Voluntary Societies and Urban Elites in Nineteenth-Century Naples

The article deals with voluntary societies in Naples during the 19th century. The aim of my research on voluntary societies has been to explain the cultural and political shift from a corporate aristocratic society to an individualistic and bourgeois one. Voluntary societies in Italy, as in other countries, played a very important role in the process of renovation of the language of stratification. By working as a training ground for democracy and as centres of circulation of news and information, they became crucial institutions in the emergence of both public opinion and a public sphere. In the study of Naples I have reconstructed the entire network of formal associations in the period starting with the restoration and ending with the beginning of the first world war. My research dealt essentially with clubs, sports, cultural, reading and philanthropic societies and with all those societies which the city elites set up and promoted and in which they used to meet. The first thing that emerges from my study is a different chronology between Naples and other important cities of Europe and Northern Italy. The years between 1815 and 1860, except the short season of the 30s, were characterised by a complete lack of voluntary and bourgeois societies. The picture changed completely after the unification. From 1860 onwards the increase in the number of voluntary associations was constant. The 60s witnessed the spontaneous constitution of the early elite clubs and early working-class and employees mutual aid societies. The 70s and the 80s saw a “boom” in mutual aid societies and the distribution of the elite pattern of social life among groups of middle and petite bourgeoisie. The 80s and 90s confirm the increase in the participation in the life and activities of the voluntary associations: people belonging to different social strata are noww concerned with voluntary societies of the most varied kinds. During the first half of the century only people belonging to the nobility could join the existing associations which were not founded by private individuals, as they were all organised by the state. Birth and blood were the two criteria upon which the system was based. The state promoted, organised, controlled, managed and financed the leisure activities, the cultural debate and the scientific experimentation. The Bourbons tried to prevent the foundation of freely organised voluntary associations both in the capital and in the provinces, offering the local elite a range of associations submitted to their control. They were societies with written rules, members, subscriptions and entrance fees etc., but they were not voluntary. People were not free to join and leave. People did not join because of a programme or to support a particular objective. Membership was limited and admission was decided after many complicated bureaucratic stages. People joined because they belonged to a specific social group, because they were selected by the king, because they were co-opted. The participation in this kind of society was a sort of reward they were granted; a means of confirming loyalty to the king and to the Bourbon monarchy as an institution. It was a way to increase the links between the monarchy and the elite, but it was, above all, a concrete tool to point out and to reaffirm the boundaries of this elite. After Italian Unification the Neapolitan elite’s associative life changed completely. The piedmontese constitution was granted to the entire kingdom. It introduced the principle of associative liberty. It also introduced, even if for a very small minority, the right to vote and to choose the parliamentary and municipal representatives. These two elements provoked an immediate excitement in the upper social strata, especially in the liberal bourgeoisie and aristocracy, which participate in the Risorgimento. Naples registered an abrupt and fast increase in the number of associations. All these societies were voluntary. They were all based on the principle of freedom of joining and leaving. But the most important innovation of the period was the fact that the main character of the associative life was no longer the state but the individual. The state continued of course to supervise and exercise a strict control in particular on political associations, but it stopped to organise societies, clubs and academies. At the end of the 60s the city elite was no longer represented by only one association as during the restoration. Now it was split up into different groups and into different associations. The boom of voluntary societies of the 60s was mainly a bourgeois phenomenon, even though the aristocracy still played a very important role. In general the novelty of the 60s was the end of the segregation of classes, and the beginning of the segregation of sexes. The emergence of a public sphere in which the bourgeoisie had a very visible and active role involved the exclusion of women. The real change in associative life took place in the last two decades of nineteenth century. Club life was to become a mass phenomenon in Naples as in Milan and in other Italian cities. In the 80s and in the 90s numbers of mutual aid societies, electoral committees, recreational clubs, occupational societies were created. The implementation of the new electoral law greatly contributed to this increase. Naples had plenty of groups, which assembled to found societies with the most different programmes and objectives, which wrote and printed statutes, which were engaged in frantic activities. The clubs and societies of the new era, apparently, did not attach too much importance to the profession, to the wealth, and to the status of its members. Formally the associations of the postunification period had given up the aristocratic and exclusive orientation of the early nineteenth-century societies, but the chief system of admission in the most elitist club remained the co-option. Entrance to these clubs was no longer regulated by birth and blood but by a mixture of “qualities” such as political affinity, common economic interests, kinship, and even neighbourhood. Despite the number of associations, actually a very restricted group of Neapolitan population was affected by the phenomenon. Large part of the population remained cut out, while some social areas maintained a very marginal position. In Naples, as in other Italian cities, especially in the two first decades after the unification, the elite voluntary societies worked in many respects as interest groups in a period characterised by the lack of organised political parties and by a very restricted franchise. They were probably one of the places in which candidates for the general and municipal elections were informally selected and where electoral campaign were organized. They were also a good voting reservoir and a crucial place to exchange information and favours. They were one of the places in which the new Neapolitan and Italian ruling class took shape and learnt the language of politics. At the beginning of the XXth century the elitist phase of associations could be considered completely closed. Elite clubs and societies continued to survive but its role had dried up. The associative activity continued to be very frantic, but at the mean time very frail and slender. The political and public space began to be occupied by the new political mass parties which substituted the various associations and committees giving voice to larger and more varied social groups.