Resentment against the artificers of the defeat, anger against those responsible for the collapse, contempt for the king, Badoglio and the fleeing generals involved a still more insidious risk than the one described above. They could produce – I am still referring to the weeks immediately following 8 September – a zone of uncertain and oscillating reactions, which still fell short of choosing between the Resistance and the Social Republic.
With pragmatic open-mindedness, Palmiro Togliatti was later to talk in terms of a ‘misunderstanding … inadequate though the word might be as a description of so profound a political and social event’ – that somehow or other had been created ‘between us and some of those who were fighting against us’.66 More penetratingly, Calvino had put into the mouth of the partisan Kim these words: ‘Basta un nulla, un passo falso, un impennamento dell’anima, e ci si trova dall’altra parte’ (‘Just a trifle, a false step, a tipping of the soul, and we find ourselves on the other side’).67
This ‘nulla’ (‘trifle’), which was, all the same, capable of generating an abyss, might be, particularly in the case of young men from bourgeois families, a chance encounter with the right person or the wrong person, and could hark back to reactions during the days following 25 July, when haughty spirits viewed the vital explosion of popular joy that ‘took possession of the fait accompli’ as a last-minute volte-face,68 – a camouflage, what is more, for the most opportunistic, and those who had most seriously compromised themselves with the regime.
‘The people to whom bootlicking is nothing new are now indulging in cowardly outrage’, Emanuele Artom had written in his diary.69 Nuto Revelli’s testimony is candid enough to admit this. On 12 October he noted in his diary:
If it hadn’t been for Russia, on 8 September perhaps I’d have hidden myself like a sick dog. If on the night of 25 July I had let myself be beaten up, today perhaps I’d have been on the other side. Those who say they’ve always understood everything, who continue to understand everything, give me the willies. It was no easy thing to understand 8 September!
And on 1 February 1944, surer now of his decision to join the Resistance:
On 26 July you could also make the wrong choice. If they’d hit me, if they’d spat at me, perhaps I’d have joined the other side, with the Fascists, with the victims of that precise moment. Today I’d be with the scoundrels, with the Barabbases, with the Germans’ spies. I wouldn’t be in the Todt or in a district, that is, I wouldn’t at any rate have been among draft dodgers.70
There appear to have been a few weeks of uncertainty and crisis in the province of Modena.71 ‘The drama of indecision’ is the title of an article that recalled that period about a year later.72 There were thoughts and second thoughts, as in the case of some Nembo paratroopers who, in Calabria, first followed Captain Eduardo Sala in joining the retreating Germans, then returned to their regiment that was awaiting the Allies.73 Several paratroopers of the Ciclone battalion, whose commander, Major Giovanni Blotto, fought with the Social Republic, participated in the defence of the Futa pass against the Germans.74 Officers who had initially been part of the ‘apolitical’ bands then went over to the Social Republic.75 This was a sort of prelude to the changes of sides which, in two senses, would later occur on more than one occasion. After several weeks of torment – ‘Calosso from London didn’t convince me. Alessandro Pavolini from Salò made me ashamed of myself’ – a prominent figure like Davide Lajolo, the future Garibaldi commander Ulisse, but a militant Fascist at the time – made a choice that was decided by his meeting with an old Socialist uncle.76 Thus it is possible to detect genuine regret, alongside the obvious propagandist intent, in these words that appeared a year later in a Fascist newspaper: ‘One need only skim the collections of youth weeklies: not only would we understand why many youths who went unheeded are unfortunately not with us now, but we would find the same reasons that could be used to argue our case.’77
Of the uncertainties which, in their turn, marked some of the decisions to join the Social Republic, I here want to recall those manifested by a young man who enlisted in the fanatically Fascist naval flotilla Decima Mas:
Perhaps at the crucial moment that we are going through we should no longer speak of patriotic sentiment, because nobody knows who the real enemy is. So everyone is left to decide for himself; there are those who hate the Germans, there are those who hate the Anglo-Americans. I … am one of the latter. I have witnessed so many scenes that have made me ashamed to be Italian … They have been apocalyptic scenes.78
– and others of an eighteen-year-old, who became an Alpino in the Monterosa, who described to his parents the tempests that had swept through his soul, concluding with a reassuring ‘doubt didn’t last long’.79 Worthy of mention is the exceptional case – though it is that of a former volunteer to Africa and Spain, a survivor of the massacres perpetrated by the Germans on Cefalonia, who joined the RSI because, indignant though he was about those massacres, he was ‘yet more indignant against the Italian General Command who had ordered the generous combatants to resist without giving them the slightest help’.80
The common features distinguishing initial uncertainties and ambiguities reinforce rather than diminish the significance of the choice. That choice was indeed made on the basis of what appeared to be the essential, decisive and all-engaging point. It is this that makes the decision to resist most akin to that taken in the German internment camps by the soldiers who preferred life behind barbed wire to fighting back for the Social Republic. Whether or not to step forward in answer to a Fascist officer’s exhortation symbolically distils individual motivations that might be very different from each other.81 In short, it was a question, for one and all, of a process of simplification, which took pride of place over whatever those who came down on opposing sides might have in common, particularly at a level of deep and long-standing culture. What was involved, therefore, were not misunderstandings, which it is the historian’s business to unmask, but a radical rooting and re-rooting of differences – which were destined to endure, even when the end of the state of emergency saw dormant affinities resurface. It has been said that, in ‘modern economies of the emotions’, passions do not flare up or flicker out suddenly, but tend to burn slowly and flamelessly, and that the ‘time-worn pigeonholing of people as angels or demons gives way to other, psychologically more sophisticated classifications’, so that ‘all relationships tend to be ambivalent’.82 The Resistance – indeed, the Second World War as a whole – reignited the flame of conflicting passions, and left indelible burns. At the same time, kindred passions were driven to group together into homogenous blocks, following a pattern that gave rise to ‘a system of emotions’ tending to take the form of ‘an institution’ – and that institution eventually regarded those very emotions as undesirable elements.83 Even Sartre’s model of ‘the group in a state of fusion’, containing the seed of its own disintegration, may usefully be applied to those processes which, during the Resistance, saw ties between different persons form, dissolve, and re-form.84
As for the choice made by the Fascists – ‘We can no longer compel anyone, let whoever wants to come, come’ – was initially the attitude of the most highly motivated of them;85 we have already seen some examples, and shall see others. Here it should be added that, for the Fascists, the memory of 8 September was to remain a nightmare throughout. To this day, the view of 8 September as pure tragedy or as the beginning of a process of liberation remains a distinguishing line between the ways in which the event is interpreted by those of opposite persuasions.86 At the time, only very few Fascists saw the catastrophe as a liberating act of the kind that appears in this letter: ‘Amid so many calamities, the betrayal has offered us the chance to let the great truths of Fascism shine forth and to gain mastery over the popular mind in this Second Revolution.’87 In turn, Paratroop Major Mario Rizzati wrote that, following the blow of the capitulation, ‘after a moment’s meditation, I felt curiously happy: ah, at long last we had emerged from the eq
uivocal situation of a war we didn’t want to win, like Cadorna. At long last the clarification which had not come at Caporetto had arrived. Not all evil, I concluded, comes to do harm.’88
But very few took the myth of the return to origins so literally as to get much joy from it. The most convinced Fascists, like the others who for one reason or another fought under the flag of the Social Republic, were more or less all, even those who insisted on believing in inevitable victory, shrouded in the black shadow of a grim and incomprehensible catastrophe and of the terror that it might repeat itself.89 To revert again to an opinion expressed about an altogether different historical experience, the Fascists ‘who had once attributed so magnificent a destiny to themselves, just wouldn’t resign themselves to recognising the truth, not even in defeat’.90 On the contrary, the decision to join the Social Republic was often a way of fleeing a moment of truth that would mean necessarily having to think things through to the end – the prospect that the Fascists dreaded most.
What prevailed, therefore, in those who opted for the Social Republic was the fear of losing the identity they had grown accustomed to and the urge to recover it no matter how, both in its version of reassuring order and in its nihilistic version. These were, after all, the two historic animators of Fascism, which were doomed to be played out, in that final showdown, in the form of sluggish opacity or ferocity. The Fascist author quoted above speaks of the ‘sensation of being as it were uprooted’, and describes how this turned into ‘blind anger,’ the refusal of ‘passive acceptance’: ‘To accept that defeat meant to accept everything that had led to it: the hypocrisy, the falsehood, the cowardice … And we didn’t want that!’ These words are all the more notable for the fact that the writer records how, in the months that followed, the reasons for making a choice on the basis of such considerations grew progressively fainter.91
A particularly radical choice, at once ideological and belligerent, was that made by the Fascists who placed themselves directly at the service of the Germans, without awaiting Mussolini’s resurrection. A case in point is Major Rizzati, mentioned earlier – a protagonist, in Sardinia, with his Nembo division, of one of the first episodes of the civil war, which led to the execution of Colonel Alberto Bechi, who intended to ensure that Badoglio’s orders were respected.92 The 63rd battalion of the Tagliamento division in turn went over to direct service under the Germans,93 as, immediately, did some hundred paratroopers from the Viterbo school and part of the 10th Arditi unit at Civitavecchia.94 Already at Salerno, Lieutenant Dante Ciabatti, one of Renato Ricci’s orderly officers, placed himself under the orders of the Germans, but, unlike Rizzatti, would not swear the oath of allegiance to the Führer.95 These, clearly, were men who acted out of quite different motives from those who answered Rodolfo Graziani’s call-up. It is no accident that, in a paratrooper formation Command document, Nembo complained that those who answered the Marshal’s call-up were ‘all those officers, perhaps even the senior ones, who on 9, 10, 11 and 12 September ordered their men to shoot at the German armed forces and those who were ostentatiously Anglophile’.96
Dante Di Nanni, the Gappist who, besieged by Fascists in his house in Turin, put up a heroic defence before succumbing, was given this food for thought by another Gappist, Giovanni Pesce: ‘In this war each of us has made his choice. Not one of us has had a gun put in his hands without being told why. He has chosen the side to be on in complete conscience; and the same was true with the Fascist on the balcony. Each pays the debts he has agreed to pay.’97
The recognition that, if you were on one side rather than the other, it was because you chose to be, is encountered with the reappearance of that most traditional figure, the volunteer. The political commissar Andrea, from a detachment of the 28th Mario Gordini GAP brigade, gave this proud reply to the question, ‘Why are we fighting?’: ‘We gappisti volunteers to this organisation, the spearhead, the backbone of the proletariat, have taken up arms not because a superior force has imposed it on us, nor even because we were ordered to by our party; nobody has imposed it on us; we are volunteers.’98
Commander Fulco, another Gappist from the province of Ravenna, put things more bluntly still when he recalled that the Garibaldini, each of whom initially ‘refused to call themselves comandante’, were not ‘all of a sudden to place themselves on the loathsome leash of orders from above’. And he explained:
The distinguishing feature of the Commands of all illegal and volunteer formations, be they of bandits, mutineers or rebels, is that it is always from the breasts of the masses they are leading that they draw that course of action and also those orders which they will then impose on the very people who have dictated them. For those who rebel are the possessors of that will, that powerful sense of justice and injustice, everything, in short, that makes strong-willed individuality. It is a mistake to believe that a volunteer is more blindly obedient than others: indeed, seeing that he starts the struggle from an act of his own will, it is hardly likely that he will accept the progress of the battle however it is imposed on him. Whenever each man’s personal sense of justice is violated, he, the volunteer, will again have the courage to impose his own will, on himself, if he is alone, or on the whole rebel organism, if his will is that of the majority of the insurgents.99
The profoundly fundamental nature of the choice whose autonomy these Garibaldini are claiming demanded constant reaffirmation. On the one hand, the choice was felt to be irrevocable, in the sense that ‘there is no turning back’;100 on the other hand, it needed continual reconfirmation, implicitly or explicitly, to endorse this irrevocability. Formulae like ‘He who chooses has chosen for ever’ are thus both statement and exhortation. An article, ‘Impegno d’onore’ (‘Honorable commitment’), which appeared in a Giustizia e Libertà newspaper, vigorously stresses this moral:
Just as when we took up arms each of us was moved by a purely personal reflection and each of us weighed up clearly the import of what he was doing and took full responsibility for it, so we wish that responsibility, as the struggle goes on, to be forever present in the minds of each of us, like an honourable commitment from which one cannot and must not deflect.101
The impossibility of backing out is present in another Action Party document almost as a crude, incontrovertible fact, its purpose being to urge its readers to accept the full political consequences the choice contains in nuce, with that identification of moral coherence and intellectual self-consistency which distinguished the political philosophy of the Action Party:
To all those who have joined the struggle from the tragedy afflicting the country, we say this: have no illusions: breaking with the totalitarian state, not answering the call-up, not taking the oath, resisting in any form or way you can, means taking a path that events themselves will oblige you to follow to the end. The struggle against totalitarianism is totalitarian. ‘Normality’ can only be reconquered now by passing through a profound revolution.102
There was a constant need to make the choice over and over again, at times in conditions yet more difficult than those of the first months, which reduced the space conceded to wavering, second thoughts, abandoning the cause (‘We were well aware … that we couldn’t prevent anyone from making off, if they didn’t want to stay with us’).103 Under the pressure of new dilemmas there grew what we might call the tardy vocations, prompted by the Fascist calls-to-arms and the German labour call-ups,104 or the fruit of more personal itineraries.105 The choice should therefore be considered not as a moment of sudden illumination but as a process that at times asserted itself arduously, because the men who had to make it were weary. From the point of view of the intensity of the values called into play, it might be thought of as a set of non-linear and chronologically non-overlapping diagrams.106 In any case, it is obvious that the choices made in spring 1945, when the end was nigh and there was not the slightest doubt about the outcome, were different from those of September 1943. To jump on the victor’s bandwagon is not a choice, at least not in the sense desc
ribed above. All the same, it is worth getting a few things straight on this score.
There is no doubt that certainty of victory marks off the entire Italian Resistance from the other European resistance movements. While the resistance workers of the other countries, in making their initial choice, took a risk as to both the outcome and duration of the struggle, the only risk the Italian resistenti took regarded the duration. True, in the other countries as well – in France and even in Yugoslavia – the resistance got truly under way only towards the end of 1942, when Stalingrad, the Anglo-American landing in French North Africa, and El Alamein showed, for those with eyes to see, the turn the military tide had unequivocally taken. Nevertheless, Italy remains a special case in this respect. Not that this turns the Italian resistenti into ‘cortigiani della vittoria’ (‘suitors of victory’), as an authoritative philosopher has recently claimed.107 Rather, it should induce us to focus our attention on the significance acquired by the wish to give destiny a helping hand, to aid her by making oneself worthy of her, and thereby to become what one was.108 This attitude was the very antipode of that practised by those collaborationists who had reckoned themselves to be cannier than others and more capable of bending destiny to their own Machiavellian ends.109 In Rome the resistenti wanted to be different from the mass of their fellow citizens, who, as one caustic definition has it, were awaiting the liberation as a gift owed to themselves and to the Pontiff.110
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