CADORNA, RAFFAELE. - Italian general, b. in Milan on 9 Feb. 1815, d. in Turin on 6 Feb. 1897.
Of a deeply Catholic family, of a difficult temperament, of an authoritarian and soldierly mentality, averse to any accommodating understanding in civil affairs, he was not always fortunate in carrying out certain assignments in which the functions proper to his rank were joined by tasks of a more broadly administrative, social, political and even diplomatic nature, at particularly complex and delicate moments. This was seen in particular in the harsh repression of the deplorable and ill-considered Palermo riots of the autumn of 1866, which, through base anticlerical maneuvers, placed him in serious difficulties with the clergy, wrongly and indiscriminately accused of supporting the insurgents, and harshly struck in its most exemplary and distinguished men.
Nor did C.'s conduct during the brief campaign and his brief governorship of Rome in 1870 offer less grounds for criticism, which was neither minor nor less justified, from every quarter. Unequal to overcoming the many and grave difficulties of an order not only military but above all religious, political and diplomatic connected with those events, he was then and afterward the object of bitter polemics, culminating still twenty years later with the publication, deliberately delayed, of his volume on La liberazione di Roma (Turin 1889), an unfortunate book, both for the inaccuracies of fact it contains, and for its scant understanding of those events, and for the bitter spirit infused into it, and for its little sense of chivalry with regard to the opposing army, whereas this army, as C. himself had had to acknowledge in his time and as critical studies demonstrate, had fought strenuously with equal ideals and valor in Latium and along the Aurelian Walls.
Bibliography6 works
Paolo Dalla Torre