Francesco Saverio Nitti

Career[edit]

Born in Melfi, Basilicata, Nitti studied law in Naples and was subsequently active as journalist. He was correspondent for the Gazzetta Piemontese (English: Piedmontese Gazette) and was one of the editors of the Corriere di Napoli (Courier of Naples). In 1891, he wrote a work about Christian socialism, titled Il socialismo cattolico (Catholic Socialism). In 1898, when he was only 30 years old, he became professor of finance at the University of Naples. Nitti was chosen in 1904 for the Italian Radical Party to serve in the Italian Parliament. From 1911 to 1914, he was minister of agriculture, industry, and trade under the then prime minister Giovanni Giolitti. In 1917, he became minister of finance under Vittorio Emanuele Orlando and held it until 1919.


On 23 June 1919, Nitti became prime minister and interior minister, after Orlando had resigned following the disappointed Italian gains at the Paris Peace Conference, resulting in widespread indignation within Italy about an alleged mutilated victory. A year later, Nitti was also minister of the colonies. His cabinet had to deal with great social unrest and dissatisfaction over the peace treaties. Particularly troublesome was the agitation over Fiume led by Gabriele D'Annunzio. Nitti had great difficulty keeping the administration functioning at all, thanks to the enmity between the extremely divergent political factions of communists, anarchists, and fascists. After less than a year as head of government, he resigned and was succeeded by the veteran Giolitti on 16 June 1920. In social policy, Nitti's government passed a law setting up compulsory insurance for unemployment, invalidity and old age.^[5]


From 1901 to 1924, Nitti was a member of the country's Chamber of Deputies, first for the Italian Radical Party and then for the Italian Democratic Liberal Party. Still a member of the Italian Parliament, Nitti offered resistance to the nascent power of Italian fascism and openly despised Benito Mussolini. In 1924, Nitti decided to emigrate, and returned to Italy only after World War II, and joined the National Democratic Union and was a member of the Senate for the Republic in the Independent Left group from 1948 until his death in 1953. As a secularist and anticlerical, he opposed Christian Democracy and staunchly opposed NATO membership. In his 1927 book Bolshevism, Fascism and Democracy, Nitti correlated fascism with Bolshevism, saying: "There is little difference between the two, and in certain respects, Fascism and Bolshevism are the same."^[6] At the same time, as a positivist, for Nitti both politics and history boiled down to facts. Like World War II, the Russian Revolution was a fact. Against the opinion of Georges Clemenceau, who considered the Russians to be perfectible ignorant barbarians and the Germans to be imperfectly educated barbarians,^[7] Nitti wondered what would have prevented them from getting along with Bolshevik Russia, once they had got along well with the Russia of the Tsars. Referring to modernisation, he wrote: "Transplanting the principles and methods of the Russian Revolution into a country like Italy ... would be certain ruin. But it can be added that there is something in the spirit of the Russian Revolution that even Italy cannot ignore."^[8]