Francesco Crispi’s sicilianità

Abstract

Francesco Crispi was the first southerner to become prime minister of Italy. He presided over two successive governments between August 1887 and February 1891, and then over two more between December 1893 and March 1896, when the disastrous defeat of Italian forces by an Ethiopian army at Adowa forced his resignation. Crispi has been described as the first literary hero of Italian politics, although his influence as a personality extended far beyond the literary sphere.1 He is regarded by some as a “charismatic” figure who marked a new phase in the development of relations between the political domain and Italian society. His public image, it is suggested, was a sign that Italy was no longer the oligarchic society of the 1860s and 1870s: the masses now had to be addressed, in however demagogic a way.2 Crispi saw the statesman’s role as being pedagogical as well as governmental. He revitalized old Risorgimento values and created a populist, monarchistic patriotism by portraying himself as the last of the generation of titans who had forged the nation (he had been Garibaldi’s agent before and during the Sicilian expedition of 1860). Crispi’s ideology has been the subject of suggestive readings by Silvio Lanaro and Umberto Levra.3 He publicly reconstructed a “national-popular” version of Risorgimento history from which, for example, the figure of Cavour had all but disappeared, overshadowed by the monarchy and the people, whose avatars were Victor Emmanuel and Garibaldi respectively.