The Red Brigades cover art

The Red Brigades

The Terrorists who Brought Italy to its Knees

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The Red Brigades

By: John Foot
Narrated by: Mark Meadows
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About this listen

 Bloomsbury presents The Red Brigades by John Foot, read by Mark Meadows.

'A compelling and sobering read' JOHN DICKIE
'Deeply researched and powerfully written' ROSS KING

The explosive story of the terrorist group who brought Italy to a standstill in the 1970s.

In March 1978, the Red Brigades kidnapped former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro, murdering his bodyguards. For nearly two months, they held him hostage while a shocked world looked on, before eventually killing him and dumping his body in the middle of Rome.

But who were this terrorist group? What did they want? And how did they continue to operate for almost twenty years, terrifying a nation from 1970 to 1988? In John Foot’s remarkable new book, we learn how they became the most formidable left-wing terrorist organisation in post-war Western Europe.

Drawing their support from the student protest movements of the 1960s, activists and workers radicalised by the ‘hot autumn’ of 1969, the Red Brigades were inspired by terrorist groups from across the world, especially in Latin America. They recognised no rules and authority other than their own, and launched a campaign of murder, kidnap, kneecapping and intimidation that paralysed Italy’s justice system and reshaped the political landscape. For a time, they were admired as freedom fighters by the Italian left and commemorated as martyrs.

Through meticulous research, Foot uncovers the true story behind the myths that have grown around the Red Brigades, highlighting the human costs of their actions, as well as their impact on Italian society. He explains how the contradictions inherent in their actions eventually led to their downfall in a series of high-profile mass trials. The Red Brigades sheds new light on the shadowy world of the brigatisti, and highlights their legacy of conspiracy, distrust and bitterness that still lingers in Italy to this day.©2025 John Foot (P)2025 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Freedom & Security Politics & Government War & Crisis Italy War Rome

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Critic reviews

A sober, painstaking corrective to wild notions that have the group as the catspaw of the CIA, the Rothschilds or Italy’s secret services (James Owen)
John Foot’s history of the Red Brigades is as comprehensive a study as you will find, and it should be the final one… Foot has carried out an immense amount of research and provides an extraordinary quantity of detail (Simon Gaul)
If John Foot’s The Red Brigades were not so clear-eyed, well-documented and humane, the story it tells would scarcely be believable. A small group of misfits managed to bring Italy’s courts to a grinding halt and shake democracy to its foundations. Foot deploys previously unstudied material to reconstruct the Red Brigades’ woolly ideology, their cult of violence, their tactics, and the escalating horror of their actions. He is pitiless in exposing how intellectuals and ordinary citizens alike acquiesced to the Red Brigades’ reign of terror, and how a generation of journalists failed to question the way victims were dehumanised. A compelling and sobering read (John Dickie, author of MAFIA REPUBLIC)
All stars
Most relevant
Well written, narrated and researched. You do need to be interested in the topic because it is long and detailed. It is somewhat difficult to keep up with all the different names.

Thorough research, serious work

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This is a good thoroughly-researched narrative account. The motivation and strategy of the BR remains hard to fathom, not least because of it's decentralised and fluid structure and lack of ideological coherence. Perhaps the author could have said more about its ideas and tactics which often seem to have had more in common with the Italian anarchist tradition than Marxism.

Helps to unravel the mystery

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