Gianni Agnelli, the republican monarch. Fiat, the parallel with Cuccia and the blow on the wind – Corriere.it

As Jas Gawronski says, interviewed by Aldo Cazzullo on Corriere della Sera last sunday,Giovanni Agnelli – who was the republican monarch of the twentieth century, in his Savoy Turin – felt as his equal, at least in Italy, only Enrico Cuccia. In his own way, the legendary head of Mediobanca was also a republican ruler in post-war Italy. A sovereignty of intelligence and culture. Not only of economic and financial power. And this is perhaps the big difference with today’s business community. That of the time was a ruling class not without defects, not free from faults (even serious ones), but, at least in some of its peaks, of undisputed value. If it hadn’t been like this, he wouldn’t have resisted so many raiders à la Michele Sindona, the seductions of hidden powers, the voracity of parties, with whom he did not always deal with honor. A cosmopolitan and internationalized ruling class in a country that is still partly backward and provincial. With a wholly personal and even authoritarian governance. Raffaele Mattioli, the legendary managing director of Banca Commerciale, would not easily have an office today. He would not pass the strict rules of the ECB. And perhaps he would immediately be investigated by the judiciary for his activity as a patron outside of any corporate rule.

Cuccia actually had the future of Fiat in his hands for a long time. He determined their destinies, including those of the Agnelli family and of the lawyer himself. He helped her, protected her and conditioned her. A little too much. Not only when Fiat experienced a profound crisis at the end of the seventies, resolved thanks to the action of Cesare Romiti, chosen by Cuccia himself, with his symbolic date (October 14, 1980), the day of the march of the 40,000 then they were much less). However, Agnelli and Cuccia were two monarchs, who voted republican (in the sense of the PRI of Ugo and then of Giorgio La Malfa), but also and above all two great Italians, with a sense of responsibility towards their country. Despite errors and omissions. They are united by another feature. If we want negative. Both did not care what would be said about them next. They left no memoirs, no writings. The Advocate (today they would dispute the title) probably liked, but only for the sake of provocation, a line by Oscar Wilde: Why should I care about posterity? What have they done for me?. Cuccia had other and more refined readings. They didn’t guiltily take care of guarding their memory out of discretion or simply out of distraction. And that void that was created after their death, at the beginning of a new century and millennium, was filled by others. For the good, but mostly for the bad. And in the end it happened like this.

Twenty years after his death, Giovanni Agnelli, in the collective imagination, above all an icon of elegance and style. Instead, his figure as an industrialist ended up fading, tarnishing. As if he had never been an entrepreneur. An attention concentrated above all on passions and appearances: private life, Ferrari, sailing, women, Juventus. On the subject of enjoyable and topical love for football, one of his conversations with Enzo Biagi, fresh from having interviewed Tommaso Buscetta, the repentant mafioso. a Juventus fan, he told me to tell him. And Agnelli: Look, Biagi, perhaps this is the only thing you shouldn’t regret. Legendary.

Some memories, even the most affectionate and sincere ones, make him look like a kind of twentieth-century influencer. A definition that today would horrify him, apart from the curiosity to know the interpreters, especially female. The anthology of episodes, jokes, infinite. Heartening for only the less young. a nostalgia supplement. It transmits neither experiences nor values. Instead, it would be appropriate to discuss more – in a critical sense without any apologetic intention – on the entrepreneurial legacy.

We would better understand the strengths and weaknesses of our capitalism. Ask ourselves why the country has lost many large companies and what the causes and faults were. On the occasion, partly dispersed, of the privatizations, in which the Agnelli group participated almost reluctantly, putting a shred of capital into the so-called nucleus of Telecom, now burdened with debts and truly reduced to a nugget. Or on the Edison finished, coincidentally, still to the French. And again: on the relationship between private capitalism and the State, today triumphant and intrusive. And, finally, on the aversion of part of that private entrepreneurship – which saw its beacon in Agnelli – for the open market, eager to take refuge in protected niches, in the shadow of the public client. Fortunately, today we have many companies that have successfully accepted the challenges of the open market in a country that is wary of competition. Agnelli witnessed an Italian spirit proud of its excellence but at the same time endowed with a sufficient dose of self-irony to admit the defects and limitations of the national character.

The lawyer never felt like a foreigner in his homeland, even if he probably took some of his assets out of Italy (so they did and unfortunately many still do). Perhaps, for him, he would not have followed the prevailing trend of transferring the legal and fiscal offices of almost all of Made in Italy abroad. As a life senator they would have asked him for the bill and he would have been a little ashamed. But after all, Sergio Marchionne – whom he did not know – and his nephew John Elkann, created those international mergers which in his eyes were in any case inevitable, attempted several times and failed. Agnelli was proud to have worn the military uniform, loyal to the state even after 8 September. He could have left Italy, especially at the time of terrorism and kidnappings. But he didn’t. He felt deeply connected to his country. The First Republic was intimately his, more out of affection than out of interest.

And the decline began when he underestimated the arrival of the Second, dominated by Silvio Berlusconi, leader of the revolt of small industrialists against the excessive power of Turin. The Berluschini against the industrial monarchy of the Fiat group, above all in Confindustria, from which Marchionne sensationally separated. Agnelli would never have done that. A monarch accustomed to general consent would not have resisted the opposing pleas of his followers, many of whom were no longer subjects. The Lawyer was a popular aristocrat. Detached, not without a touch of cynicism, from real life but, at the same time, immersed, intoxicated by an almost childish curiosity for everything that was happening around him. Thirsty for encounters, backstories, little snippets of other people’s lives. A tireless explorer of the female universe. The main enemy for him was boredom. I also love the wind because it cannot be bought. You blow him almost always in favor. Except in the family, concentrated in too many sufferings – such as the suicide of his son Edoardo – many solitudes and future hereditary quarrels.

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