> ". (4) But the Beatniks and Provos in Italy were a small vanguard, the prophets of a collective state of mind, just as were the Situationists and the Angered in Nanterre, France, the Hippies in the United States, and the generation that rallied round the music of the Beatles and the psychedelic circles in England. Teh students' movement broke out in Italy - unexpectedly and unforeseen by anyone - during 1967 presenting itself not any longer as an avant-garde symbol of a widespread sensibility, but as a social mass phenomenon. Generational factors, specific contradictions within the universities and the general political situation (5) contributed equally to creating what took on the character of a mass movement.
The Radicals - along with the rest of the political groups large and small - stood outside the movement, even though the very existence of the Radicals had its reason for being in two
problems that were basic determining factors of the movement itself: the need to break up the stagnant political balance by taking up a subjective leftist initiative, and the rejection of the bureaucratic way of practising politics through recourse to direct action. But that which the Radicals hoped for and anticipated with the instinct of a very restricted group was asserted by the movement with mass action, triggering off dissent outside of the insurgent university sphere and creating movements that revealed a new aspect of the country.
Thus one cannot speak of a Radical presence in the movement of '68 nor of particular contributions. Rather it is interesting to note how the Radicals subjectively saw the movement and their attitudes to it - and it is important to specify that it was a matter of an evaluation and not of a joining in action. In fact that political attitude taken at the time is significant for all the subsequent relations between the Radicals and the new Marxist and extra-parliamentary left which originated in '68. A first evaluation regards a rupture in the political balance. In a note appearing in "Notizie Radicali" of June 1968, one could read: "What has political relevance is that the movement was formed by re-opening the political and idealistic struggle in many countries, and in Italy, within a few weeks, breaking the bureaucratic inertia of the youth organisations". (6) The birth of the student movement plus Catholic dissent and the new battles of the workers' movement, seemed to confirm the Radicals' analyses and
forecasts, just as the methods of "self--management of the university struggle, the libertarian organisation of the spontaneous and the greater participation of the working class... were the ground that blocked the crystallisation of small ideological groups or the assertion of an all-encompassing political direction". (7) A document written by the PR's National Secretary, Gianfranco Spadaccia, did not ignore the fact that the Radicals had remained outside the movement nor try to hide that "the party had assumed the same an attitude not unlike that of the other leftist parties - that is, the feeling of having been taken by surprise and left behind by events, all the more serious in a small party that cannot and does not want to count on the power of self-preservation typical of the other organisations". (8) Then followed an analysis of the movement's ideas and methods to indicate its affinities and differences: in common with the movement of dissent the Radicals had the rediscovery "of the subjective and
voluntary element in an action that wants to be truly revolutionary", (9) and the positive rejection of the economy-oriented and internationalist character. On the contrary it warned of the risk of re-proposing the old vices of the Italian left, that is "abstraction and maximalism, mere lip service to revolution, sectarianism, and dogmatism". (10) And at the same time it recalled the difference between the "fight against the regime" (taking up again the old slogan of the November 1967 Congress) and the "fight against the system" or "global dissent" that was the guiding principle of student dissent. "We must overcome this situation" the document concluded, "in which the official parliamentary components of the left do not seem able to wage any fight other than the one against a government formula and program, and which in its new and extra-parliamentary components has taken on the impressive but abstract objective of a fight against the system... so too we must explode the insistence on the false alternativ
e between the pacifist way and the insurrectional way to revolution". (11)
Thus the Radicals were close to the movement of '68, understood its deep significance, but was unable to join in it because of the impossibility of making the leap from minority group to mass movement. And it is no accident that two Radicals, Carlo Oliva and Aloisio Rendi, were the authors of the first lucid and documented study of "The Student Movement and its Struggles", in which they were able - perhaps thanks to their own political experience - to put into relief the movement's principle features: "the two components of an anti-authoritarian, dissenting conscience and direct action for concretely realising the dissent are the foundation... of a revolution of the individual, of his liberty and dignity... in the re-acquisition of the voice of the individual and the small group in the face of the apparently ineluctable suffocation of all expressions of dissent by a conformist and consumerist society". (12) But just this crucial year in which the Radicals' political sensitivity proved itself closed for
them with the Ravenna Congress attended by only a few dozen militants in confirmation of the highly limiited energies on which they could go ahead with their yet lucid interpretations of the meaning of that year's events.
The moment in '68 when a crisis in the political system was created, brought out the hypothesis of a recomposition of the parties as an expression of movement, not only in the social realities, but in their political outlets. Then the hope of a "new left" was born by means of multiple projects and various experiences: the student movement; dissent in the traditional parties of the left; and political dissent on the part of the so-called "spontaneous groups". These latter, mainly but not exclusively of Catholic origin, attempted to develop with a flexible organisation of an associational type around the prospects of a new left force that would renew the form of political organisation and the contents of the whole range of the Italian left.
From November on, a hundred or so groups became associated meeting at Rimini (13) and then at Bologna in February 1968 in a conference where Wladimiro Dorigo made the introductory report on the subject of "Believers and Non-Believers for a New Left"; and finally in the "Assembly of the Spontaneous Groups of Political-Cultural Commitment for a New Left", held again at Rimini from November 1-4, 1968.
The Radicals followed with great interest the developments of that aggregation both because of the laicization that was arising from the dissent in the Catholic world and because of the new organisational form being considered that tended to preserve the individuality of each group involved in a federated type of connection. Both these elements had affinities and similarities with what the PR represented in the lay spheres. Thus they associated themselves with the assembly of the spontaneous groups (14), participated locally in common undertakings and even at the Rimini convention of November 1968 where one of the reports was made by the Radical Teodori on "Struggles Against the Authoritarianism of the State Apparatus". (15)
But that generous prospect, that was the guiding idea of a rigorous intellectual like Dorigo and of the "Questitalia" group that he led, did not succeed in the end in establishing itself; and once the '68 movement burned out, it left the field to enclaves of avant-gardist groups of strict Marxist or Marxist-Leninist persuasion.
The Radicals, who had declared their readiness to dissolve themselves in a new and wider movement in its way of practising politics as well as in its ideas, had thought to see this in the spontaneous groups. But now they were left to go their solitary way anchored to the specific struggles which by now they had grown tired of proposing and re-proposing even in the moments when a general upheaval seemed near, provoked by the movements of '68.
2. THE NEW INITIATIVES: JUSTICE, SEXUALITY, CONCORDAT, WOMEN'S LIBERATION
The Bologna Congress of refoundation held in May 1967 was primarily dedicated to approving a new formal constitution - the statute of the new party - which nevertheless would for many years remain more an indication of a program than the concrete realisation of a political and organisational charter.
The 1967 statute foresaw an open party organisation of a federal and libertarian kind centred on independent groups qualifying as regional organisations with the norms and characteristics of parties - a formula of free association, membership for individuals and groups, also for limited periods of time and for achieving specific objectives; national federative congresses that would deliberate on a few points considered binding on all members if approved by a majority of three quarters of those present; no bonds on those elected in legislative and administrative assembly; the direct election of a person responsible for financial policy, the treasurer, and rigorously public budgets.
The concept on which that statute was based was the presence at the same time, institutionalised, of basic independent associational members and the common, united commitment to just a few battles so as to eliminate all ideological, systematic and permanent adhesions to the political organisation. Self-financing was a policy that signified the party's refusal of professional politicians and the relationship between the proposed battle and a material expression of consensus on the part of the citizens involved which anticipated the subsequent position against public financing of parties in the form of money. It also meant: the independence of the treasurer and the increased power of the treasurer compared to the traditional party practices and underlined the value of financial policy strictly tied to political choices and as a presupposition for them. The autonomy of the associations (and the forms of association) as regional parties that had confederated in a national party (and not a national party w
ith regional organisations) was a counterpoise to the pyramidal structure by province on which all the other parties were modelled and anticipated the order by regions which had not yet been actuated.
The institutional mechanism of the party according to its
statutory form, thus intended to be the equivalent of a proposal for the entire left precisely in the moment when the forms of the traditional organisations were in a crisis because of the emergence of the new social movements. "This because" one could read in an interview published by "L'Astrolabio" immediately following the congress, "a party that is the first to claim to be a lay group cannot pretend to furnish a common and obligatory answer to all aspects of the political fight, but only to those that appear to be ripe and resolved in the conscience of militants". (16)
But to pass from the formal to the practical constitution many years were needed and only when a series of initiatives took on general and national importance (after 1974) and the small, compact group that constituted the party grew to several thousand militants, only then the libertarian intentions began to become a concrete reality, not without encountering difficulties and contradictions.
Radical actions and initiatives however began developing form then on, spreading out into a network of civil rights projects and libertarian battles and campaigns that were progressively to become part of the public domain. In April 1967 the Rome section of the PR organised together with the AIED (Italian Association for Demographic Education, ed.) a debate on "Sexophobia and Clericalism" with reports made by Luigi De Marchi and Fausto Antonini. (17) A few months later, in February 1968, a conference on "Sexual Repression and Social Oppression" (18) contributed to a further development of the theme inserting apparently non-political issues into the business of a political group. At the November 1967 congress, a report on civil rights (19) encompassed under this title numerous aspects of private life, to the degree that in the final motion of the congress, accepting that suggestion, one could read: "In Italy traditional legislation, based on the concepts of honor and the indissolubility of the family, t
he absence of a demographic policy, the lack of sexual education, the active and daily poisoning of the natural development of the child, the persecution of love relationships that have not received the sanction of an authority, are all phenomena that reveal the not merely individual character, but also the social one of the sexual question". (20) This anticipated the notion of "the private is political" that subsequently characterised the feminist movement and other groups of existential liberation.
At the beginning of 1969, with the inauguration of the judicial year, the Roman Radicals organised a public counter-inauguration in Piazza Cavour in front of the Palace of Justice which was open not only to magistrates, lawyers, and other professions dealing with justice, but to all citizens as well who were damaged by the malfunctioning of the judicial apparatus. "The problem of justice in Italy", one could read in the invitation to the demonstration, "is not a technical problem, it is the problem of the civil rights of second-class citizens, a problem of the structure of the regime that aims at being the pillars of a particular paternalistic, baronial, consumeristic and clerical society, based on these apparent residues of an age-old backwardness". (21) Shortly afterwards the party constituted a group headed by the attorneys Giuseppe Ramadori and Mauro Mellini for a "Judicial Revolt" action aimed at uniting those interested "in the fight for the civil right of justice and for a different relationship
between the citizens and the State". (22)
A case where the judicial action initiative blended with a political aspect and a press campaign was the Radical attitude to the "Braibanti Affair". Aldo Braibanti, a shy intellectual outsider, was tried in 1968, found guilty in January 1969 and sentenced to nine years for "plagio" (literally plagiarism, a judicial concept regarding the subjection of a person's personality to another), a crime that until then was practically unknown to Italian justice. It was evident here that a man who professed anarchical ideas was framed and forced justice applied to strike at the non-conformist habits of his private life and to make a crime of his singular civil and political ideas, almost as if to make an example of him at a time of growing dissent.
At first Braibanti was afforded solidarity and attention by a part of the cultural world only to be left to his destiny in the end by almost everyone. It was at that point that the Radicals engaged in a public campaign of written articles, appeals and demonstrations to bring the truth to light in this "case". Contesting the judge who had passed the sentence because of its juridical and scientific bases, and ending up in turn condemned in court for defamation as the authors of articles in "L'Astrolabio" and "Notizie Radicali", Pannella and other Radicals (23) worked for three years to disseminate counter-information and to transform what might have appeared to be a private affair into a publicly known episode of the "violent bahavior" (24) of justice.
During the course of the long divorce business, with its parliamentary itinerary interrupted by the elections of May 1968 and then taken up again by the new legislature, the Radicals tried to put in the political spotlight the knotty question of abrogating the Concordat between the Italian State and the Holy See and extricate it from the condition of a problem under study.
Already in the motion of the November 1968 congress, their appeared for the first time mention of a referendum to abrogate the Concordat "to begin immediately after the coming into effect of the law instituting referendums". (25) This commitment was taken up again by the congress the following year in the first point of the operative resolution (26) and reiterated yet again in November 1970 one month before the Fortuna law was finally passed. (27)
With divorce won, it seemed to the Radicals that the time was ripe to latch on to this first victory of the laity and follow it up with its natural successor, the anti-Concordat campaign. Furthermore, two new elements could favor the launching of the Radical action: the approval of the law instituting referendums for abrogation of laws which the clerical forces had instantaneously put to use against divorce in the Spring of 1971, and the fact that the Concordat was on the legislative agenda in Parliament where proposals for revision had emerged from both the Catholic and the official lay sides.
On February 11, 1971 in Milan a series of national conferences was held by minority groups of Republicans, Liberals, pro-divorce forces and Catholic believers, from which later grew a single united national assembly that deliberated on the constitution of an autonomous organisation called "The Italian League for the Abrogation of the Concordat" (LIAC).
Prompted by solicitations of the Radicals, between March and April deputies and senators belonging to the LIAC or sympathising with it, presented motions and bills against the Concordat in Parliament. Active in this sense in the Senate was Giammario Albani (independent leftist of Catholic extraction), together with Parri and Simone Gatto (independent left) and the Socialists Jannuzzi and Fenoaltea. In the Chamber the motions were signed by several deputies of the PSIUP and Manifesto, the Socialists Scalfari, Fortuna, Mussa-Ivaldi, the independent leftist Basso and the Liberal Bonea. (28) At the same time the Secretary of the PR sent a document to all the lay members of Parliament in which they presented arguments for the abrogationists and as a necessary point of departure also for the revisionists. "On the other hand," the document read, "revision for its own sake and the concern over liquidating the anti-Concordat movement weaken the political forces in any negotiation whatsoever thus depriving it o
f the only good card it can play in regard to the Vatican, that of an accelerating movement to overthrow those norms which the Holy See has for too long stubbornly defended and tried to conserve". (29)
Added pressure was put on the Parliamentary forces, who could not even find the modifying road to revision, by a first campaign for mobilisation with the unofficial gathering of hundreds of thousands of signatures in favor of abrogation - an action that intended to be both a first reply to the anti-divorce referendum as well as the first move towards the real and true referendum against the Concordat.
In succeeding years the Radicals will have tried two more times (30) to collect the necessary half million signatures for proposing a solution to the Concordat problem that Parliament was not able to provide, without ever succeeding, until 1977 when the signatures were gathered for that and seven other referendums.
At the end of 1969 another Radical front was opened with the introduction of an issue that had already emerged in other Western countries on the wave of '68 anti-authoritarian movements, especially in the United States. It was precisely on the basis of the American experience that in January 1970 a studious and militant Radical, who well knew the overseas scene,
organised first a report on women's liberation in the new American left, and next a political working seminar. (31)
The action and the information proposed in those meetings fell on very fertile ground, both within the Radical circles as well as more generally within the new sensibility that had been generated by the anti-authoritarian struggles. At this point a group took over that organised into the "Movimento di Liberazione della Donna" ("Women's Liberation Movement" or MLD, ed.) (32), federatively connected to the PR, that published a manifesto proposing several issues to be fought for based specifically on the situation of women in Italy: "The discrimination, oppression and exploitation of women..." the manifesto declared, "are of a specific nature with respect to other forms of oppression of man on man, and can be found in different factors: economic, psychological and sexual". (33) The objectives for struggle, already from that first declaration of intent, were these: information on methods of contraception, liberalisation and legalisation of abortion, action in the schools and the contesting of the institut
ional myths, socialisation of services and nursery schools, the contesting of family law, action against the male authoritarian relationship. (34)
In February 1971, on the MLD's initiative, the first national assembly on women's liberation was held and, immediately afterwards, the feminist groups, working with the Radical Party in a federative connection, began the work of demolition. In May the MLD proposed a bill for the suppression of the ONMI (Opera Nazionale Maternità Infanzia - the Catholic aid service to mothers and infants, ed.) and the liberalisation of abortion, given that this issue had been selected by the movement as "an action to unhinge the situation of social subjection of women". (35)
Meanwhile in the country various feminist groups had been developing, united among themselves by a common sentiment of collective liberation movement, but divided on the relationship with political forces, on the participation of men in the women's battle and on the need or not to face battles of the changing of laws.
The MLD was at the head of concrete action for abortion. In May 1971 it began the first collection of signatures for a law of popular initiative. Next it made a public self-accusation for an abortion performed on one of its members, Matilde Maciocia, (36) and went on to a collective action signed by many hundreds of women along the lines of civil disobedience already tried in France and Germany. (37) And it contributed to agitating public opinion to provoke legislative action taken by Socialist members of Parliament in June 1971 in the Senate and in October in the Chamber. (38)
During 1972 women's liberation, and abortion in particular, were themes that no longer only regarded small groups but were being always more amply treated in the press as well. And the MLD Radicals, with their action, were the attack brigade in the ranks of a movement where they nevertheless were not alone but which was constantly swelling due to the roots it had sunk in the collective conscience. The feminists sent twenty thousand signatures for abortion to the Pope, causing a reaction in the pontiff himself and in the Catholic spheres, (39) and argued with the moderate position of the PCI that blocked the participation of the UDI (Union of Italian Women, ed.) in the feminist front for abortion. (40)
At the beginning of '73, while the Conference of Italian Bishops was considering the question by repeating their firm opposition to the legalisation of abortion, Loris Fortuna, as he had already done with divorce, presented a bill on February 11, 1973, partially abolishing penalties for abortion, on which the MLD looked favorably, declaring it "a useful point of departure for the battle for liberalisation". (41) The question had become one of national interest, once again primarily through the impulse given it by the Radicals.
3. ANTI-MILITARISM AND CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTORS
Already from the beginning of its formation as an autonomous political idea at the beginning of the decade, the Radical left had put out an analytic thesis of advanced European industrial societies, together with those of the Third World and the so-called Socialist countries, in which the military structures were identified as instruments of authoritarian governments. In this too was shown the distance from the European and occidental orientation of the lay spheres taken by the new Radicals, who nevertheless did not adhere to the neutralist positions of the Socialist tradition with their sometimes national or nationalistic character. The accent on a policy of active pacifism connected the Radicals - as had already been concretely realised with their adhesion to the International Confederation for Peace and Disarmament at the beginning of the 1960's - to the Western minorities which had at first joined the ranks against nuclear weapons and later in favor of unilateral disarmament (of individual countries
) and of resistance to military structures.
Ever after the motions of the congress of refoundation the anti-militarist issue was constantly insisted upon and from time to time specific battles were indicated: in 1967 the conversion of military structures into civilian ones and the resignation from NATO; in 1968 the PR committed itself to an anti-militarist movement "capable of determining the detachment of the masses from the military institutions and the national and nationalistic myths by means of the fight against military organisations, their international connections, their expansionist logic and their prevalence over civilian needs and institutions...". (42) In 1969, besides the anti-militarist march, the Radicals took on the task of publishing a white book on the militarisation of Sardinia. In 1970, a connection of the PR's anti-militarist activity with international organisations and the quick approval of the law on conscientious objectors containing provisions for the detraction of the expenses for civilian service from the ministry of d
efence budget. In 1971, the holding of the anti-militarist congress was confirmed. In 1972, they named as objectives the transformation of the law on conscientious objectors itself as well as referendums to abrogate the military codes and the laws establishing military courts and prisons. (43)
For the realisation of these constantly reiterated issues there corresponded both a direct action along the lines of that employed for other issues, as well as action for getting the laws changed. We have already recalled how in Milan in 1966-67 the small Radical group had found connections and consenses with neo-anarchist, Beat and Situationist circles in united anti-militarist type demonstrations. Giorgio Cavalli, Aligi Taschera and Andrea Valcarenghi were arrested during the military parade of June 2, 1967 for having distributed iconoclastic leaflets about the army. And a few months later the Radicals' Rome headquarters organised the political action for conscientious objectors against the latter.
In Summer of 1967 the anti-militarist marches from Milan to Vicenza were inaugurated which were to be repeated up until 1972 in the same region. The march offered, for the first time in Italy, a concrete occasion for the meeting of anti-military minds coming from different backgrounds and ideologies. This itinerant initiative kept together for about ten days several thousand militants with debates, the exchange of experiences, internal discussions and propaganda in the cities and countryside where the colorful cortege passed.
With these marches, Italian pacifism, which already had a small tradition of the Christian-evangelical type as well as the lay-Gandhian type connected to the activities of Aldo Capitini (44), came out of its small-group condition to become a candidate as a political rallying point. The marches were organised by the Radicals with the participation of anarchists, pacifists of various orientations, extra-parliamentarians of Marxist or even of Marxist-Leninist persuasion, generic militants of the left, and through all the years that they were held they could constitute occasions for action and collective reflection at the same time.
When in 1972 the annual marched changed route and was held along the Trieste - Aviano road in Friuli, touching places held sacred by nationalist rhetoric and irredentist myths, the right wing ex-military MSI Deputies Birindelli and De Lorenzo, vainly attempted to have the march banned. The choice of that site was dictated by the same reasons as in the case of the demonstration several years before at the Altar of the Fatherland and others repeatedly held on the June 2 and November 4 anniversaries (45), which was the desire to reacquire the right of the democratic and
pacifist left to pay homage to the war victims and not leave the monopoly on such celebrations to the heirs of those responsible for the past.
Various factors fed the Radical anti-military position: the aversion to the values of the military and of authoritarian militarism as opposed to non-violence and libertarianism; the analysis of the weight carried by groups heading the army and the secret services (as in the decade 1964-1974) even in a country like Italy with little military tradition and little weight given to military structures; the fight against the structural level of armaments of industrialised countries, the aversion to the Jacobinism existing also on the left with faith in the myth of force and the "people in arms" as a presumed democratic element; and finally, the evaluation of the "new military concept" as one of the important growing factors in contemporary society.
This attitude was very polemical towards the moderate groups as well as the international set-up based on blocks and against the leftist forces that founded their policies on respect of the existing situation. This was shown on the occasion of the international action in Eastern Europe in September 1968 when four Radicals, Marco Pannella, Marcello Baraghini, Antonio Azzolini and Silvana Leonardi, protested against the Soviet invasion of Prague in August by going to Sofia, the Bulgarian capital, to distribute peacefully leaflets condemning the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact troops - an invasion which reinforced NATO and reduced the possibilities of ending the war in Vietnam. The slogan "End the occupation of Czechoslovakia" well summed up the pacifism of the Western dissent that had promoted the demonstration in Eastern Europe through the auspices of the international conscientious objectors' organisation "War Resisters' International" (WRI) with its headquarters in London.
The meaning of the new military ideologies current in the West was pointed out at the 1st Anti-Militarist Congress held in Milan in November 1969: "The new military concept", stated the opening report, "is that of dissolving the army and militarising civilian society... Inasmuch as the only hypothesis of war historically feasible today is that of a war that splits the fictitious idea of national states as prevailing over other common interests and sentiments, it organises the citizen not as an Italian or a Frenchman, but as a producer and a member of the order. He will not strike because he has to defend the order, because there is a war on or an emergency... In a moment of crisis the new military concept is preparing the ideological tools and the political and institutional solutions for the contradictions of a kind of capitalism that finds itself losing the traditional imperialistic aspects on which it based much of its historical capacity to dominate as a class. Its techniques of exploitation must co
me up to date if it is to survive and develop. Its worst contradictions must be resolved and this sometimes necessitates the use of violence within the ranks of the classes". (46)
If the Radicals have in general been nourished throughout a decade by their active anti-militarism and the tendency to draw up specific analyses of the influence of the military structures and ideologies, the question of conscientious objectors and how to set it up as a political act of resistance and not merely as a moral attitude, represented the specific reform that the PR posed as a limited, concrete and realisable goal to act on.
Up until 1968 the number of conscientious objectors in Italy was small, (47) coming mostly from the Jehova's Witnesses and with only a few individual exceptions mostly from Christian sects. Thanks to the actions of the Radicals and the general climate in the country, after '68 the number of objectors grew, motivated by political reasons (48) so that action towards having their rights recognised became a Radical commitment.
In promoting the "Lega per il riconoscimento della obiezione di coscienza" (League For The Recognition of Conscientious Objectors, ed.) during 1969 in Rome, (49) the Radicals participated with other groups, and during the constituent assembly on February 1, 1970, they had inserted - not without resistance from the majority - the principle that the league would support the "attribution to civilian service the sums of the government budget already attributed to the Ministry of Defence because of the diminished expenses of said ministry and the institutional and functional needs of civilian service". (50)
In supporting this position, which considered conscientious objectors to be a political and not merely private factor, and which at the same time tended to broaden its meaning in contesting military structures, the Radicals found themselves in conflict with two other anti-militarist positions. On the one hand there were the moderate and legalistic pacifists, and on the other there was the attitude of the extra-parliamentarians, in particular Lotta Continua (Continuous Struggle, ed.) which ever since its formation in 1969 had devoted particular attention to the military question with the creation of the "Proletari in divisa" group (Proletarians in Uniform, ed.). These groups, while not rejecting a priori the case of the conscientious objectors per se as a form of struggle, believed that the fight to grant them recognition was inadequate "above all because subjectively and objectively limited to things outside the military barracks" and because it remained "an exemplary and demonstrative action rather tha
n a political one". (51)
While the objections of groups with political motivations were multiplying because they were organised, several bills were presented (52) which however were neither discussed nor approved. For this reason Radical action was directed for two more years at accelerating the pace of the reform and trying to stop the passage of any law judged to be a bad one. This action made use of various tools: agitating public opinion (hunger strikes and appeals); pressure on Parliament (thousands of postcards sent to the Chamber's Defence Commission); direct action and the pressing demands that came from the cases and trials of the objectors themselves (demonstration in the case of the trial of the objectors Mario Pizzola and Matteo Soccio in the Turin military court in September 1971. (53) In March 1972, Roberto Cicciomessere, ex secretary of the PR, followed up his characteristic anti-militarist activity by turning himself in to the military authorities along with ten or so other objectors. He then continued his figh
t from inside the Peschiera prison by publicly denouncing the conditions and treatment given to the objectors according to the norms of the military courts and prisons. (54)
On September 20 a public demonstration was held in Rome in Piazza Navona with the Socialists Riccardo Lombardi and Loris Fortuna, the Communist Umberto Terracini, Lotta Continua and Manifesto participating with the Radicals with the common aim - the political moment being what it was - of liberating the "military political prisoners" (that is the objectors) and the "political prisoners" (that is Valpreda and the other anarchists accused of the Piazza Fontana massacre) from jail. On the following October first a collective hunger strike began which was continued indefinitely after October 18 by Pannella and by the Catholic Radical Alberto Gardin until the President of the Chamber Sandro Pertini committed himself to quickly putting the vote on conscientious objectors on the agenda. Under such pressure the bill was passed on December 15.
In January 1973, with the rights of conscientious objectors now on the law books, there was formed the "Lega degli obiettori di coscienza" (The Conscientious Objectors League, or LOC, ed.) federated with the PR (55) to confront specific issues deriving from the new juridical situation and to continue anti-militarist agitation inside and outside the army.
THE RADICALS AND THE POLITICAL SYSTEM FROM THE ELECTIONS OF'68 TO THOSE OF '72
After having formally refounded the party, the new Radicals moved, as we have seen, on initiatives regarding single issues: divorce, public assistance, judicial battles, sexuality, the Concordat, anti-militarism, and women's liberation. What was the basic pattern that held together such different issues, and what the relationship with the traditional left?
From the columns of "L'Astrolabio" in Spring 1967 a commentator gave voice to some of the questions that widely accompanied the Radicals' actions: "Why should it be a party? Is the energy that the young leaders of the PR employ with such admirable generosity really being used in the most productive way? Or would it not be better used in other forms, in other parties?". (56)
In reality all the actions of the PR in those years were aimed at building a political position on the basis of single battles and a relationship with the historical left measured exclusively on their adhesion to the ideas of those battles. The obstinate claim to an autonomous existence was to be explained by a method that could seem paradoxical in the Italian political scene and so appeared foreign to the culture and practice of the leaders of the left. In the meanwhile the desire for unity on the left was continually expressed and confirmed. Issues to be fought for were set in motion, which, proposed by the Radicals as unitarian and qualifying, were considered eccentric if not polemical by a great part of the larger factions of the Communist and Socialist spheres.
Also on the electoral level the presentation of an independent Radical course was continually reiterated and confirmed. In 1968, in argument with the Communists over divorce and far from a PSU all in the government, the majority of the party opted for the blank ballot with the justification that the new forces of the left had no chance of an effective presence in the electoral contest, for the exclusive use by the "traditional parties represented in Parliament of the instruments for information and moulding public opinion - and first of all the RAI-TV". (57) This was the first appearance of the polemics over the use of the mass media and their central role in the democratic game for the creation of political consensus and dissent. In reality the abstention line was in that moment the recognition of politico-organisational state of a group that made far more politics than its combined energies would have permitted. The Milanese group, which did not agree with the blank ballot policy, presented itself in
the Milan-Pavia election. The results it obtained only verified how great was the distance between political intentions and the communication of the Radical political message and the fragility of the Radical-small group positions.
In the 1970 regional elections the abstention line was interrupted and a recommendation given to vote PSI on the basis of negotiations between the two parties in which the PSI took on three commitments towards the Radicals: a quick vote in Parliament on divorce, discussion of a law on conscientious objectors rights, and support for the campaign to collect signatures for the referendum against the Concordat. (59) It was not by accident that the abstention line in the elections was interrupted for the sake of attaining specific goals and not for general agreements; and it caused a rapprochement of the Radicals with a PSI that, having emerged from the schism with the Mario Tanassi followers (PSDI), was experiencing at that moment the contradictions of a party that was bound to a government alliance formula and yet capable of producing within itself dynamic actions and positions in conflict with the center-left alliance with the Christian Democrats. One could read in the newspaper editorial dedicated to the
agreement, that: "The truth is that in this society the PSI is not yet a party holding power, even though it is - for now - in the government." (60) The Radicals'
hope in a transformation of the Socialists was based precisely on this readiness of the PSI; or a part of it, to agree to the Radical proposals: "One does not strengthen and extol concrete goals of human and civil liberation without thus practising - here and now - authentic Socialism... We do not claim, however, that the PSI will continue and accentuate the positive process of which the agreements with us Radicals certainly more an indication than a solid and determining factor. But we do claim that this agreement. is precious and unifying... for Italy's fight for democracy". (61)
After the passing of the divorce law and the difficulties encountered in making rapid headway with the anti-Concordat action, there was also a rapid dwindling away of the idea that the area for collaboration with the PSI could become constantly larger. The situation of the country between 1970 and 1971 worsened for what regarded the strategy of tension and the consequent shift to the right of the political balance. The entire divorce action had taken the political leaders by surprise, including those of the left, and it was not easy for the Radicals to successfully repeat the combined action of political guerrilla tactics and pressure on the established political groups. The effects of the strategy that underlay the fights on single issues began to become clear and thus to provoke reactions. The basic Radical thesis came to the surface: "An alternative to the DC, renewal and unification of the left by means of a Radical policy to develop civil rights, an uncompromising fight between the <> a
nd the <>. This is the only democratic and parliamentary road that is correct and passable". (62) Their polemics against the top levels of the laity and the left also contributed to isolating the Radicals: "Who today, in 1971, can say that we are isolated and detached from the feelings of the masses and that it is not rather the Berlinguers (PCI) and the De Martinos (PSI), the Malagodis (PLI) and La Malfas (PRI) who are?" (63)
The party was paying for the presumption of wanting to dictate the issues for struggle to the left despite being only a small minority. That "lay party" which the Radicals saw in the country as a tendency passing within and through the various groups ended by having its vital space reduced when pressured from the outside. In the concluding document to the annual congress of November 1971 it was affirmed that: "The Radical Party appears by now - not by its own choice - like the only idea constituting and representing that "lay party" in the country which, if it is certainly composed of masses of independent citizens and substantial minorities of traditional parties and also of extra-parliamentary movements, does not however find any other adequate structure". (64)
When the national elections were called in May 1972 with the first early dissolution of Parliament in the history of the Republic, the PR found itself, along with the rest of the traditional and the new left, under the accelerating pressure from the moderates and the reactionaries. Feeling this, and in disagreement with the defensive attitudes of the historical leftist parties, the Radicals tried to throw a bridge for the elections over to those groups that were the heirs of the '68 movements and intended to give them a politico-parliamentarian outlet as well.
In the name of the party, a group of Radical leaders (Mellini, Pannella, Sircana, Spadaccia, Teodori) (65) proposed to "Manifesto", which was preparing the symbolic candidacy of Valpreda (the anarchist first accused of the Piazza Fontana massacre, ed.), making up combined new-left lists open to all those who wanted to conduct a battle against the regime. They justified the meaning of this proposal thus: "First, in these days there has been created a situation in which even before the verbose differences of line... it is necessary to distinguish between who is part of the political swamp and who is not; between who causes, accepts or is subject to the filth which by now is inextricably connected to public life and who maintains a fundamental cleanliness; between who is part of the "regime", first and more importantly than part of the "system", and who is not. Secondly, the awareness of having to work for the construction of a new left without any prejudices whatsoever in regard to differing traditions
- on the contrary, the need of opposing ideological purity and a closed theoretical approach... with the attempt to shape a new fighting movement fertilised by experiences and experiments". (66)
Il Manifesto refused to consider the Radical proposal, justifying its attitude by the lack of anti-capitalist and anti-reformist platform and with the absence of common basic experiences and positions between the two groups. Lacking this possibility of conducting a broad, unified campaign in the elections against the very way in which the elections were convened and held, the Radicals recommended not voting, thus passing from the blank ballot position of 1958 to active abstention (with a public burning of the electoral certificates in Rome) as a rejection of the way those particular elections were held. The worsening of the opposition at election time was meant to indicate "an act of resistance to the regime, of civil disobedience to laws that do not correspond to the democratic conscience, of non-cooperation with an illegal government". (67)
The movements that had wanted jealously to conserve their own purity - Il Manifesto and MPL (Popular Workers'Movement) as well as the PSIUP - met with an insuccess that wasted about a million votes altogether. This, together with the losses sustained by the PSI, brought about a shift to the right in the elections as well, as the result of the counteroffensive against the '68 and '69 movements and which the left as a whole had not managed to oppose effectively.
5. THE DIFFICULTIES OF THE PARTY AT THE CONGRESS OF THE RELAUNCHING (TURIN 1972)
It is not possible to understand the difficulties of the party, internally and externally, the internal discussions, the nature of the choices and the political decisions, especially in the five years after the refoundation; but afterwards too in the context of its extremely scanty politico-organisational structure and the voluntary fiction of such a restricted group calling itself a "party" - a fiction, nevertheless, almost always capable of anticipating and generating subsequent conquests of greater capacity for political initiatives.
From 1967 until the Summer of 1972 the PR had between 150 and 200 registered members (68) throughout the country. It is true that this cannot be considered the only measure of the Radicals' combined energies since the sympathisers and the so-called "non-registered supporters" must be considered - that is, those who contributed financially to the party or to single activities. And, above all, one must take into account the citizens and the militants who participated in specific actions, and, during the period under consideration, two particular circles - the pro-divorce elements that rallied around the LID to a larger degree, and to a smaller degree the anti-militarist group - who guaranteed a relatively massive presence. But having said this much, the fact remains that the Radical group had all the earmarks of a restricted group, homogeneous in its personal extraction and collective history too. And that high degree of internal cohesion partly made up for the objectively scanty quantity without elimina
ting however the constant disproportion with respect to the tasks of an independent force that the group took on itself. It may be of interest to know, as a quantitative point of reference, that the entire yearly budget of the party in those years never exceeded ten million lire.
In this light one must also consider the dissent that flowered in 1968-69 between the Milanese group and the Roman-National one. In fact, the party at that period was composed of a harmonious Roman group of about a hundred people and of the Milanese group which was the only other functioning on an independent political capacity and had aggregated between 1965 and 1969 around Lorenzo Strik Lievers and Carlo Oliva, to whom was added in 1967 Felice Accame at the same time as the return to activity of the older Radical Luca Boneschi. (69) The Milanese participating in the national elections of 1968 worked for a greater explication of total political line that would be made more visible and more organic in respect to the importance, factual and theoretical, of each single battle.
Carlo Oliva, who had sustained the Milanese group for four years, resigning from party activity in February 1969, writing: "I believe in the fact that a single <> is not capable of defining any political strategy at all and that this can only be found in the organic relationship... of several struggles with different aims. Therefore the time has come for choosing the struggles and their connections... it is an essential and preliminary factor to organising the struggles themselves. The objective facts are not lacking:... the ability to mobilise... the possibility of acting... but the most important factor nevertheless remains (subjective and voluntary in nature) of defining the most global strategy possible... It seems to me that it has been decided... to do the opposite: to take the fights that are objectively feasible as a point of departure, build groups around them, and coordinate the results at a later date". (70) Thus, in fact, at the November 1969 Congress in Milan, the entire Milanese group, with the one exception of Strik Lievers, disengaged itself in substance from the party, considering it to be inadequate to the tasks of the moment after having described in the debate the PR's approach of moving from fight to fight as a kind of "dragonfly theory". (71) The three Milanese leaders, not by accident, turned their attention to other extra-parliamentary activities: Oliva joined Lotta Continua, Accame the MPL while Boneschi worked as legal advisor to Capanna's student movement.
That single initiatives could appear to be insufficient in themselves to give substance to a political group was a widespread idea not only in the Milanese group which had made it explicit. But the contradiction of the Radical's entire existence did not reside so much in their putting an absolute value on the individual battles, as in the objective impossibility of their operating in any other way due to the fact that the generally accepted characteristic of the whole group was their pragmatic way of always connecting pronouncements with the possibility of action - that is, to match their objectives with their possibilities of dealing with them. Their slender energies, as has been said, conditioned the policies themselves of the party.
It is not to be marvelled at that the knotty problem of the Radicals' subjective insufficiency in relation to the objective political needs came to the fore just after the divorce victory. This was truly an exception in the course of Italian politics, and the Radicals were well aware that the predominating classes, after that accident, would be much more on the alert than previously for the guerrilla politics that could create a crisis for the big balances in the country. As long as the Radicals had worked on the margins of the political scene bearing witness to a position and asserting it, a few tens or hundreds of very determined people had been effective. But in the new post divorce context and the simultaneous accentuation of a regime situation (confirmed in the 1972 election) the disproportion became constantly wider between the subjective will of the Radicals to operate at the center of the political conflict and their chances of doing so effectively. On the eve of the 1971 congress, Marco Pannell
a gave voice to this awareness, writing: "This proof of our existence and our strength that we are giving or which we have given, cannot be continued eternally, or even for years or many months without new support and new concrete party memberships. Otherwise we cannot keep on idealistically, politically, economically or organisationally". (72)
The Rome Congress of November 1971 opened precisely on this dilemma of the party's possibility of making a qualitative leap on the politico-organisational level or else dissolving. This last possibility, that Pannella advanced and that the retiring secretary Roberto Cicciomessere made his own, was not however shared by a great part of the participants, and in particular by Mellini, Teodori, and Bandinelli on the basis of data emerging in the country and thus on the function of the Radicals that was moving in the direction of objective external political possibilities for the party and not only for its subjective projects. (73)
Furthermore in the same period signs of a political broadening and subdividing of the group's activities came from several directions including from inside the party itself. In Autumn 1971 the first number of "La Prova Radicale" (The Radical Test, ed.) was published. This was a quarterly with Massimo Teodori as managing editor (74) and was the first attempt to print a party organ of a politico-editorial kind that would serve not only to inform the public, but to mould it and give it food for thought that went beyond the Radical press's preceding efforts marked as they had been by the urgent need for action on a day to day basis. The review was published for three years, acquired some ten thousand readers, and the type of material it published contributed to overcoming the party's growth crisis and to install the new political and organisational dimensions that were realised at the congress of the relaunching in November 1972.
The problem of available energy nevertheless remained the central one for the Radical Party, so that, during 1972, the goal was set of getting one thousand registered members as the minimum number necessary for beginning an effective political battle in a situation where the country was considered to be subjected to a real and true regime. An appeal was made to sympathisers to join the party as well as to the lay militants of the left, who shared an interest in single Radical initiatives, to take a "double membership" and renounce an exclusive view of political commitment. These appeals were accepted, not without a highly dramatic presentation of the goal to be reached considered as a symbol of the necessary leap in quantity - and hence also of quality.
The Turin Congress of November 1972 was thus held in a subjectively and objectively dramatic atmosphere. There was a general awareness that the Radical Party was at the crossroads. The left had received an appeal that demanded an answer to the question of whether or not the survival of the Radical Party as an active group was of any use in the Italian situation. Its militants in particular were asked to take out a Radical membership, thus indicating with a double membership the irreplaceable Radical presence alongside the traditional groups. The hunger strike to the bitter end of Gardin and Pannella, to force putting the conscientious objectors' issue on the agenda in Parliament, was a symbolic act of conflict with the institutions to compel their proper functioning. The goal of increasing tenfold, or almost, what had been the Radicals' membership for a decade, the group had thrown down a challenge to itself: that is, to be able to take on tasks adequate to the external situation, and, even if consider
ed impossible, to be able to achieve them.
In Turin all those challenges were met and won. The Radical Party, refounded in 1967, was relaunched with a flow of new energy: Liberals, Republicans, Socialists and Communists took membership in the Radical Party as well, and set out for the libertarian and militant shores of the new left that had suffered disappointment elsewhere. The group that had presumptuously called itself a party since 1962 began to take on a new aspect. New local realities began to take shape, among which the most important was Milan where a qualified group of Republican left leaders such as Franco Corleone and Mercedes Bresso answered the appeal and set up an active new political center in that town of Lombardy. The old group of new Radical leaders that had kept the party going in all those years (Pannella, Spadaccia, Teodori, Mellini, Bandinelli) began to enlarge, making space for the Milanese, the Turinese, and a few Romans of the new generation (form which had emerged already Roberto Cicciomessere for anti-militarism and Ma
rcello Baraghini for the counter-culture). Youths emerged in other towns such as Giulio Ercolessi of Trieste and Giuseppe Calderisi of Pisa and representatives of other movements like Angelo Pezzana of FUORI (homosexual revolutionary front, ed.) in Turin.
The new political project for the coming years was also set up: the referendum strategy for civil rights, for which the sights were raised towards a complex campaign to mobilise the masses which could be guaranteed by the new political and organisational set up which was noted in the congress's closing document: "In the course of the congress it was shown that in only one month more than six hundred companions coming from all democratic political directions decided to adopt the project of refoundation of the lay party in order to build a libertarian and Socialist society and for a renewed and unified alternative left in Italy. The unity of the more than 1,300 members is deep and rich in the yeast of almost all the alternative groups that our society now contains". (75)
NOTES
1) Beatniks, Provos and Situationists
2) "Fogli di via" are orders the police of any Italian community can give to non-residents they consider undesireable obliging them to return to the place where they have legal residence, usually their birth place.
3) Cf. Andrea Valcarenghi, "Underground: a pugno chiuso!", Arcana, Rome 1975, pp.32-50
4) Carlo Silvestro, "Provos e Beats a Roma nel 1966", in Valcarenghi, cit. p.173.
5) Cf. among the large number of studies, a work written by two Radicals, Carlo Oliva and Aloisio Rendi, "Il movimento studentesco e le sue lotte", Feltrinelli, Milan, 1969.
6) See "Notizie Radicali" no.30, of June 8, 1968.
7) Documents of the Secretary of the PR Gianfranco Spadaccia: "Il partito radicale e il movimento radicale nel paese: una strategia politica per la nuova sinistra", part I, published in "Notizie Radicali" no. 51, mimeographed, October 18, 1968.
8) Ibidem.
9) Ibidem.
10) Ibidem.
11) Ibidem
12) Oliva, Rendi, op. cit. preface, p.8
13) First conference on the theme "La fine dell'unità politica dei cattolici, la socialdemocrazia al potere e le prospettive della sinistra italiana" (relators, the independent Socialist Luigi Anderlini, the director of "Questitalia" Wladimiro Dorigo,
the Communist Achille Occhetto, and the Social Proletarian Franco Boiardi) Rimini, November 25-26, 1967; the second national conference on the theme "Credenti e non credenti per una nuova sinistra", introduced with a report by W. Dorigo, Bologna, February 25 1968; third conference, "Assemblea dei gruppi spontanei di impegno politico-culturale per una nuova sinistra", Rimini, November 1-4, 1968.
14) The Radicals associated themselves through "Notizie Radicali".
15) Among the reports made at Rimini in November 1968, was one by Massimo Teodori on the struggle against the authoritarianism on the State apparatus. Cf. all the material in "I gruppi spontanei e il ruolo politico della contestazione"; Libreria Feltrinelli, Milan, 1969. In particular pp.47-55.
16) "Radicali: bilancio di un congresso", interview with Marco Pannella, in "L'Astrolabio", May 21, 1967. pp.15-16.
17) Part of the congressional debate, with the contributions of De Marchi and Antonini, was published in "Agenzia Radicale", special edition for the "Anti-Clerical Year", no.133, August 1, 1967.
18) "Repressione sessuale e oppressione sociale", conference held at the Teatro Parioli in Rome, February 1968. Cf. an AR special edition, no.145 of January 13, 1968.
19) "Diritti civili", report of C. Oliva and L. Boneschi to the PR Congress, November 1967, mimeographed.
20) Motion approved by the November 1967 Congress, presented by M. Mellini, Maria Ricciardi Ruocco, Gabriella Parca, Claudio Moffa and others; In AR, no.145, January 13, 1968.
21) Distributed leaflet signed Rome Section of the PR, Januaray 1969.
22) Cf. "Notizie Radicali", no.64 of March 21, 1969.
23) Incriminated were: Marco Pannella for having written articles published in "Notizie Radicali"; Giuseppe Loteta for having written the article "Braibante, il demonio in corte di Appello" published in "L'Astrolabio" of March 30, 1969 and Mario Signorino as the person legally responsible for the weekly.
24) All of the documentation regarding that case and the battle around it has been published as follows: << "Affare Braibanti" Dossier-Processo al processo>> with contributions by Marco Pannella, Giuseppe Loteta, Piergiorgio Bellocchio, and Franco Fortini, in "La Prova Radicale", year I, no.2, Winter 1972, pp.35-36.
25) Motion approved by the November 1968 Congress of the PR, then reprinted in "Le lotte dei radicali attraverso i documenti congressuali e lo statuto", published by PR, Rome, 3rd edition, 1976, p.16.
26) Ibidem.
27) Ibidem.
28) Cf. "Il dossier parlamentare sul Concordato", in "La Prova Radicale", year I, no.4, Utumn 1971, pp.192-198, in which are collected the acts (motions, bills, interpellations and interrogations presented in the Chamber and the Senate) that expressed positions of the laity and against the Concordat in Parliament.
29) "Document sent to the Secretary of the PR and all lay members of Parliament", mimeographed, April 1971.
30) The collection of signatures for the anti-concordat referendum together with the other referendums did not reach the necessary minimum of 500,000 in 1973-74.
31) In January 1970, Massimo Teodori gave a talk on American "Women's Lib"; this led to the "Seminario di lavoro politico sulla liberazione della donna" that lasted from February through March. At the end of this the "Movimento di Liberazione della Donna" (MLD) was formed that became the cradle of many other feminist groups born in Rome as offshoots of the MLD.
32) "Il documento per un movimento di Liberazione della donna (Bozza)" was published in "Notizie Radicali" no.92, June 3, 1970, then reprinted in Rosalba Spagnoletti's (ed.) "I movimenti femministi in Italia", Samonà e Savelli, Roma 1971, pp.61-70.
33) Ibidem.
34) Cf. MLD - Partito Radicale, "Contro l'aborto di classe", edited by Maria Adele Teodori, Savelli, Roma, 1975, pp.10-11.
36) "Autodenuncia di Matilde Maciocia", in "La Prova Radicale", year I, no.2, Winter 1972, p.184.
37) In France the "Manifesto of the 343" was made known by "Le Nouvel Observateur" (<>), April 5, 1971.38) The parliamentary bill presented in June 1971 in the Senate by Banfi, Caleffi, Fenoaltea (PS) and the bill presened in the Chamber in October 1971 by Brizioli, Zappa, Ferrari, Bensi, Querci and Zaffanella (PSI). Published in "La Prova Radicale", year I, no.2, Winter 1972, pp.182-193.
39) Cf. Maria Adele Teodori, op. cit. p.14.
40) Ibidem.
41) Ibidem.
42) Final motion of the Vth National Congress of the PR, Milan, November 1968. In "Le lotte radicali attraverso...", op. cit., p.15.
43) All the rest of the final motions of the PR congresses, in "le lotte radicali attraverso...", op. cit.
44) Aldo Capitini, from the start of his anti-Fascist activities, had dedicated many years to his work of research and non-violent pacifist action. At the beginning of the '60s Capitini promoted the first Italian pacifist demonstration, the Perugia-Assisi march (September 24, 1961) and then the Camucia- Cortona one (July 1962). For the general anti-militarist and pacifist scene, Cf. Angiolo Bandinelli, "Anti-militarists: the chronicles of 25 years" in "La Prova Radicale", year I no.1, Autumn 1971, pp.125-166.
45) June 2 and November 4 are respectively the celebration of the founding of the Italian Republic after World War II and the Victory Day relating to the armistice of World War I.
46) Marco Pannella, report to the 1st Anti-Militarist Congress, MIlan, November 4, 1969, mimeographed, then reprinted in detail by A. Bandinelli, cit., p.145.
47) Cf. the documents of the "Lega per l'obiezione di coscienza", reprinted in A. Bandinelli, op. cit., p.145.
48) In 1965 there were the cases of the anarchists Ivo della Savia and Mario Barbani, and the Waldensian Caponetto; in 1967 there was Valcarenghi, in 1968 the Catholic Enzo Belletato, the anti-militarist Piercarlo Racca, and then many others.
49) The conscientious objectors' league was promoted by Senator Luigi Anderlini, the Waldensian Giorgio Peyrot, the inerconfessional group "Movimento Internazaionale di Riconciliazione" (International Movement for Reconciliation, ed.) and by the Radicals.
50) Cf. Bandinelli, cit. pp.148-149
51) Cf. "Proletari in divisa" from "Dall'obiezione di coscienza all'azione politica nell'esercito" in "Quaderni Piacentini" , year IX no.42, November 1970, pp.71-75.
52) The bills that went to the Chamber and the Senate were presented respectively by Anderlini (ind. left) then withdrawn, Francanzani (DC) and Marcora (DC), Albarello (PSIUP). This last one was then approved in December '72.
53) Cf. Bandinelli, cit. pp-150.152
54) Cf. Roberto Cicciomessere, "Diario di ricordi di Pescheria e dintorni", in "La Prova Radicale", year I no.4, Summer 1972, pp.135-136. Cf. also "Il caso Cicciomessere", in "notizie Radicali", mimeographed, no.158 of May 1, 1972.
55) The "Lega degli obiettori di coscienza" (LOC), formed January 21, 1973, had in the presidency: Sen. Antonicelli; the Hon. Servadei; Fr. Ernesto Balducci; Mario Sbaffi of the Evangelical Churches; Marco Pannella; Mauro Mellini; Beppe Marasso; Giuseppe Ramadori; Sandro Canestrini; Gustavo Comba.
56) Luigi Ghersi, "Radicali: una fuga in avanti", in "L'Astrolabio", May 21, 1967. p.14.
57) Motion approved by the administration of the PR March 31, 1968 and published as a mimeographed circular dated April 4, 1968, Radical Party, central headquarters.
58) The list of candidates bearing the "PR Phrygian hat" symbol was presented in the Milan - Pavia constituency of the Chamber and obtained 1,531 votes.
59) Cf. the documents of the agreement in "Notizie Radicali" no.89, May 22, 1970 and no.92, June 3, 1970.
60) M.P., "No al <> lotta" in NR, no.89 and no.92, cit.61) Ibidem.
62) Marco Pannella, "E' ora di decidere con o senza il Partito Radicale", in "Notizie Radicali", mimeographed July 23, 1971, then reprinted in "La Prova Radicale" year I no.1, Autumn 1971, pp. 48-50.
63) Ibidem.
64) "Le lotte radicali attraverso...", op. cit. p.27.
65) The letter sent to "Il Manifesto" was signed by Mellini, Pannella, Sircana, Spadaccia, Teodori, and was followed by a document of the PR administration signed by the same party officers and by Bandelli, the PR secretary. All of the documentation was published in "La Prova Radicale", year I no.3, Spring 1972, pp.64-71.
66) Massimo Teodori, "Per una concentrazione delle nuove sinistre", in "La Prova Radicale" , year I no.3, Spring 1972, p.64
67) Massimo Teodori, "Perchè ci asteniamo", editorial in "La Prova Radicale", year I no.3, Spring 1972, p.23.
68) The data is inferred from the official documents presented to the annual congresses.
69) Luca Boneschi, in his thirties, was part of the Radical nucleus that passed over from the old to the new PR in 1962; the younger Lorenzo Strik Lievers and Carlo Oliva came to the PR around 1964 from the Centro Salvemini, and Felice Accame arrived in 1967 coming from the Situationist groups.
70) Carlo Oliva, "Lettera ai compagni radicali coinvolti nelle vicende della federazione milanese", mimeographed, Milan, February 27, 1969.
71) Cf. Giorgio Manzini, "I radicali: il mestiere di oppositori", in "L'Astrolabio", 44, November 9, 1969, pp.15-16.
72) Marco Pannella, "E'ora di decidere", cit.
73) Cf. Gianfranco Spadaccia, "Radicali con tessera e con partito", in "L'Astrolabio", 22, November 7, 1971, pp.17-18. For the contents of congressional debate, cf. also "Discourse" of Mauro Mellini, Massimo Teodori and Gianfranco Spadaccia, in "La Prova Radicale", year I no.2, Winter 1972, pp.186-190.
74) "La Prova Radicale", political quarterly, began publishing in October 1971 with a general manager (Massimo Teodori) and a panel of managing editors composed of Angiolo Bandindelli, Marcello Baraghini, Alessandro Coletti, Massimo Corsala, Aloisio Rendi, Gianfranco Spadaccia, Giorgio Spadaccia. Afterwards the panel of managing editors changed: Massimo Corsale left the no.2 post to Piero Craveri; Bona Pozzoli took the no.3 post; Graziana Depierre, Mauro Mellini, and Marco Pannella no.4, whereas
Giorgio Spadaccia left. Silvio Pergameno and Franco Sircana also took part.
75) "Le lotte radicali attraverso...", op. cit. p.29
