CADORNA, RAFFAELE. – Italian general, born in Milan on 9 February 1815, died in Turin on 6 February 1897.
Of a deeply Catholic family, difficult in temperament, authoritarian and military in outlook, and lacking any accommodating understanding in civil affairs, he was not always successful in bringing certain assignments to completion, in which duties proper to his rank were combined with broader administrative, social, political, and even diplomatic responsibilities, at particularly complex and delicate moments. This was especially evident in the harsh repression of the lamentable and ill-considered Palermo uprisings in the autumn of 1866, which, as a result of low anticlerical manoeuvres, placed him in serious difficulties with the clergy, wrongly accused indiscriminately of supporting the rebels, and harshly struck at in the persons of its most exemplary and distinguished members.
Nor did C.’s conduct during the brief campaign and his brief government of Rome in 1870 expose him to fewer or less justified criticisms from all sides. Unable to overcome the many grave difficulties connected with those events, not only military but above all religious, political, and diplomatic, he was then and later the object of bitter controversies, which culminated once more, a full twenty years later, with the publication, deliberately delayed, of his volume on La liberazione di Roma (Turin 1889). The book is unsuccessful, both because of the inaccuracies in its factual data, because of its scant understanding of those events, because of the acrid spirit infused into it, and because of its limited chivalrous regard for the opposing army, whereas that army, as C. himself had been obliged to acknowledge at the time and as critical studies demonstrate, had fought with equal idealism and valour in Lazio and along the Aurelian Walls.