Making Secular Martyrs: Ascesis, Apostleship, and Revolution (Southern Europe, 1820–1870)

Abstract

This article analyzes how martyrdom progressively diverged from heroism to become an autonomous category of political discourse in nineteenth-century southern European Catholic societies. It argues that the secularization and politicization of Catholic asceticism played a central role in this process, which culminated in the martyr’s moment of agony and raised the question of the voluntary dimension of martyrdom. The analysis draws on a wide range of political martyrologies, funeral orations, and press reports, and focuses mostly on the Spanish and Italian cases, where martyrdom gained greatest prominence in the political sphere and gave rise to the most explicit theoretical expositions. It highlights the extent to which martyrdom was transformed into a powerful tool of legitimization and mobilization centered on willing self-denial and self-sacrifice for a cause or community. By reassessing secular martyrdom in relation to its religious substrate, this article seeks to reconsider sacrifice, holiness, and memory within Southern European Romanticism, shedding new light on the dynamics of secularization in post-revolutionary Europe.

1. Introduction

In the nineteenth century, martyrdom became a central archetype of the post-revolutionary European political order. As part of a broader movement toward secularization, which saw the religion-based social and mental framework gradually replaced by a more secular mindset, it was one of several secular transpositions in which religious figures endowed with recognized performativity and efficiency, such as Christ, the Virgin Mary, saints, and apostles, acquired new roles within the modern political sphere (Delpu 2024). In Southern European Catholic societies, this widespread tendency had peculiar consequences as it questioned the foundations of a social contract largely built during the sixteenth-century Counter-Reformation and structured around the most prominent archetypes on which it relied for legitimacy: the saint and the martyr. Despite its prevalence across all contemporary political cultures, martyrdom was rarely clearly defined. It oscillated between the two better-known archetypes, the hero and the victim, borrowing characteristics from both. Its significance was perceived as self-evident in societies accustomed to religious imagery of exemplary death.

Martyrdom is a cultural artifact taken from Christianity to refer to exemplary death due to hatred of faith that bears evidence of personal dedication and is presented as the result of persecution. Its progressive adaptation to the secular order, which gained prominence from the late eighteenth century onwards, turned it into a common expression of sacrality. Martyrdom is neither death nor suffering in itself, but rather the result of an aesthetic construction of death or suffering that renders it exemplary and provides a group with a powerful tool of legitimization and pedagogy. It refers to a supposed willingness to die or suffer in testimony to a commitment, manifested through resistance to a form of oppression, and entails discipline of body and soul. It thus carries an ascetic dimension, rooted in the exaltation of suffering and exemplary devotion unto death, centered on notions of zeal, sacrifice, and apostleship. Martyrdom therefore lies at the crossroads of religion, politics, memory, and emotion (Murphy 2023). Its liminal dimension enables its transposition to the secular order while preserving the foundational characteristics of the religious archetype.

During the second third of the nineteenth century, secular martyrdom began to separate from heroism, with which it had long been conflated under enduring rhetorical traditions sacralizing death for liberty. The cultural and emotional context of European Romanticism played a central role in that process, as it redefined the dynamics of attachment and love for abstractions and communities of belonging. This was a key moment in the construction of modern identities and subjectivities, at the threshold both between politics and religion and between the public and the private spheres. The spiritualization of politics characteristic of the 1830s contributed significantly to this development, particularly within democratic circles, where the defense of the “true religion”, Christianity, was contrasted with the abuses of the established Church. This unfolded in a context of systematic criticism of the latter and the most visible symbol of its power: the Inquisition (Berenson 1984; Tcherbbis Testa 2023). This context promoted forms of sacrality borrowed from the Catholic repertoire but decoupled from the influence of the Church (Caliò 2022).

The promotion of secular martyrs linked to political causes entailed the transposition of the defining characteristics of martyrdom to the secular sphere. This explains the insistence on the ethical framework it carried with it, and especially on the discourse of ascesis. This article argues that the secularization of ascesis strongly contributed to consolidating martyrdom as an autonomous category of politics, distinct from heroism. Here again, the influence of the Catholic tradition was crucial. The narrative of the persecution of the early Christians in late Antiquity shaped perceptions of secular exemplarity linked to sacrificial death. In Christianity, martyrs were once defined as “athletes of faith”, following an expression coined by the third-century bishop Eusebius of Caesarea. This expression, alongside the memory of the first Christian martyrs, inspired nineteenth-century secular authors who defined martyrdom as a performance in which the martyr was the actor. Such conceptions reflected how, in a Catholic cultural context, lay political subjectivities were framed independently of the role assigned to religion and the Church in the political contract and gained prominence in all political cultures. Moral treatises, martyrologies produced in different political contexts, and published lives of protagonists made into martyrs of a lay cause all attest to the formation of this mindset. It was closely linked to the formation of post-revolutionary ethics, constructed in partisan contexts, and embodied in the specific temporality of the martyr’s agony. It raises the question of the voluntary or involuntary nature of the sacrifice, which takes different forms when associated with gendered features.

2. Political Martyrdom as an Exercise

Like its religious counterpart, nineteenth-century secular martyrdom was defined by contemporaries primarily as an attitude: it consisted of offering oneself, or being offered, as a sacrifice, as an exemplary expression of devotion to a cause. The long history of Christianity had already established martyrdom as one of the most accomplished forms of sanctity, grounded in a dual ethics of spiritual excellence attained either through red martyrdom (dying for one’s faith) or white martyrdom (practicing ascesis). These notions remained fundamental throughout the nineteenth century, intertwining with another matrix of pagan origin, heroism, based on the idea of supererogatory action. The fusion of these two traditions and the revolutionary wave that swept the globe at the end of the eighteenth century enabled the exponential spread of modern secular martyrdom. It also explains the hybrid nature of the category while anchoring it in the contemporary perception of holiness. As British philosopher James O. Urmson showed, holiness rests above all on an attitude of acceptance and internalization of moral duty. The voluntary performance of supererogation is characteristic of the saint and becomes heroic when carried out effortlessly (Urmson 1958).

Thus, more than the voluntary aspect of self-sacrifice, it was the attitude of apostleship that was central to contemporary perceptions of martyrdom. In the first half of the nineteenth century, use of the term became prominent in democratic political cultures, which extensively mobilized religious concepts for the purposes of legitimization and pedagogy, often under the banner of evangelism. The liberal clergy’s theoretical contributions were especially significant, as exemplified in the French priest Félicité de Lamennais’ most impactful book, Words of a Believer (1833). The Spanish translation of 1834 echoed the liberal shift in the country after the death of King Ferdinand VII and influenced the construction of democratic opinion. In the Italian states, fifteen different editions appeared between 1833 and 1850. Democratic priests played a central role in transposing these languages, employing the tools of religion—preaching, sermons, and funeral orations—for mass politicization and frequently invoking martyrdom. During the 1830s, this engagement became increasingly systematic, particularly in Spain, where a sacralized vision of an especially conflictive political order that evoked the martyrs of early Christianity was articulated (Alonso 2014). Religious discourse thus facilitated the transposition of the Christian lexicon to the secular sphere and contributed to the naturalization of its categories as secular ones. The exemplarity expressed through martyrdom referred to a specific cause or community whose sacralization required the language of religion. In that respect, lay martyrs were necessarily martyrs for something, and their sacrality was usually recognized and celebrated only within a specific group (van Liere 2024).

Aligning with these conceptions, the Italian democrat Giuseppe Mazzini offered a central theoretical contribution, providing one of the first systematic definitions of martyrdom in the lay sphere. Referring in 1846 while exiled in London to those he called “martyrs for Italian liberty”, he presented the notion as a secular transposition of the Catholic one, as an ethic rooted in a spiritual exercise in the face of death:

“Between Saints and Fanatics, God has placed signs where every earnest man can easily recognize. […] men of all ages, and all classes, raising themselves, their brows pure from thought of crime, calm-hearted, high-soaring, and religious, to protest, by the sword or by the pen, against brute force, and dying with a smile—then you may say, without fear of deceiving yourself, that there is a thought of God fermenting in the heart of a great people. Such men are Apostles; their Tomb is an Altar.”

(Mazzini 1846a)

In Mazzini’s view, martyrdom came from the willingness of its protagonists to endure death and suffering. He considered it was largely driven by the individual and represented a discipline of the spirit expressed in the face of violence inflicted by a perpetrator. At its core stood an act of violence by a perpetrator that offended the victim’s supposed moral exemplarity and thereby became a source of indignation for contemporaries. Those who recognized the injustice of the act affirmed the victim’s status as a martyr, constructed the narrative of their exemplary life, and exalted it through accounts that borrowed from the canons of hagiography and legend. As textual vehicles, these works facilitated the identification of secular figures with an invented sacrality through the religious archetype of martyrdom. In doing so, they transformed the factual perpetrator–victim opposition into an executioner–martyr one, reinforcing the Manichean opposition between the two poles. The cruelty attributed to the executioner, rarely identified as a person but rather as a regime or system, was set against the moral virtue of the martyr, whose devotion to the cause or community expressed an ascetic disposition. This constituted a central feature of holiness: a form of eccentricity defined by the ability to extract oneself from worldly logic and which secular martyrdom narratives transposed to the political sphere (Myoupo 2023).

To support his definition of martyrdom, Mazzini cited the biographies of three activists who, in his view, embodied these qualities. Jacopo Ruffini, one of his early supporters, died in prison in 1833, exemplifying to the end unwavering devotion to the democratic and national causes. The brothers Attilio and Emilio Bandiera, two Venetian members of his movement, who were captured and sentenced to death in 1844, accepted their fate to lessen the charges against their fellow activists. Their capacity for self-denial led Mazzini to liken them to Christian figures of sanctity, such as Catherine of Siena (Mazzini 1844). These examples, commemorated within Mazzinian circles in the case of Ruffini and more widely in that of the Bandiera brothers through inclusion in foreign martyrologies of liberty (Esquiros 1851, pp. 235–37), demonstrate the multiple pathways through which the logic of sacrifice was transposed into the secular sphere.

The ascetic repertoire of action lay at the heart of martyrdom narratives, which applied the logic of Catholic sanctity to lay political movements. Whatever the context it referred to, martyrdom was part of an apostolic endeavor, sometimes consciously embraced by those who adopted it. In the case of Mazzini, contemporaries noted that he imposed an ascetic attitude on himself, a testament to his absolute devotion to the cause he defended, that of democratic nationalism. During his exile in London, the man of letters Thomas Carlyle, a personal friend of Mazzini, recalled that Mazzini publicly declared himself unmarried, ate very little, lived poorly, and paid little attention to his health. In the gallery of heroes he published in 1840, entitled On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, Carlyle placed Mazzini among them, defining the lay martyr’s ascesis as a form of heroism. Deeply integrated into militant and intellectual circles in London, Mazzini’s staging of a representation of himself imitating Christ contributed to the success of the political model he embodied (Mack Smith 1994, p. 31).

All lives of martyrs defined them as standing for a community or a cause, thus linking their individual reputations to a collective identity. Sacrifice on behalf of the group was highly valued in the culture of honor and respectability promoted by the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie (Sánchez 2018). This culture emerged as a reaction to the individualism that Enlightenment philosophy and the revolutionary upheavals of the previous century were thought to have reinforced. In 1840, the French liberal Alexis de Tocqueville called for the restoration of the aristocratic ethic of heroism as a form of apostolic attitude, emphasizing that “it is glorious to forget oneself and right to do good without self-interest, like God Himself.” (Tocqueville 1840, vol. II, p. 2). This promotion of sacrifice as the path to virtue was further developed in the moral literature of the period, which framed it as the continuation of the evolutionary trend in human history toward secularism. In 1841, in a political essay dedicated to female martyrdom, the French democrat Alphonse Esquiros argued that every political change in world history had been achieved through persistent sacrifice, grounded in a metaphor of work developed in Genesis:

“All the progress in the world comes only at the cost of this continuous labor of soul and body; one should not lament it: it is the law of humanity, it is the law of God himself. Indeed, from the very opening of Genesis, the Bible presents Jehovah as a worker.”

(Esquiros 1841, p. 155)

As defined in nineteenth-century narratives, lay martyrdom was the continuation of an ancient logic of sacrifice, one that now took on a reflective dimension. No longer merely the passive result of exposure to a perpetrator, it became a tool of action for those willing to offer their lives for a cause or community. In the first martyrology of liberty published in Spain in 1848, the democrat Luis Cucalón y Escolano asserted:

“The magical words of liberty and independence, over the last three centuries, have not been able to shine in their full purity and beauty, even though on four occasions resolute and valiant men—whose deeds we are about to recount—offered their lives to restore their splendor.”

(Cucalón y Escolano 1848, vol. I, p. 1)

Martyrdom was thus defined as a process of abstraction and self-denial for the sake of a group or an idea that embodied civic virtue. It involved two types of protagonists: the victims capable of sacrificing their lives for the collective, and the eulogists who promoted this attitude and presented it as a model for all, framing the martyr as the ideal embodiment of the community. They exalted martyrs’ exemplary lives within a group called upon to share their pain, to admire them, and to consider them as models of behavior. This conception was not unique to the democratic milieu and existed across the political spectrum, producing different perceptions of martyrdom linked in various ways to the Catholic matrix. Even if counterrevolutionary milieux were reluctant to erect their dead protagonists as martyrs, a category they typically reserved for the Church, they began to recognize victims shot during riots or revolutions as such. In 1821, the French priest Aimé Guillon praised those who “seal the Faith with their blood,” whose example the clergy considered their duty to promote (Guillon 1821, p. 104). This logic of exemplarity raises the question of whether the martyrs’ willingness to die, taken as a sign of their strong attachment to the cause, was voluntary or not.

3. Voluntary Martyrdom and Martyrdom Endured

While reworking sacrificial death into martyrdom, nineteenth-century narratives not only reinterpreted the final stages of the martyr’s life, but also the entire process that led them to confront death. Funeral orations, biographies of protagonists considered lay martyrs, and martyrologies devoted to a specific cause or community emphasized the psychological features of the figures being honored, insisting on their personal willingness to be martyred. In the nineteenth century, willing martyrdom for explicitly secular purposes was not frequently reported as it was associated with intransigent Catholic fanaticism (Popiel 2021) or isolated cases of celebrity-seeking, as in the case of the young French farmer Pierre Riviere, who slaughtered three of his relatives in 1835 in the hope of being executed and gaining notoriety as a martyr (Foucault 1973). Nonetheless, a frequent trait of lay martyrologies was the insistence on the martyr’s decision to deliberately choose death as a way of resisting oppression in the name of a cause. Thus, the discourse on martyrdom framed it as an attitude oscillating between deliberate choice and fervent impulse, an idea especially present in counterrevolutionary rhetoric where the lay dimension of sacrifice was subordinated to the religious one (Langlois 1994). In 1821, in his compendium of biographies of Catholic victims of the French Revolution, French priest Aimé Guillon highlighted the intentionality of a martyrdom that was both religious and political. Those who had supposedly died due to hatred of faith were not merely “the victims of political obstinacy and stubborn royalism”; rather, they were “sacrificed in large numbers, because of their unwavering attachment to the Catholic Faith, and their heroic loyalty to the duties it imposes.” At the root of their sacrifice lay far more than violence; it was driven by a fervor that manifested in resignation and penance as testimony to religious faith and devotion:

“It is established as a generally accepted principle that one is not a martyr if one receives death, even unjustly, for any political interest. There can be no martyrdom, even in suffering it voluntarily, if one does not receive it for faith or for some act of virtue directly related to faith.”

(Guillon 1821, pp. X–XI)

The narrative scheme used by Guillon was not unique to counterrevolutionaries. It constituted a shared rhetorical tool of lay martyrology, used by both conservative milieux and their antagonists: martyrdom was the result of a persecution. Rooted in Catholic tradition, and as a constant feature of the martyrology of early Christianity, it was systematically transposed to the secular realm, where nineteenth-century edifying literature drew inspiration from Christian hagiography. The abundant memorial literature, present in all post-revolutionary political cultures, sought to depict the martyr’s life as linear and marked by endless vexations faced with constancy and resignation. Experiences such as violence, imprisonment, confiscation of private property, and exile from their homeland or family were invoked as the consequences of a committed political stance and as prior steps leading to an exemplary death.

From the 1820s onwards, the significance of the category of martyrdom expanded to include the sufferings experienced throughout the martyr’s life, giving rise to a new figure that gained prominence in the revolutionary milieux of the 1830s and 1840s: the living martyr. Rafael del Riego, an outstanding military hero and protagonist of the Spanish revolution of 1820, was regarded as such after his arrest and imprisonment in 1823. He was already considered as a martyr before being condemned to the scaffold (Rújula 2025). The most striking case was the Piedmontese conspirator Silvio Pellico, a Carbonaro arrested after the Turin revolution of 1821 and imprisoned by the Austrian authorities in Spielberg prison until 1830. His memoirs, published in 1832 under the title Le mie Prigioni and circulated throughout Europe, emphasized the central role of his imprisonment in his martyrial profile and his conversion from Carbonarismo to Catholicism. In his book, Pellico reflected on his personal disposition toward sacrifice and the utility of suffering, mentioning his “perpetual aspiration to make [himself] noble through generous sacrifice,” which led him to “bless the prison, as it made me understand humanity’s lack of acknowledgment, my misery, and God’s goodness.” (Pellico 1832, pp. 28–35). Pellico emphasized his constancy in suffering for a faith that could be both political and religious: his commitment to the Piedmontese Carboneria and the Catholic devotion he evolved toward, both identities perceived as holy. His sufferings were defined as willingly endured for these causes, recalling the moral framework of Catholic thinkers such as Frenchman Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, who in the seventeenth century developed the concept of the purifying effects of suffering (Romani 2018).

Pellico’s case has been widely commented upon, and has been considered representative of a specific kind of living martyr who interpreted his own condition as an apostleship for the cause he defended. Nineteenth-century martyrologies associated these attitudes both with the martyrs’ lives, portraying them as exemplary, and with their deaths, which were understood as the culmination of a life of privations. In this way, political protagonists became the active agents of their own martyrdom, which was framed as a sacrifice contributing to a cause. One of the most prominent martyrologies of the Spanish First Republic (1873), published by a republican club in Barcelona, recounted the biography of one of the most recent national republican martyrs, Rafael Guillén. He died at 40, in 1869, after being arrested and tortured following an insurrection in which he participated: “Rafael Guillén, who hated abuse, Rafael Guillén whose existence had been nothing but a sacrifice for justice and legality, could not remain silent when so terribly attacked.” (Los Mártires 1873, p. 421)

Guillén’s death highlights a constant feature of the narratives of secular martyrdom: the acceptance, through resignation and penance in the name of an ideal, of becoming a victim of the very thing they fought against. The confrontation with death shows how the martyr embodied a moral code aligned with the ethics of the movement to which they belonged. Other martyrologies emphasized the extent to which these attitudes were disseminated in society, being sometimes presented as an objective assigned to readers, seen as heirs to the illustrious predecessors celebrated therein. In 1848, Cucalón y Escolano stressed that asceticism was a deliberate choice that enabled an individual to claim an exemplary status within a community as a result of sustained effort. He thus dedicates his book to

“those who have never dishonored the good name of Spain, far from apostasy and betrayal, who did not allow the liberties of the homeland to be tainted, preferring to wear the rags of beggary rather than enrich themselves in scandalous usury […] those who, covered in scars, have not made the oath a vain word […] those who abandoned the homeland, dying slowly and painfully in foreign lands, rather than bow the knee before despotism.”

(Cucalón y Escolano 1848, p. I).

Beyond the long-standing debate over whether martyrdom belongs to the religious or political sphere lies the idea, borrowed from Christian patristics, that the cause for which the martyr suffered or died was superior to the materiality of death. Death itself thus became an instrument serving the cause. While the narrative and iconography of martyrdom emphasized the edifying value of the sufferings endured, they also pointed out, across all martyr biographies, the importance of a specific temporality: the scene of agony. This belonged to a wider process of dramatization of martyrdom, caught at its climax to be offered as an object of veneration to the community to which the martyrs belonged. The specific attention paid to that moment was part of a narrative strategy that aimed to present martyrdom as necessary willed.

4. The Martyr’s Agony

Political martyrdom arises from the spectacle of death, which allows it to generate the collective identification of the community with the martyr’s fate. In the nineteenth century, most executions were public rituals intended as edifying scenes for the spectators that provoked both fear of a similar punishment and commiseration toward the condemned. As in other societies that practiced capital punishment, this process of edification arose from two parallel initiatives: the violence carried out by the perpetrators, and the narrative and iconographic work performed within civil society to elevate the victim to the status of martyr (Nicholls 1988), which strengthened the fiction of voluntary martyrdom. The spectacle of execution highlighted two temporalities central to the construction of martyrdom: the very moment of death and the moment of agony that preceded it. Most lay hagiographies published from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, particularly in left-wing milieux, paid little attention to the materiality of death, offering scant detail on how executions were carried out or on the executioners themselves, in order to emphasize the role of a specific power in executing an opponent. This literary construct reinforced the Manichean opposition between the virtuous martyr and the diabolized tyrant responsible for their fate.

The prevalence of a culture of honor and respectability in nineteenth-century edification practices, especially in Spain (Sánchez 2018), led to an ethical framing of heroism and martyrdom that centered on the moments that revealed the martyr’s moral perfection. In this regard, across all nineteenth-century political cultures, eulogies emphasized the key role of agony in the construction of martyrdom. Through the emotions it elicited, widely described in the martyrs’ lives, agony revealed their exemplarity, emphasizing the connection between deprivations, physical suffering, and the psychological tenacity of the dying person. This conception of death and suffering insisted upon the martyr’s willingness to endure pain or to die for the group’s sake, frequently drawing comparisons with the Christian martyrs of late Antiquity. In that respect, embodiments of Christ and the Virgin Mary were especially significant, being used as a matrix for lay martyrdom. From the so-called Reconquista onwards, the narrative of Christ’s martyrdom had gained prominence in Spanish Catholicism, reaching its high point during the Counter-Reformation and informing a topos of religious literature: Christ’s sacrifice for mankind. Throughout the nineteenth century, such figures were among the most frequently recalled models of exemplary behavior. They provided political movements with a religious legitimacy and embodied the evangelic quest for true religion, standing in opposition to what were often perceived as the tyrannical abuses of the Church. The religious matrix was consistently intertwined with other sources of legitimacy, including military heroism and the bourgeois culture of respectability. One such example is the tribute paid by the democratic Spanish press to the Republican Manuel Abad, sentenced to execution in November 1848 for instigating an uprising some weeks before in the Aragonese town of Huesca:

“This remarkable young man died like a hero, like a Christian, and like a knight. […] He died like a Christian, because by scrupulously following the evangelical reflections of the worthy priest who assisted him, and being deeply moved by a painful penance similar to that of our divine Redeemer, he himself endeavored to die well. […] He said he was dying without remorse having lived without crime, a statement he had read in the history of Saint Julian, proving that this young man was of more than satisfactory instruction.”1

This account of Abad’s final moments was strongly shaped by the evangelical perspective characteristic of Spanish democrats. His apostolic qualities, modeled on Christ’s death, were conveyed through religiously inflected rhetoric that emphasized his martyrdom over heroic action. The narrative of the martyr’s agony sought to aestheticize the execution, transforming it into a sacrifice. Drawing on a long-standing history of Christian sacrifice that was undergoing a process of secularization (Sheehan 2026), it fitted the model of crucified Christ to lay protagonists. Agony worked as a rite of passage, moving the martyr from real to symbolic existence, a process in which he actively performed his own death. These characteristics were embodied, bearing witness to the sacrifice (DeSoucey et al. 2008). The attitudes and moral dispositions displayed in this process underscored the martyr’s connection to both the cause and the community he was part of, defining him as transcendent. In this respect, the victim became a martyr while distancing himself from bodily sensation, oscillating between a resigned acceptance of death and a use of this moment to demonstrate the strength of his commitment, informed by examples taken from Christian hagiography and from lay national histories. Martyrologies frequently recalled previous protagonists, depicting them as predecessors of nineteenth-century martyrs. One such example were the Spanish Comuneros, executed in 1521 after being condemned to death for conspiring against King Charles V. In the compendium he published 1848, Luis Cucalón y Escolano highlighted the case of one of them, Pedro Maldonado y Pimentel:

“Pimentel listened to the sentence without becoming unsettled or showing any emotion: he could have easily escaped while free, […] but trusting in his innocence, he waited firmly for whatever they might do to his body, which no longer belonged to him since he had offered it for the sake of liberty: no sign of bitterness was noticeable on his face, he asked to be confessed, and prepared himself Christianly for the terrible step.”

(Cucalón y Escolano 1848, p. 123)

Like other nineteenth-century eulogists, Cucalón y Escolano considered the political martyrs of his time as the heirs of the Comuneros, sharing with them a set of moral dispositions and a discipline of action that led them to die for the cause to which they were committed. The distancing of the physical body drew on models borrowed, explicitly or by indirect analogies, from holy history, and thus led to the quintessential martyr, Christ. In the mid-nineteenth century, this figure was reactivated across various secular political currents, giving rise to revolutionary Christs, Christs of the barricades, or Christ-like avatars within major national discourses, transposing the Christian narrative of creation to secular realities (Bowman 1987). This identification of lay martyrs with Christ originated from a narrative pattern that, since early Christianity, had conceptualized sacrifice as an imitation of Christ’s passion. Accordingly, the episode of the agony alternated between resignation and inspired exaltation, as reflected in the last words attributed to martyrs, often reconstructed by their eulogizers. In retracing the agony of the Spanish soldier Juan Díaz Porlier, executed in 1815 at the age of 26, Cucalón y Escolano recalled:

“He thought only of the consolations of religion, no longer concerned with the affairs of the world, only when he heard the mock screams from the crowd gathered at his prison gate did his face brighten and, with a voice of thunder, he exclaimed: No, the constitution cannot die, it will not die.”

(Cucalón y Escolano 1848, p. 123)

As with the narrative of the agony, the staging of the last words plays a significant role in the narrative construction of martyrdom. These final words were both a confession of political faith and the culmination of a trajectory of spiritual perfection, facilitating the martyr’s transition into the symbolic order. As the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard observed in 1848:

“The first form of rulers in the world was the tyrants; the last will be the martyrs. No doubt there is an infinite difference between a tyrant and a martyr; yet they have one thing in common: the power to constrain. The tyrant, with a craving for power, constrains by force; the martyr, personally unconditionally obedient to God, constrains by his own sufferings. Then the tyrant dies, and his rule is over; the martyr dies, and his rule begins.”

(Kierkegaard 2015, p. 370)

The parallel between both kinds of symbolic leadership reveals a conception of martyrdom as an active exercise, culminating during the martyr’s final hours. Martyrs completed longer and more complex trajectories, perceived as different stages of a sustained sacrifice, encompassing physical and psychological sufferings arising from exile, political imprisonment, or other experiences of deprivation. By culminating in death, agony worked as an epiphany, which is why it was frequently presented through a rhetoric of victory common to various post-revolutionary political cultures. As the French legitimist Guillon recorded, it was the starting point of a process of consecration, through which martyrs “win the victory of salvation.” Drawing on Christian patristics, he argued that it was precisely the agony that rendered martyrs intercessors for the community that recognized them as exemplary:

“The death of the martyrs was regarded as their glorious birth into heavenly life. Hence this name of natal day that, by a privilege reserved for them, was given to the day of their death.”

(Guillon 1821, p. 75)

The agony, like the ascetic life that preceded it, reinvested and secularized earlier religious constructions, linking the martyr’s subjectivity to moral character, body, and gender. Martyrdom was thus an embodied sacrifice whose features were different in the case of male and female protagonists and were largely shaped by the Christian gendered archetypes of sanctity: the virgin-martyr saint and Christ. When transposed to the post-revolutionary nineteenth-century context, the logic of asceticism was interpreted and enacted differently depending on these archetypal figures.

5. Gendered Forms of Political Ascesis

The post-revolutionary order relied on gender representations that, firmly rooted in collective perceptions of politics, updated a discourse of creation structured around the opposition between a male group (Christ, the apostles, and the martyrs) and a female one (the Virgin Mary, the saints, and the female martyrs). This antagonism became systematic in most of the nineteenth-century lay narratives, expressing the sacrality of the causes they defended and granting them undeniable legitimacy. In a foundational study, the historian Alberto M. Banti demonstrated how this transposition contributed to the success of the Italian narrative (Banti 2000). Its expansion across the nineteenth-century political order, regardless of the political cultures involved, underscores the enduring influence of religious forms of legitimacy in societies undergoing secularization. Owing to the long-lasting legacy of the Counter-Reformation, sanctity remained one of the most powerful sources of legitimacy. Nineteenth-century political subjectivities, shaped by the implicit ideals of heroes, heroines, martyrs, and victims, treated these figures as lay avatars of saints. This perception significantly influenced the collective vision of the political order, which was constantly being defined as gendered roles and attributions became increasingly fixed.

The emotional regimes of Romantic Europe strongly shaped this process, determining the different roles assigned to men and women. The gendered narrative of Creation partially aligned with the post-revolutionary political order, as reflected in lay martyrologies, which were predominantly male and shaped around the idea of normative masculinity expressed through the collective interest in heroism (Calvo Maturana 2020). Eulogies of martyrs emphasized the rarity of female figures, who had to be presented and justified in line with the prevailing perceptions of exemplarity and socially acceptable modes of action for women. Romanticism frequently linked female sacrifice to prominent Catholic representations of pain and suffering, both in religious and in political contexts (Van Osselaer 2023). It was framed as a variant of Christian heroism shaped around religious piety and asceticism, thereby aligning more closely with the religious rather than the political order. Following a tradition dating back to late Antiquity, female martyrdom was identified with another form of asceticism: bodily purity, which constructed the image of femininity while highlighting the profanation caused by assaults on the flesh (Brown 1988). A significant case is that of the young Italian Maria Regina Pedena, executed in 1827 at the age of fourteen and redefined as a virgin-martyr for preferring death over rape. Contemporary accounts insisted upon her resigned acceptance of her fate and the moral purity her attitude embodied, fostering two contrasting interpretations: while Italian patriots portrayed her as a symbolic image of Italy assaulted and violated by the Austrian Empire, counterrevolutionaries presented her as a figure of Christian purity and virginity (Turi 1990).

The political repercussions this case generated were exceptional, demonstrating both the evocative force of the case and the enduring role of religion as a source of political legitimization. A discourse on female martyrdom emerged around a specific practice of asceticism, linked to models of apostolic life taken from Antiquity or the Middle Ages. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Spanish poet Carolina Coronado, who moved in democratic circles, sought inspiration in the life of Teresa of Ávila, whose virtuous example she adopted to guide her own actions. This example allowed her to conceive of herself as a “bride of Christ” and to dedicate herself to the emancipation of Spanish women, linking her gender to a Christian pattern of virtue (Burguera 2025b). Teresa de Ávila was, alongside Catherine of Sienna, one of the most prominent examples of female sanctity and was constantly invoked as an inspiration for women in public life and interpreted as a reformer attentive to political and social concerns.

One of the most striking female figures to embody her ascesis was the Spanish martyr Mariana Pineda, executed in Granada in 1831 for her supposed involvement in a conspiracy against King Ferdinand VII. Within a short while of her death, she gave rise to a public mythology mainly aligned with female heroism, but which defined her as a political martyr for liberty, presenting her as a secular virgin-martyr saint. Drawing on precedents from Spanish hagiography and popular literature, she was identified both with the Virgin Mary and, at times, with biblical prophets, such as Judith, for her salvific and restorative role (Delpu 2026). A major contribution to this mythology was the biography that José de la Peña, a lawyer from Granada, dedicated to her in 1837 during a period of liberal ascendancy in Spanish national politics. De la Peña framed Pineda’s execution in moral terms, as “the impious sacrifice of this unfortunate young woman,” evoking “the bloodstain that her executioners will carry upon themselves.” It appeared as the culmination of a longer sacrificial trajectory, reconstructed according to the codes of Christian hagiography. This narrative emphasized her sacrifice of personal freedom for her supposed fellow conspirators and for Spaniards in general. Her arrest, trial, and execution were portrayed as a spiritual and quite apostolic experience, as illustrated by her final exchange with her confessor, Father José Garzón, who administered her the last rites. In response to the tears “falling in torrents from Mariana’s beautiful eyes,” the priest “comforted her by speaking of the infinite mercy of the Lord, which implicitly opposed the cruelty of earthly justice.” According to De la Peña, this dialogue strengthened Pineda’s selflessness and her readiness to offer herself for the survival of the group:

“After this religious act, during which her confessor gave her the sweetest words for a Christian soul in such critical and trying moments, she rose from the ground, where she had been kneeling for a long time, showing on her face a calmness of mind, a serenity of spirit that only those who do not fear to account for their thoughts and actions before the divine presence can enjoy.”

(De La Peña y Aguayo 1837, p. 90)

The image of the condemned woman walking toward the scaffold confirms her identification with figures of sanctity, merging the resignation of the virgin-martyr with the attitude of Christ on the cross:

“Mariana walked with firm steps, with a humble but determined expression, her hair undone at the back, flowing underneath her cap covering her back, shoulders, and part of her chest. […] She kept her eyes fixed on the crucifix, but did not shed a single tear.”

(De La Peña y Aguayo 1837, pp. 102–3)

The sacralization of Mariana Pineda’s memory relied on a set of moral features drawn from female religious martyrdom: selflessness in service to the group, steadfastness in the face of death, and detachment from bodily and emotional sensations. In contrast, male martyrs embodied the image of Christ, whose ascesis constituted the highest point of Catholic sanctity. Leading figures and victims from earlier revolutions had already been depicted as Christ-like as a way of conferring holiness upon them. In his famous painting La mort de Marat (1793), the French painter Jacques-Louis David portrayed the journalist Jean-Paul Marat’s corpse, after being slain by counterrevolutionary Charlotte Corday, as an imitation of Christ’s death. In Spain, Francisco de Goya employed the same template to depict Madrilenian civilians resisting Napoleonic invasion in 1808 in his work Tres de Mayo (1814) (Marzolf 2020).

The models of action were drawn either from Christ or from the saints and apostles of Christianity. In the account he gave of his imprisonment, the Italian conspirator Silvio Pellico described his experience as a constant martyrdom, being “spied upon, searched, caught”, “beaten”, “martyred by interrogatories.” He partly devoted the relief he had from his jailers to ascetic practices, such as reading the Bible, praying, and meditating, activities he connected both to his earlier life as a Carbonaro and to the strengthening of his Catholic faith, which his imprisonment reinforced:

“They did allow me to have a Bible and Dante […] but my spirit was too agitated to devote myself to any reading. Each day I learned a canto of Dante by heart, yet this exercise was so mechanical that I did it thinking less about those verses than about my own situation. The same happened when I read other works, except at times with certain passages of the Bible. This divine book, which I had always loved greatly, even when I believed myself to be an unbeliever, was now studied by me with more reverence than ever.”

(Pellico 1832, p. 16)

Pellico later emphasized his usual practice of reading and reflecting on the works of Christian moralists, such as the seventeenth-century Frenchman Blaise Pascal, whom he referred to as a model, in his efforts to get closer to God and “endeavoring to remain continually in His presence.” The strength and constancy of his commitment made him a model of exemplary behavior rooted in virtuous discipline, which contributed to the reputation he acquired among various circles. While he became one of the leading points of reference in the international struggle surrounding political prisoners, particularly influential within European liberal networks (Kenney 2017), he also emerged as a model of discipleship for Catholic opinion, especially in France, where his book underwent seventeen different translations and 45 editions in just ten years (Vimont 2012). Imprisonment emerged as an experience particularly conducive to edification, recalling precedents drawn from holy history, such as Saints Perpetua and Felicity, who were very popular in early Christianity. Although few figures achieved an impact equivalent to Pellico’s, which remained exceptional, other male protagonists stood out for their ascetic way of living and dying that enabled comparisons with Christ and the apostles. Across much of post-1848 Europe, most activists defending the causes of liberty and democracy praised the case of the German parliamentarian Robert Blum, a former writer executed on a barricade in Vienna in November 1848. Numerous French, Italian, and Spanish newspapers reported the personal virtue he placed at the service of his cause.2 Funeral services were held in several European cities. In Rome, the theologian Gioacchino Ventura delivered an oration in his memory, comparing him to models drawn from the Catholic tradition (Ventura 1848). Other Christ-like parallels were also invoked, referring to individual figures, such as the American abolitionist John Brown, executed in 1859 and exalted as the “Christ of negroes” (Vésinier 1864), or to entire national groups, such as the Poles, defined by their propagandist Adam Mickiewicz as the “Christ of nations” (Mickiewicz 1833). All these comparisons highlight the pedagogical dimension attributed to martyrdom. It was conceived as a discipline of action which had to be taught, exemplified, and disseminated among contemporaries.

6. Exemplary Dedication in Practice: From Asceticism to Apostleship

As a practice seeking exemplarity, political ascesis had to be taught and imitated within the community that recognized the martyr’s exceptionality. The logic of sporulation, borrowed from the biological order, was inherent to martyrdom and supposed the reproduction of its ethical principles, rather than of its repertoire of actions, as the martyr was one of the most fully realized ideal types of this community (Bourgaux 2022). For this reason, martyrdom conceived of itself as a form of teaching in the service of a cause, inspired by Catholic catechesis. Within democratic milieux, the construction of political modernity impelled a permanent debate with the Church: while rejecting its systematic influence, these milieux simultaneously reinvested its instruments of social control and pedagogy (Tcherbbis Testa 2023). Alongside martyr biographies, iconography, press reports, and funeral rituals, the political martyrologies published after 1848 became one of the most powerful vehicles of this strategy, adapting the pattern of Christian exempla to the secular sphere (Arisi Rota 2009).

Introducing the first martyrs for Italian liberty to an English readership, Giuseppe Mazzini concluded in 1846: “Italy will live where Italians have learned to die. And for that, there is no other teaching than example.” (Mazzini 1846a). He clearly characterized martyrdom as a discipline that had to be taught and grounded in examples of perfect dedication and commitment, transmitting them within a community to emulate the moral qualities they embodied. As this account was addressed to British radicals, who were interested in the Italian struggle for independence insofar as it embodied a broader fight for liberty, the examples he invoked were meant to be compared with others distinguished by a similar discipline of action. Mazzini made parallels between the ethics embodied by the Italian martyrs and the collective dedication he recognized in the Polish, whom he described as “the martyred people” (Mazzini 1846b). Due to the similarities between these two situations, which differed only in the scale involved in persecution, the Italian example could serve as a model for other struggles that shared its sacrality and the moral perfection of its exponents. Two years later, another Italian, the Tuscan priest Atto Vannucci, published a martyrology of Italian liberty with the objective of “inspiring by example the youth who might feel capable of undertaking such magnanimous endeavors,” as he considered the martyrs’ lives especially worthy of emulation:

“Seeing how such great minds could endure prison, exile, poverty, and death for the promotion of a cause, certainly grand and just, yet unfortunate, and opposed by all the powerful of the earth, who could fail to be convinced of the holiness, the extraordinary virtue of the martyrs, and the honors that are due to them?”

(Vannucci 1848, p. I)

As theorized within European democratic milieux, the ethics of martyrdom were part of a broader reflection on mankind’s duties, which necessarily encompassed a discipline of action aimed at educating human virtue. In 1841, while already exiled in London, Mazzini had founded a newspaper, Apostolato popolare, inspired by the thought of Félicité de Lamennais, to encourage political virtue among the lower classes. In 1845, defining martyrdom as a pedagogic tool, he asserted “a book devoted to martyrs should inspire delicacy and a sense of Art.”3 The aim of this strategy was to foster political virtue, an endeavor provided with spiritual significance and a recurring presence in edifying literature, which sought to develop a discipline of action. In I Miei Prigioni, Pellico wrote that man’s duty entailed “sacrificing everything to virtue,” a way to “accomplish the sacrifice”. In a book he published in 1834, Dei doveri degli uomini, he laid the foundations for this attitude, structured around ascesis for a higher ideal, the benefits of prayer and meditation, and the inspiration exemplary lives could generate.

The pedagogical use of martyrdom was thus situated within a dual virtuous perspective that constantly intertwined politics and religion and whose protagonists were the martyr himself and the propagandists who shared and emulated his story. By appealing to the virtuous attitude martyrdom embodied, Mazzini and Pellico did not call on their contemporaries to accept voluntary death, but presented it as a possible tool in a repertoire of political actions deeply rooted in a spiritual vision of humanity and history, as well as in the nineteenth-century culture of honor and respectability. Their aim was to highlight the moral excellence martyrs were supposed to express and to invite their contemporaries to admire and emulate these qualities. Exemplary death, political imprisonment, exile, and deprivations were understood as ways of expressing political virtue, resisting oppression, and maintaining steadfast commitment. In this regard, martyrdom appeared as evidence of political love for a cause or a community, which justified a series of duties impelling a discipline of action. By the mid-nineteenth century, conceptions of love strongly influenced political subjectivities, shaping the narratives of emancipation (Burguera 2025a). These conceptions had particular resonance in the Italian democratic milieux that formed around Mazzini’s writings, as they articulated the aspiration to expiate the vexations Italy experienced and to turn them into proof of Italian virtue (Riall 2010). Due to Giuseppe Mazzini’s international influence and the contacts he established during his exile in London, these conceptions circulated widely. The idea of “democratic nationalism”, as defined by Mazzini, emerged from political struggle and required exemplary figures able to legitimize it through the cult of sacred death, self-sacrifice, and devotion to humanity, God, and the fatherland.

Mazzini’s vision of martyrdom was highly influential and was adopted by many nineteenth-century emancipation movements that drew upon his political theory (Bayly and Biagini 2008). In southern Spain, where Mazzinianism had a particular impact on the republican movement that developed mainly during the 1850s, his precepts gave rise to a conception of popular heroism positioned at the crossroads between heroism and martyrdom. They shaped the repertoire of actions of the rural uprisings that mostly occurred in Andalusia in the 1850s, spreading the idea of self-sacrifice and the legitimacy it conferred upon the cause (Thomson 2017). Mazzini systematized this interpretation of martyrdom in his most renowned book. Published in 1858 and entitled The Duties of Man, it principally aimed to reach the English working classes, albeit addressing a broader scope tied to human emancipation. He defined martyrdom as a general category overlapping different experiences of suffering and exemplarity, linking disparate political contexts such as the contemporary struggles for political emancipation, the fight for democracy, and the emergence of the working class as an autonomous political actor. Mazzini established the prevalence of human duties over human rights and the ethic of action they entailed, framing them within an evangelical perspective:

“When Christ came, and changed the face of the world, he spoke not of rights. […] He spoke of Duty, he spoke of Law, he spoke of Sacrifice, and of Faith, and he said that they should be first among all who had contributed most by their labour to the good of all.”

(Mazzini 1858, pp. 19, 32)

In Mazzini’s view, the mid-nineteenth century was as conflict-ridden as Christ’s epoch, making it especially conducive to apostolic actions, which in turn required a discipline of conduct that had to be learned and practiced. For this reason, the idea of political ascesis reinforced the idea of imitating Christ, which he described as “capable of being educated” (Mazzini 1858, p. 142). Much more than encouraging self-sacrifice within his supporters, he sought to provide them with models of spiritual perfection able to legitimatize their political action and promote its broader dissemination.

7. Conclusions

The transposition of Catholic asceticism into the secular sphere played a central role in establishing martyrdom as an autonomous category within post-revolutionary politics. This evolution occurred mostly in the second third of the nineteenth-century and was part of a wider movement of spiritualization of politics that sought to express the sacred dimension attributed to secular causes and convey it through the language of religion (Perkins 1999). Whereas political martyrdom was hitherto understood as a category of exemplarity, closely linked to heroism, it increasingly became a category of sacrality, supported by religious parallelisms and references.

In the way in which it was transferred into the nineteenth-century political order, ascesis became a powerful tool of legitimization and mobilization that revolved around a disposition toward self-denial and self-sacrifice for a cause or community. Its politicization was not specific to Catholic southern European societies: in the 1830s, British Chartism defined itself as a movement based on a rational use of passion and on a discipline of action shaped by other sources, such as Methodism (Roberts 2022, pp. 176–207). Mazzini defined martyrdom as “a language common to all men, and which all understand” (Mazzini 1858, p. 55) to justify the theory of sacrificial death in the service of emancipation. The instrumental dimension of that process was evident and entailed a pedagogy of martyrdom, in which ascesis played a key role as a method of educating and disciplining the body and the soul. But its prevalence in the political sphere, which would expand to other political cultures in the second half of the nineteenth-century, reveals the extent to which secularization was unachieved, even in the political movements most resistant to the power and influence of the Church. From an evangelical perspective, mid-nineteenth-century martyrdom expressed a sacrality that was decoupled from the Church but leaned on what contemporaries called “true religion”.

As the nineteenth-century Spanish and Italian secular martyrs illustrate, different political movements drew on and transformed the cultural and religious traditions of dominant Catholicism and put them at the service of political campaigns. The expansion of martyrdom across the whole political spectrum powerfully demonstrates that exemplarity was still conceived through the lens of Catholic sanctity. Even in more recent contexts, the processes that consolidated martyrdom as a specific political category drew on a process of lay transposition that could be paradoxically initiated by clergymen before being extended to civil society (Catoggio 2013). The peculiar emotional texture of political suffering and sacrificial death, beyond its willing or endured character, and beyond its gendered features, provided it with an undeniable ability to justify and legitimize its subsequent commemoration and imitation among the different emotional communities it fostered.