In the 20th century, and especially since the end of the Second World War, the received interpretation of Italian unification, the Risorgimento, has become the object of historical revisionism. The justifications offered for unification, the methods employed to realise it and the benefits supposedly accruing to unified Italy are frequent targets of the revisionists. Some schools have called the Risorgimento an imperialist or colonialist venture imposed by Savoy.
Some revisionists tend to negatively re-evaluate key characters of Italian national unity, such as Camillo Benso di Cavour, Giuseppe Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel II of Savoy. They grafted in this way in the debate on the causes of the so-called Southern Question (Questione Meridionale), and say that the Risorgimento was a true work of colonization, followed by a centralizing policy of conquest, because of which the Italian Mezzogiorno would have fallen into a state of backwardness still manifest. Others consider that the policies of tax, toll and industry implemented in the southern regions by the Savoy government since 1861, together with endogenous factors, have further depleted the area or they have affected its development.Norma Bouchard, ed. Risorgimento in modern Italian culture: revisiting the nineteenth-century past in history, narrative, and cinema (Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 2005).
Background and historical basis of revisionism on the Risorgimento The ideas behind the revisionist movement already began to awaken and strengthen in the years immediately following the events that led to the Kingdom of Sardinia to become the Kingdom of Italy, even before the birth of a historical debate on the subject. The first doubts about the reasons behind the foreign policy of the House of Savoy were raised by Giuseppe Mazzini, one of the theorists and supporters of Italian unification. In this regard Mazzini suggested in his paper "Italy of the people" that the government of Cavour was not interested in the principle of a united Italy, but simply to push the boundaries of the Savoy state. Even once Italy was unified, Mazzini returned to attack the government in respect of the new nation: "There is no man who can understand how unhappy I feel when I see increasing year by year, from a materialistic and immoral government, corruption, skepticism about the benefits of Unity, the financial difficulties, and fade the entire future of Italy, all the ideal Italy."
Statements of Mazzini are precursors of the dispute on the ideal unification process, which began already during the 20th century, as a continuation of the contentious debate between the moderate and democratic parties of Risorgimento. The first criticism of the hagiographic reconstructions came by the same liberal leaders, who had enthusiastically promoted any political activity that would have contributed to the national cause. Among the main targets, there were contentious politics of the new centralized unitary state, defined negatively by the neologism of "piemontesizzazione" (homologation to Piedmont).
Parallel to the abovementioned political and ideal dispute, across the late 19th century began to appear the first historiographical contributions alternative to the mainstream historiography on the Italian Risorgimento. These works furnished the substrate on which the later revisionist theories were built.
A prime example was the writer Alfredo Oriani, which put into question the outcome of the events of the Risorgimento in his work The political struggle in Italy (1892), which examined the conflict between federalism and unitarianism. Oriani criticized the "royal conquest" as a unilateral action to create a new state, assuming that without the support of a strong democratic movement, it would prove to be weak in its foundations. This work is considered the prototype of the first modern revisionist historiography on Italy, alternately to apologetic historiography of Savoy.
Criticisms against the interpretation of the Risorgimento events were also moved by Francesco Saverio Nitti, who in his works North and South (Nord e Sud)(1900) and Italy at the dawn of the twentieth century (L'Italia all'alba del secolo XX) (1901), analyzed the consequences of the national Unity from a framework illustrating the political and economic situation in the pre-unification states. According to Nitti, the benefits of the national unification process were not equitably distributed throughout the country, facilitating further development of northern Italy at the expense of the South.
Oriani's ideas influenced the thinking of the liberal Piero Gobetti who in 1926 criticized the liberal ruling class in his collection of essays Risorgimento without heroes (Risorgimento senza eroi). According to Gobetti, the Risorgimento was the work of a minority who resigned to pursue a deeper social and cultural revolution. From this "failed revolution" a state unable to meet the needs of the masses was born.
In the same vein of political and cultural connotations, but with more openly Marxist-style, is part of the revisionist and anti-apologetic analysis of Antonio Gramsci. In his book Prison Notebooks (Quaderni del carcere), published posthumously only after 1947, he describes the Risorgimento as a "passive revolution" suffered by the peasants, the poorest social class of the population. The Southern question, Jacobinism, the construction of the revolutionary process in Italy are the central themes of his analysis on the basis of which he reinterprets the Italian Risorgimento as a process of socio-political transformation began in 1789 with the French Revolution, passively transposed in Italy, and hesitated in the collapse of the Ancien Régime.
Historical revisionism
The reinterpretation of the Italian Risorgimento's events have not a single origin. The questioning of the assumptions of official history is coming from a part of the academic world and from several independent scholars, including several essayists. The growth of this cultural movement, in particular measure across the last fifty years, has generated the emergence of a growing critical literature of the broader historiography, which has gradually been the subject of increasingly acute dispute and controversy. Across the following paragraphs are presented the contributions to historical revisionism, divided according to the framework of origin.Bouchard, ed. Risorgimento in modern Italian culture: revisiting the nineteenth-century past in history, narrative, and cinema (2005).
Origins The Financial Crisis of the Kingdom of Sardinia
Contrary to the good economic situation of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, revisionist authors argue that one of the reasons that pushed the Kingdom of Sardinia to engage in the conquest of the pre-unitary states was less connected to idealism and more to the financial crisis of the Savoyard state. Indeed, between 1848 and 1859, Turin is said to have accumulated a debt of about 910 million lire. Already in July 1850, Count Cavour, in a speech to the Chamber, expressed his concerns about the state of Piedmont's finances:
“I know, as everyone does, that if we continue on the path we have followed for two years, we shall go straight to bankruptcy, and that by continuing to increase our burdens, after a few years we shall be unable to contract new loans or repay the old ones.” — Camillo Benso di Cavour
Revisionist authors believe that the expenses sustained for the various expansionist wars, or those undertaken in order to insert the kingdom into the international diplomatic game, weighed heavily on the liabilities of the Savoyard state. In particular, the Crimean War, which Cavour regarded as a good springboard for introducing Piedmont onto the European political stage, imposed on Turin, in addition to the human sacrifice of one third of its contingent, a major economic sacrifice. This was financed by a debt to the United Kingdom that would not be paid off until 1902, burdening the state budget for more than forty years.
In reality, by observing the evolution of the budget of the Kingdom of Sardinia between 1830 and 1860, one notes a doubling of revenues but also very large spikes in expenditure corresponding to the two wars of independence (1847–50 and 1859–60), which produced significant budget deficits, with the 1850s also remaining in deficit, albeit mildly, due to Cavour's strongly expansionist policies. International diplomatic circles were aware of this situation, and British, French, and German newspapers even questioned the survival of the new Kingdom because of its budgetary difficulties.
The construction of a new fiscal framework was therefore a priority, but it is understandable why it could not be completed quickly, especially due to the military events that occurred in the meantime. It took a decade for it to be fully completed and a few years more for it to function properly, with the achievement of budget equilibrium in the mid-1870s.
Various sources confirm the state of heavy indebtedness of the Kingdom of Sardinia, while reporting a very different situation for the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. What appears clearly is the great predominance of the debt inherited from the Kingdom of Sardinia (about 60% of the total, compared with 30% for the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies), with the other areas contributing only marginally.
The total level of indebtedness of the new Kingdom was not extremely high, but it was destined to grow rapidly, because revenues covered only about 60% of expenditures. Relative to the population of the new Kingdom, this debt represented 69 lire per capita. But per capita amounts varied significantly among the former states: Piedmont (142 lire), Tuscany (67 lire), Naples (63 lire), Lombardy (56 lire), Sicily (49 lire), other unified states (13 lire).
It is hardly disputable that the citizens of the new Kingdom were required to bear the burden of debts contracted by the Kingdom of Sardinia, without being able to enjoy the benefits of the works financed by those debts.
In the years following the annexation of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies to the newborn Italian State, contemporary witnesses gave the prints the first works that brought a critical analysis of the political unification of the peninsula.
The first historian to develop an alternative vision to the mainstream historiography was probably Giacinto de' Sivo. Born from a family of long loyalty to the Bourbon dynasty, de 'Sivo was certainly a militant legitimist, enough to be arrested on September 14, 1860, for refusing to pay homage to Garibaldi. In 1861 he published his first historical essay Italy and its political drama in 1861 (L'Italia e il suo dramma politico nel 1861), in which he judged the unification process as elitist and distant from the interests of the people, led by gun violence and the spread of lies. As a result, and despite the risk of persecution and difficulty to find printers willing to print his testimony, the historian developed his most representative work, History of the Two Sicilies from 1847 to 1861 (Storia delle Due Sicilie dal 1847 al 1861), published in several volumes between 1862 and 1867.
In his works, he described the unification process as an assault against two sovereign states (the Two Sicilies and the Church), in violation of international law and in particular of the spiritual and civil values of the Neapolitan nation. The thought of de' Sivo was long the subject of ostracism, in spite of Benedetto Croce had highlighted his thickness as a scholar by writing a biography that was included in the work A family of patriots (Una famiglia di patrioti).