Peasants fought for Austria because nationalism seemed a gentlemen’s affair

Evidence

The Lombard and Venetian peasants enrolled by Austria were one of the most effective instruments for suffocating the Vienna revolution, and hence also that of Italy. For the peasants the movement in Lombardy-Veneto, like the Viennese movement, was an affair of gentlemen and of students. Whereas the Italian national parties ought to have, by their policies, brought about or assisted the dissolution of the Austrian Empire, in fact by their inertia they saw to it that the Italian regiments were one of the best supports for Austrian reaction. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 492

Categorization

• XREF: Connects forward to Gramsci’s own theory of subaltern classes and why the peasantry must be won over — the classic ‘national-popular’ problem that Islamophobia readings about failed solidarity and working-class co-optation echo.
• DEFINE: Illustrates the key Gramscian principle that a national movement failing to recruit the peasant masses leaves them available to the enemy.