Confronting America

The Cold War between the United States and the Communists in France and Italy

Alessandro Brogi

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781469622118
  9780807834732
• eBook ISBN:
  9780807877746
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

Throughout the Cold War, the United States encountered unexpected challenges from Italy and France, two countries with the strongest, and determinedly most anti-American, Communist Parties in Western Europe. Based primarily on new evidence from communist archives in France and Italy, as well as research archives in the United States, Alessandro Brogi’s original study reveals how the United States was forced by political opposition within these two core Western countries to reassess its own anticommunist strategies, its image, and the general meaning of American liberal capitalist culture and ideology.

Brogi shows that the resistance to Americanization was a critical test for the French and Italian communists' own legitimacy and existence. Their anti-Americanism was mostly dogmatic and driven by the Soviet Union, but it was also, at crucial times, subtle and ambivalent, nurturing fascination with the American culture of dissent. The staunchly anticommunist United States, Brogi argues, found a successful balance to fighting the communist threat in France and Italy by employing diplomacy and fostering instances of mild dissent in both countries. Ultimately, both the French and Italian communists failed to adapt to the forces of modernization that stemmed both from indigenous factors and from American influence. Confronting America illuminates the political, diplomatic, economic, and cultural conflicts behind the U.S.-communist confrontation.

1 THE COMMUNISTS AND NATIONAL REBIRTH IN FRANCE AND ITALY, 1944–1946

America’s confrontation with Western European Communism was as meaningful as its clash with Soviet Communism. Although the postwar growth of the French and Italian Communist Parties highlighted economic distress and quickly induced American policy makers to seek economic solutions, the leftist appeal was broader than simply economics, though this was not always immediately apparent to outsiders. In the first postwar years French and Italian needs for reconstruction entailed a redefinition of national politics and identities. The postwar experience for the two profoundly traumatized nations came to be formulated in terms of national rebirth and renewal, offering, as might be expected, a chance for radical solutions. Communist anti-Americanism and American anti-Communism remained carefully restrained and relatively muted while the two parties remained included in government coalitions, and until the wartime Grand Alliance irretrievably broke down in the spring and summer of 1947. But the very legitimacy acquired by the communist forces in France and Italy in 1944–46, especially when further justified by a public desire for radical renewal, was in most respects more threatening to the emerging Western cohesion than their strong opposition in the first decade of the Cold War.

The Two Parties’ Strengths, Differences, and Contradictions

During the last years of World War II, the strength of the French and Italian Communist Parties grew not only from economic distress, but also from their capacity to reconcile passionate patriotism with proletarian internationalism. It was buttressed by organizational power and ability to seize key economic and political institutions, as well as by intellectual magnetism. The two parties’ leaders understood that cultural transformation was as critical as political change. All these sinews of communist influence—nationalist, organizational, cultural—became the essential components of a powerful resistance to American hegemony.

At the time of the Liberation, the Grand Alliance yielded immediate results for the French and Italian Communist Parties. In both cases, the Soviet Union gained political influence over the two countries: in March 1944 it was the first of the great powers to recognize Italy’s provisional government that had deposed and ousted Benito Mussolini a few months earlier; it was also the first to welcome Charles de Gaulle, then interim prime minister, at a power summit in Moscow that December for a treaty of friendship. These diplomatic moves led to the return from Soviet exile of party leaders Palmiro Togliatti and Maurice Thorez, and to the formation of broad coalition governments including the PCI and PCF.¹ These developments constituted more than a revival of the Popular Front of the mid-1930s, for the two parties received popular acclaim for breaking the political impasse, defending the nation, and giving the masses hope of economic emancipation.

With their participation in the provisional governments, the PCF and PCI transformed themselves from conspiratorial, sectarian cliques into mass parties, adopting parliamentary politics and democratic means to reach power. Their membership skyrocketed in the last year of the war: in France from three hundred thousand in 1939 to more than eight hundred thousand by the end of 1945; in Italy, the underground party of a few thousand became by the end of the war a mass organization of 1.7 million (reaching 2.5 million in 1947), second only to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Equally staggering was the number of affiliates to the communist-dominated and highly politicized trade unions, reaching in the early Cold War years 3.8 million in the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) and a slightly lower figure in the Confederazione Generale del Lavoro Italiana (CGIL), founded in 1944.

While similarities prevailed, significant differences divided the two parties, differences that have been amply examined and reassessed. Many will emerge in the course of this study. Suffice it here to mention the most outstanding ones. A renowned, though a bit overstated distinction casts the PCF as genuinely bolshevized, more doctrinal, and more cohesive than the PCI.² To some extent that difference reflected the respective political traditions of Italy and France. In the former, where the state’s weakness remained endemic, “partitocracy,” or rule by parties, undermined a strong executive—with the notable exception of the discredited fascist years—and also favored the search for constant mediation and even “transformism” (as Italian political culture described party back-channeling), the Communists reinforced their tendency to assimilate and compromise.³ In the latter, where the state was strong and centralized, where societal conflict was more inscribed in its evolution and even enshrined in the French Revolution, unassailable ideological faith could be more easily conflated with national identity.⁴ International status also mattered. In France a strong national identity depended on the obsessive maintenance of a strong international role; no less sensitive to prestige, vanquished Italy was much weaker and severely handicapped by fragile national unity and the disgrace of the fascist experiment. Communist nationalism needed to be calibrated to these different situations.

Because ideological intransigence and national identity could be more closely aligned in France, the French Communists became more subordinate to Soviet dictates than their Italian counterparts. While recent research has revealed that Italian comrades also maintained a strong intimacy with Moscow, at least until the Prague Spring of 1968,⁵ the PCI’s long experience as a clandestine group under Fascism kept its cadres alert to possible political backlash. A more subtle explanation has also highlighted the need to replace a reactionary mass regime with a strong revolutionary mass organization deeply inserted in society and with an appeal beyond that of the working class. Fear of being marginalized, as in 1920–21, also informed Togliatti’s conduct in “refounding” the PCI in 1944 as a partito nuovo, a new national, mass party able and willing to participate in a coalition government. In contrast, the experience in the Popular Front of the mid-1930s gave the PCF more confidence in its capacity to maneuver the system.⁶ Furthermore, the rapid growth of the PCI in 1944, the sheer number of new members, “precluded systematic indoctrination in Soviet-style Marxism Leninism,” notwithstanding Togliatti’s determination to do so, whereas Thorez found it relatively easy to impart the “Marxist-Leninist formation of the party’s new adherents.” Even at the highest party levels, Thorez retained more control than Togliatti. The latter experienced difficulty persuading the Central Committee to confirm his March 1944 Svolta (turn), a move—mostly decided by Stalin, as we now know—that temporarily set aside the party’s antimonarchy stance and subordinated revolutionary goals to the necessity of national unity against Germany and Fascism.⁷

The prominence of intellectuals was notable in both parties. Nevertheless the PCI fielded a more highly educated leadership than the PCF: the intellectual sophistication of founding leaders such as Antonio Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti had not isolated the party from the masses; in fact it more frequently allowed it to exert an effective control of its rank and file—thus tempering the effects of rapid, “undisciplined” growth—as well as of its most radical leaders, since Togliatti fully exploited his privileged access to Gramsci’s legacy. Their French counterparts brandished their modest backgrounds as badges of honor but also maintained less control of fellow-traveling intellectuals. If this was potentially and ironically one of the French Communists’ major weaknesses, the Italian Communists found a main obstacle in the countervailing faith of the Italian masses: the Catholic Church.⁸

Relevant as these differences may have been, the two Communist Parties followed remarkably parallel paths, at least until 1956, and for this reason America’s attention focused on those similarities. Immediately the analogies emerged with the two parties’ spectacular ascendancy in 1944–46. The Catholic novelist Georges Bernanos had famously claimed that “a poor man with nothing in his belly needs hope, illusion, more than bread.” The two Communist Parties demonstrated that, in countries which had experienced material and spiritual loss, the dream of national reassertion could be as important as the need for material restoration.

NATIONALISM

Mass discontent caused by economic dislocation, and the natural craving for change after a devastating wartime period, largely explained communist success. But no less important during the Liberation and postwar period was the overwhelming credit and prestige—among both the middle and working classes—that the “red” partisans received from having led the Resistance against Nazi Germany and the fascist forces. Militants in both parties profited from their clandestine record, from the experience many of them had in the Spanish Civil War, and from the discipline and devotion they could muster under intense pressure. Even death brought them luster. Frequent setbacks did not tarnish the Resistance myth, for defeat could also forge a strong sense of national solidarity: in most respects being the parti des fusillés for the French Communists or holding the majority of the thirty-five thousand casualties of the Resistenza for the Italian Communists added to their reputation as martyrs of fascist and Nazi repression. Later, the Communists could cite that record to reinforce their claim that the Resistance, the chance for genuine national revival and independence, had been betrayed by the Anglo-American allies and by the other partisan forces. The myth of the heroic battle for national liberation and the partisan propaganda became so effective that communist consent to Stalin’s purges or to the Russian-German entente of 1939–41 soon disappeared into public oblivion.⁹

Heroism was not enough, however. The two parties reinforced their patriotic credentials by embracing the rhetoric of national prestige. Even before being readmitted as a legitimate political force, the PCF declared in its 1943 Charte du Conseil National de la Résistance that the main task for the Communists was “to defend the political and economic independence of the nation and to restore France’s power, grandeur, and universal mission.” At the 1945 Party Congress Thorez began to emulate Charles de Gaulle, declaring that “the independence of France and the restoration of its grandeur, sacred vow of all our heroes, must be the leading principle of the future foreign policy of the country.” Significantly, as a follow-up, the party issued an anthology of Thorez’s most prominent speeches titled Une politique de grandeur française. A year later, with de Gaulle no longer at the helm of the provisional government, and with the PCF at the height of its power, in a highly symbolic gesture, the military parade of 14 July took place for the first and only time at the site of the Bastille instead of at the Arc de Triomphe. As the Christian Democrat prime minister, Georges Bidault, proclaimed, “14 July is the feast of workers, not of the bourgeois. We are going to celebrate it with the people!” For the first time in French history, the Communists were no longer just “communards”: under the Resistance, the protection of national greatness seemed perfectly attuned to the socialist promise. Party historian Annie Kriegel even coined the term “National-Thorezism” to explain this strong appeal.¹⁰

While the French bourgeoisie had temporarily lost its primacy in representing the connection between grandeur and the Revolution, the Italian bourgeoisie appeared more permanently damaged by its historical failure to make Italy one of the great powers. Fascism had left a desire for international respect, a legacy that persisted after humiliating defeat. In his first speech after returning to Italy, Togliatti called for his party to lead the nation and to restore national pride among the youth after “the vacuum created by the collapse of fascism”; under the ideological opposite of fascism, Italy could thus become again “great, strong, respected.”¹¹ In a country where artificial pomp had so often replaced civic and democratic integration, such claims of grandezza might have seemed irrelevant and counterproductive. But for the PCI the point was to reclaim a strength and vitality that other movements had failed to project. Writing to his comrade and member of the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale (CLN) Mauro Scoccimarro in 1944, Togliatti recommended emphasis on the rhetoric of national unity and national grandeur in order to “further help cast our policy as truly national.” For defeated Italy, finally, restoring grandezza meant nurturing patriotic more than nationalist feelings. The Communists suggested that, thanks to their government participation, the vanquished would never become a client nation.¹² This argument also implied that the arrogance of the winners could reignite revanchist nationalism in Italy.

The message of patriotism remained clear for both Communist Parties: national grandeur should not only be bent on restoring great power status; it would also lead to moral resurrection. The recovery of moral standing after World War II had become a crucial source of international prestige: the French were still reeling from the Vichy experience; the Italians were pervaded by a sense of guilt for having consented to the shames of tyranny—which, on top of being oppressive, had failed miserably in mastering aggression. “To be nationalist today in Italy,” Togliatti proclaimed in 1943, “is to be antifascist.” The PCF echoed with the slogan, “L’anti-communisme, c’est l’arme de l’anti-France.”¹³ In countries exhausted, humiliated, and ashamed by defeat and collaboration, a commitment to national independence became perfectly reconcilable with pacifist rhetoric. Besides contributing to national liberation, the Resistance, like most patriotic movements, enjoyed an aura of moral purity, of which the Communists claimed to be the incarnation. Jean-Pierre Rioux noted that the PCF “set itself up as spokesman of the poor and the pure, wielding a moral advantage worth more than all theories.” The Italian Communists also found stronger appeal on moral than on doctrinal ground. They contended that the Resistance was not a mere civil war: since the Resistance contributed to the Allied war effort, they argued, it was the best ground for a fair peace treaty and for international recognition of the country’s moral rebirth.¹⁴

By recasting nationalism as democratic and anti-imperialist, the two parties also justified their ambivalence on issues such as the unresolved Trieste dispute between Italy and Yugoslavia, or France’s insistence on retaining its overseas empire. In the immediate postwar months Togliatti argued that a nationalist frenzy over the Northeast borderlands would only work to the advantage of reactionary groups who dreamed of a neofascist revival, just as had happened after World War I. Furthermore, he construed, a recrudescence of Italian imperialism, as recent history had shown, would weaken Italian independence and grandeur: colonial adventures by a relatively poor country would be a drain on national resources and would also alienate the great powers to the point of reducing Italy to a “vassal imperialist” (of the Anglo-Americans).¹⁵ The PCF was naturally more ambiguous on the French imperial mission, which in North Africa (not ripe for “socialist emancipation”) still seemed acceptable. But certainly it lost no opportunity in 1945 to distinguish itself from de Gaulle, responsible, according to Thorez, for “unlatching” reactionary, imperialist ventures (at that point, referring to the bombing of Damascus).¹⁶ All these arguments, from both parties, naturally served Soviet interests; but they also helped the two parties cast an image of moral patriotism. Downplaying chauvinism helped them to further discredit the extreme Right and to uphold the politics of the Grand Alliance. These politics could especially prevent Anglo-American control of their nations, while also validating a communist role in the coalition governments.

Above all, democratic nationalism signified the right of the proletariat to represent national interests, as opposed to the decadent bourgeoisie, which was responsible for the March on Rome, Munich, and Vichy. For the French Communists there was a spiritual equivalence between their leader, former miner Maurice Thorez, who, underscoring his humble origins, proclaimed himself a fils du peuple (son of the people), and the historic fille du peuple, Joan of Arc. Evoking the feats of one paladin established a link between the party’s personality cult and patriotism, while the national mission of the French proletariat became clearer by stressing the ideal continuity with the Revolution of 1789. National grandeur and workers’ internationalism were even more intertwined for France than for the Soviet Union, and the eighteenth-century Phrygian cap, symbol of republican liberty, abounded in the iconic propaganda of wartime and postwar French Communism. That myth, confirming that the Left was born in France long before Marxism, granted the PCF an ad...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• CONFRONTING AMERICA
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 THE COMMUNISTS AND NATIONAL REBIRTH IN FRANCE AND ITALY, 1944–1946
• 2 CONFRONTING THE COMMUNISTS IN GOVERNMENT
• 3 POLARIZED CONFRONTATION
• 4 COMMUNIST PEACE CAMPAIGNS AND AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE, 1948–1955
• 5 THE CULTURAL COLD WAR AT ITS PEAK
• 6 DIPLOMATIC MANEUVERING
• 7 REDEFINING OPPRESSION
• 8 REDEFINING INTERDEPENDENCE
• EPILOGUE: Cultural and Political Decline
• CONCLUSION
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index