To Discipline a Nation: Italy and the War Governments, 1915–1919

This article examines the militarisation of Italian society under the wartime emergency. It highlights the central role of two pieces of legislation in April and May 1915, both enacted before Italy formally entered the war, in transferring powers from parliament to the executive and from the civilian authorities to the military, all in the name of national defence and security. It also analyses the constant conflict between army headquarters in Udine and the civilian government in Rome, with Chief of General Staff Luigi Cadorna maintaining that ministers were incompetent, cowardly or too liberal in their approach to wartime rule. As Cadorna’s stranglehold over the north of Italy, including the front-line areas and the increasingly expanding war zones, grew, so too did the harshness of military justice in those territories. The piece ends by considering the legacy left by Cadorna, both for his successor as Chief of General Staff Armando Diaz, in November 1917, and for the transition from war to peace after the end of 1918. Some of the exceptional measures practised during the war fed into policies of surveillance of Slav and ‘Austrian’ groups in the New Provinces acquired under the Treaty of St. Germain in 1919, while the emphasis on discipline and order encouraged many former and serving officers to throw in their lot with ultra-nationalist groups, and eventually with Mussolini’s Fascists.