Red Brigades (Italy)

LORENZO BOSI

The origins of the Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse

in Italian; hereafter BR), which emerged in
October 1970, are to be found in the Collettivo Politico Metropolitano (CPM), formed
in Milan in September 1969 with the support
of various local workers and students committees. Among other left-wing armed groups
operating in Italy since the early 1970s the
BR was the largest, the leading organization in
terms of degree of political violence deployed,
claiming 145 killings, and most long-lived, lasting, despite splitting up into various groups and
wings, until the end of the 1980s. It was strictly
organized into city columns: Milan and Turin
were the first, which were subdivided into
brigades with three- to five-member cells.
Over time the city columns expanded into
Rome, Genoa, Naples, and Venice. Over the
1970s and the 1980s it was estimated as being
composed of over 400 full-time members, plus
an unknown number of supporters.
Italian left-wing political violence originated
out of the increasing fear that a possible coup
detat was just around the corner and from
the conviction that the state was part of a
conspiratory anticommunist strategy of tension, facilitated by the Italian secret service,
parts of the army, and the American CIA.
This influenced the collective decision of some
extraparliamentary left-wing groups to resort
to violence as a weapon of political competition (della Porta 1995). They saw an armed
response as the only way to oppose the total
domination of the Italian working class, which
was seen to have been abandoned by the
Italian Communist Party (PCI), unwilling to
serve any longer in the vanguard of the struggle for the proletariat in its drive to become
a credible democratic force. An opportunity
existed for a champion of revolution to emerge
on the left of the PCI, and the BR identified

themselves completely with this role (Melucci

1981).
Marxist-Leninist in its ideology and organizational structure, the BR aimed to perpetuate
and even radicalize the 1969 labor conflict,
providing armed support to striking workers.
Capitalist society, controlled nationally by the
Christian Democrat (DC) establishment and
globally by American imperialism, was, in its
leaders view (among others, Renato Curcio,
Alberto Franceschini, Mara Cagol, and Mario
Moretti) a monster preparing to demolish the
world, against which the use of force to undermine the status quo was legitimate in order to
bring a communist upheaval led by a revolutionary proletariat. Acts of physical violence
soon followed their bellicose rhetoric. Initially
the groups main activities were fairly low level.
They did not go beyond damaging company
properties, setting fire to numerous automobiles owned by business executives, security
staff, and heads of sections, or the brief kidnapping of industrial managers and right-wing
trade unionists. In those factories where they
were present (Sit Siemens, Alfa Romeo, Magneti Marelli, Pirelli, and FIAT) members of
the BR carried out what they termed counterinformation: the exposure of the hidden
maneuvering of capitalist power.
The development of the BR towards the
adoption of more specifically radical repertoires came about gradually. The new task of
the organization, by the mid 1970s, was that
of attacking and destroying capitalist power
by striking against the heart of the Italian
state, seen as the imperialist collection of
multinational corporations (Stato Imperialista
delle Multinazionali, SIM). Violent action
shifted from the factory to more directly
political objectives, the DC. In 1976 the BR
killing of General Public Prosecutor of Genoa,
Francesco Coco, and two members of his
bodyguard, marked an ominous change in its
tactics. The declining social protest movement

The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements,

Edited by David A. Snow, Donatella della Porta, Bert Klandermans, and Doug McAdam.
2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781405198431.wbespm376

re d br i g a de s ( i taly )

in Italy during the 1960s and early 1970s;

activists everyday conflicts with the police; the
beginning of the historic compromise between
the DC and PCI that caused widespread
indignation in the extraparliamentary Left;
and the competition within this same milieu
with other left-wing armed groups, like the
Front Line and the Fighting Communist Front
(for recruits, financial support, and attention),
were all important factors in the further
radicalization of the BR repertoire (della Porta
1995). The most famous and emblematic
crime of the BR was the kidnapping in 1978
and subsequent murder of Aldo Moro (with
five bodyguards killed), who had twice served
as prime minister and was one of the most
important leaders of the DC.
The sociopolitical conditions of the late
1970s and the new repressive emergency
measures, which constrained organizational
resources and recruitment capacities, brought
a further radicalization of the BR, leading to a
sort of encapsulation from the outside world,
in order to survive, keeping its organizational
integrity, but at the cost of becoming more
and more out of touch with political reality
(della Porta 1995). The increasing brutality of
its actions ended up disgusting not only the
broader public, but also its own constituency.
Public disapproval of the killing of Moro and
other extreme crimes gave the state the opportunity to regain its legitimacy. The trade unions
and the PCI engaging in proactive campaigns
against left-wing underground groups; internal conflict over strategy; state antiterrorist
measures of heavy military repression; and
the onset of penitence or active collaboration
(repentance law of 1980) by a number of

captured militants from early 1980, were all

factors which progressively drove the BR to
its end: a process that took almost a decade
to complete, from the end of the 1970s to
the end of the 1980s. The organization never
announced a complete cessation of its military
activities, but essentially folded due to a lack of
armed activists, given that most of them were
either dead, in prison, or had decided to quit
(Bosi & della Porta forthcoming).
A new group with few links with the BR
performed the last violent attacks, in 1999
killing Massimo DAntona, and in 2002 Marco
Biagi, both labor advisors to the Italian government. This armed group, the BR-Partito
Comunista Combattente, deserves a totally separate analysis, despite its claim to links with the
old organization.
SEE ALSO: Direct action; Marxism and social
movements; Radicalism; Terrorist movements;
Violence and social movements.
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS
Bosi, L., and della Porta, D. (forthcoming) Processes
out of political violence: A comparative historical
sociology of Italian left-wing underground organizations and the Provisional IRA. In Gunning,
J. (ed.), How Does Terrorism End? Routledge,
London.
della Porta, D. (1995) Social Movements, Political
Violence, and the State: A Comparative Analysis of
Italy and Germany. Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge.
Melucci, A. (1981) New movements, terrorism, and
the political system: Reflections on the Italian
case. Socialist Review 56, 97136.