On June 9, 1937, Carlo Rosselli and his brother, Nello, were murdered by the French far-right movement La Cagoule on the orders of Italian Fascists. This was a fate that Carlo — leader of Giustizia e Libertà (GL), alongside Communists Italy’s main anti-fascist movement — had long seen coming.

The 1930s had been a decisive test for militants like Rosselli. Since the consolidation of Benito Mussolini’s regime, they had spent a decade in Paris, a city that had become like a “museum of anti-fascist” exiles. The two possible outcomes were death or what they called riscatto — “redemption,” in Walter Benjamin’s sense. For Rosselli, anti-fascism was about remembering the defeated, actively fighting the common adversary, and laying the foundations for ultimate victory.

Rosselli made this clear on May Day 1937 as he commemorated anti-fascism’s martyrs, in particular Antonio Gramsci, who had died a few days earlier after a decade in a Fascist jail. Rosselli insisted, “The new society is born from pain, just like a baby. It seems the passage to a higher phase of coexistence is impossible before we have reached the depths of abjection.”