At this juncture the PCI, instead of putting the DC on the defensive by pressing for an uncompromising purge of the state—cleaning out all senior collaborationist officials in the bureaucracy, judiciary, army and police—invited it to head the government, and lifted scarcely a finger to dismantle the traditional apparatus of Mussolini’s rule. Far from isolating Christian Democracy, Togilatti manoeuvred to put its leader De Gasperi at the head of the government, and then joined with the DC—to the indignation of the Socialists—in confirming the Lateran Pact that Mussolini had sealed with the Vatican. The prefects, judges and policemen who had served the Duce were left virtually untouched. As late as 1960, sixty-two out of sixty-four prefects had been minions of Fascism, and all 135 of the country’s police chiefs. As for judges and officers, the unreconstructed courts acquitted the torturers of the regime and convicted the partisans who had fought against them, retrospectively declaring combatants of the Fascist Republic of Salò legitimate belligerents, and those of the Resistance illegitimate—the latter hence liable to summary execution after 1943, without penal sanctions for the former after 1945.60 These enormities were a direct consequence of the actions of the PCI. It was Togliatti himself who, as minister of justice, promulgated in June 1946 the amnesty that enabled them. A year later, the party was rewarded with an unceremonious ejection from the government by De Gasperi, who no longer had need of it.
The post-war history of Italy was thus to be entirely unlike that of Germany. There, where there had been no popular Resistance, Nazism was destroyed by both the extremity of military defeat, and the uprooting of the subsequent Allied occupations. In the Federal Republic, Fascism could never raise its head again. In Italy, by contrast, the Resistance bequeathed an ideology of—patriotic—anti-fascism, whose ubiquitous official rhetoric, in which the PCI took the lead, covered the actual continuities of Fascism, both as an inherited apparatus of laws and officials, and as an openly proclaimed creed and movement. Reconstituted as the MSI, the Fascist party was soon sitting in Parliament again, and eventually received into the establishment under its leader Giorgio Almirante. This figure, exalting Mussolini’s anti-Semitic laws, had told his compatriots in 1938 that ‘racism is the vastest and bravest recognition of itself that Italy has ever attempted’, and in 1944, after Mussolini had been air-lifted north by the Germans, that if they did not enlist as fighters for the Republic of Salò they would be shot in the back. When Almirante died in the eighties, Togliatti’s widow was among the mourners at the funeral. Today Fini, his appointed heir, is speaker of the Chamber of Deputies, and probable successor to Berlusconi as prime minister.
Beyond the obvious reproaches to this trajectory, what is most damning in the PCI’s part in it was its self-destructive futility. When it had a chance to weaken Christian Democracy by sinking the sword of an intransigent anti-fascism into its flanks, to cut it away from the reactionary constituencies that had sustained Mussolini’s regime, it did just the opposite. Helping the DC to establish itself as the dominant force in the country by passing a lenifying sponge across collaboration with the regime, it simply consolidated the conservative bloc under clerical command that would shut it out of power till its dying day. In this debacle, the party’s conduct was without international excuse. If revolution was ruled out in post-war Italy, by 1946 the Allies had essentially left the country, and were in no position to halt a lustration of Fascism. Togliatti’s naiveté in being so completely outmanouevred by De Gasperi had little to do with external influences. It was rooted in a strategic conception he had derived from Gramsci, interpreted through the gauze of Croce and his forebears. The pursuit of political power, Gramsci had written, required two kinds of strategy, whose terms he took from military theory, a war of position and a war of movement—trench or siege warfare, versus mobile assault. The Russian Revolution had exemplified the second; a revolution in the West would, for a considerable period, require the former, before eventually passing over to the latter.61 Just as it had diluted Gramsci’s notion of hegemony simply to its consensual moment, fixing it essentially in civil society, so under Togliatti the PCI reduced his conception of political strategy to a war of position only, the slow acquisition of influence in civil society, as if no war of movement—the ambush, sudden charge, rapidly wheeling attack, catching class enemies or the state by surprise—were any longer needed in the West. In 1946–7, De Gasperi and his colleagues did not make the same mistake.
By 1948 the popular élan of Liberation was broken. After electoral defeat amid the onset of the Cold War, it was twenty years before another wave of political insurgency crested in Italy. When it came, the generational rebellion of the late sixties, embracing both students and young workers, went deeper and lasted longer than anywhere else in Europe. Under Togliatti’s successor Longo, somewhat more of a fighter and less of a diplomat, the PCI did not react as negatively to the youth revolt as the PCF in France. But nor did it respond creatively, failing either to connect with a culture of the streets in which high and low—the classics of the Marxist and Bolshevik past, the graffiti of the spray-can present—did for a time interact dynamically, or to renew its increasingly stationary stock of strategic concepts. When critical opposition to its inertia emerged within the party in the shape of the Manifesto group, that numbered the best minds of its post-war levy, the PCI leadership lost no time in expelling it.
The excommunication came after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which the Manifesto condemned without reservation. Here, alongside the native idealism of its formation, lay the second reason for the continuing strategic paralysis of Italian Communism. However flexible in other respects, the PCI remained Stalinist in both its internal structures, and its external ties to the Soviet state. Despairing of one-party rule by a torpid Christian Democracy, liberal well-wishers of the party—of which there were to be many over the years—would time and again express their admiration for the PCI’s sensible domestic moderation, yet exasperation that it should compromise its otherwise excellent record by its links to the USSR, and the organizational norms that followed from it. In reality, the two were structurally inter-related. From Salerno onwards, the party’s moderation was a compensation for its relations with Moscow, not a contradiction of them. Just because it could always be taxed with a suspect kinship to the land of the October Revolution, it had to over-prove its innocence of any wish to emulate that all too famous model of change. The burden of an imputed guilt and the quest for an exonerating respectability went hand in hand.
Incapable of assuming or developing the revolts of the late sixties and early seventies, the PCI turned instead once again towards Christian Democracy, in the wistful hope that the DC had changed its ways and would now be prepared to collaborate with it in governing the country—Catholicism and Communism uniting in a ‘Historic Compromise’ to defend Italian democracy against the dangers of subversion and the temptations of consumerism. Proposing this pact in 1973 soon after he became the new leader of the party, Berlinguer invoked the example of Chile, where Allende had just been overthrown, as a warning of the civil war that risked breaking out, were the Left—Communists and Socialists combined—ever to try to rule the country on the basis of a mere arithmetical majority of the electorate. Few arguments could have been more obviously specious. There was not the faintest prospect of civil war in Italy, where even such outbreaks of violence as had occurred—the bomb planted by right-wing terrorists in the Piazza Fontana of Milan in 1969 was the worst case—had little incidence on the political life of the country as a whole. But once the PCI had moved to embrace the DC, the revolutionary groups to the left of it that had sprung out of the youth rebellion foresaw the emergence of a monolithic parliamentary establishment, government without opposition, and shifted towards direct action against it. The first lethal attacks by the Red Brigades began the following year.
But the political system was in no danger. The elections of 1976, in which the PCI did well, were perfectly tranquil. In their wake, the DC graciously ac
cepted Communist support for governments of so-called ‘National Solidarity’ under Andreotti, without altering its policies or conceding any ministries to the PCI. Repressive legislation, gratuitously curbing civil liberties, was stepped up. Two years later, the Red Brigades seized the DC’s most influential leader, Aldo Moro, in Rome, demanding the release of its prisoners in exchange for freeing him. In fifty-five days of captivity, fearing he would be abandoned by his own party, Moro wrote increasingly bitter letters to his colleagues, posing a clear threat to Andreotti were he to be at large. In this crisis, once again the PCI showed neither humanity nor common sense, denouncing any negotiations to secure Moro’s release more vehemently than the DC leadership itself, which was understandably torn.
Moro was duly left to his fate. Had he been allowed to live, his return would certainly have split Christian Democracy and probably ended the career of Andreotti. The price of saving him was negligible—the Red Brigades, a tiny group that in any objective sense was never a significant threat to Italian democracy, could hardly have been strengthened by the release of a few of its members who would have been under continuous police surveillance the moment they walked out of jail. The notion that the prestige of the state could not survive such a surrender, or that thousands of new terrorists would have sprung up in its wake, was little more than interested hysteria. The Socialists realized this, and argued for negotiations. Plus royalistes que le roi, the Communists, in their anxiety to prove that they were the firmest of all bulwarks of the state, sacrificed a life and saved their nemesis in vain. The DC showed no gratitude. Once he had used them, Andreotti—a greater master of timing than De Gasperi himself—reduced them. When elections came in 1979, the PCI lost a million and a half votes, and was out in the cold again. The Historic Compromise had yielded it nothing, other than the disillusionment of its voters and a weakening of its base. When in the following year Berlinguer called for solidarity with Fiat workers, threatened with mass dismissals, his appeal fell on deaf ears. The last big industrial action in which the party would ever be involved was rapidly crushed.
Four years ago, reflecting bitterly on his country’s politics, Giovanni Sartori remarked that Gramsci had been right to distinguish between a war of position and a war of manoeuvre. Great leaders—Churchill or De Gaulle—were such because of their instinct for wars of manoeuvre. In Italy, politicians knew only wars of position. He himself had always thought the title of Ortega’s famous book España invertebrada would be still more apt for Italy, where the Counter-Reformation had created deep habits of conformism, and continual foreign invasions and conquests had made of the Italians specialists in survival by bending low. Lacking any elites of mettle, this was a nation without a bone in its body.62 Sartori was not talking at random. His addressees were the political class he described. By this time, the PCI was gone, Berlusconi was in power and his central objectives were clear: to protect himself and his empire from the law. The ad personam measures to secure both, pushed through Parliament, landed on the desk of the president. The Italian presidency is not a purely honorific post. The Quirinale not only nominates the premier, who must be ratified by Parliament, but can withhold approval of ministers, and refuse to sign legislation. In 2003 the incumbent was the former central banker Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, an ornament of the Centre-Left who had headed the final government of the First Republic, served as finance minister under Prodi, and is today a senator for the Democratic Party.
Imperturbably, Ciampi signed exceptional legislation not only to consolidate Berlusconi’s grip on television, but to guarantee him permanent immunity from prosecution—an immunity of which Ciampi himself, as president, was also a beneficiary, as he appended his signature to it. Outside the Quirinale, anguished candle-lit appeals in the street begged him not to. But the heirs of Communism raised no objection. Indeed it had been from the ranks of the Centre-Left itself that the first draft of the bill for immunity had come. If there was hand-wringing in the press over the law, the president—constitutionally supposed to be super partes, and treated with all due reverence—was not put in question. Only one significant national voice was raised, not plaintively, but scathingly, against Ciampi. It came from Sartori, as a conservative liberal, who publicly asked Ciampi whether he even existed, contemptuously dubbing him a rabbit for his cowardice.
These days, it is a former Communist—Giorgio Napolitano, leader of the most right-wing faction in the PCI after the passing of Amendola—who sits in the Quirinale. By this time the first immunity law had been struck down by the Constitutional Court. But when it was given a new wrapping—after the fashion of Lisbon, one might say—and the substance of the same bill was voted through again by Berlusconi’s majority in Parliament, the head of the post-Communist delegation in the Senate, far from opposing it, explained that the Democratic Party had no objection in principle, though perhaps it should come into force only in the next legislature. Napolitano had no time for such points d’honneur, signing the bill into law on the day he received it. Once again, the only voices to denounce this ignominy were liberal or apolitical, Sartori and a handful of free spirits—immediately reproved by the press not only of Democratic, but Rifondazione obedience, for wanting in respect for the head of state. Such is the sinistra invertebrata of Italy today.
Powerful historical forces—the end of the Soviet experience; the contraction, or disintegration, of the traditional workingclass; the weakening of the welfare state; the expansion of the videosphere; the decline of parties—have borne hard on the Left everywhere in Europe, leaving none in particularly good shape. The fall of Italian Communism is in that sense part of a wider story, which lies beyond censure. Yet nowhere else has such an imposing heritage been so completely squandered. The party that was outwitted by De Gasperi and Andreotti, failing to purge fascism or split clericalism, was still an expanding mass force of remarkable vitality, whatever its strategic innocence. Its descendants have colluded with Berlusconi, with no shadow of an excuse: fully aware of who he was and what they were doing. There is now an abundant literature of exposure on Berlusconi, both within Italy and without, including at least three first-class studies in English. But it is striking how limp-wristed much of this becomes when it touches on the role of the Centre-Left in helping him clean his slate and entrench his power. The complicity of its presidents in successive bids to put him—and themselves—above the law is no anomaly, but part of a consistent pattern that has seen the heirs of Italian Communism allow him to retain and expand his media empire, in defiance of what was once the law; not lift a finger to deal with his conflicts of interest; spring his right-hand man, and not a few other millionaire criminals, from jail; and repeatedly seek to cut electoral deals with him, at the expense of any democratic principle, to benefit themselves. At the end of all this, they have come away not only as empty-handed as their predecessors, but terminally emptier of mind and conscience.
3
What, for its part, has happened to the great cathedral of leftwing culture in Italy? It had started to crumble long before, its foundations undermined with the one-time citadel of the mass party itself. As in Germany, the shift to the right came first in the field of history, with a revaluation of the country’s dictatorship between the wars. The first volume of Renzo De Felice’s biography of Mussolini, covering his years up to the end of the First World War, was published in 1965. But it was not until the fourth, covering the period from the Great Depression to the invasion of Ethiopia, appeared in 1974—followed a year later by a book-length interview with the American neo-conservative Michael Ledeen, subsequently prominent in the Iran-Contra affair—that this huge enterprise had a major impact in the public sphere, for the first time attracting a barrage of criticism on the left as a rehabilitation of Fascism.63 By the time his fifth volume came out, in the early eighties, De Felice had become an accepted authority, enjoying ready access to the media—he would increasingly appear on television—and meeting decreasing domestic challenge. Soon he was calling for the end of anti-f
ascism as an official ideology in Italy, and by the mid-nineties was explaining that the role of the Resistance in what was actually a civil war in the north, in which loyalties to the Republic of Salò had been underestimated, needed to be demystified.64 His eighth and last volume, incomplete at his death, came out in 1997. In total, De Felice devoted 6,500 pages to the life of Mussolini, over three times the length of Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler, and proportionately longer even than Martin Gilbert’s authorized life of Churchill: the largest single monument to any leader of the twentieth century.
The scale of the work, poorly written and often arbitrarily constructed, was never matched by its quality. Its strengths lay in De Felice’s indefatigable archival research, and his insistence on a few unexceptionable truths, principally that the militants of Fascism as a movement had come in the main from the lower middle class, that Fascism as a system attracted support from businessmen, bureaucrats, and higher social classes generally, and that at its height the regime commanded a wide popular consensus. These findings, none of them particularly original, sat in incoherent company with claims that Fascism was an offspring of the Enlightenment, that it had nothing to do with Nazism, that its collapse saw the death of the nation, and not least, with a hopelessly indulgent, oversized portrait of Mussolini himself as a great—if flawed—realistic statesman. Intellectually speaking, De Felice had little of the conceptual equipment or breadth of interest of Ernst Nolte, whose first book had preceded him. But his impact was much greater, not only by reason of the sheer weight of his scholarship, or even of the fact—fundamental though this obviously was—that in Germany fascism had been discredited much more absolutely than in Italy, but also because by the end of his career there was so little life left in the official post-war culture he had set out to oppose. Significantly, the most radical demolitions of his edifice came from Mack Smith in England, rather than any Italian historian.65
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