A Civil War (122 page)

It has been repeated many times that the name ‘Resistenza' is French in origin, and that in Italy it was taken up only after the event. This is true if one is referring to the canonised use of the formula ‘movimento di liberazione'.
¹⁸⁷
But if one looks at the press and at contemporary documents, one notices the
frequent occurrence of the word, almost always with a small
r
, in the literal sense, implicitly and at times also explicitly ‘defensive',
¹⁸⁸
even if there is no lack of more solemn adoptions. It is telling that these should appear in a ‘message from the CLNAI' to the CLN of emigrants to France,
¹⁸⁹
that previously an Action Party newspaper had praised De Gaulle ‘for strengthening French resistance against Nazi domination',
¹⁹⁰
and that the expression ‘movimento della resistenza' figures in the agreement of 7 December 1944 between the CLNAI delegation and Allied Command, which clearly had experience of French affairs.
¹⁹¹

A leaflet dropped by British planes on the night of 22 October 1943 already reminded the ‘Italians of the resistance' of the ‘armed or passive resistance' taking place in the other occupied countries.
¹⁹²
Passive resistance still fell short of even defensive violence, and the newspaper of young Roman Christian Democrats defended the latter, arguing that already during the Fascist
ventennio
it had been an authentic Italian masterpiece.
¹⁹³
The newspapers of the more committed movements tended rather to use qualifying adjectives such as
attiva
,
organizzata
, or
armata
.
¹⁹⁴
At times
L'Unità
speaks of resistance as simply a first step;
¹⁹⁵
and the same concept recurs, for example, in an unsigned leaflet of November 1943 addressed to the young men of Arcugnano: ‘Let us find ourselves again as soldiers even if in civilian dress and let us begin our battle of resistance at once, for the time being: let us not yield.'
¹⁹⁶

The principle of self-defence gave rise to complex developments. Mere individual self-defence was not feasible unless one lay low in isolation. Getting together in groups immediately posed the problem of the use of weapons. A Communist document severely criticises a
professore
who ordered his men to remain hidden in the village, the result being that they were all arrested in the taverns and houses. This episode demonstrates, the document concludes, that ‘only with weapons in our hands and with a perfect military organisation can we save ourselves and at the same time inflict heavy blows on the enemy'.
¹⁹⁷
Earlier,
L'Unità
had written: ‘We mustn't let ourselves be butchered. We must arm and defend ourselves.'
¹⁹⁸

More calmly, but no less forcefully, a Garibaldi commander later wrote: ‘It made no sense having abandoned civilian life to take ourselves off to live wretchedly in the mountains without starting that guerrilla warfare which would justify our daily privations and provide experience for future developments.'
¹⁹⁹

The steady growth of the network of CLNs, culminating in the CLNAI and the coming to the fore as a military and unitary organism of the Corpo dei Volontari della Libertà (Corps of Volunteers for Liberty) headed by the General Command, may be regarded as signalling a growing political and institutional legitimisation of violence. It was not so much general and top-level legitimisation – relations with the monarchy, the government in Rome and the Allies – as the process of organisation springing from the very heart of the movement that saw the establishment of a series of guarantees against an indiscriminate and blind use of violence. It is this normalisation with the nascent state, to which attention has already been drawn, that distinguishes the immediate context within which single acts of violence took place.

Naturally a system of norms, however approximate, and organisation, born again in the name of liberty, recreated authority as well. The norms within which Resistance violence sought to discipline itself did not correspond to those that the enemy followed, or claimed to follow. The upshot of this was that the expression ‘fuori legge' (‘outlaw') mirrored the conflict between two different ‘laws'. At the same time the
resistenti
tended, within certain limits, to revert to customary practices, such as the adoption of a uniform, which, according to even the most labile international law relating to war, should have guaranteed their status as combatants. One of the most noticeable differences between the ‘political' bands (above all the Garibaldi and GL) and the ‘autonomous' ones was that the latter were more inclined to adopt norms and styles belonging to military tradition. Indeed, in the conditions of complete autonomy in which he found himself operating, as prestigious a commander as Mauri (the major on permanent active service Enrico Martini) could give free rein to the militaristic concept that he had of his men as cavaliers and defenders of order. In his capacity as commander of the 1
^st
Group of the Alpini divisions, Mauri thus reprimanded a lieutenant
colonel under him – and this in itself was quite a departure from the traditional hierarchy – for his behaviour towards the men in his charge:

Not, of course, that this drastic and cynical policy was carried out to the letter; but the very fact of declaring it is a sign of the presence of a hyper-militaristic cultural structure, seen as the only alternative to the laxity which was in turn so much a part of the Italian military tradition.

The most pressing problem that had to be faced was that of distinguishing oneself from the robbers and plunderers who got busy on the wave of dissolution of the Royal Army and the pillaging of military stores that had followed it. The phenomena of the days immediately following the Armistice still lie this side of the distinction between robberies and plundering, on the one hand, and acts committed by the bands in order to sustain themselves, on the other. Little by little, the CLN, CVL and party organisations would, at least to some extent, take charge of this aspect of the struggle too. A late Action Party report which announced that ‘the demarcation line' between partisan activity and banditry ‘is often highly uncertain', said that the prestige of the Commands and of the CLNs greatly depended on the regularity of the financing they received.
²
But the first bands had had to fend for themselves.

Intent on distinguishing between criminality and politics wholly within the practice of killing, Nuto Revelli wrote in his diary with his customary frankness:

Consequently, adds Revelli, the bandits ‘are more scared of the partisans than they are of the
carabinieri
: the partisans shoot them … To close the circle around these delinquents our squads are also operating in collaboration with the
carabinieri
of the valley' – i.e. with the
carabinieri
in the service of the RSI. But elsewhere Revelli also distinguished between rigour and inhumanity when, about the proceedings instituted against six false partisans, he wrote:

Revelli also recalls having vainly hunted the robbers of a group of Jews at Demonte in order to shoot them, but of having given a ‘suspended' death sentence to some youths on their way to commit a robbery almost as an act of bravado, granting them the opportunity to rehabilitate themselves by fighting – which was what in fact happened.
⁴

A Piedmontese band took the initiative of putting up posters asking for the collaboration of the population in repressing ‘bandits outside the army'.
⁵
Phenomena of this kind were reported in many areas, from western Piedmont to the province of Biella and Friuli. In Friuli there was the execution of ‘elements who, passing themselves off as partisans, were harassing the populations', while in the Apuan Alps ‘three brothers [were shot], the first for having stolen and the other two for having tried to avenge his death'.
⁶
There are youths who ‘say that they want to fight the enemy and not to be burglars in order to fatten up those of the Command', quite clearly a Command lacking in any prestige.
⁷
Others seem
to suggest that banditry descended from the art of fending for oneself, which was a cornerstone of the ethics of the Royal Army.
⁸
Still others distinguish between the requisitioning from civilians by means of coupons, ‘recovery' – ‘total or partial removal of foodstuffs and material belonging to the partisan movement, entrusted to civilians' – and ‘confiscation' – ‘compulsory removal of material and foodstuffs from organisations or persons who used them for purposes contrary to our ends'.
⁹
In other documents any expeditious appropriation of useful articles is vaguely defined as an ‘act of recovery', possibly with an unintentional reminiscence of the aspiration to expropriate the expropriators.

One consequence of the tendential re-monopolising of violence in the hands of the ‘third government' of the Resistance was that the formations that refused to recognise the authority of the CLNs and the CVLs – especially when the latter became formally unified – were to be looked on with distrust: lacking the official blessing of the new legitimacy, they would always seem to be on the point of falling into street banditry. The Command of a Garibaldi brigade reminded a commander who was stubbornly resisting the unification of the forces that those who remained outside would be treated as ‘bandits' and ‘saboteurs of liberty' and be given the death penalty.
¹⁰
Another Garibaldi formation warned that those who used ration coupons without supporting the CLN, but usurping its name, would have to answer before a people's tribunal, while if they did not even use the name, they would certainly be shot.
¹¹
No less severe was the GL Lombard Command with its reminder that only membership of the CVL legitimates a formation, ‘which otherwise would at present, and still more so after the Liberation, be considered altogether differently'; and which, to make things still clearer, added that uncontrolled initiatives led to damaging actions and useless losses, even ‘when they do not degenerate into more or less open forms of banditry'.
¹²

Naturally, this more or less unavoidable necessity lent itself to political vendetta – for example the denunciation, mentioned earlier, of ‘
sinistrimo
as a mask of the Gestapo', and to acts of discrimination against those who saw ‘irregularity' as being still an innate component of their decision to join the Resistance
and the increasingly rife ferments of social revolt. A typical case is Giuseppe Marozin, an intriguing popular ringleader from the Vicenza area. While no one questioned his courage and enterprise, orders were given that, if he was caught in the act, ‘one should intervene with the maximum determination and with all the means at one's disposal'.
¹³

The danger was also felt on the left that nuclei of future white guards were nesting in the irregular formations. Above all, and particularly in the last months, the Communists were on the lookout on this score; and the efforts made to defend the factories by means of the SAPs and other CLN-recognised formations aimed also at preventing a last-minute collapse, to their own disadvantage, of that unification of forces in the name of which so many of the class ‘differences' most deeply felt by the militants had been sacrificed. On the other hand, the very presence of armed workers in the factories could tempt the owners to organise their own squads. When in Turin the DC became spokesman for such a request, the PCI's reaction was extremely severe. ‘Any other organisms [that are not SAPs] directed and financed by the forces of reaction will be fought with every means': ‘In fact, the Turin Communists had earlier warned: the industrialists, especially the management of the Fiat plant, would do well to remember that the workers will not tolerate management's private squads entering the factories, since they are considered real corps of white guards and are treated as such.'
¹⁴

Similar warnings were given in Milan and elsewhere.
¹⁵
An extremely precocious denunciation of this kind had come from
L'Italia Libera
, the Action Party newspaper: ‘Watch out for squads that the capitalists themselves are promoting
for their class interests, under the guise of the appeal to ‘national solidarity' and ‘sacrifices to bear in common' and under the promises of ‘concessions on the social terrain'.
¹⁶