Luigi Pelloux

Resigning office, he was sent as Royal Commissioner to Bari in May 1898, where, without recourse to martial law, he succeeded in restoring public order suppressing street demonstrations demanding "bread and work". Upon the fall of Rudinì in June 1898, after the Bava-Beccaris massacre, General Pelloux was entrusted by King Umberto with the formation of a new government, and took for himself the post Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior. He resigned office in May 1899 over his Chinese policy,^[1]

Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs Felice Napoleone Canevaro had demanded that the Chinese Empire grant it a lease for a naval coaling station at China's Sanmen Bay (known as "San-Mun Bay" to the Italians) similar to the lease the German Empire had secured in 1898 at Kiautschou Bay. China refused to comply and Italy had to withdraw its ultimatum, becoming the first and only Western power to fail to achieve its territorial goals in China. The fiasco was an embarrassment that gave Italy – still stung by its defeat at the hands of the Ethiopian Empire in the Battle of Adowa in 1896 – the appearance of a third-rate power.^[1] Pelloux and his fellow cabinet ministers stated that Canevaro had acted without informing them, and it was widely believed that king Umberto I was the one who had given Canevaro the orders to acquire a concession in China.^[2]

Pelloux was again entrusted with the formation of a government. His new cabinet was essentially military and conservative, the most decisively conservative since 1876.^[3] He took stern measures against the revolutionary elements in Italy. The Public Safety Bill for the reform of the police laws, taken over by him from the Rudinì cabinet, and eventually promulgated by royal decree, was fiercely obstructed by the Socialist Party of Italy (PSI) and Extreme Left. The law made strikes by state employees illegal; gave the executive wide powers to ban public meetings and dissolve subversive organisations; revived the penalties of banishment and preventive arrest for political offences; and tightened control of the press by making authors responsible for their articles and declaring incitement to violence a crime.^[3]

The Radicals and Socialist start an obstructionist campaign against the new coercive law using the filibuster: points of order, endless speeches and other procedural delaying tactics.^[4] When Pelloux tried to force the law through Parliament by royal decree in June 1899, more moderate politicians like Giuseppe Zanardelli and Giovanni Giolitti that considered the measure unconstitutional, joined the opposition.^[4] The growing opposition succeeded in forcing General Pelloux to dissolve the Chamber in May 1900, and to resign office after the general election in June.

In the autumn of 1901 he was appointed to the command of the Turin army corps. He retired in 1905. Pelloux died at Bordighera in 1924.

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Pelloux, Luigi". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
• Clark, Martin (2008). Modern Italy: 1871 to the present, Harlow: Pearson Education, ISBN 1-4058-2352-6
• Mack Smith, Denis (2001). Italy and Its Monarchy. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-05132-8.
• Seton-Watson, Christopher (1967). Italy from liberalism to fascism, 1870-1925, New York: Taylor & Francis, ISBN 0-416-18940-7

Political offices
Preceded by Antonio Starabba, Marchese di Rudinì	Prime Minister of Italy 1898 – 1900	Succeeded by Giuseppe Saracco
	Italian Minister of the Interior 1898 – 1900