Year XXXIX, Number 1, March 2026

Silvia Romano

EU affairs professional, member of the bureau of Presse Fédéraliste and part of the editorial board of the Fédéchoses.

Youth and education

Francesca, called ‘Checca’ in her family, was born in Venice on 13 December 1919, the second child of lawyer Silvio Trentin and Giuseppina ‘Beppa’ Nardari. In 1924, her father joined the Ca’ Foscari Institute of Commerce in Venice as a professor of public law, after a brief but intense parliamentary experience as a member of the Venetian Social Democratic Party and teaching at the University of Macerata as a professor of administrative law. However, due to growing tensions generated by the fascist regime, and following the issuance of a decree depriving civil servants of their political and intellectual freedoms, Silvio Trentin resigned in January 1926 and left Italy with his entire family. After a long journey, the family crossed the border in early February and settled in Pavie (in France, near Auch), where Franca began primary school with the nuns. In Auch, their second place of exile after the bankruptcy of her father’s farm in Pavie, Franca attended the Girls’ School and obtained her secondary school certificate in July 1934.

At the end of 1934, the family settled in Toulouse, where Silvio Trentin acquired a bookshop at 46 Rue du Languedoc, which became a hub for anti-fascists and intellectuals. It was therefore in Toulouse that Franca attended the Girls’ High School and obtained her baccalaureate in July 1936.

At the heart of European anti-fascism The Spanish Civil War of 1936 was a crucial moment for Franca and her brothers, raising their awareness of the Resistance. Their family hosted young people who had made ‘rebellious’ life choices by abandoning their studies, work and families to join the fight for the freedom of a people. After the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939, Franca often accompanied her mother to Camp de Gurs to bring comfort and relief to the wounded. Her father sent her several times to deliver money and messages to the President of the Spanish Republic in exile, Manuel Azaña Diaz, who had taken refuge in Montauban. Enrolled at the Faculty of Arts in Toulouse, she obtained a degree in English in 1939 and a postgraduate diploma the following year.

After the German occupation of Paris in June 1940, the Trentin bookshop, already frequented by teachers and students from Toulouse, became an attraction for “new arrivals” to the region. All the Italian exiles and a flood of intellectuals, writers, artists, politicians, Jews, and fugitives from Belgium, Holland, Poland, and Germany also frequented the bookshop. Franca breathed the air of European anti-fascism daily. This would be a fundamental part of her personal and professional development. Her open-mindedness and her ability to see beyond borders would accompany her throughout her life, fuelling her intolerance to nationalism, her desire to engage with others and her openness to the world. In 1940, Franca acquired her long-awaited French citizenship, but she had to wait two years before she could sit the state teaching exam. In the meantime, she decided to continue her studies, which led to a second degree in October 1942, a bachelor’s degree in Italian language and literature, marking the start of her academic career as an Italianist. During those same years, to support herself, she accepted temporary substitute teaching positions, worked as an interpreter and translator, supervised municipal summer camps, and served for a long period as secretary to the dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Toulouse. In this role, she was often called upon to deal with bureaucratic and administrative issues, helping students who had fled the capital and wished to continue their studies in what had become the most vibrant, cosmopolitan and welcoming city in the country.

The “shooting star” of Libérer et Fédérer

On 14 July 1942, Silvio Trentin founded the resistance movement ‘Libérer et Fédérer’ (Liberate and Federate), whose objectives were: “To liberate France and Europe from the fascist and Nazi invasion and to unite the peoples of Europe to prevent further wars. [...] To liberate the people from the yoke of a centralised state, inevitably oriented towards totalitarianism and dictatorship, and to federate individuals and professional or spiritual communities in order to coordinate their activities while respecting their autonomy as much as possible.”

For Silvio Trentin, the state must be founded on the ‘permanent and pre-existing value’ of autonomy, ‘understood as the self-realisation of the individual and as self-government” meaning the “self-sufficient organisation of individual groups, whether territorial or not’, constituting civil society . The institutional structure must be modelled on the basis of civil society, as defined above. This is quite similar to the French school of thought known as ‘integral federalism’, which takes up some of his suggestions and whose federalist project is both intranational and supranational. In addition, Silvio Trentin drafted two federalist constitutions, which are among the few examples of texts from that period to mention the ‘European republic’ .

It is important to note, however, that the work of Silvio Trentin and subsequently of Libérer et Fédérer focused primarily on internal federalism. In his work there is no trace of the influence of the Ventotene Manifesto, which focused on the supranational dimension, even though it arrived in Toulouse in 1942 . The main objective of Libérer et Fédérer’s federalism was to prevent the central power from restricting individual freedom and group autonomy in the future, as had been the case in Europe’s totalitarian states.

Franca Trentin’s role in the activities of Libérer et Fédérer is well recognized, particularly in relation to her numerous missions as a courier in Lyon and Marseille, delivering messages. Some called her the ‘étoile filante’ (shooting star) of Libérer et Fédérer. As a naturalised citizen, she was able to move around freely and her father entrusted her with these important and dangerous missions.

Although Franca did not develop federalist ideas at that time, or simply took no interest in them (she later claimed to have acted in a “semi-conscious” state), she was naturally driven by a genuine “existential Europeanism”. This was the result of the environment in which she grew up, in daily contact with intellectuals and resistance fighters from several countries in her family’s bookshop. The aspiration for a free and united Europe was therefore obvious. Libérer et Fédérer ultimately had a circumscribed development, due to its regional presence being restricted to the Garonne valley and its limited financial resources. The departure of Silvio Trentin left the movement without its political mentor. In 1944, Libérer et Fédérer merged with the Lyon-based movement ‘L’Insurgé’ to form the Revolutionary Socialist Movement, but this now played a minor role. 

When Silvio, Beppa and their two sons returned to Italy in August 1943, Franca, the only member of the family to have become a naturalised French citizen, was unable to leave the country. However, even after her family’s departure, she continued to participate clandestinely in local resistance movements. On 2nd March 1944, she married Horace Torrubia, a young Catalan man who was a hero of the Spanish Civil War, a communist and a member of the French Resistance. Due to the breakdown in communications with Italy, her family was unable to be informed of the marriage, and Franca only learned of her father’s death – which occurred ten days later, on 12 March – much later.

After the liberation of Toulouse in August 1944, Franca moved to the city with Horace. She applied for membership in the Association des Résistants de 1940. In 1946, she was awarded the Croix de la Résistance. On 1 June 1946, her son Silvio Torrubia was born in Toulouse.

The post-war period: emancipation through career

It was through her work that Franca found independence, both financially and psychologically. She aspired to become someone in her own right by freeing herself from the role of ‘daughter of’ and all the conditioning she had grown up with. After failing the first time, she passed the public competitive examination for teaching Italian language and literature with flying colours in 1951. She was immediately appointed to the Faculty of Arts in Dijon as an assistant professor of Italian. In 1954, she divorced Horace. In the meantime, she had met Mario Baratto, cultural director of the Italian Communist Party in Venice, then professor of Italian language and literature at the Écoles Normales Supérieures in Paris. They married in 1956 and their son Giorgio was born in 1958.

From 1956 to 1959, as a research fellow at the CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research), Franca conducted research at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the Sorbonne. She was appointed head of the Italian department in 1959 and, from 1961, became a senior lecturer while also serving as a union representative at the Parisian university. From Paris, Franca and Mario became a point of reference for Italian writers, intellectuals and journalists to introduce to a wider French audience. In addition to promoting cultural events, Franca, called the ‘passeuse’ (facilitator)in an article published by Le Monde after her death, created in her living room a multitude of crossovers between different worlds and disciplines.

In 1966, while her husband was teaching Italian literature in Italy, Franca obtained a secondment to the Faculty of Languages at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice as a lecturer in French language and literature. She followed with determination the initiatives of the Silvio Trentin Study Centre, founded in 1974 in Jesolo, and the publications of her father’s selected works, edited by historian Giannantonio Paladini.

Years of political activism: pacifism and feminism come together

As retired from teaching (1985) and no longer a French civil servant, she took part in political activism and several initiatives related to the women’s movement and to the study of the Resistance. From 1996 to 2000, she was president of the Venetian Institute for the History of the Resistance and Contemporary Society.

Already close to feminist movements in France, she took part in the major campaigns of the time, including the legalisation of abortion, which led to the adoption of the Veil Law. Once in Italy she continued to take an interest in feminist issues, which she explored in greater depth from a literary perspective by organising courses such as ‘Le madri di noi tutte’ (the mothers of all of us) and through associative and political activism. In particular, a recurring theme in Franca Trentin’s reflections was women’s political citizenship.

Furthermore, it was during the Gulf War that Franca’s activism turned towards pacifism. In this context, she took the initiative to create a feminist association for peace called ‘Donne sul piede di pace’ (women on the foot of peace). Once the war was over, together with the other women member of the association, they decided to explore the complex question of pacifism in the face of the reality of war. During those same years, Franca played a leading role in the association ‘Donne per la città’ (Women for the City). Solidarity among women of all ages, professions and ‘social classes’ was central to her idea of feminism.

Moreover, Franca Trentin wanted her archives to be passed on to women, and she herself chose to donate them, a few months before her death, to the association for women’s memory and history ‘rEsistenze’, of which she was a founding member . The archives are housed at the Casa della Memoria e della Storia (CMS) in Venice, in the same location as the IVESER archives (Venetian Institute for the History of Resistance and Contemporary Society). Defending federalism from the manipulations of the Northern League.

In 1996, the Silvio Trentin Centre for Studies on Federalism was inaugurated in Padua, with the stated aim of providing a space for study and exchange on federalism, paying tribute to the thinking of the great Italian jurist. Among the founders of the study centre were Lega Nord municipal councillor Elio Franzin and University of Padua professor Mario Quaranta, as well as many prominent figures from the Lega Nord, including party leader Umberto Bossi.

It is therefore clear that Silvio Trentin’s name has no place among the secessionist and xenophobic demands of the Lega Nord (now Matteo Salvini’s ‘Lega’). Silvio Trentin’s writings, not well known to the general public, have thus fallen into the trap of a political party seeking to build a theoretical foundation to legitimise its secessionist rhetoric, which envisages Northern Italy separating from the Centre-South.

Although Silvio Trentin’s three children are all strongly opposed to this association, Giorgio and Bruno leave their sister Franca to fight alone to defend their father’s memory. It is at this point that she immerses herself in her father’s thinking guided by Professor Giannantonio Paladini.

In letters addressed to the leaders of the Centro Studi sui Federalismi, as well as to the editors of the local press, Franca fought against the ‘absurd exploitation’ of Silvio Trentin’s thinking, which ‘has nothing to do with the ideas promoted by the Lega’. On the contrary, as an early anti-fascist in exile in France, Silvio Trentin – along with his family and entourage – had tried to convey an image of Italy and Veneto that ‘in no way corresponds to that proposed by Umberto Bossi’. Professors Paladini and Giovanni De Luna will also take part in the debate to shed light on Silvio Trentin’s federalism, which never questioned the unity of Italy . The Treviso branch of the Associazione Nazionale Partigiani d’Italia (ANPI) will also take a stand to defend the memory of Silvio Trentin as a leading figure in the anti-fascist resistance in France with Libérer et Fédérer, as well as in Italy, notably through his actions alongside the ‘partigiani’ of the Treviso region, which led to his arrest in 1943.

Franca Trentin died at her home in Venice on 28 November 2010, in accordance with her wishes, and ‘anti-fascist’ is the only word accompanying her name in the family obituary.