First published by Verso 2013
Translation © Peter Levy 2013
Introduction © Stanislao G. Pugliese 2013
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
Verso
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ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-750-4
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pavone, Claudio.
[Guerra civile. English]
A civil war : a history of the Italian resistance / Claudio Pavone; translated by Peter Levy with the assistance of David Broder; introduced by Stanislao G. Pugliese.
page cm
Originally published as: Guerra civile. Torino : Bollati Boringhieri, 1991.
ISBN (US): 9781781682364
ISBN (UK): 9781781685419
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-84467-750-4 (alk. paper)
eBook ISBN: 978-1-78168-236-4
1. Italy–Politics and government–1943-1947.
2. World War, 1939-1945–Underground movements–Italy. I. Title.
DG572.P3513 2013
940.53’45–dc23
2013029227
v3.1
To my daughters
Liberiana, Flaminia and Sabina
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction by Stanislao G. Pugliese
Preface
1 The Choice
The Collapse
A Clear and Difficult Choice
Betrayal
2 The Legacy of the Fascist War
Wishing for and Fearing Defeat
The Uncertain Motivations of the Combatants
The Repudiation of the Royal Army
3 Paths to a New Institutionalisation
Militarisation and Its Limits
Relations with the Parties
4 The Patriotic War
Regaining National Identity
The Traditional Allies
The Rediscovered Enemy
5 The Civil War
A Controversial Definition
The Reappearance of the Fascists
The Anti-Fascists’ Attitude to the Civil War
The Main Enemy: The Fascists or the Germans?
The Catholics and the Civil War
The European Civil War
6 The Class War
Class, Nation, Anti-Fascism
Workers and Workers’ Representation
Political Struggles and Economic Struggles
Struggle in Society and the Struggle for Survival
Class Struggle and Armed Struggle
The Myth of the USSR
7 Violence
The Problem of Violence in the Context of War
Resistance Violence and Fascist Violence
Self-Discipline and the Organisation of Violence: The Punitive System
Reprisals and Counter-Reprisals
Urban Guerrilla Warfare and the GAPS
Insurrectional Violence
8 Politics and Future Expectations
Politics and Morality
Public and Private
Relations Between the Generations
Reckoning with the Past
The Sense of the Future
The Return
Chronology
List of Abbreviations
Glossary
INTRODUCTION
The Italian Resistance: Three Wars and the Eternal Struggle for the Past
‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’
William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun, 1950
Nearly seventy years after the end of the Second World War, the armed Resistance against fascism – in both its Italian and German variants – is still the caesura of contemporary Italian politics, society and culture. Historically, psychologically, and culturally, it functions much like the Dreyfus Affair in France or the Civil War in the United States. As in France, the Italian Resistance evolved its own necessary mythology, thereby generating a counter-narrative of rightist revisionism. But from its earliest days, the Resistance, its participants and its chroniclers were aware of the sometimes morally ambiguous nature of the movement.
On its initial publication in 1991 by the Italian publishing house of Bollati Boringhieri in Turin, Claudio Pavone’s Una guerra civile was generally acknowledged to be the most important work of history in a generation.1 With 800 pages of text and notes, this was a monumental work of scholarship, maturing after decades of labour in the relevant archives. Two decades later, it can be seen to have altered the terms of debate on the armed Resistance; a true paradigm-shifter in Italian historiography.2 When first published in France, it was recognised outside Italy’s borders as a fundamental work.3 Now, after a convoluted and complicated history, the book is finally available to English-language readers.4
Its most fundamental contribution to Resistance historiography is in Pavone’s delineation of three simultaneous wars: a patriotic war, a civil war and a class war. Pavone had first used the loaded term ‘civil war’ at a conference in Belluno in October 1988.5 Previously, only the Fascists and neo- or post-Fascists had used the phrase.6 Just as only a Nixon could go to China, only an historian with such impeccable anti-Fascist credentials as Pavone could propose looking at the Resistance in this manner. Today, it is almost a commonplace to speak of the civil war in Italy between 1943 and 1945.7
This book’s genesis might be said to have begun with Pavone’s participation in the Resistance as a young man. Its more immediate birth was recounted by the author in his preface to the original Italian edition.8 Many years earlier, Ferruccio Parri had proposed that Pavone write a history of the Resistance using, as a model, two fundamental works that had been published in France some time before: Henri Michel’s Les courants de pensée de la Résistance,9 and, by the same Henri Michel and Boris Mirkine-Guetzévitch, Les idées politiques et sociales de la Résistance.10 When Norberto Bobbio invited Pavone to develop a series of seminars on the relationship between politics and morality at the Centro Gobetti in Turin, the lectures became the nucleus of this book.
Pavone’s original intent to focus on the institutions of the Resistance, based on his earlier essay, ‘La continuità del Stato’,11 was abandoned when he ‘became convinced of the difficulty, in an essay on the Italian Resistance, of separating political, social, and institutional ideas and programmes’. Instead the work refocused on ‘analysing the behaviour of the protagonists to understand the ideas that inspired them, even if those ideas were formulated without clarity or coherence’. Hence Pavone’s focus on the partisans themselves, without his losing sight of the political and military frameworks in which they acted. Letters, memoirs and diaries are used extensively, as are literary texts, such as those by Beppe Fenoglio and Italo Calvino.
Pavone argues that, from September 1943 to April 1945, Italy was divided by three different wars occurring simultaneously: there was a class war, a civil war and a patriotic war. The book was part of a larger trend in Italian historiography concerning the Resistance, yet it is also the single most influential piece of scholarship in the last generation. In his depiction of the vast social dimension of the Resistance and his sensitive exploration of the moral and ethical problems associated with armed resistance, Pavone has written a work that is often described as a masterpiece of the historian’s craft. It demonstrates the evolving and sophisticat
ed nature of Italian historical writing – a reality often not recognised outside Italy. A Civil War is not just a standard but a central point of reference in the rapidly growing body of scholarship on history and memory, so that the continued absence of an English-language edition posed a serious obstacle to a fuller understanding of these issues, making one of the finest examples of contemporary Italian historical scholarship inaccessible to Anglophone readers.
While A Civil War is universally recognised as the most important work of history and historiography in a generation, it can also be seen as the intellectual and historiographical response to Renzo De Felice’s monumental eight-volume biography of Benito Mussolini. Pavone has crafted a more subtle and substantive interpretation of the armed Resistance against Fascism and the Nazi occupation of Italy. Mediating between the hagiography of the left and the dismissive revisionism of the right, he has forged a new reading of the most important event in modern Italian history.
Most influential has been his reading of the Resistance as three interrelated wars. Using this imaginative and innovative framework, Pavone was able to draw together the amazingly complex events, discourses and interpretations into a new narrative. While most scholarly and popular attention has been focused on these three interrelated wars, Pavone also offers a sophisticated and ambitious chapter on the moral and political nature of violence, carefully delineating a profound difference between Fascist violence and partisan violence, thereby avoiding any moral equivalency between the two.
As readers will soon notice, 8 September 1943 looms large in the book. Much of the subsequent historiography and political mythology revolve around this seminal date. Historians and politicians still debate the symbolism and political ramifications of Italy’s surrender. The left saw (and sees) the date as the beginning of Italy’s attempt to redeem itself, with the armed Resistance as a ‘second Risorgimento’. The right offers a very different interpretation. For example, in 1996, Italian historian Ernesto Galli Della Loggia published La morte della patria, in which he equated the collapse of Fascism (July 1943) and the Armistice with the Allies (September 1943) with the ‘Death of the Fatherland’.12 Most historians and citizens agree that the events of July–September 1943 engendered a crisis of moral consciousness and national identity, but the larger and longer-term ramifications have been the subject of widely varying interpretations. Historian Elena Aga Rossi offers an overview of the issues in commenting critically on Pavone’s book:
In Claudio Pavone’s book Una guerra civile, the choice in the days following the Armistice between loyalty to the monarchy and loyalty to Mussolini is for the first time considered a legitimate ‘moral’ one. Pavone, an intellectual of the left, uses the concept of ‘civil war’ to explain the struggle between partisans and exponents of the Italian Social Republic, thereby avoiding the usual condemnation of the followers of Mussolini voiced by historians of the Resistance.…
In historical studies, the patriotic element has been relegated to second place, while the concepts of the Resistance as a ‘civil’ and a ‘class’ war have prevailed – to borrow Claudio Pavone’s most useful classification. Pavone’s text is a good example of the contradictions that can be found in many histories of that period. It represents a turning-point, since it introduces reflections on the patriotic theme, but at the same time it does not in the least free itself from old assumptions, dedicating to the patriotic war much less space than that devoted to the ‘civil’ and ‘class’ aspects of the conflict.13
Aga Rossi’s critique of A Civil War was not unusual, but it failed to recognise how distinctive Pavone’s work really was.
The armed Resistance did not appear spontaneously on 8 September 1943. In fact, it had a distinguished if complex political and intellectual genealogy. And considering the involvement of the Italian volunteers in the Spanish Civil War fighting alongside the Loyalists in defending the Republic, it also had a military prehistory as well. What follows is a brief contextualisation of the Resistance for those readers who may not be familiar with the history.
Even before the Second World War came to an end in Italy, the political and intellectual battle over the ultimate meaning and significance of Fascism and the armed Resistance was joined.14 Had Fascism been a revolution that radically changed Italy and the Italians, or merely the violent reaction of a morally and politically bankrupt bourgeoisie threatened by socialist revolution? Was the regime a manifestation of deep-rooted historical, economic, and social problems that could be traced back to a failed Risorgimento, the movement for national unification in the nineteenth century? Had Mussolini been a buffoon, a manipulator, an opportunist? Had he been a ‘sincere’ revolutionary? Had he indeed made the trains run on time and saved Italy from a Bolshevik revolution? Had he committed his ‘only’ mistake in allying himself with Hitler in the mid 1930s? Was the armed Resistance an illegal movement that betrayed the nation-state, and the Armistice of 8 September 1943 a betrayal of Italy’s Axis partner, Nazi Germany? Was the Resistance a second – and truly popular – Risorgimento, bringing the masses into the struggle for a democratic republic founded on the principles of social justice and individual liberty? Had the regime fostered a genuine ‘consensus’, or was the populace coerced into political silence? Was Fascism an early form of totalitarianism, or was there room for artists, writers, intellectuals and individuals to think and create on their own? Were the Fascist and Nazi massacres of civilians legitimate acts of war or crimes against humanity? Was the Italian Communist Party (PCI) – the largest and most influential of the anti-Fascist forces – a patriotic organisation or the tool of Stalin’s Soviet Union? Were the anti-Fascist activities of sabotage, killings and executions of Mussolini and Fascists legitimate acts of war or acts of terrorism? Had the pernicious effects of Fascism ended with 25 April 1945 (the date usually understood to mean the end of the war in Italy), or were they to infect the very foundations of the Italian Republic as it emerged after the war? Has post-war Italy come to terms with and fully acknowledged its Fascist past?
Interpretations and readings of the fascist ventennio and the anti-Fascist Resistance have proved extraordinarily contentious for more than half a century. The fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war in 1995 served as a catalyst for a major re-examination of the issues that bore more than a passing resemblance to the infamous Historikerstreit (Historians’ Debate) over the nature of Nazism in Germany during the 1980s.15
Some anti-Fascists, such as Ugo La Malfa, then a member of the Action Party and later a leading figure of the Italian Republican Party (PRI), argued that a broad coalition of anti-Fascist parties would be required to effect the necessary break with the pre-Fascist past. In May 1944, La Malfa charged that ‘Italy has never been a real democracy’ and called for a ‘progressive democracy’ that avoided the injustices of both the liberal and the communist state.16 La Malfa was echoing the heretical ideas first proposed by the liberal socialist Carlo Rosselli in the 1920 and 1930s. This indictment of the status quo ante could not go unchallenged. In a radio broadcast on 1 September 1944, Pope Pius XII offered a religious justification of private property, while Alcide De Gasperi, leader of the Christian Democrats (DC), would write that ‘anti-Fascism is a contingent political phenomenon, which will at a certain moment be overturned by other political ideals more in keeping with the … feelings of Italian public life, for the good and the progress of the nation’.17 Ada Gobetti of the Action Party spoke for many in this later recollection:
In a confusing way I sensed, however, that another struggle was beginning: longer, more difficult, more tiring, even if less bloody. It was no longer the question of fighting against arrogance, cruelty and violence … but … of not allowing that little flame of solidarity and fraternal humanism, which we had seen born, to die in the calm atmosphere of an apparent return to normal life.18
In a famous speech before the National Assembly on 26 September 1945, Prime Minister Parri shocked his audience by echoing Piero Gobetti and Carlo Rosselli: ‘I do no
t believe that the governments we had before Fascism can be called democratic.’ For the new prime minister, the legacy of the anti-Fascist Resistance was that it was the only democratic movement in the history of Italy that the masses had supported. With the Resistance, both Fascism and the nineteenth-century liberal state based on formal law had been superseded: ‘We can say that in the history of anti-Fascism all the best traditions of the Italian spirit … are summed up and gathered together and guide it to successive liberating stages, beginning with the first enlightenment revolution of the eighteenth century.’19
The first militant anti-Fascist organisation (1921–22), the Arditi del Popolo, had a troubled history, but managed to cobble together diverse groups in order to combat Fascism in the field. Not averse to combating the violence of the squadristi with violence of their own, they were forsaken by the official organs of the state (police, military, judiciary) and even the leaders of the Italian Socialist and Communist parties; consequently, they were left to fend for themselves. With hindsight, most now recognise that the Arditi del Popolo represented a ‘lost opportunity’ to confront – and perhaps defeat – Fascism in its earliest form.
Originally used by the fascists to express contempt for the anti-Fascist exiles, the term fuorusciti (literally: those who have gone outside, outlaws) came to encompass the entire spectrum of anti-Fascism abroad. Paris was the capital of the fuorusciti, but there were other centres of activity in London and New York. A major flaw of the fuorusciti was their insistence on continuing the old political party divisions while in exile. This problem was fully evident in the most important anti-Fascist organisation abroad, the Concentrazione Antifascista, established in April 1927 with headquarters in Paris. Led by the socialist Pietro Nenni, the Concentrazione Antifascista was composed of the revolutionary PSI and the reformist PSU (which merged in July 1930), the PRI, the Confederazione Generale del Lavoro (CGL), and Lega Internazionale dei Diritti dell’Uomo (LIDU). The CA published a weekly newspaper, La Libertà, from May 1927 until May 1934, and managed to gather many of the fuorusciti into one organisation. The PCI refused to join, and internal divisions were to cause the CA to dissolve in 1934; it was replaced by a Unity of Action Pact.20
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