Alessandro Torlonia

The Pope's Banker

Daniela Felisini

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9783319419978
• eBook ISBN: 9783319419985
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Financial Services
• Index: Economics

This book provides a vivid biography of a towering Italian banker, pioneer and entrepreneur. It weaves the entrepreneurial ventures of Alessandro Torlonia(1800-1886) through the narratives of business and politics in the Nineteenth century, the growth of European financial markets and the decline of Papal power during the Italian Risorgimento. The discussion is founded in rigoroushistorical research using original sources such as theArchivum Secretum Vaticanum papers and other official documents; the archives of the Torlonia family, and of the Rothschild bank in Paris; memoirs; correspondences, and newspapers. Through this book readers learn that Alessandro Torlonia was a man of many faces, who was one of the most complex and influential characters of Italian economic life in the nineteenth century. Felisini also provides an expert critique of the financial history of the papacy: an area of heightened interest given the notoriety of relations betweenthe Holy See and its bankers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Focal topics such as the history of European elites and the history of European financial markets will have an interdisciplinary appeal for scholars and researchers.

© The Author(s) 2016

Daniela FelisiniAlessandro TorloniaPalgrave Studies in the History of Finance10.1007/978-3-319-41998-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Daniela Felisini¹

(1)

University of Rome Tor Vergata, Rome, Italy

End Abstract

1.1 Between Biography and History

Few figures in nineteenth-century Rome had as striking a presence as Alessandro Torlonia and his family: they are remembered and celebrated in chapels, shrines, obelisks and inscriptions, as well as by their palazzi and other residences. The Torlonia family were a source of great interest and fascination to their contemporaries, and the subject of countless anecdotes, pamphlets and satirical pieces. Most travellers and diplomats of the period mentioned them in their memoirs and dispatches, Stendhal’s colourful pages providing a prime example.¹ The banker even appears in novels of fantasy and imagination, such as Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo ² and Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon.³ As late as the 1940s a fictionalized Torlonia became the protagonist of a tale by a German writer: his book, including its title, conjured up a character as fabulously rich and powerful as Croesus, somewhere between history and legend.⁴

This profusion of references helps us to see how a glittering but also complex and ambivalent representation of Alessandro Torlonia has been constructed, run through with the stories of a legend—enormous wealth, exceptional enterprises, magnificent works of art—but also with the prejudices that have accompanied the activities of bankers across the centuries. These were prejudices with ancient roots, rekindled by the fact that Alessandro was the Pope’s banker and, at the same time,enjoyed close relationships with great Jewish financiers such as the Rothschilds. While rooted in the Papal State, Torlonia’s life and affairs in fact extended across the Europe of the nineteenth century, a period that saw the triumph of finance; financiers represented a new aristocracy based on money,⁵ portrayed by great literature as “the brightest flame, eros, thought, feelings, emotions, degradation, hell, power, rage.”⁶

In order to fully understand the life of Alessandro Torlonia, banker and entrepreneur, I have therefore first of all had to dispel this aura of myth. This has only been possible through the careful critical analysis of a wide range of different sources, from those of the company and the family to those kept in the Vatican Secret Archives. Balance sheets and private letters, papal chirographs and contracts, book-keeping entries and diplomatic correspondence: these have provided the basis for a book that threads its way between biography and history, following a business history approach.

I have thus been faced with the complex issues of biography as history: the methodological challenge posed by having the subject character and his context constantly in dialogue; the inherently interdisciplinary nature of biography; the degree of my inevitable authorial involvement in addressing the character⁷; and the need to refer frequently to the interweaving of biography and historical narration.

The relationship between biography and history is not a simple one, and has drawn attention since classical times⁸; it has come through the medieval and modern eras, and in the contemporary period has found new themes and spheres of debate. In the course of such a long trajectory this complex relationship has experienced variation and change, which has depended both on the shifting conceptions of history as a form of knowledge of the past, and on the different ways of perceiving and writing biography.⁹

There was for a long time an under-appreciation of biographical method, whose results had a very critical reception from academic historiography.¹⁰ Writing a biography has often been seen as less rigorous than writing history.¹¹ This negative view was reinforced by the rise of historicism, which in both its idealist and its Marxist incarnations strongly influenced historical research up until the second half of the twentieth century. Teleological and providentialist visions of human development did not completely deny the role played by individual figures, but interpreted this as action determined by external forces and processes, while limited importance was attributed to their characteristics.¹²

In competition with the different types of historicism, the mid-twentieth century saw the major influence of the Nouvelle histoire (or “new history”), the successor to the Annales School; this pushed the boundaries of research towards the social sciences, preferring the longer term of material civilization and mentalités. However, the almost exclusive interest in the longue durée had little time for the “short term” of a single life, and thus little consideration of the impact of individuals on the unfolding of historical events, while interest in patterns of thought and the emotions was directed more towards collectivities than individual subjects.¹³

At the end of the 1970s, however, a new sensitivity towards the narration of individual lives emerged. No longer was it seen as a peripheral methodology, but rather as having the potential to illuminate processes of socio-economic and cultural change and cast a light on segments of society hitherto ignored by historical enquiry. There was discussion of a “biographical turn,” to indicate that biographical method and narration had fully entered the human and social sciences.¹⁴ Within the field of history, this turn was supported by various phenomena. There was the impact of the decline of historicisms and their providentialistic visions, which, as discussed, had denied the importance of individual action.¹⁵ New historiographical currents such as “microhistory” promoted the value of life stories,¹⁶ and a new biographical approach developed with Gender Studies, focusing attention on the relationship between public and private life.¹⁷ Biographical method was given recognition for its ability to offer the historian insights into the internal motivations and intentions of individual action.

The debate around the relationship between biography and history thus entered a new phase, which continues today. Mistrust of biography was still voiced, especially regarding its temporal dimension: it was argued that the narrow confines of an individual existence would compromise the understanding and analysis of longer-term socio-economic, political and cultural dynamics.¹⁸

However, historical biography has responded to these challenges by reviewing its aims and methods, and demonstrating its ability to offer insights that prevent a reduction “to rigid frameworks of causality, and to over-simple and generalizing models and paradigms.”¹⁹ The post-modern age, suspicious of “grand narratives,” has been more open to an appreciation of the decisive role that individuals have played: “biography can be seen as the archetypal ‘contingent narrative’ and the one best able to show the great importance of particular locations and circumstances and the multiple layers of historical change and experience.”²⁰

Biography acquired greater importance in academic circles from the point when it was recognized that the study of individual lives can, at the same time, grasp both the particular and the general, the subjective and the objective, and the short and long term: individual agency cuts across and reacts with long-term economic, political and social processes. A range of evidence suggests that the relationship between the individual and their context is extremely strong and resistant, and therefore that the individual can be seen as a vital component, and a necessary starting point from which we can turn to history in general: “[h]istory could hardly exist without biographical insights—without the texture of human endeavour that emanates from a full appreciation of human motivation, the real or perceived constraints on human action, and exogenous influences on human behaviour.”²¹

From this perspective it can be seen that biography is not a separate method from history; it requires the knowledge of a multiplicity of disciplines, and its reliability is also founded on the careful critical analysis of sources and the related credibility of interpretation. The trajectory of a person’s existence is seen as an interpretative key: a prism that allows a number of historical fields to be held together.²²

In relation to eminent characters, famous men and women who were members of the ruling classes, biography has profoundly changed. It has been enriched by an awareness of the importance of context, and at the same time by reflections on the issue of individual agency in history.²³ It does not restrict itself to placing people within their historical context, but asks how they dealt with the conditions imposed by the outside, and how they used the material and immaterial resources available in the context that they inhabited. The attempt is thus to understand the networks of relationships that they constructed and which consolidated their professional, financial or political rise, from their development as young people to their arrival at the summit of their careers. Such explorations can shine a fresh light both on how institutions and markets functioned, and on how men and women understood and constructed themselves and gave direction to their lives and their society. Biography also attempts to penetrate their internal world and the effect this had on the difficulties they faced and the decisions they made, as I have done in reconstructing events in the life of Torlon...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Origins and Rise of the Torlonia Family and Bank
• 3. Alessandro Torlonia: A Passion for Business
• 4. The Pope’s Banker
• 5. A Banker of European Stature
• 6. Prince and Entrepreneur
• 7. Torlonia, Witness to a Century
• Backmatter