I still have the memory of a profound euphoria, an experience of happiness, of great faith in ourselves and in others. The extraordinary thing was above all seeing in a very brief space of time the transformations that took place in people. Young people who until the day before I had seen as moderates and totally indifferent to social problems changing their attitude completely, as if the discovery of new tools of communication made it possible to draw out of the unconscious of each what until that moment had lain buried.44
When Parri had been crushed ‘between the two theological and cardinalitial faces of the two illustrious leaders of the left and the right [Togliatti and De Gasperi] and by the symmetrical glinting of their spectacles’, and the faces of the ushers of the Viminale glowed with satisfaction that the intruders had been driven out,45 something was already over:
In the history of post-war Italy, Prime Minister Parri emerges as an appealing and tragic figure. A man of unquestioned integrity, of lofty aspirations and a conscience tempered through long suffering, he had a Lincolnian grandeur. But the very lack of political and administrative experience that made him so attractive as a symbol of a new and better Italy was also his ruin.46
For many, that was the beginning of the end of the post-war era, and they heaved a sigh of relief. Some were delighted, and were even more delighted on 18 April 1948, that the danger had been avoided. Others seized the opportunity to turn their backs on the terrible recent past without deeply engaging their passions, if passions they had. Others still concentrated on the effort for survival, which required work, food and home, as well as the rediscovery of the capacity simply to have fun. This is what Colonel Stevens failed to grasp when, from the microphones of Radio London, he contrasted with a Europe hard at work on the job of reconstruction an Italy where – what are they doing? – ‘In Italy they’re dancing.’47
Perhaps nobody expected years that might have seemed, as Calvino said, a new belle époque. When these years came, they came as a surprise above all to those who had seen the moral catastrophe suffered by mankind at Auschwitz as foreshadowing the final catastrophe of the entire species, which Hiroshima, also a product of man, showed to be possible48 – and to those who had at that same time placed their trust in new struggles and newly attainable concord to rescue and redeem the future.
1 See Chapter 3.2.
2 For an example of this type of critique of the theory of political exchange, see Hirschman, Shifting Involvements, pp. 94–100.
3 Testimony of Raffaele Maruffi, mechanical engineer born in 1924 (Bravo and Jalla, La vita offesa, p. 195).
4 This image was used, with regard to the impegno meridionalista (i.e. post-war efforts to develop the socio-economic conditions of the South of Italy), by Rossi-Doria in his 1967 report L’osso e la polpa dell’agricoltura meridionale. See M. De Benedictis, ‘Manlio Rossi-Doria’, in Belfagor XLV (1990), pp. 284–5.
5 See ‘Intervista sulla guerra partigiana’, an interview he gave to L. La Malfa Calogero and M.V. de Filippis, pp. 22–4. Note the statement that ‘military formations are not the place for doing politics’ in ‘Proposte di una delibera del CLNAI per la costituzione di una commissione responsabile delle operazioni militari in Lombardia’, late December 1943 (Atti CVL, Appendix 1, paragraph 5).
6 Though himself very political, the Garibaldian commissar Eros (Didimo Ferrari: see the fine pages devoted to him in Battaglia, Un uomo) wrote, together with the commander Monti, that ‘doing politics merely means preparing the body, will and spirit for action’ (report on ‘operational activity’, late October 1944 (?), IG, BG, Emilia-Romagna, G.IV).
7 Battaglia, Un uomo, pp. 186–9.
8 M.A. and S. Timpanaro, ‘Introduzione’ in G. and E. Varlecchi, Potente, p. 33.
9 Bianco, Guerra partigiana, pp. 62–3, on a document he drew up on 26 March 1944 in his role as a political commissar: later published in part in Formazioni GL, pp. 78–80.
10 Fogar, Le brigate Osoppo-Friuli, p. 286
11 ‘Bollettino n. 43’, by the Command of the 52nd Luigi Clerici Brigade, 22 August 1944 (IG, BG, 0625).
12 INSMLI, CLNAI, envelope 8, folder 12.
13 It would be interesting to compare this Resistance understanding with the results of the historiography which, beginning with the studies of Alberto Aquarone, has insisted on the gradual ‘depoliticisation’ of the Fascist Party.
14 LRI, pp. 228–31 (the letter is from summer/autumn 1944; Ulivi was shot on 10 November of that year).
15 ‘Il principio (Orientamenti liberali)’, edited by the Piedmont section of the PLI (supplement to issue 5 of L’Opinione, n.d).
16 The text is quoted in Gorrieri, La Repubblica di Montefiorino, pp. 390–1. See ‘La Democrazia cristiana invita i giovani a lavorare per un’Italia migliore‘, editorial of the 25 September 1944 Northern edition of Il Popolo.
17 ‘Risveglio’, Risorgimento Liberale, Rome edition, 15 March 1944.
18 Diena, La rivoluzione minimalista, p. 8.
19 As Giustizia e Libertà. Notiziario dei patrioti delle Alpi Cozie, April 1944, put it (quoted in Giovana, Storia di una formazione partigiana, p. 105).
20 Artom, Diari, p. 151 (26 January 1944).
21 The words of ‘machine shop worker’ Georges Navel in his Travaux, cited – though not agreeing with him – by Caffi, Critica della violenza, p. 93.
22 Rome edition, 12 January 1944.
23 See A. Rossi-Doria, Il ministro e i contadini. Decreti Gullo e lotte nel Mezzogiorno (1944–1949), Rome: Bulzoni, 1983.
24 F. Traniello, ‘Stato e partiti alle origini della Repubblica nel dibattito storiografico’, in Italia contemporanea 135 (April–June 1979), pp. 3–15, esp. p. 5.
25 Foa, Carlo Levi, pp. 50–1.
26 Spinelli, Io, Ulisse, p. 117.
27 Note the sharpness with which Foa claimed that the parties had failed their first anti-Fascist duty: ‘to tell the truth’ (Inverni, I partiti, p. 17).
28 Spinelli, Io, Ulisse, p. 102. As he began to distance himself from the PCI, Spinelli remained moved by ‘Secchia’s immense rescue effort, which I could only manage to explain with the idea that he, at heart, wanted to save a friend, showing what was, for a Bolshevik, a reproachable weakness’ (ibid., p. 247).
29 Battaglia, Un uomo, p. 80. See also pp. 5, 6.
30 ‘Origini del movimento’, Bollettino Popolo e Libertà, 1, pp. 2–3.
31 Hirschman, Shifting Involvements, p. 100, with reference not only to Machiavelli but also to Sartre’s Mains sales. ‘Sartre’s epigones’ have developed a true ‘Manichean myth’ around this play: ‘to act implies sacrifice, in the superstitious sense of the term’, forcing one to ‘reduce to ashes that which one holds most dear’. E. Morin, ‘La dialectique et l’action’, in Arguments, April–May 1958, p. 13, quoted by L. Sciolla, ‘Opposizione intellettuale e PCF: l’esperienza di “Arguments” ’, in Rivista di storia contemporanea X (1981), p. 132.
32 Bruzzone and Farina, La Resistenza taciuta, p. 110.
33 V. Foa, ‘Le strutture economiche e la politica economica del regime fascista’, in Fascismo e antifascismo (1918–1948). Lezioni e testimonianze, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962, p. 281.
34 Germani, Autoritarismo, especially the concluding pages.
35 ‘Abbiamo intervistato un partigiano’, in Voce Operaia, 19 November 1943.
36 Todorov, ‘La tolleranza e l’intollerabile’, p. 95, paraphrasing Spinoza.
37 ‘Only a ruling class which feels itself to be threatened is afraid to flaunt a double standard’. E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common, London: Merlin, p. 55.
38 ‘Dichiarazione costitutiva’, by the Partito Italiano del Lavoro (pamphlet ‘Partito italiano del lavoro – “Popolo e Libertà”,’ January 1944, p. 32).
39 See Bianco, Guerra partigiana, and Fenoglio, Il partigiano Johnny, p. 182.
40 Meneghello, Bau-sète, p. 69.
1 F. Calamandrei, ‘Piero Calamandrei mio padre’, essay introducing P. Calamandrei, Diario 1939–1945, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1
982, pp. xii–xiii.
2 Falaschi, La Resistenza armata, pp. 163, 165. This concerned the story of a partisan who had to shoot a girl as a spy, but feared that he might previously have known her. But then he could tell from her teeth that this was not the case, and shot her without further hesitation.
3 See Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1951, Part III.
4 B. Fenoglio, Una questione privata, Milan: Garzanti, 1965, p. 28.
5 Calamandrei, La vita indivisibile, p. 119 (4 November 1943).
6 Testimony of Nelia Benissone Costa, in Bruzzone and Farina, La Resistenza taciuta, p. 60.
7 Testimony of Milan’s Ida Rovelli in A voi cari compagni, p. 69.
8 Cicchetti, Il campo giusto, p. 220.
9 R. Sbardella, ‘Movimento reale e critica della politica’, in L. Vitale and C. Pavone, eds, Contro l’autonomia della politica, Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1978, p. 64 (‘Quaderni di Fabbrica e Stato’, 6–7).
10 I. Calvino, ‘La sfida al labirinto’, in Il Menabò di letteratura 5 (1962), p. 95.
11 Battaglia, Un uomo, pp. 60–1.
12 Gobetti, Diario partigiano, p. 15.
13 J. Michelet, Le peuple, Brussels: Meline, Cans et Compagnie, 1846, pp. 205–6; with these words begins Chapter 1, ‘L’amitié’, of part III, ‘De l’affranchissement par l’amour: La Patrie’.
14 Testimonies of Maria Luisa Fasana Oggero and Natalina Bianco Giai (Bravo and Jalla, La vita offesa, p. 108).
15 Partito italiano del lavoro – ‘Popolo e Libertà, January 1944.
16 ‘Conoscerci’, La Voce dei giovani, 1 August 1944 (very likely written by Delfino Insolera).
17 On all this, see the chapter ‘Conflitto, solidarietà, organizzazione’, in Levi, I sommersi e i salvati.
18 See, on this development, A. Lay, ‘Un’ etica per la classe: dalla fraternità universale alla solidarietà operaia’, in Rivista di storia contemporanea XVIII (1989), pp. 309–35.
19 The 20 March 1944 edition featured the subheading: ‘We take liberty as our principle, equality as our means, fraternity as our end. Proudhon.’
20 See Chapter 4.2, above. Note Hood’s memoirs, Pebbles from my Skull.
21 Absalom, Ex prigionieri alleati, p. 462 and n. 43; Absalom draws his quotes from the article ‘Fucilazione di un rinnegato’ in La Santa Milizia, weekly of the Ravenna PFR fascio, of 8 January 1944; he adds that the Allied authorities later refused the shot man’s father any compensation, because ‘the help he provided was too little to justify any reimbursement’. However, his widow was paid the sum given for fallen ‘helpers’.
22 Saint-Just, Fragments sur les institutions républicaines, §6, 2.
23 See the articles ‘Contattismo e sedentarismo, malatti dei cattolici’ and ‘ “Contattismo” e contatto personale’ in Voce Operaia, 16 December 1943 and 5 January 1944. The polemic was directed against the Catholic practice of operating politically by means of personal contacts (which would, in fact, be one of Christian Democracy’s strong points). See also the articles ‘Organizzazione rivoluzionaria’ and ‘Che fare, noi sacerdoti’, in the issues of 4 October and 16 December 1943.
24 See Portelli, Biografia di una città, p. 231. See the letter from the Austrian Communist Franz Reingruber, who had been sentenced to death, to his mother: ‘Yes, this [struggle] has completely absorbed me, but at the very bottom of my heart I loved you with all the intensity with which a son can love’ (8 May 1943, in LRE, p. 49).
25 Pajetta, Il ragazzo rosso va alla guerra, p. 34.
26 Fenoglio, Il padrone paga male, p. 127.
27 Such was how Artom noted having heard one militant define communism: Artom, Diari, p. 102 (4 December 1943).
28 Albero, to the insurrectionary triumvirate for Lombardy, 9 March 1945 (IG, BG, 01880).
29 ‘At that time we had no “brakes” put on us, neither by events, nor by politicians, Party leaders standing over us [Longo and him] on account of their capacity and authority’: a diary entry written in December 1954, Pietro Secchia, 1945–1973, ed. E. Collotti (‘Annali dell’Istituto Giangiacomo Feltrinelli’, XIX, 1978, p. 258). Such a situation of relative autonomy primarily concerned the early months of the Resistance. The Party’s ‘provisional organisational norms’, drawn up by Togliatti in Naples on 27 June 1944, were also printed in the North just after Liberation, as No. 1 of Le guide dell’organizzatore comunista, Milan: Tip. Rosia, 1945 (my thanks to Giovanni Verni for supplying me with this information). These ‘norms’ held that ‘every communist is a militant’; it is notable that Togliatti himself rendered the word ‘party’ with a lower-case ‘p’ (IG, Archivio PCI, ‘Direzione. Verbali della Delegazione PCI per l’Italia meridionale’).
30 Secchia added ‘I go to C … to Colonel X and all his breed when the Party’s interest demands it: that is the norm we live by’. In the margin Luca (Gian Carlo Pajetta) made a note: ‘Could we be less soldier-ish in the old manner?’
31 The letter, sent from the ‘commissar-general Vineis’ to the Valle di Lanzo Military Committee, 21 December 1943, published in Le Brigate Garibaldi, vol. I, pp. 173–8. Note the article ‘Lo spirito di partito’, in L’Unità, Rome edition, 26 October 1943.
32 E. H. Carr, A History of Soviet Russia, Foundations of a Planned Economy 1926–1929, vol. II, London: Macmillan, 1971, p. 91. The passage refers to the Communist Party Central Committee meeting of 16–23 April 1929.
33 Spinelli, Io, Ulisse, p. 193. Spinelli had been no less of this view in the Communist youth militia, where he was pestered by the ‘problems of no significance’ which the student comrades, unlike the workers, heaped on him; he termed the suicide of one of these students ‘a petty-bourgeois act’, the suicide having placed ‘ “his own personal preoccupations above his duties as a Communist” … meeting an icy response from those present. “What are you, made of stone?” one of them said’ (ibid., p. 76).
34 Ibid., p. 247.
35 See N. Ajello, Intellettuali e Pci. 1944–1958, Bari: Laterza, 1979, p. 187.
36 L’Unità, 17 October 1980, on the occasion of Longo’s death.
37 See Spinelli, Io, Ulisse, pp. 159–60, with reference to Viterbo prison.
38 Transcript of 20 October 1944, in IG, BG 01519. Immediately after Liberation, such objections manifested themselves, and with their own specific tone, in the area around Gradisca, on the Yugoslav border. A document of the local ‘Communist Committee’ firmly argued that ‘they must be considered Party members’ and not sympathisers, generic anti-Fascists or members of the youth federation. With a characteristic leap into universal judgements, the document concluded: ‘He is a member of the Party, he who is active and gives his whole self for the future development of humanity – independently of his political maturity’ (document from the Osoppo archive, a copy of which Galliano Fogar gave to the IRSFVG).
39 ‘Estratto di una lettera del Comando unificato (Divisione Sesia – Divisione Ossola), ufficio del commissario politico’, from the commissar of the Volante Loss Brigade, undated but from winter 1944–45 (IG, BG, 06560).
40 Pesce, Senza tregua, p. 166.
41 Ibid., p. 163.
42 Letter from Riccardo to the Lombardy Delegation, n.d. (IG, BG, 01775).
43 ‘Rinnovarsi per progredire’, in the 25 January 1944 northern edition. On top of this consideration, there was also the ‘division between the recreational and political fields’, much greater among the Communists than the Socialists, which has been discussed by Victoria De Grazia (De Grazia and Passerini, Alle origini della cultura di massa, p. 25).
44 ‘Rapporto al centro del Partito’ by Banfi, Emilia, 16 December 1943 (IG, Archivio PCI).
45 Testimony of Arnaldo Lippi (Portelli, Biografia di una città, p. 26); testimony of Maria Francesca Accossato, widow of Sandrone, in Guidetti Serra, Compagne, vol. I, p. 31. On the lasting difficult relation between friendship and ‘the cement of politics’ among Communist trade union leaders after Liberation, see S. Tatò’s interview of Emilio Gugl
ielmino (A voi cari compagni, pp. 25–45). An analogy could be drawn between the Communist trade unionist among the workers and the Party militant among partisans.
46 Testimony of Teresa Cirio, in Bruzzone and Farina, La Resistenza taciuta, p. 74.
47 See Unità e Libertà, Domodossola, 28 September 1944.
48 ‘Informazioni da Milano’, 15 December 1944 (Secchia, Il PCI e la guerra di liberazione, p. 708).
49 Testimony of Giovanni Serbandini, in G. Bocca, Storia dell’Italia partigiana, Bari: Laterza, 1966, p. 99.
50 Lazagna, Ponte rotto, p. 40.
51 Among the many firm statements to this effect, see the letter from the ‘comrades responsible’ for the Piedmont Delegation sent to those responsible for the Val di Susa brigades on 12 July 1944, and the ‘Direttive organizzative e di lavoro’, dated 28 January 1945, drawn up by the directorate of the Party Committee for the Friuli Division (Le Brigate Garibaldi, vol. II, pp. 116–20, and vol. III, pp. 299–302).
A Civil War Page 113
