Antonino Paternò-Castello

Antonino Paternò-Castello

Antonino Paternò-Castello, 6th Margrave of San Giuliano, Margrave of Capizzi, Baron of Policarini, Lord of Mottacamastra (born December 10, 1852 in Catania , † October 11, 1914 in Rome ) was an Italian landowner and politician. From May 15 to December 15, 1892 he was Minister of Agriculture in the Giolitti Cabinet (1st) , from May 14, 1899 to June 24, 1900 Minister of Post and Telegraphy in the Pelloux Cabinet (2nd) , from December 24, 1905 to on February 8, 1906 in the Fortis cabinet (2nd) and from March 31, 1910 until his death in the cabinets of Sonnino (2nd) , Luzatti , Giolitti (4th) and Salandra (1st) Foreign Minister of his country.

In Italian literature he is mostly referred to as Antonino di San Giuliano .

Life

The old Palazzo San Giuliano in Catania.

Coming from the noble Paternò family, traceable since the 11th century , which goes back to the House of Barcelona and has also been one of the richest families in Sicily since at least the end of the 17th century , Paternò-Castello received a careful upbringing and training, which was due to long stays in London and Vienna was rounded off. In 1875 he graduated from the University of Catania with a law degree , married Enrichetta, b. Statella, from the family of the Counts of Castagneto and became a councilor of his hometown. The marriage with Enrichetta, who died in 1897, had two daughters and a son. Since 1893 Paternò-Castello was a member of the Freemason Lodge Universo in Rome.

Political career

Mayor and MP

After getting to know the city administration from the inside as an assessor , Paternò-Castello was appointed mayor of his hometown in 1879. Since 1878 he was also a member of the Provincial Council of the Province of Catania. During this time he also published numerous articles on questions of agriculture, industry, labor law and Italian emigration in various magazines. In 1882 he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies for his hometown, to which he belonged continuously until 1904. He was considered a liberal member of parliament with no firm ties to any of the parliamentary allegiances that had replaced the parties in Italy as part of the trasformismo . Above all, the promotion of the development of the Mezzogiorno and the protection of the colonial and foreign policy interests of Italy were the basis for his assessment of the respective Italian government.

In order to prepare for the post he was aiming for as foreign minister, Paternò-Castello repeatedly undertook long trips to the areas that he classified as belonging to the Italian sphere of interest. a. to Eritrea in 1891 and 1905 and to today's Albania in 1902, he also supported the colonial efforts of the government in parliament and became a member of some corresponding lobby organizations, such as the Marineliga ( Lege navale italiana ) and the Dante Society for the spread of the Italian language in the world .

After leaving the Chamber of Deputies, Paternò-Castello was appointed Senator for life.

Minister of Agriculture and Post

To combat the constant unrest in southern Italy, Paternò-Castello sought a double solution: On the one hand, the large estates were to be settled in order to create a class of peasants who owned and are interested in defending the state order, and on the other hand, against the revolting farm workers and their associations, the fasci siciliani , are cracked down on. However, due to the short term in office, he was unable to realize these ideas.

During his time as Minister of Post, Sicily was connected to the telegraph network of mainland Italy, the improvement of the postal service in various major Italian cities and the reorganization of the postal connections between Italy and the eastern Mediterranean.

Foreign Minister and Ambassador

The climax of Paternò-Castello's first, very short term of office as Foreign Minister was the Algeciras Conference , at which Italy asserted participation in the government of the Tangier Zone , which was internationalized by this conference , and also the consent of the other powers to occupy the previously Ottoman territories of Cyrenaica and reached Tripolitania , which laid the foundation for the colonization of today 's Libya .

From autumn 1906 Paternò-Castello was Italian ambassador in London, then from November 1909 in Paris , from where he was again appointed foreign minister. His good personal relationship with King Victor Emanuel III. contributed significantly to the fact that he belonged to all subsequent, politically quite differently aligned governments as a "dormant pole".

Paternò-Castello's second term of office as Foreign Minister was marked by numerous diplomatic crises and wars on the eve of the First World War and finally by the question of whether Italy extended its alliance obligations from the last one in 1912 - that is, during its own term of office - at the outbreak of the World War, and by one in 1913 Naval Convention supplemented Triple Alliance should or not, coined. First of all, the Second Morocco Crisis in 1911 should be mentioned here , the "slipstream" of which Italy used to expand its presence in what is now Libya. Since this area was nominally still part of the Ottoman Empire at that time, the Italian-Turkish War 1911/12 emerged from it , with Paternó-Castello consciously driving the development forward. In addition to sovereignty over Libya, Italy gained actual rule over the Dodecanese , although the islands remained officially Ottoman or Turkish until the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. The first of the Balkan Wars broke out even before the peace between Italy and the Ottoman Empire . At the London Ambassadors' Conference called for the reorganization of the Balkans, the results of which were fixed in the London Treaty of 1913 , Italy was unable to enforce its claims to Albania, which led to a further tightening of the already strained relations with the country because of the irredentism (also represented by Paternò-Castello) Triple Alliance partner Austria-Hungary led.

Multiple attempts by the German Reich to reach a compromise between its allies through its ambassador in Rome, Hans von Flotow , failed because of the demand made each time by Paternó-Castello for the cession of some of the Austrian territories ( Welschtirol and Trieste ), which were generally designated as terre italiane , which was unacceptable for the Danube Monarchy for political and economic reasons: Trieste was the country's most important commercial and naval port, and although Italian native speakers made up the largest single population group in the Austrian coastal region , the majority was made up of Southern Slavs ( Slovenes and Croats ). Even after the assassination attempt in Sarajevo during the July crisis , the Italian government answered inquiries from Vienna and Berlin regarding the Italian allegiance to the alliance with their territorial claims. On July 31, 1914, the Italian Council of Ministers finally decided, at the suggestion of Paternó-Castello, to remain neutral for the time being, but did not see this as a breach of the Triple Alliance. This was justified with the poor condition of their own army and the risk of a conflict with Great Britain, which Italy felt unable to cope with. Parallel to the publicly declared neutrality, the government, at the suggestion of Paternó-Castello, had been negotiating a change of sides with Great Britain since August 11, 1914, which - after his death - led to the secret London Treaty of 1915.

Publications

In addition to numerous newspaper and magazine articles, Paternò-Castello published

• Un po 'più luce sulla questione del prestito (Catania 1880, on economic questions)
• Le condizioni presenti della Sicilia. Studi e proposte (Milan 1893, on the development of Sicily)
• Lettere sull'Albania (Rome 1903, Politico -Economic Travel Reports , first published in 1902 in the Giornale d'Italia ).

Others

Paternò-Castello was an honorary doctorate from Oxford University. In Rome there is a street Viale Antonino di Sangiuliano , in Catania there is a Via Antonino di Sangiuliano in memory of him.

Web links

• Newspaper article about Antonino Paternò-Castello in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Article DI SAN GIULIANO (PATERNÒ CASTELLO) Antonino on the website of the Italian Senate, accessed on March 22, 2016.
2. ^ Ferraioli, Gianpaolo: Politica e diplomazia in Italia tra il XIX e XX secolo. Vita di Antonino di San Giuliano (1852-1914) . Catanzaro: Rubbettino, 2007, ISBN 88-498-1697-9 , pp. 19 to 38.
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e} article SAN GIULIANO, Antonino Paternò-Castello, marchese di in Enciclopedia Italiana (1936), accessed on March 22, 2016.
4. ^ Ferraioli, Gianpaolo: Politica e diplomazia in Italia tra il XIX e XX secolo. Vita di Antonino di San Giuliano (1852-1914) . Catanzaro: Rubbettino, 2007, ISBN 88-498-1697-9 , p. 56.
5. ^ Ferraioli, Gianpaolo: Politica e diplomazia in Italia tra il XIX e XX secolo. Vita di Antonino di San Giuliano (1852-1914) . Catanzaro: Rubbettino, 2007, ISBN 88-498-1697-9 , p. 99, p. 166f., P. 174.
6. ^ Ferraioli, Gianpaolo: Politica e diplomazia in Italia tra il XIX e XX secolo. Vita di Antonino di San Giuliano (1852-1914) . Catanzaro: Rubbettino, 2007, ISBN 88-498-1697-9 , pp. 113 to 117 and p. 156.
7. ^ Ferraioli, Gianpaolo: Politica e diplomazia in Italia tra il XIX e XX secolo. Vita di Antonino di San Giuliano (1852-1914) . Catanzaro: Rubbettino, 2007, ISBN 88-498-1697-9 , pp. 791 to 793, pp. 797f. and p. 807.
8. ^ Ferraioli, Gianpaolo: Politica e diplomazia in Italia tra il XIX e XX secolo. Vita di Antonino di San Giuliano (1852-1914) . Catanzaro: Rubbettino, 2007, ISBN 88-498-1697-9 , pp. 849f., Pp. 898 to 900 and pp. 904 to 908.