A Civil War (132 page)

The book by one of the most intrepid and cool-headed Gappists, Giovanni Pesce, mentioned earlier, is full of yet more tragic expressions: ‘alone and hunted'; ‘here I am back at home stretched out on the bed, my eyes fixed on the
ceiling'; ‘struggle against fear and solitude'; ‘it's not the risk, it's the isolation that wears down the Gappist'; the Gappist ‘no longer has a home, only addresses'; ‘anguished waiting'; ‘my own jailer'. The sublimation suggested to Pesce by a prestigious chief like Ilio Barontini is not enough to liberate him: ‘When you're alone, the Party is you.' Pesce well understood those who ‘rather than the terrible and draining isolated struggle prefer that of the mountain formations', and looked back nostalgically on Spain, where ‘we faced the enemy in combat, face to face'.
⁴⁶
The personalisation of the enemy, for example through tailing him prior to the action, endowed him with a ‘private' face and demanded of the Gappist a firmer and more ‘abstract' determination to eliminate him. When in Milan Pesce saw a new comrade coming towards him ‘smiling and cordial', he immediately said to himself: ‘no one smiles like that after the first actions', and sent him off to ‘gain practical knowledge' with the partisans of the Pavese Oltrepò. As for Pesce himself, when a bomb exploded prematurely at Milan station, he found himself a prey to the ‘absurd' doubt that the Gappist who had been assigned the action, previously reprimanded for being half-hearted in combat, might think he had been deliberately sent to his death.
⁴⁷

Being alone and shut up was, as it were, the symbol of a solitude born above all from the wearing effort to keep morality and inflexibility united in taking the lives of others. Franco Calamandrei, a Gappist with no past experience of anti-Fascist militancy, lucidly described in his diary the tension with which he lived his dual activity as assailant and intellectual. It was a distinction of planes which, though practised to safeguard one's own moral unity at its deepest level, was felt to be no less harrowing for that:

Elsewhere Calamandrei speaks of the ‘voluptuousness of solitude', and again of detachment, lack of interest, indifference, tiredness – and exclaims: ‘How much there still is to reclaim within myself!' When he remembers Giorgio Labò and the joy that his comrade had felt when he had been asked to write an article on Communism and architecture, Calamandrei notes: ‘There was in him, in short, the more or less conscious anxiety to recover his terrain, to free himself from adventure, and the impossibility of actually being able to get away
in practice, and the vain effort to resign himself to this condition that he had inadvertently imposed on himself.'

Labò yearned ‘to be sent out of Rome, into some band'; and faced with the death of his friend, Calamandrei needs to believe ‘that death is always just, that the individual prepares it himself, day by day, that each of us dies only when he has to die'.

Making no comment, Calamandrei records the tale of a comrade who, having taken up position in Piazza di Spagna to prepare for the Via Rasella attack, on seeing the German column who were to be exterminated, first says to himself that he couldn't care less about the death of all those men, and then feels tears running down his cheeks. Calamandrei frees himself from the tragic sense of the situation with the successfully achieved action (‘and I felt full of an elementary, childlike joy') and with the emotion he experienced at the immense misery of the refugees: ‘Precisely because grief appears so out of proportion with the remedy, precisely for this reason we need to fight and fight so that an end is put to the disproportion.' Finally, Calamandrei appeals to political conscience as an antidote to the deviations that that type of fighting can lead to: ‘I urge you to resume political life more actively in order to remedy a certain
sportismo
that is infecting us.'
⁴⁸
In many Communist documents, ‘sporting activity' meant military activity; and here possibly Calamandrei was keen to warn against the danger that might lurk in that conspiratorial formula.

A fine death and a gratuitous death were not in fact part of Resistance thinking, but of that of Fascism. Two Gappists wrote:

The GAP action that has aroused most discussion is, together with that of Via Rasella, the killing of the philosopher Giovanni Gentile, which occurred in Florence on 15 April 1944. The most considered comment to appear at the time,
Carlo Dionisotti's, begins with the words: ‘the violent end of Giovanni Gentile is only an episode in the crisis that Italy is going through'.
⁵⁰
Another
resistente
, Enzo Enriques Agnoletti, who had originally expressed disapproval at the attack, has recently written that ‘only the fame of the victim made him a special case'.
⁵¹

These are opinions inspired by repugnance at giving preferential treatment to illustrious personages in the tragedy. But it is true that not only Gentile's fame, but also his being a great intellectual give his case a symbolic value that, on the one hand, particularly highlights the civil war context in which his killing took place, and on the other raises the question of the relationship between the responsibility of the man of culture and that of the politician. ‘They are even killing philosophers', was Benedetto Croce's comment.
⁵²
Necessary and useful, but marginal to this problem, appear the many investigations into the dynamics of the attack, into who its originators were, into when exactly the decision was taken to carry it out, into the possibility, claimed by some, of Fascists having been behind it.
⁵³

The essence of the problem was clearly formulated at the time by Antonio Banfi when, in an article devoted to the killing of the philosopher, he posed this question: ‘He was a scholar, they say, a philosopher, a man of culture and a man who protected, defended culture and always celebrated the values of the spirit, and was this not a sufficient shield against his political errors?' The answer was a firm no, argued by denying whoever it might be in the ‘inebriating and terrible struggle' that was in progress, a ‘privilege of salvation', and all the more so in the case of someone who ‘has made his intelligence and his knowledge into an instrument of deceit and perversion'.
⁵⁴

The problem was therefore that of the political responsibility of the intellectual, understood, in this case, as the basis of the legitimacy of the action aimed at killing him. In other words, the problem of the relationship between thought, word, and action. What needs identifying is the point at which the function of the word as an instrument of action prevails over its function of expressing and transmitting thought.
⁵⁵
Any judgment on the link between Gentile's philosophy and Fascism is, from this point of view, marginal, even if it is natural that in those circumstances his famous speech about the cudgel being equal to the sermon as an instrument of thought was widely recalled, not least by Banfi.
⁵⁶
But there is no doubt that the Gentile who supported the Social Republic and accepted important positions in it like that of president of the Accademia d'Italia, the Gentile who publicly thanked ‘il condottiere della grande Germania', and who invoked ‘yes, the cessation of the struggles, save that vital one against treasonous instigators, whether they have sold themselves or are in good faith, but inebriated with extermination', thereby faithfully repeating the words used by the Fascists, had stepped well beyond the threshold which, even with the flaring up of a civil war, ought to mark the zone of immunity accorded to a thinker.
⁵⁷
In Gentile's case, however, his status as a philosopher conferred on him greater force as an active Fascist. It would have been odd if this circumstance had played in his favour.

When, in his speech to the Italians pronounced from the Campidoglio on 24 June 1943, Gentile had sought to champion a form of national unity in the form of Fascism, a newspaper of new generation anti-Fascists had commented in language which, though archaic, hit the nail on the head: ‘He scorns us only because he is sufficiently able at leading innocents, namely the young and the masses further down the path of vice rather than that of virtue.'
⁵⁸

Now, in the course of the civil war, the frontier between ‘vice' and ‘virtue' was garrisoned, on both sides, with arms; and ‘national unity' could only be proposed either wholly from one side or wholly from the other side of that frontier. Indeed, in order to achieve it on his side, Gentile demanded the elimination of those who sought it from the opposing side. If some credit is due to Gentile in those circumstances, it lies in his having taken sides without hesitation – though,
as Dionisotti has pointed out clearly, with the ambiguity of the philosopher of history convinced that, whatever the situation may be, he has to be there at the centre of events. There is some truth, then, and, in the final part, ingenuous optimism, in this article in
L'Italia Libera
: ‘This bloody death has somehow redeemed Giovanni Gentile, not certainly in comparison with the Italian intellectuals who have died fighting against Nazism, but in comparison with the Federzonis and Bottais who have abased themselves with some obliging protector, in the hope of avoiding the inevitable judgment that awaits them.'
⁵⁹

The violence practised during the Insurrection and the phase immediately following it had a character of its own, when the direct ‘settling of accounts' reached its acme, but at the same time headed towards its rapid conclusion, giving way to the process of punishment and purging that was to be conducted by the new institutional order. Coexisting in the climate of general euphoria of the last days of April 1945 were faith in and doubts about the near future, the fears of the Allies, the Rome government and the moderate parties that they might lose their hold on the situation, and on the other hand the urge to achieve, while time remained, as much as possible in the way of irreversible actions. On the one hand, in short, a determination to strike while the iron was hot, and on the other hand a ready commitment to cool the iron down. This is the background against which the explosion of violence that occurred in those crucial days has to be seen, when the exasperation accumulated in twenty months of civil war came out of hiding and was given vent in a way which, though legitimised by the victory, the victory itself might before long push down the slippery slope of mere and unseemly vendetta.

‘Only justice which is
rapid and exemplary
will prevent an excessive number of massacres on the one hand and unmerited impunity on the other' – this is how the Piedmontese regional military Command had wisely sought in advance to steer the phase of transition in which excessive indulgence could only have added fuel to partisan radicalism.
¹
The secretariat of the Action Party for Northern Italy had moved along the same lines early on, in urging the avoidance both of ‘a bureaucratic and central purging process' like that promoted in Rome and a ‘spontaneous movement of mob vendettas', which would simply have meant playing into the Allies' hands. There was in all this the awareness of how difficult it was to ‘find a just middle way between inconclusive Jacobin
extremism and inertly waiting for a Constitution which in itself will be unable to solve anything if the way is not suitably paved by positive actions'.
²

The news coming from the South was a spur to act swiftly if, as the PCI representative in the Piedmont regional military command had said at the beginning of the year, one wished to avoid repeating ‘Rome's error as a result of which too many Fascists are still roaming the streets of the city undisturbed, and, what is worse, holding public offices and fomenting disorder of every kind'.
³

Immediate problems of this order include the arguments and conflicts that occurred in the CLNs and in the CVL Commands about the role that the partisans ought to play in keeping the peace immediately after the overthrow of the Nazi-Fascist authorities. In the background there was the equally and perhaps still more important question of the inclusion of the partisans in the regular forces of the army and the police.

‘Total and exclusive employment of military formations for purposes of warfare' was written in the agreement stipulated between the CLNAI and Under-Secretary Medici Tornaquinci on a mission to the North.
⁴
The distinction between military activity, police action and judicial proceedings was as clear on paper as it was difficult in practice in the days of the insurrection. Much as one wished to reduce the partisans to a pure military status, everyone knew full well that this was not how things stood: indeed, Edgardo Sogno, chief of the Franchi organisation, urged that the regular Italian Liberation Corps (CIL) troops should be the first to enter Milan, while the Communists were pressing the Garibaldini to liberate the city.
⁵

On 20 April the CLNAI issued a ‘regulation for the functioning of the commissions of justice' in order to ‘offer the population a serious guarantee that justice will be done with serenity and promptness'. On 25 April, proclaiming the state of exception, it ordered the zone commands of the CVL to set up military war tribunals, and, the same day, issued a decree concerning its own jurisdictional powers.
⁶
This disciplining of the easily foreseeable violence during the phase of transition was fairly loosely woven, since much depended on those
who, when it came down to it, would act in concrete terms. This regulation, which repeated that ‘every due regard should be shown' towards enemies who did not put up resistance, stressed that ‘arms must be used against those who on the contrary put up resistance or are about to do so'.