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Title: Luigi Camillo Berneri Author: Toni Date: 1998 Language: en Topics: Camillo Berneri, biography Source: Retrieved on 2012-03-12 from https://web.archive.org/web/20120312172720/http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/spain/berneri.html Notes: Translated from the Italian by David Short
Luigi Camillo Berneri was born on 20^(th) July 1897 in Lodi, in
Lombardy, Northern Italy. His father was a self-educated local civil
servant; his mother, Adalgisa Fochi, a primary school teacher who wrote
on education, and was involved in conferences and projects for the
promotion of literacy. Her father was one of Garibaldi’s Redshirts [1],
whereas her grandfather had been a member of the ‘Carbonari’ [2] secret
society, and a follower of Mazzini [3].
Camillo had an eventful childhood. Malnutrition having brought him near
death at only a few months old, his family moved to Milan, where his
mother started to write for an education magazine. In 1904 he was in
Palermo, Sicily, where he came down with typhus. In 1905, he lived in
the towns of Cesena and Forlí in Romagna, the “reddest” and most
republican region in the kingdom. In Varallo Sesia, Berneri fell ill
with enteritis. However, only with the move to Reggio Emilia did
political activity begin for Camillo Berneri.
He was already a member of the Italian Socialist Youth Federation (FGS
[4]) when, in 1912, they held their Congress in his town, one of the
first in Italy to be governed by a leftist administration. Berneri was a
member of the “culturist” tendency, that is to say he maintained the
importance of the Party as a vehicle to bring cultural enlightenment to
the masses, in order to make them aware of their rights. Berneri was the
only student out of the seven hundred FGS members in Reggio Emilia. On
1^(st) February 1914, he wrote his first article for ‘l’Avanguardia’ [5]
(“The Lies of the Old Testament” [6]), a piece full of attacks on the
clergy, in the style of the young Mussolini, who was a socialist at that
time. However, Lido Caiani, the editor of ‘l’Avanguardia’, had not long
followed Mussolini in adopting an “interventionist” position (that is,
in favour of declaring war on Austria-Hungary), when Berneri managed to
kick him out of the paper with the help of Amadeo Bordiga (who would
found the Italian Communist Party (PCd’I [7]) in 1921).
Berneri’s conflicts with the Socialist Party followed the riots in
Reggio Emilia which took place during the rally organized by Cesare
Battisti, the pro-intervention ex-socialist from Trento. The Party’s
official position on the war became an ambiguous “neither support nor
sabotage”. But Berneri, absolutely against the war, left the Central
Committee of the Socialist Federation of Reggio Emilia, and befriended
Torquato Gobbi, a twenty-year-old anarchist bookbinder. Berneri met and
married Giovanna Caleffi, a clever and hardworking sixteen-year-old
anarchist. She would become his life-long companion, inspiring him to
write “A harem lacks variety compared to a woman with whom you are
deeply in love [8]”.
On being conscripted, Berneri, now an anarchist, started to agitate in
the army, even amongst officers, for which he was gaoled on Pianosa,
near the Isle of Elba.
After the war had ended, he joined up with Errico Malatesta, recently
back from his period of exile, and worked with him on ‘Umanità Nova’.[9]
But he also worked with non-anarchist anti-authoritarian magazines such
as Piero Gobetti’s ‘Rivoluzione Liberale’[10] (whose founder would die
exiled in Paris following a fascist beating). In Florence, he visited
Piero Calamandrei (later an Action Party 11] anti-Nazi and “father” of
the Italian democratic constitution), and Nello and Carlo Rosselli, with
whom he attended Gaetano Salvemini’s university lectures. They were all
agreed on a policy of persistence and determination in the face of the
fascist squads’ attacks. Berneri also went to Bonaventura’s
psychoanalysis classes, which would turn out to be useful when he wrote
an essay on the psychology of Benito Mussolini [11].
He had to leave Florence due to fascist persecution and he withdrew to
Umbria to teach in a teacher-training school. Because of his continuing
political propaganda, he was forced to flee to France with his wife and
daughters.
He was expelled from France as a “dangerous anarchist”, and then
proceeded to be kicked out of Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg,
Germany and Spain. At that point, unable to be expelled into any other
country, he could legally reside in France.
In the thirties in Paris he earned a living with a little shop
&endash;where he welcomed the most wanted Italian exiles&endash; and did
filing work in libraries and on newspapers on behalf of Salvemini, his
anti-fascist professor.
Problems arose when Guido Miglioli, an anti-fascist Catholic, introduced
him to, and vouched for, one Ermanno Menapace. Menapace was not,
however, an anti-fascist exile, but a dangerous agent of the OVRA, the
fascist régime’s secret political police. The infiltrator exploited the
divisions that had arisen between Berneri and Giuseppe Donati, giving
Berneri money to help him to publish writings against Donati, a Catholic
anti-fascist who had accused the régime of the murders of Matteotti and
Giovanni Minzoni, a parish priest from Argenta. However, Donati was also
approached by an OVRA infiltrator, who, in turn, subsidized his writings
against Berneri.
The situation became more complicated when Carlo Rosselli and Emilio
Dolci managed to escape from Italian prisons and reach Paris. A series
of bombs exploded in Nice and in bars in Cannes. The responsibility lay
with the fascist régime, who expected the anarchists to be blamed,
forcing the French government to repatriate them. In the meantime,
Camillo Berneri had been preparing an ‘attentat’ on Alfredo Rocco
&endash;the man behind the infamous Rocco Penal Code [12]&endash; during
his Brussels visit. Menapace arranged it so that Berneri would be
arrested in Belgium, in possession of a pistol and some photographs of
the Minister of Justice, Rocco. So, he was captured and Menapace
returned to Rome. In court on 22^(nd) February 1930, Berneri’s friends
were acquitted, but he himself was sentenced to six months in prison,
while Menapace was sentenced ‘in absentia’ to two years, since it was
accepted that he instigated the whole thing. Once back on the other side
of the Franco-Belgian border, Berneri went through a second trial for
the same events and was sentenced to a year and two months. He was given
amnesty on 14^(th) July 1931 and expelled from the country, but, as he
had already been declared undesirable (‘persona non grata’) in the
surrounding countries, Berneri was again able to stay in Paris.
Life in Paris went on with the job of drafting texts and trying to
convert Italian exiles to anarchism. In this period his daughter married
the English anarchist Vernon Richards, who subsequently wrote a text on
Malatesta and took part in the Spanish Civil War.
His numerous libertarian articles in the widest variety of European and
North-American publications show how prolific a writer Berneri was.
Among his more notable works are his studies on Mussolini’s psychology,
in which the ‘Duce’ is seen not as a theatrical fool, but as a cunning
politician who knew how to use theatrical tricks to subdue the masses
(unlike Gramsci, who saw in the dictator the buffoon, not the
politician). Another important subject was anti-Semitism, analysed not
only in ‘El delirio racista’ [13] and in ‘Le Juif antisémite’ [14], but
in many letters to friends. He analysed the “self-hate” expressed by
many Marxist Jews and attacked Marx himself for his embarrassed silence
on the Jewish question. Anticipating the Holocaust, Berneri wrote
“Anti-Semitism will be one of mankind’s favourite forms of stupidity for
some time to come [15]”. His sympathy for the Jews was due to the
fascination he had for those with no country; he wrote “the stateless
are the best suited to form the bases of the great human family”. Sadly,
fascist Jews in Turin, who would, a year later, endure the Italian race
laws of 1938, attacked his ‘Le Juif antisémite’ in their magazine ‘La
Nostra Bandiera’ [16]
Berneri’s theoretical attack on the concept of the State came with his
identification of bureaucracy as a tool of oppression of the centralist
State &endash;whether bourgeois or “Soviet”. There was much controversy
between him and Trotsky on this. Trotsky saw the Soviet bureaucracy as a
“historical absurdity”; for Berneri it was not an absurdity, but a
natural consequence of trying to maintain the State apparatus, which had
not led to Soviet society being “classless”, but to a division between
proletarians and autocratic bureaucrats. For Berneri, only federalism
could provide a way to escape bureaucracy, and thus the State. He was
not referring to the administrative federalism, imposed from above, that
would do no more than create so many small-scale States, but rather to
the federalism that comes from social revolution, which would have
produced independent communes, freely federated, in which federations of
grass-roots councils would have taken over the functions of the
bureaucratic State organization. When it came to his own country, what
Berneri saw as an absurdity was the attempt to govern Italy by a single
administration, given the country’s great regional diversity. This had
led to the rise of a parasitic bureaucracy.
Berneri declared, “In the economic sphere anarchists are possibilists,
in the political sphere they are 100% intransigent!”. By this he meant
that even if the critique of the state and the negation of the principle
of authority were aims that could not be dispensed with, the anarchist
economic model must remain open and experimental. He personally
considered that free rein should be given to individual business and
labour and collectivist business and labour. Thus, he condemned
collectivization if it were forced, rather than a free choice. This led
him to the conclusion that anarchy would not bring about a society of
absolute harmony, but one of tolerance.
On 12^(th) July 1936, news of the ‘coup d’état’ in Spain reached Paris.
With the slogan “Today in Spain, tomorrow in Italy” on their lips, the
Italian anti-fascists got ready to leave. On the 25^(th), Berneri
arrived in Catalonia with a cargo of rifles and ammunition. He was
immediately offered there a position in the Council of the Economy, but
he refused as soon as he realized he was dealing with a sort of
ministry.
Berneri instead hosted a rally before 100,000 people in Plaza de los
Toros, in Barcelona, bringing with him the greetings of the Italian
anarchists and their solidarity with the Catalan revolution.
So, with Angeloni and de Santillán (from the CNT-FAI), he organized an
Italian anarchist column within the Francisco Ascaso formation in the
Pedralbes barracks (renamed “Bakunin”), and on 19^(th) August, he left
the exultant crowds of Barcelona for the Aragonese front. On the 21^(st)
they arrived at Vicien and occupied the Galocha upland plain, dominating
the road between Huesca and Saragossa. On 23^(rd) August he took part in
the harsh engagements on the “bare mountain”, where the anarchists
Angeloni, Perrone and Centrone died, Angeloni singing the
Internationale. But the attacking Nationalist troops were completely
driven back. Because of problems with his vision and hearing, Berneri
was sent back from the front and returned to Barcelona.
In Barcelona, he tried to warn people about the important implications
of the imminent fascist landings in the Balearic Isles, did propaganda
work, attacked the Madrid government for its politics of compromise
which were damaging Catalan autonomy, and criticized the ambiguous
behaviour of the French and English governments. He wrote for ‘Guerra di
Classe’ [17], and often visited the ‘Amigos de Durruti ‘ [18].
When clashes with the Communist Party broke out, his house, where he
lived with other anarchists, was attacked on 4^(th) May 1937. They were
all labelled “counter-revolutionaries”, disarmed, deprived of their
papers and forbidden to go out into the street. There was still shooting
in the streets when, on 5^(th) May 1937, news arrived from Italy of
Antonio Gramsci’s death in a fascist prison. Then, after writing his
last letter home to his daughter &endash; his spiritual final testament,
Berneri went out and walked towards Radio Barcelona where they were
commemorating the death of the Communist Gramsci, who had written in
‘Ordine Nuovo’ [19] “We must never permit ourselves to be enemies of the
anarchists; enemies have contradictory ideas, not merely different ones
[20]”.
Leaving Radio Barcelona, Berneri set off for the Plaça de la Generalitat
[21], where some Stalinists shouted out to him. Before he could turn and
look, they opened fire with machine guns, and left his dead body there
on the street.
[1] Garibaldi: Left-wing leader of the movement for the liberation of
Italy
[2] Italian for “charcoal burners”. The Carbonari were an early
19^(th)-century masonically-organized bourgeois constitutionalist
grouping.
[3] Mazzini: Republican nationalist leader.
[4] La Federazione Giovanile Socialista.
[5] The Vanguard.
[6] “Le Menzogne del Vecchio Testamento”.
[7] Il Partito Comunista d’Italia.
[8] “Un harem è piú povero di varietà di una donna profondamente amata.”
[9] New Humanity.
[10] Liberal Revolution. (Funnily enough.)
[11] Berneri, 1966.
[12] Still in effect today in the Italian “Democratic” Republic.
[13] Racist Delirium.
[14] The Anti-Semitic Jew. In Italian, L’ebreo antisemita (Berneri,
1984).
[15] “l’antisemitismo sarà ancora per lungo tempo all’ordine del giorno
della stupidità umana.”
[16] Our Flag.
[17] Class War. An Italian-language paper published in the Catalan
capital.
[18] “Friends of Durruti”, a purist FAI splinter group.
[19] New Order
[20] “Non ammetteremo mai di essere avversari degli anarchici, avversari
sono due idee contradditorie, non due idee diverse.”
[21] Parliament Square.