L'ITINERARIO POLITICO DI FERNANDO SCHIAVETTI (Dal partito repubblicano al partito d'azione)

Till now Fernando Schiavetti has not drawn the interest of scholars of contemporary history just as he should have well deserved. Actually, he has filled a role as protagonist during the various phases of the Italian history, as political secretary of the Italian Republican Party and as editor of the « Voce repubblicana » in the dramatic years of the first post-war period, till Fascism, and later as a leading exponent of antifascist political exile in France and in Switzerland during the long period of his exile. Besides as a political leader and organizer, Schiavetti distinguished himself also as a protagonist of the cultural and ideological debate in the laic-socialist sphere. The originality of his position lies in the attempt to join the presuppositions of the republican and socialist traditional programmes, also in the light of the critical valuations by Rosselli and by « Giustizia e Libertà », to propound a new model of society and of State conforming to the principles of the participation of the citizens to the political life, in a social context of economic equality. The Mazzinian thought and Marxism, accepted in their components of greater actuality, form the support for the elaboration of a non-dogmatic and peculiar « socialist-republican » conception. The essay reconstructs the most important stages of Schiavetti's political evolution, from his beginning in Pisa as a student of the « Scuola Normale », to the interventionist choice, to the struggle against Fascism, through the experience of the « Aventino » till the exile when, denouncing the limits of the « Concentrazione » and stressing the risks of unions ideologically heterogeneous to the aims of the antifascist revolution, he chooses to withdraw and to found, in 1935, his own group, the ARS. In the conclusive part of the essay the motives are analyzed of his option for « Giustizia e Libertà » in 1937, and successively for the « Partito d'Azione ».