Last summer [2002], the head of the Italian state broadcasting system (RAI), Antonio Baldassarre, addressed the national congress of the National Alliance, the right-wing party led principally by ‘post-Fascists’, and announced that it was time to ‘rewrite history’ as it is presented on Italian television. ‘The old RAI represented only one culture and not others’, he said. ‘Often, they didn’t tell real history, but told fables, offered one-sided interpretations.’ This call to ‘rewrite history’, before a party many of whose leaders were ardent admirers of Italian Fascism, had a very clear meaning: no more ‘one-sided’ portrayals of anti-Fascists as noble patriots and Fascists as evil villains.37
As this introduction is being drafted, Berlusconi again finds himself in the political spotlight. Considered a dark horse in national elections, he added a new twist to the old ‘Mussolini’s only mistake was allying himself with Hitler’ argument. On Holocaust Remembrance Day 2013 (27 January), he declared that, while the Racial Laws were Mussolini’s ‘worst mistake’, the Duce had done the right thing for Italy in allying with Hitler as it was obvious that Nazi Germany was on its way to victory.38 At the same time, controversy flares as a public monument in Affile (near Rome), his hometown, is dedicated to General Rodolfo Graziani, accused of war crimes.
In this current climate of anti-anti-Fascism and the denigration of the Resistance, a mysterious transformation (some might say a miracle) occurred in Rome. Over the entrance to the EUR Administration building, designed by Gaetano Minucci, a bas-relief by Publio Morbiducci depicts the history of Rome. The facade, originally constructed during the Fascist era, included an imperious Mussolini astride an impressive steed hailed by men, women and children. With the fall of the Fascist regime in July 1943, the bas-relief was attacked and the face of Mussolini chipped off. Recently, the face has been restored and the facade cleaned.39
Yet we should not throw up our hands and conclude that the debate over the political and ethical significance of the Resistance is simply and forever spinning its wheels in mud. As Claudio Pavone made clear in a recent communication, while it is true that the debate continues to this day, its physiognomy has changed (for the better) with the change in the political and cultural climate in Italy.40
Looking back over the last two decades, one is struck by how Pavone’s A Civil War has influenced the debate over the Resistance, both in the academy and in popular culture. Of course, as British historian Philip Cooke has observed, ‘Pavone’s book is a work that has suffered the fate of being more talked about than read. There is a gulf between what is actually in Pavone’s book and what is perceived to be in it.’41 Perhaps the writing and reception of history is paradoxically and unavoidably both public and personal. As Pavone himself acknowledges in a personal ‘last observation’:
great and exceptional events render problematic that which usually appears obvious. This simultaneously promotes the drive towards clear-cut choices and judgments and the love of ambiguity that allow us to comprehend others when they resonate in us. Those who in their youth were involved in these great events have difficulty transmitting all of this wealth to newer generations. And if one tries to do it with historical research, a silent process, mustered over so many years of memory, insinuates itself in the selection of sources. In this sense, my research has also been of an autobiographical nature.42
Stanislao G. Pugliese
Hofstra University
April 2013
1 ‘Pavone’s study of the struggle between the Resistance and the Fascist Republican regime, Una guerra civile, has provided the broad interpretative framework for much recent scholarship.’ Alexander De Grand, American Historical Review 106: 2 (April 2001), p. 677.
2 For Pavone’s influence on two generations of Italian historians, see Cesare Bermani, et al., La nuova storia contemporanea in Italia: omaggio a Claudio Pavone, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2001 and Paolo Pezzino and Gabriele Ranzato, eds, Laboratorio di storia. Studi in onore di Claudio Pavone, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1994.
3 Une guerre civile: Essai historique sur l’éthique de la Résistance italienne, ed. Bernard Droz and transl. Jérôme Grossman, Paris: Seuil, 2005. ‘Un ouvrage fondamental sur l’histoire des années 1940 en Italie’, according to Jean Marie Guillon, Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire 54 (April–June 1997), p. 155; while Fédéric Attal wrote that ‘est le travail le plus accompli jamais écrit sur la Résistance italienne’, Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire 91 (July–September 2006), p. 180.
4 A collective decision was made to edit the late Peter Edward Levy’s translation with a light hand. Levy, who taught in Siena, translated Pavone’s erudite, Latinate Italian into a complex, intricately rendered English. My thanks to Charles Maier, Mark Mazower, Victoria De Grazia and the late Tony Judt for their unflagging support in publishing this English translation.
5 Proceedings published as Massimo Legnani, Ferruccio Vendramini, eds, Guerra, guerra di liberazione, guerra civile, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1990.
6 See, for example, Giorgio Pisanò, Storia della guerra civile in Italia (1943–1945), Milan: FPE, 1965; and Indro Montanelli, L’Italia della guerra civile, vol. 9 of his monumental 12-volume Storia d’Italia, Milan: Corriere della Sera, 2003.
7 See Gianni Oliva, Primavera 1945: Il sangue della guerra civile, Milan: Giunti, 2011; or, for a more wide-ranging and contested application, Stanley G. Payne, Civil War in Europe, 1905–1949, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
8 ‘Premessa’ in Pavone, Una guerra civile. Saggio storico sulla moralità nella Resistenza, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1991, ix–xii.
9 Paris: PUF, 1962.
10 Paris: PUF, 1954.
11 The essay now appears in Claudio Pavone, Alle origini della repubblica: scritti su fascismo, antifascismo e continuità dello stato, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1995.
12 Ernesto Galli Della Loggia, La morte della patria. La crisi dell’idea di nazione tra Resistenza, antifascismo e Repubblica, Rome: Laterza, 1996.
13 Elena Aga Rossi, A Nation Collapses: The Italian Surrender of September 1943, transl. Harvey Fergusson II, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 134–8.
14 Parts of this Introduction have been adapted from an earlier essay, ‘A Past That Will Not Pass: Fascism, Anti-Fascism and the Resistance in Italy’, in Fascism, Anti-Fascism and the Resistance in Italy, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004, pp. 1–22.
15 The ‘Historians’ Debate’ in West Germany unfolded in the mid-to-late 1980s over the nature of the Holocaust and its relation with the Soviet gulag system. Originally a dispute between historian Ernst Nolte and philosopher Jürgen Habermas, it evolved into a watershed philosophical and historiographical moment. In English, see Rudolf Augstein et al., Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? Original Documents of the Historikerstreit, The Controversy Concerning the Singularity of the Holocaust, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993 (English-language edition of ‘Historikerstreit’: Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistschen Judenvernichtung, Munich: Piper, 1987); Peter Baldwin, Hitler, the Holocaust and the Historians Dispute, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1990; Richard Evans, In Hitler’s Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape the Nazi Past, New York: Pantheon, 1989; New German Critique 44 (special issue on the Historikerstreit) (Spring–Summer 1988); Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretations, London: Arnold, 1989; Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust and German National Identity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
16 Domenico Settembrini, ‘The Divided Left: After Fascism, What?’ in Spencer Di Scala, ed., Italian Socialism: Between Politics and History (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), p. 110.
17 Quoted in Giorgio Bocca, Storia dell’Italia partigiana, Milan: Mondadori, 1995, p. 416.
18 Ada Gobetti, Diario partigiano, Turin: Einaudi, 1956, p. 414.
19 Ferruccio Parri, Scritti 1915–1975, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976, p.
179.
20 Alexander De Grand, The Italian Left in the Twentieth Century, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989, pp. 68–70.
21 On the charismatic Rosselli, see Stanislao G. Pugliese, Carlo Rosselli: Socialist Heretic and Antifascist Exile. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
22 For the first biography of Silone in English, see Stanislao G. Pugliese, Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009.
23 For an excellent anthology of writings in Italian on the armed Resistance, see Philip Cooke, ed., The Italian Resistance: An Anthology, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997.
24 Renata Viganò, L’Agnese va a morire, Turin: Einaudi, 1949 – winner of the Premio Viareggio and basis of the 1976 film of the same name directed by Giuliano Montaldi; Ada Gobetti, Diario partigiano, Turin: Einaudi, 1949 – there is a forthcoming English translation by JoMarie Alano. See also Rosetta D’Angelo and Barbara Zaczek, eds, Resisting Bodies: Narratives of Italian Partisan Women, Chapel Hill, NC: Annali d’Italianistica, 2008; and Jane Slaughter, Women and the Italian Resistance, 1943–1945, Denver: Arden Press, 1997.
25 On the persistence of Fascist and neo-Fascist threats to the Italian Republic, see Franco Ferraresi’s Threats to Democracy: The Radical Right in Italy after the War, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996 (original edition published by Feltrinelli in Milan, 1995).
26 Alessandra Mussolini (born 1962), member of the Italian parliament, still defends her grandfather’s political legacy.
27 See Robert Katz, Death in Rome, New York: Macmillan, 1967.
28 Guglielmo Petroni, transl. John Shepley, The World Is a Prison, Evanston, IL: Marlboro Press, 1999, pp. 74–6.
29 Piero Malvezzi and Giovanni Pirelli, eds, Lettere di condannati a morte della Resistenza italiana: 8 settembre 1943–25 aprile 1945, Turin: Einaudi, 1994, 3–4, transl. Stanislao G. Pugliese.
30 Ibid., pp. 319–20.
31 See Roy Palmer Domenico, Italian Fascists on Trial, 1943–1948, Chappell Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
32 Editor’s note: Rosario Romeo, Il problema nazionale tra 19° e 20° secolo: idee e realtà, Roma: Bulzoni, 1977.
33 Renzo De Felice, Rosso e nero, Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, 1995, pp. 12–25, transl. Stanislao G. Pugliese.
34 Aga Rossi, A Nation Collapses, p. 137.
35 Nicola Tranfaglia, Un passato scomodo. Fascismo e postfascismo, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1996.
36 Roberto Battaglia, The Story of the Italian Resistance, trans. P. D. Cummings, London: Odhams Press, 1957, p. 281.
37 Alexander Stille, New York Times, 28 September 2002.
38 ‘Il fatto delle leggi razziali è stata la peggiore colpa di un leader, Mussolini, che per tanti altri versi invece aveva fatto bene … certamente il governo di allora per timore che la potenza tedesca vincesse preferì essere alleato alla Germania di Hitler piuttosto che opporvisi.’ La Repubblica, 27 January 2013, p. 1. ‘The fact of the Racial Laws was the worst mistake of a leader, Mussolini, who, for so many other reasons, was good for Italy … certainly the government of the time, fearful that German power would win, preferred to ally itself with Hitler’s Germany rather than oppose it.’
39 See Borden W. Painter, Jr, Mussolini’s Rome: Rebuilding the Eternal City, New York: Palgrave, 2005, p. 160.
40 Claudio Pavone email message to Stanislao G. Pugliese, 28 March 2013.
41 Philip Cooke, The Legacy of the Italian Resistance, New York: Palgrave, 2011, p. 160.
42 Pavone, ‘Premessa’, pp. xi–xii.
Preface
Many years ago, Ferruccio Parri proposed to me that I write a book using, as a model, two works that sometime before had been published in France: Les courants de pensée de la Résistance by Henri Michel and, by the same Michel and Boris Mirkine-Guetzévitch, Les idées politiques et sociales de la Résistance. When I began my research I was, at first and above all, attracted to the institutional theme, though it was indeed through the drafting of the essay on La continuità dello Stato when I became convinced of the difficulty, in an essay on the Italian Resistance, of separating political, social, and institutional ideas and programmes.
Above all, many of the ideas that circulated during the Resistance were developed earlier, or, if developed at that time, were later on elaborated a great deal and organised in a climate of rapid political change. This not only made the identification of the sources difficult, but also indicated the necessity of analysing the behaviour of the protagonists to understand the ideas that inspired them, even if those ideas were formulated without clarity or coherence. Thus, the objective of my research shifted from programmes to the protagonists themselves – their moral convictions, the cultural structures around the protagonists themselves, their feelings, and the doubts and passions elicited by that brief and intense sequence of events. On what grounds did people base their actions, when institutions – within the frame of which they had been accustomed to operate – vacillated or vanished, to then reassemble themselves and demand new and different loyalties? To this question, years of terrorism added yet another question, illustrated with particular dramatic force: if, how, and why is violence justified when it must be carried out without a clear, institutional legitimacy? In other words: when the state is no longer capable of exercising its monopoly of violence with any certainty? The question appeared particularly difficult to those who refused an answer that denied politics and history. And it was in fact at that moment, during a series of seminars on the relationship between politics and morality initiated by Norberto Bobbio at the Centro studi Piero Gobetti in Turin, that the presentation I made constituted the first nucleus of this book.
The word that seemed to me to best summarise what appeared to become the object of my research was ‘moralità’. Not ‘morals’, a term that, on the one hand was confined to the individual conscience, while on the other risked sliding into the rhetoric of the Resistance. Not ‘mentalità’, a word that in a short time has acquired multiple meanings and generated controversies which I did not intend to get caught up in. When my book was already finished, I found confirmation of my choices in a letter from Giorgio Agosti to Dante Livio Bianco in their recently published correspondence: ‘Your correspondence has the interests and the character of an eighteenth-century epistolary exchange – full, as it is, of “moralità” and of perspicacious “notations.” ’1
Moralità is a word particularly suited to define the territory on which politics and ethics meet and clash, relying on history as a possible common measure. It was necessary, whenever possible, to immerse oneself in the historical context when dealing with matters that first appeared to be political but which were in reality great moral problems and, reciprocally, to show how these same historical events necessarily influenced those problems.
The ‘high’ [political] sources – the most noted and studied – have thus ceded much of the field to ‘low’ [popular] sources. In fact, I propose not to reconstruct once again the history of leading organisations – parties such as CLN, CVL, etc. – but to see how the general directives were received and acted upon at various levels, being adapted by these organisations to a vast array of individual and collective experiences, that just through these adaptations, and even upheavals, left a trace of themselves. That which the political approach and military strategy in this subtle diffusion lost in coherence, it gained in adherence to reality; and this, if not always pleasing to politicians, today it is surely so for historians.
Is it possible, in only so many pages and with only so many examples, to give everyone a say? There are partisans who have never spoken, nor will they ever speak; they have not escaped from the situation, as expressed by a concentration camp survivor, in which: “It is sad to live without letting others know.” I would be very happy if they could recognise themselves, even slightly, in what I have written here.
It goes without saying that this book could not have been written if the ground had not been broken by others,
starting from the pioneering Storia della Resistenza italiana by Roberto Battaglia (the first edition published in 1953), to the vast research promoted by the Istituto Nazionale per la Storia del Movimento di Liberazione in Italia and the network of institutes associated with it. Only these works allowed me to accept certain assessments of facts and analysis of ideologies.
My book presumes a distinction between a Resistance in a real and proper sense, the one fought politically and militarily in the North by a conspicuous minority, and a Resistance in the broader and more literal sense, that assumed with time – even for those who had not participated or who had tried to avoid, manipulate or marginalise its memory – the role of legitimising the entire political system of the Italian Republic and its ruling class (the ‘constitutional arch,’ heir of the CLN). This book deals with the Resistance in the former sense, but must necessarily emphasise, side by side with the differences, also its connection with the Resistance in the latter, broader, sense.
The three central chapters could be grouped under the title “The Three Wars: Patriotic, Civil and Class.” I first used this formula in a work presented at a conference held in Belluno in October of 1998. In this work, civil war emerges from the other two. It, in fact, offers a key reading in a general sense (and above all, denies fascist or pro-fascist apologists with provocative intentions the possibility of manipulating the facts). This interpretation of civil war prevented that separate parts of the book be dedicated to fascists: fascists, as opponents, are present everywhere in this volume.
A last observation: great and exceptional events render problematic that which usually appears obvious, and promotes simultaneously the drive towards clear-cut choices and judgments, and the love of ambiguity that alone allows us to comprehend others when they resonate in us. Those who in their youth were involved in these great events have difficulty transmitting all of this wealth of experience to newer generations, and, if one tries to do it through historical research, a silent process, mustered over so many years of memory, insinuates itself in the selection of sources. In this sense, my research has also been of an autobiographical nature.
A Civil War Page 3
