Italy—unity and after
Raymond Carr
Victor Emanuel, Cavour, and the Risorgirnento D. Mack Smith (OUP £7.00) Ito/Y since 1945, Elizabeth Wiskemann (Macmillan £2.95) The great failing of the more popular of our professional historians is their determination to make things easy. At best this represents zeal to disseminate useful knowledge, to reach a wide and profitable audience; at worst a heretical belief that history can be simplified. It can't. Denis Mack Smith's book is professional history at its very best. Not for him historians who try to convert "a tangle of facts into a, simple shape . . . there is no necessary reason why truth should be beautiful or siMple."
Mr Mack Smith's meticulous — but far from dull — scholarship is displayed in detailed studies of the years around 1860 When Italian unity, to the surprise of Europe, became a fact. His quest for truth destroys two beautiful myths: firstly that Cavour was the all-seeing calculator of the nal fi V product; secondly that his king, ictor Emanuel, was a model constitutional king and a gallant gentleman. Both myths were cultivated by establishMent historians prepared, not merely to Withhold documents that in any other country would be public property, but to fudge them in quotation. The idea of Italy rtust appear as the general will of all aliaris forged into a united nation by selfless statesmen, rather than, as Mack ,, l'hith demonstrates, a not very popular eclucept guided by hesitant politicians concerned above all with their own survival and the defeat of rivals. Liberal Politicians, as one of them put it, iWou 1 d held "it not be right to have beautiful Terods discredited by historical criticism." ue defeat of liberalism was therefore ri°t. unconnected with [the liberals] 'LYsterical self-vindication — a Bismarskian peav°1-ir was a brilliant improviser, a r,n "tical Paganini rather than a long-term t'('Ianner. Jealous of collaborators and with la° Much power in his own hands, he ihrided himself in awful muddles with CseanY. His ruthlessness and outbursts of trYs.terical self-vindication — a Bismarkian d,ap are unattractive. He jettisoned co—„,zeglio, his first Prime Minister, without '"Punction; he was ready to betray h,uds°o, the British Minister in Turin, who d risked a career by showing him official e„sePatches. Above all the statesman who is citi,dited With the creation of United Italy u riot believe in Italy — he was ready to give Tuscany to a Hohenzollern as ftoePrresentative of "a race which still has and vigour." It was the ' reds ' like _odribaldi who believed in Italy. When he sh not hang them (as he professed he tak,ed to do) Cavour dished them by ',1'!g the guts out of their programme, as Wit'hid with Garibaldi in Sicily and Naples. hapt,"°ukt the 'reds' Italian unity would Dos 'eel). a longer process; and, it is becasiiile to argue, a more satisfactory one lurnZse it would have meant a less hurried Cr,Ig together of disparate societies. Victor Emanuel's main use for parlia mentary government was that he could land his ministers with the responsibility for the failures of policies pursued behind their backs. Full of impossible notions of leading his army to victory he confessed, "the one thing that truly gives me pleasure is fighting wars." He forgot that Italian unity had been secured by French arms; not a single Italian perished at the decisive battle of Magenta; Italians perished fighting against Italy in the Austrian armies. His military fantasies all but led his kingdom and his dynasty to disaster. A rotten general and a feeble politician (it was his lazy indecision that stopped him subverting the constitution) the shortcomings of this shameless intriguer and womaniser were hidden by his own servants and subsequent historians. Mr Mack Smith, in brilliant fashion, exposes him for what he was: a rather vulgar man (his dyed moustaches — his ministers made him shear them by ten centimetres before meeting Queen Victoria — ran in the rain) rarely in control of events and ready to tell any lie or sacrifice any servant to cover his own often fatuous blunderings.
The only excuse for his hankering after absolutism is the feebleness of the parliamentary parties; and this, as Mr Mack Smith demonstrates, derives from Cavour's use of loose centrist coalitions, a technique which was to remain the essence of Italian parliamentarianism. Such governments could never face up to fundamental issues because they would disintegrate in the process; hence the failure to tackle the regionalist problem. Highly dissimilar regions were forced into a centralist straitjacket and the national parliament was swamped by trivial local issues. In this, as in so much else, an emergency solution pushed through in a difficult crisis became settled policy. That this can happen is one of the profound lessons of Mr Mack Smith's splendid studies.
His essays will not, I suspect, please Italian patriots. There was not much popular steam behind the notion of a united Italy; hence its achievement came as a surprise, and that it was gained so easily left Italian nationalism with a sense of frustration intensified by the shaming defeat of Custoza — Victor Emanuel's attempt to go it alone. The North knew little of the South and didn't like what it knew. No cook, remarked Azeglio (Mr Mack Smith's favourite politician), can make a good dish with stinking meat; for puritan Piedmont to join Naples was like going to bed with a smallpox victim.
It is sad that Elizabeth Wiskermann's account of Italy since 1945 is her last book; sad, too, that she is not at her best in it. Her habitual command of ordered detail is here a little on the dry side. Many of the problems that defeated Cavour plague the modern Italy — above all, it would seem from Miss Wiskemann's analysis, the problem of a 'backward' South whose underemployed pour into the 'progressive ' industrial North, straining social services and creating social tensions. Housing and education for the immigrants present appalling problems.
English history does not seem to contain such persistent, intractable problems which give a curious continuity to Italian or Spanish history. Nor, for that matter, do English politicians stab each other in the back, Italian style, with ideologically refined weapons; they just stab each other in the back, pragmatically. They do not share that mania for intellectual definition that splits parties (Miss Wiskemann is particularly valuable on the ' currents ' in Christian Democracy), nor do English politicians share the concomitant expertise in high-level intrigue characteristic of Fanfani. They are not burdened with the task of fitting together the bits and pieces that have split asunder into a working majority. What with the Pope ready to deny any Italian the right to divorce, and the strongest Communist party in Europe willing to bring down any ministry, no wonder that politicians like Moro were broken by the struggle to keep parliamentary government on its feet.
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