I’ll tell you the true story of Toni Negri
An extravagant story that of Toni Negri: a man who grew up with a religiously Catholic and politically socialist faith but was very radical in his reasoning, his conduct and his acquaintances, including that with Renato Curcio. Damato's italics
As soon as he died in Paris with all his debts paid to the Italian justice system, which had sentenced him first to 30 and then to 12 years in prison for subversive association, armed gang, moral complicity in a deadly robbery, Toni Negri had not even turned 50 when – in the summer of 1983 – he was let escape to France by none other than the Prime Minister and the Minister of the Interior in office at the time. Which were, respectively, the socialist leader Bettino Craxi and the "all-in-one" Christian Democrat, as they called him in his party, Oscar Luigi Scalfaro. He was pleased to wear, attached to his skin under his civilian clothes, the magistrate's robe which had only apparently been abandoned in 1946, when he was elected to the Constituent Assembly.
THE PARADOXICAL DECISION OF CRAXI AND SCALFARO ON TONI NEGRI
That of Craxi and Scalfaro was neither an act of generosity nor of cowardice, nor of betrayal which could then be contested by both before the Constitutional Court. It was a paradoxical decision, useful to prevent the entire legislature that had just begun from taking place in the curious ways imagined by that devil Marco Pannella. That the well-known university professor of philosophy had nominated and had elected deputy, even though he had been in maximum security prison since 1979, when he was arrested in a substantial round-up in Padua of suspected terrorists, murderers, robbers and kidnappers.
Freed by force at the moment of his election as deputy, the magistrates promptly prepared the request for authorization to arrest him again due to the seriousness of the crimes charged against him, while waiting to try him. Then, in the scenario pursued by Pannella, they would have had to authorize him from time to time to be brought to the Chamber to participate in the courtroom or commission sessions chosen by the prisoner to fulfill his mandate.
Even though they were both friends of Pannella, the Prime Minister and the Minister of the Interior did not even need to speak to each other. An exchange of glances was enough to understand each other and understand that, by abandoning the already alerted surveillance and letting Negri escape to France from a port in Tuscany, they would have spared the Italians a spectacle with unpredictable developments and implications.
THE REFUGE IN FRANCE
So Toni Negri found refuge in France, like others in his condition. And, having collected his large parliamentary allowance for the entire legislature with delegation to I don't know who, he returned to Italy of his own free will after 14 years, with trials concluded, sentences reduced and able to negotiate a modest "residual sentence", containing four years of semi-freedom. An epilogue in some way consistent with his extravagant story, to say the least, of a man who grew up with a religiously Catholic and politically socialist faith but so radical in his reasoning, his conduct and his acquaintances, including that with Renato Curcio, that to gain all kinds of suspicions: even of having contributed to the founding of the red brigades and the kidnapping of Aldo Moro.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/toni-negri/ on Sun, 17 Dec 2023 08:14:01 +0000.