A Civil War

A History of the Italian Resistance

Claudio Pavone, Peter Levy

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781781687772
• eBook ISBN:
  9781781685419
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Italian History
• Index: History

A Civil War is a history of the wartime Italian Resistance, recounted by a historian who, when only a boy, took part in the struggle against Mussolini's fascist Republic. Since its publication in Italy, Claudio Pavone's masterwork has become indispensable to anyone seeking to understand this period and its continuing importance for the nation's identity.
Pavone casts a sober eye on his protagonists' ethical and ideological motivations. He uncovers a multilayered conflict, in which class antagonisms, patriotism and political ideals all played a part. A clear understanding of this complexity allows him to explain many details of the post-war transition, as well as the legacy of the Resistance for modern Italy. In addition to being a monumental work of scholarship, A Civil War is a folk history, capturing events, personalities and attitudes that were on the verge of slipping entirely out of recollection to the detriment of Italy's understanding of itself and its past.

CHAPTER 1

The Choice

1. THE COLLAPSE

On 23 August 1943, as he left the prison of Castelfranco Emilia, Vittorio Foa gave Giambattista Vico’s Scienza Nuova to his cellmate Bruno Corbi, inscribing these words from Vico’s text as a dedication: ‘by various and diverse ways, which seemed like hazards and were in fact opportunities’.¹

Foa was referring to ‘the last harrowing years of Fascism’, but the situation was such that those words were as apt an interpretation of the recent past as they were prophetic of the immediate future. They divine that ‘widening of the field of possibility’² which, before long, the 8 September 1943 catastrophe and the Resistance were to offer the Italian people, and which Foa himself, elsewhere in his writings, was to reformulate as follows: ‘During the Resistance and, for a brief moment, at the Liberation, all had seemed possible to us’.³

In a short article entitled ‘Omero antimilitarista’ (‘Homer the Antimilitarist’) in the Turin edition of L’Unità for 15 September 1946, Italo Calvino was to write:

What in fact is The Odyssey? It is the myth of the return home, born during the long years of ‘naja’ [military service] of the soldiers who have gone off to fight in distant places, of their anxiety about how they will manage to get home, when the war is over, of the fear that assails them in their dreams of never managing to make it home, of the strange obstacles that appear on their journey. The Odyssey is the story of the eighth of September, of all the eighth of Septembers in History: the need to return home by hook or by crook, through lands fraught with enemies.

Between these two poles – a readiness to consider new possibilities and a run for cover in what was familiar and secure – lies the wide range of reactions provoked in the Italians by the 8 September 1943 Armistice and the collapse of the country’s military and civil structures immediately following it. To turn our attention to the Resistance means to give pride of place to the first of these positions – which was the minority position; but the variety of attitudes adopted by the Italians and the common elements linking, often in the most tenuous way, otherwise conflicting positions, creates a complex web of blurred relations between the two types of experience. Thus, the disappointment caused by being denied the chance to return home impelled many to take stock of the other possibilities that the situation had to offer.

As yet we know little about the Italians who fought in the Second World War between 1940 and 1943. The inglorious defeat, the change of sides, the Resistance regarded as the founding moment of the new Italian republic, the memory of the connection between the desire to return home and right-wing subversivism, stressed by Fascism and to all effects assimilated by post-Fascism, the tendency of the protagonists to forget a past charged with sufferings that could not easily be re-processed in memory – all help to account for this lack.⁴ What we can say with a fair degree of certainty, however, is that weariness with a long, hard and ill-motivated military life had led the vast majority of the soldiers to the conviction that armistice, the end of the war, and return home amounted to the same thing. It was in these three aspirations that the desire to fight dissipated, experienced as a necessity which would brook no delay.

With emphases and approximations reflecting the character of the document, yet in a singularly prophetic way, a group of Italian and English anti-Fascists had declared in 1941:

The Italian soldier will fight no more under the orders of Mussolini, either for Hitler or against Hitler, not even for Italy. The Italian soldier will fold his arms and let himself be killed by the enemy in front or by the rifles of the Blackshirts watching over him from behind.⁵

This page concluded by saying that the Italians would take up arms again only if they had something real to hope for.

On 25 July 1943, weariness with the war had found a sort of moral sanction in the all-but-heroic fall of its promoters, guarantors of its political and patriotic significance. As Second Lieutenant Giorgio Chiesura, on garrison duty in Sicily, noted in his diary:

If they wanted an armistice, the change of government was all right. But it makes no sense if they want to go on with the war, as seems to be the case. We won’t pick up as we did after Caporetto. Miracles are no longer possible. The war seems to be completely unjustified after the fall of the government responsible for its beginnings and its presuppositions.⁶

The impossibility of a recovery such as occurred after Caporetto had already been noted in February 1943 by an Italian informer of the Germans (possibly Guido Buffarini Guidi, dismissed from the under-secretaryship for the Ministry of the Interior on 6 February), who did not mince his words in his judgment of the Fascist power system: ‘Since Fascism is a totalitarian regime it leaves no room for spontaneous patriotic reactions as in 1917.’⁷

It is historically debatable whether Caporetto had in fact constituted the ‘spur to a racehorse’;⁸ but what is important here is the illusory appeals made to the memory of that event in the aftermath of the Fascist war. Figures as diverse as the federal secretary of Cuneo⁹ and the philosopher Giovanni Gentile gave credence to the legitimacy of that appeal. The latter, in a speech to the Italians given at Campidoglio on 24 June 1943, had in fact referred to one of his writings dating from 1917.¹⁰ Paradoxically, greater realism was shown, in their way, by those Fascists, real incunabula of the Italian Social Republic, who, albeit in the deviant form of an obsessive denunciation of traitors whom they saw lurking everywhere, were more fully aware of the oncoming collapse. From Radio Londra, Umberto Calosso had clearly explained that Fascism could not hope to construct ‘a space of patriotic passion for defence as on the Piave’.¹¹ A cavalry captain who, after Stalingrad, El Alamein and the North African landing was going around declaring that the Italian people ‘if given a whipping will react overwhelmingly and victoriously’, aroused mere pity and a sense of the ridiculous in another officer who had close dealings with the new anti-Fascist recruits, and all the more so since the captain himself had the look of ‘a whipped cur’.¹² After 25 July the tangled thread of motivations – Italian war, Fascist war – that had run through all three years of a war conducted in an increasingly subordinate position to Nazi Germany was highlighted with all its contradictions: ‘On 25 July – recalls a survivor of deportation – suddenly we were all happy, like a liberation, because we took it to be the end of the war; and then when we realised that this wasn’t the case, anger took possession of us, a terrible anger.’¹³

In Venice, a diary records how a sort of ‘banditore’, or town-crier, went through calli and campi shouting the announcement of Mussolini’s overthrow in a voice that bespoke ‘emotion, hilarity and at the same time uncertainty, like somebody experimenting with an unfamiliar language’; and one soldier had ‘such a radiant smile on his face that it seems to contain all the joy in his heart, all the words he would like to utter: he’s a recalled soldier, he’s old, his family’s far away, knows no one here, for sure, and hopes now to return home’.¹⁴

The passage from joy to hope and from hope to disappointment is described in numerous memoirs and testimonies, together with the wish to believe that the words of Badoglio’s proclamation – ‘The war goes on. Italy … will keep its word’¹⁵ – were insincere and dictated by mere tactical prudence. Most Italians took those words ‘as being a simulation’ and ‘from that moment they began not just to dream of the Armistice but to behave as if it had already taken place’.¹⁶ In a climate such as this, attempts to re-dub as ‘national’ the war that had been wished on the Italians by the now demolished Fascism had not the slightest hope of receiving a hearing.¹⁷

Much has been written both about the tortuous and clumsily devious route by which the Badoglio government arrived at the drafting and then announcement of the Armistice with the Anglo-Americans,¹⁸ and about the responsibility for the disastrous predicaments that ensued to be attributed to King Victor Emmanuel III, Marshal Pietro Badoglio and his government, and the High Commands. They did not pay serious enough heed to the patently obvious prediction, unambiguously stated by Baron von Mackensen, the German ambassador in Rome, as early as 4 December 1942, that ‘A separate peace aimed at keeping the war away from the Italian mainland would automatically make it a theater of war.’¹⁹ Immediately after Mussolini’s overthrow, President Roosevelt himself had also stated: ‘Fighting between the Germans and the Italian Army and population will probably be a result of the fate of the German troops in Italy and particularly of those south of Rome.’²⁰

What also needs emphasising is that the generals and colonels were not sufficiently aware of the state of mind of the men serving under them. The fact that they themselves, in their heart of hearts, shared this state of mind very probably induced them first of all to hide its truth and significance, and then, by their conduct, to set the avalanche on its disastrous descent. The well-known, ambiguous sentence with which Badoglio concluded his proclamation of the Armistice – the armed forces ‘will repel any possible attacks from any ot...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction by Stanislao G. Pugliese
• Preface
• 1 The Choice
• 2 The Legacy of the Fascist War
• 3 Paths to a New Institutionalisation
• 4 The Patriotic War
• 5 The Civil War
• 6 The Class War
• 7 Violence
• 8 Politics and Future Expectations
• Chronology
• List of Abbreviations
• Glossary