A Civil War (52 page)

Rejection of the king, the generals and the discredited government of the South as guides, or even simply as fully fledged comrades in the war against the Germans, could even reach the point of questioning the very opportuneness of that war. By this I do not mean certain strictly class attitudes, to which we will have to return, but to a form of abstract moralist–revolutionary intransigence,
which was nonetheless able to identify several genuinely problematic questions. The clearest formulations of this sort of populist, aristocratic and self-punitive fence-sitting are found in the press of the small Partito Italiano del Lavoro. A people still widely polluted by servile behaviour was not – it was claimed – worthy of participating in a war that free peoples were waging. To avoid being confused with the turncoat reactionaries, the only viable path remaining was to abstain from fighting the new war that the latter were now sponsoring, following the ‘umpteenth betrayal' by that ‘despicable dwarf', the king.
³⁵
A declaration inspired along these lines states:

From this it was deduced that ‘Italy's war against Germany is immoral and politically absurd'.
³⁷
Within this moralising pessimism, which underrated the northern population's capacity to react and fight, immediate objectives were nevertheless posed that did not widely differ, save in the stress laid on the defensive spirit, from that envisaged by those who strongly advocated war against Germany and the Fascists: armed defence of people, houses and cities, assistance to the persecuted and their families, refusal to collaborate in public services and public offices. Almost a year later another newspaper of the same group was to write: ‘It's wrong to think that the mere fact that we speak of defensive struggle means that we're lukewarm in the struggle itself: what we're doing is exactly the same as what the partisan or Gappist is doing.'
³⁸
But this group was a unique case in Resistance circles in knowing how to give a positive connotation to what would then be the southern ‘non si parte', (‘we aren't going'): ‘If Badoglio doesn't manage to scrape together those divisions – which will however unfortunately happen – to offer as cannon fodder to the English, that would give the Allies the impression of a real popular will which no speech or congress will succeed in giving.'
³⁹

Emerging from these positions was a problem that, to varying degrees of intensity, as hope or fear, ran through the Resistance: that of the link between war and revolution, to which we shall need to return. For
La Voce del Popolo
the answer was drastic: ‘The possibility of coupling the war with social revolution is lost for the Italian people: by stubbornly insisting on pursuing it we'll end up doing neither the one nor the other'.
⁴⁰

Emphasis on the nation could lead to the two foreign armies occupying Italy being mechanically equated with each other. This formula, which led to the anti-Fascist character of the war being placed in parenthesis, was appealed to instrumentally, in some cases, even by voices above all suspicion, such as Radio London which, through its commentator Candidus, broadcast the appeal to accelerate, fighting alongside the Allies, the liberation of Italy from the ‘two foreign armies'.
⁴¹
Some strictly observant Mazzinians equated the Germans who had ‘brought Fascism to Italy' with the Allies who ‘are bringing the monarchy back to Rome … and it's not enough simply to serve, one must also applaud in order to serve the interests of the foreign government that is protecting the adversary'.
⁴²
At times there are traces of this argument, stripped of its Mazzinian emphasis, in the Action Party press, which uses it in anti-monarchic and anti-Badoglian terms.
⁴³

In the Republican Party press the equation of the two foreign armies led to populist – or rather
prequalunquistico
– words like those that appeared in Rome on the monument to the early nineteenth-century Roman dialect poet Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli: ‘Clear off, the lot of you. Leave us to weep alone!' This appeared to
La Voce Repubblicana
as ‘an exclamation vibrating with all the dejected anguish of the drama of our nation … in these words there's the light of a new conscience. This withdrawing into ourselves, this probing our hearts embittered by grief is what it means.
Andatevene tutti!
'
⁴⁴

In deeply considered and heartfelt terms, the student newspaper
La nostra lotta
declared on the one hand that ‘the struggle for liberation and independence will make us independent of the allies as well', and on the other showed as strong a contempt for the monarchic regime of the South as repulsion for the Social Republic. In fact, between these two poles ‘which are opposites only
geographically … a large number of the Italian people are again sinking wretchedly into an attitude of passivity and fatalism'.
⁴⁵

One of the minor Roman newspapers spoke ironically (we are still in 1943) about the fact that Radio Munich and Radio London both broadcast Garibaldi's hymn, ‘Va fuori d'Italia, va fuori stranier!', while the Italians stood by watching the two foreign armies confronting each other, both courageously, on their territory.
⁴⁶
More cautiously and realistically, a Christian Democrat newspaper invited its readers not to delude themselves, but recalled too that the Anglo-Americans would never treat us as the Germans were treating us, and that linked to the victory of the former was the future of democracy in Italy.
⁴⁷
La Democrazia del Lavoro
drew a parallel with the wicked neutralism that had broken out against the other war,
⁴⁸
while at the other extreme,
La Voce del Popolo
spoke of the ‘two current stumps of capitalism in Italy', each protected by a foreign army, so that one had to fight ‘against every occupation'.
⁴⁹
Even the most circumspect equation of the two foreign armies could give grist to the mill of monarchy. ‘Friends? Enemies? Allies?', a clandestine paper of that persuasion asked itself. And answered: ‘From natural tendency, confirmed by experience, the foreigner who in any guise whatsoever sets foot on the soil of others wants somehow or other to assert himself as master.' Only the legitimate sovereign – this was the moral – could place himself above the two foreign armies contending for Italy.
⁵⁰

On the other front, some Fascists too tried at the eleventh hour to re-play the card of ‘stretching our arms again above the foreign bayonets'.
⁵¹
There are
countless traces of these final transformist dartings, and indeed they bespeak the appeal to create new forms of solidarity against the foreign armies, whichever they might be. For example, an officer of the Decima Mas, one of the Fascist formations that tried to exploit this most, on presenting himself to the striking workers of the Borletti company in Milan on 16 April, said to them: ‘The situation has reached the end of the road and … we mustn't scrap but find a way of coming to terms to ensure that neither the Germans nor the English take advantage.' The workers did not prove, on that occasion, to be well enough vaccinated, since they agreed to send a delegation to the provincial head, who gave it short shrift.
⁵²

Indicative of these Fascist velleities, if only indirectly, are the invitations made to the partisans on several occasions to open their eyes about the fate that the Allies had in store for them. ‘Ecco la gratitudine dell'Inghilterra!' (‘There's England's gratitude for you!') was the caption on a poster representing Churchill giving a partisan a kick.
⁵³
An apocryphal number of
L'Unità
reproduced an appeal by Ercole (Palmiro Togliatti), substituting Germans with the English: ‘A prime and indispensable condition for this successful outcome is the struggle against the English invader, exploiter of peoples.'
⁵⁴

The upshot of equating the two foreign armies, however it was suggested and whatever the motivation, was that it gave force to ‘attesismo' (waiting on events). Thus there was the confirmation that blurring the anti-Fascist character of the new war inhibited the reconquest of national identity. ‘There are no liberators, only men who liberate themselves!' a leaflet proclaimed,
⁵⁵
underlining the commitment to defeat the selfishness, apathy and sloth that were weighing
on the Italians both as individuals and as a people. ‘Our historic curse, opportunism', wrote an Action Party broadsheet.
⁵⁶

National identity could thus only be re-established by shaking off the age-old destiny that had made of Italy only the stage of great historical dramas enacted by the protagonists of other peoples. It thus became natural to go in search of episodes that lent themselves to offering a less depressing vision of the history of the
patria
. Commonplaces, rhetoric, recycling of memories and cultural stereotypes, autonomous reflection on one's past as a people – all circulate in Resistance circles, and above all stress the Risorgimento, whose wars had been the most Italian and anti-German of all. The Resistance drew strength and at the same time ambiguity from the Risorgimento, as witness the much abused expression ‘Secondo Risorgimento'.
⁵⁷
More or less all the political and ideological positions of the Resistance movement, and indeed of the Fascists too, chose their special bit of the Risorgimento to refer to.
⁵⁸

The two largest movements – the Garibaldi brigades militarily, the Action Party politically – gave themselves names that evoked the Risorgimento veins which, in the struggle for hegemony in the new state, had succumbed to the liberal-moderate-monarchic solution. Implicit in these names is the programme of again calling into question the post-Risorgimento orders – not just the Fascist one, but the Liberal one as well. On the other hand, the Risorgimento, with the force of its hagiographic and homologising stereotypes, made a fitting ideological screen for both the left-wing and moderate versions of the policy of unity.
Il Risorgimento Liberale
explicitly stressed as much on one occasion.
⁵⁹

The great powers at war with Fascist Italy had themselves been the first to set the liberating version of the Risorgimento against the one entangled in Fascist nationalism-imperialism: not only the English, for whom numerous testimonies could be cited (Radio London, for example, had a soft spot for the expression ‘Secondo Risorgimento', and throughout the war commemorated
the anniversary of Garibaldi's death),
⁶⁰
but even the Greek dictator Metaxas. The latter, in a radio broadcast on 22 November 1940, shortly after the Italian invasion, said: ‘Greece forgets neither Santarosa, nor Fratti, nor Garibaldi, nor the many other Italians who shed their blood for her, for the liberty and independence of Italy in the last century.'
⁶¹
Nor had the Fascists dared to call their war the ‘fifth war of independence', despite the objectives set for it: ‘Nice, Savoy, fateful Corsica, Malta bulwark of Romanità', as one of their songs listed them.

From the Kingdom of the South the voice of Victor Emmanuel III at once hastened to remind the Italians what ‘the inhuman enemy of our race and our civilisation' was;
⁶²
and, still in the South, an ‘Appeal to the King' to resign, written by an intellectual of some prestige, concluded with the enjoinder to Italy to resume ‘the tradition of its Mazzinian and Garibaldinian risorgimento, and the mission that Fascism, in a dominion of ignorance and brutality, had disowned and divided'.
⁶³

The memory of the Risorgimento sustained the spirits of the military internees in the German camps. Already at the Brenner Pass there rose from one of their troop-trains the chorus of Verdi's
Va' pensiero
or
Oh Signor che dal tetto natio
.
⁶⁴
And, to the request that they join the RSI, ‘the choice [was] between the Italian Italy of the Risorgimento, of the old war, human and honest, and the Germanised Italy, of the Fascist myth, inhuman and dishonest because, though unreal and unrealisable, it was preached as being real and true'.
⁶⁵
After 8 September, it might seem that the miracle of 1848 was reviving, when ‘Alle irruente orde straniere/studenti e popolani/per improvisa concordia terribili/il petto inerme opponendo/auspicarono col sangue/il riscatto d'Italia' (‘Against the violent foreign hordes/students and common folk,/grown terrible from sudden concord,/presenting their unarmed breasts,/hoped with their blood/for
the redemption of Italy').
⁶⁶
The following words appear in a newspaper of an ‘extremist' group, the Roman Communist Movement of Italy, on the anniversary of the October Revolution: ‘It is not under the sign of the monarchy and with the army of the monarchy that Italian unity was formed and is defended, but with the heroic deeds of the Risorgimento which has created the nation's fibre and makes it inviolable!'
⁶⁷

Unity ‘as in the epoch of the Risorgimento' was a desire expressed on one occasion by Pietro Nenni, with some reservation however on the part of his party, sensitive as the latter was to the risk that the Resistance would turn out disappointingly, as the Risorgimento had.
⁶⁸
This concern was extremely strong in the Republican Party, which was always ready to denounce the ‘absurd concordance' between 1859, 1860, 1866 and 1915.
⁶⁹
Nor did the ‘vague patriotic vocabulary' used against the ‘enemy of the Piave' appeal to an intransigent GL member who considered it ‘a step backwards', to which however ‘it was necessary … to adapt', while another GL member was convinced that it was a mistake to confuse the Risorgimento with the present struggle.
⁷⁰