The legality of the executions that occurred at Dongo stems from the complex institutional system that sustained the last phase of the Resistance, and then the insurrection. Without going too far back, on 12 April 1945 the CLNAI, ordering his capture, had denounced Mussolini and the members of the Fascist directorate as ‘traitors to the country and war criminals’;34 and we have seen what consequences a declaration of this sort automatically involved. After the execution, the CLNAI fully endorsed it, deprecating only ‘the explosion of popular hate which has on this single occasion gone so far as to produce excesses’ – which was imputable, however, ‘to the climate desired and created by Mussolini’.35
Italy, unlike France and England, had no regicides in its history as watersheds between opposing epochs. It had never fractured the monistic vision of power with the ‘final decapitation of the king as symbol’.36 Italy, the late comer even in this field had, in the very middle of the twentieth century, the execution of the Duce. Occurring in broad daylight, but without mob participation, along the road between Dongo and Giulino di Mezzegra, that execution of the charismatic leader fleeing ‘disguised as a German’37 was, immediately afterwards, made public in Piazzale Loreto. And in the most macabre manner, reviving the tradition of the dead body of the tyrant to be displayed to the people, and paying back Fascism, which had practised it in the self-same place, with the spectacle of the exhibition of the corpses. The symbolic value of this repayment, however, went very deep: the Duce’s body, invulnerable to so many assassination attempts, was now hanging upended and lifeless.38 And upended too was the Fascist symbology of the lictor’s axe as an instrument of executions: the victim now was the Duce of Fascism himself, defeated and guilty. A sort of lex talionis was being put into practice, on the assumption that, in this case too, the ‘forms of the execution referred to the nature of the crime’.39 The killing of Clara Petacci, which had not been bargained for, was due to the fidelity, worthy of respect, that she showed to the person of Mussolini. But the exhibition of her corpse came to appear as a moralistic and public punishment for the tyrant’s lasciviousness and a debunking of the myth, which had been cultivated so strenuously, of his virility.40
Piazzale Loreto lies, therefore, midway between ‘posthumous lynching’ and the ‘splendour of the executions’ which, with the ‘spectacle of public punishment’, engenders the fear that that spectacle might ‘accustom the spectators to a ferocity from which one wished to divert them’.41 Hence the emphasis on the exceptional character of the event to which the nature of a unique, unrepeatable last act of the tragedy, of ‘an epilogue that had been amply prepared for in the years of war’, was attributed by one and all.42 Luigi Meneghello, who ‘in his heart of hearts exulted’ but feared that the ‘upended puppet’ might become ‘our scapegoat’, has subsequently written that ‘naturally it was necessary to rid ourselves of Fascism in a way that was perceptible to the senses’.43
The huge crowd that immediately flocked to the scene reacted in ways in which the tragic and historic meaning of the situation seemed to get lost. ‘An infantile people would have been the only way to describe those who clustered into Piazzale Loreto throughout the day to contemplate the illustrious corpses, recognisable by now only from the signs pinned to their clothes’ – wrote one eyewitness to whom the spectacle did not seem up to the standard of that revolutionary morality, that ‘furor del popolo’ which alone might justify it.44 The following comment is inspired by a still blunter intransigence:
Sic transit gloria mundi: thus ends the glory constructed with violence and falsehood. They have paid, and this is right. But the scene is disgusting all the same: because the immense crowd now shoving their way forward towards those corpses is the same one that once trembled and lauded them when they were living men, at the height of their power and infamy. The crowd has remained servile as they were then. The Italian people has not liberated itself of its masters: it has crushed and killed them because they have been defeated by the Anglo-Americans. Now it presents the corpses to the victors, as Ptolemy offered the head of Pompey to Caesar.45
Another witness, a partisan mounting guard over some Fascist prisoners, told one of them what he had seen in such terms that ‘what emerged was the picture of a festival, a sort of popular fête. All those folk going there, whole families leading their children by the hand.’46 An upper-middle-class woman, on her husband’s arm, said: ‘Well I never, what nice little legs Petacci had!’47
If the ‘holiday atmosphere’ could be fuelled in some measure by the plain recognition of the irreversible end of a nightmare, so that the macabre and horrible character of the scene seemed to be placed in parenthesis, this very same character was underlined instead by the fatuous way people conducted themselves and the comments they made. It was not, however, a spectacle that could last long, and the Piazzale, to prove that the horror was well and truly over, had to return quickly to being used for its original purpose – normal living. L’Italia Libera put it discreetly:
In the square sanctified, a year ago, by the blood of fifteen innocents – and we know that the blood of innocents cries out for vengeance in the sight of God – in the square there was a spectacle that satisfied every fantasy in search of the macabre … But let’s empty our minds of that memory, just as the square was emptied, shortly after two o’clock, and became once again the city’s busiest square, the square of trams going into the country, full of workers, trucks, bicycles.48
L’Unità’s comment was more predictable: it exalted the ‘historic importance of the fact that the greatest war criminals have been executed in Jacobin fashion, with an act of popular justice which is the inevitable corollary of the insurrection’. The exhibition of the corpses was written off by the Communist paper with a brief and contemptuous news item: ‘The “carrion” of the duce of evildoers, surrounded by a good number of his acolytes, is lying in Piazzale Loreto, exposed to public derision’.49
The crowning comment came from Avanti!:
Yesterday on a luminous sunny day a horrible spectacle took place. Necessary like so many horrible punishments … What ‘legality’ could have redressed the wrong committed, arbitrariness made law, violence erected into a normal part of life? No law, no legality that was not a ‘legality’ springing spontaneously from the very people who had suffered the affront. And the people have been compelled to execute their tyrant in order to liberate themselves from the nightmare of an irreparable offence … For the Italians there was no other way out … It was the only catharsis possible … Perhaps those who were all too willing to see Fascism only as a droll comedy will understand today what a tragedy it has really been for us, who have endured it, who have paid for it to the bitter end.50
1 Official figures of the Italian Prime Minister’s Office (Presidenza del Consiglio dei ministri) reported in Battaglia, Storia della Resistenza, p. 561, notes. Battaglia adds that, according to ANPI figures, some 32,000 partisans died abroad, and that the number of Fascists and Germans who fell in the anti-partisan struggle is impossible to define.
2 Figures from the Istituto Centrale di Statistica, Morti e dispersi per cause belliche negli anni 1940–45, Rome 1957, Table 1.1 and M. L. Salvadori, Storia dell’età contemporanea dalla restaurazione all’eurocomunismo, Turin: Loescher, 1976, pp. 924–5. I thank Giorgio Rochat for having made me aware of an error in the original edition of this book.
3 As Hannah Arendt put it in her On Revolution, New York: Viking Press, 1963.
4 Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, New York: Knopf, 1981; Michelle Vovelle, La mort et l’Occident de 1300 à nos jours, Paris: Gallimard, 1983.
5 Battaglia, Un uomo, p. 157.
6 E. P. Thompson, ‘Folklore, Anthropology and Social History’, Indian Historical Review III (1978), p. 2.
1 See chapter 2.1.
2 ‘The individual citizen can with horror convince himself in this war of what would occasionally cross his mind in peace-time – that the state has forbidden to the individual the practice of wron
g-doing, not because it desires to abolish it, but because it wants to monopolise it, like salt and tobacco. A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual.’ Sigmund Freud, ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’ (1915), in On Creativity and the Unconscious, New York: Harper, 1958.
3 Sartre, The Search for a Method, New York: Knopf, 1963, pp. 19–20.
4 On this, see the comments and quotes used in Langendorf, Elogio funebre, esp. p. 50.
5 Pintor, Doppio diario, pp. 120–1.
6 Levi, I sommersi e i salvati, p. 14.
7 Letter to the mother of the twenty-one-year-old Valerio Bassavano, an electrical mechanic from Genoa, shot on 19 May 1944 (LRE, p. 523).
8 See the chapter ‘La vergogna’, in Levi, I sommersi e i salvati.
9 Letter to the relatives of Sergio Papi, a state employee from Milan, of twenty-three years of age. Captured by the SS, on 18 October 1944, Papi was condemned to death by the Littorio Division tribunal, presided over by the general Tito Agosti, who later hanged himself in Rome’s Forte Boccea (LRI, pp. 159–60).
10 LRI, pp. 174–5.
11 Letter to the relatives of Spartaco Fontanot, shot on 21 February 1944 (LRE, p. 337).
12 Letter to the parents of Daniel Decourdemanche, shot on 30 May 1942 (LRE, p. 293).
13 Letter to the mother of Richard Altenhoff, shot on 30 March 1944 (LRE, p. 101).
14 Letter to a female friend of Alexandra Ljubic, shot by the Ustaše on 9 November 1942 (LRE, p. 582).
15 Letter to the family of Ivan Charitonovic Kozlov, 27 December 1942 – adding ‘Such a shame! I have a mad desire to live!’ – shot at the end of December 1942 (LRE, p. 787).
16 Testimony of Tersilla Fenoglio Oppedisano (Bruzzone and Farina, La Resistenza taciuta, p. 151).
17 Testimony of Margherita Bergesio Coccalotto (Bravo and Jalla, La vita offesa, p. 81).
18 Remo Sottili, shot in Munich on 29 August 1944 (LRI, p. 209).
19 Levi, I sommersi e i salvati, p. 83.
20 A. Caffi, ‘Critica della violenza’, an essay written for the journal Politics in 1946, included in an eponymous volume edited by N. Chiaromonte, Milan: Bompiani, 1966, pp. 77–104 (the words cited appear on p. 77).
21 To use Todorov’s expression in La tolleranza e l’intollerabile, pp. 87–108.
22 T. Mann, Ironie und Radicalismus, cited by L. Ceppa, ‘I fratelli Mann. Una biografia in parallelo’, in Rivista di storia contemporanea XIII (1984), p. 115.
23 Vidal-Naquet, Il buon uso del tradimento, p. 69.
24 Churchill, The Gathering Storm, New York: Bantam, 1961, p. 286.
25 Report by Giovanni, ‘from verbal information received from Giuseppe’ (Le Brigate Garibaldi, vol. I, p. 105).
26 See above, Chapter 5.5 and compare the words that a Dutch Catholic, Johannes A. J. Verleun, condemned to death by the Germans and shot on 7 January 1944, recalled his father having told him: ‘God wills that it should not happen, but should the Germans stamp their hefty feet on our Fatherland, then a cordial Act of Contrition, boy, and do not hesitate’ (LRE, p. 689).
27 ‘Alcuni rilievi sulla organizzazione della 3a divisione’, Liguria, November– December 1944 (?), signed ‘Luigi’ (IG, BG, 010477).
28 Il Popolo, Rome edition, 20 February 1944.
29 See the article ‘Il fascismo nella campagna elettorale’, in Il nuovo Trentino, 7 April 1921 (cited in R. De Felice, Le interpretazioni del fascismo, Bari: Laterza, 1969, p. 143).
30 See, for example, don Giuseppe Menegon’s reprimand of the band-leader Masaccio, in Ventura, La società rurale veneta, p. 69, n. 115.
31 This paper, ‘organ of the democratic Christian movement’, 15 April 1944, is cited in Bianchi, I cattolici, p. 264.
32 ‘Cristo e il lavoro’, an article from 9 April 1944.
33 ‘Perché Cristiano-Sociali’, in L’Azione dei lavoratori, ‘Roman organ of the Christian-Social Movement’, 25 January 1944.
34 Note the contrast between the positions expressed, within the Osoppo formations, between the ‘military men’ don Ascanio De Luca and don Attilio Ghiglione (a former Alpinists’ chaplain) and the ‘politician’ don Moretti (Fogar, Le brigate Osoppo-Friuli, pp. 289–90).
35 See the letter from the Modena PCI federation to the Party committee for the mountain areas, 8 January 1945 (Le Brigate Garibaldi, vol. III, p. 200).
36 Levi, I sommersi e i salvati, pp. 109–11.
37 Fussell, La grande guerra, p. 97.
38 M. Carli, Arditismo, Rome–Milan: Augustea, 1929, pp. 26–7, and A. Gatti, Caporetto. Dal diario di guerra inedito, ed. A. Monticone, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1964, p. 230, cited in Rochat, Gli arditi della grande guerra, pp. 35, 49. Marinetti told the Arditi, in an October 1918 speech: ‘All right is on your side when you slit an Austrian’s throat’ (appendix to F. Cordova, Arditi e legionari dannunziani, Padua: Marsilio, 1969, p. 207). See, finally, the title of an article by M. Risolo in Gerarchia XXII: 3 (March 1943), pp. 103–5.
39 Cited in N. Tranfaglia, ‘Tra Mazzini e Marx. Fernando Schiavetti dall’interventismo repubblicano all’esperienza socialista’, in Rivista di storia contemporanea XIII (1984), p. 223, n. 6. Tranfaglia adds as an appendix the article ‘Repubblica e fascismo (commento alla lettera di Benito Mussolini)’, published by Schiavetti in the Iniziative of 20 November 1920 (see p. 235).
40 From the aforementioned letter by Ivan Charitonovic Kozlov, 27 December 1942 (LRE, p. 787).
41 Battaglia, Un uomo, p. 83
42 Gobetti, Diario partigiano, p. 100 (13 March 1944).
43 La Democrazia del Lavoro, 10 February 1944. I wanted, here, to quote a moderate publication, which used an old-fashioned expression – bands at war – and appealed to Risorgimento-era (and, as such, reassuring) examples, such as Mazzini and Pisacane.
44 Two texts by Carole Beebe Tarantelli have confronted this terrible question in lucid fashion: ‘Io, vedova delle BR vi dico’, and a conversation with Doris Lessing on her novel The Good Terrorist (both appearing in La Repubblica, 1 February and 25 May 1986). To understand the different ways in which one can deal with these questions, compare these texts to Guido Almansi’s fatuous review of Lessing’s novel, ‘Attentatrice offresi’ (also in La Repubblica – 20 November 1985).
45 Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan, referring back to Concept of the Political. Schmitt succeeded in producing eloquent pages on the inhuman invention of the absolute enemy, which he attributes to Leninism, without citing Nazism.
46 See ‘Guerra di liberazione e di Giustizia’, Voce Operaia, 26 October 1943, and above all ‘Politica e morale’, in the 15 January 1944 edition. For the application of these same conceptions to the violence implicit in the class struggle, see the article ‘Il cattolico di fronte al problema della violenza’, in the 9 November 1943 issue. Lastly, see F. Balbo, L’uomo senza miti, Rome: Einaudi, 1945, p. 80.
47 E. Jünger, Feuer und Blut, Magdeburg: Stahlhelm Verlag, 1925, p. 18.
48 Lyttelton, Fascismo e violenza, pp. 982–3, discussing N. Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975, p. 186.
49 Referring to positions repeatedly expressed by Gianni Baget-Bozzo and other similar Catholics.
50 Letter to General Jourdan, 17 June 1794. These words are used as an epigraph by J. J. Langendorf in his Elogio funebre.
51 M. Merleau-Ponty, Humanisme et Terreur, Paris: Gallimard, 1947, p. 48.
52 E. Franceschini, ‘Il mio no al fascismo’, in Vita e Pensiero LVIII (1975), p. 831.
53 LRI, pp. 58, 240, 61, 74, 94, 191.
54 Letter from the commissariat of the Valle di Susa divisions group to the Command of the 17th Brigade, 17 December 1944 (Le Brigate Garibaldi, vol. III, p. 102).
55 I. Calvino, ‘La stessa cosa del sangue’, in his Ultimo viene il corvo, pp. 84–5. On the autobiographical character of this account, see Falaschi, La Resistenza armata, p. 123.
56 Calvino, Il sentiero dei nidi di ra
gno, p. 147.
57 Falaschi, La Resistenza armata, p. 136, with regard to the piece ‘Uno dei tre è ancora vivo’ (in Ultimo viene il corvo, pp. 140–8).
58 Calamandrei, La vita indivisibile, p. 138 (under the date 3 March 1944).
59 ‘Anonimo romagnolo’, 1943–45, pp. 91–2.
60 See the account ‘La Croce di Sant’Uberto’, in Il Partigiano, directed by the commissar Bini (Giovanni Serbandini), August 1944 (quoted in Falaschi, La Resistenza armata, pp. 20–1).
61 Chiodi, Banditi, p. 107.
62 See R. H. Bainton’s Christian Attitudes Towards War and Peace (Nashville: Abingdon, 1960), cited in G. Sofri, ‘Riflessioni sull’ educazione alla pace’, in Rivista di storia contemporanea XIII (1984), p. 516.
63 Chiodi, Banditi, p. 119 (8 March 1945).
64 Battaglia, Un uomo, p. 156.
65 Bloch, La strana disfatta, p. 64.
66 Gorrieri, La Repubblica di Montefiorino, p. 87.
67 ‘Old soldiers have two types of memory: that which is allowed and that which is not allowed. They are not allowed to remember the extent to which they took pleasure from killing and torture’ (Doris Lessing, in conversation with Carole Beebe Tarantelli, cited above).
68 ‘Cantonate giovanili’, Voce Operaia, 27 February 1944, replying to the criticisms that the paper of the young Christian Democrats, La Punta, levelled against the article ‘Politica e morale’.
69 Falaschi considered this phenomenon ‘rhetorical dross that hung on in partisans’ language’: a reductive reading, though serving the purpose of adding emphasis to the claim that the ‘Resistance also represented a turning-point in the Italian language’ (Falaschi, La Resistenza armata, pp. 19, 10).
70 Leydi, discussing the ‘fascist derivation’ of some partisan songs, wrote – forcing matters somewhat – that it was not a question, as Pasolini claimed, of imported material coming from former officials of the Royal Army, but rather the fact that ‘there was now a generically Fascist spirit within any politically committed song’ (R. Leydi, ‘Introduzione’ to Canti della Resistenza italiana, collected and annotated by T. Romano and G. Solza, Milan: Collana del Gallo Grande, 1960, pp. 72–3). Moreover, Falaschi himself – La Resistenza armata, pp. 73–4 – has observed that the changes to La ragazza se ne va con Diavolo introduced by Marcello Venturi in the 1965 reprint (the first edition was from 1946) served precisely to bring into focus the troubling question of kinship.
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