A Civil War

by Claudio Pavone

  Here the writer is mainly thinking about the Communist Party; but an Actionist gives a similar description of the non-pedagogic but maieutic politicisation that occurred in the GL bands by means of few words and many actions, in order to bring to light in the consciousness of each individual the ‘ideals’, the ‘political motives’, the ‘historical reasons for the struggle’ that were ‘in the air’ and ‘in the very reality surrounding the partisan’.9 A sober description of how, for that matter, politics gained ground in its own particular way in the Osoppo brigades is given by Galliano Fogar, intent on squeezing all the positive juices out of the much acclaimed apolitical character of those formations.10

  There was a widespread conviction that politics constituted a duty. It was as if, having turned away from the state that had failed, morality was seeking a way of redefining its public dimension. A Garibaldi news-sheet announced that a worker, a priest and a soldier had found that they all agreed that one had a duty to participate in political life if one wished to avoid scourges such as Nazi-Fascism repeating themselves.11 There was some truth behind this instrumental unitary rhetoric. Addressing the ‘Piedmontese workers of the land’, an Action Party leaflet urged them to concern themselves actively with politics: ‘It is time to convince ourselves that politics is a dirty business only when it is in the hands of shady politico profiteers, as it was during the Fascist regime’.12

  The partisans sought a way out of vulgar, trumpeting Fascist pan-politicism not along the road that was to be the fortune of the ‘Uomo Qualunque’ movement, and would be successfully taken by the Christian Democrats as well, but in vindicating the morality of politics and denouncing the fact that, beneath its rhetoric, Fascism had prospered from the depoliticisation of the Italians.13 In a letter written to his friends before he was arrested, Giacomo Ulivi put his finger on the fundamental contradiction that had, ultimately, marked the message transmitted by Fascism: that politics is a dirty business and, at the same time, a business reserved for specialists: ‘We have copped out’, wrote Ulivi, and here are the results, now that in political life we have been ‘shunted aside by events. It’s here that we’re to blame.’14 Equally unsparing about the Italians having placed their welfare in the charge of others is a Liberal pamphlet that concludes: ‘They have given this sloth a new name: gerarchia.’15

  ‘Accusa agli onesti’ was the title of a leaflet of the Christian Democratic Movement of Modena; and the accusation was that ‘serious, honest and able men’ had kept away from politics ‘on the basis of the old and anti-democratic mentality that the decent man, the serious person, ought not to interest himself in politics’. This stance was all the more remarkable for the fact that, coming from Catholics, the meanness of the ‘selfish personal and family circle’ was denounced: this was the only way to account for the fact – the essential point in the argument – that, in the absence of honest men, so many good-for-nothings had ended up among the partisans.16 A Liberal newspaper traced the Italians’ lack of interest in politics back ‘to the years immediately preceding the advent of Fascism, which had in fact been engendered by that lack of interest. This was certainly historically false, if we consider the fervour of the biennio rosso, but, besides helping the Liberals to disassociate themselves from the responsibilities of the ruling class to which they intended to re-associate themselves, it was nevertheless a contribution to stances in favour of political engagement.17 The Actionist Giorgio Diena wrote: not ‘save us from the state!’, but ‘let us all be politicians!’18 Clearly expressed, in some of these exhortations, is the anxiety to have done with selfishness and the invitation to ensure that it did not triumph at the very moment of deliverance.19 On this score, even the fiery polemics against attesismo acquire a significance that goes beyond the mere incitement to fight. The aim now was to shake the Italians out of their atavistic inferiority, soaked in sloth. A medical student, a fine and active fellow, who declared that he had no political opinions, received this answer from Emanuele Artom: ‘I wouldn’t get that kind of answer from a young Russian or American of your age.’

  In his impassioned apologia for political commitment, Artom draws a contrast between the workers who, ‘driven by need, have concerned themselves in these years with political problems and have matured’, and the ‘foolish bourgeois youths … intellectually lazy and morally sceptical’.20 But it was not just a question of economic drives. Fascism’s depoliticising of people made words like the following particularly true: ‘There is a sadness in the worker for whom the only medicine is political action’.21 ‘Comrade worker, listen!’ was the title of an article in Avanti! which, in tones rather similar to those of Edmondo De Amicis, explained to the workers that it was not true that politics was a mug’s game.22 There were great expectations, also, in the parallel peasants’ movements of the South,23 for ‘political answers’ to the great questions emerging from Italian society.24

  The risks that could arise from this view of politics – and it was a view of politics which at that moment was fast gaining strength – are clearly expressed in the retrospective testimonies of two leading figures: Fede and Roselli (as Carlo Levi rechristened them in his novel L’Orologio). Vittorio Foa has written, almost apologetically, that, immediately after the Liberation, ‘many of us fell in love at that time with the technique of politics’, which he sets alongside poetry and truth: ‘and all of us fell for it together, poets (like Carlo Levi, Emilio Lussu, Guido Dorso and Ferruccio Parri) and tecnici alike’.25 Altiero Spinelli speaks of many ‘who without batting an eyelid took on the heavy commitment of anti-Fascists and partisans, and when all that was over, felt that it had been an ethical impulse of civil courage that had driven them along this path, but that they had no real political passion; and set their minds to other things, as peaceful citizens’.26

  In Foa’s words, there was nostalgia for the unity of politics, poetry and truth that was experienced in the blissful season of the Resistance, and together with this, though more secret, the aspiration not to renounce it.27 In Spinelli’s words, by contrast, there is the reminder of the harsh difference between politics and ethics: a harshness symbolised by that taste for command which in his clandestine and prison encounters had made him feel close to Pietro Secchia.28

  It was this all-embracing character, which politics tended to acquire in the Resistance experience, that revived within it the inevitable polarity between means and ends. This polarity rubbed shoulders uneasily with the aspiration to reunify oneself – ‘an intimate accord of each of us with himself’, Roberto Battaglia calls it29 – that was at the root of the genuine decision to resist. The higher the stakes, and the greater the conviction that, ‘at the present historical moment … politics finds its true embodiment in ethics’,30 the more seriously one came to realise that ‘political action often involves one in other activities of a very different nature – making strange alliances, dissimulating one’s real objectives, betraying yesterday’s friends – all of this, naturally, in the interest of the final ‘end’.31

  The conflict between the claims of ‘verità’ and those of ‘tecnica’ is evident in Anna Cinanni’s account of her arrest. Interrogated, she denied everything: ‘However, I did not want to renounce my ideal, renounce saying that I was indeed anti-Fascist. It was a question of principle for me; I could not, I did not want to renounce saying it.’32

  What I have called the urge to reunify oneself was a way of reacting against the divorce between words and facts which, in Fascism, had been one of the things that ‘most affronted human reason’.33 In sociological language, Fascism had wanted both to ‘mobilise’ and ‘demobilise’ the population. Gino Germani, who has analysed this process, has shown how it leads to the apathy of the many and the fanaticism of the few – conformists in substance, fanatics in form.34 The decision to resist aimed at overcoming this dichotomy, while that of the RSI militants exacerbated it in the vain hope of salvation. Even within the Catholic faith sincerely experienced, participation in the Resistance could come to mea
n a way out of a specific, individual contradiction within oneself: ‘I received a religious upbringing in my family, but felt an abyss between the catechism and the lifeless and selfish actions that I and the others around me, even the members of my family, were performing.’35

  ‘A state that obliges its subjects to become hypocrites works against its own interests’:36 it was precisely this that Fascism had done; and now a game which over the years had become more and more bare-faced and oppressive had to be unmasked. The Fascist ruling class had never felt sufficiently secure, and at the same time were too demagogic to parade, let alone practise, a dual morality.37 They had thereby deprived themselves of the allure that the splendour of vices can exercise, without even managing to transform their hypocrisy into the homage paid to virtue.

  Testimonies abound of this desire for coherence that was felt in the Resistance. A more difficult matter is to try to identify its contents, ambiguities and residues that had not been reabsorbed.

  ‘Immediate coherence with their professed ideas is demanded of members, the only valid guarantee in times in which words have lost all value’: this declaration, dictated by a minor group,38 could well have been underwritten by a wide circle of resistenti. ‘A New Set of Mores’ is what Libérer et Fédérer, Silvio Trentin’s newspaper, had called for on 5 January 1943 against political schemers. ‘Gobettian sobriety’, which was Dante Livio Bianco’s constant point of reference, is another formula that synthesises this attitude, and that is echoed in Beppe Fenoglio’s prophecy of an Italy that will be ‘small but terribly serious’.39 The formula would reoccur, with a show of irony that ill succeeds in concealing regret, in the words of another leading figure: ‘It seemed to me … that any hope I had had of making my private life somehow or other coincide with the public life of my country (which I had unfortunately believed to be the be-all and end-all of life) was dead.’40

  2. PUBLIC AND PRIVATE

  The commitment to reunifying conscience and to making action coherent with it therefore raised the question once more of the relationship between public and private. In recent years, which have been distinguished by the rediscovery of the value of ‘the private’, the Resistance, with the petering out of the wholly political accusations levelled at it from the left for having failed to transform itself into revolution, has been the target of the no less harsh criticism that it devoted scant attention to the private aspects of life, or indeed that it wholly sacrificed them.

  Speaking of his difficult relationship with his father Piero, Franco Calamandrei has given a thoughtful testimony on that dual border zone between the public and the private and between generations, which shaped the ‘moral chiaroscuro that had hitherto remained on the sidelines’ of the ‘autobiography’ of anti-Fascism. Calamandrei asks this question:

  Might it not be that also the separation between ‘public’ and ‘private’, if not the ousting of the ‘private’ by the ‘public’, which has become more accentuated in Italian life in these last few decades and has contributed to young people’s estrangement from politics, had an embryo, at the origins of the present post-Fascist phase, in the relative obliteration of sentiments and persons in favour of ideologies, parties, classes, which, since those origins represent the memory of anti-Fascism, has operated on objective laws, almost as one of the necessary conditions for re-founding politics rationally?1

  For the majority of the combatants of the Fascist war the ‘private’ had been a refuge – memory, nostalgia, prefiguration of the return home – against being overwhelmed by a ‘public’ that they felt extraneous to them. In most resistenti the positions tended to be inverted, and the private, initially an instrument of salvation, became a risk of perdition. Analysing Giorgio Caproni’s I denti di Ada, Giovanni Falaschi concluded that the private dimension of life was felt in the Resistance to be a snare. There is some truth in this observation, which Falaschi supports with a quotation from the Catholic Teresio Olivelli: ‘rid yourself of the temptation of your affections’;2 but things do not end there. When Nazi-Fascist totalitarianism was over, there was a definite and active awareness that shutting oneself up in the isolation of one’s private life had been one of the actual causes of totalitarianism, even if it did not have the critical clarity later given it by Hannah Arendt.3 Hidden beneath a sometimes nobly rhetorical form was personal shame and respect for proportions: What! The world is ablaze and here am I thinking about my individual circumstances! Hidden too is a thread of subterranean regret at not having enjoyed one’s private life more authentically when there was still time, interwoven with guilt at having possibly enjoyed it too much, until the terrible blow that had befallen the world. In Una questione privata Fenoglio chronologically traced the relationship between public and private. ‘The things of before – later, later!’: where the ‘things of before’ are girls, who today ‘are laughable. Disgusting and pathetic … given the life we’re leading and the job we’re doing it takes nothing to go to pieces.’4 It was hard to distinguish the ‘private’ from a normality that the emergency situation, fully accepted, made appear distant, extraneous and even inimical. At Villa Paganini, in Rome, Franco Calamandrei listens to ‘the little girl saying to her governess “Miss, may I take off my coat?” What with everything that is happening or what you’d like to be happening, you feel on the other side of an abyss.’5

  Public commitment, which has inscribed in it the dichotomy between life and death stripped to the bone, was loath to represent itself as a mere parenthesis; but was pervaded at the same time by nostalgia for the serenity of a normality that at times would come to be experienced as renunciation. ‘When the war was over we got married’, because ‘then I couldn’t, I didn’t have time’; but then when this partisan got married and, at her husband’s request, left political activity, ‘this meant no longer being able to sleep! I grieved and suffered enormously’.6 Another resistente, a Communist since 1940, said: ‘I had the impression that with marriage everything would come to an end … political commitment, personal freedom, the possibility of choosing.’7 In women’s testimonies the laceration between public and private appears particularly powerful and explicit; but it can also be experienced as obvious, to the extreme case of the partisan whose boyfriend was in the Black Brigades, ‘but set great store by keeping personal affections and politics apart’.8

  The years following the Liberation were to see the coexistence of regret for lost unity and remorse at not having managed to seize that exceptional opportunity to renew one’s own individual life more completely.

  It has been written about the crisis of the 1968 movement, but could equally well apply to that of the Resistance: ‘When the movement flows again, the personal and the political always part ways again; the memory of unity rightly becomes again an obstacle to the suppression of the personal within the political, but at the same time, dangerously and ambiguously, again facilitates the suppression of the political within the separateness of the personal sphere.’9

  But when the unity of the movement, never as great as it is made out to be, has led to the sacrifice of its two constituent parts, then one can say that ‘militant ideology leaves the trenches of the individual life unmanned; and the territory that two centuries or so of the history of secular thought managed to remove from the theologians is on the point of falling into the hands of the necromancers’.10

  One of the spheres in which public and private, collective and individual, interwove is that of the personal relations between the resistenti. Here things moved in two inverse but convergent directions: friendship evolved into political kinship and political kinship generated friendship. The trust between partisans, writes Battaglia, ‘is a joy and a necessity’: there was in fact the need for ‘something that warmed determination with a sentiment’.11 Ada Gobetti gave her diary this epigraph: ‘It was precisely friendship – a bond of solidarity, founded not on blood relationship, or country, or intellectual tradition, but on the simple human relationship of feeling that you were two people together am
ong many – that seemed to me to be the intimate significance, the hallmark of our battle.’12

  Among the false foundations of friendship Ada Gobetti listed not class and party, but the patria. In her view, the urge to reconquer national identity was evidently not enough, after the degradations of National-Fascism, to recover Michelet’s concept of one’s country as ‘the great friendship that contains all the others’. But many traces of the route traced by Michelet were present in the Resistance experience, by whatever name one might wish to call the final outlet:

  Our individual friendships are like the first steps of this great initiation, stations through which the soul passes, and gradually ascends to know and love each other on a higher, a better, a more disinterested plane that is called the fatherland.13

  Ada Gobetti identifies friendship with solidarity. In fact, solidarity covered a wider, and in any case different, field than both friendship and politics, and revealed what it essentially was precisely when it sprung up between people who had neither personal nor political relations with one another. A girl who had been a partisan dispatch-rider, continuing all the while to go to school, later had this to say about what had motivated her: ‘I don’t know whether out of ideals or out of friendship. Perhaps for both reasons … in this way I was taking part in what my comrades in the mountains were going through.’ And another girl: ‘What did I know of Communism and Fascism and things like that, at fifteen! I was a child! I went to take food to my partisan brothers. Who wouldn’t have done it?’14

  The meaning of friendship is extended in the ‘Dichiarazione costitutiva’ of the Italian Labour Party: ‘Relations between party members will naturally be those among “friends” who love and respect one another, by virtue of the fact that their lives are inspired by the same ideal and that they have passed through the same sieve.’ The rigour of this small group went so far as to sanction these relations between friends economically: all its members ‘recognise the party’s right to make use of their private assets, movable or immovable, at any given time, with the exception of articles of everyday use and the house they live in’.15 A newspaper published by the group commented that with this ‘direct and immediate testimony … we intend to anticipate, as far as is possible, the kind of society in which we believe’.16