Epilogue Post #6
Syndicalism and Catalunya:
During the Great War and shortly after, many thinkers in France were observing the rise of the Spanish Federative Republic with great interest. After the annexation of the Viennese Workers' Republic, socialist thinkers were eager to see a new socialist state form out of the ashes of a former European monarchy. Some of the French socialists such as Jean Jaures and George Sorel observed the Viennese and Andalucian experiments and determined that the socialist model, if it was to be applied on a larger scale, had to come from the democratic participation of the workers and be built from local sources upward, rather than a top-down approach from a dominant city such as in Vienna and later Mexico City. From this philosophy, the syndicalist socialist movement grew in France in the decades surrounding the Great War and as France further industrialized. Syndicalism was most successful in the southern towns such as Toulouse and rural regions around areas like Perpignan and Carcassonne. Syndicalism never reached great political success among the broader left in France. However, some elements of the Spanish Federative Republic adopted the decentralization of syndicalist thinking, though it was derailed when Alejandro Lerroux briefly led an Union Izquierdista government from 1920 to 1921 which attempteed an ill-fated centralization scheme. The Union Izquierdista quickly broke apart after a number of walkouts by members of Lerroux's government in 1917, and by the end of that year Lerroux was out of power and the left was dented for nearly the next five years, having been in power in some form since the Spanish Federative Republic had been created.
Meanwhile, one part of the Iberian Peninsula much closer to France was more receptive to some of the syndicalist ideology. Jaures, born in a small southwestern French village, spent much time following the French invasion of Spain and the creation of an independent Catalunya afterward. Similarly, George Sorel had spent a lot of time in Perpignan and was greatly familiar with the plight of the Catalunyan nationalists under the Spanish kingdom and its liberation by France in the Great War. Men like Sorel and Jaures also commiserated with Marshal Joffre during the Spanish campaign of the Great War and during the post-war erection of an independent Catalan state. While Joffre was Catalan, which is why the French government appointed him as Marshal of Catalunya following the war, he still accepting influence from other Frenchmen sympathetic to Catalunya, and Sorel and Jaures quickly rose in influence in Joffre's circle. Marshal Joffre, still widely revered as the founder and first president of Catalunya, though he never held the title president, ruled and molded Catalunya's government for over a decade following the Great War. Under the leadership of Joseph Joffre, Catalunya's government slowly grew out from under France's shadow and adopted a socialist system similar to that of the Viennese Workers' Republic with Barcelona as the dominant force, but with slight syndicalist trappings to appease the more rural Aragon and western Catalunya proper[1]. After Joffre stepped down at least to let the people of Catalunya decide their own self-government in 1924, the system stuck. The Grans Coalició dels Treballadors, or GCT, a united coalition of urban and rural workers' collectives, led the 1924 Catalan elections and formed a government with Domènec Martí i Julià as the first elected and native president of Catalunya. With the election of Martí i Julià, the Republic of Catalunya finally achieved full independence, no longer under the dominance of either Spain or France. To mark the occasion, Marshal Joffre (who informally kept the title of Marshal for the rest of his life), organized and personally opened the Jocs Florals, or Floral Games. The opening of the game by Joffre in front of Fontserè's Cascada Monumental became an iconic image of Catalan pride as one of the first Catalan events captured in photo and on film.
The End of the Italian Experiment:
Italy was been heavily weakened by the Great War after suffering both the ravaging of its coasts and the invasion of much of its northern industrial region, as well as the territorial losses the country incurred in the Peace of Vienna. While there was some inclination toward a revenge movement by the government of Gabriele D'Annunzio after his election in 1912, the economic situation became dire in much of the country. Inflation was rampant in Italy during the 1910s as the slow recovery of the destroyed Italian industrial capacity created mass unemployment, and poor harvests in rural southern Italy soured farmers toward the D'Annunzio government. Regionalism, which had remained dormant for over half a century, now emerged once again as the government in Rome seemingly flailed in its attempts to right the Italian ship of state.
The first hotbeds of fractious nationalism came in two very opposite but far-flung regions from Rome: Sicily and Veneto. Sicily had already been rocked by revolt before the Great War. As attempts to introduce modern capitalist systems to the largely rural and agrarian communities on the island combined with a global fall in prices for wheat and other agricultural goods, rural communities formed "Fasci" or workers' leagues[2]. The Sicilian organizations were unlike the more traditional workers' organizations in more industrial areas of Vienna, Barcelona, and even northern Italy, in that they were looser communal organizations, possibly having more in common with the early leagues in the Spanish Federative Republic. The First Revolt of the Fasci in 1893 saw widespread violence in western Sicily, especially as socialist intellectuals in Palermo joined with longstanding mafia organizations. While the First Revolt of the Fasci was crushed, the resentment lived on in the Fratellanza Siciliana or Sicilian Brotherhood. As the Sicilian economy worsened even more during the French blockade in the Great War and under D'Annunzio and following governments, the time became ripe for another rebellion. By 1916, after new president Dino Perrona Compagni attempted a violent crackdown on crime in Palermo, the Second Revolt of the Fasci erupted. Led by charismatic socialist Bernardino Verro and an alliance of several mafiosis, the rebellion spread from the inland town of Corleone as a large militia army marched north toward Palermo. Palermo fell to Verro after a fierce battle, forcing the governor of Sicily to flee the island, and soon after Verro and others signed a proclamation of an independent Sicilian Republic. Seeing the rejection of the relatively urban class in Palermo, the capital of Sicily remained in Corleone even after its gained recognition and drove Italian forces entirely off the island.
Veneto, while wealthier than Sicily, had also suffered heavily from the Great War with the German invasion of the region. Many Venetians and nationalists had already adopted a symbol of the neglect that Rome had shown to the region. In July of 1902, the Campanile di San Marco, the bell tower of the Basilica di San Marco in Venice, developed a large crack in the north wall. The crack continued to spread, and that same month, the entire bell tower collapsed. Luckily, nobody was killed. Sentiment to rebuild the Campanile was strong among Venetians, but with the outbreak of the Turkish War and the looming Great War, funding from Rome was hard to come by and the Campanile remained unreconstructed for over two decades[3]. The Campanile di San Marco thus joined the Lion of St. Mark as a nationalist symbol of Venice and the entire Veneto region, hence why the Campanile now joins the Lion on the flag of the Venetian Republic. During the 1910s under the governments of D'Annunzio and Compagni, the Leone di San Marco party gained ground in local and national elections in Veneto. Attempts by D'Annunzio to standardize the teaching of Italian throughout the country only enraged Venetians even more, and with ample German funding pouring in (though tellingly not for rebuilding the Campanile until after Venetia's independence), the Leone di San Marco party swept the 1919 governorate elections. Former President Luigi Luzzatti, a Venetian himself, warned Compagni that the situation in Venetia was dire, but the warning fell on dear ears. Veneto's governing assembly passed a declaration of independence in 1920, and with German backing now explicit, the region declared independence. Britain protested, but with it involved in its own internal troubles at the time, could do nothing. Despite his issuing the warning to Compagni, Luigi Luzzatti was elected the first Doge of the new Venetian Republic, reinstated as a ceremonial position to the parliament and Prime Minister, the first of whom was Leone di San Marco founder Italico Corradino Cappellotto[4]. Luzzatti, 70 at the time Venetia elected him Doge, lived for another five years, long enough to see the Campanile restored.
In the face of the secession of the Sicilian and Venetian republics, President Dino Perrone Compagni attempted to clamp down even further on the areas of Italy that remained under control from Rome. Compagni, who had served as a lieutenant in the Italian army in the Great War, declared himself the Generalissimo of the Italian Republic and "Grand Duke" of his native Tuscany, where his largest support base was. Meanwhile, both France and Germany were now supporting regional movements and warlords throughout the country. Some historians and cartoonists at the time declared the rise of gobernadores and the Mexicanization of Italy to a return to the Italian Wars of the 15th and 16th centuries. Sardinia soon broke off from Italy under French backing. Following a referendum in favor of restoring the monarchy, Luigi Amadeo I was crowned King of Sardinia. Other warlords took control in the Piedmont, Lombardy, the Abruzzi, and elsewhere. By 1924, Compagni's control over the country was limited to Tuscany and Lazio. This warlord period dominated Italian history for the following decade as Germany and France covertly backed several warlords for dominance of Italy in effectual proxy wars[5].
[1] This is one of the more half-formed ideas I'd had for the post-end events in Union and Liberty. I wanted Joffre to become a founding father figure for Catalunya, but also for it to become socialist on the vein of the Viennese Workers' Republic as another example of TTL's "socialism can only really work on a small scale in a pseudo-city state context" common thought.
[2] The Fasci Siciliani were short-lived workers' leagues that formed in Sicily in the late 19th century as a sort of reaction to the transition of the region from feudalism to capitalism.
[3] The Campanile collapse in 1902 in OTL as well. However, in OTL the rebuilding of the Campanile was funded almost immediately following the collapse and it was rebuilt with the exact same design by 1912.
[4] Italico Cappellotto also found a
Lion of St. Mark party in OTL, in an interwar attempt at Venetian nationalism.
[5] This bit is kind of open ended on how the situation ends up. I couldn't decide if I wanted the ultimate situation to be a return to a lot of small Italian states and a Mexicanization of Italy, or if most of Italy should reunite (maybe except Veneto, Sardinia, and Sicily) but have a two-party system with French-influenced and German-influence parties vying for power.