Though he was without many of the books he needed, he went back to work on his three current projects – the political right in Italy, Piedmont between 1849 and 1860, and Italy’s foreign policy towards Britain. As he wrote ruefully to Gina Lombroso: ‘It is my destiny that just as my labours are coming into port, a sudden squall throws them back on to the high seas.’ However, Ponza was the very island to which the nineteenth-century patriot Pisacane had been sent, and he began to think that he might write his biography; since he had no documents, he would use his imagination ‘to make him come alive inside me’. Carlo Levi had sent him paints and part of his days were spent outside with his drawing pad. ‘It is certain that if I loved and admired you very much before,’ Levi wrote, ‘I love and admire you and your family even more today. You endure all these reversals not only without complaining, but you find in them ways to stay alive and even to be happy . . . You are, in short, an extraordinary family.’ It made him, he said, almost embarrassed to be so weak and so idle.
On learning of Nello’s arrest, Volpe wrote him a tetchy and reproachful letter. ‘I would like to believe that the charges levelled against you are once again only suspicions . . . I would feel most pained if you had broken your promises to me.’ Somewhat reassured by Nello’s protests that he was innocent, Volpe again intervened on his behalf with the Ministry of the Interior, saying that he had seen no sign of any kind of political activity in Nello. Maria was now in the eighth month of her pregnancy. To everyone’s surprise, Nello was allowed to leave Ponza and travel to Florence to be with her, though he took two guards with him. On 5 November came the even more unexpected news that the case against him had been dropped. The next day, at eight in the morning, Maria gave birth to their second daughter. She weighed over 3½ kilos and had a loud voice and chubby hands. Compared to the delicate and doll-like Silvia, Amelia wrote to Carlo and Marion, she looked distinctly ‘borghese’. Having expected a boy, her parents had no name for her. Eventually they settled on Paola.
The family’s fortunes had taken a turn for the better. Neither of Amelia’s sons was any longer a prisoner. And though Carlo was in exile, Nello was free, in a cautious way, to move around. He and Maria bought a former convent in the hills above Florence at Bagno a Ripoli. A large sixteenth-century villa reached by a long dirt road, there were olive trees, an orchard, a vegetable garden and a magnificent view of the city laid out below them. It had a terrace of cypresses and an old chapel, which Nello turned into his study. Here, taking Amelia with them, they planned to spend the summer months.
L’Apparita, the Rosselli house at Bagno a Ripoli above Florence
Amelia was now fifty-nine, and still beautiful; her hair, of which she was very proud, was completely white; she rinsed it with a blue wash to stop it looking yellow. Conscious of her looks, she dressed in lilac and grey, and wore a wide ribbon around her neck, in white rather than the usual black. She carried a lorgnette in a little bag which closed with a button, and told Silvia and Paola that she could make it open by blowing on it. When the little girls went to bed at night, she kissed them all over their heads, as if flowers were falling down on them.
Long before Carlo, Lussu and Nitti arrived in France in the high summer of 1929, Paris had become the capital of Mussolini’s enemies. It was an excitable, affectionate and disputatious world, riven by feuds, prey to rumours, full of hope and despair. Turati, in his iron-grey coat, large bow tie and scuffed wide-brimmed hat, chain-smoking, his expression one of permanent gentle irony, was its undisputed patriarch and elder statesman. Alongside him were Claudio Treves, his fellow socialist leader, small, with thick red hair cut en brosse and red whiskers, much respected but too austere and trenchant to be universally liked, holding his loneliness and passions behind a cool, courteous manner; Carlo Sforza, one-time Italian ambassador to France; and Francesco Saverio Nitti, uncle to Francesco Fausto, and briefly prime minister of Italy in 1919. These were the ‘pezzi grossi’, the big fish.
Around these men were representatives of every faction of Italian politics – maximalist and reformist socialists, communists, liberals, republicans and anarchists – and, as in the penal islands, every variety of man and woman who had fallen foul of the fascists. There was also Salvemini, who came and went between London and Paris, and refused to follow any political line, referring to himself as the wandering Jew of anti-fascism.
The Italian exiles had reached France in three waves during the 1920s, joining not just the earlier generations of Italian patriots, driven abroad by the revolutions of the Risorgimento, but the Russians, Armenians, Latin-Americans, Poles, Algerians and Jews, drawn to France by its liberal views. A country that welcomed political exiles, France was where the League of Human Rights was born among a disparate group of syndicalists, pacifists, Freemasons and republicans. The first wave of Italians, arriving in the wake of the March on Rome in 1922, had brought anarchists and socialists, active in the labour confrontations and hounded from home by the squadristi. Many of these had settled in Argenteuil, fifteen kilometres to the north of Paris and soon known as ‘la petite Italie anti-fasciste’. Next came men such as Salvemini and Turati, targeted by the fascists after Mussolini’s triumphant speech in January 1925. Finally came those who, after the fascist decrees of November 1926, understood that there was no longer any place for them in the new Italy and who, after Mussolini closed the borders in 1927, had survived often hair-raising journeys over high mountain passes. By 1929, all Italian political parties in exile had their headquarters in Paris, reproducing what they had been forced to leave behind, including their differences and their schisms. Nevertheless, at a meeting held in the south-western town of Nérac in March 1927, the exiles had formed themselves into a coalition, the Concentrazione Antifascista, dedicated to keeping alive a sense of opposition, and to bringing some kind of unity to their deliberations. Only the communists had refused to join; they looked after their own.
Many of these refugees – most of them men – were now impoverished. As one man put it, exile represented ‘the very outer limits of unhappiness’. Accustomed to respect and affluence, as lawyers, professors, engineers and parliamentarians, they were grateful when they could find jobs as waiters, garage mechanics, clerks.
Filippo Turati (centre) and the Italian exiles in Paris
Carlo’s friend Sandro Pertini washed cars at night, then became a bricklayer. The exiles lived frugally, like students, in small dark rooms in modest hotels around Rue de La Tour-d’Auvergne, in the 9ième, and met in smoke-filled halls above cafés run by other Italians. At the Unione delle Cooperative, they ate at one long table covered in a white cloth with a small bottle of red wine before every place. With their beards, some wispy, some lush, their pince-nez and dark clothes, they looked neat and serious.
The more fortunate were sometimes invited to Nitti’s uncle’s house on Boulevard de La Tour-Maubourg, where the former president and his wife Antonia, who had managed to bring money out, provided an ‘oasis of faith and hope in this desert of resignation, inconclusion and dissatisfaction’. To every new arrival, the former prime minister said cheerfully: ‘In three months we will be home.’ Turati, who shared none of his optimism, was to be found in a fifth-floor studio, where he rose before dawn, washed in cold water and made coffee on a primus stove from special beans bought from La Maison du Café – his only luxury – before sitting down to work very close to the window as his sight was increasingly poor. He kept a large framed photograph of Anna Kuliscioff on his table.
As the months of exile had passed and turned into years, and their funds had kept shrinking, so the Italians had moved to ever smaller and dingier hotels. They often went hungry. Their neat suits frayed. All they had left was words. When not talking – loudly, indiscreetly, heedless of eavesdroppers – the exiles wrote articles and memoranda, position papers and speeches and pamphlets. With the Concentrazione Antifascista had come La Libertà newspaper, written almost single-handed by Treves in two grimy rooms in the Faubourg-Saint-Denis. There was
also the satirical Il Becco Giallo – ‘The Yellow Beak’ – co-founded by Alberto Cianca, former minister in the Bonomi government and editor of Il Mondo.
As for the French, they had been very generous to these refugees – there were said to be some 150,000 Italians living in and around Paris at the end of the 1920s, and over a million across the whole of France – but they were growing wary, particularly since a prominent fascist called Nicola Bonservizi had been shot dead in a restaurant not long before. His killer, an anarchist, would have gone to the guillotine had it not been for the outrage of the French public over the Matteotti murder. Aristide Briand had just replaced Raymond Poincaré to create his eleventh cabinet in a long and uneasy run of shifting political allegiances. Six months before Carlo’s arrival, the government had announced that no political fracas from the exiles would be tolerated, and anyone caught breaking the law would be deported. Since politics were all the exiles had left, this decree had been greeted with great apprehension. In the French newspapers, Carlo, Lussu and Nitti’s arrival was noted in a mixture of ways, the left celebrating ‘a contagion of courage – crowned by success – which might yet change into an epidemic’, the right anxious lest the three men transform a hitherto peaceful Italian community, albeit one sometimes disparagingly described as ‘i macaroni’, into one of troublesome agitators.
It was into this quietly seething, impoverished, rivalrous grey world of exile that Carlo erupted, youthful, bursting with vigour and resolve. Greeted, as he told Amelia, ‘like a brother and a hero’, he moved into a small hotel in Rue de Chabrol, not far from the Gare du Nord. The moment he knew that Marion and Mirtillino were free and safe, he got down to work with Salvemini, Lussu and Nitti. It was immediately clear to the newcomers that the parties and political leaders already in exile had grown inward-looking, inert, bogged down by doctrinal differences. As Treves summed it up: ‘Don’t look to us, we are the defeated, the failures.’ The Concentrazione Antifascista was interested only in propaganda, talk, rhetoric, but not in action or in supporting those anti-fascists still clinging on in Italy. But action was precisely what Carlo had in mind. As he wrote to Amelia, ‘My thoughts and my heart are in Italy. It is there that lie our hopes, our field of action.’ What was needed was not more talk, and certainly ‘no old parties, no old names’.
Within two weeks, a movement – strictly not a party – was formed. This ‘veritable laboratory of ideas’ was to be called Giustizia e Libertà, the name they had chosen on Lipari, and was to draw inspiration from Salvemini’s teachings in Florence, from Non Mollare, from Gobetti and from Il Quarto Stato. It had nine founder members: Cianca, a stocky, whiskery man with a prominent nose who, as a serious, well-regarded editor, kept up a moral crusade against Matteotti’s murder; Vincenzo Nitti, son of the former prime minister, a cool, sarcastic young man, excellent at deflating absurd ideas; the high-handed Raffaele Rossetti, original plotter in the first Lipari escape; Cipriano Facchinetti, with whom Rossetti had founded an important anti-fascist magazine in Turin; Tarchiani, architect of their freedom, silent, impassive, but extremely tenacious; and Salvemini. Carlo, Lussu and Francesco Fausto, one socialist, one republican, one liberal, three faces of an ‘inscindibile trinomio’, became the joint directors.
Giustizia e Libertà, attached to no political party and anxious to distance itself from the timorous legality of the Concentrazione, had more than a touch of anarchy in its tone. It would fight for ‘Liberty, the Republic, Social Justice’ in a single ‘unity of action’, which, though respectful of the ‘great dignity and rights’ of the exiled community, would be committed to revolt, to actions, ‘noisy, vast and violent’, inside Italy itself. ‘We Italians,’ they announced, ‘and no one else, will defeat fascism.’ After much debate, they took Lussu’s suggestion for their slogan – ‘Insorgere! Risorgere!’ – and a flaming sword as their symbol. Carlo was indefatigable, working fourteen-hour days, ‘modest and disciplined, heedless of all obstacles, seeing only the flowery, sunlit valley of his hopes’.
Having successfully launched Giustizia e Libertà in a fanfare of publicity, Carlo set about finding somewhere for his family to live. Marion would have liked a house in the countryside, mostly because she wanted her children to grow up surrounded by trees and grass, but also because she thought Carlo would be safer. Carlo himself, mindful of the grey, wet Parisian winters, would have preferred the bustle of the Left Bank, close to the shabby hotels and offices of the Italian exiles. They compromised on a light, sunny flat on the sixth floor of a new block of flats in Passy, close to Salvemini’s pension and to the Bois de Boulogne, an area largely unchanged from the eighteenth century, with tree-lined avenues and imposing houses.
By the end of September, Marion and Mirtillino were installed and their furniture had arrived from Italy. To his mother, Carlo wrote that he had at last ‘found a still point after so much agitation and so many problems’. Here, in the peace of Passy, surrounded by his family, he planned to complete his book on what he called Socialismo Liberale. Marion’s baby was due in the spring. She longed to play a more active role in Carlo’s life, but was constantly checked by her ill-health, saying sadly that she was nothing but a useless ‘barrel’ of a wife. On his thirtieth birthday that November, Carlo wrote a long letter to his mother. ‘Do you remember me as a boy,’ he asked. ‘Wily, impetuous, generous, bad-tempered, lazy?’ And as a young man, ‘voluble, prey to every passing fancy?’ Today, he told her, he could at last see the path ahead. ‘I will get there.’
He paid a quick visit to London, where he gave a talk at the National Liberal Club on ‘Fascism: Its Latest Phases’. He spoke at the LSE, to the Fabian Society, the 1917 Club and in Conway Hall, and he was invited to meet Dora Russell, Gilbert Murray and Lady Astor. He was not yet a very polished speaker, but he was fast on his feet and the English were charmed by his sense of humour, his modesty and his passion. Everywhere, to everyone, he described conditions on the penal islands. His country, he told his listeners, was now ‘silenced and cowed, regimented, spied on . . . controlled by an army of police agents’. The new Italy was ‘rapidly acquiring the soul of a slave’. ‘The day we overthrow the fascist regime,’ he told the Manchester Guardian, ‘it will be in Matteotti’s name. This is Mussolini’s dread.’
In Rome, Il Popolo d’Italia angrily depicted Carlo as a ‘renegade’, a repugnant traitor trotting out ‘bitter and scurrilous’ lies, and accused him of making money, like Judas, out of his treachery. It was all good publicity. Fêted everywhere, Carlo had time for little more than a dinner with Bertha Pritchard, to whom he wrote: ‘After three years of impotency, I feel full of energy . . . We will work and we will win, even if the fight lasts another twenty years and exacts from us extreme sacrifices.’
None of this activity was lost on Mussolini or Bocchini in Rome – not Carlo’s plans, nor his movements, nor his life with Marion and Mirtillino. For by the summer of 1929 Bocchini had made great progress with his many-tentacled secret services.
Two years earlier, Bocchini had decided to despatch a number of men to infiltrate the communities of exiles in various different countries, recruiting his agents from within the Fascist Party and for the most part attaching them to embassies and consulates. He gave each of them a code name, chosen from among the Homeric heroes – Ulisse, Achille – and the gods – Apollo, Diana, Castore. When he ran out of these, he moved into classical culture: Aristotle, Socrates. Now Mussolini announced that he would form his own ‘exquisitely fascist’ consular corps. In theory, these men were to be ‘authentic fascists and veterans of squadrismo’, aged between thirty and forty-five, have a university degree, and speak perfect French and at least one other language. In practice, some of those sent to France were ill-educated and thuggish, priding themselves on being graduates of the ‘school of the manganello’. The Italian embassy in Paris acted as logistical support for these diplomats-come-spies and their satellites of informers, while the consulates provided valuable information about the movements of the anti-fasci
sts around France. In Marseilles, a particularly zealous consul had a dozen men helping him draw up lists of ‘subversives’, subdividing them according to their physical appearance: ‘lame’, ‘wears glasses’, ‘bearded’, ‘with scars’.
For the moment, the sinister OVRA was still operating mainly inside Italy, while Polpol handled the foreign spies, paying them through secret funds and shady deals with money from the Ministry of the Interior. Not that all the informers needed paying: subtle threats against family members or promises of work were often enough to persuade the impoverished and frightened exiles to turn spy against their friends and colleagues. It was a murky world, and the various spy rings struggled for supremacy.
Bocchini’s ‘fiduciari’, his trusted agents, were given precise instructions: to report ‘facts, situations, opinions, criticisms’; to keep an eye out for any weakness which might be usefully exploited; to listen for rumours of plots. They were told to tap phones, read mail and carry out house searches. The idea of a ‘terrorist’ attack, particularly against Mussolini, continued to haunt Bocchini. Every report sent back to Rome was filed in the central police archive. The agents were given red dossiers, and known only by their pseudonyms and numbers.
The escape of Carlo, Lussu and Nitti, and particularly the enormous amount of bad publicity about fascist Italy it gave rise to, had been a severe blow to Mussolini. Bocchini circulated a letter to all his outposts saying that these men were ‘persone pericolose’, ‘dangerous people’, capable of committing ‘injurious acts’ and warning that Lussu, as a much-decorated war veteran, might well instigate his ‘partisans’ to carry them out. A report from the Italian ambassador to Paris at the end of October advised that Carlo was already ‘blowing life’ into the anti-fascist movement. His ‘principles’, reported one spy, ‘are absolutely different from those of the former leaders’. Another, clearly present at a meeting in Turati’s house, noted that he had seen Carlo ‘gesticulating, talking enthusiastically, telling everyone of the sufferings of the Italian people, enslaved to an armed and tyrannical minority’. On Carlo’s personal file in Rome, opened around this time, is stamped in large letters, ‘PERICOLOSO’. Bocchini ordered that surveillance on him should be increased.
A Bold and Dangerous Family Page 29
