Abstract

The essay aims to shed some light on military discipline and Commissioned Officers’ deviance in Liberal Italy. Firstly, it briefly reconstructs the socioeconomic and cultural composition of the Italian Officer Corps between 1861 and 1914. Secondly, it examines the set of values the military penal codes and the disciplinary regulations established both in public and private sphere. Moreover, it shows how this set of values affected the COs’ representation that was popularized by press and literature ideologically close to the Military. Finally, the essay focuses on four key-issues (politics, sexuality, hierarchy and money) in order to ascertain how COs dealt with their honor code, how/why they infringed the rules and how their colleagues in the regiment as well as in the disciplinary councils reacted.