Carlo Rosselli

Origins and early life

Carlo Rosselli was born in Rome on 16 November 1899 to two Jewish families of the Italian Risorgimento: his father, Joe Rosselli, came from the Jews of Livorno, in whose house at Pisa Mazzini had died, and his mother, Amelia Pincherle, a playwright, from the Jews of Venice; the family was secular and 'felt Italian first and Jewish second', as his biographer says, and this fiche records it so — Carlo was a Jew by both parents, and the fascist press never let him forget it.

Work and career

An economist trained in Florence, a professor at Genoa, he chose action over the academy: in 1926 he organized the escape of the socialist leader Filippo Turati to France, was sentenced to internal exile on the island of Lipari, and in 1929 escaped by motorboat with Emilio Lussu and Francesco Nitti to Paris, where he founded Giustizia e Libertà, Justice and Liberty, the movement that became the principal antifascist force in Italy outside the Communist Party.

His book Liberal Socialism, written on Lipari and published in 1930, argued that socialism must be the heir of liberalism and not its enemy, and gave the Italian left after the war the doctrine of the Action Party. When the Spanish Civil War broke out he led the Italian volunteers of the Ascaso column into battle at Monte Pelato and broadcast from Barcelona the words that became the movement's motto: 'Today in Spain, tomorrow in Italy'.

On 9 June 1937, at Bagnoles-de-l'Orne in Normandy, where he was taking a cure, he and his brother Nello were stabbed to death by killers of the French Cagoule acting on the orders of Mussolini's regime; two hundred thousand people followed their coffins through Paris.