Prager Tagblatt
- Traitor and Agent Provocateur.
- The Consolidation of the “Regime” in Italy.
- The Termination of the Treaty.
The Prager Tagblatt of 7 November 1926 carried a sharp report declaring it already established that Ricciotti Garibaldi, grandson of the Italian national hero, had sold fellow anti-fascist exiles to Mussolini's police and had been paid to stage conspiracies against the Fascist regime on French soil. A second item explained how Italy's new protection law would banish active opponents of the regime, either to a fixed district they could not leave or to one of four penal islands, with the prefect deciding irrevocably. A partly legible commentary on the termination of a trade treaty argued that Austria, too, was in a bind, because its new protective tariff could not take effect until trade relations with Czechoslovakia were definitively settled.
Translation
Traitor and Agent Provocateur.
It is already established that Ricciotti Garibaldi not only betrayed and sold, for money, to Mussolini's henchmen his compatriots who had fled Italy from the misdeeds of Fascism, but that, beyond this, the tasks for which he was paid by the Italian police consisted in staging, as an agent provocateur on French soil, conspiracies against the political regime in Italy.
The Consolidation of the “Regime” in Italy.
With regard to the forced banishment, provided for in the protection law, of persons who actively oppose the regime, it is announced that, depending on the gravity of the case, this may mean keeping the guilty party in a particular region of Italy which he may not leave, or else taking him to one of the four banishment islands, Pantelleria, Trimiti, Ustica and Lipari. The duration and the manner of the banishment are decided, in agreement with the police, exclusively by the prefect, whose decisions are irrevocable.
The Termination of the Treaty.
… was delay. Admittedly, Austria too finds itself in a predicament. The new customs tariff, which producers demanded in view of the unfavourable economic situation in that state and which was indeed pushed through, can only be put into force once commercial relations with Czechoslovakia have been definitively settled.
Context
Garibaldi and the Prats de Molló plot
The Prague report concerns an affair that broke in early November 1926 on the Franco-Spanish border. The Catalan separatist leader Francesc Macià had planned an armed incursion into Catalonia from French territory via Prats de Molló and had brought Italian exiles in Paris into the scheme. Later historical accounts describe one of them, Ricciotti Garibaldi, grandson of the hero of Italian unification, as no genuine anti-fascist but a double agent serving Mussolini's political police, and state that this is how Primo de Rivera learned of the planned invasion. French police arrested most participants near the border, 111 people in all, and seized Macià himself on 4 November in the country house he occupied. Contemporary figures diverged: Time magazine wrote that Garibaldi had put 400 armed men disguised as mountaineers into the field and presented him almost as the leader. The same Time report of 15 November added, more cautiously, that documents found by the French police appeared to brand Garibaldi as an agent provocateur employed by the Italian secret service. The Prager Tagblatt's assertion that this was "already established" was therefore stronger than that wording. The matter ultimately went before a Paris court, where the trial of 18 accused, including the two Italians Arturo Rizzoli and Ricciotti Garibaldi, began on 21 January 1927.
Paris press anger and a split in the Garibaldi family
The exposure strained relations between France and Fascist Italy. According to Time, the semi-official Paris journals accused Mussolini of having deliberately caused his agents to egg on a plot that might have embroiled France and Spain had it gone further. The French press saw the same hand in attacks that week by Fascist mobs on the French consulates at Tripoli and Benghazi, and Time noted a lingering impression that Fascists were being roused against France as the republican ground on which plots against Fascism were hatched. Within the exile community the blow was personal: Ricciotti's brother Sante Garibaldi, a fervent anti-fascist, confronted him in Paris. As Time reported it, Ricciotti admitted taking Fascist gold but insisted he had not betrayed the cause of liberty. The Prague paper's headline calling him a traitor matched the exiles' anger rather than his own defence.
How the Fascist confino worked
The forced banishment described in the article was the confino. In 1926 the Fascist government enacted a new public security law that substantially remodelled confinement. Under it, people deemed subversive could be ordered to live in a designated place under surveillance for one to five years, a term that could be extended, and mere suspicion of anti-fascist activity sufficed even when no crime had been committed. The article's statement that the prefect's decisions were irrevocable fits this procedure without trial. The main places of confinement were hard-to-reach islands, including Pantelleria, Ustica and Favignana off Sicily. The communist intellectual Antonio Gramsci, arrested in 1926, spent 44 days on Ustica and used that short time to organise history and literature courses for fellow detainees. By one estimate more than 12,000 people were subjected to the measure between 1926 and 1943.
Austria's 1926 tariff and Prague's delaying tactics
The commentary's dispute had a long prehistory. According to the historian Tomáš Moric, Austria's foreign-trade statistics for 1923, once published, showed a marked deficit with Czechoslovakia, after which Austrian industrial and agricultural circles pressed for stronger customs protection, culminating in the tariff amendment of 1926. Prague answered the pressure to revise mutual trade terms with postponement tactics, seeking to keep the one-sided advantage it had enjoyed while Austria maintained the old Austro-Hungarian tariff, merely multiplied by a coefficient, until 1924. A second supplementary convention was reached in summer 1925, but negotiations on a general revision of trade relations did not begin until early 1927. The commentary's mention of delay and its point that Austria could not apply its new tariff until relations with Czechoslovakia were settled describe exactly this deadlock.
Original
Verräter und Agent provocateur.
Schon jetzt steht fest, daß Ricciotti Garibaldi nicht nur seine vor den Untaten des Fascismus aus Italien geflüchteten Landsleute für Geld an die Schergen Mussolinis verraten und verkauft hat, sondern daß darüber hinaus die Aufgaben, für die er von der italienischen Polizei bezahlt worden ist, darin bestanden haben, auf französischem Boden als Agent provocateur Verschwörungen gegen das politische Regime in Italien zu inszenieren.
Die Befestigung des „Regimes“ in Italien.
Zu der im Schutzgesetz vorgesehenen Zwangsverschickung solcher Personen, die aktiv gegen das Regime auftreten, wird mitgeteilt, daß es sich dabei je nach der Schwere des Falles darum handeln kann, den Schuldigen in einer bestimmten Gegend Italiens zu halten, die er nicht verlassen darf oder aber nach einer der vier Verschickungsinseln Pantelleria, Trimiti, Ustica und Lipari zu bringen. Ueber die Dauer und die Art der Verschickung entscheidet in Uebereinstimmung mit der Polizei ausschließlich der Präfekt, dessen Beschlüsse unwiderruflich sind.
Die Vertragskündigung.
Verzögerung war. Allerdings befindet sich auch Oesterreich in einer Zwangslage. Der neue Zolltarif, der mit Rücksicht auf die ungünstige Wirtschaftskonjunktur in diesem Staate von der Produktion gefordert und auch durchgesetzt wurde, kann erst in Kraft gesetzt werden, wenn die handelspolitischen Beziehungen mit der Tschechoslowakei eine definitive Regelung erfahren haben.