Giustizia e Libertà (GL) (“Justice and Freedom” in English) was an Italian militant anti-fascist movement which existed from 1929 to 1945. The group was founded by liberal socialist Carlo Rosselli while in exile in Paris, and included several notable members, including Ferrucccio Parri and Sandro Pertini, who would later go on to become Prime Minister and President of Italy, respectively.
At first serving as an anti-fascist propaganda operation, Rosselli and Giustizia e Libertà took their first direct actions when they helped anarchist Camillo Berneri in leading the Matteotti Battalion, a coalition of Italian liberals, socialists, anarchists, and communists, to assist the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War. Among a series of battles against the fascist Nationalists in the Aragon region (including the Battle of Monte Pelato, where the group defeated Nationalists who had them outnumbered and outgunned), they fought with the slogan “Oggi in Spagna, domani in Italia”: “Today in Spain, tomorrow in Italy.” Berneri was assassinated by the USSR-backed Communist Party of Spain during the May Days of 1937, and the Spanish Republic collapsed in 1939, leading the GL volunteers to flee to France.
Some members moved to the US where they formed a left-liberal anti-fascist society for Italian-Americans, the Mazzini Society; the group would later set up an underground propaganda radio station for the GL out of the UK. Other members who remained in France fled once more to Italy following the Nazi invasion in 1940. While the attempts at creating underground insurrectionist groups in the 1930′s largely failed, the GL had much better success at combating Italian fascism in the 1940′s. As the largest group of non-communist partisans in the Italian Social Republic (one estimate suggesting they constituted 29% of the total partisan forces, translating to perhaps 20,000-23,000 thousand members), they received direct help from Allied forces. The GL suffered 4,500 casualties during its 20 months of combat in Italy.
Many of the group’s leaders were killed during its run, including Rosselli. Two weeks after speaking at Antonio Gramsci’s funeral in 1937, Rosselli was stabbed to death along side his brother (who was both stabbed and shot) by fascist assassins who were posing as motorists whose car had broken down. The assassins, members of the fascist French group Cagoule, had been following him for several months beforehand and may have been operating under orders from Mussolini. An estimated 100,000-200,000 people attended their funeral service in Paris, where they were buried with a grave with the inscription: “Expect together/ that the sacrifice of their youth/ will hasten/ in Italy/ the victory of their ideals/ justice and liberty.”
Through the Giustizia e Libertà’s journal “Papers of ‘Justice and Freedom’”, the organization’s program, and Rosselli’s 1930 book “Liberal Socialism,” Rosselli and others sought to promote the idea of liberal socialism: the incorporation of liberal ideals into a non-Marxist democratic socialism. Criticizing fascism, monarchy, and Stalinist communism, the Italian liberal socialists advocated for human freedom and both political (parliamentary democracy within a semi-federalist system of autonomous regions) and economic democracy (a mixed market featuring workers’ councils, labor unions, markets, and nationalized public services). As Rosselli wrote:
Socialism, grasped in its essential aspect, is the progressive actualization of the idea of liberty and justice among men: an innate idea that lies more or less buried under the sediment of centuries in the marrow of every human being. It is the progressive effort to ensure an equal chance of living the only life worthy of the name to all humans, setting them free from the enslavement to the material world and material needs that today still dominate the greater number, allowing them the possibility freely to develop their personalities in a continuous struggle… against the corruptions of a civilization too much the prey of demons of success and money.
Rosselli’s views made him somewhat of an outcast in a political environment where breaking from Marxism was considered apostasy in leftist circles. Palmiro Togliatti, leader of the USSR-aligned Italian Communist Party, labelled him “a reactionary ideologue who has nothing to do with the working class.” When he met with Trotsky in 1934, Rosselli explained “our revolutionary liberalism has nothing to do with bourgeois liberalism, [and] the struggle against a fascist dictatorship compels even the Communists to put the passwords liberty and democracy first.”
Liberal socialism continued to live on Italy after Rosselli’s death through several means: Rosselli’s Action Party, which saw its member Ferrucccio Parri briefly serve as Prime Minister after the War before dissolving in 1948; later Italian theorists like Noberto Bobbio; and later Italian politicians like President Alessandro Pertini. It’s much less prominent than it was in the 20th century, but has yet to entirely disappear- as a minor anecdote, when I visited Venice in 2017, I found a collection of liberal socialist essays sitting visibly on top of pile of books in a bookstore.
Sources: Wikipedia, Stanislao G. Pugliese’s “Death in Exile: The Assassination of Carlo Rosselli,” and Nadia Urbinati’s introduction to the 1994 publishing of Carlo Rosselli’s “Liberal Socialism.”
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