V. The Alliance in Italy

• • Introduction
  • II. The secret Alliance
  • III. The Alliance in Switzerland
  • IV. The Alliance in Spain
  • V. The Alliance in Italy
  • VI. The Alliance in France
  • VII. The Alliance after the Hague Congress
  • VIII. The Alliance in Russia
  • IX. Conclusion
  • X. Appendix
  • XI. Documents

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In Italy, the Alliance preceded the International. Pope Michael stayed there and built up numerous contacts among the young radical elements of the bourgeoisie. The first section of the Italian International, the one at Naples, was, since the time of its foundation, controlled by these bourgeois and Alliance elements. Gambuzzi,* a lawyer and one of the founders of the Alliance, raised his “model worker” Caporusso to the chairmanship of the section. At the Basle Congress, Bakunin, arm in arm with his faithful Caporusso, represented the Neapolitan members of the International, whereas Fanelli,** the Antonelli of the Alliance and a delegate for workers’ associations formed outside the International, was delayed en route owing to illness.

Morago, shopkeeper and frequenter of taverns, preserved his autonomy as a professional gambler by living on the earnings of his wife and his apprentices. When the Federal Council emigrated to Lisbon, he deserted his post as member of the Council and suggested throwing the International’s papers into the sea. When Sagasta outlawed the International, he again deserted his post as member of the Madrid local Council and sheltered from the storm in the haven of the Alliance. Although lacking a Christ, the Alliance abounded in St. Peters.

Clémente Bové, as Chairman of the Catalan Factory Workers’ Association (las très clases de vapor), was discharged and expelled for his excessively autonomous handling of funds.

Dionisio Garcia Fraile, called “our dear colleague” by La Federation, an Alliance organ, in its issue of July 28, 1872, where he published a long letter full of attacks on the New Madrid Federation, worked for the police at Saint-Sebastien and embezzled funds belonging to sections of the International.

• “One of Caporusso’s most fervent partisans was the lawyer Carlo Gambuzzi, who thought he had found in him the ideal chairman for an International section. It was Gambuzzi who furnished him with the necessary means to go to the Basle Congress. When Caporusso’s expulsion was decided upon in the general assembly of the section, Gambuzzi protested vigorously against the publication of this fact in the Bulletin, and also persuaded his friends not to insist on the insertion in the bulletin of the other shameful fact, the embezzlement of 300 frs.” (Letter from Cafiero, July 12, 1871).
  • Fanelli had long been a member of the Italian parliament. On being questioned about this matter, Gambuzzi stated that it was an excellent thing to be a deputy; that it made you immune to the police and allowed you to travel free of charge on all the Italian railways. The Alliance forbade the workers all political action, since to demand of the State any regulation of working hours for women and children was to recognise the State and to acknowledge the principle of evil; but the Alliance’s bourgeois leaders had papal dispensations which allowed them to sit in parliament and enjoy the privileges offered by bourgeois States. Fanelli’s atheistic and anarchistic activities in the Italian parliament had been limited, so far, to a high-flown eulogy of the authoritarian Mazzini, the man of “Dio e popolo”.

His close friendship with the Holy Father went to our brave Caporusso’s head. On returning to Naples, he thought himself superior to the other Alliance members; he behaved as if he were the boss of the section.

“His trip to Basle changed Caporusso completely... He came back from the Congress with strange ideas and pretensions entirely contrary to our association’s principles. He spoke, at first quietly, then openly in an imperious manner, of powers which he did not, and could not, have; he affirmed that the General Council had confidence in no one but himself, and that if the section did not bow to his will, he had been empowered to dissolve it and found another.” (Official report from the Naples section to the General Council, November 1871, drawn up and signed by Carmelo Palladino, Alliance lawyer.)

Caporusso’s powers must have come from the Alliance’s Central Committee, for the International never issued any of the kind. The good Caporusso, who only saw the International as a source of personal profit, nominated his son-in-law, an ex-Jesuit and an unfrocked priest,

“professor of the International, and compelled the unfortunate workers to swallow his tirades on respect for private property and other fatuities of bourgeois political economy” (letter from Cafiero).*

He then sold himself to the capitalists, who were disturbed about the progress being made by the International in Naples. On their orders, he dragged the Neapolitan furriers into a completely hopeless strike. Imprisoned with three other members, he pocketed the sum of 300 frs. sent by the section for the maintenance of the four prisoners. These noble deeds led to his expulsion from the section, which continued to exist until it was forcibly dissolved (August 20, 1871). But the Alliance, on escaping from police persecution, profited by this to take the International’s place. When sending the official report quoted above, Carmelo

• Rebuffed at Naples, Caporusso had the nerve, two years later, to try and inflict this same individual on the General Council with the following testimonial: “Citizen Chairman of the International, the great problem of labour and capital, which was dealt with at the Working Men’s Congress of Basle and which is today taxing the minds of all classes, has now been solved. The man who has been studying the complex problem of the social question is my son-in-law, my daughter’s husband, who, examining the decisions of this Congress and invoking the favours of science, has picked up the thread of the difficult knot wherewith to put into perfect equilibrium the working-class family and the bourgeoisie, each in its own right”, etc. (signed: Stefano Caporusso). Palladino protested on November 13, 1871 against the London Conference in the very terms and with the very arguments used in the Sonvillier circular dated one day earlier.

In November 1871, a section consisting of various elements was formed in Milan. It included workers, mainly mechanics brought by Cuno, alongside students, journalists from the small newspapers, and clerks, all completely under the influence of the Alliance. Owing to his pan-Germanic origins, Cuno was debarred from these mysteries. However, he made sure that after a pilgrimage to Locarno, the Rome of the Alliance, these young bourgeois were organised into a section of the secret society. Shortly afterwards (February 1872), Cuno was arrested and deported by the Italian police. Thanks to this heavenly providence, the Alliance now had a free field, and gradually gained control over the Milan section of the International.

On October 8, 1871, the Working Men’s Federation was formed in Turin. It asked the General Council for admission to the International. Its secretary, Carlo Terzaghi, wrote literally: “Attendiamo i vostri ordini” (we await your orders). To prove that the International in Italy, from its first steps, must work its way through the bureaucratic channels of the Alliance, he announced that

“the Council will receive through Bakunin a letter from the Working Men’s Association in Ravenna declaring itself a section of the International”.

On December 4, Carlo Terzaghi informed the General Council that the Working Men’s Federation was divided, since the majority were Mazzinists and the minority had formed a section called Emancipation of the Proletarian. He profited by the occasion to ask the Council for money for his newspaper II Proletario. It was not the General Council’s business to provide for the needs of the press; but there was in London a committee which was engaged in collecting funds to assist the International’s press. The committee was about to send a subsidy of 150 frs., when the Gazzettino Rosa announced that the Turin section had openly sided with Jura and had decided to send a delegate to a world congress convoked by the Jura Federation. Two months later, Terzaghi boasted to Regis that he had taken this resolution after having received Bakunin’s instructions personally, at Locarno. In view of this hostile attitude to the International, the committee did not send the money.

Although Terzaghi was the Alliance’s right arm at Turin, the true papal nuncio there was a certain Jacobi, a self-styled Polish physician. In order to explain the hatred which he felt for the so-called pan-Germanism of the General Council, this doctor member of the Alliance accused it of

“negligence and inertia in the Franco-Prussian war; it should be blamed for the failure of the Commune, in that it did not use its immense power to support the movement in Paris, and its Germanic tendencies are conspicuous when one considers that, at the walls of Paris, in the German army, there were 40,000 members of the International” (!), “and the General Council could not, or would not, use its influence to prevent the continuation of the war” (!!—Report from Regis to the General Council, March 1, 1872).

Confusing the General Council with the Press Committee, he accused it of “following the theory of corrupt and corrupting governments” by refusing the 150 francs to Terzaghi of the Alliance. To prove that this complaint came from the bottom of the Alliance’s heart, Guillaume considered it his duty to repeat it at the Hague Congress.

While Terzaghi was publicly beating the big anti-authoritarian drum of the Alliance in his newspaper, he was secretly writing to the General Council and asking it to refuse authoritatively the subscriptions of the Working Men’s Federation of Turin and demanding the formal excommunication of the journalist Beghelli, who was not even a member of the International. This same Terzaghi, the “friend (amicone) of the Turin prefect of police, who used to offer him vermouth when they met” (official report of the Federal Council of Turin, April 5, 1872), denounced at a public meeting the presence of the refugee Regis, sent to Turin by the General Council. Given these leads, the police went in pursuit of Regis, who only managed to cross the frontier thanks to the section’s help.

Terzaghi ended his Alliance assignment in Turin as follows. When serious charges were levelled against him, he

“threatened to burn the section’s books if he were not re-elected secretary, if they refused to submit to his authority, or if they censured him in any way. In any one of these cases, he would take his revenge by becoming a police agent, (questurino)” (report of the Turin Federal Council, quoted above).

Terzaghi had good reason for wanting to intimidate the section. In his capacity as treasurer and secretary, he had helped himself to the funds far too liberally in the truly Alliance fashion. Despite the Council’s official ban, he had allotted himself an allowance of 90 frs.; he had entered in the books, as paid, sums which had not been paid and which had disappeared from the funds. The balance sheet personally drawn up by him showed 56 frs. in hand which could not be found and which he refused to make good, as well as declined to pay for 200 subscription stamps received from the General Council. The General Assembly unanimously threw him out (scaccio) (see report quoted above). The Alliance, which always respected the autonomy of sections, ratified this expulsion by immediately nominating Terzaghi honorary member of the Florentine section and, later, as delegate for that section to the Conference of Rimini.

In a letter of March 10 a few days later, Terzaghi explained his expulsion to the General Council as follows: he had tendered his resignation as member and secretary of that section of riff-raff and spies (canaglia et mardocheria) because it was “composed of government agents and Mazzinists”, and they had tried to pin the blame on him “do you know what for? For preaching war on capital!” (a war which he had been practising on the section’s funds). The letter was intended to prove that the General Council had been strangely misled about the character of this brave Terzaghi who asked for nothing better than to be its humble servant. After all, he had “always declared that, to be a member of the International, it was necessary to pay one’s subscriptions to the General Council”—contrary to the secret orders of the Alliance.

“If we joined the Congress of Jura, it was not to make war on you, dear friends; we were merely swimming with the stream. Our aim was to bring a word of peace into the conflict. As for the centralisation of the sections, without depriving them, however, of some of their own autonomy, I find it very useful”.—”I hope that the higher Council will refuse to admit the Mazzinist Working Men’s Federation. You may be sure that no one will dare tax you with authoritarianism. Myself, I assume all the responsibility... If it were available, I would like to have an accurate biography of Karl Marx. We haven’t an authentic one in Italy, and I would like to be the first to have this honour.”

And what was behind all this toadying?

“Not for myself, but for the cause, so as not to give way to my numerous enemies and to show them that the International is united, I earnestly beg you, if there is still time, to allow me the subsidy of 150 frs. which was decreed to me by the higher Council.”

Imagining himself to be immune, Terzaghi seems to have made himself so impossible in Florence with new escapades that even Fascio Operaio was forced to disown him. Let us hope that the Jura Committee will better appreciate his services.

If in Terzaghi the Alliance had found its true representative, it was in Romagna that it found its real territory, where it formed its group of so-called International sections whose first rule of conduct was not to observe the General Rules, not to announce their own formation, and not to pay subscriptions to the General Council. They were true autonomous sections. They adopted the name of Fascio Operaio and served as centres for various working men’s associations. Their first Congress, held at Bologna on March 17, 1872, was asked:

“In the general interest, and to guarantee the complete autonomy of the Fascio Operaio, should we subject it to the direction of the General Committee in London or to the one in Jura, or should it remain entirely independent, while keeping up relations with both committees?”

The reply was in the form of the following resolution:

“The Congress does not recognise the General Committee of London or that of Jura as anything other than mere correspondence and statistical bureaux, and instructs the local representation in Bologna to establish relations with both of them and to report back to the sections.”

The Fascio Operaio committed a great blunder in disclosing the mysterious existence of the Alliance’s secret centre to the profane. The Jura Committee felt obliged to make a public denial of its secret existence.—As for the General Council, the representation at Bologna never once informed it of its own existence.

As soon as the Alliance heard about the convocation of the Hague Congress, it pushed to the fore its Fascio Operaio which, in the name of its autonomous authority, or its authoritarian autonomy, grabbed the title of Italian Federation and convoked a conference at Rimini on August 5. Of the 21 sections represented there, only one, that of Naples, belonged to the International, whereas none of the really active sections of the International was represented, not even that of Milan. This Conference disclosed the Alliance’s plan of campaign in the following resolution:

“Considering that the London Conference (September 1871) has tried to impose, with its resolution IX, on the whole International Working Men’s Association an authoritarian doctrine which is that of the German Communist Party;

“that the General Council is the promoter and supporter of this fact;

“that the doctrine of the authoritarian communists is the negation of the revolutionary sentiment of the Italian proletariat;

“that the General Council has employed highly unworthy methods, such as calumny and mystification, with the sole aim of imposing its special communist authoritarian doctrine on entire International Association;

“that the General Council has reached the height of unworthiness with its private circular, dated London, March 5, 1872, in which, pursuing its work of calumny and mystification, it reveals all its craving for authority, particularly in the two remarkable passages following:

“‘It would be difficult to carry out orders without enjoying moral “authority”, in the absence of any other “freely recognised authority”’. (Private circular, p. 27).

“‘The General Council intends to demand at the next Congress an investigation of this secret organisation and its promoters in certain countries, such as Spain, for example (p. 31);

“that the reactionary spirit of the General Council has provoked the revolutionary resentment of the Belgians, the French, the Spaniards, the Slavs, the Italians, and some of the Swiss, and has also provoked the proposition for the suppression of the Council and likewise the reform of the General Rules;

“that the General Council, not without reason, has convoked the General Congress at The Hague, the place furthest removed from these revolutionary countries;

“FOR THESE REASONS,

“The Conference solemnly declares to all the workers of the world that from this moment the Italian Federation of the International Working Men’s Association breaks off all solidarity with the General Council of London, affirming at the same time economic solidarity with all the workers and proposing to all sections which do not share the authoritarian principles of the General Council that they send their representatives on September 2, 1872 not to The Hague, but to Neuchâtel (Switzerland) for the opening of the general anti-authoritarian Congress on the same day.

“Rimini, August 6, 1872. For the Conference: Carlo Cafiero, chairman, Andrea Costa, secretary”.

The attempt to substitute the Fascio Operaio for the General Council was a total failure. Even the Spanish Federal Council, a mere branch of the Alliance, did not dare to submit the Rimini resolution to the vote of the International’s Spanish members. The Alliance, to make amends for its blunder, went to the Hague Congress without cancelling the convocation of its antiauthoritarian Congress at Saint-Imier.

Italy had only become the promised land of the Alliance by special act of grace. Pope Michael unveils this mystery for us in his letter to Mora (Documents, No. 3):

“Italy has what other countries lack: a youth which is passionate, energetic, completely at a loss, with no prospects, with no way out, and which, despite its bourgeois origins, is not morally and intellectually exhausted like the bourgeois youth of other countries. Today it is throwing itself headlong into revolutionary socialism, accepting our entire programme, the programme of the Alliance. Mazzini, our mighty antagonist of genius” (sic) “is dead, and the Mazzinist party is completely disorganised, and Garibaldi is letting himself be carried away more and more by that youth which bears his name, but is going, or rather running, infinitely further ahead of him.” *

The Holy Father is right. The Alliance in Italy is not a “workers’ union”, but a rabble of déclassés. All the • so-called sections of the Italian International are run by lawyers without clients, doctors with neither patients nor medical knowledge, students of billiards, commercial travellers and other tradespeople, and principally journalists from small papers with a more or less dubious reputation. Italy is the only country where the International press—or what calls itself such—has acquired the typical characteristics of Le Figaro. One need only glance at the writing of the secretaries of these so-called sections to realise that it is the work of clerks or professional authors. By taking over all the official posts in the sections in this way, the Alliance managed to compel the Italian workers, every time they wanted to enter into relations with one another or with the other councils of the International, to resort to the services of déclassé members of the Alliance who found in the International a “career” and a “way out”.