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Liberalism, Civil Rights, and Reform: Vittorio Emanuele Orlando and the Great War

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Liberalism, Civil Rights, and Reform: Vittorio Emanuele Orlando and the Great War 186 Di Scala Chapter 9 Liberalism, Civil Rights, and Reform: Vittorio Emanuele Orlando and the Great War Spencer M. Di Scala The First World War altered what appeared to be the evolutionary course of many countries. Following the war, no major European nation changed so quickly, so radically, and so thoroughly as Italy. In historian A. William Salomone’s felicitous phrase, Italian democracy had been ‘in the making’ before 1914, but by 1922 the former Socialist founder of worldwide fascism, Benito Mussolini, had come to power.1 Not surprisingly, this development destroyed the careers or reputations of the Liberal leaders that had struggled to make the country more democratic. These Liberals included Giovanni Giolitti, who dominated politics before the First World War, and Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, the Prime Minister who led Italy to victory. Before and dur- ing the Great War Orlando had established a solid track record in welcoming diverse groups into Italian politics, trying to build consensus, and defending civil rights. Because of Mussolini’s rise to power, however, historians have either written Orlando out of history, neglecting his successful preservation of Liberal principles during the First World War, and the Liberal State suffered a calamitous blow to its reputation that negatively affected subsequent Italian history. Liberal Italy was attacked from all sides. Even before the First World War, writes Salomone, ‘Italian political literature…[was] drenched with a flood of bitter criticism about everything and everybody.’ Critics, including Gaetano Salvemini, attacked the parliamentary system, condemning it as a betrayal of the Risorgimento, setting it up as the ultimate evil without realizing that some- thing worse could occur. After coming to power the Fascists agreed with these critics, in effect, by condemning the Liberal State as weak and ineffectual – especially at the Paris Peace Conference – and presenting themselves as the legitimate heirs of the Roman Empire and the Risorgimento. Following the end of the Second World War, Communist-Socialist interpretations reviled liberal- ism as having been unable to block fascism from coming to power, condemning 1 See A. William Salomone, Italy in the Giolittian Era: Italian Democracy in the Making (Philadelphia, 1960). © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004363724_011 Liberalism, Civil Rights, and Reform 187 too the Risorgimento that gave rise to the Liberal State, and hoping to set up a Soviet regime.2 Even today, many historians ignore or view with scepticism the idea that the Paris Peace Conference following the Great War contributed to the destruction of Italian democracy.3 The debate on the rise of fascism has been inadequate in that historians tend to dismiss the role of the Paris Peace Conference in Mussolini’s coming to power in 1922. The debate has centered on the questions of whether fascism was just a ‘parenthesis’ in Italian history or whether it can be attributed to fatal flaws in the character of Italians or of their history. These contrasting views – which, in one form or another, have survived until the present – may be discerned in two famous books by anti- Fascists: Benedetto Croce’s A History of Italy, 1871-1915, first published in 1928, and in G.A. Borgese, Goliath: The March of Fascism (1937). The idea that the shock of the First World War and the shabby treatment that Italy received at the Paris Peace Conference had a significant role in the derailing of Italian democracy has had less currency than the two opposing views stated above, and yet it has earlier origins. The French led the denigra- tion of the Italian war effort at the Conference by inventing the myth that the Italians began their final offensive when the Central Powers had already been defeated.4 Furthermore, the resulting failure of Orlando and the Italian del- egation to achieve the gains Italians expected after their participation in the conflict brought a prediction from Orlando that the issue would ‘cause violent conflicts in Italy in the more or less near future.’5 Confirmation of Orlando’s admonitions arrived in the form of disorders; in the branding of Italy’s participation in the war as the ‘mutilated victory’; and in the rebellion by intellectuals ranging from the moderate Gaetano Salvemini to the Nationalist leader Francesco Coppola against the country’s treatment at Paris. Coppola excoriated Orlando, and through him Liberal Italy, seeing in his failure, and in that of the Liberal State, an inability to lead the battle for the country’s future survival in a hostile world; and Salvemini interpreted the 2 See the Salomone book for a taste of these debates, especially the “Introductory Essay” by Salvemini (the quote is the opening line of this essay), and the section entitled “Giolittian Italy Revisited”. 3 The idea that the Paris Peace Conference was responsible for Hitler’s coming to power in 1933, fourteen years after the Conference, while the refusal to consider seriously that the Conference might have contributed to Mussolini’s takeover in Italy in 1922, only three years after the same Conference, is perhaps the ultimate irony. 4 The full details of this campaign are beyond the scope of this essay and may be found in Spencer M. Di Scala, Makers of the Modern World. Vittorio Orlando: Italy (London, 2010; up- dated e-book, 2014), pp. 126-131. 5 Ibid., p. 52..
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