Antifascist migration Social history allows us to question contemporary society by applying innovative methods compared to traditional political historiography. By focusing on the experience of common antifascists through ego-documents - mostly letters and oral sources -, we can uncover a migratory phenomenon that is both political and economic, mostly family-based and deeply-rooted in transnational community networks, tied to political parties and regional provenience. These family-based networks constituted a dissenter civil society, representing a civic and political fundamental resource facing the stiffening of Italy’s institutions and their following disruption: a positive "familismo". At the arrival of wwii, the antifascist family had been effectively invested in the republican reconstruction; the role of antifascist families which remained in France turns out to be less evident, made "invisible" by the Gaullist assimilationist politics.