On the other front, some Fascists too tried at the eleventh hour to re-play the card of ‘stretching our arms again above the foreign bayonets’.51 There are countless traces of these final transformist dartings, and indeed they bespeak the appeal to create new forms of solidarity against the foreign armies, whichever they might be. For example, an officer of the Decima Mas, one of the Fascist formations that tried to exploit this most, on presenting himself to the striking workers of the Borletti company in Milan on 16 April, said to them: ‘The situation has reached the end of the road and … we mustn’t scrap but find a way of coming to terms to ensure that neither the Germans nor the English take advantage.’ The workers did not prove, on that occasion, to be well enough vaccinated, since they agreed to send a delegation to the provincial head, who gave it short shrift.52
Indicative of these Fascist velleities, if only indirectly, are the invitations made to the partisans on several occasions to open their eyes about the fate that the Allies had in store for them. ‘Ecco la gratitudine dell’Inghilterra!’ (‘There’s England’s gratitude for you!’) was the caption on a poster representing Churchill giving a partisan a kick.53 An apocryphal number of L’Unità reproduced an appeal by Ercole (Palmiro Togliatti), substituting Germans with the English: ‘A prime and indispensable condition for this successful outcome is the struggle against the English invader, exploiter of peoples.’54
The upshot of equating the two foreign armies, however it was suggested and whatever the motivation, was that it gave force to ‘attesismo’ (waiting on events). Thus there was the confirmation that blurring the anti-Fascist character of the new war inhibited the reconquest of national identity. ‘There are no liberators, only men who liberate themselves!’ a leaflet proclaimed,55 underlining the commitment to defeat the selfishness, apathy and sloth that were weighing on the Italians both as individuals and as a people. ‘Our historic curse, opportunism’, wrote an Action Party broadsheet.56
National identity could thus only be re-established by shaking off the age-old destiny that had made of Italy only the stage of great historical dramas enacted by the protagonists of other peoples. It thus became natural to go in search of episodes that lent themselves to offering a less depressing vision of the history of the patria. Commonplaces, rhetoric, recycling of memories and cultural stereotypes, autonomous reflection on one’s past as a people – all circulate in Resistance circles, and above all stress the Risorgimento, whose wars had been the most Italian and anti-German of all. The Resistance drew strength and at the same time ambiguity from the Risorgimento, as witness the much abused expression ‘Secondo Risorgimento’.57 More or less all the political and ideological positions of the Resistance movement, and indeed of the Fascists too, chose their special bit of the Risorgimento to refer to.58
The two largest movements – the Garibaldi brigades militarily, the Action Party politically – gave themselves names that evoked the Risorgimento veins which, in the struggle for hegemony in the new state, had succumbed to the liberal-moderate-monarchic solution. Implicit in these names is the programme of again calling into question the post-Risorgimento orders – not just the Fascist one, but the Liberal one as well. On the other hand, the Risorgimento, with the force of its hagiographic and homologising stereotypes, made a fitting ideological screen for both the left-wing and moderate versions of the policy of unity. Il Risorgimento Liberale explicitly stressed as much on one occasion.59
The great powers at war with Fascist Italy had themselves been the first to set the liberating version of the Risorgimento against the one entangled in Fascist nationalism-imperialism: not only the English, for whom numerous testimonies could be cited (Radio London, for example, had a soft spot for the expression ‘Secondo Risorgimento’, and throughout the war commemorated the anniversary of Garibaldi’s death),60 but even the Greek dictator Metaxas. The latter, in a radio broadcast on 22 November 1940, shortly after the Italian invasion, said: ‘Greece forgets neither Santarosa, nor Fratti, nor Garibaldi, nor the many other Italians who shed their blood for her, for the liberty and independence of Italy in the last century.’61 Nor had the Fascists dared to call their war the ‘fifth war of independence’, despite the objectives set for it: ‘Nice, Savoy, fateful Corsica, Malta bulwark of Romanità’, as one of their songs listed them.
From the Kingdom of the South the voice of Victor Emmanuel III at once hastened to remind the Italians what ‘the inhuman enemy of our race and our civilisation’ was;62 and, still in the South, an ‘Appeal to the King’ to resign, written by an intellectual of some prestige, concluded with the enjoinder to Italy to resume ‘the tradition of its Mazzinian and Garibaldinian risorgimento, and the mission that Fascism, in a dominion of ignorance and brutality, had disowned and divided’.63
The memory of the Risorgimento sustained the spirits of the military internees in the German camps. Already at the Brenner Pass there rose from one of their troop-trains the chorus of Verdi’s Va’ pensiero or Oh Signor che dal tetto natio.64 And, to the request that they join the RSI, ‘the choice [was] between the Italian Italy of the Risorgimento, of the old war, human and honest, and the Germanised Italy, of the Fascist myth, inhuman and dishonest because, though unreal and unrealisable, it was preached as being real and true’.65 After 8 September, it might seem that the miracle of 1848 was reviving, when ‘Alle irruente orde straniere/studenti e popolani/per improvisa concordia terribili/il petto inerme opponendo/auspicarono col sangue/il riscatto d’Italia’ (‘Against the violent foreign hordes/students and common folk,/grown terrible from sudden concord,/presenting their unarmed breasts,/hoped with their blood/for the redemption of Italy’).66 The following words appear in a newspaper of an ‘extremist’ group, the Roman Communist Movement of Italy, on the anniversary of the October Revolution: ‘It is not under the sign of the monarchy and with the army of the monarchy that Italian unity was formed and is defended, but with the heroic deeds of the Risorgimento which has created the nation’s fibre and makes it inviolable!’67
Unity ‘as in the epoch of the Risorgimento’ was a desire expressed on one occasion by Pietro Nenni, with some reservation however on the part of his party, sensitive as the latter was to the risk that the Resistance would turn out disappointingly, as the Risorgimento had.68 This concern was extremely strong in the Republican Party, which was always ready to denounce the ‘absurd concordance’ between 1859, 1860, 1866 and 1915.69 Nor did the ‘vague patriotic vocabulary’ used against the ‘enemy of the Piave’ appeal to an intransigent GL member who considered it ‘a step backwards’, to which however ‘it was necessary … to adapt’, while another GL member was convinced that it was a mistake to confuse the Risorgimento with the present struggle.70
In the Catholic world too there were residues of anti-Risorgimento intolerance, early expressed by the preacher who in the church of Sant’Agostino in Rome, in May 1943, had remarked ironically: ‘There’s never an end to our famous Risorgimento: we started from Eritrea, then Libya and then the world war; to obtain a scrap of land in the sun we went messing around in Abyssinia, then we went knocking our heads in Spain, then ended up in Russia. Where, where on earth will we end up this time!’71
But favourite among the Catholics are the suggestions of neo-Guelphism. The new Risorgimento must be finally conducted not against the Catholics but with the Catholics, so that ‘the patria and the true God are circumfused with the light of a single love’.72 Piero Malvestiti founded the Guelph Action Movement, which was then merged with the Christian Democrat party; and free rein was given to appeals regarding the ‘providential mission’ assigned by God to the Italy of Girolamo Savanarola, Francesco Ferrucci and Matilde of Canossa.73 More wayward still, Il Risveglio, the Christian Democrat weekly of the South, refigured the history of Rome, claiming Christ, as a Roman, lumped together with St Francis of Assisi and St Catherine of Siena, the Madonna del Grappa and the Carroccio, St Nicholas of Bari, and proclaiming that the Alps were placed by God as the sacred boundary of Italy.74 Unfortunately
the Action Party and the Group for the Defence of Women were no better when, in some of their Genoese leaflets, they tried to claim Balilla as their own.75 In Piedmont, the Babel of Risorgimento languages led to the assumption of the name ‘Nuovo Risorgimento Italiano’ by a movement formed from the remnants of the 4th Army and inspired by General Operti. After provoking tense discussions within the Piedmontese cities’ military command, this movement, through the intransigence of the Communists and the regional CLN directives, ended up being identified as an enemy to fight ‘on a par with the Nazi-Fascists’.76
Naturally the Fascists too, though hindered by their German comrades, descended onto Risorgimento ground. They placed Mazzini’s effigy on their stamps, invoked Mameli and his national anthem,77 pitted a truly patriotic Garibaldi of their own against the one besmirched by the ‘bandits’,78 and proclaimed that ‘the RSI is the heir of the Roman Republic’ of 1849.79 One university student volunteer loftily invoked the Risorgimento virtues (which numbered among other things virility too), and reproached his wife for not wishing to read Le confessioni di un italiano, which would have enabled her to ‘penetrate deeply into my soul’.80 The Fascists for their part made no excuse about claiming for themselves the glories of the history of Italy: they too invoked St Francis and St Catherine, Francesco Ferrucci and Marcus Furius Camillus; they named one of their battalions Pontida (possibly more out of ignorance than impudence) and, naturally, brought Balilla over to their side.81
This vying for even the distant past was not, however, an exclusively Italian phenomenon. In France Vercingetorix and the victorious defence of Gergovia against the Romans in 52 BC were subject to it. When Vichy organised a ceremony in which all the French regions had to bring a handful of their earth to Gergovia there were outcries of profanation, because Vercingetorix ‘is the hero of the Resistance.82
Irritated, the anti-Fascists replied sarcastically to what seemed to them unwarranted appropriations. ‘Why don’t the Fascists quote these words of Mazzini’s?’ asked an Action Party youth paper, after quoting some of the Genoese’s thoughts inspired by the theme of liberty.83 From the microphones of Radio London, Umberto Calosso noted that ‘Giovanezza [Youth], the hymn of the old men of the Fascist hierarchy was increasingly being replaced by other hymns, including those of Garibaldi and Mameli’.84 Disdainful and concerned, La Riscossa italiana wrote that the Fascists were profaning Mazzini, Garibaldi, and the Roman Republic, and mentioned the free Comuni and Archbishop Ariberto into the bargain.85
When we look at the counter-evidence of the names of the clandestine newspapers and formations, and the noms de guerre, the impression that the neo-Risorgimento spirit was spreading assumes more modest proportions. General titles prevail in the newspapers, pivoting on words like ‘libertà’, ‘liberazione’, ‘lotta’ (‘struggle’), ‘battaglia’, ‘rinascita’ (‘rebirth’), ‘riscossa’ (‘recovery’), ‘combattente’, ‘volontario’ and the like, often associated with geographical, or else political and ideological names.86 On the other hand, not many newspaper names appeal to the Risorgimento: La Giovane Italia of the Youth Front of Tuscany, the Fratelli d’Italia of the Veneto CLN, L’Italia e il secondo Risorgimento, and only a few others, even if we consider titles inspired by patriotism of a general kind, such as a Stella garibaldina of the Piedmontese Garibaldi brigades (flanked, to be on the safe side, by a Stella partigiana), Il Tricolore of the Pavese Oltrepò operative sector, and Patria of the Lazio Christian Democrats. In acquiring, at a medium level, a firm ideological commitment, as expressed in the names of the newspapers, the Risorgimento clearly had less space, as a motivation for war against the Germans and Fascists, than that given to it in the more solemn and official writings and speeches or in the schools, where those writings and speeches turned up again. By contrast, the great Revolution figures considerably more, indeed massively, in the titles of the French underground press, where there frequently appear ‘La Révolution française’, ‘Valmy’, ‘Père Duchesne’ (which indicates 1942 as its ‘151e Année: ô drapeau de Wagram! ô pays de Voltaire!’), ‘La Marseillaise’ and the ‘Ça ira’, the ‘14 Juillet’ and the ‘Quatre-vingt-treize’. One of the newspapers with the latter title is specified as being ‘journal of the descendants of the French Revolution’.87 ‘To re-make France’, it states ‘we must repeat 1792 and Valmy’; or even ‘1794–1944. The youth of France greet the 150th anniversary of the death of the young fighter for Liberty: Saint-Just’.88
Pétain, the victor at Verdun, is compared to Dumouriez, the victor at Valmy: both of them traitors.89 Bloch recalled that in May 1940 the Marseillaise had still signified ‘the cult of the patrie and the execration of tyrannies’.90 But the Marseillaise was a popular song, while the Risorgimento had become a bombastic and scholastic concept. Besides, there are explicit Jacobin echoes in Italy too: in a speech given in Naples on 3 September 1944, Nenni called the partisans ‘sans culottes of the French revolution’, and both Avanti! and L’Unità, at least in the first few months, invoked a government of public health.91
The Risorgimento appeared more insistently perhaps in the names of the partisan formations, above all in Veneto, but never on a large scale.92 Here, when the formation was not designated by a number alone, geographical names prevailed as well as the names of those who had died fighting in the Resistance itself – as if to underline the local roots of many formations and the preponderant bond that they felt with their own immediate past. Names indicating the political and ideological patrimony to which the formations appealed were, in turn, more numerous than the purely Risorgimental ones. There was an intermediate group of broadly patriotic inspiration – Italia, Italia Libera (the most widespread of this type), Fratelli d’Italia, Patria, Italiano, Dante, and the like.
Significant too was the dose of Risorgimento-inspired names in the different formations. Of the seven detachments making up the 2nd Garibaldi (Biella) assault brigade, three had plainly Risorgimento names, in the democratic vein – Bixio, Mameli, Fratelli Bandiera; one, Pisacane, a heretical, already tendentially Socialist, Risorgimento name; one, Piave, a name from the ‘fourth war of independence’; and finally, two that were political names inspired by unity between the parties of the left – Matteotti and Gramsci.93 But the most recurrent Risorgimento names circulating in the Garibaldi formations appear to be Mazzini (at least five times), Pisacane, Bixio, Fratelli Bandiera (three times each), Cattaneo, Nievo, Nullo, Mameli (twice), and then Anita Garibaldi, Mazzini and Garibaldi, Manin, Cairoli, Calvi, Pellico, Menotti, and also a Camicia Rossa (Red Shirt) between the Risorgimento and the workers’ movement.94 Still rarer, perhaps surprisingly, seem to be the Risorgimento names adopted by the GL formations, even if we take into account that there were fewer of these than the Garibaldi brigades: Cattaneo and Mazzini (twice each, as if to symbolise the dual, traditional inspiration of Italian political radicalism) and, here too, Nullo. Cattaneo figured among the minor politicised formations like the Socialist Matteotti ones, while we should recall there were also some Mazzini brigades inspired by the Republican Party.
Appearing among the Lombard Liberal organisation were the Fratelli Bandiera and Goffredo Mameli, alongside San Giusto and San Fermo.95 The Osoppo in their turn recalled Mameli, and the Green Flames drew inspiration from Tito Speri. Among the formations of not clearly definable political leanings, again there were Mazzini, Cairoli, Mameli, the Fratelli Bandiera, as well as Silvio Pellico, Luciano Manara, Santorre di Santarosa, Cinque Giornate, Dieci Giornate, Curtatone and Montanara.
A survivor of one of the Yugoslavia formations gives a desecrating explanation of what motivated the decision to take the name Garibaldi: Mazzini was too republican, Matteotti too political, while ‘Garibaldi, let’s face it, is all right for everybody and was all right for us too, and so we became the “Divisione partigiana Italia Garibaldi”.’96
If we descend from the names of the formations and newspapers to the noms de guerre chosen by, or given to, the partisans, things become trickier. Mixed with politic
al, ideological and autobiographical motivations was a vast range of attitudes to that partial mutation of one’s identity that a change of name involved.97 At times, ‘subtle reasons’ preceded the choice of a name; and it is not right to call them ‘Arcadia’.98 The panorama is vast, a veritable pattern book of popular fantasy and culture, in which patriotic remembrance seems to play only the most modest part. We find classical and mythological names (Ajax, Euclid), names from noble literature (Carducci, Alighieri),99 the most learned names (Bede), names from popular literature of various tongues (D’Artagnan, Gordon, Radiosa Aurora), English names (Bill, Tom) and Russian ones (Boris, Ivan); barbarians’ names (Attila, Alimiro) and exotic names (Alì, Ataman), names of sports champions (Bartali, Nuvolari and the thoroughbred Nearco), cocky and violent names (Ardito, Uragano, Mitra – meaning machine-gun), defiant names (Boia – hangman; Caino – Cain), the names of animals (which were among those most often adopted: from tordo – thrush – to bufalo) and of plants (bambù and grano – wheat), names deriving from physical (Baffetti) and psychophysical features (Bestione), place names that take their cue from a Royal Army tradition, great military commanders (Scipio, Napoleon). In such varied company, the Risorgimento makes a very scanty showing.100
Evidently there was not much inclination among individual resistenti to recognise themselves, even ironically, in the heroes of the Risorgimento. We do find a Piedmontese Garibaldini named Garibaldi, and a Veneto who calls himself, with generous unitary sentiment, Cavour, but there is no way of telling how much of a bearing physical resemblance had in cases like these. A couple of Nullos and a Nievo are recorded (in Veneto), a Cecilia deriving from La Cecilia,101 and precious little else. When forty-five Garibaldini of the Natisone division asked to enrol in the Italian Communist Party, they were asked to choose a name for themselves: nine chose their own names; four, Slav names; three, Anglo-Saxon names; six drew inspiration from romantic war fiction; one from the novels of Salgari (Yanez); three opted for national-patriotic and almost irredentist names (Adriatico, Roma, Pisino); and one even recognised himself in Balilla.102
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