Bologna Chamber of Labour

The Bologna Chamber of Labour was a key labor organization in the unrest that made the countryside around Bologna a battleground over hiring, working conditions, and political power. Its role is shown most clearly at Decima, where speakers sent by the organization addressed a gathering on the collective farm agreement, and in the province-wide general strike it proclaimed after the shooting left eight people dead. The organization’s intervention connected a local confrontation to a broader labor response, though the account distinguishes it from the peasant leagues that organized much of the agricultural struggle.

Position in Bologna’s Labor Conflict

The Chamber operated amid an intensifying contest over revolutionary influence in Bologna. The city had two competing chambers of labor, both associated with revolutionary extremism; the surrounding rural districts were described as being dominated by Socialist Party organizations, including farmers’ unions, cooperatives, and local cells. These networks imposed labor conditions on landowners and made employment a central point of conflict. The Chamber of Labour belonged to this charged political landscape, but the evidence does not establish that it controlled those rural leagues or their activities.

The agricultural dispute was not merely a contest of slogans. In Ferrara, a strike over renewal of the collective farm agreement halted sowing and compelled landowners to accept wage increases, worker-managed hiring centers, and a compulsory employment quota. Similar confrontations spread to other provinces. This wider campaign forms the context for the Chamber’s intervention at Decima, where the collective farm agreement was again the stated subject of a rally.

The Decima Rally and Massacre

At a gathering in Decima di San Giovanni in Persiceto, Sigismondo Campagnoli, sent by the Bologna Chamber of Labour, spoke about the agricultural question before turning to denunciations of capitalists, priests, and the Carabinieri and calls for revolution. A public-order brigadier interrupted him. Pietro Comastri, also sent by the Chamber, then took the platform and promised to moderate the proceedings, but within fifteen minutes he too had moved from discussion of the employment quota to revolutionary language. The brigadier pulled him down from the wooden platform, but the officer’s small force faced around 1,500 angry farmworkers.

The confrontation turned violent after a soda siphon struck the wall beside the farmhouse where the Carabinieri had been lined up. In the confusion that followed, the crowd rushed forward and the officers fired. Eight people were killed and about thirty injured. The account notes that almost all the dead had been shot in the back, and that Campagnoli was killed with a bayonet. The massacre fixed the rally’s outcome in the public memory not as a routine labor meeting, but as a lethal clash between farmworkers and the forces charged with maintaining order.

Strike and Provincial Mobilization

In response to the deaths, the Bologna Chamber of Labour proclaimed a three-day general strike throughout the province. For seventy-two hours, workers withdrew their labor and public and private services stopped. The strike extended the consequences of Decima beyond the people present at the rally: a confrontation over agricultural employment became a province-wide suspension of work.

The stoppage also prompted a political reaction among groups who feared for their safety and property. Farmers, manufacturers, merchants, professionals, public employees, and homeowners began organizing independently. On April 8, a meeting promoted by the Chamber of Commerce established the Bolognese Association of Social Defense. On April 15, that association sent Prime Minister Nitti a brief accusing the state of failing to confront socialist violence and declaring its readiness to act in the name of self-defense. This was a separate organization, not an initiative attributed to the Chamber of Labour, but its formation shows how the strike widened the conflict between organized workers and a mobilizing bourgeois response.

Significance and Limits of the Record

The Chamber’s documented actions reveal two forms of political leverage: sending speakers to a rural meeting and calling a general strike capable of stopping services across a province. Its work connected agricultural demands to urban labor organization, while the events at Decima exposed the danger of a confrontation in which the balance of force lay with armed officers rather than the farmworkers who had gathered to hear the speakers.

The account does not provide a full institutional history of the Chamber, name its leadership, or explain its internal structure. Nor does it identify the organization as the sole author of the wider labor movement’s demands. Its significance rests instead on the sequence it records: representatives addressing the collective farm question, a massacre at the meeting, and the Chamber’s immediate conversion of those deaths into a province-wide strike.