Postwar

These groups and sects replicated in miniature the fissiparous history of the mainstream European Left. In the course of the 1970s each violent act would be followed by assertions of responsibility by hitherto unknown organizations, frequently by sub-sections and breakaways from the original unit. Beyond the terrorists themselves orbited a loose constellation of semi-clandestine movements and journals whose sententious ‘theoretical’ pronouncements offered ideological cover for terrorist tactics. The names of these various groups, cells, networks, journals and movements are beyond parody: in addition to the Red Brigades there were Lotta Continua (‘Ongoing Struggle’), Potere Operaio (‘Workers’ Power’), Prima Linea (‘Front Line’) and Autonomia Operaia (‘Workers’ Autonomy’); Avanguardia Operaia (‘Workers’ Avant-garde’), Nuclei Armati Proletari (‘Armed Proletarian Nuclei’) and Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (‘Revolutionary Armed Nuclei); Formazione Comuniste Combattenti (‘Fighting Communist Formations’), Unione Comunisti Combattenti (‘Fighting Communist Unions’), Potere Proletario Armato (‘Armed Proletarian Power’), and others besides.

If this list suggests in retrospect a desperate desire to inflate the social and revolutionary significance of a few thousand ex-students and their followers at the disaffected edges of the labour movement, the impact of their efforts to bring themselves to public attention should not be underestimated. Curcio, his companion Mara Cagol and their friends may have been living out in fantasy a romanticized fairy tale of revolutionary bandits (derived in large measure from the popularized image of revolutionary guerrillas in Latin America), but the damage they wrought was real enough. Between 1970 and 1981 not a year passed in Italy without murders, mutilations, kidnapping, assaults and sundry acts of public violence. In the course of the decade three politicians, nine magistrates, sixty-five policemen and some three hundred others fell victim to assassination.

In their first years, the Red Brigades and others confined their actions largely to the kidnapping and occasional shooting of factory managers and lesser businessmen: ‘capitalist lackeys’, ‘servi del padrone’ (‘the bosses’ hacks’), reflecting their initial interest in direct democracy on the shop floor. But by the mid-seventies they had progressed to political assassination—at first of right-wing politicians, then policemen, journalists and public prosecutors—in a strategy designed to ‘strip away the mask’ of bourgeois legality, force the state into violent repression and thus polarize public opinion.

Until 1978 the Red Brigades had failed to provoke the desired backlash, despite a rising crescendo of attacks in the course of the previous year. Then, on March 16th 1978, they kidnapped their most prominent victim: Aldo Moro, a leader of the Christian Democrat Party and former Prime Minister and Foreign Minister. Moro was held hostage for two months; backed by the Communists and most of his own party, the Christian Democrat Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti refused even to consider the kidnappers’ demand for the release of ‘political prisoners’ in exchange for Moro’s life. In spite of unanimous condemnation across the Italian political spectrum and appeals from the Pope and the Secretary General of the UN, the terrorists refused to relent. On May 10th Aldo Moro’s body was found in a car brazenly parked on a street in the centre of Rome.

The Moro Affair certainly illustrated the incompetence of the Italian state—the Interior Minister resigned the day after the body was found. After eight years of frantic anti-terrorist legislation and nationwide manhunts, the police had manifestly failed to break the terrorist underground.[206] And the reverberations of the Red Brigades’ success in committing political murder at the very heart of the state and its capital city were significant. It was now clear to everyone that Italy faced a real challenge to its political order: less than two weeks after Moro’s corpse was found, the BR killed the head of the anti-terrorist squad in Genoa; in October 1978 they assassinated the Director General of Penal Affairs in Rome’s Justice Ministry. Two weeks later the Formazione Comuniste Combattenti assassinated a senior public prosecutor.

But the very scale of the terrorists’ challenge to the state now began to extract a price. The Italian Communist Party threw its weight firmly and unambiguously behind the institutions of the Republic, making explicit what was by now clear to almost everyone: namely, that whatever their roots in popular movements of the Sixties, the terrorists of the Seventies had now placed themselves beyond the spectrum of radical politics. They were simple criminals and should be hunted down as such. And so should those who provided them with ideological cover, and perhaps more: in April 1979 the University of Padua lecturer Toni Negri, together with other leaders of Autonomia Operaia, was arrested and charged with plotting armed insurrection against the state.

Negri and his supporters insisted (and continue to insist) that the radical ‘autonomists’, neither clandestine nor armed, should not be confused with illegal secret societies, and that the political decision to go after them represented precisely the retreat from ‘bourgeois order’ that the Red Brigades had prophesied and sought to bring about. But Negri himself had condoned at the University of Padua violent attacks on teachers and administrators falling only just short of terrorist tactics. The slogans of ‘mass illegality’, ‘permanent civil war’ and the need to organize ‘militarily’ against the bourgeois state were widely declaimed in respectable academic circles—including Negri’s own paper Rosso. A year after the kidnapping and murder of Moro, Negri himself wrote in celebration of ‘the annihilation of the adversary’: ‘The pain of my adversary does not affect me: proletarian justice has the productive force of self-affirmation and the faculty of logical conviction’.[207]

The idea that political violence might have the ‘productive force of self-affirmation’ was not unfamiliar in modern Italian history, of course. What Negri was affirming, and what the Red Brigades and their friends were practicing, was no different from the ‘cleansing power of force’ as exalted by Fascists. As in Germany, so in Italy: the far Left’s hatred of the ‘bourgeois state’ had led it back to the ‘proletarian’ violence of the anti-democratic Right. By 1980 both the targets and the methods of terrorist Left and terrorist Right in Italy had become indistinguishable. Indeed, the Red Brigades and their offspring were by no means responsible for all the violence of Italy’s anni di piombo (‘Lead Years’). The conspiratorial, anti-republican Right resurfaced in these years (and perpetrated the single worst crime of the age, the bombing of Bologna’s railway station in August 1980, killing 85 and wounding 200 more); and in the Mezzogiorno the Mafia, too, adopted a more aggressive strategy of terror in its war with magistrates, police and local politicians.

But to the extent that the re-emergence of neo-Fascist terror and the resurgence of Mafia violence illustrated and exacerbated the vulnerability of democratic institutions, their undertakings were—perhaps correctly—interpreted by Left terrorists as a sign of their own success. Both extremes sought to destabilize the state by rendering normal public life intolerably dangerous—with the difference that the far Right could count on some protection and collaboration from the very forces of order they sought to subvert. Shadowy right-wing conspiratorial networks, reaching up into the higher ranks of the police, the banking community and the ruling Christian Democrat Party, authorized the murder of judges, prosecutors and journalists.[208]

That democracy and the rule of law in Italy survived these years is a matter of no small note. From 1977 to 1982 especially, the country was under siege from random acts of extreme violence by far Left, far Right and professional criminals alike—it was in these same years that the Mafia and other criminal networks assassinated police chiefs, politicians, prosecutors, judges and journalists, sometimes with apparent near-impunity. While the more serious threat came from the extreme Right—better organized and much closer to the heart of the state— the ‘Red’ terrorists made the greater impact upon the public imagination. This was in part because, like the Red Army Fraktion in Germany, they traded upon widespread local sympathy for radical ideas. Official Communists correctly saw this appropriation of the revolutionary heritage as the terrorists’ chief asset, as well as a symptom of the risk that they posed for the credibility of the mainstream Left.

Ironically, and unbeknown to local Communists themselves, the Red Brigades and the Red Army Fraktion— like the similarly motivated but ineffectual Cellules communistes combattantes in Belgium, Action Directe in France and other, even smaller operations elsewhere—were financed in part with money supplied by the Soviet secret services. This cash was not part of any coherent strategy: it was paid out, rather, on general principles—the enemies of our enemies, however absurd and insignificant, are still our friends. But in this case the undertaking backfired: the one incontrovertible achievement of left-wing terrorism in Western Europe in these years was the thoroughness with which it expunged any remaining revolutionary illusions from the local body politic.

All the mainstream political organizations of the Left, Communists especially, were constrained to take and maintain their distance from violence of any kind. Partly this was a spontaneous response to the threat terror posed to them as well as others—trade unionists and other representatives of the traditional labor movement were