A Civil War

by Claudio Pavone

  At the suggestion of the Ministry of Popular Culture97 the announcement of the Armistice had been published by the newspapers as an obituary notice. This was an act of hypocrisy both towards the vast majority of the population who wanted, somehow or other, to have done with the war, and towards the Fascists, who wanted to continue it. What was felt to be a new massive Caporetto was not defeat by the British and Americans, but sudden, headlong defeat by the Germans.98 Victor Emmanuel III turned on its head the appeal that had been made by the Fascist government, and, in an attempt to rally people’s spirits, this time against the Germans, once again reverted to the memory of 1917 in his speech broadcast on Radio Bari on 24 September.99 As we shall see, the sense of defeat was to reappear in the Fascists of the Social Republic as a stimulus to their desire for revenge and, at least in some members of the Resistance, as a need to give a new face, after the two-fold defeat, to national identity.

  To enrich the picture, we must recall the manifestations of solidarity and help that a large part of the population immediately offered the disbanded and fugitive troops.100 This solidarity essentially took the form of concrete actions. Alongside the first glimmers of active resistance, the seeds were widely sown, in the course of those days, of ‘passive resistance’, insofar as a climate and environment were created favouring the former. The railway engineers slowed down the trains and made unscheduled halts to allow the soldiers to escape, or left saws and hammers in the wagons to aid flight.101 The peasants were ‘moved by a confused and powerful sentiment that was at once both heartfelt pity for all those homeless and endangered “figli di mamma”, and solidarity for these men from other regions, most of them peasants like themselves’.102 One witness speaks tearfully to this day of Emilian girls who ‘waited for the soldiers, brought them food and then said “if you want to stay here …” ’103 Bewildered soldiers were ‘surrounded by people wanting to help them’.104 Everybody offered the soldiers civilian clothing. Fraternisation between civilians and soldiers, which had failed to occur under the equivocal sign of Badoglio, succeeded under that of common misfortune. No one rallied around the institution of the Royal Army, but everyone came to the aid of Italians who had been plunged into dire peril. In Turin, the few soldiers still in active service whom it had occurred to someone to dispatch to disperse the crowd were applauded and embraced by them;105 the soldiers interned by the Germans in a barracks at Acqui were set free by the local people.106 The eruption of a potential bellum omnium contra omnes was counterbalanced by the aid total strangers offered each other. The bitterness of civil war and of war against the occupier was beating at the door, and people seemed to have discovered that the only remaining support lay in trusting one’s neighbour. Exceptionally powerful fears and acts of exceptional solidarity commingled in the thick of daily living: ‘The State is in ruins, the army has disintegrated, but the train from Acqui to Alessandria is still running. It seems absurd.’107

  If on the one hand this ‘absurd’ normality was an offence against the exceptional character of the situation, on the other hand it responded to a wistful hankering after complete normality and a desire to re-enter the ‘womb-like warmth of legality’.108 Acquiescence to the authority of the RSI, and of that administrative machinery that it somehow or other reactivated, was to have its roots in this desire.

  Reluctance to face the fact that institutional legality had completely dissolved helps account for the residual attempts by the anti-Fascist forces to lean on royal, military and civilian authorities, in the hope of involving them in the taking of firm stances in both word and deed. In the case of the moderate left-wing parties, this responded to their fear of losing contact with those authorities and their wish to leave no stone unturned. But one needs to distinguish between attempts made from the ranks by the odd new-born partisan squad to win over those fragments of the defeated Royal Army that were still, for the time being, on their feet,109 and high-level approaches still made in the name of legality. In Turin the constitutional scruples about poster-sticking and holding assemblies were such that Communists and Actionists had no option but to dissociate themselves from the other parties.110 In Rome, in a situation whose atypical character was further highlighted by the pretence that it was a ‘città aperta’, uncertainty and fear generated in the local press an ‘evasive and minimising approach’111 whose sole concern was the maintenance of public order. Thus, while Il Lavoro appeared, a lone voice, with its headline ‘Torna Garibaldi’ occupying the entire front page,112 Il Piccolo saw applause for the armed forces as a wish to collaborate ‘in the maintenance of order’, and Il Messaggero praised the common-sense of the Romans, entitling its back-page article for 12 September, ‘Calma e fiducia’, repeated on the local pages as: ‘Fermezza e dignità dell’Urbe’ (‘Firmness and dignity of the City’).

  More than a year later, a newspaper of the Giustizia e Libertà (GL) units printed a caustic article against the myth of order that had brought Fascism to power, but added that the people now ‘have the arms and the force to impose that minimum of salutary “disorder” which in 1789 heralded a century of liberty for the poor and which has one name alone: REVOLUTION’.113 Even if we discard that prediction of a revolutionary turning-point, the optimistic interpretation of disorder as an opportunity for liberty and the pessimistic one which, by contrast, generated bewilderment and a desire for the restoration of order, were the two ways in which people reacted against the institutional void that had been created – a void which could indeed produce either exaltation, or dismay and a sense of having been abandoned. If we regard the state, even the Italian state which was the subject of so much atavistic suspicion, as ‘the last great form of collective solidarity in which individuals take refuge’,114 this refuge suddenly vanished, and those individuals found themselves compelled to make up for it in other ways. But that void was felt, and has remained in people’s memories as a basic fact. Immediately after the Liberation the regional CLN [Committee of National Liberation] would say, of Tuscan public opinion, ‘we felt completely isolated and abandoned at the moment of greatest crisis’.115

  ‘Nothing was left, there was no established order’ – this was how Terni was recalled.116 The feeling of collapse was widespread: ‘When the Italian state collapsed on 10 September’, wrote Vittorio Foa a few months later;117 and as late as 1948 another Actionist, Dante Livio Bianco, would speak of the ‘collapse of the state’ that occurred in the days of September.118 ‘Italians, in Italy there is no longer a government. The king has fled, Badoglio has abandoned his post’, declared a socialist leaflet of 12 September.119 Even a jurist, Costantino Mortati, would then describe the CLNs ‘true organs of the state community, having organised themselves after the disintegration of pre-existing state structures’.120 A French historian has written: ‘The collapse of the state and of civil order had constituted, also in France in June 1940, the fact that had most affected the citizens, who were left to fend for themselves.’121

  I do not intend here to take up the issue of the problem of the character of the CLNs and of state continuity as the guiding thread and goal of the process that began on 25 July.122 All I wish to do is to highlight the eclipse of the institutions that occurred during those days in September, and to identify, in the reactions triggered by so richly illustrative an event, the seeds of many of the attitudes that the Italians adopted in the months that followed. In the anti-Fascist parties, people were to interrogate themselves, during the struggle, about the exact significance of the rupture that had taken place and about the political value they should attach ‘to the instincts and elementary popular reactions to the events that had occurred’;123 they would also tend to emphasise its importance as an epoch-making milestone.124 The following March, in quite another language, Teresio Olivelli, Catholic and former Fascist militant, would write: ‘8 September is a watershed: here springs and flowers the new life of the nation, which bursts forth in the spirit, is illumined with truth, quivers in action.’125 And Giaime Pintor, more soberly: ‘Th
e soldiers who traversed Italy last September, famished and half-naked, wanted above all to return home, to hear no more talk of war and hardships. They were a defeated people; but they bore within themselves the seed of a dimly-sensed recovery: the sense of offences afflicted and endured, disgust with the injustice in which they had lived.’126

  It was in fact to be the memory of the abyss that opened wide on 8 September that nourished the Resistance with pride at having succeeded in hauling themselves out of it. ‘And they were days of desperate humiliation, but followed by a recovery’, L’Italia Libera was to write in January. In November the same newspaper had made this profession of faith: ‘We refuse to consider the days of September as a tragic episode in the history of Italy. In the torment of an unprecedented national tragedy we see the travail of a people which will eventually give itself the principles of living.’127

  One aspect of those September days still needs emphasising. In the dissolution of the military and civil institutions and the emergence of solidarity, the working classes, at least those in the main factories, were the social group who gave the greatest indication of internal cohesion. Officers and soldiers fled and scattered, but the workers tended to stay united and to draw from this unity the impetus to free themselves from passivity and anger at their impotence:

  This morning certain workers had the harebrained idea of making an unarmed dash for it to get hold of the Germans’ machine-guns; others tried to dissuade them. One man aged around forty, well-dressed, with a gleaming-new bicycle, intervened, explaining that it was impossible to react against the Germans, and everyone insulted him then, saying, ‘We’re tired of obeying you borghesi; twenty years of Fascism is enough.’128

  To this day a worker from Terni still gets riled when, at a distance of years and superimposing two such diverse episodes, he recalls things as follows: ‘What I find hard to swallow is 8 September, because on 8 September we could have beaten the hides off the Germans … we could have done anything. Instead, calma, calma, calma … it was just like the Togliatti business, calma, calma, calma.129

  Here resentment against i borghesi is combined with, and possibly predominates over, that against the prudence of the Communist Party cadres. The state authorities are, by contrast, the exclusive target of another accusation: ‘We went on strike on 8 September and on that occasion we wanted, all together, to assail the Distretto, but the police dispersed us. Together with other workers we held big demonstrations. In the factory a comrade held an assembly urging us to strike.’130 And here is a Turin partisan’s recollection of events:

  The boys immediately went [on the announcement of the Armistice] to storm the barracks … then we held a big demonstration outside the Camera del Lavoro, where the workers asked for weapons: ‘Torino like Stalingrad’ … It was nothing less than the army of the working class that was on the march … Wonderful! We went to the barracks, we took the guns, formed up. You should have seen it: all for the Fronte Nazionale. Voluntary enlistment. It lasted only a few hours, though, because General Adami-Rossi, commander of the Torino fortress, betrayed us.131

  Again in Turin, after the 10 September assembly the workers asked: ‘Where shall we go? What direction should we head in?’132

  A more complete attempt at analysis, along the lines of the class war – to be examined later – appears in a Communist report, again from Turin, written in December 1943. The worker, it says, ‘feels that new events are at hand and knows too that everything that will issue from this fearful struggle will lead him towards the emancipation of his class, and so, though having no clear set of political principles, he feels that only through our programme will he obtain that social justice vainly promised and anxiously awaited.’133

  2. A CLEAR AND DIFFICULT CHOICE

  Great, exceptional, catastrophic events confront peoples and individuals with radical options and, with little or no forewarning, compel them to take stock of truths that were working away unbeknown to them, or of which full knowledge was the preserve only of a select few. The institutional void created by 8 September gave the predicament in which the Italians found themselves this character: they were called upon to make choices that many of them had never for one moment believed that their lives would ever require of them. In the normal run of things, ‘it is not necessary to be taking up positions continually in favour of the system’.1 But the need explicitly to agree, or dissent, becomes impelling when the system totters, the monopoly of state violence shatters, and one’s obligations towards the state no longer constitute a sure reference point for individual conduct, since the state is no longer in a position to demand those ‘sacrifices for love’ on which it often relies.2 A classic page from Hobbes, seems to sum up Italy as it was in September 1943:

  The Obligation of Subjects to the Sovereign is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth, by which he is able to protect them. For the right men have by Nature to protect themselves, when none else can protect them, can by no Covenant be relinquished. The Soveraignty is the Soule of the Commonwealth; which once departed from the Body, the members do no more receive their motion from it. The end of Obedience is Protection; which, wheresoever a man seeth it, either in his own, or in anothers sword, Nature applyeth his obedience to it, and his endeavour to maintaine it. And though Soveraignty, in the intention of them that make it, be immortall; yet is it in its own nature, not only subject to violent death, by forreign war; but also through the ignorance, and passions of men, it hath in it, from the very institution, many seeds of a naturall mortality, by Intestine Discord.3

  The non-presence of the state might be felt with a sense of disorientation or as an opportunity to make a bid for freedom. But first of all it might be experienced immediately as an exceptional moment of harmony in a community freed from the shackles of power.

  Perhaps the finest testimony we have of this experience, almost of a blissful, miraculous and fleeting aurora, is that of an English colonel:

  When a village has been in no-man’s land for weeks, between our lines and the enemy’s, the folk don’t rob and kill each other, but help one another to an incredible degree. All that is absurd and marvellous. Then we come along and set up the indispensable AMG offices and services, and all at once the Italians fall out, bicker, quarrel over trifles, denounce each another. The previous harmony dissolves into feuds and vendettas of every sort. Quite incredible.4

  Strictly speaking, the situation described here does not typify the Resistance. In the Resistance nobody chooses anything, but interpersonal relationships are lived with self-sufficient spontaneity. It does, however, display some traits shared with the solidarity extended to entire communities above all in the very first days after the collapse, but subsequently in several free zones too, or in territories where the presence of German and Fascist authorities was not strongly felt. Thus, a protagonist who was ten years old at the time recalls the formative value of experiencing the intense altruism shown by one and all, ‘without orders’ and ‘freely chosen’, at Borgo Anime in the province of Ravenna.5

  ‘We behaved well towards one another, in fact we were fonder of one another’, recalls a tradesman from the Terni area speaking of the mass exoduses from the city.6 No doubt these are transfigurations of memory, filled with nostalgia for the moments when the absence of authoritarian ties did not give rise to the bellum omnium contra omnes. But a book of memoirs, still hot from the event, of the Umbrian countryside which generously took in the fugitive Allied prisoners points out that ‘for once the eternal rancour of traditional disagreements, which divide and have always divided peasants sharing the boundaries of a field or a wood, had an unexpected outlet of goodness’.7 Generalising, a sociologist has written: ‘Partisan aggregation was favoured by small local communities, by a not hostile or a favourable local community environment.’8

  When the German occupying troops began to give a minimum of formalisation to their violence, which had flooded the space left vacant by the eclipse of the Italian authorities, an
d when, immediately after, the Fascists created the Social Republic – when, that is, the institutional void was somehow or other filled by a different system of authority – the choice became more difficult and more dramatic, because the spontaneous human solidarity of the first days no longer sufficed. Now the choice had to be made between disobedience, for which the price to pay would be ever higher, and the allure of Nazi–Fascist normalisation, grim though it was.

  The words with which Sartre begins a famous work – ‘Never have we been so free as under the German occupation’ – pinpoint this core of Resistance experience: a choice all the more authentic the more one was compelled by events to choose, and the stakes could be summed up in the formula ‘rather death than …’. Out of this grew, writes Sartre, ‘in shadow and in blood … the strongest of Republics … without institutions, without an army, without police’.9 Some years later, a text as dry as a library catalogue would reach a conclusion that endorses Sartre’s eloquent position: ‘On pourrait presque soutenir que les conditions difficiles égalisent les chances et favorisent les plus résolus, jamais presse ne fut plus libre que cette interdite.’10

  Sergeant Cecco Baroni, who ended up in a POW camp in Germany, puts the same situation simply: ‘You see those sentries behind the barbed wire? It’s they who are Hitler’s prisoners, not us. We say no to Hitler and Mussolini, even when they want to starve us out.’11

  The first meaning of liberty, acquired by the decision to resist, is implicit in its being an act of disobedience. It was not so much a question of disobeying a legal government, since it was a moot point who possessed legality, as of disobeying those who had the power to make themselves obeyed. In other words, it was a revolt against man’s power over man, a reaffirmation of the ancient principle that power should not prevail over virtue.12 The fact that the power you were revolting against might subsequently be deemed illegal as well as illegitimate in the strong sense of the word simply completes the picture. The Fascists’ decision to join the Social Republic – this is a difference that we would do well to highlight from the start – was not enveloped in this light of critical disobedience. As we know, ‘I did it because I was ordered to do so’ was to be the main argument used by the Fascists and Nazis to defend themselves in the trials instituted against them after the war.13 So intrinsic was this to the Nazi–Fascist ethic that it was to relegate to second place, and not just for reasons of courtroom expediency, the independently inspired choices which, as we shall presently see, some Fascists also made.