Giovanni Giolitti (Italian pronunciation: [dʒoˈvanni dʒoˈlitti]; 27 October 1842 – 17 July 1928) was an Italian statesman who was the prime minister of Italy five times between 1892 and 1921. He is the longest-serving democratically elected prime minister in Italian history, and the second-longest serving overall after Benito Mussolini. A prominent leader of the Historical Left and the Liberals, he is widely considered one of the most wealthy, powerful and important politicians in Italian history; due to his dominant position in Italian politics, Giolitti was accused by critics of being an authoritarian leader and a parliamentary dictator.
Giolitti was a master in the political art of trasformismo, the method of making a flexible and centrist coalition of government which isolated the extremes of the Left and the Historical Right in Italian politics after the unification. Under his influence, the Liberals did not develop as a structured party and were a series of informal personal groupings with no formal links to political constituencies. The period between the start of the 20th century and the start of World War I, when he was prime minister and Minister of the Interior from 1901 to 1914, with only brief interruptions, is often referred to as the "Giolittian Era".
A liberal, with strong ethical concerns, Giolitti's periods in office were notable for the passage of a wide range of progressive social reforms, together with the enactment of several policies of government intervention. Besides putting in place several tariffs, subsidies, and government projects, Giolitti also nationalized the private telephone and railroad operators. Liberal proponents of free trade criticized the "Giolittian System", although Giolitti himself saw the development of the national economy as essential in the production of wealth.
The primary focus of Giolittian politics was to rule from the centre with slight and well-controlled fluctuations between conservatism and progressivism, trying to preserve the institutions and the existing social order. Right-wing critics like Luigi Albertini considered him a socialist due to the courting of leftist votes in Parliament in exchange for political favours, while left-wing critics like Gaetano Salvemini accused him of being a corrupt politician and of winning elections with the support of criminals. Nonetheless, his highly complex legacy continues to stimulate intense debate among writers and historians.
Giolitti was born on 27 October 1842 in Mondovì, a town in Piedmont, the main territory of the Kingdom of Sardinia, into an upper-class family. He was the son of Giovenale Giolitti (1802–1843), who had been working in the avvocatura dei poveri, an office assisting poor citizens in both civil and criminal cases, and Enrichetta Plochiù (1808–1867), a member of a wealthy family of French origin. His uncle was a member of Parliament of the Kingdom of Sardinia and a close friend of Michelangelo Castelli, the secretary of Camillo Benso di Cavour; however, Giolitti did not appear particularly interested in the Risorgimento and differently to many of his fellow students, he did not enlist to fight in the Italian Second War of Independence. Giolitti, nicknamed "Gioanin" within the family, was left fatherless at the age of one when his father died of pneumonia.
The family moved in the house of his mother's four brothers in Turin, all unmarried, who surrounded the boy with particular care and affection. Because of some health problems in his adolescent years, and on the advice of a physician uncle, Giolitti periodically stayed in the mountains of the Maira Valley, at his maternal grandfather’s house in San Damiano Macra. His mother taught him to read and write; his education in the gymnasium San Francesco da Paola of Turin was marked by poor discipline and little commitment to study. He did not like mathematics and the study of Latin and Greek grammar, preferring history and reading the novels of Walter Scott and Honoré de Balzac. At sixteen, he entered the University of Turin. After three years, he earned a law degree in 1860.
Career in the public administration
Giolitti pursued a career in public administration in the Ministry of Grace and Justice. That choice prevented him from participating in the decisive battles of the Risorgimento (the unification of Italy), for which his temperament was not suited anyway, but this lack of military experience would be held against him as long as the Risorgimento generation was active in politics.
In 1869, Giolitti moved to Calabria and was appointed as chief secretary of the Central Tax Commission. He moved to Rome Italy in 1905. That year he married Rosa Sobrero and they would have seven children – Giovenale, Enrichetta, Lorenzo, Luisa, Federico, Maria and Giuseppe. In 1870, he moved to the Ministry of Finance, becoming a high official and working along with important members of the ruling Right, like Quintino Sella and Marco Minghetti. In the same year, he married Rosa Sobrero, the niece of Ascanio Sobrero, a famous chemist, who discovered nitroglycerine. In 1877, Giolitti was appointed to the Court of Audit and in 1882 to the Council of State.
Beginnings of the political career
At the 1882 Italian general election Giolitti was elected to the Chamber of Deputies (the lower house of the Parliament of the Kingdom of Italy) for the Historical Left. This election was a great victory for the ruling Left of Agostino Depretis, which won 289 seats out of 508. As deputy, he chiefly acquired prominence by attacks on Agostino Magliani, Treasury Minister in the cabinet of Depretis.
Following Depretis's death on 29 July 1887 Francesco Crispi, a notable politician and patriot, became the leader of the Left group and was also appointed prime minister by King Umberto I. On 9 March 1889, Giolitti was selected by Crispi as the new Minister of Treasury and Finance. In October 1890, Giolitti resigned from his office due to contrasts with Crispi's colonial policy. A few weeks before, the Ethiopian emperor Menelik II had contested the Italian text of the Wuchale Treaty, signed by Crispi, stating that it did not oblige Ethiopia to be an Italian protectorate. Menelik informed the foreign press and the scandal erupted. After the fall of the government led by the new prime minister Antonio Starabba di Rudinì in May 1892, Giolitti, with the help of a court clique, received from the King the task of forming a new cabinet.
First term as prime minister, 1892–1893
Giolitti's first term as prime minister (1892–1893) was marked by misfortune and misgovernment. The building crisis and the commercial rupture with France had impaired the situation of the state banks, of which one, the Banca Romana, had been further undermined by maladministration.
The Banca Romana had loaned large sums to property developers but was left with huge liabilities when the real estate bubble collapsed in 1887. Then prime minister Francesco Crispi and his treasury minister Giolitti knew of the 1889 government inspection report, but feared that publicity might undermine public confidence and suppressed the report.
The Bank Act of August 1893 liquidated the Banca Romana and reformed the whole system of note issue, restricting the privilege to the new Banca d'Italia – mandated to liquidate the Banca Romana – and to the Banco di Napoli and the Banco di Sicilia, and providing for stricter state control. The new law failed to effect an improvement. Moreover, he irritated public opinion by raising to senatorial rank the governor of the Banca Romana, Bernardo Tanlongo, whose irregular practices had become a byword, which would have given him immunity from prosecution. The senate declined to admit Tanlongo, whom Giolitti, in consequence of an intervention in Parliament upon the condition of the Banca Romana, was obliged to arrest and prosecute. During the prosecution, Giolitti abused his position as premier to abstract documents bearing on the case.
Another main problem that Giolitti had to face during his first term as prime minister was the Fasci Siciliani, a popular movement of democratic and socialist inspiration, which arose in Sicily in the years between 1889 and 1894. The Fasci gained the support of the poorest and most exploited classes of the island by channelling their frustration and discontent into a coherent programme based on the establishment of new rights. Consisting of a jumble of traditionalist sentiment, religiosity, and socialist consciousness, the movement reached its apex in the summer of 1893, when new conditions were presented to the landowners and mine owners of Sicily concerning the renewal of sharecropping and rental contracts. Upon the rejection of these conditions, there was an outburst of strikes that rapidly spread throughout the island, and was marked by violent social conflict, almost rising to the point of insurrection. The leaders of the movement were not able to keep the situation from getting out of control. The proprietors and landowners asked the government to intervene. Giovanni Giolitti tried to put a halt to the manifestations and protests of the Fasci Siciliani, his measures were relatively mild. On November 24, Giolitti officially resigned as prime minister. In the three weeks of uncertainty before Crispi formed a government on 15 December 1893, the rapid spread of violence drove many local authorities to defy Giolitti's ban on the use of firearms. In December 1893, 92 peasants lost their lives in clashes with the police and army. Government buildings were burned along with flour mills and bakeries that refused to lower their prices when taxes were lowered or abolished.