ABSTRACT
The most serious subversive organization in the new united Italy was the Church. Informed Liberal opinion and successive governments especially those of the Left, after 1876 were hostile to the Church, and her role in society was a constant theme of angry political debate. This chapter focuses on the political activities of those outside, or on the fringes of, the official political system. Anarchist ideas had come to Italy in the 1860s mainly through the Russian exile Mikhail Bakunin. The anarchist decline after 1878 provided an opportunity for rival doctrines and rival organizations to spread. The chapter presents some of the forms that popular and clerical disaffection took between 1871 and 1887. Clearly major changes occurred in this period the rise and decline of anarchism, the decline of intransigent Republicanism, the shift of some mutual-aid societies towards resistance. Moreover, just when strikes and Socialism became more of a threat, the first attempts at reconciliation with the Church ended in failure.
