Week 80

 

On April 25^th 1919, Italian Prime Minister V.E. Orlando made his almost triumphal return from the Peace Conference in Paris, saluted along his way by enthusiastic patriotic crowds (the events had “awakened the same enthusiasm of 1915” - explained the Popolo d'Italia on the following day) and met with countless proclamations of support for the cause of the Italian revendications and for his personal stance on the matter. The press, with the obvious exception of the socialists, was also largely supportive of the Italian delegation – if not precisely of their line of conduct – in what certainly appeared as a general display of national unity and resentment for the opposition of the Allies to Italy's rightful compensation, and especially of the one man who had become a symbol for the just order which was to come after the Great War. An uncomfortable position even for one who aspired to it.

Not that anyone else appeared to be sitting too comfortably in their chair – at the end of the preliminaries, Orlando had jokingly likened his entrance to the Peace Conference to being cast “into the lions' den”, and in fairness he was able to walk out of it mostly unharmed. Outside of the impulse reaction of the public opinion and of the apparent (and short-lived) confirmation of his Ministerial Position though, there is no doubt that Orlando was deeply affected by his failure to accomplish the realization of the Italian aspirations (different reports describe him breaking into tears at the end of his last appeal to the Council in April). Unable to secure either the “minimum program” of the Nationalists (Dalmatia plus Fiume, which he had adopted publicly, both as a possible leverage with the Allies and to maintain the support of the national-interventionist forces for his Executive) or to come to an agreement for a revision of the Treaty granting Italy the possession of Fiume (Fiume in exchange for renouncing to most of Dalmatia and part of the islands, which had been the main angle of the Italian delegation since the preparations of January and February 1919) and unwilling to take the desperate step of demanding the integral application of the Treaty of London – he had eventually resolved to take a stand against the obstinate opposition of the Allies, and especially of US President Wilson, walking out of the Conference empty handed rather than continue with fruitless negotiations. Orlando hoped – well, according to some contemporaries: there wasn't really much to be hoped, and it would be hard to maintain that the experienced Italian Prime Minister expected a positive resolution of his intransigent posturing in the form of a more conciliatory attitude from the Allies. He hoped, perhaps, to salvage his government and to be able to resume the negotiations later on, under better circumstances, without any further Italian concession to the Allies appearing in too striking a contrast with his intended and proclaimed “defense of national rights”. Outside of the vast (apparent) support of the nation, the inadequate, conflicting, often unorganized approach of the Italian delegation to the negotiations with “the Allies and the Associated One”, their insistence on submitting complete and detailed lists of their arguments, cahiers de doleances more than diplomatic and political illustrations, never able to pick one over another even when they stood in apparent contrast, never committing to one with the result of lessening all of them – and on the other hand, the extreme reluctance and at times even distaste of the American delegation to even enter a detailed dialogue over the Italian claims (which had certainly a large preconceived and perhaps even deliberate component, but which the Italian government and diplomatic world had failed to contrast in any way) – had pushed Orlando and the whole Italian Government into a dead end: a Prime Minister can't run away from home and come back in five minutes because it's raining out there.

Orlando had made of the positive resolution of the negotiations – that is of a resolution which satisfied the “legitimate aspirations of the Italian Nation” - a central point of his political existence. He had contributed to turn Fiume into the cornerstone, or better into the symbol of these legitimate aspirations. And he couldn't give up on it without putting up a fight for everyone to see; especially not after Wilson had chosen to send his (remarkably unfortunate) address to the Italian people.

Not that one couldn't see already the danger in this conduct – reaching well beyond the negative impact of a failure on Orlando's Government and on the realization of the Italian aspirations. As senator and chief editor of the Corriere della Sera Luigi Albertini had explained in a private letter to Orlando (April 10^th 1919), concerning the rumors (which had begun to be reported by the press, with the approval of the nationalist and national-oriented ones – the Italian delegates had mentioned the possibility already before the negotiations begun, but merely in the hypothetical form of a worst case scenario) of the Italian delegation abandoning the Conference:

Those who envisage, for Italy and the world, the perspective of a triumph of our rights achieved by means of this petty blackmail – what are they thinking? Do they really believe that the country has nothing else in mind but Yugoslavs and Dalmatia? If the authors of those vehement lines could see what's the impact of their musty rhetorics on the public, they would water down their wine a lot. Nowadays the public opinion has much bigger concerns: they see the Bolshevik stain spread with vertiginous rapidity; they see the noise of revolutionary propaganda in Italy grow to an impassable volume; they take notice of some sort of bourgeois resignation, a form of passive wake, a fondness for novelty among those who have little to lose, of mistrust in the proper functioning of the ordinary restraints; they are forced to contemplate a general state of drunkenness in which the wildest vindications follow one another without any conciliatory sentiment being able to moderate them, to a gush of general madness which may come to pass without consequences, but which might also throw everything up in the air.

A conservative liberal, it's little surprise that Albertini identified the main threat for post Great War Europe in the combination of Bolshevik ideas promoting abrupt and violent subversion of social order and of bourgeois apathy, driven by the state of moral exhaustion following the long conflict. This view certainly colored his interpretation of the social and political crisis which had begun to reveal its early signs. After all the idea that overcoming the threat to societal unity, represented in large part by socialist extremism, required a more active engagement of the bourgeois forces with the new ideas of the Century had been a significant portion of the liberal-national platform during the decade before the Great War, playing no little role in Albertini's support of Salandra's action at the time of the intervention. So that his remedies for the aftermath of the Great War weren't much different from those he had already advocated for before the Great War, intervention included; a view which may have inspired in part Orlando's circumstantial retort (Orlando to Albertini, April 12^th 1919) that the main danger for the Italian stability, given the “national character of the Italians” was that of suffering a “great patriotic disillusionment”.

Even with this consideration in mind, it's difficult to see how Orlando could hope to prevent this severe disillusionment, when the substantial (it does look fairly minor on a map) divide between the Italian delegation and the Allies on the matter of Fiume and of the additional revision of the Treaty of London had certainly become apparent by mid April 1919.