A Civil War (79 page)

It is no easy thing to find an organic framework for positions inspired by such contradictory impulses and the proclamation of one's duty to disobey the laws of the Social Republic made by so prominent a Christian Democrat politician as Paolo Emilio Taviani.
¹¹³
The exhortation by Teresio Olivelli, who died at Mauthausen, to become ‘rebels for love' is interpreted by his biographer as a choice made precisely by virtue of his Christian spirituality.
¹¹⁴
The same need to come down clearly on one side or the other was felt by Alfredo Di Dio, the Catholic partisan leader of the Val d'Ossola, who, replying to his mother, who was exhorting him to hide, said that he regarded those who were neither partisans nor Fascists as ‘mediocre'.
¹¹⁵

Still more significant is the itinerary of Giuseppe Dossetti. In the summer of 1942, at the inter-regional conference of the Catholic graduates of Emilia-Romagna, Dossetti had maintained that Christian morality considers rebellion against tyranny legitimate. Immediately after 8 September he was recommending that one keep clear of the fratricidal struggle and direct one's energies at offering fraternal assistance to the persecuted and suffering. Dossetti was then to become president of the provincial CLN.
¹¹⁶
Gorrieri clearly saw where Catholic engagement in the Resistance would lead politically. The Catholics, he wrote, had grown convinced that their organised presence in the armed struggle would constitute a qualification for participating in the construction of the new democratic state soon after the Liberation.
¹¹⁷

The contradictions of the Catholics were mirrored almost identically in the contradictions and uncertainties of the ‘lay'
resistenti
they found before them. When the
laici
found themselves again alongside the Catholics, they showed incredulity, positive surprise, suspicion, at times almost contempt, together with
manifestations of a unitary spirit, at times instrumental, at times sincere. Sincere certainly was the wish to avoid the rebirth of anti-clericalism, though this attitude does not simply bespeak a civil ideal of tolerance, but also inadequate attention to the great problems of theory and morality, sacrificed to the political need for agreement between Catholics and the representative role assumed for them by the Christian Democrat party. If on the one hand this party constituted the visible proof of the Catholics' commitment, on the other hand it might instead have aroused suspicion exactly by virtue of its being a bridge between religion and politics, over which it was hard to tell what might cross in future. ‘We started hearing talk of Christian Democrat units', writes a pungent Veneto Action Party–inspired author in his memoirs: ‘Late in the day but sure enough, they too arrived. The participation of priests and of some church folk in the first phases of the Resistance had been admirable; but now one might almost have thought that this organisational intervention, coming rather late in the day, was an opportunist, competitive move.'
¹¹⁸

Many
laici
also hoped that the Catholics, and the clergy in particular, would take sides – without, however, altogether giving up hoping for a clergy that was somehow, in humanitarian terms and without political pretensions, above the struggle. The humanitarianism of the clergy could then be seen with satisfaction both insofar as it constituted the humus in which the Resistance sunk its roots, and in its being a counterweight to a politicisation that was welcome, but not unreservedly so. At the same time it could be criticised as being a brake on the struggle. A Communist report says: ‘A good many clergy, with the pretext of humanitarianism, are seeking to reach a compromise with the enemy, saving him from just punishment, and the masses, not being politicised, will be easily influenced.'
¹¹⁹

In the
laici
there was, in short, a contradiction that mirrored the contradiction we have encountered among the Catholics: a desire for the Church to take the right side, but also a fear, which generally remained hidden, that they would overstep the mark.

Many of the aspects of the civil war seem, as it were, to have been sublimated in the conviction that a great European civil war was taking place. This concept is almost as controversial as that of a civil war applied only to Italy. The controversy becomes richer in significance when the entire ‘thirty years war' that took place in Europe between 1914 and 1945 is regarded as being a ‘civil'
war.
¹
This interpretation of the war as civil, ideological and religious, while not denying the geopolitical reasons for the conflict, does not consider that they tell the whole story.
²
It is clear in fact that, if one sets off from the view that ‘the real dominant tendency' of the Second World War, ‘for all the ideological embellishments', was that of ‘a contest between the great powers for a distribution or the preservation of their international positions, that is to say, a problem of strategic and economic spheres of interest', one cannot but conclude that the groups who had taken it ‘for a sort of “international civil war” ' were mistaken.
³
On the other hand, if the European civil war is seen, as it has been, as a question regarding only Bolshevism and National Socialism, one ends up with a reductive and distorted vision, leading to the aberrant conclusion that all the Nazi horrors, including the extermination of the Jews, were an ‘excessive response' to the violence practised by the Bolshevik revolution and the Soviet regime.
⁴
As we have already seen, there is undeniably a link between revolution, civil war and war between nations, but in a far more complex sense than the link theorised in these terms by Ernst Nolte. As Hannah Arendt wrote, ‘a world war appears as the consequence of a revolution, a sort of civil war unleashed over the whole of the Earth's surface: it is in fact as such that much public opinion – and not without reason – regarded the Second World War'.
⁵

Indeed, the discourse needs to be extended in three directions. Above all, the very technique of the war inaugurated by the Germans ‘against the defensive euphoria of the French' – parachute drops behind the enemy lines, action by ‘fifth columns', often formed by local Nazis in civilian dress, innumerable ways of terrorising the civilian populations – was something that ‘smacks more
of a civil war or a coup d'état than the traditional employment of the various weapons in combat'.
⁶
This technique of war and resistance against the invader and his accomplices had, moreover, the effect of stripping spying activity against the occupying regime of the despicable features traditionally associated with it: no longer hired spies, but informers who were freely contributing to the cause of recovery.
⁷

Secondly, the very fact that the peoples of Europe were fighting each other for the second time in twenty years was widely felt as a fratricide which crudely highlighted the fracture that had taken place between the normal development of civilisation and the lack of an adequate
jus publicum Europaeum
for the reality of the new century, and capable of coping with nationalistic degeneration in its different guises.
⁸
The federalist projects that flowered during the Resistance stemmed not least from this state of affairs.

Finally, the civil and ideological war crossed the borders of the various countries and was a war of coalition, like that fought by the great Allies. There was in fact an extremely close interweaving between the war between the nations that became civil war and the civil war that became a war between nations; and the features of the one reverberated against the other. Alongside the figure of the German enemy there was the common figure of the Fascist– collaborationist enemy who drew together the different European Resistance movements, in other respects so various and heterogeneous. Collaborationism was born from within the invaded countries themselves and gave a glimpse of a possible Europe that was truly and wholly Nazi-Fascist, body and soul. ‘The unforgivable crime of Vichy is not having simply deferred to the enemy force but to quickly give it its full collaboration.'
⁹

The desire to collaborate did more than boost the German request for collaboration. In Hitler at least, the will for dominion overwhelmed the convenience
of making widespread use of collaboration that was not merely manual labour to use and discard. It was above all the more esoteric component of Nazism, the SS, that became the bearer of a National Socialist European ideology, on the basis of which it seemed possible to give the war, particularly from 1942 onwards, the character of a crusade open in one way or another to all healthy and Aryan Europeans, and not the exclusive preserve of the German people and their Führer.
¹⁰

The Italian
resistenti
, who were all too familiar with the part the Fascists had played in their country in dragging the European peoples into that terrible showdown, gained strength and faith from feeling that they were involved in an event whose dimensions were so vast and whose significance so profound as to sweep away, or at least attenuate, the distrust which, as Italians, they knew they had to overcome. A French partisan wrote of an Italian partisan to whom he had spoken about 10 June 1940: ‘There was too much sadness in his voice for me to doubt his sincerity, and then four years under the Vichy regime helped me understand what I could not admit in May 1940.'
¹¹

In 1942
Nazioni Unite
, the organ of the Mazzini Society, entitled one of its articles ‘Cronache della guerra civile europea' (‘Chronicles of the European Civil War').
¹²
A Tuscan Action Party newspaper stated that civil war had been going on in Europe for years.
¹³
In its opening paragraph, a GL pamphlet, written by Massimo Mila, forcefully stressed that the Second World War was a European war of religion and explained: ‘Fractions of Italians, Chinese, Frenchmen and Russians are today fighting on one side or the other … Today we partisans feel the anti-Hitlerian German to be our brother, and the Italian Fascist our deadly enemy.'

Similar concepts were expressed by Adolfo Omodeo and Carlo Dionisotti, the latter of whom defined the whole period that began with the First World War as a ‘European revolution'.
¹⁴
It is no accident that these quotations bear the ‘actionist' stamp: the ‘democratic revolution', in which the Action Party synthesised its programme, was in effect conceivable only in the context of a European revolution, even if this involved civil war.
L'Italia Libera
published two articles side by side: ‘La rivoluzione italiana' and ‘La rivoluzione europea:
Jugoslavia'.
¹⁵
And as early as September 1943 it had written: ‘European solidarity has been re-established. The Italians have by now taken their place among the peoples who are fighting for liberty', alongside the French, the Greeks and the Yugoslavs, whom the soldiers had silently learned to admire.
¹⁶

The aspiration to create a European federation was the natural outlet for this attitude.
¹⁷
At the Action Party Conference of 5–6 September 1943, Leone Ginzburg had explicitly argued in favour of ‘participation in the anti-Nazi war as essential in allowing the Action Party to pursue its Risorgimento and Europeanist mission'.
¹⁸
This was the only path considered practicable, even if it meant paying a very high price, if one was to avoid the abyss of that
finis Europa
that had instead appeared inexorable to many of the major intellectuals who had come of age before 1914, from Benedetto Croce to Thomas Mann. And it was also the generous final card that could be played by the old claim, dear to Carlo Rosselli, of the international autonomy of anti-Fascism or, as one reads at times in
Avanti!
, of a socialism that did not want to get itself crushed between the two blocs that were taking shape among the victors.
¹⁹

The internationalist tradition of the workers' movement also tended to view the European civil war approvingly, and spurred the Italian partisans ‘to feel tied to the partisans of the whole world': that is how a Garibaldi commander replied to the officer of a British mission who wished to convince him that the Greek partisans were ‘just rebels'.
²⁰
The Communist cadres, however (more so than in the Garibaldi and workers' rank-and-file), trod more cautiously, governed as they were by Stalin's policy, which was unitary on the international as it was on the internal plane. To harp on too much about a European civil war might in fact clash with the cause of the great coalition, by evoking that ‘transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war' which had been definitively proscribed after 21 June 1941. In this sense the case of Greece exemplifies the confusion of political meanings, projected into the future as well, that the ‘civil war' acquired both internationally and internally, and at the level of both ideological involvement and, emotionally, of sympathies and fears. Two very differently inspired documents bear this out. The first is the hotly contested approval of the contradictory motion hailing the Greek patriots that was passed by the CLNAI on 6 January
1945, and contested by the liberals at the following session on 12 January.
²¹
The second is the declaration made at a party meeting by a Communist worker from Milan: ‘The Greek question is looked on favourably by some comrades, because by rising up [against the British-supported government] the Greek people would seem to have shown their maturity. The liberation of Greece is a result of the Russian advance.'
²²

The exemplary value assumed in the eyes of the Italian partisans by those of other countries was forcefully affirmed especially by Actionists, Communists and Socialists. A Garibaldi document lists French, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Czechoslovaks, Hungarians, Romanians, Bulgarians, Yugoslavians and Greeks;
²³
but generally it was the French, the Yugoslavians and also the Russians who were held up as examples. The Yugoslavians exerted a particular fascination on the Communist and working-class rank-and-file, not least because they seemed in their struggle to unify three wars – patriotic, civil and class. A Roman ‘extremist' newspaper underlined that the Yugoslavian partisan war was a ‘people's war not just against enemies from without, but also and above all against the enemy from within'.
²⁴
But the myth too of Paris, mother of all revolutions, was bandied about at the moment of the liberation of the French capital, alongside that other myth of revolutionary fraternity between the two peoples.
²⁵