Politics and exile
After the war Lussu, together with Camillo Bellieni, founded the Partidu Sardu-Partito Sardo d'Azione (Sardinian Action Party), that blended social-democratic values and Sardinian nationalism. The party took a formal position in 1921, opposing the increasing power of the Fascist movement. Lussu was elected to the Italian parliament in 1921 and, in 1924 was among the Aventine secessionists who withdrew from the Italian Parliament after the murder of Giacomo Matteotti.
Lussu's anti-Fascist position was, at the time, one of the most radical in Italy. Lussu was physically attacked and injured by unknown aggressors several times. In 1926, during one of these attacks (notably, the same day that Benito Mussolini suffered an attack in Bologna), Lussu shot one of the squadristi (italian blackshirts), in self-defense. He was arrested and tried, being found non-guilty due to the right to self defense, only to be later sentenced (due to fascist political interference) to 5 years of confinement on the island of Lipari, within the Aeolian Islands near the northern coast of Sicily.
In 1929 Lussu escaped from his confinement and reached Paris. There, together with Gaetano Salvemini, Carlo Rosselli, Riccardo Bauer, Ernesto Rossi and other anti-fascist refugees he founded Giustizia e Libertà (Justice and Freedom), an anti-Fascist movement that proposed revolutionary methods to upset the Italian Fascist Regime. While in exile, he came to be known as "Mister Mills".
In 1938, Lussu's novel "One Year on the High Plateau" (Un anno sull'altipiano) was published in Paris. This thinly fictional account tells of the lives of soldiers during World War I and the trench warfare they encountered. One Year on the High Plateau underlines, with chill rationalism, how the irrationalities of warfare affected the common man. Gifted with a keen sense of observation and sharp logic, Lussu demonstrates how distant the real life of soldiers is from everyday activities. In a notable passage, he describes the silent terror in the moments preceding an attack, as he is forced to abandon the "safe" protective trench for an external unknown, risky, undefined world: "All the machine-guns are waiting for us".
