Giolitti, Giovanni (1842–1928)

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GIOLITTI, GIOVANNI (1842–1928)

Italian politician.

Statesman Giovanni Giolitti embodied liberal Italy, its progress and its final failure when fascism came to power. He dominated two decades of Italian political history to the point that historians speak of an "età giolittiana" (age of Giolitti). The statesman from the Piedmont left a rather controversial image of himself that recent historiography has revisited in a more favorable light.

After studying law, Giolitti began his prefectorial (civil service) career in 1862 and was elected deputy in parliament in 1882. He served as prime minister in 1892–1893 and was minister of the interior in the Giuseppe Zanardelli government in 1901–1902. He became prime minister once again in 1903, a post he would keep, with only a few brief interruptions, until World War I. He came back to power in the context of a postwar political and social crisis.

Giolitti encouraged the liberalization of Italian political life. He worked hard to consolidate the unitary state's social foundations by broadening the nation's political participation. This political modernization process would be accompanied by important economic and social transformations. Italy's industrial takeoff took place in the 1900s and gave birth to a bourgeois business class. Being pragmatic, not dogmatic, Giolitti wanted to be the man of "the fair middle." He invited leaders of the Socialist Party to enter the government on several occasions. Simultaneously, he wanted to encourage Catholics to participate in the nation's political life, as they had remained marginal since 1870 due to the conflict between the Vatican and the Italian state. Therefore the "Gentiloni Pact" was passed in 1913, after Count Vincenzo Gentiloni, leader of the Electoral Union, a Catholic lobby, proposed a pact with the moderate candidates of Giolitti's party, promising the support of Catholic votes to those who advocated Christian values in the Chamber of Deputies (with regard to divorce, family, education, and other issues). A new electoral law in 1912 established a system of universal suffrage for males aged twenty-one and older (thirty years for illiterates). The administration enjoyed tremendous growth under Giolitti, expanding the role of the state in the life of the country.

Giolitti's liberalism found its limits with the development of social movements, particularly in the south of Italy, where he justified police repression of strikers and protestors. Giolitti was also criticized by right-wing, nationalist Italians, whose organizations and ideas were flourishing at the beginning of the century. They denounced Giolitti's "Italietta" (little Italy), the lack of the ideal of national grandeur, and his "politician's" politics.

Giolitti's career was also stained by corruption. The Banca Romana (Rome Bank) case (in which he promoted the bank's allegedly corrupt director to senatorial rank) forced him to resign his position as prime minister in 1893, interrupting his career. But Giolitti was especially reproached for "giolittism," which consisted in governing with the support of parliamentary majorities where political differences and ideology mattered less than clienteles. The Italian historian Gaetano Salvemini stigmatized Giolitti's methods of governing, particularly in the south, labeling him the "ministro della malavita" (minister of the underworld). While his methods of governing brought about political stability, they also contributed to postponing in-depth social democratization, the differences between parties resting more on network and clientele rivalries rather than on opposing programs or ideas.

Giolitti's impact was also important in terms of foreign policy. He remained a partisan of Italy's loyalty to the "Triplice" (alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary), regularly reaffirmed until 1912. Pressured by certain financial institutions, particularly the Banco di Roma, a group of moderate Catholics and Italian nationalists, he decided—with the king's assent, but without consulting parliament—to invade Libya, making it an Italian possession with the Treaty of Lausanne in October 1912. The conquest of Libya triggered a wave of nationalist sentiment and divided Italian socialists, some of whom were sensitive to the nationalist theme of "the proletarian nation" driven to find new territories to migrate to. Giolitti resigned in March of 1914 and failed to prevent Italy's participation in World War I, when it sided with the Allies in 1915.

Giolitti's last term in power (June 1920–June 1921) has become one of the most discussed periods of his career. Though he was firm in dealing with the seizure of Fiume by Gabriele D'Annunzio and his legionnaires, chasing them out of Trieste in December 1920, he let the social and political crisis that gripped Italy after the war deteriorate. In the same way that other politicians of the Liberal Party had, he underestimated the Fascist danger, supporting, for example, the Acerbo electoral law project when he was president of the parliamentary commission, which changed the law to favor the Fascist Party, dealing a decisive blow to democracy. After the Fascist March on Rome in 1922, Giolitti remained in Parliament, as part of the antifascist opposition after 1925, until his death in 1928.

See alsoFascism; Italy.