Giovanni Giolitti

Image from the Liber Liber publication — From the Liber Liber publication

Giovanni Giolitti (Mondovì, 27 October 1842 – Cavour, 17 July 1928) was five times prime minister and the dominant figure in Italian politics between 1901 and 1914, the years historians call the «Giolittian era»^[1]^[2]. Born in the Cuneo area and raised in Turin, where he studied and began his career in the civil service, he remained attached to Piedmont throughout his life: he entered the Chamber of Deputies in 1882 as a deputy for the Cuneo constituency and died in Cavour, at the foot of the Pinerolo Alps^[1].

Origins and youth in Turin

His father Giovenale was a court clerk in Mondovì and died a year after his son's birth, of pneumonia caught on a mountain excursion. The paternal family came from the Val di Macra: his grandfather was a notary in San Damiano and secretary of nearly every municipality in the valley, and the family papers traced back to Acceglio, to the hamlet of Lausetti^[3]. His mother, Enrichetta Plochiù, belonged instead to the Turin upper middle class: left a widow, she moved to Turin with her son, into the home of her four bachelor brothers, first in via d'Angennes and then in via Principe Amedeo^[1].

From 1852 Giolitti attended the San Francesco da Paola grammar school. He was an undisciplined pupil, impatient with the grammatical study of ancient languages and little drawn to mathematics, but an avid reader of history books and of the novels of Walter Scott and Balzac. At sixteen he enrolled in the Law faculty of the University of Turin and, according to the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, graduated on 14 August 1861 with a thesis on marital society^[1]; the 1933 Enciclopedia Italiana instead dates his degree to 1860^[2]. In his memoirs, dictated in old age, he judged those years without emphasis: the events of his childhood and education were, in his words, «quite simple and of a common kind»^[3].

From civil servant to deputy

In 1862 he joined the Ministry of Grace and Justice without a salary, when Turin was still the capital of the Kingdom of Italy; he followed the offices to Florence in 1864, with the transfer of the capital, and in 1866 returned to Turin as deputy public prosecutor^[1]. At the start of 1869 he met the nineteen-year-old Rosa Sobrero, niece of the chemist Ascanio Sobrero, the discoverer of nitroglycerin, and married her on 31 March of that same year^[1]. Quintino Sella, who had sensed his abilities, made him head of section at the Finance Ministry and then, in 1870-1871, his private secretary; in 1877 he moved to Rome and became secretary general of the Court of Auditors, then, briefly, a councillor of State^[1].

In 1882, in the first elections held by list ballot, he was elected at the head of the list in the Cuneo constituency, which his friend and outgoing deputy A. Riberi had opened up for him; in the Chamber he joined the Constitutional Left^[1]. Later it was Dronero, in the Val Maira, the paternal family's home territory, that became the centre of his constituency^[4]. He was Treasury Minister between 1889 and 1890 and in May 1892 formed his first government^[5].

The first government and the Banca Romana scandal

His first ministry (May 1892 – November 1893) fell amid the Fasci Siciliani uprisings and the Banca Romana scandal: Giolitti was accused of having kept silent, as Treasury Minister, about what he knew of irregularities at the bank^[1]. In December 1894 he handed the Chamber a bundle of documents implicating Francesco Crispi^[2]; to avoid arrest he took refuge in Germany, in Charlottenburg, returning in February 1895. The Chamber eventually dropped the proceedings unanimously^[1]. The Turin newspaper La Stampa, of which Alfredo Frassati had become a co-owner at the end of 1894, continued to defend his image and his line into 1895; Frassati, who became its editor in 1900, shared Giolitti's political project but differed from him on foreign policy matters^[6].

The Giolittian era

Interior Minister from 1901 to 1903, Giolitti then led the country in 1903-1905, in 1906-1909 and in 1911-1914^[1]^[5]. His formula was an «orderly civil progress»: cautiously widening political participation, keeping the State neutral in conflicts between capital and labour, protecting industry with targeted tariffs^[5]. In the Chamber, on 21 June 1901, he defined politics as «the art of governing the country as it is and with the laws that exist»^[1].

His fourth government declared war on the Ottoman Empire on 29 September 1911 and obtained Tripolitania and Cyrenaica in October 1912; in the same year the electoral reform raised male suffrage from about 3.3 to 8.6 million voters^[1]. The system had harsh critics: Gaetano Salvemini, in a 1909 pamphlet, branded him The Minister of the Underworld^[7]; among the recurring accusations were government pressure on elections^[5].

Neutrality, the postwar period and Fascism

At the outbreak of the Great War he favoured neutrality. In January 1915, in a letter that became famous, he argued that Italy could obtain «quite a lot» from Austria without fighting; back in Rome on 9 May, he gathered around himself more than three hundred deputies and about a hundred senators opposed to intervention, declaring that he knew nothing of the Treaty of London^[2]^[6]. Frassati too was a neutralist, but for different reasons: Giolitti's neutralism stemmed chiefly from domestic political concerns^[6]. During the war he withdrew to Cavour^[1].

Recalled to government in June 1920, he faced in September the occupation of the factories with the same tactic as in 1904: no military clearing of the occupied plants, and pressure on industrialists to negotiate^[1]. He concluded the Treaty of Rapallo, but the elections of May 1921 brought the Fascists into Parliament; defeated on bureaucratic reform, he resigned in June 1921^[2]. Frassati, appointed ambassador to Berlin in November 1920, judged the dissolution of the Chambers «a genuine mistake»^[6].

Giolitti long believed he could «constitutionalize» Fascism. In 1924 he put forward his own list, separate from Mussolini's listone, and after the Matteotti murder he gradually sided with the opposition^[1]. On 21 December 1925 he resigned the presidency of the provincial council of Cuneo, rather than submit to the obligation to join the Fascist party^[1]:

«I respect the government of my country but I would feel unworthy of representing the proud mountain folk of the districts of San Damiano and Prazzo if, out of opportunism, I had, in any form, renounced the liberal faith I professed throughout my life»
Giovanni Giolitti, letter of resignation from the provincial council of Cuneo, 21 December 1925

The memoirs and final years

The Memorie della mia vita was published by Treves in Milan in 1922, with a long preface by Olindo Malagodi^[3]. It was the journalist who persuaded him, during a visit to Bardonecchia: when asked whether he had written his memoirs, Giolitti replied that he had never thought of it^[3].

«What would be the use? I have always tried to do what seemed useful to my country: now that my work, whatever it may be, is done, I do not see why one should go back over it.»
Giovanni Giolitti to Olindo Malagodi, quoted in the preface to the Memorie della mia vita, 1922

The book went through new editions, including a third one, published by Garzanti in 1945^[8]. Having retired from active politics, Giolitti spent his last years in seclusion in Cavour; he went to the Chamber for the last time on 16 March 1928^[1] and died on 17 July of that same year in the Plochiù family home in Cavour^[9].

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