24 Facts About Leone Cattani

Leone Cattani was an Italian lawyer, politician and anti-Fascist activist.

Leone Cattani was born in Rieti, a small industrial city and regional capital a short distance to the north of Rome.

Leone Cattani was the youngest of the four recorded children of Antonio Cattani, a primary school teacher, originally from nearby Antrodoco.

Leone Cattani's mother, born Maria Costantini, came from a Rieti family.

The move to Crema meant living close to Milan, which is where Cattani undertook his university studies, receiving a degree in social sciences in 1925 and in jurisprudence in 1927.

Leone Cattani was influenced by the liberal ideas of Benedetto Croce and Luigi Einaudi.

Leone Cattani became an activist and then a leading figure in the Catholic Federation of University Students, expressing hostility within the federation to the Fascists who had been running the government since 1922.

Leone Cattani was a promoter of the "Golliardic Union for Liberty", an association of socialist and liberal Catholics which had been founded in 1924.

Leone Cattani was among those arrested, accused of having set up a secret "Young Italy" association.

Leone Cattani nevertheless had lost his job with the National Institute for Exports.

Leone Cattani became involved in clandestine resistance activities, although clandestine resistance appears to have been far more active following the outbreak of war, in the early 1940s, than during the 1930s.

Leone Cattani refused to join his group of young liberals to the new Action Party because he believed that the republican aspirations of its leaders, notably Ugo La Malfa and Ferruccio Parri, would rule out the creation of a broadly based anti-Fascist party capable of attracting middle class voters who were still, in his judgement, predominantly monarchist.

Leone Cattani was the liberal representative on Ivanoe Bonomi's antifascist committee on 25 July 1943.

Leone Cattani opposed joining the Badoglio government, which differentiated him from the "grand old men" of liberalism Alessandro Casati and Marcello Soleri.

At the time of the brief but savage German occupation of Rome Leone Cattani contributed to the clandestine underground publication of the "Liberal Movement of Italy" programmes and, together with Mario Pannunzio, of "Risorgimento Liberale" which after the liberation of Rome became the official organ of the Italian Liberal Party.

In December 1944 Brosio joined the Bonomi government while Leone Cattani became secretary general of the Italian Liberal Party: with fascism apparently vanquished, he identified Communism as the more pressing danger, and worked to limit the powers of the CLN, which was dominated by the Italian Communist Party, and for its dissolution following Liberation.

Directly after the war Leone Cattani was a member of the National Council established in September 1945, and he saw to it that his party was part of the short-lived Parri government to represent the left-wing wing of the CLN.

For Leone Cattani participation in the government was a necessary precondition for the creation of a more moderate Christian Democratic-Liberal government headed up by Alcide De Gasperi.

Directly after the fall of the monarchy, Leone Cattani committed to back an investigation into Fraud allegations from the monarchist side.

Nevertheless, once the Republic had been proclaimed, Leone Cattani quickly became a foremost defender of the state's legitimacy in the face of proposals to undergo further discussions ahead of a second referendum.

When in June 1948 Nicolo Carandini took the initiative and launched the Independent Liberal Movement, Leone Cattani stood aside from the project and for several years withdrew completely from the political scene.

Leone Cattani's energies were instead diverted to a new political weekly magazine, "Il Mondo" from the pages of which he argued his liberal position with some fervour.

In 1950, following the removal of party General Secretary Roberto Lucifero and the arrival in the post of Bruno Villabruna, who subsequently launched a determined move to make the party more mainstream, attempting to create a broadly based political "third force", Leone Cattani was among those who began to look for ways of drawing together the fractured strands of political liberalism.

In 1952 Leone Cattani presented himself as a candidate in the Rome municipal elections, standing as a candidate for a coalition comprising the Liberals, the Christian Democrats, the Republicans and the Social Democrats.