A Civil War

by Claudio Pavone

  37 Title of an article in the Roman edition, 20 January 1944.

  38 See the motion to public functionaries of 7 January, the decree of 14 September on the sanctions to apply to the officers and public functionaries who swear, the motions to officers on leave of 24 October 1944, and the decree of 29 March 1945, again on the sanctions (demotion) to apply to officers who swear the oath (Atti, CLNAI [Acts of the Committee for National Liberation of Northern Italy], pp. 111–12, 172, 197, 294).

  39 The passage from Gramsci reads as follows: ‘In the East the state was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West between state and civil society there was a just relationship and in the trembling of the state a robust structure of civil society could be discerned immediately’. A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, ed. V. Gerratana, II, Turin: Einaudi, 1975, p. 866.

  40 Testimony by Giampiero Carocci to the author.

  41 See V. E. Giuntella and G. Rochat’s works, cited above.

  42 See Rochat, Memorialistica e storiografia sull’internamento, p. 37.

  43 Letter to his mother by Giuseppe Di Stefano, reserve lieutenant, philosophy professor, Sicilian, 6 December 1943 (LRE, p. 462).

  44 See Rochat, Memorialistica e storiografia sull’internamento, p. 37.

  45 Testimony by Cinzio Violante to the author (1982).

  46 See Rochat, Memorialistica e storiografia sull’internamento, p. 37.

  47 G. Vangelista, Oltre il filo spinato. Storia e considerazioni di un ex internato militare italiano, Rome: Stampa d’oggi, n.d., quoted in Rochat, Memorialistica e storiografia sull’internamento, p. 48.

  48 See the articles ‘Il supremo dovere’ and ‘Gli artefici della guerra civile’, both of 23 October 1943 (Roman edition).

  49 Article entitled ‘Fede a un giuramento’, 14 November 1943 (Roman edition), signed ‘un ufficiale di Marina’ (‘a Naval officer’).

  50 See P. Scoppola, Chiesa e Stato nella storia d’Italia, Bari: Laterza, 1967, p. 673. In the agreement with the regime reached on 2 September 1931 the pope was to renounce the modification of the oath. Giovanni Gentile had replied to the pope’s stance in his article ‘Dopo due anni’, published in Educazione fascista, 20 July 1931, and later included in Origini e dottrina del fascismo, Rome: Istituto nazionale fascista di cultura, 1934, pp. 98–103.

  51 ‘Il giuramento’, article in Il Messaggero, 28 September 1943. The same article reads: ‘The ally could be betrayed, not played with’, almost a revealing lapse in the strenuous pursuit of the Realpolitik model that the Fascists always engaged in. Il Messaggero would become the fully fledged organ of the RSI with the appointment to the editorship of Bruno Spampanato on 14 December 1943. See G. Talamo, Il Messaggero, un giornale durante il fascismo, Florence: Le Monnier, 1988, pp. 336 ff.

  52 Fondo RSI, n. 755 (September 1943).

  53 In the commemoration of June 1942, Alfredo De Marsico repeated this argument in less clear-cut terms, defending the Neapolitan admiral, however, against the accusation of oath-breaking brought against him in the entry entitled ‘Caracciolo, Francesco, duca’ in Enciclopedia italiana (VIII, 1930, p. 928) by Francesco Lemmi. On this whole affair see L. Canfora, La sentenza. Concetto Marchesi e Giovanni Gentile, Palermo: Sellerio, 1985, pp. 41–5.

  54 Quoted in G. Rovero, ‘Il clero piemontese nella Resistenza’, in Giorgio Agosti, ed., Aspetti della Resistenza in Piemonte, Turin: ISRP, 1950, p. 44.

  55 S. Cotta, replies to the remarks on his report ‘Lineamenti di storia della Resistenza italiana nel periodo dell’occupazione’, in Rassegna del Lazio, XII, 1965, special number with the proceedings of the national conference on the Resistance held in Rome on 23 and 24 October 1964, pp. 124–5.

  56 Here is the passage devoted to ‘diritto alla resistenza’ (‘the right to resist’), which ‘tends precisely to confer efficacy to natural right, affirming the pre-eminence of this respect to that emanated by the state. If one starts from the opinion that the observation of state law by citizens, independently of its content, is in itself a moral duty, the affirmation of the right to resist in order to make respect for an ethical imperative prevail gives rise to one of those ‘conflicts of loyalty’ which has already been mentioned; conflicts that are resolved as circumstances present themselves, according the gravity of the conflict, the intensity of the sentiment that feeds the faith in ethical values, the coercive capacity of legal power’ (Mortati, Istituzioni di diritto pubblico, vol. I, p. 51).

  57 ‘Perché non giuriamo’, in L’Uomo, 3, quoted in Bianchi, I cattolici, pp. 223–4.

  58 ‘Appello ai presentatisi’, in L’Italiano, 15 March 1944. Another article in the same number, however, presents the RSI enrollments as ‘La tratta dei minorenni’.

  59 A. C. Jemolo, Anni di prova, Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1969, p. 194.

  60 P. G. Proudhon, De la capacité politique des classes ouvrières, Paris: Dentu, 1865, p. 250.

  61 Bianco, Guerra partigiana, pp. 20–1. Of Vian, the animator of the Boves bands, it has been written that faith to the oath, religiously motivated, was ‘the main reason for his resistance’. V. E. Giuntella, Ignazio Vian, il difensore di Boves, edited by his family, Rome 1954, p. 6.

  62 Action Party pamphlet ‘Che cos’è il CLN’ (Quaderni dell’Italia libera 3), p. 6, observed that the words of Badoglio’s 8 September proclamation – ‘Italian troops will respond to attacks wherever they may come from’ – reduced everything to ‘a question of military honour’.

  63 The words are R. Cassin’s, quoted in H. Michel, Les courants de pensée de la Résistance, Paris: PUF, 1962, p. 49. On de Gaulle’s and France Libre’s self-legitimisation, see again Michel, ‘Gli Alleati ela Resistenza in Europa’, in INSMLI, La Resistenza europea e gli Alleati, Milan: Lerici, 1962, p. 27.

  64 Valmy, typescipt newspaper of the ‘Section parisienne du 15ème arrondissement del la Jeunesse Républicaine’, May 1941. Accusations against Vichy of betrayal and dishonour are extremely widespread in the French underground press.

  65 La Voce del Popolo, 12–19 February 1944.

  66 Article entitled ‘Onore’, March 1944 (northern edition).

  67 Giovana, Storia di una formazione partigiana, p. 63.

  68 Bianco, Guerra partigiana, pp. 56–7. The test of the oath pronounced by Bianco himself is published in G. De Luna, Formazioni GL, Instituto nazionale per la storia del movimento di liberazione in Italia, Federazione italiana delle associazoni partigiane, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1985, p. 83, where an editor’s note warns that ‘the numerous conservative formularies of the oath are identical’.

  69 Revelli, La guerra dei poveri, p. 478.

  70 With this line of argument, for example, the ‘Proposta di riorganizzazione’, no author, undated, relating to the province of Parma, demanded the oath for every patriot (IG, BG, Emilia-Romagna, G.IV3.2)

  71 IG, BG, 07315.

  72 Ibid., 09447.

  73 The text of the oath constitutes point 14 of a ‘Regolamento’ (‘Regulation’) in sixteen paragraphs, conserved in INSMLI, CVL, envelope 90, folder 12.

  74 Memory of the author’s.

  75 Battaglia, Un uomo, p. 242.

  76 The article was published in December 1943 in La nostra lotta I: 3, pp. 16–19.

  77 These words are Merleau-Ponty’s, quoted in F. Fortini, Dieci inverbi 1947–1957, Bari: De Donato, 1973, p. 247.

  78 The disturbing oath–fraternity–terror route is described in Sartre, Critica, vol. II, pp. 90–103 (‘traitors, in fact, are by definition a minority’ – p. 100). Enzensberger, Sulla teoria del tradimento, p. 25, continues the passage on the taboo with these words: ‘The history of revolutionary conspiracies shows us traces of this infection everywhere’.

  79 L. Bolis, Il mio granello di sabbia, Turin: Einaudi, 1946.

  80 Testimony by Bruno Vasari, functionary of the EIAR, Action Party. Bravo and Jalla, La vita offesa, p. 114.

  81 Undated letter to his mother by Vinicio Gotti, soon to be sub-lieutenant of the republican National Guard (LRSI, p. 200).
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  82 Letter to his mother by Umberto Scaramelli, inhabitant of Fiume, participant in the March on Rome, detachment commander of the Black Brigades, who was to be shot by the partisans on 12 February 1945, written 28 October 1944 (LRSI, p. 168).

  83 See, for example, Pansa, L’esercito di Salò, particularly pp. 142 and 144.

  84 Letter by Roberto Nanni, 21 January 1945 (LRSI, p. 183).

  85 Many letters collected in LRSI are written in this spirit.

  86 Undated letter to his father by Attilio Gianoli, of the X Mas (LRSI, p. 140).

  87 Letter to his mother by Filippo Uecher, 31 December 1943 (LRSI, p. 49).

  88 Letter by Paolino Leone, born in 1928 in Mogadishu, 18 May 1944 (LRSI, p. 114).

  89 See E. Amicucci, I seicento giorni di Mussolini, Rome: Faro, 1949, p. 317.

  90 E. Lodolini, La illegittimità del governo Badoglio, Milan: Gastaldi, 1953. Mortati, Istituzioni di diritto pubblico, vol. I, p. 87, agrees with Lodolini’s thesis.

  91 See Repubblica Sociale Italiana (Storia), ed. Centro editoriale nazionale, quoted in R. Perrone Capano, La Resistenza in Roma, Naples: Macchiaroli, 1963, vol. I, p. 165.

  92 Memorial letter of 18 October 1943.

  93 Note written immediately after 8 September 1943 by Attilio Bonvicini, lieutenant of the Decima Mas (LRSI, p. 34).

  94 Letter by Roberto Salvi, of a mobile battalion, to his father ‘old soldier of the Carso and the Piave’ (LRSI, p. 155).

  95 Francesco Attimonelli’s reply to some of his fellow soldiers, undated (LRSI, p. 104).

  96 Testimony by Canzio Eupizi, in Portelli, Biografia di una città, p. 263.

  97 Memoir by Vincenzo Fenudi, carabinieri marshal, non-collaborationist, on the time he spent in the disinfestation bath of Vorlagen (my thanks to his son Mariano for allowing me to read it).

  98 Invocation to the war dead are frequent in LRSI.

  99 Enzo Braschi, airforce lieutenant, to his mother, 21 September 1943 (LRSI, p. 39).

  100 Francesco Nepoti, born in 1926, of the ‘Volontari della Morte’ battalion, to the voluntary recruitment and enlistment centre of Bologna, 4 March 1944 (LRSI, p. 39).

  101 This expression comes from a letter sent to me on 26 September 1986 by Franco Manni about his father’s experience. (I shall make use of his father’s unpublished memoirs below. My thanks to his son for having allowed me to read them.) The second expression is attributed by Mazzantini, A cercar la bella morte, p. 221, to a sergeant who had fought in Africa, Spain and Russia.

  102 See the note quoted in Bonvicini, LSRI, 34. On 10 October 1944, in a letter to a friend, Bonvicini was to express himself in a way that sounded almost like Alfieri: ‘I believe and I suffer, I feel – I want and I must’ (LRSI, p. 35).

  103 Unsigned article, ‘Traditori arrestati e deferiti ai Tribunali Speciali’, in La Stampa, 20 October 1944, quoted in G. Gabrielli, ‘La stampa di Salò e il problema dell’epurazione’, in P. P. Poggio, ed., La repubblica sociale italiana 1943–45, Conference Proceedings, Brescia, 4–5 October 1985, Annali della Fondazione Micheletti 2 (1986), Brescia, p. 170.

  104 Letter to his wife by Emanuele De Lorenzo, born in 1909, December 1943 (LRSI, p. 139). The fact that it came from Germany accentuates, rather than diminishes, the significance of this testimony, which is eager to speak in terms of the ‘past regime’. De Lorenzo was to die fighting against the partisans in Val di Taro with the Monterosa. His contempt for ‘uniforms of every shape and kind’ sounds pathetic, given that he was to find a much vaster assortment in the RSI.

  105 Letter to a friend, November 1943, by Attilio Gianoli, of the X Mas (LRSI, p. 40).

  106 Dionisio Biondi’s declaration, quoted in Perrone Capano, La Resistenza in Roma, p. 166.

  107 Quoted in A. Gibelli and M. Ilardi, ‘Lotte operaie: Genova’, in Operai e contadini, p. 137.

  108 ‘Esame della corrispondenza censurata al 30 giugno 1944’ (ACS, SPD, CR, RSI, envelope 9, folder 3).

  109 G. B. A., ‘Fucilazioni alle Cascine’, in Bilenchi, Cronache degli anni neri, p. 70.

  110 Ibid., pp. 70–1. Before the firing squad, the five men who were shot had sung ‘The Internationale’.

  111 ‘Spiritual testimony’ of Giampiero Civati, killed 5 December 1944 (LRSI, p. 180).

  112 Letter by Elio Busi, born 1902, of 25 October 1944 (LRSI, p. 216). A ‘Multi’ is a member of the Fascist paramilitary Black Brigade.

  113 Letter to his mother by the seventeen-year-old Dante Natta, 10 January 1945 (LRSI, p. 182).

  CHAPTER 2

  The Legacy of the Fascist War

  1. WISHING FOR AND FEARING DEFEAT

  The ‘party of the foreigner’ has never been viewed kindly, especially when a country is at war. One of anti-Fascism’s hardest tasks was to shake off this defamatory judgment, whereby anyone is to be regarded as a traitor if he sees the realisation of his principles as depending on the defeat of his country. It has been justly observed that ‘from an ethical point of view, paradoxically, “treason” is less tolerable in a democratic society, which admits diversified political positions, than in a totalitarian state, where it is often the only possible form of opposition’.1

  This was the pass into which Fascism drove many Italians when, on 10 June 1940, it declared war on France and Great Britain. This was the pass which as early as November 1941 induced a group of young Italians to write: ‘We are reduced to attempting by whatever means to flee what at one time we actually regarded as our duties … to despair of Italy and the Italians, to think in terms of help from outside as the only kind which can liberate us from tyranny’.2 The situation that had come about was similar to that sketched in 1858 by Fustel de Coulanges in his remarks on Polybius’s defection to the Romans: ‘That an honest citizen, devoted to his country, should rejoice at the success of the public enemy, that this preference is not treason, but almost a form of patriotism is a fact worthy of attention.’3 Worthy of attention, certainly, are utterances made on different occasions, like that of the student Emanuele Artom: ‘It is in Italy’s interest to be defeated’; or another one, overheard in an osteria: ‘We’d do better to lose the war, that way we’ll be able to liberate ourselves from Fascism’; or again that of an intellectual, Pietro Chiodi: ‘He who is not free has no patria, he who has no patria has no military duties’.4 Some time earlier, an intelligent policeman, Arturo Bocchini, or it might have been Carmine Senise, had put his finger on the problem: ‘One can confidently state that in Italy the only ones who have good reason for desiring the war are the anti-Fascists, because only with the war will they be able to rid themselves of the hated regime.’5

  It was in fact since 1789, according to Bloch, that ‘Rulers, in a war, place their regime at risk as much as they do the country as a whole’:6

  Fascism – a common lot of many nationalist movements – had ended up severing and wearing out even the most tenacious fibres of nationalism … and proposing to the nation the conservation or failure to conserve Fascism as what was truly and decisively at stake in the struggle (whence … the invincible repugnance for a victory thus conditioned and, given the prevailing revolutionary immaturity, the withdrawal into a sluggish, resigned waiting on events with marked sympathy for the so-called enemy forces and an aversion for the so-called allies, which grew, the more likely and then certain their inferiority appeared).7

  Of this situation, which saw so many Italians living the first phase of the Second World War in an atmosphere ranging from hope in a defeat to the anxiety which that prospect provoked, by way of various forms of resignation – in the absence to this day of a complete historiographic reconstruction of this situation, two components above all will be traced: the anti-Fascists and the combatants. One of the premises of the encounter in the Resistance between veteran anti-Fascism and some of the new generation who had grown up under Fascism was the positions the respective parties took towards the war.

  The positions taken by the various anti-Fascist currents towards Europe’s headlong descent into war are w
ell enough known. Likewise for the first phase of the war, which was the most tormented from an ideological point of view, until the attack on the USSR appeared to simplify things. The agony of Italian anti-Fascism needs to be seen in the context of the difficult re-conversion of the European left from pacifism, felt almost as a point of honour after the 1914 catastrophe, to the wholehearted espousal of the war against Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Keep the peace or fight against fascism? was the problem that the European left posed itself with increasing apprehension in the second half of the 1930s; and the French trade unionist who put the problem in the above terms answered his question with contradictory baldness: ‘We want peace even if this consolidates the different Fascisms. And we know that war would reinforce all Fascisms, ours included.’8 ‘From pacifism to fascism, what deception!’, what ‘tragic sophistry!’, was, conversely, how a Resistance newspaper responded.9 The British Labour Party was for a long time held back by fear that a rearmament policy would reinforce the Tories.10 But an American intellectual was keen to point out, after the war in Spain, that neutrality in the sense of non-belligerence did not mean ‘treating the aggressor and his victim alike’.11

  For the Italian anti-Fascists, who spoke in the name of a nation that already had Fascism in power, the problem had been particularly dramatic. It is to Carlo Rosselli’s credit that he put things with precocious lucidity, immediately after Hitler came to power, in his famous article ‘La guerra che torna’. ‘The struggle between Fascism and anti-Fascism,’ wrote Rosselli, ‘is heading for the judgment of God … From this moment Mussolini can launch his anathema against the traitors of the Fascist patria.’12

  A fair idea of the difficulty a movement of long-standing pacifist traditions had in following the Giustizia e Libertà leader on a path thought to be too brazen is given by Pietro Nenni’s response. Faithful to the position he assumed in July 1930, at the congress of socialist unity, against the hypothesis of war as a means of defeating Fascism,13 Nenni wrote that an anti-Fascist preventive war would acquire the character of an ‘imperialist intervention, dictated by imperialist considerations’, whereas ‘revolutionary duty is to say no to war, to deny it in whatever form it should present itself, whether under the wing of revolutionary war or war of liberty.’14 These words certainly bespeak the anti-warmongering passion of a former interventionist, which is what Nenni had been, and which induced him to write, in the article just cited, that ‘all the illusions, all the errors of 1914–15, are returning’. But the whole of the PSI, in its oscillations and in its contradictions, appeared in those years to be an interesting laboratory of the problems of peace and war, closely interwoven with those of the autonomy to be salvaged for socialism and anti-Fascism in the increasingly acute conflict between the great powers.15 Even after the unity-of-action pact with the Communists, viewed by the latter primarily as a projection of the drawing together of the USSR and Popular Front France, the autonomist group of the PSI, whose foremost exponent was Giuseppe Emanuele Modigliani, had inserted in the closing motion of the congress held in Paris in June 1937 an appeal to the need for the workers’ and socialist movement not to identify ‘at all costs with a bloc of anti-Fascist states’.16