Italy, Liberalism, and the Age of Empire

Abstract

In the 1864 Syllabus of Errors, Pope Pius IX stated unabashedly that whoever might think he “ought to reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization”¹ was grievously wrong. In the 1860s, as in our own times, the papacy was expected to attune itself to current fashions or face the wrath of self-styled progressives. In the nineteenth-century Italy, the expectation was of an accommodation with liberalism. By the 1880s, when the belpaese first fumbled toward empire, this force should have been basking in what historian and wordsmith George Dangerfield called “its Victorian plenitude.” But in Italy liberalism was not, as in Britain, a “light burden” made up of “a various and valuable collection of gold, stocks, progressive thoughts and decent inhibitions.”² It was rather a delicate shoot likely to be suffocated by the surrounding vegetation possessed of the deep roots and thick trunks engendered by time immemorial. Liberalism, however, was a feisty upstart flushed by its recent triumph of having captured, indeed invented, the Italian national state. But it was far from having won the mind of a society that, like the papacy, had no pressing desire to keep abreast of “modern civilization.” At unification, after the heroic exploits of Cavour, Garibaldi, and Victor Emanuel II, the Italy formerly known as Piedmont faced not the acclaim of a liberated people but what some historians have regarded as its first colonial war.