TURATI, FILIPPO. – Politician, founder of the Italian Socialist Party, born at Canzo (Como) on 27 November 1857, died in exile in Paris on 30 March 1932.
He made his debut in 1883 with several pamphlets of a political and social character and, together with Anna Kuliscioff, a Russian nihilist who had subsequently accepted Marxist doctrines, collaborated on the social journal Cuore e critica, which in 1891 changed its title to Critica sociale, and assumed its direction. In 1892 he founded the Italian Socialist Party in Genoa with Claudio Treves (v.), and in 1896 was elected deputy in one of the constituencies of Milan. Tried and condemned for the riots of 1898 and released from prison in 1899 (from that period date the Lettere alla madre, from the Pallanza prison: Nuova antologia, 81 [1926], pp. 105–20, 219–40), he gave the party, in which he always held a prominent position, a reformist tendency. He opposed the Libyan War (1911–12) and Italy’s intervention in the First World War of 1914–1915. Nevertheless, at Reggio Emilia, at the party congress, faced with Mussolini, then a fiery revolutionary, he and Treves assumed the leadership of the forces that subsequently became the reformist party.
After the war he failed to keep the party within the lines of its programme (cf. Rifare l’Italia, [of 1920], Rome 1944). With a minority he gave rise to the Partito socialista unitario (Congress of Rome, 1923), and infused the Marxist principles with sentimentality derived from the tradition of Lombard democracy, without deciding, in practical terms, either on collaboration with the liberal-democratic government or on openly revolutionary action. Only with the advent of Fascism to power did he, together with the minority, propose the acceptance of governmental responsibilities in defence of constitutional liberties. But it was too late; and he fled into exile in Paris. Alongside his journalistic activity stood his activity as an orator. Some speeches were reissued after the fall of Fascism, such as the two in which he commemorated Giacomo Matteotti (Milan 1945, Cremona 1945). His religious ideas likewise show a tempering of Marxist materialism by a vague religious sentimentalism (cf. the preface to M. Bakunin’s book, Dio e lo Stato, Rome 1946).