Forces of opposition

The political elite may have agreed on most issues, but there was plenty of opposition in the country. Most men owned guns, and violent crime was common. There were 3,000 murders a year, many of them a result of vendettas or blood feuds. Brigands were still active in parts of the southern mainland in the 1870s, and banditry was still common in the mountainous zones of Sardinia. In the towns, rioting was frequent; more than 250 people were killed in riots against the grist tax in 1869, and similar riots against local taxes or for land and jobs continued well into the 20th century. The strikes of the 1880s—especially by organized agricultural labourers in Mantua province—much alarmed respectable opinion. Anarchists were active in the Romagna and parts of the south and occasionally attempted to carry out insurrections, as at Matese in 1877, or to kill the king, as Giovanni Passanante attempted to do in 1878.

However, the anarchist leader in the Romagna, Andrea Costa, soon converted to socialist ideas. In 1881 he founded the Revolutionary Socialist Party of Romagna (later the Italian Revolutionary Socialist Party), which preached eventual revolution but also agitated for such causes as universal suffrage and labour and welfare legislation; in 1882, under the new suffrage, Costa became Italy’s first socialist deputy. In Lombardy a moderate, labour-oriented Italian Workers’ Party, founded in 1885, helped to organize the Po valley peasantry into “leagues” and labour cooperatives. The northern labour movement—unions, mutual aid societies, and cooperatives—adopted either revolutionary or reformist socialist ideas. Reformist local councils began to be elected in central Italy, first in Imola and then in other small agricultural towns.

Republican opposition also survived, particularly in central Italy, long after Mazzini’s death in 1872. Republicans ran many of the mutual aid societies and cooperatives. They opposed strikes, nationalizations, and the class struggle but strongly favoured social protective legislation and civil rights. Some of them, including Matteo Renato Imbriani, also advocated an active irredentist foreign policy—that is, a policy that aimed to liberate Italians living in foreign territory; in particular they wanted to wrest Trento and Trieste from Austrian control. They considered the Triple Alliance and colonial expansionism inimical to Italian interests and expressions of Italy’s monarchical and conservative political institutions.

Perhaps the most serious opposition force in the country was the Roman Catholic Church. The Risorgimento had deprived the church of the Papal States, including Rome itself, and of much of its income. The church had lost its previous virtual monopoly of education and welfare, and compulsory state education was deliberately secular. Many religious orders had been disbanded; monasteries and convents had become public buildings, used by the state. In the south particularly, ecclesiastical organization had relied heavily on monks and friars and could barely continue to function. Bishops needed royal approval, which was often refused, to receive their revenues and take up their posts. The state’s Law of Guarantees of 1871 permitted the pope himself to retain only the Vatican and Lateran palaces as well as Castel Gandolfo. Pius IX denounced the new usurping state, forbade Catholics to vote in parliamentary elections or to become candidates, and appointed a new generation of “intransigent” bishops. New laymen’s organizations were founded; the Opera dei Congressi, with committees at parish level, became the focus of Catholic resistance to the new state. It organized cooperatives, welfare insurance, credit banks and mutual aid societies, as well as a host of local journals and campaigns against liberal secular proposals (such as a divorce law). Church and state remained mutually suspicious, particularly in the Veneto region, where the Catholic social movement effectively mobilized regionalist opposition to centralizing government and peasant hostility to landlords and free trade.