Camillo Berneri

Camillo Berneri (Italian: [berˈnɛːri]; 1897–1937) was an Italian anarchist and anti-fascist activist. Born in Lodi, Berneri joined the Italian Socialist Party at an early age, but quickly became dissilusioned with its lack of militancy and failure to oppose Italian imperialism. He then became an anarchist, joining the Italian Syndicalist Union (USI), and briefly worked as a schoolteacher before being forced to flee into exile after the rise of the Fascist dictatorship in Italy. Among exiled Italian anarchists, he became one of the movement's leading figures, which attracted the attention of fascist spies and the French police. From 1928 to 1931, he was arrested, imprisoned and expelled from multiple different countries in western Europe, none of which had a legal agreement about what to do with him.

After receiving a pardon, he rejoined the Italian anti-fascist movement, building an alliance between the anarchists and the liberal socialists of Giustizia e Libertà (GL). He also came into conflict with the Italian Communist Party (PCI), which he came to regard as an expression of "left-wing fascism". After the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, he held a conference of Italian anarchists in which they planned to lead an armed return to Italy in the event of its defeat in the war. He then went to fight in the Spanish Civil War, before finding a career as an anti-fascist journalist in Barcelona. There he exposed evidence of Italian plans to annex the Balearic Islands, called for the Spanish Republic to recognise Moroccan independence and denounced moves by the Republican government which he considered counterrevolutionary. During the May Days of 1937, Berneri was arrested in his home and executed near the Palace of the Generalitat of Catalonia. The main theories about his death hold that his killers were either Stalinists, Catalan nationalists, members of a Francoist fifth column, the OVRA, or Italian anarchists in the employ of Interior Minister Ángel Galarza, all of which had the motive and means to carry out the assassination.

Camillo Berneri was born in the Lombard city of Lodi, on 28 May 1897. He was raised by his mother, Adalgisa Fochi, in Reggio. There he joined the youth wing of the Italian Socialist Party, within which he came under the influence of the socialist humanism espoused by Camillo Prampolini [it]. He later joined the city's anarchist movement and was educated on anarchist philosophy by Torquato Gobbi. In 1915, Berneri resigned from the Socialist Party in an open letter, in which he accused the party of falling into a "destructive egoism" and called for a renewed sense of militancy. Considering anti-colonialism to be an integral aspect of his philosophy, he reproached the moderate socialists for not having adequately resisted the colonisation of Libya or the outbreak of World War I. Following the Italian entry into the war, in 1917, Berneri was himself conscripted into the Royal Italian Army.

He returned to his studies after the war, enrolling at the University of Florence, where he studied history under Gaetano Salvemini and met other members of the nascent Italian anti-fascist movement, including Carlo and Nello Rosselli. Following the Biennio Rosso, Berneri joined both the Italian Anarchist Union (UAI), an anarchist political organisation, and the Italian Syndicalist Union (USI), a trade union federation. He acted as a representative for the latter at the founding of the International Workers' Association (IWA) in 1922. He also closely followed anti-colonial movements fighting to overthrow the British Empire, from Ireland to India. He went on to teach the humanities at a secondary school, but by 1926, the establishment of a Fascist dictatorship in Italy compelled him to flee into exile. He was followed soon after by his wife Giovanna, and their two daughters Maria Louisa and Giliana.

He initially went to France, where exiled Italian anarchists were facing the constant threat of fascist spies infiltrating their ranks. Berneri dedicated himself to counterintelligence operations to expose the fascist spies, which elevated him to a leading position within the Italian anarchist movement (succeeding Errico Malatesta and Luigi Fabbri). This made him into a key target for agent provocateurs, who circulated weapons among the anti-fascists to attract the attention of French police. He was arrested, detained and violently interrogated. During his questioning, he commented on an image of Voltaire on the pipe carried by one of the police officers, which briefly humanised him to the officer and opened up a dialogue between them.

What followed was a series of expulsions, arrests and counter-expulsions, which led Berneri to describe himself as "the most expelled anarchist in Europe". In December 1928, French authorities arrested Berneri and expelled him to Belgium, where he was swiftly arrested and imprisoned for possessing a fake passport and a gun. From his prison cell, he wrote to his daughter Giliana, attempting to reassure her of how much he love his family, despite the pain he was causing them through his exile. In May 1930, he was expelled to the Netherlands, but the Dutch authorities forced him back into Belgium, where he was arrested again. In June 1930, he was expelled into Luxembourg, where local police likewise arrested him and prepared his expulsion to France. He drew attention to the fact that he had already been expelled from France, and was prohibited from entering several other countries, so the police attempted to make his expulsion discrete. When he was pushed over the border, he began screaming to call the attention of nearby people to his expulsion, as he was arrested by French police.

In August 1930, the French authorities expelled him into Germany. During his brief stay in Berlin, he was shocked by the anti-Romani sentiment expressed by his neighbours towards the local Romani community, leading him to write about the use of xenophobia as a way to enforce societal conformity. In October 1930, he was expelled from Germany back into France, where he was subsequently arrested and imprisoned. The Human Rights League took up his case, organising a series of political demonstrations calling for his release. Berneri himself emphasised the illegality of his multiple expulsions and counter-expulsions, as the countries involved lacked any formal agreement or even permission from the countries they were expelling him into. In May 1931, he was finally granted a pardon by President Gaston Doumergue and released from prison.

Berneri then settled in Paris, where he worked as a bricklayer. For a time, he remained isolated and alone, despite the cosmopolitan environment of the French capital. The experience of constant arrests and expulsions had exhausted Berneri, and he fell into a depression. Despite the hardships, he continued to stimulate himself intellectually and develop his political philosophy, writing to Luigi Fabbri that he hoped to prepare an anarchist programme by 1933. He soon resumed his involvement with the exiled Italian anti-fascist movement, encouraging cooperation between anarchists and the more moderate liberal socialists of Giustizia e Libertà (GL). He also struggled against the political sectarianism of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), which at the time refused to cooperate with anti-fascist alliances and even attempted to recruit fascists into their ranks, leading Berneri to conclude that they were facing conflict with "left-wing fascism" (represented by Stalinism) as well as right-wing fascism. Berneri also reached out to Italian anarchists in the Americas, building a network of anti-fascist exiles from Raffaele Schiavina's L'Adunata dei refrattari in the United States to Luce Fabbri's Studi Sociali in Uruguay.