The role of ideas, networks and cultural representations in the support for the Risorgimento and Giuseppe Mazzini among Belgian progressives. The Italian connections of Charles Potvin.

For too long historiography has been founded on the assumption that the period up to the outbreak of the First World War was only an era of national integration and of national conflicts. This article anayzes the Italian connections of Belgian intellectual and freethinker Charles Potvin (1818-1902).We explore Potvin's ideological and practical support to the Risorgimento and his affinity with Mazzini.
Examining the connections of Potvin with the Risorgimento can throw a light on the
importance of transnational connections, both on a ideological and practical level in the interconnected history of the Risorgimento and anticlericalism in the 19th century.