Sidney Costantino, Baron Sonnino (; 11 March 1847 – 24 November 1922) was an Italian statesman, 19th prime minister of Italy and twice served briefly as one, in 1906 and again from 1909 to 1910. Sidney Sonnino, Incarichi di governo, Parlamento italiano (Accessed May 8, 2016) He also was the Italian minister of Foreign Affairs during the First World War, representing Italy at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference.
Early life Sonnino was born in Pisa to an Italian Jewish father, Isacco Saul Sonnino, who converted to Anglicanism, and a Welsh mother, Georgina Sophia Arnaud Dudley Menhennet. He was raised as an Anglican by his family. Sidney Sonnino (1847–1922). Note biografiche, Centro Studi Sidney SonninoMorley Sachar, A History of the Jews in the Modern World, p. 541 His grandfather had emigrated from Livorno to Egypt, where he had built up an enormous fortune as a banker.Baron Sonnino Dies; Italy's Ex-Premier; Foreign Minister During the Great War Stricken Suddenly With Apoplexy, The New York Times, November 24, 1922 As a young man, Sonnino suffered from a severe case of unrequited love, which badly damaged his self-esteem. In a typical entry in his diary, Sonnino wrote: "Who can and should love this nonentity lacking all physical and moral attraction?" To make up for his distress when the object of his affection married someone else, Sonnino took to long solitary walks and threw himself obsessively into work as he sought career success as a sort of consolation prize for his broken heart.
After graduating in law in Pisa in 1865, Sonnino became a diplomat and an official at the Italian embassies in Madrid, Vienna, Berlin, Paris and Saint Petersburg from 1866 to 1873. His family lived at the Castello Sonnino in Quercianella, near Livorno. He retired from the diplomatic service in 1873.
In 1876, Sonnino travelled to Sicily with Leopoldo Franchetti to conduct a private investigation into the state of Sicilian society. In 1877, the two men published their research on Sicily in a substantial two-part report for the Italian Parliament. In the first part, Sonnino analysed the lives of the island's landless peasants. Leopoldo Franchetti's half of the report, Political and Administrative Conditions in Sicily, was an analysis of the Mafia in the 19th century that is still considered authoritative today. Franchetti would ultimately influence public opinion about the Mafia more than anyone else until Giovanni Falcone, over 100 years later. Political and Administrative Conditions in Sicily is the first convincing explanation of how the Mafia came to be.Dickie, Cosa Nostra, p. 43-54
In 1878, Sonnino and Franchetti started a newspaper, La Rassegna Settimanale, which changed from weekly economic reviews to daily political issues.
Early political career Sonnino was elected in the Italian Chamber of Deputies for the first time in the general elections in May 1880, from the constituency of San Casciano in Val di Pesa. He belonged to the chamber to September 1919 from the XIV to XXIV legislature and supported universal suffrage. Sidney Costantino Sonnino, Camera dei diputati, portale storico Sonnino soon became one of the leading opponents of the Liberal Left. As a strict constitutionalist, he favoured a strong government to resist the pressure of special interests, which made him a conservative liberal.Sarti, Italy: a reference guide from the Renaissance to the present, p. 567
In December 1893, he became Minister of Finance (December 1893 – June 1894) and Minister of the Treasury (December 1893 – March 1896) in the government of Francesco Crispi and tried to solve the Banca Romana scandal. Sonnino envisaged establishing a single bank of issue, but the main priority of his bank reform was to rapidly solve the financial problems of the Banca Romana and to cover up the scandal that involved the political class, rather than to design a new national banking system. The newly established Banca d'Italia was the result of a merger of three existing banks of issue (the Banca Nazionale and two banks from Tuscany). Regional interests were still strong, which caused the compromise of the plurality of note issuance with the Banco di Napoli and the Banco di Sicilia and the provision for tighter state control.Seton-Watson, Italy from liberalism to fascism, pp. 154–56Alfredo Gigliobianco and Claire Giordano, Economic Theory and Banking Regulation: The Italian Case (1861-1930s) , Quaderni di Storia Economica (Economic History Working Papers), Nr. 5, November 2010Pohl & Freitag, Handbook on the history of European banks, p. 564
As Minister of the Treasury, Sonnino restructured public finances, imposed new taxesIncreased Taxation In Italy; Chamber of Deputies Approves the Scheme Outlined by Sonnino, The New York Times, December 11, 1894 and cut public spending. The budget deficit was sharply reduced from 174 million lire in 1893–94 to 36 million in 1896–97.Clark, Modern Italy: 1871 to the present, p. 147 After the fall of the Crispi government as a result of the lost Battle of Adwa in March 1896, he served as the leader of the opposition conservatives against the liberal Giovanni Giolitti. In January 1897, Sonnino published an article, Torniamo allo Statuto (Let's go back to the Statute), in which he sounded the alarm about the threats that the clergy, the republicans and the socialists posed to liberalism. He called for the abolition of the parliamentary government and the return of the royal prerogative to appoint and to dismiss the prime minister without consulting parliament, which he considered to be the only possible way to avert the danger.Clark, Modern Italy: 1871 to the present, p. 140 In 1901, he founded a new major newspaper, Il Giornale d'Italia.
Opposition and Prime Minister In response to the social reforms presented by Prime Minister Giuseppe Zanardelli in November 1902,Proposed Reforms In Italy; Government Formulates Its Social Programme, The New York Times, November 15, 1902 Sonnino introduced a reform bill to alleviate poverty in southern Italy that provided for a reduction of the land tax in Sicily, Calabria and Sardinia; the facilitation of agricultural credit; the re-establishment of the system of a perpetual lease for smallholdings (emphyteusis) and the dissemination and the enhancement of agrarian contracts to combine the interests of farmers with those of the landowners.Notes of "The Observer" in Rome; Why Baron Sonnino's Reform is Purely a Charity Measure, The New York Times, November 23, 1902 Sonnino criticised the usual approach to solve the crisis through public works: "to construct railways where there is no trade is like giving a spoon to a man who has nothing to eat."Wretchedness In Italy; People Suffering Dire Distress – "The Only Thing Which Prospers," Says Sonnino, "is the Blood-Sucking Octopus of Usury", The New York Times, February 5, 1903
Sonnino's uncompromising severity towards others long proved to be an obstacle to forming his own government. Nevertheless, Sonnino served twice briefly as prime minister. On 8 February 1906, Sonnino formed his first government,New Italian Cabinet; Baron Sonnino Premier and Count Guicciardini Foreign Minister, The New York Times, February 9, 1906 which lasted only three months. On 18 May 1906,Italian Cabinet Resigns; Thursday's Vote Showed Unexpected Strength In the Opposition, The New York Times, May 19, 1906 after a mere 100 days, he was forced to resign. He proposed major changes to transform Southern Italy, which provoked opposition from the ruling groups. Land taxes were to be reduced by one third except for the largest landowners. He also proposed the establishment of provincial banks and subsidies to schools.Clark, Modern Italy: 1871 to the present, p. 160 His reforms provoked opposition from the ruling groups, and he was succeeded by Giovanni Giolitti.
On 11 December 1909, Sonnino formed his second government with a strong connotation to the centre-right, but it did not last much longer and fell on 21 March 1910.
First World War
After the July Crisis, Sonnino initially supported maintaining the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1914. He firmly believed that Italian self-interest entailed participation in the war, with its prospect of Italian territorial gains as a completion of Italian unification.Who's Who – Sidney Sonnino at firstworldwar.com However, after becoming Foreign Minister in November 1914 in the conservative government of Antonio Salandra and realising that it was unlikely to secure Austro-Hungarian agreement to concede territories to Italy, he sided with the Triple Entente of the United Kingdom, France and Russia, and he sanctioned the secret Treaty of London in April 1915 to fulfil Italian irredentist claims. Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary on 23 May 1915.MacMillan, Paris 1919, pp. 283–92 During the talks, Sonnino omitted to include the largely Italian-speaking Austrian city of Fiume (modern Rijeka, Croatia) into the lands that were to go to Italy, an omission that he later would regret in 1919.
Sonnino followed what he called a "Bismarckian" foreign policy under which all that mattered was sacro egoismo ("sacred egoism"). The term sacro egoismo as the guiding principle of his foreign policy was Sonnino's way of saying that the interests of the Italian state were to be pursued via a ruthless policy of realpolitik. Sonnino felt no great animosity towards the Austrian empire and no great love for the Allies, and only favoured intervening on the Allied side because the French, British and Russian diplomats he was talking with were willing to promise Italy more than the Austrian and German diplomats. Sonnino admitted in private that he would have favoured having Italy enter the war on the side of the Central Powers if only their diplomats had promised more than the Allied diplomats. The Australian historian R. J. B. Bosworth wrote it was not true that Italy entered the war in 1915 because of the Italian cabinet was "stumbling over the brink into the boiling cauldron of war", but rather as an act of cold calculation by Salandra and Sonnino to achieve what they viewed as rightful Italian national interests. Bosworth wrote that the only way that Italy's entry in the First World War can be seen as a mistake was the belief by Salandra and Sonnino that Italy would be able to swiftly defeat the Austrian empire as the both prime minister and the foreign minister believed that the war would be over by Christmas 1915.