On 2 August 1914 King Victor Emmanuel III initialled military plans for action by Italy on her north-western borders, that is against France. That very day the Italian government was preparing its declaration of neutrality, which was issued the next morning. After this decision had been made public, San Giuliano talked frankly with Olindo Malagodi, direttore of La Tribuna. Italy had not joined her Triple Alliance partners in war, he explained, because British naval strength had to be recognised as the force majeure: ‘our decision depended necessarily on that of England’.

No doubt the contrasting royal initials were more a product of the automatic machinery of bureaucracy than the serious making of foreign policy around a strategic plan. Yet, the apposition of potential military conflict with France, and wholly necessary naval peace with Britain, is most striking. At the great crisis point, with war imminent, with the most crucial foreign policy decision in her history demanded, Liberal Italy acted as though a contest with Britain was out of the question, but a fight with France was possible, and perhaps not unattractive.

Many Italian statesmen of the post-Risorgimento regime would not have been surprised at that apposition. If sometimes obscured by the greater threat from Austria, the strand of hostility to France had been a constant one in Italian diplomacy since unification. The questions of Trento and Trieste always carried the extra danger of exacerbating domestic irredentism, and thus Mazzinian republicanism hostile to the Savoyard regime. But any Italian government looking to the Mediterranean immediately ran into the rivalry of France, that ‘Latin sister’ often dubbed the sorellastra, the nasty step-sister, by sensitive Italians.