Prager Tagblatt
- Death, Prison, Internment.
- Italy in Chains.
- Ricciotti Garibaldi, Mussolini's Secret Agent.
On 6 November 1926 the Prager Tagblatt carried a Rome report on what Mussolini's cabinet had decided the day before. According to the report, all passports issued so far would be void from 9 November, anyone who tried to leave Italy without a proper passport, or helped someone do so, faced severe penalties, and there was an obligation to shoot at people leaving with unauthorized passports. An unsigned editorial compared the mood in Italy to Goethe's Egmont and to Dutch towns under the Duke of Alba. It argued that the foolish Bologna attempt on Mussolini had come in very handy for Fascism. A third item dismissed Colonel Macià and his 132 Catalan conspirators, arrested by French police at the Spanish border, as muddled idealists and adventurers who had more money than weapons. Its headline named Ricciotti Garibaldi as Mussolini's secret agent.
Translation
Death, Prison, Internment.
Rome, November 5. This morning's Council of Ministers resolved on measures whose scope is as great as it is unusual. It is enough to list them: 1. Review of all permits granted for travel abroad, and cancellation of all passports already issued, effective November 9, with the exception of those whose holders are currently abroad. 2. Establishment of severe penalties for all those who attempt to leave the country without a proper passport or who assist an attempt to leave the country. There is an obligation to shoot at persons who seek to leave the country with unauthorized passports.
Italy in Chains.
When one looks at the long list of penal threats that the Italian government holds ready for so-called political offenses, the mood that blows icily toward one from Goethe's "Egmont" comes alive; from now on the Italian citizen will probably creep about with feelings like those the inhabitants of the Dutch cities occupied by the Duke of Alba may have harbored. The foolish assassination attempt in Bologna, reprehensible like every attack on a human life, has, as one can see, come very conveniently for Fascism.
Ricciotti Garibaldi, Mussolini's Secret Agent.
Colonel Macia and his 132 conspirators, who fell into the hands of the French police while trying to cross the Spanish border, have not the slightest thing about them of dangerous criminals against the state. They are a group of muddled idealists and sensation-hungry adventurers who had got it into their heads to tear the province of Catalonia away from Spain and who believed they could reap fame, laurels and perhaps also material advantages in a romantic adventure. It is telling that they were better equipped with money than with weapons. The police seized from them considerable sums in French and Spanish notes, as well as whole suitcases of banknotes that were to be put into circulation in the new republic.
Context
How the Bologna shooting led to the November measures
On 31 October 1926 someone fired a shot at Mussolini as he rode through Bologna in an open car, and the shooting led to the lynching of a 15-year-old boy, Anteo Zamboni. The terrorism scholar J. Bowyer Bell later wrote that the boy was probably innocent and that the affair was either a put-up job or a plot among Fascists. The attempt was followed by laws that created Mussolini's secret police. A 2025 ItaliaOggi review of Mimmo Franzinelli's book on the attempts argues that the 1926 attacks were used to push through the special laws and to dismantle what little was left of Italy's free institutions: the independent press was outlawed, and the parties and Freemasonry were dissolved. The Prague editorial said at the time that the Bologna attempt had come very conveniently for Fascism, the same reading later historians would give. The cancelled passports and the duty to shoot at people leaving the country are details of the decree as the paper reported them from Rome on 5 November.
Four attempts on Mussolini in less than a year
The Bologna shooting was the fourth attempt on Mussolini's life in under twelve months. That history lies behind the editorial's 'long list' of penalties for political offenses. The former Socialist deputy Tito Zaniboni was arrested on 4 November 1925 for attempting to assassinate Mussolini, and historians believe the government itself engineered the plot as a pretext to consolidate power. Laws enacted in late 1925 then made it possible to suppress any opposition political organization. On 7 April 1926 Violet Gibson fired a pistol at Mussolini, and on 11 September 1926 the anarchist marble worker Gino Lucetti threw a bomb at him. The measures the paper reported on 6 November came at the end of this sequence: both the Zaniboni affair and the Bologna shooting were followed by new repressive legislation.
What became of Macià's Prats de Molló plot
Francesc Macià, leader of Estat Català and a former colonel in the Spanish army, planned to send two columns over the border from French Catalonia, columns that were to occupy Olot and proclaim a Catalan Republic. The money the Prague paper found so telling came from fund-raising: the movement had issued the Pau Claris loan, worth nearly nine million pesetas. The invasion failed completely because the French police knew about it in advance, apparently through a leak. The Wikipedia account counts 111 detainees, fewer than the 132 conspirators in the paper's report, and says Macià himself was arrested on the 4th at the country house he was using. Within days most of those arrested were expelled from France, and about twenty alleged ringleaders were taken to Paris to stand trial. According to El Nacional, France wanted no trouble with the authoritarian governments in Madrid and Rome, so it ended the affair with a quick trial in January 1927 and a symbolic sentence. The same article says the episode made Macià a legendary figure who went on to win a landslide in the first Republican elections. The paper's scorn for 'muddled idealists and adventurers' resembles a historian's description, quoted by Wikipedia, of the Italian recruits as a minority of idealists and a majority of adventurers and marginal characters.
Ricciotti Garibaldi Jr as a police informant
Later accounts strongly support the headline's charge. Ricciotti Garibaldi Jr, grandson of the hero of Italian unification, was one of the Italian exiles in Paris whom Macià approached. The Wikipedia account describes him as no real anti-fascist but a double agent working for Mussolini's political police, through whom Primo de Rivera learned of the planned invasion. Even so, he was tried in Paris as one of two Italian defendants. A 2017 El Nacional article also says a relative of Garibaldi betrayed the operation to Mussolini, although it calls him a nephew rather than a grandson. The family name mattered: according to the same Wikipedia account, many of the Italian exiles in the operation had fought in the Garibaldine Legion during the First World War. His father Ricciotti, who died in 1924, had worked to embody and revive the red-shirt tradition of volunteer fighting, and a study in Storia e Futuro examines how Mussolini tried to neutralize the Garibaldi myth and its libertarian spirit. That family tradition helps explain why the exiles were willing to trust a Garibaldi.
Original
Tod, Gefängnis, Internierung.
Rom, 5. November. Der Ministerrat von heute vormittag hat Maßnahmen von ebenso großer wie ungewöhnlicher Tragweite beschlossen. Es genügt, sie aufzuzählen: 1. Revision aller für Reisen ins Ausland gegebenen Genehmigungen und Annullierung aller bereits ausgegebenen Pässe ab 9. November, mit Ausnahme derjenigen, deren Besitzer sich augenblicklich im Auslande befinden. 2. Festlegung schwerer Strafen für alle diejenigen, die versuchen, das Land ohne ordentlichen Paß zu verlassen oder die den Versuch, das Land zu verlassen, unterstützen. Es besteht die Verpflichtung, auf solche Personen zu schießen, die das Land mit nicht bewilligten Pässen zu verlassen trachten.
Italien in Fesseln.
Betrachtet man die lange Liste der Strafdrohungen, welche die italienische Regierung für sogenannte politische Vergehen bereithält, so wird die Stimmung lebendig, die einem aus Goethes " Egmont " eisig entgegenweht; der italienische Staatsbürger wird wohl von nun an mit ähnlichen Gefühlen einherschleichen, wie sie die Bewohner der von Herzog Alba besetzten niederländischen Städte hegen mochten. Das törichte Attentat von Bologna, verwerflich wie jeder Anschlag auf ein Menschenleben, ist, wie man sieht, dem Fascismus sehr gelegen gekommen.
Ricciotti Garibaldi Geheimagent Mussolinis.
Der Oberst Macia und seine 132 Verschwörer, die bei dem Versuche, die spanische Grenze zu überschreiten, in die Hände der französischen Polizei gefallen sind, haben nicht das geringste von gefährlichen Staatsverbrechern an sich. Eine Gruppe verworrener Idealisten und sensationslüsterner Abenteurer, die es sich in den Kopf gesetzt hatten, die Provinz Katalonien von Spanien loszureißen und die in einem romantischen Abenteuer Ruhm, Lorbeeren und vielleicht auch materielle Vorteile ernten zu können glaubten. Es ist bezeichnend, daß sie mit Geld besser ausgerüstet waren als mit Waffen. Die Polizei hat bei ihnen stattliche Beträge in französischen und spanischen Noten und ganze Koffer von Geldscheinen, die in der neuen Republik in Umlauf gesetzt werden sollten, beschlagnahmt.