Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [180]
Inside Wilson’s office, Clemenceau looked on coldly. The British were frozen with horror; Hankey said he would have spanked his own son for such a disgraceful display of emotion. The only person to make a move was Wilson, who went over to console the Italian prime minister, a particularly generous gesture given the animosity between the Americans and the Italians by this point.1
The most serious dispute to break out among the Allies at the Peace Conference had just reached an acute stage. This could not have happened at a worse time: with the German delegates about to arrive in Paris, it was essential that the peacemakers present a united front. Although Italy’s demands at the conference covered three vast regions—Africa, the Middle East and Europe—it was the port of Fiume, in the Adriatic, that caused the problem. The quarrel was over territory but it was also over principle, since the Italians wanted what they had been promised under the old diplomacy, while the Americans stood firm on the new. And it was a clash of personalities, between Wilson and the Italians, especially Sonnino, their foreign minister. The question was whether the peace meant sharing the loot, as the Americans said contemptuously, or drawing borders based on ethnic lines. The territories Italy wanted had either been promised it by Britain and France under the secret Treaty of London (which Wilson loathed) or were inhabited largely by Slavs (which violated the principle of self-determination), or both.
Orlando had hoped to avoid a confrontation. A product of the murky world of Italian politics, with its deals, arrangements and doling out of patronage, he was a Sicilian by birth and a lawyer by training who had always found that difficulties could be papered over with the right words. A short, square man, much given to gesturing, he took a straightforward pride in both his country and his family. In Paris, he boasted to a table of Americans that he had produced three children in thirty-one months; impossible, he said, to do it any faster. Nicolson wrote him off, unfairly, as “a white, weak, flabby man,” but Orlando had held his country together when it faced defeat.2
The war had been a tremendous strain for a society already divided between the prosperous, industrializing north and the agrarian, tradition-bound south. The great promise of the unification of the 1860s had not yet been realized. Italy’s economy had grown slowly and its brief forays into foreign affairs had been embarrassing or, in the case of its defeat by the Ethiopians at Aduwa (Adwa) in 1896, humiliating. Like Germany, another new nation, Italy had a political system with many enemies: Catholics whose church had not accepted the new state, radical socialists who despaired of reform within the existing structures, and right-wing nationalists who longed to replace the corrupt and boring status quo.
In the war, Italy, the poorest of the Great Powers, spent money it did not have. By 1919 it owed its allies the equivalent of £700 million ($3.5 billion) and wartime inflation was higher than in any country except Russia. On the Austro-Hungarian front, Italian soldiers, badly led and ill equipped, had been slaughtered as they fought uphill into the Alps. The army had collapsed at Caporetto in 1917; Italians blamed their generals but also the system. Over half a million men had died by 1918 and as many more were seriously wounded. What had it all been for? Already a phrase that was to become a commonplace—“the mutilated victory”—was being heard in Italy, and so was talk of revolution.
Liberals and moderate socialists withdrew their support from the government, appalled at what they saw as its profound cynicism, and Orlando increasingly had to rely on the nationalist right. He badly needed