Death in Exile: The Assassination of Carlo Rosselli
1997; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 32; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1177/002200949703200302
ISSN1461-7250
Autores Tópico(s)Italian Fascism and Post-war Society
ResumoWhen the 'grand old man' of Italian socialism, Filippo Turati, died in Paris in 1932, many saw his passing as the end of an era. In truth, the great hope of Italian socialism had been dashed with the rise to power of Mussolini and the fascist regime a decade earlier; Turati's death was a symbolic postscript to that defeat. In a moving elegy, Carlo Rosselli commemorated his death and with poetic insight lamented what seemed the inexorable destiny of sad death in exile for those Italians who fought against injustice. Rosselli had made a name for himself in the 1920s as a heretical socialist, criticizing the intellectual and political shortcomings of Italian socialism. During the 1930s he was the enfant terrible of the anti-fascist opposition in exile; this reputation was ultimately to seal his fate as he himself hinted years earlier. Yet his legacy was manifest in the programme of the Action Party and its noble attempt to forge a new Italy out of the crucible of the armed resistance against nazism and fascism. Carlo Rosselli (1899-1937) was born into a wealthy, patriotic, bourgeois Jewish family with strong ties to the Risorgimento. Like most of their class, the Rosselli family fervently supported the new nation-state and answered its call to arms in 1915. The eldest brother, Aldo, was killed at the front in 1916, while Carlo and his younger brother, Nello, served as junior officers (even though as sons of a widow, they could have claimed exemption from military duty). With the end of the war and the rise of fascism, both brothers were confronted with a stark ethical dilemma: since acceptance of the regime was out of the question, they were forced to choose either active opposition or quiet moral resistance. The studious historian Nello opted for the latter; his more exuberant and expansive brother Carlo joined the active resistance. Trained as an economist, Carlo abandoned a promising career as a professor of political economy and devoted his prodigious energy, intellect and fortune to various anti-fascist projects. In 1925, he was the moving force behind the
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