Salvemini, Gaetano

(1873–1957)

   Born in Molfetta, near Bari, Salvemini was a historian best known for his work on the French Revolution. He was also a prolific journalist and a liberal-socialist publicist of some importance. Salvemini managed to argue with both the political systems of prefascist Italy and Fascism itself. Salvemini was particularly damning of trasformismo. Writing in the magazine Unita, of which he was a founder, Salvemini attacked Giovanni Giolittifor being il ministro della malavita(the minister of the criminal underworld) in 1910. It was a view he disavowed only in 1945 in the introductory essay to a study of the Giolittian era. Salvemini bitterly opposed the war in Libyain 1911–1912 and the whole idea that poverty-stricken Italy, unable even to settle its own southern question, should benefit from the absorption of even poorer territories in North Africa. Both an Anglophile and a Francophile, he favored entry into World War I on the side of these democratic states, especially after the attack on Belgium. When the question of a Yugoslavian state was raised, Salvemini was among the “renouncers,” that is, those who thought that friendly relations with a new state replacing Austria would be beneficial, and therefore it was justifiable to renounce any claims to Dalmatia.

   Salvemini became internationally known for his courageous criticism of Fascism. He was the chair of modern history at the University of Florencewhen BenitoMussolinicame to power but resigned rather than sign the “loyalty oath” required of all state employees (including professors). Together with Carlo and Nello Rosselli, he founded in 1925 the antifascist publication Non Mollare!(Don’t Give Up!). He was arrested in June 1925 and after an amnesty was forced to flee to Paris, where he lived as an exile. Salvemini was one of the founders of Giustizia e Liberta/Justice and Liberty (GL). Salvemini subsequently moved to England and, in 1934, to the United States, where he accepted an appointment to Harvard’s history department. Two of his books, The Fascist Dictatorship in Italy (1928) and especially Under the Axe of Fascism (1936), were decisive exposes of Mussolini’s rule for a British and American audience. On his return to the University of Florence in 1948, he is said to have opened his first lecture with the words, “Stavo dicendo . . .” (“As I was saying . . .”). He died in Sorrento (Naples) in September 1957.