How would you prove that Guiseppe Mazzini's The Duties of Man can support and explain romanticism?

Romanticism is a broad term. In this address, Mazzini gives voice to a liberal nationalism that was associated with the Romantic movement. In particular, he argues that one's nation or country is something elemental, something a person was given by God. Romantic nationalists thought that nations were bodies of people bound together by a common history, language, and culture (a concept that was just beginning to emerge in the nineteenth century). They believed that for centuries, monarchs and empires had denied people the ability to express their national identities—to share a polity with others like them. As Mazzini writes,

Evil governments have disfigured the Divine design. . . . They have disfigured it by their conquests, their greed, and their jealousy even of the righteous power of others. . . . These governments did not, and do not, recognize any country save their own families or dynasty, the egoism of caste. But the Divine design will infallibly be realized; natural divisions and the spontaneous, innate tendencies of the peoples will take the place of the arbitrary divisions, sanctioned by evil governments.

Mazzini believed that the "map of Europe would be redrawn" in ways that better reflected the fundamental ties between different groups of people. This was a departure from the thinking of both dynastic monarchies and Enlightenment philosophers, who generally spoke of divinely-endowed universal rights. To Romantic nationalists like Mazzini, rights, identity, and other such things came from God. However, they only made sense through a nation-state formed with other people connected to them in fundamental ways. As he said in summation,




O, my brothers, love your Country! Our country is our Home, a house God has given us, placing therein a numerous family that loves us, and whom we love; a family with whom we sympathize more readily and whom we understand more quickly than we do others.

This sentiment may seem somewhat xenophobic and chauvinistic to modern readers, but to Mazzini and other Romantic nationalists, it made sense that liberal reforms would be more likely to adhere in homogenous societies, in which people had a sense of fellow feeling with others. In this way, The Duties of Man is an example of the nationalistic strain in Romanticism.