When the Red Brigades began setting fire to cars in Milan in 1970, most of the leftist groups in Italy denounced these actions as the work of agents provocateurs, the secret services, or fascists. Similarly, in Germany, few of the movements' activists could believe that some of their comrades were responsible for acts of arson in two Frankfurt department stores in 1968. Only later on did the Left admit that there was indeed a link between the radicals and other activists, that the former were – in the words of the prominent Italian journalist of the New Left, Rossana Rossanda – the “unwanted children” of the wave of protest that started in the sixties.

Although I am far from believing that – as conservative politicians hastened to explain at the time – such violence was a direct consequence of the activists' ideology, one of the principal premises underpinning my analysis is that political violence cannot be understood as an isolated criminal phenomenon and must, instead, be interpreted in the context of other forms of protest. As I argued in Chapter 1, social and political conflicts are a necessary, albeit not sufficient, precondition for political violence. Italy and Germany were no exception to this rule: in the late sixties and seventies violence escalated during various protest campaigns. These campaigns generated new political organizations and new collective identities; student movements, women's movements, environmental movements, urban movements, youth movements, antinuclear movements, and peace movements developed in both countries.