The resistenti made the necessary distinctions between Fascists, offering them in the weeks immediately following 8 September a still possible choice to save themselves. That is to say, if exceptional events produced in the Fascists the temptation to damn themselves once and for all, the same events also offered the chance of redemption ‘to the gentlemen who feel blood coming to their cheeks at the very memory of having been Fascists’: these, wrote L’Unità, would certainly not allow themselves to be gulled by the resuscitated Mussolini and Farinacci.54 A Modenese leaflet said: ‘We offer a hand to all Fascists who have repented, and bullets for the gerarchi who persist along the path of betrayal.’55
The resistenti also distinguished between those who by now were fighting under the flags of the RSI. This was chiefly due to the obvious intention to divide and scatter the enemy, to the point of imposing the drastic final dilemma ‘surrender or perish’. It was also due to genuine understanding for those who had answered Graziani’s call-ups reluctantly or performed other acts of forced submission. And lastly it was due to the tendency already mentioned, a typical feature of civil war, to consider a more or less large proportion of those deployed on the opposite side as being recoverable on the field (which is an altogether different problem from the recovery of the defeated by the victors after the event).
This problem was faced squarely in two Communist documents. The ‘Direttive di carattere generale riservate ai soli compagni’ (‘General directives reserved for comrades only’) warned:
Our policy towards the Fascists, including squadristi, must prove capable and must tend to dissolve those forces. We must tell them squarely that our future attitude towards them will depend on the position that they take at this moment. We need to bring home to them that the moment of their rehabilitation has come, and it will happen only insofar as they show themselves to be good Italians in the struggle against the Germans and against the Fascists who have sold themselves to the Germans.56
The ‘Direttive’, with evident reference to the attempted agreements recorded above,57 hastened to add: ‘This attitude of ours towards the Fascists must not lead us to make pacification pacts, whether they be made by single comrades or still less in the name of our party’; and not only because free credit should not be given to those who ‘have always been our declared enemies’, but to put a stop to a ‘demagogic propaganda which has the cheek to demonstrate to the people the possibility of an accord with the Communists’. In other words, the crux lay in the dilemma posed by an appeal published in L’Unità on 5 October: ‘Fascists! This is the crucial point: either save yourselves together with the dignity of Italians, or perish branded as traitors!’58
On 21 October the ‘Direttive di lavoro’ returned to the question of ‘what line should be taken with the Fascists and the capitalists’, making many distinctions between them.59 Relations with the RSI, which had shown its colours, could only be combative. The ‘anti-German Fascists’ were not forbidden to fight the Germans if they really wished to; but this did not mean one should forget that the object of the struggle was the destruction of Fascism. The category ‘anti-German Fascists’ appears very rarely indeed, in such bald terms, in the Resistance press and documents. It does however raise, one might say preter-intentionally, a real problem that was deliberately passed over at the time by the immediate needs of the struggle, by subsequent political opportunism, and still more by the general need to feel purified. Namely: was it enough to become anti-German to cease being Fascist? As we have seen, the Communist document’s answer seems to be ‘no’; and certainly, no ‘antitedesco’ continued to describe himself as ‘Fascist’. But if we take ‘Fascist’ in its strong sense, the perspective immediately became less linear; and the suspicion with which the merely military and patriotic ‘autonomous’ formations were viewed appears attributable not just to political sectarianism, but also to the perception of a difference in substance and to an unresolved tangle of the national conscience in wrestling with the problem of its responsibility for Fascism and the war.
The distinction between gerarchi and gregari, the high-ranking Fascist officials and the rank-and-file, offered a first possible way out. The Communist ‘Direttive’ of 21 October unreservedly criticised an article that had appeared in the southern edition of L’Unità on 12 October, according to which, ‘if the representatives of the regime up to 25 July … want to redeem themselves and become our brothers again’, only one way is open to them: the struggle. Too easy! protested the ‘Direttive’: ‘They have done too much harm to Italy and to our people for their present participation in the struggle against the Germans to absolve them completely. They, and above all the most senior of them, will always have to answer to the people for their misdeeds.’
By contrast, the ‘ex-Fascists from the ranks, duped and deluded’ must certainly be helped to take ‘the road to redemption’.
The Fascists who did not seize the last opportunity offered by the catastrophe that they themselves had brought about, and who persisted instead in the wrong choice, appeared then as the symbolic essence of the twenty-year-old offence suffered by the Italian people. Facing them in a final showdown meant getting rid of something that went beyond their capacity to do harm (which was itself considerable) and then surviving as an organised political force (which was practically non-existent).
Probably, it is precisely during the civil war that the word ‘Fascist’ acquired, with particular intensity, a meaning that went beyond the concrete and specific historical experience of Fascism, eventually coming to denote a kind of human being with negative connotations from every public and private point of view. A Garibaldino’s description of a Fascist is typical of this:
Spy and agent provocateur, delinquent and pimp. He has punctually supplied information to the Tizzano carabinieri and was constantly on the lookout for information about our activities. He captured and disarmed Truk (Allegri), handing him over to the police. He has abused women with violence and death threats. A bestial, dangerous, hated man. He martyred his wife.60
A moderate paper is no less damning, with the possible difference that it stresses not so much the absolute wickedness of the man as his inconsistency on a plane that goes beyond mere ferocity: ‘Repubblichino in name and unchanged in substance, more bestial than before, more incompetent and incoherent, nonexistent save in acts of ferocious repression: a mob of violent and unhinged wretches, the object of scorn and the most exacerbated execration.’61
The persistent use of fascista as an epithet that was insulting, global, and expressive of all the ignominy that could reside in a human being may be regarded as the extreme consequence of this expansion, to which the RSI gave a decisive contribution, of the semantic content of the word beyond historically verifiable limits.
Resistance journalism, by and large, offered confirmation of the recapitulatory character acquired by the struggle against the Social Republic – and not just because it devoted thorough attention to the RSI as such, if only to denounce its subjection to the Germans, its repressive ferocity, and its demagogic manoeuvres culminating in socializzazione, but because it took its cue from the present experience to formulate differentiated long-term judgments on Fascism tout court – above all its origins, its ‘nature’, and the catastrophe it had brought about in the war. It is not one of the purposes of this study to analyse the intrinsic value of these judgments and their relationship both with the studies conducted during the Fascist ventennio and with subsequent historiographical studies. It will suffice here to give a few examples of the need that was felt to give historical and social, we might say ‘objective’, weight to Fascism – not least to give better support to the dislike of the republican Fascists, who found themselves being regarded as at once nonexistent and all too real. On 5 October 1943, L’Unità wrote:
The re-creation of a pseudo-Fascist government does not mean the resurrection of Fascism: that is well and truly dead in the souls of the Italians. This government is nothing more than a branch of the Berlin
Nazi government. It is both a grotesque and a tragic fact. It is the last act truly worthy of Fascism, the one that sums up all its acts of baseness and its crimes: betrayal of the patria.62
There could be different lines of argument. It was difficult to disentangle the search for the sub-base that had generated and sustained Fascism from the intrinsic inconsistency of the soul of Fascism itself. Fascism, a liberal pamphlet says, had been the ‘improvisation of an unreasoning and uneducated faction which was supported by the self-interested complicity of classes who should have been in command of the country and accepted with indifference by the masses’.63
This was the ‘aristocratic’ version of Fascist inconsistency. A variant lay in attributing to Nazism a more solid historical and cultural structure. La Riscossa italiana, the ‘Piedmontese organ of the National Liberation Front’, wrote:
It is well known that while Fascism sprung up fortuitously after the end of the war in 1918, with scant and vague Crispist and nationalist derivations, and with no coherent or constant ideas save that of hanging on to power at all costs … Nazism, on the contrary, is linked to a vast, organic movement of ideas which for about a century has had a foothold in Germany under the auspices of Prussian militarism, pragmatism and racism.
It began with Fichte, the paper explains, continued with Treitschke, and then went from bad to worse.64
Inquiring into the fundamental nature of Fascism was, however, a means of warning against the tendency to identify it wholesale with the discredited republican Fascists in a sort of levelling and general absolution that let all the other Fascists off lightly. This line of argument took a wide variety of directions. A GL newspaper warned against forgetting those who ‘pull the strings of these clumsy puppets whose heads are crudely carved in wood, and which have for so long been got up in the most disgusting and gaudily ridiculous variety-show uniforms’. The paper listed the puppet-masters as follows: ‘the inhuman capitalism of the great industrialists and landowners, of the gigantic firms, unbridled militarism and high finance’, backed by a king who had betrayed the Constitution.65 This sort of summa of the convictions of the left, ranging from a section of the Action Party to the Communists, was given a clear Third Internationalist slant in a Garibaldi brigade document:
Many ingenuous people still marvel at the fact that a theory like Nazi-Fascism, which is inconsistent from the ideal point of view and shameful from the civil point of view, has been able to turn the world upside-down. They forget or do not know that Nazi-Fascism is simply an aspect of polyhedric capitalist imperialism; it is a death-throe of great capital seen as a political force of world hegemony.66 Even the Christian Democrat paper Il Popolo wrote: ‘Behind the handy screen of Fascism, for twenty years the capitalist classes have imposed themselves on the state, dominated its politics, paid its men, inspired its ideas’.67
In the moderate Resistance press too, the capitalistic and landowning classes were frequently accused of collusion. But when very general, fulsome, at times rhetorical statements gave way to rather more pertinent arguments, the ideological and political differences reappeared. A case in point is the contrast between the lecture entitled ‘Il Fascismo’ from the Breve corso per commissari (Short course for commissars), given on 15 September 1944 by the 1st Garibaldi Osoppo divisional command, in the brief period from 27 July when the Garibaldini and Osovani achieved uneasy unification, and a discussion topic – ‘political theme: the disunion first of the Italian, then of the German people permitted the advent of Nazi-Fascism’ – developed on 1 November by the Friuli Osoppo division, which had again become autonomous.68 The first text states that reaction, having repelled the revolutionary forces, sought a way ‘of eliminating the class struggle once and for all’, and found it
in the nascent Fascist party which, run by a man with no precise political line, driven by his ambition to the conquest of power by any means, reunited in its ranks the most reactionary elements of the bourgeoisie and all the elements living on the margins of society, who were prepared to sell themselves simply to avoid having to work.
By contrast, the second text, which was mainly Catholic in inspiration, attributes the advent of Fascism not so much to the defeat suffered by the working class as to the very fact that there had been the outbreak of a struggle that had created ‘unbridgeable abysses between the various classes, in other words the disunion of the Italian people’. In these words it is not difficult to glean retaliation against the vaunted unitarianism of the Communists. The document appears to have absorbed many of the views that Fascism had given to the post-First World War crisis: disorder, degenerate parliamentarianism, extremism, ‘disillusion at the concrete results of the war’. The lack of ‘quick and efficient’ legislation, capable of ensuring a ‘more equal distribution of wealth’, had thus left the field free to ‘extempore and charlatan demagogues’. Only when everything was already compromised did the parties, ‘reduced to a scanty group of shadows, understand the mistake they had made, and they went off to ponder things on the Aventino, from which they were duly sent packing scornfully and derisively by the dictator and his thugs. A pathetic, wretched spectacle!’
It is remarkable that, in a scenario so full of conventional elements, there should have been this final outburst of youthful moralism and opposition between generations, which more closely resembled Communist-inspired polemics than the defence of the Aventino still to be found in the ‘New Year’s Message to the Young’ that appeared in Avanti!. Recognisable in that appeal is the soundness of the ‘cruellest criticisms’ on the ‘plane of news and tactics’, but it is solemnly stated that ‘in spirit and in its historical achievement [the Aventino] was a memorable event’.69
Circulating in the Resistance press are a collection of opinions about the nature of Fascism that are not well amalgamated – not even in the Communist writings, which could have used a more rigid ideological frame of reference. Reflections, attempted inquiries, and the challenging of facts converge here – together with expressions of moral repulsion, either lengthily argued or the most rapid generalisations; judgments about the social and economic forces that had fathered and sustained the regime; denunciations of the responsibility of individuals, classes, social groups or the entire national community; and finally a desire to go beyond, while not prematurely burying, a past that was truly so arduous a task to put behind one. In an Action Party pamphlet a visible attempt is made to keep all these threads together. It talks in terms of ‘institutional crystallisation’ and ‘social reaction’, of ‘mentality, in the deep sense given to this word by political speculation’, of a ‘psychological aspect’ by which Fascism is ‘a combination of distrust and fear which corresponds to the letter with the defence of very precise interests’.70
This widening of the significance to be given to the struggle against Fascism meant involving firstly the entire Italian ruling class, which was getting itself together again in the South, and then the whole of the nation’s past, at least from the time of unification. The repression of the concept of civil war was certainly rooted in this subterranean awareness of its implicit potentiality to embrace Fascism in the widest sense of the word, to the point of overstepping it. ‘No further proof is needed of the political failure of the ruling classes’, wrote the Rome edition of L’Unità during the phase of stiffening anti-Badoglio sentiment following 8 September:
It is nonsense to say that the struggle against the Germans is not simultaneously a struggle to the end against Fascism. But the struggle against Fascism implies the mobilisation of large masses of the population, and Badoglio shrinks from this in horror [because] at the basis of the Badoglio government are those same plutocratic and imperialist groups which were formerly the soul of Fascism.71
More radically, Avanti! bore this half-title: ‘The King’s appeals from Palermo [sic] are echoed by Mussolini’s speeches from Vienna: the dialogues of the dead!’72 And L’Azione, organ of the Christian Socialists: ‘The Italian people do not want to fight either for one (the m
onarchic government) nor the other (Mussolini’s government).’73 In an article entitled ‘Il congresso di Bari’, L’Italia Libera was to speak of ‘two phantom governments’ flapping this way and that against the backdrop of the Italian tragedy.74
The attitudes taken towards the purges are an excellent index of the different meanings given to Republican Fascism and to that of the ventennio75 (just as in Restoration France they were compelled to distinguish between the followers of Napoleon during the ‘normal’ period and those of the hundred days).76 The fact that the proposals were generally more drastic in the North than the South, or than in Rome, should be seen as being closely linked with the radicalising experience of the civil war.
For their part, the republican Fascists obviously polemicised against the purges set under way in the Kingdom of the South. But they do not seem to have taken advantage of that stimulus for self-criticism that they had claimed they wished to conduct; on the contrary, they were unable to hide a certain embarrassment. They declared the need for retaliation, played the victim, consoled themselves – Mussolini most of all – with repeated charges of conspiracy; in short, they revealed their fear of alarming their comrades by harping on too much about so burning an issue. The Duce himself was keen to put his seal on this question: ‘None of this naturally can frighten us Fascists. We have committed ourselves to a struggle in which what is at stake is life itself.’77
The two sides engaged in the civil war also vied for the past of the nation, and above all the Risorgimento. In the last chapter attention was drawn to the anti-German use of the Risorgimento and the different evaluations given to it by the Resistance. Here we might add that there was nothing new in the different interpretations of the formative process of national unity being used as instruments of political struggle. But, precisely because of the civil war, 1943–45 saw the final breakdown of the unity of the Risorgimento tradition as an instrument of ‘nationalisation of the masses’, independently of the fact that the RSI’s appropriation of Mazzini and Garibaldi was largely illegitimate. The RSI could not but take to its extreme consequences the vision of a Risorgimento that aimed essentially at creating a strong, united nation-state, with the odd splash of populism perhaps, but in any case not undermined by liberal-democratic fancies and poisons. It was the most crudely Savoyard interpretation that the RSI inevitably made its own, even though it was compelled to expel the Savoy royal family. It was at the same time the interpretation that many of the groups of young Resistance intellectuals (and not just the Actionists) had learned to criticise and scorn in the pages that Luigi Salvatorelli had published on the eve of the regime’s collapse.78
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