A Civil War (14 page)

That need had now arisen with an urgency and a vengeance that were probably unforeseen by the Pope when he dictated those words. And the Christian Democrat paper strove to argue the different value to be attributed to the two oaths. The oath to the king, it wrote, ‘is a promise made freely and voluntarily, calling God to witness one's own words'; by contrast, that to the Duce ‘is absurd and illicit, given the aim it commits one to. It was wrung out of the majority of people with violence, since it was imposed as a condition for saving one's life.'

Truth to tell, to ‘save one's life' an Italian had to swear to the king as well; and the opening words of the text in question implicit in the reference to ‘the aim that [the oath] commits one to' was contradicted when the article denied that the king's conduct might invalidate the oath taken to him. The upshot of this was the invocation of the age-old argument whereby only the oath's addressee, raised to the status of sole independent variable, had the power to release one from it. Mussolini, it said, could not release himself from the oath he had sworn to the king. It would have been all too easy for a Fascist to reply: And how can the king release himself from the oath he swore to Mussolini? A defensive article in
Il Messaggero
, which was not yet fully ‘normalised' in the Fascist sense, seems implicitly to accept the adversary's terrain, in recognising the greater weight to
be given to the oath to the king. Shortly after 8 September, the Roman newspaper wrote:

If it had simply been a question of one oath, the criterion adopted by
Il Popolo
might have had some archaic resonance; but it was an altogether inadequate way of resolving the conflict between the two oaths, from which neither of the two addressees had the slightest intention of releasing those who had sworn it. It was not the will of the addressee, therefore, but his act of betrayal that again became the liberating element. Obviously, this argument was widely used by the Fascists. A manifesto that they addressed to the soldiers said in fact that the King's treachery had released them from any obligation to be loyal to him.
⁵²
Prophetically almost, an RSI journalist, Ezio Maria Gray, had in 1936 absolved Admiral Francesco Caracciolo from the accusation of treason towards his Bourbon king, Ferdinand IV – an accusation in which strictly monarchical writers were indulging, on the grounds that the king had been the first person to betray the nation.
⁵³
Even the most committed
resistenti
argued that the king's betrayal of the people released the latter from any obligation contracted with the oath, the only difference being that they applied the same criterion also to the betrayal committed,
ab antiquo
, by the Duce.

In answer to the oath requested by the Social Republic, the archbishop of Milan resorted to an argument very much along the same lines as that of Pius XI in 1931. In his
Communicazioni al clero ambrosiano
of 1 May 1944, Cardinal Schuster issued the following decree: ‘It is legitimate to take an oath to a “de facto government”, responsible for maintaining public order: always provided, however, it is in accordance with one's conscience, with divine and ecclesiastical
law and is within the sphere of its own duty and office.'
⁵⁴
In fact, the subtle casuistry of the Catholic tradition proved incapable of unravelling so intricate and dramatic a knot. Those with uncompromising religious consciences were the first to shun the preventive absolutions offered them by those who advocated long promises with short waits. Witness this episode recounted by Sergio Cotta:

A great Catholic jurist, Costantino Mortati, then appealed to natural law as the only possible basis of the ‘ethical imperative' capable of resolving ‘conflicts of loyalties'.
⁵⁶

Distinctions and mental reservations, suggested not only by Catholics, came to be instruments of general reconciliation. To claim that the state of necessity – that very state in which the sacred character of one's obligation to the oath shone forth – on the one hand released one from the oath previously taken, and on the other hand nullified the new, different one, led, even beyond the intentions of those who argued in this manner, to a final indemnity. Hence, the words of the Catholic intellectual Mario Apollonio: ‘the moral validity of the oath, if he who takes it does so against his spontaneous will, is null',
⁵⁷
and those cruder words of a Roman rag which explained to those who swore the oath to the RSI under
coercion that they nevertheless remained ‘soldiers of the king',
⁵⁸
could lead the last liberal Catholic in Italian history, Arturo Carlo Jemolo, to remark bitterly: ‘It was hands off everybody, and it was admitted that even a soldier is all right if he changes sides, when he does so in a state of grave coercion.'
⁵⁹

To the out-and-out
resistenti
, who made a clean break with past oaths, these must have appeared in the scathing light in which Proudhon placed them when speaking of the post-1789 French as ‘intrepid oath-swearers': ‘We are all busy swearing and forswearing: we have made an oath sworn reluctantly and mentally retracted into an act of virtue.'
⁶⁰

To those who moved in these circles, the decision to oppose the Social Republic in the name of the oath taken to the king appeared as a decision to respect, but slightly clouded when compared with the oath of those who directly and autonomously chose on the basis of a judgment of value, without feeling the need to support today's act with another act performed yesterday in conditions that had been so much less free. In response to the first ‘military' bands of Boves, which, on the initiative of Ignazio Via, were made to repeat the oath ‘to the king and his royal successors' (but the very need to reconfirm what was in itself an imperishable act already revealed a flawed certainty), a rigorous lay conscience like that of Dante Livio Bianco remarked: ‘But really, how often do even the most genuine reactionaries, albeit unwittingly, not make an exterior show of nobility?'
⁶¹

In using the adjective ‘exterior' with such severity, Bianco undoubtedly had two things in mind. The first, which was more starkly moral and existential, consisted of placing in default the determining value of behaviour motivated by criteria of heteronymous loyalty to an institutional, though interiorised, fact. The second, which was political in nature, lay in his denunciation of the continuity of the old Italian state, which could take advantage of that ‘exterior nobility'.

Military honour, to which the stances taken by men such as Ignazio Vian or Martini Mauri appeal, was not the most important of Resistance values.
⁶²
It might refer not only to the institution of the Royal Army, but cover a professional
dignity and lifestyle chosen at some time or other, and not sufficiently undermined by the disaster of the war. Honour could be appealed to also in this broad, self-legitimising sense, very widespread in the French Resistance not just in its Gaullist variety, and expressed as follows by one of its exponents: ‘Many of our comrades did not calculate whether they were within the law … they have simply obeyed the command to fight for the honour of our country which is the custodian of such precious values.'
⁶³

The leading article of an underground paper,
De l'Honneur
, read as follows: ‘Crimes against honour are unforgivable. We could accept the French leaders' imbecility, cowardice, senile vanity, political rancour, powerless pretention. Their daily insults to honour are revolting to a people that disgorges them even before it punishes them.'
⁶⁴

Presently we shall see that the appeal to honour was to be one of the most widespread motifs among the Fascists of the Social Republic. Unaware of the gaffe, a clandestine Roman paper – one of the minor ones – thought that it was putting those Fascists in difficulty by comparing them to De Gaulle, who had been called a traitor for not having accepted the capitulation of his country,
⁶⁵
while
Risorgimento Liberale
preferred to toss back at the Fascists the theme of honour to be defended.
⁶⁶

The problem of the oath would reappear within the partisan movement as a consequence of its very development, producing significantly discordant responses. Those who insisted on the free nature of the choice, which was to be constantly repeated to ensure that the commitment that had determined it did not diminish, inevitably had scant sympathy for the introduction of oath-taking in the partisan formations. An outright rejection can be found in Mario Giovana's explanation of how the oath was not introduced in the Damianis' group, in the province of Cuneo: ‘because it is considered an act that goes against the genuinely voluntary, and so morally tenser character of the struggle; besides, the experience of Fascism had demonstrated the vanity of these commitments if they were not accompanied by the genuine adhesion of ideal conscience, for which it is repugnant to resuscitate only its formal aspect.'
⁶⁷

But not all Justice and Liberty and Action Party members proved so intransigent. In the ‘Italia Libera' band (again in the province of Cuneo), the request was
made to commit oneself ‘with the oath of a man of honour' to fight the Germans and the Fascists, and ‘pursue ideals of social justice and democratic liberty'. Any betrayal would be punishable by death. And Dante Livio Bianco recalls dealing out the death sentence ‘with a completely clear conscience' to three partisans who were preparing to desert in the event of a roundup.
⁶⁸
And when the Valle Stura Carlo Rosselli brigade, which had crossed the border into France, had to resist pressures aimed at incorporating them into the 74
^th
(foreigners') battalion of the French regular army, Revelli was to point out, in a memorandum to General Alphonse Juin, that ‘the proposal was rejected because it ran counter to honour and the freely taken oath'.
⁶⁹

The request for the oath needs to be considered in relation to the militarisation and politicisation of the bands, which will be discussed later. It is no accident that in the Garibaldi brigades, which had a more precise ideological point of reference and were particularly committed to nursing the prospect of being incorporated in the future regular army, the provoked fewer doubts, and was used to reunite the formations in times of crisis.
⁷⁰
On 9 December 1944, Cino (Cino Moscatelli) and Ciro (Eraldo Gastone), in the name of the group command of Garibaldi assault divisions of Valsesia, Ossola, Cusio and Verbano, almost as if they wished to crown a practice followed in the formations for some time now, were to propose this formula to the general Garibaldi brigade Command: ‘I swear to fight by every means in my power, to the point of the supreme sacrifice of my life, for the total destruction of Nazi-Fascism, for a free, democratic and popular Italy, to be loyal to the general Command of the Garibaldi assault brigades and not to lay down my arms or the Garibaldi uniform until ordered.'
⁷¹

In the final words there seems to be a pre-emptive stance in relation to the disarmament that the Allies were ordering; but still clearer is the echo of a Third International–type institutional culture. Bearing a yet greater ideological mark, but still starker, is the oath adopted by the Belluno Garibaldi division: ‘I swear never to lay down these arms until the principles of progressivist liberty and democracy are established, and to combat any offensive return of Fascism and of anti-democratic and anti-popular reaction that may attempt to wrest power
from the representative organs of the people.'
⁷²

For their part, the ‘autonomous' and ‘military' formations had no objection, in principle, to the oath. Major Martini Mauri had his bands repeat the one customarily used in the Royal Army. As has already been said of the first Boves bands, the soldiers should, rather, have considered reviving the oath to be superfluous, given that they saw themselves as operating, in perfect continuity, within the institutions of the Kingdom of Italy. All the same, they were loath to renounce the symbolic value of the oath and of the cohesive force traditionally attributed to it; nor is it by any means sure whether, coexisting with certainty as to the legitimacy of the institutions, there was not some doubt and anxiety as to their ethical value. At times the autonomous bands proposed high-flown formulae, such as this one of the Brescia Green Flames (Fiamme Verdi):

In fact, as has already been suggested, various kinds of cultural elements influenced the practice of the oath. The honour appealed to by the military and, in their way, the aforementioned
giellisti
(of Giustizia e Libertà) is certainly of a different feather from what must have been going through sixteen-year-old Walter Atti's mind when, as he was being led out of the prison of Castelfranco Emilia to be shot, he took his leave with these words: ‘They are taking me to the wall because I have sworn loyalty to Stalin.'
⁷⁴
Here the category of the oath (and, in implicit opposition to it, of treason) has nothing to do with institutions.