Italy’s Intervention To WWI. The “Home Front” And The Psychological Heritage

Abstract

This paper aims to share the most updated results of the Italian and foreign historiography about how
and why the Italians split on the opportunity to go to war joining the Entente powers and on the Italian
society in the war years. The better part of the supporters of the intervention argued that the war was the
great opportunity for completing national unity. Aside or behind this rational aim purposes such as imposing
to Italian people an ordeal so to bring it to maturity and self-confidence were present. The leftist supporters
of the intervention looked beyond the immediate territorial interests and aimed at the destruction
of the “prison of the peoples”, to say the Habsburg Empire. One of them was Benito Mussolini, who used
to be a prominent left-wing socialist and traumatically broke with his comrades joining the pro-war front.
Catholics, socialists and many liberals, in sum the majority of the country, did not desire the intervention,
but their opposition was dull and passive. Italian intervention was largely a coup d’état prompted by a violent
minority. Nonetheless Italians accepted tamely the decision of the government and went to die in the
trenches. Only in 1917, and especially in Turin, there were serious troubles, which started due to shortage
of essential goods. Even the Russian revolutions and the great Caporetto defeat did not push the socialists
to modify their loyal and passive attitude. The happiness for the final victory was from the very beginning
poisoned by the sensation that France and Great Britain inclined to give scarce satisfaction to Italy, especially
in the eastern Adriatic shore and in Turkey. So, Italy emerged from the war in a psychological state
closer to the mood of a defeated country rather than to the mood of a victorious country.