The label lazzaronismo encoded ruling-class contempt for Naples’ sub-proletariat

Evidence

“Lazzaronismo ”, from lazzaroni or lazzari , from the Spanish lazaro — poor (which in turns derives from the Biblical figure of Lazarus the beggar). From the sixteenth century onwards this word was applied by the Spanish rulers to the urban “mob” of Naples (and thence by extension of other cities). In Naples, this sub-proletariat was strongly monarchist, and in 1799 it rose in the Sanfedista rising against the bourgeois Jacobin regime of the Parthenopean Republic. It continued to be the bastion of the Bourbons to the end. The term itself was pejorative, stressing the wretched condition of that sub proletariat and its supposed laziness and dishonesty, and it is these connotations to which Gramsci is referring here. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1923

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Defines lazzaronismo: the pejorative term Spanish rulers applied to Naples’ urban sub-proletariat, and its etymology.
• XREF: Connects to the toolkit’s ‘construction of the Other’ theme — how a ruling power’s naming of a subordinate class carries implicit moral condemnation (laziness, dishonesty), parallel to Orientalist naming practices.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did the sub-proletariat’s monarchism in 1799 square with Marxist expectations of class solidarity? Gramsci presumably engages this somewhere in the notebooks.