Carlo Rosselli
Italian political leader (1899–1937)
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Through Socialism, Historian and Philosophy
Early life and education
Rosselli was born in Rome to a wealthy Tuscan Jewish family. His mother, Amelia Pincherle Rosselli, had been active in republican politics and thought and had participated in the unification of Italy. She was also a playwright and children's book author. In 1903, he was taken to Florence with his mother and siblings. During the First World War, he joined the Italian Armed Forces and fought in the alpine campaign, rising to the rank of second lieutenant.
After the war, thanks to his brother Nello, Rosselli studied in Florence with Gaetano Salvemini, who was to be from then a constant companion of both the Rosselli brothers. It was in this period that he became a socialist, sympathetic to the reformist ideas of Filippo Turati, in contrast to the revolutionary socialist thinking of Giacinto Menotti Serrati. In 1921, he graduated with a degree in political sciences from the University of Florence with a thesis about syndicalism. He later undertook a law degree that he would pursue in Turin and Milan, where he met Luigi Einaudi and Piero Gobetti. He graduated in 1923 from the University of Siena. For some weeks, he visited London where he studied the workings of the British Labour Party, which would deeply influence him.
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Rise of fascism
An active supporter of the Unitary Socialist Party (PSU) of Turati, Giacomo Matteotti, and Claudio Treves, Rosselli began writing for Critica Sociale (Social Criticism). a review edited by Turati. After the murder of Matteotti, Rosselli pushed for a more active opposition to Italian fascism. With the help of Salvemini and Ernesto Rossi, he founded the clandestine publication Non mollare (Do Not Give Up). During the following months, fascist violence towards the left became increasingly severe. Rossi left the country for France, followed by Salvemini. On 15 February 1926, fellow activist Piero Gobetti died as an exile in Paris for the consequences of a fascist aggression which happened in Turin the year before. Still in Italy, Rosselli and Pietro Nenni founded the review Quarto Stato (Fourth Estate), which was banned after a few months.
Later in 1926, Rosselli organized with Sandro Pertini and Ferruccio Parri the escape of Turati to France. While Pertini followed Turati to France, Parri and Rosselli were captured and convicted for their roles in Turati's escape and sentenced to a period of confinement on the island of Lipari (1927). It was then that Rosselli began to write his most famous work, Socialismo liberale (Liberal Socialism). In July 1929, he escaped to Tunisia, from where he travelled to France, and the community of Italian antifascists including Emilio Lussu and Francesco Fausto Nitti. Nitti later portrayed Rosselli's adventurous escape in the book Le nostre prigioni e la nostra evasione (Our Prisons and Our Escape) in an Italian edition in 1946 (the 1929 English first edition was titled Escape).
Exile in Paris and Giustizia e Libertà
In 1929, with Alberto Cianca, Lussu, Nitti, and a partisan circle of refugees that had formed around Salvemini, Rosselli helped found the anti-fascist movement Giustizia e Libertà (GL). GL published various numbers of the review and the notebooks Giustizia e Libertà with cadence weekly magazine and salary, and was active in the organization of various spectacular actions, notable among which was the flight over Milan of Bassanesi (1930). In 1930, he published in French Socialisme libéral.
The book was at once a passionate critique of Marxism, a creative synthesis of the democratic socialist, Marxist revisionism (Eduard Bernstein, Turati, and Treves) and of classical Italian liberalism (Benedetto Croce, Francisco Saverio Merlino, and Salvemini). It also contained a shattering attack on the Stalinism of the Third International, which had lumped together social democracy, bourgeois liberalism, and fascism with the derisive formula of "social fascism". As a result, Palmiro Togliatti, one of the most important leaders of the Communist Party of Italy (PCd'I) and later the Italian Communist Party (PCI), defined Liberal Socialism as "libellous anti-socialism" and Rosselli "a reactionary ideologue who has nothing to do with the working class".
GL joined the Concentrazione Antifascista Italiana (Italian Anti-Fascist Concentration), a union of all the non-communist anti-fascist forces (republican, socialist, and nationalist) trying to promote and coordinate expatriate actions to fight fascism in Italy. They also first published the weekly political magazine Giustizia e Libertà. Rosselli was the founding editor of the weekly and served in the post from 1934 to 1937. Following his assassination in 1937, Alberto Cianca replaced him in the post.
Spanish Civil War
After the advent of Nazism in Germany, the paper began to call for insurgency, revolutionary action, and military action in order to stop the Italian and German regimes before they plunge Europe into a tragic war. They wrote that Spain seemed the destiny of all fascist states. In July 1936, the Spanish Civil War erupted as the fascist-monarchical led army attempted a coup d'état against the republican government of the Popular Front. Rosselli helped lead the Italian anti-fascist supporters of the Spanish Republican Army, criticizing the neutrality policy of France and Britain, especially as Italy and Germany sent arms and troops in support of the rebels. In August, Rosselli and the GL organized their own brigades of volunteers to support the Second Spanish Republic.
With Camillo Berneri, Rosselli headed the Matteotti Battalion, a mixed volunteer unit of Italian anarchist, liberal, socialist, and communist. The unit was sent to the Aragon front, and participated in a victory against Francoist forces in the Battle of Monte Pelato. Speaking on Barcelona Radio in November, Rosselli made famous the slogan Oggi in Spagna, domani in Italia ("Today in Spain, tomorrow in Italy"). After falling ill, Rosselli was sent back to Paris, from where he led support for the anti-fascist cause, and proposed an even broader "popular front" while still remaining critical of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) and the Soviet government of Joseph Stalin. In 1937, Berneri was killed by Communist forces during a purge of anarchists in Barcelona. With the fall of the Spanish Republic in 1939, GL partisans were forced to flee back to France.
Murder
In June 1937, Rosselli and his brother visited the French resort town of Bagnoles-de-l'Orne. On 9 June, the two were killed by a group of cagoulards, militants of La Cagoule, a French fascist group. Archival documents later implicated Mussolini's regime in authorizing the murder. The two brothers were buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris; in 1951, the family moved them to Italy into the Monumental Cemetery of Trespiano, a frazione of Florence. His British-origin wife Marion Catherine Cave, their three children, Giovanni Andrea "John", Amelia "Melina", and Andrew, and his mother Amelia Pincherle Rosselli survived him.
Thought
Rosselli published only one book, Liberal Socialism. This work marked Rosselli out as a heretic in the Italian left of his time for which Marx's Das Kapital, albeit variously understood, was still regarded as the main reliable source of political analysis and guidance. The influence of the British labour movement, which he knew well, was significant. As a result of the electoral successes of the Labour Party, Rosselli was convinced that the norms of liberal democracy were essential, not only in building socialism but also for its concrete realization. This stood in contrast to Leninist tactics, which prioritize organizational power over democratic procedures. This Rossellian synthesis is that "[parliamentary] liberalism is the method, Socialism is the aim".
As a democratic socialist, Rosselli rejected the Marxist–Leninist idea of revolution founded on the dictatorship of the proletariat (which he felt, as in the Russian case, was synonymous with the dictatorship of a single party) in favour of a revolution that—as famously put in the GL program—must be a coherent system of structural reforms aimed at the construction of a socialism which does not limit but is intended to exalt the freedoms of personality and of association. Writing in his final years, Rosselli became more radical in his positions, defending the social organization of the CNT-FAI he had seen in anarchist Catalonia and Barcelona during the civil war, and informed by the rise of Nazi Germany.