Eugenio Chiesa (18 November 1863 – 22 June 1930) was an Italian accountant who found a job with a toy factory. He worked his way up through the ranks and, when the opportunity arose, acquired the business and became very rich. By that time he had also entered politics. As a young man he had been greatly influenced by the writings of Mazzini: he remained a committed Risorgimento-republican throughout his life. His long political career was also marked by several high-profile anti-corruption campaigns. Between 1904 and 1926 he served as a member of the Chamber of Deputies (the lower house of the kingdom's bicameral parliament). After 1922 he emerged as an uncompromising opponent of Fascism. In June 1924 he was among the first members of parliament openly to accuse Mussolini in connection with the (presumed) murder of Matteotti a couple of weeks earlier. Eugenio Chiesa ended his life in exile.
Biography Provenance and early years Eugenio Chiesa was born and grew up in Milan, concluding his education with an accountancy qualification, following which he took a job in the manufacturing sector. Early on joined the Parravicini Toy Making company, though it is unclear whether or not this was his first employer following qualification.
At an early age he displayed his republican convictions by becoming a member of the "Società democratica della gioventù" (loosely, "Young Democrats") and embarking on a parallel career as a journalist, notably in an exceptionally polemical article which he contributed in March 1883 to the only edition that was ever published of "Il Quarantotto" ("The '48") in which he attacked what he termed "government moderation". A month earlier, on 6 February 1883, his name had appeared under another similarly passionate article in "La Nuova Italia", another short-lived political journal dedicated to preserving the political legacy of Giuseppe Mazzini.
Republican Party of Italy The period was one in which attempts were underway to firm up a new organisational structure for the republican movement. Chiesa was part of a new generation that created the foundations for a political party which valued the Mazzinian heritage and opposed the dead hand of conservatism and political moderation, while at the same time harnessing and containing the burgeoning of socialism among the "popular classes". In a letter of December 1892 addressed to Napoleone Colajanni, Chiesa writes of "our new Milanese organisation", which will be the theme of a congress to be held in Bologna in 1893 and of an initiative promised for October 1894 by the "Consociazione repubblicana romagnola" (loosely, "Republican Convocation of Romagna"). Thus was born the Italian Republican Party, formally inaugurated at Bologna on 21 April 1895. Chiesa emerged as an early and effective advocate for what has survived to become the most long-lasting of Italy's various political parties.
During the second half of the 1890s the new party took such an intransigent approach to the conservative Rudinì governments that after food riots developed into something more serious in 1898, the Republicans found themselves caught up in the ferocious backlash, along with Socialist and Catholic government opponents. Chiesa fled to Lugano in Switzerland, accompanied by his two-year-old daughter, while his wife, Lucia, stayed at this stage, in Milan to look after the family business. Chiesa remained in Lugano for several months, during which time his supposedly inflammatory contributions to the journal "L'Italia nuova" earned him an "ammonito ufficialmente" ("official warning") - dated 4 August 1898 - from the Swiss parliament. The family were subsequently reunited in Paris.
At around the turn of the century, the political heat had reduced and Chiesa felt able to return with his family to their home in Milan. He now faced trial in respect of an allegedly inflammatory article he had published in the magazine "Ribelle", but with the able advocacy of Giuseppe Marcora, his distinguished defence attorney, he secured an acquittal, which in turn opened the way for a cautious return to engagement in mainstream politics. In October 1899 he was among the promoters of Crepuscolo, a short-lived revival of a weekly political magazine that had ceased publication in 1859. In its new incarnation, the publication was targeted at republicans in the Lombardy region, and a platform in which Chiesa presented a political programme, agreed with other leading figures in the Lombard republican community such as Arcangelo Ghisleri, Luigi De Andreis and Giovanni Battista Pirolini, in anticipation of forthcoming regional elections. Early in 1900 Eugenio Chiesa was duly elected to membership of the Milan city council. At the party congress, held that year in Florence during the first three days in November, he co-produced and presented a report dealing mainly with party organisational issues. He also served, between November 1900 and October 1902, as "political secretary" to the party, returning to undertake the role briefly between May and June 1908, by which time the role of "political secretary" was shared out between more than one man.
In August 1900 Chiesa found himself in disagreement with the party's Milanese leadership and, in particular, with Giovanni Bovio (1837-1903), the respected University Professor of Philosophy and Jurisprudence widely acknowledged as the man who founded the Republican Party of Italy. Both men were committed republicans: disagreement nevertheless arose in the aftermath of the assassination by an anarchist, on 29 July 1900 at Monza, of King Umberto. Chiesa did not share Bovio's principled intransigence over whether senior Republican Party leaders should participate in the late king's funerary honours. Chiesa nevertheless quickly became one of the leading members of the party leadership, appointed to membership the Party Central Committee ahead of the Ancona party congress in November 1901.
During the early years of the twentieth century, Chiesa came out in opposition to a sizable minority of party colleagues pushing for a closer working relationship - possibly even some form of alliance - with the Socialist Party (which despite continuing electoral progress was itself undergoing its own internal disputes about how far to compromise ideology for political pragmatism). Chiesa was robust in his insistence that he could never accept "collectivist solutions" agreed in alliance with the socialists, who would almost certainly, in terms of election results, generally emerge as the numerically weightier member of any partnership. In an electoral college vote held in March 1902, Chiesa gave his support to the anarchist Pietro Calcagno, who was imprisoned on the island of Ventotene at the time, rather than to the high-profile socialist candidate Filippo Turati.
In 1902 the party congress was held at Pisa. Chiesa spoke out on the subject of military budgets, arguing that republicans must oppose military spending because [under the monarchical system operating in Italy] the entire social-political system rested on military power and on the related economic questions, which imposed an essentially conservative and paternalistic interpretation of the relationship between production and labour, between employers and employees, and between social classes. The theme was one which he would continue to elaborate on in the future. He was also contributing to the Milan-based newspaper "Italia del popolo" during this period, providing a series of essays under the heading "Osservazioni" ("Observations"), which were later gathered into a single volume and in 1904 published as "Osservazioni per L'Italia del popolo".
Parliament In the General Election of November 1904 Chiesa secured election to the 508 seat Chamber of Deputies. He represented the electoral district of Massa-Carrara, defeating Cherubino Binelli, the traditionalist-liberal candidate put forward what has come to be known as the "Historical Right" quasi-party in a contest dominated locally by the high level of abstentions orchestrated by anarchist activists. (The region's marble quarries were already famous as hotbeds of political anarchism.) He frequently became a regular participant in debates, noted for the lucidity and incisiveness of his contributions. In June 1907 he was prominent among parliamentarians condemning the series of scandals unfolding on the Genoa stock exchange. At almost exactly the same time he reaffirmed Republican Party opposition to military spending in parliamentary debates. In October 1907 he added his name to those of several Socialist and Radical deputies on a telegramme addressed to "Prime Minister" Giolitti in which the signatories condemned the conduct of "Carabinieri" (police) who had shot at striking workers. In July 1908 he again hit the headlines when he teamed up with Claudio Treves to head up negotiations to settle a trade dispute at the Fabriano paper mill. Perhaps of greater significance in retrospect than at the time was Chiesa's application to the government in October 1909, requesting that a protest be lodged with the Austrian government over the expulsion from Trento (at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian empire) of a socialist agitator from Forlì (in Italy) called Benito Mussolini. In June 1911 he delivered a long speech in parliament in which he denounced the monopolistic regime under which the life insurance system was organised in Italy.
It was also in 1909 that he submitted a parliamentary question, which the government chose not to answer, concerning reported links between the young widowed industrial heiress (and alleged spy) Baroness Eleonora Siemens Füssli, and General Fecia di Cossato.Atti parlamentari della Camera dei Deputati, Legislatura XXIII, Tornata del 18 novembre 1909 His presumptuousness earned him no fewer than five challenges to duels, according to Guelfo Civinini, writing in the Corriere della Sera.Franco Manzoni, "Spia o semplice seduttrice? Il caso della vedova Siemens", Corriere della Sera, 15 novembre 2020, p. 39.
Chiesa was among those deeply opposed to the military intervention identified in Italian sources as The Libyan War of 1911–12. During February 1912, as the unilateral Decree for African Annexation was under discussion, he spoke out fiercely against the repressive measures undertaken on behalf of the Italian government by the nation's colonial administrators in Libya. He then submitted a parliamentary question on 23 February 1912 asking the government if it had been necessary to conduct an expensive war against the Ottoman Empire in Libya. On the domestic front at this time he was a prominent advocate in parliament for employee rights in the private sector.
In April 1912 Chiesa surprised commentators and created significant controversy with his outspoken expressions of support for the Piombino steel workers who had suffered a significant defeat in an industrial dispute with the powerful "Stabilimento siderurgico di Piombino" ("Piombino Steel Trust").