Abstract
‘Italy finds itself at the beginning of a new period in its political life. For the first time since the creation of the kingdom of Italy, public opinion is profoundly troubled, strong and audacious extremist parties have emerged, new social problems challenge us, the masses have entered into political life and parliamentary institutions have fallen into crisis. All this reveals the start of a new period of profound transformations.’
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Notes
S. Talamo, ‘La questione sociale e i cattolici’, I cattolici e la questione sociale in Italia, 1894–1904, ed. G. Are (Milan, 1963), pp. 148–74; the article, which first appeared in 1896, highlights the importance of the social question to Catholics.
On the crisis of 1893–9 as a symptom of the weakness of the liberal state, see G. Candeloro, Storia dell’Italia moderna, vol. vii: La crisi di fine secolo e l’età giolittiana (Milan, 1974); U. Levra, Il colpo di stato della borghesia: La crisi di fine secolo in Italia, 1896–1900 (Milan, 1975); J. A. Davis, Conflict and Control; R. Bach Jensen, ‘Police Reform and Social Reform: Italy from the Crisis of the 1890s to the Giolittian Era’, Criminal Justice History, 10 (1989), pp. 179–200.
G. Giolitti, Memoirs of My Life (London and Sydney, 1923), pp. 48–69 on the nature of his dissidence and his vision. At the time of writing, Alexander De Grand’s The Hunchback’s Tailor: Giovanni Giolitti and Liberial Italy from the Challenge of Mass Politics to the Rise of Fascism, 1882–1922 (Westport, Conn., 2000) has not yet been published.
A. Aquarone, L’Italia giolittiana, 1896–1915, vol. 1: Le premesse politiche ed economiche (Bologna, 1981), pp. 184ff. and 285ff. on Giolitti’s resolution of the political crisis.
The speech appears in L’età giolittiana: Documenti della storia, ed. M. L. Salvadori (Turin, 1980), pp. 60–3, 63.
On the importance of the search for consensus and legitimacy in welfare-state development in Europe after 1885, see J. Alber, ‘Le origini del welfare state: Teorie, ipotesi ed analisi empirica’, Rivista italiana di scienza politica, 12:3 (December, 1982), pp. 361–421, esp. 405.
From the earliest days after her arrival in Italy in 1884, Kuliscioff supported the idea of social reform because of her feminism. Involved from the beginning in the formation of the socialist party in the 1890s, she pushed for socialists to distance themselves from anarchists and adopt a pragmatic programme. Both she and Turati were imprisoned in 1898 for ‘inciting violence’; the experience of persecution during the anti-socialist campaign of 1894–99 convinced Turati of the need to exploit the new liberal regime in order to obtain social rewards that might win socialism adherents. See the collection of Kuliscioff’s works and reminiscences of friends that was published to mark her death: Anna Kuliscioff in Memoria (Milan, 1926), intro. esp. pp. 33–8; and on Turati’s reformist convictions, S. Discala, Dilemmas of Italian Socialism: The Politics of Filippo Turati (Amherst, Mass., 1980), pp. 5–21.
N. Valeri, Turati e La Kuliscioff (Florence, 1974), pp. 62–3; P. Favilli, Storia del marxismo italiano: Dalle origini alla grande guerra (Milan, 1996), pp. 328, 339.
E. Gentile, L’Italia giolittiana, 1899–1914 (1977; rev. ed. Bologna, 1990), pp. 79–80.
On the rise of anti-reformist revolutionary syndicalism within the PSI in 1900–07, see the classic account by R. Michels, Storia critica del movimento socialista italiano dagli inizi fino al 1911 (Florence, 1921). And see the controversial work on ‘Sorelianism’, Z. Sternhall, with M. Sznajder and M. Asheri, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, trans. D. Maisel (Princeton, 1994), ch. 3.
G. Giolitti, ‘Per un programma liberale di governo’, in Discorsi extraparliamentari di Giovanni Giolitti, ed. N. Valeri (Turin, 1952), pp. 237–46.
Ibid., pp. 238, 241, and 245.
See for example, A. W. Salomone, Italy in the Giolittian Era: Italian Democracy in the Making, 1900–1914 (1945; 2nd edn. Philadelphia, 1960); G. Natale, Giolitti e gli italiani (Milan, 1949); G. Ansaldo, Il minisero della buona vita: Giolitti e i suoi tempi (Milan, 1949); F. Gaeta, La crisi di fine secolo e l’età giolittiana (Turin, 1982).
In the prewar period, Giolitti served as prime minister November 1903–March 1905, May 1906–December 1909, and March 1911–March 1914. In addition, he did five stints as president of the council of state and as interior minister: Seton-Watson, pp. 728–30. Over the course of his long career, he also served as a deputy uninterruptedly for 46 years from 1882 to 1928, as Crispi’s treasury minister from March 1889 to November 1890, as prime minister from May 1892 to November 1893, and as Zanardelli’s interior minister from February 1901 to October 1903. See the biographical essay in Camera dei Deputati, Discorsi parlamentari di Giovanni Giolitti, vol. 1 (Rome, 1953), intro., esp. pp. xiii–xiv.
G. Toniolo, An Economic History of Liberal Italy, 1850–1918, trans. M. Rees (London and New York, 1990), ch. 10; G. Federico and G. Toniolo, ‘Italy’, Patterns of European Industrialization: The Nineteenth Century, ed. R. Sylla and G. Toniolo (London and New York, 1991), pp. 197–217, 202.
Revisionist scholars are finally starting to challenge traditional depictions of Imperial Germany’s welfare policies as crude attempts at social control. They are also moving away from the fixation on the ‘feudal-dynastic’ aspects of Bismarckian reforms from above. These new interpretations allow us to see welfare as a means to command and construct modernity. G. Steinmetz, Regulating the Social: The Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial Germany (Princeton, NJ, 1993), for example, explores how social insurance reforms became an imperative for bourgeois society.
G. V. Rimlinger, Welfare Policy and Industrialization in Europe, America, and Russia (New York, 1971), pp. 114, 116.
P. Paur, ‘The Corporatist Character of Bismarck’s Social Policy’, European Studies Review, 11:4 (October, 1981), pp. 427–60, 445.
G. Procacci, La lotta di classe in Italia agli inizi del xx secolo (Rome, 1970).
See, for example, D. F. Crew, Town in the Ruhr: A Social History of Bochum, 1860–1914 (New York, 1979); R. J. Lustig, Corporate Liberalism: The Origins of Modern Political Theory, 1890–1920 (Berkeley, California, 1982).
G. C. Marino, La formazione dello spirito borghese in Italia (Florence, 1974); F. Bonelli, ‘Il capitalismo italiano: Linee generali d’interpretazione’, Storia d’Italia, I: Dal feudalesimo al capitalismo (Turin, 1978), pp. 1195–255.
A. Lonni, ‘Fatalità o responsabilità? Le “jatture” degli infortuni sul lavoro: La legge del 1898’, Salute e classi lavoratrici in Italia dall’unità al fascismo, pp. 737–62, 738–9.
A. Cherubini, Storia della previdenza, p. 81.
Ibid., pp. 62–5, 81, 86–9; and on classic liberal theory of the open and competitive society, see D. Fraser, The Evolution of the British Welfare State (1973; reprinted. Basingstoke and London, 1990), ch. 5, esp. 104.
P. Thane, The Foundations of the Welfare State: Social Policy in Modern Britain (1982: 6th edn New York, 1989), p. 41–2.
P. Flora, vol. 1, p. 599.
M. V. Ballestrero and R. Levrero, Genocidio perfetto: Industrializzazione e forza lavoro nel lecchese, 1840–1870 (Milan, 1979), pp. 30ff; M. V. Ballestrero, Dalla tutela alla parità: La legislazione italiana sul lavoro delle donne (Bologna, 1979), pp. 11–13.
S. Ortaggi Cammarosana, ‘Labouring Women in Northern and Central Italy in the Nineteenth Century’, Society and Politics in the Age of the Risorgimento, pp. 152–83, 153.
G. Tagliacarne, ‘L’occupazione delle donne nelle fabbriche e negli uffici durante gli ultimi cinquant’anni e la diminuzione delle nascite’, Giornale degli economisti, 49:12 (December, 1934), pp. 927–40, 932.
Ortaggi Cammarosano, p. 180; on the vagaries of Italian official statistics on women workers, see A. Pescarola, ‘I mestieri femminili: Continuità e spostamenti di confini nel corso dell’industrializzazione’, Memoria, 3:30 (1990), pp. 55–68.
Supported by the socialist party, the camere di lavoro were organized on a territorial basis; they helped workers find jobs and organize disputes. Many also managed their own mutual funds. At the turn of the century, they had more members than did craft or industry-based federations of workers. P. Spriano, Socialismo e classe operaia a Torino dal 1892 al 1913 (Turin, 1958), ch. 1; D. Marucco, Mutualismo e sistema politico: Il caso italiano, 1862–1904 (Milan, 1981), pp. 127–33. On the voluntary insurance movement in Britain, see B. Abel-Smith, ‘The History of Medical Care’ in Comparative Development in Social Welfare, ed. E. W. Martin (London, 1972), pp. 219–40.
P. Frascani, ‘La disciplina delle industrie insalubri nella legislazione sanitaria italiana, 1865–1910’, Salute e classi lavoratrici, pp. 713–35.
Cherubini (1977), pp. 114–17, 121; Lonni, pp. 745–50.
In 1904, mutual aid societies voted at their third national congress to lobby for the introduction of compulsory contributory pensions: Cherubini (1977), p. 133. Not until 1911 did trade unions give their support to the concept of obbligatorietà; and in 1914, the reformist socialist party officially endorsed a platform calling for state-run compulsory insurance. See S. Merli, Proletariato di fabbrica e capitalismo industriale: Il caso italiano, 1880–1900, vol. 1 (Florence, 1972), pp. 223–5.
ApC, Legislatura XXI, Sessione I, Discussioni, Vol. IV, Tornata del 13 maggio 1901, interpellanze sulla cassa nazionale di previdenza, pp. 3757–61, 3759.
INPS, Seventy Years of the National Social Insurance Institute, Fifty Years of General Compulsory Insurance for Disability and Old-Age (Rome, 1970), pp. 228–32; Cherubini (1977), p. 149.
A. Wood, Nineteenth-Century Britain, 1815–1914 (1960; 2nd edn Harlow, 1982), quotes on pp. 398, 402.
A. I. Ogus, ‘Britain’, in The Evolution of Social Insurance, 1881–1981: Studies of Germany, France, Great Britain, Austria and Switzerland, ed. P. A. Kohler and H. F. Zacher, with M. Partington (London and New York, 1982), pp. 150–264, quote on p. 183.
D. Fraser, ch. 7; quotes on p. 157; P. Thane (1982/1989), pp. 74–84; G. C. Peden, British Economic and Social Policy: Lloyd George to Margaret Thatcher (1985; reprinted. Oxford, 1988), ch. 2.
See B. B. Gilbert, The Evolution of National Insurance in Great Britain (London, 1966) on the legislative process.
Some commentators depict the British case as an example of a ‘patriarchal welfare state’ which viewed women as mothers and men as breadwinners: C. Pateman, ‘The Patriarchal Welfare State’, Democracy and the Welfare State, ed. A. Gutmann (Princeton, New Jersey, 1988), pp. 231–60. On Britain specifically, see J. Lewis, The Politics of Motherhood: Child and Maternal Welfare in England, 1900–1939 (London and Montreal, 1980), intro.; and, by the same author, ‘Gender and the Development of Welfare Regimes’, Journal of European Social Policy, 2 (1992), pp. 159–73. For a discussion of these issues, see S. Pedersen, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914–1945 (1993; pb ed Cambridge and New York, 1995), intro. and ch. 1. Others argue that the act entrenched the insurance principle in British welfare policy and committed it to the maintenance of a system, based as it was on flat-rate contributions compulsorily drawn from all wage-earners, which functioned as a form of regressive taxation; see Fraser, pp. 166–7.
Gilbert, quote on p. 53; and Thane (1982/1989), pp. 94–6 and Pedersen, p. 50.
The term is from S. Romano, Giolitti: Lo stile del potere (Milan, 1989).
ApC, Legislatura XXI, Sessione 1900–01, Vol. VI, Discussioni, Tornata di sabato 29 giugno 1901, aggiunte e modificazioni alla legge del 17 luglio 1898, pp. 6081–5; and A. Cherubini, ‘La previdenza sociale nell’epoca giolittiana’, Salute e classi lavoratrici in Italia, pp. 562–81, 570–1.
F. Bettio, The Sexual Division of Labour: The Italian Case (Oxford, 1988), pp. 104–5; see also S. Musso, Gli operai di Torino, 1900–1920 (Milan, 1980), passim.
See P. Flora, vol. 1, p. 460 and vol. 2, p. 554; A. Cherubini (1977), pp. 154–5; and L. Preti, Giolitti, i riformisti e gli altri, 1900–1911 (Milan, 1985), pp. 243–4.
G. Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency, 1899–1914 (Oxford, 1971).
Seventy Years of the National Social Insurance System, p. 234.
After textiles, the manifatture dei tabacchi employed the most numerous category of female factory workers in Italy. F. Pieroni Bortolotti, Socialismo e questione fem-minile in Italia, 1892–1922 (Milan, 1974), p. 193–4; see also, P. Nava, La fabbrica dell’emancipazione: Operaie della manifattura tabacchi di Modena (Rome, 1986).
A. Aquarone, L’Italia giolittiana, 1896–1915, vol. 1 (Bologna, 1891), pp. 67–71.
L. Preti, Giolitti, p. 249; Cherubini, pp. 172–3.
P. Favilli, Storia del marxismo, chs 5–6; E. Gentile, L’Italia Giolittiana, ch. 4; N. Valeri, Turati e Kuliscioff, pp. 74–7.
A. Cherubini, ‘La previdenza sociale’, p. 566; L. Preti (1985), pp. 145–6.
J. H. Quataert, ‘Social Insurance and the Family Work of Oberlausitz Home Weavers in the Late Nineteenth Century’, German Women in the Nineteenth Century, ed. J. C. Fout (New York and London, 1984), pp. 270–94.
See M. L. Stewart, Women, Work and the French State: Labour Protection and Social Patriarchy, 1879–1919 (London, 1989); J. Jenson, ‘Gender and Reproduction: Or Babies and the State’, Studies in Political Economy, 20 (1989), pp. 9–46 and, by the same author, ‘Representations of Gender: Policies to ‘Protect’ Women Workers and Infants in France and the United States before 1914’, in Women, the State, and Welfare, ed. L Gordon (Madison, Wisconsin, 1990), pp. 152–77; and L. Lee Downs, ‘Between Taylorism and Denatalite: Women Welfare Supervisors and the Boundaries of Difference in French Metalworking Factories, 1917–1930’, Gendered Domains: Rethinking Public and Private in Women’s History D. O. Relly and S. M. Reverby (Ithaca, New York, 1992), pp. 289–302.
Since 1898, for instance, the Italian federation of metalworkers supported the idea of equality in jobs and pay between the sexes. A notable, but unrepresentative exception involved the print workers’ union, which discriminated against women: Bettio, p. 147.
Kuliscioff pointedly reminded her male colleagues that not until 1910 did any socialist party congress make ‘the question of the female proletariat’ the ‘order of the day’. She believed that the problem of the economic emancipation of women was marginalized in party doctrine and practice: see her ‘Proletariato femminile e partito socialista: Relazione al congresso nazionale socialista 1910’, Anna Kuliscioff in memoria, pp. 299–312, 299. The PSI never really addressed the specific problems of women in employment. To have done so would have demanded a critical examination of gender relations, which could act independently of class relations. Instead, male socialists who ran the parliamentary party focused on single-issues, such as maternity benefit or working hours, but only as a secondary aspect of their programme.
Legislators angered many women’s representatives, including Anna Mozzoni, because they ‘infantilized’ women by defining their minority age as 15 to 21, while that of men was 12 to 15. L. Valiani, L’Italia dal 1876 al 1915, pp. 435–6.
C. Ficola, ‘Legislazione sociale e tutela della maternità nell’età giolittiana’, Salute e classi lavoratrici in Italia, pp. 698–735, 708; see also Bortolotti, Socialismo e questione femminile, ch. 3; and see Kuliscioff’s proposals in Congresso nazionale del partito socialista italiano, Roma, 8–10 settembre 1900: Organizzazione economica per una legge sul lavoro delle donne e dei fanciulli (Milan, 1900), pp. 5–8.
Cherubini (1977), pp. 166–9.
Ballestrero, Dalla tutela alla parità, pp. 20–1.
Ibid., pp. 26–32.
See Bettio, p. 134; and S. Puccini, ‘Condizioni della donna e questione femminile, 1892–1922)’, La questione femminile in Italia dal 900 ad oggi, ed. G. Ascoli, N. Fusini, et al. (Milan, 1979), pp. 9–75, esp. 12–26.
C. Ficola, ‘Legislazione sociale e tutela della maternità’, p. 701; Bettio, pp. 43–4. So deeply imbedded was the sexual division of labour that even during the war the use of female labour in war industries was not as extensive in Italy as it was in other countries. The owners of big firms, like Fiat, for example, were decidedly against employing women, even though mechanization, which de-skilled many tasks, made employing women more possible. See A. Camarda and S. Peli, L’Altro esercito: Le classe operaia durante la prima guerra mondiale (Milan, 1980), pp. 22–6 and pp. 34–5, on resistance to the entry of women in traditionally ‘male jobs’.
Cherubini (1977), pp. 171–2.
A. Buttafuoco, ‘Motherhood as a Political Strategy: The Role of the Italian Women’s Movement in the Creation of the Cassa Nazionale di Maternità’, in Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States, 1880s-1950s, ed. G. Bock and P. Thane (London, 1991), pp. 178–195, 191; Ficola, ‘Legislazione sociale’, p. 710.
Buttafuoco, p. 191.
Cherubini (1977), pp. 126, 131, 133; and see MAIC, Ufficio del Lavoro, La donna nell’industria italiana (Rome, 1905) and Operai ed orari negli opifici soggetti alla legge sul lavoro delle donne e dei fanciulli, anno 1907 (Rome, 1908), cited in Ficola, p. 701.
‘L’impresa libica e i problemi della vita nazionale’, speech presented in Turin on 7 October 1911, Discorsi extraparlamentari, 259–72, 261, 264.
Based on literacy, the law gave the vote to all literate men at the age of 21; illiterate men who had completed military service or were over thirty could also vote. As a result of the reform, the electorate increased from 3.3 to 8.6 million, representing a growth in the citizenry from 9.5 to 24 per cent of the total population: E. Gentile (1977/1990), p. 205.
See L’età giolittiana, e.d. M. L. Salvadori, pp. 267–76, for Salandra’s speech.
‘Il monopolio delle assicurazioni’, session 8 July, Camera dei Deputati, Discorsi parlamentari di Giovanni Giolitti, vol. 3 (Rome, 1954), pp. 1426–35, esp. 1428–29.
A. Scialoja, ‘L’istituto nazionale delle assicurazioni e il progetto giolittiana di un monopolio di stato delle assicurazioni sulla vita’, Quaderni storici, 6 (1971), pp. 971–1027.
G. Carocci, Giolitti e l’età giolittiana (1961; 8th edn Turin, 1971), ch. 13; E. Gentile (1977/1990), p. 204; D. J. Forsyth, The Crisis of Liberal Italy: Monetary and Financial Policy, 1914–1922 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 33–4.
Carocci, pp. 59–60; Forsyth, p. 29.
Répaci, p. 27.
A. Caracciolo, ‘Il processo d’industrializzazione’, Lo sviluppo economico in Italia: Storia dell’economia italiana negli ultimi cento anni, vol. 3: Studi di settore e documentazione di base, ed. G. Fuà (Milan, 1969), pp. 98–182, 98–120.
S. Sepe (1995), p. 194.
Throughout the Giolittian period, the kingdom devoted barely 1 per cent of GNP to social spending: J. Hage and R. A. Hanneman, ‘The Growth of the Welfare State in Britain, France, Germany, and Italy: A Comparison of Three Paradigms’, Comparative Social Research, 3 (1980), pp. 45–70, 57.
Répaci, pp. 37, 168–9. See also R. M. Russo, La politica dell’assistenza: Storia dello sviluppo capitalistico e del sottosviluppo assistenziale in Italia dal 1860 ai giorni nostri (Rimini and Florence, 1974), n. 10, p. 31 for the following figures on the state’s social expenditure (in contemporary lire): 1905–07 6,473,395; 1909–10 9,308,185; 1912–13 8,945,375; 1913–14 8,946,612; 1914–15 19,473,224 1922–23 60,500,000; 1923–24 63,027,000; 1924–25 108,530,000.
The term is used by Vera Zamagni in ‘La dinamica dei salari nel settore industriale, 1921–1939’, Quaderni storici, 10: pts. 2–3 (1975), pp. 530–49, 548; also see her ‘Sui salari industriali nell’età giolittiana’, Rivista di storia economica, 1 (1984), pp. 183–221.
M. Langan and I. Ostner, ‘Gender and Welfare: Towards a Comparative Framework’, Towards a European Welfare State? ed. G. Room (Bristol, 1991), pp. 127–50, 136–7.
Flora, vol. 1, pp. 460–1.
Eventually France found its own way, by reforming its German-style social insurance system in 1930 (and allowing workers to choose their own insurer) and, more importantly, by exploiting the best of its own native traditions of family-based welfare. Introduced in 1932, compulsory family allowances and the many other pronatalist and familist initiatives that followed became cornerstones of a peculiarly French welfare state: Y. Saint-Jours, ‘France’, The Evolution of Social Insurance, pp. 93–149, 117; Quine, Population Politics, ch. 2.
A. De Swaan, In Care of the State: Health Care, Education and Welfare in Europe in the Modern Era (Oxford, 1988), intro. pp. 1–12.
P. Baldwin, The Politics of Social Solidarity: Class Bases of the European Welfare State, 1875–1975 (Cambridge and New York, 1990), pp. 1–3.
M. Paci, ‘Il sistema di welfare italiano tra tradizione clientelare e prospettive di riforma’, Welfare state all’italiana, pp. 297–326, 307–8.
Cited by N. Valeri, in his introduction to Discorsi extraparlamentari, p. 68.
Salomone, pt. 2, ch. 3.
P. Togliatti, Discorso su Giolitti (Rome, 1950), pp. 15, 28, 42. Though he was no apologist for giolittismo, Togliatti praised its creator for conceding ‘an almost universal suffrage’ (if you ignore women, of course) at a time when not all ‘democrats’ were even convinced of the benefits of democracy (p. 32).
Salomone, p. 42.
Romano, Lo stile del potere, p. 5; and see pp. 329 ff. for details about Giolitti’s role in the rise of fascism.
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Quine, M.S. (2002). The Rise of Giolitti’s ‘Insurer State’. In: Italy’s Social Revolution. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403919793_4
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