Neue Freie Presse
- Differences Sharpen in the Civil Servants Question
- Anti-French Outrages in Benghazi and Tripoli
- Bomb Attack on the Militia Barracks in St. Peter
On 4 November 1926 the Neue Freie Presse led with an editorial on the deadlocked civil servants question: after several weeks of uninterrupted negotiations, the writer judged, the two sides stood further apart than ever and no way out was yet in sight. A correspondent's telegram reported anti-French violence, describing how a band of Fascists broke into the French consulate in Benghazi and forced the consul to hoist the Italian flag. A second telegram covered a bomb attack on a Fascist militia barracks at St. Peter: the police had found no trace of the attackers, Fascist reinforcements had been brought in from Adelsberg, and senior militia leaders had come to inspect the scene.
Translation
Differences Sharpen in the Civil Servants Question
Once again a bottleneck. Perhaps it will soon be overcome, but the publicist who is compelled to speak of the here and now can only say that, after several weeks of uninterrupted negotiations, the differences today gape wider apart than ever, and for the time being no way out is in sight.
Anti-French Outrages in Benghazi and Tripoli
In Benghazi a band of Fascists forced its way into the French consulate and compelled the French consul to hoist the Italian flag.
Bomb Attack on the Militia Barracks in St. Peter
The police are busily searching for the perpetrators. So far there is no trace of them. Fascist reinforcements have been brought in from Adelsberg, and the most important leaders of the militia have also appeared on the spot to examine the situation.
Context
How the civil servants question had already brought down a government
The 'bottleneck' in the editorial was the latest stage of a crisis that had already changed Austria's government in October. According to the Austrian National Library's blog review of the year 1926, Chancellor Rudolf Ramek resigned in mid-October because federal employees were threatening to strike, and Ignaz Seipel, who had held the office from 1922 to 1924, became chancellor again. The English Wikipedia biography of Ramek dates the resignation to 20 October 1926 and links it to a crisis around the state-owned Postsparkasse, the postal savings bank. The two accounts stress different triggers, but both name Seipel as the successor. The same biography sketches the economic backdrop to the pay dispute: League of Nations supervision of Austrian finances had ended, yet the depression continued and unemployment was rising. When the Neue Freie Presse writer reported that weeks of uninterrupted talks had widened the gap, the Seipel government had been in office for only about two weeks.
What lay behind the anti-French outbreaks of early November 1926
The Benghazi incident belonged to a series of anti-French acts that autumn. Writing nine days after this issue, the London Spectator described very unpleasant incidents over the previous fortnight in the border towns, in which the French flag had been insulted and French officials assaulted. The Spectator traced them to an Italian grievance: Italy felt that France, through mistaken tolerance or even negligence, harboured too many Italian refugees who were plotting against their own country. A second quarrel ran the other way. The weekly reported that French newspapers alleged that Colonel Ricciotti Garibaldi, who was said to be connected with a Spanish plot hatched in France and who professed to be an anti-Fascist, was really an agent of the Italian police. Each side thus accused the other of bad faith, and the Spectator judged relations so strained that great restraint would be needed. The Neue Freie Presse telegram shows the same hostility reaching Benghazi, where Fascists made a French consul raise the Italian flag. The Spectator's explanations are contemporary commentary rather than settled findings.
How the Bologna attempt on Mussolini sharpened Fascist reprisals
This issue appeared four days after a shot was fired at Mussolini as he rode through Bologna on 31 October 1926, an episode that ended in the lynching of a 15-year-old boy, Anteo Zamboni. It came after earlier attempts that year, including Violet Gibson's pistol shot in April, which grazed Mussolini's nose, and the bomb that the anarchist marble worker Gino Lucetti threw at his car in September. The Bologna affair remains doubtful: the terrorism specialist J. Bowyer Bell wrote that the boy was likely innocent and that the affair was either a put-up job or a plot among Fascists. The regime nonetheless turned it to account, and the attempt resulted in laws creating Mussolini's secret police. The Spectator, which said the new laws had been provoked by the repeated attempts on Mussolini's life, also noted decrees under which a foreigner spreading false or exaggerated news that injured the prestige of the State faced severe punishment. In that atmosphere, Fascist anger at France as a refuge for exiles plausibly fed the attacks on French consulates reported in early November.
What resistance to Fascist rule existed in Italy's newly acquired borderlands in 1926
The St. Peter report says only that the police were searching for the attackers without any trace and that Fascist reinforcements and senior militia leaders had arrived. The wider setting is well documented. After the First World War Italy acquired former Austro-Hungarian territories known at the time as the Julian March, and the Fascist government pursued the Italianization of their Slovene and Croat inhabitants: in 1923 Slovene and Croatian were banned in all public offices, and in 1925 in the courts. According to the English Wikipedia article on the later organisation TIGR, organised anti-Fascist resistance in the Julian March began in the mid-1920s in the easternmost districts around Postojna and Ilirska Bistrica, on the border with Yugoslavia, where local Slovene activists in contact with the Yugoslav nationalist organisation Orjuna launched the first attacks on Italian military and police personnel. These were still mostly individual actions without an organisational background. TIGR itself was active only from 1927, so the November 1926 bombing predates it and cannot be attributed to TIGR on this evidence.
Original
Verschärfung der Gegensätze in der Beamtenfrage.
Wiederum ein Engpaß. Vielleicht ist er bald überwunden, aber der Publizist, der gezwungen ist, von jetzt und heute zu sprechen, kann nur sagen, nach mehreren Wochen ununterbrochener Verhandlungen klaffen heute die Gegensätze weiter auseinander als jemals und vorläufig zeigt sich kein Ausweg.
Franzosenfeindliche Ausschreitungen in Benghasi und Tripolis.
In Benghasi ist eine Bande von Fascisten in das französische Konsulat eingedrungen und hat den französischen Konsul gezwungen, die italienische Flagge zu hissen.
Bombenattentat auf die Milizkaserne in St. Peter.
Die Polizei ist eifrig auf der Suche nach den Tätern. Bisher fehlt von ihnen jede Spur. Fascistische Verstärkungen sind aus Adelsberg herangezogen worden, auch die bedeutendsten Führer der Miliz sind an Ort und Stelle erschienen, um die Lage zu prüfen.