Leone Cattani

Leone Cattani (5 January 1906 – 29 October 1980) was an Italian lawyer, politician and anti-Fascist activist.

Between December 1944 and December 1945 he served as secretary general of the Italian Liberal Party. Later, in 1955, he was a co-founder of the Italian Radical Party.

Life

Family provenance and early years Leone Cattani was born in Rieti, a small industrial city and regional capital a short distance to the north of Rome. He was the youngest of the four recorded children of Antonio Cattani (1873–1939), a primary school teacher (later a director of studies), originally from nearby Antrodoco. His mother, born Maria Costantini, came from a Rieti family. For work reasons, while he was growing up, the family relocated to Urbino, later moving further afield to Crema in the north-west of Italy (Lombardy).

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. It was while he was a student that he became politically involved, joining Catholic associations. Cattani was influenced by the liberal ideas of Benedetto Croce and Luigi Einaudi. and he saw to it that his party was part of the short-lived Parri government to represent the (non-Communist) left-wing wing of the CLN. For 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.

On 10 December 1945 a new government under De Gasperi took over, created from the six parties of the CLN, which had the backing of the occupying powers. There was pressure from the right-wing parties in this very broadly based coalition for Cattani to be excluded from it and for the Liberal Party to go into opposition, but in the end Cattani joined the government as Minister of Public Works, while his duties as party general secretary passed to Giovanni Cassandro. Directly after the fall of the monarchy, Cattani committed to back an investigation into Fraud allegations from the monarchist side. During the sessions of the Council of Ministers held overnight on 12/13 June 1946 he was the only member of the government to vote against the taking of power by De Gasperi as provisional head of state. Nevertheless, once the Republic had been proclaimed, 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. At the end of 1947 he emerged as a leading champion of the liberal left at the fourth Liberal Party national congress: as the political mood in the country drifted to the left, the Liberal Party moved in the opposite direction. Following a victory by the "right", in a vote over a proposed merger with the populist Common Man's Front ("Fronte dell'Uomo Qualunque"; UQ), Cattani resigned from the Liberal Party early in 1948, Cattani stood aside from the project and for several years withdrew completely from the political scene. His 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. After less than a year he resigned from this office, however, in order to avoid having any involvement in condoning a major building project on the Monte Mario hill.

As a supporter of the Electoral Law ("Fraud Law"; "legge truffa") of 1953, Cattani soon found himself at odds with the Liberal Party mainstream again, especially after 1954 when Giovanni Malagodi took over as Party General Secretary. This led to Cattani's final break with the party which he left at the end of 1955, along with others on the left wing of the party, including Bruno Villabruna, to found the Radical Party.

Cattani's "radical adventure" also proved short-lived. In 1961 the "Piccardi case" surfaced in the columns of "Il Mondo". The managing editor of the magazine was Mario Pannunzio, a close political ally of Cattani's. Leopoldo Piccardi, a member of the Radical Party secretariat, was accused of having been involved in Italo-German discussions in 1938/39 in which racial arguments had been addressed. Cattani and others associated with "Il Mondo" demanded Piccardi's resignation, but the left wing of the party backed him. The upshot was another party resignation for Leone Cattani.

Retreat into private life After the termination of his political career in the Radical Party, in 1963 Cattani ran as a candidate for Giuseppe Saragat's Italian Democratic Socialist Party (PSDI), but he failed to secure election. This, for most purposes, signalled his retreat into private life. In 1968 he was one of the promoters of the Pannunzio Centre at Turin, along with Arrigo Olivetti, Nicolò Carandini, Pier Franco Quaglieni and Mario Soldati.

Leone Cattani died at Rome on 29 October 1980.