Italy Through British Eyes, 1919–1920

Bentivoglio, Giulia

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-50093-1_3

Giulia Bentivoglio⁵

Part of the book series: Security, Conflict and Cooperation in the Contemporary World ((SCCCW))

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Abstract

The outcome of the First World War posed significant challenges to Italy, which emerged with dramatic strength during 1919–1920: a mix of internal political weakness, economic distress and social turmoil upset the country. The analysis of British diplomatic documents offers a fresh perspective of the Italian crisis and reveals new aspects of this neglected topic. Through the lens of British papers, we can acquire new elements in order to understand to what extent domestic and foreign policy were connected and how Italy, as an international actor, was perceived in London, precisely at the peak of its internal crisis when the danger—whether real or perceived—that the country could be on the verge of revolution reached its highest point.

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Notes

1.
The National Archives, Kew (TNA), FO 371/3810, Rodd to Curzon, despatch 380, 8 September 1919.
2.
Martin Clark, Modern Italy. 1871 to the Present (London: Pearson Education, 2008), chapter 10.
3.
Richard J. B. Bosworth, Italy the Least of the Great Powers: Italian Foreign Policy Before the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
4.
On the Peace Conference see Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2002).
5.
See, for instance, H. James Burgwyn, Italian Foreign Policy in the Interwar Period, 1918–1940 (Westport: Praeger, 1997), where Italy’s policy before the advent of Fascism is limited to an analysis of the Paris Conference. One exception is the monographic number of The International History Review, Vol. 8 (1), 1986, on Italy in the aftermath of the First World War.
6.
The only work dealing with Anglo-Italian relations after the Great War is that of Luca Micheletta, Italia e Gran Bretagna nel primo dopoguerra. Le relazioni diplomatiche tra Roma e Londra dal 1919 al 1922, 2 Vols. (Rome: Jouvence, 1999), although mainly based on Italian sources and mostly focusing on diplomatic relations.
7.
Luciano Monzali, ‘La politica estera italiana nel primo dopoguerra 1918–1922. Sfide e problemi’, Italia contemporanea, (256–257), 2009: 379–406.
8.
Nick Carter (ed.), Britain, Ireland and the Italian Risorgimento (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Elena Bacchin, Italofilia. Opinione pubblica britannica e Risorgimento italiano 1847–1864 (Turin: Carocci, 2014); Lucy Riall, Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
9.
O. J. Wright, Great Britain and the Unifying of Italy: A Special Relationship? (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
10.
See, for instance, Pietro Pastorelli, 17 marzo 1861. L’Inghilterra e l’unità d’Italia (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2011); Eugenio Di Rienzo, Il Regno delle Due Sicilie e le potenze europee 1830–1861 (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2012).
11.
See Enrico Serra, Christopher Seton-Watson (eds.), Italia e Inghilterra nell’età dell’imperialismo (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1990).
12.
Antonio Varsori, Radioso maggio. Come l’Italia entrò in guerra (Bologna: Il Mulino: 2015).
13.
Vanda Wilcox, Morale and the Italian Army during the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); John Gooch, The Italian Army and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
14.
See William Mulligan’s chapter.
15.
Bosworth, Italy the Least, VIII.
16.
Klemens Wenzel, Prince von Metternich, first used this famous expression in his ‘Memorandum to the Great Powers’, written in 1814.
17.
Bosworth, Italy the Least, 2.
18.
Cedric James Lowe, Frank Marzari, Italian Foreign Policy, 1870–1940 (Abingdon: Taylor & Francis, 2002), 173–175. On the economic aftermath of the war see Marianna Astore and Michele Fratianni, ‘“We Can’t Pay”: How Italy Dealt with War Debts After World War I’, Financial History Review, Vol. 26 (2), 2019: 197–222.
19.
On the psychological impact of war see Susan Kingsley Kent, Aftershocks: Politics of Trauma in Britain, 1918–1931 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). On the widespread network of Soviet agents in the West, see Robert Service, Spies and Commissars: Bolshevik Russia and the West (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). On the Bolshevik threat to the British Empire, see Giulia Bentivoglio, ‘The Empire Under Attack: Anglo-Soviet Relations and Bolshevik Infiltration in India in the Early 1920s’, in Valentine Lomellini (ed.), The Rise of Bolshevism and its Impact on the Interwar International Order (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 93–111.
20.
Stephen White, The Origins of Detente: The Genoa Conference and Soviet-Western Relations, 1921–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 15.
21.
TNA, CAB 24/74/65, ‘Memorandum on the political situation in Italy’, by the Political Intelligence Department, FO, 4 February 1919.
22.
TNA, FO 371/3804, despatch n. 275, Rodd to Curzon, 23 June 1919; despatch n. 282, Rodd to Curzon, 27 June 1919.
23.
TNA, FO 371/3808, despatch n. 52, Rodd to Curzon, 30 January 1919. On the US propaganda in Italy see Daniela Rossini, Woodrow Wilson and the American Myth in Italy; Culture, Diplomacy and War Propaganda (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2008) and, by the same author, the chapter in this volume.
24.
TNA, FO 371/3808, despatch n. 214, Rodd to Curzon, 23 May 1919.
25.
TNA, FO 371/3808, despatch n. 256, Rodd to Curzon, 16 June 1919.
26.
TNA, FO 371/3808, despatch n. 214, Rodd to Curzon, 23 May 1919.
27.
TNA, FO 371/3809, Rodd to Curzon, despatch n. 252, 15 June 1919.
28.
TNA, FO 371/3810, Rodd to Curzon, despatch n. 380, 8 September 1919.
29.
TNA, FO 371/3809, Rodd to Curzon, despatch n. 252, 15 June 1919.
30.
Adrian Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy, 1919–1929 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973), 36. See also Roberto Franzosi, ‘Mobilization and Counter-Mobilization Processes: From the ‘Red Years’ (1919–1920) to the ‘Black Years’ (1921–1922) in Italy. A New Methodological Approach to the Study of Narrative Data’, Theory and Society, Vol. 26 (2–3), 1997: 275–304.
31.
On Sir Rennell Rodd, see Richard J. B. Bosworth, ‘Sir Rennell Rodd e l’Italia’, Nuova Rivista Storica, LIV, 1970.
32.
TNA, FO 371/3804, despatch n. 109, Rodd to Curzon, 13 March 1919.
33.
TNA, FO 371/3808, despatch n. 233, Rodd to Curzon, 5 June 1919.
34.
TNA, FO 371/3808, despatch n. 286, Rodd to Curzon, 30 June 1919.
35.
TNA, FO 371/3810, despatch n. 306, Rodd to Curzon, 12 July 1919.
36.
TNA, FO 371/3810, Rodd to Curzon, despatch n. 380, 8 September 1919.
37.
George Buchanan, My Mission to Russia and Other Diplomatic Memories (London: Cassell & co, 1923).
38.
TNA, FO 371/3812, despatch n. 207, Buchanan to Curzon, 8 April 1920.
39.
TNA, FO 371/3812, despatch n. 250, Buchanan to Curzon, 11 April 1920.
40.
TNA, FO 371/3813, despatch n. 449, Buchanan to Curzon, 11 June 1920.
41.
TNA, FO 371/3813, despatch n. 448, Buchanan to Curzon, 11 June 1920.
42.
Ibid.
43.
TNA, FO 371/4886, ‘Likelihood of revolution’, Political Report by S.I.S., 30 June 1920. The riots were triggered by the refusal of a group of Bersaglieri to leave for Albania, where the port of Valona was occupied by an Italian expeditionary force which needed reinforcement troops.
44.
Paolo Spriano, The Occupation of the Factories: Italy, 1920 (London: Pluto Press, 1975).
45.
TNA, FO 371/4887, Tel. 453, Kennard to Curzon, 8 October 1920.
46.
See chapter by Massimo Bucarelli and Benedetto Zaccaria.
47.
On the Eastern border after the First World War see Stefano Santoro, ‘The Italian Administration of the Annexed Territories at the End of the First World War: the case of the Italian Eastern Border’, in Sorin Arhire and Tudor Roşu (eds.), The Paris Peace Conference (1919–1920) and Its Aftermath: Settlements, Problems and Perceptions (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019).
48.
TNA, FO 371/4895, ‘Situation in Trieste’, Duncan to Buchanan, 23 June 1920.
49.
TNA, FO 371/4895, despatch n. 677, Buchanan to Curzon, 28 August 1920.
50.
TNA, FO 371/4895, despatch n. 713, Hertslet to Buchanan, 3 September 1920.
51.
TNA, FO 371/4895, despatch n. 677, Buchanan to Curzon, 28 August 1920.
52.
TNA, FO 371/4895, ‘Disturbances at Trieste’, report by the British Embassy, 18 September 1920.
53.
TNA, FO 371/4896, ‘Anti-Italian feeling at Trieste’, Political Report by S.I.S., 22 August 1920.
54.
TNA, FO 371/4896, despatch n. 7474, Kennard to Curzon, 27 September 1920.
55.
Ibid.
56.
TNA, FO 371/4889, despatch n. 882, Buchanan to Curzon, 8 November 1920.

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Department of Political Sciences‚ Law and International Studies, University of Padova, Padova, Italy
Giulia Bentivoglio

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Correspondence to Giulia Bentivoglio .

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Department of Political Science, Law, and International Studies, University of Padova, Padova, Italy
Antonio Varsori
Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Venice, Italy
Benedetto Zaccaria

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Bentivoglio, G. (2020). Italy Through British Eyes, 1919–1920. In: Varsori, A., Zaccaria, B. (eds) Italy in the New International Order, 1917–1922. Security, Conflict and Cooperation in the Contemporary World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50093-1_3

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50093-1_3
Published: 14 August 2020
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-50092-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-50093-1
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