esercito e città dall'unità agli anni trenta. tomo i - Sistema ...

186 ANTHONY L. CARDOZA
tury. Already in the sixteenth century, the small state's geopolitica! position
necessitated an aggressive foreign policy and involvement in a series
of wars as a matter of survival. As a result, an army officered by aristocratic
gentlemen carne to play a far more important role in Piedmont than in the
other Italian states and transformed the nobility into a mainly military
caste 2. For its part, the Piedmontese nobility carne to view involvement
in the military as an essential component of its power an d status in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. Walter Barberis has argued that the army
provided the institutional framework within which the nobility « coltivò il
terreno di salvaguardia della propria supremazia sociale e della propria identità
culturale . .. (e) tentò sistematicamente di organizzare la successione a se stessa
come ceto prevalente " 3. Nor did the extraordinary disruptions and
changes of the Napoleonic era appear to destroy aristocratic preeminence
within the Piedmontese army. Indeed, with the Restoration of 1814, the
nobility regained a virtual monopoly of the officers corps. Significantly, the
command structure of the army, as reflected in the Elenco Militare of 1818,
remained firmly in the hands of the ancien regime nobles, while roughly
90% of the ne w recruits t o the R. Accademia militare di Torino in 1816 carne
from the ranks of titled families 4.
Nonetheless, historians have cited a number of factors that worked in
the ensuing decades to undermine the aristocratic conception of a military
career as a « cursus honorum del cortigiano " an d to reduce the predominance
of the nobility within the military hierarchy. John Whittam, for instance,
has noted how reliance on a small number of safe noble families resulted
in a serious shortage of officers and created irresistible pressures to expand
the social base of recruitment as early as the 1830s. Whittam has also argued
tha the increasing pace of technological change in Piedmont, especially with
the spread of the railroads in the 1850s, favored the modernization of the
army and the formation of an officers corps that viewed war as " something
more than the extension of hunting ,, 5. Pressures to enlarge and professionalize
the army found expression not only in the Lamarmora reforms of
the 1850s, but also in the social makeup of the Accademia Militare where,
2 GIORGIO ROCHAT and GIULIO MASSOBRIO, Breve storia dell 'esercito italiano dal
1861 al 1943, Torino 1978, p. 19.
3 W ALTER BARBERIS, " La nobilità militare sabauda fra corti ed accademie scientifiche:
politica e cultura in Piemonte fra Sette e Ottocento "• Les Noblesses européennes
au XJXe siècle, Ecole française de Rome, November 21-23, 1985, pp. 1-2.
4 lbid., pp. 3-4; F. L. ROGIER, La R. Accademia Militare di Torino: note storiche
1816-1870, Vol. II, Torino 1916, pp. 1-19.
5 jOHN WHITTAM, The politics oj the ltalian Army, 1861-1918, London 1977, p. 26,
49.
AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN 187
according to Piero Del Negro, the proportion of nobles fell from 66% in
the 1820s to 30% by the 1850s 6. The work of Lucio Ceva suggests that
the transition from the Armata Sarda to the Esercito Italiano only hastened
the decline of the Piedmontese military caste by expanding further the officers
corps and by accelerating its bourgeosification. In this regard, Ceva
has pointed to the differences between the German and Italian military
establishments in the second half of th nineteçnth century. While nobles
made up 49% of the German officers corps in 1872 and 33% as late as 1911,
nobles from all regions of the peninsula accounted for only 6.5 to 7% of
the Italian officers in 1863 an d 3 t o 4% in 1887 7•
Emphasis on the bourgeois conquest of the military establishment,
however, should not obscure the highly visible presence and influential role
that the Piedmontese nobility continued to have within the armed forces
of Liberai Italy. Although they constituted a shrinking percentage of the total
corps, the actual number of aristocratic officers from the region remained
relatively constant between unification and the First World War. A survey
of the Annuari Militari del Regno d'Italia between 1875 and 1914 reveals
that the Piedmontese nobility accounted for from 200 to 248 officers in active
service at any given moment throughout the period. Predictably, they
tended to concentrate in the most prestigious branches of the Cavalry and
Artillery where two-thirds of them could usually be found, but another 50
to 68 nobles on average seemed to give precedence to duty and professionalism
by serving in the less glamorous Infrantry. By and large, Piedmontese
families avoided the Carabinieri an d Engineers Corps 8.
This relatively small group of aristocratic officers assumed a disproportionately
large share of the command responsibilities within the Italian army.
Some fifteen years after unification, two ofthe three Generali d'Armata,
a thìrd of all the Tenenti Generali, 25 of the 84 Maggiori Generali, and roughly
a third of the military staff attached to the royal family carne from the ranks
ofthe Piedmontese nobility. At the same time, aristocratic officers from the
region commanded five of the six Cavalry brigades and half the Cavalry
regiments 9. Of course, the Piedmontese could not maintain such a domi-
6 PIERO DEL NEGRO, Esercito, stato, società: saggi di storia militare, Bologna 1979,
pp. 63-64.
7 LuCio CEVA, « Forze armate e società civile dal 1861 al 1887 " in Atti del L Congresso
di storia del Risorgimento italiano, Roma 1982, p. 285.
8 This informations is drawn from the lists published in the Annuario Militare del
Regno d'Italia, Roma, anni diversi, for the years 1875, 1885, 1895, 1905 and 1914.
9 Il Palmaverde. Almanacco universale per l'anno 1874, (Torino 1874), pp.
143-153.
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