“Christ of the Workers”

“Christ of the Workers” names Nicola Bombacci as both a bearer of revolutionary hope and a figure caught between the promise of collective action and the difficulty of making it happen. The religious title gives his political role a devotional scale, but the book repeatedly places that scale beside his hesitation: the crowd looks to him for a word that he cannot bring himself to say.

The Making of an Epithet

At the Socialist Party’s congress in Bologna, the maximalist majority adopted a platform inspired by the Bolshevik revolution, which it hailed as a defining event for the proletariat. The party rewrote its old charter for the new revolutionary moment and appointed Bombacci secretary. The book presents the title “Christ of the Workers” in this setting: he preaches the advent of an Italian Soviet republic and the transfer of power to the proletariat. The movement’s new emblem, a hammer and sickle encircled by ears of corn, gives that promise a visible form.

The epithet makes Bombacci more than a party functionary. It casts him as an interpreter of workers’ hopes, someone expected to announce a new political order. Yet the image also sharpens the tension between faith and action. At a great rally in Bologna, with the crowd gathered around the statue of Neptune, Bombacci hesitates to pronounce the word revolution. The people have come to hear it; they leave without the declaration they expected.

A Revolutionary Program and Its Limits

Bombacci pursued revolution through organization as well as oratory. At the Socialist Party’s national council in Florence on January 11, he argued for forming councils on the Russian model throughout Italy. His proposal received 401 of the 440 votes cast, a substantial show of support. But support did not mean agreement on timing or method. Palmiro Togliatti dismissed the proposal as premature and theoretically incomplete, likening Italian councils to an imitation of Russian ones.

The book sets Bombacci’s confidence in mass politics against the party’s divisions. In fifteen months, socialist membership had increased tenfold to more than 200,000, yet the leadership remained reluctant to turn that strength into an alliance broad enough to include Gabriele D’Annunzio. Bombacci pressed for such a coalition; other leaders raised objections, as they had to his council proposal. His revolutionary ambition thus repeatedly met resistance not only from opponents but from colleagues who questioned its readiness or political wisdom.

The Revolutionary Vanguard’s Expectations

The Communist International’s representative in Italy, Vladimir Degott, saw Bombacci as a possible instrument of decisive action. Behind the scenes at the congress, Degott worked to prepare for revolution and criticized the socialist leadership for its caution. He regarded Giacinto Menotti Serrati as politically accommodating, Antonio Gramsci as perceptive but unable to influence the masses, and other leaders as lacking initiative. Degott and, through him, Vladimir Lenin placed their hopes in Bombacci, expecting him to side with the advancing proletarian vanguard when the moment came.

That confidence makes the epithet more than praise: it records an expectation placed upon Bombacci by forces inside and outside the party. Yet the book complicates the image by noting that Bombacci had studied in a seminary, had been declared unfit for military service for health reasons, and believed himself incapable of harming even a fly. The contrast is not simply between a symbolic leader and a crowd; it is between the revolutionary role others project onto him and his own reluctance to endorse violence.

Promise, Hesitation, and Political Meaning

Bombacci’s later efforts continued to test whether revolutionary aspiration could become practical politics. He sought to establish diplomatic relations between Italy and Lenin’s Russia, treating recognition as a possible opening toward revolution. In Copenhagen, however, Leonid Krasin made clear that his mandate was to secure recognition of Moscow, not to advance an Italian proletarian revolution. The book thereby sets Bombacci’s hopes beside a diplomatic agenda with narrower aims.

The title’s force lies in this unresolved gap. “Christ of the Workers” evokes a leader entrusted with collective longing, while the scenes around him show how that longing can remain suspended between a mass mandate, organizational disputes, international expectations, and hesitation at the decisive moment. The epithet dignifies Bombacci, but it also exposes the burden of being made into the answer to a revolution that the surrounding political actors have not yet brought about.