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" In 1883 the leaders of the Left, Agostino Depretis, and the Right, Marco Minghetti, formed an alliance based on flexible centrist coalition of government which isolated the extremes of the left and the right; this politics was known as ""Trasformismo"". Crispi, who was a strong supporter of two-party system, strongly opposed it and founded a progressive and radical parliamentary group called Dissident Left. The group was also known as ""The Pentarchy"", due to its five leaders, Giuseppe Zanardelli, Benedetto Cairoli, Giovanni Nicotera, Agostino Magliani, Alfredo Beccarini and Crispi.
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" The party supported authoritarian and progressive internal policies, expansionism and Germanophile foreign policies, and protectionist economy policies.
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" After the general elections in May 1886, in which the Dissident Left gained almost 20% of votes, Crispi returned to office as Minister of the Interior in the Depretis cabinet. Following Depretis's death on 29 July 1887 Crispi, abandoned the Dissident Left and became the leader of the Left group; he was also appointed, by the King, Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs.
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" On 29 July 1887, Francesco Crispi sworn in as new Prime Minister. He was the first one from Southern Italy. Crispi immediately distinguished himself, for being a reformist leader, but his political style caused lots of protests from his opponents, who accused him of being an authoritarian Prime Minister and a strongman.
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" True to his initial progressive leanings he moved ahead with stalled reforms, abolishing the death penalty, revoking anti-strike laws, limiting police powers, reforming the penal code and the administration of justice with the help of his Minister of Justice Giuseppe Zanardelli, reorganising charities and passing public health laws and legislation to protect emigrants that worked abroad. He sought popular support for the state with a programme of orderly development at home and expansion abroad.
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" One of the most important acts was the reform regarding the central administration of the State, with which Crispi wished to strengthen the role of head of government. The bill aimed to separate the roles of the government from those of parliament, trying to untie the first by the political games of the second. The first point of the law was to give the cabinet the right to decide on the number and functions of the ministries. The prospect was also to keep the King (as well as provided the Albertine Statute) free to decide on the organization of the various ministries. Moreover, the reform provided the establishment of the secretaries, who were supposed to help ministers and, at the same time, do them as spokesmen in parliament. The reform was heavily criticized by the Rightist opposition but also by the Far Left. Anyway, on 9 December 1887 it was approved by the Chamber of Deputies.
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" In 1889 Crispi's government promoted a reform of the magistracy and promulgated a new penal code, which unified penal legislation in Italy, abolished capital punishment and recognised the right to strike. The code was regarded as a great work by contemporary European jurists. The code was named after Giuseppe Zanardelli, then Minister of Justice, who promoted the approval of the code.
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" Another important reform was that of local government, or ""comuni"", which was approved by the Chamber in July 1888, in just three weeks. The new reform almost doubled the local electorate, incrementing the suffrage. But the most controversial part of the law was related to the mayors, who were previously appointed by the government, and who would now elected by the electors, in the municipalities with more than 10,000 inhabitants and in all the provincial capitals. The law also introduced the office of the prefect. The reform was approved by the Senate in December 1888 and entered into force in February 1889.
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" As prime minister in the 1880s and 1890s Crispi pursued an aggressive foreign policy to strengthen Italy's beleaguered institutions. He saw France as the permanent enemy and he counted heavily on British support. Britain was on good terms with France and refused to help, leaving Crispi perplexed and ultimately disillusioned about what he had felt was a special friendship between the two countries. He turned to imperialism in Africa, especially against the independent kingdom of Ethiopia, and Ottoman province of Tripolitania (in present-day Libya).
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" One of his first acts as premier was a visit to the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck, whom he desired to consult upon the working of the Triple Alliance.
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" Basing his foreign policy upon the alliance, as supplemented by the naval entente with Great Britain negotiated by his predecessor, Carlo Felice Nicolis di Robilant, Crispi assumed a resolute attitude towards France, breaking off the prolonged and unfruitful negotiations for a new Franco-Italian commercial treaty, and refusing the French invitation to organize an Italian section at the Paris Exhibition of 1889. The Triple Alliance committed Italy to a possible war with France, requiring a vast increase in the already heavy Italian military expenditure, making the alliance unpopular in Italy. As part of his anti-French foreign policy, Crispi began a tariff war with France in 1888. The Franco-Italian trade war was an economic disaster for Italy which over a ten year period was to cost two thousand million lire in lost exports, and was ended in 1898 with the Italians agreeing to end their tariffs on French goods in exchange for the French ending their tariffs on Italian goods.
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" Francesco Crispi was a patriot and an Italian nationalist, and his desire to make Italy a colonial power led to conflicts with France, which rejected Italian claims to Tunisia and opposed Italian expansion elsewhere in Africa.
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" Under Crispi's rule, Italy signed the Treaty of Wuchale; it was a deal reached by King Menelik II of Shewa, later the Emperor of Ethiopia with Count Pietro Antonelli in the town of Wuchale, on 2 May 1889. The treaty stated that the regions of Bogos, Hamasien, Akkele Guzay, and Serae were part of the Italian colony of Eritrea and is the origin of the Italian colony and modern state of Eritrea. Per the Treaty, Italy promised financial assistance and military supplies.
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" Balkan geopolitics and security concerns drove Italy to seek great power status in the Adriatic sea and Crispi viewed a future autonomous Albania within the Ottoman Empire or as an independent country being a safeguarded for Italian interests. Crispi regarded Albania's interests against Pan-Slavism and possible Austro-Hungarian invasion were best served through a Greco-Albanian union and he founded in Rome a philhellenic committee that worked toward that goal. Crispi, after becoming prime minister, stimulated and intensified ethno-cultural relations between Italo-Albanians and Albanians of the Balkans, moves which were considered as extending Italian influence over Albanians by Austria-Hungary. To counteract Austro-Hungarian influence in northern Albania, Crispi took the initiative and opened the first Italian schools in Shkodër in 1888. Prominent Albanians involved with the Albanian National Awakening such as Abdyl Frashëri and Thimi Mitko corresponded with Crispi over the Albanian question.
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" The general election in 1890 was an extraordinary triumph for Crispi. Out of 508 deputies, 405 sided with the government. But already in October, the first signs of a political crisis grew up. The Emperor Menelik had contested the Italian text of the Wuchale Treaty, stating that it did not oblige Ethiopia to be an Italian protectorate. Menelik informed the foreign press and the scandal erupted. Few days after the Finance Minister and long-time Crispi's main political rival, Giovanni Giolitti, abandoned the government.
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" However, the decisive event was a document published by the new Minister of Finance Bernardino Grimaldi, who revealed that the planned deficit was higher than expected; after that, the government lost his majority with 186 votes against and 123 in favor. Prime Minister Crispi resigned on 6 February 1891.
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" After fall of Crispi's government, Umberto I gave the task of forming the new cabinet to the Marquis Antonio Starabba di Rudinì. The government faced many difficulties since the beginning and in May 1892, Giolitti, who became the new Left leader after Crispi's resignation, decided not to support it anymore.
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" After that, King Umberto I, appointed Giolitti as new Prime Minister. The first Giolitti cabinet, however, relied on a slender majority and in December 1892 the Prime Minister was involved in a major scandal.
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" The Banca Romana scandal surfaced in January 1893 in Italy over the bankruptcy of the Banca Romana, one of the six national banks authorised at the time to issue currency. The scandal was the first of many Italian corruption scandals, and, like the others, it discredited the whole political system.
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" The bank had loaned large sums to property developers but was left with huge liabilities when the real estate bubble collapsed in 1887, but feared that publicity might undermine public confidence and suppressed the report.
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" Even Umberto I was involved in the scandal and Crispi's reputation emerged greatly strengthened: he could overthrow Giolitti's government at any time or impair the reputation of the King. Giolitti and his allies defended themselves trying to collect compromising news against Crispi, but the judicial inquiry into the Banca Romana left the latter essentially harmless.
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" In December 1893 the impotence of the Giolitti cabinet to restore public order, menaced by disturbances in Sicily and the Banca Romana scandal, gave rise to a general demand that Crispi should return to power.
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" The Fasci Siciliani were a popular movement of democratic and socialist inspiration, which arose in Sicily in the years between 1889 and 1894. The Fasci gained the support of the poorest and most exploited classes of the island by channeling their frustration and discontent into a coherent programme based on the establishment of new rights. Consisting of a jumble of traditionalist sentiment, religiosity, and socialist consciousness, the movement reached its apex in the summer of 1893, when new conditions were presented to the landowners and mine owners of Sicily concerning the renewal of sharecropping and rental contracts.
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" Upon the rejection of these conditions, there was an outburst of strikes that rapidly spread throughout the island, and was marked by violent social conflict, almost rising to the point of insurrection. The leaders of the movement were not able to keep the situation from getting out of control. The proprietors and landowners asked the government to intervene. Giovanni Giolitti tried to put a halt to the manifestations and protests of the Fasci Siciliani, his measures were relatively mild. On November 24, Giolitti officially resigned as Prime Minister. In the three weeks of uncertainty before Crispi formed a government on 15 December 1893, the rapid spread of violence drove many local authorities to defy Giolitti's ban on the use of firearms.
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" In December 1893, 92 peasants lost their lives in clashes with the police and army. Government buildings were burned along with flour mills and bakeries that refused to lower their prices when taxes were lowered or abolished.
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" On January 3, 1894, Crispi declared a state of siege throughout Sicily. Army reservists were recalled and General Roberto Morra di Lavriano was dispatched with 40,000 troops. The old order was restored through the use of extreme force, including summary executions. A solidarity revolt of anarchists and republicans in the Lunigiana was crushed as well.
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" The repression of the Fasci turned into outright persecution. The government arrested not just the leaders of the movement, but masses of poor farmers, students, professionals, sympathizers of the Fasci, and even those simply suspected of having sympathized with the movement at some point in time, in many cases without any evidence for the accusations. After the declaration of the state of emergency, condemnations were issued for the paltriest of reasons. Many rioters were incarcerated for having shouted things such as ""Viva l'anarchia"" or ""down with the King"". At Palermo, in April and May 1894, the trials against the central committee of the Fasci took place and this was the final blow that signaled the death knell of the movement of the Fasci Siciliani.
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" Crispi steadily supported the energetic remedies adopted by his Minister of Finance Sidney Sonnino to save Italian credit, which had been severely shaken the financial crisis of 1892–1893 and the Banca Romana scandal. Sonnino's proposals were harshly criticized both by members of the Left and the Right, causing his resignation on 4 June 1894; on the following day Crispi resigned too, but the King gave him again the task to form a new government.
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" On June 16, 1894, the anarchist Paolo Lega tried to shoot Crispi but the attempt failed. On June 24 an Italian anarchist killed French President Carnot. In this climate of increased the fear of anarchism, Crispi was able to introduce a series of anti-anarchist laws in July 1894, which were also used against socialists. Heavy penalties were announced for ""incitement to class hatred"" and police received extended powers of preventive arrest and deportation.
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" The whole parliament expressed solidarity with the Prime Minister who saw his position considerably strengthened. This favored the approval of the Sonnino law. The reform save Italy from the crisis and started the way for economic recovery.
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" In 1894 he was threatened with expulsion from the Masonic Grande Oriente d'Italia for being too friendly towards the Catholic Church. He had previously been strongly anticlerical but had become convinced of the need for rapprochement with the Papacy.
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" At the end of 1894, his long-time rival Giovanni Giolitti tried to discredit Crispi submitting to parliament a few documents that were supposed to ruin it. It was actually some old papers attesting loans contracted by Crispi and his wife with the Banca Romana.
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" Moreover, Crispi's uncompromising suppression of disorder, and his refusal to abandon either the Triple Alliance or the Eritrean colony, or to forsake his Minister of the Treasury, Sidney Sonnino, caused a breach with the radical leader Felice Cavallotti. Cavallotti began a campaign of defamation against him. Cavallotti himself proposed to establish a commission, which should investigate about the relations between Crispi and Banca Romana.
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" On 15 December the commission published its report and this caused some riots in the Chamber. Crispi, in defense of the institutions, submitted to the King a decree to dissolve parliament. On 13 January 1895 Umberto I dissolved the parliament and Giolitti, who was under trial for the bank scandal, was forced to move to Berlin, because his parliamentary immunity expired, and the risk of being arrested.
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" Giolitti and Cavallotti's attacks were soon renewed more fiercely than ever. They produced little effect and the general election of 1895 gave Crispi a huge majority of 334 seats out of 508. On 25 June 1895, Crispi refused a request to allow a parliamentary inquiry into his role in the Banca Romana scandal, saying as a prime minister he felt he was ""invulnerable"" because he had ""served Italy for 53 years"". Despite his majority, Crispi preferred to rule via royal degree instead of getting legislation passed by parliament, leading to concerns about authoritarianism.
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" During his second term, Crispi continued his colonial expansionist policy in East Africa. King Umberto I commented that ""Crispi wants to occupy everywhere, even China and Japan"". Crispi was strongly supported by the king, who alluding to his personal dislike of him, stated ""Crispi is a pig, but a necessary pig"", who despite his corruption, had to stay in power for ""the national interest, which is the only thing that matters"". Crispi took a very belligerent line on foreign policy as he during a three month period in 1895, he talked quite openly about attacking France, sent a naval squadron to the eastern Mediterranean to prepare for a possible war with the Ottoman empire in order to seize Albania, of sending an expeditionary force to seize a city in China, and planned to sent a force to South Africa to forcibly mediate the dispute between Great Britain and the Transvaal Republic. Crispi who favored a militant anti-French line wanted to revise the Triple Alliance as the preamble to the Triple Alliance spoke of preserving peace in Europe while ""for Italy, it must be the opposite; for us, the Triple Alliance must mean war!"" Those who knew him by this stage of his life considered Crispi to be almost mindlessly bellicose as he broke off diplomatic relations with Portugal over a supposed slight, saying he deserved more respect from this ""entirely unimportant country"" ruled over by a ""minuscule monarchy"".    
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" The main event which occurred during his premiership was the First Italo-Ethiopian War, which originated from a disputed treaty which, the Italians claimed, turned Ethiopia into an Italian protectorate. Much to their surprise, they found that Ethiopian ruler Menelik II, rather than opposed by some of his traditional enemies, was supported by them, and so the Italian army, invading Ethiopia from Italian Eritrea in 1893, faced a more united front than they expected. In addition, Ethiopia was supported by Russia an Orthodox Christian nation like Ethiopia with military advisers, army training, and the sale of weapons for Ethiopian forces during the war and was supported diplomatically by the United Kingdom and France in order to prevent Italy from becoming a colonial competitor.
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" Full-scale war broke out in 1895, with Italian troops having initial success until Ethiopian troops counterattacked Italian positions and besieged the Italian fort of Meqele, forcing its surrender. In April 1895, Crispi withdrew part of the Italian Army from Ethiopia to save money. He told General Baratieri that if needed more money to just impose more taxes on the Ethiopians and ""copy Napoleon who made war with the money of those he conquered"". Crispi did not understand that Ethiopia was a poor, backward country and the money necessary to sustain a modern army could not possibly be raised from taxing the Ethiopians, causing major problems for the Italian Army in Ethiopia. Through Crispi fought the war against Ethiopia on the cheap, he used secretly used public money to bribe journalists to write pro-war articles in the Italian newspapers while those foreign journalists who reported critically about the war were expelled from Italy. Italian newspapers that reported critically about the war with Ethiopia were heavily fined by the Crispi government with the offending editions of the papers being burned under the grounds that it was ""unpatriotic"" to criticize the government in wartime.
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" On 22 February 1896, Umberto dismissed General Baratieri as commander of the Italian expeditionary force, ordering him to remain in command until his successor arrived. On 25 February Crispi sent a telegram to Baratieri accusing him of cowardice and incompetence, and ended with demanding he fight the Ethiopians immediately ""whatever the cost to save the honor of the army and the prestige of the monarchy"". In response to Crispi's telegram, Baratieri ignored his doubts and attacked a much larger Ethiopian force on 1 March 1896 in the Battle of Adwa. Italian defeat came about after the Battle of Adwa, where the Ethiopian army dealt the heavily outnumbered Italians a decisive loss and forced their retreat back into Eritrea. General Baratieri took no responsibility for the defeat, blaming his men, saying they were cowards who had let him down at Adwa. By contrast, the British military observer stated the ordinary Italian soldiers at Adwa ""were as good as fighting material as can be found in Europe"", but they had been let down by their officers who had shown no leadership abilities whatsoever.  
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" The casualty rate suffered by Italian forces at the Battle of Adwa was greater than any other major European battle of the 19th century, beyond even the Napoleonic Era's Waterloo and Eylau. More Italians were killed in one day's fighting at Adwa than in all the wars of the Risorgimento. Crispi announced after Adwa that he planned to continue the war against the ""barbarians"" of Ethiopia, and would be sending more troops to the Horn of Africa, which prompted a public backlash against the unpopular war. After the humiliating defeat of the Italian army, riots broke out in several Italian cities, and within two weeks, the Crispi government collapsed amidst Italian disenchantment with ""foreign adventures"". In Rome, people demonstrated under the slogans ""death to the king!"" and ""long live the republic!"" as the war had badly damaged the prestige of Umberto who had backed Crispi so forcefully and strongly. Crispi was opposed to making peace with Ethiopia, saying he regarded it as humiliating for the Italians to make peace with ""monkeys"" as he called the Ethiopians and said he did not care about the lives of 15, 000 Italians taken prisoner at Adwa who were being held as hostages, saying they were ""expendable"" compared to the ""glorious"" national mission of conquering Ethiopia.
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" The ensuing Antonio di Rudini cabinet lent itself to Cavallotti's campaign, and at the end of 1897 the judicial authorities applied to the Chamber of Deputies for permission to prosecute Crispi for embezzlement. A parliamentary commission of inquiry discovered only that Crispi, on assuming office in 1893, had found the secret service coffers empty, and had borrowed money from a state bank to fund it, repaying it with the monthly installments granted in regular course by the treasury. The commission, considering this proceeding irregular, proposed, and the Chamber adopted, a vote of censure, but refused to authorize a prosecution.
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" Crispi resigned his seat in parliament, but was re-elected by an overwhelming majority in April 1898 by his Palermo constituents. For some time he took little part in active politics, chiefly on account of his growing blindness. A successful operation for cataract restored his eyesight in June 1900, and notwithstanding his 81 years, he resumed to some extent his former political activity.
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" Soon afterward, however, his health began to give way and he died in Naples on August 11, 1901; according to many witnesses, his last words were: ""Before closing my eyes to life, I would have the supreme comfort of knowing that our homeland is beloved and defended by all its sons"".
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" Crispi was a colourful and intensely patriotic character. He was a man of enormous energy but with a violent temper. His whole life, public and private, was turbulent, dramatic and marked by a succession of bitter personal hostilities. According to some Crispi's ""fiery pride, almost insane touchiness and indifference to sound methods of government"" were due to his Albanian inheritance. Although he began life as a revolutionary and democratic figure, his premiership was authoritarian and he showed disdain for Italian liberals. He was born as a firebrand and died as firefighter. At the end of the 19th century, Crispi was the dominant figure of Italian politics for a decade. He was saluted by Giuseppe Verdi as 'the great patriot'. He was a more scrupulous statesman than Cavour, a more realistic conspirator than Mazzini, a more astute figure than Garibaldi. His death resulted in lengthier obituaries in Europe's press than for any Italian politician since Cavour.
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" As prime minister in the 1880s and 1890s, Crispi was internationally famous and often mentioned along with world statesmen such as Bismarck, Gladstone and Salisbury. Originally an enlightened Italian patriot and democratic liberal, he went on to become a bellicose authoritarian prime minister and ally and admirer of Bismarck. He is often seen as a precursor of Benito Mussolini. Mussolini generally portrayed the Liberal era (1861–1922) as a perversion of the idealist vision of Mazzini and Garibaldi, and Crispi was the lone prime minister of the Liberal era whom ""Il Duce"" depicted in favorable terms. In particular, Mussolini praised Crispi as the inventor of an ""Italian imperialism"" as opposed to ""western imperialism"", presenting his foreign policy as the inspiration for Fascist foreign policy, and the period after 1896 was excoriated as a period of decline caused by the alleged pusillanimous policy of Giolitti. His reputation was a victim of Italian Fascism, which awarded him an abundance of street names, most erased after 1945. With the collapse of Fascism, Crispi's reputation was left fatally tarnished.
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" Historian R.J.B. Bosworth says that Crispi:
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" See: Full text of ""The Encyclopædia Britannica""
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