The Crispi era, 1887–1900

Domestic policies

On the death of Depretis in 1887 the Sicilian and former Mazzinian Francesco Crispi became prime minister and pursued a policy of administrative reforms at home and expansion abroad. His main domestic achievement was to extend suffrage at local elections to all males over age 21 who paid five lire per annum in local taxes—that is, to 3.5 million people. This was a real blow to the local notables who had previously controlled local government. The larger councils (after 1896, all councils) were also permitted to choose their own mayors and were required to meet in public. The Crispi government also brought in a reasonably effective system of administrative law for the first time, through the provincial councils (giunte) and the Council of State. The government reformed the charities, excluded the clergy from running them, and often diverted the funds to more-secular purposes. The minister of justice, Giuseppe Zanardelli, promulgated a new code of criminal law that abolished the death penalty and legalized strikes unless violence or intimidation occurred.

However, the most important act of Crispi’s first government was the new tariff of 1887. It was a response to demands from northern steel and textile interests, from farmers (also mainly from the north) who faced imports of cheap American grain or Asian rice, and from social reformers eager to secure legislative measures that employers could afford. A duty of 50 lire per ton was placed on imported wheat by 1888, and later it went higher still; food prices rose sharply, provoking considerable unrest. Similar measures protected steel, shipbuilding, and textiles. Italy’s largest trading partner was France, and the French retaliated against Italian goods. A “tariff war” between the two countries lasted until 1898. Franco-Italian trade was more than halved, and entire sectors of Italian agriculture, including wine, silk, cattle, and olive oil, collapsed overnight as their markets were cut off. When excess food supplies drove all agricultural prices down, even grain growers failed to benefit from the new tariff. Moreover, the crisis helped to drag down many of Italy’s banks, including one of the largest, the Banca Romana. Resulting inquiries revealed that the bank had made interest-free loans to leading politicians, including Crispi himself and former treasury minister Giovanni Giolitti, who was prime minister from May 1892 to November 1893. Politicians needed the money to finance their election expenses and to run or bribe newspapers. The Banca Romana scandal of 1893 was the first of many famous Italian corruption scandals, and, like the others, it discredited the whole political system.

Colonialism

Crispi’s colonial policy brought additional blows. The Italian settlement at Massawa soon provoked conflict with Ethiopia, which claimed Massawa as part of its own territory and whose forces in 1887 killed 500 Italian troops at Dogali. The two countries made peace at Wichale in 1889, and Crispi expanded the Italian possessions along the Red Sea to include most of present-day Eritrea and along the Indian Ocean coast to include eastern and southern Somalia. In 1895 the Italians annexed a large portion of the Ethiopian province of Tigray, and war with Ethiopia began again. In March 1896 the Ethiopians overwhelmed the Italian army at the Battle of Adwa (Adua), killing about 5,000 Italian troops. This disaster forced Crispi to resign and ended Italy’s colonial adventures for some years. It was widely seen in Italy as a disgrace to the whole political system and to Italy’s aspirations to great-power status; it would have to be avenged in the future.

Years of crisis

Economic hardship and political corruption at home, together with military failure abroad, provoked riots and uprisings throughout the country. In the early 1890s the fasci siciliani (Sicilian peasant leagues organized by socialists and others) led successful strikes and land occupations until Crispi, in January 1894, used the army to restore order. The fasci’s leaders were imprisoned, and the movement soon collapsed. At the same time, the government also suppressed an anarchist insurrection in Lunigiana by martial law. Further riots occurred in 1898, mainly in cities and towns, over civil liberties and the high price of bread. Shortly after troops killed hundreds of rioters in Milan, King Umberto I decorated their commander, General Fiorenzo Bava Beccaris. Governments also exercised repression by attempting to govern without parliament, as Crispi did in 1895; by dissolving opposition associations and unions, as the government of the marchese di Rudinì, Antonio Starabba, did in 1897; and by attempting to restrict civil liberties by royal decree, without parliamentary approval, as the governments of both Rudinì and Luigi Pelloux tried to do in 1898–99. Socialists, anarchists, and syndicalists protested against this authoritarian rule both inside and outside parliament. In 1899 Socialist deputies overturned the parliamentary ballot box to block the passage of a measure.

Repression resulted in a constitutional crisis. Conservative politicians, notably Sidney Sonnino in 1897, argued that the Italian parliament was corrupt and unfit to govern and that the king should provide strong executive rule, according to the letter of the 1848 Statuto (constitution). Most moderate Liberals rejected this argument. The campaign for constitutional government was led by Felice Cavallotti and the Radical group in parliament, who in the 1890s strongly denounced bank scandals, tariff protectionism, colonial wars, and the Triple Alliance. The Radicals were a northern, anticlerical, moralistic group that denounced the corruption of the south (Crispi was the first southern prime minister), of the monarchy, and of the Roman establishment and strongly favoured wider civil liberties and army reform. In 1900, after months of bitter parliamentary dispute and obstructionism, Pelloux called a general election to resolve the constitutional issue, in which the left triumphed; the Radicals won 34 seats, and their allies, the Republicans, won a further 28 out of a total of 557. (The two groups had had 51 seats between them in the previous parliament.)

Furthermore, in 1892 a young Milanese lawyer, Filippo Turati, had helped to found the Italian Workers’ Party (Partito dei Lavoratori Italiani), which in 1893 became the Italian Socialist Party (Partito Socialista Italiano; PSI). The PSI united the various socialist and labour groups of northern and central Italy and Sicily and stood in opposition to the anarchist movement. The new party was mainly social democratic and heavily influenced by the German model. It preached class struggle and aspired to parliamentary representation and state socialism. Formally Marxist, it envisaged a long period of evolution before an eventual “revolutionary” transformation of society. Crispi dissolved the party in 1894, but it revived in the late 1890s and won 32 seats in 1900. While its deputies worked closely with the Radicals to secure constitutional liberties and social reforms, ordinary party members were often much more revolutionary in their aims. Other socialist organizations, such as trade unions and cooperatives, also grew in the 1890s and by 1900 were significant in the newly industrializing economy of northern Italy. They campaigned for concrete short-term gains on wages and working conditions and were usually more reformist than the party. However, the more radical syndicalist movement also began to take hold among various groups of workers and peasants at this time, including dockworkers, marble miners in Tuscany, and peasants in Puglia. These organizations preached revolutionary class struggle and opposed the reformist policies of the Socialist Party leadership. Railway workers, who were also influenced by revolutionary syndicalism, formed their own autonomous union, the Italian Railroad Workers Union (Sindacato Ferrovieri Italiani; SFI), in 1907. Moreover, a syndicalist federation, the Italian Syndical Union (Unione Sindacale Italiana; USI), was founded in 1912.