Amintore Fanfani

Biography

The first article of the Italian Constitution, “Italy is a democratic republic, founded on labour”, was proposed in 1946 by a member of the Constituent Assembly for the Christian Democracy party, Amintore Fanfani. He was thirty-eight, and before politics he had worked on economic history.

He was born in Pieve Santo Stefano, in the province of Arezzo in Tuscany, on 6 February 1908 (by some accounts, 3 February). The first of nine children of Giuseppe Fanfani, a notary, and Anita Leo, a housewife, he grew up in a family of practising Catholics. He was named after Amintore Galli, the composer of the music of the socialist “Workers’ Hymn”. From the age of twelve he belonged to Catholic Action, the lay organisation of the Catholic Church, attended the scientific lyceum in Arezzo, and in 1926 entered the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, where he studied political, economic and social sciences. He graduated in 1930. From 1932 he worked there as an assistant and lecturer, and in 1936 he took over the chair of economic history. His book “Catholicism, Protestantism and Capitalism” (1934, in English 1935) argued with Max Weber: Fanfani held that the capitalist way of life had formed in the Italian trading cities more than a century before the Reformation, and that Luther and Calvin, if anything, hindered it. In Milan he grew close to Giuseppe Dossetti and Giorgio La Pira, with whom he discussed the place of Catholics in society. In the same years he supported corporatism under Mussolini’s regime, was a member of the National Fascist Party, taught at the School of Fascist Mysticism and wrote for its journal. In 1938 his name was among those who signed the “Manifesto of Race”, and in texts of the late 1930s he made racist statements. Later he did not hide this past and admitted that he had been wrong.

After Italy’s surrender on 8 September 1943 the circle of friends broke up. From 17 September 1943 until July 1945 Fanfani lived in Switzerland, taught at the universities of Lausanne and Geneva, and organised courses for Italian refugees.

On his return, at Dossetti’s invitation, he headed the propaganda and press office of the Christian Democracy party, then entered the Constituent Assembly and the commission that wrote the text of the Constitution. His patron was Alcide De Gasperi. In 1947–1950 Fanfani was Minister of Labour: under his plan houses were built for workers, by various counts between 300,000 and 350,000 flats. In 1951–1953 he was Minister of Agriculture, and in the summer of 1953 briefly Minister of the Interior.

In January 1954 President Luigi Einaudi asked him to form a government. It consisted only of Christian Democrats, lasted twenty-three days and failed to win the confidence of the Chamber of Deputies: 260 votes for, 303 against. It was the shortest-lived cabinet in the history of the republic. In June Fanfani became secretary of the party and remained so until March 1959; he rebuilt the party organisation and loosened its dependence on the Church and the government. He combined his second government (July 1958 to January 1959) with the post of Minister of Foreign Affairs and pursued a more independent policy in the Mediterranean and towards the Arab world. Deputies of his own party, unhappy at such a concentration of power, voted against the cabinet, and in January 1959 he resigned. His third government (from July 1960) relied on the abstention of the Socialists, and the fourth (from February 1962) began the centre-left coalitions. Under it the electricity industry was nationalised (Enel was created), a single middle school was introduced, and schooling was made compulsory until the age of fourteen. After the elections of 1963, in which the party lost about a million votes, Fanfani left office.

In March 1965 he became Minister of Foreign Affairs in Aldo Moro’s second government, resigned in December over an interview in which he sharply criticised the government and the United States, and two months later returned in Moro’s third government. In 1965–1966 he chaired the United Nations General Assembly, the only Italian to hold that post.

From 1968 Fanfani was a senator. He presided over the Senate in 1968–1973, 1976–1982 and 1985–1987. In the presidential elections of 1964 and 1971 he stood as a candidate and was not elected. In March 1972 President Giovanni Leone appointed him senator for life. In 1973–1975 he was again party secretary and led the campaign to repeal the divorce law; in the referendum of 1974 the supporters of repeal lost, 40.7 per cent to 59.3, and in July 1975 he left the post. After the resignation of Giovanni Leone in 1978, Fanfani, as president of the upper house, temporarily exercised the functions of president of the republic until the election of Sandro Pertini. During the kidnapping of Aldo Moro he did not rule out negotiations with the terrorists; of the Christian Democrats, only he was admitted by Moro’s family to the funeral.

Fanfani’s fifth government held office from December 1982 to April 1983, and the sixth, made up of Christian Democrats alone, from April to July 1987; it did not win the confidence of the Chamber. Later he was Minister of the Interior (1987–1988), Minister of Budget and Economic Planning (1988–1989), and in 1992–1994 chairman of the Senate’s Foreign Affairs Committee. He supported the dissolution of the party amid the Tangentopoli corruption scandal and joined the Italian People’s Party.

Fanfani died in Rome on 20 November 1999.