On 24 September 1961, a long procession wended its way down the final stage of the northern Franciscan Way, from Perugia to Assisi. No less than twenty thousand people gathered at the finish at Prato della Rocca, the fields in front of an impressive fortress that dated back to the time of Saint Francis himself, and that had once been held by Frederick Barbarossa, the 12th century Holy Roman Emperor. As the mass of people, carrying signs for a variety of peace causes, slowly arrived at the fortress, the march’s convenor, Italian philosopher and Gandhian Aldo Capitini, took to the stage. Capitini was a well-known public figure because of his long-standing association with the anti-fascist movement. He could count on the sympathy of other Italian intellectuals like Italo Calvino and Arturo Carlo Jemolo, who took the stage with him. Their call was for a broad-based coalition for peace, that collectively would show that ‘pacifism and nonviolence are not inert and passive acceptance of existing evils, but are active and engaged in struggle, with their own methods that relentlessly inspire solidarity, non-collaboration and protest’.
Far from being confined to formal institutions and meeting halls, peace internationalism in the 1960s was characterised by physical and public action. This specific march had been prompted by the nuclear anxiety that threatened to engulf the planet – an anxiety that had grown when it became apparent in early 1960 that the moratorium on nuclear testing, observed by the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom, was starting to break down. The first French nuclear test in the Algerian Sahara had thrown further fuel onto the fire. The months between the announcement of the march in September 1960 and the actual event a year later had not been quiet, either. Six weeks before the march, construction of the Berlin wall had begun, sparking widespread fears in Italy – as in other European NATO countries – of catastrophic escalation of East-West tensions. Both the US and the Soviet Union resumed nuclear testing a few weeks later.
That same autumn, American anthropologist Margaret Mead diagnosed this nuclear anxiety as a breakdown of civilian morale, ‘confused, panicky, and incoherent’. She urged people to put that anxiety to more constructive use. Rather than relying on the nation-state and its logic of deterrence as the only means of protection, she wanted them to imagine a world-nation, because,
‘the more expansive we become in our willingness to take responsibility not only for our children but for all children, including the children of our enemies, the more we can mobilise our energies and the energies of the world to bring into being these new forms of nationhood’.
In the face of systemic breakdown, she urged people not to succumb to their basest instincts by protecting only their own, but to protect everyone.
In Italy, meanwhile, Capitini thought along similar lines: he considered the overwhelming enthusiasm for the march as a sign that people did not feel represented by national political rhetoric. It was proof that people needed something more direct: they needed to feel that they too were doing something, taking action. And rather than telling people what to do with their anxiety, Capitini wanted to give them an opportunity to make themselves heard, to participate actively and without mediation in propagating peace. Capitini wrote after the march:
‘A march is not a congress, where few speak and many listen and not everyone understands; in a march everyone is equal, the farmer and the intellectual, the working woman and the student, and this creates an exciting sense of community. Everyone can carry a sign’.
Dismayed by the divisions wrought by party politics, to which Capitini had a well-documented aversion, he wanted to ensure people could participate in the most direct of ways: by moving their bodies from one place to another. And where better to do that than in the footsteps of St. Francis, the saint who had embodied non-violence by opposing the crusades and advocating for the compassionate treatment of animals both human and non-human.
In this way, the Perugia to Assisi march was designed to democratise the peace internationalism that Capitini believed could ‘unite Italians more than any other idea’. Officially called Marcia per la Pace e la Fratellanza dei Popoli (March for Peace and Brotherhood Among Peoples), it called on ordinary people to take responsibility for the world – a call that would soon be echoed by Margaret Mead. But Capitini’s call had a condition attached. The path towards such a universalism was not negotiable: it had to be non-violent.
‘To fight with destructive means can lead to the elimination of the entire human race, and that therefore we must find a new universal morality. Therefore, nonviolent methods of struggle are of great importance. They can be applied to all liberations, following Gandhi’s example’.
But creating a truly democratised peace march while also insisting on a message of non-violence was a difficult balance to achieve. Participants were free to bring their own protest signs, but the organisation would not tolerate violent or hateful messages, attempting to discipline participants somewhat in a leaflet that explained:
‘Assisi was chosen because St Francis in the Middle Ages and in the West, and Gandhi in the modern age and in the East, are two great popular teachers, implementers and propagators of the nonviolent method, from whom one can always draw valuable inspiration, even with differing ideologies. It will be up to the marchers to broaden and enrich the meaning of the demonstration with their placards…’
As a result, the march advocated for a variety of internationalist causes that related in varying degrees to peace. The march organisers provided participants with a list of suggested quotes on non-violence and respect for life for their placards, most of them by Gandhi, and some by the German polymath and pacifist Albert Schweitzer. Other suggested slogans spoke directly to global politics, calling for solidarity with Afro-Asia or with ‘the peoples of Belgrado’, as the Non-Aligned Conference there had ended just three weeks prior. Notably, the suggested slogans steered clear of voicing support for national liberation movements. This was a contentious issue in pacifist internationalism, which generally opposed colonial oppression, but refused to be complicit in anticolonial violence. While most participants used slogans from the list, this was one point where participants deviated from the script, and carried placards against the Portuguese in Angola or the murder of Lumumba, which had occurred earlier in 1961.
The Perugia to Assisi march succeeded in mobilising a politically and socially diverse crowd. Its members voiced the call for ‘peace and brotherhood among peoples’ in different ways, but they all marched non-violently to Assisi in the footsteps of the saint. Despite the march’s specific blending of Gandhi and St Francis in reshaping a local pilgrimage route, many of the Italian marchers were acutely aware that they were not marching in isolation. The march closely and explicitly identified with the Aldermaston marches, in which several of the Perugia to Assisi marchers had themselves participated. The nuclear anxiety of the 1960s had inspired people all over the world to democratise protest in the purest of ways: to move their bodies. In 1961 alone, Dutch youth organised a long-distance bike ride to the Volkel Air Force base in the Netherlands to protest the placement of American nuclear warheads on Dutch soil. Earle Reynolds and his family sailed from Japan to Nakodhka in the USSR along with anti-nuclear activists Nick Mikami and Tom Yoneda to protest the resumption of Soviet tests. And while the Italian marchers stood at the Rocca in Assisi, the San Francisco to Moscow march had just reached Russia, some nine months into their journey.
Peace internationalism was never restricted to the meeting halls of international conferences alone. Importantly, the obverse is true as well: the institutional world of peace internationalism was never separate from physical peace marches. Long-standing international peace organisations like the War Resisters’ International or the International Fellowship of Reconciliation co-organised, hosted and participated in peace marches. Peace advocates who worked to enshrine the right to conscientious objection into law, who were religious leaders, or who ran for parliaments and legislatures on pacifist platforms, could march side by side with high school students, trade unionists, and nonconformists. Peace marches were an integral part of peace internationalism in the early 1960s. The global nuclear anxiety of the early 1960s provided this mode of protest with an international commensurability, while international peace organisations provided international connection. In 1961, a Dutch teenager at the Volkel airbase, an American Quaker on the road to Moscow, or indeed Nick Mikami sailing on the Pacific, would have considered themselves engaged in the same peace action as the crowds in Assisi. This construction of a shared repertoire of protest, one that was globally recognisable in outline but locally contingent in form, was not the fringe of peace internationalism, but its heart.