A Civil War

by Claudio Pavone

  The Catholics had their own specific position on this point. In them one encounters a bipolarity between their adoption as an apologetic argument of the culture of crisis and prophecies of the collapse of civilisation and a realism that sketches out the future by making itself the interpreter of the average situations and aspirations of the present. Since the nineteenth century, the Jesuit fathers had preached that those who have sown the wind shall reap the whirlwind. Now that the whirlwind, provoked by the de-Christianisation of society – or better, by its turning away from the teaching of the Catholic Church – had well and truly been unleashed, all that remained was to take stock of its consequences and seek to govern them, without ever tiring of denouncing their causes. This appeared the only way to ‘contend with the Communists for the future city’; otherwise all that would remain would be black ‘pessimism about the future’.5 The tragedy that had befallen the modern world could thus be resolved in the triumph of the truth improvidently violated and ‘in the design to elaborate a genuinely “Catholic solution” ’ to the crisis of civilisation.6

  ‘Without needing to appeal to the apocalyptic and woolly Spengler, we consider that in this century we are witnessing the end of a cycle of civilisation’: hence, wrote a Catholic broadsheet of the Resistance period, ‘the religious duty, the obligation of conscience’ to unite in a party, to organise oneself politically in order to impose an honest political order on the country.7 While the Church was guaranteeing the essential and final fruits of the ‘Catholic solution’, a wide space was opening up for immediate action by Catholics present in society and engaged in the political struggle. The triumphant apocalyptics and the re-emergent empiricists thus protected each other, both fronts reiterating Catholic ‘diversity’. The realism of the politicians, their supple adherence to the creases and contradictions of Italian society, were favoured by the fact that it was not so much a question of changing society as of ‘saving it’ by continuing the work of re-conquest that had been proceeding since 1929 under the protective wing of the Fascist regime.

  In 1897 Gaetano Salvemini had identified the strength of the ‘neo-Guelph’ party as lying in the fact that it knew how to stamp the hallmark of ‘order’ on its criticism of liberal and capitalistic society.8 In 1933 Sergio Paronetto, one of the interlocutors to whom De Gasperi paid most heed, spoke critically of the New Deal and the dangers that it involved, and predicted its failure if it were not detached from the optimistic–rationalistic model of the lay democracies and did not assimilate the model of ‘Latin equilibrium and measure, and still more of the primacy of the spirit and of Christian realism’.9

  The capacity of the soaring spirit to coexist with a realism that observes and mingles with the world was to be the basis of the political success of the Italian Catholics, who were ready to proclaim the maximum faith in man but at the same time never to lose sight of the weaknesses and depths of human nature that bore the wound of original sin. The soaring flight rediscovered man’s equality before God; the low-flying one observed, to quote Il Popolo, ‘the social distinctions and qualifications of wealth, work and culture’, attributing to them a ‘trivial importance before simple humanity’, and thus reducing them to a ‘purely technical value’.10

  In order to put a brake on aspirations to ‘make it all new’, Don Moretti, the priest who organised the Osoppo formations, said that he preferred ‘the new patch to the old suit’:11 it was after all a suit you reckoned to know well, and whose durability you could vouch for. Thus, having kept the Utopian aspiration as it were suspended, it was possible to get down to programmes with no Utopia, at times irritating those Catholic resistenti who, engaged in action and even critical of the maximalism of the young men reared in Catholic Action, considered the programmatic preoccupations of the Christian Democrat politicians as often mistaken or less useful to immediate ends.12 A like degree of irritation was probably kindled in the Catholic partisans, for its one-sidedness, by the thanks given to providence for having sent ‘this period of inner preparation, of concentration, of whetting one’s energies for tomorrow’s activity’.13 ‘Faith in man’ and ‘acting in the real world … for Christian civilisation’ were the two central exhortations of another article in Il Popolo.14 The objection raised to the Communists’ project for the unitary organisation of the young (the ‘Youth Front’) is telling: the proposal did not seem to the Christian Democrats to ‘correspond with the reality of things’.15 The ductility of this realism did not exclude the unity represented by the CLN;16 indeed it bent it to its own ends, and at the same time paved the way for that degree of innovation that would have come about in any case, being, to a considerable extent, the work of those who had felt its allure and urgency least intensely.

  Those who did not enjoy the reassuring mediation offered by the Catholic Church saw the tension between desire for the future – the alteration of oneself and of the world – and the impact with reality more dramatically. Luciano Bolis was to speak of ‘this Liberation of ours’ having cost a ‘heap of values, in blood, terror and expectations’.17 Sounding the memory of a now old and sick partisan, Alessandro Portelli later had the impression that he was listening to a ‘tale permeated with dream and desire’.18 The recognition that, in the action of the resistenti, rationality regarding value did not always coincide with instrumental rationality19 meant acknowledging a Utopian dimension to the Resistance, which was quite another thing from attributing to it illusions that history would then rightly have belied:

  Seeking the flashes of Utopia where they manage to shine, the historian inevitably encounters the fragments of Utopia too, the shattered dreams. As befits it, does not the Utopian imagination perhaps reproduce the historic future from which it emerges and by which it is swallowed up?… In the shadow cast by the representations of the transparent City, is not the power of the dream perhaps placed at the service of the machine of power, and the energy of this dream converted into the heavy inertia of a discourse of oppression?20

  It might be said that the resistenti had the sentiment but not the theory of liberty.21 There thus germinated in them a ‘maximalism’ of consciences, an admirable occurrence in a people in whom almost everyone wants to mediate and few commit themselves to constructing, risking the things the very things mediated. At times that maximalism expressed its desires and its needs in the form of prediction, thereby exposing itself to the all-to-easy irony of the ‘realists’. One protagonist has said:

  If someone recounts an event differently from the way it actually occurred, perhaps unconsciously he has actually aimed to do so; it was a desire that he had and in which he has actually operated, probably. If, then, it has not come about as a historical fact, because it has not been achieved materially, you can nevertheless be sure that he who recounts it aspired to it.22

  The living of the future as if it were the present, the entrusting to predictions and hopes of the process of unification, which the systemisation of empirical experiences was no longer able to guarantee,23 are features characterising the Resistance. In some way they stand in, as it were, in the absence of economic, political and institutional planning, as if the vagueness of content was compensated for by the intensity of aspiration. One Catholic-Liberal historian has recalled, with specific reference to the Resistance, that ‘in great struggles and popular uprisings, sentiments count more than well-defined projects, “politico-juridical planning” of structural, economico-social forms etc.’.24 To this one might add that what was involved was the intertwining of sentiments with ethical demands, sketches for theoretical formulations, demands for existential guarantees. Faith in some form of palingenesis helped exorcise a death, to be inflicted or suffered which events showed to be always very, very close.

  ‘A thousand signs herald the fullness of the times’, wrote a Garibaldino newspaper, transforming its expectations into biblical form.25 ‘In that epoch we thought, we believed, that we could turn things upside-down, that we were overturning things’;26 ‘I’d say that folk expected so profou
nd a change that they seemed to want everything.’27 Possibly these words, recorded after 1968, are resonant with the echo of ‘vogliamo tutto’ (‘we want everything’); but the contamination is significant.

  There was also the projection of the future into an already mythicised past: ‘Remember, Lupo di Vecchio, what we chattered about through the woods … and you wanted to know how primitive society developed, when men hadn’t yet learned to hate one another and lived in communion with one another.’28

  At times exploitation was interpreted as the ultimate form of man’s dominion over man.29 A commissar serving in the very same zone of the eastern frontier from which the above quotation comes wrote: ‘We had an ambitious vision of the future of our country’, and we did not want to end up at Caprera like Garibaldi.30

  A Jewish teacher, Giuliana Tedeschi, returned from deportation animated by the ‘need to put everything back on its feet, the whole world’, by the ‘need to make the world be reborn’; and she was frustrated ‘because the world was never in the right shape … And so why did a war occur, to what purpose so many victims, if we were going back to square one?’31 Others attempt to forestall frustrations, but what they actually do is reinforce their presuppositions by taking their aspirations as having been fulfilled: witness a GL paper that speaks of a ‘radical transformation that has come about in the mentality, customs and will of the Italians’.32 On the other hand, these transformations had come about so rapidly that it seemed legitimate to expect the rhythm not to slow down.33

  This Resistance utopianism assumed a curious form, almost as if it were a last-minute attempt to keep the respective inheritances of Romanticism and of the Enlightenment united, in manifestations of a concretismo (concreteness) interwoven with a need to be most fully alive. I have already recalled how Manlio Rossi-Doria, the last great expert on the problems of Southern Italy, spoke of the need to pass back from science to Utopia. Ferruccio Parri, with a ‘minimalism’ fed by his polemic against the political schemers in Rome, said: ‘And I naively believed that, if anything, the liberation would have brought a greater sensitivity to certain social problems, such as that regarding the supply of provisions.’34

  The partisans’ hope in the future was at times so strong, but at the same time so vague in terms of content, as to coexist with a scant interest in becoming familiar with more precise analyses and programmes, especially when these were offered in the form of indoctrination. We have already seen how complaints about the scant enthusiasm aroused in the Garibaldi brigades by the ora politica (the hour of political education) were not infrequent. A party leader declared that it was ‘not viable because the Garibaldini get tired’. A partisan from Terni recalls that his comrades fled (that was ‘il sòno della campana sorda’ – ‘the sound of the deaf bell’).35 But another commissar, after speaking out very severely against the political ignorance of the Garibaldini (‘It’s quite clear, they grew up under the past regime’) acknowledged that they ‘were still enthusiastic about future liberty’ because they ‘were still rebels’ – though the commissar seemed anything but satisfied about this fact.36 Possibly the rejection pointed out in this and similar documents helps explain why an English officer could write that the vast majority of partisans who declared themselves to be Communists actually ‘thought along the lines of the Conservatives in England’.37

  Requests to receive some political education did come from the rank-and-file.38 But the most besetting requests regarded the final goals, rather than how to set about achieving those goals. Giovanni Pesce relates how, after their first action a group of Gappists, mostly peasants, ‘want to know, and with desperate tenacity, what future prospects will be, after the defeat of the Germans and Fascists. What might happen tomorrow? They want to get straight in their minds not only who they are fighting against, but why they are fighting … What is the final objective of the struggle?’

  Pesce’s answers do not appear to be aimed at placating all this anxiety: they centre, rather, on the need to behave ‘like a family before the fire which is about to destroy their house’, leaving the rest for later. This seems rather like a request for a promissory note, to be honoured even with one’s very life. However, since there was a Catholic among his interlocutors, on that occasion Pesce added that one was fighting in order that the Fifth Commandment would finally be fully put into effect, ‘and the Slaughter of the Innocents therefore finish’.39

  In a fable written after the war, Maarbale says to Hannibal: ‘Every war is like this … Every war. Because it puts everything off until later, when it’s over. And, while there’s the war, it’s like being suspended in mid-air, outside time. Time will get going again an hour later, but war is already the sum of all the hours lost.’40

  Pietro Secchia explained clearly that ‘the combatants of the partisan war want to know that they are fighting for a new and better Italy’ – but then added ‘putting together programmes is not what is needed at the moment’.41

  In fact, in the PCI, or to be more precise among its leaders, the reign of final ends was on the one hand assured, once and for all, by doctrine, and on the other hand embedded and hidden in the organisation. Faith in the rightness of the line to follow and in the party’s capacity to put it into practice was to give sufficient support to action as the priority choice. This helps explain the PCI’s particular commitment, already mentioned, to militarising the bands, and also the type of guarantee that the party implicitly offered the militants: do your duty, and the rest will be given you in addition. A report by Giordano Pratolongo on the Venice federation took its leaders to task for being too practical and for not bothering to do their homework on what was being discussed by the party’s leaders, but in the same breath recommended that the young be rallied to act, without wasting time over the preliminaries of theoretical elucidation – ‘If theory is the right word for it, since I consider it the fruit of opportunism’.42

  This attitude could result in ‘too euphoric and contrived a tone’, criticised a Roman Gappist,43 a tone that aimed at reinforcing the exhortation by presenting it as a statement of fact: not ‘Italians, fight!’, but ‘All Italians are fighting.’ Compared with Avanti! and L’Italia Libera, but also with Il Popolo and Il Risorgimento Liberale, the underground edition of L’Unità in fact appears more tied to contingency and less rich in attempts to bring about the problematic reign of ends.44

  One gets a better idea of future hopes and expectations not so much in closely argued positions as quite simply in the way people behaved. Some cases see the loftiest principles of Communism being translated into prescriptions for the needs of the immediate present. One Command made the following recommendation: ‘Incidentally, we say that it is not always a good thing to distribute into equal parts: when a political commissar knows his men thoroughly, he will distribute more fairly according to the needs of each man.’45

  Solidarity and dignity were requested and were willingly paired with each other. The waiters, like those of Petrograd described by John Reed in Ten Days that Shook the World, and like the barbers of Barcelona in the first weeks of the Spanish Civil War, no longer wanted to feel themselves despised by the workers, nor be considered ‘ever ready to sink to the worst sort of bowing and scraping in order to obtain a tip’; they no longer wanted to see themselves treated as ‘floor mats’ by the padroni who used them as ‘mudguards’ against the complaints of the customer, who, then, ‘moved to pity and wishing to show indulgence, pardons, and gives a few coins’ worth of tip, the humiliating alms’.46

  In the Action Party, too, or at least in one of its wings, there was strong activist commitment, the legacy of GL. But the need to assert their identity as a new party led the Actionists, who unlike the Communists had no solid doctrinaire references to appeal to, on the one hand to engage as far as was possible also in refining their ideological position and formulating a programme, and on the other hand to arguing that action was not just an instrument used with a view to the future but in some way already anticipated it. Re
ferring to the GL years, and rejecting ‘the fateful time of transition’, Vittorio Foa would later write that ‘liberation lay within the struggle. The future had to be lived immediately.’47 A somewhat forced exegesis of this grass-roots version of the ‘democratic revolution’ pursued by the Action Party was given by the GL partisan Mario Giovana:

  We even refused to stop and meditate about political issues and to read the newspapers that came up to us from the plain. Running through us were anarchist tremors (even when we believed ourselves to be indeed legitimists), in revolt against an infinite number of things from our past without the slightest notion of possible remedies, nor the wish to waste our time analysing prospects for the future. What good would that do?48

  The ‘Gobettian seriousness’, summed up in the formula ‘for this generation no leave is granted’,49 was likewise a way of calmly affirming faith in the future. It can be descried in this stance, which has its touch of rhetoric, against political professionalism and thus in favour of politics as the duty of everybody:

  Let us return home with simplicity, after twenty months of struggle and distance: we shall find the warmth of family affection, we shall find Mamma aged, poor blessed Mamma. Read, study in the newspapers about political problems which are problems that concern us, our well-being, our existence. Take the thought and not the form seriously, the work and not the chatter … Don’t trust the politicos: someone who wants to make a living from politics is above all an idler and always ready to sell himself into the bargain. Political activity comes at the end of the working day.50