Podcast no 18 – Was Italian unification a success between 1860 and
1871?
Italy (and for that matter many Italians) went through a difficult
time in the 10 years after the unification of North and South in
1860. Over the next two podcasts we’ll look at those difficulties in
6 different categories:
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Continuing differences between North and South;
The problems caused by “Piedmontisation”;
The Brigand’s war;
The disillusionment of the radicals and democrats after 1860;
The attitude of the Catholic Church to the new state; and
The effect of the death of Cavour.
In today’s podcast we’ll look at the first three of these problems,
that of the differences between North and South, and the problems
caused by ‘Piedmontisation’, we’ll end by look at how these hit the
South especially hard and caused a civil war known as ‘the brigands
war’.
You may have heard that the Italian liberal politician D’Azeglio said
after 1861 that ‘Italy is made, now we must make Italians’. Even
when looking at the differences between Lombardy and the next
door state of Piedmont, this statement seemed true. However, it
was doubly true of the differences between the North and the
South. In Piedmont, there was a long tradition of loyalty to the
Royal family, and of a state bureaucracy - of a system of
government which employed civil servants to get things done. In
the South a persons’ loyalty was held much more to a town, or a
city. Relationships with local landowners were far more important
to most ordinary Southerners than their relations with or loyalty to
the government in, let alone to the King of Naples. We’ll see how
this became a problem when Piedmontisation (at first at least) cut
local landlords out of wielding power.
The economies of North and South were also very different. In both
North and South, agriculture was still the main way of making
money. However, farms were often owned by peasants in the
North, and some peasants had grown wealthy in their own right
through farming. In the South peasants were much more likely to
be landless, and to earn a living day to day by working for local
landowners. In the period running up to unification, in a process
known as ‘latifundia’ this had been getting worse. Landowners had
been using the law to take control of common land previously used
by peasants to graze cattle or sheep. This forced even more
peasants off the land and into the search for poorly paid work.
In the North there was a growing industrial sector, and better and
better transport connections with Europe. Trains linked Paris with
Turin, enabling goods to be traded outside of Italy.
Even the languages of Italy were still a barrier to unification. Only
2.5 % of those living in ‘Italy’ spoke ‘Italian’. Christopher Duggan
describes in his book ‘The Force of Destiny’, how soldiers from
Piedmont found the locals of Naples to be ‘incomprehensible’,
leaving them with the feeling of being strangers in a foreign land.
The final difference between North and South I would like to point
out is the attitude of Northerners to Southerners, something which
remains a problem in Italy even to this day. Time and time again in
the documents one can see a dismissive and superior attitude to the
South and Southerners in the use of words like ‘uncivilised’,
‘backward’, ‘barbaric’, ‘superstitious’, ‘immoral’, ‘lazy’, ‘cowardly’.
Even a supporter of Garibaldi, described a volunteer peasant,
fighting alongside him against the Bourbon Army in Sicily in 1860 as
‘a little dwarfish monster’, ‘more brute than man’. Southern Italy
was often seen as being ‘sick’ or ‘ill’. The fear in the North was
that, unless the illness was given some treatment, the disease
would spread.
The difficulties caused by these differences were made even worse
by the process of ‘Piedmontisation’ that took place after unification.
Unification was completed in a hurry and Cavour had made no plans
as to how to control the South. Those who joined Garibaldi often
expected that Sicily and Naples would get some form of autonomy
or devolved local rule, and elsewhere in Italy democrats hoped that
some sort of federation would be set up, so that the different parts
of Italy would continue to have their own laws and traditions of
government.
This was not to be. At first Piedmont’s laws and constitution was
used as a temporary way of ruling the new provinces in the North,
and there was talk of having a later constitutional congress or
review, to decide the best way to rule Italy. However, when the
South was joined to Italy, and when the South proved to be a
difficult place to keep in order, the idea of local powers and local
arrangements was abandoned. Instead Piedmont’s system of
government was imposed across the peninsula, backed up by the
army as a way of keeping the peace.
This meant that Piedmont’s currency, weights and measures, civil
laws and eventually criminal laws, her voting laws and parliament,
her tax system, tariffs, the system of conscription and even the
school system was imposed across Italy. In some ways this
probably represented progress for many of the states, but in others
there were reasons to resent these changes. In Lombardy for
instance the education system had been far better than that of
Piedmont. In Tuscany a long tradition of autonomy and fair,
progressive laws was ended overnight. In the South the new
system of bureaucracy didn’t work well with the tradition of loyalty
to the local town and the power of the landlords over the peasants.
Conscription and higher taxes were especially hated in Naples. In
Sicily, peasants who thought that they had been fighting to liberate
Sicily from Naples, found instead that they were now ruled from
Turin in Piedmont.
What’s more, the Sicilians found themselves paying for the privilege
of being ruled by the North. Piedmont had borrowed large sums of
money from foreign investors, not only to pay for the industrial
expansion of the 1850s, the railways and canals that Cavour
needed to modernise Piedmont, but also to pay for the wars of 1859
and 1860. In the 1860’s Italy’s debt was running at about 400
million lire, which was equal to the whole of the money earned by
all Italians in one year (to compare, in the UK in 2010, at the height
of concerns about the national debt, ours was equal to 50% of what
the country earned). Taxes were raised across Italy to pay
Piedmont’s debts, and this caused a great deal of resentment.
Particularly hated by peasants, especially in the South, was a tax on
grinding flour, called the ‘grist’ tax.
These problems hit the peasants, and those of the South especially
hard. The high taxes fell on to the peasant’s shoulders. The
Piedmontese government had closed monasteries in the South, and
sold their land to raise money. The monasteries had been the place
peasants had gone when they had no food or money, and this
welfare system was destroyed along with the sale of church land.
Conscription caused 25,000 Southerners to run away from the army
in 1861 alone. They often joined bands of soldiers who had been
sacked from the Bourbon armies at the end of the war of 1860,
roaming the country and taking what they could to live.
These ‘brigands’ were often used by local landowners as a way of
controlling their peasants, they sometimes they had political aims
and decided to fight for the return of the Bourbons. Sometimes
they were just brigands, and killed and stole to stay alive. Often
however, they were revolting at the high taxes, the conscription and
their increasing poverty. Nonetheless, there were so many of these
‘brigands’ in the South in the 1860s that by 1864 100,000 Italian
troops were required to keep the peace in the South. This period
was really a civil war between those in the South who didn’t want to
be ruled by Piedmont, and the Piedmontese determined to control
them. The war became known as the Brigands War, and until
things started to calm in the late 1860s, as many as 16,000 Italians
had died, more than in the wars of liberation, and many as a result
of great barbarity on both sides.
This ‘brigand’s war’ is a powerful example of the way that the
problems of Italy after unification hit the South especially hard. In
today’s podcast we’ve seen how the attitude of the Northerners to
the South, how the economic problems of Italy, and how the
process of ‘Piedmontisation’ led to a bloody civil war. In the next
podcast we’ll turn to the disappointment in the new state of the
radicals, the democrats and those following Mazzini, and look at the
difficult relationship between the Catholic Church and the new state.