A Civil War

by Claudio Pavone

  A major development in intellectual and political anti-Fascism was the foundation of a new, left-wing movement, Giustizia e Libertà (GL). Born in Paris in the summer of 1929, GL was inspired by Carlo Rosselli, who had managed a sensational escape from confino on the penal island of Lipari. Rosselli (1899–1937) was born into a wealthy Jewish family with strong ties to the Risorgimento. Abandoning a promising career as a professor of political economy, he joined the anti-Fascist cause and was instrumental in publishing the first underground anti-Fascist newspaper. Arrested for his activities, he was sentenced to confino on the island of Lipari, off the coast of Sicily. After a daring escape, he made his way to Paris where, in August 1929, he founded GL, the largest and most influential non-Marxist leftist movement. From Paris, Rosselli wrote essays, organised the movement, and even plotted Mussolini’s assassination. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Rosselli was one of the first to arrive in Barcelona in defence of the Spanish Republic. Rosselli believed that the Spanish Civil War had to be transformed into a European-wide offensive against Fascism and Nazism. That idea, and his speech, ‘Oggi in Spagna, domani in Italia’ (‘Today in Spain, Tomorrow in Italy’), given over Radio Barcelona on 13 November 1936, may have sealed his fate. An anonymous police spy wrote to Rome that Rosselli was ‘the most dangerous of the anti-Fascists in exile’ and that it was necessary that he be ‘suppressed’. While recuperating in the French countryside, Rosselli was assassinated, together with his brother, the noted historian Nello, on 9 June 1937.

  While on Lipari, Rosselli clandestinely wrote his major theoretical work, Socialismo liberale, in which he argued that twentieth-century socialism was the logical heir to nineteenth-century liberalism. Attacked from both the left and the right, Rosselli insisted on an heretical ‘liberal socialism’ and was acknowledged as the enfant terrible of Italian anti-Fascism.21 GL attracted some of the most important anti-Fascist intellectuals, and was second in influence only to the PCI.

  Another factor in anti-Fascism was Italian anarchism, led by the heroic figure of Errico Malatesta (1853–1932), the tragic figure of Camillo Berneri (1897–1937), assassinated by Stalin’s agents during the Spanish Civil War, and the romantic figure of Carlo Tresca (1879–1943), assassinated by still-unknown persons on New York City’s Fifth Avenue.

  Ignazio Silone, an important member of the PCI until he abandoned Communism and active politics, attempted an analysis of Fascism from his exile in Switzerland. For Silone, Fascism was neither accidental (‘Fascism did not fall from the heavens’) nor the destiny of Italy (‘Fascism was not inevitable’). His novel, Fontamara (Bitter Spring), written in exile while Silone thought he was mortally ill with tuberculosis, was the most influential piece of anti-Fascist literature, translated into a dozen languages and selling millions of copies.22

  The culture of liberal anti-Fascism was embodied in the figure of Benedetto Croce. The philosopher had acquired such international prestige by the 1920s that the regime dared not silence him. In his works of history and historiography, Croce served as a beacon for two generations under Fascism. His work was often openly read as an implicit condemnation of Fascism.

  Anti-Fascists, led by the Communists, successfully organised mass strikes in March 1943 protesting against Fascist Italy’s continuing participation in a losing war and the dire economic and social conditions on the home front. In the summer of 1943, Rome was bombed by the Allies as they began an invasion of Sicily. Mussolini was deposed on 25 July 1943, but confusion reigned. Marshal Pietro Badoglio was named prime minister, but his radio announcement that ‘the war continues’ was more confusing than inspiring. The confinati were released and the fuorusciti returned from exile, sparking the armed Resistance.23 On 8 September 1943, Italy signed an Armistice with the Allies, and the next day the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale (CLN) was formed. The CLN comprised five political parties, the Liberals (PLI), the DC, the Socialists (PSI), the PCI, and the Partito d’Azione (Actionists). Tensions eventually developed between the CLN and the Allied Military Government over the CLN’s role in post-war Italy. Mussolini was rescued by the Nazis and installed in a puppet regime, the Republic of Salò. When Salò issued a decree calling for all able-bodied men to join its army, many fled instead into the hills, countryside and mountains, and joined the Resistance. The PCI was the largest and most influential of the anti-Fascist movements, followed by the Actionists, a movement founded on the legacy of Rosselli’s GL. Women played a critical role in the Resistance, often as staffette, relaying written or oral communications between partisan groups, conveying arms, and gathering information. They were also permitted, not without considerable dissent and grumbling, a role in military operations. Renata Viganò’s L’Agnese va a morire and Ada Gobetti’s Diario partigiano represent the important contribution made by Italian women to the armed Resistance.24

  Conservatives and neo-Fascists argue that Mussolini and those who joined the fascist Repubblica Sociale Italiana (RSI) were performing a patriotic duty; others see the RSI as the last gasp of a brutal regime. Indeed, one of the RSI’s major duties was the repression and execution of Italian partisans. The RSI also tried and executed those Fascists who had voted for the dictator’s dismissal on 25 July 1943. Mussolini’s own foreign minister and son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano, was executed despite the pleas of his daughter, Edda Mussolini Ciano. On 14 November 1943 the first congress was held of the Fascist Republican Party, which issued the so-called ‘Manifesto of Verona’, a confusing mix of Fascism’s early radicalism and an attempt to placate the Nazis.

  The Italians who rallied to the Salò Republic and their activities remain controversial to this day: Were they defending the honour of Italy from an invading foe (the so-called ‘ragazzi di Salò’), or were they fanatical Fascists determined to fight until the end? Prince Junio Valerio Borghese, from a noble Roman family, was symbolic of this choice. He commanded the notorious Decima Mas (a torpedo boat squadron) and carried out barbaric reprisals against the anti-Fascist partisans. Sentenced to twelve years in prison after the war for his atrocities, Borghese was instead immediately released and became a prominent neo-Fascist politician. In 1971, when his role in a murky right-wing coup d’état was revealed, he fled to Spain.25 His funeral in Rome three years later was the occasion for a major neo-Fascist demonstration. Borghese’s story is recounted here as an indication of how Fascism survived the immediate post-war period and became something of a force in Italian politics, even to this day.26 Others responsible for anti-Fascist reprisals included the ironically named Mario Carità, who organised the infamous Carità Band and worked with the SS and Gestapo in Florence; Pietro Koch, who committed atrocities in Rome; and Pietro Caruso, involved in the notorious Ardeatine Caves massacre.27

  Examples of Fascist brutality against the Resistance are legion. One episode has been recounted by Guglielmo Petroni. Born in Lucca, Petroni (1911–93) became a poet and journalist in Florence. In 1943 he joined the Resistance, but was arrested on 3 May 1944. For the next thirty-three days he was interrogated and tortured by the Gestapo in various prisons in Rome. His memoir of those days, The World is a Prison, has been almost continuously in print since it first appeared in 1948. In it, he not only chronicles his experiences but meditates on the nature of a precarious existence in which paradox and absurdity abound:

  I had the terrible sensation that seems to become more acute in such circumstances than when one is alone in the darkness of the prison; I felt a sense of infinite solitude, the impression that the whole world had forgotten me, something that even today it occurs to me must be similar to what a shipwrecked person feels when alone and lost in the middle of the ocean. But this feeling was submerged, it lay hidden at the bottom of the soul; on the level of my nerves, never had I felt so alive and secure in an unwavering mood, whatever might happen.28

  In January 1952, the Turin publishing house Einaudi published a collection of letters by anti-Fascists condemned to death, thereby reigniting the debate over the Resistance. Covering a
broad spectrum of Italian society, from aristocratic military officers to workers and peasants, from conservative monarchists to liberals and communists, the letters are an eloquent testimony to the sacrifices and ideals of those who fought for the principles of liberty and justice. An excerpt from the letter of Antonio Fossati, a member of the Corpo Volontari Libertà in Milan, to his fiancé Anna:

  On the 2nd they tortured me for the third time: they put flaming candles to my feet and I found myself tied to a chair; my hair turned all grey, but I didn’t talk and it passed. On the 4th I was taken to a room where there was a table where I was tied with a rope by the neck and for ten minutes an electric shock passed through me; this went on for three days until the 6th, when at five in the afternoon they said if I was ready to talk but I refused to answered; I wanted to know what my fate was to be so I could write to my dear Anna and they told me of that terrible condemnation: death. I made them see that I was very proud. But when I was brought back to the cell I fell on my knees and wept.29

  A different kind of letter was penned by Giacomo Ulivi, an anti-Fascist in hiding in Modena, charging his colleagues with the moral and political tasks still to be to addressed:

  Have you ever thought that in the coming months the fate of our country and our own will be decided? What will be the decisive influence of our will if we rely on it? That if we encounter danger it will be our responsibility? There is much to do. Try to ask yourselves, each and every day, what idea you have of the true life: is it well-ordered? Inquire about the objectives. Do you believe in democratic freedom, in which, within the limits of the Constitution, you yourselves may direct public affairs, or rather wait for a new more egalitarian conception of life and property? And if you accept the first solution, do you want the power to elect to be for everyone, so that the elected body is a genuine and direct expression of our country, or do you wish to restrict it to those better prepared today to achieve a progressive programme? This and more you have to ask yourselves. You have to convince yourselves and prepare yourselves to convince others, neither to overpower others, nor to give up. Today we must fight against the oppressor. This is the first duty of us all, but it is good to be prepared to solve those problems in a sustainable manner, and to avoid their resurgence and the repetition of all that has befallen us. I end this long letter a bit confused, I know, but spontaneous, with apologies and wishing you all good luck.30

  Although a High Commission for the Expurgation of Fascism was created after the war, it failed to achieve its goals and was hampered by political conservatives in Italy.31

  The CNL and the Allies worked together (not without problems), and the war eventually came to an end. On 25 April 1945 Milan revolted, expelling the Fascists and Nazis, and the war soon ended. Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci were captured by partisans on 27 April as they were trying to reach Switzerland, and executed the next day. Their battered bodies were hung upside-down at a petrol station in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto, where anti-Fascist partisans had been executed months earlier, their bodies left hanging for days for the edification of the local population. Ferruccio Parri of the Action Party was Italy’s first post-war prime minister (19 June–24 November 1945). Parri had been active in anti-Fascist circles since the 1920s but was not able to manage the post-war peace. When the Liberals and Christian Democrats refused to follow his reform programme his government collapsed, initiating a four-decade monopoly of power by the Christian Democrats. On 2 June 1946, the Italian people voted 54 percent to 46 percent to abolish the monarchy and create an Italian Republic. A new Constitution, crafted by a constituent assembly, went into effect on the first day of 1948.

  After the war, Fascism and anti-Fascism continued to play important roles in Italian politics, culture and society. The Action Party dissolved, and the PCI became the largest communist party in western Europe. Fascism, although outlawed, survived in the uomo qualunque movement and the Movimento Sociale Italiano; it survived in the guise of ‘post-Fascism’ in the Alleanza Nazionale, a political party dissolved in 2009. Anti-Fascism became – at least in official rhetoric and according to the Constitution – the foundation of the Italian Republic. Some have criticised the ‘myth’ of anti-Fascism, and the last two decades have witnessed a sustained historiographical and political attack on the ideals of the Resistance.

  In some ways, Pavone’s book can be seen as a reply to the work of Renzo De Felice, the dean of fascist studies in Italy. De Felice (1929–96) was considered one of the foremost historians of Fascism. Professor of contemporary history at the University of Rome, he was also director of the journal Storia contemporanea and editor of the Journal of Contemporary History. His monumental seven-volume biography of Mussolini (the last volume published posthumously) forced a reconsideration of the Italian dictator. Based on extensive archival research, De Felice claimed it was time to examine Mussolini and Fascism from an ‘objective’ point of view, but he was criticised by some for ‘rehabilitating’ the dictator. De Felice argued that the Resistance had generated its own mythology and alienated many Italians from the state. More specifically, he argued that there existed a ‘Resistance vulgate’ censoring any debate and forcing historians, intellectuals and citizens to accept a historiography based on myth. In the place of this mythologised historiography, De Felice argued for one based on a ‘scientific’ methodology:

  Anti-Fascism cannot constitute the only explanatory principle in understanding the historical significance of the Resistance. Nor does it follow that the anti-Fascist ‘label’ can replace the democratic ‘label’ or that the two years 1943–1945 must be interpreted exclusively in the vast riverbed of the collective crisis that conditioned the circumstances since that time and that influences those of today; or that the hierarchy of value of ‘anti-Fascist purity’ at whose vertex the PCI immediately placed itself finds resonance anymore (if it ever did) among the majority of Italians.

  Neither Fascists nor anti-Fascists, neither Communists nor anti-Communists, are legitimised to explain to the people what happened in those two years or how decisive they have been for the history of today’s Italy. And, after all, the people no longer trust them anymore, and consider them sellers of myths in which it no longer believes and to whom it attributes a good part of the responsibility for the situation in which Italy finds itself today. What is even more serious, the people extend this negative judgment of the reconstruction of the past done by intellectuals to all of history. The result is that which Rosario Romeo32 feared, in a less degraded context twenty years ago: that of increasing that crisis of identity among Italians. And that today is more and more difficult to halt.33

  De Felice’s critique is echoed by Aga Rossi:

  The Italian republic emerging from the 1946 referendum was founded on the myths that the Resistance was a popular struggle and that the population adhered to the values of anti-Fascism. To support these myths it was necessary to deny the fact that the majority of the population had accepted the Fascist regime, thus upholding a false interpretation and preventing the country from coming to terms with its Fascist past.34

  But it has been argued that De Felice’s historiography, and what came to be called an anti-anti-Fascism, was permeated by its own mythology. A clear critique of De Felice’s historiography was offered by Nicola Tranfaglia in his book Un passato scomodo (An Uncomfortable Past).35 An example of what De Felice derisively called the ‘Resistance vulgate’ can be seen on the final page of Roberto Battaglia’s seminal Storia della Resistenza italiana, first published in 1953 and awarded the Premio Viareggio. Battaglia was a partisan in the Action Party, and, after its dissolution in 1946, joined the PCI. In his conclusion he delineates the political and ethical importance of the Resistance both to Italy’s domestic and its international politics:

  The historic importance of the part played by the Resistance in the liberation of Italy and the overthrow of National Socialism and Fascism cannot be too strongly emphasised. Of the countless patriots who had flocked to the movement and figh
t in defence of national independence, many thousands acquired for the first time an understanding of the part they would be called on to play in the future of their country, and, when the war was over, these new protagonists, the workers and the peasants, entered the lists.

  On the international plane, the Resistance redeemed the honour of Italy which had been so vilely besmirched by the Fascists. At home, it paved the way for the Republican Constitution which was approved, in 1947, by the Constituent Assembly in an atmosphere of harmony and unity that was due to the fraternity of the struggle for liberation. The political and social principles on which the Republican Constitution was based were those that had inspired the Resistance throughout, the principles that every Italian who cherishes the independence, liberty, and well-being of his fellow countrymen will always have at heart.36

  Today, the denigration of the Resistance comes not only from Fascist, neo-Fascist or post-Fascist politicians and intellectuals. In 2002, the government of right-wing Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi proposed a drastic rewriting of the country’s history textbooks to purge them of ‘left-wing bias’. Berlusconi argued that the nation’s history textbooks tended to glorify the Resistance and denigrate those who defended the Salò Republic. In this rewriting of history, Fascists were also victims of the Second World War. A corollary to this proposal recommended the abolition of the many historical institutes dedicated to the study of the armed Resistance. Since 1995 – the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War – there has been a protracted and often bitter debate over the scale, significance and repercussions of the Resistance. Here, journalist Alexander Stille writes about recent developments in the continuing struggle to define and interpret the past: