The Failure of Italian Nationhood The Geopolitics of A Troubled Identity

Italian and Italian American Studies
Stanislao G. Pugliese
Hofstra University
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This publishing initiative seeks to bring the latest scholarship in Italian and Italian American history,
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University of Chicago New York University
FRED GARDAPHÉ PHILIP V. CANNISTRARO†

Queens College, CUNY Queens College and the Graduate School, CUNY
ALESSANDRO PORTELLI
Università di Roma “La Sapienza”
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The Failure of Italian Nationhood: The Geopolitics of a Troubled Identity
Manlio Graziano, September 2010
The Failure of Italian Nationhood
The Geopolitics of a Troubled Identity
Manlio Graziano
the failure of italian nationhood
Copyright © Manlio Graziano, 2010
All rights reserved.
This book was originally published in Italy by Donzelli Editore under the title Italia
senza nazione? Geopolitica di un’identità difficile, copyright © 2007 Donzelli Editore.
Translated to English by Brian Knowlton. Mr. Knowlton is a Washington-based

journalist and translator. “Introduction” translated by Sara Bielecki.
First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a

division of St. Martin‘s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe, and the rest of the world, this is
by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in
England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21
6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has
companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United
Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN: 978-0-230-10413-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Graziano, Manlio, 1958-

[Italie, un état sans nation? English]
The failure of Italian nationhood : the geopolitics of a troubled identity / Manlio
Graziano ; [translated to English by Brian Knowlton].
p. cm. — (Italian & Italian American Studies Series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-230-10413-6 (alk. paper)
1. National characteristics, Italian. 2. Nationalism—Italy—History. 3. Regional
disparities—Italy—History. 4. Group identity—Italy—History. 5. Italy—Politics
and government. 6. Italy—Politics and government—1994- 7. Italy—Social
conditions. 8. Italy—Ethnic relations. I. Title.
DG442.G7513 2010
945.092—dc22 2010007421
Design by Scribe Inc.
First edition: September 2010
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America.

Contents
Preface to the English Edition vii

Introduction to the English Edition ix
Introduction 1
Foreword: The “Original Sin” 13
Part I: The Original Characteristics
1 How Premature Development Became a Factor of Backwardness 27
2 The Phantom Nation 35
3 The Northern Question 43
4 Inventing Ancestors 49
5 The Unhappy Consciousness of Italian Development 55
6 A Culture without a Nation 61
7 The Difficult Italianization of the Piedmont 69
8 The Difficult Piedmontization of Italy 75
9 The Moderate Social Bloc 81
Part II: The Permanencies
10 Transformism 91
11 Internationalization Crises and Transformism 99
12 Emerging Sectors and Transformism 105
13 The Southern Question 111
Part III: Identity and Sovereignty
14 A Counter-Reformist Identity 121
15 A Civil “Guelph” Religion 129
16 The Quest for a Civil Italian Religion 137
17 A Petit-Bourgeois Fatherland 145
vi CONTENTS
18 A Country of Limited Sovereignty 153

19 Identity and Development 161
20 The Failure of “Democratic Nationalization” 167
21 Italian Metamorphoses 177
22 Between Europe and the Mediterranean 183
23 The Internationalization Crisis of the 1990s 191
Conclusion 199
Biographies 203
Notes 217
References 249
Index 259
Preface to the English Edition
This book, written by an Italian purposely for a foreign public, was first published
in France, where I live and work, in 2007. It attempts to explain the profound
changes that are under way in Italian politics and, more generally, in Italian soci-
ety. This book comes out in the United States just a few months before the 150th
anniversary of the unification of Italy, and, with unpremeditated irony, illustrates
why Italy was never really unified. People who, for different reasons, are interested
in current Italian affairs are usually eager to understand the nature of “Berlus-
coni-ism,” a cultural, political, and social phenomenon that has lasted, by now,
for longer than 10 percent of the entire time that the Italian state has existed. The
brilliant thinker and politician Piero Gobetti, killed by fascists in 1926 at the age of
twenty-five, described fascism once as the “autobiography” of the Italian nation.
Today, it is possible to describe “Berlusconi-ism” as the most recent version of this
country’s autobiography.
This is the reason why almost no changes have been made to the original ver-
sion of the book, published when Italy was ephemerally led by a center-left gov-
ernment. That short period was exceptional; since then, Italy has recovered its
“normality,” which is the actual subject of this book.
This book, therefore, lacks any reference to the 2008 global economic crisis,
which substantially modified the character of international relations, upon which
Italy is, as I have tried to demonstrate, particularly dependent. But since this is a
study of historical and structural trends and not an “instant book,” the 2008 crisis
did not compromise any analysis done before this date.
I want to take advantage of this short introduction to the American edition
to thank all the people who made this publication possible: Professors Stanislao
Pugliese, of Hofstra University, and Osvaldo Croci, of Memorial University of
Newfoundland, who submitted the text to Palgrave; Chris Chappell and Saman-
tha Hasey, from Palgrave; Brian Knowlton, my very patient translator; Professor
Vera Negri Zamagni, whose expertness is exceeded only by her kindness; and my
friends Constance Cooper and Paolo Rampini, who encouraged—and helped—
me unfailingly.
Manlio Graziano
Paris, February 1, 2010
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction to the English Edition
This book by Manlio Graziano proposes a historical interpretation of the present

difficulties and strengths of Italy, making use of an original approach. The author
covers the last two centuries of Italian history, mixing chronology with themes,
without sticking to the mere succession of events, and referring often to the pres-
ent. He adopts an interdisciplinary viewpoint, putting together culture, politics,
and economics, with the aim of giving a comprehensive view of Italian society.
Graziano has not cultivated a single historical discipline at the expense of others
because he believes that a more global assessment of the issues at stake is necessary
to the understanding of a country like Italy; he can do this because he possesses
an extensive and rare capability of reading and processing different types of litera-
ture. The result is a book that touches upon many of the most important passages
of the history of unified Italy in a highly readable form, which I consider particu-
larly suitable to a foreign audience not interested in too many details if unneces-
sary to illustrate the arguments discussed. Also, the long-run view offered by the
author is particularly adequate to represent the “path dependence” that underlies
his basic argument.
The thrust of Graziano’s thesis is summarized in the book title: Italy, a ter-
ritory of strong municipal traditions, has unified and modernized without ever
becoming a “nation.” The author starts by pointing out that the unification of
the country in 1861 was a surprising process covering areas that were not at all
prepared for this event, much less capable of becoming active partners in it, as a
result of the cultural and economic backwardness produced by the decline of the
once flourishing Italian city-states. Indeed, there was such a widespread awareness
of this at the time that the Risorgimento writer and politician Massimo D’Azeglio
proclaimed “after having built Italy, we have to build the Italians.” Unfortunately,
the bourgeois class, which in central and northern Europe led the national mod-
ernization of their countries, was, in Italy, insufficient to the task, and even the
decision to adopt a centralized model of government, à la France, served only to
mask the many shortcomings of local territories, without paving the way to the
effective building of a nation.
Having clearly analyzed these initial conditions, Graziano tries to answer the
following question: Was the Italian state able to overcome its unfavorable begin-
nings at some point in time? His negative answer is built up through a discussion
of the efforts put in place to this end in the various periods of Italian history. Dur-
ing the liberal years of the second half of the nineteenth century, the much criti-
cized “trasformismo” of Italian politics (the less than neat political coalitions that
x INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH EDITION
were formed in Parliament) is seen as the only way to govern a country with such
diverse cultural and economic conditions. The fascist dictatorship is judged as an
effort to produce a coherent government for a country that was no longer ame-
nable to a peaceful democratic coexistence, while the never-ending north-south
dualism is seen as a failure to build a common set of rules of behavior, in spite of
the unified legislation in existence. The long discussion that Graziano offers of
the ambiguous role of Catholicism is of great interest in this context: on the one
side he recognizes that the Catholic identity could be a deeply unifying element of
the Italian nation, though hardly a really distinctive element because of the well-
known supranationality of Catholicism; on the other side he points out that the
many efforts to contrast Catholicism by building alternative secular identities were
unsuccessful, but served to increase divisions.
On the whole, we can say that the picture Graziano offers of successive Ital-
ian governments shows how they tried to bypass the problem rather than facing
it, putting in place strategies to keep the country together without lessening the
differences. In this context the present political move toward “federalization” is
explained as an acknowledgment by the Italian elites of the failure to make Italy
a nation, but it also offers the chance to raise some extremely interesting final
thoughts.
Indeed, if the lack of an effective national identity could have been a handicap
for Italy in the past, in the present transition of the European nation-states toward
entrusting increasing shares of sovereignty to the European Union, Italy might
suffer less and be better equipped to live under a “glocal” regime: global institu-
tions on the one side and local governments on the other side. The author speaks
in this connection of an “advantage of backwardness.” It should never be forgotten
that in Italy practically nothing is brand new because nearly everything has been
experimented with in some other form in the past. So the present “local” dimen-
sion has in Italy antecedents in the premodern times that were quite advanced and
flourishing and could easily be revived within an entirely new framework.
As every good book does, this one too opens up a number of questions previ-
ously not raised. The book’s thesis implies a counterfactual, namely, that a country
in modern times can produce better political and economic results if it enjoys a
stronger national identity. Indeed, a cohesive nation can express a more coherent
and sustained set of policies, both domestically and in the international arena, but
it can also breed a tendency toward warfare and economic protectionism. The lack
of a strong national identity did not spare Italy the horrors of two world wars. This
book raises questions that are relevant today not only for Italy.
Vera Zamagni
University of Bologna, 2010
Introduction
I n 1987, Prime Minister Bettino Craxi announced that Italy, having surpassed
the gross domestic product (GDP) of Great Britain, had become the fifth world
power. This declaration was followed by a storm of polemic, in particular from
the British, who accused ISTAT (the Italian Office of National Statistics) of hav-
ing modified its method of calculating the GDP to their advantage. This was, to
some extent, true. But it was also true that the Italian economy was proving, at
that point, to possess a dynamism superior to not only that of Thatcher’s Britain,
weakened by a strong dose of liberal medicine, but also that of France, where the
Italian “nouveaux condottieri,” as L’Express had labeled them two years previously,
were seizing hold of the media, the banks, the insurance sector, and even one of the
symbols of French national pride, the famous sugar company Béghin-Say.
In reality, the ruse was not so much falsification of the figures as the fact that,
while the other countries were restructuring their economies and their public
administration, Italy was managing to sidestep the obstacles by playing the cards
of low wages, devaluation of the lira, and public debt.
Twenty years later, Italy had fallen to seventh place among the major powers; in
2006, its GDP was not more than 78 percent of Great Britain’s, and in 2004 it was
overtaken by China.1 From 2001 to 2005, Italy was recorded as having the weakest
rate of growth in Europe, and its share of global trade fell from 5 percent in 1987
to 3.6 percent in 2005, which was the level at the beginning of the 1960s.2
The main political and economic players tried to place the blame for this
downturn on each other: in the second half of the 1990s, when the ruse of arti-
ficial growth had ceased to work, it was the so-called “First Republic” and its
figurehead, Bettino Craxi, that found themselves on trial. Then, the two oppos-
ing coalitions, born out of the crisis, held each other accountable for the feeble
economic performance of the country, without the slightest allusion to their
own responsibility, nor a nod toward the influence of the global economy, unless
in order to absolve themselves.
And yet, ten years after Craxi’s triumphant statement, Sergio Romano sug-
gested that the problem was structural; at the end of the period of the “economic
miracle,” Italy, to his mind, had strong chemical, iron and steel, and information
technology industries, and had the potential to be a civil nuclear power. “All of
these assets have disappeared over the years,” he concluded.3
* * *
2 THE FAILURE OF ITALIAN NATIONHOOD
In this book we will be studying Italy with reference to structural elements that are
verifiable and quantifiable.
In 1859 through 1861, Italy came together out of an unusual combination of
factors, predominantly international ones, with the major powers realizing the
benefits of adding a new pawn to their geopolitical chessboard. It was not born,
like many other nation-states, from the bourgeois struggle against the limitations
that hampered its own development. This singular trajectory—at least among
the great and middle powers—has meant that in Italy the prevailing cultural and
political inclination is more oriented toward official and, even more often, unof-
ficial diplomatic maneuvering than toward the necessities of the economy.
Among the ruling classes of the country, concern for immediate particular
interests has nearly always predominated over the necessity of defining the general
interest. Consistently with this habit, politicians have managed public resources for
the sake of privileging first and foremost their electoral “clients,” even if this means
contradicting the rules of development. Thus from the end of World War II to
the end of the 1980s, the small peasantry, artisans, shopkeepers, transporters, and
small-scale bankers (all in sectors of low productivity) were sheltered from specific
legislation. When this policy of protectionism was revealed to be unworkable, the
tendency was to absorb the excess workforce into public administration.
All of these factors have flowed into the persistent low productivity of the coun-
try: the industrial horizon has always been dominated by small businesses; transport
and distribution networks are among the most fragmented in Europe; the organiza-
tion of the education system and of research remains among the most inefficient;4
and, finally, the number of public-sector employees—at 3.36 million in 2006—is less
than that of France, but more than that of Germany in relation to the population,
and much greater than that of countries whose economic results have been among
the best in the whole of the European Union (EU) in recent years, such as Spain
and Ireland. Together, these conditions have contributed to the progressive decline
of Italian industry, so much so that we may speak of the “eclipse” or even, to quote
Luciano Gallino in 2003, the “vanishing” of Italian industry.
Gallino underlined the fact that the weakness of industrial production was not
without geopolitical consequences. In the twenty-first century, he wrote, as in pre-
vious centuries, and perhaps even more so, a country that lacks a large manufac-
turing industry “risks becoming a sort of colony, subordinated to the economic,
social and political needs of other countries possessing such an industry.”5 Ital-
ian passivity in international relations can also be explained by this fundamental
structural characteristic.
In a text from 1993 entitled Stato senza nazione, Zeffiro Ciuffoletti, referring
to the period after the unification, suggested a link between the lack of “nation-
alization of the masses” and the lack of industrial development in the country.6
Furthermore, in their text about the history of Italian foreign policy, Giuseppe
Mammarella and Paolo Cacace returned insistently to the connection between the
“lack of clear vision of national interests” and “the interrelation between foreign
and domestic politics.”7
* * *
INTRODUCTION 3
Examining the structural characteristics of the country will help us to avoid the
risk of getting lost in what Bollati has defined as “the ethnic ether.”8 It equally
means we can avoid the tendency to moralize, which never actually changes the
facts of reality.
In this book we will be principally concerned with what is “constant” in the physi-
ognomy of the country, knowing full well that “constant” does not mean “immu-
table.” On the contrary, we are forced to put the most emphasis on the idea of process,
on the transformation of different phenomena. For example, “crises of internation-
alization” are present throughout the whole history of unified Italy, defined by its
traumatic collisions with major upheavals in the global economy and international
politics; nevertheless, it is obvious that, with each collision, as much its subject as its
object changed—both in form and dimensions. The crisis of 1866 was, like that of
1992, a “crisis of internationalization” that had a significant impact upon the politi-
cal and economic face of the country; but the national and international contexts,
the personalities and the factors involved can in no way be compared.
* * *
One section of this book will be devoted to the “crossing of the desert” from 1494
to 1861. Our aim will be to understand in what way the country’s “original char-
acteristics,” its fundamental elements, have determined how contemporary Italy
came together and took shape. Our aim will be to understand why, on the eve of
1861, very few leaders of the ruling classes of the different Italian states were con-
templating the possibility of the unification of the peninsula, indeed, why most of
them actually opposed any impetus that led in this direction.
Educated by the lessons of 1848 through 1849, the Lombards feared that a union
with the Piedmontese would remove them from the geopolitical orbit of central
Europe without actually freeing them from their status as a political minority, which
they suffered as part of the Austrian Empire. The Piedmontese, who had not partici-
pated in any essential moment in the life of Italy up until that point, were thinking
only of a dynastic extension of their territory, which would bring to the house of
Savoy the rich regions of northern Italy, as well as a loose confederate link with the
other parts of the peninsula. The Sicilians were struggling for their own indepen-
dence. The Neapolitans were determined to protect the integrity of their kingdom,
which was threatened by separatism and the local potentates. The Pope, quite sim-
ply, identified unification with the loss of his temporal power, and when his fears
were realized, he excommunicated the whole of the political community, withdrew
inside the walls of the Vatican, and ostracized the nascent state. Last but not least,
regarding the unitary patriots, since the failed revolutions of 1848 and 1849, either
they had signed on to Cavour’s “diplomatic revolution” or they had squandered their
energy and credibility in the fabrication of implausible insurrections.
* * *
The exceptional circumstances leading to the unification of Italy will be the sub-
ject of a special analysis at the beginning of this book, because they help us to
understand one of the main characteristics of the country: its constant subordi-
nation to the interests of other great powers. When the military alliance between
France and the Kingdom of Sardinia against Austria in 1859 provoked the unin-
tended result of insurrections in central Italy and Sicily, Great Britain swapped
its initial caution for unreserved support for unification. Therefore, from its very
birth, Italy was often to be an instrument used by the major powers. Trying to
find a place in the shadow of whichever power enjoyed the most prosperity at
any given moment, Italy has been pitched from one alliance to another accord-
ing to the dynamics of interests that were hardly ever its own.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the German chancellor Bernhard
von Bülow expressed his annoyance at Italy’s habit of “waltzing” with Germany’s
enemies. From that day on, the vagaries of Italy’s foreign policy were regularly
denounced. What have been rarer, however, are attempts to explain why it vacil-
lated so.
The outstanding performance of the Italian officers who, in the centuries before
unification, were in the service of France and Austria; the undeniable brilliance of
Garibaldi’s armies; the demonstrable heroism of soldiers abandoned by the state
after September 8, 1943; and even the political and diplomatic qualities of two
“Italians” who led other countries, Napoleon Bonaparte and Sonia Maino Gandhi,
spare us the temptation of creating an “ethnic” link between the foreign policy
of the country and its population. If the problem does not reside in the Italian
“character,” then it resides in other factors of a historical nature, be they economic,
social, cultural, or institutional, or as is most likely, all of these put together.
* * *
In this book we will try to clarify systematically the link between a weak national
identity and an uncertain presence on the international stage.
While other countries pursue power politics in order to serve national interests,
in Italy there has been, since the unification, a trend to support the need for the
country to pursue power politics in order to discover what its interests actually are.
Each time this trend announces itself, it reveals the lack of a guiding principle in
foreign policy—that is, the lack of a sense of aim and initiative when attempting
to act on the international stage. Each time this trend resurges, Italy heads straight
toward risking new humiliation.
We may note quite rightly that the phrase “lack of national interests” encour-
ages a degree of confusion, in the sense that it could lead one to think that Italy
does not have its own interests. In reality, the problem is the exact opposite; across
the Italian peninsula there exist a great number of disparate interests that, inca-
pable of identifying themselves in collective will, create a host of divergent foreign
policies, potential or actual. The major cities, the regions, the different productive
sectors, the economic groups more open toward international markets, those who
are oriented more toward the domestic market, the Catholic movements (often
laying claim to differing positions, even while serving ultimately the same cause):
all these particular interests rarely manage to synthesize their will with the general
interest.
INTRODUCTION 5
The form of political action that is designed to cater to multiple interests and
that, instead of achieving a general synthesis, seeks out short-term provisional and
partial synthesis is referred to as “transformism.”
* * *
This book will give ample space to the question of transformism. We could even
say that it is a book about transformism, if this did not suggest that it is, by the
same token, a book on the weak identity of Italians and on the wavering trajectory
of the foreign policy of their country.
This is not another history of Italy. In fact, it is rather an attempt to sketch out a
history and an analysis of the social and political mechanisms that govern Italy as a
unitary state and their correlation with the social psychology of Italians. A history,
because we are retracing the abiding nature of these mechanisms throughout the
whole existence of the country; an analysis, because we are trying to understand
the reasons for their existence.
It is necessary to try to establish a reason why a country born without an identity,
without a well-defined international role, established upon political structures that
were transformist in essence, found itself, almost 150 years later, still suffering from
a weak identity, an unstable international position, and a transformist employment
of political power. We locate this reason in the country’s endemic low productivity.
A country like the Italy of 1861, with an essentially rural economy and very
little industry, all of which was of small or very small proportions, could only
ever be a country of low productivity. The fragmentation and the isolation of the
bourgeoisie as well as its fundamentally agricultural identity as a result made it
difficult for different interest groups to align themselves in powerful coalitions
capable of acting as figureheads for the general interest. In addition to this, the
international patronage of the country had, to some extent, absolved the ruling
classes of the necessity of strategically evaluating their own development. As they
were not being solicited by active coalitions of interests, the political community
operated through a process of carefully co-opting the productive sectors of society,
and welcoming them with transformist initiatives, with the ultimate aim of pre-
serving the stability of social relations and avoiding all potential social dislocation.
One of the first consequences of transformism was that general productivity
remained low. The second consequence, strongly linked to the first, was that the
social dislocations were almost always imposed from abroad.
* * *
The history of Italy is also the story of a long succession of “crises of internation-
alization.” These crises were brought about by changes in international economic
and political relations, which in turn had brutal repercussions for the internal sta-
bility of Italy. Another constant is that the greater the attempts to keep the influ-
ence of foreign upheaval from Italy, the worse the problem became.
The chapter devoted to the internationalization crisis of 1866, which marked
the end of the internal balance of powers upon which Italy had been founded,
examines what was, to some extent, the prototype of a long series of transforma-
tions generated, or at least stimulated, by international events. The end of the free-
trade cycle in the 1880s, the French conquest of Tunis in 1881, the expansive Belle
Époque period, the Eastern Crisis, World War I, German rearmament in 1935, the
Keynesian cycle resulting from the Great Depression, and the beginning of the
new free-trade cycle from the second half of the 1970s: there we have a brief list of
some of the major international upheavals that had violent repercussions for the
Italian nation.
Only once did the breach of stability come from within; at the end of the 1960s,
when major strikes meant the end of the social compromise of low salaries, one
of the keys—indeed, for many, the only key—to the “economic miracle” of the
1950s and the 1960s. But on this occasion, the opposite happened: in the absence
of major international upheaval, the temporary crisis was overcome by the trans-
formist co-optation of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in the governmental
majority, which put a halt to salary growth, and by a phase of economic expansion
contrived by the “competitive devaluation” of the lira.
The lowering of salaries and the depreciation of the currency were the two
shortcuts that allowed Italy to harbor, for another ten years, the illusion that it
could exist without a radical overhaul of its structures in order to ensure a system-
atic increase in productivity.
* * *
Encountering the “European constraint”—to employ a phrase happily coined by

Guido Carli—was the most recent crisis of internationalization faced by Italy, and
ultimately triggered the cataclysm of the 1990s.
The members of the European fellowship—who were, we should note, also
direct competitors—agreed upon the objective of preventing Italy from enjoy-
ing the sort of “unfair” competition it had endured so often before through the
devaluation of the lira. At the end of the 1970s, the members of the European Eco-
nomic Community employed a relatively “soft” method, by obligating the Italian
currency to adhere to the European Monetary System, all the while giving it some
special dispensation. Despite this favorable treatment, the impact of this ruling
was brutal, and one of its many consequences was the exit of the PCI from the
governmental majority.
During the 1980s, the public debt took on unheard of proportions, which allowed
families to multiply their revenue and business concerns to conquer foreign markets,
which were, at the same time, in the process of restructuring. Nevertheless, the 1980s
was also the period when Germany ceased to be a “political dwarf” and provoked a
sudden acceleration of the European process. Franco-German cooperation, signified
by the Maastricht Treaty and the single currency, was also the sign that, for Italy, the
period of special treatment was definitively over.
Very few observers have suggested that the coincidence of timing between the
Italian crisis, the signing of the Maastricht Treaty, the collapse of the Soviet Union,
the breakdown of Yugoslavia, and also the beginning of the Japanese “squandered
decade” was not down to chance. If we consider, as Sergio Romano did, that the
INTRODUCTION 7
Italian state was “the greatest entrepreneur to the west of Dnepr,”9 the coinci-
dence becomes understandable. The combined pressure of German strength and
international free trade had shaken the structures of all countries with a mainly
state-governed economy, which had stood firm up until that point thanks to the
geopolitical safety net assured by Yalta.
Italy welcomed the “European constraint” wholeheartedly. Any other option
meant the risk of isolation from the motor of development moving through the
rest of Europe. The regionalist factions that had developed in the 1980s expressed,
whether consciously or not, a determination to maintain their link with the rest of
Europe, with Italy or without her. Although everyone was aware of the risks, and
although everyone was aware that liberalization was the only possible solution,
people were equally convinced of the fact that it was up to “others” to suffer the
burden of this decision and sacrifice themselves for the good of the country.
To put an end to the deadlock, it was necessary, as Federico Rampini said in
1996, to summon the European “bogeyman,”10 who alone was capable of conquer-
ing all opposition. Among the most vociferous resistors were the major Italian
political parties, born in the state-capitalism era and incapable of playing the lib-
eral role put upon them by the new free-trade era. The “Clean Hands” judges were,
to a certain extent, the “secular arm” charged with administering the European
verdict that condemned this torpid political system.
* * *
In his book on Italy in Europe, Mario Monti remembers having said one day to
Margaret Thatcher that Italians needed Maastricht because they had “never had a
Margaret Thatcher.”11
In France, some commentators think that Mitterrand’s liberal awakening in
1983 left behind few concrete measures and a considerable amount of antiliberal
doctrine. In Italy, not only was there no Thatcher, but there was not even a Mit-
terrand. We could even go so far as to say that in Italy the situation was exactly
the inverse: Mitterrand became liberal while maintaining a language that was
“Socialist;” in Italy, the country continued to be “Socialist” while using a liberal
vocabulary. The reason lies in the fact that the political and economic players were
inexorably linked to the state; even the largest private industries received loans
and orders from the state, profited from the mass acquisition of public shares at
an attractive price, exported successfully due to the favorable value of the lira, and
ultimately got their credit from state-owned banks.
Silvio Berlusconi presented himself as a free-marketer. In reality, he is no
such thing, neither by his origins—the Socialist Party led by Bettino Craxi hav-
ing assisted considerably in the domestic expansion of his business—nor through
his political actions. Under his second government, tax came to represent, in
2005, 45.4 percent of the wage in comparison to an average of 37.3 percent in the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries;
in the same year the level of debt as a percentage of GDP had increased by 2.5
points compared to the year before, reaching a total of 106.4 percent. The current
account surplus went from 6.6 percent of GDP in 1997 to 0.4 percent in 2005. In
addition, between 2001 and 2004 productivity decreased by 0.1 percent, whereas
in Germany it increased by 11.8 percent and in France it increased by 8.9 percent:
according to the Global Economic Forum, in 2005 Italy was forty-seventh in the
global rankings of productivity. Growth, having remained fixed below 1 percent
from 2002, reached a level of stagnation at 0 percent in 2005. As a result, Italy’s
part of the global market fell from 4 percent to 3 percent between 2001 and 2005.12
* * *
One cannot help but stand up and take notice when a new paradox emerges in
which the right wing acts as the party of laxity and the left wing presents itself as the
party of discipline. This new paradox was accompanied by another that saw the left
wing and the pacifists greet the Italian military mission to Lebanon with enthusiasm,
while the right wing and the nationalists expressed trepidation. An Italian in hiber-
nation since the 1960s, reawakening in 2007, would surely feel disoriented.
The problems encountered by the second government of Romano Prodi
(2006–2008) must not be attributed exclusively to the strength of the far left in
the coalition, as suggested by the Anglo-Saxon press and the employer’s federa-
tion, but rather they should be attributed to the risk of alienating the electorate by
attacking its social status. It is a difficulty encountered by the left and the right, by
every government; indeed, it is the challenge of all politicians subject to the judg-
ment of the voters. The Italian particularity, when it comes to this issue, is that
the left wing as well as the right wing are culturally strangers to the free-market
mentality and any profound change is only possible if it is imposed by a foreign
“bogeyman” at the gates.
The first and certainly the most important step in the Italian turnaround was
the weakening of protectionism under the first government led by Giuliano Amato,
in 1992. Many public assets were privatized and public expenditure was subject to
the biggest reduction in the entire history of the Italian Republic. Some of the
“historic” institutions—for example, the famous “Cassa per il Mezzogiorno”13—
were dismantled, as well as one of the biggest state conglomerates in the Western
world, the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (IRI).14 The Italian market was
fully opened to external competitors, many diverse sectors were deregulated, and
vast reform of the public administration as well as an initial reorganization of the
banking system began.
We must remember that Amato had had the good fortune to be prime minister
when the parliamentary right to veto was almost nonexistent: 205 out of 630 dep-
uties were in fact prosecuted on May 18, 1993,15 and consequently they were ready
to vote for any government rather than risk the dissolution of the parliament,
and probably time in prison. This “extraparliamentary” character of the govern-
ment broke down the traditional transformist mechanism, and Amato was able to
submit the country to European guidelines. This submission brought about more
structural changes than forty years of democratic elections.
Some other transformations induced by the European process concerned the
political field more directly. From the unification until 1994, the Italian political
system always centered around a single party; with the exception of a short period
INTRODUCTION 9
in the mid-1870s, two opposing coalitions never presented themselves before the
electorate with the same chances of success. After its victory in 1876, Agostino
Depretis’ Sinistra became the “single party of the bourgeoisie,”16 and the Destra
progressively ceased to be a real party of opposition and eventually disappeared.
In the decades that followed, debate about the possibility of having several parties
was even the subject of theoretical discourse. Benedetto Croce, to name but one
example, suggested in two essays from 1912 and 1928 that such a thing was artifi-
cial. Between the publication of Croce’s first and second text, fascism had imposed
de jure the single-party system. In the postwar period, the Communist Party never
represented a real danger to the monopoly of the Christian Democrats (DC), as
the international stage did not allow it any access to power.
The changes on the international stage in the 1980s and 1990s altered the situ-
ation. Thanks to her relationship with Europe, Italy not only avoided a fate like
that of Yugoslavia or the USSR, or even that of Argentina in 2001, but also became
a “normal country,”17 at least in the sense that two coalitions could now compete
for power.
Governmental stability was the other important modification to take place in
Italy over the last decade, at least with the Silvio Berlusconi governments. After
Alcide De Gasperi in the period between 1948 and 1953, Berlusconi was the sec-
ond president of the Italian Counsel to be in office for an entire term; the govern-
ment he led from June 2001 to April 2005 was the longest lasting in the entire
history of the republic: 1,414 days, which is more than a third longer than the
former record, held by Bettino Craxi, for some 1,083 days between 1983 and 1987.
Very few commentators have noticed that this shift occurred in all the major Euro-
pean countries, in which the process of Europeanization had imposed greater sta-
bility. Italy became a “normal country” in the sense that it became less Italian and
more European.
* * *
Among the permutations of recent years, one of the most striking is the emergence
of a “personalization” of politics. This phenomenon does not simply stem from
the European process, but is also part of the “natural” evolutionary trend of parlia-
mentary politics, discernible in many different countries with diverse customs and
institutions. In Italy this trend was worsened by the frenetic search for a “substi-
tute” for traditional politics, at least from the 1970s onward. Used for the first time
by Craxi, provoking both skepticism and sarcasm, the “personalization” card was
abundantly played during the years of the great crisis, especially by Silvio Berlus-
coni. The latter certainly took it up a notch, and his adversaries have been equally
vocal in contributing to his iconization, even if contemptuously. For this reason
we have too often seen Berlusconi as the man being talked of, without interrogat-
ing Berlusconi-ism—a social and psychological phenomenon whose roots lie, we
might say, in the whole history of Italy.
Since the birth of this country, numerous political leaders and intellectuals—
not to mention the Catholic Church—have praised frugality, and considered it as
a sort of Italian fatality: the nationalists and the Fascists went so far as to transform
it into virtue, as a moral crutch to be used in the fight against the “five meals a day”
nations, as Mussolini used to refer to the “rich countries.” In the postwar period,
the DC and the PCI competed fiercely for the virtue of temperance, right up until
the second half of the 1970s, when these two parties began their governmental col-
laboration under the twin mottos of “austerity” and “sacrifice.”
But meanwhile—since the time when it was said that the sun was the only
industry that suited Italy, the time of “proletarian Italy,” the time when the frugal-
ity of the rural family was held up as an example to the whole of the nation—an
essential change had occurred in the lives of Italians: they had ceased to be the
beggars of neorealist movies—they had gotten rich. The immigrants, the sciuscià,
and the bicycle thieves18 were now coming from the Balkans, from North Africa,
and from the Far East, and all trying to land on the Italian coast.
Many within the political and intellectual communities failed to recognize these
changes and, more to the point, failed to understand them. This created a division
between the Italians who wanted to benefit from their new conditions without feel-
ing guilty and their political and intellectual leaders. Some years before Berlusconi
gave his name to this phenomenon, the president of Fiat, Gianni Agnelli, visited a
secondary school where he was greeted with enthusiasm by the students, who excit-
edly suggested that he grab the reins of the country himself and kick out the “petty
politicians.” This welcome left the political community flabbergasted, in particular
the left wing, for whom Agnelli still personified the “enemy of the people”.
The shades of this new climate were recognized by Bettino Craxi. In abolishing
one part of the mechanism of index-linking salaries, Craxi launched a challenge
to the trade union power that was tightly linked to the PCI. In the referendum on
this issue, 54.3 percent of the electorate voted with the Socialist prime minister
and against the unions and the PCI. We could say that Berlusconi-ism was born
on that day.
* * *
Fifteen years after the beginning of the lengthy Italian crisis, the polemic about the
political “caste”—that is, despite the Indian metaphor, the “untouchables” who are
ready to defend their privileges at any cost—is resurfacing, along with the threat
of another great political turmoil.
There exists a long tradition of the myth of the “antipolitical” that took root in
the whole history of postunification Italy. A minister of the last Prodi government,
Tommaso Padoa Schioppa, noted that “artists, administrators, lawyers, advertising
executives, trade unions, and entrepreneurs are as much a ruling class as the gov-
ernment.” We return once more therefore to the problem of the ruling classes and,
as Padoa Schioppa would suggest, to the issue of bad habits, and the worst habit
of all, that of trying to solve the mystery of their own historical weakness through
finding a scapegoat.
In recent years, studies on the absence of an Italian sense of civicness have
become more common. Some have attributed this to “amoral familism,”19 oth-
ers to the Counter-Reformation, some to the rampant cult of individualism sanc-
tioned by the “Berlusconian way of life,” and others to the political parties and
INTRODUCTION 11
the so-called cost of politics. Some have spoken of the limited resources of “social
capital,” meaning, in sociological terms, “a sense of the responsibility towards oth-
ers and institutions—solidarity and participation.”20 In sum, a general observation
is that there is great reluctance from individuals to sacrifice even a small part of
their own particular interests in the name of the general good.
The Italy of today is still characterized by marked “political fragmentation”—
the absence of a “center” already observed by Giacomo Leopardi in 1824. In
addition to having introduced certain corrections and, in certain cases, certain
solutions to some of the structural problems of the country, the European process
has offered a place in which this fragmentation—inherited from its history and
its geography—has been acknowledged and, little by little, has begun to disap-
pear. Italy became, for a while, a sort of model of supranational integration, of
polycentrism, of voluntary (and sometimes even eager) cession of sovereignty in
the framework of a new plurality of institutions that leaves behind the traditional
concept of a “Europe of regions.”
From the phase of stop and go experienced in Europe between 2005’s referenda
in France and the Netherlands (but probably from the “Letter of the Eight” in
2003) and the election of Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007, media campaigns used fear of a
possible return to 1992 as a warning to the political community. When the Euro-
pean process slows down, Italy risks falling back into bad habits, which are now
less likely to succeed, given that the ministers and central bankers can no longer
use the ruse of competitive devaluation. On the other hand, when the European
process speeds up again, the squabbles of Italy’s political leaders, the backwardness
of the country’s infrastructure, the low wages, and the burden of public debt and
increasing taxation are all factors capable of preventing the country from follow-
ing the continental pace.
The problematic national identity of Italy, from whichever angle it is examined,
has been and is of geopolitical significance.
Foreword
The “Original Sin”
All’Italia indifferente fu imposta la rivoluzione da motivi esterni e da contingenze

di politica europea
[External causes and European political situation imposed the revolution to an
indifferent Italy.]
—Piero Gobetti (1923)1
Italy’s External Origins
A t the moment of its unification, Italy was one of Europe’s most backward coun-
tries, in both economic and financial terms. Agriculture, which accounted
for 56.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), employed 70 percent of active
workers, while industry, which contributed 20.3 percent to GDP, employed only
18 percent, with most of those working at home and in sectors using low-level
technologies (notably textiles). The state, indebted to the tune of 500 million lira
(about 2 billion euros at the 2002 equivalent), had neither the capital nor, as we
will see, the political will to foster a shift from a largely traditional phase, involving
modest forms of manufacturing, to an industrial phase.
Modern industrial establishments were exceedingly rare (there were only
ten blast furnaces on the peninsula), and even if they were nearly all linked to
railway construction, the rail network itself remained very limited (1,829 kilo-
meters), relying heavily on imported equipment. The banking system, without
the stimulation of the industrial demand, managed to attract only 1.4 per-
cent of national revenue and included almost none of the medium-term credit
establishments that are indispensable to industrial financing. The backward-
ness of industry was also linked to low primary-sector productivity: by some
estimates, revenue per hectare amounted to barely 80 lira, compared to the
equivalent of 170 lira in France and 213 lira in England, while wheat produc-
tion was a mere nine hectoliters, compared to fifteen in France and thirty-two
in England.2
pal-graziano-00forword.indd 13 7/28/10 3:11 PM

Given a demographic growth rate weaker than the continental average, and
modest industrial development, the process of urbanization was extremely slow,
despite an urban tradition far more ancient than in most other European coun-
tries. Thus Naples was the country’s most populous city, with 447,000 inhabitants,
followed by Turin (250,000), and Rome and Milan (each with 185,000). The lack
of a well-qualified labor force weighed further on development, more than other
factors, as both an effect and a cause of the country’s backwardness. While 54 per-
cent of the working population was illiterate, only a mere 12 percent could truly
read and write. Of the 15 million people age eighteen or older, only 120,000, or 8
percent, had completed any secondary education. Finally, per capita revenue was
only one-third that of France, and one-fourth that of Great Britain.
Italy was not the only European country with economic and social indicators
that trailed countries like France and Great Britain. Backwardness is a relative con-
cept and cannot be measured purely by statistical data. But Italy’s backwardness
became a first-order geopolitical handicap at the very moment when the new state
pretended to rank among the great powers, regardless of its grave structural defi-
cits. This made the country appear, as Bismarck sarcastically proclaimed, “like a
creature of great appetite but weak teeth.”
The Italy of the second half of the nineteenth century displayed none of the
characteristics that typically give rise to an “autonomous” or “national” unification
movement. The historic rupture that led to the integration of the different parts of
the peninsula was provoked by an extraordinary set of circumstances far beyond
anyone’s expectations. In his reflections on the Risorgimento—Italy’s “rebirth”—
Antonio Gramsci ascribes this unexpected development to a “determined historic
European connection:” the reciprocal weakening of the two great continental
powers—France and Austria—and the emergence of a third great power, Prussia.3
In other words, the formation of the Italian state resulted in large part from the
spreading seismic waves that were shaking Europe’s geopolitical balance of power.
Count Cavour and Napoleon III, with the hypotheses they concocted in 1858,
hardly foresaw the unification of the country; moreover, the Piedmontese ruling
class was far from possessing the force required to imagine such a solution. That is
why it had to hastily “invent” a political product lacking cultural or popular bases
in hopes of achieving within mere decades what neighboring countries had spent
centuries constructing.
The Piedmont’s domination of the other regions—heavy-handed for the Mez-
zogiorno, but humiliating as well for Lombardy, one of Europe’s most evolved
regions—and its subsequent co-option by the great-power concert, imposed the
need on this new Italy to have a direction even before it had an identity. Having
lacked a direction a priori, the fruit of a rational political plan—which existed
only in the minds of the patrioti, who had played a negligible role in the country’s
birth—it was necessary to look for a direction a posteriori. Thus was invented the
legend of an Italy that “si è fatta da sé”—had made itself—and thus too was forged
the religion of the Risorgimento, a mythical epic in which a few powerful actors
had managed to bend reality to their will.

FOREWORD 15
“Artichoke” Politics
A number of historians have recently established a relationship between the

absence of the masses in the national movement, the “heterogenesis” (external ori-
gins) of the Italian state, and the persistence, in a unified Italy, of some distinctive
traits of the Savoyard political tradition.
From the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, the House of Savoy had enlarged its
borders in the direction of Italy, not by dint of its material or spiritual wealth, but
by a form of diplomacy practiced without hesitation, always able to draw advantage
from rivalries among its neighbors—the Guelphs and Ghibellines, the Italian repub-
lics and the empire, France and Austria. The foreign policy of the Savoy constantly
evolved through ambiguity and by playing one side against another.
One of the rare countries where the post-Napoleonic Restoration truly deserved
its name was the Piedmont, where the civil code and the gains that it brought were
abolished. It is highly likely that the Savoy’s rigid adherence to the principles of
the Restoration and its hostility to any unitary notion were two reasons why, at
the Congress of Vienna, their kingdom became seen as a balancing factor against a
total Austrian domination of the peninsula. Two other reasons were its geographic
situation as a buffer state between France and Austria, and the fact that since it was
largely French in language and culture, it was supposed to be exempt, by its very
nature, from any temptation toward Italian “nationalism.”
The reattachment of Genoa and of all of Liguria was indisputably the essential
factor in strengthening the Kingdom of Sardinia, making it a symbolic counter-
weight to Hapsburg hegemony on the peninsula. For all that, Turinese diplomacy
played no role in the annexation, which was decided in the first treaty, even before
the Piedmont delegation arrived in the Austrian capital.
Despite that, the Piedmontese rulers attributed the “conquests” achieved in
Vienna to politics based on the old scheme of dynastic expansion characteristic
of Savoyard politics: that of the “artichoke,” whose leaves are eaten one after the
other.4 They considered it perfectly normal, in the literal sense of the word, that
their state should be able to grow by profiting openly from the quarrels between
the great powers. For the same reason, they did not consider themselves the slight-
est bit indebted to the country—France—that had supported the enlargement of
the Sardinian kingdom and that directly guaranteed its independence vis-à-vis
Austria. To the contrary, since France was in a position of weakness and Austria in
a position of strength, the best tradition suggested that Turin should profit, purely
and simply, by turning toward the latter in order to gain advantage at the expense
of the former. Thus, until the 1830s, Charles Albert continued to claim French ter-
ritories beyond the Alps, even while confiding in Metternich that he would enjoy
“his most beautiful day when he could march alongside Austrian soldiers against
France and Louis-Philippe.”5
In reality, Austrian soldiers had no intention of marching against France. This
demonstrates how misapprehended international affairs remained in the eyes of
the Piedmontese ruling class: for its members, the “balancing of power” consisted
simply of the atavistic habit of jumping from one side of the balance to the other.
The new European situation had definitively deprived the Italians of any option

of turning the neighboring powers against each other. Therefore Piedmont was no
longer able to apply its traditional politics and found itself at the rearguard of the
national movement.
Between Myth and Reality
The historian Francesco de Sanctis was the first to sense, from the early years of
the new kingdom, the need to use history as a political weapon by celebrating an
imaginary compromise between the moderates and the democrats as a sort of
founding act of the unified kingdom. His objective was to give ideological legiti-
macy to the new state against those who would deligitimize it (above all, the Cath-
olic Church) by giving it a certain consistency in the eyes of the masses, who were
indifferent or even open to the clerics’ arguments. With de Sanctis, the syncretic
vision of the Risorgimento arose and placed in the same Olympus such diverse and
irreconcilable figures as Victor Emmanuel, Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Cavour. Little
by little this political weapon became a sort of collective and retrospective myth:
the king, the liberals, and the ordinary people marching together, arm in arm,
toward the common objective of “making Italy.”
In fact, the kings had been fiercely hostile to anything remotely suggestive of
unification, to the point that the Piedmontese censor had banned, as late as the
1840s, the very use of the words “Italy” and “nation”, always replaced by a more
anodyne “country.” The liberals and the masses, for their part, felt little common
bond. The former saw no way that their elevated ideals could possibly have any-
thing to do with the mundane needs of the latter, while the latter were left baffled
by the obscure formulas employed by the former.
If this triad—the king, the liberals, and the people—was but a chimera, invented
a posteriori (the way the Galls were for the French or the Goths for the Germans),
then just who were Italy’s true “founders”? Put another way: Did any force exist in
Italy capable of leading a national movement?
Theoretically, yes. For example, the thousands who, under Napoleon, had held
civil or military posts—young, ambitious, talented people, sensitive to the political
and cultural problems of their era, regretful that this was not an epoch in which
a career was offered to people of talent. The latter could only reject the “intel-
lectual hell” that dominated in Turin (the phrase comes from Camillo Benso, the
Count of Cavour, who was peremptorily asked to leave the kingdom after having
published in Paris in 1846 an essay on the railway system in Italy and its unifying
role in the peninsular market). Indeed, their influence within the army played
a determining role during the insurrections of Naples in 1820 and Piedmont in
1821. But the resounding failure of both the revolts sufficed to exclude them from
among those who might have been able to take leadership of an eventual Italian
national unification process.
For a while the hope of a “patriotic” Pope was the hypothesis most discussed
in Italian intellectual circles. The neo-guelfi (neo-Guelphs) argued that the Pope
could use his moral authority to bring together the “Italian race,” which was politi-
cally divided, but united by ties of blood, religion, and language. But when several

FOREWORD 17
armies from different states of the “Italian race” began pursuing the routed Austri-
ans in April 1848, Pope Pius IX declared that he “rejected the disconcerting sugges-
tions contained in newspapers and other writings by those who would make the
Roman Pontiff the president of a certain new republic to be constituted with the
support of all the peoples of Italy.”6 This about-face by a Pontiff who had seemed
at first to support the liberals’ aspirations was not, however, the only reason for
the failure of the neo-Guelph plan. In fact, as Gramsci observed, the great powers
probably would not have accepted that “the cultural function of the Church and
its diplomacy, already sufficiently encumbering . . . gain further strength by basing
itself on a large territorial state and a proportionally important army.”7
The bourgeoisie was actually the only class with any direct and immediate
interest in achieving a unified national market. But with isolated exceptions, this
class produced few theories and even less action toward this end.
A Weak and Fragmented Bourgeoisie
The modern idea of nation arrived in Italy on the tips of the bayonets of the revolu-
tionary French bourgeoisie: the standardization of institutions and of legal codes,
the adoption of the decimal metric system, and the improvement of communica-
tions that, after the Napoleonic conquest, was applied to the entire peninsula left a
concrete taste for the benefits to be gained from national unification.
In March 1816, Marshal Heinrich Joseph de Bellegarde, governor of Lombardy,
wrote in a dispatch to Vienna that after Napoleon, the Italians would never again
accept a simple reconstitution of the small states of yesteryear. In particular, Bel-
legarde added, Milan, as the capital of the former Italian kingdom, had acquired
considerable political importance.8
Notwithstanding his confusion between “the” Italians and a small minority of
them, Count Bellegarde had seized on a key point: the political importance of
Milan. But he had attributed to it a certain scent of Italianness that was not actu-
ally so clearly discernible. It is true that while the first revolts against the Vien-
nese-imposed order had broken out in Naples and in Turin, the true capital of the
liberal political movements was Milan.
Il Conciliatore, a journal founded in September 1818 by Count Federico Con-
falonieri, comprised a group of young people with liberal political aspirations and
a shared interest in economic and educational reform. In ensuing years this ten-
dency produced numerous offshoots. Among them, the group gathered around
the Politecnico, another journal created in Milan in 1839 by Carlo Cattaneo, was
doubtless the one that placed greatest emphasis on the link between industrial
progress and the expansion of constitutional liberties. Moreover, the agrarian
transformation had favored the development in Lombardy of a conspicuously
larger bourgeoisie than in other regions of Italy, beginning in the mid-eighteenth
century.
The Austrian Empire, which after 1815 included also Lombardy and Veneto
was not about to impede the development of the Lombardian bourgeoisie, if only
because of the wealth it could amass through taxation. Indeed, the budget of the

“Lombard-Venetian Kingdom” was always positive, whereas that of the Austrian

Empire, as a whole, was in deficit at least until 1860. Among the advantages ben-
efiting the Lombardian bourgeoisie at the end of the Napoleonic wars were the
resumption of exports to Great Britain, the respect of property that originated
under the Italian kingdom, an administrative system far more modern than those
of the other Italian states, and a road network that was considerably improved,
especially in the direction of the Alps—not to mention the thirty-four years of
uninterrupted peace from 1814 to 1848.
While the sociological connotations of what one calls the “bourgeoisie” are
often eclectic and problematical, one can accept, at least with circumspection, the
assertion that the incidence of bourgeoisie over the entire population of the King-
dom of Italy in Napoleonic times was 2.5 to 3.5 times greater than the rate calcu-
lated for the entirety of the peninsula eighty years later.9 That being said, although
the Lombard bourgeoisie was among the most numerous, wealthiest, and most
industrialized in Italy and in Europe, it did not take the lead in the process of
national unification. Despite its admiration for the French example, it was under-
mined by its fragmentation and by the absence of real links to any political power
that might have directly represented its interests.
Since the end of the independence of the Duchy of Milan (1494), Lombardy
had been subjected in turn to domination by the French, the Swiss, the Imperial
power, the Spanish, the Austrians, the French, and once again by the Austrians,
before finally being conquered by the French in 1859 and ceded to the Piedmon-
tese. Its “unpolitical” characteristic is perhaps one of the reasons for Milanese
superiority vis-à-vis Rome, Florence, Turin, and Naples; but it may also constitute
one of the reasons for the hesitation and political division of the Milanese bour-
geoisie at the time of the Risorgimento. None of the democrats and only a few
liberals were interested in allying themselves with the backward and reactionary
Piedmont, to which they preferred the Austrian Empire and its opening to more
promising markets Even Carlo Cattaneo, who was later to lead the anti-Austrian
insurrection of 1848, had not hesitated earlier to support Metternich’s plan for a
closer economic union between Austria and northern Italy. The Milanese revolt of
1848 was, in its origins, a simple manifestation of the fact that people were fed up
with the “annual pillage,” denounced by Cattaneo, which had filled the Austrian
tax collectors’ coffers with “two thousand of our millions.”10
The impossibility of providing a unitary administrative, fiscal, and military
framework for the common interest left private interests free to play any angle
in pursuit of immediate benefit. Thus municipal jealousies—like the rivalries
between Bergamo and Treviglio that ultimately blocked for many years the com-
pletion of the rail line between Milan and Venice—combined with sporadic capi-
talist initiatives and limited use of scientific and technical advances. Even when
the result was to express a semblance of a common interest, it did not necessarily
amount to a national Italian character. When the need was seen to open to new
markets from the base of a large unitary grouping, the inclination was to turn
where satisfaction seemed most rapidly attainable. Thus, in the 1830s, the Milan
Chamber of Commerce manifested its need for opening to new markets through
a desire to adhere to the German Zollverein (Customs Union). If these were the

FOREWORD 19
realities of the Lombard bourgeoisie—the most developed, the most entrepre-

neurial, and the most numerous in Italy—one can imagine what the situation was
in the rest of the country.
The absence of the masses in the national process must be linked to this fun-
damental circumstance. In fact, the bourgeoisie of the peninsula felt a more acute
fear of “the people” than of “the tyrants.” There were three essential reasons for
this: the bourgeois were few in number; they had very strong social kinships with
large property owners; and they had begun to become conscious of their own exis-
tence as a class only after the French Revolution. Nevertheless, the principal causes
of their weakness were their fragmentation and their small numbers. Because of
these factors, during the Risorgimento process and even afterward, private interests
and regional divisions outweighed any national feelings.
It thus becomes difficult to pose the problem of an Italian “passive revolution”
in terms of a lack of political will, as has often been done. The only class objectively
interested in a unification of markets was lacking in economic power, political
energy, and historic tradition. Under these conditions, the Italians might never
have achieved national unity if an external event had not unsettled the country’s
situation, and that of Europe. The “heterodirection” (external direction) thus
becomes key to reading contemporary Italian history.
“Diplomatizing the Revolution”
In 1821 the traditional duplicity of the House of Savoy manifested itself, with
two different kings applying two different policies. Victor Emmanuel abdicated
because of the insurrection, and Charles Albert—the self-proclaimed regent—
accepted the constitution and named as minister of war the head of the con-
spiracy, Santorre di Santarosa, in order to prepare for the inevitable conflict with
Austria. Charles Felix, the legitimate heir, dismissed Charles Albert and Santarosa
and called on the Austrians to come to his aid. Charles Albert, fearful of losing his
right to the succession, renounced the conspirators and, when he became king in
1832, went so far as to exclude them from the traditional amnesty.
When the insurrection of 1820 erupted in Naples, the equilibrium established
in Vienna in 1815 was still too recent for the English to respond to the insurgents’
calls for help. Unable to profit from dissensions among the great powers, the Ital-
ian insurrection of 1820 through 1821 foundered.
International influence in the affairs of the peninsula was clear during the two
revolutionary crises that shook Europe shortly afterward. The French revolution
of 1830 gave rise, in 1831, to a series of small uprisings, which were almost imme-
diately put down. And in 1848, after the insurrections of Paris, Vienna, Budapest,
and Prague, the antifiscal furies that, from the beginning of the year, had the Mila-
nese boycotting tobacco and lottery games—following the model of the Boston
Tea Party—turned into armed revolt.
For some years Charles Albert, having lost all hope of annexing a part of Switzer-
land, and having realized that the Austrians were not disposed to back his expan-
sionist aims in the direction of France, had turned toward Lombardy, long coveted

by the House of Savoy. This is the reason why, fearful of the risk of a republican
contagion in Turin, he decided to march on the Lombard capital on March 24,
1848, to seize the initiative from the liberals. Thus, divisions among anti-Austrian
parties, Piedmontese indecisiveness and military insufficiencies made Milan the
first insurgent capital of the Empire to be brought back, on August 6, under the
authority of Vienna.
Nonetheless, Austrian revanchism and the proclamation of the Tuscan and
Roman republics—the latter under highly popular leaders like Mazzini and
Garibaldi—forced the Piedmontese to resume the war with the goal of reestab-
lishing order in the interior under the cover of “national” action. This decision
was surely made less painful by the certainty that England and France, as Denis
Mack Smith reminds us, guaranteed that the Piedmontese kingdom would suf-
fer no territorial loss, even if it should be defeated yet again.11 “We cannot win,”
Massimo d’Azeglio frankly acknowledged to Silvio Spaventa a few days before
hostilities resumed, “but we will fight anew: our defeat will be the defeat of this
party that pushes us today to resume the war, and between a defeat and a civil
war we choose the former.”12
If defeat was the goal, it was achieved barely three days later, ingloriously, at
Novara: the king abdicated, but the dynasty was safe. As Mack Smith notes, the
hypothesis that Italy was created “by itself ” was revealed as manifestly absurd. As
the Tuscan liberal Bettino Ricasoli bitterly remarked: “Italy no longer does any-
thing by itself.”
The sine qua non of Italian unification was thus the modification of the
geopolitical framework that emerged from the Congress of Vienna. This order
suffered in the second half of the century: industrialization, having spread to
other regions, began to transform the relationships between the powers. This
new phase was marked by three major conflicts: the Crimean War, the Ameri-
can Civil War, and the war between Prussia and France. The conflict on the
shores of the Black Sea, according to Paul Kennedy, put an end to the diplo-
macy of the European concert and caused each of the “flank” powers—that is,
Russia and England—“to feel less committed to intervention in the center.”13
Prussia, not yet the hegemonic power of the German world, and Austria, still
wrestling with numerous problems engendered by its years of decadence, left
France to emerge as the dominant power in continental Europe, even if this
was a domination by default.
It was as this new international context was coming to a head that Count
Camillo Benso di Cavour, now prime minister in Turin, launched his strategy
of trying to “diplomatize the revolution.”14 The English and the French, aim-
ing to placate Austria, did everything in their power to engage Piedmont in the
Crimean War, thereby lessening any temptation it might have to take advantage
of the situation to attack Lombardy. Cavour was thus invited to the Congress of
Paris of 1856, during which the “Italian question” was dealt with rather sum-
marily. The brief references to it had no practical consequences; nevertheless,
Cavour obtained two relatively significant results: the increase of Turin’s pres-
tige in Italy, as the Piedmontese kingdom was the only and the first state on
the peninsula to be represented in an international assembly, and, above all, the

FOREWORD 21
possibility of testing its allies’ intentions and availability regarding a possible

campaign against Austria. The “diplomatization” of the Italian question was
thus, from that point on, in motion.
Gramsci observes that Cavour was not only a diplomat but, above all, a politi-
cal creator.15 The origins of his creation, a unitary Italy, were thus diplomatic and
international—not national. As Sergio Romano points out, this “original sin” was
to mark its history.16
An Italian “Miracle”
In the mid-1850s, Napoleon III concluded that conditions were in place for the
“Vienna order” finally to be modified. The major obstacle was, obviously, Austria.
Therefore the “Italian question” served primarily as a pretext to weaken Vienna. As
to Cavour, who was perfectly aware of the geopolitical constraints facing the king-
dom and the Savoy family’s traditional politics, he explicitly offered the French the
geostrategic advantage of controlling the Po Valley.
The relationship—equivocal, to say the least—between the head of the Turin
government and democratic terrorism circles led some historians to suspect him
of inspiring, directly or indirectly, the attack on Napoleon III perpetrated by
Felice Orsini on January 14, 1858. While this was never proved, the attack clearly
could not have come at a better moment for those on either side of the Alps.
Amplifying the revolutionary threat through his resort to spectacular police
measures, Cavour sought to demonstrate that, absent a diplomatic solution to
the “Italian question,” it was going to be difficult to contain all the bombers
roaming around Europe and taking the French emperor as their favored target.
In France, Orsini’s act helped put in motion the process of unraveling the trea-
ties of 1858, supplying Bonaparte with an occasion to prepare public opinion for
a decision bound to be far from popular.
Between July 1858 and January 1859, the pacts between France and Piedmont
were sealed. The map of a new Italy was drawn up, providing for the birth of three
states: the north plus Emilia was attributed to Piedmont, which would cede Savoy
and Nice to France, the center to Napoleon III, and the south to Lucien Murat,
the son of the last king of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Naples and Sicily, Joachim
Murat. These three states were then to be confederated under the presidency of
the Pope. Each protagonist had grounds for satisfaction: Bonaparte because he felt
he had “reconquered” the peninsula, and Cavour, who, considering the thought of
unification as so much nonsense (“corbellerie”),17 hoped for the birth of a homo-
geneous state, limited to the rich northern regions and led by Turin.
The war and its consequences confirm the validity of the thesis that society’s
history is the terrain on which countless wills and forces confront and collide,
with a result rarely corresponding to the protagonists’ initial plans. In fact, the
war provoked not only the expected intervention of France, but also insurrec-
tion in Emilia and Tuscany, which proclaimed their allegiance to Piedmont; the
deep anxiety of the Pope, of whom Napoleon III was the international protector;
the threats of Berlin in Paris and, last but not least, a completely new English

perspective on the Italian question. All these factors, even if separately predict-
able, completely transformed the landscape when they arose all at once. The
emperor, just as the revolutionaries had foreseen,18 decided not to pursue the
routed Austrians, instead signing an armistice with them in Villafranca, near
Verona, on July 8, 1859.
The events of 1859 through 1860 were a sort of archetype of the Italian attitude
on the international stage—imposed by objective circumstances, but nearly always
presented as the result of an autonomous and subjective choice—consisting of
relying on its own weaknesses as if they were elements of strength. Having fur-
nished Napoleon III with a troop contingent significantly smaller than promised,
and after having been accused by Victor Emmanuel of “playing at making revolu-
tion in central Italy,” Cavour resigned after the French-Austrian armistice, slam-
ming the door and denouncing the king as a “traitor” for having signed it.
Yet, these mutual recriminations between the two heads of the Piedmontese
executive did not prevent them from reversing roles later. Victor Emmanuel,
who had signed a treaty guaranteeing the return of the “legitimate sovereigns” to
Florence and Modena, took his own turn at “playing at making revolution” with
Garibaldi, even as he assured Pope Pius IX and the king of the Two Sicilies of
his respect for the integrity of their states—and this just twenty days before the
departure of the Garibaldinian “Red Shirts” for Sicily. Cavour, who had returned
to power under the insistent pressure of the English ambassador in Turin,
reached agreement with Napoleon III to exchange central Italy for the Savoy
(fatherland of the king) and Nice (fatherland of Garibaldi). Later, using as a pre-
text the risks inherent in a breakthrough by the Garibaldinian “bands”—which
he had done nothing to stop—he finally obtained from the French emperor
the authorization to traverse—and to annex on his way through—Romagna,
Marche, and Umbria, which belonged to the states of the Church, thus achieving
the unification of the peninsula.
Several “historical determined connections” thus contributed to the success
of this “Italian miracle”: an official alliance with France, which was trying to
resolve its historic rivalry with the Germanic world; a permanent sort of black-
mail exercised against France itself, based on its weaknesses and fears; an unscru-
pulous game between the varied revolutionary movements; and finally, the room
for maneuver that the Mediterranean policy of the British Empire allowed (and
sometimes encouraged). Among all these factors, the latter was doubtless the
most important.
An English Creation
Having crossed the Mediterranean for Algeria in 1830, colonial France pursued its
expansion under the Second Empire in the direction of Africa and the Far East. In
1854 Ferdinand de Lesseps obtained from the viceroy of Egypt, Mohammed Said
Pasha, a concession to begin excavation for the Suez Canal. Work began in 1859.
To satisfy the demands of an expansionist and Mediterranean politics, the French
fleet was reinforced, to the point that in 1859 it raised apprehensions in London.

FOREWORD 23
From 1859 to 1860, Great Britain’s attitude regarding the “Italian question”
passed through three distinct and apparently contradictory phases that might
appear contradictory but which make sense given traditional Anglo-Saxon prag-
matism: a first phase, during which London wanted to prevent any modification
of the status quo that had served well enough for nearly five decades; a second,
following the armistice of Villafranca, during which English diplomats grew
concerned at the possible expansion of French hegemony on the peninsula; and
finally a third, marked by the insurrections of central Italy and Garibaldi’s expe-
dition to Sicily, which was seen as the definitive collapse of French ambitions,
and in particular as the occasion to integrate the peninsula in a stable manner
into a new balance of power more favorable to the ambitions and interests of the
British crown.
It was for that reason that the British ambassador in Turin “imposed” Cavour’s
return; he was the only man positioned to successfully lead the annexation of the
former states of central Italy. It was also for that reason that the warships of the
Mediterranean fleet “protected” the vessels of the Garibaldinian fleet from any
threat by the Neapolitan navy. And when the Pope and the former king of Naples,
exiled to Rome, threatened to add an international political-military alliance to
the pontifical anathema against the new state, the British made public a fiery dec-
laration justifying Italian unification in the name of the principle of nationality.
This declaration, along with the immediate recognition of the new state, signified
that Italy was henceforth placed under the protection of the Empire of Her Gra-
cious Majesty. Compared to the subalpine kingdom that had served since 1815 as
a buffer state between France and Austria, unified Italy offered added value in its
fortunate geopolitical position.
Having long made the government of the Two Sicilies a pillar of their regional
hegemony, the English now gladly abandoned a contested and vacillating king of
Naples for a young and dynamic Kingdom of Italy whose future Mediterranean
ambitions, at times openly encouraged by other powers, were likely to conflict
with French designs without constituting the slightest threat to English supremacy.
Thus opened what Sergio Romano calls Italy’s “historic cycle of Mediterranean
policy”19 under the shadow of Great Britain. It would continue, almost without
interruption—if not without numerous infidelities—until 1935.
“Determined Historical Connections”
Among the varied protagonists of the Risorgimento, those who, like Cavour, played
an active role managed to do so by rapidly adapting their actions to the actual
movements of the international balance of power. Others, like Garibaldi, played a
role that was, in truth, passive.
Nonetheless, it is the character of Garibaldi who most fascinates those who
have written the history of the Risorgimento. In 1854, even before the actions that
would reinforce his aura—the Expedition of the Thousand, the Aspromonte and
Mentana battles—he received a particularly warm welcome from workers groups
during a visit to London. After 1860 the figure of Garibaldi became the prisoner of

a hagiography in which appreciation for his undeniable military qualities became

jumbled with sentimental considerations.
But some aspects of the “Red Shirts” expedition of the Thousand to Sicily seem
to justify the fear, expressed decades later by Prime Minister Giolitti, that “such
beautiful legends”20 might be spoiled if they were better known: for example, the
Mafia’s decisive support in the conquest of Palermo, or the Camorra’s support
before the triumphal entry into Naples.
It was a series of exceptionally favorable circumstances that, along with Garib-
aldi’s military genius and undeniable charisma, made it possible—for the first and
last time—for an Italian military expedition to produce a lasting political result.
We can briefly list some of these: the Palermo insurrection of April 4, 1860; the
king’s unofficial support for an expedition to Sicily; the exclusively verbal opposi-
tion of Cavour who, far from stopping Garibaldi, secretly forwarded arms to him
and arranged for him to be protected by Admiral Persano’s fleet; the interests of
the Genoese naval company Rubattino, which placed its ships at the disposal of
the expedition; the benevolent neutrality of two English warships anchored just
off Marsala; the dispatch, following the conquest of Palermo, of four thousand
new “volunteers” under the command of military officers close to Turin; the Eng-
lish government’s clearly negative response to the French request to organize a
joint maritime blockade in order to discourage any landing by the Red Shirts in
Calabria; the decision by most Neapolitan naval officers not to block the general’s
march toward the capital of the kingdom; and the allegiance to Garibaldi of the
southern property owners, convinced of the necessity of “changing everything so
that everything will remain unchanged.”21
It thus required the support of the king, the distraction of the government,
England’s benign neglect, the weariness of the enemy, and the favorable recep-
tion of the ruling classes and of local mafias for the Sicily expedition to achieve
a different outcome from defeats such as Gianicolo, Aspromonte, Bezzecca, and
Mentana.22 Despite everything, the new kingdom adopted the adventure of the
Expedition of the Thousand as the foundation of its national legitimacy. Thus the
myth of “the sacred rabble of Garibaldi” having awakened “Italian civilization”
from its “secular lethargy”23 began to spread. In the end, this legend served as the
foundation of a conviction that Italy’s creation was marked, as Sergio Romano
writes, not by a plan but by an act, not by an idea but by an intuition. The country,
as Romano says, thus remains subject, in its most difficult moments, to a fascina-
tion with the decisive gesture, the thundering oration, the Providential man.24
From Garibaldi to Berlusconi, by way of Mussolini and De Gasperi—all actors
in “the most difficult moments” of the country’s history—the passivity of the
masses has focused attention on a few individuals and on the happy few who bask
in their aura. Political psychology, anthropology, and even hagiography have thus
ended up pushing aside the study of “determined historic connections.”

Part I
The Original Characteristics

Chapter 1
How Premature Development

Became a Factor of Backwardness
“One, None, and a Hundred Thousand”
P ostunitary Italy, far from presenting a well-defined face, is the unstable com-
bination of some particular characteristics. The first of these is the fragile dia-
lectic between the various geographical pieces that make it up: the “thousand bell
towers,” the regional particularities, the use of dialect as a badge of local identity,
the relations between the center and the periphery—most particularly, between
the north and the south, ever a source of jealousies, haggling, and friction.
When, beginning in the 1880s, the governments of the Sinistra attempted to
bind up certain of these divisions, they began by co-opting emerging interest
groups, or those previously excluded from power (the southern elites, above all),
and did so simply by juxtaposing them to the already dominant interest groups.
Political institutions thus became the venues of incessant bargaining. The forma-
tion of these fragile and temporary alliances between particular and sectoral inter-
ests was referred to as “transformism,” a process that has accompanied the entire
history of united Italy. This fragmentation hampered the search for a national
“common interest” and consequently prevented the development of any long-
term national strategy.
The impossibility of defining objectives not at the mercy of such transactions
hindered the formation of national political parties able to represent alternative
interests in any enduring way. The problem, which Francesco de Sanctis described
as early as 1877—“We are now at the point where there are no solidly constituted
parties, except perhaps for those based on regions and on clientele, Italy’s two
scourges,” he said1—was a constant of Italian history up to the 1990s. Until that
time, the peninsular political system, lacking viable alternatives, always pivoted
around a sort of “single party”—at times surreptitious, at times official. The liberal
monarchy, fascism, and the Christian Democratic republic all experienced, under
different forms, governmental mechanisms incapable of any change except by
traumatic rupture. Opposition parties were thus always forced to choose between
“subversivism” (different from subversion, which they never practiced) and more
or less open collaboration with power; they sometimes managed simultaneously
to be both subversive and governmental.
In the early years of the country’s existence, these opposition groups, though
kept at a distance from official political life, possessed a capital that the forces
of the government and the administration lacked: identity. The democrats, the
Catholics, and the Socialists benefited from having strong and clear identities,
which were even more salient in contrast to the governing powers, which lacked
any clearly defined personality.
The fragmentation of the ruling class, the fortuitous character of unification,
the mistrust of politics, and the “pragmatism” of the transformist governments
thus deprived this new creature of a clearly defined national character. At the
beginning of the Italian adventure, the country’s new leaders—the Destra—were
preoccupied with building from nothing the structures of a new state with sud-
denly enlarged borders, and they had little time to abhor any ideological vacuum.
But this changed once Italy found itself projected into the center of a system of
international relations in which it supposedly had a role to play; the difficulty
of defining a plausible national identity began to pose a major problem when
compared to other countries that had constructed their own over centuries. From
that point forward, any shift in the international order had repercussions for Italy,
provoking a more or less serious internal crisis that aroused new doubts about
its identity.
Dynamic Constants
The constants of postunitary Italian history reflect realities rooted deeply in

the social life of the country. Yet, unless one analyzes their interconnections,
there is a risk of magnifying them as pure manifestations of political folklore,
or of using them as ideological cover for otherwise unmentionable struggles
between conflicting interests. Through most of the history of unitary Italy, that
has been true of the north-south “dualism”: detached arbitrarily from other
factors, the “southern question” has given rise to partial interpretations, used
by some in the ruling southern classes as an ideological alibi to solicit every
sort of public assistance.
These unilateral visions produced other risks. To continue with the example
of the north–south “dualism,” other inequalities in the country’s interior have
often been neglected, such as the existence of a center and a northeast, with their
own distinct characteristics. The social and economic phenomenon referred to,
appropriately, as the “Terza Italia,” (“Third Italy”)—an industrial area that notably
includes Veneto, Emilia, and Tuscany, as well as the Adriatic regions—has arisen
and asserted itself, despite the ruling class’s near-sightedness.
A too-hasty analysis of these factors leads to a further misunderstanding: their
unchanging aspect ends up completely overshadowing their dynamic aspect. In
other words, the fragility of national identity, transformism, state control, cli-
entelism, regional divisions, de facto “single-partyism” and interference by the
Church crop up so regularly that they can leave the impression that Italian society
of the past century and a half has scarcely evolved at all.
HOW PREMATURE DEVELOPMENT BECAME A FACTOR OF BACKWARDNESS 29
In reality, it is clear that these factors, appearances notwithstanding, never

remain static. Even those that lend themselves most readily to folkloric represen-
tations of the supposedly eternal “Italian genius”—the Mafia, for example—have
undergone radical transformations through their history, always linked to the rad-
ical transformations of the conditions with which they have interacted. The Mafia
arose, according to certain interpretations, as a sort of feudal agent defending the
“oppressed,” but it was “baptized” only after Italian unification, and today repre-
sents a veritable multinational entity with both licit and illicit interests.2
The same can be said of other strictly political factors. As one historian has
noted, the “law” of transformism appears only when one assesses the history of
Italy on the basis of an external model, namely, on the basis of a level of institu-
tional functioning that one supposes the country could have attained and that it
has failed to reach because of its defects.3
Nearly all recent studies on the relationship between north and south in Italy
find that the gap between the two regions can be viewed as a consequence of uni-
fication, to the extent that unification—by bringing the regions under the same,
uniform institutional framework—tended to institutionalize the gap. At the same
time, if one considers the dynamic aspect, it becomes clear that over the past fifty
years the difference between the two has remained essentially constant, which
means that in relative terms the south has developed at rates comparable to the
north.4 This reading of “dualism” undercuts the conventional wisdom on the situ-
ation of the Mezzogiorno.
A Heavy Heritage
Generally those who have sought to explain the traditional weaknesses of the Ital-
ian ruling class without resorting to shortcuts like fatalism, moralism, or even rac-
ism, have insisted on the backwardness—or backwardnesses—of the country. We
should keep in mind that the notion of backwardness is relative and based on
multiple factors. It necessarily implies a comparison with other entities presumed
to be more advanced, or examined under different points of view. It also supposes,
naturally, the existence of a competition, of whatever nature.
Italy, even while expressing fairly early on a subjective will to compete with
the other powers of the “European Concert,” found itself from its very birth in
objective competition with those powers, by reason of its history, its “geopolitical
capital,” and the uses the other powers sought to make of it. In the Middle Ages,
Italy was the leading capitalist country in the world, both chronologically and in
terms of its importance. That conferred certain responsibilities: the commercial
expansion led by the Venetians and the Genoese, the financial importance of the
Lombard and Florentine bankers, the prodigious cultural splendor dispensed by
the universities, the literary schools, the centers of pictorial and musical arts, all
left a concrete heritage, of which the use of Tuscan as the lingua franca of many
intellectual and commercial circles was long the most salient sign. If we add to that
the role of universal spiritual power played by one of the peninsular states and, no
less important, the aura of ancient Rome, we can see that the Risorgimento myth
of a “Third Rome” was far weightier than anything the bards of Italy’s “manifest
destiny” could support.
The Italian colonies present on the Adriatic, in Malta, in Tunis, in Alexandria,
in Istanbul, in the Aegean, and even on the shores of the Black Sea endowed uni-
fied Italy, virtually, with a far from negligible political capital that it could have
used, at least proportionately, the way de Gaulle used the Francophone community.
Although there were no substantial initiatives to this end, the inheritance of the past
nonetheless helped the new country occupy a space—and not just geopolitically or
geoeconomically—with which others, and Italy itself, would henceforth have to deal.
The ruling class in Piedmont that now found itself in command, preoccupied
with internal concerns and accustomed to dealing with other powers from a sub-
ordinate position, reacted slowly to the new international reality. Relations with
the outside world were perceived without the problem of the saltus really being
raised—and consequently, without necessary connections to internal problems
being made. The theoretical awareness of the gap between ambitions and the
means to achieve them emerged slowly among most of the ruling class: yet, it
was precisely this gap that was to mark the subsequent history of the country and
make its backwardness a problem without a solution.
The Destra, despite a rich theoretical tradition far superior to the disordered
eclecticism of the Sinistra, lost its bearings once unification was achieved. Not
only had the imperatives of centralization drained it of its decentralizing liberal-
ism, but also the Destra incorporated the interests of a dispersed class of property
owners who were weak, few in number, and, with rare exception, insensitive to the
requirements of industrial development. Its conservatism was dictated not only by
its will, however understandable, to preserve the social relationships from which
it drew its wealth, but also by the quite natural sociopsychological reflex through
which all human groupings tend to persevere with the mechanisms that made
their success possible.
One idea originating in England, and to which the property owners were
evidently sensitive, was that “the Italians’ steam is their sun,”5 as the industrial-
ist Richard Cobden told Massimo d’Azeglio in 1847. During the debate on the
commercial treaty with France of 1863, the deputy Carlo de Cesare explained to
the chamber his free-trade choice by noting that “the climate, the air, the sun, the
countryside of Italy will never permit us to become eminently industrial like the
English and the French. One struggles in vain against the laws of nature.”6 The pre-
eminence of “natural” social relationships, deemed so because of their bond to the
earth, led several representatives of the Destra to posit a sort of “agrarian fatalism”
as one of the “laws of nature.”
When the first serious difficulties appeared, coming on top of the crisis of the
southern brigantaggio, the need for a more profound consideration became clear.
Thus one observer went so far as to describe unification as a distortion of the
laws of history and geography and to observe, as did the southern liberal Giustino
Fortunato, that the new country had a cumulative “lag of several centuries vis-à-
vis other civilized nations.”7 Once the problem of Italy’s “lag” or backwardness
was posed in these terms, a small minority began the search for its causes, and the
means to attack it.
A “Too-Early” Comer
Among the paradoxes of Italian history, one of the most singular is that the coun-
try, generally considered as a “late comer,” is in truth a “too-early comer,” if one
can put it that way. The decline and then the decadence of the peninsula after
the Renaissance are in direct relationship to the precocity of its development: too
much commerce, too much production, too much wealth, and cities that were too
large for the economic, political, or military conditions of the era.8
Without wading into the debate on the causes of Italian decadence, let us briefly
consider a few points that may illuminate the political factors in contemporary
Italy and of the social psychologies behind them.
It is necessary first to set aside a few simplifications. While the conditions for
the decadence of the richest Italian cities were present by the end of the fourteenth
century, it would be inexact to suggest that the Italian economy of the Renaissance
was decadent. At the end of the fifteenth century, for example, Florentine banks
kept capital reserves two to three times what the bankers Peruzzi and Bardi used
in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. More significantly, as the economics
historian Vera Zamagni states, at the end of the seventeenth century, Bologna was
the most highly industrialized city in Europe.9 The decline thus stretched out over
a very long period, and it was not until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
that we can really speak of decadence.
Thus the prevailing notion that the great geographical discoveries of the late fif-
teenth century constituted the direct and immediate cause of Italian decline must
be considered with caution. They doubtless catalyzed—but did not provoke—a
process rooted in developments at least a century earlier. When one considers the
reasons for decline in their entirety, both economic and political, it becomes clear
that many of them are linked to “excess” growth, that is, a physiological defect
of capitalism that Italian development highlighted for the first time in history:
overproduction.
Among the causes of Italian weakening, Vera Zamagni cites above all the accu-
mulation in a few hands of the wealth engendered by prosperity.10 This accu-
mulation was due to several causes, starting with the substantial stability of an
internal market that, as the misery of the masses persisted, offered few prospects
for enlargement outside those guaranteed by the rich merchants, bankers, aris-
tocrats, and princes of the Church, ever more refined and demanding. Then, the
increasingly limited dimensions of the world market on the one hand and of tech-
nological capacities on the other probably made it difficult to contemplate major
investments that would render productivity more extensive or intensive, and this
further encouraged the tendency toward what we now would call nonessential
consumption.
According to Maurice Aymard, the technological deficit also contributed
to inflexibility in different sectors of production. This was true notably in the
countryside, in the face of increased demand provoked, again, by growth. Sup-
ply shortages pushed up wheat prices, in turn leading to increased salaries for
manufacturing jobs, and consequently, a transfer of capital into agriculture, where
development potential could be realized only slowly.11
Finally, we must not forget the rigidity of corporations, which tend to perpetu-
ate means of production and levels of remuneration even when they are no longer
appropriate.
The “corporations of artisans and tradesmen” began appearing in the second
half of the twelfth century, at first simply as associations for defense and mutual
assistance; but later, they rapidly became a necessity of economic life in towns and
cities, the inevitable consequence of the closed nature of communal markets. The
proliferation of autonomous communes—born in just a few decades on the bases
of the old Roman cities—had the corollary effect of producing a complete divi-
sion of work between country and city. Thus each commune, needing to establish
a vital relationship with the surrounding countryside, found itself in a state of
near-constant hostility, open or latent, with the neighboring commune, typically
thirty to forty kilometers distant. In these conditions, the city and the countryside
had no choice but to preserve at all costs their mutually indispensable economies.
Toward that end, they created mechanisms to regulate, limit, or prevent free com-
petition within the commune. Clearly this artificial equilibrium—which allowed
the artisan or small merchant to forecast the precise quantity of merchandise that
he would be certain to sell to his restricted and guaranteed clientele—could not be
maintained in an era when certain cities had reached far higher levels of develop-
ment. It was at that moment, in the second phase of the communal age, particu-
larly between the second half of the thirteenth century and the first half of the
fourteenth, that corporations became major impediments to growth, a key cause
of the decline of certain regions to the profit of others with more flexible and
lower-cost labor forces.12
At this stage of economic and social evolution, the potential offered by the
organization of the state began manifesting its clear superiority over the cit-
ies: the internal monopoly guaranteed by communal organization was over-
whelmed by this newer form of organization that could regulate, protect, and
encourage commerce both internally and externally. That gave rise, in effect, to
converging movements of the commercial bourgeoisie toward the absolute state
(helping it extend the means of communication and defend against the nobility
and competitors), and of the absolute state toward the commercial bourgeoisie
(furnishing it, through taxes and credit, with the means to finance its adminis-
tration and its wars).
This tendency toward the formation of national states (as they would be called
much later) took shape at a time when the decline of the Italian states had already
reached a relatively advanced stage. But the new economic problems alone do not
sufficiently explain this missed rendezvous that, in the final analysis, would prove
fatal for Italian development.
When the Europe of the fifteenth century—this “hodge-podge of petty king-
doms and principalities, marcher lordships and city-states,”13 as Paul Kennedy
describes it—began witnessing the formation of the first states of a certain size,
the Italian cities, which had developed far beyond the limits of the old, small
communes, arose as a final insuperable obstacle preventing the constitution of
an absolute Italian state. The great modern monarchies, on the other hand, had
the good fortune not to encounter, on their paths toward unification, any serious
urban obstacle.14 It is not by chance that the south, where urban civilization was
much less developed, had been the only region on the peninsula to unify, for better
or for worse.
Of course, other factors contributed to this outcome: demographic movements,
growth in external trade, the expansion of the monetary economy, the appearance
of new competitors in central and southern Europe as well as in Mediterranean
trade, the threat presented by Turkish advances, and finally, geographic discover-
ies, although their real effects would become clear only much later.
But if one wanted to synthesize this abortive process, one could say that each
of the five city-regions that then dominated on the peninsula—Milan, Florence,
Rome, Venice, and Naples—was too strong to allow one of its rivals to impose
hegemony on it and too “weak” to succeed in imposing it. Thus began a period
characterized by a long series of debilitating wars, with frequent appeals to foreign
powers and the progressive deferment of any hope of being able to manage the
creation of a central power or, at a minimum, to reform a fragmented market.
These initial characteristics marked the history of the peninsula so profoundly
that they would remain present even after unification.
Chapter 2
The Phantom Nation
The Origins of the Nation
B efore proceeding further, a rapid digression is indispensable regarding the

“national question” in general and the “crisis of the nation-state” in particular.
The debate surrounding the “nation” gave rise to concepts as varied as the nations
themselves. Even more so, for the concept of nation changes not only in space but
also with time. The key is not to define the supposedly true nature of a “nation”—
and of its political form, the nation-state, which does not exist—but rather to find
a political and historical meaning that might help us pierce the mystery of the
Italian nation.
To say that the great national states—France, England, Spain—were born in the
fifteenth century is to employ a sort of diachronic contraction, but one unlikely
to satisfy those who seek the “true nature” of the particular political entity that
we call a “national state.” In fact, these states were termed “national” only a poste-
riori, and for two good reasons: (1) the concepts of “nation” and of “nationality”
appeared only much later, and (2) these states hardly possessed the attributes now
considered characteristic of a “nation.”
“The state,” says the Enciclopedia Einaudi, “becomes a nation when the com-
munity that it organizes in the interior of a fixed territorial, economic and social
space becomes conscious of its own historical, cultural and linguistic identity as a
civilization with well-defined borders.”1 If we follow this definition, we must rec-
ognize that at the point when the borders of France, Great Britain, and Spain were
becoming settled, the process of “nationalization,” far from being consecrated by
unification, was only beginning. National identity is acquired through the super-
position of heteroclite elements (creating what later would be called “national
specificities”), nearly always imposed by state power, with the principal aim of
creating uniform conditions to allow a market with much larger borders to exist.
The “nation,” as a political and juridical concept, began taking a defined form
only at the end of the eighteenth century. With the French Revolution, it became
the foundation of French political sovereignty, a role that had belonged, during
the Ancien Régime, to the person of the king. This coincidence between the birth
of the “nation” and the bourgeoisie’s assumption of political power is hardly a
matter of chance. Sieyès himself explained that the nation and the bourgeoisie are
but one: “The Third (Estate) thus embraces everything that belongs to the nation;
and everything that is not the Third cannot be viewed as being of the nation.”2 So
it should not be surprising that the Napoleonic Wars, the first attempt at bourgeois
unification in Europe, were fought under the banner of the nation. Nor should it
be surprising that, having modified social relationships in the conquered coun-
tries, they would have awakened “national” sentiments there, at times taking the
form of collaboration and at times opposition to the French armies.
The supposed contradiction between a sort of “civilizing mission” of nation-
alism and its “thirst for domination” is in fact an inevitable consequence of the
contradictory nature of the bourgeoisie. This class has always combined its par-
ticular national interests with its universal interests, everywhere attempting to cre-
ate favorable conditions for its businesses. The implementation of the “principle
of nationality” at Versailles in 1919 confirms that pure national states have never
existed, but that all states have adopted the “national” form as a political cover for
their modernization and expansion.
Denationalization and Renationalization
Since evolutions in international relations have brought the hypothesis of Euro-

pean unification out of the realm of pie-in-the-sky theoretical speculation, the
inadequacy of the national state has become a major political problem for the
leaders of all affected countries.
Italy—where the political crisis of the 1990s combined with a weak national
consciousness—brought this crisis of the nation-state into sharp focus, further
fueling the misconception that it was purely an Italian problem. Perhaps this mis-
conception slowed awareness of the problem in other European countries; in any
case it sparked a particularly rich and in-depth debate on the causes of the national
deficit in Italy and on the true Italian particularities behind it.
The Gulf War of 1991 sparked a debate by several newspapers and commenta-
tors on the lack of a foreign policy sufficient to the new international conditions.
The country had been pulled into the conflict through no initiative of its own
and without a clear vision of its implications. The term “renationalization”—
which first appeared in the German debate on reunification, but with an opposite
meaning—led in Italy to a demand that national interests be redefined to give the
country greater autonomy in foreign policy choices. The point was to make Ital-
ian interests more visible, but to do so first by better defining their nature and by
asserting, without nostalgia or inhibition, a sense of national pride.
As these themes were raised by men and political forces largely considered con-
servative, the debate risked succumbing to the very cleavages that it meant to over-
come in the name of an overarching national interest. It was partly toward this end
that, in 1993, the review Limes was created, with an editorial council that included
figures of every political stripe.
From its very first issue, the review declared an ambition of “searching for the
national interest” in a geopolitical debate.3 In October 1994, an editorial in an issue
devoted entirely to this debate4 held that the end of the so-called “First Republic”
THE PHANTOM NATION 37
and the difficulties in birthing a second could be attributed to “denationalization”—

that is, the pretension, supposedly dating from the end of World War II, of building
national institutions “on the denial of the nation.” The fact that, for a half century,
the national question has remained “buried away in a well-guarded warehouse of
collective repression” had not produced entirely negative results, the editorial writer
held: in truth, the political and military cover provided by the United States had
allowed Italy to practice a “discreet and parasitic” geopolitics, cunningly managing
its interests in the Mediterranean and in Eastern Europe. Thanks also to its low pro-
file and its adaptability, the author concluded, Italy had become “one of the richest
countries in the world.”
If one accepts the argument of the Limes editorialist that one condition for
Italy’s enrichment was the capacity of its postwar governments to thrive parasiti-
cally in a particularly favorable geopolitical context, the logical conclusion is that
the end of this balance could not help but affect the general situation in the coun-
try. From the moment the Berlin Wall fell, this “parasitic” foreign policy ceased
to be profitable and an urgent need arose to redefine the nature and means of
the “national interest.” For it was then that the “geopolitical limits” of Italy’s eco-
nomic and commercial power—as the Limes editorialist put it—could be seen in
the collapse of “the illusion that Italian industry can spread through the world
merely by its intrinsic virtues, without a country-system to support its penetration
into external markets.”5 It was only at this moment that the imbalance between a
well-performing economy and a weak and vacillating “country-system” became
the crucial problem at the center of the Italian political struggle, and the object of
a veritable tidal wave of critical speculation.
National Europeanism
This gap between the dynamic economic power of Italy and political structures
incapable of supporting its interests in the face of international competition is
not, however, an exclusively Italian occurrence. Being composed of men, states,
along with their bureaucracies, their institutions, their political parties, their trade
unions, and their economic groups, are ever vigilant, as is any living organism,
about their own preservation and reproduction. Toward that end, they sometimes
tend to encroach on one another’s areas of competence. One could almost say
that a degree of confusion about roles and prerogatives constitutes a physiological
“anomaly” common to every political system. In Italy, in any case, this “anomaly”
has often produced a pathological degeneration: Fascism went so far as to codify
this, by superimposing the roles of the party and the state, and by the latter’s seizure
of key economic sectors; the republic roughly maintained this confusion, despite a
strictly liberal constitution, by perpetuating organic links between a Christian Dem-
ocratic “party-state” and the key centers of economic control. It is thus not surpris-
ing that once this mechanism ceased functioning in one direction—from politics
toward the economy—it began functioning in the opposite direction. The ascen-
sion to the highest offices in the state of Carlo Azeglio Ciampi (former governor of
the Bank of Italy), of Romano Prodi (former chairman of IRI, Italy’s biggest state
holding company), and of Silvio Berlusconi (former chairman of Fininvest) are

only the most conspicuous examples.
This blurring of genres has benefited Italian capitalism in moments of crisis
and reconstruction. But it has nearly always led to a tangled system of intermix-
ing and of mutual impediments. These are provoked by the asynchronous move-
ments of the particular interests of the state, its bureaucracy, and its institutions,
and of the parties, the trade unions, the economic groups, and so on. These
“conflicts of interest,” when not disturbing the mechanisms that allowed Italy
to become “one of the richest countries in the world,” have been condemned, at
most, as strains on an ideal democratic model. At a certain stage of international
competition, however, these distortions have been viewed not only as “immoral,”
but also as “antieconomic.” Only when they reached the latter level had their
“immorality” led them before the courts.
Consider the example of corruption in the assignment of public markets. So
long as international competitors lacked the means to penetrate the Italian market,
the misappropriation of public funds was considered merely a sort of supplemen-
tary “tax” aimed at regulating internal competition. But once foreign competitors
gained the economic strength to begin knocking at the peninsula’s doors, this “tax”
ended up strangling productive activity. Since it was also an essentially protec-
tionist mechanism, it ultimately had the effect—taken with other protectionist
practices, such as the systematic devaluation of the lira—of provoking counter-
measures by the international economic and political community. Those in turn
led to the progressive marginalization of Italian products. The situation became
intolerable when the international balances that had guaranteed Italy’s “impunity”
disappeared, and Rome found itself standing alone before a European Union that
demanded the end to illicit practices and the opening of markets. It was then that
the “geopolitical limits” of Italian economic and commercial power created an
urgent need for a rapid and radical solution.
To simplify, there were effectively two currents of thought confronting each other.
A large part of the productive bourgeoisie—in particular, the small and medium
bourgeoisie of Lombardy and the northeast—lined up with the “pessimists of rea-
son”: since the state had proven itself unable to defend their interests, they would
have to find their political representation beyond the state, in Europe or in local
realities, or in a privileged linkage between local realities and European institutions,
bypassing state mediation. In Brussels, important industrial and commercial sectors
began engaging in ever more intense dialogues with foreign diplomats, completely
eliminating the institutional filter, or else substituting for it.6
The hypothesis of the “optimists of will”—that is, of those who subscribed to
the need to bet on the state’s redemptive capacities and thus of rediscovering the
geopolitical frontiers of the Italian nation—based this on another bit of evidence,
no less troublesome for the peninsula’s various interest groups: if Italy undeniably
needed Europe, what concrete reasons could support the hope that Europe still
needed Italy? The response, from those holding this view, lay in the reestablish-
ment of a state sufficiently strong and credible to become an indispensable partner
in the great political negotiation under way on the European construction site. If
this approach was to stand any chance of success, however, it was necessary above
all for Italy to avoid giving the impression that it was a country whose various
parts were available to the highest bidder.
These two theses, considered in their pure theoretical formulations, appear
radically opposed, and incompatible. That did not prevent the two political for-
mations which represented the most extreme versions—the Northern League and
the former Fascist National Alliance—from reaching governmental and electoral
agreements, almost without interruption, within the center-right coalitions.
The accession to the European Monetary System (1978) and the subsequent
signing of the Treaty of Maastricht (1991) drastically reduced the number of “het-
erodox” options available, notably the possibility of a competitive devaluation
of the lira. From that point on, despite some bitter disagreements and oratorical
jousting, at times bordering on the grotesque, all the Italian political groupings
have been, to varying degrees and at varying times, Europeanist, federalist, and
national, with the partial exception of the Northern League, which sometimes
added—for purely extortionate purposes—a secessionist nuance. The neo-Fascist
party headed by Gianfranco Fini was, for its part, anti-European, so long as it
continued to see itself as being excluded a priori from any possibility of directly
controlling power. Once this possibility became reality for the first time with the
electoral coalition of 1994, not only did it throw overboard all its Mussolinian-
derived ideological bric-a-brac but also it converted to Europeanism—moderate
and nationalist, to be sure, but still in phase with the imperatives of Italian eco-
nomic power. This proves that, polemical excesses aside, there simply was no other
path possible but the one indicated by Brussels.
The editorial board of Limes was quite aware of this. In the issue mentioned,
General Carlo Jean gave concrete dimension to the geopolitical quest for a national
identity: “Interests cannot be mapped in concentric circles of decreasing intensity,”
he wrote. “The only objective parameters allowing us to identify them are the size
of economic exchange and the number of Italian citizens in the various zones.”7
Based on the first of these two parameters, most observers agreed that Italy’s inter-
ests lay, above all, in Europe.
According to data furnished by Patrizio Bianchi,8 in 1992 to 1993, 41.7 percent
of direct foreign investment by Italian industry went to Western Europe, 27.1 per-
cent went to Eastern and central Europe and the former USSR, for a total of 68.8
percent of all investment abroad. Investments for corporate control amounted
to 74.3 percent of all investments for the whole of Europe. The objective for the
“optimists of will” was therefore not to disengage from the European process, but
rather to try to more effectively advance Italian interests within Europe, or as Jean
put it in a frank and direct manner: “We cannot permit Italy to be useful to Europe
unless Europe is useful to Italy.”
Unfortunately for the “optimists of will,” in 1994 the season of national Euro-
peanism had not yet arrived. If it were to have any hope of following the rhythms
and meeting the deadlines of the European process, Italy still had many exams to
pass, many companies to privatize, much debt to reduce, many tangles to unravel.
It was in no position to insist that Europe demonstrate, any more than Bianchi’s
data had already done, how it could “serve Italy.” The immaturity of this line of
reluctant Europeanism was one of the principal reasons—perhaps the principal
one—for the very early end of Silvio Berlusconi’s first attempt to rule the coun-
try. Thus “passive Europeanism” became, paradoxically, the only way for Italy to
overcome its backwardness and lessen the fluctuations due to the gap between its
economy and its politics.
Northern Europeanism
In an essay published in the August 1996 issue of Limes, Jacopo Turri analyzed four
ways that the risks posed by the Northern League might evolve: a “Belgian” model,
involving increasing autonomy for the regions, which, however, would not dare
go to the point of a rupture; a “Czechoslovak” model, characterized by a peaceful
and consensual separation; a “Soviet” model, born from the implosion of the state
“envelope”; and a “Yugoslav” model, where separation would carry “worrying and
bloody” implications.9
None of these four models applied to the Italian case. In fact, the author him-
self imagined a fifth hypothesis—even though he termed it extremely unlikely—
of a “neutralization of the League” through its co-option within the system and
its transformation into one of the elements of a new political balance built on
bipolarity. Ultimately this “co-option” took place: it was one of Silvio Berlusconi’s
fundamental achievements, and it helped propel him to victory in the elections of
May 2001.
The long and durable governmental collaboration between the Northern
League and the center-right beginning in 2001 should not make us forget that the
party of Umberto Bossi had been, in December 1994, the parliamentary faction
responsible for the fall of the first Berlusconi government, nor that it later assured,
along with the parties of the center-left, the survival of the government of Lam-
berto Dini until the elections of 1996. Thus when, in June 1995, the League created
a “Parliament of the North,” with the objective of writing the constitution of the
“Italian federal republic,” the head of the opposition at that time, Silvio Berlusconi,
termed the initiative a “grotesque bit of buffoonery,” while the head of the Demo-
cratic Party of the Left (PDS; the former Italian Communist Party) and future
prime minister, Massimo D’Alema, termed it a “normal political initiative, lacking
any subversive character.”10 A few months later the same D’Alema explained that
the League had much in common with the left, above all a “strong social contigu-
ity,” as Bossi’s grouping was in the majority among the workers of the North.11
Even after the electoral victory of the center-left in 1996, the new prime minister,
Romano Prodi, offered the League the chairmanship of two parliamentary com-
mittees, including the one in charge of regional affairs.12
The apprehensions regarding the “secessionist” threats of the League redoubled
in intensity when the grouping, electorally weakened, flatly renounced any pos-
sibility of an alliance with the left and again became the object of Silvio Berlus-
coni’s earnest attentions. Virulent campaigns ensued, and they were all the more
virulent because everyone knew that the elections of 1996—when the center-right
forces victorious in 1994 had increased their electoral pull—had been carried by
a center-left coalition only because of the electoral division between Berlusconi’s
“House of Liberty” coalition and the Northern League. It was at that moment
that a certain number of leftist intellectuals discovered the virtues of “republican
patriotism,” in order to oppose the “risks of the disintegration of the nation.”
In fact, the exaggeration of the risks represented by the League was often the
form taken in the political battle over assuring its support—or demonizing it
when it was moving toward the opposite pole. Rare were those who grasped the
real motivations; among them was Sergio Romano, who said: “If Italy does not
enter into Europe on the first of January 1999, the unity of the nation is in danger.
He who truly believes that the country’s northern regions would accept, tomor-
row, being left in the bosom of Piraeus, Andalusia and Estremadura, while see-
ing themselves separated, perhaps irremediably, from the Tyrol, the Carinthians,
Bavaria and the Alpine departments of France, well, this man would be commit-
ting a serious political error.”13
In this utterly explicit “egoism,” one finds the reasons for the strength of the
League starting in the late 1980s, but one also finds their antithesis, which is to say,
the reasons that led to its electoral weakening, starting precisely in January 1999. To
simplify, the regionalist movements reflected the fierce determination of a few of
the most dynamic economic groups to remain bound to Europe (if only to be rid of
the parasitic burden). A sort of direct relationship was thus established between the
strength of the League and the delay in the movement toward European integration.
And vice versa, for, even as the various steps in the rapprochement to the European
process were taken by the “country-system” as a whole, the determination of one
part of these groups changed direction toward the “passive Europeanism”, their prin-
cipal aim still being not to lose contact with the Tyrol, the Carinthians, Bavaria, and
the Alpine departments of France.
“Passive Europeanism” thus seemed to satisfy this demand. In the wake of his
victory in 1996, Romano Prodi confirmed his government’s intention to adapt
his country as quickly as possible to the criteria of the Maastricht Treaty.14 This
decision was supported not only by the will of the head of government but also by
the opening of credit from Europe, and from Germany in particular, which culmi-
nated on November 24, 1996, with the readmission of the lira into the European
Monetary System, a sort of holding room on the path to the common currency.
That is why, little by little, the League lost part of its electoral influence, to the
benefit of the parties of “national Europeanism,” which had been hunting on more
or less the same ground, geographically and socially. In the elections of 1996, this
open competition resulted in what was called a “vendetta of the North” between
the League and Forza Italia, with the result not only of allowing the center-left
to win the elections but also of excluding from the first Prodi government any
representation of Milan (outside the existing links between Minister Antonio
Maccanico and Mediobanca15), or of Lombardy and the northeast. The political
convulsions that flowed from the crisis of the 1990s thus raised anew the existence
of an unresolved “southern question.”
Chapter 3
The Northern Question
“The Particular Interest”
I n his “Prison Notebooks,” Antonio Gramsci contends that all Italian intellectual
life up to the twentieth century was no more than a “phenomenon of French
provincialism”:1 it pretended to have its foundations in historic antecedents in
Italy, but in fact these antecedents were well rooted in the culture and traditions
of France.
When national identities are invented, reciprocal borrowing is the rule. But for
the Italian ruling classes and intellectuals, France was long the almost exclusive
reservoir of ideas, taste, institutions, and symbols. The centralism, the system of
prefects and of education, the literary, philosophical, and scientific trends, even
the flag of the Cispadane Republic—everything was based on the French model.
Remarking on this “intellectual and moral hegemony of foreign intellectuals,”
Gramsci concludes that in Italy there is no “national intellectual and moral bloc.”2
His undeniably perceptive observations notwithstanding, Gramsci some-
times overestimates the capacity of intellectuals to influence historic events,
either positively or negatively. In observing the process of Risorgimento, one
might better explain the cultural hegemony of the “moderates” by the very
nature of a national “revolution”—which was meant to take place without pro-
voking ruptures or, above all, involving the masses. In short, by hoping to have
a revolution without a revolution, the Italian bourgeoisie condemned itself to
seeking awkward compromises with the old dominant groups, thus perpetuat-
ing its own divisions and all the constraints caused, among other factors, by
structurally unequal regional realities.
The intellectuals who committed themselves to the Risorgimento were not in a
position to forge a national identity; at times, they even explicitly refused to do so,
as was the case with Vincenzo Gioberti. But it is not enough to merely say this; one
must also seek to identify the “objective responsibilities” that help determine the
subjective responsibilities evoked by Gramsci. It is in seeking these that one finds
the elemental basis of a connection between an Italian “national question” and the
“northern question”: indeed, the only bourgeoisie within the geographic confines
of the peninsula that was truly in a position to support the cause of national iden-
tity was the Lombard bourgeoisie. And yet, it did not do so.
As the historian Giorgio Rumi noted,3 when one deals with the question of
Italian decadence, one often returns to Milan and its incapacity to become the
“European bridgehead of the country,” its incapacity to play a significant role in
the political life of the country. And this incapacity is a constant of Italian history,
at least up to its most recent Berlusconian variation.
Civil Magnificence and Political Impotence
The social psychology of the northern Italian elites—who placed the jealous defense
of their territory’s dynamism above all nonepisodic involvement in any other activ-
ity4—has been solidifying for centuries. In a text presented at the Sixth Italian Scien-
tific Congress of 1844, Carlo Cattaneo dates from the time when the ancient Roman
municipalities reappeared—between the late first millennium and early second—
the first wave of transformation of the serfs into the free peasants, transformation
that, in subsequent centuries, spread through all of Europe.5 This emancipation of
feudal law, achieved in the name of old Roman right, allowed numerous Lombard
cities to give birth to a civilization founded on what Cattaneo calls the “occupations
of peace”: commerce, trade, and industry. Even in modern times, Cattaneo proudly
points out in another text,6 “the streets of Paris and of London carry the names of
Lombard bankers; and ‘Lombard,’ in France, meant banker.”
This historic phase culminated with the Duchy of Milan, whose state power
and territorial expansion were proportional to the prosperity of its economic
activities. Still, we must again point out that the appetites born from this exuber-
ance were behind the decadence that was to follow. Like all Italian states—too
weak to absorb others, too strong to let themselves be absorbed—Milan relied
on foreign assistance and entrusted its political ambitions to the army of the king
of France Charles VIII. Despite the multiple and successive twists and turns of
Ludovic Sforza himself, the Lombard capital lost forever its political independence
and, at the same time, lost some of its importance relative to other great cities
of the north—Venice, Genoa, Turin—which, themselves, maintained their role as
political capitals.
Thus opened a new phase in Milan’s historic existence, characterized by the
divorce between its economic strength and its political power. As Rumi put it,
then began “a destiny of civil magnificence and political impotence.”7 The seeds
of the Lombard social psychology that have been transmitted down through the
centuries were sown.
Control of the ancient duchy of the Sforzas passed into Spanish hands in 1535.
The decadence that followed brought economic decline and a shrinking of bor-
ders. According to Cattaneo, it was a certain “contempt for the trades and for busi-
ness”—which the Spaniards considered “work suitable for infidels and the impure
castes”8—that led to this decadence. The Austrian conquest, two centuries later,
did not restore the city’s political prerogatives, but favored a rebirth of the hard-
working traditions of the local populace, returning a certain degree of administra-
tive autonomy to the municipalities while simultaneously abolishing feudal rights,
which were replaced by a modern cadastral system within a substantially unified
THE NORTHERN QUESTION 45
commercial space. Vienna’s solicitude allowed the Lombards to return to their old
traditions of productive intensity.
According to Cattaneo’s calculations, the Lombard peasants enjoyed produc-
tivity rates twice those of their French counterparts. Besides, the city of Milan
alone employed some 450 engineers, while the French Department of Bridges and
Highways (Ponts et Chaussées) employed only 568 for the entire country.9 This
pride in producers who were “more brave than lucky”10 strengthened the convic-
tion that Lombardy was summoned by a singular destiny to give birth to not just
any sort of civilization, but precisely to an “economic civilization” that could com-
pensate for the loss of political supremacy.
In fact, this conviction reflected reality: Lombardy was not only the most pros-
perous region south of the Alps; it was the richest in all the Austrian Empire. But this
conviction also reflected the real state of things, in that “political impotence”—along
with “civil magnificence,” to be sure—left the dominant Lombard classes without a
state of their own to count on. This obliged them to engage with the central authori-
ties in a sort of permanent negotiation. This situation gave rise to a series of recipro-
cal dependences which—when examined in all their complex and often conflicting
intertwinings, marked by suspicion, subtle calculations, ruses, and collusion—might
help us unravel the tangle of the Italian nation.
The Social Psychology of Lombardy
For a long time the “northern question” was merely the rhetorical, polemical
counterpart to the more famous “southern question.” It became a real political
problem only when Milan found itself no longer satisfied to play its traditional
role as “moral capital” and began demanding greater involvement in the manage-
ment of political power.
The early beginnings of this came in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, and its
causes were the same as those that later were to provoke the upheaval of the Ital-
ian political panorama. At that time, the “northern question” manifested itself in
two apparently distinct forms: the stormier of the two, and thus the one bound to
arouse the curiosity of the media, had to do with the local electoral lists referred
to as “civic” lists (i.e., not linked to existing political parties), which, while existing
more or less throughout Italy, in the north ultimately federated themselves into
several leagues, and finally into the Northern League; the other form, reminiscent
of the course of an underground river, led in 1983 to the nomination of Bettino
Craxi as head of the government, the first Milanese president of the council in all
the history of unitary Italy.
The League’s “folkloric” forms of public activity masked the distant roots of
the “northern” factor. For the historian Marco Meriggi, the League’s anticentral-
ism and antifiscal polemic can be seen as a resurgence of a trait that has recurred
through the history of these regions, where development and wealth are concen-
trated to the highest degree.11
For these reasons, it can be difficult to understand Italian political events of the
latter part of the twentieth century if one ignores certain constants in the social
psychology of the north, and particularly of Milan. They can be classified as a

sort of regional version of a quite Italian virtue, almost a sort of survival instinct,
which consists in attempting to transform a weakness into a source of strength.
The absence of local institutions of state and the subordination of the Milanese
elites to the great political and cultural realities of Vienna, Paris, and Madrid was
transformed into a prideful demand for material and civic wealth; this legitimized
the resentment against the political center and its fiscal pressures.
To this attitude we must add the mix of fear and defiance in the face of a
national revolutionary movement, capable of encouraging popular demands that,
as French experience shows, can sometimes hardly be contained. The resultant
mixture describes a dominant Lombard class firmly astride its prerogatives, cer-
tain of being able to use its money to constrain Vienna, threatening if need be to
join the Italian national cause, so long as the latter does not produce consequences
inimical to commerce.
Lombardy, like every other region, saw the birth of numerous political cur-
rents, representing even more numerous and disparate economic and social inter-
ests. But most of these currents were infused, one way or another, with the same
social psychology that we have just described. In a study devoted to the “State of
Milan,”12 Fausto Fonzi describes some of the characteristics of the Lombard radi-
cal movement (the far left wing of the time) in a way that would not seem entirely
out of place in describing the uninhibited syncretism of certain recurrent themes
of the “Lombardism” of the 1990s. This movement, he writes, was able to reconcile
“the interests of the rural and shop-owning bourgeoisie to the poetry of Caval-
lotti” and to unite socially heterogeneous forces thanks to a rather fluid demagogy,
nourished by a form of municipalism with antisouthern and moralistic accents,
and confronting fiscal and centralizing pressures.
In 1899 the Lombard radicals used their talent for rallying disparate interests
under their banner to promote a municipalist alliance based on themes that had
been used against Vienna during the time of the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom,
namely, the demand for autonomy and the denunciation of the waste by central
state institutions of resources extorted from the hard-working north. This alli-
ance—opposed by the most-protected sectors of the economy, notably the cot-
ton industry and electricity producers—included not just radicals, but free-trade
industrialists, Socialists, and a part of the Catholic world. These groups, as one can
see, were of a heterogeneous and even conflictual nature, but all were close to an
autonomist tradition with strong local roots.
With the rhetoric that surrounded them, the elections of 1899 ended a period
of five years of troubles and contradictions, during which Milan had been the the-
ater of a dialectic of conflicts and agreements characteristic of advanced countries.
First the bourgeoisie sought, and gained, the support of the proletariat against
Crispi and his Abyssinian War of 1896; then it begged the support of the armed
state against the riotous proletariat in 1898; finally, an important part of the free-
trade bourgeoisie again gained the support of the proletariat by seducing its politi-
cal leaders with the myth of “municipal socialism,” this supposed “prelude of the
socialist society to come,” preached by Filippo Turati.13
THE NORTHERN QUESTION 47
In short, at the end of the nineteenth century, some of the constants of the
social psychology of the dominant Lombard classes—the defense of the particu-
lar prerogatives of different municipalities; the feeling of being subjected to a
sort of systematic pillage of wealth produced; the polemic against the “foreign”
capital of the pillagers—had ample political echoes. The ideologies that resulted,
however, were merely the forms in which this social psychology was historically
incarnated.
Chapter 4
Inventing Ancestors
Plebeian Jacqueries
T he idea that production and good administration are more important than
the management of public affairs is a legacy from the Lombard bourgeoisie to
the rest of the country.1 In the early decades of unified Italy, the productive bour-
geoisie remained largely at a distance from political power and made no attempt
to define a vision of the whole, a general “national” perspective. It thus remained
prisoner to its own regional and cultural divisions, the two often going hand in
hand. The absence of a coherent ideological horizon left room for a sort of ersatz
conscience that Giulio Bollati has identified in history and in the invention of the
“national character.”2
Bollati wanted to avoid the traps of the “pure idea or ethnic ether,”3 and pro-
posed measuring and verifying the concrete manifestations of Italian social psy-
chology. His first step was to define the historic circumstances and the temporal
space in which the Italian made his first appearance as a social species unto its own,
between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Previously, the author
suggests, Italians were nothing more than a highly confined group of speakers
of a capricious and often arbitrary language that had outlived its past glory. The
inhabitants of the peninsula had almost nothing in common on a cultural level
and, in their near totality, were ignorant of even the most elementary rudiments of
the spoken language—or, as we shall see, the written—used by the confined group
mentioned above.
The principal characteristic of the history of this mass of uncultivated natives
was precisely its lack of history: they had scarcely played any role in the diverse
historic processes that had unfolded on the peninsula. Or more precisely, they
had participated the way slaves participated in the construction of the great classic
civilizations.
This phenomenon has been explained in various ways. According to Galli della
Loggia, for example, the resigned and passive submission of the Italian peasant
masses stemmed from the fact that they were politically controlled not by a feudal-
type aristocracy, as in the classic European model, but by cities and by the Church.
As everywhere else, this control was based on a relationship of forces; but it also
depended on the prestige enjoyed by the communes and on the Church’s ability
to remain close to rural communities and thereby neutralize any temptation they
had to revolt.4 Thus, in the absence of serious peasant movements in medieval and
early modern Italy, it was the urban plebes—from the Vespers of Palermo to the
Revolt of the Ciompi, from Cola di Rienzo to Masaniello—who were the protago-
nists of sporadic episodes of rebellion.5
In the cases mentioned, conflicts were more often provoked by profound
political crises than by social crises, as with the German peasant revolt of 1525 or
the French peasant reaction during the “grande peur.” The explosions of Italian
anger mentioned above were brief, indecisive, and quickly subdued. They were
not the action of a class or of a coalition of classes, but rather of an ambiguous
mass of the lower classes, of “plebes” without history, roots, defined interests, or
premeditated designs.
It is notable that such keen observers of Italian reality as Giuseppe Prezzolini,
Luigi Barzini, and Indro Montanelli employed nearly identical images to draw a
sort of “analogical portrait” of Cola di Rienzo as a paradigm of one form of the
Italian political struggle, comparing him to Benito Mussolini. “He embodied the
inflamed and angry temperament of the ignorant and frustrated commoners,”
wrote Montanelli. Di Rienzo, he added, was “a typical Italian troublemaker who,
when he speaks, gets drunk on his own words and ends up believing them, thus
losing all sense of reality and proportion.”6
Naturally, analogies between Cola di Rienzo and Mussolini must be viewed
with caution, given the differences between the two periods. Nonetheless, once
one starts in this direction one must not stop with external coincidences, one must
consider the symptomatic conditions that surrounded the birth, six hundred years
apart, of these two very similar political phenomena: first is the existence of a sort
of social and political sediment that filters into any space vacated by state author-
ity and generates the sort of banditism that, Prezzolini says, Italians idealized as a
revolt against the established order; next comes the composite pragmatism of the
political “programs” built on this slippery, viscous mire; and finally, the readiness
of Italians to succumb in times of crisis to a fascination with the “providential
man”—these three factors are often found in Italian history.
Fabricating Ancestors
Each country, at the moment when it creates its national identity, discovers a cer-
tain number of more or less legendary figures in its past who are then raised to the
rank of ancestors. But the question arises: How are these figures chosen?
The shadow of Rome, of course, extends over much of Italian history. But, as
Theodor Mommsen pointed out, the Italians, divided, undisciplined, and defeated
in almost all their wars, can be considered heirs of the Romans—who for their
part unified the civilized world by force of arms and law—only in the way that
maggots can be considered heirs of the carrion of a once proud and noble horse.7
INVENTING ANCESTORS 51
Classical writers—Virgil, above all, but also Cicero and Titus Livius—
“explained” Rome’s greatness as flowing from the particular favor that the Urbs
enjoyed among the gods. Augustine and other fathers of the Church “explained” it
as providential design. To Dante, the divine seal on the “Eternal City” made collab-
oration between the Church and the empire indispensable. This insistence on the
providential character of Rome contributed to the creation of a myth, more politi-
cal than religious, that others through the ages have drawn upon, from Petrarch to
Machiavelli, from Alfieri to Mazzini, from Carducci to Mussolini. Still, there is no
Roman who, in Italian mythology, fills the role occupied by, for example, Vercin-
getorix in French mythology.
One explanation could stem from the fact that national ideologies began form-
ing during the eighteenth century, at a time when they had, first, to distinguish
themselves from the French model. Thus, instead of Greco-Roman mythology,
or the mythology of the Mediterranean world, upon which France had a corner,
it was the rustic thatched cottages of northern Europe that were celebrated. The
new national cultures were forged by opposing “their bodies to the threat of the
universal monarchy imposed by Rome,” in the words of Fichte,8 where, behind
Rome, one must read Paris.
Divided between their admiration for philosophical and revolutionary France
and their desire to free themselves from its domination, Italian intellectuals thus
hesitated between several myths. Those drawn to the “thatched villages” of north-
ern Europe summoned up a mythical peasant who, however, had one major draw-
back—he could easily be compared to other, actually existing, peasants. The actually
existing peasants could not boast of the imaginary characteristics that their mythical
“colleagues” own and, moreover, had to be kept at a distance from the creation of
unitary Italy. The result was a sort of latent schizophrenia that would do nothing to
strengthen the “feeble popular legitimation of the Italian state.”9
Mythical Peasant and Empirical Peasant
There was no shortage of rebellions against such-and-such a baron or this-or-that

feudal lord during the history of modern Italy: The revolt of the Calabrian peas-
ants of 1459 through 1464 comes to mind, as do at least seven other major rebel-
lions, between 1512 and 1584 in Calabria, Abruzzi, and Basilicata. These, however,
were isolated and generally ephemeral episodes that did not evolve into “national”
uprisings of the sort seen in Germany or France.
A particular and unique cultural overlap between the ruling classes of the coun-
tryside and of the communes made the Italian peasantry a doubly submissive class,
almost incapable of an autonomous social presence. For a very long time, property
owners in other countries generally shared with their serfs a state that one might
call cultural nonexistence. They exercised absolute control over their subjects in
matters economic, juridical, and military, but barely differed from them in terms
of knowledge or, in some cases, the way they lived. In Italy, to the contrary, the
progressive integration of property owners into urban economic life led to their
cultural integration as well, thus adding this particular form of superiority to the
other types of domination. In this double oppression was the sort of total cultural
submission of the peasants that Galli della Loggia describes; they were reduced to
a state of political insignificance and “covered, anthropologically, with discredit.”10
We mentioned the “overlapping” between the ruling classes of the city and
those of the country: the former “offered” the latter the cultural instruments of
their domination, the latter brought to the city the “minor tradition” of a popular
culture of which they, too, were the guardians. That explains the persistence of
the “agrarian cultural paradigm” that feeds some in the intelligentsia aiming to
prepare the terrain for a national Italian ideology.
This “peasant ideology,” nonetheless, is neither exclusively nor specifically Ital-
ian. Almost everywhere, the second phase of identity construction is that in which
the real peasant continues to be treated as a negligible quantity, but the literary
peasant begins assuming the “coelacanth function”11—a living fossil, guarantor of
the reconstitution of the ancestors—embodied until then by a “people” lacking
concrete reference. In the eyes of the urban intellectual sitting at his desk by the
fireplace, the peasant becomes the most authentic expression of the relationship
between a nation and its land, and his mores become ethical references.
At this stage of the construction of identity, Italian intellectuals were far from
being an exception. The real Italian specificity is manifested by the discovery of
the deep roots of “ancient peasant civilization” decades before other European
cultures—late in the eighteenth century—when the process of forming national
unity was still in gestation. Unequal economic development was reflected—in the
medium or, more often, the long term—by an unequal ideological development
whose effects were sometimes surprising. Thus, in Italy, the particular mixture
of capitalism’s precocious rise (and precocious fall), and the way it then increas-
ingly trailed behind other potential competitors, led to a singular phenomenon
of anticipation, which one might define as a sort of “Italian path to Catonism.”12
The Italian Path to Catonism
For centuries, as we have seen, peasants had been condemned by their subordinate
cultural state not only to political insignificance but to “anthropological discredit.”
Testifying to this discredit is the lexicon in which nouns relating to the peas-
ant condition have often become adjectives used to describe someone crude or
grubby: villano, rustico, cafone, zotico. From Tommaso Garzoni (1585) to Giuseppe
Baretti (1769), literature, too, offers evidence of the disdain with which real peas-
ants are viewed.13
It may be of interest to note that in apparent opposition to this “anthropologi-
cal discredit,” only a few years after Garzoni’s work was published, the Bolognese
writer Giulio Cesare Croce published Le sottilissime astuzie di Bertoldo (1606) and
Le piacevoli e ridicolose semplicità di Bertoldino (1608), two books that, according
to Prezzolini, defend “the countryman against the city, the wisdom of tradition
against academic culture” and even “poor nations against rich nations.”14 While
G. C. Croce himself affirmed in his autobiography that “sod and soil are [his]
Latin,”15 his work does not seem to step beyond the confines of the republic of
INVENTING ANCESTORS 53
letters. Besides their evident references to situations typical of the Commedia

dell’Arte, certain of the adventures experienced by the peasant hero Bertoldo
reproduce those of fabliaux peasant heroes like Brunain, la vache au prêtre or, espe-
cially, Le Vilain mire, in which the protagonist is supposed to illustrate more a char-
acter than a social condition, and whose place, clearly allegorical, might even be
occupied by an animal. Croce does not want to depict a social situation, but simply
to comment, in burlesque fashion, on the most obvious faults of men and women.
It would not be until the end of the eighteenth century that a small number
of Italian intellectuals would suddenly discover that the soul of the fatherland is
embodied in country people. Bollati even gave us the precise dates of this phe-
nomenon: from 1796 to 1800, between Bonaparte’s two Italian campaigns. At that
moment, certain property owners tried to turn a revolutionary dynamic into an
antirevolutionary defense, by adopting “the French model, but reversed in such
a way that it functioned against the social consequences of the French model.”16
Previously partisans and detractors of the French Revolution had fought in
the name of ideas and had totally ignored the real forces behind those ideas. This
attitude persisted so long as the real Italian forces were not pounded, directly or
indirectly, by the waves unleashed by the French storm; that is to say, until, in
Bergamo and in Friuli, for example, sentiments of revolt began to spread among
peasants who had been struck by the winter famine of 1793 to 1794; during these
riots, the French example was openly evoked.
Bollati tells us that it was at that moment that, for the first time, the shrewdest
aristocrats—Paolo Greppi, Federico Manfredini, and, above all, Francesco Melzi
d’Eril, who were far from being anti-French, since they saw Napoleon’s France as
the best guarantee against the revolutionary tide—began asking themselves how
best to use “the incalculable resource of all these men on whom, unfortunately, we
will have to rely to save Italy,” in Greppi’s own words.17
We can rather approximately situate the birth of an Italian “rural ethic” in
Naples, sometime around the Parthenopean Republic of 1799. Its authors were
two of the protagonists of this experiment, Vincenzio Russo and Vincenzo Cuoco.
The former was the voice of abstract rhetoric of the republican government, of
antimodernism so radical that it was almost an apology for pauperism, and at the
same time, a partisan of extremely moderate social reforms. The latter, a survivor
of the bloody repression that had followed the reconquest of Naples, arrived at the
conclusion that rhetorical abuses detached from the people’s real interests had, in
the end, helped Cardinal Ruffo build his counterrevolutionary army on an ample
mass base, principally of peasants.18
The connection between the problem of popular participation in the “com-
mon cause” raised by Greppi and the failure of this first “passive revolution” in
Italian history provides us some insight, beyond the ideological representations,
into the complex network of relationships between the objective situation, the
wishes of the ruling classes, and the role of intellectuals, who have often become
the unhappy conscience of a poorly understood process.
Chapter 5
The Unhappy Consciousness

of Italian Development
The Discovery of the Real People
A ccording to Paolo Greppi, at the end of the eighteenth century Italian land-
owners found themselves caught between the Napoleonic armies and the
peasant masses who, he said, seemed ready at any moment to “cry, ‘To the winner
go the spoils’ and to help the French pillage the rich”1; so it was urgent, he contin-
ued, for these same landowners to persuade the ministers of the various peninsu-
lar states to deploy “two armies in the field, each of one hundred thousand men.”2
In the notes of this gentleman of Lombardy, Bollati sees evidence of three capital
discoveries: first, the existence of a country of seventeen million inhabitants; next,
the possibility, even the obligation, for landowners to federate out of common
interest; and finally, the necessity, if this federation is to survive, to transform the
peasants into consenting citizen-soldiers and turn them away from any tempta-
tion to rebel.3
None of Greppi’s wishes came to pass, for reasons worth further analysis, but
of these the most important surely is the polyphony (indeed, the cacophony) of
reactions to the suggestions coming from revolutionary France. Even if one con-
siders only those who did not militate against the Napoleonic armies, at least two
dissonant refrains emerge: first, the pragmatic realism of the Greppi’s, the Melzi
d’Eril’s, and other Lombard landowners; and, second, the idealism—ranging from
sentimental purism to dogmatic rigorism—of the leaders of the Parthenopean
Republic of 1799.
The lawyer Vincenzio Russo can be considered an archetype of metaphysi-
cal revolutionary idealism. After having been arrested and banished from the
Kingdom of Naples, he wrote from Rome, where he had taken refuge during the
ephemeral republic of 1798 to 1799, a sort of radically antimodern manifesto. The
theoretical postulate of his platform was that “he who extends commerce beyond
simple barter has forged the first links in the chain of slavery.” Russo went on to
preach the destruction of Italy’s leading ports, “a source of corruption,” and the
disappearance of the great cities, “favorable to despotism.”4 While the real people
of Rome revolted against the French troops barely two weeks after their arrival,
Russo’s notion of ideal humanity was rooted in the “sterile regions”: he cited the
mountain folk of Switzerland and the Apennines as models to follow.
One of his political adversaries was his friend Vincenzo Cuoco, a fellow leader
of the Neapolitan revolution of 1799. With Cuoco, the speculative bent of the
southern intellectuals, which in Milan had come into contact with the hard core
of social and political conflicts, transformed itself, to a degree, into the “conscious-
ness from without” introduced to a ruling northern class whose empiricism often
prevailed over coherent theoretical thought. It was not the first time, nor would
it be the last, that the “philosophy” of the south would come to the rescue of a
northern “pragmatism” lacking in great concepts.
Although he was critical of the dogmatic fervor of Vincenzio Russo, it was from
him that Cuoco borrowed the notion of a “peasant philosopher,” in order to forge a
“prototype of an Italian” whose health and vigor emanated precisely from his rural
origins. This ideological reversal of the relationship between city and country-
side could be explained by the possibility—rendered concrete by the conscription
of the masses—of resolving the problem of a national army, a problem that had
haunted partisans of Italian unity since Machiavelli. It was no longer a question,
as had been the case for Greppi, of improvising a military mobilization to face the
French, but rather of laying the bases of an institution on which the legitimacy
of a state would reside. Vincenzo Cuoco thus threw himself into the pedagogical
task of explaining to the landowners that the time for disdain of the people was
past, for it would henceforth be their responsibility to ensure the continuity and
the defense of property. Instead of disdain, it was now time to seek consensus: It
was necessary for the “predominant class” to share with “the servant class” all “the
benefits of civil life.”5
Other intellectuals, such as Berchet, Borsieri, Gioberti, and, especially, Man-
zoni, undertook the task of accompanying this peasant in his encounters with
industrial civilization.
Philanthropic Paternalism
Invisible to eighteenth-century observers, the peasant masses haunted the night-

mares of landowners late in that century and early in the next before transforming
themselves, during the Napoleonic domination, into “wild beasts to be tamed.”
Once the Austrian occupiers had again interposed their military and police shield
between the landowners and the masses, “it was no longer necessary (it was not yet
necessary) to manage their warlike energies.”6 The intellectual avant-garde could
deny historical evolution, but it could not go so far as to force the subordinate
classes back into the void from which the French Revolution had pulled them.
Instead, it adopted an air of philanthropic paternalism in their regard.
According to Gramsci, the intellectuals’ attitude of “paternal and ‘god-like’ pro-
tection” comes across as a sort of “relationship between two races,” a rapport estab-
lished on the model of the “Animal Protective League or the Anglo-Saxons’ Salvation
Army vis-à-vis the cannibals of Papua New Guinea.”7 The so-called “literature of
THE UNHAPPY CONSCIOUSNESS OF ITALIAN DEVELOPMENT 57
humbles” that resulted—Manzoni is its most illustrious representative—reflects

the intellectuals’ self-satisfaction, their sense of superiority.
Bollati notes that Manzoni represents, better than most, the fundamental
puzzle of the Risorgimento, namely, the “crossing of two vectors running in two
opposite directions”: on the one side, the objective necessity of channeling a coun-
try’s every energy toward the goal of constructing an independent state, and on
the other, the tendency of the ruling classes to “constrict, control, conserve” these
same energies, if only to stay on top of economic development so rapid that it risks
becoming subversive.8
The Augustinian concept of peace as “tranquillitas ordinis”9 was the most suit-
able representation of the thread from which the “revolutionary” weaves of the
Lombard bourgeoisie were made; thus the Catholic intellectuals became almost
naturally their avant-garde. Manzoni and other writers shared the privilege of rins-
ing the liberal laundry in the papal Tiber,10 notably with Niccolò Tommaseo and,
especially, with Vincenzo Gioberti, to whom one owes the “neo-Guelph” hypoth-
esis of Italian unification. Manzoni meantime played an absolutely exceptional
role in the attempts to build a national ideology—indeed, a unique role—serving
as a sort of bridge between the often fanciful romantic national archeology and
the more concrete needs of a nation that was starting to construct itself, beginning
with its language.
Although considered the most eminent Italian representative of this movement,
Manzoni was in reality a “critical” romantic. If he fully embodied the spirit of the
new literary movement, he was far more reticent about embracing all its ideolo-
gies and symbols. For him, real humanity of the sort that must be offered as both
example and model—especially for future Italians—was to be found not among
history’s active figures, but among their victims. “Guilt” resides not only among
“the emperors, the kings, the conquerors, the factious and the ambitious”11; it is
also found among those who cling to the fatal pretension that man can find within
himself the source of morality, can be the artisan of his own destiny. Manzoni
contends that this sin of pride inevitably produces a quest for possessions that can
never be fully sated and that can lead to certain evils, given the nature of human
instability. In the end, man must submit to the only certain and immutable law—
that which is revealed by God.
The Manzonian man, who draws his moral qualities from the unhappiness of
experience, is torn by a struggle between pride and punishment that is part of his
condition. It goes beyond history and, a fortiori, beyond social classes. Nonethe-
less, tossed out the door of philanthropic solidarity, social realities find their way
back in through the window of this imaginary construct: the man frozen in a his-
torical immobility is none other than the peasant; centuries have passed, leaving
him still in place, tirelessly carrying out the tasks that have befallen him.
“The Curse of the Proletariat”
The political immobility of the countryside, Galli della Loggia asserts, was a “con-
stant” of Italian life at least until the second half of the nineteenth century, mainly
due to an extremely prolonged “stagnation” in social relationships, which would

prove to be a fundamental element of Italian backwardness.12 The linkage between
rural immobilism and the incapacity to solve the problems that left Italy lagging
behind other European powers is particularly interesting; it allows us to verify the
conservative—rather, “antimodern”—character of Manzoni’s ideology.
As we have seen, a reactionary current always spreads within parts of the intel-
lectual elite as capitalist development advances. In Italy, beyond the doctrinaire
fanatics of antimodernity, à la Vincenzio Russo, who had only the most glancing
understanding of capitalism, there existed a grouping sufficiently familiar with this
new social organization to want to save the country from it. The Italian example is
not isolated: The “populist” movement of late-nineteenth century Russia took up
the same concept, evoking the existence of a “Russian exceptionalism” that would
allow it to move directly from a primitive community to a collective economy
without passing through capitalism. But while this movement “toward the people”
in Russia led numerous intellectuals to join directly in action and propaganda, in
Italy such practical gestures were rare and isolated; the dominant intellectual atti-
tude was essentially, as we have seen, one of condescending paternalism.
The two most important episodes of the Italian version of the movement
“toward the people”—those of 1844 under the brothers Bandiera and that of
Pisacane in 1857, all of them linked more or less to Mazzini—ultimately led to
a mobilization of the rural plebes, but a mobilization whose target was the very
people who had come to “liberate” them. For Gramsci, the structural reason for
the Pisacane failure was the absence of a platform, of a party, of a cadre trained to
lead a new state.13 And that brings us back to the heart of the problem: the separa-
tion between the supposed “national revolution” and the real “nation.”
To the empirical observation on the masses’ absence from the national unifica-
tion movement, Denis Mack Smith adds an important thought: The masses were
absent so long as the “civil war” between the old and new ruling classes did not
affect the conditions of their social existence, but when it did, he adds, the peasants
nearly regularly constituted a counterrevolutionary force.14 Thus the national Ital-
ian movement could no longer afford simply to ignore, to channel, or to mythicize
the peasant masses; it had to prevent them from being in a position to do harm.
The more developed countries had already recognized the impossibility of pro-
scribing class struggles, so the ruling Italian classes and their ideologues simply
proscribed the classes—or at least the system, which seemed, in its development,
to have provoked class struggles. In 1819, the Milanese landowner Giuseppe Pec-
chio, writing in the Conciliatore, described the misdeeds effected by large landhold-
ings, as well as the excessive use of machines in manufacturing. This observation
resulted from a study of industrialization in England where, Pecchio wrote, “two
years ago, the numerous population of factory workers rose up against the tyr-
anny of the bosses.”15 In 1829 another former contributor to the Conciliatore,
Gian Domenico Romagnosi, in an article on “British pauperism,”16 denounced
“the veritable slavery of the factory, absolutely analogous to the serfdom.” In 1841
the Piedmontese count Carlo Ilarione Petitti di Roreto questioned whether indus-
trial innovations were really always useful, particularly for an agricultural country
like Italy.17 Behind his philanthropic preoccupations, Petitti did not hide another
THE UNHAPPY CONSCIOUSNESS OF ITALIAN DEVELOPMENT 59
concern, raised by the ever-growing masses of “proletarians: a term selected to

designate the little people living day-to-day” who “are in a state of latent war
against their employers.”18 Even for Cesare Correnti of Milan, an organizer of the
1848 uprising, “the curse of the English proletariat”19 had to be exorcised.
Most prominent in this chorus of anticapitalist doubt—with the remarkable
absence of Cavour and Cattaneo—were thinkers, like Gioberti, who framed their
concepts in a broader philosophical context. For the latter, “an insufficient con-
sideration of the moral ingredients of wealth is the cause of numerous economic
errors and makes a great number of questions almost insoluble.”20 Like some of
the other authors mentioned above, Gioberti displayed his admiration for English
power and wealth, but he turned the problem upside down: it was not a ques-
tion of avoiding the British model, but rather of proposing the Italian model
to the British. The “turbulent democracy” into which the “Chartists’ abject fac-
tion” risked plunging England could be averted by embracing the “propensities
of Oxford,”21 that is, by reintegrating the Roman Catholic family. The reference to
Chartist movement is symptomatic: the return to Rome of the British prodigal son
not only would help replace “the moral ingredients” of capitalist wealth but also
would spare it the agonies of class struggle. This, then, was the model proposed for
Italian development.
An Imaginary Crucible
Paul Kennedy, in describing the situation of the different powers on the eve of
World War II, wrote that Mussolini’s Italy was one of the rare cases in all the his-
tory of human conflict when a country’s entry into war did more damage to its
allies than to its adversaries.22 What might at first seem like a “bon mot” or a para-
dox is in fact a thesis amply illustrated by a minutely detailed summary of the
structural fragility of Italy in the 1930s: a fragility due, according to Kennedy, to
the persistent dependence on small farming.23
Under Mussolini, the peasantry‘s “Catonist” function—as a rampart of social
stability—reached its apogee. It was no accident that the “virtues of rural life” and
of corporatist ideology were being glorified at the same time. But the resurrection
of corporatist theory from the fogs of medieval history was an ideological opera-
tion, one that cannot be attributed to fascism. It dated back another fifty years,
when Catholic social circles, pointing to the experience of the Catholic Friend-
ship Society of Joseph de Maistre, gave birth in June 1874 to the movement of
l’Opera dei Congressi, the Work of the Congress. Opposed to capitalism, bearers of
an individualistic and conflictual conception of social relationships, they exalted
the virtues of rural society, while viewing the cities as hotbeds of corruption and
impiety. Rerum Novarum, the encyclical promulgated by Pope Leo XIII in 1891,
offered a systematic framework for this social doctrine, founded on an unyielding
opposition to liberal economy, a reevaluation of the corporatist system, a condem-
nation of capitalism, and a demand for a “just salary.” The first “modern” Catho-
lic labor union, the Italian Confederation of Labor (CIL)—founded in 1919 to
stem the rapid rise of the General Confederation of Labor (CGL), the trade-union
organization linked to the Socialist Party—included in its platform “the abolition

of salaried workers and the collaboration between the classes, organized at the
trade-union level according to the corporatist and social-political model.”24
Starting in the first half of the nineteenth century, even before the Church had
expressed its position ex cathedra, these theses had been spread through Italy by
some renowned Catholic intellectuals. Following the logic of “moderate hege-
mony,” not only was there an a priori rejection of any identification between a
nation and a single class—namely, the bourgeoisie—but also the very possibility
of such an approach was ruled out. Therein resides one reason for Italy’s uncertain
national aspect: the clear and firm demand for such identification had, after all,
constituted a prime force behind the French revolutionary bourgeoisie.
Rather than do everything in their power to regain lost terrain, the leading
Italian classes satisfied themselves with contemplating the country’s backward-
ness and, indeed, transforming it into a specific native virtue, into a distinctive
characteristic of a supposed national identity. In doing so they went beyond even
the traditional distinctions between Catholic and secular culture. Taking a stand
against the “theory of rights,” and in particular against the “right to well-being,”
Giuseppe Mazzini demanded an Italian specificity not too different from what the
Catholics proposed: the Italian nation should be founded not on rights, but on
duties, he said, and the first of these should be to renounce any private or personal
demands in order to let them all meld jointly in the crucible of the Motherland.25
The final paradox largely explains the deficits that Italy had to overcome, pain-
fully, throughout its contemporary history: at the very moment when the unitary
state became a reality, the rural myth of the ancient agricultural civilization con-
fronted the harsh reality of a war led by the Italian army against the peasants of the
south and pursued by fiscal means against the peasants of the entire country. The
new state thus came into being as an entity that was foreign, even hostile, to a large
majority of the “real” Italian people. Even the official language of the new state
was unknown to 97.5 percent of the population, according to the “rough” calcula-
tion of Tullio De Mauro. From that point forward, the ability to speak Italian was
a “distinctive sign of one’s class.”26 After fifty years spent trying to paper over the
social differences in the mare magnum of the “people,” nothing could more strik-
ingly symbolize the gap between the planned Italian identity and its actual real-
ization—leaving the real people, in every way, as foreigners in their own country.
Chapter 6
A Culture without a Nation
Linguistic Dirigisme
A t the moment of Italian unification, the ruling Piedmontese class faced an

unexpected reality: Rather than governing a small, semi-French, mostly
homogeneous, subalpine region, it now had to govern an almost entirely Mediter-
ranean entity, disparate both geographically and in human terms. Deeply prag-
matic, these first rulers wasted no time contemplating their difficulties, but instead
plunged straight into what they considered the most urgent tasks facing them. The
thorniest of these, in their eyes, was the survival of the new state.
In the early years of unitary Italy, the fear that this barely constructed edifice
might collapse under the concentric attacks of the Catholic powers (Austria and
France) and of the Bourbons of Naples, exiled in the Pope’s court, outweighed all
other concerns. Thus, instead of any discussion of the formation of a “nation,”
the ruling classes gave immediate priority to the creation of the state, which is to
say the establishment of an administration and of a coercive, unitary governing
apparatus.
Paradoxically, it was precisely these coercive structures that proved to be the
most rapid and effective, at least in the short term, in a first “nationalization” of the
masses. Indeed, they succeeded, just years after the new state’s birth, in giving rise
to movements of rebellion that involved the real masses of the entire country. The
extremely unpopular wheat tax provoked, in December 1868 and January 1869, a
wave of revolts that spread from Lombardy through the entire peninsula, forcing
the army to intervene.1
But the best-known case was the contribution that mandatory military ser-
vice—especially during World War I—played in diffusing the “national” lan-
guage. Beginning in 1915, peasants from every region of Italy found themselves
at the fronts, communicating together for the first time, with army chaplains
often serving as intermediaries and interpreters. The language that provided a
common vehicle for communications was a new and original Italian, impreg-
nated with dialects and military jargon, in which the Piedmontese dialect of
the old hierarchies and the southern accents of the new ones predominated. It
thus took nearly sixty years of unitary life and a world political catastrophe for
a “national” language to begin to be understood (if almost never practiced) by a

majority of the Italian people.
A particularity of the Italian dialects—certainly the most original one—is that
their diffusion was, so to speak, “democratic.” In the other national entities that
sprung into being in the nineteenth century, a scholarly language, used by the
political, economic, and cultural elites, existed in opposition to the popular forms
of speech; in Italy, on the contrary, dialects were used by every social category not
only in private life but often in official and public occasions as well. The first Ital-
ian king hated speaking Italian; his prime minister, Camillo Benso di Cavour, felt
much more at ease with French or even English, and ministerial meetings were
regularly conducted in Piedmontese, until after unification.
In 1868, Alessandro Manzoni was named to head the Commission of the Min-
istry of Public Instruction, in charge of linguistic questions. For decades Manzoni
had dreamed of being able to contribute to the birth of the new unitary language,
but his wish had collided with another of his dearest hopes—for the revolution to
take place without a revolution. As the linguist Giacomo Devoto emphasizes, the
demand that unitary political institutions be linked to a unitary language encoun-
tered a key obstacle in “the social immobility accompanying the national revolu-
tion.”2 The persistence of dialects, adds another linguist, Tullio De Mauro, was the
consequence of “the plurisecular stagnation of the economic, social and intellec-
tual life of the country.”3
Manzoni favored a language imposed from top to bottom: Florence should thus
have fulfilled the centripetal role played in France by Paris, in Spain by Madrid,
and in England by London. This policy, later described as “dirigiste,” proved illu-
sory, and not just for the reasons mentioned by Devoto. Even the notion of send-
ing Tuscan teachers across the national territory to serve as “missionaries of the
language” failed in the end, principally because of the clear lack of structure in the
Italian educational system in the early decades of the unitary experience. Accord-
ing to a ministerial inquiry of 1910—fifty years after unification—two-thirds of
all classrooms were “inadequate” and half of the sixty thousand teachers were
“insufficient”; in some cities, the law explicitly authorized placing illiterate teach-
ers in charge of classes when necessary; and under the pretext that students did not
understand Italian, their teachers generally spoke in a dialect.4 Della Loggia quotes
the Economic Archives of Italian Unification as saying that in Tuscany, the land
of the “language missionaries,” only 20 percent of those who had attended school
could actually read.5 According to De Mauro, Manzoni’s “dirigiste” proposition
ultimately engendered “a new purism and a new pedantry”6 that had no practical
effect on language training or on a national conscience.
A Dead Language
As we have seen, the linguistic tools used for centuries by the various populations
that were now brought together under the virtual name of “Italians” created more
division than cohesion. The persistence of dialects is like a dust cloud left by the
peninsula’s history of fragmentation; the Italian language, for its part, was just
A CULTURE WITHOUT A NATION 63
one more sign of not only regional and local divisions (sometimes even divisions
between a city’s neighborhoods)7 but also of social divisions.
As asserted by Carlo Gozzi, Manzoni himself, Luigi Settembrini, Antonio
Gramsci, and others, Italian was for centuries a “dead language,” resuscitated with
the goal of becoming the koinê—a standard language—of populations of dispa-
rate origins and languages, a little like Hebrew for the state of Israel.
After the fall of the communes and the affirmation of the principalities, writes
Gramsci, Italian became “yet again, a written and not a spoken language, of the
learned and not of the nation,”8 like Latin before it. The same intellectuals who,
even in the nineteenth century, saw the resurrection of Italian as offering a here-
tofore absent “linguistic motherland,” actually used it almost exclusively in their
writing, and often as a second language, after French or a dialect.
Before unification, the “language question” had remained in the domain
of artistic production; with unification, it was supposed to be rethought with
a view to serving the communications needs of the new Italians. The failure
of the Manzonian approach shows that it had become impossible to favor any
other approach based on personal preferences. The theses of the “dirigistes” were
opposed by the “liberal” theses of the man considered the most eminent linguist
of his time, Graziadio Isaia Ascoli, who placed his hopes for the diffusion of
the national language in the improvement of the cultural, economic, and social
conditions in the country.9
In fact, it was not until certain major upheavals shook the bases of “social
immobility” that the Italian language started, however slowly, to become the
collective patrimony of the Italian people. As with other social phenomena, the
moments when this historic movement sped up or slowed down (such as political
unification, the world war, or the “economic boom” of the 1950s) were also the
moments when the propagation of the Italian language sped up or slowed down.
Tullio De Mauro describes four social processes that were largely responsible for
the progressive linguistic unification of the country: the actions of the organs of
the unitary state, industrialization, urbanization, and interregional demographic
exchanges. In fact, the rural flight, which underlay the migration toward cities and
industrializing countries—is simply the flip side of industrialization. If industrial-
ization was the most important social vector of linguistic unification, then clearly the
“agriculturalist” policy adopted by the first unitary governments (despite Cavour’s
resistance) retarded any benefits that the “invisible hand” could have brought—in
language, too—to the puny and vacillating “visible hand” of the state.
As for the latter, the institution on which Manzoni’s hopes largely resided—
schools—probably contributed the least to the diffusion of the Italian koinê. In
contrast, the establishment of a unitary bureaucratic apparatus played a hardly
negligible role. On the one hand, it favored the concentration in Rome of a ruling
class, drawn from the regions, which was forced on a daily basis to use the com-
mon language; on the other hand, by conferring tasks on the peripheral organs of
the new state, it established them as outposts of the Italian language.
Nonetheless, as we have seen, it was compulsory military service that played
the central role in the diffusion of the language. If a schools inspector in Palermo
province in 1864 could deem “satisfactory” an attendance rate of 30 percent for
boys and 18 percent for girls10—this, though attendance supposedly was “obliga-
tory”—the state was far less yielding in dealing with those who sought to avoid
mandatory military service, going so far as to deport, or even summarily execute,
draft dodgers.
During the first decade of the twentieth century, one could see empirical
evidence that a direct and proportional relationship existed between the end of
“social immobility” and the spread of instruction: During this period of the first
“economic miracle” on the peninsula, the avoidance rate for mandatory schooling
fell rapidly, to 25 percent. Moreover, the zones of “linguistic conservation,” the
countryside, began to depopulate, as people moved to the centers of “linguistic
innovation,”11 that is, the cities. “Thus,” wrote the linguist Matteo Giulio Bartoli in
1930, “the cities, which yesterday were the cradles of dialectal variety, will become
their tombs.”12
The “Italian Genius” Abroad
As to the role played by eighteenth-century intellectuals in the global diffusion

of Italian culture, Gramsci raises the question of whether “the cosmopolitanism
of Italian intellectuals” is of the same nature as “the cosmopolitanism of other
national intellectuals.”13 The response, as emerges throughout his writings, is neg-
ative: in the Italian case, he states, cosmopolitan character and national character
are opposed and mutually exclusive.
Catholic universalism also weighed on this, with an absolutely singular char-
acter in comparison to the Church of Rome’s other “national” experiences. The
demand for a centralist approach to counter feudal division could certainly not be
satisfied in Italy by a Church that was itself directly or indirectly feudal; nonethe-
less, writes Amadeo Bordiga, the Italian communes, managed by artisans, bankers,
and merchants with relationships across Europe, viewed the Church’s universal
influence as a sort of subsidiary political network.14 To this “passive” function—
the Church used by the nascent Italian bourgeoisie as a sort of facsimile of the
universal Roman Empire—one must add the “active” function, linked to the needs
for defense, development, and independence in the face of the great European
monarchies. These necessities, Gramsci writes, “led the Church to turn ever more
to Italy to seek the bases for its supremacy and to the Italians for the personnel to
man its organizational apparatus.”15
This character of the Catholic Church, both Italian and universal, in Galli della
Loggia’s view, explained the intrinsically antinational role that it played from the
Middle Ages to 1929, the year the Concordat was signed. Its independence vis-à-
vis the state and society was facilitated by the lack of state unity in Italy, and so the
Church militated actively against such unity.16 Thus della Loggia continues, Ital-
ians were subjected to a double-negative consequence: the Church was an obstacle
to their national plans, and they were unable, in contrast to other Europeans, to
count on “the precious support of a national Church.”17
Whatever the cause, the absence of a state, of a central political power capable
of offering a national perspective to the wide sweep of the intellectual energies of
the peninsula, lay behind the emigration of the most active and gifted of Italians.
In order to be able to exercise their talents, the latter found themselves having
to put themselves in the service of some foreign power, thus losing all specifi-
cally “Italian” character. The reason Christopher Columbus sailed in the service of
Spain and not of an Italian republic, Gramsci observes, “must be sought in Italy
and not among the Turks or in America,” those generally blamed for the decadence
of the peninsula.18
Leaving aside the emigration of laborers, which began on a massive scale only
late in the nineteenth century, the Italians who gained fame and importance
outside their native land in the most disparate areas were like the “adventurers”
described by Giuseppe Prezzolini. This group, as Prezzolini wrote, would—had
they grown up in a “civil and well-ordered society”—have become “ministers of
state and the most distinguished of diplomats, eminent generals or admirals, pro-
fessors capable of arousing their students’ intellectual curiosity, excellent writers
rich in ideas”; yet all of them, Prezzolini concluded, for want of a supportive state,
elected to try their chances abroad.19
Among a great number of examples, Gramsci recalls that, in the war of Flanders
in the late sixteenth century, a large number of military men, many of particular
genius, were Italians.20 One might also cite two other illustrious examples, both
of them paradigmatic, yet verging on the paradoxical. The first is that of the fate
of Prince Eugene, the only representative of the Savoy family who is still famous
through much of the Christian world for his military virtues.21 Another example
is the battle of Lissa in 1866, where Italian admirals in the service of the Austrian
Empire prevailed rather easily over the quite new military fleet of the Italian king-
dom commanded by Admiral Persano.
This “cosmopolitan function of the cultivated Italian classes”22 had a prejudi-
cial effect on the birth of an Italian cultural identity, a prejudice that men of letters
inherited and in turn passed on through the centuries.
The “Foreign Genius” in Italy
As to the defeat of 1866, Pasquale Villari observed that its reasons should not be
sought so much in the “quadrilateral” of Mantua, Verona, Legnago, and Peschiera,
as in the “quadrilateral of 17 million illiterates and of 5 million Arcadians.”23 As
conservative as he was, Villari did not content himself, as did some of his contem-
poraries, with snide references to the cultural inadequacies of the lower classes; he
was equally critical of the shortcomings of the ruling classes, imbued over the cen-
turies with a cultural education that was dominated, as Gramsci put it, by “empha-
sis, the declamatory style, and stylistic hypocrisy.”24
During the same period when, in France, a generation of men “of science, of
arts and of crafts” began to rally together in the pursuit of “common ideas of com-
mon interests”—thus giving birth to a veritable “party of philosophers”25—in Italy,
each intellectual was entrenched in his own garden, protecting it fiercely from any
outside influences. In France, by bringing together their scattered energies, phi-
losophers had applied themselves to studying their times, with the conviction that
it was only by exploring the limits within which one operates that one learns to
move beyond them. In Italy, all the cultivated classes remained prisoners of their
situation, even when the French armies brought them the “liberty” that they had
not managed to achieve on their own.
In the eighteenth century, Italian cultural circles remained essentially under
French influence. After the “Great Century,” France’s political, economic, and cul-
tural influence radiated across virtually all the so-called civilized world. But its
effects were particularly important in Italy, because it did not enrich and complete
a vibrant local culture, but, in a sense, replaced it, filling the voids left by an inad-
equate national tradition. Inasmuch as the Italian language was arbitrary and very
rarely used even by representatives of the “cultivated classes,” another linguistic
medium was needed to foster the circulation of ideas and of men as well as of mer-
chandise, which even then had long ago spilled beyond the narrow confines of the
“shadow of the local bell tower” within which one spoke one’s own dialect. This
medium was, quite naturally, French.
The linguist Melchiorre Cesarotti observed, regarding the end of the century,
that there “was no even slightly cultivated person for whom [the French language]
was not familiar and almost natural: the library of worldly women and men is only
French.”26 During Napoleon’s domination of the peninsula, the historian Carlo
Denina, analyzing the junction between the subjective demands of the nascent
Italian bourgeoisie and the existing cultural and political conditions, went so far as
to propose the outright adoption of French as Italy’s national language.27
Most of the authors responsible for the literary glory of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries had to struggle to achieve a mastery of Italian that equaled
the ease with which they had mastered French and their own dialect. Vittorio
Alfieri recounted in his autobiography how he had first written in French before
“sinking into the grammarian’s abyss” in order to put himself “in a condition to
know [his] language, as a man of Italy.”28 Francesco de Sanctis writes that Alfieri
had decided to go live in Florence to “disfrancesizzarsi” (de-Frenchify) and “into-
scanirsi” (Tuscanize) himself; and once, after having worked and reworked some
verses, he cried out: “Gira, volta, ei son francesi” (Turn them and turn them again,
they are still French!).29 Manzoni, in a personal letter, compared the “ease” with
which he had written the Lettre à M. Chauvet sur l’unité de temps et de lieu dans
la littérature (1820), in French, with the “suffering endured” during the rewriting
of Promessi Sposi.30 Before becoming a celebrated writer and the author of impor-
tant dictionaries of the Italian language, Niccolò Tommaseo, born in Sibenik, on
the Dalmatian coast, where Venetian dialects competed with Croatian, began his
apprenticeship as a writer in dialect and in Latin, displaying “a skill that his first
compositions in Italian did not manage to equal.”31 Having noticed, during a stroll
in Rome, that Giovanni Verga expressed himself “with difficulty and with numer-
ous imperfections” in Italian, whereas he spoke easily in Sicilian with some sailors
he chanced to meet, the writer Edoardo Scarfoglio wondered “why Verga doesn’t
have the Sicilians he writes about speak in Sicilian.”32 Through the first half of the
twentieth century, several of the most celebrated writers—Gabriele D’Annunzio,
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Giuseppe Ungaretti, and Curzio Malaparte, for
example—continued to write with equal ease in French or Italian.
One might say, as Sergio Romano did, that the entire history of Italian literature
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is marked by a certain linguistic precar-
iousness, by a sense that the relationship between the artist and his principal tool
was, in a real way, artificial.33 But, as Gramsci reminds us, “Every time the question
of language resurfaces one way or another, it is because a series of other problems
are lining themselves up at the front of the stage.” The most important of these was
“the development and the enlargement of the ruling classes.”34
Chapter 7
The Difficult Italianization

of the Piedmont
A Rib of France
W hen he arrived in Turin in 1831, the Tuscan writer Cesare De Laugier

noticed with some amazement a sign, in the direction from which he had
just come, that read “Road to Italy.” When he asked the significance of this, he was
told in French: “Do you not realize you’re in Piedmont, and not in Italy?” In an
1855 text, the historian Cesare Balbo recalled that the elder members of his family,
when they left the Piedmont, would say that they were going to Italy.1
The Piedmont is hardly the only region with few ties with Italy. What is par-
ticular is that the country’s unification began in this region, which, as the federalist
Enrico Cenni put it in 1861, had “the palest color of Italianity.”2 According to Galli
della Loggia, “from a geolithic point of view,” this was a veritable case of outside
“interference” in Italian affairs; it contributed to making the pursuit of a national
identity problematic and laborious.3
The Piedmont administrative region as we know it today is a recent creation,
born in 1912 by joining the “statistical provinces” created in 1864 into “statistical
regions” of no administrative character whatsoever. The name “Piedmont,” in the
beginning, had a purely geographical meaning (“at the foot of the mountains”). In
the twelfth century, when it first appeared, it still had its original connotation and
referred only to the territory reaching from the Alps to the upper reaches of the
Po. It later expanded to include the entire area at the foot of the Alps, from Aosta
to Nice, and some territories that today are Piedmontese—the plains east of the
Sesia, Asti, and the Montferrat—have not been part of it for long.
Simply put, the Savoy dynasty anchored its power to an ethnic and territo-
rial continuity that has existed, one might say, forever. The Roman administrative
division established under Augustus gave rise to the province of the Cottian Alps;
its capitals were Susa (now in Italy), Briançon, and Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne (now
in France). This unity was confirmed by the episcopal subdivision in the Middle
Ages, which had supplanted the administrative organization of the Roman Empire.
It was subjected to the vicissitudes of war between the Francs and the Lombards,
yet, it never gave birth to any “natural” border along the crest of the Alps.4
The Savoy dynasty worked to reassemble the feudal mosaic. It used as its base
communications routes that were often shared but that depended on control of
the peaks through which trade transited between northern and southern Europe:
Mont Cénis and the Saint Bernard passes. This family, with its ancient Burgun-
dian roots, whose authority extended to the Rhone and the banks of Lake Geneva,
considered itself a repository of the frontier culture that united the French, Italian,
and Swiss worlds. When, in the wake of the peace of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559,
Emmanuel Philibert transferred the capital of the duchy from Chambéry to Turin,
there was no particular sense that it had changed countries, all the more so since
the new capital lived entirely under French influence.5
The decision to transfer the capital to Turin indicated a fundamental politi-
cal reorientation. This was not, however, dictated by a supposed Italian national
vocation, but rather it was due to the uncomfortable position of the duchy, which
existed as a sort of earthenware pot lodged between the cast-iron vessels of France
and the Empire. After the Hundred Years War, the political homogenization of the
French kingdom and the wars of Italy, Savoy’s western possessions found them-
selves under objective threat. Thus the choice of bilingualism, along with other
measures geared toward a progressive “Italianization” of the duchy, had an emi-
nently political significance. This held not only a defensive character vis-à-vis
France but also a view toward later enlargements of the kingdom, which were cer-
tainly more likely in the direction of a weak and divided Italy—and, conceivably,
of Switzerland—than of a strong and centralized France.
Finally, to the extent that one can speak of an “Italian choice,” one cannot do so
before the eighteenth century. It was then that Charles Emmanuel and his entou-
rage broke the precarious bilingual equilibrium and encouraged the use of Italian.
The attestation of Cesare de Laugier shows, nevertheless, the point to which Pied-
montese life remained foreign to these measures, which went against the entire
historic and cultural tradition of the region.
The National State of Savoy
In a famous passage of his De vulgari eloquentia, from 1303, Dante Alighieri defini-
tively excludes (“et si quis dubitat, illum nulla nostra solutione dignamur” [if anyone
doubts it, we would not consider this worthy of a response]) Piedmontese from
the list of commonly spoken Italian tongues.6 As we have seen, Montaigne largely
confirmed this judgment 250 years later. For the former Florentine prior, as for
the chairman of the Parliament of Bordeaux, this was an empirical observation;
modern linguistic studies would later provide scientific confirmation. Linguists
grant Piedmont the particular status of “border land,” with all the ambiguity the
term implies; the specific political calculation involved added to the ambiguity.
The choice of bilingualism for the duchy of Savoy carried with it (and, in a
way, implied) a fundamental contradiction. On the French side, it merely institu-
tionalized the use of a language already widely employed, even among the lower
classes, in view of an effective political unification. But on the Italian side, it was
a juridical fiction, to the extent that there was an attempt to impose by decree
THE DIFFICULT ITALIANIZATION OF THE PIEDMONT 71
a language hardly known outside intellectual circles, and even intellectuals were
highly divided as to its use.
Constanza Arconati noted that, three centuries after the arrival of the dukes in
Turin, the “three national languages [of Piedmont] are French, Piedmontese and
Genovese,” even though, as she underlines, “only French was understood by every-
one.”7 As we have seen, the princes of Savoy themselves used Piedmontese and
French as “national languages”: the use of dialect helped to create a sort of famil-
iarity with their subjects, even the most humble of them, paradoxically facilitating
their sociocultural integration in their chosen region.8
But it was not just Piedmont’s linguistic specificity that marginalized the region
in comparison to the rest of the peninsula. There was also the fact that Piedmont
had not experienced the urban flowering that was such a salient characteristic
of Italian history, and that while in the rest of communal Italy the first collec-
tive emancipations of serfs dated to the thirteenth century, Emmanuel Philibert’s
sixteenth-century attempts to abolish the significant remains of servitude in his
state collided with a highly conservative social and historic framework.
According to Bollati, the effort at renewal, which stemmed from a desire to
follow modern Europe’s footsteps, led not to the birth of the early core of a future
national state, but to “a veritable national state itself,” on the model of the great
monarchies.9 State structures were transformed and consolidated; the goal was to
reinforce the principle of subordinating private interests to a central power. Par-
liaments were the key instrument of this action, while the creation of provinces,
prefectures, and a Council of State helped in forming a modern administrative
structure. As we will see, this evolved form of state was to constitute Piedmont’s
specific contribution to the Italian cultural panorama of the eighteenth century,
and would be a particularly important trump card for Turin during the nine-
teenth-century process of Italian unification. But it was in terms of military orga-
nization that the process of modernization begun by Emmanuel Philibert left the
most enduring mark, from at least three viewpoints: of the independence of the
state; of the subjection of feudal potentates; and in the birth of an alleged Pied-
montese specific “nature”10.
As for this last aspect, it was the military tradition that, according to Balbo,
explained the “greater solidity and the lesser vivacity”11 of the Piedmontese when
compared to the Lombards. This “natural” quality intermingled with the nature
and history of the dynasty: the habit of commanding and obeying the confidence
“in the calming values of bureaucratic regularity”12 were legacies that Piedmont
transmitted to Italy. This heritage was to prove vitally important during Italy’s
critical moments, but would be a major handicap in times when Italy was at its
most dynamic.
Piedmont’s Lag
According to Piedmontese historians of the first half of the nineteenth century, the
region’s “natural” quality reflected a mixture of military tradition, administrative
solidity, and social conservativism. If this correlation of factors indeed underlay
Piedmont’s social order, it clearly was destined to morph from a stabilizing ele-
ment into a multiplier of instability once any of the factors entered into crisis. That
has been the case each time the jealously preserved principle of social homogeneity
has collided with some new historic development. So it was in the eighteenth cen-
tury, when certain eastern regions were incorporated into the Kingdom of Savoy
whose social relationships dominating in the countryside differed significantly
from those typifying rural Piedmont.13 And so it was certainly when Piedmont
felt the shocks of various international upheavals: whether political catastrophes
like occupation under Napoleon; or new conditions emerging in world markets,
as in the 1870s, when the end of the free-trade cycle gave a coup de grace to the
“agriculturist path to economic development” that the Piedmontese had followed.
It is important to recall that Piedmont’s lag behind the rest of Italy proved both
a blight and a blessing for the House of Savoy. There is no doubt, for example,
that the region’s social conditions at the point when the capital was transferred to
Turin were among the peninsula’s worst. Yet this immaturity put the duchy in a
potentially favorable situation compared to the other Italian states; while the oth-
ers found themselves at the start of a phase of senescence, the duchy could be seen
as having a certain youth, with prospects of considerable growth and develop-
ment. Moreover, from the end of the sixteenth century, Piedmont-Savoy appeared
(along with Venice, which was possibly even less Italian than Turin) to be the only
Italian state that had maintained its independence in the face of the omnipresent
Spanish guardianship ratified at Cateau-Cambrésis.
But the Savoys’ objectives were not national, they were territorial and dynastic,
and their policy of state reform must be placed in this strategic perspective. Even
at this point, Piedmont’s development lagged behind the rest of the peninsula.
When Victor Amedeus II reformed the administration of his state, developed the
University of Turin, and fought against abuses by the clergy and the nobility, notes
Procacci, the Medici still reigned in Florence, Naples had yet to regain its indepen-
dence, and Habsburg reformism had not yet reached Milan. But the advantage was
only apparent, and it was transitory. Rather than anticipating the great reforms of
the eighteenth century, the Kingdom of Piedmont attempted to create for itself
structures worthy of a “great European monarchy,” but based (though with a few
decades’ delay) on the classic scheme of absolutism. Thus, by opting for a protec-
tionist mercantilism, the Savoy king completely ignored the liberalization of land
and merchandise that was taking shape in Lombardy and Tuscany, and he encour-
aged the trends toward the integration of a nearly invisible bourgeoisie with the
diffusion of the “bourgeois gentilhommes” who financed the public debt even as
they shed their entrepreneurial vestments.
Moreover, the new “ruling class,” created to manage the apparatus of absolutism,
was composed of skillful, hardworking, and meticulous executors, but, as Quazza
writes, men lacking “the general capacities of judgment that politics demands.”14
Finally, the reforms engendered a malaise among the traditional nobility by accel-
erating a process that marginalized them, to the benefit of a “service nobility.” The
result was that the old dominant classes felt threatened by change even though
other social classes did not feel advantaged.
THE DIFFICULT ITALIANIZATION OF THE PIEDMONT 73
Thus some of the factors that had touched off the decline of France from
the end of the seventeenth century to the beginning of the eighteenth century
found their way to the Piedmont, aggravated by the latter’s backwardness vis-à-vis
the rest of Italy and of Europe. The signing of a concordat with the Church, the
resumption of persecutions of the Jews and the Waldensians, the arrest of cer-
tain intellectuals like Alberto Radicati di Sostegno15 and Pietro Giannone, and the
dismissal from the university of these same professors who had supported the
reform process were, from the first half of the century, among the telltale signs of a
stunningly rapid regression: Turin, as Procacci writes, rapidly became the grayest
of Italian capitals, the best protected against the spread of the Enlightenment, by
imposing the barrier of censorship, “the barracks and the Boeotia of enlightened
Italy,”16 Piedmont’s noninvolvement in the tumultuous and changing history of
the rest of the peninsula made possible this original process, which helps under-
stand the seeming mystery that allowed this region, “politically and intellectually
underdeveloped”17 in the eighteenth century, to take a role, a century later, leading
the unification of Italy.
Chapter 8
The Difficult
Piedmontization of Italy
Piedmont as a Political Party
I n 1824 Giacomo Leopardi wrote that “as the nation has no center, there is not
really an Italian public.”1 The situation had not greatly changed thirty-seven
years later. When Italy unified, it suffered from two main defects, as Sabino Cassese
put it: that of being “a state without a nation” and that of suffering from a “chronic
weakness of its ruling class.”2 As we go forward, let us keep in mind this correlation
between the absence of a “center,” the weakness of a national “ruling class,” and the
absence of an “Italian public.”
The notion of a “center” involves several characteristics, including the geo-
graphic, cultural, and economic senses; the Italy of 1861 lacked all three at once.
The principal reason, as we have seen, lay in the very conditions of the process
of unification, which resulted not so much from the work of politicians emerg-
ing from the struggles of the Risorgimento as from a fortuitous mixture of sev-
eral exceptional circumstances. It was thus necessary to create from scratch a new
ruling class, and to do so with men lacking both in experience and in national
vocation.
It would not be accurate, however, to suggest that the Italy of the 1860s was
completely lacking in political leaders with a sense of the “national interest,” as
we understand that term today. To the contrary, the problem was that there were
too many of them. There was a Piedmontese “national” ruling class, a Lombard
“national” ruling class, another from Emilia, and others from Tuscany, Rome,
Naples, and Sicily, just to mention the most important of them. As the preuni-
tary states were at such highly different stages of development, the organization
of interest groups within the new Italian state entity occurred not “horizontally,”
which is to say through the representation of the interests of the various classes,
but “vertically,” that is, through the representation of the interests of the regions.
This was evident even at the level of parliamentary groupings: within the Des-
tra, there was notably a standing Piedmontese delegation, a Tuscan faction (called
Consorteria), a Lombard faction and an Emilian faction.
In this struggle between regional parties, it was Piedmont—the least Italian

of all the regions—that assumed the leading role. Nonetheless, most historians
agree that there was little alternative to Piedmontese leadership. They offer several
explanations. First, it was the ruling class of Turin that managed to turn the inter-
national situation to advantage and pull off the process of unification. Second, as
we have seen, only Piedmont had succeeded in its political independence. Third,
independence had guaranteed a continuity of institutions and customs that, bol-
stered by the Albertine Statute of 1848, had helped insert Piedmont, and later
Italy, into the current of European liberalism. Fourth, the tepid response, even the
overt hostility, of other regions of the peninsula to the unitary concept meant that
parts of their ruling classes were excluded from the subsequent Italian experience.
Last but not least, Piedmont was sufficiently weak, sufficiently small, sufficiently
peripheral, and sufficiently not very Italian that the local ruling classes of the other
states of the peninsula could accept its hegemony as a lesser evil.
All the arguments for some other center for national political life faced correspond-
ing major handicaps. Rome was a sort of natural center for obvious historic, cultural,
and geographic reasons; Naples was the most populous city on the peninsula, and
capital of the largest state; Milan’s economic weight was too great; Florence, in addition
to its tradition and its certified “Italianity,” had long been the most liberal capital. The
affirmation of one of them would have constituted, in the eyes of all the others, a much
more cumbersome weight and a far harder obstacle to surmount than the choice of
the subalpine capital. To all that one must add the desire to confront Europe with a fait
accompli, in order to avoid what seemed the imminent risk of having the peninsula’s
barely achieved unity placed in question. All these factors made the new state more an
enlargement of the old Piedmont than a new and original political organism.
Since political distinctions, at the dawn of unitary Italy, were based not on class,
but on region, differences over the economic and social choices to be made seemed
less urgent than those involving the relationship between the dominant region and
the other centers of local power. In this regard, the debate in Turin revolved around
two principal options and a secondary option. The first, advocated by Cavour, fore-
saw a rebalancing of the new political entity around Rome, and this in the medium
term. For the second, the unitary process demanded the assimilation of the other
states to the state of Piedmont, to its institutions and to its laws, with a view to creat-
ing a “certain identity of thought and of feelings around the fundamental problems
of the state.”3 The third, minority view, was represented by those who were nostal-
gic for “Piemons felix”; for them, the supposedly harmonious development of the
Kingdom of Savoy would be definitively disturbed by this union against nature with
“unhappy populations lacking morals, lacking courage, lacking education.”4
Cavour eventually prevailed, and in March 1861 the new Italian Parliament
approved the principle of Rome as capital. But this did not mean that the oppo-
nents of Rome had forgotten their reluctance, nor that the functionaries and mili-
tary men of Piedmont did not storm the rest of Italy as if it were a conquered land.
That is why the “Piedmontization” of Italy was seen as abusive by the other
regions—even as “the last of the barbarian invasions”5—and behind it came the
most serious and murderous of all the wars fought by the Italian armies in the
nineteenth century: that against the brigantaggio.
THE DIFFICULT PIEDMONTIZATION OF ITALY 77
Centralism and Decentralization
Proposals advanced by certain Piedmontese liberals even before 1848—calling for

the establishment with other states of the peninsula of a customs union, the con-
struction of a national rail network, the unification of currencies, and the stan-
dardization of measures—showed that at least some members of Turin’s ruling
class were aware that the only path to development had to involve the formation
of a national market.
In the 1840s, the Piedmontese state promoted development with ever more
evident determination. This acceleration is confirmed by a study of Turin’s budget
from the Restoration until 1850: between 1820 and 1830, public spending rose by
10.15 percent; from 1830 to 1840, by 11.3 percent; and then in the years from 1840
to 1850 it took a spectacular leap, 262.44 percent.6 Beginning in the 1850s, this
process continued under Cavour’s direction, as new approaches were adopted on
customs, fiscal, and administrative matters.
Cavour’s superiority flowed from the realization that any political option is
effective only to the extent that it takes account of the constraints imposed by
“determined historic connections.” His ability to adapt, rapidly and without par-
ticular scruple, to even the most unexpected of new circumstances allowed him to
preserve a basic strategic perspective for the productive Italian classes.
His capacity for adaptation was suddenly tested by the unexpected unification;
one could almost speak of a theoretical conversion. Though in his previous politi-
cal programs he had always advocated the principle of self-government, Cavour
did not hesitate to drop this and become the fiercest partisan of centralism the
moment that regional autonomy seemed to lure those who might be tempted to
challenge unification.
Nevertheless, Cavour exploited every facet of this ambiguous oscillation
between self-government and centralization in order to accelerate the unification
process once that had become a concrete possibility. When he returned to power
in January 1860, after the Villafranca episode, he began by criticizing the “expe-
ditive method” by which the annexation of Lombardy had been undertaken. In
a speech to parliament on May 26, 1860—the day Garibaldi began the siege of
Palermo—he promised to create a commission to ensure the specific needs of the
regions that chose to unite with Piedmont.
Between his May 26 speech and his letter of December 18—with its central-
ist and resolutely unitary tone—the prime minister had availed himself of every
nuance available on his political palette in order to construct a complex system
of alliances between the different parts of the peninsula. He had first soothed the
irritated and disappointed Lombards, even as he coaxed the Emilians and the Tus-
cans while winking in the direction of the Sicilians, who were rebelling over the
disrespect shown by the regime in Naples to their historic identity. Later, when
Piedmontese laws began to be applied in the annexed states, the commission that
had been promised in May quickly drowned in a sea of vague and timid proposals,
to the great relief of the many Piedmontese who had supported the Risorgimento
on the condition that the supremacy of their laws and traditions be explicitly rec-
ognized. The progressive decline of the regionalist approach could only benefit the
different municipalities, whose autonomy would most likely be greater in relation

to a central government than in relation to regional capitals.
The axis around which this oscillating policy revolved was Cavour’s persever-
ance in asserting the need to shift the capital of the new kingdom to Rome. In his
conception of a balance of power à l’italienne, Rome perfectly fulfilled the require-
ment of a capital that was not too strong, not too peripheral, not identifiable with
a specific dynasty, and having a nonnational governmental tradition. Rome was a
“neutral” city, equidistant from “strong” cities—though strong for different rea-
sons—like Milan and Naples, either of which would have upset the precarious
unitary balances had it been given an excessively important role. But it was also
distant from Turin, which, by virtue of the spread of its laws, its institutions and its
personnel throughout the peninsula, was no longer the modest city—the “lesser
evil”—of the preunification period.
It would take another forty years for a “Roman party” to begin to appear, with
its policy of conquest and occupation of the state, and for its opposite, an anti-
Roman polemic.7 Those forty years were dominated by a slow transition from
“Piedmontization” to the nationalization of the state administrative machine.
Italy Under Piedmontese Guardianship
The state of emergency in the early years of the new state’s existence justified, even
in the eyes of the Lombard Stefano Jacini, a “temporary dictatorship.”8 For the
federalist and southerner Gaetano Salvemini, a centralized administration was an
absolute necessity, considering the administrative anarchy of southern Italy.9
This centralized regime, however, proved to be far from “temporary.” To the
contrary, it became an almost distinctive mark of Italian political life. It survived
the transformist earthquakes, was raised to the level of a state religion by fascism,
and, finally, was surreptitiously preserved by the republican regime despite the
great decentralizing principles set out in the Constitution of 1948. Even in June
2006, Italians rejected, in a referendum, a constitutional reform calling for the
devolution of greater powers to the regions, a reform sought by the center-right
coalition and fiercely resisted by the center-left coalition.
Thus unification took political responsibilities away from the regional capitals,
without, however, managing to grant them to a strong central power. It is true
that the essential policy lines undertaken by Cavour were, in a certain measure,
determined by events themselves. Still, it is impossible to deny that their applica-
tion gave rise to a sort of heterogenesis of ends. With the sacrifice of democrats as
potential political personnel, the thus-impoverished ruling class had to deal, with-
out the necessary practical experience, with problems far exceeding its capacities
of adaptation and response. What is more, “Piedmontization” soon transformed
into a force of conservation, indeed of self-conservation.
The determination of Cavour and of the moderates to free themselves from
all democratic and Garibaldian interference was both an inspiration and a neces-
sity of the strategy of unification. To be sure, the most determined elements of
the Italian national avant-garde were found in the camps of the democrats and
THE DIFFICULT PIEDMONTIZATION OF ITALY 79
the republicans. But their actions had led to a litany of failures, whereas Cavour’s
strategy had been crowned with success. Not only were the democrats, with their
subjectivism and unpredictability, incapable of developing a strategy based on the
interests of a class aspiring to become a national ruling class, but they constantly
risked undercutting that strategy. Gramsci emphasizes that the moderates repre-
sented a relatively homogeneous social group, which means that their politics saw
relatively modest swings, whereas the democrats, as Gobetti put it, comprised “a
people of originals, of unemployed and of civil servants,”10 and thus had such large
swings of position that the moderates could easily exploit them.11
The “Piedmontization” of public life extended into the administration of the
state from its summit to its periphery, from the formalization of juridical continu-
ity between the Piedmontese and Italian kingdoms to the holding of plebiscites,
from the decision to maintain the dynastic continuity of Victor Emmanuel to the
choice of prefects; it included the laws of 1859—extended to the entire peninsula
in 1865—and the men given ministerial responsibilities in the different postuni-
tary executives.
By Emilio Gianni’s calculations, of the fifteen Italian governments in the period
1861 through 1876, the men of Piedmont occupied 28.8 percent of the posts, fol-
lowed by Tuscany with 11.6 percent, Emilia with 10.3 percent, and finally the south
with 11.6 percent. Of the eight presidents of the Council of Ministers, five were
Piedmontese (Cavour, Rattazzi, La Marmora, Menabrea, and Lanza) and three were
“Piedmontized” (Farini, Minghetti, and Ricasoli). The same trend can be seen in
those who held the principal ministries: interior, foreign affairs, and justice.12
But if governments change, bureaucracy endures. It is thus extremely significant
that the “central core” of the latter was based on the ancient Piedmontese bureau-
cracy, facilitated by a superior familiarity with legislation largely transferred from
the Kingdom of Sardinia to Italy and by the political support it enjoyed.
Despite the supposed desire to keep it “temporary,” Piedmont’s predominance
continued for several decades. Even at the end of the century, one-quarter of senior
civil servants were Piedmontese, and among military officers, the figure was a still
higher, 36 percent, even though the population of Piedmont was a mere one-tenth
of the total Italian population.13 As for the prefects, in 1861, 30.5 percent had come
directly from the former Piedmontese bureaucracy, a percentage that rose to 45.8
percent in the years of administrative unification (1865–66), before sinking again
to 27.5 percent in 1871.14
Given these conditions, it is not difficult to see why, in the early years of the
kingdom, political struggle took on the color of a struggle between regions and,
more specifically, of a struggle for or against Piedmontese occupation of the state.
It was not until the end of the liberal regime and fascism that Piedmont finally lost
its predominant role in Italian public life.15
Thus the most delicate period in the formation of the new state was based
largely on a single regional experience. The process of integration that ensued
was not seen by the affected populations as a process of adhesion to a common
national state and common national values. The “Italianization” of the country
continued, but very slowly, at a rate inversely proportional to the influence exer-
cised by Piedmont and the Piedmontese.
Chapter 9
The Moderate Social Bloc
The “Brigantaggio”
A s with the analogous movement in Germany, Italian unification took place by

“iron and by blood,” but unlike in Germany, it was mostly the iron and blood
of others. The French war against Austria of 1859, the 1866 war between Prussia
and Austria, and finally, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 were truly the founding
acts of unified Italy. But one must also mention another war, entirely Italian, which
left a deep impact on the unitary experience: the war against the brigantaggio.
According to Prime Minister Bettino Ricasoli, this anti-Italian guerrilla move-
ment consisted of “escapees from every prison” and of “soldiers and apostles of
European reaction.”1 These two groups were, undeniably, a part of the brigantag-
gio, but in reality its nature was more complex and heterogeneous, which would
lead later to highly disparate interpretations.
To begin with, it had a history. Brigandage, both solitary and gang banditry, had
for centuries been the only form of peasant revolt. Giuseppe Prezzolini found refer-
ences in the literature to outlaws who were beloved by the “poor and the deprived”
because they had had the courage to break with the established order.2 In studying
the southern peasants of the second half of the nineteenth century, it is important to
keep in mind their “two-headed” character: having played a decisive role in weaken-
ing the power of the king of the Two Sicilies, these peasants, almost without ceasing,
continued their guerrilla war against the new Italian army of occupation.
To be sure, these peasants were transformed into “soldiers of European reac-
tion.” Their hatred for “progress” and the influence of the Church were two sides
of the same coin. In fact, the juridical abolition of feudal life at the start of the
nineteenth century had merely rendered their existence even more pitiable. Fol-
lowing the abolition of grazing rights on state-owned land and their usurpation
by the nobles and the bourgeois, the peasants lost the last physical spaces they had
been free to exploit. They then fell deep in debt and were left with no choice but
to borrow at usurious rates. The members of the new bourgeoisie, for their part,
having devoted their capital to the purchase of land and to more profitable invest-
ments, brought few technical improvements to agricultural production; they dealt
with their competition, feeble as it was, merely by intensifying their exploitation
of the peasants’ manual labor.3 All these factors strengthened the image of the
Church in the peasants’ eyes, the Church that reminded them of the virtues of a
time when feudal lords still had obligations and responsibilities to them.
The spread of capitalist social relationships was at the origin of the break
between peasants, on the one side, and property owners on the other, with their
retinue of lawyers, shopkeepers, employees, and minor intellectuals. The “alliance”
of 1860 between the Jacquerie and the “democratic revolution” could have been
merely tactic and temporary. When the police of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies
took flight, Jacquerie no longer knew any restraint and the “democratic revolu-
tion” quickly changed its priorities. Denis Mack Smith affirms that Garibaldi rap-
idly realized that “his only chance” of lasting success lay in the support of property
holders, and he quickly launched a policy of widespread repression.4
The actions of the intellectuals and military men of Piedmont (as well as the
“Piedmontized”5) sent to “pacify” the south were dictated, quite simply, by fear,
by concern, and by misconceptions. The fear: all those who had put their eggs in
the basket of unification were haunted by the specter of 1799—the counterrevo-
lutionary Jacquerie organized at the highest level and with international support.
The concern: the imponderable attitude of the democrats vis-à-vis the Jacquerie.6
The misconceptions: a profound misunderstanding of the southern situation and
a conviction that applying philosophical and economic principles that had seemed
logical in the north would overcome all the problems. It is now clear that those
misconceptions shaped the practical steps taken to confront the fears and the con-
cerns that, in fact, had very real foundations.
Among these misconceptions was the notion that it was poor governance by
the Bourbons that had kept the supposedly untapped richness in the south from
being developed. This idea, according to Salvatore Lupo, was in turn supported by
a typically positivist conviction that would leave a deep and lasting impression on
the history of the country: the notion that economic development is “natural”, and
that imbalances therefore reflect “anomalies that imply inadequacies more than
they demand remedies.”7
But this conviction had a flip side, as Sergio Romano put it: “a sort of racism
toward those who appear irremediably corrupt and allergic to liberal therapy.”8
The lieutenant of the King, Luigi Carlo Farini, contrasted the civic virtues of the
Bedouins to the “barbarity” of the “cafoni,” the southern peasants. Even the Garib-
aldians considered the southern peasants as “Bedouins,” speaking an “African-
like” language.9
The resignation of the very popular Liborio Romano (elected in eight districts)
from the Council of Lieutenancy; the purging of the local bureaucracy, where the
Garibaldian petit bourgeoisie had begun to install itself; the dissolution of the
100,000-strong Neapolitan army, suddenly reduced to joblessness; the liquidation
without severance of the Red Shirt army; the law suppressing most religious orders
(which destabilized the liberal clergy): one way or another, all these measures ulti-
mately fed the growth of banditism. Thus, among the “scum” denounced abroad
by Ricasoli, one found, along with the “apostles of reaction,” the newly jobless cre-
ated by the new regime, but also some of those who had cooperated in putting the
new regime in place or who, at the very least, had been disposed to support it; and,
above all, was the mass of angry and exasperated peasants.
THE MODERATE SOCIAL BLOC 83
Only when the war against the brigantaggio ended did the “southern question”
officially arise, that is the ascertainment that if Italy was now undeniably a juridi-
cal entity, the Italian nation itself was still far from reality.
The “Great Fear” of 1860
The “southern question”—which was the point of contact between two very dif-
ferent stages of development—arose during the rigid administrative centraliza-
tion of 1859 to 1865. According to one witness with a privileged perspective,
Cavour’s personal secretary Isacco Artom, the cause of regional autonomy ran
aground precisely over “the question of Naples”10: the fear of peasant revolts in
the south was the real reason for abandoning any plans for decentralization; all
other causes were subordinate.
Undeniably, the largest part of the Italian bourgeoisie—of whatever regional
origin, economic power, or political leaning—was shaken, and sometimes gen-
uinely terrified, by the upheavals of 1859 to 1861. But what exactly was it that
inspired such fear?
“Fear of revolution” was on everyone’s mind, but it was a vague fear, not
entirely justified by actual circumstances. To be sure, there were memories of 1848
to 1849 and the “specter of communism.”11 But again, these fears must be attrib-
uted more to French intellectual and moral influence than to the actual state of
social life in Italy, where the industrial proletariat was practically nonexistent. In
fact, the democratic revolutionary tempest of the midcentury had provoked two
sorts of opposite reactions: while in the other Italian states repression had raged,
to varying degrees of severity, in the Piedmontese kingdom the task of reestablish-
ing calm and quieting the democrats’ passions was left to the Statute, a sort of
constitutional chart.
According to Charles Albert’s juridical counselor, Federigo Paolo Sclopis, the
charter could open the way to the integration of the “educated middle classes”
in the management of public affairs.12 At the same time, the liberal choice had
allowed the Piedmontese kingdom to absorb a large part of the energetic ele-
ments—a sort of intellectual avant-garde of the bourgeoisie—whom the other
governments of the peninsula had banned.13 While only a small number of them
had lastingly integrated the structures of the Piedmontese state,14 these exiles
exerted significant influence, directly or indirectly, on the Piedmontese culture
of the 1850s, as seen in the moderates’ developing hegemony and in the con-
comitant decline in the democrats’ influence.
The democrats having been left on the margins of political life after 1848,
the question on the origins of the “great fear” remains. It was certainly fanned
by the threat of peasant revolts. But the real risk was not one of a “rural revolu-
tion”; the social conditions for this were missing, as was a serious political plan
of action and leaders capable of imposing it. The real risk was represented by the
“specter of 1799,”15 which, as it developed, took on the contours of an organized
and permanent Jacquerie.
The defense of property and of the barely achieved unification seemed worth
the sacrifice of some vaguely decentralizing principles. “The aim is clear, and it is
not open to discussion,” wrote Cavour on December 14, 1860, at the moment of
his “Jacobin adaptation”: “to impose unity on the most corrupt, the weakest part
of Italy. And as to the means, no doubt is permitted: moral force and, if it proves
insufficient, physical force.”16
Beginning in March 1861, an occupation army of 120,000 men proceeded to
reconquer southern Italy, using summary methods and violence of every sort that
left thousands of victims in its wake. This intervention had been demanded—and
carried out, so long as they were still in positions of responsibility—by the demo-
crats themselves.
Moderate Hegemony
By 1849 Cavour had become convinced that a “democratic revolution” in Italy had
little chance of succeeding. He had reached this conviction through an analysis of
the social bases of the democratic party: lacking support among the masses, he
wrote, it could count on support only from the middle and, to an extent, the upper
bourgeoisie, “and they have many interests to defend.” Had the social order been
truly threatened, he said, he was persuaded that even the most extreme republi-
cans would have been in “the front ranks of the conservative party.”17
Cavour saw rather lucidly what the real situation was regarding a question—
that of the “democratic revolution”—that historians would later spend more than
a century sorting through. He understood that the radical democrats’ social base
was still too young, too limited, and too timid to achieve a real unity of interests
that could be translated into a substantial plan of action. Facing a murky outlook,
these new societal groups increasingly found ways to accommodate themselves to
a reality that allowed them to satisfy their immediate interests. This might have
been less enticing in terms of grand ideals, but it was certainly more attractive in
terms of the conditions of their material existence.
These new groups had begun taking on social weight under the absolute mon-
archies at the end of the eighteenth century, with the establishment of a profes-
sional bureaucracy in which recruitment was based on ability, not birth. The
French contamination and the adoption of the civil code—with its repercussions
on social relationships—meant that the influence and the role of these bourgeois
sectors gradually grew. The Restoration seemed to frustrate their political ambi-
tions, leading some of the most dynamic elements to embrace the cause of the
democratic revolution, yet economic evolution continued to strengthen their
influence. The subjectivist idealism of the doctrinaire democrats, who failed to
understand the correlation between economic facts and political facts, was lost
in their vague theoretical constructions. Their futile attempts to force reality to
conform to their fantasies gave rise to senseless abortive uprisings that ended up
decimating the revolutionary avant-garde.
The ever-starker contradiction between the economic emergence of these new
bourgeois groups and the political failure of those who should have been in their
front ranks was synthesized by Turin’s liberal choices, with its policy of integrat-
ing the middle classes in public affairs, and by the strategy of Cavour’s “diplomatic
revolution.” In political terms, this choice translated as the “connubio” (marriage) of
1852, the parliamentary alliance between the center under Cavour and the center-
left under Rattazzi.
If, as Rosario Romeo attests, the evolution of primitive accumulation is behind
the development of new layers of society, and if their development in turn explains
the need to integrate them into the management of public affairs, it is indispens-
able for us to ponder, however briefly, the question of primitive accumulation in
the Italy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while noting that findings on
this subject are far from unanimous.
To Romeo, for example, it goes without saying that the sources of capitalist
accumulation in Italy were less numerous than in other countries, since trade and
colonial exploitation must be excluded. It was, rather, the revolutionary actions of
the French occupiers, he continues, that allowed the bourgeoisie to appropriate
a good part of the ecclesiastical property and that erased all juridical distinction
between feudal property and bourgeois property.18
According to Vera Zamagni, the elements of capitalist transformation of the
countryside gave the agricultural economy a much larger role than that of a simple
producer of foods and raw materials: they encouraged the birth of rural industries,
enlarged the markets for services (transport, credit and insurance), favored the
rise of entrepreneurial aptitudes, and stimulated the importation of machines and
of raw materials. Moreover, the increase in agricultural productivity made possible
the forceful eviction of country labor, which could then be put to use in other
activities.19 This latter aspect corresponds, according to Marx, to a fundamental
stage in the process of primitive accumulation.20
We must also underline the importance of what Franco Bonelli calls “externally
induced agricultural accumulation”. The increase of revenues in more industrially
advanced European countries had provoked a demand for products—raw materi-
als and semifinished products, food products, and to some extent even services—
that the Italian economy was in a position to provide.21
This expansion of wealth and economic activities thus upset the existence of
the traditional social classes—notably by making the nobility more bourgeois22—
while giving rise to other, more numerous classes. Beyond the big property owners,
who were traditional beneficiaries of this “agrarian surplus,” there were a growing
number of actors occupied in new industrial or semi-industrial activities linked
somehow to agricultural accumulation. And there were others who profited indi-
rectly from the new wealth, including those in commercial activities or financial
and liberal professions (bookkeepers, notaries, lawyers) linked to the multiplica-
tion of properties. Here, in flesh and blood, were the “middle classes” that Sclopis
envisaged integrating into the management of public affairs and who would con-
stitute, under Cavour, the real actors of Piedmontese acceleration in the 1850s.
The Structural Bases of Moderate Hegemony
According to Indro Montanelli, another result of the terror of a popular revolt was
the creation of a “closed oligarchy.”23 Piedmontese electoral law, extended little-
changed to the rest of the country, reflected the criteria that had inspired the con-
cession of the statute, that is, the desire to co-opt the “middle classes.” The proof
of this is that the democrats had accepted it since 1848 because, as one of their
more radical members, Angelo Brofferio, put it, it opened the doors to “indus-
try, to art and to intelligence of every sort.”24 Moreover, the Piedmontese elec-
toral corps could brag of far broader bases than those that existed in France under
the July Monarchy, which was considered a “bourgeois monarchy” par excellence.
And while the electoral law of 1861 foresaw, in keeping with Cavour’s desire, a
reduction in the number of electoral districts in the turbulent south, these same
democrats did not oppose this either. It was only much later that the latter, by then
transformed into the Sinistra, would have become the almost exclusive representa-
tives of the interests of the new bourgeois classes, particularly in the south. These
groups would gradually but surely be involved in the management of “public
affairs” from 1876, the date of the massive entry of the southern bourgeoisie into
the executive, and 1882, the date of the new electoral law that tripled the number
of voters.25
The cultural hegemony of the moderates had become firmly established in the
1850s, at the point when the promises implicit in the statute, in the electoral law,
and in the “connubio” had seemed to translate into a sort of “Get rich!” invitation
extended to all levels of the Piedmontese bourgeoisie.
With a population equivalent to only 11.2 percent of that of the peninsula,26
in 1857 Piedmont and Liguria provided 18.1 percent of total agricultural produc-
tion (while Lombardy furnished only 15.3 percent); in 1859, 46.4 percent of the
entire Italian rail network was on the territory of the two regions of the Savoy
kingdom (28.5 percent of it was in the Lombard-Venetian Kingdom). In 1858 they
were also leaders in imports (36.9 percent of the total, compared to 21.5 percent
for Lombardy-Venice) and exports (30.9 percent to 26.6 percent); also in 1858,
37.9 percent of all employees in the mechanical industry were concentrated in the
Turin and Genoa regions, while only 15.1 percent were in the two Italian regions
of the Austrian empire.27
Beyond the numerous polemics that have muddled this discussion, it seems
rather clear that the question of Piedmontese hegemony can be explained by these
three fundamental, and fundamentally linked, factors: (1) an exceptional concen-
tration of intellectual energy in Turin and Genoa; (2) Cavour’s political acuity,
which provided a national strategy in the framework of international constraints;
and (3) the capacity for these influences to spread socially as Piedmont rapidly
gained tangible economic supremacy over the other Italian regions (which, let us
not forget, were in a concomitant phase of economic slowdown).
Piedmontese hegemony, in any case, entered into crisis at the very moment
of unification, because the material conditions that had determined it changed
abruptly. As the newly unified country engaged increasingly with the world mar-
ket, Piedmont’s economic power, which had seemed so vigorous compared to the
other Italian states, suddenly looked pallid in comparison to the other powers. In
1840 the Italian states accounted for 10.8 percent of the total economies of the six
leading European powers; this rate declined inexorably for the rest of the century
to 10.5 percent in 1850, 10.05 percent in 1860, 8.6 percent in 1870, and 8.3 percent
in 1880.28 And if one makes the comparison to the most dynamic economy of the
era, that of the United States, the gap is even clearer and more dramatic. In 1830
the two countries’ relative shares of world industrial production were approxi-
mately equivalent (2.3 percent for the Italian states and 2.4 percent for the United
States), but by 1860 American industrial power was 2.9 times that of Italy, and in
1880, 5.9 times.
Thus the bases of the implicit pact proposed by Cavour to the Piedmontese (or
Piedmontized) bourgeoisie had collapsed at the very moment when that pact had
achieved its goal.
Part II
The Permanencies
Chapter 10
Transformism
The Co-opting of Emerging Social Strata
T he question of transformism, long buried in history books, resurfaced sud-

denly in the 1990s as a result of the Italian political crisis.1 Curiously, this ref-
erence to transformism occurred at the very moment when the Italian system was
experiencing something unheard of: a democratic transition from one coalition
to another. From 1861 to 1994, never had one majority been replaced by another
following an electoral verdict. This de facto “monopartyism” had often been con-
sidered the most blatant proof of transformism—as a mechanism through which
the party in office could keep power, and as a solution to the impasse created by
lack of a dialectic.
Before examining whether the changes on the Italian political horizon in the
1990s affected the nature of transformism, we should first make some semantic
clarifications. “Transformism” does not mean transformation; the term trans-
formism does not represent simply a change in the head of state or the migration
of politicians from one coalition to another. These are but symptoms of a far more
complex phenomenon linked inextricably to the weakness and inadequacies of the
Italian ruling class.
Aside from the small group of commentators who, like Benedetto Croce or
Rosario Romeo, have relativized the importance of transformism, historians and
specialists have generally considered transformism a physiological characteristic
of Italian political life and have tried to define its contours.
The American historian Raymond Grew has pointed out that some traits typi-
cally considered as transformist are not exclusive to the Italian experience. Their
quasi-institutional character, he suggests, is what distinguishes Italy and discour-
ages the formation of national political parties. The absence of national parties in
turn prevents specific local problems from being connected to national, more gen-
eral problems.2 Thus, according to Grew, the tradition of the Risorgimento would
have created—in the “new” Italy where interests invariably had multiplied—a sys-
tem physiologically incapable of representing the general interest.
For Antonio Gramsci, “the whole of political Italian life since 1848 is char-
acterized by transformism.” Having considered its temporal dimensions,
Gramsci explained the phenomenon as the process of the “the elaboration of an
ever-expanding ruling class . . . through gradual but continual absorption of active

elements coming as much from opposing groups as from allied groups.”3 This
analysis was confirmed in the 1990s by all those who had associated transformism
with the weakness of the social base of power and with the problematical necessity
of widening it: thus the co-opting of new elites and new interest groups was the
only way the Italian ruling class could think of to regenerate itself.4
In light of this, many historians have wondered whether the so-called connu-
bio (marriage) between Cavour and Rattazzi in 1852 should be thought of as the
prototype of transformism. Clearly, if we consider the connubio as one stage in the
process of the integration of the “middle classes” that began with the granting of
the statute, we can only conclude that it was a form of transformist co-optation.
This practice resurfaced in 1860, with the absorption of local notables, Neapolitan
soldiers, and former Garibaldians into the ruling class. Obviously it would occur
again in 1876, when the term “transformism” was coined by Agostino Depretis to
justify his “transformation of the parties” into what Raffaele Romanelli would call
the “single party of the bourgeoisie.”5
Transformism, Grew concluded, is therefore a factor of stability and continuity,
to the extent that it prevents one government class from being replaced by another
“in the revolutionary sense,”6 exactly as Gramsci had written some thirty years
earlier.7
Thus, although the term “revolution” has been used too often—from the “par-
liamentary revolution” of Depretis in March 1876 to the “revolution of the mani
pulite” in 1992, by way of the “Fascist revolution” of 1922—in no case did one
class substitute for another in the “revolutionary sense”; rather, changes took place
within the ruling class. The arduousness of these changes was proportional to the
resistance of the old group in power, reluctant to accept the integration of new
social strata. The contrary is also true, as the connubio and other examples dem-
onstrate. Rosario Romeo reminds us that Cavour had taken to heart the words of
Chateaubriand, who said that “in the major revolutions, the talent that collides
head on with the revolution is crushed; only the talent that follows it can master
it.”8 Transformism has been the only method used throughout Italian history to
try to “master” the political, economic, and social contradictions of the country.
The Impossible Conservative Party
In March 1886 a representative of the liberal Destra, Silvio Spaventa, established a

causal link between the “disorganization of the parties” and the “disorganization of
the social classes” represented by those parties just before the rise to power of the
Sinistra.9 At that time—March 1876—Agostino Depretis had presented his new
government to the Chamber of Deputies, with a speech rich in democratic senti-
ment: beyond the rhetorical demagoguery borrowed from Mazzini, this speech
concealed, according to Sergio Romano, “the interests of the new social strata,
eager to consolidate their wealth.” According to Romano, who cites the memoirs
of Fernando Martini, a close collaborator of Depretis, the latter was aware of the
necessity of opening up to these social strata, but feared that this operation could
TRANSFORMISM 93
endanger the structures of the young state. Thus, in its origins, the transform-
ist process was not really an ambitious project for renewing the country, but an
attempt to consolidate gains “through enlarging the social base of the nation and
the legitimacy of power.” Seen from this angle, transformism was responding, in
Romano’s eyes, to “a physiological necessity of the political country.”10
Other historians have emphasized the purely defensive character of the opera-
tion: a convergence of the liberal right and left toward the center in order to isolate
and reduce the intrinsically subversive extreme wings. The seditious elements that
the transformist operation was designed to curb were on the one side the Catholic
Church and on the other the far left—republican and socialist. The country hav-
ing been unified without (and against) them, they were not only strangers to the
system, naturally enough, but also its declared enemies.
In fact, the far left of the 1870s and the 1880s represented an even lesser threat
than the democrats in the time of Cavour. It was the remnants of the preceding
democratic tradition, stripped of their bourgeois social base, that had merged into
the Sinistra. Now, wrote Gramsci, this left wing represented nothing more than the
“miserable, impoverished, illiterate” part of the country and could express itself
only through “sporadic, disjointed, hysterical forms, a series of anarchist, subver-
sive gestures, with neither consistency nor a concrete political direction.”11 More-
over, Gramsci added in another note, even the most superficial of analyses showed
that in the 1870s the economic and social conditions hardly existed to create a
socialist party that could genuinely threaten the liberal state.12
Only the Catholic Church was a serious danger in the eyes of the liberal ruling
class; subjectively, because of the personal convictions of the men of the Sinis-
tra (a number of them having anticlerical political backgrounds), and objectively,
because of the violently hostile attitude of Pius IX and part of the ecclesiastical
hierarchy toward the new state.
Several elements suggest that this supposed danger was, in fact, less than had been
claimed. First, after unification, and especially after 1870, the “Pius IX generation”
had bet heavily on what could be called “a strategy of refusal,” implying a nostal-
gic, if fading, hope for a reestablishment of the pope’s temporal power.13 In other
words, Catholic energies were largely concentrated upon the goal of reconstituting
the pontifical states, not conquering Italy. It was only after the defeat of Napoleon
III’s France that the idea of a role in Italian affairs began, timidly, to emerge. None-
theless, this idea long remained embryonic, largely because of the opposition from
those who complained of the plundering inflicted by the Italian state.
Another reason a Catholic uprising was unlikely: in Italy, the Church lacked
a homogeneous social base. Without this, it could not create a synthesis of inter-
ests and establish an alternative strategy to the power in place. At the moment of
unification, the Church represented—the landowning clergy aside—a part of the
Ancien Régime nobility, the small and negligible mass of the Roman Lumpenprole-
tariat whose revenue was assured by public charity, and above all, the great major-
ity of the peasantry. The church’s influence upon the latter merely kept them away
from the parliamentary political system.
The only attempt to create an English-style two-party system came from a
group of property owners—“the national conservatives,” to use Stefano Jacini’s
definition14—who proposed to Catholics the idea of forming a large conservative

party with an essentially peasant base. A more relevant example came from Spain,
where the clergy, allied to the landed classes, helped mediate between the peasants
and the ruling class, and did this so well that universal suffrage, introduced in
1899, could be used in a conservative direction. It was, however, from Italian par-
ticularity that the project failed: in fact, it occupied the same social ground as the
“single party of the bourgeoisie,” whose interests and objectives it shared. The only
significant difference with the former—the idea of integrating the peasant masses
into political life through universal suffrage—became meaningless the minute the
Church withdrew all support, direct or indirect, for the conservative project.
The main reason the Church did not respond to the conservatives’ solicitations
was that it wanted to preserve its autonomy of judgment and action in order to
assimilate its defeat—stinging, but temporary—and prepare its revenge. According
to Edoardo Soderini, Leo XIII was less interested in a conservative party than in
one like the German Zentrum, which was more unmistakably Catholic and capable
of acting upon the political scene without necessarily linking itself to a right-wing,
even an extreme right-wing, position.15 The weakness of the conservative platform,
moreover, led the Catholic hierarchy to fear a double reduction of its autonomy: first
at the hands of the conservatives themselves, and then at the hands of the traditional
liberal groups that seemed likely to absorb the conservative party. The Pope’s con-
sideration of possible parliamentary action by the Catholics16 showed that he was
guided not by a “fundamental opposition to a liberal state,” as Croce17 affirmed, but
by the fear that a Catholic party, emerging prematurely, could be swallowed up in
the political morass and lose its specific identity. The Pope thus preferred to play the
card of temporal power, giving him much more leverage to negotiate with the Italian
state, than to risk eventual dilution in the existing system.
The traditional strength of a bimillennial organization like the Catholic Church
comes from its capacity to build very long-term strategies. Thus, to secure the
resources indispensable to its survival, and indeed its revival, the Church ended
up constructing its social base from the network of credit institutes created in
Rome and in northern Italy beginning in the 1880s. Only after forming this base
could the Church transform its traditional influence over the rural masses into a
real plan of action and into direct competition with the socialists for the loyalty of
the nascent working class. From that moment, the Church could count on its own
forces, without outside help, and thus begin the slow march toward the Concordat
and the Christian Democrat Party.
The Constant Characteristics of Transformism
In texts dealing with the Italian crisis of the 1990s, different definitions of trans-
formism sometimes refer to the same object, and the same definition can suggest
different objects. Nearly all specialists agree, however, on the description of the
phenomenon, while disagreeing on names and dates.
According to Roberto Cartocci, for example, the transformist practice was dom-
inant between 1945 and 1992, meaning until the moment when the first Giuliano
TRANSFORMISM 95
Amato government had partly interrupted the “perverse relationship” between

the government, the parties, and the parliament. Amato himself, as Treasury min-
ister in the Craxi government, referred to government activity thus: “Everyone
bargains with everyone, all procedural activity is a bargain, and at each bargain
either we come to a halt or something goes missing.”18 For Gianfranco Pasquino,
equally, the “centrality of Parliament” signified only a central place for transac-
tions between the government, the opposition, and “a good number of powerful
interest groups.”19 Sergio Romano adopted the same timeframe as Gramsci: Italy,
he wrote, was governed from 1848 by large transformist coalitions that preserved
power by expanding as much to the right as to the left, through a constant traffic
of favors that was as systematic as it was lacking in strategic vision.
Interestingly, the British historian Seton-Watson described the Depretis era in
much the same way. The post-1876 parliament, he wrote, “became the market-
place for the distribution of functions; the government was considered a dairy
cow, from which it was possible to milk a job, a title, a new railway line, or a new
import tax, in exchange for votes to support the majority.”20
Other similarities between the two periods are too numerous and striking to
be simply the result of chance. Among them, the lack of a true opposition, and
thus of any possibility of take over between opposing forces, is probably the most
telling. But there are other “coincidences” worth underlining: for example, the fre-
quency of governmental crises even amid an incontestable stability of power, only
paradoxical in appearance.21 One could also cite the constant growth of southern
representation in governments, and a curious resemblance between the personal
characteristics of some of the protagonists of the two eras: sometimes discreet,
prudent, disinterested, yet at the same time clever mediators in the most complex,
even shameless, bargaining; models, we could say, of private virtue and public vice.
Structurally the two periods are characterized foremost by a huge increase in
public spending and by growing state intervention in the economy. Under the
Sinistra, Vera Zamagni has calculated, the incidence of public spending on gross
domestic product (GDP) had increased by up to 20 percent by the end of the
1880s.22 Similarly, during the republican period, it did nothing but increase, reach-
ing 57.8 percent of GDP in 1993 (with the public debt–GDP index reaching 119
percent that year). At the same time, the growing participation, direct or indirect,
of the state in economic affairs had contributed to creating what Cassese called a
“capitalism without capital that is not public, and with very few capitalists.”23
Regarding Italy in the first few decades after unification, one must not overlook
the thousands of jobs created in both central and local bureaucracies. These new
recruits had a political interest in the survival of the apparatus that was provid-
ing them a living. Similar hypertrophic enlargement of the public administration
was seen between 1970 and 1990, when the number of civil servants (all levels
included) went from 1,779,004 in 1971 to 2,325,304 in 1992 (an increase of 23.5
percent), the year when a rapid decrease began to be seen.24 In both cases, it was
the sudden need to deal with the exigencies of the global market that provoked the
transformist rupture.
The Transformist Rupture
We have spoken up to now of “physiological transformism,” which takes place

through that almost daily practice of parliamentary and governmental bargain-
ing, and with the progressive enlargement of the bases of power. There is, however,
another kind of transformism that is more traumatic, characterized by the collapse
of political regimes, and that is regularly accompanied by a “transformism of the
masses.”
The structural fragmentation of the ruling class does not constitute a critical
problem so long as the political parties and the governmental coalitions manage to
represent most interest groups through transformist mechanisms. However, this
same fragmentation can prove lethal once the implicit pact linking the ruling class
to its clients dissolves. In fact, if the negotiation between disparate interests is the
mechanism that resolves, technically and temporarily, the problem of forming a
majority, this same mechanism feeds a permanent state of conflict, which explodes
every time the negotiation grinds to a halt.
We return finally to the structural problems of the various economic sectors:
the difficulty of finding a common interest and a corresponding political agenda.
If this proves impossible, each sector is obliged to bypass the obstacles by trying to
create a short-term synthesis, for example, through an exchange of favors.
The fact that each economic group tries to influence the successive political
syntheses by promoting its own interests is part of the rulebook in all industrial-
ized countries; it is not in itself a crisis factor. It becomes such, Arrigo Cervetto
wrote in 1969, once a particular interest has sufficient strength to provoke a rup-
ture in the balance, but not yet enough to create a new balance.25 This was Italy’s
situation at the end of the expansion of the “economic miracle”; experiencing a
crisis marked by the imbalance between those groups oriented toward the global
market and those sectors assisted by internal protectionism. A similar crisis was
precipitated some twenty years later by the upheaval provoked by the global free-
trade cycle and by the great disorder in the global geopolitical framework.
The corruption that was “unmasked” by the “mani pulite” inquiry starting in
1992 was merely the tangible manifestation of transformist negotiations of the
1970s and 1980s. But this corruption concerned not only the many entrepreneurs
and politicians who were greasing the skids for their enterprises with bribes; it had
become a mass phenomenon as well. The clientelist strategy had become indis-
pensable for getting a job or a pension, even to gain admission to a hospital. But
there were other forms of mass corruption. Taxes were relatively low26 and tax eva-
sion was largely tolerated; interest on public debt was conspicuously high; welfare
was practically free. This system was affordable in the boom years, but when it
became clear that considerable cuts had to be made, the debate degenerated into a
fight of everyone versus everyone, each social group trying to leave to another the
honor of saving the national economy.
We arrive at the heart of the problem: as Sergio Romano explained, a regime
collapses when the majority of its adherents and its clients abandon it because it is
no longer capable of satisfying their demands.27 This was the case of the subjects
of Francis II of the Two Sicilies, of Leopold II of Tuscany, and of the pope, sub-
jects who voted the annexation of Italy with a plebiscite; the case of the millions
TRANSFORMISM 97
of Italians who voted for the Fascists in April 1924 having almost all voted anti-
Fascist three years earlier; of the millions of members of the Christian Democrats
(DC) and the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in 1946 who, three years earlier, had
held Fascist party membership; and finally, it explained the mass abandonment
of the Christian Democrats and the Socialist Party between 1992 and 1994. The
Piedmontese in 1859, the Fascists in 1922, the anti-Fascists in 1943, Berlusconi in
1994,28 all profited from the collapse of the old regime, but they did not provoke it.
If we follow the timeframe suggested by Sergio Romano, we see political cycles
of around twenty years each: the rupture of 1859 to 1861, the transformism of
1876 to 1881, the crisis of the end of the century and Giolittism; the post–World
War I period and fascism; World War II and the republic; the “crisis of imbalance”
at the end of the 1960s; and the crisis of 1992 to 1994.
Internal Italian quarrels, influenced for a quarter century by a dispute over
institutional reform, can lead to the conclusion that the crises were provoked by
the lack of or inadequacy of shared rules. In fact, with the exception of the Fascist
period, these rules have always formally existed and, in the case of the republi-
can phase, they were shared even by the political forces that, whether government
or opposition, had together drawn up the constitution. So the determining cause
must be sought elsewhere, and precisely in the degree to which Italy was exposed
to international, political, and economic influences.
Regarding 1859, a series of factors linked to European politics—principally that
of Napoleon III devising a plan to undermine the balance of power decided in
Vienna—shook Italian politics to the point where every old state but one had col-
lapsed. From the late 1870s to the early 1880s, the crisis of the global free-trade
cycle and its direct implications on international politics obliged the political class
that had run the preceding phase to withdraw gradually from affairs. The turn-of-
century crisis had been brutally linked to the encounter with global competition
and its political manifestations (especially the colonial wars). The two world wars
had a devastating impact on the whole of Italian society, with no traces of the
preexisting systems remaining. The “crisis of imbalance” was the product of accel-
erated industrial development by the integration of Italy into the ascendant phase
of the world economic cycle (particularly through integration in the European
Economic Community). And the crisis of the 1990s was provoked by the collapse
of the Soviet Union, German unification, and above all, the rapid acceleration of
development in Asia and its influence on globalization.
But the reasons these international influences touched off a transformist rup-
ture were the primary weakness of the unitary state, the fragility of its institutions,
and its chronic lack of legitimacy. Again, we can point out the fundamental prob-
lems of the Italian bourgeoisie: its late emergence, its fragmentation, and conse-
quently, its difficulty in finding a balance of power within the state. These inherent
weaknesses always made it particularly susceptible to major movements in inter-
national economics and politics.
Vera Zamagni reminds us that Italy was a country “of numerous towns and
numerous agricultures,” and indeed numerous ideologies, thus the profound
significance of transformism consists, according to her, in its constant search for
“operational convergences allowing the country to be governed in the presence of
such plurality of ideologies and interest”29: quod erat demonstrandum.
Chapter 11
Internationalization Crises
and Transformism
The Crisis of Internationalization of 1866
T he second half of the 1860s was marked by the early signs of the crisis that
would end with the arrival in power of the Sinistra. In this phase, social groups
previously excluded from power began to wield sufficient weight to disrupt the
previous balance, but not enough to allow them to forge a new one.
Between 1861 and 1880, Italian industrial production as a share of total gross
domestic product (GDP) shrank from 20.3 percent to 17.3 percent, despite
an annual mean growth in industrial production of 1.4 percent to 2.2 percent
(depending on the source).1 The sector was thus undergoing a profound restruc-
turing. This included the disappearance of thousands of small and very small
enterprises, halfway between artisanship and home-based production, often
closely linked to agricultural activities, and the progressive, but extremely slow
birth of a more modern industrial sector, with higher levels of production.
The year 1866 marked a turning point. It was a particularly painful year for
Italy, politically, economically, and militarily: with an army of 400,000 men—more
than all the forces of the British Empire, according to Denis Mack Smith2—and a
fleet twice as large as Austria’s, Italy was defeated in two major battles, on land near
Custoza, and in the Adriatic see, near the island of Lissa.
But the humiliation suffered at the hands of the Austrians was only the most
glaring of the misfortunes that struck the kingdom barely five years after its birth.
These misfortunes were due largely to its dependence on foreign countries, and in
particular France;3 that is, they reflected the coincidence of an economic crisis and
an international political crisis, the effects of which were multiplied in Italy by the
coefficient of its economic and political weakness. The country was struck, in a
manner of speaking, by the first big “internationalization crisis.”
That the crisis of the mid-1860s was rooted in the world market is beyond
doubt. It also appears to be a classic example of a crisis provoked by overinvest-
ment during a favorable period (1862–1863), which manifested itself first through
a depletion of the money supply in circulation, then by an unprecedented rise in
the key rates of the Bank of England (which reached 10 percent in May 1866), and
finally, by a recession that spread first through the British Isles and then the con-
tinent. But it was also the first manifestation of “globalization,” in the sense that
Europe was struck with the effects of a political crisis that had exploded in another
part of the planet, namely, the United States. During the American Civil War, in
fact, a considerable flow of American capital left the country in search of safer
investments and poured across the old continent, helping saturate the markets.
Later, at the end of the war, not only was part of this capital repatriated, but the
resumption of American production led to a drop in the price of cotton, a key area
of Italian industrial activity.
Italy was doubly affected: first, because of its economic dependence on other
countries; and second, and less directly, because of its political subordination.
Thus in 1859 (and later during all the great turning points in international rela-
tions), to pursue its own foreign policy objectives, it had to try to insinuate itself
into disputes between other powers. Since the armistice of Villafranca, the return
of Venice had become, along with the annexation of Rome, one of the two over-
arching objectives of Italian foreign policy; the tensions between Vienna and Ber-
lin after 1864 were thus considered an occasion not to be missed.
But the major “external constraint” was represented by Napoleon III, who over-
saw the peninsula as a sort of “semiprotectorate.”4 Candeloro suggests that the
excessive prudence with which the Italians took part in the war—a major reason
for the debacles of Lissa and Custoza—was also the consequence of a note slipped
by Napoleon III to Costantino Nigra, the ambassador in Paris, recommending that
the Italians not fight “with too much vigor.”5
But the chief cause of the defeat lay elsewhere: not only Italy’s military man-
power, but also its larger ambitions were greater than what the country’s economic
potential could afford. The effects of the international crisis were multiplied by
internal Italian weaknesses. The run on the banks provoked by credit restrictions
was inflamed in Italy by the plunging value of public debt securities as French
investors dumped them in mass. This, along with some exceptional financial deci-
sions, soon led to a veritable stampede as war approached.
From that moment on, the country had no choice but to rely on its own
resources. On May 1, 1866, the forced circulation of the virtually irredeemable
lira put an end to convertibility between the Italian currency and gold. Two other
measures were taken at the same time: the imposition of a loan from the Banca
Nazionale to the state of 250 million lira at an interest rate of 1.5 percent, and
the legal circulation of bills from four preunitary banks, guaranteed by the Banca
Nazionale itself.
For finance minister Quintino Sella, the reestablishment of the state’s financial
authority, by balancing the budget to create conditions favorable to private inves-
tors and to expanded industrial activity, quickly became a question of survival for
the country. At the same time, economic groups of the center-north began to talk
of seeing the state play a larger role in defending industrial interests. The erosion
of the old ruling class’s bases of power had begun.
INTERNATIONALIZATION CRISES AND TRANSFORMISM 101
Splendor and Decline of Free-Trade Policy
In November 1869 an alliance of mixed interests brought about the fall of the
Menabrea government, but without giving rise to an alternative majority.
The most important economic sectors demanding a new political balance
within the Italian state were industry, credit, and the southern bourgeoisie. This is
a rather schematic breakdown; there does not, of course, exist a single interest of
the financial bourgeoisie or, even more obviously, a single interest of the south-
ern bourgeoisie. But what brought these three disparate groups together was their
desire to emerge—that is, to transform their economic weight and influence into
political weight and influence.
The crisis brought on first a decomposition and then a recomposition of the
two traditional political families along the lines of regional fractures and interests:
the ultraliberal Tuscan Destra found common interests with the southern Sinistra
more easily than with the northern Destra, which, for its part, often joined forces
with certain sectors of the radical Milanese Sinistra and, in particular, with the
“statist” dirigiste and “social” factions of the southern Destra.
In its earliest years, the Kingdom of Italy had adopted a policy that was “natu-
rally” pro–free trade, which enjoyed wide support if one considers that the 1863
free-trade convention with France was ratified by a vote of 257 to 49. In the same
period, Italy also concluded commercial treaties with the Ottoman Empire (1861),
Sweden (1862), Great Britain (1863), Belgium, Denmark, The Netherlands, Russia
(1864), Austria and the German Zollverein (1865), Switzerland, Uruguay, Japan,
China, Tunisia (1868), and Spain.
The capital needed to develop the “natural industries,” and thus to form a vast
national market, could be found only through close connections to the world mar-
ket, as Cavour asserted in his last parliamentary address. In the prime minister’s
view, a free-trade policy would make it possible for agriculture to accumulate the
capital necessary for future industrial development.6 It is noteworthy that Cavour,
on this occasion, was responding to a speech by Quintino Sella, who was to become
the finance minister of the Destra in 1864, and who was delivering his first address
before the Chamber of Deputies to support the possibility of accumulation and
development based above all on the “combination of factors available internally
within the country.”7 And the necessary precondition for productive internal com-
petition, according to Sella, had to be protection from foreign competition.
Two years later, during the parliamentary debate on the convention with France,
a deputy from Turin denounced the parliamentary commission for having failed
to consider the fact that thirty of the thirty-one chambers of commerce opposed
it, as did the 23,000 heads of enterprise who had signed petitions in opposition to
the treaty. During the same debate, the Lombard cotton industrialist Ercole Lualdi
listed numerous grievances against England and France, which he accused of
preaching free-trade policy only after having conquered every market through the
protections they had enjoyed for centuries; he proposed the formation of a com-
mission of inquiry on industry. Giovanni Ricci, a Genoese deputy, demanded that
France be stripped of the right to practice petit cabotage. Two Garibaldian depu-
ties, Antonio Polsinelli and Antonio Mordini, put forth for the first time the thesis
that the country’s independence depended on the creation of a state-protected

military industry. The Milanese democrat Giuseppe Ferrari accused the majority
of lacking confidence in the nation’s industry.8
The debate and its outcome demonstrate that the industrial group’s interests
and positions were, at the beginning of the 1860s, largely in a minority within a
class that enjoyed near-direct representation in the parliament,9 but it also shows
that ideological weapons were starting to be polished up for use from the late 1870s
to the early 1880s in a final attack on the free-traders’ last remaining redoubts.
These years had been characterized not only by the beginning of a theoretical
dispute, but, above all, by the ascension, the flowering, and the decline of the free-
trade cause. By the time the final battle between free-traders and protectionists
was engaged in Italy, the other world powers—the United States, Germany, France,
Austria, Russia, and, to an extent, even England—had already raised their import
taxes or were preparing to do so. Once again, the Italian dynamic and its internal
struggles left it trailing in the footsteps of the world market.
A Difficult, Slow-Motion Changing of the Guard
Quintino Sella was one of the rare political leaders of the era who attempted to
offer all the disparate interests the outline of a common strategic perspective.
Sella’s strategy, as we have seen, was to create favorable conditions for invest-
ment and for industrial expansion. His origins, his studies, and his accumulated
political experience combined to inspire in him, as in Cavour before him, the con-
viction that industrial development was the necessary path to lead the country into
the modern world. Thus, when he took up his battle to balance the budget—a fun-
damental precondition necessary to free up capital for productive investment—he
found himself in conflict with the financial aristocracy who had drained out most
of this money at a time when state securities were more profitable than invest-
ments. It was impossible to establish this equilibrium, as Marx wrote in regards to
the July Monarchy, “without encroaching on interests which were so many props
of the ruling system—and without redistributing taxes.”10
But Sella felt that redistributing taxes was his “mission,” the most important
measure in his strategy for balancing the budget.11 The increase in fiscal charges
was accompanied by borrowings from the Banca Nazionale, cuts in the budgets
of the military ministries, the transfer to the provinces of the expenses of second-
ary instruction, the reduction of the royal appanage, and the sale of some Church
assets and some state properties (including the rail networks).
The financial aristocracy resisted Sella’s policies for another reason, and while
this stemmed from something as immaterial as social psychology, it was no less
real a force: the conviction that, as the banks held the capital needed by the indus-
trialists, the latter were subordinate to the former. It was a subjective impression,
but it strengthened the objective resistance.
Sella, however, was far from being naturally hostile to the capitalist banks. A
capitalist himself, he was aware of the irreplaceable role of financial intermedia-
tion and he had been, as minister of finance, the protagonist of numerous treaties,
INTERNATIONALIZATION CRISES AND TRANSFORMISM 103
including that of November 1864, when the sale of certain of the kingdom’s assets
was confided to a syndicate formed by the Credito Mobiliare of Turin, the Banco di
Sconto e Sete, also of Turin, and the Cassa di Sconto of Genoa. Sella persisted with
Cavour’s old attempt to discipline the way credit was organized by uniting all the
issuing banks into a single bank, then a common practice in the more advanced
countries. But like Cavour, his predecessor at the Ministry of Finance, he met stern
resistance from numerous local groups, until in the end his attempt failed.12
After the fall of Menabrea, a new majority struggled to emerge. Lanza having
renounced any interest in forming a government, General Cialdini13 tried in vain
to do so with the leaders of various parliamentary groups. In the end, Lanza was
again called on and succeeded in forming a government in which Quintino Sella
was the finance minister, and this despite the rivalries between the two politicians
and with the Piedmontese Destra (although both men were from Piedmont and
part of the Destra). Despite the fundamental hostility of the Tuscan Destra, the
government obtained the confidence of parliament, thanks to the favorable vote of
Marco Minghetti, who was linked by personal and political connections to Floren-
tine circles, and whose support was supposed to condition, to a degree, the actions
of the government. But from the moment the government took office (in Decem-
ber 1869), the deep-seated hostility was transformed into a veritable guerrilla war
of attrition. The series of financial measures presented by Sella were examined by
no fewer than four parliamentary committees, and the debate, begun in the spring
of 1870, produced a positive vote of parliament only on August 11, 1870, barely a
month before the annexation of Rome.
The length of the discussions reflected deep divisions within the ruling class,
and Mazzini thought the moment was right to launch a series of attempted raids,
which led, as usual, to the dispersion of fragile republican groups and the arrest
or death of some of their leaders. Nonetheless, the press of the Destra, especially
that part under Tuscan influence, used this as a pretext to attack the government,
accusing it of excessive weakness.
The attempts to overturn Lanza took place not only in the heat of the discus-
sion over his financial intervention plan, but also in the midst of the Franco-Prus-
sian War, at a point in time when much was being asked of the young structures of
a state born under international protection. We should add that at the beginning
of the war, two of Victor Emmanuel’s former counselors, Antonio Gualterio and
Luigi Federico Menabrea, had attacked the government with the aim of replac-
ing Lanza with someone closer to the king,14 and that the king himself had sent
General Cialdini on August 3 to attack the system of parliamentary government in
order to regain the diplomatic initiative and carry Italy into war alongside France
against Prussia.15
As we can see, the concept of a “national union” was still far—very far—from
seeing the light of day within a ruling class where the numbers of those preferring
chaos to the risk of sacrificing even a part of their private interests were still legion.
Chapter 12
Emerging Sectors
and Transformism
Finance
I f one were to sketch an outline of the history of banks in Italy, one could say
that Italian financial institutions, over the course of a century and a half, were
numerous, fragile, and protected, and once the state stopped protecting them,
directly or indirectly, they became prey to sturdier foreign institutions better
versed in the rules of competition. Recent years have seen a rather timid reversal
of that trend, but it is too early to draw firm conclusions.
In Italy, banks managed to fashion around themselves an original juridical
framework, that of the “universal bank,” halfway between the Anglo-Saxon model
of total integration with enterprises and the German model of complete separa-
tion. The state first intervened directly in the activities of the credit sector in the
great rescues of 1888 through 1893 and 1931 through 1936, and later by taking
control, after World War II, of 70 percent to 80 percent of all bank activities.1
Whatever the case, and whether under a regime in which public property was
dominant or one almost exclusively favoring private property, the major bank-
ing institutions rarely missed a chance, in the decisive battles, to influence state
policy in the direction most favorable to their interests. This battle of influence
took different forms: at times it was subtle and indirect, through the banks’ pres-
ence within industrial groups or financial or insurance companies; at other times
through political relations, involving pressure that was more or less legal; and at
yet other times through what one might call “confidential” diplomacy, something
at which Enrico Cuccia, the most celebrated banker of the second half of the twen-
tieth century, was a master.2
According to Gianni Toniolo, the decision to move toward the forced currency
for the lira in 1866 was the first important rescue operation undertaken in Italy
by the “lender of last resort.”3 It is an interesting point of view, not only because it
predates by some three decades the year in which the central bank—in substance if
not in form—was established, but also because it corroborates the theses of those
for whom the existence of Italy corresponds to the existence, in the country, of an
economic system dominated by state capitalism.
When the Banca d’Italia was officially established, in 1893, it began to fulfill the
institutional task of “monetary power,” supervising the general monetary interests
of the country, in keeping with the regular tenets of capitalist development. In this
context, the central bank does not play the role of one credit institution among
many, defending its particular interests while others do the same; it acts rather as
a traffic cop for different private interests, and not only for banking interests but
also for all economic sectors as it works to safeguard the “general interest.”4
This specific role is imposed by facts, not by desire. In 1870, four years after the
decision on the forced currency, issuing banks held 66.9 percent of all paper cur-
rency in circulation. Ten years later, these same banks held only 36.5 percent.5 In
absolute numbers, the total sum of circulating currency in the hands of the issuing
banks had declined by an almost imperceptible amount (going from 621 million
lira in 1870 to 557 million lira ten years later); this means that the total mass had
grown in the meantime (from 929 million to 1.527 billion), but more importantly,
that a slew of new financial actors were now competing for it. In fact, from 1870
to 1874 there was a veritable boom of banking institutions. The number of ordi-
nary credit institutions rose from 36 to 121 and the number of “banche popolari”
(industrial cooperative banks) rose from 48 to 109.6
The general framework of the Italian economy was beginning to mature. Inte-
gration between finance and industry became so evident that the activities of ordi-
nary credit banks began to grow and contract in close conjunction with the cycles
of industrial production.
According to an Italian political tradition, the responsibility for these changes
was found not in the dynamic of the Italian economy within the world market,
but in the subjective choices of governments. Thus, in 1873, Lanza was forced to
resign by a new coalition of interests that felt threatened; Minghetti was finally
able to take his place, with the goal of reducing the power of the Banca Nazionale
by creating a cartel of minor banks, notably southern ones. Around them emerged
much of the growing opposition of the Sinistra.
The Minghetti government thus constituted a sort of intermediate step toward
new balance. But these new equilibria had a difficult time establishing themselves,
confronted with the greatest upheaval the Italian social structure had faced in cen-
turies: industrialization.
Industry
To the causes of Italian economic backwardness at the moment of unification,

one must add what Alexander Gerschenkron calls “the absence of vigorous ideo-
logical encouragement for industrialization.” The supporting testimony is near
unanimous: for Guido Baglioni, author of a reference text on the subject, “there is
no ideological horizon to match the role of the productive bourgeoisie.” For Vera
Zamagni, the problem lies in the absence of a single ideology of industrialization
able to impose itself over all others.7
The responsibility for this lack of an “industrialist culture” must be sought,
as we have seen, within the bourgeoisie itself. According to historian Guido De
EMERGING SECTORS AND TRANSFORMISM 107
Ruggiero, the bourgeoisie “was a class of uncultured bureaucrats and businesspeo-

ple, skeptical about the importance of ideas and programs.” More recently, Paolo
Farneti generalized that opinion by saying that the bourgeoisie “lacked a broad
vision of its class interests in the wider framework of those of the nation.”8
This situation hardly arose by chance: if the “industrialist” position seemed
uninspired it was because it reflected industry’s own shortcomings. Even an origi-
nal opinion like Cavour’s—that stimulating the growth of the agricultural surplus
would provide a base from which industry could take off—was interpreted by
“agriculturalists” as an endorsement of their conservatism, while “industrialists”
viewed it as a cunning sabotage of their views on the importance of the develop-
ment of manufacturing activities.
From the moment of unification, the industrial fractions tended to intervene
with state powers more to obtain aid and protection than to influence strategic
choices or contribute to the establishment of a common policy aimed at promot-
ing and defending the general interest of their entire class. In this sense, one can
say that Italy lacked a national strategy from the beginning. The lag in develop-
ment, Italian cultural tradition, and the modalities of unification helped create
this psychological substratum. By interpreting the events that determined the
birth of the unitary kingdom as manifestations of an auspicious “destiny,” the Ital-
ian bourgeoisie persuaded itself that its own direct involvement in the edification
of this destiny was tangential, indeed, superfluous.
Benedetto Croce has given us, as regards successive agricultural cultures in
the Puglia region, an exemplary description of the way Italian entrepreneurs
attempted to adapt gradually to diverse circumstances rather than seeking to for-
mulate their own development strategy.9 One finds this same passive adjustment,
on the national level, during the economic crisis of 1866, during the Vienna-Berlin
conflict of the same year, during the French defeat of 1870, during the rapid rise
of steam-powered shipping, during the stock market crisis of 1873, and during the
turn toward protectionism in the following decade.
One reason for the breakdown between different societal groups after 1866
lay in a miscalculation—or, one might say, in a lost bet—in Cavour’s strategic
vision. Beginning in 1846, the future prime minister linked Italy’s “magnificent
economic perspective” to the organization of commercial traffic along a north-
south axis, so as to make of the peninsula “the shortest and most convenient
path from the Orient to the Occident.”10 When excavation of the isthmus of Suez
began in 1854, Cavour’s theories seemed confirmed, for southern Italian ports,
linked by railway to northern Italy and to Europe, were considered a natural
endpoint for a large part of the traffic that the Suez Canal would be funneling
into the Mediterranean.
Things turned out quite differently, and almost all the development projects
that were built up around this axis found themselves rather suddenly in dire trou-
ble.11 There were several reasons for this failure, the most important of which were
structural, that is, linked to the weak Italian economic structure: the elevated costs
of rail construction, which led to higher freight charges that caused shippers to
abandon the Brindisi line in favor of maritime transport; the aging of the Italian
commercial fleet that, though it ranked third in Europe in tonnage terms, was
almost entirely wind powered, and sail ships were poorly suited for navigating
the Red Sea.12 But there were other factors, one internal—the Brindisi port was
too shallow for the high-seas vessels traveling to the Red Sea and back—and one
external—the high tolls charged by the canal discouraged a considerable amount
of traffic. And finally there was a factor tied to the growth of the world market,
which reduced the gap in prices of products and raw materials from different parts
of the globe, putting an end to the day when a merchant could derive a profit from
the large price differentials between distant markets.
Thus, rather than serving to promote Italy’s progress and development, as
any good free-marketer might have expected, the newly built Suez Canal merely
served to aggravate its backwardness. The Rubattino shipping company, which in
December 1869 had purchased a concession in the Bay of Assab in Eritrea as a for-
ward post for Italian commercial penetration in the Red Sea, had to resell it to the
government thirteen years later. The shipyards that popped up like mushrooms
after rain when the canal opened had to rapidly scale back their ambitions or, in
many instances, file for bankruptcy.13 The involvement of the Italian fleet in inter-
national trade, rather than growing, was drastically reduced, and even the share
of internal commercial navigation handled by Italian vessels fell from 52.6 per-
cent of the total in 1881 to 31.4 percent in 1891, despite the establishment, in the
meantime, of significant protectionist tariffs.14 Finally, the considerable decline in
the price of maritime shipping contributed to a sharp drop in the price of some
imported foodstuffs, in particular wheat and rice, thus accelerating the crisis in the
country’s agricultural sector.
The example of the Suez Canal clearly demonstrates the damage that can result
from an incapacity to provide a strategic perspective for Italian capitalist develop-
ment, leaving it reliant on the “ephemeral favors of fortune.”
The Southern Bourgeoisie
In 1873 the world experienced the first great depression of contemporary eco-
nomic history. It was provoked by the creation, in Germany after the victory of
1870, of joint-stock companies and banks specialized in investments that favored
the development of a “bubble” in rail and real-estate values, to the point of trigger-
ing the classic mechanism of rising costs and prices and falling markets.
Opinions are divided on the direct influence this crisis had on the Italian situa-
tion. For some, the economic weakness of the peninsula helped preserve the coun-
try, while for others the impact on the lira was strong, causing its value to plunge15;
for Cafagna, it had at least the merit of putting an end to the “plaster” economy
born in a time of market effervescence.16
The impact of this crisis—coming just years after the first major shock of
1866—affected the whole of the Italian ruling class, and in particular, sectors that
had scarcely participated in the major political choices, or who considered them-
selves damaged by the political choices they had made up to that point. With an
abstention rate of 55.4 percent of voters (and as much as 70 percent in the large
northern cities), the elections of 1870 sent 170 new deputies to the chamber,17
EMERGING SECTORS AND TRANSFORMISM 109
most of them representing not traditional parties, but local interest groups—an
extremely significant signal of the malaise that the crisis of 1873 was to catalyze.
The new sectors of the economy, still fragile because of their youth, were naturally
more exposed to the effects of the latest crisis and reacted by accentuating their
political pressure.
When discussing interest groups keen to play a more consequential role in
managing the country’s affairs, we must not forget a part of the ruling class, much
older and more substantial than those mentioned above, which had been almost
totally excluded from national power practically since unification: the southern
bourgeoisie. The necessity of integrating it into the management of public life was
felt ever more acutely, starting in the late 1860s and especially in the early 1870s, as
demonstrated by the attention Minghetti paid to its expectations.
But Minghetti merely added to the frustrated ambitions and dashed expecta-
tions of the dominant southern classes, constrained as he was to pursue the rigor-
ous budget-balancing policies inaugurated by the preceding governments. Thus
the dominant southern classes definitively cast their lot with the Sinistra.
Loyalty to the Sinistra was built around the question—crucial to landowners—
of the equalization of property taxes. The provisional calculation of property tax
assessments, established shortly after unification, favored southern landowners.
Faced with a likely reform of this calculation, that group held that differences
in property-based revenues owing to different conditions of viability, trade, and
culture should have been taken into account. Two separate regimes should have
been institutionalized—one for the south and another for the rest of the coun-
try—which was the negation of a national unitary policy and which was to be the
fundamental characteristic of Italian “dualism.”
The results of the 1874 elections—which saw voter participation jump by 10
percentage points from the previous electoral exercise—anticipated this “dual-
ism,” giving a territorial character to the political divide between the Destra and
the Sinistra. The Sinistra won 100,350 votes, 63.4 percent of them in the south and
the islands, and the Destra won 116,129 votes, of which 76.5 percent were in the
north and the center.18
From 1874 to 1876, the political struggle was feverish. Matters descended to
the paradoxical level—even more absurd if one thinks of the results of the insti-
tutional referendum of seventy years later—of dangling the specter of separation
between a republican south and a monarchist north. What is certain is that from
1874 to 1876, the Sinistra ended up representing—partly through profound con-
viction, partly through opportunist calculation—a deeply mixed coalition repre-
senting every faction that wanted to confirm the break with what remained of the
previous equilibrium. These disparate interests came together around two classi-
cally liberal demands: to reduce the tax burden and to defend the free movement
of the “invisible hand” against any state interference.
As for taxes, the country felt that the spartan policies imposed by the Destra
had seen their day. Indeed, it is no coincidence that after the elections of 1874, the
Chamber of Deputies rejected any proposed tax increase, although the Destra held
a majority. And when Silvio Spaventa, minister of public works, suggested putting
an end to the hypocrisy of “private” rail companies supported by extensive public
aid and proposed nationalizing the sector outright, the “enraged Smithians” (as
they were called) of the Tuscan Destra and the Sinistra found common cause: The
day after the announcement that the budget had been balanced, the Minghetti
government was disavowed by the chamber and had to resign. As Denis Mack
Smith writes, the Destra had “completed their task of tightfisted and unspectacular
administration. New times called for new men.”19
Chapter 13
The Southern Question
Dualism and Unequal Development
L iterature devoted to the “southern question” began appearing between the elec-
tions of 1874 and 1876. The first to specialize in this new discipline were men
of the Destra who were struggling to understand the reasons for their crushing
electoral defeat of 1874 in southern Italy. Thus the Tuscan Leopoldo Franchetti1
traveled to Sicily to meet the historian Pasquale Villari, author of Lettere meridi-
onali [Southern Letters]. Discussions between the two men led to the conclusion
that the new laws and the new institutions that unification had brought to the
south had worsened conditions in the Mezzogiorno, not improved them. In two
later texts, Franchetti pointed the finger at the “economic and class relationships
that prevented the civil development”2 of these regions.
The Sinistra angrily rejected Franchetti’s conclusions, seeing them as an attack
on existing property relationships, launched with electoral objectives in mind.
The debate on the “southern question,” with the themes and position-taking that
would accompany it for more than a century, was thus opened.
The theme that cropped up most often in the debate was what Luciano Cafagna
described as the “impostazione rivendicativa risarcitoria” [demand for damages and
compensation]: The Mezzogiorno, by this logic, had a right to demand damages,
with interest, from the Italian political class for losses provoked by unification.3
The basis for this view was easily found in the conclusion that Villari and Fortu-
nato had reached during their meeting in 1875: in observing that conditions in the
Mezzogiorno had worsened after unification, they were describing an incontestable
reality; yet by placing all responsibility for this on the new laws and institutions,
they were asserting a causal link that was arbitrary to say the least.
For those who have carefully analyzed this question in recent decades, unification
simply placed the two parts of the country into a direct relationship within a uni-
form institutional framework, submitting them to the same policies; yet this attempt
to make two such different regions uniform merely focused the gap separating them.
Most historians now conclude that, in the first postunitary decades, neither part of
the country developed to the detriment of the other. Between north and south, they
asserted, there was substantial “economic indifference,” in the wider context of an
absence of interchange between the different “economic Italies.”4
In fact, the widening of the north-south gap was due to unification only insofar
as unification accelerated the integration of the Mezzogiorno into the world mar-
ket. Postunitary free-trade policies put Italy in contact with the more advanced
parts of Europe, favoring agricultural exports from the south as well as the north
and sparking an industrial restructuring in all parts of the country. This process
would eventually have produced comparable results in the Mezzogiorno even with-
out unification.
If unification widened the gap, it did not create it. Even a superficial study of
the history of the peninsula demonstrates that this “dualism”—and more gener-
ally, all the disproportions between the “economic Italies”—has roots extending
long before unification. Pasquale Villani calculated that in the continental Mez-
zogiorno of the late eighteenth century, two-thirds of the population was depen-
dent on ninety families. This level of concentration made it extremely difficult to
effect genuine “democratization” of agricultural property by dividing it into small
lots.5 A closed rural economy dominated in the south; an internal market and
export flows that were very limited and thus had no need for evolved financial or
commercial institutions, nor of an effective transport system. At the moment of
unification, the rail network consisted of a mere ninety-nine kilometers of track
in the entire kingdom, and the credit system was essentially based on a few private
institutes and on two public banks in Naples and Sicily, each of them with a sub-
sidiary in Bari and another one in Catania.6 As for manufacturing, beyond state-
owned industry and a few foreign investments, it was essentially limited to rural
and family-based activities, closer to self-consumption than to a market.
Agriculture in the south, of course, faces serious geographical and climatic
handicaps, from the mountainous terrain to the limited availability of hydro-
logical resources, from the torrid temperatures six months a year to the narrow,
clay-filled plains subject to catastrophic seasonal flooding. But we should avoid
the temptation to explain the region’s lag in agricultural production by a sort of
“geographic determinism,” when the shallowest of historic reviews offers a more
nuanced picture. We know that in the time of the grandeur of Rome, Sicily was
the “granary of the Empire,” while during the same period, Lombardy was a deso-
late and unproductive land. According to David Abulafia, even at the end of the
Middle Ages the agricultural production of the southern regions was greater than
that of the north.7 We must conclude that responsibility for the radical changes in
the relationship between the two parts of Italy lies in the actions of man and not
of nature.8
The cumulative effects of the actions of man and the actions of nature form the
substratum of later development. This is why the territory of a modern national
state is never homogeneous and, when the different parts come in contact, it
merely accentuates their respective inequalities and future “dualisms.” The case of
Italian north-south “dualism” is no exception.
THE SOUTHERN QUESTION 113
The Universal Character of Unequal Development
Vera Zamagni writes that in most great countries, “including the United States,”
important dualisms have long existed.9 Piero Bevilacqua, for his part, notes that at
the end of the 1990s, the ratio between the gross domestic product (GDP) of the
richest region and the poorest was the same in Italy and in France (2.4) and nearly
the same in Germany (2.3).10
But these “dualisms” and “inequalities” affect not only territories separated
by great distances—geographically or structurally; they can be found even in the
interior of regions considered economically and socially more “homogeneous.”
To take the case of Piedmont, the imbalances between the mountainous zones
and the plains or hilly country, as well as the inequalities between the different
provinces, are found in every social indicator, sometimes by a ratio of two to
one. From 1824 to 1861, the urbanization process in the cities of Novara and
Vercelli grew 64 percent, while in Cuneo and Asti, the rate was lower than that
of Aosta. In the province of Turin, according to data from 1883, the average life
expectancy of a mountain dweller was only thirty-eight years, while in the plain
it was forty-five to fifty years. The rates of illiteracy among those called to mili-
tary service was 24 percent for young men from Cuneo province, 22 percent for
those from Alessandria province, 18 percent for those from Novara, and 12 per-
cent for those from Turin. In the same period, the rate of industrial employees
among all workers was 2.6 percent in the province of Alessandria, 2.9 percent in
the province of Cuneo, 6.2 percent in the province of Turin, and 7.6 percent in
the province of Novara.11
As for the phenomenon of rural exodus toward urban centers, it first affected
the north, and massively so; only in the late nineteenth century did emigration
from the south start to take on considerable dimensions. And yet, contrary to
widespread belief, since unification the countryside of the north has been depopu-
lated at rates and in numbers far larger than those of the south.12
Once we have brought the supposed Italian specificity—and within it the sup-
posed southern specificity—into a more realistic context within the “universal”
framework of the laws of development, we must nonetheless reconsider the partic-
ular situation of Italian “dualism,” and its exponents. That is, we must reexamine
the way in which the south’s historic backwardness, its uneven development, and
the miserable conditions faced by the enormous majority of the population were
used by the southern bourgeoisie for political purposes.
Having been inaugurated by intellectuals of the Destra, the “southernist” theses,
as they were to be called, grew more elaborate, but also more diverse, until they
were left with only two points in common: the insistence on southern specific-
ity, and the fact of being exploited by all those for whom the Mezzogiorno repre-
sents the main flaw of Italian development. On every other question—questions
of substance, since they were supposed to concern proposed solutions—the vari-
ous approaches were miles apart, even totally opposed. From the “social” wing
of the Destra, “southernism” evolved into one frankly reactionary faction, under
Pasquale Turiello, and another into a syndicalist faction, under Arturo Labriola. At
the same time, “southernists” included men like Pasquale Villari, Sydney Sonnino,
Napoleone Colajanni, and Francesco Saverio Nitti, all of them partisans to vary-
ing degrees of state intervention in economic matters. Alongside them there were
intransigent free-traders like Antonio De Viti de Marco and Gaetano Salvemini,
federalists like Salvemini and Colajanni, rigorous centralists like Fortunato, impe-
rialists like Leopoldo Franchetti, and also pacifists. According to Salvatore Lupo,
the absence of a unique “southernist” discourse can be explained quite simply by
the absence of unique southern interests.13
All these confused or even antithetical tendencies gave rise to two contradictory
movements: on the one hand, the persistent demand for political action to reduce
the gap, and on the other, an inability to formulate concrete proposals on how best
to do so. It was a contradiction, however, that could be synthesized by the “demand
for damages and compensation,” as Cafagna calls it. Starting with the protection-
ist laws enacted progressively from 1878 to 1887 and, more particularly, with the
“special legislation,” no measure of public intervention was considered sufficient
to definitively resolve the problems, which meant more “special legislation” was
required, and so on. Thus the gap between north and south, as Gianfranco Viesti
wrote, became the pretext employed by a large part of the ruling class to obtain the
greatest quantity possible of public allocations.14
This attitude highlighted a conception of the function of the state that is the
historic product of several heritages: by constantly demanding favors, the south-
ern elites seemed to propose to the liberal state what Paolo Macry calls a “courtisan
paradigm.”15 This relationship with the state revealed another of the south’s his-
toric handicaps, and not the least important.
The Ruling Southern Class
At the moment of unification, and for fifteen years afterward, the Destra govern-
ments had excluded even the possibility that the southern ruling classes should
play a direct role in managing the affairs of the new state; they were considered
too querulous and too preoccupied with managing public matters as if they were
private affairs. The “Piedmontized” southern intellectuals were the most deter-
mined about this. They refused, on the one hand, to separate the interests of the
Mezzogiorno from that of the entire nation, while on the other hand, based on
their experience in their home regions, they imagined the transformation of Italy
into an “ethical state” that could make up for the traditional lack of a civic sense.
According to Aldo Schiavone, in the social psychology of the inhabitants of the
peninsula, the notions of state and ethics are most often in contradiction. This
mistrust of established power, he asserts, was born from foreign domination, fol-
lowed by the failure of “the relationship between bourgeois development and the
construction of the state” in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. As they grew
accustomed to this domination from the outside, the Italians began to associate
public power with the invader, and force to pillage, thus establishing a direct rela-
tionship between the state and the stifling of their own identity.16 This sentiment,
common to the entire peninsula, was displayed most flagrantly in the south due to
the almost uninterrupted subjection of these regions to foreign powers, and to the
absence of any possibility of a “relationship between bourgeois development and

the construction of the state.”
The most “Italian” of the southern kings was a German, Frederick II of Hohen-
staufen, the founder in the thirteenth century of the Sicilian school of poetry, the
first in a “vulgar” language. At the other extreme of the southern Italians’ histori-
cal experience—chronologically, as well—was Ferdinand IV, son of the Spanish
King Charles III, king of the Two Sicilies at the moment of the 1799 revolution,
semiliterate, speaking little but the Neapolitan dialect, “lazzarone” among “laz-
zaroni” (the lazzaroni, or street people of Naples, were fiercely monarchist). The
long thread uniting these two seemingly utterly different monarchs is the fact that
they were foreigners in their own kingdoms: the former, a Swabian speaking the
vulgar tongue and an unknown number of other languages, was as foreign to his
people as was the latter, a Neapolitan-speaking Spaniard who, though at home
in the Spanish quarters of Naples,17 was a foreigner in Palermo, in Puglia, and in
other parts of the kingdom.
The other factor linking the two is that Frederick II helped, we could say, to lay
the bases of power for Ferdinand IV. In effect, the kingdom of the south—born
out of the struggle against the communes—lacked the necessary conditions to
establish this “relationship between bourgeois development and the construction
of the state” which had been attempted, precisely through the communes experi-
ence, by other regions of the center and the north.18 Protected by past history and
present domination, the feudal lords of the south were not threatened, either in
power or in privileges, by an emerging bourgeoisie. That would have given rise,
according to an interesting thesis by Paolo Sylos Labini, to what he defines as a
“lazzarone absolutism”: the king, struggling against the barons, and unable to
rely on the bourgeoisie, sought support from the plebes in the cities, to whom he
granted all sorts of favors, and from the peasants as well. Thus, continues Sylos
Labini, the phenomenon of the “lazzaroni kings,” from which emerged the popular
royalist sentiment, present above all among the lowest layers of the population,
and that persisted until very recent times.19
Giving rise to “lazzarone absolutism” in the south of Italy was the presence of
a weak and disjointed civil society in which the central power of the state was
organically incapable of exercising its fundamental function in an era of abso-
lutism: that of replacing the “spirit of the bell tower” with centralized control.
Instead, the persistence of that spirit contributed, in the Mezzogiorno, to the estab-
lishment of jealously preserved fiscal privileges, which faithfully reflected these
local particularisms.
The southern bourgeoisie, Sylos Labini continues, lagged behind the social
groups of feudal origin, both economically and politically, at least until unifica-
tion. And when they replaced them, as property owners, they were inspired by
these two models: the feudal barons, as concerns the economy and society, and
“lazzarone absolutism,” as concerns politics.20 Yet, given their extreme weakness,
they were unable from these models to construct a superior synthesis.
It is thus not surprising that those men of the south who truly understood the
social nature of their country—and who, while waiting for the “ethical state” to
emerge, concerned themselves with the problems of the actual state—should have
judged the new Italian government’s moralizing ambitions as not only extrava-
gant, but dangerously out of place. “Do you know,” Pasquale Villari wrote Gover-
nor Farini on December 9, 1860, “that in Naples, destroying corruption amounts
to destroying the country?”21
It is also unsurprising that, in these conditions, the Piedmontese would prove
reluctant to involve the southern ruling classes in the management of the state;
all the more so because Cavour belonged to a generation (and a class) unaccus-
tomed to resolving social problems by creating jobs, of greater or lesser utility,
within an administration, and equally unaccustomed, as Cavour himself said,
to a “system that consists of reconciling men’s differences at the expense of the
State treasury.”22
For fifteen years, the men of the Destra lived under the illusion that the prac-
tices of transformism and clientelism were the result of free choices, and conse-
quently they rejected them. They could not yet know—and their political culture
inhibited such awareness—that these practices constituted what Cafagna consid-
ered a “regular and constant tendency” of a democratic state, which would expand
as the bases of electoral consensus expanded.23
The men of the Sinistra, for their part, displayed a more pragmatic approach,
progressively adapting to the new situation. Those deputies elected in 1876,
accused by their opponents of representing corruption and intrigue, may have
lacked the prestige of their predecessors, but they had sufficient moral stature to
embody the transformist process—a process, Carocci wrote, “of which the growth
of democracy was the cause and the degeneration of democracy was the effect.”24
The Sublimation of Transformism
The social enlargement of the bases of power having gone hand in hand with
geographic enlargement, one can say that the leaders of the Sinistra constituted
the first truly national governments. At the same time, however, their transformist
practices led them to renounce any notion of a “nationalization of the masses,”
that is, to renounce any structural effort to stifle particularisms in order to seek a
theoretical national interest in which Italians might recognize themselves.
The Sinistra had been carried to power by a coalition of interests intent, in
part, on weakening, if not abolishing, the rigorous restrictions imposed on pub-
lic spending by the Destra. After several years, enlarging the bases of consensus
through public spending became the mechanism of ordinary functioning of the
state. This mechanism essentially worked in two directions: it extended the elec-
toral base, as per the law of 1882, while expanding the bureaucratic apparatus.
With the law of 1882, the habit of regularly electing a town’s notable, particu-
larly in the south, leapt to a new level. The end of the organic relationship between
elected and elector led these notables increasingly to entrust the representation of
their interests to new political professionals, markedly this “small crowd of South-
ern lawyers” that Romano describes.25 The function of the latter was to haggle
with each minister, offering their votes in exchange for certain local interests being
taken into account.
As for the enlargement of the bureaucracy, the period of 1883 to 1891 brought
13,000 new civil servants, a growth rate of 20.3 percent in eight years.26 It was now
more closely aligned to geographic criteria, unlike the earlier “Piedmontization” of
public structures in the first years of the kingdom. This increasing “southerniza-
tion” mainly affected the lower layers of bureaucracy, while executive functions
remained primarily in Piedmontese hands for some time to come. This phenom-
enon—which gave structure to the “Turin-Naples axis” on which, according to
Galli della Loggia, the Italian state project would be built—is one effect of the
capacity for negotiation the Mezzogiorno acquired after its rise to power (the oth-
ers being linked to the “policy of compensation” put in place by the special legis-
lation). As Jean Meynaud writes, the “Southernization of public life” was a trend
responding to the pressure of a petit bourgeoisie lacking in local perspective or the
means to ensure its existence.27
The renunciation of the nationalization of the masses resulted directly from
what Lanaro calls “transformism as the extreme sublimation of the clientelist rela-
tionship.”28 It was a renunciation in terms of national moral cohesion, for trans-
formism implies the loss of all legitimation not founded on negotiation, and a
“legitimation” subject to constant challenge can hardly provide a stable marker of
identity. And it was a renunciation in terms of the material cohesion of the nation
because, as a result of this “sublimation,” the center ceded in the face of local pres-
sures and began progressively to adapt different rules for the Mezzogiorno.29
The special legislation and the enlargement of the bureaucratic apparatus (and
later, the military expeditions into Africa) were financed by those regions of Italy
that could do so, which is to say, mainly those in the north.30 This transfer of funds
is justified as an imperative of national solidarity that is apparently absolute but
that in the real world takes place only to the extent that it corresponds roughly
to the interests and social psychology of those controlling the purse strings. The
strength and importance of the hesitations and the resistance are always directly
proportional to the opacity of the “national contract.” When the most important
groups and sectors of the dominant class have difficulty seeing the benefits they
might gain from representing a supposed “general interest,” they tend to tighten
their grip on the national purse and to contest the right of those ostensibly repre-
senting them to speak in their name. They exploit every means at their disposal to
challenge the defined balance.
Thus, in transformist Italy, the versatility of political relationships was the rule.
Each time a proposal, an idea, or a demand surfaced somewhere in the country,
there was an effort to isolate it from the others and to give a particular, specific
response. The “historic bloc” between the industrialists of the north and the big
property owners of the south that, according to Gramsci, prevailed throughout the
phase that began with the adoption of customs tariffs in 1887 should only be con-
sidered as a specific and episodic tactical alliance that brought together, around
protectionist demands, powerful interests with little else in common.
Shortly after the arrival in power of Francesco Crispi, it was Milan that set the
tone for the campaigns against the government headed by the man whom the
Socialist Filippo Turati referred to as the “cynical Sicilian bumpkin.” The “true
bourgeoisie,” Turati declared, had nothing in common with the “brazen banditry
and crookedness of the bumpkins and thugs who made Crispi their hired gun.”31
The opposition of the “State of Milan” marked the collapse of the last attempt
by the ruling class of the Risorgimento to endow the Italian bourgeoisie with a
“positive” political identity, capable of measuring up to the Catholic and Socialist
identities. Born from the failure of efforts to base national legitimation on trans-
formist mediation, this attempt foundered on the same reef: the social bases of any
plan for a “sacred union” between the classes were still too weak and the habit of
pitting different interests against each other in the search for state support drained
all meaning from any striving for national concord.
Crispi resorted to the old Garibaldian expedient of attempting to bypass the
obstacles of reality through subjective voluntarism, but this transformed him into
a sorcerer’s apprentice of social movements—riots, insurrections, and military
adventures—with catastrophic consequences for the new Italy. In the ensuing cri-
sis, Giovanni Giolitti recognized that the social and political actors no longer had
anything in common with those of forty or even twenty years earlier. His attempt
to create a new “unique party of the bourgeoisie” marked the final effort to seek a
national Italian identity, and it led to two political and military catastrophes: the
Libyan War and the Great War.
Part III
Identity and Sovereignty

Chapter 14
A Counter-Reformist Identity
The Disappearance of Italy
I n a 1999 essay, the then archbishop of Bologna, Giacomo Biffi, wrote that the
gravest error of the Piedmontese ruling class in the 1860s was to underestimate
“how deeply rooted Catholic faith is in the Italian soul, and its near consubstanti-
ality with national identity.”1
The voice of Cardinal Biffi was but one of many to be raised from within the
Catholic hierarchy during the 1990s to explain that the fundamental reasons for
the identity crisis then shaking Italy lay in the separation between the develop-
ment of the state and the national spiritual tradition. The bishops were sounding a
polemical theme that the Church had previously taken up during the celebrations
of the fiftieth anniversary of Italian unification. On that occasion, the Holy See’s
daily newspaper had observed that the masses were indifferent, even hostile, to
the state because liberalism had failed to represent “the true interests of Italy and
the Italians.”2 In 1929, immediately after the signing of the Concordat, the Jesu-
its’ review blamed the “Piedmontese government” for the failure of the “national
league” proposed by Pius IX in 1848: the pope and the cardinals, far from opposing
unification, simply wanted “to achieve it differently.”3 Sixty years later, a revisionist
Catholic school of historiography again took up and emphasized these polemical
themes, which had been put aside in the name of a Christian Democratic republic:
The real trustees of the national identity, according to this school, were not Garib-
aldi and Victor Emmanuel, but Cardinal Ruffo and Pius IX.4
The Church’s investment in Italy bore fruit: today, in the peninsula, the voice
of the Vatican is not only heard and respected, but it has become the axis around
which many great decisions of the country revolve, whatever the coalition in
power. This investment, however, does not date from the 1990s, it dates from
the moment when the popes renounced any intention to reestablish their tem-
poral power on the right bank of the Tiber in order to devote themselves to
the conquest of both banks, that is, of all Italy. It is a long-term strategy, which
began with the transformation of the Church from a feudal to a financial power,
continued with the creation of the first national Catholic organizations, refined
itself with the substantial support of the Italian clergy for the military effort of
the Great War, and culminated with the birth of the People’s Party in 1919. The
Concordat of 1929, viewed by many as an endpoint, should really be seen as the

formalization of a strategy, as an indispensable intermediary step, and as a sort
of treaty (signed, if not always respected) with a regime that had its own preten-
sions of forging a national identity based on its particular concept of Italian-
ness. Afterward came the long period of Christian Democratic domination, the
“clerical republic,” in the words of the most important (Catholic) historian of
Church-state relations in Italy, Arturo Carlo Jemolo.5 But it was only with the
disappearance of Christian Democracy—that is, from the moment when the
Church succeeded, with difficulty, in ending its relationship with one of the par-
ties—that the Church was able to claim for the first time since unification that it
represented the overall population and could assert a “quasi-consubstantiality”
between the Catholic and Italian identities.
For Gramsci, Italian Catholicism was a sort of “substitute for a spirit of nation-
ality”6 after the sixteenth century, that is, from the moment when the Church of
Rome asserted itself as the major obstacle to any political unification of the penin-
sula. Biffi, for his part, places the roots of “consubstantiality” in the fourth century,
at the moment when the transition (itself partly a continuity) began from the
institutional structures of the declining Roman Empire to the emerging Catholic
Church. At that time, the peninsula was subjected to multiple influences, mixing
and interacting with the common Latin—and later Catholic—base, giving rise
to sometimes very different variations in identity. Disputed by Byzantines, Lom-
bards, Francs, and Arabs, the peninsula would yield up the principles of a com-
mon identity only hundreds of years later.
Not until the time of Dante and Petrarch did the name of Italy gain political
resonance. According to the two Tuscan poets, torn between Empire and Church,
“enslaved Italy”7 could only have been reconciled by the conjunction of these two
powers. Petrarch began to develop the idea of an Italian “lag” compared to other
nearby entities, an idea that Machiavelli would carry to its conclusion by suggest-
ing that “certainly a country can never be united and happy, except when it obeys
wholly one government”—as had been the case, in very recent history, of “France
and Spain.”8
During the ten centuries from the fall of the Roman Empire to the time of
Dante and Petrarch, two major characteristics emerged that would transform
the Catholic Church into the pivot of Italian political and social life while foster-
ing a break with the Roman experience: the formation of a state in central Italy
and the decline of urban civilization. The pontiffs’ state, indispensable in pre-
serving Church autonomy, prevented all direct contact between the north and
the south of the peninsula for more than one thousand years. And the reversal
of the city-country dynamic saw the clergy taking root in rural areas, where it
eventually represented the only social mediating force between the peasants and
the rest of the world.
When the cause of an Italian national state appeared compromised in the late
fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the clearest and most forward-looking think-
ers placed the prime—sometimes sole—responsibility on the Catholic Church. The
most important of them was, of course, Machiavelli, who expressed this convic-
tion in the clearest and most irrevocable language. To him, “the court of Rome has
A COUNTER-REFORMIST IDENTITY 123
destroyed all piety and religion in Italy.”9 To this moral grievance he added another
that we would now describe as geopolitical: the Church was sufficiently strong to
constitute its own state, but not enough to unify the peninsula, often requiring the
aid of foreign powers to protect its temporal power.10 It is interesting to note that
even those who, like Guicciardini, did not necessarily view the division of the pen-
insula as a problem, they nevertheless shared Machiavelli’s thesis on the divisive role
played by the Church.11
But the debate on the failure to unify the peninsula faded as the real possibil-
ity of overcoming its division receded. The more distant its prospects became,
the larger did Church influence loom over the entire Italian population. Certain
historians have observed that the Counter-Reformation shaped Italian anthropo-
logical identity as few phenomena have done. The fear of punishment, the habit
of acquiescing without necessarily approving, and thus the necessary recourse to
duplicity and dissimulation had a depressing moral effect on the Italian mind,
not unconnected to the weak public morality of the peninsula’s inhabitants.12
Another important heritage that the Counter-Reformation bequeathed to Italy’s
later destiny was the progressive but ineluctable decline of intellectuals as a social
group, who, though limited in size, were still potentially able to exert and claim a
“national” ruling function.
The Disappearance of the Italian Intellectual
The intellectuals’ decline should not be seen as a regrettable bit of “collateral dam-
age” from the Counter-Reformation; rather, it was central to the Church’s six-
teenth-century rebirth from the ashes of the Italian Renaissance. At the moment
when the collapse provoked by the Reformation suggested an irreversible decline
of the Catholic institutional structure, religious life was surprisingly “ardent and
intense.”13 It was a popular religiosity, impregnated with superstition and the
residual influence of ancient polytheistic cults. Facing such vitality, Machiavelli
and some others hoped to channel it toward mundane political ends; others
wanted to purge it of its superstitious elements and restore its original purity; still
others wanted to use it to lessen the difficulties facing the Church. It was the latter
approach that prevailed.
According to Giordano Bruno Guerri, it was Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino, pro-
tagonist of the trials against Bruno, Campanella, and Galileo, who was the first to
acknowledge the loss of northern Europe; he advocated a strategic retreat to make
it easier to safeguard those border countries that had remained Catholic, starting
obviously with Italy.14 Toward this end, all available weapons were deployed, and
not just repressive action. The most important and lasting result was to appropri-
ate the form and contents of popular religiosity by disciplining them and oppos-
ing them to the schisms and wars that result whenever one attempts to eradicate a
people’s most deeply rooted beliefs.15
According to the sociologist Enzo Pace, writing about Italians’ religious prac-
tices in the 1990s, “primary religious socialization” has resisted secularization, still
affecting more than 90 percent of the population. Pace used that phrase to define
the “sort of comfort” that religion and its structures provide during certain fun-
damental life experiences, whether suffering, death, marriage, or birth.16 There
is a singular coincidence between the characteristics Pace attributes to “primary
religious socialization” and what certain Renaissance intellectuals denounced as
the ultimate essence of superstition. In 1539 the Tuscan jurist Enrico Boccella
described as superstitious all those who turn to God only in a moment of fear or
when faced by a material problem that they do not know how to solve. True reli-
gion, Boccella added, should concede nothing to external rites or to the “egoisms
of individual appetites.”17
The Counter-Reformation condemned such positions, which it said were dic-
tated by “haughty intellectuals,” and it rose to the defense of the sancta simplicitas
of the people. During the seventeenth century, Italy witnessed a proliferation of
religious cults, miracles, and revelations, and a multiplying of new saints, prodi-
gious images, and religious relics. In this way the Church renewed its traditional
ties to the people while marking the limits of its agreement with Reformation
theses. For a time, a series of “scholars” were put on trial, even as a systematic cam-
paign was undertaken first against the press—as a technological invention—and
then against publishing and books. Pope Paul IV created in 1557 a congregation to
monitor the application of the Index librorum prohibitorum. When the Inquisitors
put a stop to the attempted resistance of Venice, where, by then, two-thirds of Ital-
ian books were being printed, they had ten thousand to twelve thousand volumes
burned, though the government first obliged them to purchase the tomes to avoid
a revolt by bookstore owners and printers.18
And yet, the cultural policy of the Counter-Reformation did not consist solely
of repressive measures. The trials and the book burnings cannot, by themselves,
explain its successes. For Gramsci, the explanation lay in the fact that in Italy,
religion did not represent “an element of cohesion between the people and the
intellectuals.”19 But there is another reason, again identified by Gramsci: culture
had developed in Italy in the Middle Ages in the cities from which the struggle
between the bourgeoisie and the feudal nobility began; the premature interrup-
tion of this process weakened the bourgeoisie and thereby deprived the royal pow-
ers (whatever their form) of the possibility of pitting this class against the nobility
to keep both in check. This brings us back to the fundamental problem breaking
the straight, ascending line of Italian bourgeois development: the absence of the
material conditions indispensable to the formation of absolute states.
In this framework, the pitting of “the simple folk” against the “scholars” is rem-
iniscent of Sylos Labini’s thesis regarding “lazzarone absolutism” in the Kingdom
of Naples. But there was a sizable difference: in the latter case, it was not simply a
question of the problematic power of the monarch in Rome (the Pope) over the
subjects of his kingdom (the Papal States), but of the power of all ecclesiastical struc-
tures over all subjects on the entire peninsula. The “favors of every nature” that the
Church was able to dispense to the plebes and peasants were incomparable to what
other states could offer. Even if one disregards properly religious questions—and
they are hardly negligible—the decisive difference lies in the clergy’s capacity to tend
to the most elementary needs of society’s lower levels, a capacity that for centuries
made the Church the only Italian institution that was genuinely popular.
In material terms, this capacity contrasted markedly with the impotence of

states in terms of primary services. In Italy, all the structures of what we now
would call the “welfare state,” such as hospitals, hospices, and aid to the poor,
remained the monopoly of ecclesiastical institutions until the end of the nine-
teenth century. Especially in the countryside, the priest was long a public scribe,
a teacher, an intermediary with bureaucracy, and—not negligibly—the holder of
everyone’s secrets.
The Church thus played a decisive role in what Gramsci calls the “denational-
ization of intellectuals”20: taking their place in “cohesion” with the people; forc-
ing those who would not submit to emigrate; and preparing its personnel for a
Catholic universe reaching far beyond the peninsula. Thus, Guerri expounded, the
Italy that had dominated science and culture until the sixteenth century essentially
became a country of intellectual export. The bases for the creation of an ideology
and of a national ruling class were thus definitively destroyed.
The Appearance of the Catholic Party
As mentioned, Counter-Reformist spirit left a deep impression on Italian culture

and social habits. The distrust of the written word, for example, channeled a large
part of the still-existing creative energies toward visual arts, architecture, and
music, which helped make Italians, even today, as famous for their esthetic sense
as for their weak penchant for reading.21
The actions of the Congregation of the Index pushed men of letters to abandon
sensitive subjects and to take refuge in an exaggerated attention to formal prob-
lems. Celebrated Italian universities declined rapidly into decadence, leaving to
the Jesuits a monopoly on the education of the upper classes. As for the political
world, general theoretical explorations of the organization of the modern state
were henceforth displaced far from Italy. Geopolitically the peninsula was under
near-complete Spanish domination, with the exception of three states that were
but partially Italian: Venice, Savoy, and the Papal States. The fight against “schol-
ars” and the loss of resources from wealthy northern Europe led to an impover-
ishment—qualitative as well—of the court of Rome, and its loss of international
prestige. At the moment of the Treaty of Westphalia, for example, Rome’s protests
against the document’s religious clauses left European chancelleries unmoved.
Thus it is not surprising, in this situation of evident decadence, that certain
Italian intellectuals accentuated their cosmopolitan character. Gramsci notes that,
among men of science and culture, those who represented the more advanced
techniques and capacities generally quit the country.22 Men of letters, having long
dealt in light or inoffensive subjects, slowly rediscovered a taste for themes of more
general interest. But in doing so, and lacking social reference points, they con-
structed their polemical edifices on moralist foundations, comporting themselves
as the ultimate judges of their contemporaries’ virtue and as the sole “official”
representatives of the general interest.
What is noteworthy about the generation of great men of letters reaching from
the Counter-Reformation to Romanticism is that almost none of them—from
Ludovico Muratori to Pietro Giannone, to Baretti, Vico, Goldoni, Parini, Alfieri,

Cuoco, Foscolo, and Leopardi—dealt with the Church or the Catholic religion,
and when they did do so, it was to castigate the Church and the religion for their
bad influence on Italian behavior.23 On the contrary, during the Romantic period,
the most prestigious group of leading Italian intellectuals who posed the problem
of national redemption was formed of Catholics who resolutely proclaimed their
religious convictions: from Silvio Pellico to Massimo d’Azeglio, from Cesare Balbo
to Carlo Troya, from Niccolò Tommaseo to Vincenzo Gioberti, and from Alessan-
dro Manzoni, naturally, to Antonio Rosmini.
This religious awakening resulted from several converging factors. For Piero
Gobetti, the struggle of the Risorgimento against the Church was purely political.
It did not touch on “dogmatic” issues, for the quest for liberation from the Popes’
territorial domination had absorbed all the Italians’ energies, preventing them
from following the example of other developed countries and devoting themselves
to religious Reformation. In this religious renaissance the traditional subordina-
tion to French culture also doubtless played a role, as did, surely, the disenchanted
realism of much of the postrevolutionary generation.
One principal effect of the upheaval produced by the French Revolution was
the secularization of politics, which had deprived the Church of its organic rela-
tionship with the power of the state. Candeloro emphasized that if, during the
Restoration, there was constant talk of an “alliance between the throne and the
altar,” it was precisely because this organic relationship had been ruptured and
replaced by a simple, temporary agreement between the ecclesiastical structure
and a certain type of government against a common enemy.24 Unable to do so
directly, the Church was forced to find new forms of representation for its inter-
ests, thus giving rise to a veritable Catholic movement, or to “a party opposed to
other parties,” in Gramsci’s words.25
The ruling Italian classes had suffered only a pale echo of the “Great Fear” in
France; the peasant masses, for their part, had been either the passive element of
the revolution or the active element of the counterrevolution. But there remained
what Croce called an “impression of fear,” which led to a certain dread of the mis-
deeds of the “fraternité” and distaste for the promises of “égalité,” leaving only
“liberté” as an object of bourgeois interest. And the only power in Italy able to
combine the struggle for “liberty” with real control of the peasant masses was the
Catholic Church. This explains the tendencies of a good part of the liberal Italian
bourgeoisie: The ancient faith, as Croce wrote, remained a means—“mythological
to be sure, but still an effective means, to soften and appease suffering and pain.”26
Pius IX may have been the first to notice that, as Croce would write much later,
among “liberal Catholics,” the emphasis was “on the adjective”—liberal. For this
reason the Pope placed the works of Gioberti, Rosmini, and Ventura on the list of
prohibited books in May 1849.27 In any case, the movement played a decisive role
in the creation of the myth, denounced by Cattaneo,28 that the “Guelph Party” in
Italy was essentially identical with the national party.
When Pius IX invoked a divine benediction on Italy on February 10, 1848, the
clergy and the faithful began considering seriously for the first time the possi-
bility of national unification.29 Ippolito Nievo recalls that both peasants and city
dwellers, the educated and the illiterate, were at that moment united in “the cry
of ‘Long live Pius IX!’” Yet, when the pontiff ostensibly abandoned the national
cause, “this religious link that had united intellectuals and the plebeians of our
Italian countryside in common aspirations was broken.”30
According to Gramsci, the breaking of this bond meant that, in the Italian
Risorgimento, the democrats—who, in an ideal (and abstract) scheme, should
have represented the “Jacobins”—expressed none of the essential demands of the
masses31; the real “theoretical Jacobins,” the true strategists, were the liberal Catho-
lics. This group, however, was destined to fail, for it could only lead the masses to
the extent that it was prepared to wed itself fully with the policies of the Church.32
The Italian bourgeoisie thus found itself a prisoner of its traditional histori-
cal contradiction: that of being a class that both needs change but also fears it.
Once again, this fundamental indecision left it as a hostage to the Church. And
the Church, once it learned this lesson, exploited to its own benefit this trace of
national spirit that it had never had.
Chapter 15
A Civil “Guelph” Religion
The Red and the Black
T hroughout the process that empowered the bourgeoisie—from the Refor-

mation to the Italian Army’s entry into Rome in 1870, by way of the French
Revolution—the Catholic Church witnessed a progressive decline in its doctrinal
prerogatives, in its property holdings, and in its material and spiritual influence.
The impact in Italy was not nearly as disruptive as had been the case in sixteenth-
century Germany or in eighteenth-century France, but it carried the potential of
even more dire consequences for the Church.
As had happened elsewhere, development on the peninsula was supposed to
eliminate feudal vestiges. Beginning in Piedmont in the 1850s, a series of legisla-
tive acts guaranteeing the free circulation of capital were progressively put in place,
provoking a violent reaction from local clergy and from Rome.
Most historians agree today that the threat for the Church was far less seri-
ous than it seemed at the time, certainly far less so than it might have been.
According to the Catholic historian Roger Aubert, anticlerical legislation was
often applied flexibly and with moderation.1 In September 1870, the Italian laws
against congregations were not applied throughout the newly conquered Roman
region, leaving time for churchmen to sell anything they could. In May 1871,
finally, eight months after the taking of Rome, the law known as “guarentigie”
(the Guarantees Bill) was passed, assuring the Vatican a small independent ter-
ritory and an annual income of 3,225,000 lira, around 5 percent of the annual
budget of the kingdom. The pope firmly rejected both the law and the money,
making it known through the Ubi nos encyclical that the Church could not
receive from the state those rights that are given it by God. Some six months
earlier, the same Pius IX had excommunicated the king, the government, and the
“subalpine” army; later he forbade Catholics to take part in the political activi-
ties of the kingdom. The rupture was real and profound.
During the final phase of the Risorgimento, the Catholic Church’s material
strength had deteriorated rapidly. The coup de grace came in 1860 with the loss of
Emilia and the Marche, the two richest regions of the Papal States. Church hierar-
chies were paralyzed by doubt and uncertainty; a strategy of reconquista did begin
to emerge only some years later. It was a strategy built on two trump cards: the
Church’s still-strong influence in the countryside, and the desire of many bour-
geois liberals for appeasement.
Its real presence in society’s most remote corners allowed the Church to exert
the full weight of the political blackmail represented by its absence from political
competition. This absence was all the more strongly felt since part of the bour-
geoisie was beginning to think that the closest peril was no longer represented by
sanfedism in the interior or by a hostile alliance of Catholic powers in the exte-
rior, but by socialism. Even as a parliamentary discussion continued in Rome
on the Law of Guarantees, in Paris, said the Foreign Minister Visconti Venosta,
blew “the impious breath that extinguished all moral sense and all sentiment of
honor among the masses.”. In the Parliament, the former head of government
Luigi Federico Menabrea warned against acting like the Byzantines in 1453:
“Rather than continuing to wage a war against a group that no longer represents
any danger, let us unite to exorcise the common enemy.”2 In the struggle against
the “revolutionary peril,” the Church undeniably held a solid lead. While it could
draw on the capital accumulated during centuries of implacable struggle against
“revolution,” the Italian bourgeoisie had only just waged its own revolution, and
a timid one at that.
The absence of a real workers movement in Italy meant that the repression of
Thiers in France sufficed to remove the fear of “red peril” for several more decades.
But, Jemolo writes, the “impious breath” had left Church hierarchies and Italian
bourgeoisie believing that a society without private property constituted a graver
threat than a society that allowed divorce.3 The accords of 1929 would merely give
such thinking a juridical underpinning.
The Conversion of the Church
The real problem facing the Italian state in the early decades of its existence was not
to defend itself from the lower classes, which posed no concrete threat, but rather to
find broad legitimacy among the ruling class. What united Church and state from
the start of the unification process was the vital and primordial problem, for both, of
survival. Yet, since their reciprocal hostility was real and unavoidable, the difficulty
consisted in finding a balancing point between rapprochement and repulsion.
Thus, Candeloro writes, having eliminated its temporal power, confiscated part
of its assets, secularized its laws and some of its structures, “the bourgeoisie satis-
fied itself with what it had achieved and even offered the Church the possibility of
involving itself in the new state of things.”4 The Church, while officially rejecting
this implicit truce offering, was not about to ignore the proposal, taking advantage
of it to begin the long work of economic and organizational transition.
Underlying this transition, writes the most important historian of the Azione
cattolica, Gianfranco Poggi, was the clear awareness that a simple attitude of refusal
“would have been disastrous.” Secularization tended to loosen the attachment of
the faithful, an attachment that risked disappearing for good if the Church did not
decide to approach the new context with more constructive attitudes.5 It thus pro-
ceeded toward a more rigorous centralization and a broader opening to lay people
A CIVIL “GUELPH” RELIGION 131
to give the latter direct responsibilities within ecclesiastical institutions; these were
strictly interdependent measures, for the larger the number of lay people speaking
in the Church’s name, the more necessary it is for them to come under hierarchi-
cal control and strict discipline. These choices prefaced the creation of a national
organization of coordination of all Catholic associations. During its Congress of
1874, this organization made known its principal demands, particularly concern-
ing education and family policy.
Although it had rejected the notion of a conservative Catholic party, the Vati-
can nonetheless maintained various forms of organization at the national level, and
remained willing to intervene through appropriate political instruments in local sit-
uations where it had specific interests to promote or defend, as in the city of Rome.
In the kingdom’s new capital, the main act of the Church’s metamorphosis was
being played out. Having had to abandon its final links to the remnants of the feu-
dal world, the Church was being pushed to make its grand entry into the capitalist
system, with the status of a great financial power.6 In this turning point lies the
main explanation for its survival amid the bourgeois tempest.
The liquid capital that the Church had managed to conserve came partly from
the custom of “Peter’s pence,” a sort of economic billows for the universal Church,
but above all from the transfer of its property holdings, largely effected in the short
period between the conquest of Rome and the application of the laws against the
congregations. This capital led to the creation of a vast financial system, which made
it possible to buy back some of the same properties that had once been the “inalien-
able” assets of the feudal Church. A multiplier mechanism kicked in, boosted by the
dizzying rise in property values: The banks provided the indispensable capital for
property investors and builders, and in turn, these investments, yielding phenom-
enal profits, supported an unprecedented expansion of the credit sector.
Since Rome had become the country’s capital, numerous enterprises had
opened offices there and thus came into contact with the Catholic economic
forces dominating the city. Productive bonds, at times conflicting, but more often
cooperative, were thus forged between Vatican finance and the rest of the Italian
capitalist world. In these linkages one finds the fundamental reason that many
moderate liberals sought common ground with the Catholics.
At the time of the Libyan War, in 1911, the Banco di Roma—the largest of the
Catholic banks, directed by the uncle of the future Pius XII—distinguished itself
as a key supporter of the colonial mission.7 It was no accident if the “baptism
by fire” of Italian imperialism in Libya was followed almost immediately by the
suspension of the non expedit (the Vatican policy, enjoined on Italian Catholics,
of abstaining in parliamentary elections), by the concession of universal suffrage,
and by the entry into parliament of the first Catholic deputies. During World War
I, the Church gained entry among the fundamental forces of the state by institu-
tionalizing its instruments of support, assistance, and comfort.
Social Transformism
Catholics’ involvement in the management, direct or indirect, of the affairs of the

kingdom was often curbed by the Church hierarchy, but almost never by Italian
political officials. Even Crispi, who, as a deputy of the far left, had fought the Guar-
antees Bill, sang its praises once he had become prime minister.
Crispi was a sort of human hinge of the first decades of the new Italy, since
he personified the connection between the “heroic” period of the Risorgimento
and the early colonial phase. He knew that, in an open war, the Church could
have unleashed the peasantry against the state, whereas the mission of Italian
“grandeur” necessitated internal concord; he thus created, as Jemolo reminds us,
the conditions for an unprecedented rapprochement between the political and
religious authorities; no important Catholic, Jemolo adds, was ever excluded
from any branch of the administration because of his convictions.8 The first
important public evidence of this rapprochement, as regards colonial ambitions,
came with the clergy’s participation in the national memorial services, in 1887,
for five hundred soldiers killed during a battle against the Abyssinians in Dogali,
in Eritrea.
But the truly decisive turning point was represented, in the eyes of many observ-
ers, by the events in Milan of May 1898. On this occasion, the ruling liberal class,
for the last time, played the card of self-sufficiency, striking equally at the “reds”
and the “blacks” to prove itself the sole arbiter of conflicts in Italy. This pretense
began to appear, even in the eyes of part of the bourgeoisie, as disproportionate,
the symptom of a paranoid syndrome of utter encirclement quite out of keeping
with the new situation. The parliament disavowed the government, which was
forced to resign, opening the way for a new transformist phase that would take its
name from Giovanni Giolitti.
During the following decade, the development of Catholic organizations and
of the Socialist Party were only two of the political forms taken amid the coun-
try’s profound social transformation. As this first Italian “economic miracle”9 took
shape, numerous new financial and industrial actors appeared. Giolitti’s approach
was to systematize what Crispi had attempted to do: to associate the old social
groups in power with those fostered by industrialization, by directly targeting
their political representatives.
As for the lower classes, Crispi had, for the first time since the birth of the
new state, adopted a “social policy.” Thus, while social spending constituted a
mere 0.3 percent of total public expenditures in 1870 and 0.5 percent in 1880, it
doubled in the Crispian decade to reach 1 percent in 1900. The social portfolio
became a fundamental element of Giolitti’s policy, to the point that by 1906, it
accounted for 2.3 percent of all public spending.10 But that was not enough to
reach the objectives the prime minister had set. As the Italian proletariat had
not yet given birth to a “workers’ aristocracy” that could be mobilized to defend
the established order, the attempt to separate the reformist Socialists from the
extremist swamp failed.
With the Catholics, the difficulties were not as large. The great majority of
them, Spadolini writes, realized after 1898 that the “anti-state, anti-unitary
prejudice” no longer made any sense. The riots of Milan, Spadolini continues,
had laid bare the interweaving of the interests of the secular bourgeoisie and the
new Catholic bourgeoisie, leading the latter to understand that a collapse of the
liberal state would have taken with it many of the group’s positions and zones
of influence.
Despite the convergence of interests, Giolitti’s attempts at a policy of assimilation
did not produce the anticipated fruits. This was partly because of the Socialists’ irre-
ducibility, but primarily because of the immaturity of Italian capitalist development
and the necessity not to break with old social classes that were already integral to the
new system. Thus, having failed to define the contours of a “national interest,” that is
an agenda capable of unifying the conscience of Italians, the ruling liberal class again
resorted to a case-by-case negotiation for political consensus, using the same meth-
ods Depretis and Crispi had employed: bargaining at every level, corrupt practices,
pressures of every sort, seizure of prefectures and their local administrations, and
electoral intimidation. A witness of the time, Ettore d’Orazio, described the majority
as “the temporary coalition of different groups, having different leaders and divided
by tradition, by interests and by tendencies.”11
To simplify, one could say that the “Giolittian” strategy was based on three prin-
cipal objectives: to enlarge the parliamentary majority; to integrate the new actors
that had arisen from development into the management of the state; and to create
a national collective conscience. Of these three objectives, the first was achieved
(though at the cost of the most brazen parliamentary maneuvers), the second was
not realized (because of the Libyan War and, especially, World War I), and the last
failed owing to the constant resort to transformist practice.
In 1911, even a liberal monarchist like Benedetto Croce acknowledged seeing,
fifty years after unification, the decline of social unity. Individuals, the philosopher
wrote, “no longer feel linked to a grand whole,” and if such division cannot be
overcome, he concluded, it was vain to hope that “Italy will ever become great.”
The “Great War” of the Church
Catholicism came to occupy a predominant place in the collective Italian mind,

with each point of transition marked by an accompanying weakening of secular
culture. The phenomenon has been widely noted in relation to the crisis between
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; Gramsci and Jemolo observed it in
connection with the crisis between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and
some are starting to see it in connection with the crisis between the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries.
Just as during the first of these critical phases, the central problem during
the second had to do with the relationship to the masses, though under differ-
ent forms, of course. Gramsci dealt with this notion in an article in December
1918: the collision with Catholicism, he wrote, caused the liberal state to shrivel
and could lead only to the “subordination of liberalism to Catholicism.”12 Gramsci
wrote these words in the aftermath of World War I, during which this “subordina-
tion” had become clear.
As we have seen, the Catholic bourgeoisie had realized for some years that its
interests did not differ substantially from those of the rest of the Italian bour-
geoisie. Thus even those bourgeois Catholics who expected no direct benefit from
Italy’s participation in the war rallied to the ambient patriotism for fear that they
otherwise would be accused of being unpatriotic and might lose, as Candeloro
puts it, “the political, economic and administrative positions they had attained in
the preceding years.”13
The Church thus found itself having to manage the contradiction between
its universalism (which required it to continue being the Church of Catholics in
Austria, France, Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Poland, etc.) and the “national”
interests of the bourgeois Catholics in those countries. It dealt with this awkward
position by allowing the faithful to deal with the distinction between the Church’s
universal position and that of the Catholics in the nations involved in the conflict.
Thus, on May 20, 1915, four days before Italy’s attack on Austria, Catholic deputies
joined their votes to those of the majority (407 to 74) in granting full powers to
the prime minister “in case of war.” In June 1916, the first Catholic deputy, Filippo
Meda, entered the government as minister of Finance.
This transition from neutrality to engagement took place not just at the top
of the social ladder, but, more importantly, at its very bottom. The 2,400 army
chaplains that the commander in chief of the Italian Army presided over among
the 25,000 clergymen mobilized were part of a veritable infiltration of the army.
The Pope not only authorized the chaplains to serve but also created a special dio-
cese within the army, with its own bishop—who immediately obtained from the
state the rank of general. It was a clear case of do ut des (“I scratch your back, you
scratch mine”) in which each of the contracting parties served its own interests,
and it anticipated the Concordat.
During the war, the clergy officially regained its traditional role of social
mediator between power and the people, a role that it had never lost despite the
secularization that accompanied modernization. The state now recognized the
importance of this role, both to boost the morale of the troops and to bolster
failing backup. The parishes managed 11,932 charities, 8,088 money and clothing
collection centers, 4,177 information offices, 1,963 day-care facilities, and 3,084
committees for civil mobilization and assistance.14
Militarily, and in terms of international politics, the Italian war was won by the
English and the French, with decisive help from the Americans. Morally, and in
domestic political terms, the Italian war was won by the Church.
The Church did not hesitate to present its bill. Not only did the state take it
upon itself to increase the emoluments provided to priests, but also, starting in
1920, it undertook serious negotiations to resolve all outstanding disputes. The
most significant change, however, came in the birth of the People’s Party, which
Gramsci described at the time as “the most important event in Italian history since
the Risorgimento.”15 The Church had renounced the demand for the restoration of
the temporal state, because now it harbored a far more vast ambition, involving
the identification between the Italian nation and the Catholic nation. The Vatican
now aimed, Candeloro writes, for the creation of an integrally Christian state,16 an
ambition that would lead, inevitably, to the confrontation with fascism.
The conviction that a reintegration of God in both legislation and public affairs
was under way was reinforced by a series of measures taken by the new fascist
government: the return of the crucifix to schools and courtrooms, mandatory reli-
gion classes in school, the education reform of 1923 that placed public and private
schools on an even footing, and the establishment of Sacred Heart of Milan, the
first Catholic university.
When the Concordat was signed in February 1929, the “Roman question” died
away for good. It was at that moment that the latent conflict between two religions,
both aspiring to provide spiritual direction to the Italian masses, burst into plain sight.
Chapter 16
The Quest for a Civil

Italian Religion
The Voluntarist Shortcut
I taly, writes Gian Enrico Rusconi, has known no form of “civil religion”—nei-
ther the American form, which emphasizes the noun in that phrase, nor the
French form, which accents the adjective. This void, according to Rusconi, was
filled by the Church, which exercises the role of a “substitute civil religion.”1 The
Italian case is unique in this regard. Unlike other Catholic countries like France,
Austria, and even Spain, where the ecclesiastical apparatus has had to confront an
entrenched royal power since at least the fifteenth century, in Italy the authority of
the Church has long faced no real state obstacles.
At its birth, the Kingdom of Italy lacked all the common qualities that puta-
tively create a sense of belonging to a single nation: unity of language, unity of ter-
ritory, and unity of tradition. Above all, the new country lacked “a common way of
thinking, a common principle, a common goal,” that is, the very essence of nation-
ality in Mazzini’s eyes. The Destra lost little sleep over this. It had other priorities,
starting with the need to build structures that could extend state power across the
entire peninsula; the national principle was not part of its cultural mentality. The
ruling Piedmontese class was accustomed to dealing with subjects, not citizens,
and the conditions under which the country had unified gave it little motive to
abandon its traditional vision.
It was only when the Sinistra arrived in power that the ambition of an Italian
“civil religion” began to find practical application. This was not only because of
the different cultural education of the men who had come to power in 1876, nor
was it simply because the Paris Commune had shown, early in the decade, that
the people were not merely a sum of individuals, but a mass whose moods had to
be recognized and disciplined. It was also because the Sinistra had been the first
manifestation of a real enlargement of the bases of power, and it had to attempt
to bring a certain form and coherence to the new and composite interests that it
had pulled together.
For Francesco de Sanctis, minister of public instruction, but also a literary
critic, this task was the responsibility of the schools and of literature, guardians
not only of a national identity but also of a national pedagogy. That said, the edu-
cation system was weakened by profound structural inadequacies, as we have seen,
and the patriotic literature of De Amicis, Carducci, Pascoli, D’Annunzio, and even
the futurists continued for a very long time to address itself to a very limited public
with diversified tastes; moreover, this literature was deeply influenced by French
literary production.
The attempt to apply the pedagogical virtues of the French Third Republic to
Italy had failed not only because Italy was not France but also because the terms
of the relationship between the grandeur of the country and a national conscious-
ness in Italy had constantly been reversed. The “nation” was only a abstract con-
cept in France before the distribution of land to the peasants, before the civil code,
and before the Napoleonic conquests. British pride, for its part, was not a condi-
tion of the creation of the empire, but its consequence. The Americans did not
conceive of themselves as a “nation” with the objective of throwing the English
into the ocean and creating the first constitutional republic in human history, but
rather in the aftermath of these two titanic enterprises. National consciousness
is a consequence of real strength. It can grow as a function of the growth of real
strength; it never replaces it and, a fortiori, never creates it.
In Italy, like in many weaker countries, it is the voluntarist factor that has domi-
nated the concept of nation. De Sanctis’s idea that literature could permit Italy
to rise above “second-rank” status and aspire even to “convert the modern world
into a world that we own”2 does not date from the Sinistra’s accession to power.
It comes from the conviction, which grew during the Risorgimento, that Italy had
to be the “educator” of humankind, even the “verb of God among the races,” in
the words of Mazzini. This idea was popularized, if one can say it, by Vincenzo
Gioberti and also by Mazzini himself, who offered historic, cultural, religious, and
even geopolitical justifications for it.
This idea of a “civilizing mission” clearly influenced the first leaders of unified
Italy—“even the most realistic and those most aware of the country’s real condi-
tions,” writes Emilio Gentile—to reject the possibility that the new country might
limit itself to a modest neutrality in the concert of nations.3 Given the circum-
stances of its creation, its objective weight in demographic and economic terms,
and its geographic position, Italy had no real possibility of remaining neutral for
long. The lack of realism among the leaders of the country thus lay not so much
in their thoughts of an impossible neutrality, but in the conviction that the new
country could prevail over other powers.
As we have seen, lacking policies of their own, the democrats of the 1850s were
in fact guided by Cavour and the moderates. A similar thing occurred on the
international policy scene, especially among men of democratic background. In
an April 1868 letter, Otto von Bismarck offered a lesson in geopolitics to Mazzini,
exploiting the latter’s notorious francophobia: Italy and Germany, the Prussian
chancellor wrote, “exert their action in such different directions that Italy can
never aspire to dominate the Baltic, nor Germany the Mediterranean”; at the same
time, “the configuration of the terrestrial globe being unchangeable, Italy and
France will always be rivals and often enemies.”4
THE QUEST FOR A CIVIL ITALIAN RELIGION 139
The most Mazzinian politician of the new Italy, Francesco Crispi, recognized
that the grandeur of Italy and its national conscience would be born of its suc-
cesses in international politics, notably, if they were achieved through military
means. Italy, he asserted in 1866, the year of the humiliations of Custoza and
Lissa, “needs a baptism by fire: she owes it to herself, so that the great nations of
Europe know that she, too, is a great nation, and that she is sufficiently strong
to demand respect in the world.”5 Yet, the “baptisms by fire” that Italy was to
experience under Crispi’s leadership—Amba Alagi and Macallé in 1895, Adwa in
1896, not to mention the Fasci Siciliani—destroyed Crispi, diminished respect
for Italy in the world, and lessened the possibility that Italy might one day be
able to construct its own “civil religion.”
Italian Fatherlands
On the eve of World War I, the competition between those presenting them-
selves as the sole true trustees of the “fatherland” was fierce. The conservative
liberals pointed to the undeniable progress achieved since 1861 and, in the
fiftieth-anniversary celebrations, made official the syncretistic vision of the
Risorgimento advocated by de Sanctis as early as 1862. The republicans, for their
part, condemned the “lie” of an official Italy, which they said was physically but
not spiritually united because it “lacked a popular soul.” As natural heirs to the
Mazzini’s “voluntarist shortcut,” they conceived the “true fatherland” as the real
country purged of its flaws; they made of this a moral postulate.
The living conditions of the people outside the public arena were also a polemi-
cal target of the Catholics and the Socialists, hostile to a state seen as “foreign” to
Italians’ real interests. But, unlike the republicans, the Catholics and Socialists had
deep roots among these same people. Because of the continuity of their institu-
tions, the propagation of their religion, and their centuries-long symbiosis with
the peasant world, the Catholics also claimed to represent the true fatherland of
the Italians, which was naturally different from the liberals’. They knew that so
long as they were not called on to manage the state, it could not truly be a state
for all, and this, indirectly, would give them political strength. On top of that, they
would bring to the negotiating table with the liberals the trump card of their social
doctrine. Embodied in state structures, it could provide a dowry to the common
fatherland—a solution to the “workers question,” that is, social peace.
Among the different fatherlands proposed to the Italians, one was actually
Socialist. For Filippo Turati, “Italian, worker and citizen” are but one; separated,
they unmasked the “lie” upon which the official Italian state was founded.6 But
here again was an underlying offer of collaboration: the proposal to transform
the proletariat into a social pillar of the Italian state. It is not incidental that this
suggestion came from the leader of the reformist wing of the party who, during
the Giolittian decade, had come close to throwing his support to a majority that
today we would call center-left. But the Socialist Party was very divided and, in
1912, it was the maximalist (extremist) faction that emerged to take the reins,
declaring war on “bourgeois patriotism” and expelling four of its deputies for their
“nationalist and warmonger” positions.
All the political groups mentioned were in fact divided at their cores: the
liberals were motivated by their ideals, of course, but also by their transformist
management of public affairs; the republicans oscillated between a liberalism
barely more radical than that of the government and revolutionary subversiv-
ism; and the “modernist” tendencies troubled the consciences of many Catholics,
before being energetically condemned by Pius X in his 1907 encyclical Pascendi
Dominici Gregis.
To be sure, among the republicans and the Catholics there were factions and
individuals who were unalterably hostile to the liberal state, but most of Mazzi-
ni’s heirs seemed more interested in “pursuing their business interests within the
shadow of the monarchy” than in overturning it, as one can read in a report by the
prefect of Forlì, a republican stronghold.7 In any case, outside Romagna and the
Carrara region, their political influence was negligible. Catholics, for their part,
had already begun their slow ascension toward the conquest of the state; their hos-
tility toward it was tactical, though a few took it literally. Support for the Libyan
expedition and the elections of 1913—when Catholics were responsible, accord-
ing to Count Ottorino Gentiloni, for the election of 195 of the 305 deputies in the
liberal majority—testified eloquently to this fact.
Outside of these minorities—reactionary Catholics, revolutionary republi-
cans, extremist Socialists, and anarchists—one other political grouping declared
open hostility to the liberal state: the nationalists. If the Socialists were the direct
product of the Giolittian era’s “economic miracle”—representing, as they did, a
proletariat that had grown in quantity and in quality8—the nationalists were the
indirect product, the still uncertain expression of new forces that had begun to
raise questions about the old balance but that were not yet able to create new one.
During the Giolittian period, industrial production rose from 50 percent to
twice that, depending on the source.9 Imports tripled and exports rose by a factor
of 2.5 in less than twenty years.10 The agricultural consumption of chemical prod-
ucts rose by 9.25 times between 1893 and 1913, and this had a multiplying effect
on the rural exodus.11 The number of Italians leaving the countryside each year
rose from 310,434 in 1896 through 1900 to 679,152 in 1909 through 1913 (hav-
ing hit a high of 739,661 emigrants per year in 1905 through 1907).12 At the same
time, the cities grew more and more crowded as they went from 24 percent of the
population in 1881 to 31.3 percent in 1911 (four-fifths of this increase stemmed
from migratory flows).13
During the early years of the decade, the combined effects of protectionism,
expanded credit and production, plus increasing purchasing power seemed to
create a virtuous circle that could satisfy all demands. Transformism as an occa-
sional exchange of favors soared to new heights. But the crisis of 1907, born
out of the first great financial panic in the United States, brought to light all the
contradictions that growth had hidden. Banks refused to continue long-term
financing, creating a liquidity crisis for large industry; industry then demanded
more substantial aid from the state and abandoned the policy of direct negotia-
tions with workers. Consumption diminished, and the most export-dependent
sectors, which had suffered in a time of protectionist-aided development, tight-

ened further.14
At once, the balance that had been assured in a time of impetuous growth broke
down, with serial political effects. Among the Socialists, the reformist camp rapidly
lost ground; among the Catholics, the factions that had favored lending a helping
hand to the liberal state gained strength; among the nationalists, the movement
broke free of the limited intellectual circles in which it had been confined. At its
heart, the rupture between “free-traders” and “protectionists” became complete,
and the nationalists became the political organ of big Italian capital financiers as
well as of the frightened new petit-bourgeois groups who were terrified of losing
their recently gained prosperity.
The “Dogmatic Vice” of Nationalism
It was only during the Giolittian decade and, in particular, in connection with the
1907 crisis that some in Italy first theorized about the necessity of a “party of the
bourgeoisie.” This notion arose precisely at the moment when the “sole party of
the bourgeoisie,” based on transformism, faced a crisis.
The first to seek to give a political conscience to the productive bourgeoisie
were the nationalists, united around the journal Il Regno. For them, “the life of
Italy” was embodied by those “courageous industrialists who increase our pro-
duction, fight for the markets of England [and] conquer Asia Minor and South
America”; their factories, these nationalists continued, would have an advantage
over the “word factories” of parliamentary politics.15
Francesco Saverio Nitti, however, was the first, or one of the firsts, to speak in
terms of an actual party. Writing in 1907, Nitti offered the outlines of a platform
meant to reflect the general interest of the bourgeoisie, and in particular of the
industrial bourgeoisie; the party was not seen so much as an organization as it was
a “conscience.”16 On the creation of a “coherent conscience of the bourgeoisie after
the economic malaise of the years after 1907,” according to Carocci, the work and
action of the economist Vilfredo Pareto, a theoretician, with Gaetano Mosca, also
dealt with the power of the economic elites.17 Pareto would become, over the years,
the advocate of a “national” or “imperialist” socialism; and it was with a socialism
transposed from class struggle to the struggle between nations that Enrico Cor-
radini, considered the “theoretician” of Italian nationalism, also aligned himself.
The nation, to Corradini—like the proletariat for the Socialists—without theo-
retical conscience is a class in itself, but not a class for itself: the task of the Social-
ists, he said, had been to “teach the proletariat the value of class struggle,” while the
task for the nationalists was to “teach Italy the value of international struggle.”18
If, for Socialists, class consciousness developed through struggle and strikes, for
nationalists, Corradini concluded, national consciousness developed through
imperialist war: “Nationalism should give rise in Italy to the desire for victorious
war.”19 Corradini drew up a list of seven reasons why, even in 1911, “Italy does not
have a developed national conscience”: (1) it had never been a nation; (2) it had
not had (and still does not have) a national language; (3) it was not the product of
a revolution; (4) it was, instead, the product of “diplomatic maneuvers and foreign
arms”; (5) it was the theater of too much antagonism; (6) it was the theater of too
many social conflicts; and (7) its political class was “the residue of servile times.”20
Beyond the polemical exaggeration, the description is correct, but, as with a bor-
rowing from Marxism, it stops at the surface. Rather than finding “the organic
process that necessarily determined these conditions,” Gobetti wrote, the national-
ists merely “came back to Gioberti’s poor dream of despair.”21
The nationalists celebrated the Libyan War as the beginning of Italian gran-
deur and the displays of patriotism that accompanied it as the beginning of
national consciousness. They had seen only the surface and the potential of eco-
nomic transformation in the just-ended decade and ignored its contradictions:
growth and power for them were merely a question of virtue and desire, and
only immorality and a failure of will could stop the triumphal march of the
bourgeoisie in Italy.
Over the course of the decade, industrial monopolies, created with the com-
plicity of protectionist policy and with the direct participation of the major banks,
had taken on greater and greater importance, to the point that even Luigi Einaudi,
a sworn enemy of any state intervention in economic affairs, had begun to worry.
Protected from foreign competition, the steel industry long continued to use
techniques that necessitated no great capital investments or particularly qualified
manual labor, but the steel thus produced cost twice as much as English steel. So
it was normal that with each economic slowdown, with each crisis putting Italian
production in even slightly greater contact with foreign production, the monopo-
lists felt lost and called on the state to help. In 1911 the Banca d’Italia responded
to such appeals by creating, along with the Banca Commerciale and the Credito
Italiano—the two largest banks in Italy at the time—a syndicate designed to pro-
vide ninety-six million lira to troubled enterprises.22 Also in 1911, Italy declared
war on Turkey and invaded Libya.
The foreign policy of transformism was the exact mirror of domestic policy:
Italy was allied with everyone at once and promised its support to all the parties in
the various conflicts. In June 1902, Foreign Minister Prinetti signed an accord with
France, which was in a state of open hostility with Germany, two days after having
signed the renewal of the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria. In October
1909, Minister Tittoni signed an agreement with Russia against, among others, any
Austrian expansion in the Balkans, just four days after having ratified a pact with
Vienna providing for compensation for Italy in the event of Austrian expansion in
this same region, and committing the two countries to make no agreements with
third states on the subject of the Balkans.
The whole “organic process that necessarily determined” the gestures of Italian
imperialism was foreign to the nationalists, who made this simply a question of
“courage,” of “moral integrity,” of “national pride.”
When Italy launched its Libyan adventure, the patriotic effervescence and the
triumphalism of the nationalists joined to conceal international perplexity over the
gap between Italian ambitions and the reality of the country’s development.23 The
war itself necessitated sending a contingent three times larger than anticipated. It
lasted a year and ended in October 1912 with a unilateral retreat of Turkish army
from Libya, under pressure from the birth of a hostile coalition in the Balkans.
During World War I, the Libyan Arab tribes succeeded in chasing out the Italians,
and the “pacification” of the region would be announced twenty-one years after
the start of operations there, in January 1932, by Governor Pietro Badoglio.24
In fact, despite the performance of the Giolittian decade, Italy’s lag behind other
great powers was remarkable and, owing to protectionism, had even grown wider.
Its share of total world manufacturing production declined from 2.5 percent in
1900 to 2.4 percent in 1913. This also explains the undulating character of foreign
policy, buffeted by the military difficulties, but also by the incapacity to find other
domestic political balance beyond the transformist approach.
In 1913 Italian industrial production was 2.5 times less than that of France, 3.6
times less than that of Russia, 6 times less than that of Germany or England, and
13.3 times less than that of the United States. Despite the steel-making monopo-
lies, its steel production was only one-third that of France, barely 5.3 percent that
of Germany, and a mere 3 percent that of the United States. Its energy consump-
tion, to conclude this brief comparative tableau, was 17.6 percent that of France,
5.8 percent that of Germany, and 2 percent that of the United States Nothing in
these data seems to justify the optimism of the editors of Regno regarding the
capacity of Italy’s “courageous industrialists” to fight for English markets or to
conquer “Asia Minor and South America.”
In 1913 Gaetano Salvemini wrote that the nationalists had a “megalomania-
cal vision of the capacities of Italy,” and added that he personally felt more like a
citizen of “the Italy of today, only beginning to rise up from the intellectual, moral
and economic misery of several centuries.”25 For Gobetti, the nationalists were
the “grand party of a dreary and infantile Italy.” For them, concluded this young
liberal—who would be killed by the Fascists in 1926, at age twenty-five—“colonial
expansion and militarism are not specific desires, but dogmatic vices.”26 It was
these dogmatic vices that would lead Italy to catastrophe during the two world
conflicts just ahead.
Chapter 17
A Petit-Bourgeois Fatherland
The Rise and Fall of the Petite Bourgeoisie
F ascism represented the most coherent attempt to create an Italian civil reli-
gion—a homogeneous body of values, feelings, and behaviors to be shared
among all the peoples of the peninsula.1 But everyone knows how catastrophically
this turned out: in 1945, after two years of civil war, with Italians on both sides
swapping accusations of betrayal, all mentions of the nation, the fatherland, or any
other symbol even remotely suggestive of the Fascist experience were abandoned.2
After the question of national identity resurfaced in Italy following the political
crisis of the 1990s, many people said that it was fascism and the war that had kept
it on a back burner for more than forty years. Fewer dared to link this “disqualifi-
cation” of a sense of identity to the successes achieved earlier by the Mussolinian
regime in attempting to forge such a sense: a social compromise with the petite
bourgeoisie founded on promises that could not be kept.
It may seem paradoxical that the petite bourgeoisie should have become so
politically important at the precise moment when it was starting on a downward
curve in economic and social affairs—that is, when large numbers of peasants
were abandoning the countryside to become hourly laborers, and when small-
scale production and distribution were hit by the first big processes of concen-
tration. Historically the petite bourgeoisie has been the first to benefit from the
gradual enlargement of political institutions in newly maturing capitalist societies,
making it a mass base for liberal democracy, and an unavoidably pivotal social
element. Its political importance has helped slow its downward curve, socially and
economically, as have legislative initiatives; this braking action has grown more
decisive as social and economic decline have become more pronounced.
In Italy, the growth of the political strength of the petite bourgeoisie largely
took place in just a few years, between the repression of the Milanese riots of 1898
and the entry into World War I in 1915. The group’s arrival on the political scene
was marked by a pronounced hostility toward the old ruling classes, which the
petit bourgeois wanted to replace, and by an equally sharp hostility toward the
proletariat, whose demands were seen as a direct threat to the economic well-
being and social prestige so recently acquired. Let us not forget that from 1901 to
1913, while average income increased by 17 percent, workers’ salaries rose by 26
percent, strengthening the petit-bourgeois conviction that industrial employees

were privileged in their own way.3
In a 1923 essay, Luigi Salvatorelli explains that this class was democratic and
Socialist leaning so long as it thought it had found, in democracy and in socialism,
the idealized forms of its interests, and it abandoned them the moment they began
to transform into reality and embody its worst nightmares: industrialization and
a workers’ coalition. In the years of Giolittism, the petite bourgeoisie aligned with
nationalism because, Salvatorelli continues, it was “too weak and inconsistent as
an organic class—that is, one holding power and economic function”—to mea-
sure up to the haute bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Its “class struggle,” according
to Salvatorelli, consisted in the negation of the very concept of class, replacing
it with that of “nation.” In the case of the fascist movement, he concludes, “the
petit-bourgeois element” is numerically dominant, but above all is “distinctive and
directive.”4 Along with Salvatorelli, numerous witnesses of the period—including
Gobetti, Gramsci, Ansaldo, and Tilgher5—and nearly every historian of the post-
Fascist period has insisted on the dominance of the petit-bourgeois element in
fascism, as much in social terms as in moral or intellectual terms.
The haute bourgeoisie, for its part, was uninvolved in fascism’s birth or its direc-
tion, but used it precisely because of its character as a mass movement, able to pro-
mote its interests as an “organic class.” A similar attitude had been adopted toward
nationalism in the period before World War I. From August 1914 to May 1915, the
industrial and agricultural sectors, battling for international market share, had
remained faithful to Giolitti in the conviction that there was more to gain through
neutrality than through war, and in the fear that war would strengthen the pro-
tectionist alliance between high finance and heavy industry. They finally gave in
when it appeared that Italy would participate in the conflict regardless, for fear of
being excluded from what was thought to be the imminent work of defining a new
postwar order.
The mass of peasants had always opposed the war. The urban petite bourgeoi-
sie—shopkeepers, artisans, intellectuals—believed that the conflict would mean
an end to the Giolittian system, to the tyranny of the trade unions, and to usurious
banking practices, and would allow it to satisfy its thirst for a “gentle” patriotism,
learned from De Amicis’s books, and also its thirst for an aggressive and venge-
ful patriotism, learned from D’Annunzio’s speeches on the war, “the most fertile
matrix of beauty ever to appear on Earth.”6 The Italian war, in its three and a half
years, would show that the petit-bourgeois were right only in judging that the
Giolittian system was a thing of the past.
The Death of Liberal Transformism
The European war immediately transmitted to Italy the effects of the stock market
collapse, the interruption of credit and foreign trade, and the consecutive failure
of banks and of enterprises, and it caused numerous emigrants to return home.7
In December 1914 the state created an entity—the Consorzio per le sovvenzioni
sui valori industriali—to inject capital into troubled banks and industries. The
A PETIT-BOURGEOIS FATHERLAND 147
money came from the Banca d’Italia, which, to fund this program, had to enlarge
the monetary mass in circulation. When the country entered the war, the new
Ministry for Arms and Munitions gave rise to another organization aimed at cen-
tralizing industrial production. The 1,976 enterprises connected to it benefited
from military orders, easy access to credit, energy, raw materials, transportation,
and exemptions from military service for some employees. This was a windfall for
many industries—even those that had been hostile to participation in the war—
and they absorbed a number of their competitors and saw their turnover, profits,
and activities soar. The manufacturing industry’s share in gross domestic product
(GDP) creation rose from 25 percent to 30 percent.8 Meantime, workers, though
they had been militarized during the war, saw their salaries rise afterward, and the
intense social struggles of the period—more than twenty-two thousand days lost
to strikes in 1919 and more than thirty thousand in 19209—reinforced this trend,
leading to passage of the forty-eight-hour maximum work week, social insurance,
and minimum wages.
This tableau would have been depressing enough for the petite bourgeoisie—
which had dreamed of resolving all society’s complexity in a single “national mid-
dle class”—if it had not been for the fact that, while the peasants paid the highest
tribute in blood during the war, it was the petit-bourgeois who paid the highest
economic cost. The state—to pay its suppliers, prop up the banks and enterprises
involved in the military effort, reimburse interest, at least, on the debts contracted
with the allies and through the purchase of public securities—resorted to taxes
(although they covered only 32 percent of the public deficit in 1918), issuing new
state securities, borrowing, and above all, to the printing of paper money. Thus,
in 1920, the volume of the monetary mass was six times what it had been in 1915.
The lira had depreciated in comparison to the dollar by a factor of five from 1914
to 1919, and the wholesale price index by a factor of 5.9 between 1913 and 1920.
Italian inflation, writes Michèle Merger, was the most pronounced in Europe, fol-
lowing that of Germany.10
After inflation, forever its most terrible nightmare, the petite bourgeoisie was
frightened by the successive waves of labor unrest in industry and agriculture,
more so than the haute bourgeoisie, which, for its part, had the economic and
organizational strength (the Confederation of Industry was officially founded in
April 1919) to resist the shock. Some major employers, bolstered by their substan-
tial war profits, even considered exploiting the trade union struggles of 1919 to
1920 to induce hourly workers and technicians to join a sort of reformist alliance
of the productive classes by way of salary and contract concessions.
The fear of expropriation, indeed, of revolution, played in favor of the grad-
ual abandonment of any reformist hypothesis, but the decisive factor, in the end,
was the global overproduction crisis of 1920, which culminated a year later in
Italy with the collapse of the reference bank of one of the most important Italian
industrial groups, Ansaldo. It was only then that the Fascist option began to make
headway among industrialists. But whether the preferred solution was reformist
or authoritarian, it was clear that Giolittian transformism, already in decline just
before the war, had breathed its last.
Attitudes in the run-up to the war were decided outside the usual mediating
channels of Giolittism, which were the king’s palace, the corridors of the Foreign
Ministry, the embassies, the newspapers, and the universities. To the contrary,
from the summer of 1914, parliament was consulted only once, to approve a deci-
sion already taken, on May 20, 1915. According to Denis Mack Smith, in the first
year of the European war, the Corriere della Sera became a political institution
far more influential than the Chamber of Deputies.11 Historians of the right, the
left, and from abroad have spoken of a “coup d’état” against the monarchy and
the government, in favor of a few press organs of the boisterous interventionist
minorities that had invaded the streets.12 Whatever the case, the parliament barely
convened through the duration of the conflict, and legislative activity was handled
by government decree. The machine for mediation and transformist recomposi-
tion had broken down.
At the end of the war, the first elections, in 1919, were dominated by the Social-
ists and the Catholics, two parties that based their actions more on motivations
of a general order than in defense of small interest groups.13 At the same time, the
new electoral law—calling for proportionality, larger districts, and preference to
electoral lists and not to candidates—further loosened the bond between depu-
ties and their electors. But more than that, the coup de grâce to Giolittism came
from the fact that transformism does not work without constantly integrating new
interest groups as soon as they take on social importance. And at this point, the
new interests knocking on the door of the state were those of the peasant, worker,
and petit-bourgeois masses. In the face of the full social variety of mature capital-
ism, and shaken by war’s calamitous consequences, the political machine of liberal
Italy, born in 1861, came grinding to a halt.14
Apprenticeship in Consensus
Mussolini and his collaborators were the first representatives of the ruling Italian
class called to manage what would later be referred to as a “mass society.” As a
general rule, the management of a “mass society” requires the “learning of con-
sensus,” which is nothing more than what we might define as “the final stage of
transformism.” This pursuit of consensus can (and to a degree, must) become a
veritable creative forge of values; but consensus can never be founded exclusively
on a sharing of abstract values. According to Gian Enrico Rusconi, the virtues
of “citizenship”—namely, “loyalty” and “civic solidarity”—can be learned only in
a “concrete manner.” They become shared values only when “citizenship allows
access to specific assets,” whether these be “rights” or “benefits induced by social
policies.”15 By shining a direct light on the close linkage between “citizenship” and
“benefits,” Rusconi, and Cafagna with him,16 reveal for us some of the fundamen-
tal workings of the mechanism of consensus in developed capitalist societies. It
matters little if this is manifested in democratic forms or otherwise. What matters
is that the more “benefits” there are to distribute, the broader will be the consensus
and the more those enjoying them can aspire to create a collective mythology, a
framework of common belonging to the nation.
Mussolini and his regime believed it possible to found a collective Italian iden-
tity on the idea of Italy as a great power. But this idea, to enjoy any credibility at all,
had to be backed by a tangible demonstration that the well-being of Italy and the
well-being of the Italian people could, to some extent, coincide. Thus the second
half of the 1920s was characterized by the “battle for quota 90” (a rate of 90), a
brutally deflationist policy in defense of small savers that aimed to bring the Italian
currency back to an exchange rate of 90 lira per pound sterling, after it had sunk
to 148.87 in August 1926: and indeed, on April 25, 1927, the lira reached its high
point of 85.75 per pound.
Moreover, after having founded, in 1925, the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro—
with the mission of organizing “after-work” leisure activities, vacation out-
ings (especially for workers’ children), trips, and cultural events—the regime in
1934 instituted the forty-hour work week. The welfare state was reorganized and
expanded, notably with the institution of family allowances, temporary layoffs,
and public health measures. During the 1930s, public spending steadily increased,
rising from 16.5 percent of GDP in 1926 to 33.4 percent in 1936.17 All of this was
built around a promise to end the humiliations suffered by the Italian people in
the past, especially those that had led to emigration.
On these bases, fascism attempted to create a national mythology—a “civil reli-
gion”—that would reinvigorate the Mazzinian plan for a “fusion of interests and
of individual and class rights in the melting pot of fatherland,” as Bollati summed
it up.18 Yet, the vicious circle in which Mussolini and his men found themselves was
typical of the contradiction that has long hampered the blooming of a national
Italian consciousness: to have any chance of creating a true civil religion, one needs
tools of social cohesion that go beyond the means the country has at its disposal.
The Mussolinian autarchy was not merely the Italian version of the widespread
protectionism of the 1930s, or an ideological backdrop to the lack of raw materi-
als, it was also a sort of sanitary cordon pulled tight around the petite bourgeoisie
so that it could contemplate its social betterment without being tempted to com-
pare it to the conditions of the “decadent demo-plutocracies.” In fact, based on
statistics on living conditions, Zamagni notes that there was not, during the Fascist
period, any real improvement of the living conditions of the “middle classes,” but
rather a “revenge” of the lower classes, a revenge that would reinstate the prewar
differences, both materially and in terms of social prestige.19
As heir to the profound social transformations of the first twenty years of the
century, fascism found itself confronted with the same corrosion of centuries-old
social relationships that the Church defines as “secularization.” But faced by these
processes, the attitudes of the Church and of fascism sometimes converged—as in
their common opposition to liberalism and socialism—while at times competing,
in a similar ambition to assume “the spiritual leadership” of the Italian masses. For
fascism, religion was nothing but an instrumentum regni, while for the Church,
the fascist regime could be an instrumentum religionis. The goal of both parties
was to master processes that by their very nature are ungovernable. The conflict
between traditional religion and “civil religion” contributed to disorienting Ital-
ians and feeding their “ethical and political weakness,” which would be, according
to De Felice, at the base of the defeatist sentiment during the war.20
The Apprentice Sorcerer
The fundamental error of fascism, on a political level, was to take seriously the idea
of totalitarianism and to truly believe in the “fusion of interests and of individual
and class rights in the melting pot of fatherland.” In fact, the party and the regime
were nothing but a confederation of “baronies and of big corporative autono-
mies”21—the different groups and factions of the bourgeoisie, the armed forces,
the court—that “il Duce” believed he had disciplined into a sort of national and
Fascist reductio ad unum.
Mussolini built his concept of “totalitarianism” around a confidence in the
“primacy of politics” that he had shared with many of his former Socialist friends.
He could not have been unaware that certain factions and counterfactions in soci-
ety are constantly erupting, nor that they express contradictory interests, but he
felt certain that politics—the control of the political levers of society—could keep
them in check.
The obstacles raised to emigration22 and the attempt to divert it toward the
“fourth shore” (Libya) are perhaps the most striking examples. Another case came
with the foolish ambition to lessen the influence of Church and family on young
people. Once again, not having resolved the root causes of Italian backwardness—
determinate of what would be called “amoral familyism”23—fascism attempted a
purely superficial operation aimed at “socializing” the family institution through a
sort of militarization of youth, even though the economic bases of nuclear family
life were still in place.24
The desire to “nationalize the masses” by acting such that each social group
“could find in the corporatist and totalitarian state a minimum of material and
moral advantages”25 required an ever more intense Italian participation in the
competition for a share of the world market, until the ultimate consequences
would result. On this subject, the most important historian of fascism, Renzo De
Felice, made a significant and inexplicably underestimated observation: one could
expect anything from Mussolini, he wrote, “except neutrality; at the extreme, an
intervention against Germany was more plausible than neutrality.”26 The entry
into World War II was the price the Italian bourgeoisie had to pay in exchange for
the generous state aid and social peace that had allowed its businesses to prosper
for twenty years.
Given the conditions facing Italy in 1940, as Paul Kennedy has written, only
“a miracle, or the Germans, could prevent a debacle of epic proportions.”27 The
situation in the year of the “stab in the back” was not so different from that preced-
ing Italy’s entry into World War I. The country’s industrial production had nearly
doubled from 1913 to 1938, but it represented only 2.9 percent of world produc-
tion, a smaller share than the 3.3 percent of 1929. On the eve of the conflict, its
industrial might amounted to barely more than half that of France, one-third that
of Great Britain, less than one fourth that of their German ally, one-sixth that of
the USSR, and one-tenth that of the United States.28 In terms of military potential,
the gaps were a bit smaller in comparison to France and the Soviet Union, some-
what larger compared to Germany and Great Britain, whereas a gulf separated the
military power of the United States—which was 16.7 times greater29—though that
did not stop Italy from declaring war against America in December 1941.
Certain contemporary observers and a number of historians today hold that
some Italians were motivated by a sort of cupio dissolvi, an essential defeatism,
from the very beginning of the conflict.30 To some, this pessimism had begun to
manifest itself even before Italy’s entry into the war. The bellicose enthusiasm that
had accompanied the “conquest” of Ethiopia had cooled significantly with the
realization that Italy would be facing armies hugely more powerful than that of the
Ethiopian Negus. Even Giuseppe Bottai, a Fascist deputy since 1921 and former
governor of Addis Ababa, who defined himself as an “insincere interventionist,”
noted in his journal the coolness with which the crowd assembled on the Piazza
Venezia on June 10, 1940, greeted the speech declaring war: “One perceives the
difficulty of the small groups of the faithful, full of goodwill to lead the cheers and
cries. There was the sensation of a sort of stunned discipline which the Party was
unable to brighten with its slogans.”31
During the first phase of Italian participation in the war, the Germans’ victories
were accompanied by feelings that oscillated between relief and enthusiasm. But
those victories did not entirely compensate for the alarm Italians felt in the face
of the Greek counteroffensive in the autumn of 1940, for the declaration of war
first against the Soviet Union and then against the United States, followed by the
loss of eastern Africa in 1941, well before the decisive defeats of El Alamein and
Stalingrad.
For Sergio Romano, a “mass transformism” occurs when most of the followers
and clients of a regime abandon it and take up hostile positions. But clients aban-
don their usual providers only when the latter no longer have much to offer and
the degree of loyalty is insufficiently strong to convince them to maintain their
confidence even in times of distress. The flame of popular support for fascism
had been fed by the myth of a “proletarian nation,” a myth based materially on
the promise—often implicit—of greater well-being for all. So, from the moment
when the regime proved that it was incapable of keeping this promise, the invest-
ment of confidence it had benefited from shifted inevitably toward those who
seemed better placed to fill this expectant void, thus the “massive phenomenon of
servility and transformism” that Galli della Loggia perceived in “the comportment
of many of the bourgeois and the petits-bourgeois.”32 Another chapter in Italian
transformism had come to a close.
Chapter 18
A Country of Limited Sovereignty
A Geopolitical Capital Up for Bid
A ccording to Sergio Romano, “the founding ideology of the Italian republic”

was built on “a lie”: that Italy had not lost the war. It was a lie, he said, meant
to help the country repair its damaged collective conscience, by offering a com-
fortable alibi to divert it from its “Schuldfrage,” the question of its responsibili-
ties. The alibi, Romano continued, was built on a colossal political bargain: The
masses, who not so long before were still acclaiming Mussolini, would agree to
be governed by the anti-Fascists so long as the latter would drop any demand for
an accounting of their behavior during the preceding quarter century.1 Romano’s
thesis is more than plausible, but also consider this: one aspect of this bargain was
the extraordinary indulgence with which the anti-Fascists in power treated the
Fascists whose places they had taken.
On June 22, 1946, Justice Minister Palmiro Togliatti, leader of the Italian Com-
munist Party (PCI), signed an amnesty decree that freed some ten thousand Fas-
cists, including some who were guilty of torture or massacres, of denouncing
others to the police, and of collaborating in the hunt for Jews.2 After the early
and sometimes blind acts of vengeance in the first days after the Germans’ hasty
retreat, the ostensible “purge” almost did not happen. When trials were held, the
largest number of suspects possible were freed. Paul Ginsborg calculated that as
late as 1960, 62 of 64 prefects had had public responsibilities under the Fascists, as
had all 135 police prefects and 139 subprefects.3
In its first decades of existence, the anti-Fascist republic retained the legal codes,
the norms, the institutions, the public administration, the civil servants, and the
teachers that had been created, educated, and recruited under fascism. This phe-
nomenon, known as “state continuity,”4 also involved the continuity of a number
of state organs or state-related organs created under Mussolini’s dictatorship. Even
among the political parties there was a certain continuity: Giorgio Galli calculated
that the total percentage of Italians belonging to all the anti-Fascist parties after
the war (12 percent) corresponded roughly to the number of Fascist Party mem-
bers immediately before the war.
Official ideology, established in the constitution, was that there had been a rup-
ture with the past, yet the daily practical experience of the general population was
one of continuity. This can only be considered a paradox by those who genuinely
believed in the “anti-Fascist revolution,” or in those, like Benedetto Croce, who
believed that fascism was a kind of brief interlude, foreign to Italian history and tra-
dition. For others, who believed that there was never a real social or economic break
between the Fascist and post-Fascist periods, “state continuity” was never a surprise.
This gap between reality and the way it is represented made it harder to build
any sort of identity or idea of a nation, as Galli della Loggia emphasizes.5 But was
there ever really a desire for such an identity?
The ruling Italian class never saw a lack of concern toward the fatherland as
an entirely negative thing. Along with the “fiction” of a “Republic born from the
Resistance” and therefore victorious, the absence of a well-defined and declared
national interest made it possible to present Italy on the international scene as
open to all possibilities. As Sergio Romano writes, the war had cost Italy every-
thing, except its “geopolitical capital.”6 When De Gasperi insisted, on August 10,
1946, at the Paris Peace Conference, on the “meta-national” inspiration of the
new Italian leaders—“the humanitarian aspirations of Mazzini, the universal-
ist concepts of Christianity, and the internationalist hopes of the workers”7—he
was demonstrating this broad readiness to make the country’s geopolitical capital
available to the highest bidder.
The “clericalization” of Italian political life also pointed it toward “denational-
ization.” The Church and its theoreticians knew that Catholicism in Italy—unlike
in Poland or Ireland—had not been a force for national cohesion. The Poles and
the Irish, surrounded and oppressed by non-Catholic nations, had made religious
identity the distinctive sign of their very right to exist. Nothing comparable has
ever happened in Italy, all of whose neighbors are Catholic and which has never
been oppressed, in modern history, by any but Catholic powers. Thus, on the Ital-
ian side, the equation between Catholicism and Italianity suggested an availability
and an openness to universalism, to use the Catholic vocabulary, or to the pursuit
of new ties for the Italian national interest, to use the “realist” terminology.
With the end of the war, Europe became the other pole of availability. A Euro-
pean sensibility—which one can view as a desire to dilute Italy in a vast continen-
tal whole—was seen even in the late 1910s, when Fiat president Giovanni Agnelli
and the free-trader economist Attilio Cabiati drew up a plan for a federal Europe.8
But when it became clear that Italy needed Europe more than Europe needed Italy,
Prime Minister De Gasperi and Foreign Minister Carlo Sforza became the most
fervent advocates of continental unification. According to Sergio Romano, this
choice presented the dual advantage of salving national injuries by offering the
prospect of a larger European nation of which Italy would be the precursor, even
while putting all European countries on the same starting line, erasing the distinc-
tion between victors and vanquished.9
But while the vision of a united Europe was being raised, other identity stand-
ins were making an impression on Italians’ collective consciences. Above all was
that embodied by the American dream.
A COUNTRY OF LIMITED SOVEREIGNTY 155
The Fictions of a Republic
In a small book devoted to Alcide De Gasperi, Giulio Andreotti repeats no fewer

than six times that the fundamental reason for the governmental alliance with the
PCI lay in the desire, first, to obtain better conditions for the peace and, once that
hope was shattered, in the need to share the burdens of the treaty.10
The internal debate on the conditions imposed on Italy at war’s end is the last
explicit defense of a national interest before the “rediscovery” of the 1990s. One
explanation for the lurch in this direction is that for once—perhaps for the only
time in decades—the entirety of the Italian ruling class was expressing a common
will on the international scene different from that of its allies of the moment.
Although the capitulation signed on September 3, 1943, was “unconditional,”
De Gasperi—and with him the whole of the ruling class—maintained the illu-
sion of being able to gain negotiating leverage by raising the role of the Resis-
tance and of the monarchist government’s participation alongside the Allies as
the war wound down. Foreign Minister Sforza clearly illustrated this ruling-class
state of mind when he declared that he felt “a right, given the role played in the
war of liberation, and given the real demands of the country, to expect a revision
of the diktat.”11 When De Gasperi and Sforza were forced to drop this attempt,
they embraced a new strategy: exploiting the divergences between the victorious
powers. For this strategy, national identity was superfluous, even deleterious, and
a low profile was a must.
A leader of the war of liberation, Vittorio Foa, wrote that the “most profound
sense of the Resistance” lay precisely in the need to regain a national identity.12
Still, the Resistance was unable to give birth to real national sentiment among
the Italian people. The very notion of national feeling, as we have seen, had been
monopolized by the Fascists, so it carried an almost direct identification with a
regime from which the Italians wanted quickly to distance themselves. Further-
more, the Resistance was far from being a mass movement.13 And finally, among
many Resistance fighters, the “need to find a national identity” was hardly the
decisive motive for involvement.
The only real mass movement to arise during the war was that of the strikes of
March 1943 and March 1944, which mobilized several hundreds of thousands of
workers (more than three hundred thousand in the province of Milan alone). This
movement certainly had a real impact in giving birth to the Resistance, for the
German repression of 1944—two thousand workers were deported—had urgently
raised the question of the military defense of the strikes and of the clandestine
nature of their organization; but in this movement, trade-union and class consid-
erations outweighed those of a “national” or “patriotic” character. The PCI, thanks
to its organizational strength and political homogeneity, subsequently managed
to establish hegemony over the workers movement, channeling it toward national
objectives in the explicit goal of “assuring Italy a position of strength at the peace
table.”14 It was thus that the myth of the Resistance as a “founder” of republican
values began to emerge.
The real motivations of the strikers of 1943 and 1944 were cast aside once the
season of “national unity” had arrived. For a very long time, silence prevailed
about the fact that most of the young people who had embraced the armed anti-
Fascist struggle had been pushed to do so only when the battle front drew nearer,
and by the decree of the Fascist republic of the north condemning to death those
draft dodgers born in 1922 through 1925.
The country, divided in two, also gave rise to at least two opposed nationalisms,
each following the traditional reflex that there is no Italian nation without a for-
eign “godfather”: a “German” nationalism on the one side, and a “Russian” and an
“American” nationalisms on the other. Naturally the first condition for these three
nationalisms to exist was the rejection of any national legitimacy of the other,
even the accusation—well-founded in both cases—that the “enemy” was at the
service of one or several foreign powers. The abolition for decades of the phrase
“civil war” to describe the period from 1943 to 1945 stemmed from the necessity,
for the victors, to consider the vanquished (in this case, the Fascists) as foreigners
to the civil community in order to promote themselves to the rank of the one and
true Italian nation.
The staging of this “new” anti-Fascist Italy, which expected “a revision of the
diktat,” coincided with the drafting of the republican constitution. This document
thus reflected the major themes of the alliance among the “great popular forces.”
Once the peace treaty had been signed, and in the climate that developed after
1948, the tie was no longer antifascism, but anticommunism. While the Fascists
were largely set free, in the years after 1948 the Communist Party witnessed among
its numbers 48 deaths, 73,000 arrests, and 15,000 sentencings for a total of 7,598
years in prison, according to Walter Barberis.15 This new reality, added Galli della
Loggia, sparked a sort of constitutional short circuit for, while the constitution
derived its legitimacy from antifascism, the actual political system found its own
in anticommunism.16 This short circuit did not lead to political schizophrenia,
only because the norms provided for by the constitution were largely side-stepped;
nor did this lead to the sort of “constitutional patriotism”17 that Jürgen Habermas
describes, and even less to an American-style “constitutional faith.” Indeed, it was
precisely thanks to the absence of “patriotism” that Italy was able to regain, at
times surreptitiously, an important place among the “concert of nations.”
The End of Italian Parties
With fascism and the war in the past, Italy, in the striking phrase of Sergio Romano,
was “saved by its enemies,”18 first of all its international enemies. The treaty of 1947
was tough, it was said, but extraordinarily indulgent when compared to the fate
reserved for Germany and Japan. Then came its internal enemies. The Catholics,
the Socialists, and the Communists, foreigners all to Risorgimental tradition, were
better qualified to take on the management of Italy’s third incarnation because
they had played no major role in leading the first two, saving them any major
responsibility for both debacles.
The Catholics and Stalinists had been trained in the national spirit in foreign
schools, the former in the school of the Church’s universalism, and the latter in
that of Russian nationalism. It is not quite accurate, however, to describe the
Christian Democratic Party or the Communist Party of Italy, respectively, as the

“Vatican party” or the “Russian party.” In his book on “the death of the fatherland,”
Galli della Loggia describes the PCI’s politics of this period as being at times “anti-
Italian”19 and at others “nationalist.”20 In truth—Galli della Loggia himself points
this out—the two terms were not in contradiction, since all of Italian political life
from 1943 to 1947 was modeled “under the influence of a decisive factor: Italy’s
total subordination to foreigners, to lots of foreigners.”21
Since unification, Italian politics has always been essentially “hetero-directed,”
even when the noise of nationalist rhetoric was deafening.22 After the debacle of
1943 to 1945, anyone who might have attempted to govern the country could not
possibly have followed a purely nationalism-inspired policy. The “national unity”
of the anti-Fascist parties was the concrete form taken by the alliance between
those parties “inspired,” directly or indirectly, by the international anti-German
coalition: the Christian Democrats and the Partito d’Azione (Action Party) by
the Americans, the liberals and monarchists by the British, the Communists and
Socialists by the Russians.23 A shrewd observer, Giuseppe de Luca, wrote in 1946
that it was henceforth impossible to “speak in Italy of an ‘Italian’ political life, that
is, one of Italian inspiration, Italian content, and with Italian finalities, and thus
one cannot speak, in the same sense, of ‘Italian’ political parties—one has to speak
of political parties ‘in Italy.’”24
Nonetheless, for the foreign influence—whether Anglo-American, German, or
Russian—to translate into concrete policy in Italy, it was indispensable that the
intermediaries have real Italian roots and truly represent Italian interests. Thus
the ability to embody the complex dialectic between national and antinational
(or, more precisely, between Italy’s national interest and that of another country)
became a necessary condition for any political approach hoping to play a role in
reconstruction.
The British had decided to rely on an institution—the monarchy—that was
certainly popular, but irremediably compromised with the fallen regime. Yet they
failed, not because they had bet on a lame horse, but because they could no longer
punch their weight, in Italy as elsewhere, against the American ally. The United
States, with all its economic and military dominance, was able to show greater
flexibility and pragmatism in its choice of political agents, all the more so since,
unlike London, Washington had begun only very late in the game to take a positive
interest in the geopolitical capital of the peninsula.
The Americans did not cast their attention immediately on the Christian Dem-
ocrats25—who were virtually nonexistent in 1943—but on the “liberal” wing of
the Action Party. They would turn to the party of De Gasperi only after he was
able to prove, through electoral results, that he enjoyed ample popular backing.
Meantime, the Christian Democrats’ transformation into an “American party” (or
better, a “national-American party”) would be completed only between the elec-
tions of April 1948 and Italy’s adherence to the Atlantic Pact, a year later, after the
final settling of scores with the party’s neutralist and nationalist left wing.
As for the Communist Party, its evolution followed an inverse path. From an
exclusively “Russian” party, it transformed itself progressively into a national party
(better still, “Russo-national”) beginning with the 7th Congress of the Komintern,
in 1935, where Togliatti was one of the protagonists. Until then, the national sec-
tions of Moscow Central served merely as annexes or substitutes for the Soviet
Embassy; politically, they were isolated in each country, just as the Soviet Union
was isolated internationally. The USSR’s orientation, as we know, changed 180
degrees after Hitler’s first foreign policy moves. Thus, in its introductory report
to the 1935 congress, the secretary of the Komintern Georgi Dimitrov extolled the
alliance between the working class “and the strata of the urban and rural petite
bourgeoisie,” the “respect for democratic conquests” and the “respect for national
sentiments.”26
Upon his return to Italy in 1944, Togliatti announced his intention to “take
up the flag of national interests that fascism has dragged through the mud and
betrayed.”27 Thus the policy of “national unity” was, from the Italian Communist
Party’s viewpoint, the synthesis by which Togliatti attempted to combine Soviet
interests with those of the ruling Italian class, which faced the need to reestablish
credibility after the country’s downfall under fascism. The PCI became “national”
because the interests of the USSR demanded it. It should come as no surprise that,
each time Italian national interests came into conflict with the national interests of
Russia, the party chose Moscow without hesitation. But nor should it be surprising
if, once it had become the permanent representative of certain national interests, it
dared, with time, to take a certain distance, mainly verbally, from Moscow.
The party of Togliatti lost any hope of representing the “general interests of the
country” when it conformed to the Kremlin’s directives against accepting Marshall
Plan assistance, confirming yet again that the real difficulty in Italy was not that of
being a servant to two masters, but rather of being a servant to the right masters.
The National Vatican Party
On September 16, 1929, barely eight months after the signing of the Concordat,
Pius XI declared to ecclesiastical members of Catholic Action: “The day will come
when we will have need of reliable men, unquestionably honest, and we will think
of you again.”28 Despite the ecclesiastical hierarchy’s “cordial relations, infused by a
spirit of collaboration”29 with the Fascist regime—as the Catholic historian Arturo
Carlo Jemolo describes it—the hierarchy was already thinking and operating with
an eye to the future.
Under fascism, the Church always fiercely defended the prerogatives of Catho-
lic Action and other movements linked to it. Its imperative was to preserve the
relative autonomy of structures that would allow it to form an independent ruling
class, capable, if need be, of replacing the ruling class of the regime. Yet its capac-
ity to remain independent and meticulously prepare the political personnel for
a postfascism era, while a necessary condition, was not sufficient to make it the
dominant force after the war, let alone to give Italy what Jemolo calls “the cachet
of a clerical state.”30
The Christian Democrats, whose first cadres were largely men who had started
out with Catholic Action,31 were not the only “mass party” of the time. This element
alone does not explain why it was the Church that left such a mark on the state.
Other factors played a role, above all the popularity of the Church itself.
The point of departure has to be the vast process of societal dislocation brought
by war and then defeat. No possibility of a radical social transformation was there
to offer the Italians hope, as had been the case during the Great War. This time,
too, the Italians were deprived of any “institutional” prospects—of being able, at
least potentially, to resort to some trustworthy authority. The state having dis-
solved itself at the moment of capitulation, on September 8, 1943, ordinary people
had to attend to the most urgent matters first, to rebuild connections by turning
first to what was nearest at hand for immediate support. The collective tragedy
had laid bare a survival instinct that, in normal conditions, is the most private of
matters. Other than the few tens of thousands of people taking orders from one of
the five authorities disputing control of the peninsula,32 the great mass of Italians
lived a sad and isolated reality of “every man for himself.” In this shipwreck, the
Catholic Church, the only surviving institution, found itself playing the role of
“defensor civitatis,” rather like during the time of the fall of the Roman Empire, as
the secular historian Federico Chabod puts it.33
The Church’s capacity to exert both civil and institutional authority reinforced
its moral authority. But while that alone might have explained its enormous influ-
ence, other factors were at play. For example, the identification of ordinary people
with the Church could only be strengthened by the common desire to forget the
many compromises, large and small, that had been made with the fallen regime;
the ordinary people could measure their chances to do so with the successes of the
Church. Its close relationship with the peasant world was another major factor,
especially in a country where the population was still largely rural. Then, too, a
part of the dominant class that was preparing, by force or persuasion, for a regime
change wanted to avoid having the new power be dominated by “revolutionary”
forces; the Church wanted the same. Finally, the Allies—the true masters of the
situation in Italy—were searching for an anti-Fascist power that met these very
same criteria.
Starting in the second half of the 1940s, the Church permeated Italian soci-
ety, influencing the lives of the entire population, independently of individuals’
religious or political convictions. Religious authorities intervened directly in
numerous decisions affecting public life. They were invited to every ceremony—
from the annual report of the Banca d’Italia to the distribution of vaccines in
the schools—and, in exchange, organized virtually obligatory religious services
in the ministries and in every public establishment. They often had the last word
on appointments to public office, and nearly always on any new law or proposal.
They controlled school texts, censorship of movies, theater, radio, and later televi-
sion, with the repressive organs of the state such as the police, the carabinieri, and
magistrates keeping close watch to ensure respect for morals and the “common
sense of modesty.”34
Although it was largely the effect of a well-prepared reconquista strategy, this
strength of the Church also reflected the weakness of the ruling Italian class and
its traditional inability to define the contours of the “national interest,” an inabil-
ity aggravated in the early postwar years by the severe constraints of an utterly
unfavorable international situation. The Christian Democrats were able to become

the pivotal party of Italian politics for more than forty-five years not because they
bent, purely and simply, to the will of the Church, but because they knew how to
combine its interests with the need of the major part of the productive bourgeoisie
for a spokesman within the state after the military defeat.
For De Gasperi, Christian democracy was supposed to be only one branch of
the Church’s more global strategy of intervention in all of Italian society and, as he
himself wrote, “the proper organizational tool to act on a single sector of society,
the state.”35 The party’s left wing, headed by Giuseppe Dossetti, more responsive to
the desiderata of Pius XII, believed, on the other hand, that the Christian Demo-
crats were called to mold civil society such that it would conform to the “substan-
tial values of Christianity.”36 While the Christian Democratic left dreamed of a
corporatist recomposition of social conflicts, De Gasperi and his colleagues threw
a lifeline to the petite bourgeoisie, still shaken by the recent catastrophe, by guar-
anteeing it the same protection against inflation that Mussolini had guaranteed
with the “battle for quota 90.”37 At the same time, they explicitly invited the haute
bourgeoisie—the “fourth party”38—to take a place within the government.
Even as it worked to represent in its own councils the most diverse interests and
to serve as their mediator, the Christian Democratic Party was above all a “north-
ern” party and, more particularly, the party of the industrial triangle (Milan,
Turin, Genoa), as illustrated by its deep electoral and organizational roots. In the
elections of 1946, while obtaining a nationwide average of 35.2 percent of the vote,
the party won 37.3 percent in the north, 30 percent in the center, and 35 percent
in the south. As for its members, 54.3 percent were in the north (of which 34.7
percent in the northwest), 16 percent in the center, 22.6 percent in the south, and
7 percent in the islands. In the National Center (the Christian Democrats’ “central
committee”) that arose from the First Congress, one-third of the members came
from the industrial triangle alone. The closer one came to the ruling bodies, the
more evident was the influence of the northern industrialized regions.39
For the party to succeed, it had, above all, to avoid giving in to the “totalitarian
temptation” suggested by the Vatican and the party’s left wing. De Gasperi knew,
Andreotti asserts, “that a party that attains 50% of the vote carries within it very
profound contradictions.”40 He knew, as noted earlier, that if all major interests are
forced to seek representation within a single political envelope, they will inevitably
end up locked in paralysis or, at a minimum, face extremely laborious dialectical
confrontations, a major problem for fascism.41 As Andreotti put it, De Gasperi
understood that “if a general synthesis was not possible,” it was necessary to try “to
obtain at least partial syntheses.”42
“The sole party of the bourgeoisie,” functioning by “partial syntheses,” was
thus reconstituted, and Christian Democratic transformism reproduced even the
external forms of the transformist regimes that had preceded it. This situation,
born of the necessity always to have recourse to “partial syntheses,” led to the con-
viction that, whatever happened, the search for a “general synthesis” had become
impossible, if not superfluous.
Chapter 19
Identity and Development
The Mythical Transfiguration of Italian Backwardness
I n the late 1920s, Italian intellectuals found themselves caught up in a debate that
seemed to mirror Italian backwardness. On one side was the Strapaese faction,
representing a supposed “plebeian tradition” of Italian culture rooted in the values
of small towns and the countryside; on the other side was the Stracittà faction,
which published the French-language journal 900 and urged receptivity to recent
international cultural productions.
Stracittà—which embodied the transition between the declining influence
of French culture and the rise of American cultural influence—reflected a cos-
mopolitan aspiration to maintain contact with modernity’s leading edge, if
only in the artistic domain. Strapaese was suspicious of progress, industry, and
urban life in general, indeed of all that sociologists mean by “modernity.” Curzio
Malaparte—one of the group’s most eminent members, along with Leo Longa-
nesi and Mino Maccari—summed up its message this way: “Italians are unfit to
become modern.”1
Strapaese might be the most explicit example of what Bollati calls the “Italian
Sturm und Drang against modern civilization,”2 of the opposition mounted since
unification by intellectuals, the Church, the political class, and, sometimes, indus-
trialists themselves. Some observers attribute the “molecularity of the collective
behavior” of Italians precisely to this will to oppose the national conscience and
“modernization.”3
Fascism’s intrinsic limit had been that it represented an overly bottom-
heavy synthesis of the Italian bourgeoisie’s interests. In seeking to make Italy a
great power even while “ruralizing” it, Mussolini’s regime was plunging unstop-
pably toward catastrophe. This “bottom-heavy imbalance” was ideological as
well: Strapaese was a sort of cultural guarantee of the regime’s “Catonist” ideology
(which saw the peasant as a savior of the nation), a mythical transfiguration of
Italian backwardness, brandishing it as a sign of rigor and virtuous frugality, and
aiming to give value to the very modest social ascension of the petite bourgeoisie.
To tame its mass base, fascism had to improve the people’s material well-being,
but the country’s real conditions being what they were, frugality had to be made a
virtue. Thus the slogans warning against the “comfortable life” coincided with the
sugary mirages of the Telefoni bianchi and the Mille lire al mese.4
The dominant political cultures of the postwar period, the Catholic and the
Stalinist, were more coherent. Any trend toward consumerism was liable to eat
into their power bases. The Church saw the attack as direct, for development and
affluence tend to undermine two pillars of its influence: rural life and the fam-
ily. For the Italian Communist Party (PCI), rooted in a zone where social migra-
tion occurred mainly within the petite bourgeoisie (between country dwellers,
cooperatives, craftsmen, and small businesses), the direct effects were probably
less immediate, but noticeable nonetheless in a growing disaffection for militant
political life. So both sides based their prescriptions on the precepts of temper-
ance and abstinence, tinted with a hatred of change built around the presumed
“authenticity” of Italian life and tastes.
In a 1946 speech, Pius XII underlined the link between the defense of “authen-
tic rural civilization” and the possibility of perpetuating values like “work, sim-
plicity, purity of life, and respect for authority,” without which life would lose its
meaning and be transformed into an “unbridled pursuit of personal gain.”5 That
same year, the Christian Democrats’ secretary (and minister of education), Guido
Gonella, depicted modern civilization, and radio in particular, as “an invisible
and silent atomic bomb that has torn the family apart.”6 The PCI, not wanting to
be left behind, contrasted the hypocrisy of the “bourgeois family” to the “greater
modesty and simplicity” of the Soviet-style “Socialist family,”7 and the Union of
Italian Women (UDI), one of the party’s “mass” organizations, made the “happy
family” the theme of its national congress in 1947.8 In December 1950, an arti-
cle in the PCI’s youth monthly vehemently condemned the publication in Italy
of a review titled “Sexual Digest,” with its “disgusting” and “obscene” articles of
“evident American origin” and full of “psychoanalytical vocabulary.”9 The Cath-
olics, for their part, did not limit themselves to verbal condemnation: the Cen-
tral Bureau for Cinematography, headed by Giulio Andreotti and then by Oscar
Luigi Scalfaro, provided detailed judgments on what was licit and what was illicit,
“advising against,” for example, the projection of “scenes likely to excite the senses,
such as of kisses or of prolonged and sensual embraces.”10
These attitudes were the ideological and political mirror of the concerns felt by
social classes that had just learned from the Fascist regime that when one toys with
the existing equilibrium, immense catastrophes can result.
Republican Transformism
According to Guido Carli, the postunification economic world of Italy harbored

both a minority of people open to the world and a majority of “animal spirits”
intent on protecting their own immediate interests and fearful of the risks that
even their own development might involve.11 Immediately after World War II, Carli
continues, these “animal spirits” rematerialized in those who opposed liberaliza-
tion and sought a return to the “tranquillizing cocoon of corporative society.”12
In 1945, before the Economic Commission of the Constituent Assembly, Angelo
IDENTITY AND DEVELOPMENT 163
Costa, the head of the Italian industrialists’ union, asserted that big industry in
Italy was “against nature.” And Gaetano Marzotto, who led the largest garment-
making group, even declared that it was necessary to “take a step backwards,”
because big industry undermined the true character of Italian production, which
could never really go beyond the stage of “grand craftmanship.”13
It is difficult to know whether the major postwar parties represented the inter-
ests of small producers and small distributors because of their “antimodern”
sensibility or whether, to the contrary, they ended up embracing the Strapaesane
reservations because of the ideological influence of their social reference classes.
Regardless, even while promoting the trend toward a vast economic state network,
these parties worked first of all to defend the petit-bourgeois interests they had
protected since their birth.
The ideological and political inertia of the PCI and the Christian Democrats
were doubtless provoked as well by the international division of labor as well as
by their dependence on, respectively, the Soviet Union and the Catholic Church.
Moreover, the PCI, by its defense of rural- and village-based national traditions
that it said were threatened by “monopolies,” the “market,” and “America,” cut
itself off culturally from any chance of becoming the sort of social-democratic
labor party that could usefully have contributed, as Gianni Agnelli put it, to a
“clarification of Italian political life.”14 The Christian Democrats, for their part,
drew on governmental connections to do everything possible to deter the increas-
ing concentration of production and distribution and to open the public admin-
istration’s doors to some victims of these processes.
To slow a massive rural exodus,15 a series of laws and decrees were approved
beginning in 1948 to facilitate land purchases, so much so that by 1956, some 1.4
million hectares had passed into the hands of small farmers. The number of crafts-
men remained stable from 1951 to 1971 and, because of the legislative obstacles to
opening supermarkets16—the first of them arrived in Milan in 1957—the number
of small businessmen actually rose, from 1.35 million to 1.7 million. In 1971, 8.7
percent of the working Italian population consisted of shop owners, compared to
6.6 percent in France (in 1968) and 2.2 percent in Great Britain (in 1966).
The presence of civil servants in the overall workforce grew in direct propor-
tion to the rural exodus, rising in the 1951 to 1971 period from 4.6 percent to 8.1
percent.17 And then there were the enti pubblici—bodies attached to the executive
and created to fulfill temporary missions, but often serving to do little more than
distribute revenues. They numbered 44,500 in the 1960s, and 70 percent of the
public funds allocated to them ended up paying salaries.18
The production of such “artificial middle classes,” as Lanaro called them,19 is
one form that transformism assumed in its republican version. The PCI, while
in the opposition, not only did not seek to block legislation in this direction, but
often contributed to it, and decisively so. Most of the laws, and particularly those
concerning the sorts of interests we have just discussed, were approved in parlia-
mentary commissions sitting during legislative sessions where each group’s vote
is distinguishable only over the long term. Thus, according to Musella’s review of
all votes, the PCI took positions against the majority one time in three in the first
legislature, one time in seven in the second, one time in sixteen in the third, and
one time in six in the fourth and the fifth.20
The constitutional expert Giuseppe Maranini, in 1967, described the republi-
can parliament as “a sort of echo chamber of contracts that had been ratified else-
where,” contracts “between small and mediocre feudal systems, and sometimes
between minuscule groups, even individuals; minor contracts which, through
the quasi-secret legislative actions of the commissions led to disorder, immoral-
ity and incoherence.”21 The description might rather easily have applied to the
epochs of Depretis, Crispi, and Giolitti, and it anticipated by exactly twenty-
five years the chorus of indignation that arose upon the “discovery,” early in the
1990s, of the existence of these mechanisms upon which Italian transformism
has resided since the beginning.
The American Dream
Italian culture, up to the early twentieth century, had been a phenomenon of

“French provincialism,” as Gramsci put it. One might also suggest that during that
same century it gradually became a phenomenon of “American provincialism.”
This again was a question of the absence of a “center” or of a native identity with
well-defined contours shared by the entire national community. This vacuum has
always been filled by themes, symbols, and even objects from abroad, seasoned to
the different tastes found on the peninsula.
During the 1950s, according to Stephen Gundle, Italy was the most receptive
country in Europe to American cultural offerings.22 This trend had begun in the
1930s when intellectuals and part of the petite bourgeoisie began seeing every-
thing American as the fulfillment of their unrequited desires. Fascist voluntarism
had bet on what we might call welfare nationalization, but the country’s structural
weaknesses yielded the opposite of what was intended: the Fascists fanned the
growing appetites of the new middle class without being able to satisfy them. Thus
Italians welcomed the American “liberators” with wide-open arms because, if they
could not drink from the well of affluence, they could watch as its representatives
debarked on their shores.
To better respond to the curiosities born during the 1930s, the publisher Val-
entino Bompiani, in 1938, asked Elio Vittorini to undertake an anthology of the
translated works of American authors. Italian writers as important as Eugenio
Montale, Alberto Moravia, Guido Piovene, Cesare Pavese, Giansiro Ferrata, and
Fernanda Pivano worked on the project, and it led to the publication in 1941 of
the book Americana, which included texts by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan
Poe, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Erskine Caldwell, Wil-
liam Saroyan, Herman Melville, and others. Unfortunately, the year was not a pro-
pitious one for the celebration of Italian-American friendship, and the publication
was sequestered. Nevertheless, Americana embodied the hopes and expectations of
a generation whose mores, as Corrado Alvaro wrote later, were no longer Italian,
“but a mixture of behaviors derived—à l’italienne—from the books, movies, the-
ater, and magazines of the richest and freest of countries, America and England.”23
IDENTITY AND DEVELOPMENT 165
In reality, for the American way of life—which intellectuals knew through

direct experience, or more often, through their readings—to become a widely
shared myth in the peninsula, Italians would have to wait for direct contact with
its themes, symbols, and objects, first through the American Army, then through
the liberalization of markets. Confidence in the illusory opulence of fascism had to
dissipate, as it did through the disaster of war and through the moral and material
misery that followed.
America again became the promised land, as it had been for the five million
Italians who disembarked at Ellis Island between 1880 and 1950. This time, how-
ever, there was a secret hope that “America” could be achieved in Italy. The first
step was the imitation of the model, beginning with writers who took inspira-
tion from the dry, fleshless prose of the generation represented in Americana,
and including the more naively and superficially “Americanizing” behavior gently
mocked in a film like Steno’s 1954 Un americano a Roma with Alberto Sordi, or in
Renato Carosone’s famous 1956 song Tu vuò fa’ l’americano (“You want to act as
an American”, words in Neapolitan, but with a rock ’n’ roll rhythm).
The symbols and objects that Italians found so tempting were not just chew-
ing gum or Carosone’s “whisky and soda.” Nor was it simply the representations
of American life contained in the 5,368 films to cross the ocean from 1945 to
1953. It was above all the dollars and the massive assistance to arrive first through
the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and then
through the European Recovery Program, better known as the Marshall Plan. In
1946 the UNRRA, created in November 1943, had already contributed $450 mil-
lion to Italy, providing 70 percent of its food aid, 40 percent of its coal, 82 percent
of its agricultural equipment, 22 percent of its industrial equipment, and 100 per-
cent of its medical supplies. Between April 3, 1948, and June 30, 1952, the Marshall
Plan poured into the peninsula $1.5 billion—80 percent of it in goods and 20 per-
cent as credits—or 11.3 percent of all aid sent to Europe. It was less than the $3.18
billion allocated to Great Britain or the $2.71 billion provided to France, but more
than the $1.39 billion for Germany. In any case, the sums were colossal, given the
situation on the peninsula.
This manna was not destined for clearly defined uses, and the Americans
debated whether the conditions placed on it were appropriately restrictive. None-
theless, the Marshall Plan—which boosted gross domestic product (GDP) by 2
percent over four years—made it possible to import the wheat and coal the coun-
try badly needed, to plug the holes in public finances and stabilize the lira, to
modernize industrial infrastructure, to intervene in the Mezzogiorno, and to deci-
sively boost the reconstruction of civilian structures. In particular, the equivalent
amount of 390 million euros were destined for the construction of 75,000 new
housing units; 480 million for the reconstruction of 450,000 dwellings damaged
in the war; and 130 million to finance thirty-year, fixed-rate loans (at 4 percent
interest) for the purchase of 350,000 new apartments.24
If one considers that the bombardment of Milan left 230,000 people (one-third
of the population) homeless in the month of August 1943 alone, one realizes the
size of the gap between the people’s needs and the aid offered. Psychologically,
however, it had a resounding effect. The Americans not only helped end the war,
but now they were “offering” help with reconstruction. Needless to say, in the peo-
ple’s eyes the responsibility for the damage and destruction lay entirely with the
Fascists and the Germans. Much of the population also appreciated the Americans
as the major reason the country had not fallen into Communist hands.
Thanks to the example from the other side of the ocean, Italians began to believe
that frugality was not, after all, their unavoidable destiny. People even began to see a
connection between the “five meals a day” that the Fascists had asserted that the Brit-
ish indulged in25—and that the Fascists ritually denounced—and the hegemony that
first Great Britain and later the United States had managed to impose on the world.
But for the Church and for the PCI, the “American dream” presented a threat.
For Togliatti’s party, hostility toward consumerism was reinforced by the political
and cultural anti-Americanism flowing from Moscow’s new line in the autumn
of 1947. Thus, for ten years, through obeisance to the mother party, the PCI mar-
ginalized itself. Even while it accentuated its patriotic rhetoric, it fiercely opposed
the Marshall Plan and the Atlantic Pact—the two initiatives that gave Italy both
the oxygen for reconstruction and the international political context in which to
resume business dealings interrupted by war.
This “anti-imperialist” orientation, with its nationalist, populist character, was
not unknown in Catholic circles either, particularly by those most attuned to Vati-
can sensibilities. Those who had done ideological battle with fascism could not
stand idly by while what they considered the Trojan horse of secularization and
the “unbridled pursuit of profit” penetrated the fortress of Catholicism. But the
Christian Democrats, by fair means or foul, had to consider international politi-
cal imperatives, and De Gasperi, more by fair means than foul, tried to preserve
for Italy its room for negotiation and autonomous initiatives. This would play an
important role in the years to come.
Despite the massive influence of the Church and the PCI, however, public opin-
ion felt the persistent lure of the American way of life until the new European
myth finally began to take hold in the last decade of the twentieth century. That
does not mean that other traditional benchmarks had been abandoned: one could
devote oneself to the magic rituals of fecundity26 even while coveting the real or
imagined affluence seen in American films. It was a case of “the slum dwellers who
had managed to buy a television,” as Pasolini complained in 1963. Long after the
era of “modernization” opened, it cohabited with lifestyles and ideologies rooted
in a long-ago past.
In these “slums,” it was the native Italian elements—the hyperlocal nature of
the “thousand bell towers”—that divided the inhabitants of the peninsula, while
what united them in common hope for a better life were the elements imported
from abroad. While the absence of a “center” fed into all the particularities of the
outlying areas, popular acculturation was based on models borrowed from the
United States.27
Later, when the “modernity” that some had tried to neutralize took its revenge,
assuming “the resounding form of an immoderate and unstoppable bulimia,”28
what seemed to be the realization of the American dream emerged as a new model
of social integration—the social integration that the national ruling classes had
never managed to achieve.
Chapter 20
The Failure of “Democratic

Nationalization”
The Shameful Abandonment of Frugality
W hen mass consumption shifted for the Italians from aspiration to satiation,
they gradually began to shrug off the pedagogical grip of the two dominant
cultures that found cause for present temperance in the promise of future ethereal
happiness. This involved not a peaceful, linear transition, but rather a series of
profound upheavals provoked by what we commonly call the “economic miracle.”
This phase of intense Italian economic development—generally said to have
lasted from 1953 to 1973, or some say from 1958 to 1963, when average annual
growth reached 6.3 percent—brought a typical succession of events. The accel-
eration of the rural exodus sparked by the development of industry (particularly
mechanical and chemical) lured millions of people into industrial cities, where
their production contributed further to the conditions that had provoked them to
abandon the countryside in the first place. In the 1961 census, industrial workers
(38 percent) and those in tertiary sectors (32 percent) surpassed farm laborers
(30 percent) for the first time. Internal migration in 1955 through 1971 involved
nearly one-third of the population, with 9,140,000 people leaving their regions of
origin for good. Between 1951 and 1967 the population of Rome rose from 1.65
million to 2.6 million, that of Milan from 1.27 million to 1.68 million; and that
of Turin from 719,000 to 1.12 million. Coinciding with these internal movements
were the migrations out of Italy of 956,458 people from 1959 to 1968. For the first
time, Italy found itself confronting a series of problems linked to immigration and
urbanization.
One characteristic of the unequal development that occurs amid accelerating
growth was the coexistence of profound social difficulties—many people experi-
enced a clear degradation in their quality of life—with increasing consumption.
Thus in the same years when immigrant families were piling four or five to a room
in subdivided apartments in central Turin’s basements or attics; when infant mor-
tality began rising again and public schools had to operate two or three shifts a
day; when manifestations of racism became more frequent and apartments were
often not rented to southerners,1 in these same years per-capita income rose in
Italy more rapidly than in any other European country but Germany: 3.7 times
more than in France and 4.2 times more than in Great Britain.
The first “revolution” in Italians’ lives was the daily presence of meat on their
tables. Once this stage had been reached, everything became simpler and priori-
ties started to change. The physical benefits of durable consumption constituted
a new divinity to be worshiped. In the years from 1958 to 1967, the number of
families owning a television rose from 12 percent to 49 percent of the population,
and of those possessing a refrigerator rose from 13 percent to 55 percent. Between
1950 and 1964, the number of private automobiles increased more than 13.5 times
(from 342,000 to 4.67 million), and the number of motorcycles more than 6 times
(from 700,000 to 4.30 million).
These new manifestations of wealth represented not only a material conquest
but also the fulfillment of a long psychological journey. It had begun with the
Mussolinian dream of Italian greatness that ultimately produced the “mass trans-
formism” that led first to the fall of fascism and later, in the 1950s, to an impatient
wait for better days. When this aspiration first evolved into a sense of concrete pos-
sibility, it was difficult to express openly, often accompanied by a sort of implied
guilt, as if those who dared nourish such hopes were foreigners to a national tra-
dition of frugality and sacrifice. Lanaro asserted that material enrichment, and
the sharing of new means of expression and communication, meant an “impov-
erishment of the collective symbolic universe.” The move to modernization and
its social transformations, the “nationalization of words and of signs” of a people
brought together by migration, speaking for the first time one language—that of
television—all this came about without any attempt to provide any underlying
meaning or value.2
As the country continued to develop, the ruling class and certain intellectuals
retained a sense of nervous distrust regarding “modernity.” The search for col-
lective myths to make sense of material well-being gradually shifted elsewhere,
beyond the political and institutional representations Italians had known. The
gap between economic development, the functioning of the state apparatus, and
the “collective symbolic universe” became brutally clear in the late 1960s. Lan-
aro speaks of 1968 as a metaphor for “the aspiration to a ‘civil life’ in keeping
with the outsized potential of the ‘economic life.’”3 The student movements repre-
sented the demand for social mobility of the recently acculturated middle classes.
This demand pointed to the material bases of a new step for transformism: a step
that, having not been fulfilled with the co-optation of the ruling Socialists, would
impose itself in the form of crisis thirty years later, involving the emergence of
original phenomena and political personages.
Low Productivity, Low Wages
There is a close relationship between productivity, increasing revenues, and mass

consumption. So long as productive activity remains essentially at a craftsman’s
level, productivity remains low, costs high, wages low, and the market limited. It
is the rise in productivity (through technical innovation and concentration) that
THE FAILURE OF “DEMOCRATIC NATIONALIZATION” 169
reduces costs and unit prices, making possible the creation of less-expensive prod-
ucts, as well as the payment of higher wages, which in turn stimulates the market.
And yet, weak productivity and low salaries did not prevent Italy—before
World War I—from joining the fight for economic market share. But the portion
of social capital destined for foreign investment was only a small part of a well of
overall capital that was also small.4 Italian imperialism drew great profits from its
zones of influence when the relationship was purely economic. Afterward, at the
moment of military conquest, the costs of maintaining them always surpassed the
benefits and, at times, the political chaos that ensued ultimately depressed eco-
nomic activity. If the Libyan War cost 1.30 billion lira, emptied the state’s treasury
and arsenals, and provoked the crisis of the Banco di Roma, for the Mussolinian
“empire” it was worse. In Ethiopia, the destruction and the massacres of people
and livestock by poison gas provoked a crisis of production and exportation, to the
point that the minister of colonies, Alessandro Lessona, was forced to admit that
“external trade flourished more during the time of the Negus.”5
Fascism was certainly voluntarist, and even succeeded in putting into place the
beginnings of a welfare state. But as for guaranteeing higher working-class wages,
it went in the direction opposite to what Corradini described. The priority was to
“nationalize” the petite bourgeoisie, with the costs paid by other sectors of society.
Part of this fell on certain groups of the upper bourgeoisie, as in the case of the
“battle for quota 90,” but the largest part was paid by the working class. Accord-
ing to Sylos Labini, the policy of systematic wage reductions was a distinctive trait
of fascism at that time. Up to 1940, he notes, real salaries had fallen in Italy by
about 20 percent, much more than the 5 percent in Great Britain or France.6 This
reduction allowed the regime to gain the sympathy of sectors of the bourgeoisie
unhappy with the “bottom-leaning synthesis,” and because industrial profits were
thus increased, to enlarge the shares for pensions, commerce, and taxes.
In the nascent phase of imperialism, Italy had become a favored destination for
foreign investors, drawn by its generally low costs and its labor force. It drew the
same sort of attention now reserved for certain former Soviet-bloc countries or
Southeast Asian nations: foreign entrepreneurs established businesses or subsid-
iaries there or made investments there.7 The ample availability of unskilled labor,
following the massive rural exodus, helped keep wages low. The policy of salary
restrictions boosted competition and helped offset other deficiencies (lack of raw
materials, inadequate infrastructure, weak financial system, modest level of tech-
nological training, near-total absence of research), but it discouraged fixed invest-
ments, postponing indefinitely the solution to the structural problems linked to
low productivity.
There was nothing uniquely Italian about this. The specificity lies in fascism’s
choice to “steer” wage policy as it had “steered” monetary policy. Thus an objective
blot on development was transformed into a (subjective) virtuous choice, part of
the consoling myth of the “proletarian nation.”
The costs of reconstruction after World War II were also essentially paid by
wage earners, who were hit by inflation (salaries fell by half in real terms during
the war), the role played by trade unions in boosting the “national reconstruction,”
and by massive layoffs.8 The path to liberal reconstruction taken by the parties of
national unity, including the PCI,9 resulted from the confluence of three factors:
(1) international constraints, which left no alternative; (2) the traditional deficien-
cies of the productive system, aggravated by the war, which could be only partially
offset through wage compression; and (3) the interclass character of the mass par-
ties, which forced them to take measures that did not harm the petite bourgeoisie.
In any case, reconstruction and, later, the “economic miracle” owed much of
their success to wage reductions, although such reductions were relative. Amid
growth, from 1951 to 1958, of national revenue by 43.93 percent, of imports by
90.18 percent, of exports by 138.93 percent, of net investments by 118.61 percent,
and in the face of an 89 percent increase in industrial production from 1953 to
1960 and of productivity by 62 percent, real salaries declined over the same period
by 0.6 percent.10 The situation changed little in the years immediately afterward:
Between 1964 and 1968 the annual rate of increase of compensation per worker in
industry, including employer-paid national insurance contributions, was the low-
est of any country in the European Community, except for Luxembourg. In 1968
the average annual salary of Italian industrial workers was $2,000, just two-thirds
of that paid to their German colleagues, a bit more than half that of the French,
and less than one-quarter the average salary of American workers.11
Even if the largest part of new production was destined for international mar-
kets, Italy experienced a strangling effect typical of development. Growth required
an enlargement of the domestic market, which necessarily required wage increases,
which cut into or even canceled the competitive advantage of Italian industry.
Some major entrepreneurs began to think that, in order to consolidate growth,
there was an urgent need to break out of the cycle of low salaries and help new
social groups enter a sphere of more mature consumption. But, as noted earlier,
this option implied the need to drastically boost industrial productivity in par-
ticular, and the productivity of the system in general, by overcoming its structural
deficiencies.
The transformist political operation that should have made it possible to “shake
up” the Italian productive system and enlarge the social bases of democracy was
the center-left. But the processes that this operation attempted to launch ended
up, yet again, in failure.
The Failure of the “Great Reform”
In 1957 Amintore Fanfani, the Christian Democrats’ secretary, declared that the
goal of the rapprochement between his party and the Socialist Party was to “recover
vast popular social strata, evidently not the conservative ones, for the democratic
base of the state.”12 In these words from an architect of the “opening to the left”
of the early 1960s, one sees the explicit basis for a new season of transformism.
However, to fully understand this political operation—and its failure—one must
look beyond a strictly Italian framework and consider the reformist dynamic of
the center-left in the context of the international dynamic of the time.
From a macroeconomic viewpoint, the Italian “miracle” meant an increasing
presence of “made in Italy” sales, from 2.2 percent of the world market in 1951 to
3.4 percent in 1960 and 4.6 percent in 1970. Its relative weight more than doubled
in less than twenty years, causing a proportional increase in influence globally,
and particularly in Europe. Italian success would not have been possible without
the boost provided by the development period 1945 to 1975 (the so-called Trente
Glorieuses, the glorious thirty) and without integration into the European market.
Against a broader framework of increasing trade worldwide, the volume of mer-
chandise destined for the five European Economic Community (EEC) partners
rose twice as fast as the overall increase of exports: between 1953 and 1964, Italian
production destined for Germany, France, and the Benelux countries rose from 23
percent to 40.2 percent.13 Yet constraints increased along with benefits: Italy found
itself ever more exposed to the imperatives of the market—from the prices of
imported raw materials to those of exported industrial products—while its capac-
ity to influence the latter remained limited. Thus the problems relative to levels
of productivity and concentration, always the principal cause of Italy’s backward-
ness, now presented themselves with such urgency that they could no longer be
ignored without risk to the gains so recently achieved.
Because of their greater public visibility, the major groups often seem to be the
only economic actors in a country, which is never the case. In the Italy of the 1960s,
95 percent of the members of the Confindustria employers association were small
or very small entrepreneurs. It was from this group that the greatest resistance
emerged. Since the electric monopolies took up the fight against any nationaliza-
tion of the sector, a “natural” alliance formed between the employers group and
the petite bourgeoisie, which had achieved its own miracle thanks to low wages
and the absence of trade unions.
Late in the decade, faced with the delaying tactics and timidity of the center-
left governments, some large private groups like Fiat, Pirelli, Olivetti, and a major
public monopoly like ENI attempted to break this “conservative” alliance in the
name of efficiency, which they now proposed as the standard of industrial manage-
ment, rather than the simple pursuit of profit. These groups represented the most
dynamic contingent of the Italian economy. They had had to adapt to a far greater
level of competition than they had been used to and thus needed what Lucio Car-
acciolo referred to, in his mentioned 1994 editorial, as a “country-system” capable
of supporting their penetration into external markets. Their proposals, backed by
certain press organs and some important research centers, were presented in the
form of a vast reformist project, both more organic and ambitious that what big
capital had attempted in the aftermath of World War I. Collaboration with the
trade unions was foreseen, even a convergence with them on some fundamental
objectives that reached far beyond simple industrial relations: the reform of the
legal code, public administration, taxation, and education systems; unification of
the sanitary system; new housing legislation; and above all, a policy of investment
in the Mezzogiorno.14
All these reformist recipes—particularly when combined with a policy of col-
laboration between the big industrial groups and the trade unions, which made
wage concessions possible—provoked the inevitable hostility of the small pro-
duction and small commerce sectors, which, in the short term, could only be
weakened, if not destroyed, by rising productivity and the rationalization of the

apparatuses of production and of the state.
The interclass nature of the political parties thus became an echo chamber for
the tensions and conflicts shaking society. These tensions and conflicts interested
the Christian Democratic Party in particular, because it was the political shell
within which all the interests expressed themselves, confronted one another, and
often ensured the failure of both sides. One protagonist of the period, the Social-
ist economist and minister Francesco Forte, acknowledged that it was difficult to
reform certain sectors of society without attacking the Christian Democrats’ elec-
toral foundation: the small farmers organized in the all-powerful Coldiretti, the
shopkeepers opposed to fiscal rigorousness and the opening of supermarkets, the
bureaucracy of the state and of its parallel administrations, and so on.15 These
sectors of society were also organized and protected by other parties, though to a
lesser degree: the small farmers of the left by Confagricoltura, and the left-leaning
craftsmen within Confartigianato, not to mention the powerful League of the
Cooperatives, a holding company directed by the PCI, whose interests often con-
verged with those of the petite bourgeoisie.16
Thus many of the reforms envisaged from the beginning of the center-left expe-
rience were impeded, delayed, and finally mutilated by the resistance—manifest or
covert—that parliamentary action inflicted on the stances of the various parties.
When the proposed law for the election of regional councils—which the Con-
stitution had set for 1950 at the latest—was finally presented during the legisla-
tive session of 1963, it had to pass through 231 votes in the Chamber and 825 in
the Senate, involving 4,300 amendments and 600 speeches, before the legislature
adjourned without an actual vote on the law. The proposal, taken up again in
1969, was finally approved in May 1970, without including a clear definition of the
powers accorded the elected councils.17 Similar difficulties hobbled the creation
of the Scuola media unica—the unified middle school. As for the nationalization
of electrical energy, seen by many as the most important, if not only, accomplish-
ment of the center-left, it was the culmination of a process that, begun a decade
earlier, led to direct or indirect state control of the greater part of Italy’s most tech-
nologically advanced sectors. Those who believed that the nationalizations were
“the antechamber of socialism,” in the end, simply went along. The five private
electricity producers operating on Italian territory, for their part, received 2.2 tril-
lion lira in indemnities (around 18 billion euros in 2001)—of which 1.8 trillion
went to Edison alone—and thus transformed themselves into new industrial and
financial powers, with a debt of recognition and much closer ties to the state that
had expropriated them.
The wage storm stirred up by the “hot autumn” of 1969, and the growing sense
that the parties and parliament had lost control of social dynamics, fed into a last
paroxysm of reformist fever in 1970 when, beyond the law on the regions, law-
makers approved a new labor law and even a law permitting divorce, the latest of
thirteen proposals on the subject presented to parliament since 1852, but the first
to be approved.
The law on popular referenda, also approved in 1970—so that Catholics could
subject the divorce law to the people’s judgment—created another instrument for
bypassing the institution of parliament. The premature dissolution of the legis-

lature in 1972, effected precisely as a means of delaying this referendum, can be
considered as parliament’s last feeble attempt at resistance before finally recogniz-
ing its capitulation before “civil society.” The two chambers—which, during the
republican period, had been stripped almost entirely of the constitutional pre-
rogative of expressing defiance to governments—now found themselves denied
their traditional role as transformist mediators of different fragmented interests.
The various party factions, organizations, trade unions, economic groups, and the
Church had by now learned to negotiate directly among themselves, disdaining
parliamentary mediation. Governments, whose formal legitimation flows from
parliament, were diminished to the point of seeming almost to disappear, as indi-
cated by the titles of several texts published during the decade.18 Thus opened
a new phase of social fragmentation, one in which “clienteles,” “counterpowers,”
and “surrogates,” even “shadow states,” waged an all-out battle that definitively
wrecked the balancing system among the powers of the state.
The “Shadow States”
According to Lanaro, the real failure of the 1964 to 1970 period lay less in the inca-
pacity of the ruling class to reform society than in the lost opportunity to achieve
a “democratic nationalization,” that is, a sharing of common values, “starting with
the predominance of general interests over individual demands.”19
The center-left not only was born of a loose assembly of differing desires and
designs but also had encountered some tenaciously opposed interests, firmly
bound to their prerogatives. In fact, what ensured the convergence of such dispa-
rate interests was, again, the low-wage policy. So long as wages remained moderate,
the “programmation”—this magic word of the center-left—could be seen as an
attempt to channel, to tone down, or to dilute the disturbing effects of accelerat-
ing global development on Italian society. Urbanization and full employment had
sparked a rise in consumption that, though moderate, had enlarged demand in
the marketplace. Because the generally low productivity of the Italian system—in
particular in agriculture and commerce—were unable to fulfill the new demands,
the only way to satisfy consumers was to increase imports. When, as early as 1953,
the governor of the Bank of Italy Donato Menichella used his annual report to
denounce the new imbalances in Italian society, he was thinking above all about
the commercial imbalance. His recipe for reducing imports focused on a “dam-
ming up” or “regulation” of consumption.
In 1962, for the first time since the 1940s, the country faced inflationist pres-
sures. Some historians attribute this to a tendency of wages to exceed the ceilings
set by national contracts.20 The relationship between wage growth and inflation is
the same as that between the number of ill people and hospitals; and yet no one
would suggest that it is hospitals that generate sick people. In the Italy of the “eco-
nomic miracle,” consumption was merely the last act of a process during which the
product had to pass through the long gauntlet of a nit-picking bureaucracy full of
redundancy and overwhelmed by new tasks, then be transported over a seriously
inadequate road network, and, last but not least, face an extremely fragmented
distribution system. All of this could only add to the final sales price.
In the immediate postwar period, Italian workers paid a high price in the strug-
gle, first, against inflation provoked by the war, and then by the peculiar monetary
policy of the occupation authorities. They paid again in the 1960s to guarantee to
the parties their electoral petit-bourgeois clienteles, the true cause of the currency
devaluation. As Menichella had done in 1953, Ugo La Malfa devoted part of his
efforts in 1962 to establishing a policy of “wage moderation” through an explicit
offer of collaboration with the trade-union world, and its insertion into a reform-
ist circuit in which the PCI could not tread directly, owing to international con-
straints. A few years later it was the Socialist Party that claimed credit for helping
to overcome “the most dramatic moment of the economic crisis by imposing two
years of austerity on the working masses.”21
But the events of 1962—the year of the rioting at the Piazza Statuto in Turin
against an agreement reached between Fiat and the social-democratic trade union
UIL—had taught two important lessons: first, that any serious notion of reform
could not avoid the question of increasing productivity and, therefore, wages; and
second, that once one meddled with productivity and wages, the result was cer-
tain panic among the petite bourgeoisie. The struggles late in the decade for the
renewal of collective labor contracts—the celebrated “autunno caldo” of 1969—
led to a wage increase equal for all, a workweek of forty hours, the extension of
union rights for apprentices, the national unification of wage scales that had var-
ied by region, the right to organize paid assemblies during working hours, and so
on. The Corriere della Sera summed this up by writing that the country had found
itself “at the edge of a precipice.”22
Despite their efforts at self-preservation, the parties saw their role as collec-
tors of clienteles undercut as their former clients attempted to confront their vital
problems on their own, or collectively. The traditional political system no longer
seemed to respond to the varied expectations of the diverse interests it represented.
The Christian Democrats were weakened by a rural exodus that drained its tradi-
tional reservoirs of support, and even by the open contestation of a significant part
of the Catholic world, including institutions like Catholic Action (AC), Catholic
Association of Italian Workers (ACLI), and the Catholic labor union (CISL). The
Socialist Party meanwhile suffered a new schism in July 1969, just five years after
the first split, in January 1964, with the departure of adversaries of the center-left.
As for the PCI, its membership fell from 2.11 million in 1950 to 1.50 million in
1970, with an even more marked loss of influence among the working class. The
number of PCI groups in companies dropped from 11,272 in 1950 to 2,977 in
1971. Forced for the first time after the war to confront a movement born outside
of, and in opposition to, its directives, the PCI suffered a rupture of its own in
1969, with the exclusion of the group united around the journal Il Manifesto.23
The traditional “absence of a center” compounded by the “nongovernment”
led to a multiplication of independent power centers, which Lanaro defined as an
attempt at “unbridled self-government by all the corporations, old and new,” the
“shadow states.”24 The failure of “democratic nationalization” resulted in a con-
trary phenomenon. All those wielding even a fragment of power—legal, semilegal,
or frankly illegal—considered themselves authorized, by dint of the absence of

central authority, to fill the gaps left free, often trampling on prerogatives coveted
by other powers in the process.
This applied to the trade unions, economic groups, the media, the Church,
and the “street” in general—which the Corriere della Sera described in 1969 as the
new power center in Italy25—and, beginning in 1970, to the regions as well, which
began the long march toward what would later be called devolution. This applied
as well to two other phenomena that, in the 1970s and even afterward, would often
be considered abroad as the only aspects of Italian life worthy of attention: the
Mafia and terrorism.
A growing number of people explain today terrorism as the weapon of a frus-
trated and frightened petite bourgeoisie. The phenomenon is thus starting to
emerge from the fog of the various conspiracy theories in which it was long stuck.
But if it has become more common to suggest that the bombing of the Piazza
Fontana in December 1969 was a reactionary response to the “hot autumn,” there
is greater reticence regarding the petit-bourgeois character of the leftist terrorism
of the 1970s. The leader of the PCI, Enrico Berlinguer, denounced this character
when Aldo Moro was abducted, although more for immediate tactical reasons—
the PCI had just entered the governmental majority—than through any in-depth
analysis of the social and ideological tensions in the country. In fact, it was the
growing joblessness of intellectuals and the timid attempts to slow public spend-
ing that, combined with the anti-American campaigns of the 1960s, created a fuse
for this new season of violence; a season—whose actual importance was probably
less than a few dramatic actions and their media depiction implied—that ended
with the arrival of the new “economic boom” of the 1980s.26
During the 1960s and part of the 1970s, the most important “shadow state” was
not the Mafia or the terrorists, but, as we have seen, the trade-union federations.
This was not because of their intrinsic strength, which was actually rather limited,
but because of the support they received from those who wanted to free up Italy’s
“blocked system” through needed structural reforms. The unions added to their
explicit job the role of a labor party. This change profited them in the short term in
membership growth (the Italian General Confederation of Labor [CGIL] and the
CISL grew from 4 million members in 1968 to 6.75 million in 1975), but in terms
of pure union strength it did not help them.
Certain sectors of big capital attempted, as we have seen, to forge alliances
with the trade unions in the absence of a true labor party. But this coalition was
far from being homogeneous or speaking in unison, for it worked within a frag-
mented framework in which “all the corporations, both old and new” wanted to
change the country to suit their own interests. Rather than being reformed by
some preestablished design, society ultimately reformed itself, following a disor-
dered (but modern) process of molecular adaptation.
Chapter 21
Italian Metamorphoses
Involuntary Unification
T he social earthquakes of the 1960s finally activated the self-preserving instincts

of the political system, pushing it into a sort of mad race against changes that
were imposing themselves spontaneously and anarchically on society. As we have
seen, the laws on the regions and the referendum did little more than simply fill
a constitutional void of more than twenty years. Yet the reorganization of certain
sectors of state industry and public service—while helping rationalize functional
mechanisms of the “country-system”—seemed to better serve the parties to which
these sectors and services were linked than the “general interest” of the country.
This division inspired the journalist Alberto Ronchey, in 1968, to coin a meta-
phor that would become greatly popular: that of the lottizzazione (parceling out,
as in the sale of housing lots) of public property. If the public holding company
IRI (Industrial Reconstruction Institute) remained the private hunting ground
of the Christian Democrats, the chemical and hydrocarbon giant ENI (National
Hydrocarbon Agency) was left to be managed by the Socialist Party, and the EFIM
(Agency for Participation and Financing of Manufacturing Industry) was over-
seen by the other governmental parties, the Republicans and the Social Demo-
crats. Following the RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana) reform of 1975, the Christian
Democrat monopoly was broken; this merely reshuffled the cards. Thus the lead-
ing television station—dubbed “national” up to that time—was confirmed as a
Christian Democratic fiefdom, the second channel was entrusted to the Italian
Socialist Party (PSI), and the newly established third channel went to the Ital-
ian Communist Party (PCI). In 1978 the National Healthcare Service was finally
unified, and executive positions were strictly lottizzate: in 1985, 57 percent of the
presidencies were in Christian Democratic hands, 20 percent were held by Social-
ists, and 23 percent were held by representatives of other parties.1
Other measures taken in the early 1970s seemed to respond to trade-union
demands. There were the housing reforms of 1971 and 1978, but above all, the Sta-
tuto dei lavoratori (Labor Bill), approved in May 1970, which guaranteed legal pro-
tections for wage earners, while excluding from its terms all enterprises with fewer
than fifteen employees, which was to say the great majority of Italian industry.2
As for “fiscal reform,” wage withholding was confirmed, yet measures to control
independent workers remained problematic. In 1977, when the PCI was part of
the governing majority, Mario Salvatorelli wrote in La Stampa that wage earn-
ers deserved “the Oscar for best tax-payer,” because they provided 80 percent of
declared revenues, even as tax evasion remained massive.3 At the beginning of the
following decade, the first Craxi government risked provoking a crisis when its
finance minister, Bruno Visentini, proposed stricter controls on tradesmen, who,
on average, declared receipts that were actually less than the wages they paid their
employees. When, in 1989, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reported that
housing taxes in Italy produced fiscal receipts that were just half those of similar
countries, the president of the Confedilizia (the Association of Building Own-
ers), Attilio Viziano, explained that in fact 50 percent of buildings were simply
“unknown to the tax authorities” because the housing law of 1978 imposed a sort
of “political rent” that led their owners to expect to be paid the market price, but
under the table.4 By 2005, declarations to the tax administration showed that the
situation had not changed; car dealers, for example, claimed revenues less than
those of automobile metalworkers. Still in October 2006, Finance Under-Secretary
Vincenzo Visco declared to parliament that in certain Italian provinces, there were
fiscal irregularities in more than 50 percent of declarations.5
As we have seen, the possibility of staging referenda had transferred to the
“sovereign people” some parliamentary prerogatives. This was true not only
institutionally but also from the viewpoint of the social reality that parliament
was supposedly representing through the parties. The most striking demonstra-
tion of this came the first time the procedure was used, on May 12, 1974, when
Italians were asked to vote on whether to maintain or reject the divorce law of
December 1970. A modification of the law, even a wording change, could have
averted the referendum. But the intransigent Catholics did everything possible
to bring the matter before the people, persuaded that Italians would reestab-
lish the primacy of Christian values that had been undercut by the eruption of
“modernity.” The Christian Democrats, despite their initial reservations linked
to their governmental relationship with the “prodivorce” parties, ultimately fol-
lowed in the Catholics’ footsteps, seeing the referendum as a way to relaunch a
party facing a crisis of legitimacy.
The result revealed that the various political powers were far from understand-
ing what the country had become in the course of its “economic miracle”: 59.3
percent of the voters supported continuation of the law, with much narrower
margins between deeply Catholic parts of the country and others. Moreover, the
margins between the north and the south of the country were much smaller than
those recorded in 1946 in the referendum between the monarchy and the republic.
This trend was confirmed even more clearly seven years later, when the 1978 law
on abortion was submitted to a referendum: 67.9 percent of the voters supported
it; so did every Italian region except Trentino-Alto Adige, which missed doing so
by only 0.3 percent. For the first time in history, Italians had expressed themselves
nearly unanimously on a question concerning their whole society.
The referenda on “civil rights,” beyond their specific goals, constituted a sort of
reactive indicator of a new relationship among Italians, flowing from three major
ITALIAN METAMORPHOSES 179
correlated and concomitant changes affecting them all: the growth in consump-
tion, the “melting pot,” and the great trade-union struggles.
In this regard, we should recall above all the linguistic unification of the coun-
try. Italy, in the second half of the twentieth century, was the European coun-
try in which social and regional linguistic distances were most rapidly reduced.
According to De Mauro’s calculations, in 1955, only 10 percent of Italians cor-
rectly spoke the national language, and nearly all of them still used a dialect
for their daily communications. After the cinema, which for most Italians was
the first “teacher” of Italian, radio and television generalized the use of the
national language, while resolving in a practical way the theoretical dilemmas
that had divided nineteenth-century linguists. The media, in effect, did not create
the language, as De Mauro notes, but adapted themselves to existing tendencies,
and those tendencies, since the unification of the country, have developed in the
major economic, demographic, political, and intellectual centers of the country:
in Turin, in Milan, and in Rome. It was there, and not in Tuscany, that radio and
television spontaneously drew their lexical and pronunciation models, which they
then spread to the rest of the peninsula: one result was to make the Tuscan pro-
nunciation of Italian seem provincial.6
The Transnational Consumer
But the increasing uniformity of some aspects of Italians’ behavior did not mean
they were being “nationalized.” Those who had been brought together by their
trade-union demands were only a portion of society, and the very circumstances
of their rapprochement ruled out any feeling of “national” solidarity with repre-
sentatives of the classes who had opposed them in the season of struggles. The
solidity of their gains, moreover, was shaken once the big company owners began
a counteroffensive. But the chief reason why “modernization” did not generate
a common national identity is that even with the standardization of behavior
that followed the increasing turn to mass consumption, no “Italian” specificity
emerged. Instead, mass consumption brought an inhabitant of Milan closer to a
citizen of Paris or New York than to someone from Matera or Cuneo.
The small party that had made itself the herald of “civil rights”—the Radical
Party7—was referred to quite appropriately as “transnational.” Its battles repre-
sented the tendency of the upwardly mobile strata of society to align their behav-
ior with that of the social groups in more-developed countries that had already
achieved such success.
As marketing experts know, consumption, however massive, remains a fun-
damentally individual act. Thus the possibility to consume more is always seen
as an individual victory and the social behavior that accompanies it is seen as the
securing of a long-denied right. There is an almost perfect correlation between
crossing a certain threshold of consumption and the appearance of specific social
behaviors. The improvement of the quality of life regularly leads to a decrease
in the birth rate. Thus even though each couple feels certain it is deciding freely
how many children it desires, at the moment when improved living conditions
become widespread, most couples respond more to collective behaviors, rather

like the sudden and simultaneous movements of a school of fish, than to carefully
thought-out individual choices.
In Italy, the fertility rate dropped in 1968 below the 2.4 or 2.5 children-per-
woman rates maintained since the 1950s, falling to less than 1.5 in 1984, and sta-
bilizing around 1.2 in the late 1990s. Indeed, for some time, in the mid-1990s,
the Italian fertility rate was the lowest in the world.8 This phenomenon coincided
with another characteristic of development: the massive entry of women into the
workplace. From 1970 to the end of the century, the employment rate for women
rose 70 percent even as male employment stagnated. In parallel, the average age
of women at the birth of their first child rose from 24.9 years to 29 years between
1972 and 1990, accentuating the decrease in births.9
The combined impact of these factors was that, in the Italian social structure,
a still largely absent “labor aristocracy” was replaced by a growing “wage aristoc-
racy.” Average wages remained low, even very low, but the average number of rev-
enue earners per family rose as family sizes declined, leading to an overall increase
in resources per household.
When one considers that these changes were accompanied by a profound mod-
ification of the labor market—an increase in the training levels of hourly workers
and of their expectations—one has a better picture of the conditions that favored,
in the 1980s, the rise of a significant part of the population to the income level
above them. Because of this process, carried out against a backdrop of persistent
protectionism, waves of migrants from developing countries began to fill the least-
rewarding jobs on the social ladder, responding to a demand that local laborers
were less and less available to fill.
Italy thus underwent one of the most radical (and rapid) social metamorpho-
ses of its history: from being a net exporter of labor until the early 1970s to being
a net importer of labor at the start of the following decade. This new social reality
provided the ideal terrain for the Church to regain a central position in society. It
again affirmed itself as the lone institution capable, thanks to its cultural weight
and material structures, of handling social phenomena that had overwhelmed a
clearly insufficient state.
The Church and the “Unjust Masters”
The new behaviors provoked by the social impact of the economic boom pointed
to an ever-clearer emancipation from the cultural guardianship of the two domi-
nant ideologies in the republic’s early decades. But while this led to a steady erosion
of the influence of the PCI, that of the Church, paradoxically, would be strength-
ened, to the point that it became an inescapable force in all political equations as
matters settled after the earthquake of the 1990s.
Those seeking an explanation for this “miracle” often look to the undeniable
weaknesses of “secular thinking,” ever more on the defensive for its inability to
make sense of the contradictions of “modernity.” Some university professors, hav-
ing successively been Maoists or followers of Sartre, Adorno, or Nietzsche, revealed
ITALIAN METAMORPHOSES 181
themselves in the 1980s as Kantian: unable to understand the transformations of

Italian society, they lent philosophical dignity to what they called “weak thought”:
the simple presumption of understanding the world, they said, must be rejected,
for it is the antechamber of totalitarian ideologies. The left, rapidly losing its ideal
reference points, seized on the “weak thought” theory to justify both the collapse
of its myths and its inability to find new ones.
To understand how the Church was able to transform apparent defeat into
certain triumph, we must consider not just the wanderings of “secular thought,”
but the strength and skillfulness of the Church itself. It was able to (and still
can) prevail through four points of added leverage: (1) a plurisecular heritage
of struggle against “secular” philosophies that allows it to dispose of, with seem-
ingly coherent responses, the concerns and uncertainties raised by “modernity”;
(2) a long experience with humankind that has led it to measure historical time
not in terms of political or electoral cycles, but through secular perspectives; (3)
a long experience with humankind that has led it to analyze events not through
their present manifestations, but in terms of their dynamic aspects; and (4) a
consolidated and increasingly centralized organizational structure that allows it
to “give legs” to the three points of strength mentioned above by grounding its
roots in the social terrain.
The Catholic defeat in the divorce referendum certainly marked the end of the
supposed identification of the Italian nation with Catholicism. It left the Church
in the minority. But it is precisely in its awareness of the need to adapt in “sec-
ularized” societies to minority status that the Church launched its spectacular
rebound. It is difficult to know whether the line that developed around the con-
cept of “minority Church,” explicitly defended by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in
a 1996 text,10 was adopted after this referendum or whether the rearguard battle
on divorce was not already part of this strategy of adaptation. It appears fairly
evident, however, that contrary to widespread belief, the battle over abortion con-
stituted an essential moment.
The defeat at the ballot box had little importance for the Church because, as
Ratzinger put it, “statistics is not one of God’s measurements.” The church is not,
he continued, “a business operation that can look at the enterprise to measure
whether [its] policy has been successful”. The results of its actions are not visible
in the short-term; what is important, Ratzinger continued, is to plant “mus-
tard seeds.”11 The battle against abortion was such a seed. On the one hand, it
helped the Church assure the cohesion of the faithful—at least some of them—
by involving them in battles of principle over “difficult” subjects. On the other
hand, it became the central axis of a campaign on a key problem overhang-
ing the country’s future and, more generally, that of the Christianized West: the
demographic deficit.
In Italy, the legacy of the Fascist period did not help in coping with the birth
crisis and its attendant problems. The dark memory of the Mussolini regime’s
natalist policy long provoked a more or less conscious repression of the demo-
graphic question. Moreover, the persistence of Fascist legislation meant that the
release of information on birth control or family planning was for years deemed
a misdemeanor, and Article 533 of the Penal Code, which punished the use of
contraceptives, was not abrogated by the Constitutional Court until 1971. All
this fed into an atmosphere of massive illegality, which only grew as “modernity”
imposed its laws. Thus when the drop in the birth rate began to create labor
shortages, lawmakers found themselves bankrupt for ideas; not so, needless to
say, the Church.
These shortages could be overcome, at least partially, only through immigra-
tion, but this was likely to produce a negative, identity-centered reaction, at least
psychologically. Over these social and psychological repercussions, the Church
was able to recover some of its credit in the eyes of the country.
In a series of articles published in February 1989 on the occasion of a closed-
door session of the Italian episcopal conference on the question of immigration,
the bishops’ semiofficial journal, Avvenire, offered an analysis of the phenomenon.
Immigration, the Catholic journal wrote, is inevitable for three key reasons: (1)
the demographic imbalance between the north and south coasts of the Mediter-
ranean, (2) the fact that many immigrants came from oil-exporting countries,
and (3) the demands of the Italian labor market. “An industrial country,” said a
commentary in Avvenire, “needs reserves of low-cost manual labor: farm workers,
domestics and seasonal laborers.”12 This was thus an inevitable destiny in the eyes
of the bishops, but also a threat to the social equilibrium of the country, and one
that in Avvenire’s estimation only the Church could prevent. For it had known
how to defeat slavery in the Roman Empire “not by opposing it, but by telling the
slaves: Subjugate yourselves to unjust masters, too.”13
The Italian secular culture, which in the meantime had ceded to Catholic cul-
ture the monopoly of ideals, of solidarity, and of the means to practice it, could
only follow the Church’s path on questions that had long split it between its do-
good instincts and apprehensions that were more or less culturally justified. Faced
with a proposal by Biffi in a pastoral note of September 13, 2000, that immigra-
tion from Catholic—or at least Christian—countries should be favored, the most
famous Italian political scientist, Giovanni Sartori, wrote “in his capacity as a lay-
man” that the remarks of the cardinal of Bologna were “holy words, to say the least.
And very responsible.”14
Thus some twenty years after the referendum on divorce, the authority of
the Church had again begun to radiate a light so bright that few shadows dared
intrude, and the supposed superposition of the Catholic and the Italian identities
was restored to prominence with scarcely any resistance from intellectuals or the
public authorities of the peninsula.
Chapter 22
Between Europe and

the Mediterranean
The “Pedagogy of Austerity”
T he Italian crisis of the 1990s began in the early 1970s in Washington, D.C.,
Basel, and Kuwait City. The end of the gold-dollar standard, announced from
the White House on August 15, 1971, by President Richard Nixon, the creation of
the European monetary “serpent,” decided in the Swiss city on April 10, 1972, and,
finally, the oil crisis that followed the decision by the Organization of Petroleum
Exporting Countries (OPEC), on October 17, 1973, in Kuwait, to raise the price of
oil from $3 to $5.15 a barrel touched off a seismic movement whose aftershocks
would shake the entire Italian system twenty years later.
With the failure of a timid deflationist policy decided after the wage increases
of 1969, each Italian social and economic actor reacted, once again, by pursuing
its own immediate interests. Many small and medium entrepreneurs closed their
businesses or profited from the largess of the state, either by selling troubled busi-
nesses or by profiting from the generous financing meant to support investment
in the Mezzogiorno.1 Others decided simply to export their capital abroad, while
some shifted higher production costs to consumers; nearly all of them practiced a
sort of fiscal self-indemnification, seeking to pay the lowest taxes possible.
Public enterprises, for their part, continued to produce at a loss. At the end of
1978, Castronovo points out, while private enterprises were reporting 613 lira of
debt per 1,000 lira of turnover, state-owned companies were declaring more than
1,100 lira; in other words, debt exceeded their turnover.2 In 1971 the state-owned
EFIM (Agency for Participation and Financing of Manufacturing Industry), IRI
(Industrial Reconstruction Institute), ENI (National Hydrocarbon Agency), and
IMI (Istituto Mobiliare Italiano), each of them loss-makers, gave birth to GEPI
(Società per le Gestioni e Partecipazioni Industriali), whose aim was, as its found-
ing statute declared, to “contribute to the maintenance and the growth of jobs
compromised by the transitory difficulties of industrial enterprises,” that is, to
purchase private companies poised at the brink of bankruptcy.3 Thus, from 1969
to 1973, state involvement in economic affairs grew steadily, increasing from 19.9
percent of all employees to 25.2 percent, and from 31 percent of capital to 39.2
percent, a trend that would continue until the 1980s.4 From 1970 to 1975, the flow
of public money destined to enterprises rose from 6 trillion to 17 trillion lira, and
in 1992 the European commissioner Lord Leon Brittan complained that 28 per-
cent of the country’s deficit went to subsidizing companies.
Bit by bit, a new “social compromise” took shape, thanks to the Keynesian and
protectionist policies of the state, supported by public debt, which rose from 38
percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 1970 to 55 percent in 1982, reaching
120.2 percent in 1997. This policy took three directions: direct (subsidies) and
indirect support (orders, trade and fiscal protection, etc.) to industry; expansion
of the bureaucratic apparatus; and, above all, an inflationist policy intended to
support exports.
After the February 1973 decision to allow the lira to float on currency exchanges,
the mechanism of “competitive devaluation” thus became the principal weapon of
the “doped-up” competition of the 1970s and 1980s. While the great powers were
beginning successively to follow the painful path of deregulation, Italian industry
kept afloat thanks to this expedient. Not until the arrival of the single currency was
Italy definitively deprived of the option of resorting to this form of competition.5
The other weapon was also a return to tradition: the attempt to reestablish pre-
1969 wage conditions. If the aims remained the same—and helped re-create “class
solidarity” between the petite and the grand bourgeoisie, between the private and
public sectors—the methods could not help but change. Gianni Agnelli, president
of Confindustria since 1974, had two years earlier described the perspective of this
new phase of social relations thus: “We have only two possibilities,” he said. “Either
a frontal shock to impose a lowering of wages or a series of courageous initiatives
to eliminate the more intolerable phenomena of waste and inefficiency. Needless
to say, we have chosen the latter.”6
In short, this was a new attempt to adopt the path of “great reform,” but this
time employing every decisive force influencing the agents of society. The simul-
taneous launching—just days before the oil crisis of the fall of 1973—of a political
plan for “historic compromise” by the secretary of the Italian Communist Party
(PCI), Enrico Berlinguer, was more than simple coincidence. The strategic objec-
tives of the head of Fiat and the boss of the PCI were in agreement, even to the
choice of words: Berlinguer, too, effectively committed himself to fight “waste and
dissipation, the exaltation of the most immoderate particularities and individual-
ism, the most brazen consumerism.”7
The PCI was welcomed into the governmental majority less than three years later,
in the summer of 1976. Its willingness to play the role that, ten years earlier, had
belonged to the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) enjoyed trade-union support—support
the center-left never had—for a veritable “pedagogy of austerity.” The secretary-
general of the Italian General Confederation of Labor (CGIL; the union close to
the PCI), Luciano Lama, announced that this austerity would consist of “not mar-
ginal, but substantial sacrifices”: wage moderation, restriction of the wages guar-
antee fund mechanisms, “real” mobility for hourly workers, and “an end to the
system of permanently subsidized labor.”8 Arguing that unemployment tends to
rise when wage levels are too high in comparison to productivity, Lama presented
his as the only way to defend employment. In fact, he was defending the traditional
BETWEEN EUROPE AND THE MEDITERRANEAN 185
practice of attacking wages in order to avoid dealing with low productivity. Real
wages diminished without reducing unemployment, which in fact rose from 5.9
percent in 1975 to 7.7 percent in 1979. Still, thanks to a series of successive devalu-
ations beginning in the first half of 1976, exports revived, creating the conditions
that would allow the adventures of the nuovi condottieri in the 1980s.9
In legislative terms, the period of “national solidarity”—the name given to the
phase of Christian Democrat–PCI collaboration that would last until 1979—pro-
duced modest results, probably less important than the achievements a decade
earlier during the first years of center-left rule. Disappointment was even more
crushing since the PCI had presented its participation in the governing majority as
the act through which the working class would “become” the state (“si fa Stato”),
as per the famous slogan of 1977. In the elections of 1979, the PCI paid dearly
for its policy of austerity, especially in big-city working-class neighborhoods and
among the young. Even as its overall share of the vote dropped by 11.75 percent
compared to 1976, the loss among voters age eighteen to twenty-one saw the PCI’s
share fall by more than a third (–35.41 percent). The progressive decline, which
would lead to the party’s ultimate dissolution a decade later, had begun.10
But the failure of “national solidarity” went beyond the fortunes of the par-
ties that had promoted it. One could say about this new “missed opportunity”
just what Galli della Loggia had said about the impossibility of building national
sentiment on the fiction of a “republic born from the Resistance”: it “clashed too
obviously with the concrete experience of the majority of the population.”11 The
“pedagogy of austerity” and the ethic of sacrifice were not in tune with the trans-
formations of Italian society and with the relative enrichment of multi-income
families, who measured their social progress in terms of consumption. To be con-
vincing, wrote Enzo Pace, an ideology must seduce both emotionally and ratio-
nally, but also must “produce useful social effects, both in collective terms and in
individual incentives.”12 “National solidarity” did neither.
Among the electorate there also arose, in the following decade, “a new political
animal.” This voter, as the journalist Mariella Gramaglia portrayed him in 1987,
loved money and power, was “irritated by egalitarianism,” and was seduced by
“guts and effrontery as virtues that he would like to possess and that he imitates
as best he can.”13 This “political animal,” who voted in the 1980s for the PSI of
Bettino Craxi, would become the protagonist, in the 1990s, of the Berlusconian
“revolution.”
“External Constraints”
In August 1974, the Bank of Italy was constrained to pledge part of its gold reserves
in exchange for a $2 billion loan from the Bundesbank. Afterward, the lira’s inter-
national standing was downgraded to a level below that of the Mexican peso. The
subordination to Germany that was formalized by this loan provided added proof
that international factors would play an ever greater role in determining the situ-
ation of Italy. This became even more evident after the oil crisis and the recession
of 1974 to 1975.
The crisis of the early 1970s revealed a new global configuration after thirty
years of unequal development. In 1974, while the industrialized countries saw
their manufacturing production drop by 0.5 percent, that of the newly industrial-
ized countries continued to grow at an annual rate of 7.2 percent. For the old pow-
ers, the need to deregulate and to restructure the productive apparatus of the state
began to appear urgent and inevitable if they were to stay ahead of these dynamic
countries, so rich in labor and free of parasitic burdens and social preoccupations.
The need to deal with these new actors would lead to a new global free-trade cycle
and a new liberal cycle in the domestic politics of different countries. Margaret
Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Helmut Kohl, and François Mitterrand (after 1983)
would be the political agents of this crisis of restructuring.
In Italy, on the other hand, the free-market tendencies long remained weak.
Adding to the difficulties arising from a political world born and nourished by
a planned economy was the resistance of a productive apparatus that hoped
indefinitely to postpone its technological reconversion by relying on its tradi-
tional resources: the depreciation of the lira and low wages. Wages, according to Le
Monde, had risen in 1974 by 4.9 percent in Germany, 1.6 percent in Great Britain, 5
percent in France, and 1.3 percent in Japan. In Italy, in contrast, they had fallen by
a full 5 percent.14 Though often overshadowed by “competitive devaluation,” low-
wage policies would long be characteristic of Italian competitiveness. Twenty years
after the data cited by Le Monde, an Organization for Economic Development and
Cooperation (OECD) estimate found that Italians were working more for less pay
than were workers in other industrialized countries.15
The Italian monetary authorities quickly sounded the alarm about the inher-
ent risks of resorting systematically to these expedients to avoid dealing with the
structural problem of low productivity. It was no accident if Guido Carli, Carlo
Azeglio Ciampi, and Lamberto Dini (two former governors and a former director
general of Banca d’Italia) occupied leading positions in Italian political life start-
ing in 1991. They were the first to argue that if Italy was unable to reform itself,
changes ultimately would be imposed by constraining European mechanisms, or
by what Carli called an “external constraint.”16
The first of these “constraints”—meant to impose on Italy an ability to com-
pete not by “the degradation of the lira,” but by “limiting costs and increasing
productivity”—was, according to Ciampi, adherence to the European Monetary
System (EMS), in March 1979. When the effects of entry into the EMS began to be
felt “in June 1980,” Ciampi said, companies came to understand that “their reorga-
nization could no longer be postponed.”17
Ciampi himself did his best to help them understand. Giangiacomo Nardozzi
recounts what happened in the summer of 1980 when the president of Fiat, Gianni
Agnelli, visited the governor of Banca d’Italia to ask for a new lira devaluation:
Ciampi turned him down “politely but firmly.”18 That September, Fiat sent out
fifteen thousand dismissal notices. After a twenty-day strike that brought down
the government, the dismissals were transformed into “temporary” layoffs, but for
twenty-three thousand workers. In the end, only a few dozen were rehired. In the
years to follow, Fiat closed its facilities in Lingotto and Chivasso. The victory of
the Turinese group in its strong-arm confrontation with the trade unions marked
a turning point, the official beginning of industrial restructuring in Italy. Nardozzi

estimates that this restructuring yielded an increase in per-employee productivity
of 50 percent during the 1980s.19
Adherence to the EMS, as we have seen, was hardly the fruit of a coherent stra-
tegic vision by Italy’s governing classes. In some ways it was not even the fruit of
a deliberate choice; it was, to employ an oxymoron, an obligatory choice. Indeed,
while it provided special terms for Italy—a 6 percent range of fluctuation for the
lira, compared to 2.25 percent for other currencies—the EMS involved a mon-
etary discipline that the national solidarity government attempted to evade until
Germany finally posed an ultimatum. At that point, the head of the government,
Giulio Andreotti, obtained approval for the decision by a narrow parliamentary
margin in a late-night session on December 12, 1978.
The “general law” of external constraint, as Sergio Romano describes it, was
confirmed. The country, Romano wrote, “can permit itself a few diplomatic liber-
ties and marginal autonomy so long as the international events or decisions of its
most important allies do not suddenly restrain its field of action; in such circum-
stances, it has no choice but to conform in order not to lose contact with those
upon whom, ultimately, its prosperity and political stability depend.”20
“Party of Europe” and “Party of Inflation”
The same “general law” had characterized the Italian Atlanticism of the preced-
ing three decades. As Francesco Cossiga summed up the situation, Italy depended
entirely on the international policies of the United States and NATO, but this
loyalty allowed it to exploit “the marginal utility, the geopolitical ‘income’ that
came from being a frontier country with an internal frontier which, moreover,
accommodated on its territory the Holy See.”21 Romano explains in concrete terms
how this “marginal utility” was expressed: Italy accepted its subordination to the
United States, in exchange reserving itself the right to flirt “with the enemies of
its principal friend: the Soviet Union, the PLO of Arafat, Gaddafi’s Libya, and the
Ethiopia of Mengistu.”22
Tacitly authorized by the Americans, this “Mediterranean Atlanticism” had,
of course, to be very discreet. Often this policy sidestepped the Foreign Ministry
and was conducted instead by economic groups, by Catholic organizations, and,
naturally, by the PCI, which was the privileged intermediary for matters on the
other side of the Iron Curtain. The case of Enrico Mattei, who, as president of
ENI, bypassed governments and the big international petroleum companies to
establish direct relationships with the oil-producing countries of the Mediter-
ranean, was surely the most famous example of this “parallel diplomacy,” but
hardly the only one.23
“Mediterranean Atlanticism” was the essence of republican Italy’s international
political projection until the caesura of 1989 to 1991, when it was succeeded by
the phase of “passive Europeanism” or “impotence,” of which the “forced” mem-
bership in the EMS had provided a foretaste in the 1970s. Beyond its impact on
the productive system, this membership also affected the strategic debate of the
governing class. It clearly exposed a double fault line that followed rather clear
geopolitical lines, internal and international. On the one side were the economi-
cally free-market-leaning groups and tendencies of the north; they relied on
Germany to help them seek advantage over the other side—the “Mediterranean”
groups and tendencies—which were largely protectionist.
The theses supported by some entrepreneurs in the north can be summed up
thus: even if the lands south of the Mediterranean form an attractive market, Ger-
many is the locomotive of the European economy and is the country capable of
absorbing the bulk of Italian exports; it is thus to Europe that Italian interests
must be tied. The opponents of this line, continued the northern businessmen,
are defending backward sectors of production by use of monetary protection. The
true line of demarcation, they concluded, is the one that separates the “party of
Europe” from the “party of inflation.”24
This debate had inevitable political echoes. Interest groups closer to the mar-
kets of the “deutsche mark zone” began in the late 1970s to support a rising politi-
cal phenomenon—“localism”—which was explicitly anticentralist. Transborder
associations that included Italian, Swiss, Austrian, and German regions of the east-
ern Alps intensified their encounters. A “Working Community of Eastern Alpine
Regions,” referred to as the “little EEC of the Alps,” included as its members not
only Veneto, Friuli, Carinthia, Styria, and Upper Austria but also Slovenia and
Croatia, a dozen years before the breakup of Yugoslavia. All these regional group-
ings posed rather explicitly the problem of using the north’s resources to develop
trade with the rest of Europe rather than “wasting” it on the unproductive con-
sumption of Rome and the Mezzogiorno.
The backers of the “party of Europe” could not help but find sympathy for
their beliefs within the traditional parties. At the end of November 1978, a cer-
tain Christian Democratic university professor from Bologna joined the govern-
ment. He was the head of the Il Mulino publishing house, Romano Prodi. Early the
following month, Prodi was, along with others including Beniamino Andreatta,
Giuseppe De Rita, and Umberto Agnelli, the promoter of a symposium launching
a Christian Democratic “free-trade” faction. But the party that felt most invested
in this “mission” was the small Republican Party of Italy, headed by Ugo La Malfa,
long the party of reference of the great capital of the north. In late 1978 the Repub-
lican Party attacked the PCI for its opposition to the EMS.
Adherence to the EMS in December 1978 marked the end of “national soli-
darity.” Within the PCI, not only had the traditional pro-Russian and anti-Ger-
man reflexes prevailed, but so had the factions linked to Mediterranean trade. In
December 1978, Claudio Petruccioli, a party leader, dismissed the economic and
political demands of the north as a “wave of provincial neoliberalism.” But that
was not all. The conviction also prevailed within the PCI that the monetary rigor
required by membership in the EMS had negative effects on employment and
wages: a rather unfortunate outcome for a working class that was supposed to
“become the state.”
When Andreotti resigned, Italian President Sandro Pertini turned, on February
22, 1979, to Ugo La Malfa to form the new government. Despite the failure of this
effort, it was the first time in republican Italy that this role had been assigned to a
political leader who was not a Christian Democrat.
In the meantime, other forces and other men prepared to face the future. In
early December 1978, under orders from the new pontiff, the Italian Church orga-
nized in Varese a meeting on “Christian Europe” to which was invited the head of
the Bavarian Christian Social Union, Franz Josef Strauss. For its part, L’Osservatore
Romano, the Holy See daily, expressed the desire that one day the European Com-
munity would be able to include Eastern Europe. On the “secular” front, among
the “provincial neoliberals” mocked by Petruccioli, a Milanese industrialist,
important in the business world but unknown to the general public, was mulling
the possibility of creating, in Milan, local electoral lists because, as he said, “if we
do not succeed in finding a successor to this political class, dark days await us.” His
name: Silvio Berlusconi.
Chapter 23
The Internationalization
Crisis of the 1990s
The “Recycling of Public Spending”
D espite Italy’s adherence to the European Monetary System (EMS), the liberal
northern groups had merely won a battle. They were not yet sufficiently pow-
erful to remake state policies according to their demands.
The Italian situation in the 1980s was rather like Penelope’s tapestry: Italy,
goaded by European legislation, was beginning cautiously to dismantle certain
forms of protectionism, but new ones were constantly being created, particularly
through the uncontrolled growth of public spending and what Carli described,
in the rather baroque language of a Banca d’Italia official, as “the allocation of
undue sums in order to distend the natural mechanisms of competition and to
subtract a large part of the country’s economy from selective confrontation with
the market.”1 His style aside, Carli’s description illustrates the protectionist char-
acter of corruption, and it points to the reasons that the signing of the Maas-
tricht Treaty coincided almost exactly with the opening of the operation known
as “Clean Hands.”2
The political interpreter of this pendulum swing between the heritage of a
planned economy gone wild and the first timid steps toward free trade was the
Socialist Party secretary, Bettino Craxi, the first Milanese to lead the government
in Italian history. Under his government—which set a record for longevity in the
republican period surpassed only by Silvio Berlusconi—the contradiction evoked
by Carli would underlie a new form of “social compromise,” a well from which all
society’s actors, including many wage earners, would drink. The mechanism of
this compromise was the “recycling of public spending.” The state hired, and to
hire it had to indebt itself. To pay its debt, it issued high-interest securities. These
were then purchased by the people the state had hired (and debt-service payments
required the continual issuance of new high-interest securities, and so on).3 Each
social faction urgently advocated reductions in public spending, so long as it was
other factions who were renouncing their benefits. This explains the ample sup-
port Craxi received from those who had dared say “Enrich yourselves!”
The Socialist chief, of course, engendered mistrust from part of the Catho-
lic world (but at the same time, the enthusiasm of certain pragmatic Catholic
movements, like Comunione e Liberazione, for which money had long ceased to
be stercus diaboli), and the implacable hostility of the PCI. There were various
motivations for this opposition, but the principal one, summing up all others, lay
in Craxi’s proposal to repeat in Italy the French experience of strengthening the
Socialist Party at the Communists’ expense. This operation was meant to be built
on the modern, dynamic, and casual character of the Socialist Party, in contrast
to the archaic nature of the PCI, which was presented as moralistic and pauperis-
tic, for it had spent years preaching sacrifice and austerity. The attack on the PCI
came on the worker front. Craxi not only demonstrated that public-debt securities
brought more money to families, and more quickly, than protests and struggle, but
he worked to dismantle the mechanisms that still guaranteed negotiating power
to unions.
For a time, the electoral results seemed to confirm the Socialist leader’s hypoth-
esis. While the PCI was steadily losing favor in voters’ eyes, the Socialist Party
passed from 9.6 percent of votes cast in 1976, when Bettino Craxi was elected sec-
retary, to 14.3 percent in 1987, when he left the prime ministership, meaning it had
grown by nearly half, even if it did not pick up the entire eight percentage points
lost by the PCI. The Socialist Party had also managed to draw into its orbit some
of the intellectuals who had distanced themselves progressively from Berlinguer’s
party as it lost power and prestige, as well as some of those who had, until then,
adhered to the wanderings of a reduced extreme left (the list that included survi-
vors of the group once known as “extraparliamentary” ranged from 1.4 percent to
1.7 percent of the vote in those years).
This in partibus infidelium breakthrough made Craxi public enemy number 1
of the PCI, to the point that Berlinguer, in 1984, actually declared him “a danger
to democracy.”4 Despite this hostility, conveyed in daily attacks by La Repubblica,
the secretary of the PSI managed to gain the backing of PCI sympathizers and
leaders in September 1985, when he demanded that American forces turn over to
him the leader of a Palestinian terrorist group intercepted in Sicily who had just
hijacked an Italian cruise ship and killed a Jewish American tourist. The PCI, all
the anti-American factions, and the small number of self-described “nationalists”
applauded the firmness of the head of government, which was seen as an act of
defiance toward the “American imperialists.”5
In short, during the “Craxi years” people began to believe that the distance
separating the official country and the real country had narrowed, that Italy had
evolved on the international scene onto an equal footing with other powers, and
that feelings of national pride could legitimately be displayed, even outside sport-
ing events. Contributing to these impressions were the events just described:
unprecedented governmental stability, Craxi’s main role in the Socialist Interna-
tional, and the signing of the new Concordat, which had been in the works for
decades but which the Christian Democrats had been unable to bring to frui-
tion given the risk of political insider trading. But above all was the conviction
that the Italian political class had finally become progrowth. Italians were seeing
their income soar; inflation was falling (from 10.4 percent to 4.9 percent in the
THE INTERNATIONALIZATION CRISIS OF THE 1990S 193
five years of the Craxi government); gross domestic product (GDP) was rising (in
1987, the prime minister announced that Italy had become the fifth leading world
power, having passed Great Britain); the “Third Italy” of small businesses was
showing its dynamism; the nuovi condottieri—Carlo De Benedetti, Raul Gardini,
Silvio Berlusconi, Luciano Benetton—launched their assault on the world, starting
with France; and Italians were no longer emigrating. For the first time, affluence,
money, and profit were becoming positive notions in the collective imagination,
and the inhabitants of the peninsula, growing richer, suddenly realized they could
do so without a sense of guilt.
Still, this social compromise revealed its continuing fragility when it encoun-
tered its intrinsic limits—the risk of a state bankruptcy or new inflation—and,
above all, the limits imposed by its European competitors. Once Germany gave
up its politically subordinate role, the cards were on the table. The overarching
requirement for any country wanting to remain in Europe was to fight against its
public deficits and accumulated debt. For Italy, accepting this rule meant killing
the goose that laid the golden egg.
From that moment, the king was declared naked. If Great Britain had indeed
been surpassed, it was only because of a change in the way GDP was calculated.
If inflation had been defeated, it remained the highest in Europe. If industrial
productivity had increased, services, distribution, and administration had not
followed suit. Above all, even if Italians were undeniably growing richer, public
spending had risen by 8 percent of GDP during the decade.
The first sign that this new era of milk and honey was nearing an end was the
retreat of the nuovi condottieri, who, one after the other, had to shelve their dreams
of international glory. Even the lord of all the condottieri, Gianni Agnelli, after
some flashes of brilliance during the “Craxi years,” faced a lengthy crisis, from
which Fiat has only quite recently emerged. At the end of the 1980s, the “disap-
pearance of industrial Italy” would brutally accelerate. For the “disappearance of
political Italy,” such as it had been known, the wait would not to be so long.
European Constraints
At the beginning of the 1990s, the international upheaval provoked by German

reunification and the collapse of the Soviet Union coincided with a crisis of the
Italian political system. The disappearance of the international architecture built
after World War II had drastically depreciated the country’s “geopolitical capital.”
Italy, no longer a frontier country, lost much of its importance in American eyes,
without, however, gaining any in the eyes of the new reference power, Germany, or
of its privileged partner in the creation of the European Union, France.
The peninsula’s urgent need to revalue its geopolitical capital among the
French and Germans flowed from the horror vacui that afflicts Italy. As history has
amply demonstrated, the country cannot exist without an intimate linkage to one
or more great reference powers. Thus the weakening of America’s interest had to
be compensated for by a strengthening of the interest of another power to which
Italy would swear utmost fidelity, as it had for more than forty-five years to the
United States—at least officially. But there was another reason for urgency. The
country’s fear, given the accelerating European pace, that it might definitively lose
contact with the rest of the continent and slide progressively into the Mediterra-
nean. This fear was sharpest in the north, particularly in Milan. For Lombardy, one
of the three richest regions of Europe, along with Bavaria and the Paris region, the
thought of a distancing from the heart of the continent was intolerable. Any other
solution was preferable.
Milan had “made” Craxi; now Milan “unmade” him. From the Lombard capital
emanated first the political challenge and then the judiciary challenge to the sys-
tem of power that had reigned throughout postwar Italy and was now seen as the
chief culprit behind the risk of exclusion from Europe. The many anticentralist local
electoral lists found their federating force, at the regional level and then beyond,
in a leader with both the vices and virtues of the increasingly well-off petite bour-
geoisie of the north—which he embodied down to his very verbal tics and gestures,
and with uncommon flair and political flexibility: Umberto Bossi. Joining him were,
among others, Gianfranco Miglio, former faculty president of the School of Political
Science at the Catholic University of Milan, a Craxi-era theoretician, who brought as
a dowry his long experience as an analyst of political thought.
But the Northern League was only the best known and, until 1994, the most
successful of the many attempts at a metamorphosis of the political system. Early
in the 1980s the Republican Party was the object of a major political investment
by the large groups and their leading daily newspapers—Corriere della Sera and
La Stampa—and it dreamed briefly of becoming the third major power in the
Italian political panorama, representing rigor and efficiency. Then came the turn
of “Craxi-ism,” which, as already seen, came closer to the goal of breaking up the
Christian Democrat–Communist Party duopoly. In the early 1990s, it was the son
of the former president of the republic, the Sardinian Christian Democrat Mario
Segni, who left his party to give birth to a grand federation of all those who saw the
proportional electoral system as underlying the country’s problems. The federa-
tion had its moment of glory when, in a 1993 referendum, 82.7 percent of voters
(63.68 percent of those registered) cast ballots for the abolition of the propor-
tional voting law for the Senate. Between the two decades, even the PCI attempted
a break with the past. The disappearance of the Soviet Union relieved it of its inter-
national obligations, and it tried to recycle itself as a “liberal” European party, as
its last secretary, Achille Occhetto, put it in declaring war on “ineffective, corrupt,
bureaucratic statism” in the name of “civil society.”6
From 1991 to 1993 Italians were called to vote in nine referenda, eight of them
on laws regulating the relationship between citizens and the state. Along with the
electoral system of the Senate, they abolished the single preference on electoral
lists for the Chamber (by 95.6 percent of voters); the law on public financing of
parties (90.3 percent); the laws concerning the designation of the heads of public
banks (89.8 percent), of certain sanitary services (82.6 percent), and of three min-
istries: agriculture (70.2 percent), tourism (82.3 percent), and state participations
(90.1 percent), the “owner” of public industry in Italy.
Given that in 1978 another referendum for the abolition of the same law on
public financing of parties had been rejected by 56.4 percent of voters, one can
measure, even quantify, how much the rejection of traditional political groupings
had grown over fifteen years, reflecting the evolution of liberal sentiment within
“civil society.” In 1970 Jacques Nobécourt described the small Liberal Party as the
party of all those for whom “the demand for liberty meant the preservation of all
that they themselves had acquired or constructed.”7 Twenty years later the Liberal
Party had disappeared, but the number of those who had acquired or constructed
something worth preserving now measured in the millions.
If they were able to ride it and at times exploit it, an ex-Christian Democrat and
an ex-Communist could certainly not channel and stably organize this “liberal”
and “antiparty” wave with its determination to break with the past. The Northern
League’s campaign against “Roma ladrona” (Rome the thief) had a greater chance
of succeeding. The party of Bossi and Miglio passed from the 186,000-vote mark in
1987 to 3.4 million in 1992, an eighteen-fold increase in its electoral base in just five
years. Thus the Italian political earthquake clearly began well before the annus ter-
ribilis of 1992. But the fact that in 1992 the traditional parties were caught unpre-
pared indicates that earlier predictions of this earthquake had been too cautious.
The predictors were considering not only the League’s folkloristic character but
also its intrinsic, structural limits, represented by its geographic confines. It could
not be the party to unite and represent the discontent and appetite for change
of all Italians because it quite simply was not an Italian party, it was a northern
regional party.
Channelling this will for change would require a force present nationwide, of a
clearly liberal nature, and which seemed to keep a certain distance from the party
system, and indeed from politics in general. In this sense, Forza Italia represented
both the “final stage” and the fruition of all the trends that were transforming Ital-
ian society. The most elemental aspect of Silvio Berlusconi’s success lay in the fact
that his eruption into a political world in profound upheaval could have succeeded
only by presenting itself as completely foreign to that world.
But Berlusconi, as innovative and “impolitic” as he was, suffered—for differ-
ent reasons, and perhaps acutely—from the same malady that afflicts the political
world in general and its Italian version in particular: subjectivism. This disease
helped persuade the political actors of the 1990s that Europe was something of
their own making, not the other way around. For without the gravitational pull
exerted by Europe, Italian political life would have taken an entirely different direc-
tion. Berlusconi’s first government fell only months after it was established, after a
fatal miscalculation that it could resuscitate the Atlantic linkage quo ante in order
to avoid European constraints. Similarly, the Northern League was “European” in
the way Molière’s Monsieur Jourdain spoke in prose (though he was surprised
to learn it). If the rise of Forza Italia at first did not erode the League’s electoral
basis—even while competing on the same northern Italian playing field—the
Bossi’s party lost more than half of its votes in the 2001 elections, after the risk of
a break with the rest of Europe had been warded off.8
The strength of the various center-left coalitions—starting with the one that
took the place of Berlusconi in 1994 (led by his former economy minister Lamberto
Dini and supported by the Northern League)—consisted of the capacity to submit
passively to European directives. In September 1996, four months after becoming
head of the government, Romano Prodi had attempted, it is true, to obtain the sup-
port of Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar of Spain in order to modify the Maastricht
parameters. When the latter refused, the former doubled overnight the level of cuts
foreseen in the proposed budget, from 32,500 billion lira to 62,500 billion lira. Eco-
nomics Minister Ciampi, freshly back from a meeting of his European counterparts
in January 1997, added a further 40,000 billion lira. From that moment on, Europe
was to become both the zenith and the nadir of center-left actions.
The co-option into the Euro club on May 3, 1998, was welcomed by a sense of
general jubilation. Italy had averted the fate that had been suffered by the Soviet
Union and Yugoslavia and that would strike Argentina in 2001 to 2002. But in the
chorus of satisfaction one could also hear pride for having so quickly attained an
objective that, after the departure from the Monetary System in September 1992,
had seemed permanently unreachable.
When he became prime minister again in 2006, Romano Prodi could brag of far
closer relations with Brussels than he had enjoyed ten years earlier, relations made
even more solid by the presence in his government of Giuliano Amato, the former
vice president of the Constitutional Convention, and of the former director of the
European Central Bank Tommaso Padoa Schioppa. These were “pro-European
credentials,” which, as Quentin Peel wrote in the Financial Times, compensated for
the parliamentary weakness of the new executive and its political minority in Lom-
bardy.9 In charge of the Foreign Ministry, Massimo D’Alema, who had been prime
minister when Italy was involved in the Kosovo war, inaugurated a new phase in Ital-
ian diplomacy, one that might be called “Atlantic Europeanism,” relaunching Italy’s
Mediterranean interests under both European and American cover.
Thus it was that Italy was to furnish, in August 2006, the bulk of the Euro-
pean contingent for the United Nations mission in Lebanon. According to a view
largely shared by important press outlets, the country, having regained credibility
in European eyes, was now restoring its credibility—and usefulness—in the eyes
of the Americans.
The Lebanon mission seemed to mark a first, the birth of a genuine, autono-
mous foreign and defense policy, as the editor of La Repubblica suggested.10 Or
did it? Was it instead the latest version of the “Crimean syndrome,” leading Italian
political leaders to attach themselves to military expeditions—even highly risky
ones—with the sole objective of increasing the country’s international credibility,
as Sergio Romano asserted?11 Regardless, the Italian Army embarked for Lebanon
accompanied by the cheers of the left and the pacifists and by the cautions of the
right and the nationalists. Could anyone have imagined a more paradoxical epi-
logue to a 145-year history replete with paradoxes?
The “Advantage of Backwardness”
The slowing of the European process after the 2005 French referendum on the
European constitution eclipsed another debate concerning the near-term future of
Italy, a more theoretical but still interesting debate, which followed the acceptance
of European constraints: that of the “advantage of backwardness.”12
The European constraints, as we have seen, involve a progressive cession of

sovereignty. This process confers on Italy, at least theoretically, two advantages.
All European countries, to the extent that they integrate into the process of con-
tinental unification, entrust part of their sovereignty to European authorities. In
Italy, unlike countries like France or Great Britain, a cession of sovereignty actually
involves the loss of very little. To the contrary, its historic tradition and its diffi-
culty in synthesizing differing local interests made Italy a sort of trailblazer for the
“Europe of regions.” Its lag in creating a national state could become a trump card
when national states were being dissolved into a supranational European whole.
This view, embraced by some, abhorred by others, seems to have faded a bit
as the European process has slowed since 2005. But that leaves two possibilities:
either the march toward Europe resumes and Italy can again play the card of the
“advantage of backwardness,” or the stagnation continues and Italy, having found
a balancing point in Europe, will again suffer. In the final months of 2006, the
latter view led the British think tank Centre for European Reform to formulate a
new hypothesis, which is the paradoxical reversal of a paradox. Given its low pro-
ductivity, if Italy had retained the lira, it would have suffered from a crisis of con-
fidence and a “currency crash,” doubtless forcing it to embrace needed reforms, as
in the early 1990s. The European safety net, according to the Centre, would thus
have made the governing class even lazier and more conservative, exposing it to
the risk of having to “abandon the Euro zone.”13
Beyond this hypothesis, meant perhaps to create a new bogeyman, the Centre for
European Reform’s analysis should be completed with a consideration of the history
from which we started: foreign policy makes Italy more than Italy makes foreign policy.
Since 1861 the Italian state has been unable to exist without submitting to a
determinative relationship with a reference power. That was the case when it was
still too weak to engage in the battles of European competition, and it was true
when it began to measure itself against larger competitors still of the same general
order of magnitude. It is true now, when international competition has sized up
the continental powers and left Europe itself suddenly looking quite small. And it
is even more true today, given new qualitative and quantitative challenges, above
all demography and migration. If Europe should slow its pace, Italy will slow its
own. If Europe loses sight of its structural problems, Italy will do so as well.
This subordination to international policy applies to Italy, but it does not apply
to one of the political forces acting in Italy or, more precisely, from Italy: the Cath-
olic Church. As an Italian, European, and global power, the Church has succeeded,
as Cervetto wrote in 1978, in “adapting itself to the structural movement of the
past 30 years and can, better than any other, project itself into the social demands
and future demographics of Italian capitalism.”14
The “advantage of backwardness” has also, and perhaps even more so, this
characteristic.
Conclusion
P araphrasing the seventeenth-century English philosopher James Harrington,

the Italian economics minister Giulio Tremonti wrote in 1993 that “empire
follows property, that is, political power depends on a society’s economic struc-
ture.” But, Tremonti continued, “if the latter internationalizes, then the former
loses, especially if it continues to operate as if nothing had changed.”1 Europe’s
impact on Italy produced some absolute new realities on the political level—above
all, the regular change in government of two coalitions and newfound govern-
mental stability—and some relative changes on the economic level—above all, the
drastic weakening of the entrepreneurial state for the first time since the 1930s.
Most importantly, power followed property when the latter, in monetary form,
deserted the Banca d’Italia to flow to the towering headquarters of the European
Central Bank (ECB) in Frankfurt. It was then that Italian industry lost the last of
its protections and was abandoned to the mare magnum of international competi-
tion. Before fixed exchange rates took effect, the combination of the small scale of
the production, credit, and distribution sectors, the weakness of the lira, and the
opening of the market transformed the country into a great bazaar where foreign
groups—primarily French and German—came bargain-hunting, particularly in
sectors where deregulation had been the slowest. Thus began the debate on Italian
“decline.”
Toward the middle of the first decade of this century, certain indices—impor-
tant ones, though of uncertain long-term effect—seemed to augur fundamental
change. In 2006, after a few years of de facto stagnation, Italian gross domestic
product (GDP) experienced growth of about 2 percent, owing essentially to, as the
Banca d’Italia governor Mario Draghi put it, “investments and the expansion of
external demand, especially from Germany.”2 In May 2006, industrial production
had already begun to grow, at a 2.9 percent pace, largely because of the growth of
the automobile sector, which was 94.1 percent greater than the year before.3
In the credit sector, in June 2005, the second-largest Italian bank group, Uni-
credit of Milan, took over the second-largest German group, Hypovereinsbank
of Bavaria, thereby joining the elite list of Europe’s ten largest banks. Unicredit
became the number one bank in Austria, Poland, Croatia, Bosnia, and Bulgaria,
and also became a major player in the Turkish and Russian financial mar-
kets.4 Thus strengthened, the Milanese institution proceeded to merge, in May
2007, with Capitalia of Rome, giving birth to the world’s sixth-largest bank (in
capitalization terms). This put at least a momentary halt to the latest takeover
attempts from abroad, following the conquest of Banca Nazionale del Lavoro
by BNP-Paribas and of Antonveneta by ABN Amro. At the same time, it opened

other battlefronts, in particular over Mediobanca and Generali. The merger
between Banca Intesa of Milan and SanPaolo IMI of Turin, announced in
August 2006 and concluded in December that same year, was important not only
because it gave birth to the second-largest Italian group (before being passed by
Unicredit-Capitalia) but also for its repercussions both on international finance
and on Italian economic geography.5
The Unicredit-Hypovereinsbank merger involved two of the richest Euro-
pean regions—Lombardy and Bavaria—which joined together to gain financial
domination of the markets of Eastern Europe, previously under Russian political
domination. The marriage of Intesa and Sanpaolo opened new perspectives for
the Italian economy in Europe. Luigi La Spina, an editorial writer for La Stampa,
saluted this accord as the opening of a new chapter in the country’s history: “The
Italy of the 19th century, when the sub-Alpine capital was the suspicious cousin of
the city that was heiress to Austrian Lombardy-Venice, has finally been buried.”6 If
we further note that the Unicredit-Capitalia accord broke two other taboos—the
hostility between “secular” finance and “Catholic” finance, as well as the supposed
incompatibility of Milan and Rome—we can see just how greatly the Italian geo-
economic panorama was being transformed.
The process of Europeanization also finally brought typical Italian polycen-
trism—the simultaneous existence of several power centers—into an institutional
framework. Despite the rigid formal centralism that has characterized the country
from unification up through the creation of the regions in 1970, and including the
Fascist period, the major cities and regions have always defended their interests
without worrying overly much about whether those interests corresponded to the
larger interests of the country. The European framework now allows these centers
to establish direct relationships with the European Union, as well as with other
European metropolises, while bypassing the mediation of Rome.
* * *
In this book we have barely mentioned two other major areas of change that affect
not just Italy, but also other countries: the demographic crisis and immigration.
We have done so not because these matters are of lesser importance, but rather
because each deserves a specific and much more detailed treatment.
According to the Italian National Statistics Institute (ISTAT), in 2003, while the
population of native-born Italians declined by 45,405 (544,063 births to 586,468
deaths), the number of inhabitants on the peninsula rose considerably because of
a migratory influx of 407,521 people. In 2005 the native-born population was still
in decline, but by only 13,282. In fact, while the number of newborn Italians had
declined by 1.5 percent from the year before, immigrants themselves were having
9.4 percent more children. According to the United Nations Population Fund, in
2050 the population of Italy could reach 58 million, up from today’s 50.9 million.
The trends appear to point, however, to an Italy peopled with ever fewer Italians, a
worrying perspective for some.
CONCLUSION 201
The only institution in Italy that is prepared to confront the dual challenge rep-
resented by demographic decline and immigration growth is the Catholic Church.
In this book we have described some of the principal steps along the path that
has made the Church one of the most important social and political actors on the
peninsula; indeed, the only inescapable one.7 As we have noted, the struggles—
considered rear-guard battles—against divorce, and especially against abortion,
contraception, and homosexuality, are part of a long-term probirth strategy that
has begun to bear fruit.
The failure of the 2005 referendum against the law that strictly regulates stem
cell research was determined by a massive abstention of voters, an abstention
called for by the president of the Italian bishops of the period, Camillo Ruini. The
result, some said, was revenge for the referenda lost by the Catholics on divorce in
1974 and on abortion in 1981. This was generally viewed as proof that, in Italy, it
had again become impossible to govern or legislate against the will of the Church.
This, too, may be thorny terrain that Italy is in the process of clearing for the
rest of Europe. The Church tests, in the laboratory of the peninsula, its strategies
for fighting against individualism—consciously or unconsciously Malthusian—
and for an immigration policy founded on a clever mixing of welcoming attitude
and doctrinal intransigence. If immigration is not just inevitable, but necessary
to the country’s economic survival, the new immigrants must be welcomed in all
Christian virtues, without ceasing for a moment to point out that these virtues
are Christian. Benedict XVI has stated that the peoples of Asia and Africa do not
fear the West because it is modern, but because it attempts to exclude God from
public life.
In an Italy and a Europe facing the difficult geopolitical and geoeconomic chal-
lenges of the twenty-first century, the Church is preparing to play a role rather
larger than that simply of a “stand-in” for identity.
Biographies
Giovanni Agnelli (Gianni, nickname: “l’Avvocato,” “the Lawyer”), 1921–2003
Grandson of Senator Giovanni Agnelli, the founder of Fiat. Mobilized during World
War II, he fought in Russia and Africa, and was a liaison officer with the Allies toward
the end of the conflict, helping spare Fiat’s Turinese facilities any serious devastation.
He became president of Fiat in 1966, succeeding Vittorio Valletta, shortly after the
signing of an agreement to produce vehicles in the Soviet Union.
At the end of the 1960s he embodied, with a few other big industrialists of the
north and the ENI, the sectors of Italian capitalism that saw a need to deal with
workers struggles by collaborating with trade-union organizations. In keeping
with that line, he was elected president of the Confindustria employers organiza-
tion in 1974, remaining in that position until 1976.
In 1980, faced with the refusal of the governor of the Bank of Italy, Carlo Azeg-
lio Ciampi, to again devalue the lira, Agnelli undertook the most sweeping house-
cleaning of the postwar period, laying off twenty-four thousand Fiat workers and
profoundly restructuring its factories.
Having absorbed Lancia in 1970, Fiat took over Alfa Romeo in 1987 and Fer-
rari in 1988. Agnelli gave up the group presidency in 1996 to Cesare Romiti, but
remained one of its central protagonists until his death.
He was also president, among other things, of the publishing house La
Stampa and of Juventus, the Turin-based soccer team. In 1991 he was named
senator-for-life.
Giulio Andreotti, 1919–
President of the Catholic university students from 1942 to 1945, deputy in the
Constituent Assembly (1946), he was repeatedly reelected before being named
senator-for-life in 1991. A close collaborator of Alcide De Gasperi, and undersec-
retary in his governments from 1947 to 1953, he became a minister in 1955 and,
for a rather long period (1959–1966), was minister of defense. Named head of the
government in 1972, he served in that position a total of seven times up to 1992. In
1973 Andreotti led a center-right executive branch that excluded the Socialists, yet
in 1976, he became the head of the first government to be supported by the PCI.
In the Ministry of Foreign Affairs almost without interruption in the 1980s, he
again became president of the Council of Ministers in 1991, during the Gulf War.
204 BIOGRAPHIES
Accused of several offenses, notably for links between some of his Sicilian
friends and the Mafia, he was always acquitted. He authored more than thirty
books and memoirs, and heads two Catholic magazines, including 30 Giorni.
Despite his denials, he was considered the Vatican’s man in Italian politics. In 1999,
two days after having been accused of playing an intermediary role in a political
murder, Andreotti was publicly blessed by the pope.
Silvio Berlusconi (nickname: “il Cavaliere”), 1936–
He has headed the government three times: in 1994, between 2001 and 2006, and
since 2008.
An entrepreneur in the construction sector since 1960, in 1978 he created one
of the first private television networks, “Telemilano,” which became “Canale 5”
in 1980, after the birth of the financial/media company Fininvest. He followed
this with the purchase in 1982 of “Italia 1” from the Rusconi publishing house,
and in 1984 with the purchase of “Retequattro” from Mondadori. At the invita-
tion of François Mitterrand, he founded “La Cinq” in France (1986), attempting
to enlarge his activities throughout Europe, along with “Telefünf ” in Germany
(1987) and “Telecinco” in Spain (1989). In 1990, a law was passed in Italy declaring
an end to the state’s monopoly on television.
His publishing activities, which began with his investment in Indro Monta-
nelli’s Giornale in 1977, continued with the purchase of the biggest Italian pub-
lishing house, Mondadori, in 1989. Berlusconi also moved into the distribution,
insurance, and financial products sectors, with Mediolanum and Programma Ita-
lia. Since 1986 he has owned the Milan AC soccer team.
Until then, very close to the Craxi’s Socialist Party, a few weeks before the par-
liament elections of 1994, he founded his own party, Forza Italia, which carried
the elections. He formed his first government with the former fascist National
Alliance and the Northern League, which would quit the coalition that December.
He was defeated in the legislative elections of 1996 because he was unable to make
an arrangement with the Northern League. He changed that in 2001, with the seri-
ous electoral decline of the party of Umberto Bossi. Berlusconi set a record for the
survival of a postwar Italian government. In the 2006 elections his coalition was
defeated, by a margin of slightly more than twenty thousand votes. In the 2008
elections his new coalition with National Alliance and Northern League succeeded
by and large.
On Forbes magazine’s list of the richest men in the world, published in March
2009, Silvio Berlusconi ranked seventieth.
Guido Carli, 1914–93
Employed by the IRI, he was a Liberal Party deputy in the Constituent Assem-
bly. In 1947 Carli was named the Italian representative to the executive board of
the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In 1957 he became minister of external
commerce and, in 1959, director general of Banca d’Italia. In 1960 he became its
BIOGRAPHIES 205
governor, a position he kept for fifteen years. In 1976 he was elected president
of Confindustria, where, until 1980, he represented continuity with the Agnelli
line. A Christian Democratic senator, he was Treasury minister until 1991. In that
position, Carli was an architect of the single currency and helped bring about the
compromise that led to the signing of the Maastricht Treaty.
Carlo Cattaneo, 1801–69
Milanese, a Latin professor in 1820, beginning in 1835 he worked as a publicist,

editing economic and technical texts. His reformist proposals rendered him sus-
pect in the eyes of the Austrian authorities. He criticized Mazzini’s strictly unitary
hypotheses and the neo-Guelphism of Gioberti, urging a federal solution for Italy,
without being hostile to the Austrian Empire. The insurrection of Milan in March
1848, however, chose him as its leader. Victorious, he left the city when it was occu-
pied by the Piedmontese army. Elected a deputy after unification, he never set foot
in parliament, to avoid having to swear allegiance to the king.
Between 1839 and 1844, then again from 1860 to 1863, he headed Il Politecnico,
a journal that had the subtitle “Monthly Review of Applied Studies on Prosperity
and Social Culture.” With Cavour and Quintino Sella, Cattaneo was one of the rare
men of the Risorgimento who insisted on the necessity of industrializing the country.
Camillo Benso, count of Cavour, 1810–61
Lieutenant in the Engineer Corps in 1827, he took part in the fortification of the
Alps. A partisan of the liberalism, à la Louis Philippe, in punishment he was sent
to Fort Bard fortress in Val d’Aosta. After leaving the army he became mayor of the
commune where his family owned property. In 1835 he traveled through north-
west Europe, drawn by the economic and technical progress of Great Britain. On
May 1, 1846, the Revue nouvelle published his essay “Des chemins de fers en Italie
par le comte Petitti, conseiller d’État du royaume de Sardaigne” (On the Railways of
Italy, by Count Petitti, state counselor of the Kingdom of Sardinia), which earned
him an “invitation” to leave the kingdom. The same year he became the lead-
ing shareholder in the railway linking Turin to Genoa. In 1847 he founded, with
Cesare Balbo, Il Risorgimento, a liberal journal.
As a deputy in 1848, Cavour was minister of commerce and of agriculture, and
of the navy in 1851, and became president of the council (prime minister) the fol-
lowing year. In 1857 he launched a tunnel project under Mont Cenis that would
make possible a rail link from Paris to Turin and open, according to his idea in
1846, a link from London to India via Brindisi and Suez. Having resigned after the
armistice of Villafranca in 1859, he was persuaded by the English ambassador to
Turin to return to his post in early 1860 to take the reins of the unification process
then under way. He remained prime minister until his death.
206 BIOGRAPHIES
Charles Albert of Savoy Carignan, 1798–1849
King of Sardinia beginning in 1831. Close to Piedmont’s moderate liberal circles,

he accepted the regency after the abdication of Victor Emmanuel I following the
1821 riots and conceded to the constitution. Disavowed by Charles Felix, a pre-
tender to the throne, he left for exile in Florence. From there, he claimed Austrian
support for his ambitions to the throne, which he obtained in exchange for a prom-
ise to retain an absolutist regime in Turin. As king, he respected that promise, even
refusing to grant clemency to his comrades of 1821, in prison for ten years. Having
expelled Cavour in 1846 because of his pamphlet on the railways, he authorized
him to establish a liberal newspaper in 1847. In March 1848, facing the threat of
revolution in Turin, he granted the statute that bears his name (Statuto albertino)
and that would later become the Fundamental Law of a unified Italy until 1947.
That same month he invaded Lombardy, which had declared itself independent,
chasing the democrats from power in Milan. Defeated by the Austrians, he went
to war against them again in March 1849 to prevent a revolution or a coup d’état
in Turin. Defeated in Novara, he abdicated in favor of his son Victor Emmanuel.
Benedetto Craxi (Bettino), 1934–2000
A Socialist leader in a “red” suburb of Milan, Sesto San Giovanni, in the 1950s, he
moved into the party leadership in 1965, following the line of Pietro Nenni, who
favored greater autonomy vis-à-vis the PCI. A deputy in 1968, he became secretary
of the PSI in 1976, following its worst electoral showing since the war. He was a
severe critic of the Christian Democrats and the PCI, attempting to create a “third
pole” at the moment of the governmental alliance between the country’s two most
important parties. He was the only influential politician to favor negotiations with
the Red Brigades to save the life of Aldo Moro.
The PSI then experienced what Craxi called a “groundswell” of electoral growth,
without however reaching the goal of becoming the leading party of the Italian
left. Craxi brought his party back into the government in 1980, after a five-year
absence. Named president of the council in 1983, he headed the executive twice up
to 1987, thus giving the impression that the country had achieved domestic politi-
cal stability and new international prestige.
The chief accused in the corruption scandals that were revealed starting in 1992,
he explained, in a memorable speech to the Chamber of Deputies, the mechanisms
by which all the parties had financed themselves. He then left the country and took
refuge in Tunisia, where the local government protected him from several interna-
tional arrest warrants issued following his repeated convictions in Italy.
He was vice president of Socialist International.
Francesco Crispi, 1818–1901
A Sicilian lawyer, he was a leader of the Palermo insurrection of January 1848.

Exiled to Piedmont during the counterrevolution, he became a journalist. Active
BIOGRAPHIES 207
in all the Mazzinian conspiracies, Crispi had to take refuge in Malta, then in
France. In 1860 he organized the arrival of the Garibaldians in Sicily and was an
official in the new provisional government. Distanced from the leadership because
of his republican and anti-Piedmontese sentiments, Crispi was, as of 1861, a dep-
uty of the far left, even after his conversion to the monarchy (1864). A supporter
of the war of 1866 and of an alliance with France in 1870, he became a minister
in the first governments of the Sinistra, despite his polemics against transform-
ism. As prime minister in 1887, he attempted to consolidate the national fabric of
the country through his effort to solve the “Roman question,” with the enlarge-
ment of the up-to-then nearly nonexistent welfare state, with the repression of
social movements, and with an expansionist policy on the international scene. A
supporter of the Triple Alliance, he was the instigator of the colonial missions to
Ethiopia, which came to an end in 1895 with the defeat at Adwa, which forced him
to resign. He was elected to parliament a final time in 1898.
Benedetto Croce, 1866–1952
Philosopher, historian, literary critic, and politician, he first met Antonio Labri-
ola in the 1890s and, having fallen under the influence of Marxism, broke with it
resoundingly at the end of the decade. This experience was, however, at the origin
of his sense of history, which he wrote about in his journal La Critica, founded in
1903 and later one of the jewels of the Laterza publishing house of Bari.
Named senator in 1910, he was minister of public instruction under Giolitti
in 1920. Having followed with intense interest the rise of fascism, he broke with it
after the murder of Matteotti in 1924. He was at the origins, in 1925, of the Mani-
festo of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals. He took to the Senate floor in 1929 to express his
opposition to the Concordat with the Church. He again became minister during
the Badoglio and Bonomi governments (1944). President of the Liberal Party, he
was elected to the Constituent Assembly.
Alcide De Gasperi, 1881–1954
Born in Trento, an Austrian subject, he studied at the University of Vienna. Begin-

ning in 1905, he edited the newspaper of the local diocese. Elected municipal
counselor of the Austrian People’s Party in 1909, he became a deputy in the Aus-
trian Parliament in 1911. A neutralist in 1914, he came into contact in Rome with
politicians and the Church hierarchy with the aim of averting the conflict. Later,
he spoke in the Vienna Parliament in favor of more humanitarian treatment of
Italian war prisoners. Having become Italian himself in 1918 after the annexation
of his native region, he took part in the founding of the People’s Party in 1919, and
became a deputy in 1921. He voted in favor of the first Mussolini government and,
in 1923, replaced Luigi Sturzo as leader of the PPI, who had been pushed aside
by the Church because of his opposition to fascism. After a final semiclandestine
party congress in 1925, he sought refuge in Austria, but was arrested and con-
demned for possession of fake documents. Freed after sixteen months in prison,
208 BIOGRAPHIES
he worked, beginning in 1929, for the Vatican library, while also contributing to
some Catholic journals.
In 1944 he became national secretary of the Christian Democratic Party and
minister, beginning with the first Bonomi government (1944). He became head
of the government in 1945 and continued in that role until 1953. He was a strong
advocate of European integration, and the first president of the European Coal
and Steel Community.
Agostino Depretis, 1813–87
Born near Stradella, in the province of Pavia (at that time part of the Kingdom of
Savoy), he was an early disciple of Giuseppe Mazzini. Elected deputy at the Turin
Parliament in 1848, since 1862 he was several times a minister in governments led
by the Destra, in particular as minister of the navy during the catastrophic war
against Austria in 1866. After some Destra representatives joined the Sinistra, he
was called upon to form the first Sinistra cabinet in March 1876, which he led until
1878. Again prime minister in May 1881, he retained that office until his death.
Amintore Fanfani, 1908–99
A student at the Catholic university of Sacred Heart of Milan, he studied economics

under Agostino Gemelli. He became a proponent of fascism, sharing its corporatist
conception of society, which was close to the social doctrine of the Church. In 1938,
as a professor of economic history at the same university, Fanfani signed the Mani-
festo of the Race, supporting the anti-Semitic laws voted on that same year. After
the war he was part of the fundamentalist social-left faction within the Christian
Democratic Party and rose to official rank in the party’s propaganda office.
Involved in the drafting of the Constitution, he is known for having penned the
phrase with which it begins: “Italy is a democratic republic founded on work.” As
minister of labor in 1947, he linked his name to a vast project for the construc-
tion of subsidized housing units, made possible by Marshall Plan financing. He
became the Christian Democrats’ secretary in 1954, just as De Gasperi was leav-
ing the scene. Late in the decade he was among the advocates of the “opening
to the left.” He headed the first executive branch supported by the Socialists in
1962. Thrown into the minority in his party, he was for two years president of the
General Assembly at the United Nations. As Christian Democrat secretary again
in 1973, Fanfani suffered a crushing defeat in the referendum on divorce. As head
of government for the sixth and last time in 1987, he took part in refounding the
People’s Party after the end of the Christian Democrats and gave a vote of confi-
dence to the Prodi government in 1996. He was president of the Senate five times.
BIOGRAPHIES 209
Giuseppe Garibaldi, 1807–82
Joined the merchant marine at the age of fifteen as a ship’s boy and traveled to
Odessa. Close to the Mazzinian republicans, he was sentenced to death in 1834
following an aborted conspiracy. Taking refuge in Latin America, he took part,
between 1835 and 1843, in the continent’s political and military struggles, in par-
ticular for the defense of the Rio Grande do Sul, which was in revolt against the
Brazilian empire. At the moment of the 1848 revolution, Garibaldi swore loyalty to
the King of Sardinia and became head of the provisional army of the government
of liberated Milan. In 1849 he took on the same position in the new Roman repub-
lic and in that role inflicted minor defeats on the French Army, which had come
to reestablish papal power. During the Sicilian insurrection of 1860, he raised a
volunteer army (the “Mille”, or “Red Shirts”), supported by the king and the Brit-
ish and tolerated by the Piedmont government, with which he was able to rout the
Neapolitan Army. Having conquered Naples, Garibaldi restored the kingdom to
the hands of Victor Emmanuel II. He twice attempted (1862 and 1867) to attack
the Latium, which remained in the Pope’s hands, but he was stopped once by the
Italians and once by the French. In 1866 he fought the sole victorious battle against
the Austrians, at Bezzecca, but the king ordered him to pull back. Elected to parlia-
ment in 1861, he organized in 1870 a volunteer corps to defend the French Repub-
lic against the Prussians, and then the Paris Commune against Thiers. In the 1871
election, he was elected to the French National Assembly.
Giovanni Giolitti, 1842–1928
A government functionary, he was elected to parliament in 1882 and became min-

ister for the first time in 1889, at the Treasury, under Crispi. Head of the govern-
ment in 1892, he was accused of receiving bribes from the Banca Romana, which
was in crisis after the collapse of its real-estate investments, and had to resign. A
minister again in 1901, he finally became head of the government, almost without
interruption, until 1914. In this decade Italy experienced its first major wave of
industrialization. Hostile to Italian participation in the European conflict of 1914,
he remained in the shadows throughout the war. In 1920 Giolitti was called for the
fifth and last time to serve as prime minister. Having assembled an electoral alli-
ance that brought Fascist deputies into the parliament for the first time, he later
opposed the Mussolini government.
Antonio Gramsci, 1891–1937
A student at the University of Turin, he made contact with the city’s workers
groups and joined the Socialist Youth in 1913. An interventionist from the begin-
ning of the war, he later had a change of heart, and in 1916 began working with
the Turinese edition of the party’s journal Avanti!. He took part in the insurrection
of August 1917 and, in 1919, he was an organizer and, above all, a theoretician of
the experiment with factory councils, considered the Italian laborers’ form of the
210 BIOGRAPHIES
Soviets. The same year he founded the Communist journal L’Ordine Nuovo and
was, the year afterward, involved in the efforts that led to the birth of the Com-
munist Party of Italy, in January 1921. As a deputy in 1924, he founded L’Unità and
headed the group that, on Moscow’s orders, ousted Amadeo Bordiga from party
leadership. He was arrested in November 1926 and sentenced to twenty years and
four months in prison. It was during his detention that he wrote his notes on the
ruling class and Italian intellectuals, of which a large part, following the “purging”
desired by Togliatti, would be published after the war under the title The Prison
Notebooks. He was freed just days before his death.
Niccolò Machiavelli, 1469–1527
Secretary of the Florentine chancellery in 1498, he undertook diplomatic mis-

sions for the republic to other Italian and foreign states. Upon his return from the
Medicis in Florence, in 1512, he was accused of conspiracy and imprisoned. Freed
and banished from Florence, he withdrew to his country home, where he devoted
his existence to the study and production of historical and political texts: among
others, he wrote The Discourses on Livy and The Prince. He returned to Florence
in 1515 and wrote the comedy La Mandragora (The Mandrake) and, from 1520 to
1526, The History of Florence.
Alessandro Manzoni, 1785–1873
Born in Milan, he was Jacobinian during the French domination of Italy. He

moved to Paris in 1805, where he frequented the literary salons and met his future
wife, Henriette Blondel. In 1810 he converted to Catholicism and returned to Italy,
where he composed the first of his Hymns, devoted to the chief religious festivi-
ties. In 1821 he began writing a novel that, after four different versions—the last
of them completed in 1840—would become I promessi sposi (The Betrothed). He
also wrote two tragedies and several poems, including March 1821, in which he
expressed his hopes for war with Austria, and The Fifth of May, on Napoleon and
the limits of human action. After the 1827 version of Promessi sposi he decided to
go to Florence to “purify” his language (to “rinse his laundry in the Arno,” accord-
ing to a famous phrase). A moderate liberal, he maintained his distance from
active political life, but dealt actively with linguistic problems. Named a senator in
1860, he headed the Committee for Linguistic Reform and, after 1870, he agreed to
become an honorary citizen of Rome, despite the interdiction decreed by Pius IX.
Giovanni Maria Mastai Ferretti (Pius IX), 1792–1878
Ordained a priest in 1819, he was sent to work in the apostolic nunciature of Santi-
ago de Chile in 1823. Archbishop of Spoleto in 1827, then of Imola, he was named
cardinal in 1840. Elected pope in 1846, he granted a broad amnesty to political
prisoners and undertook some timid liberal reforms, including a customs league
BIOGRAPHIES 211
with the other Italian states. Faced with the spread of the revolutionary movement
in 1848, Mastai Ferretti condemned the war against Austria and, in November,
was himself overthrown by the proclamation of the republic in Rome. Restored to
power by the French Army, he adopted a firm policy toward liberal and national
ideas. In 1864 he published the Syllabus, a list of eighty ideas condemned by the
Church, including rationalism, liberalism, and modern society in general. In 1854
and 1870 came two of the Church’s defining dogmas: the immaculate conception
and papal infallibility. In 1870, during the Italian conquest of Rome, he closed
himself up in the Vatican, excommunicated the king, the government, and its mili-
tary, and rejected the law of guarantees offered by the new peninsular state. His
pontificate was the longest in Church history. He was beatified on September 3,
2000, by John Paul II.
Giuseppe Mazzini, 1805–72
As a law student at the University of Genoa, he published in 1827 a literary essay

on Dante. After spending time in the secret societies of the Carboneria, in 1831
he founded the republican and unitary movement Giovane Italia (Young Italy).
After an attempted insurrection in Savoy, he was sentenced to death and fled to
Switzerland, where he founded the movement Young Europe, for the liberation of
oppressed nationalities. Taking refuge in London, he published his fundamental
text Doveri dell’uomo (Duties of Man) and organized a series of plots, conspiracies,
and attacks. Back in Italy during the revolutionary tempest of 1848, he ultimately
found himself at the head of the Roman Republic in 1849, with two other patriots,
Carlo Armellini and Aurelio Saffi. Returning to London after the defeat of the
revolution, he again began organizing plots and insurrections, concentrating his
political hatred on the France of Napoleon III. Among his plans were a plot to
dynamite Notre-Dame during the marriage of a relative of the emperor. He was
among the founders of the Workers’ International, but distanced himself from it
to defend a religious conception of policy. In 1865 he was elected a deputy, but
his election was invalidated because of his past convictions. In 1870 he returned
to Italy with the goal of proclaiming a republic. Arrested, he was amnestied and
exiled to Switzerland. He returned soon afterward, under an assumed name.
Aldo Moro, 1916–78
National president of Catholic university students, he became a professor of penal

law in Bari in 1941. A deputy to the Constituent Assembly, he was junior minister
under De Gasperi and minister from 1955. He began to play an important role in the
Christian Democratic Party during the preparation of the center-left, which he saw
as a means to eliminate social and political conflicts in Italy. Secretary of the party
in 1959, he also continued as a university professor. In December 1963 he headed
the first government to include Socialists. The crisis of the center-left in the late
1960s and early 1970s led to his ignoring for some time his most important politi-
cal responsibilities. He was, nevertheless, minister of foreign affairs in the early
212 BIOGRAPHIES
1970s, a position in which he accentuated the pro-Arab character of Italian policy.

As head of the government again in 1975, he was the architect of the entry of the
PCI into the majority one year later. In 1976 he became president of the Christian
Democratic Party. Kidnapped by the Red Brigades in March 1978, he was aban-
doned by his party and killed by the terrorists fifty-five days later.
Benito Mussolini, 1883–1945
A militant socialist, in 1900 he fled to Switzerland to avoid military service and

there encountered the works of Georges Sorel. Back in Italy, he did his service and
then lived by his wits before becoming a teacher and contributor to numerous
socialist journals. His growing influence within the party led him to take the offen-
sive against the moderates, in particular during the Libyan War, which he fiercely
opposed. Having distinguished himself at the PSI congress at Reggio Emilia, which
was dominated by the far left wing, he was named chief-editor of Avanti!, the party
journal. He was involved in the “red week” of Romagna, a series of strikes and
clashes with security forces in June 1914. A pacifist when the war broke out, in
October 1915 he became an interventionist and was immediately expelled from
the Socialist Party. With his new journal, Il Popolo d’Italia, he led a violent cam-
paign in favor of intervention, and was mobilized in 1915.
After the war he organized a political front formed of veterans, nationalist
intellectuals, and revolutionary anarcho-syndicalists, along republican, anticleri-
cal, and corporatist positions: the Fasci italiani di combattimento (Italian League
of Combat). After two years with little influence, his movement took the leader-
ship of the antiunion movement in late 1920, and was responsible for a growing
number of acts of violence against trade-union and cooperative organizations and
its political adversaries. With the violence reaching its peak, in the autumn of 1922
the king asked him to form a government, which also included the People’s Party
and the liberals.
After a crisis following the assassination of the Socialist deputy Matteotti, Mus-
solini claimed full moral responsibility for the actions of the Fascists and disman-
tled all political and labor organizations, except those linked to the Fascist Party
and the Church, as well as the Confederation of Industrialists. From then until
his death, three days after the general anti-German insurrection of April 1945, his
personal history and that of the country were inseparable.
Eugenio Pacelli (Pius XII), 1876–1958
Grandson of Prince Marcantonio Pacelli, one of the founders of the daily Osser-
vatore Romano, cousin of Ernesto Pacelli, founder and president of the Banco di
Roma, he studied theology at the Gregorian University and was ordained a priest
in 1899. Chamberlain of Pope Pius X, he was a consultant to the Holy Office in
1911 and subsecretary for foreign affairs on the eve of World War I. Papal nun-
cio in Bavaria in 1917, he was transferred to Berlin in 1925. In February 1930 he
BIOGRAPHIES 213
was named secretary of state (prime minister) of the Vatican, under Pius XI, and
signed the concordats with Austria, Yugoslavia, and Nazi Germany.
In March 1939 he was elected pope after a single day of conclave. Having
worked to prevent the conflict, Pacelli maintained an attitude of silent neutral-
ity—an attitude that, notably, as concerns the Shoah, fueled endless discussions
and debate. His visit to the neighborhoods of Rome bombed during the war was
the first official trip by a pope outside Vatican walls since 1870. Upon the lib-
eration of the capital in June 1944, Pacelli supported the Christian Democrats
and mobilized Church structures in favor of the party. In 1949 the Holy Office
announced the excommunication of “the communists and their allies.” Pacelli was
an active partisan of the re-Christianization of Italian society.
Romano Prodi, 1939–
A graduate of the Catholic university of the Sacred Heart in Milan, he was a pro-
fessor of economics and industrial policy at the University of Bologna. President
of the Il Mulino publishing house in Bologna from 1974 to 1978, he took part,
with his political mentor, Beniamino Andreatta (who had been his boss at the
university), in the birth of a free-trade faction within the Christian Democratic
Party. Minister of industry in 1978, Prodi founded the Nomisma research center in
1981, from which many of his future collaborators would emerge. In 1982 he was
named to head the largest industrial and financial holding company in Italy, the
publicly funded Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (known by its Italian ini-
tials, IRI), overseeing the majority of big Italian industries, heavy industry, naval
shipyards, nearly all banks, Alitalia, and the television system. Under his leader-
ship, IRI erased a large part of its deficit. After his term expired in 1989 he was
called back to service by the head of the government, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, with
the aim of overseeing a substantial privatization of state properties.
With Andreatta’s support, Prodi was chosen as a candidate for prime minister
by the center-left coalition of the Ulivo (Olive Tree) in the 1996 elections. Victo-
rious, thanks to the divisions of the center-right, Prodi remained as head of the
government for two years, succeeding first in returning the lira to the European
Monetary System and later ushering it into the euro zone. He was ousted from
the government by Massimo D’Alema, leader of the Democrats of the Left (DS),
and was “indemnified” with the presidency of the European Commission. Under
his leadership, the euro would become the effective currency of eleven countries
in the European Union (EU), and ten new member countries would be co-opted
in the EU as of May 1, 2004.
Back in Italy after his term ended, he was again named leader of the center-left
coalition, narrowly carrying the elections of April 2006, and on May 16 he was
named president of the Council of Ministers. His government, which had more
than one hundred ministers and undersecretaries, resigned two years later.
214 BIOGRAPHIES
Achille Ratti (Pius XI), 1857–1939
Enrolled in a Lombard seminary in 1867, he was ordained to the priesthood in 1879.

With degrees in philosophy, canon law, and theology from the Gregorian University,
he was, from 1888 to 1912, curator of the Ambrosian Library, before being named
prefect of the Vatican Library in 1914 by the new pope, Benedict XV. As apostolic
nuncio in Warsaw once the Polish state was reconstituted, he was profoundly marked
by the siege of the city by the Red Army in August 1920. At a time when the fate of
Silesia was not yet decided, he threw in his lot with Germany, as Pius XII would do
twenty-five years later, disavowing the primate of Poland Stefan Wyszynski.
Archbishop of Milan in 1921, he was elected pope the following year. His plat-
form, aiming to “instaurare omnia in Christo,” clashed with the Fascist attempt to
create a civil religion in Italy. Despite the support offered to fascism at the moment
when he took power, notably with the abandonment of Sturzo and of the People’s
Party, and despite the signature of the Concordat and of the Lateran accords in
1929, Ratti was involved in two major crises with the Mussolini regime, in 1931
and 1938, which allowed the Church to maintain the independence of its organi-
zations, especially among youth and university students. In 1937 Ratti published,
in German, the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (With Great Concern), in which
he denounced the persecutions of Catholics in Hitler’s Germany, without, how-
ever, mentioning the situation of the Jews. Five days later he published another
encyclical, the Divini Redemptoris, in which he violently attacked communism. In
1938, during Hitler’s visit to Rome, he polemically left the capital.
Luigi Sturzo, 1871–1959
Ordained to the priesthood in 1894, he earned a degree in theology in 1896. In

1900 Sturzo was among the founders of the Christian Democratic movement, dis-
avowed by Pope Pius X. Deputy mayor of his native city Caltagirone, in Sicily, from
1905 to 1920, he served in 1912 as deputy president of the Association of Italian
Communes. Secretary of Catholic Action in 1915, four years later he was among
the founders of the People’s Party and became its national secretary. Opposed to
any agreement with the liberals, Sturzo voted, with his colleagues, in favor of the
first Mussolini government. A year later, at the head of the faction hostile to any
collaboration with the Fascists, Sturzo was disavowed by his own party and forced
to resign. Abandoned as well by the Church, he was “invited” to leave Italy. He
spent a lengthy exile in New York, where he published numerous historical and
political texts. He returned to Italy at the end of the war, despite attempts by the
ecclesiastical authorities to dissuade him. In 1952 he was named senator-for-life.
That same year Pius XII invited him, against the advice of Chrstian Democrat
secretary De Gasperi, to seek an agreement between the Christian Democrats of
Rome and the Fascist far right to prevent the parties of the left from prevailing
in municipal elections in the capital. After this attempt failed, Sturzo—isolated
and ill—withdrew from active political life. The process of his beatification was
opened in 2002.
BIOGRAPHIES 215
Palmiro Togliatti, 1893–1964
Member of the Socialist Youth in Turin, where he was a university student, he

was an interventionist at the start of the war and, for that reason, was not invited
to the 1921 congress where the Communist Party was born. Collaborated with
Gramsci on L’Ordine nuovo, and for some time was a faithful collaborator of sec-
retary Amadeo Bordiga. After the latter’s arrest, Togliatti formed a new majority
around Gramsci, more responsive to directives from Moscow. Following Grams-
ci’s own arrest in 1926, Togliatti became secretary of the party. Taking refuge in the
USSR, he became number two in the Komintern and a faithful executor of Stalinist
policy. He was commissioned to repress the internationalists and the anarchists
in Spain, took part in the elimination of numerous Communists who had sought
refuge in the Soviet Union, and signed with his own hand the dissolution of the
Polish Communist Party in 1939, on the eve of the accord with Hitler. Back in
Italy in 1944, he supported the Badoglio government and promoted the theses on
“the Italian path to socialism.” As minister of justice in 1946, he signed a decree of
amnesty for thousands of Fascists, including some admitted collaborators. Victim
of an terrorist attack in July 1948, shortly after the electoral defeat of his party, he
urged his comrades to react calmly. After breaking in 1948 with Tito—dubbed
a “Fascist”—Togliatti severely condemned the “Fascist” insurrection in Hungary
and, that same year, attempted to prevent the publication in Italy of Khrushchev’s
secret report to the twentirth Communist Party Congress (PCUS). Upon his death
the Russian industrial city of Stavropol was renamed Togliattigrad.
Victor Emmanuel II of Savoy, 1820–78
A soldier during the wars against Austria in 1848 and 1849, he became king of
Sardinia upon the abdication of his father, Charles Albert, following the defeat at
Novara, in 1849. Having concluded peace with Austria, he dissolved parliament. He
named Cavour prime minister, and a long diatribe began between the two, each
trying to diminish the authority, even the prerogatives, of the other. He maintained
close contacts with the conspirators, both democrats and republicans, and, accord-
ing to some sources, even with Felice Orsini, just days before the latter threw a bomb
at Napoleon III in Paris. He threatened to dismiss Cavour when the latter agreed to
cede Nice and Savoy to France in exchange for its war against Austria. In 1859, after
the armistice of Villafranca, he signed the peace with Vienna, and Cavour resigned.
At that point Victor Emmanuel accused the prime minister of “playing at making a
revolution” and, a few months later, made contact with Garibaldi and encouraged
his plan for the invasion of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.
Parliament named him king of Italy in March 1861. He decided to keep the
dynastic numeral “II” to underline continuity with the Kingdom of Sardinia and
the Kingdom of Italy.
216 BIOGRAPHIES
Victor Emmanuel III of Savoy, 1869–1947
Son of King Humbert I, he ascended to the throne upon his father’s assassina-
tion in 1900. Considered a liberal, he left substantial latitude to his prime min-
isters, in particular Giovanni Giolitti. During the early years of his reign, Italy
evolved toward a system of constitutional monarchy. During the war he partici-
pated actively in overturning alliances that led Italy to be at war against the central
empires. In October 1922, when the Fascists invaded the capital, he refused to sign
the state of siege, and gave to Mussolini responsibility to form the new govern-
ment. After the murder of Giacomo Matteotti, he was a key supporter of the Fas-
cist head of the government. Removed from real responsibility, after the conquest
of Ethiopia he was proclaimed emperor, and after the conquest of Albania, its
king. In 1938 he signed the laws against the Jews, making them enforceable. When
the end of the conflict was in sight, he organized a coup d’état and had Musso-
lini arrested, replacing him with Marshal Pietro Badoglio. When the armistice was
announced on September 8, 1943, he fled with the latter and a large part of the
new government, without leaving any directive to the military, and sought Anglo-
American protection. While Mussolini, freed by the Germans, gave birth to the
social republic, Victor Emmanuel declared war on Germany. Having confided the
regency to his son Humbert, he abdicated only a month before the institutional
referendum of June 1946, which transformed Italy into a republic.
Notes
Introduction
1. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the GDP of the People’s Repub-
lic of China and Hong Kong was $1.817 billion in 2004, while that of Italy was $1.680
billion. According to the World Bank, China and Hong Kong had a GDP of $1.812
billion, while that of Italy was $1.672 billion. IMF, World Economic Outlook database,
September 2005; World Bank, World Development Indicators database, July 1, 2006.
According to these Washington-based organizations, China had also surpassed France
and Great Britain in terms of GDP.
2. For the range of statistical information, see Vera Negri Zamagni, Dalla periferia al
centro. La seconda rinascita economica dell’Italia (1861–1990) (Bologna: Il Mulino,
1990), 465. For the 2005 estimate see https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/
rankorder/2078rank.html. According to the same source, calculating purchase power
parity, the GDP of Italy was eighth in the world rankings in 2006 after the United
States, China, Japan, India, Germany, the UK, and France.
3. Sergio Romano, interviewed in Specchio, supplement of La Stampa, February 1, 1997.
4. The European Innovation Scoreboard, a body of the European Union (EU), ranked
the Italian education system twenty-first out of twenty-five in 2006 (http://trendchart
.cordis.lu). According to data gathered by Marc Lazar, in 2002 spending on research
and development represented 1.16 percent of GDP, “well below that of the European
average.” In terms of high-tech patents, Italy had only 7.1 per million inhabitants,
compared with a European average of 26.45 in Germany and 32 in France and the UK.
Lazar, L’Italie à la derive: Le moment Berlusconi (Paris: Perrin, 2006), 132. According
to the World Economic Forum, Italy was in forty-second place (out of 115 countries
studied) in 2006 for its level of investment in research and development, its coop-
eration between universities and business, and the quality of scientific education; in
ninety-first position regarding the rubric “absorption of technology into business
practice.” Statistics offered by Giuseppe Cassini, Gli anni del declino: La politica estera
del governo Berlusconi, 2001–2006 (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2007), 18.
5. Luciano Gallino, La scomparsa dell’Italia industriale (Turin: Einaudi, 2003), 3.
6. Zeffiro Ciuffoletti, Stato senza nazione. Disegno di storia del Risorgimento e dell’Unità
d’Italia (Naples: Morano, 1993), 311, 312.
7. G. Mammarella and P. Cacace, La politica estera dell’Italia. Dallo Stato unitario ai giorni
nostri (Bari: Laterza, 2006), vi. These authors return to this question at several points,
from section 4, chapter VIII, sections 1 and 2 of chapter IX, in particular pages 277,
278, 280, and 281.
218 NOTES
8. Giulio Bollati, L’Italiano. Il carattere nazionale come storia e come invenzione (Turin:
Einaudi, 1983), 40.
9. Sergio Romano, Histoire de l’Italie du Risorgimento à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 1977), 201.
10. “Europe should be again to us the External Commissary, the Bogeyman who force this
anarchical and bungling country to pull itself together” Federico Rampini, Germaniz-
zazione: Come cambierà l’Italia (Bari: Laterza, 1996), 20.
11. Mario Monti, Intervista sull’Italia in Europa, under the direction of Federico Rampini
(Bari: Laterza, 1998), 164.
12. Statistics taken from the annual report of the governor of the Banca d’Italia Mario
Draghi (see Corriere della Sera, June 1, 2006); Hugues Portelli, L’Italie de Berlusconi
(Paris: Buchet Chastel, 2006), 14; Marc Lazar, L’Italie à la derive, 111, 112; Cassini, Gli
anni del declino, 18, 19.
13. Register (or Fund) for the South, created in 1950 in order to stimulate economic
growth and development in the south of the country. It was given a new status in 1984.
14. The Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (IRI) was an organization set up by the
Italian government in 1933, initially to rescue floundering companies that could no
longer afford to repay their creditors. In the postwar period, the IRI owned many
diverse businesses such as the highway system, public television, Alitalia Airlines, 80
percent of the most important banks, telecommunications companies, and several
industries (food, iron and steel, shipyards, vehicles, Alfa Romeo, etc.).
15. In Italy, deputies have immunity from legal prosecution as long as Parliament is in
session, unless Parliament itself authorizes the prosecution of one of its members.
16. Raffaele Romanelli, L’Italia liberale (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990), 212. The use of Sinistra
and Destra in Italian allows us to distinguish from the left and right defined by the
parliamentary “geography” of the twentieth century.
17. This phrase was made famous by Massimo D’Alema’s book Un paese normale. La
Sinistra e il futuro dell’Italia (Milan: Mondadori, 1995).
18. Shoeshine (Italian: Sciuscià, 1946) and Ladri di biciclette (released in English as The Bicy-
cle Thief or Bicycle Thieves, 1948) are two of Vittorio De Sica’s major neorealist works.
19. Edward C. Banfield, Moral Basis of a Backward Society (New York: Free Press, 1958),
118, 139, 155, 156, 161.
20. Roberto Cartocci, Mappa del Tesoro: Atlante del capitale sociale in Italia (Bologna: Il
Mulino, 2007), 13.
Foreword
1. Piero Gobetti, “Motivi di storia italiana,” La Rivoluzione liberale, May 1, 1923.

2. Valerio Castronovo, Storia economica d’Italia (Turin: Einaudi, 1995), 6–10; Giacomo
Perticone, La politica estera italiana dal 1861 al 1914 (Turin: ERI, 1961), 13; Tullio
De Mauro, Storia linguistica dell’Italia unita (Bari: Laterza, 1965), 37, 38; V. Zamagni,
Dalla periferia al centro. La seconda rinascita economica dell’Italia (1861–1990) (Bolo-
gna: Il Mulino, 1990), 42, 43; www.stradeanas.it.
3. Antonio Gramsci, Il Risorgimento (Turin: Einaudi, 1949), 42, 43.
4. Maximilien Misson credits this phrasing to Victor Amadeus II (1666–1732), the first
king of the House, in his Voyage d’Italie, avec un Mémoire contenant des avis utiles à
ceux qui voudront faire le mesme voyage (The Hague: Chez Henry van Belderen, 1702).
5. Quoted by Denis Mack Smith, “L’Italia,” in Storia del mondo moderno, vol. X (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 705.
6. Quoted by Giuseppe La Farina, Storia d’Italia dal 1815 al 1850, vol. II (Milan: Casa
Editrice Italiana, 1861), 474.
7. Gramsci, Il Risorgimento, 49.
NOTES 219
8. Quoted by Giorgio Candeloro, Storia dell’Italia moderna, vol. II, Dalla Restaurazione alla
rivoluzione nazionale, 1815–1846 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1958), 27. The Kingdom of Italy
included, in 1810, the regions of Lombardy (augmented by the province of Novara and
the zone of Tortona), Veneto, and part of Emilia, Romagna, and the Marche.
9. This approximate valuation comes from different calculations suggested by J. M. Roberts,
Italia, in Storia del mondo moderno, vol. x (Milan: Garzanti, 1969), 499; Marco Meriggi,
“Borghesie,” in Dizionario storico dell’Italia unita, ed. Bruno Bongiovanni and Nicola
Tranfaglia (Bari: Laterza, 1996), 73, 74; Didier Musiedlak, “Construction politique et
identité nationale,” in L’Italie, une nation en suspens, ed. I. Diamanti, A. Dieckhoff,
M. Lazar, D. Musiedlak (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1995), 30.
10. Carlo Cattaneo, L’insurrezione di Milano nel 1848 e la successiva guerra (Turin: Loescher,
1968), 6 (first edition, Paris, September 1848). By some calculations, the Austrian trea-
sury absorbed some two-thirds of the annual active budget of the Lombard–Venetian
Kingdom. Candeloro, Storia dell’Italia moderna, 23–24.
11. Smith, “L’Italia”, 722.
12. Quoted by Gramsci, Il Risorgimento, 109. Massimo d’Azeglio served as prime minister
of the Sardinian kingdom on several occasions.
13. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (London: Fontana Press, 1989), 234.
14. The phrase was created by Francesco Crispi: “Cavour? What did he finally do, Cavour?
Nothing but to diplomatize the revolution » - as cited in Gramsci, Il Risorgimento, 149.
16. Sergio Romano, Histoire de l’Italie du Risorgimento à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 1977), 14.
17. Quoted by Smith, L’Italia, 732.
18. “Napoleon III will conclude a peace with Austria and stifle all efforts of the Italians
to carry on the war . . . but, should Austria be worsted in the fight, that peace will be
concluded on the Adige, which will leave the whole of Venice and part of Lombardy in
the hands of the hated Austrians.” Karl Marx, in the New York Daily Tribune, January
24, 1859.
19. Romano, Histoire de l’Italie du Risorgimento à nos jours, 9.
20. Senate minutes relative to the session of June 4, 1912.
21. “Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga come e, bisogna che tutto cambi”; this is the affirma-
tion made famous by the novel Il Gattopardo by Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa.
22. The revolutionary republic of Rome (February to July 1849) provided Garibaldi with
his first opportunity to make his military virtues known: he defeated the French dis-
embarked in Civitavecchia and repulsed the Neapolitans in Palestrina and Velletri; he
was, however, defeated in the battle of Gianicolo on June 3. For the battles of Aspro-
monte, Bezzecca, and Mentana, see the biographical profile.
23. Italo Balbo, in Critica fascista, May 24, 1932, quoted by Gramsci, Il Risorgimento, 165.
24. Romano, Histoire de l’Italie du Risorgimento a nos jours, 21.
Chapter 1
1. Quoted by Mario Vinciguerra, “Depretis e la nuova classe politica italiana,” in Il cen-

tenario del Parlamento, 8 maggio 1848–8 maggio 1948 (Rome: Chamber of Deputies,
1948).
2. The word “mafia” is used for the first time in a theater comedy Li mafiusi di la Vicaria
di Palermu in 1862 and 1863. The prefect of Palermo, Filippo Gualtiero, was the first
to speak of Mafia “officially” in April 1865. S. Lupo, Storia della mafia dalle origini ai
giorni nostri (Rome: Donzelli, 1996), 13.
220 NOTES
3. Giampiero Carocci, Il trasformismo dall’unità ad oggi (Milan: Unicopli, 1992), 7.

4. P. Bevilacqua, Breve storia dell’Italia meridionale (Rome: Donzelli, 2005), 146–59;
G. Viesti, Abolire il Mezzogiorno (Rome: Laterza, 2003), 4; Vera Zamagni, “Les difficultés
économiques de la Seconde République,” in L’Italie aujourd’hui: Situation et perspectives
après le séisme des années 90, ed. Manlio Graziano (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004), 121.
5. Quoted by Valerio Castronovo, L’industria italiana dall’Ottocento a oggi (Milan: Mon-
dadori, 1980), 9.
6. Quoted by V. Castronovo, Storia economica d’Italia. Dall’Ottocento ai giorni nostril
(Turin: Einaudi, 1995), 42.
7. Quoted by Denis Mack Smith in Storia d’Italia dal 1861 al 1997 (Rome-Bari: Laterza,
1998), 85.
8. See Gino Luzzatto, Breve storia economica dell’Italia medievale (Turin: Einaudi, 1958),
182.
9. Vera Zamagni, Dalla periferia al centro. La seconda rinascita economica dell’Italia
(1861–1990) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990), 23.
10. Zamagni, Dalla periferia al centro, 19.
11. Maurice Aymard, “La transizione dal feudalesimo al capitalismo,” in Storia d’Italia
Annali I. Dal feudalesimo al capitalismo, ed. Ruggiero Romano and Corrado Vivanti
(Turin: Einaudi, 1978), 1133–92.
12. See Luzzatto, Breve storia economica, 111–14; and Zamagni, Dalla periferia al centro,
18, 19.
13. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (London: Fontana Press, 1989), 4.
14. See Fernand Braudel, Le modèle italien (Paris: Flammarion, 1994).
Chapter 2
1. José Gil, “Nazione,” in Enciclopedia Einaudi, vol. IX, ed. Ruggiero Romano (Turin: Ein-
audi, 1980), 851.
2. Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, Écrits politiques (Paris: Edition des archives contemporaines,
1994), 121.
3. Limes 1993, no. 1–2:10. The first article in this edition was a discussion on the theme
“In Search of the National Interest.”
4. This monograph-style edition had the thematic title “A che serve l’Italia” (What good
is Italy) and the subtitle “Perché siamo una nazione” (This is why we are a nation).
5. Lucio Caracciolo, “Editorial,” Limes 1994, no. 4:9.
6. Federico Fubini, “A Bruxelles è tramontato il tricolore,” Limes 1996, no. 3:208. Fubini is
a researcher and a journalist for the Corriere della Sera.
7. Carlo Jean, “La nostra sicurezza nel mondo balcanizzato. Linee-guida per una politica
estera e di difesa coerente,” Limes 1994, no. 4:202. General Jean was at the time the
president of the Centro Alti Studi per la Difesa (Center for Advanced Defense Studies).
8. Patrizio Bianchi, “Dove stanno i nostri interessi economici,” Limes 1994, no. 4:214. At
the time he wrote the article, Bianchi was a professor of economics for the European
Community in Bologna.
9. Jacopo Turri, “Scene da una secessione,” in Limes 1996, no. 3:.
10. Corriere della Sera, June 8, 1995.
11. La Stampa, November 1, 1995.
12. Corriere della Sera, June 1, 1996.
13. Sergio Romano, “Così muore una nazione,” La Stampa, January 11, 1996.
14. Interview with Romano Prodi, Limes 1996, no.3:24.
NOTES 221
15. Antonio Maccanico was secretary to the president of the republic under Sandro Per-
tini and Francesco Cossiga, president of Mediobanca (1987–1988), senator and min-
ister on several occasions, notably minister of institutional reforms in the Prodi and
D’Alema governments.
Chapter 3
1. Antonio Gramsci, Letteratura e vita nazionale (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1975), 88.
2. Gramsci, Letteratura e vita nazionale, 138.
3. Giorgio Rumi, “Povera Padania, triste storia la sua,” Liberal, October 1996.
4. See Silvio Lanaro, “Le élites settentrionali e la storia italiana,” Meridiana, no. 16, 1993.
5. The text was C. Cattaneo, Notizie naturali e civili su la Lombardia (1844), now Storia
della Lombardia (Milan: Rusconi, 1992).
6. La città considerata come principio ideale delle istorie d’Italia (1855), now Storia della
Lombardia.
7. G. Rumi, “Povera Padania, triste storia la sua,” Liberal, no. 19, October 1996.
8. Cattaneo, Notizie naturali e civili, 138.
9. Cattaneo, Notizie naturali e civili, 163. According to the calculations of Vera Zamagni,
in 1857 Lombardy produced a value corresponding to 238 lira per hectare, which was
slightly less than 1.5 times the production of Piedmont (169 lira), approximately twice
that of Tuscany (117 lira), 3 times that of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (81 lira), and
3.5 times that of the State of the Church (68 lira). Dalla periferia al centro. La seconda
rinascita economica dell’Italia (1861-1990) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990), 42.
10. Cattaneo, Notizie naturali e civili, 167.
11. Marco Meriggi, Breve storia dell’Italia settentrionale, dall’Ottocento ad oggi (Rome:
Donzelli, 1996), 152.
12. Fausto Fonzi, Crispi e lo Stato di Milano (Milan: Giuffrè, 1965). The “State of Milan”
was, according to Francesco Crispi’s polemical description, a coalition between Mila-
nese industry, the democrats, the Socialists, and a part of the Catholic world organized
against the Africa policy of the Sicilian prime minister. During hostile street demon-
strations organized in Milan during the Abyssinian War, people shouted slogans of
support for the Ethiopian Negus Menelik. Felice Cavallotti (1842–98) was a radical
politician, poet, and dramatic author.
13. Filippo Turati, “Proemio al programma comunale dei socialisti milanesi” Critica Soci-
ale, 20(9): 134–37, May 1, 1910.
Chapter 4
1. See Ernesto Galli della Loggia, L’identità italiana (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998), 81.
2. This was in “Il carattere nazionale come storia e come invenzione,” published in 1976
in the first volume of La Storia d’Italia (Turin: Einaudi), and republished as a book
under the very similar title L’Italiano. Il carattere nazionale come storia e come invenzi-
one (Turin: Einaudi, 1983).
3. “Il carattere nazionale come storia e come invenzione,” 40.
4. Galli della Loggia, L’identità italiana, 130, 131.
5. The revolt known as “the Sicilian Vespers” was organized in Palermo by the Sicilian
nobility to “avenge” the Swabians, who had recently been vanquished by the Planta-
genets after the death of Frederick I Barbarossa. It was at the beginning of Spanish
222 NOTES
domination of the Aragonese and, some say, the birth of the Mafia. The revolt of the
Ciompi (wool workers) of Florence in 1378 was probably the revolt in which the class
characteristics of the protagonists were the clearest. Nonetheless, it also led to the
uprising of the “very slim people” under the impulse of a leader, Michele di Lando,
who did not hesitate to betray the Ciompi and pass over to the “Arti maggiori” (Major
Guilds) This revolt ended with the workers’ defeat and the definitive political crisis
of the Commune of Florence. Masaniello (1620–1647; his real name was Tommaso
Aniello), led the revolt of the Neapolitan commoners of 1647 against tax-collection
bureaus. Named “captain general of the most loyal people” by the viceroy of Naples,
he was later killed by his own partisans. Finally, Cola di Rienzo took advantage of the
vacancy in the pontifical seat in Rome in 1347 and was named “tribune of the peo-
ple” with the support of Clement VI, one of the Avignon popes. A victim of his own
ambition, he defied Emperor Charles IV, who imprisoned him. Returned to Rome, he
ended the anarchy of the city before being captured and killed by the populace.
6. Indro Montanelli and Roberto Gervaso, L’Italia dei secoli d’oro (Milan: Rizzoli, 1967),
135; Luigi Barzini, The Italians: A Full-Length Portrait Featuring Their Manners and
Morals (New York: Touchstone, 1996); Giuseppe Prezzolini, The Legacy of Italy (New
York: Vanni, 1948).
7. This image, which appeared in the Rümische Geschichte, was repeated by G. Prezzolini.
8. Johann Gottlieb Ficthe, Discours à la nation allemande (Addresses to the German
Nation), Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1992), 54.
9. Galli della Loggia, L’identità italiana, 155.
11. The phrase comes from Anne-Marie Thiesse, La création des identités nationales.
Europe XVIIIème-XXème siècle, Paris: Seuil, 1999, 161.
12. “Catonism,” according to the American sociologist Barrington Moore, is the “rhe-
torical glorification of the peasant as the backbone of society.” Barrington Moore, Jr.,
Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Lord and Peasant in the Making of the
Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 491–96.
13. Tommaso Garzoni, Piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo, e nobili et ignobili
(Venice: Gio Battista Somascho, 1586); Giuseppe Baretti, An Account of the Manners
and Customs in Italy: With Observations on the Mistakes of Some Travelers, With Regard
to That Country (London: T. Davies, 1768).
14. Prezzolini, The Legacy of Italy, 220.
15. Quoted by Claudio Varese, “Teatro, prosa, poesia,” in Storia della Letteratura Italiana,
vol. V, ed. Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Sapegno (Milan: Garzanti, 1967), 736.
16. Vareses, “Teatro, prosa, poesia,” 58.
17. Paolo Greppi, La Rivoluzione francese nel carteggio di un osservatore italiano, vol. 1
(Milan: Hoepli, 1900–1904), 360. Greppi was the “finance minister” of the Cisalpine
Republic, of which Melzi d’Eril was vice president.
18. “Our revolution being a passive one, the only way it could prevail was by conquering
the opinion of the people,” wrote Cuoco in his famous Saggio storico sulla rivoluzione
napoletana del 1799. In order to return King Ferdinand IV to the throne, Cardinal Fab-
rizio Ruffo di Bagnara organized the Army of the Holy Faith (whose adherents were
thus referred to as Sanfedisti), led by famous and pitiless outlaws, but enjoying vast
support among the peasant masses of the kingdom.
NOTES 223
Chapter 5
1. Paolo Greppi, La Rivoluzione francese nel carteggio di un osservatore italiano (Milan:

Hoepli, 1900–1904), 364. Greppi (1748–1800), a nobleman and a tradesman, was also
a diplomat who was close to Napoleon, both in Paris and in Milan.
2. Greppi, La Rivoluzione francese, 380.
3. G. Bollati, L’Italiano. Il carattere nazionale come storia e come invenzione (Turin: Ein-
audi, 1983), 58.
4. Quoted by Ettore Passerin d’Entreves, “Ideologie del Risorgimento,” in Storia della Let-
teratura Italiana, vol. VII, ed. Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Sapegno (Milan: Garzanti,
1969), 240.
5. These quotations, taken from articles published in the Giornale italiano, are men-
tioned by Bollati, L’Italiano, 66–68.
6. Bollati, L’Italiano, 77. It is Bollati who emphasizes this.
7. A. Gramsci, Letteratura e vita nazionale (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1975), 98, 99.
8. Bollati, L’Italiano, 81.
9. Augustine of Hippo, De civitate Dei contra paganos (413–426), XIX, 13.
10. Having completed his first version of the Promessi Sposi (which in fact was his third,
after Fermo e Lucia and Gli sposi promessi) in 1827, Manzoni’s linguistic preoccupation
led him to travel to Florence “to rinse his laundry in the Arno.” From this linguistic
revision, founded on the spoken language cultivated in the Tuscan capital, the defini-
tive version of Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed) was born in 1840.
11. A. Manzoni, “Sulla morale cattolica, part II,” in Tutte le opere, vol. ii (Milan: Mondadori,
1963), 534.
12. E. Galli della Loggia, L’identità italiana (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998), 131.
13. A. Gramsci, Il Risorgimento (Turin: Einaudi, 1949), 116.
14. “Their instinctive tendency was to oppose any patriotic army which requisitioned
their scanty food supplies and hence were usually a counterrevolutionary force in pol-
itics. In 1848 the Lombard peasants opened the irrigation dikes against the invading
Piedmontese. In 1849, as in 1799, they had fought for the old dynasties in both North
and South, because their dislike of royal tyranny was less than their hatred of the local
lawyer, the usurer and the factor who managed the landowner’s estate.” Denis Mack
Smith, Storia d’Italia dal 1861 al 1997 (Roma: Laterza, 1997), 49, 50).
15. Giuseppe Pecchio, Il Conciliatore, July 8, 1819. The same year, Giuseppe Pecchio became
a deputy of the provincial assembly of Milan. In 1829, he wrote Storia dell’economia
pubblica in Italia, A. Levasseur, Paris,1830.
16. Published in the review Annali universali di statistica, vol. XIX (1829).
17. Carlo Ilarione Petitti di Roreto, Del lavoro de’ fanciulli nelle manifatture,(May 20, 1841)
Turin, Memorie della Regia Accademia delle scienze di Torino, 1841.
18. Cenni statistici sulla condizione economica e morale della città di Parigi (1839), quoted
by G. Bollati, L’Italiano, 105.
19. Quoted by G. Bollati, L’Italiano, p. 105.
20. V. Gioberti, Del primato morale e civile degli Italiani, part I (Naples: Stamperia del
Vaglio, 1861), 166.
21. Gioberti, Del Primato morale, 52. In the second part (Théologie des nations europée-
nnes), Gioberti states: “The salvation of England comes from Catholicism.”
22. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987),
385.
23. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 337.
224 NOTES
24. Quoted by Elena Aga Rossi, Dal partito popolare alla democrazia cristiana (Bologna:
Cappelli, 1969), 22.
25. Giuseppe Mazzini, Dei doveri dell’uomo (Genoa: Giovanni Ricci Editore, 1922), 18.
26. Tullio De Mauro, Storia linguistica dell’Italia unita (Bari: Laterza, 1963), 43, 44.
Chapter 6
1. According to figures suggested by Raffaele Romanelli, the movement led to 257 deaths,
1,099 injuries, and 3,788 arrests. Rosario Romeo, L’Italia liberale (Bologna: Il Mulino,
1990), 156.
2. Giacomo Devoto, Il linguaggio d’Italia (Milan: Rizzoli, 1974), 306, 308.
3. T. de Mauro, Storia linguistica dell’Italia unita (Rome: Laterza, 1984), 16.
4. T. de Mauro, Storia linguistica dell’Italia unita, 92, 93. Examples of the structural inad-
equacy cover more than five pages of de Mauro’s text.
6. T. de Mauro, Storia linguistica dell’Italia unita, 46.
7. A thesis on dialectology written in 1968 was entirely devoted to the “differences, espe-
cially of a lexical character, between one zone of the city and another” of the town of
Asti. Maria Grazia Socco, “Per una topografia linguistica di Asti” (thesis, University of
Turin, 1967–68), 1, 2. Keep in mind that, when the research published in this thesis was
carried out, Asti had only some 75,000 inhabitants (76,151 in the 1971 census).
8. Antonio Gramsci, Gli intellettuali e la formazione della cultura (Turin: Einaudi, 1953),
23.
9. Among others, Luigi Settembrini, Edoardo Scarfoglio, Carlo Dossi, as well as the Tus-
cans Giosuè Carducci and Pietro Fanfani.
10. The data come from the ministerial survey of 1864–65; quoted by de Mauro, Storia
linguistica dell’Italia unita, 40.
11. This sociolinguistic distinction between the countryside and the cities was intro-
duced by Marcel Cohen in Pour une sociologie du language (Paris: Albin Michel, 1956),
139–40.
12. Matteo Giulio Bartoli, “I dialetti dell’Italia settentrionale,” in Piemonte, 5th ed. (Milan:
Touring Club Italiano, 1930), 83.
13. Gramsci, Gli intellettuali, 39.
14. Amadeo Bordiga, I fattori di razza e nazione nella teoria marxista (Milan: Iskra Edizioni,
1976), 80.
17. Galli della Loggia explains that “in France, in Spain and in Austria—which is to say in
all the other large Catholic countries—a religiously inspired political and ideological
perspective . . . was consciously assumed by the national monarchy” (L’identità, 127).
19. G. Prezzolini, The Legacy of Italy (New York: Vanni, 1948), 237.
20. Gramsci, Gli intellettuali, 59, 60.
21. Eugene of Savoy-Carignan-Soisson (1663–1736) led the Austrian army in its victori-
ous campaigns against the Turks of Zenta in 1697 and again in Petrovaradin, in Temes-
var, and, especially, in Belgrade (1716–1717), and against the French during the War
of Spanish Succession. He was also governor of Milan and a diplomat (the peace of
Rastadt in 1709 and of Passarowitz in 1718).
NOTES 225
23. Pasquale Villari, Di chi è la colpa? O sia La Pace e la guerra (Milan: Tipografia di Zanetti
Francesco, 1866), 31. Villari (1826–1917) was a famed historian. The “quadrilateral”
was a territory controlled by four Austrian fortresses that had allowed Vienna’s army—
during the wars of 1848, 1859, and 1866—to defend the western accesses to Venice
while also guarding communications avenues with the center of the empire via Tren-
tino and the Tirol.
24. A. Gramsci, Letteratura e vita nazionale (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1975), 86.
25. Manlio Graziano, “Le philosophe militant,” in L’Internationaliste no. 17–18, July–August
2001.
26. Melchiorre Cesarotti (1730–1808) was a teacher of rhetoric and ancient literature. The
text from which the quotation is taken is the Saggio sulla filosofia delle lingue applicata
alla lingua italiana (Padoua: Penada, 1785).
27. French became an official language of the Italian departments of the empire in 1809
(including, roughly speaking, the modern regions of Piedmont, Liguria, Tuscany, and
Latium), along with Italian.
28. Vittorio Alfieri, La vita Turin: Unione Tipografico Editrice Torinese, 1948, 168, 169.
29. Francesco de Sanctis, Storia della letteratura italiana (Milan: Bietti, 1963), 810, 811. De
Sanctis (1817–1883), the most important Italian literary critic of the nineteenth cen-
tury, took part in the revolution of 1848 in Naples. Later (1878–1882), he was minister
of education.
30. Quoted by T. de Mauro, Storia linguistica, 281.
31. Carlo Muscetta, “Niccolò Tommaseo,” in Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. VII, ed.
Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Sapegno (Milan: Garzanti, 1969), 750.
32. Edoardo Scarfoglio, Il libro di don Chisciotte (Naples: L’Editrice Italiana, 1919), 103,
104.
33. S. Romano, Histoire de l’Italie du Risorgimento à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 1977), 33.
34. Gramsci, Letteratura e vita nazionale, 252.
Chapter 7
1. Quoted by Gianfranco Lotti, L’avventurosa storia della lingua italiana (Milan: Bom-
piani, 2000), 121. Balbo’s text is Del naturale dei Piemontesi (Florence, 1855).
2. Quoted by Aurelio Lepre in Italia, addio? Unità e disunità dal 1860 a oggi (Milan: Mon-
dadori, 1994), 41.
4. See Gaston Tuaillon, “Le frontiere linguistiche (Il caso Piemonte),” in La frontiera da
Stato a nazione. Il caso Piemonte, ed. Carlo Ossola, Claude Raffestin, and Mario Ric-
ciardi (Rome: Bulzoni, 1987), 221.
5. The royal family’s entrance into the new capital of Turin took place on February 7,
1563. In October 1581, Montaigne wrote of Turin: “French is widely spoken here, and
all the people of the country seem quite affectionate toward France. The common
language has only Italian pronunciation but it is essentially composed of our own
expressions.” M. de Montaigne, Journal du voyage de Michel de Montaigne en Italie par
la Suisse & l’Allemagne en 1580 & 1581 (Paris: Chez Le Jay Librairie, 1774), 154.
6. Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia, vol. I, XV, 7
7. Quoted by T. de Mauro, Storia linguistica dell’Italia unita (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1984),
287. After 1848 Costanza Arconati (1800–1871), born in Vienna, followed her hus-
band, the Milanese marquis Giuseppe, to Belgium and to Turin, where she held a polit-
ical and literary salon open to exiles of the other Italian states.
226 NOTES
8. See M. Meriggi, Breve storia dell’Italia settentrionale dall’Ottocento ad oggi (Rome:

Donzelli, 1996), 9.
9. G. Bollati, “Osservazioni sul carattere dei piemontesi,” in an appendix to L’Italiano. Il
carattere nazionale come storia e come invenzione (Turin: Einaudi, 1983), 185.
10. The phrase comes from Cesare Balbo, Del naturale dei Piemontesi (Florence, 1855).
11. Cesare Balbo, “Del naturale dei Piemontesi,” quoted by Meriggi, Breve storia dell’Italia
settentrionale, 8, 9. The quality that makes Piedmontese stand out from other Italians
is, according to Balbo, that they are less subject to “the excitation of passions,” less
subject to inconstancy and to “infidelity.” The “sodezza” [solidity] of which he speaks
has to be understood more in a psychological sense (i.e., a taste for the concrete) than
in a physical sense. “It is solidity [sodezza],” he concludes, “that makes men happy.”
12. Meriggi, Breve storia dell’Italia settentrionale, 9, 10.
13. Romeo cites, in particular, the lower Novarese region, the region of Vigevano (Lomel-
lina), and a large part of the provinces south of the Po, where social relationships were
certainly much closer to those of Lombardy than to those that existed in Piedmont
itself. Meriggi, Breve storia dell’Italia settentrionale, 8.
14. Guido Quazza, Le riforme in Piemonte nella prima metà del Settecento, vol. I (Modena:
STEM, 1957), 53.
15. “Born around 1690, dead in 1737, he was the leading philosopher of the Enlightenment on
the Peninsula, before Giannone, Verri and Beccaria,” wrote Pietro Gobetti, who devoted to
him the first chapter of his Risorgimento senza eroi (Turin: Edizioni del Baretti, 1926, p. 37).
16. G. Procacci, Histoire des Italiens (Paris: Fayard, 1970), 231.
17. Procacci, Histoire des Italiens, 234.
Chapter 8
1. G. Leopardi, “Discorso sopra lo stato presente del costume degli Italiani” (1824), in Tutte
le opere, vol. 1 (Firenze: Sansoni, 1969), 971.
2. S. Cassese, Lo Stato introvabile. Modernità e arretratezza delle istituzioni italiane (Rome:
Donzelli, 1998), 53.
3. So said the deputy Niccola Marselli, quoted by Alberto Caracciolo, Stato e società civile.
Problemi dell’unificazione italiana (Turin: Einaudi, 1960), 69.
4. Open letter from Sicily to the former Prime Minister Massimo d’Azeglio, in August
1861. D’Azeglio had resolutely opposed the Roman solution starting in March 1861.
5. The phrase comes from the Milanese federalist Giuseppe Ferrari, quoted by Denis
Mack Smith, Storia d’Italia dal 1861 al 1997 (Rome: Laterza, 1997), 73.
6. A. Caracciolo, Stato e società civile, 28.
7. A. Caracciolo dated from the 1910s the beginning of this “anti-Roman polemic.” Roma
capitale. Dal Risorgimento alla crisi dello Stato liberale (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1999), 63.
Emilio Gianni notes that, in the first fifteen years of the twentieth century, the Latium
influence in governments doubled when compared to forty years earlier, reaching 6.1
percent of all ministers. E. Gianni, “Le influenze regionali nei poteri governativi,” in
Lotta comunista 1985, nn. 182, 183, 185.
8. Quoted by A. Caracciolo, Stato e società civile, 67.
9. G. Salvemini, L’Italia politica nel secolo XIX (1925), today in Scritti sul Risorgimento
(Milan: Feltrinelli, 1961), 433.
10. P. Gobetti, “Motivi di storia italiana. Socialismo di Stato,” La rivoluzione liberale no. 15,
May 22, 1923.
11. See A. Gramsci, Il Risorgimento (Turin: Einuadi, 1949), 69, 70.
NOTES 227
12. E. Gianni, “Le influenze regionali nei poteri governativi,” art. cit. One should keep in
mind that some of the men elected in regions other than Piedmont, such as the
Tuscan Ricasoli and the Emilians Minghetti and Farini, were considered “Piedmon-
tized,” having spent the majority of their political careers in Piedmont as exiles.
A particular case is that of Agostino Depretis, who had been elected to the Pied-
montese parliament starting in 1848 as a deputy of Stradella, a city in Piedmont
until 1859, when it was incorporated into the province of Pavia and, consequently,
“Lombardized.” It is thus not entirely accurate to consider Depretis, who headed
most of the thirteen ministerial teams during the Sinistra period (1876–91), as rep-
resenting Lombardy.
13. The data come from a study by Francesco Saverio Nitti, Il bilancio dello Stato dal 1862
al 1896–97 (Naples, 1900), cited by A. Caracciolo, Stato e società civile, 124.
14. E. Ragionieri, Politica e amministrazione nella storia dell’Italia unita (Rome: Editori
Riuniti, 1979), 136, 137. One must consider that the prefects who had been career
bureaucrats were but a minority in a corps dominated by men who had come directly
from political careers, leaving one to suppose—for want of specific data—that the
incidence of Piedmontese among prefects was much greater than what is cited above.
15. During World War I, the Lombards, for the first time, had a greater presence in Italian
government (15.2 percent of ministerial posts) than the Piedmontese (13.1 percent);
under fascism, the subalpine presence dropped further, to 6.1 percent.
Chapter 9
1. Note sent to Italian embassies abroad on August 24, 1861, quoted by S. Romano, His-
toire de l’Italie du Risorgimento à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 1977), 28.
2. G. Prezzolini, L’Italia finisce, ecco quel che resta (Milan: Rusconi, 1994), 210–22.
3. See G. Candeloro, Storia dell’Italia moderna, vol. V, La costruzione dello Stato unitario,
1860–1871 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1968), 47; Christopher Seton-Watson, L’Italia dal liber-
alismo al fascismo (Bari: Laterza, 1973), 31; V. Zamagni, Dalla periferia al centro (Bolo-
gna: Il Mulino, 1990), 37–39, 92; Denis Mack Smith, Storia d’Italia dal 1861 al 1997
(Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1997), 50.
4. Smith, Storia d’Italia, 52.
5. According to Romeo, the southern emigrants, who composed nearly the entirety of the
provisional government of the south (in the autumn of 1860) were “fierce adversar-
ies” of autonomy (R. Romeo, Dal Piemonte sabaudo all’Italia liberale [Rome: Laterza,
1974], 274), and they had “become almost strangers to the country” (G. Candeloro, La
costruzione dello Stato unitario [Milan: Feltrinelli, 1968], 127).
6. Out of hatred for France, Mazzini had described the Sanfedisti revolt of 1799 as “an
atrocious war, but a national one.” Franco Della Peruta, Politica e società nell’Italia
dell’Ottocento. Problemi, vicende e personaggi (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1999), 13.
7. Salvatore Lupo, “Mezzogiorno,” in Dizionario storico dell’Italia unita, ed. B. Bon-
giovanni and N. Tranfaglia (Rome: Laterza, 1997), 584.
8. Romano, Histoire de l’Italie, 27.
9. The quotations come from Galli della Loggia, L’identità italiana (Bologna: Il Mulino,
1998), 66, A. Lepre, Italia, addio? Unità e disunità dal 1860 a oggi (Milan: Mondadori,
1994), 4, and A. Caracciolo, Stato e società civile. Problemi dell’unificazione italiana
(Turin: Einaudi, 1960), 68); on the Garibaldians, A. Lepre, Storia del Mezzogiorno nel
Risorgimento (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1974), 283, and E. Ragionieri, Politica e ammin-
istrazione nella storia dell’Italia unita (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1979), 91.
228 NOTES
10. Quoted by Ragionieri, Politica e amministrazione, 98.

11. After 1848, Cavour said that the “spectre of communism . . . is keeping many worried
minds in suspense” (quoted by Romeo, Dal Piemonte sabaudo, 120).
12. Federigo Paolo Sclopis, private letter dated February 9, 1848 (quoted by Romeo, Dal
Piemonte sabaudo, 115). The statute granted by Charles Albert was not, as we have
seen, the Piedmont government’s only reaction to the threat of political and social
upheaval: the war against Austria, and particularly its 1849 phase, was equally con-
ducted with the objective of preventing a revolution in Turin and ending it in Milan.
13. Candeloro provides some quantitative indications of the size of this phenomenon,
calculating that in 1849 the number of political émigrés in Turin was “perhaps”
50,000, and between 1850 and 1858 their number ranged from 20,000 to 30,000. Sto-
ria dell’Italia moderna, vol. IV, Dalla rivoluzione nazionale all’Unità 1849–1860 (Milan:
Feltrinelli, 1964), 21.
14. As of the end of 1857, only 2,300 refugees were in public jobs or functions, and only
one, the Venetian Pietro Paleocapa, was among Cavour’s ministers. Candeloro, Storia
dell’Italia moderna, 211–13.
15. When we speak of the “spectre of 1799,” we are referring not only to the Sanfedisti revolt
but also more generally to the open or tacit hostility of the peasant masses toward the
French army and the “patriots.” The insurrection of Binasco, near Pavia, was in fact the
most important of a much wider insurrectional movement that affected the cities of
Milan, Lodi, Varese, Como, and Pavia beginning on May 23, 1796 (Bonaparte entered
Milan on May 15).
16. Quoted by Romeo, Dal Piemonte sabaudo, 275.
17. Quoted by Smith, Storia d’Italia, 53.
18. R. Romeo, Risorgimento e capitalismo (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1998), 29–33. “It is sig-
nificant,” the author continues, “that the celebrated domain of Cavour in Leri was
originally owned by the Abbey of Lucedio, confiscated and conceded by Napoleon to
Prince Borghese, and then sold to the Marquis Michele di Cavour.”
19. Zamagni, Dalla periferia al centro, 75, 76.
20. Karl Marx, Capital, part 8, chapter XXVII, “Expropriation of the Agricultural Population
from the Land.”
21. Franco Bonelli, “Il capitalismo italiano. Linee generali di interpretazione,” in, Storia
d’Italia. Annali I. Dal feudalesimo al capitalismo (Turin: Einaudi, 1978), 1196.
22. The aristocracy, Candeloro writes, “had largely become bourgeois-ified, and did not
disdain banking and commercial activities.” Storia dell’Italia moderna, vol. IV, Dalla
rivoluzione nazionale all’Unità 1849–1860 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1964), 14.
23. Indro Montanelli, L’Italia del Risorgimento (Milan: Rizzoli, 1972), 656, 657.
24. Quoted by Romeo, Dal Piemonte sabaudo, 122.
25. The electoral corps grew more in 1882 than even in 1912, when the principle of “uni-
versal suffrage” was adopted. It grew by a factor of 1 to 2.9 in 1912, but from 1 to 3.3 in
1882. See Giovanni Sabbatucci, Il trasformismo come sistema (Bari: Laterza, 2003), 53.
26. The data reflect the total of the Italian regions (Venice and Rome included), not that
of Italy in 1861.
27. The data were synthesized based on numerous sources suggested by Zamagni, Dalla
periferia al centro, 42, 43.
28. The following data come from a graph in Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great
Powers (New York: Random House, 1987), 220, describing the gross national product
(GNP) of Russia, France, England, Germany, the Austrian Empire, and Italy, calculated
in billions of U.S. dollars in 1960.
NOTES 229
Chapter 10
1. Among the most important texts are the 1989 essay by Carlo Tullio-Altan, “Populismo
e trasformismo” and the article by Giovanni Sabbatucci, “La soluzione trasformista.
Appunti sulla vicenda del sistema politico italiano” in Il Mulino (March–April 1990),
which was the point of departure for the book Il trasformismo come sistema (Rome:
Laterza, 2003); Giampiero Carocci, Il trasformismo dall’unità ad oggi (Milan: Unicopli,
1992); Riccardo Nencini, Il trionfo del trasformismo (Firenze: Loggia de’ Lanzi, 1996);
Sandro Rogari, Le origini del trasformismo (Rome-: Laterza, 1998); and perhaps the
most complete, Luigi Musella, Il trasformismo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003). In addition
are essays such as that by Piero Melograni, “Trasformismo vizio italiano,” published in
Corriere della Sera (March 17, 1993), and that of Alfio Mastropaolo, “Innovation ou
transformisme? D’une classe politique à l’autre . . .” in Politique à l’italienne (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1997).
2. Raymond Grew, “Il trasformismo: ultimo stadio del Risorgimento,” in Il Risorgimento
e l’Europa, ed. Vittorio Frosini (Catania: Bonanno, 1969).
3. A. Gramsci, Il Risorgimento (Turin: Einaudi, 1949), 70. Musella’s book begins with the
first of these two quotations.
4. See E. Galli della Loggia, L’identità italiana (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998), 99; L. Musella, Il
transformismo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003), 9, 173; G. Carocci, Storia d’Italia dall’Unità
ad oggi (Milan: Feltrinielli, 1975), 43.
5. Raffaele Romanelli, Il transformismo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990), 212.
6. R. Grew, quoted in Romanelli, Il transformismo, 59.
7. For Gramsci, the transformist operation certainly weakened the influence of the aris-
tocracy and landowners in the life of the state, but “it is impossible to speak of the
substitution of one class for another.” Romanelli, Il Risorgimento, 57.
8. Speech by Chateaubriand in the French House of Lords, on the death of the Count of
Sèze (Moniteur, June 20, 1828), quoted by Rosario Romeo, Cavour e il suo tempo (Bari:
Laterza, 1969), 283.
9. Quoted by Giampiero Carocci, Agostino Depretis e la politica interna italiana: 1876–
1887 (Turin: Einaudi, 1956), 612. By “disorganization,” Spaventa means what today we
probably would call “disarticulation.”
10. S. Romano, Histoire de l’Italie du Risorgimento à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 1977), 72–74.
13. See Arturo Carlo Jemolo, Chiesa e Stato in Italia. Dall’unificazione ai giorni nostri
(Turin: Einaudi, 1974), 3, 44.
14. Stefano Jacini explores these themes in an 1879 text, I conservatori e l’evoluzione natu-
rale dei partiti politici in Italia. See Giorgio Candeloro, Il movimento cattolico in Italia
(Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1982), 178, and Gabriele de Rosa, I conservatori nazionali. Bio-
grafia di Carlo Cantucci (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1962), 32–43.
15. Edoardo Soderini, Il pontificato di Leone XIII, vol. II (Milan: Mondadori, 1932), 20.
16. See G. Candeloro, Il movimento cattolico in Italia (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1982), 178.
17. Benedetto Croce, History of contemporary Italy (1871–1915) (Paris: Payot, 1929), 26.
18. La Repubblica, July 2, 1988.
19. Gianfranco Pasquino, “Interprétations du système politique italien,” in L’Italie
aujourd’hui. Situation et perspectives après le séisme des années 90, ed. Manlio Graziano
(Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004), 52.
20. C. Seton-Watson, L’Italia dal liberalismo al fascismo 1870–1925 (Bari: Laterza, 1973),
109 (original edition: Methuen, 1967)
230 NOTES
21. The stability of power offered by Depretis, Romanelli states, lies in the “capacity to turn
the classic institution of the vote of confidence through an attentive management of
extra-parliamentary crises, of sudden resignations, followed by an immediate renewal.”
R. Romanelli, L’Italia liberale ((Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990), 210. Let us remember that all
51 governments from 1945 to 1992 revolved around the Christian Democratic Party, and
31 of them were led by only six prime ministers (De Gasperi, Fanfani, Moro, Andreotti,
Rumor, and Craxi). Sabino Cassese remarked that the length of service of many Italian
ministers was no less than that of their counterparts in France or in Great Britain in the
same period. “Histoires et caractéristiques de l’État italien,” in Portrait de l’Italie actuelle,
ed. Sabino Cassese (Paris: La Documentation Française, 201), 27.
22. V. Zamagni, Dalla periferia al centro. La seconda rinascita economica dell’Italia (1861–
1990) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990), 210, 211. Concerning the incidence of the public
debt on GDP, it was 45 percent in 1861, 95 percent in 1876, 116 percent in 1889, and
119 percent in 1896, its high point.
23. S. Cassese, “Introduction,” in Portrait de l’Italie actuelle (Paris: La documentation fran-
çaise, 2001), 13.
24. The statistics come from annual general records of the State Accounts Department.
Regarding the decrease, we have to consider that entire sections of the public adminis-
tration (post and telecommunications from 1993, the agency of national roads - ANAS
- from 1995, the railways, etc.) are removed from the statistical sheets once the process
of their privatization began.
25. Arrigo Cervetto, “La tendenza generale del capitalismo italiano,” in L’ineguale sviluppo
politico: 1968–1979 (Milan: Editore Lotta Comunista, 1991), 86.
26. The tax rate in Italy was 25.8 percent of GDP in 1960 and 31.0 percent in 1980 (an
increase of 20.1 percent in 20 years); it rose to 39.5 percent of GDP in 1990 (an increase
of 24.05 percent in 10 years).
27. S. Romano, L’Italia scappata di mano (Milan: TEA Storica, 1995), 11.
28. In 1992 the Christian Democrats and Italian Socialist Party won 43.3 percent of the
vote, in 1994 they received 13.3 percent, and in 1996 they received 6.8 percent.
29. Zamagni, Dalla periferia al centro, 139, 149.
Chapter 11
1. For Valerio Castronovo (Storia economica d’Italia [Turin: Einaudi, 1995], 49, 51) growth
was 1.44 percent from 1862 to 1878; for ISTAT, it was 2.0 percent (1861–1881); and for
Stefano Fenoaltea, it was 2.2 percent for the same period (quoted by V. Zamagni, Dalla
periferia al centro [Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990], 108).
2. Denis Mack Smith, Storia d’Italia (Rome: Laterza, 1995), 98.
3. After the signing of the convention on navigation and the treaty on commerce between
Italy and France in 1863, imports from France rose from 233 million lire in 1862 to
346 million in 1865 (an increase of 48.5 percent) and exports to France went from 189
million lire to 188 million. G. Candeloro, Storia dell’Italia moderna, vol. V, La costru-
zione dello Stato unitario 1860–1871 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1968), 242. A large part of the
public debt issuances (which rose from 21 percent of total public spending in 1861
to 31 percent in 1866 through 1870) were subscribed abroad, and notably in France.
Christopher Seton-Watson, L’Italia dal liberalismo al fascismo, 1870–1925 (Bari: Lat-
erza, 1980), 24. Moreover, for the period 1861 through 1870, 325 million of the 789
million lire of gross investment (or 41.2 percent) came from abroad. See. R. Romeo,
Risorgimento e capitalismo (Bari: Laterza, 1959), 106.
NOTES 231
4. The phrase comes from Candeloro, Storia dell’Italia moderna, 289.

5. Quoted by Candeloro, Storia dell’Italia moderna, 292.
6. For Cavour’s speech of late May 1861, see Candeloro, Storia dell’Italia moderna, 238–
40, and Romeo, Risorgimento e capitalismo, 36.
7. Quoted by Candeloro, Storia dell’Italia moderna, 239, 240.
8. For this debate, see Roberto Casella, “1863: I primi passi dello scontro tra protezionisti
e liberoscambisti in Italia,” in Lotta comunista (September 1984); Giuseppe Are, Alle
origini dell’Italia industriale (Naples: Guida, 1974), 152–61; Zamagni, Dalla periferia al
centro, 148, 149; Candeloro, Storia dell’Italia moderna, 239–41.
9. In the elections of 1861, only 239,583 of 418,696 registered voters cast ballots, yielding
only about one deputy for 550 voters.
10. Karl Marx, “Les luttes de classes en France,” (1850) in, Oeuvres, vol. IV, Politique I Paris:
Gallimard, 1994), 239.
11. Benedetto Croce discusses Quintino Sella’s sense of “mission” in Histoire de l’Italie
(Paris: Payot, 1929), 56.
12. See Zamagni, Dalla periferia al centro, 179, 180.
13. The victor of the siege of the fortress of Gaeta, the last bastion of the Kingdom of Two
Sicilies, had been a lieutenant of the king in Naples since July 1861 and led the military
fight to suppress the brigantaggio.
14. See Denis Mack Smith, Vittorio Emanuele II (Milan: Mondadori, 1994), 242.
15. See Denis Mack Smith, Storia d’Italia, 118.
Chapter 12
1. The estimate comes from Vera Zamagni, Dalla periferia al centro (Bologna: Il Mulino,
1990), 464.
2. Enrico Cuccia (1907–2000) went to work for the Banca d’Italia in 1932, for the IRI in
1934, and for the Banca Commerciale in 1938; he was cofounder (in 1946) and direc-
tor (from 1982 until his death, honorary chairman) of Mediobanca SpA, the largest
Italian merchant bank following the suppression of mixed banks in 1936.
3. Gianni Toniolo, Storia economica dell’Italia liberale, 1850–1918 (Bologna: Il Mulino,
1988), 104. Remember that in the modern sense, the “lender of last resort” is the cen-
tral bank.
4. When Bonaldo Stringher became its director-general in 1900 (a position he held until
1928, when he was named governor, a role he kept until his death in 1930), the Banca
d’Italia had a privileged clientele, in competition with other banks. This proves that its
transformation into an organ of “monetary power” was the result of a process and not
of a preestablished plan.
5. The banks in question were the Banca Nazionale, Banco di Napoli, Banca Nazionale
Toscana, Banco di Sicilia, and Banca Toscana di Credito. The Banca Nazionale played a
central role among all these issuing banks, with (as of December 31, 1873) 67.7 percent
of total capital.
7. Alexander Gerschenkron, Il problema storico dell’arretratezza economica (Turin: Ein-
audi, 1965), 84; Guido Baglioni, L’ideologia della borghesia industriale nell’Italia liberale
(Turin: Einaudi, 1974), 120; Zamagni, Dalla periferia al centro, 140–45.
8. Paolo Farneti, Sistema politico e società civile (Turin: Giappichelli, 1971), 171. For the
quote from De Ruggiero (1888–1948), see Renzo De Felice, Gli intellettuali di fronte
al fascismo (Rome: Bonacci, 1985), 50. We should point out the different conclusion
232 NOTES
reached by Silvio Lanaro, who, in L’Italia nuova. Identità e sviluppo, 1861–1988 (Turin:
Einaudi, 1988), states that, from the beginning of unitary history, “with the excep-
tion of a few modest Catholic groups, Italian nationalism was markedly industrialist”
(p. 161).
9. B. Croce, Histoire de l’Italie contemporaine (Paris: Payot, 1929), 62, 63.
10. C. Cavour, “Des chemins de fer en Italie par le comte Petitti, Conseiller d’État du Roy-
aume de Sardaigne,” quoted by G. Candeloro, Storia dell’Italia moderna, vol. V, La
costruzione dello Stato unitario, 1860–1871 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1968), 37, 38.
11. Among the major works projects linked to this hypothesis we should mention the
extension of rail service to Brindisi (completed in January 1865) and the construction
of the Fréjus tunnel, inaugurated in 1871.
12. In 1862 only 1.59 percent of global tonnage was steam powered, compared to 11.1 per-
cent of English tonnage and 9.71 percent of French; moreover, the average vessel was a
mere 69 tons, compared to 170 tons for both British and French ships (see Candeloro,
Storia dell’Italia moderna, 40, 41). Zamagni notes that “even in 1913, one-third of the
Italian merchant marine was wind-powered” (Dalla periferia al centro, 131).
13. In Genoa alone, the number of shipyards rose from eight in 1868 to nineteen in 1873,
and having built, from 1870 to 1875, a yearly average of 70,000 tons of capacity, all Ital-
ian shipyards combined produced only 14,000 tons in 1880 and 11,000 the year after.
14. R. Romanelli, L’Italia liberale (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1979), 236.
15. The former thesis is supported by Romanelli (L’Italia liberale, 164), the latter by
C. Seton-Watson (L’Italia dal liberalismo al fascismo (Bari: Laterza, 1980), 74).
16. Luciano Cafagna, Dualismo e sviluppo nella storia d’Italia (Venice: Marsilio, 1989), 269.
The same observation is made by G. Candeloro in Storia dell’Italia moderna, vol. VI, Lo
sviluppo del capitalismo e del movimento operaio, 1871–1896 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1970), 21.
17. The number of new deputies comes from Romanelli (L’Italia liberale, 144), although
Candeloro puts the number at 184 (Storia dell’Italia moderna, 387).
18. In describing the regional vote breakdown, we consider the south to be the provinces
of the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies plus Sardinia, the center to be the regions of
the former Papal States plus the former Grand Duchy of Tuscany, and the north to be
the other provinces (Piedmont, Liguria, Lombardy, and Venice).
19. D. Mack Smith, Storia d’Italia (Rome: Laterza, 1995), 132.
Chapter 13
1. Leopoldo Franchetti (1847–1917) would become a deputy in 1888. According to Luci-

ano Cafagna, Nord e Sud, non fare a pezzi l’unità d’Italia (Venice: Marsilio, 1994), 23,
Franchetti was the first to use the term “clientelism.”
2. Quoted by R. Romanelli (L’Italia liberale (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1979), 189). The texts in
question are “Condizioni economiche e amministrative delle Province Napolitane” and
“Inchiesta sulla Sicilia,” written with Sidney Sonnino.
3. Cafagna, Nord e Sud, 58.
4. Romanelli, L’Italia liberale, 22. G. Carocci, Storia d’Italia dall’Unità a oggi (Milan:
Feltrinelli, 1975), 37; Salvatore Lupo, “Mezzogiorno,” in Dizionario storico dell’Italia
unita, ed. B. Bongiovanni and N. Tranfaglia (Rome: Laterza, 1997), 584; Alberto Car-
acciolo, La storia economica (Turin: Einaudi, 1973), 511, 512. Vera Zamagni quantifies
this “economic indifference,” saying that at the moment of unification, less than 20
percent of the Italian states’ trade was among those states. Zamagni, Dalla periferia
al centro. La seconda rinascita economica dell’Italia (1861–1990) (Bologna: Il Mulino,
NOTES 233
1990), 101. Among the indicators of this “indifference,” we should also include the
near-total absence of any migratory flow between the two parts of the country (see
Cafagna, Nord e Sud, 46).
5. See Pasquale Villani, Mezzogiorno tra riforme e rivoluzione (Bari: Laterza, 1973),
195–197.
6. Zamagni, Dalla periferia al centro, 37–39.
7. David Abulafia, Le due Italie. Relazioni economiche tra il Regno normanno di Sicilia e I
comuni settentrionali (Naples: Guida, 1977).
10. P. Bevilacqua, Breve storia dell’Italia meridionale (Rome: Donzelli, 2005).
11. See Valerio Castronovo, “Il Piemonte,” in Storia d’Italia. Le regioni dall’Unità a oggi
(Turin: Einaudi, 1977), 4, 5, 146, 149.
12. From 1871 to 1881, the migration balance (emigration minus immigration) was nega-
tive, by 34,000 people a year for the north and 2,000 for the south; from 1881 to 1901,
62,000 people left the north and 47,000 left the south every year; and from 1951 to 1967,
in total, some 2.6 million people left the northern countryside and 1.5 million left the
south. Paolo Sylos Labini, Problemi dello sviluppo economico (Bari: Laterza, 1974), 116.
13. S. Lupo, “Mezzogiorno,” in Dizionario storico dell’Italia unita, 591.
14. Gianfranco Viesti, Abolire il Mezzogiorno (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2003), 7.
15. Paolo Macry, La società contemporanea. Una introduzione storica (Bologna: Il Mulino,
1992).
16. A. Schiavone, Italiani senza Italia. Storia e identità (Turin: Einaudi, 1998), 103.
17. This was the neighborhood built in the southwestern area of the city, at the feet of the
Sant’Elmo hill during the reign of Charles V, under Vice-King Pierre of Toledo. It was
the working-class neighborhood.
18. One of the paradoxes of national Italian mythology is that it promotes the anti-imperial
leagues of the communes to the rank of founders of a supposed national conscience
against the invader from the north, whereas these leagues played a fundamental role
in the struggle to prevent Ghibelline unification against the papacy. The defeat of the
emperors allowed the pope to remain as arbiter of a fierce struggle between the “thou-
sand bell towers” until the eve of unification of the peninsula, without, however, suc-
ceeding in spreading the communal system through the kingdom of the south.
19. Sylos Labini, Problemi dello sviluppo economico (Bari: Laterza, 1974), 111. Labini places
the beginning of this process in the Bourbon era.
20. Labini, Problemi dello sviluppo economico, 112.
21. Letter quoted by A. Lepre, Italia, addio? Unità e disunità dal 1860 a oggi (Milan: Mon-
dadori, 1994), 33.
22. Letter from Cavour to Nigra, ambassador to Paris, on March 4, 1861.
23. Luciano Cafagna, La grande slavina. L’Italia verso la crisi della democrazia (Venice:
Marsilio, 1993), 19, 20.
24. G. Carocci, Il trasformismo dall’Unità a oggi (Milan: Unicopli, 1992), 14.
25. S. Romano, Histoire de l’Italie du Risorgimento à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 1977), 77.
Between 1861 and 1882, 29.7 percent of the lawyers present in the chamber were of
the Destra and 37.5 percent were of the Sinistra (without counting the extreme left);
from 1882 to 1900, only 15 percent of lawyers in the chamber were of the Destra, com-
pared to 40 percent of the Sinistra. See Fulvio Cammarano, “Sinistra storica,” in ed.
Bongiovanni and Tranfaglia, Dizionario storico dell’Italia unita, 830, 831.
26. Data cited by A. Caracciolo, Stato e società civile. Problemi dell’unificazione italiana
234 NOTES
27. Jean Meynaud, Rapporto sulla classe dirigente italiana (Milan: Giuffrè, 1966), 44. Mey-
naud refers to the post–World War II situation, when this phenomenon, qualitatively
comparable, was to undergo a powerful quantitative acceleration.
28. S. Lanaro, L’Italia nuova. Identità e sviluppo. 1861–1988 (Turin: Einaudi, 1988), 110.
29. The 1904 law on the southern region of Basilicata would mark a veritable resort to “spe-
cial legislation” until the war in 1915. See Zamagni, Dalla periferia al centro, 218, 219.
30. At the time of the first African expeditions, the Milan newspaper Italia del popolo cal-
culated that the Milanese were paying 89.85 lira in taxes per inhabitant, while the
national average was only 47.95 lira. Quoted by Lepre, Italia, addio? 81.
31. Filippo Turati, in Critica Sociale, October 16, 1891. Quoted by Lepre, Italia, addio? 83.
Chapter 14
1. Giacomo Biffi, Risorgimento, Stato laico e identità nazionale (Casale Monferrato:

Edizioni Piemme, 1999), 44. About the role of the Church in Italy, see Manlio Gra-
ziano, Identité catholique et identité italienne. L’Italie laboratoire de l’Église (Parigi:
L’Harmattan, 2007), whose following chapters are a modest and necessarily partial
synthesis.
2. “Sciopero e patriottismo,” L’Osservatore Romano, March 27, 1911.
3. Civiltà cattolica, March 16, 1929, quoted by A. Gramsci (Il Risorgimento (Turin: Ein-
audi, 1949), 146).
4. Among the works of the revisionist camp, we would cite that of Angela Pellicciari,
L’altro Risorgimento. Una guerra di religione dimenticata (Casale Monferrato: Edizioni
Piemme, 2000).
5. Arturo Carlo Jemolo, Chiesa e Stato in Italia. Dalla unificazione ai giorni nostri (Turin:
Einaudi, 1977), 314–315.
7. “Ah, Italy enslaved, abode of misery, pilotless ship in a fierce tempest tossed, no mis-
tress over provinces but a harlot!” (Dante, La Divina Commedia, “Purgatorio,” canto vi,
76–78).
8. Niccolò Machiavelli, Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, book I, chapter XII, ed.
C. Vivanti (Turin: Einaudi, 1983)
9. Machiavelli, Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, book I, chapter XII.
10. Machiavelli, Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, book I, chapter XII.
11. Francesco Guicciardini, Considerazioni intorno ai discorsi di Machiavelli.
12. This thesis was first formulated by Francesco de Sanctis in 1869. Others who took it up
were E. Galli della Loggia, L’identità italiana (Bologna: Il Mulino, 54; G. B. Guerri, Gli
italiani sotto la Chiesa (Milan: Mondadori, 1992), 128; and Adriano Prosperi, “Intellet-
tuali e Chiesa all’inizio dell’era moderna,” in Storia d’Italia, Annali, vol. IV, Intellettuali
e potere (Turin: Einaudi, 1981), 187.
13. Delio Cantimori, “Le idee religiose del Cinquecento. La storiografia,” in Storia della let-
teratura italiana, vol. V, Il Seicento, ed. E. Cecchi and N. Sapegno (Milan: Garzanti,
1967), 7.
14. Guerri, Gli italiani sotto la Chiesa, 126.
15. According to Ortensio Lando (1512–1553), writer and first translator of Thomas More
in Italy, “Scholars give birth only to discord, schism and pestilential heresies. The her-
esies come from men of letters, and from the illiterate, veritable saintliness . . . Once
a scholar reads a composition on any possible subject, he immediately gives birth to
some bizarre controversy [alcuna strana contradittione].” Quoted by Adriano Prosperi,
NOTES 235
Intellettuali e Chiesa all’inizio dell’era moderna, in Storia d’Italia, vol. IV, Intellettuali e
potere (Turin: Einaudi, 1978), 195.
16. Enzo Pace, La nation italienne en crise (Paris: Bayard, 1998), 122, 123.
17. Quoted by Prosperi, Intellettuali e Chiesa all’inizio dell’era moderna, 181.
18. Guerri, Gli italiani sotto la Chiesa, 132.
20. Gramsci, Gli intellettuali e la formazione della cultura (Turin: Einaudi, 1953), 39.
21. On this subject, read chapter 5 (The Means of Seduction) of the T. Jones book, The Dark
Heart of Italy (London: Faber & Faber, 2003), 109–30.
23. We must exclude from this list a series of minor authors, like Daniello Bartoli
(1608–1685), a historian and apologist for the Society of Jesus; Emanuele Tesauro
(1592–1672), an ex-Jesuit and theoretician of baroque poetry; and Giovanni Botero
(1540–1617), an ex-Jesuit and a theoretician of “raison d’État.”
24. G. Candeloro, Il movimento cattolico in Italia (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1982), 13. Bene-
detto Croce, Storia d’Europa nel secolo decimonono (Milan: Adelphi, 2007), 36, also
discusses the temporary agreement between the Church and a part of the “vanquished
states and classes.”
25. Antonio Gramsci, Note sul Machiavelli, sulla politica e sullo Stato moderno (Rome: Edi-
tori Riuniti, 1971), 307.
26. Croce, Storia d’Europa nel secolo decimonono, 36.
27. Croce, Storia d’Europa nel secolo decimonono, 35.
28. C. Cattaneo, “Vita di Dante” di Cesare Balbo, quoted by E. Passerin d’Entreves, “Ide-
ologie del Risorgimento,” in Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. VII, ed. E. Cecchi and
N. Sapegno (Milan: Garzanti, 1969), 326.
29. See Roger Aubert, “L’Eglise catholique de la crise de 1848 à la Première Guerre mondiale,”
in Nouvelle Histoire de l’Eglise, vol. V, L’Église dans le monde moderne, ed. J. Danielou,
L.-J. Rogier, R. Aubert, and D. Knowles (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 32.
30. Ippolito Nievo, Opere (Naples: Riccardo Ricciardi Editore, 1952), 1079, 1080.
Chapter 15
1. R. Aubert, “L’Église catholique de la crise de 1848 à la Premiere Guerre mondiale,” in Nou-

velle Histoire de l’Église, vol. V, L’Église dans le monde moderne, ed. J. Daniélou, L.-J. Rogier,
R. Aubert, and D. Knowles (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 93.
2. Quoted by Federico Chabod, Storia della politica esiera italiana dal 1860 al 1896 (Bari:
Laterza, 1951), 430, 435.
3. A. C. Jemolo, Chiesa e Stato in Italia. Dalla unificazione ai giorni nostri (Turin: Einaudi,
1977), 81.
4. G. Candeloro, Il movimento cattolico in Italia (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1982), 136.
5. Gianfranco Poggi, Il clero di riserva. Studio sociologica sull’Azione Cattolica Italiana
durante la presidenza Gedda (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1963), 22.
6. See A. Caracciolo, Roma capitale. Dal Risorgimento alla crisi dello Stato liberale (Rome:
Editori Riuniti, 1999), 173, 174; G. B. Guerri, Gli italiani sotto la Chiesa (Milan: Mon-
dadori, 1992), 219, 220; Jemolo, Chiesa e Stato in Italia, 53. Aubert, for his part, asserts
that despite the expropriations, the Church “seems to have managed to maintain sub-
stantial liquid capital.” Aubert, “L’Église catholique de la crise de 1848,” 93.
236 NOTES
7. See Candeloro, Il movimento cattolico, 344; Guerri, Gli italiani sotto la Chiesa, 250;
D. Mack Smith, Storia d’Italia dal 1861 al 1997 (Rome: Laterza, 1997), 325; Luigi Goglia
and Fabio Grassi, Il colonialismo italiano da Adua all’Impero (Bari: Laterza, 1981), 139,
140; E. Ragionieri, Italia giudicata 1861–1945, vol. II (Turin: Einaudi, 1976), 385; Pietro
Grifone, Il capitale finanziario in Italia. La politica economica del fascismo (Turin: Ein-
audi, 1971), 21; V. Castronovo, Storia economica d’Italia (Turin: Einaudi, 1995), 182.
8. Jemolo, Stato e Chiesa in Italia, 57, 63.
9. The phrase “first economic miracle” comes from Michèle Merger, Un siècle d’histoire
industrielle en Italie (1880–1970). Industrialisation et sociétés (Paris: Sedes, 1998), 37.
1990) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990), 210.
11. Quoted by L. Musella, Il trasformismo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998), 84.
12. Antonio Gramsci, “I cattolici italiani,” in Avanti!, ed. Piemontaise, December 22, 1918;
available in A. Gramsci, Scritti politici, vol. I (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1973), 225, 226.
13. Candeloro, Il movimento cattolico, 375.
14. The data are from Guerri, Gli italiani sotto la Chiesa, 256.
15. Gramsci, “I cattolici italiani,” 228.
16. Candeloro, Il movimento cattolico, 25.
Chapter 16
1. Gian Enrico Rusconi, “Religione civile e identità italiana,” in Il Mulino, no. 5 (2003):833.
2. F. de Sanctis, Storia della letteratura italiana (1870) (Milan: Bietti, 1963), 859.
3. E. Gentile, La Grande Italia. Il mito della nazione nel XX secolo (Rome: Laterza, 2006), 46.
4. Quoted by Giacomo Perticone, La politica estera italiana dal 1861 al 1914 (Turin: ERI,
1961), 154, 155.
5. Quoted by A. Lepre, Italia, addio? Unità e disunità dal 1860 a oggi (Milan: Mondadori,
1994), 74, 75.
6. Filippo Turati, “1° maggio 1911,” in Critica Sociale, April 16, 1911.
7. Quoted by G. Belardelli, “Una nazione ‘senza anima’: la critica democratica del Risorgi-
mento,” in Due nazioni. Legittimazione e delegittimazione nella storia dell’Italia contem-
poranea, ed. L. Di Nucci and E. Galli della Loggia (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003), 49.
8. The Socialist Party went from representing 2.95 percent of votes cast in the election of
1897 (15 deputies) to 6.5 percent in 1900 (33 deputies), 8.7 percent (41 deputies) in
1909, and 17.7 percent (52 deputies) in 1913 (not to mention the 5.2 percent of votes
and the 27 deputies of the two other Socialist parties that took part for the first time
in this election). We should note that the elections of 1913 were the first involving
universal suffrage for men.
9. According to the Italian Statistical Institute (ISTAT), it rose by 51 percent between
1900 and 1911; A. Gerschenkron estimated that it rose by 74 percent during that same
period, while S. Fenoaltea reports a rise of 118 percent. M. Merger, Un siècle d’histoire
industrielle en Italie (1880–1970). Industrialisation et sociétés (Paris: Sedes, 1998), 145.
One also gains a better understanding of the industrial dynamism of the period from
energy production, which doubled between 1898 and 1913 (while production of elec-
trical energy soared by a factor of 20). See V. Zamagni, Dalla periferia al centro. La
seconda rinascita economica dell’Italia (1861–1990) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990), 125.
10. Merger, Un siècle d’histoire industrielle, 50. The period in question was 1895 through 1913.
11. See Zamagni, Dalla periferia al centro, 89.
12. Merger, Un siècle d’histoire industrielle, 148.
NOTES 237
13. Merger, Un siècle d’histoire industrielle, 37. The percentages are based on cities of more
than 20,000 inhabitants.
14. On the crisis of 1907, see Merger, Un siècle d’histoire industrielle, 51; P. Grifone, Il capi-
tale finanziario in Italia. La politica economica del fascismo (Turin: Einaudi, 1971), 18;
Richard A. Webster, L’imperialismo industriale italiano. Studio sul prefascismo 1908–
1915 (Turin: Einaudi, 1974), 45.
15. Il Regno, May 22, 1904, quoted by E. Gentile, La Grande Italia, 70.
16. Francesco Saverio Nitti, Il Partito Radicale e la nuova democrazia industriale. Prime
linee di un programma di un Partito Radicale (Turin: Sten, 1907).
17. Giampiero Carocci, Giolitti e l’era giolittiana (Turin: Einaudi, 1971), 149.
18. E. Corradini, Principii di nazionalismo (1910), in Scritti e discorsi, ed. L. Strappini
(Turin: Einaudi, 1980), 173, 174.
19. Principii di nazionalismo, 174.
20. E. Corradini, Le nazioni proletarie e il nazionalismo in Scritti e discorsi, ed. L. Strappini,
Turin: Einaudi, 1980, 186, 187.
21. P. Gobetti, “Il nazionalismo italiano”, in La Rivoluzione Liberale, September 20, 1922, in
La Rivoluzione liberale. Saggio sulla lotta politica in Italia, Turin: Einaudi 1995, 116.
22. See Merger, Un siècle d’histoire industrielle, 50, 51; Grifone, Il capitale finanziario in
Italia, 18, 19.
23. See. E. Ragionieri, L’italia giudicata, 1861–1945, vol. II (Turin: Einaudi, 1976), 385.
24. On the Libyan War, see Angelo del Boca, Gli italiani in Libia (Rome: Laterza, 1986) and
Italiani, brava gente? (Venice: Neri Pozza, 2005).
25. G. Salvemini, “Alla ricerca di una formula,” in L’Unità, March 14, 1913, quoted by Gen-
tile, La Grande Italia, 88.
26. Gobetti, Il nazionalismo italiano, 117, 119.
Chapter 17
1. E. Pace talks about “the most coherent attempt” in La nation italienne en crise (Paris:
Bayard, 1998), 72, 73. As to the Fascist “secular religion,” see Emilio Gentile, Il culto del
littorio. La sacralizzazione della politica nell’Italia fascista (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1993).
2. The military defeat of Fascist Italy seems “to disqualify forever the slightest reference
to the nation,” wrote Marc Lazar, who dealt with this subject in the essay “La gauche,
la République et la nation,” in I. Diamanti, A. Dieckhoff, M. Lazar, and D. Musiedlak,
L’Italie, une nation en suspens (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1995), 66.
3. For the data, see V. Castronovo, Storia economica d’Italia (Turin: Einaudi, 1995), 174.
4. Luigi Salvatorelli, Nazional fascismo (Rome: Libero, 2004), 22, 25, 28.
5. Giovanni Ansaldo (1895–1969), a contributor to La Rivoluzione liberale, asserted, in a
debate with Salvatorelli, that fascism’s origins were not among petit-bourgeois intellectuals,
but among the productive petite bourgeoisie (“La piccola borghesia,” in Il Lavoro, Genoa,
June 3, 1923). Ansaldo later became one of the most important journalists of the Fascist era.
Adriano Tilgher (1887–1941), a philosopher and literary critic, in his essay “Piccoli borghesi
al bivio” (Il Tempo, December 7, 1919, then in La crisi mondiale e saggi di socialismo e marx-
ismo [Bologna: Zanichelli, 1921]), emphasized the hostility toward the working class.
6. Speech delivered in late May 1915, quoted by D. Mack Smith, Storia d’Italia dal 1861 al
1997 (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1997), 354.
7. According to S. Romano, 470,000 emigrants returned to Italy in the first months of the
European conflict, including 150,000 from France. Histoire de l’Italie du Risorgimento
à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 1977), 163.
238 NOTES
8. See M. Merger, Un siècle d’histoire industrielle en Italie (1880-1970). Industrialisation et

sociétés (Paris: Sedes, 1998), 61–63.
1990) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990), 307. The number represents the total of strike days
by industrial and farm laborers. This gauge of social conflict would only be exceeded
in 1969, with 37,824 strike days.
10. The inflation data come from Merger, Un siècle d’histoire industrielle en Italie, 64.
11. Smith, Storia d’Italia, 346.
12. The phrase “coup d’état” is used by, among others, Indro Montanelli and Mario Cervi,
L’Italia del Novecento (Milan: Rizzoli, 1998), 23; G. Procacci, Histoire des Italiens
(Rome: Laterza, 2006), 367; and D. Mack Smith, Storia d’Italia, 356.
13. In the elections of November 1919, the Socialist Party obtained 1,834,792 votes (32.3
percent of those cast, electing 156 deputies) and the Catholics of the People’s Party
obtained 1,167,354 votes (20.5 percent and 10 deputies). Of 508 deputies, the liberals
of all factions elected 149; the Social Democrats, 60; the Combatants Party, 20; and the
Economic Party, 7; while all the other seats (272) went to groupings that were more or
less openly hostile to the liberal state (Socialists, Catholics, republicans).
14. Renzo De Felice also sees the crisis of the liberal state as a consequence of its habit of
“absorbing the leaders” of opposition parties “without having the capacity to integrate
the masses into the heart of the State.” R. De Felice, Intervista sul fascismo (Bari: Lat-
erza, 1975), 45.
15. Gian Enrico Rusconi, “Question nationale et question démocratique en Italie. Thèses
pour un patriotisme républicain,” in “Italie. La question nationale,” Herodote, no. 89
(1998):24.
16. Among the elements constituting “the forms of acquisition of consensus” in a mass
society, there is, according to Cafagna, “a very wide gamut of obligations of transfer-
ence” based on “social considerations, and those of political involvement.” L. Cafagna,
La grande slavina. L’Italia verso la crisi della democrazia (Venice: Marsilio, 1993), 20.
17. V. Zamagni, Dal centro alla periferia, La seconda rinascita economica dell’Italia (1861–
1990) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990), 316.
18. G. Bollati, L’Italiano. Il carattere nazionale come storia e come invenzione (Turin: Ein-
audi, 1983), 109.
19. Zamagni, Dal centro alla periferia, 397, 398. According to calculations by Sylos Labini,
Problemi dello sviluppo economico (Rome: Laterza, 1974), 156; during the Mussolinian
period, until 1940 workers’ real salaries diminished by about 20 percent, while civil
servants saw their pay rise slightly, by 3 percent.
20. Renzo De Felice, Mussolini. L’alleato (1940–1945), vol. II (Turin: Einaudi, 1990),
770. On the conflict between the Fascist state and the Catholic Church, see M. Gra-
ziano, Identité catholique et identité italienne: L’Italie laboratoire de l’Eglise (Paris:
L’Harmattan, 2007), chap. 4.
21. S. Romano, L’Italia scappata di mano (Milan: TEA Storica, 1995), 20.
22. From 2.6 million emigrants in the 1920s, for a net emigration of 1.5 million, the
total declined to 113,000 in the 1930s. Underlying this trend, the effects of the Great
Depression must be cited, as well as the restrictions put in place by the United States
in 1921 and 1924. See Zamagni, Dalla periferia al centro, 398, 399). According to the
calculations of Anna Treves, during the 1930s an average of 1,200,000 people changed
residence each year. A. Treves, Le migrazioni interne nell’Italia fascista (Turin: Einaudi,
1976), 168.
23. According to Edward Banfield, “amoral familism” is “the inability of villagers to act
together for their common good or, indeed, for any end transcending the immediate,
NOTES 239
material interest of the nuclear family.” E. Banfield, The Moral Basis of a Backward
Society, New York: The Free Press, 9-10.
24. See Renzo De Felice, Un totalitarisme a l’italienne? (Paris: Presses de la Fondation
Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1988), 138–40.
25. P. Milza and S. Bernstein, Le fascisme italien. 1919–1945 (Paris: Seuil, 1980), 277.
26. R. De Felice, Intervista sul fascismo (Rome: Laterza, 1975), 60. It is interesting to note
that the Hungarian-British journalist George Mikes (1912–1987), in his book on the
Italians, published in 1956, offered the same observation as the great historian of fas-
cism. He added an almost banal further observation that seems to have escaped those
who have criticized the feeble patriotic enthusiasm of the Italians and their army on
the eve of the war of 1940: “One cannot expect an army to put all its soul into a battle
if it knows that the decision to fight, on one side or the other, was taken by the flip of
a coin.” G. Mikes, Italy for Beginners (London: Allan Wingate, 1956), 76.
27. P. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Con-
flict from 1500–2000 (New York: Random House, 1987), 383.
28. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 386, 426.
29. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 430.
30. Thus, for example, contended Corrado Alvaro in 1944: “A large part of Italy hoped for
defeat from the first day of the war.” C. Alvaro, L’Italia rinunzia? (Palermo: Sellerio,
1986), 34.
31. Giuseppe Bottai, Diario. 1935–1944 (Milan: Rizzoli, 1982), 193.
32. Ernesto Galli della Loggia, La morte della patria (Rome: Laterza, 1996), 95.
Chapter 18
1. Sergio Romano, “Perché gli italiani si disprezzano,” in Limes no. 4 (October–November

1994):161.
2. See Mimmo Franzinelli, L’amnistia Togliatti. 22 giugno 1946: Colpo di spugna sui cri-
mini fascisti (Milan: Mondadori, 2006).
3. Paul Ginsborg, Storia d’Italia dal dopoguerra ad oggi. Società e politica, 1943–1988
4. On this question, see Claudio Pavone, “La continuità dello Stato. Istituzioni e uomini,”
in Italia 1945–1948. Le origini della Repubblica (Turin: Giappichelli, 1974).
5. E. Galli della Loggia, La morte della patria (Rome: Laterza, 1996), 84.
6. S. Romano, Guida alla politica estera italiana. Dal crollo del fascismo al crollo del comu-
nismo (Milan: Rizzoli, 1993), 14.
7. Quoted in Un uomo solo in difesa dell’Italia. Discorso del Presidente del Consiglio on.
Alcide De Gasperi alla Conferenza di Pace di Parigi, il 10 agosto 1946, available at http://
www.democraticicristiani.it/documenti/degasperi3.html.
8. G. Agnelli and A. Cabiati, Federazione europea o Lega delle nazioni (Pordenone: Studio
Tesi, 1986). The same ideas had been advanced in articles in the Corriere della Sera by
another economist, the future head of the Bank of Italy and the future president of the
republic, Luigi Einaudi.
9. Romano, Guida alla politica estera italiana, 62.
10. Giulio Andreotti, Intervista su De Gasperi (Bari: Laterza, 1977), 36, 37, 65, 66, 69, 78.
11. Declaration of the foreign minister to the Constituent Assembly (July 24, 1947), quoted
by Giuseppe Intersimone, L’Italia e il trattato di pace del 10 febbraio 1947 (Rome: Trevi
Editore, 1970), 93.
240 NOTES
12. Vittorio Foa, Il cavallo e la torre (Turin: Einaudi, 1991), 137. Vittorio Foa was a founder
of the Action Party and was one of the most important postwar Socialists, with the
CGIL, the union linked to the PCI.
13. Estimates range from around 100,000 active members “if one excludes the 11th-hour
converts,” a figure advanced by Paul Ginsborg (Storia dell’Italia contemporanea (Turin:
Einaudi, 1988), 90), to the 223,639 “fighting partisans” suggested by Gianni Oliva (I
vinti e I liberati [Milan: Mondadori, 1994], 590).
14. Pietro Secchia, Aldo dice 26 x 1. Cronistoria del 25 aprile (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1973), 155. Pietro
Secchia (1903–1973) was the no. 2 man in the Communist Party during the Resistance.
15. W. Barberis, Il bisogno di patria (Turin: Einaudi, 2004), 84.
16. E. Galli della Loggia, La morte della patria, op. cit., p. 70. “Naturally,” Galli della Loggia
continued, “the Republic will always be obliged to deny, at least officially, this double
truth. In the official declamations, in solemn written documents, in school books, it
will always, and only, be anti-Fascist.”
17. Jürgen Habermas, “L’identité des Allemands, une fois encore.” in Ecrits politiques. Cul-
ture, droit, histoire (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1986), 245–63.
18. S. Romano, Histoire de l’Italie du Risorgimento à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 1977), 232–34.
19. E. Galli della Loggia, La morte della patria, 61. Moreover, he describes it as “radically
and manifestly foreign to the national community” (p. 72).
20. Galli della Loggia, La morte della patria, 128.
21. Galli della Loggia, La morte della patria, 67.
22. Remember that the Mussolinian adventure had begun under the auspices (and with
the money) of the French government and of the SFIO, the French Socialist party,
before finishing its arc with its hands and feet tied to Germany. See P. Milza and S.
Bernstein, Le fascisme italien. 1919–1945 (Paris: Seuil, 1980), 93, among others.
23. The Action Party, founded in 1942 and dissolved in 1947, was a very heterogeneous mix-
ture of diverse tendencies, united in the attempt to federate the non-Stalinist anti-Fas-
cists, but irremediably divided at the moment it proposed a governmental action plan.
24. Quoted by S. Lanaro, Storia dell’Italia repubblicana (Venice: Marsilio, 1992), 160. Mon-
signor de Luca (1898–1962) was a close collaborator of Cardinal Gasparri in the 1930s,
then of Cardinal Montini (the future Paul VI) and John XXIII. He was a mediator in
the Vatican’s contacts with the Communist Party and the Soviet Union.
25. See Gianni De Michelis, La lunga ombra di Yalta (Venice: Marsilio, 2003), 21, 22.
26. Quoted by Giuseppe Boffa, Storia dell’Unione Sovietica. 1917–1941. Lenin e Stalin.
Dalla rivoluzione alla seconda guerra mondiale (Milan: Mondadori, 1976), 504.
27. Palmiro Togliatti, La via italiana al socialismo (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1972), 38.
28. Quoted by Antonio Pellicani, Il papa di tutti. La Chiesa cattolica, il fascismo e il razzismo.
1929–1945 (Milan: Sugar, 1964), 31.
29. A. C. Jemolo, Chiesa e Stato in Italia. Dalla unificazione ai giorni nostri (Turin: Einaudi,
1977), 270.
30. Jemolo, Chiesa e Stato in Italia, 313.
31. See Renato Moro, La formazione della classe dirigente cattolica (1929–1937) (Bologna:
Il Mulino, 1979).
32. The “official” government of Badoglio and of the king; the “Italian Social Republic”
of Mussolini; the National Liberation Committee; the German military governor; and
the Allies.
33. Federico Chabod, L’Italia contemporanea (1918–1948) (Turin: Einaudi, 1994), 125.
34. See A. C. Jemolo, Chiesa e Stato in Italia, 314, 315; Guido Verucci, La Chiesa nella soci-
età contemporanea. Dal primo dopoguerra al Concilio Vaticano II (Bari: Laterza, 1988),
231, 232.
NOTES 241
35. Alcide De Gasperi, 1946, quoted by Lanaro, Storia dell’Italia repubblicana, 103.
36. See Gianni Baget Bozzo, Il partito cristiano al potere. La DC di De Gasperi e di Dossetti
(1945–1954), vol. I (Florence: Vallecchi, 1974), 255. Giuseppe Dossetti (1913–1996), a
university professor and resistance militant, was vice secretary of the Christian Demo-
cratic Party in 1945. A deputy since the Constituent Assembly, he abandoned political
life in 1958 to become a priest. He took part in the work leading up to the Second Vatican
Council and was a patron of Romano Prodi’s candidacy for prime minister in 1996.
37. For De Gasperi, as Andreotti writes, the defense of the currency was “the best guarantee
for savers, for employees, for the little people.” Andreotti, Intervista su De Gasperi, 106.
38. According to an ex-minister of the Communist Party, De Gasperi said, during a min-
isterial meeting in April 1947: “Experience has taught me that it is impossible today to
govern Italy without drawing into the new government, in one form or another, the
representatives of this fourth party, of the party of those who have the money and the
economic power.” Quoted by P. Ginsborg, Storia dell’Italia contemporanea, 100, 101.
39. Emilio Gianni, “La DC nasce come partito nordista,” in Lotta Comunista no. 149, Janu-
ary 1983.
40. Andreotti, Intervista su De Gasperi, 103. In the elections of 1948, the Christian Demo-
crats obtained 48.5 percent of the votes cast and won 305 of the 507 seats in the Cham-
ber of Deputies.
41. Manlio Graziano, “Trois idées sur les mutations de la vie politique italienne,” in L’Italie
aujourd’hui. Situation et perspectives après le séisme des années 90, ed. M. Graziano
(Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004), 17.
42. Andreotti, Intervista su De Gasperi, 33.
Chapter 19
1. Curzio Malaparte, Italia barbara (1925), quoted by G. Bollati, L’Italiano. Il carattere

nazionale come storia e come invenzione (Turin: Einaudi, 1983), 122.
2. Bollati, L’Italiano, 119.
3. The phrase quoted is from Silvio Lanaro, L’Italia nuova. Identità e sviluppo. 1861–1988
(Turin: Einaudi, 1988), 240. Others have offered similar observations, including
L. Cafagna, “Legittimazione e delegittimazione nella storia politica italiana,” in Due
nazioni. Legittimazione e delegittimazione nella storia dell’Italia contemporanea, ed.
L. Di Nucci and E. Galli della Loggia (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003), 20; E. Galli della Log-
gia, L’identità italiana (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998), 140; and Guido Carli, Cinquant’anni
di vita italiana (Bari: Laterza, 1993).
4. Telefoni bianchi and Mille lire al mese are two famous samples of cultural production
under fascism, as illustrated by the lyrics to the song (Mille lire al mese) by Gilberto
Mazzi (1939): “. . . A modest job, without pretension / I can work / to finally find peace.
/ A little house / on the edge of town / a little wife, young and pretty / . . . If I could have
1,000 lira a month / . . . I would buy, among all things / the most beautiful, those that
you desire.”
5. Speech delivered by Eugenio Pacelli (Pius XII) to the First Congress of the Con-
federazione dei coltivatori diretti (Coldiretti, the leading trade union of property-
owning peasants) in 1946. Available at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xii/
speeches/1946.
6. Report to the First Congress of the Christian Democratic Party, quoted by P. Ginsborg,
Storia d’Italia dal dopoguerra ad oggi. Società e politica, 1943–1988 (Turin: Einaudi,
1988), 99.
242 NOTES
7. Thus said the famous literary critic Luigi Russo in 1953, quoted in Nemici per la pelle.
Sogno americano e mito sovietico nell’Italia contemporanea, ed. Pier Paolo D’Attore
(Milan: Franco Angeli, 1991).
8. Pina Nuzzo, Congressi dal 1944 al 1968. Available at www.udinazionale.org, Archivio
centrale – Memoria.
9. Franco Paparo, “Pubblicazioni sulle questioni sessuali,” in Gioventù Nuova no. 11–12
(November–December 1950). In the review Sexual Digest, translated from the French,
one finds articles by Jacques Prévert, Francis Carco, and Roland Dorgelès, and in the
Italian version, pieces by Giovanni Papni, Luigi Barzini, Jr., and even texts by father
Agostino Gemelli and Pius XII.
10. Quoted by S. Lanaro, Storia dell’Italia repubblicana (Venice: Marsilio, 1992), 207. In
1950, according to Marta Boneschi, only 72 of 104 films obtained the censor’s stamp
of approval. Boneshi, Poveri ma belli. I nostri anni cinquanta (Milan: Mondadori,
1995), 287.
11. Carli, Cinquant’anni di vita italiana, 3, 4. It is noteworthy that Carli uses the phrase
“animal spirits” here in a sense opposite to that used by Keynes, to the extent that,
for the latter, the phrase referred to irrational behaviors when private investment is
left to itself.
12. Carli, Cinquant’anni di vita italiana, 3, 4.
13. Quoted by Lucio Villari, Il capitalismo italiano del Novecento (Bari: Laterza, 1972), 484,
522.
14. G. Carli, Intervista sul capitalismo italiano (Rome: Laterza, 1977), 89
15. V. Zamagni calculates that the number of farmers dropped from 8.6 million to 2 mil-
lion from the end of the war to the 1990s, and their share in the creation of GDP fell
from 23 percent to 5 percent. Zamagni, Dalla periferia al centro. La seconda rinascita
economica dell’Italia (1861–1990) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990), 442.
16. The law “for the defense of the consumer” was signed by the Christian Democrat
Giuseppe Togni in 1950, laying out a series of rules intended to block the rise of big
retailers.
17. The data were reported by Lanaro, Storia dell’Italia repubblicana, 183; Paolo Sylos
Labini, Saggio sulle classi sociali (Bari: Laterza, 1975), 49, 158; and Ginsborg, Storia
dell’Italia dal dopoguerra a oggi, 186, 187, 323.
18. Jacques Nobécourt, L’Italie à vif (Paris: Seuil, 1970), 45–48. The figure quoted comes
from a 1967 study. According to the government, Nobécourt says, they numbered
2,000; those who wanted to cut into this forest, he concludes, were never able even to
“carry out a count of the trees.”
19. Lanaro, Storia dell’Italia repubblicana, 183.
20. L. Musella, Il trasformismo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003), 155, 156. For the functioning
of the commissions, see Nobécourt, L’Italie à vif, 56. On the nearly regular contribu-
tion of the PCI to the majority, see L. Cafagna, La grande slavina. L’Italia verso la crisi
della democrazia (Venice: Marsilio, 1993), 40; Carli, Cinquant’anni di vita italiana, 17;
and R. Cartocci, “L’Italia di tangentopoli e la crisi del sistema partitico,” in La coscienza
civile degli italiani. Valori e disvalori nella storia nazionale, ed. C. Tullio-Altan (Udine:
Gaspari Editore, 1997), 225.
21. Giuseppe Maranini, Storia del potere in Italia 1848–1967 (Milan: Corbaccio, 1995), 511.
22. Stephen Gundle, “L’americanizzaione del quotidiano. Televisione e consumismo
nell’Italia degli anni Cinquanta,” Quaderni Storici no. 62 (August 1986):561–94.
23. C. Alvaro, L’Italia rinunzia? (Milan: Bompiani, 1945), 33.
24. The data come from Ginsborg, Storia d’Italia dal dopoguerra ad oggi, 102, 103; Mis-
sione Americana per l’ERP in Italia, Divisione Informazioni, June 1951; George
NOTES 243
C. Marshall Foundation, Marshall Plan Information, http://www.marshallfoundation

.org/marshall_plan_information.htm. The numbers expressed in euros are calculated
based on the corresponding value of the dollar in 2000.
25. Under fascism, the English were often presented to the Italians as “the people of five
meals.”
26. The rituals linked to “magico-Christian syncretism” were the object of some varied but
equally rich studies by Ernesto De Martino, notably Sud e magia (Milan: Feltrinelli,
2001) and Alfonso di Nola, Gli aspetti magico-religiosi di una cultura subalterna itali-
ana (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2001).
27. Despite appearances, this was not true of the language. Indeed, by the middle of the
twentieth century, 94.8 percent of the lexicon was of Italian origin, while Gallicisms
and Anglicisms of recent import constituted a mere 1.6 percent of the total. Beginning
in the 1950s, however, the new acquisitions were more often Anglicisms. Of a statistical
sampling of seventy-eight foreign phrases, writes De Mauro, “we counted 60 Angli-
cisms, 9 Gallicisms and 9 foreign expressions of other nature.” T. De Mauro, Storia
linguistica dell’Italia unita (Rome: Laterza, 1963), 202, 210.
Chapter 20
1. The most complete text on this subject is that of Goffredo Fofi, L’immigrazione meridi-
onale a Torino (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1964).
2. S. Lanaro, Storia dell’Italia repubblicana (Venice: Marsilio, 1992), 290. This lack was also
underlined by E. Galli della Loggia, La morte della patria (Rome: Laterza, 1996), 136.
4. See V. Zamagni, Dalla periferia al centro. La seconda rinascita economica dell’Italia
(1861–1990) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990), 17 for the period that preceded World War I;
Adriana Castagnoli and Emanuela Scarpellini, Storia degli imprenditori italiani (Turin:
Einaudi, 2003), 154–160, on the history of Italian businessmen abroad; and Richard
A. Webster, L’imperialismo industriale italiano. Studio sul prefascismo 1908–1915
(Turin: Einaudi, 1974), 357–74, on Italian economic expansion in the Balkans and in
Eastern Europe before 1914.
5. Telegram from A. Lessona, November 11, 1937, quoted by Fabienne Le Houerou,
L’épopée des soldats de Mussolini en Abyssinie, 1936–1938 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994),
156. Coffee exports fell from 15,822 tons in 1935 to 200 tons in 1939, and pelts from
4,984 tons in 1936 to 48 tons in 1939. While the commercial balance with Ethiopia was
active in 1935 (28.497 billion lira in imports and 21.508 billion lira in exports), in 1937
Italy was obliged to send merchandise to its colony worth 86.998 billion lira, and in
1939 it imported goods worth only 480 million lira. Richard Pankhurst, “A charter in
Ethiopian commercial history: Developments during the Fascist occupation, 1936–1941,”
in Ethiopia Observer vol. XIV (1971).
6. P. Sylos Labini, Problemi dello sviluppo economico (Rome: Laterza, 1974), 156.
7. Among the foreign entrepreneurs who “emigrated” to Italy, we should mention Gior-
gio Enrico Falck, Heinrich Mylius, Pietro Krumm, Giulio Richard, Roberto Lepetit,
Ulrico Hoepli, Otto Joel, and Federico Weil. From 1880 to 1890, foreigners held about
15 percent of industrial capital, a figure that had declined to 8 percent by 1913. The
foreign presence was more evident in the credit sector. The Banca Commerciale was
formed with 99 percent foreign capital, and the Credito Italiano owed its creation to
the capital of two German banks and one Italian bank. See Zamagni, Dalla periferia
244 NOTES
al centro, 168–171; M. Merger (Un siècle d’histoire industrielle en Italie (1880–1970).

Industrialisation et sociétés (Paris: Sedes, 1998), 40–44.
8. According to P. Ginsborg, in February and March 1946, 240,000 workers, 13 percent of
the southern industrial labor force, were laid off. Ginsborg, Storia d’Italia dal dopogu-
erra ad oggi. Società e politica, 1943–1988 (Turin: Einaudi, 1988), 125.
9. On the “resolutely and uncritically liberal” choice of the first economic conference
of the PCI (August 21–23, 1945), see Lanaro, Storia dell’Italia repubblicana, 86, and
C. Daneo, La politica economica della ricostruzione (1945–1949) (Turin: Einaudi, 1975),
106. Italo Calvino describes the Communist Party of these years as “an ideal liberal
party, which had never before existed.” Calvino, La giornata di uno scrutatore (Turin:
Einaudi, 1963), 37.
10. See Lanaro, Storia dell’Italia repubblicana, 194, 195; and Eugenio Scalfari, Rapporto sul
neocapitalismo in Italia (Bari: Laterza, 1961), 101.
11. Data quoted by J. Nobécourt, L’Italie à vif (Paris: Seuil, 1970), 202, 203.
12. Quoted by L. Musella, Il trasformismo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003), 144.
13. See Zamagni, Dalla periferia al centro, 465; and Ginsborg, Storia d’Italia dal dopoguerra
ad oggi, 289.
14. The basic text of this big-capital reformist policy is Una politica per l’industria, of May 1969,
compiled by a group of young industrialists—among them Leopoldo Pirelli, Giovanni
Agnelli, Roberto Olivetti, Enrico Salza, and Renzo Vallarino Gancia—and by intellectuals
of the “Einaudi” Center such as Valerio Zanone, Giuliano Urbani, Mario Deaglio, Piero
Ostellino, and Giorgio Rota. See Paolo Soddu, “Strategie e generazioni industriali,” available
at www.sissco.it/attivita/sem-set-2003/relazioni/soddu.rtf. On this question, see also Nobé-
court, L’Italie à vif, 146–53. Ginsborg, Storia d’Italia dal dopoguerra ad oggi, 357.
15. Quoted by Lorenzo Parodi, Riformismo da piccolo cabotaggio (1966), in Critica del
sindacato riformista (Milan: Edizioni Lotta Comunista, 1987), 651, 652. The Con-
federazione nazionale coltivatori diretti, commonly referred to as “Coldiretti,” was the
small-farmers’ trade group. According to Nobécourt, L’Italie à vif, 74, in the elections
of 1968, it had delivered as a sort of dowry to the Christian Democrats three million
votes, thus guaranteeing the election of eighty-five deputies and twenty-nine senators.
At the time, it organized 1.6 million small landowners, controlled 7,000 of the 7,200
farm societies, as well as the Agriculture Commission in the Chamber. Nobécourt also
lists the “Enti pubblici” or “para-pubblici” that existed with the sole purpose of financ-
ing the parties and maintaining their electoral bases, and he concludes that no one had
any interest in “killing this chicken with the golden eggs” (pp. 45–49).
16. In 2005, the Lega delle cooperative boasted 7.5 million associates.
17. See Nobécourt, L’Italie à vif, 223, 224.
18. Among them: Percy A. Allum, Italy. A Republic without a Government (New York: Nor-
ton and Company, 1973), and Giuseppe Palma Surviving without Governing. The Ital-
ian Parties in Parliament (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). In Italy: Ugo
La Malfa, Intervista sul non-governo (Bari: Laterza, 1977), and Sabino Cassese: Esiste un
governo in Italia? (Roma: Officina Edizioni, 1980).
20. Parodi reports these data on wage growth beyond the ceilings: 0.2 percent in 1960;
2.9 percent in 1961; 3.6 percent in 1962; 3.5 percent in 1963. The reason for these
increases, Parodi adds, lay in the raises proposed by the industrialists themselves in
order to attract qualified workers. Parodi, Riformismo da piccolo cabotaggio, 651.
21. See La Stampa, June 2, 1968.
22. Edition of February 22, 1970, quoted by Denis Mack Smith, Cento anni di storia itali-
ana visti attraverso il Corriere della Sera (Milan: Rizzoli, 1978), 547.
NOTES 245
23. For the data on the PCI, see Marc Lazar, Maisons rouges. Les partis communistes français
et italien de la Libération à nos jours (Paris: Aubier, 1992), 397, 398.
25. Edition of February 2, 1969, quoted by Smith, Cento anni di storia italiana, 546.
26. According to the Association of Victims of Terrorism, the political violence of the left
caused, between 1970 and 1989, the deaths of 118 people, including 18 between 1969
and 1977, 90 between 1978 and 1982, and 10 between 1983 and 1989 (see www.vittim-
eterrorismo.it). In the same years, the five attacks of the Questura on Milan (Decem-
ber 12, 1969, and May 17, 1973), Brescia (May 28, 1974), the Rome–Brenner train
(August 4, 1974), and the Boulogne station (August 2, 1980), which can certainly not
be blamed on leftist terrorism, claimed a total of 125 victims.
Chapter 21
1. On the reform of the public sanitary service, see P. Ginsborg, Storia d’Italia dal dopogu-
erra ad oggi. Società e politica, 1943–1988 (Turin: Einaudi, 1988), 528.
2. At the beginning of the 1980s, in the manufacturing sector, 90.6 percent of companies
had fewer than fifty employees (and, according to 1998 data, nearly 75 percent of these
had fewer than fifteen employees).
3. La Stampa, July 24, 1977.
4. Quoted by A. Cervetto, “Nuovi aspetti del riciclaggio sociale” (February 1989), in Cervetto,
Forze e forme del mutamento italiano (Milan: Edizioni Lotta Comunista, 1997), 209.
5. “I gioiellieri guadagnano meno dei maestri,” in Corriere della Sera, October. 14, 2006.
6. See Tullio De Mauro, “La culture et la langue,” in Portrait de l’Italie actuelle, ed.
S. Cassese (Paris: La Documentation Française, 2001), 136–43, and Storia linguistica
dell’Italia unita (Bari: Laterza, 1963), 120–26.
7. Created in 1956 by the union of a small liberal group and a group of intellectuals
linked to the weekly Il Mondo (notably its celebrated editor, Mario Pannunzio), the
Radical Party enjoyed some media success thanks to its battles first for the right to
divorce and later for abortion rights.
8. Massimo Livi Bacci, “La population italienne,” in Cassese, Portrait de l’Italie actuelle,
100–105. See also Stefano Molina, L’equazione demografica italiana: variabili e costanti
(Turin: Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, 2004).
9. Paul Ginsborg, L’Italia del tempo presente. Famiglia, società civile, Stato. 1980–1996
10. “The Church of tomorrow [ . . . ] will be a Church of a minority” (Salt of the Earth: The
Church at the End of the Millennium. An Interview With Peter Seewald, San Francisco:
Ignatius Press, 1997, 265.
11. Ratzinger, Salt of the Earth, 16.
12. Quoted by Guido La Barbera, Crisi di internazionalizzazione. L’Italia degli anni Nov-
anta (Milan: Edizioni Lotta Comunista, 2000), 58.
13. La Barbera, Crisi di internazionalizzazione, 58.
14. Giovanni Sartori, “Ma quanto è laico, Eminenza! È un uomo di Chiesa a dare una lezione
ai ministri dello Stato sul problema immigrati,” in L’Espresso, September 29, 2000.
246 NOTES
Chapter 22
1. The Cassa per il Mezzogiorno reimbursed 20 percent of initial investments and financed
70 percent of this through a 4 percent loan reimbursable over fifteen years. In his 1970
text, Nobécourt cited the case of industrialists who, having received financing to create
businesses in the south, closed them not long afterward and brought back to the north
the machines purchased with the state’s money. J. Nobécourt, L’Italie a vif (Paris: Seuil,
1970), 213.
2. V. Castronovo, Storia economica d’Italia (Turin: Einaudi, 1995), 495, 496.
3. The statute of the GEPI (Gestioni e partecipazioni industriali) is quoted by Luciano
Barca, Dizionario di politica economica (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1979), 164. It is inter-
esting to note that, in chronological order, the IMI (in 1939), the IRI (1933), and the
EFIM (1947) were created at different moments with the same objective, but wound
up becoming state holding companies.
4. S. Lanaro, Storia dell’Italia repubblicana (Venice: Marsilio, 1992), 439. Between 1977
and 1982, the number of the workers of the state-owned factories grew 31.9 percent.
5. The comment by Jacques Chirac, in September 1996, that “the devaluation of the lira
has done a lot of harm to a certain number of European countries, and in particu-
lar France” (see www.elysee.fr) was followed by near-general indignation in Italy, led
by Deputy Prime Minister Walter Veltroni. Two governors of Banca d’Italia, Paolo
Baffi, in 1979 (see G. Carli, Cinquant’anni di vita italiana [Rome: Laterza, 1996], 350),
and Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, in 1980 (Il Sole 24 Ore, October 27, 1985), had already
denounced the risks of a recovery “doped” by the continual depreciations of the lira.
6. Gianni Agnelli, interview with Eugenio Scalfari, L’Espresso, November 19, 1972.
7. Enrico Berlinguer, Austerità, occasione per trasformare l’Italia (Rome: Editori Riuniti,
1977), 13.
8. Interview with Eugenio Scalfari, Repubblica, January 24, 1978. Luciano Lama’s line was
approved by the Congress of the CGIL in February 1978.
9. P. Ginsborg, Storia d’Italia dal dopoguerra a oggi. Società e politica, 1943–1988 (Turin:
Einaudi, 1988), 601.
10. In 1976 the PCI obtained 34.37 percent of all votes cast; in 1979 this fell to 30.38 per-
cent; in 1983 to 29.89 percent; and in 1987 to 26.57 percent. In 1992 the two parties
born of its dissolution won a total of 21.73 percent.
11. E. Galli della Loggia, La morte della patria (Rome: Laterza, 1996), 84.
12. E. Pace, La nation italienne en crise (Paris: Bayard, 1998), 107.
13. Mariella Gramaglia in La questione socialista. Per una possibile reinvenzione della sinis-
tra, ed. Gaetano Arfé, Vittorio Foa and Antonio Giolitti (Turin: Einaudi, 1987)
14. Quoted by A. Cervetto, L’ineguale sviluppo politico. 1968–1979 (Milan: Edizioni Lotta
Comunista, 1991), 216.
15. La Stampa, January 7, 1996. The OECD estimate comes from October 1995.
16. Carli, Cinquant’anni di vita italiana, 5.
17. Ciampi, Il Sole 24 ore, October 27, 1985.
18. Giangiacomo Nardozzi, Miracolo e declino. L’Italia tra concorrenza e protezione (Rome-
Bari: Laterza, 2004), 68.
19. Nardozzi, Miracolo e declino, 69.
20. Romano, Guida alla politica estera italiana, 192.
21. Francesco Cossiga, “Perché contiamo poco,” interview with Lucio Caracciolo, Limes,
May 1995. Cossiga (1928) was the Christian Democratic interior minister when Aldo
Moro was abducted. He was president of the republic from 1985 to 1992.
22. S. Romano, L’Italia scappata di mano (Milan: TEA Storica, 1995), 120, 121.
NOTES 247
23. On “Mediterranean Atlanticism,” see also Arrigo Cervetto, Forze e forme del muta-
mento italiano (Milan: Edizioni Lotta Comunista, 1997), 147, who coined the phrase;
Romano, Guida alla politica estera italiana, 85, 86, and L’Italia scappata di mano, 120,
121; L. Caracciolo, Terra incognita. Le radici geopolitiche della crisi italiana (Rome: Lat-
erza, 2001), 14, 15. In English, see Manlio Graziano, “The Rise and Fall of the ‘Medi-
terranean Atlanticism’ in the Italian Foreign Policy: the Case of the Near-East,” Modern
Italy, vol. 12, no. 3 (November 2007).
24. Thus said the president and director-general of Toro Assicurazioni (Fiat Group), Anto-
nio Mosconi, before an assembly of northern entrepreneurs in January 1979. Quoted
by Sergio Motosi, Scritti. Indagine scientifica e passione rivoluzionaria (Milan: Edizioni
Lotta Comunista, 2003), 469.
Chapter 23
1. G. Carli, Cinquant’anni di vita italiana (Rome: Laterza, 1996), 5.

2. The Maastricht Treaty was signed on February 7, 1992. The arrest of Mario Chiesa,
which marked the beginning of the operation known as “Mani pulite” (Clean Hands),
took place on February 17, 1992.
3. See M. Graziano, “Trois idées sur les mutations de la vie politique italienne,” in L’Italie
aujourd’hui. Situation et perspectives après le séisme des années 90, ed. M. Graziano
(Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004), 19. The phrase “social compromise based on the recy-
cling of public spending” comes from Guido La Barbera, Crisi di internazionalizza-
zione. L’Italia degli anni Novanta (Milan: Edizioni Lotta Comunista, 2000), 104. On
this mechanism, also read the first chapter of La grande slavina. L’Italia verso la crisi
della democrazia (Venice: Marsilio, 1993), by Luciano Cafagna, in particular pages
17 through 30, and Alfredo Reichlin, Acts of Congress organized by the journal Ital-
ianieuropei (May 2, 2000).
4. Paolo Franchi, “Un socialista italiano,” in Corriere della Sera, January 20, 2000.
5. On this episode, see M. Graziano, 2007, “The rise and fall of ‘Mediterranean Atlanti-
cism’ in Italian foreign policy: The case of the Near East.”
6. L’Unità, March 18, 1991. The Congress that saw the dissolution of the PCI and its trans-
formation into the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS) took place in February 1991.
7. J. Nobécourt, L’Italie à vif (Paris: Seuil, 1970), 111.
8. The presence of Forza Italia in the 1994 elections led to a loss of only around 150,000
votes for the Northern League, which declined from 8.65 percent of total 1992 votes to
8.36 percent. In the 2001 elections, on the other hand, the Northern League lost nearly
1.8 million votes and fell to 3.94 percent of the total.
9. Quentin Peel, “Fear Unites Factions in Prodi Cabinet,” Financial Times, May 19, 2006.
10. Ezio Mauro, “Il tramonto dell’illusione unilaterale,” in La Repubblica, August 26, 2006.
11. Sergio Romano, “La sindrome di Crimea. Missioni all’estero e ricerca di reconoscimenti,”
Corriere della Sera, August 25, 2006.
12. The phrase comes from Lucio Caracciolo, Terra incognita. Le radici geopolitiche della
crisi italiana (Rome: Laterza, 2001), 102.
13. Editorial, “Silvio Berlusconi’s bequest: The soft underbelly,” The Economist, September
16, 2006.
14. A. Cervetto, “La disfunzione dei partiti parlamentari,” in L’involucro politico (Milan:
Edizioni Lotta Comunista, 1994), 87.
248 NOTES
Conclusion
1. Giulio Tremonti, Il futuro del fisco, in F. Galgano, S. Cassese, G. Tremonti, T. Treu, Ric-
chezza senza nazioni. Nazioni senza ricchezza, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993.
2. Mario Draghi, Considerazioni finali per l’anno 2006, general meeting of the Banca
d’Italia, exercise CXIII, Rome, May 31, 2007, p. 8.
3. Data from ISTAT, July 11 and 12, 2006.
4. Unicredit was created through the progressive merger, begun in 1998, of Credito Ital-
iano, Credito Romagnoolo, Cassa di Risparmio di Verona, Vicenza Belluno e Ancona,
Cassa di Risparmio di Torino, Cassamarca (Cassa di Risparmio della Marca Trivi-
giana), Cassa di Risparmio di Trento e Rovereto, and Cassa di Risparmio di Trieste.
5. Banca Intesa is the result of the merger, between 1998 and 2001, of Cassa di Rispar-
mio delle Provincie Lombarde (Cariplo), Banco Ambroveneto (in turn created by the
merger of Banco Ambrosiano and Banca Cattolica del Veneto), and Banca Commer-
ciale Italiana.
6. Luigi La Spina, “Prime prove di megalopoli,” La Stampa, August 25, 2006.
7. For a more complete analysis of this subject, allow me to refer the reader to my own
Identité catholique et identité italienne: L’Italie laboratoire de l’Église (Paris: L’Harmattan,
2007).
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Index
Abruzzi, 51 Baretti, Giuseppe, 52, 126

absence of the masses in Italian Bari, 112
unification, 15, 16, 19, 24, 43, 49, 56, Bartoli, Matteo Giulio, 64
58–61, 83, 94, 121, 126, 127 Barzini, Luigi, 50
Abulafia, David, 112 Basilicata, 51
Action Party, 157 Bellarmino, Roberto, 123
Agnelli, Gianni, 10, 163, 184, 186, 193 Bellegarde Heinrich Joseph de, 17
Agnelli, Giovanni, 154 Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger), Pope,
Agnelli, Umberto, 188 181, 201
Albertine Statute, 76, 83, 86, 92 Benetton, Luciano, 193
Alfieri, Vittorio, 51, 66, 126 Berchet, Giovanni, 56
Alighieri, Dante, 51, 70, 122 Bergamo, 18, 53
Alvaro, Corrado, 164 Berlinguer, Enrico, 175, 184, 192
Amato, Giuliano, 8, 95, 196 Berlusconi, Silvio, 7, 9, 10, 24, 38, 40, 97,
Andreatta, Beniamino, 188 189, 191, 193, 195
Andreotti, Giulio, 155, 160, 162, 187, 188 Bevilacqua, Piero, 113
Ansaldo, Giovanni, 146 Bianchi, Patrizio, 39
Aosta, 69, 113 Biffi, Giacomo, 121, 122, 182
Arafat, Yasser, 187 Bismarck, Otto von, 14, 138
Arconati, Costanza, 71 Boccella, Enrico, 124
Artom, Isacco, 83 Bollati, Giulio, 3, 49, 53, 55, 57, 71, 149,
Ascoli, Graziadio Isaia, 63 161
Aspromonte, 23, 24 Bologna, 31, 121, 182, 188
Asti, 69, 113 Bompiani, Valentino, 164
Atlantic Pact (NATO), 157, 166, 187 Bonaparte, Louis (Napoleon III), 14, 21,
Aubert, Roger, 129 22, 93, 97, 100, 211, 215
Augustine of Hippo, 51 Bonaparte, Napoleon (Napoleon I), 4, 16,
Avvenire, 182 17, 53, 66, 72, 210
Aymard, Maurice, 31 Bonelli, Franco, 85
Aznar, Jose Maria, 196 Bordiga, Amadeo, 64
Borsieri, Pietro, 56
Badoglio, Pietro, 143 Bossi, Umberto, 40, 194, 195
Baglioni, Guido, 106 Bottai, Giuseppe, 151
Balbo, Cesare, 69, 71, 126 Brindisi, 107, 108
Banca d’Italia, 37, 106, 142, 147, 159, 173, Brittan, Leon, 184
185, 186, 191, 199 Brofferio, Angelo, 86
Bandiera brothers (Attilio and Emilio), 58 Bruno, Giordano, 123
Barberis, Walter, 156 Bülow, Bernhard von, 4
260 INDEX
Cabiati, Attilio, 154 Cobden, Richard, 30

Cacace Paolo, 2 Colajanni, Napoleone, 114
Cafagna, Luciano, 108, 111, 114, 116, 148 Columbus Christopher, 65
Calabria, 24, 51 competitive devaluation of lira, 1, 6, 184–88
Caldwell, Erskine, 164 Comunione e Liberazione, 192
Campanella, Tommaso, 123 Confalonieri, Federico, 17
Candeloro, Giorgio, 100, 126, 130, 134 Confederation of Industry
Caracciolo, Lucio, 171 (Confindustria), 147
Carducci, Giosue, 51, 138 Constitution of the Italian Republic, 37,
Carli, Guido, 6, 162, 182, 186, 191 78, 97, 153, 156, 172
Carocci, Giampiero, 116, 141 Corradini, Enrico, 141, 169
Carosone, Renato, 165 Correnti, Cesare, 59
Carrara, 140 Corriere della Sera, 148, 174, 175, 194
Cartocci, Roberto, 94 Cossiga, Francesco, 187
Cassese, Sabino, 75, 95 Costa, Angelo, 163
Castronovo, Valerio, 183 Craxi, Bettino, 1, 7, 9, 10, 45, 95, 178, 185,
Catania, 112 191–94, 204, 206
Catholic Church (Vatican), 3, 9, 16, 17, crisis of internationalization, 3, 5, 6, 14, 38,
22, 28, 31, 49–51, 59, 60, 64, 73, 81, 41, 97, 99–103, 183, 186–88, 191
82, 93, 94, 102, 121–27, 129–34, 137, Crispi, Francesco, 46, 117, 118, 132, 133,
149, 150, 154, 156–63, 166, 173, 175, 139, 164
180–82, 189, 197, 201 Croce, Benedetto, 9, 91, 94, 107, 126, 133,
Cattaneo, Carlo, 17, 18, 44, 45, 59, 126 154
Cavour, Camillo Benso, Count of, 3, 14, Croce, Giulio Cesare, 52, 53
16, 20–24, 59, 62, 63, 76–79, 83–87, Cuccia, Enrico, 105
92, 93, 101–3, 107, 116, 138 Cuneo, 113, 119
Cenni, Enrico, 69 Cuoco, Vincenzo, 53, 56, 126
Cervetto, Arrigo, 96, 197 Custoza, 99, 100, 139
Cesarotti, Melchiorre, 65
CGIL. See Italian General Confederation D’Alema, Massimo, 40, 196
of Labor D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 66, 138, 146
Chabod, Federico, 159 D’Azeglio Taparelli, Massimo, 20, 30, 126
Charles Albert of Savoy Carignan, King of DC. See Christian Democratic Party
Sardinia, 15, 19, 20, 83 De Amicis, Edmondo, 138, 146
Charles Emmanuel III of Savoy, King of De Benedetti, Carlo, 193
Sardinia, 70 de Cesare, Carlo, 30
Charles Felix of Savoy, King of Sardinia, 19 De Gasperi, Alcide, 9, 24, 154, 155, 157,
Charles III, King of the Two Sicilies, 115 160, 166
Charles VIII, King of France, 44 de Gaulle, Charles, 30
Christian Democratic Party (DC), 9, 10, 37, De Laugier, Cesare, 69, 70
94, 97, 122, 157, 158, 160, 162, 163, 166, de Luca, Giuseppe, 157
172, 174, 177, 178, 185, 188, 192, 194 de Maistre, Joseph, 59
Cialdini, Enrico, 103 De Mauro, Tullio, 60, 62, 63, 179
Ciampi, Carlo Azeglio, 37, 186, 196 Denina, Carlo, 65
Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 51 Depretis, Agostino, 9, 92, 95, 133, 164
CISL. See Italian Confederation of Free De Rita, Giuseppe, 188
Workers De Ruggiero, Guido, 107
Ciuffoletti, Zeffiro, 2 de Sanctis, Francesco, 16, 27, 66, 137–39
Clean Hands operation (“Mani Pulite”), 7, Destra (historical right), 9, 28, 30, 75, 92,
92, 96, 191 101, 103, 109–11, 113, 114, 116, 137
INDEX 261
De Viti de Marco, Antonio, 114 Gentile, Emilio, 138

Devoto, Giacomo, 62 Gentiloni, Ottorino, 140
Dini, Lamberto, 40, 186, 195di Rienzo, Gerschenkron, Alexander, 106
Cola, 50 Gianni, Emilio, 79
d’Orazio, Ettore, 133Dossetti, Giuseppe, Giannone, Pietro, 73, 126
160 Ginsborg, Paul, 153
Draghi, Mario, 199 Gioberti, Vincenzo, 43, 56, 57, 59, 126,
138, 142
Einaudi, Luigi, 142 Giolitti, Giovanni, 24, 118, 132, 133, 139,
Emilia, 21, 28, 75, 77, 79, 129 146, 164
Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy, 70, 71 Gobetti, Piero, 79, 126, 142, 143, 146
Eugene of Savoy-Carignan, 65 Goldoni, Carlo, 126
Gozzi, Carlo, 63
Fanfani, Amintore, 170 Gramaglia, Mariella, 185
Farini, Luigi Carlo, 79, 82, 116 Gramsci, Antonio, 14, 17, 21, 43, 56, 58,
Farneti, Paolo, 107 63–65, 67, 79, 91–93, 95, 117, 122,
fascism, 9, 27, 37, 59, 78, 79, 97, 134, 135, 124–27, 133, 134, 146, 164
143, 145–47, 149–51, 153–62, 164–66, Greppi, Paolo, 53, 55, 56
168, 169, 181, 200 Grew, Raymond, 91, 92
Faulkner, William, 164 Gualterio, Filippo Antonio, 103
Ferdinand IV, King of the Two Sicilies, 115 Guerri, Giordano Bruno, 123, 125
Ferrari, Giuseppe, 102 Guicciardini, Francesco, 123
Ferrata, Giansiro, 164 Gundle, Stephen, 164
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 51
Fini, Gianfranco, 39 Habermas, Jürgen, 156
Florence, 18, 22, 33, 62, 66, 72, 76 Habsburg, House of, 72
Foa, Vittorio, 155 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 164
Fonzi, Fausto, 46 Hemingway, Ernest, 164
Forlì, 140
Forte, Francesco, 172 Italian Communist Party (PCI), 6, 9, 10,
Fortunato, Giustino, 30, 111, 114 40, 97, 153, 155–58, 162, 163, 166,
Forza Italia, 41, 195 170, 172, 174, 175, 177, 178, 180, 184,
Foscolo, Ugo, 126 185, 187, 188, 192, 194
Franchetti, Leopoldo, 111, 114 Italian Confederation of Free Workers
Francis II, King of the Two Sicilies, 96 (CISL), 59, 175
Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, Holy Italian General Confederation of Labor
Roman Emperor, King of Sicily, 115 (CGIL), 59, 175, 184
Friuli, 53, 188 Italian language, 49, 57, 60–63, 66, 67, 70,
71, 137, 141, 168, 179
Gaddafi, Muammar al-, 187 Italian Republican Party (PRI), 188, 194
Galilei, Galileo, 123 Italian Socialist Party (PSI), 7, 28, 60, 94,
Galli, Giorgio, 153 97, 132, 133, 139, 141, 148, 157, 170,
Galli della Loggia, Ernesto, 49, 52, 57, 64, 174, 177, 184, 185, 191, 192
69, 117, 151, 154, 156, 157, 185
Gallino, Luciano, 2 Jacini, Stefano, 78, 93
Gardini, Raul, 193 Jean, Carlo, 39
Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 4, 16, 20, 22–24, 77, Jemolo, Arturo Carlo, 122, 130, 132, 133, 158
82, 121
Garzoni, Tommaso, 52 Kennedy, Paul, 20, 32, 59, 150
Genoa, 15, 44, 86, 103, 160 Kohl, Helmut, 186
262 INDEX
Labriola, Arturo, 113 Marshall Plan (European Recovery

lack of general (national) interest, 2, 4, 11, Program), 158, 165, 166
27, 28, 36, 37, 49, 60, 75, 76, 78, 79, 91, Marx, Karl, 85, 102
96, 97, 102, 103, 106, 107, 116–18, 125, Marzotto, Gaetano, 163
133, 137, 141, 148, 151, 154, 159, 173, Masaniello (Tommaso Aniello), 50
183, 197, 200 Matera, 179
Lama, Luciano, 184 Mattei, Enrico, 187
La Malfa, Ugo, 174, 188 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 16, 20, 51, 58, 60, 92,
La Marmora, Alfonso, 79Lanaro, Silvio, 103, 137–40, 149, 154
163, 168, 173, 174 Meda, Filippo, 134
Lanza, Giovanni, 79, 103, 106 Medici, House of, 72
La Spina, Luigi, 200 “Mediterranean Atlanticism,” 187
Legnago, 65 Melville, Herman, 164
Leopardi, Giacomo, 11, 75, 126 Melzi d’Erli, Francesco, 53, 55
Leopold II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, 96 Menabrea, Luigi Federico, 79, 101, 103, 130
Leo XIII (Gioacchino Pecci), 59, 94 Mengistu, Haile Mariam, 187
Lesseps, Ferdinand de, 22 Menichella, Donato, 173, 174
Lessona, Alessandro, 169 Mentana, 23, 24
Liberal Party (PLI), 195 Merger, Michèle, 147
Limes (Italian Journal of Geopolitics), 36, Meriggi, Marco, 45
37, 39, 40 Metternich, Klemens von, 15, 18
Lissa, 65, 99, 100, 139 Meynaud, Jean, 117
Livy (Titus Livius), 51 Miglio, Gianfranco, 194, 195
Lombardy, 3, 14, 17, 18–20, 38, 41, 43–47, Milan, 14, 17–20, 33, 41, 44–46, 56, 59, 72,
49, 55, 57, 61, 71, 72, 75, 77, 86, 112, 76, 78, 117, 118, 132, 133, 135, 155,
194, 196, 200 160, 163, 165, 167, 179, 189, 191, 194,
Longanesi, Leo, 161 199, 200
low productivity of Italy, 1, 2, 5, 8, 13, 142, Minghetti, Marco, 79, 103, 106, 109, 110
161, 163, 168–74, 184–87, 197 Mitterrand, François, 7, 186
Lualdi, Ercole, 101 Modena, 22
Lupo, Salvatore, 82, 114 Mohammed Said Pasha (Sa’id of Egypt), 22
Mommsen, Theodor, 50
Maccanico, Antonio, 41 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, 70
Maccari, Mino, 161 Montale, Eugenio, 164
Machiavelli, Niccolò, 51, 56, 122, 123 Montanelli, Indro, 50, 86
Mack Smith, Denis, 20, 58, 82, 99, 110, 148 Monti, Mario, 7
Macry, Paolo, 114 Moravia, Alberto, 164
Mafia (Camorra), 24, 29, 175 Mordini, Antonio, 101
Maino Gandhi, Sonia, 4 Mosca, Gaetano, 141
Malaparte, Curzio (Kurt Erich Suckert), 66 Murat, Joachim, 20
Mammarella, Giuseppe, 2 Murat, Lucien, 20
Manfredini, Federico, 53 Muratori, Ludovico, 126
Manifesto, Il, 174 Musella, Luigi, 163
Mantua, 65 Mussolini, Benito, 10, 24, 50, 51, 59,
Manzoni, Alessandro, 56–58, 62, 63, 66, 148–50, 153, 160, 161, 168, 181
126
Maranini, Giuseppe, 164 Naples, 14, 16–19, 21, 23, 24, 33, 53, 55, 61,
Marche, 22, 129 72, 75–78, 83, 112, 115–17, 124
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 66 Nardozzi, Giangiacomo, 186, 187
Marsala, 24 National Alliance (Alleanza nazionale), 39
INDEX 263
NATO. See Atlantic Pact Poe, Edgar Allan, 164

Negri Zamagni, Vera, 31, 85, 95, 97, 106, Poggi, Gianfranco, 130
113, 149 Polsinelli, Antonio, 101
neo-Guelphism, 16, 17, 57. See also Prezzolini, Giuseppe, 50, 52, 65, 81
Gioberti, Vincenzo PRI. See Italian Republican Party
Nievo, Ippolito, 126 Prinetti, Giulio, 142
Nigra, Costantino, 100 Procacci, Giuliano, 72, 73
Nitti, Francesco Saverio, 114, 141 Prodi, Romano, 8, 10, 37, 40, 41, 188, 196,
Nixon, Richard, 183 208
Nobécourt, Jacques, 195 PSI. See Italian Socialist Party
Northern League (Lega Nord), 39–41, 45, Puglia, 107, 115
194, 195
Novara, 20, 113 Quazza, Guido, 72
Ochetto, Achille, 194 Radical Party, 179

Orsini, Felice, 21 Radicati di Sostegno, Alberto, 73
Osservatore Romano, L’, 189 Rampini, Federico, 7
Rattazzi, Urbano, 79, 85, 92
Pace, Enzo, 123, 124, 185 Ratzinger, Joseph. See Benedict XVI
Padoa Schioppa, Tommaso, 10, 196 Reagan, Ronald, 186
Palermo, 24, 50, 63, 77, 115 Repubblica, La, 192, 196
Paolo IV (Giovanni Pietro Carafa), Pope, 124 Ricasoli, Bettino, 20, 79, 81, 82
Pareto, Vilfredo, 141 Ricci, Giovanni, 101
Parini, Giuseppe, 126 Romagna, 22, 140
Pascoli, Giovanni, 138 Romagnosi, Gian Domenico, 58
Pasquino, Gianfranco, 95 Romanelli, Ruggero
Pavese, Cesare, 164 Romano, Liborio, 82
PCI. See Italian Communist Party Romano, Sergio, 1, 6, 21, 23, 24, 41, 67, 82,
Pecchio, Giuseppe, 58 92, 93, 95–97, 116, 151, 153, 154, 156,
Peel, Quentin, 196 187, 196
Pellico, Silvio, 126 Rome, 14, 18, 23, 29, 33, 38, 50, 51, 55, 59,
People’s Party (PPI), 121, 134 63, 64, 66, 75, 76, 78, 94, 100, 103, 112,
Persano, Carlo Pellion di, 24, 65 122, 124, 125, 129–31, 167, 179, 188,
Pertini, Sandro, 188 195, 199, 200
Peschiera, 65 Romeo, Rosario, 85, 91, 92
Petitti di Roreto, Carlo Ilarione, 58 Ronchey, Alberto, 177
Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca), 51, 122 Rosmini, Antonio, 126
Petruccioli, Claudio, 188, 189 Rubattino shipping company, 24, 108
Piedmont, 14–16, 18, 20–22, 30, 61, 62, Ruffo di Bagnara, Fabrizio Dionigi (Army
69–73, 75–79, 82, 83, 85–87, 97, 103, of the Holy Faith), 53, 121, 130
113, 116, 117, 121, 129, 137 Ruini, Camillo, 201
Piovene, Guido, 164 Rumi, Giorgio, 44
Pisacane, Carlo, 58 Rusconi, Gian Enrico, 137, 148
Pius IX (Giovanni Maria Mastai Ferretti), Russo, Vincenzio, 53, 55, 56, 58
Pope, 17, 22, 23, 93, 96, 121, 126, 127, 129
Pius X (Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto), Pope, Salvatorelli, Luigi, 146
140 Salvatorelli, Mario, 178
Pius XI (Achille Ratti), Pope, 158 Salvemini, Gaetano, 78, 114, 143
Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli), Pope, 131, 160, 162 Santarosa, Santorre de’ Rossi di, 19
Pivano, Fernanda, 164 Saroyan, William, 164
264 INDEX
Sarkozy, Nicolas, 11 Tremonti, Giulio, 199

Sartori, Giovanni, 182 Trentino-Alto Adige, 178
Savoy, House of, 3, 15, 19–22, 65, 69–72 Treviglio, 18
Scalfaro, Oscar Luigi, 162 Troya, Carlo, 126
Scarfoglio, Edoardo, 66 Turati, Filippo, 46, 117, 118, 139
Schiavone, Aldo, 114 Turiello, Pasquale, 113
Sclopis, Federigo Paolo, 83, 85 Turin, 14–18, 20–24, 44, 69–73, 76–78, 85,
Segni, Mario, 194 86, 99, 101, 103, 113, 117, 160, 167,
Sella, Quintino, 100–103 174, 179, 200
Seton-Watson, Christopher, 95 Turri, Jacopo, 40
Settembrini, Luigi, 63 Tuscany, 21, 28, 62, 72, 75, 79, 96, 179
Sforza, Carlo, 154, 155 Twain, Mark (Samuel Langhorne
Sforza, Ludovico (Ludovico il Moro), 44 Clemens), 164
Sicily, 3, 4, 21–24, 66, 75, 77, 111, 112, 192
Sieyès, Emmanuel-Joseph, 35 Umbria, 22
Sinistra (historical left), 9, 27, 30, 86, 92, 93, Ungaretti, Giuseppe, 66
95, 99, 101, 106, 109–11, 116, 137, 138
Soderini, Edoardo, 94 Veneto, 17, 28, 188
Sonnino, Sidney, 113 Venice, 18, 33, 44, 72, 100, 124, 125
Sordi, Alberto, 165 Ventura di Raulica, Gioacchino, 126
Spadolini, Giovanni, 132, 133 Vercelli, 113
Spaventa, Silvio, 20, 92, 109 Verga, Giovanni, 66
Stampa, La, 178, 194, 200 Verona, 22, 65
Steno (Stefano Vanzina), 165 Vico, Giambattista, 126
Strauss, Franz Josef, 189 Victor Amedeus II, Duke of Savoy, 72
Susa, 69 Victor Emmanuel I, Duke of Savoy, then
Sylos Labini, Paolo, 115, 124, 169 King of Sardinia, 19
Victor Emmanuel II of Savoy, King of
terrorism, 21, 175 Sardinia, then King of Italy, 16, 22, 79,
Thatcher, Margaret, 1, 7, 186 103, 121
Thiers, Adolphe, 130 Viesti, Gianfranco, 114
“Third Italy,” 28, 193 Villafranca, 22, 23, 77, 100
Tilgher, Adriano, 146 Villani, Pasquale, 112
Tittoni, Tommaso, 142 Villari, Pasquale, 65, 111–13, 116
Togliatti, Palmiro, 153, 158, 166 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro), 51
Tommaseo, Niccolò, 57, 66, 126 Visco, Vincenzo, 178
Toniolo, Gianni, 105 Visconti Venosta, Emilio, 130
transformism, 5, 27, 85, 86, 91–97, 116–18, Visentini, Bruno, 178
133, 143, 151, 160, 163, 164, 170 Viziano, Attilio, 178

The Failure of Italian Nationhood The Geopolitics of A Troubled Identity

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Italian and Italian American Studies

REBECCA WEST JOSEPHINE GATTUSO HENDIN

FRED GARDAPHÉ PHILIP V. CANNISTRARO†

Queer Italia: Same-Sex Desire in Italian Literature and Film

The Geopolitics of a Troubled Identity

Translated to English by Brian Knowlton. Mr. Knowlton is a Washington-based

First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Graziano, Manlio, 1958-

Design by Scribe Inc.

First edition: September 2010

Printed in the United States of America.

Preface to the English Edition vii

18 A Country of Limited Sovereignty 153

This book by Manlio Graziano proposes a historical interpretation of the present

Encountering the “European constraint”—to employ a phrase happily coined by

All’Italia indifferente fu imposta la rivoluzione da motivi esterni e da contingenze

Italy’s External Origins

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A number of historians have recently established a relationship between the

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Between Myth and Reality

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A Weak and Fragmented Bourgeoisie

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“Lombard-Venetian Kingdom” was always positive, whereas that of the Austrian

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realities of the Lombard bourgeoisie—the most developed, the most entrepre-

“Diplomatizing the Revolution”

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possibility of testing its allies’ intentions and availability regarding a possible

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“Determined Historical Connections”

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a hagiography in which appreciation for his undeniable military qualities became

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The Original Characteristics

How Premature Development

“One, None, and a Hundred Thousand”

The constants of postunitary Italian history reflect realities rooted deeply in

In reality, it is clear that these factors, appearances notwithstanding, never

The Phantom Nation

The Origins of the Nation

B efore proceeding further, a rapid digression is indispensable regarding the

Denationalization and Renationalization

Since evolutions in international relations have brought the hypothesis of Euro-

and the difficulties in birthing a second could be attributed to “denationalization”—

holding company), and of Silvio Berlusconi (former chairman of Fininvest) are

The Northern Question

“The Particular Interest”

Civil Magnificence and Political Impotence

The Social Psychology of Lombardy

psychology of the north, and particularly of Milan. They can be classified as a

Mythical Peasant and Empirical Peasant

There was no shortage of rebellions against such-and-such a baron or this-or-that

The Italian Path to Catonism