A weak bourgeoisie’s failure to ally with peasants prevents hegemonic revolution

Evidence

If in Italy a Jacobin party was not formed, the reasons are to be sought in the economic field, that is to say in the relative weakness of the Italian bourgeoisie and in the different historical climate in Europe after 1815. The limit reached by the Jacobins, in their policy of forced reawakening of French popular energies to be allied with the bourgeoisie, with the Le Chapelier law and that of the maximum , appeared in 1848 as a “spectre” which was already threatening—and this was skilfully exploited by Austria, by the old governments and even by Cavour (quite apart from the Pope). The bourgeoisie could not (perhaps) extend its hegemony further over the great popular strata—which it did succeed in embracing in France—(could not for subjective rather than objective reasons); but action directed at the peasantry was certainly always possible. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 483

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illustrates Gramsci’s core sense of hegemony as bourgeois leadership extending to popular strata — its absence in Italy is explained economically, not moralistically.
• XREF: Core hegemony concept the reader is assembling for the Islamophobia toolkit — bourgeois incapacity to win peasant/popular alliance is what forces reliance on a ‘royal conquest’ / external state rather than genuine national leadership. — connects to: Mazzini-inspired insurrection failed because aristocrats withheld support; Revolutionary movements fail when foreign allies restrain land reform that could win rural support