A Civil War (72 page)

In the moderate Resistance press too, the capitalistic and landowning classes were frequently accused of collusion. But when very general, fulsome, at times rhetorical statements gave way to rather more pertinent arguments, the ideological and political differences reappeared. A case in point is the contrast between the lecture entitled ‘Il Fascismo' from the
Breve corso per commissari
(Short course for commissars), given on 15 September 1944 by the 1
^st
Garibaldi Osoppo divisional command, in the brief period from 27 July when the Garibaldini and Osovani achieved uneasy unification, and a discussion topic – ‘political theme: the disunion first of the Italian, then of the German people permitted the advent of Nazi-Fascism' – developed on 1 November by the Friuli Osoppo division, which had again become autonomous.
⁶⁸
The first text states that reaction, having repelled the revolutionary forces, sought a way ‘of eliminating the class struggle once and for all', and found it

By contrast, the second text, which was mainly Catholic in inspiration, attributes the advent of Fascism not so much to the defeat suffered by the working class as to the very fact that there had been the outbreak of a struggle that had created ‘unbridgeable abysses between the various classes, in other words the disunion of the Italian people'. In these words it is not difficult to glean retaliation against the vaunted unitarianism of the Communists. The document appears to have absorbed many of the views that Fascism had given to the post-First World War crisis: disorder, degenerate parliamentarianism, extremism, ‘disillusion at the concrete results of the war'. The lack of ‘quick and efficient' legislation, capable of ensuring a ‘more equal distribution of wealth', had thus left the field free to ‘extempore and charlatan demagogues'. Only when everything was already compromised did the parties, ‘reduced to a scanty group of shadows, understand the mistake they had made, and they went off to ponder things on the Aventino, from which they were duly sent packing scornfully and derisively by the dictator and his thugs. A pathetic, wretched spectacle!'

It is remarkable that, in a scenario so full of conventional elements, there should have been this final outburst of youthful moralism and opposition between generations, which more closely resembled Communist-inspired polemics than the defence of the Aventino still to be found in the ‘New Year's Message to the Young' that appeared in
Avanti!
. Recognisable in that appeal is the soundness of the ‘cruellest criticisms' on the ‘plane of news and tactics', but it is solemnly stated that ‘in spirit and in its historical achievement [the Aventino] was a memorable event'.
⁶⁹

Circulating in the Resistance press are a collection of opinions about the nature of Fascism that are not well amalgamated – not even in the Communist writings, which could have used a more rigid ideological frame of reference. Reflections, attempted inquiries, and the challenging of facts converge here – together with expressions of moral repulsion, either lengthily argued or the most rapid generalisations; judgments about the social and economic forces that had fathered and sustained the regime; denunciations of the responsibility of individuals, classes, social groups or the entire national community; and finally a desire to go beyond, while not prematurely burying, a past that was truly so arduous a task to put behind one. In an Action Party pamphlet a visible attempt is made to keep all these threads together. It talks in terms of ‘institutional crystallisation' and ‘social reaction', of ‘mentality, in the deep sense given to this word by political speculation', of a ‘psychological aspect' by which Fascism is ‘a combination of distrust and fear which corresponds to the letter with the defence of very precise interests'.
⁷⁰

This widening of the significance to be given to the struggle against Fascism meant involving firstly the entire Italian ruling class, which was getting itself together again in the South, and then the whole of the nation's past, at least from the time of unification. The repression of the concept of civil war was certainly rooted in this subterranean awareness of its implicit potentiality to embrace Fascism in the widest sense of the word, to the point of overstepping it. ‘No further proof is needed of the political failure of the ruling classes', wrote the Rome edition of
L'Unità
during the phase of stiffening anti-Badoglio sentiment following 8 September:

More radically,
Avanti!
bore this half-title: ‘The King's appeals from Palermo [
sic
] are echoed by Mussolini's speeches from Vienna: the dialogues of the dead!'
⁷²
And
L'Azione
, organ of the Christian Socialists: ‘The Italian people do not want to fight either for one (the monarchic government) nor the other (Mussolini's government).'
⁷³
In an article entitled ‘Il congresso di Bari',
L'Italia Libera
was to speak of ‘two phantom governments' flapping this way and that against the backdrop of the Italian tragedy.
⁷⁴

The attitudes taken towards the purges are an excellent index of the different meanings given to Republican Fascism and to that of the
ventennio
⁷⁵
(just as in Restoration France they were compelled to distinguish between the followers of Napoleon during the ‘normal' period and those of the hundred days).
⁷⁶
The fact that the proposals were generally more drastic in the North than the South, or than in Rome, should be seen as being closely linked with the radicalising experience of the civil war.

For their part, the republican Fascists obviously polemicised against the purges set under way in the Kingdom of the South. But they do not seem to have taken advantage of that stimulus for self-criticism that they had claimed they wished to conduct; on the contrary, they were unable to hide a certain embarrassment. They declared the need for retaliation, played the victim, consoled themselves – Mussolini most of all – with repeated charges of conspiracy; in short, they revealed their fear of alarming their comrades by harping on too much about so burning an issue. The Duce himself was keen to put his seal on this question: ‘None of this naturally can frighten us Fascists. We have committed ourselves to a struggle in which what is at stake is life itself.'
⁷⁷

The two sides engaged in the civil war also vied for the past of the nation, and above all the Risorgimento. In the last chapter attention was drawn to the anti-German use of the Risorgimento and the different evaluations given to it by the Resistance. Here we might add that there was nothing new in the different
interpretations of the formative process of national unity being used as instruments of political struggle. But, precisely because of the civil war, 1943–45 saw the final breakdown of the unity of the Risorgimento tradition as an instrument of ‘nationalisation of the masses', independently of the fact that the RSI's appropriation of Mazzini and Garibaldi was largely illegitimate. The RSI could not but take to its extreme consequences the vision of a Risorgimento that aimed essentially at creating a strong, united nation-state, with the odd splash of populism perhaps, but in any case not undermined by liberal-democratic fancies and poisons. It was the most crudely Savoyard interpretation that the RSI inevitably made its own, even though it was compelled to expel the Savoy royal family. It was at the same time the interpretation that many of the groups of young Resistance intellectuals (and not just the Actionists) had learned to criticise and scorn in the pages that Luigi Salvatorelli had published on the eve of the regime's collapse.
⁷⁸

The objective of the Risorgimento dispute was the appropriation of the essence of that movement, whereby those who joined with the opposite side were rejected with the word ‘anti-Italian'. There was nothing new about this phenomenon either. It has always been denied that the Risorgimento was a civil war, even in episodes like the Expedition of the Thousand, which saw only Italians fighting against Italians. This process is analogous to that described in regard to the ‘war of national liberation', which led to the annihilation of the very nationality of compatriots fighting on opposite sides. The success of the appeals to the Risorgimento made between 1943 and 1945 probably lies also in their capacity to place the internal enemy on the same plane as the external one, in line with the reassuring vision of the founding process of the unitary state.

At times the recapitulatory thrust of the ‘day of reckoning' that occurred between 1943 and 1945 transcended the very opposition between Fascism and anti-Fascism and its links with the Risorgimento. Fractures emerged, together with resentments, ancient desires for vengeance, more far-reaching and deeply rooted conflicting conceptions of the Italian man and the Italian nation. In a pamphlet written in December 1943, Riccardo Lombardi claimed that ‘1922 is simply a repetition, befitting the changed times, of 1898', just as Luigi Salvatorelli in 1919 had linked the crisis of the end of the century, the radiant May of 1915, and the Fascist reaction.
⁷⁹
But comparisons and questionings could go well beyond this. There were imprecations against ‘our historic curse, opportunism'.
⁸⁰
There
was the wish to liberate oneself from the diagnosis of Fascism as a ‘revelation' or as the ‘autobiography of the nation'.
⁸¹

Once the figure of the Fascist enemy had been redefined, alongside that of the German enemy, the unifying category ‘nazifascista' was not always enough to keep the two parties together, even though the category was viscerally understood by the majority of
resistenti
, and not invalidated by the fact that the Fascist was the servant of the German – not an occasional servant, but a servant morally and politically in accord with his master.

Let us take another look at a page from Beppe Fenoglio, whose initial title, we should remember, for
The Twenty-Three Days of the City of Alba
had been
Tales of the Civil War
.
¹
Note this dialogue between two partisans:

In this dialogue the claim, ideally so clear-cut and so often repeated, that the German is being fought only insofar as he is a Nazi and the Italian only insofar as he is a Fascist,
³
is unable to contain and control all the emotions and doubts that the civil war arouses in relation to the war against the foreigner. What is more, in Beppe Fenoglio's words there emerges one of the most perturbing aspects of the civil war.

The civil war was generally described by both sides as ‘fratricide', so as to fan its horror and to lay a more infamous condemnation at the feet of the enemy, who was held up as the only culprit. There were families whose different members had chosen to fight on opposite sides.
⁴
But the fratricide metaphor sprang most forcefully from fraternity as a category extended to the entire nation. Giancarlo Puecher, shot by the Fascists, forgave them because ‘they know not what they do and do not know that brothers killing each other will never produce concord'.
⁵
‘I'm not going to fight against my brother' – this was the reason a prisoner in Germany gave for refusing to join the ranks of the RSI.
⁶
A southerner cut off in the North did not join the Fascists because he did not want to fight against his brothers; he did, however, join the partisans because, evidently, the Fascists appeared to him to have fallen from the rank of brothers.
⁷
A soldier conscripted by the RSI did not intend ‘to defend an idea that doesn't concern me … kill a brother for no reason … stain my hands and my soul with our [own] blood'.
⁸
Fascist leaflets distributed in the South denounced the call-up to fight the brothers of the North.
⁹

In the page from Fenoglio quoted above, fratricide appears as a fact that aggravates the struggle and which, in place of mutual pity, generates mutual scorn. Umberto Saba raised this theme of fratricide almost to the status of an interpretive canon for the whole of Italian history: