Napoleone Colajanni

Napoleone Colajanni

Napoleone Colajanni (Castrogiovanni, April 27, 1847 - Castrogiovanni, September 2, 1921) 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.^[1] He has been called the father of Sicilian socialism.^[2]

Redshirt

He was born in Castrogiovanni (now Enna). At a young age he was inspired by Giuseppe Garibaldi and attempted to join the Redshirts in the Expedition of the Thousand for the unification of Italy in 1860 escaping to Palermo at the age of 13, but without success. Two years later, in 1862, when Garibaldi passed by Castrogiovanni in his Expedition against Rome, Colajanni joined the partisans. He reached the Aspromonte, where he was captured by government troops and deported to Palmaria.^[3]

In 1866, again free, he joined the police in Genoa, and took part in the clashes of the Third Italian War of Independence in an attempt to capture Rome, the main centre of the peninsula still outside of the newly unified Kingdom of Italy. In 1867 he again joined Garibaldi in his second attempt to capture Rome, but the papal army, strengthened with a new French auxiliary force, defeated the badly armed volunteers at Mentana.^[3]

On February 26, 1869, while a medical student, he was arrested in Naples, for taking part in a Republican conspiracy. He remained in prison until November 20, when an amnesty was declared because of the birth of the future king of Italy, Victor Emmanuel III of Italy.^[3]

In Parliament

After graduating in Medicine in 1871, he went to South America before returning to Italy to devote himself to the study of sociology and continue his political activities. In 1872 he was elected as city councilor in Castrogiovanni, and in 1882 as a provincial councilor. In 1890 he was elected in the national Italian Chamber of Deputies for the first time. After having played the role of de facto leader of the Republicans in Parliament, moving to sponsor initiatives such as the parliamentary inquiry on Eritrea (1891) and the reporting of the Banca Romana scandal (1892), which caused the fall of Giovanni Giolitti.^[4]

In 1892 he was appointed Professor of Statistics at the University of Palermo. He published many books and essays on social and political problems, and exposed the unscientific theories of Cesare Lombroso^[5] and Enrico Ferri on criminology. Colajanni was particularly critical of Lombroso’s biological determinism and he put a much greater emphasis on social conditions as a cause of offending. Lombroso and his disciples, however, remained dominant in Italy.^[6]

For many years he edited the Rivista popolare, by means of which he strove to improve the moral and intellectual standard of the masses and combated all forms of intolerance and hypocrisy.^[4]

Fasci Siciliani

Though never a member of the Socialist Party, Colajanni was Sicily’s leading political radical. He supported the Fasci Siciliani a popular movement of democratic and socialist inspiration, which arose in Sicily in the years between 1891 and 1893. The demands of the movement were fair land rents, higher wages, lower local taxes and distribution of misappropriated common land.^[7] He took the Fasci under his political protection, defending them in parliament and in the press.^[8]

Francesco Crispi, who took over after the fall of Giolitti in December 1893, promised important measures of land reform for the near future. Crispi was not blind to the misery and the need for social reform. Before 1891 he had been the patron of the Sicilian working-class and many of their associations had been named after him. Colajanni, the chief architect of Giolitti’s fall, was first offered the Ministry of Agriculture, which he refused, then sent to Sicily on a mission of appeasement.^[8][9]

Crispi’s good intentions were soon drowned in the clamour for strong measures. In the three weeks of uncertainty before the government was formed, the rapid spread of violence drove many local authorities to defy Giolitti’s ban on the use of firearms. During December 1893 peasants lost their lives in clashes with the police and army. These disorders were not the product of a revolutionary plot, but Crispi believed otherwise. On the strength of dubious documents and reports, Crispi decided there was an organised conspiracy to detach his own Sicily from Italy; the leaders of the fasci were in league with the clerics and financed by French gold, and war and invasion were imminent.^[8][9]

On January 3, 1894, only four days after Crispi had promised Colajanni there would be no state of siege, martial law was declared in the island. General Roberto Morra di Lavriano was dispatched with 40,000 troops to restore order.^[9] Colajanni, disillusioned by the spread of violence in Sicily, to which he believed the Socialist party’s discourse of the class war had contributed, reverted in 1894 to his original republicanism. Within a few days of the declaration of martial law, however, he broke with Crispi and wrote the book Gli avvenimenti di Sicila e le loro cause on the events in Sicily, which placed the main blame on Crispi.^[9] He condemned the Fasci leaders for lacking to keep the peace.^[10]

Against the Mafia

In 1900, Colajanni wrote a j’accuse directed at the magistracy, the police, and the government in relation to the trial about the 1893 murder of Emanuele Notarbartolo, the ex-mayor of Palermo and ex-governor of the Bank of Sicily. Notarbartolo had been killed on the instruction of Raffaele Palizzolo, a member of parliament and a director of the Bank of Sicily, in revenge for exposing a swindle using the bank's money. Palizzolo was allegedly involved with the Sicilian Mafia.^[11]

The Italian government, Colajanni wrote, has done everything to consolidate the Mafia and render it omnipotent. “To fight and destroy the reign of the Mafia, it is necessary that the Italian government ceases to be the king of the Mafia,” he said in his book Nel regno della mafia (In the realm of the Mafia). The government, he said, needed to wipe the slate clean in Sicily and institute a fair and practical administration.^[11]

Anti Marxist

Colajanni who counted himself a socialist, continued to reject in substance the ideological importunings of classical Marxism. He remained a social-Darwinist throughout his life, convicted that socialism would be a product of a natural process of evolution and social selection.^[12] On April 12, 1895, he took part in the founding congress of the Italian Republican Party (Partito Repubblicano Italiano).

He did not consider himself a materialist: the social question was not only an economic issue but also an ethical one. He rejected the concept of class struggle: there was struggle there, sure, but it was only the first stage of evolution, which was not be encouraged, but passed in favour of a greater spread of altruism. A position that proved irreconcilable with Marxism, which led him to adhere to the newborn Republican Party.^[3]

At the outbreak of World War I, despite its anti-militarist ideas, he became an ardent supporter of the interventionist camp on the side of the Triple Entente. He launched a vigorous campaign against Avanti, the organ of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), when Benito Mussolini was removed as chief editor, and openly criticized the PSI for what he considered Bolshevik sympathies.^[4] He felt a certain sympathy for fascism in its initial phase. But his death in 1921, saved him in a sense from this embarrassing adhesion.^[3]

Books

• La sociologia criminale. (Catania: Tropea, 1889)
• Gli avvenimenti di Sicilia e le loro cause. (Palermo: Remo Sandron, 1895)
• Nel regno della mafia, dai Borboni ai Sabaudi. (Palermo: Remo Sandron, 1900)

References

1. ^ Seton-Watson, Italy from liberalism to fascism, p. 155
2. ^ Seton-Watson, Italy from liberalism to fascism, p. 161
3. ^ ^{a b c d e} (Italian) Il re della mafia, by Marcello Donativi, in Nel regno della mafia, pp. 9-10
4. ^ ^{a b c} Napoleone Colajanni, Classic Encyclopedia based on the 1911 Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica
5. ^ See for instance: Homicide and the Italians, by Napoleone Colajanni, The New York Times, March 24, 1901
6. ^ Emsley, Crime, police, and penal policy, p. 191
7. ^ Seton-Watson, Italy from liberalism to fascism, pp. 162-63
8. ^ ^{a b c} Fentress, Rebels & Mafiosi, pp. 227-228
9. ^ ^{a b c d} Seton-Watson, Italy from liberalism to fascism, pp. 165-67
10. ^ Sicily in a State of Siege; The Tax Agitation Has Been Practically Suppressed, The New York Times, January 9, 1894
11. ^ ^{a b} Fentress, Rebels & Mafiosi, p. 246
12. ^ Gregor, Young Mussolini and the intellectual origins of fascism, p. 13

• Colajanni, Napoleone & Marcello Donativi (1900/2009). Nel regno della mafia, Brindisi: Edizioni Trabant, ISBN 8896576067
• Emsley, Clive (2007). Crime, police, and penal policy: European experiences 1750-1940, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0199202850
• Fentress, James (2000). Rebels & Mafiosi: Death in a Sicilian Landscape, New York: Cornell University Press, ISBN 0-8014-3539-0
• Gregor, Anthony James (1979). Young Mussolini and the intellectual origins of fascism, Berkeley: University of California Press, ISBN 0520037995
• Seton-Watson, Christopher (1967). Italy from liberalism to fascism, 1870-1925, New York: Taylor & Francis, 1967 ISBN 0-416-18940-7

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Name	Colajanni, Napoleone
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Date of birth	April 27, 1847
Place of birth
Date of death	September 2, 1921
Place of death