For the first time in the history of united Italy, the Italians lived, in one form or another, an experience of mass disobedience. This was particularly important for the generation who had been made, at elementary school, to learn by heart these words from the only state textbook: ‘What must be the first virtue of a balilla? Obedience! and the second? Obedience!’ (in gigantic letters).
A second thing to consider is that that the link between necessity and liberty, which it is always so difficult to put one’s finger on, appears in the at once problematic and limpid decision to resist. The thorniest aspect of its problematic character lies in the fact that the choice was made in that ‘total responsibility in total solitude’, which Sartre has called ‘the very revelation of our freedom’.14 So profound was this solitude that not even the Catholics could escape from it, even though they had the backing of the only institutions that had not collapsed; but in those weeks those institutions too had left consciences to dangle in the void.15 A letter sent on 25 September by Cazzani, bishop of Cremona, to the archbishop of Milan, Schuster, is sincere in registering this attitude. The monsignor wrote to the cardinal that he ‘assume[d] no responsibility for advising a definite line of action. I tell them the possible dangers of one or the other path, and that they are to do as they wish.’16
One consequence of the choice made in solitude was that, when the spontaneous solidarity of the first days no longer sufficed, the Italians were compelled to size each other up again, to demand new credentials of each other, to establish who was an accomplice and who a victim of persecution.17 No one any longer could predict for certain the behaviour of others according to the old canons. Something similar, if more devastating, had occurred in France after the June 1940 catastrophe. As Léon Blum wrote, ‘Friends, meeting each other, never knew beforehand whether they would find themselves in agreement or not.’18 Earlier still, immediately after the Anschluss, there had been ‘a terrible solitude. No one could trust anyone any more, no one knew any longer who the other was.’19 The very opposite of this was to occur in April 1945, when, in the euphoria of victory, everybody seemed certain that they could recognise the sentiments of others. Thus Ada Gobetti:
‘Well?’, I shouted, soft-pedalling my bicycle. And so identical were our feelings and thoughts during those days that they completely understood the meaning of my question and, though they didn’t know me any more than I knew them, they answered with a gay wave of the hand: ‘They’ve gone!’20
It is as if solitude, that is, full individual responsibility for one’s decisions – ‘I’ve done this of my own free will, so you mustn’t cry’, a man condemned to death was to say21 – is exalted and at the same time redeemed by the realisation of the unavoidable need to choose between one or other form of behaviour bearing inscribed values, which immediately implies an objective situation, shared by all (‘Those who are not with us are against us’, a German proclamation threatened).22 Again, this is not just true of Italy. An Austrian awaiting execution wrote that several times he had asked himself whether he ought not to have behaved differently: ‘But I always come to the same conclusion: “I could not have done otherwise”.’23 Of France it was written: ‘The defeat puts paid to any possible way out … and thus the imperative need to make fundamental choices.’24 ‘Desperate necessity’ is the expression used by Vittorio Foa.25 A similar kind of ‘desperation’ seems to inspire these words of Arturo Jemolo’s: ‘curious, this terrible freedom of choice concerning the most important things, this already marked out path concerning the things of least importance’.26
Roberto Battaglia wrote that it was the first time that society ‘had put him with his back to the wall’.27 Franco Venturi evoked the ‘sense of necessity lying at the basis of this creation of freedom, a sense of serene acceptance of the fact of being finally outlaws of an impossible world’.28 When Ada Gobetti notes in a boy the ‘fascinating normality’ of his being a partisan,29 she is simply registering a concrete case of the experience illustrated by Franco Venturi, which is also recalled by these other words: ‘Today, despite the wreckage, the situation is better … therefore, despite the collapse, liberty lives today among us’.30 Immediately after the Liberation, Massimo Mila was to speak of 8 September as a ‘self-revelation’ of a new possibility of life.31
This sense of life ‘beginning anew’, though it had in many respects assumed the guise of politics, went well beyond that ‘politician’s risk-taking’ which, in Schmittian terms, has been considered the ineluctable consequence of the fact that ‘all citizens are obliged to take sides in a civil war’.32 Rather, there is the ‘sudden perception (or illusion) that I am able to act to change society for the better and, what is more, that I am able to unite with other people of like mind’ and that all this is ‘pleasurable and indeed inebriating’.33
This inebriation sprung from a singular fusion – which does not mean that it was felt always and by everyone – between the tragic sense of life and the joy of living.34 Roberto Battaglia spoke of the ‘unbridled joy’ that seized him at the moment of the partisan formation’s arrival, and evoked the ‘blessed days, a new infancy of ourselves and our guerrilla, at the memory of which that dark sense of being survivors that we bore imprinted in us seems to vanish’.35 When Calvino read Ada Gobetti’s diary, he exclaimed: ‘My God, what fun you had!’ This comment was in line with the ‘Ariostesque’ character he had given to his novel The Path to the Nest of Spiders.36 In her Diario partigiano, Gobetti herself resorts to expressions such as ‘as if we were going on vacation’, ‘a new, free and adventurous infancy’, ‘gush of sudden joy’, ‘moments of the most perfect serenity’ – ‘fulfilment, completeness, harmony – felt at the very moment of greatest danger’; and recognises the ‘providential’ character of the ‘absurd, widespread irresponsibility’.37
‘We went up into the mountains like that … it seemed such a merry thing, so to speak’: not even deportation to Mauthausen was enough to cancel the memory of it in this survivor.38 And a Catholic officer, who described his experience in Venezia Giulia with one of the first mixed Italo-Slovene formations as being ‘a joyous rush towards the large dark mountain, the partisans’ stronghold’, felt, thanks to the ‘seriousness, enthusiasm, fervour of life’ that he found there, that ‘his childhood faith regained a singular virginity, a freshness, and grew more profound’.39 Again hot from the event, the Tuscan Garibaldino Attilio De Gaudio spoke of ‘happy moments – and they were the best in my life – that I lived with my division in that ideal environment, where, to use an apt expression of the railwayman Bonassai, we were all for one, one for all, as in 1919–22, when liberty was no myth but a living, concrete reality’.40
Here emerges a thread that we shall encounter again: the recovery of the historical memory of the biennio rosso. Another Tuscan, a political commissar of the Potente Garibaldi division (the Arno division that had taken the name of its commander Aligi Barducci, who fell during the battle for the liberation of Florence), was to write in his final report: ‘Often, in moments of melancholy solitude, I feel nostalgia for those almost carefree moments, for that was the time when our attention was centred on how to surprise, offend and dodge our enemies’ – almost a game that concentrated and absorbed all one’s energies.41 Many years later the Roman Gappist Rosario Bentivegna was to declare to Robert Katz: ‘Strangely enough we felt free, close to everyone.’42
In agreement on this point are the women’s testimonies collected in La Resistenza taciuta, where, however, the sense of death is prominent:
For me it was the best period of my life. It was also tragic for me, because I saw so many lads die when I would have liked to give my life twenty times over to save theirs, and this made me suffer atrociously. We risked death, but there was such joy in living! Every so often I read that my companions were gloomy. That’s not true. We were serene. Indeed, we were actually happy, because we knew that we were doing something very important … That time was fantastic, a wonderful period. I have never lived such a fine
life since then. There were sufferings all right, but what an experience!43
In testimonies of this kind, individual choice has already been transformed into a sense of collective responsibility.
Speaking very generally of the Second World War as a whole, E. P. Thompson remarked that it was an ‘extraordinary formative moment in which it was possible to be deeply committed even to the point of life itself in support of a particular political struggle that was at the same time a popular struggle’.44 In an Italy that had been for so long repressed and alienated by the conviction, ‘We all are all of one mind’, this process was favoured by the conviction, ‘This last-minute opportunity to intervene, once and for all to become participants, was not to be missed.’ This commitment of Franco Calamandrei’s is all the more relevant for being accompanied by the scrupulous admission that ‘perhaps it has come looking for me more than I have gone looking for it’, and by the awareness of the part played in his choice by the ‘taste for danger’ and ‘escape from a bourgeois upbringing sought in adventure’.45 A GL women’s newspaper wrote, with equal pregnancy: ‘It is not just that “finally one can speak without danger” of the forty-five days, but “finally one can do something and one can do it at the cost of sacrifices, dangerously”.’46
Beppe Fenoglio succeeded in expressing with poetic force the conjunction of liberty and energy that followed the decision to resist:
And at the moment when he left, he felt himself invested – death itself would not have been divestiture – in the name of the authentic people of Italy, to oppose Fascism in every possible way, to judge and to act, to decide militarily and as a citizen. Such supreme power was intoxicating, but infinitely more intoxicating was the consciousness of the legitimate use he would make of it.
And even physically he had never been so much a man, herculean he bent the wind and the earth.47
Natalia Ginzburg, in turn, has lovingly re-evoked the significance of the rapid coming of age that the Resistance experience had for many:
They were years in which many became different from what they had been before. Different and better. The sensation that people had become better circulated in the streets. Each person felt the need to give the best of his or her self. This spread around an extraordinary well-being, and when we remember those years, we remember the well-being together with the discomfort, the cold, the hunger and the fear, which during those days never left us: and thus one discovered that ‘one’s neighbour’ was different from the ‘stupid multitudes yelling lies in the squares’.48
‘That 8 September I suddenly became an adult … from that day I made my choice’, a protagonist recalls today.49 This invigorating discovery of oneself and of others included a powerful desire to set things right, a desire to punish oneself for one’s own offences and those of one’s generation. ‘In our confused way we felt that somebody at least had to suffer for what had happened in Italy; at certain moments it seemed to us a personal exercise in mortification, at others a civic commitment. It was as if we had to bear with us the weight of Italy and its misfortunes.’50 Ferdinando Mautino speaks of the ‘sacrifice of the anti-Fascist forces to redeem the crimes committed by Fascism’,51 and Franco Calamandrei of the ‘consciousness of all the impurity that remains incorrigible within me’.52 A forty-year-old who had anticipated the decision to resist by deserting in favour of Tito’s partisans was convinced that only ‘the hardest personal sacrifices’, to the point of ‘offering my very life’, would liberate him from his atrocious remorse at having behaved in so cowardly a way in 1922, just to obey the ‘exhortations of family and friends’.53
There is scant evidence of this desire for redemption and self-punishment among the combatants of the South. A paratrooper from the Corpo Italiano di Liberazione (Italian Liberation Corps) writes that he fails to understand why one should be fighting ‘to redeem oneself from strange offences which only the day before were considered merits’.54
Within the picture traced so far, a wider variety of individual motivations may be identified: the intolerableness of a world that had become a theatre of ferocity;55 rebellion against abuses of power coming from near and far, at times against the very smallest of abuses;56 a self-defensive instinct; the desire to avenge a dead relative;57 the spirit of adventure;58 love of risk together with a not fully conscious awareness of it;59 family traditions; long-standing or more recent anti-Fascism; love of one’s country; class hatred.60 These motivations, of differing cultural weight, often interweave, and we can only grasp how they unfolded in people’s consequent behaviour if we bear in mind the entire span of Resistance experience. We shall in fact encounter these various substructures again.
Here all that needs stressing is that the choices, whatever motivated them, belong to a climate of moral enthusiasm that is a far cry from the resigned, gloomy and resentful mood of many combatants in the weary army that the Royal government was attempting to put back on its feet way down in the South. Witness the following letter:
Today the only reality that exists is our defeat with all its tremendous consequences: hunger, unemployment, moral disorganisation. Don’t you too feel what uncertain times we’re living in, how impossible it is to reconstruct anything solid? We must await the Armistice, the real one, and ignore the stupid accident of a year ago. Only then will we be able to start again, and there will be a lot of hard work to do.61
When, after the Liberation, the magistracy wanted to apply general mitigating circumstances for the crimes committed by the partisans during the Resistance, it was to invoke the climate of ‘moral disintegration’ in which the combatants had, in its view, acted.62 The upshot of this was that, out of good intentions, it damagingly assimilated the Resistance spirit with the lowest points reached by the public spirit in those twenty months.
Some clarification is necessary at this point on what we have said so far about the founding value of choice. On the one hand, liberty as a value is attributed to the very act of choosing; on the other, it seems impossible to avoid putting off the choice actually entailed in practical terms. There is no getting around this contradiction. We do, however, need to be clearly aware of it if we wish to recognise the fact that the republican Fascists too (at any rate, the committed, militant ones) also made their choice and, at the same time, to hold fast to the difference between the two choices. Possibly it might help in such a difficult attempt, and one that will become extremely difficult when we get on to the theme of violence, to warn of the quicksands of ambiguity, in its multiple senses: an attempt to shirk the choice; subterranean affinities between opposing forms of behaviour; and the coexistence, in the crisis of the weeks immediately following 8 September, of possibilities of divergent courses of action.
Many episodes bear witness to this tendency to be chosen rather than to choose, to the point of yielding to a resigned and bloodless moralism; to remain up there in the ‘house on the hill’, rather than choose the partisan mountain or the Fascist city.63 A significant case in point is that of Second Lieutenant Giorgio Chiesura, to whose diary I have already referred. Chiesura managed to return to his home in Venice possessed by this state of mind: ‘All I knew was that for me it was over; let the others do what they wanted.’ But he was so tired that even hiding was too much of an effort for him. So when the Germans issued the public summons to present oneself, he gave himself up – and was to be deported to Germany – ‘because he did not want to recommence doing what the so-called patria orders us’, nor, to avoid this, did he want to ‘live amid flights, subterfuges, expedients, compromises, shiftings’: hitherto his life had consisted of ‘serving without any premises for doing so’; now he no longer wanted to collaborate. On 8 September he was prepared to fight against the Germans: if the generals and colonels now wanted to wage their war again in the service of the Germans, let them go ahead and do so. They could count him out. This behaviour, and the motivations adopted in support of it, are certainly a special case, rationalised after the event; but they do express a kind of reaction tha
t is less paradoxical and rare than might at first appear. Indicative too are the attitudes of those nearest and dearest to Chiesura. His girlfriend says: ‘But are you crazy?’ His parents, on the other hand, advise him to give himself up, because they can’t conceive the idea of disobeying an order issued by an authority, of whatever kind it may be. In a state of such extraordinary emergency, all they are able to do is conduct themselves in obeisance to traditional resignation before the fate of their sons called to the hazard of military service.64
Evading the choice is at times presented as standing above the contending parties: ‘Since there are two governments in Italy, the king’s and Mussolini’s, I have advised the young peasants to stay at home, work their land and procure bread for all Italians … Let the Germans and the Allies pass through, the poor Italians have to be fed.’ Speaking here is Sandro Scotti, who, during the Resistance, tried to revive the Partito dei contadini d’Italia (The Party of the Peasants of Italy), which he had founded after the First World War. The ‘colonna rurale Monviso’, which he organised as an instrument of peasants’ self-defence, was to approach first Democrazia Cristiana and then GL, thereby demonstrating the impossibility of remaining well and truly impartial, let alone in a state of indolence.65
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