A Civil War (80 page)

At work in the Resistance was the memory of the Spanish Civil War, seen as the great rehearsal for the European conflict precisely in the ‘civil' and ideological sphere. ‘It started in Spain' was how
L'Italia Libera
entitled one of its evocative articles,
²⁶
to show, as it were, that Carlo Rosselli's famous prophecy from Radio Barcelona – ‘Today in Spain, tomorrow in Italy' – had been fulfilled; and the
GL paper recalled that the tradition of the movement's struggle was born precisely in Spain.
²⁷
L'Unità
in its turn celebrated the beginning of the heroic and luckless struggle of the Spanish people, giving the version of it canonised in the Third International.
²⁸
On the other hand, this interpretive conformism – yoked to the probable concern that it was inopportune, particularly as far as relations with the Catholics were concerned, to labour the point too much – resulted in Spain's being given less space in the Italian Communist press and the PCI's other Resistance documents than one might have expected. The newspaper
Democrazia Internazionale
drew attention to this, lamenting the fact that the glorious name ‘Fronte Popolare' was being kept hidden for tactical reasons.
²⁹
But the prestige enjoyed by the veterans from Spain, some of whom arrived via the French Resistance, was great – from Luigi Longo to those partisans – but here we are among those incorporated in the 9
^th
Yugoslav Corps – who sang:

The memory of the ‘enormous political contribution by the party in Spain among the first “volunteers” to make them into soldiers of a cause' had been immediately invoked by a Piedmontese Communist leader in support of his conviction that ‘the partisan formations in Italy today have a function exceeding that of sniper in the strict sense of the word'.
³¹
But the Spanish model could seem so noble that emulating it seemed an object beyond one's reach. Speaking of Umberto, a veteran from Spain, the Garibaldini ‘ask[ed] themselves' whether ‘in any of our formations there is an Italian with the same qualities'. The comment of a party representative, torn between nostalgia for Communist solidarity and duty towards CLN unity, is crude and ungenerous: ‘Don't come to me with the
example of the Spanish International Brigade, because here things are very different. There they were men united by a faith, here they are men united only by contingent circumstances but who then have particular interests that are very different from each other.'
³²

Parallel with this were vivid hopes and longings that the Axis defeat would bring with it the fall of Franco's regime.
L'Italia Libera
warned that the European revolution that was taking place should not bypass Spain.
³³
Avanti!
assured its readers that ‘the progressivist and revolutionary forces of the whole world would make sure that they did not allow' the saving of Franco, whose destiny remained ‘linked with that of Mussolini and Hitler'.
³⁴

The Fascists too cultivated the memory of the exploits of their legionaries in Spain.
³⁵
If they did not make too much of this point, however much it lent itself to use in their approach with Catholics and the contemplation of the new European order, this is probably because things were made awkward for them by the ingratitude shown by the Generalissimo, over which it was prudent to draw a veil of silence.

In any case, if the Fascists had read the Spanish press of those months they would have noted how the Franco regime was progressively and clearly distancing itself from the losing powers, albeit amid reticence and ambiguities cloaked in exaltation of the Church, of Pius XII and of the ‘crusade against communism' (the headline under which news from the Russian front was generally collected). On 30 July 1943 the Barcelona edition of
La Vanguardia Española
called the ‘constututional situation' created by Mussolini's defenestration ‘simple and legalistic'; and on 9 September, in an article entitled ‘A momentous step', wrote that in any case Italy had the ‘inmense good luck' to house ‘in its heart' Vatican City. Mussolini's liberation, which on 15 September was defined as an ‘heroic undertaking', on 18 September was considered a fatal signal of civil war. The main thing for which Mussolini was reproached in the respectful obituary dedicated to him on 1 May 1945 would be – and who can doubt the
journalist's sincerity? – that of having committed the ‘colossal error' of entering the war.

The theme of the defence of Europe was widely present in Fascist propaganda – or, rather, Europe's defence against external enemies and from internal enemies, who were in many respects still more insidious. In the old polemic which in June 1927 Telesio Interlandi (one of whose articles at that time had borne the title ‘Anti-europei perché fascisti') had set against Francesco Coppola's argument in favour of the union of the European West against ‘Asiatic subversivism',
³⁶
the RSI adopted the latter position, now in the form of submission of the peoples of the European continent to the New Order imposed by Germany on the Western powers. Even the fond hopes of Fascist internationalism
³⁷
had had to give way to the patent fact of German predominance; and all the more so in the light of the maladroit attempts that the part of Italian diplomacy headed by Under-Secretary Giuseppe Bastianini had made to create around Italy and in the name of Europe a constellation of smaller states with a view to disengaging from Germany.
³⁸
It was, moreover, the very process of subjection that led to an accentuation of this kind of SS-type Europeanism and the hatred it generated among Europeans: ‘Hitler saved Europe, and for this reason Rexists had the effrontery to shout: Heil Hitler', Léon Degrelle had said in a speech that he gave in Liège on 5 January 1941.
³⁹
A French poster calling for enlistment in the SS proclaimed: ‘With your European comrades you will conquer under the banner of the SS!'
⁴⁰

This attitude, mentioned earlier, had been reinforced after the attack on the USSR, when Hitler himself, in a proclamation to the German people on 22 June 1941, had described himself as the ‘conscious representative of European culture and civilisation'.
⁴¹
Now, in Italy, immediately after 8 September, a poster of the Livorno
Kommandantur
also urged that the words ‘Long live the new Europe under the leadership of Adolf Hitler!' be shouted.
⁴²
An SS proclamation in the province of Forlì denounced as outlaws those who wanted ‘the annihilation of every cultural value of the West, of religion, and consequently of the spiritual patrimony of every upright person'.
⁴³
Of all people, it was Mussolini who seemed the
most uncertain on this score. When he was a prisoner of the king and Badoglio's and was taken to Ponza, it appears that he said to Admiral Franco Maugeri that it was nonsense to consider Russia a peril for European civilisation.
⁴⁴
As head of the RSI he had the weekly
Avanguardia Europea
, edited by Felice Bellotti, closed down.
⁴⁵
Some Nazi-Fascist propaganda posters and other news-sheets appear, therefore, more eloquent than the Duce's customary wavering or the vague European-toned propositions of the Verona manifesto.
⁴⁶
A leaflet assured its readers that the ‘victory of European arms' was ‘sure and imminent'.
⁴⁷
A poster was entitled ‘The European Crusade', and bore in its background the flags of the SS and of several European nations. Other posters proclaimed: ‘The New Europe: Enough with the tyranny of money'; ‘Germany defends Europe'; ‘Read and think it over: Europe rushes forward'; ‘Italian SS Legione. Awaits the youth for the benefit of Italy and Europe'; ‘Europe will resist the new barbarians'.
⁴⁸
An airman wrote to his brother Benito: ‘I'm glad I've enlisted in the SS and I can't wait to be able to offer my tangible contribution to the cause of the New Europe, the only hope that Europe can have for life and well-being tomorrow.'
⁴⁹

‘Long live fascism! Long live Europe!' were the last words written to his mother by a Fascist shot as a spy by the British in Santa Maria Capua Vetere on 30 April 1944.
⁵⁰
In comparison to this, a medical officer appeared kind-hearted and bewildered when, thinking of the Holy Roman Empire, he wrote to the ‘Very Reverend Don Tullio Calcagno': ‘Many years ago, at school, I learned that European civilisation consists essentially of three elements: “Romanism, Christianism and Germanism”.'
⁵¹

The Europeanism inspired by the SS's murky esotericism was one of the channels through which RSI Fascism assimilated the trappings of Nazism in a particularly marked fashion, bequeathing them to the post-war neo-Fascists.
⁵²

Earlier I suggested how the events in Greece offered a glimpse of the possibility of the meaning of ‘civil war' slipping from a war between anti-Fascists and Fascists to a war that might explode
after
the defeat of the Fascists. An article in
Risorgimento Liberale
, the Liberal newspaper, in its ambiguity, straddles these two possible meanings. Fascist propaganda, it says, ‘could have created the premises for a civil war': the unity of the CLN had averted the danger, because the parties proved to be ‘conscious that a civil war would only lead to final irreparable disaster and to reactions as predictable as they would be iniquitous'.
⁵³

For the right, brandishing the ‘Greek prospect' was a way of curbing the fearsome developments, charged with international significance, that were coming to light in Greece. For the left, it was useful to suggest, albeit discreetly, the bogeyman of similar developments elsewhere in order to obtain the greatest possible shift of the unitary faction over to their side, in return for the guarantee that events would take a different turn in Italy. This second attitude emerged clearly at a meeting held in the Langhe in February 1945 between the British captain O'Regan (Chape), Mauri, commander of the autonomous brigades, and Andreis (Italo Nicoletti), a Garibaldi inspector. O'Regan, in agreement with Mauri, had proposed the unification of the formations under his command. Andreis replied that, if one wished to avoid offending Italian national sentiment, unity could only be achieved in the ambit of the CLN and the Piedmontese regional military command, which was under the authority of the committee, and added that what had occurred in Greece was impossible in Italy, ‘since we have a government which is recognised both by the Allies and by the partisans; and any decision taken by this government would be carried out by us'. There were not, then, the conditions in Italy for a post-Liberation civil war; but, Andreis warned, with the attempts at dispersal that were being made, with the attempts being conducted ‘outside the CLN and the Italian government, conditions for civil war were being concretely created'.
⁵⁴

It was precisely the radical nature of the struggle, both Italian and European, that might drive people to brandish the prospect of a civil war in the immediate future, if the present one failed to have all the effects hoped for. This threat was
explicitly formulated in the unlikely context of the ‘Outline for the manifesto of the Committee for the defence of teachers and intellectuals'. Here, the government of the South was warned about jeopardising its future by taking decisions without consulting the entire Italian people: only by working without falling into this error would those governing in the South ‘be able to avoid incurring responsibility for a civil war that would be no less inevitable for having to be deferred for a few years'.
⁵⁵

In the speech he gave at the Brancaccio theatre in Rome on 31 December 1944, Pietro Nenni did not hesitate to state the equation: ‘political centre bloc' equals ‘civil war'.
⁵⁶
This was certainly a case of verbal intemperance. But that intemperance contributed to fostering alarm for the future. Just back from his mission to the North, Aldobrando Medici Tornaquinci, under-secretary at the Ministry for Occupied Italy, voiced this alarm to the Liberal national committee, which met in Rome from 1 to 4 March 1945: ‘There are some parties (which yet form part of the CLN), that are demonstrating in the most blatant way that their war propaganda does have the liberation of the North as its aim, but also, or possibly above all, the formation of armed groups, or ideally, of an army which is the army of a particular party.'

The situation, Medici Tornaquinci explained, ‘is not marked by the red of the CLN, but there is the risk that it will be dominated by a darker red'.
⁵⁷
It is this red, darker and more dazzling, feared by some, hoped for by others, that now takes us on to examine the third aspect of the struggle that was being waged in Italy at that time: the class war.