The Spanish pejorative lazzaronismo labeled Naples’ urban poor monarchist and lazy
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
- DEFINE: Defines the term lazzaronismo’s etymology and pejorative charge against Naples’ urban sub-proletariat.
- XREF: Connects to Gramsci’s broader vocabulary of subaltern classes and to how elites coin demeaning labels for the dispossessed — the same labeling logic Islamophobia studies trace in ‘mob’ and ‘underclass’ discourse. — connects to: The label lazzaronismo encoded ruling-class contempt for Naples’ sub-proletariat
- yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: The label lazzaronismo encoded ruling-class contempt for Naples’ sub-proletariat