Akademik

   The occupation of Romein 1870 still left a number of “unredeemed” Italian territories such as the Trentino and Trieste. In 1877, the radical politician Matteo Renato Imbriani formed, with the patronage of Giuseppe Garibaldi, an association called L’Italia irredenta,whose goal was the liberation of these “unredeemed” territories from Austrian rule. The Italian government’s refusal to push Italy’s claims at the Congress of Berlin (1878) and the pro-German foreign policy followed by the administrations of Agostino Depretis and Francesco Crispi after the signature of the Triple Alliance in 1882 led the association to become one of the main opposition forces in liberal Italy. An offshoot of the association, the “Committee for Trento and Trieste,” was banned by Crispi in 1889. Subsequently, clubs of citizens named in honor of an Italian nationalist from Trieste, Guglielmo Oberdan, who had been hanged by the Austrians, were also banned.

   After 1900, the movement became more prone to violence and illegality, and many irredentists transmuted their beliefs into nationalism and even imperialism. Irredentismo was at the bottom of the decision of many socialists, radicals, and republicans to support the war in 1914, although unlike the nationalists, the irredentists were usually in favor of entering the war on the side of the Entente. By 1919, when Gabriele D’Annunzio seized Fiume to general popular approval, the movement had lost its authenticity. Benito Mussolini also used the rhetoric of irredentismo to justify Italian adventures in Dalmatia, Albania, and the eastern Mediterranean—a perversion of the original ideal.