Carlo was intending to repeat his success at the Savona trial and turn the occasion into a further public attack on the fascists; eminent European democrats were offering to act as witnesses in his defence. But having initially bombarded Germany with ever wilder accusations against the plotters, then realised that he would be giving Carlo another platform, Mussolini dropped all charges, though not before hundreds of the leaflets had been spirited out of police hands by German social democrats and posted into Italy. A possible ten-year prison sentence was turned into a fine and expulsion from Germany. The three men were freed. Cheated of his day in court, Carlo was comforted by a letter from Nello: ‘I am proud of you and your activities. Bit by bit, your name is being mentioned everywhere as a future leader in Italy . . . If you sometimes feel alone and unheeded, forget it . . . You will end up – we will end up – the victors as long as we never give up [non mollare], not for a moment, not by a hair on our body.’
Bold flights over Italian cities were now abandoned. They were too expensive, too unpredictable, too dangerous. Bassanesi continued to roam erratically around Europe, dreaming up ever madder schemes, alienating his friends by his truculence and closely watched by Bocchini’s spies. He finally took up with a pretty law student at the Sorbonne called Camilla Restellini, described by Turati as the ‘flower of exile’, and had four children with her. But the giellisti never quite trusted him again.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
A World of Moral Richness
Amelia, Nello and Maria, with Silvia and Paola, now three and two, spent the last night of 1931 in Via Giusti. There was a strong wind blowing and the fireplace smoked, but at midnight they opened a bottle of champagne and raised their glasses to Carlo and Marion in Paris. To say that she thought especially hard about him at that very moment, Amelia wrote to Carlo next morning, would be a mistake, because she thought about him ceaselessly, in an almost continuous single thought of love and good wishes. They had put Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony on the gramophone while they drank their champagne, and when Amelia remarked that it was really a funeral march, they agreed that it should be a funeral for 1931, which had turned out to be such a cursed year.
Though Carlo had not been prevented from re-entering France after prison in Konstanz, there were moves by the French government, and especially by the new prime minister Pierre Laval, to have him expelled, in order not to provoke Mussolini. But Carlo had met and become friends with Léon Blum, leader of the socialists, who intervened to get the order lifted; in exchange, he had to promise to refrain from all further ‘disorder’. Carlo told friends that he had no intention of stopping his campaigns: he would simply try to make himself less visible. Lying low was not something that came naturally to him. The Italian embassy reported to Rome that there were satisfactory indications that Carlo was not much liked in some French government circles, but added: ‘all the more powerful Jews, the 18-carat Jews,’ had come forward to support him. A tone of anti-semitism was beginning to creep into the language of Mussolini’s men, as it was, indeed, beginning to colour the tone of the French far-right papers. Nothing about the refugees, wrote one columnist, was more horrible to contemplate than ‘this mixture of people with their peculiar features, their hooked noses, their too-black hair, their leathery, bronzed, earthy hues’.
Carlo loved the new flat, where the windows looked immediately on to the Pantheon; in the evenings, if he had spent most of the day at his desk, he would stroll along the Boulevard Saint-Michel and pause by the book stalls. A newcomer to Paris at around this time, the Russian writer Victor Serge, described Carlo as watchful, a good listener and extremely courteous, but someone who – with a sudden direct observation or ‘merciless criticism’ – would reveal ‘the militant inside his soul’. Though some of the exiles were irritated by Carlo’s refusal to be constrained by anything, and others objected to the way he attacked the ‘anziani’, the ancients, he was on the whole much liked: his discreet generosity had become legendary. A new young friend, the musician Massimo Mila, heard him play Beethoven one day and remarked that though Carlo was not technically perfect, ‘behind every note you could hear a world of unrivalled moral richness’.
Salvemini with Mirtillino
Carlo and Marion had begun to have trouble with three-year-old Melina, who was turning out to be very wilful. Marion found her almost impossible to deal with, complaining that she upset the sunny and contented Andrea and saw something to complain about in even the nicest things. Marion was making efforts to get out more. Attending a meeting of the Italian socialists in the Pantheon one night, wearing what a police report described as a ‘pretty fur coat’, she was heckled and called a ‘sale bourgeoise’, until she seized a red scarf and waved it above her head to demonstrate her true colours. There was nothing she or Carlo now did which was not recorded by someone, whether the French police or the Italian spies. Even Carlo’s occasional colds were reported to Rome.
Carlo and Lussu continued to meet and to talk every day – Lussu would later say that their conversation had continued uninterrupted for seven years. Sometimes they quarrelled violently, but next day they were talking again. Lussu himself was penniless, unable to find work, walking everywhere to save money on Métro fares, eating scraps and visiting exhibitions only when they were free. No one, he joked, not even the Parisians, had ever visited the Louvre as often as he had. ‘I am not complaining about my situation,’ he wrote to his mother. ‘I like it a thousand times more than I would one of dishonourable tranquility.’ He was, however, in terrible shape, the damp and cold of his meagre lodgings aggravating his low-lying TB, and he often stayed in bed, passing the time writing caustic articles for the anti-fascist papers. He was keeping secret from his friends the fact that he had become involved with the pretty blonde blue-eyed twenty-year-old daughter of a friend, Joyce Salvadori, whom he had met when she had visited her father in confino. Lussu kept trying to put her off, pointing out that he was old and ill; but she was persistent and though she kept well away from the other exiles, she eventually moved into his hotel, where she cooked and filled his room with flowers.
Mutterings of criticism had been heard among the various members of the Concentrazione Antifascista that Carlo and Giustizia e Libertà were too stand-offish and superior. But Turati, to whom Carlo remained devoted and who continued to be regarded as the ‘ombrellone’, the ‘big umbrella’ of all the exiles, was anxious to broker some kind of accord. He feared that their incessant quarrels, along with their excessive prudence, made them appear both weak and unserious. ‘We have to get out of this poisonous miasma . . . We have to resist in every way possible: propaganda, airplanes, bombs? Everything rather than nothing. We have to remember always that they are the enemy and, as with a snake, we have to crush its head, wherever it hides.’
In February 1932 Carlo agreed to come up with plans for a unified movement in exile, making the Concentrazione responsible for all activities outside Italy, and Giustizia e Libertà for all those inside, becoming in effect their ‘armed wing’. Salvemini, never one to mince his words, continued to complain bitterly about the ‘cadaverous’ socialists. ‘I understand that it was inevitable,’ he wrote sourly to Carlo. ‘But what a pity you have had to swallow this filth . . . How much more heroic it would have been to remain independent . . . Instead, we have yoked together the living and the dead, shrouding the living with all the passivity of the corpses.’ The communists, who Salvemini hated even more than the socialists, refused to have any part in the new movement, saying that they considered Giustizia e Libertà ‘a masterpiece of hypocrisy, lies and stupidity’.
Hoping to rise above the endless sniping, Carlo opened the columns of a new paper, I Quaderni di Giustizia e Libertà, to all political views as a way of airing grievances and widening the discourse. Privately, he fumed against the scepticism and Machiavellianism of his supposed colleagues, saying that they were always quick to ‘deride anything of any value, and to turn the most devastating tragedies into farces’. Observing event
s, the spies reported to Rome that Carlo was rapidly emerging as the dominant figure, ‘the real victor of the situation’.
Turati, not long before his death in Paris
Turati, the charming ombrellone, was failing. He continued to rise early in the morning, to make his sugary coffee on his spirit stove, and to walk slowly to the park, the pockets of his ancient loden coat stuffed with newspaper cuttings. There he would sit on a bench and watch the children playing. But his asthma was getting worse, and the friends with whom he lived listened anxiously to his slow, heavy tread up and down the stairs. One night in March 1932 he arrived home late from a political meeting almost unable to breathe. He refused all help and when he had shut his bedroom door they hovered silently outside wondering what to do. Next morning Turati was back at his desk again. Visitors flocked to the house. When Carlo came, he was horrified to see how yellow Turati’s skin had become, how thin his face, and how his eyes seemed not to focus. He hugged his old friend and kissed him.
On the 29th, with Marion and Carlo and a few other friends by his bedside, Turati died. He was seventy-five. A hearse pulled by black horses and shrouded in a vast bower of flowers was followed to Père Lachaise Cemetery by every exiled Italian in Paris. Carlo helped carry the coffin of the man he had so loved and admired to the grave. In a forty-two-page obituary of his friend, Carlo described Turati as the ‘moral leader’ of Italy.
Claudio Treves, Turati’s natural heir as leader of the community, did not long outlive him. Treves, too, had spent his six years of exile begging his companions to fight ‘the cruellest, the toughest, but the most sacred fight’ against the fascists, even unto death. Treves was just sixty-four, but ground down by poverty. He died alone, of a ruptured artery, in a dingy hotel room. Marion wrote to Amelia that when she saw the bleakness and barrenness of that little room, the full injustice of it all was suddenly brought home to her. It was another vast funeral; and once again the French police and the Italian spies took careful note of who was there. ‘How sad to see them die in exile, so soon one after the other,’ wrote Carlo to Bertha Pritchard, ‘the best and the purest.’ An era was over. He had often found Treves weak and irresolute, but had never ceased to admire his ferocious sense of justice.
Slowly, inexorably, the mantle of leader seemed to be passing to him; and he did nothing to deflect it. ‘I feel in myself’, he wrote to Marion one day when she had escaped briefly to convalesce in the peace of a country hotel, ‘the strength, the impulse, the ideas, the possibility of making the others pulsate, come alive.’
In January 1933, Hitler came to power. Fascism was no longer an isolated phenomenon in Europe: on the contrary, it was democracy that was becoming isolated. In Italy, early in the new year, Mussolini decided to consolidate his dictatorship by inviting people to join the Fascist Party; those who refused would see almost every avenue blocked to them. He greeted Hitler’s rise with pleasure, envisaging a fruitful collaboration, in which France and Britain would be obliged to revise the central European borders. Plans were under way for Hitler to visit Italy.
At the time, few people detected a pattern. But Carlo was one who did. He took stock of what he called a ‘catastrophe of nature’, the speed and ease with which a civilised continent had accepted a ‘new form of barbarity’. Were it not for the concentration camps, the tyrannical decrees, the political repression, it would, he said, be perfectly possible to regard what was happening as a Wagnerian fantasy, full of operatic characters fighting it out with wooden swords. But, as he wrote to Don Sturzo in London, ‘the European situation is a tragedy’, a crisis in which morality had failed, and power and tyranny were being blindly accepted, and it had taken an ‘authentic barbarian’, Hitler, to awaken the continent. German Nazism was a harsher animal than Italian fascism, but these two animals were not, in the end, all that dissimilar.
‘La guerra che torna’, the war which is returning, arguably Carlo’s most famous article, was published in I Quaderni in June 1933. The time was over, he wrote, for defensive politics; the position of the anti-fascists as ‘defenders of peace’, paralysed by intrigues, had to be jettisoned. Dictatorships were expanding in the face of the ‘confusion and exhaustion’ of old democratic traditions; the democracies had no option but to go on the offensive and launch a preventative revolutionary uprising, by raising a force as strong as that of the fascists. Without immediate intervention, ‘intransigent, fierce, hard, with no compromises’, there would be no avoiding a ‘new massacre’, a second world war. ‘War is coming,’ he wrote. ‘War will come.’ Not at once perhaps, but in a few years, when Germany felt sufficiently strong to challenge its enemies. Not all Carlo’s forebodings would come to pass, but many of them, such as the British and French attempts to cling on to neutrality, were prescient.
Lussu and Carlo, who disagreed over many things, were at one on this. But Lussu was almost Carlo’s only ally. Across the socialist world in exile, there were again outpourings of criticism and anger. Nenni, custodian of the Socialist Party in Paris, dismissed Carlo’s words as rubbish and insisted that all war was imperialistic, and that only social revolution was worth dying for. The outburst of hostility only drove Carlo to rail more loudly against the pacifist orthodoxy of the socialist Second International, to warn against schisms, and to become increasingly impatient with the ‘cadavers’ and the taboos of the exiles. A war of words broke out in the Quaderni. Carlo remained calm. Hitler, Mussolini, fascism were problems now for the whole of Europe, not just Italy, and they had to be addressed together; and it was Italy, the first country to be hit by fascism, that should be the first to free itself, and then help others to do the same. It all fitted in with his convictions, first explored as a student in Milan, that the future lay with a united Europe, liberal and socialist, ‘united morally and politically even before economically’. In this too, in his dreams ‘to make Europe’, Carlo was moving ahead of his friends.
On Christmas Eve 1932, 93 of Italy’s most fecund women, mothers between them of 1,300 children, were brought to Rome to visit the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution to mark the tenth anniversary of the March on Rome. They were led to the glass case containing, on a velvet cushion, the bloodstained handkerchief with which Mussolini had staunched the bullet wound to his nose from Violet Gibson’s gunshot, and they kissed it. They were not the only visitors. Some four million Italians were more or less forced to make the pilgrimage to see the life-sized photographs of the young martyred fascists in their coffins, showing gaping wounds, the illuminated cases with Mussolini’s pen and letters, and the special shrine, behind heavy crimson velvet curtains, with its large cross rising out of a pool of blood in the middle of the room, while fascist hymns played softly in the background. Foreign dignitaries came too, among them Anthony Eden, Goering and the King of Siam. Oswald Mosley, who had recently received money from the London fascio, brought his wife Cynthia. Dedicating one room to the squadristi slain for the revolution, Mussolini spoke with reverence of the ‘bold, proud, strong, fearless young men’ who, with their hearts, wills, faith, love and purity, had broken the opposition and created the new Italy.
Fascism had never been more exultant. Mussolini himself had become a tourist attraction. To impress those Italians who had earlier gone abroad, he offered special train fares and hotel rooms so that they could see for themselves all that had been achieved. The cracks in the ‘Corporate State’, described as a happy balance between capitalism and socialism and sometimes likened to Roosevelt’s New Deal, were not yet too apparent. Mussolini’s stranglehold over the media was absolute: the Ministry of Popular Culture in Rome oversaw, with fanatical rigour, the publication of 81 daily papers, 123 political weeklies, 3,860 magazines, 7,000 parochial news sheets and 32 foreign news agencies. A popular magazine, La Voce della Donna, extolled the chic fascist woman, showing her doing gymnastics. In cinemas and schoolrooms all over Italy documentary films were screened about contented labourers clearing the Pontine Marshes and happy families returning from horrible emigration
to the prosperity of new Fascist Italy.
To many Italians, these were miracle years. Fascism, with its Futurist aspirations, was going further and faster: the fastest seaplane, the fastest transatlantic liner, the most successful football player, the most skilled athletes. What no one mentioned was that behind the triumphalist talk, all over Italy petty tyrants ruled through blackmail and beatings. Italy had become a country of subservience, equivocation and graft.
Towards those who wished to leave, Mussolini was merciless. In 1929, soon after reaching Paris, Carlo, Lussu and Tarchiani had sent a message to Velia, Matteotti’s thirty-five-year-old widow, kept under strict surveillance by the fascists. Written in invisible ink in the pages of a book, it asked her to consider leaving Italy with her three children, and to give evidence of Mussolini’s atrocities. The invitation evidently reached Mussolini’s ears. Bocchini issued orders for ‘relentless, efficient, uninterrupted surveillance’ of the entire family, leaving no moment when they were not watched.
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