Even in the left-wing press there were defensive, reticent or oscillating attitudes. On 7 February 1944 Avanti! wrote that Mussolini, ‘before disappearing, wanted to build the premises of the new civil war’.11 But more incisive lines of argument appeared, too. Above all the Fascists were reminded that their responsibility for the explosion of civil war was not just today’s: they had been busy unleashing fratricidal war against the Italian workers for twenty years now.12 There was also pride in taking up a challenge. Commemorating Mario Fioretti, a youth killed by the Fascists – baldly defined as a ‘subversive’, a very rare form of description for the Resistance press – Avanti! wrote that ‘the murder of our comrade is to be regarded as being among the first signs of civil war’. And it added immediately:
This war that Fascism has insisted on unleashing as the last act of the tragedy into which it has thrown the country will be waged by us without quarter. Only from this war, from what by now are its decisive discriminations and its bloodbath, will social justice and liberty for the Italian people and all Europe be able to rise as inviolable conquests.13
More soberly, L’Italia Libera wrote: ‘So Fascism wants civil war? All right, then. And let it be the CLN that will wage it until Fascism is exterminated.’14 In another ‘actionist’ article the undertaking was made with greater pride: ‘We know that we have to achieve our idea in the fire of a war which is also civil war’.15
For the Action Party the civil war was an aspect, or an initial phase, of democratic revolution. Dante Livio Bianco spoke of ‘true civil war, and ideological and political war if ever there was one’ in a context in which democratic revolution was discussed.16 Vittorio Foa wrote that ‘the people’s war has to be the first act of the people’s revolution’.17 Closer still is the tie established in a small GL newspaper: ‘The opportunity to assert the rights and claims of the people and the workers is given us today now that the people and the workers are armed and can defend themselves, or never again … And this armed struggle has a name: Revolution!’18
From its opening lines a GL pamphlet vehemently emphasised that the Second World War was a war of religion: ‘Fractions of Italians, Chinese, French and Russians are fighting today on both sides … We partisans feel the anti-Hitlerian German to be our brother and the Italian Fascist our deadly enemy.’19
Another, internal Action Party document recognised the civil war ‘between opposing religions’ as inevitable.20 If anything, it was on tactical grounds that the need was felt to draw distinctions. Giorgio Agosti wrote: ‘The tactic of “the worse it is the better it is”, which consists of involving even the lukewarm and indifferent with the partisan cause and rousing the atmosphere of civil war in the most indolent zones, is useful when insurrection is imminent, but becomes dangerous when one is forced onto the defensive.’21
Talk of civil war in any case took the refusal of continuity with the Royal Army to its extreme consequences: this refusal indeed already contained within itself the descent into civil war, in the strong sense of the term.22
The Communists regarded the civil war as an incontrovertible fact; but, while not shrinking from calling it by its name on many occasions, they did not insist on the use of the expression. This attitude may be ascribed to the Communists’ prevailing commitment to making some class needs converge with the national and unitary character of the struggle for liberation, and to incorporating in this design the specifically anti-Fascist objective that was, by contrast, the core of the democratic revolution championed by the Actionists. In the course of events, however, it was the requirements of the struggle itself that often influenced the ideological pattern. On 19 September 1943 L’Unità wrote: ‘The struggle against the Germans is inseparable from the struggle against Fascism. Nazi Germany and Fascism are locked in a mortal embrace: one cannot strike one without the other.’23
And immediately after this, on 29 September, the same paper explained: ‘We mustn’t forget that interwoven with the struggle against the Germans is a civil struggle that is already taking place.’ Fascism is dead, ‘but national life has certainly not been purged of Fascism. And some Fascists are taking advantage of the presence of the Germans to give vent to their base instincts of rancour, hatred and vengeance … The struggle against the Germans and the struggle against the Fascists are one and the same thing.’24
A few days later L’Unità again clearly indicated the three tasks facing the Italian people: ‘War against the Nazi aggressor; civil war against the Fascists, their allies; political struggle against the reactionary forces that lie across its path in the attempt to display all its energies and capacity for action and for fighting.’25 The party’s theoretical review authoritatively endorsed this point of view, writing: ‘It is the time for battle, the time for the partisans’ war, the time for civil war, the time for war actively fought against the Germans and against the Fascists.’26 As for personal experience, a concentration camp survivor has recounted how, spurred to make the initial choice by his hatred of the Germans, he had then ‘transferred the image of the German onto Fascism’.27
The operational instructions for fighting the Fascists often implied, above all when drafted by Actionists, Communists and Socialists, or under their influence, the enjoinder to go beyond the notion of the Fascist as a contemptible and dangerous but circumscribed residue. Paragraph 2 (‘Azione prima di tutto’ – ‘Action before all else’) of the ‘Direttive per la lotta armata’ (‘Directives for the Armed Struggle’), issued in Milan in February 1944 by the military Command for Northern Italy, states:
Let not only spies, agents provocateurs and traitors be our objective in the civil struggle, even if they are the main target. Let us aim at the petty local tyrants, the swine who are terrorising the populations, the political and military hierarchies in general, and particularly those whose disappearance could be most damaging and demoralising for the enemy. Let us deal with the offices and institutions of the Fascist party. Let us attack wherever possible the units, detachments and barracks of the militia.28
No less drastic, more than a year later, were the PCI ‘Direttive n.16’ for the insurrection, written by Luigi Longo and issued on April 1945:
In the cities the GAP and SAP units must attack and unsparingly destroy as many Fascist gerarchi as they can get to; all those agents and collaborators and Nazi-Fascists who continue to betray the patria (questori, commissars, high state and municipal officials, industrialists and technical managers of production subservient to the Germans); all the Nazi-Fascists and ‘republicans’ who remain deaf to the patria’s injunction to surrender or perish.29
If we descend from these lofty declarations of principle and maxims to a more close-range view of things, this picture is not belied, but becomes more complex – at times more homogeneous, at times more blurred and differentiated. Here, too, the dividing lines between attitudes and sentiments do not always coincide completely with those that distinguish the top ranks of the parties.
A sentiment that was certainly widespread, and which stoked the loathing that was immediately manifested for the republican Fascists, lies in the way the latter assumed the character of dismal but brazen revenants. True, the forty-five days of Badoglio’s rule had been days of false liberty, of military dictatorship, of turbid compromises. But the headlong collapse of so much of Fascism’s specific machinery and symbols had been such as to strike people’s souls as an event from which there could be no turning back. Popular conscience had, to a large degree, galloped along this road, well beyond the intentions, fears and manoeuvres of the king and Badoglio. Now the resuscitated Fascists seemed, against nature, to be making time flow backwards. They had only just risen from the tomb, and there they were immediately giving orders. The vindictive attitudes they were flaunting (the conciliatory intentions recorded above were not so visible), the way they roamed about the cities in black shirts and motley uniforms, theatrically re-hoisting the symbols of the regime and restoring the Fascist names of streets and squares, the recapturing in Rome
of Palazzo Venezia and the headquarters in Piazza Colonna, miming punitive expeditions and warlike assaults against nonexistent enemies – these were all spectacles that shook, frightened and saddened even those who had not completely clarified their ideas on whether they should join the Resistance. In Piazza Colonna, Franco Calamandrei’s sharp eye came to rest on the ‘people stopping in the square to watch, with a mixture of curiosity, fear, commiseration and mockery, and an expression of mutual understanding’.30 Not so different from this is a Fascist’s memory of things: ‘The passers-by on the pavements raised their eyes, slightly astonished at seeing something so unexpected; they sought us with incredulous faces, but we were already some way away.’31 The fact that the Fascists could once again play the bully like this because they were protected by the Germans deprived that resurrection of any glimmer of even the most obscure heroism.
Certainly, as I have already noted, the Fascists in this way re-qualified themselves in their own eyes and recharged themselves against their enemies. But the anti-Fascists recharged themselves too, many of them beginning to repent having been too temperate after 25 July, having confused their personal feeling of liberation with a reality that was in fact a good deal more irksome and difficult. In a climate that was ‘more tuned to joy than revenge’, an error had been committed out of too much generosity and failure of foresight: ‘We mocked them, insulted them, and that was all.’32 The Germans had been feared, not the Fascists. During the forty-five days, as Ferruccio Parri, who had always been vigilant of German moves, testified many years later, ‘the Fascist revival was not taken as certain; it might have been probable, but I have to say that it was not viewed as being imminent’.33
The error was not to be repeated, however. ‘Don’t delude yourselves with the memory of the forty-five days. This time you won’t get off so lightly’, wrote L’Unità on 4 June 1944.34 And in the instructions circulated on the eve of the insurrection, the PCI leadership declared: ‘We can’t have a second 25 July.’35 Running through the whole Resistance is this constant concern. Il Combattente wrote explicitly that on 25 July the Italian people had been too temperate.36
An article relating to Captain Mazzuoli, defined as ‘one of Matteotti’s murderers’, reads: ‘Not eliminated when he should have been, this scoundrel, like so many of his fellows, was able, after 8 September, to join the SS and commit other murders.’37 In Rome, at a meeting of the Socialists in charge of the Appio-Tuscolano-Prenestino military sector, Giuseppe Lopresti, an extraordinarily noble-hearted and fine-spirited young man, said: ‘The Fascists have returned because on 25 July Fascist blood was not spilled.’38 The GL partisans who sang La Badoglieide, with the words ‘ma il fascismo restava il padron’ (‘but Fascism remained the boss’) expressed regret at not having acted at the right time. A curious piece of counter-evidence is furnished by an article in Il Popolo which, wishing to deny the existence of the civil war, argues: ‘If that’s how things were, why didn’t it break out on 25 July?’39 But it was precisely because it didn’t break out on 25 July that it broke out on 8 September.
We’re telling you once and for all: we don’t want to see your pre-25th July faces anymore. We don’t want to see them anymore because you are all responsible for the catastrophe that has engulfed us; we don’t want to see your faces anymore because you still have the old mentality, because you have the old methods, because, lastly, as long as you stay in the seat where you’ve placed yourselves again, no one will be able to believe in the possibility of renewal, in the new marching impulse, in the new idiom that you’re preaching. We want new people, and by new people we mean: morally healthy and limitlessly honest.40
These are the words of young men who still believed in Fascism and its capacity to regenerate itself. But the sight of the old faces of the regime triggered in them reactions to some extent akin to those of the anti-Fascists.
On the other hand, the new-style Fascists had no better effect on them:
[T]hey looked athletic, extremely efficient, infinitely more so than similar units of the late Royal Army, very modern, Germanlike, all with smiles of exploding faith, with a lousy visual effect, openly, deliberately fratricidal. But the acme was contained in the photograph of Ettore Muti’s legionaries, who carried ultramodern weapons in the old fancy-dress of the March on Rome, tommy guns slung over black ski-tops, with the tin badge of the skull. But, on examination, unbalanced units, made up of old men and children, veterans, raw recruits and mascots.41
In the first few weeks an Action Party pamphlet had shown that it underestimated the perilousness of the reappearing Fascists: ‘No, poor, black-shirted Fascists, you won’t manage to destroy Italy!’42 Certainly, the Fascists were no longer capable of destroying Italy any further; but they were capable of inflicting cruelties upon it and of involving the anti-Fascists in a bloody final reckoning. ‘They are using terror to defer the moment of reckoning as long as possible’, wrote Eusebio Giambone in his last letter.43
The civil war between Fascists and anti-Fascists can in fact be seen as the recapitulation and final enactment, under the cloak of the German occupation, of a conflict that began in 1919–22. A similar interpretation has been advanced for the struggle between Vichy and the French Resistance, interpreted as a summing-up of the fractures that had marked the history of modern France: ‘Sous le regard de l’occupant, se règle un formidable arrière de comptes.’44
In Italy the phenomenon had a special impact, because the conquest and management of power by the Fascists had been wholly autochthonous. This is precisely why the republican Fascists, coming as they did at the end of the cycle of Fascism’s fortunes, had nothing new to offer, nothing to hope for; they themselves appeared desperate and became the object of a more intense hatred. By contrast, in the resistenti the reckoning, which looked back to the past, was capable of being charged with hopes and projects for the future.
I have already mentioned the retrieval of the memory of the biennio rosso, which was conducted by some of the older resistenti, and which seduced the younger ones. Two Communist leaflets addressed to the people of Florence proudly recalled the defence of the San Frediano district against the squadristi.45 Flamigni and Marzocchi have spoken of town councils in Romagna that proudly cherish the memory of not having let the Fascist squads through, citing for example San Leonardo di Forlì, which was to became a centre of the Resistance and a firm seat of CLNs, partisan commands and PCI organisms.46 To this day, in their reminiscences the elderly Turin workers interviewed as part of an oral history research project compare 1919–21, the period of the biennio rosso and of squadrismo, with 1943–45. As the interviewer observes, this is no mere repression of the Fascist ventennio, but ‘has the merit of being an interpretation of history, a way of speaking about recovery from defeat’.47
It is true that the definition of 1919–22 as a civil war is disputable, even if it was used, both then and later, by Socialists, Communists and Fascists alike. In his report to the 7th Congress of the International in August 1935, Togliatti spoke of the ‘most barbarous civil war’ that took place in Italy after the war.48 And in 1943, in his speech to the directorate of the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF) on 17 April, Mussolini said that the highly ‘unpopular’ war of 1915–18 ‘was the first result of the first episode of the civil war that ended in 1922’.49 Jens Petersen has remarked how, ‘in Fascism’s mythology of wars and struggle, war and civil war make an indissoluble pact with each other’, and how in 1919–22 there had been a ‘unilateral distribution of the causes for violence’;50 and Adrian Lyttelton has made the point that Fascist violence was organised, whereas socialist violence was not.51
In 1943–45 revenge was indeed taken against this iniquitous distribution of violence, which was made to pay for the sense of frustration experienced in the uneven fight against the action squads:
Ste quattro facce gialle color del sego
portavano la morte e il me ne frego
anche noi ce ne saressimo fregati
se il gover
no com alor ce avesse armati
[These four yellow faces the colour of tallow
bringing death and the motto ‘I don’t give a damn’
we too would have been screwed
if the government had armed us like then]
Sung in 1922 in Rome and Viterbo to the tune of ‘La Leggenda del Piave’, probably by the Arditi del Popolo, this song was then rediscovered by the partisans.52 For their part, the Fascists who cultivated the myth of the return to origins dreamed of it as an opportunity not to repeat the errors committed in 1922 out of stupid indulgence. One of them, terrorised in the days of the insurrection by the stories he had heard about the ‘Sarzana massacre’ and the ‘Empoli massacre’, on seeing what remained of a Black Brigade, remarked: ‘The last 18 BLs who left twenty-three years before.’53
A Civil War Page 51
