42 Facts About Sidney Sonnino

Sidney Sonnino was the Italian minister of Foreign Affairs during the First World War, representing Italy at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference.

Sidney Sonnino was raised as an Anglican by his family.

Sidney Sonnino's grandfather had emigrated from Livorno to Egypt, where he had built up an enormous fortune as a banker.

Sidney Sonnino's family lived at the Castello Sonnino in Quercianella, near Livorno.

In 1876, Sidney Sonnino travelled to Sicily with Leopoldo Franchetti to conduct a private investigation into the state of Sicilian society.

Sidney 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.

Sidney Sonnino belonged to the chamber to September 1919 from the XIV to XXIV legislature and supported universal suffrage.

Sidney Sonnino soon became one of the leading opponents of the Liberal Left.

Sidney 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.

In January 1897, Sidney Sonnino published an article, Torniamo allo Statuto, in which he sounded the alarm about the threats that the clergy, the republicans and the socialists posed to liberalism.

Sidney Sonnino 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.

On 8 February 1906, Sidney Sonnino formed his first government, which lasted only three months.

Sidney Sonnino proposed major changes to transform Southern Italy, which provoked opposition from the ruling groups.

Sidney Sonnino proposed the establishment of provincial banks and subsidies to schools.

Sidney Sonnino's reforms provoked opposition from the ruling groups, and he was succeeded by Giovanni Giolitti.

On 11 December 1909, Sidney 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.

Sidney Sonnino firmly believed that Italian self-interest entailed participation in the war, with its prospect of Italian territorial gains as a completion of Italian unification.

Sidney Sonnino followed what he called a "Bismarckian" foreign policy under which all that mattered was sacro egoismo.

Sidney 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.

Sidney 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.

Once the crisis caused by Capretto passed and it became clear that Italy was not going to be defeated after all, Sidney Sonnino performed a volte-face on the issue of Yugoslavia and reverted back to demanding all of the lands promised by the Treaty of London should go to Italy.

Sidney Sonnino was greatly upset at the Bolsheviks for publishing the Treaty of London, especially as the related diplomatic correspondence to the negotiations made him look petty and selfish as he demanded various parts of the Austrian and Ottoman empires as the reward for entering the war on the Allied side.

Sidney Sonnino sought to explain away the Treaty of London by arguing that he had demanded too much with the intention of bargaining away the gains made by the Treaty of London in exchange for territory elsewhere.

Sidney Sonnino objected strenuously to a Supreme Command with the control of all the Allied armies, arguing that it was humiliating that King Victor Emmanuel III who as King of Italy was the Supreme Commander of all the Italian forces should be subjected to the authority of a French Marshal.

Sidney Sonnino remained Foreign Minister in three consecutive governments and represented Italy at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference with Prime Minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando.

Sidney Sonnino was less welcoming as he wrote that he was "disgusted" when Wilson told him that he was sincere about having national self-determination to be the basis of the peace.

The Italians had broken the American diplomatic codes, and Sidney Sonnino was much offended when he learned that the State Department had debated the merits of having Wilson ask for Sidney Sonnino to be dropped from the Italian cabinet during his visit to Rome.

Orlando had favoured having Italy renounce its claims to Dalmatia and the Dodecanese archipelago in exchange for American support for Italy annexing the rest of the lands promised by the Treaty of London, but Sidney Sonnino chose to take the maximalist position of demanding all of the lands promised by the Treaty of London.

However, Sidney Sonnino went to Paris, promising in public that national self-determination was to be the basis of the post-world order without being opposed in private, a sleight-of-hand argument that Wilson at first took at face value.

Sidney Sonnino defended the literal application of the Treaty of London and opposed a policy of self-determination for the peoples in the former Austro-Hungarian territories.

King Victor Emmanuel III chose not to impose clear guidelines on the Italian delegation out of the fear that either Orlando or Sidney Sonnino might resign in protest, which would leave the king with the responsibility of overseeing the formation of a new government, a duty that king wished to avoid.

Sidney Sonnino often argued to Wilson that because Italy lost half-million killed in the war that felt the Allies had an obligation to fulfil all of the terms of the Treaty of London.

Orlando was prepared to renounce territorial claims for Dalmatia to annex Rijeka, a major seaport on the Adriatic Sea, but Sidney Sonnino was not prepared to give up Dalmatia.

Sidney Sonnino stubbornly maintained that Italy was entitled to a larger share of Asia Minor than it was promised under the Treaty of London, and received a promise that Italy would have a larger occupation zone in what is southwestern Turkey.

The belief that Sidney Sonnino was seeking to add the city of Smyrna where slightly less than one-half of the population was Greek-speaking, to the Italian occupation zone led directly to the Greek prime minister Eleftherios Venizelos ordering the Greek army to occupy Smyrna in May 1919, which set off the Greek-Turkish war.

Bosworth argued that given the antipathy of Wilson that Sidney Sonnino did in fact do fairly well at the Paris peace conference as he won for Italy the Austrian province of South Tyrol, the ethnically mixed city of Trieste and parts of Istria where Slovenes were in the majority.

Sidney Sonnino was nominated senator in October 1920 but did not actively participate.

Sidney Sonnino died suddenly on 24 November 1922 in Rome after he had suffered an apoplectic stroke.

Sidney Sonnino's main aims were to revive southern Italy economically and morally and to fight illiteracy.

The only Protestant leader in Italian politics, Sidney Sonnino was described as "decidedly British in manner and thought" and "the great puritan of the Chamber, the last uncorrupted man".

Sidney Sonnino was further portrayed as a very able diplomat who belonged to the "old" diplomacy with an undeserved prominence at the Paris Peace Conference as the typical imperialistic annexationist although the diplomatic rules had changed.