Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy: The Life of Marion Cave Rosselli 9781788316040, 9781788312004

Citation preview

List of Plates

1. Marion Cave at via Giusti, Florence, spring 1926. Fondazione Rosselli. 2. Marion Cave Rosseli’s police file. CPC, ACS, Rome. 3.

Carlo, Marion and John (‘Mirtillino’), Lipari Island, 1928.

Fondazione Rosselli. 4. Marion, Carlo and Filipo Turati, 1931. Fondo Panunzio, BNCF, Florence. 5. Marion, Carlo and Marion’s sister Pat Lewis, Le Praz, summer 1931. ISRT. 6. Filipo Turati and Marion Cave Rosselli, Brussels 1931. Fondo Panunzio, BNCF, Florence. 7. Marion and Carlo Rosselli, Royan, summer 1932. CPC, ACS, Rome. 8. Amelia Rosselli, Marion and Carlo Rosseli, Hendaye, summer 1933. CPC, ACS, Rome. 9. Marion (right, sitting) with Ada Venturi (left, sitting) and two young friends, La Baule 1934. ISRT. 10. Marion and Carlo, Bagnoles de l’Orne train station, 9 June 1937. Fondo Panunzio, BNCF. 11. Rosselli Funerals, Ceremony at La Maison des Syndicats. Marion sitting in the front row. Istoreto.

viii

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

12. The funeral procession. From the right: Alberto Tarchiani (partly hidden), Emilio Lussu and Marion. Istoreto. 13. The funeral procession and the public tribute to the slain brothers. Itoreto. 14. Pe´re Lachaise cemetery: Marion (sitting) between Lionello Venturi (left) and Alberto Cianca (right). Istoreto. 15. Mazzini Society flier, New York. ISRT.

Acknowledgements

Scholarly research is a collective endeavour and I am endebted to many people who have supported me, shared information with me and discussed my work in various academic settings. Some very special thanks are due to Alyson Price, the archivist of the British Institute in Florence, who first introduced me to Marion Cave; to David Rosselli who encouraged me to pursue my research on the life of his grandmother; to Paola Rosselli, Elisa Benaim and the late Genevie`ve Noufflard who discussed some of their souvenirs of Marion with me. I am also greatly indebted to Pierre Joxe who, despite his duties at the Conseil Constitutionnel, took the time to answer my queries about his childhood memories of the Rosselli family and introduced me to his sister, Claude Joxe-Nabokov, who kindly made available the many letters her mother, Franc
oise Joxe, exchanged with Marion Cave Rosselli. This book could not have been written without the help of so many archivists, in small or major institutions, around Europe and the United States. I am grateful to Howard Bailes, the historian of St Paul’s Girls’ school in London who facilitated my visit to the school’s archives, and to the young librarian who let me rummage through the private letters and diairies of Florence and Elie Hale´vy in their villa at Sucy-en-Brie. To the archivists at Reading University, Churchill College in Cambridge, the Labour Party Archives in Manchester and the Institute for Social History in Amsterdam, I am indebted for helping me find materials about various British

x

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

antifascist groups and individuals. The staff of the Archives Nationales in Paris guided me through the police files on the Italian anti-fascist exiles. The archivists of the Howard Gottlieb Research Center at Boston University offered me a warm welcome during a very cold New England winter. A special mention also for the anonymous archivists who sent me copies of scattered – but precious – letters from different corners of the world. The bulk of the research for this book was carried out in various archives in Italy whose staff have been helpful in so many ways. I would like to thank in particular Paolo Bagnoli and Mirco Bianchi of the Istituto di Storia della Resistenza in Toscana; Andrea d’Arrigo of the Istituto Piemontese per la Storia della Resistenza a Torino; Daniela Italia of the Fondazione Rosselli in Turin; Adelina Taffuri of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze. My gratitude also goes to the staff of the Archivio Centrale dello Stato in Rome; the Archivio di Stato di Firenze; the University of Pavia; the European Union Archives in Florence; the Berenson Archives at Villa I Tatti; the Don Luigi Sturzo Archives in Rome. I owe a special debt to two of my colleagues at Universite´ Paris Diderot. Catherine Collomp shared with me her findings about the various networks that supported and welcomed Italian anti-fascists in the United States. Be´ne´dicte Deschamps has accompanied and supported this project from day one and I have greatly benefited from her extensive knowledge of everything Italian, past and present. Colleagues in France and Italy who specialize in the history of antifascism have allowed me to present my work at various conferences. I have relied extensively on their research and their comments, criticisms and suggestions have been extremely helpful. Thanks especially to Eric Vial, Alessandro Giacone, Valdo Spini, Hugo Garcia and Mercedes Yusta. My discussions with Noemi Crain Merz, who has studied the gender fault-line within Italian democratic antifascism, and Simone Visciola, who is writing a biography of Nello Rosselli, have been particularly fruitful. For some lively and useful exchanges, my thanks also go to Antonio Beccheloni, Elisa Signori, Mimmo Franzinelli, Marina Calloni, Stella Savino and Diego Dilettoso. To family and friends, a big thank for your support and patience.

‘They were the salt of the earth. What would my life have been like if I had not met them on the way? But surely, I would not have come across them if I had not chosen that way.’ Ernesto Rossi ‘Of course, being married to Andre´ was a royal gift, but a gift that I paid with my own disappearance.’ Clara Malraux

Introduction

It took several hours for the funeral procession to reach the Pe`re Lachaise cemetery. Along the narrow streets and the broad boulevards of northern Paris, tens of thousands of people gathered to pay their last tribute to Carlo Rosselli, the leader of democratic antifascism, and his brother Nello who had been assassinated a few days earlier in Normandy by fascist thugs armed by Mussolini. In the previous years, the streets of Paris had witnessed numerous mass gatherings, but such somber crowds had not been seen for some time. In 1934, the demonstrators who gathered to protest the attempted fascist coup of the Croix de Feu were in a defiant mood. Two years later, jubilant crowds celebrated the social achievements of the Popular Front government. But on that day of June 1937, a gloomy atmosphere hung over the popular neighbourhoods as the silent crowd followed the slow progress of the two hearses covered with numerous wreaths of red and white flowers. A few individuals raised their fists without much conviction. Others – mostly Italian immigrant workers who had flocked in large numbers from the eastern suburbs of Paris – shed tears when reading the words ‘la mamma’ on one of the flower wreaths. The silence was impressive, only broken now and then by a solitary cry of ‘down with fascism’.1 All the leaders of the Italian antifascist organizations in exile – some just back from the various fronts of the Civil War in Spain – walked behind the hearses together with their French friends, the human rights activists, the left wing political leaders, the intellectuals

2

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

who had warned French public opinion that the assassination of the Rosselli brothers signaled the death of liberty in Europe. Amid this somber but friendly crowd, Carlo’s wife, Marion, was the only representative of the Rosselli family. The slain brothers’ mother, Amelia, had rushed from Florence a few days earlier, but she could not face the ordeal of the funeral. Nello’s wife, Maria, had just given birth to their fourth child in Italy and could not undertake the long journey to Paris.2 Marion Cave Rosselli was one of the few women who walked alongside the antifascist leaders. Dressed in black, holding a bunch of flowers in her hands, despite her grief she seemed perfectly aware of the political meaning of the event she had helped organize. A familiar figure among the Italian exiles, she was surrounded by friends and comrades whom she had known since the early days of the antifascist opposition in Florence, the last battles against the Mussolini regime in Milan, the penal island of Lipari and the years of heroic struggles from abroad. Friends and comrades with whom she shared a passion for democracy and a steadfast commitment to fighting fascism in Italy and in the rest of Europe. Yet, in the rich historiography of Italian antifascism, which has consistently underestimated the role of women in the movement, she only appears as a fleeting presence in the shadow of her charismatic husband, and her role and personality disappear behind the figure of the dignified widow of the socialist martyr carved for her by some of the speakers at the Pe`re Lachaise cemetery.3 The friends who walked at her side on that day of June 1937 knew that she was more than that. Some remembered the young British student who had arrived in 1919 in Florence fired with revolutionary enthusiasm and had found her way into the first antifascist opposition where she had met Carlo Rosselli. More than just a ‘perfect companion’, they all agreed that, from the start, she had been an equal partner with her husband and that his ‘accomplishments would not have been as complete and forceful had he not had at his side a companion like Marion, who was both a confidant and an instigator.’4 Not surprisingly for many of them, in the years following Rosselli’s death, ‘she continued to support the movement until the fall of France and lived intensely in the United States the last months before the restoration of liberty’

Introduction

3

in Italy. And after her untimely death in 1949, many feared, like the historian Aldo Garosci who shared her exile in France and the United States, that the true meaning of her life alongside Carlo Rosselli would disappear with her contemporaries for lack of written traces.5 Shortly after his mother’s death, John Rosselli confided to a friend his desire to write: a brief memoir of mamma and incidentally of the antifascist milieu as I remember it. It has often struck me how little is really known of the private character and lives of many of the men of the Risorgimento, so that one sees them through a kind of hagiographic mist; and I would like to do what I can to bring to life the figure of my mother, and to a certain extent of my father.6

Unfortunately, he never wrote this memoir, but his intention to bring to life the figure of his mother and her involvement with the antifascist milieu has been one of the guidelines of the present biography. In doing so, it follows two trends among contemporary historians of antifascism. On the one hand, the adoption of a biographical approach to put flesh and bone onto the experience of the antifascist activists and embody their ideals in all their ‘humane complexity’; on the other, a focus on the experience of women, not only to make them visible in the ‘temple of virility’ that was antifascism, but to highlight the challenges they faced in trying to carve a role for themselves in a highly patriarchal milieu.7 Despite Aldo Garosci’s fears to the contrary, there is a wealth of public and private archival material in Great Britain, Italy, France and the United States, and a great number of memoirs of antifascist activists that form a rich mosaic and make it possible to reconstruct the life of Marion Cave Rosselli in relation to the multiple social, political and cultural worlds she inhabited. Her life is of interest because she was the ideal companion of one of Mussolini’s fiercest opponent. But one goal of this biography has been to lift the shadow cast by her illustrious husband and identify the multiple social and cultural determinisms that led her to move to Italy and embrace the antifascist struggle. It uses a gendered lens to reconstruct her involvement in the movement in Italy and in her French and American exile and show how her trajectory was both unique for a person of her time and social background and indicative

4

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

of the experience of a wide range of female activists. The tumultuous life of Marion Cave and her companion Carlo Rosselli reveals the gender fault-line within antifascism. By highlighting the complex articulation between the personal and the political in the context of underground activism and exile, it broadens our understanding of the antifascist experience. Recent research has tried to identify the specific political spaces occupied by exile activists. Stephane Dufoix has coined the term ‘exopolity’ to refer to the paradoxical space occupied by national political movements in a transnational context. He has also highlighted the specificity of this unregulated and under-institutionalized political space, but he has ignored its gendered nature and the way men and women were differently affected by their common experience.8 Gender historians have long challenged the idea of a strict separation between the public and private spheres stressing instead the porosity between the two, yet these categories form a continuum that remains useful to assess the obstacles women have encountered to circulate from the one to the other in different political contexts.9 The experience of Marion Cave Rosselli indicates that a precise periodization must be applied to the study of the political spaces occupied by men and women in the antifascist struggle. Making all opposition movements illegal, the Mussolini regime excluded both men and women from the public sphere of politics, forcing its opponents to invent new forms of political activities that took place in an in-between space, neither public nor private, where traditional gender rules did not seem to apply, as was the case in the first opposition groups in Florence or on the prison island of Lipari. Yet, the unfolding story of the antifascist opposition in exile in Paris reveals a permanent tension between this original gender parity in the movement and a successful attempt to reintroduce a separation between formal spaces (editorial boards, political committees) reserved to male activists, and informal spaces (the home, salons, social and cultural associations) where men and women interacted on an equal footing. Patricia Gabrielli has noted that it was in these in-between spaces, where sociability and politics mixed, that women were able to participate in the antifascist conspiracy. It is true that in the

Introduction

5

under-institutionalized milieu that was antifascism in exile these spaces played an important role, in particular for the members of Rosselli’s movement Giusitizia e Liberta` who considered opposition to fascism as a moral and existential stance. But their separation from the spaces where strategic discussions and decision making took place signaled an exclusion that was bitterly resented by Marion Cave Rosselli who had been raised in a Labour family in England at a time when women where claiming their political rights.10 More importantly, this separation revealed the conviction of the leaders of the movement that women did not possess the rational mind and independent spirit required for serious politics, a conviction that would lead them to be extremely reluctant to the granting of the vote to Italian women in 1945.11 Like his friends, Rosselli greatly appreciated having at his side a politically alert and supportive wife, yet he made no secret of what he thought her main responsibility should be, and Marion’s regular protests about the ‘unfair division of labour’ within their couple were met with constant reminders of her ‘motherly duties’. This unequal division of personal and political responsibilities remained a permanent source of tension between Marion and Carlo Rosselli, but it never destroyed the strong bonds and the shared commitment that had united them since their first meeting in the early 1920s in Florence. Discussing the existential experience of the Giustizia e Liberta` activists, Giovanni De Luna has noted that as they refused ‘the professionalization of politics, they ended up living it within their own familiar universe, in a perspective that ignored the destructive effects of the split between the “public” and the “private”.’12 Their opposition to fascism was not only political but also moral and cultural and embraced every aspect of their lives. The development of new forms of sociability with like-minded people, the participation in different cultural networks, the education of the children were areas in many ways as important as the formal political debates to define the universe of antifascism. Bringing in this existential dimension, this biography not only does justice to a remarkable woman but adds a cultural and social perspective to the study of transnational antifascism and presents a multi-layered story that offers an excellent entry point into a period full of hopes, anxieties and disappointments.

CHAPTER 1

A British Education

Who was Marion Cave and what brought her from a monotonous London suburb to the Communards’ Wall, amidst the large crowd gathered there to warn of the danger threatening to destroy the continent? Aldo Garosci, who had been very close to the Rossellis in Paris and to the young widow during her American exile, thought he would never find out. Writing to her son John Rosselli after her death in 1949, he concluded sadly that nobody would ever truly know how this ‘beautiful Nordic Amazon’ with her ‘passionate revolutionary principles’ had arrived in Florence, joined the first antifascist forces and become Carlo Rosselli’s companion.1 All those who met her then agreed that she was ‘charming’. ‘Not beautiful, but fresh and pleasant to look at,’ recalled Giovanni Ansaldo, a friend of Carlo and Marion before becoming one of the main propagandists of the regime.2 She was a ‘ray of sun’ according to Anna Kuliscioff, the Russian companion of the socialist leader Filippo Turati.3 ‘Extremely good looking’ thought Alessandro Levi who witnessed her first experiences with the Florentine antifascists alongside her future husband Carlo Rosselli.4 As for her mentor, the historian Gaetano Salvemini, he waxed lyrical about Marion’s charm. ‘How beautiful you were, O Biancafiore,’ he recalled in her obituary, using the nickname he had given her when they first met in 1921. ‘Such wit, such brio, such a sense of repartee and humour . . . And such a gentle smile!’5

A British Education

7

‘Witty’, ‘intelligent’: again, everybody seemed to have agreed. More than anything else, she was ‘independent’. Maybe a little too much so for her future mother-in-law, Amelia Pincherle Rosselli, who had herself flouted conventions by abandoning her womanizer husband in 1903 and settling as a single mother of three sons in Florence where she lived by her pen. Amelia Rosselli had chosen Florence because she knew that she would find there a rich network of friends, relatives as well as professional acquaintances. On the contrary, Marion Cave had chosen the Tuscan capital to escape from her stifling petit-bourgeois environment and, freed from any binding relationships, embrace unknown horizons.6 Giovanni Ansaldo was probably close to the truth when, without hiding his contempt for British individualism, he referred to her as ‘a girl who belonged to one of those loosely-tied English families, whose children travel around the world trying to make a life for themselves.’7 Marion Catherine Cave was born on 1 December 1896, in the twilight years of the Victorian era, at Swallowfield in Berkshire, into a modest family who had experienced a degree of upward mobility thanks to education. Marion’s eldest son recalled his maternal grandfather as ‘a beautiful figure of self-educated Victorian.’8 Although not entirely accurate, the image conveys the amount of determination and personal efforts required from a child from a poor family to have access to education. Ernest Alfred Cave was born in 1867, the youngest of four children, in Charlwood, a small rural village in Surrey. His own father had first worked as a farm labourer and then as the village postman. His mother did needle work at home to supplement the family’s meagre income.9 He benefited from the 1870 Education Act that established the first national school system, but the Caves’ fragile economic situation did not allow Ernest to continue beyond primary education, grammar schools being at the time very limited in numbers, highly selective and extremely costly.10 To pursue his education, he took up a position as a pupilteacher in a local grammar school. It was a form of teacher’s training scheme whereby the pupil-teacher tutored younger children while he was being prepared for examinations. After four years, he could hope to find a place in a normal school and eventually become a teacher. The system was quite precarious and so was the subsequent career of

8

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

the pupil-teacher as can be gathered from the memoirs of H.G. Wells, a contemporary of Ernest Cave, who went through a similar experience at Midhurst Grammar school.11 Ernest Cave was not as lucky as H.G. Wells who obtained a scholarship to enrol at the Normal School of Science inaugurated a few years earlier in South Kensington.12 His father having died prematurely, he had to help support his family and he took up a job as an assistant teacher in a local school. At the same time, he enrolled at the University of London to prepare a degree in literature as an external student, a status that allowed him to take the examinations but not to attend classes. In that sense, he was indeed self-taught. Again, just like H.G. Wells who, having failed to fulfil the requirements of his fellowship, painstakingly completed his degree as an external student. Until his death, Ernest Cave would proudly show the list of students who had graduated from the University of London where his name appeared alongside that of the famous author. Yet, H.G. Wells completed his BA in 1890 at the age of 24 while Ernest Cave obtained his in 1896, the year Marion was born. He was 30, a married man with four children who had had to find time between his professional duties and family responsibilities to complete his degree.13 Living outside of London and taken by his many obligations and the solitary preparation of his exams, he did not participate in the exciting life of his fellow students who met a great number of intellectual and political movements increasingly critical of both Victorian values and triumphant capitalism. H.G. Wells and his friends from the Normal School of Science regularly attended meetings organized by various socialist groups. Their favourite haunt was the home of the poet-artist William Morris in Hammersmith, on the Thames embankment, where socialists, Fabians and even anarchists would gather every Sunday night and plan to set the world to rights, arguing passionately until dawn in a smoke-filled atmosphere.14 Ernest Cave developed similar ideas through his own reading. He was strongly influenced by John Ruskin and his relentless criticism of the inhumanity of industrial capitalism. He also seems to have shared Ruskin’s spiritual values and search for social justice and, not surprisingly given his own personal trajectory, he strongly adhered

A British Education

9

to Ruskin’s beliefs in the importance of the education of working people for the development of a genuine democracy. Although little is known about Ernest Cave’s early political activism, his concern for social justice led him to become a life-long member of the Independent Labour Party.15 He also seems to have shared the crisis of faith that affected his intellectual mentor as well as many of his educated contemporaries. Although raised in the Church of England, he embarked on a spiritual quest that led him later in life to join the Quakers, becoming a member of the Society of Friends after World War I.16 Combining spiritual individualism with the quest for social justice, Ernest Cave was guided by ethical and political concerns that had a strong influence on his younger daughter.17 In the family lore, Ernest Cave’s endearing personality clearly predominates. On several occasions, Marion explained how close she felt to her father but confessed that she had always felt quite distant from her mother and biographical details about her are difficult to come by.18 Mary A. Russell was born at Bromley, Kent, in 1861, in the same town and the same social environment as H.G. Wells. Her family background was like that of her husband, and she seems to have partly followed the same educational trajectory although she did not obtain any university degree. When they married in 1891, she was the headmistress of a private primary school for girls, a profession that was becoming increasingly feminized.19 She was 30; Ernest was 25, and they rapidly had five children. The young couple changed residence quite often, following employment opportunities in the south-western counties. Their eldest son Norman was born in 1893 at Botley, Hampshire, and so were their twin daughters Constance (‘Pat’) and Ella two years later. Marion and her brother Bernard were born in 1896 and 1898 respectively at Swallowfield, Berkshire, where their parents taught in the local primary school.20 In 1900, the family again changed residence, settling not very far away at Uxbridge, a large market town alongside the Grand Junction Canal that was in the process of being absorbed by the expanding capital whose population had doubled in the previous three decades. The Caves settled in a newly built area on the outer margin of the town, St Andrews, a street of semi-detached houses typical of the commuter suburbs that were sprouting around London at the time

10

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

thanks to the expansion of the railroad network.21 In addition to the parents and five children, a young cousin, Edith Kimpton, lived in the house in exchange for the childcare services she provided to this large family with both parents employed full-time.22 The Cave children spent their first years of schooling in their parents’ schools, the girls in the small establishment Mrs Cave opened on Uxbridge High Street, the boys in the school Ernest Cave opened in the nearby town of Harrow on the Hill.23 Marion has left few souvenirs from her early years, apart from a reference to a rheumatic fever that left her with a heart condition which would reappear in adulthood and affect her for the rest of her life.24 From occasional complaints about the crowded atmosphere of her childhood home, and the rather stifling cultural and social environment of Uxbridge – ‘depressing’ and ‘intolerable’ as she would describe it later – we can imagine the limits her family’s modest material conditions would have imposed on her personal and intellectual development had she not had the opportunity to attend one of the best grammar schools for girls in the country.25 The choice of a highly selective grammar school underscores the importance her parents attached to their children’s education and the sacrifices they were ready to make to send their three daughters to St Paul’s. While her sisters were not particularly talented students, from the start Marion demonstrated a marked taste for learning and obtained some of the most academically demanding scholarships, such as the Junior Foundation Scholarship and the Senior Foundation Scholarship.26 The school had opened in 1904 on Brook Green, in Hammersmith, as the annexe for girls of St Paul’s Boys’ School, a four-century-old grammar school belonging to the small network of exclusive private establishments whose task it was to educate the elite of the Kingdom.27 From the start, the founders of the Hammersmith School intended it to be an elite grammar school and imposed a programme of studies that was as demanding as that of the boys’ school, thus rejecting the restrictions imposed on the education of girls in state schools by a traditional understanding of the role of women in the family and society. In addition, despite its connection to the Church of England, St Paul’s had adopted a conscience clause and accepted pupils

A British Education

11

from different faiths and even freethinkers, favouring a cultural diversity that was quite unusual at the time.28 The school was built on extended grounds in a green neighbourhood of West London and benefited from the most recent technological developments. The generously proportioned building had an elegant facade made of strawberry-red bricks and sandy stones to which the Queen Anne windows added an antique touch. The Great Corridor had a rather solemn atmosphere with its vaulted ceiling, oak-panelled walls and red, green and white marble floor. This solemn atmosphere was reinforced by the magnificent organ installed in July 1910 in the Great Hall which served as assembly room, auditorium, and venue for various academic ceremonies. The school was lighted by electricity and included several rooms fitted with the most up-to-date scientific equipment – quite rare at the time for a girls’ school – a painting studio, a music room, a gymnasium, a swimming pool and several libraries.29 Marion Cave spent five years at St Paul’s, from 1910 to 1915. Every morning, after a one-hour train ride from Uxbridge to Hammersmith, she entered a world of austere elegance, whose affluence, though substantial, was never ostentatious and where all activity aimed to achieve excellence. According to the principles of liberal education, the school strove to develop the intellectual, artistic and physical aptitudes of the pupils. Equal importance was therefore given to the traditional academic disciplines and to music, drawing, individual and collective sports. In addition, extracurricular activities intended to develop individual initiative and self-confidence, competitiveness and group spirit. Literary and musical societies, a history club, an amateur theatre group, and several debating societies filled up the afternoon free time.30 The rules were extremely strict, but not printed – ‘you found out when you broke one’ recalled the author Dodie Smith who was at St Paul’s in the same years as Marion – and the system emphasized selfdiscipline rather than punishment.31 In fact, the independence of the pupils was strictly supervised, but it was real all the same and required a disposition for autonomy and self-sufficiency that not all the girls possessed. Indeed, some found the system baffling. For instance, the novelist Antonia White, who

12

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

was at St Paul’s at the same time as Marion, disliked her experience there intensely.32 But Marion Cave adapted easily to the school environment and performed particularly well. The prizes and distinctions she obtained each year signalled a marked predilection for literature and foreign languages.33 For a while, she flirted with the idea of an artistic career, no doubt encouraged in that direction by the unusually high quality of artistic teaching at St Paul’s, in particular under the leadership of the composer Gustav Holst, who was music master there from 1905 until his retirement.34 Instead, she chose a specialization in French, under the influence of Mademoiselle Fouquet, a teacher with a ‘magnetic personality’ and great vitality, according to Dodie Smith who was, with Marion, one of the ‘happy members of the French VII’.35 Miss Fouquet conveyed to her students an appreciation of the French Revolution which she presented not only as a momentous event but also as a positive one – not a widely-shared opinion in Britain. She also staged with them L’Aiglon, a play by Edmond de Rostand about the tragic life of Napoleon’s son and, at the end of a hugely successful performance, she led the audience in a powerful rendering of La Marseillaise!36 Apart from what she taught them about French history and culture, she seems to have instilled in her students a sense of the pleasure of learning. ‘The most important fact I learned from that likeable, vivacious woman’ noted Dodie Smith, ‘was something she never put into words; the fact that all knowledge should add to the fullness of life and not just be a collection of facts shut up in compartments of the brain’.37 Dodie Smith also remembered that ‘literature was particularly well-taught’ at St Paul’s and the students were encouraged to use the well-stocked libraries.38 An avid reader from an early age, Marion had devoured H.G. Wells’ anticipation novels with delight and embraced his utopian social visions. At St Paul’s, where Shelley and Byron were revered, she immersed herself in the works of the Romantics and absorbed their cosmopolitanism and devotion to Italy. She also came to admire and appreciate the liberal novelist George Meredith and his powerful portraits of restless women.39 The pupils of St Paul’s were aware of their belonging to an intellectual elite but, contrary to Marion, most also belonged to the social elite of a country where class differences were strongly marked.

A British Education

13

While few children from the aristocracy attended the school, most pupils belonged to the upper professional classes. Their fathers were doctors, lawyers, newspaper editors, higher civil servants, university professors.40 Yet, behind the walls of the school, social distinctions were not discernible at first sight, because all the junior pupils wore a uniform. The only available photo of Marion at St Paul’s shows her standing in the front row of a class group wearing, like all the other girls, a drab tunic dress of heavy navy serge loosely tied by a white string, a white shirt with long sleeves and a buttoned-up collar, thick woollen stockings and white sports shoes. The senior students could wear their own clothes but, as we can see on a photo of Ella Cave in her final year, they opted for a rather strict dress code, for any sign of frivolity, or even femininity, was strongly discouraged. There was not a single mirror in the entire building!41 Outside the school, though, Marion and her fellow students lived in very different social and cultural worlds. While Marion went back home every evening to the monotonous suburb and crowded house of Uxbridge, the other girls lived in the elegant neighbourhoods of West London and took full advantage of the numerous distractions the capital and their family relations had to offer – most of which were inaccessible to a family of five children living on two school teachers’ salaries whose leisure might have included an occasional night at the cinema and maybe one or two-day trips to the seaside in summer.42 Such differences did not encourage socialization, and Marion does not seem to have established any lasting relationship with her fellow students at St Paul’s. Yet, her experience there provided her with a new openness to the world and other intellectual and social realities that fostered her desire to escape the limited perspectives her own family environment offered. Even if it is not easy to measure its influence on a young teenager, the turbulent social and intellectual climate of the pre-war years could not but have encouraged her hope for a different future as so many sectors of British society were trying to free themselves from the many constraints inherited from the Victorian era. ‘On or about December 1910 human character changed’, wrote the novelist Virginia Woolf. ‘All human relations have shifted – those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children.’

14

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

These changes were taking place in many different domains: religion, politics, art and literature, private and public conduct.43 There was a new energy in the air, a desire for change, a certain excitement as to what the future held after the death, in 1910, of Edward VII whose reign had so frustrated the aspirations for change aroused by his mother’s death a decade earlier.44 Through a wave of militant strikes and the creation of the Labour Party, the voice of the working class was being heard in the streets and in Parliament; Ireland was demanding political and administrative home rule; the House of Commons was discussing a bill that proposed to restrict the power of the aristocratic House of Lords; modernist movements were launching their assault on traditional culture, and after decades of campaigning the feminist movement for the vote was taking a more radical tone.45 The social and political world was in flux as the fixity of the previous decades had vanished.46 While Marion Cave was too young to be caught directly in the whirlwind, echoes of the new political radicalism reached her through her father under whose influence she became, from an early age, ‘most wildly interested in politics’.47 Ernest Cave participated actively in the Left politics of the time as a member of the Independent Labour Party, one of the socialist groups affiliated with the Labour Party. He had first contacted the ILP through the Harrow branch founded in the late 1890s by Ramsay MacDonald, and he then participated in the creation of the Uxbridge branch in 1911, under the influence of the strike wave and industrial unrest that swept Britain at the time.48 If the Fabian Society represented the moderate, intellectual, wing of Labour, the ILP brought to the movement a more radical socialist commitment, expressed in its call to secure ‘the collective ownership of all the means of production, distribution and exchange’. Its socialism was ‘fervent and emotional’, and its meetings mixed Evangelical fervour and calls for social justice.49 As a young participant, Fenner Brockway recalled the quasi-religious atmosphere of the ILP meetings: ‘ We had a small voluntary orchestra, sang labour songs and the speeches were mostly socialist Evangelism, emotional in denunciation of injustice, visionary in their anticipation of a new society.’50 This strong ethical component combined with a passionate commitment to social

A British Education

15

justice was what appealed most to the young Marion Cave who admitted years later, after discovering the anarchist and libertarian ideas of the Russian thinker Peter Kropotkin, that had she read him at 15 ‘[she] would have very easily become a disciple of his.’51 In practice, however, the ILP implemented a rather pragmatic program of ‘local socialism’. Public housing, swimming and recreational facilities, a free library: such were the demands put forward during the 1911 local election at Uxbridge by the ILP list which included Ernest Cave as one of its candidates.52 This mixture of ideological radicalism and reformist pragmatism assimilated from an early age had a lasting influence on Marion Cave’s political outlook. In addition to socialist politics, Marion Cave who, according to her son, was ‘a feminist, to the extent that this was possible in the twenties and the thirties,’ was influenced by the powerful suffragette movement around Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia. Frustrated by the repeated denials opposed to their demands, the suffragettes had turned to more militant direct action in the years preceding World War I.53 Echoes of the movement were heard even behind the walls of St Paul’s. In 1906, the Association of Head Mistresses had made its support for women’s suffrage public and had sent a petition bearing 223 signatures to Prime Minister Asquith in 1909 but Miss Gray, St Paul’s Headmistress, was rather conservative on this issue. Yet, numerous teachers as well as some pupils and their parents were associated either with the suffragist or the more militant suffragette movements.54 Dodie Smith, for instance, participated with her mother and her aunt in the demonstration that brought about half a million people from all over the country to London in June 1908 in a spectacular show of strength.55 The suffragettes’ agitation was impossible to ignore. Paulina, the school’s newspaper, offered a prize for the best essay relating an imaginary encounter between Christabel Pankhurst and a very traditionalist headmistress of a private girls’ school. The winning essay, entitled ‘An Anachronism’ drew a rather sympathetic portrait of Christabel and of her goals while criticising the suffragettes’ wild tactics.56 Indeed, their campaign was taking ever more violent forms. ‘Deeds, not Words’ was their slogan, and they multiplied direct actions against the symbols of the male-dominated institutions and

16

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

society that denied them the vote. Between sensational trials and hunger strikes, the activists spent several years in and out of prison, taking refuge in France or going underground and always figured on the front page of newspapers and in public and private conversations.57 In many ways, this was an exhilarating period for women who were acting as subjects and could feel that a new power was within their reach. Women of Marion’s generation could envisage choosing their own path, despite still powerfully enforced social norms that destined them for the sole role of spouse and mother.58 Marion found echoes of these aspirations in her favourite author’s novels. Visiting H.G. Wells at Grasse in 1934, she explained to him that it was his feminist novel Ann Veronica that had most influenced her when she read it at the age of 18. Published in the heat of the suffragettes’ campaign, Ann Veronica tells the story of a young woman who challenges the man-made social norms imposed on women in Edwardian England and never deters from her resolve to make her own decisions in her professional and personal life. ‘It made an enormous impression on me then, as if I had definitely found myself once for all’, Marion wrote to Wells later. ‘I am not sure that my life would have been any different without Ann Veronica, but it might very well have been more muddled and messy.’59 Given her excellent school results and her intellectual leanings, it seemed natural that Marion Cave should decide to attend university. She was the first and only one in her family to do so, and it was still an unusual choice at the time, although the action of the female education pioneers of the previous decades had succeeded in opening universities to women. The growing demand for educated women to fill the new skilled service jobs had altered the aspirations of many, and public opinion seemed more willing to accept the idea that women could embark on a course of study to acquire professional skills.60 Even if only a tiny minority did so, it was now possible for women to choose between being a housewife or occupying a ‘socially useful’ career as a teacher, a nurse or a civil servant. When Marion entered university the battles of the pioneers had borne their fruit and women students of her generation no longer had to justify the legitimacy of their choice.61

A British Education

17

Marion spent the war years at Bedford College where she enrolled in September 1915. It was, with Royal Holloway, one of the first establishments to have accepted female students and acquired full university status in 1878 when the University of London decided to grant degrees to women.62 In 1913, it had moved to the South Villa, recently built on the inner circle of Regent’s Park and it was surrounded by 9 acres of land on which a real campus could be built.63 It was in these new premises that student life became formally organized. A hall of residence was opened in 1913 but, like Marion Cave, most students lived at home. That same year, the student association of Bedford College, created in 1894, became a proper student union with all the responsibilities this entailed for the organization of student life on campus. It was also in 1913 that Caroline Spurgeon, who had joined the English Department of Bedford College in 1910, became the first woman in the country to be appointed university professor.64 During her first year, Marion Cave prepared the Intermediate Examination in Arts of the University of London, which she passed successfully in June 1916, her subjects being Latin, English, French and Mathematics.65 During the following two years, she studied French and Italian, preparing an honours degree in the first language. But she became increasingly interested in the Italian language that was a new subject of study in English universities. Of course, Italian had been a favoured language since the days of the Grand Tourists and had remained so for the English romantics of the early nineteenth century, but its study had always been restricted to a privileged few who were tutored privately.66 Its introduction in British universities was part of a broader cultural and diplomatic offensive launched at the beginning of the war in order to encourage Italy to sever its links with the Central Powers, under the aegis of the British-Italian League created for that purpose in 1916.67 At the University of London, the Chair of Italian was created by two Italian professors, Camillo Pellizzi and Antonio Cippico, and a British Italianate intellectual, Harold Goad, with the help of Emma Dobelli who taught Italian at Bedford College and became the Head of the Italian Department which she created.68. She was the daughter of Ferdinando Dobelli, a prominent radical-democratic journalist in

18

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

Rome, who had been silenced after the conservative political turn of 1898, and she had moved to London in 1903. She was also a skilled translator and she produced a greatly admired translation of George Macaulay Trevelyan’s magisterial three-volume biography of Garibaldi.69 This talented and lively woman was a major influence on Marion Cave who became an active member of the small but very dynamic Italian Department at Bedford College.70 Even though she travelled every evening back to Uxbridge, for four years the campus in Regent’s Park became for Marion a new living environment where she could expand personally and culturally, independently from her parents. Due to her fragile health, she did not participate in the many sports activities that other students seemed to enjoy immensely. Instead, she was extremely active in various discussion clubs, such as the French Reading Society, the Circolo Italiano and the Theatre Club. In fact, while working on her French degree, she dedicated more and more of her time to the learning and promotion of Italian language and culture, and she rapidly became an impassioned italophile, following the path of the English romantics who had transformed the peninsula into a second cultural and political homeland in the nineteenth century.71 She had discovered amateur theatre under the guidance of the enthusiastic Mademoiselle Fouquet at St Paul’s, and it became her main extracurricular activity at Bedford College. Later in life, she would recall the thrilling expectation and the fleeting anxiety that took hold of her as she was getting ready to come on stage and inhabit the character she had chosen to personify.72 Given the political context, many performances were organized in aid of various philanthropic institutions linked to the war effort. On 19 and 20 April 1917, for instance, a play was performed for the benefit of the New Hospital for Women. It was The Rose and the Ring, ‘a fire-side pantomime for great and small children’, written by William Makepeace Thackeray in Rome in the 1850s. Marion Cave played the part of Prince Bulbo, the hero of the story.73 In March 1918, for the first time, Bedford College produced an Italian play, La Sposa Sagace by Goldoni, thanks to the ‘inspiration of Signorina Dobelli and the devoted work of Marion Cave’. It was performed before a large audience composed of members of the academic world and experts in

A British Education

19

the teaching of the Italian language. Produced for the benefit of the Italian Red Cross, the play was so successful that it had to be repeated on 23 May, at the express request of a group of Italian professors who were touring British universities. Marion’s performance received special notice in the College magazine: ‘Miss Cave passed from the lover to the valet with wonderful versatility.’74 Indeed, her acting seemed to have distinguished her from the other young women, and the long poem that acknowledged the peculiar skills of individual students at the end of the year thus paid homage to her talent on stage (and her skill for foreign languages): In French or Italian, in plays gay or grave, As male or female, success crowns Miss Cave.75

The light tone of the magazine is rather surprising if one remembers that these activities took place during World War I. The conflict did not seem to affect the life of Bedford College which remained in its premises in Regent’s Park. According to a historian of the university, the war was a distant presence for the students. They might occasionally lend a hand to the Marylebone Women’s War Club to send parcels to the front; they might attend special gatherings organized on campus for injured soldiers on Sunday afternoons; but that was about it.76 Similarly, the conflict did not impair the teaching activities as was the case in colleges with a male student body. Admittedly, some young women who might otherwise have gone to university after grammar school chose an occupation linked to the war effort. On the other hand, the increased demand for skilled women to take on the jobs left vacant by soldiers guaranteed a regular influx of female students.77 All the same, the war was not totally absent from the life of the campus. A cycle of conferences was held to discuss the moral and political dimensions of the conflict. In 1915, the topic was ‘The Ethical and Psychological Dimension of the International Crisis’; in 1916, the theme was ‘The Theory of the State’ considering the international situation. The students attended the talks in considerable numbers, eager to make sense of the chaos that prevailed outside the somewhat sheltered precinct of the College.78 Apart from that, the academic year followed its established pattern, undisturbed by

20

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

the conflict, with one exception: in June 1918, the graduation ceremony was postponed. The festive atmosphere that usually accompanied such occasions would have been particularly inappropriate at a time when the country was counting its dead by the hundreds of thousands. Outside the campus, though, the war was difficult to ignore. Its most direct impact for Marion’s generation was the mobilization of most of the young men of the country on the deadly battlefields of northern France.79 The most immediate consequence of this situation was the greater visibility of women who, little by little, replaced the soldiers and entered jobs from which they had been barred until then. In public transport, banks, post offices, Londoners became accustomed to the presence of an almost entirely female workforce. Despite the war propaganda, which promoted a clear gender division with men assigned to the defence of the fatherland and women to the protection of the home, the prejudices against women working outside the home were temporarily defeated by the war.80 Furthermore, the vote was finally granted to women in 1918 in recognition of their contribution to the war effort.81 The growth of female employment and the new public presence of women also contributed to a gradual loosening of social norms. Women modernized their look, shortening their skirts and their hair, shamelessly applying make-up and wearing trousers. Younger women tended to be freer, at work or leisure, and in their relationships with the other sex.82 This certainly sounded as a momentous change if we are to believe the testimonies of the time. Writing about her youth in the pre-war years, Vera Britain noted in 1933: ‘It would not . . . be possible for any present-day girl of the same age even to imagine how abysmally ignorant, how romantically idealistic, and how utterly unsophisticated my more sensitive contemporaries and I were at the time.’ As for sexuality, it ‘was the absolute taboo’ and ‘was conveyed as intrinsically bad’, recalled Vera Brittain, who admitted she was ‘still extremely hazy with regard to the precise nature of the sexual act.’83 Women were enjoying greater freedom, then, but in a context marked by the absence of young men. They had been sent to the front by the millions, slaughtered and maimed by the hundreds of

A British Education

21

thousands, so much so that some have talked of a ‘missing generation’ at the end of the war and, for women of Marion’s age, of a ‘superfluous generation.84 These statements might be somewhat exaggerated, but they do illustrate a tangible reality: for numerous young women who might have wanted to marry and have a family, marriage was simply not an option, and the decision to embrace a career was not always a choice but a necessity. Margaret Tuke, the President of Bedford College, noticed – and regretted – this growing ‘professionalization’ of higher education, as most women students now envisaged university as a place where to acquire a skill and not just enrich their culture.85 This was certainly the case for Marion Cave who was determined – and compelled – to embrace a professional career. Like most Londoners, on Monday 11 November 1918, 11 a.m., Marion and the other students from Bedford College ceased all activity and rushed to the streets to celebrate the end of the world conflict.86 According to Vera Brittain, on that occasion people expressed more relief than triumph. ‘When the victorious cannons were heard in London at 11 a.m. on November 11, 1918, the men and women who looked at each other incredulously did not shout with enthusiasm “We’ve won the war!”. They simply said, “The war is over!”’87 The patriotic hysteria of 1914 had become blunted on Flanders’ fields. There were too many dead, too many battle-scarred young men. Britain had won the war but at what price? The small pacifist groups that had opposed the conflict from the start denounced the sacrifice of Europe’s youth. While they remained a minority in their radical opposition to war, the recent bloodshed contributed to the emergence of a diffuse pacifist feeling among large sectors of the population. Writing about his political education in Paris in the 1930s, Marion’s son stated matter-of-factly: ‘And of course, as my mother came from a Quaker family, we were opposed to war.’88 Was it true during World War I? In the Cave family, the eldest son Norman, born in 1893, volunteered like 2.5 million young men before the Military Service Act of 1916 introduced conscription.89 Resisting the warmongering chauvinism of the time proved extremely difficult and even the Quakers felt disoriented. Together with Bertrand Russell’s Non-Conscription League, they were

22

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

one of the few groups to oppose the war on principle, but about one third of their members in age to serve joined the army.90 As for the ILP, it stuck to its principled pacifist position even when the Labour Party proclaimed its support for the war. Even though a few of its members served prison sentences, its pacifist position was not easy to hold, and many of its public figures defected to the war camp.91 We can guess that these must have been harrowing times for the Cave family, as for so many others in Britain. Times of soul searching, discussion and division. All we know for sure is that Ernest Cave and his daughter Ella joined the Society of Friends in 1919, a choice dictated by their opposition to war. It was not an absolute choice for Marion’s father, however. According to his grandson, he abandoned the Quakers in 1939 because he felt that war against Fascism and Nazism was justified. According to John Rosselli again, his mother shared this position.92 Marion received a second-class honours degree in French in October 1918 and, in the following year, she remained at Bedford College to pursue her study of Italian with a view to preparing an MA degree on an eighteenth-century philosopher from Padua, Antonio Conti.93 The choice of her research topic signalled a taste for demanding intellectual debates and a cosmopolitan streak that throw an interesting light on her successive life choices. Conti was a defrocked abbot, a free thinker belonging to the late Galileanist school, and a major eighteenth-century intellectual figure. He studied philosophy, science and mathematics and spent several years in Paris and London. He was influenced by Descartes and John Locke, became close to Malebranche in France and Newton in England, and he was the main arbiter in the dispute between the latter and Leibniz over infinitesimal calculus. He was at the centre of an impressive network of European intellectuals and was also a prominent cultural gobetween between Italy and Great Britain, thanks to his translations of English authors in his native language. This played a major role in Marion Cave’s decision to study this cosmopolitan intellectual.94 To carry out her research project, she received the first scholarship offered by the British-Italian League, according to an announcement published in The Times: ‘The Committee of the British-Italian League have awarded to Miss Marion Cave, of Bedford College, the

A British Education

23

scholarship for Italian offered by them, to be held for three years at any university providing an Honours Degree in Italian.’95 Through this scholarship, the British-Italian League pursued its goal of establishing closer intellectual, political and economic links between Italy and Great Britain.96 For the penniless student, the stipend of £150 a year – equivalent to the annual salary of a primary school teacher at the time – was a real godsend. Although the scholarship was a great opportunity, Marion’s decision to leave England for Italy cannot be explained only by reasons of expediency. During her years at Bedford College, the process of estrangement from her family initiated at St Paul’s had accelerated. She had become a young adult whose perspective on life was being shaped in a totally different social and cultural milieu. In addition, she now belonged to a small educated elite: in the early 1920s, out of a total of 1,679 university graduates, only 325 were women.97 She was, therefore, in a better position to make her future choices, and to do so she felt the need to move away from a family environment that she perceived as more and more stifling. For all the warm relationship she had enjoyed with her father as a young teenager, he was not able to guide her in her adult life that would be shaped by her passion for foreign cultures, even though he would always support her personal and political choices. As for her mother, the distance that had always existed between them rapidly became insuperable, more so as she dedicated most of her time to the care of Marion’s sister, Ella, who suffered from schizophrenia. Visiting her parents upon his arrival in exile in England in 1925, her political mentor, Gaetano Salvemini, justified her decision to create a new environment for herself away from Uxbridge. He stressed the kindness of her father and mother, but he immediately grasped how the narrowness of their social milieu and their restricted cultural outlook would have prevented her from blossoming and taking full advantage of her education. ‘Very likeable, . . . but at a distance. You were right . . . never to want to go back,’ he concluded.98 Having decided to build a life for herself away from home, the choice of Italy was obvious. Through her study of the language and the culture of the peninsula, she had developed a profound – albeit

24

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

virtual – identification with Italian culture, encouraged in that by the writings of so many British travellers or expatriate writers who had chosen Italy as their spiritual home. She was steeped in the literature of the Romantics – Shelley, Byron, Keats – and of Victorian scholars and novelists, such as Gilbert Murray or George Meredith who, in their writings and their lives, had expressed their fascination for Italy, and she looked to them for guidance. She became convinced, like Lord Byron’s Childe Harold, that Italy ‘was a land where one could be free to be oneself’ and came to prefer the ‘spontaneity and freedom’ of the Italian character that Madame de Stael’s Corinne contrasted with the British ‘sense of duty, moral obligation and domesticity’.99 Many of her intellectual models had also passionately embraced Italy’s struggle for freedom during the Risorgimento, when Mazzini and Garibaldi were adopted as national heroes by a large coterie of British liberals and radicals.100 Marion would also follow in their path, transferring her enthusiasm for politics to the labour conflicts that enflamed the peninsula immediately after the war and that she followed regularly in the Socialist daily L’Avanti! Writing years later, Giovanni Ansaldo maliciously compared her to one of those English romantic young ladies falling for Italian politics, a modern version of Luisa Lucy, the heroin of Giovanni Ruffini’s Il Dottor Antonio, who experienced a desperate love story with a Sicilian patriot during the Risorgimento.101 There was, admittedly, a certain degree of romanticism in her determination to move to Italy and ‘die on the barricades if necessary’, yet even the sarcastic Ansaldo had to acknowledge the seriousness of her commitment when he described her wholehearted defence of the victims of Fascism.102 According to Umberto Calosso, who would pay her a tribute in the Italian Parliament upon her death in 1949, ‘she came to Italy at an early age because she was tired of English monotony . . . She wanted to live in a country where things happened: wars, revolutions, crises . . . . ’ More importantly, apart from fleeing English monotony, she wanted to live, like Ann Veronica, the heroin of H.G. Wells’ novel she so much admired. ‘She was vehemently impatient – she did not clearly know for what – to do, to be, to experience.’103

CHAPTER 2

Witnessing the Rise of Fascism in Florence (September 1919 – January 1923)

Arriving in Florence was always a moving experience for most travellers who had absorbed so many cliche´s and preconceptions about the cradle of the Italian Renaissance and were getting ready, with a mixture of excitement and humility, to discover the city that had given so many giants to European culture. ‘The moment has its grandeur’ wrote Arnold Bennett during his 1910 visit. ‘This city is the home of the supreme artists. Dante, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Brunelleschi’.1 The travellers expected to penetrate a dense, centuryold urban reality, which they hoped to find fixed in time in the years of the Renaissance, although the city had inexorably entered the modernity of the new century with ‘dusty boulevards and smart beaux quartiers’ as Henry James deplored.2 Marion Cave settled in the Oltrarno, on the southern bank of the river. It was a mixed neighbourhood, more popular toward San Frediano, more aristocratic and cosmopolitan around the Pitti Palace. The mediaeval lanes along the river, with their small artisan workshops, gave way to broader streets lined with splendid Renaissance mansions that went up to the imposing Pitti square. Members of the foreign colonies had rented or bought a great number

26

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

of these mansions during the final phase of the unification of Italy, when the court of Vittorio Emmanuele moved to Rome carrying in its wake all the great aristocratic families.3 At the turn of the century, many cheap pensions had opened in the neighbourhood to welcome the penniless would-be artists and writers, the many scholars with limited means who would be so instrumental in building Florence’s identity as the cradle of the Renaissance, or the ‘old English ladies’ who spent there their last years, making the best of their meagre income in a city that was much cheaper than any in Great Britain.4 Marion Cave settled in one of these pensions, at 13 piazza Pitti and remained there until September 1920.5 The pensione Gianneschi occupied the main floor of a middle-sized building in pure Renaissance style, with its projecting cornice and the perfect symmetry of its facade. A few minutes away stood the house of the British poet Elizabeth Barrett, who had settled in Florence after eloping with Robert Browning and had immortalized the 1848 revolution in her poem Casa Guidi Windows.6 One can easily imagine the enchantment of waking up every morning to the sight of the vast sloping square dominated by the imposing facade of the Pitti Palace, whose rather austere architecture was softened by the honey golden colour of its rough-hewn stones, swept for centuries by the benevolent rays of an overgenerous sun. Marion Cave was far away from Uxbridge, from its narrow horizon, its skimpy volumes and rainy greyness. ‘Colour, fragrance, light . . . instead of Shaftesbury Avenue and the wet omnibuses’. Even though they belong to the cliche´s repeated in dozens of travel books or mediocre autobiographical novels, the words of Elizabeth Von Arnim’s heroin expressed an important truth about the drawing power of Italy for the British expatriates who decided to settle there.7 The tiresome train rides that had been Marion’s daily fare since her early teens were also a thing of the past. The city was literally at her door, all its beauties within walking distance, and numerous tram lines could take her to the outlying areas and the surrounding hills.8 ‘Italy has the highest concentration of the world’s artistic heritage; Tuscany has the highest concentration of Italy’s artistic heritage, and Florence has the highest concentration of Tuscany’s artistic heritage,’ Florentines like to say.9 This certainly explained the power of

Witnessing the Rise of Fascism in Florence

27

attraction of the city, but such artistic wealth also represented a risk for the foreigner who lived there. It was easy to be overwhelmed by so much beauty, sharing Stendhal’s ecstasy – and ‘fierce acceleration of the heart’! – in front of so many artistic treasures, and never understand the deeper meaning of the place.10 Time alone and a personal connection with the very fabric of the city would make it possible to grasp the peculiar relationship Florence had established between its past and its present, between the works of its many geniuses and the daily experience of its inhabitants to form a coherent whole.11 The literary critique Carlo Bo, who came to study in the Tuscan capital at the same time as Marion Cave, described it as a very familiar city, where everybody knew everybody and where daily life followed a similar pattern for everyone.12 For the young British student, in contrast, this familiar city was a foreign environment where she had to find her bearings and discover points of entry apart from the inevitable touristic landmarks. The pensione Gianneschi which, from Marion’s rare souvenirs, one imagines quite like the pensione E.M. Forster described in his famous novel A Room with a View, probably offered a reassuring anchorage at first. It could also have become a trap, locking her up in the routine circuit of the expatriates and tourists for whom Italy was a construction of the mind and Florence a ‘theme park of the past’.13 Marion Cave was not attracted to this embalmed city. While enjoying all the charm of her new environment, she endeavoured to discover another social reality, through work and political engagement and, thanks to her connection with the British-Italian League and her research at the university, she was introduced to the various circles that formed the rich intellectual fabric of the Tuscan capital. She had not chosen Florence by chance. For a long time, the city had been the cultural and intellectual capital of the country, the ‘Athens of Italy’, for Italians and foreigners alike and it offered a dense network of libraries, cultural institutes and centres where she could carry out her research for her master’s degree. Antonio Conti, the intellectual figure she had chosen to study, had been a cultural gobetween in early eighteenth-century Europe and Marion was above all interested in his role as an intermediary between Italian and

28

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

English culture. In a way, he played this role again posthumously by opening for her the doors of the Florentine scholars.14 She immediately joined the Gabinetto Vieusseux, the city’s main circulating library which received newspapers, magazines and books from all over Europe and whose register of subscribers read like a who’s who of European and Italian intellectuals.15 Thanks to her introduction from Bedford College, she could attend lectures at the University and receive the advice of scholars in her field for her research that she carried out mostly at the National Library of Florence in the Palazzo della Dogana, in front of the Uffizi Gallery. Even if it drove its staff to despair, the maze of more than 150 small rooms, corridors and staircases all lined with bookshelves weighted down by countless books accumulated along the centuries had a certain charm for those who spent long hours there like Marion.16 She also benefitted from the presence of several foreign cultural institutes – the German Kunsthistorisches Institut, the French Cultural Institute and of course the British Institute – that had opened in the city in the previous years. At the intersection of cultural diplomacy and scholarly research, they significantly contributed to the reinvention of Florence as cultural and artistic capital after the transfer of the court and the government of Italy to Rome.17 Because of her university training in French, she was a frequent visitor of the French Institute on Piazza Ognisanti, using its library, attending the conferences that established it as a major showcase of French culture on the banks of the Arno and becoming acquainted with its director, Julien Luchaire, who was an important figure of the local intellectual scene.18 Marion was, of course, more directly associated with the British Institute. ‘The school of the British Institute was opened in 1919 under the direction of Professor Aldo Ricci as headmaster, with the assistance of Professor Guido Ferrando, Miss Hilda Cox, Miss Marion Cave and Madame Orsi-Plucknett’ recalled Harold E. Goad, who was its director from 1922 until World War II.19 Despite the strong British presence in the city, the Institute was a latecomer and had more shaky beginnings than its French counterpart which was the brainchild of the Italian Department of the University of Grenoble and had the support of the French authorities. The British Institute

Witnessing the Rise of Fascism in Florence

29

had been created in the middle of World War I. According to Harold Goad, ‘Ever since the creation of the French Institute . . . it had been the desire of a number of English residents and anglophile Italian scholars to start a similar British Institute’.20 Their concerns were essentially cultural and intellectual, but the requirements of war propaganda seemed to have weighed much more as the British Ambassador to Rome admitted in his Memoirs.21 The capital of Tuscany seemed an obvious choice for such a cultural institute because of the large number of British expatriates who resided there and felt the need to present their homeland’s motivations in the conflict under a more favourable light.22 The Foreign Office strongly encouraged the endeavour, and even financed it at first, but left the initiative to private individuals. The writer Edward Hutton, the Hellenist scholar Walter Ashburner, Professor Guido Ferrando a specialist of British literature, the poet and editor Angiolo Orvieto, the art critic Bernard Berenson, Arthur Acton and Janet Ross, the dowager of the British colony, gave their support, donating books, furniture and money. At the end of 1917, a first library opened in the Loggia Rucellai, made available by Contessa Rucellai – the American-born Edith Bronson – in via Vigna Nuova, off via Tornabuoni, the favourite haunt of the foreign colony.23 A few months later, in the spring of 1918, the Institute moved into larger premises, via dei Conti, near the San Lorenzo market. The official inauguration of the Institute, on 21 June of that year, was attended by representatives of the Italian civil and military authorities, Italian intellectuals and academics and members of the British, French and American colonies. On that occasion the British Ambassador, Sir Rennell Rodd, stressed the intellectual and diplomatic functions of the Institute which should spread the English language and culture as well as ‘explain the chief problems of the British Empire’.24 After the war, this propaganda mission waned rapidly and under the dynamic leadership of its first director, the Cambridge scholar Arthur Spender – uncle of the poet Stephen Spender – the Institute became a centre of intellectual exchange through cycles of conferences on historical and literary topics that brought together prominent British and Italian intellectuals. Aldo Sorani and Angiolo Orvieto from Il Marzoco, Guido Biaggi, director of the Laurentian

30

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

Library, or the historian Gaetano Salvemini were regular participants and contributed to inscribing the Institute in the Florentine intellectual landscape.25 Marion Cave was part of the first team that created the School of English and, from the start, she worked with the University of Florence which lacked a fully developed Department of English Language and Literature and had turned to the Institute to provide tuition in these subjects for its students. Teaching in the Institute’s two-year higher course leading to a teacher’s diploma, Marion Cave was in close contact with Italian students and teachers from the university, which helped her to avoid the many trappings of the expatriate milieu.26 In these early post-war years in Florence, a city that still counted about 5,000 residents from the British Isles, it was possible to live in an exclusively English environment. One could use the currency exchange and money transfer services of the Haskard and Maquay banks, buy English soaps and cologne at Roberts’, sensible tweed clothing at the Old England Store, the best marmalades and other English delicacies in specialized grocery shops, or taste the best tea and scones in several tearooms. And, of course, Thomas Cook had one of its most important foreign branches on the via Tornabuoni. The expatriates could turn to British dentists and doctors to cure their body, choose between no fewer than four English-speaking Protestant churches to take care of their soul and improve their mind at the Vieusseux Library or the Seeber bookshop which received all the latest publications from London. The British residents had colonized Doney and Giacosa, two elegant cafe´s on the via Tornabuoni, and several clubs welcomed their members in the style of the best institutions of St James’s in London.27 Marion Cave was determined not to limit her experience of Florence to the carefully bounded horizon of the British colony and, between the University, the National Library and the British Institute, she rapidly became part of an intellectual and human network that gradually drove her away from the stuffy atmosphere of the pensione Gianneschi and its lodgers who belonged to another age and another world. In the summer of 1920, she left the pensione and took a room at the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) which occupied the top floors of the splendid Palazzo Guadagni on piazza Santo

Witnessing the Rise of Fascism in Florence

31

Spirito. Established to welcome the young single women who either studied or worked in the city, the YWCA was a real change from the pensione Gianneschi. First, and most importantly, it offered a younger ambiance, but also a greater autonomy despite its officers’ intent to provide a moral supervision to the young ladies.28 The palazzo Guadagni was one of the purest examples of Renaissance architecture with its often-copied top floor loggia. At the end of the previous century, James Jackson Jarves, the famous American art collector who donated his paintings to the Yale University museum, had rented it. When Marion moved in, the first municipal library of Florence occupied the ground floor, the German Kunsthistorisches Institut the first floor and the YWCA the upper two storeys of the building.29 When she left piazza Pitti, Marion chose to move away from the tourist city. Gradually, as she fulfilled her various activities, she followed a personal geography that allowed her to appropriate her new environment. Her work took her from the National Library near the Piazza della Signoria to the British Institute in San Lorenzo and the University on Piazza San Marco. This was also a classic visitor’s tour – the Uffizi Gallery and the Palazzo Vecchio, the church of San Lorenzo with the Medici Chapel, the Academy and the convent of San Marco – and the discovery of the city’s architectural and artistic treasures was thus naturally incorporated into her daily routine. Marion Cave’s desire to move to Italy had been motivated in large part by her passionate reading of the press accounts of the numerous social movements that had been shaking the peninsula since the end of the war. She had chosen Italy because it was a country where ‘things were happening: wars, revolutions, crises.’30 In that respect reality certainly exceeded her wildest expectations, and her first months in Florence offered her a crash course in Italian politics that eventually led her to join the ranks of the first antifascist forces. Even if, like many of her compatriots, she had wished to do so, it would have been difficult for Marion to ignore the profound crisis Italy was going through in the years that followed the war. Tensions were palpable even in the most refined environments as she realized very early on. On one of her first outings to the opera in October 1919, she witnessed a manifestation of the exacerbated nationalist feelings when, during the interval, the officers present in the concert hall

32

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

stood up to shout their support for ‘Fiume Italiana’.31 Marion had arrived in Italy at the time when a group of Italian irredentists, led by the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, were occupying the Croatian port city. Fiume had become the symbol of the so-called ‘mutilated victory’ criticized by the Italian nationalist forces who rejected the Treaty of Versailles for its failure to grant Italy the irredentist regions it had been promised, and its occupation by the condottiere and his legions served as a rehearsal for the fascist seizure of power three years later.32 The nationalist and irredentist passions were not the only ones to express themselves in spectacular forms. The peasants and industrial workers, who had not wanted the war but had been the main victims of its catastrophic management by an ill-prepared general staff, returned home in an exasperated mood, and the post-war social and economic crisis further fuelled their anger.33 The war had set in motion a mass social protagonism that expressed itself in the following years in the rejection of the leadership of the national liberal elite and local notables, as well as in the demands for some degree of control over the management of factories, or in the peasant leagues and the cooperative movement in the countryside. The peasants demanded a piece of land and the workers wanted to follow the example of Russia where the Bolsheviks had just seized power. More prosaically, most struggled simply to put food on their plate. Before her departure for Italy, Marion Cave had followed in L’Avanti! the accounts of the revolts against the high cost of living that had shaken the country in June and July 1919. They had been particularly violent in Florence, where the food shops had been assaulted for several days in a row in the popular neighbourhoods of San Frediano and Santa Croce.34 It was these struggles that had fired her political imagination and made her want to go to Italy to ‘die on the barricades’ if need be.35 As soon as she arrived in Florence, she eagerly attended the numerous Socialist Party meetings and demonstrations in the run up to the general election of November 1919, trying to make sense of the passionate debates as she planned to join the youth section of the party. Yet, she found it difficult to navigate between the various currents that lacerated the socialist movement.36 The Socialist Party

Witnessing the Rise of Fascism in Florence

33

was then dominated by Giacinto Serrati’s maximalist faction which adopted a revolutionary programme and decided to join the Communist International, despite the opposition of a substantial moderate minority. It won a remarkable 32 per cent of the vote in the November 1919 general election at the national level and more than 50 per cent in Florence, but its maximalist leadership that kept talking about creating ‘soviets’ like in Russia proved incapable of acknowledging the genuine popular revolt that was unfolding under its very eyes. Caught between its verbal radicalism and its fear of popular spontaneity, it contributed to the political vacuum in which the movement wasted its energy, making way for the offensive of the fascist squads which started in earnest after the failure of the wave of strikes and factory occupations in autumn 1920.37 Having moved to a popular neighbourhood, Marion was an eye witness of the violent clashes that opposed the radical workers and the fascists in the following months. Angelo Tasca has described the rise of fascism in the post-war years as a ‘posthumous and preventive counterrevolution’.38 Still in shock after the factory and land occupations and having lost confidence in the liberal state that had proved incapable of defending their property rights, the industrialists and agrarians expressed their growing determination to resort to force, not only to restore public order but also to crush in the bud any new movement by workers and peasants. To that effect, they decided to use the fascist gangs which had launched their violent attacks against progressive forces as early as 1919.39 Created officially in March 1919 in Milan, the fasci di combattimento (combat bands) came out of the revolutionary interventionist current that had broken with the pacifist Socialist Party in 1914 to advocate Italy’s entry into the world conflict alongside the allied forces. Benito Mussolini embodied this lineage and, in 1919, he still claimed a revolutionary identity, even though his views had taken a nationalist tone that was more in tune with the activists he was attracting. The first fascist movement regrouped people frustrated by the ‘mutilated victory’, a large number of middle rank officers who were finding it difficult to adapt to civil life and had to face a wave of popular hostility towards anyone identified with the army, and a number of intellectuals and artists, in particular those

34

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

associated with the Futurist movement.40 Their number was quite limited at first, a few thousand at the most until the spring of 1920, but from the start they exercised their violent methods – the squadrismo – against their preferred targets, at first socialist activists and elected officials and later the militant working-class. After the failure of the factory occupations in autumn 1920 and the exacerbation of social confrontations in the countryside, fascism underwent a rapid transformation both in its social basis and its goals and ideology. Its areas of recruitment shifted from the industrial North to the agrarian regions of the Po Valley, Ferrara and Tuscany. The emergence of this ‘agrarian squadrismo’ provoked an onslaught of violence against the peasant leagues and cooperatives, the case del popolo (local social centres) and the socialist newspapers and municipalities. The ranks of fascist organizations grew rapidly, swelling from about 20,000 members at the end of 1920 to 250,000 at the end of the following year, and the new recruits came primarily from the rural and urban lower middle classes.41 The ferocity of the black-shirt squads swept through the whole country but as many authors have noted: ‘In “gentle Tuscany” [. . .] fascist cruelty and violence reached their highest level.’42 Backed by a united front of landowners and industrialists formed in autumn 1920, the fascist squads unleashed their brutality first against the sharecroppers (mezzadri) who were particularly combative in the province. Then, they found an outlet for their fanaticism in “Red Florence”, a city that since the introduction of male universal suffrage in 1913 had always given a majority of its votes to the Socialist Party.43 The Florence fascist gangs were among the first to emerge, as early as the spring of 1919, and they multiplied their attacks on socialist groups and workers organizations in the following years.44 The radicalisation of workers and peasants, who opposed a staunch resistance to the attacks of the blackshirts in the entire province, can partly explain the brutality of the clashes in Tuscany. It was also the result of the confrontation, within the local fascist organization, between a ‘legalist’ current and an extremist one determined to wage an all-out war against those they perceived as enemies.45 This wave of violence culminated in the so-called battle of Florence in February – March 1921, of which Marion was an

Witnessing the Rise of Fascism in Florence

35

eyewitness. A fascist attack against the socialist paper, La Difesa, in January 1921 led to sporadic, bloody clashes in the following weeks. A semi-insurrectional situation erupted as of 27 February. After a bomb had exploded during one of their marches, thousands of blackshirts roamed the streets of the working-class neighbourhoods seeking revenge. At night fall, they reached the headquarters of the Railway Workers Union where they shot at point blank the Secretary of the Union, Spartaco Lavignani who, only a few weeks earlier, had joined the ranks of the young Communist Party created at the Livorno Congress of January 1921.46 The next day, railroad workers called a general strike which spread rapidly to other industrial sectors and other cities of Tuscany. It was a violent strike. Barricades, manned by armed workers, sprang up in the popular neighbourhoods. Bloody clashes occurred with the fascist bands directly backed by the police forces. Marion witnessed the pitched battle in San Frediano. ‘The exasperated “reds” as they were called, defended themselves by firing behind closed shutters, while the women-folk prepared scalding oil to throw from the roofs, while the police and the fascists, armed by them, aimed at them from the square.’47 Observing the clash from a window of the top floor of the Palazzo Guadagni, she was spotted by the police who pointed their guns at her and ordered her to go away. She obeyed in a way, slipping out of the building to get a closer look at what was happening in the streets: Machine guns manned the bridges across the Arno. As I approached one of them, I was stopped by hordes of yelling fascists. Two strings of them, each fascist united to his neighbour by the thick stick or manganello, which was his badge, were dragging in triumph a man who stood upon a truck. I had no difficulty in recognizing him as Benito Mussolini.48

She provided an accurate account of the ferocity of the clashes and the support the police – and later the army – offered the fascist bands to defeat the popular insurrection in Florence and in the rest of the province. Despite the high number of casualties – 17 dead, 500 injured – and the arrest of more than 1,500 workers, the battle of Florence did not put an end to fascist violence. It continued, unabated, in the following months, under the leadership of one of the most bloodthirsty squad leader, Tullio Tamburini, and his young

36

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

lieutenant, Kurt Erich Suckert – better known under his penname, Curzio Malaparte – who started then his meteoric rise within the Florence branch of the Fascist Party.49 If the daily violence she witnessed had a sobering effect and dampened her romantic revolutionary enthusiasm, it also strengthened Marion’s desire to join the fight alongside the forces that opposed the fascist onslaught. But the forces of the left were in absolute shambles. After the divisions created by the war between various factions of interventionists and pacifists, the post-war period brought new causes for discord. What attitude should the Socialist Party adopt vis-a`-vis the Bolshevik Revolution? What political strategy should it implement in the social struggles that tore the country apart? There were no consensual answers to these questions. The divisions of the socialist forces accelerated as a far-left faction led by Amedeo Bordiga and Antonio Gramsci decided to leave the party at the Livorno Congress in January 1921 to form the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI). Then, in October 1922, a few days before the March on Rome, the reformist wing of Turati and Giacomo Matteotti went its own way and abandoned the maximalist Socialist Party to create the Partito Socialista Unitario (PSU) that rejected any revolutionary overbidding and advocated the defence of democratic institutions from fascist attacks.50 The debacle of the labour movement and the disarray of the socialist forces could only be unsettling for a young British student with vague radical ideas. If her solidly anchored democratic convictions led her spontaneously to oppose fascism as a fundamentally reactionary movement, the waste land that was the Italian left made it quite difficult for her to determine what to do and who to join to oppose it. In this dispiriting context, her encounter with the historian Gaetano Salvemini offered her a way out of this dead-end and, in so many ways, determined most of the political and personal choices that would affect the rest of her life. Gaetano Salvemini has often been called the first Italian antifascist. However, when Marion met him in the spring of 1921, he was seriously considering giving up politics altogether and even leaving Italy to settle in Great Britain or the United States. This is what led him to require the teaching services of Marion Cave at the British Institute, as learning English

Witnessing the Rise of Fascism in Florence

37

was a prerequisite for the realization of his expatriation plans.51 But given his standing as a major public intellectual and political figure it proved difficult for him to abandon the sinking ship of the Italian left and his expatriation plans did not materialize until he was forced out of the country by the fascist repression in 1925. Gaetano Salvemini belonged to the generation of Marion Cave’s father. He came from a similar background and had followed a similar path, using education to overcome the limits of his social origins. Born to a large family of small, impoverished landowners from Molfetta, in the province of Puglia, he pursued his secondary education in the local seminary and, after receiving a scholarship, went on to university to study history with Pasquale Villari in Florence in 1890.52 Salvemini’s work on medieval Florence established his reputation as a historian and he was appointed professor of history at the University of Messina at the age of 28. At the same time, he joined the Socialist Party and contributed articles to socialist newspapers, sharpening his talents as a fierce polemicist against the political corruption of the Giolitti government.53 Alongside this active and successful public and professional life, Salvemini also shared with his young wife and their five children a perfect family happiness that came to a tragic end in December 1908. The Messina earthquake, which destroyed 90 per cent of the Sicilian city and killed 70,000 of its residents, spared Gaetano Salvemini who remained hanging from a window pane while his entire family disappeared in the rubble.54 Mad with grief, he spent days searching for his wife and children’s corpses with his bare hands. He felt he was losing his mind but insisted on pursuing this desperate search, until his friends, Julien Luchaire and his wife Fernande Dauriac, took him away to Florence.55 There, after a while, he seemed to recover his remarkable energy, but his jovial facade concealed a deep wound that would never heal. According to Luchaire, his frenetic engagement with his country’s problems in the following years was his way of forgetting, if not overcoming, his tremendous personal grief. Likewise, the tragedy of losing his five children also explained the keen interest he would take, after the war, in a few younger people who, like Marion, would follow his intellectual guidance and become his surrogate family.56

38

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

After being appointed at the University of Florence, he resumed his intense intellectual and political activity that made him a key figure of the city’s public life and placed him at the centre of multiple networks to which he would later introduce Marion Cave. He collaborated to La Voce, a major cultural and political magazine created in 1908 by Giuseppe Prezzolini. In 1911, he broke both with Prezzolini, who supported Italy’s conquest of Libya and the Socialist Party which he judged too lukewarm in its opposition to Italy’s colonial enterprise.57 He created the weekly L’Unita` to promote his anti-colonial positions, to campaign for universal male suffrage – granted in 1913 – and then to support the intervention of Italy in World War I alongside the allied powers, calling for the end of existing empires and the freedom of peoples to choose their destiny. After the war, he resumed his political activity and was elected as an independent in 1919, but his short stint in parliament confirmed his disillusion with party politics and his contempt for the corruption of the liberal political class. In 1921, he refused to run again and stopped publishing L’Unita`, announcing his intention to go back to his historical research.58 Given his state of mind when Marion met him, he would prove at first a poor political guide but, like most of his students, she was immediately attracted to his flamboyant, life-enhancing personality, his impetuous and passionate temper, his strong moral standing and his desire to help their intellectual development to the best of his ability.59 This intellectual support she greatly appreciated as she was completing her master’s thesis and getting ready to defend it in London just as the fascists were gathering in Naples to launch their march on Rome.

CHAPTER 3

Becoming Biancafiore (1923 – 24)

The winter of 1922 – 23 was particularly harsh in Florence. For days, a blizzard hit the city and a biting wind rushed through its narrow medieval lanes, transforming them into Siberian corridors. Yet, the Italian Mail hailed the return to a ‘brighter Florence’ on the front page of its first issue published on 23 December 1922. The English weekly, jointly sponsored by the British and American Chambers of Commerce, was saluting the new, quieter political climate and the return to stability in the country resulting from the ‘triumph of fascism’, which ‘has not only placed a new government in power but is also a portent of the vigorous enterprise of young Italy’.1 The political climate had indeed radically changed during the few weeks between Marion Cave’s departure for London and her return to Italy in the aftermath of the March on Rome. In Florence, the organized fascist groups had paved the way for the coup.2 By the end of the summer, the fascist squads had carefully wiped out the last strongholds of resistance in the popular neighbourhoods. At the end of October, a large delegation of Florentine fascists had assaulted the trains to join the march from Naples to Rome. They were among the more radical blackshirt squads who presented the initiative as the final offensive for a seizure of power by force, whereas Mussolini conceived of it as a means of exercising a strong pressure on the King

40

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

and parliament to force them to appoint him as head of government.3 The Florentine reactionary forces did not conceal their satisfaction to see Mussolini lead his movement to power, through intimidation admittedly, but all the same maintaining a legal facade. In Florence, the celebrations lasted several days to greet the formation of the first Mussolini government.4 All the fascist detainees were released from prison and let free to join the blackshirt militias responsible for maintaining the brighter climate hailed by the Italian Mail.5 For no one was fooled. The apparent legality that prevailed in Rome depended on the pacification imposed through violence and maintained by force in the provinces. Aware of these latest developments which she followed in the British press, Marion Cave knew what to expect when she returned to Florence. Her decision to move to Italy in 1919, when she hoped to join the socialist revolution, had been politically motivated. Things had not turned out as she expected, but given her passion for politics, her choice to return to Italy and settle there permanently after the March on Rome indicated her desire not to shy away from the necessary fight against the new regime. While in London, she had noticed that the reactions to the seizure of power by Mussolini were mostly favourable, despite methods considered highly questionable in view of British democratic traditions. The fear of ‘Bolshevik infection’ on the continent and straightforward pragmatism determined the attitude of the Conservative government. It openly expressed its satisfaction and did not conceal a certain admiration for the man who had restored order and established a strong government in a country that had, so far, essentially proved its inability to govern itself.6 Mussolini appeared as the only alternative to chaos, and the Times openly wished for his arrival to power, by force if need be.7 Although the Labour Party’s reaction was more hesitant, it too seemed seduced by Mussolini’s ‘bloodless revolution’ and his determination to govern the country.8 On the whole, at the end of 1922 in London, ‘confidence in Mussolini was almost unanimous’.9 In Florence, Marion realized that the British community offered the new regime their militant support. The Anglo-American business groups applauded the crushing of the labour and socialist movements and the restoration of social stability, thanks to Mussolini’s iron grip

Becoming Biancafiore

41

and the bludgeons of his militias. The wealthy British aesthetes and aristocrats too cheered the subjugation of the ‘reds’ and did not conceal their admiration for the man who had put the country back to work and made sure that the trains ran on time.10 Most ‘went native’ in expressing their wholehearted support for the new regime, as the American art critique Bernard Berenson – one of the few antifascist voices in that community – deplored in a letter to his wife.11 As for the British writers and artists whom Marion occasionally met at the British Institute, the fascist movement was simply part of the scenery. Like Norman Douglas, they could decide to ignore it completely. They could admire it for its aesthetic qualities, like Aldous Huxley who did not conceal his fascination for the ‘fabulous elegance’ of the young officers, or the ‘fierce young fascists with faces of Roman heroes’.12 While not necessarily approving of them, they chose to turn a blind eye on the violence and violations of civil and political liberties that accompanied the installation of the Fascist regime. Like many other expatriates, they too appreciated the pacified social climate and pursued their literary endeavours as if nothing had happened.13 Closer to her, Marion soon realized that, beyond their admiration for Mussolini and his government, certain members of the British community openly declared their ideological affinity with the new regime and willingly became the instruments of a sustained campaign of promotion of fascism among the British expatriates in the peninsula and public opinion in Great Britain. In this group, the most prominent figure was her boss, Harold E. Goad, who had been appointed director of the British Institute in the spring of 1922. A specialist of Italian language and literature, he had contributed to the creation of the Italian Department at the University of London in 1917, in collaboration with Emma Dobelli, Marion’s Italian teacher at Bedford College.14 He was a devout Anglican, bordering on mysticism, and an ardent admirer of Francesco of Assisi to whom he dedicated several books. But he was also closely connected to the most conservative circles in Great Britain and expressed his adhesion to fascism very early on. Two of his Italian colleagues and close friends from the University, Antonio Cippico and Camillo Pellizzi, created the first fascio abroad in London, in June 1921, and Harold

42

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

Goad participated in several public demonstrations of the blackshirts in the British capital before moving to Florence.15 His arrival in the Tuscan capital coincided with a marked improvement in the financial situation of the Institute. Could his close relations with the Fascist authorities account for this change, as Marion suggested, in 1934, in answer to a query from William Gillies – head of the Labour Party’s International Department – who expressed concern about Goad’s activities alongside Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts?16 It cannot be ascertained but seems unlikely. The change in the financial situation of the Institute was essentially due to Harold Goad’s connections to the conservative business milieu, men like Sir Walter Becker, a wealthy British ship owner working in Italy who supported the Institute financially until his death. His generosity allowed Harold Goad to transfer the British Institute, at the beginning of 1923, to Palazzo Antinori, one of the finest examples of Renaissance architecture in the upper section of the via Tornabuoni.17 Becker was a fervent supporter of fascism, whose antidemocratic methods he enthusiastically defended in the British press.18 As for Harold Goad, he used his privileged position within the British community in Italy to launch an efficient work of counterpropaganda, sending telegrams, letters and articles to the British press in order to debunk the criticisms of the new Italian regime that were occasionally published.19 He was probably not financially rewarded for his support but his enthusiastic defence of the new regime greatly enhanced the visibility of the British Institute in the local cultural landscape. With a boss that she considered ‘a fanatic fascist’, Marion had to be cautious.20 She had to be particularly careful also in her relationships with the British community. Gradually, outside work, her contacts were limited to the few individuals who opposed the new regime, all of whom were part of Gaetano Salvemini’s close circle and tended to belong to his generation, such as Vernon Lee, born Violet Paget. Her family had settled in Florence in the 1870s, renting the Villa Il Palmerino at Settignano, which she bought in 1906 and where she resided until her death in 1935. A prolific intellectual with progressive social ideas, she spoke Italian fluently and did not conceal her homosexuality. She was also one of the few British

Becoming Biancafiore

43

expatriates to declare her opposition to the Fascist regime from the start.21 Protected by her notoriety and respectable age, the ‘Lady from Il Palmerino’, as Marion called her, would become a precious contact in the following years.22 Salvemini also introduced Marion to another group which found its rallying point at Villa I Tatti where the American expatriates Bernard and Mary Berenson had settled, at the beginning of the century, to develop their thriving business in the art trade. A local aesthete and wealthy cosmopolitan dilettante writer, Carlo Placci had introduced the Berenson to Gaetano Salvemini who would play an important role in their apprehension of political developments in Italy during and after World War I. He rapidly became intimate with both Bernard and Mary Berenson who appreciated his volcanic personality and sharp mind and often invited him to stay at Villa I Tatti where he sometimes brought his ‘young friend’.23 The Berenson opposed the new regime from the start, but were extremely careful not to attract the attention of the Fascist authorities, so as not to put their resident status in jeopardy as it was essential to their activities in the international art trade.24 During the first years of the regime, Villa I Tatti became a haven for the Italian and British opponents of fascism, and it also became the target of intense surveillance by the fascist police. ‘There is, in Florence, a clique that meets each week to elaborate schemes detrimental to Fascism and to Italy, plotting and diffusing the most hostile propaganda abroad,’ an agent wrote to the Secretariat of the Duce. ‘They are in permanent contact with the United States, England, Belgium and France. Their meeting place is almost always the villa Berenson’.25 Threatened with expulsion from Italy, the Berenson would soon officially ‘cease to be in opposition’, while continuing to express their criticism of the regime in their private circle and generously supporting their antifascist friend Salvemini when he was forced into exile in 1925. After he left, Marion would continue to visit them and use their international connections to convey information abroad about the opposition to Mussolini.26 While Marion’s contacts with the British community were becoming more limited, she strengthened her connections with the Academic milieu. Here as well, she drew closer to the people who

44

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

soon rallied around Gaetano Salvemini, although he seemed, at first, an unlikely leader for the budding opposition. At the end of 1922, Salvemini had gone through a period of discouragement that made him hesitate about what to do next. Apart from its political dimension, he seemed to have experienced the victory of fascism as a personal defeat, the not very brilliant outcome of decades of engagement in public life.27 As Marion was leaving London to return to Florence, Gaetano Salvemini was seriously considering remaining abroad. His deep disappointment with politics even led him to consider Mussolini’s seizure of power as a lesser evil, as he would admit later: I must confess that when in Paris, in October 1922, I received the news that Mussolini had become Prime Minister, I exclaimed ‘Better him than any of the others!’ My indignation towards political schemers such as Giolitti, Bonomi, Facta and Salandra, to whom fascism owed its victory [. . .], and my distrust of both reformist and maximalist socialists [. . .] led me to consider a Mussolini experience as the least infamous for Italy at this moment.28

Confronted with these rather dim political prospects, he envisaged permanent exile and a return to historical research. On 4 November 1922, he wrote to Mary Berenson: ‘I have decided to remain permanently outside of Italy from next January.’29 To Giuseppe Prezzolini, his old accomplice from La Voce, he confided at the same time, ‘I feel that, overall, we have a similar assessment of the situation about future action. No more active politics and more cultural work: writing books, teaching history, maybe a few articles to clarify confused positions, and abandoning politics to men without scruples.’30 To the young students who looked to him for guidance, he tried to justify his decision to remain abroad by mentioning the repression that would most certainly hit him. ‘Given my past, as soon as I would set foot in Florence I would be sent to the nick or to the next world [. . .]. In Italy, in the best-case scenario, I would be reduced to silence’, he wrote to Ernesto Rossi in November. The next day he added: ‘My plan would be to spend a year between Paris and London doing research [. . .]. I would no longer be active in politics, but I would write books. I would learn English. And if the atmosphere in Italy became unbearable for me, I would settle in England, or I would

Becoming Biancafiore

45

go to the United States.’31 However, he returned to Florence a few days later to give the end of semester exams and his friends and students, who would have seen his departure as a decision dictated by fear, persuaded him to stay. If he no longer planned to emigrate, he still intended to travel regularly to Great Britain to give conferences at various universities. Mastering the English language therefore remained a priority for him and this, as he had written to his wife while still in Paris, ‘I’ll do [. . .] with the help of Miss Cave and her beautiful eyes.’32 He resumed his English language lessons at the British Institute immediately upon returning to Florence and realized that, like his young students and friends, Marion was groping to make sense of the new political reality and felt the need to engage in a collective reflection with like-minded people.33 In January 1923, he invited her to attend the first public conference of the Circolo di Cultura (Cultural Circle). The Circolo was the brainchild of a few young people who had awaken to politics during World War I and had often sought answers to their questions about the post-war crisis in Salvemini’s L’Unita`. They refused to give up hope as they watched the collapse of liberal Italy and the defeat of the left. Although not sure how to go about it, they were determined to withstand the reactionary offensive and, at the same time, they aspired to the renewal of the ideal and organizational heritage of the democratic left. They were critical of their elders, but also conscious of their own limits and lack of experience. Nello Rosseli was one of Salvemini’s history students at the University of Florence, together with Federico Chabod, Ernesto Sestan and Lidia Minervini, his late wife’s younger sister. His brother Carlo and Ernesto Rossi, who had both volunteered during the war, had found in Salvemini a master and surrogate father who had been a helpful guide for them both at the personal and political levels.34 There were also younger academics, such as the jurist Piero Calamandrei and the philosopher Ludovico Limentini; or liberal progressive intellectuals, such as Piero Jahier and Umberto Morra di Lavriano. They had in common their participation to World War I, which they had supported on the side of the democratic interventionists and in which many had volunteered to fight. Contrary to the Futurists, who had glorified the war as the ‘world’s only hygiene’ and

46

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

had then naturally found their way into the fasci di combattimento and embraced Mussolini’s virile politics, these young people now saw the war experience as extremely negative for themselves and the country.35 Were they not responsible for sending tens of thousands of peasants and workers to a senseless slaughter while encouraging the nationalist forces now unleashed across the country? If so, they wanted to understand their error, but they also wanted to keep a cool head in front of the outburst of reactionary violence and the failure of the democratic and socialist forces. On the suggestion of Alfredo Niccoli, a young lawyer whose mother was British and who greatly admired the English debating clubs, they proposed to meet on a weekly basis, outside of any organized political group, to discuss freely without any immediate finality.36 For about two years, in 1921 and 1922, the group met for informal reunions in Alfredo Niccoli’s offices, via degli Alfani, or in the Rossellis’ large mansion, via Giusti. In the aftermath of the March on Rome, however, they felt that the situation required a more determined stance on their part. Yet, the old political parties, whose ideal appeal had long waned and who had proved incapable of resisting the ascent of fascism, repelled them. They did not shy away from politics as such but intended to find a new meaning for political activity.37 To this end, they decided to transform their friendly meetings into a well-established formal cultural association – the Circolo di Cultura – with a conference room open to the public, and a library subscribing to the most influential Italian and European journals. Carlo Rosselli was the most enthusiastic about this proposal. Scion of a wealthy Jewish family, he financed the enterprise, renting and furnishing premises in Borgo Santi Aspostoli. The windows of the large conference room opened on the piazza Santa Trinita`, at the bottom of via Tornabuoni, and the ancient Roman column of Justice that stood at its centre.38 Carlo Rosselli’s energetic personality and the enthusiasm of his young friends were essential assets for the launching of the enterprise. But the Circolo would probably not have played such a prominent role without the intellectual contribution of Gaetano Salvemini. As Marion Cave recalled, while Carlo was the organizer, Salvemini was the intellectual dynamo behind the enterprise.39

Becoming Biancafiore

47

Although doubtful at first, he adhered to the project and was particularly supportive of the young people’s desire for reflection and clarification detached from any immediate political goal. His intellectual reputation attracted prominent intellectuals to the debates. His volcanic personality, his intellectual rigour and his corrosive wit delighted the young Florentine antifascists to whom he gave the courage to pursue an enterprise that the semi-legality prevailing in the first years of the regime made possible yet precarious.40 There was an immediate meeting of hearts and minds and Marion’s decision to join the Circolo represented a watershed in her political and personal life. She met there a group of politically committed young people that she would soon accompany as they moved toward openly militant opposition to the Fascist regime. She also found a social and cultural milieu where she forged solid ties of friendship and love that would determine the course of her life. The members of the Circolo were young people on the threshold of their adult life; the core members were graduate students; only three or four were above 30 and had entered professional life. Most belonged to the enlightened Florentine bourgeoisie and tended to be secular and left-leaning.41 The most active members – around 50 – met daily in the premises that were open in the morning and the evening, to read the press or prepare the weekly conferences. These debates often attracted a large public, from 150 to 200 people, who belonged to the same milieu: professors, journalists, publishers, lawyers, doctors, visiting foreign intellectuals, but few industrial workers. The fascist repression had already taken its toll in that milieu, forcing many into silence or exile, and those who remained active frequented more radical underground circles close to the anarchists and communists.42 Like her new friends, Marion frequented the Circolo daily and there she met the cream of the democratic antifascist intelligentsia. The talks covered numerous topics: the Bolshevik Revolution, the Irish Crisis, the Partito popolare (Don Sturzo’s Catholic party); fiscal, agrarian or educational reforms; the League of Nations; socialism, syndicalism, and many more.43 Like-minded young antifascist intellectuals would come from Turin, Genova or Rome, and an

48

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

informal network was set up with similar circles that met in other cities. During its two years of existence, the Circolo di Cultura carved a free, democratic space in a city whose political and cultural life was being stifled by the fascist forces that controlled it. Little did they know that it would be the last such site of democratic expression until the liberation of the city in August 1944.44 Despite their desire to remain apolitical and to focus on the intellectual formation of a new democratic elite, the members of the Circolo could not ignore the radicalization of the political situation and the gulf that separated them from the fascist forces now in power. Still believing in the virtue of open democratic debate, in April 1924 they organized a discussion about ‘the function of fascism in Italian Society’ to which they invited two fascist intellectuals. In pure fascist style, the two guests arrogantly refused the democratic exchange and resorted to insults and rhetorical violence. For Marion, ‘at that moment, we understood, indeed we deeply felt that there was an abyss between them and us, and nothing could bring us together, not even language.’45 Political events would soon confirm the repressive nature and totalitarian tendencies of the new regime and force the young antifascists to devise ways to oppose it more forcefully. Determined to consolidate his power through regular elections, in July 1923 Mussolini had forced a change in the electoral law, with the support of most Liberals in Parliament. At the same time, his militias had stepped up their physical attacks on his potential opponents, forcing former Prime Minister Francesco Saverio Nitti into exile in November 1923, and seriously injuring the liberal democratic journalist and MP Giovanni Amendola. The Acerbo Law, named after its author, gave a super majority to the party that received the largest number of votes. With as little as 25 per cent of the vote, a party could receive two thirds of the parliamentary seats.46 The April 1924 general election was the first to be held under the new law which turned out not to have been necessary. After a campaign marked by violent intimidation of opponents and massive fraud, Mussolini’s ‘listone’, the big list of the national bloc that brought the Fascists, some Liberals, Catholics and other conservatives together, won nearly 65 per cent of the vote and dominated the new Assembly.

Becoming Biancafiore

49

Giacomo Matteotti, the leader of the PSU seized the occasion of the opening of parliament on 30 May to expose, in a scathing two-hour long speech, the numerous irregularities that had led to the super fascist majority. It was to be his last speech. On 10 June 1924, he was kidnapped by fascist thugs and his dead body would only be found two months later, on 16 August.47 The two months that separated Matteotti’s abduction and the recovery of his corpse in a ditch outside Rome were one of those defining moments when the country, the regime, and those who opposed it found themselves at a fatal crossroad. The Fascist Party had crossed a line by demonstrating its determination to silence its enemies in the most radical fashion, while pretending to play according to the democratic rules. Violence and political assassinations had been current in the tumultuous years leading to the March on Rome. Yet, whether Mussolini was directly responsible or not for giving the order, the cold-blooded assassination of one of the regime’s main opponents in parliament exposed the fiction of a distinction between ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ fascism that some had entertained. It also put an end to the illusion that fascism could be, somehow, absorbed into the constitutional framework.48 The news of the abduction and murder of the socialist leader sent shock waves across the country. The democratic and socialist forces stifled by several years of violence, stunned by the apparently unstoppable forward march of fascism, and weakened by their own divisions felt suddenly in tune with the outrage that spread in large sectors of public opinion. Mussolini himself was caught by surprise and, for several months, his power seemed to be on the verge of collapse. Once more, the official opposition did not prove up to the task. By abandoning the Assembly, the Aventine Secession – taking its name from a plebeian rebellion in ancient Rome – led by the Socialists and Centrists intended to force the King to dismiss Mussolini and call new elections, but he refused to act. The Aventine Secession failed to provide an active leadership likely to channel the people’s anger toward an assault on the regime while, at the same time, leaving Mussolini and his deputies without any opponents in parliament and facilitating the establishment of a dictatorial power.49

50

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

In Florence, the members of the Circolo shared in the general outrage. For several months already – at least since the April election – the need to engage into a more determined struggle against the Fascist government had become more pressing among them. The assassination of Matteotti sounded like a wake-up call and moved them to action. What was, indeed, the point of polishing one’s analyses and clarifying one’s ideas if, as was becoming increasingly clear, the regime was determined to prevent any free political debate? Since July 1923, it had strengthened its control over the press, subjecting it to strict supervision.50 The violence of the electoral campaign was another sinister portent of things to come. Even Giovanni Gentile, the philosopher turned minister of Education, had stated in a much-publicized speech in March 1924 that the ‘bludgeon’ could be considered as a valuable instrument of persuasion.51 Not wanting to be outdone, the Florentine fascists soon announced their determination to use violence to silence all their opponents in the city. In early July 1924, the first issue of their newspaper, Battaglie Fasciste, inaugurated a weekly column titled ‘Manganelatte’ (‘Beatings’) which provided a list of their opponents to be given a taste of their bludgeons. The members of the Circolo were at the top of their list.52 Marion Cave shared the impatience of those of her friends who were eager to confront the fascists head on and, to that effect, she joined the Florentine branch of the clandestine association Italia Libera created a few days after Matteotti’s assassination. Founded by veterans who resented the full support given to the regime by their official organization, Italia Libera developed rapidly in the second half of 1924, with about 150 local groups and a weekly paper that sold up to 20,000 copies.53 From the start, the Florentine branch was the most openly political and action oriented. Most of its members were close to the Circolo di Cultura. Dino Vannucci was the driving force behind Italia Libera in the Tuscan capital, and he first rallied Ernesto Rossi, Carlo and Nello Rosselli, Piero Calamandrei, Nello Traquandi, Piero Jahier, and Raffaele Rossetti, the war hero who had sunk an Austrian battleship, the Virbus Unitis, in the port of Pola in October 1918.54 They were soon joined by people who had not been soldiers during the war, but were now willing to engage in active battle

Becoming Biancafiore

51

against fascism. Marion Cave was one of them, together with Guido Ferrando, her colleague from the British Institute and the University, the legal scholar Alessandro Levi, the Socialist MPs Gaetano Pieraccini and Gaetano Pilati and others.55 Impatient with the passivity of the Aventine opposition, Italia Libera wanted to express ‘politics in action’. It aimed to restore democratic liberties, but it did not have a precise political programme apart from getting rid of fascism by confronting it head on in the streets.56 One of its first manifestations took place a few weeks after Matteotti’s abduction, for the anniversary of the assassination of Cesare Battisti by the Austrians in 1916. Italia Libera organized a meeting at the Gymnasium, a cinema near the train station, where several hundred people gathered to hear speeches that compared the slain socialist leader to the war hero. Although they had not received an official permit, the participants walked out of the theatre and formed a procession headed by Marion Cave who carried a wreath with a ribbon bearing the names of both Battisti and Matteotti. Shouting ‘Viva Matteotti!’, ‘Viva l’Italia Libera!’, about a thousand people walked slowly along via Cerretani and via Cavour to San Marco Square where Marion placed the wreath below the commemorative plaque honouring Cesare Battisti in the hall of the University.57 In the following weeks, the group multiplied their anti-fascist actions to make their opposition visible in the streets of Florence, and Marion Cave found herself engaged in the kind of actions she had dreamed of when she had decided to go to Italy to ‘die on the barricades’ for the revolution. She roamed the streets at night with her young antifascist friends to cover the walls with pro-Matteotti posters. One night, they covered all the yellow posters celebrating the fascist ‘martyrs’ with portraits of the Socialist leader. They seized the occasion of the day of the dead, 2 November, to stage another homage to Matteotti. Marion Cave and Ernesto Rossi met early in the morning at the opening of the gates of the Porte Sante cemetery next to the church of San Miniato on the hills of the Oltrarno. They went to the mortuary chapel of the Vannucci family where they placed a large portrait of Matteotti, flowers and candles. All day long, Florentine antifascists walked up to the cemetery, laying wreaths and

52

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

bunches of flowers in front of the portrait, until the fascists intervened to put a violent end to this political pilgrimage.58 This did not dampen the group’s enthusiasm for direct action, though. A few weeks later, on a visit of the Duce’s brother Arnaldo Mussolini on 7 December, they painted the slogan ‘Italia libera’ in large letters on the walled embankment of the river Arno. The infuriated fascists took days to remove it.59 The Florentine protests were the most spectacular in the country, and they demonstrated that the young members of the Circolo were ready to cross the line that separated legal and illegal opposition. Engaging on that path had not been difficult for them. All it seemed to have required was fierce determination, careful preparation and great caution: working with trusted people; finding safe addresses; using assumed names. Marion became Biancafiore, adopting the private nickname Salvemini had given her since their first encounter. Their actions remained local, though, and connecting them with a national political opposition proved more difficult. Despite his mistrust of political parties, immediately after the assassination of Matteotti, Salvemini had advised his young followers to join one of the antifascist parties. In respect for the slain leader, he chose the PSU, and so did Carlo Rosselli, more out of solidarity than convinced adhesion, though.60 Other members of Italia Libera chose Giovanni Amendola’s recently created Unione Democratica. One of the leaders of the Aventine Secession, Amendola proposed a liberal democratic programme: defence of the rule of law, of the constitution, restoration of civil liberties, labour rights, and freedom of the press.61 Together with Nello Rosselli, Ernesto Rossi, Piero Calamandrei, Guglielmo Ferrero, Guido Ferrando and Umberto Zani Bianco, Marion Cave joined the Florentine branch demonstrating in that occasion, as she would often do later, that her radicalism was always tempered by a good dose of British pragmatism. In that case, she felt that with Giovanni Amendola, l’Unione had the only national – and charismatic – leader able to lead the opposition to victory.62 Such would not be the case, though, and the crisis opened by the Matteotti affair turned out to be a lost occasion for the antifascist opposition. By the end of the year, Mussolini had overcome his apparent hesitations. Either for fear of embarrassing revelations about

Becoming Biancafiore

53

the assassination of Matteotti, or under the influence of the hardliners in his party who pressed him to reconnect with the radical strains of early fascism, Mussolini decided to take full responsibility for the violence perpetrated by his followers. He also took steps to consolidate his dictatorial regime, beginning with a law, signed on 31 December 1924 that put an end to the freedom of the press.63 The atmosphere was sombre in Florence on the day of San Silvestro, as Marion and her friends prepared to welcome the New Year. Early in the day, it became clear to them that a violent offensive against the local antifascist forces was under way. Not the usual manganellate, but something on a totally different scale. More than 15,000 demonstrators in blackshirts carrying pitchforks, pistols, and shot guns converged on Florence from the surrounding countryside. The local fascists had decided to launch a final assault on their opponents in the city, and they unleashed their troops against the headquarters of the independent newspaper Nuovo Giornale, the Masonic lodges, various associations, and the offices and private homes of well-known antifascist lawyers.64 In a blind rage, they concluded their destructive spree by attacking the headquarters of the Circolo di Cultura in Borgo Santi Apostoli, breaking down the entrance door, throwing hundreds of books and dozens of pieces of furniture out of the windows, and burning them in a bonfire at the bottom of the column of justice that stood on Piazza Santa Trinita`.65 It did not take long for the Florentine antifascists to take the full measure of what was happening. On 5 January 1925, the prefect of Florence announced the dissolution of the Circolo di cultura, for being ‘a centre of fierce anti-national propaganda and hostility toward the current government’, whose members ‘held frequent political meetings under the pretext of cultural discussions’.66 Two days earlier in Rome, Mussolini had launched his counteroffensive, defiantly announcing to parliament that he took full responsibility for all the violence of the previous year, warning of more to come and proudly claiming that ‘if fascism has been a criminal association, then I am the head on this association’.67 His challenge to the opposition went unanswered as the Aventine Secession, still absent from the Assembly, chose to remain silent. Mussolini was free to act.

54

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

On 3 January 1925, fascism abandoned all constitutional pretence and turned its back on the liberal democratic state as the government launched an all-out offensive against any form of organized opposition. Dozens of associations – including all the branches of Italia Libera – were declared illegal. The fascist militias and police forces submitted known opponents to constant harassment; the prefects banned all public demonstrations and strictly enforced the laws controlling the press, submitting opposition newspapers to repeated office searches and impounding of the printed material.68 The Florentine branch of Italia Libera had been the most active and best organized in the country, and it was the only one to survive this new wave of repression.69 Not surprisingly, its members were the first to try to pierce the wall of silence that the authorities had decided to impose on the country. ‘We have been denied our freedom of speech. We are taking it back.’ announced the first issue of Non Mollare! (Don’t Give in!), the first underground antifascist newspaper in the country, published in Florence in January 1925. ‘Our title is our programme’ it defiantly proclaimed. ‘It meant exactly what we wanted to say,’ Ernesto Rossi later recalled. ‘It was a reproach, an incitement, a command’ to all those who found a thousand reasons to explain that nothing could be done, all those who were ready ‘to give in’ without a fight.70 The young Florentine antifascists, who were activists of Italia Libera or had participated in the Circolo di Cultura, did not hesitate to cross yet another line that led from semi-legal to underground activity. They all agreed to continue to voice their opposition to the regime by defying the ban on the press. The Rosselli brothers bankrolled the operation; Gaetano Salvemini contributed the most important articles seconded by Ernesto Rossi and Carlo Rosselli, and Marion Cave typed them: ‘I was secretary of the paper. I typed all the handwritten copy and always sat near the stove, so I could throw the sheets into the fire if there was a police raid. When the sheets were typed I carried them away concealed in my clothing,’ together with the addresses to which she sent the paper in Italy and abroad.71 Nello Traquandi dealt with the printing which could never be done twice in the same place, lest it should be discovered by the police. Dino Vannucci concealed the printed copies in the morgue of Santa Maria

Becoming Biancafiore

55

Novella Hospital where he worked, and sympathetic railway workers carried the paper around the country.72 The network was so well organized that the paper was widely distributed, as if ‘we threw it from the top of Giotto’s bell tower’. It printed two or three thousand copies, but each was circulated to three or four people, usually through the old network of Italia Libera, or people who had been active in the first opposition groups: Riccardo Bauer in Milan, Max Ascoli in Rome, Carlo Levi in Turin.73 ‘Mussolini knew everything . . . Mussolini received the papers and passport of the Honourable Matteotti as proof of his disappearance,’ claimed the Filippelli memorandum published by Non Mollare! in February 1925. Filippelli was the editor of a fascist newspaper who had been involved, with Cesare Rossi and Amerigo Dumini, in the murder of Giacomo Matteotti. Threatened with arrest and fearing that Mussolini would abandon him, he decided to reveal the implication of the highest echelons of fascist power in the assassination. After obtaining a copy of his memorandum from the Socialist MP Giuseppe Emmanuelle Modigliani, Gaetano Salvemini published it in Non Mollare!, which printed 12,000 copies on that occasion. It was a journalistic feat that established the paper as a serious outlet for antifascist opinion, and many documents were leaked to it in the following months. In Florence at least, it could measure its influence when it called a boycott of the visit of the King in the city in May 1925. Along the royal procession, the streets of the city were deserted except for a thin cordon of black-shirted onlookers.74 The very existence of Non Mollare! and the defiant attitude of the group behind it infuriated the fascists. They were constantly on the look-out, trying to discover where the paper was printed, where it was stocked, who distributed it. The members of the group had to be extremely careful, carrying on with their professional activities as normally as possible and meeting in safe places. Marion Cave had to keep a low profile as she often walked around the city carrying incriminating evidence concealed in her clothing. In agreement with her colleague Guido Ferrando, she often used the premises of the British Institute as a hiding place for the manuscripts, and as a letter box for correspondence from political friends from around the country and, increasingly, from abroad.75

56

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

The main target of the fascists’ fury was Gaetano Salvemini whom they rightly considered as the driving force behind Non Mollare!. For the fascists, who had tried to prevent him from teaching since the autumn of 1923, his very presence in front of his students was a provocation. The university was rapidly becoming a major battle ground for the regime, eager to control the minds of the younger generation and to train the future elite of the regime. All around the country, academics, intellectuals and artists were pressed to give their open support to fascism.76 In March 1925, Giovanni Gentile gathered the signatures of luminaries on a fascist cultural manifesto: F.T. Marinetti, Curzio Malaparte, Ardengo Soffici, Enrico Corradini, Giuseppe Bottai, Dino Grandi, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Luigi Pirandello, Gioachine Volpe, Margherita Sarfatti, among others, rallied behind the Duce. Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Amendola immediately reacted with an antifascist manifesto carrying 41 signatures in addition to their own: Luigi Einaudi, Luigi Salvatorelli, Luigi Albertini, Piero Calamandrei, Emilio Cecchi, Rodolfo Mondolfo, Gaetano Mosca, Eugenio Montale, Giustino Fortunato, Francesco Ruffini, Silvio Trentin, Mario Vinciguerra, Sibilla Alerano, Paolo Lombroso, Umberto Zanotti Bianco and, of course, Gaetano Salvemini.77 The atmosphere was extremely tense at the University of Florence, where Marion Cave started teaching English language and literature full-time in the 1924 – 25 academic year. Having created a proper Department of English that year, the university hired her and Guido Ferrando, the two teachers of the British Institute who had the proper academic credentials to teach at that level.78 From then on, Marion spent most of her working time at the university in piazza San Marco, and she could witness first-hand how precarious professor Salvemini’s position was becoming. Fascist bullies regularly launched violent attacks against antifascist students and soon set out to eradicate any form of opposition within the universities. This meant silencing, by force if necessary, all the antifascist teachers seen as a major obstacle for the development of the fascist cultural hegemony in the academic world.79 From the beginning of the 1924 –25 academic year, Gaetano Salvemini suffered from a relentless campaign of intimidation. ‘Threatening shadows’ followed him from his home to the university.

Becoming Biancafiore

57

Blackshirts often invaded the history lecture hall and maintained a constant state of disorder, while Salvemini was trying to finish his lesson as if nothing was happening.80 Marion Cave witnessed many such scenes, as the one described by Piero Calamandrei, one of her colleagues at the university who had also participated in the Circolo di Cultura: A crowd of howling Blackshirts invaded the first floor and tried to force the door of the history hall. It did not give in because, of course, Salvemini’s students were resisting with all their strength from the inside. At the end of the lecture, the demonstrators calmed down as the door opened and Salvemini walked out, stone-faced, his round hat pulled down over his eyes, between two rows of students. No one dared touch him.

In March 1925, Battaglie Fasciste published an explicit warning against Salvemini who was supposed to make a speech at the university to commemorate his master, Professor Pasquale Villari. ‘The university should know that the fascists are sick and tired of seeing that most of the official culture is slave to antifascism . . . . Salvemini must not speak and will not speak in Florence!’ Fearing serious disturbances, the dean of the university cancelled the commemoration. The next day, Salvemini was to give his usual lecture, and serious trouble was expected. The blackshirts were certainly ready. So were Salvemini’s friends. Students packed the lecture hall but, more importantly, numerous faculty members occupied the front rows to express their solidarity with their colleague as well as their defence of academic freedom. Concealing his emotion and pretending not to notice anything unusual, Salvemini started his lecture on foreign policy. As he walked out at the end, the audience gave him a standing ovation.81 The infuriated Florentine fascists decided to put an end to this bold challenge to their authority. If the university refused to silence Salvemini, the courts would do it. The fascists were hoping to kill two birds with one stone, by getting rid of the influential professor and the editor of Non Mollare!. They had successfully placed spies among the Non Mollare! circle and, during the trial of the lawyer Gustavo Console, in whose office copies of the paper had been found, one of them denounced Salvemini and Ernesto Rossi as the persons

58

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

responsible for the publication. Salvemini convinced Rossi to flee to France, while he went on with his normal business, travelling to Rome to sit on an examination board. On 8 June 1925, he was arrested in the capital and then transferred to the Murate prison in Florence where he waited for his trial to be held on 13 July.82 The Non Mollare! team made it a point of publishing a special issue of the newspaper, with the help of sympathetic typographers and printers who worked after hours for free.83 Not abandoning its ‘politics in action’ approach, the group also decided to commemorate the first anniversary of Matteotti’s assassination, on 10 June, by hanging a giant portrait of the slain Socialist leader from the electric cables above the Santa Trinita` bridge on the Arno.84 A few days later, a group of seven people, including the Socialist MP Pieraccini and his wife, Marion Cave, Carlo Rosselli, and Alessandro Levi walked to the statue of Garibaldi on the Lungarno Vespucci and laid several wreaths with ribbons celebrating Giacomo Matteotti. They were all arrested and taken to the police station of Santa Maria Novella. Claiming to be ‘gentlemen’, the fascists released the women after a few hours, but they sent the men to the Murate prison and kept them there for three days.85 Marion was lucky that, at the time, the fascists did not consider women as serious opponents, but the arrest was a warning that she would have to be more guarded in the future. Both sides were bracing themselves for the coming trial and the atmosphere in the packed courtroom was electric. Well-known journalists, professors and lawyers had come to express their support. Marion Cave was eager to stand alongside her friends and her old mentor in this time of trial. But the wiser Salvemini sent her – and Carlo – away because she was already a suspect for the authorities who might now turn against her. ‘Tell her she should envisage a change of air . . .’ he had told Lidia Minervini who acted as go-between between the accused in the courtroom and his friends who had stayed away. Marion had been particularly active since the arrest of Salvemini. She had pressed Vernon Lee and the Berensons to contact their friends in England, where Salvemini was a well-liked figure among intellectuals and academics. She had also secured the presence of the war hero Raffaele Rossetti, whom she had met in the Italia Libera group and whose wife Maria she had befriended, often

Becoming Biancafiore

59

spending weekends at their villa in Rapallo. She also made sure to dispatch Salvemini’s messages immediately in Italy and abroad.86 The day ended with a dramatic turn of events as the case was dismissed on a technicality and Salvemini was set free pending a new trial. Pandemonium followed. His friends were exultant, scoffing at the fascists who had claimed for many years that they entirely controlled the city and its institutions. Bands of blackshirts armed with their bludgeons surrounded the courthouse and yelled at the antifascists that they would murder Salvemini and his friends.87 And this they immediately set out to do, going on a rampage in the city. They beat up Salvemini’s lawyer, Ferrucio Marchetti, who died a few days later from his injuries. Salvemini was driven away from the courthouse late at night and decided to stay at the Rosselli mansion in via Giusti, his home being under constant watch from the fascists. The next day, he wisely joined some of his antifascist friends who had taken refuge at Umberto Morra di Lavriano’s Villa in Cortona, and this probably saved his life, as one of the gardeners of via Giusti was a fascist spy who had signalled Salvemini’s presence to the blackshirts. The next day they ransacked the Rosselli home, pulling down the bookshelves, destroying the furniture and shooting rounds of ammunition again the windows and the facade.88 Although Mussolini declared a general amnesty for political crimes at the end of July to secure the release of Matteotti’s assassins, Salvemini thought it wiser to leave the country and with the help of friends from Turin he soon crossed the border to France at the Little St Bernard Pass.89 Salvemini’s young antifascist associates in Florence continued to produce the paper. The issue published in late September 1925 contained another document linking Mussolini to the Matteotti murder. This was the last drop. The Duce immediately ordered to put an end to this challenge to his authority. The Florentine blackshirts launched a punitive expedition against some known collaborators of Non Mollare!. They assassinated three socialist activists: the lawyers Gustavo Consolo and Giovanni Becciolini and the former Socialist MP Gaetano Pilati. A few years later, testifying at the De Rosa trial in Brussels, Marion described the events of what has often been called the Florence Saint Bartholomew:

60

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy I learned these facts from the widow of Pilati herself. Other fascists arrived at the home of Consolo around midnight. They forced the door open. Consolo’s wife and children fell on their knees, begging for pity. The fascists knocked his wife over and they found Consolo hiding behind a bed. They shot him five times at point blank with a handgun. That night, the fascists had prepared a list of ten people to eliminate. My fiance´ [Carlo Rosselli] was among them. Knowing he was out of town, they settled for a new assault on his home.90

The homes and offices of several known antifascsists and members of the Masonic lodges were also ransacked. In this climate, opposition activity was necessarily scaled down, and the publication of Non Mollare! ceased for good.91 The atmosphere in Florence had become oppressive and the young antifascists felt leaderless. Marion Cave worked as intermediary between the exiled professor and his young followers in Florence, keeping him informed about the situation in Italy and the discussions of the group about the best forms of action to adopt. Should they publish Non Mollare! abroad? Should they create a new organization like Italia Libera? Rather than ideological propaganda, Marion preferred ‘a concrete programme that echoed the feelings of the large masses of the country.’ Always attracted to daring feats, she looked for answers in past radical conspiracies. ‘I’ve read Luzio’s Mazzini Carbonaro in one go [. . .]. It’s almost an instruction manual for us,’ she wrote to Salvemini.92 Meanwhile, she also translated the texts of his public conferences into English and tried to sustain the interest and commitment of colleagues and students to Salvemini’s case. When he resigned from his position as Professor of Modern History to protest the lack of academic freedom, she informed him that she had distributed copies of his resignation letter to the Senate of the University ‘among your colleagues and among the students by circuitous means. I also sent copies to different cities.’ Yet the democratic antifascist opposition was decisively routed in Florence and Marion informed Salvemini that the first super-fascist laws of December 1925 were producing a disheartening stampede. ‘Everybody, except ultra-die-hards like us, is either becoming fascist or pretending to be, or makes it a point to display their lack of interest.’93

CHAPTER 4

The Best of Times, The Worst of Times (1924 –26)

‘It was the best of times; it was the worst of times [. . .]. It was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us.’1 How fitting are Charles Dickens’ opening lines of his A Tale of Two Cities to describe the web of contradictory emotions Marion Cave and her young antifascist friends were wrestling with in the early years of the Mussolini regime. While they shared in the political tragedy of the country, they were also at an age when one tends to look hopefully at the future, choosing a career path, building friendships, seeking personal happiness. They learned quickly enough that their active opposition to the regime would seriously curtail their career opportunities, but this did not deter most of them. On the other hand, they determined not to let the fascists deprive them of their youth and to live their lives as fully as possible. To hope against hope would rapidly become an essential form of resistance. Marion and a group of her friends were captured on a black and white photograph sometime in 1924. They were in the countryside, on the hills outside Florence, on a sunny but bitterly cold winter day, if one is to judge from the bright light illuminating the faces of the young people and the warm winter clothes they were wearing. There

62

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

are three young women and four young men, standing in a relaxed and friendly line up. The two women on the right are wearing smart dark coats and fashionable cloche hats. The young woman on the left with bobbed hair is bareheaded and is wearing a sensible tweed outfit and a thick black woolen scarf. The young men are all dressed up: dark suits, ties and hats, as was the usage at the time. It looks like a typical Sunday outing. After a lazy lunch in one of the restaurants of Fiesole, the young people had probably taken a stroll in the surrounding countryside before heading back to Florence. They were all members of the Circolo di Cultura. Ernesto Rossi and a woman friend, the MP Gaetano Pieraccini and his wife, Carlo Rosselli and, next to him in the tweed outfit, Marion Cave. Cut off on the left, one can guess the figure of Gaetano Salvemini. The group rapidly became accustomed to these excursions in the Tuscan countryside, usually organized by Carlo Rosselli, during which they could let off steam and simply enjoy the pleasure of being together.2 In addition to being a center of political opposition to fascism, from the start the Circolo was also a socializing network in which the members built personal relationships at a time when it was becoming increasingly arduous for convinced antifascists to interact at a personal level with people who either supported the regime or pretended to ignore its inequities. This was particularly true for Marion Cave. Unlike most of her friends, who could rely on the presence of their extended family in Florence or other parts of Italy, she had grown gradually estranged from her British relatives. Her decision to remain in Florence after receiving her master’s degree resulted from her desire to build a new milieu for herself, away from the narrow confines of life in Uxbridge. She had confided this desire, and the feeling of guilt it sometimes provoked, to Gaetano Salvemini who would justify her choice after visiting her parents in England in the summer of 1925. While stressing their kindness, he understood that ‘this could not be a satisfying environment for you [. . .]. It’s not a question of judging whether this environment is better or worse than the one you have created for yourself: it is different, voila` tout’. The only fellow student with whom she kept in close contact was Virginia Jeffreys, who had studied Italian with her at Bedford College and who travelled regularly to Italy during the first years of the regime and

The Best of Times, The Worst of Times

63

would serve as a courier between the exile Salvemini and his friends in Italy.3 As she now worked full-time at the university, Marion ceased to appear on the payroll of the British Institute and kept her distance from its director and the members of the British colony who never missed an occasion to cheer the Duce.4 She only remained in contact with the few antifascists in that milieu: the Berenson circle at Villa I Tatti, Lina Waterfield and her husband Aubrey who reported on the fascist regime for The Observer and the Guardian, and Vernon Lee. Because of age and class differences her contacts with them were scarce, and mostly restricted to the need to inform the British and European press and sympathetic intellectuals outside Italy about the fate of the Florentine antifascists. In contrast, between work and activism, her network of Italian friends widened and most of them were close to Salvemini. In many ways, the historian was a substitute parent figure, and not just for Marion. ‘Lo Zio’ (the uncle) was the nickname the young members of the Circolo di Cultura and the Non Mollare! team gave him. For Ernesto Rossi and the Rosselli brothers, who had lost their fathers at an early age, he was far more than a political mentor. He was also a precious guide as they entered their adult lives and there was a close, personal relationship between them that would survive their political disputes. Marion was equally close to ‘Father Bear’ as she called him. If her chosen nickname for Salvemini stressed the warm, filial nature of their relationship, she could not ignore that he was soft on her. He had been from their first encounter at the British Institute in 1921, charmed by her enchanting smile and her quick wit.5 His second wife, Fernande Dauriac, resented their relationship and the generous payments he offered Marion for the translation of his lectures into English. They apparently far exceeded the accepted rate that the historian Guglielmo Ferrero offered Mrs Salvemini for the translation of his work into French, ‘but of course he is not sweet on me’, she would remark bitterly.6 Marion feigned to ignore these feelings and for her, as for the rest of this group of young antifascists, Salvemini was first and foremost a tutelary figure who helped them find their way in the troubled waters of early fascism. Marion’s circle of relations and friends encompassed individuals who were among the first to oppose fascism in Florence and, in

64

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

various forms, would remain steadfast in their opposition until the fall of the regime in July 1943. There were professors who were now her colleagues at the university such as Guido Ferrando who taught British and American literature, or the philosophers Ludovico Limentani and Alberto Sorano. Most of the others came from the different cultural and political groups she had worked with: the Circolo di Cultura, Italia Libera, Giovanni Amendola’s Unione Democratica, or the team around Non Mollare!. They covered the center-left political spectrum, ranging from moderate liberals such as Piero Calamandrei, Umberto Morra di Lavriano, Umberto Zanotti Bianco, to radical democrats and reformist socialists such as Max Ascoli, Alessandro Levi, Carlo Levi, Alfredo Niccoli, Raffaelle Rossetti, Nello Traquandi, Dino Vannucci, to name just a few with whom she would remain in contact in the following decades.7 They were all young people born between 1890 and 1900 who, like her, had to face decisive life choices and accept their consequences. In the feverish first years of the regime, when the hope of reversing its authoritarian impulse was still present, they all responded to the same feeling of urgency that dictated their every action and created a lasting bond between them. When legal or semilegal action became arduous, most started to lead what Ernesto Rossi called ‘a double life’, one legal, and the other clandestine.8 Among the activist members who carried out the most militant protests, Ernesto Rossi was her closest friend. ‘Esto’, as she called him, taught Economics at Florence’s Polytechnics and their antifascist activities frequently brought them together. They often faced danger side by side and developed a strong friendship based on a deep trust that would survive Marion’s exile and Rossi’s long imprisonment.9 Not surprisingly, it was among this group of friends that she found the love of her life. When she first met Carlo Rosselli in January 1923, he was ‘a highly spirited young man, full of energy’, the enthusiastic organizer of the Circolo di Cultura and of the weekend escapades on the hills of Florence. Like all the young people who frequented the Circolo, she was immediately drawn to his exuberant personality and boisterous vitality. Three years younger than her, he was ‘cheerful, loud, and ebullient’ and ‘looked like a frisky puppy from the Maremma’ recalled Ernesto Rossi.10 The attraction was reciprocal. At first, Marion attracted Carlo’s interest because of her steadfast

The Best of Times, The Worst of Times

65

engagement in the antifascist protests, but he gradually fell under the spell of her subtle charm, vivid intelligence and free spirit.11 It is not exactly clear when they started dating, for in 1923 and 1924 Carlo was always on the move. In July 1923, as he was preparing to leave for his first trip to England – where he was to attend the Fabian summer school with Salvemini – he learned that he had been offered a job as a research assistant at the Bocconi university in Milan. He acquired a small flat in that city and frequented the local antifascist forces, returning to Florence two or three times a month at the weekend.12 Despite the distance, it seems that Marion and Carlo saw each other frequently during this period, either in Milan or Tuscany and, by the spring of 1924, all their friends were aware of their love relationship. Hearing Marion’s voice on the Allied radio from his prison cell in 1945, Giovanni Ansaldo recalled with sarcastic nostalgia the spring evenings when he discussed with Salvemini and Nello Rosselli, while Carlo and Marion were flirting on the terrace of the restaurant La Luna in Fiesole. In a letter to Salvemini in 1937, Amelia Rosselli also recalled that in July 1924, before departing for a second research trip in Great Britain, Carlo spent a short holiday with Marion in Solda, in the Italian part of south Tyrol.13 She forgot to mention that, at the time, she disapproved of her son’s relationship with this young, independent English woman, expressing strong concerns about the great differences in their social and cultural backgrounds. The differences were significant but, in many ways, they consolidated their relationship as the different personal qualities shaped by starkly different upbringings turned out to be complementary rather than antagonistic as Amelia had feared. Unlike Marion, who knew very little about her humble ascendency, except that her forebears were land labourers who had never moved out of the rural areas of Hampshire and Middlesex, Carlo came from a long line of Sephardic Jews and could trace back his Rosselli ancestors to the fifteenth century. Expelled from Spain at the time of the Reconquista, they settled for several generations in Holland before moving to Rome in the eighteenth century and then establishing themselves in the early nineteenth century in the port of Leghorn, benefitting from the greater tolerance granted to religious

66

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

minorities by the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. They were prosperous property owners and merchants who traded with Great Britain and a branch of the family settled in London as bankers.14 Highly cosmopolitan in their cultural outlook, the Rossellis were also deeply rooted in Italian history. In England, they met Giuseppe Mazzini and became closely acquainted with another Jewish bankers’ family, the Nathans who, themselves, were staunch supporters of the Republican exile and financed his movement. Moses Nathan married a young woman from Pesaro, Sara (‘Sarina’) Levi and their two eldest daughters married into the Rosselli family. Janet, herself a convinced Mazzinian married Pellegrino, and it was at her home that the defeated Mazzini died in 1872 under the assumed name George Brown. Harriet married Sabatino Rosselli, and their son Giuseppe – Joe – was Carlo and Nello Rosselli’s father.15 On his mother’s side, Carlo came from an equally privileged and patriotic Jewish family from Venice, the Pincherle-Moravia. One of Amelia’s uncle had been a close collaborator of Daniele Manin, the leader of the Republic of Saint Marc in 1848, and she grew up in a refined environment in a palace on the Canal Grande. In her family, culture and politics were highly regarded, and commitment to the new, unified Italy was paramount. One of her brothers, Carlo, was the father of the novelist Alberto Moravia; another, Gabriele, was a senator of the realm.16 Marion and Carlo’s immediate family environments and upbringings were also very different. In the rather traditional Cave family, the father was the dominant figure and had the most lasting influence on his daughter’s schooling as well as on her political and spiritual outlooks. The Rosselli family, in contrast, was clearly dominated by the mother Amelia, a fascinating figure of a woman caught between tradition and modernity. She had met Joe Rosselli in Rome and, after their marriage in 1892, the young couple moved to Vienna to start a life dedicated to art and culture. Joe studied music, Amelia started writing, and they found the exciting cultural environment they were looking for in what was then the cultural capital of fin-de-sie`cle Europe.17 Their first son Aldo was born in Vienna in 1895, but their marriage quickly deteriorated. Apparently, Joe was more successful in his pursuit of women than in

The Best of Times, The Worst of Times

67

his musical career. While he squandered his time – and money – in casinos, Amelia dedicated her energy to her writing. When they returned to Rome, she produced a first play, Anima, in 1898. After winning a major national prize, it was staged in Torino and became an instant success, and so was her second play Illusion. Despite the birth of Carlo in 1899 and Nello in 1900, Amelia and Joe did not manage to patch up their marriage and eventually decided to live apart. ‘Severe and sentimental’ as her favorite nephew Alberto Moravia described her, Amelia could not bring herself to forgive her husband’s infidelity and felt she had to leave him, while remaining deeply attached to him until his death a few years later.18 In 1903, she moved with her three young boys – aged eight, four and three – to Florence where she started a new life as an independent working mother. One of the reasons she chose the Tuscan capital was the presence of friends and of some Rosselli-Nathan relatives who provided her children with a warm family environment.19 In a city that was still the cultural capital of Italy, Amelia also knew she would find the stimulating intellectual environment necessary for the progress of her career as a writer and editor. The education and intellectual stimulus Marion received at St Paul’s, Carlo found at home. His mother’s friends and relations were closely associated with various Florentine intellectual milieus. Her closest friends were Laura and Angiolo Orvieto who she knew from Venice. Laura wrote children books and Angiolo was a famous poet and editor of the magazine Il Marzocco, to which Amelia contributed articles. She was also close to the essay writer Gina Lombroso, daughter of the famous criminologist Cesare Lombroso, and her husband Guglielmo Ferrero, a major historian of ancient Rome who taught at the University of Florence.20 Amelia was a celebrated writer and through the Orvietos and the Ferreros she became part of an extended cultural network in which she met many important intellectual figures of the time. Benedetto Croce, Gaetano Salvemini, Guido Biaggi, Angelo Conti, Carlo Placci, Enrico Corradini, D’Annunzio and his mistress Eleonora Duse often met in her salon. It was not the Florence of the futurist vanguard or Prezzolini’s La Voce, but a refined and enlightened cultural milieu, strongly attached to the notion of an aristocracy of the mind.21

68

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

In at least one respect, Carlo’s and Marion’s upbringing was similar, since neither of them received a religious education. From his maternal and paternal families, Carlo belonged to a tradition of assimilated and secularized Jews. His ancestors, as well as his immediate relatives strongly identified with the political movement that closed the ghettos and accepted the Jews in the new national elite. After all, one of his uncles, Ernest Nathan, was the Mayor of Rome at a time when the Pope considered himself a ‘prisoner’ in Vatican City!22 In her autobiography, Amelia does not recall any regular religious rituals in her family, whereas she stresses their fervid devotion – of an almost religious nature – to the Republican heroes of the Risorgimento. ‘Yes, we are Jews. But first and foremost, Italians,’ Amelia proclaimed, admitting that the ‘religious elements’ she transmitted to her sons were of ‘a solely moral character’.23 When, at the age of 12, Carlo expressed some curiosity about the religious upbringing of his cousins, he went two or three times to the synagogue, but rapidly lost interest. ‘From then on, he never expressed even the slightest sign of any religious concern.’24 His brother Nello seemed much more attached to his Jewish identity, but he too interpreted his Judaism as a secularized system of moral values.25 Carlo certainly did not ignore his Jewish roots but ‘they were of no great matter to him and in the end of no importance’, his son John recalled. Carlo’s outlook was ‘essentially secular’ and in that, John added, ‘he totally shared Marion’s agnosticism’ and he and his siblings would not receive any religious education.26 For the Caves, as for the Rossellis, politics was a family passion, but of a different nature. Marion had been educated to the values of the labour movement, local socialism, the battle for women’s suffrage and a degree of pacifism. Liberalism and republicanism were the core values that Amelia transmitted to her sons, but so was a strong attachment to the Italian nation, a part of the Mazzinian legacy that easily morphed into the budding nationalism of the turn of the twentieth century.27 Nationalist fervor ran high in the Rosselli family on the eve of the war and, now in their teens, the three Rosselli brothers – like their mother and her friends – enthusiastically called for intervention alongside Britain and France. Like Marion’s brother, the eldest son Aldo volunteered, but he died in combat. The loss of

The Best of Times, The Worst of Times

69

her favorite son drove Amelia almost mad with grief – a grief she described as ‘wild and cruel’ – but she could not prevent her two younger sons from eventually enrolling in late 1917 and early 1918, Carlo in the Alpine troops and Nello in the artillery.28 The experience on the front was a sobering one, and the mass slaughter of tens of thousands of poor peasants had a dampening effect on the red-hot nationalist fervor that had pushed so many – including the Rosselli brothers – to enroll.29 It also provoked a first rift between Carlo and Nello Rosselli and their mother. As the young men became more critical of the nationalist movement, she remained attached to the patriotic values that had led so many, including her eldest son, to sacrifice their lives. She expressed her disarray in her book Fratelli minori (Younger brothers) written in 1921. The title did not refer to Carlo and Nello personally, but to their generation, the young men who joined the army too late in the war to see any real fighting and were now openly criticizing the patriotism of their elders as obsolete, and calling for a thorough overhaul of Italian society.30 After the war, Carlo’s political education took the direction of reformist socialism as his uncle, Alessandro Levi, introduced him to Treves and Turati’s Socialist Party and Gaetano Salvemini to the Fabians and the British Labour Party. Unlike Marion, who came from a family where every penny counted and had always been expected to work for a living, Carlo always lived among people of his affluent class. Amelia’s writing allowed her family to live decently – although in more modest conditions than she had been accustomed to as a child and a young spouse. The Rosselli’s financial situation improved dramatically after Joe’s death in 1911. The boys inherited shares from SIELE, a mercury mining company on the Monte Amiata in South Tuscany, which became extremely profitable in the following years and was the source of their fortune.31 During the war, though, daily contact with brave and resourceful ordinary Italians on the front had a lasting effect on Carlo’s social conscience. He became painfully aware of his great material privilege and this unleashed a feeling of moral unease that he would try to assuage by dedicating himself and his resources to fighting for greater social justice.32 In this also, he was trying to find his own way even though it meant differing from his mother. In her autobiography,

70

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

she recalls a telling anecdote about her reaction to the new social consciousness her sons acquired during the war. An evening, while they were sitting in their comfortable home, the two young men asked her: ‘If we decided to divest ourselves of all our possessions, would you be ready to come and live with us in one or two rooms in a poor neighbourhood of the city, and share our poverty?’ Dismayed, Amelia countered that, in order to realize one’s ideal it was better ‘to use one’s wealth to improve the lot of the poor through prudent initiatives,’ rather than sharing their poverty and ‘being compelled to renounce this ideal because of the need to earn a living.’33 The discussion stopped there, but it hinted at a growing difference between the mother who was full of compassion for the less fortunate, but enjoyed and was determined to maintain her affluent way of life and social standing, and her son Carlo who, she admitted, felt an imperious desire to break with his life of privilege and would find in Marion a companion who encouraged him to do so.34 When they met, Marion and Carlo were both about to embrace a university career, although his education had been shakier at first than the path of excellence she had followed from St Paul’s to Bedford college. He had failed the exam that would have allowed him to enter the university directly and followed a two-year’s course in the Institute of Social Sciences which then allowed him to study law at the University of Siena. He greatly benefitted from the advice of Salvemini who was supervising Nello’s master’s thesis in history. As a tutor who brought to his young prote´ge´s ‘clarity, logical rigor, a scientific method and the ability to provide an overall view of the most complex social phenomena,’ Salvemini made it his duty to channel Carlo’s exuberant mind – ‘a volcano in perpetual effervescence’ – toward serious intellectual work.35 Carlo took this education very seriously and dedicated to it the three years following the end of the war and eventually landed his first job at the Bocconi in 1923.36 The following year, while in England, he learned that he had received a position as assistant lecturer in Economics at the University of Genoa. In the following months, he deployed what his friends remembered as a gift for ubiquity, teaching in Genoa, editing Non Mollare! in Florence while keeping in touch with antifascist

The Best of Times, The Worst of Times

71

circles in Milan.37 Marion adapted to this frenzied activity, teaching at the University of Florence, collaborating to Non Mollare! and visiting Carlo in Genoa or Milan. Their shared political passion and the personal risks they were ready to take together strengthened their relationship as Ansaldo recalled: ‘During their petting period, she was a wild and enthusiastic supporter of Matteotti: flowers in the cemetery or on the embankments of the Arno, placards posted on the walls at nights in adventurous car expeditions, stealth propaganda in her classes. It must have been a love affair for the glory of the opposition’.38 The fact that she was a foreigner who had been living independently for several years also meant that she was ready to enter a steady relationship regardless of the rigid social norms that governed courtship in Florence’s respectable society. When did they decide to get married? Here again, it is not exactly clear, but probably in the spring or summer of 1925. When they tried with their friends to celebrate publicly the first anniversary of Matteotti’s assassination, the press reported among the persons arrested ‘Professor Rosselli from Genoa and his wife’.39 They were not yet married, but this indicates that they presented themselves as a couple. This arrest, which had no serious consequences at the time, might have speeded up their decision to legalize their relationship to protect Marion from the risk of deportation. They probably made up their mind in July, when they spent a few days with Salvemini and a few friends at the Rossetti home in Rapallo before the professor left for exile in England.40 It was at this moment that Carlo’s formidable mother decided that their relationship was becoming too serious for her taste. It was not so much the fact that Marion was not Jewish that troubled her as her independent way of life. It was certainly unusual at the time in Italy but, more significantly, Amelia’s misgivings reflected her own ambivalent modernity.41 Despite her personal choices and her advocacy of more independence for women, she adhered to the strong familialism and maternalism that dominated Italian and Jewish cultures. Together with Laura Orvieto, Amelia had defended the rights of working women and presented work as a form of freedom for women but she, nevertheless, believed that marriage and maternity were the ‘fullest expression’ of a woman’s life.42

72

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

While showing a certain openness to the need of modern women, she remained strongly attached to traditional gender roles. Her plays expressed this ambivalence. They are certainly Ibsenian in their themes, staging women who suffer from the double standard governing men and women’s behaviour. Yet, there is no Ibsenian resolution in Anima or Illusion. Unlike Nora or Hedda Gabler, her heroines do not make dramatic personal choices to escape the constraints of the patriarchal family and discover their true selves but, in a more ‘boulevardesque’ fashion, are satisfied with a degree of revenge against the brutal male characters.43 While supportive of Carlo’s growing political commitment against the Fascist regime, she still hoped he would embrace an academic career and choose a companion in his cultural and social milieu. By the summer of 1925, however, sure of their love and shared commitments, Carlo announced his decision to marry Marion. Faced with her son’s resolution, Amelia decided – for the last time – to exercise her parental authority. She asked him to accept a one-year separation before deciding. Carlo accepted, ‘which infuriated Marion’.44 Decades later, this was still part of the family lore. When John’s sons asked him to tell them more about the family’s story, he wrote a short text that related this episode.45 Convinced that Carlo was about to embark on a ‘brilliant university career’, which she strongly encouraged, Amelia determined not to let his political commitment or his love affair prevent him from fulfilling this expectation, even though she realized that Carlo was not enthusiastic about it.46 To make sure he would pursue this professional path, but also to keep him away from Marion, Amelia decided to move for a few months to Genoa with Nello, taking rooms in the Pensione Flora where Carlo lived.47 In the autumn and winter 1925 – 26, Carlo and Marion severed all direct contact, but they tried to keep in touch through Salvemini whom they bombarded with questions about their respective activities. Marion, 20 October: ‘I have no news from Carlo; I heard that he was planning a trip to the Abruzzi?’ Carlo, 21 October: ‘Next time I’ll write to you more specifically about Marion. Is she currently in Florence? Rossi has given me some news and I am not very satisfied. Poor little thing, she is facing a sad winter!’48

The Best of Times, The Worst of Times

73

A sad winter it certainly was! The political violence in the streets of Florence, the attacks against Salvemini at the university, the falling apart of the early antifascist groups created a disheartening political climate in which Marion and a few friends strove to maintain the fight. Things were as somber on the personal front. Not only did Marion feel extremely bitter about Amelia’s pressure on her son, but she was also deeply disappointed by Carlo as she wrote to Salvemini: What had attracted me in Carlo’s character was the effort he made to liberate himself from the too comfortable and convenient atmosphere of his bourgeois milieu. In this bourgeois milieu, he’ll get nowhere. He might become a well-known professor or scholar [. . .], but he will be finished as a political activist because his milieu is like a thick eiderdown that stifles any altruistic tendency and in such a milieu a man of character or determined action cannot exist.

She had learned from Ernesto Rossi that Carlo planned to prepare for the recruiting competition for lecturers that winter and for Marion this amounted to a choice of personal career over political commitment. ‘Maybe I exaggerate,’ she wrote to Salvemini. ‘I know I have a rather extremist trend, but I am sure there is something true in all my reflections.’49 She was convinced that his mother would make sure they would not meet again. An incident on the train confirmed her fears. As she was travelling to Rapallo to spend a few days at the Rossetti’s, she realized that Amelia and Nello were on the same train. Nello pretended not to see her and this hurt Marion deeply. They were travelling to Genoa to be with Carlo and she was sure ‘they would never leave him alone during the whole winter’, destroying any hope she might have had of clarifying things with him.50 As for Nello, he seemed to have been torn between loyalty to his brother and obedience to his mother. Silence was the solution. ‘With Carlo, absolute silence from his part and ours on the question that is so important to us,’ he wrote to Salvemini. ‘What is going to happen? Personally, all I want is his happiness, or at least to avoid his immediate or future unhappiness.’51 The year 1925 ended in political and personal disarray for Marion. She spent the winter holidays at home in Florence, learning German, spending time with Ernesto Rossi and his mother, not sure what to expect of the New Year.52

74

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

It is not easy to establish when Carlo decided to break his promise to his mother regarding both his professional career and his personal life, and when he and Marion started seeing each other again – probably as soon as his mother and brother left Genoa for Rome in January 1926. By March, they had obviously resumed their relationship for Carlo wrote very matter-of-factly to Amelia that he had complained to Marion about wasting his time at the university.53 What is clear is that, despite his mother’s hope, he never seriously accepted the prospect of an academic career and he soon informed her of his decision to give up his teaching position at the end of the school year. ‘I must admit that I felt an infinite pain,’ confessed Amelia.54 Carlo’s decision was irrevocable. He had agreed to start a new antifascist magazine, Il Quarto Stato, with the young socialist Pietro Nenni in Milan, and had bought a small flat in via Ancona, in the Brera neighbourhood, where he planned to have the editorial office of the magazine.55 A few weeks later, he also confirmed his intention to marry Marion. Confronted with this double fait accompli, Amelia put on a brave face and wrote a note to Marion to welcome her in the family. Marion answered with a very formal card. ‘Dear Madam, Thank you for your note. Your cordial tone gave me great pleasure. I hope you will allow me to visit you before my departure from Florence. I would very much like to ask you for some advice about my trousseau. Thanking you again, Marion Cave.’ It would take some time for the relationship between the two women to warm up though, and Marion did not meet Amelia in Florence before leaving for Capri where she planned to spend the Spring break with Virginia Jeffreys, her friend from Bedford College.56 Being in love on the enchanted island of Capri is a hackneyed cliche´, and Marion and Carlo’s short pre-marital honeymoon was no exception to the rule. They first exchanged passionate and impatient letters until Carlo managed to join her. After a long train journey and a rough sea crossing, he found Marion radiant and in great shape. They settled in Anacapri, away from the tourist-ridden piazzetta, and spent the following days enjoying the spectacular scenery and the prospect of their life together. ‘Carlo wrote that Capri was a delight and that he was “madly in love” with Marion,’ Nello informed his

The Best of Times, The Worst of Times

75

mother. ‘In Capri with Marion: delightful and extremely happy hours . . . We are madly in love’ Carlo wrote to Salvemini.57 It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Their stay in Capri was a blissful interlude in an otherwise darkening political climate. A few months earlier, they had learned the death of Piero Gobetti, the young antifascist intellectual from Turin, in a Paris clinic. Now, on their idyllic island, they received the news of the passing away of Giovanni Amendola in a clinic in Cannes, on the French Riviera. Both had been severely beaten up by fascist thugs in the preceding months, and both had fled to France to escape their tormentors, but neither had recovered from their wounds.58 This was a new blow for the opposition and a personal loss for the young couple. Carlo had worked with Gobetti in the early years of his journal Rivoluzione Liberale; Marion had joined Amendola’s Unione Democratica after Matteotti’s assassination and greatly admired the man and the leader. This new setback only strengthened their resolve to dedicate their life and energy to fighting the regime, and Marion agreed that this fight should take precedence over personal considerations.59 In the meantime, they had to resume their teaching duties as the end of the year exams were approaching while arranging the marriage ceremony and finding a suitable home in Milan. Things were getting tougher for Carlo at the University of Genoa. At the end of April, fascist thugs attacked him in the street to punish him for the antifascist remarks he made during his lessons. The next day, his students applauded him while preventing the fascists from entering the lecture hall.60 A few weeks later, the academic authorities notified him that his contract would not be renewed the following year, because of his ‘repeated declarations of hostility to the national government’ and the incidents they provoked within and outside the university. He hoped they would sack him immediately, so he would not have to give the exams, but they did not, and the marriage had to be postponed until mid-July.61 Marion and Carlo spent a few hectic weeks between Florence, Genoa, Milan and Rapallo, fulfilling their teaching duties, handling the formalities related to their marriage and simply enjoying being together. ‘Yes, I am happy, so happy,’ Carlo wrote to Salvemini. ‘I would never have believed that to love so much was possible.

76

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

Marion has conquered me slowly, almost unwittingly, but entirely. I cannot imagine my life without her. She is a divine and delightful creature . . . The feeling of having realized my ideal of life, of having found the companion I had always dreamed of, excites and scares me at the same time. Thank you, a thousand thank you, dear professor, dear Father Bear.’62 In May 1926, Nello announced that he too was going to get married, to Maria Todesco, a young woman from a traditional Jewish family, whom he had been dating for several years.63 Amelia had an obvious preference for Nello’s chosen bride. She came from a proper upper-middle-class Italian Jewish family, had no interest in politics, and was highly traditional in her cultural outlook. Nello’s engagement would be a family celebration while Carlo’s wedding would be a strictly private affair.64 Despite her rigidity of character, she came to accept the situation and both sides made efforts to patch things up. Amelia travelled to Milan to meet with Marion who was already arranging the home the young couple had found in via Borghetto. At first, the two women were a little embarrassed, but when Amelia left two days later their parting was very emotional, and Amelia used the familiar ‘tu’ with Marion. ‘A true revolution,’ Carlo wrote to Salvemini, brought about by the ‘superior qualities’ that made him adore Marion.65 The wedding was a very simple ceremony at the Genoa town hall on 24 July 1926, attended only by the close family and a few friends. At 9 a.m., they went to the Municipio where two childhood friends of Carlo’s joined them to act as witnesses. No one came from Britain.66 The whole thing lasted four minutes. Apparently, Amelia and Nello were deeply impressed, but for Carlo and Marion this exchange of a few words was a mere formality, as they later explained to Salvemini. There would be no further celebration, just a card sent to family members: ‘Carlo Rosselli and Marion Cave announce their wedding celebrated on 24 July 1926’.67 They spent their honeymoon on the Lake of Braies in the Dolomites where they stayed in a comfortable hotel nestled in a spectacular mountain scenery.68 The weather was awful, but they were supremely happy. Once more, they made Salvemini, ‘the best ally of [our] happiness’, the epistolary witness of their felicity.69 After a week, Nello joined them with his fiance´e

The Best of Times, The Worst of Times

77

Maria, and the four went on a rambling expedition in Alto Adige. A photo captured these happy moments. Two young men and two young women dressed in mountaineering attire, looking buoyant, apparently oblivious to the crisis looming on the horizon.70 In August and early September, Marion and Carlo settled at Stresa, on the Lake Maggiore, to be close to Milan but away from the sultry weather in the city. Everything slowed down in the stifling Italian summer and they spent a studious summer, perfecting their knowledge of the German language and German philosophy. Always an avid reader, Marion was eclectic in her choice of titles. She mentioned reading Leon Trotsky’s book on Lenin and the latest H.G. Wells novel, probably The World of William Clissold, which was more a vehicle for the author’s political and philosophical ideas than a conventional novel. As they prepared to return to Milan and to resume the political fight against the regime in early October, Marion announced that she was pregnant.71 It was the worst of times, it was the best of times.

CHAPTER 5

From Milan to Savona: The Last Stand in Italy (July 1926 – September 1927)

Carlo had not appreciated Milan when he had first moved there to work at the Bocconi in 1923 – too rich, too complacent, disheartening. But the young couple came to relish its unique atmosphere, its combination of imposing buildings and intimate galleries, its rich cultural and political life.1 They chose a flat in via Borghetto, near Porta Venezia. The neighbourhood was both central and isolated, near the Public Gardens and the Royal Palace now a Museum of Contemporary Art. The flat was vast and light, on the top floor of a modern building and, although they bought furniture and brought works of art from Florence, its decoration was never completed. There was too much to do. Because of its location and the Rosselli’s recent arrival in the city, the flat was not yet subject to police surveillance and rapidly became the hub of the antifascist opposition, as Amelia Rosselli realized on her first visit: ‘When I went to Milan in October to see the young couple’s home, help Marion put the final touch to the decoration and spend a few days in the intimacy of their new life as a couple, I found a setting that was quite different from what I had expected.’ Instead of a quite love nest, their home was a place where people came and went all day long. It was the meeting point of the

From Milan to Savona

79

leading antifascists, those who were most at risk because of the heightened repression. The evenings were spent in ‘secret discussions, with people who came to bring or hear the more recent news’.2 Any hope Amelia Rosselli may have had of her son and his young bride embarking on a traditional bourgeois married life vanished completely during this visit. When she accompanied them at the Scala theatre, she realized that the contrast was too stark between this formal social gathering where the couple was welcomed in the ‘best Milanese society’, and the feverish political conspiracy that was their daily life. It was the last time they took part in such a society outing.3 The Lombard capital was an active centre of antifascist resistance. It was the cradle of Italian socialism and an important industrial centre with a large working class. The main labour unions, the Socialist and Communist Parties and their newspapers had their headquarters in Milan. In the elections of 1924, the Fascist listone which won in the rest of the country suffered a thrashing in Milan where the opposition forces received a majority of the votes.4 There was also a network of younger activists whom Carlo and Marion knew from Florence where they had occasionally attended meetings of the Circolo di Cultura. Followers of Piero Gobetti, Riccardo Bauer and Ferruccio Parri had published an anti-fascist journal Il Caffe`, from July 1924 to May 1925. Like Non Mollare!, it had a large following locally and was constantly submitted to police censorship and seizure until it was forced to stop publication.5 Marion had often accompanied Carlo in his numerous visits to the city in the previous 18 months and she had become familiar with the salon of Anna Kuliscioff, a Russian revolutionary who had come to Italy to fight alongside her Italian lover the anarchist Andrea Costa. She was one of the first Italian feminists and later had become the political muse and great love of Filippo Turati, with whom she founded the Critica Sociale in 1891 and the Socialist Party in 1893. She was an inspiring figure for several generations of activists, socialists, feminists, ordinary workers and aspiring radicals.6 She had first spotted Carlo Rosselli, on his way back from Great Britain in the autumn of 1923 with his new-found enthusiasm for the Labour Party. She compared him to ‘a spring breeze’ and in a letter to Turati praised his ‘sound youth’ and his ‘robust and intensive mind’. She was also charmed by Marion

80

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

and, using another meteorological metaphor, she compared her to ‘a ray of sun’.7 Before Marion and Carlo settled in Milan though, the political atmosphere had started to change for the worse. After the repression which had befallen the opposition forces during 1925 – the workers’ unions were banned, the socialist and communist dailies were suspended and even the liberal director of the Corriere della Sera was forced to transfer his shares to the pro-fascist Crespi family8 – the death of Anna Kuliscioff signalled the changing atmosphere in the city. It symbolized, in a way, the death of the old guard and her funeral, on the last day of the year, represented the last major popular socialist demonstration until the liberation of the city in 1945.9 It was in this gloomy atmosphere, permeated with a sense of impending catastrophe, that Marion and Carlo Rosselli settled in the Lombard capital. They had failed to convince their mentor Gaetano Salvemini to come back from London and take the lead of a movement to revitalize the opposition forces and were left to their own devices.10 Having followed the writings of the young maximalist leader Pietro Nenni who shared his analysis of the failure of Italian socialism to stop the rise of Mussolini to power, Carlo had contacted him before settling in Milan and offered to finance a new magazine that would open its pages to those who thought on similar lines and favoured what he called ‘a more virile conception’ of the antifascist struggle. The idea of the Quarto Stato (The Fourth Estate) sprang from their first encounter in early 1926 and the first issue appeared in March 1926.11 The title was borrowed from the famous painting by Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo which represented the inexorable advance of the proletarian masses. Il Quarto Stato aroused great interest for it addressed the concerns of the different branches of the fragmented socialist movement, even though it ruffled a few feathers. It was not content with just picking up the flag but called for an open discussion and a thorough renewal of Italian socialism. Its call for the unity of the antifascist forces received a positive echo among all the currents while its merciless criticisms of past errors were more appealing to the younger generation of socialists.12 The most dedicated activists of this younger generation gathered around Nenni

From Milan to Savona

81

and Rosselli, contributing to the journal or distributing it around the country. According to some estimates, it reached a readership of about 10,000 at its peak.13 Among those who rallied around the new journal, many had participated in the experience of Non Mollare! in Florence and belonged to the Rossellis’ close circle of friends. There was Lelio Basso in Genova, Leo Valiani in Venice, Fernando De Rosa in Turin, Fausto Nitti and Max Ascoli in Rome. In Milan, Ferrucio Parri and Riccardo Bauer, former editors of Il Caffe´, joined the editorial team, and so did Ernesto Rossi, Marion’s old friend from Florence. He had wisely left the country at the time of the Non Mollare! trial in June 1925. After the general amnesty pronounced later in the year, he had returned to Italy and, taking advantage of his quite common name, he had taken a competitive examination and found a teaching position at the Bergamo Polytechnics. From there, he travelled almost every evening to Milan where he worked with the Quarto Stato team and resumed his friendship with Marion and Carlo.14 In ‘Casa Rosselli’, the optimism of the will clearly outweighed the pessimism of the mind, to paraphrase Antonio Gramsci’s famous statement. Given Rosselli’s dedication of his time, energy and money to the cause and Marion’s wholehearted support, their home was the centre of frenzied and perpetual activities aiming to bring together the scattered socialist forces or simply to boost the morale of disheartened companions. On 21 October 1926, a Congress was held at the Rossellis’, where the Partito Socialista dei Lavoratori Italiani (PSLI – Italian Workers Socialist Party) was founded to replace the PSU, outlawed the previous year after the attempted assassination of Mussolini by the ex-Socialist MP Zaniboni. Delegates arrived from around the country, and some were surprised to see the younger generation in charge. ‘Is daddy home?’ a middle-aged delegate asked the young Marion who opened the door.15 Despite the tense political discussions, the door of via Borghetto was always opened to friends and comrades in these frantic weeks before the final catastrophe. ‘I used to come here in the sad autumn of 1926, looking for assistance, help and company. And I found them,’ Giovanni Ansaldo recalled after the war, as he visited the publisher Longanesi housed in the same building and felt suddenly assaulted by

82

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

the ghosts of his anti-fascist past. ‘Carlo Rosselli, the young Marion Cave who adored him, Parri who arrived like a conspirator, Bauer, always serious and reliable.’16 Carlo and Marion had met Ansaldo in Rome in 1924 and they had become close to him in Genoa in early 1926. He was the editor of Il Lavoro, the local socialist daily, and had signed Benedetto Croce’s Manifest of Antifascist Intellectuals in 1925. By 1926, like many others, he was harassed by the fascists, but despite the oppressive and demoralizing political climate, he was reluctant to leave the country and regularly sought comfort in the Rosselli home. He recalled the intense atmosphere, the heated debates in which Marion participated with spirit and passion but, always a shrewd observer, he also noted with sarcasm that ‘she did not seem to understand how delicate her position was and the silent part that would be allotted to her’ in case her husband became a major political leader as she was sure he would.17 Marion and Carlo also kept in touch with their acquaintances from Florence whenever they came to Milan. Nicky Mariano, Bernard Berenson’s secretary and mistress, recalled a lively dinner towards the end of October 1926 at the restaurant of the elegant hotel Cavour. Nicky and Berenson enjoyed the presence of the Rossellis and the animated political discussion, although they feared it might have attracted the attention of fascist spies when, a few days later, at Brescia, they learned they were wanted by the police. But their arrest had to do with theft of artwork in a church and not with their encounter with the passionate antifascist couple.18 Early in November 1926, events accelerated and imposed rapid, and sometimes wrenching decisions on the Milanese antifascist conspirators. On 30 October, as he was taking part in the celebrations of the March on Rome in Bologna, Mussolini was the target of an assassination attempt, allegedly at the hands of 15-year-old Anteo Zamboni who was lynched on the spot by the fascist crowd.19 This was the fourth assassination attempt against Mussolini, and the second that year after a deranged Irish woman, Violet Gibson, had tried to kill him in Rome the previous April.20 The Duce seized the occasion to wipe out the last semblance of the rule of law and representative government. In the following days, drastic measures were introduced to consolidate a dictatorial regime: the adoption of a

From Milan to Savona

83

new police code; the creation of the Special Tribunal for the defence of the state and internal banishment (the confino di polizia); the dissolution of all opposition parties and suppression of what remained of the antifascist press. In addition, a special police force was created, the OVRA (Organization for the Vigilance and Repression of Antifascists); the death penalty was reintroduced for assassination attempts on the King or the Duce; passports were cancelled, and severe penalties were imposed for illegal expatriation. Finally, all the 120 opposition MPs, whether members of the Aventine Secession or not, were dismissed.21 Antonio Gramsci, the Communist leader elected to parliament in April 1924, was arrested and would only come out of jail to die 11 years later.22 This announced the widespread crackdown on what was left of the opposition forces, either at the hands of the fascist bands in the various cities or the repressive organs of the dictatorship.23 Testifying a few years later at the De Rosa trial in Brussels, Marion recalled the atmosphere created by the Bologna incidents in Milan. ‘About one hundred private homes and offices were ransacked by the fascists, three workers were killed and many more injured.’24 The most important socialist leaders were the preferred targets of those attacks. Pietro Nenni’s flat was invaded by a violent band of squadristi who, under the eyes of his 10-year-old daughter, smashed all the contents to pieces, shot bullets in the family portraits, painted obscenities on the walls and threw all the books in the streets.25 One evening, a friendly policeman – there were still a few – warned Claudio Treves that his life was in danger. Despite the harsh political disputes of the previous months Carlo, who was related to Treves, felt responsible for his safety and the Rossellis took him to their home and ‘hid him for a few days’. Eventually a civil servant informed the Rossellis that furious fascists were roaming the streets, threatening to kill Treves and Turati and parade their heads on pikes on Piazza del Duomo, and that no protection would come from the police.26 Rosselli, who had always been opposed to exile, now felt that given the circumstances expatriation was the only solution. The eldest leaders, those most exposed to the repression should leave the country while the younger activists remained to continue the fight. With his friends from Il Quarto Stato – which had stopped publication

84

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

like the rest of the opposition press – he set up an informal group to organize the expatriation of the most well-known leaders of the PSLI.27 In the dispiriting atmosphere of November and December 1926, the Rosselli home became for them a sort of friendly half-way house between the oppressive country they knew too well and the unknown land of exile. The expatriation of Claudio Treves was a sad affair. Given the threats on his life, he could no longer stay home, but there was no clear plan. Treves had left for the Rosselli flat with a pair of pyjamas and an umbrella, planning to spend the night there. He never returned home. Via Borghetto was not safe either for him and, early the next morning, Carlo, Marion and Treves’ son, Paolo, accompanied him to a more secure place. The atmosphere was so highly charged that Paolo Treves feared Marion’s ‘foreign’ looks’ – ‘she was so beautiful, so blond and tall’ – would put them at risk and he accompanied her to his grandmother’s flat. Meanwhile, Alessandro Levi, who had arrived from Florence, drove the older Treves to Como, from where he would try to reach Switzerland, as Nenni had done a few days earlier. Later that morning, Paolo Treves took Marion and his mother back to via Borghetto where they expected to receive information about the escape. For hours, they waited and, despite Carlo’s attempts to relax the atmosphere, gloom set in as Mrs Treves sat at the piano and played Beethoven’s symphonies, one after the other, for hours. They waited until sunset, but still nothing. Paolo took his mother home and only much later, in the middle night, they received a call from Carlo informing them that the escape had been a success.28 Next, came Ansaldo’s turn. Arriving one day in early December via Borghetto for his weekly dose of comfort, he too found himself confronted with a major personal and political decision. ‘As I walked in,’ he recalled, ‘Rosselli asked me point-blank: “So, now you’re convinced you should go to France?” He looked like an organizer of tourist excursions.’29 The headquarters of Il Lavoro had been sacked and torched and, as editor of the paper, Ansaldo feared for his life. In early December, Riccardo Bauer, who was familiar with the Alpine route toward Switzerland, accompanied him and another journalist, Carlo Silvestri, but the three of them were

From Milan to Savona

85

arrested at the border with Switzerland, and sent to the Como prison.30 Despite this unhappy outcome, the Rossellis and their friends in Milan were now fervidly preparing to whisk away the old socialist leader Filippo Turati from under the nose of the fascist police. It was clear enough that he was the squadristi’s main target. Daily, they chanted under his windows ‘With Turati’s beard, we’ll make a brush/ To shine Mussolini’s boots’,31 threatening to assault him physically should he dare try to leave his home. Despite the direct threat to his life, the old leader was reluctant to abandon his country in this dark hour as well as the familiar setting of his dearest memories, aware that he would be embarking on a journey with no return. Rosselli and Parri finally convinced him that he would be in a better position to continue the fight from France, a country he knew well and where he counted numerous friends.32 Given Turati’s age and poor physical condition, the land route of escape, which required hours of walking in the snow, was out of the question. Likewise, Lake Como was under strict surveillance after the arrest of Ansaldo, Silvestri and Bauer. They would have to try the sea, and this required entirely different logistics. In addition, Turati would have to leave his flat unbeknownst to the 10 police agents who were constantly watching his windows and the door of his building in the Gallery Vittorio Emmanuelle. Carlo’s ingenuity once again worked marvels. Through the attic, he discovered another way out of the building on a back street, where a car waited and carried them away from Milan to stay in the villa of the socialist journalist Albini near Varese; then to a more secure place in Piemonte, the home of Giuseppe Levi, father of the writer Natalia Ginzburg. There, they had to wait for 12 days until a solution could be worked out from the coast of Liguria.33 Sandro Pertini, a young antifascist lawyer from Savona, who was close to the antifascist circles of Florence and Milan, set up a team of trustworthy sailors, with Italo Oxilia, Lorenzo Da Bove and Giuseppe Boyance`. After a false start, the group was finally able to leave on 12 December, on a moonless night. There was a violent storm and it was a rough crossing, but when they approached the coast of Corsica, near Calvi, the next morning, the sea had calmed. As they disembarked, Turati was immediately recognized and welcomed by

86

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

the local socialist club with a hearty breakfast.34 He seized the occasion to make his first speech in exile, in perfect French, thanking his local comrades and announcing that he had left his country to continue to fight the regime from abroad. After the tension of the previous days, the scene was so charged with emotion that Rosselli could not hold his tears.35 Three months pregnant, Marion was not directly involved in Turati’s escape, apart from the occasional surveillance work. She remained in Milan where she tried to hold the fort, as people started to panic. In the previous weeks, some relatives and friends had advised against the project, fearing reprisals.36 Five days after he had left Milan, the police discovered the escape of the ‘great old man’ of Italian socialism, and unleashed a massive search for suspects. Marion feared a disheartening stampede like the one she had witnessed in Florence the previous autumn. Terrified by the police, several people were ready to collaborate. Turati’s doctor, for one, appeared panicstricken at Marion’s door and pressed her to reveal Turati’s hiding place to appease the police.37 By then, fortunately, nobody knew precisely where the fugitives were hiding. Shortly afterwards, Marion found herself on the frontline, desperately trying to free her husband from the clutches of the fascist police. As Turati and Pertini continued their journey to continental France, the other members of the expedition – Rosselli, Parri, Oxilia, Da Bove and Boyance` – sailed back to Italy. On 13 December, Rosselli and Parri disembarked at Marina di Carrara while the others continued toward La Spezia. Unfortunately for them, there was a chase for a famous bandit in the region, and they were all arrested and sent to the Massa Carrara jail. At first, the local police did not make any link with Turati’s escape, but a few days later, upon the request of the Como police, they sent Rosselli and Parri to that city where they were wanted regarding the failed expatriation of Ansaldo and Silvestri.38 Learning that the prisoners were to stop over in Milan, Marion began a frantic search for Carlo in the city’s jails with the help of some influential friends and relatives, but to no avail. The authorities denied her the right to meet with her husband at the San Fedele prison, but she eventually managed to see him at the central station

From Milan to Savona

87

as he was boarding a train for Como. She had convinced a highranking officer of the carabinieri – a friend of a friend – to accompany her and she could approach Carlo and give him a warm coat. It was Turati’s legendary cloak.39 On Christmas Eve, Carlo arrived at the Como prison where he shared a cell with Bauer, Ansaldo and Silvestri. During the following year, Marion spent most of her time visiting her husband in various jails.40 Meanwhile, one of her famous compatriots had a much more enthusiastic experience of Fascist Italy. The Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill, who had managed to spend ‘an agreeable holiday’ in Florence in the days of the October 1925 massacre, was now visiting Rome and he did not fail to express his great admiration for the new regime and its energetic leader: I could not help being charmed, like so many other people have been, by Signor Mussolini’s gentle and simple bearing and by his calm, detached poise in spite of so many burdens and dangers. If I had been an Italian, I am sure that I should have been wholeheartedly with you from start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism.

A statement which apparently ‘elicited enthusiastic comments from all the fascist newspapers,’ noted the Rome correspondent of the Times.41 But Marion could only have read it with despair as, at the time, she was deploying all her energy to rally support for the defence of Carlo and his friends against the fascist police. She was under constant watch and the agents who tailed her testified to her pugnacity. An agent informed Rome: [Rosselli’s] wife is desperate, and she won’t easily resign herself to his arrest. She is English, a strong woman, courageous and hysterical, and therefore she is deemed very dangerous, as much and maybe more than her husband. She might do something foolish and we think it would be wise and prudent to send her away with her husband and to submit them both to strict surveillance.42

In the meantime, her every move was being noted and wherever she went, the local police were contacted and ordered to follow her and keep Rome informed of her whereabouts.43 After several months under the investigation of the Como police, Carlo and his friends were exonerated in the Ansaldo-Silvestri case

88

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

and were discharged in May 1927. But Carlo was immediately sent to the confino, a banishment measure which required a simple administrative decision. He was banished for five years, to the remote island of Ustica, one of the toughest of Mussolini’s penal islands in terms of climate and geography. Marion learned the news in Florence where she was expected to give birth to their first child in early June. As the train carrying him to Ustica stopped overnight in Florence, Carlo tugged at his guardians’ heartstrings and convinced them to take him to via Giusti to see his wife and the baby’s empty cradle. It was a brief, moving encounter, a few minutes stolen from fate during which Carlo and Marion only had time to reaffirm their shared love and commitment before the guards called the prisoner to take him back to the station. Carlo took his time, walking slowly around the house and the garden he loved so much and that he would never see again.44 ‘Mirtillino’, as the baby had been nicknamed soon after its conception – something to do with a passionate embrace near a blueberry bush – would come to life in the beautiful Rosselli home, surrounded by his extended family, but without his father and under the watchful eyes of the local police. A few hours before his birth, agents thoroughly searched Marion’s bedroom and seized all the letters Carlo had sent her from prison.45 It was a fitting de´but for an infant who would unwittingly be closely associated with his parents’ eventful life in the following years. Carlo hardly had time to appreciate the illusory liberty offered by the island of Ustica after several months of confinement in a crowded prison cell in northern Italy. After a few weeks, he was arrested again for the Turati escape. The charges were more serious this time, as the successful endeavour had dealt a blow to the regime and Rosselli and his friends made no secret of their role in it.46 During his transfer to the Savona prison, he met his brother Nello, who was arrested in via Giusti on 10 June and, after one month in the Murate prison in Florence, was banished for five years to the island of Ustica.47 This did not leave Marion much time to settle in and enjoy her new role as a mother. With Mirtillino at her side – the boy was officially called Giovanni (after Amendola) Giacomo (after Matteotti) – she was even more determined to stand by her husband and fight

From Milan to Savona

89

for his release. Moved and comforted by her unwavering resolve, Carlo wrote to her that he ‘blessed for the hundredth time the day we met and the fate that brought us together’ and assured her that their couple would come out stronger and happier from this ordeal.48 In the meantime, there were many practical decisions to make in view of Carlo’s anticipated long stay in the Savona prison and the preparation of the future trial. At first, the police did not allow any visit and Marion went back to Milan to take care of the couple’s financial situation. As Carlo insisted in his letters, it was important to reduce spending, selling the small flat in via Ancona first, and later maybe also giving up or sub-letting some rooms of their vast home in via Borghetto.49 She was also busy contacting their friends in England to rally support for Carlo and his co-accused and inform British public opinion of the real situation in fascist Italy. ‘Did you write to Keynes?’ urged Carlo; ‘Can you get the British press?’ If not, ‘Can you get Dobelli [Marion’s former Italian teacher at Bedford College] to send us the articles that might interest us?’50 After a few weeks in Bolzano with her mother in law, Marion and her son settled in Varazze, a seaside town a few miles south of Savona where she rented a small house stuck between two industrial establishments and all she could see from her window were dreary zinc roofs. But it was cheap and a short train ride to the Savona prison.51 Both Carlo and Marion were anxious to meet again as they had spent more time apart than together since their wedding, and she had urged Carlo’s lawyer to secure a visit permit for early September so that she may at last introduce father and son.52 Marion’s first impression of Savona was disastrous. ‘Heartbreak city’ she called it. When she arrived, the authorities refused to give her the precious permit and she had to beg them for hours, with her small baby in her arms before they finally gave in. Then another long wait at the prison, so that when they finally saw Carlo both mother and son were exasperated. Mirtillino was whining and Marion was exhausted and sad that their first gathering as a family should occur under such circumstances.53 On the other hand, she was pleased to see that Carlo was calm and relaxed as usual, but she also noticed a new seriousness and maturity in his behaviour. He was no longer the cheerful youngster who had provoked giggling fits among his cellmates at the

90

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

Como prison a few months earlier. What Riccardo Bauer called his ‘contagious exuberance’ seemed to have given way to a new awareness of the stakes and challenges raised by the impending trial, both for the accused and the antifascist opposition or what was left of it.54 Marion managed to bring invisible ink hidden in medicine bottles provided by the young Milanese chemist Umberto Ceva, and the prisoners carefully prepared their defence with their friends and counsels outside.55 They were not to be tried behind closed doors by the recently established Special Tribunal and decided to seize the opportunity of a public trial to shake up the country’s apathy and demonstrate by their very attitude that opposition to the regime was still possible. The atmosphere was feverish in and around the Savona courthouse as friends of the accused and supporters of the regime gathered on the first day of the trial on 9 September 1927. Foreign journalists were not allowed in the courtroom to limit unfriendly coverage, but the Manchester Guardian had sent Barbara Barclay Carter to report on the proceedings. She was close to the antifascist circles around Don Luigi Sturzo, the cleric who had been forced into exile in England by the Vatican because of his hostility to the regime. With the help of Marion Rosselli, who presented her as a cousin, she could enter the courtroom and she wrote the only full account of the trial, which was partially published by the Guardian.56 She was strong on atmosphere and presented her British readers with a far more sombre and realistic image of fascist Italy than the one provided by Winston Churchill a few months earlier.57 On the first day of the proceedings, the court declared Filippo Turati, Alessandro Pertini and the boat pilot Italo Oxilia contumacious as they had found refuge in France. On the second day, the two star-accused took the floor. In the morning, in his sober, austere style, Ferruccio Parri took full responsibility for the escape and justified his action in the name of self-defence, as Filippo Turati’s life was clearly endangered by the fascist squads. The same line of defence was adopted by Rosselli. During Parri’s deposition, Barbara Barclay Carter reported, ‘he had spent the morning exchanging smiles with his

From Milan to Savona

91

young English wife’. Rosselli’s lawyer, Erizzo, used Marion to try to soften the bench, insisting on the fact that his client had only seen his baby son once through prison bars. ‘Mrs Rosselli is English’ he declared, his voice full of emotion, ‘she comes from a country were similar practices are incomprehensible. Here she is, listening to you and you can see her anguish in her eyes.’ The bench seemed unmoved, but ‘many members of the audience had tears in their eyes’.58 As for Marion, she might have been anxious, but she agreed that the Savona trial had all the elements for a ‘sublime drama [. . .] worthy of the pen of Victor Hugo’, as her husband wrote later to a friend. She was enthralled by Carlo ‘who fought like a lion’.59 His exuberance having apparently returned, he took the floor without paying attention to the incessant interruptions from the bench and, like Parri, declared his action as ‘highly legal’ – in view of article 49 of the penal code which allowed for lawful self-defence – but also ‘highly moral’, because he was only acting in the high ethical tradition of the Risorgimento to which he was personally connected. ‘Fifty years ago, my grandmother received in her house the dying Mazzini. Could I do otherwise fifty years later than lend assistance to Filippo Turati when in sore need?’ His words and his attitude galvanized the public; Carter wrote: He bore [the Bench] down by sheer force of personality. He held them at the sword’s point. It seems that it was not he, the accused, but the whole of fascism that was placed on trial. The effect of his fearless outspokenness, in a land where fear and whispering have become the rule was amazing.60

Marion immersed herself in the passionate atmosphere of the courtroom, reassured by the solidarity expressed by the crowd inside the tribunal and in the street. ‘At noon, yesterday, a stranger came up to me’, she wrote to her mother-in-law. ‘He asked me if I was Mrs Rosselli. He was wearing the medal of military valour. “Allow me to convey to you the deep admiration your husband’s attitude has aroused in the soul of all gentlemen”.’61 The next day, as Paolo Treves was travelling to Savona to testify about the fascist threats against his father in Milan, he met Marion who boarded his train at Varazze. She was ‘full of enthusiasm and confidence’, he recalled. She discussed the trial with exuberance, ignoring Paolo’s guardian angels.

92

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

‘Marvellous, splendid [. . .]. All the public is with us’, she assured him.62 News about the attitude of the accused had spread rapidly and, on the last day of the trial, the courtroom was packed with friends and sympathetic members of the public. ‘When the judges retired to deliberate, the courtroom was over-excited,’ Carlo later wrote to a friend. A silent but inflexible crowd gathered inside and outside the courtroom and remained there for hours. ‘It had come to judge those who were about to render their judgment.’63 When the light sentence was read, the audience burst into wild applause, storming the prisoners’ cage to embrace them, congratulating the lawyers before rushing into the street ‘shouting, laughing, chanting. Everybody smiled [. . .]. It was as if a hole had been opened in a sultry sky’. In this giddy atmosphere, Marion and her friends were understandably overoptimistic. ‘Three more trials like this one and fascism is dead,’ some exclaimed.64 Despite the advice of the prosecutor, who had requested a sentence of five years’ imprisonment and a heavy fine, the judges accepted the self-defence argument of the accused and characterized their action as a contravention rather than a crime. Rosselli and Parri received a sentence of 10 months in jail, of which they had already served eight. In addition, they were assigned to the confino for five years.65 The news was sobering after the excitement of the trial and the feeling of triumph that had gripped the accused and their friends at its conclusion. Marion accepted it with calm, fully understanding the political importance of what had happened at Savona. ‘During those long months, I never regretted what Carlo had done, and from the beginning of the first day of the trial I understood that, whatever the sentence, what Carlo had done would be a gain and not a loss for him.’66 Carlo stayed at the Savona jail until the end of the year before his transfer to the penal island of Lipari. Marion returned to Milan to take care of practical matters – subletting part of the flat, trying to get a passport. Numerous acquaintances came to get the latest news and she exchanged numerous letters with friends and supporters in Italy and abroad to inform them about the outcome of the trial and its significance.67 As she wrote to Giorgina Zabban, a friend of Amelia

From Milan to Savona

93

Rosselli to whom she had grown very close, this took top priority and letters to family and friends would have to wait. ‘I am overwhelmed with letters and I have to follow a certain order: first politics, second urgent matters and then friends.’68 This meant neglecting Amelia and Nello who resented it. From Ustica, where Amelia was visiting him, Nello complained to Marion that she did not inform them about her visits to Carlo. ‘Mummy is very unhappy’ he added, ‘and claims that you do not love her and that being a mother-in-law is a tough job’.69 Although Amelia had earlier expressed her admiration for Marion’s attitude during the trial – ‘really admirable, worthy of her noble companion’70 – relations between the two women still needed some ironing out. Rosselli and Parri left the Savona prison on 26 December 1927. As the train stopped overnight in Rome, Marion had telegraphed Carlo’s uncle, Senator Gabriele Pincherle, who went to the station and watched his nephew, hand-cuffed and chained, walk confidently toward his destiny. Convinced that his cause was just, he was ready to face the sacrifices it required with Marion at his side. ‘It would be tragic if the people closest to us did not share our position or remained indifferent to the problems that torment us,’ he wrote to the Zabbans. ‘Fortunately, this is not the case. With Marion, we are “two in one”,’ he concluded, borrowing a line from Dante’s Inferno.71

CHAPTER 6

Welcome to the ‘Escape Club’ Lipari (January 1928 – July 1929)

Despite many tourist guides’ idyllic depictions of the Lipari Islands, for the confinati who were sent there against their will for up to five years, the nagging question was ‘How could an escape be made from this inferno?’1 Emilio Lussu, the fearless Captain of the Sassari Brigade during World War I, arrived on the island a few months before Carlo Rosselli and immediately planned to escape. On Rosselli’s first visit, he discovered that he had similar plans and, together with two other prisoners, they formed an ‘escape club’. When Marion landed on the island with her baby son on 8 January 1928, ‘she was immediately admitted to the “club”’, as she was determined to escape with her husband, ‘thinking nothing, like a true Englishwoman, of adventuring her life at sea.’2 Between these early days, when the prisoners shared their wildest dreams of freedom, and their actual escape, 18 months elapsed during which Marion, Carlo and their accomplices pretended to settle in their daily routine while secretly conspiring to flee. ‘Infernal weather, storm, rain, rain, storm’; ‘it rains, and the wind blows without interruption’; ‘tremendous tempest, hailstorms’; ‘depressingly bad weather with this nasty wind blowing day and night’; ‘our little house groans and trembles as the wind roars through it.’3 Except for a few months in spring and early autumn, the

Welcome to the ‘Escape Club’

95

weather was harrowing, with violent storms in the winter and African heat and winds in the summer. The Aeolian Islands were located 19 miles north of Sicily, too far for an easy escape, but near enough for a daily boat service to bring goods, information and regular new loads of prisoners. The main island, Lipari, was rather small, about 14 square miles, with a permanent free population of 12,000 people, mostly fishermen, peasants, artisans and small shopkeepers. The confinement zone was surrounded by a three-kilometre security perimeter including the city centre and the harbour. Prisoners were restricted to this area within which they were under strict surveillance. The curfew bugle sounded at 8.00 p.m., there were morning and evening roll calls, surprise visits during the night carried out by the police, and a constant watch by 200 fascist militiamen who followed their own rules and formed what Rosselli called ‘the walls of flesh and bones’ of the ‘cell without walls’ that was the confino.4 Together with the carabinieri and the police, they picketed the few streets were the prisoners were permitted to walk and guarded the virtual border that separated the confinement zone from the surrounding countryside. At sea, there were several armed motor boats and even a small warship.5 All this to watch over 500 political prisoners, ‘a sample of antifascist Italy’ – Members of Parliament deprived of their seats, antifascist intellectuals and students, socialist and communist activists, most of them ordinary workers or peasants. Marion remembered watching ‘war heroes disembark, handcuffed and wearing their military medals on their chest’.6 Many prisoners brought their families and by 1929 there were about 130 children on the prison island. Most detainees were extremely poor and lived in deplorable conditions. The mazzetta, a small sum of 10 liras per day they received from the state, was hardly enough to buy food, and most prisoners lived in vermin-infested barracks deprived of running water or heating during the winter. Only the better-off could rent a flat or a house within the security zone.7 Marion and Carlo were among those who could afford to do so, and they settled in a small house situated at the further end of the confinement zone. The house was rustic but very pleasant and offered exquisite views of the sea and the countryside. The scenery was North African, but ‘on the left there was an irregular row of tousled cypresses

96

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

that recalled the soft lines of the Tuscan hills’. The house was surrounded by a small garden which Marion desperately tried to cultivate despite the challenging sandy soils and the wind that blew away everything. To the end, she and Carlo kept digging their garden ‘to convince friends and enemies alike that our thoughts lay only at home’.8 They had decided to offer the image of quiet family life to fool the authorities into believing they were resigned to their fate while, in fact, they had only one thing on their mind, escape. ‘Escape by boat, motor-boat, steamer, aeroplane, airship. Escape, escape, escape, will, would, shall, can, must escape.’9 ‘We formed a happy little group in this house’ Marion recalled years later, and Lussu also remembered Carlo ‘smiling, accompanied by the perfect companion of his life, walking along Marina Lunga, while Mirtillino, his first child, was blooming, bright as a flower in the fields’. The worst of times, the best of times. It was almost like a second honeymoon and, after being apart for so long, Marion and Carlo enjoyed each other’s company ‘even more than in the first months’.10 To his own surprise, Carlo also fell in love with his baby son although, in pure Italian masculine fashion, he believed that, until they could reason, children should be the exclusive responsibility of the mother. But life in the penitentiary colony tended to blur the traditional division of roles within the family, as husbands and wives shared a similar fate. ‘Carlo is a delightful father’ Marion wrote to her sister Pat. And in his letters to family and friends, Carlo enthused about Mirtillino’s charm. ‘[He] is a small Cupid and deserves to stand alongside Della Robbia’s cherubs. We get along divinely, he smiles all the time and is extremely sociable,’ he informed Ferruccio Parri, while the grandmother, Amelia, was regularly kept abreast of the boy’s feats and tricks.11 With so much time at their disposal, Marion and Carlo indulged in their shared passion for reading and studying. They resumed their study of the German language and together read the classics, Molie`re, the Greeks. Marion immersed herself in the writings of the philosopher and pedagogue Rudolf Steiner. She loved The Mother by Gorky and found an echo of her youthful radical leanings in the writings of the Russian anarchist Kropotkin.12 Music also brought them closer. Their only luxury in their small house was a piano and

Welcome to the ‘Escape Club’

97

Carlo, who was an experienced amateur musician, often let off steam by playing the symphonies of his favourite composer, Beethoven. Marion was just beginning to practice on a regular basis and she took lessons twice a week with the local maestro and delighted Carlo with her rapid progress.13 They also read and commented the press. Only the pro-fascist papers reached the island, of course, but they occasionally published articles of interest on non-political issues. Marion was infuriated by an article published in the daily Il Lavoro from Genoa, by Leo Ferrero, son of the historian Guglielmo Ferrero and the writer Gina Lombroso and a childhood friend of Carlo and Nello Rosselli. He was full of contempt for English women who, according to him, had exchanged their femininity for equality, thereby gaining an illusion of power but losing their real influence.14 Carlo had another taste of Marion’s feminism when he realized that she found the idea of escaping ‘perfectly natural’, but it was he who could ‘not find it natural that she should find it natural. Masculine pride blinded me,’ he confessed. ‘I imagined the spirit of adventure to be the privilege of the male. I was forgetting that in England it is the women who govern.’15 Unfortunately, there was also a black spot on this rosy picture. Being close to Marion day and night, Carlo became aware of her fragile health which had been made worse by her recent pregnancy. While in prison in Savona, he had expressed his concern that she exhausted easily and had sent her for a check-up with Dr Nicola Pende. The renowned physician had found that she showed new signs of congestive heart failure, a consequence of the rheumatic fever she had suffered from as a child and recommended a quiet life and a special heart treatment.16 Not exactly good news in view of the adventure in which they were planning to embark. Meanwhile, Marion seemed well enough, always ready for long escapades in their limited territory, but also for more demanding expeditions, as when Carlo was suddenly arrested and transferred to Palermo in April 1928, ‘at the disposal of the Special Tribunal’. Despite the difficulties of communication, Marion pulled all the stops to clarify the matter and rushed to Palermo where she could demonstrate that it was a case of mistaken identity and get him released.17

98

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

On the island, Marion and Carlo’s house soon became the hub of an extensive network of friends and acquaintances. There were close friends from Milan. Riccardo Bauer left in May 1928 but was soon replaced by Ferruccio Parri and his family. There was also Carlo Silvestri who had been arrested with Ansaldo in November 1926, and many acquaintances from the Socialist Party. They made new friends among the anarchists who were numerous on the island. Maria Porcellotti, a wet nurse from Tuscany, had agreed to come to Lipari to help with Mirtillino because her boyfriend Alfredo Agostini, an anarchist with a loud and exuberant personality, was there. Carlo and Marion also became close to Gino Bibbi and his sister Maria, both anarchists from Carrara who would later join them in their Paris exile.18 They were, of course, closest to the members of the ‘escape club’ all of whom they had met for the first time on the island. The day after his arrival, Carlo had sought out the famed Sardinian MP, Emilio Lussu, who was ill with pleurisy. Despite the stark differences in their background they hit it off instantly. Lussu came from a family of small Sardinian landowners and trained as a lawyer. He supported the war on the side of the democratic interventionists and became the legendary captain of a Sardinian unit, the ‘Sassari Brigade’, and a stinging critic of the incompetence of the Italian armed forces top command.19 In 1919, he was elected to Parliament for the Sardinian Action Party. He was a partisan of Sardinian autonomy but also a radical democrat with socialist leanings and rapidly became a staunch opponent of the rising fascist movement.20 He became the target of the fascist squads that unleashed their violence in Sardinia as in the rest of Italy after Zaniboni’s attack on the Duce in November 1926. They attacked him on his doorstep, but he shot back and killed one of his assailants. After 13 months in the Cagliari jail, he was tried and absolved because he had clearly acted in self-defence, but he was then sent for five years to the confino on Lipari Island.21 Physically, Rosselli and Lussu could not have been more different. Carlo was big and strong with a pale complexion, an open face and a friendly smile, while Lussu was tall and lean with a stern face, dark looks and brooding features. But they shared a similar strength of character and unswerving commitment to the democratic cause. Rosselli was more idealistic, Lussu more

Welcome to the ‘Escape Club’

99

pragmatic but, according to Fausto Nitti, they were ‘two morally superior human beings who communicated to others their intrepid faith’.22 When he arrived on the island Lussu found two young men who had been part of a Republican group he frequented in Rome. Gioacchino Dolci, was a draughtsman, and Fausto Nitti, nephew of the post-war Prime Minister Francesco Saverio Nitti, had helped found the antifascist organization ‘Giovane Italia’ after Matteotti’s assassination.23 With the Rossellis, they now formed the escape club. ‘The members of the escape club consulted each other constantly. Rosselli, his wife, Dolci, Nitti and I’, Lussu recalled. At this preparatory stage, their task was to gather accurate facts about the sea currents, the coast, the surveillance system, to communicate to their future rescuers. Romantic walks along the coastal pathway were occasions for astronomical and nautical observations; friendly strolls around the security perimeter offered the opportunity for spotting the comings and goings of the police forces. It was during one of these strolls that Emilio Lussu eventually convinced Marion that it was not wise of her to want to escape with her baby boy, which would certainly put the whole enterprise at risk. ‘She was influenced in making up her mind by my astrological studies: one evening, I mistook the pole star for Mars, and this proved decisive. Signora Rosselli wisely resolved not to entrust the safety of her only child to us.’ All the same, she remained an active member of the club and became an essential linchpin in their relations with their accomplices abroad.24 After a visit to the island in March, Amelia had smuggled out a few letters informing Salvemini in London and Alberto Tarchiani in Paris that the prisoners were getting impatient to leave their ‘chicken coop’ of an island.25 To discuss an escape plan securely required a sophisticated system of communication. Rosselli and Lussu had hoped that Marion would be able to travel to Paris and London in the spring of 1928 to discuss the plan face to face with their accomplices, but a passport was now necessary to travel abroad.26 Under international law at the time, any woman who married a foreigner automatically lost her original nationality. Marion was therefore no longer British but Italian and as a known antifascist and wife of a political prisoner she was refused a passport.27 Yet, she travelled

100

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

regularly to Florence and Milan to establish a secure communication network. In Milan, she met again with the young chemist Umberto Ceva who had helped the Savona prisoners in 1927. Marion took the sympathetic ink back to Lipari in perfume bottles and a re-agent in the form of bright green crystals which she sewed in the hem of her bath robe of the same colour. In Florence, she met with young British women who were envoys from Salvemini and together they agreed on a code system using the press that could be sent to Lipari from London. She also transmitted maps of the island and other documents that she smuggled out hidden in Mirtillino’s nappies. It was also necessary to transfer most of Carlo’s fortune abroad to finance the plan and to protect it from seizure by the authorities. After consulting with Nello, Riccardo Bauer put Marion in contact with the President of the Bank of Pisa, Senatore Della Torre, a friend of his family with antifascist leanings who made all the necessary arrangements to transfer Carlo’s assets abroad, in Switzerland and Great Britain.28 The prisoners and their friends in exile could now discuss the details of their plan. Marion wrote her father in England apparently innocent letters about their life on the island, but she copied all the instructions concerning the escape plan between the lines in sympathetic ink. Her father sent the letters to Paris and sent back the answers he received from Paris to Lipari using the same method. The islanders also scanned the English press that they received to spot possible messages in the form of circled letters in certain articles or ads. The method worked well in terms of security, but it was painstakingly slow and frustrating and a poor substitute for face-to-face discussion. It was essential that Marion go to Britain. To receive a passport, she asked her father to intervene with the Italian embassy in London explaining that her mother was seriously ill. After several attempts, she finally received the precious document and immediately set off for England with her baby son, reaching London on 24 June 1928.29 She had not been back to England since October 1922, when she had defended her master’s thesis. It was only six years, but it seemed like a lifetime. Her parents had grown older but had not changed much, pursuing their modest existence in the narrow confines of

Welcome to the ‘Escape Club’

101

Uxbridge, while she had gone through life-changing experiences. Her father wholeheartedly supported her political commitment, but there was not much in common between the tranquil municipal socialism he engaged in and the antifascist resistance she had embraced in full knowledge of the consequences. The changes went deeper. For good or bad, she identified so strongly with Italy that she felt totally estranged from her former British self. It was not so much a homecoming than her first trip to London ‘as a foreigner’ full of nostalgia for Italy and who thought of her new family there with ‘a lump in the throat’. ‘I am absolutely no longer English’, she wrote to Amelia on her first day in Britain.30 There had also been a major change in her financial circumstances. While her parents were used to counting every penny, she seemed to be able to spend freely for her own and her son’s comfort. She took rooms at the South Kensington Hotel on Queen’s Gate Terrace, and from there she resumed her contacts with Salvemini and Tarchiani who rushed to London as soon as he learned of her arrival. She did not know how long she would stay, but she had agreed with Carlo that she should closely monitor the preparations and remain until the rescuers received the green light. Her first contacts with Salvemini and Tarchiani were not very encouraging. There had been a lot of talk, but no concrete decisions. Salvemini insisted that Raffaele Rossetti, the hero from Pola, be put in charge of the technical part of the plan. His exploits during the war certainly spoke in his favour, but the more pragmatic Tarchiani was not convinced, since for this operation Rossetti would not have the support of the General Staff of the Navy as in 1918, but would have to rely on his sole initiative and know-how. He had therefore contacted Italo Oxilia who had successfully driven the boat that had transported Turati from Liguria to Corsica in 1926. Salvemini had prevailed in the end but Raffaele Rossetti seemed to have disappeared and he let things drag on until Marion’s arrival in Britain. Even then, he did not seem to understand the feeling of urgency that prevailed among the islanders and their friends in London who were all aware of the limited window of opportunity to carry out the plan.31 After the summer months, the foul weather would make it almost impossible to approach the island safely. There was another problem

102

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

with the boat. Salvemini had mentioned friends or allies who would lend a yacht, but when Marion and Tarchiani tried to meet them, they seemed to have vanished into thin air.32 It was clear that the preparations would take much longer than expected and Marion had to make practical arrangements for a prolonged stay and find an excuse to justify it to the Italian authorities. In the first days of July, in her letters to Carlo and Amelia, she started mentioning a serious illness contracted by her baby son who required a major treatment by specialists and a healthy environment to recover. In the following months, numerous letters to Florence and Lipari would document the evolution of Mirtillino’s health, while between the lines Marion would keep Carlo abreast of the infuriatingly slow preparation of the escape plan.33 During her first days in London, she had spent a lot of time with Salvemini and his circle of friends who were all supportive of the Italian antifascist struggle, in particular some young women who lent a hand to the escape plan. Marion already knew Ivy Marion Enthoven who had worked as a volunteer at the British Institute in Florence in 1925. Like her, she had graduated from Bedford College with a degree in Italian studies and was related to one of the numerous Anglo-Florentine families who, since the middle of the nineteenth century, had contributed to building a close relationship between the Tuscan capital and England. Thanks to these family connections she could travel with relative ease in Italy. She had been one of Salvemini’s envoys to Florence a few months earlier and had helped Marion with the transfer of Carlo’s assets abroad through bearer bonds.34 In the spring of 1927, she had created the Italian Refugees Relief Committee and worked closely with a similar group in Paris.35 She was the niece of Virginia Crawford, a well-known journalist and social worker who had met Salvemini through Don Sturzo and had founded with him the association Friends of Italian Freedom, a loose network that offered a meeting point to the different groups and individuals determined to support Italian antifascism. She also published a monthly journal, Italy Today, which became an important mouthpiece for exiled antifascists and British intellectuals critical of the Mussolini regime.36 Marion also met other women active in the antifascist circles, such as Isabella Massey from

Welcome to the ‘Escape Club’

103

Bedford College or Mari-Lou Peacop a French teacher who travelled regularly to Italy and France. So as not to attract too much attention to her presence in England, Marion decided to rent a house in Haslemere, a quaint village an hour away from London frequented by artists and intellectuals. She could monitor the preparations by mail, telephone, visits from the people involved and the occasional day trip to London, while spending a seemingly quiet and ‘normal’ holiday. ‘Cristina’ – her chosen name for this operation – was in almost daily contact with ‘Matilda’, alias Tarchiani, and both were getting really annoyed by the numerous excuses that delayed Jack’s – Rossetti – arrival. As for ‘Palloncino’ – Rosselli – he bombarded Marion with letters expressing his growing impatience and urging her to get things running. Rossetti finally turned up in England at the end of July and visited Marion in Haslemere. Despite her old friendship with him and his wife Maria, Marion was by then close to sharing Tarchiani’s doubts about the suitability of their choice of a captain, but she was anxious to speed up the plan and it was too late to change.37 Rossetti eventually reached Paris in mid-August and started looking for a boat, which was not an easy task for it had to be small, in order not to attract the attention of the coastguards, and at the same time have more than 800-mile autonomy to travel from Marseilles to Lipari and then from Lipari to the Tunisian coast. Rossetti took several weeks to find the Sigma IV in Sartrouville near Paris, and then decided to reach the Mediterranean Sea through the rivers and canals that criss-crossed France. Informed of this decision by ‘Matilda’, ‘Cristina’ was infuriated. She feared that a boat built for inland navigation would not hold at sea and thought that the long journey through France amounted to a sort of touristic cruise that could endanger the whole enterprise. She sent Rossetti an angry letter conveying her own bitterness as well as the anxiety of the prisoners.38 Marion’s worst fears were confirmed in the following weeks. Not only did the boat travel extremely slowly but it ran into serious mechanical problems halfway through the journey. Between the lines, her letters from Haslemere to Italy mentioning a relapse in Mirtillino’s condition informed Carlo of the many failures of the plan and his angry reactions added to her own anxiety.39 Her nervousness

104

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

was exacerbated by the presence of her parents whom she had invited to spend some time with her at Haslemere. There was no hiding that they had grown more estranged from her over the years as they lived in two completely different worlds. She confided in a letter to Marion Enthoven that ‘the presence here of my mother and father, whose life is so utterly outside mine, gives me a curious feeling of leading a double life, and makes me continually trip over the threads of one or other of them.’40 She left Haslemere in early September and went to stay with her sister Pat Lewis near Liverpool and another anxious wait ensued as, by the end of the month, it became clear that the engine of the boat would have to be changed. Despite the comforting company of her sister, Marion was more and more depressed by her prolonged stay in cold and grey Britain. She had not anticipated the growing dislike she felt for her native country nor how much she would miss her country of choice. She could no longer bear the melancholy of the sunless English sky. ‘I do not like England!’ she repeated in her letters to her mother-in-law.41 Despite the sadness that invaded her soul, Marion was desperately trying to hold both ends of the chain with the support of Tarchiani. She had to reassure the members of the escape club who waited with a feeling of anger and powerlessness and did not hide their rage at the amateurish plan of the hero of Pola.42 Together with Tarchiani, Marion put pressure on Rossetti but to no avail. Apart from sending more money and more furious letters, all she could do was hope that the mechanic would fix the boat before the bad winter weather set in. In his coded letters to her, ‘Palloncino’ insisted that mid-October was the last possible date, then settled for early November but by then, unbeknownst to him and Marion, the plan had gone adrift. Exasperated by Rossetti’s foul character, the mechanic simply disappeared. Then, as Marion had feared, when the boat finally reached Marseilles, it proved unseaworthy and nearly capsized. Rossetti telegraphed Tarchiani announcing that he was giving up, but it was too late to warn the members of the ‘escape club’. On the date previously agreed they waited in vain in the cold water until it became too risky and they had to rush back to answer the nightly roll call.43

Welcome to the ‘Escape Club’

105

Torn between her despair at the failure of the plan for which she rebuked Rossetti harshly and her joy of being soon reunited with Carlo, Marion prepared to leave England. ‘Despite everything’, she wrote to Amelia, ‘I have an insane desire to be in Italy.’44 Carlo was also impatient to see her and to resume their life as a happy family despite the terrible setback they had just experienced. Marion reached Italy on 30 November and stopped in Turin for a brief family reunion with Nello who was there for his research together with Maria and their baby girl Sylvia. She then spent a few days in Florence, ‘at home’ at last, before continuing her journey to Lipari where she landed on 10 December after a stormy crossing.45 Of course, the Rossellis and their friends were bitterly disappointed but by then they were used to making the best of a bad situation. The escape club did not disband. On the contrary, it immediately set up a new plan. This time they decided to trust seasoned craftsmen and sailors rather than the grandiose plans of a war hero whose glory had obviously faded. Luckily, Gioacchino Dolci, who had spent a year on Lipari, left the island in late December 1928 after completing his sentence. A gifted draughtsman, he took with him detailed maps of the island plus a first-hand knowledge of the coast and the surveillance system, and he immediately expatriated to France to prepare a second attempt with Tarchiani.46 Meanwhile, life resumed in the small community of the confinati who were, as usual, anxious to convince the authorities that they accepted their fate. So far, Marion and Carlo had been very good at deceiving their guardian angels with their intense exchange of letters about family, study, gardening, and they intended to continue doing so. In early January 1929, they organized a children’s party in their house for the feast of the Epiphany. Marion had asked Amelia to send dozens of small gifts, paint boxes, crayons, dolls, mechanic toys and plenty of candies for the more than 60 children who attended. They screamed with fear then laughed as a tall, dark Befana (good witch) appeared through the window with her basket of presents. Fausto Nitti had donned a long black dress and shawl for the occasion and played the part to perfection. There were sandwiches, pastries and cakes prepared by some talented confinati, music, games, and even fireworks at the end of the day.47

106

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

In the following months, days went by quietly between readings, gardening, long walks when the weather allowed it and Mirtillino’s charming smiles and happy babble.48 During Marion’s absence Carlo had decided to put down his ideas in a book that would draw a balance-sheet of the failed socialist movement and propose an alternative for the future that he summarized in the book’s title Liberal Socialism. It was a way for Carlo, who was not a theoretician, to compensate for his forced inactivity but also to prepare a platform to regroup future action groups when the escape plan succeeded. He spent most of the spring working on the book, carefully hiding the manuscript in the piano or even the rabbit hutch in the garden as writing about politics was strictly forbidden.49 To the island authorities, Carlo appeared as the ‘model prisoner’, and they wished that all the others were like him.50 Meanwhile, the members of the escape club were following the preparations in France. To reduce any suspicion that may arise as to their plans, they decided to set up an English study group to allow Lussu and Nitti to visit the Rossellis several times a week. Marion was their teacher and she took her job very seriously, convinced that a knowledge of English might prove useful for her students once in exile.51 In France, their friends were hard at work preparing a new escape plan that would greatly benefit from the lessons drawn from all the mistakes of the first one. This time, Italo Oxilia, a trained sailor with an extremely precise and methodical mind, would find the boat, assisted by Gioacchino Dolci and his detailed knowledge of everything concerning Lipari. On the Riviera, Oxilia eventually found the Dream V which belonged to an Egyptian prince. The boat was acquired by Mari-Lou Peacop in the name of ‘Lord’ Cave, Marion’s father being granted a title for additional security as the fascist agents in France were aware that something was in the offing. Oxilia and Dolci hired a French mechanic, Paul Vonin, and together they planned to take the Dream V first to Tunisia where Tarchiani would be waiting for them and then from Tunisia to Lipari. Two sets of dates had been agreed upon, between 5 and 7 July or 25 and 27 July, the two periods of moonless nights in July when it would be possible for the Dream V to approach the coast without drawing attention.52

Welcome to the ‘Escape Club’

107

On 23 June, Marion left Lipari with Mirtillino who had a bad fever, carrying a copy of Carlo’s manuscript in the child’s crib. As their friends accompanied her to the pier, Marion kissed Ester Parri and whispered in her ear that she was pregnant. ‘I’m going to have another baby, but I did not have the courage to tell Carlo. I’ll write to him.’ At such a decisive point in the plan, she did not want Carlo to be distracted by personal matters.53 She probably also thought that it was not the best of times to add a member to their family as they were embarking on an uncertain future, either in exile or in prison. Once informed, Carlo shared her misgivings. ‘Mummy tells me that [. . .] you are either delighted or tormented by the idea of a second Mirtillino on the way.’ He agreed that this was not the best of times, but he had decided ‘to be pleased.’54 As had been the case the previous year, in the daily letters between Carlo and Marion now in Florence, Mirtillino’s health were a cover up for anxious questions about the development of the escape plan.55 A few days to the first appointment Carlo was beginning to fear another failure. The Dream V had in fact accumulated a delay of several days during the crossing along the coasts of Corsica and Sardinia as Tarchiani telegrammed Marion. But it was too late to warn the prisoners and, once again, the three fugitives spent long, anguished minutes in the water before deciding to run home for the night roll call, disappointed and discouraged.56 Would the next attempt succeed? All the persons involved lived through the middle weeks of July in a state of anticipation and anguish. Tarchiani suffered from acute sciatica and left Tunis for the French Alps to cure it. The Dream V team remained in Tunisia, working on the last details and trying not to attract too much attention from the local authorities who seemed to be on the lookout for suspicious sailors. Marion followed the preparation as closely as possible and sought to reassure her accomplices from the escape club who could only wait and hope for the best. The second period of moonless nights approached and Tarchiani, still in pain, travelled back to Tunisia where the Dream V team was ready. And so were the prisoners as Marion informed him. They would be waiting on 25 July between 8.30 and 9.20 p.m., as agreed. Unfortunately, due to a rough sea, the Dream V could not leave Tunisia that day.

108

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

The three partners returned to the same spot on the coast the next evening and again waited in vain. On 27 July, in a state of despondency, the trio waited once more for the boat that did not appear. Lussu and Rosselli had already decided to go back home when Nitti heard the muffled noise of a motorboat and saw the agreed signal. He managed to catch up with his friends who rushed frantically back to the coast, dived fully dressed into the sea and boarded the Dream V. ‘Do you have guns?’ was the only question Lussu asked his rescuers and he smiled silently when they said yes.57 The Dream V sailed all night without running into major problems and reached the Tunisian coast the next day in the afternoon. The group would later describe the feeling of exhilaration that overwhelmed them, but on the photos taken aboard the boat they looked relaxed and serene. On another photo taken on land, the prisoners and their rescuers stood in the North African sun with dirty clothes and dishevelled hair and rather than extravagant joy, they offered an image of cool determination and dispassionate resolve.58 Of course, they were thrilled at having fooled the fascist authorities and regained their freedom. But they also felt the burden of new responsibilities and Rosselli expressed their thoughts upon landing on the barren coast of Tunisia: ‘All our thoughts are bent on the future. We mean to work, fight, and take up our post again in the struggle against fascism. Only on such terms do we feel justified in exchanging a prison in Italy for freedom in exile.’59 That evening, after drinking to the success of their adventurous escape with Rosselli and Lussu whom he met then for the first time, Tarchiani telegraphed to his wife the message she should send to Marion-Cristina, who was waiting at Courmayeur, in the Italian Alps, with her baby and her mother-in-law. The message was short but to the point, ‘All well, very glad’.60 She did not have much time to rejoice as the fascist authorities unleashed a frantic search for potential accomplices of the runaways on the island and the mainland. One of their first targets was Marion, whose many suspicious trips in Italy and abroad were considered as strong evidence of her participation to the enterprise. On 30 July, the prefecture of Aosta received the order from the Ministry of Interior to proceed at once ‘to the arrest of Signora Marion Rosselli, residing at Courmayeur, wife of the prisoner Carlo

Welcome to the ‘Escape Club’

109

Rosselli who has escaped from the colony of Lipari.’ A search of her villa and her person was ordered, and Marion was to be presented to the competent committee ‘to be sent to the confino for her complicity in facilitating her husband’s escape’.61 The arrest took place immediately and, although the police found no evidence in the villa or on her person, they locked Marion in the Aosta prison in a cell with petty criminals and prostitutes. Amelia did not spare her efforts to get her released. She informed the authorities that Marion was pregnant and suffered from a heart condition and that a stay in the foul atmosphere of the prison represented a serious risk for her health. The prefect of Aosta was responsive to her concerns and, after 48 hours, he informed the authorities in Rome that given the lack of adequate medical services in the prison he had decided to put Marion Rosselli under house arrest first in a hotel at Aosta and then at Courmayeur. Agents were stationed permanently at the door of the hotel. No-one was to approach her, and she was not allowed to communicate with anyone outside.62 At about the same time, Nello was arrested in Fiuggi, a holiday resort in the Latium where he was staying with his family, and transferred first to the prison of Frosinone, then to the penal island of Ustica and finally to Ponza at the end of August.63 During the trip from Algeria to Marseille, Tarchiani had noticed that despite the joyous atmosphere and intense political discussions, Carlo’s face often darkened at the thought of the reprisals that would most certainly hit his loved ones.64 The enthusiastic welcome the runaways received upon their arrival in Paris distracted him for a while from these sombre thoughts. On 1 August 1929, Rosselli, Lussu, Nitti, Dolci and Tarchiani arrived at the Gare de Lyon in Paris where they were met by Salvemini who had just returned from the United States, the old socialist leader Filippo Turati and Alberto Cianca, editor of the antifascist weekly La Liberta`. They all cheered the spectacular action that would surely fuel the hopes and energy of the antifascist opposition that had been stuck in the doldrums for some time. ‘With our arrival, it seemed that fascism had collapsed,’ noted Lussu about the exaggerated reactions to their exploit. For several days, they were caught up in a whirlwind of media interviews, parties, and political meetings, and Carlo did not try to contact

110

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

Marion until a week after his arrival and her arrest.65 Asking her forgiveness for the long silence, he gave her Turati’s address in Paris where she could send news. But there was no answer for the authorities intercepted the telegram; he tried again on 9 August, hoping the letter would reach its destination this time. Apparently, Amelia received it and could inform her son of what had happened to Marion and Nello.66 Amelia was supportive of her son’s political choices, but she had serious misgivings about his latest action. For one, she feared it would destroy Marion. She could visit her once in her hotel in Aosta and, writing afterwards to Nello, she expressed her concerns about her mental and physical health. ‘You can see that she is a woman who is well if she leads an absolutely tranquil life without any thoughts of any kind.’ Consequently, she drew severe conclusions about Carlo. ‘It surprises me and pains me even more that Carlo decided to choose such a desperate path, because whichever way you look at it, she is absolutely unable to support the painful and difficult consequences resulting from his action.’67 She was, of course, unaware of Marion’s participation to the escape club and totally misread her daughter-inlaw’s state of mind in a way that Marion would have probably found insulting. To be fair it must be said that, given the turbulent life of the young Rosselli couple, Amelia had had little opportunity to get to understand Marion’s personality and mindset. It might also be the case that she read the situation through the prism of her own state of mind and, always a little self-centred, she felt that with Carlo’s escape and Marion and Nello’s arrest fate had dealt her another bitter blow. ‘Fate has been so merciless with me,’ she complained to Nello, ‘that it is almost ludicrous. This is my reward for a life dedicated to duty and a constant search for lofty aspirations for me and my family.’68 Back in Paris, Carlo did not waste any time in mobilizing support to get Marion released. He took advantage of the presence in the French capital of the many British journalists who had come to interview him and his fellow escapees and informed them of the retaliatory measures the regime had launched against his wife and brother. Given Marion’s British birth, he rightly thought that a campaign for her release would be more efficient in her country of

Welcome to the ‘Escape Club’

111

origin, more so as Mussolini was very keen on maintaining good relations with London.69 Carlo also contacted their friends in England and urged them to develop a public protest campaign. In Italy, the authorities were speeding up the procedure to send Marion to the confino and she remained under strict police surveillance. Yet, Paolo Treves managed to visit her. He learned of Carlo’s successful escape and Marion’s arrest as he was spending a few days in the Alps near Courmayeur. Hiking on little known trails he managed to lose his own guardian angels before reaching the hotel where Marion was kept incommunicado. It was a busy holiday day with many tourists walking in and out of the place and Treves, dressed as a mountaineer, fooled the four agents standing at the entrance of the hotel and reached Marion’s door on the second floor. Amazed, Marion invited him in and they only had a few minutes to rejoice, exchange a few words about the situation and, after kissing the little boy, out he went again unnoticed by the police. Later, as he boarded a bus to return to his holiday resort he noticed Marion who had chosen this moment for her daily walk outside accompanied by two security agents. They exchanged a long look and a smile that was almost unnoticeable but whose message was clear to the two of them.70 Marion learned on 12 August that she would soon be leaving for the confino, but the massive press and diplomatic campaign under way in England started then in earnest and would soon seriously embarrass the fascist authorities and force them to suspend their decision. The main quality papers as well as the popular dailies all carried stories about the ‘English wife’ of an antifascist activist taken hostage by Mussolini. The story and a photo of Marion even made the front page of the Evening News.71 Many Liberal and Labour Party leaders questioned Mussolini’s action publicly. In addition, women organizations that, since World War I, had been campaigning for the repeal of the law on the nationality of married women joined in the campaign. The International Organization of University Women was holding a conference on this topic in Geneva to put pressure on the Society of Nations which was to convene the first conference on the alignment of international Law at The Hague the following year. Informed by Ernest Cave about

112

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

Marion’s fate, they immediately took up her case.72 Marion’s father was active on all fronts, giving interviews to the press, asking the support of various groups and questioning the Italian consul as to the situation of his daughter.73 Pressed from all sides, the Italian Ambassador seemed to fly off the handle as he was desperately trying to relay the contradictory messages arriving from Italy. Repeating what he heard from Rome, he tried to deny that Marion was under arrest but was challenged by the press and Marion’s father. From his point of view, things were getting out of hands and the arrest of a pregnant British woman in retaliation for her husband’s action appeared to be a catastrophic move for Italy’s image in Great Britain. The embarrassment of the Italian authorities appeared clearly in the nervous exchange or orders and counter-orders between the Minister of the Interior Arturo Bocchini, the prefect of Aosta and the Italian Ambassador in London. Until 14 August, all the messages referred to the ‘normal procedure’ engaged to send Marion Rosselli to the confino. But suddenly on 15 August, ‘after consulting with His Excellency the Head of Government [Mussolini]’, Bocchini ordered the Aosta prefect ‘to suspend the decision to send Rosselli Marion to the confino’ and to send her instead back ‘to her usual city of residence and submit her to strict surveillance’. The following message partially corrected this order: ‘She can go wherever she wants. Suspend constant surveillance but keep an eye on her’.74 The Italian Ambassador was submitted to relentless questioning from the British press. On 17 August, the Manchester Guardian even published an editorial on ‘The Rosselli Case’ which listed all the contradictory statements of the Embassy and questioned him directly about Marion Rosselli’s treatment. Exasperated, the Ambassador sent a long memorandum to the Minister of the Interior on 18 August blaming the mishandling of the ‘Rosselli Case’: In my telegrams, I have mentioned the consequences on English public opinion of the news sent from Paris about the arrest of the wife of the antifascist Rosselli who recently escaped from Lipari. The fact that she is English and that her parents are in this country has particularly moved and scandalized the British soul naturally prone to sentimentality and respectful of individual liberty. It has of course been

Welcome to the ‘Escape Club’

113

exploited to the utmost by the antifascists, but I have been told by many that they were not the only ones to have been upset by the incident.75

It was a surprise for him to count among those who expressed their discontent about the whole affair Luigi Villari, who had been one of the main pro-fascist propagandists in Britain since 1926. Exploiting to the full the intellectual prestige of his father, the historian Pasquale Villari, and the family connections of his English mother, the writer and translator Linda White, he had rapidly gained a considerable influence in important political and intellectual circles in Britain.76 Not surprisingly, he felt that the mishandling of the Rosselli Case clearly undermined his work on behalf of the regime and blamed the Italian authorities in no uncertain terms accusing them of using ‘the Bolsheviks’ methods’ and urging them to release Signora Rosselli.77 In this unpleasant Ambassador was the Marion’s former boss staunch supporter of

atmosphere, the only consolation of the support he received from Harold Goad, at the British Institute in Florence and a the Mussolini regime.78 He promised the

Ambassador he would inform the press about ‘the Rosselli woman whom he has known since she was Miss Cave and taught at the [British] Institute.’ He described her as a fanatic who ‘even before her marriage had expressed her anti-fascist sentiments in sensational fashion by travelling on purpose from Florence to Rome to lay a wreath on the very spot where Giacomo Matteotti had been abducted.’79 As a known supporter of the fascist regime, he was challenged to explain its actions even in the pages of the conservative weekly The Spectator and did not fail to support them resolutely.80 On 25 August, the Ministry of the Interior in Rome published a statement claiming that Marion Rosselli had not been arrested, but simply briefly questioned about her husband’s escape. Unfortunately for them, having finally been released, Marion managed to inform the British press, through her father, about what really happened.81 She also travelled to Milan to consult with her friends there. She obviously intended to join Carlo in Paris but had to decide the best way to do so. As the wife of an exile, suspected of

114

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

collaboration in his escape, she feared she would not receive a passport or would have to wait a very long time before obtaining the precious document. She would apply for one all the same and she asked her father to intervene once again with the Italian Embassy in London to support her request. As she informed Carlo in a long letter written in sympathetic ink on the pages of a novel by Tolstoy, she was also considering expatriating clandestinely and had discussed various possibilities with her friends in Milan. She learnt from ‘Accipicchia’ (Riccardo Bauer) that ‘the Via Battisti is ready and will be secure for just a month . . . . I could also use the Swiss route but after September.’ In the meantime, she had to clear their flat in Milan and arrange to transfer abroad what was left of their assets in Italy with the help of Marion Enthoven and Isabel Massey.82 Despite her fears, Marion was hopeful as she could measure the impact of the British campaign through the large numbers of letters she received from unknown supporters. Her fellow students from St Paul’s and Bedford College sent their support and she was also very surprised and touched to receive a long letter from Miss Margaret Tuke, Principal of Bedford College. As she was certain her correspondence was monitored she was never sure her letters reached their destination abroad.83 She could convey her gratitude for this support campaign through Mari-Lou Peacop who travelled to Courmayeur at the end of August and managed to meet Marion still waiting for a passport that was not forthcoming. She found her ‘in good spirit’ and impatient to move on.84 Meanwhile Marion kept in touch with Nello and the two veteran confinati exchanged friendly letters. ‘I think that in Ponza you’ll find a few good friends of mine. Give them my greetings,’ she wrote to him on 26 August. ‘I have transmitted your greetings to many friends who know you either personally or by reputation and they all send warm greetings,’ he answered a few days later.85 When she finally received her passport on 12 September, her last letter was for Nello with whom she had shared so much since their first meeting in 1923.86 When and where would they meet again, if they ever did, was one of the many questions she could not answer as she prepared to

Welcome to the ‘Escape Club’

115

leave Italy after 10 eventful years. Three months pregnant, with her two-year-old son and a few personal items, Marion crossed the border to France at Bourg Saint-Maurice in mid-September, not really knowing what awaited her except reunification with her husband and some of her political friends. Before boarding the train for Paris, she just had the time to send a reassuring telegram to Amelia.87

CHAPTER 7

New Beginnings: The Heroic Years (1929–31)

The media whirlwind that had surrounded the arrival of the fugitives from Lipari was only just subsiding when Marion and Mirtillino arrived at the Gare de Lyon and the young family was reunited in modest hotel rooms in northern Paris. After nearly two years of roaming between prison cells, confinement islands and cheap hotels, Carlo had admitted to Marion that he ‘longed for a home’,1 and he had been looking for a place – close to a park and to the centre of the city were his and Marion’s main specifications. They finally settled for a flat on the sixth floor of a modern building overlooking the Bois de Boulogne on the rue des Marronniers, not far from Salvemini’s residence when he was in Paris.2 Their furniture arrived rapidly from Milan and the Rossellis strove to establish a semblance of normalcy in an otherwise uncertain situation. There is a built-in tension in all exilic experiences between the desire to return home as soon as the context will allow and the need to adapt to life in the host country. The strength of the tension depends on the rapidity of the expected change at home and, in these early months, the Rossellis and their friends were rather optimistic. The flight from Lipari had exposed a certain vulnerability of the dictatorship and brought new blood committed to reinvigorating the forces of the opposition abroad. As soon as she arrived, Marion was

New Beginnings

117

caught up in a flurry of meetings and heartfelt reunions with friends and companions of recent battles in Italy. The spies of the fascist police, who were numerous in Paris, sensed the changing mood among the fuorusciti, as the exiled antifascists chose to call themselves – appropriating as a badge of honour the disparaging fascist term for those who left Italy – and informed Rome: In those subversive political circles, one hears that Mrs Rosselli, wife of the famous fugitive, who has arrived in Paris with a regular passport, intends to run an intellectual and political salon open to all the emigrants and friends of the cause of Italian freedom, while her husband will develop an ambitious programme of propaganda and infiltration among the educated classes [. . .]. They have at their disposal large sums of money, many acquaintances and people sympathetic to their cause and, with such support, they hope to create a vast movement against our regime.3

Although wrong on most of the specifics, the message conveyed both the optimistic mood that seemed to prevail among the antifascist exiles and the concerns of the regime for the potential threat represented by the couple who had recently ridiculed the dictatorship and fired the political imagination of many Italians who had settled in the French capital. Between the economic immigrants and the political exiles, there were about 150,000 Italians in the Paris region and 50,000 in Paris itself. Large groups had also settled in other parts of France, bringing the total Italian population to about one million by 1930. France was therefore bound to become an important battleground for the fascist forces determined to control the large Italian population abroad and the antifascist groups equally eager to rally their exiled compatriots against the regime.4 Many opposition party leaders had left Italy and settled in Paris; those who chose Belgium, Switzerland or England travelled regularly to the French capital. The former Prime Minister Francesco Nitti lived in rue Vavin on the Left Bank and his salon was generously open to less fortunate refugees. Carlo Sforza, former Foreign Secretary had settled in Brussels. The historian Guglielmo Ferrero, close friend of the Rosselli family, had accepted a university position in Geneva. Different members of the Republican Party had also settled in Switzerland, such as Cipriano Facchinetti, Egidio Reale and Randolfo

118

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

Pacciardi. Don Luigi Sturzo, founder of the Catholic Popular Party, forced into exile by the Vatican, had settled in London.5 The young socialist activist Giuseppe Saragat and the journalists Alberto Tarchiani and Alberto Cianca had settled in the French capital and were soon joined there, after the super-fascist legislation of November 1926, by the major socialist leaders such as Pietro Nenni, Filippo Turati, Claudio Treves and his son Paolo, the MP Giuseppe Modigliani (brother of the famous painter Amedeo), the tradeunionist Bruno Buozzi and many other lesser known activists who had been frequent visitors at via Borghetto.6 The republican Raffaele Rossetti had also reached Paris and he was reconciled with the Rossellis after his catastrophic handling of Carlo’s first escape attempt.7 Before Marion’s arrival in Paris, Rosselli had realized that the Italian opposition forces in exile had simply fallen back on the political arrangements of the Aventine Secession that he had so bitterly criticized in Italy. In addition to the Lega Italiana dei diriti dell’uomo (LIDU – Italian Human Rights League), created in 1922 by the left-wing journalist Luigi Campolonghi, the exiled leaders of the Aventine Parties had formed the Concentrazione Anti-fascista (Antifascist Concentration), which took the form of a cartel of organizations: the two Socialist Parties (Nenni’s PSI and Turati and Treves’ PSLI), the Republican Party, the CGIL (Bruno Buozzi’s trade union federation) and the LIDU.8 The new umbrella organization did not have any ambitious social programme and did not propose any action in Italy, limiting its work to the denunciation of fascism in its weekly La Liberta`, edited by Claudio Treves, and the organization of various anniversaries and cultural events.9 It was what he saw as a repetition of the passivity and moderation of the opposition during the rise of fascism that led Carlo Rosselli to speed up the formation of a new political movement that would operate a clear break with both the pre-fascist political world and the spirit of the Aventine Secession. Between the landing of the Lipari fugitives in early August and Marion’s arrival in mid-September, intense meetings took place between the three fugitives and a number of people who shared their understanding of the urgency of political renewal and action.10 The driving intellectual force behind

New Beginnings

119

the movement was Carlo Rosselli who brought to it his ‘heretic socialism’ with a libertarian streak in line with the reflections that he had started to put to paper at Lipari in what would be published in 1930 under the title Liberal Socialism. Gaetano Salvemini, who had for some times argued that the only useful action for the antifascists abroad was to influence the democratic powers to act against the Mussolini regime, felt invigorated by the youthful energy of Rosselli and his friends and lent his support to their endeavour that found its political and practical inspiration in the Mazzinian movement.11 The Republicans Raffaele Rossetti, Cipriano Facchinetti and Fernando Schiavetti also supported the new group because of its principled opposition to the monarchy. Alberto Tarchiani combined a moderate liberal ideology to a ruthless determination to use any means, even violence if necessary, to bring down the fascist regime. Alberto Cianca was a democrat who, like Marion, had been close to Giovanni Amendola whose newspaper, Il Mondo, he had edited in Rome until it was suspended. Although a moderate, he too was ready to work with anyone and use any means to defeat Mussolini.12 Emilio Lussu was a radical democrat with socialist leanings and, coming from Sardinia, he brought to the movement the notion of a decentralized state and regional autonomies. The name of the movement, Giustizia e Liberta`, borrowed from one of Carducci’s poems, encapsulated its programme; its motto ‘Insorgere, Risorgere’ (‘Revolt, Rise Again’), suggested by Lussu, was a call to action, as was its symbol, a flaming sword.13 It was a motley group of democratic socialists, radical republicans and liberals, but its members had decided to play down their ideological differences and build a movement on their shared desire to act against the dictatorship as the first clandestine issue of Giustizia e Liberta` that reached Italy in November 1929 explained. ‘Coming from different political currents, we have decided for the time being to archive our party membership cards and to promote a unity of action. A Revolutionary Movement, not a party. Giustizia e Liberta` is its name and its symbol. Republicans, socialists and democrats, we are fighting for freedom, for the Republic, and for social justice. We are not three different trends but an indivisible trinomial’.14 The group was united around a number of principles rather than a fully

120

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

developed programme. The republican ideal, the conviction that the liberation of Italy should be the work of Italians and the belief in the indissoluble link between social justice and political liberty.15 In the tradition of the radical movements of the Risorgimento, the group believed in propaganda by deeds and they were convinced that a dedicated minority of fearless individuals would eventually succeed in awakening the masses and spur them into revolutionary action.16 Fueled by Carlo’s voluntarism and financed by his fortune, by the end of 1929 Giustizia e Liberta` (GL) was ready to launch its open conspiracy. ‘Plots, attacks, insurrection, revolution, we thought of nothing else in the first years of exile’ Lussu recalled.17 All their attention was focused on the need to establish political centers in Italy, using the nucleus of like-minded people who had remained there. The two main groups of GL were in Milan, around Ernesto Rossi, Riccardo Bauer, Ferrucio Parri and Umberto Ceva, and in Turin around Leone Ginsburg, Carlo Levi, Aldo Garosci, Ada Gobetti, Barbara Allason, Vittorio Foa`. Connections were also established with friendly individuals scattered around the country, such as Max Salvadori in Rome or Nello Traquandi in Florence.18 ‘The Paris years must have been her finest because she so loved politics.’ Remembering Marion at the time of her death in 1949, Ester Parri, who had been at the confino with her, surmised that freed at last from police surveillance and censorship she would have thrown herself with delight into the political struggle.19 This was only partly true though for, in that domain, the Paris years proved to be a roller coaster of excitement and disappointment for Marion Cave Rosselli. She was a seasoned activist and intended to continue the struggle against the dictatorship in exile. But what form would the struggle take in these new circumstances? This was a question that tormented all the exiles who were caught up between their newly-found freedom and security abroad and the urge to act in support of the opposition at home. But this was also a question that affected men and women differently. Very early on, it became clear that among the many adjustments required by life in exile, there would be a need for continuous renegotiations of political and family duties and responsibilities between husband and wife.20

New Beginnings

121

Nothing had been traditional in Carlo and Marion’s first years of life together, neither the form of their political engagement nor their life as a couple. Shared activism and the urgency of the period had tended to blur the traditional division of roles within the family. But these had been exceptional circumstances; at least this was Carlo’s opinion, shared by most of the male leaders of Giustizia e Liberta`.21 Already in Milan, at the time of the Quarto Stato, there had been a clear tendency to reserve the sphere of lofty political discussions to the men within the movement. It became clear in Paris that if life in exile was to bring back a degree of normalcy, it would lead to a return to more traditional political and family arrangements, and in the years to come Marion would be caught in a tug of war between her desire to pursue her political engagement against the dictatorship and Carlo’s conviction that her role was essentially to support and facilitate his own political activity. At the same time, life in exile could never be entirely conventional. It did not allow for a clear distinction between the public sphere of politics and the private sphere of home and family. Political discussions and action planning often took place within the private circles of friends and family and, as had been the case in Milan, the Rosselli home in Paris soon became a center of activism in which Marion participated fully as all her friends remembered and OVRA agents testified.22 ‘Plots, attacks, insurrection, revolution. . .’ – this was the kind of politics that had always attracted Marion and she wholeheartedly embraced the conspiratorial nature of the new organization that would differentiate it from the other exiled groups. Soon after her arrival in Paris, Giustizia e Liberta` demonstrated its impetuous desire to strike at the dictatorship by any possible means when it lent its support to the attempted assassination of the heir to the Italian throne who was visiting Brussels for his engagement to a Belgian princess. The plot, carried out on 24 October, was not initiated by GL but by Fernando De Rosa, a young member of Nenni’s Socialist Party. When informed of the plan, not only did GL not discourage De Rosa, but it provided him with some logistical support.23 Although the plan failed, it was publicized by the sector of the antifascist opposition that embraced the politics of spectacular gestures as a legitimate way of opposing the dictatorship that had suppressed all legal forms of

122

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

opposition.24 Giustizia e Liberta` was also very active in the organization of De Rosa’s defense and as one of the most recent victim of fascist oppression to come out of Italy, Marion would be a major witness at his trial a few months later.25 In the meantime, while Marion was trying to organize their new home and family life, Carlo was seizing every opportunity to publicize the antifascist cause, accepting numerous invitations to speak in France and Great Britain. Although not in possession of an Italian passport, he received the authorization to visit Britain as he was considered by the Home Office as a ‘prominent antifascist with many influential friends in this country’.26 He spent a couple of weeks in England at the end of November and beginning of December during which he presented his views on the Mussolini regime at the National Liberal Club, the 1917 Club and other venues in London, Cambridge and Oxford. He met prominent public figures and he was also interviewed by various newspapers.27 Through Marion Enthoven, he also met the members of the informal antifascist network who had helped Marion during the preparations of the escape from Lipari.28 He had wanted Marion to join him on this trip, for the pleasure of visiting her native country with her of course, but also because he was not very familiar with the London political scene and was still not fluent in English. ‘When Marion joins you, she’ll cause quite a stir’, wrote Salvemini from Paris for he believed that she would shine in the left-liberal circles he frequented in London.29 Marion had looked forward to this trip, but nearly six months pregnant she feared it would be too exhausting for her.30 He accepted her choice to remain in Paris from where she followed his daily speeches reported in the press or in friends’ letters and rejoiced at the improvement of his public speaking skills. She also advised him on English texts to use in his lectures. For the Ethical Society, she suggested Aeropagitica from John Milton. ‘It is a defence of press freedom and, if I remember well, there is also a beautiful passage on liberty in general and the language is superb.’31 At the same time, she found this vicarious participation in Carlo’s political tour frustrating. ‘I feel disheartened and disfigured’ she wrote to him on 30 November. ‘The other day I was surrounded by

New Beginnings

123

people who felt, and made me feel, that my only mission was to produce a baby [. . .] This sharp division of labour, certainly just and inevitable, makes me feel even more my incapability [. . .] What a contrast with your super active life.’32 And again a few days later. ‘My poor autonomy, dear Carlino. It seems to me it no longer exists, or at least it has been suspended for the moment.’33 No doubt this despondency was the result of an unwanted and difficult pregnancy that put her fragile health at risk, but it also expressed her growing awareness of the division of labour that was gradually being established within their couple. In addition, this trip to London would also be the first time Carlo met her family and she felt quite anxious about his reaction to the social and cultural differences with his refined and privileged milieu. She had painted a rather gloomy picture of her family environment. ‘Has Uxbridge managed to depress you? Can you imagine such an intolerable life?’ A second letter sent a few hours later testified to her growing anxiety. ‘The general impression from Uxbridge must have been disastrous [. . .] But do you still love me all the same?’ Carlo reacted light-heartedly, or maybe politely, to her concerns. ‘I really did not feel the oppressive atmosphere that you announced,’ he wrote after his visit.34 It seemed clear, however, that shorter distance and freedom of movement would not favour closer ties between Marion and her English family from which she had been estranged for 10 years now, both geographically and culturally. As 1929 ended, Marion and Carlo could look back at an eventful year, a year of new beginnings and redefinitions, rich in exciting political prospects and emerging tensions. To remind them that life in exile would never be plain sailing, on New Year’s Eve they received the visit of the French political police which conducted a full-scale security search of their flat. Tarchiani and Cianca underwent the same treatment and were even put under arrest for allegedly plotting terrorist attacks against Italian targets. Only Cianca was charged and sent to prison after the police found seven crates of cheddite and several detonators and fuses in his flat. This was the first of numerous attempts by fascist agent provocateurs to silence the vocal opposition of GL.35 After more than three months in jail, Cianca was tried and cleared of all the charges, but the fear of arrest and expulsion from the

124

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

French territory would now hang like a sword of Damocles over the members of Giustizia e Liberta`. Indeed, the authorities decided that Cianca, Tarchiani, Rosselli and Lussu should be deported from France as they did not seem to abide by the 1928 police ruling that regulated the presence of Italian refugees on the French territory and strictly forbade any form of political activity.36 The leaders of Giustizia e Liberta` had influential friends in France, among the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme and the French Socialist Party (SFIO), and it was apparently an intervention by the Socialist leader Le´on Blum that convinced the police to suspend the deportation order. But they now had to get their residence permits renewed every three months37. While Carlo and Marion had to adjust to these new constraints, they also tried to keep in regular contact with the rest of the family in Italy, but it was not easy to maintain the closeness offered by physical proximity and almost daily contact. The problems did not come only from the constant surveillance of their mail or the difficulty for Amelia and Nello to obtain a passport to travel abroad, but also from the very different lifestyles of the two branches of the family. They shared a similar opposition to the regime, but Amelia, Nello and Maria certainly did not have the same passion for politics as Carlo and Marion whose every decision was influenced by their engagement against the dictatorship. Always strongly attached to her privileged lifestyle, Amelia was not prepared to alter her social habits, but she also placed her children above everything else and would be very instrumental in trying to establish a virtual family network through extensive letter writing and regular visits to Paris. ‘I hope you will write often to keep me as much as possible informed about your life, from which I have been unfortunately – or should I say, in a certain sense, fortunately – cut off. I do not always manage to separate these two contradictory feelings’, she wrote to Marion after her departure for France.38 Nello was supportive of Carlo and Marion’s choices, but his was a more contemplative personality and he opted for withdrawal from public life, focusing on his historical research. After the publication of his thesis, Mazzini and Bakunin, he had been admitted as a member of the School of Modern and Contemporary History presided by Gioacchino Volpe. The famous historian supported the regime but also lent his support to gifted

New Beginnings

125

researchers regardless of their political opinion and he intervened to obtain Nello’s release from the confino in 1928.39 He, too, would strive to maintain close links with his brother and sister-in-law, and would even support their action financially but, like Amelia, he would always be cut off from an important, maybe the most important, part of Carlo and Marion’s life. When Marion left Italy in mid-September 1929, Nello was still at Ponza where he had been banished for five years for his alleged participation in his brother’s escape. Many letters of protests were published in the British press and sent to the Italian authorities by prominent British intellectuals such as Bolton King and Gilbert Murray. Once again, Gioacchino Volpe secured his release and his reintegration in the School of Modern and Contemporary History with a program of research on the relationships between Great Britain and Italy during the Risorgimento. Volpe also convinced the Duce to grant him a passport for Great Britain. In June 1930, Nello arrived in London where he planned to spend an entire year and was soon joined there by his wife Maria and his mother.40 Freed from the repressive grip of the dictatorship – but not from surveillance by OVRA agents abroad – , for a while the Rosselli family could resume the warm and frank epistolary exchanges that had always characterized their relationships. The aggrandizement of the family with Nello’s second daughter Paola, born in November 1929 and Marion and Carlo’s second child, Amelia, born in March 1930 were occasions for rejoicing. Yet, despite their eagerness to do so, neither Nello nor Amelia would be able to travel to Paris before the spring of 1931.41 Amelia – who was called Melina – was born on 28 March 1930. The delivery went smoothly, without too much strain on Marion’s heart, yet she soon felt the consequences of her difficult pregnancy. She had to remain in the clinic for several weeks and the doctors warned her against a new pregnancy, which could seriously endanger her life.42 When she returned home, while dealing with many household problems such as finding suitable help for the children, she was caught up in the excitement of the preparation of a new ‘coup’ by Giustizia e Liberta`. Upon Cianca’s release from prison at the end of March 1930, he was contacted by Giovanni Bassanesi, a young photographer member

126

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

of the LIDU, who had taught himself how to fly an aeroplane. He proposed to fly over Milan and drop antifascist propaganda flyers on the city, a feat that would remind Italians of a similar flight organized by Gabriele D’Annunzio with a fleet of 10 aircrafts over Vienna in February 1918.43 Always on the look-out for dramatic actions likely to shake Italians out of their torpor and arouse the ire of the dictatorship, GL enthusiastically embraced his project and provided him with the help he needed. Rosselli financed the purchase of the small tourist airplane and helped write and print the leaflets. Gioachino Dolci was asked to second Bassanesi in carrying out the enterprise. The plane would depart from the Swiss canton of Ticino, chosen for its proximity to the northern Italian border, and the Republican Rodolfo Pacciardi, exiled in Switzerland, cleared technical matters locally.44 In early July, while the GL team was putting the final touch to the preparations, Marion left for Chamonix where she would spend the summer months with her children. Chamonix was halfway between Paris and the canton of Ticino and an easy stop-over on the way to the take-off site. As Bassanesi and a second pilot flew the plane from France to Switzerland, on 7 July Carlo, Tarchiani and Dolci left Paris by car and stopped for a couple of days at Chamonix where Marion was waiting for them in a chalet outside the town. The calm provided by the surrounding Alps summits and a cooling mountain stream in the garden was misleading. The atmosphere was a mix of excitement and anxiety remindful of the feverish days that led to the escape from Lipari. On 9 July, Carlo, Dolci and Tarchiani left for Switzerland and contacted several Swiss socialist activists who lent a hand for the final preparations.45 Carlo and Tarchiani watched the airplane take off in the late morning on 11 July, and immediately drove back to Chamonix where, together with Marion, they waited to hear about the outcome of the expedition. Marion did not have any doubt, imagining her old accomplice from the Lipari days, ‘happy and ironic’, looking like “a good Mephistopheles’ when he dropped his political cargo from the skies of Milan. She was not far from the truth.46 Around noon, when most people were out in the streets for lunch, the plane approached the centre of Milan and swooped down on the piazza del Duomo. Dolci then dropped tens of thousands of leaflets

New Beginnings

127

that blanketed the square and the nearby streets where thousands of people picked them up. Bassanesi and Dolci flew back to Ticino where they landed before the airplanes of the Italian military defence had taken off.47 After dropping Dolci, Bassanesi flew on towards Zurich, but he was caught in a storm over the Gotthard Mountain; his plane crashed and he was taken to the Military Hospital in Andermatt with a broken leg.48 While Bassanesi’s injuries were not too serious, the crash drew the attention of the Swiss authorities who decided to sue the perpetrators of the flight and their accomplices for violation of Swiss air space. This did not dampen the enthusiasm of the GL members who were delighted with the success of the flight, and the wide coverage it received reinforced their organization’s reputation as a bold opponent to the dictatorship. They also felt the trial, to be held at the end of the year in Lugano, in Italian, would offer them an important platform from which to denounce Mussolini.49 Eager to build on the success of the flight over Milan, Carlo spent most of the summer in Paris, leaving Marion alone with the children in Chamonix where he visited her two or three times only. To keep her busy, he had suggested she wrote her autobiography recounting her experience of the rise of the fascist dictatorship. But she was dissatisfied with the results, expressing an autobiographical modesty typical of so many antifascist women exiles. Compared with the magnitude of the broader political events, ‘my small personal role seems so ridiculous’ she complained to Carlo.50 After the shared excitement of the previous months, she resented being cut off from the activist milieu and confined to her maternal duties. At the end of July, despite all the doctors’ warnings, she learnt that she was again pregnant, which must have further contributed to her restlessness. There were angry exchanges between her and Carlo whom she blamed for leaving her alone with sole responsibility for their family. ‘I’m not happy at all, dear Carlo’, she wrote on 20 August. ‘I’m sick of paper kisses. I’m infuriated.’ Carlo answered in a similar vein: Why are you so angry with me? What have I done? You have always understood the importance of my activity, so I think you’ve had a small breakdown due to your pregnancy [. . .]. Accept me as I am. Yes, I know, the terrible work in which we are engaged leads me to neglect my

128

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

family. But, after all, this is a sacred task, for which, as you yourself acknowledge, everything must be sacrificed, except the health of the children.51

All the same, he travelled down to Chamonix to mend things with Marion. As on previous occasions, they were easily reconciled, but on Carlo’s terms. ‘I was deeply moved when I left you last night. And, believe me, not just for the generous thrust that leads you to understand the tough duties which have been laid on me’.52 It was clearly a one-way understanding, for Carlo seemed blind to the fact that, in addition to being fully supportive of his choices, Marion would have also liked to take her share of his ‘tough duties’. Back in Paris, she could immerse herself again in the antifascist struggle. Indeed, she was to be one of the major witnesses for the defence at Ferdinando De Rosa’s trial in Brussels in the last days of September. De Rosa’s defence was organized by Paul-Henri Spaak, a brilliant lawyer and socialist politician. He clearly opted for a political defence which aimed to demonstrate the impossibility to oppose the Italian regime legally. Marion was the only woman to testify alongside some of the most famous representatives of the antifascist opposition abroad: Filippo Turati, Gaetano Salvemini, Silvio Trentin, Alberto Tarchiani, Pietro Nenni. She was called to the bar immediately after the former Prime Minister Francesco Saverio Nitti, and she testified at length about the violence that accompanied the establishment of the dictatorship, from the bloody days of October 1925 in Florence, to the murderous fury that followed the November 1926 attack on Mussolini in Bologna, to her own arrest and detention after the flight from Lipari. Her testimony vividly captured the atmosphere inside Italy and it figured prominently in all the accounts of the case.53 The trial was deemed a success for the antifascists, as the defence clearly exposed the regime as being outlaw and De Rosa was sentenced to a rather light punishment of five years – of which he would serve only two.54 Unfortunately, they did not have much time to celebrate. Shortly after their return to the French capital, they learned of the arrest of 24 members of the GL group in Milan, among whom were their closest friends Ernesto Rossi, Riccardo Bauer, Umberto Ceva, Ferruccio Parri and Nello Traquandi. Once again, this was the result of the

New Beginnings

129

infiltration of an agent provocateur from the OVRA inside GL. Carlo Del Re had approached the Milan group and, under the guidance of the chief of the fascist police, Arturo Bocchini, had convinced them to prepare violent attacks on official targets in Italy. They went along with his plans, but the actions were suspended after a friendly civil servant informed Riccardo Bauer that the police had infiltrated two agents in the GL group. Fearing the exposure of their agent and the failure of their carefully prepared operation, the police decided to round up the members of GL in Milan and the region on 30 October.55 It was a devastating blow for Giustizia e Liberta` because the Milan group was the largest, best organized and most experienced team they had inside Italy. It was a personal tragedy for the activists and their families, as the arrested members of GL would be tried by the Special Tribunal and risked long prison sentences and even the death penalty. It was also a harrowing ordeal for their friends abroad who felt both guilty and helpless, secure in their exile but deprived of any real means of influencing the fate of the prisoners. Their helplessness was clear to all when they confronted Carlo Del Re who had the audacity to contact them in Paris. During a long questioning session at the Rossellis’, they forced him to admit his culpability but had to let him go for they did not have the means to punish him.56 Apart from their political dimension, the arrests affected Marion and Carlo personally as they struck some of their oldest and dearest companions. Their friendship with Ernesto Rossi and Nello Traquandi went back to the early days of their anti-fascist engagement in Florence. Ferrucio Parri and Riccardo Bauer had been their closest allies in Milan and they had spent time at the confino with them. Marion was very close to Umberto Ceva, the young chemist from Pavia who had taught her many tricks to escape police surveillance at the time of the Savona trial and the preparation of the escape from Lipari. The tragedy could only reinforce their determination to publicize the misdeeds of the dictatorship abroad and try to bring pressure on the Italian authorities to lessen the sentences. The first occasion was the Bassanesi trial which opened in mid-November for five days at Lugano. Bassanesi, who had waited for the trial in a Swiss prison, Carlo Rosseli, Alberto Tarchiani and some

130

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

of their local supporters were in the dock; Vincent de Moro-Giafferi, a rising star of the French bar, defended them; internationally-known antifascist figures such as Filippo Turati and Count Carlo Sforza testified for the defence. The accused and their friends clearly intended to seize the occasion to put the fascist regime on trial and hoped to catch the attention of international public opinion as numerous foreign journalists flocked to Lugano.57 The line of defence was the same as the one adopted at the De Rosa trial in Brussels two months earlier. No legal means existed in Italy for people to express their dissent, therefore the opponents to the dictatorship could legitimately use any available means at their disposal to publicize their concerns. As in the Savona trial three years earlier, it was Rosselli’s lyrical and forceful statement that caught the attention of the audience and the press. I had a home: they destroyed it. I had a newspaper: they suppressed it. I had a professorship: I had to abandon it. I had, as I still have today, ideas, dignity, an ideal: to defend them I had to go to prison. I had teachers and friends – Amendola, Matteotti, Gobetti – they killed them.58

The defence carried the day since Bassanesi was sentenced to four months in prison – which he had already served – and Rosselli, Tarchiani and their Swiss friends were acquitted. The enthusiastic applause that welcomed the sentence was reminiscent of the conclusion of the Savona trial. The celebratory atmosphere lasted for several days both in Switzerland and Paris.59 It was important to take full advantage of the outcome of the trial to rally support against the dictatorship and, given her exalted temperament, Marion fully shared in the over-optimistic climate created by the Bassanesi trial. She was active in informing their friends and allies in England about the victory scored at Lugano and in rallying support for the coming trial of their friends in front of the Special Tribunal. In such a heated climate, she did not have much time for discussing trivial family matters. A bit disheartened, Amelia conceded from London ‘Of course, I understand that with you two caught up in such an atmosphere, my concerns regarding my visit must seem rather petty to you.’ And she postponed her visit to Paris for a couple of months.60

New Beginnings

131

Once again, the celebration was short-lived. Over Christmas, Marion and Carlo learnt the tragic news of Umberto Ceva’s suicide in cell n8 440 at the Regina Coeli prison in Rome. On Christmas Eve, certain that he would be sentenced to death because of the evidence about his role in fabricating the explosives and not wanting to betray his friends under torture, he took his life by swallowing a mixture of solid combustible and broken glass.61 The shock was tremendous as Ceva was the first of their group to die for the cause in such a tragic fashion. There was a protest campaign and an appeal by major intellectuals in the British and French press. The largest number of protesters came from Great Britain. On New Year’s Day 1931 in the Manchester Guardian, numerous personalities questioned the methods of the Special Tribunal and called for a fair trial: Arnold Toynbee, Bolton King, H.W. Seton Watson, Leonard Woolf, the Bishop of Birmingham, the Secretary of the Trade Union Congress. Marion, who had gained some notoriety in England after her arrest in 1929, published an article on Umberto Ceva’s suicide in the Manchester Guardian, to illustrate the human consequences of the political drama unfolding in Italy and correct the fascist authorities’ claim that Ceva had insisted that no political meaning should be assigned to his suicide.62 Apart from these relentless but modest efforts to try to rouse public opinion and draw the attention of democratic governments, there was not much else the exiles could do. In this tense atmosphere, carrying on with normal life was both difficult and necessary. The Rossellis had two small children plus a third one on the way and their flat in Passy was becoming too small, if one added the live-in nanny and housemaid they employed. They set their choice on the Latin Quarter ‘so much more welcoming and closer to our spirit than philistine Passy’, Carlo wrote to his mother.63 They found a large and elegant flat on the Place du Panthe´on in the 5th arrondissement. It was close to the Luxemburg Gardens, the Sorbonne and various e´lite institutions of higher education such as the Ecole Normale Supe´rieure or the Colle`ge de France, and nearby Saint-Germain-des-Pre´s was home to the most prestigious publishing houses and reviews. The flat was on the third floor of a building constructed recently and the Rossellis were enchanted with it and with their new surroundings.64 The flat was also large enough to

132

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

accommodate visiting family members and Amelia, Nello and Maria came to stay in February 1931, Nello and Maria for a few days, Amelia for the whole month.65 It was an emotional family reunification as for the first time for several years the Rossellis could actually talk freely about their lives and their concerns if not their plans given the uncertainty of the situation. Amelia and Nello could also have a glimpse of Carlo and Marion’s life in exile, this unusual combination of affluent bourgeois environment and intense political activism that surprised so many of their visitors.66 Andrea was born on 12 March 1931, almost exactly one year after Melina. The last weeks of pregnancy were particularly painful for Marion and she had once again to recover in a clinic for several weeks before moving to Cap d’Antibes with the children to rest. Having sent his family away, at the end of April Carlo left for Spain with Tarchiani and Bassanesi to establish contacts with the newly-formed Republican government. They made a second trip to Spain in May, but nothing came out of it.67 Away from Paris and with scarce communication from Carlo, Marion felt once again cut off from the activist milieu and neglected by her husband despite his soothing declarations of love.68 He paid her a rapid visit between his two trips to Spain but kept her in ignorance of the latest developments regarding GL. ‘I envy you your absence of concern for the people you are away from,’ she wrote to him from Cap d’Antibes, adding with a bit of self-pity ‘Poor Marionellina. She is really cut off from everything.’ She complained that he had not informed her of the latest blow suffered by GL when Le´o Moulin, a young Belgian professor who had offered to transport GL documents to Italy, was arrested leading to the imprisonment of additional members from the Milan group.69 But once again, her complaints fell on deaf ears and Carlo made no secrets of what her role should be. ‘Do you want to get back to be the nice little girl and the clever, competent mummy? Then face the necessary sacrifices!’ was his blunt answer to her complaints. And once more, he claimed for himself the sole responsibility of the political struggle which justified the limited time and attention he devoted to his family.70 Marion proved again to be understanding while not giving up: ‘You’re absolutely right, dear Carlo, and as far as the struggle and your duties are concerned,

New Beginnings

133

I have never thought differently from you. I should say “our duties,” because I would like to share in your responsibilities and activities. That’s why I was looking forward to returning to Paris.’71 Another reconciliation ensued when she did return to Paris where, together with the other antifascists, she waited anxiously for the results of the trial of the Milan group to be held on 29 and 30 May. The shadow of death hung over the impending trial as Mussolini was determined to silence the opposition in Italy. The GL group obviously had influential friends around Europe and the press campaign on their behalf had both infuriated and worried Mussolini. A summary judgement by the Special Tribunal followed by executions would seriously damage the image of the regime abroad – so, no death sentences this time, but harsh condemnations all the same. Bauer and Rossi were locked up behind bars for 20 years. Parri was acquitted for lack of evidence but in a second trial in June Nello Traquandi was sentenced to seven years in prison and other members received shorter sentences. Inevitably, this threat for the remaining forces of the organization in Italy triggered a discussion about the strategy of spectacular gestures that had characterized the action of GL from the beginning. As in the other antifascist organizations, in GL strategic thinking was the exclusive domain of men members and Marion did not participate in the formal debates.72 If she actively took part in the constant discussions that took place in her home, like for other antifascist women her practical contribution to the movement was confined to a capillary action that remained invisible but proved essential for the survival of the opposition: the diffusion of the press of the organization through the intermediary of friendly teachers of English in the peninsula; the building of a solidarity network for prisoners and refugees; the distribution of the antifascist British journal Italy Today throughout Europe; the writing of letters to British intellectuals to keep them informed of developments in Italy that might call for a public statement.73 The summer of 1931 was another period of ups and downs for Marion. There were exciting talks of a trip to Russia with the Belgian lawyer Charles-Henri Spaak whom she and Carlo had befriended during the De Rosa trial, but nothing came out of them.74 Marion

134

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

spent the months of July and August with the three children in a rented chalet at Le Praz, in the French Alps. There were happy moments when Carlo spent a few days with his family and Marion’s sister Pat and brother-in-law Roger Lewis. There is a photo showing a tanned and relaxed Carlo and the two sisters smiling broadly at the photographer.75 But there were also long stretches of loneliness when Marion resented Carlo’s absence and her isolation from the movement.76 Carlo only spent the occasional weekend with his family at Le Praz as he was caught up most of the summer by the intense political talks that led to a reorganization of the antifascist forces in France. Despite the heroic aura it conferred to the organization, GL’s policy of spectacular actions had led to a certain isolation, further reinforced by the fusion between the two branches of Italian Socialism – Nenni’s maximalist party and Turati’s reformist party – that had occurred the previous year.77 In July 1931, a first agreement was reached between the newly united PSI and Giustizia e Liberta`. The latter adhered to the Antifascist Concentration dominated by the former, but there would be a clear division of labour between the two groups. The PSI would focus on propaganda abroad while GL would be responsible for action inside Italy. The new arrangement ushered in a new phase for GL marked by the need for a clearer definition of the programmatic identity of the movement and a long-term theoretical reflexion.78 Nevertheless, GL was not yet ready to abandon its propaganda by deed. When Marion returned to Paris in September, she was again caught up in the exciting expectation of the outcome of another propaganda flight, over Rome this time. GL had not planned the action, but it lent its support to the poet-pilot Lauro De Bosis who intended to follow the example of Bassanesi’s flight over Milan. De Bosis was Italian by his father and American by his mother and spent a lot of time in the United States with his lover the actress Ruth Draper, opposing the dictatorship through his writings. He was a conservative liberal and he hoped to goad the monarch into dismissing the dictator. On 3 October 1931, he took off from Marseille, flew his small plane alone over Rome where he dropped thousands of antifascist leaflets before turning away and vanishing forever into the Mediterranean. A poor pilot but a promising writer,

New Beginnings

135

he had left a sort of testament, ‘The story of my death’, translated into English and broadly publicized by Ruth Draper.79 The endearing personality of the poet-pilot, his tragic death and poignant posthumous essay ensured wide publicity for his daring action – only outside of Italy, though, for an infuriated Mussolini made sure the press of the peninsula would not mention a word about it. Like the rest of GL Marion had been a mere spectator of De Bosis’ bold enterprise, but the next propaganda flight put her at the forefront of events. In what would be their last serious attempt to distribute their propaganda from the sky, Carlo and his friends intended to repeat Bassanesi’s feat by flying a plane from Constance over Switzerland and Milan, taking advantage of the logistics support offered them by their socialist friends in Germany. Once again, only a few men of the movement were involved in the preparation and, as Rosselli, Tarchiani and Bassanesi left at the beginning of November for Constance, Marion was left alone to her maternal duties and to face the emptiness of her life when she was excluded from political action. In her first letters to Carlo, she expressed the wish to be more directly involved in the political activities of GL when he returned because ‘the discussions about the price of meat and vegetables and the size of the children’s clothes do not satisfy me at all.’80 She pushed her case further in her next letter: ‘If you were British, you and your friends would include me without hesitation in your political work.’ But such was not the case and as she looked for something useful to do, she found nothing else but the mending of Carlo’s trousers. ‘Does this really seem to you a fair division of labour?’ she concluded but did not receive any answer.81 Ten days later, on 11 November, Marion finally received a short letter from Carlo informing her that he and his friends were imprisoned in Constance.82 Due to a technical problem, their plane could not take off and Rosselli, Tarchiani and Bassanesi were arrested on the spot by the German police and locked in a cell at the local prison.83 Marion and their GL friends in Paris – Lussu, Cianca, Salvemini – got together to organize the defence and, despite her concerns for her husband, she did not hide her pleasure at being able to immerse herself in political activities. ‘Don’t be angry’ she wrote to Carlo, ‘but I have really enjoyed the last days of frenzied activity,

136

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

which have convinced me that despite my stupid life I am not yet totally rusty or paralysed.’84 She informed him of the campaign they were preparing, rallying support in France and England for a political trial in the spirit of what happened at Lugano. But she was also determined to clarify things with Carlo who found himself, unwittingly, with a lot of free time on his hands. ‘My dismay is not due solely to your arrest,’ she wrote to him, trying to convey the deeper causes of her dissatisfaction, which he seemed to understand: My growing concern at not receiving news from you and the rambling thoughts this provoked have made me understand how necessary and indispensable you are to me, dear little thing. Sometimes you complain that you are too often cut off from my work, and I share your lament. But neither of us understands how precious our tacit collaboration is, how sweet our fusion is, and what strength both of us (yes, both of us I think) draw from the knowledge that we share such a beautiful sphere of affection and peace.

These were soothing words, but it was not clear whether he would be ready to include Marion more closely in his political activities once he returned to Paris after having been expelled from Germany a few days later.85

CHAPTER 8

Building a Life in Exile (1932 – 34)

Despite the feeling of political urgency whipped up, sometimes artificially, by Carlo’s hyper-activism, as the years went by without any serious sign of the dictatorship weakening, the ‘fleeting inbetween moment’ that was exile became less and less provisional, even less so after Hitler’s rise to power in January 1933 and the massive influx of intellectuals, activists and Jews from Germany. How to continue focusing all their energy on fighting the dictatorship in Italy while contributing to building what Gerd-Rainer Horn has called an ‘antifascist transnational consciousness’ in Europe: such was the conundrum facing the Rossellis and their friends caught up in the tension between past and future, France and Italy, action and reflection.1 The paradox existed also at a more personal level. Although their determination to fight the Mussolini regime never flinched, the Rossellis did not want to let the dictatorship control their existence and were determined to live free and fulfilling lives that would express a form of cultural resistance to a system that intended to crush dissenting individuals as much as opposition organizations.2 Paris had a lot to offer for a well-off couple such as Marion and Carlo, but if they were eager to take advantage of the rich cultural life of the French capital, their political commitment meant they would never

138

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

care to socialize with people who did not share at least part or their ideal visions. At the same time, their very affluence and cosmopolitan education meant that they did not always patronize the same social spaces as their antifascist friends of less privileged background. Their political and personal lives, always closely intertwined, thus enfolded in differentiated and sometimes overlapping social circles. Now that the Rossellis had moved to the more centrally located Place du Panthe´on, their home became once again an important hub of activism and encounters as had been the case in via Borghetto in Milan. The elegant flat witnessed a constant procession of close collaborators, loved ones, political acquaintances and fresh arrivals from Italy or Germany, not forgetting many fascist spies. It witnessed endless discussions from the early morning, when Marion and Carlo scanned and commented the French and foreign press in their bed, to the evening when many heated debates developed spontaneously with whoever happened to drop by. This is how John/Mirtillino remembered his childhood in Paris: Ours was a political childhood: treason, hedging, fellow-travelling, fanatical loyalty to one’s own and hatred of the rest . . . Our flat was often crowded with [Carlo’s] friends; one of my earliest political memories is of sitting on someone’s knee and listening through the cigarette smoke to long and ardent discussions of what the movement ought to do next. To join or not to join with Nenni; to approve or disapprove of Soviet policy – and what was stirring underground in Italy?3

Not surprisingly, those who formed the inner circle of the Rossellis’ friends were anti-fascist activists with whom they had shared so much over the years, and who would always remain close despite the political disagreements that eventually emerged between them. Gaetano Salvemini remained the intellectual guiding spirit as well as dear Father Bear, a father and grandfather figure for Carlo, Marion and now their children. He lived in England where he managed to survive thanks to his conferences and writings – and Carlo’s generous financial support – but he travelled regularly to France where most of the Italian antifascists resided and where his wife Fernande Dauriac and stepson Jean Luchaire had settled.4 In 1934, he moved to the United States at Harvard University, where he held a Chair of Italian

Building a Life in Exile

139

Civilization endowed by Ruth Draper, Lauro De Bosis’ lover. But he returned each summer to Europe and always arranged to spend a few days with the Rossellis. Emilio Lussu was another daily presence at the Rosselli home. After escaping with Carlo from Lipari, he had settled in Paris where he lived in ‘dignified poverty’ – first in a cheap hotel at the Saint Michel end of rue de Vaugirard, then in a student hotel in rue Saint Jacques, but never more than a few minutes away from the Rosselli flat. He found it difficult to make ends meet by writing for the press and he too benefitted from Carlo’s generous support.5 Despite their difference in background and education, they had a lot in common, but he was also a fierce debater who often questioned Rosselli’s choices, opposing the need for alliances and the necessity to build a mass movement to the daring individual actions favoured by Carlo and Marion. They would spend hours arguing while walking up and down the boulevard Saint Michel and then be reconciled the following morning in the flat place du Panthe´on.6 During the Paris years they also became closer to Carlo Levi. The painter-writer-activist from Turin was vaguely related to Carlo through Claudio Treves.7 More importantly, he had shared the political experiences of Carlo, Marion and their companions in the early years of fascism and they had become close in 1924 when he was doing his military service in Florence at the time of the Circolo di Cultura.8 Trained as a doctor, Carlo Levi became a self-taught artist of some renown while joining the ‘full daylight conspiracy’ that was the Giustizia e Liberta` group in Turin.9 Through his artistic activities he developed professional and personal relations in various Parisian cultural circles, travelling regularly, between 1930 and 1935, to the French capital where he even had his own studio in Montparnasse for a couple of years.10 Careful not to attract the attention of the fascist agents, he avoided the regular haunts of the fuorusciti, but he was closely associated with Giustizia e Liberta` in Paris and had an intimate relationship with Carlo and Marion with whom he shared many personal and cultural interests.11 Lionello Venturi was another close acquaintance connected to the art world. Son of the renowned art historian Adolfo Venturi, he taught art history at the University of Turin after the war while

140

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

collaborating with museums and galleries. He had volunteered during World War I and was rather conservative in his politics, close to Lauro De Bosis’ Alleanza Nazionale. In 1925, he had even signed Giovanni Gentile’s intellectual manifesto, but this did not mean he supported the regime for he was mostly interested in his work and, in 1931, he was among the small number of academics who refused to take the oath of allegiance that Mussolini imposed on all university professors.12 After losing his job, he left Italy and eventually settled in Paris where he was well known among curators and art historians and where he was able to resume his career as an influential lecturer, writer and art expert. In the French capital, he also became more active politically as a dedicated anti-fascist. He met the fuorusciti and was immediately drawn to Carlo Rosselli, adhering to his movement in early 1933.13 While the Rosselli home was a hub of activism, Lionello and Ada Venturi’s flat – first near the Champs-Elyse´es, then avenue Henri-Martin in the posh 16th arrondissement – was a meeting place for prominent intellectuals and artists of antifascist leanings and Carlo and Marion were frequent visitors. Marion also became very close to Ada Venturi, a painter and a mother of three children, with whom she often spent part of the school holidays.14 The circle of their close acquaintances was much broader of course and included, at one point or another, all those who were actively engaged in antifascist activities even if not actually members of Giustizia e Liberta`. The Rosselli home also seemed to have been a mandatory passage for antifascist exiles or visitors hailing from very different political horizons, such as the antifascist Catholic cleric Don Luigi Sturzo whom they had befriended in London.15 Carlo and Marion greatly admired the man although they did not always share his politics, and despite their obvious agnosticism the priest appreciated the young couple and their children whom he visited regularly when he was in Paris from his nearby hotel in rue Madame.16 Another regular visitor was Benedetto Croce who dropped by each time he came to Paris for his scholarly research at the Bibliothe`que Nationale. The extremely influential liberal philosopher from Naples became a sort of moral antifascist conscience after producing the Antifascist Intellectual Manifesto in May 1925.17 He never left Italy as his international notoriety protected him from

Building a Life in Exile

141

the wrath of the regime, and with his preaching of the ‘religion of liberty’ and his call for an ‘open conspiracy of culture’ he represented a beacon of intellectual integrity for many young students and academics in the country, helping them to live through the darkest hours of the regime.18 Croce had been a regular visitor at the Rosselli home in Florence before the war and he had remained in regular contact with Nello Rosselli. Although critical of the ‘socialist’ dimension of Rosselli’s liberalism, he was eager to keep in touch with the exiled antifascists of the younger generation and he always visited the Rossellis and the Venturis in Paris as his diaries testify.19 Marion and Carlo had first met Croce in Paris at the home of former Prime Minister Francesco Saverio Nitti who had settled in a patrician flat in rue Vavin near the Luxemburg Gardens.20 His salon was a popular meeting point for all the antifascists and their French friends of different generations and political persuasions, not least because of the generous buffet offered them by the hostess, Dona Antonia Nitti.21 Vera Modigliani, the wife of the former Socialist MP Giuseppe Modigliani, recalled how ‘all the Italian refugees, famous or unknown, intellectuals or workers, poor or rich, found there a welcoming setting and an oasis of italianness.’22 For Marion and Carlo, who visited the Nittis regularly, it was a place where they could both indulge in this ‘italianness’ and establish contacts with different French intellectual and political circles. Beyond this extended community of Italian friends and acquaintances, Marion and Carlo developed a family-like relationship with the Hale´vys and the Noufflards, two families of French intellectuals and artists who had many connections with Italy. Daniel and Elie Hale´vy were heirs to a famous artistic and political dynasty of assimilated Jews. Their father, Ludovic, was a successful librettist who worked with major opera composers such as Offenbach and Georges Bizet (for whom he wrote the Carmen libretto). He married into a wealthy family of Protestant Alsatian scientists and engineers, the Bre´guet, renowned for their fine watchmaking and later for their aircraft engines. The family was fully immersed in the artistic milieu of their time and father and sons also became actively involved in the defence of the wrongly accused Captain Dreyfus at the turn of the century.23 A friend of Vernon Lee and Salvemini,

142

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

Daniel Hale´vy regularly visited Florence and there he met Florence Noufflard, a young woman of French and Italian descent, whom he invited to stay at the family home at Sucy-en-Brie. She fell in love with and soon married Daniel’s elder brother Elie in 1901.24 Florence’s younger brother, Andre´, was educated in Italy but went to Paris in 1910 where he trained as a painter at the Grande Chaumie`re. There, he met a fellow artist, Berthe Langweil, and they married in 1911.25 Both the Hale´vys and the Noufflards often travelled to Italy and they met Carlo and Marion in the mid-1920s in Florence, but it was after their arrival in Paris that they forged strong links with the young exile couple and their children, becoming a surrogate family to them.26 The Rossellis and their children were frequent visitors at both the Noufflards’ homes, an elegant mansion house in rue de Varenne in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, and a country house at Fresnay in Normandy.27 They often spent the weekend at the Maison Blanche, Florence and Elie Hale´vy’s home at Sucy-en-Brie near Paris. They felt strong personal, intellectual and cultural affinities, due to their multicultural backgrounds, their family connections with Italy and their shared opposition to tyranny. There were many similarities between the Rosselli and the Hale´vy families. Both belonged to an enlightened and assimilated Jewish bourgeoisie engaged in artistic and intellectual pursuits and both had been closely involved in major democratic struggles in their respective countries – the Risorgimento in Italy and the Dreyfus Affair in France. There was also a shared connection with England as Elie Hale´vy was a major historian of Great Britain and spent a lot of time among liberal intellectual circles in that country.28 In addition to their common interest for the Labour experience in Great Britain, Rosselli and Hale´vy also felt a similar concern about the coming ‘age of tyrannies’ to borrow the title of Hale´vy’s famous essay. Hale´vy was rather pessimistic about the new generation’s ability to resist tyranny, yet the political determination of the Rossellis might have given him some ground for hope.29 Although they did not see eye to eye in every respect, the Rossellis and the Hale´vys greatly appreciated each other’s company and spent many pleasant hours together discussing serious issues as well as trivial matters.

Building a Life in Exile

143

It was through Elie Hale´vy that Marion and Carlo were introduced to the intellectual network connected with the famous De´cades de Pontigny and the association L’Union pour la Ve´rite´. This network was the brainchild of Paul Desjardins, a professor of philosophy at the prestigious Ecole Normale Supe´rieure and a dreyfusard. In the aftermath of the ‘Affair’ he created l’Union pour la Ve´rite´ and a few years later acquired the Abbaye de Pontigny in Burgundy, a secularized Cistercian monastery where, each summer, he promoted regular encounters between French and European intellectuals and artists. Three 10-day symposia – the de´cades – brought together the intellectual e´lite of the time for exchanges on selected topics and informal networking with a view to promoting cosmopolitanism, pacifism and intellectual cooperation. In addition to the summer symposia at Pontigny, l’Union pour la Ve´rite´ held weekly meetings in its own premises located in the narrow rue Visconti near Saint-Germain-des-Pre´s.30 Apart from its important role as a French and European intellectual hothouse, this network was also unusual at the time for encouraging the participation of women – more as listeners than lecturers though – and it was the only formalized circle that Marion and Carlo frequented together on an equal footing.31 In the weakly institutionalized milieu that was Italian antifascism, this extensive web of connections structured Marion and Carlo’s life in exile as they circulated between these many informal and formal groups that linked together the personal, social, cultural and political spheres.32 In many ways, 1932 was a year of transition. After the first heroic years, Marion and Carlo and their three children were now settling in a life of exile that required some personal adjustments. Her third pregnancy had greatly damaged Marion’s precarious health and her heart condition now required constant medical attention and long periods of rest. Yet, she was solely responsible for the care of her large family. As was typical for a man of his time and culture, Carlo did not hide his lack of interest for his children. ‘Apart from Mirtillino at breakfast, I spend little time with the children. After five, ten, fifteen minutes I totally lose patience. The children world is totally alien to me . . . All they do is eat, sleep . . .’.33 Of course, the Rossellis could afford live-in help – a nanny and a cook, John/Mirtillino recalled –

144

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

but the management of their extensive household took up a large part of Marion’s time, and it was clearly not something she enjoyed doing.34 On the other hand, while her forced stays at holiday resorts brought a welcome rest from the hustle and bustle of her crowded Parisian flat, they also kept her away from the political agitation she so much relished. Following her doctor’s advice, in early 1932 Marion spent six ˆ te d’Azur to benefit from the milder climate and the weeks on the Co tranquil atmosphere of the region. There, she kept herself busy with translation work for Carlo and extensive reading, and she always tried to get in touch with whoever was staying in the area among their acquaintances. In January 1932, to her delight, Gaetano Salvemini joined her there for a few days at Juan-les-Pins. She also visited H.G. Wells at his nearby holiday villa Lou Pidou in Grasse.35 She and Carlo had met Wells when he launched a welcoming party for the fugitives from Lipari.36 A staunch opponent of Mussolini from the start, he was always ready to lend his name to the antifascists’ campaigns and even exposed the risks of a Mussolini-like dictatorship in Great Britain in his 1929 novel The Autocracy of Mr Parham.37 As all the British youngsters of her generation, Marion had been an avid reader of his anticipation writings, but she also greatly appreciated his social novels.38 As she explained to him during her visit at Grasse, it was his feminist novel Ann Veronica that had most influenced her when she read it at the age of 18. ‘It made an enormous impression on me then, as if I had definitely found myself once for all’, Marion later wrote to Wells recalling their conversation at Grasse. ‘I am not sure that my life would have been any different without Ann Veronica, but it might very well have been more muddled and messy.’39 In the meantime, at Lou Pidou, Marion had a glimpse of H.G. Wells’ own messy love life as he was staying at the villa with one of his mistresses, the Dutch adventurer and writer Odette Keun, with whom he had a stormy relationship that was about to end.40 Marion returned to Paris in time to accompany Filippo Turati in his last moments. The cold and grey March weather matched the sombre mood of all the antifascist activists who took their turn at the bedside of the dying figurehead of Italian socialism. Marion and Carlo visited him every day and, with a few others – Nitti, Modigliani,

Building a Life in Exile

145

Treves – Marion spent the last day there until Turati’s last breath in the middle of the night. She was there again with Carlo for the wake where, to their surprise and joy, Fernando De Rosa joined them, having just been released from jail in Belgium.41 The next day, they attended the grandiose funeral when a procession of tens of thousands of Italian antifascists, French socialists and trade unionists accompanied the hearse to the Pe`re Lachaise cemetery in the north of Paris.42 Meanwhile, the political and strategical clarification within GL proceeded as the agreement with the PSI and the entry into the Antifascist Concentration strengthened the movement’s determination to maintain its own political identity. On the other hand, the GL activists in the peninsula had voiced their criticism of the organization’s spectacular actions which unleashed the fascist repression but did not produce lasting political effects for the domestic opposition.43 Carlo and his friends produced the Revolutionary Programme of Giustizia e Liberta`, stating their aims for a post-fascist society: a constituent assembly to establish a Republic founded on local autonomy and administrative decentralization; a mixed economy; an agrarian reform and major industrial and social reforms. To promote it, they started publishing the Quaderni di Giusizia e Liberta` in January 1932.44 As had been the case from the start in GL, formal political discussions remained the exclusive domain of the men of the movement and this period of strategic reflection meant a greater estrangement for Marion, but in the informal political exchanges she continued to express her opinion forcefully. An OVRA agent reported a discussion at the Rosselli home in which Marion stated that ‘fascism can only be fought with terror and with a direct and violent attack against its Chief.’45 In the meantime, though, peaceful solidarity work with the victim of fascist repression remained her main field of action. In the spring and summer of 1932, she joined forces with Sylvia Pankhurst to create an international women’s committee in support of Velia Matteotti, the widow of the slain Socialist leader, who was under house arrest in Rome. An international network of feminist, pacifist and human rights activists gathered women from England, Ireland, the United States, Holland and France.

146

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

Marion Rosselli, who had herself been put under house arrest with her baby son by Mussolini, could use her experience to inform British and international public opinion. Sylvia Pankhurst also used her testimony in a long essay about ‘women under fascism’ that she later published in the Hibbert Journal. It is not easy to measure the immediate impact of the committee for its members learned in 1933 that the persecution against the Matteotti widow had ceased after she had come under the protection of the Catholic Church. Yet the campaign kept the transnational women’s antifascists networks on alert and allowed them to broaden their domestic and continental connections.46 Amidst all this, Marion and Carlo did not always stick to their promise to keep Amelia informed of the details of their everyday life and there were many letters of protest from Florence followed by a flurry of letters from Paris.47 In March 1932, after more than two months of silence, Marion resumed her correspondence with her mother-in-law, keeping her abreast of public and private events: Turati’s death; the excitement surrounding President Doumer’s assassination and his funeral ceremony at the Pantheon which Marion and Carlo watched from their windows; the visit at their home of the Russian Menshevik leader Fyodor Illich Dan and his wife, who was the sister of Lenin’s close friend Martov; their plans for the summer holiday which always bothered Marion because ‘the holidays, for me, mean mostly partial widowhood’. She was not sure either whether to visit her own family in England, given the apparent lack of interest expressed by her parents – in the end she decided against it.48 For obvious security reasons, she did not mention their cultural outings with Carlo Levi who spent a lot of time in Paris in 1932 to prepare his first solo exhibition at Galerie Jeune Europe. They spent a lot of time together either at the artist’s studio in Montparnasse or at the Rosselli home and Carlo even posed for a portrait by Levi.49 Marion also tried to keep in touch with Ernesto Rossi, her dear Esto who was locked away in jail and found it difficult but essential to stay aware of his friends’ activities. Political communication was impossible, but he was eager for personal news, which he received from Marion through his mother Elide Verardi or his wife Ada.

Building a Life in Exile

147

‘Please tell Esto,’ Marion wrote to his mother ‘I would like to tell him so many things that I do not know where or how to start! Anyway, let him know that we often think about him, that we often talk about you two and we love you both so much. Please tell him that I embrace him with all my tenderness and a great hope in my heart.’50 She organized for him to receive a subscription to the Guardian and, upon his repeated requests, sent him photos of her children, news from the ‘Zio’ (Salvemini) or ‘Palloncino’ (Carlo).51 Marion spent the long summer months of 1932 with her three children and a nanny in a villa at Royan on the Atlantic Coast. She read a lot. Le Noeud de Vipe`res, by Francois Mauriac – ‘a powerful psychological study’, Freud by Stefan Zweig – ‘interesting but not very exciting’. Otherwise, she despaired at the ‘far too vegetative life’ she was forced into with no adults who shared her interests around. Carlo, who could not bear to be inactive for more than a couple of days, only came down for the weekends. At the end of July, he brought Lionello Venturi and his family and they spent a few pleasant days together.52 There were happy moments, caught by a friendly camera, of Carlo playing on the beach with his children and of a radiant Marion, dressed in a fashionable linen pant outfit, walking hand in hand with her relaxed husband.53 But these were ephemeral moments which did not alter the bitterness she felt when she compared her life to Carlo’s. ‘On the beach, in front of the vast light of the ocean’ she wrote to Ada Rossi, ‘I have often thought that some contrasts were a little too cruel.’54 Fortunately, in August she had the opportunity to ease the monotony of these long and lonely summer days when she joined Carlo and other friends, including Gaetano Salvemini, at the Abbaye de Pontigny in Burgundy. The second de´cade, at the end of August, focused on the press and its role in fostering or endangering peace, and the organizers had invited Carlo to join in the discussion with other editors. The surroundings were charming, the company stimulating and the schedule, though demanding, left a lot of time for socializing. Around the large tables of the refectory, in the garden along the river or under the tree-covered walks, the participants regrouped according to their preferences and interests.55 The company was particularly interesting that summer. Apart from

148

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

the core group behind the Pontigny encounters – Paul Desjardins, Jean Schlumberger, Leon Brunschvicg – there were many well-known intellectuals and writers: Charles Du Bos, Raymond Aron, Antoine de Saint-Exupe´ry, Roger Martin du Gard, Andre´ Philip, Denis de Rougemont, Colette Audry, Ramon Fernandez, Andre´ Malraux and his wife Clara who shared with her charismatic husband a relationship not unlike that of Marion with Carlo.56 Carlo went back to Paris at the beginning of September, but Marion was asked to remain at Pontigny to intervene in the third de´cade which gathered around a topic to which she could contribute from her own experience of expatriation and exile: ‘The transmission of values between generations, social classes, nations’. The Nazis having destroyed the Pontigny archives, only scattered and incomplete testimonies have reached us about the content of the discussions. Ramon Fernandez oversaw this de´cade and it seems that, together with Andre´ Malraux and Raymond Aron, he dominated the debates.57 But it also appears that Marion actively joined in the discussion as Antonia Nitti, the former Prime minister’s wife, also present at Pontigny, reported to Carlo. ‘Donna Antonia told me that you, yes you, were a big success at Pontigny!’ Carlo wrote enthusiastically to Marion who had returned to Royan to fetch the children.58 As for the reason of this success we are left to guess, but it indicates that Marion was perfectly able to engage in a sophisticated debate and hold her own in this intellectual milieu although she must have felt intimidated by some of the towering figures present, as we can guess from a photo taken in the Pontigny refectory. Indeed, if women were welcomed at the de´cades, the dominant gender norms were rarely challenged, and they usually listened religiously to the male participants, ‘apart from a few less inhibited foreign women’ such as Marion who was not satisfied to live by proxy in the overriding shadow of her husband, as Clara Malraux put it.59 Marion and Carlo remained in touch with some of the people they met at Pontigny and who, like them, frequented the weekly meetings of the Amis de la Ve´rite´ in rue Visconti during the winter months. They saw a lot of Ramon Fernandez until he moved towards the extreme right. They also befriended Emmanuel Berl, a pacifist writer and editor who co-founded the leftist weekly Marianne with

Building a Life in Exile

149

Fernandez in 1932.60 Through these acquaintances they kept abreast of developments in French politics at a time when tensions were growing between the left-wing pacifist forces and the far-right Action Francaise which often took to the streets. On Armistice Day, 11 November 1932, socialists, pacifists and human rights activists called an anti-war demonstration at rue Soufflot near the Panthe´on, and the Action Francaise invited its supporters to gather nearby. Watching the confrontation that ensued from her window, Marion decided to express her solidarity with the socialists by agitating a piece of red cloth. Summoned by the police, she justified her action by stating that she was an antifascist and a republican and could not remain neutral in such circumstances; but she was rebuked and reminded that, as an exile, she was not to participate in any political activity.61 In France, the Mussolini regime had been considered essentially an Italian problem, but the rise to power of Hitler in early 1933 transformed fascism overnight into a major international phenomenon and opened new possibilities for the development of a panEuropean anti-fascist movement. In the context of the ongoing division between the socialists and the communists, it took almost another year and the appearance of a tangible far-right threat in the country for a united response to emerge in France.62 In the meantime, Rosselli and his friends seized the opportunity to inform, explain and warn. Carlo Rosselli immediately anticipated the possible consequences for Europe of the victory of Nazism in Germany, which he put forward in his famous text ‘La Guerra che torna’ (‘War Returns’).63 Not only did he show considerable foresight, but he also unleashed a heated debate with the Italian and French socialists whose pacifism he exposed as a losing strategy to stop the triumphant forward march of fascism.64 These were intense weeks of discussion and work. In between weekends at the Halevy’s just back from Italy, visits from Ruth Draper, problems with the English nanny who could not cope with Melina’s antics, Marion was busy translating Carlo’s articles both into French and English a task she shared for the longer pieces with Isabel Massey, Salvemini’s friend from Bedford College.65 Carlo was also much in demand as a public speaker and Marion accompanied him to

150

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

London where they spent nearly a month from mid-March to midApril, lodging at the Palace Hotel at Lancaster Gate. Carlo lectured at Chatham House, the home of the very influential Royal Institute of International Affairs, and at other more liberal venues. There were also reunions with friends and acquaintances who had supported them since the days of Lipari – Berthe Pritchard, Don Sturzo, Barbara Barclay Carter, Sylvia Pankhurst, Isabel Massey.66 They met several times with H.G. Wells who introduced them to Emma Goldman, the Russian-born anarchist and feminist. They also spent a weekend near Liverpool with Marion’s sister Pat and her husband. When they returned to Paris, they were again caught up in the political turmoil as events in Germany after the arson attack on the Reichstag building confirmed Hitler’s dictatorial intents.67 In the absence of any concrete united reaction, active propaganda work remained the order of the day. In such a context, problems of daily life and household management seemed trivial but could not be avoided. For some time, Marion had decided to employ young Italian antifascist women to help her with the household, but the French government stepped up its control of foreigners and Gina, their Italian help, was expelled from the country at the end of April. In addition, going over their finances, Marion and Carlo convinced themselves that they would have to cut down on their family expenditures, but they kept deferring any drastic decision. At the end of April, to recover from these exciting but exhausting weeks, Marion spent a few restful days alone with Mirtillino in Fontainebleau. Walking in the forest and visiting the Chateau and its corridors of French history alone with her precociously curious eldest son was a delight she did not conceal.68 In May and June, Marion and Carlo spent some time with their friend the painter Carlo Levi, and with Rosselli’s cousins, the writer Alberto Moravia and his sister the artist Adriana Pincherle, the children of Amelia’s brother, Carlo. They visited Levi’s workshop in Montparnasse as he was getting ready for another personal show at a major Gallery in rue La Boe´tie. Marion had mixed feelings about his work. She greatly admired his women portraits but could not always understand some of his more ‘bizarre’ still lives.69 In her view, they were in sharp contrast with the ‘enchanting’ Renoir paintings

Building a Life in Exile

151

exhibited at the same time in Paris.70 Alberto Moravia and his sister Adriana Pincherle visited the Rossellis separately in June. They were both creators who lived in Italy and, as such, had to navigate between the relative openness of the regime towards artistic and cultural production and its desire to control the ideological content conveyed by writings and works of art. Being related to such an enemy of the regime, they had to be cautious, but Moravia was very skilful at steering his career through punishment and reward, depending on his own ambivalent attitude toward a regime which he never openly supported but always refused to condemn.71 His 1933 visit was his first – and only – to his antifascist cousin and his wife in exile. He recalled that, on this occasion, Carlo entrusted him with a letter to deliver to a contact in Rome. When Moravia asked whether it was dangerous, Carlo answered facetiously that if a famous writer like Alberto were to be arrested, it would offer such a good opportunity for a propaganda campaign by the antifascists. Moravia did deliver the letter and noted that a few weeks later a bomb exploded at the Vatican! After that, he simply severed his relationships with his embarrassing antifascist cousins of whom he would later draw a disturbing portrait in his novel The Conformist, published after Carlo’s assassination.72 After celebrating Mirtillino’s sixth birthday on 10 June, at 4 in the morning Rosselli received a phone call from Levi announcing the sudden death of his uncle, the Socialist leader Claudio Treves, who had lived in exile in Paris since 1926. He was only 63 and had seemed in perfect health the day before when he had participated in the commemoration of Matteotti’s assassination. Marion felt despondent as she walked up the steep four flights of steps of the modest hotel where he had been living alone in a sad little room. A room which brought about ‘very bitter thoughts’. ‘From every point of view, this is probably the worst moment we have experienced so far,’ Marion wrote to Amelia, reflecting on the terrible injustice of the situation they were all facing.73 The death of Treves also raised the issue of the role wives did or should play alongside their husbands. All his friends thought that Treves had been deeply affected by the refusal of his wife Olga to join him with their children in exile. ‘Most of them were very critical, but I would not dare judge her’ noted Marion,

152

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

who stressed Olga Treves’ free will. ‘It was clear that she did not share his life and ideas.’74 Mid-July, Carlo drove his family to Hendaye but spent only three days with them before driving back to Paris to attend the French Socialist Party congress. Marion loved the place. The house was charming, a few metres away from the beach and San Sebastian was only a 15-minute drive by bus.75 But – just like Carlo – she had a limited taste for futile summer activities and, after a few days, her letters were again full of nagging complaints. ‘What a stupid life; children, knitting. A little reading when I can.’ She was eager to know about the debates of the 30th Congress of the French Socialist Party – the SFIO – which witnessed the split of the ‘neo-Socialists’, a current whose criticism of Marxism attracted Carlo for a while, but she had to content herself with the press reports.76 Amelia joined her and spent the whole month of August at Hendaye. It was the first time they met and spent some time together since the birth of Andrea in April 1931, and Carlo made a special effort to be present. It was a parenthesis of apparent normalcy, a few tranquil weeks of bourgeois holiday life with Amelia displaying her class and elegance in the fashionable resort and presiding over the family activities and discussions77 – pleasant moments, undoubtedly, but certainly a little awkward too, so far removed from their usual concerns. Besides, after a couple of weeks Carlo drove back to Paris where his ‘thirst for revolution’ called him, despite the reputation of the French capital as a ghost-town during the hottest weeks of summer and his own feeling of loneliness. ‘I miss you all desperately’ he wrote, ‘above all when I am alone in the empty flat, with this extraordinary sun and a tremendous longing for happiness.’78 But he remained alone in Paris, Amelia travelled back to Florence and Marion and the children stayed at Hendaye until school resumed at the end of September. With a lot of time on her hands to scan the press, Marion noticed that the famed conductor Arturo Toscanini was to lead the Straram orchestra for three concerts in Paris in mid-October at the The´aˆtre des Champs-Elyse´es. She begged Carlo to get tickets and suggested the antifascists pay homage to him and thank him publicly for his ‘perfect attitude’ towards the regime. Following many incidents,

Building a Life in Exile

153

Toscanini had finally decided to leave Italy after being physically attacked by the blackshirts for refusing to play Giovinezza, the fascist hymn in Bologna on 14 May 1931.79 Marion and Carlo did eventually attend two of the three concerts, but there is no record of any public gesture by the antifascists on these occasions. In the meantime, back in Paris, Marion resumed her busy life. She sometimes felt ‘desperate’ because of the proliferation of boring household chores but was also fully involved in Carlo’s work as she translated his essays about Hitler’s withdrawal from the League of Nations. There were intense exchanges as she felt he was far too radical in some of his assertions and not pedagogical enough in his explanations.80 As Mirtillino resumed his schooling at the Se´vigne´ primary school, Marion started to think about what to do with Melina and Andrea the following year. Interested in innovative teaching methods, she envisaged sending them to a Montessori school or else they would attend the Se´vigne´ kindergarten. She felt she had inherited her enthusiasm for children education from her father, and it was also something she shared with Ada Venturi whose children were also of school age.81 This reinforced her conviction that important personal issues and choices could only be discussed with people who shared her ideological outlook, although she did try to socialize with different people. At Hendaye, for instance, she had befriended an American woman married to a Frenchman with school-age children. She had visited her at home in Neuilly and invited the couple for dinner place du Panthe´on. But it turned out that the husband was becoming an enthusiastic follower of Hitler, so their relationship ended abruptly.82 Maintaining close contacts between the two branches of the Rosselli family was a permanent concern and this could only be done by fooling the Italian authorities. In early 1934, the two brothers decided it was time to have a family reunion to introduce their eldest children to each other. Nello and Maria obtained a passport for the ˆ te d’Azur and they travelled to Juan-les-Pins with Silvia to meet Co Carlo, Marion and John/Mirtillino. Roughly the same age, the two children played together on the beach and exchanged a few words in Italian. It was a short and happy interlude, the second and last occasion when the two young families spent time together.83

154

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

At Juan-les-Pins, Marion was sent back to her years in Florence when Carlo informed her that William Gillies, the International Secretary of the Labour Party, was seeking political information about her former boss and active fascist Harold E. Goad, the director of the British Institute in Florence. He was close to the fascio in London since the time of its creation in the early 1920s and he also served as an intermediary between Oswald Mosley’s Union of Fascists and Mussolini.84 Marion was eager to expose Goad’s early and consistent pro-fascist leanings and she wrote a long letter to Gillies detailing his attitude while she was working under his direction. In a telling gesture, Carlo intercepted her letter and sent the information to Gillies in his own name.85 ‘There is a general atmosphere of excitement which is not displeasing,’ Marion wrote to Amelia in early February 1934.86 Crisis had been in the air since the beginning of the year following a major embezzlement scandal linked to the banker Alexandre Stavisky. Various far-right, anti-parliamentary leagues accused the government of covering up the scandal and after the removal of the conservative police Chief Jean Chiappe, they took to the streets to force the government out of office. On the evening of 6 February 1934, an assortment of these far-right groups – The Action Francaise, the Croix-de-feu, the Francisque, the Camelots du Roi, the Jeunesse patriotique – gathered on the Place de la Concorde, just a bridge away from the National Assembly. The police confronted them, and riots ensued through the night, leaving 15 dead and more than a thousand wounded.87 After years of opposition to established authorities, Marion felt it was ‘not very interesting to agree with the government’ on this occasion, even more as the riots led to a conservative turn.88 The crisis operated as a powerful wake-up call for the French left and the antifascist forces that had not yet put their act together despite the events in Germany. On 9 February, the communists called a demonstration during which violence erupted and nine people were killed. On 12 February 1934, the two main trade unions, the CGT (close to the socialists) and the CGTU (close to the communists) called a general strike and the SFIO and the Communist Party organized separate demonstrations in support. But under the pressure of the participants, the two marches merged, initiating the popular

Building a Life in Exile

155

front policy that the Seventh Congress of the Comintern would ratify a few months later, leading to a united action pact between the French Socialist, Communist and Radical parties.89 These were exciting times as Paris was becoming the ‘capital of world antifascism’, and the change in the situation prompted major political realignments within the antifascist forces in exile.90 From the outset, the collaboration between Giustizia e Liberta` and the Antifascist Concentation had never been easy because of mutual distrust. Tensions became more strained after a scathing attack on the PSI published by Emilio Lussu and GL eventually decided to leave the Concentrazione which the socialists then decided to dissolve in May 1934.91 On the other hand, the rapid reorientation of the Comintern toward united action would lead to an alliance between the PCI and the PSI on the model of what was happening with the left parties in France.92 For GL, the new situation meant both regained independence and greater isolation. It was eager to make its voice heard thanks to the weekly newspaper Giustizia e Liberta` that began publication in May 1934. Calling for a ‘unification of the socialist forces’, it remained outside the pact between the two left parties and the options opened to the group provoked major tensions and disagreements. Rosselli favoured collaboration with the communists whereas Lussu argued in favour of a reconciliation with the socialists but, seriously ill with tuberculosis, he had to recover in a sanatorium in Switzerland and was away from Paris for more than two years. Other members of the original group disagreed with the turn to the left then operated by Rosselli. Alberto Tarchiani would still contribute a few articles to the paper but abandoned any active participation in the movement. Gaetano Salvemini expressed his opposition more forcefully, despairing of the new orientation of GL which now called itself the ‘Movement of Socialist Renewal’, while assuring Carlo and Marion this would not affect their friendship.93 The Rossellis were caught up in the whirlwind of events. These were hectic weeks with a multiplication of meetings at the Amis de la Ve´rite´ or the Hale´vys, and the launching of the weekly paper. The situation was exciting but also insecure and, despite intensive discussions with a variety of antifascist intellectuals who frequented the Rosselli home, it was not easy to figure out which way the wind

156

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

would blow in France or what it would take to weaken the hold of the fascist dictatorship on Italian society.94 Carlo’s hyper-activism failed to mask the political impotence of his movement but it was essential for him to maintain momentum, even artificially, in the hope that some turn in the situation would find him ready to intervene promptly and resolutely. In such a context, he had even less time or patience for family matters. The education of his eldest son or the various childhood diseases that affected Melina and Andrea were left to Marion to handle. The walk to and from school across the Luxembourg gardens were the occasion for interesting discussions between mother and son about trivial matters or more serious, quasi philosophical questions about the meaning of life. As Mirtillino once explained to her that life was sometimes darkened by sad things such as ‘war and revolution’, Marion felt obliged ‘to correct his ideas about revolution’. On the other hand, she was determined to maintain their cultural interests for, if left to himself, ‘Carlo would be happy simply to go and see a movie to relax after a busy day’. So, she made sure they would attend the latest opera performances – Mozart’s Don Giovanni directed by Bruno Walter-, concerts – Toscanini, twice – or plays. Their friend, the American actress Ruth Draper, back from an adventurous journey in Africa and Palestine, took them to the Gymnase theatre to see the much talked-about play, Le Messager by Henri Bernstein with the famous Gaby Morlay. They hated it: ‘slow, monstrous, depressing, banal in the feelings it conveys’. As for Morlay she was not of their liking either, her acting being too monotonous.95 In early May they attended a reading of Leo Ferrero’s play, Angelica. Carlo’s boyhood friend had moved to Paris in 1928 to pursue a modestly successful literary career and then had moved to the United States where he died in a car crash in August 1933. His inconsolable parents, Guglielmo Ferrero and Gina Lombroso, who lived in exile in Geneva, strove to get their son’s work performed even if only privately as on this occasion in Paris. The success was limited. They waited for the arrival of Amelia in early June to attend Cocteau’s Machine infernale, a modern rendering of Sophocles’ Oedipus directed by Louis Jouvet at the Come´die des Champs Elyse´es, or the lighter comedy Les temps difficiles by Edouard Bourdet. The highlight of the season was

Building a Life in Exile

157

undoubtedly a performance at Ope´ra Garnier of Wagner’s Mastersingers of Nuremberg directed by Leo Furtwangler, with the famous German soprano Lotte Lehman.96 Fascist spies were as busy as ever among the antifascist exiles in Paris and some, such as Pitigrilli, took their place among the constant flux of visitors to the Rosselli flat. Pitigrilli was the pen name of a second-rate writer of ‘naughty’ novels who worked as an OVRA agent during the 1930s. Carlo and Marion were surely guilty of negligence. Keeping their house open to a variety of visitors was part of their determination to live as freely as possible despite the circumstances, but some of their friends in Italy had to pay for their carelessness. Pitigrilli gathered sufficient information to incriminate the entire GL group in Turin. More than 200 persons were arrested, among them Carlo Levi, Barbara Allason, Vittorio Foa, Giulo Einaudi, Cesare Pavese, Norberto Bobbio. From then on, GL ceased de facto to exist as an activist movement in Italy and could only count on scattered groups of intellectuals who read its literature.97 After his first visit to the Rossellis, Pitigrilli had sent a long report to Rome about their financial circumstances: ‘Carlo Rosselli [. . .] has dilapidated his fortune to finance the activities and publications of Giustizia e Liberta`. And now, despite the idealism of his English wife, a dreamer and a Quaker, he has reduced his propaganda expenditures, or at least he is trying to spend his money more rationally’.98 There was some truth to the report. Given the cost of the weekly paper, the Rossellis did have to reduce their personal expenditures and to make some drastic choices. They decided to leave the beautiful, but expensive, flat on Place du Panthe´on and to move to a smaller place in a less exclusive neighbourhood after the summer holiday that Marion and her children spent at La Baule where the Venturi family and other Italian friends joined her for a few weeks.99 As usual, Carlo only spent a couple of weeks in August with his family and remained most of July in the capital which seethed with political manoeuvring on the left. He visited several flats, and they opted for one in rue Notre-Dame-des Champs, close to the Quartier Latin and to the children’s school, not to mention the cafe´s of Boulevard Montparnasse,100

158

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

Marion spent September at Marlotte, near the foreˆt de Fontainebleau with the nanny who watched over the children. Ada Venturi kept her company and Carlo travelled from Paris almost every evening ‘but he is also beginning to find the Valle´e de Chevreuse too far away!’101 In this quiet countryside, she continued to perform her tedious task of sending the GL press to as many addresses as possible in Italy, suspecting that many letters did not reach their destinations. A note from the fascist police of September 1934 did in fact report that all the letters sent from Marlotte were intercepted as ‘the study of the handwriting reveals they were all sent by Cave, Marion, wife of the famous fuoruscito’.102 Given the state of her health, taking care of the relocation to the new flat was out of the question and for two weeks Marion took a room at the hotel Paris-Dinard, near place Saint-Sulpice. She felt ‘indecently well for a runaway mother’, with time to write to friends and read. She took great interest in the famous murder trial of young Violette Nozie`res and found the death sentence for the 19-year-old a ‘cowardly decision’. Following Carlo’s new interest in the Communist Party, she also read the book of ‘an extremely intelligent British communist author’, R. Palme Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution. Carlo joined her for dinner at the hotel and they occasionally spent the evening out.103 On the third floor of a recent building, the new flat was smaller but very comfortable, with five rooms and all the modern amenities.104 Marion and Carlo loved their new flat, very bright and modern, as well as the neighbourhood, more central and better connected than place du Panthe´on.105 As soon as they had settled, they resumed their busy life. The flux of visitors at their home never slackened and they often visited friends and acquaintances. Marion described a typical week to her mother-in-law. ‘We’ve received five invitations, a lunch, three dinners, a night out and we had to refuse a dinner party’.106 These were most of the times social and political occasions that they shared together, but Carlo also spent a lot of time in political meetings or at the headquarters of the newspaper and he clearly enjoyed this time away from family responsibilities. ‘In that intense life’ he wrote to his mother, ‘the family has a very small part – much to the displeasure of Marion. Very bad or very well? Knowing myself

Building a Life in Exile

159

I’d say very well.’ On the other hand, he knew that Marion and his family were essential elements of strength and stability in his elusive existence. At the close of the year he wrote to the solitary Salvemini in Harvard, taking stock of his family life. ‘Mirtillino is always the same: intelligent, shrewd and original with a rare sensitivity. Melina is transformed: sweet, cute and pretty. She’s going to school, hence the miracle . . . As for Andrea, he is my soft spot, perhaps because we are so much alike . . . After the difficult summer months, Marion is feeling better, she has not had any new serious heart problem and is very cheerful. We still love each other as much as ever. Sometimes, I get mad at my family. But sometimes I wonder how it would be for me here if I were alone like you.’107 At about the same date, Marion wrote to H.G. Wells to thank him for the positive influence his books had had on her life trajectory. ‘As it is, in spite of some very bad times, there’s nothing important in it that I wish I’d done differently.’108

CHAPTER 9

The Personal is Political (1935 –36)

‘Don’t worry about how I will bear the turmoil of the revolution when it finally comes,’ Marion wrote in July 1934 to Carlo who kept teasing her about her recurring health problems. ‘If it finds me in good heart conditions, I have no doubt I’ll be able to face whatever there is to face. Enthusiasm helps a lot.’1 Little did she know that she would soon be seriously tested both by the worsening of her state of health and the rapid evolution of the political situation. They started the New Year in a somewhat melancholy mood. ‘We’re feeling rather grey, like the weather’, Marion informed a friend.2 For different reasons, she and Carlo were a little weary of family life and frustrated by their political impotence, but they would soon have serious cause for concern. At the end of January, Marion learned that she was again pregnant and, as the doctors had warned her, this could entail dire consequences, but they had not advised her about the existing means of birth control as the law in France made it a crime, incurring harsh sanctions, to even inform women of the existence of such methods.3 Despite the strict prohibition against abortion, authorized doctors could recommend terminating a pregnancy in case of danger for the mother’s health and, a year earlier, finding herself pregnant, Marion had already undergone such a procedure. She now prepared to do it again but, this time she was

The Personal is Political

161

determined to take more drastic measures. Surprisingly enough, it was her mother-in-law who suggested undergoing tubal ligation.4 At the end of February, Marion underwent the abortion procedure, refusing a general anaesthesia and, apparently, all went well and a few days later she attended a concert by the famous Austrian violin player Fritz Kreisler.5 Yet the operation had delayed effects and she had to wait several weeks for the more serious intervention. Though it is now seen as a rather minor procedure, tubal litigation required a general anaesthesia and was not yet widely practised at the time. The operation gave her a shock and imposed a longer period of rest and recovery which, in turn, imposed some serious adjustments in family arrangements. Amelia had travelled to Paris in April and agreed to take the younger children with her to Florence if necessary. For a while, Carlo continued to plan a trip to the United States where he hoped to spend two months for a tour of conferences organized for him by Gaetano Salvemini.6 But he eventually had to abandon the idea of crossing the Atlantic and leaving Marion alone to face her difficult and painful situation.7 There were also problems on the political front as the original GL group unravelled. From his Swiss sanatorium, Lussu expressed his dismay at the evolution of GL away from mass action and toward abstract political debates. ‘I have the absolute conviction that since the publication of the newspaper (. . .) GL has become an intellectual sect that survives on the prestige of the original group,’ he wrote to Carlo in February 1935.8 Lussu asked to have his letter of resignation from GL’s Central Committee published in the weekly paper. Entitled ‘The Italian Situation and Antifascism Abroad’, the letter acknowledged the success of fascism which had reached the apex of its power on the eve of the Abyssinian crisis and identified the Italian proletariat as the only revolutionary force likely to defeat it. ‘If in this period we, of GL, do not engage in any action we’re finished. Personally, I would pass agreements with the socialists and the communists to do something serious’ he concluded.9 Needless to say, such an approach did not satisfy Rosselli who still insisted on the need for GL to remain an autonomous force, nor Gaetano Salvemini or Alberto Tarchiani who rejected such a classist approach.10 Undeterred, Rosselli pursued his

162

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

chosen course with the loyal Cianca at the helm of the paper, and many younger activists such as Aldo Garosci and Franco Venturi, both of whom came from Turin and were students at the Sorbonne.11 Things were not better on the Italian front for GL. After the arrests of 1934, Leone Ginzburg was sentenced to four years in jail. In May 1935, the rest of the Turin group was arrested and Giulio Einaudi, Norberto Bobbio, Cesare Pavese, Vittorio Foa, Carlo Levi were convicted and received different sentences of prison or banishment.12 On the eve of the Abyssinian crisis, GL thus found itself isolated both in Italy and among the antifascist groups in France, but this only fuelled Rosselli’s unremitting voluntarism and left him little time to worry about Marion’s state of health or face the adjustments required in his family life. Marion had her tubes tied in early May and spent more than a month of convalescence in Paris. All she needed was a long period of rest. ‘I’m all in one piece’ she wrote to Nello towards the end of May, ‘except for the occasional moments of despondency’. She had read a lot. Light and entertaining novels at first, but always related to her situation. One was Alan A. Milne’s Two People, in which the author of the better-known Winnie the Pooh stories meditated on what it took to maintain a happy marriage while continuing to affirm one’s individual personality. Another one was Rose Macaulay’s Going abroad, a satire of a diverse group of Britons travelling in the Spanish Basque country, which must have reminded Marion of her encounters with some of her compatriots on the French Riviera. But she soon turned back to ‘splendid works, Madame Bovary, War and Peace – for the third time’.13 The Rosseli flat was as busy as ever as friends and comrades were eager to make sense of the growing Italian threats against Abyssinia. The French and British governments seemed at first all too eager to allow Mussolini his new colonial adventure, but Rosselli and his friends immediately exposed the coming war as a capitalist and imperialist endeavour that should be rejected, while taking care to recall that they were not absolute pacifists and would accept a civil war against fascism14 – a distinction that young Mirtillino, always aware of the latest debates in the family drawing room, found difficult to fathom, just as he was more than once puzzled to see his

The Personal is Political

163

mother’s Quaker pacifist convictions give way to her strong support of murder attempts against Mussolini. ‘She had schooled me to hate wars and distrust armies’ he recalled, ‘Violence, I gathered, might be all right in revolution and tyrannicide’.15 Given her health condition, Marion followed the Abyssinian crisis from afar, essentially through the press. In early June, she left Paris with Melina and Andrea for Evian where Amelia joined her for a few days and then travelled back to Florence with the two young children to relieve Marion – and Carlo – of their care.16 Fortunately, Marion had several friends on the other side of the lake, in Geneva. The historian Guglielmo Ferrero, who had been teaching at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Internationales since the beginning of his exile in 1929, and his wife Gina Lombroso – both close friends of Amelia Rosselli and Gaetano Salvemini – often crossed the lake to have lunch with Marion.17 There were also a number of political acquaintances close to Giustizia e Liberta` such as the Republican Egidio Reale, who also taught at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Internationales, or the socialist journalist Carlo a Prato who was accredited to the League of Nations.18 She was particularly pleased to receive the visit of her dear Father Bear, Gaetano Salvemini, who came to spend a few days with her while he was staying at Carlo Sforza’s summer home at La Garde near Toulon.19 For a few days in Evian, Marion could engage in lively exchanges with Salvemini and their friends from Switzerland, about the Paris Congress for Cultural Freedom where Salvemini had intervened to expose the repression against intellectuals in the Soviet Union.20 Salvemini was happy to find her in better physical and moral conditions and he understood that she mostly suffered from solitude and isolation as he wrote to Carlo.21 But husband and wife spent most of the month of July apart, Mirtillino was being cured for measles in a Paris clinic and Melina and Andrea were away in the Italian Alps with Nello, Maria and their children.22 Left alone, Marion kept herself busy reading the press and trying to maintain a dialogue with Carlo from afar. She advised him to be more pedagogical in his articles on Abyssinia and not to assume that his readers knew the details of the situation. She also translated his articles on Abyssinia that she sent to the British press. She was

164

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

surprised, one day, to receive a letter from an old English woman she had met in 1919 – 20 at her pensione on Piazza Pitti who agreed with one of Carlo’s articles in the Manchester Guardian and informed her that she had left Italy never to return as long as Mussolini was in power.23 Yet this was not sufficient to overcome her feeling of loneliness and dispel the sadness that invaded her whenever she thought of her deteriorated physical state. ‘Wouldn’t it be better to stop living?’ she wrote to Amelia at the beginning of August. ‘But then, I have to face the intolerable pain of leaving Carlo and Mirtillino and I am caught again by a sense of hopelessness. This is how I spend my days with a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes. The more I think about it, the worst it gets.’24 Amelia was probably saddened by the letter, and, although she knew that Mirtillino had always been Marion’s favourite child, she must have been shocked that she did not even mention Andrea and Melina. No support was forthcoming from Carlo who, despite his son’s recovery, was not in a hurry to leave Paris, although the city was at a standstill. ‘I haven’t the slightest desire to go’, he wrote to Salvemini. ‘With our friends arrested and the newspaper, I really should stay here. But Marion is expecting me eagerly [. . .]. How did you find her? Now of course she’s depressed again. What hard luck to have this family problem!’ But he added as an after-thought in a rare experiment in self-criticism, ‘I shouldn’t forget that if the engine is no longer working properly this is also due to the kind of life I have forced her to lead.’25 He remained in Paris, dallying with the idea of convincing Marion to spend the rest of the summer near Fontainebleau, but he finally decided to join her in Savoie after learning that Nello, who was attending a congress of historians in Vienna, might come and visit him there.26 Nello spent a few days with them at Combloux, near Mege`ve, where Marion had moved for a change of scenery after two months at Evian, and Carlo took the opportunity ‘to clarify with him many points that they don’t seem to grasp’ about Abyssinia (‘they’ meaning both his family in Florence and Italians in general who were caught in a nationalist frenzy).27 Not having any ‘pressing commitments’, as he wrote to Salvemini, or ‘no excuse to go back to Paris’, as Marion noted sarcastically, Carlo spent nearly 10 days at Combloux.28 It was a total change of

The Personal is Political

165

atmosphere from the boredom of her lonely weeks on the shores of Lake Geneva, although Marion was still bitter, and Carlo annoyed by his forced inaction. They befriended a couple staying in the same hotel who they had met once at the Hale´vys. Antoine Goldet was a renowned physicist and his wife an English teacher in a progressive school, and though they were not political buffs like the Rossellis, the two couples enjoyed lively exchanges about Italy, the education of children or literature.29 Marion had re-read some of the English classics she had enjoyed at a younger age. Despite the obscure and abstruse style of the author, she enthused about George Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways, the story of ‘a beautiful and forceful woman’ trapped in an unhappy marriage and hindered in her ambition to live an independent and meaningful life. She also read E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India and found in his depiction of the English settlers’ attitude towards the Indians an echo – but ‘multiplied by the hundreds’ – of the attitude of the British expatriates in Florence towards the Italians. Once again, her reading choices were never far removed from her personal experiences and concerns.30 At the end of August, Carlo, Marion and Mirtillino left Combloux and mother and son settled at Barbizon in the south of Paris until school resumed.31 In the last months of 1935, they witnessed the invasion of Abyssinia and, to the despair of both, one of the most successful petitions of the period gathered signatures of many famous French intellectuals in support of Mussolini and the defence of Western culture against a ‘bunch of ignorant tribes’. Even though some of their friends on the left tried to react, it was obvious that the Italian offensive did not produce the opposition they had hoped for in French and European public opinion.32 The situation was even more depressing in Italy, as Mussolini successfully rallied public opinion against the League of Nations and in support of his military offensive. This was made obvious on the so-called ‘Day of faith’ of November 1935 when millions of Italian women and men answered his call and offered their gold wedding rings to finance the war effort. Even Benedetto Croce, although opposed to the attack against Abyssinia, chose to express his patriotism by giving his Senator gold medal to the state.33

166

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

Despite their sombre mood, Marion and Carlo found the time to go to the theatre to see The Trojan War Will Not Take Place, a play by Jean Giraudoux in which Louis Jouvet played an anti-war Hector who tried to sign a peace treaty with Ulysses, but all in vain as Cassandra’s warnings that war could not be avoided proved accurate in the end. The hints at the contemporary situation were so obvious that some of the dialogue triggered wild laughter among the audience.34 It was a pleasant interlude, but certainly not enough to dispel the gloomy atmosphere that prevailed in the Rosselli home at the close of 1935 and would continue into the New Year as both the family situation and the political context remained tensed. At the end of January 1936, an agent informed Rome that ‘the well-known Cave, Marion, wife of the fuoruscito Rosselli Carlo, and the also well-known Maria Bibbi, sister of the anarchist Bibbi Gino, have moved to Cannes.’ The local Italian consulate was ordered to keep an eye on them.35 Marion was still suffering from occasional heart palpitations and, once again, doctors ordered complete rest if possible away from Paris. Maria Bibbi kept her company and took care of Mirtillino when he occasionally came to stay with his mother. These were monotonous weeks and Marion often felt awkward in social surroundings that were light-years away from her own political and cultural milieu. Many among the betterˆ te d’Azur offs of her compatriots spent the winter season on the Co but, far from creating a feeling of community, their presence made her feel even more alien. ‘I introduced myself to a group of English clients at the hotel’ she wrote to Carlo, ‘but if they knew how “un-English” they made me feel!’36 She kept herself busy as usual, reading, discussing in her letters to Carlo the articles of GL that she often found too abstruse, sending copies of the newspaper to different addresses in Italy like so many political bottles tossed at sea.37 Compounding her despondency about her state of health, her guilt at having sent her younger children away to Florence haunted her and she wrote many anxious letters to Amelia expressing her desire to take them back rapidly while knowing this was not yet possible.38 There were also tensions with her mother-in-law about Mirtillino’s education. Amelia sent Marion a copy of Gioacchino Volpe’s L’italia in cammino for her grandson to read. This was a book

The Personal is Political

167

that had already provoked an argument between Carlo and his mother when it had come out in 1927. ‘Scratch, scratch and in mutter one always finds a bit of nationalism’, Carlo had teased her because of her enthusiasm for the book. Ten years later, she still felt it was a suitable introduction to the history of Italy for her grandson. Marion strongly disagreed. She found the book without the slightest critical spirit and written in a tone of nationalistic exaltation. ‘I do not want Mirtillino to learn the history of Italy in this way’, she wrote to Carlo.39 Carlo had little patience with Marion’s health problems. “Fever, weakness, palpitations. A misery with no end in sight,” he wrote to ˆ te d’Azur. “She is not feeling Gina Ferrero after visiting her on the Co well and is very depressed. I am really extremely upset.”40 But then, by the end of March, nearly a year after her serious heart problems started, her condition improved, and she could envisage returning to Paris. Mirtillino was with her and, as they boarded the train to go home, they bumped into H.G. Wells who had come to take care of his house at Grasse now that his affair with Odette Keun – Marion’s hostess four years earlier – was over. He invited them to have lunch in the dining car and they had a long discussion about the political situation. For Wells, being cosmopolitan seemed the only solution, but when she remarked that Carlo and she were certainly so, his answer unsettled her. ‘Rosselli has always seemed too Italian to me’ he said, referring to his action exclusively focused on the peninsula. As for Mirtillino, he was overjoyed to meet the author of Invisible Man – he had just seen the film – and of The First Men in the Moon that he was reading.41 Things were improving on the domestic front for the Rossellis, and the entire family was finally reunited at the end of April. The political situation in Italy, on the other hand, seemed to reach an all-time low with Mussolini’s military victory in Abyssinia in early May and the proclamation of the Empire a few weeks later. ‘These last weeks have been the most painful. As for me, I have lost all illusions. Total military victory will be followed by diplomatic victory’, Carlo wrote to Salvemini – and indeed, in July, Great Britain lifted its sanctions against Italy. ‘A new period is beginning for Italy and for us. It will be marked by a relative stabilization of fascism and our disappearance at

168

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

least as a movement of immediate action’ he added, wondering whether the time had not come to close down the organization and the newspaper, rather than accepting a long period of agony.42 Confirming H.G. Wells’ remark to Marion, the Rossellis were so deeply demoralized by the overwhelming victory of fascism in Italy that they seemed to pay little attention to the electoral victory of the Popular Front in France and the wave of strikes and factory occupations that followed. GL had first considered the Popular Front program too moderate and too exclusively focused on elections. If they came to see some hope in the wave of workers activity in May– June 1936, they continued to blame the Blum government for its blindness toward the fascist menace in Europe.43 But the situation in France was clearly not their main concern and, in their personal correspondence, the Rossellis only make a few passing references to practical disturbances provoked by the social agitation. Mirtillino had to wait for a while to receive the bicycle his parents offered him for his birthday as it was delayed by the strikes, and they conceded the 40-hour week to their live-in help (although the law did not apply to this category of employees as Marion informed Amelia).44 They also had to make full use of their network of relationships to make sure their precocious son could be enrolled in a good secondary school the following year and, thanks to a friendly inspector, he was finally admitted at the Lyce´e Montaigne, one of the best state grammar schools in Paris.45 As French workers were about to enjoy their first paid holidays granted by the Popular Front government, for the Rossellis the summer months did not appear very promising. At the end of June, Marion left Paris for Annecy where she spent a few days on her own delighting in the peaceful scenery, but the weather was so awful that she remained indoors reading.46 In mid-July, Carlo joined her with the children and the nanny and they settled at Morzines, a mountain resort in Haute-Savoie. The weather was cold and depressing and the relationship between husband and wife was marred by a certain degree of melancholy as they took stock of their life together after 10 years of marriage. Marion sounded rather disenchanted. ‘Having reached the tenth year is already something, but for me reaching a second decade would be a real tour de force!’47 She read Le´on Blum’s

The Personal is Political

169

famous essay, Marriage, first published in 1907, and strongly agreed with his claim that women, like men, should acquire some sexual experience before marriage and with his advocacy of an equal relationship once married. Yet, she regretted that he only discussed the experience of bourgeois couples, ignoring the problems that working-class couples may face. More importantly, she criticized him for not discussing the problems of children and how they could affect (‘complicate’, ‘hamper’ or ‘enrich’ was the choice of verbs she offered) the happy and equal relationship between the spouses.48 Political events would soon both rekindle and test their relationship while reviving their political passions. International communication was slow at the time, but they eventually received the news of the military coup organized by a group of officers led by General Franco to topple the recently elected Popular Front government in Spain, triggering a civil war that would pit the Nationalists – as the rebels were called – against the Republicans or Loyalist forces.49 Carlo immediately drove back to Paris to follow the political situation and assess the mood among Italian antifascists. With his usual sharp political intuition, he immediately interpreted the Spanish coup as the beginning of the European Civil War against fascism that he had been calling for for such a long time, and he understood that the main front, for the time being, had moved to Spain.50 From the start, there was no doubt in his mind that Italian antifascists should not only rally to the support of the Republicans, but should also prepare to fight at their side and, by their example, stimulate reactions against the Mussolini regime in Italy.51 He was obliged to wait and see for a while. How would the military situation evolve? What would the French – and British – government do? To what extent were the various antifascist groups ready to embrace his proposal to send an Italian column to Spain? On the three counts, the answers were not encouraging. The rebels were scoring rapid victories and, fearing to push Italy and Germany on the side of Franco, the French and British authorities refused to send arms to the threatened Spanish government. Not much surprise there, but more disappointing was the reaction of the Italian communists and socialists. The first had not yet received the official line from Moscow and the second were linked to them by the Popular Front agreement,

170

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

so they refused point blank Rosselli’s proposal to send armed combatants to Spain.52 Only the anarchists agreed with him and offered their collaboration. In the meantime, Rosselli did the most he could to offer concrete help to the Loyalists. Weapons were the most important items in demand and he took many contacts in France, Belgium and Switzerland to acquire what he could. He also helped Andre´ Malraux form his air squadron by mobilizing the technicians and pilots he had come to know during the GL propaganda flights in the Italian skies. In early August, he travelled to Barcelona to meet the local anarchists and study with them the formation of the ‘Italian column’ and, once convinced of its feasibility, he quickly travelled back to Paris to finalize the preparations.53 Despite her many misgivings about her personal situation, Marion totally supported Carlo’s engagement on this new front and he kept her informed of his whereabouts by the occasional cryptic letter or telegram.54 She occasionally played the courier, taking messages to Geneva related to the acquisition of weapons, and her energy seemed sufficiently restored to face the long journey by bus, boat and train. It was a modest contribution to the cause and the occasion to get away from the ‘too many’ children, in particular from Melina who was ‘extremely difficult’. ‘I despair at her mean attitude’ and her ‘blind egocentrism’, she complained to Amelia55 Then on 14 August, Carlo arrived ‘dressed as a worker who has just walked out of the factory’ and wearing a Basque beret, his combatant uniform.56 This last weekend before Carlo’s departure for Spain was the occasion for the activist couple to renew their commitment to each other and to their cause. The time had finally arrived for a physical engagement with the enemy and, despite the risks entailed, they found themselves once again in complete agreement. Gone was the melancholy and doubts that had marred their tenth wedding anniversary, and Carlo rejoiced of their restored agreement: The idea that you understand me and that, although suffering from my absence, you feel that I could not and should not act otherwise, that if you were free from your motherly duties you would be here too gives me great serenity. Thanks again Marionellina for this proof of intelligent and deep affection. It is so nice for both of us to find ourselves again after ten years with the same spirit and understanding as in the past.57

The Personal is Political

171

They were again strongly united in their struggle against fascism and both were convinced that engagement in Spain was extremely important for the liberation of Italy. Marion and Mirtillino accompanied Carlo to Grenoble from where he would reach Spain. It was a beautiful day and they parted after a happy meal. ‘I am certain that you understand me and approve of my choice, dear Marionellina, even if regarding family responsibilities you would have the right to blame your husband who loves you as much as in the early days, even more that when we first met’, Carlo reassured her in his first letter from Barcelona.58 His repeated references to her ‘motherly duties’ and ‘family responsibilities’ were veiled references to the arguments he must have opposed to Marion who had not given up the idea of eventually joining him in Spain in some non-combatant role. The Rossellis’ mood was once again optimistic and Marion and Mirtillino spent a joyful weekend with the Ferreros and some English friends in Geneva.59 Marion could not stand staying in her mountain resort, away from any fresh news that may arrive from Spain and ‘surrounded by people who have nothing in common with me.’60 So she took her family to Barbizon where she could travel regularly to Paris to keep in touch with the political situation. As soon as school resumed, she moved back to the city and busied herself with the solidary work for the families of the Italian volunteers that was starting in earnest.61 Carlo wrote to her from the Aragonese front, full of enthusiasm for his new social and political experience; ‘Imagine, my dear little wife, the great joy of your husband at having finally been able to move from a theoretical to a practical position, Spanish today, Italian tomorrow.’ He was totally caught up in the excitement of the situation and felt ‘like a man whisked away from the earth to the moon.’62 The 130 or so members of the ‘Italian column’ named after Garibaldi – some GL activists but mostly anarchists – were integrated into the Catalan anarcho-syndicalist forces and they had their first major military engagement at the end of August at Monte Pelato on the front of Huesca. Their success in fighting off the Nationalist forces generated a great excitement among exiled antifascists who flocked to the Catalan front, and the ‘Italian column’

172

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

soon counted 400 members.63 ‘Marion, what an extraordinary experience’, Carlo enthused. ‘I will come back enriched, strengthened and rejuvenated’. He had been slightly injured, but with no serious consequences, and was rather proud that, as he had hoped, ‘the first bullet would be mine’.64 In the following weeks, the military stasis on the Aragon front and the political disputes between the GL activists and the anarchists dampened his enthusiasm, although they did not alter his understanding of the significance of the Spanish engagement for the global fight against fascism. Now the communists, socialists and republicans agreed to form an ‘Italian legion’, which the GL activists would eventually join and their bataillon would become the Garibaldi Brigade a few months later. Rosselli would try to regroup the non-communist forces in a Matteotti bataillon but ironically, as his vision was triumphing, GL was in fact losing its independent role.65 In early November, Carlo made a short trip to Paris to cure his wound, and he was once again reassured of Marion’s full support. Since the early days of Florentine antifascism or the Lipari years they had never been so close and so convinced of the rightness of their cause. At the Venturi’s, they attended a dinner party where they met Victor Serge, the Russian revolutionary who had finally been released after the campaign launched six months earlier by Salvemini at the Congress for the Freedom of Culture. He was impressed by the Rossellis as he would recall after learning of Carlo and Nello’s assassination a few months later: It was last November, at the home full of rare books of an Italian scholar. There was Modigliani, persecuted veteran of Italian socialism. There was the art historian Jacques Mesnil, a specialist of Botticelli. There was also Carlo Rosseli [sic] and his wife, both smiling with the inner confidence of people for whom the awareness of the tragedy of human destiny has produced a sort of balance. Together – they almost look alike – at first sight they convey an impression of plenitude and security. One feels they are self-confident, totally trustworthy. They lead a simple life, they are loyal and put their clear and agile intellect at the service of a great cause. Having found their destiny, they are willing to fight for it to the end. We discussed the tragic situation in Russia. Then we discussed the tragic situation in Italy. Finally, we discussed the tragic

The Personal is Political

173

situation in Spain . . . Here we were together, having escaped from several totalitarian dictatorships and yet confident in the future of humanity.66

After a few days with his family and Amelia who had travelled to Paris, Carlo headed back to Catalonia. At the station, the couple parted once again with mutual reassurances.67 Upon returning to Spain, Rosselli performed one of his most brilliant propaganda coup with his impassioned speech on Radio Barcelona, a short-wave station that reached Italy. In ‘Today in Spain, Tomorrow in Italy’, he presented the ongoing Civil War as the first step toward defeating fascism in Italy, but he also insisted on the social advances made in Catalonia, ‘Communism, yes, but libertarian communism’. He concluded with a passionate denunciation of Mussolini’s murderous role alongside Franco’s forces and an appeal to his compatriots not to let Italian bombs ‘assassinate the freedom of the Spanish people’.68 Although the direct impact of the speech in Italy was difficult to assess, it further enhanced Rosselli’s reputation as Mussolini’s staunchest enemy as the fascist police concluded in a report.69 Despite Carlo’s legendary optimism, the military operations were excruciatingly slow, and the following weeks witnessed an accumulation of problems. Military stasis, political disputes within the Italian column and criticism of Rosselli’s style of leadership led to his resignation in early December. He planned to travel to Valencia where the Spanish anarchist minister Garcia Oliver had asked him to join him, but the demanding physical regime on the front had provoked a bout of phlebitis and he remained tied up in Catalonia.70 As he planned to remain in Spain to cure his phlebitis and eventually relaunch a new Italian column, he remained very vague in his letters and Marion was becoming increasingly restless. Her ‘motherly duties’, to use Carlo’s expression, kept her in Paris and she both enjoyed and resented them. The revolution had come, and she felt that she was deliberately kept away and left to experience it only by proxy. Her feelings, at that moment, were not very different from those of Clara Malraux: ‘Andre´ was my delegate to the outside world that reached me only through the haze of frosted glass.’71 Yet, many people – including women – were going to Spain to fulfil

174

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

non-combatant duties and she strongly desired to do so, as she wrote to Carlo in mid-December, but to no avail. To reject her demand to come to Barcelona, he first alluded to the uncertain military and political situation but, more importantly from his point of view, he reminded her of her primary duties: ‘There are three children to be taken care of’. At about the same time, the Malraux had similar tense exchanges as Andre´, who resented Clara’s presence in Spain at his side, reminded her of her motherly duties and suggested she return to Paris to take care of their daughter.72 As for Marion, torn between her desire to join the fight and her disappointment with Carlo’s attitude, she put aside, yet again, her resentment to give her full support to her husband who still hoped to make a difference in Spain today and ‘tomorrow in Italy’.73

CHAPTER 10

Death in Normandy (Spring 1937)

The climate of political uncertainty and personal concern that dominated the last weeks of 1936 did not dissipate with the New Year. Marion spent the holidays with her children near Montreux in Switzerland expecting Carlo to return from Spain at any moment. ‘For a long time or a short time, I can’t say.’1 When he finally arrived, she could assess his state of health and his state of mind, and she realized that the Spanish episode had taken its toll. His body was exhausted and his mind quite dejected. Beyond its broader political meaning which remained unchanged, Carlo’s personal and political experience in Spain had been both exhilarating and disappointing. The redemptive dimension of the direct armed engagement against the fascist enemy, the surprisingly easy contact with men from very different social backgrounds, the political experimentation of new forms of social and economic organizations had reignited his perennial optimism which had been temporarily battered by the Abyssinian crisis. On the other hand, the political bickering with the anarchists, the difficulty of playing a leadership role both at the military and political levels, the growing feeling of isolation as the Popular Front parties were forming better organized and stronger international brigades in Spain, fostered a certain pessimism about the action of organized groups. ‘I love

176

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

mankind at an abstract level and man at a concrete level. But the group, the association, with rare exceptions, seems to me ever more flawed and sometimes even unbearable’, he confessed to Marion who shared his opinion. ‘Haven’t I always told you so? That as soon as you look at mankind through groups, it is a sorry sight? But this observation makes the rare individuals who can withstand all the trials even more precious.’2 While such a judgment brought Carlo and Marion closer together, it was not much of a political recipe for intervention in a struggle that mobilized masses of people split up in many different parties and groups. Carlo’s phlebitis was more serious than expected and doctors recommended a hydrotherapic treatment at Bagnoles-de-l’Orne, a spa in Normandy which did not open until mid-May.3 In the meantime, Paris was bristling with activists of various persuasions, escapees from Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy, combatants from Spain eager to go back to the front, volunteers for the International Brigades waiting for their baptism of fire, not to mention fascist spies and Soviet commissars. Carlo and Marion resumed their active life of meetings, visits and endless debates with old and new acquaintances.4 There was a new closeness with the communists now that they were strongly engaged on the side of the Spanish Republicans. Marion recalled Ercoli (the communist leader Togliatti) calling their flat several times a day to talk with Carlo and she was active in the solidarity committees with Spain organized by the Popular Front parties.5 Many German antifascist intellectuals visited the Rossellis, including a young rising star of German letters in exile, Ernst Erich Noth, brought to their flat by an Italian intellectual, Giacomo Antonini, who claimed to be antifascist but was in fact an OVRA spy. After nearly two years in Swiss sanatoriums, their old friend Emilio Lussu was finally back in Paris ‘almost cured and anxious to go to Spain’.6 Amid all this Carlo and Marion learned from Amelia that the value of their shares in Siele and other similar companies were skyrocketing because of the threat of war, a paradoxical development they had not anticipated but that they probably welcomed, given the depleted state of their finances.7 Carlo and Marion managed to go away together, without the children who were sent to Barbizon with their nanny. In early April,

Death in Normandy

177

ˆ te d’Azur where they spent a full week at Beaulieu, on the Co Carlo could enjoy the rest he absolutely needed to recover fully. It was also the occasion for the couple to reinforce their bonds severely tested by recent events. In the precarious and volatile political situation in Europe they convinced themselves once again of their shared commitment to each other and to the antifascist cause and their short holiday turned out to be a ‘beautiful and very sweet honeymoon.’8 In the context of intense tactical discussions and military preparations, it was clear that there would be a sharp division of roles and responsibilities. Carlo returned to Paris for political meetings while Marion started planning for their long stay at Bagnoles. Rosselli and what was left of GL found themselves quite isolated in the new context dominated by Popular Front policies and the formation of the International Brigades under communist and socialist auspices. In Spain, the GL combatants had by now abandoned the idea of forming an autonomous unit and were joining the Garibaldi brigade. In France, at the end of March, 500 delegates, mainly from the PCI and PSI, gathered in Lyon to form an Italian popular front, l’Unione Popolare italiana with its daily paper, La Voce degli Italiani. The appeal of the new organization was great among exiled antifascists and, despite the early reluctance of several GL leaders, Rosselli was working for a rapprochement as expressed in his last important political text ‘For the political unification of the Italian proletariat’ published in five instalments in March and April in Giustizia e Liberta`. The texts expressed a clear shift to the left and the embracing of a more classist approach, identifying the working class as the agent of the socialist revolution as opposed to his previous vision that attributed this role to an enlightened elite. It was not yet clear whether and how GL would find its place in the Unity of Action Pact as some of its historic leaders, such as Lussu or Trentin, were wary of the overwhelming domination of the communists on the new front, but it was undoubtedly the orientation Rosselli was trying to give to his organization in the last weeks of his life.9 This did not deter him, however, from renewing with the GL tradition of propaganda by deeds. After the battle of Guadalajara in early March, when the Italian brigadists defeated battalions

178

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

composed essentially of Italian fascist soldiers, his propaganda campaign in Giustizia e Liberta` reached new heights. This was a clear proof that ‘the prophets were no longer disarmed’ and that wellorganized and determined antifascist forces could defeat fascism. He published many testimonies of disenchanted Italian soldiers captured by the Republicans and printed two special broadsheets, to be posted whenever possible on the walls of Italian cities, reproducing many photos of captured soldiers with their names and addresses.10 He planned to organize a flight over Turin to distribute them to a large Italian public. A letter to Marion, giving important details about the distribution of leaflets from the sky, was seized by the Italian police who alerted their French colleagues and the flight had to be abandoned.11 This was a setback but, in the broader scheme of things, a rather minor one, unlike what was happening in Spain where tragic developments could have dampened his enthusiasm for the new alliance he envisaged with the Popular Front groups. In May in Catalonia, following Comintern directives, the socialist – communist forces launched a bloody attack to overthrow the anarchists and trotskyists regrouped in the POUM, killing hundreds of activists, among whom were Camillo Berneri and many of Rosselli’s Spanish friends.12 Clearly disheartened, Carlo nevertheless adopted a careful attitude, regretting the repression but assessing it exclusively from the point of view of its impact on the continuation of the war. ‘In the current situation, it is useless to dream of a pure and abstract revolutionary politics’, he wrote in what was probably his last political statement. Convinced that the USSR was the only support of the Spanish Republicans, he chose to turn a blind eye on its abuses. “Sure, the USSR is intervening in Spain beyond what is just and necessary. But without the USSR would there still be a Republican Spain today? Despite all the errors, the setbacks, the disillusions, Spain remains the battleground between Fascism and Antifascism.’13 The ‘May events’ in Barcelona did not call into question his new sympathy for the communists. He expressed it forcefully in his celebration of the life and thought of Antonio Gramsci, the jailed Communist leader who had just died in Italy. His speech was celebrated by the French and Italian Communist leaders along whom he appeared at a commemoration meeting at the Gymnase Huygens

Death in Normandy

179

on 22 May in what would be his last public appearance.14 In his last days in Paris before leaving for Bagnoles, he was often spotted with Marion at the terrace of the Montparnasse cafe´s engaged in intense and friendly discussions with Italian communist leaders. It is on such an occasion that one of his future assassins identified his target.15 In contrast with the rather sombre political climate, the month of May started on a happy note in the Rosselli family. On May Day, after a difficult pregnancy, Maria gave birth to her fourth child in Florence. The same day, Mirtillino went out to the street corner to buy a bunch of lilies of the valley, a good-luck present traditionally offered on May Day in France. ‘It seems to me it has brought good fortune to the whole family,’ a delighted Marion wrote to her mother-in law.16 She went to stay for a few days at Fresnay, the Noufflards’ home in Normandy, ‘in the middle of Flaubert country.’ Carlo and Mirtillino joined her for the long Whitsun weekend, while Melina and Andrea remained in Paris with their nanny. It was a charming Normandy cottage and she was given the room of Miss Paget (Vernon Lee), her old acquaintance from Florence who had been a frequent visitor until her death two years earlier. The unrelenting rain reminded her of the Middlesex countryside of her youth and this made her feel even more estranged from her native country.17 The family mood remained festive and they drove back to Paris just in time to attend the meeting honouring Gramsci. The last days before their departure for Bagnoles were hectic. In between the usual political discussions and meetings, she enrolled Melina and Andrea at the infant school of the Lyce´e Montaigne, visited a flat with Carlo behind the Panthe´on where they envisaged to move after the summer and spent with him a weekend at the Hale´vy’s in Sucy-en-Brie; she translated and typed a long article, made arrangements with Genevie`ve Noufflard, now a young teenager of 16, who would accompany Mirtillino in his after-school activities, and went to the theatre with Carlo and the girl’s parents to see Giraudoux’s latest play Electra staged by Louis Jouvet. With the wisdom of hindsight, it is tempting to see an element of foreboding in the story of Electra and her destructive quest for the truth about the murder of her father but, for the Rossellis and their friends that evening, it was simply ‘the theatrical event of the season’.18 Amid all this agitation, she did

180

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

not pay much attention to the young man who, one afternoon, knocked at her door in rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs and insisted on visiting the flat to sell her carpets. She quickly got rid of him just as the concierge of the building had done a few days earlier with another young man who inquired about the whereabouts of the Rossellis to whom he intended to sell an insurance policy.19 Marion and Carlo left Paris on Thursday 27 May by car and after six hours they arrived in the elegant town of Bagnoles-de-l’Orne, where they planned to spend three weeks. Before leaving, they had learned that Amelia would not visit them as she had originally planned, but that Nello, who had unexpectedly received his passport, would join them for a few days in early June. The place combined the elegance of splendid Belle E´poque and Art Deco residential villas, hotels and spa facilities with the lushness of the Normandy forest. Marion ˆ tel Cordier in Tesse´-laand Carlo rented two rooms at the Ho Madeleine, on the outskirt of the town. They had brought ‘a suitcase full of books’ and, between reading, writing and Carlo’s treatment of mud baths, they did not intend to take any part in the many social events offered by this rather fashionable resort frequented by various celebrities. Husband and wife greatly appreciated A.J. Cronin’s The Stars Look Down, a novel about social injustices in a coalmining community. Marion ‘devoured’ Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, loving his snappy style and the cinematic qualities of his descriptions of the Basque country. She also discovered the writings of Vita Sackville-West, who had been one of H.G. Wells’ mistresses and probably the model for Ann Veronica.20 Never since the days of Lipari had the couple enjoyed such a long period of rest together and they were determined to take full advantage of this short interlude before new political engagements, as testified by the letters ‘full of passion and visions for the future’ Carlo wrote to his friends from Bagnoles.21 Aware of the fragility of this agreeable but temporary lull in their lives, Marion even hesitated to go to Paris for her son’s birthday. But, of course, she could not disappoint Mirtillino and Carlo would not be alone since Nello had arrived on 6 June to keep him company. On 9 June, the three of them had a pleasant lunch in a local inn, La vieille Madeleine. Delighted to be together again, they did not notice the four men who entered the restaurant and watched them

Death in Normandy

181

until they left for the station. Marion took the express train for Paris planning to return on 11 June.22 ‘The tragedy befell us, and it was final.’ Tarchiani’s words expressed the feeling of Carlo’s many friends as the news of his assassination reached them.23 For Marion, the tragedy first took the form of a minor hitch. She had been so busy with her son’s birthday party that she had not been particularly worried that Carlo had not called her or Mirtillino. After all, a postcard of his, also signed by Nello, had arrived. ‘35 kisses and 47 good wishes’ was its message.24 The next day though, now a little concerned not to have heard from her husband, she called the hotel and was puzzled by the evasive answers she received, immediately suspecting that an accident may have occurred. As she put the phone down, the doorbell rang. Two excited reporters from Le Journal asked for ‘Madame Rosselli’ and their attitude confirmed her worst fears. ‘My husband has had an accident? Please tell me if he’s injured.’ Faced with her obvious anxiety and nervousness, the journalists did not answer, obeying a silent sign from the housekeeper who approached them. ‘Madame has a heart condition; a great shock could harm her; better to let a relative give her the details.’ Leaving Marion in tears, the journalists ran to the office of Giustizia e Liberta` where they found Cianca, gave him the news and rushed back with him to rue Notre-Damedes-Champs where he informed Marion of the tragedy. ‘The widow bravely dried her tears and turning toward us, she said: “This is a political crime. I intend to do everything I can to help with the enquiry”.’25 She only learned the details of the attack the following day when she went, together with Alberto Tarchiani and Franco Venturi, to identify the bodies at the mortuary in Couternes. After dropping her at the station, the two brothers had decided to drive to Alencon to visit the cathedral and buy some lace placemats, a specialty of this small town, not noticing they were closely followed by no less than seven people in two cars, a Peugeot and an Oldsmobile.26 On the way back, a few kilometres before Tesse´-la-Madeleine, near the Chaˆteau de Couternes, Carlo’s Ford was overtaken by the Peugeot which, after a few minutes, stopped abruptly on the narrow country road forcing Carlo to come to a halt. The Oldsmobile which was tailing him also

182

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

stopped. It was a deserted, wooded area, ideal to set up an ambush, yet the two brothers did not seem suspicious at first. Believing the Peugeot had had a mechanical failure, Nello stepped out of the car to offer help. As he approached the Peugeot, one of the men, Filliol, looked up and shot him while another, Jakubiez, approaching him from behind stabbed him. Filliol walked to the Ford and shot Carlo who was still inside. The two brothers seemed to have opposed a fierce resistance since Nello was stabbed 17 times and Carlo’s face and neck suffered several stab wounds.27 Two of the assailants carried the bodies in the nearby forest and covered them with a layer of foliage. As Jakubiez drove the Ford away followed by the Peugeot, a young woman – He´le`ne Besneux a hairdresser from Bagnoles – rode past them on her bike. She noticed a large blood stain on the road but was scared by the men’s hostile looks and rode away. The two cars drove to a spot 10 km from Couternes and Jakubiez abandoned the Ford after failing to blow it up. Some local peasants noticed first the two cars then the abandoned Ford but did not think much of it on the moment. The murderers and their accomplices drove quickly back to Paris and vanished. Two days later, on the Friday morning, a blacksmith riding to Bagnoles on his bike stopped and entered the forest to answer nature’s call. He discovered the two bodies piled on top of each other as well as the blood-stained switchblade and hurried to Couternes to warn the police.28 Within a few hours, the assassination became front-page news and Marion was not left much time to grieve and mourn her beloved Carlo as she had to deal with the private and public aspects of the tragedy. By a superhuman effort of the will, she managed to stave off a cardiac crisis and face both the sorrow of her family, the questions of the police, the compassionate visits of her friends and acquaintances, the numerous political speculations about motives, paymasters, executioners, while at the same time seeing to the organization of the funerals. Even if she had wanted to, there was no way she could have protected her children, even the young ones, from the news, given the comings and goings of friends and journalists in their flat. They all remembered precisely the moment when she told them and the words she used, even if all the rest

Death in Normandy

183

remained rather confused. John, who had just turned 10, recalled: ‘It must have been the afternoon of 11 June that [my mother] strode into my room (strode is the word; my mother was not one to sidle into things at such a time). Speaking in her native English as she did in moments of stress (or when she was addled up), she said “Darling, the fascists have killed Babbo!”’29 Later that same day, she called Melina and Andrea, aged seven and six, into her room as Melina later recalled: ‘She was in her bed, with a sense of defeat, a woman who had been tested. But, essentially, she was calm. She asked us: “Do you know what the word ‘assassination’ means?” We answered yes; then all I remember is that we returned to our room.’30 Then there was Amelia and Nello’s family in Florence. Alessandro Levi, the first of the Rosselli relatives to be informed, had rushed to Paris from Florence. Marion sent a telegram to Amelia, but she did not dare to break the terrible news. She just mentioned a ‘great misfortune’ and urged her to come immediately.31 The chief of police Bocchini informed Mussolini that ‘the mother of the Rosselli brothers has asked for a passport: I thought better to grant it to avoid comments or conjectures.’32 Accompanied by Aldo Forti, a friend of Nello who rented a flat in the Rosselli mansion, she took a night train to Paris thinking her sons had had a car accident.33 She was welcomed at the Gare de Lyon by Lionello Venturi, and when she saw the swarm of curious journalists armed with cameras, she understood that something serious had happened – murder, not an accident. ‘White-haired, frail and broken’, the very image of motherly sorrow, this is how she appeared to the press after being given the details of the tragedy by Lionello Venturi. ‘I prefer it to be like this’ she reacted, ‘because at least, like their brother, they died for an ideal’.34 He took her to rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs where she was reunited with Marion. Embracing her, she cried out ‘Ah! There’s someone left who still calls me “mamma”!’ After that, she simply collapsed and remained confined to her room, mad with the grief of losing her two younger sons after Aldo who had died during World War I.35 Maria, still weak after a difficult child-birth, was recovering at the Zabban villa on the hills of Florence with little Alberto whom she was breastfeeding. The other three children were with their maternal grandparents who mentioned ‘a long journey’, but also a

184

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

‘serious illness’, until eventually her mother told them: ‘Don’t you understand? Babbo will never come back!’ She too collapsed and was unable to travel to Paris.36 No matter how distraught she felt, Marion was determined to follow the investigation and make herself available for the police. Maıˆtre Moro Giafferi, the famous human rights lawyer who had already defended Carlo and his co-accused at Lugano and was a close friend of the couple, offered to assist her with the case. Former Prime Minister Nitti, who had pressed Minister Marx Dormoy to speed up the inquiry, accompanied her to of the Ministry of the Interior. The police questioned her about suspicious characters she may have noticed. She mentioned a young Italian intellectual, Carlo Naef, who had insisted on visiting Carlo at Bagnoles, but he was arrested and soon released because he had an alibi. She also mentioned Giacomo Antonini and his suspiciously frequent visits to the Rosselli flat in the previous months. She gave them several letters he had written to Carlo announcing that he would visit him at Bagnoles. He became a prime suspect and left France for Holland as another OVRA agent immediately informed the authorities in Rome.37 Apart from that, the police had few cues. Like Marion and her friends, they were convinced of the political nature of the murder, but they looked to French far-right terrorist groups that had been active since the arrival of the Popular Front to power. Groups like the CSAR (Comite´ secret d’action re´volutionnaire) – also called La Cagoule (‘the Hood’) – connected to the Action Francaise or the Croix-de-Feu. Although they did not have anything to link these groups to the murders, the French police clearly favoured this lead, while the antifascists insisted on the Italian connection but were unable to prove it concretely at the time.38 ‘We denounce Benito Mussolini as the prime instigator of the murder perpetrated in France against Carlo and Nello Rosselli by fascist hired killers.’ With these words, the Central Committee of Giustizia` e Liberta` put the blame directly on the Duce. This judgment was shared by all the Italian antifascist organizations. United in their horror at the crime of Bagnoles, they affirmed ‘categorically and unanimously that the terrorist organization OVRA, under the direct orders of the head of the Italian government, is responsible for instigating and executing the horrible attack.’39

Death in Normandy

185

Their worst suspicions were confirmed by the efforts the fascist agents deployed in Italy and the European press to spread doubt and confusion about the possible motives for the murders, thereby trying to divert attention away from the various Italian government agencies. A rumour had it that Carlo Rosselli had made his peace with the regime in exchange for an amnesty and was the victim of the wrath of the exiled anti-fascists. Le Figaro in France carried the story a few days after the murder and it was also picked up by Le Matin and La Liberte´.40 A similar story was published the same day by the Times of London. Marion reacted immediately and asked to see the correspondent of the Manchester Guardian at her home in Paris to make the following statement: I have not yet made personally any statement to the press, but I wish to say this to the Manchester Guardian for which my husband had the greatest esteem. From the first minute, I have not had the slightest doubt that the murder of my husband and his brother was instigated by the Italian government. I solemnly accuse the Italian government before the civilized world, as the crime bears all the marks of the murder of Matteotti.

She then broached the issues of the rumours: Referring to a report in some of the British newspapers that Carlo Rosselli ‘had recently told several friends that he meant to give up his anti-fascist activities and that he had been given permission to return to Italy,’ Signora Rosselli exclaimed with tears in her eyes. ‘This is an abominable lie spread by the agents of Italian Fascism. Perhaps those who spread the report would kindly produce the “friends” to whom my husband made such a statement.’41

Some of Marion’s friends in England also stepped in to oppose a firm denial to the rumours about Carlo making his peace with the regime.42 As the story continued to circulate, a few days later Marion sent an official statement to several European papers. To repudiate the infamous campaign of the Fascist Government, which is trying to invent an excuse, I, the widow of Carlo Rosselli, formally declare that Carlo Rosseli fought against Fascism with all his power and was, to his last breath, faithful, in Italy, in Spain, and in France, to his ideal of justice and liberty. He is a victim to his ideal. Nobody must believe, even for one moment, the lies told by the agents of Fascism who would make out that Carlo Rosselli meant to adhere to the Fascist

186

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

regime. This lie is worse than a crime. I beg all persons of good faith to defend the honour of a martyr, of his innocent children, and mine.43

Another story referred to a feud between the various left-wing factions fighting in Spain. It was first voiced by Giovanni Ansaldo, ‘the despicable Ansaldo’ as Carlo called his former friend, who stated that ‘It is probably an “elimination” resulting from the antagonisms between different extremist sects.’44 Despite the repeated denials of Marion and her friends, these stories continued to circulate in the following weeks, probably to the satisfaction of the French authorities, as their inquiries did not make much progress and they were concerned that probing deeper into fascist complicities might antagonize the French government’s relations with Italy. For the Rossellis’ friends and acquaintances these slanders compounded the gut-wrenching feeling of irremediable loss they all experienced, a loss that was as much personal as political. They were all aware of the deadly nature of the Fascist regime, and many had been convinced for some time that Carlo, with his unrelenting campaigns against the lies and crimes of Mussolini, would be the dictator’s next target. But when the news of his death reached them, many could not believe that their congenial, indomitable friend had met his tragic fate. They felt a need to be together, to support his family in this moment of grief and, in the days before the funerals, there was a continuous flow of callers at rue Notre-Dame-desChamps. ‘Antifascist friends trooped in and out of the flat,’ John/ Mirtillino recalled, ‘giving Italian signs of sympathy – hushed consideration for my mother, anguished pats on the head for me – that were genuine, but dramatically heightened.’45 Some of Carlo’s friends were fighting in Spain, others were abroad, and those who could rushed back to Paris. Emilio Lussu was in Barcelona when the news reached him. Pietro Nenni recalled: ‘He looked for me all day long, He had a paper with the first news about the fascist murder [. . .]. We all felt that antifascism had just registered an irretrievable loss. Then an appalling silence descended upon us [. . .]. It was as if something had broken within us.’46 They immediately left for Paris. Lussu had last seen Carlo at the end of May as he was preparing to go to Bagnoles. As usual, they had had a

Death in Normandy

187

heated argument about the best tactics to adopt but, as Lussu was leaving for Spain the next morning, they had not had time to patch things up as they had always done in the past. Remembering their last dispute, when he came to visit her Marion’s first concern was to reassure him. ‘You know, Carlo did not hold anything against you at all.’ Lussu refused to see Carlo’s dead body. ‘I will always see him as he was [at the time of our first meeting at Lipari], standing, robust, strong. So strong that he seemed immortal, even physically. Like a Greek hero.’47 Gaetano Salvemini had just boarded the S.S. Champlain in New York when he received the news. Despite their political estrangement they had remained personally close and Salvemini had planned to spend part of the summer holiday with Marion and Carlo in England.48 He was devastated at the loss of his two pupils whom he considered almost as his sons, and he just wanted to be with Marion to support her. He did not make it to Paris in time for the funerals, but he spent a few days in the French capital with Marion and Amelia. He expressed the magnitude of his despair to Isabel Massey: The tragedy here is so great that it still overwhelms my mind [. . .]. I have the feeling that my life has been again cut short as it was in 1908. It is a terrible thing to see first one’s children to be destroyed, and then again, a new set of sons to be destroyed. Rossi, Traquandi, and so many others buried in prison or on penal islands; Carlo and Nello murdered. Life is too hard indeed.49

As for Rossi, Bauer and the other GL activists arrested in Italy, the news reached them belatedly in prison and only reinforced their feeling of defeat and helplessness. The desire to share in the common grief was stronger than security considerations. In the Roman prison of Regina Coeli, Ernesto Rossi, Riccardo Bauer and Vittorio Foa wrote a message on a piece of cigarette paper which Rossi rolled into a tiny ball and transmitted to his mother on 29 June. It read: To be published immediately with our signatures. Carlo and Nello Rosselli with their mutilated bodies continue to repeat ‘DO NOT YIELD’. From prison, we urge you to follow the path taken by our dead, for this is the only honour worthy of them. Not for revenge, but for justice and liberty.50

188

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

The message reached Marion and her friends, but they did not publish it for fear of retaliation against its authors. Elie and Florence Hale´vy were in London when they learned of the double murder. They had left Paris just after the weekend they had spent at Sucy-en-Brie with Carlo and Marion and other friends among whom Raymond Aron.51 Europe was becoming an ‘infernal continent’ and the murder of his friends reinforced Elie Hale´vy’s pessimism about the coming ‘age of tyranny’. ‘The death of the Rosselli brothers – both my friends,’ he wrote to Baron von Meyendorff, ‘one a fierce and unremitting enemy of Mussolini, the other a moderate antifascist and a talented historian, has submerged us in grief.’ He again expressed his feeling of despondency to Gabrielle Le´on, the wife of his friend the philosopher Xavier Le´on: We have been deeply moved by the dual murder of the Rosselli brothers for whom – in particular for Carlo, but also for Nello – we felt a great friendship. That a man who has repeatedly eaten at your table, who has often visited you with his wife and children would be murdered surreptitiously by a tyrant’s henchmen is a new and bitter impression for me. Yet, I make a difference between the two victims. Carlo, who had gone to fight in Spain, knew the risks he was facing. But his unfortunate brother, a talented historian, certainly antifascist but totally cut off from politics and married to a woman who was nothing less than antifascist, would pay such a price for an accidental visit to Carlo on the day chosen by fate is really an atrocity. Alas! Such is our century!52

He expressed the widely-shared feeling that Nello’s death was a collateral damage, not the result of any plan and that, had Marion or Amelia been in Bagnoles instead of him, they too would have been assassinated.53 The Noufflards stepped in to help Marion with the children. Once the post-mortem examinations were over at Couternes, the evening of 13 June the bodies were taken to the flat in rue Notre-Dame-desChamps where they laid in state for a couple of days, and the flow of visitors continued. The children were sent to the Noufflards and, after the gloomy and tense atmosphere of their family home, the town house rue de Varenne was a haven with ‘everything to cocoon a child’ John recalled. ‘Lots of space, an old harmonium, a toy carriage and horses, an old puppet theatre . . . costumes for dressing up; a garden,

Death in Normandy

189

a cat and two kittens.’ Unlike the Rossellis’ Italian friends and their effusive grieving, the Noufflards were ‘not at all given to dramatizing the situation’ and strove to create a tranquil environment for the children. Genevie`ve Noufflard left the three Rosselli children at rue de Varenne on the day of their father’s and uncle’s funerals, Saturday 19 June, which she attended with tens of thousands of Parisians. A few days earlier, the two coffins had been taken from the flat to a funeral home in Aubervilliers. Only a few friends witnessed their departure. Barely audible, Marion whispered ‘Addio Carlo’, while Amelia, who had insisted on being present, collapsed suddenly and ‘from her mouth came a cry that did not seem human’.54 The Ligue des Droits de l’Homme took care of all the practical arrangements for the official funerals at the Pe`re Lachaise cemetery, but Marion supervised the ceremony that first took place in a hall provided by the main Trade Union Confederation in rue de la Grande-aux Belles near Place de la Re´publique. When he left for Spain, Carlo had discussed with Marion what she should do in the event of his death. Not in details, but he had insisted on having Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony performed, a piece he had often played on his piano at home to calm his restless mind. The conductor Robert Siohan accepted to direct it with the Fe´de´ration Symphonique des Concerts Poulet et Siohan. The two coffins stood in the middle of the vast hall, draped in red. In the previous days, Marion had found the time to embroider the GL logo – a flaming sword between the two letters – on Carlo’s shroud. Among the numerous wreaths that surrounded the coffins there was a small bunch of flowers brought secretly overnight from the mountains of Italy. The orchestra took place behind the coffins and on each side, on several rows, sat the friends of the family and the representatives of all the Italian antifascist organizations, together with numerous French officials, representing the government, the left-wing parties, the trade unions, and the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme.55 An eerie silence pervaded the hall. Suddenly all the people present stood up to welcome Marion who walked in accompanied by Emilio Lussu and Alberto Cianca and followed by other members of GL. She was the only representative of the Rosselli family as Amelia and Maria, overcome by grief, had found it impossible to face the ordeal.

190

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

She demonstrated an ‘unwavering, superhuman feeling of pride,’ Giustizia e Liberta` reported with some rhetorical flourish. ‘Her light eyes stared at Carlo’s coffin; she was far away, estranged from her environment, alone with him for the last time.’56 As she sat down, the orchestra struck the first notes of the symphony. It played again when the coffins were carried outside and loaded on two hearses. Several trucks were necessary to carry the great numbers of red and white flower wreaths. They opened the procession, followed by the two hearses and an impressive crowd while thousands of people watched the convoy from the sidewalks. The leaders of Giustizia e Liberta`, followed by the representatives of the Italian antifascist organizations in exile, formed the front lines. Young Aldo Garosci, just back from Spain, stood out as he walked slowly, solemnly carrying Carlo’s militia uniform resting on a cushion. Then came Carlo’s closest collaborators, Lussu, Tarchiani, Cianca, Venturi, Trentin with their heads bowed, and Marion holding a bunch of flowers and looking straight ahead, both perfectly aware of the political significance of the gathering and totally lost in her grief. It took nearly an hour for the funeral procession and the crowd, estimated at more than 150,000, to reach the Pe`re Lachaise cemetery. Despite the sunny afternoon, a gloomy atmosphere hung over the popular neighbourhoods as the silent crowd followed the slow progress of the two hearses.57 The crowd packed the tree-lined lanes of the vast cemetery as the coffins were driven to their destination near the Mur des Fe´de´re´s (the Communards’ Wall), a site of pilgrimage for the French left as it was the place where 147 members of the Paris Commune had been buried in a mass grave. On the way, they passed the tombs of Piero Gobetti, Filippo Turati, Claudio Treves, three other antifascist leaders who had died in exile. Marion found a place to sit on a nearby funerary monument to listen to Cianca’s funeral oration and a long series of speeches by the leaders of the French and Italian Communist and Socialist Parties, the Spanish Republican Government, the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme – Emile Kahn reading Victor Bash’s speech as the Rossellis’ dear friend had been taken to the hospital. Although this was a moment of mourning, most speeches were also a call to arms, an invitation and a promise to continue Carlo’s fight against the fascist threat in

Death in Normandy

191

Europe.58 All were carefully registered by the many OVRA spies who had followed every step of the ceremony. Some of them, deeply embedded in the movement, also found their way into the private meeting that took place at Marion’s home afterwards. ‘Deeply moved, the widow shook the hands of all those present and thanked them with tears in her eyes,’ one agent dutifully reported to Rome.59 The grandiose demonstration of respect from her friends and the people of Paris probably helped Marion to bear the mean-spirited intervention of the French government intent on controlling the inscription on the tomb to make sure it would not offend Mussolini. The original epitaph should have read: ‘Carlo and Nello Rosselli – Murdered together 9 June 1937 – Expect together that the sacrifice of their youth will hasten in Italy the victory of their ideals – Justice and Liberty’. The incriminating words were ‘in Italy’ and the government ordered them to be removed, leaving a dotted space that would be filled only after the fall of the Fascist regime.60 Afterwards, there was only silence and emptiness in the flat. Carlo was gone, the children had not yet returned from the Noufflards’, and Amelia remained prostrate in her room. The extraordinary energy that Marion had mustered over the previous week threatened to give way and she seemed on the verge of physical and mental collapse. Although she suffered from cardiac palpitations for a few days, her unwavering commitment to Carlo, his children and his struggle gave her the strength to face the difficult days ahead without him at her side. There were many decisions to be made and she did not know where to start. ‘I don’t know what to do’ she wrote to Gina Ferrero. ‘I don’t know whether Amelia will go back to Florence. In any case, naturally my children will never go to Italy as long as the regime is in place.’61 Indeed the fate of the family was now the most immediate concern. The children returned a few days later, Mirtillino went back to school and a semblance of normalcy was restored at home, but for how long? Besides, what would Amelia and Maria do? In Florence with her children, surrounded by family and friends, Nello’s wife did not intend to leave Italy.62 And Marion had no intention of leaving France, the country where she had spent eight eventful years with Carlo and where his assassins were still on the run.

CHAPTER 11

Hope against Hope (July 1937 – July 1940)

Hecuba. This is how her son recalled Marion in the aftermath of Carlo’s assassination. ‘My mother might still be English, liberal, protestant in her mode of expression; in her feeling about this death she was antique as Hecuba’; and, like Hector’s mother, ‘she sought vengeance; she hated.’1 Her quest for revenge was not dictated by some irrational impulse but by the political conviction that the fascists had targeted one of their most talented enemies and, beyond the personal dimension of the tragedy, seeking retribution was part of the broader struggle to defeat Mussolini and his regime. There was no way Marion would accept being confined to the role of the grieving, dignified and resigned widow laid out for her by Cianca at the funeral. She would grieve for her beloved companion who, since the first romantic escapades in Florence, had shared and been the cause of most her joys and some of her sorrows. In her worst moments of despair, she might feel like her mother-in-law who wrote to her brother Carlo Pincherle Moravia: ‘It’s not a nightmare. It is a reality that has destroyed my life in the most absolute fashion.’ But she would not conclude, like Amelia, ‘And beyond this, there is nothing left. Nothing.’2 No. Marion would have to learn to live with the vacuum Carlo’s death had created. How, she had no idea, but she would try. For her children, for the cause, for herself.

Hope against Hope

193

Marion had deployed superhuman efforts to face the enquiry and the funerals, but now she collapsed and Amelia, who was still with her at rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, feared a heart attack. An eerie silence now pervaded the flat that had hosted so many lively discussions and heated exchanges. Marion was bedridden while Amelia, who seemed a mere shadow of her former self, moved around like an automaton muttering that her life was over.3 Friends took care of the children, keeping them away from home as often as possible. When not at school, Mirtillino spent most of his time at the Noufflards’ who had adopted him as their ‘new nephew’ or stayed at the Hale´vy’s in Sucy at the weekend. Florence Hale´vy also asked her niece, Francoise Hale´vy-Joxe, who had two small children Pierre and Claude, to keep Andrea and Melina with her whenever she could.4 Then eventually, a semblance of normalcy was restored. Marion’s heart problems had been a false alarm and she soon recovered although she still required rest. ‘I went back to school; we went back home; we went on holiday. The crisis of my father’s death was over.’ John recalled matter-of-factly, as things seemed to go back to normal. ‘When I went back to the Lyce´e in June 1937 one or two [of my schoolfellows] asked casually “Was that your father who was murdered?”; “Yes, it was”. And we went on to talk of other things that mattered to both of us for our selves’ sake.’5 Of course, some of his friends’ left-leaning parents did invite him at home and, on such occasions, he felt he was being paraded as the ‘son of a socialist martyr’.6 But these occasions were rare, and he was left to resume the usual life of a 10-year-old schoolboy. At home, normalcy was only apparent, though. John seemed to regret that ‘grown-ups do not always show such discretion’ as he and his school friends demonstrated. Always a perceptive child, he spotted early on the different ways his mother and grandmother had of expressing their pain and torment. He remembered how, upon arriving from the Gare de Lyon, Amelia had embraced Marion and cried out ‘Ah! There’s someone left who still calls me “mamma” a greeting his mother had found a little too self-conscious. A few days later, Amelia, still in a state of collapse, had grabbed John and wailed ‘You are the son of my son.’ Although he never doubted the depth

194

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

of her feelings, he found her way of dramatizing them ‘a jarring experience’ and a very ‘Italian thing’. On the other hand, ‘my mother, though deeply involved for twenty years with Italy and Italians, was still English enough to prefer the quiet personal utterance to this public call upon men and gods; and so was I.’7 Similar differences would soon appear about the new orientation their lives should take. Kept very close through letter writing and occasional visits, the two branches of the Rosselli family had in fact always lived apart, in very different political and cultural environments. Although of a same mind regarding fascism, they had chosen different ways of expressing their opposition. Maria and Nello – and Amelia for that matter – had opted for a quietist approach and lived their dissent privately while pursuing their very bourgeois existence. Marion and Carlo, on the other hand, had dedicated their every hour to combatting the dictatorship and this choice had governed all their public and private decisions. There was no reason this would change, and Maria and Marion would have very different ways of envisaging widowhood. Maria would have wanted to bury Nello in Italy, to privatize her grief in a way, but Amelia convinced her that it was important he should remain with his brother and share with him ‘the magnificent tribute paid to their sacrifice in Paris’. She also reassured her about her decision not to travel to Paris for the funeral and to remain instead in Florence to mourn Nello in the privacy of their home where they had been so close, while ‘for Marion, it was different. She felt closer to Carlo by accompanying him all the way there that day.’8 How to keep this distressed family together would become Amelia’s main concern in the following years.9 There was the question of where to live. Marion was determined to stay in France to remain close to the police enquiry and to contribute what she could to the pursuit of Carlo Rosselli’s movement which found itself in dire straits after the death of its charismatic leader. In addition, she did not want to remove her children from their familiar Parisian environment and schools. Besides, all her closest friends, her political companions, her surrogate family being in France, it was only natural that she would want to stay close to them. As Maria was determined to remain in Florence, Amelia was torn

Hope against Hope

195

between her two daughters-in-law and, for several months, was unable to decide about her permanent residence. Amelia, Marion and the children spent most of the summer at Amphion-les-Bains, on the French side of Lake Geneva. Overlooking the lake, the hotel was a haven of tranquillity and the views of the surrounding mountains had a soothing effect on Marion.10 Her stay in this comforting environment was clouded by the news of Elie Hale´vy’s death.11 At the end of August, the Rossellis moved to Vevey, in Switzerland, for the rest of the summer.12 The Ferreros came over from Geneva as did Egidio Reale, a Republican who was close to Giustizia e Liberta` and who had often called on Marion whenever she stayed in the region in the past.13 In the end, this long and uneventful holiday allowed Marion to find her bearings again and to start contemplating her family’s future. ‘The return home has been very painful, but now I am trying to resume a normal life’, Marion informed Reale in early October.14 Amelia also returned to Paris and took a room for a while in a hotel on rue Cassette around the corner from rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. ‘For the moment, it’s better for me to stay here for the children’ she informed Maria.15 It was also a way of keeping an eye on Marion who seemed to her increasingly restless and restive, as she complained to Giorgina Zabban. Her friend tried to reassure her. ‘Don’t torment yourself about what you wrote to me about Marion . . . She’s not responsible for what she says, and because she’s not responsible I find it impossible to let her determine the life of an entire family with her wild fantasies or her indecision.’ Amelia had expressed concerned about Marion’s desire to send her youngest child, Andrea, to a kindergarten with a ‘communist teacher,’ and her friend strongly encouraged her to oppose such a move as well as any other strange ideas Marion might have ‘with a few blunt words’. In contrast, she had nothing but praises for Maria ‘She is so precious’ she enthused. ‘I have found her calm, courageous, and so level-headed.’16 This sharp distinction between the two sisters-in-law would become an insidious sub-text of the family lore in the coming months and years, as Marion’s efforts to carve a new existence for herself and her children, instead of simply accepting a life of private mourning in the shadow of her martyred husband, would often be interpreted as signs

196

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

of personal unbalance.17 In the meantime, Amelia could put her fears to rest. Andrea and Melina went to the kindergarten of the Ecole Se´vigne´ together with Pierre and Claude Joxe and Mirtillino resumed his schooling at the Lyce´e Montaigne. Yet, the incident had revealed potential lines of tensions between Marion and her mother-in-law and, a few weeks later, Amelia decided to move to Switzerland and settled in a chalet at Villars-sur-Ollon, a small resort in the Alps above Montreux. Marion was determined to support Giustizia e Liberta`, but with Carlo’s death, the movement had received a severe blow from which it would never fully recover. Emilio Lussu was now the most authoritative figure and, immediately after the funeral, he took the movement in the left-wing direction Carlo had begun to embrace. He intended to bring about an alliance between all the socialist forces but only the group Azione Repubblicana Socialista (ARS) led by Fernando Schiavetti, a Republican activist exiled in Switzerland since 1926, agreed to a formal fusion with GL which, from then on, called itself the Movement of Socialist Unification. Many among the original GL group disapproved of this new political twist. Unlike Alberto Tarchiani, Cianca, Garosci, Venturi, Calosso did not resign officially, but their links with the organization became more tenuous although they remained active among the broader anti-fascist forces.18 And so did Marion, as the fascist police soon ascertained. In July, she transmitted 5,000 Francs to Cianca ‘for the movement’ and the chief of the fascist police ordered ‘strict surveillance of the widow of the deceased fuoruscito Carlo Rosselli, who continues to carry out a significant political activity hostile to the regime and who is in constant contact with the exiled milieu, encouraging their action and subsidising their initiatives.’19 She was mostly a public figure for the movement, using her name and status as the widow of the assassinated leader to rally support and publicize different initiatives. Various opposition figures who happened to pass through Paris made a point of visiting her. In the autumn, Benedetto Croce, the communist Giorgio Amendola, Don Sturzo, among others, all made the detour by rue Notre-Dame-desChamps.20 She would have liked to travel to Barcelona to answer directly on the airwaves a letter of condolences a group of young

Hope against Hope

197

Italian antifascists had sent assuring her that ‘the spirit of the deceased is alive among us’. Mailed from Italy in mid-June, the letter only reached her at the end of the summer after crossing four countries. Because of her fragile health and the situation in Spain she abandoned the idea of traveling there, but her answer was read all the same on Radio Barcelona and later published in the weekly Giustizia e Liberta`. After the expected words of gratitude and solidarity with the widows of Mussolini’s victims, she focused her message on the struggle to come: To all of you, antifascists from Italy, the martyred bodies of Carlo and Nello Rosselli continue to shout the old heroic watchword ‘Non Mollare!’ [Do not yield!]. The assassination of Carlo should not interrupt for a single moment the work to which he devoted his entire life. ‘If we fall,’ Carlo wrote last May, ‘others will take our place’. Take his place, young Italians, in the sacred struggle for justice and liberty. The hired assassins, who on Mussolini’s order have cut short Carlo and Nello Rosselli’s youth, have aggravated the eerie atmosphere of suspicion, contempt and hostility which surrounds the name of Il Duce both inside and outside Italy. ‘The dead are a burden,’ Mussolini once said. These new dead will increase the burden under which the Fascist regime will be crushed. Two new martyrs, Carlo and Nello Rosselli have been added in the golden book of Italian liberties to the names of Matteotti, Amendola, Don Minzoni, Sozzi, Gramsci and thousands of others, known or unknown. From the ashes of so many victims their avengers will rise. Italy, my beloved country of adoption, Italy which has given to the world the examples of Mazzini and Garibaldi is destined, I am convinced, to a future of liberty and justice. From the abyss of my torment, I am sending to the Italy of tomorrow a cry full of hope and love.21

These were powerful words, but her trust in the future sounded quite over-blown at a time when the antifascist opposition was perhaps at its lowest point since the early 1930s. The Republicans in Spain and their supporters in the International Brigades were facing fierce resistance from the Nationalist rebels and their German and Italian allies; in Italy, after some signs of unrest at the time of the Abyssinian war, the fascist repression had crushed the last small clusters of dissidents such as the Giustizia e Liberta` group set up in Florence by the young American activist Robert Winston Wiley; and in France Leon Blum’s Popular Front government had fallen in late June and

198

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

the new Cabinet headed by the more conservative Camille Chautemps seemed all too eager not to antagonize Mussolini.22 Public opinion was moving to the right and the radical pro-fascist forces were on the offensive. However, in October, the French police discovered ‘large quantities of Italian arms and munitions in the secret fascist arsenals of France’, giving credibility to Marion’s accusation of connivance between the Fascist regime and the Rossellis’ assassins.23 This speeded up the enquiry about the Bagnoles de l’Orne murders and Marion travelled to Normandy in November, but to no avail.24 In the meantime, she worked frantically for the organization of the International Conference against Fascist Terror to be held in Paris on 11 – 12 December. She tried to obtain solidarity statements and possibly personal appearances from British personalities. She appealed in similar terms to William Gillies of the Labour Party, whom she had met on several occasions with Carlo, and to H.G. Wells. ‘We feel that fascism has reached such a point of effrontery and criminality that a movement of protest is more necessary than ever’ she wrote, using Carlo and Nello’s murder as powerful evidence. ‘I do not want to make this appeal a personal one, although the murder of my husband and brother-in-law is one of the most eloquent signs of this rising fascist menace in Europe.’ Both sent telegrams of solidarity to the conference but failed to attend it.25 The end of the year was the occasion for the first family reunion since the assassination of Carlo and Nello.26 Despite the joy of being reunited at Villars-sur-Ollon with what was left of her family, Amelia apprehended the encounter between her two daughters-in-law as she was aware of their very different outlooks. Maria proved to be utterly loyal to the memory of the two brothers and strongly rejected any suggestions that Carlo’s activism was responsible for her husband’s death.27 She knew her husband’s views on fascism and she remained loyal to them, but she was herself totally apolitical and did not intend to embrace them in any active fashion, whereas Marion was desperate to find a way of pursuing Carlo’s struggle. Behind the joyful facade of the family holiday, the potential tensions Amelia had feared seemed to have somewhat marred the occasion, as she wrote to her friend Gi’

Hope against Hope

199

Zabban on the last day of the year ‘And here I was between those two poor girls [. . .]. But I knew you’d understand my state of moral tension due to my effort to speak two different languages according to whether I am with one or the other.’28 The reunion did not bring about any major change in the family arrangements. Maria returned to Florence with her children, Marion to Paris with hers, and Amelia remained at Villars. This was a gloomy period for Amelia who revisited the past with bitterness and resented the silence of her favourite nephew, Alberto Moravia, who did not even send her a telegram or a letter after the assassination.29 The new year – 1938 – would turn out to be the worst moment for antifascism in Europe and this would affect the Rossellis most directly.30 Yet, the year started on a hopeful note as, upon her return to Paris, Marion learnt that the police had identified the assassins of Carlo and Nello. After the discovery of large amounts of weapons in October, the French police had arrested a great number of people who belonged to La Cagoule (the Hood), a group that brought together a bunch of fascists, adventurers, nationalists and anti-communists with a propensity to violence. During the investigation, the police uncovered the intrigues and various networks of this right-wing conspiracy and eventually found out the names of the Rosselli assassins who belonged to the same organisation. For security reasons, Jean Bouvyer, who had been part of the murder team, had joined the French army in Constantine (Algeria) and there had boasted about his participation in the assassination. Once arrested, he had given the names of his accomplices, Jean Filliol, Fernand Jakubiez, Robert Purieux, Andre´ Tenaille. They were all arrested.31 On 15 February 1938, Marion attended the careful reconstitution of the events at Bagnoles.32 The alleged murderers repeated all their actions on that fateful day, from the early shadowing of the Rossellis to the concealment of the car after the murder. At one point, Marion pointed at Jakubiez and exclaimed: ‘That’s him! I remember. He came to our flat, rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. He offered to sell me a carpet [. . .]. I managed to get rid of him only with great difficulty. He insisted [. . .]. He was probably trying to get information about our habits and to identify us in order not to make an error when the day came.’33

200

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

Immediately after learning of the arrests in January, Marion had made an official statement to point at the responsibility of Mussolini and his police: To me, it is inconceivable that Frenchmen, whoever they are, Frenchmen who had never had the slightest contact with my husband and his friends, would commit such a horrible crime without having been incited by the Italian fascists, whose interest it was to suppress such a fierce adversary. I do not doubt, therefore, that without sparing anyone everything possible will be done to identify the real instigators of this crime. And if they are seriously sought after, they will be found in the fascist camp.34

Unfortunately, the French authorities were not eager to explore the Italian connection. With the rumbling of Hitler’s army increasing after the Anschluss with Austria in March 1938, they were determined to appease Mussolini and prevent him from joining forces with Nazi Germany. So, despite Marion’s hopes, the investigation focused exclusively on France. In addition, it languished because the assassins seemed to benefit from complicity in the upper reaches of power.35 With the first anniversary of Carlo and Nello’s assassination approaching, Amelia came to Paris and joined Marion in the commemoration. It was organized at the LDH headquarters and all the friends and companions of the Rossellis were present to listen to a beautiful speech by Gaetano Salvemini which deeply moved the audience.36 It was a heart-breaking experience for the two women but, with the presence of so many friends Marion appeared to face it with courage. Two days later, she attended a dinner party at the Noufflards’ with Salvemini, his wife and a couple of other people, and to her friends she seemed almost back to her former self, joining actively in the discussion.37 But appearances were misleading. She was still not sure of where to live and what to do with her life. Immediately after that dinner, she left alone for England where she spent a couple of weeks, staying first at her former Italian teacher Emma Dobelli’s country house at Lyndhurst in the New Forest and then in London, where she met regularly with Salvemini and Florence Hale´vy who was visiting her friends Graham and May Wallas.38 She seemed to be testing the waters. With the rumours of

Hope against Hope

201

war on the continent, would it not be safer to resettle in England? Would it not be easier for her to find a job there in case Carlo’s sharply reduced inheritance would make it necessary for her to work to support her children? Should she remain in Paris where she had asked John to look for a cheaper flat?39 When she returned to Paris in mid-July, her friends found her in a sombre mood and utterly distressed. But they were not much help as their only solution to her despair was to see her marry again quickly.40 Marion took Melina and Andrea to Villars-sur-Ollons to stay with their grandmother and Maria’s children while she returned to England with Mirtillino for the summer, staying first in London and then in a cottage at Horsham in West Sussex not very far from the capital. The company of her many acquaintances in London seemed to do her good as Salvemini informed her French friends, but this stay in England also convinced her that it could not be a long-term solution for her as she still felt so estranged from her native country.41 Salvemini was trying to convince her to leave Europe for the United States where he thought she could find a quieter environment to educate her children. His friend Giorgio La Piana, a modernist Catholic historian who taught at Harvard University, offered his financial support for John’s studies in the United States should she decide to settle in that country with her family. Aware of the importance of such a generous offer, Marion felt she had to refuse it for the time being, because she did not want to leave Paris, or Europe for that matter, before the trial of Carlo’s assassins.42 In addition, despite the uncertain international climate and the fragmentation of the antifascist forces, France remained the centre of militant fuoruscismo and, like her companions, she was determined to remain there until the circumstances forced her to move elsewhere. She finally decided to keep the flat in rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs and enrolled at the university to prepare a degree in biology. If she were obliged to work to support her family she knew her health would make teaching difficult, but research in a scientific laboratory could be a possibility.43 The racial laws adopted by the Mussolini regime in late 1938 represented another blow for the Rosselli family. In a move that signalled Italy’s increasing ideological alignment with Nazi Germany,

202

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

in October 1938 the Fascist Grand Council adopted a ‘Declaration on Race’ translated a month later into Racial Laws targeting the Jews of Italy. In the following months, the Fascist Party launched a violent anti-Semitic campaign which became one of its priorities.44 This settled the matter for Amelia, who was already outside Italy and resided legally in Switzerland. Now, Maria was also forced to leave the country and, for that, she required resident permits for herself and her children at a time when Switzerland was becoming increasingly wary of the potential influx of refugees. While in Geneva Egidio Reale was doing his utmost with the Bureau des E trangers, in Florence Maria tried to protect the Rosselli property from possible confiscation by transferring the titles of the mansion on via Giusti and her villa l’Apparita to a non-Jewish aunt.45 Egidio Reale’s efforts paid off and in November the permits were granted for the whole family.46 Nello’s four children went to the local school in Switzerland, Andrea and Melina to the kindergarten of the Ecole Se´vigne´ with Francoise Joxe’s children and Mirtillino to the Lyce´e Montaigne in Paris, while Marion concentrated on her demanding training as a biologist. A semblance of order, albeit fragile, was restored for the Rosselli family while threatening rumours of war accumulated on the international horizon, despite the Munich agreements which allowed Hitler’s annexation of the German-speaking territories of Czechoslovakia in exchange for an elusive peace. And the New Year brought more depressing news. The drama of the Spanish Civil War unfolded on the French borders as hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing Franco’s victorious army started pouring into France. The defeat of the Republican forces sounded the death knell for the exiled antifascists. As their Spanish friends were locked up in bleak concentration camps in the French Pyrenees, all that remained for them was to contemplate the war looming on the horizon.47 These were months of torment and frustration for Marion and her friends, as there were few political options and even personal choices depended on factors beyond their control. Marion often despaired of finding a proper balance between her studies, her political engagement and her family responsibilities. One day, she rushed to the Noufflard’s home complaining that ‘men were lucky because they don’t have to believe that their only duty is to take care of their

Hope against Hope

203

children!’ But no help was forthcoming from friends and family who were convinced that parental responsibilities were her most important duty and judged her harshly for not agreeing with them.48 In the meantime, news from the judicial front were not encouraging as the instruction lingered and the French authorities seemed all too eager to minimize the role of La Cagoule lest it revealed embarrassing complicities in the Army.49 The only piece of good news in that last spring before the war came from the country she had been estranged from for 20 years. During her last visit to England, she had initiated formalities to have her British nationality restored. Having become an Italian citizen by her marriage to Carlo, Marion feared that in case Italy joined the war on the side of Germany she and her children would become ‘enemy aliens’ both in France and England, risking internment. Her efforts were successful as on 13 April 1939 the London Gazette announced that ‘Marion Catherine Rosselli, the British-born wife of Professor Carlo Rosselli, the leader of antifascist Italians in France, who was murdered with his brother in June 1937, has been readmitted to British nationality. Certificates of naturalization have also been granted her three children.’50 This was a reassuring piece of news and she could now concentrate on her studies as the final exams for her first-year course were fast approaching. She enjoyed the friendly support of Francoise Joxe, who greatly admired her and secretly envied her eventful life so different from her own rather bourgeois routine. She rented two houses for them near Fontainebleau for the summer season, and in May and June she often welcomed Andrea and Melina there to allow her friend to dedicate herself to the preparation of her exams.51 Before her academic tests, Marion had to face the ceremony commemorating the second anniversary of Carlo’s assassination. Despite the many doubts that she had confided to Francoise Joxe, she attended the Pe`re Lachaise gathering and she was heartened by the presence of thousands of Italian antifascists, by Lussu’s motivating speech and by a moving message from Italian members of the International Brigades parked in the camp of Gurs who, despite their dire circumstances, had also commemorated the death of their comrade-in-arms.52

204

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

Despite her fears to the contrary, she passed her exams with flying colours and received her Certificat d’Etudes Supe´rieures en Biologie at the end of June 1939.53 She now prepared to spend a restful summer with her children and the Joxe family near Fontainebleau.54 But once again, history knocked on the Rosselli’s door, in Switzerland this time. With the rumours of war ever louder, Bern reaffirmed the country’s neutral status by tightening its refugee policy. Consequently, the Bureau des Etrangers refused to renew the resident permits of Nello’s four children.55 Great Britain seemed the most sensible option, as it was the farthest away from the potential war front and the Rossellis had many relatives and friends in that country. Amelia, Maria and her four children left Switzerland in early July and settled for a while at Eastbourne, a seaside resort on the southern English coast. After the declaration of war in early September, the area became too close to the front line for comfort and the family moved to Quainton, a calm inland country town away from the threat of German bombers.56 Marion and her children spent a few days at Eastbourne, but they returned to France to resume their holiday with the Joxe family. In August, Marion sent the younger children to England while she travelled to Lucerne with John to attend a concert by Toscanini and meet some friends.57 On the backdrop of the preparations of war, she was still dithering about what to do or where to stay and did not have anyone to turn to as most of her political friends were in a similar situation. The Italian fuorusciti in France were in disarray. After the bombshell of the signature of the German – Soviet Pact in August 1939, any united response to the war situation was out of the question and the antifascist forces were threatened with widespread demoralization. There was a lot of scurrying around as the political situation also complicated the personal circumstances of many.58 Marion showed many signs of hesitation and even distress in the early months of the war. She wanted to remain in France to follow the case of the Cagoulards, although it was now at a standstill. But she also wanted to protect her children and remain in close contact with the other branch of the Rosselli family now in England. She went to Quainton in early September but only stayed for a few weeks. Nello’s eldest daughters were sent to a boarding school and

Hope against Hope

205

Marion Enthoven-Rawson and Isabelle Fry offered to take care of Melina and Andrea while Marion sought a more suitable arrangement for her family. She did not want to part with Mirtillino by sending him to boarding-school, so she decided to move to Cambridge where she rented a house on Eltisley Avenue, a quiet street by a pleasant park and within walking distance of the city centre. There was an excellent school for Mirtillino and her friends Isabelle Massey, Paolo Treves and Piero Sraffa lived nearby.59 Yet, this new environment did not bring her peace. She rather liked Cambridge as she wrote to Don Sturzo, ‘but I simply cannot feel chez moi in this country, and I never could’. Although she hesitated to take Mirtillino out of his school in mid-term, her nostalgia for France proved too strong to resist. She secured a permit to leave the country and, despite her mixed feelings, she travelled back to France.60 There was nothing reasonable in Marion’s decision to return with her three children to France in January 1940, just an irrational desire to be in control of her choices when everything was unravelling around her, and she felt tossed on the rough sea of warn-torn Europe. At least, she had her friend Francoise Joxe who was all too eager to welcome her and the children in Nantes where her own family had found refuge. Mirtillino was enrolled in the local Lyce´e and the small children frequented a kindergarten with Pierre and Claude Joxe.61 The pervasive feeling of impending crisis due to the military situation was compounded by Marion’s deteriorating state of health. In early February 1940, she suffered a stroke that left her temporarily incapacitated but, thanks to the dutiful care of her friends, she recovered just enough to face the next ordeal.62 By mid-May, it was clear that France and England were losing the battle against Hitler’s army on the continent and there were talks of Marion and her children accompanying the Joxe family to Algeria. But this implied a long and risky journey and the thought that they might be stuck in France and that Mirtillino might be forced to attend a school ‘controlled by the enemy’ convinced Marion that the wisest thing to do was to try to catch a boat for England.63 On 9 June 1940, Francoise Joxe’s aunt drove the Rossellis to Saint-Malo and secured a passage for them. Late in the day, they boarded one of the last boats for Southampton, but it was so crowded that Marion had

206

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

to abandon all their luggage, including a suitcase containing Carlo’s papers and letters.64 Empty-handed and still partially paralysed, she joined the rest of the Rosselli family in Quainton. For the sake of the children, the three women agreed that they should try to reach the United States. In Washington, Max Ascoli convinced Eleanor Roosevelt to speed up the procedure to obtain entry visas, while in England their friends did the same for the exit papers and the securing of passage for 10 people on a transatlantic ship.65 All they could do was wait and watch their entire world collapse after Italy joined the war alongside Nazi Germany and France signed an armistice with Hitler. Many friends and members of the Nathan – Rosselli family came to greet them in the London hotel where they spent a last restless night because of an anti-Blitz alarm test during which Melina got lost.66 The next day, they sailed from Liverpool to a haven in America as Europe faced its darkest hour.

CHAPTER 12

So Far Away from Italy USA – (July 1940 – July 1943)

The transatlantic journey was a harrowing experience. On 17 August 1940, the Rossellis boarded the Duchess of Atholl at Liverpool together with more than 1,000 children who were being evacuated to Canada. Amelia, now a physically fragile elderly woman, Marion, who had not yet fully recovered from the partial paralysis that had struck her in Nantes, Maria and the seven children – aged three to 13 – huddled together in the congested space and faced the constant fear of German attacks from the skies or the sea.1 They landed at Quebec and travelled to Montreal to catch a train for New York. With their British passports, Marion and her children were allowed into the country without problems and spent the day visiting the city. Being Italians, and therefore considered ‘enemy aliens’, the rest of the family was kept in a detention centre with Jewish refugees until the departure of their night train for New York. In the early hours of the next morning, as the train stopped at Croton-on-Hudson, Max Ascoli, who had been so active in providing the Rossellis with the necessary visas for entry into the United States, boarded the train with his wife-to-be Marion Rosenwald, heir to the Sears Roebuck fortune, and they all spent the rest of the journey in the dining-car enjoying a full American breakfast.2 They stayed at the Barbizon Plaza Hotel on Central Park South and there were a few happy days as the Rossellis were reunited with so

208

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

many of their friends and acquaintances from Italy and France.3 There was Gaetano Salvemini who had been anxiously waiting for them to reach the United States since the fall of France. Marion found him tired but as ‘charming and selfless as ever’. There was Ruth Draper, Alberto Tarchiani and Angelica Balabanoff; there was Lionello Venturi who had moved in 1939 to New York where he had many contacts in the art world and was eventually offered a teaching job at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore; there were many Jewish acquaintances who had emigrated after the adoption of the racial laws, like the Bolaffis and the Zevis.4 Salvemini was shrewd enough to understand the incompatibility of characters between the two sisters-in-law and convinced Max Ascoli that they should find different accommodation for the two families. After a few days in New York, Amelia, Maria and the children went to rest at the seaside in a villa put at their disposal by the Italian-American Labour leader Augusto Bellanca. Marion stayed at the Venturi’s on Central Park West and followed a treatment for her heart problems.5 There were many practical matters to sort out. She had travelled light from Europe, since she had been forced to abandon all her luggage, including many personal documents, before boarding the ship at Saint-Malo. She had not had time to settle her financial situation with the banks where most of her money was deposited and she could not get hold of it now that it was in occupied France. She had access only to a part of her capital invested in British and American banks and the revenue it brought her would impose careful budgeting. Fortunately, she had many friends who were ready to help with the school fees for the children. She took up the offer Giorgio La Piana had made in 1937 to finance John’s education. In addition, Max Ascoli and his wealthy wife were very generous and over the war years helped a lot with school fees and holiday camps expenditures for all the Rosselli children.6 Yet there was a lot of tension with Salvemini and Ascoli who were irritated by Marion’s apparent indecisiveness about the direction her life should take and felt they knew better what was appropriate for her and her children. She also had to sort out her relationships with Amelia and Maria. There was mutual respect between the three women and the family solidarity in the face of hardship was genuine,

So Far Away from Italy

209

but it did not erase the personal tensions between them as Salvemini rightly surmised when he first met them together upon their arrival in New York. Marion had found her mother-in-law ‘hard and unsympathetic’ after Carlo’s death and, while things had improved and she had a great respect for Amelia, they would never be very close.7 On the other hand, there was more than a serious incompatibility of character between the two sisters-in-law who did not see eye to eye on most issues.8 Settling in some sort of harmonious family life for the duration of the war was therefore out of the question and Marion’s hesitations reflected both her misgivings in that regard and her reluctance to opt for any form of permanent arrangement in the United States. This was a land of forced exile, and this exile had to be temporary and fully committed to the struggle against fascism, whatever form it could take from that distance. Practical arrangements had to be rushed as the beginning of the school term was approaching. Amelia and Maria decided to move to Larchmont, a small town on the Long Island sound about 40 minutes from Manhattan, where several Italian Jewish families they knew resided. In the town centre, they rented a small furnished house more adapted to their reduced circumstances. Nello’s children went to the local elementary school, whereas Melina and Andrea were sent to a Quaker boarding school nearby in Connecticut. As for John/ Mirtillino he went to a good private boarding school at Belmont, near Cambridge. Ruth Draper and Giorgio La Piana shared the expenses with Marion who, though extremely grateful, did not easily accept to be separated for the first time from John.9 He excelled at his new school with the prospect of receiving a scholarship the following year so, despite the pain of separation, she had to accept the arrangement and make the best of her son’s visits during the school holidays.10 She still had to decide where to reside. Although still convalescent, after a couple of months of treatment in New York, she moved to Larchmont and decided to take a room in a small pension, Magnolia Inn, just outside town by the sea – apart from Amelia and Maria, but just a bus ride away from their house in Clark Court, so she could visit them regularly and spend some time with the children at the weekend.

210

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

No doubt the arrangement suited her because she was in no condition to take care of a household and its temporary nature was perfect for the time being, but she was determined to find a more settled situation – hopefully closer to Mirtillino – as soon as she fully recovered.11 In the meantime, the short distance from both New York and Boston made it possible for her to travel there several times a week and reconnect with the anti-fascist diaspora. After the fall of France, many Italian exiles managed to enter the United States thanks to the support of several organizations linked to the American Labour Movement and the Jewish Labor Community, or through the help of personal or professional acquaintances. Lionello Venturi had played an important role in that respect. Upon his arrival in New York in the summer of 1939, he had participated in the founding of the Italian Emergency Rescue Committee and immediately sent a list of his companions from Giustizia e Liberta` still in France to the American Consulate in Marseilles which was working hard to get visas for beleaguered European opponents to Nazism and Fascism. Apart from Emilio Lussu, most of the remaining nucleus from GL reached the American shore in the following two years.12 As Marion immediately noticed, with the onset of the war in Europe Gaetano Salvemini and Max Ascoli who, in the mid-1930s, had taken their distance from both Giustizia e Liberta` and active politics, had resumed the struggle against fascism with the means at their disposal. They both had secure university jobs – Salvemini held the Lauro de Bosis Chair in Italian Civilization at Harvard University and Ascoli was Dean of the New School for Social Research, also known as the ‘University in exile’, in New York – and in the spring of 1940 both had decided to become American citizens.13 During the following months, together with Lionello Venturi, Salvemini and Ascoli strove to regroup and mobilize the Italian antifascists who reached the United States. Alberto Tarchiani and Carlo Sforza had arrived in New York shortly before Marion, in June 1940.14 Other GL members, who did not manage to board the last English ships in mid-June 1940, followed more complicated routes to leave occupied France and reach the United States. Alberto Cianca, Aldo Garosci, Randolfo Pacciardi, Nicola Chiaromonte all made long detours before reaching the United States. Some could leave from Marseilles to Alger;

So Far Away from Italy

211

others were smuggled across the border to Spain, travelled to Lisbon then crossed the Mediterranean Sea to Alger or Casablanca from where they sailed to England and eventually reached the American shores months later.15 Marion was also reunited with Guido Ferrando, her colleague from the British Institute and the University of Florence. He had moved to the United States in 1936 and eventually became Head of the Department of Italian Language and Literature at Vassar College in upstate New York.16 Among her many acquaintances from Europe, Don Sturzo also reached the United States a few weeks after her and was welcome by the Catholic historian Giorgio La Piana, Salvemini’s colleague and friend from Harvard.17 Marion also met numerous Italian academics who had left their country in the early years of the Fascist regime or after the introduction of the oath for university professors in 1931 and the racial laws in 1938. Most had found positions in universities around the United States and they had formed a loose antifascist network with Salvemini, Ascoli and La Piana.18 With the outbreak of war in 1939 and the arrival of exiles from Europe, they felt that a more forceful action was required and, to that effect, they created the Mazzini Society in September 1939.19 Their first concern was to help the antifascists in Europe escape from Nazi-occupied countries and to reconnect the members of the antifascist diaspora in the Americas. More importantly, anticipating political and military developments, they felt the Allies would play a major role in the post-war settlement in Europe and they intended to influence their policy choices for post-fascist Italy. If their programme was still vague, choosing Mazzini as political patron for their organization indicated that, in their view, nothing short of a republican alternative to the Savoy monarchy and its compromise with fascism would guarantee a democratic transition in Italy. Another concern was to secure a just non-punitive peace for their country.20 Their means of action were limited though. They were cut off by class, education and experience from the mostly proletarian ItalianAmerican community which had been the target of a very intensive and effective fascist propaganda campaign in the United States.21 Another major difficulty was that neither Italy nor the United States

212

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

had yet entered the war and, with the November 1940 election approaching, F.D. Roosevelt did not intend to alienate sectors of the Italian-American electorate by adopting a strong anti-fascist posture.22 Things began to change when Marion Rosselli joined the group in the late summer of 1940. The change was of course triggered by Italy’s entry into the war on the side of Nazi Germany in mid-June 1940. The United States was still not at war and its main concern regarding Italy at the time was to try to lessen the fascist influence among Italian immigrants both in the United States and in Latin America and, to that effect, the Mazzini Society could be of some use. Through the publication of its bulletin the Mazzini News from February 1941 and the creation of the Italian News Service that provided the American press with an alternative source of information about Italy, the group promoted its antifascist views to the American public and the Italian-American community. It succeeded in rallying some support from the members of a few labour unions, reaching 1,000 affiliates in spring 1941.23 At first, Marion Rosselli’s relationship with the organization was essentially symbolic. She lent her name to its propaganda, but she was still too weak and too much taken by personal matters to participate fully in its activities. For a few months after reaching the United States she was in a state of physical and mental depression.24 The sequels of her stroke, the departure from France where she had left behind Carlo’s grave and his assassins – amnestied by the Vichy government – the separation from Mirtillino, the difficulties to cope with her family responsibilities, her shaky financial situation: all this had taken its toll and Max Ascoli, although helpful in so many ways, found her a ‘hopeless mess’ and seemed to lose patience with her.25 She was indeed restless and, as soon as she felt a little better, in the spring of 1941, she decided to start looking for a flat in Cambridge to be closer to John, who was at school nearby at Belmont, and to live in a more stimulating intellectual environment. Both La Piana’s sister, Angelina, and Gaetano Salvemini helped her in her search but she soon drove them mad with her hesitations.26 After a few weeks, she had to admit that this would not be a practical arrangement from the familial as well as the financial point of view. She gave up the idea of the flat in Cambridge and opted for a small house in Larchmont, her

So Far Away from Italy

213

‘eighth house in 15 years’. Melina would live with her, Andrea would stay at his Quaker boarding school and John would come and stay during the school holidays and on the occasional weekend.27 By late 1941, she had recovered from the sequels of her stroke and seemed to have finally taken stock of her new situation, accepting that John’s school arrangements were the best for his future and that her reduced means dictated some hard choices. She even envisaged looking for a job as a teacher as she explained in a letter to Bedford College asking for a copy of her degree, the original having been lost during her flight from France.28 All her friends and relatives noticed her change of attitude. ‘Your mother has been feeling really good for a while’ Amelia wrote to her grandson at the beginning of December 1941. ‘There is no comparison with how she was at the same period last year, and this is also true for her mood which is much more serene.’29 Her recovered health and peace of mind also meant that she could be more active politically, although she was not very hopeful about the situation. She travelled very often to New York during the last two months of the year as the Mazzini Society stepped up its activities. With the globalization of the conflict since Hitler’s attack on Russia in June 1941, the US entry into the war was now a matter of weeks and it was obvious that it would play a major role in the post-war settlement in Europe. It was becoming urgent for the Mazzini Society to express its support for the US war effort while, at the same time, trying to orient the administration’s policy toward Italy. Immediately after Pearl Harbor, it organized a meeting at the Cooper Union in New York to praise the US Administration’s decision to declare war on the Axis powers, and Marion Rosselli spoke alongside Carlo Sforza, Max Ascoli and the influential American journalist Dorothy Thompson that she and Carlo had welcomed to their home in Paris when she was expelled from Nazi Germany in 1934. Marion gave a message full of hope, but she confided later to Don Sturzo that it was ‘a hope full of despair’.30 She had good reasons to feel pessimistic given the scarce influence of the Mazzini Society and the internal bickering that set in among its members as soon as the discussion about tactics and strategy became more concrete. Yet, she could not keep out of the fray for, as she would confide a few months later to her French friend

214

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

Francoise Joxe, ‘apart from John, what is the most important for me is the war and my passion for democracy’.31 Two projects monopolized the discussions of the Mazzini Society during 1942. The first one was Randolfo Pacciardi’s proposition to form an Italian Legion that would join the Allied forces when they landed in Italy. Marion knew Pacciardi well from the days of the Bassanesi flight over Milan when he had helped with the technical arrangements in Lugano and she doubted his capacities as an inspiring leader. ‘We would need Carlo!’ she wrote to Gioacchimo Dolci who had found refuge in Argentina. As an alternative, she would ‘far prefer Lussu’, but he had remained in Lisbon. ‘I guess you should not look a gift horse in the mouth’, she concluded, using this popular Italian saying to convey the poor opinion she had of Pacciardi as a political and military leader, despite his experience in the Spanish Civil War.32 But the project was marred from the start by other difficulties. The most important regarded recruitment. The Italian exiles did not have the resources available to De Gaulle who had rallied a sector of the French military to his Free French forces in London and would soon be able to use the French colonies in North Africa as a territorial basis. They could not count either on recruiting Italian-Americans who would be incorporated into the American Armed Forces. In addition, Pacciardi’s willingness to work with the communists who had more militant forces at their disposal sparked a violent debate within the Mazzini Society.33 The second project of the Mazzini Society was the creation of a sort of Free Italian government in exile headed by Count Sforza, also based on the model of De Gaulle’s Free France in London. The main concern was, once again, to exercise some influence on the Allies policy towards Italy and the transition to a post-fascist government. There was agreement on the name of Sforza, who was the only one among the exiles to have had some experience as a statesman. There was also a basic agreement on a few programmatic points such as a constituent assembly and a Republic, but it was more difficult to convince the American and British authorities of the viability of the project.34 If the Allies agreed about getting rid of Hitler and Mussolini, there was no follow-up plan and they wanted to leave the door open. Churchill made no secret of favouring a limited solution,

So Far Away from Italy

215

that would dispose of the dictator but not of the conservative institutions of Italy and he saw the monarchy as an essential element of stability. As for F.D. Roosevelt, he did not want to have his hands tied in advance with a clear political commitment to Sforza’s plan, and he seemed to put more trust in the pressure he was exercising on the Vatican and dissident fascists to get rid of Mussollini.35 It did not take long for Emilio Lussu, who travelled to New York for two weeks in March 1942, to assess the weakness of the whole antifascist enterprise in the United States. From Lisbon, he had been trying to convince the British to help him set up a guerrilla force in Sardinia that could be a launching pad for an attack on mainland Italy, but without much success. He had taken the measure of the utter conservatism of the Foreign Office and was hoping to find more support for his plans in Washington. His trip was the occasion for a warm reunion with all the members of Giustizia e Liberta`, to whom he brought news from their friends who had remained in Europe. Politically, though, Lussu’s trip was more disappointing. He realized that Italian antifascism in America was ‘far too cut off from Italy geographically,’ as he wrote to the Republican Ferdinando Schiavetti in Switzerland. It could neither influence public opinion within the country nor act efficiently abroad. ‘The links with Italy have been broken,’ he concluded before travelling back to Europe.36 A diagnosis that Marion Rosselli shared with a few others, such as Aldo Garosci, who felt that nothing serious could be achieved without a strong connection with the opposition forces that were emerging in Italy. For Garosci, the various movements which existed abroad had a limited role and were ‘nothing more than attempts to safeguard the freedom of expression of the Italians during the absence of Italian national sovereignty’. Rather than getting embroiled in the internal fights of the Mazzini Society, he started writing a biography of Carlo Rosselli for which he relied heavily on Marion’s testimony, visiting her regularly in Larchmont.37 Like Garosci, Marion had little patience for the constant bickering among the Mazzini Society members, but she felt it her political and personal duty to work alongside what remained of GL. She had been reconciled with Max Ascoli, who had also become a sort of surrogate father for all the Rosselli children in exile, and she worked closely

216

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

with him for a while. In June 1942, she was elected to the new Executive Committee and, even though she was unable to weigh in much in the discussions, she understood the symbolic dimension of her presence at her friends’ side, while despairing of their divisions and lack of pragmatism.38 Indeed, the Allies’ declining interest for Pacciardi’s Legion or Sforza’s Free Italian government, due to their scarce representativeness, led to protracted debates and the eventual unravelling of the group. Ascoli and Salvemini soon fell apart. Both were convinced that nothing could come from inside Italy and that only the Allies could defeat Mussolini and should monitor the postfascist transition; but Ascoli trusted the Roosevelt administration whereas Salvemini feared that the American President would endorse Churchill’s conservative plans. Salvemini rapidly moved away from the Mazzini Society. Always averse to any type of formal political organization, he pursued his one-man struggle against what he considered the treacherous British and the weak-minded Americans, advocating a total autonomy of the antifascists vis-a`-vis the Allies.39 In some respect extremely clear-sighted regarding the attitude of the Allies, his position was not deprived of contradictions since he totally underestimated the ability of the antifascist forces inside Italy to contribute to the defeat of Mussolini and had explained, since 1925, that the only hope in that respect would come from the Democratic powers. Ascoli also agreed that ‘Fascism [could] be fought only by other nations, not by internal plotters or by refugees’ and that ‘the destiny of every European nation [would] be decided by the behaviour of those of its sons who have become Americans’.40 But, unlike Salvemini, in his position as an employee of the State Department in charge of contrasting the propaganda of the Axis powers among Italian-Americans in the United States and in Latin America, he totally supported the Roosevelt Administration. Consequently, he wanted the Mazzini Society to express its absolute loyalty to the Allies’ policy, and he succeeded in doing so with the help of some Italian-American labour leaders, such as Augusto Bellanca and Luigi Antonini, who rapidly took over the leadership of the group.41 Marion and the other members of GL felt increasingly marginalized. They shared some of Salvemini’s fears, but they preferred a quieter approach to try to convince the Administration to his aggressive

So Far Away from Italy

217

polemics and increasingly personal attacks against anyone who disagreed with him.42 Some old friendships were broken in the process, and Marion became estranged from Salvemini who accused her of succumbing to pro-British sentiments and, like the others, she became the target of his bitter criticisms. But she did not waste time over her shattered relationship with her ‘ex-Father Bear’ as she now called him in her letters to Isabel Massey and Francoise Joxe.43 Indeed, there were other causes for concern given the increasingly sharp divisions within the Mazzini Executive Committee. In fact, by late of 1942, it was a free-for-all, as various members developed their own initiatives to influence the Administration. There was a violent clash when Marion, Tarchiani and Cianca supported the initiative of an old GL member, Dino Gentili, who transmitted to the State Department a brief regarding the conditions of a non-punitive peace for Italy and the guarantee of its territorial sovereignty. It had been written by Lussu who felt that such a guarantee was essential to the credibility of the opposition forces in Italy. Lionello Venturi sided with Bellanca who publicly denounced Gentili as a ‘British agent’. He sharply criticized Marion for supporting Gentili and resigned from the leadership of the group. The violent controversy that ensued did not bear so much on the political substance of the brief – on which all agreed – as on what was seen as an attempt to circumvent the Mazzini Society. More than anything else, it revealed the total loss of cohesion of the group and the absence of any shared concrete plan of action.44 Another major split line opposed those who relied on the influence they could have over the American administration and those who felt they should reconnect as quickly as possible with the opposition forces in Italy and build their plans based on the situation inside the country. During his short stay in early Spring, Lussu had informed them of interesting developments in Italy, like the regrouping of the scattered GL members who were about to create the Action Party with other liberal-socialist and republican forces, but also the growing presence of the communists and the collaboration between the two underground groups. He had urged those who could to try to repatriate as quickly as possible. Marion sided with the group around Garosci, Tarchiani, Sforza, Cianca, Gentili, Salvadori who pressed the Allies to help them reach Europe. With the landing of the Anglo-American forces in

218

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

North Africa in November 1942, this possibility became more concrete, although it would take lengthy negotiations, especially with the British, who did not like the idea of having a bunch of hardened antifascists moving freely around the country.45 Marion was convinced that the repatriation of the GL members was the only practical move even though it meant she would have to observe this new phase of the struggle from afar. Despite her burst of joy at learning of the landing of the Allies in North Africa, she assessed the situation with a certain pessimism, as was clear from her first letter in three years to Francoise Joxe, who was in Algiers where her husband was working with De Gaulle’s Free French: I have lost my illusions I suppose. We can’t believe, as we have been tempted to, that we can take full control of the situation immediately [. . .]. In Italy, things will tumble from Fascism to the monarchy, or maybe the generals and conservative forces. And we will still be in the opposition, but at least Fascism will be over.

A rather disenchanted albeit realistic assessment. While expressing her strong desire to go back to Italy as soon as possible, she proved quite fatalistic about what she expected to find there: It will be a disillusionment, I am sure, which is always the case, don’t you think, with everything we desire so much? I’m sure that personally I’m destined to belong to the losing party. As soon as we start winning (if we ever do) I lose interest. I get discouraged because I suddenly realise that politics is dirty [. . .]. So, you see, I am well prepared for the possibility that our return will be a disillusionment.46

In the meantime, she would do what she could, but she was lucid about the very modest contribution she could make to the cause in this new phase dominated by military action. ‘I have been asked to speak on short wave radio’, for a broadcast to Italy, she informed her friend, but I have refused . . . It seems to me that an Italian woman listening to my voice from America could only react in one way. She would think that I was speaking to her from a country where there were no bombs or threats of bombs. This would be enough to remove all credibility to what I was saying.47

In the following months, she would always express similar concerns about the reactions and attitudes of the Italians who, she felt, despite

So Far Away from Italy

219

their dire situation, should be the ones to decide the direction their country should take. Despite the uncertainty about their immediate future, the life of the Rossellis had gradually settled into a kind of comforting routine. More than ever, John was ‘the consolation’ of Marion’s days, thanks to his brilliant academic results. For his last year of high school he had received a scholarship from Exeter, one of the most demanding prep schools in the country. By the spring of 1943, he was applying for scholarships at Harvard and Swarthmore, a liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. As for Melina and Andrea, like their cousins, they were rapidly becoming American teenagers, speaking English with a strong Yankee accent and enjoying sports and the outdoors. Melina went to the local state school with Nello’s children and she expressed a great interest for artistic subjects. Andrea was a boarder at a Quaker school where he showed skills for technical matters. They all did very well, but Melina remained the most difficult of the three to manage. Relations with Amelia had somewhat improved and, although she would never enjoy a great intimacy with her mother-in-law, Marion admired her resilience and equilibrium and shared many intellectual and cultural interests with her. She had also made some acquaintances in Larchmont and had joined a local discussion group where the situation in Europe was often on the agenda. In their exile, the Rossellis appeared to have found a quiet haven although the tensions at work in the broader society were never far away. They were dismayed, for instance, to learn that in their quiet little corner of America there were ‘restricted areas’ to keep the Jews, the Negroes and the Italians at bay and that the children were often the target of anti-Semitic slurs at school or refused admission at certain holiday camps for being Jewish.48 But in the early months of 1943, their attention was entirely focused on Europe and they were aware that their situation depended on events out of their control as they anxiously awaited news from Italy.

CHAPTER 13

Hope is Reborn USA – (July 1943 – June 1946)

After the landing of the Allies in North Africa in the autumn of 1942, reports about the unravelling of the Mussolini regime started to appear in the press.1 The massive walk-out of workers from the Turin and Milan factories in March 1943 were the first powerful signs of the weakening of the consensus so carefully built by Mussolini, and a number of conservative groups increasingly feared the social unrest triggered by the growing unpopularity of the war.2 For the British and the Americans the climate was favourable for increased pressures on the Church, the Crown and dissident fascist elements to get rid of Mussolini as a first step toward pulling the country away from Germany.3 It was clear to all that Italy was on the verge of a major change and that the days of the dictator were counted. For Marion’s friends, the acceleration of events in Italy made repatriation to England or North Africa even more urgent. By late June, Britain’s reluctance was finally overcome. They received the green light and, shortly afterwards, Tarchiani, Cianca, Garosci, Zevi, Gentili and Sforza embarked for a destination kept secret. A few weeks later, Marion received a brief note from Tarchiani informing her that they had just arrived safely in London. By July, the progress of the Allies in the Mediterranean was front-page news, but the press was more interested in military operations than in political developments, as was

Hope is Reborn

221

obvious in the stories reporting the landing of the Allied forces in Sicily on 10 July; and there was an unnerving period during which Marion had to try to guess what was going on in Italy.4 She was coming back from the cinema together with Madeleine Garosci, John and her niece Silvia when she received a phone call from Amelia announcing the fall of Mussolini and his replacement by Marshall Badoglio, the victor of Addis Ababa. They all celebrated with a glass of Vermouth. Despite the lack of details and the limited confidence she had in Badoglio and King Vittorio Emanuele, Marion felt that with the fall of Mussolini and the coming liberation of the prisoners ‘everything becomes possible’.5 Gradually, the American press reconstructed the sequence of events that led to the vote of the Fascist Grand Council and the arrest of Mussolini on 25 July, but the details remained fuzzy and the attitude of General Badoglio, who headed the new government, remained unclear. ‘I was hoping to hear something on the radio about Italy being liberated from the Germans, but nothing’, she wrote to Francoise Joxe. ‘Tomorrow, maybe’.6 Her anxiety was shared by most Italians who had hoped that the end of Mussolini meant the end of fascism and the end of the war, as the photos of cheering crowds pulling down the symbols of the regime in the streets of Rome, Venice, Milan, Turin and Florence indicated. Yet, in one of his first public declarations, Badoglio announced that he would pursue the war alongside Germany. Although the Allies used all the means at their disposal – from carpet bombings to secret negotiations – to force the new government to sign an armistice, the period known as ‘Badoglio’s 45 days’ was one of great confusion during which the antifascist forces in Italy and abroad walked a tightrope between hope and disillusion.7 Marion assessed the situation with a good dose of British empiricism. ‘Mamma` [Amelia] and the others here are extremely depressed by the evolution of the situation in Italy,’ she informed her French friend at the beginning of August. ‘Not me. It was inconceivable that we would move directly from fascism to the revolution and a democratic government!’ She hoped that Badoglio would be the one to pay the price for liberating Italy from the Germans and signing an unconditional surrender with the Allies. ‘And then we could have free elections and, I hope, get rid of

222

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

the monarchy.’ In the meantime, she was eager to follow the action of her friends. ‘The papers today mentioned a “Radio Giustizia e Liberta`”. It’s not clear where it is broadcasting from, but it seems from Italy.’ It was difficult to figure out the reality of the antifasicst forces and their line of action, but she was happy to find the names of people she knew in the press.8 At least, it was a sign that they were free and regrouping. The newspapers now ran stories about the propaganda of the antifascists against the new government, often mentioning ‘Giustizia e Liberta`, the leftist coalition’.9 A few days later, Marion sounded even more hopeful: ‘In the news from Italy, we often hear the name Giustizia e Liberta`,’ she wrote to Francoise Joxe. ‘It seems that Emilio Lussu has returned already. Ernesto Rossi and Riccardo Bauer have probably been released by now [. . .]. I have a “hunch” that something is going to happen soon in Italy.’10 She guessed right. Franco Venturi, Leone Ginzburg, Ernesto Rossi, Ricardo Bauer and others were finally released after years of prison and confino, and they rapidly made contact with the other members of GL who had joined liberal-socialist and republican forces to form the Partito d’Azione (PdA, Action Party) the previous year.11 Emilio Lussu also reached Rome from France and his influence was obvious in the strong statements made by the PdA in the following weeks, calling for a ‘government liberated from the shadows of the gallows’ and the end of the ‘Badoglio dictatorship, which is fascism without Mussolini’.12 With the pressures from within increasing and the action of the Allies intensifying after their landing in Calabria in early September, the Badoglio government was eventually forced to sign an armistice with the Anglo-Americans. It was not an honourable peace but a total surrender, and those who signed it did not behave honourably either. Immediately after announcing the armistice on the radio, Badoglio and his aides, the King, his family and numerous office holders fled Rome for Brindisi, as far away as possible from the battleground, abandoning the country to the Nazis who had already invaded the north and central regions. There was no authority left and the country was on the verge of chaos as military commanders dissolved their units and hundreds of thousands of soldiers were left to care for themselves. In this darkest hour when confusion reigned supreme, the antifascist parties stepped in to fill the leadership vacuum and

Hope is Reborn

223

rally the population against the Nazi invaders. On 9 September, they announced that they were forming a Comitato di Liberazione Nationale (CLN – Committee of National Liberation) ‘to call the Italians to resistance against the occupying troops and to reconquer for Italy its rightful place among free nations.’ The anti-Nazi Resistance had started.13 ‘How can I describe the various states of mind we’ve been through in the last few days’, Marion wrote to her friend in Algiers in mid-September. When she heard of the ‘end of this horrible struggle between the Italians and the British’, she cried tears of joy. But her joy was short-lived: ‘After a few days of exhilaration, we are again depressed. The Germans all over the place, the people wandering on the roads and Mussolini who seems to have escaped! And no news from our friends, those who were released and those who were in exile with us and have returned.’ She spent hours scanning the press, finding many references to Giustizia e Liberta` in the New York Times, ‘but it does not really explain what is happening in the country. Oh! How I wish I were in Italy, even though I must admit I could not do much.’ A few days later, she was unable to conceal her growing frustration: ‘Oh! Francoise. I long so much to go back to Italy. But what would I do with the education of my children?’14 There was no realistic possibility of her returning to Italy for a while and, apart from her family responsibilities, all she could do was to keep up her work in the Mazzini Society, with not much enthusiasm though as, by then, it was paralysed by violent disputes, typical of exile groups that have little influence on the unfolding of events at home, as she informed Francoise Joxe: The Italian-Americans are terrible. As soon as one of the exiles returns to Italy, the others find it natural to destroy their political character and to fight over what should be done. Unfortunately, among them is my ex-Father Bear. I say ‘ex’ with sadness [. . .]. He has gone so far as to ask that Croce be deprived of his citizenship. Now, I hear he is attacking Sforza. What an imbecile! I am tempted to say it to his face, but I won’t because I do not want to add to the spectacle of Italians fighting each other. Fortunately, he is American now, so let America try to untangle his ideas. They won’t hurt us in Italy.15

224

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

Salvemini’s personal war against the Foreign Office, the State Department and those of his former friends who did not consider these institutions as arch-enemies had reached new heights with the armistice and the landing of the Allies in southern Italy. In September, with his Harvard colleague Giorgio La Piana, he published a pamphlet against what he considered to be the Allies’ plans for his country. What to do With Italy? was a mixture of accurate analyses and extravagant accusations that tended to weaken its argumentation.16 The book read more like a settling of scores than a serious proposals for a post-fascist solution in Italy and it was marred by a lack of precise understanding of the Allies’ plans and the reality of the political forces in Italy, as well as by the bitterness of the authors’ personal attacks against all those who disagreed with them.17 The Allies were certainly determined to avoid major social upheavals, but there was no ready-made political masterplan for a country torn between three potential governments: Mussolini’s Salo’ Republic supported by the Nazis in the north, the Badoglio Government under the supervision of the Allies in the south, the German army controlling two-thirds of the country, and the Committees of National Liberation in the north and centre. In the weeks and months that followed the fall of Mussolini and the armistice, the Allies’ political choices were dictated essentially by their military concerns.18 Salvemini also accused his former friends of being mere pawns in what he saw as the Allies’ fateful plan for his country. Here again, he was quite off the mark. The British strongly opposed Sforza’s return to Italy as they felt he would be an obstacle to their alliance with Badoglio. As for the Americans, they did not have any objection to his return, but they had made no commitment whatsoever to the exiled antifascists before they embarked for Europe. Ascoli, expressing the opinion of his employer the State Department, wished his friends – Cianca, Sforza, Tarchiani and Garosci – good luck when they left but told them not to forget that they only represented themselves. As for the returned exiles, they were perfectly aware, as Garosci recalled, that no political pact or firm engagement bound them to the Americans and, although they might have appreciated more support from the Allies in the following months, they were eager to act with the existing

Hope is Reborn

225

opposition forces in Italy which were totally underestimated by Salvemini, Ascoli and the Allies.19 Marion agreed with her friends that the absolute priority was to reconnect with the antifascist groups in Italy and, in the absence of concrete information about the situation there, all she could do was to defend their character when Salvemini disparaged them.20 From the press and the letters she started to receive from Italy, she learned with satisfaction of the intransigence of the six antifascist parties towards the Badoglio government and the King. They stated repeatedly that their members would never swear allegiance to Vittorio Emanuele who had handed power to Mussolini and been a willing accomplice of his regime. As an alternative, they all insisted on his abdication and a regency with his grandson, the six-year old Prince of Naples and they also required that the government originate from the CNL. Badoglio was unable to form a representative government in the autumn, and the antifascist parties meeting in Bari in January 1944 reiterated their opposition to any collaboration with the King and Badoglio.21 The situation was full of promises and difficulties as Tarchiani informed Marion at the end of the year. ‘Tell everyone we will not compromise,’ he asked her, although they were meeting with a lot of ‘misunderstanding, and meanness.’ ‘I do not need to go into the details of the debates,’ he added, ‘because – with your long experience of antifascist struggles and hopes – you are perfectly aware of our aspirations and the national and international obstacles that stand in our way.’ In a letter to Ascoli, he also complained of the scarce support the antifascists were receiving from the Americans and asked him to convince the State Department to support a government based on the six parties of the CNL.22 Taking stock of this eventful year, Marion felt cautiously optimistic. ‘It seems to me’ she wrote to Amelia, ‘that on the whole, the scale of history tips more on the side of hope than fear. The situation of the world was so much more desperate in 1939 – 40.’23 But what could she do? She was now more isolated since most of her friends had returned to Italy and she had severed all connections with Salvemini and his colleagues, but she did not want to be bogged down in a wait-and-see attitude. She was still a member of the Mazzini Society Executive Committee, but she was no longer

226

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

very active, and the group was wracked with conflict. Instead, she chose to use her name and status as the widow of a martyr of fascism to call attention to events in Europe or express the opinion of her friends in Italy. Early in January, she received the news of the assassination of Victor Basch and his wife He´le`ne by the French proNazi militiamen headed by Paul Touvier near Lyon. The tragedy aroused memories of so many happy moments spent at the home of the leader of the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme who was so fond of his Italian friends, but it also echoed her own personal catastrophe of June 1937, and she made a powerful speech on the radio concluding with a call to arms. ‘Let’s bow our heads over his body, our fists clenched with grief and wrath, and let’s swear, once more, never to give up the fight for his and our cause!’24 A few days later, she turned to a more argumentative mode when she corrected Raymond Swing, the most influential radio commentator of his day, who reported from Britain about the situation in Italy: It is almost, but not quite too late for the Allies to take up a fresh and encouraging attitude to the antifascists in Italy by asking the fascist King not to be present in Rome upon its liberation, perhaps by permitting the solution of the monarchical question altogether before the entry into Rome. As an English woman, I can feel for the Allies in their groping and fumbling with the Italian situation, but as an Italian woman I can only deplore the terrible muddle they have got themselves into through lack of knowledge.25

The situation was evolving rapidly in Italy and social and political tensions increased in the following weeks as popular anger did not subside and thousands of workers joined the armed resistance to avoid deportation to Germany.26 An unexpected turnabout occurred when the Communist Party leader Palmiro Togliatti, back from Moscow, announced his party’s support for the Badoglio government regardless of the monarchical question, taking all the antifascist parties by surprise. He was acting on Moscow’s order, of course, and in line with the plans agreed upon by the three Allies – the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union – at Tehran in November 1943, regarding both the immediate conduct of the war and the postwar division of Europe that would leave Italy in the Western camp. To that effect, consolidating the authority of the state was essential and

Hope is Reborn

227

any insurrectional tendency had to be thwarted. The support of the Allies made his proposal extremely difficult to resist by the other parties. It took many stormy meetings before they would eventually agree to enter a national unity government headed by Badoglio. To sugar the pill, it was agreed that the King would abdicate in favour of his son Umberto after the liberation of Rome and that a future Constituent Assembly would decide the new regime for Italy. The Action Party opposed the strongest resistance, but it was too weak to offer an alternative strategy. At the end of April, the second Badoglio government was formed, and it included representatives from the six antifascist parties. Two of Marion’s friends entered the government. Count Sforza was a minister without portfolio and Alberto Tarchiani was in charge of Public Works; another representative of the Action Party, Adolfo Amadeo, headed the Ministry for Education.27 Like Cianca and the other GL members of the PdA, Marion felt that Togliatti’s strategy had ‘forced the hand’ of the other antifascist parties, but at least she believed that with responsibility for Public Works and Education her friends could make a positive contribution to the reconstruction and reform of the country.28 The intricacies of the political situation were difficult to gauge from afar, but the news on the military front were more exciting. In early June, Marion, Amelia and Maria followed on the radio the news of the Allies’ landing in Normandy and the liberation of Rome by General Clark’s Vth Army. Marion would now be able to get in touch directly with so many of her friends in both countries and, in some ways, be reconnected with both her past and her future. The liberation of Rome brought both good and bad news. Vittorio Emanuele abdicated in favour of his son Umberto and the pre-fascist politician Ivanhoe Bonomi replaced Badoglio at the head of a new government which emanated from the CNL.29 At the same time, the Allies made it clear that they would not recognize the authority of the CNL Alta Italia (the Committee of National Liberation in Northern Italy) – headed by Marion’s old friend Ferrucio Parri (‘Maurizio’ in the Resistance) and the communist leader Luigi Longo, which organized the armed resistance to the Nazis and assumed political responsibility in the areas it liberated. The Rome Protocols made it clear that upon the liberation of the country all authority should be transferred to the

228

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

Allied military government, thereby clipping the political wings of the armed resistance. Marion could only express her perplexity, which was shared by many of her friends in Italy.30 The new situation meant that there was now more open discussion of the responsibilities of the Fascist regime and she had many opportunities to express her opinion in that regard. She was invited by the Rotary Club in Larchmont where she gave a detailed first-hand account of the early fight against fascism that was reported in the local press.31 A long interview in the same paper focused on the contemporary situation. Both Marion, Amelia and Maria stated bluntly that it would be ‘absolutely impossible to make Mussolini suffer as much as he has made others suffer. They are just for putting him up against a wall and shooting him’, the journalist reported. All three women expressed their desire to go back to Florence as soon as possible but Marion also presented her analysis of the situation. She said that ‘eventually she would like a strong Republic, to do away with the King, his son and grandson. She said that she would prefer to see men of her husband’s GL movement in the government. She named Ernesto Rossi, Riccardo Bauer and Emilio Lussu as good possibilities – all members of the Action Party, she explained, describing it as a kind of ‘Henry Wallace program’ referring to the New Deal liberal Vice-President of the United States who would found the Progressive Party in 1948.32 She also closely monitored the reports by Herbert Matthews, the New York Times correspondent in Rome, whose coverage of Italy she found rather superficial and ill-informed. When he ‘revealed’ that Mussolini was linked to the assassination of Matteotti, her tone was quite sarcastic. ‘At last, Herbert Matthews published the true story of the Matteotti murder. These facts, these memoranda, these names and details have been known for 20 years to all politically minded Italians and could have been known to him in 1924, or, for that matter, to any other American correspondent had it been deemed expedient to explore them’. And she recalled how Carlo Rosselli and his friends had first published the Filippelli memorandum in Non Mollare!, a paper for which she worked ‘as secretary and factotum’. She also invited Matthews to investigate the more recent murders of her husband and brother-in-law.33 He apparently heeded her remarks

Hope is Reborn

229

and their next exchange was more cordial as she expressed her gratitude to him for revealing that, according to the confession of some purged fascists, ‘Ciano ordered the Rosselli murders’.34 The news meant that, with her friends in the government and the beginning of the purge of the fascists, it might now be possible to reconstruct the chain of responsibilities that had led from Rome to Bagnoles-de-l’Orne. After the news of the liberation of Florence by the partisans in early August, and the first letters from Gi’ Zabban and Maria’s family, came the thrilling news of the Liberation of Paris, where Marion had lived for more than 10 years. She was asked to make a speech on a radio programme for Italy and Germany to recall the importance of the French capital for the antifascist exiles. ‘I wrote it in one go and it was very emotional’ she informed Francoise Joxe, who had returned to Paris with her husband, who was now a member of the French provisional government. She stressed the hospitality of the French capital where Giustizia e Liberta` was created and the numerous underground links that connected it to Italy. She evoked ‘the remains of the two [Rosselli] brothers, buried together in the Pe`re Lachaise cemetery’ which she could almost feel ‘shivering with joy upon hearing that the Liberation of Europe is near’. She expressed her admiration for the partisans of northern Italy who were heeding Carlo’s call to action. ‘Those of us who, unfortunately, are still away from Italy, tell you, as if Carlo was speaking through us, “Well done, Italians, let’s show the world how to defend liberty”.’ It was a small thing she told her French friend, but ‘it’s mine and I am glad to have done it. Without false modesty, I can tell you it was very good’.35 Now that she could write directly, she immediately contacted her lawyer in Paris, Maıˆtre Moro-Giafferi, and asked him to inform her as soon as the trial of the Cagoulards reopened. ‘The trial of Petain might reveal something’ she hoped.36 She also resumed her exchanges with Aldo Garosci, who was working hard to publish Carlo Rosselli’s Liberal Socialism in Italy. She sent him a letter through Countess Sforza who was returning to Rome, with ‘the only copy’ of the manuscript and ‘the preface I had promised’, in which she recalled the context of the writing of the book in the faraway days of Lipari.37

230

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

Her most emotional epistolary reunion was with Ernesto Rossi, her old accomplice from Florence who had spent nine years in jail and four at the confino. These years of isolation had taken a heavy toll and after his release he shifted from periods of intense activity to long bouts of depression. He was determined to push forward his proposition for a free and unified Europe that he had elaborated on the penal island of Ventotene together with Altiero Spinelli. After his release, he joined the Action Party, but he also launched the European Federalist movement and seemed much more interested in this project that in the tricky politics of post-fascist Italy. In early 1944, he had moved to Switzerland to escape capture by the Germans and to cure his depression, and by the end of the year he seemed unwilling to return to Italy. His friends felt they were losing a major thinker and leader. From Italy, Max Ascoli informed Marion about Rossi’s state of mind and pleaded with her: ‘For God’s sake, Marion, go to Ernesto’s rescue. He is too valuable a man to be lost that way.’38 Rossi had first contacted Salvemini, urging him to convey his warmest greetings to Marion and her family and he had been disappointed by his answer full of bitterness. Salvemini had warned him against their former friends who, by then, he considered as traitors beyond redemption. He was particularly acrimonious about Marion. ‘[She] has never understood anything to politics’, he stated, erasing with the stroke of a pen a life of political engagement. ‘I have severed all contact with her. Her mind has been totally screwed after Carlo’s death. I hope you will never see her again. It would be a terrible disillusion.’39 Fortunately, Rossi knew from the returned exiles how embittered and rancorous Salvemini had become and he did not conceal his disappointment which marred his joy of receiving direct news from his former mentor.40 Marion was very direct in her first letter to Rossi. ‘What I want you to tell me is how you feel deep inside’ she asked him. ‘What I want to know is how these terrible experiences in prison have affected your soul?’ These were not indiscrete questions, she felt, but the only way she could understand his present mood and move on to her next set of queries regarding Italian politics. She pressed him to return to Italy and join the efforts of their friends. ‘If your ideas have not changed (I can’t believe they have, I’m sure you still adhere to GL) what is

Hope is Reborn

231

keeping you in Switzerland?’41 His answer was very emotional for Marion’s letter ‘had brought back so many memories buried deep for years’. He was still with GL, he reassured her. He had even moved more to the left on economic questions, ‘a true liberal socialist who would feel at home in a Labour Party’. He was obviously more interested by his plans for Europe than Italian politics: ‘Too many manipulative politicos’. He felt he would not know how to behave and saw himself more as a thinker.42 Marion was happy to have resumed her conversation with her old friend, but also a little disappointed by his attitude, as she confided to Ascoli. ‘I have a feeling the long years of jail and relegation may have reinforced his quibbling character, for which I once described him as “negative” compared to Carlo’s “positive” character’.43 Upon the suggestion of Lussu, Alberto Tarchiani was appointed Ambassador of Italy to the United States and arrived in Washington in January 1945. Ascoli asked Marion to write an article in Free World, a magazine published by the United Nations in 20 languages, and she praised his long commitment to antifascism during his exile years and since his return to Italy.44 After his arrival, they met several times in New York and Larchmont and had long discussions about the situation in Italy.45 Although the developments on the political front were not very exciting, he brought more encouraging news with the setting up, at the end of 1944, of a High Commissioner for the Punishment of Fascist Crimes headed first by the communist Mauro Scoccimaro, who was replaced by Sforza in early 1945. There was finally hope that it would shed light on the responsibilities for the Rosselli murders.46 But with so many fascists remaining in the state apparatus, there was also the possibility that the judiciary would target second fiddles and not those who gave the order. In a statement published in January 1945 in Italia Libera, the Action Party weekly, Marion, who wanted ‘justice for Carlo, not vengeance’, was very straightforward in her accusations. I am certain that Mussolini is personally responsible for the Rosselli murders and I can offer compelling evidence. I fervently hope that one day he will be arrested and eliminated as he deserves, not only for the Rosselli murders but for all the other crimes he is responsible for in the eyes of the world. Count Ciano was the true organizer of the

232

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

murders, with the support of the secret military and fascist organizations headed by General Roatta which, together with the cagoulards, wickedly assassinated the Rosselli brothers.47

Colonel Santo Emanuele, an officer from the Military Intelligence Service (SIM) who knew about the murders, was arrested and pointed to the responsibilities of Galeazzo Ciano and his then Head of Cabinet Filippo Anfuso, in addition to a few low-level members of the military. Ciano and Anfuso were both conveniently out of reach of the antifascist justice, the former having been shot by a fascist firing squad after betraying his father-in-law at the Grand Council in July 1943, and the latter being ambassador of the Salo’ Republic in Germany. It was clear that Emanuele and his colleagues were trying to muddy the waters, but additional rumours pointed to the top echelons of the army, in particular to General Mario Roatta who was the head of the SIM in the 1930s. He was soon arrested and charged with complicity in the Rosselli murder in addition to war crimes in Croatia. Marion dreamt of flying to Rome and ‘testify against the prominent Italian fascists now on trial – including for the brutal murder of her famous husband and his brother’, a Larchmont paper reported.48 But this was not possible, as the trial was speeded up and opened at the end of January in Rome in front of a packed house. Piero Calamandrei and other lawyers close to GL insisted on exposing the responsibility of Mussolini and his top aides whereas the defence presented the accused as simple links in the chain of command. The case attracted a lot of attention from the public and the press, as it was the first time that fascists were put on trial and it did not lack twists and surprises.49 As the guilty sentence approached, benefitting from complicity within the hospital where he was detained, General Roatta escaped and with the help of the Vatican fled to Spain. The news provoked several days of violent riots in Rome as people were infuriated and blamed the Bonomi government for its lack of determination in ousting the fascists from the state administration.50 In this climate, the court could only deliver a harsh sentence, although the three main culprits were out of its reach. Ciano – dead – was identified as the person who gave the order; Anfuso – in Berlin – received a death sentence in absentia, Roatta – in Spain – received a life sentence in prison and so did Emanuele and Navale. This was a bitter vindication for Marion, even

Hope is Reborn

233

more as she learned a few weeks later that the convicts would do everything possible to appeal their sentence although the High Court rulings were final. Their first appeal was rejected in May 1945, but the very generous Togliatti amnesty of June 1946 spared many of the fascist civil servants in the judiciary as elsewhere, and they would soon prove all too willing to absolve their friends.51 Would there be more hope for justice in France? At first sight, it was not very likely. Among the members of the Cagoulards who had been charged for the Rosselli murder before the war and released after the 1940 armistice, three had died, three had disappeared and only Jakubiez, Puireux and Me´te´nier were arrested. Jakubiez did confess but, as Marion would inform the judges, the three were low-level executioners who did not have a clue who they were assassinating. There would be a trial in Paris in 1948, but the identity of those who ordered the murders would never be discussed.52 ‘Exile is such a sad experience!’ Marion wrote to a friend after learning of the death of her mother in England. ‘Although I was not as close to her as you are to your mother” she wrote to Ernesto Rossi, ‘to lose her was a cruel blow.’ She rejoiced that her father ‘who is closer to me spiritually’ was still alive, but she feared she would not be able to return to Europe in time to see him before he died.53 Political differences also influenced family relations. Amelia and Maria, who were very close to Salvemini, had sided with him in the political disputes of the Mazzini Society which they left in the spring of 1944 whereas Marion remained on the Executive Committee, the only member left who was directly connected to the exiles. They also shared his enmities. After Marion published her article in Free World to welcome Ambassador Tarchiani, Salvemini decided to withdraw his name from the Honorary Board of the magazine, and when she attended an official reception to honour Tarchiani in New York, both Amelia and Maria refused to join her.54 Her many exchanges with her friends in Europe made Marion realize how powerless she was so far away from the political frontlines. ‘I am so anxious to go back to Italy’, she confessed to Rossi. But there was no plan for that in the immediate future, because a lot depended now on John’s drafting. He would ask to be enrolled in the British army when he turned 18 in June 1945 and the family would

234

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

not decide anything before that was sorted out.55 There was also the problem of the younger children who were now American teenagers and did not master Italian well enough to enrol in a good grammar school in Florence. ‘Melina is a beautiful girl . . . and quite a strong personality!’ she wrote in her first letter since 1940 to Gi’ Zabban. ‘Cohabitation with her is not always easy but often very interesting. She has an iron will and excels at school. However, she is often sharptongued . . . . Andrea is exactly the opposite. Very easy-going, a lot of charm, but absolutely no sense of truth and personal probity.’56 Always prone to severe – or lucid – judgments about her younger children, Marion had only praises for John and her praises were widely shared by her friends and his educators.57 With the end of the war approaching, the question of returning to Europe was becoming more pressing. But where in Europe? Italy was her first choice, but would it be practical? Most of her money was blocked in Great Britain and could not be used outside the country. Max Ascoli assured her that she and her younger children could survive in Italy on what she had invested in the United States. All the same, she insisted that she should get a job. Not just for the money, although it would be welcome, but for the sake of doing something of interest. She thought of applying to be the new director of the British Institute, which had been closed since 1939 but would now reopen, as she believed she was qualified to play ‘the go-between between British culture and the Italian world’. There was a caveat though, she explained to Ascoli. ‘The position of the Institute obliges one, quite rightly, to be non-political. Can I really be non-political? With Italy in the condition it is?’58 The news from Italy was exhilarating. The final offensive against nazi-fascism began in mid-April when, against the advice of the Allies, the workers and the partisans staged a revolt in the large northern cities, liberating first Genoa and then Turin and Milan. The partisans also seized and executed Benito Mussolini, his mistress Clara Petacci, and other fascist top leaders as they were trying to reach the Swiss border. Their bodies were taken to Milan and hanged by their feet at Piazzale Loreto where they were abandoned to the fury of the people. Apart from the Vatican, there was no one to lament the pitiful end of the Duce. ‘A fitting end to a wretched life’ concluded

Hope is Reborn

235

the New York Times.59 As for Marion, she was delighted, and so was Maria as they explained in a joint interview for a Voice of America broadcast to Italy on 10 June, the eighth anniversary of Carlo and Nello’s assassination. Asked for her reaction, Marion did not hesitate: I am delighted that they were all shot on the spot, thus avoiding the many delays and legal manoeuvrings that would have been insults to justice. Delighted that Italian partisans got rid of an individual who had betrayed his fatherland. When the story of these events is written, I think that a great honour will be bestowed on the patriots for the speedy and decisive manner in which they liquidated militant fascism. The atmosphere in Italy and in the world has become more breathable.

She expressed her great satisfaction that so many partisan brigades chose the name Rosselli or Giustizia e Liberta` and added a personal note. ‘I have been particularly moved to learn the important part played in the organization of the northern patriots by Carlo’s dear friend, Ferrucio Parri, to whom I send a passionate greeting [. . .] remembering the years at Lipari when we shared so many secrets.’ As for the future of Italy, she was hopeful, but more careful. ‘In a democracy, all free ideas can be expressed freely, and I am sure that Carlo’s political and social ideas will find fertile ground.’ As women would soon get the vote, she expressed her eagerness to go back to Italy and get involved in the political debate.60 Despite the final victory over fascism the political news from Italy was somewhat disheartening for Marion and her friends. The Action Party had refused to join the second Bonomi government because it no longer emanated from the CLN but from the Regent Umberto. Ferrucio Parri headed the CLN Northern Italy together with the communist Luigi Longo and they had decided to assert the power of the Resistance by calling for the insurrection despite the opposition of the Allies. They scored a major success and they now wanted to extend it at the political level. At the same time, the prefect of Milan, Riccardo Lombardi, also from the Action Party, refused to swear allegiance to the Allies and stated that he would be responsible only to the CLN. But this interlude was short-lived as the Anglo-Americans hurried to proceed to the disarmament of the partisan bands and, while not entirely dismissing the CLN, made sure they would play an auxiliary role and not represent an alternative form of power.61 In their effort to prevent a radical

236

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

reconstruction, the Allies received the direct support of the Christian Democratic Party and the indirect help of the Communist Party whose attitude contributed to the defusing of the social dynamic of the Resistance.62 The formation of the short-lived Parri government as a compromise between the CLN parties did not represent the triumph of the ideals of the Resistance but rather their last salvo. The Action Party had been strong in the partisan armed struggle but was weakly represented in Italian society and could not challenge Togliatti’s policy of alliance between the two mass parties.63 The conservative reconstruction of the state and the economy accelerated, defeating the Action Party’s project for a ‘democratic revolution’.64 The Rossellis started the formalities to obtain exit visas and secure travel arrangements, both of which seemed to require complicated administrative procedures and lengthy delays given the circumstances. There were other exiles waiting to return, like Don Sturzo and Tullia Zevi, and in the following weeks they exchanged impatient letters while waiting for the various authorizations to come through.65 In October, Marion attended a meeting organized in her and Maria’s honour by the Italian-American workers of Patterson, an industrial town in New Jersey with a strong anarchist presence, where she gave a poignant farewell speech. She had finally opted for Italy, and she sounded full of hope for her country of adoption. ‘Our return to Italy must be understood as an act of faith in the democratic spirit of the country [. . .]. We also go to Italy to add the little forces we have to those of so many who are trying to pull the country out of the situation created by 23 years of fascism.’ But she assured them that their eagerness to leave for Italy was not a sign of ingratitude toward the country that has welcome them for five years: We are, on the contrary, extremely grateful to America for allowing us to raise our seven children away from the battlefields [. . .]. And we are also grateful to America for having given us so much, in particular your friendship that has been so important to me. I am happy to have known you and to have felt united to you by our shared devotion to the fatherland.66

The Rossellis’ departure would be postponed for six months, though, as over the New Year, Marion suffered another attack of rheumatic fever. As she was in hospital in New York, John received his marching

Hope is Reborn

237

orders informing him that the British army needed him in early February. Marion had mixed feelings. She was happy for the new exciting life he would lead in Europe now that the war was over. But in her despondent mood, she felt she might not survive to see him again. ‘I haven’t got out yet of this line of thinking,’ she informed Marion Ascoli after John left her. She even suggested he ask for a six months’ delay, but he refused. The doctors felt she was doing quite well and there was no cause for concern. She did recover soon enough to be able to go for a resting period in Florida in March as a ‘traveller’ and not as a ‘patient’, Amelia informed John who was, by then, undergoing basic military training in Cornwall.67 She settled at the Buckingham Hotel in St Augustine, and followed a cure of injections. The holiday atmosphere did not do much to cheer her up, though. St Augustine was an ancient town ‘chocked by hyper-modern and extremely ugly advertising billboards’ and she felt depressed and ‘horribly lonely’.68 She came to realize how her health could become a serious impediment to her involvement in Italian politics. The day she arrived in Florida, she received a telegram from Nello Traquandi, another old companion from the years of Italia Libera and the Circolo di Cultura in Florence, who had spent years in prison and was now active in the Action Party. ‘Action Party in Florence would be honoured to include you in its list for the elections to the Constituent Assembly. If you accept, urgently send a statement certified by the Consulate and two birth certificates’. This was a pleasant surprise and an exciting prospect for her re-entry into active politics. Women had recently been granted the right to vote and to be elected and, on 2 June 1946, there would be both a referendum to decide whether Italians wanted to keep the monarchy or get rid of it and a general election to elect the members of the Assembly that would draft the new Constitution.69 Despite her excitement, she rapidly understood that her participation was totally unrealistic given her state of health and because she would have to reacquire her Italian citizenship. The elections were due to take place in a couple of months and there was no way she could get her papers, travel and reach Italy in time to take part, even only briefly and symbolically, to the campaign. She reluctantly decided to decline the invitation.70 ‘I won’t say it was not hard for me to relinquish the only way in which I could serve the country’ she wrote to Amelia. ‘I find it

238

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

painful to accept that I will no longer be able to serve, as I have always done, in the only domain that is familiar to me’ she complained to Ascoli who reassured her that her illness gave her a good reason not to become embroiled in the factional disputes of the Action Party, by now divided into several warring factions.71 The cure seemed to be working and her health improved rapidly. She could even play the tourist, but she was in a hurry to leave and she booked a return plane for early May. She felt she was ‘coming back to life’ and could start making plans for their return to Italy and future family arrangements. Once again, her main concerns came from her younger children, in particular Melina. ‘I do not know yet what to do with her’ she wrote to Amelia. ‘But I’m afraid I will never again be able to face her crises.’ Their relations had reached a breaking point just before she fell ill. ‘I am no longer prepared to let myself be massacred – albeit unconsciously – by Melina. She will have to control herself or leave home.’72 She flew back to New York on 14 May 1946 and speeded up the formalities for their return. They would travel on the Vulcania, an Italian ship leaving from New York on 15 June. Max Ascoli and his counsel would take care of the practical arrangements – the sale of the house, the management of the children’s trusts and of Marion’s finances. Tarchiani also made sure that the authorities would welcome them when they landed in Italy. They hardly had the time to celebrate the results of the referendum which established the Republic. In early June, Marion went to stay at the Ascolis in Croftonon Hudson. Tarchiani and his wife joined her there for her last weekend in America and saw the entire family off on 15 June.73 Tullia Zevi also travelled back with them. ‘It was a war ship, still equipped to transport troops’ she recalled. Sitting on bunk beds, they talked for hours. ‘These were moments of great uncertainty, doubt and anxiety, but also of hope.’74

CHAPTER 14

Coming Home (July 1946 –October 1949)

‘You can’t go home again’, Klaus Mann wrote after 12 years of exile in France and the United States, anticipating the experience of many of his antifascist companions. Exile was also a ‘journey of no return’ for one of his compatriots, the playwright Carl Zuckmayer. ‘The person who goes into exile and dreams of coming home is lost. He may return to people he missed a lot, to places he loved, he may return to where his mother tongue is spoken. But he can never stay home.’1 While still in the United States, Marion Cave Rosselli had spent anxious hours trying to decide where was the ‘home’ she aspired to go back to. She had chosen to leave her native country to settle in Italy in 1919; she had been forced into exile in France in 1929 by the Fascist regime and then in the United States in 1940 by the Nazi war. She could now choose again freely where to reside, but there was no obvious answer. Home had been where she had lived with Carlo and where their shared political commitment had led them. With Carlo dead, fascism defeated and Italian politics in turmoil, there was no compelling reason to choose one country over another. In the end, opting for Italy was a pragmatic choice with a semblance of rationality. There was a house in Florence, a family, some friends, and maybe a future, although she was not sure what to expect given ‘the abyss of different experiences we have gone through in the past years.’2

240

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

Her first contact with post-war, post-fascist Italy brought hope and despair in equal measure. The public and private reception was overwhelming. When the Vulcania arrived at Naples on 30 June 1946, Marion’s old companion Alberto Cianca, minister without portfolio and freshly elected to the Constituent Assembly, came on board together with the Navy undersecretary to welcome the Rosselli family in the name of the Italian government and to accompany them to the presidential carriage – until recently the royal carriage! – of the train sent specially to take them to Rome and then to Florence. The embarrassing luxury of the dining and parlour cars was in sharp contrast with the squalor they discovered by the windows. All that was left of Naples was piles of rubbles and swarms of ragged children who roamed the ruins in search of food. With a lump in their throats and tears in their eyes, they took the measure of the misery that had befallen their beloved country during the war as the train made its slow journey to Rome. ‘I cried my heart out for the pain of Italy’, Amelia wrote to John a few days later.3 In Rome, there was another grandiose reception at the station by representatives of the government and the various antifascist parties, and then a continuous flow of visitors and friends in the luxurious royal suite of the Grand Hotel put at their disposal by the authorities. They stayed overnight and, the following day, as the children visited the city in a horse-drawn carriage, Marion, Maria and Amelia received their personal and political friends. Marion was reunited with many members of the old GL group who were now members of the Constituent Assembly elected in early June. Emilio Lussu, Ernesto Rossi, Fernando Schiavetti who had spent endless evenings at the Rosselli flat in Paris plotting against the Fascist regime were no longer exiles or political prisoners, but ‘onorevoli’ in charge of drafting the new Constitution. Yet, they confirmed what she already knew. With the fall of the Parri government at the end of 1945, any hope of seeing the ideas of GL and its heir, the Action Party, triumph had vanished, and the political game was determined by the Christian Democratic Party, the Communist Party and their allies. The warm and respectful public welcome extended to the returning Rossellis honoured the martyrs of the past struggle against fascism rather than their political contribution to the future of Italy.4

Coming Home

241

The family continued its journey to Florence and they once again witnessed the destruction inflicted on the country by the long conflict. They reached Florence at night and horse-drawn carriages took them to via Giusti. The city was dark and silent except for the sound of the horses’ hoofs on the cobblestone streets and, luckily, they could not see the devastation caused by the retiring Nazis who had blown up all the bridges – except the Ponte Vecchio, a favourite of Hitler apparently – and the surrounding areas along the Arno, including in via San Jacopo the building where Marion had lived at the time of the Non Mollare!.5 In via Giusti, Maria’s family had prepared a splendid supper of melon, figs, cured ham and all the food typical of a Tuscan summer meal. It seems that all their friends had sent flowers, for the house was transformed into a colourful and fragrant garden. Then there were a few dizzying days when an uninterrupted flow of people came to greet them. People from all walks of life: family, friends, local traders, servants and gardeners who had worked for the family. There were also the officials: the prefect, the mayor of the city – the old socialist Pieraccini whose electoral meetings Marion attended when she first came to Florence, the leaders of the Action Party, colleagues from the University. The three women were bewildered but also moved to tears by this universal homage paid to their dead sons and husbands. The children were stunned and felt a little out of place, except for Paola and Silvia who had spent their early childhood in that house and that city.6 Things eventually calmed down and the family had to adjust to this familiar yet, in many ways, new environment. The house was large but not adapted for three families. In addition, the three women had been unable to live together in the United States and it would be even more difficult here where Marion felt, or was made to feel as she complained to John, an outsider in the family home. After Nello and Maria had moved to their villa l’Apparita in the early 1930s, the top floor of via Giusti had been rented to a friend of theirs, Aldo Forti and his family, and the income from the rent was welcome. Amelia, Maria and her children shared the first floor and the reception rooms downstairs, where there remained two small rooms at the back with no bathroom for Marion and her two children. After a few days, she could not put up with this situation any longer. ‘I am deeply

242

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

unhappy here’ she wrote to John. It was not just the material arrangements but ‘the way we are treated. Damn the in-laws! They find more ways to make you suffer than there are stars in the firmament!’ Apart from the personal frictions, there were also political tensions. She could not stand the ‘nationalistic feeling that predominated at home’, and the ‘lack of interest for the United Nations’. After sending Melina to spend the summer at Forte dei Marmi with the Benaim family, she arranged to move with Andrea to Il Frassine, Gi’ Zabban’s villa outside Florence. There, she found a welcoming environment and some respite before deciding on a more permanent arrangement.7 She knew she could not go back to live with Amelia and Maria at via Giusti. ‘The fact is that we are so different in upbringing, in ways of thought and habit that the relationship of mother and daughterin-law ends up in a series of clashes and this is simply unbearable for me,’ she explained to Max Ascoli.8 She envisaged taking rooms in a pension for a while, which infuriated Amelia who could not understand why Marion was dissatisfied with the situation in via Giusti when ‘so many people would feel blessed to have a roof over their head’. She put it down to her disillusion with Italy ‘which was no longer the Italy of her youth where she had been so happy’.9 More importantly, she felt that back in Italy, as the widow of Carlo Rosselli, Marion should keep up a certain decorum and that no one would understand if she ended up in a cheap pension. This made things even worse for Marion and she reminded Amelia: You know that my means are extremely reduced. And I am not complaining because this is due to the enormous expenditures incurred by Carlo to finance his enterprises and that, as you well know, I never opposed. But that you should tell me that as Carlo’s widow I must maintain a certain standard of living well above my means seems incredible to me, dear mamma, and if you think about it you will realise how wrong you are. Believe me, it is better for both of us that you should stop interfering with my arrangements.10

What these arrangements would be, she was not sure yet. The most important problem was the education of Melina and Andrea. The youngest boy hardly spoke Italian and had to take lessons all summer like Nello’s two sons. There was another difficulty with the

Coming Home

243

equivalences of diplomas. Melina had graduated from high school and would have entered university in the United States, but Italy required at least an additional year of schooling, maybe two; the situation was similar for Andrea who was not accepted in the senior high school – the Lyceo – in Florence. Melina, who had spent the summer with the Benaim, an Italian Jewish family who lived in England and had a daughter her age, Elisa, who attended St Paul’s Girls School in London, had become convinced she would do much better in England. By the end of the summer, she had also convinced her mother who had increasing doubts about the wisdom of educating her children in Italy.11 Beyond the question of degree equivalences, there was a deeper concern about the abyss she perceived between the liberal education she had received and ‘the lack of freedom that does not allow [Italians] to grow untrammelled when they are young’. ‘I could go for reams about this country’ she wrote to her brother-in-law in England, trying to explain her state of mind. ‘Why it is delightful, why it is stultifying to youth. How it is the women that bear the brunt of life and how they are just beginning to wake up and shake themselves a little freer.’ She had wanted to come back to Italy moved by a ‘mixture of gratitude to the country for Carlo and love for the countryside that is beautiful,’ but she was no longer the starry-eyed young person who had arrived in Florence after World War I. As a mature woman who had gone through both exhilarating and dramatic political and personal experiences during her adult years entirely dedicated to fighting for the freedom of Italy, she was now much more critical of the mentality of the people and had become convinced it was not a proper environment to educate her children. She was quite decided to send them to England, but this might take time, not just because of all the practical questions of finding schools and lodgings, but also because ‘there are all sorts of sensibilities to be considered in getting the children out of here.’ These ‘sensibilities’ had to do with Amelia who, by then, strongly disapproved of Marion’s choices, but also with some of Carlo’s friends.12 Yet, Marion acted rapidly because she did not want Melina to waste a year. She mobilized the efforts of Marion Enthoven Rawson, Isabel Massey and Marjory Fry, the reformer whom she had met in the

244

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

United States and who was now working for the Education Department. Melina was eventually accepted at St Paul’s Girls School where she would prepare the exams for the matriculation in the University of London. Elisa Benaim and Marion Rawson’s daughter also attended St Paul’s, and Melina would live first at the Benaim’s and then at the Rawson’s.13 Then there was the problem of Andrea. He had spent the war years in a Quaker boarding-school and now found it difficult to adapt to his new environment, not least because of his lack of mastery of the Italian language and the unstable family environment. During the autumn and winter months, Marion was unable or unwilling to find a stable arrangement. She kept the two rooms in via Giusti where she stayed with Andrea, but when she could no longer put up with the family tensions she rented rooms at the pensione Rigatti on the Lungarno, near the Ponte alle Grazie, and when she was too exhausted she found refuge at Il Frassine. Andrea soon expressed the desire to go to England and Marion informed John that she too was seriously considering leaving Italy and would discuss her plans with him as he had been posted to Italy and would soon be able to visit the family in Florence.14 Before making a final decision, she also wanted to assess the political situation. She wanted to see for herself how things had evolved since the end of the war, and whether there were any possibilities for her to get involved in some way. But she already had her doubts, as she wrote to Nathan Levin, her financial advisor in New York. She would soon go to England to explore the possibility of buying a house and resettling there, she informed him. ‘I may change my mind after staying in Rome, but I do not think it is likely.’15 She had re-established contact with Ferrucio Parri who had paid her a short visit in September, but she needed to have longer conversations with him and other friends and, for that, she would have to go to Rome since the political life now revolved entirely around the Constituent Assembly.16 She was already aware that the Action Party was in dire straits after its more than disappointing results in the June 1946 election, when it arrived at the very bottom of the list with a meagre 1.5 per cent of the vote. Even the small Republican Party had done better with 4.4 per cent, but the bulk of the votes had been

Coming Home

245

divided between the three ‘mass parties’: 35.2 per cent for the Christian Democratic Partry, 20.7 per cent for the Socialist Party and 19 per cent for the Communist Party. A first split had occurred at the National Congress of the Action Party in February 1946, when Ferrucio Parri and Ugo La Malfa had walked out to form a more moderate Republican Party.17 But this did not put an end to the tensions between those who wanted to maintain their rather elitist conception of the party and an autonomous political stance and Lussu and his friends who pushed for a confluence with the Socialist Party.18 As the post-war divisions between the former allies increased and the Cold War framework imposed itself more forcefully on international and national politics, the independent political stance that GL and the Action Party had always favoured was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain and the pressures to ‘choose camps’ ever more compelling, as Marion realized in her epistolary exchanges with Ernesto Rossi. The man she still considered as the potential leader Italy needed offered an extremely pessimistic and rather fatalistic reading of the situation. As Italy had not been liberated by the antifascist forces and Europe had not engaged in its unification, the country was at the mercy of the Anglo-Americans who only saw it as a ‘launch-pad for their imminent war against Russia’ and, in that perspective, they had done all they could to help the fascists and priests to maintain or regain their positions of power. He was obviously distraught at seeing all his fascist persecutors well entrenched in the economic and judicial structures of the ‘new Italy’ and claimed he would not hesitate to choose his camp: ‘If tomorrow Russia meant for us a communist dictatorship and England a clerical-fascist dictatorship, I would prefer Russia. I can accept the existence of economic privileges as the price to pay for liberty, but if I must renounce liberty I would prefer a dictatorship that tends to economic equality.’19 Marion could not accept such a bleak reading of the situation and rejected his pessimism that could only lead to withdrawal and inaction. She insisted it was still possible to move forward without having to choose between the Allies and the Russians and rejected the broad-brush picture he presented. ‘You put together the Socialists and the Communists and refer to the Christian-Democrats as fascists. But the Christian-Democrats are not

246

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

fascists. They do not assassinate their political opponents. They are democrats but, in our opinion, with huge flaws and drawbacks.’ With the country being strongly Catholic it was not surprising that they should be the first party but, for her, the real problem was their allegiance to the Vatican. ‘As for the Communists, I cannot trust them . . . In various committees in Paris and New York I have had enough experience of their methods and will never forget them. At the appropriate moment, they always come up with Russian nationalist demands. And fascist methods’. Above all, she wanted to convince her friend that there was still hope for change and ‘to offer an injection of English empiricism’. She had just read his book about abolishing poverty and compared it to the Beveridge plan for the welfare state in Great Britain. Why would he not draft a similar plan for Italy to begin with?20 But he was not convinced. He did not consider himself as a ‘statesman’ but as a ‘poor devil of an intellectual’ and it was clear that he had already succumbed to his pessimism. ‘The DC is totally subservient to the Vatican and the Vatican’s ideal is a fascism that bows to its will, i.e. a fascism more awful than the one we have experienced in Italy. If I must choose between Stalin and Pius XII, I would prefer Stalin.’ And he was not alone, he wrote to Marion. ‘This opinion is shared by many intellectuals who would have sided with the Anglo-Americans if they had implemented a progressive policy instead of imposing their imperialist policy of zones of influence and of alliance with the reactionary forces against the Russian threat.’21 At that point, any hopes Marion might have entertained about Rossi’s role in the renewal of Italian politics were seriously shattered, and he did not leave her much room for optimism about the future of the Action Party which he left in October 1946 when Lussu’s line of fusion with the Socialist Party won a majority at the National Council. She already knew by then that her own participation to what would be the last national Congress of the Action Party in the following spring in Rome would be essentially symbolical.22 The year ended on a happy note as she could finally see John after nearly a year of separation. He had been posted to Italy to oversee the repatriation of British military material and was able to visit his

Coming Home

247

family in Florence for the Epiphany in early January 1947. He found Marion rather depressed because of her persistent heart problems, which required constant surveillance, and her ‘equivocal situation at Via Giusti’. As he and Melina had already chosen to live in England where they felt there were more opportunities in their fields of study than in Italy, he accepted Marion’s plan to resettle in London. Of course, the climate was not ideal for her health, but he knew things would be even worse for her if she lived a lonely and pointless life in some sunny resort on the Riviera as Ascoli had suggested.23 Her stay in Rome for the Congress of the Action Party in March – April was quite emotional at the personal level as she spent days with friends she had not seen for years and met a new generation of activists who had been inspired by Carlo’s action and ideas. The political situation had evolved so rapidly, though, that it felt a little like a reunion of ghosts from a distant past who had not delivered on their promises. On the other hand, Marion had also changed a lot and her friends, who had been charmed by her quick wit, her radiant smile and wholehearted support, could measure how her dramatic experiences had changed her. ‘Little was left of her smile except for a slight trace at the corner of her mouth’, noted Ester Parri.24 As for her political enthusiasm it was seriously eroded and, although she was given a standing ovation by the delegates of the congress, all she could do was to join a few friends from Florence to put up a symbolic fight in defence of the political ideas of Carlo Rosselli. At the Teatro Della Valle, the line of confluence with the Socialist Party won. Marion and her friends formed a Movement of Socialist Action that was short-lived and, a few months later, the Action Party would pronounce its own dissolution and its members join the various left parties.25 Over the Easter holiday, Marion travelled back to Florence with Ernesto and Ada Rossi. Stopping over at Assisi and Perugia, they could put aside Italy’s political problems for a while and enjoy the stunning beauty of the country. As she flew to London a few days later, she probably knew she would never see Italy again.26 ‘I am ready to die, since there seems to be no other way for me, but first I have too many urgent things to attend to not to leave the children too exposed to the vicissitudes of life’, she wrote to Gi’ Zabban in her first letter from London.27 She was lucid and willing to

248

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

face her situation in a straightforward manner. She knew her health would never improve. On the contrary, there was a slow but continuous deterioration that she could not ignore and the prospect of becoming an invalid was difficult to face for a person as active and independent as she had been. She had come back to Italy hoping to return to active politics and contribute to the reconstruction of a freer and fairer country but had been utterly disappointed. There was no room for her in post-war Italian politics that was moving further away from the vision developed by Giustizia e Liberta` in exile. And there was no room for her either, or so she felt, in the Rosselli home in Florence. England was her native country and, ever since becoming a young adult, she had always felt estranged from it, but she felt it was where she could offer the best opportunities to her children, and that was a sufficient reason to try and build a semblance of home there for the years she had left. There was no enthusiasm in her choice, but a sense of urgency dictated by her declining health and the demands of two difficult teenagers. She arrived with Andrea in mid-April and took rooms at the Constance Hotel in Lancaster Gate where she was welcomed by John, Melina and Elisa Benaim. She spent a few pleasant days with her three children, enjoying London and discussing their plans. After finishing his military service, John hoped to join the Old Vic theatre school to train as a director, an interest he had developed at Swarthmore, but it was a very competitive examination. As for Melina, Marion already knew that she felt restive at St Paul’s. Her brother-in-law had informed her that her term report was poor. He agreed with Marion Rawson that Melina felt that girls her own age were far ahead of girls of the same age in US schools and grew discouraged. There was a positive side though as she had developed a new passion for music, studying violin and piano (for composition), and she had concentrated on these two subjects for which she received good grades. He also agreed with Marion Rawson that it was useless to oppose her desire as ‘she can be as obstinate as a mule in many ways.’ At 17, she was a fascinating young person who was determined to have her own way in her studies as well as in her looks, developing a sort of ‘bad boy’ attitude that Marion found difficult to deal with for fear of antagonising her.28 She agreed to finish her exams before

Coming Home

249

focusing exclusively on music, but immediately decided to make Marion pay for forcing her to do so, accusing her of being the most pitiless mother in the world and initiating a period of intense conflict that would end only with Marion’s death.29 Andrea was not easier to deal with. He was a troubled teenager who could not survive in a traditional school environment. He had done well at his Quaker boarding school in Connecticut and Marion now looked for a similar arrangement in England with the help of Marjorie Fry. She succeeded in enrolling him at Leighton Park School, a very innovative Quaker establishment near Reading that accepted to take him so late in the year, and the Headmaster even offered to take him as a paying guest in his home. It was a relief for Marion, but as she accompanied him to his new school in early May, she feared that Andrea’s behavioural problems might eventually ruin everything.30 After many hesitations between the countryside and the city, Marion chose a detached house with a garden in Ealing in West London, large enough for the entire family and practical for a person with reduced mobility. The simple tasks of recuperating her furniture and personal belongings from Florence and France and preparing the house were exhausting for Marion due to her health and Melina’s constant nagging and atrocious mood.31 In unexpected ways, her past revisited her during that summer. To her great surprise and pleasure, among all her belongings from France she recovered the suitcases she had had to abandon at Saint-Malo before boarding the ship for England in June 1940. The Red Cross had taken care of them and found their owner through the British Embassy, a precious gift as they essentially contained most of Carlo’s papers and letters from his exile years in Paris.32 More painful was the tenth anniversary of Carlo and Nello’s murder which was the occasion for an official celebration in Florence. From the start, Marion had been ambivalent about such public mourning because they tended to consign the figures involved safely to the past instead of celebrating their contribution to the present and the future of the country. This was even more true then as the influence of Carlo’s followers was rapidly declining in Italy and even his writings could not find a publisher. Maria, her four children and Amelia attended the ceremony at the cinema Odeon. On Carlo’s side,

250

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

only John was present, but also all Carlo’s old companions from Giustizia e Liberta`. John reassured Marion whose misgivings he shared, as he did not want to become the official representative of the family on such occasions. Piero Calamandrei payed a moving tribute to Amelia and her personal sacrifice as a mother of three sons who died for their country but, as important in John’s view, was the intervention of Ricardo Lombardi who presented at length the action and political thought of Rosselli and their relevance for contemporary Italy.33 Back in London, more surprising for Marion was a visit from Salvemini who, after some hesitation, had just returned to Italy after 22 years in exile and visited his friends in England that summer. Isabel Massey brought him ‘and we kissed as if nothing had happened’. There was no mention of their past disputes, but despite Marion’s pleasure at seeing him she could not help remembering ‘his hatred and contempt’. He seemed ‘less aggressive now’, but their relationship remained awkward as he was a ghost from a past she would rather have forgotten.34 Despite the real hardships due to strict rationing, Marion was surprised to discover that she quite appreciated England and the rich intellectual and cultural life it offered. Apart from her family of whom she saw little, all her acquaintances there were linked in some way to the antifascist struggle and many visitors came from the continent.35 Whether Marion would find some balance in this new phase of her life depended much on her children. John was, once more, a source of satisfaction for his mother. He was finally demobbed in February 1948 and benefitted from a generous government scholarship offered to all former soldiers for whatever field of studies they chose. His heart leaned toward the Old Vic and his reason toward History at one of the major universities. He did not make it at the Old Vic but was accepted at both Cambridge (Peterhouse) and Oxford (Magdalen). He opted for Cambridge where he would prepare for the Tripos and then a PhD in History. He would come of age in June of that year and Marion hoped he would be able to take her place as head of the family but, at the same time, she worried about becoming a burden to him.36 Things were more difficult with Andrea. As she had feared, his behavioural problems turned out to be too much for the kind Headmaster of Leighton Park School and he was thrown out

Coming Home

251

in February. Her brother-in-law found a sea-school in Wales as a band-aid solution, and she hoped Leighton Park would take him back for the last term to prepare for the final exams. Unfortunately, this did not work out and she finally sent him as a day student to a ‘crammers college’ where, to everyone’s surprise, he started working seriously and successfully passed his exams. He even won an exoneration from the University matriculation and could enrol in a technical college to prepare a bachelor’s in science.37 With Melina, on the other hand, relations reached a breaking point as she hung around the house spewing out her hatred of her mother and making Marion miserable. She was probably also miserable as she set herself goals that were obviously out of her reach. She planned to pass an audition for the Guild Hall School of Music, one of the most competitive arts schools in the country, after just one year of musical studies, and hoped to receive a scholarship as well. The tests were in July and during the Easter holidays she went to Florence. This was a temporary relief for Marion and John immediately noted an improvement in her health. Knowing how difficult Melina was, Amelia also felt that Marion had suffered physically and mentally from the cohabitation with her daughter, and when Melina suddenly announced that she was giving up all her plans in England and would remain in Italy to study music there with a private tutor, nobody tried to stop her. By then, Marion, Amelia, John and their relatives all knew that it was pointless to argue with her when she set her mind on something and felt – in her grandmother’s words – that it was better ‘to let her cope with her life’.38 After so many months of tension and worry, Marion was much more hopeful about her family and, as a result, felt much better herself. She had not paid much attention to the general election in Italy in April 1948 but, unlike Max Ascoli, she could not feel totally alien to what was happening in the peninsula. She shared his anticommunist prejudice though. The April election was the first important ballot to take place in the context of the Cold War and it pitted the Christian Democratic Party – openly supported by the US government – against the left bloc formed by Togliatti’s Communist Party and Nenni’s Socialist Party. Despite her earlier misgivings about the role of the Vatican in Italian politics, she

252

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

felt that communism represented the greater danger this time. The Soviet takeover of Eastern European countries had started, opening a new phase of Stalinist purges and she was strongly influenced by the debate in Great Britain, in particular by Bertrand Russell whose writings she read avidly. The election yielded a landslide victory for the Christian Democrats (48.51 per cent) and a crushing defeat for the left bloc (30 per cent). The Italians had chosen the lesser of two evils she felt, favouring, like her, a reactionary government over a potential communist dictatorship. To those of her acquaintances who stressed their common fight with the communists in the Spanish Civil War, she listed their various crimes against dissidents such as Berneri and the POUM activists and, as Carlo had done at the time, insisted that the alliance with them was justified because the enemy was fascism, which was no longer the case today. She also chose to see the 7 per cent gathered by her friends in the small Socialist Alliance as a satisfying result instead of admitting that they had been squashed by the two main political blocs. Overall though, it was clear that, like so many former exiles and underground activists, she did not feel much interest in the traditional political process.39 She could not muster much interest either for the trial of the Cagoulards which was to open in early October in Paris. She had been rather disillusioned, to say the least, with the actions of the courts in Italy in the previous two years. The fascist culprits sentenced by the High Court in 1945 had benefited from multiple complicities within the judiciary thanks to the generous amnesty pronounced by Togliatti when he was minister of Justice. As early as May 1946, the Court of Appeal of Rome had finally accepted to hear the appeal of those condemned by the High Court (whose rulings were supposed to be final). It quashed the sentence of Pariani and remanded the case of the others to the criminal court in Rome, which overturned the sentences of Anfuso, Navale and Angioi and confirmed that of Emanuele. In January 1947, the Rome criminal court absolved Pariani. Later in the spring, the same court heard the cases of Angioi (by default) and Navale who was found guilty and condemned to a reduced sentence of seven years. He immediately received a remission of sentence of five years and walked free the next day, while the absent Angioi was absolved. Finally, Emanuele, Navale and Anfuso

Coming Home

253

were remanded to the criminal court of Perugia which was to hear their case the following year.40 In view of these results, what could she expect from the trial of the Cagoulards, so far removed from the Italian context and in which the Rosselli murder was only one of the charges? Yet the defence lawyer, Moro Giafferi, who had been a close friend of Carlo and Marion in Paris, insisted that the Rosselli family be represented for he believed it would make a strong impression on the members of the jury. But Marion had mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, attending the trial would bring a sort of closure to this painful affair but, on the other hand, as she wrote to Moro Giaffieri, ‘the perpetrators of the murder do not interest me; they did not even know my husband. Let France judge them’. Anyhow, her health prevented her from travelling to Paris and, in the end, John and Maria were present for three days at the trial which lasted more than a month. Of all the people involved in the murders, only three were present in court, Jakubiez, Purieux and Me´te´nier, all low-level operatives. They received heavy sentences, but the fuzzy debate did not bring any clarification about the real instigators of the crime and Marion, who eagerly followed the debates in the French press, did not learn anything that she did not already know.41 With this nightmare behind her and her children seeming at last to find their way, the year apparently ended on a lighter note for Marion. Even the severe rationing was somewhat alleviated by the Ascolis’ generous food parcels and Marion, John and some of their friends could feast on a turkey and other goodies from the United States.42 Yet, another serious health crisis and a painful cure of mercury injections reminded her once more that such blissful moments were only ephemeral, and she started the new year in a sombre mood, wishing for a quick end rather than hanging to an existence made miserable by physical pain and lack of purpose. She had been determined to survive and had been able to rally her energies because she had felt she was needed and useful – for her children, for her political cause. Was her determination now abandoning her and had she reached what she called a ‘period of peace and resignation’? It was clear that she knew and that her friends knew – or feared – she was approaching her final days.43

254

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

What energy she had left between two bouts of heart failure she dedicated to her children, with delight in the case of John, with more worries in the case of Andrea and Melina. John loved Cambridge and had opted for a research topic that would bring together his two cultures. He chose to study the work of Lord Bentinck, Commander of the British troops in Sicily in 1811 – 14, who tried to promote a liberal constitution for the island.44 His research required extensive stays in Italy that allowed him to hold together the weakened family ties of the Rosselli clan. At 18, Andrea had discovered at the same time a passion for women and for politics. He had fallen in love with a young typist and skipped many classes to be with her. He had also become a staunch communist, defending totalitarian positions ‘that would have made Carlo’s hair stand on end’. That he should be interested in politics did not bother Marion – after all her and Carlo’s lives had been entirely driven by their political passions, but that he should embrace intolerant attitudes and support dictatorial regimes when a new wave of Stalinist purges was in the making was more than she could bear. Except hoping it was a fad, there was not much she or John could do, as Andrea simply ‘spouted out the Daily Worker’s latest editorials at the slightest provocation’.45 Another surprise came from Melina who, in early January, announced out of the blue that she was getting married to a certain Mauro Misuli, a student who had been active in the Action Party and had now joined the Socialist Party. Here again, that her daughter aged 19 should have a first love affair did not bother Marion, but that she should rush into an early marriage did. ‘You know that, looking at this situation with Anglo-Saxon eyes, I find myself in almost total opposition to the Italian mode of thinking,’ she wrote to Amelia who strongly supported the marriage.46 Marion was right to surmise that Melina had been encouraged to make such a hasty decision by the familial environment. Her cousins Silvia and Paola, who were about her age, had married the Forti brothers in June 1948, and Silvia had just given birth to a baby while Paola was expecting twins for June. The whole affair infuriated Marion and gave her the occasion to fire a last salvo at her mother-in-law who was pressing her to accept an early marriage. ‘Your attitude fills me with bitterness when I think of how you reacted 23 years ago!’ she answered back, referring, of

Coming Home

255

course, to Amelia’s fierce opposition to her marriage with Carlo. Amelia was probably aware of the irony of the situation; if not, Marion reminded her of the difference of circumstances. In the 1920s, Carlo and Marion were independent adults who married after several years of courtship and shared activism, whereas Melina had known Mauro for a few months and neither of them had a job or means of supporting themselves. But to no avail. John, who visited via Giusti in early April, noted the intense atmosphere of family building, which he found a little disturbing although he was the oldest of the new generation, and he informed Marion that Amelia’s insistence on an early marriage was probably linked to the fear of ‘a baby on the doorsteps’.47 Marion did not have the energy to keep up the fight though. In early May, she had to be hospitalized for several weeks as the cure she followed for her heart problems seemed to be worse than the disease. She received encouraging letters from Florence, but with only casual references to Melina and Mauro.48 Amelia seemed more interested in the unveiling of a headstone in Bagnoles-de l’Orne on the spot where Carlo and Nello had been assassinated in 1937. Like Ernesto Rossi, Marion had been reluctant to see her husband’s memory – and thought – set in stone, or rather marble as their anarchist stone cutters friends from Carrara had offered to provide the material for the stele. With the money collected for the monument, she would have preferred to set up a scholarship in the name of Carlo and Nello granted each year to a student of antifascism. But the Italian tradition of worshipping martyrs had prevailed and after many disputes about who would attend and make speeches the headstone was officially unveiled on 19 June 1949 in the presence of many French officials and representatives of the antifascists from France and Italy, including most of the surviving members of the Paris GL group. Once again, John went reluctantly to represent the family together with Maria, knowing the importance his grandmother attached to such events.49 Marion came out of the hospital in mid-June feeling a little better but without much illusion about any lasting improvement in her state of health. She was practically bed-ridden and could only spend a few hours in her garden in an invalid chair. She seemed to accept her fate

256

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

and faced death with remarkable fortitude as all her friends and visitors noted. Riccardo Bauer, Alessandro Levi and his wife, the Noufflards – Berthe, Andre´ and Henriette at different moments – and Florence Hale´vy all spent some time with her during that last summer. None of them doubted that the end was near, but they appreciated her determination to make the most of those fleeting moments when her weakened heart gave her some relief. At times, she even seemed cheerful and chatted away with the wit and passion that had always been her hallmark. There were few letters from Florence that summer. In September, Melina informed John that she had changed her mind and was no longer getting married. She did not write to Marion though and only towards the end of September did she inquire about her mother’s state of health; but it was too late.50 Marion was hospitalized for an operation to relieve her from an oedema, but her heart was too weak. On 14 October 1949, at the age of 53, she died peacefully after spending some last, almost unconscious minutes with John, and she was cremated a few days later in a very private ceremony attended by her two sons and her sister and brother-in-law.51 The same day, in a climate ‘where universal reprobation of the Fascist regime [. . .] is now a faint memory,’ the Perugia Court of Appeal declared Anfuso, Emanuele and Navale not guilty of Carlo and Nello Rosselli’s murder.52 Why is it that ‘precisely when we should feel we have achieved our goal do we realize that our dream is shattered, and reality is so different?’ Ester Parri had written to Marion some time before her death, expressing the disenchantment of many if not democratic antifascist exiles whose struggles she had their numerous telegrams of sympathy to John Rosselli the ‘beautiful Nordic Amazon’ who had arrived in

most of the shared.53 In they saluted Florence in

1919 with her ‘passionate revolutionary principles’ and whose untimely departure sounded the death knell of their own hopes and expectations.

Abbreviations

AN

Archives Nationales

AGL AGP ARP ASC

Archivio Giustizia e Liberta` Aldo Garosci Papers Amelia (Melina) Rosselli Papers Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Rome

ASF ATP BRI CPC

Archivio di Stato di Firenze Alberto Tarchiani Papers British Institute Archives Casellario Politico Centrale, Rome

CR ERP FHP FJP

Carteggio Rosselli Ernesto Rossi Papers Florence Hale´vy Papers Franc
oise Joxe Papers

GSP JRP LSP MAP MRP

Gaetano Salvemini Papers John Rosselli Papers Luigi Sturzo Papers Max Ascoli Papers Marion Rosselli Papers

RFA

Rosselli Family Archives

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. Le Populaire, 20 June 1937; Giustizia e Liberta`, 25 June 1937. 2. Alessandro Levi, Ricordi dei fratelli Rosselli (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1947), pp. 210–11; Letter from Amelia Pincherle Rosselli to Maria Todesco Rosselli, 30 June 1937, in ‘L’annello forte della famiglia Rosselli’, Nuova Antologia, 578, n8 2202 (1997), p. 39. 3. Patricia Gabrielli, Tempio di virilita`. L’anti-fascismo, il Genere, la Storia (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2008); Isabelle Richet, ‘Women and Anti-fascism. Historiographical and Methodological Approaches’, in Hugo Garcia et al. (eds), Rethinking Anti-fascism. History, Memory and Politics, 1922 to the Present (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016), pp. 152–66. 4. Piero Calamandrei, ‘I Rosselli, “Non Mollare”’, in Uomini e citta` della Resistenza (1944–1955) (Milan: Linea d’ombra, 1994), p. 96. 5. Aldo Garosci, ‘Preface’ in Carlo Rosselli, Scritti dall’esilio, vol. 1, Socialismo liberale (Turin: Einaudi, 1989), p. lxxxix. 6. John Rosselli to Max Ascoli, 26 October 1950, MAP, John Rosselli, box 1988, folder 6. 7. Quido Quazza, ‘L’anti-fascismo nella storia italiana del Novecento’, Italia Contemporanea, 178 (1990), p. 7; Giovanni De Luna, Donne in Oggetto. L’anti-fascismo nella societa` italiana, 1922–1939 (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1995), pp. 24 –31; Patrizia Gabrielli, Tempio di virilita`, pp. 8 –13; Sara Galli, Le tre sorelle Seidenfeld. Donne nell’emigrazione politica Antifascista (Florence: Giunti, 2005), pp. 11 –12; Guillaume Piketty, ‘La biographie comme genre historique ? Etudes de cas’, Vingtie`me sie`cle, 63/1 (1999), p. 126. 8. Ste´phane Dufoix, ‘Les le´gitimations politiques de l’exil’, Gene`ses, 34 (1999), pp. 53 –79; Emmanuelle Loyer, ‘Exile’ in Akira A. Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier (eds), The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 368.

Notes to Pages 4 – 9

259

9. Leonore Davidoff, ‘Gender and the “Great Divide”. Public and Private in British Gender History’, The Journal of Women’s History, 15/1 (2003), pp. 11 –22; Sarah Richardson, The Political Worlds of Women. Gender and Politics in Nineteenth Century Britain (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 1–3. 10. Gabrielli, Tempio di virilita`, p. 59; De Luna, Donne in Oggetto, p. 83. 11. Noemi Crain Merz, L’illusione della parita`. Donne e questione femminile in Giustizia e Liberta` e nel Partito d’Azione (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2013), pp. 75 –7, 149– 63. 12. De Luna, Donne in Oggetto, p. 83.

CHAPTER 1

A BRITISH EDUCATION

1. Aldo Garosci, ‘Preface’ in Carlo Rosselli, Scritti dall’esilio, vol. 1, Socialismo liberale (Turin: Einaudi, 1973), p. lxxxxix. 2. Giovanni Ansaldo, L’Anti-fascista riluttante. Memorie del carcere e del confino, 1926–27 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992), p. 117; Carlo Rosselli, ‘Osceno Ansaldo’, Giustizia e Liberta`, 20 September 1935. 3. Gaetano Salvemini, ‘Marion Rosselli’, Il Ponte V/11 (1949), p. 1443. 4. Alessandro Levi, Ricordi dei fratelli Rosselli (Florence: Centro Editoriale Toscano, 2002), p. 84. 5. Salvemini, ‘Marion Rosselli’, p. 1443. 6. Amelia Rosselli, Memorie, (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001), pp. 111–12. 7. Ansaldo, L’Anti-fascista reluttante, p. 117. 8. John Rosselli to Aldo Garosci, 14 August 1971, AGP 63, file 915. 9. England Census, 1871 and 1881. 10. Ibid., 99 –104. 11. John Rosselli, letter to Aldo Garosci, 14 August 1971, AGP; English Census 1881; H.G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography (London, Victor Gollancz & the Crescent Press, 1934), p. 126; Midhurst Grammar School Tercenary 1672– 1972 (Chichester: Moore for the Regnum Press, 1972). 12. Borman and Jeanne Mackenzie, H.G. Wells. A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), pp. 39– 53. 13. John Rosselli to Aldo Garosci, 14 August 1971, AGP. The list published in 1926 registers all the students having received a BA from the University of London since 1836. It is available online at http://archives.ulrls.lon.ac. uk/graduates.pdf (accessed 20 June 2015). 14. Mackenzie, H.G. Wells, p. 63; H.G. Wells, Experience in Autobiography, p. 239. 15. John Rosselli, Letter to Aldo Garosci,14 August 1971. For Ruskin’s social vision see John Batchelor, John Ruskin. No Wealth but Life (London: Pimlico, 2001), pp. 208– 9. 16. Frank M. Turner, ‘The Victorian Crisis of Faith and the Faith That Was Lost’, in Richard J. Helmstadter (ed.), Victorian Faith in Crisis: Essays on Continuity and Change in 19th Century Religious Beliefs (Stanford: Stanford

260

17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34.

35. 36. 37.

Notes to Pages 9 – 12 University Press, 1991), pp. 9–38 (for Ruskin see pp. 26 –7). Letter from John Rosselli to Aldo Garosci, 14 August 1971. Ernest Cave appears as a member of the Uxbridge meeting of the Society of Friends as of 1919. Society of Friends, London and Middlesex Quarterly Meetings, 1919 and following years. Marion Rosselli to Ernesto Rossi, Larchmont, NY, 7 December 1944, ERP. Ibid. English Census, 1901; Roy Love, ‘Education 1900– 1939’, in Chris Wrigley (ed.), A Companion to Early Twentieth Century Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. 429. English Census 1901. John Stevenson, British Society 1914 –45 (London: Penguin, 1984), pp. 22 –4; Ken Pearce, A Short History of the Town of Uxbridge (Uxbridge, 1970), p. 12. St Andrews is today part of an RAF base. English Census, 1901. Kathleen Jones, ‘From Dame School to Finishing School, The Uxbridge Record, 25 (1976), pp. 4 –5; ‘Professor and Brother murdered’, The People, 13 June 1937. Marion Cave to Gaetano Salvemini, Florence, 7 November 1925, in Gaetano Salvemini, Carteggio, 1921–1926, edited by Enzo Tagliacozzo (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1985) p. 477. Marion Cave to Carlo Rosselli, 30 November 1929, in Carlo Rosselli, Dall’esilio. Lettere alla moglie, 1929 –1937, edited by Costanzo Casucci (Florence: Passigli, 1997), p. 43. Marion Cave’s registration file, n8 597, January 1910 –January 1915. St Paul’s Girls’ School Archives. Howard Bailes, Once a Paulina . . . A History of St Paul’s Girls’ School (London: James and James, 2000), p. 15. Ibid., pp. 24 –25, 78. Ibid., pp. 32 –38. Paulina, March 1909, November 1910, July 1911, July 1912. Dodie Smith, Look Back with Mixed Feelings (London: W.H. Allen, 1978), p. 5. Dodie Smith is the author of the 101 Dalmatians. She was in the same form as Marion Cave at St Paul’s. Jane Dunn, Antonia White. A Life (London: Virago, 1998), pp. 51 –2. Paulina, November 1910, December 1911, December 1912, December 1913. In 1914, she passed the Cambridge Higher Local Examinations with distinctions in English and French. Marion Cave’s registration file, n8 597. Marion to John Rosselli, London, 10 May 1947, ARP; Geoffrey Wadford (ed.), The Private Schooling for Girls Past and Present (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 54. Smith, Looking Back with Mixed Feelings, p. 30. Paulina, July 1914. Smith, Looking Back with Mixed Feelings, p. 30.

Notes to Pages 12 – 16

261

38. Ibid., p. 19. 39. John Rosselli, ‘Nello and the Other Rossellis’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 6/3 (2001), pp. 422–8; John Rosselli to Aldo Garosci, 14 August 1971, AGP 63, b. 915. 40. Howard Bailes, Once a Paulina, 117–118. 41. Photo of Marion and class group, 1910, CR, annexe, doc. 1; photo of Ella Cave in her last year in Bailes, Once a Paulina, p. 144; Smith, Looking Back with Mixed Feelings, pp. 4, 31. 42. Dunn, Antonia White, p. 54; Vera Britain, Testament of Youth (London: Virago, 2007), p. 18; Juliet Nicolson, The Perfect Summer. Dancing into Shadow in 1911 (London: John Murray, 2007), 218; George Robb, British Culture and World War I (New York: Palgrave, 2001), p. 127. 43. Virginia Woolf, ‘Character in Fiction’ in Virginia Woolf, Selected Essays, edited by David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 38. 44. Nicholson, The Perfect Summer, pp. 13–15. 45. Jose Harris, Private Life, Public Spirit. A Social History of Britain 1870–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 2; Stevenson, British Society 1914– 45, p. 54; Robb, British Culture, p. 69. 46. Nicolson, The Perfect Summer, p. 15. 47. Marion Rosselli, Speech to the Larchmont, NY, Rotary Club, June 1944, in Paolo Bagnoli, Una famiglia nella lotta. Carlo, Nello, Amelia e Marion Rosselli: dalle carte dell’archivio dell’Istituto Storico della Resistenza in Toscana (Florence: Polistampa, 2007), p. 123. 48. http://ourhistory-hayes.blospot.com/2009/05/leonard-spencer-anduxbridge.html (accessed 10 June 2015). 49. Malcolm Pearce, Geoffrey Stewart, British Political History, 1867–2001. Democracy and Decline (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 249; Robert E. Dowse, Left in the Center. The ILP, 1893–1940 (London: Longmans, 1966), pp. 6 –7. 50. Fenner Brockway, Inside the Left (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1947), p. 22. 51. Marion Rosselli to Amelia Rosselli, 30 January 1929, RFA M 3182. 52. ILP leaflets, 1911, Uxbridge local history archives. 53. John Rosselli, ‘Nello and the Other Rossellis’, p. 423; Martha Vicinus, Independent Women. Work and Community for Single Women (London: Virago, 1985), p. 254. 54. Bailes, Once a Paulina, pp. 20, 155. 55. Smith, Looking Back with Mixed Feelings, p. 17; Martha Vicinus, Independent Women, p. 266. 56. Jane Joseph, ‘An Anachronism’, Paulina, July 1910, pp. 4 –7. 57. Antonia Raeburn, The Militant Suffragettes (London: Michael Joseph, 1973); Martha Vicinus, Independent Women, pp. 247–52. 58. Ibid., pp. 254, 6–7. 59. H.G. Wells, Ann Veronica (London: The Floating Press, 2013); Marion Rosselli to H.G. Wells, 11 November 1934, H.G. Wells Papers.

262

Notes to Pages 16 – 20

60. Martha Vicinus, Independent Women, pp. 1, 28. 61. Ibid., pp. 123, 143. 62. Linna Bentley, Educating Women. A Pictorial History of Bedford College, University of London, 1849– 1985 (London: Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, University of London, 1991), p. 4. 63. Ibid., pp. 13 –33. 64. Ibid., p. 44; Carol Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex? Women in British Universities, 1870–1939 (London: UCL Press, 1995). 65. Enrolment Form, Bedford College Archives; Bedford College Magazine, 90, January 1917, p. 39. 66. C.P. Brand, Italy and the English Romantics. The Italianate Fashion in Early Nineteenth Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), pp. 38 –42. 67. British Italian League, ‘Report of the Inaugural Meeting Held at the Mansion House, Thursday, November 23rd, 1916’, BRI ¼ I ¼ D 18 ff 1– 3; E. R. Vincent, ‘Lo sviluppo degli studi italiani in Gran Bretagna durante il ‘900’, in Inghilterra e Italia nell’900 (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1973), pp. 63 –4. 68. Claudia Baldoli, Exporting Fascism. Italian Fascists and Britain Italians in the 1930s (Oxford: Berg, 2003), pp. 1 –2, 10; Alfio Bernabei, Esuli ed emigranti italiani nel Regno Unito, 1920–1940 (Milan: Mursia, 1997), p. 76. 69. Bedford College Archives, Letter of Recommendation from the President of Magdalen College, Oxford, January 1905; D 304 Emma Bice Dobelli. 70. Later, Dobelli would help Marion and the Italian antifascists on many occasions and, during the war, she worked for the Foreign Office as an expert on things Italian. Bedford College Archive, D 304, Emma Bice Dobelli; Margaret J. Tuke, A History of Bedford College for Women, 1849– 1937 (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), pp. 249–50. 71. Maura O’Connor, The Romance of Italy and the English Political Imagination (Londres: Macmillan, 1998). 72. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 10 July 1936, RFA, M 3262. 73. Bedford College Magazine, 91 (1917), pp. 22–3; William Makepeace Thackeray, The Rose and the Ring (London: Macmillan, 1908). 74. Bedford College Magazine, 93 (1918), pp. 5 –6. 75. Ibid., pp. 6, 13. 76. Bentley, Educating Women, p. 45. 77. Tuke, A History of Bedford College, p. 229. 78. Ibid., pp. 229–31. 79. Stephen Inwood, A History of London (London: Macmilan, 1998), pp. 699–704; Stevenson, British Society 1914–145, p. 48; Adrian Gregory, ‘Lost generations: the impact of military casualties on Paris, London, Berlin’, in Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert (eds), Capital Cities at War. Paris, London, Berlin, 1914 –1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 59 –60.

Notes to Pages 20 – 23

263

80. Vicinus, Independent Women, p. 281; Stevenson, British Society 1914–45, pp. 83 –84; Robb, British Culture, pp. 33 –40. 81. Vicinus, Independent Women, p. 282; Stevenson, British Society 1914–45, p. 84. 82. Ibid., pp. 172–73; Brittain, Testament of Youth, p. 154. 83. Ibid., p. 28; Paul Thompson, The Edwardians: The Remaking of English Society (London: New York, 2nd ed., 1992), p. 57; Stevenson, British Society 1914 –45, pp. 172–3; Brittain, Testament of Youth, pp. 32, 154. 84. Adrian Gregory, ‘Lost Generations’, p. 60; Virginia Nicholson, Singled Out: How Two Million British Women Survived Without Men After World War I (London: Viking, 2007). 85. Margaret J. Tuke, ‘Women Students in the Universities: Fifty Years Ago, and Now’, The Contemporary Review 133/1 (1928), pp. 73, 76. 86. Inwood, A History of London, p. 704. 87. Brittain, Testament of Youth, p. 421. 88. John Rosselli, ‘Paris in the Thirties – A political Childhood’, Twentieth Century 154/913 (1957), pp. 335–43. 89. Stevenson, British Society, 1915–45, pp. 57 –64; Public Records, Military Medals. 90. Thomas C. Kennedy, ‘Fighting for Peace: The No Conscription Fellowship and the British Friends’ Service Committee, 1915– 1919, Quaker History 69/1, (1980), pp. 3 –23; Thomas C. Kennedy, British Quakerism, 1860– 1920. The Transformation of a Religious Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 7–9, 313–336. 91. Dowse, Left in the Center, pp. 20 –5. 92. John Rosselli to Aldo Garosci, 14 August 1971 AGP; Annual Reports of the Society of Friends, London and Middlesex Quarterly Meetings, 1919 and following years. 93. Bedford College Archives, Marion Cave File, Letter of Recommendation from the Principal of Bedford College, 16 July 1919; Bedford College Magazine, 94 (1919), pp. 32. 94. Nicola Badolini, Antonio Conti, un abate libero-pensatore fra Newton e Voltaire (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1968); Marie Boas Hall, ‘The Royal Society and Italy, 1667–1795’, Notes on Records of the Royal Society of London 37/1, (1982), pp. 63– 81. 95. ‘Scholarship for Italian’, The Times, 15 August 1918, p. 3. 96. For the various intellectuals supporting the British-Italian League, see Laura Trevelyan, A Very British Family. The Trevelyan and Their World (London, I.B.Tauris, 2006), pp. 159–60, 170–3. 97. House of Commons Library, A Century of Change. Trends in UK Statistics since 1900. Research paper 99/111; 21/12/1999, 11; http://www. parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99-111.pdf (accessed 10 June 2015). 98. Marion to Carlo Rosselli, 7 April 1926, RFA, M 2843; Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 11 February 1937, RFA, M 3180.

264

Notes to Pages 24 – 27

99. John Rosselli ‘Nello and the Other Rossellis’, pp. 422–8; O’Connor, The Romance of Italy, pp. 27– 9. 100. Paul Ginsborg, ‘Il mito del Risorgimento nel mondo britannico: “la vera poesia della politica”’, Il Risorgimento XLVII/1–2 (1995). 101. Giovanni Ansaldo, L’Anti-fascista riluttante, p. 117; Giovanni Ruffini, Il Dottor Antonio (Genoa: Fratelli Ferrando, 1856). 102. John Rosselli, ‘Preface’ in Carlo Rosselli’s Socialismo Liberale (Turin: Einaudi, 1973), p. 3. 103. Umberto Calosso, Socialist MP, Camera dei Deputati, 22 October 1949, Atti Palamentari, 12679; H.G. Wells, Ann Veronica, pp. 4–5.

CHAPTER 2

WITNESSING THE RISE OF FASCISM IN FLORENCE

1. Arnold Bennett, ‘Night and Morning in Florence’, English Review 5/04-07 (1910), pp. 442–55. 2. Henry James, Italian Hours (New York: Penguin, 1992), p. 239; R.W.B. Lewis, The City of Florence (London: I.B.Tauris, 1995), pp. 40, 54; Melina Lasansky, The Renaissance Perfected. Architecture, Spectacle and Tourism in Fascist Italy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), pp. 28 –34. 3. Lina Waterfield, Castel in Italy (London: John Murray, 1961), pp. 39 –40; Christopher Hibbert, Florence. The Biography of a City (London: Penguin (1994) 2004), pp. 250– 8. 4. Aldo Palazzeschi, Il Piacere della memoria (Milan: Mondadori, 1964), pp. 49 –58. 5. Marion to Carlo Rosselli, 13 July 1935, in Carlo Rosselli, Dall’esilio. Lettere alla moglie, 1929 –37, editd by Costanzo Casucci (Florence: Passigli, 1997), p. 200; Gabinetto Vieusseux, Libro dei Soci, 1920. 6. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Casa Guidi Windows (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 7. Elizabeth von Armin, The Enchanted April (London: Virago, 1993), p. 8; John Pemble, The Mediterranean Passion. Victorians and Edwardians in the South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 137–43. 8. Alberto Marcolin, Firenze in Camicia Nera (Florence: Medicea, 1993), p. 189. 9. Pier Francesco Listri, Il dizionario di Firenze (Florence: Le Lettere, 1998), p. 256. 10. Stendhal, Rome, Naples and Florence: A Journey from Milan to Reggio (London: Calder (1817) 1959), p. 72. 11. Lewis, The City of Florence, pp. 16 –17. 12. Carlo Bo, ‘La letteratura a Firenze tra gli anni ’20 e gli anni ’30’, in Pier Luigi Ballini et al. (eds), La cultura a Firenze tra le due guerre (Florence: Bonochi, 1990), p. 11. 13. Marion to Carlo Rosselli, 13 July 1935, Rosselli, Dall’esilio p. 200; Michael J. Collins, ‘ Introduction’, in Marcello Fantoni (ed.), Gli Anglo-Americani a

Notes to Pages 27 – 31

14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

28.

265

Firenze. Idea e construzione del Rinascimento (Rome: Bulzoni, 2000), p. 10; Arnold Bennett, ‘Night and Morning in Florence’, p. 444; Jeremy Black, Italy and the Grand Tour (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 7. Marion Cave, Antonio Conti e il suo posto nella letteratura del settecento, Master’s thesis (London: London University, October 1922), pp. 4, 105–16, 125. Gabinetto Vieusseux, Registro di Soci, n8 22, Florence, 1920; Laura Desideri (ed.), Il Vieusseux. Storia di un gabinetto di lettura, 1819 –2000 (Florence: Edizioni Polistampa, 2001), pp. 14, 36, 67, 131–5; Francesco Adorno (ed.), Accademie e istituzioni culturali a Firenze (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1983), pp. 131–34. Biblioteche d’Italia: le bibliotheche pubbliche statali (Milan: Centro Tebaldi, 1996). Luigi Mascilli Migliorini, L’Italia dell’Italia: la tradizione toscana da Montesquieu a Berenson (Florence: Le Lettere, 2006), p. 22. Max Seidel (ed.), Storia dell’arte e politica culturale intorno al 1900. La fondazione dell’Istituto Germanico di Storia dell’Arte di Firenze (Venice: Marsilio, 1999); Julien Luchaire, Confession d’un francais moyen, 1876– 1914, vol. 1, (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1965); Isabelle Renard, L’institut francais de Florence (1900– 1920): un e´pisode des relations franco-italiennes au de´but du XXe`me sie`cle (Rome: Ecole francaise de Rome, 2001). Harold E. Goad, History of the British Institute of Florence (Florence: Giannini & Giovannelli, 1939), p. 18. Ibid., p. 5; Carlo Pellegrini, ‘Biblioteche straniere a Firenze’ in Accademie e biblioteche d’Italia, 37/2 (1969), pp. 117–18. Right Hon. Sir Rennell Rodd, Social and Diplomatic Memoirs, 1902–1919, chap. XII, http://net.lib.byu.edu/,rdh7/wwi/memoir/Rodd/Rodd12.htm (accessed 5 June 2015). Waterfield, Castle in Italy, p. 167. Ibid., pp. 169–73; Christopher Seton Watson, ‘British Propaganda in Italy, 1914–1918’, in Inghilterra e Italia nel ‘900 (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1973), pp. 119, 127. ‘British Institute in Florence’, The Times, 24 June 1918, p. 7. Goad, History of the British Institute, pp. 7 –8, 16; Ian Greenless, The British Institute. Its Origin and History (Florence: Giuntina, 1979), pp. 5–7; Laura Trevelyan, A Very British Family. The Trevelyan and Their World (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), pp. 4, 160, 173. British Institute, Annual Reports 1922 –47, vol. 1, November 1922 –April 1923, pp. 3–4. Greenless, The British Institute, p. 11; Giorgio Spini, ‘Firenze: una citta` nella storia’, in Giorgio Spini and Antonio Casali (eds), Firenze (Rome– Bari: Laterza, 1986), pp. 127–8; Kenta Beevor, A Tuscan Childhood (New York: Vintage, 1993), pp. 147– 50. Anna V. Rice, A History of the World’s Young Women’s Christian Association (New York: Woman’s Press, 1948), pp. 164–65.

266

Notes to Pages 31 – 34

29. Marcello Vannucci, Spendidi palazzi di Firenze (Florence: Le Lettere, 1995); Francis Steegmuller, The Two Lives of James Jackscon Jarves (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951), pp. 309–10. 30. Umberto Calosso, MP for the PSLI, Camera dei Deputati, seduta del 22 ottobre 1949, Atti Parlamentari, 12679. 31. Marion Rosselli’s speech at the Larchmont (NY) Rotary Club, June 1944, in Paolo Bagnoli (ed.), Una famiglia nella lotta. Carlo, Nello, Amelia e Marion Rosselli dale carte dell’Archivio dell’Istituto Storico della Resistenza in Toscana (Florence: Edizioni Polistampa, 2001), p. 126. 32. ‘D’Annunzio occupa Fiume . . . ’, La Nazione,13 September 1919; Angelo Tasca, The Rise of Italian Fascism, 1918 –22 (New York: H. Fertig, 1966), pp. 48 –80. 33. Emilio Lussu, Sardinian Brigade (London: Prion, 2000); Eric Vial, Guerres, socie´te´s et mentalite´s: l’Italie au premier XX8 sie`cle (Paris: Seli Arslan 2003), pp. 93 –101. 34. Luigi Salvatorelli and Giovanni Mira, Storia d’Italia nel periodo fascista (Verona: Mondadori, 1972), vol. 1, pp. 83 –6; Roberto Bianchi, BocciBocci. I tumulti annonari nella Toscana del 1919 (Florence: Olschki, 2001), pp. 93 –143. 35. Marion Rosselli, speech at the Larchmont (NY) Rotary Club, June 1944, in Bagnoli, Una famiglia nella lotta, p. 126. 36. Speech by Marion Rosselli to a group of Italo-American antifascists in New York City on the eve of her return to Italy, July 1946, in Bagnoli, Una famiglia nella lotta, p. 136. 37. Giogio Galli, Storia del socialismo italiano (Rome’Bari: Laterza, 1980), pp. 65– 95, 101–11; Tasca, The Rise of Italian Fascism, pp. 82 –90; R.J.B. Bosworth, Mussolini (London: Arnold, 2002), pp. 136–44. 38. Tasca, The Rise of Italian Fascism, p. 109. 39. Ibid., pp. 110–11; Frank M. Snowden, The Fascist Revolution in Tuscany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 146–58. 40. Renzo Di Felice, Mussolini. Il rivoluzionario (Turin: Einaudi, 1967), pp. 460– 512; Pierre Milza, Mussolini (Paris: Fayard, 1999), pp. 231– 38. 41. Di Felice, Mussolini, pp. 616– 67; Tasca, The Rise of Italian Fascism, pp. 99 –108; Donald Sassoon, Mussolini and the Rise of Fascism (London: HarperCollins, 2007), pp. 93 –100. 42. Tasca, The Rise of Italian Fascism, p. 114. 43. Marco Palla ‘I fascisti toscani’, in Giorgio Morri (ed.), Storia D’Italia dall’Unita` a Oggi. Le Regioni. La Toscana (Turin: Einaudi, 1986), pp. 458 – 59; Snowden, The Fascist Revolution in Tuscany, pp. 139 – 45; Cosimo Ceccuti, ‘La Firenze dei Rosselli’, in Zeffiro Ciuffoletti and Nicola Tranfaglia (eds), Vita politica e culturale della famiglia Rosselli all’insegna della liberta` (Rome: Edimond, 2004), pp. 4 – 5. 44. Snowden, The Fascist Revolution in Tuscany, p. 139.

Notes to Pages 34 – 38

267

45. Marcolin, Firenze in camicia nera, pp. 15 –19. 46. Ibid., pp. 23–8; Snowden, The Fascist Revolution in Tuscany, pp. 77 –9; Roberto Cantagalli, Storia del fascismo fiorentino (Florence: Vallechi, 1972), pp. 147–58. 47. Speech by Marion Rosselli at the Larchmont Rotary Club, June 1944, in Bagnoli, Una famiglia, pp. 126–7. 48. Ibid. 49. Libertario Guerrini, ‘La provocazione fascista per giustificare la repressione del movimento operaio e la repressione titolo preminente e permanente del carrierismo’, in Enzo Santarelli (ed.), La Toscana nel regime fascista, 1922 – 39 (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1972), vol. 2, pp. 624 – 5; Marcolin, Firenze in camicia nera, pp. 22 – 3; Tasca, The Rise of Fascism, pp. 115 – 16; Marco Palla, ‘I fascisti toscani’, pp. 459 – 65; Alexander J. DeGrand, ‘Curzio Malaparte: The Illusion of the Fascist Revolution’, Journal of Contemporary History 7/1 – 2 (1972), pp. 72 – 5; Adrian Lyttelton, ‘Fascism and Italy: The Second Wave’, Journal of Contemporary History I/1 (1966), p. 96. 50. Giorgio Galli, Storia del socialismo italiano, pp. 101–11. 51. Gaetano Salvemini, Storia di un fuoruscito, in Giorgio Agosti and Alessandro Galante Garrone (eds), Gaetano Salvemini: Scritti Politici (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978), p. 583; Gaspare De Caro, Gaetano Salvemini (Turin: UTET, 1970), pp. 326–9; Gaetano Salvemini, ‘Marion Rosselli’, Il Ponte, 5/11 (1949), p. 1443. 52. Sergio Bucchi, ‘Gaetano Salvemini: la vita e le opere’, in Mirko Grasso (ed.), Gaetano Salvemini. L’uomo, lo storico (Calimera: Kurumuny, 2008), pp. 19 –20; Mauro Moretti, Pasquale Villari: storico e politico (Naples: Lignori, 2005). 53. Bucchi, ‘Gaetano Salvemini: la vita e le opere’, pp. 25 –8. 54. Salvemini’s Testimony, Il Nuovo Giornale, 7 January 1909. 55. ‘Journal de Romain Rolland, 13 –17 April 1911’ quoted in Henry Giordan, ‘Romain Rolland et le movement florentin de La Voce’, Cahiers Romain Rolland, 16 (1966), pp. 264–5; Julien Luchaire, Confession d’un Francais moyen, p. 141. 56. Bucchi, ‘Gaetano Salvemini: la vita e le opere’, pp. 26 –38; Luchaire, Confessions d’un Francais moyen, p. 189. 57. Paolo Bagnoli, ‘Per un profilo della cultura laı¨ca a Firenze nel Novecento’, Il Vieusseux, 4/10, (1991), pp. 26 –8; Charles Killinger, Gaetano Salvemini. A Biography (Wesport: Praeger, 2002), pp. 70 –4. 58. Bucchi, ‘Gaetano Salvemini: la vita e le opere’, pp. 35 – 8; Roberto Vivarelli, ‘Salvemini e il fascismo’ in Ernesto Sestan (ed.), Atti del Convegno sur Gaetano Salvemini (Milan: Il Sagiatore, 1977), pp. 140–1. 59. Bucchi, ‘Gaetano Salvemini’, pp. 38 –9; Nicky Mariano, Forty years with Berenson (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1966), p. 30.

268 CHAPTER 3

Notes to Pages 39 – 42 BECOMING BIANCAFIORE

1. ‘Brighter Florence’, The Italian Mail, 23 December 1922; Ibid., 24 February 1923. 2. In 1922, Tuscany counted 411 out of 2,129 fasci (local branches) and 51,372 out of 322 310 members of the Fascist Party. Ernesto Ragionieri, ‘Il Partito fascista’ in La Toscana nel regime fascista, 1922–1939 (Florence: Olschki, 1971), p. 59. 3. Renzo di Felice, Mussolini il fascista. 1. La conquista del potere (Turin: Einaudi, 1965), pp. 6–40; R.J.B. Bosworth, Mussolini (London: Arnold, 2002), pp. 164–69. 4. La Nazione, 31 October, 3 November 1922. 5. La Nazione, 29 October 1922. 6. R.J.B. Bosworth, ‘The British Press, the Conservatives, and Mussolini, 1920–1934’, The Journal of Contemporary History, 5/2 (1970), pp. 171–2; Elena Fasano Guarini, ‘Il Times di fronte al fascismo, 1919–1932’, Rivista Storica del Socialismo, 8/25– 26 (1965), pp. 167–70. 7. ‘Signor Facta’s Position’, The Times, 27 October 1922. 8. Charles Keserich, ‘The British Labour Press and Italian Fascism, 1922– 25’, The Journal of Contemporary History 19/4 (1975), pp. 579–81. 9. Aldo Berselli, L’opinione pubblica inglese e l’avvento del fascismo, 1919– 1925 (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1971), 93; Richard Lamb, Mussolini and the British (London: John Murray, 1997), pp. 61–2. 10. Christopher Hibbert, Florence. The Biography of a City (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 288; Harold Acton, Memoirs of an Aesthete (London: Faber and Faber, 2008), pp. 234. 11. Bernard Berenson to Mary Berenson, 23 December 1924, Berenson Archives, I Tatti. 12. Robin Chanter, ‘Norman Douglas’, in Inghilterra e Italia nell’900 (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1973), p. 46; Roland Pieraccini, Aldous Huxley e l’Italia (Naples: Liguori, 1998), p. 87. Huxley would later become highly critical of fascism. 13. Giuseppe Orioli, Le avventure di un libraio (Milan: Il Polifilo, 1988). 14. Claudia Baldoli, Exporting Fascism. Italian Fascists and Britain Italians in the 1930s (Oxford: Berg, 2003), pp. 1 –2, 10. 15. Richard Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right (London: Constable, 1980), pp. 17 –8; Stephen Dorril, Blackshirt. Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism (London: Penguin, 2006), pp. 198–9; Roberta Suzzi Valli, ‘Il fascio italiano a Londra. L’attivita` di Camillo Pellizzi’, Storia Contemporanea 95/6 (1995), pp. 957–68; Claudia Baldoli, ‘I fasci in Gran Bretagna’, in Emilio Franzina and Matteo Sanfilippo (eds), Il fascismo e gli emigrati (Rome – Bari: Laterza, 2003), pp. 53 – 74; Alfio Bernabei, Esuli ed emigranti italiani nel Regno Unito, 1920 –1940 (Milan: Mursia, 1997), p. 94. Pellizzi later became one of the most influential ideologues of Italian fascism. Danilo Breschi and Gisella Longo, Camillo Pellizzi.

Notes to Pages 42 – 45

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

269

La ricerca delle e´lites tra politica e sociologia (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2003), p. 28. Letter from Carlo Rosselli to William Gillies, 6 January 1934, Labour Party Archives, WG/ITA/81. The letter, signed by Carlo, was written by Marion. Marion to Carlo, 5 January 1934, in Carlo Rosselli, Dall’esilio. Lettere alla moglie, 1929–1937, ed. Costanzio Casucci (Florence: Passagli, 1997), p. 293. Harold E. Goad, History of the British Institute in Florence (Florence: Diannini & Giovannelli, 1939), pp. 9–10. Walter Becker, ‘Mussolini and Fascismo: Their Opponents and Prospects’, National Review 84/490, (1924), pp. 545–60. Barbara Storm Farr, The Development and Impact of Right-Wing Politics in Britain, 1903–1932 (New York: Garland, 1987), pp. 76 –8. Marion to Carlo Rosselli, 5 January 1934, in Rosselli, Dall’esilio p. 293. Peter Gunn, Vernon Lee: Violet Paget 1856 –1935 (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 199–215. Marion to Gaetano Salvemini, 22 December 1925, in Enzo Tagliacozzo (ed.), Gaetano Salvemini, Carteggio, 1921–1926 (Rome–Bari: Laterza, 1985), 524–5. Vineta Colby, Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), p. 98; Gunn, Vernon Lee, pp. 149–53; Marie-Jose Cambieri Tosi, Carlo Placci. Maestro di cosmopoli nella Firenze tra otto e novecento (Florence: Vallecchi, 1984), pp. 147–91; Bernard Berenson, Rumour and Reflexion, 1941 –1944 (London: Constable, 1952), pp. 23 –4; Bernard Berenson, Sunset and Twilight, ed. Nicky Mariano (London: H. Hamilton,1964), p. 278; Charles L. Killinger, Gaetano Salvemini: A Biography (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002), pp. 98–110. Mary Berenson, A Self-Portrait from her Letters and Diaries, ed. Barbara Strachey and Jayne Samuels (New York: W.W. Norton, 1983), p. 259. ACS, Segretario particolare del Duce, ins. Ugo Ojetti, 2 November 1925. Mary Berenson, pp. 259–64. Mary Berenson’s Diaries, 4 February and 30 March 1926, Berenson Archives I Tatti. Roberto Vivarelli, ‘Salvemini e il fascismo’, in Atti del convegno su Gaetano Salvemini (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1975), p. 141. ‘Memorie di un fuoruscito’, in Giorgio Agosti and Alessandro Garrante Garrone (eds), Gaetano Salvemini. Scritti Vari (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978), p. 588. Gaetano Salvemini to Mary Berenson, 4 November 1922, Berenson Archives I Tatti. Gaetano Salvemini to Giuseppe Prezzolini, in Gaetano Salvemini, Carteggio, 1921–1926, p. 128. Gaetano Salvemini to Ernesto Rossi, 20 October 1922 and 2 November 1922, Il Mondo, 2 February 1960. Gaetano Salvemini to Fernande Luchaire, 14 October 1922, in Gaetano Salvemini, Carteggio 1921 –1926, p. 91.

270

Notes to Pages 45 – 50

33. Ibid.; Giuseppe Fiori, Casa Rosselli (Turin: Einaudi, 1999), p. 39. 34. Sergio Bucchi, ‘Gaetano Salvemini. La Vita e le opere’ in Mirko Grasso (ed.), Gaetano Salvemini, l’uomo, lo storico (Calimera: Kurumuny, 2008), p. 38; Umberto Morra di Lavriano, ‘L’amico dei Giovanni’, Il Mondo, 26 January 1960, p. 11. 35. Emilio Gentile, ‘La nostra sfida alle stelle’. Futuristi in politica (Roma–Bari: Laterza, 2009), pp. 44 –9, 87 –94. 36. Piero Calamandrei, ‘Il manganello, la cultura e la giustizia’, in Mimmo Franzinelli (ed.), Non Mollare (Turin: Bollati-Boringhieri, 2005), pp. 70–1; Carlo Francovich, ‘Il Circolo di Cultura: l’ultima espressione di vita democratica a Firenze’, Quaderni del Circolo Rosselli 11/1(1991), pp. 80–4; Amelia Rosseli, Memorie (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001), p. 171. 37. Aldo Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli (Rome: Edizioni U, 1945), vol. 1, p. 37. 38. Gaetano Salvemini, Memorie e Soliloqui. Diario 1922 –1923 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011), pp. 174–5. 39. Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, vol. 1, pp. 42 –3. 40. Ibid. The chapter dealing with Rosselli’s Florentine activities was based primarily on Marion Cave Rosselli’s souvenirs. Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, vol. 1, p. 44, n. 1. 41. Ibid., p. 43; Enzo Ronconi, ‘Anti-fascismo borghese 1922 –30’, Italia Contemporanea, 140 (1980), pp. 19 –38. 42. Garosci, Vita di Carlo Garosci, vol. 1, p. 45. 43. Vieri Dolara and Ivan Tognarini, ‘Dal Circolo di Cultura alla stampa clandestina’, Quaderni del Circolo Rosselli, supplement to n8 1 (2006), pp. 5 –10. 44. Francovich, ‘Il Circolo di Cultura’, pp. 80–4. 45. Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, vol. 1, p. 44. 46. Charles F. Delzell, Mussolini’s Enemies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 8. 47. Mauro Canali, Il delitto Matteotti (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004); Delzell, Mussolini’s Enemies, pp. 11 –13; Bosworth, Mussolini, 192–216. 48. Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, pp. 45 –6. 49. Luigi Salvatorelli and Giovanni Mira, Storia d’Italia nel periodo fascista (Verona: Mondadori, 1972), vol. 1, pp. 331–45; Delzell, Mussolini’s Enemies, pp. 13 –16. 50. Philip V. Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso. Fascismo e mass media (Roma–Bari: Laterza, 1975); Yannick Beaulieu, ‘La presse italienne, le pouvoir politique et l’autorite´ judiciaire durant le fascisme’, Amnis, 4 (2004). 51. Calamandrei, ‘Il manganello, la cultura e la giustizia’, p. 85. 52. Ibid., pp. 72 –6. 53. Luciano Zani, Italia Libera. Il primo movimento Anti-fascista clandestino (1923–1925) (Roma–Bari: Laterza, 1975), pp. 64 –5. 54. Ernesto Rossi, ‘L’Italia Libera’, in Ernesto Rossi, Piero Calamandrei, Gaetano Salvemini (eds), No al fascismo (Turin: Einaudi, 1957),

Notes to Pages 50 – 55

55. 56.

57.

58.

59. 60. 61. 62.

63.

64. 65.

66. 67.

68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

271

pp. 25–48; Ernesto Rossi, Un democratico ribelle (Parma: Guanda, 1975), pp. 55– 6; Alessandro Levi, Ricordo dei fratelli Rosselli (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1947), p. 130. Gaetano Salvemini, ‘Il Non Mollare’, in Gaetano Salvemini, Opere, vol. VI (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1974), p. 467. Giovanni Belardelli, Nello Rosselli, uno storico Anti-fascista (Florence: Passigli Editore, 1982), pp. 37 –40; Nello Traquandi, ‘L’anti-fascismo a Firenze’, L’Astrolobio, 5 March 1967. Cesare Battisti had been a student of Pasquale Villari at the university of Florence together with Gaetano Salvemini. Gaetano Salvemini, ‘Memorie di un fuoruscito’, p. 586; Fiori, Casa Rossselli, p. 44. Rossi, Un democratico ribelle, pp. 59– 69; Giuseppe Armani, La Forza di Non Mollare. Ernesto Rossi dalla grande guerra a Giustizia e Liberta` (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2004), pp. 84 –5. Ronconi, ‘Anti-fascismo borghese 1922 –30’, p. 25; Zani, Italia Libera, p. 80. Bucchi, ‘Salvemini. La vita, le opere’, pp. 41– 2. Simona Colarizi (ed.), L’Italia Anti-fascista. La lotta dei protagonisti (Rome–Bari: Laterza, 1976), vol. 1, pp. 48 –54. Carlo Francovich, ‘Profilo dell’anti-fascismo militante toscano’, in La Toscana nel regime fascista (Florence: L. Olschki, 1971), p. 92; Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, p. 48; Fiori, Casa Rosselli, pp. 41 –3. Delzell, Mussolini’s Enemies, p. 23; Stanislao G. Pugliese, Carlo Rosselli, Socialist Heretic and Anti-fascist Exile (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 61. Ronconi, ‘Anti-fascismo borghese 1922– 30’, pp. 19– 26. ‘La grande adunata fascista di ieri turbata da una serie di clamarosi incidenti’, La Nazione, 1 January 1925; Alberto Marcolini, Firenze in Camicia Nera (Florence: Medicea, 1993), pp. 46 –9; Calamandrei, ‘Il manganello’ p. 79; Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, vol. 1, p. 52. Decree reproduced in Dolara and Tognarini, ‘Dal Circolo di Cultura alla stampa clandestina’, p. 15. Charles Killinger, Gaetano Salvemini. A Biography (Wesport: Praeger, 2002), pp. 190– 1; Stanislao Pugliese Fascism, Anti-fascism, and the Resistance in Italy: 1919 to the Present (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), pp. 68 –9. Salvatorelli and Mira, Storia d’Italia nel periodo fascista, vol. 1, pp. 355 – 7. Zani, Italia Libera, p. 81. Ernesto Rossi, ‘Il Non Mollare’, Il Ponte, September 1945, pp. 529–30. Marion Rosselli, Interview to the Sunday Mirror, Larchmont, NY, 28 January 1945. Rossi, ‘Il Non Mollare’, pp. 530–1; Nello Traquandi, ‘Sul Non Mollare e Giustizia e Liberta`’ in Luigi Arbizzani and Alberto Caltabianco (eds), Storia dell’anti-fascismo italiano (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1964), pp. 65 –6;

272

73. 74.

75. 76. 77.

78.

79.

80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

87.

88. 89.

Notes to Pages 55 – 59 Marion Rosselli, Interview to the Sunday Mirror, Larchmont, NY, 28 January 1945. Rossi, ‘Il Non Mollare’, p. 533. Rossi, ‘Il Non Mollare’, pp. 531 – 2; Salvemini, ‘Il Non Mollare’, pp. 470–1; Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, pp. 54–5; Rossi, Un democratico ribelle, pp. 63 –4. Fiori, Casa Rosselli, p. 50; Ronconi, ‘Anti-fascismo borghese 1922– 30’, p. 26. Emiliana P. Noether, ‘Italian Intellectuals under Fascism’, The Journal of Modern History 43/4 (1971), p. 631. Ibid., p. 641; Giovanni Belardelli, Il ventennio degli intellettuali (Rome– Bari: Laterza, 2005), pp. 3 –33; Philip V. Cannistraro, ‘Mussolini’s Cultural Revolution’, in Matthew Feldman and Roger Griffin (eds), Fascism: Fascism and Culture (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 183– 9. British Institute Archives, BRI¼I¼D¼30¼ff 1 – 10; Harold Goad, History of the British Institute of Florence (Florence: Giannini & Givannelli, 1939), p. 29; Gabriele Turi, ‘La cultura tra le due guerre’, in Giorgio Morri (ed.), Storia d’Italia, La Toscana (Turin: Einaudi, 1986), p. 544. Luca La Rovere, ‘Fascist Groups in Italian Universities: An Organization at the Service of the Totalitarian State’, Journal of Contemporary History 34/3, (1999), pp. 463–4. Gina Lombroso Ferrero, ‘Prodromi al diario’, in Leo Ferrero, Diario di un privilegiato sotto il fascismo (Turin: Chiantore, 1946), pp. 8– 9; Salvemini, ‘Memorie di un fuoruscito’, p. 586. Calamandrei, ‘Il manganello’, pp. 98 –100; Killinger, Gaetano Salvemini, pp. 191– 2. Armani, La forza di non mollare, pp. 87 –8; Salvemini, ‘Memorie di un fuoruscito’, pp. 587–8; Killinger, Gaetano Salvemini, pp. 192–3. Rossi, ‘Il Non Mollare’, p. 533. Ibid., p. 60; Ronconi, ‘Anti-fascismo borghese 1922–30’, p. 25. ‘L’arresto dell’on. Pieraccini e di due professori universitari che volevano commemorare l’on. Matteotti’, La Nazione, 12 June 1925. Lombroso Ferrero, ‘Prodromi al diario’, pp. 11 –12; Bucchi, ‘Gaetano Salvemini’, pp. 42– 43; Lidia Minervini, ‘Amico e maestro. Ricordi di Salvemini’, Il Mondo, 22 October 1957; Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, vol. 1, p. 57. ‘Tumulti e clamorosi incidenti al processo Salvemini’, La Nazione, 14 July 1925; ‘Italian Professor’s Trial. Charges Indefinitely Adjourned’, Manchester Guardian, 17 July 1925; ‘Secret Newspapers in Italy. The Salvemini Case’, The Times, 14 July 1925. Killinger, Gaetano Salvemini, p. 204; Levi, Ricordi dei fratelli Rosselli, pp. 77 –82. Bucchi, ‘Gaetano Salvemini’, pp. 42 –3; Rossi, Un democratico ribelle, pp. 66 –7; Salvemini, ‘Memorie di un fuoruscito’, pp. 587–94.

Notes to Pages 60 – 65

273

90. ‘Te´moignage de Marion Rosselli’, Le proce`s De Rosa. De´positions, plaidoiries et jugement (Paris: Librairie Valois,1930), pp. 71–4. 91. Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, vol. 1, pp. 58– 9; Rossi, ‘Il Non Mollare’, p. 535. 92. Marion to Gaetano Salvemini, in Salvemini, Carteggio 1921–1926, pp. 476– 7. 93. Marion to Gaetano Salvemini, 6 December, 22 December 1925, in Ibid., pp. 515– 16, 524–5.

CHAPTER 4

THE BEST OF TIMES, THE WORST OF TIMES

1. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (London: Penguin Books, 2007), p. 1. 2. Aldo Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli (Rome: Edizione U, 1945), vol. 1, pp. 43 –4. 3. Salvemini quoted in a letter from Marion to Carlo Rosselli, 7 April 1926, RFA, M2843; Head of Bedford College to Marion Cave Rosselli, 27 February 1942, Bedford College Archives, Marion Cave File. 4. BRI¼I¼D¼30¼ff1-10, Letter from Harold Goad to Sir Daniel Stevenson, 10 June 1924, explaining the agreement with the University; see also BRI, Annual Report 1924–25 and 1925–26; Lina Waterfield, Castle in Italy (London: John Murray, 1961), p. 196; Kinta Beevor, A Tuscan Childhood (New York: Vintage Books, 2000). 5. Gaetano Salvemini, ‘Marion Rosselli, Il Ponte 5, n8 11 (1949), p. 1440. 6. Fernande Dauriac to Gaetano Salvemini, Paris,12 October 1923, in Enzo Tagliacozzo (ed.), Gaetano Salvemini, Carteggio, 1921–26 (Rome–Bari: Laterza, 1985), p. 269. 7. Alessandra Taiuti, Un Anti-fascista dimenticato. Max Ascoli fra socialismo e liberalismo (Florence: Polistampa, 2007); Alessandro Galante Garrone, Calamandrei (Milan: Garzanti, 1987); Gigliola De Donato, Sergio D’Amaro, Un torinese del Sud: Carlo Levi (Milan: Baldini Castoldi, 2005); Alfonso Bellando, Umberto Morra di Lavriano (Florence: Massigli, 1990); Romain H. Rainero, Raffaele Rossetti dall’affondamento della Viribus Unitis all’impegno Anti-fascista (Settimo Milanese: Marzorato, 1989). 8. Giuseppe Armani La Forza di Non Mollare. Ernesto Rossi dalla grande guerra a Giustizia e Liberta` (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2004), p. 77. 9. Ibid., pp. 85 –90. 10. Marion Rosselli, ‘Cari amici . . .’, in Paolo Bagnoli (ed.), Una famiglia nella lotta. Carlo, Nello, Amelia e Marion Rosselli: dalle carte dell’archivio storico dell’Istituto Storico della Resistenza in Toscana (Florence: Polistampa, 2007), p. 136; Ernesto Rossi, Un democratico rebelle (Parma: Guanda, 1975), p. 87. The Maremma is a marshy area of the south of Tuscany. 11. Alessandro Levi, Ricordi dei Fratelli Rosselli (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1947), p. 87.

274

Notes to Pages 65 – 68

12. Carlo Rosselli to Amelia Rosselli, 23 February 1923 and 21 July 1923 in I Rosselli: epistolario familiare di Carlo, Nello, Amelia Rosselli, 1914–1937, edited by Zeffiro Ciuffoletti (Milan: Mondadori, 1997), pp. 147, 155. 13. Giovanni Ansaldo, Diario di prigiona (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993), p. 407. See also Giovanni Ansaldo, Anni freddi, Diari 1946 –1950 (Bologne: Il Mulino, 2003), p. 351; Amelia Rosselli to Salvemini, 23 July 1937, ERP, E.R. 6. 14. Emilio Lussu, ‘Alcuni ricordi di Carlo Rosselli’, Il Ponte, 3/6 (1947), p. 507; Carlo Mangio, ‘Nazioni e tolleranza a Livorno’, Nuovi Studi Livornesi 3 (1995), pp. 11–22; Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: the Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 15. Giovanni Belardelli, Mazzini (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011); Denis Mack Smith, Mazzini (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 224; Giovanna Amato, ‘Haskalah a casa Rosselli’, Quaderni Circolo Rosselli 32/1, (2012). 16. Amelia Rosselli, Memorie, edited by Marina Calloni (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001), pp. 35 –106; Giovanna Amato, ‘Le memorie’, Quaderni Circolo Rosselli 32/1 (2012), pp. 27 –9. 17. Carl E. Schorske, Fin de Sie`cle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Knopf, 1981); Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), pp. 1–92. 18. Alberto Moravia, ‘Preface’, in Aldo Rosselli, La famiglia Rosselli; Una tragedia italiana (Milan: Bompiani, 1983), p. 2, Amato, ‘Le Memorie’, pp. 40 –1. 19. Amelia Rosselli, Memorie, pp. 108–11. 20. Ibid., pp. 119–20; Cosimo Ceccuti, ‘Gli Orvieto a Firenze fra ‘800 e ‘900: dalla “Vita Nuova” al “Marzocco”’, in Caterina del Vivo (ed.), ‘Il Marzocco’, Carteggio e cronache tra ottocento e avanguardie (Florence: L. Olschki, 1985), pp. 37 –56; Delfino Dozza, Essere figlie di Lombroso. Due donne intellettuali tra ‘800 e ‘900 (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1990). 21. Cosimo Ceccuti, ‘La Firenze dei Rosselli’, in Zeffirelli Ciuffoletti and Nicola Tranfaglia (eds), Lessico Familiare. Vita, cultura e politica della famiglia Rosselli all’insegna della liberta` (Rome: Edimond, 2004), vol. 1, pp. 2–3; Aldo Garosci, ‘Preface’ in Carlo Rosselli, Socialismo liberale, edited by John Rosselli (Turin: Einaudi, 1973), p. xix. 22. Nadia Ciani, Da Mazzini al Campidoglio: vita di Ernesto Nathan (Rome: Ediesse, 2007). 23. Amelia Rosselli, Memorie, p. 128. 24. Ibid., pp. 130–1. 25. Giovanni Belardelli, Nello Rosselli, uno storico anti-fascista (Florence: Passigli Editore, 1982), pp. 44 –6. 26. John Rosselli,’Nello and the Other Rossellis’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 6/3 (2001), p. 423. 27. Amelia Rosselli, Memorie, p. 122.

Notes to Pages 69 – 72

275

28. Ibid., pp. 155–60. 29. Ibid., p. 159; Denis Mack Smith, Modern Italy. A Political History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 361–77. 30. Amelia Rosselli, Memorie, pp. 162–4, Amelia Rosselli, Fratelli minori (Florence: Bemporad, 1921). 31. Letter from John Rosselli to Aldo Garosci, 14 August 1971, AGP 63, busta 915; Zeffiro Ciuffoletti, Maurizio Mambrini and Lucio Nicolai (eds), Sara Levi Nathan, I Rosselli e le miniere del Monte Amiata (Arcidosso (GR): Edizioni Effigi, 2013). 32. Amelia Rosselli, Memorie, pp. 164–5. 33. Ibid., pp. 167–8. 34. Ibid., p. 169. 35. Giusseppe Fiori, Una Storia Italiana. Vita di Ernesto Rossi (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), p. 50. 36. Giuseppe Fiori, Casa Rosselli (Turin: Einaudi, 1999), p. 33; Amelia Rosselli, Memorie p. 16; Belardelli, Nello Rosselli, pp. 14 –15; Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, vol. 1, pp. 45 –6. 37. Fiori, Casa Rosselli, p. 58. 38. Giovanni Ansaldo, L’Anti-fascista riluttante. Memorie del carcere e del confine, 1926–27 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992), p. 117; Stanislao Pugliese, Carlo Rosselli. Socialist Heretic and Anti-Fascist Exile (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 63. 39. ‘L’arresto dell’ on. Pieraccini e i due professori universitari che volevano commemorare l’onorevole Matteotti’, La Nazione, 12 June 1925. 40. Carlo to Amelia, Rapallo, 27 July 1925, in I Rosselli: epistolario familiare di Carlo, Nello, Amelia Rosselli, 1914 –1937, edited by Zeffirelli Ciuffoletti (Milan: Mondadori, 1997), p. 255. 41. Nicola Tranfaglia, Carlo Rosselli dall’interventismo a ‘Giustizia e Liberta` (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1966), p. 323; Fiori, Casa Rosselli, pp. 66–7. 42. Monica Miniati, Les Emancipe´es. Les femmes juives italiennes aux XIX8 et XX8 sie`cles (Paris: H. Champion, 2003), pp. 38, 236; Amelia Rosselli to Gina Lombroso, 19 August 1922, in Marina Calloni and Lorella Cedroni (eds), Politica e Affetti Familiari (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1997), pp. 152– 4. 43. Amelia Rosselli, Anima (Turin: Lattes, 1901); Ibid., Illusione (Turin, Rome: Roux & Viarengo, 1906); Mirka Sandiford, ‘Il Lyceum di Firenze ai tempi di Amelia’, Quaderni Circolo Rosselli, 263/3, (2006), pp. 39–40. 44. Tranfaglia, Carlo Rosselli, p. 67. 45. Thanks to Elisa Benaı¨m for showing me this text. 46. Amelia Rosselli, Memorie, pp. 195–6. 47. Ibid., p. 195; Carlo Rosselli to Gaetano Salvemini, Genoa, 7 November 1925, in Fra le Righe; Carteggio fra Carlo Rosselli e Gaetano Salvemini, ed. Elisa Signori (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2009), p. 103. 48. Marion to Gaetano Salvemini, 20 October 1925, in Salvemini, Carteggio, 1921– 26, p. 444; Carlo Rosselli to Gaetano Salvemini, 21 October 1925, in Ibid., p. 450.

Notes to Pages 73 – 78

276 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58.

59. 60.

61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

Marion to Gaetano Salvemini, 7 November 1925, Ibid., pp. 476–7. Ibid., p. 476. Nello Rosselli to Gaetano to Salvemini, November 1925, Ibid., p. 505. Marion to Gaetano Salvemini, 22 December 1925, Ibid., p. 525. Carlo Rosselli to Amelia Rosselli, 30 March 1926, I Rosselli, p. 290. Amelia Rosselli, Memorie, pp. 197–8. Carlo Rosselli to Amelia Rosselli in I Rosselli, p. 289. Marion to Amelia Rosselli (n.d., but end of March 1926), RFA M2710. Marion to Carlo Rosselli, 3 April 1926, RFA, M2845; Marion to Carlo Rosselli, 7 April 1926, RFA, M2843; Marion to Carlo Rosselli, 9 April 1926, RFA M2844; Carlo Rosselli to Amelia Rosselli, 13 April 1926, in I Rosselli, p. 291; Carlo Rosselli to Amelia Rosselli, 15 April 1926, Ibid., p. 292; Nello Rosselli to Amelia Rosselli, 24 April 1926, Ibid., p. 302; Carlo Rosselli to Gaetano Salvemini, 29 April 1926, in Fra le Righe, p. 108. Barbara Allason, Memorie di un’anti-fascista, 1915–1940 (Turin: Spoon River, 2005), pp. 43 –5; Charles F. Deltzell, Mussolini’s Enemies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 24. Ansaldo, L’Anti-fascista riluttante, p. 118. Carlo Rosselli to Gaetano Salvemini, 29 April 1926, in Fra le Righe, pp. 107– 8; Carlo Rosselli to Amelia Rosselli, 2 May 1926, in I Rosselli, p. 295. Giulio Pietranera, ‘La cultura in orbace. Carlo Rosselli e la presa di possesso fascista dell’unversita` italiana’, L’Astrolobio, 4 June 1967, pp. 28 –35. Carlo Rosselli to Amelia Rosselli (n.d., but end of May 1926), RFA S 3093. Carlo Rosselli to Amelia Rosselli, 16 May 1926, I, I Rosselli, pp. 297; Carlo Rosselli to Amelia Rosselli, 17 May 1926, RFA, S 3090; Carlo Rosselli to Gaetano Salvemini, 5 June 1926, in, Fra le Righe, p. 110. Carlo Rosselli to Amelia Rosselli (n.d., but early June), in I Rosselli, p. 297. Carlo Rosselli to Amelia Rosselli, 17 May 1926, RFA, S 3090. Carlo Rosselli to Gaetano Salvemini, 5 June 1926, in Fra le righe, p. 110. Marion to Gaetano Salvemini, 29 July 1926, in Fra le righe, p. 113; Fiori, Casa Rosselli, p. 67. Marion to Gaetano Salvemini, 29 July 1926, in Fra le righe, p. 113. Ibid. Carlo Rosselli to Gaetano Salvemini, 29 July 1926, in Fra le righe, p. 113. Photo RFA Carlo Rosselli to Amelia Rosselli, 7 October 1926, in Carlo Rosselli, Dall’esilio. Lettere alla moglie, 1929 –1937, ed. Costanzo Casucci (Florence: Passigli, 1997), p. 300.

CHAPTER 5 IN ITALY

FROM MILAN TO SAVONA: THE LAST STAND

1. Carlo to Amelia, 19 March 1924, in I Rosselli: epistolario familiare di Carlo, Nello, Amelia Rosselli, 1914 –1937, edited by Zeffiro Ciuffoletti

Notes to Pages 78 – 80

2. 3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

277

(Milan: Mondadori, 1997), p. 201; Paola Barbara Conti, ‘I Caffe`, le atmosfere e gli aromi’, in Roberta Cordani (ed.), Milano. Il volto della citta` perduta (Milan: CELIP, 2004), pp. 288–9. Amelia Rosselli, Memorie, edited by Marina Calloni (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001), pp. 198–9. Ibid., p. 200. Giovanni Ferro, Milano capitale dell’anti-fascismo (Milan: Mursia, 1985), pp. 40 –65; Nicola del Corno, ‘Carlo Rosselli a Milano’, in Nicola del Corno (ed.), Carlo Rosselli: Gli anni di formazione a Milano (Milan: Biblion, 2010), pp. 10–11; Domenico Zucaro’ (ed.), Il Quarto Stato di Nenni e Rosselli (Milan: SugarCo, 1977), pp. 17 –18. Carlo Rosselli to Amelia Rosselli, 24 March 1924, in I Rosselli, p. 202; Bianca Ceva (ed.), Antologia del Caffe`. Giornale dell’anti-fascismo (Milan: Lerici, 1961). Marina Addis Saba, Anna Kuliscioff. Vita privata e passione politica (Milan: Mondadori, 1993); Paolo Treves, ‘Portici Galleria 23’, in Critica Sociale. Esperienze e studi socialisti (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1957), pp. 332–6. Filipo Turati, Anna Kuliscioff, Carteggio, VI, 1923– 1925. Il delitto Matteotti e l’Aventino, ed. Franco Pedone (Turin: Einaudi, 1977), p. 466; Gaetano Salvemini, ‘Marion Rosselli’, Il Ponte, 5/11 (1949), p. 1443. Ivano Granata, ‘Il regime fascista: peculiarita` milanesi’, in Giorgio Rumi, Virgilio Vercelloni and Alberto Cova (eds), Milano durante il fascismo, (Milan: Carilpo, 1994), pp. 45– 57; Maurizio Punzo, ‘L’anti-fascismo milanese’, in Rumi, Vercelloni, Cova, Milano, pp. 75 –7; Aldo Aniasi, Parri. L’avventura umana, militare e politica di Maurizio (Turin: Nuova ERI, 1991), pp. 25– 7; Katia Colombo and Davide Assael, Milano fascista, Milano anti-fascista (Milan: Guerini e Associati, 2007). Marina Addis Saba, Anna Kuliscioff, pp. 438–9; Riccardo Bauer, Quello che ho fatto. Trent’anni di lotte e ricordi (Milan: Carilpo, Rome– Bari: Laterza, 1987), p. 42; Pietro Nenni, Six ans de guerre civile en Italie (Paris: Librairie Valois, 1930), pp. 213–14. Nello Traquandi, ‘L’anti-fascismo a Firenze’, L’Astrolobio, 5 March 1967, pp. 31–2; Carlo Rosselli to Gaetano Salvemini, 29 September 1925, in Fra le righe: Carteggio fra Carlo Rosselli e Gaetano Salvemini, edited by Elisa Signori (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2009), p. 98. About the feeling of impending doom, see Paolo Treves, Quello che ci ha fatto Mussolini (Manduria: Piero Lacaita, 1996), pp. 53 –4. Gastone Manacorda, Il Socialismo nella storia d’Italia (Rome– Bari: Laterza, 1970), vol. I, pp. 513–14; Enzo Santarelli, Pietro Nenni (Turin: UTET, 1988), p. 101– 2; Carlo Rosselli to Amelia Rosselli, 25 January 1926, in I Rosselli, p. 288; Gian Biagio Furiozzi, ‘Carlo Rosselli e Filippo Turati’, in Del Corno Carlo Rosselli, pp. 98 –100. Domenico Zuca`ro, ‘Introduzione’, in Zuca`ro, Il Quarto Stato, pp. 30 –42; Charles F. Deltzel, Mussolini’s Enemies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 32– 4; Stanislao Pugliese, Carlo Rosselli. Socialist Heretic

278

13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

Notes to Pages 80 – 85 and Anti-Fascist Exile (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 70 –8. Domenico Zuca`ro, Socialismo e democrazia nella lotta Anti-fascista, 1927– 1939 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1986), pp. 9 – 11; Punzo, ‘L’anti-fascismo milanese’, pp. 79 –80. Ernesto Rossi, Un democratico ribelle (Parma: Guanda, 1975), pp. 70 –1; Giuseppe Fiori, Una storia italiana. Vita di Ernesto Rossi (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), pp. 69 –73. Aldo Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli (Rome: Edizioni U, 1945), vol. 1, pp. 91 –2; Carlo Rosselli to Amelia Rosselli, 21 October 1926, in I Rosselli, p. 301. Giovanni Ansaldo, Anni freddi: Diari 1946–1950 (Bologna: Il Mulion, 2003), p. 75. Giovanni Ansaldo, L’Anti-fascista riluttante, Memorie del carcere e del confino, 1926–27 (Bologne: Il Mulino, 1992), pp. 116–22; Ansaldo, Anni freddi, p. 351. Nicky Mariano, Forty Years with Berenson (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1966), p. 144. Brunella Dalla Casa, Attentato al Duce: le molte storie del caso Zamboni (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000). Frances Stonor Saunders, The Woman Who Shot Mussolini (London: Faber and Faber, 2010). Charles F. Deltzell, Mussolini’s Enemies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 38 –42. Ariane Landuyt, Le sinistre e l’Aventino (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1973), pp. 481– 2. Michael R. Ebner, Ordinary Violence in Mussolini’s Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 88 –9. Marion Rosselli, ‘Te´moignage,’ in Le proce`s De Rosa, De´positions, plaidoiries et jugement, edited by Jean-Richard Bloch (Paris: Librairie Valois, 1930), pp. 74 –5. Giuseppe Tamburrano, Pietro Nenni (Rome–Bari: Laterza, 1986), pp. 92–3. Marion Rosselli, ‘Te´moignage’, p. 75. Aniasi, Parri, pp. 37 –8. Treves, Quello che ci ha fatto Mussolini, pp. 60 –82. Ansaldo, L’Anti-fascista riluttante, p. 119. Aniasi, Parri, 38; Mario Melino, ‘Contributo ad una biografia di Riccardo Bauer’ in Mario Melino (ed.), Riccardo Bauer (Milan: Franco Angeli,1985), pp. 356–7; Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, vol. 1, pp. 97 –8. Both Ansaldo and Silvestri would eventually make their peace with the regime. The former became a close associate of Ciano while the latter joined the Republic of Salo’ in 1943. Aniasi, Parri, p. 38. Carlo Rosselli, ‘Come Turati lascio’ l’Italia’, La Liberta`, 14 April 1932. Natalia Ginzburg, Lessico famigliare (Turin: Einaudi, 1963), pp. 76 –7.

Notes to Pages 86 – 92 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

279

Carlo Rosselli, ‘Come Turati lascio’ l’Italia.’ Treves, Quello che ci ha fatto Mussolini, pp. 82 –3. Carlo Rosselli, ‘Come Turati lascio’ l’Italia’. Marion Rosselli’s testimony in Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, vol. 1, p. 100. Ibid., p. 105. Ibid., p. 111. Marion Rosselli, ‘Te´moignage’, pp. 74 –5. Mary Soames, Winston Churchill. His Life as a Painter. A Memoir by his Daughter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990), p. 87; ‘Mr Churchill on Fascism’, The Times, 21 January 1927; ‘Fascist Newspapers and Mr Churchill’, The Times, 22 January 1927. ACS, CPC b. 1205, Cave, Marion in Rosselli, Div. Affari generali riservati, 18 January 1927. Ibid., 17 January 1927, 21 March 1927, 23 March 1927. Giuseppe Fiori, Casa Rosselli (Turin: Einaudi, 1999), pp. 78 –9. Marion Rosselli ‘Te´moignage’, pp. 75 –6. Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, vol. 1, pp. 102– 3. Ibid.; Amelia Rosselli, Memorie, p. 219. Carlo Rosselli to Marion, Mamma`, Maria, 24 June1927, in I Rosselli, p. 341. Carlo Rosselli to Amelia Rosselli, 12 July 1927, in I Rosselli, p. 342. Carlo Rosselli to Marion, 2 September 1927, in I Rosselli, p. 345. Marion to Giorgina Zabban, 9 September 1927, JRP. Carlo Rosselli to Marion, 2 September1927, in I Rosselli, p. 345; Marion’s Letter to ‘gentilissimo avvocato’, September 1927, AGL, MRP. Marion to Giorgina Zabban, 9 September 1927, MRP. Ibid.; Bauer, Quello che ho fatto, p. 60. Bianca Ceva, Retroscena di un dramma (Milan: Ceschina, 1955), p. 10; Aniasi, Parri, p. 41. Conrad Bonacina, ‘Barbara Barclay Carter’, People and Freedom 124 (1951), pp. 1– 3; Giovanna Farrell-Vinay, ‘The London Exile of Luigi Sturzo (1924–1940)’, Heythorp Journal 4 (2004), pp. 158–77; Marion Rosselli to Don Luigi Sturzo, 23 August 1945, f. 664, 60, LSP. ‘Savona Trial: Light Sentences’, Manchester Guardian, 28 September 1927. Barbara Barclay Carter, ‘Il processo di Savona’, in Vico Faggi, Il processo di Savona (Genoa: Edizione del Teatro stabile, 1965), p. 109. Carlo Rosselli to Umberto Zanotti-Bianco, Il Ponte 3/6 (1947), pp. 521–2; Treves, Quello che ci ha fatto Mussolini, p. 105. Carter, ‘Il processo di Savona’, p. 110. Marion to Amelia Rosselli,12 September 1927, MRP. Treves, Quello che ci ha fatto Mussolini, pp. 105–6. Carlo Rosselli to Umberto Zanotti Bianco, Il Ponte, 521–2.

280

Notes to Pages 92 – 96

64. Carter, Il processo di Savona, pp. 114– 15; Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, pp. 122– 4; Carlo Rosselli to Zanotti Bianco, Il Ponte, 522. 65. Fiori, Casa Rosselli, p. 83. 66. Marion to Zia Gi and Zio Giu` Zabban, 21 September 1927, MRP. 67. Marion to Nello Rosselli, 15 December 1927, RFA, C5165; Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 4 December 1927, RFA, M3225. 68. Marion to Zia Gi and Zio Giu` Zabban, 21 September 1927, MRP. Giorgina Zabban and her husband Giulio were close friends of Amelia Rosselli and had been a surrogate family of sort for her three fatherless boys who called them Zia Gi’ and Zio Giu` (Aunt and Uncle). Cf. Silvia Rosselli, Gli otto venti (Palermo: Sellerio, 2008), p. 46. 69. Nello Rosselli to Marion, 11 December 1927, MRP. 70. Amelia Rosselli to Nello Rosselli, 16 September 1927, in I Rosselli, p. 310. 71. This message to the Zabbans was transmitted by Marion. Cf. Marion to Zia Gi, 25 December 1927, MRP. The line is from Canto XXVIII of the Inferno, ‘and they were two in one and one in two’.

CHAPTER 6

WELCOME TO THE ‘ESCAPE CLUB’: LIPARI

1. Karl Baedeker, Italy. Handbook for Travellers: Southern Ital and, Sicily, with Excursions to the Lipari Islands, Malta, Sardinia, Tunis and Corfu (Leipzig: Baedeker, 1900), p. 226; Emilio Lussu, Enter Mussolini. Observations and Adventures of an Anti-fascist (London: Taylor & Francis, 2010), p. 103. 2. Ibid., p. 104. 3. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 26 March 1928, RFA, M3209; 15 December 1928, RFA, M3199; 28 January 1929, RFA, M3183; 30 January 1929, RFA, M3182; Carlo Rosselli, ‘My Escape’, Contemporary Review 139/785 (1931), p. 610. 4. Emilio Lussu, ‘Memorie di Lipari’, Archivio Sardo del movimento operaio, contadino e autonomistico, 8/10 (1977), p. 310; Michael R. Ebner, Ordinary Violence in Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 113–15; Emilio Lussu, Marcia su Roma e dintorni (Rome: Einaudi, 1945), p. 189; Carlo Rosselli, ‘My Escape’, p. 606. 5. Francesco Fausto Nitti, ‘Prisoners of Mussolini – Part II’, North American Review 229/3 (1930), p. 267. 6. Lussu, ‘Memorie di Lipari’, p. 311; Marion Rosselli, ‘Te´moignage’, in Le proce`s De Rosa. De´positions, plaidoiries et jugement, edited by Jean-Richard Bloch (Paris: Librairie Valois, 1930), p. 76. 7. Ebner, Ordinary Violence in Fascist Italy, pp. 103, 113; Marion Rosselli, ‘Te´moignage’, pp. 76–7. 8. Carlo Rosselli to Ferruccio Parri, 6 January 1928, in Marina Giannetto (ed.), Un’altra Italia nell’Italia del fascismo. Carlo e Nello Rosselli nella documentazione dell’Archivio Centrale dello Stato (Rome: Edimond, 2002), p. 76; Marion Rosselli to Pat Lewis, 25 March 1928, in Giannetto, Un’altra Italia, p. 23.

Notes to Pages 96 – 99

281

9. Carlo Rosseli, ‘My Escape’, p. 607. 10. Marion Cave Rosselli, ‘Lettera della moglie’ in Carlo Rosselli, Socialismo Liberale (Rome: Edizione U, 1945), p. 3; Emilio Lussu, ‘Rosselli (dieci anni fa)’, Giustizia e Liberta`, 25 June 1937; Emilio Lussu, ‘Alcuni ricordi di Carlo Rosselli’, Il Ponte, 6, (1947), pp. 505–9; Carlo Rosselli to Amelia Rosselli, 24 February 1928, in Zeffiro Ciuffoletti (ed.), I Rosselli: epistolario familiare di Carlo, Nello, Amelia Rosselli, 1914– 1937 (Milan: Mondadori, 1997), p. 194. 11. Marion to Pat Lewis, 25 March 1928, ACS, Confinati, b. 883, fasc. Rosselli, Carlo; Carlo Rosselli to Ferruccio Parri, 12 February 1928, in Gianetto, Un’altra Italia, p. 81; Carlo Rosselli to Amelia, January 1928, in I Rosselli, p. 194. 12. Carlo Rosselli to Amelia Rosselli, January 1928, I, I Rosselli, p. 194; Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 26 December 1928, RFA C445; Ibid., 30 January 1929, RFA, M3182. 13. Carlo Rosselli to Amelia Rosselli, 15 March 1928, in I Rosselli, p. 404. 14. Carlo Rosseli to Gina Lombroso Ferrero, 23 April 1929, in Maria Calloni and Lorella Cedroni (eds), Politica e affetti familiari. Lettere dei Rosselli ai Ferrero, 1917 – 1943 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1997), p. 60; Leo Ferrero, ‘La tragedia delle donne’, in Leo Ferrero, Segreto dell’ Inghilterra (Rome: Edizioni delle Catacombe, 1944), pp. 84– 7. 15. Carlo Rosselli, “My Escape”, p. 607. 16. Carlo Rosselli to Ferruccio Parri, in Gianetto, Un’altra Italia, pp. 81 –2. Dr Nicola Pende would later be one of the authors of Mussolini’s Race Manifesto. Ibid., n. 12, 80. 17. Carlo Rosselli, in Luca Di Vito and Michele Gialdroni (eds), Lipari 1929. Fuga dal Confino (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2009), p. 104. 18. Marion to Zia Gi’ Zabban, 6 April 1928, MRP; Jaures Busoni, Confinati a Lipari (Milan: Vangelista, 1980), p. 63; Fra le righe. Carteggio fra Carlo Rosselli e Gaetano Salvemini, edited by Elisa Signori (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2009), n. 8, p. 308; Aldo Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli (Rome: Edizioni U, 1945), vol. 1, p. 130. 19. Emilio Lussu, The Sardinian Brigade (London: Prion, 2000). 20. Giuseppe Fiori, Il Cavaliere dei Rossomori. Vita di Emilio Lussu (Turin: Einaudi, (1985) 2000), p. 172. 21. Lussu, Marcia su Roma e dintorni, pp. 180– 2, 185–7. 22. Fausto Nitti, in Di Vito and Gialdroni, Lipari 1929, p. 73; Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, vol. 1, p. 164. 23. Massimo Fini, ‘Gioacchino Dolci, l’uomo che libero’ Lussu e Rosselli’, L’Europeo, 27 June 1987, pp. 132–7; Francesco Fausto Nitti, Escape. The personal narrative of a prisoner who was rescued from Lipari, the fascist ‘Devil’s Island’ (New York: Putnam, 1930), pp. 20– 1; Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, vol. 1, p. 165. 24. Emilio Lussu, Enter Mussolini, pp. 230–33. 25. Carlo Rosselli, ‘My Escape’, p. 610.

282

Notes to Pages 99 – 104

26. Alberto Tarchiani, ‘L’impresa di Lipari’, in Ernesto Rossi (ed.), No al fascismo! (Turin: Einaudi, 1957), p. 71. 27. Paul Ward, Britishness Since 1870 (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 41; Marion Rosselli to her sister Pat Lewis, Lipari 25 March 1928, ACS, Confinati, b. 833, fasc. Rosselli, Carlo. 28. Marion Rosselli, ‘Intervention at the Larchmont Rotary Club’, 1944, in Paolo Bagnoli (ed.), Una famiglia nella lotta (Florence: Edizioni Polistampa, 2007), p. 132; Isabelle Richet, ‘Marion Cave Rosselli and the Transnational Women’s Anti-fascist Networks’, Journal of Women’s History 24/3 (2012), p. 117–39; Riccardo Bauer, Quello che ho fatto, p. 80; Aldo Garosci, ‘Linea per una microstoria’, in Giuseppe Galosso (ed.), Il partito d’Azione dalle origini all’inizio della Resistenza armata (Rome: Archivio Trimestriale, 1985), p. 287; Arturo Colombo, ‘Il solidazio tra Carlo Rosselli e Riccardo Bauer’, in Nicola del Corno, Carlo Rosselli: gli anni della formazione e Milano (Milan: Biblion, 2010), pp. 135–6. 29. Massimo Fini, ‘Gioacchino Dolci’, pp. 132–7; ACS, CPC, b.1205, Cave, in Rosselli, 7 June 1928. 30. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 24 June 1928, RFA, M3238. 31. Maria Rossetti’s testimony in Romain Rainero, Raffaele Rossetti: dall’affondamento della ‘Viribus Unitis’ all’impegno anti-fascista (Milan: Marzorati, 1989), pp. 95 –8. 32. Tarchiani, ‘L’impresa di Lipari’, pp. 78 –80. 33. Cf. among the many letters from Marion to Amelia Rosselli, RFA, M3239, M3237, M3210, M3211, M3212, M3213, M3214. 34. T.P. Wiseman, ‘Elisabeth Donata Rawson, 1934– 1988’, Proceedings of the British Academy (London: British Academy,1993), pp. 447–51; Letter from Marion Enthoven to Carlo Rosselli, August 1929, MRP. Marion Enthoven later married and used her husband’s name, Rawson. 35. ‘Italian Refugees’, Manchester Guardian,11 May 1927; ‘Italian Political Refugees’, Letter to the Editor, Manchester Guardian, 11 May 1927; Vittorio Gabrielli, “Marion Rawson”, La Cultura, 18/2, (1980), p. 305. 36. Giovanna Farrell-Vinay, ‘The London Exile of Don Luigi Sturzo (1924– 1940)’, Heythrop Journal, 4, (2004), pp. 158 – 77; Barbara Barclay Carter, ‘Virginia Crawford’, People and Freedom 108 (1948), p. 1; Virginia Crawford’s Draft statement about the magazine Italy Today, LSP, f 307/1 c 6. 37. Tarchiani, ‘L’impresa di Lipari’, pp. 80 –1; Marion Rosselli to Marion Enthoven, 23 July 1927, Marion Rawson Archives, MS1244, C.E. 42. 38. Tarchiani, ‘L’impresa di Lipari’, pp. 82 –3. 39. Ibid. 40. Marion to Marion Enthoven, 20 August 1928, Marion Rawson Archives, MS 1244, C.E. 49. 41. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 4 October 1928, RFA, M3232; 26 September 1928, RFA, M3243. 42. Fiori, Il cavaliere di Rossomori, p. 210.

Notes to Pages 104 – 110

283

43. Tarchiani, ‘Limpresa di Lipari’, pp. 89–93; Mari-Lou Peacop to Marion Enthoven, 15 November 1928, Marion Rawson Archives, MS1244, C.E. 56; Ibid., 21 November 1928, Marion Rawson Archives, MS1244C.E. 57; Romain Rainero, Raffaele Rossetti, pp. 99 –100. 44. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 15 November 1928, RFA, M3181. 45. Carlo Rosselli to Marion, 30 November 1928, RFA, S3132; Ibid., RFA, S3231; Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 9 December 1928, RFA, M3196. 46. Carlo Rosselli, ‘My Escape’, p. 609; Romain Rainero, Raffaele Rossetti, pp. 99 –100. 47. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 20 December 1928, RFA, M3190; 26 December 1928, RFA, C445; 7 January 1929, RFA M3195. 48. Carlo Rosselli to Amelia Rosselli, 20 March 1929, I Rosselli, 212; Ester Parri, ‘Ricordo di Carlo Rosselli’ Controcorrente (June 1949), pp. 7–8. 49. Marion Rosselli, ‘Lettere della moglie’, p. 3. 50. Di Vito and Gialdroni, Lipari 1929, pp. 232–3. 51. Lussu, ‘Memorie di Lipari’ p. 316; Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 28 January 1929, RFA, M3183. 52. Tarchiani, ‘L’impresa di Lipari’, pp. 70 –80. 53. Di Vito and Gialdroni, Lipari 1929, p. 250 54. Carlo Rosselli to Marion, 22 July 1929, in Di Vito and Gialdroni, Lipari 1929, pp. 71–2. 55. Ibid., p. 252. 56. Tarchiani, ‘L’impresa di Lipari’, p. 124; Carlo Rosselli, ‘My Escape’, p. 611. 57. Ibid.; Pietro Ramella, Francesco Fausto Nitti. L’uomo che beffo’ Hitler e Mussolini (Rome: Aracne, 2007), pp. 62 –3. 58. Photos in Di Vito and Gialdroni, Lipari 1929, pp. 322–3. 59. Carlo Rosselli, ‘My Escape’, pp. 611–13, quote at p. 613. 60. Tarchiani, ‘L’impresa di Lipari’, p. 170. 61. ACS, Confino politico, b. 883, fasc. personali, Rosselli Marion; Gianfranco Porta, ‘L’evasione di Lipari’ in Mario Isnenghi, Eva Cecchino (eds), Gli Italiani in Guerra, vol. 2, Il Ventenio fascista (Turin: UTET, 2009), pp. 573–5. 62. ACS, CPC, Prefect of Aosta to the Ministry of the Interior, 1 August 1929; Guiseppe Fiori, Casa Rosselli (Turin: Einaudi, 1999), p. 107. 63. Marion Rosselli, ‘Intervention at the Rotary Club, Larchmont’, pp. 133–4; Giovanni Belardelli, Nello Rosselli, uno storico Anti-fascista (Florence: Passigli Editore, 1982), p. 103. 64. Tarchiani ‘L’impresa di Lipari’, pp. 124–26., 65. Porta, ‘L’evasione di Lipari’, 573; Gaetano Salvemini, Dai ricordi di un fuoruscito, 1922 –1933 edited by Mimmo Franzinelli (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2002), p. 202; Emilio Lussu, La Catena, edited by Mimmo Franzinelli (Milan: Baldini e Castoldi, 1997), p. 10; Filipo Turati ‘Vincitori e vindici’, La Liberta`, 11 August 1929; ‘Mussolini’s island prisoners. Escape of three Anti-fascists’, Manchester Guardian, 9 August 1929;

284

66. 67. 68. 69.

70. 71.

72.

73. 74.

Notes to Pages 110 – 112 ‘Professor Rosselli’s Escape’, The Times, 14 August 1929; ‘Professor tells how he and his two friends escaped Mussolini’s Devil’s Island’, Chicago Daily Tribune, 8 August 1929 (Paris edition). Telegram, Carlo Rosselli to Marion, 7 August 1929, ACS, Segreteria particolare del Duce; Carlo Rosselli to Marion, 9 August 1929, AGL. Amelia Rosseli to Nello Rosselli, 7 August 1929, in I Rosselli, p. 437. Ibid., 13 August 1929, p. 438. Carlo Rosselli to ‘Amelia, Marion and Nello’, 14 August 1929, in I Rosselli, pp. 452– 4; Richard Lamb, Mussolini and the British (London: John Murray, 1997), pp. 62–78. Paolo Treves, Quello che mi ha fatto Mussolini (Manduria: Piero Lacaita, 1996), pp. 231–33. Marion Rosselli ‘Te´moignage’, p. 78; ‘Professor Rosselli’s Escape. Wife and Brother Arrested’, The Times, 11 August 1929; ‘Fascist Victim’s English Wife. “Unpleasant” Treatment in Italy’, Daily Herald, 10 August 1929; ‘Anti-fascist’s English Wife. “Unpleasantness” in Italy’, Daily News, 10 August 1929; ‘Escape of Anti-fascists. Italian Reprisals. English Wife Cast into Cell’, Manchester Guardian, 14 August 1929; ‘Arrest of an English Wife. Fascists Avenge the Escape of Rosselli’, Daily News, 14 August 1929; ‘Fascists Arrest an English Woman. Professor’s Wife as Hostage’, Daily Express, 14 August 1929; ‘English Girl-Wife as a Hostage. Husband’s Escape from Italian Prison Island. Appeal of Father’, Evening News, 14 August 1929; ‘The Rosselli Case’, Manchester Guardian, 17 August 1929 (editorial); ‘The Rosselli Case’ The Times, 17 August 1929; ‘An Englishwoman in Italy. Signora Rosselli’s Plight. Father’s Reply to Denial of Arrest’, Manchester Guardian, 17 August 1929; ‘Signora Rosselli Liberated. Telegram to Her Father. Official Denials Disproved’, Manchester Guardian, 19 August 1929; ‘Signora Rosselli: Passport to Leave Italy Secured’, Manchester Guardian, 5 September 1929; ‘Englishwoman’s Ordeal. Father’s Criticism of Italian Embassy’, Manchester Guardian, 17 September 1929; ‘English Wife of Anti-fascist. Safe with Her Husband in Paris’, Manchester Guardian, 17 September 1929. Stanislao Pugliese, Carlo Rosselli, 121; Helen Jones, Women in British Public Life, 1914– 1950, p. 101; cf. also the editorial of the Manchester Guardian, ‘The Rosselli Case’, 17 August 1929; Catherine Jacques, ‘Des lobbys fe´ministes a` la SDN: l’exemple des de´bats sur la nationalite´ de la femme marie´e (1930 –1935)’, in Jean-Marc Delaunay and Yves Dene´che`re (eds), Femmes et relations internationales au XXe`me sie`cle (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2006), pp. 267–77; Carol Miller, ‘Geneva. The Key to Equality Interwar Feminists and the League of Nations’, Women’s History Review 3, n8 2, (1994), pp. 218–45. Ernest Cave to Carlo Rosselli, 16 August 1929, JRP. Telegrams dated 8 August, 14 August, 15 August 1929, ACS, Confino politico, b. 883, fasc. personali, Rosselli, Marion.

Notes to Pages 113 – 117

285

75. Ibid., Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Roma, 18 August 1929, Memorandum from the Ambassador in London. 76. Claudio Baldoli, Exporting Fascism. Italian Fascists and Britain Italians in the 1930s (Oxford: Berg, 2003), pp. 10–12; Marion Enthoven, ‘Letter to Zanotti Bianco, 3 April 1927’, in Umberto Zanotti Bianco, Carteggio 1919– 1928, edited by Vaeriana Carinci and Antonio Jannazzo (Rome– Bari: Laterza, 1989), pp. 652–3; Luigi Villari, ‘Missione di Luigi Villari a Londra, 1926–34’, ACS, Minculpop, Nuclei di Propaganda Italiana all’Estero (NUPIE), b. 37, f. 193. 77. Letter reproduced in the Memorandum from the Italian Ambassador, 18 August 1929. 78. ‘Harold Goad’, ACS, Minculpop, NUPIE, b.37, f. 36. 79. Memorandum from the Italian Ambassador, 18 August 1929. 80. The Spectator, 17 August 1929; 24 August 1929, pp. 250–1. 81. ‘Signora Rosselli Liberated. Official Denials Disproved’, Manchester Guardian, 19 August 1929. 82. Marion Rosselli, no date but around 20 August 1929, MRP. 83. Marion to ‘Dear friends’, 26 August 1929, CR, Appendice, Inserto I, n8 2. 84. Mari Lou Peacop to Marion Enthoven from Chamonix, 31 August 1929, Marion Rawson Archives, C.E 74. 85. Marion to Nello Rosselli, 26 August 1929, RFA, M3340; Nello Rosselli to Marion, 8 September 1929, MRP. 86. Marion to Nello Rosselli, 12 September 1929 RFA, M3341; ‘Signora Rosselli. Passport to Leave Italy Secured’, Manchester Guardian, 5 September 1929; ‘English Wife of Anti-Fascist Safe with her Husband in Paris’, Manchester Guardian, 17 September 1929. 87. Amelia Rosselli to Marion and Carlo, 29 September, in I Rosselli, 444.

CHAPTER 7

NEW BEGINNINGS: THE HEROIC YEARS

1. Diego Dilettoso, La Parigi e la Francia di Carlo Rosselli (Milan: Biblion, 2013), pp. 80 –6; Carlo to Marion, 29 August 1929, MRP. 2. Carlo Rosselli to Amelia Rosselli, Paris, 29 –30 September 1929, in I Rosselli: epistolario familiare di Carlo, Nello, Amelia Rosselli, 1914–1937, edited by Zeffiro Ciuffoletti (Milan: Mondadori, 1997), pp. 458–9. 3. Letter from the Division of Political Police, 17 October 1929, ACS, CPC b. 1205, Cave, Marion in Rosselli. 4. Aldo Garosci, Storia dei fuorusciti (Bari: Laterza, 1953), pp. 9 –12; Bruno Groppo, ‘Entre immigration et exil: les re´fugie´s politiques italiens dans la France de l’entre-deux-guerres’, Mate´riaux pour l’histoire de notre temps 44 (1996), pp. 27– 35; Eric Vial, ‘Emigre´s politiques, e´migre´s qui se politisent: quelques donne´es tire´es du Casellario politico centrale (Rome)’, in L’e´migration politique en Europe au XIX8 et XX8 sie`cles (Rome: Ecole francaise de Rome, 1991), pp. 73–93; Matteo Pretelli, Il fascismo e gli italiani all’estero (Bologna: CLUEB, 2010).

286

Notes to Pages 118 – 121

5. Garosci, Storia dei fuorusciti, pp. 27 –9. 6. Aldo Berselli, ‘L’anti-fascismo all’interno e all’estero’, Storia della societa` italiana, vol. XXII, La dittatura fascista (Milan: Teti, 1983), pp. 354–6. 7. Garosci, Storia dei Fuorusciti, p. 54. 8. Eric Vial, ‘La Ligue des droits de l’homme et la L.I.D.U., son homologue italienne, organisation d’exile´s Anti-fascistes dans l’entre-deux-guerres’, Le Mouvement Social, 183 (1998), pp. 119–34; Santi Fedele, Storia della Concentrazione Anti-fascista (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976), pp. 3– 27. 9. Fedele, Storia della Concentrazione, pp. 28–58; Garosci, Storia dei Fuorusciti, pp. 33– 50; Hubert Droz, Histoire de l’anti-fascisme en Europe, 1923–1939 (Paris: La De´couverte, 1985), pp. 42–7. 10. Charles Killinger, Gaetano Salvemini. A Biography (Westport: Praeger, 2002), p. 226. 11. Stanislao Pugliese, Carlo Rosselli. Socialist Heretic and Anti-Fascist Exile (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 121–42; Gaspare de Caro, Gaetano Salvemini (Turin: UTET, 1970), pp. 372– 4. 12. Aldo Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli (Rome: Edizioni U, 1945), vol. 1, pp. 191– 92. 13. Manlio Brigaglia, Emilio Lussu e Giustizia e Liberta` (Cagliari: Edizioni della Torre, 1976), pp. 28–39; Aldo Garosci, ‘Linee per una microsstoria’, in Giuseppe Galosso (ed.), Il partito d’Azione dalle origini all’inizio della Resistenza armata (Rome: Archivio Trimestriale, 1985), pp. 221– 38. 14. Giustizia e Liberta`, n8 1, November 1929 in AGL, IV, fascicolo 2, sottofascicolo 1, inserto 2, n8 1. 15. Droz, Histoire de l’anti-fascisme, p. 51; Pugliese, Carlo Rosselli, 123–8; Carlo Rosselli, ‘Giustizia e Liberta`’, Giustizia e Liberta`, 14 May 1937. 16. Giovani de Luna, ‘Giustizia e Liberta`’, in L’Italia in esilio. L’emigrazione italiana in Francia tra le due guerre (Rome: Presidenza del consiglio dei ministri, 1993), pp. 314–16; Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, vol. 1, 17; Marco Bresciani, ‘La politica del gesto e degli attentati’, in Gli Italiani in Guerra, vol. IV, t. 1, Il Ventennio fascista. Da l’impresa di Fiume alla Seconda Guerra Mondiale (1919– 1940), ed. Mario Isnenghi and Giulia Albaneser, (Turin: UTET, 2008), pp. 591–5. 17. Giuseppe Fiori, Il cavaliere dei Rossomori, Vita di Emilio Lussu (Turin: Einaudi, (1985) 2000), p. 225. 18. Droz, Histoire de l’anti-fascisme, pp. 52 –3; Garosci, Storia dei Fuorusciti, pp. 56 –60; 19. Ester Parri, ‘Marion Rosselli’, Il movimento di liberazione in Italia, 3 (1949), p. 63. 20. Eliane Gubin and Vale´rie Piette, ‘Sur la singularite´ de l’exil politique fe´minin dans une perspective historique’, in Anne Morelli (ed.), Femmes exile´es politiques. Exhumer leur histoire (Brussles: Sextant, 2009), pp. 160–1. 21. Leonardo Casalino, ‘L’esperienza politica di Giusitizia e Liberta` nella Francia degli anni trenta’, in Maria Cristina Maiocchi Gli anni di Parigi. Carlo Levi e i fuorusciti, 1926 –1933 (Turin: Ministero per i beni e le attivita`

Notes to Pages 121 – 125

22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

40.

287

culturali, 2003), p. 35; Noemi Crain Merz, L’illusione della parita`. Donne e questione femminile in Giustizia e Liberta` e nel Partito d’Azione (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2013), pp. 7–11, 75 –7; Patrizia Gabrielli, ‘Pre´sence et absence des femmes dans l’e´migration Anti-fasciste italienne en France’, in Morelli, Femmes exile´es politiques, pp. 52 –3. Aldo Garosci, ‘Preface’ in Carlo Rosselli, Scritti dall’esilio, vol. 1, Socialismo liberale (Turin: Einaudi, 1987), p. lxxxviii; Sara Galli, Le tre sorelle Seidenfeld. Donne nell’emigrazione politica Anti-fascista (Florence: Giunti, 2005), p. 12. Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, vol. 2, p. 59. ‘Il Gesto di Bruxelles’, Giustizia e Liberta`, November 1929. Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, vol. 2, p. 60. HO 144/22561. Marion Enthoven to Carlo Rosselli, 25 October 1929, MRP; Carlo Rosselli to Marion, 4 December 1929, in Carlo Rosselli, Dall’Esilio. Lettere alla moglie, 1929 –1937, edited by Costanzo Casucci (Florence: Passigli, 1997), pp. 47 – 8; ‘The Fascist Regime, Dr. Rosselli’s views’, The Times, 6 December 1929. Carlo Rosselli to Marion 25, 27 and 29 November 1929, Dall’esilio pp. 35, 37 –8, 41. Gaetano Salvemini to Carlo Rosselli, Paris, 29 November 1929, in Elisa Signori (ed.), Fra le righe: Carteggio fra Carlo Rosselli e Gaetano Salvemini (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2009), p. 114. Marion to Carlo Rosselli, 27 November 1929, Dall’esilio p. 36. Ibid., 28 November 1929, 5 December 1929, 6 December 1929, Dall’esilio, pp. 39, 50 –1, 53. Ibid., 30 November 1929, Dall’esilio, pp. 42 –3. Ibid., 3 December 1929, Dall’esilio, p. 46. Ibid., 29 November 1929, Dall’esilio, p. 43; Ibid., 29 November, MRP; Carlo Rosselli to Marion, 30 December 1929, Dall’esilio p. 44. Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, vol. 1, pp. 209– 10. AN, F 7 –13252; AN, F 7–13249, ruling dated 21 December 1928. Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, vol. 1, pp. 210– 11; Pierre Guillen, ‘La question des “Fuorusciti” et les relations franco-italiennes (1925– 1935)’, in Jean Baptiste Duroselle et Enrico Serra (eds), Italia e Francia dal 1919 al 1939 (Milan: Istituto per gli studi di politica internazionale), 1981, pp. 27–32. Amelia Rosselli to Marion, 24 September 1929, I Rosselli, p. 444. Zeffiro Ciuffoletti, ‘L’anello forte della famiglia Rosselli’, Nuova Antologia, 2002 (1997), pp. 36 –40; Giovanni Belardelli, Nello Rosselli, uno storico Anti-fascista (Florence: Passigli Editore, 1982) pp. 105–7. CPC busta 4422, fasc. 11057, Rosselli Sabatino; Belardelli, Nello Rosseli, pp. 106– 11.

288

Notes to Pages 125 – 130

41. Amelia Rosselli to Carlo and Marion, 30 June 1930, RFA, C3110; Amelia Rosselli to Marion, 16 June 1930, RFA, C3108; Nello Rosselli to Carlo Rosselli,19 June 1930, I Rosselli, pp. 496–7. 42. Carlo Rosselli to Berthe Pritchard, 8 April 1930, AGL, I, 94, 2. 43. Giorgio Evangelisti, La scrittura nel vento: Gabriele d’Annunzio e il volo su Vienna, immagini e documenti (Florence: Olimpia, 1999). 44. Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, vol. 2, pp. 212–13; Franco Fucci, Ali contro Mussolini: i raid Anti-fascisti degli anni trenta (Turin: Mursia, 1978), pp. 25–36, 42 –3; Gino Nebiolo, L’uomo che sfido’ Mussolini dal cielo. Vita e morte di Giovanni Bassanesi (Soveria Mannelli: Rubettino, 2006), pp. 70 –84. 45. Alain Clavien and Nelly Valsangiacomo (eds), Les intellectuels Antifascistes dans la Suisse de l’entre-deux-guerres (Lausanne: Antipodes, 2006), 21. 46. Testimony from Gioacchino Dolci, in Giuseppe Galosso (ed.), Il partito d’azione dalle origini all’inizio della resistenza armata (Rome: Archivio trimestrale, 1985), pp. 212–14; Carlo Rosselli to Gioacchino Dolci, 15 July 1930, in Paolo Bagnoli, Una famiglia nella lotta (Florence: Edizioni Polistampa, 2007), p. 45. 47. Giuseppe Fiori, Casa Rosselli (Turin: Einaudi, 1999), pp. 116–17. 48. Alberto Tarchiani, ‘Il volo di Bassanesi su Milano e il processo di Lugano’, in Trent’anni di storia italiana (1915–1945) (Turin: Einaudi 1975), pp. 168– 9. 49. Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli., vol. 1, pp. 213–14. 50. Carlo Rosselli to Marion, 27 July, 1930, Dall’esilio p. 55; Marion to Carlo Rosselli, 29 July 1930, Dall’esilio, p. 56. About the ‘ego atrophy’ of women exiles, see Patrizia Gabrielli, Tempio di virilita`. L’anti-fascismo, il genere, la storia (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2008), p. 22. 51. Marion to Carlo Rosselli, 20 August 1930, MRP; Carlo Rosselli to Marion, 22 August 1930, Dall’esilio pp. 63 –4. 52. Carlo Rosselli to Marion, 29 August 1930, Dall’esilio, p. 67. 53. ‘Il processo di Rosa’, La Liberta`, 3 October 1930; Jean-Richard Bloch, Le proce`s de Rosa (Paris: Librairie Valois 1930), pp. 71 –7. 54. Giuseppe Moteta, ‘Fratello, mio valoroso compagno!’ Dall’Italia alla Spagna, la vita aventurosa di Fernando De Rosa, socialista libertario (Venice: Marsilio, 1998), pp. 101–29; Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, vol. 2, pp. 59 –60. Marion to Zia Gi’ Zabban, 7 October 1930, RFA, M2351. 55. Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosseli, vol. 1, pp. 217–18; Ernesto Rossi, Una spia del regime. Carlo del Re e la provocazione contro Giustizia e Liberta` (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2000), pp. 18– 20. 56. Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, vol. 1, p. 219. 57. Tarchiani, ‘Il volo di Bassanesi su Milano e il processo di Lugano’, p. 169. 58. Carlo Rosselli, Scritti dall’esilio, vol. 1, Socialismo liberale (Turin: Einaudi, 1989), pp. 20 –2, translation by Stanislao G. Pugliese, Carlo Rosselli. Carlo

Notes to Pages 130 – 135

59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69.

70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83.

289

Rosselli, Socialist Heretic and Anti-Fascist Exile (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 137. Ibid. Amelia Rosselli to Marion, 29 November 1930, I Rosselli, p. 473. Bianca Ceva, 1930. Retroscena di un dramma (Milan: Edizioni Pontegobbo, (1955) 2010), pp. 54– 9. Manchester Guardian, 1 January 1931; Marion Rosselli ‘The trial of Antifascists. Signor Ceva’s Suicide’, Manchester Guardian, 7 January 1931; Giuseppe Fiori, Una storia Italiana. Vita di Ernesto Rossi (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), pp. 102–3. Carlo Rosselli to Amelia Rosselli, 31 December 1930, I Rosselli, p. 481. Carlo Rosselli to Amelia Rosselli, 26 January 1931, RFA S 3294; Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, vol. 2, p. 49, n. 1. ACS, CPC busta 4422, fasc. 11057, Rossellini Sabatino, note dated 22 May 1931, letters from Amelia Rosselli sent from Paris on 6 February 1931, 12 February 1931. Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, vol. 2, p. 49. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 235–7. Carlo Rosselli to Marion, 6 May 1931, Dall’esilio p. 81. Marion to Carlo Rosselli, 27 April 1931, Dall’esilio, pp. 78 –9; Carlo Rosselli to Nello Rosselli, 29 April 1931, I Rosselli, p. 518; Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, vol.1, p. 226. Carlo Rosselli to Marion, 10 May 1931, in Rosselli, Dall’esilio p. 83. Marion to Carlo Rosselli, 11 May 1931, Ibid., p. 86. Casalino, ‘L’esperienza politica di GL nella Francia degli anni trenta’, p. 35. CPC, Busta 4422 fasc. 11057; Vittorio Gabrielli, ‘Marion Rawson’, La Cultura 18/2 (1980) pp. 305–7. Gabrielli, ‘Pre´sence et absence des femmes’, pp. 51 – 4; Ibid., Col freddo nel cuore. Uomini e donne nell’emigrazione Anti-fascista (Rome: Donzelli Editore, 2004), pp. 12 –13. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 1 June 1931, RFA, M3308. RFA, photo Carlo Rosseli, 29; Letter from Roger Lewis to Carlo and Marion, 28 July 1931, JRP. Marion to Carlo, 4 August 1931, Dall’esilio. pp. 97 –8. Berselli, ‘L’anti-fascismo all’interno e all’estero’, p. 369. Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, vol. 1, pp. 234– 45. Piero Calamendrei, ‘Varro’ piu` morto che vivo’, in Piero Calamandrei (ed.), Uomini e citta` della Resistenza (Bari: Laterza (1955) 2006), pp. 39 –55; Lauro De Bosis, The Story of my Death (New York: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1933); Jean McLure Mudge, The Poet and the Dictator. Laura de Bosis Resists Fascism in Italy and America (Wesport, CT: Praeger, 2002). Marion to Carlo Rosselli, Paris 1 November 1931, Dall’esilio p. 105. Marion to Carlo Rosselli, Paris 2 November 1931, Dall’esilio, p. 108. Carlo Rosselli to Marion, 11 November 1931, Dall’esilio p. 111. Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, vol. 1, 241–2.

290

Notes to Pages 136 – 139

84. Marion to Carlo Rosselli, Paris, 15 November 1931, Dall’esilio p. 115. 85. Marion to Carlo Rosselli, 24 November 1931, Dall’esilio, pp. 125–7; Carlo Rosselli to Marion, 25 November 1931, Dall’esilio, p. 128. ‘Italian Refugees in German Prison’, The Manchester Guardian, 19 November 1931, 6; Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, vol. 1, 238– 9.

CHAPTER 8

BUILDING A LIFE IN EXILE

1. Manes Sperber, Until my Eyes are Closed With Shards (New York: Holmes & Meyer, 1994), p. 69; Gerd-Rainer Horn, European Socialists Respond to Fascism: Ideology, Activism and Contingency in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 117–34. 2. Marco Gervasoni, ‘Metapolitica e miti politici nell’eta` dell’emergenza: Carlo Levi e la cultura politica francese degli anni Trenta’, in Maria Cristina Maiocchi (ed.), Gli anni di Parigi. Carlo Levi e i fuorusciti, 1926– 1933 (Turin: Ministero per i beni e le attivita` culturali, 2003), p. 23. 3. John Rosselli, ‘Paris in the Thirties – A Political Childhood’, The Twentieth Century 154/913 (1957) p. 24. 4. Charles Killinger, Gaetano Salvemini. A Biography (Wesport: Praeger, 2002), pp. 231– 2; Enzo Tagliacozzo, ‘Nota biografica’, in Ernesto Sestan (ed.), Atti del Convegno su Gaetano Salvemini, edited by Elisa Signori (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1977), p. 264; Fra le righe: carteggio fra Carlo Rosselli e Gaetano Salveminie, edited by Elisa Signori (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2009), pp. 61 –2. 5. Giuseppe Fiori, Il cavaliere dei Rossomori. Vita di Emilio Lussu (Turin: Einaudi (1985) 2000), pp. 233–4, 257; Manlio Brigaglia, Emilio Lussu e ‘Giustizia e Liberta`’ (Cagliari: Edizioni della Torre, 1976), p. 99. 6. Emilio Lussu, ‘Alcuni ricordi su Carlo Rosselli’, Il Ponte III/6 (1947), p. 506. 7. Ghislana Sirovich, L’azione politica di Carlo Levi (Rome: Il Ventaglio, 1988), p. 17. 8. Aldo Garosci, ‘L’Era di Carlo Levi’, in Carlo Levi, Disegni dal carcere, 1934. Materiali per una storia (Rome: De Luca Editore, 1983), p. 10. 9. Gigliola De Donato, Sergio D’Amaro Un torinese del Sud: Carlo Levi. Una biografia (Milan: Baldini Castoldi Dalai, 2005), p. 44; Giovanni De Luna, ‘Una cospirazione alla luce del sole. Giustizia e Liberta` a Torino negli anni Trenta’, in Nicola Tranfaglia (ed.), L’itinerario di Leone Guinzburg (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1996), pp. 12–39. 10. Giocanni Dotoli, Carlo Levi e la Francia (Fasno: Schena, 2010), pp. 8–10; Maria Cristina Maiocchi, ‘Carlo Levi, peintre italien de Paris, dicembre 1931–settembre 1933’, in Maria Cristina Maoicchi (ed.), Gli anni di Parigi. Carlo Levi e i fuorusciti, 1926–1933 (Turin: Ministero per i beni e le attivita` culturali, 2003), p. 67; Sirovich, L’azione politica di Carlo Levi, p. 33. 11. Giovanni De Luna, ‘Carlo Levi e Aldo Garosci: I percorsi dell’amicizia’, in Maiocchi, Gli anni di Parigi, pp. 18– 20.

Notes to Pages 140 – 142

291

12. Out of a total of 1,200 university professors, only 12 refused to take the oath. Giorgio Boatti, Preferirei di no. Le storie dei dodici professori che si opposero a Mussolini (Turin: Einaudi, 2001), pp. 166–9; Barbara Allason, Memorie di un’Anti-fascista, 1915– 1940 (Turin: Spoon River, 2005), pp. 137– 8. 13. ‘Lionello Venturi, in esilio in Francia e in America’, in Luigi Arbizzani e Alberto Caltabiano (eds), Storia dell’anti-fascismo italiano, vol. 2, Testimonianze (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1964), p. 91. 14. Lionello and Ada Venturi had three children. Franco was born in 1914 and became a student at the Sorbonne and an activist in GL; Rosabianca was born in 1920 and Lauro, born in 1923 was only a few years older than Mirtillino. 15. Giovanni Grasso (ed.), Luigi Sturzo e i Rosselli tra Londra, Parigi e New York (1929–1945) (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2003), pp. 9 –11; Giovanna Farrell-Vinay, ‘The London Exile of Don Luigi Sturzo (1924–1940)’ Heythrop Journal, 45 (2004), p. 162. 16. Gabriele De Rosa, Luigi Sturzo (Turin: UTET, 1977), p. 373; Maurice Vaussard, ‘L’esilio tra Londra e Parigi’, in Luigi Sturzo, Aldo Moro et al. (eds), Luigi Sturzo. Saggi e Testimonianze (Rome: Edizione Civitas, 1960), pp. 123– 4. 17. Fabio Fernando Rizzi, Benedetto Croce and Italian Fascism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), pp. 74– 91. 18. Ibid., pp. 181–2; Gaetano Salvemini, ‘La politica di Benedetto Croce’, in Ibid., Scritti sul Fascismo, Opere VI (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1974), p. 451; Barbara Allason, Memorie di un’Anti-fascista, pp. 56 –60. 19. Rizzi, Benedetto Croce, pp. 183– 9, 193; Aldo Garosci, ‘Benedetto Croce antifascsita’, Resistenza 20/ 4 (1966), pp. 6–8; Benedetto Croce, Taccuini di Lavoro (Naples: Arte Tipografica, 1987). 20. Rizzi, Benedetto Croce, p. 188. 21. Aldo Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli (Rome: Edizioni U, 1945), vol. 1, pp. 291– 2; Allason, Memorie, pp. 73–4. 22. Vera Modigliani, Esilio (Milan: Garzanti, 1946), p. 97. 23. Henriette Noufflard Guy-Loe¨, ‘Elie e Florence Hale´vy’ in Maurizio Grifo e Gaetano Quagliarello (eds), Elie Hale´vy e l’era delle tirannie (Soveria Manneli: Rubbettino, 2001), pp. 18–23. 24. Se´bastien Laurent, Daniel Hale´vy. Du libe´ralisme au traditionalisme (Paris: Grasset, 2001), p. 201. 25. Andre´ Noufflard, Berthe Noufflard, Andre´ et Berthe Noufflard, leur vie, leur peinture, une e´vocation par leurs filles et leurs amis (Paris: Association des amis d’Andre´ et Berthe Noufflard, 1982), pp. 17 –32. 26. Ibid., pp. 129–30, 155; Laurent, Daniel Hale´vy, pp. 356–7. 27. Interview with Genevie`ve Noufflard, 31 August 2007. 28. Elie Hale´vy wrote a six-volume History of the British People in the Nineteenth Century (London: Ark, 1987). Cf. Anthony Hartley, ‘Elie Hale´vy, historien de l’Angleterre’, Contrepoint, 18 (1975), pp. 149–63.

292

Notes to Pages 142 – 146

29. Roberto Pertici ‘Varia presenza di Elie Hale´vy nella cultura italiana del novecento’, Cromohs n8 4 (1999), http://www.unif.it/riviste/ cromohs/4_99/pertici.html (accessed 20 November 2015). 30. Francois Beilecke, ‘L’Union pour la Ve´rite´ pendant l’entre-deux guerres’, in Francois Chaubet et al. (eds), Un sie`cle de rencontres intellectuelles, Pontigny-Cerisy (Paris: IMEC, 2005), pp. 39– 53; Anne Heurgon-Desjardins (ed.), Paul Desjardins et les De´cades de Pontigny: e´tudes, te´moignages et documents ine´dits (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964); Francois Chaubet, ‘Les de´cades de Pontigny (1910–1939)’, Vingtie`me Sie`cle, n8 57, (1998), pp. 36– 44. 31. Anne-Marie Duranton-Cabrol, Nicole Racine, Remy Rieffel (eds), Pontigny, Royaumont, Cerisy: au miroir du genre (Paris: Le Manuscrit, 2008), pp. 17 –19. 32. Gabriela Gribaudi, ‘La metafora della rete. Individuo e contesto sociale’, Meridiana,15 (1992), pp. 92– 3. 33. Carlo Rosselli to Giulio Zabban, 20 June 1933 quoted in Silvia De March, Amelia Rosselli tra poesia e storia (Napoli: l’Ancora, 2006), p. 21. 34. Giuseppe Fiori, Casa Rosselli (Turin: Einaudi, 1999), pp. 167–9. 35. Marion to Carlo Rosselli, 9 January 1932, in Carlo Rosselli, Dall’esilio. Lettere alla moglie, 1929–1937, edited by Costanzo Casucci (Florence: Passigli Editore, 1997), p. 132. 36. Emilio Lussu, La Catena, in Ibid., Tutte le Opere, Vol. 2. L’esilio antifascista 1927– 1943, edited by Manlio Brigalia (Cagliari, Aisara 2010), p. 4. 37. Michael Foot, The History of Mr. Wells (London: Doubleday, 1995). 38. John Rosselli, ‘Nello, and the Other Rossellis’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 6/3 (2001), pp. 422–8. 39. H.G. Wells, Ann Veronica (London: The Floating Press 2013); Marion to H.G. Wells, 11 November 1934, H.G. Wells Papers. 40. Jeanne MacKenzie and Norman MacKenzie, The Time Traveller – The Life of H.G. Wells (London: The Hogarth Press, 2nd revised edition, 1987), pp. 342– 3. 41. ‘Testimonianza di Rinata Buozzi’ in Alberto Schiavi (ed.), Vita e morte di Filippo Turati, 1926–1932 (Rome: Opere Nuove, 1956), pp. 502–9. 42. Renato Monteleone, Filippo Turati (Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1987), pp. 476– 9. 43. Fiori, Casa Rosselli, p. 141. 44. Aldo Garosci, Storia dei Fuorusciti (Rome–Bari: Laterza, 1953), pp. 74 –7; Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, vol. 1, pp. 247– 9. 45. Quoted in Paolo Palma, Una bomba per il Duce. La centrale Anti-fascista di Pacciardi a Lugano (1927–1933) (Soveria Manneli: Rubbettino 2003), p. 306, n. 29. 46. Richard Pankhurst, ‘Sylvia Pankhurst and the Italian Anti-Fascist Movement: The Women’s International Matteotti Committee’, Socialist History, 19 (2001), pp. 2–8, 21 –3; Sylvia Pankhurst, ‘Women under

Notes to Pages 146 – 149

47.

48.

49.

50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55.

56.

57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62.

293

Fascism’, Hibbert Journal, 34, (1936), 219–34; ‘Women Unite to Aid Matteotti Family’, New York Times, 24 August 1932. Letter from Amelia Rosselli to Carlo and Marion, 3 February 1932, in I Rosselli: epistolario familiare di Carlo, Nello, Amelia Rosselli, 1914–1937, edited by Zeffiro Ciuffoletti (Milan: Mondadori, 1997), p. 522. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 27 March 1932, M3208, RFA; Marion to Zia Gi’ Zabban, 16 May 1932, M2335, RFA. The Menshevik leader Dan was exiled from Russia in the early 1920s and lived in Berlin until 1933. He then moved to Paris and later to New York. Maiocchi, ‘Carlo Levi, peintre italien de Paris, dicembre 1931–settembre 1933’, pp. 63 –8. Levi’s Portrait of Carlo Rosselli is reproduced at p. 107. Marion to Ernesto Rossi, Januray 1932, in Elide Rossi, Lettere a Ernesto (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1958), p. 50. Ernesto Rossi, Elogio della galera, Lettere 1930–1943 (Bari: Laterza, 1968), pp. 88, 243, 289. Marion to Carlo Rosselli, 18 July 1932, Dall’esilio p. 139; Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 20 July 1932, CPC, b. 4421, fasc. Rosselli Carlo; Marion to Ada Rossi, 14 September 1932, ERP, E.R.6. Photos CPC, b. 4421, fasc. Carlo Rosselli. Marion to Ada Rossi, 14 September 1932, ERP, E.R.6. Carlo Rosselli to Amelia Rosselli, 3 September 1932, in I Rosselli, 532; Heurgon-Desjardins, Paul Desjardins, p. 406; Claire Paulhan, ‘Le reflet des de´cades de Pontigny a` travers journaux intimes et correspondances’, in Claire Paulhan (ed.), Un sie`cle de rencontres intellectuelles de Pontigny a` Cerisy (Paris: IMEC, 2005), p. 59. Paul Masson, Jean-Pierre Pre´vost (eds), L’Esprit de Pontigny (Paris, Editions Orizons,2014), pp. 187–92; Clara Malraux, Le bruit de nos pas, vol. 4, Voici que vient l’e´te´ (Paris: Grasset, 1973), pp. 49 –50, 72–6. Chaubet, Paul Desjardins, p. 238. Carlo Rosselli to Marion, 2 September1932, Dall’esilio, p. 142. Remy Rieffel, ‘Conclusions’, in Duranton-Cabrol, Pontigny, pp. 229–32; Malraux, Voici que vient l’e´te´, p. 50. Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, vol. 1, p. 293; Dominique Fernandez, Ramon (Paris: Grasset, 2009); Bernard Morlino, Emmanuel Berl: les tribulations d’un pacifiste (Paris: La Manufacture, 1990); Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 1 February 1933, Un’altra Italia Italia nell’Italia del fascismo. Carlo e Nello Rosselli nella documentazione dell’Archivio Centrale dello Stato (Rome: Edimond, 2002), p. 233. Danielle Tartakowsky, Les manifestations de rue en France, 1918–1968 (Paris: Publication de la Sorbonne, 1997), pp. 244–7; AN, F/7/13252. Gilles Vergnon, L’anti-fascisme en France de Mussolini a` Le Pen (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2009), pp. 42 –52; Bruno Groppo, ‘Les difficulte´s de mise en place d’une strate´gie anti-fasciste dans la gauche non-communiste des anne´es trente’ in Serge Wolikow,

294

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72.

73. 74. 75.

76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

85.

86. 87. 88.

Notes to Pages 149 – 154 Annie Bleton-Ruger (eds), Anti-fascisme et nation. Les gauches europe´ennes au temps du Front populaire (Dijon: EUD, 1998), pp. 68–73. ‘La Guerra che torna’, Quaderni di Giustizia e Liberta`, 9 (1933). Stanislao G. Pugliese, Carlo Rosselli, Socialist Heretic and Anti-Fascist Exile (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 182– 8. Marion to Zia Gi’ Zabban, 7 March 1933, RFA, M2344. Amelia Rosselli to Carlo Rosselli, 2 April 1933, I Rosselli, pp. 40–1. Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889– 1936. Hubris (New York: Norton, 1999), pp. 456– 9. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 21 April 1933, ACS, CPC, b. 4421, fasc. Rosselli, Carlo. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, Paris, 15 May 1933, RFA, M3179. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 30 June, RFA, M3177. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922 –1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 20 –37, pp. 51 –68; George Talbot, ‘Alberto Moravia and Italian Fascism: Censorship, Racism and Le ambizioni sbagliate’, Modern Italy 11/2 (2006), pp. 127–45. Alberto Moravia, Alain Elkann, Vita di Moravia (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1991), p. 65; Alberto Moravia, The Conformist (South Royalton, Vt.: Steeforth Press, 2011). Marion to Amelia Rosselli, Paris 12 June 1933, RFA, M3280. Ibid. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 6 July 1933, RFA, M3178; Marion to Zia Gi’ Zabban, 14 July 1933, RFA, M2345; Marion to Amelia Rosselli, RFA, M3290. Marion to Carlo Rosselli, 22 July 1933, Dall’esilio p. 151. CPC, b. 4421, fasc. Carlo Rosselli. Carlo Rosselli to Marion, 6 September 1933, Dall’esilio p. 154. Marion to Carlo Rosselli, 21 September 1933, Dall’esilio, p. 159; Luciano Bergonzini, Lo schiaffo a Toscanini: fascismo e cultura a Bologna all’inizio degli anni Trenta (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991). Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 2 October 1933, RFA M3286. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 23 October 1933, M3291. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 11 November 1933, Un’altra Italia, p. 240. Silvia Rosselli, Gli otto venti (Palermo: Sellirio Editore, 2008), p. 36. Harold E. Goad, Muriel Curray, The Working of a Corporate State (London: Nicholson & Watson, 1932); Claudia Baldoli, Exporting Fascism: Italian Fascists and Britain’s Italians in the 1930s (Oxford: Berg, 2003), p. 20. Marion to Carlo Rosselli, 5 January 1934, Dall’esilio p. 161; Carlo Rosselli to William Gillies, 6 January 1934, Gillies Papers, Labour Party Achives, WG/ITA/81. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 6 February 1934, in Un’altra Italia, p. 241. Brian Jenkins and Chris Millington, France and Fascism: February 1934 and the Dynamics of Political Crisis (London: Routledge, 2015). Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 6 February 1934, in Un’altra Italia, 241.

Notes to Pages 155 – 159

295

89. Julian Jackson, The Popular Front in France. Defending Democracy, 1934 –38 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 28 –38. 90. Jean Bastie´, Rene´ Pillorget, Nouvelle histoire de Paris. De 1914 a` 1940 (Paris: Bibliothe`que historique de la ville de Paris, 1997), p. 133. 91. Pugliese, Carlo Rosselli, pp. 150–4; Emilio Lussu, ‘Orientamenti’, Quaderni di Giustizia e Liberta`, 10 (1934), pp. 58– 72; Garosci, Storia dei Fuorusciti, p. 78– 9. 92. Paolo Mattera, Storia del PSI, 1892 – 1994 (Roma: Carocci, 2010), pp. 115– 22. 93. Giovanni De Luna, Storia del Partito d’Azione (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1982), pp. 30–1; Garosci, Storia dei Fuorusciti, pp. 82–3, 122–3; Gaetano Salvemini to Carlo Rosselli, 29 September 1935, GSP; Santi Fedele, ‘Salvemini e l’antifascismo. I rapporti con la Concentrazione e Giustizia e Liberta`’, in Gaetano Cingari (ed.), Gaetano Salvemini tra politica e storia (Bari: Laterza, 1986), pp. 400–1; Maulio Brigaglia, ‘Introduzione’, pp. liv–lvi. 94. Marion to Zia Gi’ Zabban, 25 February 1934, RFA, M2340; Carlo Rosselli to Zia Gi’ Zabban, 4 March 1934, RFA, M2337; Carlo to Amelia Rosselli, 4 March 1934, I Rosselli, p. 571. 95. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 3 May 1934, RFA M3302. 96. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 11 March 1934, RFA M3288; 3 May 1934, RFA, M3302; Marion to Zia Gi’ Zabban, 3 June 1934, RFA M2543; 5 June 1934, RFA M2336; Aldo Garosci, ‘Gli anni di Leo’, in Leo Ferrero, Il muro trasparente; Scritti di prosa e di teatro, ed. Manuela Scotti (Milan: Scheiwiller 1984), pp. 9 –24. 97. Mimmo Franzinelli, I tentacoli dell’OVRA. Agenti, collaboratori e vittime della political fascsita (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1999), pp. 283–91. Vittorio Foa was sentenced to 15 years in jail, and Carlo Levi was sent to the confino in Lucania where he wrote his famous book Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli; cf. Gigliola De Donato, Sergio D’Amaro Un torinese del Sud: Carlo Levi. Una biografia (Milan: Baldini Castoldi Dalai, 2005), pp. 99– 112. 98. Letter dated 8 August 1934 in Domenico Zuca`ro (ed.), Lettere di una spia (Milan: SugarCo, 1977), pp. 61– 2. 99. Marion to Zia Gi’ Zabban, 16 June 1934, RFA 2339. 100. Carlo Rosselli to Marion, 15 July 1934, Dall’esilio p. 167; Marion to Carlo Rosselli, 18 July 1934, Dall’esilio, p. 169. 101. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 12 September 1934, in Un’altra Italia, 244. 102. CPC, b. 1205, Cave, Marion in Rosselli. 103. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 14 October 1934, RFA, M3305. 104. Carlo Rosselli to Marion, 17 July 1934, MRP; Giuseppe Fiori, Casa Rosselli, p. 159. 105. Carlo Rosselli to Amelia Rosselli, 1 November 1934, I Rosselli, p. 575. 106. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 29 November 1934, RFA M3311. 107. Carlo Rosselli to Gaetano Salvemini, 20 December 1934, in Fra le righe, p. 225. 108. Marion to H.G. Wells, 11 November 1934, H.G. Wells Papers.

296 CHAPTER 9

Notes to Pages 160 – 163 THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL

1. Marion to Carlo Rosselli, 16 July 1934, in Carlo Rosselli, Dall’esilio. Lettere alla moglie, 1929–1937, edited by Costanzo Casucci (Florence: Passigli Editore, 1997), p. 168. 2. Marion to Zia Gi’ Zabban, 7 January 1935, RFA, M2338. 3. Francoise The´baud, Quand nos grand-me`res donnaient la vie: la maternite´ en France dans l’entre-deux-guerres (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1986), pp. 19 –20. 4. Amelia Rosselli to Marion, 2 February 1935, RFA, C3260; Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 16 February 1935, RFA, M3316. 5. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 15 March 1935, RFA 3314. 6. Amelia Rosselli to Nello Rosselli, 4 April 1935, CPC busta 4422 fasc. 11057, Rosselli Sabatino; Amelia Rosselli to Marion, 12 March 1935, RFA, C3267; Carlo Rosselli to Gaetano Salvemini, 9 March 1935, in Fra le righe: Carteggio fra Carlo Rosselli e Gaetano Salvemini, edited by Elisa Signori (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2009) p. 239; Marion to Egidio Reale, 29 March 1935, in Giovanni Spadolini, Il Partito della democrazia (Florence: Passigli Editore, 1984), pp. 62–3. 7. Carlo Rosselli to Gaetano Salvemini, 9 March 1935, Fra le righe, pp. 239–40. 8. Letter from Lussu to Rosselli quoted in Giuseppe Fiori, Il cavaliere dei Rossomori. Vita di Emilio Lussu (Turin: Einaudi, 2000), p. 287; Manlio Brigaglia, ‘Introduzione’ in Emilio Lussu, Tutte le opere, vol. 2: L’esilio antifascista 1927–1943 (Cagliari: Aisara, 2010), edited by Mauro Manlio, pp. lvii–lviii. 9. Giustizia e Liberta`, 1 March 1935. 10. Charles Killinger, Gaetano Salvemini. A Biography (Westport: Praeger, 2003), pp. 270–1; ACS, CPC b. 5029, Tarchiani Alberto. 11. Aldo Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli (Rome: Edizioni U, 1945), vol. 2, pp. 104– 5. 12. ‘Leone Ginzburg’, Giustizia e Liberta`, 21 December 1934; ‘Cresce il terrore in Italia’, Giustizia e Liberta`, 24 May 1935; Mario Giovana, Giustizia e Liberta` in Italia. Storia di una cospirazione antifascista (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2005), pp. 395–449. 13. Marion to Nello Rosselli, 31 May 1935, RFA, M3291. 14. ‘Perche` siamo contro la Guerra d’Africa’, Giustizia e Liberta`, 8 March 1935. 15. John Rosselli, ‘Paris in the Thirties – A Political Childhood’, The Twentieth Century 154/913 (1957), p. 27. 16. Amelia Rosselli to ‘Charlino’, 9 June 1935, RFA, C3271; Marion to Carlo Rosselli, 13 June 1935, Dall’esilio p. 173; Amelia Rosselli to Carlo Rosselli, 16 June 1935, RFA, C3272. 17. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 28 July 1935, RFA M3321. 18. Spadolini, Il partito della democrazia, pp. 61–3; Sonia Castro, Egidio Reale tra Italia, Svizzera e Europa (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2011); Nanda Torcellan,

Notes to Pages 163 – 166

19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

297

‘Per una biografia di Carlo a Prato’, Italia Contemporanea, XXVIII (1976), pp. 2 –48. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 28 July 1935, RFA, M3321. Herbert Lottman, The Left Bank: Writers, Artists, and Politics from the Popular Front to the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 83–94; Enzo Tagliacozzo, ‘Nota biografica’ in Ernesto Sestan (ed.), Gaetano Salvemini (Rome: Bari, Laterza, 1959), pp. 264–6; Michel Winock, Le sie`cle des intellectuels (Paris: Seuil 2004), pp. 317– 18; Carlo Rosselli to Marion, 25 June 1935, Dall’esilio p. 187. Salvemini to Carlo Rosselli, 2 July 1935, Fra le righe, p. 240. Nello Rosselli to Marion, 20 July 1935; 30 July 1935, in Paolo Bagnoli (ed.), Una famiglia nella lotta (Florence: Polistampa, 2007), pp. 96 –9. Marion to Carlo Rosselli, 22 June 1935, Dall’esilio p. 188; Marion to Carlo Rosselli, 13 July 1935, Dall’esilio, pp. 199–200. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 1 August 1935, RFA, M3322. Carlo Rosselli to Gaetano Salvemini, 5 August 1935, Fra le righe, pp. 241– 2. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 4 August 1935, RFA M3320; Carlo Rosselli to Gaetano Salvemini, 7 August 1935, Fra le righe, p. 243. Carlo Rosselli to Gaetano Salvemini, 7 August 1935; 17 August 1935, Fra le righe, pp. 243, 245. Carlo Rosselli to Gaetano Salvemini, 22 August 1935, Fra le Righe, p. 247; Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 26 August 1935, RFA, M2343. Marion to Zia Gi’ Zabban, 26 August 1935, RFA, M2343. Antoine Goldet, who was of Jewish descent, joined the Free French in London in June 1940 and became a pilot with the RAF. Marion to Amelia, 26 August 1935, RFA, M3325; George Meredith, Diana of the Crossways (London: Constable, 1912); E.M. Forster, A Passage to India (London: Edward Arnold, 1967). Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 28 August 1935, RFA, M3324. ‘Manifeste des intellectuels francais pour la de´fense de l’Occident et la paix en Europe’, Le Temps, 4 October 1935; ‘La Guerra’, Giustizia e Liberta`, 4 October 1935; Jean Francois Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions francaises (Paris: Fayard, 1990), pp. 92, 96 –7. David I. Kertzer, The Pope and Mussolini. The Secret History of Pius IX and the Rise of Fascism in Europe (New York: Random House, 2014), pp. 228–9; Fabio Ferdinando Rizzi, Benedetto Croce and Italian Fascism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), p. 219. ‘Il giorno della fede’: can be translated either as ‘the day of faith’ or ‘the day of the wedding ring’. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 27 November 1935, RFA, M3282. ACS, CPC, b. 1205, Cave, Marion in Rosselli, note dated 21 January 1936. Marion to Carlo Rosselli, 28 January 1936, Dall’esilio p. 210. Marion to Carlo Rosselli, 10 February 1936, Dall’esilio, 212; Marion to Carlo Rosselli, 22 March 1936, Dall’esilio, 234.

298

Notes to Pages 166 – 171

38. Amelia to Marion, 4 February 1936 and 11 February 1936, in Bagnoli, Una famiglia nella lotta, pp. 102–3. 39. Stanislao Pugliese, Carlo Rosselli. Socialist Heretic and Anti-Fascist Exile (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 87 –8; Marion to Carlo Rosselli, 17 March 1936, Dall’esilio pp. 213–14. 40. Carlo Rosselli to Gina Ferrero, 6 March 1936 and 9 March 1936, in Marina Calloni and Lorella Cedroni (eds), Politica e affetti familiari (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1997), pp. 72, 74. 41. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 4 April 1936, ASF, Pincherle Amelia, vedova Rosselli. 42. Carlo Rosselli to Gaetano Salvemini, 12 May 1936, Fra le righe, p. 275. 43. Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, vol. 2, 154–5. 44. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 10 June 1936, in Un’altra Italia: nell’Italia del fascismo. Carlo e Nello Rosselli nella documentazione dell’Archivio Centrale dello Stato (Rome: Edimond, 2002), p. 258; 45. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 28 June 1936, RFA, M3260. 46. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 10 July 1936, RFA, M3262; 25 July, RFA M3266. 47. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 25 July 1936, RFA M3266. 48. Le´on Blum, Marriage (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1937); Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 9 August 1936, RFA, M3267; 10 August 1936, RFA, M3263. 49. Paul Preston, The Coming of the Spanish Civil War: Reform, Reaction and Revolution in the Second Republic (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 239– 75. 50. Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, vol. 2, p. 157; Aldo Garosci, Storia dei Fuorusciti (Rome– Bari: Laterza, 1953), p. 17. 51. Giulia Canali, L’anti-fascismo italiano e la guerra civile spagnola (Lecce: Manni, 2004), pp. 11– 28. 52. Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, vol. 2, pp. 162– 3. 53. Ibid., pp. 165–6, 172; Marco Bresciani, Quale antifascismo? Storia di Giustizia e Liberta` (Roma: Carocci, 2017), pp. 196–7; Walter G. Langlois, ˜ a de ‘Les “avions pour l’Espagne”. La naissance de l’escadrille Espan ˆ t 1936)’, in Christine Moatti (ed.), Malraux vue des coulisses (juillet– aou Malraux lecteur (Paris: Lettres Modernes, Minard, 2001), pp. 154–60. 54. Carlo Rosselli to Marion, 3 August 1936, MRP, F. 2, sf 5, scatola 3. 55. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 8 August 1936, RFA, M3268. 56. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 16 August 1936, RFA, M3276. 57. Ibid.; Carlo Rosselli to Marion, Barcelona, 19 August 1936, Dall’esilio p. 221. 58. Ibid., p. 222. 59. Postcard from Berthe Pritchard to Don Sturzo, signed G & L Ferrero, Marion Rosselli, Paola Lombroso, LSP, f. 328 c. 66. 60. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 23 August 1936, RFA, M3272. 61. Carlo Rosselli to Marion, 31 August 1936, Dall’esilio, p. 229.

Notes to Pages 171 – 176

299

62. Carlo Rosselli to Marion, Aragonese Front, 23 August 1936 and 31 August 1936, Dall’esilio, pp. 226–7. 63. Garosci, Storia dei Fuorusciti, pp. 148–51; Bresciani, Quale antifascismo? pp. 198–9; ‘La colonna italiana si batte vittoriosamente davanti a Huesca. Durissima battaglia di Monte Pelato’, Giustizia e Liberta`, 4 September 1936. For a recent comprehensive study of the early Italian anti-fascist engagement in Spain cf. Enrico Acciai, Antifascismo, volontariato e Guerra civile in Spagna. La sezione italiana della Colonna Ascaso (Milan: Unicopoli, 2016). 64. Carlo Rosselli to Marion, 31 August 1936, in Carlo Rosselli, Oggi in Spagna, domani in Italia (Turin: Einaudi, 1967), p. 48. 65. Carlo Rosselli to Marion, 5 October 1936, Dall’esilio, pp. 239–40; Garosci, Storia dei Fuorusciti, pp. 152–3; Canali, L’anti-fascismo italiano, pp. 32 –4. 66. Victor Serge, Retour a` l’Ouest. Chroniques, Juin 1936 –Mai 1940 (Marseilles: Agone, 2010), p. 187. 67. Carlo Rosselli to Marion, 8 November 1936, Dall’esilio, p. 251. 68. ‘Oggi in Spagna, domani in Italia’, 13 November 1936, in Carlo Rosselli, Sritti dall’esilio, vol. 2, Dallo scioglimento della Concentrazione Anti-fascista alla Guerra di Spagna (1934–1937), edited by Costanzo Casucci (Turin: Einaudi, 1922), pp. 424–8. Translation by Pugliese, Carlo Rosselli, p. 208. 69. Ibid., p. 208. 70. Carlo Rosselli to Alberto Cianca, 13 December 1936, Dall’esilio, pp. 262–5; Carlo Rosselli to Marion, 26 November 1936, Dall’esilio, pp. 258–9; Claudio Venza, ‘Oggi in Spagna, domani in Italia’, in Mario Isnenghi and Giulia Albaneser (eds), Gli Italiani in Guerra, vol. IV, t. 1, Il Ventennio fascista. Da l’impresa di Fiume alla Seconda Guerra Mondiale (1919–1940), (Turin: UTET, 2008), pp. 681– 7. 71. Clara Malraux, Le bruit de nos pas, vol. 4, Voici que vient l’e´te´ (Paris: Grasset, 1973), p. 50. 72. Carlo Rosselli to Marion, 22 December 1936, Dall’esilio p. 270; Dominique Bona, Clara Malraux. Biographie (Paris: Grasset, 2010), pp. 295–6. 73. Marion to Carlo Rosselli, 29 December 1936, Dall’esilio, pp. 272– 4.

CHAPTER 10

DEATH IN NORMANDY

1. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 4 January 1937, RFA, M3223. 2. Carlo Rosselli to Marion, 16 December 1936, in Carlo Rosselli, Dall’esilio. Lettere alla moglie, 1929–1937, edited by Costanzo Casucci (Florence: Passigli Editore, 1997), p. 266; Marion to Carlo Rosselli, 29 December 1936, Dall’esilio, p. 273. 3. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 15 February 1937, RFA, M3256. 4. Herbert Lottman, The Left Bank.Writers, Artists and Politics from the Popular Front to the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 102–11; Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 11 February 1937, RFA, M3180.

300

Notes to Pages 176 – 181

5. Giuseppe Fiori, Casa Rosselli (Turin: Einaudi, 1999), p. 169; Marion to Ernesto Rossi, 10 October 1946, in Ernesto Rossi, Epistolario 1943–67, edited by Mimmo Franzinelli (Rome: Laterza, 2007), pp. 68 –70. 6. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 17 March 1937, ASF, Pincherle, Amelia, vedova Rosselli; Anna Morelli, ‘Don Sturzo face a` la guerre d’Espagne et spe´cialement au proble`me de la Catalogne et du Pays Basque’, Sociologia, 24 (1990), pp. 15–37; Roberto Festorazzi, Il segreto del conformista. Vita di Giacomo Antonini, l’uomo che spio’ Carlo Rosselli ispirando Moravia (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2009), pp. 80 –1. 7. Amelia Rosselli to Carlo Rosselli and Marion, 19 March 1937, RFA, C3309. 8. Carlo Rosselli to Gina Ferrero, 29 March 1937, in Marina Calloni and Lorella Cedroni (eds), Politica e Affetti Familiari (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1997), p. 78; Marion to Zia Gi’ Zabban, 1 April 1937, RFA, M3221. 9. Charles F. Delzell, Mussolini’s enemies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 155–6; Stanislao Pugliese, Carlo Rosselli. Heretic Socialist and Anti-fascist Exile (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 211–18; Eric Vial, L’Union Populaire italienne, 1937 –1940 (Rome: Ecole Francaise de Rome, 2007), pp. 50– 1; Charles Killinger, Gaetano Salvemini. A Biography (Westport: Praeger, 2003), pp. 270– 1. 10. ‘Documenti sulla rotta fascista a Guadalajara’, Giustizia e Liberta`, 26 March 1937; ‘Tra I prigionieri italiani’, Giustizia e Liberta`, 16 April 1937, Giustizia e Liberta` 23 April 1937. 11. Letter from Milan to Marion Cave, 4 May 1937, MRP; Aldo Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli (Rome: Edizioni U, 1045), vol. 2, pp. 259– 62. 12. Delzell, Mussolini’s Enemies, pp. 153– 4; the ‘May events’ in Barcelona are the subject of George Orwell’s famous book, Homage to Catalonia (London: Penguin Classics, 2000). 13. Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, vol. 2, p. 270. 14. Paolo Vittorelli, L’eta` della tempesta (Milan: Rizzoli, 1981), pp. 28 –9. 15. Mimmo Franzinelli, Il delitto Rosselli, 9 giugno 1937, anatomia di un omicidio (Milan: Mondadori, 2007), p. 99. 16. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 2 May 1937, RFA, C673. 17. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 15 May 1937, RFA, M3257. 18. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 23 May 1937, RFA, M3258; Marion to Amelia Rosselli, Bagnoles, 28 May 1937, RFA2684. 19. Franzinelli, Il delitto Rosselli, p. 99. 20. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 23 May 1937, RFA, M3258; 28 May 1937, RFA, M2684; 29 May 1937, RFA, M352; Marion to Zia Gi’ Zabban, 5 June 1937, RFA, C2494. 21. Alberto Tarchiani, ‘Giustizia e Liberta` a Parigi’ in Alberto Tarchiani (ed.), Quaderni di Giustizia e Liberta` (Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1959), p. 17. 22. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 9 June 1937, RFA, M2057; Marion to John Rosselli, 9 June 1937, Dall’esilio, p. 276; Franzinelli, Il delitto Rosselli, p. 100.

Notes to Pages 181 – 186 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39. 40.

41. 42.

43. 44. 45.

301

Tarchiani, ‘Giustizia e Liberta` a Parigi’, p. 18. Carlo Rosselli to his son, 9 June 1937, Dall’esilio, p. 276. ‘La tragique e´nigme de Bagnoles-de-l’Orne’, Le Journal, 12 June 1937. Filliol, Jakubiez, Puireux, Baillet in the Peugeot and Fauran, Bouvier and Alice Lamy, Filliol’s mistress in the Oldsmobile. Franzinelli, Il delitto Rosselli, pp. 101–2. Ibid., pp. 103–5. John Rosselli, ‘Death of my Father’, The Twentieth Century 168/1002 (1960), pp. 127–37. ‘Babbo’ means daddy in Italian. Amelia Rosselli, interview in Giacinto Spagnoletti (ed.), Amelia Rosselli. Antologia Poetica (Milan: Garzanti, 1987), pp. 149–50. Translation by Stanislao Pugliese, Carlo Rosselli, p. 231. Zeffiro Ciuffoletti,‘L’annello forte della famighia Rosselli. Lettere di Amelia Pincherle Rosselli a Maria, 1937’, Nuova Antologia, n8 2202 (1997), p. 31. ACS Segreteria particolare del Duce, 12 Giugno 1937, SPD, CR, b. 77. Silvia Rosselli, Gli Otto Venti (Palermo: Sellerio, 2008), pp. 26, 59. ‘Aged Novelist Mother is Told Her Two Sons Were Stabbed’, Daily Express, 14 June 1937; ‘L’assassinio’, Giustizia e Liberta`, 18 June 1937. John Rosselli, ‘Death of my Father’, p. 133. Silvia Rosselli, Gli otto venti, p. 43. ‘Rosselli Murder. A Political Crime’, The Times, 14 June 1937; ‘Two Exiled Foes of Fascism Slain’, New York Times, 12 June 1937; ‘Rosselli Murder Yields Few Clues’, New York Times, 13 June 1937; Roberto Festorazzi, Il segreto del Conformista, pp. 92– 3. ‘Deux cadavres d’Italiens Anti-fascistes dans une foreˆt’, Le Temps, 13 June 1937; Andre´ Touret, Marx Dormoy (1888–1941). Maire de Montlucon, ministre du Front Populaire (Montlucon: Editions CREER, 1998), pp. 172– 3. ‘Dichiarazione di Giustizia e Liberta`’; ‘Dichiarazione unitaria dell’antifascismo’, Giustizia e Liberta`, 18 June 1937. ‘M. Carlo Rosselli amnistie´ par le gouvernement italien devait rentrer dans son pays’, Le Figaro, 14 June 1937; ‘Carlo Rosselli avait-il offert sa collaboration a` M. Mussolini ?’, Le Matin, 12 June 1937; ‘Le myste´rieux assassinat des fre`res Rosselli’, La Liberte´, 13 June 1937. ‘The Murder of Rosselli. A False Report: Views from Italians in France’, Manchester Guardian, 15 June 1937. ‘Carlo Rosselli: He never flinched in his Anti-fascist activity’ Letter to the Editor signed by G.P. Gooch, Isabel M. Massey, Bertha Pritchard, The Times, 16 June 1937. The Times, 18 June 1937. Quoted in Franzinelli, Il delitto Rosselli, p. 109. Vera Modigliani, Esilio (Milan: Garzanti, 1946), pp. 263–4. John Rosselli, ‘Death of my Father’, p. 75.

302

Notes to Pages 186 – 191

46. Pietro Nenni quoted in Manlio Brigaglia, ‘Introduzione’ in Emilio Lussu, tutte le opere, 2. L’esilio antifascista, 1927 – 1943 (Caglliari: Aisara, 2010), p. lxxviii; Pietro Nenni, Il vento del Nord (Turin: Einaudi, 1978), p. 268. 47. Emilio Lussu, ‘Alcuni ricordi di Carlo Rosselli’, Il Ponte 3/6 (1947), p. 507; Emilio Lussu, ‘Carlo Rosselli dieci anni fa`’, Giustizia e Liberta`, 25 June 1937. 48. Gaetano Salvemini to Marion Rosselli, 1 May 1937, GSP. 49. Gaetano Salvemini to Isabel Massey, 13 June 1937, GSP; Ibid., 20 June 1937, GSP. 50. Ernesto Rossi, Nove anni sono molti. Lettere dal carcere, 1930 –39 (Turin: Bollato Boringhieri, 2011), pp. xciv– xcv. 51. Many years later, Raymond Aron would recall having spent a weekend with the two brothers at the Hale´vy’s three days before their death. But this is impossible because Elie and Florence Hale´vy were in Great Britain from mid-May to mid-June and Nello did not visit them on the occasion of his trip to Bagnoles. Cf. Raymond Aron, ‘Historien et philosophe’, Contrepoint, n8 18 (1975), p. 166. 52. Hale´vy to Von Meyendorff, London 13 June 1937; Hale´vy to Ganrielle Le´on, London 15 June, in Elie Hale´vy, Correspondance, 1891–1937, edited by Henriette Guy-Loe¨ (Paris: de Fallois, 1996), pp. 745, 747. 53. Gaetano Salvemini, ‘Il mandante’, Giustizia e Liberta`, 19 July 1937. 54. Alessandro Levi, Ricordi dei fratelli Rosselli (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1947), p. 215. 55. The photo album of the funeral is accessible online on the site of the ISTORETO in Turin, http://www.metarchivi.it/dett_documento.asp? id ¼ 8266&tipo ¼ fascicoli_documenti; Alessandro Levi, Ricordi dei fratelli Rosselli, 216. 56. ‘Les e´mouvantes obse`ques de Carlo et Nello Rosselli’, Le Populaire, 20 June 1937; ‘I funerali di Carlo e Nello Rosselli sono stati un’apoteosi’, Giustizia e Liberta`, 25 June 1937. 57. Le Populaire, 20 June 1937; Giustizia e Liberta`, 25 June 1937. 58. ‘I funerali di Carlo e Nello Rosselli sono stati un’apoteosi’, Giustizia e Liberta`, 25 June 1937. 59. Note from Paris, 21 June 1937, ACS, PS, fp.b.79/A. 60. Levi, Ricordi, p. 217. The bodies of Carlo and Nello Rosselli were transferred to Florence in 1951, but their empty tomb is still in the Pe`re Lachaise. Alessandro Giacone, ‘La traslazione delle spoglie di Carlo e Nello Rosselli a Firenze’, in Alessandro Giacone e Eric Vial (eds), I Fratelli Rosselli, l’anti-fascismo e l’esilio (Roma: Carocci, 2011), pp. 165–73. 61. Marion to Gina Ferrero, 26 June 1937, in Marina Calloni and Lorella Cedroni (eds), Politica e Affetti Familiari (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1997), p. 240. 62. Maria to Amelia Rosselli, 30 June 1937, AST, Pincherle Amelia; Amelia Rosselli, edited by Marina Calloni (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001), pp. 241–2.

Notes to Pages 192 – 196 CHAPTER 11

303

HOPE AGAINST HOPE

1. John Rosselli, ‘Death of my Father’, The Twentieth Century 168/1002 (1960), p. 135. 2. Amelia to Carlo Pincherle Moravia, 17 July 1937, in Un’altra Italia nell’Italia del fascismo. Carlo e Nello Rosselli nella documentazione dell’Archivio Centrale dello Stato (Rome: Edimond, 2002), p. 262. 3. Amelia to Gina Ferrero, Paris 10 July 1937, in Marina Calloni and Lorella Cedroni (eds), Politica e Affetti Familiari (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1997), p. 230. 4. Letter from Berthe Noufflard to Florence Hale´vy, 27 June 1937. FHP; interview with Claude Joxe-Nabokov, Paris, September 2007. Francoise was the daughter of Daniel Hale´vy. She married Louis Joxe who would join De Gaulle’s Free French during the war and become a minister in De Gaulle’s government in the 1960s. Their son Pierre Joxe was a minister in Francois Mitterrand’s government. 5. John Rosselli, ‘Death of my Father’, p. 134. 6. Ibid., ‘Paris in the Thirties – A political Childhood’, Twentieth Century 154/913 (1957), p. 27. 7. Ibid., ‘Death of my Father’, p. 133. 8. Amelia to Maria, 30 June 1937, in Zeffiro Ciuffoletti, ‘L’”anello forte” della famiglia Rosselli’, Nuova Antologia, 2002 (1997), p. 39. 9. Patrizia Gabrielli, ‘Reti familiari e lotta anti-fascista: la famiglia Rosselli’, Italia Contemporanea, 250 (2008), pp. 177–81. 10. Marion to Father Bear, 30 August 1937, RFA, M3254. 11. Henriette Noufflard Guy-Loe¨, ‘Florence Hale´vy. Portrait d’une femme en son sie`cle’, in Florence et Elie Hale´vy, Six jours en URSS, Septembre 1932. Re´cit de voyage ine´dit (Paris: Presses de l’Ecole Normale Supe´rieure, 1998), p. 132. 12. Marion to Father Bear, 30 August 1937, RFA M3254. 13. Marion to Egidio Reale, 9 October 1937, in Giovani Spadolini, Il partito della democrazia (Florence: Passigli Editore, 1984), p. 64. 14. Ibid. 15. Amelia Rosselli to Maria Todesco, 5 October 1937, in Ciuffoletti, ‘L’“anello forte” della famiglia Rosseli’, p. 40. 16. Amelia Rosselli to Giorgina Zaban, 7 October 1937, AST, Pincherle, Amelia. 17. Giuseppe Fiori, Casa Rosselli (Turin: Einaudi, 1999), p. 214. 18. Alberto Tarchiani, ‘Giustizia e Liberta` a Parigi’, in Alberto Tarchiani (ed.), Quaderni di Giustizia e Liberta` (Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1959), pp. 18 –19; Manlio Brigaglia, Emilio Lussu e Giustizia e Liberta`, (Cagliari: Edizioni della Torre, 1976), pp. 175–6; Giovanni De Luna, ‘Giustizia e Liberta`’, in L’Italia in esilio. L’emigrazione italiana in Francia tra le due guerre (Rome: Presidenza del consiglio dei ministri, 1993), pp. 314 –15; Charles F. Delzell, Mussolini’s Enemies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 164–6; Elisa Signori, Marina Tesoro, Il Verde e il Rosso. Fernando

304

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

Notes to Pages 196 – 200 Schiavetti e gli Anti-fascisti nell’esilio fra repubblicanismo e socialismo (Florence: Le Monnier 1987), pp. 255– 65. Mimmo Franzinelli, Il delitto Rosselli, 9 giugno 1937, anatomia di un omicidio (Milan: Mondadori, 2007), p. 132; ACS, PS, fp, b. 79/A, Rome 10 November 1937. Fabiano Fernando Rizzi, Benedetto Croce and Italian Fascism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), p. 189; Giorgio Amendola, L’ıˆle (Paris: Liana Levi, 1983), p. 226; Giovanni Grasso (ed.), Luigi Sturzo e I Rosselli tra Londra, Parigi e New York, Carteggio (1929–1945) (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2003), p. 27. ‘Marion Rosselli agli Italiani’, Giustizia e Liberta`, 22 October 1937. Don Minzoni was an Anti-Fascist Catholic priest assassinated in August 1923 by fascist thugs; Gastone Sozzi, was an Italian communist who died under torture in Mussolini’s jails in 1933. For Robert Winton Wiley’s activities in Italy on behalf of Giustizia e Liberta`, see Isabelle Richet. ‘The “Irresponsibility of the Outsider”? American Expatriates and Italian Fascism,’ Transatlantica, 1 (2014), http:// transatlantica.revues.org/6853. For the situation in France, see Serge Bernstein, La France des Anne´es Trente (Paris: Armand Colin, 2011), pp. 153–74. Statement by the Secretary of the Committee for the International Conference against the Fascist Terror, Labour Party Archives, William Gillies Papers, WG/ITA/269. Marion to Maria Rosselli, 2 November 1937, RFA, S4730. Marion Rosselli to William Gillies, 30 November 1937, Labour Party Archives, William Gillies Papers, WG/ITA/267, WG/ITA/270; Marion Rosselli to H.G. Wells, 30 November 1937, H.G. Wells Papers. Silvia Rosselli, Gli otto venti (Palermo: Sellerio, 2008), p. 62. Ibid., p. 60; Alessandro Levi, Ricordi dei fratelli Rosselli (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1947), p. 213. Amelia Rosselli to Giorgina Zaban, 31 December 1937, quoted in Amelia Rosselli, Memorie, edited by Marina Calloni (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001), p. 245. Ibid., p. 112; Fiori, Casa Rosselli, pp. 212–13. Leonardo Rapone, ‘L’anti-fascismo tra Italia e Europa’, in Alberto de Bernardi and Paolo Ferrari eds, Anti-fascismo e identita` europea (Rome: Carocci, 2004), p. 21. Philippe Bourdel, La Cagoule (Paris: Albin Michel, 1992) pp. 153–69; AN, BB830615 Dossier assassinat des fre`res Rosselli; Aldo Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselil (Rome: Edizioni U, 1945), vol. 2, p. 281. Amelia Rosselli to Marion, 11 February 1938, RFA, M3104. Bourdel, La Cagoule, p. 152; Mimmo Franzinelli, Il diletto Rosselli, p. 157. ‘Dichiarazione di Marion Rosselli’, Giustizia e Liberta`, 14 January 1938. Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, vol. 2, pp. 282– 3. Berthe Noufflard to Florence Hale´vy, 11 June 1938, FHP. Genevie`ve Noufflard to Florence Hale´vy, 13 June 1938, FHP.

Notes to Pages 200 – 204

305

38. Amelia Rosselli to Marion, 24 June 1938, RFA, M3109; Berthe Noufflard to Florence Hale´vy, 21 June 1938, FHP. 39. Mirtillino to Marion, 25 June 1938, MRP. 40. Berthe Noufflard to Florence Hale´vy, 22 July 1938, FHP; Andre´ Noufflard to Florence Hale´vy, 23 July 1938, FHP. 41. Berthe Noufflard to Florence Hale´vy, 9 August 1938, FHP; Amelia to Marion, 25 July 1938, RFA, M3096. 42. Marion to ‘Carissimo Father Bear’, 17 August 1938, GSP. Of Italian birth, Giorgio La Piana moved to the United States in 1913 and became an American citizen in 1918. Critical of the Roman church hierarchy in general and of its support of Mussolini in particular, he was in contact with the anti-fascist milieu in the United States and supported many exiles, including Salvemini as we can gather from their extensive correspondence. Cf. Gaetano Salvemini, Lettere Americane, 1927–49, edited by Renato Camurri (Rome: Donzelli, 2015). 43. AN, Universite´ de la Sorbonne, Faculte´ des Sciences, Register 1938–1939. 44. Michele Sarfati, ‘Characteristics and Objectives of the Anti-Jewish Racial Laws in Fascist Italy, 1938–1943’, in Joshua D. Zimmerman (ed.), Jews in Italy under Fascist and Nazi Rule, 1922 –1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 72 –7; Michael Livingston, The Fascists and the Jews of Italy. Mussolini’s Race Laws, 1938– 43 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 2–3; Alberto Marcolin, Firenze in Camicia nera (Florence: Medicea, 1993), pp. 232–3. 45. Silvia Rosselli, Gli otto venti, p. 63. 46. Amelia Rosselli to Egidio Reale, 20 November 1938, in Spadolini, Il partito della democrazia, pp. 63 –4. 47. Genevie`ve Dreyfus-Armand, L’exil des Re´publicains espagnols en France (Paris: Albin Michel, 1999); Stefania Prezioso, ‘“Aujourd’hui en Espagne, demain en Italie”. L’exil Anti-fasciste italien et la prise d’armes re´volutionnaire’, Vingtie`me Sie`cle, 93 (2007), p. 91. 48. Berthe Noufflard to Florence Hale´vy, 28 February 1939, FHP. 49. Franzinelli, Il Delitto Rosselli, pp. 171–3. 50. The Manchester Guardian, 13 April 1939. 51. Francoise Joxe to Florence Hale´vy, 20 May 1939, FHP; Francoise Joxe to Marion, 21 May 1939, 24 May 1939, 28 May 1939, CR, Appendice, Inserto I, n. 4. 52. Ibid., 8 June 1939, 10 June 1939, CR, Appendice, Inserto I, 4; Giustizia e Liberta`, 15 June 1939. 53. Francoise Joxe to Marion, Sunday (no date but probably 19 June 1939), CR, Appendice, Inserto I, 4. 54. Diploma dated 24 June 1939; Universite´ de la Sorbonne, Archive Faculte´ des Sciences, AG16 5314. 55. Georg Kreis, ‘Swiss Refugee Policy 1933 – 45’, in Georg Kreis (ed.), Switzerland and World War II (London: Frank Kass, 2000), pp. 103–31.

306

Notes to Pages 204 – 208

56. Amelia to Gina Ferrero, 18 September 1939, in Calloni and Cedroni, Politica e affetti familiari, p. 205. 57. Amelia Rosseli to Gina Lombroso-Ferrero, Eastbourne 25 July 1939, in Calloni and Cedroni, Politica e affetti familiari, p. 202; Francoise Joxe to Florence Hale´vy, 5 August 1939, FHP. 58. ‘Crisi di un ideale’, Giustizia e Liberta`, 26 August 1939; Signori and Tesoro, Il Verde e il Rosso, pp. 330–3. 59. Amelia Rosselli to Gina Ferrero, 18 October 1939, in Calloni and Cedroni, Politica e affetti familiari, p. 207; Silvia Rosselli, Gli otto venti, pp. 65 –6; Berthe Pritchard to Luigi Sturzo, 4 October 1939, f 553, c. 10; 15 October 1939, f 553, c. 12, LSP. 60. Ibid., f 339, 68; Amelia to Gina Ferrero, 8 December 1939, Calloni and Cedroni, Politica e affetti familiari, p. 209; Marion to Francoise Joxe, 19 April 1943, FJP. 61. Interview with Claude Joxe-Nabokoff, 24 August 2007. 62. Ibid; Gaetano Salvemini to Isabel Massey, 4 February 1940, 4 June 1940, GSP. 63. Interview with Claude Joxe-Nabokoff, 24 August 2007; Marion to Francoise Joxe, 19 April 1943, FJP. 64. Marion to Gioacchino Dolci, 27 August 1940, AGL, b. 18, fondi vari. 65. Gaetano Salvemini to Isabel Massey, 8 July 1940 GSP; Amelia Rosselli to Gina Ferrero, 11 September 1940, in Calloni and Cedroni, Politica e affetti familiari, p. 219. 66. Silvia Rosselli, Gli otto venti, p. 71; Interview with Melina Rosselli, in Amelia Rosselli, Antologia Poetica, ed. Giacinto Spagnoletti (Milan: Garzanti, 1987), p. 150.

CHAPTER 12

SO FAR AWAY FROM ITALY

1. Amelia Rosselli to Valeria De Angeli, 2 September 1940, in Un’altra Italia nell’Italia del fascismo. Carlo e Nello Rosselli nella documentazione dell’Archivio Centrale dello Stato (Rome: Edimond, 2002), p. 264; Marion to Isabel Massey, 4 September 1940, GSP; Marina Calloni, ‘Amelia tra Italia, Europa e Stati Uniti (1927–1954)’ in Amelia Rosselli, Memorie, edited by Marina Calloni (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001), p. 247. 2. Gaetano Salvemini to Max Ascoli, 29 August 1940, MAP, Box 203/ Salvemini; Calloni, ‘Amelia tra Italia, Europa et Stati Uniti’, pp. 247–8. 3. Amelia Rosselli to Valeria De Angeli, 2 September 1940, in Un’altra Italia, p. 264; Tulia Zevi, ‘La mia autobiografia politica’, Quaderni del Circolo Rosselli 68/1 (2000), pp. 83 –4. 4. Marion to Isabel Massey, 4 September 1940, GSP; Calloni, ‘Amelia tra Italia, Europa e Stati Uniti’, p. 248; Zevi, ‘La mia autobiografia politica’; Gaetano Salvemini to Max Ascoli, 17 July 1940; Max Ascoli to Gaetano Salvemini, 13 August 1940, MAP, Box 203/Salvemini; Greighton E. Gilbert, ‘Lionello Venturi e l’America’, Storia dell’arte, 101 (2002), p. 11.

Notes to Pages 208 – 211

307

5. Gaetano Salvemini to Max Ascoli, 4 July 1940, MAP, Box 2013/Salvemini. 6. Marion to Isabel Massey, 4 September 1940, GSP; Marion to Giorgio La Piana, 11 November 1940, GSP; Marion to Don Sturzo, 26 January 1941, in Giovanni Grasso (ed.), Luigi Sturzo e i Rosselli tra Londra, Parigi e New York (1929– 1945) (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2003), p. 83. 7. Ibid. 8. Max Ascoli to Gaetano Salvemini, 10 March 1941, MAP, Box 203/ Salvemini. 9. Lionel Venturi to Giogio La Piana, 9 September 1940, GSP; Marion to Isabel Massey, 22 October 1940, GSP; Amelia Rosselli to Gina Ferrero, 6 June 1941, in Marina Calloni and Lorella Cedroni (eds), Politica e affetti familiari (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1997), p. 219. 10. Aldo Rosselli, La mia America e la tua (Rome–Naples: Edizione Theoria, 1995), p. 26; Silvia Rosselli, Gli Otto Venti (Palermo: Sellerio, 2008), p. 75. 11. Marion to Isabel Massey, 22 October 1940, GSP; Silvia Rosselli, ‘Le donne di casa Rosselli: Amelia Pincherle, Marion Cave, Maria Todesco’, in Pupa Garribba (ed.), Donne Ebree (Rome: Edizioni Nuovi Tempi, 2001), pp. 119– 20. 12. Catherine Collomp, ‘“I nostri compagni d’America”: The Jewish Labor Committee and the rescue of Italian Anti-fascists, 1934 –1941’, AltreItalie, 27 (2003), pp. 68 –75; Laura Fermi, Illustrious Immigrants. The Intellectual Migration from Europe, 1930–1941 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971). 13. Alessandra Taiuti, Un anti-fascista dimenticato. Max Ascoli fra socialismo e liberalismo (Florence: Edizioni Polistampa, 2007), pp. 167–77; Max Ascoli, ‘N8 38 Becomes a Citizen’, The Atlantic Monthly, February 1940, p. 169; Charles Killinger, Gaetano Salvemini. A Biography (Westport: Praeger 2003), pp. 283–4; Enzo Tagliacozzo, ‘Nota Biografica’, in Ernesto Sestan (ed.), Atti del Convegno su Gaetano Salvemini (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1977), pp. 268–9. 14. Carlo Sforza, L’Italie telle que je l’ai vue, 1914–1944 (Paris: Grasset, 1946), pp. 203– 4. 15. Randolfo Pacciardi, ‘L’anti-fascismo italiano negli Stati Uniti: una testimonianza’, in Antonio Varsori (ed.), L’anti-fascismo italiano negli Stati Uniti durante la Seconda Guerra mondiale, (Rome: Archivio trimestriale, 1984), pp. 5 – 17; Aldo Garosci, Storia dei Fuorusciti (Rome – Bari: Laterza, 1953), pp. 208 – 10; Aldo Garosci, ‘Dalla Francia agli Stati Uniti’, in Varsori, L’anti-fascismo italiano, pp. 19 – 34. 16. Harold Fields, The Refugees in the United States (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 174. 17. Luigi Sturzo, La mia battaglia da New York (Milan: Garzanti, 1949); Gabriele de Rosa, Luigi Sturzo (Turin: UTET, 1977), pp. 405–6; Giovanni Grasso (ed.), Luigi Sturzo e i Rosselli tra Londra, Parigi e New York (1929– 1945) (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2003), pp. 83 –91.

308

Notes to Pages 211 – 213

18. Charles Killinger, ‘Fighting Fascism from the Valley. Italian Intellectuals in the United States’, in Peter Isaac Rose (ed.), The Dispossessed: An Anatomy of Exile (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), pp. 133–57; Dante Della Terza, Da Vienna a Baltimore. La diaspora degli intellettuali europei negli Stati Uniti d’America (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 2001), pp. 127–45, 195–203; Fields, The Refugees in the United States, p. 174; Carlo Francovich, Giorgio Spini, ‘Per Roberto Bolaffio’, Il Ponte XXXIII/11–12, (1977), pp. 1480 –1; ‘Michele Cantarella’, New York Times, 23 January 1988. 19. Killinger, ‘Fighting Fascism from the Valley’, pp. 139–40; Antonio Varsori, ‘Gli Stati Uniti Paese di rifugio per l’emigrazione politica italiana fra le due guerre’, in L’Emigration politique en Europe au XIX8 et XX8 sie`cle (Rome: Ecole Francaise de Rome, 1991), pp. 176– 7. 20. James Edward Miller, ‘Costruire un ponte tra due mondi: Max Ascoli e la questione italiana (1940– 45)’, in Renato Camurri (ed.), Max Ascoli, Anti-fascista, intellettuale, giornalista (Milan: FrancoAngeli 2012), p. 208; ‘Statuto della Mazzini Society’, in Lamberto Mercuri (ed.), Mazzini News 1941– 42 (Bastogi: Foggia, 1990), p. 91. 21. Killinger, ‘Fighting Fascism from the Valley’, p. 141; Varsori, ‘Gli Stati Uniti paese di rifugio’, p. 177–80; Philip V. Cannistraro, ‘Per una storia dei Fasci negli Stati-Uniti (1921–1929)’, Storia Contemporanea XXVI/1 (1995), pp. 1061–95. ˆ le de la Mazzini Society dans l’e´migration 22. Leonardo Casalino, ‘Le ro de´mocratique anti-fasciste aux Etats-Unis, 1940–43’, Mate´riaux pour l’histoire de notre temps, 60 (2000), pp. 17 –18; Antonio Varsori, Gli alleati e l’emigrazione democratica Anti-fascista (1940 – 43) (Florence: Sansoni Editore, 1982), pp. 51 –2; Maddalena Tirabassi ‘La Mazzini Society (1940–1946)’ in Giorgio Spini (ed.), Italia e America dalla Grande Guerra ad Oggi (Venice: Marsilio, 1976), p. 145. ˆ le de la Mazzini Society’, pp. 18– 20; John P. Diggins, ‘The 23. Casalino, ‘Le ro Italo-American Anti-fascist Opposition’, The Journal of American History 54/3 (1967), pp. 579– 98; Varsori, Gli alleati e l’emigrazione democratica Anti-fascista, pp. 26– 35; Catherine Collomp, Re´sister au nazisme. Le Jewish Labor Committee, New York 1934–1945 (Paris: CNRS Editions), pp. 63–5. 24. Marion Rosselli to Don Sturzo, 26 January 1941, LSP, f 655.27 25. Max Ascoli to Gaetano Salvemini, 3 March 1941, MAP, Box 203, Salvemini. 26. Gaetano Salvemini to Max Ascoli, 31 May 1941, 19 July 1941, 21 July 1941, 25 July 1941, 2 August 1941, MAP, Box 203, Salvemini; Marion to Angelina La Piana, 21 July 1941, GSP, 2/3a; Amelia Rosselli to Gina Ferrero, 6 June 1941, in Calloni and Cedroni, Politica e Affetti Familiari, pp. 225– 6; Amelia Rosselli to John Rosselli, 9 August 1941, JRP, 1/1.1/2 27. Marion to Gioachimo Dolci, 19 January 1942, AGL, fondi vari, b. 18. 28. Bedford College Archive, Marion Cave’s file, 23 January 1942. 29. Amelia Rosselli to John Rosselli, 12 December 1941, JRP, 1/1.1/1.

Notes to Pages 213 – 217

309

30. Max Ascoli to Carlo Rosselli, 19 June 1934, in Taiuti, Un Anti-fascista dimenticato, p. 230; ‘Events Today’, New York Times, 20 December 1941; Marion to Don Sturzo, 12 January 1942, LSP, f 655. 28. 31. Marion to Francoise Joxe, 19 April 1943, FJP. 32. Marion to Gioacchimo Dolci, 19 January 1942, AGL, b. 18, fondi vari, Mazzini Society. 33. Alessandra Baldini, Paolo Palma, Gli Antifascisit italiani in America, 1942– 43: la Legione nel carteggio di Pacciardi con Borgese, Salvemini, Sforza e Sturzo (Florence: Le Monnier, 1990), pp. 1– 90; Charles F. Delzell, Mussolini’s Enemies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 201–2; James E. Miller, ‘Sforza in America: The Dilemmas of Exile Politics, 1940– 43’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 15/5 (2010), p. 683; Garosci, Storia dei Fuorusciti, p. 220. 34. James E. Miller, ‘Carlo Sforza e l’evoluzione della politica americana verso l’Italia, 1940– 43’, Storia Contemporanea 7/4 (1976), pp. 825–54. 35. Miller,’Sforza in America’: pp. 682–4; Varsori, Gli alleati e l’emigrazione democratica anti-fascista, pp. 109–58. 36. Emilio Lussu, Diplomazia clandestina (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1956), pp. 28– 9, 46 –8; Emilio Lussu to Ferdinando Schiavetti, December 1942, in Un’altra Italia, pp. 225–8. 37. Aldo Garosci, ‘Ritorno critico su un’amicizia’, in Marco Brunazzi (ed.), Umberto Calosso Anti-fascista e socialista (Venice: Marsilio, 1981), pp. 18 –51; Aldo Garosci to Marion, 31 October 1942, MRP. 38. Max Salvadori, ‘Giellisti e loro amici negli Stati Uniti durante la seconda guerra mondiale’, in Giustizia e Liberta` nella lotta Anti-fascista e nella storia d’Italia (Florence: La Nuova italia, 1978), pp. 294–5; Max Salvadori, ‘Introduzione in Mercuri, Mazzini News, pp. 17 –19; Baldini and Palma, Gli antifascisiti italiani in America, pp. 48 –52. 39. Taiuti, Un Anti-fascista dimenticato, pp. 181 –2; Killinger, ‘Fighting Fascism from the Valley’, p. 144. 40. Max Ascoli, ‘The World Civil War’ in Civil Liberties and the Arts, 5/6 (1941), 270; Max Ascoli, Nazioni Unite, 21 February 1942. 41. Killinger, ‘Fighting Fascism from the Valley’, pp. 143 – 4; Charles Killinger, ‘Nazioni Unite and the Anti-Fascist Exiles in New York City, 1940–46’, Italian-American Review, 8 (2001), pp. 160–4. 42. Enzo Tagliacozzo, ‘Nota Biografica’, pp. 270 – 1; Killinger, Gaetano Salvemini, pp. 290– 2; Miller, ‘Costruire un ponte’, 224– 5. 43. Marion to Isabel Massey, 22 March 1943, GSP; Isabel Massey to Alberto Tarchiani, 30 March 1942, ATP; Marion to Francoise Joxe, October 1943, FJP. 44. Garosci, Storia dei Fuorusciti, pp. 224–8, 289–91; Marion to Lionello Venturi, 29 December 1942, MRP; Lionello Venturi to Marion Rosselli, 30 December 1942, MRP; Marion to Giorgina Zabban, 24 August 1945, CR, Inserto I, n. 5; Lionello Venturi to Alberto Cianca and Alberto Tarchiani, 22 November 1942, AGL, Fondo Mazzini Society, VI, 1,1, letter

Notes to Pages 217 – 222

310

45.

46. 47. 48.

14; Max Ascoli to Carlo Sforza, 11 January 1943, AGL, II/1, appendice 57, 1, sottoinserto 1. Giovanni De Luna, Storia del Partito d’Azione, 1942–47 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1982), pp. 6–29; Elena Savino, La Diaspora Azionista. Dalla Resistenza alla nascita del Partito d’Azione (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2010), p. 46, n. 65. Marion Rosselli to Francoise Joxe, 19 April 1943, FJP. Marion Rosselli to Francoise Joxe, 18 December 1942, FJP. Marion Rosselli to Gioacchimo Dolci, 23 October 1942, AGL, b. 18, Fondi vari; Marion to Isabel Massey, 22 March 1943, GSP; Marion to Francoise Joxe, 13 April 1943, FJP; Aldo Rosselli, La mia America e la tua, pp. 26–9; Silvia Rosselli, Gli otto venti, pp. 89 –90.

CHAPTER 13

HOPE IS REBORN

1. Mireno Berrettini, La Gran Bretagna e l’anti-fascismo italiano. Diplomazia clandestina, Intelligence, Operazioni speciali (1940– 1943) (Florence: Le Lettere, 2010), pp. 72–85; Antonio Varsori, Gli alleati e l’emigrazione democratica Anti-fascista (1940–43) (Florence: Sansoni Editore, 1982), p. 262. 2. ‘Strike in Italy Reported. Troops say Troops were used as 40,000 Quit Work in Turin and Milan’, New York Times, 27 June 1943; Paul Ginsborg, Storia d’Italia dal dopoguerra a oggi. Societa` e politica, 1943 –1988 (Turin: Einaudi, 1989), p. 6; Jonathan Dunnage, Twentieth Century Italy. A Social History (London: Longman, 2002), pp. 117–19. 3. Giovanni De Luna, Storia del Partito d’Azione, 1942– 1943 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1982), p. 40; Dunnage, Twentieth Century Italy, pp. 120–1; Varsori, Gli Alleati e l’emigrazione democratica Anti-fascista, pp. 262–3. 4. Elena Savino, La diaspora azionista, Dalla Resistenza alla nascita del Partito d’Azione (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2010), p. 46, n. 68; Alberto Tarchiani to Marion, 23 June 1943 and 21 July 1943, MRP; ‘Allies Capture Three Aerodromes in Sicily’, New York Times, 12 July 1943. 5. Marion to Francoise Joxe, 1 August 1943, FJP; ‘Mussolini seized at King’s Palace’, New York Times, 30 July 1943. 6. Marion to Francoise Joxe, 1 August 1943. FJP; Marion to John Rosselli at Swarthmore College, 6 July 1943, AGL, JRP, JR/1/1.1/3. 7. ‘City Crowds Demand Peace’, New York Times, 24 July 1943; Dunnage, Twentieth Century Italy, pp. 122–3; ‘Police Routs Mobs’, New York Times, 4 August 1943; Francesca Cavarocchi, Valeria Galimi (eds), Firenze in Guerra, 1940–44 (Florence: Firenze University Press, 2014), pp. 69 –70. 8. Marion to Francoise Joxe, 10 –11 August 1943, FJP. 9. ‘Italian Press Defiant’, New York Times, 9 August 1943. 10. Marion to Francoise Joxe, 30 August 1943; FJP. 11. Giuseppe Fiori, Una storia italiana. Vita di Ernesto Rossi (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), pp. 188–93; De Luna, Storia del Partito d’Azione, pp. 29– 35, 47.

Notes to Pages 222 – 227

311

12. Manlio Brigaglia, ‘Introduzione’, in Emilio Lussu, Tutte le Opere, vol. 2, L’esilio Anti-fascista, 1927– 1943, edited by Mauro Brigaglia (Cagliari: Aisara, 2010), pp. cxx–cxxvii; Giuseppe Fiori, Il Cavaliere dei Rossomari. Vita di Emilio Lussu (Turin: Einaudi 2000), p. 346–59; Emilio Lussu, Diplomazia Clandestina (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1956), p. 250. 13. The signing parties were the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, the Action Party, Christian Democracy, Democrazia del Lavoro and PSIUP. Luigi Salvatorelli, Giovanni Mira, Storia d’Italia nel periodo fascista (Verona: Mondadori, 1972), vol. 2, pp. 540–3; ‘Italy surrenders’, New York Times, 9 September 1943; ‘Italian Collapse’, New York Times, 12 September 1943; Jonathan Dunnage, Twentieth Century Italy, 122–4. 14. Marion to Francoise Joxe, 13 September 1943, 7 October 1943, FJP. 15. Ibid. 16. Gaetano Salvemini and Giorgio La Piana, What to do with Italy? (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1943). 17. The New York Times reviewer called it a ‘hard-hitting, bitter and sometimes intemperate volume’. John MacCormac, ‘What to do with Italy?’, New York Times, 12 September 1943. 18. Ginsborg, Storia d’Italia dal dopoguerra a oggi, pp. 48 –9; James E. Miller, ‘Sforza in America: The Dilemmas of Exile Politics, 1940–1943’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 15/5 (2010), p. 688. 19. ‘London said to bar Sforza from Italy’, New York Times, 22 September 1943; Davide Grippa, Un Anti-fascista tra Italia e Stati Uniti. Democrazia e identita` nazionale nel pensiero di Max Ascoli (1898 – 1947) (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2009), p. 146; Aldo Garosci, Storia dei Fuorusciti (Bari: Laterza, 1953), p. 227; Charles Killinger, Gaetano Salvemini. A Biography (Westport: Praeger, 2002), pp. 290–5. 20. Ibid.; Valentina Sforza to Marion Rosselli, 16 October 1943, MRP. 21. Miller, ‘Sforza in America’, p. 689; Franco Catalano, Storia del CLN Alta Italia (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976), pp. 70 –1; Alberto Tarchiani to Max Ascoli, 14 December 1943, JRP; H. Matthews ‘Badoglio to Resign After Rome Falls’, New York Times 15 November 1943; H. Matthews, ‘Neapolitan Rally Denounces King’, New York Times, 20 December 1943; ‘Six Italian Parties Urge Abdication’, New York Times, 30 January 1944. 22. Alberto Tarchiani to Marion Rosselli, 19 December 1943, JRP; Alberto Tarchiani to Max Ascoli, 26 December 1943, MAP; Grippa, Un Antifascista tra Italia e Stati Uniti, p. 149. 23. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 1 January 1944, RFA, M3226. 24. Text of her speech, 10 January 1944, JRP. 25. Marion to Raymond Swing, 27 January 1944, MRP. 26. ‘Germans Call Army in Italian Strikes’, New York Times, 6 March 1944; ‘The Italians Strike’, New York Times, 9 March 1944. 27. ‘Italian Reds Drop Abdication Issue’, New York Times, 2 April 1944; Milton Bracker, ‘Junta to Support Badoglio Program. Socialist Party Quits

312

28.

29.

30. 31.

32. 33.

34.

35.

36. 37. 38.

39.

40. 41. 42.

Notes to Pages 227 – 231 Meeting, Action Party Votes Against Proposal’, New York Times, 10 April 1944; Milton Bracker, ‘All Junta Parties in Italian Cabinet’, New York Times, 22 April 1943; Ginsborg, Storia d’Italia dal dopoguerra ad oggi, pp. 65– 7; Dunnage, Twentieth Century Italy, pp. 127–8; Aldo Agosti, Palmiro Togliatti: A Biography (London: I.B.Tauris, 2008), pp. 151–89; De Luna, Storia del Partito d’Azione, pp. 141–50. Marion Rosselli, ‘Nothing could give me . . .’, first draft of article about Alberto Tarchiani upon his nomination as Ambassador to the United States, January 1945, MRP. Amelia Rosselli to John Rosselli, 8 June 1944, JRP; ‘The Victory of Rome’, New York Times, 6 June 1944; ‘Anti-Fascists in Cabinet’, New York Times, 9 June 1944. Ginsborg, Storia dell’Italia dal dopoguerra ad oggi, 74; Alberto Tarchiani to Marion Rosselli, 9 September 1944, JRP. ‘Mrs. Rosselli Tells of Fight on Fascism’, PM, 19 June 1944; the text of her conference is published in Paolo Bagnoli, Una famiglia nella lotta. Carlo, Nello, Amelia e Marion Rosselli: dalle carte dell’archivio dell’Istituto Storico della Resistenza in Toscana (Florence: Edizioni Polistampa, 2007), pp. 122– 34. ‘Rosselli Interview’, PM, 20 August 1944. Herbert L. Matthews, ‘Mussolini is linked to Matteotti Plot by Fascist Papers’, New York Times, 28 July 1944; Marion Rosselli, ‘More About Matteotti Murder’, New York Times, 3 August 1944. Herbert L. Matthews, ‘Ciano Ordered Rosselli Murders’, New York Times, 24 September 1944; Marion Rosselli, ‘Grateful to Mr Matthews’, New York Times, 2 October 1944. Ginsborg, Storia d’Italia dal dopoguerra ad oggi, p. 70; Marion Rosselli to Aldo Garosci, 21 September 1944, AGL, Marion Rosselli Papers; Marion Rosselli to Francoise Joxe, 23 August 1944, Joxe Family Papers; Marion Rosselli, ‘Italiani, vi parla Marion Rosselli . . .’, in Bagnoli, Una familia nella lotta, pp. 134– 35. Marion Rosselli to Maıˆtre Moro-Giafferi, 13 November 1944, MRP. Marion Rosselli, ‘Lettera della moglie’, in introduction to Socialismo liberale, 1st Italian edition (Rome, Florence, Milan: Edizioni U, 1945). Altiero Spinelli, Ernesto Rossi, ‘ Problemi della Federazione Europea’, Rome, Quaderni del Movimento Federalista Europeo 1 (1943); Giuseppe Fiori, Una storia italiana, 200–10; Max Ascoli to Marion Rosselli, 6 December 1944, MRP. Ernesto Rossi to Gaetano Salvemini, 26 March 1944, in Ernesto Rossi, Gaetano Salvemini, Dall’esilio alla Repubblica. Lettere 1944– 1957, edited by Mimmo Franzinelli (Turin: Bollatti Boringhieri, 2004), p. 27; Gaetano Salvemini to Ernesto Rossi, 3 December 1944, Ibid., p. 31. Ernesto Rossi to Gaetano Salvemini, 12 February 1945, Ibid., p. 51. Marion Rosselli to Ernesto Rossi, ERP, E.R. 23. Ernesto Rossi to Marion Rosselli, 9 February 1945, MRP.

Notes to Pages 231 – 235

313

43. Marion Rosselli to Max Ascoli, 25 March 1945, MRP. 44. Marion Rosselli to Max Ascoli, 7 January 1945, MAP, Box 189; Marion Rosselli, ‘Alberto Tarchiani’, Free World, March 1945; draft article in Baldini, Una famiglia nella lotta, pp. 116– 21. 45. Alberto Tarchiani to Marion, 28 February 1945, 7 March 1945, 8 March 1945, 24 March 1945, 29 March 1945, MRP. 46. Eric Vial, La Cagoule a encore frappe´! (Paris: Larousse, 2010), p. 205. 47. Inez Robb, ‘Rosselli’s widow hopes for justice at last’, Sunday Mirror, 22 January 1945; ‘Accuse precise della vedova di Rosselli’, Italia Libera 29 January 1945. 48. Robb, ‘Rosselli’s widow hopes for justice at last’, Sunday Mirror, 22 January 1945. 49. Vial, La Cagoule, pp. 225–49; Mimmo Franzinelli, Il delitto Rosselli, 9 giugno 1937, anatomia di un omicidio (Milan: Mondadori, 2007), pp. 191–7; ‘Joint Trial is Ordered: All of Fascism’s International Crimes Will Be Bared at Once’, New York Times, 3 January 1945; Herbert L. Matthews, ‘Fascist Leaders on Trial Today’, New York Times, 22 January 1945; ‘Rosselli Murders Laid to Mussolini’, New York Times, 31 January 1945; ‘Rosselli’s Fortune Given to his Cause’, New York Times, 17 February 1945. 50. Vial, La Cagoule, pp. 249– 52; Milton Bracker, ‘Roatta, High Fascist Aide, Escapes by Walking Out of Rome Hospital’, New York Times, 6 March 1945; Milton Bracker, ‘1 Dead as Mob in Rome Riots and Demands Bonomi Quits’, New York Times, 7 March 1945. 51. Franzinelli, Il delitto Rosselli, pp. 198–202; Mimmo Franzinelli, L’amnistia Togliatti (Milan: Mondadori, 2006). 52. Marion to Maıˆtre Moro-Giafferi, 15 May 1945, JRP; Vial, La Cagoule, pp. 270– 2. 53. Marion Rosselli to Carlo Tagliacozzo, 17 March 1944, GSP; Marion Rosselli to Ernesto Rossi, 7 December 1944, ERP, E.R. 23. 54. Marion Rosselli to Gi’ Zabban, 30 May 1945, RFA, M2349; Maddalena Tirabassi, ‘La Mazzini Society’ (1940–1946)’ in Giorgio Spini (ed.), Italia e America dalla Grande Guerra ad Oggi (Venice: Marsilio, 1976), p. 152; Amelia Rosselli, Memorie, edited by Marina Calloni (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003), p. 261. 55. Marion Rosselli to Ernesto Rossi, 7 December 1944, ERP, E.R. 23. 56. Marion to Gi’ Zabban, 20 February 1945, RFA M3485. 57. Dean Everett Hunt, to John Rosselli, 12 March 1945, JRP; Max Ascoli to Marion, 26 March 1945; 23 May 1945; Marion Rosselli to Max Ascoli, 23 May 1945, MAP, Box 189, Marion Rosselli (folder 1). 58. Marion Rosselli to Max Ascoli, 18 March 1945, MAP, Box 189, Marion Rosselli (folder 1). 59. ‘Northern Italy in Revolt. Civilians and Partisans Battle Germans and Fascists’, New York Times, 26 April 1945; Ginsborg, Storia sociale dell’Italia contemporanea, pp. 83 –7; ‘Mussolini’s End’, New York Times, 30 April 1945.

314

Notes to Pages 235 – 240

60. Interview of the Rosselli widows by Mario Rossi for Voice of America, 10 June 1945, JRP. 61. Ginsborg, Storia d’Italia dal dopoguerra ad oggi, pp. 87 –9; Guido Quazza, Resistenza e storia d’Italia (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976), pp. 326–50. 62. Dunnage, Twentieth Century Italy, p. 128; James E. Miller, ‘The Search for Stability: An Interpretation of American Policy in Italy, 1943–4’, Journal of Italian History, 1 (1978), pp. 264–72. 63. Emilio Lussu, Sul Partito d’Azione e gli altri (Milan: U. Mursia & C8, 1968), pp. 107– 9. 64. Ginsborg, Storia d’Italia dal dopoguerra ad oggi, pp. 103–11. 65. Marion to Max Ascoli, 8 June 1945, MAP; Marion to Don Sturzo, 19 April 1945, LSP, f 662, 124; Marion to Don Sturzo, 13 June 1945, LSP, f 662, 125; Don Sturzo to Marion, 27 June 1945 and 8 July 1945, JRP. 66. Marion Rosselli, ‘Cari amici . . . ‘, October 1945, in Baldini Una famiglia nella lotta, 135–7 (the text is wrongly dated 1946). 67. Marion to Marion Ascoli, 29 January 1946, MAP; Amelia Rosselli to John Rosselli, 9 January 1946, JRP, JR, 1.1.1/5; 30 January 1946, JRP, JR, 1.1.1/6; 4 February 1946, JRP, JR 1.1.1/7; 19 March 1946, JRP, JR 1.1.1/8. 68. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 1 April 1946, RFA C54; 9 April 1946, RFA C63. 69. Patrizia Gabrielli, Il 1946, le donne, la Repubblica (Rome: Donzelli, 2009). 70. Marion to Max Ascoli, 7 April 1946, MAP; Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 4 April 1946, RFA C62. 71. Ibid.; Marion to Max Ascoli, 7 April 1946, MAP; Max Ascoli to Marion, 10 April 1946, MAP; Marion to Max Ascoli, 26 April 1946, MAP; Ginsborg, Storia d’Italia dal dopoguerra ad oggi, pp. 116–17. 72. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 16 April 1946 RFA C141; Marion to Amelia, 30 April 1946, RFA C64; Amelia Rosselli to John Rosselli, 13 May 1946, JRP, JR 1.1.1/10; Marion to Gi’ Zabban, 11 May 1946, CR, Appendice, Inserto 1, n8 5. 73. Max Ascoli to Alberto Tarchiani, 3 June 1946, MAP. 74. Tullia Zevi, La mia autobiografia politica, http://www.liberalsocialisti.org/ articol.php?id_articol-91.

CHAPTER 14

COMING HOME

1. Nicola Behramann, ‘You Can’t Go Home Again: Exiles in Klaus Mann’s The Volcano’ in Eckart Gaebel, Sigrid Weigel (eds), ‘Escape to Life’: German Intellectuals in New York. A Compendium on Exile After 1933 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), pp. 353–70; Carl Zuckmayer, A Part of Myself (London: Secker & Warburg, 1970), p. 329. 2. Marion to Gi’ Zabban, 20 February 1945, RFA M3485. 3. Amelia Rosselli to John Rosselli, 17 July 1946, JRP, JR 1/1.1/11; Silvia Rosselli, Gli ottoventi (Palermo, Sellerio, 2008), p. 112. 4. Piero Calamandrei, ‘Saluto alla famiglia Rosselli’, La Nazione del Popolo, 3 July 1946; Silvia Rosselli, Gli Otto Venti, p. 112; Amelia Rosselli to

Notes to Pages 240 – 247

5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

315

John Rosselli, 17 July 1946; JRP, JR, 1/1.1/11. ‘Onorevole’ (‘Your Honour’) is the title given to Members of Parliament in Italy. Silvia Rosselli, Gli ottoventi, pp. 113–14; Gianluca Belli, Amedeo Belluzzi, Una notte d’estate del 1944 (Florence: Edizioni Polistampa, 2013); Firenze Ferita. La guerra, le devastazioni dei bombardamenti, l’arrivo degli Alleati: la citta` dal 1940 al 1944 (Bologna: Pendragon, 2007). Amelia Rosselli to John Rosselli, 17 July 1946, JRP, JR 1/1.1/11. Marion to John Rosselli, 12 July 1946; 15 July 1946; 18 July, ARP. Marion to Max Ascoli, 16 August 1946, MAP. Amelia Rosselli to John Rosselli, 5 September 1946, JRP, J.R. 1/1.1/12. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 7 September 1946, RFA M3476, Melina to John Rosselli, 29 August 1946, Marion to John Rosselli, 28 August 1946, ARP; Marion to Marion Ascoli, 16 August 1946, MAP. Marion to Roger Lewis, 6 September 1946, ARP; Amelia Rosselli to Max Ascoli, 17 September 1946, MAP. Marion to John Rosselli, 26 September 1946; John Rosselli to Marion, 9 October 1946; John Rosselli to Marion, 3 October 1946; Marion to John Rosselli, 14 October 1946; Melina Rosselli to John Rosselli, 19 October 1946; John Rosselli to Marion, 17 October 1946, ARP. Marion to John Rosselli, 6 October 1946, Marion to John Rosselli, 14 October 1946, John Rosselli to Marion, 17 October 1946, Melina Rosselli to John Rosselli, 19 October 1946, ARP; Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 15 October 1946, RFA M2009; Amelia Rosselli to John Rosselli, 31 December 1946, JRP, JR 1/1.1/3. Marion to Nathan M. Levin, 11 October 1946, MAP. Marion to John Rosselli, 15 September 1946, ARP. Paul Ginsborg, Storia d’Italia dal dopoguerra a oggi. Societa` e politica, 1943– 1988 (Turin: Einaudi, 1989), p. 132; Emilio Lussu, Sul Partito d’Azione e gli altri (Milan: Mursia, 2009), p. 229; Alessandro Roveri, Il socialismo tradito (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1995), p. 66. Giovanni De Luna, Storia del Partito d’Azione (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1982), pp. 292– 6; Lussu, Sul Partito d’Azione, pp. 207–40. Ernesto Rossi to Marion Rosselli, 22 September 1946, in Ernesto Rossi, Epistolario 1943–67. Dal Partito d’Azione al Centro-Sinistra, edited by Mimmo Franzinelli (Rome: Laterza, 2007), pp. 66 –8. Marion to Ernesto Rossi, 9 October 1946 and 10 October 1946, in Rossi, Epistolario 1943–67, pp. 68– 70. Ernesto Rossi to Marion Rosselli, 1 November 1946, in Epistolario., pp. 72 –3. Lussu, Sul Partito d’Azione e gli altri, p. 225. John Rosselli to Max Ascoli, 17 January 1947, MAP, Box 1988, Folder 6 John Rosselli. Ester Parri, ‘Marion Rosselli’, Il Movimento di Liberazione in Italia, 3 (November 1949).

316

Notes to Pages 247 – 253

25. Lussu, Sul Partito d’Azione, p. 227; Roveri, Il socialismo tradito, p. 119; Giancarlo Tartaglia, I Congressi del Partito d’Azione, 1944/1946/1947 (Rome: Archivio Trimestrale, 1984), pp. 429 –33; Claudio Novelli, Il Partito d’Azione e gli Italiani (Milan: La Nuova Italia, 2000), pp. 232–3. 26. Ernesto Rossi to Gaetano Salvemini, 15 April 1946, in Lettere Americane, 1927– 49, edited by Renato Camurri (Rome: Donzelli, 2015), p. 245. 27. Marion to Gi’ Zabban, 27 April 1947, RFA M3510. 28. Roger Lewis to Marion Rosselli, 9 April 1947, RFA, M3498; Marion Rawson to Marion Rosselli, 11 March 1947, ARP. 29. Marion to John Rosselli, 1 June 1947, ARP. 30. Marion to John Rosselli, 10 May 1947, 20 May 1947, ARP. 31. The address was 27 Hillcroft Crescent, Ealing Broadway. Marion to John Rosselli, 20 May 1947, 1 June 1947, 6 June 1947, ARP. 32. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 21 July 1948, RFA, M1793. 33. John Rosselli to Marion, 9 June 1947, ARP; “I fratelli Rosselli commemorati da Piero Calamandrei e Ricardo Lombardi”, La Nazione, 9 June 1947; Piero Calamandrei ‘Amelia Rosselli’, Il Ponte XI, 1 (1955). 34. Marion to John Rosselli, 27 July 1946, ARP; Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 31 August 1947, RFA, M1750. 35. Marion to Gi’ Zabban, 18 October 1947, RFA, M2350. 36. Marion to Gi’ Zabban, 11 February 1948, RFA, M2348; Marion to Max Ascoli, 15 February 1948, MAP; Marion to Max Ascoli, 3 June 1948, MAP; Marion to Gi’ Zabban, 27 May 1948, RFA, M2418. 37. Marion to Max Ascoli, 15 February 1948, MAP; Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 8 May 1948, RFA, M3302; Marion to Max Ascoli, 11 May 1948, MAP; Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 21 July 1948, RFA, M1793; Marion to Max Ascoli, 15 September 1948, MAP. 38. Marion to Max Ascoli, 15 February 1948, 11 May 1948, MAP; Amelia Rosselli to John Rosselli, 20 May 1948, JRP, JR 1/1.1/26; Marion to Gi’ Zabban, 27 May 1958, RFA M2418; Melina Rosselli to Marion, 4 June 1948, RFA, M343; Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 16 June 1948, RFA, M3432; John to Max Ascoli, 19 July 1948, MAP; Amelia Rosselli to John Rosselli, 7 November 1948, JRP, JR 1/30. 39. Marion Rosselli to Max Ascoli, 11 May 1948, MAP; Roberto Faenza and Marco Fini, Gli Americani in Italia (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976), pp. 226–70; Max Ascoli to Marion, 23 August 1948, MAP; Ivan Berend, Central and Eastern Europe, 1944–1993 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 3–40; Marion to Gi’ Zabban, 11 February 1948, RFA, M2348; Marion to Gi’ Zabban, 18 October 1947, RFA, M2350; Marion to Gi’ Zabban, 22 April 1948, RFA, M2347. 40. Mimmo Franzinelli, Il delitto Rosselli, 9 giugno 1937, anatomia di un omicidio (Milan: Mondadori, 2007), pp. 212– 19. 41. V. de Moro Giafferi to Marion, 3 October 1948; Marion to V. de Moro Giafferi, 6 October 1948, CR, inserto I, n.6; Marion to Max Ascoli, 28 October 1948, MAP; Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 2 November 1948,

Notes to Pages 253 – 256

42. 43. 44.

45.

46. 47.

48.

49.

50.

51.

52. 53.

317

RFA, M1787; John Rosselli to Amelia Rosselli, 15 November 1948, RFA M1790; Eric Vial, La Cagoule a encore frappe´ (Paris: Larousse, 2010), pp. 271– 5. Marion to Max Ascoli, 30 December 1948, 8 January 1948, MAP. Marion to Gi’ Zabban, 14 December 1948, RFA, M3509; Marion to Gi’ Zabban, 17 December 1948, RFA, M2546. John Rosselli, Lord William Bentinck: The Making of a Liberal Imperialist (London: Chatto and Windus, 1974). Nello Rosselli had also studied Anglo-Italian relations in his Inghilterra e regno di Sardegna dal 1815 al 1847 (Turin: Einaudi, 1954). Marion to Gi’ Zabban, 27 January 1949, RFA, M2547; Marion to Gi’ Zabban, 25 February 1949, RFA, M3487; Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 4 April 1949, RFA, M3225; John Rosselli to Max Ascoli, 7 April 1949, MAP. The Daily Worker was the daily of the Communist Party in Great Britain. Melina Rosselli to Marion, 11 January 1949, ARP; Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 9 January 1949, RFA, M1600. Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 9 March 1949, RFA, M2037; John Rosselli to Marion, 15 April 1949, ARP; John Rosselli to Amelia Rosselli, 29 October 1948, RFA, M1789. Melina Rosselli to John Rosselli, 5 May 1949, ARP; Marion to Amelia Rosselli, 24 May 1949, RFA, M1625; Amelia Rosselli to Marion, 28 May 1949, CR, Inserto I, n. 9; Melina Rosselli to Marion, 3 June 1949, ARP. Amelia Rosselli to Marion, 7 June 1949, CR, Appendice,, Inserto I n. 9; Marion to Tristano Codignola, 21 August 1946, JRP; Ernesto Rossi to Amelia Rosselli, 28 April 1949, 24 May 1949, ERP; Amelia Rosselli to John Rosselli, 25 May 1949, JRP, JR, 1/41; Ge´rard Bourdin, ‘L’affaire Rosselli et l’Orne: de l’aveuglement a` l’oubli’, Cahiers des Annales de Normandie 29/1 (2000), pp. 209–24. Florence Hale´vy to Amelia Rosselli (n.d.) RFA, M3614; Florence Hale´vy to John Rosselli, 19 October 1949, JRP; John Rosselli to Max Ascoli, 22 August 1949, 20 September 1949, MAP; Riccardo Bauer to Gaetano Salvemini, 19 October 1949, GSP; Alessandro Levi to Gaetano Salvemini, 19 October 1949, GSP. John Rosselli to Max and Marion Ascoli, 16 October, MAP; John Rosselli to Florence Hale´vy, 16 October 1949, FHP; West Middlesex Hospital, Register of Deaths. ‘Rosselli Murder Trial Verdicts’, The Observer, 16 October 1949; Vial, La Cagoule, p. 221; Franzinelli, Il delitto Rosselli, p. 227. Ester Parri to Marion Rosselli, 16 July 1947, MRP.

Sources and Bibliography

UNPUBLISHED SOURCES

France Archives nationales Archives de la Chancellerie des Universite´s de Paris Surveillance des antifascistes italiens Florence Hale´vy Papers, Sucy-en-Brie Franc
oise Hale´vy Papers, Paris

Great Britain Bedford College – Students’ Files Italian Refugees’ Rescue Committee Archives, Reading University Marion Rawson Archives, Reading University St Paul’s Girls’ School – Students’ Files Uxbridge Local History Archives William Gillies Papers, Labour Party Archives, Manchester

Italy Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Rome: – Casellario Politico Centrale + Rosselli Carlo + Salvemini, Gaetano + Cave, Marion in Rosselli – Confino di Polizia + Rosselli, Carlo + Cave, Marion in Rosselli – Ministero della Cultura Popolare + Goad, Harold + Villari, Luigi

Sources and Bibliography

319

Archivio di Stato di Firenze – Questura di Firenze, Pincherle Amelia, vedova Rosselli – Rosselli Family Archives (formerly at Fondazione Rosselli, Turin) Istituto Piemontese per la Storia della Resistenza, Turin Aldo Garosci Papers Rosselli Brothers Funeral Album Istituto di Storia della Resistenza in Toscana, Florence – Carlo Rosselli Papers – John Rosselli Papers – Marion Rosselli Papers – Gaetano Salvemini Papers – Alberto Tarchiani Papers – Archivio Giustizia e Liberta` – Archivio Mazzini Society Amelia (Melina) Rosselli Papers, Centro di tradizione manoscritta degli autori del Novecento, Pavia University Berenson Archives, Villa I Tatti, Florence British Institute in Florence Archives Don Luigi Sturzo Archives, Rome Ernesto Rossi Papers, European Union Archives, European University Institute, Florence Carteggio Rosselli, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Florence

Netherlands Bertha Pritchard Papers, Institute for Social History, Amsterdam Sylvia Pankhurst Papers, Institute for Social History, Amsterdam

USA H.G. Wells Papers, The Rare Books Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana Max Ascoli Papers, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University

PUBLISHED SOURCES

Correspondence Bagnoli, Paulo (ed.), Una famiglia nella lotta. Carlo, Nello, Amelia e Marion Rosselli dalle carte dell’archivio dell’Istituto Storico della Resistenza in Toscana (Florence: Polistampa, 2007).

320

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

Fra le righe: carteggio fra Carlo Rosselli e Gaetano Salvemini, edited by Elisa Signori (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2010). Hale´vy, Elie, Correspondance, 1891– 1937 (Paris: Editions Fallois, 1996). I Rosselli: epistolario familiare di Carlo, Nello, Amelia Rosselli, 1914–1937, edited by Zeffiro Ciuffoletti (Milan: Mondadori, 1997). Lettere all’Ovra di Pitigrilli, edited by Domenico Zuca`ro (Florence: Parenti Editore, 1961). Nello Rosselli. Uno storico sotto il fascismo. Lettere 1924– 1937, edited by Zeffiro Ciuffoletti (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1979). Politica e affetti familiari. Lettere di Amelia, Carlo e Nello Rosselli a Guglielmo, Leo e Nina Ferrero e Gina Lombroso (1917–1943), edited by Marina Calloni and Lorena Cedroni (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1997). Rosselli, Carlo, Dall’esilio: Lettere alla moglie 1929 –1937, edited by Costanzo Casucci (Florence: Passigli, 1997). Rosselli, Carlo and Nello, ‘Lettere inedite’, Il Ponte, III, n8 6 (1947), pp. 520–33. Rossi, Elide, Lettere a Ernesto (Florence: la Nuova Italia, 1958). Rossi, Ernesto, Elogio della galera. Lettere, 1930 –1943, edited by Manlio Magini (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1968). ——— Guerra e Dopoguerra. Lettere 1915–1930, edited by Giuseppe Armani (Florence: la Nuova Italia, 1978). ——— Epistolario 1943 –67. Dal Partito d’Azione al Centro-Sinistra, edited by Mimmo Franzinelli, Mimmo (Rome: Laterza, 2007). ——— ‘Nove anni sono molti’. Lettere dal Carcere, 1930–39, edited by Mimmo Franzinelli (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2009). Rossi, Ernesto and Gaetano Salvemini, Dall’esilio alla Repubblica. Lettere 1944–57, edited by Mimmo Franzinelli (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2004). Salvemini, Gaetano, Carteggio, 1914 –1920, edited by Enzo Tagliacozzo (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1985). ——— Carteggio 1921 –1926, edited by Enzo Tagliacozzo (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1985). ——— Lettere Americane, 1927–49, edited by Renato Camurri (Rome: Donzelli, 2015). Sturzo, Luigi, Sturzo a Londra: Carteggi e documenti (1925–1946), edited by Giovanna Farell-Vinay (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2003). ——— Sturzo e i Rosselli tra Londra, Parigi e New York. Carteggi 1929–1945, edited by Giovanni Grasso (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2005). Tranfaglia, Nicola, ‘Lettere di Carlo e Nello Rosselli a Gaetano Salvemini’, Annali della Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, 1 (1967), pp. 345– 59. Turati, Filippo, Lettere dall’esilio, edited by Bianca Pittoni (Milan: Pan, 1968). ——— Carteggio Turati-Kuliscioff, 1923–25 (Turin: Einaudi, 1977). Un’altra Italia nell’Italia del fascismo. Carlo e Nello Rosselli nella documentazione dell’archivio centrale dello stato, edited by Marina Giannetto (Rome: Edimond, 2002). Zanotti-Bianco, Umberto, Carteggio (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1989).

Sources and Bibliography

321

Memoirs Allason, Barbara, Memorie di un’Anti-fascista, 1915–1940 (Turin: Spoon River 2005). Amendola, Giorgio, L’ıˆle: me´moires d’un exil (Paris: L. Levi, S. Messinger, 1983). Ansaldo, Giovanni, L’Anti-fascista riluttante. Memorie del carcere e del confino, 1926–27, ed. Marcello Stagliero (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992). ——— Diario di prigiona, edited by Renzo di Felice (Bologna, Il Mulino, 1993). ——— Il giornalista di Ciano, 1932 –1943 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000). ——— Anni freddi. Diari, 1946–1950 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003). Aron, Raymond, ‘Historien et philosophe’, Contrepoint, 18 (1975), pp. 165–77. Bauer, Riccardo, Quello che ho fatto. Trent’anni di lotte e di ricordi (Milan, Rome: Cariplo-Laterza, 1987). Bedford, Sybille, Jigsaw. An Unsentimental Education, a Biographical Novel (New York: Knopf, 1989). Beevor, Kinta, A Tuscan Childhood (New York: Vintage, 1993). Bennett, Arnold, ‘Night and Morning in Florence’, English Review, 5 (1910) pp. 422–55. ——— Florentine Journal, 1st April–25th May 1910 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1967). Berenson, Mary, A Self-Portrait From her Letters and Diaries, edited by Barbara Strachey and Jayne Samuels (New York: W.W. Norton, 1983). Bowra, C.M., Memories, 1898–1939 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966). Brittain, Vera, A Testament of Youth (London: Virago (1933) 2007). Busoni, Jaure`s, Confinati a Lipari (Milan: Vangelista, 1980). Calamandrei, Piero, In memoria di Carlo e Nello Rosselli nel processo dinanzi l’Alta Corta contro Roatta & C8 (Naples: Rispoli, 1945). ——— ‘Ricordo di Nello’, Il Ponte I, n8 1 (1945), pp. 56 –7. ——— Amelia Rosselli’, Il Ponte, XI, n8 1 (1955), pp. 127–8. ——— Uomini e citta` della Resistenza (Milan: Linea d’Ombra, 1994). Campolonghi, Lidia, La vie d’une femme anti-fasciste (Florence: Centro Editoriale Toscano, 1994). Ceva, Bianca, 1930. Retroscena di un dramma (Milan: Ceschina, 1955). Croce, Benedetto, Taccuini di Lavoro (Naples: Arte Tipografica, 1987). De Bosis, Lauro, The Story of my Death (New York: Oxford University Press, 1933). Ferrero, Leo, Diario di un privilegiato sotto il fascismo (Turin: Chiantore, 1946). Garosci, Aldo, ‘Ritorno critico su un’amicizia’, in Umberto Calosso Anti-fascista e socialista, edited by Marco Brunazzi (Venice: Marsilio, 1981), pp. 18 –51. ——— ‘Dalla Francia agli Stati Uniti’, in L’anti-fascismo italiano negli Stati Uniti durante la Seconda Guerra Mondiale (Rome: Archivio trimestriale, 1984), pp. 19 –34. Ginzburg, Natalia, Lessico famigliare (Turin: Einaudi, 1963). Kabraji, Etain (ed.), Looking Back. Memories of St Paul’s School for its 90th birthday (no date, no publication place). Koestler, Arthur, Oeuvres autobiographiques (Paris: Laffont, Bouquins, 1994).

322

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

Levi, Alessandro, Ricordi dei Fratelli Rosselli (Florence: Centro Editoriale Toscano (1947) 2002). Luchaire, Julien, Confession d’un franc
ais moyen, 2 vols. (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1965). Lussu, Emilio, ‘Outwitting the Fascists’, Italy Today, n8 3 (1931). ——— La Catena (Rome, Florence, Milan: Edizioni U, 1945). ——— ‘Alcuni ricordi su Carlo Rosselli’, Il Ponte, III, n86 (1947), pp. 505–11. ——— Diplomazia clandestina (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1956). ——— ‘La Nascita di Giustizia e Liberta`, in Dall’antifascismo alla resistenza. Trent’anni di storia italiana (1915–1945). Lezioni con testimonianze (Turin: Einaudi, 1973), pp. 173–7. ——— ‘Memorie di Lipari’, Archivio sardo del movimento operaio, contadino e autonomistico, n88 –10 (1977), pp. 312–22. ——— The Sardinian Brigade (London: Prion, 2000). ——— Enter Mussolini. Observations and Adventures of an Anti-fascist (London: Taylor & Francis, 2010). Lussu Joyce, Fronti e frontiere (Rome: Edizioni U, 1945). ——— Lotte, Ricordi e altro (Rome, Biblioteca del Vascello, 1992). Malraux, Clara, Le bruit de nos pas, vol. 3, Voici que vient l’e´te´ (Paris: Grasset, 1973). Mariano, Nicky, 40 Years with Berenson (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1966). Minervini, Lidia, ‘Amico e Maestro. Ricordi di Salvemini’, Il Mondo, 22 September 1957, pp. 11 –12. Modigliani, Vera, Esilio (Milan: Garzanti, 1946). Moravia, Alberto, ‘Preface’ in Aldo Rosselli, La famiglia Rosselli: una tragedia italiana (Milan: Bompiani, 1983). Nenni, Pietro, Six ans de guerre civile en Italie (Paris: Librairie Valois, 1930). ——— Pagine di Diario (Milan: Garzanti, 1947). ——— Vingt ans de fascisme (Paris: Maspe´ro, 1960). Nitti, Francesco Fausto, Escape. The Personal Narrative of a Prisoner who was Rescued from Lipari, the Fascist ‘Devil’s Island’ (New York: Putnam, 1930). Noufflard, Andre´ and Berthe Noufflard, Andre´ et Berthe Noufflard, leur vie, leur peinture, une e´vocation par leurs filles et leurs amis (Paris: Association des amis d’Andre´ et Berthe Noufflard, 1982). Noufflard, Genevie`ve, ‘Elie e Florence Hale´vy’ in Elie Hale´vy e l’era delle tirannie, edited by Maurizio Grifo e Gaetano Quagliarello (Soveria Manneli: Rubbettino, 2001), pp. 18–23. Parri, Ester, ‘Ricordo di Carlo Rosselli’, Controcorrente, 7 –8 (1949). ——— ‘Marion Rosselli’, Il Movimento di Liberazione in Italia, 3 (1949). Parri, Ferruccio, ‘Dopo Matteotti’, L’Astrolobio, 18 June 1967. Pertini, Alessandro (ed.), Il Nostro Parri (Venice: Neri Pozza, 1983). Prezzolini, Giuseppe, Diario 1900–1941 (Milan: Rusconi, 1978). Rosselli, Aldo, La famiglia Rosselli. Una tragedia italiana (Milan: Bompiani, 1983).

Sources and Bibliography

323

——— ‘L’esilio dei Rosselli’, in Zeffiro Ciuffoletti and Nicola Tranfaglia (eds), Lessico familiare. Vita, culturale, e politica della famiglia Rosselli all’insegna della liberta` (Rome: Edimond, 2002), pp. 57 –9. Rosselli, Amelia, Memorie, edited by Marina Calloni (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001). Rosselli, Carlo, ‘My Escape’, Contemporary Review 139, n8 785 (1931), pp. 604–13. ——— Fuga a quattro tempi, in Carlo Rosselli, Socialismo liberale ed altri scritti ed. John Rosselli (Turin: Einaudi, 1973), pp. 511–25. Rosselli, John, ‘Paris in the Thirties – A Political Childhood’, The Twentieth Century 154, n8 913 (1957), pp. 335–43. ——— ‘Death of my Father’, The Twentieth Century 168 n8 1002 (1960), pp. 127–37. ——— ‘Nello and the other Rossellis’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 6, n8 3 (2001), pp. 422–8. Rosselli, Marion, ‘Lettera della moglie’, Socialismo liberale (first Italian edition) (Rome, Florence, Milan: Edizioni U, 1945). ——— ‘Te´moignage’ in Le Proce`s De Rosa. De´position, plaidoiries et jugement (Paris: Librairie Valois, 1930). Rosselli, Silvia, Gli Otto Venti (Palerme: Sellirio Editore, 2008). ——— ‘Le donne di casa Rosselli: Amelia Pincherle, Marion Cave, Maria Todesco’, in Pupa Garribba (ed.), Donne Ebree (Rome: Edizioni Nuovi Tempi, 2001). Rossi, Ernesto, ‘Il Non Mollare’, Il Ponte, 1, n8 6 (1945), pp. 529–35. ——— ‘L’Italia Libera’ in No al fascismo, edited by Ernesto Rossi et al. (Turin: Einaudi, 1957), pp. 25 –48. ——— Un democratico ribelle (Parme: Guanda, 1975). Rossi, Ernesto et al. (ed.), No al Fascismo (Turin: Einaudi, 1957). Salvemini, Gaetano, Carlo and Nello Rosselli. A Memoir (London: For Intellectual Liberty, 1937). ——— ‘Marion Rosselli’, Il Ponte, 5, n8 11 (1949) p. 1443. ——— Memorie di un fuoruscito (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1960). ——— Dai ricordi di un fuoruscito, 1922–1933 edited by Mimmo Franzinelli (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2002). ——— Memorie e soliloqui. Diario 1922–1923, edited by Roberto Pertici (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011). Serge, Victor, Retour a` l’Ouest. Chroniques, Juin 1936–Mai 1940 (Marseilles: Agone, 2010), Sforza, Carlo, L’Italie telle que je l’ai vue, 1914 –1944 (Paris: Grasset, 1946). Smith, Dodie, Look Back with Mixed Feelings (London: W.H. Allen, 1978). Sperber, Mane`s, Ces temps-la`, 3 vols. (Paris: Calmann-Le´vy, 1976). Tarchiani, Alberto, ‘Il volo di Bassanesi su Milano e il processo di Lugano’, in Trent’anni di storia italiana (1915–1945), dall’antifascismo alla Resistenza, ed. Franco Antonicelli (Turin: Einaudi 1975), pp. 167–70. ——— ‘L’impresa di Lipari’, in No al fascismo! edited by Ernesto Rossi (Turin: Einaudi, 1957), pp. 73 –126. Traquandi, Nello, ‘L’antifascismo a Firenze. Colloquio con Nello Traquandi’, L’Astrolobio, 5 March 1967.

324

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

Treves, Paolo, ‘Portici Galleria 23’, in Critica Sociale. Experienze e studi socialisti (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1957), pp. 332–6. ——— Quello che ci ha fatto Mussolini (Manduria: Piero Lacaita Editore, 1996). Venturi, Lionello, ‘In esilio in Francia e in America’, in Storia dell’antifascismo italiano, vol. 2, Testimonianze, edited by Luigi Arbizzani e Alberto Caltabiano (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1964). Waterfield, Lina, Castle in Italy (London: John Murray, 1961). Wells, H.G., Experiment in Autobiography, 2 vols (London: Victor Gollancz & The Crescent Press, 1934). White, Antonia, As Once in May. The Early Autobiography, ed. Susan Chitty (London: Virago, 1983). Zevi, Tullia Calabi, ‘La mia autobiografia politica’, Quaderni del Circolo Rosselli 68, n8 1 (2000). Zuckmayer, Carl, A Part of Myself (London: Secker & Warburg, 1970).

Political and Other Writinsgs Garosci, Aldo, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, 2 vols. (Rome: Edizioni U, 1945). ——— Storia dei Fuorusciti (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1953). Lussu, Emilio, Sul Partito d’Azione e gli altri (Milan: Mursia, 1968). ——— Tutte le opere. Vol. 2. L’esilio antifascista 1927 –1943, edited by Manlio Brigaglia (Cagliari: Aisara 2010). Rosselli, Amelia, Anima (Turin: Lattes, 1901). ——— ‘Discussioni sul femminismo. Risposta a Neera’, Il Marzocco, 17 October 1904. ——— Illusione (Turin, Rome: Roux & Viarengo, 1906). ——— ‘A proposito di un Congresso (chiacchiere sul femminismo)’, Il Marzocco, 14 October 1906. ——— (anonimo) ‘Propaganda elettorale femminile’ Il Marzocco, 30 November 1913. ——— Fratelli Minori (Florence: Bemporad, 1921). Rosselli, Carlo, Opere Scelte: Socialismo Liberale, vol.1, edited by John Rosselli (Turin: Einaudi, 1973). ——— Scritti politici, edited by Zeffiro Ciuffoletti and Paolo Bagnoli (Naples: Giuda, 1988). ——— Scritti dall’esilio, I. Giustizia e Liberta` e la Concentrazione Antifascista (1929–1934), edited by Costanzo Casucci (Turin: Einaudi, 1988). ——— Scritti dall’esilio, II. Dallo scioglimento della Concentrazione Antifascista alla Guerra di Spagna (1934–1937), edited by Costanzo Casucci (Turin: Einaudi, 1992). ——— Liberal Socialism, edited with an introduction by Nadia Urbinati, translated by William McCuaig (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994). Rosselli, Marion, ‘Alberto Tarchiani’, Free World, 3 (1945), pp. 31 –3.

Sources and Bibliography

325

Rossi, Ernesto, Una Spia del Regime. Carlo del Re e la provocazione contro Giustizia e Liberta` (Turin: Bollato Boringhieri, 2000). Salvemini, Gaetano, Giorgio La Piana, What to do with Italy? (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1943).

Documents, Periodicals, Yearbooks Bedford College Magazine, 1915 –1919. Camera dei Deputati, seduta del 22 ottobre 1949, Atti parlamentari, intervento dell’Onorevole Calosso, p. 12676, 12679–80. Cave, Marion, Antonio Conti e il suo posto nella letteratura del Settecento, Master’s thesis, London University, October 1922. Antologia del Caffe`: giornale dell’antifascismo 1924–25 edited by Bianca Ceva (Milan: Lerici, 1958). Conference of All Friends, Official Report (London, 1920). England Census, 1861, 1871, 1881, 1891, 1901. Faggi, Vico, Il Processo di Savona (Genoa: Teatro Stabile di Genova, 1965). Friends Meetings – London and Middlesex Quarterly Meeting; 1900–1949. House of Commons Library, A Century of Change. Trends in UK Statistics Since 1900, Research paper 99/111; 21/12/1999, 11, http://www.parliament.uk/ commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99–111.pdf. I Quaderni di Giustizia e Liberta`, edited by Alberto Tarchiani (Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1959). Il Quarto Stato di Nenni e Rosselli, edited by Domenico Zuccaro (Milan: SugarCo, 1977). Levi, Carlo, Carlo Levi, Disegni dal carcere, 1934. Materiali per una storia (Rome: De Luca Editore, 1983). Mazzini News 1941–42, edited by Lamberto Mercuri (Foggia: Bastogi, 1990). Non Mollare!, 1925, edited by Gartano Salvemini, Piero Calamandrei and Ernesto Rossi (Florence: La Nuova Italia (1955) 1968). Saint Paul’s Girls’ School Book, 1904– 1925, London, St Paul’s School, 1925. Tornano i Rosselli, Florence, Palazzo Vecchio, 1951.

NEWSPAPERS, PERIODICALS Giustiza e Liberta` Il Corriere della Sera Italia Libera The Italian Mail, 1922 –1932 La Liberta` The Manchester Guardian La Nazione, The New York Times The Times The full bibliography of secondary sources mentioned in the endnotes is available on the author’s page on Academia.edu and on the I.B.Tauris website.

Index

Acerbo Law, 48 Acton, Arthur, 29 Action Party (Partito d’Azione), 217, 222, 227, 228, 230, 234, 236–238, 240, 244–247 Agostini, Alfredo, 98 Allason, Barbara, 120, 157 Amendola, Giorgio, 196 Amendola, Giovanni, 48, 52, 64, 75, 88 Amis de la Ve´rite´, Les, 148 Anfuso, Filippo, 232, 252, 256 Anima, 67, 72 Ann Veronica, 16, 24 Ansaldo, Giovanni, 6, 7, 24, 65, 71, 81, 84, 85, 86, 87, 98, 185, 279n.30 antifascism, antifascists, 43, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 52, 54, 79, 81, 82, 84, 85, 90, 91, 92, 109, 117, 118, 126, 127, 128, 134, 140, 141, 149, 169, 186, 196, 197, 201, 204, 210, 222 Antifascist Concentration (Concentrazione Antifascista), 118, 134, 145, 155 Antifascist Intellectual Manifesto (Benedetto Croce), 56, 82, 140 Antonini, Giacomo, 176, 184

Antonini, Luigi, 216 Aron, Raymond, 188, 302n.51 Ascoli, Marion, Rosenwald, 207, 208, 215 Ascoli, Max, 55, 64, 81, 206, 207, 208, 210, 211, 212, 213, 215, 216, 224, 230, 238, 253 Avanti!, 24, 32 Aventine Secession, 49, 51, 53, 83, 118 Badoglio, Pietro, Marshall, 221, 222, 225, 226, 227 Bagnoles-de-l’Orne, 176, 180, 255 Basch, Victor, 226 Bassanesi, Giovanni, 125, 126, 127, 132, 134–136 Basso, Lelio, 81 Battaglie fasciste, 50, 57 Battisti, Cesare, 51, 271n.57 Bauer, Carlo, 55, 79, 81, 82, 84, 85, 87, 90, 98, 100, 114, 120, 128, 129, 133, 187, 222, 255 Becciolini, Giovanni, 59 Becker, Walter Sir, 42 Bedford College, 17–20, 22, 41, 62, 70, 74, 102, 103, 114, 213 Bellanca, Auguste, 208, 216, 217 Benaı¨m, Elisa, 242, 244, 248, 275n.45

Index Bennett, Arnold, 25 Berenson, Bernard, 29, 41, 42, 58, 63, 82 Berenson, Mary, 43, 44 Berneri, Camillo, 252 Besneux, He´le`ne, 182 Biaggi, Guido, 29, 67 Biancafiore, see Rosselli, Marion Cave Bibbi, Gino, 98, 166 Bibbi, Maria, 98, 166 Blum, Le´on, 123, 168, 169, 197 Bo, Carlo, 27 Bobbio, Norberto, 157, 162 Bocchini, Arturo, 112, 129, 183 Bocconi University, 65, 70, 78 Bonomi, Ivanoe, 44, 227 Bordiga, Amedeo, 36 Bottai, Giuseppe, 56 Bouvyer, Jean, 199 Boyance`, Giuseppe, 85, 86 Britain, Vera, 20, 21 British expatriates in Florence, 27, 29, 30, 40 –42, 63, 165 British Institute in Florence, 28, 41, 42, 55, 56, 63, 102, 113, 154, 234 British-Italian League, 17, 22 –23, 27 Brockway, Fenner, 14 Buozzi, Bruno, 118 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 12, 24 Caffe`, Il, 79, 81 Cagoule (La), Cagoulards, see CSAR Calamandrei, Pietro, 45, 50, 52, 56, 57, 64, 232, 250 Calosso, Umberto, 24, 196 Campolonghi, Luigi, 118 Carter, Barbara Barclay, 90, 91, 150 Cave, Bernard, 9 Cave, Constance, see Lewis, Pat Cave, Ella, 9, 13, 22 –23 Cave, Ernest, 7, 8, 14, 22– 23, 106, 111, 112, 260 n16 Cave, Marion, see Rosselli, Marion Cave

327

Cave, Norman, 9, 21 Ceva, Umberto, 90, 100, 120, 128, 129, 131 Chabod, Federico, 45 Chiaromonte, Nicola, 210 Christian Democratic Party, 236, 240, 244, 251 Cianca, Alberto, 109, 118, 119, 123, 125, 135, 161, 181, 189, 190, 196, 210, 217, 220, 224, 240 Ciano, Count Galeazzo, 229, 231 Cippico, Antonio, 17, 41 Churchill, Winston Sir, 87, 214, 215, 216 Circolo di Cultura (Cultural Circle), 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 53, 57, 62–64, 79, 139 CNL (Committee of National Liberation), 223, 225, 227 CNL-AI (Committee of National Liberation in Northern Italy), 227, 235 confino di polizia (domestic exile), 83, 88, 92, 95, 98, 109, 110, 111, 112, 114, 125 Conformist, The, 151 Conti, Angelo, 67 Conti, Antonio, 22, 27 Consolo, Gustavo, 57, 59 Corradini, Enrico, 67 Corriere della Sera, 80 Crawford, Virginia, 102 Critica Sociale, 69 Croce, Benedetto, 56, 67, 82, 140, 141, 165, 196 CSAR (Comite´ secret d’action re´volutionnaire – La Cagoule), 184, 199, 203, 204, 229, 233, 252, 253 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 32, 67, 126 Da Bove, Lorenzo, 85, 86 Dauriac, Fernande, 37, 63 De Bosis, Lauro, 134, 135, 140 De Gaulle, Charles, 214, 218

328

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

De Rosa, Fernando, 59, 81, 83, 121, 122, 128, 145 Del Re, Carlo, 129 Desjardins, Paul, 143, 148 Dobelli, Emma, 17, 41, 89, 200, 262n70 Dolci, Gioacchino, 99, 101, 105, 106, 126, 127, 214 Dottor Antonio, Il, 24 Douglas, Norman, 41 Draper, Ruth, 134, 135, 139, 149, 156, 208, 209 Dreyfus, captain (Affair), 141, 142, 143 Dumini, Amerigo, 55 Duse, Eleonora, 67 Einaudi, Giulio, 157, 162 Einaudi, Luigi, 56 Enthoven, Marion, 102, 104, 114, 123, 205, 244, 248, 282n.34 Ercoli, see Togliatti, Palmiro Fabians, 8, 14, 65, 69 Facchinetti, Cipriano, 117, 119 fasci di combattimento (fascist squads), 33, 41, 46, 268 Fascist Cultural Manifesto (Giovani Gentile), 56, 140 Fernandez, Ramon, 148, 149 Ferrando, Guido, 28– 29, 51, 52, 55, 56, 64, 211 Ferrero, Gina Lombroso, 67, 97, 156, 163, 195 Ferrero, Guglielmo, 52, 63, 67, 97, 117, 156, 163, 195 Ferrero, Leo, 97, 156 Filippelli, Filippo, 55, 228 Filliol, Jean, 182, 199 Florence, 25 –27, 30, 34, 35, 37, 38, 39, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 59, 60, 67 Foa`, Vittorio, 120, 162, 187 Forti, Aldo, 183, 241 Forster, E.M., 27

Fratelli Minori, 69 Free Italian Government in Exile (Sforza), 214, 216 French Institute, 28 Friends of Italian Freedom, 102 fuoruscismo/fuorusciti, (antifascist exiles), 117, 118, 139, 140, 201, 204, 24 Futurism, Futurists, 34, 45, 46, 67 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 24 Garosci, Aldo, 3, 6, 120, 162, 190, 196, 210, 215, 217, 220, 224, 229 Gentile, Giovanni, 50, 56, 140 Gentili, Dino, 217, 220 Gibson, Violet, 82 Gillies, William, 42, 154, 198 Ginzburg, Leone, 120, 162, 222 Ginzburg, Natalia, 85 Giolitti, Giovanni, 37, 44 Giustizia e Liberta` (GL), 119–122, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 133, 134, 135, 136, 139, 145, 155, 157 161, 162, 177, 178, 196, 197, 210, 215, 217, 222, 228, 229, 240, 248 Giustizia e Liberta`, 155, 161, 177, 178, 181, 190, 197 Goad, Harold E., 17, 28–29, 41, 42, 113, 154 Gobetti, Ada, 120 Gobetti, Piero, 75, 79, 190 Gramsci, Antonio, 36, 81, 83, 178, 179 Grandi, Dino, 56 Hale´vy, Daniel, 141, 142 Hale´vy, Elie, 141, 142, 149, 155, 179, 188, 195 Hale´vy, Florence Noufflard, 142, 179, 188, 193, 200, 256 Harvard University, 138 Holst, Gustav, 11 Huxley, Aldous, 41, 268n.12

Index Illusion, 67, 72 ILP (Independent Labour Party), 9, 14, 22 Italia Libera, 50, 51, 53, 55, 58, 60, 64 Italia Libera (1945), 231 Italian Emergency Rescue Committee, 210 Italian Legion (Pacciardi), 214, 216 Italian Mail, The, 39, 40 Italian News Service, 212 Italian Refugees Relief Committee, 102 Italy Today, 102, 133 Jahier, Piero, 45, 50 Jakubiez, Fernand, 182, 199, 233, 253 Jeffreys, Virginia, 62, 74 Jewish Labor Committee, 210 Joxe, Claude, 193, 196, 205 Joxe, Franc
oise Hale´vy, 193, 203, 205, 218, 229, 303n.4 Joxe, Louis, 218, 229 Joxe Pierre, 193, 196, 205, 303n.4 Kropotkin, Peter, 15, 96 Kuliscioff, Anna, 6, 79–80 Kunsthistorisches Institut (Florence), 28, 31 Labour Party, 14, 22, 40, 42, 69, 79, 111, 154, 198 La Piana, Angelina, 212 La Piana, Giorgio, 201, 208, 209, 211, 224, 305n.42 Larchmont (N.Y.), 209, 210, 212, 213, 219, 228 Lavignani, Spartaco, 35 Lavoro, Il, 82, 84, 97 Lee, Vernon (Violet Paget), 42, 52, 58, 63, 141, 179 Levi, Alessandro, 6, 51, 58, 64, 69, 84, 183, 255 Levi, Carlo, 55, 120, 139, 146, 150, 157, 162 Levi Sarina, 66

329

Lewis, Pat, 9, 104, 134, 150 Lewis, Roger, 134, 150 Liberal Socialism, 106, 119, 229 Liberta`, La, 109, 118 LIDU (Italian Human Rights League), 118, 125 Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, 124, 189, 190, 200, 226 Limentini, Ludovico, 45, 64 Lipari Island, 92, 94 –96, 98, 105, 106, 229 Lombardi, Riccardo, 236, 250 Lombroso, Cesare, 67 Longo, Luigi, 227 Luchaire, Jean, 28, 37, 138 Lugano trial, 127, 129, 130 Lussu, Emilio, 94, 96, 98, 99, 106, 108, 109, 119, 135, 139, 155, 161, 176, 177, 186, 187, 189, 190, 196, 203, 210, 214, 215, 217, 222, 240, 245 MacDonald, Ramsay, 14 Malaparte Curzio, 36, 56 Malraux, Andre´, 148, 170 Malraux, Clara, 148, 173, 174 Manchester Guardian, 90, 112, 131, 147, 164, 185 March on Rome, 39, 40, 46 Marchetti, Ferrucio, 59 Mariano, Nicky, 82 Marinetti, F.T., 56 Marzocco, Il, 67 Massey, Isabel, 103, 114, 149, 150, 187, 205, 250 Matteotti, Gioacomo, 49, 50, 51, 52, 55, 58, 59, 71, 75, 88, 99, 228 Matteotti, Velia, 145, 146 Matthews, Herbert, 228, 229 Maurizio, see Parri, Ferruccio Mazzini, Giuseppe, 24, 66, 91, 119 Mazzini News, 212 Mazzini Society, 211–214, 216, 217, 223, 233 Meredith, George, 12, 24

330

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

Me´te´nier, Franc
ois, 233, 253 Minervini, Lidia, 45, 58 Mirtillino, see Rosselli, John Modigliano, Giuseppe Emmanuelle, 55, 118 Modigliani, Vera, 141 Mondo, Il, 119 Montale, Eugenio, 56 Moravia, Alberto, 66, 67, 150, 151, 199 Moro-Giafferi, Vincent, 130, 184, 229, 253 Morra di Lavriano, Umberto, 45, 59, 64 Morris, William, 8 Mosley, Oswald, 42, 154 Movement of Socialist Action, 24 Murray, Gilbert, 24 Mussolini, 1, 33, 35, 39, 40, 43, 44, 46, 48, 49, 52, 53, 55, 59, 81, 82, 98, 102, 111, 112, 133, 140, 162, 165, 167, 184, 192, 215, 216, 220, 221, 223, 224, 228, 234 Nathan, Ernesto, 68 Nathan, Moses, 66 Navale, Roberto, 233, 252, 256 Nenni, Pietro, 74, 80, 83, 84, 118, 128, 186 Niccoli, Alfredo, 46, 64 Nitti, Donna Antonia, 141 Nitti, Fausto, 81, 99, 105, 106, 108, 117, 128 Nitti, Francesco Saverio, 48, 99, 141, 184 Non Mollare!, 54–60, 63, 64, 70, 71, 79, 81, 228 Noufflard, Andre´, 142, 188, 255 Noufflard, Berthe Langweil, 142, 179, 188, 255 Noufflard, Genevie`ve, 179, 188, 255 occupation of the factories, 32 –34 Orvieto, Angiolo, 29, 67

Orvieto, Laura, 67, 71 OVRA (Organization for the Vigilance and Repression of Antifascists), 83, 121, 125, 129, 145, 157, 166, 176, 184, 191 Oxilia, Italo, 85, 86, 90, 101, 106 Pacciardi, Randolfo, 118, 126, 210, 214 pacifism, 21 –22 Pankhurst, Sylvia, 145, 146, 150 Parri, Ester, 107, 120 Parri, Ferruccio, 79, 81, 82, 85, 86, 90, 91, 92, 93, 96, 98, 120, 128, 129, 133, 227, 234, 236, 240, 244, 245 Pavese, Cesare, 157, 162 PCF (French Communist Party), 154, 155 PCI (Italian Communist Party), 36, 155, 158, 226, 236, 240, 244, 251 Peacop, Mari-Lou, 103, 106, 114 peasants’ movement, 32– 34 Pellizzi, Camillo, 17, 41, 268n15 Pende, Nicola, 97 Pe`re Lachaise cemetery, 1, 145, 189, 190, 203, 229 Pertini, Sandro, 85, 86, 90 Pieraccini, Gaetano, 51, 58, 62, 241 Pilati, Gaetano, 51, 59 Pincherle, Adriana, 150, 151 Pincherle, Carlo, 66 Pincherle, Gabriele, 66, 93 Pirandello, Luigi, 56 Pitigrilli (Dino Segre), 157 Placci, Carlo, 43, 68 Pontigny (de´cades), 143, 17, 148 Ponza Island, 109, 114, 125 Popular Front, 1, 155, 168, 169, 175, 176, 197 Porcellotti, Maria, 98 PNF (National Fascist Party), 36, 49

Index POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unity), 178, 252 Prezzolini, Giuseppe, 38, 44, 68 Pritchard, Berthe, 150 PSI (Italian Socialist Party), 32, 33, 34, 36, 37, 79, 81, 118, 121, 134, 145, 244, 251 PSLI, (Socialist Party of Italian Workers), 81, 84, 118, 155 PSU (Unified Socialist Party), 36, 49, 52, 69 Purieux, Robert, 199, 233, 253 Quakers (Society of Friends), 9, 21 –22 Quaderni di Giustizia e Liberta`, 145 Quarto Stato, Il, 74, 80, 81, 83, 121 racial laws (1938), 201, 202 Rawson, Marion, see Enthoven Reale, Egidio, 117, 163, 195, 201 Republican Party, 117, 118, 244, 245 Rivoluzione Liberale, La, 75 Roatta, Mario, General, 232 Room with a View, A, 27 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 206 Roosevelt, Franklin, Delano, 212, 215, 216 Rosselli, Alberto, 183 Rosselli, Aldo (1895–1916), 65, 68 Rosselli, Amelia (Melina), 125, 149, 153, 159, 163, 170, 179, 183, 193, 196, 205, 206, 209, 213, 219, 234, 238, 242, 243, 244, 248, 251, 254, 256 Rosselli, Amelia Pincherle, 2, 7, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 71, 73, 74, 76, 78, 93, 96, 99, 105, 109, 110, 123, 130, 132, 146, 152, 161, 163, 180, 183, 189, 191, 193, 194, 198, 199, 204, 207, 208, 209, 219, 228, 233, 240, 251 Rosselli, Andrea, 132, 152, 153, 159, 163, 179, 183, 193, 195, 196, 205, 209, 213, 219, 234, 242,

331

244, 248, 249, 250, 251, 254, 256 Rosselli brothers funerals, 2, 189–91 murder, 2, 181, 182, 184, 185, 188, 189 police enquiry, 184, 198, 199, 200, 203 trial (France), 229, 230, 233, 252, 253 trial (Italy), 231, 232, 233, 252 Rosselli, Carlo, 1, 2, 45, 46, 50, 52, 53, 54, 58, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 68, 69, 70 –77, 82 –99, 102– 109, 116, 118, 119, 123, 126, 127, 128, 129, 132, 135, 136, 147, 153, 156, 158, 159, 175, 176, 242 Rosselli, Giuseppe (Joe), 65, 66 Rosselli, John (Giovanni, Andrea, ‘Mirtillino’), 3, 21, 68, 72, 88, 96, 98, 100, 102, 103, 106, 107, 138, 143, 150, 151, 153, 155, 156, 159, 162, 163, 166, 167, 168, 179, 180, 181, 183, 185, 186, 188, 191, 192, 193, 194, 196, 201, 204, 205, 209, 213, 219, 233, 234, 236, 237, 246, 247, 248, 250, 253, 254, 255, 256 Rosselli, Maria Todesco, 2, 76, 77, 105, 132, 153, 163, 179, 183, 184, 191, 193, 195, 198, 201, 204, 207, 208, 209, 228, 233, 234, 240, 253, 255 Rosselli, Marion Cave antifascist activism, 2, 36, 45, 47, 48, 50, 51, 52, 54, 58, 81, 82, 86, 87, 128, 129, 130, 131, 133, 135 145, 146, 149, 153, 158, 163, 164, 166, 170, 171, 176, 196, 197, 198, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 223, 225, 226, 228, 229, 230, 231, 234, 235

332

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

arrest (1929), 108–114 Biancafiore, 6, 39, 52 British Institute in Florence, 28, 30, 36, 42, 45, 63 Circolo di Cultura, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 52; cultural concerns, 146, 147, 152, 156, 157, 166, 167, 243 De Rosa trial, 122, 128 education, 10, 11– 16, 17 –20, 22–23, 153, 166 engagement and marriage, 64– 65, 71–77 estrangement from England, 62, 100, 101, 104, 105, 123, 146, 166, 179, 194, 201, 205, 226, 248, 250 escape from Lipari, 94, 99, 100, 101–106 family background, 7 –9 gender roles, 15 –16, 82, 96, 97, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 127, 128, 132, 133, 135, 136, 143, 144, 145 147, 148, 151, 152, 154, 156, 165, 169, 170, 171, 173, 174, 177, 201, 202, 203 health problems, 10, 97, 123, 125, 132, 143, 144, 159, 160, 161, 162, 164, 166, 167, 193, 205, 208, 212, 213, 236, 237, 238, 247, 248, 253, 255, 256 Italia Libera, 50, 51, 52 memory celebration, 200, 203, 249, 250, 255, 302n.60 nationality, 99, 100, 110, 112, 166, 201, 203, 207, 226, 237 Non Mollare!, 53, 55, 58 post-war Italian politics, 235, 236, 237, 240, 242, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 251, 252 religion, 68, 140 Savona trial, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93 Sorbonne, 201, 203, 204

University of Florence, 56, 57, 60, 71 Rosselli, Nello, 1, 45, 50, 52, 53, 63, 65, 68, 69, 70, 72, 73, 74, 76, 88, 93, 100, 105, 109, 114, 124, 125, 132, 143, 153, 163, 164, 180 Rosselli, Paola, 125, 204, 205, 241, 254 Rosselli, Pellegrino, 65 Rosselli, Sabatino, 65 Rosselli, Silvia, 105, 153, 204, 205, 241, 254 Rossetti, Maria, 58 Rossetti, Raffaele, 50, 58, 64, 71, 73, 101, 103, 104, 105, 118, 119 Rossi, Ada, 146, 247 Rossi, Cesare, 55 Rossi, Ernesto, 44, 45, 50, 51, 53, 53, 57, 58, 62, 63, 64, 72, 73, 81, 120, 128, 129, 133, 146, 197, 222, 230, 240, 245, 246, 247, 255 Ruffini, Giovanni, 24 Ruskin, John, 8–9 Russell, Bertrand, 21 Russell, Mary A., 9, 23 St Paul’s Girls’ School, 10, 11, 15, 67, 70, 114, 242, 243, 244, 248 Salvadori, Max, 120, 217 Salvemini, Gaetano, 6, 23, 30, 36, 37, 38, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 65, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 76, 80, 99, 100, 101, 102, 109, 119, 128, 135, 138, 141, 143, 147, 155, 159, 161, 163, 187, 200, 201, 208, 210, 211, 212, 216, 217, 224, 230, 233, 250 Sante Emanuele, colonel, 233, 252, 256 Saragat, Giuseppe, 118

Index Sarfatti, Marguerita, 56 Savona Trial, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92 Schiavetti, Fernando, 119, 196, 240 Serge, Victor, 172 Serrati, Giacinto, 33 Sestan, Ernesto, 45 SFIO (French Socialist Party), 123, 152, 154, 155 Sforza, Count Carlo, 117, 130, 163, 210, 213, 214, 217, 220, 224, 227, 231 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 12, 24 SIELE, C8, 69, 176 Silvestri, Carlo, 84, 85, 86, 87, 98, 278n.30 Smith, Dodie, 11, 12, 15, 260n.31 Soffici, Ardengo, 56 Sorano, Alberto, 64 Spanish Civil War, 1, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 175, 177, 178, 197, 202, 300n.12 Special Tribunal for the Defence of the State, 83, 90, 97, 129, 133 squadrismo, squadristi, 33, 34, 35, 39, 53, 83, 85 Sturzo, Don Luigi, 90, 102, 140, 150, 196, 211, 236 Suckert, Kurt Erich, see Malaparte Suffragette Movement, 15 –16 Swing, Raymond, 226 Tarchiani, Alberto, 99, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 118, 119, 123, 126, 128, 129, 132, 135, 136, 155, 161, 181, 190, 196, 208, 210, 217, 220, 224, 225, 227, 231, 238 Tenaille, Andre´, 199 Thompson, Dorothy, 213 Times, The, 22 –23, 40, 87, 185 Todesco, Maria. See Rosselli, Maria Todesco Togliatti, Palmiro, 176, 226, 227, 233, 236, 252

333

Toscanini, Arturo, 152, 153, 156, 204 Traquandi, Nello, 50, 53, 64, 120, 128, 133, 237 Trentin, Silvio, 128, 177, 190 Treves, Claudio, 69, 83, 84, 118, 151, 190 Treves, Paolo, 84, 101, 111, 118, 205 Tuke, Margaret, 21, 114 Turati, Filippo, 69, 79, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 90, 91, 101, 109, 118, 128, 130, 143, 144, 190 Ungaretti, Giuseppe, 56 Union pour la Ve´rite´, 143 Unione Democratica Nazionale, 52, 64 Unione Popolare Italiana, 177 University of Florence, 30, 45, 51, 56, 63 University of Genoa, 70, 75 University of London, 8, 17, 41 Ustica Island, 88, 93, 109 Uxbridge, 9– 10, 13, 23, 26, 62, 101, 123 Valiani, Leo, 81 Vannucci, Dino, 50, 53, 64 Venturi, Ada, 140, 147, 153, 157, 158, 172 Venturi, Franco, 162, 181, 222 Venturi, Lionello, 139, 140, 147, 157, 172, 183, 190, 196, 208, 210, 217 Victor Emmanuel III, King, 221, 222, 225 Vieusseux Library, 27 Villa Il Palmerino, 42, 43 Villa I Tatti, 43, 63 Villari, Luigi, 113 Villari, Pasquale, 37, 57, 113 Voce degli Italiani, La, 177 Volpe, Gioacchino, 56, 124, 125 Von Arnim, Elizabeth, 26

334

Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy

Waterfield, Aubrey, 63 Waterfield, Lina, 63 Wells, Herbert, George, 8, 12, 16, 24, 77, 144, 150, 159, 167, 180, 198 What to do With Italy?, 224 White, Antonia, 11 White, Linda, 113 Wiley, Robert Winston, 197 Woolf, Virginia, 13

YWCA (Young Women’s Christian Association, Florence), 30 –31 Zabban, Giorgina and Giulo, 92, 93, 195, 242, 280n.68 Zamboni, Anteo, 82 Zani Bianco, Umberto, 52, 56, 64 Zaniboni, Tito, 81, 90 Zevi, Bruno, 220 Zevi, Tullia, 236, 238

PLATE 1 Marion Cave at Via Giusti, Florence, spring 1926. Fondazione Rosselli.

PLATE 2

Marion Cave Rosseli’s police file. CPC, ACS, Rome.

PLATE 3 Carlo, Marion and John (‘Mirtillino’), Lipari Island, 1928. Fondazione Rosselli.

PLATE 4 Marion, Carlo and Filipo Turati, 1931. Fondo Panunzio, BNCF, Florence.

PLATE 5 Marion, Carlo and Marion’s sister Pat Lewis, Le Praz, summer 1931. ISRT.

PLATE 6 Filipo Turati and Marion Cave Rosselli, Bruxelles 1931. Fondo Panunzio, BNCF, Florence.

PLATE 7 Marion and Carlo Rosselli, Royan, summer 1932. CPC, ACS, Rome.

PLATE 8 Amelia Rosselli, Marion and Carlo Rosseli, Hendaye, summer 1933. CPC, ACS, Rome.

PLATE 9 Marion (right, sitting) with Ada Venturi (left, sitting) and two young friends, La Baule 1934. ISRT.

PLATE 10 Marion and Carlo, Bagnoles de l’Orne train station, 9 June 1937. Fondo Panunzio, BNCF.

PLATE 11 Rosselli Funerals, Ceremony at La Maison des Syndicats. Marion sitting in the front row. Istoreto.

PLATE 12 The funeral procession. From the right: Alberto Tarchiani (partly hidden), Emilio Lussu and Marion. Istoreto.

PLATE 13 The funeral procession and the public tribute to the slain brothers. Itoreto.

PLATE 14 Pe´re Lachaise cemetery: Marion (sitting) between Lionello Venturi (left) and Alberto Cianca (right). Istoreto.

PLATE 15

Mazzini Society flier, New York. ISRT.