Marina Petrella has lived in France for thirty years. She is now 68 years old, and risks ending her days in prison. A former member of the Red Brigades, she is accused of having participated in the assassination of a policeman and the kidnapping of a magistrate, and sentenced to life imprisonment in Italy. She is one of the ten former Italian activists summoned before the French courts, after their arrest on the decision of Emmanuel Macron.
These political exiles are all accused of having taken part in terrorist acts during the “years of lead” (from the end of the 1060s to the beginning of the 1980s). They have rebuilt their lives in France, for some for four decades, far from the armed struggle they had pledged to leave. Such were the unwritten terms of the “Mitterrand doctrine”, which in exchange granted them asylum.
Since the 1990s, French governments have respected the same pact towards former far-left activists, despite repeated extradition requests from Italy. In 2008, when she was claimed by Silvio Berlusconi, Nicolas Sarkozy renounced to extradite Marina Petrella because of her state of health. According to historian Marc Lazar, the insistence of his wife, Carla Bruni, would have done much to avoid this extradition. It would, in fact, “the whole Bruni Tedeschi family who convinced Nicolas Sarkozy”, he specifies.
A gesture of humanity variously interpreted
Carla Bruni and her sister Valeria Bruni Tedeschi come from a family of wealthy Milanese industrialists. Believing themselves to be threatened by far-left terrorism, their parents fled Italy in 1972. Twenty-five years later, reports “Sensitive Affairs”, there was this astonishing scene: the two sisters incognito at Marina’s bedside Petrella, threatened with extradition, on hunger strike at Sainte-Anne hospital. This gesture of humanity on their part could be interpreted as a form of forgiveness.
This gesture, Patrick Raynal, the first publisher of Cesare Battisti, another Italian political exile who made a career in France as an author of thrillers, finds it “magnificent” and admire “that people follow their heart, or their reason, and go against their interests”. But for the daughter of a journalist from Corriere della Sera killed by a small group from the extreme left, it goes badly coming from a “first lady”.
Benedetta Tobagi sees it on the contrary “great naivety“typical of”this high bourgeoisie with leftist ideas”, “seduced by the story and by the representation of ex-terrorists, (…) seen as romantics or anti-system rebels“. She considers these extraditions necessary because “justice must do its job” – adding “that we must fight to demand the most humane treatment possible, and penalties that take into account the time that has elapsed since the facts, the state of health, age…“If there is an extradition, the procedure will be long anyway, and Marina Petrella will not know her fate for several months.
Excerpt from “Red Brigades: the end of exile?”, a document to see on March 28, 2022 in “Sensitive Affairs”, a magazine presented by Fabrice Drouelle and co-produced by France Télévisions, France Inter and INA based on the original France Inter broadcast.
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