Cavallotti, Felice

(1842–1898)

   A picturesque figure much given to duels with his political rivals, Felice Cavallotti nevertheless played an important political role in liberal Italy. Aradical, a democrat, and a republican, Cavallotti took part in Giuseppe Garibaldi’s expedition to Sicily in 1860 when he was barely an adolescent. After a career as a poet, playwright, and editor—in his native Milan—of the leading radical daily of the time, Il Gazzettino rosa (The Pink Gazette), he entered Parliamentin 1873 and soon became one of the leading critics of Agostino Depretis’s reluctance to carry out social reforms. In 1879, he and Garibaldi founded the Lega della democrazia/ League for Democracy. As leader of that body, he fought a fruitless battle for universal male suffrage, repression of the clergy, decentralization of the state administration, and improvements in public hygiene (he worked as a volunteer in Naplesin 1884 when the city was stricken by cholera). He was a prominent figure in the irredentist movement and took an active role in the protests against Austrian rule in Trieste and, more generally, was strongly critical of the Italian government’s link with Germany and Austria in the Triple Alliance. In 1886, he became leader of the radical party in Parliament. By then, he was Garibaldi’s heir apparent in the public imagination, and he campaigned against political corruption and took an active part in the parliamentary investigation into the Banca Romana scandal. In June 1895, in the wake of the scandal, he published an open letter addressed to “the honest people of all parties” that contained a richly documented account of the corruption of the then prime minister, Francesco Crispi. Rather than debate Cavallotti’s accusations in the Chamber of Deputies, Crispi and his supporters voted to close Parliament for six months. In the 1890s, Cavallotti and the Radicals united with the Republicans to press for social reforms of a more explicitly socialist character, but Cavallotti never quite arrived at an open endorsement of the nascent workers’movement. Cavallotti was killed in his 32nd duel in 1898 by a fellow parliamentary deputy, Ferruccio Macola.