Justice and Liberty

Justice and Liberty 

(Giustizia e Liberta), an antifascist movement that arose in 1929 among bourgeois and petit bourgeois circles of the Italian emigres in France. Its most prominent figures abroad were C. Rosselli, E. Lussu, A. Tarchiani, and A. Cianca, while E. Rossi and R. Bauer were its leaders in Italy. The ideas of P. Gobetti exerted the principal influence on the political and social aims of the movement. The basic demands of the program, which was worked out in 1931, were the establishment of a republic, the transfer of key positions in industry to public control, administrative reform and provincial autonomy, and separation of church and state. In the struggle against fascism, the leaders of the movement collaborated with the Communist Party on a number of occasions (for example, during the antifascist war in Spain in 1936-39). After the occupation of most of France by the fascist German troops (1940), the movement disintegrated because it had neither a strong organization nor a mass base. The Party of Action later grew out of the movement; it took part in the war of national liberation of the Italian people (1943-45).

G. S. FILATOV