Paolo Treves

Who was Paolo Treves?

Born in Milan in 1908, son of the well-known Italian socialist Claudio Treves. Paolo Treves worked for the Milanese socialist paper La Giustizia in the early 1920s and studied under Benedetto Croce, with whom he corresponded until the outbreak of war despite the latter's tacit support for Benito Mussolini. After the Fascist takeover, Paolo was singled out and detained for several months by the government, primarily because of Mussolini's hatred of the elder Treves.

After fleeing Italy, Paolo became a member of the Executive Committee of the underground Partito Socialista Italiano. He worked as a liaison officer with Italian exiles in Paris and then, following his father's death in 1933, lived in the UK from 1938 to 1944. Treves studied Linguistics at Liverpool University in 1939 and became a lecturer in Italian at Bedford College of the University of London. He was recruited to be a scriptwriter and broadcaster for the Italian section of the BBC in 1940 and worked for the BBC until 1944. He contributed to several papers on Italian affairs and published 'What Mussolini did to us' and 'Italy, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow'. As a member of the London branch of the PSI, Treves sat on the Advisory Committee of International Socialist Forum and the International Bureau of the Fabian Society.