Giliana Berneri

Giliana Berneri or Giliane Berneri (5 October 1919 – 19 July 1998) was a French doctor of medicine and a libertarian communist activist.

Early life and education Giliana Berneri was the second daughter of the eminent Italian anarchist and academic Camillo Berneri and his similarly focused wife Giovanna Berneri (born Giovanna Caleffi). Giliana and her elder sister Marie-Louise Berneri were born in Tuscany, but the family fled to France in 1926 in order to escape the Fascist Mussolini government. Her father's scathing anti-Fascist newspaper articles had marked the family out for persecution. In France he was unable to find permanent employment, and frequently went into hiding to avoid the unwelcome attentions of the Italian Security Services. Nevertheless, there was considerable solidarity among the political anti-Fascist exiles in Paris and eventually Giovanna, the girls' mother, was able to set up a fruit and vegetable shop in a popular quarter. including Georg K. Glaser and André Prudhommeaux. Her home in the Latin Quarter of Paris was one of those scheduled for police monitoring. Giliane Berneri: some publications Sur quelques cas de polynévrites par intoxication alimentaire accidentelle par des substances contenant du triorthocresyl phosphate, thèse, Médecine, Paris, 1946. Notes prises au cours de la conférence sur l'orientation professionnelle pratiquée par le service médical à la Chambre des métiers de Seine-et-Oise, Paris, mars 1957. During this period she was a leading figure in the Cercle libertaire des étudiants (Libertarian Students' Circle/ CLE) which organised meetings with leading icons of the left such as André Prudhommeaux, and with writers closely attached to libertarian objectives such as Albert Camus. She worked on the editorial team of the journal Le Libertaire. Unlike her husband, however, she refused to become involved in the initiatives of Georges Fontenis to create a secret (and manipulative) sub-group within the French Anarchist Federation, to be known by the name "", the machinations of which she later, reportedly, denounced.