Monarchie et Identité Nationale en Italie (1861-1900)

"I’ve chosen this for two reasons. The more important one is that the monarchy, as an object of study, has been quite neglected by scholars of the Risorgimento, which is counterintuitive because the unification of the country happened as a result of the military leadership of the king of Piedmont. King Victor Emmanuel II was one of the founders of the fatherland and part of this patriotic Pantheon. So, this book covers a very important topic, where I feel there’s a bit of a void in the scholarship of the Risorgimento. Another, less important reason, is that I wanted to include at least one of my French colleagues who have been studying the Risorgimento. I’ve tried to include Italian scholars, British scholars like Lucy Riall. And, among the Italians who have worked on the Risorgimento, we have some based in Italy and some, like Maurizio Isabella, who are based abroad. There is a strong tradition of French scholarship on the Risorgimento, and I thought it would be nice to include at least one work that comes from that corner. Another important scholar of the Risorgimento from France would be Gilles Pécout . Actually, I’d like to mention two other important books on Italian unification that I was tempted to include on this list, but had to exclude in the end from my five picks. One book is an impressive piece of research about the national character of Italians by Silvana Patriarca, Italian Vices: Nation and Character from the Risorgimento to the Republic (2010). She’s another Italian based abroad, in the United States at Fordham. The book is about the construction and deconstruction of the Italian national character, with a specific focus on the bad qualities of Italians. “Piedmontese institutions—and legislation to begin with—were just extended to the whole territory of the peninsula to create the new kingdom” Another book that I actually wanted to mention when we were discussing the Isabella book is America in Italy: the United States in the Political Thought and Imagination of the Risorgimento, 1763-1865 (2019) by Axel Körner, a German colleague based in London. Körner looks at the importance of transnational ties and exchanges in the cultural and political imagination of the Risorgimento. So, I’ve tried to highlight these transnational exchanges, not only at the time, but also nowadays, among scholars working on similar topics. Brice looks at the role of the institution of monarchy in the nationalisation of Italians. The periodisation is slightly different from the other books we have looked at because she really starts with a unified Italy in 1861. She analyses the role the monarchy played in the nationalisation of Italians, in the political education of Italians and the creation of an Italian political culture. She also looks at its role in the national patriotic narrative. That’s a crucial question. What happened in practice was that Piedmontese institutions—and legislation to begin with—were just extended to the whole territory of the peninsula to create the new kingdom. So this was really a process of ‘Piedmontisation’ and the royal family remained very much linked to the Piedmontese traditions. Many new Italians reacted against this perceived invasion from Piedmont. Yes. It stayed in Turin until 1864, when it was transferred to Florence. Then it moved to Rome in 1871, after the conquest of the Pope’s last stronghold. That was a crucial moment, trying to show that this was a new political entity and not simply an extension of Piedmont. But the King, Victor Emmanuel, kept the numeration—the Second—of his official Piedmontese title. He was the first King of Italy, but he was always Victor Emmanuel II, which really emphasises the continuity with the Piedmontese tradition. And, actually, one of the problems that the royal family, the monarchy and the country faced after unification was the need to Italianise this dynastic rule by retelling the story of the royal family, claiming that, in fact, the Savoy family had been close to the Italian people for centuries and was an early supporter of Italian independence and unification. That was quite tricky, because it really required a retelling and manipulation of the past to fit the new situation in which the royal family found itself. Yes. They were, indeed. First of all, on the constitution. In 1848 the King of Piedmont-Sardinia, Carlo Alberto, granted a constitution, the ‘Statuto Albertino’—the Albertine Statute—to his subjects. There are many important things to say about this document, but the most important one is that it was not abrogated after the failure of the 1848-49 revolutions. Many sovereigns granted constitutional charters in 1848, but nearly all of them were abrogated as soon as possible, between 1849 and 1852—the Tuscan constitution was the last one. But the Statuto Abertino stayed and so the Kingdom of Sardinia remained a constitutional monarchy. And this was used as a tool for the legitimation of this monarchy and for the role of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia as the leader of the Italian unification. Another important point about it is that the Statuto Albertino granted equal rights to religious minorities—to Protestants and Jews, which became one of the reasons why Protestants and Jews overwhelmingly supported Piedmont as the military leader of the unification process and the house of Savoy as the Italian royal family. “Margherita was very much involved in philanthropic activities and also became a fashion icon” The fight against the Catholic Church, which characterized the whole second half of the 19th century—it’s not just limited to 1849-1870—really structures the political life of liberal Italy. It’s very complex. You’re right when you say that the Savoy family was a Catholic family. But King Victor Emmanuel II was excommunicated by Pope Pius IX right after the conquest of Rome. So was the prime minister and a bunch of other important people. So, it became quite difficult for the king to reclaim Catholicism as the main legitimation of his power. You can see this in representations of the king. It is very uncommon and unusual to see images of the king praying, which was a very classic, traditional way to represent a monarch. It is hard to find such images, even at the time of Victor Emmanuel’s death. But, although there was this ongoing fight with the Catholic Church and the king could not find in Catholicism the source of legitimation for his power, the royal family remained Catholic as did the majority of Italians. Catherine Brice tells an interesting story about what happened when Victor Emmanuel II died in 1878. He died of pneumonia in a matter of days, quite unexpectedly. He was only in his fifties. The nation was not prepared for it at all. And when he was lying on his deathbed he was asked to repent in order to be able to receive extreme unction. The priest was forbidden by the Pope himself to administer the sacrament without official repentance. There was a back and forth for days. It was an important issue, not only for the king himself, but for his family and for the whole country. It seems that the king, in the end, did make a declaration of official apology to the Pope—for all the sorrow that he had caused or something like that. It really illustrates how this conflict between the church and the state played out. But that was by no means a turning point in the relationship between the church and the state. It wasn’t until the beginning of the 20th century, in 1912, and then later, of course, in 1929 with fascism and the Lateran Pacts that you had a formal reconciliation between the state and the church in Italy. Yes. Victor Emmanuel was portrayed very much as the warrior king and father of the nation, a father for all Italians. I don’t know if he was present in all Italian homes, but in many, for sure. One of the many aspects of the story that Catherine Brice analyses is how the monarchy managed to reach the people and become popular. She analyses, for example, royal tours and the way in which family events, like weddings, funerals and christenings were staged. These are very important events for the royal family, but there were ways of making them important for the nation. She claims that these were even more important than official national holidays because scholarship has found that, in the Italian case, the new national holidays—like the festival of the Statuto celebrating the constitution and the 20th of September celebrating the conquest of Rome—did not become massive popular successes. But royal weddings, funerals and christenings became more popular among the bourgeoisie and the Italian masses. Some more recent research has looked into the role of the heir to the throne, Prince Umberto, and his wife Margherita in popularizing the monarchy and trying to reach the people through the ‘ embourgeoisement’ of the royal family and the way Umberto and Margherita—and their relationship—are portrayed. Margherita was very much involved in philanthropic activities and also became a fashion icon, presenting herself as a model of bourgeois femininity. No, I wouldn’t say so. The monarchy was compromised with fascism. That was why Victor Emmanuel III abdicated. There were only, really, three kings of Italy, Victor Emmanuel II, Umberto I and Victor Emmanuel III. His son, Umberto II, reigned for only a month or something before the monarchy was abolished in a referendum. In 2002 a constitutional change has allowed the descendants of Umberto II to come back to Italy, putting an end to the exile that was forced on the whole family after 1947. The current generation was deemed to be quite harmless. Yes. That’s right. There were a variety of political projects that imagined the new Italy as a federation, or confederation, of states under the Pope. The most important and probably the most famous was Vincenzo Gioberti’s plan. These ideas flourished under a very specific pope, Pius IX. At the very beginning of his pontificate—he became pope in 1846—it looked like he would be an innovator, a liberal pope very open to the modernization of the political system in the Papal States and to promoting projects for the unification and independence of Italy. That gives me the opportunity to mention another important book that has come out recently about the myth of Pius IX by Ignazio Veca. It’s called Il Mito di Pio IX: Storia di un Papa Liberale e Nazionale— ‘The Myth of Pius IX: History of a Liberal and National Pope’. It was published in 2019 and is all about the construction of the myth of the ‘liberal Pope’ and how Pius IX himself contributed to the creation of the myth. And it’s about how that myth evolved and, later, collapsed because, in reality, Pius IX became one of the most reactionary popes in in the history of the Catholic Church. Yes. He died in 1878, exactly the same year as Victor Emmanuel II. Exactly. And the Syllabus of Errors in 1864. He also promulgated the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary. I don’t think it could have happened any other way, given the circumstances of the time, but, of course, it’s difficult to work with the ifs and buts of counterfactual history. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter There are many legacies, for sure. Just to give you one: there is an ongoing debate surrounding the Risorgimento, in southern Italy especially. This debate was re-energised in 2017 when the Regional Council of Puglia approved a motion presented by the Five Star Movement proposing a ‘day of memory’ on 13 February to commemorate the southerners who were the victims of the Risorgimento, because they fought defending the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the Bourbon royal family against this invasion from the north. This has fuelled a very interesting conversation, not just among scholars, about the legacy of the Risorgimento, especially in shaping this north-south divide and the southern question. That remains an open wound in Italian life. The perception of the divide has changed over time, but the idea that there is an intrinsic difference between the north of the country and the south is still very much present and this does, indeed, have its roots in the Risorgimento, in how it happened and how the political elites of liberal Italy managed—or did not manage—to integrate the south into this new unified country. Yes and no. The north and south were much closer in terms of socio-economic structure at the beginning of the 19th century and the gap has become bigger and bigger since, but many important differences in the socio-economic structure were already present and can be traced back to more ancient times. No. It was a terribly complex question and a terribly complex problem that the political elites of the time faced and it was not the only one. So, I would not support a simplistic judgment. But we are certainly still living with this legacy. This remains one of the main problems of contemporary Italy."