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All 508 seats in the Chamber of Deputies 255 seats needed for a majority | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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General elections were held in Italy on 26 May 1895, with a second round of voting on 2 June. [1] The "ministerial" left-wing bloc remained the largest in Parliament, winning 334 of the 508 seats. [2]
In December 1893 the impotence of the Giovanni Giolitti cabinet to restore public order, menaced by disturbances in Sicily and the Banca Romana scandal, gave rise to a general demand that Francesco Crispi should return to power. Although Giolitti tried to put a halt to the manifestations and protests of the Fasci Siciliani, his measures were relatively mild. In the three weeks of uncertainty before Crispi formed a government on 15 December 1893, the rapid spread of violence drove many local authorities to defy Giolitti’s ban on the use of firearms. In December 1893 92 peasants lost their lives in clashes with the police and army. Government building were burned as well as flour mills and bakeries that refused to lower their prices when taxes were lowered or abolished. [3] [4]
On 3 January 1894 Crispi declared a state of siege throughout Sicily. Army reservists were recalled and General Roberto Morra di Lavriano was dispatched with 40,000 troops. [5] [6] The old order was restored through the use of extreme force, including summary executions. A solidarity revolt of anarchists and republicans in the Lunigiana was crushed as well.
The repression of the Fasci turned into outright persecution. The government arrested not just the leaders of the movement, but masses of poor farmers, students, professionals, sympathizers of the Fasci, and even those simply suspected of having sympathized with the movement at some point in time, in many cases without any evidence for the accusations. After the declaration of the state of emergency, condemnations were issued for the paltriest of reasons. Many rioters were incarcerated for having shouted things such as "Viva l'anarchia" or "down with the King". At Palermo, in April and May 1894, the trials against the central committee of the Fasci took place and this was the final blow that signaled the death knell of the movement of the Fasci Siciliani. [7]
On 16 June 1894 the anarchist Paolo Lega tried to shoot Crispi but the attempt failed. [8] On 24 June an Italian anarchist killed French President Carnot. In this climate of increased the fear of anarchism, Crispi was able to introduce a series of anti-anarchist laws in July 1894, which were also used against socialists. Heavy penalties were announced for "incitement to class hatred" and police received extended powers of preventive arrest and deportation. [9]
Crispi steadily supported the energetic remedies adopted by his Minister of Finance Sidney Sonnino to save Italian credit, which had been severely shaken the financial crisis of 1892–1893 and the Banca Romana scandal. In 1894 he was threatened with expulsion from the Masonic Grande Oriente d'Italia for being too friendly towards the Catholic Church. [10] He had previously been strongly anticlerical but had become convinced of the need for rapprochement with the Papacy. [11]
Crispi's uncompromising suppression of disorder, and his refusal to abandon either the Triple Alliance or the Eritrean colony, or to forsake his Minister of the Treasury, Sidney Sonnino, caused a breach with the radical leader Felice Cavallotti. Cavallotti began a pitiless campaign of defamation against him. The unsuccessful attempt upon Crispi’s life by the anarchist Lega brought a momentary truce, but Cavallotti’s attacks were soon renewed more fiercely than ever. They produced little effect and the general election of 1895 gave Crispi a huge majority. Nevertheless, the humiliating defeat of the Italian army at Adwa in March 1896 in Ethiopia during First Italo-Ethiopian War, brought about his resignation after riots broke out in several Italian towns. [12] [13]
 | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Party | Votes | % | Seats | +/– | |
| Historical Left | 713,812 | 58.57 | 334 | +11 | |
| Historical Right | 263,315 | 21.61 | 104 | +11 | |
| Historical Far Left | 142,356 | 11.68 | 47 | +20 | |
| Italian Socialist Party | 82,523 | 6.77 | 15 | New | |
| Others | 16,761 | 1.38 | 8 | −28 | |
| Total | 1,218,767 | 100.00 | 508 | 0 | |
| Valid votes | 1,218,767 | 97.02 | |||
| Invalid/blank votes | 37,477 | 2.98 | |||
| Total votes | 1,256,244 | 100.00 | |||
| Registered voters/turnout | 2,120,185 | 59.25 | |||
| Source: National Institute of Statistics | |||||
Giovanni Giolitti was an Italian statesman. He was the Prime Minister of Italy five times between 1892 and 1921. After Benito Mussolini, he is the second-longest serving Prime Minister in Italian history. A prominent leader of the Historical Left and the Liberal Union, he is widely considered one of the most powerful and important politicians in Italian history; due to his dominant position in Italian politics, Giolitti was accused by critics of being an authoritarian leader and a parliamentary dictator.
Francesco Crispi was an Italian patriot and statesman. He was among the main protagonists of the Risorgimento, a close friend and supporter of Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi, and one of the architects of Italian unification in 1860. Crispi served as Prime Minister of Italy for six years, from 1887 to 1891, and again from 1893 to 1896, and was the first Prime Minister from Southern Italy. Crispi was internationally famous and often mentioned along with world statesmen such as Otto von Bismarck, William Ewart Gladstone, and Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury.
Luigi Luzzatti was an Italian financier, political economist, social philosopher, and jurist. He served as the 20th prime minister of Italy between 1910 and 1911.
Antonio Starrabba, Marquess of Rudinì was an Italian statesman, Prime Minister of Italy between 1891 and 1892 and from 1896 until 1898.
The Fasci Siciliani[ˈfaʃʃi sitʃiˈljani], short for Fasci Siciliani dei Lavoratori, were a popular movement of democratic and socialist inspiration, which arose in Sicily in the years between 1889 and 1894. The Fasci gained the support of the poorest and most exploited classes of the island by channeling their frustration and discontent into a coherent programme based on the establishment of new rights. Consisting of a jumble of traditionalist sentiment, religiosity, and socialist consciousness, the movement reached its apex in the summer of 1893, when new conditions were presented to the landowners and mine owners of Sicily concerning the renewal of sharecropping and rental contracts.
Rosario Garibaldi Bosco was an Italian Republican-inspired socialist, politician and writer from Sicily. He was one of the leaders of the Fasci Siciliani, a popular movement of democratic and socialist inspiration in 1891-1894.
Giuseppe De Felice Giuffrida was an Italian socialist politician and journalist from Sicily. He is considered to be one of the founders of the Fasci Siciliani a popular movement of democratic and socialist inspiration. As the first socialist mayor of Catania in Sicily, from 1902 until 1914, he became the protagonist of a kind of municipal socialism.
Nicola Barbato was a Sicilian medical doctor, socialist and politician. He was one of the national leaders of the Fasci Siciliani a popular movement of democratic and socialist inspiration in 1891-1894, and perhaps might have been the ablest among them, according to the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm.
Napoleone Colajanni was an Italian writer, journalist, criminologist, socialist and politician. In the 1880s he abandoned republicanism for socialism, and became Italy's leading theoretical writer on the issue for a time. He has been called the father of Sicilian socialism. Due to the Socialist party's discourse of Marxist class struggle, he reverted in 1894 to his original republicanism. Colajanni was an ardent critic of the Lombrosian school in criminology. In 1890 he was elected in the national Italian Chamber of Deputies and was re-elected in all subsequent parliaments until his death in September 1921.
The Banca Romana scandal surfaced in January 1893 in Italy over the bankruptcy of the Banca Romana, one of the six national banks authorised at the time to issue currency. The scandal was the first of many Italian corruption scandals, and discredited both ministers and parliamentarians, in particular those of the Historical Left and was comparable to the Panama Canal Scandal that was shaking France at the time, threatening the constitutional order. The crisis prompted a new banking law, tarnished the prestige of the Prime Ministers Francesco Crispi and Giovanni Giolitti and prompted the collapse of the latter's government in November 1893.
General elections were held in Italy on 6 November 1892, with a second round of voting on 13 November. The "ministerial" left-wing bloc emerged as the largest in Parliament, winning 323 of the 508 seats. The electoral system reverted to the pre-1882 method of using single-member constituencies with second round run-offs.
General elections were held in Italy on 21 March 1897, with a second round of voting on 28 March. The "Ministerial" left-wing bloc, led by Giovanni Giolitti remained the largest in Parliament, winning 327 of the 508 seats.
Events from the year 1893 in Italy.
Events from the year 1894 in Italy.
Events from the year 1895 in Italy.
The Lunigiana revolt took place in January 1894, in the stone and marble quarries of Massa and Carrara in the Lunigiana, the northernmost tip of Tuscany (Italy), in support of the Fasci Siciliani uprising on Sicily. After a state of siege had been proclaimed by the Crispi government, armed bands dispersed into the mountains pursued by troops. Hundreds of insurgents were arrested and tried by military tribunals.
Nicola Petrina was an Italian socialist and politician from Sicily. He was one of the national leaders of the Fasci Siciliani a popular movement of democratic and socialist inspiration from 1891 to 1894.
The Lercara Friddi massacre took place on Christmas-day 1893 in Lercara Friddi in the Province of Palermo (Sicily) during the Fasci Siciliani uprising. According to different sources either seven or eleven people were killed and many wounded.
Bernardino Grimaldi was an Italian politician. He was a Minister in several governments.
Giacomo Montalto was an Italian Republican-inspired socialist, politician and lawyer. He was one of the leaders of the Fasci Siciliani, a popular movement of democratic and socialist inspiration in 1891-1894.
