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

484 JOHN A. DA VIS
sions of protesting workers in the Corso Garibaldi an d the Piazza del Duomo
had been charged by mounted troops with drawn sabres 2 •
Whether there was anything unusual - in a broader European context
- about the use of troops to contro l urban demonstrations is open to doubt,
however, and both Third Republic France and Great Britain provide many
comparable examples. In the British case the tendency to use troops against
striking workers if anything tended to increase rather than decline in the
years after the turn of the century.
Was there anything unusual, therefore, about the role of the army in
the maintenance of arder in Italian cities in the decades after Unification?
What was its role and did this change during the period under consideration?
As many of the titles an d subjects of other contributions to this section
of the conference illustrate, the army's role in the context of urban arder
cannot be limited to the narrow perspective of policing and public arder
enforcement alone. The presence of large garrisons in major urban centres
inevitably gave rise to a variety of different relations between the army and
society, the military and the municipality, the soldier and the civilian which
touched on issues of law and arder in many different ways.
Within the city the garrison soldiers - in large part conscripts - formed
a separate body with its own internai laws and hierarchies. But the
authority of the military nonetheless stretched beyond the walls of the barracks.
Conscription is the field in which the contact between the military
and civilian Italy has been most fully studied, although we know much more
about the functioning of conscription in the countryside than in the cities.
But the obligation of military servi ce endowed the military authorities with
powers that covered a wide cross-section of the urban male population.
Even though the exercise of that authority was more carefull limited after
the massive abuse of these powers by Generai Govone in Sicily in the years
immediately after unification, offenses relating to conscription potentially
placed a large part of the civilian male population under military jurisdic­
tion 3 . The army of course also disciplined its own. According to one contemporary
account there were annually between two and three thousand
soldiers in military jails 4•
2 V. HUNECKE, Classe operaia e rivoluzione industriale a Milano 1859-92, Bologna
1982, p. 367.
3 Cf. R. MARTUCCI, Emergenza e tutela dell 'ordine pubblico nell'Italia Liberale, Bologna
1980, p. 143 and esp. P. DEl NEGRO 'Leva Militare in Italia dall'Unità alla Grande
Guerra' in ID .. Esercito Stato e Società, Bologna 1979, pp. 169-262.
4 L. LucCHINI, SolJati delinquenti: giudici e carnefici, 1896, cited in G. OLIVA, 'La
coscrizione obbligatoria nell'Italia Unita: tra consenso e rifiuto', in Movimento Operaio
e Socialista l, IX, 1986, p. 27.
THE ARMY AND PUBLIC ORDER IN ITALIAN CITIES 485
Despite the rigid and often brutal discipline to which the enlisted soldiers
were subject, the concentration of large numbers of unmarried and young
men in the major urban centres was in itself an important potential source
of disorder. In part this was the responsibility of the military police and
the Carabinieri, yet there were inevitably areas in which the disorderliness
of the soldier impinged on problems that were the preserve of the civil and
municipal authorities - for example, abusive drinking, public rowdiness
and affrays between rival groups of soldiers or between soldiers an d civilians,
prostitution, and public health more generally.
On the other hand, a number of recent studies have also emphasised
the ways in which military parades and fanfares played an important role
in transmitting the values of the lay nation state and perhaps even replaced
the predominantly clerical or municipal public ceremonials of the past. The
army also acted as a direct instrument of 'education' in that it taught (or attempted
to teach) illiterate conscripts how to read and write. But it was
perhaps at a more general level that its role as 'educator' was more effective,
and it was primarily through the army and its presence in the cities
of the new state that the nation and above ali the monarchy became part
of the day to day social an d recreationallives of the town dwellers of liberai
Italy. These wider parameters of the social impact of the military presence
in the major Italian cities are the subject of other papers in this section, and
this paper will therefore be confined to a consideration of the narrower questions
of the army's role in the context of urban policing and public arder.
Armies and Urban Order in the Risorgimento Years.
The role of the army in urban policing has to be seen in relation to the
institutional reorganization of the Italian states in the years after the crisis
of the Ancien Regime monarchies, and in particular during the reforms of
the Napoleonic era in Italy. The task is complicated by the fact the history
of professional policing in Italy, as in virtually every other European state
throughout the 19th century, is stili barely beyond its infancy. Although
it is relatively easy to sketch out some of the broader contours of these
developments, it is stili difficult to move from the generai to the particular
(although many of the papers that will be delivered o this conference provide
the first systematic attempt to explore these aspects of urban or der an d
'social control' in concrete terms). But since we still know very little, for
example, about the nature of the contacts between police and people in the
major urban centres in the late 19th century, the concrete aspects of the