Orlando, Vittorio Emanuele

(1860–1952)

   A Sicilian professor of law, Orlando was a member of several prefascist cabinets, rising to the post of minister of the interior during World War I. In 1917, he became prime minister himself when the Caporetto disaster brought about Paolo Boselli’s resignation. Abetter risk calculator than his predecessor, he ordered Italian forces to counterattack in late October. By the end of the month, Italian forces with British reinforcements inflicted a major defeat on the Austrian army at Vittorio Veneto and, on 5 November (nearly a week before the armistice in France), the guns were silenced on the Austrian front. Orlando was called the “President of Victory” and became one of the “Big Four,” together with Woodrow Wilson, Georges Clemenceau, and David Lloyd George, charged with making the postwar settlement. Italy and Orlando cut something of a bad figure in the Paris negotiations. Italy’s failure to obtain the full territorial gains promised to it by the 1915 Treaty of Londonled to the Italian delegation’s storming out of the French capital in April 1919 and retiring to Rome. Orlando seemingly assumed that the Allies would offer terms to persuade him to return. Instead, Orlando and Foreign Minister Sidney Sonnino eventually returned to Paris, barely in time for the German signature on the Treaty of Versailles.

   Italy did in fact obtain the Brenner frontier with Austria and Trieste. It was hardly the “mutilated peace” that Italian nationalists condemned. Orlando’s resentments were nourished by the question of Fiume (Rijeka), which Italy coveted, and the Dalmatian coast. The subsequent Treaty of Lausanne with Turkey (July 1923) confirmed Italian sovereignty over the Dodecanese Islands, which had been exercised de factosince 1912. Nevertheless, the perception that the settlement had been mishandled and Italy denied its just deserts led to Orlando being turned out by Parliament in a humiliatingly lopsided vote, 262–78. His successor, Francesco Saverio Nitti, had the good sense to abort a naval expedition to annex Soviet Georgia that Orlando had devised. Orlando’s relationship with Fascismwas initially ambiguous. Like many Italian liberals, Orlando feared the Fascists less than he feared the socialist menace and the influence of the Vatican. Nevertheless, by 1925 he had realized the futility of his hopes. He broke with Benito Mussolini and resigned from Parliament and from all political activity. When the regime required university professors to pledge allegiance to Mussolini in 1931, only 11 in the entire system refused and resigned their posts. One of them was a by now elderly Orlando. In 1944, the government of Ivanoe Bonomi named Orlando president of the Chamber of Deputies. In 1948, he became a life senator, a position he held until his death.