A Civil War (69 page)

On 15 March 1944 the CLNAI warned against subscribing to the ‘prestito città di Milano' (‘city of Milan loan') launched by Piero Parini,
podestà
and subsequently head of the province, who was fond of flirting with self-rule in Milan and
Risorgimento Liberale
urged the people of Milan not to subscribe to a loan that ‘does not possess the qualifications and authorisations provided for by Italian laws'. But in a fortnight a billion lire were raised and the loan, after being annulled by the municipal council by decree of the CLN, was to all effects recognised as valid in 1946 by the city administration that won the election.
¹²¹
This Fascist success was all the more significant for the fact that it appeared to go against the trend of ‘tesaurizzazione' (‘accumulation' or ‘hoarding'), which back in June 1943 had caused the ‘scant success' of the issue of multi-year treasury bonds, compelling the government ‘to rely increasingly on the pressure of bank-bills'.
¹²²

Only analytic research will be able to give an adequate indication of the outcome of the injunctions to fiscal disobedience. But Massimo Legnani's findings do seem to give us some idea:

Sometimes it was the practical needs of small town councils that made it difficult to put fiscal boycotting into practice. This is revealed by the 31 October 1944 request by the ‘CLN, Ufficio collegiale di Valsusa' to the CVL Command of the Alta Valle to put up a poster urging payment, given that, in the absence of tax collections, they were proving unable to provide essential services.
¹²⁴

In fact, appeals not to pay taxes, and other similar appeals, do not always appear to carry complete conviction. The president of the CLNAI himself, the independent Alfredo Pizzoni, implicitly acknowledged this when he reminded the parties that ‘as a rule what is decided at the CLNAI level serves for a well circumscribed interval of time'.
¹²⁵

The government of the South, for its part, was to take measures for ‘legislative order in the liberated territories' without taking account of what the CLNAI was decreeing.
¹²⁶
When a delegation of the prime minister's legislative office subsequently arrived in Milan after the Liberation, it was to write in its report: ‘We feel no desire at all that the measures of the CLNAI or the various liberation committees be recognised as having legislative value.' The delegation thus toed the line of ‘throwing in the sponge' over the clearly widespread practice of ignoring the CLNAI's injunctions of non-collaboration and civil disobedience.
¹²⁷

The double-crossing and opportunism, the absences and presences, the doing and not doing characterising the activity of the public administration which went over to the service of the RSI, often corresponded to the more or less widespread expectations of an exhausted population that needed to use certain essential services, and for which the dividing lines between acquiescence to de facto established authorities, fence-sitting and passive resistance were not well defined, thus making for a toing-and-froing from one territory to another. The ‘resigned fatalism' that Mussolini himself could not help drawing to Hitler's attention on 3 October 1943 – though he considered it as coexisting with the opposite pole of a ‘volontà di ripresa' (‘determination to recover') – the oscillation of the large majority between scepticism and pessimism, which the Duce
would again mention to Hitler at the Klessheim meeting of 22 April 1944,
¹²⁸
the ‘grey zone of the indifferent and the resigned' undulating between ‘il popolo sano' and the ‘rebels',
¹²⁹
are like their counterpart, in Fascist guise, of the
attesismo
insistently denounced by both the Communists and the Actionists. The latter were all too aware how the moderate anti-Fascist parties had their eyes on the weary and uncertain mass whose numerical weight would count when it came to elections.

A strongly partisan and GL province like Cuneo would later give most of its votes to the monarchy and Democrazia Cristiana. The provincial head, who complained about not managing to get himself taken seriously ‘because the population felt that the established authorities had less force than the rebels', traced this picture with pessimistic perspicacity:

There was a great deal of Fascist propaganda against ‘sceptics, fence-sitters, Anglophiles', as a poster of 20 April called them.
¹³¹
Another poster quoted these words of Eleonora Duse: ‘He who despairs betrays'.
¹³²
A propaganda postcard read: ‘Sfiducia [here meaning “disheartenment”]. Away with that S', which was represented in the form of a serpent.
¹³³
A leaflet of 5 October considered ‘the Italians' attitude of equivalent detachment from the English and the Germans a way of not doing their duty towards the
patria
'.
¹³⁴
Republican Fascism missed the fact that, though it makes sense to play a waiting game vis-à-vis a winning cause whose fruits one is waiting to gather, contributing as little as possible to it, it makes no sense to do so when it comes to a losing cause. In the latter case, fence-sitting can mean no more than waiting, without taking any risks, for by now inevitable, definitive defeat.

Between the small amount of possible ordinary administration swathed in vague Fascist phraseology and act upon act of increasingly barbaric violence, no
middle way lay open to the RSI. A twenty-one-year-old auxiliary, sentenced to death by the partisans of the Valle d'Aosta, expressed this contrast in the bitterest terms, blaming his fate on the uselessness of a war fought for those who preferred not to lift a finger: ‘It's terrible to think that tomorrow I'll no longer exist; I'm still unable to convince myself. I don't ask to be avenged, there's no point; but I'd like my death to serve as an example to all those who call themselves Fascists and who sacrifice nothing for our Cause except words.'
¹³⁵

Anti-Fascist and Resistance circles sometimes refused, but more often than not agreed to recognise, implicitly or explicitly, what was taking place as a civil war, though with various inflections. These range from reticence to deprecation, from the rejection of all responsibility for the Fascists to the firm acceptance of the phrase as describing an incontrovertible fact.

The monarchist ‘Centro della Democrazia italiana' adopted an extreme position. As late as April 1944 it accused the CLN of not having grasped the fact that, after the great event of 25 July, ‘liberation', after 8 September as well, could only have ‘the value and meaning of liberation from the foreigner', as well as the restoration of ‘the reign of law' violated first in 1919–22 and then in 1922– 43. The monarchist newspaper
L'Italiano
did not hesitate to use the formula ‘war of national liberation' and, while going so far as to speak of ‘war of religion', did so in the extremely literal sense of identifying the right side with the Catholic Church. The ‘Centro' declared that it had been born to give voice to the increasingly large number of people who disapproved of the CLN and of whom, certainly, and above all in Rome, there were more than a few.
¹
This was not an isolated position, as regards either the present, the past (the
biennio rosso
being bracketed with Fascism), or a near future, above all in Rome and the South. It amounted to the partisans being saddled with responsibility for the civil war even by those who were not Fascists. Another minor Roman underground paper had already done as much, albeit in the guise of an impartial condemnation of both parties. The parties, it says, ‘under the influence of extremist positions', have ‘unleashed the civil war', and it is difficult to distinguish right from wrong in it.
²
Victor Emmanuel III had come cleaner when, in his speech on Radio Bari of 24 September 1943, he had denounced those who ‘either by betraying the oath they had given, or by forgetting the repeated assurances of loyalty given
to me personally, foment civil war by inciting the Italians to fight against their brothers'.
³

A few months later, what was happening in the North would be recognised in no uncertain terms as being a civil war by the general commanding the
carabinieri
, while explicitly denying a similar contraposition between the Kingdom of the South and the Social Republic.
⁴

In its famous order of the day of 16 October 1943 (asking that it be given ‘all the constitutional powers of the state'), the central CLN laid the entire blame for the civil war on the Fascists, maintaining all the while some uncertainty as to the effective outcome of the initiative that the latter had taken. In fact it spoke of ‘Mussolini's last-minute attempt to raise, beneath the mask of a self-styled republican state, the horrors of civil war'.
⁵
The Modena CLN, to cite a peripheral example of some months later, resolutely declared:

Equally clear-cut was the position taken by
Risorgimento Liberale
: ‘Mussolini is to blame for the blood being spilled today in the streets and jails of Italy, even the blood of his extreme and wretched supporters. It is he who has stimulated his followers, compelled his enemies, urged his allies to be violent. It is he who has unleashed the civil war.'
⁷

Notable, in these two texts inspired by the ‘moderate' parties, is its being taken for granted that the Fascists are worse than the Germans.

Views of the civil war appear to oscillate in the Christian Democrat press. On 23 October 1943
Il Popolo
recognised its existence and laid all the blame on the Fascists; on 23 January 1944 it went back on this. On 12 December it had declared that the Italian front was the internal one.
⁸
The Christian
Democrat view of things would be influenced by fear that the ‘civil war' would swing in favour of the left and degenerate into revolution. Indicative of this is a document sent to Alcide De Gasperi by the Christian Democrats of Turin on 15 January 1945.
⁹
After giving a picture of the Garibaldi (and also Matteotti) partisan movement which anticipates many of the themes of 18 April, it said that unfortunately Democrazia Cristiana and the Liberal Party had not managed to impose the idea of ‘keeping the rebels' movement on purely patriotic and military ground under a single command, which should also have been military in character'; Actionists and Communists had clashed because above all the latter aimed to make the partisan formations into ‘an instrument of oppression for tomorrow, more so than a means of anti-German and anti-Fascist struggle for today'. Without too much thought to coherence, the authors of the document strongly underlined that 90 percent of the population were extremely hostile to the Germans, but even more so to the Fascists. Moreover, at roughly the same time, in one of its propaganda booklets the Ministry of Occupied Italy, run by the Communist Mauro Scoccimarro, published the famous words of the song
Fischia il Vento
(The Wind Whistles) with one variant, ‘a conquistare la
bella
primavera' (rather than
rossa
), and another which had the partisan waving the Italian flag.
¹⁰

Even in the left-wing press there were defensive, reticent or oscillating attitudes. On 7 February 1944
Avanti!
wrote that Mussolini, ‘before disappearing, wanted to build the premises of the new civil war'.
¹¹
But more incisive lines of argument appeared, too. Above all the Fascists were reminded that their responsibility for the explosion of civil war was not just today's: they had been busy unleashing fratricidal war against the Italian workers for twenty years now.
¹²
There was also pride in taking up a challenge. Commemorating Mario Fioretti, a youth killed by the Fascists – baldly defined as a ‘subversive', a very rare form of description for the Resistance press –
Avanti!
wrote that ‘the murder of our comrade is to be regarded as being among the first signs of civil war'. And it added immediately:

More soberly,
L'Italia Libera
wrote: ‘So Fascism wants civil war? All right, then. And let it be the CLN that will wage it until Fascism is exterminated.'
¹⁴
In another ‘actionist' article the undertaking was made with greater pride: ‘We know that we have to achieve our idea in the fire of a war which is also civil war'.
¹⁵