Antifascism in Italy

Marco Bresciani

The formation of opposition to the rise of fascism in Italy was neither immediate nor straightforward. The continuous organizational divisions on the Left weakened the only forces which could have opposed the rise of fascism, instead catalysing the energies of socialist and communist militants and leaders especially towards internal issues and tensions. Only between 1923 and 1924, vis-à-vis the constitution of Mussolini’s government, which radically altered the liberal institutions, did a form of antifascism begin to coagulate.  

Between 1925 and 1926 Mussolini paved the way for the full deployment of the dictatorial regime, eliminating any margin of freedom for political opposition and imposing on them a spectrum of choices ranging from resignation, conspiracy or emigration. France, particularly Paris, began to become the place of political exile and reorganization of antifascist opponents. The socialist, republican and liberal-democratic parties resumed publishing party newspapers and launching propaganda initiatives, aimed both at the Italian communities abroad and at the influence of public opinion in the host countries. Socialists, republicans and democrats established the Concentration of Antifascist Action in 1927, but discussions and disagreements continued between the various party formations, increasingly isolated from Italian reality. In 1929, the group of Giustizia e Libertà was set up on the basis of Carlo Rosselli’s new revolutionary antifascist platform.

The line of the Communist Party of Italy, on the other hand, was less linked to Italian political contingencies and more dictated by the organizational and ideological imperatives of the Comintern. Even within this process of bolshevization, the PCd’I, led by Palmiro Togliatti, tried to follow a partially autonomous path, marked by direct confrontation with the fascist experience. The fall of the Weimar Republic marked a point of no return, creating the conditions for antifascism to be converted from an Italian battlefield to a horizon of European struggles. From mid-1934 onwards, the new Popular Front policy of the Comintern, grounded on the identification of fascism as the “main enemy”, found immediate consonance in the now sparse and reduced ranks of Italian communism. In August 1934, Italian communists and socialists signed a Pact of Unity of Action.

The civil war in Spain created the conditions for a first military confrontation between fascism and antifascism on a transnational European scale. It was precisely on the Iberian Peninsula that the most consequent forces of antifascism found the field of experimentation of the armed struggle. It was clear to the Italian antifascists that the battle against Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany was taking place on a European ground.

In the wake of the collapse of the fascist regime and the Italian State (July-September 1943), those antifascist forces met the challenge of fighting against the Repubblica Sociale Italiana and the German occupation. The Resistance took on the meanings of a civil war, a struggle of national liberation and a social strife in the context of the European, contributing to establishing a new, post-fascist and constitutional democratic regime.

After 1945, the myth of the Resistance became the official foundation of the Republic’s democratic legitimacy. At the same time, this provided the Italian Communist Party, which represented the main organised force of the Resistance, with a powerful source of national democratic legitimacy despite its structural links with the Soviet Union. Between the 1960s and 1970s, the language of radicalism increasingly sought to renew the political and social order in the name of a “new Resistance”. From the mid-1980s onwards, anti-fascism became the focus of bitter public controversy. Anti-fascist public discourse was increasingly contested by those aiming to transform the post-1945 parliamentary system into a presidential system. Since the 1990s, leftist networks have attempted to revive the anti-fascist tradition in response to the growing prominence of new right-wing forces, ranging from Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia to Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia.

Some key literature sources include:

A. Bechelloni (a cura di), Carlo e Nello Rosselli e l’antifascismo europeo, Franco Angeli, Milano 2001

M. Bresciani, Becoming Antifascist: Uncertainties, Dilemmas, Contradictions vis-à-vis Italian Fascism, in G. Albanese (ed.), Rethinking the History of Italian Fascism, Routledge, London 2022, pp. 269-293

M. Bresciani, Fascism, Anti-Fascism and the Idea of Nation: Italian Historiography and Public Debate since the 1980s, “Contemporary European History”, 30, 1, February 2021, pp. 111-123

M. Bresciani, Socialism, Anti-Fascism and Anti-Totalitarianism: The Intellectual Dialogue (and Discord) between Andrea Caffi and Nicola Chiaromonte, “History of European Ideas”, 40, 7, 2014, pp. 984-1003

M. Bresciani, La repressione degli intellettuali durante il ventennio (1922-1945) in S. Luzzatto and G. Pedullà (a cura di), Atlante storico della letteratura italiana. III. Dal romanticismo a oggi, Einaudi, Torino 2012, pp. 623-644

M. Bresciani e D. Scarpa, Gli intellettuali italiani e la guerra civile (1943-1945) in S. Luzzatto and G. Pedullà (a cura di), Atlante storico della letteratura italiana. III. Dal romanticismo a oggi, Einaudi, Torino 2012, pp. 703-717

A. De Bernardi, P. Ferrari (a cura di), Antifascismo e identità europea, Carocci, Roma 2004

F. De Felice, Antifascismi e Resistenze, Nuova Italia Scientifica, Roma 1997

Georgi Dimitrov, The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1933-1949, introduced and edited by Ivo Banac, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000

A. d’Orsi, La cultura a Torino tra le due guerre, Einaudi, Torino 2000

A. Garosci, Anni di Torino, anni di Parigi , a cura di M. Bertini, prefazione di G. De Luna, Nuova Editrice Berti, Parma 2019

L. Guerci, G. Ricuperati (a cura di), Il coraggio della ragione. Franco Venturi intellettuale e storico cosmopolita, Fondazione Einaudi, Torino 1998

V. Foa, Lettere della giovinezza. Dal carcere 1935-1943, a cura di F. Montevecchi, Einaudi, Torino 1998

E. Gentile, Fascismo e antifascismo. I partiti italiani tra le due guerre, Le Monnier, Firenze 2000

M. Giovana, Giustizia e Libertà in Italia: storia di una cospirazione antifascista, 1929-1937, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino 2005

S. Luzzatto, Crisi dell’antifascismo, Einaudi, Torino 2004

C. Pavone, Una guerra civile. Saggio sulla moralità nella Resistenza, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino 1991

L. Polese Remaggi, La nazione perduta. Ferruccio Parri nel Novecento italiano, il Mulino, Bologna 2004

S. Pons, I comunisti italiani e gli altri. Visioni e legami internazionali nel mondo del Novecento, Einaudi, Torino 2021

C. Rosselli, G. Salvemini, Fra le righe: carteggio tra Carlo Rosselli e Gaetano Salvemini, a cura di E. Signori, Franco Angeli, Milano 2009

P. Togliatti, Corso sugli avversari. Le lezioni sul fascismo, a cura di F. Biscione, Einaudi, Torino 2010