Abstract
Few figures in nineteenth-century Rome had as striking a presence as Alessandro Torlonia and his family, who were a source of great interest and fascination to their contemporaries. A legendary but also complex image of Torlonia came into being, not least because he was the Pope’s banker and at the same time enjoyed close relationships with great Jewish financiers such as the Rothschilds. While rooted in the Papal State, Torlonia’s life and affairs in fact extended across the Europe of the nineteenth century. The true character of Alessandro Torlonia, European banker and entrepreneur, is investigated in this book; it charts a course between biography and history, whose complex relationship is discussed here.
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Notes
- 1.
Stendhal gave colourful descriptions of the Torlonia receptions and residences, including their art collections, although his pages are pervaded by prejudice towards the banker and his activities. See Stendhal, A Roman Journal. See also Dupuy, “Un personnage de Stendhal: le banquier romain Torlonia.”
- 2.
In this famous novel by Dumas, first published in 1844, the name of Torlonia, Duke of Bracciano, comes up several times, and with some mistakes, in relation to both his magnificent parties (“the house of the Duke of Bracciano is one of the most delightful in Rome, the duchess, one of the last heiresses of the Colonnas, does its honours with the most consummate grace, and thus their fêtes have a European celebrity”), and his financial readiness (“Run to Torlonia, draw from him instantly four thousand piastres”). See Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo, 295 and 297.
- 3.
Jules Verne included Torlonia among the major international bankers listed as sponsors and collectors of subscriptions for the rocket launch in his science fiction novel From the Earth to the Moon, first published in French in 1865 as De la Terre à la Lune.
- 4.
Von Hülsen, Torlonia “Krösus von Rome.”
- 5.
On this issue there are some very interesting chapters in the collection edited by Youssef Cassis, Finance and Financiers in European History.
- 6.
This description is by Pietro Citati in his introduction to the Italian translation of the novel David Golder by Irène Némirovsky, which tells the story of a ruthless banker.
- 7.
The personal involvement of the historian when writing a biography is a well-known problem, although perhaps an under-theorised one. Authors have in varying degrees experienced how this includes “a deeply personal and affective dimension.” See Leckie, “Biography matters: why historians need well-crafted biographies more than ever.” Rachel Morley suggests that “[a]s biographers, we are still unclear about how to turn implicit knowledge into external knowledge made. There is also uncertainty about how we should deal with the issue of ourselves as feeling/experiencing knowledge-makers.” See Morley, “Fighting Feeling: Re-thinking Biographical Praxis.” John Tosh reflects on the historian’s deployment of the three basic techniques of description, narrative and analysis, and on the use of narrative, an evocative form shared with the creative writer, as “the historian’s basic technique for conveying what it felt like to observe or participate in past events.” See Tosh, The Pursuit of History, 124–25.
- 8.
Momigliano, The Development of Greek Biography.
- 9.
The long relationship between biography and history, and the terms of the recent debate, are very skilfully reconstructed by Barbara Caine in her Biography and History.
- 10.
Biographical method was acknowledged to have some degree of usefulness, but it was always seen as marginal in relation to the complexity of themes and issues addressed in the study of political institutions, economic processes and social structures. See Nasaw, “Introduction.”
- 11.
On this theme see Elton, The Practice of History; Hearn and Knowles, “Representative Lives? Biography and Labour History.”
- 12.
During that era, apart from works of a eulogistic type, with marked hagiographical features, biographies instead celebrated the “representative individual.” See Loriga, “The Role of the Individual in History.”
- 13.
Burguière, “The Fate of the History of Mentalités in the Annales.”
- 14.
In Italy the “biographical turn” was first addressed by a group of well-known historians in a seminar on 9 October 1981: the contributions were published in 1983 in a collection edited by Alceo Riosa, Biografia e storiografia. For a comparative perspective on the origins and development of this “turn” in the social sciences, covering Britain, France and Germany, see Chamberlayne, Bornat and Wengraf, The Turn to Biographical Methods in Social Science. It also affected specific fields such as the historiography of European communism: see Morgan, “Comparative Communist History and the ‘Biographical Turn’.”
- 15.
This decline opened up the way to new cross-cutting interpretations, in contrast to the traditional rigid class-based analysis; the categories that emerged, including gender and ethnicity, have been increasingly used in the histories of phenomena such as migration, and in “world history.” See Caine, Biography and History, 14–23.
- 16.
Microhistory, which in Italy coalesced around the work of Giovanni Levi and Carlo Ginzburg in the 1970s and has been seen as one of the most important contributions to historiography of the late twentieth century, gives specific attention to life stories (or life writing). These enable an understanding of how large-scale processes have an impact on the life and adaptation strategies of individuals who belong to subordinate, marginal and oppressed groups and communities. The method of microhistory can be summarized as the reduction of the scale of observation of the subject of study in order to arrive at more general interpretative keys, and to discover previously unexamined phenomena. For summaries, see Revel, Jeux d’échelles. La micro-analyse à l’expérience; Trivellato, “Microstoria/Microhistoire/Microhistory.” On the overlaps and differences between life writing and biography, see the contributions to Section 4 of the book edited by Renders and de Haan, Theoretical Discussions of Biography.
- 17.
Thanks to these studies the dichotomy between “politicization” and “personalization” in complex questions and historical processes started to fade. For reflections on the importance of biographies of women, see Riall, “The Shallow End of History?”
- 18.
Tosh, The Pursuit of History, 54–68. There are also interesting reflections on these issues in Kershaw, “Personality and Power”; Blanning and Cannadine, History and Biography.
- 19.
Sgambati, “Le lusinghe della biografia,” 411–12.
- 20.
Caine, Biography and History, 2.
- 21.
So writes Robert Rotberg, who declares that “[b]iography is history, depends on history, and strengthens and enriches history. In turn, all history is biography.” See Rotberg, “Biography and Historiography,” 305.
- 22.
Jordanova, History in Practice, 41–42. This approach was supported by, among others, Renzo De Felice, the well-known biographer of Benito Mussolini; in 1981, De Felice stated that he had chosen to study Italian Fascism through a biography of its leader in order to bring unity to the complexity of the themes in play. See his contribution to the collection by Riosa, Biografia e storiografia, 48–51. The expression “prism of history” was coined by Barbara Tuchman in her essay “Biography as a Prism of History.”
- 23.
In this regard, Chloe Ward writes that “in the past ten years theoretical attempts to reintroduce the notion of individual agency to history, and the emergence of works that successfully navigate the boundary between history and biography, have demonstrated the latter genre’s validity as a means of historical analysis.” See Ward, “Biography, History, Agency,” 77. Some specific fields, including the history of international relations, have seen debates on the importance of biographies of leaders; see Milza, “Figures de grands décideurs.”
- 24.
Knowles, “Writing Biography as Business History,” 2.
- 25.
The first project to compile and collect biographies of business leaders started in the late 1970s within the Business History Unit at the London School of Economics, and led to the publication of the Dictionary of Business Biography, edited by David Jeremy, in 1984–1986: a six-volume work with more than a thousand entries. In Italy, the most significant project has been the work promoted and coordinated by Franco Amatori, the Dizionario Biografico degli Imprenditori Italiani, which by 2015 included about 700 entries (some of which have been published in the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani) across a time span stretching from Italian unification up to the end of the twentieth century. For methodological considerations regarding the collected biographies of entrepreneurs, see Jeremy, “Anatomy of the British Business Elites”; Barjot, “Les entrepreneurs du Second Empire”; Amatori, “Entrepreneurial Typologies in the History of Industrial Italy: Reconsiderations”; and, most recently, papers presented at the World Economic History Conference in Kyoto in 2015.
- 26.
Bigazzi, Storie di imprenditori, 10–11.
- 27.
On the role of political and economic institutions in creating incentive structures in economies, and thus in affecting the decisions taken by entrepreneurs, the 1990 work by Douglass North is still essential reading: North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. The essence of this vision was revisited in 2010 by William Baumol, “Preface: The Entrepreneur in History.”
- 28.
Casson and Casson, “The History of Entrepreneurship.”
- 29.
Friedman and Jones, Business History; Amatori, “Entrepreneurship.”
- 30.
For a survey of different approaches to biographies of entrepreneurs, with examples, especially in relation to Britain, the United States and Germany, see Corley, “Historical Biographies of Entrepreneurs.” See also Tortella, Quiroga and Moral, “Entrepreneurship: A Comparative Approach”; Tortella and Quiroga, Entrepreneurship and Growth.
- 31.
Cassis and Pohle Fraser, “Introduction,” xv.
- 32.
Landes, Dynasties.
- 33.
In the long debate discussed in the preceding pages, most parties have recognized that the biographical method that has emerged in recent decades does not necessarily require all aspects of an individual’s life to be explored. In the case of important figures, in particular, the chronological order of the person’s life does not have to be slavishly followed; rather, it is seen as more effective to highlight the aspects and issues which most merit an exploration, commenting on other aspects of the subject only to the extent that they are relevant to an understanding of the key questions made the focus of scientific attention. See Rosario Romeo’s contributions to the book edited by Alceo Riosa, Biografia e storiografia.
- 34.
The denomination ‘Banco’ reflects older Italian terminology for finance houses that was still in use in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this book I generally refer to the Banco Torlonia as ‘the Bank’, with a capital letter, to distinguish it from the other banks mentioned.
- 35.
Nuvolari, Toninelli and Vasta, “What Makes a Successful Entrepreneur?”
- 36.
Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development, 89–90 and 213–15.
- 37.
A persuasive example of the importance of the human dimension in the biography of a banker is Niall Ferguson’s High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg.
- 38.
Finel-Honigman, A Cultural History of Finance; the quotation is from Manara, L’Io e la Borsa, 19.
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Felisini, D. (2016). Introduction. In: Alessandro Torlonia. Palgrave Studies in the History of Finance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41998-5_1
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