HISTORY

MICHAELBURLEIGH FAILED STATES

THEFORCEOFDESTINY: A HISTORYOF ITALYSINCE1796

★

By Christopher Duggan (Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 688pp £30)

ATTHISTIMEof year many readers may be about to holiday in Italy. One indispensable item for the journey is Christopher Duggan’s brilliant and monumental The Force of Destiny, which deserves to be the standard history of modern Italy for the foreseeable future. Leave a pair of shoes at home and take Duggan instead. His chronological starting point, when much of the peninsula was overrun by Napoleonic armies, was unpropitious. Before, and for decades after the Risorgimento, Italy was merely the ‘geographical expression’ which Metternich had spoken of in 1847. The flat plains of the Po may have had good roads, but only two led to Rome and they were unsafe. Two roads snaked southwards, one through the malaria-ridden Pontine Marshes, but they both terminated at Naples, leaving Apulia, Basilicata and Calabria to their own devices. These regions and Sicily itself were best reached by sea. East-west travel across the Apennines was virtually impossible. By the 1840s, by which time a few Italian states had managed to construct 620 kilometres of railway track, Britain had 10,000, Germany 6,000 and France 3,000 kilometres respectively. Apparently there was a problem with tunnels; the Catholic Church thought darkness encouraged immorality. Since trade mostly went abroad from the ports, a national internal market evolved very slowly. Another major obstacle to communication was language, a problem common across nineteenth-century Europe. In 1861 only 10 per cent of the population spoke Italian, the vernacular Tuscan of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, while only a further 20 per cent could understand and read it, without speaking or writing it well. Eighty per cent of people spoke dialect. When two Milanese aristocrats visited Sicily’s mountainous interior in 1853, the inhabitants thought they were Englishmen. When Camillo Cavour visited the South after unification, he was always relieved to encounter priests, since they were the only locals who spoke Italian, a language that came less easily on paper to the Piedmontese statesman than French. All of which is to say that the peoples of Italy’s cities and villages had intense local attachments, of which the strongest was the ‘amoral familism’ that corrupted a Catholic virtue into a chauvinistic clannishness. The only exceptions to

this rule were the tiny minorities who pursued the utopian vision of a united Italy. They initially operated through successive conspiracies, often propagated and commemorated via literature, painting and song, subjects to which Duggan brings expert ears and eyes. Much of this product recalled vanished glories, or retouched epic events like the Crusades, the Sicilian Vespers or the voyages of Columbus in red, white and green. Patriotic opera-goers imposed their own meanings on works of Bellini and Verdi, shouting ‘Yes, Yes’ when the Druids shrieked ‘War, War’ in Norma, even though the Druids’ oppressors were Romans rather than the Austrians who ruled northern Italy. This reviewer is not going to quibble with the modish concept underlying most of the central chapters of the book. Duggan is a firm believer, so to speak, in the process whereby political movements sublimate religion (obviously Catholicism in this case), although he tends to assume, rather than prove, how that process of metastasis operates. Here we need a bit more empirical political science and less vivid anecdotage. The political religion of Italian nationalism was actively preached as a gospel by people who saw themselves as apostles or missionaries, for the only precedent for such a mass conversion was the propagation of Christianity by the early Church, and the northerly pools of heightened religiosity that resulted from the Counter-Reformation. The national movement was instrumentalised in the service of the colder-eyed ambitions of the Piedmontese state. As the author of a major biography of the politician Francesco Crispi, Duggan is extremely good on the mechanisms of postUnification nation-building, through primary education, military conscription into the armed forces, the saintly cults of Cavour and Garibaldi and so on, all areas in which Crispi played a leading role. But Duggan also highlights the manifold weaknesses of what resulted. The Catholic Church was unreconciled to the outcome for decades, instructing Catholics not to stand for office or to vote. There was a monarchy, but the King, Vittorio Emmanuele, could hardly bring himself to visit Rome. There was a parliament, at Montecitorio, but this was so poorly attended that there was often no quorum, while politics as such became a byword for clientelism and pork-barrel corruption in which railway lines were built in the middle of nowhere to assuage some shady interest. A system called ‘transformism’ became normative. It was almost worthy of Gordon Brown, in the sense that nominal opponents were ‘transformed’ into members of a vaguely progressive centrist government bloc, the leading practitioner of this being the liberal Giovanni Giolitti, a real political survivor. Leading intellectuals like Gaetano Mosca and Roberto Michels inveighed against such a system in which an ideational legal Italy was imperfectly imposed on the myriad squalors of the real place. Alliances with Austria

LITERARY REVIEW August 2007

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