AHC Italy Instability

With a 1870s POD or later, try to get some Republican sentiment in Italy.

The goal is that in 1911, a work strike turns into a revolution. The republicans are in the minority and Po River Valley, Tuscany are still hotbeds of royalist sentiment. The rural areas are 75% neutral, 24% royalist.

However, despite the royalists outnumbering the republicans as much as 3 to 1 countrywide, they are concentrated in many cities including... Rome. The King loses his nerve and flees Rome, disappearing completely, leaving the royalist cause headless. They just sit around and wait while the republicans consolidate power until it's later revealed the king fled to Vienna.
 
With a 1870s POD or later, try to get some Republican sentiment in Italy.

The goal is that in 1911, a work strike turns into a revolution. The republicans are in the minority and Po River Valley, Tuscany are still hotbeds of royalist sentiment. The rural areas are 75% neutral, 24% royalist.

However, despite the royalists outnumbering the republicans as much as 3 to 1 countrywide, they are concentrated in many cities including... Rome. The King loses his nerve and flees Rome, disappearing completely, leaving the royalist cause headless. They just sit around and wait while the republicans consolidate power until it's later revealed the king fled to Vienna.

Republican sentiment in Italy was fairly huge in cities, which incidentally means, mainly in the Po river basin, Tuscany, and adjoining areas. The South was (and still is, to a point) generally more rural and more conservative.
If Umberto I is not killed in 1900, and Giolitti's liberal policies are not implemented, you may well see a scenario like the one you describe by 1911. However, the hotbeds of Republican feeling are likely to be in the North, and the King would probably either stay in Rome or, if forced, flee to Naples.
 
Can we get the Republican sentiment into Rome proper? And make the king panic so much he flees the country instead of to where his supporters were?
 
Can we get the Republican sentiment into Rome proper? And make the king panic so much he flees the country instead of to where his supporters were?

Hard. It requires either a very different, unlikely development of Rome under early Italian rule into an industrial center (as opposed to an administrative and political one) or a really monumental mismanagement of the city by the Savoyards, building resentment.
 
Any investment the Savoyards can do to improve the city that has looong term payoffs (you know, so the masses can't understand)? Who works in the Rome at this time anyways? I know it's mainly an administrative center, but are there really no industry?
 
Any investment the Savoyards can do to improve the city that has looong term payoffs (you know, so the masses can't understand)? Who works in the Rome at this time anyways? I know it's mainly an administrative center, but are there really no industry?
Some industry existed, but it was small, also regarding the size of individual firms. Little of a working class to speak off. There was an impoverished urban mob living of small service jobs around the formal economy of administration.
The Savoyards DID do a lot of lot of long term major projects, and most did work out quite poorly both in immediate public reception at the time and final result. This did not create significant lasting resentment though. My point is: IOTL, they were fairly incompetent in managing Rome, and this had no major impact on their public standing. It's hard to see how they can plausibly mismanage MORE.
 
Some industry existed, but it was small, also regarding the size of individual firms. Little of a working class to speak off. There was an impoverished urban mob living of small service jobs around the formal economy of administration.
The Savoyards DID do a lot of lot of long term major projects, and most did work out quite poorly both in immediate public reception at the time and final result. This did not create significant lasting resentment though. My point is: IOTL, they were fairly incompetent in managing Rome, and this had no major impact on their public standing. It's hard to see how they can plausibly mismanage MORE.

Ok, so them mismanaging Rome even more goes beyond plausible.

With a 1870s or later POD, could a left-ist orator style guy agitate them and turn the existing mismanagement into discontent? I mean, miserable people often only need just the right kind of ideas to think a system shake-up is easier than trying to get better by working harder.

Or, if Free Speech isn't a thing in Savoyard Italy, could a conspiracy forment dissent in the shadows?
 
Ok, so them mismanaging Rome even more goes beyond plausible.

Well, I was exaggerating a bit, but basically yes. The point is that Romans benefitted so much from living in the capital that it is hard to see how much more mismanagment would be required to create lasting opposition. I think it would take an astonishingly high level of incompetence.

With a 1870s or later POD, could a left-ist orator style guy agitate them and turn the existing mismanagement into discontent? I mean, miserable people often only need just the right kind of ideas to think a system shake-up is easier than trying to get better by working harder.

Or, if Free Speech isn't a thing in Savoyard Italy, could a conspiracy forment dissent in the shadows?

It's possible, but the social makeup of Rome was not very amenable to leftist ideas. Free speech had some limits but it existed. Socialist ideas could be discussed in public usually, although talking subversion was not a thing to do lightly.
Now, a possible POD would be the Right staying in power after 1876 at the national level, so that key reforms such as expanded franchise come later - when the Left takes charge, does that under Crispi, so that it is not much Left in anything but name anymore. A broader, more radicalized Leftist opposition takes root, similar to British Labor except it is has a broader social spectrum behind it - less of a working class focus and some appeal to petty bourgeosie, artisans, low level civil servants, who are more numerous in Rome. This coalition is Republican and looks at the historical legacy of Mazzini and Garibaldi - they occupy the social space between the actual Socialist revolutionaries and the ruling conservative/rightwing liberal block. If Crispi shows his OTL's dictatorial tendencies you could have a broad if fractious Republican movement that is strong in Rome and the Northern cities, bitterly opposing a magnate/agrarian/military coalition. Franchise will have to be expanded anyway but it may take longer and be a more difficult process. The "social question" cannot be ignored even by the establishment of course, but decades of half-measures, errors and ham-handed repression may create the groundwork for what you describe.
The only thing you can't have here is the North to be the hotbed of Royalism.
 

raharris1973

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Why were the rulers of Piedmont-Savoy so much more unpopular in their home areas and the rest of the north than in the south where their presence was even more artificial?
 
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