At the same time, the French Sûreté was doing a little spying of its own, some of it fanciful. Marion, a policeman noted, was thinking of opening a salon for the exiles and for the women who ran the Friends of Italian Liberty. The Rossellis were reported to have ‘large sums of money, acquaintances, sympathisers, and they propose to create a vast movement of anti-fascism’. A report written on Oxilia, still in the South of France, is revealing. A rumour had been picked up in the Italian community that the fascists were planning to kidnap him, and he had told friends that he was terrified of being attacked in the street, bundled into a car and driven across the border. Since the French were anxious not to arouse anti-Italian sentiment, they decided to tell border police to look out for anyone looking suspiciously cowed in the back of a car trying to cross into Italy.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, the Italian anti-fascists in France were growing increasingly aware that they were being watched, though most remained curiously innocent of the perils. At about the time of Carlo’s arrival, an anarchist called Camillo Berneri, another former disciple of Salvemini’s, had started a file of his own on suspected spies. Though he concluded gloomily that ‘there is nothing but confusion in Paris, and it’s no longer possible to distinguish one’s friends from one’s enemies’, he continued to compile names and potted biographies and put out a paper on ‘Fascist Spies Abroad’. But neither he nor the uneasy anti-fascists were any match for Bocchini and his men.
The spies were much helped by the presence in Paris of a small, but vocal and growing, band of fascists. The first Paris fascio had been set up by a personal friend of Mussolini, Nicola Bonservizi – the man assassinated by an anarchist in 1924 – with a duke, a count, a professor and two doctors on its board. ‘Centurions’ of the ‘Bonservizi cohort’ were busy instilling ‘l’anima italiana’, the Italian soul, into otherwise sadly ‘denationalised’ Italian children. As in the London fascio, there was much singing of ‘Giovinezza’ at banquets and gatherings attended by the grandees in their fascist uniforms, and children were sent home to Italy at the expense of the state to be bathed in italianità during the summer holidays. Expectant mothers were also offered a free passage home so that their offspring would be born in the patria. Their meeting place, the Casa d’Italia, just off the Champs-Élysées, had been done up with sumptuous elegance, intended to reflect an image of ‘the Italy of today, ardent, young, active, dedicated to discipline . . . respectful of hierarchy’.
Mussolini was right to fear the power of Carlo and his friends, for they were indeed committed to making trouble. As Lussu wrote long afterwards, ‘In those first years of exile we thought of nothing but plots, attacks, insurrection and revolution.’
The first plot, however, was not of their making. A twenty-one-year-old student called Fernando de Rosa, active in the Turin anti-fascist movement until forced to flee Italy in 1928, had made friends among the more conspiratorial members of the exiled Italian community. They called him the ‘beniamino’, the youngest son. Since he firmly believed that the old Italy he loved had been crushed, he told his friends, he did not mind dying for the cause of its freedom. Telling no one of his plans, he caught a train to Brussels on 22 October 1929 and went to the Colonne du Congrès, where the Italian heir to the throne, Crown Prince Umberto, in Brussels for his wedding to the Belgian king’s daughter, was due to lay a wreath to the Unknown Soldier. De Rosa managed to slip through the police cordon, pulled out a gun and fired. But he had aimed far too high and his bullet missed the prince. De Rosa was thrown to the ground and almost lynched by the crowds. Later, he would explain that his gesture had been intended to draw the world’s attention to the complicity of the Italian monarchy in fascism.
His trial drew many friends and supporters, including Turati, who spoke affectionately of a young man ‘overcome by the folly of self-sacrifice, like the first martyr in the catacombs’, and described Italy as a country in which ‘violence and crime’ now held sway. De Rosa’s lawyer argued that it was the effect of fascism on young and impressionable minds, when they saw their homeland battered and dishonoured, that should be judged. De Rosa was given a five-year prison sentence. Carlo, not surprisingly, was full of praise for his act. Tyrannicide, he had taken to saying, was not something that should be rejected out of hand. His words were not lost on the spies.
The next plot, in which Carlo was an unwitting player, was somewhat more complicated. It involved one of Bocchini’s early recruits, Ermanno Menapace (No. 98 in the police dossiers) who, passing himself off as a salesman of used cars, had been courting the journalist Cianca and anarchist Berneri for some time with a view to provoking an incident that would reflect badly on the anti-fascists. With Carlo’s arrival and the setting up of Giustizia e Libertà, the prospect seemed even more appealing. Tarchiani, observing Menapace’s machinations, had grown suspicious and tried to warn his friends, but Berneri was a complicated character, full of candour and a longing for martyrdom. And he, like Carlo, yearned for action. Menapace fed him the idea of assassinating Alfredo Rocco, architect of Mussolini’s new corporativism, while on a visit to the League of Nations in Geneva.
Berneri, deftly played by Menapace, took possession of some gelignite and fuses, and was then caught in his flat in Paris, in a cleverly orchestrated sting, which soon implicated not only Cianca, but Tarchiani, Lussu and Carlo. The French authorities were surprisingly lenient. Cianca spent 100 days in the Santé prison. Berneri served a longer sentence, and then paid a high price for his gullibility. Ostracised by the other exiles, he wandered from country to country in search of asylum. As for Tarchiani, Carlo and Lussu, they were formally expelled from France, but friends in high places managed to convert immediate expulsion into renewable temporary visas. Menapace, exposed as having planted the incriminating gelignite, fled to Italy.
None of this dented Carlo’s longing for a truly sensational stunt. The furore that had surrounded his escape from Lipari had died down, and it was time to stir it up again. He had just finished writing his book, his thesis that Italian socialism had to be rescued from both communism and fascism in a ‘third way’, harking back to the democratic dreams of Mazzini, Pisacane and the Risorgimento. And in March, Marion had given birth to a daughter, with, as Carlo wrote to his mother, a large mouth, a great deal of fair hair and ‘a little nose belonging to the potato family’. They decided to call their new child Amelia, after her grandmother, but she was soon known as Melina. Mirtillino had started to talk, and his sentences came out in a mixture of Italian, English and French. ‘The family grows in a most harmonious way,’ Carlo wrote to Amelia, adding that the one bitter note in his life, ‘mammolina cara’, was that she was so far away: otherwise, he was content, and ‘following my chosen path’. Amelia now had four grandchildren, but two were in exile and likely to remain there.
The new plot was the kind of adventure that Carlo most relished. Giovanni Bassanesi was a twenty-five-year-old teacher from Aosta, formal in manner, Catholic as well as liberal, who was supporting himself by photography while studying at the Sorbonne. With his very pale skin and straight dark hair slicked back, he looked a little like Rudolph Valentino, unsmiling and intense. He had been nineteen when Matteotti was murdered, and the event had marked his life. Soon after Cianca was released from prison, Bassanesi came to him with a plan. He had tried the communists but they had turned him away. He told Cianca that he had once scattered anti-fascist leaflets from the upper box of a theatre over the audience below, and this had given him a better idea. He would learn to fly, pilot a plane over an Italian city, and drop leaflets. Like many of these schemes, Bassanesi’s plan had a sort of absurd innocence about it. But when he heard about it Carlo was delighted. He said that he would buy the plane, pay for the leaflets and organise the whole venture.
Bassanesi duly learnt to fly. Because small planes have limited fuel capacity, an airfield was identified by friendly local socialists in the Swiss canton of Ticino, close to the Italian border, at Lodano. In a remarkably short space of time,
minutely orchestrated by Tarchiani and Carlo – by now experts in this kind of planning – a Farman biplane had been bought, an experienced French pilot found to fly the plane with Bassanesi on the first leg of the journey, the leaflets were printed, and Dolci had volunteered to fly as passenger in order to throw them out over Milan. Bassanesi, though by nature highly volatile and nervous – and also prone to airsickness – remained resolute.
Early in July 1930, Bassanesi and the French pilot flew to Bellinzona, the capital of Ticino, where the pilot was dropped off. Bassanesi then flew on to Lodano, where Carlo, Tarchiani, Dolci and the leaflets were waiting. Everyone was jumpy. At the last moment the parachutes had to be jettisoned because there was no room for them. At 11.30 a.m. on Friday 11 July, the plane took off, with the anxious Bassanesi at the controls. They crossed the frontier, flying at 150 kilometres an hour, and by midday were above Milan. For the next fifteen minutes they flew low over the city, Dolci throwing out the leaflets, which fell, like multicoloured snowflakes, on to the workers emerging from offices and factories for their lunch hour. One pack, which failed to come apart, broke a factory window, but no one was hurt.
Having dropped Dolci back at another airfield just over the border, Bassanesi flew towards the St Gotthard Pass. There was heavy cloud and he had no instruments. Unable to see where he was going, he made a crash-landing in a rocky field. The Farman fell apart and he was briefly unconscious before being pulled from the wreckage with a broken leg. He was arrested by the Swiss police and taken to a prison hospital in Andermatt.
Giovanni Bassanesi, before his flight over Milan
The effect of the stunt was extremely satisfactory. The first news of the flight appeared in a Ticino paper, which gave it a special edition. The story was picked up, repeated, reprinted throughout Europe. In Italy, there was at first total silence. Then a short article appeared about a ‘rogue’ plane with a ‘renegade’ pilot, spewing ‘words of hatred’ in the form of leaflets, all of which had been quickly recovered and destroyed. The aeroplane, said the Corriere della Sera, symbol of all that was glorious and progressive, had been turned into a ‘hateful device’ and a reminder of treachery.
The truth was somewhat different. The snowstorm of leaflets had caused a sensation in Milan, and far from being recovered, all but 15,000 of the 150,000 thrown out were spirited away, to be passed on from hand to hand and city to city. The daring of the enterprise was much admired, and the name of Giustizia e Libertà was on everyone’s lips. Mussolini called for the maximum punishment for these ‘violators of the inviolable sky’ and for a trial for endangering the security of Switzerland. The Swiss refused, saying they would bring charges only for violation of the rules on flights.
Carlo, Tarchiani and Dolci all volunteered to appear before the court, believing it would afford them much welcome publicity. The trial did not go Mussolini’s way. Held in the city of Lugano under a judge, Agostino Soldati, known for his independence of spirit, it became a replica of the famous Savona trial. Lawyers from all over Switzerland volunteered to defend the men. Once again it was not those in the dock but fascism itself that was on trial. Speaker after speaker described the brutality of the fascists. There was a huge turnout of lawyers, politicians and journalists, many of them from foreign newspapers. Carlo Sforza and Turati testified on Bassanesi’s behalf, Turati saying that the stunt had been a beacon of light amid the terror and unhappiness of an ‘oppressed and depressed Italy’. Do not hope, he said, that in fining Carlo Rosselli you will make him mend his ways. ‘He is incorrigible. And he will commit many other such acts . . . until the Patria has been redeemed and restored to liberty.’ Sforza spoke at length about ‘sacred ideals’ until stopped by the judge.
Bassanesi had broken Swiss law and received a four-month prison sentence, but since he had already spent several months awaiting trial, he was immediately released. His ‘idealism’ was praised, and he received no fine. Carlo, Tarchiani, Dolci and the French pilot were all acquitted. As in Savona, the cheering flowed out into the streets. That night, there was a celebratory banquet before the plotters boarded their train for Paris. At stations along the way were waiting enthusiastic crowds. Bassanesi returned to Brussels, where he was much congratulated; and soon set about dreaming up new stunts. Once again, Carlo, Tarchiani and Dolci were heroes. But Amelia was full of angst. ‘I beg of you,’ she wrote to Carlo, ‘be sensible, do not push your luck. I am terrified that your constant little pinpricks will result in some disaster (though I fervently hope that moment never comes).’
The flight over Milan had put Giustizia e Libertà firmly on the map. But its leaders were now squarely in Bocchini’s sights.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Just One Heart
As Piero Calamandrei later described them, Carlo and Nello were ‘two spirits, two attitudes of mind, two kinds of life, but just one heart’. While Carlo chose to fight the fascists from abroad, ‘the land of freedom’, Nello considered it his duty to challenge them within Italy, ‘the land of slavery’. Pressed by friends to join Carlo in France, he would say that someone had to stay behind to give an example of how not to give in to the fascists, to ‘salvar l’anima’, save his soul, in the very midst of them: it had fallen to his lot to do so. The two brothers’ natures were not so much alike as complementary: Carlo excitable, impatient, optimistic; Nello calm, even-tempered, full of self-doubt. Where they met, somewhere in the middle, was over the beliefs inculcated in them since early childhood by Amelia and carried into their adult years: a certainty that they had to take responsibility for their own actions, a shared honesty, loyalty and deep sense of family, and their profound love for each other. There were no voices of criticism or disapproval between them. They were now thirty and twenty-nine. That they looked so similar, both tall, fair-skinned, somewhat overweight, with open faces and warm manners, only added to their closeness.
Both possessed, as Amelia did, curiosity, a need to understand, a moral centre, a belief in human dignity, and implicit in everything they said and wrote was their attachment to liberty. For both of them, the evils of fascism lay not in questions of class and privilege but in the mistakes of the past, and neither one believed that, once fascism was defeated, it would ever be possible to go back to what had come before. Something new had to happen. Carlo was seeking it in action, Nello in history, as seen through the men and women who had shaped it. The fact that Nello’s part was by necessity more oblique, more guarded, made him seem the less involved of the two. But he was not. He, like Carlo, was a fighter, always conscious, as he told a friend of ‘all the beauty and value of a life of battle’. As Carlo put it, they both knew that the battle might last many years, and that it was likely to entail many sacrifices; but there was no avoiding it. ‘We are working for eternity! This is our strength.’ Amelia, reluctantly, with fear and misgivings but also with pride, accepted this. Both her sons knew how much she minded not being near them. This, Carlo wrote to a friend, also in exile in France, was the sad fate ‘of our mothers who are growing old’.
At the Scuola Moderna, Volpe had not ceased to manoeuvre on Nello’s behalf. He was clearly attached to his young colleague and prepared to put up with criticism that he was supporting ‘an open enemy of the regime, a socialist, a Salveminiano’. Nello’s Mazzini e Bakunin had been praised by critics for its meticulous accumulation of material and for its style, free of flourish and vested interest, unusual in the world of Italian academia. He had already done what research he could for the Scuola di Storia Moderna e Contemporanea’s project on British and Italian diplomatic relations in the archives in Palermo, Naples, Turin and Rome. Volpe wanted him to pursue them in the Public Record Office in London, and he now persuaded a reluctant Mussolini to grant Nello a passport. Though the material was too dry to be congenial to Nello, for he was increasingly drawn to a wider, more discursive and biographical view of history, seen through men’s ambitions and drives, he was a willing and diligent worker and accepted the possibility of a stint abroad with pleasure. I
t was made clear to everyone that he was not considering flight.
All the Rossellis, in their own way, loved London. Englishness, like the Risorgimento, was part of their rational image of themselves, as people not easily buffeted by oratory or obfuscation. Carlo had briefly considered making London his base, but quickly realised that, for the anti-fascists, its staid social circles were no match for the volatile cross-currents of Parisian life.
In June 1930, leaving Maria, Silvia and Paola with Amelia in Via Giusti, Nello set out for England. ‘I am wonderfully happy,’ he wrote from the Thackeray Hotel in Bloomsbury. He loved the cordiality of the people he encountered and their ‘passionate respect’ for individual liberty, and he even liked the weather. It was, he told them, as if he had come home ‘after a long mental illness’. His ‘old English blood’ thrived. In the mornings, he went to the archives, despairing about the sheer amount of material he was finding; in the afternoons he joined his painter friend Carlo Levi, also on a visit to England, and they took their easels to Hampton Court, catching a boat up the Thames. One day, they hired bicycles and set off to explore the English countryside.
A Bold and Dangerous Family Page 30
