CHAPTER II

LIBERALISM IN ITALY

For the foreigner interested in the political affairs of Italy a study of the pedigree of the two elements of Fascism is essential in order to distinguish what is exclusively Italian from what is to become universal. It is therefore necessary to trace, or at least attempt to trace, this pedigree in spite of the difficulty of the task.

Fascism presents itself at first as being essentially the expression of the national consciousness of Italy. So it is; but it must be stated at once that it is the national consciousness recently acquired by the people of Italy, which, like an uncontrollable force, has worked itself out, taking Fascism as its expression. Without this distinction the student is induced by its nationalist character to see in the present movement the last act of the long drama of wars and agitations that led to the independence and unification of the country. The truth is, that though it is practically the epilogue of that drama, Fascism cannot be identified with the Risorgimento. The spirit which animated the men of the days of Cavour and Garibaldi is totally and essentially different from that which impels the followers of Mussolini to act as they do. The wars of independence were due to the initiative of an aristocratic minority; whose aristocratic and intellectual qualities distinguished them and perhaps ensured their success. The leaders of the Risorgimento were not hampered by anything like a popular following; and their eventual agreement as to what was best for their cause was always made certain by this intellectual selectness. All were able, like Garibaldi and Mazzini, to see things as they were and to act accordingly, not only to the extent of sacrificing their lives but of sacrificing their dearest ideals as well. Republicans, they accepted monarchy; ministers, of their own free will they relinquished power to place it in hands they thought more fit than their own to realise their dream; staunch Catholics, during their life they fought the Church in its temporal politics, in an age when the best educated priests would not admit and could not even see the possibility of distinction between temporal and spiritual power. Only religious and idealistic men can realise by how much such sacrifices surpassed for them the gift of money, liberty, or even life. There is one English word that sums up what these Italian liberators were, whether noblemen, solicitors, writers, professors, officers, doctors: they were _gentlemen_ of good classical education and wide reading who had assimilated what was best in Europe. The common people, one cannot insist too much upon the fact, remained indifferent at best, and that only as long as their interests were not affected; the lower middle class were hostile, that is to say the shop people and all the multitude of small functionaries who saw their daily bread dependent on the existing state of things, were openly against any change. How could such people feel the need or see the possibility of building up a nation, one nation, out of the harlequin coat presented by the map of Italy?

Thus a free hand was guaranteed to the small number of Italian gentlemen then endowed with heroic souls. They had nobody to consult, they were a State in themselves, a State without a lower class. Perhaps for the last time in the history of the world we see there realised the classical republic without a political plebs. No wonder that they worked a miracle; they belonged politically to different states, and yet by the force of their ideal they attained that oneness of conscience which gives personality and reality to a nation. The spirit of the nation existed before its material realisation; there is no better illustration of the new notion that Fascism is bringing to the fore in the world of concrete history, that of the nation as a spiritual reality, independent of geographical and ethnographical determinations. Never in history has this notion received a more complete and actual realisation than in this first dawn of the national life in Italy. The reality of the nation had its first affirmation in the sacrifice of these men, for it is obvious that no sober man would give up life, liberty, wealth, for something unreal; and, in fact, the reality of Italy as a nation ceased to be questioned then and there.

Every advantage, of course, has its disadvantage. As the pioneers of the Risorgimento did not need the people, they overlooked all the problems that the necessity of obtaining popular collaboration would have compelled them to face. All economic and social questions were overlooked except by a very few; the spiritual education of the lower class was not even suggested in their programme of action. Their aims were the independence and the political unity of Italy, and to that goal they directed their hearts and minds indifferent to the needs of practical life, and to all the obstacles that seemed to make their dream a theme for the lyrical effusions of poets. In fact they were poets, all of them, for they created a reality out of an ideal vision that was more an intuition than an intellectual conception. The very manner in which they carried out their revolution was æsthetic more than practical; they shut their eyes to all that was in contradiction to their dream, exactly as the artist does who strives to express an intuition through material realisation, and in order not to let the objective world crowd his mind deliberately shuts his eyes to it, to everything that is not his present ideal.

The economic and social questions could not in any case have been faced, still less dealt with, as long as the nation was not a political reality. Any attempt would have been sterile and perhaps even harmful. First, it would have led the people to believe that under the then present conditions the economic organisation of each little state might have been so planned as to ensure the material well-being of the population, that they could receive a greater share of political importance and therefore of administrative attention from the local governments and thus be better off in the harlequin coat than under the flag of a united Italy. It was, moreover, expedient to hold to the singleness of purpose that was more likely to make action coherent all through the peninsula; only such singleness of aim made it possible to men of so different temperament and breeding as professional men and noblemen, Tuscans and Sicilians, Freemasons and ardent Catholics, to think and therefore to act in positive harmony.

When a bullet has hit the bull’s-eye it has fulfilled its purpose, and stays there in helpless immobility or falls to the ground a useless thing. It was meant for that shot, and is bound to be purposeless when it has made its mark. The generations of Carlo Alberto and Mazzini, of Vittorio Emmanuele and Cavour, had certainly hit the mark when Rome had become the capital of Italy. Was it to be expected that men who had identified themselves with the goal should be able to take another goal and fit themselves to a new task? Or could it be that the realisation of the new State should bring, as its immediate consequence, a ready-made generation of statesmen? Indeed, if there is one thing that cannot be produced by a magic wand, it is a body of able and trained political men.

When the days of heroic deeds were over the makers of Italy turned to the government of the new realm and found themselves faced by all the problems of national life. Inspiration and idealism proved out of place, and although theirs was, what would have been called in England or in France, a Conservative government, they had to rely on a very strange electoral body. While they did not extend the vote at once, they found in the middle class a set of Arrivists with an imperative egoism that was to prove the curse of political life in Italy. It is difficult for an English, French, or American citizen to realise the kind of problems with which these men were beset. Above all it is difficult to an Englishman; England has had five or six centuries of political experience, a length of time sufficient to produce electors and mandatories able to realise what are the duties of the executive as well as of the legislature. In Italy, on the other hand, the nineteenth century has seen all stage of political development succeeding one another in a hurly-burly that has a good deal in common with the succession of the events of a man’s life on a cinema film. He passes from childhood to youth, and on to manhood, maturity and old age in a couple of hours. If he actually could crowd all experience into a couple of years the proportion would be better; but he would have no fairer notion of reality and of his own rights and duties at any stage of his life than the Italians could be expected to have when they had to pass in less than fifty years through the political stages successively experienced by the people of other countries in several centuries.

Now no student of the history of politics, or even of art, ignores the fact that when a nation has reached a political or artistic form it is in the process of getting a mastery of that form that criticisms arise, and that out of criticism comes the idea, confused at first, then clearer and clearer, of the form that is to supersede it. This is, in fact, the process of dialectic: it is the dialectic of history; and in spite of the wish to avoid any special terminology, it is better to call the process by its own name. At first people struggle to reach a certain form of government, and that moment of dialectic ends when the form is reached; they then apply it more and more fully and, during its application, discover its limitations; this second moment ends in criticism of the whole theory; finally they set themselves to remedy its shortcomings. This last moment coincides in the people with the free consciousness of dissatisfaction, and in the leaders with a clear understanding of the new tendencies to be satisfied, so that it is not theoretical to say that the people learn to use a new form whilst they are using, then discarding, the one that came before it. In Italy nothing of the sort happened. The international culture of its scholars put them in contact with all that was best or worst in the politics of Europe. They would have been ashamed to be behindhand in what was considered social progress.

Then two uncommon factors came into play after 1870. To make Italy, it had been necessary to trample upon a good deal of historical tradition. Not all the local governments were as bad during the eighteenth century as they were said to be. Moreover, paramount had been the prestige of the Popes. Against all the Conservative forces the men of the Risorgimento had appeared as a lot of Jacobins; they had to fight the Church in its temporal power, and although this power was not essential to religion it had behind it a tradition of ten centuries. With the government of the Popes the whole Italian civilisation was closely connected; indeed, the best brains of Italy have always realised that, whatever the faults of the Church, Italy is first of all a Catholic country. Anti-clericals in their political activity, men like de Sanctis, would not have printed a word against the Church as historians. Indeed, the greatest thinkers of the time, Gioberti and Rosmini, tried very hard to be good Catholics and great philosophers at the same time.

Yet since they could not doubt that Italy must have Rome for its capital as the seal of its political unity, the Popes had to be deprived of their temporal sovereignty. The feeling about Rome was one of historical mysticism, and seldom, if ever, have men found themselves thrown into an irreligious attitude by a sentiment of that kind. No contradiction could have been more profound, for it brought these ardent lovers of their remotest past to make use of forces that were antagonistic to the one institution that linked their present to this same past. However, there was no alternative; adopting Illuminism as one of the chief currents animating modern life, they had as their most precious support the anti-Catholic movement, to which, as a matter of fact, a great many of them belonged. Anti-Catholicism had a great weakness in that it was not a national product, but had been introduced into political life as a necessary stimulant to rouse the people from their slumbers, as will be seen later on; now that they were awake it divided the nation and prevented the welding of the new tradition to its history of twenty centuries.

The statesmen of this epoch had no experience of the administration and government of a big State: they were not conscious of the problems of international relations; they knew nothing of the economic and social exigencies of a population exceeding thirty millions of souls.

The people had no political education whatsoever. On the other hand, the leaders would not be retrograde and became more and more liberal, at a rate that did not allow the people to be prepared by experience for successive steps in popular government. The sequence of reforms was not historical, was not dialectical: it did not correspond with the spiritual and economic development of the people, but was introduced to make up for lost time and bring Italy up to the Western European level as fast as possible.

With no tradition to make up ballast, the so-called “Right” could not be termed Conservative because it originated in a revolution, and it kept its old ideal as a target after it had been realised, and therefore had ceased to be a principle of action.

What was to be expected under such conditions? The wonder is that the nation did not go to pieces, and that the work of two generations of constructive men was not destroyed by their incapacity to husband what they had created. In the face of such facts one cannot help thinking of Vico and his identification of divine Providence with the rationality of history. This people was politically at the nursery stage; it had no modern political science of its own, and therefore none of its legislative acts were based on actual and practical understanding of what were the national necessities. They were inspired by the example of foreign governments and, consequently, could not meet Italy’s peculiar necessities. What did for the others could not do for Italy. Yet it was impossible to keep back a people so well informed of modern progress.

The Italian Liberals, it must be said for their immortal fame, had the clear-sightedness necessary to attain their aims, inasmuch as they had reduced them to a formula that could be accepted by all the other patriots. “Italy, one and free,” was their aim, and to this aim nobody could object. The flaw of such an aim is that it is too simple to correspond to actual reality. It sounds like an algebraical axiom, and, indeed, is just as abstract in its basis as any mathematical formula.

For the Liberals the nation was exclusively constituted by its territorial expansion and by the unification of the people of the different states therein included. They could not change their aim, and when they had to administer the new realm their eagerness and singleness of purpose often blinded them to reality. As the unity they had reached was formal, if one can term it so, their legislation purposely ignored the differences between Sicilians and Tuscans; and in their haste to unify internally what was already externally one, they imposed what could at best be formal and artificial unity. Every annexation had been preceded by a local struggle, and success was not sufficient to cause equanimity in the triumphant party. All that had existed under the old régime was an object of hatred to the Liberals; and their ministers, even when they kept above such feelings, were none the less unable to discriminate between the antiquated local laws and those that were still useful and even good. They destroyed local institutions, often created to meet actual requirements, to impose, for instance, upon the people of Sicily Piedmontese laws, the inspiration of which was usually imported from France or England. They had the impression that it would be dangerous to the unity of the country to keep some of the local laws, or to make new ones to meet the particular needs of this or that province. In the minds of these passionate creators of unity, unity was a quite fragile affair, produced by them _ex tempore_; they did not see that it could only be the result of a slow elaboration, bound to go on for generations, and that the final success of their enterprise was more likely to be ensured by an intelligent interpretation of tradition than by the application of exotic doctrines that did not fit any of the historical characteristics of the country.

The same singleness of vision was to prove blinding in regard to several other points; but it will be enough to state here that the fact that the men who had sacrificed themselves to the cause of unity had all been gentlemen, led those in power to consider the higher classes as exclusively constituting the nation they had brought into being. The rest were politically non-existent; and in the haste to develop the commercial and industrial possibilities of the country a good deal too much was done to enthrone capital and invite thereby the advent of Socialism.

Finally, another cause of trouble—indeed, another consequence of the same lack of political tradition and education—was the impossibility of forming proper party organisations. Who was Left—and who was Right? Discrimination was impossible. Parties, like all historical organisms, are called into being and developed according to, and in consequence of, the political development of the country. In Italy they had to be produced, planned and organised all at once, by the mere empirical decisions of men, who, whatever their ability, or the loftiness of their ideals, could not avoid the arbitrariness and the errors to which the best individual men are subject, limited as their views are by their personal feelings or ambitions. Therefore, what happened was this: some followers of Mazzini who had joined the Liberals in the struggle for liberty, stood out as republicans; some who had followed Garibaldi and who had for ten years longed to take Rome from the Pope, became anti-clerical democrats; the rest were not to be clearly distinguished from one another because a man who was a staunch monarchist may have been in the same time anti-Catholic if he was a Freemason, whilst another might have had strong democratic tendencies and yet stand for tradition. The best instance of this may have been Crispi: he belonged to the Left, and certainly often acted and felt like a man of the Right.

Such confusion was to reach its climax when, after 1866 and 1870, it was understood that the king and the government, having obtained the Veneto from Austria, had given up the intention of adding Trento and Trieste to the kingdom. Then the extreme Left joined irredentism to its anti-Catholic activity. They went on speaking of the ethnographic right that such provinces had to claim themselves as Italian, and they artfully bound their anti-religious campaign to a programme that sounded highly idealistic. No wonder that the different governments that succeeded each other should lose their time fighting the ghost of financial bankruptcy. One thing only can be brought against them, and it is that though all men of great culture they did not understand how unhistorical were their actions. They should have known that their conception of State and citizen, their idea of what is the function of the government, had been taken ready made from other countries and lazily accepted without any proper study of its antecedents. Some were Anglophile, some under their new Germanophilism hid the most perfect assimilation of French doctrines taken in their easiest and, therefore, most abstract formulas. None took liberty for what the word had meant of actual and positive political conquest to the average Englishman of the seventeenth century; they did not even take it for what it had meant of practical improvement to the Frenchman of the eighteenth century; they took it as a rhetorical figure with an abstract concept behind it, as soon as it ceased to mean independence from foreign rule.

They termed themselves Liberals, however, and when they came to be ministers of a Liberal government they professed sometime a very curious notion of what such a government should be; Cairoli put it down in three words, _reprimere non prevenire_; an excellent motto perhaps, when the citizens are used to the exercise of their duties and rights, but soon proved to be dangerous in a country where traditions had been trampled upon during half a century. In less than a decade Italy was the prey of anarchy, for in 1878, the same Cairoli, had to defend the king’s life in Naples at the risk of his own, and in Florence and Pisa bombs were thrown against the crowds rejoicing over the king’s narrow escape. The Liberals looked at the way legislation worked in France and in England, but, like all followers of Illuminism, they took it for granted that there existed a certain kind of animal which was the same wherever and whenever you find Man, and they looked at the application of the system, not at its origin, not at its philosophical and political antecedents; in short, they did not see that it was brought about by the whole history of the countries in which it flourished, and they believed that it would work wherever men lived together in nations.