Literary Review - August 2007

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HISTORY

and Germany covered an aggressive foreign policy in the Horn of Africa which resulted in slaughter at the hands of Ethiopian tribesmen at Adua (or Adowa). This Italian defeat poisoned the political atmosphere, giving rise to a clamorous nationalist movement responsible for military intervention in Libya in 1911 and Italy’s belated decision to join the Entente side in 1915. Duggan gives a moving account of the fate of peasant boys dragooned into the hopeless battles of the Isonzo, and the mounting rage that accompanied the mutilated peace which resulted. The fanatic Left made the Allende-type mistake of indulging in a gestural rural and municipal socialism in the ‘red biennial’ which elicited the Fascist backlash orchestrated by the maverick former socialist Mussolini. Italy’s imperfect democracy was dismantled by the mid1920s and replaced by a Fascist police state whose oppressive weight was felt more by the southern Mafia than by political opponents, who were quarantined in remote southern villages. The regime executed all of twenty-five people. Mussolini also sought a moral and physical revolution, from which would spring a martial ‘new man’, who foreigners would no longer confuse with clowns, organ grinders and waiters. This failed to come about, despite the propagation of manliness, the adoption of the goose-stepping passo romano and the Roman salute. ‘Oi voi’, so to speak, for the formal ‘Lei’, was abandoned as too bourgeois. For the first time in the eighty-year history of the unified Italian state, ancient Rome became exemplary, while war was used to forge a sense of Fascist nationhood. Ironically, much of central Rome was ruined to bring this vision about. Barbaric imperial campaigns were launched in Libya and Ethiopia, reliant upon concentration camps, mass executions and, to secure rapid victory, at Mussolini’s express insistence, bombing with mustard and arsine gas to wipe out resistance. Like the ancient Romans at Carthage, the Fascists made a desert and called it civilisation. Intervention in Spain cemented the fateful alliance with Hitler, and a final disastrous war. By 1943–45 this had also become an Italian civil war in which 44,000 resistance fighters lost their lives. The chapters on postwar and contemporary Italy are

Springing into action: Mussolini’s New Men

relatively disappointing. An allegedly inspiring antiFascist vision among resisters gave way to the machine politics of Christian Democrats and Communists, while few steps were taken to purge Italy of former Fascists or to hold war-crimes trials. There is an interesting account of the consequences of internal migration, with some nine million southerners (and islanders) going to Milan and Turin, and of how Italians opted for the rampant consumerism of New York rather than Moscow, even though those who had named their kids Uliano or Vladimiro also shed a fond tear on the death of Stalin. Marshal Aid and membership of the EEC transformed Italy into a prosperous place. The state remained the main problem. Duggan incisively criticises the Christian Democrats, who, leaving ‘ethics’ to a Church they pulled away from, colonised the machinery of the state so as to pack the hugely bloated public sector with their own clients. In one Catania hospital, where everyone from the surgeons to the cleaners was a Christian Democrat, the CD Senator director bussed in extra patients to boost his party’s vote. Finally, readers get perfunctory accounts of the implosion of the political system in the wake of ‘Bribesville’, Red Brigade and neo-Fascist terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s, the struggle against the Comorra and Mafia, and the rise of the Northern League, National Alliance, Forza Italia and so forth. The last parts of the book read as if 9/11 had not happened. Duggan’s Italy is very white, albeit with a fetching tan, as if Arab and African refugees are not rowing there each day. There is no mention either of Milan as a major centre of Islamist radicalism, notably the sinister role of its Islamic Cultural Institute in several major Al Qaeda or North African terror cells, or the sterling work done by the Italian police and secret service in crushing this. These chapters lack the surefootedness and verve of what went before. So Duggan’s book may not explain much of what you see around you on your Tuscan holiday – the posters, the press, the books, the Africans selling trinkets or themselves in Florence – but it is an impressive and essential guide to how Italy was shaped by the last two hundred years. To order this book at £24, see LR Bookshop on page 37

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LITERARY REVIEW August 2007

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HISTORY

ALLANMASSIE

THE JULY MONARCHY

THEPERILOUS CROWN: RULINGFRANCE, 1814–1848

★By Munro Price (Macmillan 480pp £20)

A FEWYEARSago I happened on a strange bar in the Rue de Rivoli. A haunt of taxi drivers and people buying tickets for the tiercé éand lottery, it is also dedicated to the cause of Royalism, and, if you enquire, you will be given a pamphlet explaining why France needs a king. On one visit I even found a Royalist conclave in session, and on my last, earlier this year, there was a huge bouquet of lilies by the portrait of Louis XVI, sent, on the anniversary of his execution, by the faithful Royalists of Nîîmes. However, it’s not merely a Royalist bar, but a Legitimist one, scorning the Orleanist claimant, the Comte de Paris, and professing allegiance to a handsome young prince of the House of Bourbon-Parma, known to his adherents as Louis XX. There isn’t of course the slightest possibility of a Restoration, though the previous Comte de Paris nursed for a long time the fond hope that de Gaulle would name him his successor. But there are still tiny groups of Royalists, who, like the fringe parties of the Left, exchange bitter words with each other. The division between the two branches of the French royal family dates back to the Revolution of 1789. Louis XVI, passive and dutiful, accepted the Revolution, however reluctantly, until in 1792 he tried to escape. His brothers, the Comte de Provence and Comte d’Artois, had already emigrated. In contrast, their cousin, the immensely rich Philippe, Duc d’Orlééans, a liberal progressive and Anglophile (also a debauchee and alcoholic), welcomed the Revolution, perhaps (as his enemies believed) because he hoped to replace Louis. However, when titles were abolished and that hope was dashed, he became Citizen Egalitéé, and it was as a member of the Assembly that he voted for his cousin’s execution. He may have done so in a state of confusion – his son Louis-Philippe, serving with the Revolutionary army, had urged him to absent himself. It did him little good; he followed the King to the guillotine a few months later, by which time Louis-Philippe and such members of his family as he could arrange for had prudently joined the emigration. When, after Napoleon’s first abdication, the elder branch of the Bourbons was restored, with the former Comte de Provence as Louis XVIII, Louis-Philippe also returned to France, after many years of exile in England and somewhat uncertain of his welcome. Munro Price,

the author of this scholarly, well-written and engaging history of the Restoration, sometimes seems to suggest that the distrust with which Louis XVIII regarded his cousin was ill-founded. Yet it was surely natural enough. The shadow of Egalitéé and his vote for the death penalty at Louis XVI’s trial hung over them, souring relations. Besides, Louis-Philippe never retracted his support for the Revolution in its early days, and was thought to have the same ambition to supplant the senior branch of the family as his father. The relationship couldn’t have been anything but uneasy. Curiously, Louis-Philippe was on better terms with the Comte d’Artois (who would succeed his brother in 1824 as Charles X) even though Artois was well to the right of Louis XVIII. The Bourbons made a mess of things. Everyone knows that Talleyrand is supposed to have said that they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Actually, it would not have been so bad if they had forgotten nothing; the trouble was that Charles X and his ministers seemed to have forgotten the most important thing: that the Revolution had led to a Republic, and that their position was therefore precarious. Sure enough, their failure to remember this provoked another Revolution on 30 July 1830. This time, however, the moderates kept control. Louis-Philippe, Duc d’Orlééans, was named First Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom and then King himself. To demonstrate that he was a different sort of king, he took the title King of the French, rather than of France. In short, he was King by the grace of the People, rather than the Grace of God – even if the particular people who made his accession possible were an elite rather than the mob. The elder branch had failed to make a constitutional monarchy work, because they resented, and were thought eager to subvert, the Charter they had felt compelled to grant. Louis-Philippe, in contrast, was genuinely determined to abide by the Constitution; he would be a monarch in the British style, for his years of exile had made him a warm admirer of England – and indeed, as Price observes, the July Monarchy would be better disposed towards Britain than perhaps any other French regime. Louis-Philippe may be called the first bourgeois monarch; his support rested on the upper bourgeoisie and he presented himself as a Citizen-King (title of a biography by T E B Howarth published in 1961). Intelligent and well-meaning, informal in manner and endlessly loquacious, he presented a marked contrast to his predecessors. Price lays great emphasis on the support he had from his devoted unmarried sister Adelaide, Madame d’Orlééans; her influence, generally good, was such that he sees her as the King’s closest aide and even his partner in government. For eighteen years France enjoyed stability and mostly peace (though it was in his reign that the Algerian adventure, which was to mean so much to France and end so bitterly, was launched). Unlike Charles X, Louis-Philippe

LITERARY REVIEW August 2007

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