Claudio Treves (24 March 1869 – 11 June 1933) was an Italian politician and journalist.
Claudio Treves was born inTurin into a well off assimilated Jewish family. As a student he participated in theRadical milieu of Turin and, in 1888, he joined first his university's student radical circle, then the local independent labor union, influenced by theMilanese socialistFilippo Turati. In 1892 he graduated in law and made his way into the militantsocialist community.
Treves became a member of the managing committee of thePiedmontese regional federation of thePartito Socialista Italiano (PSI), and in 1894, prosecuted under the 'exceptional laws' on sedition, he spent two months in prison. For some years after he travelled abroad, spending two years toBerlin, then on toParis, Switzerland, Netherlands, Belgium and Scandinavia. All the while Treves was sending reports from these countries toAvanti!, the Italian socialist paper. He contributed to several newspapers and periodicals, among which werePer l'idea,Grido del popolo (which he edited from 1896 to 1898),Critica Sociale,Lotta,Lotta di classe,Rassegna popolare del socialismo,Riscatto and, finally, Milan'sUniversità popolare where he was on the editorial board until 1915.
In 1899 he moved to Milan to become editor of the dailyIl Tempo, which under his stewardship became a leading voice for greater democracy and the ItalianReformist Socialist movement. Working closely with Turati, in 1906 he was elected deputy from Milan. over the next decade, the PSI see-sawed between reformist and revolutionary factions. Seen as far too close toGiovanni Giolitti and the Liberals, Turati and the Reformists lost control of the party in 1904, regained it in 1908, only to lose it again in 1912. After the Milan conference of the PSI in 1910 he was named editor ofAvanti!, a job in which he was succeeded in 1912 byGiovanni Bacci and laterBenito Mussolini before the one time socialist's drift to the right. As a result of the division in the socialist movement between 'Maximalists' andReformists, in 1922, with Turati,Giacomo Matteotti, and Treves founded theUnitary Socialist Party (PSU). He was named editor of the party's paper,La Giustizia, only to see it closed by state order of the newFascist government in 1925.
In November 1926 Treves fled into exile, emigrating first to Switzerland and then to France, where he was one of the more frequent collaborators of the weekly journal of the PSLI (the underground successor to the now outlawedPSU),Rinascita socialista. In 1927 he was named editor ofLa Libertà, journal of theConcentrazione Antifascista Italiana, a coalition of non-communist Italian anti-fascist groups. In 1930 he supported the unification of the PSLI and thePSI. Always attentive to the evolution of European Socialism, he attended theBritish Labour Party conference of 1930, the international trade union conference inMadrid in June 1931 and the conference of theSocialist International inVienna in July 1931.
He died on 11 June 1933, still in exile in Paris, and in 1948 his ashes were returned to Milan.
Treves' son,Paolo Treves, later succeeded him as a militant of thePSI and editor ofAvanti!, while his sister,Annetta Treves, was also active in Milanese politics. She is the mother of writer and activistCarlo Levi.
In theFlorestano Vancini's filmThe Assassination of Matteotti (1973), Treves is played byManlio Busoni.
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