Denis Mack Smith

Historian, pre-eminent British writer on modern Italy

Denis Mack Smith, historian. Born: 3 March, 1920 in London. Died: 11 July, 2017 in Oxford, aged 97.

Denis Mack Smith, whose mythdestroying interpretation of Italian unification infuriated many Italian historians but established him as the pre-eminent British writer on modern Italy, has died at the age of 97.

In his first book, Cavour and Garibaldi, 1860: A Study in Political Conflict, published in 1954, Smith took a cold look at the politics and personalities involved in the Risorgimento, the movement that forged a unified Italian state from a disparate collection of regional kingdoms. For Italian historians, this was a glorious chapter in their country’s history, a heroic national struggle, brilliantly planned and executed, leading to the creation of a liberal democracy.

Marshaling extensive and persuasive documentary evidence, and writing in a clear, urbane style, Smith told a less romantic story. Modern Italy, he asserted, was forged in bitter conflict, with elites pitted against elites, church against state, north against south, and the great powers pulling strings. Idols emerged tarnished. Count Camillo Cavour, hitherto regarded as the clear-eyed genius behind reunification, emerged as a scheming, often impulsive, trickster. Giuseppe Garibaldi, rather than a dashing warrior, emerged as a waffler, and Victor Emanuel II, Italy’s first king, as a feckless playboy.

In Italy: A Modern History (1959), Smith caused further outrage by refusing to regard Italian fascism and the rise of Benito Mussolini as an aberration. The causes, he insisted, could be traced to long-standing political tendencies and to structural weaknesses in the Italian system.

Denis Mack Smith was born on 3 March, 1920, in London to Wilfrid Smith, a tax collector, and the former Altiora Gauntlett.

He attended St Paul’s Cathedral Choir School and Haileybury College in Hertfordshire, where he won a scholarship to study history at Peterhouse College, Cambridge. Along the way, he taught himself Italian.

After teaching at Clifton College in Bristol and serving in the war Cabinet, he immersed himself in historical archives in Sicily. In 1947 he became a fellow at Peterhouse, where he taught until he was elected a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, in 1962. His first marriage, to Ruth Hellmann (later Viscountess Runciman) ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, the former Catharine Stevenson; two daughters, Sophie and Jacintha; and four grandchildren.