The election of the tenth President of the Italian Republic

Abstract

The election on the first ballot of Carlo Azeglio Ciampi to the Presidency of the Republic came as a surprise. This article explores how it occurred by analysing the criteria usually employed to screen the candidates for President and the misplaced efforts by the secretary of the Partito popolare to win the office for a candidate of his party. An assessment of the powers of the President, in particular those concerning the appointment of the Prime Minister and the dissolution of parliament, is offered with reference to the experience of outgoing President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro. The success of Walter Veltroni, secretary of the Leftist Democrats, and of Gianfranco Fini, leader of the National Alliance, in persuading the opposition to vote for Ciampi is related to their interest in reigniting a process for the reform of the political system and the construction of a majoritarian and bipolar democracy. President Ciampi may prove to be very helpful in this difficult task, but most of the initiative and responsibility lie with party leaders and members of parliament.     

'The Return of Ulysses': Gladstone, Liberalism and Late Victorian Politics

Gladstone, Whiggery and the Liberal Party, 1874–1886 . By T. A.Jenkins. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1988. vi, 328 pp. £32.50.
The Gladstonian Turn of Mind: Essays Presented to J. B. Conacher . Edited by Bruce L. Kinzer. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 1985. xv, 294 pp. £35.00.
Gladstone, Home Rule and the Ulster Question, 1882–93 . By James Loughlin. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. 1986. 369 pp. No price given.
Parliamentary Politics and the Home Rule Crisis: The British House of Commons in 1886 . By W. C. Lubenow. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1988. vii, 389 pp. £37.50.
The Gladstone Diaries with Cabinet Minutes and Prime Ministerial Correspondence, Volume IX, January 1875-December 1880 . Edited by H. C. G. Matthew. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1986. xcvii, 714 pp. £55.00.
Parnell and the First Home Rule Episode, 1884–87 . By Alan O'Day. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. 1986. x, 314 pp. £25.00.     

The Six Fevrier 1934 and the 'Survival' of the French Republic

The Paris riots of the six février 1934 are rememberedchiefly as the event that provided the initial spark and theeventual rationale for the anti-fascist Popular Front. However,most French historians have tended to downplay the importanceof the riots themselves, arguing that the Republic was not underserious threat, and that the Left at the time greatly exaggeratedthe danger. Indeed, the fact that the regime ‘survived’these events has often been cited as proof of its resilience,of France’s deep-rooted ‘democratic political culture’,and its inbuilt ‘immunity’ to fascism. This historiographicalreview argues that the standard interpretation of the six févrieris deeply flawed, especially in its tendency to deduce the intentionsof the actors from the outcome of the events. The six févrierconstituted a serious challenge to the regime, and created adangerously fluid situation in which a variety of ‘outcomes’became possible. It should be analysed not as a discrete andtemporally circumscribed event but as a key moment in an ongoingprocess of political radicalization on the French Right.     

In enemy hands: the Byzantine experience of captivity between the seventh and tenth centuries

The present paper deals with forced migration experienced by subjects of the Byzantine Empire captured by foreign enemies in the context of warfare between the seventh and the tenth centuries. The focus of the first part is on the scenarios faced by individuals and groups when an enemy had taken control of a settlement or a larger territory. The second part discusses aspects of the role social status and gender played in the process of being taken over and then (possibly but not necessarily) held in captivity. Although one can trace similarities in the way captors treated their captives on different occasions, an overgeneralizing approach can prove misleading, distracting us from the dynamics of the consequences that war and abduction had on both the agency of the victor and the fate of the loser in the early Middle Ages.     

French jurisdictional supremacy in Gascony: one aspect of the ducal government's response

As a result of the 1259 treaty of Paris, the king of England resumed a feudal relationship with the French monarch, thus holding his duchy of Gascony as a fief. This meant that Capetian officials could exercise their master's jurisdictional authority in the duchy, in part because of the supreme appellate powers of the royal court, the Parlement of Paris. This they did with enthusiasm and skill, causing considerable disruption to English power in the duchy. Accepting the challenge, ducal officials devised a number of tactics to thwart the exercise of French jurisdiction in Gascony. These methods were altogether illegal or even criminal in nature, but the officials felt they were necessitated by the critical threat of Capetian authority to Plantagenet control of Gascony. Unfortunately, such tactics did little to alleviate their jurisdictional problems. Ducal authorities failed to create any consistent and systematic program for ending permanently Gascon judicial appeals to the French court, and they were hamstrung both theoretically and physically in the haphazard efforts they did make. Far from halting the advancement of Capetian jurisdictional authority in the duchy, the unlawful methods merely underscored the precarious nature of the English position there.     

The United States, Algeria, and the Fall of the Fourth French Republic

The relative alacrity with which the United States accepted the collapse of the Fourth Republic in France in May 1958 stands in marked contrast to the obsessive concern with French internal stability that characterized the earlier postwar period of U.S.-French relations. Indeed, the Americans appear to have played a considerable role in undermining the very stability of the regime they had done so much since 1947 to help preserve. Much had changed in the intervening period that helps explain the revised American attitude. The French economy, precarious and dependent on American assistance in the years 1947 to 1952, was now robust and growing, and the threat of the French Communist party, which the Americans believed strong enough to seize power virtually at will in 1947, was now much reduced. The French army had been built by Washington into a powerful military force, meant to be the linchpin of European defense against a Soviet invasion, but it was now heavily embroiled in Algeria, and its role was on the way to being assumed by a restored German army, negotiated on the heels of the failure to construct a European Defense Community in 1954.¹ Finally, in the immediate postwar period, Paris and Washington had acted as allies, the United States offering military assistance and almost fully financing the Indochina War by 1953, although the French goal, to preserve their crumbling empire, became obscured by the American obsession with the possible expansion of Soviet power. In Algeria, in contrast, the conflict began in November 1954, following the humiliating French defeat at Dien Bien Phu and withdrawal from Indochina. In the absence of communism as a salient issue, American anticolonial attitudes came into play, and frustration grew with the French inability to bring a conclusion to a war that, as viewed in Washington, increasingly appeared to play into the hands of Soviet ambitions.     

French jurisdictional supremacy in Gascony: one aspect of the ducal government's response

As a result of the 1259 treaty of Paris, the king of England resumed a feudal relationship with the French monarch, thus holding his duchy of Gascony as a fief. This meant that Capetian officials could exercise their master's jurisdictional authority in the duchy, in part because of the supreme appellate powers of the royal court, the Parlement of Paris. This they did with enthusiasm and skill, causing considerable disruption to English power in the duchy. Accepting the challenge, ducal officials devised a number of tactics to thwart the exercise of French jurisdiction in Gascony. These methods were altogether illegal or even criminal in nature, but the officials felt they were necessitated by the critical threat of Capetian authority to Plantagenet control of Gascony. Unfortunately, such tactics did little to alleviate their jurisdictional problems. Ducal authorities failed to create any consistent and systematic program for ending permanently Gascon judicial appeals to the French court, and they were hamstrung both theoretically and physically in the haphazard efforts they did make. Far from halting the advancement of Capetian jurisdictional authority in the duchy, the unlawful methods merely underscored the precarious nature of the English position there.