CHAPTER TWO

Making Italy and making Italians

The history of Italy between […] 1861 and […] 1922 is the history of a state in search of a nation.

Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians, 1860-19201

‘Unfortunately we have made Italy, but we have not created Italians.’

Massimo d’Azeglio.²

THE unified Kingdom of Italy was a state born out of conflict, of which Victor Emmanuel II of Piedmont-Sardinia was crowned King in 1861. Curiously, he did not retitle himself to become Victor Emmanuel I, and so appeared to be the second King of Italy. The Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia itself was one of eight Italian states that had been recreated after the defeat of Napoleon at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Autocratic governments ruled all those states, and, though nominally independent, many of them depended on Austrian protection and were effectively satellites of the Austrian Empire. Patriotic sentiments had begun to spread among Italian elites during Napoleonic rule (1805–14), under which large parts of Italy had been politically unified. The post-Napoleonic restoration led to growing demands for the granting of constitutional charters and independence from foreign rule. These, in 1820-21, led to a series of insurrections in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and Piedmont-Sardinia. They achieved very little and were brutally crushed. In the case of the Two Sicilies, an Austrian army was despatched under the auspices of the Holy Alliance who feared that the notion of constitutional government might spread to other Italian states and perhaps even further.³

Attempts to shrug off Austrian dominance resulted in what became known as the First Italian War of Independence. This was fought in 1848 between Piedmont-Sardinia and the Austrian Empire. The conflict arose from the local manifestation of the widespread revolts of 1848, a pan-European phenomenon. The population of Lombardy-Venetia, under Austrian rule, rose as did the people of Sicily. With similar trouble occurring in Vienna the Austrian forces evacuated the island. Perceiving a time of apparent Austrian weakness, several Italian states, including Piedmont-Sardinia, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Tuscany and the Papal States, sent their military forces into Lombardy-Venetia. After some initial success, the Italian alliance fractured; the Pope recalled his troops and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies also withdrew. The Grand Duke of Tuscany, Leopold II, greatly alarmed at the course of events in his native state where ‘revolutionaries’ had taken control, decided to follow the Papal example.4 Piedmont-Sardinia was left to face Austria alone, and was too weak to prevail, being forced to acquiesce in a short-lived armistice before having to come to terms on 9 August 1849 and pay an indemnity of 65 million francs. The outcome of the conflict brought home to Piedmont-Sardinia the unlikelihood of being able to defeat Austria single-handedly, and left insurrectionist regimes in Venice (the Republic of San Marco), Florence, the capital of Tuscany, and Rome as the sole representatives of defiance to Austrian domination.5 This was fairly short lived; the Austrians retook the Republic of San Marco in August 1849 after a long siege, and Leopold II was restored to his capital the same year with the assistance of Austrian troops, who occupied Tuscany until 1855.⁶ One insurrectionary government that was defeated by other than Austrian assistance was that which had risen in the Papal States during March 1849. A constituent assembly had been formed, which abolished the temporal power of the Pope and proclaimed a Roman Republic. A new constitution was proclaimed, which guaranteed a government subject to legal constraints, a free press, freedom of conscience, the abolition of capital punishment and universal male suffrage amongst others. One of the leaders of the Republic was Giuseppe Mazzini, a politician, journalist and activist, known popularly as ‘The Beating Heart of Italy’. He is usually ranked alongside Cavour and Garibaldi as one of the leading figures of the Italian Risorgimento.

The Kingdom of Italy in 1911, showing the pre-unification states and the dates of their accession. Having created an Italian state in 1861, with King Victor Emanuel II of Piedmont-Sardinia becoming Victor Emanuel II of Italy, the problem then was, as Massimo d’Azeglio put it, creating Italians. The capital city, after previously being located at Turin (1861-64) and Florence (1864-71), was moved to Rome in 1871 following the surrender of Pope Pius IX to military force. (© Charles Blackwood).

The reactionary forces that sought to ‘restore the Pope’ came this time from France. France was then under the presidency of Louis Napoleon. His motives in intervening were largely domestic-political; French ultramontane Catholics formed a large part of his core constituency.⁷ A French expeditionary corps, with some Spanish assistance, was duly despatched and one of the French commanders, General Charles Oudinot, when told that he would meet resistance uttered the quip ‘Italians don’t fight’ (les Italiens ne se battent pas). He was wrong, and as he found to his cost the Italians did fight and bloodily repulsed his advance.⁸ Indeed, it was only after fierce resistance that the short-lived Roman Republic surrendered in June 1849.⁹

The fact that Piedmont-Sardinia alone, or with unreliable allies, could not prevail against Austrian military strength, even when this was diluted by domestic discontent, seemed to pose an insoluble problem. A solution however came from the former French President, Louis Napoleon, who had, since 2 December 1852, reinvented himself as Emperor Napoleon III. Since that time the two states had been allied during the Crimean War against Russia, fighting alongside the forces of the United Kingdom and The Ottoman Empire. Napoleon III had chosen to pick a quarrel, indeed a fight, with Austria in a bid to extend French influence in Italy; ‘a new Bonapartist hegemony’ in A J P Taylor’s phrase.¹⁰ He did not expect that his strategy would lead to the creation of a unified Italian state. Rather, in the south, he expected the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies to remain as it was, whilst in central Italy the Papal States would endure and the smaller territories would combine to form a kingdom that France might control. Northern Italy would be dominated by Piedmont-Sardinia, which would receive Lombardy and Venetia; the whole confederation would be presided over by the Pope.¹¹

The Emperor invited the Piedmontese Prime Minister, Camillo Benso, Count Cavour, to a secret meeting at Plombieres, in eastern France on 20-21 July 1858. The outcome of this meeting was an agreement, the main strands of which were that France would help Piedmont-Sardinia to fight against Austria, and Piedmont-Sardinia would then give Nice and Savoy to France in return.¹² There were caveats, inasmuch as Austria had to be seen as the aggressor, and that ‘the war should have no revolutionary taint to alarm the reactionary governments of Europe.’¹³

In order to provoke Austria, Cavour arranged for military manoeuvres to be held close to the Austrian border and did nothing to discourage the Austrian belief that Piedmont-Sardinia had been supplying armaments to separatists in Lombardy. The desired effect was realised when Austria issued an ultimatum on 23 April 1859 demanding the disarming of the army of Piedmont-Sardinia. This of course went unheeded, and Austria accordingly, on 29 April, declared war. Napoleon, declaring he had come to ‘liberate Italy from the Alps to the Adriatic,’ decided to lead his army in person, and on 13 May he met the Piedmontese king, Victor Emanuel II, at Genoa. The combined, though overwhelmingly French, armies fought and won two significant battles over the next four weeks; the Battle of Magenta on 4 June and the much larger Battle of Solferino, or Solferino and San Martino as it is also known, on 24 June. The latter was a particularly vicious struggle lasting some nine hours; the casualties on the French and Piedmontese side have been computed as around 17,000 whilst Austria suffered some 22,000 losses.14 These figures are probably underestimates; an anonymous correspondent of the New York Times, who had been at the scene on the day and was in the area for two week afterwards, calculated that the Franco-Piedmontese army alone had suffered 45,000 killed and wounded.¹⁵

These victories, though they were hardly decisive in the military sense, nevertheless meant that Austria was weakened and in danger of being pushed from northern Italy completely. But then, it appears, Napoleon got cold feet. Far from proceeding with the project to liberate Italy as far as the Adriatic, he resolved that the action would go no further than Lombardy.¹⁶ His motives for this have provoked much debate, but were probably manifold. The threat of Prussian mobilisation and revulsion at the butcher’s bill occasioned during the June battles are often cited, but in any event, he sent a French general under a flag of truce to the Austrian HQ on 10 July, with a request that the Austrian Emperor, Franz Joseph, meet him at Villafranca di Verona the next morning. This was acceded to, and over the heads of the Piedmontese, the two emperors met and concluded an armistice. Cavour resigned when he learned of it.¹⁷

The agreements reached, (basically that Lombardy was to be united with Piedmont while Venice was left to Austria), were formalised in the Treaty of Zurich. This was signed by Austria, France and, in some disgust, Piedmont-Sardinia on 10 November 1859. There were three parts, or, more correctly, three treaties; one between France and Austria which ceded Lombardy to France and re-established peace between the two emperors. The second treaty, between France and Piedmont-Sardinia, passed Lombardy along to the latter power, whilst the third re-established a state of peace between Austria and Sardinia.¹⁸

Even whilst it was being signed, the treaty was, in reality, a dead letter. Provisional governments had usurped power in the Austrian guaranteed statelets of Tuscany, Parma, Modena and the northern portions of the Papal States (also known as Romagna).¹⁹ They had gone on to elect representative assemblies, which, being dominated by Italian patriots, were vociferous about becoming Italian under the auspices of Piedmont-Sardinia. Certainly they were not about to put themselves back under the authority of Grand Duke Ferdinand IV, Duke Robert, Duke Francis V, and Pope Pius IX respectively.²⁰ They formed a federation, generally known as the United Provinces of Central Italy, which was a short-lived affair. Plebiscites were held on 11-12 March 1860 on the question of independence or annexation to Piedmont-Sardinia.

The outcome of these referenda was, in all cases, a massive vote in favour of annexation to Piedmont-Sardinia. The electorate consisted of males over the age of 21, and around seventy-five per cent of those eligible to vote did so. There were accusations that the votes had been rigged,21 and the one-sidedness of the result is of a magnitude that invites suspicion: Parma: For 53,782 - Against 165. Modena: For 52,499 - Against 56. The Papal Legations (Romagna): For 200,659 - Against 244. Tuscany: For 371,000 - Against 15,000.²² However, whilst there is evidence of irregularity in respect of the elections of the provisional governments, with, for example, the more conservative rural voters prevented from casting ballots, there seems little doubt that the results of the plebiscites reflected popular opinion.²³ Despite having effectively reneged on his promise in respect of the amount of Italian territory he would liberate, Napoleon still wanted his share of the spoils as agreed at Colombiers in 1858. On 25 March 1860 a general election was held throughout the recently enlarged state, including Nice and Savoy, and on 2 April the deal regarding the territorial transfer, formalised by the Treaty of Turin signed on 24 March 1860, was revealed to the assembly.²⁴ One of the newly elected members was Giuseppe Garibaldi, voted in as deputy for his birthplace – Nice.²⁵

Garibaldi was a unique figure. He was renowned internationally for his exploits in pursuit of liberation in South America, whilst similar feats in pursuit of a united Italy, particularly during the 1848 revolutions, had raised him to almost legendary status domestically.²⁶ On 12 April he made his first address to Parliament. He read to the assembly the fifth article of the Constitution, which stipulated that no part of the state could be transferred without the consent of parliament.²⁷ He referred to the pressure being exerted on the citizens of Nice, where no public meetings to discuss the matter were allowed, and no canvassing or leafleting arguing against the annexation was permitted. A new governor, Louis Lubonis, had been appointed, and he bent his whole efforts to securing a vote in favour. Garibaldi asked that the referendum in Nice be postponed from 15 April to 22 April.

Cavour, who had returned as Prime Minister on 20 January 1860, dismissed Garibaldi’s arguments by pointing out that to have refused to honour the Colombiers agreement would have destroyed all hope of advancing the cause of Italian nationalism. He advised Garibaldi to ‘turn your eyes beyond the Mincio and beyond the confines of Tuscany.’²⁸ Garibaldi is supposed to have described Cavour as being a ‘low intriguer’ for his dealings,²⁹ but whatever the status assigned to his secret diplomacy it was undoubtedly effective; large amounts of territory had been added to what was soon to become Italy.

Garibaldi was, in the interim, to famously add even more. However, on the evening of his plea to the assembly he decided on a more parochial course of action; at the head of two hundred men he would sail for Nice and enter the town immediately after the referendum had taken place. His men would then appropriate the ballot boxes and scatter their contents, thus forcing a rerun prior to which Garibaldi and his followers would actively campaign against annexation.³⁰ This project was abandoned the same evening however; as the Englishman Laurence Oliphant recorded it following his visit to Garibaldi, who was ensconced with a number of others:

I am very sorry, but we must abandon all idea of carrying out our Nice Programme. Behold these gentlemen from Sicily. All from Sicily! All come here to meet me, to say that the moment is ripe, that delay would be fatal to their hopes; that if we are to relieve their country from the oppression of Bomba, we must act at once. I had hoped to be able to carry out this little Nice affair first, for it is only a matter of a few days; but much as I regret it, the general opinion is, that we shall lose all if we try too much; and fond as I am of my native province, I cannot sacrifice these greater hopes of Italy to it.31

Nice and Savoy voted undisturbed on the given dates, with the result being, as expected, hugely in favour of union with France.³² Garibaldi’s quoted comment about the moment being ‘ripe’ as regards Sicily was prompted by unrest that had broken out there. It was also provoked, it has been argued, by his annoyance at Cavour and the Piedmontese government regarding the cession of Nice.³³ In any event, it was the case that an insurrection had begun in Palermo on 4 May. This quickly spread, leading to it becoming known as the ‘April revolution’.³⁴ In order to support this revolution Garibaldi assembled a force of around 1,000 nationalists (i Mille), and this contingent of redshirts (camicie rosse) embarked in two ‘requisitioned’ paddle-steamers, which they renamed Piemonte and Lombardo, from Quarto near Genoa on 5 May.³⁵ Pursued by vessels of the Neapolitan Navy,³⁶ the Thousand nevertheless landed safely at Marsala, Sicily, on 11 May where they were joined by local insurrectionist forces.³⁷ The armed forces of Francis II, ruler of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, had been weakened somewhat shortly following that monarch’s accession on 22 May 1859. On 7 June some detachments of the Swiss Guard, considered to be the best troops available to the regime, had mutinied. The mutineers had then been massacred by order of General Alessandro Nunziante, Duke of Majano and an intimate of the king, and the rest of the guard then disbanded.³⁸

This perhaps goes some way to accounting for the victory of around 800 of the redshirts over the Neapolitan forces during the course of an apparently minor engagement near the village of Calatafimi on 15 May. Led by Garibaldi in person, some 1500 of the enemy were beaten, but the battle was decisive inasmuch as without this initial success the whole campaign might have failed. It also fed the Garibaldi legend; it was before this battle that he is supposed to have uttered the immortal phrase ‘here we make Italy or die’ (qui si fa l’Italia o si muore). Garibaldi survived the battle, declared himself dictator of Sicily in the name of King Victor Emmanuel, and went on with the quest to ‘make Italy.’ On 4 June he renamed his force the Southern Army (Esercito Meridionale); it was enlarged by volunteers from northern Italy, deserters from the Neapolitan forces, local volunteers, and foreigners (mainly Hungarian). Though there was a good deal of fighting Garibaldi’s progress seemed inexorable. Having successfully crossed the Straits of Messina he travelled to Naples on 7 September and, almost alone and seemingly without any resistance, took control of the capital. His arrival was greeted with popular approval:

At the railway National Guards were stationed at all the entrances, and flags were coming down in rapid succession, for the arrival of the Dictator was sudden, like everything he does, and people were unprepared. […] At last 12 o’clock strikes, and a bell sounds, and from a distance a signal is made that Garibaldi is approaching. ‘Viva Garibaldi’ rises from a thousand voices, and the train stops; a few [redshirts] get out, and they are seized, hugged, and kissed with that most unmerciful violence which characterises Italian ardour. […] There was one poor elderly man who, by virtue of his white beard, was taken for Garibaldi, and was slobbered so that I thought he must have sunk under the operation; but the great man had gone round by another door, and so there was a rush in all directions to intercept him.³⁹

The accomplishments of the Southern Army led to concerns in the camp of Garibaldi’s ostensible allies, the Piedmontese regime. Indeed, Victor Emanuel and Cavour, despite having winked at his exploits whilst officially disapproving of them, had become troubled by the rapidity and extent of his success. Garibaldi, though he was well known for his republican views, had of course, in the middle of May, announced that his assumption of the role of dictator was in the name of Victor Emanuel. His subsequent achievements, and there is no denying that they had been remarkable, had propelled him not only to the forefront of the struggle for Italian unity, but also to international fame, or indeed notoriety dependant upon point of view. The Piedmontese regime had, in short, rather lost the initiative, but yet it was they that had to contend with the foreign policy implications that Garibaldi’s advance raised. These devolved essentially upon the position of the Pope and the extent of the territory he ruled. Garibaldi had made little secret of his intention to lead the Southern Army into the Papal States and indeed Rome itself, a course of action that would have caused French intervention.

Accordingly, and in order to forestall such an eventuality, Cavour played off Napoleon III and Garibaldi against each other, by, in the words of Mack Smith, threatening, ‘with exquisite tact […] Napoleon with Garibaldi, and Garibaldi with Napoleon.’40 This diplomatic strategy was backed by direct action, and on the pretext of using force to quell unrest and disturbances in the Marches and Umbria, which he had arranged for, and to protect Papal authority, Cavour sent a Piedmontese army into those territories on 10 September 1860 of some 50,000 men under the command of General Enrico Cialdini. Pius IX had forces of his own, a cosmopolitan army of some 8,000 men formed in April 1860 under the command of the anti-Napoleonic French general Christophe Leon Louis Juchault de Lamoricière. This heterogeneous force fought with the invaders at the Battle of Castelfidardo on 18 September, and was heavily defeated. Forced to retreat, Lamoriciére concentrated his remaining troops at the fortress of Ancona, but was forced to capitulate on 29 September 1860. Meanwhile other Piedmontese troops had advanced to the south, fighting and winning battles at Perugia and Spoleto. The latter was defended by a contingent of Irishmen, the Brigade of Saint Patrick, under the command of Major Myles O’Reilly. This force held out for two days against a more numerous and better-armed detachment commanded by General Filippo Brignone, but was forced to terms on 18 September.⁴¹ Napoleon III had done nothing to prevent the conquest of most of the Papal States.

Upon Garibaldi’s entry into their capital, the Neapolitan regime had decamped to the city fortress of Gaeta, some 80 kilometres north of Naples. Here the now effectively deposed Francis II attempted to reform his army and seek, a hope looking increasingly forlorn, assistance from another power that would intervene on behalf of those who opposed Italian unification under Piedmont Sardinia. The Neapolitan army was put under the command of 66-year-old War Minister, Field Marshal Giosuè Ritucci, who regrouped and reorganised it at Capua, some 25 kilometres north of Naples. His strategy involved purging his command of unreliable elements, and then utilising this reinvigorated force to fight a battle based on the line of the Volturno river, whereby they hoped to defeat and scatter the Southern Army.

There were initial signs that the Neapolitan military strategy at least was sound when elements of the Southern Army, advancing from Naples under the leadership of the Hungarian Stefano Türr (Türr István), suffered a repulse at Caiazzo (Cajazzo) on 19 September. Ritucci’s force, numbering over 40,000 men in total according to some sources, also had some success in the recapture of the difficult position of Castel Morrone on 1 October during its advance to the south. This exploit, part of the larger action of the Battle of Volturno, was however to be the last of its kind. Over two days, 1-2 October, Garibaldi, who had returned to lead his forces in person, fought to prevent around 30,000 Neapolitan troops from moving to retake Naples. Despite his 20,000 strong force being outnumbered, they were successful in stopping the enemy advance and driving them back to Capua. In fact the game was almost up for Francis II and his government, who were now being assailed from both north and south as the Piedmontese army, under the personal command of Victor Emanuel II, advanced across the Neapolitan frontier on 13 October. Ritucci was thus forced to leave Capua garrisoned against an attack by the Southern Army, whilst redeploying the majority of his force northwards to the line of the Garigliano some 60 kilometres miles to the north-west. Garibaldi followed, leaving a detachment to contain Capua, which eventually surrendered on 2 November, and on the 26 October 1860 he and Victor Emanuel met at Teano. This meeting later became immortalised in Italian culture because of the supposed ‘Handshake of Teano,’ whereby Garibaldi is depicted shaking the hand with Victor Emanuel and acknowledging him as the (future) King of Italy.

The same day, Ritucci was relieved of his command and replaced by Giovanni Salzano, but no amount of tinkering could now alter the facts on the ground. A series of fairly minor battles were fought and won by the Piedmontese between 29 October and 4 November, including that of Mola di Gaeta on 2 November, which cut off the Neapolitan regime at Gaeta along with some 10-16,000 troops. These were supported by the, thus far, passive presence of a French squadron of warships, and all that was left for them to hope for was the military intervention of Austria. That this was not to be forthcoming has been attributed to the actions of Prussia under Bismarck, which refused to back Austria and thus left her isolated. Whether this was part of Bismarck’s plan for the unification of Germany is the subject of scholarly disputation, but the effect was to support Italian unification under the auspices of Piedmont-Sardinia.

Unification was however very much incomplete when Victor Emmanuel II was crowned King of Italy on 17 March 1861. Indeed, Italian society as a whole had immense problems. These included the alienation of the Catholic Church, always likely to be a problem in an overwhelmingly observant population, which believed that a unified nation was against its own interests and argued that Italy, as a state, was illegitimate. Such was Pius IX’s detestation of the concept of an Italian State, or perhaps the removal of the temporal powers of the Papacy that such a polity not only implied but was instrumental in causing, that he:

[…] had recourse to the most formidable weapon at his command: the greater Excommunication, which, with all mediaeval pomp, was pronounced on April 23, 1860 […] No particular individuals were named, but all, beginning with the King of Sardinia, who had taken part or should take part […] or in any way, even outside of Italy, should assist by work or will in the accomplishment of the new order of things, or in any way profit by it, were included.42

Indeed, the future capital of Italy remained outside the control of that state for nearly a decade following reunification. The Pope, as King, ruled Rome and its environs including Civita Veccchia, Velletri, Frosinoni and Viterbo. These formed the final remnant of the Papal States most of the rest of which had joined the Kingdom of Italy in 1861.

Bismarck certainly played a part in the next acquisition of territory considered to be ‘unredeemed’ (Italia irredenta) or incorporated into the Italian state. The Austro-Prussian War, also known as the Third War of Independence to Italians, began with Prussia declaring war on Austria on 16 June 1866 followed by Italy three days later. Italy had agreed to assist Prussia on the condition that Venetia was ceded to it after the conflict, which it obviously expected Prussia to win. Italy hoped to conquer the territory single-handedly and moved two armies against Austria for that purpose. One of them, under General Alfonso Ferrero la Marmora, met with disaster at the Battle of Custoza on 24 June 1866 when it was soundly beaten by an inferior Austrian force under Field Marshal Archduke Albrecht and driven out of Venetia. The defeat was caused by a badly defective supreme command, which divided its forces and had no clear conception of what it wanted to do. Accordingly a series of uncoordinated attacks were made and the Austrians, who kept their forces concentrated, were able to defeat the attackers in a series of isolated encounters. It was hardly a hard-fought battle, (according to Whittam the Austrian casualties far outweighed the Italian), but it destroyed Italian self belief in the military value of their army.43 As a future Chief of Staff put it in his study of the battle published in 1903; ‘the defeat of Custoza still weighs down our army like a cloak of lead (cappa di piombo) 36 years later’⁴⁴ However, if the Battle of Custoza was perceived as a huge, if indecisive, defeat for the army, the outcome of the Battle of Lissa (Vis) on 20 July was as bad, if not worse, for the navy.⁴⁵

The National Italian Navy had been created on 17 November 1860, when the regional navies – Sardinian, Bourbon, Sicilian, Tuscan and Papal – combined. Four months later, on 17 March 1861, it became the Regia Marina Italiana, following the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy. The outcome of Lissa largely revolved around the irresolution and poor strategic and tactical judgement of the Italian Commander in Chief, Admiral Carlo Pellion di Persano. Urged by the government to take some Austrian territory before the war ended, particularly after Custoza, he conceived a plan to sortie with virtually the entire Italian fleet in order to effect a bombardment of, and landing on, the Austrian island of Lissa (now Vis in Croatia) in the Adriatic.⁴⁶ Persano deployed twelve ironclad warships and twenty-two unarmoured vessels (including transports for some 3000 troops) against which the Austrian fleet, under vice admiral Wilhelm von Tegethoff, could pit only seven armoured frigates (built of wood and plated with thin armour), seven steam-driven wooden ships without armour, and an assortment of thirteen screw-driven and paddle-wheel gunboats.

Persano left from the port of Ancona on 16 July, and was off the island by 18 July whereupon he commenced firing on the defences. No attempt was made to land as the Italian commander, despite his materiel superiority, feared the Austrians might arrive whilst the procedure was underway. The bombardment continued the next day and some of the troops were landed. Persano however failed to provide a covering force for these landings and was unaware that Tegethoff, who had been informed of the attack by cable, was hurrying to the scene from the Austrian base at Fasana, near Pola (Pula), on the southern tip of the Istrian peninsula. Tegethoff arrived off Lissa on the morning of 20 July, and approached the position with his command organised in three divisions, arranged in succession; armoured ships first, then unarmoured large ships. Each division was in a chevron formation, the flagship of the division in the centre with the rest of the ships echeloned sternwards to port and starboard. The Italians were disorganised and Persano attempted to form a line of battle whilst, for reasons unknown, simultaneously deciding to switch his flagship and thus interrupt command and communication. The end result was that the Austrians were able to charge through and sunder the Italian battle line and defeat them in detail. Persano, who compounded all his earlier errors by initially reporting that he had won the engagement, was dismissed from the navy, which was itself left under a cloud. It was perhaps then unsurprising that one of the government’s first moves after the disaster was to reduce the Navy’s budget, ushering in what the historian Aldo Fraccaroli called ‘dark, sad years for the Navy, [it being] relegated to a position of minor importance’.47

However, despite the defeats of Custoza and Lissa, Italy got what it wanted from the war. Following the Prussian victory at Königgrätz (Sadowa) on 3 July 1866 Austria sought to make peace, and Bismarck was keen to oblige. He did not seek any Austrian territory, but rather wanted to exclude Austria from Prussian and wider German affairs and to bind the small German states that had been allied to Austria to Prussia, mostly by annexation. Bismarck kept his word to Italy however, and Austria was forced to cede Venetia under the terms of the ‘Peace of Prague,’ the treaty that ended the war on 23 August 1866. However, Austria refused to hand the territory directly to Italy, preserving national amour-propre by handing it to Napoleon III, who, in turn ceded it to Italy. The province ceded equates roughly with the modern Italian regions of Veneto, including the capital Venice, and Friuli-Venezia Giulia, though minus its capital, Trieste, which remained in Austrian hands. Austria also retained the Trentino territory (the modern semi-autonomous province of Trento), which remained a major bone of contention.

Otto von Bismarck was again to play an important, albeit indirect, part in the next major redemption of Italian territory; that of Rome and the Lazio. That Rome and the surrounding area had remained beyond the control of the Italian state was mainly due to the presence there of French troops, tasked with preserving the remnant of Papal temporal power by Napoleon III. However, the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 resulted in the withdrawal of this force, and more importantly the backing of the Second Empire for Papal temporal power, leaving the way clear for the Italian state to take control. Without the support of Napoleon III, who was captured at the Battle of Sedan on 2 September and whose rule was ended by the effective declaration of a Third Republic on 4 September 1870, the Papal regime was doomed. The Italian State quickly formed a force of some 50,000 men under general Raffaele Cadorna (the father of the First World War general) which moved on Rome on the 11 September. On the Italian side the hope was for a peaceful solution, and the King of Italy wrote to the Pope on 8 September guaranteeing his person and position:

The Government of the King will protect the interest which the whole Catholic world possesses in the entire independence of the Sovereign Pontiff […] The Government of the King is firm in assuring the guarantees necessary to the spiritual independence of the Holy See, and that the head of the Catholic Church shall preserve on the banks of the Tiber a seat honourable and independent of all human sovereignty.⁴⁸

Pius IX was however determined upon offering at least token resistance, and he had sufficient force to do so; defending the Papal territory was a force of some 11,000⁴⁹ troops under a German general, Hermann Kanzler.⁵⁰ These consisted of members of the Palatine Guard (guardia palatina), Noble Guard (guardia nobile), and the famous Swiss Guard (guardia svizzera), together with the colourful Papal Zouaves (zuavi pontifici) under the command of Roger de Beauffort.51

The Italian army reached the ancient Aurelian Wall on 19 September and took up position. The rituals of siege-craft, formulated over the centuries, stipulated that the defenders of a position could honourably surrender once a ‘practicable breach’ had been made in the wall.⁵² The Aurelian Wall, built between 270 and 282 AD,⁵³ had been designed, to utilise Gibbon’s picturesque prose, ‘only to resist the less potent engines of antiquity’ and it was no match for the ‘thundering artillery’ that was now pointed at it.⁵⁴ Nevertheless there was some fighting:

Six battalions of the reserve Bersaglieri had been assigned to advance against Porta Pia. The artillery was still targeting the wall to open the breach […] [and] it was announced that a large hole had been opened near Porta Pia, and that the Pontifical guns, which had been very ineffectual in rate of fire, had been dismounted and silenced. Papal Zouaves were stationed on the thick walls of the Castrum Praetorium and their fire was causing much suffering to one of our regiments. A few hundred metres from the wall two of our large artillery pieces were firing at the wall and with every shot more pieces of the wall fell away. When the Porta Pia was clear [of enemy troops] and the breach nearby open almost to the ground, the infantry launched the attack and the six battalions of Bersaglieri rushed by and entered the city.⁵⁵

The news of the breach and its successful storming was brought to Pius IX around 09:00 hrs, who was at the time conferring with the diplomatic corps in the throne room of the Vatican. He is said to have murmured ‘fiat voluntas tua in coelo et in terra’ [thy will be done on earth as in heaven] before turning to the diplomats and announcing that he intended to surrender to save the unnecessary shedding of blood, but asked them to witness that he did so only under the threat of violence. The Zouaves, who were manning that particular portion of the defences, and had asked to be allowed to fight to the end, were ordered to surrender after showing sufficient resistance to prove the Pope’s point.⁵⁶ Casualties were low; the Italians lost 56 dead and some 140 wounded whilst on the Papal side 20 died and 49 were wounded.⁵⁷ As had occurred in all previous annexations, the people of the areas under question voted in a plebiscite that was held on 2 October 1870. The issue was worded as follows: ‘We wish to be united with the the Kingdom of Italy under the constitutional government of King Victor Emmanuel II and his successors’. The result was promulgated on 9 October. In the City of Rome, 40,785 voted for incorporation in the Italian State, as against 46 for remaining under the Pope. In the region as a whole out of 167,548 registered voters, 133,681 voted for incorporation with 1,507 against.⁵⁸ The Pope, refusing all entreaties from, and guarantees offered, by the Italian government retreated into the Vatican and became a self-imposed prisoner. Thus began a long period of stand-off, and the state and the church did not reach agreement on their relationship until 1929.⁵⁹

The incorporation of Rome into Italy seems like a victory for democracy, however it has been convincingly argued that the plebiscites, which were used to legitimise the formation of Italy from its component parts from 1860 onwards, were rigged.⁶⁰ Certainly, it is difficult to visualise what would have happened had the vote gone against. The vast majority of the population was in any case excluded from any form of political participation. Suffrage, linked to property and literary qualifications, was extremely limited, and the parliamentary system was such that governments were formed from ‘the variable and casual fluctuations of groups and personalities’ over the members of which the Prime Minister, and the monarch, deployed a powerful patronage system. This system was used to ensure that Members of Parliament who toed the line were rewarded. This process was known as transformismo, whereby opposition was ‘transformed’ into support.61

Further, by the Papal decree non expedit of 29 February 1868, Roman Catholics were forbidden to take any part in the political life of the new state. Enough observed this prohibition so as to ensure that prominent politicians were ‘commonly secular or anticlerical, and often Freemasons.’⁶² Internationally, the Roman Catholic hierarchy were fiercely critical of Italy as a constituted state. The English Cardinal Henry Edward Manning wrote in 1877 that:

The present Chamber, elected by less than a hundredth part of the Catholic Italian people, represents the Revolution, and nothing but the Revolution. The Catholic electors refuse to vote: less than two hundred and fifty thousand elect the Parliament, which Englishmen believe to represent the 26,000,000 of Italy.⁶³

Despite his obvious bias, it has to be conceded that Manning had a point.

Political power at the provincial level was vested in a government appointed prefect, a system borrowed from France, who was responsible for implementing centrally derived policy. The prefect was a powerful figure, being also the head of the police in his province. Prefects could, and did, utilise these powers to neutralise political opposition to the government, dissolve councils and proscribe political associations which posed a threat to what they perceived as ‘public security.’ These measures were applied during election periods when the prefect was able to use these powers so as to disadvantage anti-government candidates.⁶⁴ This centralisation process, known as Piedmontisation, ensured that Italy was, ostensibly at least, a highly centralized state, albeit with a number of very disparate regions. Division was also evident along class lines; the nobility was in decline but, as late as 1909, ‘over most of the south the old-established oligarchies still retained control.’⁶⁵ Here the prefect assumed the status of a ‘diplomatic agent’ accredited by a ‘foreign’ government to the local potentates, and the southern peasant – really landless day labourers (braccianti) – remained, in fact, an ‘oppressed serf.’⁶⁶ Perhaps unsurprisingly, emigration from southern Italy was on a large scale. Between 1876 and 1914 a total of 13,882,000 Italians are calculated to have left Italy. By 1913 sixty-three percent of these had left the northern and central regions, whilst despite only having thirty-eight per cent of the population, forty-seven per cent departed from the south. Most of the latter migrated to the US, Latin America and Australia, whilst the majority of emigration from northern and central Italy was to European destinations.⁶⁷ However, by far the largest single recipient of Italian immigrants was the US.⁶⁸

Physical hardship accounted for a large degree of this flight. The standard of living became worse in the whole of Italy between 1870 and 1900, especially in the countryside, where the majority of the population resided. For example, in the ‘pellagra triangle’ of Veneto, Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna the eponymous condition, causing dermatitis, diarrhoea and, in many cases, dementia, was endemic and considered unavoidable. In fact it was easily avoidable; whilst the causes (a deficiency of niacin, which was not present in maize, the staple diet of the rural poor) were not properly identified until early in the twentieth century, that it could be alleviated, if not eradicated, by a slight dietary improvement was well known. It has been calculated that, merely to stay alive, the rural poor were forced to spend up to seventy-five percent of their income on food, which despite its relative cost, did not contain enough nutrition.69 The trouble was, as Zamagni has pointed out, ‘in order to rid the countryside of pellagra the social relations that existed in these areas would have to be revolutionised, and this was something that only started to happen towards the end of the nineteenth century.’⁷⁰ There is undoubtedly truth in Ashley’s statement that ‘The fact that Italian politicians came from the propertied class made them singularly sanguine about alleviating poverty by stimulating capitalism.’⁷¹

The Italian state also suffered from endemic malaria – widely regarded as the ‘Italian national disease’ during the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth – throughout nearly the entire peninsula and the islands of Sicily and Sardinia. Southern Italy, including Rome, was however afflicted with the falciparum strain, the most dangerous and acute type, whilst the north suffered from the less deadly, but still debilitating, vivax malaria. This disease was a part, and probably an important part, of the reason for the large-scale emigration, particularly from the south, causing a cycle of economic backwardness. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in 1900 the average life expectancy for both sexes in Italy has been computed to be about 43 years, which compares rather unfavourably with England and Wales at just over 48 years, France at 47.7, and Germany at a little over 45. It was however better than Austria-Hungary, whose combined figures average out at around 38 years, and much better than Spain at 35 years.⁷²

Perhaps also having an effect on emigration was the widespread social unrest that manifested itself through violence and uprising. One prime example of this was the insurrection that took place in Sicily in 1893; instigated by the fasci movement in protest at an increase in food prices and onerous working terms, it led to the government initiating a state of siege, under which those participating were brutally suppressed. The rural police force, the Carabinieri, was unable to cope and 40,000 troops were sent to Sicily, martial law was declared and military tribunals were established.⁷³ A form of internal exile (domicilio coatto) to penal colonies, usually on islands off the coast such as Pantelleria, was resorted to, and over 1000 were deported without trial.⁷⁴ Most alarmingly, in January 1894 this unrest spread to the north, leading to an uprising in what is now the province of Massa Carrara in the Tuscany region. Luigi Molinari, an anarchist, syndicalist, and lawyer, and in 1901 the founder of the newspaper L’Università popolare, was held to have been the instigator. At least this was the verdict of the military tribunal that tried him following the extension of the state of siege to the area. Molinari was sentenced to 23 years in prison. This, however, provoked a huge protest movement, and he received an amnesty the following year.⁷⁵

Anarchism was a powerful force to be reckoned with on the Italian left, and in July 1894 the government of Crispi put in place a series of laws that greatly restricted the exercise of free association. These measures, basically curtailing the ability of workers to collectivise in the name of eliminating ‘incitement to class hatred,’ were defined as ‘anti-anarchic.’⁷⁶ Furthermore, the electoral registers were ‘amended’, the Socialist Party of Italian Workers was barred, its deputies arrested, and parliament prorogued in October 1894.⁷⁷ Crispi justified such measures, which made prosecution possible on mere suspicion, on the grounds that they guaranteed the punishment of those criminals who would otherwise have been acquitted for lack of evidence.⁷⁸ Automatic sentencing for belonging to organisations deemed subversive was also introduced.⁷⁹ There were many more internal and social problems as helpfully if briefly itemised in 1913 by the historian and politician Pasquale Villari when he noted the continuing prevalence of ‘illiteracy, crime, the camorra, the mafia’ and the North-South divide of the country.80

In its relations with other European states the cornerstone of Italian foreign policy was membership of the Triple Alliance, or Triplice, with its old enemy Austria-Hungary, as Austria had become following the ‘Compromise of 1867,’ and its past ally Germany. One of the primary reasons for Italy joining with the members of what had been the Dual Alliance on 20 May 1882 was rivalry with France. Italy and France had been at something approaching loggerheads over North African territory since 1881. In that year France had established a protectorate over the nominally Ottoman territory of Tunis, which Italy had coveted since reunification. The Italian claim was based on it having the largest European population, some 97,000, in residence, and, somewhat more ephemerally, on Roman occupation in antiquity. Whatever merits the Italian claim might have had, it was as nothing when confronted with the realities of French and British power. These states had, as one scholar has put it, ‘abandoned their former policy of working to uphold [Ottoman] territorial integrity and were now helping themselves to its real estate.’⁸¹ Perhaps this is overstating the matter, but certainly Britain had also taken charge of Ottoman territory when it gained administrative responsibility, though not sovereignty, over the Ottoman island of Cyprus in 1878. Having been thwarted in her colonial ambitions, Italy was fearful that the resultant discord with France might mean that she was, as Francesco Crispi told Herbert Bismarck, in danger of being placed ‘between two enemies, one on our right and the other on our left.’⁸² Avoidance of this situation was the leading factor behind Italy joining what then became the Triple-Alliance.⁸³

The failure to prevail against French expansionism in Tunisia did not however blunt Italy’s wish to acquire a colonial empire. There had been an Italian presence in what became Eritrea since the mid-1880s when an Italian shipping company purchased a harbour at Assab from the Sultan of Obock. The Italian government took over the harbour in 1882 and developed it whilst spreading its presence along the coast and inland. In 1885 the Italians occupied Massawa but this expansion caused them to come into conflict with the Abyssinians, ruled by Yohannes IV, particularly when they occupied the town of Sahati. This confrontation resulted in the Dogale Massacre, when the Abyssinian forces encircled an Italian contingent at the town of that name some 18 kilometres from Massawa and defeated and killed them all. However, rather than finding this incident discouraging it only spurred the Italian government on, and they determined to increase their military presence with a view to colonising more of the area. This process, encouraged by Britain, continued until the Treaty of Ucciale (Wichale) (Trattato di Uccialli) formalised the matter. Agreed between Italy and King Menelik II of the autonomous Abyssinian Kingdom of Shewa (who later became Emperor of Abyssinia), and signed on 2 May 1889, it ceded what became Eritrea to the Italians. They named it as such, Colonia Eritrea, and declared it their Colonia Primigenia on New Years Day 1890.⁸⁴

Under the terms of the treaty Italy recognised Menelik as Abyssinian Emperor and agreed to provide financial assistance and military aid. However, the two parties swiftly came into dispute over the wording and meaning of it. The Amharic version and the Italian version differed it appears, and whilst Menelik thought he had agreed only to consult with Italy over foreign policy if he so desired, the Italian version stipulated that he would do so as a matter of course. In other words, Menelik considered he had been duped into conceding an Italian protectorate over Abyssinia and formally repudiated the treaty on 22 February 1893.85

Bordering Abyssinia to the east was another Italian territory, Italian Somaliland or Somalia Italiana. Italy had acquired this area piecemeal, reaching agreements with Sultan Ali Yusuf regarding a protectorate over Hobyo Sultanate in December 1888, and similarly with Sultan Osman Mohamoud and the Alula Sultanate in April 1889. Negotiations with the Sultan of Zanzibar, Sayid Barqash, yielded a fifty-year lease on the ports of Mogadishu, Merka, Warsheikh (Warshiikh) and Brava (Barawa) in 1892, which were purchased outright in 1905.⁸⁶ Administratively, Italian Somaliland was divided into six administrative subdivisions; Brava, Merca, Lugh, Itala, Bardera, and Jumbo.⁸⁷

The difference of opinion regarding the Treaty of Ucciale led to Italy mounting an invasion. The governor of Eritrea, General Oreste Baratieri, led a force into Abyssinia in December 1894, but was unable to force the opposion to a decisive battle. In January 1895 he fell back to a defensible position close to the border and hoped to induce the enemy to attack him there, knowing that such a tactic would allow his superiority in rifles and artillery to tell. Bariateri commanded some 20,000 men in four brigades with fifty-six artillery pieces whilst Menelik, who commanded in person, had around 100,000 though not all possessed firearms. Wisely refusing to fight on Italian terms, Menelik’s army advanced as far as Adwa (Adowa) and remained there throughout February. However, as Bartieri was well aware, his enemy could not keep large forces in the field for long periods because they lacked any effective logistical organisation, and so by waiting he would compel the enemy to either attack or disperse. Political considerations then intervened when the government in Rome, led by Francesco Crispi, became frustrated at the apparent lack of success. Bartieri received a telegraph message from the Prime Minister on 28 February in which he likened the campaign to a progressive wasting disease. The admonition continued:

I have no advice to give you because I am not on the spot, but it is clear to me that there is no fundamental plan in the campaign, and I should like one to be formulated. We are ready for any sacrifice in order to save the honour of the army and the prestige of the monarchy.⁸⁸

Although worded diplomatically there could be little doubt what was expected, and following consultation with his subordinate commanders on 28 February Bartieri determined to advance to the attack the next day. Accordingly, on the evening of the 29 February the four brigades advanced towards Adwa; three brigades abreast under Matteo Albertone on the left, Giuseppe Arimondi in the centre and Vittorio Dabormida on the right. One brigade, under Giuseppe Ellena, followed as the reserve.

The fighting began soon after 05:30 hrs on the morning of 1 March. By noon the battle was effectively over. It had ended in utter disaster for the Italians, and the Battle of Adowa has been accurately dubbed ‘the bloodiest defeat ever suffered by a colonial power in Africa.’⁸⁹ It was certainly bloody; out of some 17,700 engaged on the Italian side only about 9,000 – about half Italian and half locally recruited – survived the retreat to Eritrea. Amongst the senior officers Dabormida and Arimondi were killed, Albertone was taken prisoner and Ellena was wounded. Only Bartieri, who had boasted he would bring Menelik home in a cage, escaped unscathed. When the news reached Italy the next day it caused civil unrest on a considerable scale, particularly in urban areas, which the army was called out to control. Bartieri was swiftly recalled to Rome to face a court martial (he was acquitted). Crispi was forced to resign whilst Menelik, who might have attempted a pursuit into Eritrea, retired into Ethiopia to await negotiations. On 26 October 1896, he signed the Treaty of Addis Ababa, which abrogated the Treaty of Ucciale. Adowa was considered a national disaster.

The army, disgraced though it had been by Adowa, continued to be used against the Italian people, particularly those who were perceived as threatening the stability of the state such as the socialists. The Italian Socialist Party (PSI), which changed its name from the Socialist Party of Italian Workers at Parma on 13 January 1895, was composed of several strands, including anarchists, advocates of revolution, and evolutionary socialists. The latter strand became the dominant one in the 1890’s and though ultimately committed to the socialisation of production and exchange the party opted for an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, approach under the leadership of Filippo Turati.90 Despite opting for a constitutional approach, Turati and the PSI were viewed with extreme suspicion by the Italian government. Indeed Turati was sentenced to twelve years in jail for ‘instigating civil war’ following the Bava-Beccaris massacre on 6 May 1898.⁹¹

Named after General Fiorenzo Bava-Beccaris, the massacre took place as part of the bloody repression of widespread strikes and riots in Milan in early May 1898. On 5 May 1898 a large-scale strike was organised to protest against the increase of food prices amidst the near famine that was affecting the country. The police were unable to control the crowds and resorted to shooting, which led to one demonstrator in the town of Pavia, Muzio Mussi, the twenty-three year old son of a prominent radical, being shot and killed.⁹² On the morning of 6 May the workers at the Pirelli factory went on strike and leaflets denouncing the killing the previous day, were distributed. Rioting broke out, and ‘owing to the imbecility of the authorities, sufficient force was deployed to provoke, not to overawe, and they allowed the riots to make head.’⁹³ Two rioters were shot dead and several wounded. In response the government proclaimed a state of siege in Lombardy and ordered Bava-Beccaris, the commander of VIII Corps, to the area. Reserves were also mobilised, raising the total manpower available to the general to around 45,000, including infantry, cavalry, artillery and, because the railway men were on strike, railway troops. The forces were comprised particularly of men from rural districts and the alpine regions as these were considered to be more reliable than those recruited from the urban working class.

On 7 May 60,000 Milanese went out on strike and large numbers of them began to move towards the city centre from the outlying working class districts. Bava-Beccaris was determined to stop them and force them back into their districts. Accordingly he deployed forces in the Piazza del Duomo, the central square overlooked by Milan Cathedral. From this position they began to move outwards, clearing the demonstrators’ barricades and pushing them back into the districts of Ticinese to the south, Romana, Vittoria and Venezia in the east and Garibaldi to the north. He also wanted to regain control of the central station and the railway in general.⁹⁴ This however proved more difficult than was envisaged. Some of the insurrectionists had armed themselves with rifles, removed from the workshops of arms manufacturers, whilst many had installed themselves on the roofs of the houses and pelted the troops with stones and roof tiles. The state of the streets, encumbered with rubble and barricades, limited the use of the cavalry and blocked the movement of artillery. Bava-Beccaris however had authorised the use of both rifle and cannon fire against the insurgents, and the streets were thus cleared. Reinforcements arrived outside the city on 8 May and began moving in with the aim of trapping the insurrectionists between two fires. The whole affair was over by the evening of the following day, with order definitely restored by 10 May. Casualty figures are much disputed; the contemporary official accounts reckoned a cost of 80 dead and 450 wounded on the civilian side, whilst two policemen and soldiers had been killed and twenty-two wounded. By way of comparison, it might be noted that the massacre at the Winter Palace in St Petersburg in 1905, which sparked off a full-blooded revolution, left 130 dead and around 300 seriously wounded according to official figures.95

It is possible that Bava-Beccaris thought he had been facing a revolutionary situation. He had military tribunals set up, over some of which at least he personally presided. Around 1,500 Milanese were sentenced to prison terms, and ‘the whole conduct of the authorities was a travesty of justice and a mockery of legal procedure.’⁹⁶

The repression went further; any press organ deemed to be in opposition to the government was muzzled, and Catholic and socialist associations were dissolved. As already related, amongst those jailed was Turati, who, far from instigating the disturbances, had attempted to calm the situation issuing a leaflet arguing that the ‘days for street fighting are past’ and calling on the populace to be ‘calm and patient.’⁹⁷

In an astonishingly crass move, Umberto I, who had succeeded Victor Emanuel II on 9 January 1878, awarded Bava-Beccaris a medal for ‘great services to the State in the suppression of the revolution,’ the Gran Croce dell’Ordine Militare di Savoia,⁹⁸ and promoted him to the Senate. There was a massive and popular backlash against the monarch, the soldier, and the repression in general. One of the results of this was that Turati was released in 1899. He drew certain lessons from his experiences. Battles with the power of the state were to be avoided and the disavowal of anarchist methods was confirmed; both in Sicily in 1893-4 and again in 1898 the Italian army had demonstrated it had the capacity, and the willingness, to maintain order. The way ahead was via the parliamentary route, and when necessary, alliances with Liberals and others would be enacted in order to preserve a constitutional system within which a socialist party could exist at all.

Indeed, it was via the parliamentary route that the political left won a significant victory. General Luigi Pelloux, who had filled the same role as Bava-Beccaris in Bari in May but without resorting to martial law and overt aggression, had become Prime Minister in June 1898. This was following the fall of the previous ministry, largely because of the results of the policies that had led to the massacres and repression. In February 1899 Pelloux presented to parliament a comprehensive Public Safety Bill, also known as the coercion bill, which would have severely curtailed civil liberties. The opposition parties – socialist, radicals and republicans – combined to thwart attempts to get the bill passed, and when Pelloux had parliament prorogued, and the bill passed by royal decree, he caused uproar. This episode was known as the ‘Obstructionist Crisis’ and even members of his own side accused him of acting unconstitutionally. With little support outside the normal bastions of extreme conservatism and reaction, Pelloux dissolved the chamber in May 1900 and elections were held the next month. Despite the highly restrictive franchise,⁹⁹ which meant that only eight per cent of the Italian population could vote, he was defeated, inasmuch as he could no longer count on a parliamentary majority.¹⁰⁰ The President of the Senate, Giuseppe Saracco, was able to muster such a grouping, including of course the socialists, and thus form a ‘Cabinet of Pacification.’¹⁰¹

This peace was to be relatively short lived, for in a reversal of the ususal direction of travel, a silkworker domiciled in Paterson, New Jersey, Gaetano Bresci, travelled to Monza, Italy and, on the evening of 29 July 1900, fired three revolver shots into Umberto I. The King perished, and Bresci, a self-proclaimed anarchist justified the regicide on the grounds of avenging those people killed during the Bava-Beccaris massacre. Bresci had been a skilled textile worker in Tuscany before becoming a victim of state repression; he was placed in internal exile on the island of Lampedusa in 1895. In early 1898 he emigrated to the US where he acquired a wife of Irish extraction. He had been horrified to discover that Umberto had decorated Bava-Beccaris for the Milan massacres, rather than hanging him, and determined to take revenge.102 Umberto could not, even if he had so desired, hanged Bava-Beccaris.¹⁰³ The Kingdom of Italy’s first penal code, the Zanardelli Code of 1889, abolished capital punishment. Justice minister Giuseppe Zanardelli had argued that it was ‘absurd that the law should avenge homicide by itself perpetrating homicide’ and that capital punishment was ‘calculated to blunt the best sensibilities of mankind.’¹⁰⁴ This of course meant that Bresci could not be executed for murdering the king and he was accordingly sentenced to life imprisonment on 29 August. ‘I shall appeal after the coming revolution’ he is supposed to have said, but whilst serving his sentence at the Santo Stefano Ergastolo (a place of confinement for those serving life sentences) he committed suicide, or was murdered, on 22 May 1901.¹⁰⁵

Saracco, who was seventy-nine when he assumed the premiership, did not remain long in office. His administration was brought to an end in February 1901 by a vote in the chamber condemning his perceived weakness in relation to a large-scale strike on the docks at Genoa. The inability of the government, any government, to achieve industrial peace, (it has been calculated that in the period 1890-1901 there were some 1,700 major strikes),¹⁰⁶ was to become manifest over the next decade or so. Although the Socialist PSI had remained united while there was something tangible to unite against, it remained a grouping of strands, and indeed strands within strands. The members of these factions, when released from the common threat, seemed more concerned with their differences rather than unity as a whole. Accordingly, by 1902 the PSI had fractured into three parts, each antagonistic to the others and all, naturally enough, claiming to be the only real socialists. Whilst Turati continued to head the revolutionary wing, the leader of those professing revolution was Enrico Ferri.¹⁰⁷ Ferri said of Turati: ‘He hates me because he thinks there is not enough room for two cocks in the same chicken house.’¹⁰⁸

The labour unrest of the period culminated in the general strike of 16-20 September 1904 – Italy’s first. Encouraged by revolutionary elements in the PSI, the strike resulted from the use of the military in shooting workers engaged in lesser industrial action. Whilst the strike was effective inasmuch as ‘for three whole days the city of Genoa was left without light and bread and meat; all economic life was paralysed,’¹⁰⁹ it swiftly collapsed thereafter. One side effect of the militancy was the relaxation of the Papal non expedit; in 1904 Pius X urged Catholics to vote to halt the spread of socialism.

There is no doubt that up to that time the PSI exerted a powerful influence upon the workers. To the intellectuals at the head of the party however, general strikes were akin to forms of revolutionary experimentation.¹¹⁰ After the general strike that influence began to wane very rapidly. The workers began to suspect the motives of those who led the party. In the opinion of Agostino Lanzillo, who moved from revolutionary syndicalism to Fascism, the primary aim of the intellectuals, who included parliamentarians, lawyers, physicians, and teachers, was financial success through ‘a socialist career.’111 The PSI had made progress in terms of parliamentary success; despite the restricted franchise there were fifteen PSI deputies in 1897 and thirty by 1904.¹¹² Had it managed to remain united, and had there been even a semblance of party discipline, it is possible that it might have made great strides, as did the SPD in Germany. It was however not to be, and internecine strife between the reformists and revolutionaries wracked the movement up until 1906, when the reformists themselves started to fragment.¹¹³

Despite the various stresses, and indeed fractures, and general instability in Italian political and social life over the period, and despite even the disaster of Adowa, there was one foreign policy and colonial aim that remained more or less constant. It became, following the French acquisition of Tunis, an axiom of Italian foreign policy that Tripoli, with its long Mediterranean littoral, must some day be Italian territory.¹¹⁴ Indeed, those who had a hope of seeing Italy as an independent state had foreseen that colonies, including Tripoli, would figure in the national life. Italian interest in the acquisition of colonial territory was undoubtedly related to what is now termed social-imperialism; an attempt to focus the population on foreign policy rather than domestic issues and to arouse patriotic feelings. This policy was undoubtedly encapsulated by the maxim attributed to Massimo d’Azeglio after his death in 1864 - ‘we have made Italy, now we must make Italians.’¹¹⁵ This dictum was generally adopted by the Italian political elite following the debacle of Adowa, and its use, or resurrection, has been attributed to the former minister, and Governor of Eritrea from 1897 to 1907, Fernando Martini.¹¹⁶ Martini blamed the failure of the army on a lack of patriotism amongst the soldiery.¹¹⁷ There had always been a bellicose side to Italian nationalism,¹¹⁸ but rather than being quelled somewhat by the disaster that had attended the attempts to realise this facet, it became, if anything, enhanced by them. Indeed, to the political elite, foreign adventurism of some sort seemed to be the only answer to many of Italy’s problems, which did not lessen as the fiftieth anniversary of unification approached.