A Civil War (70 page)

For the Action Party the civil war was an aspect, or an initial phase, of democratic revolution. Dante Livio Bianco spoke of ‘true civil war, and ideological and political war if ever there was one' in a context in which democratic revolution was discussed.
¹⁶
Vittorio Foa wrote that ‘the people's war has to be the first act of the people's revolution'.
¹⁷
Closer still is the tie established in a small GL newspaper: ‘The opportunity to assert the rights and claims of the people and the workers is given us today now that the people and the workers are armed and can defend themselves, or never again … And this armed struggle has a name: Revolution!'
¹⁸

From its opening lines a GL pamphlet vehemently emphasised that the Second World War was a war of religion: ‘Fractions of Italians, Chinese, French and Russians are fighting today on both sides … We partisans feel the anti-Hitlerian German to be our brother and the Italian Fascist our deadly enemy.'
¹⁹

Another, internal Action Party document recognised the civil war ‘between opposing religions' as inevitable.
²⁰
If anything, it was on tactical grounds that the need was felt to draw distinctions. Giorgio Agosti wrote: ‘The tactic of “the worse it is the better it is”, which consists of involving even the lukewarm and indifferent with the partisan cause and rousing the atmosphere of civil war in
the most indolent zones, is useful when insurrection is imminent, but becomes dangerous when one is forced onto the defensive.'
²¹

Talk of civil war in any case took the refusal of continuity with the Royal Army to its extreme consequences: this refusal indeed already contained within itself the descent into civil war, in the strong sense of the term.
²²

The Communists regarded the civil war as an incontrovertible fact; but, while not shrinking from calling it by its name on many occasions, they did not insist on the use of the expression. This attitude may be ascribed to the Communists' prevailing commitment to making some class needs converge with the national and unitary character of the struggle for liberation, and to incorporating in this design the specifically anti-Fascist objective that was, by contrast, the core of the democratic revolution championed by the Actionists. In the course of events, however, it was the requirements of the struggle itself that often influenced the ideological pattern. On 19 September 1943
L'Unità
wrote: ‘The struggle against the Germans is inseparable from the struggle against Fascism. Nazi Germany and Fascism are locked in a mortal embrace: one cannot strike one without the other.'
²³

And immediately after this, on 29 September, the same paper explained: ‘We mustn't forget that interwoven with the struggle against the Germans is a civil struggle that is already taking place.' Fascism is dead, ‘but national life has certainly not been purged of Fascism. And some Fascists are taking advantage of the presence of the Germans to give vent to their base instincts of rancour, hatred and vengeance … The struggle against the Germans and the struggle against the Fascists are one and the same thing.'
²⁴

A few days later
L'Unità
again clearly indicated the three tasks facing the Italian people: ‘War against the Nazi aggressor; civil war against the Fascists, their allies; political struggle against the reactionary forces that lie across its path in the attempt to display all its energies and capacity for action and for fighting.'
²⁵
The party's theoretical review authoritatively endorsed this point of view, writing: ‘It is the time for battle, the time for the partisans' war, the time for civil war, the time for war actively fought against the Germans and against the Fascists.'
²⁶
As for personal experience, a concentration camp survivor has
recounted how, spurred to make the initial choice by his hatred of the Germans, he had then ‘transferred the image of the German onto Fascism'.
²⁷

The operational instructions for fighting the Fascists often implied, above all when drafted by Actionists, Communists and Socialists, or under their influence, the enjoinder to go beyond the notion of the Fascist as a contemptible and dangerous but circumscribed residue. Paragraph 2 (‘Azione prima di tutto' – ‘Action before all else') of the ‘Direttive per la lotta armata' (‘Directives for the Armed Struggle'), issued in Milan in February 1944 by the military Command for Northern Italy, states:

No less drastic, more than a year later, were the PCI ‘Direttive n.16' for the insurrection, written by Luigi Longo and issued on April 1945:

If we descend from these lofty declarations of principle and maxims to a more close-range view of things, this picture is not belied, but becomes more complex – at times more homogeneous, at times more blurred and differentiated. Here, too, the dividing lines between attitudes and sentiments do not always coincide completely with those that distinguish the top ranks of the parties.

A sentiment that was certainly widespread, and which stoked the loathing that was immediately manifested for the republican Fascists, lies in the way the latter assumed the character of dismal but brazen revenants. True, the forty-five
days of Badoglio's rule had been days of false liberty, of military dictatorship, of turbid compromises. But the headlong collapse of so much of Fascism's specific machinery and symbols had been such as to strike people's souls as an event from which there could be no turning back. Popular conscience had, to a large degree, galloped along this road, well beyond the intentions, fears and manoeuvres of the king and Badoglio. Now the resuscitated Fascists seemed, against nature, to be making time flow backwards. They had only just risen from the tomb, and there they were immediately giving orders. The vindictive attitudes they were flaunting (the conciliatory intentions recorded above were not so visible), the way they roamed about the cities in black shirts and motley uniforms, theatrically re-hoisting the symbols of the regime and restoring the Fascist names of streets and squares, the recapturing in Rome of Palazzo Venezia and the headquarters in Piazza Colonna, miming punitive expeditions and warlike assaults against nonexistent enemies – these were all spectacles that shook, frightened and saddened even those who had not completely clarified their ideas on whether they should join the Resistance. In Piazza Colonna, Franco Calamandrei's sharp eye came to rest on the ‘people stopping in the square to watch, with a mixture of curiosity, fear, commiseration and mockery, and an expression of mutual understanding'.
³⁰
Not so different from this is a Fascist's memory of things: ‘The passers-by on the pavements raised their eyes, slightly astonished at seeing something so unexpected; they sought us with incredulous faces, but we were already some way away.'
³¹
The fact that the Fascists could once again play the bully like this because they were protected by the Germans deprived that resurrection of any glimmer of even the most obscure heroism.

Certainly, as I have already noted, the Fascists in this way re-qualified themselves in their own eyes and recharged themselves against their enemies. But the anti-Fascists recharged themselves too, many of them beginning to repent having been too temperate after 25 July, having confused their personal feeling of liberation with a reality that was in fact a good deal more irksome and difficult. In a climate that was ‘more tuned to joy than revenge', an error had been committed out of too much generosity and failure of foresight: ‘We mocked them, insulted them, and that was all.'
³²
The Germans had been feared, not the Fascists. During the forty-five days, as Ferruccio Parri, who had always been vigilant of German moves, testified many years later, ‘the Fascist revival was not taken as certain; it might have been probable, but I have to say that it was not viewed as being imminent'.
³³

The error was not to be repeated, however. ‘Don't delude yourselves with the memory of the forty-five days. This time you won't get off so lightly', wrote
L'Unità
on 4 June 1944.
³⁴
And in the instructions circulated on the eve of the insurrection, the PCI leadership declared: ‘We can't have a second 25 July.'
³⁵
Running through the whole Resistance is this constant concern.
Il Combattente
wrote explicitly that on 25 July the Italian people had been too temperate.
³⁶

An article relating to Captain Mazzuoli, defined as ‘one of Matteotti's murderers', reads: ‘Not eliminated when he should have been, this scoundrel, like so many of his fellows, was able, after 8 September, to join the SS and commit other murders.'
³⁷
In Rome, at a meeting of the Socialists in charge of the Appio-Tuscolano-Prenestino military sector, Giuseppe Lopresti, an extraordinarily noble-hearted and fine-spirited young man, said: ‘The Fascists have returned because on 25 July Fascist blood was not spilled.'
³⁸
The GL partisans who sang
La Badoglieide
, with the words ‘ma il fascismo restava il padron' (‘but Fascism remained the boss') expressed regret at not having acted at the right time. A curious piece of counter-evidence is furnished by an article in
Il Popolo
which, wishing to deny the existence of the civil war, argues: ‘If that's how things were, why didn't it break out on 25 July?'
³⁹
But it was precisely because it didn't break out on 25 July that it broke out on 8 September.

These are the words of young men who still believed in Fascism and its capacity to regenerate itself. But the sight of the old faces of the regime triggered in them reactions to some extent akin to those of the anti-Fascists.

On the other hand, the new-style Fascists had no better effect on them:

In the first few weeks an Action Party pamphlet had shown that it underestimated the perilousness of the reappearing Fascists: ‘No, poor, black-shirted Fascists, you won't manage to destroy Italy!'
⁴²
Certainly, the Fascists were no longer capable of destroying Italy any further; but they were capable of inflicting cruelties upon it and of involving the anti-Fascists in a bloody final reckoning. ‘They are using terror to defer the moment of reckoning as long as possible', wrote Eusebio Giambone in his last letter.
⁴³

The civil war between Fascists and anti-Fascists can in fact be seen as the recapitulation and final enactment, under the cloak of the German occupation, of a conflict that began in 1919–22. A similar interpretation has been advanced for the struggle between Vichy and the French Resistance, interpreted as a summing-up of the fractures that had marked the history of modern France: ‘Sous le regard de l'occupant, se règle un formidable arrière de comptes.'
⁴⁴

In Italy the phenomenon had a special impact, because the conquest and management of power by the Fascists had been wholly autochthonous. This is precisely why the republican Fascists, coming as they did at the end of the cycle of Fascism's fortunes, had nothing new to offer, nothing to hope for; they themselves appeared desperate and became the object of a more intense hatred. By contrast, in the
resistenti
the reckoning, which looked back to the past, was capable of being charged with hopes and projects for the future.

I have already mentioned the retrieval of the memory of the
biennio rosso
, which was conducted by some of the older
resistenti
, and which seduced the younger ones. Two Communist leaflets addressed to the people of Florence proudly recalled the defence of the San Frediano district against the
squadristi
.
⁴⁵
Flamigni and Marzocchi have spoken of town councils in Romagna that proudly cherish the memory of not having let the Fascist squads through, citing for example San Leonardo di Forlì, which was to became a centre of the Resistance and a firm seat of CLNs, partisan commands and PCI organisms.
⁴⁶
To this day, in their reminiscences the elderly Turin workers interviewed as part of an oral history research project compare 1919–21, the period of the
biennio rosso
and of
squadrismo
, with 1943–45. As the interviewer observes, this is no mere repression of the Fascist
ventennio
, but ‘has the merit of being an interpretation of history, a way of speaking about recovery from defeat'.
⁴⁷