On September 5, 1952 a national committee organised an Akkademja Patriottika to “commemorate Maltese victory on September 5, 1800 on the 152nd anniversary” of the event at the University (see invitation).

Albert Ganado, who formed part of the committee, remembered (with this writer on February 28, 2011) that the then ADC of the British Governor attended the evening. Dr Ganado noticed that this guest sat, somewhat perplexed, at the very back and left at the end of the programme without communicating with anyone. The next day the organising committee was disbanded and never met again.

Further to contributions by Dr Ganado and Henry Frendo on commemoration of the peasants’ revolt of 1798 I thought readers might find the above information interesting as it could confirm why the event was not marked while Malta was under British rule.

The British did not only impede the victorious Maltese from entering Valletta after the blockade in 1800, they also made sure, with the full collaboration of the Church, that the islanders would never memorialise the event.

According to historian Alfredo Mifsud (1907) this manipulated agenda could have arisen from British fear of encouraging the Maltese to harbour ideas of rising against them. During the Language Question years and up to WWII the local Italianate community endorsed the heroics of the Maltese victory in order to repel British hegemony campaigns.

Could it be that after the insurrection, which had been instigated by political ecclesiastics and leading negozjanti, the Maltese were not certain if they had been on the right side of history when taking political decisions?

The Church, eager to disremember the tribulations of the uprising, must have done its best to help the community forget the trauma of thousands of lives lost to hunger and sickness because of the prolonged blockade which started with l’infami massacru that the insurgents committed in Mdina when they opened up the bodies of some 60 French soldiers and their Maltese supporters, tore out and cooked their livers and finally ate them.

George Mitrovich (1835), Gaetano Gauci (1899) and Giovanni Faure (1913) are all on record admiring a number of political liberties enjoyed during the short-lived republican French interlude from which the common citizen was to gain socially at the expense of lost privileges of landowning clerics and countryside merchants.

Before we rush to establish the sixth national day, could readers perhaps ponder why subsequent generations of Maltese realised that ‘patres nostri peccaverunt et non sunt’ (‘our fathers sinned, and are no more’) as aptly lamented by Zaccaria Roncali in the Council of Government (Debates, January 11, 1884)?