Prime minister and the Crown in Liberal Italy: from Neutrality to the first Government of War (1914-1916)

The essay intends to analyse the relations between the Council Presidency and the Monarchy during liberal Italy. In doing so, it was decided to privilege the study of such relationships within a particularly dramatic phase for the country, as was the First World War, focusing on the period 1914-1916 that goes from the proclamation of neutrality to the fi rst Government of war, leaded by Antonio Salandra. The choice of this periodization depended on the awareness that the First World War was an effective test to verify the interaction between the powers of the State and to clarify whether or not the Parliamentarisation of the liberal political system was achieved. The events of the Salandra Government, in which the political confrontation between the powers of the State reached levels never reached during the confl ict, testifi es well the limits of this Parliamentarisation and the observation of how the liberal political system was a fundamentally hybrid system, in which Monarchy’s powers of intervention were always very broad and, at times, straining to dissolve the unresolved nodes of the system itself.

Keywords: First World War; Italian Monarchy; Italian Political System.

Andrea Ungari, Presidente del Consiglio e Corona nell’Italia liberale: dalla neutralità al primo governo di guerra (1914-1916) in "VENTUNESIMO SECOLO" 43/2018, pp 31-55, DOI: 10.3280/XXI2018-043003