The Frontier of Loyalty by Shain Yossi;

Author:Shain, Yossi;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Pragmatism in Exile Politics

In November 1926 Mussolini imposed his dictatorship on Italy. He forbade political opposition, forcing many of his adversaries, leaders of socialist parties especially, to flee abroad. These leaders established the Concentrazione antifascista in Paris in April 1927. In its first years the organization was limited in its communication with the clandestine groups inside Italy, and its propaganda warfare was ineffective.78 In 1929, almost a century after Mazzini established Young Italy, Carlo Rosselli founded Justice and Liberty in Paris.79 The exile organization was neither the first nor the largest of the Italian anti-Fascist exile groups, but by the early 1930s almost all the other exile groups regarded it as the most effective organization in mobilizing clandestine groups to fight Fascism within Italy.80 Carlo Rosselli himself earned a reputation as the most dangerous of the Italian anti-Fascists.81

Justice and Liberty owed its relative success in mobilizing loyalists inside Italy to its leadership’s ability to project personal valor and readiness for self-sacrifice. Its core members in Paris had established their own reputation for heroism a number of years before. Its original nucleus had been formed in 1922 in Italy under the leadership of Piero Gobetti, whose newspaper Rivoluzione Liberale, published in Turin, was one of the most “progressive and provocative” anti-Fascist organs in Italy between 1922 and 1924.82 Carlo Rosselli, Riccardo Bauer, Gaetano Salvemini, Guido de Ruggiero, and others, who later joined Justice and Liberty in exile, had collaborated inside Italy in 1924 in publishing the clandestine anti-Fascist newspaper Non Mollare! (Don’t Give In!). This newspaper called upon Italians to revive the spirit of the Risorgimento and to boycott the Fascist regime just as their fathers had boycotted the Austrian authorities from 1848 to 1859.83 Founders of Non Mollare! established an underground section in Florence, which advised Florentines to stay at home or leave town on the day of a visit by King Victor Emmanuel, “since the King was no longer the king of the Italians but of the Fascists.”84 The Fascist regime eventually forced many Non Mollare! activists to leave Italy.

In September 1927 Rosselli and his friend Ferruccio Parri were sentenced to five years in prison for assisting Filippo Turati to escape abroad. The seventy-year-old Turati, who was parliamentary leader of the right-wing Socialist Party, was kept under house arrest in Milan on charges of anti-Fascist tendencies. Unable to bear the humiliation and persecution of their political teacher, Rosselli and Parri organized his escape; together they navigated a small motor boat from Savona to Corsica, and from there Turati found his way to Paris. In the sensational trial that followed, Rosselli and Parri were convicted as accomplices in the crime of “unauthorized expatriation.”85 They did not deny the charges; on the contrary they accepted full responsibility for Turati’s escape, “not in any hope of clemency, but because they knew their action to have been highly moral.”86 They had followed the Mazzinian code of ethics, placing the duties of man toward humanity above the loyalty of a citizen to his government.

Mazzini

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