Carlo Rosselli
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Carlo Rosselli (b.Rome, 16 November 1899 - d.Bagnoles-de-l'Orne, France, 9 June 1937) was a political leader, journalist and historian. Anti-fascist activist, first in Italy then abroad; he was a theorist of "liberal Socialism", a non-Marxist Socialism, reformist, inspired by the British Labour movement, that has been defined as "liberal Socialism".
Contents |
[edit] Life
[edit] Birth, war and studies
Born in Rome 16 November 1899, to a wealthy Tuscan Jewish family. His mother, Pincherle, had been active in republican politics and thought and had participated to the Re-unification of Italy. See: Risorgimento. 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 point of companion of both the Rosselli brothers. It was in this period that he became a socialist, simpathetic 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 persue at Turin and 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.
[edit] 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 is for pushes for more active opposition to Fascism. With the help of Ernesto Rossi and Gaetano Salvemini he founded the clandestine publication "Non mollare". During the next months, fascist violence towards the left became severe. Ernesto Rossi leaves the country for France, followed by Salvemini. In February of 1926 fellow activist Piero Gobetti is 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 and sent for a period of confinment 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 traveled to France, and the community of Italian antifascists such as 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).
[edit] Exile in Paris: Giustizia e Libertà
In 1929, with Lussu, Nitti, and a Parisian circle of refugees which had formed around Salvemini, Rosselli helps 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 is active in the organization of various demonstrative actions, between which the flight over Milan di Bassanesi (1930). In 1930 he publishes, in French, "Socialisms liberal".
The book is 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 Salvemini). But it contains 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" "libelous antisocialism" and Rosselli "a reactionary ideologue who has nothing to do with the working class".
Giustizia e Libertà joined the Concentrazion 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 edpublish 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 regiemes before they plunge Europe into a tragic war. Spain, they wrote, seems the destiny of all fascist states.
[edit] The Spanish civil war
In July 1936 the Spanish Civil War erupted as the fascist-monarchical led army atempted a coup d'état against the republican government of the Popular Front. Rosselli helps lead the Italian anti-fascist support of the republican forces, criticizing the neutrallity policy of France and England, especilally as Italy and German send 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 on to the Aragon front, and partcipated 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 taking 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 Stalin.
In 1937, Berneri was killed by Communist forces during a purge of anarchists in Barcelona. With the fall of the Spanish Republic in 1937, Giustizia e Libertà partisans were forced to flee back to France.
[edit] Murder
In June 1937 Carlo Rosselli and his brother had visited the Frech 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, likely on the order of Mussolini.
[edit] Thought
Carlo Rosselli only published a single book, "Liberal Socialism", in his life. This work marked Rosselli out as a heritic in the Italian left of his time (for which Marx's Das Kapital, variously interpreted, was still the bible). Undoubtedly the influence of the British labour movement, which he knew well, is visable. As a result of the electoral successes of the Labour Party, Rosselli was convinced that the 'rules' of liberal democracy were essential, not only in buliding 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 (that he felt, like in the Russian case, was a dictatorship of a single party) he rejected in favor 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.
[edit] Sources
- Translation of Italian Wikipedia article: [1].
- Stanislao G. Pugliese, Death in Exile: The Assassination of Carlo Rosselli. Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Jul., 1997), pp. 305-319
[edit] External links
- [2]Stanislao G. Pugliese, _Carlo_Rosselli:_Socialist_Heretic_and_Antifascist_Exile, Harvard University Press (1999). ISBN 0-674-00053-6
- Nicola Tranfaglia. "Carlo Rosselli, dall'Interventismo a Giustizia e Libertà". Bari: Laterza, 1968.
- [3] Italian Life Under Fascism: Opposition to Fascism.
- [4] "Carlo Rosselli e l'altro socialismo" : Links and Timeline (Italian).
- [5] biography of Rosselli (Italian).
- [6] Carl Rosselli and the Aventino (Italian).
- [7] biography, information and other links on Giustizia e Libertà and Carlo Rosselli (Italian).
