LITMIR.BIZ

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in numerous recollections.⁴ Recent scholarship notes that the evidence, at least in the United Kingdom, of popular joy at the prospect of war ‘is surprisingly weak’.⁵ But, at least when war broke out, there was sufficient public enthusiasm to attract the notice of newspapers, and those who opposed it were subdued, divided and resigned.⁶

      Jean–Jacques Becker’s 1914: Comment les Français sont entrés dans la guerre, still, after more than thirty years, the most thorough study of public opinion in a particular country at the start of the First World War, gives a complex picture of the divergent attitudes in France. These included sadness and resignation as well as patriotic enthusiasm, the latter being far less widespread than was commonly thought.⁷ But some were thrilled with excitement. Adolf Hitler, writing in Mein Kampf in 1924, recalled his elation at the news: ‘To me those hours seemed like a release from the painful feelings of my youth. Even today I am not ashamed to say that, overpowered by stormy enthusiasm, I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven … for granting me the good fortune of being permitted to live at this time.’⁸ Hitler’s enthusiasm may not be surprising, but more sober minds were also caught up in the ferment, including intellectuals of the calibre of Stefan Zweig and Max Weber.⁹ Max Beckmann, the Expressionist painter, was exhilarated.¹⁰ Rupert Brooke, in October 1914, wrote in his famous sonnet ‘Peace’: ‘Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour’. Rainer Maria Rilke celebrated the advent of the conflict in his Five Cantos in August 1914: ‘… the battle–God suddenly grasps us’. The Viennese playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Rudyard Kipling, turned into war propagandists. Thomas Mann declared: ‘How could the artist, the soldier in the artist, not praise God for the collapse of a peaceful world with which he was fed up…’ Sigmund Freud too, at least initially, rejoiced in partisanship.¹¹ And during the war the French philosopher of perception Henri Bergson travelled repeatedly to the USA to encourage Washington to enter the hostilities on the side of the Allies.

      The popularity of the war can be gauged by the behaviour of the socialists. Before the eruption of the conflict they had repeatedly committed themselves to averting war by all possible means. However, on 3 August 1914 the parliamentary group of the German Social–Democratic Party stood unanimously behind their Emperor in defence of Germany. The French, Belgian and Austrian socialists also adopted a vigorous patriotic position. In Great Britain Labour MPs and the trade unions did the same (though some Labour leaders, such as Keir Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald, did not).

      In spite of the war fever raging elsewhere, in Italy a wait–and–see attitude prevailed at first. This unwillingness to be plunged into the fighting was paralleled in other European states such as Holland, Spain and Sweden, which stayed out for the duration, and Romania, Greece and Portugal, which, like Italy, eventually joined in.

      It would be wrong to assume that pacifism had much to do with Italy’s reluctance to go to war. There were, at the time, two main strands of opinion which might be labelled ‘pacifist’: the Catholic and the socialist – but neither was committed to pacifism as a matter of principle. Catholics accepted the idea of just wars, but were hostile to the Italian state, whose foundation originated from a war of conquest against the Papacy. Socialists accepted the possibility of revolutionary violence, but regarded wars as the result of capitalist greed. There was also (and there still is) a common perception that Italians were ill–suited to wars and had a predisposition towards non–bellicose activities: Italians as ‘brava gente’, that is decent and good–hearted folk.¹² Such stereotypical attitudes occasionally had the imprimatur of major philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant, who remarked that Italians had put their genius ‘in music, painting, sculpture and architecture’.¹³ Italian intellectuals had often lamented the lack of warlike qualities in their fellow countrymen. Even Alessandro Manzoni, a Catholic novelist and playwright consecrated by Italian nationalism and revered by all, despaired at how centuries of foreign invasions had reinforced the supine attitude of Italians. In the first chorus of his 1822 tragedy Adelchi he described the Italians as ‘a scattered people with no name’ (‘un volgo disperso che nome non ha’), uncertain, timorous and undecided, eternally waiting for a foreign invader to liberate them.

      The reluctance to enter the war could more profitably be explained in terms of Italy’s past rather than of national stereotypes. Italy’s recent forays into imperial adventures had not turned out to be successful. In March 1896 at Adua in Ethiopia a large Italian expeditionary force of 17,700 men was annihilated by the armies of Emperor Menelik, the most scorching defeat of any European army in Africa. The dead and some of the prisoners were castrated in traditional Ethiopian custom. The disaster ended the political career of the then Prime Minister, Francesco Crispi.¹⁴ The rush to colonies divided Italy far more than it divided Great Britain, Germany or France. In 1911–12 Italy declared war on Turkey and occupied Libya, Rhodes and the islands of the Dodecanese. This proved an easier enterprise than Ethiopia, but almost as controversial. The shame of Adua was redeemed, and Italy had become a colonial power, albeit a second–ranking one. Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti, who had agreed to the war on Libya with some reluctance, had been supported by the liberal press, above all by Luigi Albertini’s Corriere delta sera, as well as by some Catholic organisations who saw the expedition as another crusade against the heathens. Libya, however, did little for Giolitti’s prestige, while considerably enhancing the influence and power of Italian nationalists. Organisations such as Enrico Corradini’s Associazione nazionalista italiana exploited the Libyan adventure, thereby assuming a much greater weight in national life than its numbers warranted, and made inroads into the civil service, the armed forces and intellectual life: ‘By the conclusion of the war, the nationalist movement had burrowed its way into Turinese, Milanese, Venetian, Roman and Neapolitan centres of journalism.’¹⁵

      Intellectuals played a role in legitimising a bellicose attitude. The futurists, who were against bourgeois conventions, including liberalism, parliamentarism and pacifism, glorified war and violence, regarding the artist, seen as a kind of Nietzschean superman, as in charge of his own destiny and showing the future to others.¹⁶ Artists were supposed to abandon their ivory towers, approach the masses and lead them with deliberately shocking slogans worshipping war and violence – ideas soon annexed by the fascists. In the Futurist Manifesto, published in the Figaro in Paris on 20 February 1909, Marinetti, with the evident desire to épater les bourgeois, wrote that the futurists ‘will glorify war – the only hygiene of the world – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gestures of libertarians, the beautiful ideas that kill, and contempt for woman’.¹⁷ Marinetti also wrote enthusiastically about the Italian conquest of Libya in 1911 as the correspondent for the right–wing Paris newspaper L’intransigeant. Much of this provided a fertile intellectual ground for fascist ideas. But such a nationalist position was far from being the sole prerogative of futurists and modernists. Giosuè Carducci, Nobel Prize–winner (1906) and revered man of letters whose influence on Italian education and intellectual life cannot be overestimated, often glorified patriotic and warlike themes, evoked the greatness of ancient Rome and exhibited a ‘visceral dislike of parliamentary institutions’.¹⁸

      The Italian election of 1913, the first held under universal male suffrage, demonstrated, however, that the extreme nationalists had been kept in check: the liberals, though deeply divided, still had a majority, while the socialists improved their position considerably. This explains, at least in part, why the Prime Minister Antonio Salandra, a right–wing liberal,

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