‘Long live fascism! Long live Europe!’ were the last words written to his mother by a Fascist shot as a spy by the British in Santa Maria Capua Vetere on 30 April 1944.50 In comparison to this, a medical officer appeared kind-hearted and bewildered when, thinking of the Holy Roman Empire, he wrote to the ‘Very Reverend Don Tullio Calcagno’: ‘Many years ago, at school, I learned that European civilisation consists essentially of three elements: “Romanism, Christianism and Germanism”.’51
The Europeanism inspired by the SS’s murky esotericism was one of the channels through which RSI Fascism assimilated the trappings of Nazism in a particularly marked fashion, bequeathing them to the post-war neo-Fascists.52
Earlier I suggested how the events in Greece offered a glimpse of the possibility of the meaning of ‘civil war’ slipping from a war between anti-Fascists and Fascists to a war that might explode after the defeat of the Fascists. An article in Risorgimento Liberale, the Liberal newspaper, in its ambiguity, straddles these two possible meanings. Fascist propaganda, it says, ‘could have created the premises for a civil war’: the unity of the CLN had averted the danger, because the parties proved to be ‘conscious that a civil war would only lead to final irreparable disaster and to reactions as predictable as they would be iniquitous’.53
For the right, brandishing the ‘Greek prospect’ was a way of curbing the fearsome developments, charged with international significance, that were coming to light in Greece. For the left, it was useful to suggest, albeit discreetly, the bogeyman of similar developments elsewhere in order to obtain the greatest possible shift of the unitary faction over to their side, in return for the guarantee that events would take a different turn in Italy. This second attitude emerged clearly at a meeting held in the Langhe in February 1945 between the British captain O’Regan (Chape), Mauri, commander of the autonomous brigades, and Andreis (Italo Nicoletti), a Garibaldi inspector. O’Regan, in agreement with Mauri, had proposed the unification of the formations under his command. Andreis replied that, if one wished to avoid offending Italian national sentiment, unity could only be achieved in the ambit of the CLN and the Piedmontese regional military command, which was under the authority of the committee, and added that what had occurred in Greece was impossible in Italy, ‘since we have a government which is recognised both by the Allies and by the partisans; and any decision taken by this government would be carried out by us’. There were not, then, the conditions in Italy for a post-Liberation civil war; but, Andreis warned, with the attempts at dispersal that were being made, with the attempts being conducted ‘outside the CLN and the Italian government, conditions for civil war were being concretely created’.54
It was precisely the radical nature of the struggle, both Italian and European, that might drive people to brandish the prospect of a civil war in the immediate future, if the present one failed to have all the effects hoped for. This threat was explicitly formulated in the unlikely context of the ‘Outline for the manifesto of the Committee for the defence of teachers and intellectuals’. Here, the government of the South was warned about jeopardising its future by taking decisions without consulting the entire Italian people: only by working without falling into this error would those governing in the South ‘be able to avoid incurring responsibility for a civil war that would be no less inevitable for having to be deferred for a few years’.55
In the speech he gave at the Brancaccio theatre in Rome on 31 December 1944, Pietro Nenni did not hesitate to state the equation: ‘political centre bloc’ equals ‘civil war’.56 This was certainly a case of verbal intemperance. But that intemperance contributed to fostering alarm for the future. Just back from his mission to the North, Aldobrando Medici Tornaquinci, under-secretary at the Ministry for Occupied Italy, voiced this alarm to the Liberal national committee, which met in Rome from 1 to 4 March 1945: ‘There are some parties (which yet form part of the CLN), that are demonstrating in the most blatant way that their war propaganda does have the liberation of the North as its aim, but also, or possibly above all, the formation of armed groups, or ideally, of an army which is the army of a particular party.’
The situation, Medici Tornaquinci explained, ‘is not marked by the red of the CLN, but there is the risk that it will be dominated by a darker red’.57 It is this red, darker and more dazzling, feared by some, hoped for by others, that now takes us on to examine the third aspect of the struggle that was being waged in Italy at that time: the class war.
1 On all counts see G. Pisanò, Storia della guerra civile, Milan: FPE, 1965–66, and G. Almirante, Autobiografia di un ‘fucilatore’, Milan: Edizioni del Borghese, 1973. For a summary of fascist positions on this score, see M. Isnenghi, ‘La guerra civile nella pubblicistica di destra’, in Rivista di storia contemporanea XVIII: 1 (1989), pp. 104–15 (including, on p. 105, a reconstruction of the trajectory followed by Pisanò in his writings on the subject). See also P. Corsini and P. P. Poggio, ‘La guerra civile nei notiziari della GNR e nella propaganda della RSI’, in Legnani and Vendramini, eds, Guerra, guerra di liberazione, guerra civile, pp. 245–98 (on pp. 231–44 they republish the aforementioned report by Isnenghi).
2 See, among others, the intervention by Gian Carlo Pajetta at the Brescia conference on the Italian Social Republic, in Poggio, La Repubblica sociale italiana, pp. 431–4; E. Sarzi Amadé, ‘Delazione e rappresaglia come strumenti della “guerra incivile” ’, in Legnani and Vendramini, Guerra, guerra di liberazione, guerra civile, pp. 323–53; M. Palla, ‘Guerra civile o collaborazionismo?’, in ibid., pp. 83–98 (another version appeared with the title ‘Italia 1943–1945: guerra civile o collaborazionismo?’, in Passato e Presente 19 [January–April 1989], pp. 165–71). Sarzi Amadé further expressed his positions in a piece entitled ‘Guerra civile o Resistenza?’ in L’Unità of 4 November 1988 (the response by the author of this present work appeared in the 9 November edition). These authors all polemicised against the positions expressed by Pavone in ‘La guerra civile’ in Poggio, La Repubblica sociale italiana, pp. 395–415, and in his ‘Le tre guerre: patriottica, civile e di classe’, in Legnani and Vendramini, Guerra, guerra di liberazione, guerra civile, pp. 25–36 (a paper delivered at the 1988 Belluno conference, now published in Rivista di storia contemporanea XVIII, 1989, pp. 209–18. For a first balance-sheet of this still ongoing discussion, see C. Bermani, ‘Guerra di liberazione e guerra civile’, in L’Impegno X: 1 (April 1990), pp. 10–16 (on pp. 7–9, the interventions of various readers are reproduced).
3 These words appear in the January 1946 essay Storia e poesia (quoted in Canfora, La sentenza, p. 13).
4 See Corrado Stajano’s interview of Carlo Dionisotti, in Corriere della Sera, 3 January 1989.
5 See ‘Democrazia al lavoro. Una guida per lo sviluppo dei CLN sulla via della ricostruzione’, stenograph-report of the interventions at the First Congress of the Milan provincial CLN, 6 August 1945.
6 C. Galante Garrone, ‘Guerra di liberazione (dalle galere)’, in Il Ponte III (1947), p. 1054.
7 L. Valiani, Tutte le strade conducono a Roma, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1947, p. 172.
8 Meneghello, I piccoli maestri (a 1964 book). The term ‘Civil War’ also appears frequently in Bau-sète, Milan: Rizzoli, 1988.
9 The canvas is conserved at Rome’s Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, listing number 4710
10 F. Scotti, ‘La nascita delle formazioni’, in La Resistenza in Lombardia, Milan: Labor, 1965, p. 64.
11 Spriano, Storia del Partito comunista italiano, V, p. 340.
12 Words from Emilio Sereni’s intervention, reproduced in Quazza, Valiani and Volterra, Il governo dei CLN, p. 195.
13 For a definition of the modern state as overspill from the wars of religion, see Fioravanti, Stato (Diritto intermedio), part 3.
14 In the preamble to the 1926 PNF statutes, entitled ‘Faith’, one could read that ‘new Italians’ were those born in the struggle ‘between the Nation and the anti-nation’ (See Missori, Gerarchie e statuti del PNF, p. 355).
16 ‘Even Salò is part of our history.’ This is the title of N. Tranfaglia’s review of Bocca’s La Repubblica di Mussolini in the 20 February 1977 edition of La Repubblica.
17 Gorrieri, La Repubblica di Montefiorino, p. 762.
18 See the special edition – No. 5 (January–March 1985) – of Vingtième Siècle, and within this, on pp. 55–79, H. Rousso’s essay, ‘Vichy, le grand fosse’.
19 October 1985 conversation with Milica Kacin Wohinz of the Institute for the History of the Workers’ Movement of Slovenia.
20 G. Pesce, Soldati senza uniforme (Diario di un gappista), Rome: Cultura Sociale, 1950, p. 15.
21 Mazzantini, A cercar la bella morte, pp. 203–04 (see also pp. 67, 207).
22 Schnur, Rivoluzione e guerra civile, p. 138. See also Hannah Arendt’s observations in Sulla rivoluzione, Milan: Edizioni di Comunità, 1983, pp. 4–5 (original edition On Revolution, New York: Viking, 1963).
23 See C. Berneri, L’ebreo antisemita, Preface by A. Cavaglion, Rome: Carucci, 1984, p. 84 (original version Le Juif antisémite, Paris: Editions Vita, 1935).
24 On renegades, see L. Scaraffia, ‘Il rinnegato’, in Prometeo, June 1986, pp. 38–47.
25 On this, see P. P. Portinaro’s Introduction to Schnur, Rivoluzione e guerra civile, p. 8 and passim, as well as Schnur’s own text, p. 129 and passim.
26 On this connection, with particular regard to 1789 and 1917, see J. W. Borejsza, ‘La guerre civile dans l’Europe contemporaine’, in Vingtième Siècle 5 (January–March 1985), pp. 143–4.
27 For Action Party members’ propensity to speak of civil war, see V. D’Alberto, ‘Tra Resistenza e guerra civile. Nota su GL’, in Protagonisti IX: 32 (July–September 1988), pp. 5–9, and the testimonies quoted therein.
28 Sergio Cotta has maintained that the formulation ‘war of national liberation’ is more comprehensive than, and thus preferable to, ‘civil war’, ‘war of independence’, ‘ideological war’, and so on. See his Lineamenti di storia della Resistenza italiana, as well as this author’s reply (Rassegna del Lazio XII [1965], pp. 111–15), and that of E. Passerin d’Entrèves, ‘Un recente saggio sui problemi di storia della Resistenza’, in Il Movimento di liberazione in Italia 78 (April–June 1965), pp. 92–100. Vittore Branca has in turn written: ‘Not, then, so much a “civil war” as a war of “national liberation” from the foreigner and his servants.’ In short, a second Risorgimento, moreover comparable to the first Risorgimento in that then also there had been ‘reactionary Italians’, allied to the Austrians. See V. Branca, ‘La città dell’Arno nella Resistenza e nella liberazione’, in Nuova Antologia, CXIX: 2152 (October–December 1984), p. 98. See also, by the same author, ‘Liberazione nazionale o guerra civile? (lettera a Carlo Francovich)’, in Il Mulino 135 (January 1964), pp. 40–2.
29 Hughes, United States and Italy, p. 128. Non-Italian students have obviously felt less unease about facing up to the reality of a civil war. See M. Clark, Modern Italy, 1971–1982, London–New York: Longman, 1984, pp. 299, 316, where he speaks of ‘civil war and popular vendetta’ (I thank Angelo Gaudio for bringing this to my attention).
1 See Bocca, La Repubblica di Mussolini, p. 97.
2 See Deakin, Brutal Friendship, Chapter: ‘The “Last Wave” of the Fascist Party’, and L. Balestrieri, Stampa e opinione pubblica a Genova tra il 1939 e il 1943, Genoa: Istituto storico della Resistenza in Liguria, 1965, pp. 66–7.
3 See Senise, Quand’ ero capo della polizia, p. 193 (this episode is dated 19 July 1943).
4 See Pisanò, Storia della guerra civile, pp. 4–36. For evidence of this at a local level – ‘on 26 July the PNF showed not a single sign of life’ – see M. Calandri, ‘Qualche considerazione sulla rsi nel Cuneese’, in Poggio, ed., La Repubblica sociale italiana, p. 191.
5 See Bocca, La Repubblica di Mussolini, pp. 14, 25.
6 See Zangrandi, 1943, p. 243.
7 The author of this article, published in the Gazzetta dell’Emilia of 22 October 1943, was Enrico Cacciari, who in other pieces displayed his thirst for revenge (quoted in Gorrieri, La Repubblica di Montefiorino, esp. p. 48).
8 An expression used by Bocca, La Repubblica di Mussolini, pp. 124–7.
9 A. Soffici, Risaliremo l’abisso, in the Corriere della Sera of 1 November 1943.
10 Diary of Ottaviano Rocchi, shot by partisans in Parma province in November 1944 (LRSI, p. 24).
11 Letter of 17 November 1944 by Azelio Facini, who met his death on the Umbrian front two days later (LRSI, p. 177).
12 See Calamandrei, La vita indivisibile, p. 142 (7 March 1944).
13 Letter to the mother of Umberto Scaramelli, written on 28 October 1944 (LRSI, p. 168).
14 ‘Esame della corrispondenza censurata al 30 giugno 1944’ (ACS, SPD, CR, RSI, envelope 9, folder 3).
15 ‘Anonimo romagnolo’, 1943–45, p. 79. For the invective hurled against traitors in the Milan Lyric Theatre speech of 16 December 1944, see Deakin, Brutal Friendship, p. 742.
16 Quoted from the papers of the Duce’s private secretariat in Mazzatosta, in Educazione e scuola nella Repubblica Sociale Italiana, p. 91.
17 J. Evola, Il fascismo. Saggio di un’ analisi critica dal punto di vista della Destra, Rome: Volpe, 1964, p. 98 (quoted in P. Rauti and R. Sermonti, Storia del fascismo, vol. I, Le interpretazioni e le origini, Rome: Centro editoriale nazionale, 1976, p. 46).
18 K. Hildebrand, The Third Reich, New York: Routledge, 1984, p. 71 (original edition Das Dritte Reich, Munich: Oldenbourg, 1979).
19 The order – Nero-Befehl – is from 19 March 1945. See Hillgruber, Storia della seconda guerra mondiale, p. 176. See also, by the same author, La strategia militare di Hitler, p. 611.
20 For a detailed reconstruction of the Gentile affair see Canfora, La sentenza, pp. 54–64; on Ricci, see Setta, Renato Ricci, p. 247
21 Testimony of Matteo Mareddu, communicated to me by Elvira Gencarelli.
22 Giovana, Storia di una formazione partigiana, p. 70.
23 Calamandrei, La vita indivisibile, p. 213 (19 August 1945).
24 See Francovich, La Resistenza a Firenze, p. 136.
25 See Bocca, La Repubblica di Mussolini, p. 81.
26 Ibid., pp. 26–7, 78–9; Gorrieri, La Repubblica di Montefiorino, pp. 48–9; on the Teramo fascio, where some 150 of the 482 PFR members had not been signed up to the PNF, see L. Ponziani, ‘Teramo 1943–1944. Condizioni di vita e mentalità’, in Gallerano, ed., L’altro dopoguerra, p. 160.
27 Fenoglio, Il partigiano Johnny, p. 124.
28 ‘The younger ones’ – Cappuzzo adds – ‘(I was twenty-one) reacted better’. See La Repubblica of 7 September 1983. For an analogous situation in the USSR’s prison camps, see F. Gambetti, ‘ “L’Alba”, giornale dei prigionieri italiani in URSS’, in Istituto storico della Resistenza in Cuneo e provincia, Gli italiani sul fronte russo, p. 344. On fascist memories of the prison camps, see Isnenghi, La guerra civile nella pubblicistica di destra.
29 See also the case of two blackshirt battalions near Rome, recorded in Zangrandi, 1943, p. 145. ‘Abandoned and ignored by the Madre Patria’ – namely, by the Social Republic – these soldiers remained at the Germans’ side in the Balkans (‘Esame della corrispondenza censurata al 30 giugno 1944’, in ACS, SPD, CR, RSI, envelope 9, folder 3).
30 See M. Legnani, ‘Potere, società ed economia nel territorio della rsi’, in Poggio, ed., La Repubblica sociale italiana, p. 12.
31 Ibid., p. 11.
32 See, among other authors dealing with this topic, Schreiber, La linea gotica nella strategia tedesca, pp. 25–6. See also Klinkhammer, ‘Le strategie tedesche di occupazione’.
33 An instruction to Rahn, in ACS, SPD, CR, RSI and quoted in Bocca, La Repubblica di Mussolini, p. 151. On Hitler’s clear disappointment with Mussolini’s new Italy, see J. Petersen, L’organizzazione della propaganda tedesca in Italia, a talk given at the aforementioned ‘L’Italia in guerra 194
0–43’ conference, page 81, note 18.
34 See P. Puntoni, Parla Vittorio Emanuele III, Milan: Palazzi, 1958, pp. 352–3.
35 See on this Bocca, La Repubblica di Mussolini, pp. 306–8, on the ‘Bonfantini affair’, and also Canfora, La sentenza, esp. pp. 183–4, 193, 196, where these initiatives are credited with exaggerated significance.
36 La resistenza al fascismo a Montelupo nel 1943–1944, the October 1966 written testimony of Giuseppe Romano (ISRT, Raccolta di biografie).
37 See Flamigni e Marzocchi, Resistenza in Romagna, pp. 115–16.
38 It was ‘propaganda at all cost’ and the ‘printed press bands’ that changed the climate. See Battaglia, Un uomo, pp. 36, 30–1.
39 See the ‘Rapporto di Giovanni’ of 22 September 1943 (IG, Archivio PCI) and that by Alfredo (Arturo Colombi) on ‘the political–organisational situation’ from 10 October of that year (Secchia, Il PCI e la guerra di liberazione, pp. 123–6).
40 See Pansa, L’esercito di Salò, pp. 72–3, which cites a GNR report of 2 August 1944. Blinded during the war, Borsani had been awarded the Medaglia d’Oro, and was president of the Associazione Nazionale Mutilati e Invalidi. He is now remembered on account of the ‘conspiracy of the three Bs’ (see Bocca, La repubblica di Mussolini, p. 148.).
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