http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Rosselli
Carlo Rosselli
Carlo Rosselli (16 November 1899 – 9 June 1937)
was an Italian political leader, journalist, historian and anti-fascist
activist, first in Italy then abroad. He developed a theory of reformist,
non-Marxist Socialism inspired
by the British Labour movement, that he described as "liberal
Socialism". Rosselli founded the anti-fascist militant
movement Giustizia e Libertà.[1] Rosselli
personally took part in combat in the Spanish
Civil War where he served on the Republican side.[2]
Life
Birth, war and studies
Rosselli was born in Rome to a wealthy Tuscan Jewish family. His
mother, Amelia Pincherle Rosselli, had been active in republican politics
and thought and had participated in the unification of Italy. In 1903 he was taken to Florence with
his mother and siblings. During the First World War he joined the Italian armed
forces and fought in the alpine campaign, rising to the rank of second
lieutenant.
After the war, thanks to his brother Nello,
he studied in Florence with Gaetano
Salvemini, who was to be from then a constant companion of both the
Rosselli brothers. It was in this period that he became a socialist,
sympathetic to the reformist ideas of Filippo
Turati, in contrast to that revolutionary thinking of Giacinto Menotti Serrati. In 1921 he
graduated with a degree in political sciences from the University of Florence
with a thesis titled: "sindacalismo" (Syndicalism).
Later he undertook a law degree that he would pursue in Turinand Milan, where he met Luigi
Einaudi and Piero Gobetti.
He graduated in 1923 from the university of Siena. For some weeks
he visited London where he studied the workings of the British Labour Party: the English Labour
movement would deeply influence him.
The rise of Fascism
An active supporter of the Partito Socialista Unitario of
Turati, Matteotti and Treves,
he began writing for "Critica
Sociale", a review edited by Turati. After the murder of Matteotti,
Rosselli pushed for a more active opposition to Fascism. With the
help of Ernesto Rossi and Gaetano
Salvemini he founded the clandestine publication "Non
mollare". During the following months, fascist violence towards the left
became increasingly severe. Ernesto Rossi left the country for France, followed
by Salvemini. In February 1926 fellow activist Piero
Gobetti was assassinated in Paris by a Fascist hit squad. Still in
Italy, Rosselli and Pietro Nenni founded the review "Quarto
Stato", which was banned after a few months.
Later in 1926, he organized with Sandro
Pertini and Ferruccio Parri the escape of Turati to
France. While Pertini followed Turati to France, Parri and Rosselli were
captured and convicted for their roles in Turati's escape and sentenced to a
period of confinement on the island of Lipari (1927).
It is then that Rosselli began to write his most famous work, "Liberal
Socialism". In July 1929 he escaped to Tunisia, from where he travelled to
France, and the community of Italian antifascists including Emilio
Lussu and Francesco Fausto Nitti. Nitti later
portrayed Rosselli's adventurous escape in the book Le nostre prigioni e
la nostra evasione (Our Prisons and Our Escape) in an Italian edition in
1946 (the 1929 English first edition was titled Escape).
Exile in Paris: Giustizia e Libertà
In 1929, with Lussu, Nitti, and a Parisian circle of refugees
which had formed around Salvemini, Rosselli helped found the anti-fascist
movement "Giustizia e Libertà". GL various numbers
of the review and the notebooks omonimi (with cadence weekly magazine and
salary) and was active in the organization of various spectacular actions,
notable among which was the flight over Milan di Bassanesi (1930). In 1930 he
published, in French, "Socialisme Libéral".
The book was at once a passionate critique of Marxism, a
creative synthesis of the democratic socialist revisionism (Bernstein, Turati and Treves)
and of classical Italian Liberalism (Francisco Saverio Merlino and Gaetano
Salvemini). But it contained also a shattering attack on the Stalinism of
the Third International, which had, with the
derisive formula of "socialfascism", lumped together social
democracy, bourgeois liberalism and fascism. It was
not surprising, therefore, when one of the most important Italian Communists, Togliatti,
defined "liberal Socialism" "libellous anti-socialism" and
Rosselli "a reactionary ideologue who has nothing to do with the working
class".
Giustizia e Libertà joined the Concentrazione Antifascista
Italiana (The Italian Anti-Fascist Concentration), a union of all the
non-communist anti-fascist forces (republican, socialist, nationalist) trying
to promote and to coordinate expatriate actions to fight fascism in Italy. They
also first published the "Giustizia e Libertà Journals".
After the advent of Nazism in Germany (1933), the paper
began to call for insurgency, revolutionary action, and military action in
order to stop the Italian and German regimes before they plunge Europe into a
tragic war. Spain, they wrote, seems the destiny of all fascist states.
The Spanish civil war
In July 1936 the Spanish
Civil War erupted as the fascist-monarchical led army attempted a coup
d'état against the republican government of the Popular Front. Rosselli helped lead the
Italian anti-fascist supporters of the republican forces, criticizing the
neutrality policy of France and Britain, especially as Italy and Germany sent
arms and troops in support of the rebels. In August, Rosselli and the GL
organized its own brigades of volunteers to support the Spanish Republic.
With Camillo
Berneri, Rosselli headed the Matteotti Battalion, a mixed volunteer unit of
anarchist, liberal, socialist and communist Italians. The unit was sent to the Aragon
front, and participated in a victory against Francoist forces
in the Battle of Monte Pelato. Speaking on
Barcelona Radio in November, Rosselli made famous the slogan: "Oggi in
Spagna, domani in Italia" ("Today in Spain, tomorrow in Italy").
After falling ill, Rosselli was sent back to Paris, from
where he led support for the anti-fascist cause, and proposed an even broader 'popular
front' while still remaining critical of the Communist Party of Spain and
the Soviet government of Joseph
Stalin. In 1937, Berneri was killed by Communist forces during a purge of
anarchists in Barcelona. With the fall of the Spanish Republic in 1939, Giustizia e Libertà partisans were forced
to flee back to France.
Murder
In June 1937 Carlo Rosselli and his brother visited the
French resort town of Bagnoles-de-l'Orne. On 9 June the two were
killed by a group of "cagoulards", militants of the "Cagoule",
a French fascist group,[3][4][5] probably
on the orders of Mussolini.[6]
Thought
Carlo Rosselli only published a single book, "Liberal
Socialism", in his life. This work marked Rosselli out as a heretic in the
Italian left of his time (for which Karl Marx's Das Kapital,
variously interpreted, was still the bible). Undoubtedly the influence of the
British labour movement, which he knew well, is visible. As a result of the
electoral successes of the Labour
Party, Rosselli was convinced that the 'norms' of liberal democracy were
essential, not only in building Socialism, but also for its concrete
realization. This stands in contrast to Leninist tactics,
in which these rules, once power is taken, must be set aside. This 'Rossellian'
synthesis is that "[parliamentary] liberalism is the method, Socialism is
the aim".
The Marxist-Leninist idea
of revolution founded on the dictatorship of the proletariat (which he felt, as
in the Russian case, was synonymous with the dictatorship of a single party) he
rejected in favour of a revolution that—as famously put in the GL program—is a
coherent system of structural reforms aimed at the construction of a Socialism;
that does not limit, but indeed exalts, freedom of personality and of
association. Writing in his final years, Rosselli became more radical in his
libertarian positions, defending the social organization of the CNT-FAI he had seen in Anarchist Catalonia and Barcelona during
the civil war, and informed by the rise of Nazi
Germany.
References
^ Spencer
Di Scala. Italian socialism: between politics and history. Boston,
Massachusetts, USA: University of Massachusetts Press,
1996. Pp. 87.
^ Spencer
Di Scala. Italian socialism: between politics and history. Boston,
Massachusetts, USA: University of Massachusetts Press,
1996. Pp. 87.
^ Stanislao
G. Pugliese Death in Exile: The
Assassination of Carlo Rosselli, Journal of Contemporary History, 32 (1997),
pp. 305-319
^ Rose,
Peter Isaac (2005). The Dispossessed: An Anatomy Of Exile. University of Massachusetts Press,
pp. 138-139. ISBN
1-55849-466-9
^ Pugliese,
Stanislao G. (July 1997). "Death in Exile: The Assassination of Carlo
Rosselli". Journal of Contemporary History 32 (3): 305–319. doi:10.1177/002200949703200302.
Works
Carlo Rosselli, Liberal Socialism. Edited by Nadia
Urbinati. Translated by William McCuaig (Princeton: Princeton University Press
1994).
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