A Civil War (8 page)

Even those who did not pillage, or flee, or disobey (insofar as nobody was around any longer to give orders) saw that the pillagers, the fugitives, the insubordinate did not, at least for the time being, receive any punishment. Those first few days, therefore, saw a lightning development of acts of demonstrative disobedience, which could, however, easily change into acquiescence before the crudest and most flagrant acts of high-handedness.

At the suggestion of the Ministry of Popular Culture
⁹⁷
the announcement of the Armistice had been published by the newspapers as an obituary notice. This was an act of hypocrisy both towards the vast majority of the population who wanted, somehow or other, to have done with the war, and towards the Fascists, who wanted to continue it. What was felt to be a new massive Caporetto was not defeat by the British and Americans, but sudden, headlong defeat by the Germans.
⁹⁸
Victor Emmanuel III turned on its head the appeal that had been made by the Fascist government, and, in an attempt to rally people's spirits, this time against the Germans, once again reverted to the memory of 1917 in his speech broadcast on Radio Bari on 24 September.
⁹⁹
As we shall see, the sense of defeat was to reappear in the Fascists of the Social Republic as a stimulus to their desire for revenge and, at least in some members of the Resistance, as a need to give a new face, after the two-fold defeat, to national identity.

To enrich the picture, we must recall the manifestations of solidarity and help that a large part of the population immediately offered the disbanded and fugitive troops.
¹⁰⁰
This solidarity essentially took the form of concrete actions. Alongside the first glimmers of active resistance, the seeds were widely sown, in the course of those days, of ‘passive resistance', insofar as a climate and environment were created favouring the former. The railway engineers slowed down the trains and made unscheduled halts to allow the soldiers to escape, or left saws and hammers in the wagons to aid flight.
¹⁰¹
The peasants were ‘moved by a confused and powerful sentiment that was at once both heartfelt pity for all those homeless and endangered “figli di mamma”, and solidarity for these men from other regions, most of them peasants like themselves'.
¹⁰²
One witness speaks tearfully to this day of Emilian girls who ‘waited for the soldiers, brought them food and then said “if you want to stay here …” '
¹⁰³
Bewildered soldiers were ‘surrounded by people wanting to help them'.
¹⁰⁴
Everybody offered the soldiers civilian clothing. Fraternisation between civilians and soldiers, which had failed to occur under the equivocal sign of Badoglio, succeeded under that of common misfortune. No one rallied around the institution of the Royal Army, but everyone came to the aid of Italians who had been plunged into dire peril. In Turin, the few soldiers still in active service whom it had occurred to someone to dispatch to disperse the crowd were applauded and embraced by them;
¹⁰⁵
the soldiers interned by the Germans in a barracks at Acqui were set free by the local people.
¹⁰⁶
The eruption of a potential
bellum omnium contra omnes
was counterbalanced by the aid total strangers offered each other. The bitterness of civil war and of war against the occupier was beating at the door, and people seemed to have discovered that the only remaining support lay in trusting one's neighbour. Exceptionally powerful fears and acts of exceptional solidarity commingled in the thick of daily living: ‘The State is in ruins, the army
has disintegrated, but the train from Acqui to Alessandria is still running. It seems absurd.'
¹⁰⁷

If on the one hand this ‘absurd' normality was an offence against the exceptional character of the situation, on the other hand it responded to a wistful hankering after complete normality and a desire to re-enter the ‘womb-like warmth of legality'.
¹⁰⁸
Acquiescence to the authority of the RSI, and of that administrative machinery that it somehow or other reactivated, was to have its roots in this desire.

Reluctance to face the fact that institutional legality had completely dissolved helps account for the residual attempts by the anti-Fascist forces to lean on royal, military and civilian authorities, in the hope of involving them in the taking of firm stances in both word and deed. In the case of the moderate left-wing parties, this responded to their fear of losing contact with those authorities and their wish to leave no stone unturned. But one needs to distinguish between attempts made from the ranks by the odd new-born partisan squad to win over those fragments of the defeated Royal Army that were still, for the time being, on their feet,
¹⁰⁹
and high-level approaches still made in the name of legality. In Turin the constitutional scruples about poster-sticking and holding assemblies were such that Communists and Actionists had no option but to dissociate themselves from the other parties.
¹¹⁰
In Rome, in a situation whose atypical character was further highlighted by the pretence that it was a ‘
città aperta
', uncertainty and fear generated in the local press an ‘evasive and minimising approach'
¹¹¹
whose sole concern was the maintenance of public order. Thus, while
Il Lavoro
appeared, a lone voice, with its headline ‘Torna Garibaldi' occupying the entire front page,
¹¹²
Il Piccolo
saw applause for the armed forces as a wish to collaborate ‘in the maintenance of order', and
Il Messaggero
praised the common-sense of the Romans, entitling its back-page article for 12 September, ‘Calma e fiducia', repeated on the local pages as: ‘Fermezza e dignità dell'Urbe' (‘Firmness and dignity of the City').

More than a year later, a newspaper of the Giustizia e Libertà (GL) units printed a caustic article against the myth of order that had brought Fascism to power, but added that the people now ‘have the arms and the force to impose that minimum of salutary “disorder” which in 1789 heralded a century of liberty for the poor and which has one name alone: REVOLUTION'.
¹¹³
Even if we discard that prediction of a revolutionary turning-point, the optimistic interpretation of disorder as an opportunity for liberty and the pessimistic one which, by contrast, generated bewilderment and a desire for the restoration of order, were the two ways in which people reacted against the institutional void that had been created – a void which could indeed produce either exaltation, or dismay and a sense of having been abandoned. If we regard the state, even the Italian state which was the subject of so much atavistic suspicion, as ‘the last great form of collective solidarity in which individuals take refuge',
¹¹⁴
this refuge suddenly vanished, and those individuals found themselves compelled to make up for it in other ways. But that void was felt, and has remained in people's memories as a basic fact. Immediately after the Liberation the regional CLN [Committee of National Liberation] would say, of Tuscan public opinion, ‘we felt completely isolated and abandoned at the moment of greatest crisis'.
¹¹⁵

‘Nothing was left, there was no established order' – this was how Terni was recalled.
¹¹⁶
The feeling of collapse was widespread: ‘When the Italian state collapsed on 10 September', wrote Vittorio Foa a few months later;
¹¹⁷
and as late as 1948 another Actionist, Dante Livio Bianco, would speak of the ‘collapse of the
state' that occurred in the days of September.
¹¹⁸
‘Italians, in Italy there is no longer a government. The king has fled, Badoglio has abandoned his post', declared a socialist leaflet of 12 September.
¹¹⁹
Even a jurist, Costantino Mortati, would then describe the CLNs ‘true organs of the state community, having organised themselves after the disintegration of pre-existing state structures'.
¹²⁰
A French historian has written: ‘The collapse of the state and of civil order had constituted, also in France in June 1940, the fact that had most affected the citizens, who were left to fend for themselves.'
¹²¹

I do not intend here to take up the issue of the problem of the character of the CLNs and of state continuity as the guiding thread and goal of the process that began on 25 July.
¹²²
All I wish to do is to highlight the eclipse of the institutions that occurred during those days in September, and to identify, in the reactions triggered by so richly illustrative an event, the seeds of many of the attitudes that the Italians adopted in the months that followed. In the anti-Fascist parties, people were to interrogate themselves, during the struggle, about the exact significance of the rupture that had taken place and about the political value they should attach ‘to the instincts and elementary popular reactions to the events that had occurred';
¹²³
they would also tend to emphasise its importance as an epoch-making milestone.
¹²⁴
The following March, in quite another
language, Teresio Olivelli, Catholic and former Fascist militant, would write: ‘8 September is a watershed: here springs and flowers the new life of the nation, which bursts forth in the spirit, is illumined with truth, quivers in action.'
¹²⁵
And Giaime Pintor, more soberly: ‘The soldiers who traversed Italy last September, famished and half-naked, wanted above all to return home, to hear no more talk of war and hardships. They were a defeated people; but they bore within themselves the seed of a dimly-sensed recovery: the sense of offences afflicted and endured, disgust with the injustice in which they had lived.'
¹²⁶

It was in fact to be the memory of the abyss that opened wide on 8 September that nourished the Resistance with pride at having succeeded in hauling themselves out of it. ‘And they were days of desperate humiliation, but followed by a recovery',
L'Italia Libera
was to write in January. In November the same newspaper had made this profession of faith: ‘We refuse to consider the days of September as a tragic episode in the history of Italy. In the torment of an unprecedented national tragedy we see the travail of a people which will eventually give itself the principles of living.'
¹²⁷

One aspect of those September days still needs emphasising. In the dissolution of the military and civil institutions and the emergence of solidarity, the working classes, at least those in the main factories, were the social group who gave the greatest indication of internal cohesion. Officers and soldiers fled and scattered, but the workers tended to stay united and to draw from this unity the impetus to free themselves from passivity and anger at their impotence:

This morning certain workers had the harebrained idea of making an unarmed dash for it to get hold of the Germans' machine-guns; others tried to dissuade them. One man aged around forty, well-dressed, with a gleaming-new bicycle, intervened, explaining that it was impossible to react against the Germans, and everyone insulted him then, saying, ‘We're tired of obeying you
borghesi
; twenty years of Fascism is enough.'
¹²⁸

To this day a worker from Terni still gets riled when, at a distance of years and superimposing two such diverse episodes, he recalls things as follows: ‘What I find hard to swallow is 8 September, because on 8 September we could have
beaten the hides off the Germans … we could have done anything. Instead,
calma, calma, calma
 … it was just like the Togliatti business,
calma, calma, calma
.
¹²⁹

Here resentment against
i borghesi
is combined with, and possibly predominates over, that against the prudence of the Communist Party cadres. The state authorities are, by contrast, the exclusive target of another accusation: ‘We went on strike on 8 September and on that occasion we wanted, all together, to assail the
Distretto
, but the police dispersed us. Together with other workers we held big demonstrations. In the factory a comrade held an assembly urging us to strike.'
¹³⁰
And here is a Turin partisan's recollection of events:

Again in Turin, after the 10 September assembly the workers asked: ‘Where shall we go? What direction should we head in?'
¹³²

A more complete attempt at analysis, along the lines of the class war – to be examined later – appears in a Communist report, again from Turin, written in December 1943. The worker, it says, ‘feels that new events are at hand and knows too that everything that will issue from this fearful struggle will lead him towards the emancipation of his class, and so, though having no clear set of political principles, he feels that only through our programme will he obtain that social justice vainly promised and anxiously awaited.'
¹³³

Great, exceptional, catastrophic events confront peoples and individuals with radical options and, with little or no forewarning, compel them to take stock
of truths that were working away unbeknown to them, or of which full knowledge was the preserve only of a select few. The institutional void created by 8 September gave the predicament in which the Italians found themselves this character: they were called upon to make choices that many of them had never for one moment believed that their lives would ever require of them. In the normal run of things, ‘it is not necessary to be taking up positions continually in favour of the system'.
¹
But the need explicitly to agree, or dissent, becomes impelling when the system totters, the monopoly of state violence shatters, and one's obligations towards the state no longer constitute a sure reference point for individual conduct, since the state is no longer in a position to demand those ‘sacrifices for love' on which it often relies.
²
A classic page from Hobbes, seems to sum up Italy as it was in September 1943: