Leone Ginzburg lost his lecturing post in literature at the university of Turin after refusing to take the required oath of loyalty to the Italian fascist regime, and was a longtime organiser of the antifascist movement Giustizia e Libertà (Justice and Liberty) and, later, of the Partito d’Azione (Action Party). He wrote from prison in 1943 about the Risorgimento, the early- to mid-nineteenth century national political and cultural revival, which had as its outcome the political and territorial unification of Italy between 1859 and 1871.
For the Italians of today [he asserted], the Risorgimento is not simply the name of an historical period;…it is, rather, a still vital and jealously guarded tradition to which we refer continuously in order to derive from it standards of judgement and incentives to action…. For Italians, the attitude to take to the Risorgimento still implies…an unequivocal choice which precedes any historiographical evaluation.1
It is important to recognise from the start that the historiography of the Risorgimento and the process of national unification in Italy has always been ahistorical. Taken, naturally enough, as the most important defining event of Italy’s national history, the Risorgimento has been constantly re-enacted and re- evaluated to match the political conflicts of the time. The study of the Risorgimento is a standing example of the uses, or abuses, of history, occupying as it does the ground between politics and history.
This chapter looks at the uses to which national history was put by the Italian antifascist movement, Giustizia e Libertà. It was founded by and largely composed of middle-class intellectuals on the democratic left, drawing heavily on the democratic interventionism of the First World War, which looked to Italy achieving its ‘natural’ political frontiers at the expense of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and taking its place in a Wilsonian postwar international order. Fascism changed all that; emerging in French exile in 1929, Giustizia e Libertà was, with the Italian Communist Party, the only antifascist movement which tried to sustain a presence and activity within Italy itself in the 1930s. Its units in Italy were successively and effectively infiltrated and dismantled by the Italian police,
and by the late 1930s, as an organisation it only really survived in exile. Most of its former and current activists, whether in Italy or in exile, joined the Action Party, which, in its brief existence between 1943 and 1947, saw itself as the political heir of Giustizia e Liberià. It remained a movement of intellectuals, and some of them were professional historians who held down university posts before and after 1945. Both Giustizia e Liberià and the Partito d’Azione were the only antifascist political formations in Italy which derived their very existence and rationale from the struggle against fascism. They were the quintessential resistance movements.
There will be some emphasis on the positions of the founder and leader of Giustizia and Liberià, Carlo Rosselli, a student of Gaetano Salvemini and for a short time a university lecturer in political economy, before being imprisoned for antifascist activities in the late 1920s; and of his brother, Nello Rosselli, to whom he was personally and politically close. Nello Rosselli was also a student of Salvemini, and a professional historian who held, for a while, a research position at the School of Modern and Contemporary History, the official institute of historical research, whose director was Gioacchino Volpe. Even after two periods of confino (internal exile) imposed for antifascist contacts and activities in 1927 and 1929, he was allowed to retain his working contacts with the School. Both brothers were murdered in France in 1937 by French fascists acting on the orders and in the pay of the Italian fascist government.
Both men joined short-lived antifascist organisations before and after early 1925, the decisive point at which Mussolini embarked on the transformation of the liberal parliamentary system into the first ‘totalitarian’ state, and contributed to antifascist or independent reviews and journals, prior to the formation of Giustizia e Liberià. From the start, they identified the need to articulate an antifascist national historiography, because the success of fascism at all seemed to demand some historical analysis and explanation. How had it come about? What were the connections, if any, to Italy’s recent past? Was fascism in some way the culmination of an imperfect or deformed process of nation-formation which had its roots in the Risorgimento? A proper understanding of fascism, the better to combat it, could only apparently emerge once fascism was set in the context of national history, exploring the linkages between the Risorgimento and postunification Italy, and between liberal Italy and fascism. Ultimately, this historical contextualisation of fascism would be used to justify Giustizia e Libertà’s ‘break with the past’. The movement’s vision of a postfascist society was premised on its rejection both of fascism and of the pre-fascist political system which had made fascism feasible; no ‘restoration’ was possible. In a very overt and direct way, Giustizia e Libertà sought to legitimise antifascism by locating itself and its enemy in Italian history.
If fascism’s consolidation in power seemed self-evidently to point to a revision of Italy’s recent history, so did the appearance of alternative histories and historiographies, which similarly attempted to situate fascism in national history. Benedetto Croce, perhaps the most important Italian intellectual and historian of his age, had published his Storia d’Italia dal 1871 al 1915 (History of
Italy from 1871 to 1915) in 1928. A paean to the idea of liberty and of the civilising force of nineteenth-century liberalism, Croce’s book practically denied fascism any legitimate space in Italian history, viewing it as a brutal interruption of the country’s linear path towards the realisation of a regime of liberty.
The crude fascist appropriation of the Risorgimento appeared in the philosophical and allegedly historical essays of the idealist philosopher and pedagogue, Giovanni Gentile, who became the regime’s official ideologue in the 1920s. In Risorgimento e Fascismo, published in 1931, Gentile worked backwards from his own conception of fascism as the realisation of the ‘totalitarian’ ‘ethical state’, a state which both embodied the moral values of the nation and educated the nation in those values, to claim a lineage with the ethical and religious concept of life which Giuseppe Mazzini, Vincenzo Gioberti and others imparted to the Risorgimento. The ‘liberty’ aspired to by the great men of the Risorgimento was the ‘liberty’ of the state, through and in which the people realised their own ‘true’ freedom.
There are echoes of this statist interpretation of the Risorgimento in the far more subtle, nuanced and properly historical works of Volpe himself. His Whiggish perspective on the national past was conveyed by the title of his history of Italy, L’Italia in cammino (Italy on its Way), published in 1927. In this book and in his history of fascism, Storia del movimento fascista, published in 1933, Volpe described fascism as a new Risorgimento or as a completion of the Risorgimento and the postunification liberal state, in the sense that fascism has finally inserted the people into state and nation. This was hardly perfect fascist history, since it indicated that the pre-fascist liberal state had national virtues and had started on the process of nation and state formation, when fascists themselves wanted to emphasise that the Italy they were building was everything that the despised liberal ‘little Italy’ was not. Volpe was too good an historian to allow his work to become an apologia for the fascist regime. But as the head of a major historical research institute, which gathered in the best young professional historians, and as effectively the editor of a major history journal, the Rivista Storica Italiana, Volpe certainly influenced the direction and orientation of contemporary historical studies. A tendency to favour studies in foreign policy and diplomacy suggested that the real gain and point of the Risorgimento were to achieve unity and independence, understood as the basis of state power in the international arena rather than as the basis of popular liberty at home. Nello Rosselli was himself a ‘victim’ of this process: the research task assigned to him by Volpe in the School of Modern and Contemporary History in 1927 was a study of the relations between Britain and the Italian states between 1815 and 1847, a commission which Nello reluctantly and laboriously worked on until 1937.
In the end. Volpe’s concern with the history of Italy’s realpolitik matched the reorganisation of historical studies, and of Risorgimento studies in particular, undertaken from 1933 by the later Minister of National Education, Cesare Maria De Vecchi, who as President of the National Society for the History of
the Risorgimento, wanted to put the history profession at the service of the fascist regime. In line with his own clericalist and monarchist version of fascism, De Vecchi encouraged and published studies which pushed the ‘origins’ of the Risorgimento back to the ‘national’ groundwork of the early eighteenth century absolutist Piedmontese kings. This slant again put the emphasis on the development of state power before the achievement of unity under liberty, and as a corollary, on the intrinsic and native Italian roots of the national revival, isolating and immunising the country’s history from that of the rest of Western Europe. It was this nationalistic closing down of options for historical study and the official historiography’s implicit and explicit rejection of a European dimension to Italy’s historical development, which the Rossellis were concerned to challenge.
So, in this light, the Rosselli brothers’ historical reflections and studies were meant to meet both historiographical and political imperatives. In a rather anguished correspondence with his mentor, Salvemini, in late 1930, Nello Rosselli was trying to reconcile his duty as an historian with his duty as an antifascist. He had already rejected the deal offered to him during his first spell in confino, after Volpe and Paolo Boselli, the then President of the National Society for the History of the Risorgimento, had interceded with Mussolini on his behalf, that he should devote himself to nothing but historical research and wr iting. Feeling that the ivory tower of professional detachment was unacceptable, Nello now urged Salvemini to help him find ways of writing ‘objective’ history which would also contribute ‘in not too indirect a fashion to the development of the political struggle’.2 His brother, Carlo, had fewer doubts
about what Nello should do. In Carlo’s view, writing ‘objective’ history in the fascist regime was itself a tendentious and ‘political’ activity; and, anyway, ‘objectivity’ was an illusion, since all great historians were ‘interpreters of the concrete historical needs of their country’.3 If there was a tension between
historical scholarship and political commitment, then it could not be allowed to inhibit either the writing of history or the activity of politics, as both men were self-consciously occupying and contesting the same historical ground as the fascist regime; part of the point of being an antifascist was to redefine the meaning of Italy’s recent national history.
Carlo Rosselli’s interpretation of Italy’s past was based substantially on the insights and intuitions of a young and influential antifascist intellectual, Piero Gobetti, who famously described fascism as the autobiography of the nation. Gobetti, in turn, was indebted to Giustino Fortunato, the antifascist liberal writer and politician with a special interest in Southern Italy, who as famously defined fascism as revelation rather than revolution. Gobetti’s Risorgimento senza eroi (Risorgimento without Heroes; again, the title said it all), published in 1926, was not really a systematic history at all, more a series of polemical historical judgements which were used to support his antifascist stance.
For Carlo Rosselli, then, fascism was not just a bourgeois class reaction against the post-First World War gains and advances of the organised industrial and agricultural proletariat. It was also the outcome and accentuation of
congenital, historical defects of the Italian nation, which were as much moral and temperamental as political and social weaknesses, and amounted to a political immatur ity and lack of civic responsibility among Italians: ‘Fascism…is Italy, the product of all our history, all our traditions, the current expression of the economic and moral situation of the country, the logical conclusion of a long process slowly maturing from before the First World War’.4 In this kind of historical perspective, the Risorgimento and political-
territorial unification were a ‘failure’, or at least an incomplete and imperfect achievement, one of the many occasions (the Reformation was another) when Italy had missed its appointment with history. So unity was the work of an aristocratic and bourgeois liberal minority, who as the new nation’s political class, had failed to create a really democratic nation-state. The way unification occurred, through diplomacy and war and the enlargement of Piedmont, had deliberately served to exclude and inhibit popular participation and involvement, and in fear of it. As a result, postunification Italy had not seen the integration of the people into the nation-state, which was the unresolved issue of national formation. This diagnosis, if nothing else, indicated the ambiguous histor ical legacy of the Risorgimento: ‘making the nation’, unmade during the Risorgimento, was precisely what fascism claimed to be doing through the ‘totalitarian’ state.
Carlo Rosselli wanted to recover a popular and socialist Risorgimento, neglected or obscured in the ‘official’ historiography, the Risorgimento of those men and movements who had been ‘defeated’ in the Piedmontese, monarchical-liberal and socially conservative outcome of the process of national unification: the democratic and republican nationalists, Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi; the socialists and federalists, Carlo Pisacane, Giuseppe Ferrari, Giuseppe Montanelli and Carlo Cattaneo. All this served Rosselli’s critique of Marxist socialism and his articulation of an alternative ‘liberal socialism’. Finding socialism in the Risorgimento, finding a Risorgimento socialism, allowed him to disengage socialism from Marxism and recouple it to a national tradition which informed his own political stance: a democratic and republican socialism, a socialism achieved through democracy and the exercise of liberty.
What Carlo Rosselli did politically, his brother Nello did historically. The ‘forgotten’ Risorgimento was essentially Nello’s concern, too, as he kicked against the actual research programme which he had been allocated by Volpe in the School of Modern and Contemporary History. A reworking of his graduation thesis, Mazzini e Bakunin, appeared in 1927; his Carlo Pisacane nel Risorgimento Italiano, which he had been working on since 1925, came out in 1932. The subject matter was itself part of a revision of Risorgimento history. His Mazzini was not the romantic and romanticised visionary in exile, the Mazzini of Young Italy, but the ‘social’ Mazzini, with Rosselli locating the start of a socialist workers’ movement in Italy in the 1850s and showing how Mazzinian and Garibaldian workers’ associations found their way into an anarchist- dominated First International in the early 1860s.
What had apparently started out as a slim, straightforward narrative biography of the Risorgimento socialist, Pisacane, became the peg for a more general historical re-evaluation of the Risorgimento. Nello Rosselli regarded Pisacane’s aborted vision of national self-liberation through a popular peasant revolution, inspired by the Mazzinian socialism of ‘liberty and association’, as anachronistic, out of its time; national unification was impossible to achieve on these terms in the 1850s. Nevertheless, Pisacane’s inevitable ‘failure’ was set in a general overview of the Risorgimento which emphasised the absence of popular involvement and choice in the actual outcome of unification, vitiating the workings and development of the postunification political system. It scarcely needs emphasising that this was a political as much as an historical judgement, or an historical judgement which was transformed into a political one.
It can perhaps now be understood why Nello Rosselli’s biography of Pisacane was regarded at the time by the protagonists of Giustizia e Liberià as a major contribution to the struggle against fascism. The movement incorporated the analysis of the ‘failed’ Risorgimento into its projections of a postfascist Italy. It came most strikingly in Carlo Rosselli’s idea of the antifascist resistance as an act of national self-liberation, like a ‘second Risorgimento’ which ‘must shatter the compromises of the first and open the way to social emancipation’.5 So,
Giustizia e Liberià was the vanguard of a ‘second Risorgimento’: ‘second’ because it would not repeat the mistakes of the first and would, in fact, make good the defects and limitations of the first; ‘second’, because of the ‘two’ Risorgimentos, the ‘official’ and the defeated ‘popular’ one, it was the latter which Giustizia e Liberià looked to for that combination of liberty and social justice which inspired its own antifascist political programme.
Carlo Rosselli’s view of the ‘second Risorgimento’ was not uncontested within Giustizia e Liberià itself. There was a vigorous debate in the movement’s weekly newspaper in May 1935, over the significance of the ‘first’ Risorgimento for the antifascist struggle.6 Some contributors, who significantly soon left the
movement for the Socialist Party, argued that the Risorgimento was a bad teacher because nationalism was demonstrably destructive of individual liberty and social emancipation, then as now; and that the Risorgimento should be left well alone as a model for present and future political action, since it provided more lessons and myths for fascism than for revolutionaries like themselves who wanted to remake Italy altogether on the ruins of fascism.
Carlo Rosselli’s intervention in the debate made it clear that he saw legitimate parallels between the past and the present. He seemed to regard Giustizia e Liberià as the analogue of the popular version of the Risorgimento. This ran consciously through the activities and aims of the movement in the 1930s. With explicit reference to the expatriation of Mazzini, Garibaldi, Pisacane and others, Giustizia e Liberià took what comfort it could from the fact of political exile. Extrapolating from the ‘first’ Risorgimento, the movement could say that sometimes it was necessary to live outside one’s country when it no longer embodied one’s ideals, that one could fight for the liberty of another country and since liberty was indivisible, be also fighting
for the liberty of one’s own country, drawing the parallel here between Giustizia e Libertà’s raising of a unit to join the republican side in the Spanish Civil War and the Italian patriots who participated in the Spanish liberal revolutions against the absolute monarchy in the first half of the nineteenth century. The provocative, high-profile gestures of resistance to the fascist regime in the early 1930s emulated the heroic, conspiratorial acts of Young Italy. The leaflets dropped over Milan from a light aircraft in 1930 reminded the Milanese of the glorious ‘five days’ of the 1848 Revolution in the city, when the citizens’ militia had expelled the Austrian garrison; fascism was now the ‘internal’ ‘Austrian’ despotism.
Again, Giustizia e Libertà’s political programme was in its name, ‘Justice and Liberty’, a synthesis of ‘liberal-socialism’ which explicitly revised and rejected the Marxist reformist and maximalist wings of pre-fascist Italian socialism. Carlo Rosselli’s ‘humanistic’ socialism, rather more a well-meaning expression of human solidarity and fraternity across the classes than the product of class