Giovanni Giolitti - Death and Legacy

Death and Legacy

Powerless, he remained in Parliament until his death in Cavour, Piedmont on July 17, 1928. According to his biographer Alexander De Grand, Giolitti was Italy's most notable prime minister after Cavour. Like Cavour, Giolitti came from Piedmont, and like other leading Piedmontese politicians he combined a pragmatism with an Enlightenment faith in progress through material advancement. An able bureaucrat, he had litle sympathy for the idealism that had inspired much of the Risorgimento. He tended to see discontent as rooted in frustrated self-interest and accordingly believed that most opponents had their price and could be transformed eventually into allies. The primary objective of Giolittian politics was to govern from the center with slight and well controlled fluctuations, now in a conservative direction, then in a progressive one, trying to preserve the institutions and the existing social order.

He stands out as one of the major liberal reformers of late 19th- and early 20th-century Europe alongside Georges Clemenceau and David Lloyd George. He was a staunch adherent of 19th-century elitist liberalism trying to navigate the new tide of mass politics. A lifelong bureaucrat aloof from the electorate, Giolitti introduced near universal male suffrage and tolerated labour strikes. Rather than reform the state as a concession to populism, he sought to accommodate the emancipatory groups, first in his pursuit of coalitions with Socialist and Catholic movements, and finally, at the end of his political life, in a failed courtship with Fascism.

Antonio Giolitti, the post-war leftist politician, was his grandson.