Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (51 page)

Even more vulnerable were members of the aristocracy, particularly if any link with the Fascists could be found. In Emilia-Romagna alone 103 landowners were murdered in the aftermath of the war.
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The most famous example was the killing of the Manzoni counts at their country house near Lugo in the province of Ravenna. The counts were three brothers, all avowed Fascists, who were major local landowners and the most powerful family in the area. They had managed to avoid the popular justice during the liberation itself. But in the aftermath of the war they refused to renegotiate sharecropping contracts with their tenants, or to put right the wartime damage that had been done to their land, and this proved to be their undoing. On 6 July 1945, having lost patience, a group of ex-partisans broke into the house and shot not only the three brothers but also their mother, their maid and their dog. After the killings the entire population of the local village descended upon the villa and distributed the family’s clothes and belongings amongst themselves: the episode had the flavour of a peasants’ revolt against a feudal system that had oppressed them for decades.
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In France too the aristocracy was targeted, regardless of whether or not they had collaborated. The Duc de Lévis-Mirepoix, for example, who had nothing to incriminate him but his title, only narrowly escaped being sentenced to death by the ‘People’s Tribunal’ in Pamiers because the new prefect for Ariège closed the tribunal down. Pierre de Castelbajac, a count from Tarbes, to the north of Toulouse, was not quite so lucky. It seems that there was little evidence that this man had actively collaborated, but when his captors found his membership card for Croix-de-Feu (a prewar far-right political party), this was considered incriminating enough. He was beaten, then executed shortly afterwards.
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Similar events occurred across France, although the targeting of minor aristocrats was particularly bad in Charentes, the Dordogne, the Limousin and Provence.
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In Vienne, a baron named Henri Reille-Soult was imprisoned in a pigsty for several weeks, and regularly beaten, before finally being executed in October 1944. Far from being a collaborator, he had been part of a British intelligence network during the war.
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Count Christian de Lorgeril, a decorated war hero in Carcassonne, was apparently executed simply because of his title and his monarchist views. According to
L’Aube,
the daily newspaper of the Mouvement Républicain Populaire, he was tortured horrifically before his death: the spaces between his fingers and toes were split, his hands and feet were crushed, he was stabbed repeatedly with a red-hot bayonet, and finally placed in a bath of petrol and set on fire.
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Another favourite target, and traditional enemy of the Communist Party, was the clergy. In Toulouse there were city-wide rumours that the fascist Milice had set up gun posts in the towers of the local churches – a rumour that goes some way towards explaining why churches in the city were vandalized and machine-gunned during the August 1944 uprising. There are numerous examples across south-west France of clergymen being beaten, tortured and executed by members of the Resistance, often without any convincing evidence that they had collaborated in any way.
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In Italy too the clergy were occasionally targeted, either because they were suspected of aiding Fascists or because they insisted on denouncing the Communist Party from the pulpit.
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Finally, and most importantly, some of the more radical Communist factions began to attack their democratic rivals. In the immediate aftermath of the liberation of France there were definite attempts by various Communist leaders to take control of local areas, particularly in the south-west of the country. The Gaullist Commissaire de la République in Toulouse was forced to fight off a concerted attempt by Communist leaders to usurp him, and only did so in the end by winning military backing from one of the Resistance commanders.
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In Nimes, the Gaullist prefect was repeatedly threatened by local Communist leaders, and on one occasion was almost arrested by them. He was saved only by the opportune arrival of the Commissaire de la République, Jacques Bounin.
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In Italy the violence against political rivals was more extreme. The centre of this violence was what became known as the ‘Red Triangle’, or even the ‘Triangle of Death’ – that area of Emilia-Romagna between Bologna, Reggio Emilia and Ferrara. In the summer of 1945 a series of high-profile murders occurred there that put a serious strain on the fragile alliance between Christian Democrats and Communists. On 2 June an engineer called Antonio Rizzi and his son Ettore were murdered in Nonantola. Both were confirmed anti-Fascists – Ettore had even been a partisan – but they were also Christian Democrats. These were not hot-blooded crimes, but rather that particular brand of political murder that the Italians call
omicidi eccellenti
(in other words, the ‘necessary’ killing of notable people who are in one’s way). Six weeks later, in the same town, a Christian Democrat member of the Liberation Committee was also murdered. Similar killings of Christian Democrats also occurred in Bomporto (8 June), Lama Mocogno (10 June), and Medolla (13 June).
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9. Italy, 1945-6

The following year, after anti-Communist feeling had already begun to harden, a second series of
omicidi eccellenti
occurred in the same region. It began in June 1946 with the aforementioned murder of the Christian Democrat industrialist Giuseppe Verderi and ended in August with the killings of the liberal lawyer Ferdinando Ferioli, the socialist mayor of Casalgrande, Umberto Farri, and a captain of the carabinieri named Ferdinando Mirotti.
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It must be stressed that all of the stories above are anecdotal, and do not add up to a Communist conspiracy to seize power in either France or Italy at a national level – indeed, as I have already mentioned, it seems that the Communist Party leadership did its utmost to rein in the more extreme factions on its fringes. They understood, as some of their members did not, that the objective conditions for revolution did not exist in either country.

Some local leaders, however, who lacked this breadth of vision, appear to have believed that the time for revolution had already arrived. The sheer number of violent stories from both France and Italy show that there was a significant proportion of the Party that remained committed to violence. Some members appear to have been driven by revenge, or a sense that justice would be done only if they meted out that justice themselves. Others were more calculating, and targeted class enemies regardless of the role that their victims had played during the occupation. Some wanted to intimidate their political rivals into silence. Others seemed to be trying to induce a state of terror amongst the population, much as they had done during the war. While their actions lacked focus, and their motives appeared diverse, the common denominator was the belief that the revolution was not only imminent, but had already arrived.

In the years to come, many in the Italian and French Communist parties would blame their leadership for failing to realize the potential of such immediate, violent action. They were proud of their successes at a local level – where for a time Communists were in control of several cities and one or two entire regions of Italy and France – and believed that this might have been translated into national success, if only their party leaders had seized the initiative. But without proper coordination from the centre, their piecemeal attempts at revolution were doomed to falter and eventually fizzle out.

This does not mean, however, that the political violence of the immediate postwar period had no effect. On the contrary: the effects were far-reaching, but very different from what local agitators had been hoping for.

The Reaction

The belligerence of former partisans and rank-and-file Communist Party members did not go unnoticed. In the immediate aftermath of the war it was put down to the general atmosphere of spontaneous lawlessness that accompanied the liberation – an argument that many historians still subscribe to today.
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Later, when continuing violence demonstrated that this was not merely a short-lived phenomenon, fears began to mount. Rumours spread that the Communists were out of control or, worse still, that they were part of a more organized conspiracy to seize power. In Paris, stories circulated that the south-west of the country was undergoing a reign of terror, that Toulouse had declared itself a republic and that de Gaulle’s representative there, Pierre Bertaux, had been imprisoned by the Communists. It took a visit to Paris from Bertaux himself to dispel the myths.
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In Italy there were widespread whispers of an insurrection in Milan and Turin, along with rumours that economic collapse and a Communist takeover of the whole country were imminent. The party’s enemies certainly used such rumours to their best advantage, and stoked up people’s fears. Some Italian anti-Communists themselves admitted that such scaremongering was groundless, and had been deliberately propagated by ‘right-wing elements anxious to stir up anti-Communist feeling’.
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In the south of Italy, landowners, businessmen, police chiefs, magistrates and other middle-class notables used the memory of the land occupations in 1943 to oppose the institution of left-wing administrators. They feared for their property, their wealth and their own positions of influence – but it was their argument that communism brought civil unrest that most swayed the Allied Military Government in newly liberated areas. As a consequence right-wing candidates, and even some ex-Fascists, were appointed to positions of local power simply as a method of keeping communism at bay.
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In the north of Italy, where the violence during the liberation had been much more intense, the right and centre-right parties made the fear of left-wing violence a cornerstone of their campaigning. From January and February 1947, references to the ‘Triangle of Death’ in Emilia-Romagna began to appear in newspapers such as
La Stampa
and
Corriere della Sera
.
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In March an article in
L‘Umanità
spoke of ‘Red Squadristi’ conducting a campaign of ‘ideological and physical terror’.
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This was a transparent attempt to snatch the moral high ground away from the left by portraying former partisans not as heroes but as violent thugs.

In France too, lurid stories of partisan violence became commonplace in the press during the late 1940S. In 1947, the socialist Prime Minister Paul Ramadier pointed to the upsurge in strike action – which had come about mainly because of spiralling inflation, food shortages and plummeting living standards – and claimed that it was merely the result of Communist agitation. On 5 May he dismissed the Communists from government. Thereafter several Communist ‘conspiracies’ were uncovered, such as the infiltration of the Ministry of Ex-Servicemen. Rumours even spread of an ‘International Brigade’ being formed within France.
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However, no matter how much French and Italian politicians denounced Communist agitation at a domestic level, it was Communist action on the international stage that was the real cause for concern. What truly scared those of the centre and the right was not the piecemeal violence in their own regional cities, but the more wholesale repression that was taking place in eastern Europe. French and Italian newspapers carried increasingly worrying stories from countries such as Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, with the implication that the same repression would overwhelm Italy and France if the Communists were ever allowed to take power.

This was also a subject that worried the Western Allies, and particularly the Americans. On 19 February the American ambassador to France claimed that Paris was ‘a veritable hive of Comintern agents’ and that the ‘Soviet Trojan horse’ was ‘so well camouflaged that millions of Communist militants, sympathizers, and opportunists have been brought to believe that the best way to defend France is to identify French national interests with the aims of the Soviet Union’.
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Shortly afterwards Dean Acheson went so far as to say that, considering the strength of the Communists in every area of society, a Soviet takeover of France could occur at any moment.
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In Italy, meanwhile, diplomats in Rome spoke of a ‘psychosis of fear’ building up in the country, and warned the US State Department that 50,000 or more trained and armed Communists were preparing themselves for possible insurrection in northern Italy.
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What this shows is that if scaremongering was rife within Italian and French society, then it was amply reflected in Allied circles. Indeed, there were times when the Americans seemed to be even more afraid of civil unrest in these countries than the French and Italians themselves. They threw their considerable weight behind the anti-Communist political parties, and threatened to withdraw all aid if the Communists ever won power at the elections.
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