Umberto Merlin

Umberto Merlin was the only Catholic deputy elected in the Rovigo-Ferrara district, representing the party founded by Don Luigi Sturzo. A classmate of Giacomo Matteotti at secondary school in Rovigo, he appears in the narrative as both a political opponent in a heated parliamentary debate and a figure bound to Matteotti by an earlier act of personal solidarity. His intervention complicates any simple division between defenders and critics of political violence: he demanded that violence be judged consistently, without claiming that one side’s wrongdoing excused the other’s.

Identity and Connection to Matteotti

Merlin and Matteotti were the same age and had attended the Celio secondary school in Rovigo together. Their connection extended beyond their schooldays. In 1919, when socialist peasants were about to beat Merlin, Matteotti physically placed himself between them and his former classmate. The episode gives their later parliamentary exchange a personal history: Matteotti had once protected Merlin, even as the two occupied different political positions.

Intervention in the Parliamentary Debate

Merlin spoke after Matteotti had denounced fascist violence as the work of an organized gang and described the political struggle as barbarism. The narrator stresses that the reply came neither from a fascist nor from a right-wing extremist, but from a Catholic deputy who had known Matteotti since school. Merlin argued that fascists, too, had mourned their dead before socialists did. He cited a young man stabbed in Gavello and another stabbed in Badia, locating these incidents within the cycle of violence in the Polesine.

A Call for Reciprocal Accountability

Merlin also described the changing risks of political affiliation in his province. Whereas declaring oneself a socialist had once required courage, he said, humble workers now risked difficulty by joining Catholic organizations and affirming the faith of their fathers in a predominantly socialist region. Turning from that defense of Catholics to his former classmate, he urged the socialists to help end the intolerable violence by condemning the violence of others without making excuses for their own, even when they disapproved of it. The argument was not that the violence was equivalent in every respect; it was a demand that political allegiance not become a license to overlook harm committed by one’s own side.

Narrative Role and Significance

Merlin’s intervention appalled the socialists, while the chamber applauded. It interrupted Matteotti’s renewed denunciation of fascist violence without resolving the underlying dispute; the narrator presents that speech as being drowned in the wider European civil conflict. Merlin thus serves as a counterpoint to the debate’s hardening alignments. His former classmate’s intervention on his behalf in 1919 and his own appeal for reciprocal condemnation show a relationship that cannot be reduced to party labels, even as their political differences remain consequential.