Gaetano Salvemini
Gaetano Salvemini (born September 8, 1873 in Molfetta , Province of Bari , † September 6, 1957 in Sorrento , Campania ) was an Italian politician , historian and publicist .
life and work
After completing his philology studies in Florence (1896), Salvemini initially devoted himself to medieval studies , where he proved to be an accomplished young historian. In 1901, after working as a Latin teacher at a middle school in Palermo , the 28-year-old was given the chair of modern history in Messina . In the severe earthquake of 1908 , he lost his wife, all five children and a sister and then, as the only survivor of the family, continued teaching at the universities of Pisa and Florence.
Salvemini was a member of the Socialist Party ( PSI ) and a supporter of the Meridionalisti , d. H. of the current of the party concerned with the southern Italy question. From 1897 he wrote for the journal Critica sociale , where he persistently campaigned for southern Italian issues and universal suffrage . So he insisted on the need to form an alliance between the workers of the north and the peasants of the south in order to bind the socialist movement to meridionalist demands. He also demanded the abolition of customs duties, which protected industrial enterprises, and the promotion of small-scale farming in the course of the dissolution of large estates .
In his article Il ministro della malavita in the party organ Avanti! On March 14, 1909, he attacked the Italian Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti for his involvement in corruption and the emerging Mafia structures. Within the PSI, he had a tough argument with Filippo Turati , the leader of the majority wing, and left the party in 1911 when the war in Libya broke out , against which, in Salvemini's opinion, the PSI did not speak out clearly enough. For the same reason, he also gave up his work on the magazine La Voce and founded his own magazine L'Unità in December 1911 , which he headed until 1920 as a platform for a new meridionalist party, the Lega democratica .
When the First World War broke out in 1914, he joined the supporters of Italy's participation, the so-called interventismo , because he was convinced that the anachronistic empires of Austria-Hungary and Germany could only be defeated in this way. Towards the end of the war, however, he was disappointed that the rivalries between the states could not ultimately be overcome and that the individual peoples did not exercise enough influence on the decisions of their governments. As a member of parliament (since 1919) he spoke out against Mussolini when the fascists came to power in 1922 and against the departure of the opposition members from parliament (in the alliance of the Aventinians ) in 1924 . With the brothers Carlo and Nello Rosselli , with whom he published the first anti-fascist newspaper Non Mollare ( Do not give in ) underground in Florence in 1925 , and with Ernesto Rossi he had a close personal and political friendship.
On June 8, 1925, he was arrested by the fascist police in Rome and then sentenced together with Ernesto Rossi, but after an amnesty he managed to secretly flee to France in August. In November 1929, together with other anti-fascist exiles ( Emilio Lussu , Alberto Tarchiani , Alberto Cianca and others) in Paris, he founded the democratic resistance movement Giustizia e Libertà ( Justice and Freedom ), which came about on the initiative of the Rosselli brothers. In Italy, too, groups of Giustizia e Libertà (GL) emerged, especially among students ; many of their supporters were arrested and sentenced to long prison terms (e.g. Ernesto Rossi, Ferruccio Parri and Leone Ginzburg ).
During his stay in England, Salvemini had a hard argument with George Bernard Shaw , who was an admirer of Mussolini. In 1934 he moved to the United States , where he taught Italian history at Harvard University and became an American citizen. During the Second World War he gave lectures and lectures in America, England and France in favor of a policy against fascism, communism and the Italian monarchy. In 1939 he founded the Mazzini Society with other anti-fascists ( Lionello Venturi , Giuseppe Antonio Borgese , Randolfo Pacciardi , Michele Cantarella , Aldo Garosci , Carlo Sforza , Alberto Tarchiani , Max Ascoli and others) , which, in contrast to other GL groupings, opposed the monarchy and against the agreement that GL representatives in Toulouse had signed with socialist and communist resistance fighters. While in exile, he published some of his books on contemporary history in English, including The Fascist Dictatorship in Italy (1927), Under the Ax of Fascism (1936), and Prelude to World War II (1953).
On his return to Italy in 1947, Salvemini resumed his teaching activities at the University of Florence and continued his political commitment for a secular state and against dogmas and ideological fuzziness , in accordance with Ernesto Rossi's reformist- democratic standpoint. In his critical stance towards the Christian Democratic post-war government, he called for the Lateran Treaty of 1929 to be repealed and defended the public school system against the government's conservative reforms.
Membership and Honors
In 1941 Salvemini was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .
In 1955 he received the international Antonio Feltrinelli Prize from the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei and an honorary doctorate from Oxford University . Gaetano Salvemini died in Sorrento on September 6, 1957 at the age of 84.
Works (selection)
- The Fascist Dictatorship in Italy . New York: Holt, 1927
- Mussolini diploma . Paris: Grasset, 1932
- Under the Ax of Fascism . London: Gollancz, 1936
- La politica estera dell'Italia dal 1871 al 1915 . Florence: G. Barbera, 1944
- Prelude to World War II . London: Gollancz, 1953 (the New York: Doubleday, 1954 edition online on the Internet Archives : [1] )
- Scritti sulla questione meridionale: 1896–1955 . Turin: Einaudi, 1955
- Opera di Gaetano Salvemini . Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978
literature
- Salvadori, Massimo L .: Gaetano Salvemini . Turin: Einaudi, 1963
- De Caro, Gaspare: Gaetano Salvemini . Turin: UTET, 1970
- Bütler, Hugo: Gaetano Salvemini and Italian politics before the First World War . Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1978
- Gaetano Salvemini tra politica e storia. Atti del Convegno Internazionale . (Ed .: Gaetano Cingari) Rome: Laterza, 1986
- Killinger, Charles L .: Gaetano Salvemini. A biography . Westport (Connecticut): Praeger, 2002
- Lucchese, Salvatore: Federalismo, socialismo e questione meridionale in Gaetano Salvemini . Manduria (Province of Taranto): Lacaita, 2004
- Iris Origo : Bisogno di testimoniare , 1984, biographies of the anti-fascists Ignazio Silone, Gaetano Salvemini, Ruth Draper and Lauro De Bosis, English A Need to Testify , 1984, reprint 2001 (on Salvemini: pp. 183-268).
Web links
- Literature by and about Gaetano Salvemini in the catalog of the German National Library
Individual evidence
- ^ Members of the American Academy. Listed by election year, 1900-1949 ( PDF ). Retrieved September 27, 2015
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Salvemini, Gaetano |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Italian politician, member of the Camera dei Deputati, historian and publicist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | September 8, 1873 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Molfetta |
| DATE OF DEATH | September 6, 1957 |
| Place of death | Sorrento |