Mafia of a Sicilian Village Notes

Origins and Development of the Mafia (19th-20th Centuries)

The book explores the origins and development of the mafia from a single village perspective.
It examines the social networks and coalitions established by local mafiosi with landowners, peasants, and state agents.

The Role of Middlemen

Mafiosi emerged as entrepreneurs, often recruited from peasants and shepherds.
They were entrusted with surveillance tasks on large landed estates owned by absentee aristocrats.
These individuals acted as middlemen operating across different social realms.
They maintained control by managing tensions between these spheres.

Managing Tensions and Control

Mafiosi, frequently in alliance with bandits, used physical force to contain peasant unrest.
Positioned between the landowning elite and peasants, city and countryside, and central government and the village, they aimed to control and monopolize connections between these groups.

The Central Argument

The book argues that violent actions by mafiosi in western Sicily and the acceptance of physical violence are linked to the development of Italian society.
This is especially true regarding the degree of stable, impersonal, central control over physical force in its southern periphery.

Challenging Popular Mythology

The study reveals that the mafia was not a centralized, corporate secret society governing the entirety of western Sicily.
Communication gaps that hindered state penetration also prevented the creation of a clandestine, parallel corporate hierarchy.

Genesis of Mafia

Mafia's elements became tangible in the early 19th century.
This occurred when a modern central government was superimposed on a largely feudal society.
Sicily's feudalization was characterized by large landed estates and autonomy for local power-holders in rural and urban areas.
Foreign rule saw no government effectively penetrate the hinterland.
Spanish objectives were minimal: revenue and order, relying on landowning barons.

Baronial Jurisdiction and Private Armies

Throughout the 18th century up to 1812, baronial jurisdiction remained in force.
Noble landlords maintained private armies to control peasants.
Example: One nobleman employed a "company of twenty-four dragoons" with their own flag and military band. They were allowed considerable liberty and authority, similar to royal troops.
Neither Madrid nor Naples interfered much in Sicily, indulging the local aristocracy as long as their minimal demands were satisfied.
Poor infrastructure (roads, traffic, markets) preserved local isolation.
Foreign governments found barons less costly than royal officials.
Spanish encapsulation was nominal, lacking an overarching power structure.

Bourbon Reforms and Centralization

After 1816, the Bourbons sought to curb local overlords and encourage smallholders.
Smallholders were assumed to be a more stable social base and more interested in agricultural improvements.
The Bourbon government aimed to integrate Sicily into a centralized state by attacking centrifugal forces.
Government shifted from Palermo to Naples, and Sicily was divided into seven provinces administered by nominated Intendants and non-elected town councils.

Impact of Feudalism Abolition

The formal abrogation of feudalism (1806–15) did not seriously challenge the barons' position.
The reform reinforced traditional monopolies of the landowning aristocracy, converting fiefs into private properties.
Peasants lost title to land held under feudal conditions without substantial compensation.
The peasantry fell into new forms of dependency as land and labor-power became commodities.
The market's advent and population increase reduced Sicilian peasants to a growing rural proletariat.

Bourbon Attempts to Counterbalance Effects

The Bourbons introduced further reforms to break up large estates.
In the early 1820s, they abolished entails and primogeniture, and allowed land seizure for debt settlement.
Special commissions worked on land restitution to poor peasants.
A law of 1841 prescribed compensation to peasant communities by returning one-fifth of ex-feudal territory with common use rights.
Repetition of these laws reflected ineffective implementation.
Bourbon legislation unintentionally aided a new, powerful landed gentry.
Bourgeois landowners partly merged with and partly replaced the aristocracy, retaining disinterest in farming and disdain for manual labor.
The civili (new estate owners and gabelloti) acquired noble titles and inserted themselves into local government.
Agrarian reform was anathema to them, and they aimed to neutralize it.

Monopoly of Physical Force and Centralization

Only after a monopoly of physical force and centralization of power can general law become effective.
The government at Naples challenged local interests but also whetted the peasantry's appetite for land.
Even after Italian Unification, the State failed to monopolize physical force in western Sicily, hindering law enforcement.
Mafia originated from tensions between the central government and landowners, and between landowners and peasants.
Mafia managed these tensions by providing a code for social classes and groups to arrange themselves.

Conditions Impeding Encapsulation

When a government encapsulates its hinterland, several conditions may impede it.
Studying this process involves assessing the central government's determination and capacity to impose laws, resistance from certain groups, and differences in values.
Centralization can also be viewed from the perspective of conditions enabling effective central control.

Structure of Sicilian Society

The segmented character of Sicilian rural society hindered central control and coordination.
Poor infrastructure and rent-capitalist mode of production created interdependencies between landlords and peasants in small areas.
The Bourbon bureaucracy initiated social differentiation, fragmenting huge patrimonies.
Between 1812 and 1860, landowning families increased from 2,000 to 20,000.
The number of landless peasants increased, intensifying pressure on the land and leading to brigandage.
Growing interdependence of city and countryside created opportunities for violent entrepreneurs to control tensions.
Latifondisti and gabelloti retained power.
Commercialization of land and labor did not involve significant technological improvement.
Landed interests persisted as the chief centrifugal force, dominating links between rural communities and the outside world.

Collusion and Private Groups

Landlords and their retainers used violence to buttress control, making incursions into the State's fragile framework.
The Bourbon government relied on privately recruited groups to maintain order.
The growth of unemployment, proletarianization, and brigandage made public order difficult.
In Palermo, artisan guilds maintained order until the early 1820s.
In inland districts, Companies at Arms enforced law and order but often colluded with bandits and landlords' retainers.
The government encouraged the formation of the National Guard, a volunteer class-based militia.

Mafia vs. Bandits

What was later called mafia coincided with armed strong men and their followers exercising jurisdiction on the local level with formal authority.
Mafiosi differ from bandits and outlaws by acting in connivance with those who represent formal law, validating their private control of the community's public life.
Bandits are in open conflict with the law and the State.

Magistrate's Report (1838)

A report from a Neapolitan magistrate in western Sicily demonstrates the extent of mafiosi coalitions by 1838.
Officials prostrated themselves before local men of influence and profited from their office.
The population colluded with convicts, and mediators emerged to make up for stolen goods.
High-placed magistrates covered up fraternities (sorts of sects called partiti) with common funds.
The town-guards did not scout their area.
The capital (Palermo) was characterized by luxury and corruption, with 40,000 proletarians dependent on the rich and powerful.
Only three decades later these activities and relationships would be called mafia.

Mafia's Origins and Role

Mafia issued from tensions between local and national interests, developing within the entrails of the State.
Mafiosi provided a code according to which various groups in Sicilian society arranged themselves in conflict and accommodation.
The new configuration involved a modus vivendi between formal authorities and large estate owners, as well as patron-client relations.
A vast network of personal links offset tensions between groups.
Mafia constituted a pragmatic dimension of the State in terms of control and authority.

Centrifugal Forces and Recruited Retainers

Incursions of centrifugal forces rendered the State's apparatus subservient to vested interests.
Landowners and gabelloti recruited armed retainers from the peasants and favored those who complied with their rule.
Similar linkages tied bandits and outlaws to landlords' power domains.

Tensions and Conflicts

Accommodations were a response to inherent tensions and conflicts.
These were complementary and operated in close connection.
Mafia made itself tangible in Sicilian society in a largely unplanned way, growing out of the needs of all rural classes.

Class Tensions and Peasant Movements

The growing voraciousness for land on the part of the new gentry turned the peasantry into a latent revolutionary force.
Class tensions were manifested in banditry and smoldering peasant movements.
The 19th century witnessed six major risings: $1820, 1837, 1848, 1860, 1866$ and $1898$.
Peasants demanded expropriation and redistribution of land.
Periods of bad harvest helped ignite these insurrections, which dovetailed with urban risings.

Neutralizing Reforms and Peasant Protest

Sicilian latifondisi and gabelloti acted to neutralize Bourbon reforms by playing on local patriotism and xenophobia.
They convinced people that the Bourbons prevented improvement and kept Sicily poor.
This myth helped unleash peasant protest into the Sicilian Risorgimento.
The new Sicilian ruling classes reaped the main benefits at the expense of the peasantry.
Peasants became the primary victims of the bourgeois revolution.

Weakening the Peasantry

The potentially revolutionary force of the peasantry was systematically weakened and kept within bounds.
The increase of brigandage in the 19th century shows this clearly.
Outlaws and bandits embodied peasant resentment initially.
By ransoming the rich and stealing, bandits became folk heroes, described as social banditry.

Protectors and Banditry

Bandits depended upon other people and specific configurations of interdependent individuals.
Understanding bandit behavior requires reference to other groups, classes, or networks.
Given the specific conditions of outlawry, bandits had to rely strongly on other people and required protection to operate and survive.
Protectors may range from kinsmen and friends to powerful politicians.

Political Orientation and Class War

The more successful a man is as a bandit, the more extensive the protection granted him.
When banditry becomes increasingly politically oriented and evolves into brigantaggio politico, it assumes anti-social features.
Bandits typically initiated their careers by redressing personal wrongs.
Sooner or later, they were drawn into the power domains of established elites.

Retainership and Class Tensions

Bandits represented the other side of the class war.
When assuming retainership, bandits served to prevent and suppress peasant mobilization.
They put down collective peasant action through terror and carved out avenues of upward mobility.
These courses to "respectability" are institutionalized in mafia, on which brigandage depended.
Brigandage expresses man's pursuit of honor and power.
The myth of the bandit represents a craving for a different society.
Brigandage and bandit myths weakened peasant mobilization.

Case of Matteo (1860)

The popular insurrection in Palermo on April 4, 1860, initiated the overthrow of the Bourbon government.
News of political events in Palermo traveled fast.
In Genuardo, representatives of all classes assembled to maintain order and elected a provisional committee of internal security.
Luca, a foreman bricklayer (age 31), fashioned an armed band of 22 members, mostly artisans and peasants between 20 and 50 years of age.
Luca led his companions in an attack on the police station, disarming the gendarmes and then marching through the village promising order.
The band went to the house of town clerks and asked for the keys to the town hall, which were delivered at once.
Town clerks sought refuge with kinsmen and were shot at during their flight.