The Forces of Destiny
Napoleon Bonaparte knew how much he owed to Italy. On a spring
day in 1796, the 26-year-old fledgling general trapped and
destroyed a greatly superior Austrian force at Montenotte in the
steep hills of the Appennini Savonese.
Years later, answering a question about his bloodline, the
Emperor said: “My nobility dates from Montenotte.”
And the revolutionary general’s victory and advance into
Lombardy and Piedmont also begin the story of modern Italy, an
excruciatingly long-running opera semiseria, made up of
unequal measures of romance, pathos and near-farce.
As Bonaparte’s citizen army won battle after battle, France’s
hot revolutionary breath excited the local intellectuals, fuelling
dreams of a united, independent Italy that could take its place as
a great power alongside Austria, France and England.
On paper, it was a reasonable proposition. The people of the
peninsula spoke related tongues, they were all nominally Roman
Catholics, they all hated the Austrians, and they all regarded the
Roman Empire and the artistic and cultural glories of the great
Italian cities as their patrimony. They certainly bore a closer
resemblance to a nation than the France the revolution had just
conjured into being.
But the obstacles to a unified Italy were massive. France might
consist largely of illiterate, mean-spirited and suspicious
peasants living and dying in complete ignorance of what was over
the next hill. But France had not endured 1300 years of invasion
and rule by greedy foreigners.
The indignities inflicted on Italy since the Western Roman
empire’s collapse had created a mosaic of jurisdictions that
prevented the development of anything like a common political
culture. It was in essence still a medieval landscape in which
loyalties seldom extended beyond town, city, family or group. Only
the church’s hand touched all of the nation-in-waiting.
But within 75 years the work of the intellectuals was done.
Thanks finally to the patriotic spirit of the Risorgimento inflamed
by Garibaldi (a figure Duggan finds to be a true hero and patriot),
Victor Immanuel emerged king of a united Italy.
In time, the resistance organised by the Bourbons, their client
class and the unhappy church faded. Rome was defended by the French
until 1870, when it became the capital. It would take until the end
of World War I for Italy to regain the few remaining bits of Italia
Irredenta - “Unredeemed Italy”.
Redeeming Italy, however, was never going to be enough. For
many, satisfying what Duggan believes is a human need “to owe
primary allegiance to a collective body of one kind or another” was
only the beginning: what the glories of the Risorgimento had set
tingling in the bone marrow was a yearning for military triumphs,
for conquests, for blood.
This obsession with glory and death would produce many
pointless, farcical and tragic events. These include the battle of
Adua in 1896, in which the Ethiopians inflicted upon an Italian
force the biggest defeat ever suffered by colonials in Africa, the
incomprehensible invasion of Libya in 1911 and the humiliating rout
at Caporetto in 1917. It also produced Italian fascism and
Mussolini and runs in an unbroken line to Silvio Berlusconi.
Much of Duggan’s history is devoted to tracing the origins and
progress of this Italian personality disorder. He has no shortage
of material to draw upon. It is hard to find a page without a
quotation from an Italian patriot lamenting the nation’s lack of
“moral unity”, exhorting Italians to die for their country or
weeping over some catastrophic failure caused by his countrymen’s
lack of courage and moral fibre.
The movement known as Futurism, embraced by the leading artists
of the day, provides a perfect example of the mindset of the
intellectuals. Its 1909 manifesto says: “We want to glorify war -
the only source of hygiene in the world - patriotism, nationalism,
the destructive act.”
This sort of bellicosity led to the Libyan idiocy, which, like
America’s Iraqi adventure it so closely resembles, was paid for
with the blood of poor boys. One of them wrote later: “Why should
so many people be killed to come and get some sand, four palms and
a few lemons? And the Moors hated us.”
But what chance did the views of the peasant cannon-fodder have
when a man Duggan describes as a sober-minded intellectual could
conclude: “. . . only when Italy has secured a virile victory of
its people over an enemy - no matter who . . . will it be able to
say it has avenged a millennium and a half of shameful history and
be able to face the future with confidence.”
We owe Duggan a debt for producing a remarkably fresh and
compelling work of history. He has earned absolution for starting
off his book with a sentence of 160 words and for his many attempts
to improve upon that Churchillian mark.
Peter Temple’s most recent book, The Broken Shore (Text),
won the UK Crime Writers’ Association best novel award last
year.
