Maurice Bignami - Gli uomini eguali

Torquato Bignami was born in Bologna on 10th June, 1910, the only son of Enrico and Elvira Passiuti. He attended primary school and, after graduating, started work. In time he became a lathe operator. He joined the Communist Party at the age of sixteen, in 1926. When he emigrated to Paris, five years later, in 1931, he came in contact with party's Foreign Centre and carried out several missions as a messenger between France and Italy. At the beginning of 1932, he was sent to Bologna to reorganise the Communist Youth Federation, of which he was to be secretary. Arrested in November of the same year, he was sentenced to ten years' prison by the Special Court, a sentence that was later waived. For ten years, between 1933 and 1943, he continued as a militant in the ranks of the Communist Party in Bologna and was arrested several times. In 1936, he was sentenced to two years' probation. That year, he married Vittoria Ferriani. He was arrested during the demonstrations following the 25th of July, 1943, and convicted to two years and four months imprisonment. He left jail on September 8th and immediately went into hiding, militating in the GAP, first in the region around Bologna, then around Modena. In the spring of 1944, the Communist Party sent him to the Modena Apennines. Over the years, he reached the following partisan levels: for a short time, as general political commissary of the Centro Emilia Armed Corps, replacing Osvaldo Poppi (Davide), temporarily absent; political commissary of the Carlo Scarabelli IV Division; after the battle of Montefiorino, political commissary of the Antonio Ferrari Brigade; political commissary of the Brigadase Este Group, a partisan detachment deployed to free Bologna; general political commissary and general vice-commander of the Modena Division, the only Italian partisan group to fight alongside the Allies on the front line. After the war, accused of ordering the murder of a local director of the MSI, he was forced to flee, first to Paris and then to Czechoslovakia. Absolved in 1950, he emigrated to France, in the region of Paris.
His only son, Maurice, was born in 1951. In 1964, he went back to Bologna, but for four years, due to his past errors, both political and legal, he got nothing but occasional jobs. In 1968, he was contracted indefinitely by Bologna City Council workshop. Then, after a few years, he entered the workforce after a trade union conflict. After his return to Italy, he no longer felt fully in agreement with the Communist Party and it was only in 1974 when he was recognised by the ANPI, the National Association of Partisans of the Communist Faith, for the positions he had occupied in the Resistance. In March, 1977, Bologna had three days of fierce confrontations between demonstrators and police forces after the murder of a student. His son Maurice was arrested a few days later. In September of that year, during the so-called "Congress against Repression", organized in Bologna by the extreme left, then disappointed with the Communist Party's political line, he publicly renounced the membership he had maintained continuously for fifty-one years. In 1980, he was arrested for having rented a house where his son, a member of Prima Linea, had assisted a wounded comrade and, at the age of seventy, he was sentenced to six years' prison for subversive association and association with an armed band. The reappearance of a cancer, which had given him trouble a few years previously, and thanks to a petition also involving some of Bologna's political and cultural personalities, he was allowed to spend the rest of his sentence first working on prison leave and then under semi-liberty. He finally got parole due to his wife's seriously failing health. He was widowed in 1992 and died in summer, 2000, a few days after his ninetieth birthday.