A Civil War

by Claudio Pavone

  The developments of an intransigence that could make you a slave to your own virtue are not found only among the Communists. In November 1943, in France, Marc Bloch made a firm appeal to the Jacobin virtues against the tendency towards ‘gigantic absolution for everyone’: ‘This limp inclination towards pardon undoubtedly expresses the most sincere side of an old tortuous soul. To be indignant and punish, one needs to believe a little in what our ancestors of ’93 called, in their language devoid of false discretion, virtue.’66

  Ernesto Rossi recounted that, when imprisoned at Ventotene, in his article ‘Giacobinismo and liberalismo’, he had expressed similar views to these of Bloch, he and Altiero Spinelli, who shared those views with him, were accused of neo-Fascism.67

  A feature of Actionist intransigence distinguishing it from Communist intransigence lay in the fact that the former was compelled to manifest itself immediately in a recognisable way. Its novelty and its lack of a clear and unambiguous ideology made the Action Party visible above all through its behaviour and moral style. ‘Unlike the other historic parties, which are evaluated on the basis of their traditional political line and their programmes which are known to all, the value of the Action Party lies only in what it actually does’68 – so runs a declaration inspired by that pride in its novelty which circulated widely in the documents of the party. The party was presented as ‘the only political formation of great importance which has arisen directly from the democratic crisis of the twentieth century which culminated in Fascism’.69 To be admitted into the party, ‘the ideals of the aspirant had to be accepted (and controlled)’ – ideals, not ideology – together with his acceptance of the programme.70 Precisely by way of contrast with the Communists, it was explained that ‘We do not subordinate the programme of our party to a definite philosophical system compulsory for everyone’, but, naturally, this does not mean that we don’t have ‘our ethical, political and economic principles: because otherwise we would not constitute a party.’71

  In his pungent criticism of the ‘sixteen-point programme’ drawn up in Rome, Vittorio Foa came straight to the point: ‘Ideological unity is a utopia, unless it is confused with the mythological unity of authoritarian parties … The novelty of a party lies in its concrete political and organisational action; other than this it can be no more than an empty assertion.’72

  But, at the same time, an Action Party newspaper wrote: ‘Our belief is that the problem of the liberation of man has to be faced and resolved on all planes, that is to say for every aspect of his life, otherwise it is not solved at all.’73 An exegesis of this principle, which seems to paraphrase Churchill’s ‘tears and blood’, is found in a text that speaks in terms of the ‘terrible and severe climate of sufferings, of social solidarity and unshakable determination’ which distinguished the war of liberation and belied ‘any presumed feebleness of the Italian character’. This climate ‘is the destruction of affections, possessions and life’s comforts, and the ruin of illustrious memories and the sharing of sacrifice and renunciations … It separates people from their families. It wrenches men from their jobs … It causes raids and reprisals, it exposes convicts and deportees to starvation.’74

  To keep the tension at this pitch, the Actionists in their turn provided for political ‘giornate’, on the assumption that ‘political work is educational work’.75 The powerful individualism and the equally powerful political passion in which that individualism was expected to find expression could not be easily reconciled with the unitary policy which was nevertheless pursued by the Actionists. At the end of 1942 Aldo Garosci had written from the United States: ‘In the present phase I am in favour of the maximum sincerity, that is to say the minimum unity.’76

  Even ‘revolution in one go’, which Vittorio Foa set against the two-stage revolution advocated by the Communists, arose from a need for sincerity and unity of conscience; and it is no accident that Foa attributed ‘the difficulty experienced by the bloc of left-wing groups’ to this.77 The possible elitist consequences of such positions are clear. Leo Valiani was not mistaken in seeing the many losses suffered by the Action Party leaders as a surrogate for its lack of a mass base. This sprung not only from ‘moralistic’ subjective motivations – elsewhere Valiani has recalled the case of the giellista who, a latter-day Attilius Regolus, returned to Pietro Koch’s jail78 – but from a more intrinsic mode of being.79 Here political ties and friendship, though distinct, formed a close-knit web, of which the correspondence between Giorgio Agosti and Dante Livio Bianco constitutes a monument.80

  For the Catholic resistenti, whichever the formation they were fighting in, the relationship between politics and morality, between public and private, assumed peculiar characteristics. By Catholic I mean those for whom being so constituted an obvious fact, but implied also, in different grades and tones, a problem and a position – a distinction which does not necessarily correspond to the traditional one between practising and non-practising Catholics. Enjoinders to consider political commitment as a moral duty met with a wide variety of attitudes.

  Above all there were Catholics who, convinced that they were in possession of a revealed truth that went to the heart of their being, felt less impelled, and in no way sensed the need to link the project of profound self-renewal to a historical contingency, however dramatic that contingency might be. Not that the sense, and the attraction, of self-reunification was unknown to them. But the Catholic faith had deposited in the depths of their souls a nucleus that did not need to be reunified with anything, because it was self-sufficient, absolute and eternal. To these Catholics the ultimate presuppositions of public and private, individual and collective, had to appear serenely distinct and serenely coexistent.

  Other Catholics, of whom we have already seen some cases, sought instead in their very religiousness the profound motivations for their political commitment, which they saw as an instrument for affirming inalienable moral principles. This position generated torment and tension, all the more profound the harder it was to feel that the name ‘religious’ could confidently be given to the political actions performed by Catholics and, in particular, the clergy. In a lecture given at the Catholic University in Milan in January 1943, Giuseppe Dossetti had spoken of the active participation of the people as of a natural right.81 To fight for the triumph of a right consequently became a duty.

  Finally, there was a third Catholic attitude, which also made the religious factor the point of departure, but interpreted in a predominantly doctrinaire sense, as a model for a Christian society that was coming into being. These Catholics, in the name of coherence, were taking the dangerous paths of integralism, which is a Catholic version of totalitarianism.

  There was no clear defining line between these different positions. Teresio Olivelli, for example, oscillated between the second and the third pole, not least perhaps from the lingering influence of his Fascist education.82 One of the most upright Resistance groups, the Christian-Social Movement, started from the second position, but because of the simplistic manner with which it assumed it, ran the risk of ending up with the third. Christianity – say some of its writings – has made men equal before God and therefore before the law; but ‘economic inequality’ has made this great conquest meaningless: therefore the social problem and the moral one ‘have to fuse in a happy synthesis’.83 Or again, ‘the forgoing of wealth preached by the Gospel constitutes an essential element for the solution of the social question [to be faced therefore] in the name of the ethic of justice and love of genuinely lived Christianity’.

  All this afflatus, nourished by a Gospel that did not come to bear the sword, found its final outlet, moreover, in the apologia of the grey ‘scuola sociale cristiana’, presented as ‘the application of the eternal and universal principles of the Gospel to the contingent needs of social life’.84

  At the opposite pole, the Catholic Communists polemicised, with intellectual haughtiness, against the pretension of deducing politics from religion and from the ideals connected
with it such as fraternity, justice and mutual love.85 It is not remotely true, they maintained, that ‘it is impossible to accept a political line without the philosophy that is behind it’, otherwise the Catholics who call themselves democratic would have to accept the enlightenment and ‘immanentist idealism’.86 Lurking in the background of so much abundantly professed separatism lay a totalitarian integralism – a philosophy of history that saw in Communism (and precisely that of Stalin) the secular arm to which providence had assigned the task of realising the perfect Christian society.87 Following such lines and such principles, truly the Christian God, the true God, will be, if we ‘are worthy of our faith, the natural crowning, through supernatural grace, of the efforts of the atheist of good will’.88

  In reply to these professions of faith came the warning that ‘the unity of the Christian spirit’ can never be broken.89 And the ‘giornale di battaglia of Christian Democrat youth’ went on to explain: ‘Catholicism, Christianity is by its very essence integralist, that is, it comprehends private and public life, projects its morality on all the problems of private and public life. In this sense we Christian Democrats or Popolari intend to define ourselves and to be integralist, with no oscillations and no discontinuity – in a word, coherent.’90

  From this integralism the newspaper, paying little regard to coherence, drew a firm stance against the transfer of power: ‘Only our organic conceptions of man, the family, society, the state places the most clear-cut limits on the action of those in power and the sphere within which mutual rights are to be exercised.’91

  From their reading of some copies of La Punta, and from ‘hasty readings of Giuseppe Toniolo’, the Catholic partisans of the Modenese mountains attempted to ‘invent an ideology of Christian Democracy’. At the party’s first provincial congress (in October 1945), they affirmed the principle that the proposed reforms should not be seen ‘as the limit that we put on the reforms requested by other currents’, but should be deduced ‘precisely from Christian doctrine’.92

  Democrazia Cristiana adopted the first and third of the three positions outlined above – a feeble interest in politics specifically, the religious duty to participate, and integralism – some concessions being made to the second. This is one of the paths that led to that realismo on which they were subsequently to build so notable a part of their fortune. The Communists proved weak in their dealings with the Catholics in being so unaware of such complex facets of the latter’s behaviour. The second position was naturally extraneous to Communist culture. Replying to a Christian Democrat protest against the lay funerals of partisans, ‘Bülow’ (Arrigo Boldrini) let slip that in the Garibaldi formations there were ‘elements of various political tendencies and of consequent religious ideas’.93 The Communists would have preferred it if all the Catholics had belonged to the first position: that way, at any rate, they could consider them a fact to acknowledge, and if possible govern, as such. The Communists were aware of the existence and strength of the third position, and knew they had to combat it, when it was not possible to reach any compromise with it. But here it was often the Catholics, and above all the clergy, who had no qualms about opening hostilities.

  Sure of their hegemonic strength, but at the same time secretly wishing to be recognised as equals by so ancient and noble a potentate, the Communists often assumed an attitude of respectful and tactical forbearance towards the Catholics. Moscatelli wrote of one commander, ‘our comrade since recently’: ‘He’s still a bit weak on the religious side, but seems keen to overcome this. In any case it’s almost a good thing that he should be like this; it will come in handier for our work among partisan believers.’94

  Another document reads: ‘In these countries there is also the question of the Church and comrades should not set themselves against it. Communists are not believers but they cannot go against Catholics who have twenty years of Fascism behind them. We must not go against the Church, although we know that Catholicism has always supported the bourgeoisie.’95

  Urging that the chaplain be given a good welcome, a political commissar wrote: ‘Think of the USSR’s change of policy over religion; they are excellent examples to follow.’96

  Il Popolo might limit itself to being ironical about statements of this kind.97 But other broadsides thundered much more loudly. One need only mention the Estratto del catechismo sociale published in Padua in 1944, under the editorship of the diocese’s branch of Catholic Action, which enjoyed the freedom of the press granted it by the RSI. True to the best reactionary tradition, the pamphlet attacks, on every level, not only communism, but also socialism and liberalism.98 As they had already done with regard to the war as such, the Catholic hierarchies seemed to be concerned that the current disorder was a source of immorality, in the most traditional sense of the word, and their concern was reinforced by the fear of a Communism which was a fomenter of dissolute customs. The patriarch of Venice, Cardinal Adeodato Piazza, extended this concern even to souls in purgatory. He wrote to Monsignor Nogara, bishop of Udine: ‘It is to be hoped that the possible collapse does not also have damaging repercussions on people’s souls, especially of those who have the greatest need in Purgatory (as it would indeed have if the Masses offered for souls were to be interrupted).’99

  But it is from the same tissue of ‘Christian and patriarchal solidarity’, which favoured the indirect support given to the partisans by ‘many parish priests of the so-called “peripheral” clergy … a genuine governing class in Friulian agricultural society’,100 that the fear sprung that even the militia in the Osoppo brigades was a vehicle of immorality. Shortly after the Liberation a parish priest wrote:

  The partisans have returned home, who, to tell the truth, entered the Osoppo religiously and morally healthy and came out of it sick. Almost all of them belonged to Catholic Action and were also well educated, obedient, and church-going. Now … quam mutati! The moment of liberty has come. And for so many youngsters liberty is continuing in the form of unbridled behaviour and merry-making …101

  And another priest, referring to the osovani (members of the Osoppo brigades) shows equal alarm about this liberty:

  They’ve absorbed something that isn’t right, something that can’t be explained, that can’t be understood. There’s an evasion of every human and divine law, there’s an unbridled tendency to abuse liberty against every precept of civilized living.102

  ‘They go off and return … different from when they left’ complained the parish priest of Frassené in Cadore in his turn.103 The arrival of ‘that lot from Bologna, the damnation of our land’ and particularly the infiltration of ‘Emilian elements’, again in the parish priest’s view fomented a corruption in standards of conduct.104 ‘With the coming of the Gramsci’, wrote the parish priest of Cergnai, ‘the young are beginning to desert the church and abandon religious practices; immorality and acts of violence are constantly on the increase.’105 And the parish priest of Chies d’Alpago: ‘Even women are enlisting … with consequences that are all too well known.’106 A dean of Belluno cathedral, monsignor Palatini, even goes so far as to comment on the deportation of girls to Germany, as workers, writing in his diary: ‘With what consequences for morality it is easy to imagine, all the more so since, with the due exceptions, in young women there is a noticeable slackening of morals and an appalling frivolity, the consequences of which are being felt.’107 The retrospective reproaches of the Fascists as corrupters of youth made by another parish priest from the Belluno area sound a similar note to those used against the partisans.108

  These Veneto priests, in their way, were paying homage to the pedagogic virtues of Resistance experience which redounded from the political and military into questions of ethics and conduct. The Resistance was, however, favourably recognised as possessing these virtues by two rather more enlightened churchmen, padre Luigi Rinaldini and don Giacomo Vender, for whom the rebel movement ‘constitutes an educative environment’ for the ‘awareness it can give of the need to risk one’s life for an idea
, for liberty, justice, the life of one’s country’.109

  As the field open to judgments widened under the pressure of public events, the family came under fire as well. Witness the Fascist Roberto Farinacci, who did not hesitate to denounce the Italian family as ‘incapable of being a school of civil, patriotic, and religious education’. The only future remedy would be to remove children from their families and gather them together in state boarding schools: ‘And the parents? They’ll just have to calmly recognise their incompetence and step down gratefully.’110 The problem of the family was, however, faced only to a limited extent and, save only a few exceptions, warily, by the resistenti. The presence of the Catholics and, above all, the widespread wish not to irritate them in the name of a ‘religious peace’, the keys of which were left in the hands of the Catholics themselves, goes some, though not all of the way, towards explaining this reticence. The stances taken by the Christian Democrats on this score are well known. The last paragraph of Idee ricostruttive della Democrazia cristiana states that the democratic state ‘will safeguard public morality, protect the integrity of the family and assist parents in their mission of educating the new generations in a Christian manner’.

  In this context it was natural that the ‘juridical efficacy of religious marriage’ should be defended.111 The evangelism of the Christian Socialists was no less intransigent and hide-bound on this point. ‘When the moral unity’ of the Italian people is at stake, wrote one of their newspapers, those who profess the theory of free love are ‘free to keep it to themselves and good luck to them, but God forbid that it should affect the moral solidity of the Italian family with unhealthy ideas and scurrilous words’. Likewise, let those who are atheist ‘go ahead and live their intimate drama: but God forbid that they should touch, or threaten the ethico-religious unity of our people’.112 The Catholic Communists, then, transferred into Soviet socialism, as they imagined it to be, the full realisation of the Catholic ideal of the family, or at any rate the presence of the conditions for bringing it about.113