Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [181]
Sonnino, the other strong figure in the Italian delegation, stood behind the Treaty of London (after all, he had negotiated it) but he had little interest in Fiume. “He was apprehensive,” in Lloyd George’s opinion, “lest Italy should sacrifice bigger things in the frenzy for this trivial claim.” He was to take the full blame, however, for Italy’s disastrous diplomacy in Paris. Orlando got off lightly, partly because, unlike Sonnino, he did not speak English well; most of the Americans and British did not understand what he was saying. And, as Lloyd George said, “he had an attractive and amiable personality which made him an extremely pleasant man to do business with.” Lloyd George also asserted, quite mistakenly, that “there was no fundamental difference of outlook or principle between him and President Wilson.” Orlando was “exceedingly popular” with the Americans as well. “If Orlando were here I think I could do something,” House wrote to Wilson, “but Sonnino is hopeless.” 4
In 1919 Sidney Sonnino was in his early seventies. With a shock of white hair, a large drooping mustache, deep-set eyes under beetling eyebrows, and a severe expression, he looked the very image of an old-style European statesman. In fact, he was something more: a Protestant in a largely Catholic country, an intellectual who wrote with passion about Dante’s Beatrice, and a brilliant polemicist. Born in Egypt to an Italian Jewish businessman and his Welsh wife, Sonnino was an outsider who moved into the heart of Italian politics. An old-fashioned liberal, he moved rightward over the years. He believed in helping the masses, but not in trusting them to help themselves. Before the war he served twice, briefly, as prime minister, gaining a grudging respect even from his enemies as an honest and disinterested politician. In 1914 he became foreign minister.
“Dour, rigid and intractable,” in Lloyd George’s words, he spoke badly and made few friends in Paris. He took pride—to the point of obsession, said a man who was by no means an enemy—in not being like others: “When, as a young diplomat before the war, I used to see him fairly often in his beautiful solitary house near the Trajan Forum, I could not help being unpleasantly struck by this guileless superiority complex of which he was the first victim.” Yet there was another side to Sonnino. He had loved deeply and unsuccessfully when he was young. “Who can and who should love this nonentity lacking all physical and moral attraction?” he wrote in his diary. “What I would not give for a bit of affection! Only affection can assuage this black fever that consumes me, that makes me hateful to myself, that renders me incapable of every serious and prolonged enterprise.” When the negotiations in Paris went badly, he confided to his secretary that he felt physically sick.5
Sonnino’s view of international relations was Bismarckian: he believed that nations were motivated by what another Italian foreign minister had called “sacred egoism” and that politics was above all about power. As an Italian nationalist, Sonnino wanted security for his country; that meant land, alliances, deals, the acquisition of friends against possible enemies. Clemenceau once reproached him for “remaining too faithful to the Italian method of which the grand master was Machiavelli and not presenting clear solutions.”6 Sonnino did not trust talk of principles or morality or openness in international relations,