In the early 1860s , the appalling living conditions in Southern Italy exacerbated the phenomenon of brigandage , which had already emerged during the Bourbon period as a struggle against the social injustices enacted by the oppressive policies of the government. Thus, after unification, Southern Italy descended into a bloody civil war. On one side, the rebels opposed the new institutions with violence: severed heads displayed as trophies, rapes, and castrated soldiers. On the other, the state responded with roundups, burning villages, and summary executions. This was what has gone down in history as the "fight against brigandage."
However, as historian Gianni Oliva tells us in his latest essay entitled The First Civil War (Mondadori, 2025, pp. 228, also e-book) , labelling all the rebels as “brigands” is a mistake, which creates a serious gap in official historiography .
What happened in Southern Italy after 1860 was neither a simple phenomenon of brigandage (as liberal historiography defined it) nor a social revolt, as in the 1970s' vision of the "bandit rebelling against injustice." It was a complex clash against the new unified state, triggered by peasant revolts and with bands of brigands, often supported by Bourbon and Papal agents, acting as its armed wing. A civil war, therefore, between those who sought national unification and those who, for various reasons, opposed it.
How did all this come about? National unity did not bring tangible improvements to the lives of the peasant masses but, on the contrary, increased their frustration: already estranged from the Risorgimento movement due to their social, economic, and political circumstances, the peasants saw their needs and demands once again set aside by a ruling class deaf to anything that did not coincide with its own interests. Indeed, it was profoundly hostile to the agrarian reform that would have allowed the peasants both to improve their living conditions and to draw closer to the new Italian state. The land issue was only one of the peasants' demands: it was accompanied by protests against poverty and the provisions of the new state, such as the burdensome tax system and compulsory military conscription, which deprived families of the workforce essential for survival. Added to these factors was the political support that the Bourbon legitimists and the Catholic Church gave to banditry, whose shared goal was to restore the Bourbon dynasty to power or at least to make the institutional adjustment of the new state as difficult as possible. Brigandage affected nearly all southern regions and ended only after a bloody state crackdown that left more dead than the three wars of independence. Under the command of General Enrico Cialdini, an expeditionary force of over 100,000 men spent over two years suppressing the "brigands." Although the revolt was quelled by force, the fundamental problem underlying this large-scale and widespread rebellion had not been resolved: the poverty and social oppression of the peasants of Southern Italy. Indeed, to "tame" the South, the national ruling class made a pact with the worst elements of the southern ruling class, those who had already opposed the Bourbon kings' attempts at modernization. That agreement weighed heavily in the decades that followed, and still weighs heavily today on the imbalance between North and South.