Learning From Italian Antifascism

Marco Bresciani

Yes, exactly. He played a crucial role in this story in many ways. What I try to do in the book is to show all the connections between Rosselli and Giustizia e Libertà. But at the same time, Giustizia e Libertà was much more than just Rosselli. He was an intellectual and an academic, a professor working at the university. His major book, Socialismo Liberale (Liberal Socialism), was in many ways the outcome of several years of hard work in economic theory, history and theory of trade unions, and the history of liberalism and socialism.

He started as an intellectual, and then because of the pressure of the historical context, he became increasingly a politician, especially in the ’30s. He was involved in the first clandestine antifascist editorial projects in Florence and Milan, then he was a protagonist alongside Sandro Pertini in organizing the escape of the socialist leader Filippo Turati from Italy to France. He was arrested and sent into confinement, where he was able to spend some years studying, reading, and writing, although in very harsh conditions. He spent this time in conversation with Emilio Lussu, who is another important figure in this story. Lussu and Rosselli made an incredible escape from the prison island of Lipari to Marseille and then to Paris, where they founded Giustizia e Libertà.

Rosselli’s intuition was to create something completely new. The common ground for the new group he looked for in order to collect as many forces as possible within his group was a perspective of antifascist revolution, which is not exactly the same as liberal socialism. So this idea of emphasizing a revolutionary antifascist perspective responded to the game of trying to mobilize different political cultures and traditions: republican, democratic, and socialist.

Furthemore, Giustizia e Libertà was a group of politicians and…