Historical Right

The Right group (Italian: Destra), later called Historical Right (Italian: Destra storica) by historians to distinguish it from the right-wing groups of the 20th century, was an Italian conservative parliamentary group during the second half of the 19th century. After 1876, the Historical Right constituted the Constitutional opposition toward the left governments. It originated in the convergence of the most liberal faction of the moderate right and the moderate wing of the democratic left. The party included men from heterogeneous cultural, class, and ideological backgrounds, ranging from British-American individualist liberalism to Neo-Hegelian liberalism as well as liberal-conservatives, from strict secularists to more religiously-oriented reformists. Few prime ministers after 1852 were party men; instead they accepted support where they could find it, and even the governments of the Historical Right during the 1860s included leftists in some capacity.

The Right represented the interests of the Northern bourgeoisie and the Southern aristocracy. Its members were mostly large landowners, industrialists and people related to the military. On economic issues, the Right supported free trade and laissez-faire policies while on social issues it favoured a strong central government, obligatory conscription and during the Cavour era the secular Law of Guarantees, causing Pope Pius IX's Non Expedit policy of abstention. In foreign relations, their goal was the unification of Italy, primarily aiming for an alliance with the British Empire and the French Empire, but sometimes also with the German Empire against Austria-Hungary. In the last decades of its history, the Right was often referred to as Constitutional Opposition.