Understanding the history of the Italian unitary state circa 1860
This post is part of a series describing the history that led to the creation of the Italian unitary state with a focus on the nefarious consequences bestowed on the South, then called the Kingdom of Two Sicilies. These consequences are still felt today with the South kept in a condition of apartheid and economic subjugation to the rich North. This is to the detriment of the entire nation which in a globalized world struggles to compete.
See also Books and Videos. Specifically, we suggest the book La Storia Dell’Italia Unita which is the synthesis of a very large literature on the history of Italy after the forced unification carried out by the northern kingdom of Piedmont backed by England.
Introduction
The invasion of the South (Kingdom of Two Sicilies) did not happen by divine will, nor because the “heroes” and “martyrs” of the liberal (today we would say neo-liberal) revolution suddenly decided to defeat a fully organized army and fleet. The high tide that submerged the Kingdom of Two Sicilies grew over the years by the Piedmontese ruling class (Savoy, Cavour, industrialists, “high-level” beurocra6ts, etc… ) with the crucial support of France but above all of England
The reasons, which prompted England to support the Kingdom of Sardinia (Piedmont) in its invasion of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, were various and it cannot be said whether there was a prevalent one. Let’s discuss them briefly.
Follow the money. The British government first of all needed to put Piedmont in a position to repay the large sums it had borrowed from the London banks (Rothschilds, Bank Hambro & Sons, and others) and the British government itself.
Natural resources. The British ruling class wanted the certainty to manage without conflict the mineral resources of Sicily, which provided eighty percent of the world’s production of sulfur. Sulfur was a very critical mineral because it was a fundamental element for making gunpowder, used at the time for the preparation of all ammunition, and for the production of soda essential element in the textile industry, a leading industry of the newly born industrial revolution.
South as a colony. For some time, moreover, England intended to support the presence of a state close to its interests, in southern Italy. Its government (ruling class) had repeatedly entered into conflict with the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, as had happened in the case of the Crimean war, when Ferdinand II, despite London’s requests, did not close his ports to the Russian ships.
Religious prejudices. Finally, the Piedmontese invasion of the catholic Bourbon state was also supported by the powerful leader of the British evangelicals, lord Anthony Shaftesbury, and by the other major representatives of the Protestant movements, who, together with the liberals and Freemasonry, were leading a bitter struggle against the Church of Rome, and through their Bourbon ally, they hoped to hit it directly in Italy.
Suez Canal. In anticipation of the opening of the Suez Canal (the works were in progress and would have been completed in 1869), England wanted to guarantee more general control of Sicily, given its strategic position in the heart of the Mediterranean sea, which was preparing to become the center of the world main trade routes. As you can see from the image on the right, the Suez canal cut almost half the route between England and its colonies.
Kingdom of Sardinia’s disastrous economic situation
As the saying goes: follow the money. The Kingdom of Sardinia was in a disastrous financial situation and did not have the means to meet the commitments made, among others, it also owed significant sums to another London institution: the Bank Hambro & Sons, besides the Rothschilds, and even directly to the British government.
The debts that the kingdom of Savoy (Piedmont) incurred to wage wars and to carry out public works, often unproductive, together with widespread corruption, had produced liabilities completely out of control, and since 1855 Piedmontetse executives had been forced to proceed with provisional accounts, continually postponing the drafting of an official document, which after 5 years in 1859 still did not exist.
Ironically, or better shrewdly calculated, the situation was healed, in a certain sense by the “welcomed” unification of Italy, when only in 1862, after two years of transitory governments in all the old territories, the first Italian budget was issued, in which the debts of the various states were consolidated and related all to the value established for the lira, the national currency introduced by the Pepoli law of 24 August 1862. It was therefore in the economic document of the united nation that the liabilities of the Kingdom of Sardinia, equal to about 62 million of the new currency, merged. This debt amounts to about 306 billion euros. See the exchange of the lire of the time into euros at this location: Calculate the purchasing power in lire and euro from 1860 to 2015.
Exporting Piedmontese corruption and maladministration. As a side note, Piedmontese executives, officials, and employees systematically subtracted sums from the coffers of the Savoy kingdom’s administration and therefore large amounts of state money continued to disappear. The phenomenon assumed such big proportions that it represented a significant percentage of the general debt and the economists of the time defined it with the rather colorful expression of unspeakable public debt. Obviously, with the money recovered from the coffers of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, equal to about 80 million lire, the first operation that Piedmont did was the elimination of this particular type of liability. Notice that 80 million lire amount to about 395 billion euros, enough to balance the Piemontese debt and then some.
In modern parlance, we could say that this Ponzi scheme saved the Kingdom of Sardinia (aka Piedmont) from bankruptcy, mainly at the expense of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies.
The Kingdom of Sardinia, therefore, was in great difficulty and was literally going bankrupt. In such a situation, Lord Lionel Rothschild did the only thing he could probably do to recover the credits of his bank and turned to English Freemasonry, urging them to support the Piedmontese expansionist project, the success of which would have allowed the subalpine state to pay its debts.
Casus belli (exporting democracy?)
The invasion of the South was prepared during years of plotting and propaganda on the part of the ruling classes of the Kingdom of Sardinia and its British allies. This was coupled with the lack of “machiavellian” intelligence on the part of the Bourbon ruling class which failed to understand the kind of tsunami that was looming on their heads.
Among other things, this is demonstrated by the fact that during the Paris congress, held from 25 February to 16 April 1856 to discuss the peace following the Crimean War, Cavour obtained that the day of 8 April was dedicated to Italian and other problems. At that time, he already showed his aims for the Papal State and the Neapolitan kingdom. The British lord George Clarendon ganged up with Cavour. Regarding the Neapolitan state, he said, with typical British hypocrisy, that its system of oppression fueled the danger of an insurrection and that “if the principle of non-intervention is worthy of respect for the entire international community, nevertheless the exception to this rule, in some cases, represents duty and a right.“
On the other hand, we must not forget that the famous letters to lord George Aberdeen dated back to 1851, where lord William Gladstone, exasperating real situations and often with authentic falsifications, described Bourbon prisons as actual circles of hell. The powerful politician condemned without appeal the government of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and even defined it as “a permanent outrage to religion” (he also wrote that he had heard that in the south “the denial of God was erected as a system of government”), thus starting a prolonged campaign of international defamation of Ferdinand II and his state.
In this regard, it is worth remembering that later Gladstone, pressed by the opposition, had to admit that he had never been to any prison and that he had reported what he was told by the liberals, with whom he was in contact. It must be borne in mind, however, that the noble, of Scottish origins, was pushed to attack the Neapolitan king also from personal interests. In fact, he was personally involved in the sulfur mining activity in Sicily, which Ferdinand II intended to remove from the British monopoly.
Quid pro quo
The Piedmontese oligarchy, Cavour in particular, was certainly not moved by an ideal impulse to unify the nation, in reality, it slyly exploited the patriotic tendencies of some idealists, perhaps of Garibaldi himself, as we will later see separately. In line with the policies of the ruling classes of the times, certainly, they did not have the interest of the people at heart, of their people, let alone of the people of the South. People were used as bargaining chips.
Here are a couple of examples.
- The Kingdom of the Savoy with the Treaty of Turin of March 1860 ceded Nice and Savoy to France, to which in 1861 it also ceded the cities of Menton and Roccabruna. in this way Cavour was able to secure the support of Napoleon III, emperor of France.
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- This was the result of a long diplomatic activity and Cavour with misogynistic calculation used his beautiful cousin Virginia Oldoini, Duchess of Castiglione, to bring Napeoleone closer to the Piedmontese cause. In 1855, in fact, he sent her to Paris with the task of entering into the good graces of the emperor, of whom she soon became her lover.
This confirms that at the time there was already if not a defined plan, at least the intention to proceed with territorial expansions in the peninsula.
Involvement of England in the demise of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies
England had numerous interests in southern Italy and in particular in Sicily. In fact, it held, as mentioned, the monopoly on the exploitation of sulfur, strategic in the economy of the time, there were many British entrepreneurs, especially in the wine industry, who had invested in the island, and finally, England imported significant quantities of agricultural fine and valuable products from this island.
Ferdinand II, however, had repeatedly shown excessive autonomy and this made him unreliable in the eyes of the British empire, which could not tolerate having its own interests contested. Just think of the events related to the opium war with China.
Sulfur war
The first conflicts took place as early as 1837 and were due precisely to the activities connected with sulfur. In fact, that year, the rights to its extraction, which until then had been held by a cartel consisting of about twenty British companies, had expired. Based on his rights, therefore, Ferdinand II launched an international competition, which was won by a French consortium, led by the companies Tayx and Aycard. The new dealerships, with which the contract was signed on July 10, 1838, had offered more than double the previous British contracts, but the London government requested that their companies be reinstated in the contract.
The Neapolitan government, however, in its response confirmed the new contract with the French companies, demonstrating that it had acted in compliance with its prerogatives. After a further exchange of notes, however, England switched to the use of force, threatening a real war. Typical of what was known at the time as British gunboat diplomacy. In fact, England sent its fleet to the Mediterranean and while some ships intercepted the commercial vessels of the Two Sicilies and diverted them to Malta, other ships entered the Gulf of Naples and targeted the royal palace and the other palaces of power.
At that point, the king of France, Louis Philippe, intervened and proposed himself as a mediator to avoid a conflict, which would have had dramatic results. Thus, at his invitation, the French winning companies withdrew, in exchange for substantial compensation from the Bourbon executive, and gave way to those from across the Channel, which was reinstated in the concession by royal decree of 21 July 1840.
Unfortunately, the Kingdom of Two Sicilies was guilty of the crime of ” lesa maesta'” (injured majesty) against the British crown. This did not go unnoticed by the ruling British politicians who used to be obeyed by their colonies (as southern Italy, and later the Italian nation, was considered). Specifically, it is worth remembering that in those years Lord Palmerston and Lord Russell were already in government, albeit not in leading roles.
Probably since then, they began to mature their aversion towards the Neapolitan king.
Crimean war
In 1854 England entered the Crimean war against the Tsarist empire alongside France and Turkey (they were also joined by the Kingdom of Sardinia, which sent a contingent of 15,000 men, commanded by the general Alfonso La Marmora.
The intent was to become even closer with France and England and ultimately gain their support during the invasion of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies that happened a few years later.
During the course of the hostilities, the Bourbon government did not make its ports available to the coalition, while it did not close them, as the British government requested, to Russia, with which it even continued to have commercial relations and therefore its ships in their stops could also stock up on the food they needed. The behavior of Ferdinand II obviously did not change the course of the war, which in 1855 saw the defeat of the tsar, but certainly contributed to increasing the aversion towards him of the men at that time in power in London, and among these were Lord Palmerston and Lord Russell, who had been the main supporters of the Crimean intervention, while Lord Gladstone was already Chancellor in those years.
Ferdinand II’s attitude weakened the position of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, exacerbating its isolation on the international scene. For the English rulers, however, it would not have been possible to tolerate the further outrage of Ferdinand II and therefore it is likely that the fate of his reign had already been definitively sealed in those years (this was also the opinion of Francis II, as can be seen from the letter he sent on July 1, 1862, to Tsar Alexander II).
Admission of guilt
That the intervention of the British Empire was decisive in the fall of the Bourbon state, Lord Palmerston himself affirms in an interview with the exiled Antonio Panizzi, at the time appreciated director of the British Museum library, who, as reports the historian Eugenio Di Rienzo in The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the European Powers (Rubbettino, 2012), in a letter written in the first months of 1861 to Cavour reports:
For the British politicians, it was an indisputable conclusion that their prime minister and the government played a decisive role in the conquest of the south by the Savoy and even, as reported by Ercole Stampanoni in La Freemasonry, Rome (Napoleon III and the Italian ministers, Zecchini, 1868), Garibaldi, the leader of the “red shirts” that started the invasion of the South, admitted it when in 1864 he was a guest of the English nobility in London. On that occasion, in fact, he stated:
Conclusions
In conclusion, England not only collaborated in the preparation of the military operation but also constantly protected the advance of the invading army. It must be said, however, that not all the British political class was in favor of intervention in Italy and Lord Palmerston, Lord Russell, and the other pro-Piedmontese were often attacked in Parliament. Among the numerous, dramatic, sessions, it is worth mentioning that of the House of Commons of May 17, 1860 (described by Eugenio Di Rienzo in the aforementioned book), during which the deputy “George Hope” asked the government to stop the subscription promoted by the patriot Alberto Mario to send relief to the Garibaldi expedition. The Italian had married the journalist Jessie White, from a family of shipowners in Hampshire, who contributed greatly to the creation of the myth of Garibaldi in the Anglo-Saxon world, writing articles about him for years. and finally a biography of him in 1882. This subscription, in fact, violated the Foreign Enlistment Act of 1819, which prohibited the collection of money on the national territory for the purpose of recruiting foreign troops. Its illegality was evident, but despite this, it was not interrupted and indeed many others were organized, to which even numerous representatives of the government joined. For more information see the related post: Giuseppe Garibaldi.
To understand how much participation there was in the Anglo-Saxon world that followed Garibaldi’s enterprise, just remember what happened after the events in Bronte (Sicily).
Driven by the general’s proclamations, in which land was promised to those who worked it, Sicilian laborers rose up in various locations, seizing plots belonging to the landowners, and on 2 August riots also broke out in the town on the slopes of Mount Etna. The rioters killed sixteen people and then occupied part of the land, called the Ducea, owned by the English nobles Samuel Hood and Charlotte Nelson, granddaughter of Horace Nelson, to whom the fiefdom had been donated by Ferdinand I. The British consul of the empire at the time asked Garibaldi to intervene to protect his compatriots and the general sent a battalion of his soldiers, led by the faithful Nino Bixio. The officer restored order, arrested five alleged perpetrators, including a mentally handicapped person, and on 10 August, without a real trial, he ordered to shoot them. It was known, however, that the real perpetrators had fled and the execution, accompanied by a very harsh proclamation by Bixio himself, was only the pretext to impose respect for the properties of the barons, which were proving to be, with terror, also in the rest of Sicily. valuable allies of the invaders.
A movie was made on what happened in Bronte; you can watch it below.
The episode caused dismay among the English, who followed the exploits of Garibaldi daily with apprehension, convinced by their newspapers that the socialist leader would bring justice to the conquered provinces and finally distribute the land to the peasants. After Bronte, however, the deception was revealed and many British citizens began to see things differently. The writer Emily Bell (actually her name was Ellis) was also struck by what happened, and even wanted to transform her surname into that of the location of the massacre and so did her siblings, Branwell, poet and painter, and Charlotte, a writer, and Anne, a well-known poet.
The British oligarchy does not give up
The British oligarchy, continuing with the belief that Italy had to be a British colony, proposed the map shown on the right to subjugate Italy after WWII. From the blog post: Lo spezzatino inglese dell’Italia a Teheran. Belluno con l’intero Triveneto sarebbe passato alla Jugoslavia di Tito.
It is said that we must look forward, not backward. But that’s if you know where you are. If you are in a tunnel, you can move forward but you will always be in a tunnel. History teaches you where you are and where you come from and can help you know where you need to go.
References
- The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the European Powers (Rubbettino, 2012)
- Lo spezzatino inglese dell’Italia a Teheran. Belluno con l’intero Triveneto sarebbe passato alla Jugoslavia di Tito
- Soda essential element in the textile industry
- Calculate the purchasing power in lire and euro from 1860 to 2015
