico Rotto al Mercato less than a mile from where he would spend his short life slinging tuna and cod before he would rouse his fellow citizens to rebellion, Masaniello’s victory would be short-lived: in the end, he was assassinated by a conspiracy of bakers on the orders of the Spanish viceroy who opposed Masaniello’s redistributive policies a few months before the subsequent expulsion of the Spanish and the declaration of a republic. There had been previous anti-colonial uprisings, like the Earl of Tyrone’s Irish rebellion against the English a half-century earlier, but its leader was an aristocrat. There had also been popularuprisings, including the English Peasants’ Revolt of the fourteenth century and the Anabaptist coup in sixteenth-century Munster, but Naples combined the two, an early expression of what Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth ascribes to the colonized, who “can see clearly and immediately if decolonization has come to pass or not, for [the natives’] minimum demands are simply that the last shall be first,” true in Naples as a fish-seller assumed the position of “capo del popolo.” His reign would last for nine days.

While images of Masaniello, wearing a goatee and red cap, are not uncommon in Naples, his name (mushed into the mononym from his christened appellative) has largely been forgotten, especially as the Atlantic revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the nationalist revolutions of the nineteenth, and the communist revolutions of the twentieth have supplanted early radical political history. Despite that, “Early accounts of the Neapolitan uprising of 1647 called it a rivoluzione, or revolution, without parallel in ancient or modern history,” writes Paul Kléber Monod in The Power of Kings: Monarchy and Religion in Europe, 1589-1715. More than a century before the revolutions in America or France, that word revolutionwas aptly used to describe Masaniello’s rebellion, something that did not escape the notice of the English parliamentarians who would decapitate their own king less than two years later.

At only twenty-seven years old, Masaniello’s brief life is a rejoinder to the Great Man Theory of Historiography, still the preferred popular account among Whig historians. He did not make the Neapolitan Revolution, but was rather made by it. After more than a century under Spanish dominion, the Neapolitan working class was squeezed by regressive taxation meant to fund the Hapsburg crown’s military in the Thirty Years’ War, as well as in revolts in Holland, Portugal, and Catalonia. Southern Italy was a peripheral zone; like Ireland, it became a site of intracontinental colonization, as Rosario Villari explains in The Revolt of Naples. On the eve of Masaniello’s rebellion the region saw an “absolute decline and the elimination of progressive development. The social structure was simplified: aristocratic domination was consolidated and extended, and those . . . that resisted subjugation to feudal authority were marginalized and crushed.”   

Merchants like Masaniello were hit particularly hard by Spanish oppression, forced to make fish deliveries directly to their customers to circumnavigate the tax. Sometime after serving prison time for evading gambling debts, he met two middle-class opponents of the regime, the lawyer Marco Vitale and the elderly priest and political philosopher Giulio Genoino, who’d long advocated for reform. Genoino is sometimes configured as the brain behind the revolution, but the rebellion owed its initial success more to passing circumstance than philosophical principle. A strategist of insurrection, Masaniello was able to take advantage as a riot broke out between the fruit sellers, whose food fed the poor, and the customs officials, who made that product prohibitively expensive. On July 7, Masaniello was simply in the right place at the right time.

An English editor of Scipione Mazzella’s history of the city would remark in 1654, “The [Sultan] was never obeyed and feared in Constantinople as [Masaniello] was in Naples.” Having seized control of the market uprising, Masaniello organized the rioters into impromptu phalanxes and would burn a path through Naples’ streets to the viceroy’s palace, forcing him to flee. Masaniello next organized this rebellion into an improvised government that drafted a new set of accords for the city and dislodged aristocrats from their traditional perch. Masaniello’s rabble—or army, depending on your perspective—gathered weapons and took control of the city. The fisherman Tommaso Aniello would be inaugurated at the cathedral in silver-threaded finery as the city’s first citizen shortly after the first tomato was thrown. Not long after, he was assassinated in a monastery. In the chaos of the following months, a republic would be declared and gain French protection, which would itself fall with the return of the Spanish a year later. Despite its failures, the revolution was the “most dramatic crisis during the period of Spanish hegemony in southern Italy and shows the weakness and strengths of Spain’s position,” writes Tommaso Astarita in Between Salt Water and Holy Water: A History of Southern Italy, and Masaniello was a morning star of revolution in the empire from Lima to Manilla.

The sheer operatic spectacle of the 1647 Neapolitan revolt against Madrid, which could have emerged from an Alexandre Dumas swashbuckler, is hard to admit as history. The spectacular success of Masaniello in the first hours of the rebellion, taking the Mediterranean’s largest city before the sun had set, is only matched by his rapid downfall. Clearly the incipient revolution was not set up to realize universal emancipation, what Monod describes as a “state in which royal mediation was circumscribed or removed.” Even radical historians can be Whigs, but long before Lenin and Trotsky, Marx and Engels, Danton and Robespierre, Washington and Jefferson, the fruit sellers and grain peddlers of the marketplace imagined a world with no kings or lords. Praxis precedes theory; it may be that a Marx or Bakunin explains the mechanism of revolution, but it’s the hungry stomach that demands it. Today, it’s crucial to consider Masaniello‘s example in our own season of anti-colonial resistance.  

If Masaniello is unremembered in the English-speaking world today, his example was certainly crucial in the seventeenth century. The officers of the English New Model Army who were debating the principles of their soon-to-be-declared Commonwealth in Putney the same year as Masaniello’s revolt were certainly aware of him, as their glosses are among the earliest to elucidate a language of emancipation. Astarita writes that “people in England and the Netherlands—in the 1640s undergoing their own political upheavals—were fascinated by the Naples revolt.” In England, Oliver Cromwell was positively cast as a Masaniello by his supporters, only to be equated with the fisherman’s murderers once the Lord Protector’s rule became tyrannical. In the Low Countries, medals were forged with the familiar visage of the fish-peddler, carried by opponents to the Spanish.

In death, Masaniello became a Romantic hero, the subject of plays and operas, one of which partially instigated the Belgian revolution of 1830 after enraged audience members took to the streets inspired by the example of their radical predecessor some two centuries before. More academic philosophers, however, denigrated the frenzy of a Masaniello, dubbing him a Jacobin before Robespierre, a Bolshevik before Lenin. John Locke denigrated Masaniello in the 1689 First Treatise of Government, mocking the Neapolitans who “made him properly king, who was but the day before properly a fisherman.” Even Thomas Paine, among the most admirable of the American Revolution’s theorists, denounced Masaniello’s followers as a hysterical swarm of the “desperate and discontented” in his 1776 text Common Sense.

But why would we take their word for it? Locke, and certainly Hobbes, were allied with the power structure as demonstrated by their thinking, which while revolutionary in some respects, also consistently served to bolster a status quo. As an illiterate, Masaniello leaves us with no tracts or treatises; his example will have to suffice. The burgeoning Enlightenment would filter its politics through the abstract principle of human rights; Masaniello prefigures the more radical rhetoric of solidarity. Among the more sober fathers of the Enlightenment, Masaniello and his followers represent the rule of pandemonium to those who detested genuine popular uprisings as opposed to the schisms and jockeying of various aristocratic interests. Historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker write in The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic that to the ruling class this was a serpent composed of the “multitudes who gathered at the market, in the fields, on the piers and the ships, on the plantations, upon the battlefields,” and in the markets.????

To take Masaniello seriously means to place him within a tradition of what the historian Jonathan Israel calls the “radical Enlightenment.” Still understood as a period of human liberation, of women and men unshackling themselves from the arbitrary manacles of church and state, the radical enlightenment excises the hierarchical amendments and aristocratic pretensions that underscored the age. Israel writes in Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 that the most genuinely revolutionary thinkers of the period understood that “humbly born men are no less capable of leadership than those nobly born.” Masaniello is named by the radical Dutch-French writer Simon Tyssot de Patot in his 1720 utopian fantasy The Voyage to Greenland. In the Neapolitan revolution there is something to be understood about the primacy of materialism in any insurrection, of how the wishes of the people come from a wisdom of the muscle rather than the mind; truly radical political theories are born from the lived experience of humans and only systematized by philosophers later.

Tysson’s intellectual hero, and the main subject of Israel’s study, was the radical Dutch Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who understood Masaniello to an extent Locke or Paine never could: as a locus of the people’s desires for liberation in all things. “No one,” he writes in 1670’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus“can be deprived of his natural rights.” As we know from Spinoza’s early biographer Johannes Colerus, when the heretical philosopher died in 1677, he had been exiled from Amsterdam’s Jewish community for twenty years, yet afterward had not deigned to convert to Christianity, making him among the first truly notable secular figures. In that context, Spinoza left behind a notebook filled with drawings of contemporary luminaries.

Rendered in charcoal and ink, the sketchbook contained “on the fourth sheet an angler drawn in a shirt, with a fishnet on his straightened shoulders, just as that notorious Neapolitan rebel leader Tommaso Aniello.” According to Spinoza’s final landlord, the image of the fisherman “resembled Spinoza and that he undoubtedly had designed it after his own face.” Finally, here is a canonical thinker who understands his debt to the revolutionaries that came before. And yet, as Colerus noted, when it comes to that resemblance between Spinoza and Masaniello, “I will keep silent for obvious reasons.”  If an individual must be silent, however, there can be a liberatory cacophony in the solidarity of crowds, as Masaniello understood. A revolutionary of the marketplace, the fishmonger was great not because he led a crowd but because he was a member of it.