Religious reform agendas alienated peasants and undermined revolutionary alliance

Evidence

The Action Party, moreover, was paralysed in its action towards the peasants by Mazzini’s wish for a religious reform. This not only was of no interest to the great rural masses, it on the contrary rendered them susceptible to being incited against the new heretics. The example of the French Revolution was there to show that the Jacobins, who had succeeded in crushing all the right-wing parties up to and including the Girondins on the terrain of the agrarian question, who had succeeded not merely in preventing a rural coalition against Paris but in multiplying their supporters in the provinces, were damaged by Robespierre’s attempts to instigate a religious reform—although such a reform had, in the real historical process, an immediate significance and concreteness. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 539

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the toolkit’s theme of how religious identity can be mobilized against secular/progressive projects — relevant to later Islamophobia readings on how religious difference becomes a wedge. — connects to: Revolutionary movements fail when foreign allies restrain land reform that could win rural support