The constituent congress of the Chamber of Labor of Cuneo is held on 30-31 March 1902. 27 delegates attend, representing 1,744 members, of which 512 in the capital. Francesco Saverio Derfner is the one who in the previous months has beaten the province by holding rallies and meetings to establish resistance leagues here and there. He was born in Vinadio on November 18, 1871, his father with that strange surname, as a Central European Jew, came from Parma, a duchy in which the Bourbons and Habsburgs succeeded one another in a short time between 1700 and 1800, not to mention Maria Luisa Bonaparte. Saverio’s paternal grandfather lived in Strasbourg: she enlists in the escort of Maria Luisa when she passes through the Alsatian city on her way to Paris as Napoleon’s wife.
With the Congress of Vienna Maria Luisa obtains the Duchy of Parma. Derfner follows her and marries her in the Emilian city. Two boys were born from the marriage, Giuseppe and Giacomo, both students of the military academy, when the Risorgimento wars of 1859-60 exploded. Of the Derfner brothers, one joins the Piedmontese army, the other follows Garibaldi with the Cacciatori delle Alpi and the Mille.
Giuseppe is rewarded by the Savoy with a job in Customs. He marries a Turin woman, Maria Viola, who gives him 6 children, 5 of whom die in the first year of life. The only one who survives is Saverio, born when his father is no longer a customs officer, but a guard at the Fort of Vinadio.
Uncle Giacomo continues to follow Garibaldi in the countryside of Rome and France (1871). His father moved to Turin, where Saverio finished his elementary and electrical engineering studies, although he became an orphan in 1890.
livio berardo *
Join the army in the time of Crispi. He wins the national competition as the best shooter in Italy, with 8 out of 10 300-meter targets («Carabina d’oro»). He is sent to Africa, from which he is repatriated wounded. Second lieutenant in Messina, he suffered the repression of the Sicilian fasces. He secretly starts reading subversive books: De Amicis, Marx, Engels. He matures socialist ideas. In 1898 he was in Milan in public order service. Realizing what Bava Beccaris expects from the soldiers, he resigns from the army before the ferocious repression orders are issued.
The father of his girlfriend, supplier of the Mediterranean Network, one of the private companies that manage the Italian railways, finds him a position as chief controller in Asti. In career progression he moves to Genoa. He joins the strong railway workers union, joining the national secretariat as deputy of the leader Quirino Nofri. On 18 December 1900 the prefect of Genoa dissolved the local Chamber of Labor. Protest strikes broke out throughout Liguria. Derfner organized that of the railway workers.
After the buriana passed and the Chamber of Labor reopened, Derfner as a punishment was transferred to Cuneo, considered a quiet province. The trips on the lines to Turin and Tenda became for him as many opportunities for contacts and propaganda. The example of Genoa impressed well, when it announces the congress of March 1902. The Chamber of Labor is the link between territory and trade, the place where the worker meets the “agitators” and comrades of the other categories, it orientates itself in the labor market.
In 1903, when the resources for the salary of trade unionist ceased, he moved to Turin, where with the inheritance of his uncle Garibaldino he opened a small electromechanical workshop that works in the related industries of the nascent automobile industry. But he is a socialist, provincial councilor, candidate for the Municipality and the Chamber, college of Carmagnola. Fiat cuts his orders. In 1910 his first wife died. He emigrates to France, to Lyon, then to Paris he installs electrical systems.
In 1914 war broke out between France and Germany. Derfner enlisted in the Italian Legion promoted by Peppino Garibaldi, nephew of the Hero of the two worlds, and by his brothers, who fought alongside the French in the Argonne. Wounded, he is promoted to captain, but assigned to the Foreign Legion. He ends up fighting in the Dardanelles following the Anglo-French, then in Morocco. He is again dealing with a war that he does not share, the colonial one. He resigns from the army and goes back to electrical engineering. He gets the Legion of Honor.
The fascist police dealt with him in 1929: residing in Paris, he now seems to be foreign to political life, so much so that he obtained a passport from the Consulate with which he returned for short periods to Italy. It is even proposed that it be removed from the central political record, since the Union of Garibaldini dell’Argonne, one of the veterans’ associations of ’14 headed by Camillo Marabini and Ezio Garibaldi (the rest of the family is decidedly anti-fascist) , is well regarded by the regime.
However, when the Union began to make propaganda among Italian emigrants to enlist in a new Legion that could be inserted in the French army as an anti-German function (1938), Derfner, now colonel and vice president of the association, was reinstated in the Criminal Registry, all the more so because suspected of Jewish origins and architect of the acceptance among the members of the former combatants of the International Brigades of Spain. In disruption with Marabini, he ultimately supports Sante Garibaldi’s efforts to give the Italian Legion a decidedly anti-fascist character.
It survives the Nazi occupation, even if the headquarters of the Garibaldi Union in rue de Rivoli is occupied by the enemy. He will be back in possession of the red shirts with the Liberation. Derfner is its president. Together with the associations of fighters of other nationalities and with the Anpi, it organizes exchanges between Italy and France, commemorations not only of the Great War, but of the European Resistance (plaque for the Rosselli brothers and more).
He died in his nineties after an adventurous life. After all, who in 1902 could think of founding a Chamber of Labor in Cuneo, a province then poor in factories, conformist and right-thinking, if not a Garibaldian, contemptuous of danger and a lover of risk?
It should be emphasized that going to the assault with the red shirt at the time of the machine guns was almost suicide. In Argonne the Italian legion left hundreds of dead on the field, including two of the six sons of Ricciotti Garibaldi. –
*historical