At the source of a faith in a politically better future was faith in life and humanity. This was a characteristic feature of all the Resistance movements. ‘Hoping in life I go forth to death’, wrote a German woman worker before being beheaded; and a Frenchman, on the eve of being shot: ‘I wanted all humanity to be happy.’ A condemned Belgian woman believed that ‘after this war a life of happiness will begin’; and another Frenchman, who was sixteen years old, asked for ‘a free France and happy French people. Not a proud France, the top nation in the world, but a hard-working, industrious and honest France. That the French be happy, that’s the essential thing.’51
Paraphrasing an old anarchists’ song, an elderly Italian Communist said this to his children: ‘Love your motherland, but remember that one’s true patria is the whole world, and wherever your fellow-men are, they are your brothers.’52 ‘The world will improve, you can be sure of that’, wrote one of the members of the CMRP (the Piedmontese regional military command) with serene faith, before being shot on 5 April 1944 at the Martinetto rifle-range in Turin.53
Writing about the letters of those awaiting execution, Thomas Mann condemned the ‘infantile thought’ he had nourished between 1914 and 1918 that after the war ‘a life of happiness’ would begin: ‘Happiness and morality too are not, in fact, of this earth.’54 And at times it is the priority to be given to justice that seems to call into question the possibility of being happy: ‘But with peace it will be difficult for well-being and joy to return … Above all justice needs to be done’.55
Doubts and contradictions arose about seeing happiness as being the essence of the future. Not many resistenti, actually, belonged to that category, defined by Sorel, of those ‘optimistic, idealistic and sensitive’ types who ‘showed themselves to be the more unyielding the greater their desire for universal happiness’.56 Weighing on one and all was the accumulation of sufferings which drove a Catholic to invoke divine protection for his father, for ‘Italy, the world, the poor sad world as we have known it, and I especially’.57 It is the memory of so many fallen comrades and ‘the effort imposed on our nerves and our hearts to master sorrow’ which has ‘perhaps withered for ever our capacity for joy’. This is the doubt besetting Ada Gobetti, who tries to free herself from it by appealing to the intrinsic force of life: ‘Or maybe it won’t be like this, because life goes on inexorably and is stronger than anything. New creatures are born to replace those that have been lost and affirm the eternity of life.’58
This elementary appeal left all roads open, from the most dynamic to the most tranquilising, and each had its share of truth. After lacerating and prolonged collective upheavals, the tension involved in the effort to keep awake the need for change and the desire for security and peace which allow wounds to be assuaged may coexist far better than in so-called ‘normal’ periods, when security degenerates into conformity and tension gives way to boredom. Thus, the minority who have actively resisted and the majority of a population that has been sorely tested find themselves once again living in a climate of expectations – different, and at times conflicting, though they may be in terms of their contents and the formulae used to express them: from the Gobettian ‘generation to whom no leave is granted’ and ‘à da veni’ Baffone’ (‘Stalin is coming’), to the saying of the war veteran Gennaro Jovine in Eduardo di Filippo’s 1945 play Napoli Milionaria: ‘à da passa’ ‘a nuttata’ (‘this night must first pass’).
6. THE RETURN
Even for those who had not chosen to flee for home immediately, the hour of return arrived. This return has to be measured according to how high people’s aspirations were, and how deep the doubts accompanying them. The sense of an action not altogether completed wormed its way into satisfaction at the victory and the rediscovery of the full joy of living. ‘I felt uneasy, as if I didn’t really have the right to rejoice’, wrote one protagonist whose anxiety was permeated with ‘irritating streaks of tranquility’.1 It was an underlying joy, but one marred by shadows dense to the point of grief. The dispute, which was to drag on for a long time, between the disillusioned and the satisfied who had fought in the Resistance should take this elementary fact as its starting point. If the great utopian dream of the Resistance had been to succeed in slipping the grip that the twentieth century seemed to have prepared for man, to many resistenti it seemed that things had gone off course.2
Even before the Liberation, alarmed stances had been taken against a future demobilisation of people’s minds that might accompany that of the military formations. This included those, already mentioned, who were urged to go on being always, in every field, the best – ‘to be the first to do what they will have to demand of others’,3 to remember their ‘duty and obligation to be the first tomorrow in the no less important battle for reconstruction’.4
‘When it is all over with the Fascists and Germans’, asked Dante Di Nanni, ‘will we be truly free?’ And, in this possibly imaginary conversation, this was the answer Giovanni Pesce gave: ‘We shall be free to resume the struggle for true liberty, which exists only when every man is valued for what he is.’5 Likewise, in France a newspaper of the Francs-Tireurs Partisans Français had written that ‘our task does not start on day X and does not finish with it but will continue after the victory’; and still earlier than this, in its introductory leading article, another newspaper had announced: ‘We have understood that our union could not just limit itself to the duration of the war’.6
At the beginning of 1945, the commissar ‘Eros’ (Didimo Ferrari) had urged people to remain strong ‘so as to be at the breach tomorrow, determined to repress the reactionary forces that might attempt to impede the rebirth of Italy’.7 In the days of the Liberation, a GL newspaper wrote:
A thousand signs tell us that the forces of reaction are not dead. All around us we sense regret for the parades, the rhetoric, the big business deals, which all complement each other. If we could read into the hearts of many generals, prefects, industrialists, we would read the word Fascism. It will be up to us to defeat these forces.8
The unified Command of the partisan forces of the Maira valley, which was also strongly GL, told the demobbed partisans of the need to keep ‘ever ready to hasten back into the ranks the moment your job becomes necessary again’.9
The attitude of many Garibaldini is expressed in this warning: ‘As in Aesop’s Fables … Lads, eyes wide open! Dear comrades, if we needed only two eyes for the Germans, now we need four.’10 The men of the Gordini brigade declared themselves ‘ready to take up arms again in defence of the interest of the people and of Italian Democracy’; and meanwhile they gave the narrowest of interpretations to the handing over of arms, hanging on to ‘berets, tunics, red scarves, trousers, overcoats, trench coats, kit-bags, and cartridge pouches’.11 More explicitly, a Terni partisan made sure that the consignment of weapons to the British took place in the most orderly fashion, so as to show ‘that on that occasion we were only handing over weapons, not, to be sure, our ability to reorganise and rearm’12 – an assertion of proud collective identity that was more liable to arouse the distrust than the admiration of those who were in receipt of those weapons. Some Communists had entertained the idea of ‘conserving this force for the defence of the party when the struggle to drive the Germans out and liquidate Fascism is behind us’.13
Hand in hand with the exuberance of red belligerence, there was in fact distrust of what was still after all a bourgeois state, internationally located in the imperialist camp. Doubt as to the complete legality of the post-Liberation period had been rife even among the Communist leadership. ‘We mustn’t imagine that with the English the situation will be altogether legal [legalissima]; it may well not be like that’, Pietro Secchia had written at the end of 1943.14 Distrust of Rome, which does not bear any distinct ideological mark, had surfaced among the Actionists. Ferruccio Parri was to recall this, while Vittorio Foa had shown irritation towards the comrades of central and southern Italy who were expecting everything from what was then to
be called ‘il vento del nord’ (‘the north wind’).15 The concealing of arms, a ‘subterfuge’ authorised sotto voce by several Communist partisan chiefs of the North,16 was the most immediate way in which the mixture of suspicions and hopes expressed itself.17
‘Throughout the Fifties’, one partisan has recalled, ‘there was the conviction that the war of liberation was not over’.18 The return to the mountains where – an extreme prospect – ‘we shall fight among ourselves’19 was the alternative contemplated here and there, until the unsuccessful and innocuous attempts of August 1946 put paid to it forever.20
Hopes placed in hidden weapons were at least as great as repugnance for the openly displayed weapons to be used in the regular units – above all those responsible for public safety, where the partisans had hoped to find a place for themselves after the war.21 Once the prospect of a radical democratic renewal involving the military and police institutions had come to nothing, a future as professional soldiers or policemen could not have warmed the hearts of the partisans, leaving aside growing government distrust about their presence in such delicate sectors of the state machinery. Those who had repudiated the Royal Army and had reasoned like the partisan Condor (‘Then wars finish and you’re worse off than before. But this time those signori, the king’s officers, aren’t here to command us’22) were doomed to disappointment.
An ex-deportee, who enlisted in the police, recalled: ‘It was mortifying finding myself again in a military milieu’; and in fact this was not the way to redress the ‘inertia, the indifference that we found in Italy, which has wounded us far more than German hatred wounded us’.23 The PCI urged its most trusted militants to enlist, and a certain number undoubtedly obeyed. But, whatever the underlying political purpose of that invitation, a militant could find himself in situations like this one recounted by a Terni partisan:
Then an order came – the party was urging us to join the police … But at the last minute I pulled out, because I heard the reasoning of a policeman, who while explaining how a light machine-gun worked – which in any case we knew better than they did – was saying: ‘OK, now on the church tower, when all the scum are up there yelling, let ’em have it, with machine-gun volleys …’ It was then I realised what it was all about. What I say is steer clear of it, or things will come to a sorry pass.24
Thus the end of the Resistance saw the reappearance of the conflict, which the process of militarisation had sought to resolve, between ‘the Communard spirit that any movement of rebellion, linked to the people, instils in the masses of the disinherited’25 and the requirements of an institutionalisation that was moreover felt to be old and politically untrustworthy. Solidarity taken as having been acquired once and for all was rapidly being belied. In Bologna, shortly after the liberation of the city, Elio Cicchetti found himself by mistake in a partisan headquarters different from the one he was looking for:
‘Sorry, comrades’. ‘We’re not comrades,’ one of them explained, ‘we’re partisans, but not comrades’. ‘Pardon me, sorry again,’ I repeated, a trifle resentfully. I didn’t know you could offend someone by calling a partisan a comrade. I really didn’t know. Of everyone I had known during the struggle, no one had ever taken it out on me for hearing themselves called comrade. At the time I didn’t think too much about that distinction, but I vaguely sensed that it must have its own particular importance if they had been so keen to draw my attention to it. I went down the steps again shaking my head. I had better things to do than try to understand certain nuances of language. In the years that followed, thinking back on that small incident, I came to understand better and better its significance.26
A partisan diehard spirit, then, hovered over Italy.27 In contrast with the demoralised ex-combatants of 1940–43 and the doubly defeated men of the Social Republic, the partisans were the only ones for whom the fact of having fought constituted an undeniable badge of nobility. But it became clear at once, and would become still clearer in the immediately ensuing Cold War years, that it was a badge that didn’t get you far in practical terms, and that it could also be turned on its head; and we know how underrated or indeed unacknowledged glory is a breeding ground for veterans’ resentment.
There had been partisans who had declared that they ‘disdained any preference and any privilege over other workers by virtue of this past of theirs’.28 But this austere attitude could exacerbate the discomfort indicated in a book of memoirs: ‘With our victory, with our descent into the cities, our partisans’ morale undoubtedly underwent its most severe trial.’29 And the author of another book of memoirs, with a rage that the years have done nothing to placate: ‘Never has a national movement been betrayed in the twinkling of an eye by the bourgeois pack of hounds of the cities.’30
The prediction of the ever level-headed Emanuele Artom had been: ‘The government will never be able to abandon the partisans. In looking after the ex-combatants, which it cannot avoid doing, we will have to come first.’31 A certain Major Barni seems to have gone so far as to dream that ‘in the future republican state only those who participated in the war of liberation will have full rights’.32 Lelio Basso, with the ‘soviets of workers, peasants and soldiers’ in mind, thought, not only for the partisans, of ‘Veterans’ Councils’, to set alongside those for factories and farms.33 Dante Livio Bianco had noted alarming symptoms of trincerismo (a diehard trench mentality) in the apolitical partisans.34
And it was indeed the politicisation of the bands, which at the day of reckoning strongly insisted on their militarisation and still more on their final unification under an exclusively military sign, that prevented a partisan diehard veteran’s mentality from thriving. Massimo Mila grasped this fact when, warning against the birth of a ‘partisan belligerence’, he considered ‘the partisans going their various ways into different parties and the liquefaction of “unification” a good thing’: the partisans, he said, ought to let their voices be heard through their parties.35 One might also add that those who had more or less candidly professed themselves to be apolitical had chosen their parties too. This is borne out by the fact that while the ex-’regular’ servicemen were to conserve a single association – the ‘The National Association of Combatants and Veterans of All Wars’ – the partisans were to group themselves very quickly according to the major political and ideological tendencies.36
But the memory of the Resistance is not exhausted in the partisans’ associations. An adequate study still has to be made of the post-war process that presents two apparently contradictory faces. On the one hand, there was the demobilisation not only of the armed partisans but of all ‘resistance society’, only a small part of which would enter ‘political society’. For the women, this withdrawal often came to seem like expulsion at the very moment when the long wave of the Resistance was bringing them the vote. On the other hand, Italy witnessed the persistence of a memory that, for all the distrust and official celebrations and alternating waves of political preferences, came to constitute a subtle and intricate thread of a fairly broad part of collective consciousness – that in which ‘the memory of the wounded, the capacity for endurance, and the refusal of the unacceptable are deposited’.37 Like all great historical events, the Resistance also influenced those who had not taken part in it, though in a less triumphant way than the resistenti would have wished.38 Recalling the quotation with which this book began, we might observe that those who had seen only the hazards in the two years that had just passed tried to repress the memory of it; those who had experienced it as an opportunity, and who emerged from it transformed, had to strike a difficult balance between the processing of memory and the processing of a project that on no account was to become just a mere scrap of memory.
What one had proved to oneself about oneself became inscribed in the legacy of one’s own personal identity: ‘Certainly it was a mark of character if you were capable of committing yourself so completely; certainly it was a precious thing to have this secular faith in humanity which unfortunately many o
f us lack or which is so tinged with practical scepticism.’39 Burying one’s machine-gun became the symbol of the interment of a road towards the future, which might nevertheless be trodden once again: ‘Given that for the time being there was no longer anything for them to do, they returned home and buried their machine-guns. But engraved within them there remained that great dream that they had yearned for up in the mountains: the honest and unique dream of social renewal.’40
In his memoirs, a Fascist was keen to equate the odi et amo complex of the resistenti regarding the outcome of their experience with the hopelessness of the Fascist catastrophe: ‘Among them as well there was by now an air of having been liquidated’, he wrote; and he quotes a Fascist prisoner as saying: ‘You see, they’ve screwed you as well.’41
Perhaps this Fascist longed to find common ground with those who had beaten him in the cultivation of a new myth of the ‘mutilated victory’. Standing out in contrast to this consolatory and transformist advance is the chasteness of the position taken by the French Fascist Drieu La Rochelle: ‘Be faithful to the pride of the Resistance, as I am faithful to the pride of the Collaborators. Do not cheat me any more than I am cheating you. Sentence me to death.’42
The welding together of the generation of the active anti-Fascists of the ventennio and that of the resistenti gave birth, as I said earlier, to a long generation, favoured by the fact that the same thing happened in the Resistance as, it has been said, happens in revolutions: namely that thirty- to forty-year-old people ‘who believed themselves young’43 found themselves in positions of command. The generation of the adversities remained a short generation and, in this sense, the post-war period came to an end earlier for them, not without several advantages, before it did for those who felt committed to keeping open the season of the great opportunities. The long generation may be said to have ended only in 1968 (with some initial symptoms in 1956), when, in an Italy where, by virtue of its very longevity, it had been incapable of perceiving all that was new, a new generation appeared on the scene, eager to take up again the task of widening the field of possibility. Up to that moment the generation of anti-Fascism and of the Resistance had been able to grow old without having to face new rites of passage. These appeared in 1968 and were to be extremely demanding; for many of the older generation they were to prove insuperable. But the polemics against the Resistance as a failed revolution of one’s fathers and the subsequent salvage operations (‘the Resistance is red, it is not Christian Democrat’) are perhaps less significant, from the point of view of passages between generations, than the auroral and truly resistenziale atmosphere recalled some years later by a sessantottotino (sixty-eighter):
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