TURATI, FILIPPO. - Political figure, founder of the Italian Socialist Party, b. at Canzo (Como) on 27 Nov. 1857, d. in exile at Paris on 30 March 1932.
He began his public career in 1883 with several pamphlets of a political-social character, and with Anna Kuliscieff, a Russian nihilist who later accepted Marxist doctrine, he collaborated on the journal *Cuore e Critica*, which in 1891 changed its title to *Critica Sociale* and of which he assumed the editorship. In 1892 he founded the Italian Socialist Party with Claudio Treves (q.v.) at Genoa, and in 1896 was elected deputy for one of the Milan constituencies. Tried and sentenced for his part in the 1898 disturbances, he was released in 1899 (of this period are the *Letters to his Mother*, written from the prison at Pallanza: *Nuova Antologia*, 81 [1926], pp. 105-20, 219-40). He impressed upon the party, in which he always occupied a prominent position, a reformist tendency. He opposed the Libyan War (1911-12) and Italy’s intervention in the First World War (1914-1915). However, at the party congress at Reggio Emilia, in the presence of Mussolini, then a fiery revolutionary, he and Treves took the lead of the forces which later became the reformist party.
In the post-war period he failed to keep the party within the lines of his programme (cf. *Rifare l’Italia* [1920], Rome 1944). With a minority he gave rise to the Unitary Socialist Party (Congress of Rome, 1923), and infused Marxist principles with a sentimentalism derived from the tradition of Lombard democracy, without deciding in practice either to collaborate with the liberal-democratic government or to take openly revolutionary action. Only with the advent of Fascism to power did he, with the minority, propose acceptance of governmental responsibilities in defence of constitutional liberties. But it was too late; and he fled into exile at Paris. Alongside his journalistic activity stands his oratorical work. Some of his speeches were reprinted after the fall of Fascism, such as the two in which he commemorated Giacomo Matteotti (Milan 1945, Cremona 1945). Even in his religious ideas he tempered Marxist materialism with a vague religious sentimentalism (cf. the preface to M. Bakunin’s *God and the State*, Rome 1946).