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By Root 1060 0

to intimidate foremen and managers, and at a major Fiat plant to force female office workers to join a strike, these women being jeered at and kicked or spat upon by four thousand blue-collar colleagues. Strikes spread from large industrial plants to public and tertiary sector workers in the 1969 ‘hot autumn’, while autonomous radical organisation leached from prisoners to their judges: only the Italians could dream up ‘the assault group of stipendiary magistrates’. Even lunatics were not spared the experimentations of a leftist anti-psychiatry that regarded mental illness as a construct of repressive social structures and Enlightened ideas rather than a chemical disorder. This carnival of militancy, still evocative with nostalgic memories for many of the academics writing about it forty years later, took place without regard to the inflationary pressure of higher wages and shorter working hours or the marked tendency of capital to leave the country or to relocate production to cheap labour sources such as Spain.

The Red Brigades were the most notorious terrorists on the antidemocratic left, the most dedicated and enduring of a wide range of armed sectarian grouplets. They were ruthlessly effective, with the worker members bringing a certain craftsmanly pride in performance to their new job. They emerged from the Metropolitan Political Collective founded in Milan on 8 September 1969, gradually establishing a presence in such Milanese factories as Fiat and Pirelli, and in the surrounding working-class districts of Lambrate, Quarto Oggiaro and Giambellino.

The leading lights were the husband-and-wife team Renato Curcio and Margherita Cagol, who as recently as 1965 had exchanged the left-tinged Catholicism of Jacques Maritain for admiration of Chairman Mao’s Red Guards and the Viet Cong. Once a devout Catholic and a talented classical guitar player, Cagol fell under Curcio’s spell after meeting him in Trento’s new sociology department. They participated in various occupations before marrying, in a church wedding, in August 1969. Moving to Milan Cagol hated the ‘barbarity’ of the big city, ‘the true face of the society we live in’. Instead of finding a less stressful domicile - which would be the reaction of most people - Cagol said, ‘we must do anything possible to change this system, because this is the profound meaning of our existence’. This was written in a series of letters to her mother, in which there was incongruous stuff about buying new curtains, which Cagol signed off, ‘bye mum, lots of kisses from your revolutionary’.10 The third founder was Alberto Franceschini, from a Communist clan in Reggio Emilia, whose grandfather was a former partisan and whose resistor father had been an inmate of Auschwitz. After attempting to study at a technical institute in Milan, Franceschini fell in with Curzio and Cagol. In a symbolic link with the wartime past, an elderly former partisan instructed them in using two Second World War-vintage machine guns. The wartime historical dimension also cleared up many moral dilemmas. As Mario Moretti has put it, ‘If a partisan pumped half a kilo of lead into the belly of a German soldier, do you think you could ask him: “Didn’t you think that perhaps Fritz has a wife and five children, raises cows, and doesn’t want anything else?” “Yes, but I am defending my country” he would have replied.’ This conveniently overlooked the fact that the partisan had no lawful way of expressing dissent, while the Red Brigades terrorists chose to ignore a mature democratic system.11

At a key meeting of seventy activists in Chiavari in November 1969, Curcio, Cagol and Franceschini argued that the hour of the Italian revolution was at hand and that it was time for a violent vanguard to bring it into being. On the cover of their review, Sinistra Proletaria, a rifle joined the ubiquitous hammer and sickle. In October 1970 the review announced the formation of the Red Brigades, ‘the first moments of the proletariat’s self-organisation in order to fight the bosses and their henchmen’. In other words, the initial