Steven C. Hughes

Honor and crisis: the chivalric assumptions of Italian intervention in 1915?

Abstract The author postulates the use of chivalric language and tropes as part of the interventionist rhetoric that helped bring Italy into the First World War. Despite obvious affinities between the culture of dueling and the ‘virile assumptions’ of the interventionists, including their own participation in many duels, a review of the three major interventionist newspapers reveals the presence of surprisingly little chivalric language (sfida, vertenza, duello) during the crisis. This absence is explained primarily as a result of the rapid and effective dehumanization of the central powers, which disqualified them as gentlemen worthy of chivalric challenge. In addition, the use of the term ‘honor’ was found to be complicated by continuing confusion over Italy’s possible ‘betrayal’ of the Triple Alliance, which only faded after the treaty was finally rescinded in May 1915.

Duelling after the Duce: postwar conflicts of honour in Italy

Unlike other western European countries, Italy did not see the waning of the duel of honour after the First World War. On the contrary, there was an increase in the practice during the 1920s as the Fascists used mechanisms of honour to facilitate and legitimize their rise to power. However, Mussolinis regime found the individualism of the chivalric tradition inconsistent with its totalitarian notions of discipline and duty and worked in a variety of subtle ways to try to eliminate the ritual from Italian life. For the most part, the Second World War finished the process and, in the wake of defeat, destruction and partisan conflict, duelling virtually disappeared as a means of settling disputes of honour among elites. Nevertheless, one can point to a handful of formal duels, which adhered to traditional regulations, that occurred in the decade after the war. This article investigates these encounters in order to understand why these particular participants decided to opt for a ritual that was both out of fashion and had lost much of its legal immunity. It also argues that their actions actually demonstrate just how alienated the duel had become from Italys social mainstream after the war.

Cavour, l'Italia e l'Europa

True to its title, this book offers eleven pieces by experts which focus primarily on Cavour’s complex relationship with the rest of Europe and its effect on his critical, yet sometimes reluctant, role in creating united Italy. Divided into four sections, it discusses first his formative years and then the development of his political, economic and religious programmes. It then examines the ‘realization’ (and constant adjustment) of those programmes, and finally how he was seen by contemporaries in France, England and Germany. Thoroughly versed in the relevant bibliography, the authors generally acknowledge the difficulty of saying anything new about their subject; yet taken together the diverse essays offer a unique portrait of the great Piedmontese statesman against a detailed European landscape. While it is well known that Cavour travelled much more extensively in countries to the North than in Italy (indeed, he never ventured south of Florence), these essays demonstrate just how thoroughly his world view was pan-European and how he conceived of his goals in Piedmont, and eventually Italy, as part of a general civilizing project of liberty and progress that transcended borders and dynasties. As Giuseppe Galasso says in his piece on Cavour and the Mezzogiorno, as a leader he worried less about the boundaries of an Italian/Piedmontese state than about its liberal qualities. Thus he comes across in this volume as being at heart an idealist, albeit one whose thoughts and actions were tempered by a highly pragmatic approach born in part from his experience running a large agricultural enterprise as a young man. In his formative reading, according to Adriano Viarengo, Cavour eschewed the now-famous canon of Risorgimento romantic literature that helped inspire many other actors of the age. Rather, he preferred utilitarian philosophy and political economy: tastes he interestingly shared, particularly for Bentham, with young members of Turin’s bourgeoisie. His travels reinforced this intellectual framework, and according to Luciano Cafagna he came to discover Italy only through the economic lens of Europe as he considered its backwardness compared with the progress being made in France, England and Belgium. Indicatively, his first mention of Italian independence was in his wellknown article about railroads (written in French in a French journal), which he saw as the hallmark of the arriving and thriving Industrial Revolution. Freedom was the key to modernity, and economic liberalism had to be matched with political and religious liberty, yet the practical lessons of recent European history had to be taken into account. Thus the June days of Paris (rather than the February Revolution) convinced him that republicanism was untenable – indeed detestable – and while Guizot’s juste milieu was his theoretical watchword, it was England’s evolution without revolution that, according to Book reviews

Review: John A. Davis, Naples and Napoleon: Southern Italy and the European Revolutions (1780— 1860), Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2006; vi + 372 pp.; 9780198207559, £79.00 (hbk):

While the book broadly covers the years 1919 to 1932, Cohrs’s thesis is at heart about the meaning of the period 1923–29, covered in three substantive sections on ‘the Anglo-American stabilisation of Europe’, leading up to the 1924 London conference on reparations; ‘Europe’s nascent Pax Anglo-Americana’ (1924–25), culminating in the 1925 Locarno treaty on Western European security; and ‘the unfinished transatlantic peace order’ (1926–29), which saw the incomplete implementation of the ‘London and Locarno’ system. He puts forward two central propositions: first, it was the settlements achieved at London and Locarno which, by late 1925, had created a genuine window of opportunity for the formation of a lasting stabilization of Europe through integrating Germany politically and economically into a new international system; second, this window closed because policymakers in Britain and the United States did not maintain the necessary commitment to this settlement in order to both legitimize and consolidate it. What this meant in practice was that the crucial issue unsettling European international relations, the Franco-German dispute, remained unresolved. Cohrs spells out his intentions with great care in his Introduction; the remainder of the book is a highly detailed working out of his thesis. It is not always an easy read: the prose is stiff, formal, and – in places – decidedly clunky, yet it has the related virtues of exactness and clarity of meaning. What is new is the emphasis placed upon the American role in Europe during the 1920s, often a marginal element in studies of the period. The detail adduced here demonstrates persuasively that a rounded understanding of European international relations after the First World War requires the integration of the United States. Cohrs thus paints a much fuller picture of the details of Washington’s policy towards Europe under Charles Evans Hughes, Frank Kellogg and Herbert Hoover. However, there is a tendency to overstate the importance of American influence at the expense of other, well-established factors. By making Anglo-American relations central to European diplomacy, Cohrs seriously underestimates the strength and importance of the Anglo-French connection. While British and American motivations are interrogated in detail, those of French policymakers are taken too much at face value. Nor is it clear that British leaders were as willing to acknowledge and wait on American leadership as Cohrs suggests. Although not all its arguments are persuasive, this book is nonetheless an important contribution to the international history of the interwar period. The critical issue grappled with by European statesmen in the 1920s was the creation of new and lasting systems of security. Cohrs’s challenging thesis requires readers to reconsider how they went about this, yet his argument for the existence of a new ‘Euro-Atlantic’ order which had the potential to maintain the peace remains debatable. The aversion to new commitments in both London and Washington was always going to leave it critically short of permanency.

Probing the Police in the Past: An Italian Case Study

This article introduces the police protocols-or correspondence journals-as a quantitative tool for measuring police functions and priorities in the 19th century, using Bologna, Italy, as a case study. A legacy of the Napoleonic police system, the protocols list the provenance, subject matter, and determination of each communication received or sent by the police and thus offer the historian a bureaucratic distillation of police activity across time. In this case, the protocols of three sample years (1823, 1843, and 1863), which span the shift from the absolutist papal regime to the liberal unitary government, have been analyzed according to correspondent (e.g., private party, other administrators, religious officials) and subject matter (e.g., private morality, public order, crime prevention). Results suggest that administrative policing dominated under both regimes, and that police intervention into private matters (e.g., family disputes, wayward children, illicit pregnancies) was consistently in demand throughout the period. Continuity dominated over change during the political shift, although the nature of religious, political, and charitable police functions did alter somewhat to fit the new liberal governments ideology of private freedom and public control.