Christopher Duggan’s ambitious new history of Italy makes two innovations
which should be welcomed without reservation. First, by spanning the whole
of the nineteenth century it avoids the conventional division between
Italian history before and after Unification. This makes it possible to see
the Risorgimento as a movement which did not conclude with the creation of
the nation state, to bring out continuities and to set the achievement of
unity against the desires and aspirations of the previous national movement.
Second – and the two innovations are logically linked – this is a history of
the national idea, which takes the existence of Italy not as a given but as
a problem. The connecting thread that links the narrative is the examination
of “how the problem of the Italian nation has been formulated in terms that
recur throughout the country’s recent history”. The advantage of this
approach is that it provides a clear thematic focus that prevents The Force
of Destiny from becoming a “baggy monster”, as more eclectic general
histories inevitably are. Of course, the downside is that it involves
exclusions which may make it harder to understand some of the phenomena
Duggan discusses. However, the author is aware of the problem, and quite
clear that any general history can provide only a very partial view.
Duggan’s approach to the Risorgimento builds on his excellent biography of
Francesco Crispi (2002), a politician whose career spanned as none other the
whole period from 1848 to 1896, as a revolutionary conspirator, as the chief
political adviser of Garibaldi in the preparation of the expedition of the
Mille to Sicily, and as Italy’s would-be Bismarckian strong man at the end
of the century. The central importance for Crispi of the idea of “national
education” provides Duggan with one of his keys to the interpretation of the
post-Unification period.
Duggan’s history also fits squarely within the new history of the
Risorgimento, which has taken its inspiration from the “linguistic turn” and
the cultural approach to the study of nationalism. He is particularly
indebted to Alberto Banti’s brilliant and highly influential La Nazione del
Risorgimento (2002). Like Banti, he sees the role of poetry, the historical
novel, opera and painting as crucial in creating and diffusing a new sense
of the Italian past, and a rhetoric of revival through sacrifice and
brotherhood. Duggan provides vivid and precise summaries of how particular
paintings, novels, or opera librettos helped to shape the national idea. He
gives a particularly good description of the sculpture park created by the
enlightened and patriotic Tuscan landowner Niccolò Puccini, complete with
statues of Italian worthies from Dante to Canova, a mock-Gothic castle, a
Pantheon with a niche reserved for “the future benefactor of Italy”, and a
villa frescoed with famous scenes from Italian history. In 1836, crowds
gathered in the park to celebrate the anniversary of the victorious peace
concluded in 1183 between the Lombard communes and Frederick Barbarossa, and
to welcome the elderly Jean Sismondi, the great historian of the Italian
Republics. Of course, the creation of a new sense of national identity was
not a consensual process. What made Italy a nation? Why had it lost its
independence to foreign rulers? How was the rise and fall of Italy’s
economic and cultural primacy to be explained? What were the requirements
for “making Italy”, and on what forces could one draw to create a real sense
of national unity? All these were questions whose answers were fiercely
contested between republicans and monarchists, unitarists and federalists,
“neo-Guelph” advocates of a reconciliation between the national movement and
the papacy, who pointed to the positive example of the alliance of the
medieval Popes with the Italian communes against the Hohenstaufen emperors,
and “neo-Ghibellines”, who followed Machiavelli in seeing the papacy as the
perennial obstacle to Italian unity.
The contest over the interpretation of a national history and the content of a
national culture continued after Unification, and even became more bitter.
On the one side, the monarchist defenders of the state established between
1859 and 1870 accused of disloyalty the opponents of the strongly
centralized and uniform model imposed on all regions of Italy through the
extension of Piedmontese administration and law codes. Many of the former
followers of Giuseppe Mazzini, including Crispi, rallied to the defence of
the monarchy. However, Crispi and some other former republicans were still
highly critical of the unification settlement as insufficiently “national”.
The monarchy had itself failed to complete the transition from the
traditional dynastic conceptions of the House of Savoy to the assumption of
a new, national role. Emblematic of this was the refusal of Victor Emanuel
II of Piedmont to change his title to Victor Emanuel I of Italy. In
seventeenth-century Britain, James I had showed greater flexibility.
Parliament, the one indubitably new national institution, became increasingly
discredited as the arena for sordid bargains between local interests. One
deputy described the
"pandemonium . . . when the time approaches for an important vote.
Government agents run through rooms and up and down corridors trying to
secure support. Everything is promised: subsidies, decorations, canals,
bridges, roads, and sometimes a long-withheld legal decision is the price of
the parliamentary vote."
Although usually managed with more discretion, such patterns of behaviour have
survived until this day: Romano Prodi’s government fell earlier this year
because the leader of a minor party withdrew his support, apparently because
the Government failed to prevent the prosecution and arrest of his wife,
charged with illicit use of her influence in local government.
The army and navy had both suffered humiliating defeats during the 1866 war
against Austria, and although the novels of Edmondo De Amicis, which exalted
the army as “the school of the nation”, had a huge readership among the
middle classes, their prestige could only be confirmed by military victory.
The crucial victories which had led to the end of Austrian rule in Italy had
been won by foreign armies. Among workers and peasants, the popularity of
the army was highly questionable, since its main role in the years between
1860 and 1900 was that of repressing “subversive” movements. Apart from the
bitter civil war in the South – misleadingly qualified as a police operation
against “brigands” – as many as 40,000 troops were required to enforce
conscription in Sicily and to suppress the Palermo revolution of 1866, or to
suppress the Romagna riots against the tax on flour in 1869. Later the army
was regularly used to repress strikes, particularly by rural workers, and
this tendency to take military action against real or imagined subversion
culminated in the bloody suppression of the 1898 riots in Milan.
One of the main forces behind the popular rebellion in 1848 was hatred of the
police. Duggan perhaps could have told us more about the importance of this
legacy of the Napoleonic period; the creation of a centralized police force
was the one innovation that none of the Restoration governments repudiated.
Here again, the new Italian state failed to break with previous practices
and may have even made them more intrusive. Almost every economic activity
or public initiative required a police licence, and the extent of the
police’s arbitrary discretion was very wide. Collusion with the increasingly
organized criminal groups of the Sicilian Mafia and the Neapolitan Camorra,
for which the Liberals had excoriated the Bourbon Kings of the Two Sicilies,
revived and flourished with the help of the parliamentary deputies, who used
the criminal networks to influence and intimidate voters.
Throughout the part of his history that deals with the nineteenth century
Duggan makes good use of individual episodes, often relatively little-known,
to illuminate more general problems and local idiosyncrasies. He illustrates
his analysis of brigandage and the Southern response to Unification by a
sketch (drawn from an unpublished thesis) of the history of the small town
of Pontelandolfo, near Benevento, in one of the most backward areas of the
Southern Apennines. In August 1861, in reprisal for an ambush that killed
forty bersaglieri (riflemen), the Piedmontese troops killed several hundred
of the inhabitants and razed most of the town to the ground. It is easy to
understand why the new state did not win the loyalty of such local
communities, whose main asset was a “well-developed sense of their own
past”. It would be difficult to exaggerate the cultural gap between North
and South at the time of Unification. This was true even in the realm of
religion, as many Northerners, in Duggan’s words, “were nauseated by what
they regarded as the superstitious character of much Southern Catholicism
with its belief in demons, portents and miraculous interventions, its
fertility ceremonies and unorthodox rituals . . . its veneration of relics
and its cults of obscure local saints”. Duggan could have made more of
continuities with forms of popular religiosity under Fascism and in the
first years of Christian Democrat ascendancy. One name that is missing from
his index is that of Francesco Forgione, otherwise known as Padre Pio,
probably the most famous Italian of the twentieth century after Mussolini.
Unfortunately, the serious studies of the “Southern Question”, while
performing a valuable task in exposing the State’s failure to deal with the
South’s deeply rooted social and economic problems, often reinforced
negative stereotypes which have certainly endured till the present day.
The North–South divide is the source of serious tensions in contemporary
Italy, dramatized by the anti-Southern rhetoric of the Northern League. It
has become a commonplace to say that Italians lack a well-defined sense of
national identity. But is it true? One should not put too much faith in
opinion polls, but it is still significant that the cross-national polls
conducted by Eurobarometer show that the Italians express fewer doubts about
their national identity than Germans, where almost twenty years after
reunification the “wall in the mind” between Ossis and Wessis has not been
demolished. Fascism, for all its commitment to creating a “community of
believers” united by faith in a political religion with its own martyrs,
rituals, sacred festivals and even its own calendar, ultimately marked the
bankruptcy of the conscious attempts at building national identity by
indoctrination and state action. However, the mass media and consumer
culture, for all their faults, have brought Italians closer together,
diffusing similar models and styles of life. For the first time, Italian
became a genuinely common language during the 1960s, thanks to television,
although dialects remained the first language of the majority of Italians
for considerably longer. One could talk of a “cellular” form of national
identity, based on the reproduction and diffusion of similar patterns, in
which certain features of the past that were originally local (like cuisine)
have been “nationalized”. If pride in Italian political achievements has
been almost non-existent, the same could not be said about Italian pride in
the manufacture of cars, marketing clothes, design and, of course, football.
But one senses that these achievements rest on much more fragile foundations
now than in the past. Strong symbols of identification such as the piazza
may be losing their efficacy, and Italian culture (film is a good example)
has lost the vivacity and relevance that it had in the first thirty years of
the Republic.
Christopher Duggan’s history is less interesting when it comes to the
twentieth century. This is partly a question of emphasis and space. The
twentieth century occupies little more than a third of the total number of
pages. But his comparative neglect of economic and institutional history has
more serious consequences for his treatment of this period. Where Italians
seem to differ most strongly from other major European nations is in their
extremely low level of trust in the State. Unfortunately this also
contributes to a lack of trust between individuals and groups, since the
poverty of legitimate, fairly enforced norms, and the permeable nature of a
State which is more like a sponge than Max Weber’s “iron frame”, encourage
freeriding and a belief that honesty is definitely not the best policy from
an individual’s point of view. It is not right, I believe, to equate
distrust in the State with lack of a “civic sense”, as the Italians
themselves often do. In fact, at the city or the local level Italians often
show a high capacity for participation and cooperation. Voluntary
organizations flourish. This suggests that the structure and ethic of state
institutions, and the failure to resolve satisfactorily the problems created
by the perverse interaction of a centralized bureaucracy with a highly
formalist code of behaviour, and local systems of patronage, must be held
largely responsible for the problems of trust and identification. Trust in
the market is also limited, given the highly politicized pattern of state
intervention in industry and the deficiencies in regulation. Successful
nation states are nations of citizens, and as the late Patrick McCarthy
wrote ten years ago, in words that are still unfortunately relevant, for
Italy to produce citizens, the Italians “will have to create a state which
is neither overbearing nor absent . . . in which the market functions and
public goods are not sold to the highest bidder”.
Christopher Duggan
THE FORCE OF DESTINY
A history of Italy since 1796
653pp. Allen Lane. £30.
978 0 713 99709 5
US: Houghton Mifflin. $30. 978 0 618 35367 5
Adrian Lyttelton is Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins
University Center, Bologna. He is the editor of The Seizure of Power:
Fascism in Italy 1919-1929, 2004 and the editor of Liberal and Fascist
Italy: 1900-1945, 2002. He is working on a social history of Italy,
1860-1915.
