Not making Italians
David Gilmour THE FORCE OF DESTINY: A HISTORY OF ITALY SINCE 1796 by Christopher Duggan Allen Lane, £30, pp. 653, ISBN 9780713997095 £24 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 As 0-level students 40 years ago, we were keen to answer questions about the unification of Italy because the thesis was simple to state and easy to argue. In the middle years of the 19th century the Italians had miraculously experienced a Risorgimento and, in a long, valiant, self-sacrificing struggle, had ejected their Austrian and Neapolitan oppressors and united their nation. The main characters in this epic were the heroic guerrilla leader, Garibaldi, and the Piedmontese prime minister, Cavour (hailed by the historian G. M.
Trevelyan as `the most wise and beneficent' European statesman of the century), but many other Italians had distinguished themselves, especially those romantic young idealists who had started doomed revolutions all over the peninsula and who had cried, 'Viva Italia!' as they faced the oppressors' firing squads.
By 1968 our views (or those of our teachers) were already out of date, but for some reason our textbooks did not include the early works of a great British historian, Denis Mack Smith, who had already demolished the conventional view. Unification, he had shown, was not the consequence of a war of liberation but of a series of Italian civil wars and, more importantly, of battles fought between France, Prussia and Austria. Not many Italians had wanted unification, and very few of them had been killed in the struggle — about as many as died in a single day's fighting against the Ethiopians at Adowa in 1896.
Apart from a monumental history of Sicily, Mack Smith generally wrote biographies and political histories of the century before Mussolini's death in 1945. Now a former pupil of his, Christopher Duggan, has written a brilliant and comprehensive history of Italy from 1796, the year of Napoleon's first invasion. The earlier starting point enables him to deal equally with both segments of the observation of an acute Piedmontese politician: once Italy had been made, it would be necessary to make Italians. Nearly 50 years ago a British newspaper recommended that Ghana's first leaders should read Mack Smith's history of Italy to learn how not to set up a new state. Duggan's book is almost as critical of the Italian achievement: its subtitle might have been 'How not to make Italians'.
The Force of Destiny is, however, a cultural as well as a political history, an account of 'how the national idea unfolded in Italy'. With an impressive knowledge of the literature of the 19th century, Duggan chronicles the endless 'searching for the nation's soul', the interminable efforts made by poets, novelists and philosophers to find its historical roots, in Dante or the Lombard League or even republican Rome, and the quest for suitable moments such as the battle of Legnano (1176) and the Sicilian Vespers (1282) which composers and painters could use as subjects for patriotic works. He also analyses the competing ideologies of the various nationalist groups and the fateful defeat of federalism, the one option that might have worked after unification.
It is difficult to write about the political or military history of united Italy with a straight face or without a sense of irony. Duggan is a restrained historian who does not resort to incredulity, but his comments on the inadequacies of politicians and generals are lethal in their deftness. Without emphasising the point, he shows that the dominant nationalist theme — that is, the preferred method of 'making Italians' — was to fight wars against anyone they could pick a quarrel with. There was hardly an important politician or intellectual of liberal Italy who did not clamour for war, repetitively demanding 'baths of blood' and 'baptisms of blood' as the best way to 'forge' their nation. In this respect Mussolini had many precursors.
In 1866 the Italians insisted on fighting Austria to acquire Venice and the Veneto even after Vienna had offered to give them the territory without a fight. The subsequent humiliations — defeats by a smaller Austrian army at Custoza and by a smaller Austrian navy at Lissa — set a precedent that each generation of Italian leaders managed to forget. Desperate to disprove the view that 'Italians can't fight', they managed to confirm it by losing to everyone, including Ethiopians and Greeks, though they did seize Corfu. In the second world war Italy's battleships failed to hit a single enemy vessel, while an army of 250,000 was routed by 30,000 British troops in Libya.
Although Italian foreign policy was driven by the craving to be taken seriously by the Great Powers, the country's political behaviour usually ensured that this ambition went unfulfilled. Duggan describes the performance of the Italian parliament in his usual measured way but he cannot disguise its instability, corruption, occasional violence and frivolity: half the deputies were often absent, leaving the assembly inquorate and its votes invalid. Perhaps it is not surprising that the establishment of Mussolini's authoritarian state was done with the approval of both elected chambers of parliament.
In 2002 the country's president, Carlo Ciampi, implored cinema directors to make more films about the Risorgimento. It was a strange plea, an oblique admission that unification had not built a nation, and in any case it was too late. After Mussolini's downfall, Italian politics were dominated by antinationalist parties, the Christian Democrats with their allegiance to the Catholic Church, and the Communists with their ties to Moscow. In the mid-1990s Italy's fourth largest party was the Northern League, whose members claimed that the Risorgimento was a mistake and that Garibaldi's conquest of the south had divided Africa rather than united Italy. As Christopher Duggan suggests at the end of this outstanding book, `the very insistence with which the project of "making Italians" had been pursued down to the second world war had contributed to the scant belief in collective national values'.
The author is a serious historian who writes about what happened and does not speculate on whether unification was right for Italy in 1859 or later on. Yet while his Verdian title implies that the process was inevitable, his text will provoke readers into wondering whether other options, including the survival or revival of independent states, might have been preferable. Could not Venice have prospered as a sort of Mediterranean Holland? Might not industrial Lombardy have succeeded as a sub-Alpine Belgium? Would it not have been better for Tuscany, the most civilised state in 18th-century Europe, to have remained a kind of Denmark with Art?
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