In 1975, the Italian publisher Einaudi published a translated 549-page book. Its original English title was Politics and Society in Postwar Naples; it came with a distinctive orange cover, and its author was a British academic from the University of Reading named Percy Allum. The book caused a sensation in Italy. A rigorous analysis of the way politics and society worked in Naples, it was written with enthusiasm, panache, and crystal clarity. Most incredible of all, he named names.
Allum’s analysis of the political power structures used by the Christian Democracy party and other groups in that southern city, and in particular what he called the “clan” around the Gava family, and the “bosses” Silvio and Antonio Gava , shocked Naples. and its political establishment.
Allum, who has died at the age of 88, carefully showed how voting and power were organized and how patronage structures worked, which were connected to the city’s political culture: street by street, committee by committee, ballot by ballot. . It was obvious to everyone that the Italian edition of Politics and Society would be controversial, so the translation was carefully controlled and it was feared that the Gavas would sue over publication, which they never did. Allum’s book made him a household name in Naples and drew the ire of Antonio Gava himself, who denigrated the British academic in interviews and reacted with irritation whenever the book was mentioned for the rest of his long political career.
How had Allum come to write such an extraordinary book, with its quotations from Mao and Stendhal, and its ironic use of proverbs, as well as sociological theory, history, political analysis, and anthropology?
Born in Thame, in rural Oxfordshire, one of six children of Doris (nee Clark) and Robert Allum, he took the name Percy (rather than his given name Peter) at a young age. He went to Downs School in Colwall in the Malvern Hills, where he was first inspired to draw by an art teacher named Maurice Feild. He would draw and paint for the rest of his life, exhibiting his work in France, Italy and the UK in later years. To celebrate the new year, Percy would send hand-drawn cards to his friends.
Winning a scholarship to Cambridge, he studied law and history there after military service and also graduated with a law degree. His parents wanted him to go into the family business (a laundry based in Thame), but a teacher noticed his potential and insisted that he continue his studies. His doctorate at Oxford with the Italian historian Christopher Seton-Watson was a turning point and formed the basis of his book on Naples. Allum had already spent time in Naples, learning Italian while living in the city as an English assistant in the 1950s. In 1957 he met his future wife, Marie-Pierrette Desmas, in France. They married in 1961.
Allum’s working life spanned various institutions and universities. He taught in Manchester, and from 1966 in Reading (where he never played the academic game, causing long delays in his promotion to professor, which came in 1994), but also in Padua and Naples, in Paris and in the Sudan. He was well read and always up to date on Italian and European politics, which nourished his teaching and his later studies.
His magisterial comparative textbook, Democrazia Reale, was written in Italian in 1991 (based on lectures he gave in Padua) and later published in English as State and Society in Western Europe. Once again, the clarity of his writing was able to combine high-level analysis, stories, an eclectic body of sources, passionate political ideas and positions, and deep, concrete research.
He was a man of the left and often spoke out in favor of ethical positions in public life. At Reading he was part of a wealthy group of Italians who flourished there in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s in the history, Italian and politics departments, including Stuart Woolf, Paul Corner and Christopher Duggan. Later, he devoted years to another in-depth study of the power and culture of Christian democracy, this time in northern Italy, around Vicenza. This work was published in a series of edited articles and books, often in collaboration with local scholars.
The great Italian novelist Luigi Meneghello was a key figure in the rise of Italian studies in Reading, and wrote a beautiful portrait of Allum (Percy Agonistes) in his festschrift. Meneghello underscored Allum’s “rushing” way of speaking, as he threw references, his long blonde hair billowing around his head, and his intense ability to debate and discuss current but also historical issues.
With the encouragement of Marie-Pierrette, whose dedication to her husband and two children enabled her to write and travel extensively, spending time in archives and libraries, the Allums moved between France, Italy and the United Kingdom.
After his early retirement from Reading in 1995, Allum was appointed to a chair at the Università Degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale” in Naples, where he taught and did research for a further 10 years. This was a tumultuous time in Italian politics, and Allum was at the center of political debates and issues, writing frequently and directly in Italian for the Italian dailies La Repubblica and l’Unità, as well as speaking at numerous conferences and congresses.
His work had a profound influence on key figures in Neapolitan and national politics and society, for example the former mayor of Naples, Maurizio Valenzi, the Italian (and communist) president Giorgio Napolitano, and a whole generation of magistrates and judges who, Thanks to Allum’s original writings on Naples, they were able to take part in epic battles against the influence of the Neapolitan version of the mafia, the Camorra, in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s.
Years later, when he retired from Naples, Allum continued to draw and exhibit his work, which ranged from groundbreaking cityscapes to intimate portraits and self-portraits. He suffered from dementia in the final period of his life.
He is survived by Marie-Pierrette, her son Fabrice, her daughter Felia, two granddaughters, and three sisters.