Le Figaro's front page of 2 November 1926 opened with Henri Vonoven's editorial on the Radical party's congress in Bordeaux. There the Radicals said they were ready to work with any left-wing party willing to unite with them "sincerely", and the headline called the result a cartel of last resort. Abel Hermant used his signed column to mock Soviet justice, claiming that a son could stop his mother being his mother simply by saying so before a magistrate. In the Échos, an item signed "Le Masque de Fer" reported under a headline about sobering-up rooms that alcoholism had spread alarmingly in the USSR since the state vodka monopoly was set up.
The front page placed a Viennese editorial on the Social Democrats' party congress beside telegrams from Italy. The editorial, "Dictatorship or Democracy!", accused the congress of camouflage. It said speakers had muted their talk of force and subjugation, and it seized on Max Adler's statement that Otto Bauer's guiding ideas treated democracy as merely a means of class rule that could also be a path of violence. From Bologna the paper reported that an unknown man fired a revolver at Mussolini as he drove to the station, tearing his uniform coat. According to the report, Mussolini was unhurt and the crowd lynched the attacker. A short item added that the Italian government had banned the opposition press until further notice.
The Algiers daily L'Écho d'Alger opened this front page with a sarcastic editorial, signed in the paper's own name, about Governor-General Maurice Viollette's trip into the Oran region. The paper treated the journey as a restless outing paid for by the colony and suggested its real purpose was electoral, since it fell just before the Financial Delegations met and as the senatorial campaign began. A Paris dispatch described the Socialist (S.F.I.O.) National Council choosing between two motions on Senate lists. Blum and Bracke wanted all-socialist lists. Renaudel and Marquet wanted to allow joint left-wing lists while ruling out any pact with the Communists. A Lille dispatch described Marie Lefebvre, who had been sentenced to death, waking calmly in her cell next to that of the poisoner Mélanie Beccart.
The Journal de Genève of 2 November 1926 opened with an editorial signed W. M. on the American midterm elections held that very day. It explained that the whole House of Representatives and a third of the Senate were up for renewal, and that the vote let the country give its opinion on the presidential administration. A report signed O. Td. described how, after detailed studies and a conference of technical experts, representatives of the cantons and administrations concerned met in Lausanne on 28 October to decide on measures against the overflows of the Saint-Barthélémy torrent. The Paris correspondent announced that leading statisticians, among them Gini of Padua and Zahn of Bavaria, would meet at the Palais-Royal on 3 and 4 November at the invitation of the Institute of Intellectual Co-operation to advise on "intellectual statistics".
In this partial reading, Politika's front page of 2 November 1926 carried an interview in which the shipowner Frano Petrinović firmly denied rumors that he would take a political post or enter political life at all. He pointed to his business commitments and his own temperament, and he charged that Yugoslav politics had turned into personal feuds and mutual intrigue in which the individual counted for more than the state. A second, badly damaged editorial column headed 'For the Serbian Army' recalled a 1915 scene at the Serbian Supreme Command, where someone arrived with a document. The document reportedly told the quartermaster about British and other Allied arrangements at Brindisi and mentioned a million and a half tons of food and other supplies for the army.
Power from Nore to Eastern Norway as early as next autumn!
The political plague.
The Argus lottery.
Aftenposten's page of 2 November 1926 led with an upbeat report from the state's Nore hydropower works in Numedal. The large tunnel carrying water from Tunhovdfjorden toward the power station had been fully blasted through, as long as the Gravehals tunnel but with a 40-square-metre cross-section, and the headline promised power for Eastern Norway by the following autumn. An editorial titled “The political plague” mocked the reasoning that blamed a Conservative government for the first case of a disease simply because it had occurred on its watch. A short notice thanked a carriage and body works for giving Fiat spring gaiters to the paper's Argus lottery.
This front page of the Leidsch Dagblad set local church life beside music criticism and a new technology. It reported that Dr. J. Riemens, a Dutch Reformed minister in Leiden, had opened a three-lecture series in the Hooglandsche Kerk on Roman Catholic hierarchy and the Protestant conception of the church, with the evening opened by prayer. A review of a Residentie-Orkest concert faulted the "Salzburg master" for tuning the viola a semitone higher and writing its part in D, calling this scordatura a bad and unmusical habit of his time. The paper also announced that radio by telephone had started in The Hague the day before: the municipal telephone service had agreements with Hilversum, Daventry and Paris, and 900 subscribers were waiting to be connected.
ANTEO ZAMBONI, THE ATTACKER, WAS AN ACTIVE FASCIST
Calvin Coolidge went to the capital to cast his vote
This reading of Crítica's front page for 2 November 1926 covers three cabled reports. From Santiago, the paper reported that bakers had declared an indefinite strike, joining shoe and leather workers who were protesting against compulsory insurance, and warned that bread would be on sale only until noon. From Italy, it printed details about Anteo Zamboni, the youth named as Mussolini's attacker. It gave his age as 16 and said he belonged to the young fascists but had not attended their meetings for more than a year, and it added that his father had once moved in anarchist circles. From Washington, it reported that President Calvin Coolidge had left by special train for his home town of Northampton to vote and planned to return to the capital the same day.
Il Piccolo's front page of 2 November 1926 was given over to the aftermath of the shot fired at Mussolini in Bologna. The party's secretary general, addressing Blackshirts, denounced four years of 'stupid clemency' toward the regime's enemies and demanded the death penalty not only for the attacker but for those who had driven him to act, a speech the paper printed with its bursts of delirious applause. A second report named the culprit as a young Bolognese and described the arrest of his household: his mother, his older brother Vico, who worked in the father's print shop, and a 40-year-old sister-in-law, Virginia, with carabinieri guarding the house. A telegram from Mussolini declared that the crime did not dim the day's glory and sent the bullet-pierced Mauritian sash to be kept among the relics of Bolognese Fascism.