Managing the Army, governing the State: the Italian military élite in national politics, 1882-1915

According to several contemporary witnesses, and many nowadays historians, one of the key instruments used by the Italian social and political élite of the 19th century to secure the national unifica- tion (and the monarchy as the leading institution of the newborn state) was the army. What few of them has noted, however, is that the army and the military who controlled it were more than an in- strument: they were an essential part of the Italian national élite, capable of influencing the nation- building process itself. The Italian army officers, and specifically the general staff ones, attended univer- sity-level military academies where social sciences were taught along with general history, human geog- raphy and foreign languages. They travelled the world and confronted themselves with fellow officers from different social, political and cultural contexts. They took part in politics and local administration, as well as in economical enterprises. Above all, they were well aware of the role the army was supposed to hold in the institutional and symbolic panorama of unified Italy and pre-war Europe. And they wrote about all of this. The research project is grounded on two main sources. On one hand, the quantitative analysis of the careers and the biographies of 250 general staff officers who attained specific roles of great responsibility and relative autonomy from 1882 to 1915. On the other hand, correspondence, diaries, unpublished memoirs found in several private and family archives – in other words, those unofficial, unseen writings that we think could be more telling than the formal ones in revealing the military personal beliefs and cultural affiliations and influences. Crossing the quantitative and qualitative outputs, we can explore in depth the influence of military in the conception of politics, education, nationalization processes or social relationships in a case study, the Italian one, that is either peculiar and well integrated in the wider belle époque European context