Tested by the facts Les Derniers Abbés, an anticlerical tale by Louise Colet

The article offers a historical-critical reading of a work by Louise Colet published in 1868, which describes her trip to Italy and embodies the values and hopes of the Risorgimento. Her contribution can be seen as a polemical essay continuing the work of L’Italie des Italiens, about the most recent events of the 1860s, a contentious and anticlerical work denouncing the power of the “black party” over the societies of the South and a way of putting the myth of Naples at a distance.