A Civil War

by Claudio Pavone

  The intellectuals were called to account particularly heavily: ‘We can shout at them that they didn’t educate us’ – and, besides, what did one encounter in the Italian literary tradition? In Manzoni there was the ‘hidden hypocrisy … midway between the priest and the bourgeois’, in Carducci and D’Annunzio ‘the rhetorical bombast of the mixture of a classical formalism and an oratorical and popular low romanticism’.15

  There were invocations, together with warnings, not to betray a second, and irremediable, time. Bewildered, and anxious to find in the professors ‘not only masters of knowledge, but men, defenders of that honour and that humanity which were the pride of the free school of Italy’ is how the students declared themselves when they implored the professors not to take the oath to the Social Republic. ‘If we have been given the task of paying for the errors of a past that we refuse to recognise as our own, it is for you to offer us your doleful experience, so that youth is not betrayed once again.’ Emphatic, diplomatic and menacing words: whoever swears the oath ‘will be expelled from teaching after the war’.16

  Weighing heavily on the young was the inheritance of the Fascist-style slogans ‘Make way for the young’ and of ‘Giovinezza! Giovinezza!’ Repudiating one’s elders might have been a way of getting out of a tight corner. A clandestine Catholic newspaper spoke of Fascism as a ‘gerontocracy of the generation who wanted the war’17 – so vivid was the memory in certain Catholic circles of the papal condemnation of ‘useless slaughter’, which in other respects, like democratic belligerence, formed, by contrast, one of the fundamental elements of the long wave of secular anti-Fascism.

  ‘Make way for the young?’ wrote a newspaper of the Italian Students’ Union for Liberty, but the young people worth their salt would in any case come forward, while it was as well for the others to stay where they were.18 Actually, in that context the very word goliardica (university student) rang a bit false, though it was adopted also by a newspaper of the Youth Front19 ‘Trovarsi smarriti’ (‘Finding yourself at a loss’) is the title of an article that appeared in a Young Socialists’ newspaper. The article describes the bewilderment provoked in the young by the youth-obsessed Fascist mottos, and immediately adds: ‘And anyway how can we be blamed for it?’:

  Ours has been the story first of men’s reprobation, then of doubt and the all too easy burial of a faith. Now it is of disgust, of hatred for those who gulled us, of regret at having lost our bearings, of the tormenting desire to do something, to be finally worthy of the Patria, of the older people who did not deflect, of the masters who here and there illuminate the shadowy regions we have traversed. And we’ve become anti-Fascists with so enraged and overwhelming an anti-Fascism that alone, politically, it is no longer enough for us, now that the crimes of the neo-Fascists are so gross as to make [our anti-Fascism] merge with a general front against criminality.20

  In the same paper, ‘l’anziano di turno’ (that day’s older contributor) offered his reply. He seemed to be frightened by so much fury, and, before the claim that what the future demanded did not mean adhesion to a party programme, was ready to offer the reassuring picture of the ‘inevitable destiny of socialism, a supreme good lying at the end, not far-off by now, towards which mankind is being driven’ – a description in heartfelt tones that could well have been found in a newspaper at the turn of the century.

  Outbursts of hatred against the Fascists, based on the generation factor, were frequent:

  And really it must be said that this generation’s hatred, the hatred we young people have for Fascism is, in its intensity and insatiability, something altogether particular. We have hated Fascism as those who have never known anything else; not with the passion of the political adversary, which is itself a source of life, but with anxiety that it might be identified with our very destiny.21

  Books like Ruggero Zangrandi’s pioneering work,22 and prominent personalities like Pietro Ingrao, have attributed to the ‘long journeys’ of the young, primarily students, from so-called left-wing Fascism to anti-Fascism (and Communism above all) a more important role than they actually had. Significant, though, on the issue of generations, is the regret expressed by a Fascist paper, mentioned earlier, that the young had found themselves on opposite sides of the barricades.23

  If we shift our sights to the older people, by and large we find that, the less engaged they had been in militant anti-Fascism and the less they were now engaged in the active Resistance, the more severe they were in their attitude to the young – a severity mitigated only by paternalism. While the anti-Fascist survivors of jail, internment, exile, did have doubts and prejudices about the young who had been born and educated under Fascism, they were also, witnessing their commitment, ready to overcome these.24 For their part, the young, above all with regard to the survivors of exile, felt admiration and respect, though fear too that the latter had lost contact with the real state of affairs in Italy. This applied not just to the political plane but to social customs too: it was hard for even the best-intentioned veteran to understand certain changes that had come about in those who had lived ‘legally’ in the years of Fascism. ‘Oh! Una capocellula che balla!’ (‘Oh! A woman partisan leader dancing!’), exclaimed a horrified older comrade about a former partisan; and the latter explained: ‘We already had a different vision of life … We had seen nuns taking part in the Resistance!’25

  As I have said, it was the revenants of various shades who proved, at least initially, to be least sympathetic towards the young, almost as if, paradoxically, they had assimilated one of the aspirations of aggressive nationalism – the substitution of the class struggle with the generational struggle.26

  ‘Old and new democracy’, an article possibly penned by Ivanoe Bonomi, derided those who blamed the advent of Fascism on the old institutions and the older men: the culprits were either the young, ill-educated by Fascism, or older men who failed, at the opportune time, to give their leaders the support that would have enabled the latter to ‘react in quite another way’.27 Those who spoke in terms of the ‘ruins of the Aventino’ met with a contemptuous reply: ‘The young who, if only out of necessity, up until 25 July kept that party membership card “from which the ruins of the Aventino, and not just they, remained immune, and above all kept their anti-Fascist sentiments locked in their breasts, should wait a bit before seeking the limelight. Certain infections require a period of quarantine.” ’28

  To complete the reassurance, the youth paper of the same ‘Party of Democracy and Labour’ trembled with indignation against those who were going around saying that ‘the young don’t feel the need for authority, for order, for control’.29

  Before extremist positions of this sort there shone the good sense of those wise and well-balanced young people who recognised that it was not easy to free oneself from Fascism, which had penetrated into their brains, but added that this was no less applicable to the old than to the young.30 More often than not the elderly assumed indulgent tones, shading into blandishments. The Liberal Paolo Serini, having described as confused and suspicious the young people who had believed in Fascism ‘with the fideistic abandon typical of their age’, concluded: ‘We want to draw near them in order to help them.’31 The ‘New Year’s message to the young’ of the Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity (PSIUP) spoke of young people who had been duped and betrayed, and invoked an ‘obscure sentiment of pity for yourselves and your vanished illusions’.32

  The Catholics swung between the most diverse positions. There were young people who claimed to have ‘gone over spiritually to anti-Fascism even if, out of a false formal conscience, they did not dare enter into contact with the anti-Fascist organisation’. Therefore, they added, there was no sense in the accusations of incoherence levelled at the young by the old: ‘Shouldn’t they perhaps accuse the more mature generations instead?’33

  But there were also young Catholics who, acknowledging themselves to be ‘miseducated and bewildered’, seemed to step aside respectfully to make way for
their elders,34 and older people glad to acknowledge that ‘the best young people’ understood that ‘it was natural that the helm of the ship of the nation should be taken up again by the “first men”.’35 Still in April 1946, Attilio Piccioni, a former member of the Italian Popular Party would accuse the young, ‘used to the wicked climate’ of Fascism, of having derived from it ‘aridity of heart, career-ism and contempt for any dedication consisting of humility’, thereby attracting this pitiless reply from the young Carlo Donat Cattin: ‘The experience of our contact with the anti-Fascist political class is a bitter one and only adds to the experience of Fascism, which it would be absurd to deny.’36

  In political terms, the problem was that of the relationship between the Italian Popular Party and the Christian Democrat party. If experience had taught that ‘making way for the young’ demanded caution, entrenchment in ‘making way for the old’ was no less advisable. It is no accident that Alcide De Gasperi explicitly made himself the promoter of an intergenerational line, quite different from the model of the ‘long generation’, the equivalent rather of the inter-class policy. In an article that appeared in the clandestine edition of Il Popolo, he wrote: ‘We are younger and older people who have given each other a hand to build a bridge between two generations, between whom Fascism had attempted to dig an abyss’: namely, the First World War generation, who later ‘experienced the turbid social struggles’ and tried in vain to oppose Fascism, and the generation who had lived through Fascism ‘without getting contaminated’.37

  Elsewhere we have seen how, for the Communists, the conflict between generations sometimes figured as being between the old guard, more or less bordighista in origin, but whose roots also lay in the temperamentally fence-sitting attitude of ‘neither adhere nor sabotage’, and the lively fighting spirit of the young. Those of the Communist leaders who preferred the latter attitude did however denounce, realistically but with pedagogic indulgence, certain features that the Garibaldini had inherited from Fascism: ‘Certainly one cannot ignore the fact that our volunteers are all young men who have undergone twenty years of Fascist rule and who therefore are in need of intense and continuous explanation, clarification and persuasion’, says one report.38 And another blames the difficulties that the partisans sometimes had in their relations with the population on the ‘evil consequences of Fascist miseducation, which cannot be wiped out just like that in young twenty-year-olds brimming over with life and energy’.39 The instructions of one Command are inspired by undisguised pedagogy:

  Very often, rather than gathering more comrades, pretend to be interested in a possibly stupid conversation and then gently let things slide into subjects that interest us more. Having got the discussion going like this, it’s sometimes better to pretend to withdraw from it and let the comrades chew over the subject, otherwise you would very often end up giving a monologue, given how much better informed you are than the comrades listening. If you hear cock-eyed things don’t interrupt immediately; let them get into the habit of putting forward a concept, way out though it might be, then, with very simple words and reasoning, correct them. Speak with the greatest simplicity, in such a way that the comrade is not nonplussed by reasoning that is too difficult for him; in short, make sure that when comrades talk to you or anyhow when they take part in a discussion, they don’t immediately feel the commissar’s presence, but rather the accessible reasoning of a comrade who is also having his ‘say’. In any case, examples are more important than anything else.40

  This was a far cry from the behaviour of those Communists, exiles for years in the USSR, who addressed the Italian prisoners ‘in the wrong tone, in committee-room jargon, which was mostly incomprehensible, and with inquisitorial and illogical questions like: “Why have you come? Why didn’t you rebel? Why didn’t you desert?”.’41 In the case of the Communists, too, it was the most prestigious leader who assumed responsibility for ensuring that the manner adopted towards the young was consistent with the general line of the ‘partito nuovo’. Togliatti made numerous approaches to the young, even, as we have seen, to those fighting on the opposite side in the civil war.42

  Interwoven with the generational problem within the Communist party was the other, more complex, one of the partial ‘succession’ of the PCI to the PSI. This phenomenon occurred at times within the same family nucleus, precisely as if it were something being handed over by one generation to another.

  ‘Was your dad a Socialist?’ – ‘Yes, in those days he was a Socialist because the Communists weren’t around yet’, is the answer a Turinese worker born in 1904 recently gave to her interviewer.43 ‘Here’s to the young partisan recruits and their parents!’ said a Romagnolo poster that intended to thank the parents for having persuaded their children to join the Garibaldini.44 By contrast, ‘a seventy-year-old man, who had stuck to the pre-1914 war positions’, called the Communists ‘figliol prodighi’ (‘prodigal sons’), and interpreted the contemplated fusion between the two parties as a wish to ‘return to the fold’.45

  I myself personally remember various episodes of the initiation into Communism within traditionally Socialist family circles. Here I have to add that, on numerous occasions, the Communists showed intolerance towards the human and political dotage of the Socialists, and we have already seen some examples of this; ‘they’ve remained stuck in the same old positions of 1920–21’; their activism is scant, but they enjoy ‘a certain amount of sympathy among the older workers’; they are ‘survivors’.46 Then again, their claim, as in Modena, to invoke the relations sanctioned by the 1921 election appears absurd.47 It is evident that, in judgments of this kind, no account is taken of the minority young people’s wing of the PSIUP, originating from the MUP (Movement of Proletarian Unity), whom the Communists suspected of ‘leftism’.48

  But, leaving aside the competitive dislikes and fears on the left, the Communists were capable of lucid foresight. Thus, at a ‘meeting of PCI representatives in several Padua plants’, to combat the opinion that ‘the Socialists didn’t exist’, this was said: ‘Tomorrow at the polling-stations you will see how many folk who are today singing the praises of the Soviet Union and Communism will be more willing to give their vote to the Socialist Party than to the Communist Party.’49

  The Action Party too had put itself forward as the bearer of a new and ideologically up-to-date socialist message, to succeed the old PSI. The Action Party, it was claimed, ‘is the Socialist Party of the new generation’.50 This conviction was shared by many of the party’s leaders, from Parri to Calogero and Foa. That things did not turn out like this is an issue that goes beyond that of different generations.51

  4. RECKONING WITH THE PAST

  If the Resistance was anything it was an attempt to settle accounts with the past. ‘Il miserabile crollo dello Stato fascista fa sì che oggi tutti i nodi vengano al pettine’, said L’Italia Libera1 – a declaration which might be translated as follows: ‘The wretched collapse of the Fascist state means that today no one will escape a whipping’. Here tutti should be interpreted in a sense that goes beyond the problem of the state and power, the one immediately posed by the Action Party newspaper. Many threads of my argument so far are in fact connected by a series of questions: How responsible were the Italian people for the birth, advent and dominion of Fascism? How was it possible to transform the sense of guilt, the desire for expiation, the proclamations of innocence into a project for the future? Not the social, economic, institutional and political programmes, elaborated and achieved to a greater or lesser extent, that were put forward at the time, but fundamental aspirations and the desire that that exceptional historical opportunity should not be missed. Nor, as far as the past is concerned, do I mean to examine the historiographic validity of the theses formulated at the time, even if some points of view of the resistenti have inspired the historians’ subsequent arguments to various degrees. What I wish to do, rather, is seek to glean some features that distil the experience lived at the time – an experience which was later bra
cketed, to a greater or lesser extent in manipulated and distorted form, among the different facets of the shared collective version of things. It should never be forgotten that the victory of the resistenti was ‘the work of a minority – the work of a large minority, but still in no sense the achievement of the whole Italian people’.2

  But nor should it be forgotten that the intensity of the experience of that large minority, who truly wanted to settle accounts with the past, was to reverberate throughout the entire Italian people, who absorbed, though partly debased, its achievements. Rosario Romeo, the last great Italian liberal historian, has formulated a fundamentally correct judgment on this point:12

  The Resistance, valued in terms of an albeit hypothetical ‘second Risorgimento’, allowed … solid connections to be established with the more prestigious national tradition. In this way accounts with the Fascist past were settled in Italy extremely rapidly with the general forgetting of all responsibilities and of all the sins committed, which were soon absolved by one and all as being venial.3

  Early on, a poet and essayist warned, with one of his paradoxical proposals, against the consequences of this attitude: ‘As from 1 January of the year 2000 no politician or political party or similar movement will be able to declare themselves not responsible for their errors, nor expect a diminution of public blame by pleading that there was Fascism.’4

  There is one aspect of Italy’s responsibility which more or less all the documents and testimonies of the Resistance period choose to keep quiet about, and which clearly exemplifies what has just been said: the question of responsibility in the persecution against the Jews. The racial campaign, when it is spoken about, is blamed exclusively on the more fanatical of the Fascists, and even then insofar as they were dominated by the Nazis. Rather than becoming a stimulus for a critical examination of the forms that anti-Semitism had assumed in a country such as Catholic Italy, the way in which the racial campaign had been conducted and the resistance it had encountered, that resistance became a source of self-congratulation for being better than the Germans, whose treatment of the Jews in Russia was denounced at times in the Resistance press.5 As is well known, the far from transparent attitude taken at the time and later towards the persecution of the Jews was paraded by the Catholic Church as proof of its extraneousness to Nazi-Fascism. When the newspaper of the Catholic Communists wished to indicate what was most despicable about anti-Semitism, it made the following gaffe: ‘To attack men for what they cannot liberate themselves from.’ The self-criticism of many Italians, both secular and religious, for their personal responsibility towards the Jews took the form of concrete action, offering them help and refuge, even if other Italians behaved ignobly.6