A Civil War (22 page)

For the Italian anti-Fascists, who spoke in the name of a nation that already had Fascism in power, the problem had been particularly dramatic. It is to Carlo Rosselli's credit that he put things with precocious lucidity, immediately after Hitler came to power, in his famous article ‘La guerra che torna'. ‘The struggle between Fascism and anti-Fascism,' wrote Rosselli, ‘is heading for the judgment of God … From this moment Mussolini can launch his anathema against the traitors of the Fascist
patria
.'
¹²

A fair idea of the difficulty a movement of long-standing pacifist traditions had in following the Giustizia e Libertà leader on a path thought to be too brazen is given by Pietro Nenni's response. Faithful to the position he assumed in July 1930, at the congress of socialist unity, against the hypothesis of war as a means of defeating Fascism,
¹³
Nenni wrote that an anti-Fascist preventive war would acquire the character of an ‘imperialist intervention, dictated by imperialist considerations', whereas ‘revolutionary duty is to say no to war, to deny it in whatever form it should present itself, whether under the wing of revolutionary war or war of liberty.'
¹⁴
These words certainly bespeak the anti-warmongering
passion of a former interventionist, which is what Nenni had been, and which induced him to write, in the article just cited, that ‘all the illusions, all the errors of 1914–15, are returning'. But the whole of the PSI, in its oscillations and in its contradictions, appeared in those years to be an interesting laboratory of the problems of peace and war, closely interwoven with those of the autonomy to be salvaged for socialism and anti-Fascism in the increasingly acute conflict between the great powers.
¹⁵
Even after the unity-of-action pact with the Communists, viewed by the latter primarily as a projection of the drawing together of the USSR and Popular Front France, the autonomist group of the PSI, whose foremost exponent was Giuseppe Emanuele Modigliani, had inserted in the closing motion of the congress held in Paris in June 1937 an appeal to the need for the workers' and socialist movement not to identify ‘at all costs with a bloc of anti-Fascist states'.
¹⁶

Distrust of the USSR and the memory of Zimmerwald converged in this position, which, after the German–Soviet pact and the outbreak of the war, came to sound uncannily like the Communist theses about the Second World War as an imperialist war. Indeed, between September 1939 and June 1941 there runs the most tormented phase of the positions of the Italian anti-Fascists concerning the war. The German–Soviet pact had reshuffled all the cards that had been laboriously assembled in the name of international anti-Fascism. Staying out of the war, however it was argued, went against another long-standing tradition – the defence of democracy, bourgeois though it might be. This was, in fact, felt particularly strongly by those, like Nenni, who were deeply nurtured by post-Jacobin political culture. On 31 August 1939
Nuovo Avanti!
lost no time in headlining its front page ‘Gli Italiani sono al fianco della Francia' (‘The Italians are at France's side'); and, on the third page, hosting an article by Nenni, ‘Il
voltafaccia della politica sovietica' (‘The about-turn of Soviet policy').
¹⁷
But the very fact of coming out in favour of the bourgeois democracies at war with Hitler made the PSI all the more eager to stress its own specificity, from a socialist and class point of view, regarding the war. For example, a carefully measured-out dosage of weights and counterweights characterised Nenni's address to the party leadership on 15 December 1939.

Given the way things stand – he said plainly – the progress of Humanity depends above all on the defeat of Fascism. The task of the proletariat is therefore to support, with all the creative energy of which it is capable, the war for the overthrow of Hitler and the Fascist political system; and he added: ‘The parallelism of aims between the proletariat, which wants to rid humanity of Fascism, and the bourgeois democracies that are at war with the Third Reich, does not influence the fundamental problems of political direction and the aims of the war … Neither defeatism, therefore, nor holy union.'

This conclusion of Nenni's was formulated with one eye on Daladier's government and the other on the watchword ‘neither adhere nor sabotage' of 1915–18. But, when it came to Italy, Nenni was in no doubt. If Mussolini dragged it into the conflict, one's duty would be to ‘sabotage the Fascist war and transform it into the civil war of workers against their oppressors'. It is particularly significant that Nenni regarded this Leninist invitation of his as valid even if Mussolini, enlisted in extremis by France and England ‘among the crusaders of democracy', were to enter the war ‘in a possible anti-Bolshevik league'.
¹⁸

When the USSR was carried completely over into the anti-Nazi camp by the German attack on Russia, the Socialists – above all those who had sponsored the unity-of-action pact – heaved a veritable sigh of relief. But so profound had been the trauma that, as late as 1 May 1944, a PSIUP executive declaration said that, if there had been as strong a Communist party in England as there was in France, that would have favoured Hitler's victory.
¹⁹
In the Socialist camp, in any case, there were still those – from Ignazio Silone to Lelio Basso – who were particularly intent on Socialist anti-Fascism's remaining autonomous from the policy of the great powers, including the USSR.
²⁰

As for the relationship with the desire for Fascist Italy's defeat, the prospect of a third, autonomous anti-Fascist way was undoubtedly a sort of preventive answer to the thesis of the ‘foreigner's party', just as the never-to-be-realised creation of a corps of Italian volunteers to fight alongside the Allies would have been.
²¹
On the eve of the war, Eugenio Curiel, a young Socialist active within the party, had put his finger clearly on the problem.
²²
Speaking in the name of ‘our Milanese comrades and others', Curiel had declared himself in favour of the creation, in France, of an Italian legion which ‘must represent the Italian people in this oncoming war'. With equal clarity, Curiel had affirmed: ‘We do not want tomorrow's government to be the government of defeat, the Weimar government', and had therefore argued that one needed to have the courage to assume the role, within Italy, of
disfattista
(defeatist), even if ‘tomorrow a handful of scoundrels, in the pay of some residual Fascist, might yell the same old insults at us'. These words can be read as the invitation by a member of the new anti-Fascist
generation to a representative of the old guard to profit from the experience of the post–First World War period without allowing himself to be paralysed by it, indeed proudly assuming that epithet
disfattista
, which still troubled many veterans, and legitimising it by participating in the war on the just side.

The Weimar nightmare would continue to weigh heavily on the moderate anti-Fascists, who had not swept it away with Curiel's moral intransigence. From the United States Luigi Sturzo would appear concerned that those ‘who will take up the government will be subjected (as happened with the Weimar democrats in Germany) to all the effects of the mutilation and humiliation that the Allies will cause to Italy'.
²³
During Badoglio's forty-five days, with an suffocating calculation of costs and benefits, Alcide De Gasperi maintained, in the same spirit, that of the two questions to settle – Mussolini's defeat and the Armistice – while the former, which was active, had already been achieved to the advantage of those who had arranged it, in the case of the latter, which was passive, and thus liable to create ‘doleful responsibilities for its negotiators', it was better not to get involved.
²⁴
Unfettered by ties of caution, tradition and obedience, Justice and Liberty and the Action Party were the anti-Fascist groups which, true to the model provided by Rosselli in 1933, unrepentantly and with proud clarity, included, in the passage from pacifism to active intervention against Fascism, the prospect of Italy's defeat. In 1935 Francesco Fancello wrote from prison, with reference to Germany (though what he said could clearly be extended to Italy): ‘Only in very exceptional cases may the defeat of one's own country appear a price justified by forecasts of subsequent recoveries.'
²⁵
Nazism and Fascism had created precisely one of those exceptional cases in which the force of arms, even when it appeared triumphant, could only be opposed by faith in principles. Faced with the catastrophe of France, Vittorio Foa wrote to his parents from Regina Coeli prison: ‘I know very well that even when in Europe all the institutions in which we found our faith in a tolerable future have collapsed, nothing will be lost again if those institutions remain alive in the consciences of a few thousand Europeans; and against this spiritual tension the German tank divisions have scant influence.'
²⁶

This spiritual tension was re-evoked by Altiero Spinelli when, shortly before
his death, he testified that in 1940 he and those like him wished for the defeat of Italy, ‘even if 100 percent of the Italians were of Italian origin'.
²⁷

Little more than one month after 8 September,
La Libertà
, the Tuscan organ of the Action Party, wrote:

By now on the eve of its final dissolution, the northern edition of
L'Italia Libera
would speak of the ‘military defeat suffered in the Fascist war' as a ‘defeat that we have wished for and considered rightly as a victory'.
²⁸
The anti-Fascist party which suffered the greatest travail between September 1939 and June 1941 was certainly the Communist Party.
²⁹
But it was a travail frozen by loyalty to the USSR, a drama that involved the consciences of the militants a good deal more than was shown in the official party line. Thus Spinelli describes the Communists imprisoned at Ventotene, on hearing about the signing of the German–Soviet pact, as follows:

In fact, the Communists had never associated the struggle against Fascism with the prospect of a war that would necessarily involve the USSR. In August
1935, in his report to the 7
^th
Congress of the International, Togliatti had criticised the workers ‘who think, who have come to the point of thinking, that only war will be able to give their class the chance of taking up the revolutionary struggle again'.
³¹
The defence of peace against the new imperialist war beating at the gates, anti-Fascism, the cause of socialism, seemed firmly united, under the guarantee of the USSR, according to the watchword ‘struggle against the imperialist war, for peace, for the defence of the Soviet Union' (which is how Togliatti concluded his report to the 7
^th
Congress). The August 1939 pact put paid to these convergences, and peace now came to materialise in the extraneousness of the USSR to the second imperialist war. When Germany attacked the USSR, the German Communist Party was to accuse Hitler of having treacherously violated the pact of friendship between the two peoples.
³²

As we know, it was in France that the ‘second imperialist war' thesis had its most tragic consequences. At first the Communists voted for the claims of war, but then immediately came to toe the Comintern line. Togliatti noted with satisfaction ‘the French Communists' courageous and sincere criticism' of their initial error of forgetting that ‘today the only just policy for the working class and the Communist party is the courageous struggle against the imperialist war, for peace', and then reiterated his denunciation of the disorientation and opportunism generated by those who made ‘a sort of sentimental distinction between the two belligerent imperialist blocs'.
³³
The watchword became, ‘Down with the imperialist war';
³⁴
or again, ‘Between Hitler's Germany and capitalist England, the workers choose the French Soviet Republic'.
³⁵
Not that the party line expressed the conscience of the militants without there being residual divergences. In fact,'What was true for the party was far less so for the individual.'
³⁶

But we also need to evaluate the weight of the memory, alive not just in France, of the ‘Socialist' betrayal of 1914. Again, it was Togliatti who appealed to this, accusing the Socialists of being, as in 1914–18, ‘in the direct service of
the imperialist, reactionary and warmongering bourgeoisie'.
³⁷
That memory was also recalled by sworn enemies of the Stalinists, such as the Trotskyists and anarchists, convinced in their turn that what was afoot was a new imperialist war.
³⁸
Defeat and German occupation made the viability of this position still more arduous for the French Communists. Alongside the watchword, ‘Neither Berlin, nor London,' there appeared the afterword ‘nor Vichy';
³⁹
but the fundamental theme remained the peace – ‘Only the communists fight against the war!' – to impose on the creators of the imperialist conflict, whom ‘the traitors of 1940' had befriended.
⁴⁰
As for Italy, a country occupied by the French from time immemorial, if on the one hand it was still a tricky business squaring the circle, especially after her entry into the war, on the other hand anti-Fascism had become too intrinsic a part of the Communist movement not to remain, in one form or another, in the foreground of party policy. The PCI thus forced itself to keep together the theoretically non-contradictory objectives of ‘revolutionary
disfattismo
' and the overthrow of Fascism.
⁴¹
The prestige of the USSR, which had kept out of the imperialist bloodbath, might even prove to grow from this. In a leaflet, confiscated in Trieste by the
carabinieri
on 11 June 1940, the war that had just been declared was defined as being ‘like all others, that is serving the interests of the rich and bringing starvation and death to the poor'; and ‘Down with the imperialist war, Down with Churchill and Hitler' could be seen scribbled on several walls, flanked however by a number of pro-English ones as well.
⁴²
This coupling, whether occasional or polemical, symbolised a real contradiction in working-class anti-Fascism, to be dissolved or at least placated with the changed nature of the conflict that was reckoned to have derived from it.
⁴³
In fact, as we
shall see, the problem of the war–revolution nexus was to return in the course of the Resistance; and in the meantime it interwove with that of the defeat of Italy in the Fascist war.