Hongseu Travel

The Red Brigades appear in the novel as a point of reference in changing political explanations, rather than as the subject of a sustained account of their organization or activities. Their significance lies in the way their language about hidden power can be taken up in a later inquiry into synarchy—and in how the novel shows conspiracy narratives recycling political fears until invented connections begin to seem real.

Political Context and the Synarchy Inquiry

In a conversation with Casaubon, Inspector De Angelis remarks that his work once seemed simpler: a decade earlier, the Red Brigades were sought in squats, while the Black Brigades were sought in martial arts clubs. He immediately qualifies that old division, suggesting that the expected locations might now be reversed. In his view, ideological labels and affiliations have become less consistent, making political investigation harder to orient.

De Angelis’s uncertainty leads him to ask Casaubon about synarchy, a subject he knows only from its association with Saint-Yves. He describes a theory in which international technocrats supposedly destabilize governments by provoking wars, supporting coups, and fomenting political divisions. Casaubon recognizes in this account the Imperialist Multinational State that the Red Brigades had discussed years earlier. The exchange presents their vocabulary as part of a broader political discourse about concealed power, not as proof that the alleged plot exists.

Casaubon’s Counter-Explanation

Casaubon answers De Angelis with an ironic alternative: a secret society might exist whose purpose is to spread the rumor that a universal conspiracy exists. His response turns the logic of conspiracy inside out. Rather than identifying a hidden group behind every crisis, he points to the appeal of blaming an external enemy for failures and to the political usefulness of such an enemy in holding followers together.

The scene matters because it places the Red Brigades’ earlier formulation beside a skeptical account of conspiracy itself. Casaubon’s remark does not establish that the movement deliberately created such a rumor; instead, the conversation shows how familiar political language can be reinterpreted as evidence for a new theory. De Angelis’s need for guidance from Casaubon, whom he treats as a Templar expert, also gives the exchange an ironic edge: expertise acquired through the group’s speculative research is now being consulted in an official inquiry.

The Movement as Material for the Plan

As Casaubon, Belbo, and Diotallevi compile material for their invented Plan, they connect historical and political fragments through increasingly loose associations. Casaubon later recognizes that their repeated practice of linking everything to everything else trained them to make those connections automatically. What began as parody of conspiratorial reasoning could, through habit, become belief; he distinguishes his own growing addiction to the game from Diotallevi’s corruption and Belbo’s conversion.

The Red Brigades’ reference to an Imperialist Multinational State belongs to this wider landscape of political suspicions. The novel does not give the organization a developed role in the Plan’s history; instead, its political vocabulary becomes one recognizable fragment among many that can be folded into a supposedly comprehensive pattern. Casaubon’s account makes the danger of that process explicit: a connection can acquire force through repetition and analogy even when it began as a joke or an unsupported association.

Conspiracy, Fabrication, and Consequence

The Plan’s apparent power derives partly from the responses it provokes. Casaubon explains that the trio invented a nonexistent Plan, yet its adherents believed it had always existed and identified fragments of their own confused mythologies as parts of it. Once people act on an invented plan, he observes, it can become real in its consequences. The Red Brigades’ passing place in the novel thus participates in a larger argument about how political ideas and accusations can be detached from their original setting and recruited into new explanatory systems.

That argument has particular force in the novel’s treatment of fabricated antisemitic conspiracies. Its characters trace the supposed Protocols through layers of borrowing, forgery, and political use, while their own method repeatedly converts suspicion into apparent confirmation. Against that history, the Red Brigades are not presented as an explanation for the conspiracies discussed; they are one political reference within a narrative about how the desire for a hidden cause can turn disconnected material into a persuasive, self-reinforcing plot.