Giovanni Pirelli

Si l’histoire des intellectuels français a fait l’objet de plusieurs colloques, expositions et livres, la question de l’opposition à la colonisation française en Algérie et à la guerre d’indépendance est moins étudiée. Ce colloque se veut ainsi une synthèse de travaux qui ont déjà été menés mais tient aussi à présenter des avancées sur des figures moins connues.

La notion d’intellectuel sera ici entendue de manière extensive, renvoyant non seulement à des penseurs, des écrivains, mais aussi à des artistes, des journalistes, des magistrats, des avocats, des médecins et des membres de la société civile impliqués (syndicaliste, membres de l’église, commerçants etc.) dans le débat contre le système colonial. La colonisation et la guerre ont impacté de façon durable les sociétés algérienne et française et marqué toute une génération, d’où l’intérêt de revenir sur des figures emblématiques (dont certaines peu connues) de cette période.

Ce colloque adopte un périmètre temporel et géographique large. Il veut replacer la guerre d’Algérie dans le temps long, depuis les débuts de la conquête, mais aussi sur le plan international, en présentant des figures venant du Maghreb ou d’Europe.

Il ne s’agit évidemment pas d’aborder de manière exhaustive l’ensemble des intellectuels qui se sont opposés à la colonisation et à la guerre d’Algérie, mais de souligner la diversité des prises de positions, sans oublier des parcours iconoclastes et les démarches qui ont visé à sortir des oppositions bloc à bloc. Seront ainsi mises en valeur les parcours de grandes figures, notamment Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Raymond Aron, Jean Amrouche, Gisèle Halimi, André Mandouze, François Mauriac, Paul Ricœur ou Germaine Tillion.

Le colloque s’attachera à présenter une synthèse de l’historiographie. Il sera aussi diffusé en direct et en différé et pourra donner lieu à publication.

This paper deals with the history of the production of cables for the transport energy and telecommunications Pirelli. This aspect of the Italian business history is hitherto little studied, although of great importance for the history of the company Pirelli, and more generally, for the contemporary economic history. The cable production was in fact, since the end of the nineteenth century, globally organized. Throughout the XXth century, Pirelli has produced and sold cables in Europe, North and South America and, gradually, the rest of the global market, obtaining capital and skills which were then reinvested in its tires manufacturing activity.

This book provides an innovative cultural history of Italian colonialism and its impact on twentieth-century ideas of empire and anti-colonialism. In October 1935, Mussoliniʼs army attacked Ethiopia, defying the League of Nations and other European imperial powers. The book explores the widespread political and literary responses to the invasion, highlighting how Pan-Africanism drew its sustenance from opposition to Italy’s late empire-building, and reading the work of George Padmore, Claude McKay, and CLR James alongside the feminist and socialist anti-colonial campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst’s broadsheet, New Times and Ethiopia News. Extending into the postwar period, the book examines the fertile connections between anti-colonialism and anti-fascism in Italian literature and art, tracing the emergence of a “resistance aesthetics” in works such as The Battle of Algiers and Giovanni Pirelli’s harrowing books of testimony about Algeria’s war of independence, both inspired by Frantz Fanon. This book will interest readers passionate about postcolonial studies, the history of Italian imperialism, Pan-Africanism, print cultures, and Italian postwar culture.

In this paper, I examine the unpublished Second World War diaries of Giovanni Pirelli—heir to the helm of the Pirelli tire company—for their account of how the war and fall of Fascism may have catalyzed his dissociation from his family, his class, and his ideological foundation. In the post-war, Pirelli traced the source of his rejection of his inheritance to his experiences during the Russian retreat, but in the moment, the expression of this kind of transformation is fragmentary and complex. Scholars often look to war diaries and letters for their testimony to the state of the individual in combat. Through close reading, I trace how Pirelli’s writings negotiate his immense privilege and attempt to construct a moral identity in the midst of war. I consider how they perform his break with his wartime ideals and Fascism and how they anticipate his later transition from industrial heir to socialist activist. My examination of these diaries reveals the ambiguities inherent in this transformation of Fascist and bourgeois subjectivity.

This paper illuminates the transformation of Giovanni Pirelli from convinced fascist to partisan and anti-colonial activist and explores the significance and fruits of Pirelli’s friendship with Frantz Fanon, specifically the Centro Documentazione Frantz Fanon that Pirelli founded in Milan in 1962. Raised as the heir to an industrial dynasty, Pirelli’s letters and diaries as a fascist officer on the eastern European front reveal his growing doubts about both fascism and his personal privilege. After the war, he refused his inheritance of the company helm and dedicated himself to writing, editing, and organizing on behalf of leftist causes. This commitment—rooted in a fascination with the testimony of the oppressed—soon extended beyond Italy’s borders to countries fighting for liberation from colonialism. In 1959, Pirelli made his first contact with the Algerian liberation movement and began work on a volume of letters from Algerian partisans. He also became interested in the work of Frantz Fanon, whom he sought out in Tunis in late 1960. Their meeting, though characterized at first by distrust and skepticism, especially on Fanon’s part, quickly developed into a deep, if brief, friendship. With Fanon’s guidance, Pirelli dedicated himself to disseminating Fanon’s works in Italy, as well as two books of testimony from the Algerian war: Lettere della rivoluzione algerina and Racconti di bambini di Algeria. After Fanon’s death, Pirelli founded the Centro Documentazione Frantz Fanon in Milan, a center dedicated to spreading awareness in Italy and Europe of colonial struggles. Using documents from Giovanni Pirelli’s archive and accounts from Centro members, I explore the formation, impact, and dissolution of this center, viewing it an important product of Pirelli and Fanon’s friendship and Pirelli’s commitment to both antifascism and anti-colonialism. (See eprint link for paper)

Frutto di un lavoro più che decennale, questa biografia di godibilissima lettura segna un punto di svolta nella conoscenza della traiettoria umana e politica di Giovanni Pirelli. Come ogni indagine davvero innovatrice, il libro sollecita anche un ampio ventaglio di ulteriori ricerche sul “caleidoscopio di interessi e relazioni” che hanno caratterizzato la vita — appassionata e appassionante — di questo “autentico rivoluzionario” (Bermani).

On the fiftieth anniversary of the iconic date of 1968, the legacy and memory of the global sixties is acknowledged largely with reference to developments in a few places in Europe and the United States. Dozens of important movements of contestation, revolutionary organizations, student activism in a number of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern countries are excluded from this Eurocentric narrative. However, the 1960s was a revolutionary decade in the region as well. From Greece to Turkey, from Morocco to Tunisia and Oman, the Mediterranean and the Middle East was a stage for numerous important movements of contestation around 1968. It started with the Algerian war of independence (1954-62) and the republican uprising in Yemen (1962-70) and ended with Mu’ammar al-Qaddafi’s coup (1969) that toppled the monarchy in Libya. Apart from that, the shock waves of Israel’s brutal military victory in 1967 fueled radical movements throughout the region.
Connections between intellectuals and militants spanned several continents: Palestinian, but also various African anti-imperial activists were trained in different Arab countries; Algerians visited China or Vietnam. It was not only leftist ideologies like Maoism that proved globally attractive over the 1960s, but also revolutionary Islamism, which figures such as Malek Bennabi or Ali Shari’ati had developed in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Paris. Michel Foucault was personally involved with the Tunis student movement, while Berlin’s 1968 began with protests against the shah of Iran.
The workshop is interested in concrete transnational contacts and mobilities between the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and other parts of the world during the revolutionary global sixties. It further asks how different strands within the broader movements of anti-imperialist contestation – third-worldist, nationalist, Islamic, feminist –  interacted with each other. The workshop also intends to focus on the appropriation of and paradigmatic inspiration from other resistance movements, specifically Algeria, Palestine, Yemen, and Vietnam, through solidarity activities. We aspire to consider the 1960s not just from the perspective of transnational political and intellectual history, but also from a social history approach as the lived experience of the actors involved. Therefore, we also take into consideration the role of gender, youth, bodily performances that shaped the movements over the revolutionary decade. The workshop invites papers that intend to move beyond biographical sources and overemphasis on “the witnesses” in treating the period and bring together recent historiographical approaches in the study of the revolutionary sixties.

Fondazione ISEC vi invita alla Libreria Utopia (Milano) per un dialogo sul volume ‘Giovanni Pirelli intellettuale del Novecento’ (ISEC-Mimesis edizioni, 2016) a cura di MARIAMARGHERITA SCOTTI:
GIOVANNI SCIROCCO (Università degli studi di Bergamo) dialogherà con la curatrice.
Coordina l'incontro LUCIO MORAWETZ (Libreria Utopia)