[1871 – 1922] Liberal Italy and World War I

In 1871, a new nation was born on the ancient lands of the Italian peninsula. After centuries of division, the Kingdom of Italy was finally whole, with Rome, the Eternal City, as its capital. But this was a fragile creation, a patchwork of deeply different regions stitched together by politics and force. As one leader famously declared, “We have made Italy. Now we must make Italians.” This was the great, and perhaps impossible, challenge of the era known as Liberal Italy. The political system itself was a theater of instability. A parliamentary monarchy under King Victor Emmanuel II and his successors was governed by a practice called 'trasformismo', or transformism. Coalitions were formed not on principle, but on patronage and power, with politicians fluidly shifting alliances. Leaders like Agostino Depretis and Francesco Crispi mastered this game, but it created a government that was often paralyzed and disconnected from the people it claimed to represent.

The most profound division was the unofficial border that ran through the nation’s soul: the line between the industrializing North and the agrarian South, the 'Mezzogiorno'. In the northern cities of Milan and Turin, the air was thick with coal smoke from new factories. The first FIAT automobile plant opened its doors in 1899, a symbol of a future rushing forward. Here, a new industrial working class and a confident middle class, the 'borghesia', were forming. Men in tailored suits and women in elegant dresses strolled under the new electric lights of grand boulevards, admiring the ornate Art Nouveau architecture, known in Italy as 'Stile Liberty'. But south of Rome, this world was a distant dream. Here, millions of peasants, the 'contadini', toiled on vast estates, often under conditions that had changed little since the Middle Ages. The sun-scorched land was both their master and their prison. This chasm, the “Southern Question,” fueled a staggering wave of migration. Between 1876 and 1915, over 14 million Italians, mostly from the South, left their homeland, seeking a better life in the Americas.

Like other European powers of the age, Italy yearned for the prestige of an empire. It looked across the Mediterranean to Africa, seeking its “place in the sun.” But this ambition led to national humiliation. In 1896, at the Battle of Adwa, a modern Italian army was decisively crushed by the forces of Ethiopian Emperor Menelik II. It was a shocking defeat, a scar on the young nation’s psyche that fostered a simmering desire for redemption and glory. In the early 1900s, under the masterful political stewardship of Giovanni Giolitti, Italy experienced a period of relative calm and economic growth. Giolitti expanded voting rights to all adult men in 1912 and introduced social welfare measures, attempting to bring the growing socialist and Catholic movements into the political fold. Yet, beneath the surface, the nation remained a cauldron of conflicting forces: striking workers demanding rights, and fervent nationalists, inspired by poets like Gabriele D'Annunzio, dreaming of a warrior nation and a new Roman Empire.

When the Great War erupted in August 1914, this cauldron boiled over. Italy declared neutrality, its people deeply divided. The majority, along with the Socialists and the Pope, desperately wanted peace. The nation was economically and militarily unprepared for the industrial slaughter of modern warfare. But a loud and influential minority of interventionists saw the war as a golden opportunity. For them, it was the final act of unification, a chance to seize the Italian-speaking lands of Trento and Trieste from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Secretly, without the approval of parliament, Prime Minister Antonio Salandra and his foreign minister negotiated the 1915 Treaty of London. In exchange for joining the war on the side of Britain and France, Italy was promised these lands and more. In May 1915, against the will of its people, Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary.

The Italian front was not a war of muddy trenches; it was a vertical nightmare fought in the icy peaks and narrow valleys of the Alps and along the treacherous Isonzo River. Soldiers clawed their way up rock faces under machine-gun fire, their lungs burning in the thin air. Avalanches, sometimes triggered deliberately, became weapons as deadly as artillery shells. The Italian commander, General Luigi Cadorna, was a man of iron will and brutal discipline. He launched eleven bloody battles on the Isonzo, gaining mere miles at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. He believed in terror as a motivator, reviving the Roman practice of 'decimazione', where soldiers from units deemed cowardly were executed by their own comrades.

In October 1917, the breaking point came. A combined Austro-German force smashed through the Italian lines at Caporetto. The Italian Second Army dissolved in panic and chaos. It was a cataclysm. Over 300,000 Italian soldiers were taken prisoner, and the army fell back in a desperate, headlong retreat. The disaster of Caporetto was a humiliation far greater than Adwa, but it paradoxically saved the nation. The war was no longer an abstract quest for territory; it was a desperate fight for survival on Italian soil. Cadorna was fired, replaced by the more pragmatic and humane Armando Diaz. A new line of defense was established on the Piave River, and with the cry “Not one step back!” the nation rallied. A year later, in the autumn of 1918, as the Austro-Hungarian Empire crumbled from within, the revitalized Italian army launched a final offensive at Vittorio Veneto, shattering the enemy and securing victory just days before the armistice.

Italy had won the war, but it was about to lose the peace. Over 650,000 of its young men were dead. At the Paris Peace Conference, Italy was granted Trento and Trieste but denied other territories promised in the Treaty of London. Nationalists, led by the flamboyant D'Annunzio, were enraged, crying betrayal and coining the phrase “Vittoria Mutilata”—the Mutilated Victory. The post-war economy was in ruins. Amidst soaring inflation and mass unemployment, Italy plunged into the 'Biennio Rosso', the “Two Red Years” of 1919-1920. Inspired by Russia’s revolution, socialist workers seized factories and peasants occupied farmlands. The liberal government seemed utterly powerless to stop the slide into civil war.

Into this vortex of chaos stepped Benito Mussolini. A former socialist journalist turned ardent nationalist, he organized his followers into black-shirted squads, the 'Fasci di Combattimento'. Funded by industrialists and landowners terrified of a red revolution, his Blackshirts unleashed a wave of systematic violence against socialists, trade unionists, and political opponents, while the state largely looked the other way. The violence escalated until, in October 1922, Mussolini played his final card. He announced a “March on Rome,” a threat to seize power by force. It was mostly a bluff—his few thousand followers were no match for the army. But King Victor Emmanuel III, fearing civil war and losing faith in the democratic process, refused to authorize martial law. Instead, he handed the government to Mussolini. The era of Liberal Italy, which had begun with such high hopes in 1871, ended not with a bang, but with a capitulation. A new, far darker chapter for Italy was about to begin.