Italian state politics and the disruptive factor of volunteer groups

The Cretan crisis and the Greco-Ottoman War meant a revival of philhellenism all over Europe. Especially in Italy the war caused vigorous philhellenic reactions: demonstrations and collections of money for the Greek cause, as well as organization and shipping of groups of volunteers to the Greek war fronts. Scholarly discussion on the Italian involvement in the crisis of 1897 has revolved around two main foci: Italy’s search for a diplomatic role and a national identity between “grandezza” and “raccoglimento” policies or Italian philhellenism as an example of the power of philhellenism in nineteenth-century Europe within the broader international context of Risorgimento philhellenism. In this paper, Italian state politics will be discussed from another perspective, namely the Italian policy towards the Italian volunteer groups fighting for Greece. Published Italian state documents as well as research studies based on further Italian primary sources not having dealt with the specific desideratum, the allies’ angle, also partly the Greek perspective, as revealed through their state archives allow us to extensively reconstruct the different steps taken by the government in Rome in its endeavours to deal efficiently with the uncontrolled dynamics of its national revolutionaries both inside and outside the country. Irregular volunteer groups claimed their right and in part imposed their share to actively participate and influence directly or indirectly national and international policies, aspiring to represent continuity in a powerful revolutionary tradition against the priorities of nation-states. In times of internal crises, and despite their divergent, even contradictory, policies, nation-states of the nineteenth century came together in their objective to defend their exclusive right to shape and pursue national policy according to their priorities against the disruptive factor of national revolutionaries, and to deal efficiently with – or repress – the actions and potential for instigation by volunteer groups both at home and abroad, especially when internal collection was for them the only viable alternative left.     

The exiles of the Risorgimento: Italian volunteers in the Portuguese Civil War (1832–34)

Abstract

Between 1832 and 1834 during the civil war against the partisans of absolutism in Portugal about a hundred Italians fought as volunteers in the Portuguese liberal army. These Italians were motivated to participate by a Romantic culture of war that was strongly rooted in the liberal nationalism of the Italian Risorgimento, but above all, the decision to fight as a volunteer abroad was the result of an international movement of political solidarity with Portuguese liberalism in the early 1830s with which the Italian liberals came into contact during their political exile in France and in Belgium. For the Italian, fighting as volunteers in Portugal proved to be a decisive political experience which deeply shaped their own political ideas of the nation that the volunteers would subsequently draw on in their different political and professional roles in Italy where they became ministers, diplomats and generals of the Kingdom of Italy.     

Southern rebels against Italian unification: the Great Brigandage in the province of Capitanata

This article explores counter-revolutionary brigandage in Southern Italy after 1860 (also known as Great Brigandage). Working from archival sources, the article offers a new interpretation of the interactions between the political, social and criminal aspects of the guerrilla war against the Risorgimento. Notwithstanding the plurality of the individual motives leading single actors to fight, it is argued that brigandage was an essentially political phenomenon and that the alliances between common bandits and loyalist forces were made possible only in the macro-political setting of the collapse of the Neapolitan monarchy, the difficulties facing Italian state-building, and the emergence of popular legitimist sympathies after 1860.     

Weapons,words, politics: the three seasons of the post-unification exile of the Bourbon Monarchy (1860–1866)

ABSTRACT

This article reconstructs the ‘three seasons’ of the exile of the Bourbon rulers of southern Italy after 1860. Unlike the previous periods of exile suffered by the dynasty (in 1799 and between 1806 and 1815), the Bourbon exile after Unification took the form of a ‘hierarchical’ emigration government, ruler and diplomatic corps, and numerous foreign volunteers ready to fight for the monarchy. Between 1860 and 1866 this ‘control centre’ organized armed expeditions against the Kingdom of Italy, while deploying a variety of political strategies that through propaganda offered the promise of modernization in the shape of the concession of a constitution for the Mezzogiorno and the ‘nationalization’ of southern Italy. This propaganda campaign was combined with diplomatic pressures on the European powers. Sicily played a crucial role in these projects and became the principal Mediterranean platform for the attempts to restore the Bourbon monarchy. But although the war of 1866 between Italy and Austria brought these strategies to an end, many of the arguments set out by the Bourbons in exile would later be absorbed into the debates on the ‘Southern Question’.     

Introduction: Italians Do It Better? The Occupation of Spaces for Radical Struggles in Italy

Italy could be considered a social laboratory in relation to radical theories, practices, struggles and radical political conditions. It is worth exploring what kind of laboratory Italy is and investigating some of the features of current struggles that challenge neoliberalism and the revival of fascism. One way to grasp the specificity of the Italian context is by considering an inherent set of social conflicts that take the form of multidimensional challenges, embracing social, cultural, economic and decision‐making dimensions. Put succinctly, a prefigurative politics is the lens suggested to interpret the experience of squatting and commoning, which are the fundamental attributes of many related struggles over housing and Social Centers and environmental protection.     

Sins of memory: reflections on the lack of an Italian Nuremberg and the administration of international justice after 1945

This article reconstructs the history of the major trial that the Allies planned to institute against the entire military command of the Nazi armies operating in Italy from 1943 to 1945. The trial was prepared on the same juridical and technical bases as the Nuremberg Tribunal, but it never took place. The reason was that it would have jeopardized the re-integration of the Federal Republic in the European community, and would also have risked placing the Italian government in the embarrassing position of having the Italian army prosecuted for crimes committed in the countries occupied by the Rome?–?Berlin axis. For those reasons, the trial was abandoned and instead only legal proceedings were taken only for some marginal cases, creating the impression that these were simply isolated cases of individual responsibility. The enigma of this missing trial and an explanation of the limits of international justice can only be understood in terms of the political situation in post-war Europe, the relations between Italy and the Allies and the double game played by the Italian government. These events served, however, to give rise to highly selective memories of totalitarianism and the war.     

Between myth and reality: the euro crisis and the downfall of Silvio Berlusconi

In mid-November 2011, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi tendered his formal resignation to President Giorgio Napolitano. It was a humiliating ‘political exit’ for the controversial Italian leader who had been the dominant figure in Italian politics since the mid-1990s. With Italy in the throes of an unprecedented financial crisis, Berlusconi’s squabbling centre-right coalition had appeared increasingly incapable of dealing with the economic emergency engulfing the country. To restore credibility, Napolitano appointed Mario Monti who quickly put together an emergency government. Since then, the downfall of Italy’s longest-serving post-war prime minister has generated a good deal of controversy. Allegations that Berlusconi was pushed out of power by a cabal of domestic and international detractors have been rife both inside and outside Italy. But how plausible are these claims? Was Berlusconi brought down by a conspiracy orchestrated by Napolitano and instigated by Italy’s EU partners? This article will address these questions and, to do so, it will chart the dramatic events that led to his downfall and examine the international and domestic contexts in which these events took place.     

The hidden comparison: Modern Italy in German perspectives

The author reviews German‐language studies on Italian history since Unification and argues that the central theme in writings on economic and social history has been the ‘hidden comparison’ between the processes of political development and economic change in Italy and Germany.     

Multi/Interdisciplinary investigations into Italy and World War I: An introduction

This introductory article details some of the main points that characterized Italian politics and culture in the period leading up to World War I and during the war itself, and then surveys the contributions of each article in this series that further investigates the period. The authors note the febrile nature of Italian domestic politics before the war which challenged traditional liberal parliamentarism. This political challenge was accompanied by a challenge to traditional art, and no movement epitomized these twin challenges to the old order like Futurism. Yet, though the Futurists and other nationalist groups glorified war and helped push Italy into the conflict, the country was hardly united. In fact, the hope was that war would finally unify the nation and erase the shame of Italy’s lackluster military performances since unification. As such, Italy’s cultural experience of the war was somewhat unique, in that the desire to prove its martial valor did not lead to the level of denunciations that other nations’ artists and writers produced – though there were some critics. Ialongo’s article traces the Futurist contribution to this pro-war ethic. Reich shows how the popularity of the Maciste alpino film during the war built upon this desire to unify the nation behind the war. And Palanti’s analysis of the post-war film Umanità notes that there were critics in Italy willing to challenge the cult of war.     

Behind the Cold War: rethinking the left,the state and civil society in Italy (1940s-1970s)

This article stresses the longue durée features of the Italian political system. It examines the role of two historical factors: (1) the existence of some peculiar (and quite 'sophisticated') state financial institutions; (2) the influence of certain long-enduring social traits (regional differences, family values, the Catholic Church, political religion) on the relationship between state and citizens. It discusses the specificities of the Italian political system (with its historical Fascist heritage and the biggest Communist Party in Europe) and the reaction of the political elite (especially on the left) to international developments in the 1940s and the 1970s, since these years (of the economic 'miracle' and the origins of Italy's political 'landslide') offer the best comparison of Italy with other European countries. These two periods also enable us to examine the Communist Party's (PCI) crucial contribution in the two worst times of national crisis: the post-war years and the years of terrorism. The first part of the article examines the heritage of Fascism and how Italy's new political elite exploited it to strengthen the country's political and economic position after the war. The second explores how behind the Cold War the mass parties helped the country to expand in the international market by controlling social conflict. The third draws some conclusions about the 'success' of the 1940s and the heavy legacies that contemporary Italy has inherited from the 1970s.     

Protagonists and politics in the Italian women's movement: a reflection on the work of Annarita Buttafuoco

This article retraces Annarita Buttafuoco's work as a historian of the women's political movement in Italy through a brief survey of her essays and books. These covered more than two centuries of history, ranging from the echoes of the French Revolution in Italy and the constitution of the Jacobin Republics to the struggles for female suffrage and emancipation in the liberal era down to the period after the Second World War and the founding of the Italian Republic. Emphasizing the originality of both the sources and the methodological approaches she used, the article offers a critical appreciation of Annarita Buttafuoco's research and her role in organizing and shaping collective research projects. It is focused on three specific issues: the history of women as conscious historical subjects, the history of women's political movements not only in their social and political contexts but also in relation to institutional networks and the practices of citizenship.     

Sender,those who have not returned: Carlo Salsa and his ‘Trenches’

Abstract

Carlo Salsa’s book ‘Trenches: A foot-soldier’s tales’ (Trincee. Confidenze di un fante, 1924) was one of many published in Italy after the end of the First World War. It describes the facts of the war as they were lived by officers and soldiers on the Italian front line. The article tries to compare the book with the contemporary war literature in Italy and in Europe, without forgetting the use of the international historiography on the matter. Thus, it is analysed the way an Italian author described to his readers the brutal carnage of the war in years when Fascism was the rising star in Italian policy and the censorship was becoming the more and more a thornily factor for every writer of those days. From this analysis it is possible to note the quality of the volume both from the literary point of view, and its historical value as a reliable testimony of the facts, stepping up our knowledge of what the war literature was for the Italian public opinion after the 1918. As it is possible to note, the book puts under test our notions of the role played by this kind of literature in shaping the Italian political life at the end of the 1910s and at the start of 1920s, when Italy was becoming a country lead by the Fascist regime.     

The English Patient and the Italian Risorgimento: Medical Tourism and the Body Politic in Giovanni Ruffini's Doctor Antonio (1855)

Doctor Antonio (1855), Giovanni Ruffini's novel of therapeutic travel, cross-cultural love and Risorgimento propaganda, pairs an English patient's quest for renewed health in Italy in the 1840s with the concurrent resurgence of the Italian nation through political action. An Italian revolutionary activist turned man of English letters, Ruffini wrote seven novels in English, of which the second, Doctor Antonio, was his greatest critical and popular success. Employing the popular Victorian practice of recuperative travel as a key plot device, and using this device to convey Italian political messages to nineteenth-century English readers, the novel offers a context-specific variation of the rhetorical tradition of representing the ‘body politic’ as a site of health, disease and medical management. This essay investigates Doctor Antonio's relation to Anglo-Italian literary, political and medical contexts in the mid-nineteenth century. More specifically, it analyses how the novel's medical plot supports Ruffini's aims of challenging negative stereotypes of Italians and advancing the cause of Italian liberalism. A reading of Lucy Davenne's illness and treatment as an allegory for the condition of the ailing, but potentially resurgent, Italian nation is developed and critically reflected upon. The intersection of medical and political frames of meaning in the text is further explored by interpreting the space and community of Lucy's convalescence as the model of an ideal society to which both English and Italians might aspire. Finally, the essay considers the novel's material impact on the development of medical tourism in northern Italy, and the political significance of this impact.     

Fighting the Risorgimento: foreign volunteers in southern Italy (1860–63)

Abstract

Between 1860 and 1863 hundreds of men from all over Europe volunteered for service in the wars of southern ‘brigands’ on behalf of the exiled King Francis II of Naples. In an attempt to correct the often biased interpretation of this involvement (that was attributed simply to a thirst for adventure, romanticism or even psychological disorder) that coloured the accounts by Italian patriots, this essay suggests the need for fresh consideration. It develops three lines of inquiry that focus respectively on the strong impact of Italian Unification on conservative and Catholic opinion and the ways in which these sources portrayed the struggles of the southern insurgents, the clumsy efforts made by the Neapolitan government-in-exile to recruit volunteers and organize armed expeditions against the former kingdom, and the so-called ‘white international’ in which the warriors of the counter-revolution were depicted as combatants in conflicts that were both civil wars and at the same time episodes in a much longer international ideological struggle. In this context, the significance of foreign involvement in defence of the Neapolitan Bourbons takes on a significance that goes far beyond its poor military outcome.     

From Universalism to Nationalism: Italian Freemasonry and the Great War

Abstract

During the period from 1914 to 1915, prior to Italy’s entry into the First World War, Freemasonry was a powerful force in Italian public life with a strong presence in every part of the nation and in the most vital organs of the State (parliament, public administration, the armed forces). Between them, the Grand Orient and the Grand Lodge of Italy counted 25,000 members and more than 500 lodges. Freemasons played a critical role in the campaign to mobilize Italian public opinion and political parties in support of Italy’s intervention in the war as an ally of France and Great Britain. To do so, they abandoned the movement’s traditional cosmopolitan and pacifist stances and adopted instead the objectives of the nationalists, a shift that would be consolidated during the war. Nonetheless, from 1917 onwards Italian Freemasons joined their counterparts in other European countries to press for the creation of a League of Nations to promote a new post-war universal order premised on the peaceful coexistence of independent and democratic nations. In examining the initiatives taken by Italian Freemasons in this period, this article focuses on the principles that inspired them, the language they adopted and the forms of communication and mobilization they used.     

The American war: Italian culture and Hollywood movies on the Second World War

Abstract

This article deals with the reception of American narratives on the Second World War in Italy, assuming the key role that myths and memories about the conflict played in post-war Europe and the importance of transcultural exchanges in the mass-media age. Such narratives were not imported to Italy by official US propaganda, but were mainly conveyed by Hollywood war movies, which were centred on the ideas of the righteousness of the conflict and of the fight between good and evil. The article focuses on a specific sector of the Italian audience, that of critics and film reviewers, who played a key role in interpreting the films and in fostering their acceptance – or refusal. Through the analysis of cinema magazines and newspapers, the research outlines how the reception of such movies was influenced by multiple elements, the different political and ideological allegiances, the cultural gap between elite and popular periodicals, and the interactions with Italian myths and memories about the war. Finally, the article compares the results of the inquiry with the rare sources about the reception of American narratives among a mass audience, and underlines the importance of a transnational approach to the study of cultural issues in contemporary history.     

25 April 1994 – 17 March 2011: symbolic dates of the past and Italy's transition

The twenty-year political period on which this paper focuses opened and closed with two highly symbolic commemorations. On 25 April 1994, just a few weeks after the electoral victory of the political alliance led by Silvio Berlusiconi (Pole of Liberty), more than 500,000 people took to the streets to commemorate the anti-Fascist foundations of the post-war Italian Republic: this was a timely reaction that ran counter to the climate of disaffection that since the 1980s had marked the annual celebrations of the Liberation. The second commemoration was on the night of 11 March 2011, when thousands of citizens took part in the ‘All Night Tricolor’ parties that marked the start of the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of Italian Unification. The scale of popular participation was in part a response to President Ciampi's commitment to re-launching a sense of ‘civil religion’, to the variety of ways in which the event was turned into a spectacle and the work of the organizing committee. But it also reflected the ways in which the significance of the commemoration of the distant founding of the Kingdom of Italy was considered to be ‘above’ (even ‘anti’) party politics. Both commemorations were rooted deeply in Italian history but took place in very different institutional circumstances: this essays compares the two commemorations and how they illustrate the changing political cultures in the time of the Italian transition.     

Challenging intellectual hierarchies. Hegel in Risorgimento political thought: an introduction

ABSTRACT

The introduction to this special issue rethinks Italy’s liberal tradition and nineteenth-century Italian political thought in transnational perspective, with particular focus on the role of Italian Hegelianism during the emergence of the modern Italian nation state. Starting from an attempt to recast the transnational dimension of the Risorgimento, this co-authored article relates existing studies of Italian Hegelianism to wider trends in intellectual history elsewhere in Europe. Introducing the different contributions to this special issue, our approach challenges notions of centre and periphery in the history of intellectual flows, and helps to free the history of the Risorgimento from self-incurred exceptionalism.     

第二次国内革命战争时期党的士兵运动方针评述

士兵运动工作是我军政治工作的重要组成部分,是战胜敌人、壮大自己的重要法宝。在第二次革命战争初期,党的士兵运动工作的主要任务是分化和瓦解国民党军队、支援土地革命。随着中日民族矛盾的上升,士兵运动工作的主要任务转到争取国民党军队联合抗日上来,并对抗日民族统一战线的建立起到了巨大的推动作用。     

Italian neopatriotism: Debating national identity in the 1990s

This article discusses some of the distinguishing features of the debate over national identity that took place in Italy in the 1990s. Reacting against the threats of the Lega Nord and in response to the new ideological and political landscape of the post-Cold War order, a number of Italian intellectuals rediscovered the value of patriotism. Searching for the origins of the Italians' allegedly weak sense of national identity, some questioned the Resistance and the party system that originated from it. While this historical revisionism has been the object of well-deserved criticism, there is another type of thematization of identity which has received less attention: it deploys the old notion of an 'Italian character', which appears frequently in the press and the media. The article shows that this discourse, too, is a way of articulating patriotism, and then reflects on the meaning that this reconfiguration of ideologies and identities acquires in the new context, both domestic and international.