Definition

Luigi Federzoni was an important Italian cultural and political figure in the first half of the twentieth century. He was founder of the Nationalist Party and a leading member of the Fascist Party. He served as Fascism’s first colonial minister from 1922 to 1924 and from 1926 to 1928. Afterwards, he mobilised institutional support for colonialism and shaped a nationalist imperial discourse that survived Fascism.

Luigi Federzoni was an important Italian cultural and political figure in the first half of the twentieth century. He was founder of the Nationalist Party and a leading member of the Fascist Party. He served as Fascism’s first colonial minister from 1922 to 1924 and from 1926 to 1928. Afterwards, he mobilised institutional support for colonialism and shaped a nationalist imperial discourse that survived Fascism.

Born in Bologna in 1878, a generation after Italian unification, he belonged to a family that had solidified its place among the provincial elite in Reggio Emilia through his father’s connection to the poet Giosuè Carducci. His father, a specialist in Dante Alighieri, had been among Carducci’s first students at the University of Bologna. Luigi was among the last. Luigi gained privileged access through his father to Carducci’s circle, which included professors at the University of Bologna, national literary and artistic figures, and many former students who had swelled the ranks of Italy’s intelligentsia and political classes.

As a university student bent on becoming a famous writer in his own right, Federzoni fell under the sway of Alfredo Oriani, a colourful local figure who championed the cause of colonialism after the disastrous Italian defeats of Dogali (1887) and Adua (1896). Federzoni participated in the tail end of the Florentine nationalist revival, becoming a close disciple of the nationalist and imperialist writer Enrico Corradini. Unsuccessful as a novelist, Federzoni tried art criticism before settling on a career in journalism. In 1910, together with Corradini and others, he founded the Italian Nationalist Association (ANI). Owing in great part to Federzoni’s leadership, the ANI’s leaders transformed the group from a cultural association bent on revitalising national self-esteem into a doctrinaire, neo-conservative political party bent on expansion in the Mediterranean and the defeat of liberalism and socialism at home.

As an editor of both the ANI’s official organ, L’idea nazionale, and the important Roman daily Il giornale d’Italia, in the period leading up to the First World War, Federzoni developed imperial memes that were later central to the Fascist worldview. He argued that imperialism was both a political programme and a cultural way of being. The one required the other. He insisted that acting and thinking imperialistically was an essential part of what it meant to be Italian (italianità) even as most members of the political classes, including Benito Mussolini, then a socialist, had turned their backs on imperialism. Federzoni’s conception of the term drew on his neo-classical formation under Carducci, his informal schooling in imperialism under Oriani, his friendship with Corradini, and his reading of the nationalist writer Giuseppe Mazzini. Federzoni argued that imperialism signified both a reclaiming of Italy’s classical heritage and a point of departure for the Risorgimento. To this he added a strong dose of social Darwinism, arguing that only imperialism could enable the national organism to capitalise on its most valuable natural resources – the fertility of its people. For him, uncolonised spaces in Africa were simply voids for Italians to fill. Italy’s historic mission was to supplant indigenous populations with its own, thus creating a modern mare nostrum. His conception of imperialism is also remarkable for the manner in which he united colonial aspirations in Africa with irredentism – an older political movement aimed at annexing the so-called unredeemed lands from Austria-Hungary, where Italian speakers lived outside the borders of unified Italy. Federzoni’s imperialist designs, however, did not stop with the terra irredenta. He envisaged Italian hegemony over Albania, Greece, Switzerland, Corsica, and Malta.

Italy’s leading political figure in the early twentieth century, Giovanni Giolitti, unwittingly contributed to Federzoni’s political success when he provoked war with the Ottoman Empire (1911–12). The war marked a fundamental shift in Italian politics. Most Catholics had been estranged from national politics up to that point. They now enthusiastically supported the war, and even the Vatican gave its tacit blessing. In contrast, the Italian socialists and most radicals, republicans, and democrats actively opposed it. Thus, unlike Italy’s colonial ventures in East Africa in the nineteenth century, imperialism in the twentieth century bridged the gulf between the church and the state and derailed efforts by left-leaning liberals like Giolitti to narrow the gap between liberals and the democratic and socialist left.

Federzoni was the first politician to exploit this shift successfully for political gain. As a war correspondent for L’idea nazionale and Il giornale d’Italia, he conflated the war for Libya with a concurrent battle over the extension of the suffrage. He painted the democrats as un-Italian men who hid behind pacifism, humanitarianism, and respect for indigenous African populations abroad in order to derail Italy’s historic mission of bringing civilisation to Africa and asserting Italy’s standing as a Great Power. During the war, when a scandal broke in the army that involved Freemasons, a group associated with the political left, Federzoni conducted a survey of leading intellectual, political, and military leaders about the place of Freemasonry in modern society. He published the responses in Il giornale d’Italia. They overwhelmingly portrayed the Masons as a foreign group associated with the Ottoman Young Turks on the one hand and with radical, republican, and socialist advocates of atheism, divorce, and democracy on the other. Federzoni’s prominence spread as newspapers picked up the story. A few months later, he ran successfully for parliament against an incumbent Socialist deputy and a centre-left candidate. Imperialism played an important role in the election. Federzoni attacked his opponents as un-Italian enemies of imperialism. He demanded a more active imperialist policy that took the Italo-Turkish War as a starting point for further expansion. Many on the right who were dissatisfied with the leftward drift of the political classes under Giolitti were attracted by Federzoni’s blending of nationalism and imperialism as the basis for an anti-socialist, anti-democratic, and anti-liberal alliance of forward-looking conservatives and Catholics.

After volunteering in the First World War, Federzoni ran successfully for re-election and encouraged the nascent Fascist Party to align itself with the Nationalist political platform, which was still aimed at expansion in the Balkans and Africa. As Mussolini’s movement gained ground and drifted rightwards, Fascism found a valuable ally in Federzoni. Once Mussolini renounced his anticlericalism and his opposition to the monarchy, the Nationalists were ready to back Mussolini. Federzoni’s support earned him the post as colonial minister in Mussolini’s first cabinet. In 1923, the Nationalist and Fascist parties merged into a single party, with the Fascists adopting the Nationalist Party’s ideology as its own.

Federzoni’s tenure as colonial minister was divided into two periods: 1922–24 and 1926–28. The intervening period coincided with the Matteotti Crisis, when Federzoni took charge of the interior ministry from Mussolini and shored up Fascism. As colonial minister, Federzoni was markedly more ambitious than his liberal predecessors. He continued their efforts to reassert control over the coastal regions of Libya, which had been weakened during the First World War. But he also sought ascendency over the interior, which meant the abrogation of previous agreements with the Senussi Muslim confraternity. This policy strengthened the insurgency against Italian domination. In response, Federzoni demanded the same harsh treatment that his predecessor had used. In 1928, when Federzoni resigned, owing to a political realignment in the government, the Senussi had not yet been defeated. His successors would intensify Italian efforts, utilising new methods, including the establishment of concentration camps.

Federzoni advocated a more effective exploitation of Italy’s colonies by supporting public-private ventures aimed at increasing the importation of colonial agricultural goods to Italy and the exportation of Italian settlers to the colonies. At the same time, he applied the same heavy hand in the colonies to tame Fascist squadrismo as interior minister. He also created an important precedent for later racial policies by forbidding fasci, or local fascist groups, in the colonies to admit indigenous people. Federzoni rejected the idea that indigenous people could become Italian, an idea he dismissed as the French form of colonialism. Instead, he saw himself implementing a British form of colonialism predicated on the separation of the races.

Federzoni believed that the creation of a culture of imperialism was an important facet of his duties as colonial minister. He intended that the production and consumption of cultural life connected to imperialism – art, music, theatre, architecture, the humanities, the social sciences, and the pure sciences – should serve as a matrix for the creation of the Fascist ‘new man’ and as proof of the racial vigour of modern Italians. He created an annual celebration dedicated to colonialism and used his network of friends to speak to local audiences about the essential imperialist nature of being Italian. He sent artists to the colonies to re-imagine the world according to an imperialist gaze and sponsored exhibitions to awaken the middle classes to their role as imperialists.

Federzoni’s tenure as colonial minister was also marked by two important administrative innovations. In December 1922, he created the Consiglio Superiore Coloniale (Superior Colonial Council) to serve in an advisory capacity on colonial matters for the state. He also oversaw the drafting of the Legge organica per l’amministrazione della Tripolitania e della Cirenaica, or Organic Law (26 June 1927), which defined citizenship in Libya and established a new administrative and legal basis for colonial rule there. It created separate legal standings for Italians and indigenous Jewish and Muslim populations, giving the Jews a more favourable standing owing to his belief that they had in them the seeds of italianità for having served as agents of Italian culture and civilisation under Muslim rule. The Organic Law also strengthened the governor’s powers and paralleled the decidedly authoritarian trend in the metropole.

After 1928, Federzoni continued to play an important role in propounding a culture of imperialism. As president of the Istituto Coloniale Fascista (Fascist Colonial Institute; 1928–37) and the Istituto Fascista dell’Africa Italiana (Fascist Institute of Italian Africa; 1937–43) he strengthened his position as a gatekeeper to governmental largesse, publishing opportunities, and the professoriate for those in the younger generation in academic fields that could be linked, even tangentially, to colonialism. As director of Italy’s premier scholarly journal, the Nuova antologia (1929–43), he made imperialism a leading topic by opening its columns to explorers, geographers, historians, linguists, theorists, and colonial administrators. As president of the Italian Senate (1929–39), he took a keen interest in imperialism and made sure that the Senate gave visible support for the Ethiopian War (1935–36) and the proclamation of the empire. When Mussolini appointed him president of the Royal Academy of Italy (1938), he again used his position to foster scholarship on imperialism, now emphasising Italian expansion in the Balkans. He dedicated significant parts of the academy’s resources to expanding scholarship that emphasised ancient Roman and medieval Italian legacies in Albania and Yugoslavia, economic ties between the two sides of the Adriatic, and ethnic, linguistic, and historical studies that demonstrated enduring relationships between Italians on the one hand and Croats, Slovenes, Albanians, and Greeks on the other. In 1939 he had the academy’s charter revised so that he could have the Albanian Franciscan Friar Giorgio Fishta appointed to it.

Federzoni wrote hundreds of articles and gave numerous speeches on imperialism. He also edited important works and wrote several studies of his own, including L’Italia nell’Egeo (Rome: Garzoni-Provenzani, 1913); La Dalmazia che aspetta (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1915); La politica economica in Eritrea (Rome: Tipografia del Senato, 1923); Venti mesi di azione coloniale (Milan: Mondadori, 1926); Contributo degli italiani alla conoscenza del continente africano (Rome: Sindacato Italiano delle Arti Grafiche, 1928); La rinascita dell’Africa romana (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1929); Il re in Eritrea (Rome: Nuova Antologia, 1932); A.O.: il ‘posto al sole’ (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1936); and Dal regno all’impero (Rome: Reale Accademia dei Lincei, 1937).

After going into hiding in 1943 and seeking refuge in Portugal and Brazil after the war, Federzoni returned to Italy and connected with scholars with whom he had worked under Fascism. Many of them participated with him in recuperating Italy’s imperial legacy by writing histories that glossed over any negative aspects of Italian efforts to dominate the Balkans, East Africa, and Libya and painted Italian efforts at colonialism as a benign exception to a malefic period in world history.