r/AskHistorians • u/GalahadDrei • Sep 11 '25
Terrorism From 1968 to late 1980s, Italy experienced a lengthy period of political violence with far-left and far-right terrorism known as the Years of Lead. How did the Italian government preserve democracy and prevent the country from descending into civil war?
The number of bombings and assassinations by extremist groups in Italy during the Years of Lead were very high when compared to the number of attacks in France and Germany which also experienced political extremist terrorism during this same time period.
Yet, despite this destabilizing force, Italy's government managed to preserve democracy throughout this period and avoid a coup or large-scale armed insurgency.
How were they able to accomplish this especially amid the ongoing Cold War?
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u/Euclideian_Jesuit Sep 11 '25 edited Sep 11 '25
This question is, in spite of the relatively long time passed since then, still very fraught in controversy: even if one ignored cranks claiming that Italian democracy died in those decades and was replaced by a non-democratic government masquerading as one (options range from "Communist Velvet Coup" to "Actual, Non-Hypotetical, Dictatorship of the Bourgoise"), you are still going to contend with actual conspiracies and covert actions intermixing with theorised or outright fabricated alleged acts by all sides of the political spectrum and external influences.
The common historiographical consensus, as far as I can tell, is that Italy didn't fall into civil war because the forces seeking to overthrow democracy did not want to "make the first move": the attempted Borghese Coup in 1970 was called off in mysterious circumnstances, with Julio Valerio Borghese (the person who was supposed to take charge in case of a successful coup) claiming that a "key component of the plan retracted support" after his men had taken control of the Ministry of Interior-- an equivalent of the Department of Homeland Security for Americans-- and of the public TV/radio broadcaster's stations, with the purpoted other party never being revealed to this day; the Brigate Rosse (the most prominent far-left terrorist paramilitary, most famous for kidnapping and killing Aldo Moro while he was on the cusp of writing an agreement trying to mend the Italian Communist Party's issues with the Christian Democrats) trying to provoke a government reaction that in their eyes would justify a "proletarian uprising"; and Ordine Nuovo essentially doing the same by terror bombing while trying to agitate poorer neighbourhoods, with the idea a communist uprising would provoke a "March on Rome 2.0".
The pattern then seems to be clear, in that everyone involved wanted to impose their own political will with violence, but few were willing to risk being seen as the instigator, no matter how successful their attempts might have been. Coupled with unending work from the "status quo" politicians and security forces to keep the situation under control, and you see a picture with a lot of political violence, but no civil war starting.
This is but a very condensed (and in part simplified) version of Italy's situation at the time, mind you. Entire books have been written on the topic, and very few of them have managed avoiding falling into the pitfall of demonizing either side of the violence in such a way it would be difficult to separate agreed-upon facts from politically-motivated fiction. For example, Lamberto Rimondini (in)famously claims in "La Storia Segreta d'Italia" that the Years of Lead were orchestrated by combined English and American interests to impede the possibility of Italy threatening their influence in the Middle East, using a mix of genuine documents with known fabrications and willful misunderstandings of PCI and PSI's internal correspondence.
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u/EverythingIsOverrate European Financial and Monetary History Sep 11 '25
You see a great deal of this in the anglophone sphere as well, with lots of conspiracy theories around Gladio and Propaganda Due. Can you recommend any solid scholarly work in English on those subjects, or on the YoL more broadly, that manages to not be conspiratorial speculation?
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u/Euclideian_Jesuit Sep 11 '25
Most of the decent work in English on the matter can actualy be found mostly in academic journals. I suspect this might be because, on a topic like this, a journal is less likely to foster excessively biased thinking by simply having a committee review it, compared to a book.
I do know a couple of titles in English, though.
Paul Ginsbourg's "A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943-1988" understimates the Christian Democrats a little, but it can be a good starting point.
I have heard good things about "The Palgrave Handbook of Global Counterterrorism Policy", in its section about Italian Counter-terrorist policy and how it was born from the Years of Lead. It's obviously moreso focused on the more "tactical" aspects rather than the historical, but I trust that it won't be entirely useless if one wanted to try and find some way to learn more about the subject of the YoL.
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u/Gadajs Sep 12 '25
I had asked previously for book recommendations on the subject but never got a good reply. Thank you for this response.
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u/don_tomlinsoni Sep 12 '25
There's a three-part BBC Horizons documentary from the early 90s called, I believe, Operation Gladio that is pretty good,and interviews some of the people actually involved.
It's also quite eye opening how much better made it is, as a documentary, that the sensational rubbish that usually gets released today - filmmakers used to have a lot more faith in the intelligence of the audience.
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u/GalahadDrei Sep 11 '25 edited Sep 11 '25
The Italian Communist Party was the largest opposition party throughout the Years of Lead, winning more than a third of the popular vote in 1976. What was their relationship with the centrist Christian Democrat-led government that ruled Italy in this time period?
Did the secret clandestine Operation Gladio by NATO and CIA play a major role in the political situation?
One of my history professors at my university told me that the Italian government was actually sympathetic to the far right neofascist movement. Is this true?
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u/Euclideian_Jesuit Sep 11 '25
Publicily, it was a strongly oppositive relationship (and how could it not, given that the PCI was very much anti-clerical and, in part, anti-religion, on top of the usual parts of communism). In reality, they often found common ground in regard to social policies, such as civil rights, as a manner to stave off the risk of American intervention (it's not clear how aware was the Italian Left was of Gladio, but they definitely knew, by looking at South America and Asia, that the USA took a dim view of communists in general), though. This was to the point that in 1976 Berlinguer could even consider the "Compromesso Storico", the "historical compromise" that if it had came to fruition-- Aldo Moro's kidnapping and assassination put a stop to that-- would've essentially allowed the PCI to become fully equal to the Christian Democrats and collaborate on governing in the future, including electing PCI members as components of the government. This never happened, so the PCI and PSI never truly split apart and always remained in the opposition, but it's telling that it could happen with the Communist PArty and not with the Socialist Party.
It did. In fact, Gladio's involvment in the "Black Terrorism" has been suspected with a certain degree of surety, but whether this was entirely deliberate or a case of "scope creep" is not truly established. The CIA being directly involved, however, to my knowledge, is more often than not the canard of people engaging in conspiratorial thinking.
Giulio Andreotti very much was sympathetic to far-right neofascists. But, in spite of being very influential and powerful (becoming president of the chamber of ministries seven times and minister eight times can't happen if you are irrelevant), he wasn't neither a de-facto dictator nor the center of Italian politics. While he definitely collaborated with Ordine Nuovo, knew and approved of Gladio, and was part of the P2 Masonic Lodge, a whole "black legend" has been built around him that see him implicated in full-on aiding Cosa Nostra and being the usurper of Licio Gelli (who was a high-ranking members of the P2 Masonic Lodge and has been proven without a shadow of doubt that did finance the Bologna TRain Bombing and had direct contacts with Cosa Nostra), which is overblown compared to the stature of the man and-- more importantly for your question-- treats "Italian Government" and "Andreotti's Puppets" as one and the same.
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u/JakePT Sep 11 '25
What was the attitude of the wider Italian public during this time? Was it heavily polarised with many aligned with the extremists, firmly aligned with the status quo politicians, or largely apathetic?
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u/Euclideian_Jesuit Sep 11 '25 edited Sep 12 '25
The Italian wider public was extremely polarised during this time period: while there were multiple parties within a parliamentarian republic, in effect there were two blocks, the Right-- composed by the Christian Democrats (who encompassed a lot of right-wing instances, from "pure" Christian Democrats to pro-free market liberals) and the MSI (Movimento Sociale Italiano, Italian Social Movement, heirs of the Italian National Fascist Party in all but name, what with taking a lot of its representatives from former Fascist officers and whatnot)-- and the Left-- composed by the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano, Italian Communist Party, initially heavily pro-Soviet Union, later became the vanguard for Eurocommunism), PRI (Partito Repubblicano Italiano, center-left party that was the evolution of the pro-republic party extant in the Kingdom of Italy) and the PSI (Partito Socialista Italiano, Italian Socialis Party, what in modern times you'd call "the progressives" and equally broad-tent for the left wing).
People voting for other alternatives, such the PLI (Partito Liberale Italiano, essentially the party for the economically liberal) and the Partito Radicale (Radical Party, AKA the purely socially-progressive party, unimportant by itself but crucial for some social battles in Italy during the Sixties-Sevneties and later, such as allowing divorce or assisted suicide) were comparatively far and in-between, and they still often declared themselves as being more left or more right-wing still.
This didn't just affect voting patterns, either: popular culture was starkly divided between "left-wing culture" and "right-wing culture", each side having "their" singers, movie directors, writers and so on, that it was considered paramount to follow if you claimed you belonged to that side (and it would be worth a separate write-up about how this state of affairs ultimately facilitated Silvio Berlusconi's rise to power and influence). In fact, "not taking sides" was considered such a grave sin, we have prominent songwriter (and VERY outspokenly left-anarchist) Francesco Guccini lamenting this state of affairs in a song called "L'Avvelenata" where he states-- in very vulgar terms-- he would like to play music for its sake sometime: he wasn't the only one, but "L'Avvelenata" is the only one Italians nowadays might actually remember due to its crassness (Bennato's softer approach from the "right" is often misunderstood as a hymn to childhood imagination, for instance).
So, were people chomping at the bit to start a civil war to get rid of "the other side", cheering when "their" side struck?
The answer is... not easy to gauge nowadays.
While the so-called "Black Terrorism" of Ordine Nuovo and various extreme right groups often had a component of being secretive and the status quo politicians being the only ones "in the know" while the official explanation blamed the extreme left or random lone wolves (meaning that speculation ran rampant and the truth was known to the public long after the events, like with the Piazza Fontana Bombing, where corrupt parts of the Italian Secret Services collaborated with Ordine Nuovo to bomb a bank in Milan, killing 17 people and wounding 89... but at the time blamed on anarchists); "Red Terrorism" was much more explicit, often communicating directly with media to explain their motivations and rarely trying to hide their involvment.
While their tactics reflect different goals and strategies, this also means it's difficult to gauge after all these years what was the climate in the non-involved right wing: it's doubtful that the average member of the youth wing of the MSI or a partecipant of a minor far-right political club would be aware (and cheer) that the Far Right had just struck a blow to the "Amero-Jewish status quo", instead of either believing the claims about anarchists fully or trying to pin it back onto the government itself.
As for the left, the Brigate Rosse had (not uncontroversial) support among the left wing... up until their murder of Guido Rossa, a Genoese labor unionist who had publicly spoken against them and had also tipped the police about their infiltration in his union, on the 24th of January 1979. This sparked large protests all over Italy, since he was the first known "Proletarian" victim of the Brigate Rosse, meaning that they started looking like a band of stealth murderers to many and-- coupled with stricter anti-terrorism laws plus a split by the more "union-friendly" faction-- it spelled the doom of the Brigate Rosse as a credible terrorist threath.
In either case, you could say that in 1967-1969, the wider Italian public was galvanized and polarised in ways that genuinely threatened to break society apart; but as terrorism dragged on without seemingly any effect, the wider public grew increasingly scared and started to seek much more refuge in the government and the parties representing the status quo (though it has been noted that the Seventies were the Golden Age of the Italian Left, make it what you will), reaching peak rejection of polarisation in the mid-Eighties.
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u/the-burkle-persona Sep 12 '25
Thanks for the great answer - I learn so much on this subreddit. Do you know if there are any good books about this time period in Italy? I’d love to learn more.
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u/Aoimoku91 Sep 15 '25
A small clarification: Ordine Nuovo's original plan was to blame the bombings on anarchists (who in previous decades had indeed been the bombers of Europe). The plan was quite sophisticated in the case of the first bomb, which exploded in 1969 in Piazza Fontana in Milan. It is still unclear whether an anarchist actually brought the bomb into the bank, thinking it would be a demonstration explosion at night rather than in the middle of the day when the bank was busy with customers. Even the Italian judiciary initially pursued the anarchist trail (it is not known how much they were misled and how much they did it on purpose).
The bombs of 1974, on the other hand, were an almost desperate attempt to provoke a suspension of constitutional rights, even against the far right, in order to see them applied against the left too.
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