Filippo Turati

Filippo Turati (born November 26, 1857 in Canzo near Como, † March 29, 1932 in Paris ) was an Italian lawyer , sociologist , poet and social democratic politician . He was a member of the Camera dei deputati from 1895 to 1929 .

Filippo Turati at the age of 70

Adolescent years

After studying law, which he completed in Bologna in 1877, he began to be politically active, initially interested in questions of democratization and the connections between crime and social circumstances, on which he also wrote a highly regarded work (Il delitto e la questione sociale) wrote. At the same time, he belonged to the Scapigliatura group of artists as a poem writer and was therefore in close contact with the most important artists in Milan . After setting it, his workers ' hymn Inno dei lavoratori became the most popular song of the young workers' movement.

In Naples he met Anna Kuliscioff , who had fled Russia and in Paris had become the partner of Andrea Costa , one of the leaders of the anarchist movement. She had persuaded Costa to switch from the anarchists to the socialists, but then separated from him. The encounter with Turati was love at first sight, they remained partners until Anna's death in 1925.

Turati and the Socialist Party

When the Partito dei Lavoratori Italiani was launched in Genoa on August 15, 1892 , this was mainly due to Turati and Kuliscioff (the party called itself Partito Socialista dei Lavoratori Italiani (PSLI) from 1893 and then from 1895 Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI)). Both founding personalities were reformists and as such endeavored to achieve the victory of socialism with the help of parliament, the trade unions and popular education. They propagated these ideas in their newspaper Critica Sociale, which had been founded under the title Cuore e Critica under their colleague Arcangelo Ghisleri . As the most important socialist magazine before the First World War, it was banned after Benito Mussolini came to power and revived after the Second World War.

In order to thwart attempts by the ruling coalition to discriminate against the new party, Turati successfully advocated alliances with other democratic parties. The term of office of the strictly conservative government under Luigi Pelloux could be drastically shortened with the help of such alliances. From 1901, the Liberals provided Giuseppe Zanardelli, the head of government, whose Interior Minister Giovanni Giolitti was to determine Italy's policy until 1915. When the liberals were in danger of losing a vote in which Sidney Sonnino, a more conservative politician, threatened to come to power, Turati persuaded his comrades to vote for Zanardelli against the will of the party leadership. This action widened the gap between the strictly Marxist ( massimalista ) and reformist wing of the party, which under Turati could point to having wrested the right to strike from the liberals and achieved substantial social improvements in the subsequent strikes.

Between 1901 and 1906 the emphasis within the PSI shifted between reformists and Marxists ( massimalisti ) several times. The reformists were weakened when Turati opposed the Italo-Turkish War in 1912 , while Leonida Bissolati and companions voted in favor for patriotic reasons, were excluded and founded the Partito Socialista Riformista Italiano . Turati initially tried in vain to keep the radical young functionary Benito Mussolini away from higher party offices and the editorial office of the party organ; he did not succeed until 1914, when Mussolini started a campaign for Italy to enter the First World War .

The party only turned to war in 1917, when Italy threatened to collapse after its defeat in the Twelfth Isonzo Battle .

Turati and fascism

After the war, Turati and Kulischow opposed all attempts by Mussolini to win PSI as a partner, and as a result came under considerable pressure personally. In a whole series of speeches, Turati tried to convince his party that the new Marxist program that the PSI had decided in 1919 would lead to disaster and that an alliance with moderate bourgeois forces was required to defeat Mussolini. However, it was not able to prevail; on January 21, 1921, the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) was formed in Livorno under Amadeo Bordiga and Antonio Gramsci , which saw itself as a follow-up organization to PSI and opposed this change of direction on October 1, 1922 expelled from the party. The excluded established themselves under the leadership of Turati to the Partito Socialista Unitario (PSU). In 1924 the party secretary of the PSU Giacomo Matteotti was murdered by Fasci, whereby Mussolini's role as the commissioner of this assassination remained controversial even after several trials. When Mussolini's popularity ratings fell significantly after this attack, he used this incident for a coup d'état and to dissolve parliament. In 1926 Turati felt compelled to flee to France, which he managed with the help of Carlo Rosselli and the later President Sandro Pertini . In Paris he became the heart of the non-communist resistance to Italian fascism . In addition, he worked with Pietro Nenni to reunify the PSI until his death . His final resting place was the Cimitero Monumentale in Milan after World War II .

Works

• with Anna Kuliscioff: Amore e socialismo. Un carteggio inedito. 2001, ISBN 88-221-3965-8
• Lo stato delinquente. Delitto e questione sociale. Milan 2004, ISBN 88-7451-015-2
• Rifare l'Italia. 2002, ISBN 88-88546-94-4
• I carteggi Turati-Ghisleri (1876-1926). Published by Maurizio Punzo. P. Lacaita, Manduria 2000, ISBN 88-87280-32-0
• Il socialismo italiano. 1997, ISBN 88-86083-36-X
• with Anna Kuliscioff: Carteggio. ISBN 88-06-09944-2
  • Volume 1: 1898-1899. La crisi di fine secolo. ISBN 88-06-46714-X
  • Volume 2: 1900-1909. Le speranze dell'Età giolittiana. ISBN 88-06-46722-0
  • Volume 3: 1910-1914. Dalla guerra di Libia al conflitto mondiale. ISBN 88-06-46730-1
  • Volume 4: 1915-1918. La grande guerra e le rivoluzioni. ISBN 88-06-46748-4
  • Volume 5: 1919-1922. Dopoguerra e fascismo. ISBN 88-06-46755-7
  • Volume 6: 1923-1925. Il delitto Matteotti e l'aventino. ISBN 88-06-46763-8
• Lo stato delinquente. Delitto, questione sociale, corruzione politica. Scritti di sociologia radicale. ISBN 88-87280-48-7
• Strofe. ISBN 88-86083-00-9

literature

• Maurizio Binaghi: Filippo Turati. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland . July 25, 2011 , accessed March 19, 2020 .
• Luigi Cortesi (Ed.): Corrispondenza Friedrich Engels-Filippo Turati 1891-1895. Milano 1958.
• Spencer Di Scala: Dilemmas of Italian Socialism: The Politics of Filippo Turati. Amherst 1980.
• Paolo Favilli: Filippo Turati, a Marxist reformist. In: Gerhard Kuck (ed.): Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Italy. The development of Marxism in Italy: ways, diffusion, peculiarities . Trier 1988 (writings from the Karl-Marx-Haus issue 40/2) ISBN 3-926132-08-6 , pp. 72-88.
• Paola Furlan: Filippo Turati. Bibliografia degli scritti. 1881-192. , 6, P. Lacaita, Manduria (Taranto) 2002.
• Renato Monteleone: Filippo Turati, a "German Marxist"? In: Gerhard Kuck (ed.): Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Italy. The development of Marxism in Italy: ways, diffusion, peculiarities. Trier 1988 ( writings from the Karl-Marx-Haus issue 40/2) ISBN 3-926132-08-6 , pp. 61–71.
• Malcolm Sylvers: Filippo Turati and the Religious Question. A Study in Pre-1914 Italian Socialism. University of Wisconsin, Madison 1969.

Web links

Commons : Filippo Turati  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

• Biography on Leonardo.it (Italian)
• Biographical data
• Literature by and about Filippo Turati in the catalog of the German National Library
• Newspaper article about Filippo Turati in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .