Oliviero Zuccarini (24 August 1883 – 19 April 1971) was an Italian political journalist and Republican Party official and activist. He was arrested for antifascist activities in 1926, and though he was soon released, he remained under close police surveillance. He continued to live in Rome but kept a very low profile till after the fall of fascism. In 1946, however, he was elected a member of parliament. In the light of his background and record before 1926, he might have been expected to emerge as a leading Republican Party figure in the Chamber of Deputies, but he quickly became marginalised within the party, remaining a member of parliament for fewer than two years.
Zuccarini's republicanism was of the traditional Mazzinian variety, steeped in radicalism, anti-clericalism and uncompromising anti-monarchism. Political allies who found him resistant to compromise also criticised his excessively theoretical and romanticised approach to politics. Like Mazzini himself, Zuccarini sometimes found himself reproached for his curiously utopian brand of republicanism. According to one commentator, Oliviero Zuccarini's political philosophy amounted to an internationalist and idealistic form of republicanism that placed him somewhere between Mazzini, Mill and Sorel.
Biography Provenance and early years Oliviero Zuccarini was born into a large and growing family at Cupramontana, a small hill town a short distance inland from Ancona. Tito Zuccarini, his father, was an agricultural smallholder. Oliviero moved to Rome in order to complete his university studies and emerged in due course with a degree in jurisprudence. His interest in politics and current affairs dated back to his childhood. During 1897 he followed closely the newspaper report of the unfolding Greco-Turkish War. Closer to home, in the Kingdom of Italy, he became fascinated by the spread of republicanism during the final decade of the nineteenth century and culminated in the assassination at Monza of the (by this time conspicuously conservative) king. In 1900 Zuccarini began to contribute articles to L'Italia del Popolo, a daily newspaper base (at his stage) in Milan which drew its republican inspiration from earlier newspapers of the same name and from the still widely influential political-philosophical writings of Giuseppe Mazzini. He also set up a "Bovio Group" in Cupramontana, a "study and propaganda circle" which, in 1901, mutated into a local branch of the Republican Party. He quickly grew into a committed journalist-commentator, concentrating in particular on issues impacting small farming communities in his home, the "Marche" region. His approach was considered "moderately progressivist". Publications he contributed to at this stage included "Libertà economica", based in Bologna; "Popolano", published in Cesena; and Napoleone Colajanni's "Rivista Popolare". Increasingly alarmed by the growth of statism, in 1903 he founded a "Società del libero pensiero" (loosely, "Society of Free Thought"), and the following year successfully stood for election to the local municipal council. The list of political journals to which he contributed became longer as he intensified his journalistic war on economic state dirigism. "Libertà economica" seems to have been the publication to which he remained most committed during this period.
Political activist Zuccarini became, in effect, a full-time political activist in 1907 when he took on the post of secretary of the regional republican association at Cesena, in the adjacent region of Emilia-Romagna, focusing, principally, on trades union matters. He took on as editorial director at "Popolano", the Cesena-based political journal to which he had already been contributing for some years. He also took a lead in mediation attempts in differences that had arisen between farmworkers who were employed according to a form of sharecropper arrangement and those who were employed as wage labourers. The differences were mirrored in differences between republicanism and socialism. In 1910 he relocated back to Rome and became editor for the region of "Ragione", a political periodical directed by Ubaldo Comandini. Again, his contributions dealt with trades union issues. He became a member of the General Council of the "Chambers of Labour" ("Camere del Lavoro"), a national umbrella grouping with some of the characteristics of a twentieth-century national trades union congress/federation. Over the next couple of years in Rome, within the Italian Republican Party, Zuccarini built an increasingly effective political partnership with his fellow freemason Giovanni Conti.Aldo A. Mola, Storia della Massoneria in Italia, Bompiani/Giunti, Firenze-Milano, 2018, p. 624. Together, the two men worked to give new impetus to the republican periodical publication "Il Attesa", with the dual objectives of opposing the policies of the Giolitti government and creating a new direction for the Republican Party.
At the 1910 biennial party congress in Florence, delegates elected Zuccarini general secretary of the party's "Social Action Committee", a new body which had been created at Zuccarini's own instigation. With Italy undergoing rapid industrialisation and a correspondingly rapid growth in factory work at the expense of farm labour, the Social Action Committee was a timely initiative which attracted new support to the party from working-class members who would otherwise have been "lost" (as many still were) to socialism. Over the next couple of years Zuccarini and Conti, supported by like-minded party colleagues, were able to consolidate their influence with party cadres, encouraging support for the party's Mazzinian ideals and opposing the government's colonialist "Libyan enterprise". Increasingly the two men came to be seen as leaders of what some characterised as the party's "intransigent faction", in opposition to a more cautious and moderate wing represented by men such as Salvatore Barzilai (also a freemason).
Zuccarini was still not quite 30 in 1912 when he was elected national Party Secretary of the Italian Republican Party at that year's party congress, held at Ancona. Giovanni Conti was elected to the leadership of the party on the same occasion. Over the next couple of years, supported by Conti and other leading party figures such as Eugenio Chiesa (himself a former national secretary of the party) and Edoardo Giretti, Zuccarini committed to an energetic programme of renewal for the "Party of Mazzini", with national programmes for national disarmament, administrative decentralisation, tax reform and a series of social reforms such as the introduction of retirement pensions for workers, increased investment in "public works", agricultural incentives and encouragement for the application of "co-operative" business models.
War years When war broke out in July 1914 involving Germany and France, the Italian government let it be known that it was ill-prepared to participate. There was no rush to line up in the trenches alongside the country's Triple Alliance allies. During the second half of 1914, Italian volunteer legions nevertheless emerged and travelled to France to join the French army in its battles against the "Central Powers", with Zuccarini among them. Meanwhile, the Italian government came under intensifying pressure to join the fighting. For almost a year, it remained far from clear whether the country would become embroiled in the war and which side it would back if it did. Despite treaty obligations to fight on the side of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, there were powerful historical memories across most of Italy of colonial subservience to Vienna during the decades before 1860. Nevertheless, domestic opinion was divided. For socialists and liberals, France was a democracy and therefore had to be supported against the empires of central Europe. For equal and opposite reasons, the instincts of many conservative monarchists and nationalists would have led them to support the German and Austrian empires. When, in April 1915, Italy did join the war, it was partly in response to treaty promises by the British, who were already fighting in alliance with the French, promising that Italy would gain territory by fighting alongside the British and the French. The treaty promises remained secret till after the war was over. In the meantime, Oliviero Zuccarini had already emerged in 1914 as a passionate interventionist in support both of "the democracies" and in pursuit of a quasi-Mazzinian vision of "Pan-European Federalism", derived from a long-standing strand of political thought among Italian intellectuals mistrustful of government from Rome. In August 1916 Zuccarini joined the Italian army, which meant resigning his post as national secretary of the Republican Party. It is not clear from the competing sources whether he volunteered for military service or was conscripted. He continued to serve in the army till 1919.
Post-war activism During the first ten years of the twentieth century the Italian Republican Party experienced a progressive electoral collapse, most obviously in the expanding industrial cities. A vote share of more than 6% in the 1900 Italian general election had fallen to 2% in 1913. After the war, in the election of 1919, the Republicans received less than 1% of the popular vote. The future, as it must have seemed at the time, belonged to the Socialists. Oliviero Zuccarini remained true to the Republican cause, which in terms of mainstream Italian politics correlated with marginalisation. He had nevertheless had the opportunity presented by the war years to hone his own political philosophy. Liberty and property rights were central to his vision for a renewal of a state that aspired to become a "republic as a government over autonomies" His ideas found new life in "Critica Politica", a political journal which he launched in 1921 and in which he elaborated his prescription for a new state structure. Through the magazine he was able to gain an important foothold in the post-war political debate. His co-contributors to the journal included a number of well-known intellectuals, drawn from a surprisingly wide range of backgrounds. Prominent among them was the respected economist-sociologist Vilfredo Pareto. Some others were the socialist pioneer Arcangelo Ghisleri, the precocious radical Piero Gobetti, the leftist lawyer Guglielmo Pannunzio, and the Mazzinian historian Gaetano Salvemini. After 1922, "Critica Politica" fell victim to a government campaign of sustained disruption and seizures, and its publication eventually came to an end in 1926.
During the early 1920s Zuccarini produced three substantial political essays which were published as small books: 1920: "Pro e contro il bolscevismo" ("Pros and cons of Bolshevism") dealt with themes that had been preoccupying many thoughtful Europeans in the aftermath of the October Revolution 1921: "Il partito repubblicano dopo la guerra. La crisi e la rinascita" ("The Republican Party after the war: crises and rebirth") 1922: "Influenze mazziniane nel movimento operaio" ("Mazzinian influences on the labour movement") ran to four editions, and appears to have been the best-selling of Zuccarini's three political books from this periodInfluenze mazziniane nel movimento operaio / Oliviero Zuccarini. - Roma: Libreria politica moderna, 1922