Leonida Bissolati was an talian government offcial and politician, leading exponent of the Italian socialist movement at the turn of the nineteenth century.
Background
Bissolati was born in Cremona on February 20, 1857, the illegitimate child of Stefano Bissolati, a member of a Catholic religious order, and Paolina Caccialupi, a married woman. The elder Bissolati abandoned his religious calling in 1861, married Paolina, then a widow, and legitimized Leonida's birth through adoption.
Education
The young Bissolati studied at the universities of Pavia and Bologna. He took up journalism, and his observations of rural poverty moved him politically from the Liberal left to Socialism. He entered the Chamber of Deputies in 1897 and by the start of the new century, led the Socialist party's reform wing.
Career
In 1912 Bissolati was expelled from the Italian Socialist party. In domestic affairs, he had shown himself ready to join a bourgeois cabinet and to render respect to the monarchy. His sins, to an orthodox Socialist observer, were equally great in his view of foreign policy. The Bosnia-Herzegovina crisis of 1909 made him doubt the efficacy of international Socialism in general and the courage of Austrian Socialists in particular in preventing armed conflict. He began to take an active and sympathetic interest in Italy's military needs. Finally, Bissolati backed the Italian war effort against Ottoman Turkey (1911-12) and the expansion of Rome's new empire to include Libya.
Bissolati met the outbreak of World War I with renewed disgust at the impotence of Austro-Hungarian and German Socialists. He called for Italian intervention on the side of the Entente. Whereas once he had hoped to see the Habsburg Empire evolve into a democratic, multinational entity, thereby defusing the explosive question of Italy's irredentist claims on Vienna and Budapest, during the war he spoke of the need to destroy the Habsburg realm. When Bissolati spoke of trying "to prepare the spirit of the Italian proletariat for war," he saw this international involvement to be tied with the Mazzinian dream of the nineteenth century: Italy was to fight to create a freer Europe. Other interventionists, notably foreign ministers Antonio di San Giuliano and Sidney Sonnino, saw intervention as the price Realpolitik demanded be paid for Italian expansion.
In 1915 the fifty-eight-year-old Bissolati enlisted in the army. He divided his time between his role as a political leader and a sergeant in a combat regiment.
The following year, he entered the government of Paolo Boselli. A minister without portfolio in June 1916, Bissolati worked to establish effective links between the government and the Italian army's High Command under General Luigi Cadorna. Cadorna saw him as a dangerous civilian meddler, one who asked embarrassing questions about the string of military failures that had marred the first year of the war. Bissolati also called for a total national effort in support of the war, and he welcomed the declaration of war against Germany August 28,: it placed Italy on the side of justice against the power most inimical to a democratic Europe.
Bissolati's fiery patriotism and especially his idealistic visions of a postwar Europe collided repeatedly with Sonnino's conduct of foreign affairs. The minister without portfolio came close to resigning in June 1917, when Sonnino established an Italian protectorate over the whole of Albania. Whereas Sonnino saw the possible joining of South Slav nationalities into an independent Yugoslavia as a threat (he much preferred to see Austria-Hungary survive the war more or less intact), Bissolati welcomed South Slav unity. More specifically, Sonnino clung to the diplomatic pledges made in the Treaty of London (1915) that Italy would obtain the Dalmatian coast of the Adriatic.
Bissolati saw Italy's interests best served by cordial relations, not land grabbing, from her Slavic neighbors to the east.
The Caporetto disaster toppled Boselli (October, brought Vittorio Orlando to power, and gave Bissolati a cabinet post. He was now minister of pensions and army welfare. Along with the new minister of the treasury, Francesco Nitti, Bissolati set out to boost military and civilian morale, stressing, for example, the rewards to be enjoyed by the soldiers of a victorious Italy. He underlined a parallel, but uglier, theme when he called for shooting Italian Socialists who obstructed the war effort.
The closing months of the war saw Bissolati established as Italy's foremost supporter of the ideals of American President Woodrow Wilson. Italy, he insisted, must accept and welcome the emergence of new national states, even at the cost of Sonnino's territorial dreams. He resigned in late December 1918, protesting that Orlando and Sonnino were leading Italy in the opposite direction by occupying non-Italian lands like the Tyrol and Dalmatia. Bissolati soon found he could not speak publicly without facing violent protests from nationalist groups, including Benito Mussolini's new Fascist bands.
Seton-Watson has called Bissolati the "true realist" of postwar Italian foreign policy. He saw that Italy, lacking both military power and the diplomatic flexibility its pre 1915 position as a neutral had conferred, could succeed only by conciliating, not bullying, its new neighbors. By April 1920, as postwar tempers cooled, Bissolati's idealism seemed to be gaining ground: Italy and the new state of Austria began to ease tensions over the Tyrol. But this was a development Bissolati could observe only briefly.