Littérature scientifique sur le sujet « Trento (Italy) – Politics and government – 19th century »

1. In recent years, negotiations between parliamentary factions in Italy have had an increasing impact on the process of government formation. The frequency of such negotiations and resulting coalition agreements necessitates a more thorough examination of this phenomenon in order to understand the interaction between coalition agreements and government policy.The phenomenon of coalition governments is not a new one. A number of European states have witnessed their emergence since the late 19th century. It is, however, in regimes of extreme multi-party politics — as the Italian system must be considered — that this form of government has found full enforcement.

Roman Dmowski, a Polish nationalist and a founder of the independent Polish state, occupies an important place in Polish history. After the restoration of Poland on the political map of Europe, there was a need for a certain foreign policy that could give prosperity to a country de facto deprived of its agency for 123 years. Dmowski argues that the national identity can be protected from the Protestant countries of the West only through defining it as a main guardian of the Latin civilization. He formulated this thesis on the basis of Houston Chamberlain's The Foundation of the 19th Century, Oswald Spengler's The Decline of Europe and numerous works of Feliks Koneczny, who had a fundamental influence on Dmowski. His concept aimed at saving the Latin civilization (Italy, Poland, and France, led by Charles Maurras) from the affects of Jewish civilization and Protestantism in particular, representing the Latin civilization largely due to the reinterpretation of the Protestant countries and its further antagonization. This bloc was purely defensive and wasn't implemented in practice. Speaking about the discourse of modern Polish foreign policy, one can find many allusions to Dmowski, although it should be understood that the Polish government are not endecja (Narodowa Demokracja). So, for example, the “German-Pole” dichotomy, which was used Dmowski, is now in many ways one of those associated with the intra-European crisis. Now, in connection with the events of February 24, Poland potentially has every chance of becoming a hegemon in the Eastern European policy of the European Union, since it fully supports Ukraine and close integration with it. Since Ukraine is already a candidate for EU membership, this will allow it to compete with Germany in EU politics and possibly even result in EU reforms, due to its active pro-Ukrainian policy.

At the last stage of the Italian Wars (1494—1559), the military, political and, most importantly, financial superiority of the Habsburgs over the Valois became quite obvious. The Spanish king could make use of silver which was already coming quite regularly and in large quantities from the mines of the New World. He controlled the old (Augsburg — Ulm) and new (Besançon — Piacenza) centres of banking capital, as well as the commercial and financial heart of the emerging world economic system — Antwerp. But King Henry II of France (1547—1559) launched a series of daring reforms, sometimes far ahead of his time. The king could rely on a more developed bureaucracy than in other countries, on a state system that had reached an advanced level of centralization, and on the economy that was still on the rise, the ‘heart’ of which were the Lyon fairs that acquired international significance. In order to continue an active foreign policy, an unprecedented step was taken — not a royal official, but a Lyon banker of Italian origin, Albizzi Del Bene (Albisse Delbeyne), was appointed to the post of surintendent des finances. Thus, the government was able to use the experience and capability of the banking world for its own purposes. Under the conditions of the war, which was fought at a great distance from the borders of the kingdom, the circulation of money was greatly simplified and became more predictable. The surintendent, closely associated with the most powerful trading and banking house Gadagni (Gadagne) of Lyon, had great weight among Italian bankers who operated not only in Lyon, but also in Venice, Rome, and Tuscany. The reformers’ plans and the progress of reform can be fully appreciated by studying documents from the Lamoignon Collection (Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts, Moscow). Providing fairly clear guarantees based on the income from the Lyon fairs, the king, with the help of his surintendent and people from his entourage who were responsible for financing French policy in Italy (Constable Anne de Montmorency, royal secretary Jean Duthier), managed to attract huge sums (about 12 million Tours livres) which made it possible to resist a powerful enemy. A flexible combination of bills of exchange, clearing and other mechanisms allowed to transfer this amount of money to Italy. The crowning success of Del Bene was the creation of the Grand Parti de Lyon — a consortium of creditors to the French king. Some researchers claimed that its principles were quite comparable to the achievements of the 19th-century banking system. If there had been peace, the Grand Parti de Lyon could well have contributed to the repayment of the principal amount of borrowings and the dissolution of the accumulated interest debt. But politics had once again interfered with the economy. A new war, in which France was drawn against the will of the royal entourage, a chain of military defeats (the capture of Montmorency, the main patron of Del Bene, in 1557) and, finally, the unexpected death of Henry II shortly after the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559) put an end to bold economic reforms.

Dante Alighieri is, undoubtedly, an enduring feature of the cultural memory of generations of Italians. His influence is such that the mere mention of a ‘dark wood’ or ‘life’s journey’ recalls the poet and his most celebrated work, the Divina Commedia. This study, however, seeks to examine the construction of the medieval Florentine poet, exemplified by the above assertion, as a potent symbol of the Italian nation. From the creation of the idea of the Italian nation during the Risorgimento, to the Liberal ruling elite’s efforts after 1861 to legitimise the new Italian nation state, and more importantly to ‘make Italians’, to the rise of a more imperialist conception of nationalism in the early twentieth century and its most extreme expression under the Fascist regime, Dante was made to play a significant role in defining, justifying and glorifying the Italian nation. Such an exploration of the utilisation of Dante in the construction of Italian national identity during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries aids considerably in an understanding of the conceptualisation of the Italian nation, of the issues engendered by the establishment of the Italian nation state, and the evolution of these processes throughout the period in question. The various images of Dante revealed by this investigation of his instrumentalisation in the Italian process of nation-building bear only a fleeting resemblance to what is known of the poet in his medieval reality. Dante was born in 1265 to a family of modest means and standing in Florence, at that time the economic centre of Europe, and one of the most important cities of the Italian peninsula. His writings disclosed, however, that he was little impressed by his city’s prestige and wealth, being instead greatly disturbed by its political discord and instability, of which he became an unfortunate victim. The violent partisan conflict in Florence and the turbulent political condition of the Italian peninsula in the late thirteenth century had a decisive influence on Dante’s life and literary endeavours.

Defence date: 1 March 1996
Examining board: Prof. Christof Dipper (Technische Hochschule Darmstadt) ; Prof. Peter Hertner, supervisor (Universitaet Halle-Wittenberg) ; Prof. Brigitte Mazchl-Walling (Universitaet Innsbruck) ; Prof. Raffaele Romanelli, co-supervisor (IUE, Firenze) ; Prof. Fabio Rugge (Università di Pavia)
PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digitised archive of EUI PhD theses completed between 2013 and 2017