Bonomi, Ivanoe

(1873–1951)

   Born in Mantua (Lombardy), Ivanoe Bonomi was one of the most important early theorists of the nascent Partito Socialista Italiano/Italian Socialist Party (PSI). He contributed to Filippo Turati’s influential magazine, Critica sociale, from 1895 onward, briefly edited the party newspaper Avanti!, and in 1907 published a controversial book, Le vie nuove del socialismo (The New Roads of Socialism), in which he argued that the workers’ movement needed to reject Marxist dogma and concentrate on winning social reforms by adhering to British-style laborism—a position that found little support in the increasingly revolutionary PSI. Bonomi, who was elected to Parliament in 1909, was expelled from the PSI in 1912 along with others of the party’s moderates. Together with Leonida Bissolati, Bonomi founded the Partito Socialista Riformista Italiano/Italian Reformist Socialist Party (PSRI), but it never obtained a mass following.

   Bonomi supported the war and saw combat as a junior officer. In 1916, he became minister for public works in the government of Paolo Boselliand later became minister of war. Bonomi was himself prime minister between July 1921 and February 1922. His attitude toward the growing Fascist threat was somewhat equivocal. During the elections of May 1921, he joined Giovanni Giolittias a candidate for the blocco nazionale. As prime minister, he did little to obstruct the outrages committed by the Fascist squads. During the Fascist epoch, Bonomi eked out a precarious living as a writer of history books, the most important of which, La politica italiana da Porta Pia a Vittorio Veneto (Italian Politics from Porto Pia to Vittorio Veneto, 1943), later became a widely used school textbook. In June 1944 he returned to political activity as the figurehead premier of the provisional government containing all the leading democratic forces in Allied-controlled Italy. His popularity with the British enabled him to survive a government crisis in November– December 1944, but after the end of the conflict in May 1945, the partisans of northern Italy would not accept his continuation in office. When he resigned, his place was taken by Ferruccio Parri of the Partito d’Azione/Action Party (PdA).

   Bonomi fought the June 1946 elections in the company of Benedetto Croce, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, and Francesco Nitti as the leader of the Unione Democratica Nazionale/National Democratic Union (UDN), but these remnants of prefascist Italy fared poorly at the polls, obtaining less than 7 percent of the vote. One last institutional burden awaited him: a member of the new Italian Senate by right, he was elected by his fellow senators to be president of the first elected Senate in Italian history in May 1948 and remained in that position until his death in 1951.

   See also Badoglio, Pietro; Salo, Republic of.