64 Facts About Francesco Crispi

Francesco Crispi was an Italian patriot and statesman.

Francesco Crispi was among the main protagonists of the Risorgimento, a close friend and supporter of Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi, and one of the architects of Italian unification in 1860.

Francesco Crispi was internationally famous and often mentioned along with world statesmen such as Otto von Bismarck, William Ewart Gladstone, and Lord Salisbury.

Originally an Italian patriot and democrat liberal during his first term in office, Francesco Crispi went on to become a bellicose authoritarian prime minister and an ally and admirer of Bismarck in his second.

Francesco Crispi was indefatigable in stirring up hostility toward France.

Francesco Crispi's grandfather was an Arbereshe Orthodox priest; the parish priests were married men, and Arbereshe was the family language down to the lifetime of the young Crispi.

Francesco Crispi himself was born in Ribera, Sicily, to Tommaso Francesco Crispi, a grain merchant and Giuseppa Genova from Ribera; he was baptised as a Greek Catholic.

Francesco Crispi attended the seminary until 1834 or 1835, when his father, after becoming mayor of Ribera, encountered major difficulties in health and finances.

Between 1838 and 1839, Francesco Crispi founded his own newspaper, L'Oreteo, from the name of the Sicilian river Oreto.

In 1842 Francesco Crispi wrote about the necessity to educate poor people, about the huge damage caused by the excessive wealth of the Catholic Church and regarding the need for all citizens, including women, to be equal before the law.

In 1845 Francesco Crispi took up a judgeship in Naples, where he distinguished himself for his liberal and revolutionary ideas.

On 20 December 1847, Francesco Crispi was sent to Palermo along with Salvatore Castiglia, a diplomat and patriot, to prepare the revolution against the Bourbon monarchy and King Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies.

Francesco Crispi was appointed a member of the provisional Sicilian Parliament and responsible for the Defence Committee; during his tenure, he supported the separatist movement that wanted to break ties with Naples.

Unlike many, Francesco Crispi was not granted amnesty and was forced to flee the country.

In 1853 Francesco Crispi was implicated in the Mazzini conspiracy and was arrested by the Piedmontese policy and sent to Malta.

Francesco Crispi tended his wounds and returned to his lodgings, where police found him the next day.

In June 1859 Francesco Crispi returned to Italy after publishing a letter repudiating the aggrandizement of Piedmont in the Italian unification.

Francesco Crispi proclaimed himself a republican and a partisan of national unity.

Francesco Crispi travelled around Italy under various disguises and with counterfeit passports.

Francesco Crispi helped persuade Giuseppe Garibaldi to sail with his Expedition of the Thousand, which disembarked on Sicily on 11 May 1860.

Francesco Crispi utilized his political influence to bolster the Italian unification project.

Francesco Crispi was replaced by the more malleable Agostino Depretis, who gained Garibaldi's trust and was appointed as pro-dictator.

Pallavicino immediately stated that Francesco Crispi was unable and inappropriate to hold the office of Secretary of State.

Francesco Crispi was elected as a member of the Historical Left, in the constituency of Castelvetrano; he would retain his seat in all successive legislatures until the end of his life.

Francesco Crispi acquired the reputation of being the most aggressive and most impetuous member of his parliamentary group.

In 1877 during the Great Eastern Crisis Francesco Crispi was offered Albania as possible compensation by Bismarck and the British Earl of Derby if Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia he refused and preferred the Italian Alpine regions under Austro-Hungarian rule.

Francesco Crispi, helped by Mancini and Cardinal Pecci, persuaded the Sacred College to hold the conclave in Rome, establishing the legitimacy of the capital.

Francesco Crispi was nevertheless compelled to resign office after only three months in March 1878, bringing down the whole government with him.

For nine years Francesco Crispi remained politically under a cloud, leading the "progressive" opposition.

In 1881 Francesco Crispi was among the main supporters of the universal male suffrage, which was approved by the government of Agostino Depretis.

Francesco Crispi, who was a strong supporter of two-party system, strongly opposed it and founded a progressive and radical parliamentary group called Dissident Left.

On 29 July 1887, Francesco Crispi was sworn in as the new prime minister.

Francesco Crispi immediately distinguished himself, for being a reformist leader, but his political style provoked many protests from his opponents, who accused him of being an authoritarian Prime Minister and a strongman.

Francesco Crispi sought popular support for the state with a programme of orderly development at home and expansion abroad.

One of the most important acts was the reform regarding the central administration of the State, with which Francesco Crispi strengthened the role of the Prime Minister.

In 1889 Francesco Crispi's government promoted a reform of the magistracy and promulgated a new penal code, which unified penal legislation in Italy, abolished the death sentence and recognised the right to strike.

Francesco Crispi was the first politician to have implemented the role of the Italian lay state in the fields of charity and solidarity which till then had been traditionally kept a monopoly of private citizens and organizations, mainly of the Italian Roman Catholic Church that strongly adversed his reforms.

Francesco Crispi saw France as the permanent enemy and he counted heavily on British support.

Britain was on good terms with France and refused to help, leaving Francesco Crispi perplexed and ultimately disillusioned about what he had felt was a special friendship between the two countries.

Francesco Crispi turned to imperialism in Africa, especially against the independent kingdom of Ethiopia, and the Ottoman province of Tripolitania.

Francesco Crispi was a patriot and an Italian nationalist, and his desire to make Italy a colonial power led to conflicts with France, which rejected Italian claims to Tunisia and opposed Italian expansion elsewhere in Africa.

In 1859, Francesco Crispi wrote a union between Greeks and Albanians would make Italy and Greece become closer.

Balkan geopolitics and security concerns drove Italy to seek great power status in the Adriatic sea and Francesco Crispi viewed a future autonomous Albania within the Ottoman Empire, or an independent one, as a safeguarded for Italian interests.

Francesco Crispi believed the Albanians' interests against Pan-Slavism and Austro-Hungarian expansion were best served through a Greco-Albanian union and he founded in Rome a philhellenic committee that worked toward that goal.

Francesco Crispi, after becoming prime minister, stimulated and intensified ethnocultural relations between Italo-Albanians and Albanians of the Balkans, moves which were considered as extending Italian influence over Albanians by Austria-Hungary.

The government faced many difficulties since the beginning and in May 1892, Giolitti, who became the new Left leader after Francesco Crispi's resignation, decided not to support it anymore.

On 3 January 1894, Francesco Crispi declared a state of siege throughout Sicily.

Francesco Crispi had previously been strongly anticlerical but had become convinced of the need for rapprochement with the Papacy.

On 25 June 1895, Francesco Crispi refused a request to allow a parliamentary inquiry into his role in the Banca Romana scandal, saying as a prime minister he felt he was "invulnerable" because he had "served Italy for 53 years".

King Umberto I commented that "Francesco Crispi wants to occupy everywhere, even China and Japan".

Francesco Crispi was strongly supported by the king, who alluding to his personal dislike of him, stated "Francesco Crispi is a pig, but a necessary pig", who despite his corruption, had to stay in power for "the national interest, which is the only thing that matters".

Francesco Crispi took a very belligerent line on foreign policy as he, during a three-month period in 1895, talked quite openly about attacking France, sent a naval squadron to the eastern Mediterranean to prepare for a possible war with the Ottoman Empire in order to seize Albania, wanted to send an expeditionary force to seize a city in China, and planned to send a force to South Africa to forcibly mediate the dispute between Great Britain and the Transvaal Republic.

Francesco Crispi told General Baratieri that if he needed more money to just impose more taxes on the Ethiopians and "copy Napoleon who made war with the money of those he conquered".

Francesco Crispi did not understand that Ethiopia was a poor country and the money necessary to sustain a modern army could not possibly be raised from taxing the Ethiopians, causing major problems for the Italian Army in Ethiopia.

Francesco Crispi announced after Adwa that he planned to continue the war against the "barbarians" of Ethiopia, and would be sending more troops to the Horn of Africa, which prompted a public backlash against the unpopular war.

Francesco Crispi resigned his seat in parliament, but was re-elected by an overwhelming majority in April 1898 by his Palermo constituents.

Francesco Crispi was a man of enormous energy but with a violent temper.

Francesco Crispi was born as a firebrand and died as a firefighter.

Francesco Crispi was saluted by Giuseppe Verdi as 'the great patriot'.

Francesco Crispi was a more scrupulous statesman than Cavour, a more realistic conspirator than Mazzini, and a more astute figure than Garibaldi.

Francesco Crispi's death resulted in lengthier obituaries in Europe's press than for any Italian politician since Cavour.

Francesco Crispi is often seen as a precursor of Benito Mussolini.

Mussolini portrayed the Liberal era as a perversion of the idealist vision of Mazzini and Garibaldi, and Francesco Crispi was the lone prime minister of the Liberal era whom Il Duce depicted in favourable terms.

Francesco Crispi's reputation was a victim of Italian Fascism, which awarded him an abundance of street names, most erased after 1945.