The winner of the 2022 CEH article prize was Luca Provenzano (Sciences Po), whose article on political violence in Europe after 1968 impressed the judges by its depth, originality and comparative reach. We asked Luca to write a few words summarizing what his article is about and what its implications are for scholarship on the period.

My article examines the use of force in the context of strikes, protests, and demonstrations in France, Italy, and West Germany from the seminal year 1968 through the events of 1977 in Italy, the last major radical upsurge of the decade. It focuses on what I call ‘militancy in public space’ or ‘militancy’ and was often referred to by revolutionaries as ‘mass violence’—the collective use of force in the context of protests, strikes, and occupations.

My main questions are twofold.

1. What explains the divergent force levels adopted in the context of militancy in public space across national lines, ranging from the more or less spontaneous throwing of improvised projectiles to the use of Molotov cocktails and even firearms during protests?
2. What explains the different degrees of articulation between militancy in public space and armed struggle or ‘terrorism’ along national lines?

My argument is that the practices of revolutionary leftists in the context of violent encounters in public space were shaped by the interplay between a set of common discourses about the use of force and national contexts.

As I show, a current of the revolutionary Left groups shared similar assumptions about the legitimacy and potential usefulness of forceful forms of protest after ’68. Among the most broadly shared discourses were those of self-defense and counter-violence, which pointed towards using force to deter or neutralize police aggression and as a legitimate and obligatory riposte to the exercise of physical constraint by the state. But leftists also articulated the notion of using force as a means of encouraging working-class insubordination–the barricades of Mai 1968 were interpreted in this light—and of violence as a means of expressing and forging a collective revolutionary subject. By the end of the decade, discourses on violence in public space as the liberation of subversive desires or authentic, ‘revolutionary’ emotions also reflected the common cultural influences of the feminist movement and its ‘politics of the first person’ as well as the pursuit of authentic emotions.

Since similar premises about violence in protests, demonstrations, and strikes were shared by revolutionary Left groups across national boundaries, I argue that analysis of the legitimation discourses around the use of force does not sufficiently explain either the different ‘levels’ of ‘mass violence’ expressed by revolutionary leftists in battles over public space, nor the different levels of articulation between militancy and armed struggle in different national contexts.

Instead, the practice of violence by revolutionary leftists was shaped by the levels of force used by the police in defense of public order. It is true that militants in West Germany like members of the group Revolutionärer Kampf tended to be more circumspect about the use of force than their peers in France and Italy, and of course, a current of the revolutionary left notoriously embraced ‘the tactic of the P38’ and embraced armed protest in the Italian piazza in 1977.

Nevertheless, police use of force varied significantly across cases too. I trace this through mortality statistics; and find that from December 1968 to December 1977, only the Italian police were directly responsible for the killing of a significant number of revolutionary leftist and Communist protestors. Similarly important is the reality that Italian police used firearms far more often than their French and West German peers. My previous work has shown that, aside from the common use of the baton, police embraced different practices of ‘crowd control’. So leftists who chose to engage in militancy in different national contexts faced divergent forms of public order policing that had very real implications in terms of the possibility of serious injury and death inflicted by police.

I argue that that in all three cases, a current of revolutionary left protestors in each national context sought to rival the force levels routinely deployed by police. From this perspective, one of the most spectacular dimensions of the Italian ‘anomaly’—the emergence of ‘comrade P38’ in the ranks of protestors late in the decade—was only part of a common transnational trend. In other words, the exercise of physical constraint by the police, ‘metabolized’ through common revolutionary Left discourses on violence, pointed towards different levels of militancy, ranging from the use of improvised projectiles to Molotov cocktails and even firearms.

I also find that convergences between protest and armed struggle were strongest where public order policing practices were the most intense. Scholars have argued that the Movement of 1977 itself became a ‘radical milieu’ (Luca Falciola) that provided symbolic and practical resources and a levy of recruits to the armed movement. By contrast, most scholarship on the major social movement of the late 1970s in France and West Germany, the anti-nuclear movement, tends to confirm that the movement and domestic armed groups were largely ships passing in the night—even though there were certainly violent protests at Grohnde and Creys-Malville in 1977. The implication here is that more lethal and ‘armed’ forms of public order policing did not merely condition the intensification of ‘militancy but also played a role in encouraging the entanglement of mass violence and armed struggle.

In my article, I also call for a reconsideration of the role of Third World Marxism and national liberation struggles in providing the intellectual and political conditions for political violence in Western Europe. Although it is certainly true that revolutionary Leftists drew inspiration from national liberation struggles, and that anti-imperialist protests were often occasions for militancy, I suggest that the unique international context does not have much explanatory value for explaining the divergent trajectories of violent protest in France, Italy, and West Germany.

From a more theoretical perspective, the essay attempts to reconsider the dynamics of political violence by emphasizing the interplay between ideology and circumstances. In the scholarship on political violence in 1970s Western Europe, I think there has been renewed focus on the role of ideology in contributing to political violence the emergence of armed groups that has sometimes sidelined macrostructural or institutional factors. I agree that revolutionary Left organizations had an ideology that inclined them to use force, but ideology should not be separated from the conditions under which it was ‘operationalized’ into forms of action.

Luca Provenzano is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Sciences Po whose work focuses on transnational radicalism, political violence, and policing in Western Europe in the 1970s. Luca earned his doctorate in May 2020 from Columbia University, New York.