Ernesto Bonomini

Who was Ernesto Bonomini?

Ernesto Bonomini was born on 18 March 1903 at Pozzolengo in Italy. From a very young age he became interested in socialist ideas and became an active antimilitarist. He trained as a tailor, in which trade he was expert.

With the fascist repression against the workers’, socialist and anarchist movements, Ernesto was forced to emigrate to France in 1922. In Paris, he became an anarchist. Horrified by the beatings, imprisonment and murder administered by the Italian fascist regime, he decided to act. On 20 February 1924 he shot at a leading Italian fascist in a Paris restaurant and slew him. This fascist, Nicola Bonservizi, was the leading official of the local fascio and editor in Paris of the fascist paper L’Italie Nouvelle and correspondent for the Italian fascist paper Popolo d’Italia. Bonservizi spied on the exiled opposition, passing information back to Mussolini’s secret police and making sure they were harassed in France. Arrested after the killing, he was tried on 24 October 1924. At his trial he declared that he wanted to avenge the victims of fascism, adding that he had no sympathy for Soviet communism which persecuted anarchists as much as fascism did. He was sentenced to 8 years hard labour, which was then commuted to simple imprisonment.