Gaetano Salvemini (; 8 September 1873 – 6 September 1957) was an Italian socialist and anti-fascist politician, historian, and writer. Born into a family of modest means, he became a historian of note whose work drew attention in Italy and abroad, particularly in the United States, after he was forced into exile by Benito Mussolini's Italian fascist regime.
Initially engaging with the Italian Socialist Party, Salvemini later adhered to an independent humanitarian socialism and maintained a commitment to radical political and social reform throughout his life. Salvemini offered significant leadership to political refugees in the United States. His prolific writings shaped the attitudes of American policymakers during and after the Second World War. His transatlantic exile experience endowed him with new insights and a fresh perspective to explain the rise of fascism and shaped the memory of the war and political life in Italy after 1945.
In post-war Italy, Salvemini advocated a third way between the Italian Communist Party and Christian Democracy.
Early life and career
Salvemini was born in the town of Molfetta, Apulia, in the poor south of the Kingdom of Italy, in an extended family of farmers and fishermen of modest means. His father, Ilarione Salvemini, was a carabiniere and part-time teacher. He had been a radical republican who had fought as a Redshirt following Giuseppe Garibaldi in his fight for Italian unification.Sarti, Italy: a reference guide from the Renaissance to the present, p. 539Carnes, American National Biography, pp. 490-91 His mother, Emanuela Salvemini (née Turtur), was a socialist. His parents' political leanings, as well as the poverty of the region, shaped his own political and social ideals throughout his life.Gaetano Salvemini (1873–1957): Historian, humanitarian socialist, and activist intellectual, by Mark Clark, in Transatlantic Perspectives (retrieved May 14, 2016)
Salvemini was admitted at the University of Florence, where he met students of northern Italy and engaged with young socialists who introduced him to Marxism, the ideas of philosopher and revolutionary Carlo Cattaneo, and the Italian socialist journal Critica Sociale edited by Italy's foremost Marxist Filippo Turati. Biografia di Gaetano Salvemini, Istituto di studi storici Gaetano Salvemini (retrieved May 14, 2016) After completing his studies in Florence in 1894, his historical studies on medieval Florence, the French Revolution, and Giuseppe Mazzini established him as an historian of note. In 1897, he married Maria Minervini, the daughter of an engineer from Apulia, whom he had met while studying in Florence and with whom he would have five children: Filippo, Leonida, Corrado, Ugo and Elena.
In 1901, after years of teaching in secondary schools, Salvemini was appointed as Professor of Medieval and Modern History at the University of Messina. While in Messina, his wife, five children, and his sister perished before his eyes in the devastating 1908 Messina earthquake, while hiding under an architrave of a window; an experience that shaped his life. He wrote: "I am a miserable wretch, without home or hearth, who has seen the happiness of eleven years destroyed in two minutes."Pugliese, Carlo Rosselli, pp. 30-31
Engaging with socialism Salvemini became increasingly concerned with Italian politics and adhered to the Italian Socialist Party (, PSI). As a member of the PSI, Salvemini fought for universal suffrage and the moral and economic rebirth of Italy's Mezzogiorno (Southern Italy) and against corruption in politics. As a meridionalist, he criticised the PSI for its indifference to the problems of Southern Italy. He would eventually abandon the PSI to adhere to an independent humanitarian socialism but maintained a commitment to radical reform throughout his life.
In 1910, he published an article in the socialist newspaper Avanti!, "The Minister of the Underworld" ("Il ministro della malavita"), in which he attacked the power system and political machine of the liberal prime minister Giovanni Giolitti, who dominated Italian political life in the early 20th century.Puzzo, Gaetano Salvemini, pp. 222-23Sarti, Italy: a reference guide from the Renaissance to the present, p. 314For the 1919 edition see: Il ministro della malavita Salvemini reproached Giolitti for exploiting the backwardness of Southern Italy for short-term political goals by appeasing the landlords while engaging with corrupt political go-betweens with ties to the underworld.De Grand, The hunchback's tailor, p. 4 According to Salvemini, Giolitti exploited "the miserable conditions of the Mezzogiorno in order to link the mass of southern deputies to himself."Paoli, Broken bonds: Mafia and politics in Sicily
Salvemini opposed Italy's costly military campaign in Libya during Italo-Turkish War (1911–1912). He thought that the war did not meet the real needs of the country in need of far-reaching economic and social reforms, but was a dangerous collusion between unrealistic nationalism and corporate interests. In 1911, Salvemini left the PSI because of what he described as "the silence and indifference" on the war by the party.Killinger, Gaetano Salvemini, p. 69 He founded the weekly political review , which served as the voice of militant democrats in Italy for the next decade. He criticised the government's aspirations to build an Italian Empire and its designs in Africa as chauvinist foolishness.
Intervention in World War I Salvemini did favour Italy's entry in the First World War on the side of the Entente powers against the 'anachronistic' character of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires and calling for their defeat in the interests of Italy, as Austria-Hungary still occupied regions considered to be Italian. Intervention in the war was a minority position among socialists that, in the words of Battista Santhià (it), distinguished "between the imperialist war and the just national claims against the old imperialisms; they did not consider it right that some Italian provinces should remain under the dominion of a foreign state, moreover a reactionary one." Salvemini wanted to achieve a greater political, economic, and social stake in the nation by the masses, as well as national self-determination.Duggan, The Force of Destiny, p. 399
Within Italy's left-interventionist movement, he became one of the leaders of the democratic interventionists with Leonida Bissolati. Through the fight for democracy abroad, he believed that Italy would rediscover its own democratic roots. Consistently with his interventionist position, he joined as a volunteer in the first two years of the war. Towards the end of the war, however, he was disappointed that the rivalries between the states could not ultimately be overcome and that the individual peoples did not exert enough influence on the decisions of their governments.
Back in civilian life, he went on to teach history at the University of Pisa and in 1916 was appointed Professor of Modern History at the University of Florence. Over the years, he aligned with the economist Luigi Einaudi and gradually developed a pragmatic inquiry and inductive analysis, which he called concretismo – a combination of secular values from the Age of Enlightenment, liberalism, and socialism – in contrast to more philosophical thinkers like the liberal Benedetto Croce and the Marxist Antonio Gramsci. In 1916, he married Fernande Dauriac, the divorced wife of Julien Luchaire, an Italianist and founder of the Institut français in Florence, and an animator from 1916 to 1919 of the Revue des nations latines, on which Salvemini would also collaborate. His stepson Jean Luchaire later became the head of the French collaborationist press in Paris during the German military occupation of France during World War II."Mio figlio è un collaborazionista", La Stampa, 3 September 2018
Resisting fascism
In the immediate postwar period, Salvemini was initially silent about Italian fascism. Elected on a list of ex-combatants, he served in the Chamber of Deputies as an independent radical from 1919 to 1921 during the revolutionary period of the Biennio Rosso. He supported the Fourteen Points, the internationalist programme of self-determination of United States president Woodrow Wilson that envisioned a readjustment of the frontiers of Italy along clearly-recognisable lines of nationality, in contrast to the Italian irredentist policy of the foreign minister Sidney Sonnino.
As a deputy, he soon dissented from the political line of its parliamentary group and started a lively polemic against Benito Mussolini, whom he had admired as socialist leader, to the point that Mussolini challenged him to a duel, which never took place. Nevertheless, as late as 1922, he considered the fascist movement too small to be a serious political challenge. Salvemini was more opposed to old-style politicians like Giolitti. He wrote: "A return to Giolitti would be a moral disaster for the whole country. Mussolini was able to carry out his coup.... because everybody was disgusted by the Chamber."Clark, Modern Italy, pp. 266-67
While in Paris, Salvemini was surprised by Mussolini's March on Rome in October 1922, which initiated the National Fascist Party take over of Italy. In 1923, he held a series of lectures on Italian foreign policy in London to the ire of the Italian fascist government and Florentine fascists. The walls of Florence were plastered with posters saying "The monkey from Molfetta should not return to Italy". Instead, Salvemini not only returned home but also resumed his lectures at the university regardless of the threat of fascist students. He joined the opposition after the murder of the socialist politician Giacomo Matteotti on 10 June 1924, when it became clear that Mussolini wanted to establish a one-party dictatorship.
Salvemini worked to maintain a strong network of contacts among anti-fascist intellectuals throughout Italy while much of the Italian academic world bowed to the regime. With his former students and followers Ernesto Rossi and Carlo Rosselli, he founded the first clandestine anti-fascist newspaper Non mollare (it) ("Don't Give Up") in January 1925.Pugliese, Carlo Rosselli, p. 64 A half year later, he was arrested and put on trial;Trial of Professors Is Exciting Italy, The New York Times, July 12, 1925 he was released on a technicality, although he was kept under surveillance.Court In Florence Frees Professor, The New York Times, July 14, 1925 Threats against his life were published in the fascist press, and his lawyer was beaten to death by fascist Blackshirts.Fascisti in Frenzy in Florence Riots, The New York Times, October 8, 1925 His name was on top of the list of the fascist death squads during raids on 4 October 1925 in Florence.Rose, The Dispossessed, pp. 135-37 Earlier, in August, Salvemini had fled to France. He was dismissed from the University of Florence, and his Italian citizenship was revoked in 1926.
In exile, Salvemini continued to actively organize resistance against Mussolini in France, England, and finally the United States. Salvemini and others smuggled out documents on Matteotti's murder, eventually locking them away in the archives of the London School of Economics, because they "well knew that their quest for justice for Matteotti would be unfulfilled for the foreseeable future. But they were driven by the conviction that these documents could one day prove beyond doubt that Mussolini had orchestrated Matteotti’s assassination."The murder of Giacomo Matteotti – reinvestigating Italy’s most infamous cold case, The Conversation, 22 April 2024