Aristocrats in Bourgeois Italy: The Piedmontese Nobility, 1861-1930 (review)

Aristocracy sits awkwardly in most accounts of modern Italian history. Titled families were prominent throughout the Risorgimento, and any list of united Italy’s public figures would include a good number of noble names. Still, no question of policy, no party, no disputed interest pitted the aristocracy on one side against the nation, the peasants, or even the bourgeoisie; and the continued importance of aristocrats has not been a central issue in Italian historiography. Many explanations come to mind, including the historical and regional differences among Italy’s aristocracies, the urban base of politics, conflicts between Church and State that overshadowed many other divisions, and Italy’s relatively slow industrialization. Such factors, like the adoption of liberal political institutions and a century of middle-class ties to titled leaders (from Count Cavour to Count Sforza, from Baron Ricasoli to Baron Sonnino), can foster an impression that the Italian aristocracy readily melded with the middle class. That view is the principal target of Anthony Cardoza’s new study of the Piedmontese nobility.

He makes a good case for the focus on Piedmont. The most homogeneous of Italy’s aristocracies was tied to a single ruling house and famed for its service ethic. Piedmont’s nobles contributed greatly to the strength that enabled their state to unify Italy, and they remained close to the crown after unification. Piedmont was also a leader in economic modernization and industrial development. Cardoza can thus present his careful research on the Piedmontese nobility as a case study with broader implications for Italian social and political history. His findings, the result of a close analysis of probate records and of educational and career patterns, are stark. Nobles remained preeminent among the wealthiest families of Piedmont through most of the century; their wealth came almost exclusively from landed estates; they entered military service in large numbers and provided an intimidating proportion of the higher officers; their social life largely excluded non-nobles; they remained close to the Church; and with rare exceptions, they married each other. In short, they remained an exclusive, isolated, landed, service nobility through the Risorgimento and well after.

Few of them wrote memoirs, and their correspondence was limited, so Cardoza must infer much about their attitudes and values by judiciously squeezing data on their wealth, their endogamy, their use of primogeniture to preserve landed estates, and their exclusivity in the Società del Whist . In thirty-some tables he presents data on their fortunes, compares new and old nobles, shows their dominance in selected schools and the military, and so forth. The research is remarkable in extent and care. Because the number of cases is necessarily small, Cardoza eschews elaborate statistical manipulations, relying primarily on percentages. Individual readers may in some instances choose to give a slightly different emphasis to the patterns Cardoza uncovers, but his basic claims appear irrefutable.

After 1848, Piedmont’s nobles as a group may, he suggests, have even become somewhat narrower and more isolated. Having lost their legal privileges, they relied on traditional patterns to preserve their status, wealth, and ties to the royal court. Even without national offices, their social ties and charitable activities enabled them to maintain important networks of patronage and influence. If that continuity is impressive, so is the evidence of the fundamental change beginning in the 1820s and codified by the events of 1848 and the Statuto, a social and political transformation as important as the limitations of narrow suffrage and royal meddling that historians have tended to emphasize.

The periodization Cardoza offers of changes in noble fortunes has larger implications, too. The decline of wealth reflected in probate records at the end of the century was dramatic, for the international depression in agricultural prices combined with the rigidity of long-term leases to reduce the value of noble estates, a decline exacerbated by World War I, which Cardoza’s sees as marking the end of an era for the Piedmontese nobility. No longer the wealthiest...