Giovanni Giolitti

Giovanni Giolitti

Giovanni Giolitti (born October 27, 1842 in Mondovì , Piedmont , † July 17, 1928 in Cavour , Piedmont) was an Italian politician and multiple President of the Council of Ministers (Prime Minister).

Life

Giolitti came from a middle-class family. He received his doctorate in law from the University of Turin in 1861 and quickly made a career as a civil servant in the administration of his home province of Cuneo and later as State Secretary in the Ministry of Finance. In 1877 he was appointed to the Court of Auditors and in 1882 appointed to the State Council. In the same year he entered the Italian parliament as a liberal , where he was able to attract attention by attacking Finance Minister Magliani .

In March 1889 he was appointed finance minister in the Crispi I cabinet . After the fall of Prime Minister Rudinì , he succeeded him in May 1892. He found no solutions to Italy's problems at the time (north-south conflict, fasci siciliani , smoldering conflict with France). In the scandal surrounding the state bank Banca Romana he was accused of abuse of office; he resigned in December 1893 and fled to Berlin-Charlottenburg before being arrested .

He was only able to rebuild his battered reputation gradually, in part by taking advantage of the ensuing clashes between the conservative governments and the socialists. After the fall of the Pelloux government in 1900 and - after the murder of King Umberto I - Saracco , he was brought back to the cabinet by the new Prime Minister Zanardelli in 1901 , where he was prepared to make concessions to the reforms and revolutionary movements in the face of the strikes and excesses of that time was. After Zanardelli, who was in poor health, withdrew from politics, Giolitti inherited him as Prime Minister in November 1903. With two longer breaks in 1905/06 and 1909-11, he then held the office until March 1914.

His influence on Italian politics was so significant that this period is known as the età giolittiana (Giolitti era). It was the time when - parallel to developments in other European countries - the industrial conurbations of northern Italy and a broad working class emerged and Italy pursued an active colonial policy . Giolitti particularly promoted the industrialization of Italy, introduced state social security in 1912 and reformed the Italian suffrage (introduction of universal suffrage for men regardless of income), which increased the number of people entitled to vote to up to 8 million. The participation of new electoral groups brought a strengthening of the socialists and political Catholicism (initially in the form of the Unione Elettorale Cattolica Italiana , from 1919 then as Partito Popolare Italiano ) and, conversely, a loss of importance for the rather upper-class liberals.

Gabriele D'Annunzio speaks at a rally against “giolittismo”, an illustrated supplement to the Corriere della Sera , May 30, 1915

In terms of foreign policy, as a result of the Bosnian annexation crisis (1908) , he initiated the dissociation from the Triple Alliance with the German Empire and Austria-Hungary and, with the backing of the Entente, led the Italian-Turkish War in 1911/12 , which brought Italy in Tripolitania , Cyrenaica and the Dodecanese .

After the parliamentary elections in February 1914, which brought votes for the left and right opposition parties, he announced his resignation and recommended Antonio Salandra as his successor to the conservatives . When Italy was faced with the choice of participating in the First World War in 1914/15 , Giolitti, as the nominal leader of the neutralist parliamentary majority, stuck to Italy's neutrality, which he justified with the inadequate preparation of the army. This earned him, among other things, calls for murder by Gabriele D'Annunzio and led to his departure from Rome, which marked the collapse of the opposition to the war.

In the crisis of the post-war period ( Biennio rosso ) he was reappointed Prime Minister in 1920. He found a compromise with Yugoslavia in the Rapallo border treaty and militarily ended the occupation of Rijeka / Fiume by D'Annunzios Arditi . However, his attempt to include the fascists, who were represented in parliament for the first time, in his integration course failed. In July 1921 Giolitti had to resign, which initiated the Biennio nero , which culminated in the March on Rome in 1922 and Benito Mussolini's takeover .

In parliament he offered resistance to the fascists and after Giacomo Matteotti's murder on June 10, 1924, he became the leading figure of the remaining liberal parliamentarians. In 1926 Giolitti rejected Mussolini's exceptional laws and took a position in parliament against the fascist electoral reform. Shortly afterwards, however, he retired from politics to Cavour near Turin, where he eventually died.

His grandson Antonio Giolitti later became EC Commissioner .

Political offices

Prime Minister

• May 15, 1892-27. September 1892
• November 23, 1892-15. December 1893
• November 3, 1903-12. March 1905
• May 29, 1906-8. February 1909
• March 24, 1909-11. December 1909
• March 30, 1911-29. September 1913
• November 27, 1913-21. March 1914
• June 15, 1920–7. April 1921
• June 11, 1921–4. July 1921

Interior minister

• May 15, 1892-28. November 1893
• February 15, 1901-20. June 1903
• November 3, 1903-15. March 1905
• May 30, 1906-10. December 1909
• March 30, 1911-20. March 1914
• June 15, 1920-4. July 1921

Finance minister

• March 9, 1889-9. December 1890

literature

• Giovanni Giolitti: Memorie della mia vita (2 vols.), Milan 1922 (Ger. Memories of my life. With a letter from Giolitti to the translator as an introduction and a character image of the man and statesman. Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Stuttgart 1923.)
• Alexander J. De Grand: The Hunchback's Tailor: Giovanni Giolitti and Liberal Italy from the Challenge of Mass Politics to the Rise of Fascism, 1882-1922 , Westport 2000, ISBN 0-275-96874-X
• Frank J. Coppa : Economic and Ethical Liberalism in Conflict: The extraordinary liberalism of Giovanni Giolitti . In: Journal of Modern History 42 (1970), pp. 191-215.

Web links

Commons : Giovanni Giolitti  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

• Literature by and about Giovanni Giolitti in the catalog of the German National Library
• Newspaper article about Giovanni Giolitti in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .