A Civil War

by Claudio Pavone

  Many laici also hoped that the Catholics, and the clergy in particular, would take sides – without, however, altogether giving up hoping for a clergy that was somehow, in humanitarian terms and without political pretensions, above the struggle. The humanitarianism of the clergy could then be seen with satisfaction both insofar as it constituted the humus in which the Resistance sunk its roots, and in its being a counterweight to a politicisation that was welcome, but not unreservedly so. At the same time it could be criticised as being a brake on the struggle. A Communist report says: ‘A good many clergy, with the pretext of humanitarianism, are seeking to reach a compromise with the enemy, saving him from just punishment, and the masses, not being politicised, will be easily influenced.’119

  In the laici there was, in short, a contradiction that mirrored the contradiction we have encountered among the Catholics: a desire for the Church to take the right side, but also a fear, which generally remained hidden, that they would overstep the mark.

  6. THE EUROPEAN CIVIL WAR

  Many of the aspects of the civil war seem, as it were, to have been sublimated in the conviction that a great European civil war was taking place. This concept is almost as controversial as that of a civil war applied only to Italy. The controversy becomes richer in significance when the entire ‘thirty years war’ that took place in Europe between 1914 and 1945 is regarded as being a ‘civil’ war.1 This interpretation of the war as civil, ideological and religious, while not denying the geopolitical reasons for the conflict, does not consider that they tell the whole story.2 It is clear in fact that, if one sets off from the view that ‘the real dominant tendency’ of the Second World War, ‘for all the ideological embellishments’, was that of ‘a contest between the great powers for a distribution or the preservation of their international positions, that is to say, a problem of strategic and economic spheres of interest’, one cannot but conclude that the groups who had taken it ‘for a sort of “international civil war” ’ were mistaken.3 On the other hand, if the European civil war is seen, as it has been, as a question regarding only Bolshevism and National Socialism, one ends up with a reductive and distorted vision, leading to the aberrant conclusion that all the Nazi horrors, including the extermination of the Jews, were an ‘excessive response’ to the violence practised by the Bolshevik revolution and the Soviet regime.4 As we have already seen, there is undeniably a link between revolution, civil war and war between nations, but in a far more complex sense than the link theorised in these terms by Ernst Nolte. As Hannah Arendt wrote, ‘a world war appears as the consequence of a revolution, a sort of civil war unleashed over the whole of the Earth’s surface: it is in fact as such that much public opinion – and not without reason – regarded the Second World War’.5

  Indeed, the discourse needs to be extended in three directions. Above all, the very technique of the war inaugurated by the Germans ‘against the defensive euphoria of the French’ – parachute drops behind the enemy lines, action by ‘fifth columns’, often formed by local Nazis in civilian dress, innumerable ways of terrorising the civilian populations – was something that ‘smacks more of a civil war or a coup d’état than the traditional employment of the various weapons in combat’.6 This technique of war and resistance against the invader and his accomplices had, moreover, the effect of stripping spying activity against the occupying regime of the despicable features traditionally associated with it: no longer hired spies, but informers who were freely contributing to the cause of recovery.7

  Secondly, the very fact that the peoples of Europe were fighting each other for the second time in twenty years was widely felt as a fratricide which crudely highlighted the fracture that had taken place between the normal development of civilisation and the lack of an adequate jus publicum Europaeum for the reality of the new century, and capable of coping with nationalistic degeneration in its different guises.8 The federalist projects that flowered during the Resistance stemmed not least from this state of affairs.

  Finally, the civil and ideological war crossed the borders of the various countries and was a war of coalition, like that fought by the great Allies. There was in fact an extremely close interweaving between the war between the nations that became civil war and the civil war that became a war between nations; and the features of the one reverberated against the other. Alongside the figure of the German enemy there was the common figure of the Fascist– collaborationist enemy who drew together the different European Resistance movements, in other respects so various and heterogeneous. Collaborationism was born from within the invaded countries themselves and gave a glimpse of a possible Europe that was truly and wholly Nazi-Fascist, body and soul. ‘The unforgivable crime of Vichy is not having simply deferred to the enemy force but to quickly give it its full collaboration.’9

  The desire to collaborate did more than boost the German request for collaboration. In Hitler at least, the will for dominion overwhelmed the convenience of making widespread use of collaboration that was not merely manual labour to use and discard. It was above all the more esoteric component of Nazism, the SS, that became the bearer of a National Socialist European ideology, on the basis of which it seemed possible to give the war, particularly from 1942 onwards, the character of a crusade open in one way or another to all healthy and Aryan Europeans, and not the exclusive preserve of the German people and their Führer.10

  The Italian resistenti, who were all too familiar with the part the Fascists had played in their country in dragging the European peoples into that terrible showdown, gained strength and faith from feeling that they were involved in an event whose dimensions were so vast and whose significance so profound as to sweep away, or at least attenuate, the distrust which, as Italians, they knew they had to overcome. A French partisan wrote of an Italian partisan to whom he had spoken about 10 June 1940: ‘There was too much sadness in his voice for me to doubt his sincerity, and then four years under the Vichy regime helped me understand what I could not admit in May 1940.’11

  In 1942 Nazioni Unite, the organ of the Mazzini Society, entitled one of its articles ‘Cronache della guerra civile europea’ (‘Chronicles of the European Civil War’).12 A Tuscan Action Party newspaper stated that civil war had been going on in Europe for years.13 In its opening paragraph, a GL pamphlet, written by Massimo Mila, forcefully stressed that the Second World War was a European war of religion and explained: ‘Fractions of Italians, Chinese, Frenchmen and Russians are today fighting on one side or the other … Today we partisans feel the anti-Hitlerian German to be our brother, and the Italian Fascist our deadly enemy.’

  Similar concepts were expressed by Adolfo Omodeo and Carlo Dionisotti, the latter of whom defined the whole period that began with the First World War as a ‘European revolution’.14 It is no accident that these quotations bear the ‘actionist’ stamp: the ‘democratic revolution’, in which the Action Party synthesised its programme, was in effect conceivable only in the context of a European revolution, even if this involved civil war. L’Italia Libera published two articles side by side: ‘La rivoluzione italiana’ and ‘La rivoluzione europea: Jugoslavia’.15 And as early as September 1943 it had written: ‘European solidarity has been re-established. The Italians have by now taken their place among the peoples who are fighting for liberty’, alongside the French, the Greeks and the Yugoslavs, whom the soldiers had silently learned to admire.16

  The aspiration to create a European federation was the natural outlet for this attitude.17 At the Action Party Conference of 5–6 September 1943, Leone Ginzburg had explicitly argued in favour of ‘participation in the anti-Nazi war as essential in allowing the Action Party to pursue its Risorgimento and Europeanist mission’.18 This was the only path considered practicable, even if it meant paying a very high price, if one was to avoid the abyss of that finis Europa that had instead appeared inexorable to many of the major intellectuals who had come of age before 1914, from Benedetto Croce to Thomas Mann. And it was also the generous final card that could b
e played by the old claim, dear to Carlo Rosselli, of the international autonomy of anti-Fascism or, as one reads at times in Avanti!, of a socialism that did not want to get itself crushed between the two blocs that were taking shape among the victors.19

  The internationalist tradition of the workers’ movement also tended to view the European civil war approvingly, and spurred the Italian partisans ‘to feel tied to the partisans of the whole world’: that is how a Garibaldi commander replied to the officer of a British mission who wished to convince him that the Greek partisans were ‘just rebels’.20 The Communist cadres, however (more so than in the Garibaldi and workers’ rank-and-file), trod more cautiously, governed as they were by Stalin’s policy, which was unitary on the international as it was on the internal plane. To harp on too much about a European civil war might in fact clash with the cause of the great coalition, by evoking that ‘transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war’ which had been definitively proscribed after 21 June 1941. In this sense the case of Greece exemplifies the confusion of political meanings, projected into the future as well, that the ‘civil war’ acquired both internationally and internally, and at the level of both ideological involvement and, emotionally, of sympathies and fears. Two very differently inspired documents bear this out. The first is the hotly contested approval of the contradictory motion hailing the Greek patriots that was passed by the CLNAI on 6 January 1945, and contested by the liberals at the following session on 12 January.21 The second is the declaration made at a party meeting by a Communist worker from Milan: ‘The Greek question is looked on favourably by some comrades, because by rising up [against the British-supported government] the Greek people would seem to have shown their maturity. The liberation of Greece is a result of the Russian advance.’22

  The exemplary value assumed in the eyes of the Italian partisans by those of other countries was forcefully affirmed especially by Actionists, Communists and Socialists. A Garibaldi document lists French, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Czechoslovaks, Hungarians, Romanians, Bulgarians, Yugoslavians and Greeks;23 but generally it was the French, the Yugoslavians and also the Russians who were held up as examples. The Yugoslavians exerted a particular fascination on the Communist and working-class rank-and-file, not least because they seemed in their struggle to unify three wars – patriotic, civil and class. A Roman ‘extremist’ newspaper underlined that the Yugoslavian partisan war was a ‘people’s war not just against enemies from without, but also and above all against the enemy from within’.24 But the myth too of Paris, mother of all revolutions, was bandied about at the moment of the liberation of the French capital, alongside that other myth of revolutionary fraternity between the two peoples.25

  At work in the Resistance was the memory of the Spanish Civil War, seen as the great rehearsal for the European conflict precisely in the ‘civil’ and ideological sphere. ‘It started in Spain’ was how L’Italia Libera entitled one of its evocative articles,26 to show, as it were, that Carlo Rosselli’s famous prophecy from Radio Barcelona – ‘Today in Spain, tomorrow in Italy’ – had been fulfilled; and the GL paper recalled that the tradition of the movement’s struggle was born precisely in Spain.27 L’Unità in its turn celebrated the beginning of the heroic and luckless struggle of the Spanish people, giving the version of it canonised in the Third International.28 On the other hand, this interpretive conformism – yoked to the probable concern that it was inopportune, particularly as far as relations with the Catholics were concerned, to labour the point too much – resulted in Spain’s being given less space in the Italian Communist press and the PCI’s other Resistance documents than one might have expected. The newspaper Democrazia Internazionale drew attention to this, lamenting the fact that the glorious name ‘Fronte Popolare’ was being kept hidden for tactical reasons.29 But the prestige enjoyed by the veterans from Spain, some of whom arrived via the French Resistance, was great – from Luigi Longo to those partisans – but here we are among those incorporated in the 9th Yugoslav Corps – who sang:

  Noi siamo giovani garibaldini

  della Spagna i reduci noi siam

  combattiamo contro i fascisti assassin

  contro chi angoscia l’intera umanità.30

  [We are young Garibaldini

  we are the veterans of Spain

  we fight the fascist assassins

  who torment all of humanity.]

  The memory of the ‘enormous political contribution by the party in Spain among the first “volunteers” to make them into soldiers of a cause’ had been immediately invoked by a Piedmontese Communist leader in support of his conviction that ‘the partisan formations in Italy today have a function exceeding that of sniper in the strict sense of the word’.31 But the Spanish model could seem so noble that emulating it seemed an object beyond one’s reach. Speaking of Umberto, a veteran from Spain, the Garibaldini ‘ask[ed] themselves’ whether ‘in any of our formations there is an Italian with the same qualities’. The comment of a party representative, torn between nostalgia for Communist solidarity and duty towards CLN unity, is crude and ungenerous: ‘Don’t come to me with the example of the Spanish International Brigade, because here things are very different. There they were men united by a faith, here they are men united only by contingent circumstances but who then have particular interests that are very different from each other.’32

  Parallel with this were vivid hopes and longings that the Axis defeat would bring with it the fall of Franco’s regime. L’Italia Libera warned that the European revolution that was taking place should not bypass Spain.33 Avanti! assured its readers that ‘the progressivist and revolutionary forces of the whole world would make sure that they did not allow’ the saving of Franco, whose destiny remained ‘linked with that of Mussolini and Hitler’.34

  The Fascists too cultivated the memory of the exploits of their legionaries in Spain.35 If they did not make too much of this point, however much it lent itself to use in their approach with Catholics and the contemplation of the new European order, this is probably because things were made awkward for them by the ingratitude shown by the Generalissimo, over which it was prudent to draw a veil of silence.

  In any case, if the Fascists had read the Spanish press of those months they would have noted how the Franco regime was progressively and clearly distancing itself from the losing powers, albeit amid reticence and ambiguities cloaked in exaltation of the Church, of Pius XII and of the ‘crusade against communism’ (the headline under which news from the Russian front was generally collected). On 30 July 1943 the Barcelona edition of La Vanguardia Española called the ‘constututional situation’ created by Mussolini’s defenestration ‘simple and legalistic’; and on 9 September, in an article entitled ‘A momentous step’, wrote that in any case Italy had the ‘inmense good luck’ to house ‘in its heart’ Vatican City. Mussolini’s liberation, which on 15 September was defined as an ‘heroic undertaking’, on 18 September was considered a fatal signal of civil war. The main thing for which Mussolini was reproached in the respectful obituary dedicated to him on 1 May 1945 would be – and who can doubt the journalist’s sincerity? – that of having committed the ‘colossal error’ of entering the war.

  The theme of the defence of Europe was widely present in Fascist propaganda – or, rather, Europe’s defence against external enemies and from internal enemies, who were in many respects still more insidious. In the old polemic which in June 1927 Telesio Interlandi (one of whose articles at that time had borne the title ‘Anti-europei perché fascisti’) had set against Francesco Coppola’s argument in favour of the union of the European West against ‘Asiatic subversivism’,36 the RSI adopted the latter position, now in the form of submission of the peoples of the European continent to the New Order imposed by Germany on the Western powers. Even the fond hopes of Fascist internationalism37 had had to give way to the patent fact of German predominance; and all the more so in the light of the maladroit attempts that the part of Italian diplomacy headed by Under-Secret
ary Giuseppe Bastianini had made to create around Italy and in the name of Europe a constellation of smaller states with a view to disengaging from Germany.38 It was, moreover, the very process of subjection that led to an accentuation of this kind of SS-type Europeanism and the hatred it generated among Europeans: ‘Hitler saved Europe, and for this reason Rexists had the effrontery to shout: Heil Hitler’, Léon Degrelle had said in a speech that he gave in Liège on 5 January 1941.39 A French poster calling for enlistment in the SS proclaimed: ‘With your European comrades you will conquer under the banner of the SS!’40

  This attitude, mentioned earlier, had been reinforced after the attack on the USSR, when Hitler himself, in a proclamation to the German people on 22 June 1941, had described himself as the ‘conscious representative of European culture and civilisation’.41 Now, in Italy, immediately after 8 September, a poster of the Livorno Kommandantur also urged that the words ‘Long live the new Europe under the leadership of Adolf Hitler!’ be shouted.42 An SS proclamation in the province of Forlì denounced as outlaws those who wanted ‘the annihilation of every cultural value of the West, of religion, and consequently of the spiritual patrimony of every upright person’.43 Of all people, it was Mussolini who seemed the most uncertain on this score. When he was a prisoner of the king and Badoglio’s and was taken to Ponza, it appears that he said to Admiral Franco Maugeri that it was nonsense to consider Russia a peril for European civilisation.44 As head of the RSI he had the weekly Avanguardia Europea, edited by Felice Bellotti, closed down.45 Some Nazi-Fascist propaganda posters and other news-sheets appear, therefore, more eloquent than the Duce’s customary wavering or the vague European-toned propositions of the Verona manifesto.46 A leaflet assured its readers that the ‘victory of European arms’ was ‘sure and imminent’.47 A poster was entitled ‘The European Crusade’, and bore in its background the flags of the SS and of several European nations. Other posters proclaimed: ‘The New Europe: Enough with the tyranny of money’; ‘Germany defends Europe’; ‘Read and think it over: Europe rushes forward’; ‘Italian SS Legione. Awaits the youth for the benefit of Italy and Europe’; ‘Europe will resist the new barbarians’.48 An airman wrote to his brother Benito: ‘I’m glad I’ve enlisted in the SS and I can’t wait to be able to offer my tangible contribution to the cause of the New Europe, the only hope that Europe can have for life and well-being tomorrow.’49