Provenance and early years Tancredi Galimberti was born in
Cuneo, a midsized town and important regional capital in the hills south of
Turin. He was the eleventh of his parents' fourteen recorded children. His father, Bartolomeo Galimberti, was a
typographer by trade and something of a "self-made man" by temperament. Bartolomeo Galimberti grew prosperous and became
in 1861 the proprietor of "Sentinella delle Alpi". Family control of this politically pro-liberal and
openly pro-masonic newspaper would be helpful in his future political career. Galimberti received a classical college education from the
Scolopi ("Piarist") fathers in nearby
Savona and then progressed to university, studying first at
Rome where he became involved with
republican groups. He moved on to the
University of Turin, emerging in 1880 with a degree in
Jurisprudence. Galimberti even took a lead in defending Giolitti before the
High Court. Throughout his time as a member of
parliament, Galimberti prioritised the interests of
voters in
Cuneo. Many of his parliamentary interventions were in favour of public investment in infrastructure and other "public works and services" in the
Province of Cuneo, and of any other measures that might improve the living conditions of Cuneo residents. An enduring case in point was the
railway line linking Cuneo to Ventimiglia (and thereby to
Nice), along with a fine new
main station at Cuneo-Altipiano (the station building was subsequently replaced by a more bombastic edifice in 1937). It should nevertheless be stressed that his commitment to his local electors did nothing to diminish the extent and thoughtfulness of his parliamentary contributions on the major national issues of the day. While
Rudinì remained in power Galimberti remained broadly supportive of the government. It can be misleading to apply terms from Anglo-American party politics to Italian national politics during this period, but subject to the caveat that Italian politics were less rigidly structured according to party-political branding, it is not unreasonable to see Rudinì as a figure of the moderate right. The 1897 Italian grain harvest was a poor one at a time when world prices for American grain were surging because of the
Spanish–American War. Tariff reductions in January 1898 were widely seen as "too little too late": the Rudini government fell in response to a rapid crescendo in street disturbances not just in the south, but also in the north of Italy.
General Pelloux took over, with another new government in June 1898 following a violent police response in
Milan to
food riots, whereby several thousand were injured and approximately 80 people were killed. Pelloux restored order without recourse to an overt system of full-blown
martial law, helped by a better harvest, and demonstrating considerable political dexterity.
His government coalition included members from the moderate left, but it also contained other military men, and is widely judged by historians to have been a conservative and militarist "law and order" administration. In
parliament Tancredi Galimberti opposed the
Pelloux government, arguing powerfully that it was the paucity of "social legislation" that was feeding socialist propaganda in the cities and clerical hostility to the government across the country. At this stage he was still being identified in sources as one of the
"Giolittiani". In June 1903 Giolitti resigned from the government. He may have been impatient to take over from
Giuseppe Zanardelli as
President of the Council of Ministers As a leading member of the
"Giolittiani", Galimberti was evidently expected to follow Giolitti's example promptly. He did not do so. As matters turned out Giolitti, suffered the indignity of having to await the death of the incumbent before
the king invited him to form a new government.
Zanardelli died on 3 November 1903. At the
Ministry for Posts and Telecommunications Tancredi Galimberti was succeeded (albeit only briefly) by the poet-politician
Enrico Stelluti Scala. Galimberti would never again hold ministerial office. During this period, in 1902 Tancredi Galimberti married
Alice Schanzer (1873–1936). The bride was the daughter of a financier who was also a friend of
Giovanni Giolitti. Her family came from
Vienna, but the marriage formalities and ceremony took place in
Rome.
Troubles and career reversals In 1904, following a parliamentary investigation, the former minister
Nunzio Nasi was threatened with arrest on charges of embezzlement. Nasi reacted by escaping to France and later to England. Nasi's backers – of whom there were many – insisted that he was guilty of nothing more sinister than helping himself to some of the contents of the ministerial stationery cupboard, and that the whole thing was a political pantomime orchestrated by political rivals. Either way, for a time around 1906 and 1907 the affair assumed the proportions of a scandal comparable to the
Banca Romana scandal of 1893. As the matter snowballed, Galimberti found himself on the periphery of the "Nasi Affair", accused of offences relating to his period as Undersecretary for
Public Education. Nothing came of those accusations. One striking aspect of it that nevertheless stood out was the failure of
Giolitti to make any move in defence of his former parliamentary ally: the contrast with Galimberti's reaction over Giolitti's troubles with the
Banca Romana a dozen years earlier was starkly visible. Recurring political themes in
Italy during the first decade of the twentieth century on which Galimberti had conventionally
"liberal" views included
anticlericalism and
"Laïcité" (which involved enshrining separation between church and state in the country's constitution and laws). Galimberti's instincts drew him towards
secularist solutions. But anticlericalism could easily be presented by opponents as sympathy for socialism, which was still an anathema to mainstream politicians and many middle class electors. Ahead of the election of the
March 1909 general election he made a calculated effort to distance himself from Giolitti, presenting himself as an advocate of an informal alliance with
moderate catholic voters, necessary to dissuade the liberal-conservative voters in Cuneo from voting for the
emerging Socialist Party. As a personal electoral strategy it worked: it was almost certainly because he received the votes of large numbers of moderate and even moderately conservative catholic voters in the small towns and villages of the
Cuneo electoral district that, for the eighth general election in succession, Galimberti was once again elected to membership of the
Chamber of Deputies. Nevertheless, it cut across the shifting strategy of
Giolitti, a former and future head of government who appreciated "loyalty", and who had recently been trying to find a modus vivendi with at least the "more moderate" elements in the Socialist Party. Galimberti's electoral strategy in Cuneo was at best a distraction, cementing his status as a
"renegade Giolittiano". Confirmation, were it necessary, of the depth of the rupture between Galimberti and Giolitti came on 9 April 1911 when Giolitti sought a vote of confidence in
another new government. Alarmed, he said, by the parliamentary preponderance of Giolitti's broadly based centre-left coalition, he voted against the formal confidence motion in it. In 1912 he led parliamentary opposition to the government's innovative and controversial creation of a
nationalised life insurance monopoly.
Electoral defeat in 1913 A particularly important piece of legislation in 1912 was an electoral reform extending the right to vote to all men aged 30, without any restrictions such as the old literacy test. The right to vote was further extended to all men aged 21 and above whose income had reached a certain threshold, or who had completed elementary schooling successfully or who had undertaken military service. The number of men entitled to vote had been more than doubled, from 3½ million to more than 8 million. The
October 1913 General Election was the first to be conducted with the widened franchise. In
Cuneo this diluted the voting weight of the groups who had become Galimberti's core voters during the previous quarter century. He also faced, in
Marcello Soleri, a young energetic opponent whose liberal convictions and credentials created an overlap between the electoral appeal of the two men.
Marcello Soleri had already served briefly as Mayor of
Cuneo and was well known in the town. Ominously, Soleri was a loyal
Giolittiano. Loyalty was mutual. If he was to win the election for a ninth time Galimberti would need to retain the support of large numbers of local catholic voters with whom he had forged close links over many years. Without unforeseen interventions these would undoubtedly have continued to support him in a contest against
Soleri, whose extensive political and social network was comparatively secular and "modern" in character. Galimberti could also continue to rely on strong
masonic support, which was important Cuneo and the network of villages in the region. That might have been enough to secure electoral success for Galimberti had it not been for a direct intervention from
Giolittiano with
Count Gentiloni, a leader of
"Catholic Action", a recently launched and rapidly expanding group dedicated to reversing recent declines in the political influence of the church. In 1913 Gentiloni concluded a
pact with
Giovanni Giolitti which was intended to swing Catholic voters behind Giolitti's coalition in the forthcoming election. With the church under the direction of
a deeply conservative pope since 1903, this would strengthen any Giolitti government's hand in the intensifying struggle against a shared enemy:
Socialism. Despite the announcement of the pact, it would have been a step too far for
Count Gentiloni to persuade
the voters of Cuneo to back
Marcello Soleri in a straight contest against Tancredi Galimberti. That was not necessary for Galimberti to lose, however. It was only necessary that catholic voters should be persuaded to abstain, which they did in large numbers.
Opposition from the wilderness The loss of his parliamentary seat, and Giolitti's pivotal role in securing it, intensified the personal animosity between the two men. At the same time Galimberti drew closer to the socialism of
Gaetano Salvemini, becoming a regular contributor to
L'Unità, a weekly magazine which Salvemini had launched a couple of years earlier. When the great European powers went to
war in July/August 1914, Galimberti emerged as a
fervent interventionist. Although the Italian government held back from joining in with the war, correctly concluding that Italy was hopelessly unprepared for such a venture, on Galimberti's home turf in
Piedmont a deeply embedded awareness of the colonial legacy of
Austria-Hungary in northern Italy, meant that the idea entering the war on the opposite side to the Austrians was a popular one. Coincidentally it also placed Galimberti in opposition to
Giolitti's resolute rejection of interventionism. Despite the popularity, at least for a few years, of his interventionist advocacy, Galimberti was unable to gain the level of financial and political support that would have been necessary to return him to
the Chamber of Deputies. Among the more thoughtful of his once loyal catholic backers, many were indeed appalled by his enthusiasm for war. Nevertheless, in 1915, when Italy did indeed join the war, it was indeed in support of the French and therefore in breach of longstanding
Italian treaty commitments. The Italian government had found the
British territorial promises more enticing than anything the Germans had to offer. One result among many of Italian participation in the war was that the next general election did not take place till
the end of 1919, by which time the social, economic and political context was undergoing
significant transformation. This time Galimberti stood for election in
Cuneo as a candidate representing a locally based party of "autonomous independent farmers" (
Partito agrario autonomo indipendente), a semi-detached element in the
Italian Agrarian Party. In the post-war turbulence of the times, the party succeeded in sending a member to
the Chamber of Deputies, but they only attracted enough votes to provide for one member, and the name at the top of their party list for Cuneo was not that of Tancredi Galimberti.
Fascist Italy During the confused post-war years Galimberti appeared to settle his differences with Giolitti, but any rapprochement proved short-lived. He was associated briefly with some of the grandees of "liberalism", including
Antonio Salandra and
Francesco Saverio Nitti, before retreating into a period of political isolation. For the first time in more than thirty years, a
General election was held in 1921 in which Tancredi Galimberti was not a candidate.
After 1922 it was clear to many that for the foreseeable future, Italy's destiny lay with
the Fascists. Through
Cesare Maria De Vecchi Galimberti began to move towards
Fascism. He could see
Mussolini as a defender of order and of the state, while at the same time deploring the Fascist
deployment of violence and
casual assaults on the constitutional order as political tools. He used the "Sentinella delle Alpi" to condemn the
March on Rome at some length. Galimberti's failure to keep his reservations about the methods of Fascism to himself was undoubtedly an element in the disappointing omission of his name from the
National List (of parliamentary candidates) in the
1924 General Election. Consolation came five years later, however, when he accepted nomination to
The Senate. Tancredi Galimberti's final years were not spent as an activist
senator. He devoted his time, instead, to studying
the "Risorgimento", while supporting himself by means of his legal work. He died at
Cuneo on 1 August 1939. ==Personal==