This book provides a full account of the Italian nobility in the post-unification era. It challenges interpretations which have stressed the rapid fusion of old and new elites in Italy and the marginality of the nobility after 1861, and instead highlights the continuing economic strength, social power and political influence of Italy’s most prominent regional aristocracy. In Piedmont, the nobles were able to develop more indirect forms of influence to satisfy their hunger for leadership based on something older than constitutions or electoral politics. They remained a largely separate group within local society, distinguished by their attachment to the values of lineage, military service, landownership, and social exclusivity. This aristocratic exclusivity and influence survived the agricultural depression of the nineteenth century, before succumbing finally to the devastating effects of World War I.
• A full account of the Italian nobility in the period after national unification • Challenges revisionist scholarship by emphasising the enduring social, economic and political power of the aristocracy • Uses previously neglected records which provide a rich source of information on Italian elites
Contents
List of tables; Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. The making of the Piedmontese nobility, 1600–1848; 2. The long goodbye: aristocrats in politics and public life, 1848–1914; 3. Old money: the scale and structure of aristocratic wealth; 4. Perpetuating an aristocratic social elite; 5. The limits of fusion: aristocratic-bourgeois relations in nineteenth-century Piedmont; 6. Retreat and adaptation in the twentieth century; Bibliography; Index.
Prize Winner
American Historical Association’s Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize 1998 - Winner
Review
‘… clearly written, illustrated with vivid detail, and backed up by excellent quantitative research.’ Economic History Review
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