Dear Reader,
The reason for the existence of every government is clearly laid out in the American Declaration of Independence, and we can judge states by the extent to which they are oriented towards the public good of their populations. Prior to 1914, the Italian government and people lacked a coherent direction and identity. Unlike the more northern Western European powers, Italy had failed to reap the full benefits of industrialization and the education revolution. While Italy was treated like a western power in many ways, it more resembled Russia or Spain for its undeveloped economy and impoverished population, though Russia made great strides toward industrial modernization after its defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, Italy continued to struggle.
By 1900, half the Italian adult population was still illiterate, while Germany, France, and Great Britain had literacy rates approaching 95%. After the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, Italy was divided at the Congress of Vienna into sovereign governments covering its major regions. The Kingdom of Sardinia, aka Sardinia-Piedmont in the northwest, was ruled by the House of Savoy, and also included Liguria, the lands of the old Republic of Genoa. The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies commanded the south, over which a restored branch of the House of Bourbon dynasty ruled Naples and the island of Sicily. The ancient Papal States endured in central Italy, governed still by the Supreme Pontiff. The Habsburgs, however, held the true balance of power in Italy. The Grand Duchy of Tuscany was led by a branch of the Habsburg-Lorraine family. At the same time, the Duchy of Parma was assigned to Marie Louise, the unfaithful second wife of Napoleon I and daughter of the Austrian emperor, but only for her lifetime, at which point Parma would be annexed into Tuscany. And while a Bourbon was allowed to rule the duchy of Lucca, when its ruler died, it was to be absorbed into Marie Louise’s Parma, so both Parma and Lucca would eventually be part of Tuscany and under Habsburg rule. The Habsburg dynasty’s Este line ruled the Duchy of Modena. And the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia’s king was the Austrian emperor, Marie Louise’s father, Francis I himself, and the combination of his own and his relatives’ titles made the Austrian Kaiser de facto overlord of Italy.
What this meant was that Italian nationalists who had gotten a taste of unity under Napoleon the Great - himself a native Italian speaker from Corsica - saw Austria as their primary enemy. From 1848-1866, the House of Savoy and Italian nationalist revolutionaries agitated and, when possible, warred against the Bourbons and the Habsburgs until Italy, except for the Papal States, was ruled by Sardinia-Piedmont, which renamed itself the Kingdom of Italy in 1861. But what was this new Italy? What was the point of the nationalist movement, the Risorgimento?
The term Risorgimento can be translated into English as resurgence or revival, but more to the point, it means to rise again. Meaning Rome. It meant the unification of disparate Italian states into the Kingdom of Italy and the revival of a claimed shared national identity. The movement was about bringing Italy back to the glories of the Renaissance and retaking the legacy of the Romans. Revolutionaries and intellectuals in mid-19th-century Italy justified their support for war as a return to the heights of civilization, which they, the Italians, should be seen as the successors of the Romans who made the West. But that meant that “Italy” was not complete until it ruled Rome, the Eternal City. Which would suggest getting the pope to give up the territory his predecessors had ruled more or less since the Dark Age Frankish ruler King Pippin III, aka the Short (not a hobbit), donated central Italian lands to Pope Stephen in the Donation of Pippin in AD756. The alternative was for the armies of the King of Italy to literally attack the Pope.
They did that. The second one.
When France went to war with Prussia in 1870, they pulled their troops protecting Pope Pius IX out of Rome, and the Italians pounced. While internationally Catholic volunteers rallied to defend the Papacy, few citizens of Rome wanted to resist Italian unification by force. On September 20th, 1870, 49 Italian soldiers and 19 papal troops died in the capture of Rome. The pope accepted the end of hostilities and retreated into the Vatican. However, he refused to accept the new political situation or recognize the loss of papal temporal power, declaring himself a "prisoner in the Vatican" and excommunicating the Italian king.
Critcally, the conflict with the Roman Catholic Church added to problems for the new government in the lands beyond Sardinia-Piedmont. Despite the legal and territorial unity, the new Italian state faced persistent regional, social, and political divisions that would challenge its national coherence and ability to modernize with a coherent agenda. That Italy needed modernization was demonstrated in its unification wars with Austria, where they won due to the support of France and Prussia, but the Austrians more often than not got the better of the Italians when they met one-on-one. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a surge of Italians emigrated to the United States. Earlier, Italians came from the north; they were merchants and skilled workmen and their families who went eagerly to the land where the streets were paved with gold. But the later emigration wave came from the south, which, as mentioned, was poor, rural, and not ready for the modern industrial economy of the United States. Perhaps as many as half of Italian immigrants from the south, who often came to the USA as rural and migrant farm labor, returned to Italy due to a lack of prospects in America; they were known as the ritornati. Those who stayed occupied a place in the Italian economy similar to Latin American immigrants in the late 20th and early 21st century: they sustained local economies in Italy through remittances, bringing in new wealth due to their labor in the Land of Oppurtunity.
By 1914, Italy was still consolidating as a nation-state. Italy was a constitutional monarchy with a limited parliamentary democracy. The franchise was restricted, and the elite in the northern cities dominated politics. Much of the population, especially in the southern and rural areas, was politically disengaged, and more religious Italians outside of Rome were ambivalent about the state due to its dispute with the Papacy: the Roman Question. The Italian government attempted to resolve the Roman Question through the Law of Guarantees (1871), which would have ensured the Pope's administrative freedom and offered him special privileges and rule of the Leonine City, an area about a third larger than the current Vatican City. However, this law became a major point of contention between the Right and Left political factions in the Chamber of Deputies. The Left in Italy was already agitating against the Church and wanted the government to have power over ecclesiastical affairs, something which would upset faithful Catholics around the world. And Pius IX was a strong-willed man who was second longest-reigning pope in history at 32 years, the only one to have reigned longer was Saint Peter, and Pius rejected the law and maintained his grievances. While in a country like the USA, where liberalism was the political creed of devout traditional Protestants who led abolitionism and the great social reforms of the 19th century, in Italy, it was often the opposite of religious conviction that led to support for “liberalism; anticlericalism was associated with nationalism and liberalism. Some Catholics resisted the state, such as the Opera dei Congressi, a laymen's organization which opposed various initiatives and campaigns of the anticlerical “liberals,” such as making divorce easier. Was Italy the heartland of the Church or something more unbridled and modern?
Pius IX forbade Catholics from participating in political activities, which created further division and tension within Italian society, issuing a Non Expedit decree that Catholics should not participate in Italian democracy. The Opera dei Congressi existed in part to support the Non Expedit. The decree was not lifted until after the Great War. The capture of Rome also interrupted the First Vatican Council, which was ongoing in 1870, and is most famous for the doctrine of Papal infallibility. As the council never formally concluded many of its themes were taken up by Vatican II nearly a century later, and some have pointed to the capture of Rome as the cause of Vatican II, arguing that had Vatican I finished its work, the Church would not have reengaged on the the issue and ended up with current Vatican II settlement. However, what is important for us is that, prior to the First World War, ironically, Italy was divided religiously. Italy was divided economically. Italy had not been unified since the Dark Ages, and as a result of 1,000 years of invasion, dynastic struggle, and barbarian migration, the regions were quite different, though they spoke variations of Italian. Unity was maintained ideologically and intellectually by elites, but on the ground, the country was in danger of remaining permanently out of sync. And the northern elites looked down on the southern Italians, yet such attitudes did not lead to a sustained program of uplift and made full cultural unification more difficult because the feeling of superiority fed into the idea of difference against unity. Even in the early 21st century, there were periodic populist calls for the “productive” north to separate from the “wasteful” south.
Despite these problems, in the 19th century, the Italian elites still dreamed of being seen as a great power, and so they sought colonies rather than redoubling their efforts at home. Was the Risorgimento about colonies? What about the lands already ruled that needed to be tied closer together?
Italy’s foreign policy was driven, somewhat recklessly given its internal problems, by its ambitions to be recognized as a great power. So it joined in a “Triple Alliance” with Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1882, while continuing to look covetously at Italian-speaking territories still ruled by Austria-Hungary. And while side-eying their ally in Vienna, the Italians looked to get in on the Scramble for Africa, and moved into the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa. So, while Italy was falling behind the other great powers in education and industry, the government decided to spend resources buying up and leasing coastal land in Somalia and conquering Ethiopia. It would not go well for them. The heirs of Solomon would stand tall and proud as lions. And Italy would seek to redeem itself at Ottoman expense and then to betray Austria-Hungary.