«Kräfte des Krieges» und «Kräfte der Revolution» in der italienischen Politik zwischen Libyenkrieg und Kriegseintritt

In his famous lectures in Oxford in 1929, Élie Halévy elaborated an interpretation of the global crisis of 1914-1918. He attempted to define «the collective forces, the widespread feelings and the movements of public opinion, which, in the early years of the twentieth century, were going to clash», in other words to break both the internal balance of the European countries and the international one. Halévy identified them in the forces pressing to war and in the forces aiming at the revolution. He acutely noticed the «astonishing resemblance» and correlation that started between them. The paper outlines the action of these forces in Italian politic framework commencing from the Libyan war until the Italian intervention in World War I, when the system of notables which had ruled the country in the first fifty years after the Unification started to show clear signs of crisis. The collective forces pressing to the war and those aiming at revolution fought in the streets and on the newspapers for the entry of Italy into the conflict to break an already precarious balance in Italy and in Europe: each of them, of course, hoped a different outcome of such a break. The Salandra liberal-conservatives pointed to war and victory to confirm the centrality of liberal politicians who were concerned about the crisis of its grip on society. As it almost always happens in history, the war had unintended consequences and opened a new phase, in which, however, it is possible to find out few elements that were already present in the pre-war crisis.