Chapter 10: Conclusion

The remark, once attributed to Massimo D’Azeglio, that the Risorgimento generation had made Italy, but it was now necessary to make the Italians, is misleading. Giolitti’s analogy of the hunchback’s tailor remains more illuminating, if a bit bleak. The real task for generations after 1860 was to tailor an Italy that would fit the demands and needs of a people divided by deep regional, class, and ideological differences. Every generation after unification contested the legacy of the immediate past. We have seen how the restless young intellectuals at the turn of the twentieth century viewed liberal Italy as having fallen well short of the great hopes of the Risorgimento. Then World War I, which was to relaunch the ideal of a greater Italy, was betrayed by politicians who lost the peace and by Socialists who fostered a climate of civil war.

When the Fascists assumed power in 1922, they felt that they would bury, once and for all, Italietta, Giovanni Giolitti’s modest little Italy. Mussolini’s Italy would be the antithesis of Giolitti’s. In place of slow, undramatic progress domestically and a modest place among the major powers, the new Fascist Italy would be strong, unified, respected, and even feared. The Fascists considered the legacy of Giolittian Italy to have been domination by a weak and divided parliament that was out of touch with the “real” country. In the guise of opening to democracy, Giolitti allowed the country to fall prey to revolutionary Socialists. Fascists and their Nationalist allies accused the Piedmontese leader of leaving a weakened state and a diminished nation.¹

Giolitti fared little better among democrats and Socialists. The young anti-Fascist democrat Piero Gobetti saw in Giolitti the corruption of an entire system that went beyond the man: “But our anti-Giolittianism would exist even if the head of the government was not called Giolitti, if his system continued. Trace the career of G. G., and you will not find one single moment of greatness.”

Gobetti summed up the feelings of his generation of democrats: “Giovanni Giolitti could not be, and will never be, a great statesman precisely because of the absence of liberty and independence. He is merely the head of a parliamentary majority.”² Giolitti’s progressive opponents had always hoped that his departure from the political scene would finally open the door to true democracy. When, in fact, the Fascists took power with very different aims, it was logical to blame Giolitti for preparing the way for the collapse of Italy’s nascent democracy.

Thus, from 1922 to 1945 Giolitti’s reputation hit bottom. Scorned by the Fascists and rejected as irrelevant by the democratic anti-Fascists, the Giolittian era seemed to have been a dead end, a failure, rather than a step toward a better future. Benedetto Croce was a lonely dissenter in his History of Italy, 1871–1915. In 1929, with the Fascist regime at the peak of its power, Croce bravely defended the liberal era and its greatest prime minister:

[Giolitti] was universally recognized as a man of much perception and wide parliamentary experience. He was no less conspicuous for his whole-hearted devotion to his country, his strong political sense, his great administrative ability, and his clear cut ideas.

Croce’s Giolitti was a leader who worked to democratize Italy and to build a stronger state: ==“He labored unceasingly to select and train politicians and administrators from among the younger men to succeed him, associating them with him in the Government and preparing them to assume its control.”==³ But Croce’s praise only emphasized how remote liberal ideals were from the realities of Mussolinian Italy.

The fall of fascism during World War II brought another generational sea change. The collapse of an arrogant, swaggering, and brutal regime gave rise to hopes for a democratic second Risorgimento that would create a new Italy out of the Resistance struggle. However, the leaders of the new republican Italy remained suspicious of Giolitti and his legacy. Neither Catholics nor the Socialist-Communist left had historical or ideological ties to Giolittian liberalism, although surviving pre-Fascist liberals like Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, Francesco Nitti, and Ivanoe Bonomi, all intimately tied to the Giolittian era, insisted that the pre-Fascist era offered some valuable lessons.⁴

The first serious scholarly effort to revise the generally negative verdict on the Giolittian era came from a young Italian-American, A. William Salomone, who judged the Giolittian era to have been, if not a true democratic regime, then a major step toward the creation of a working democracy. Salomone’s book (Italy in the Giolittian Era, 1960) prompted Gaetano Salvemini, Giolitti’s harshest critic on the democratic side, to reconsider, albeit somewhat grudgingly:

My knowledge of the men who came after Giolitti in Italy, as well as of countries in which I have lived during the last twenty years, has convinced me that if Giolitti was not better, neither was he worse than many non–Italian politicians, and he was certainly less reprehensible than the Italian politicians who followed him . . . If, in seeking an impossible paradise, we scorn purgatory, we will surely end in hell.”⁵

Salomone’s work on Giolitti had been seconded by Giovanni Ansaldo’s Ministro della buona vita, by Gaetano Natale’s Giolitti e gli italiani, and, somewhat later, by Nino Valeri, whose Giovanni Giolitti, published in 1971, remains the standard. All of these works were shaped by traditions of liberal scholarship.⁶

A turning point in the reconsideration of Giolitti’s legacy for the left came with the publication of Palmiro Togliatti’s Discorso su Giolitti in 1950. Togliatti, the leader of the Italian Communist Party, boldly appropriated the Piedmontese liberal tradition of state building that Giolitti represented and made it part of the heritage of the Communist Party. He contrasted Giolitti’s defense of the secular, nonconfessional state with the Christian Democratic regime that held power after 1945. Not only was the liberal parliament under Giolitti superior to its Catholic-dominated republican counterpart in 1950, but Giolitti was now hailed for his willingness to include the reformist Socialists and the progressive Northern bourgeoisie within his political majority. Togliatti stressed that this openness was the polar opposite of the policies pursued by Catholic Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi, who expelled the Communists and Socialists from his government in 1947.⁷

It would be absurd to suppose that Giovanni Giolitti, a politician who emerged from the old bourgeois and conservative ruling class, might be the herald of the renewal of Italian society; but it cannot be denied that among the men of his era he appears today the one who, more than the others, understood [in] what direction Italian society would have to move to emerge from the conflicts of the time.⁷

Togliatti’s essay opened the way for younger Marxist scholars to take on Giolitti.⁸ By the 1960s and 1970s Giolitti was even hailed as the precursor of the entry of Catholics into political life and for his open and tolerant religious policy.⁹ There was more than an echo of Giolitti in Aldo Moro’s image of the converging parallels to describe the gradual rapprochement between Catholics and Communists in the 1970s.

Since World War II the study of Giolitti has been monopolized by those, Marxist or liberal, who defend various versions of representative or parliamentary democracy. Giolitti’s most recent Italian biographer, the historian-diplomat Sergio Romano, writing in 1989, stressed the way Giolitti used power to create within the parliamentary system a set of rules by which politics might be played. Of course, Romano did not know that within a few years the Italian political and parliamentary system would be shaken by the tangentopoli or “bribe city” scandals that effectively destroyed the consensus that had developed around the postwar republic.¹⁰

Today Italians are engaged in yet another generational rebellion against the legacy of the past. This time it is the turn of the founding myths of republican Italy—antifascism and the Resistance, but also parliamentary government—to come under increasing scrutiny. Anxiety about the cohesiveness of the Italian state has led historians like the late Renzo De Felice to argue that republican Italy was founded on the passivity of the great mass of Italians and with the collaboration of a party, the Italian Communist Party, that owed substantial allegiance to the Soviet Union. By overreacting to the Fascist concentration of power, the founders of the republic opted for a weak state that became a pawn of political parties and economic interest groups. Recent critics of the parliamentary system have almost come full circle to echo the anti-Giolitti writers of the years before World War I. However one judges the arguments of De Felice and his younger followers, they raise a long-standing question of whether Italians will ever develop substantial consensus around a set of institutions. At the end of the 1990s Italy was governed by parties that had few historical roots. For much of the decade, the country was forced to resort to rule by experts and technocrats out of the state administration. With the reputation of parliament in decline, it is likely that a more critical attitude will emerge in writing about Giolitti.¹¹

Giolitti’s governments remain a chapter in a long series of short-term successes and long-term failures in the quest to bring Italians together within a common institutional system. If Giolitti failed to unite Italians, so did Mussolini—with much more disastrous consequences; the founders of post–World War II republican Italy seem to have fallen short as well. Yet Giolittian Italy and the post-1945 Italian republic are united in the realization that unity and consensus cannot be imposed from on high by force.

Giolitti tried to extend the life of the parliamentary regime that emerged from the Risorgimento. He firmly believed that representative government was the best way to reconcile competing interests and ambitions. But his very commitment to maintain the hegemony of the old liberal political elite made it difficult for him to undertake fundamental reforms of the system of taxation or to reduce the great gap between northern and southern Italy. Despite his caution in international affairs, Giolitti was not willing to reduce military expenditures or to eschew colonial adventurism. He combined a number of incremental social and economic reforms with occasional substantial concessions, such as the right of unions to bargain collectively and universal manhood suffrage.

The result turned out to be profoundly destabilizing. The obstacles to success were enormous. The Socialist Party was psychologically and politically unprepared to enter the government or become a stable coalition partner. Class cleavages and a narrow economic base made the process of reform more destabilizing than stabilizing for the parliamentary system. Attempts at interclass cooperation failed elsewhere before the war and did not succeed for the most part in the years between the two world wars. Nor could a stable relationship be worked out between liberals and Catholics. The clerical forces understood that in any system of expanded suffrage, they had the numbers to push aside the old liberal political class. Giolitti might have been wiser to have taken Luigi Luzzatti’s more modest franchise reform, but the challenge of democratic electoral competition could not have been put off indefinitely.

By 1914 Italy was as divided regionally, socially, and ideologically as it had been in 1901. To say this is not to blame Giolitti, who merely allowed freer expression of the conflicts that had been bottled up before he took office with Giuseppe Zanardelli in 1901. World War I certainly accelerated the process of disintegration of the liberal parliamentary state. In the 1919 elections, the Socialists and the new Catholic party controlled half the parliament. We have already seen indications in his private correspondence that Giolitti began to recoil from the give-and-take of parliamentary politics after his departure from office in March 1914. The unruly pro-interventionist crowds of 1915 and the hostility of the pro-war factions in parliament during much of the war certainly accentuated Giolitti’s sense of distaste and disillusionment. After 1918, a curious and contradictory situation developed for the elderly statesman. He viewed in almost Wilsonian terms some of the vast changes brought on by the war, but he had no feeling for and understanding of the political mechanisms by which new democratic mass participation politics operated. Obstacles to cooperation with the Socialists were even greater than before the war, and, while he related well to the older Catholic leadership, there was no love lost between Giolitti and the Popular Party leader Luigi Sturzo and the newer generation of Catholic politicians. Thus, by 1920 and 1921 a serious mismatch between Giolitti’s enlightened social and economic program and his parliamentary base developed.

However, I believe that Giolitti’s reaction went beyond mere distaste for the absurdly counterproductive Socialist tactics and for the demands of the new Catholic leaders. Giolitti’s fundamental identification was with the liberal parliamentary state that had been mortally wounded. His forward momentum had been blocked. The consequences of democracy appalled him, and, given the attitude of the Socialists, he saw no way of working successfully within the new parliament that had been elected by proportional representation. His disastrous and ultimately futile decision to call elections in 1921 was a decisive moment. Thereafter, when faced with a choice between continuation of the postwar parliamentary regime and a return to order through fascism, Giolitti chose the latter. He did not do it for very long, but he did it at a crucial moment for Italy between 1921 and 1924. When confronted by the fundamentally liberal and anti-parliamentary nature of fascism, he eventually drew back and opposed the new dictatorship.

Having said all this, I would not want to fall into the trap of Salvemini and other critics of Giolitti. He must be judged by the standards of the time and in relation to what was happening in other countries. He represented the best of the old liberal tradition. It is wrong and profoundly ahistorical to judge him by democratic standards. He carried the old liberal parliamentary system as far as it would go in a country that had a fragile basis in 1901 for liberalism, much less liberal democracy. One needs only to note that Catholicism and socialism were still profoundly antiliberal. Thus, many of Giolitti’s failures look less serious, even his reluctance to modernize the Liberal Party. Nowhere on the continent was a mass party of the middle class created on a democratic basis until after 1945.

Giolitti’s career lasted an extraordinarily long time. He entered politics in 1882 and left parliament in 1928. He served in the state bureaucracy under the conservative elitists who created Italy in 1860 and ended with the crude and vulgar dictatorship of Mussolini. Giolitti pointed the way forward for Italian representative government by trying to reach an understanding (albeit on his own terms) with both Catholics and organized workers and peasants. Though his course of controlled modernization did not entirely succeed, and, especially after World War I, he was too old and set in his ways to adapt to the new politics of mass electorates and rule by the piazza, he was without doubt the greatest Italian prime minister after Camillo Cavour and one of the outstanding European statesmen of the pre–World War I era. Not bad for a man once described as a “lowly clerk” or even for a hunchback’s tailor.