Twentieth Century Italy

A Social History

Jonathan Dunnage

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780582292789
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317886907
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Following a historically chronological approach, and with a clear focus on the marked regional diversity characterising Italy, this volume analyses the impact of social, economic, cultural and political transformation on the lives of Italians. It assesses their living standards, their health and education, their working conditions and their leisure activities. The final part of the book examines contemporary Italian society in the light of the political and moral crisis of the early 1990s.

Chapter 1

Italian society in the wake of the Risorgimento, 1860–1914

The difficult unification of the Italians

The Risorgimento, the name given to the process of unification of Italy during the nineteenth century, saw the joining together of states of varying levels of political enlightenment.¹ The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (making up the South and Sicily) had been ruled by backward-looking dynastic powers. In Piedmont, the leading state in the unification process, the monarchy had ceded some of its powers to the middle classes following popular and nationalist insurrections throughout Italy in 1848. Other parts of the Italian peninsula had been subjected to foreign dominion, as in the case of Austrian-controlled Veneto and Lombardy. Much of Central Italy had been ruled by the Papacy. The unification process represented, therefore, both an act of national redemption, as Italians were liberated from foreign rule, and a Liberal revolution against absolutist rule and temporal power.

However, it was not easy to generate support for the Risorgimento among the mostly peasant peoples of Italy. It has been estimated that in 1861 between 2.5 per cent and 10 per cent of the population were able to use standard Italian, with the majority of Italians speaking local dialect only.² This did little to create a sense of national consciousness among them. Many remained loyal to the dynastic powers from which the Liberal forces wished to liberate them. Others were opposed to the dynasties but equally opposed to new forms of rule. Their loyalties often varied according to region or province and on occasion veered between support for progressive and reactionary forces, particularly in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Adrian Lyttelton notes that Calabria, for example, was the centre of anti-Borbon risings in 1848 but following unification gave strong support to counter-revolutionary brigandage. The Abruzzi, on the other hand, were consistently pro-Borbon: ‘Even to generalize about single provinces is rash; southern peasant communities were remarkably autarchic and their mutual jealousies were another source of conflicting political allegiances’.³

Because of their frequent mobilization in the cause of counter-revolution, the fathers of the Risorgimento mistrusted the masses to the extent that, while prepared to make use of them for revolutionary purposes, they were reluctant to concede power to them. Even figures like Giuseppe Mazzini, one of the main inspirers of Italian unification, belonged to an enlightened middle class and aristocratic élite that was not prepared to overturn economic injustice or consider redistribution of the land, with the result, according to Roger Absalom, that it was ‘impossible realistically to tap the revolutionary potential of the peasantry, which formed the vast majority of the population’.⁴ This attitude was maintained by the Piedmontese Liberals leading the unification process under Count Camillo di Cavour with the support of the monarchy. Even the Republican hero of the Risorgimento, Giuseppe Garibaldi, whose legendary ‘Expedition of the Thousand’ to liberate Sicily from Borbon rule caused Cavour and King Victor Emanuel II to fear a radical democratic revolution throughout Italy, did not hesitate to put down social uprisings in Sicily.

During the 1860s the rule of the Liberal Right (Destra Storica) often appeared to take on the characteristics of a dictatorship rather than a politically enlightened power. Popular participation in the life of the new nation state was limited by the restriction of the electorate to 2 per cent of the population, representing half a million male Italians out of a population of 32 million. The Liberals’ fear of conceding too much power to the people was also reflected in their adoption of police and criminal codes – inherited from the Piedmontese ancien régime and Napoleon’s occupation of the peninsula at the beginning of the nineteenth century – severely limiting personal freedom.⁵ In the South in particular, where unification was perceived by many as little more than a foreign invasion, law and order was often maintained through the imposition of martial law. The strong tensions characterizing the rule of the Destra in the South were partly a result of the failure of the unifiers to understand the broad cultural differences between themselves and those they were supposed to have liberated. Northern Italian civil servants fed with Northern cultural models felt that Southern inhabitants unjustly rejected the ‘civilization’ that they were bringing.⁶

However, more than an indication of disregard for the principles of Liberal democracy, the authoritarian expedients that the Destra Storica employed to maintain order were often a result of a sense of vulnerability and powerlessness in the face of serious opposition to the unification process. Though the centralized system of administration and policing over the provinces under the command of the prefects (of Napoleonic inspiration) was potentially oppressive, in practice local forces were easily able to undermine the power of the central government. According to a recent study of Sicily by Lucy Riall, ‘many prefects, when surveyed in 1869 over proposals to increase local autonomy, argued that their capacity to direct local government was severely limited’.⁷ Similarly, authoritarian methods of rule in the South were also justified on account of widespread brigandage. While, according to official figures, between 1861 and 1865 5,212 brigands were executed or killed in action against the Italian army, casualties among troops sent to fight them were equally serious. Though few were killed in action, thousands died of malaria and typhus.⁸

Though often interpreted as a justified resistance against a ‘military invasion’, brigandage saw an intertwining of social, political and purely criminal motives, bringing together peasants, bandits and members of the ex-Borbon state. As Lyttelton notes, peasant support of the brigands was strong because law breakers were not disliked ‘in societies which had their own methods of resolving conflict which were at odds with the official system of law enforcement’.⁹ Peasant support of forms of rebellion throughout Italy was also due to the consent if not open support of representatives of the Church that were angered by the state’s confiscation of their lands and imposition of new restrictions on their privileges. The 1869 riots in Emilia and Romagna against a tax on grain were partly encouraged by the Catholic clergy. Lack of popular support for Liberal policies was exacerbated by the Vatican’s non-expedit, following the annexation in 1870 of Rome and the removal of the temporal power of the Papacy. According to this Papal edict, practising Catholics were barred from participating in political activities. Stirred up by discontent over high taxes and enforced military conscription, the peasantry were also drawn into acts of rebellion promoted by Radical, Socialist and Republican movements advocating social revolution and the overthrow of the monarchy.

The above conflict and tensions formed the root of the divide between what is known as paese reale (real Italy) and paese legale (legal Italy), expressing the difficulty experienced by the great majority of Italians in identifying with the aspirations of the Liberal political class, which appeared not to take account of their needs and to deny them citizenship of the new nation state. This naturally hindered the development of national consciousness among the Italian masses. Such a divide, which has dominated Italian life for much of the twentieth century, was a consequence of not only high levels of indifference towards unification but also the devastating effects of economic unification on some regions and sections of the population. During the immediate post-unification period a positive response to the idea of a united Italy had not been lacking. This clearly emerges in the desire of each community to be put on the national communications network as the railways developed during the 1860s. It was the subsequent economic policies of the Italian state – discussed in the following section – which encouraged many Italians to look back nostalgically to their former rulers.¹⁰

The economic unification of Italy

At the moment of political unification Italy was a poor and overpopulated country in which the majority of inhabitants lived by agriculture. The main crops produced were cereals, grapes, oil, fruit, cheese, silk, hemp and flax. However, Italy was not self-sufficient in food. This was a consequence of the scarcity and misuse of capital and the fact that large areas of land were unfit for cultivation as a result of erosion and flooding. Yet, there were strong regional contrasts in farming forms and levels of productivity. Northern agriculture was the most advanced, particularly in the plains, showing high levels of diversification, productivity and commercial development and strong links with manufacturing. Many farms were equipped with irrigation and drainage systems. The sharecropping systems present in much of Central Italy were less commercially developed. Southern agriculture was particularly disadvantaged by erosion (owing to excessive deforestation), summer droughts, malaria and earthquakes. With its poor lines of communication, it was mainly characterized by commercially backward large estates, latifondi, producing cereals or rearing livestock. Some coastal areas of the South produced luxury goods, including wine, oil and citrus fruits. In Sardinia the main economic activity was sheep farming. A large proportion of those who worked the land – whether for the most advanced capitalist farmers in the Po Valley or the latifondisti in the South – were landless day labourers (braccianti) who lived in dire poverty as a result of low wages and the fact that they were not guaranteed work all the year round. Those peasants that owned or rented land often grew crops for subsistence only. A lack of resources together with an inward-looking mentality prevented the development of more efficient farming methods in most areas. Industrial activity of any significance was more or less restricted to the North-West of Italy (mainly metal and textiles) with pockets of industrial development in Veneto, Tuscany and Naples and a sulphur-mining industry in Sicily.¹¹

As Denis Mack Smith notes, manufacturing was strongly linked to agriculture, as is illustrated by the strength of cottage industries, especially in the textile field, which were gradually replaced by factories employing agricultural workers seasonally. A census of 1861 calculated that, while 8 million Italians were employed in agriculture, only 3 million were employed in craftsmanship and manufacture of which the majority were part-time female workers. Limited industrial development in Italy may be attributed to a lack of raw materials like coal which had to be imported, an abundant but unskilled labour force, a reliance on expensive industrial machinery from abroad and limited lines of communication and energy sources. Industrial development was more or less limited to the North-West because of the development of sources of hydro-electric power, good transport facilities, accessible markets and a stronger industrial tradition. Perhaps most significantly there existed in Italy an archaic mentality that disfavoured industrial development and entrepreneurial activities, such that many industries were financed by foreign developers.¹²

The government of the Liberal Right has been credited with completion of the process of economic and administrative unification of Italy with the creation of single tax, administrative and judicial systems, the abolition of customs barriers, land reform and the building of a road and rail network. Yet, the immediate consequences of such policies were often devastating, reflecting the narrow social basis and lack of economic vision of the ruling class. The Southern economy was unable to compete with that of the North, now that it was no longer protected, while less developed Northern industries proved to be equally fragile. Although one of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• Map
• Introduction: between tradition and modernity
• 1 Italian society in the wake of the Risorgimento, 1860–1914
• 2 Social fragmentation and violence in Italy, 1915–25
• 3 The experience of Fascism, 1925–39
• 4 War, civil conflict and the defeat of Fascism, 1940–50
• 5 Social, cultural and economic transformation in post-war Italy (1950–80)
• 6 Affluence and moral crisis: Italian society in the eighties and nineties
• Conclusion: Italian society at the dawn of the twenty-first century
• Appendix I: Chronology
• Appendix II: Glossary
• Select bibliography
• Index