Aldo Garòsci (13 October 1907 – 3 January 2000) was an Italian historian, socialist, anti-fascist activist-politician and, in his later professional career, a leading political journalist-commentator.
Provenance and early life Aldo Garòsci was born at Meana di Susa, a small mountain town overlooking the Susa Valley, roughly equidistant between Turin, to the east, and the mountain pass across into Savoy, to the west. Aldo was his father's third son. Antonio Garosci (1861–1941) was not originally from Piedmont. He had been born in Sanremo down by the coast. Antonio Garosci worked as a businessman-entrepreneur in the agri-foods sector. Despite having arrived as outsiders, by the time of Aldo's birth, the Garosci family were well networked in the valley. His mother, born Alessandra Sampò (1879–1938) was significantly younger than her husband. She had been born at Bene Vagienna (Cuneo), another small mountain town, located in the extreme south of Piedmont. Alessandra Sampò had grown up in a family of middle class intellectuals. Her sister Nelda was married to the noted medievalist Giorgio Falco, whom she had met at the University of Turin.
Education He attended elementary school locally and then moved on, like many sons of the Piedmontese "haute-bourgeoisie" to the Jesuit Istituto sociale in Turin: contemporaries included the writers Mario Soldati and Carlo Dionisotti. In 1925 Garòsci enrolled at the university in order to study for a degree in literature, as his aunt Nelda Falco had done. After a year he switched to Law, however. In 1929 he obtained a degree in Legal Philosophy with a dissertation concerning "Jean Bodin's Republic", which subsequently formed the basis for Garòsci's own first published book. His university studies were supervised by Gioele Solari, a strikingly large number of whose students later achieved notability (or, in the eyes of many governments, notoriety) as active anti-fascists: these included Piero Gobetti, Mario Andreis, Giorgio Agosti, Dante Livio Bianco, Norberto Bobbio and Alessandro Passerin d'Entrèves.
Politicisation Three years before Garòsci enrolled at the university, Mussolini's Fascists had taken power. After 1924 the country's political leaders had abandoned any supposed commitment to democracy, and thuggery was becoming ever more widely accepted as a legitimate tool of government. Turin was emerging in this period as a bedrock of anti-fascist thought and ideas, due to the presence of personalities such as Antonio Gramsci and Piero Gobetti. For Garòsci, his time as a student was a period of rapid politicisation. He was influenced in particular by two student contemporaries, the would-be regicide Fernando de Rosa and, a little later, by the activist-artist Carlo Levi. He first came across Levi in the group that had centred round Gobetti, to which Garòsci was increasingly drawn during and after 1926. (1926 was also the year of Gobetti's early death following a savage physical assault by fascist thugs.) Through these friends, and others, Garosci became familiar with antifascist philosophical themes of the time, such as liberal activism ("attivistica del liberalismo"), to be viewed more as a process than as some fixed - and thereby contentious - objective. He learned to take a closer interest in the labour movement, and in international developments involving "workers' soviets". Towards the end of the 1920s these themes came together to form, for him, a metapolitical and existential conceptual framework of antifascism which was, in more simple terms, a total opposition to everything that the government represented.
After graduating his study in Law in 1929, he began his political career, which for an antifascist in a fascist one-party state involved illegal political activism. While they were students the antifascist opposition in which Garòsci had engaged was largely restricted to student demonstrations within the university premises. The practical and conspiratorial dimensions of opposition were intensified at the end of 1929 when Aldo Garòsci joined Giustizia e Libertà (Justice and Liberty), a somewhat disparate grouping of Italian activists united in their hatred of fascism, which had been established a few months earlier by a number of political refugees centred around Carlo Rosselli and living, by this stage, in Paris. Adherents, who were keen not to be identified simply as "another political party", used for themselves the acronym "Giellisti".
In 1929/30 Garòsci also teamed up with Mario Andreis to produce, briefly, an underground newspaper, "Voci d'officina", inspired by Gobettian ideas and pursuing the mission of Il Baretti, a periodical political magazine founded by Gobetti back in 1924 which, following several years of intensifying government harassment had finally been closed down in 1928. Another important member of the little group of activists operating alongside Garòsci was Carlo Dionisotti, a political soulmate who twenty years later would emigrate to England, becoming a professor of Italian literature first at Oxford and then at London. Garosci and Dionisotti had been good friends since their time at school together.
Paris exile Garòsci emerged during this period as a leading organiser of the "Giellisti" in Turin, which quickly became one of the most resolute and well organised such groups in Italy. The underground journal Voci d'officina was designed as a core information and networking medium between antifascists across northern Italy. It was also part of the Gobettian mission to build a dialogue between "bourgeois" antifascism and the Italian labour movement. Despite the evident paucity on the ground of "bourgeois-proletarian" connections, these aspirations represented a threat to the Fascist state: during or before 1931 the "Giellisti" activities in Turin came to the attention of the police, who dismantled the entire Turin network during the Autumn of 1931. Andreis and others involved in producing Voci d'officina were arrested after just three editions had been produced, during December 1931. Garòsci managed to avoid the police, but the ongoing dangers in Turin were obvious. On 12 January 1932 he succeeded in escaping to France where he joined up with the exiled Giustizia e Libertà leadership in Paris.
The nine years during which Aldo Garòsci was based in Paris marked a period of important intellectual and personal development. The group had launched its own Paris-based weekly "mouth-piece" (antifascist political journal), also called Giustizia e Libertà, and he quickly became a key member of the team involved in producing this, along with the movement's other more intermittently produced antifascist publications. Among the others involved, those who became particular friends included Franco Venturi, Carlo Levi and, above all, the man to whom the others looked for inspiration and direction, Carlo Rosselli. Garòsci quickly became a convinced adherent of Rosselli's "liberal socialism" (with a distinctively Italian flavour),Carlo Rosselli, Liberal Socialism. Edited by Nadia Urbinati. Translated by William McCuaig (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1994) but such backing was necessarily accompanied by appropriately pertinent criticism. Indeed, it was only after the movement proved receptive to the insistence which Garòsci advanced on behalf of Turin - and in which he was supported by Levi - on the need to incorporate critiques of traditional socialism and liberalism in the underlying philosophy of the "Giellisti" along with a focus on the importance of the working class as a revolutionary force, that he himself became one of the most strident backers of the Rosselli line.
Endless ideological debates and the weekly production of Giustizia e Libertà (and related publications) were not the only aspects of the political activism pursued by the antifascist "Giellisti" from their Parisian exile. They sustained contacts to the full extent possible with anti-government resistance movements back in Italy, providing as much support as possible, with a particular focus on those parts of the country in which antifascism was less deeply entrenched. Compared to some of the comrades, Aldo Garòsci was in a relatively fortunate position. The financial support he received from his family enabled him to devote all his energies to his work as a "Giellista". Later during the 1930s he was employed as an assistant to the internationally well-connected art critic and author, Lionello Venturi. Venturi was the father of Garòsci's close friend and school contemporary Franco Venturi, and was one of just eighteen Italian university professors who, in 1931, had refused the government order to sign their "Oath of Loyalty to Fascism". He had therefore been removed from his professorship in Art History at the University of Rome and lived, between 1931 and 1940, in France, before living out the final years of the Mussolini nightmare in New York City, while lecturing at a range of North American universities.
It was also during his time in Paris that Garòsci teamed up with (Blanche) Madeleine Bride: they now shared their lives till Garòsci's political exile came to an end. There were also a number of new friendships that now became life-long with his fellow political activists who became, after 1945, prominent members of Italy's post-war political and journalistic establishment, including Alberto Cianca, Fernando Schiavetti, Paolo Battino Vittorelli and, most importantly, Leo Valiani. It was with Valiani and the friend of his school years, Franco Venturi, that he became particularly close, not just in terms of personal friendship but also as enduring intellectual soulmates.
Spanish Civil War After several years of growing instability the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936. Among the Italian "Giellisti" in Paris, Garòsci was among the first to understand what was going on. He took a lead, travelling to Barcelona that summer to make direct contact with republican leaders. He then made his contribution, during the early months of the war, as a member of the Italian unit - shortly afterwards renamed as the "Matteotti Battalion" - led by Rosselli. The battalion enjoyed early success in August 1936, as part of the army that defeated the Francoists at Monte Pelado. But Garòsci was forced by a wound received at Huesca, during the battle to abandon the military front, and escape across the Pyrenees mountains to France. After this he became a tireless warrior in the parallel propaganda war through his contributions to the movement's weekly publication, Giustizia e Libertà. In the decades that followed, it became clear that those impassioned journalistic contributions were themselves only the introduction to his part in propagating, during the ensuing decades, the legendary and heroic character of the antifascist intervention in the Spanish War. The entire Spanish experience does indeed seem to have represented a decisive juncture in Garòsci's life, and a never to be repeated point of existential commitment to causes in which his belief was seemingly total. The model provided by the "Catalan Revolution" in particular, with its peculiar elements of spontaneity and self-government, became a paradigm which he would continue to reference for many years.
After Rosselli