A wanderer in Italian cities who sees all these statues and walks down all these streets may well ponder what effect they had on the people of the time. Crispi had insisted it was the duty of governments and institutions to immortalize themselves in monuments, but he did not explain why they had such a duty. Most citizens of the new state were doubtless less cynical than Pasquale Turiello, a writer who wondered why Italy was commemorating so many ‘heroes’ in marble when Italians had not won a battle by themselves since Legnano 700 years earlier.21 Yet many of them were perplexed by the expense and effort involved. By the end of the nineteenth century their primary allegiances were more likely to be to the new socialism or the old Church than to the narrowly based liberal state that had disappointed so many of them. For those who had no vote, for those who planned to emigrate, for those who often had less to eat than their ancestors in the Middle Ages, the endless recycling of ‘beautiful legends’ was an irritation and an irrelevance.
THE QUEST FOR GLORY
The Italian peninsula had experienced much warfare in its history, but its peoples had created little in the way of martial traditions except in Piedmont and to a certain extent in Naples. Venice and Genoa had of course possessed their navies, as had Pisa and Amalfi for briefer periods. In the interior the city states had fought against each other throughout the Middle Ages and had expanded or disappeared in consequence. Yet this was not like fighting foreigners such as the French or the Germans, and the richer cities often preferred to delegate their campaigns to foreign mercenaries. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the armies of most Italian states were pitiful: Tuscany, Modena and the Papal States were all incapable of fighting even a short war.
Yet it was an axiom of united Italy that the state must be martial. The ethos of Piedmont and the ambitions of its kings combined to give it a culture of warfare from the beginning. Victor Emanuel and his son Umberto, who became king in 1878, demanded huge armies and fought hard to prevent governments from cutting expenditure on the military. Umberto often said he would rather abdicate than accept a reduction in the size of the armed forces. Like his father, he got his way. By the early 1890s Italy had built itself an enormous navy although, as it was now an ally of Austria, it had no enemies. It had also created a great many admirals, virtually one for each ship, important-looking men splattered with medals acquired for reasons that few people understood, since after Lissa Italy did not fight naval battles. Military expenditure doubled under Umberto and was higher than spending on education, public works and all the rest of the ministries combined.
Other European countries spent more on their armed forces, but all were richer and some had empires to defend and enlarge. Italy’s forces were excessive for a poor, unthreatened country without colonies until at the end of the century it acquired some outposts in the Red Sea. In the mid-1860s Italy had nearly 400,000 troops in its peninsula, more than Great Britain deployed in an empire spread across six continents of the globe.22
The state needed an army not for defensive purposes but for other reasons such as gaining prestige, quelling riots and putting down ‘brigands’. Governments also saw it, quite reasonably, as a prop to the national project, an instrument that would help them weld the people into a cohesive nation. The army was thus considered a crucible into which young men would go as Sicilians or Ligurians and come out as Italians. One scheme to foster national understanding was to put men from different regions into the same regiment, an idea which seemed admirable in theory but in practice led to the formation of regional ‘gangs’ inside a unit whose members spoke in dialects that the others did not understand.
Although the Italians had no foes, except those they chose to make in the Red Sea, they had not stopped dreaming of a military triumph against someone. The defeats at Custoza and Lissa still rankled and, in the minds of many, still required a ‘baptism of fire’ to avenge them. Italian feelings of humiliation after those defeats were exacerbated in 1878 at the Congress of Berlin, called to settle borders after the most recent war between Russia and Turkey. The congress ended up allowing the British into Cyprus, the French into Tunisia (to which numbers of Italians had emigrated in recent years and which Italy also wanted) and the Austrians into Bosnia-Herzegovina. Italy received nothing. When its minister suggested that Austria might cede the Trentino, where Italian speakers were in a majority, the Russian delegate touched the rawest of Italian nerves by joking that Italy would need to lose another battle before acquiring further territory belonging to Austria.
The results of Berlin, followed by the French invasion of Tunisia three years later, enraged many Italians, who reacted by calling for the occupation of Albania and the building of an even larger army. The government responded with plans for colonization in east Africa and also by forming the Triple Alliance alongside Germany and Austria. This was a bizarre diplomatic move that gained Italy nothing except the chimerical prestige of being on officially equal terms with the other two Powers. The alliance forced the Italians to renounce their territorial ambitions in Trieste and the Trentino, it alienated France and Britain, who were meant to be their friends, and it encouraged nationalists to vent their frustration with Europe on the tribes of Eritrea.
Foreign policy at the end of the nineteenth century was dominated by the bulky figure of Francesco Crispi, who was prime minister from 1887 to 1891 and from 1893 to 1896. This former garibaldino was a man of energy, ability and massive self-importance; in the Chamber of Deputies he once compared himself to Mount Etna, the snowy summit of his formidable will dominating the fieriness of his spirit and the passions of his nature. The domestic policies of his ministries indicated that he retained vestiges of his revolutionary youth: he abolished the death penalty and carried out important reforms in public health, local government and administrative justice. Yet in foreign affairs he discarded his red-shirted, freedom-fighting background and stridently became a militarist, an expansionist and an imperialist. Once he had wanted Italians to be the ‘Saxons of the Latin race’, building parliamentary institutions like the English; now he renounced that aspiration, concluding that his countrymen were unsuited to representative government. Contemporary Italians, he believed, required discipline more than democracy; instead of remaining decadent and effete, they needed to be turned into soldiers and empire-builders. Crispi thought Italians had been injected with ‘the morphine of cowardice’ and he feared the nation would break up through lack of patriotism. In other countries, he noticed, people stopped talking and bowed their heads when their national flags were raised; in Italy the raising of the flag seemed to be a signal for everyone to start gabbling.23
Believing that an aggressive foreign policy was the best way of inculcating a sense of patriotism, Crispi was eager to quarrel – and if possible fight wars – with almost everyone (especially the French) except Britain and Germany. Yet not even these two nations were great admirers of Crispi or his projects. Lord Salisbury, the prime minister and foreign secretary, found him an ‘embarrassing ally’ and, in a comparison with his least favourite and most difficult colleague, he told Queen Victoria he was ‘the Randolph Churchill of Italy’. Bismarck, to whom Crispi sent annual presents of Sicilian wine, was scarcely more sympathetic to the Italian’s ambitions. He dismissed Italy as of ‘no account’ in international affairs and as ‘the fifth wheel on the wagon’ of the European powers; he also observed that its colonial failures in the 1880s showed that, although it had a very large appetite, it had very poor teeth. A quarter of a century before 1914, Crispi was eager for the Triple Alliance to fight a war against Russia and France. The German army, backed by the future and final Kaiser, was also keen, but Bismarck, entering the last year of his chancellorship, managed to defeat the scheme. ‘What could Germany gain from a war now?’ he asked. Within the country’s current borders, there were ‘more Poles than we need, and more Frenchmen than we could ever digest’.24
Italy could not realistically begin a war in Europe by itself. Yet it did not require foreign allies
or the permission of others to fight colonial wars in Africa. Several other nations were busily engaged in ‘the scramble’: huge empires had already been acquired there by Britain, France and Portugal, and in the Congo the King of the Belgians was creating the largest colony on the continent. Colonial projects for Italy in other places had been mooted over the years. Victor Emanuel had been keen on either Sumatra or New Guinea, while his almost equally bellicose son wished to take Rhodes from the Turks and to establish a naval base in China. Expansion in the Balkans was another Italian ambition though, until the First World War, Africa was to be the chief focus of the country’s imperial hopes.
The French proposed Libya – then part of the Ottoman Empire – as a suitable colony, but the Italians were still so angry about Tunisia that they chose to go to the Red Sea instead. Colonies were expected to bring riches as well as prestige to their possessor, but neither of these options seemed likely to provide them. Assab, Italy’s first colony on the Red Sea, looked especially unpromising. It was the terminus of caravans crossing the Danakil Desert and a place the Italians knew so little about that the colonel in charge of disembarkation admitted he had never seen a map of it. Three years later, another colony was founded further up the Eritrean coast at Massawa. As the troops landed there, Crispi (who was not then in government) insisted that they should have a single objective, to assert Italy’s name in Africa and to show ‘the barbarians’ that Italians were strong and powerful. In the language employed earlier by Piedmontese officers in southern Italy, he added that, since the barbarians understood nothing but the power of guns, the artillery would soon be ‘thundering’.25 As it turned out, the guns did not always overawe the tribesmen. In 1887 an Italian force of 500 men ventured into the interior and was wiped out by Ethiopian troops at Dogali, a humiliating defeat transformed into an heroic sacrifice by nationalist painters who revelled in painting the courageous few being swamped by hordes of Africans. As a commemorative plaque still proclaims in the Apulian town of Locorotondo, the ‘heroes’ had died ‘like Romans, devoted to the honour of the fatherland’.
On becoming prime minister soon after Dogali, Crispi sent a revenge force to the Red Sea to teach ‘the barbarians’ a lesson for their ‘unjust aggression’. The expedition helped restore morale and led to the occupation of Asmara, which in turn led to the proclamation of Eritrea as well as Somaliland as Italian colonies. Crispi’s exclusion from office between the beginning of 1891 and the end of 1893 brought colonial activity to a halt, but when he returned to power he was more pugnacious than ever. Even King Umberto, who was no slouch when war was on the agenda, was puzzled. ‘Crispi wants to occupy everywhere,’ he noted, ‘even China and Japan.’26 Yet in practice the prime minister restricted his ambitions to an expansionist drive into Ethiopia, where he intended to overthrow the Emperor Menelik and install Umberto on his throne. In February 1896, in a move that recalls the government’s order to Admiral Persano thirty years before, Crispi told his reluctant commander in Eritrea to advance ‘at whatever cost to save the honour of the army and the prestige of the monarchy’. Incompetently led, a large Italian force duly advanced and was annihilated by an Ethiopian army at Adowa. 6,000 men were killed, and many others were taken prisoner. No other European country ever suffered such a colonial calamity.
Fortunato thought Adowa a well-deserved defeat for a weak and impoverished country that was wasting its resources on trying to become a Great Power. Crispi’s reaction to the disaster was to demand another expedition to punish the barbarians; even ‘the little King of Belgium’, he reminded the proud King of Italy, had done that. But Umberto realized that such a course would be unpopular and that it was time for Crispi, now in his late seventies, to retire. The new prime minister, Antonio Di Rudinì, was a Sicilian aristocrat who had succeeded Crispi after his first resignation in 1891. Now as then, Di Rudinì wanted to withdraw from Africa altogether but was persuaded that this would be too embarrassing and too heavy a blow to Italy’s prestige. He thus reluctantly agreed to keep Eritrea and Somaliland but to recognize Ethiopia as an independent state.
Colonial adventures were not popular until 1911, when a reluctant prime minister felt obliged to go to war to capture Libya from the Turks. In Milan and other cities Crispi’s aggression had provoked demonstrations in favour of Menelik, and many statesmen apart from Di Rudinì opposed colonial projects. One former prime minister, Rattazzi, believed the money squandered in Africa should have been used to develop Sicily, Sardinia and Calabria; one future head of government, Sonnino, who had visited Eritrea and was an expert on finance, mocked the idea that such places could be profitable to Italy. The notions that Eritrea might enrich its colonizer, that it could furnish it with a native army (as India did for Britain) or that it would become a magnet for Italians who wished to emigrate were laughable. Few people believed in them even if they subscribed to the ideas in public. How many of their countrymen could be expected to prefer to live in Eritrea than to begin a new life in the Americas? Even after Italy had acquired Libya before the First World War, only one Italian emigrant in a hundred chose to settle in the African colonies.
THE BEAR OF BUSSETO
The 1850s had been Giuseppe Verdi’s great decade. With Rigoletto in 1851 he surpassed anything he had done before, a feat he repeated with its equally memorable successors, Il trovatore and La traviata. Although the next brace of operas, I vespri siciliani (The Sicilian Vespers) and Simon Boccanegra, were never so popular, he finished the decade on a high note with the glorious Un ballo in maschera (The Masked Ball). Verdi now was, and remained, Italy’s favourite composer, overtaking Donizetti. In the ten years up to 1848 the playhouse at Ancona had staged twenty-five productions of Donizetti’s operas and only four of Verdi’s (fewer than for Bellini and Mercadante), yet over the following decade the number of Verdi’s productions there rose to twenty-six, more than half of the total.27
However much they admired the recent operas for their music and drama, nationalists were unable to detect a whiff of jingoism in the librettos. Naturally, and often with reason, they complained about the behaviour of censors in the Italian states and in Lombardy-Venetia. In Austrian Venice, for instance, the authorities objected to the character of Rigoletto, a hunchbacked jester who has to drag his daughter’s corpse across the stage in a sack, though in the end he was not prevented from being or doing either of these things at the première at La Fenice. Some of the censorship, however, was – in the mid-century circumstances – understandable. In the aftermath of 1848, following the defiance of the republics in Rome and Venice, the monarchies naturally did not wish audiences to watch lecherous kings, however fictitious, behaving badly in the theatre and even ravishing a subject. In consequence the monarch in Victor Hugo’s Le Roi s’amuse became the Duke of Mantua (a title that no longer existed) in Verdi’s operatic version of the play, Rigoletto.
Another thing monarchist censors disallowed was the killing of royalty on stage in case the sight encouraged members of the audience to emulate the assassins. Again, the anxiety was not wholly irrational. Verdi’s own sovereign, the Bourbon Duke of Parma, was stabbed to death by a saddle-maker in 1854, and Napoleon III was very nearly killed by the Italian Orsini four years later. In 1857 Verdi agreed to write an opera for the San Carlo in Naples and chose as his protagonist King Gustavus III, an amiable enlightened despot who had been assassinated at the Stockholm opera house in 1792. As a soldier had recently tried to kill the Neapolitan king, Ferdinand II, the Bourbon censors were understandably reluctant to stage a regicide at the royal opera house. In fact they demanded so many changes that the composer withdrew the work and put it on at Rome, where the papal censors also made demands. Gustavus eventually appeared in public as a governor of Boston in the seventeenth century, while his enemies, Count Horn and Count Ribbing, became Tom and Samuel.
Un ballo came out in 1859 at a time when patriots were eager to retrieve Verdi for the Italian cause. One consequence of their eagerness was the inception of the most enduring o
f all Verdian myths – the legend that audiences up and down the peninsula were forever shouting ‘Viva Verdi!’ during performances and using the composer’s name as an acronym to indicate their loyalty to Italy: what they were really meaning was ‘Long live Vittorio Emanuele Re d’Italia!’ Recent scholarship limits the shouting to a few months at La Scala at the beginning of 1859, and some of it queries even that. One German scholar claims that the use of Verdi’s name to mean Victor Emanuel is a propaganda trick invented many years after unification had been completed.28
Although Verdi was now writing operas which no one could claim were patriotic, he was still, of course, a patriot. In 1855 he became so angry with Eugène Scribe, the French dramatist who had written a libretto he disliked for I vespri, that he insisted on changing ‘everything that attacks the honour of the Italians … I am an Italian above all and … I will never become an accomplice in injuring my country.’29 Yet if his patriotism remained constant, his republicanism had diminished, as it had with Garibaldi, and he had concluded that the Savoia were now the best hope for Italy. In 1856 he accepted an honour from Victor Emanuel that made him a knight of the Order of St Maurice and St Lazarus.
The Pursuit of Italy Page 33