A Civil War

by Claudio Pavone

  18 For La Voce Repubblicana, the one man responsible, even more than the Duce, was the king. See ‘Come si imbroglia il popolo’, 30 January 1944.

  19 ‘La parola dei democratici cristiani’, signed ‘Demofilo’, in the 12 December 1943 Rome edition of Il Popolo. See too Lanaro, Società civile, p. 34, which brings to light the more advanced positions of a document produced by the Venetian Christian Democrats.

  20 ‘Rinnovamento’, in the 23 October 1943 issue.

  21 Note the campaign in favour of Franco waged by the Italian Catholic press during the Civil War. See the collection in La guerra di Spagna.

  22 ‘Carattere degli italiani’, 31 December 1943. Demofilo had even spoken of civilisation in the third millennium, etc.

  23 ‘Libertà cosciente’, in La Punta, 2 February 1944. A group of young secular anti-Fascists had termed ‘youth and the people’ not yet ‘led astray, lost’, however ‘stunned and aggrieved’ (‘Ai migliori degli Italiani’, August 1942, an appeal published in the Bollettino Popolo e Libertà, 1 June 1943, pp. 5–7).

  24 ‘Posizione’, in Il Segno, 1 March 1944.

  25 L’Italia, August 1943 (cited in Webster, The Fasces and the Cross, p. 202).

  26 ‘Fascismo e cattolicesimo’, initialed ‘e.m.g.’ in La Punta, 23 February 1944.

  27 See the text of the pact in the Rome edition of Avanti!, 19 October 1943.

  28 ‘In Corsica, Venezia Giulia, a Napoli gli italiani sono al posto di combattimento a fianco dei popoli liberi’, in the 12 October 1943 Northern edition.

  29 Letter from the commander of the 1st Zone of Liguria, Simon, to the commissar of the 2nd Cascione Division, 23 November 1944. The critique concerned a 3 November circular (Le Brigate Garibaldi, vol. II, pp. 624–8).

  30 The critique of the (former?) comrade Sante, 20 March 1945, is directed against the article ‘Formare la coscienza’, 20 February 1945 (IZDG, envelope 272b, folder IV/A).

  31 It is enough to recall here Togliatti’s Lezioni sul fascismo (1936), a 1970 reprint of which was edited by E. Ragionieri, Rome: Riuniti.

  32 See the article ‘La nostra guerra’ (which was ‘not an opportunistic improvisation’) in L’Azione, 1 November 1943, and, on the MURI, which ‘declare[d] itself in full harmony with Catholicism’, the pamphlet ‘Laws and History of the Movement’, published in Genoa immediately after Liberation (held at the INSMLI): the Italian people could ‘not be mixed up in the blame for this war, which is, rather, limited to a usurper class’ (p. 12).

  33 ‘Maturità politica’, La Punta, 29 March 1944.

  34 ‘La Prova’, in the 10 October 1943 Rome edition.

  35 ‘Orientamenti’, in Bollettino Popolo e Libertà, July 1943, 2, p. 38, and the ‘Dichiarazione fondamentale’ of the Italian Labour Party, paragraph 2.

  36 See for example the editorial ‘Responsibilità’ in the Rome edition of L’Italia Libera, 11 November 1943, reproduced ‘from the Turin organ of the Action Party’.

  37 See Morandi’s unpublished response to an article by Magrini (Aldo Garosci), written for a magazine produced among German Socialist émigrés in Prague (undated, but after 1934, thus after the end of the Concentrazione antifascista) in Merli, La ricostruzione, pp. 615–17.

  38 Spinelli, Io, Ulisse, p. 268.

  39 The persistence of the spirito azionista is one of the polemical targets of Catholic neo-fundamentalism: I refer in particular to the theses advanced by Augusto Del Noce, which appear in different forms in both historiography and political debate.

  40 Think of the analogous ambitions of German émigrés, as expressed by Thomas Mann in a letter to René Schickele: that they ‘must do our jobs very well; then some day people will say that during this period we were the real Germany’ (Letters of Thomas Mann, 1889–1955, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975, p. 188).

  41 This theme was developed in many of the reports written after Liberation on the CLNs, partisan formations, and local situations. See, for example, the report ‘on the partisan and conspiratorial movement in Ostiglia’, authored by the Socialist Paride Mantovani (INSMLI, CLNAI, envelope 6, folder 2, subfolder 4, old cataloguing).

  42 Lussu, La ricostruzione dello Stato, p. 4.

  43 Deakin, Brutal Friendship, p. 241, defined thusly the survivals of the Liberals, Populars and Socialists like Romita, re-emerging in Spring 1943.

  44 Serini, Orientamenti programmatici, p. 3.

  45 ‘Libertà sociale’, Risorgimento liberale, Rome edition, 5 May 1944.

  46 ‘Saldezza del fronte antifascista’, editorial in La Riscossa italiana, January– February 1944.

  47 ‘Direttive politiche per l’insurrezione nazionale, n. 11’, 25 October 1944 (Le Brigate Garibaldi, vol. II, p. 489).

  48 Letter of 4 June 1935 from Angelo Tasca to Giuseppe Faravelli, in Merli, La ricostruzione, p. 677.

  49 Declaration of the central committee, announcing the fusion of the PSI, MUP and Unione Proletaria Italiana, in the 22 August 1943 Avanti!. In the Northern edition of Avanti!, 10 January 1944, the editorial ‘Timori in sagrestia’ read: ‘The 1915–18 war heralded the crisis of the capitalist system, and this war now concluding marks its end. Truly, another history is beginning … The socialist revolution appears out of irreparable necessity’ for both the victors and the defeated.

  50 See the essays in the collection Fascismo e antifascismo negli anni della Repubblica (Problemi del socialismo, January–April 1986, new series no. 7).

  51 See, above all, Inverni (V. Foa), I partiti, pp. 68–71. Many years later, Foa would write with reference to the 1933–35 period, ‘Perhaps so as not to be dependent on fascism, not even in rejecting it, we refused to call ourselves anti-Fascists’ (P. Marcenaro and V. Foa, Riprendere tempo, Turin: Einaudi, 1982, p. 102).

  52 A. Capitini, Prime idee di orientamento, Perugia: Centro di Orientamento Sociale, 1944, p. 9.

  53 Pintor, Doppio diario, p. 115. In writing ‘we’, Pintor was referring to the young people who had adopted the point of view that ‘to absent oneself, from birth, is little less than suicide, and thus we all found ourselves mixed up – some more than others – in contemporary life, and were ready to reap its fruits. This position, though very dangerous in that it could easily confuse the weakest souls, was, however, the most productive one: it meant the definitive overcoming of the Fascism/anti-Fascism antithesis, and, with the outbreak of the war, posed us with a praxis that we instinctively felt to be more urgent and wider in scope than that for a long time … sought by those planning an eventual restoration. They were incapable of finding the point d’issue; we, and perhaps not through our own merit, were already stronger, because we showed ourselves at the right moment’ (pp. 118–19).

  54 Anonymous, undated note in CSPG, Fondo Calosso, no. 4. Musatti, having recently fled Italy, had written an article in the January issue of Mondo entitled ‘Lotta, non rivincita’, which aroused ‘animated discussions’ among anti-Fascists. In the June issue, Musatti had published another article, ‘Crepuscolo dei tamburi’, from which this note cited the words quoted in the text above. It was probably referring to Il Mondo (The World), ‘A Monthly Forum for Unfettered Italian Opinion on World Events’, edited by Umberto Gualtieri, published in New York from 1938 (but the January 1939 issue, the only one it was possible to consult did not include the article referred to in the note). My thanks to Luciano Boccalatte for giving me this information.

  55 ‘Projet de programme pour la Révolution Nationale’ – a national revolution different from that of the Vichy régime – in La Révolution Française. Bulletin pour un mouvement national révolutionnaire français, September–October 1940, 1.

  56 Inverni (V. Foa), I partiti, pp. 45–7. On the Action Party’s perspective of an anti-totalitarian socialism, see De Luna, Storia del Partito d’Azione, p. 201.

  57 See the articles collected in G. Calogero, Difesa del liberalsocialismo, Rome: Atlantica, 1945. Calogero distinguished the ‘third way’ from the ‘third force’: for a discussion on this point, see C. Pa
vone, ‘Terza forza e terza via’, in La Cittadella III: 5–6 (15–30 March 1948), p. 4.

  58 I refer here to the studies of Gaetano Arfé and Stefano Merli, already quoted in part above. On the ‘fusionism’ which sought to make two parties into one new body, ‘without however leaving out dissident minorities’, see in particular Arfé, La politica del gruppo dirigente socialista, p. 27.

  59 ‘Economia del lavoro’.

  60 Apart from the abundant degree of corporativism in the Idee ricostruttive della Democrazia cristiana, see, among others, the defence of corporativism against the way it had been mystified by Fascism, in the article ‘La liquidazione del sindacalismo fascista’, signed ‘Il sindacalista’, Il Popolo, Rome edition, 28 November 1943; the section ‘Tornare al corporativismo genuino’ of the programme expounded in Il Lavoratore, organ of the Friuli Christian Democrat union movement, in September 1944; and the definition of the Fascist corporations as ‘pseudo-corporations’ in the undated poster directed by the Movimento guelfo d’azioni, ‘To Italians Worthy of Freedom’ (‘Agli italiani degni della libertà’, INSMLI, CLNAI, envelope 8, folder 9).

  61 See, for example, his report from the 1877 Gand Congress and the famous 27 July 1879 letter ‘Ai miei amici di Romagna’, in the 3 August La Plebe. See A. Romano, Storia del movimento socialista in Italia, vol. III, Laterza: Bari, 1967, pp. 435–40, 447–53, and A. De Clementi, ‘Costa Andrea’, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 30 (1984), pp. 128–44.

  62 Gli scambi internazionali, la nazionalizzazione delle imprese ed i piani economici, printed in Rome by the Movimento Liberale Italiano in June 1944 (though it is dated 15 January) and reprinted in Milan in 1945 by the Upper Italy Delegation of the PLI. The Labriola quote (p. 19 of the Milan edition) is taken from Primo Saggio, p. 476, n. 1. See F. Sbarberi, Ordinamento politico e società nel marxismo di Antonio Labriola, Milan: Franco Angeli, Milan 1986. Sbarberi holds that in his Marxism, Labriola was always opposed to a statist development of the future society, which, significantly, was conceived of as the ‘self-government of labour’ (see pp. 13–60, 120–61).

  63 PENTAD, Remaking of Italy, p. 268.

  64 ‘Notre programme d’action’, in the first issue of Libérer et Fédérer, 14 July 1942.

  65 Diena, La rivoluzione minimalista, pp. 15–17.

  66 See ‘Aldi’ (F. Venturi), Socialismo di oggi e di domani; ‘Pan’t’ (A. Spinelli), ‘Alcune osservazioni a proposito di “Socialismo di oggi e di domani” di Leo Aldi’, in Nuovi Quaderni di Giustizia e Libertà, May–June 1944, 1, pp. 62–6; and L.A., ‘Postilla’, on pp. 67–9 of the same issue.

  67 ‘Che vuol dire Stato socialista’, in the 12 January 1944 Rome edition.

  68 See, for example, a report by Raffaello Ramat on a visit to Figline Valdarno, 9 October 1944 (ISRT, Carte Enzo Enriques Agnoletti, folder 10, subfolder PdA provincia).

  69 See paragraph 13 of the Direttive programmatiche of the Action Party, Tuscan section, June 1944 (Quaderni dell’Italia Libera, 3).

  70 ‘Nella società socialista’, in Bandiera Rossa, 22 October 1943.

  71 See Rossi-Doria, Il ministro e i contadini, p. 106.

  72 Such was the request of the Teramo National Transport Institute, dissolved by the Allies, to the local CLN, which (according to its 7 August 1944 minutes), in agreement with the prefect, approved its being constituted as a cooperative (AS Teramo, CLN, envelope 1, folder 4/A).

  73 The spontaneous cooperativist drive of the immediate post-war years gets little coverage in the large volume edited by F. Fabbri on cooperativism, Il movimento cooperativo nella storia d’Italia, Milan: Lega Nazionale Cooperative e Mutue and the Fondazione Feltrinelli, 1979.

  74 A judgment expressed by H. Michel, The Shadow World.

  75 Passerin D’Entrèves, Un recente saggio sui problemi di storia della Resistenza, p. 93.

  76 Editorial ‘Liberalismo e assolutismo’, in the April 1944 Piedmont edition.

  77 R. Moro, La formazione della classe dirigente cattolica (1929–1937), Bologna: Il Mulino, 1979, pp. 470–2, with reference to the FUCI and Laureati cattolici.

  78 Inverni (V. Foa), I partiti, pp. 68–9, 46.

  79 A defaced copy of the document is held in INSMLI, CLNAI, envelope 8, folder 12.

  80 T. Ruoti, La lotta per la libertà, October 1943, p. 6.

  1 Gobetti, Diario partigiano, pp. 190–1 (23 August 1944).

  2 For example, the spell that certain aspects of this culture held over Pavese can help us better to grasp this writer’s attitude towards anti-Fascism and the Resistance, around which a polemic – rarely of a high standard – lit up after the publication of some of the pages from his diary, edited by Lorenzo Mondo, in La Stampa of 8 August 1990.

  3 I take these words from a typescript by Giampiero Carocci, first draft of a work in progress.

  4 The future as ‘the present of another: of another individual, of another group, of another civilisation: is the first and exact meaning of the word “future”, and it is almost always the last we think of’ (G. Noventa, Futuro, in Opere complete, vol. IV, ‘Dio è con noi’ e altri scritti, Venice: Marsilio, 1989, p. 338).

  5 The first of the two expressions is from Lanaro, the second from Miccoli: these, in my view, have a common root (see Società rurale, pp. 199–200).

  6 See, on these themes, Moro’s La formazione, chapter ‘Il dibattito sulla crisi della civiltà’ (in particular p. 413).

  7 ‘La nostra ora’, signed Guittone, in Il Segno, 1 March 1944.

  8 Letter to Carlo Placci, from Faenza, 31 May 1897, in G. Salvemini, Carteggi, I, 1895–1911, ed. E. Gencarelli, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1968, pp. 55–8.

  9 Quoted in Moro, La formazione, p. 468.

  10 ‘Il sentimento democratico’, in Il Popolo, Rome edition, 20 February 1944.

  11 See Fogar, Le brigate Osoppo-Friuli, p. 294.

  12 See Gorrieri, La Repubblica di Montefiorino, esp. pp. 634–5.

  13 ‘Prepararsi’, in Il Popolo, Rome edition, 23 January 1944.

  14 ‘Sugli indirizzi della Democrazia cristiana’, Il Popolo, Northern edition, 20 August 1944.

  15 ‘La Democrazia cristiana e il Fronte della gioventù’ and ‘I gruppi democristiani confermano l’astensione dal Fronte della gioventù’, Il Popolo, Northern edition, 31 May and 10 June 1945.

  16 ‘The most far-sighted policy of the party, which will reap further fruits for us, too, is the policy which, for the moment, prescinds from the party and transcends it; the policy of the freedom of the Italian people, the policy of unity for the complete emancipation of this martyred people.’ Togliatti could not have put it better, except perhaps for the word ‘martyred’ (see the article ‘Il comandamento dell’ora’, in Democrazia, organ of the Lombard Christian Democracy, 9, undated, but after the establishment of the second Bonomi government, quoted in Bianchi, I cattolici, p. 266).

  17 Bolis, Il mio granello di sabbia, p. 4.

  18 Portelli, Biografia di una città, p. 289.

  19 See Weber, Economy and Society, I, p. 26.

  20 B. Baczko Lumière de l’utopie, Paris: Payot & Rivages, 1978.

  21 Constant spoke thusly with regard to Rousseau: see Discours de M. Benjamin Constant à la Chambre des Députés, I, Pinard, Paris 1827, p. 211. My thanks to Franco Sbarberi for making me aware of this passage.

  22 Testimony of Mario Conti, in Portelli, Biografia di una città, p. 18.

  23 A paraphrase of one of the concepts used in Koselleck, Futures Past. See also G. Ambrosino, ‘Koselleck: quando la politica ha pretese di verità’, interview in Il manifesto, 5 February 1987.

  24 Passerin d’Entrèves, Un recente saggio sui problemi di storia della Resistenza, replying to Cotta, Lineamenti di storia della Resistenza italiana, p. 96.

  25 ‘1945, anno della vittoria’, in Stella garibaldina, paper published by the 1st Piedmont Division, 15 January 1945. Pointing to the examples of the Soviet and Yugoslav partisans, the paper called on readers to emulate their ‘virtue’.

  26 Testimony of Mario
Filipponi, in Portelli, Biografia di una città, p. 297.

  27 Testimony of the trade unionist Emilio Guglielmino, born 1911, in A voi cari compagni, p. 27. Soon before, Guglielmino recalled ‘There was a need to know, but also be to protagonists in some way, and above all to change ourselves and all society’.

  28 Report on the activities of the Potente (Arno) Division, written by the political commissar Alessandro Pieri (ISRT, CVL, Comando militare toscano, envelope 5, folder 7). Pieri was a carpenter, a long-time Communist, jailed during the Fascist period (see Francovich, La Resistenza a Firenze, p. 330).

  29 See the text of the fifteenth lesson of the commissars’ course organised by the 1st Garibaldi-Osoppo Division (IZDG, envelope 272b, folder A/I).

  30 Padoan (Vanni), Abbiamo lottato insieme, p. 145.

  31 Testimony of Giuliana Fiorentino Tedeschi, in Bravo and Jalla, La vita offesa, pp. 363–4.

  32 Editorial ‘La vittoria del popolo’, in Giustizia e Libertà, Cuneo, 30 April 1945 (quoted in Giovana, Storia di una formazione partigiana, pp. 379–80).

  33 On how confident expectations of great transformations clouds perceptions of those really under way, see Contini, Operaismo e innovazione.

  34 ‘Intervista sulla guerra partigiana’, interview given to L. La Malfa Calogero and M. V. de Filippis. See Rossi-Dori’s pamphlet Il problema politico italiano e il partito d’azione (Quaderni dell’Italia libera, July 1944, 6). On the ‘revolutionary conception, but only in the ethical sense of the word’ subordinate to the ‘slow, empirical reformism’ of Parri, see Valiani, Tutte le strade, p. 119.

  35 Letter from Albero to the Lombardy triumvirate, on the Aliotta Division, 13 February 1945 (Le Brigate Garibaldi, vol. III, p. 355); testimony of Vero Zagaglioni (Portelli, Biografia di una città, pp. 266–7).

  36 Report by the commander Ninel on the situation in Val Nure, Milan, 25 January 1945 (Le Brigate Garibaldi, vol. III, pp. 284–5).

  37 Report by the general P. Neame, having escaped from an Italian prison camp, quoted in Absalom, Ex prigionieri alleati, p. 465.