A Civil War (151 page)

The debate about the foundations, breadth and results of the post-war anti-Fascist purging lies at the junction between a past that had to be repudiated and punished, but also understood, and a future to be safeguarded against any new risk of a Fascist nature. The condemnation of Fascist conduct, even of decisions to support the Social Republic, had to give due consideration to the need to live with certain results of that behaviour and those decisions that could not be eliminated. All would depend on the clarity of ideas and the moral and political strength that one succeeded in bringing into play. Togliatti went so far as to say that the doors of the Communist Party should not be closed even to those who, out of necessity, had sworn allegiance to the Social Republic
⁷
– and that the party was a voluntary association, not a necessary one, as the state was. When Mauro Scoccimarro, the high commissioner for the
epurazione
(the anti-Fascist purging process), accelerated the crisis of Bonomi's first government by giving an interview in which he demanded greater punitive vigour, at party headquarters he was severely reprimanded by Togliatti, who was echoed by Giuseppe Di Vittorio: ‘The purging has made us appear … as elements who wanted to ruthlessly punish all those, and there are millions of them, who have in one way or another performed Fascist activities. We have failed to maintain the imprint that was ours in the long years of national unitary political action.'

Ermete (Agostino Novella) sealed this position by urging a ‘stronger reaction against the orientation of the party rank-and-file', who were demanding greater rigour.
⁸

Very rarely during the Resistance were blanket condemnations or absolutions of the Italian people pronounced. Judgments about collective responsibility were immediately splintered and diversified, passing at times from one side to another. Nevertheless, even though not everyone spoke about it, weighing on one and all was the shadow of the suspicion that Fascism had been, as Gobetti had said, the autobiography of the Italians – the hallmark of a historical inferiority that began at least with the sad triumph of ‘Guicciardini's man', the prototype of the Italian who only thinks of his own interests, referred to by De Sanctis.
⁹
A
book about the reconstruction of Italy published in England in 1941 had already sought to combat this defeatist pessimism, which was indeed greatly fanned by comparison with the English model, noting that Italy had ‘erroneously' been deemed ‘more inclined than other western nations to throw herself into the arms of a dictator'.
¹⁰
In his last letter to his brother Luigi, Giaime Pintor made a severe remark about the Italian people, ‘flabby, profoundly corrupted by her recent history, always on the point of giving in to an act of cowardice or a weakness', but expressed faith in the revolutionary minorities which Italy possessed and in the fact that ‘today all the possibilities of the Risorgimento are once again open to the Italians'.
¹¹

An article that appeared in the clandestine edition of
Avanti!
, and which was certainly penned by an old pre-Fascist, juxtaposed, as was often the case in these acts of self-flagellation, a drastic condemnation, an invitation to keep quiet out of charity for the
patria
, and finally an obligatory optimism: ‘That the wretched twenty-year business has laid bare the political acerbity and spiritual inadequacy of a whole people, is, unhappily, a truth which it is as well not repeat to others or to ourselves'; but this does not mean that ‘the Italian people are the constitutional village idiot'.
¹²

At least two roads diverged from the recognition of the people's misdeeds and weaknesses. The first finished by taking the reverse turn of indemnity for one and all. The second attempted a more carefully considered judgment. Both contained elements of realism, in the sense that they called into question the consolatory image of a civil people instinctively hostile to tyranny.

The first position is formulated particularly clearly in several Liberal Party writings, chiefly from the Roman area, aimed at encouraging the emergence of the very few and uncorrupted elect to lead the cowardly and compromised majority. This line had been taken early on in a pamphlet by Niccolò Carandini,
¹³
and was then repeated and developed in various ways.
Il Risorgimento Liberale
wrote: ‘It was the fault of one and all, with the due exception of the few superior spirits
who knew how to steer clear of all these errors.'
¹⁴
With rhetorical élan, Medici Tornaquinci was to say: ‘To purge ourselves of twenty years of tyranny which the whole nation was responsible for having accepted and tolerated … it was necessary for the nation to suffer, fight, bleed.'
¹⁵

The most cultivated formulation of this attitude was given by Benedetto Croce in the famous passage in which, after sketching a scornful portrait of Mussolini, he adds:

Actually, these words suggest a distinction between the active responsibility of the leader and the passive responsibility of the people, and, though the ruling class is placed in parenthesis, this distinction is less simplistic than Churchill's pragmatic formula of ‘one man, one man alone', being responsible for Italy's misfortunes. Taddeo Orlandi, General Commander of the
carabinieri
, took his cue instead, without further ado, from this
lectio facilior
(facile reading) when, saying he was convinced that he was speaking for the ‘best Roman circles', he hoped that the Allies would understand that ‘Italy is paying for the misdeeds of one man', and had already paid enough.
¹⁷

In the Catholic press the problem of the responsibility of everyone, of only a few, or of just one
¹⁸
acquired notable intensity, but contradictory slants as well. De Gasperi, the candidate for the ‘succession', sought to grasp the lifeline thrown by Churchill and to give it greater solidity. He wrote that
the Italian people, ‘as English and American statesmen have solemnly admitted, are not to be held responsible for Mussolini's bids for conquest'.
¹⁹
But less than a couple of months earlier, in the same newspaper, a quivering piece of invective had appeared against ‘the vast majority of Italians … who were jointly responsible for the appalling disaster' and against ‘the tendency to obliterate past offences in order to look only to the future. A convenient expedient to evade individual and collective responsibilities; but a dreadful beginning for a radical renewal of national life which the utter ruin of the country demands.'
²⁰

The fire animating this article (which – and this was quite something for a Catholic broadsheet – even succeeds in mentioning Guernica)
²¹
smacks of a young person's pen, as does an article that appeared soon after De Gasperi's, quoted above: ‘Let's face facts: the great majority of the people have been emasculated … And enough with the myth of Rome, with the millenary tradition of the race, of imperial destiny, the cradle of art, of Christianity. Only babies sleep in cradles.'
²²

An article in
La Punta
, organ of the young Christian Democrats, presented an exemplary sequence of arguments. The article began by affirming that ‘no
truly
civil people' would have tolerated Fascism: the few banished and exiled do not change this sad reality. Therefore,

From this point on the article slid towards a total distrust in the Italian people's capacity for self-redemption – ‘are the Italians really ready
intellectually
to understand what liberty is?' – and, therefore, to indicating pedagogic instruction as the sole path to salvation: ‘Educate! Educate! That is the real mission. Indeed,
re-educate
the thousands and thousands of young people led astray and bewildered.' The article ended by reversing the initial position with an appeal more or less to wait on events: ‘Abandon the stolid propaganda of retaliation and
recrimination over the German and republican-Fascist acts of baseness. Cease from inciting hatred. Ignore the recent past. Because the present and the future are what count for us.'
²³

The condemnation of the Italian people and their misdeeds, in whatever ideological context it was found, could assume widely diverse tones: forthright and hard-bitten, if those crying it were the young; flaccid and self-absolving if it was being preached by older folk. In the Catholics, moreover, the path of intransigence ran up against the thorny question of the relations between the Church and the regime. However noble the appeals to ‘shift the problem of responsibility onto us and begin the work of redemption from ourselves, from our innermost conscience, to lead it to the light of social life',
²⁴
the problem nevertheless remained. And it could not be dodged by unconsidered assertions like this one which appeared, during the Badoglio period, in
L'Italia
, the Milanese Catholic newspaper: ‘Catholics have bent their backs less than anyone else',
²⁵
nor by the other, still more facile one according to which Pius XI had come to an accord with Mussolini, who had however deceived him, out of excessive love for Italy and because he had taken the class collaboration preached by Fascism seriously. This misapprehension had lasted, continued the journalist, prefiguring a successful historiographical thesis, until racism and the alliance with Nazism came along to set the record straight.
²⁶

On the left as well there was a mixture, albeit of a different kind, between the desire for moral clarity, realism and pragmatism. The left showed itself sensitive to the duty of safeguarding the good name of the Italian people abroad. An elaborate top-level document, like the pact of unity of action between the PCI and the PSIUP of October 1943, solemnly affirmed that the two parties were deciding to ‘join forces in the international field against any direct attempt to put the blame on the Italian people for the Fascist regime, against which the popular avant-garde has waged a heroic struggle for twenty years'.
²⁷
The appeal to the avant-gardes' struggle was de rigueur; but the relationship between the latter and the people remained a doctrinaire postulate. In the same days in October
L'Unità
took a less all-absolving stance, distinguishing between Communists and the working class on the one hand, and the rest of the Italian people on the other. A people, it was explained, which ‘by washing away its grave responsibility for its participation in the odious
Fascist war of aggression, regains the right to the collaboration and aid of free peoples'.
²⁸

These acknowledgments of popular responsibility were gradually to disappear, or almost so, from the Communist press, committed as it was to presenting a people marvellously in unison with its avant-gardes. Those with any doubts about this were reproached. Thus a commissar who had attributed ‘the errors of the past' to the ‘widespread, ignorant superficiality and
pecorinismo
[sheeplike, or poor-spirited, character] congenital to Italians', received a reprimand intended as a real history lesson: it was not the people's fault if all the anti-Fascist parties, save one, capitulated; if at times the people had wavered, this was due to those capitulations; in 1919–20 the people fought for power ‘alone against everybody and against its own party'; then there were the people's Arditi, the events in Parma, ‘true' anti-Fascism, Spain, the 1943 strikes. So energetic was this indignant harangue that the conclusion contradicted the initial assumption: deficiencies in the people, if they existed, stemmed only from those of the avant-garde.
²⁹

In its newspaper
Virtù e Lavoro
, the Fronte della gioventù (Youth Front) of San Vito al Tagliamento had declared:

The local Communist Party leaders did not take kindly to so much pedagogic zeal, smacking as it did of anarchy:

Obviously, behind these stances was the view of Fascism as being the work of capitalism or, to revert to the well-known Third Internationalist formula, of the more aggressive and reactionary forces of finance capitalism. This view of things made it possible to project onto the entire people (once the capitalists, and not even all of them, had been separated from it) the anti-Fascist purity of the working class and its avant-garde, skipping the changes of position and nuances which, in their more carefully thought-out documents, the Communists themselves had sought to analyse.
³¹