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The police and the urban ‘dangerous classes’: the culture and practice of public law and order in Milan after national unity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2015

SIMONA MORI
SIMONA MORI*
Affiliation:
Dipartimento di Lettere e Filosofia, Università degli studi di Bergamo, via Pignolo 123, 24121 Bergamo, Italy
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Abstract:

The city of Milan during the second half of the nineteenth century is the field of observation for this study, which focuses on urban policing and social control in a situation that ultimately caused problems for the whole country. The case of Milan, which has not received enough attention in this regard, is particularly interesting, given its status as the northern metropolis. It was the second largest population centre in Italy and the most important economic one, a leader in the late struggle for political independence and an opponent at that time of the centralizing policies of the nation-state.1

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Special section on policing and urban crisis
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Urban History , Volume 43 , Issue 2 , May 2016 , pp. 266 - 284
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

A city within a new state

The crisis that the Milanese police had to cope with during these decades was the result of two phenomena that worked together to upset law and order on the local level. The first was the emergency situation facing the newly born nation-state as it took its first steps, which deeply affected the way the scattered regions and local circumstances of the peninsula were integrated into a single Italian political entity. The new state was in danger from its beginning in 1861, as many different forces threatened to overthrow it.Footnote 2 These included the republicans and followers of Giuseppe Mazzini, who upheld the idea of a permanently mobilized people; the internationalists and anarchists, who not only wanted to abandon monarchy as a form of government, but aimed to destroy the state itself; the ‘ultras’, who defended the dethroned dynasties and were the source of the revived Austrian party during the 1866 war; and conservative Catholics, who supported the temporal power of the pope against the king of Italy, especially after Rome was conquered and annexed in 1870. Secondly, and most seriously, there was the impact of the political brigandage (brigantaggio) in Bourbon Italy. The government reacted to this by declaring a state of emergency in the region, thus allowing military intervention, and adopted exceptional policing measures to restore law and order.Footnote 3 Although the state of emergency only officially lasted from 1863 to 1865, the problem was not immediately resolved and periodically required new extraordinary regulations, since the population did not accept the conservative government policies. At the same time, workers’ friendly societies (società di mutuo soccorso) multiplied in northern Italy, from 443 in 1862 to 1,000 more by 1873 and 2,130 in 1878, leading to suspicions about their real purposes.Footnote 4 Socialist propaganda did as a matter of fact begin to target their approximately 400,000 members in the 1870s, considering them to be a receptive ground for the spread of revolutionary ideas.

This complex situation made the Italian government and the liberal elites feel as though they themselves, the nation as a whole and its political institutions were under siege. Its response was a growing pressure from the centre on the ‘periphery’, which was mostly expressed through the everyday activities of the local public security agencies. These organizations were constantly prompted to monitor activities in the major cities to control the ongoing potential sources of subversion. The regular reports that the Questuras (head police offices in provinces whose main cities consisted of at least 60,000 residents) were supposed to send to the Ministry of the Interior devoted a chapter to each threat, thus obliging police agents and commanding officers constantly to probe the community for fresh information about the government's political concerns.Footnote 5

The police were thus forced into a contradictory position. On the one hand, the switch to a constitutional, liberal state obliged them professionally to respect and uphold the laws and civil rights granted by the Statuto. Public opinion expected genuine change from them: no longer to be the persecutory and often corrupt instrument of despotic monarchies but to become the guardians of law and order in the service of the nation. Liberal criticism of the old police organizations had started in 1848 and never subsided, and police officers were well aware that they were on trial.Footnote 6 Soon after the first annexations in 1859, the Savoyard administration started reviewing the ranks of the public security forces to purge them of the least reputable agents and commanding officers. The operation varied in its impact according to the different areas: the turnover of personnel was highest in southern Italy, where the people had fiercely attacked the Bourbon police. It was lowest in Piedmont, low in Tuscany and Lombardy was situated in the middle.Footnote 7 As a whole, the Italian police force was almost completely rebuilt and many capable and loyal policemen, nicknamed ‘the fifty-niners’, replaced those dismissed. Nonetheless, this would not be enough to give the whole police body a new reputation.Footnote 8

On the other hand, there were demands on the police from the national government to exert stricter controls over local communities, even if at the expense of individual liberties. Extraordinary measures were used to assert government authority where needed and, as will be shown in more detail below, these measures were placed in the hands of the local public security officers themselves, although formally under the sanction of the local judge, who was generally co-operative or turned a blind eye.Footnote 9

Both of these phenomena are well known in general terms.Footnote 10 My purpose here is to highlight the opposing forces that weighed on Italian police operating in the national ‘peripheries’ on a daily basis, being at once required to reflect the new liberal regime and nonetheless to engage in repressive practices that were very reminiscent of the ones employed by the previous absolutist states.Footnote 11 Returning to the central theme, we could say that the police administration itself underwent a crisis, in the sense that it was caught in an insoluble contradiction generated by the fragile condition of the liberal state in Italy at the time. The problematic and contradictory transition of Italy to constitutional rule and its political identity as a nation allows us to speak in terms of a crisis, not in the original sense of a crucial event that decides a situation for the better or worse, but in the more recent meaning of a more long and painful process, set in motion by a discontinuity that allows no turning back and obliges new solutions to be found facing a totally unpredictable future.Footnote 12

Turning to the other element of the equation, the city was not as involved in political dissent as the government feared. In the first decades after unity, the idea of a political emergency was more a problem projected onto Milan by the central authority than one that the local community was actively concerned with. From a local perspective, the signs of an imminent crisis were of a different nature, as will soon be clear.

The urban context

In the spring of 1848, Milan experienced the overthrow of the Austrian regime and the establishment of a revolutionary government that lasted for a few months. The moderate party eventually prevailed, imposing its policy of stability on the whole region in the form of an annexation to the neighbouring House of Savoy. When that solution became final in 1859, local public opinion was not entirely in agreement. Both the reactionaries and the republicans, though in the minority, stayed active in the following years, causing the most trouble for the Milanese police in terms of the esprit public.Footnote 13 Political opposition to the new government in some cases overlapped with the discontent of urban workers due to the hardships brought about by the war between Piedmont and Austria in the mid-1860s.Footnote 14 The workers were organizing themselves at the time through the friendly societies mentioned above: the Lombardy metropolis held the highest concentration of these societies in the whole peninsula.Footnote 15

In the aftermath of Lombardy's annexation, the police were mainly concerned about the sentiments of Milan's urban masses, which in 1848 had shown unusual courage and political maturity. Those living in the inner-city neighbourhoods generally supported the national perspective, sometimes all too ready to demonstrate their patriotism or to make claims that relied on this principle.Footnote 16 While this was the attitude of the people living in the inner-city neighbourhoods, the lower classes in the peripheral areas of the city, according to one inspector's report, were ‘unceasingly devoted to work, cared little or nothing at all for politics and judged the conduct of the government according to the daily price of victuals’.Footnote 17

On the whole, police officials adopted a paternalistic manner with the working people of the metropolis, willing to gain their approval as a means of creating public acceptance of the new political order. As a result, their reports in the early 1860s, attentive to all potential threats, had a much less alarming tone than the orders coming from the upper levels of the government hierarchy.

By the second half of the decade, patriotism had started to decline and the ‘social question’ gained ground.Footnote 18 The attention of the police shifted to the risks of socialist propaganda, under the influence of the Paris Commune, while left-wing intellectuals became more aware of the living conditions of the city poor. In an effort to offer a counterbalance to these anxieties, the reports tended to emphasize the previous optimistic view of a sensible and hard-working people. Thus in 1874, one inspector would observe about one of the inner-city sezioni that

it should be agreed that the poor and the working classes are not as miserable as some journalists would have everyone believe, perhaps in order to promote their newspapers. As a matter of fact, while there hasn't been any increase in work, it has never been lacking, and workers of all kinds have been universally calm and high-spirited.Footnote 19

This positive attitude and the actual job opportunities enjoyed by Milanese citizens from every class, however unfortunate, made it difficult for republican and socialist propaganda to make inroads, as questore Amour pointed out in 1879, predicting that

the International will never take root in this intelligent and active city, as everybody here rejects any doctrines that, by undermining society as it is currently established, would lead to chaos. Here we prefer to think about industry and trade, mind our own affairs, and not worry about anything that's not concrete. Socialist theories do not even tempt those who have no property, since they too, as foolish as they are, realize that easy promises are impossible to fulfil.Footnote 20

The myth of Milan as the ‘moral capital’ evidently played a crucial role in the portrait of the city that the questori sent to the prefetto, the representative of the central government in the province.

As a matter of fact, there had been some testing encounters. In 1872, for example, groups of factory workers went on strike, appearing stronger and more numerous in comparison to the few incidents of the early 1860s.Footnote 21 Friendly societies were still multiplying and local authorities suspected them of supporting the strikers.Footnote 22 Until then, the Questura had dealt with the occasional workers’ protests with a soft touch, allowing the lower officers to play an arbitrating role and even justify the workers against the business owners.Footnote 23 But as political pressure from above increased, the strikes met with harsher reactions, with the military heavily involved in operations, as happened in 1872.Footnote 24

This response does not seem altogether proportionate to the actual state of the Milanese economy, which was still basically pre-industrial. Although it was the most advanced Italian city in many respects, Milan had not yet developed a fully modern character in the manner of the largest English, French or German centres.Footnote 25 The production network was made up for the most part of small and medium-sized workshops. Despite their number, they only absorbed a limited amount of labourers, while trade and domestic service still played a crucial role in the urban job market.Footnote 26

The local government was also quite conservative, with the nobility still exerting a great deal of influence inside the powerful consorteria (‘clique’), as the leading municipal faction was called by the press.Footnote 27 Cautious when it came to public spending, it hardly ever acknowledged the existence of a ‘social question’. Instead, it tended to rely solely on traditional charitable institutions to soothe tensions, which it saw as occasional flaws in a basically harmonious patriarchal community.

Changes in the attitude of the local elite only became evident at the beginning of the 1880s, when the number of large factories in the suburbs made an impact and modified the existing manufacturing network.Footnote 28 Significantly, in 1881 Milan hosted a national Exposition of Crafts and Industries that imitated on a smaller scale the ‘universal’ exhibitions of London, Paris, Vienna and Philadelphia.Footnote 29 It was a crucial event, where the city's elite proved willing to present a new, up-to-date identity based on values such as industry, progress, technology, private enterprise, self-government and respect for local traditions.Footnote 30 A series of cultural events and publishing projects focused on Milan celebrated the Exposition and highlighted its significance. Among the major contributions was ‘Milano industriale’, written by the well-known engineer and professor of mechanics Giuseppe Colombo, offering a thick catalogue of urban factories and workshops.Footnote 31 The 1881 Exposition marked a rise in consciousness of the Lombard metropolis to the issue of modernity, whereas heavy industry would not really take off until the turn of the century.

The ‘dangerous classes’ of Milan

Beneath this gloss, the city was facing the pressure of immigration from the countryside in numbers that would grow significantly over the decades.Footnote 32 The municipality (Comune) of Milan and the surrounding one of Corpi Santi together grew by 75 per cent in the first half of the nineteenth century, reaching a population of 232,000 domiciled inhabitants in 1859, plus 15,000 temporary residents. In 1871, the overall population amounted to 261,000, with a 7 per cent increase. In the 1870s, it would increase by another 23 per cent, and in the 1880s a further 32 per cent. In 1891, the Milanese population would reach 424,000, almost double that of the middle of the century.Footnote 33 From 1871 to 1890, Milan counted an average of 6,300 new residents every year, both from internal growth and from immigration, the great majority belonging to the second category.Footnote 34 Lombardy was the region with the highest rate of internal mobility at that time: in 1861, 265 inhabitants out of 1,000 were registered in the census in a different commune to the one they were born in, while the average for the kingdom was 150.Footnote 35 As for Milan, in 1901 only 43.4 per cent of the population were born in the city, while 22 per cent came from the smaller communes of the province, and the rest from other provinces.

This trend in immigration had a strong impact on the city in objective terms due to the high numbers. But it made an even stronger and more alarming impression on Milanese residents, as it upset an already precarious balance.Footnote 36 In the first place, not all immigrants from rural areas enjoyed stable employment. At least 15 per cent only had seasonal work, and many others had no employment at all, surviving in the end on charity or illegal activities.Footnote 37 Urbanization without a real growth in industrialization only aggravated the social discomfort.

In the second place, the rigid urban layout restricted the built-up areas from expanding into the countryside. As a result, the city's housing capacity did not grow in proportion to the immigration rate and only developed slowly, mainly by simply overusing the existing built housing inside the Spanish town walls. Therefore, many newcomers did not find any accommodation and most of them lived in overcrowded apartments.Footnote 38 In the late 1860s, the municipal authorities began to consider seriously the need to provide the city with adequate working-class quarters and a rational town plan, but it would be 20 years before they started putting those plans into practice.Footnote 39

Behind the problems generated by the shortages in work and housing was the stubborn cultural resistance of a quite traditional community that still saw itself as a whole. This attitude meant they tended to make a sharp distinction between insiders and outsiders and blame problems on external influences, seeing expulsion as the best remedy for all kinds of social problems.

As a result, they applied long-established social categories and remedies to the ‘immigrant problem’. The mass of people who could not earn their living were first classified under the traditional label of ‘I poveri’ (the poor), making the familiar distinction between the invalid and the able-bodied. The second ones were then negatively qualified as ‘idlers’ (oziosi) and associated with the ‘vagrants’ (vagabondi) as undeserving poor coming mostly from outside.Footnote 40 These social categories could then be managed according to the legal prescriptions that the Kingdom of Sardinia had inherited from the previous centuries and the Napoleonic system.Footnote 41 Under these laws, the municipality had to provide charitable assistance for the ‘true’ poor who could not work at all, and direct the able-bodied to local workhouses. Idleness, vagrancy and begging were prohibited under the criminal code of 1859. The public security laws of 1859 and 1865 ordered public security commanding officers and agents to police the cities and seize anyone who could either be charged with or simply suspected of the prohibited behaviours. The punishments applied by the judges ranged from ‘admonishment’ (ammonizione, a form of caution) to imprisonment or confinement in special workhouses, to house arrest (domicilio coatto) and, for foreigners, banishment.Footnote 42

A decade after national unification, a new sociological approach took hold in Italy under the influence of French positivism.Footnote 43 Interest in the topic was stimulated by the revolutionary events in France in 1871 that made the urban poor appear even more of a threat, especially in places such as Milan where this population continued to throng.Footnote 44 Many books were published in the 1870s that testified to this new attention to ‘social pathologies’.

Some Milanese works closely scanned the city for signs of metropolitan misery and moral decay so that they could highlight the negative side of progress.Footnote 45 Through a number of striking real-life case-studies, the works of Lodovico Corio and Paolo Valera drew attention to the conditions of the most wretched populations in the city, who lived in an underworld that was, both authors believed, deliberately and culpably ignored by Milan's upper classes.Footnote 46 The gap seemed to be all the wider by the time of the Exposition, with the deteriorating conditions of the urban proletariat on one side and the economic elite on the other celebrating the triumph of modernity. As for the remedies, while the socialist Valera suggested some sort of popular uprising, the moderate Corio appealed to the sense of responsibility of Milan's wealthier citizens, calling for an improvement of the city's welfare services, from night shelters for the homeless to schools for disadvantaged children.

Other works, mostly written by and for public security personnel, dealt with the topic of the ‘dangerous classes’ in order to suggest new strategies for social control. The best known were questore Giovanni Bolis’ La polizia e le classi pericolose della società, published in 1871; the works written a few years later by ispettor Paolo Locatelli, Sorveglianti e sorvegliati. Appunti di fisiologia sociale presi dal vero, and Miseria e beneficenza. Ricordi di un funzionario di pubblica sicurezza and Delegato di polizia Giuseppe Alongi's Polizia e delinquenza in Italia in the 1880s.Footnote 47

According to Bolis, who founded this genre in Italy, the ‘dangerous classes’

include all individuals who, though destitute of all means of survival, live in idleness and vagrancy at the expense of their fellow-citizens. Trampling on the supreme law of humanity, which is the law of work, they stand as a permanent danger to the social order, a danger which becomes all the more serious when idleness is combined with the perverted instincts that so easily prevail in those who surrender to them. For this reason, the poor and inactive classes, as Frégier rightly points out, were and always will be the best breeding ground for all kind of criminals, since misdemeanour becomes for them something of a basic necessity.Footnote 48

Since Bolis’ book was widely read by police officials, the last assertion is worthy of special attention, insofar as it states a direct connection, almost an identity, between the concepts of indigence, inactivity and criminal behaviour: where work fails, there comes indigence, and, as can be reasonably expected according to Frégier's syllogism, crime.

Locatelli's contribution is particularly valuable because it drew its material from an almost lifelong experience as a public security inspector in the city of Milan itself.Footnote 49 The author, writing in the same year that Corio's investigation was first published, declared a similar intention: ‘to draw the attention of the Government and the public to the dangerous classes of Society’, and at the same time, more specifically, ‘to public security, the state institution directly responsible for their surveillance, and consequently one of the most important, though perhaps the most neglected’.Footnote 50 Locatelli thus added the benefit of his everyday experience of Milan to the dossier opened up by Bolis on the relationship between social crisis and police activity. Maintaining an empirical approach, he gave a frank description of the difficulties encountered by the police at that time in managing the emerging social issues. While Bolis had mainly been concerned with the constitutional legitimation of the police force and spent many pages instructing policemen on how to behave to satisfy the demands of liberal public opinion, Locatelli pointed a finger at the political responsibility of the urban police for their limited performance.

In 1876, the anthropologist Cesare Lombroso published the first version of his major work, L’uomo delinquente, aiming to establish the study of criminal behaviour on strictly scientific foundations through an analysis that gave priority to biological causes.Footnote 51 Two factors prompted this new approach. One was political, since the national state-building process seemed to demand a rational strategy to prevent ‘born criminals’ from undermining the new order.Footnote 52 The other was the growing public alarm at what was perceived as an emergency situation with regard to crime, which needed some sort of quick and convincing response.Footnote 53

Lombroso's theories had a considerable impact on the debate about criminal behaviour for as long as the sociological trend lasted, which was until the end of the 1880s, when the new criminal code developed by the minister of justice Giuseppe Zanardelli marked the marginalization of sociological thought on the issue.Footnote 54 In the area of law and order, criminal anthropology supported repressive policies on a massive scale for the defence of society, giving them an impressive scientific basis in the complacent theory of the biological causes of crime. It also attempted to reduce the various kinds of criminal acts to one, since it considered all forms of lawbreaking as having the same basic nature. This authoritative opinion reinforced the existing tendency to simplify procedures and penalties by creating more general categories, leaving more to the discretion of the police officer and judge.Footnote 55 The trend had already generated all-encompassing labels such as ‘dangerous classes’ or ‘suspicious individuals’, widely used and abused in police matters in those decades. Following this line, very different unlawful acts that frequently occurred in cities, such as vagrancy, larceny and political violations, could ultimately be treated as all alike and as caused by the one kind of deviance.Footnote 56

Returning to the police literature, delegate Giuseppe Alongi, who was aligned with the Lombrosian mainstream, was pessimistic about the chances of the Italian police handling the spreading social disorder effectively. On the contrary, he considered it to be ‘powerless, unfit for either preventing or repressing crime’.Footnote 57 The reason for this was that

criminality in a nation, as positivist studies prove, is a complex, dynamic and protean phenomenon. It has a real army at its disposal…This army, with its strategy and its tactics, this illegal state within the legal one, with its traditions and its history, is to be fought by another strong and disciplined army, that wherever and however you may call it, will always be the police.Footnote 58

These were the kind of cultural attitudes circulating in Milan and the whole country in the three decades following unification, regarding the social unrest that had erupted in the major cities and the shortcomings of the police in dealing with it.

What did the statistics say about the crime rate? The first ones published on a national scale in the mid-1880s showed that Milan, like the rest of Italy, was suffering a higher level of crime than other European countries.Footnote 59 This unflattering comparison was in fact one of the causes of the experts’ alarm. The larger northern cities were not the main culprits in creating this situation; on the contrary, they occupied the lower levels of the national rankings, proving to be more orderly than less-developed Italian regions.Footnote 60

Since, in the urban environment, aggravated larceny (furto qualificato o aggravato) was the most common category of crime, its levels may give an idea of the general trend in this period. For an average population of 300,000, the trend in Milan fluctuated rather than rose between 1875 and 1884 for this category. There were over 3,000 charges of aggravated larceny (1 for every 100 residents) brought before the Milan Court of Appeal in 1875, which caused a great deal public alarm.Footnote 61 The number fell to 1,800 two years later, rose again to the previous level in 1880, stayed lower for the next five years and rose once more in the middle of the decade.Footnote 62 Other common crimes, such as larceny, resistance to authority and violent theft, followed a similar pattern, and this was also the case, with much lower figures of course, for murder.Footnote 63

In conclusion, in the decades that followed the birth of the Italian state neither the economy nor society underwent any sudden and dramatic changes that resulted in a noticeable and continuous growth in crime. And this is true even of Milan, in spite of its social and economic transformations and significant immigration intake. This did not prevent large segments of the community from feeling increasingly uneasy about law and order, nourishing the collective perception of a crisis that the police had somehow to come to terms with.

Milan's ‘crisis’ in the police reports (1861–89)

From the perspective of questore Restelli, the newly promoted local head of public security, Milan truly appeared to be ‘the big city’.Footnote 64 But despite its size, he insisted on presenting a picture of a ‘cosmos’, a coherent and comprehensible reality that was very different from the disturbing image the public was given at the same time by the Scapigliatura.Footnote 65 For him, the overall population still presented the features of a community organized into its various strata and professional groups: property owners, liberal professionals, merchants, manufacturers, tradesmen, retailers, workers, suburban farm-labourers. And as long as they were respectful and ‘industrious’, when not genuinely unable, the poor were part of the community as well, and the police, as already mentioned, tended to be protective of them, even when they expressed their discontent.

The different types of ‘undesirables’ were presented in detail, as the report form required, but they were placed outside the community circle. The police officials were well aware that their numbers were increasing, but for some time they assumed that the city would remain unaffected as long as it adhered to its traditionally industrious nature, its famous charitable institutions and the friendly societies that had recently developed at all levels of society.Footnote 66

The risk was considered to be coming from outside, according to the reports, which is to say from the immigrants who had left their original rural communities and did not share in the city's long-standing tradition of ‘moral health’. The farm day labourers who came to live in the suburbs were considered more dangerous than the inner urban workers, because they were potentially easier targets for subversive propaganda.Footnote 67 This seems to have been the precise issue concerning the dangerous classes at that point in time: when there was a disproportionate increase in the urban population due to immigrants attracted by job opportunities, the social order was at stake. As a result, Milanese police expressed their desire that the economy would develop ‘at a calm, steady, cautious pace’.Footnote 68 Crimes against property were connected to the cost of food supplies, the shortage of work and above all the extraordinary influx of people of ‘low rank’, who gathered in Milan from all over the kingdom, hoping to find a better job or else to appropriate the property of others and go unpunished.

In 1879, questore Amour wrote of the measures taken to prevent such crimes:

in the last six months there were 1,393 arrests for idleness, begging and vagrancy, 368 more than the previous six months. By means of such precautionary measures, the Questura brought long-sought criminals to justice, banished people from other municipalities from Milan, uncovered leads to other criminals and was able to report no small number of people to the judge for ‘admonishments’ as idlers, vagrants and suspicious individuals.Footnote 69

This record outlines quite clearly how the social tensions appeared to the police and what strategies were available to manage them, since the influx of rural immigration was not going to stop. At its heart lay a concept of citizenship that was not fully developed in national terms, because it was still based in the inhabitants’ overriding sense that they belonged to the local community. As an example, in 1865 the Ministry of the Interior asked all the mayors to contribute to a register of the idlers, vagrants, beggars, petty thieves and suspicious individuals in their district, sending a monthly list of those found in their municipality.Footnote 70 But they refused to co-operate with such an enterprise, which indicated their bias in favour of the local point of view and reluctance to think outside their communal perimeter. This example shows how slowly territorial identity opened up to a broader horizon, even at the level of senior officials and institutions. Public security laws themselves, moreover, allowed people to circulate freely within their own district, whereas for greater distances they were required to carry documents.Footnote 71

In the conservative mentality of the post-unification police force, the topic of social change and the resulting threat to society was therefore closely correlated with geographic mobility, and in the case of Milan immigration was considered to be the most serious problem. This opinion was certainly more in sympathy with the sentiments of the Milanese property owners and those in regular employment than with the national government's point of view.

Urban society in the 1880s presented some novelties. Beggars disappeared from the streets, due in part to the work of charitable institutions and even more so to repressive measures. They were taken in by special shelters, when unable to work, or arrested and handed over to the judicial system.Footnote 72 Criminality, on the other hand, had become organized, pulling off some ‘very bold coups’.Footnote 73 Since this sort of crime had been unusual before, it aroused fear among the citizens and concern among the police. They were aware that the situation required ‘energy, ability, cleverness and the unyielding force of the questore, the inspectors and their subordinates’. This was a major challenge for the department and for the entire police body, as Lombroso had warned not long before.Footnote 74

The urban area, moreover, became larger. Milan's surrounding suburbs had existed as a separate municipality until 1873, keeping part of their rural character: ‘the countryside moving to the town and yet not merging with it’.Footnote 75 By the 1880s, however, the suburbs developed more urban features and the two areas and their respective populations started to look and behave much more alike. As they continued to merge, the result was a much bigger population living in precarious conditions and exposed to the new dangers of city life. In fact, urban society on the whole appeared weaker and more prone to disorder to Milanese policemen in this decade.Footnote 76 Traditional ties loosened among the urban population, while the connection between poverty, moral corruption and crime became stronger. Broken families were found not only among the immigrant communities, but also at the very heart of Milan's working population. Delinquent minors, separated couples, illegitimate families, prostitutes and suicides increased. These problems, in the view of the public security officers, affected the entire city, because when individuals lost their ties with family and community, they become isolated and dangerous.

Since public and private charity had not proved to be solutions, the remedy had to be political, as one inspector frankly suggested:

This population…relies on government provisions to improve the nation's condition, by encouraging industry, reducing taxes on food staples, distributing the fiscal burden equally…It hopes that laws in favour of workers and farmers won't be further delayed, believing that, through these laws, the strikes and riots we hear are happening in other countries will be prevented.Footnote 77

With the electoral reform introduced by the Left in 1882, a portion of the working class gained the right to vote.Footnote 78 In his six-monthly reports for 1882 and 1883, questore Santagostino was anxious about the upcoming political elections, while worker unrest was worsening to the point that for the first time he had to insert a chapter on ‘Strikes’.Footnote 79 He also believed that the upper classes underestimated the risk of the workers using parliament to subvert the social order and the necessity of meeting some of their demands in advance. The report included a chapter dedicated to the condition of his own department, which needed reform to deal with the growing strain.

The urban police facing its task

The questori often expressed their appreciation of their subordinates and rarely shared in the general low opinion of the behaviour and demands of the lower police ranks.Footnote 80 The point they always stressed, as may be expected, was numbers: there were too few officers in their view to cover the various tasks imposed by complex city life.Footnote 81 All kinds of everyday or special surveillance operations took up most of the police's time, to the great detriment of more effective crime prevention strategies and investigations.

In the 1860s, with a population of approximately 250,000 and an urban area of 78 km2, Milan was patrolled by 150 police officers, one for every 1,650 inhabitants and just under two for each square kilometre.Footnote 82 By the end of the decade, the number of personnel had increased to 288 officers (1/900, 3.7/km2), but the actual number was always lower, by 20 per cent or more. In 1878, the force was down to 186 men. In the mid-1880s, facing the situation just outlined in the reports and a population of 370,000, there were about 280 officers (1/1,320).Footnote 83

Personnel shortages and inadequate salaries were the two main causes of the police crisis, together with the tensions noted above between the national government's demands and local expectations. In those decades, these problems were somehow overcome by ever more frequent repressive measures.Footnote 84 The reports made no secret of this, as has been mentioned. On the contrary, the heads of the Milanese police openly and almost proudly declared the increasing number of people under surveillance, of ‘admonishments’ and house arrests.Footnote 85 Over time, a full policing ‘cycle’ developed, that started with the simple suspicion of individuals who were considered to be inclined to unlawful acts, became more serious with the police asking for an ‘admonishment’ from the judge in the first instance, and ended with arrest and imprisonment when the ‘admonished’ person violated the strict terms of the caution.Footnote 86 The well-known inspector Vincenzo Paoletti considered this to be a useful method for exerting social control and preventing crime.Footnote 87

The sources do not give consistent information on the numbers of admonishments. As an indication, the questore reports an average of 40 a month for 1879.Footnote 88 While admonishments involved surveillance duties for the police, house arrest, a measure that could be applied to individuals who had already been punished in some way and who were still considered to be dangerous, spared the local police any trouble. The requests presented by the Questura to the judge doubled in the first half of the 1880s, moving from 10 to 20 per year, then to 40, and doubled again in the second half of the decade, reaching 76 cases in 1886.Footnote 89

Police inspectors usually emphasized the benefits of this penalty, which allowed them to remove the most undesirable individuals from their section and persuaded the rest of the population to behave, satisfying the conservatives’ expectations of law and order and ultimately lowering local crime rates.Footnote 90 The underlying attitude perfectly matched the low opinion of immigrants that circulated in the city: because the social threat came from outside, the primary reaction was to expel the ‘pathogenic element’, forcing it to reside elsewhere. For all these reasons, house arrest, together with a generous use of admonishments, made the police feel more confident in the face of peaks in crime levels, such as the ones recorded in 1879 and in 1887, especially since the judicial authorities granted most of the sanctions they were asked for.

The same measures, moreover, would eventually be used not only to repress idleness, vagrancy and petty crime, but also against individuals suspected for any reason at all and ‘political delinquents’, thus putting into practice the thesis mentioned above of the fundamental oneness of criminal violations. In so doing, the Milanese police provided the political control demanded by the state, but once again drew criticism from the liberal side of the community.

In the period shortly after unification, citizens felt relieved of the intolerable oppression of the Austrian police and gratefully welcomed the new model of public security introduced by the Savoyard constitutional monarchy.Footnote 91 By the seventies, this public trust in the police's commitment to the law had vanished.Footnote 92 Instead, its activities were constantly monitored by the major Milanese newspaper Il Secolo, which provided a remarkable daily chronicle of local police actions – the only one in the city, as it happened, that did not rely entirely on the bulletin issued by the Questura.Footnote 93 Given its radical leanings, it criticized the head office for its zeal in monitoring and persecuting political dissidents, and its complete neglect of disorder in the streets.Footnote 94 In particular, it deplored the fact that the municipality had to use its small armed forces to make up for the shortcomings of the national police and expected these officers to spend more time on the streets enforcing the laws against begging. This crime, as a matter of fact, annoyed the city's progressive vanguard as much as the upper-class municipal authorities.

The same topic was the focus of a well-known pamphlet published in 1882 by Giorio, the pseudonym of a former policeman who had served for a long time in Milan's Questura.Footnote 95 This text harshly criticized the Milanese police from various angles, stressing in particular, once again, the fact that, under the pressure of national government demands, it was mainly concerned with political issues, putting all its energy into controlling the city's citizens instead of protecting their life and property. In the end, then, the post-unification public security service turned out to be not so different from the Austrian police, except that the latter had never pretended to be anything other than what it was. On the contrary, the police force of that time was forced to compensate for its shortcomings and create the impression of effective social control by excessive use of repressive measures, to the detriment of the most unfortunate, who were made criminals by police prosecution.Footnote 96

Giorio's account created a scandal, and although the police authorities tried to defend themselves by suing the author for libel, it was not easy to change the mind of local public opinion. ‘Unfortunately’, an inspector reported in 1883, ‘the common belief is that there is corruption in the PS [public security] department.’Footnote 97 In the end, Antonio Santagostino, the head of the Milanese police from 1882 to 1889, succeeded in the enormous task of improving his department's overall reputation. Local sources agreed that he was, as Inspector Paoletti put it, ‘the most honest, capable, active and clever PS chief that Milan, and perhaps Italy, has ever had’.Footnote 98

But the police could not depend only on the personal qualities of its temporary head to overcome its deadlock.Footnote 99 As Milanese journalist Francesco Giarelli pointed out, ‘politically, these departments are exactly as the government wants them to be and, technically, they will never improve unless they are organized anew on totally modern principles’.Footnote 100 The first substantial police reform would actually arrive at the beginning of the new century under Prime Minister Giolitti, after King Umberto I was assassinated by an anarchist in Monza. It brought about an increase in numbers – Milan's officers, in principle, were doubled to 600 – and introduced new tools and qualified training opportunities for police personnel, thanks to the national police school founded in 1902.Footnote 101 The salaries, however, were still low, particularly for subaltern agents, and the overall accountability of the public security administration also remained low, as some years later Emilio Saracini would confirm, by stating that during the previous 50 years the Italian police had been ‘in a permanent state of crisis’.Footnote 102

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63 Cases of theft brought before the Milan Court of Appeal: 1959, 2366, 2062, 1843, 1885, 1798 (years 1779–84). Resistance to authority: 443, 443, 884, 1304, 854, 1282, 898, 473, 589, 498 (years 1775–84). Robbery: 94, 190, 254, 206, 198, 129, 124, 107, 109, 94 (years 1775–84). Murder: 53, 45, 42, 92, 78, 89, 61, 74, 63, 53 (years 1775–84). Direzione Generale di Statistica, Movimento della delinquenza.

64 Questore Restellli, six-monthly report, 5 Jan. 1880, in ASMi, QG, f. 105. On this image, see G. Consonni and G. Tonon, ‘La terra degli ossimori’, in Bigazzi and Meriggi (eds.), Storia d’Italia. La Lombardia, 114.

65 The Scapigliatura was the Milanese ‘boheme’, an artistic and literary movement that reacted to the prevailing bourgeois culture in the urban contests by the second half of the nineteenth century.

66 Report on City Section IV, 1 Jan. 1884 (ASMi, QG, f. 106).

67 Report on Section VIII, 22 Jan. 1885 (ASMi, QG. f. 106).

68 Ibid.

69 Questore Amour, 1 Jul. 1879 (ASMi, QG, f. 105).

70 Questore Cossa, circular letter, 28 Jan. 1866 (ASMi, QG, f. 83), referring to the Public Security Law Marzo 20, 1865.

71 Public security law, 20 Mar. 1865, n. 2248.

72 Reports on Section VIII, 20 Dec. 1883 (Inspector Vincenzo Paoletti), and on Section V, 12 Jan. 1884 (ASMi, QG, f. 106).

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76 Inspector Formenti on Section II, 12 Jun. 1883; report on Section V, 12 Jan. 1884 (ASMi, QG, f. 106).

77 Ibid.

78 By 1882, most male workers living in the cities had the right to vote (Peruta, F. Della, Società e classi popolari nell’Italia dell’Ottocento (Milan, 2005), 190Google Scholar).

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81 Cf. for example Amour, 1 Jul. 1879; Santagostino, 1 Dec. 1886, and 31 Dec. 1887 (ASMi, QG, f. 106). For a wider view of Italian police organization in the second half of the nineteenth century, see Davis, Conflict and Control, 244–69; S.C. Hughes, Crime, Disorder and the Risorgimento: The Politics of Policing in Bologna (Cambridge, 1994); Tosatti, G., ‘La repressione del dissenso politico tra l’età liberale e il fascismo. L’organizzazione della polizia’, Studi Storici, 1 (1997), 217–55Google Scholar; Bonino, La polizia italiana.

82 See dossier ‘Guardie’, in ASMi, QG, f. 92, particularly report 16 Jan. 1876.

83 Santagostino, 1 Jul. 1883, in ASMi, QG, f. 106.

84 As was the general case in Italy. Cf. Davis, Conflict and Control, 219, 247.

85 These measures were first introduced as exceptional ones and were supposed to prevent crime, but their massive use and the effects they had on the individuals they applied to made them very similar to real punishments. Cf. D. Petrini, ‘Il sistema di prevenzione penale tra controllo sociale ed emarginazione’, in Violante (ed.), Storia d’Italia. Annali 12. La criminalità, 891 ss. (901), and Sbriccoli, ‘Caratteri originari’, 487–9; specifically Fozzi, D., Tra prevenzione e repressione. Il domicilio coatto nell’Italia liberale (Rome, 2011)Google Scholar.

86 Public security law, 20 Mar. 1865, art. 106. About this policy Lacchè, L., La giustizia per i galantuomini: ordine e libertà nell’Italia liberale: il dibattito sul carcere preventivo. 1865–1913 (Milan, 1990), 140–6Google Scholar.

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88 Six-monthly report to the prefect, 5 Jan. 1880, in ASMi, QG, f. 105.

89 Cf. the reports in ASMi, QG, f. 106.

90 Locatelli, 1 Jan. 1866; report 28 Jun. 1874 (ASMi, QG, f. 105); cited report 1 Jan. 1883.

91 Report on Section V, 27 Dec. 1861 (ASMi, QG, f. 105).

92 Cf. the chapter by Valera, Milano sconosciuta, 75, with a portrait of the well-known ‘appuntato’ (policeman) Mazza (‘el scior Dondina’): efficient, but brutal in chasing the city's petty criminals.

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95 Giorio, Ricordi di questura, 83. On the same topic, see also Marius, La pubblica sicurezza in Italia, 135, and in recent times, Berselli, ‘Amministrazione’, 177.

96 Giorio, Ricordi di questura, 85. On the negative effects of ammonizione and domicilio coatto, cf. also Lombroso, Sull’incremento del delitto, 64.

97 Report on Section II, 19 Jun. 1883; report on Section III, 20 Jun. 1883; questore's report, 1 Jul. 1883 (ASMi, QG, f. 106).

98 Cited report 20 Dec. 1883; also Paoletti, Da Brundisio alle Alpi, 56 ss. On the Milanese questori and Santagostino in particular, see Giarelli, Vent’anni di giornalismo, 246–52.

99 In fact by the end of the 1880s, the condition of the Milanese police was once again crucial (Davis, Conflict and Control, 267).

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