As we know, the attitude to the king and Badoglio was to be conditioned in the Resistance press by the way the political situation as a whole was unfolding, and by the change in the parties’ positions after the Salerno ‘turning-point’. What needs to be stressed here is that including Badoglio and above all the king in the accusation of betrayal meant, on the one hand, shifting the terms of judgment and accusation onto a political and moral plane that transcended the very events following 8 September; and, on the other hand, it made the problem of whether or not to keep the oath a particularly pressing one. If, from a lay point of view, the oath was a ‘guarantee against the future’ and against the very freedom of the person taking it, it was also an ‘inert determination of the future.’35 The eternal value, essential to the form of the oath, may therefore come into conflict with the need for new and unforeseen acts of liberty. There thus emerges the clause, never openly voiced, that the oath was valid only if the fundamental conditions that determined it did not change. Thus, at the very moment when it should be deploying its whole cogent force, the oath might instead become null.
Every, or nearly every, Italian had taken two oaths: one to the king, the other to the Duce.36 More or less all those who had been enlisted in the regime’s youth organisations had sung: ‘Duce! Duce! Chi no saprà morir? Il giuramento chi mai rinnegherà?’ (‘Duce! Duce! Who will not be prepared to die? Who will ever break the oath?’). Compelled now to choose between one oath or the other, the Resistance simply cut the Gordian knot by choosing neither one nor the other, and thereby freed the solemn matter of being true to oneself from any pre-established institutional encumbrance and personal bond. But even those who felt bound to one oath rather than the other, and branded those of the opposite persuasion as traitors, were, in order to justify their choice, induced to resort to principles that went beyond loyalty to the oath as such. Thus a still predominantly formal criterion might be invoked, such as legitimacy and legality, or else deeper motivations involving the contents synthesised, or simply implicit, in the formula and the very act of taking the oath.
Things became more complicated with the problem of the legitimacy of the Social Republic, particularly when the latter demanded a further oath, thereby reviving the conflict and creating new opportunities to betray (as L’Italia Libera wrote: ‘Whoever takes the oath is a traitor’).37 It was obvious that the anti-Fascist parties and the CLNs, starting with those of northern Italy,38 would urge people not to take the oath, thus bestowing legitimacy on the government of the South, and offering visible and easily comprehensible support to undecided consciences.
But the conflict between oaths was not simply a question of two opposing legalities confronting each other. To paraphrase Gramsci’s famous remark that, in the West, with the trembling of the state the structures of civil society can be glimpsed with the naked eye,39 we might say that the conflict that was born around the question of betrayal–oath–loyalty caused cultural structures deeply inscribed in the conscience of the Italians to surface.
The determination not to break one’s oath to the king undoubtedly fed the steadfast and dignified behaviour of a large number of the internees in the German concentration camps, where even Badoglio’s name figures as a point of reference. ‘Hurrah Badoglio!’ was how friendly Russian prisoners sometimes greeted their Italian companions.40 Testimonies of this kind abound.41 Among the most eloquent worth citing is that of the 245 second lieutenants of the Pinerolo cavalry school, who, not yet having sworn the oath to the king, pronounced it, in the camp of Przemysl before the oldest officer.42 An officer shot in Greece by the Germans wrote: ‘I have always been loyal to any oaths I have taken and for the oath of loyalty to the King of Italy I give my life.’43
It is also a certified fact that the oath to the king carried more weight in the consciences of the officers, especially the older ones, than in those of the soldiers44 – an indication of the hiatus existing in the country between governing classes and the populace and, in the army, between officers and troops. The Germans tried to make the most of this hiatus, boasting the greater egalitarianism existing in their army.45 But beyond keeping one’s word and appealing to an implicit judgment of constitutional legality, other explanations as to why the oath to the king appeared more binding than that to the Duce ought to be explored.
At work certainly was a stronger, more long-standing and deep-rooted sense of the patria–state, in the person of the king, than of the government–regime, in the person of the Duce. For example, it has been noted how, in the memoirs of the ex-military internees, there is a good deal more cursing of the high Commands than of the king and Badoglio himself.46 The fact that the Fascist national party had lost, along with its entire retinue of organisations, much of its political sting, and that, to the majority of Italians, it seemed by now to be no more than one of the many bureaucratic apparatuses of the state, played against the possibility of the resurrected Republican Fascist Party’s competing on an equal footing with the traditional state, however tattered the latter might be. On the contrary, this Fascist pretension was to seem on the one hand devoid of any serious foundation, and on the other hand compromising in a new sense, which went well beyond the ritual request for the bread ration card (‘tessera del pane’).
One ex-internee offers this testimony:
Many of us, all of us, had been Fascists, some out of personal interests or compulsion, others (and they were the majority) out of conviction. But the offer that was made to us at that moment [to adhere to the RSI] acquired another meaning and consequently no more than some fifty [in his camp] were those who accepted the proposal.47
The Christian Democrat paper Il Popolo, also keen to rebut accusations of betrayal of the Germans,48 tried to take an explicit look at the thorny question of the two oaths.49 It is no accident that this was a Catholic paper: the oath to the Duce had in fact constituted one of the polemical objectives of Pius XI’s encyclical Non abbiamo bisogno of 29 June 1931. The Pope had suggested that the already signed-up Fascists there should make this mental reservation: ‘apart from the laws of God and of the Church’ or ‘apart from the duties of the good Christian’, and reserved the right to ask that in future the formula be modified, ‘should one not wish to do better, far better, and omit the oath, which is such a religious act, and is certainly not in the place most fitting to it on a party membership card’. To these mental reservations Pius XI had suggested adding this other one: ‘with the firm intention to declare such a reservation even overtly, should the need arise’.50
That need had now arisen with an urgency and a vengeance that were probably unforeseen by the Pope when he dictated those words. And the Christian Democrat paper strove to argue the different value to be attributed to the two oaths. The oath to the king, it wrote, ‘is a promise made freely and voluntarily, calling God to witness one’s own words’; by contrast, that to the Duce ‘is absurd and illicit, given the aim it commits one to. It was wrung out of the majority of people with violence, since it was imposed as a condition for saving one’s life.’
Truth to tell, to ‘save one’s life’ an Italian had to swear to the king as well; and the opening words of the text in question implicit in the reference to ‘the aim that [the oath] commits one to’ was contradicted when the article denied that the king’s conduct might invalidate the oath taken to him. The upshot of this was the invocation of the age-old argument whereby only the oath’s addressee, raised to the status of sole independent variable, had the power to release one from it. Mussolini, it said, could not release himself from the oath he had sworn to the king. It would have been all too easy for a Fascist to reply: And how can the king release himself from the oath he swore to Mussolini? A defensive article in Il Messaggero, which was not yet fully ‘normalised’ in the Fascist sense, seems implicitly to accept the adversary’s terrain, in recognising the greater weight to be given to the oath to the king. Shortly after 8 September, the Roman newspaper wrote:
Let whoever wants to say that an oat
h is an act of faith, and thus indestructible, and that we can be released from it only by the person who has received it. This is rhetoric; and even if it were not, it is preparation for an alibi for a neutrality which tallies well with the cowardice of the king and his fleeing lieutenant.51
If it had simply been a question of one oath, the criterion adopted by Il Popolo might have had some archaic resonance; but it was an altogether inadequate way of resolving the conflict between the two oaths, from which neither of the two addressees had the slightest intention of releasing those who had sworn it. It was not the will of the addressee, therefore, but his act of betrayal that again became the liberating element. Obviously, this argument was widely used by the Fascists. A manifesto that they addressed to the soldiers said in fact that the King’s treachery had released them from any obligation to be loyal to him.52 Prophetically almost, an RSI journalist, Ezio Maria Gray, had in 1936 absolved Admiral Francesco Caracciolo from the accusation of treason towards his Bourbon king, Ferdinand IV – an accusation in which strictly monarchical writers were indulging, on the grounds that the king had been the first person to betray the nation.53 Even the most committed resistenti argued that the king’s betrayal of the people released the latter from any obligation contracted with the oath, the only difference being that they applied the same criterion also to the betrayal committed, ab antiquo, by the Duce.
In answer to the oath requested by the Social Republic, the archbishop of Milan resorted to an argument very much along the same lines as that of Pius XI in 1931. In his Communicazioni al clero ambrosiano of 1 May 1944, Cardinal Schuster issued the following decree: ‘It is legitimate to take an oath to a “de facto government”, responsible for maintaining public order: always provided, however, it is in accordance with one’s conscience, with divine and ecclesiastical law and is within the sphere of its own duty and office.’54 In fact, the subtle casuistry of the Catholic tradition proved incapable of unravelling so intricate and dramatic a knot. Those with uncompromising religious consciences were the first to shun the preventive absolutions offered them by those who advocated long promises with short waits. Witness this episode recounted by Sergio Cotta:
I remember the case of an internee friend, who told me that he hadn’t joined the RSI exclusively out of loyalty to his oath. He was no monarchist, but a Catholic. A field priest had explained to him that an oath given out of official obligation is not binding on one’s conscience, since for the believer it is such only when pronounced when his conscience freely and fully adheres to it. Well, despite this he had not felt released from his oath, out of loyalty not so much to the king and to formal commitment, but to his own personal dignity.55
A great Catholic jurist, Costantino Mortati, then appealed to natural law as the only possible basis of the ‘ethical imperative’ capable of resolving ‘conflicts of loyalties’.56
Distinctions and mental reservations, suggested not only by Catholics, came to be instruments of general reconciliation. To claim that the state of necessity – that very state in which the sacred character of one’s obligation to the oath shone forth – on the one hand released one from the oath previously taken, and on the other hand nullified the new, different one, led, even beyond the intentions of those who argued in this manner, to a final indemnity. Hence, the words of the Catholic intellectual Mario Apollonio: ‘the moral validity of the oath, if he who takes it does so against his spontaneous will, is null’,57 and those cruder words of a Roman rag which explained to those who swore the oath to the RSI under coercion that they nevertheless remained ‘soldiers of the king’,58 could lead the last liberal Catholic in Italian history, Arturo Carlo Jemolo, to remark bitterly: ‘It was hands off everybody, and it was admitted that even a soldier is all right if he changes sides, when he does so in a state of grave coercion.’59
To the out-and-out resistenti, who made a clean break with past oaths, these must have appeared in the scathing light in which Proudhon placed them when speaking of the post-1789 French as ‘intrepid oath-swearers’: ‘We are all busy swearing and forswearing: we have made an oath sworn reluctantly and mentally retracted into an act of virtue.’60
To those who moved in these circles, the decision to oppose the Social Republic in the name of the oath taken to the king appeared as a decision to respect, but slightly clouded when compared with the oath of those who directly and autonomously chose on the basis of a judgment of value, without feeling the need to support today’s act with another act performed yesterday in conditions that had been so much less free. In response to the first ‘military’ bands of Boves, which, on the initiative of Ignazio Via, were made to repeat the oath ‘to the king and his royal successors’ (but the very need to reconfirm what was in itself an imperishable act already revealed a flawed certainty), a rigorous lay conscience like that of Dante Livio Bianco remarked: ‘But really, how often do even the most genuine reactionaries, albeit unwittingly, not make an exterior show of nobility?’61
In using the adjective ‘exterior’ with such severity, Bianco undoubtedly had two things in mind. The first, which was more starkly moral and existential, consisted of placing in default the determining value of behaviour motivated by criteria of heteronymous loyalty to an institutional, though interiorised, fact. The second, which was political in nature, lay in his denunciation of the continuity of the old Italian state, which could take advantage of that ‘exterior nobility’.
Military honour, to which the stances taken by men such as Ignazio Vian or Martini Mauri appeal, was not the most important of Resistance values.62 It might refer not only to the institution of the Royal Army, but cover a professional dignity and lifestyle chosen at some time or other, and not sufficiently undermined by the disaster of the war. Honour could be appealed to also in this broad, self-legitimising sense, very widespread in the French Resistance not just in its Gaullist variety, and expressed as follows by one of its exponents: ‘Many of our comrades did not calculate whether they were within the law … they have simply obeyed the command to fight for the honour of our country which is the custodian of such precious values.’63
The leading article of an underground paper, De l’Honneur, read as follows: ‘Crimes against honour are unforgivable. We could accept the French leaders’ imbecility, cowardice, senile vanity, political rancour, powerless pretention. Their daily insults to honour are revolting to a people that disgorges them even before it punishes them.’64
Presently we shall see that the appeal to honour was to be one of the most widespread motifs among the Fascists of the Social Republic. Unaware of the gaffe, a clandestine Roman paper – one of the minor ones – thought that it was putting those Fascists in difficulty by comparing them to De Gaulle, who had been called a traitor for not having accepted the capitulation of his country,65 while Risorgimento Liberale preferred to toss back at the Fascists the theme of honour to be defended.66
The problem of the oath would reappear within the partisan movement as a consequence of its very development, producing significantly discordant responses. Those who insisted on the free nature of the choice, which was to be constantly repeated to ensure that the commitment that had determined it did not diminish, inevitably had scant sympathy for the introduction of oath-taking in the partisan formations. An outright rejection can be found in Mario Giovana’s explanation of how the oath was not introduced in the Damianis’ group, in the province of Cuneo: ‘because it is considered an act that goes against the genuinely voluntary, and so morally tenser character of the struggle; besides, the experience of Fascism had demonstrated the vanity of these commitments if they were not accompanied by the genuine adhesion of ideal conscience, for which it is repugnant to resuscitate only its formal aspect.’67
But not all Justice and Liberty and Action Party members proved so intransigent. In the ‘Italia Libera’ band (again in the province of Cuneo), the request was made to commit oneself ‘with the oath of a man of honour’ to fight the Germans and the Fascists, and ‘pursue ideals of socia
l justice and democratic liberty’. Any betrayal would be punishable by death. And Dante Livio Bianco recalls dealing out the death sentence ‘with a completely clear conscience’ to three partisans who were preparing to desert in the event of a roundup.68 And when the Valle Stura Carlo Rosselli brigade, which had crossed the border into France, had to resist pressures aimed at incorporating them into the 74th (foreigners’) battalion of the French regular army, Revelli was to point out, in a memorandum to General Alphonse Juin, that ‘the proposal was rejected because it ran counter to honour and the freely taken oath’.69
The request for the oath needs to be considered in relation to the militarisation and politicisation of the bands, which will be discussed later. It is no accident that in the Garibaldi brigades, which had a more precise ideological point of reference and were particularly committed to nursing the prospect of being incorporated in the future regular army, the provoked fewer doubts, and was used to reunite the formations in times of crisis.70 On 9 December 1944, Cino (Cino Moscatelli) and Ciro (Eraldo Gastone), in the name of the group command of Garibaldi assault divisions of Valsesia, Ossola, Cusio and Verbano, almost as if they wished to crown a practice followed in the formations for some time now, were to propose this formula to the general Garibaldi brigade Command: ‘I swear to fight by every means in my power, to the point of the supreme sacrifice of my life, for the total destruction of Nazi-Fascism, for a free, democratic and popular Italy, to be loyal to the general Command of the Garibaldi assault brigades and not to lay down my arms or the Garibaldi uniform until ordered.’71
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