A Civil War (145 page)

Yet it was this very continuity between being friends and being comrades that largely sustained the ethics of the rank-and-file: ‘Those whom today we call comrades, [before Fascism] would have been called friends', said a worker from Terni; and an old militant, who had known prison and internment, was to complain many years later: ‘The young are no longer brothers and friends as we were. It was enough for us to say: “He's a comrade” and “ciau”.'
⁴⁵
Even strictly political watchwords like those following the 7
^th
Congress of the International – ‘in his report Georgi Dimitrov says that instead we need to work among all the young' – could be taken to mean that some space was set aside for human relations and that the internal barriers that had been erected, such as that against dancing with youths wearing the Fascist badge, had now collapsed.
⁴⁶
It was the tissue that formed in a life shared together, as a mark of openness, that certainly counted more than quotations from Massimo D'Azeglio, Silvio Pellico, Cesare Cantù and Herbert Spencer, which were paraded by a Garibaldino newspaper.
⁴⁷

The corollary in the Communists to the severity of the party ethics, and
the hegemonic pride inscribed in those ethics, was their severity towards themselves, their capacity to purge themselves ‘so as not to give the bourgeoisie a pretext for denigrating us'.
⁴⁸
A Communist was expected to refuse the plate of spaghetti offered him by a peasant, when it seemed like a privilege: ‘Even if he was alone, even if the others would never have known.'
⁴⁹
He had to be convinced that the terrible effort of transporting very heavy loads in the mud and rain was ‘the necessary exercise to become revolutionaries'.
⁵⁰
In every field, the Communists had to be the best.
⁵¹
This, among other things, was the only sure way of recognising each other.
⁵²
‘Made of a special material', the Communists had to convince themselves that ‘ours is the fault not only for what we ourselves fail to do, but also for what others fail to do'.
⁵³

There was a strong conviction that ‘proletarian firmness, seriousness and morality'
⁵⁴
could be fully achieved only in the party, which thus had the historic task of bearing witness in the name of all the workers, of all the oppressed.
⁵⁵
Nothing in this picture lacked significance: ‘In the life of the Party, in the work of the Party, it is a good rule never to consider anything as “unimportant”, or worse still “without significance”.'
⁵⁶
Or again: ‘If there are comrades who today are finding time to take it easy and enjoy themselves, they are not soldiers, they are not combatants.'
⁵⁷
The idea that for the partisans, too, sloth is the father of all vices is repeated in many documents:
⁵⁸

So a leader of the Belluno federation was balking at going into the formations as a commissar?: ‘My decision was: to send G. into the mountains (precisely because he doesn't like the idea).'
⁵⁹
Ludovico Geymonat, in proposing to Anna Cinanni that she be a dispatch-rider, said to her: ‘We don't promise you anything. If they catch you, you'll get a bullet from them; if you betray us, you'll get a bullet from us. Is that clear?'
⁶⁰

Always deny everything, resist torture: this is

In short, the conviction is that virtue, always, pays.

Death was preferable to betrayal. A document dictating rules about conspiracy concludes: ‘Whoever talks betrays and as a traitor must answer before tomorrow's tribunal. If need be, it's better to put an end to one's own existence like heroes than live like cowards.'
⁶²

An episode that occurred in Udine tragically sums up the conflict between ethico-political rigour and the bureaucratic spirit in which it could be applied. Thirty Communist partisans, sentenced to death, managed to spirit out of prison their request that ‘their plea for grace and subsequent developments be seen to'. On 2 April 1945, Franco, on behalf of the federal committee, answered them with a long letter. The first part is shot through with genuine sympathy for the lot of the prisoners, but the conclusion is uncompromising:

Your fate is painful to us because we love you more than brothers … Comrades, we understand that it's hard to die because all of us love life. We understand that it's easy to die as heroes on the battlefield but less easy under the refined moral torture to which the Nazi barbarian and his foul thugs are subjecting you. We understand all this, but … tell the comrades not to ask for grace. You are patriots, you are soldiers. You can and you must demand treatment due to soldiers taken prisoner. But you must not ask for any grace.
A gloss jotted at the bottom of the page reads: ‘On 9 April the thirty comrades were shot in the Udine jails.'
⁶³

The Communists and other anti-Fascists jailed during the
ventennio
can justly boast that they never signed the request for grace, even if this meant risking friction with their relatives. This, then, was the ultimate act of defiance by the condemned against the triumphant regime, a gesture that magnified the value of their testimony. But in the first days of April 1945 Nazi-Fascism was on its last legs, the Allies were about to arrive, the insurrection was at the gates. In such a situation, to apply a principle which in other circumstances had been of the highest value became a manifestation of abstract and indeed bureaucratic coherence, whatever the agony suffered by those who asked for it and those who agreed to submit to it.
⁶⁴
‘An idea is an idea', one of the condemned had written from the Udinese prison; and ‘if destiny and misfortune carried me off, I ask all of you for your pardon.'
⁶⁵

The developments of an intransigence that could make you a slave to your own virtue are not found only among the Communists. In November 1943, in France, Marc Bloch made a firm appeal to the Jacobin virtues against the tendency towards ‘gigantic absolution for everyone': ‘This limp inclination towards pardon undoubtedly expresses the most sincere side of an old tortuous soul. To be indignant and punish, one needs to believe a little in what our ancestors of '93 called, in their language devoid of false discretion, virtue.'
⁶⁶

Ernesto Rossi recounted that, when imprisoned at Ventotene, in his article ‘Giacobinismo and liberalismo', he had expressed similar views to these of Bloch, he and Altiero Spinelli, who shared those views with him, were accused of neo-Fascism.
⁶⁷

A feature of Actionist intransigence distinguishing it from Communist intransigence lay in the fact that the former was compelled to manifest itself immediately in a recognisable way. Its novelty and its lack of a clear and unambiguous ideology made the Action Party visible above all through its behaviour and moral style. ‘Unlike the other historic parties, which are evaluated on the basis of their traditional political line and their programmes which are known to all, the value of the Action Party lies only in what it actually
does'
⁶⁸
– so runs a declaration inspired by that pride in its novelty which circulated widely in the documents of the party. The party was presented as ‘the only political formation of great importance which has arisen directly from the democratic crisis of the twentieth century which culminated in Fascism'.
⁶⁹
To be admitted into the party, ‘the ideals of the aspirant had to be accepted (and controlled)' – ideals, not ideology – together with his acceptance of the programme.
⁷⁰
Precisely by way of contrast with the Communists, it was explained that ‘We do not subordinate the programme of our party to a definite philosophical system compulsory for everyone', but, naturally, this does not mean that we don't have ‘our ethical, political and economic principles: because otherwise we would not constitute a party.'
⁷¹

In his pungent criticism of the ‘sixteen-point programme' drawn up in Rome, Vittorio Foa came straight to the point: ‘Ideological unity is a utopia, unless it is confused with the mythological unity of authoritarian parties … The novelty of a party lies in its concrete political and organisational action; other than this it can be no more than an empty assertion.'
⁷²

But, at the same time, an Action Party newspaper wrote: ‘Our belief is that the problem of the liberation of man has to be faced and resolved on all planes, that is to say for every aspect of his life, otherwise it is not solved at all.'
⁷³
An exegesis of this principle, which seems to paraphrase Churchill's ‘tears and blood', is found in a text that speaks in terms of the ‘terrible and severe climate of sufferings, of social solidarity and unshakable determination' which distinguished the war of liberation and belied ‘any presumed feebleness of the Italian character'. This climate ‘is the destruction of affections, possessions and life's comforts, and the ruin of illustrious memories and the sharing of sacrifice and renunciations … It separates people from their families. It wrenches men from their jobs … It causes raids and reprisals, it exposes convicts and deportees to starvation.'
⁷⁴

To keep the tension at this pitch, the Actionists in their turn provided for political ‘giornate', on the assumption that ‘political work is educational work'.
⁷⁵
The powerful individualism and the equally powerful political passion in which that individualism was expected to find expression could not be easily reconciled with the unitary policy which was nevertheless pursued by the Actionists. At the end of 1942 Aldo Garosci had written from the United States: ‘In the present phase I am in favour of the maximum sincerity, that is to say the minimum unity.'
⁷⁶

Even ‘revolution in one go', which Vittorio Foa set against the two-stage revolution advocated by the Communists, arose from a need for sincerity and unity of conscience; and it is no accident that Foa attributed ‘the difficulty experienced by the bloc of left-wing groups' to this.
⁷⁷
The possible elitist consequences of such positions are clear. Leo Valiani was not mistaken in seeing the many losses suffered by the Action Party leaders as a surrogate for its lack of a mass base. This sprung not only from ‘moralistic' subjective motivations – elsewhere Valiani has recalled the case of the
giellista
who, a latter-day Attilius Regolus, returned to Pietro Koch's jail
⁷⁸
– but from a more intrinsic mode of being.
⁷⁹
Here political ties and friendship, though distinct, formed a close-knit web, of which the correspondence between Giorgio Agosti and Dante Livio Bianco constitutes a monument.
⁸⁰

For the Catholic
resistenti
, whichever the formation they were fighting in, the relationship between politics and morality, between public and private, assumed peculiar characteristics. By Catholic I mean those for whom being so constituted an obvious fact, but implied also, in different grades and tones, a problem and a position – a distinction which does not necessarily correspond to the traditional one between practising and non-practising Catholics. Enjoinders to consider political commitment as a moral duty met with a wide variety of attitudes.

Above all there were Catholics who, convinced that they were in possession of a revealed truth that went to the heart of their being, felt less impelled, and in no way sensed the need to link the project of profound self-renewal to a historical contingency, however dramatic that contingency might be. Not that the sense, and the attraction, of self-reunification was unknown to them. But the Catholic faith had deposited in the depths of their souls a nucleus that did not need to be reunified with anything, because it was self-sufficient, absolute
and eternal. To these Catholics the ultimate presuppositions of public and private, individual and collective, had to appear serenely distinct and serenely coexistent.

Other Catholics, of whom we have already seen some cases, sought instead in their very religiousness the profound motivations for their political commitment, which they saw as an instrument for affirming inalienable moral principles. This position generated torment and tension, all the more profound the harder it was to feel that the name ‘religious' could confidently be given to the political actions performed by Catholics and, in particular, the clergy. In a lecture given at the Catholic University in Milan in January 1943, Giuseppe Dossetti had spoken of the active participation of the people as of a natural right.
⁸¹
To fight for the triumph of a right consequently became a duty.

Finally, there was a third Catholic attitude, which also made the religious factor the point of departure, but interpreted in a predominantly doctrinaire sense, as a model for a Christian society that was coming into being. These Catholics, in the name of coherence, were taking the dangerous paths of integralism, which is a Catholic version of totalitarianism.

There was no clear defining line between these different positions. Teresio Olivelli, for example, oscillated between the second and the third pole, not least perhaps from the lingering influence of his Fascist education.
⁸²
One of the most upright Resistance groups, the Christian-Social Movement, started from the second position, but because of the simplistic manner with which it assumed it, ran the risk of ending up with the third. Christianity – say some of its writings – has made men equal before God and therefore before the law; but ‘economic inequality' has made this great conquest meaningless: therefore the social problem and the moral one ‘have to fuse in a happy synthesis'.
⁸³
Or again, ‘the forgoing of wealth preached by the Gospel constitutes an essential element for the solution of the social question [to be faced therefore] in the name of the ethic of justice and love of genuinely lived Christianity'.