Denis Mack Smith
Historian of Italy’s Risorgimento who punctured the traditionally romantic view of unification
DENIS MACK SMITH, who has died aged 97, was a historian who dominated the historiography of modern Italy for half a century. While he had the gift of writing original, serious and scrupulously researched history, which none the less remained accessible to the non-specialist, Mack Smith never fought shy of controversy and indeed one of his talents as a historian was to provoke.
His first book, Cavour and Garibaldi 1860 (1954), overturned traditional interpretations of the Risorgimento by representing it not as the fruit of the harmonious and concerted action of great men and patriots, but as a political development which grew out of internal conflict and disunity between elites.
In particular he demoted Count Camillo di Cavour, the Italian hero celebrated in so many city “corsos”, from the status of revered statesman to the role of unscrupulous trickster.
For example he showed that while Cavour had supported his supposed ally Garibaldi’s famous expedition in 1860 to capture Sicily, he had also instructed the Piedmontese Navy to intercept it.
AJP Taylor commented that “with brilliant, though well-founded perversity, Mr Mack Smith turns everything upside down”, but some Italian historians found it difficult to forgive him for puncturing the romantic myth of unification.
Mack Smith remained obstinately English, sceptical, observant and sometimes bitingly ironic – qualities to be found most strikingly in his magisterial and controversial second book, Modern Italy, which was first published in 1959, then republished in an updated and enlarged edition in 1998.
Mack Smith considered the book “a youthful work, with all the defects of any youthful work”, but between one edition and another little had changed in his interpretation.
His was a story in which almost everyone was motivated by cynicism and opportunism and every key player was at best mediocre, at worst completely corrupt.
The chief events in Italian history, he observed, were a “continuum in which certain themes recur even when the nation itself and the ideas about national identity have continued to change”. Cavour, the architect of unification, had introduced “trasformismo” – a depraved style of parliamentary government based on personalities rather than programmes or ideas – that demolished any opposition, blocked the formation of modern political parties, encouraged opportunism and turned a blind eye to corruption.
Italians, he observed, have never had a truly liberal or democratic regime, but have been consistently ruled by a parliamentary dictatorship that “differed only in degree whether under Cavour, Depretis, Crispi, or Giolitti or even Mussolini during his first years of power.”
Of Il Duce, he observed that a primary mandate with which he assumed the prime ministership of Italy in 1923 was to end the violence that he himself was largely responsible for creating. He had no political ideas of his own: “The most original contribution of Mussolini’s kind of fascism was in technique, for instance, the use of castor oil to intimidate opponents … His most important quality was that of being a stupendous poseur,” he wrote.
Once fascism had collapsed, opportunism, cynicism and corruption continued to dominate Italy’s postwar democracy, culminating in the wreck of Christian Democrat hegemony under a tidal wave of scandals and trials that became known as Tangentopoli (“Bribesville”). Again Mack Smith’s book provoked furious debate, but his interpretation coincided with the conclusions of some respected Italian historians, so could hardly be dismissed.
In his revised edition, published during the government of Romano Prodi, Mack Smith adopted a more optimistic view, declaring that “the dreams of Cavour and Mazzini have never been so close to realisation as they are today.”
By the end of the year, however, Prodi’s coalition had fallen apart and it was business as usual under Silvio Berlusconi.
Denis Mack Smith was born in London on March 3 1920 and was educated at St Paul’s Cathedral Choir School and at Haileybury College, from where he won History and Organ scholarships to Peterhouse, Cambridge.
After graduation he spent a year teaching at Clifton College, and a further four years working in the Cabinet Office. In 1946 he returned to Cambridge as a fellow and tutor at Peterhouse, becoming a university lecturer in history in 1952.
In 1962 he moved to Oxford as a senior resident fellow of All Souls and went on to serve as sub warden of the college from 1984 to 1986.
After his first two major books, Mack Smith extended his iconoclasm into other areas with, among other things, studies of Sicily, Mussolini and the Italian monarchy, which he presented, essentially, as a confederacy of dunces and philistines.
If there was one major flaw in Mack Smith’s analysis it was that he never had a satisfying answer to the question of how, despite more than a century of mainly corrupt and usually short-lived governments, Italy went from being one of the poorest and most backward societies to one of the world’s leading industrialised countries.
A fellow of both the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature, Mack Smith served as chairman of the Association for the Study of Modern Italy from 1987 and was presented with the Italian Presidential Medal in 1984.
Appointed CBE in 1990, he was named Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic in 1996.
His first marriage to Ruth Hellmann (later Viscountess Runciman) was dissolved. In 1963 he married Catharine Stevenson, who survives him with their two daughters.
Denis Mack Smith, born March 3 1920, died July 11 2017