In Montecitorio, the young deputy Matteotti (photos 5.1.1) immediately stands out for his assiduity, for the punctilious zeal with which he prepares – he spends hours at the House library (5.1.2) documenting himself – and for his astonishing capacity for work. In four years he gave more than a hundred speeches and speeches; served on parliamentary standing juntas and committees-since these were established, in the summer of 1920, he was on the Finance and Treasury one-and promoted or endorsed numerous legislative initiatives. For party comrade Giovanni Zibordi Matteotti immediately represented “a ‘novelty’ that had something Anglo-Saxon about it, in the midst of a prevalent element of Latin speakers: that man had studied and was studying”.

1919 is a happy year for Giacomo Matteotti, perhaps his last: the war is over, he has been restored to the family affections he had missed so much, and he can finally resume the political activity that holds important successes for him, both personal and for the Party. But for Italy it was a difficult, turbulent, in many ways dramatic year, so much so that to describe the climate of contrasts and uncertainties of that conflicted postwar period Pietro Nenni (5.1.3) would, years later, coin the term Diciannovisimo (5.1.4). In that year, in the aftermath of the end of the conflict, violent, subversive, anti-establishment instincts began to manifest themselves in a climate of general restlessness, which drew their foundation precisely from the wartime experience and the growing dissatisfaction, both moral and material, that was spreading.

After much hope – and broken promises (5.1.5) – workers and peasants find themselves even poorer and the middle classes begin to experience new poverty. The failure to achieve coveted prosperity and the failure to annex all the “irredent lands” fuels the myth of the “mutilated victory” (5.1.6) that is added to another myth that sounds for some like flattery, for others like a threat: the Russian Revolution of October 1917 (5.1.7).

In short, there was a widespread perception that we were living through a transition that marked the exhaustion of the prewar equilibrium and projected men and women toward uncertain destinies, in a climate of growing and angry disquiet marked by the habit of violence acquired in the trenches. The liberal political class, which had found in Giolittism its most effective and progressive expression, was falling apart over time, still unaware that it was about to leave the field to an illiberal nationalist right wing that would find in Gabriele D’Annunzio and, above all, in Benito Mussolini its crudest and most muscular expression (5.1.8). In the heart of the Red Two Years, in which workers’ and peasants’ struggles had their climax-and their conclusion-on March 23, 1919, in Milan Benito Mussolini founded the Fasci di combattimento (5.1.9, 5.1.10). In September, Gabriele D’Annunzio, leads his legionaries to the conquest of Fiume, where he founds the Republic of Carnaro: an episode of grotesque euphoria for D’Annunzio and his men, in fact an attempted coup d’état that will be the cause of deep embarrassment for the government (5.1.11, 5.1.12).

October 16, 1919 (photos 5.2.1), after the break imposed by the war, the Congress of Socialist Municipalities was held in Milan – the previous Congress of Socialist municipal and provincial governments had been held in Bologna in January 1916 (5.2.2) – and Matteotti presented a report on the reform of local taxes, but he also intervened – and with great determination – on school policy, an issue that had already been at the center of his experience as a local administrator when, before the war, he had fought for the fight against illiteracy through the improvement of compulsory schooling, school buildings, and teacher training (5.2.3). At the Congress, after frontally attacking his own leadership group (“it must be said that our comrades in the Parliamentary Group for Schools have done nothing: they have always been disinterested in it”) he expounds on his idea of schools and citizen education, which he had already outlined in previous years and which he will refine in future parliamentary experience:

“Do we really want school to be a preparation for the workshop, for work? No, absolutely; the school must be something whereby, at least for four or five years, the people of the people do not think about the preparation for manual labor, learn some thing that is outside of the immediate work, learn abstractions as well. We must not be of those who want the preparation of the boy for technical skill. We want this teaching to be free, poetic, abstract so that they enjoy it for a small part of time and carry the memory of it with them for a few years. I don’t even see the distinction between the formation of the man and the formation of the citizen….”.

The innovative idea of a creative school that aims to develop the child’s personality is borrowed from Maria Montessori (5.2.4), whose The Method of Scientific Pedagogy Applied to Children’s Education in Children’s Homes, published in 1909, Matteotti had read and appreciated (5.2.5).

From the Milan tribune he also speaks on the subject of “socialist schools of culture and people’s theater” and urges commitment to popular libraries, based on the experience already successfully conducted in the municipalities of his Polesine. He affirms:

“The first fundamental nucleus from which the small country commune can start is the People’s Library which is founded with few means […] where the peasants can have access to it, introducing magazines and newspapers. So that this library becomes first the small cultivation club and then the natural political club that takes them away from the tavern”.

A few months earlier, not yet discharged, Matteotti had signed in “La Lotta” The program of the clerical-popular (5.2.6), a polemical article that criticized the Popular Party’s school policy and denounced Catholics’ repeated calls for denominational schools. A more articulate reflection of his on higher education followed shortly thereafter, appearing in “Critica Sociale” in early June under the title Spunti universitarii (5.2.7). That of higher and academic education is one of the great issues Matteotti tackles as a parliamentarian and he will measure himself on it several times in the following years in the Chamber. Now, in the columns of Filippo Turati and Anna Kuliscioff’s magazine, Matteotti documents the elitist and class-based nature of the national education system and with the incontrovertible evidence of numbers harshly criticizes the network of universities in which law studies predominate. He advocates the emergence of universities specializing in different subject areas through a university policy of broader territorial coordination and proposes that degree programs be divided into a basic three-year course followed by a two-year specialization.

But there is not only education in the young Matteotti’s political proposal. Between March and April 1919, in three speeches also written for “Critica Sociale” on the subject of The Tax Question (5.2.8), he tackles a subject that is very dear to him and in which he is particularly well versed: the tax issue. Matteotti tackles it with a wide-ranging treatment: he starts with a reconnaissance of tax trends during the war and then outlines a tax reform radically alternative to the one that will be proposed at that time by Filippo Meda (5.2.9), minister of finance in the government led by Vittorio Emanuele Orlando (5.2.10). In his analysis Matteotti pays particular attention to productive factors-especially labor and land-to equity and the need to raise tax revenues in order to provide adequate social services and repay the debt incurred by the war. In his political vision, the tax lever becomes the tool for structural reforms such as the collectivization of land to be allocated to farmworker cooperatives. The goal is to free economic development and social progress from the shackles of the public debt that grew with the war and the lack of resources for administrations, especially peripheral ones. Matteotti first proposes extraordinary fiscal intervention, in line with the proposals of the European socialist movement, to deal with the war debt. He then builds a profoundly innovative system based on the principle of subsidiarity, based on giving municipalities a significant tax base to enable administrations to expand local welfare: a good part of the taxes collected from the territory must, in short, remain there. The “Matteotti reform” has as its epicenter the “progressive complementary income tax”, with progressive rate extended to all incomes (labor, capital and mobile wealth) and family tax base. The entire proposal is centered on two cornerstones: the need to adjust the tax burden to actual income and the progression of taxes in relation to income “progressively burdening the wealthier classes”.

Giacomo Matteotti’s economic skills and solid administrative experience (photos 5.3.1) are now well known and appreciated, to the point that the Socialist Party entrusted him with the task of writing a kind of “guidebook” for local administrators that would serve to train a new ruling class capable of applying good politics to the territory in order to win consensus through effectiveness and transparency in land management. The text, which bears the title Alla conquista del Comune (Conquering the Municipality ) and the eloquent subtitle Manuale per gli amministratori degli enti locali (Handbook for local government administrators ) is published in Milan in 1920 by the Avanti! publishing company and is presented as a “Volgarization of the ordering and functioning of local authorities within the framework of the laws in force” (5.3.2). It is a meaty, 235-page text, ranging from the administrative order of the municipality to consumer policy, closing with considerations on local agrarian policies and health care. In the text, which was promoted and disseminated by the League of Socialist Municipalities, Matteotti argues with particular vigor for sound management of the public good and efficient service policy in the local area because, he argues, “local government is the forge of democracy” (5.3.3).

While continuing to deal with local politics, however, Giacomo Matteotti is very much absorbed in parliamentary activity. In Rome, in the Chamber, he distinguished himself with his first speeches in the chamber. On March 28, 1920, the confidence in the Nitti government was debated in Montecitorio (5.3.4), which aims to put together a majority and then design a program. The Socialists had already decided not to support this government when Matteotti spoke controversially in the chamber, often interrupted by Nitti himself and Giolitti. To the solid political arguments, seasoned with a timely analysis of figures, he also accompanies irony. On Nitti’s strategy of trying to unite a majority without a program, he says, “This theory and this tradition conform to the theory of that cannon builder, who wanted to take a hole and then put bronze around it” (5.3.5).

On June 26 Matteotti was again elected to the provincial council of Rovigo, but already the next day he was in the courtroom, in Montecitorio (5.3.6), where he faces the new council president Giovanni Giolitti (5.3.7), now 80 years old and in his last term after Nitti’s failure. Matteotti denounces in him the old politics, inadequate to manage the turmoil running through the country and to give satisfactory answers to the social ferment. We are in the hot phase of the red biennium, tensions are being felt that could explode in a revolution: “But it is to you constitutionalists that hangs at this moment the obligation to preserve the last remnant of Parliament, the last constitutional prerogative, which can defend your regime from the final assault of the square”.

On November 22, 1920 Matteotti delivered a very long speech in Montecitorio on the subject of schooling and against Benedetto Croce (5.3.8), the Neapolitan philosopher who became minister of public education. His school policy is proving elitist and ineffective. Already on the previous Giacomo August 8 he had denounced the shameful state of neglect in which elementary education was then in: “In this year 1920 it is pity to ask for the establishment of elementary schools, it is pity to state that there are gathered in some classes more than 150 pupils with only one teacher”.

In November he returns to vehemently call for “education at any cost” because “the state of elementary education in Italy is simply shameful”. Once again the philosopher is his target: “Instead of doing something, the minister does nothing. You think of nothing, you study the problems of the other world, Mr. Croce, you are speculating philosophically on the clouds”.

In Matteotti’s constant attention to the problems of the school is all of Matteotti’s civil passion, which is fueled by the conviction that there is no civil and social progress for workers without their spiritual elevation, without a culture that allows them to fully exercise the rights of citizenship. It is, his, a socialist and gradualist humanism (reaching a goal by degrees, by successive steps), which eschews the idea that the redemption of the people can be achieved by an outbreak of violence or the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Matteotti’s political ideas draw nourishment from a political tradition that has its greatest theoretician in Filippo Turati (5.3.9). It is to Turati that we owe his historic speech to the Chamber of Deputies on June 26, 1920, Rifare l’Italia (5.3.10), which is recognized as the programmatic manifesto of Italian reformist socialism. Prominent in it is the call for the national function of socialism, which is conceived not only as a strategy for defending and organizing the proletariat but as a governing force capable of imparting a modernizing turn to the country.Minority in the party and in local federations, the reformist wing has a majority in Parliament, and that is no small feat: Turati leads a Parliamentary Group (5.3.11) that has in Menè (Giuseppe Emanuele) Modigliani (5.3.12), Claudio Treves (5.3.13) and Giacomo Matteotti the brightest peaks.

The rise of reformist socialism was accompanied, from the early twentieth century, by the gradual growth of the trade union movement, peasant leagues and cooperation, both in production and consumption. The General Confederation of Labor was founded in 1906 in Milan (photos 5.4.1) on the initiative of the Chambers of Labor, resistance leagues and 700 local unions and immediately had 250,000 members. The workers’ vanguard of Fiom (Italian Federation of Metallurgical Workers) (5.4.2) by Bruno Buozzi (5.4.3) is solidly anchored in reformism, and faithful to that line will be, in the years to come, the CGdL led by D’Aragona (5.4.4) and Baldesi.

The associative universe expressed by workers is also established through cooperative economic organizations. In 1902 there were 2,823 cooperative societies registered, with half a million members. In 1914 they reach one million, a number that was already very large, but which would double in the immediate post-World War I period, in a season of conquests and clashes: at the end in 1920 the share capital of the member societies of the League was around 600 million liras with a business movement around one and a half billion (5.4.5, 5.4.6).

It is not only the city, with the world of the factory and the development of services, that is the natural leaven of so much ferment: mobilization also touches the countryside, starting in the Polesine of Giacomo Matteotti, where the Peasant Leagues see exponential growth from the last glimpse of the nineteenth century to the following decades. First and foremost, farm laborers joined the Leagues, but unionization also soon followed for sharecroppers, “obligated” and smallholders, thanks in part to such outstanding union leaders and organizers as Aldo Parini and Matteotti himself. But it is above all a woman, Argentina Bonetti Altobelli (5.4.7) – also solidly linked to the gradualist strategy – who made Federterra (5.4.8) the largest agricultural union representation, reaching, in 1920, close to a million members.

It is in this context that Giacomo Matteotti conducts with Aldo Parini, in the spring of 1920, a negotiation with the large landowners of Polesine, brought together by the Agraria (National Confederation of Agriculture, or Confagricoltura) (5.4.9), in order to obtain a significant improvement in the living conditions of the farmers on his land (5.4.10). This was the so-called Parini-Matteotti Concordat, a provincial agreement to regulate relations between the agrarians and the leagues based on the recognition of class employment offices (i.e., the Chambers of Labor and the Leagues) and the so-called “taxable labor rate”, i.e., the obligation on the part of the bosses to permanently employ at least one worker for every 5 1/2 hectares of land owned. The agreement, which also included significant wage improvements, is signed in the spring and is a big success from the union perspective. Government intervention is needed to break the stalemate that arose over the taxable labor rate: negotiations are transferred to Rome, where the Rovigo Chamber of Labor is represented by Argentina Altobelli, who signs the agreement in principle on March 18, 1920. By mid-June the Concordat is now operational throughout the province of Rovigo.
It is a hard pill to swallow for the Agraria, but it is a great union success that gives the Socialists wings ahead of the local elections in October. All indications are, on the wave of the extraordinary success in the previous year’s general elections, that the Polesine Socialists will cash in on this success as well (5.4.11, 5.4.12, 5.4.12.1, 5.4.13). More than a success, however, the affirmation enshrined in the ballot box is a true triumph. All 63 municipalities in which votes are cast elect socialist mayors and juntas; at the Rovigo Provincial Council, the PSI obtains 36 out of 40 seats, the other four go to the Populars. Polesine is, again, the “reddest” land in Italy, and Giacomo Matteotti is its undisputed leader (5.4.14).

A few weeks earlier-after a long season of strikes, demonstrations and demands-the Red Biennium had peaked, and embarked on the beginning of its decline, with the season in the occupation of factories in the North (photos 5.5.1, 5.5.2, 5.5.3). Capital and big business prepare the counteroffensive by using fascist squads to suppress the workers’ claim. In the countryside, Agraria enlists bands of squads and organizes punitive expeditions and assaults targeting peasant leagues and labor chambers. The territory on which this paramilitary campaign is tested and consolidated is precisely the Polesine: the land in which the socialists are strongest, along with neighboring Emilia, will be the one on which they will refine a repressive method and criminal strategy that will later be extended to all of Italy. Matteotti witnessed this wave of violence that first threatened and then dismembered the socialist organizations in his territory: it was the “Polesine system”, which he would shortly thereafter denounce in the Chamber of Deputies in an epic, extremely harsh speech.

Where it made the most significant success for the socialists, the October administrative vote was systematically contested and fascist “action squads” (5.5.4) go on the assault in “red” municipalities, prevent installation of new administrations, and subvert the popular vote with devastating violence. Giolitti’s government and law enforcement agencies do not hinder the rising wave of squadrist violence. Sometimes they look the other way, sometimes they encourage it, as is attested by Matteotti’s documented denunciations in the press, in the stands, in Parliament.

We left Matteotti in the House as he vehemently denounced, on November 22, the miserable state of education in Italy. That session ended dramatically and will be remembered for the simultaneous announcement of no less than 7 questions on the events that had taken place the day before in Bologna. The newspapers had already reported on the massacre, but as the hours passed the scale of the bloodshed and the spread of fascist violence became increasingly clear in all its civil and political significance. The massacre at Palazzo d’Accursio (5.5.5), which took place on November 21, 1920 in Bologna, is one of the first and most serious episodes of squadristic violence to break out in Piazza Maggiore: fascists attack en masse the crowd gathered for the inauguration of the new city council headed by socialist Enio Gnudi. The clashes result in the death of 10 socialists and liberal city councilor Giulio Giordani, as well as the wounding of about 60 people (5.5.6).

The political hegemony of the socialists was countered, and then overlapped, by the squadrist offensive (5.5.7). The fascists’ assault is repeated a few weeks later in Ferrara in what will be remembered as the ecide of Castello Estense (5.5.8). The clashes began on December 20, 2020, at the culmination of a long series of intimidating violence, and left six people dead, two socialists and four fascists, as well as numerous wounded (5.5.9). The violence will follow in the following January, involving Matteotti himself.

The year 1920 also ends tragically at Fiume. Following the Treaty of Rapallo, the Regia Marina intervened against D’Annunzio and his Legionnaires, and from December 24, the Andrea Doria cannoned Fiume. In what is remembered as the “Bloody Christmas” (5.5.10) the Vate’s adventure ends leaving over 30 dead 60 wounded, including civilians, on the ground and 25 dead among the regular troops (5.5.11).
This streak of blood marks the transition from the red biennium to the black biennium. This is the reality with which the Socialists and Giacomo Matteotti will have to confront and clash (5.5.12, 5.5.13).