I feel one is duty-bound to mark the date, April 18 1948, with
the full commemoration due to it and I am glad that this can be done without holding back
with the same caution (which would be totally out of order here) that led people to
minimize the event for years or forget it had happened at all so as not to offend one of
the parties defeated in that day's decisive electoral test.
But
after half a century it is no longer a current affair but history. And events have been
such as to remove any further doubt in judging those elections for Italy's first
legislature as a Republic.
I don't
think there is any further liking or regret for the regimes of Stalinist discipline. There
is no doubt about the Soviet Union's determinant role in delivering us of Nazism. What had
to be waived - something other countries failed to do - was any ulterior extension of the
dictatorship from Moscow model. What had happened so recently (before the Italian
elections) in Czechoslovakia (March 1948) had visibly scared even sections of the
population with underlying leftist orientations.
I feel one is duty-bound to mark
the date, April 18 1948, with the full commemoration due to it and I am glad that this can
be done without holding back with the same caution (which would be totally out of order
here) that led people to minimize the event for years
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There
is one point that should be cleared up right away. Many veterans of the Popular Front
(Communist-Socialist alliance) claim that if they had won there would have been none of
the involutionary trends that so devastated democratic orders elsewhere. Rejection of this
theory definitely does not mean cataloguing Italian Communists and Socialists as
supporters of the Red dictatorship. This could not even have been said of their
counterparts in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and so on. It is a gratuitous insult to
them to sustain that the opposite is true in order to wash one's hands of them. What is
more, perhaps the various Nennis themselves and Togliattis (Nenni, Socialist; Togliatti,
Communist) would have been called to order and despatched to the sidelines in the event of
indecision. It is neither provocative nor imaginative to say (if anything, it is by way of
fitting recognition) that people who had suffered imprisonment under the Fascists would
have gone back to jail or been forced into exile.
For,
wasn't it true that the official hierarchy of the Italian Communist Party itself (PCI) -
though not all of it - was flanked by a clandestine network of people they could trust and
who were stage-managed by the Kremlin.
Nor can
the opposite said to have been proven by Stalin's suggestion to Nenni for moderation when
the latter went to pick up his (Soviet) Peace Prize. Nenni himself rightly informed De
Gasperi (Alcide De Gasperi, Italy's first Christian Democrat post-War premier) and I was
present as under secretary. When Nenni said he was fighting for a policy of neutrality
(Italy's in terms of NATO), Stalin cut him short saying that, because of its geographical
position and history, Italy could not be neutral. What he should do, instead, was fight
extremism within the Treaty. Thus was born Nenni's famed slogan (though it was really
Stalin's) against Atlantic extremism.
In the
consultations at the time of the crisis which beset the government in 1953, Nenni
sustained that the Treaty was not an obstacle to the majority's expansion because
"treaties are just pieces of paper". Later the Socialists and Nenni himself
substantially adjusted this position. And in 1977, even the Communists crossed the floor
in terms of the Treaty so to speak (they had already changed their opinion of European
institutions when Community representative bodies stopped ostracizing them).
Awareness of the need to defend the
nation from the Communist peril rapidly grew, helped along by some providential errors on
the part of the counterparts
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But
to go back to April 1948, the political climate had been atypical from the last six months
of the year before. On May 31, De Gasperi had formed a government which, for the first
time, included neither Socialists nor Communists who, to great clamor, became the
Opposition. The break had been made necessary by the total divergence on Italy's
international relations.
Meanwhile
at Montecitorio (the Italian lower house of Parliament), Members had pressed on with their
work in a constructive spirit which had never diminished and, at the end of December 1947,
they arrived at the approval of the Constitution with an overwhelming majority.
Also
ratified, though with much more difficulty, was the Peace Treaty which had been signed,
moreover, by the previous coalition government.
In a
relaxed climate, Parliament continued to sit for another month after that December: to
approve the Statutes for Regional Authorities requiring special treatment (Sicily, for
example); to complete the electoral legislation; to draft a first bill on the press
considering as obscene horrific publications and those potentially harmful to adolescents.
I remember that as far as everything else was concerned, legislative functions were
carried out by the Cabinet in which, alongside De Gasperi, Senator Luigi Einaudi lent
prestigious, untiring service yet, by way of an exception, he had stayed on as governor of
the Bank of Italy.
The
election campaign was livening up. The Communist-Socialist merger, borrowing as a model
the Hero of the Two Worlds for the purpose (Giuseppe Garibaldi who unifed Italy in the
mid-19th century), was countered by a group of allied democratic parties who kept their
own identities and who pledged themselves totally to the democratic method (an expression
De Gasperi often used). This term was not rhetorical and, since De Gasperi invited
citizens to vote for one of the government parties, it did not mean that adherence to
Christian Democracy was tepid either.
Awareness
of the need to defend the nation from the Communist peril rapidly grew, helped along by
some providential errors on the part of the counterparts (Communists and Socialists)
themselves. One of these errors was their stipulation of a pact to unsettle Europe. It had
been promoted by Moscow and only came to light in a fortunate press inquiry. Realino
Carboni, editor of the Roman daily Momento Sera, had handed over a copy (of the pact) to
the Prime Minister with fool-proof guarantees of its authenticity.
Luigi
Longo and Eugenio Reale had represented the PCI at the "conclave" held in
Poland. Any suspicion that these two had violated the secrecy had to be dispelled. So I
was sent to Paris to see the French Premier Robert Schuman who saw to (the pact's)
publication which we immediately reproduced and distributed in Italy. The Communists were
quick to issue denials but the specter of this Cominform deeply disturbed the Italian
people. But a few years later after Eugenio Reale had left the Communist Party (officially
expelled from it), he not only confirmed that the pact was authentic but revealed some
disturbing minutes of preparatory meetings. A feature had been Luigi Longo offering strong
guarantees of arms and he even invented stories of mass strikes which never happened. The
PCI was under charge for allowing itself to be put out of government and it had to justify
itself. There was one quirk of fate: the harshest censors (of the PCI) had been the
Yugoslavs who were soon to distance themselves from their great Kremlin comrade encouraged
in this by the Front's defeat (in the Italian elections).
Following the different election
result of 1953 the Prime Minister De Gasperi tried to give us an edifying lesson of life
on that sad evening of July 29, by warning us never to forget that we are all useless
servants
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A
significant part in the democratic mobilization of 1948 had been played by the religious
organizations. They ingeniously forged ad hoc links with all the forces of Catholic
inspiration in addition to the structures of Catholic Action and other institutions. The
following article is the direct testimony of one of the architects of that Spring
campaign, Cardinal Fiorenzo Angelini, which had been desired and personally supported by
Pius XII.
The
Church is still criticized for its participation in those circumstances in Italy. Appeals
were even made to the (Church-State) Concordat of 1929 - recently introduced to the
Constitution at the time. It was said that its clauses prohibiting priests from joining
political parties (an odd plural for 1929 when there was only one party [Fascism])
sanctioned a sort of vow of political chastity. I remember that, in one of those really
earthy kind of political meetings, I responded to the rebuke of this alleged invasion by
the clergy by saying that, just as farmers were duty-bound to defend their land, the
Church could not stand idly by in the face of the danger of militant atheism. For, it had
already spread its tentacles in acts of violence that the Church had not witnessed for
some considerable time against its pastors and faithful. Call them farmers of souls if you
like, but you can't presume that they will give up without a fight.
The
Civic Committees - as the new strategic Catholic-coordinated formations were called - gave
absolute priority to the fight against abstention from voting (on election day), an
eventuality that was believed would lead to a Front victory. Whether this would have
proven true or not (I think true), people were convinced that the Front would have been
able to ensure that all its supporters would turn out to vote while, in the other camp,
there were sufficiently large areas of alleged electoral indolence, others where voters
could be tempted to vote out of opportunism and others still where voters were afraid.
None of the Committees' election posters invited people to vote for the Christian
Democrats. They appealed, rather, against absenteeism at the polls and allowing potential
votes to slip through the net. It must be said, however, that one of their most effective
slogans was the warning that God could see into the polling booth while Stalin could not:
a clear indication as to whom not to vote for.
Analysts
are wary of quantifying the Catholic contribution to the April 18 victory in relation to
the organizational potential of the Christian Democrats and their allied parties. I am not
drawn to such calculations. All I know is that - in addition to the gratitude expressed to
them from outside quarters - a few days after escaping the danger De Gasperi commissioned
me to convey his acknowledgement to both Luigi Gedda and the then Monsignor Angelini. I
also remember that, four years later (though the Civic Committees were not involved), an
unwise and groundless alarm was raised for the outcome of municipal elections in Rome.
This left all us politicians deeply embittered and risked sending us back down the
slippery slope. When he was told of the situation in detail, Pius XII ordered that the
Committee maneuver be deployed again and - though history treated him cruelly - it took
its name this time from the very obedient and holy priest, Luigi Sturzo.
I
did not talk about escaping the danger blithely. The vote cast by Italians was widespread
and explicit. It is a distortion of history to say that it was brought about by external
factors (the American Fleet, a hangover from Yalta, mass financing and such like). It must
be said here that the victory was interpreted in the most linear and right way: it meant
the retention of the coalition - resisting any fundamentalist thrust - and some courageous
development laws (agrarian reform, a special fund for the Italian South, and so on). That
the victory was used to introduce reforms was certainly not popular with voters who, on
that April 18, were seeking to block Communism but not to have resources transferred to
the less affluent sectors. And it was this - among other factors - that led to the
different outcome of the 1953 elections and the ungenerous, forced retirement of the Prime
Minister De Gasperi who, on that sad evening of July 29, tried to give us an edifying
lesson of life by warning us - New Testament in hand - never to forget that we are all
useless servants. |
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