The Italian state’s discovery of the mafia

Abstract

The new Italian state first encountered criminal entities in the mafia mould in circumstances characterised by bitter political struggle between the government, its democratic opposition and pro-Bourbon forces. The charge of being ‘ mafiosi ’ was therefore often used as a weapon. However, the mafia was not an invention of the Right. By examining the attempts to counter a phenomenon that seemed uncontrollable and impervious to the new order, and against which the state realised that it lacked the appropriate means to act, we can discern some of the constituent elements of the ‘industry of violence’, a phrase that Leopoldo Franchetti was to coin only a few years later. This article analyses the early manifestations of a criminal force during the uprisings in early nineteenth-century Sicily, in order to then examine its impact on the institutions of the unified Italian state up to the mid-1870s. Those now in power were discovering unfamiliar situations, with characters who were confident about using violence, and a worrying openness of civil society to its unrestrained use. The authorities responsible for the protection of life and property were ill prepared for confronting this alien associative phenomenon, and were constantly complaining about their isolation and the lack of co-operation from the local population; in the end, they resorted to reaching agreements with organised crime, further damaging trust in the institutions of the newly unified state.