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Carlo Alberto Rosselli (16 November 18999 June 1937) was an Italian political leader, journalist, historian, philosopher and anti-fascist activist, first in Italy and then abroad. He developed a theory of reformist, non-Marxist socialism inspired by the British labour movement that he described as "liberal socialism". Rosselli founded the anti-fascist militant movement Giustizia e Libertà. Rosselli personally took part in combat in the Spanish Civil War, where he served on the Republican side.Spencer Di Scala (1996). Italian socialism: between politics and history. Boston, Massachusetts, USA: University of Massachusetts Press. p. 87.
After the war, thanks to his brother Nello Rosselli, he 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 thinking of Giacinto Menotti Serrati. In 1921 he graduated with a degree in political sciences from the University of Florence with a thesis titled: "sindacalismo" (Syndicalism). Later he 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: the Labour movement in the UK would deeply influence him.
Later in 1926, he 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, "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 language first edition was titled Escape).
The book was at once a passionate critique of Marxism, a creative synthesis of the democratic socialist revisionism (Bernstein, Turati and Treves) and of classical Italian Liberalism (Benedetto Croce, Francisco Saverio Merlino and Gaetano Salvemini). But it contained also a shattering attack on the Stalinism of the Third International, which had, with the derisive formula of "social fascism", lumped together social democracy, bourgeois liberalism and fascism. It was not surprising, therefore, when one of the most important Italian Communists, Togliatti, defined "liberal Socialism" as "libellous anti-socialism" and Rosselli "a reactionary ideologue who has nothing to do with the working class".
Giustizia e Libertà joined the Concentrazione Antifascista Italiana (The Italian Anti-Fascist Concentration), a union of all the non-communist anti-fascist forces (republican, socialist, nationalist) trying to promote and coordinate expatriate actions to fight fascism in Italy. They also first published a weekly political magazine entitled 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.
After the advent of Nazism in Germany (1933), 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. Spain, they wrote, seems the destiny of all fascist states.
With Camillo Berneri, Rosselli headed the Matteotti Battalion, a mixed volunteer unit of anarchist, Liberalism, socialist and communist Italians. 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 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, Giustizia e Libertà partisans were forced to flee back to France.
His British-origin wife Marion Catherine Cave, their three children, Giovanni Andrea "John", Amelia Rosselli, and Andrew, and his mother Amelia Pincherle Rosselli survived him.
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) he rejected in favour of a revolution that—as famously put in the GL program—is a coherent system of structural reforms aimed at the construction of a Socialism; that does not limit, but indeed exalts, freedom of personality and of association. Writing in his final years, Rosselli became more radical in his liberal 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.
Spanish Civil War
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 republican forces, 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 Spanish Republic.
Murder
In June 1937, Carlo 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 the La Cagoule, a French fascist group. Archival documents would later implicate Mussolini's regime in authorizing the murder.Peter Isaac Rose (2005). The Dispossessed: An Anatomy of Exile. University of Massachusetts Press, pp. 138–139. The two brothers were buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris but in 1951 the family moved them to Italy into the Monumental Cemetery of Trespiano, a frazione of Florence.
Thought
Carlo Rosselli published only one book, Liberal Socialism. This work marked Rosselli out as a heretic in the Italian left of his time (for which Karl Marx's Das Kapital, albeit variously understood, was still regarded as the only reliable source of political analysis and guidance). Undoubtedly the influence of the British labour movement, which he knew well, is visible. 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 stands 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".
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Categories: 1899 Births, 1937 Deaths, Politicians From Rome, Italian Military Personnel Of World War I, Members Of Giustizia E Libertà, Exiled Italian Politicians, 20th-century Italian Philosophers, Italian People Of The Spanish Civil War, Italian Social Liberals, Assassinated Italian People, 20th-century Italian Jews, Jewish Socialists, University Of Siena Alumni, Italian Anti-fascists, Italian People Murdered Abroad, Deaths By Stabbing In France, People Murdered In France, Unitary Socialist Party Politicians, 20th-century Italian Politicians, Terrorism Deaths In France, Assassinated Activists, Burials At Père Lachaise Cemetery, Jewish Anti-fascists, Italian Political Party Founders, Italian Magazine Founders, Italian Anti-francoists, People Assassinated In The 20th Century
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