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An elegantly dressed Italian gets off a train in central London on the evening of April 22 1924. He is on a secret mission to meet representatives of Britain’s ruling Labour party – including, he hopes, the recently elected prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald.
Giacomo Matteotti, co-founder and leader of the Italian Unitary Socialist Party, is one of the leading opponents of the fascist movement that has been tightening its grip on Italy since Benito Mussolini’s appointment as prime minister in October 1922, following the infamous March on Rome.
For now, though, Italy remains a democracy. The 38-year-old Matteotti, a tireless defender of workers’ rights, still hopes Mussolini can be stopped. He has entered Britain without a passport as the Italian government refuses to grant him one. At home, he has been physically and verbally attacked by fascist mobs and government-sympathising newspapers. Even in London, he is shadowed by fascist agents – a fact revealed to him by his Labour party contacts.
For Matteotti, this new British government – the first to be led by Labour, although not as a majority – is a beacon of hope. It appears willing to listen to his concerns about what is happening in Italy following Mussolini’s controversial election victory earlier that month. The coming days in London will, Matteotti hopes, prove decisive in his fight against fascism.
Instead, less than two months later, he will be kidnapped and murdered while walking to the parliament building in Rome. It is a crime that shocks Italy and, a century later, still leaves many questions unanswered.
Four days in London
In their social backgrounds, MacDonald and Matteotti could not have been more different. Britain’s new prime minister was a working-class Scot who had made his way up via humble jobs and political activism. In contrast, Matteotti hailed from a wealthy family that owned 385 acres in the Polesine region of north-eastern Italy.
Yet in April 1924, as a declared enemy of the Italian state, Matteotti was practically a refugee. The fascists feared his exceptional eloquence, which he used to express his opposition to Italy’s government both in parliament and in domestic and foreign newspapers.
It is unknown whether the two men actually met during Matteotti’s four-day visit to London – Prime Minister MacDonald would hardly have wanted to advertise an unofficial meeting with an opposition MP from another country. But we know Matteotti connected with other prominent Labour figures.
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On April 24, he gave a speech to executive committees of the ruling Labour party and other workers’ organisations, in which he asked for “moral and material assistance” for Italian workers against fascist violence. His vivid account of the situation in Italy prompted publication of an English translation of his book A Year of Fascist Domination – which detailed a long list of violent crimes allegedly carried out by the Mussolini government.
But something else may have troubled Mussolini about Matteotti’s visit to London – part of a European tour that also included stops in Brussels and Paris. Italy’s prime minister had just signed an agreement granting the American Sinclair Oil corporation a monopoly on oil exploration and extraction in parts of Italy. It was later suggested the Labour government might have provided Matteotti with proof that this monopoly had been granted by Mussolini in exchange for a bribe of US$2 million (worth around US$40 million today).
Death of a socialist
Less than two months after his visit to London, on a warm Rome afternoon on June 10 1924, Matteotti left his house near Piazza del Popolo to make the short walk along the river Tiber to the capital’s parliament building. He planned to refine a speech he was due to give the next day at a session on the government’s proposed budget. He had reportedly been working on this speech day and night, studying data and checking numbers for many hours.
But a car was waiting for him with five people on board – fascist members of a secret group formed a few months earlier at the Viminale, the palace of the interior minister. This secret group, known as Ceka after the Soviet political police created to repress dissent, had been following Matteotti for weeks. The squad’s leader, US-born Amerigo Dumini, reputedly boasted of having previously killed several socialist activists.
The gang moved quickly, grabbing Matteotti and dragging him into their car, a fancy Italian Lancia. Screaming, the opposition leader threw his parliamentary ID card to the ground where it would later be found by passers by. The car sped away along the unpaved, empty streets of Rome. Matteotti would never be seen alive again.
The atmosphere in the Italian parliament the following afternoon was febrile. Socialist MPs, alerted by Matteotti’s wife, denounced the MP’s disappearance – but were not altogether surprised by it. Twelve days earlier, Matteotti had given a speech denouncing the recent general election which gave the fascists their first (and only) electoral victory. The vote was dogged by threats and acts of violence that prevented many antifascist candidates from standing, and many workers from voting.
As Matteotti was addressing parliament, Mussolini was reportedly overheard asking: “How come this man is still going around?” In an article in the fascist newspaper Popolo d’Italia, the prime minister described the speech as “monstrously provocative” and “deserving of something more tangible than epithet[s]”.
Yet two days after Matteotti’s disappearance, Mussolini’s tune had changed. He reassured MPs that “the police were informed of the prolonged disappearance of Hon. Matteotti” and that he himself “had ordered [them] to intensify the search”. When Matteotti’s wife visited him, Mussolini assured her that he wanted to send back her husband alive.
By then, however, events were spiralling out of Mussolini’s control. The concierge of a building next to Matteotti’s house had given police the registration number of a suspicious-looking car he had spotted the day before the murder. The police soon identified the car’s owner as Filippo Filippelli, director of the pro-fascist newspaper Corriere Italiano. That same evening, Dumini, who had a cover job at the newspaper, was taken into custody, with more arrests to follow over the following weeks.
Within 48 hours of Matteotti’s disappearance, newspapers led by the Corriere della Sera were linking the crime with fascists close to the government, as Dumini’s close friendship with the head of Mussolini’s press office, Cesare Rossi, was well known in Rome. For a few days, it appeared that the resulting public outrage – much of it aimed at Mussolini himself – might even bring down Italy’s government, spelling the death knell for fascism.
Why was Matteotti murdered?
One hundred years on, Matteotti’s disappearance – and the subsequent discovery of his remains on the outskirts of Rome during the sleepy August holiday season – remains a controversial event in Italy’s collective memory. It is a topic discussed by many, yet avoided by the current government, which has been withholding funds for initiatives to mark the centenary of Matteotti’s murder.
His death can be seen as one of the most consequential political assassinations of the 20th century. By killing a leader of the opposition, Italy’s fascist regime brought political violence to a new level, making clear that it was ready to punish all who stood in its way, whatever their standing. Dictatorship loomed in Italy, and fascism became an entry in dictionaries worldwide, inspiring countless authoritarian regimes – Nazi Germany included.
Yet for the Italian right, Matteotti is a ghost. Throughout her political career, Italy’s current prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has hardly ever spoken about the historical crimes of fascists in Italy, and not once about the murder of Matteotti. Perhaps this is not surprising given the fascist roots of Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, whose logo features a flame said to symbolise the fascist spirit burning at Mussolini’s tomb.
The historical debate about the murder has also never reached a unanimous conclusion about who gave the order to kill Matteotti and why. Some leading Italian historians, including Renzo De Felice, suggested that Mussolini was himself the victim of a political plot – reasoning that since the murder occurred after “Il Duce’s” victory in the April 1924 election, there had no longer been any need for him to eliminate an opponent and risk triggering the political crisis that indeed transpired.
Now, as the centenary of Matteotti’s death approaches, scholars and archivists from Italy and the UK (including this article’s authors) are collaborating to shed new light on the Matteotti case – with the help of documents that have been locked away in the archives of the London School of Economics (LSE) the whole time, and which most Italian historians, De Felice included, never got the chance to study.
This trove of more than 4,000 pages contains transcripts of the original documents amassed by the murder investigation, led by antifascist judge Mauro del Giudice, that were not made public at the time. While these documents were examined by historian Mauro Canali in the 1990s – leading him to accuse Mussolini of being directly responsible for the murder – we still do not know their full contents, and believe a thorough re-investigation is long overdue.
In so doing, we hope to definitively dispel the theories of some right-wing historians and establish, once and for all, that it was Mussolini who ordered Matteotti’s murder – and also why he gave that order.
The LSE documents
The story of how the documents came to be secreted away in the LSE library takes us back to London for another clandestine visit – this time by Gaetano Salvemini, an esteemed professor of modern history who fled Italy in November 1925.
Salvemini sent a letter of resignation to the University of Florence while in London where, like Matteotti, he was seeking support against the threat of fascism back home. Unlike Matteotti, he didn’t make the mistake of returning to Italy afterwards. He would go on to live in exile in the US as a professor at Harvard University, while becoming revered in his homeland as one of the most important Italian intellectuals of the 20th century.
Salvemini had many friends in London. Intellectuals and politicians including John Maynard Keynes, George Macaulay Trevelyan, Thomas Okey and Ramsay MacDonald (no longer prime minister but still leader of the Labour party) had all publicly expressed their support when Salvemini was arrested in Italy by the fascist authorities a few months earlier.
“When I am in London, I am not in exile. I am at my home, in the homeland of my heart, free among the free,” wrote Salvemini to his friend, the art historian Mary Berenson.
In December 1926, while still in London, Salvemini received the secret package which he soon passed on to the LSE. Like Matteotti earlier, his movements were being reported back to Mussolini, and a letter from the Italian Embassy in London, dated January 12 1927, informed the Italian leader that:
Gaetano Salvemini had delivered a few days earlier to the librarian of the London School of Economics the only remaining complete copy of the Matteotti trial documents … It contains oral depositions of accused and witnesses in the investigation not reproduced in the public trial. An Italian authority who examined the documents said it proves that the Matteotti murder and concealment of the body were instigated by the fascist government … and that Mussolini himself is directly implicated.
Salvemini and others involved in the smuggling of these documents well knew that their quest for justice for Matteotti would be unfulfilled for the foreseeable future. But they were driven by the conviction that these documents could one day prove beyond doubt that Mussolini had orchestrated Matteotti’s assassination. After studying them closely, Salvemini himself wrote in The Fascist Dictatorship in Italy, a powerful 1928 account of why Italy became a dictatorship, that the documents he received contained irrefutable evidence that Mussolini was the instigator of Matteotti’s murder.
The reason they ended up at the LSE was probably due to Salvemini’s friendship with Alys Russell, an American-born British Quaker, relief organiser and the first wife of British philosopher Bertrand Russell. She regularly hosted Salvemini at her house in Chelsea along with LSE luminaries such as the political scientists Graham Wallas, Harold Laski and Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson. Salvemini may thus have considered the LSE a safe haven – and there the documents have remained ever since.
A voice from the dead
Following the arrest of Dumini on June 12 1924 and public outrage over Matteotti’s disappearance, Mussolini was on the defensive. He dismissed the head of the police and Cesare Rossi, probably his closest adviser, and told the Italian parliament:
Only an enemy of mine, who had been thinking diabolical thoughts for long nights, could have committed this crime, which today strikes us with horror and makes us cry out with indignation.
But sensing political blood, the opposition parties made a crucial mistake. In an attempt to pressure Italy’s king, Victor Emmanuel III, to remove Mussolini from office, they resolved to abandon parliament until those responsible for Matteotti’s murder were put on trial.
But this withdrawal of opposition – known as the secessione dell’Aventino after the hill where people gathered during political strikes in ancient Rome – did not have the hoped-for effect on the king, who feared the opposition’s republican leaders more than he feared fascist violence. Rather, the move allowed Mussolini to legislate unchallenged while the seats of the 123 MPs who had joined the rebellion were left vacant.
However, the voices of opposition were not entirely stilled. In July 1924, an article written by Matteotti days before his murder was published posthumously in English Life, a short-lived monthly magazine edited by Brendan Bracken, a close friend of Winston Churchill who would be his minister of information during the second world war.
Matteotti’s article, entitled “Machiavelli, Mussolini and Fascism”, was a response to an article published in the magazine’s June issue by Mussolini himself. The Italian prime minister’s translated essay about the Renaissance intellectual Niccolò Machiavelli had carried the provocative headline “The Folly of Democracy”.
Matteotti’s response ridiculed Mussolini’s advocacy of the use of force, while redeeming Machiavelli’s legacy. It quoted chapter 18 of The Prince, in which Machiavelli wrote:
There are two ways of deciding any question. The one by laws. The other by force. The first is peculiar to men, the second to beasts.
Matteotti’s article also gave details of the controversial Sinclair Oil deal, stating that he was aware of evidence of corruption within Italy’s government. In 1997, the historian Canali suggested that this had been what Matteotti was about to reveal in parliament, and hence was the real motive for his murder.
After describing Mussolini’s government as “an outrage against morality”, Matteotti ended the article with the far-sighted warning that fascist actions would “make Italy infamous throughout the world”.
The article was widely commented on in the British press, which had been following the story of Matteotti’s murder almost daily. Yet in Italy, the absence of the parliamentary opposition gave Mussolini breathing space from these posthumous accusations.
Finally, in mid-August 1924, when most Italians were on holiday to avoid the heat and political debate was at a minimum, Matteotti’s body was suddenly retrieved from a wood some 20 kilometres from Rome. His funeral was rushed through very quickly, with the coffin being transported overnight in an attempt to prevent public gatherings. Nonetheless, the burial in Matteotti’s small hometown of Fratta Polesine was attended by thousands of people, with many more having paid tribute during his body’s final journey.
The end of Italian democracy
By November 1924, the investigators of Matteotti’s death believed his murderers had been acting on orders from Mussolini. Sensing more political danger, Il Duce stepped up his authoritarian rule over the country. In a speech to parliament on January 3 1925, he took “political responsibility” for the murder while not admitting to ordering it. Mussolini’s speech ended with a rhetorical invitation to indict him – to a parliament now populated only by fascists. Instead, they applauded and cheered their leader.
The speech signalled the end of Italian democracy. In the 48 hours that followed, Mussolini imposed draconian limitations on the country’s free press, and granted local authorities the power to close all branches of opposition parties.
Amid Mussolini’s iron grip on power, there was no hope of realising the truth about Matteotti’s murder – in Italy at least. A trial began in 1925 but it was heavily manipulated: the antifascist judge who had led the investigation was substituted and the trial moved from Rome to Chieti, a small town and fascist stronghold, to minimise public attention.
Then in July 1925, Mussolini issued an amnesty for all political crimes. The decree was so blatantly aimed at saving Dumini and his associates that it was sarcastically referred to in antifascist circles as the “Dumini amnesty”. The trial became a farce, the perpetrators were all freed, and the truth about the murder was buried for decades.
The nature of Mussolini’s involvement was little discussed in the wake of his execution in April 1945 and the end of the second world war. Italy was now trying to overcome the civil war that had scarred it for so long, and antifascist parties looked for reconciliation rather than reviving outrage over Mussolini’s crimes. Two years later, Dumini and two accomplices were finally convicted to lengthy prison sentences for the murder – only to be later released under a new amnesty law.
However, just as Salvemini would have hoped when he handed the investigation documents to the LSE, Mussolini’s possible responsibility for the murder has been preserved in transcripts of the original inquest. Now, following a request by one of this article’s authors (Andrea), these documents are in the process of being digitised – and on Tuesday, April 23, the physical copies are being presented to the public for the first time.
The goal of our new research is to determine, once and for all, why Matteotti was murdered. Was it his democratic resistance to fascist misdeeds – particularly the violence and fraud that occurred during the 1924 general election? Was it the evidence of the Mussolini government’s corruption that he planned to reveal to the Italian parliament the day after his kidnap? Or was Matteotti killed for his international standing, exemplified by the connections to the Labour government that he fostered on that last, fateful visit to London?
And there is another motive for our research. By shedding new light on events leading up to Matteotti’s murder, we aim to highlight the plight of all political dissenters amid the resurgence of autocratic governments and corrosion of democratic values – including in Italy. By paying tribute to an early 20th-century martyr of democracy, we stress the need to understand and address the mechanisms that are still used today to silence opposition and strengthen authoritarian regimes around the world.
The murder of Giacomo Matteotti: an archive drop-in and seminar is being held at the LSE Library in central London on Tuesday, April 23.
