Italia irredenta

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Italia Irredenta (Unredeemed Italy) was an Italian patriotic and political faction, of importance in the late 19th century. It advocated irredentism among the Italian people, and had some impact in the movement toward gaining some territory of today's northern and northeastern Italy after World War I.

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Origins

The movement had for its avowed purpose the emancipation of all Italian lands still subject to foreign rule. The Irredentists took language as the test of the alleged Italian nationality of the countries they proposed to emancipate, which were Trentino, Trieste, Dalmatia, Istria, South Tyrol, Gorizia, Ticino, Nice, Corsica and Malta. The test was applied in the most arbitrary manner, and in some cases was not applicable at all. Italian, in fact, was not universally spoken in Gorizia or Istria, and Malta has a language of its own - though Italian was used for literary and judicial purposes. Austria-Hungary also promoted Croatian interests in Dalmatia and Istria to weaken Italian irredentist claims in the western Balkans. Similarly, only a very small number of Italian-speakers lived in South Tyrol before Benito Mussolini's Italianization policy of the 1920s and 1930s.

The movement was of little note before 1878. In that year it sprang into prominence because the Italians were disappointed by the result of the Congress of Berlin, summoned to make a European settlement after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877. The Italians had hoped to share in the plunder of the Ottoman Empire, but they gained nothing, while Austria was endowed with the protectorate of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the vitally important hinterland of her possessions on the Adriatic. Under the sting of this disappointment the cry of Italia irredenta became for a time loud and apparently popular. It was in fact directed almost wholly against Austria, and was also used as a stalking-horse by discontented parties in Italian domestic politics — the Radicals, Republicans and Socialists.

In addition to the overworked argument from language, the Irredentists made much of partly founded claim that the Trentino had been conquered by Giuseppe Garibaldi during the Second Independence War, and they insisted that the district was an enclave in Italian territory which would give Austria a dangerous advantage in a war of aggression.

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Agitation

On July 21, 1878, a noisy public meeting was held at Rome with Menotti Garibaldi, the son of the famous Giuseppe Garibaldi, as chairman of the forum, and a clamour was raised for the formation of volunteer battalions to conquer the Trentino. Benedetto Cairoli, then Prime Minister of Italy, treated the agitation with tolerance. It was, however, mainly superficial, for the mass of the Italians had no wish to launch on a dangerous policy of adventure against Austria, and still less to attack France for the sake of Nice and Corsica, or Britain for Malta.

The only practical consequences of the Irredentist agitation outside of Italy were such things as the assassination plot organized against the emperor Francis Joseph in Trieste in 1882 by Guglielmo Oberdan (a Triestine and thus Austrian citizen, who had deserted the Austrian army and supported Italian Irredentism), which was detected and punished. When the Irredentist movement became troublesome to Italy through the activity of Republicans and Socialists, it was subject to effective police control by Agostino Depretis.

Irredentism sank into insignificance when the French occupation of Tunis in 1881 offended the Italians deeply, and their government entered into those relations with Austria and Germany which took shape by the formation of the Triple Alliance.

In its final stages, the Italia Irredenta movement provided a way in which Italians who sympathized with French republicanism, and who disliked the monarchical governments of Central Europe, could agitate against their own government. It also manifested itself in periodical war scares based on affected fears of Austrian aggression in northern Italy. Within the dominions of Austria, Irredentism was one form of the complicated language question which disturbed every portion of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

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Consequences of Irredentism

Italy signed the London Pact and entered World War I with the intention of gaining those territories that were felt as Italian under foreign rule; several Austro-Hungarian citizens of Italian ethnicity — Cesare Battisti, Nazario Sauro, Damiano Chiesa, Fabio Filzi, Enrico Toti — fought within the Italian forces against the Austria-Hungary to free their lands. The outcome of the First World War and the consequent settlement of the Treaty of Saint-Germain enabled Italy to achieve many (but not all) of the aims of the Italia irredenta party, incorporating Trentino, South Tirol, Friuli, Istria and Trieste. The city of Rijeka/Fiume was the subject of claim and counter-claim: see Italian Regency of Carnaro, Treaty of Rapallo, 1920 and Treaty of Rome, 1924.

Irredentism played a major part in defining attitutes that were fused into Fascism. Most of fascist leaders had been irredentist activists, and the issue of participation in the war had caused divisions and acute rivalries on the political scene. The Italian Socialist Party was split over the matter, and had to resort to expelling many of its pro-war members (the latter side included Benito Mussolini himself, together with future anti-fascists such as Alceste de Ambris and Giuseppe Di Vittorio); at trade union-level, the clash created an opportunity for National Syndicalism to present itself as a patriotic, but equally revolutionary alternative to Anarcho-Syndicalism (De Ambris formed Fasci autonomi d'azione rivoluzionaria, and described the war as an opportunity equal to the French Revolution).

The stand taken by Gabriele D'Annunzio, which briefly led him to become an enemy of the Italian state, was meant to provoke a nationalist revival through Corporatism (first instituted during his rule over Fiume), in front of what was widely perceived as state corruption engineered by governments such as Giovanni Giolitti's. Moreover, Fascism made effort to seem as the natural outcome of war heroism, against a "betrayed Italy" that had not been awarded all it deserved, as well as appropriating the image of Arditi soldiers.

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See also

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References

it:Italia irredenta

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