ABSTRACT
Depretis’s resignation on 8 February 1887 was followed by the longest cabinet crisis in Italian experience. Two solutions presented themselves: either a new edition of the previous government, under Depretis, Robilant or a younger colleague, in which Minghetti’s moderate Right would be more strongly represented; 1 or a coalition of the critics of trasformismo, the Pentarchy, the Centre and the intransigent Right, under the leadership of the strong man, Crispi. After a month of fruitless negotiations Depretis was persuaded by the King to stay in office, and on 11 March he extracted a grudging vote of confidence from parliament. Three weeks later, to the disgust of Minghetti’s party, he took a decisive step to the left and offered seats in his cabinet to Crispi and his fellow-Pentarch, Zanardelli, who both accepted. Thus Crispi, the champion of political principle, who had branded trasformismo as parliamentary incest, entered the system and was himself ‘transformed’. As a counterweight to the two ex-Pentarchs Depretis gave the Ministry for War to a representative of the Right and the Ministry of Public Works to one of the Left’s most able administrators, Senator Giuseppe Saracco, who ever since his strenuous defence of the macinato tax before 1880 had enjoyed the reputation of watchdog of the budget. Nevertheless Crispi as Minister of Interior was from the first the cabinet’s dominant figure. When Depretis died at the end of July he became Prime Minister, at the age of sixty-eight.
