Maurice Bignami - Gli uomini eguali

Maurice Bignami was born in Neuilly sur Seine, France, on March 9th, 1951. The only son of Torquato, a militant communist refugee from beyond the Alps, along with his wife Vittoria Ferriani, after being accused of what was known as "partisan crime", he spent his childhood in Courbevoie, in the first of Paris' suburban extensions. "It was there where Céline was born, and that gives some idea of what a cheerful place it was". In the summer of 1964, the family returned to Italy and settled in Bologna. "For me, Bologna became the city of the Sun and the Moon. It was so real and passionate, so free and happy!" Speaking in pidgin Italian (“I knew about three words in total, like pizza, mama and signorita. It was the movies that saved me. I spent the whole summer of 1964 in the cinema. Then I began to read frantically. Luckily, paperbacks arrived in Italy around that time"), he began self-schooling, and took exams as a free student for primary and secondary school qualifications. A member of the Communist Youth Federation, he frequented the "Marxist Centre" from 1966 onwards, the crucible that was to give Bologna all the extra-parliamentary groups. The following year, during a demonstration against the Vietnam war, some riots broke out opposite the John Hopkins University and a number of students were arrested. At the age of sixteen, he was one of those caught and arrested by the Police. "When they asked me who the leader was, I answered cryptically, "Luigi Longo". In the interrogation before me, a girl had bitten the commissary's finger. It was bleeding and he was complaining from time to time, sucking it between his teeth. Fuming, but crippled, he smacked me and sent me home to my mother. The next day, the newspaper L'Unità came out with a great front-page photo. A kid with a Beatles-style haircut was crouching down while policemen hit him over the head with truncheons". As of 1970, he was a full-time militant in Potere Operaio (Workers’ Power). As a Bolognese and leading national member, in spring and summer of 1972 he was sent to Turin to take charge of the organisation's political work. Alongside his public work, he also continued from the outset with his clandestine, illegal activities. In autumn, 1972, he started working as a geometrician in the Technical Office of Bologna City Council, and remained there until September, 1978. At that time he was romantically involved with Bárbara Azzaroni, another Potere Operaio militant, later to be murdered during an armed confrontation in Turin in February, 1979. He studied at the Political Sciences Faculty in the University of Bologna, where he passed a number of exams, though never graduated due to his political commitments. He drafted a final thesis on revolutionary trade unionism in the United States. He left Potere Operaio in 1974 and took an active part in drawing up the Autonomia Operaria (Workers’ Independence) project. In 1976, he was editor of the publication Rosso and director of the organisation named after it. In March, 1977, when Bologna was in turmoil with three days of student rioting after a youth was murdered by the Police, he led the confrontations. "In that situation, I used all the ammo that I had built up over years of keeping obstinately quiet. Like an ant, I suddenly became a cicada with locust tendencies". He was arrested a few days later in the Milan-based quarters of Toni Negri, historical leader of Potere Operaio and of Autonomia, and spent seven months in prison. "I spent that time in San Giovanni in Monte, stuck in exactly the same hole where my father had suffered the bedbugs forty-five years before. It was 1977 and I'd been recently arrested with a package of blank documentation and the proofs of the Rosso newspaper in my pocket, which was inciting the Bolognese semi-revolution." In 1978, he joined Prima Linea. Forced into hiding, in September of the same year he returned to Turin. In 1979, he was one of the organisation's three national directors. " (…) I dived head-first into a tragic, desperate struggle, which, by that irony of life that we can't get away from, was compared by a few miserable bastards to wretched fate of the kids in Salo. And, in their way, in spite of all the ill-intentioned disloyalty, there was also some truth in it, as the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I spent the worst years of the armed struggle in Prima Linea, sharing all the turmoil and cruelty, the hope and disappointment, and also the ties of love and of brotherly loyalty. Nothing breathes life into courage, and its sister, insolence, like the dying embers of a mistaken cause". In autumn, 1980, then convinced that the armed conflict was a lost cause, he left Prima Linea. He could have left Italy but, like other comrades who chose to do the same, he remained. "We were all trapped in a kind of love tryst. In prison, most of us couldn't even accept the idea of a cease-fire while other comrades were risking their lives. Outside, the minority couldn't lay down their guns with all their comrades behind bars." In February, 1981, wounded during an armed confrontation in Turin, he was arrested and started off down a pathway that was to lead him to a number of special prisons. In 1982, he married Mariateresa Conti, who he had two children with. Along with other members of Prima Linea, in autumn of that year, during a long trial in which a large number of militants were accused in Florencia, he started an internal debate that was to finish in spring the following year, during another trial, this time in Turin. Together with Sergio Segio, another organisation member, he publicly announced the disbanding of Prima Linea and the creation of a movement for political separation, which, in a few years, outlining a collective pathway of reflection and returning to the rules of democracy, was to end the armed conflict in Italy as a mass movement. A few weeks afterwards, he was attacked in Nuoro prison by a group of terrorists. "At that time, I had become an enemy of the faith held by the last few souls and loyal supporters. There was no convincing them, those poor devils, that we had dared to give up. Huddled around dirty tables in taverns, they wanted to be left in that chaos. We considered them fanatics". From that moment on, accepting his penal, human and political responsibilities, he openly reconstructed the history of Prima Linea and, in more general terms, the background of the non-terrorist revolutionary movement. As a national member and thanks to his explicitly-assumed responsibility, he was condemned for nearly all the crimes attributed to the organization. "Apart from reconstructing the reasons, the dynamics and the facts, we had to face the casualties and the many victims that we had caused over the years of anger. You can't bring an end to fifteen years of violent subversion, half of which was armed combat, with mere political reflection, no matter how much you've suffered and analysed. On the other hand, it was also necessary to prevent some mindless copycat from taking over an acronym, a memory, a forgotten deposit, and start acting like the last of the Mohicans". Together with Sergio D'Elia, who a few years later was to found "Nessuno Tocchi Caino" (May No One Touch Cain), the association against the death penalty around the world, he continued his analysis, subject to fierce criticisms, of the premises that had led to armed conflict. By involving a large number of representatives from all political parties, scholars and religious figures, he contributed to organising a series of conferences and interviews in prison. These debates created a link between prison, civil society and a party system that led to the drafting and subsequent approval of the Gozzini Act on measures other than arrest. In 1987, that debate was to contribute to the drafting and passing of the Disbandment Act, which allowed the great majority of political prisoners to make a clean break with their subversive past and rejoin society. In 1986, he took part by proxy in the national congress of the Radical Party. On that occasion, he had Marco Pannella read a document by Sergio D'Elia and by himself, stressing their full adhesion to the values of liberal democracy. He set up a meeting with some representative dissidents from the Soviet Union, publicising a declaration provocatively entitled “Us and You, Exiles of Communism”. He took part in a number of hunger strikes, such as the ones organised by the Radical Party, among others, for the Soviet government to authorise Russian Jews’ emigration to Israel. He recorded a spot for the television channel Canale 56 where he encouraged the last terrorists to give up a now-pointless confrontation. By making public a document declaring his definitive abandonment of any communist involvement, provocatively entitled "The Nobility of Abjuration", he garnered more than a few criticisms from left-wing figures. "And when I rejected the basic principles and the ignoble way out of simple self-criticism, that indecent way of thinking that saves the general system at the expense of personal excrescence, I was also hailed with furious attacks from those who rise up with revolutionary violence only when it breaks out in far-off continents or in an imaginary future". In 1987, benefiting from the Gozzini’s political disbandment act and from a generalised amnesty, he was sentenced to twenty years' detention. Thanks to Monsignor Di Liegro, who he had met at a conference and who was a friend since then, as of 1989 he began to collaborate - firstly on prison-leave work, then in semi-liberty and finally under the auspices of the social services - with the Diocesan Caritas organisation in Rome. He wrote some stories and two scripts, still unpublished. As an extreme provocation and to accelerate the peace process, together with Marcello De Angelis, now director of the magazine Area and young member of Terza Posizione at the end of the seventies, he ran a far-right-wing newspaper for a month. "I didn't agree with anything it said. I didn't even like the name of that newspaper, but to give a sign of peace I had to find an association with someone situated at the other end of the spectrum. Also, in matters of ideas, you have to be excessively liberal, and more so with strange ones. Idiocies must first be straightened out and then killed. It was also funny to see that in many questions, the far right and the far left were incredibly similar". That operation didn't cause the desired effect, but gave the extremists more reasons to continue attacking him. "Depending on the moment, I was the hated fundamentalist Catholic, the cruel liberal, the shameful Americanophile and - oh, horror! - the friend of Zionists, a definition so fuzzy it needs no further description. My affairs were ruinous for all, whether right or left". He got an Arts Degree in the field of archaeology from La Sapienza University in Rome, with a thesis on domestication and the passage to an economy based on food production in central Sahara. Along with Sergio Segio, he was proud to have been the first to give up the armed fight, but the last of Prima Linea's members to get out of prison.