Enrico Bignami founded La Plebe in Lodi in 1868 to promoted Giuseppe Mazzini's ideas, financing the paper from his import business.

It gave continuity from the left wing of the Risorgimento to the post-unification labor movement and the later elaboration of socialist ideology in northern Italy.

[1] In April 1872 La Plebe began to publish a series of letters from Friedrich Engels, which helped to stimulate circulation.

[9] That year Gnocchi-Viani and other evolutionist Socialists who wrote for La Plebe founded the Northern Italian Federation of the International, an organization that believed in using legal means and was opposed to anarchists and insurrectionists.

[10] In May 1877 La Plebe published a manifesto by Bignami and Gnoocchi-Viani for the organization of the Socialist Party in Italy.

Later that year at the September congress in Ghent the rift widened between the evolutionists led by Zanardelli and the Bakuninists who favored violent revolution.