A Civil War (99 page)

This reply anticipates the Communist attitude which often, in the immediate post-war period, really did risk throwing into the arms of an unduly feared right-wing sedition the revolts of unemployed, evacuees, ex-servicemen, housewives – in short, all those irregulars that the party was unable to control and who did not fit easily into its ideological picture. Palmiro Togliatti was to express irritation at those who, in the Mezzogiorno, meant by the word ‘popolo' only the wretched and the ‘sfardati' (‘the ragged').
¹⁴

A SAP document says: ‘Our greatest concern is to avoid reaching the point of excesses being committed owing to hunger, excesses that the reactionaries can take advantage of to obstruct the establishment of the popular democratic government on the grounds of the immaturity of the masses.'

Yet the situation was such that in the very same document, alongside the denunciation of
sinistrismo
as the ‘main danger … which defeated but not completely eliminated Fascism might exploit', the ‘preparatory actions' listed include the following: ‘Raiding of town council treasuries, custom-houses, registry offices, and destruction of all the files relating to taxes, stockpiles, rallies, agrarian censuses and anything that might be useful for control of production and for possible withdrawals. The fruit of the taxes, the proceeds from duties, et cetera can be withdrawn.'
¹⁵

At about exactly the same time
L'Unità
published the following appeal: ‘The workers have asked for bread and coal. The enemy has replied by starving and arresting them. There is only one answer: to raid the provisions and fuel depots.'
¹⁶
The reports of the republican National Guard ‘are dense with news of sackings of and raids on the stockpile granaries and on goods trains, grocers' shops, bakeries'.
¹⁷
The correspondence censored by the RSI confirms the malaise, the discomfort, the anger at a situation that raised the prospect of ‘black-market trade that is the ruin of us poor workers. Even the Germanic Authorities are incapable of purging these irresponsible rascals; they will pay for it at the end or after the war, but meanwhile we're the ones to suffer and class hatred is growing.'
¹⁸

Social revolt could leave even a young Action Party intellectual greatly perplexed. Emanuel Artom wrote in his diary: ‘Many lads interpret communism as a system of anarchy, disobedience and looting. The day before yesterday one was declaring that there are no longer any officers and soldiers, while another was
intending to appropriate one of Agnelli's villas for himself … I try to calm them down in the name of the Fronte Nazionale.'
¹⁹

The fact is that, outside the factory, old drives towards social revolt emerged, while inside the factory they were incorporated in the class spirit. As was often the case, some Communist leaders lost no time in spotting this slide. Secchia wrote: ‘Revolt of the weak against the strong?… That's a language and a formula that has nothing in common with our doctrine.'
²⁰

What was really at work was the drive to identify the Nazi-Fascists not so much with the rigorous but circumscribed category of owners of the instruments of production, as with that, full of ancient echoes, of the rich and strong, whom one finally felt able to oppose on an equal footing. The ‘insurrectional plan' of a Garibaldi brigade reads: ‘The numerous rich are totally behind the Nazi-Fascists and are tough. The poor are totally behind the patriots and they too are tough.'
²¹

In the Belluno area, the Garibaldini of the Nanetti brigade got a hearing above all ‘among the poor folk', to whom they spoke ‘of a world and a future society that would put an end once and for all to all the acts of oppression, injustices and privileges of the ruling classes, that is say all those evils which for centuries have afflicted the populations of our country'.
²²
On 9 April 1945 the provincial agitation committee of Asti addressed a manifesto full of pathos to the hungry: ‘In your unity lies your force, learn to know the force of your hunger and your wretchedness … The good words of your
padroni
today will certainly be of no use to you tomorrow to season your food.'
²³

A young man of twenty-three enrolled in the Communist Party because ‘he has always wished to be part of a class of men who defend the interests of the oppressed against the tyrants'. Another, of nineteen, ‘is a poor labourer, he has understood the injustice of this infamous world and wants too to be among the defenders of human rights. He is mild, good, just, he has a big heart, an unshakable faith: he's a Communist!' Or again: ‘Although they are serving in an autonomous formation they almost all declare themselves Communists … For them Communism signifies social justice and radical, intransigent anti-Fascism.
One of them believes in Communism as the first Christians believed in the life eternal.'
²⁴

In many of these declarations there is a full-bodied and almost religious sense of social antagonism. The rich acquire a meaning that goes beyond their identification with the enemies of the country, as they are seen by a tradition present in an underground French newspaper where these words of Robespierre's are quoted: ‘Abuses are the work and the domain of the rich, they are the scourge of the people, the people's interest, their particularly interest'.
²⁵
The Communist attempt to classify behaviour smacking of social revolt in terms of the pauperisation brought about by the Fascist war, which has afflicted ‘peasants, artisans, intellectuals, office workers, professional people' – that is, all the allies, real or presumed, of the working class – appears doctrinaire.
²⁶

The intellectuals' dislike of the rich resembles, rather, certain of Malraux's characters, who directed it not ‘so much against the possessors as against the stupid principles they spout to defend their possessions', and who did not hate ‘the happiness of the rich, but their good opinion of themselves'.
²⁷
It was unlikely that an intellectual or professional person, however impoverished or desperate, would set about burning the municipal archives; if anything, it would have made him ‘happy like a boy finally burning his school-books'.
²⁸
By contrast, the partisan bands, which had many peasants in their ranks, could do so in an altogether different spirit.
²⁹

‘Town Hall: burn the papers relating to the innumerable Fascist acts of harassment (contribution of wheat, cattle etc.), but respect the registry office ones which are necessary for the normal life of the population', a Garibaldi command urges.
³⁰
A patrol occupying the town of Fosdinovo in the Lunigiana area reported
that it had executed three Fascists, and that in the town hall not only pennants and other ‘black stuff' were destroyed but ‘the tax registers on cattle, the draft lists, the food checks and other bumf were torn up'.
³¹
In a village in the Romagna Appenines a
carabinieri
barracks was occupied and ‘having carried off the weapons and smashed the telephone installation the lurid mass of paper is set fire to'.
³²
The town council offices of Sorico, ‘which in the twenty years of Fascism have become the centre for the irradiation of every act of harassment for the local country folk', is the target of raids by a partisan band: ‘a general clean-out was made of the draft lists, cattle stockpile distribution lists, wheat production lists, various documents, various stamps, a typewriter, shoes'.
³³
In the town hall of Frassinoro (Modena), ‘the partisans burned the archive and the material of the
fascio
. They then distributed the stockpile wheat to the population.'
³⁴
In 1876 the (anarchist) band of the Matese (near Benevento) would have done no differently in terms of the destruction of instruments and symbols of power, and acts redressing wrongs done to the population.

A Bolognese leaflet urged the distribution of wheat ‘to individual families … to all the categories of citizens, excluding no one'.
³⁵
The salvaging of wheat from the Nazi raids – distribution of the stockpiles to the masses was considered the premise of these raids – represented above all the counterpart of the food contributions that the partisans asked for from the peasants and that, as we have seen, gave rise to manifestations of solidarity but difficulties in relations as well. In the second place, salvaging became the central motive of what was called ‘the battle for wheat': with a degree of linguistic reserve on the part of the CLNAI, which felt it fit to add the adjective
vera
(‘this is the
true
battle for wheat');
³⁶
or without any such inhibitions engendered by the use Fascism had made of that formula, in other documents, as in the following leaflet: ‘The Ferrarese peasants have won
the wheat battle.'
³⁷
For that matter, in France too filching wheat from the Krauts and from Vichy is called ‘la bataille du blé'.
³⁸

An ambiguous relationship existed between behaviour that bespoke social revolt and that denoting political sectarianism – not least because at times it was the party documents themselves that, as we have seen, called for social extremity, while trying duly to lead it back onto the straight and narrow of the official line.
³⁹
At times social subversion found in sectarianism an elective channel of expression, and at other times it was, on the contrary, repressed by it; at still others it appeared to be compromised by it, in the sense that political sectarianism dried up the source of popular sympathy that only subversion could feed off. The political commissar Federici [Virginio Barbieri] was criticised for having set his men along the road ‘towards a certain extremism both in word and action', which necessarily went hand in hand with ‘a certain rigidity in dealing with the population'.
⁴⁰
‘Sectarian and extremist conferences which have somewhat frightened the population' and had prompted the parish priest to escape were reported in the area of Zavattarello.
⁴¹
Anti-Catholic and anti-religious demonstrations, which ‘place the Catholics on the same level as the enemies', were particularly scandalous forms of these attitudes. The first of the two documents mentioned above attributed this phenomenon to the isolation and narrowness in which the party had been compelled to live for twenty years, but also to the ‘residue of the 1919 and 1920 mentality' – that is to say, to a longer wave than that of the life of the party.
⁴²
The Modenese Christian Democrats were suspected of, and had to deny, circulating
Il Contadino
, one of those apocryphal Communist rags whose paternity was generally attributed to the Fascists or the Germans:
⁴³
the paper illustrated ‘that ideological complex which Fascism has always attributed to Communism in matters of religion, the family, etc.'
⁴⁴
The sectarianism of the political commissar Davide – again in the province of Modena – combined with the presence of ‘a politically backward mass, animated only by the class instinct', is blamed for the loss of the populations' sympathy as well as the total hostility of the clergy suffered by the Modena division, which had in fact passed under Christian Democrat control. It is a sign of a curious inversion of evaluative criteria that the Christian Democrat commander Claudio attributed Davide's initial successes not to the ‘class instinct' but to the ‘vague anarchicorebellious instincts of the young mountain-dwellers'.
⁴⁵

Beneath the wrapping of national unity, Christian Democrat anti-Communism began to build its foundations in these Resistance stances, which aimed at vying with the Communists for hegemony over the popular masses, including the workers, to whom a leaflet circulated in Tuscany offered ‘the figure and the idea of the worker of Nazareth' as a model.
⁴⁶
The ‘determined stance against any kind of dictatorial extremism', the enjoinder not to fall ‘into another dictatorship', the explicit labelling of the Communists as ‘red Fascists', to the extent that all the red paper in Domodossola was requisitioned to prevent the town council from printing its bulletin on it – these, and other similar ones (apart from the excessive zeal of the confiscation of paper ordered by commander Di Dio) were the recurrent formulae of the Christian Democrat press, directed against both PCI policy and social subversion.
⁴⁷
The Christian Democrat press
was forever engaged in warning the workers against false masters and corrupting doctrines, and at the same time in defending its good name from those who considered it to be dedicated to extremism. An ‘Address to the workers' published in
Il Popolo
concludes with the invitation not to read ‘our words' hastily: ‘Read them this evening in the peace of your poor house, while your wife frugally mends your jacket again and your children rest their heads on the table, overcome by sleep.'
⁴⁸

The fight for physical survival did bring the population together, but at the same time risked fomenting the hostility against the peasants typical of the famished cities. Resentment against peasants who ‘are selling everything on the black market and raking in the money' is indicated by the reports on the censored correspondence.
⁴⁹
If the memoirs of an Emilian landowner are to be credited, there were, on the other hand, peasants who said: ‘From the point of view of food let's enjoy these last days of war.'
⁵⁰

The Fascists were the first to attempt ‘more than ever to extol the workers at the expense of the peasants (see the fight against the black market etc.)',
⁵¹
and were eager to describe the peasants as ‘selfish, starvers and black-marketeers',
⁵²
thereby provoking, from a peasants' defence committee, the condemnation of ‘Fascist scheming aimed not only at dividing the workers and peasants, but at setting them against each other'.
⁵³
In retaliation against such scheming, the organ of the National Liberation Front of Piedmont wrote: ‘Not the peasants, but the Germans and Fascists are the cause of the present economic hardship of the workers.'
⁵⁴