Background
Sidney Costantino Sonnino was born on 11 March 1847 in Pisa, a city in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, to Isacco Saul Sonnino and Georgina Sophia Arnaud Dudley Menhennet. His father was an Italian of Jewish heritage who had converted to Anglicanism, and his mother was Welsh. He was raised an Anglican by his family and learned English as his first language.
His grandfather had left the Jewish ghetto in Livorno, known in English as Leghorn, a Tuscan port city, and emigrated to Egypt, where he built a large fortune as a banker. The family later lived at the Castello Sonnino in Quercianella, near Livorno, a setting that linked the family's Tuscan origins with its commercial wealth.
Education
Sonnino graduated in law at the University of Pisa in 1865. The university was officially founded in 1343 under a bull of Pope Clement VI, which recognised it as a Studium Generale with privileges that were recognised across Europe. By 1839 it had six faculties, including Law, and in 1862 the Italian state recognised it as one of the country's six national primary universities.
His legal training therefore took place at one of Europe's long-established universities, in a Tuscan city that had only recently become part of the new Kingdom of Italy. Law provided the professional foundation for the diplomatic career that followed in 1866.
Career
Sonnino's professional life began in diplomacy. From 1866 until 1871 he served as an official at the Italian embassies in Madrid, Vienna, Berlin and Paris, and he retired from the diplomatic service in 1873. The Kingdom of Italy, proclaimed in 1861, was still establishing its place among the established European powers during these years, and its diplomatic corps formed part of that effort.
In 1873 he returned to Italy and devoted himself to scholarly studies of the country's rural population. With Leopoldo Franchetti he carried out an inquiry into Sicily, which had been part of the Kingdom of Italy since 1861 after more than a century of Bourbon rule. The resulting study, La Sicilia nel 1876, appeared in 1877. In 1878 he and Franchetti also started a newspaper, and by the time of his election to parliament he had established himself as an authority on the peasantry.
In 1880 Sonnino was elected to the Chamber of Deputies, the elective house of the Italian parliament, where he sat with the Conservatives. The Senate, the other chamber, was composed of members appointed by the king for life. His first cabinet post came in 1893, when he served for over two years as minister of finance in the fourth government of Francesco Crispi. During this period he was associated with a fundamental restructuring of the banking system and with the unpopular, though effective, decision to meet a financial crisis by raising taxes.
Sonnino led the government as prime minister in 1906 and again from 1909 to 1910, both times briefly. His governments were interim arrangements, and he could not match Giovanni Giolitti, who dominated Italian parliamentary life in the decade before 1914.
When the First World War began in 1914, Sonnino initially favoured intervention on the side of the Central Powers, and he was regarded as pro-German. Italy had been a member of the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary since its formation in 1882. After the battle of the Marne, however, he shifted toward intervention on the side of the Entente. He became foreign minister on 5 November 1914, after the death of Antonino di San Giuliano, who had advocated Italian neutrality. The Consulta, the name by which the Italian foreign ministry was known, was now under his direction. He persuaded Prime Minister Antonio Salandra to keep negotiating with both sides over the winter, while the army prepared for a spring campaign.
Sonnino regarded the war as an opportunity for substantial territorial expansion. In December 1914 he extended Italy's foothold in Albania by seizing the port of Valona. In February 1915, when Austria resisted Italian demands for Trieste and the Trentino, he turned decisively toward the Entente. He also judged that the Dardanelles campaign, which had just begun, might either widen the war in the Mediterranean or bring the conflict to an end, and in either case he considered Italy's needs to require belligerent status.
By April 1915 Sonnino had secured his agreement. The Treaty of London, signed on 26 April 1915 despite strong Russian opposition, promised Italy gains in the Adriatic, including Istria, central Dalmatia and Valona, together with the Brenner frontier with Austria and the Dodecanese Islands. Italy renounced the Triple Alliance on 3 May and declared war on Austria-Hungary on 23 May 1915.
The historian Seton-Watson has argued that Sonnino and Salandra sought not unlimited gains but stronger frontiers, Adriatic security and a balance of power in the Mediterranean. Sonnino hoped for a short and limited conflict that would crown Italy's war effort without wholly overturning the existing order. His vision of postwar Europe included a stable, if reduced, Habsburg Empire and cordial diplomatic links between Italy, Vienna and Berlin. He held to this policy throughout the war, although his consistency did not always serve Italy's interests.
The war lasted far longer than Sonnino had anticipated. He had not secured economic assistance in the London pact, although Italy needed large sums of foreign aid during the conflict. Italian claims to the Dalmatian coast antagonised the South Slavs, who were forming the Yugoslav Committee in London to promote a united postwar state. A limited war against Austria also antagonised Italy's allies, because the treaty required Italy to declare war on all enemies of the Entente. Sonnino distrusted public opinion, had negotiated the treaty in strict secrecy, and later made little effort to build support abroad for an enlarged postwar Italy.
Sonnino was not wholly inflexible. It was the cautious Salandra, not Sonnino, who resisted declaring war on Germany. Sonnino agreed to requests from General Luigi Cadorna, commander of the Italian army, to send troops for a joint effort with Britain and France at Salonika. In general, however, he followed his own course and avoided Allied conferences until March 1916, when he attended his first. In summer 1915 he refused to pledge territorial compensation to Serbia in return for Serbian concessions to the wavering Bulgarians. As a result Bulgaria joined the Central Powers, and most of the Balkans fell to the enemy.
When Sonnino learned that Britain and France were planning to partition the Ottoman Empire, under the Sykes-Picot Agreement, he expanded Italy's territorial claims to include Smyrna and adjacent areas of Asia Minor. Salandra fell in June 1916, but Sonnino remained in office with his position and influence unchanged in the new cabinet of Paolo Boselli. Early in 1917 he worked to block Allied efforts to reach a reconciliation peace with Vienna. At St. Jean de Maurienne he obtained the assurances he sought, keeping open the prospect of gains at Austria's expense.
After the military catastrophe at Caporetto, Vittorio Orlando became prime minister in the winter of 1917 and 1918, and Sonnino's diplomacy faced pressure from several directions. Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points called for applying the principle of nationality to Italy's territorial settlement, which threatened Italy's claims to Dalmatia. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia led to the publication of the Treaty of London, which exposed Italy's Adriatic designs. Orlando adopted a more conciliatory attitude toward South Slav representatives, and he welcomed the Congress of Oppressed Nationalities, which met without official government status at Rome in April 1918.
From 1915 Sonnino sought to protect Italy's claims in two ways. He vetoed Allied moves to grant the Yugoslav Committee in London official recognition, and he pressed reluctant Italian commanders, including General Armando Diaz, into a full-scale offensive, so that Italy's allies could not claim that Rome had failed to contribute on the battlefield.
At the Paris Peace Conference, which settled the terms of peace after the war, Sonnino's aims largely failed. In January 1919 French efforts to trade support for French claims on the Rhine in return for French backing in the Adriatic met a quick rebuff, and Paris would not prefer Italy to its more powerful allies. Woodrow Wilson's firm opposition defeated Sonnino's principal goal of possessing the Dalmatian coast. Italian nationalists, who focused on Fiume, which Sonnino had never claimed, denounced the outcome as a 'mutilated victory', and even Orlando, who had given Sonnino wide latitude in foreign policy, was swept up in this agitation and was prepared to trade Dalmatia to secure Fiume.
When Orlando walked out of the talks in April 1919, Sonnino followed him and endured a heated public welcome in Rome. The Allies did not move on the Adriatic question, however, and Italy returned to the conference. In May 1919 Sonnino again acted independently, ordering Italian forces to expand their small foothold in Asia Minor, a step that risked a clash with Greek forces in the same area. The Orlando cabinet collapsed on 19 June 1919, undermined by domestic problems and by its lack of success at Paris. Sonnino retired from public life and died in Rome on 24 November 1922.
Religion
Sonnino was raised as an Anglican by his family, in a household shaped by his father's conversion from Judaism to Anglicanism. Anglicanism is the tradition of the Church of England and of churches in communion with it. It emerged from the English Reformation of the sixteenth century, retaining an episcopal structure and a liturgy centred on the Book of Common Prayer. Its worship and moral teaching combined Protestant reform with continuity from the older English church.
For a Victorian-era Italian of English-speaking upbringing, Anglicanism therefore formed part of an unusual religious and cultural background within a predominantly Catholic Italy. The Kingdom of Italy, which Sonnino served from the 1880s onward, had been unified in 1861 and recognised Catholicism as the religion of the state, so his Anglican upbringing placed him outside the majority religious tradition of his country.
Politics
Sonnino was a member of the Historical Right, the parliamentary grouping that Italian historians call Destra storica. He was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1880 and took his seat with the Conservatives. The party record associated with him also refers to 1922 and the Italian Liberal Party.
The Historical Right originated in the right-wing faction of the Sardinian Parliament, established in 1849, and it drew on classical liberalism and liberal conservatism. Its leaders governed the united Italian state in the years after 1861, and after its defeat in the 1876 general election, when the Historical Left won a large majority, it became the constitutional opposition to left governments.
Sonnino's politics were not confined to one of the traditional coalitions. He kept a critical distance from both the Right and the Left, and his conservatism appears most clearly in his wish to preserve a stable, if reduced, Habsburg Empire and sound relations with Vienna and Berlin. His wartime policy, which favored the Entente and territorial gains for Italy, reflected a nationalist strain within this conservative outlook.
