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DOI: 10.1177/0022009408095415
2008 43: 555 Journal of Contemporary History
Stfanie Prezioso
Antifascism and Anti-totalitarianism: The Italian Debate

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Stfanie Prezioso
Antifascism and Anti-totalitarianism:
The Italian Debate
For more than ten years now, the Italian media have been using negatively con-
noted terms such as crisis, loss of values, or even end of a paradigm when
addressing the question of antifascism generally. This would seem to reflect
the changing political and cultural circumstances of the postwar era, the
successive passing away of some of its most prominent historical figures and
lastly, from the beginning of the 1990s, the near-total collapse of the entire
Italian political system.
1
The discredit cast on the Republic born out of the
Resistance has in fact contaminated the way Italian society has ended up
treat[ing] its past (in both senses of the word).
2
In short, members of certain
political currents have been questioning the very foundations of the antifascist
commitment in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, with the obvious intent of deflat-
ing the legitimizing and identity-boosting function antifascism had acquired in
the postwar Italian governments.
What Emilio Gentile once called the process of retroactive defascistization
of fascism that he saw working its way through Italys general public opinion
during the postwar era may also have contributed to the change in the mean-
ing of antifascism as an important political and cultural referent during that
period.
3
The dissemination of such a pseudo-culture of rehabilitation has
largely been the work of the media. In Italy, as Bruno Bongiovanni has recently
argued, it is the media that have established the agenda of the politico-
historiographical debate.
4
Fascism appears therein as a rather benign Italian-
style form of authoritarianism in no way comparable to the brutality of the
German National Socialist regime.
5
The very impressive revival that the notion of totalitarianism has enjoyed in
the Italian media has produced a number of disturbing simplifications regard-
ing the communist experience, reduced to having a supposed nature as the
Communist phenomenon, but also regarding antifascism itself, which has
Journal of Contemporary History Copyright 2008 SAGE Publications, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi,
Singapore and Washington DC, Vol 43(4), 555572. ISSN 00220094.
DOI: 10.1177/0022009408095415
1 N. Tranfaglia, Un passato scomodo. Fascismo e postfascismo (Bari 1996), 42ff.
2 F. Hartog and G. Lenclud, Rgimes dhistoricit, in A. Dutu and N. Dodille (eds), LEtat des
lieux en sciences sociales (Paris 1993), 26.
3 E. Gentile, Fascismo. Storia e interpretazione (Roma, Bari 2002); also see F. Focardi, La guer-
ra della memoria. La Resistenza nel dibattito politico italiano dal 1945 a oggi (Bari and Rome
2005).
4 B. Bongiovanni, Revisionismo storia e antistoria di una parola, Passato e Presente 60
(SeptemberDecember 2004), 27.
5 G. Quazza, Un 25 aprile mussoliniano, Il manifesto, 30 April 1985; also see F. Focardi,
Guerra della memoria, op. cit., 60.
been identified purely and simply with the Comintern version of communism,
itself defined as strictly criminal.
6
Those who have been calling for reconcilia-
tion seem to be drawn to move beyond a strict opposition of fascism and
antifascism, the better to promote the new antithesis of totalitarianism and
democracy. Their intention has not been simply to distinguish between anti-
fascism and democracy, but to promote the idea that, since antifascism has
been blind to democracys other enemies, meaning in fact the communist
threat, it could not and cannot embody what a genuine republican dem-
ocracy
7
ought to be.
It thus is actually around the anti-totalitarian definition of antifascism that
discussions have been the liveliest, on both the historiographical and the politi-
cal levels. And this debate is all the more violent since, as some Italian
historians came to stress towards the end of the 1980s, antifascist culture did
indeed suffer from a failure of courage to confront the taboos of its own
tradition and, in particular, to analyse the relationship that a profoundly
democratic antifascism did maintain with the USSR of Stalin, thus reducing it
to a more general analysis of the relationship that organized antifascism in
general maintained with the Soviet regime.
8
One cannot help noticing that such criticisms do avoid considering the
implications of a commitment to either one of the opposing camps, in terms of
socio-political imaginary, ethics, objectives, or world vision.
9
But above all,
these analyses deny antifascism one of its main defining characteristics, namely
that of providing democracy with a plus, according to Marco Revellis excel-
lent formula.
10
The attacks which have been directed during the past few years against the
Partito dAzione, the true heir to the battles of the old Giustizia e Libert
movement, do represent particularly well this revisionist drift.
11
For it is not
so much the party itself, which was relatively short-lived in Italian history and
did in fact disappear from the political landscape in 1947, that is the true target
of these attacks; it is rather actionism itself, as a value-system based upon
antifascism and incarnated first and foremost in the movement founded by
Carlo Rosselli.
Indeed, in terms of founding values, antifascism as a homogeneous political
culture had two distinct roots: on the one hand, a detailed study of the causes
556 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 43 No 4
6 B. Groppo, Fascismes, antifascismes, communismes, in M. Dreyfus et al. (eds), Le Sicle des
communismes (Paris 2000).
7 R. de Felice, Corriere della sera, 8 January 1988.
8 On this, see Stphane Courtois introduction to the co-authored The Black Book of
Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (London and Cambridge, MA, 1999); Ernesto Galli
della Loggia, La morte della patria. La crisi dellidea di nazione tra Resistenza, antifascismo e
Repubblica (Bari 1996); and Renzo de Felice, Rosso e Nero (Milano 1995).
9 S. Luzzatto, La crisi dellantifascismo (Torino 2004), 38ff.
10 M. Revelli, Le idee, in G. de Luna and M. Revelli, Fascismo/Antifascismo. Le idee, le iden-
tit (Firenze 1995).
11 C. Novelli, Il Partito dAzione e gli Italiani. Moralit, politica e cittadinanza nella storia
repubblicana (Milano 2000).
of democratic failure, and on the other, the ambition of establishing a genuine
democracy on the grounds of the political, cultural, social and economic
responses thus achieved. Such a democracy is to be understood as a form of
unfettered democracy able to respond directly to the Italian peoples economic
and political, as well as moral and ethical needs. It is thus important not to see
antifascism as a simple negative positioning against a specific phenomenon
fascism situated in a self-contained period (Benedetto Croces famous
parenthesis). Such a convenient reading is what has enabled the recognition
of a supposedly gentle democratic transition and simultaneously confirmed
the retrospective weakening of the vague programmes for radical transforma-
tion which were advocated by parties like the Partito dAzione.
12
It is impor-
tant, rather, to consider antifascism as in a constant development.
To try to give a proper answer to the supposed crisis of antifascism of
today presupposes, I think, reflecting upon the very different ways in which the
antifascist struggle has been characterized,
13
and this in turn means revisiting
the very foundations on which this struggle was based. A study of the
Giustizia e Libert (GL) movement is particularly relevant here, for three
main reasons. To begin with, this movement presented itself as a political
organization that was literally constructed to fight fascism. In that respect, GL
represents for us a privileged entre in attempting to grasp some of the varia-
tions such a distinct militancy underwent. Secondly, and subsequently, GL
undoubtedly renewed the analytical reflections on Mussolinis regime of the
various antifascist groups in exile. The movement did produce a rich and
diversified analysis of the fascist phenomenon, and the pointed pen of Carlo
Rosselli, the centre and leader of the movement, did have a very great
influence. His feature articles were meant to give a sense of direction to the dis-
cussions within the GL group. In addition, the members of GL all shared the
same goal, which was to find a global and exhaustive interpretation of
fascism, after considering every possible interpretative model.
14
The Italian
communist Giorgio Amendola would remark, some thirty years after the
events, that:
One begins to see an authentic analysis of fascism appear within the non-Communist anti-
fascist emigration with the arrival of Rosselli and the forming of Giustizia e Libert. The
Communists then replied, but in reality this was the beginning of a polemical confrontation
between the Communists and Giustizia e Libert.
15
Prezioso: Antifascism and Anti-totalitarianism 557
12 In connection with this, see G. de Luna, Storia del Partito dazione (19421947) (Roma
1997).
13 N. Gallerano, Critica e Crisi del paradigma antifascista, Problemi del Socialismo 7 (1986).
14 S. Fedele, Analisi del fascismo nei Quaderni di Giustizia e Libert (19321935), Nuova
Antologia (OctoberDecember 1991). On Carlo Rosselli, see A. Garosci, Vita di Carlo Rosselli, 2
vols (Firenze 1973[1st edn 1945]); N. Tranfaglia, Carlo Rosselli dallinterventismo a Giustizia e
Libert (Bari 1968); Stanislao G. Pugliese, Carlo Rosselli: Socialist Heretic and Antifascist Exile
(Cambridge, MA, 1999).
15 G. Amendola, Intervista sullantifascismo a cura di Piero Melograni (2nd edn, Bari 1994), 69.
And finally, GL was the only antifascist group that was a genuine competitor
to the Italian Communist Party (PCI) during the 1930s, both on the level of
clandestine struggle and as a centralized organization of antifascism in exile. In
the mid-1930s after the dissolution in May 1934 of the Concentrazione
dAzione Antifascista and, a few weeks later, the pact of unity between the
Italian Socialist and Communist Parties GL indeed embodied a potential
alternative to Cominternian antifascism. Thus, among the political responses
to Mussolinis regime we find this revolutionary and proletarian move-
ments
16
analysis of the Soviet situation and the Third International at the time.
GL arose, within the political configuration of antifascism in exile at the
end of the 1920s, as a reaction to the obvious deficiencies of lay and non-
communist organized antifascism.
17
The movements creation constituted an
acknowledgement that traditional political organizations had clearly demon-
strated their inability to cope with the postwar crisis and to struggle effectively
against fascism. At the very beginning of 1926, Il Quarto Stato, the magazine
of the future GL leader Carlo Rosselli and the socialist Pietro Nenni, had
already pointed out the deficiencies of the Italian antifascist movements and
parties.
18
Their political stance during this period of agony for all opposition
political movements could not have been more pertinent. Indeed, during the
years that preceded the definitive outlawing of the antifascist organizations,
antifascist militancy was midway between classic militancy and a new kind of
specifically antifascist militancy. The Italian historian Ernesto Ragionieri has
seen in this situation the simultaneous presence of the new and the old.
19
In
his view, the opposition political parties were incapable of adapting their
struggle to the new political configuration of postwar Italy, as embodied in the
fascist movement. Such a discrepancy came either from a radical misapprehen-
sion of the fascist movement, or a restricted conception of the phenomenon. In
short, the incapacity of the opposition political parties to respond to the
fascist phenomenon was rooted in their organizational structure (depending
upon their respective political and social bases), and subsequently inspired the
concessions they were ready to make to their political programmes in order to
struggle more effectively on a new terrain.
Although during the period 19204 political regroupings still defined them-
selves within the framework of perennial political rivalry, it became clear
558 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 43 No 4
16 C. Rosselli, Siamo un movimento proletario, Giustizia e Libert, 26 October 1934, repro-
duced in C. Rosselli, Scritti dellesilio, vol. 2, Dallo scioglimento della Concentrazione antifascista
alla guerra di Spagna (Torino 1992), 51. (Future citations of Scritti dellesilio, a two-volume work,
will indicate volume and quoted page(s) only. For full details of volume 1 please see note 17.)
17 On the creation of GL: A. Garosci, Vita, op. cit.; E. Lussu, Giustizia e Libert dallemi-
grazione al Partito dazione, in Valdo Spini (ed.), Nel nome dei Rosselli. Quaderni del Circolo
Rosselli 1 (1991), 12743; and C. Casucci, Introduzione, in C. Rosselli, Scritti dellesilio, vol. 1,
Giustizia e Libert e la Concentrazione antifascista (Torino 1988).
18 On this see E. Santarelli, Pietro Nenni (Torino 1988), 97ff; and N. Tranfaglia, Carlo Rosselli,
op. cit., 288ff.
19 E. Ragionieri, La storia politica e sociale, in Storia dItalia Einaudi: DallUnit ad oggi, vol.
IV, tome III (Torino 1976), 215562.
to the more perspicacious among their leaders, after the assassination of
Matteotti and the experience of the Aventine, that the antifascist struggle
would be very long and very hard; such was notably the case of Pietro Nenni,
Carlo Rosselli and the Republican Fernando Schiavetti.
20
Not only did they
analyse fascism in simple ministerial terms
21
(namely as an accentuation of the
authoritarian features of the Italian political system); they had the clear con-
viction that the fascist regime also embodied a new kind of politics. And this
conviction implied, in the realm of action, the constitution of an offensive and
exclusively antifascist regrouping. Following such an analysis was an aware-
ness that the posture of purely negative denunciation of fascism had shown its
weak points. The new regrouping must therefore not only encourage the train-
ing of new revolutionary cadres, but also build the foundation of a post-fascist
Italy. As the southern Italian historian Gaetano Salvemini maintained, the
struggle was not worth the trouble if it meant merely a return to the Italy of
Giolitti and Facta.
22
As it happened, most of the leaders of antifascism had been forced into exile
and could conceive of neither the need nor the urgency of organizing such a
formation. Thus the creation in 1927 in Paris of the Concentrazione dazione
antifascista did not resolve the tension existing between the doctrinal supple-
ness thought to be necessary for thwarting fascism and the rigidity indis-
pensable for reorganizing the parties in exile. Following its creation, GL
presented itself as a socialist, republican and liberal unit of action, and thus
an organization for which the crucial goal of the antifascist struggle had to
take precedence over the autonomy and doctrinal independence of the political
parties themselves. GLs first call to its members was, furthermore, to file away
their party membership cards, whose raison dtre had been voided by the very
existence of a political regime that had done away with the framework of
classic political rivalry.
23
Thus GL intended to impose and embody the unified
organization of all antifascists for whom the essential premise lies in the revo-
lutionary conquest of freedom, and concluded: In division, defeat; in unity,
victory.
24
As a movement founded upon the combined Mazzinian imperatives of
thought and action, GL defined itself first of all as a revolutionary move-
ment which aimed at overthrowing fascism by insurrectional means.
25
This
Prezioso: Antifascism and Anti-totalitarianism 559
20 On Nenni, see Lettera ai compagni (14 November 1925), published in Avanti! 12 December
1925; it is quoted in part by N. Tranfaglia, Carlo Rosselli, op. cit., 281ff. On Schiavetti, see S.
Prezioso, Itinerario di un figlio del 1914. Fernando Schiavetti dalla trincea allantifascismo
(Manduria, Bari and Roma 2004).
21 This was notably the reading of fascism proposed by the republican daily paper La Voce
Repubblicana during this period: cf. S. Prezioso, Itinerario, op. cit., 267ff.
22 Cited by N. Tranfaglia, Carlo Rosselli, op. cit., 192. Also see C. Rosselli, Opposizione
dattacco, Giustizia e Libert, 4 October 1935 (vol. 2, 232).
23 Non vinceremo in un giorno ma vinceremo, Giustizia e Libert 1 (November 1929) (vol. 1,
1012).
24 Il nostro movimento e i partiti, Giustizia e Libert 10 (September 1930) (vol. 1, 15).
25 Agli operai, Giustizia e Libert 24 (March 1931) (vol. 1, 26).
posture required pursuing the struggle in Italy, whatever the cost might be:
Today, there are too many people in Italy, Rosselli wrote to Gaetano
Salvemini on 29 September 1925,
who are only waiting for the first hint of persecution to withdraw or to escape from the
enemys fire . . . I think that emigrating is a grave error as long as a tiny possibility of work-
ing in Italy remains . . . The basic work, material as well as spiritual, must be done in Italy.
26
For Rosselli, the tiny possibility of acting in the peninsula came to an end in
1927; two years later he escaped from the island of Lipari along with Emilio
Lussu, the leader of the Partito Sardo dAzione, and Fausto Nitti. But with the
creation of GL, the chief object of pursuing the struggle in Italy was reaffirmed.
GL cells were set up, mainly in the north of Italy and in the intellectual milieus;
participating in them were men like Nicola Chiaromonte, Carlo Levi, Leone
Ginzburg, Aldo Garosci, Umberto Calosso, Ernesto Rossi, Riccardo Bauer,
Vincenzo Calace, Nello Traquandi and Mario Andreis.
Starting in the early 1930s, after the arrest of the main GL leaders active in
the north of the peninsula and the de facto dissolution of the movements cells,
GL began to reflect on the meaning of the struggle. For Rosselli, the time had
now come to propose a discussion of the problems of the Italian revolution.
27
This became the chief purpose of the Quaderni di Giustizia e Libert, founded
in 1932.
28
Benefiting from this pause, GL would then put forward both its
analysis of fascism and its alternative political proposition. The definition of
antifascism underwent a series of transformations, even if the basic criterion
remained the same, namely that of affirming a position of constructive anti-
fascism that includes and goes beyond the fascist experience and the experi-
ences of the post-Great War period.
29
For Rosselli and most of the movements members, the fascist phenomenon
was, in the first place, a revelation of the evils intrinsic to the construction of a
unified Italy: Fascism, Rosselli would argue in the first issue of the Quaderni
di Giustizia e Libert in January 1932, plunges its roots into the Italian sub-
soil; it expresses the deep-seated vices, latent weaknesses, and miseries of the
entire nation.
30
To reiterate the analysis of the historian Santi Fedele, Rossellis
movement can be said to invite us to an interpretation of fascism founded on
the link existing between the history of Italy and fascism, and between the
latter and the character of the Italians.
31
Thus Rosselli added to the defects of
the construction of a united Italy a factor of a moral kind borrowed from Piero
Gobetti: [F]ascism is the autobiography of a people that renounces political
struggle, makes a fetish of unanimism, flees heresy, and dreams of the triumph
560 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 43 No 4
26 Tranfaglia, Carlo Rosselli, op. cit., 205.
27 C. Rosselli, Risposta a Giorgio Amendola (vol. 1, 59).
28 On this, C. Casucci, Introduzione, op. cit., xvi ff.
29 C. Rosselli, Risposta a Giorgio Amendola (vol. 1, 60).
30 Ibid., 63.
31 S. Fedele, Analisi del fascismo, op. cit., 201.
of the easy option, the triumph of enthusiasm.
32
This is without a doubt one
of the most important points made by this fringe of antifascism. As the Italian
historian Enzo Collotti has remarked, it is precisely the historiographical
currents which were both intellectually and culturally closest to the GL move-
ment that have produced studies that allow us to move beyond the vision of
fascism as a decisive break with liberal Italy and propose a reading in terms of
continuity.
33
Rosselli also introduced a fundamental aspect for understanding the causes
of Mussolinis rise to power, namely the war; it was the war which accustomed
people to violence, the worship of force, the taste for adventure and which
accentuated the authoritarian tendencies within the Italian state.
34
Rosselli
inscribed fascism, therefore, within the generic framework of movements aris-
ing from the first world war and imbued with a specific culture of war, and of
a reactionary state of mind in revolt against traditional Italian political institu-
tions resulting from the valorization of the experience of war.
35
Finally, for
Rosselli there could be no doubt that the fascist movement had been used by
the bourgeoisie as a counter-revolutionary tool in the general crisis following
the Great War. The overall interpretation which the GL leader tended to sug-
gest, then, was that the study of fascism could not be limited to a reading based
upon the degeneration of the capitalist order;
36
in other words, it could not be
said merely that fascism is at once class reaction and moral crisis.
37
And
Rosselli concluded: He who denies the second aspect only fights fascism half
way.
38
As for the regime established by Mussolini, the GL leader insisted on two
aspects in particular during the 1930s. First, in his view the fascist regime was
not a pure and simple accentuation of the authoritarian features of the Italian
political system; it was a reactionary mass regime.
39
For Rosselli, not only
could it not stand aloof from the masses, as traditional kinds of reaction do,
but it dragooned them:
Prezioso: Antifascism and Anti-totalitarianism 561
32 Cited in C. Rosselli, Risposta a Giorgio Amendola (vol. 1, 63). Also see P. Gobetti, Elogio
della ghigliottina, La Rivoluzione liberale 1 (23 November 1922); now in P. Gobetti, La
Rivoluzione liberale. Saggio sulla lotta politica in Italia (Torino 1995), 164ff.
33 E. Collotti, Lo Stato totalitario, in G. Quazza et al., Storiografia e fascismo (Milano 1985),
25.
34 C. Rosselli, Contro lo Stato, Giustizia e Libert (3 August 1934) (vol. 2, 44).
35 On this issue, see E. Gentile, Storia del Partito fascista, 19191922. Movimento e milizia
(Bari 1989).
36 C. Rosselli, Realt di oggi e prospettive di domani. III. La lotta dellopposizione, Giustizia e
Libert, 17 January 1936 (vol. 2, 285).
37 C. Rosselli, Il Programma dellopposizione comunista (trotzkista), Quaderni di Giustizia e
Libert (September 1932) (vol. 1, 145). Also see C. Rosselli, Filippo Turati e il socialismo ital-
iano, Quaderni di Giustizia e Libert (June 1932) (vol. 1, 120ff.).
38 C. Rosselli, Il Programma dellopposizione comunista (trotzkista) (vol. 1, 145).
39 [C. Rosselli], La situazione italiana e i compiti del nostro movimento, Quaderni di Giustizia
e Libert 5 (December 1932); cited in S. Fedele, Analisi del fascismo, op. cit., 2223. On this
definition of the fascist regime, also see the analyses developed by Palmiro Togliatti during a series
of lectures given in 1935 and reproduced in P. Togliatti, Lezioni sul fascismo (Roma 1970).
Mussolini is not the senile old general . . . without experience of social life and of crowd
pyschology . . . He knows that any police or squadriste terror is incapable of containing mass
fervour; his constant concern is to keep the temperature down, open the safety valves, and
prevent and suffocate opportunities for agitation.
40
In the pages of the GL magazine, Nicola Chiaromonte would go one better:
the effort and the effective political impulse of modern tyrannies is to create
masses, obedient agglomerations that one can manoeuvre as one sees fit.
41
Thus, in the context of the fascist regime, the masses are no more than that
fraction of society which is the most active and best organized politically: We
have reverted from the mass in the political sense, noted Rosselli, to the mass
in the numerical and amorphous sense.
42
This mass is brutal, ignorant, femi-
nine, at the mercy of the one who makes the most noise, has the most money,
and exudes strength and success, producing fascism as its most perfect politi-
cal incarnation.
43
This mass does not only submit, then, to the fascist yoke:
The current dictatorial State has overturned all human relations, wrote the
GL leader in September 1934,
strengthened all privileges, replaced freedom by factious law, equality by the discipline of
barrack-room and caste. Spontaneous and creative association has been replaced by a forced,
glacial, impersonal, invasive, tyrannical and inhuman kind of association that destroys social
life in its entirety . . . In the modern dictatorial State . . . there is no more place for man. The
State has taken hold of man in his entirety . . . The State enters everywhere; it is not enough
for it to repress. It requires its subjects to act according to an activism that is at once frenetic
and submissive.
44
Rosselli keenly perceived anticipating, in part, the theses developed some
years later by Hannah Arendt
45
the novelty of the fascist regime, which
mixed political violence and ideological dragooning and which sought total
domination. In order to account for this basic novelty, the GL leader utilized
the notions of totalitarianism or of a totalitarian State. These terms were
nevertheless essentially associated with the difficulty of the combat to be
waged: The technique of the fascist government, he noted in January 1936,
involves, through terror, the active subservience of citizens forced to participate in a series of
State organizations which oblige them to act, give, applaud . . . The fascist State does not let
itself be attacked from within. The attack can only come from without, en bloc, through a
negation that must always be total.
46
562 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 43 No 4
40 [C. Rosselli], La situazione italiana e i compiti del nostro movimento.
41 Sincero [Nicola Chiaromonte], Ufficio stampa, Quaderni di Giustizia e Libert 9
(November 1935); cited in S. Fedele, Analisi del fascismo, op. cit., 225.
42 C. Rosselli, GL e le masse, Giustizia e Libert, 20 July 1934 (vol. 2, 25).
43 C. Rosselli, La Lezione della Sarre, Giustizia e Libert, 18 January 1935 (vol. 2, 967).
44 C. Rosselli, Contro lo Stato (vol. 2, 42). On this, again see S. Fedele, Analisi del fascismo,
op. cit., 227ff.
45 H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York 1951). For Arendt, however, Italian
fascism did not enter into the category of totalitarian regimes.
46 C. Rosselli, Realt di oggi e prospettive di domani. III. La lotta dellopposizione (vol. 2, 286).
These words are not, therefore, envisaged as analytical categories but instead
as weapons of combat.
The second aspect that Rosselli insisted on was the necessarily dynamic
character of the regime, which constantly sought to correspond to the myth of
itself it invented. This theme is particularly present in his writings of the mid-
1930s, when it was becoming ever clearer that war [was] on the way back.
47
By definition, fascism, he wrote in September 1935, following the outbreak of
the Italo-Ethiopian conflict, cannot call a halt, cannot normalize itself . . . The
lifeline of each kind of fascism corresponds to that of maximum effort.
48
For
the GL leader, nothing was more deleterious to fascism than a period of
stability. Once the war within was won, the regime would be forced, out of a
paramount need for conservation, to export the conflict and, as Rosselli
posited, engage in A totalitarian war, then, like fascism, in which the regime
commits itself one hundred per cent, directly involving the entire population.
49
But being resolutely destructive, fascism was also potentially self-destructive:
The creator of fascism could, and probably will, become its gravedigger. In all
dynamic phenomena there is a critical point beyond which all the forces that
were acting in a particular direction begin to act in the opposite one.
50
Rosselli
remained convinced that fascism would follow its irrational logic to its logi-
cal conclusion, involving the launching of a total war which would inevitably
lead to its own destruction.
This general interpretation of Italian fascism is of considerable importance
in comparing the relative value given to the notions of fascism and totalitari-
anism, the two terms serving the GL leader as synonyms throughout the 1930s.
Rosselli wavered between reading fascism in terms of singularity (revealing the
evils intrinsic to the building of a unified Italy) and explaining it in terms of a
generic category (suited to accounting for Italian fascism and German
National Socialism).
51
In actual fact, while he did not draw attention to any
fundamental difference in the structure of power, specific techniques and
forms of domination deployed by the two fascist regimes in Europe, he did
insist on differences of degree in both the level of violence used and the degree
of ideological dragooning.
Taking over the position held by Nicola Chiaromonte, Rosselli from the first
underlined the total adherence in Germany to National Socialism, while in
Italy the State is fascist, the people not.
52
Over and above the constant wish to
Prezioso: Antifascism and Anti-totalitarianism 563
47 C. Rosselli, La guerra che torna, Quaderni di Giustizia e Libert 9 (November 1933) (vol.
1, 2509).
48 C. Rosselli, Tre passi avanti e nessun passo indietro (prospettive e compiti dellantifascismo
rivoluzionario), Giustizia e Libert, 13 September 1935 (vol. 2, 208).
49 C. Rosselli, Realt di oggi e prospettive di domani. II. Il fascismo in guerra, Giustizia e
Libert, 10 January 1936 (vol. 2, 2789).
50 C. Rosselli, Tre passi avanti (vol. 2, 2089).
51 On this, see C. Rosselli, La lezione della Sarre (vol. 2, 97).
52 C. Rosselli, La situazione in Italia (Appunti sullopposizione), Giustizia e Libert, 5
February 1937 (vol. 2, 464): emphasis in original. For Nicola Chiaromonte, Sur le fascisme,
Europe 160 (15 April 1936).
dissociate the Italian people from the responsibilities of a regime of usurpa-
tion, Rosselli also tended to paint the image of a nation made up of slaves to
bread and ignorance, of apathetic, sceptic, spineless people.
53
Seen from such
an angle, adherence to the regime is said to be the result of laziness, of a refusal
to struggle, of moral, political and cultural immaturity, in short of a lack of
character; this analysis was shared by Emilio Lussu, Carlo Levi and many
others.
54
This limit to the totalitarian ambitions of Italian fascism must not, however,
be attributed solely to the character of the Italians, but also to the fact that, in
contrast to Italian fascism, Nazism has a principle, a politics, a visible objec-
tive and therefore a formidable political and warlike potential.
55
On the
whole, according to Rosselli, with the rise of National Socialism in Germany
fascism had finally become a fully historical phenomenon. He observed in June
1933:
In order to wake Europe up, an authentic barbarian was needed, a sincere barbarian who,
having read neither Nietzsche, nor Renan, nor Machiavelli, nor Sorel, and never having plot-
ted with his own adversaries, would be in a position to take the principles of fascism seriously
and to apply them down to their very last consequences. Mussolini doesnt have enough of
what it takes to carry out this plan. Hes a pseudo-barbarian, a comediante . . . In short, with
Hitler fascism becomes something serious.
56
He concluded from this that Italian fascism was a political phenomenon mark-
ing the transition between the form of democracy that was born of the Great
War and the new National Socialist regime: [The National Socialist revolu-
tion] begins where fascism had only arrived at with difficulty.
57
Inscribing
Italian fascism within such a continuum, Rosselli managed to resolve, at least
in part, the additional problem of having to characterize the regime set in place
by Mussolini, which, if one may use the words of historian Enzo Collotti,
might indeed be seen as an unprecedented symbiosis between old and new
institutions.
58
During the course of the 1930s Rosselli and his movement presented an
innovative analysis of fascism which embraced the different readings first pro-
posed by the varied configuration of lay antifascism, made up mostly of social-
ists, communists and republicans. With Hitlers rise to power the analytical
perspective was refined in order to grasp the implications that the exporting of
what had hitherto been thought of as a uniquely Italian phenomenon might
have for the rest of Europe. However, the drawing up of such a conceptual
564 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 43 No 4
53 C. Rosselli, Salto nel 1935, Giustizia e Libert, 28 December 1934 (vol. 2, 82).
54 Tirreno [E. Lussu], Errico Malatesta, Quaderni di Giustizia e Libert 5 (December 1932);
[Carlo Levi], Seconda lettera dallItalia, Quaderni di Giustizia e Libert 2 (March 1932). Also see
S. Fedele, Analisi del fascismo, op. cit., 2037.
55 C. Rosselli, Europeismo o fascismo (vol. 2, 164).
56 C. Rosselli, Italia e Europa, Quaderni di Giustizia e Libert 7 (June 1933) (vol. 1, 208).
57 Ibid.
58 E. Collotti, Stato totalitario, op. cit., 32.
framework could be useful from the point of view of GL only in helping to
define the character of the antifascist struggle. It was a matter of determining
why antifascists and, in this particular instance, the GL members themselves
fought, and of conceiving a range of collective action adequate to the goal pur-
sued. It was from this angle that the GL members were to become interested in
both the Communist Party and the Soviet regime.
In Rossellis writings of the time totalitarianism appears as a synonym for
fascism. The Soviet regime would thus seem to be excluded from the com-
parative framework. But the contiguities between the fascist regime(s) and the
Stalinist one are not, for all that, absent from the different analyses produced
by GL. GLs interest in this question depended, however, on the ruthless
struggle that pitted the non-communist lay antifascism against the Third
International and the PCI. Rosselli certainly did give some thought to Soviet
Russia, but he lingered only briefly over the regime set up by Stalin. As Aldo
Garosci pointed out, The problem of Russia is different on account of its
position, because it is more intimately linked to politics; at certain moments it
arises as a problem of international politics, at others as part of the myth of
Communism, which is proper to the Italian masses.
59
Rosselli was very sensitive to this particular characteristic of the Soviet case,
and he never missed the opportunity clearly to distinguish the Bolshevik
Revolution from the regime set up by Stalin. He wrote in March 1932:
Our standpoint on the Russian Revolution is complex . . . We cannot adhere to it without
substantial reservations . . . However, prior to . . . any dictatorial act of atrocity, there was
the revolution that destroyed autocracy, that gave the land to the peasants. That revolution
we love and defend. Revolution is not Stalins dictatorship, that much is clear. But if we were
to choose between the capitalist world, such as it has been revealed to us by the war and the
crisis, and the Bolshevik world, we would have to opt, not without anguish, for the second.
60
Two years later, on the occasion of the anniversary of the October Revolution,
Rosselli would return to this argument. The October Revolution is defined as
an event that opens a new era in the history of humanity; however, he
claimed, in the best of cases, in Russia one is still far, very far, from
Socialism.
61
The forced collectivizations which turn the peasants back to
slavery
62
the silenced opposition and the total domination of the party over
the whole of Soviet society were some of the elements Rosselli pointed to in his
examination of the Stalinist regime. The GL leader refused to wear blinkers; in
the name of the ideals that guided the antifascist struggle, he disputed the pure
and simple exaltation of that political alternative: Revolutionaries cannot . . .
compromise on principles and close their eyes to the evils that exist.
63
Prezioso: Antifascism and Anti-totalitarianism 565
59 A. Garosci, Vita, op. cit., 325, emphasis in original.
60 C. Rosselli, Note sulla Russia, Quaderni di Giustizia e Libert (March 1932) (vol. 1, 79).
61 C. Rosselli, 7 novembre, Giustizia e Libert, 9 November 1934 (vol. 2, 638).
62 C. Rosselli, Note sulla Russia (vol. 1, 81).
63 Ibid.
Read and approved by Rosselli, the speech that Gaetano Salvemini delivered
a few months later to the International Congress of Writers partly reworked all
of these elements. The southern Italian historian was, however, much clearer in
his condemnation: I wouldnt feel I had the right to protest against the
Gestapo and the fascist OVRA if I endeavored to forget that a Soviet political
police exists, he maintained, to the boos of a number of participants.
64
Salvemini then put forward criteria for a potential comparison between the
fascist regimes and the Stalinist one:
Im sorry I shocked a number of peoples convictions . . . one has to have lived through the
experience of a totalitarian State, not among its rulers but among those who were crushed,
one has to know the moral degradation to which the totalitarian State reduces not only the
intellectual classes but the working classes as well, to realize the hatred and contempt that
any totalitarian State, any dictatorship, arouses in my mind.
65
During his period of antifascist activism, Gaetano Salvemini accentuated his
positioning as a strong opponent of Soviet communism, which he came to
define, along with Italian fascism, as a form of totalitarian dictatorship.
66
In June 1936 Rosselli would for his part maintain that No internal danger
justifies this senseless repression. Are we fighting fascism? How do we stop it
with so many concentration camps behind us?
67
For the GL leader what was
important was to reaffirm the values of antifascism, and it was indeed in the
name of those values that he condemned the Stalinist regime. But he nonethe-
less remained convinced that if the USSR could not be an ideal, it was still
useful as a myth: the fall of the Soviet regime would be a real tragedy . . . its
experience is decisive for any revolutionary movement.
68
It was on the basis of
this principle that he would later oppose Salvemini when the latter, together
with Max Ascoli and Lionello Venturi, would denounce the communist
danger. Salvemini held that communism had to be fought with the same
energy as fascism; he thus indissolubly linked the struggle for democracy in its
traditional western version with the fight against fascism. In other words, it
was not only necessary but essential for the southern historian that western
democrats and liberals both join a fight which aimed, first and foremost in his
eyes, at the regaining of fundamental liberties and the setting up of a provi-
sional government.
As for Rosselli, he distanced himself meanwhile ever more radically from his
former mentor. During that period, indeed, it became all the clearer, according
566 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 43 No 4
64 G. Salvemini, Pour la libert de lesprit, Les Humbles, cahiers 7 (July 1935). On the con-
gress, see Anne-Marie Sauzeau-Betti (ed.), Il Pericolo che ci raduna. Congresso internazionale degli
scrittori per la difesa della cultura, Parigi 1935 (Milano 1986); also see S. Teroni and W. Klein
(eds), Pour la dfense de la culture. Les textes du Congrs international des crivains, Paris, juin
1935 (Dijon 2005).
65 G. Salvemini, Pour la libert, op. cit., 249.
66 On Salvemini, see Massimo L. Salvadori, Gaetano Salvemini (Torino 1963); and G.
Salvemini, Memorie di un fuoruscito (Milano 1960).
67 C. Rosselli, Stampa amica e nemica, Giustizia e Libert, 12 June 1936 (vol. 2, 67).
68 Ibid.
to him, that antifascism, made of force and passion, could neither conform to
nor take inspiration from those pseudo-democratic regimes which passively
let fascism come to power in both Italy and Germany. Looked at from such an
angle, the antifascist struggle needed to aim at promoting a revolutionary out-
come in all of Europe, something Rosselli actually chose to state plainly in
December 1935: To those who invoke the Western democratic governments,
we reply: Revolution.
69
And a few months later, replying to Salveminis initia-
tive, he went on:
It is true that the Communist danger creates fear abroad. But is it really our role to reassure
people . . . ? If we were to address ourselves to international public opinion, we would explain
that the real problem in Italy and of Italy is not that of avoiding a revolution but that of suc-
ceeding to make one which lays down the premises of a truly free social and political life.
70
The position defended by Rosselli involved not only drawing a clear distinc-
tion between the October Revolution indispensable as a starting point for
any revolution in Europe
71
and the Stalinist regime, but also separating the
Italian Communist Party from the Third International. Since the Comintern
owed its allegiance to a dogmatic and sectarian USSR, it could not, according
to him, understand the problems of the Italian revolution, because it did not
understand what makes Italy, from the economic, political and cultural point
of view, incomparable to any other national reality.
72
If, according to the GL
leader, the USSR was a useful myth in the antifascist struggle, the PCI was an
indispensable ally in the success of that struggle. And he would never cease
repeating it in both the social-fascist popular fronts periods, regardless of the
endless conflicts he might have had with the Communist Party. Thus, in its
March 1931 call for the unity of all the forces of antifascism, GL explicitly
included the Italian communists.
73
Another reason for the attention the GL
movement and its leader paid to the PCI was the presence of communist cells
on Italian soil; for Rosselli, the PCI remained the only party which had man-
aged to preserve a clandestine organization within Italy and therefore the only
political organization with links to the actual struggle within that country.
74
The GL leader attempted throughout the 1930s to urge the PCI to reflect upon
the future beyond the struggle; the criticisms he addressed to that party make
sense only as part of that hoped-for dialogue with the communists.
Rosselli began by attacking the PCIs inclination to proclaim itself the only
legitimate representative of the antifascist struggle, defined in terms of the class
Prezioso: Antifascism and Anti-totalitarianism 567
69 C. Rosselli, Rivincita di Baraba , Giustizia e Libert, 13 December 1935 (vol. 2, 249).
Emphasis in the original.
70 C. Rosselli, A proposito di una lettera sul pericolo comunista in Italia, Giustizia e Libert,
7 February 1936 (vol. 2, 2957).
71 C. Rosselli, Risposta a Giorgio Amendola (vol. 1, 61).
72 Ibid. Also see C. Rosselli, La lezione della Sarre (vol. 2, 947).
73 Agli operai (vol. 1, 28).
74 On this, see, among others, A. Agosti, Togliatti (Torino 1996), 1545. Also G. Amendola,
Intervista, op. cit.
struggle.
75
For Rosselli, the communist reading of the fascist phenomenon was
far too restrictive. As we have already seen, fascism was, to be sure, according
to him, a form of class reaction, but it also had the dimension of a moral
crisis. In denying that second aspect, the communists refused to grasp both the
novelty of fascism and the deep roots this phenomenon actually struck in con-
temporary Italy. According to Rosselli, during the social-fascist period, while
the Communist Party was not wrong about its target, it was in fact wrong
about its potential adjuvant (the proletariat). Or, to be more precise, as fascism
was for the GL leader a reactionary mass regime, only active minorities
which do not necessarily belong to the working class, while including a fringe
of the intellectual and humanistic middle classes as well as the peasant world
might have been in a position to understand the antifascist message.
76
It was
from the same standpoint that Rosselli criticized the so-called popular front
policy. It was useless, within the framework of a regime that combined both
terror and ideological dragooning, to appeal to the forming of a wide anti-
fascist front. Such contact euphoria could not suit the goals being pursued by
Italian antifascism, as it was not in the position of defending its democratic
institutions, as in France, but had to create the conditions of a new political
deal.
77
The Communist Party got all the more tangled up in its mobilization of
a range of collective action that did not correspond to the needs of the struggle
when it launched its appeal For the salvation of Italy, the reconciliation of the
Italian people. Rosselli rambled on:
No matter how much you may try to explain [to the communists] that what is peculiar to the
totalitarian State is the prevention of mass struggle of any kind . . . that after so many set-
backs, it is absurd to hope for the masses to wake up by themselves without being encouraged
by the example of audacious minorities . . . Its all in vain. And since mass struggle is only
(theoretically) possible within the fascist organizations, the next thing you know is that the
Communists have abruptly turned into reformist fascists. One then reads homilies on ones
fascist brothers, on ones black-shirted brothers.
78
With the advent of the popular front policy the Communist Party had thus
become, for Rosselli, at best a moderate and reformist party, at worst a con-
servative and conformist organization.
79
The GL leader also criticized the dogmatism and sectarianism of the
Communist Party, which he likened to a Church out of which one could not
568 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 43 No 4
75 Agli operai (vol. 1, 31).
76 See, among others, C. Rosselli, GL e le masse (vol. 2, 258).
77 C. Rosselli, Fronte popolare e Stato totalitario, Giustizia e Libert, 26 June 1936 (vol. 2,
3804). On the idea of euphoria of contact, see C. Rosselli, Per lunificazione del proletariato
italiano. III. Il Partito comunista, Giustizia e Libert, 9 April 1937 (vol. 2, 488), and the reply thir-
ty years after the events by G. Amendola, Intervista, op. cit., 1023.
78 C. Rosselli, Matrimonio fascista-antifascista, Giustizia e Libert, 20 December 1935 (vol. 2,
254255). On the appeal, see, among others, A. Agosti, Togliatti, op. cit., 202ff.
79 C. Rosselli, La libert non un mezzo tattico n un obbiettivo provvisorio, Giustizia e
Libert, 14 December 1934 (vol. 2, 7881). Also see C. Rosselli, Europeismo e fascismo (vol. 2,
16571).
come unscathed.
80
In the end, his attacks focused on the extreme centralization,
the strictness of the criteria for party membership, the hierarchical and com-
partmentalized mode of organization of an institution which expected from its
activists nothing short of self-sacrifice in the name of the communist project;
they focused, in short, on an activist culture Rosselli qualified as being dicta-
torial:
Communism serves the proletariat by reducing it into a flock of sheep, by imposing a
Jesuitical form of discipline upon it, by wresting all autonomy from it, all freedom of criticism
and judgement, by deluding it with the perpetual exaltation of its virtues in order to submit
it all the more easily tomorrow to the dictatorship of a partys bureaucracy.
81
Still, Rosselli considered that this party, more than any other communist
organization, was capable of recognizing the vital reasons for the battle, and
this despite its submission to the USSR.
82
It would, however, take the experi-
ence of the Spanish Civil War for Rosselli to accept the communist appeals for
a union of forces, something he had been considering since 1934 as conserva-
tive and conformist. In 1937, in an article entitled For the Unification of the
Italian Proletariat, Rosselli insisted on the need to beat another path.
83
His
criticisms of the Communist Party were then balanced by the power of attrac-
tion of a party that was undoubtedly the most important organization of the
Italian proletariat, which benefited from the myth of the USSR and from
the radicalization antifascism itself underwent as a result of the outbreak of
the Spanish Civil War.
84
Rosselli at that time called for the creation of a new
political organization, namely the United Party of the proletariat, built around
the PCI and GL as its backbone: An original political formation capable of
leading against the totalitarian colossus a struggle at once practical, political
and cultural.
85
Within GL, however, there were strong differences regarding the role and
function of the Communist Party in the coming antifascist revolution, as well
as regarding the Soviet regime. Rosselli was the one to constantly opt for a dia-
logue with the PCI, convinced as he was that it was impossible to carry on the
fight without it. In his analysis, he did not purely and simply reduce the PCI to
the Third International and hence, from his point of view, to the regime set up
by Stalin; he attempted, rather, to constantly draw attention to the role this
party could and must play in the antifascist battle. Other GL members, such as
Prezioso: Antifascism and Anti-totalitarianism 569
80 C. Rosselli, Il Programma dellopposizione comunista (trozkista) (vol. 1, 142).
81 C. Rosselli, Risposta a Giorgio Amendola (vol. 1, 65). On the idea of Communist culture,
see J. Vigreux and S. Wolikow, Introduction, in Vigreux and Wolikow (eds), Cultures commu-
nistes au 20
e
sicle. Entre guerre et modernit (Paris 2003).
82 C. Rosselli, Risposta a Giorgio Amendola (vol. 1, 5665).
83 C. Rosselli, Per lunificazione del proletariato italiano. V. Giustizia e Libert (vol. 2, 535).
84 C. Rosselli, Per lunificazione politica del proletariato. III. Il Partito comunista (vol. 2,
48590); on this question, see also S. Prezioso, Aujourdhui en Espagne, demain en Italie. Lanti-
fascisme italien et la prise darme rvolutionnaire, Vingtime sicle 93 (JanuaryMarch 2007).
85 C. Rosselli, Per lunificazione politica del proletariato. V. Giustizia e Libert (vol. 2, 536).
Garosci, Salvemini, Tarchiani and Rossi, to name but a few, tended to refuse
all contact with the PCI. Rossellis death in 1937 put an end, once and for all,
to the rapprochement he had hoped for.
GL was probably the movement that best embodied antifascism and what
was both specific and universal about it: GL might be described as the first
totally antifascist European movement, wrote Rosselli in 1937, because it
sees in fascism the central issue, the dreadful novelty of our times, and because
its position derives . . . from a desire for liberation which emanates from
fascism itself and the concrete fighting experience.
86
Seen from such an angle,
the antifascist struggle was conceived as a total battle, because it pitted one
against the other two radically antagonistic worldviews: To overthrow a
government is not the point, wrote Carlo Rosselli. The point is to overthrow
a regime and found a new civilization.
87
And it would take a revolutionary
process to achieve such a goal, which could only be carried out by the work-
ing and peasant classes and by the intellectuals who share their ideals and des-
tiny.
88
Because fascism was both class reaction and moral crisis all rolled into
one, the struggle had to be thought of only in terms of anticapitalism, a con-
crete and historical anticapitalism the justification for which is not so much to
be sought in terms of some abstract and theoretical scheme but rather in the
workers moral and material suffering.
89
What had to be done, according to
Rosselli, was to abandon the class-struggle, not because class-struggle does
not exist, but rather because fascism is a phenomenon which is not restricted
to class.
90
The antifascist battle, however, could be fought only by a minority
of workers, peasants and intellectuals ready to fight for a revolution which
will transform property and production relations in the name of liberty and
justice.
91
GL thus fought for a new society that would be radically different not only
from the fascisms and the Stalinist regime, but also from pre-fascist Italy and
the European democracies as they appeared in the 1930s. For Rosselli, one first
had to get rid of the centralizing and despotic state: A full, unfettered and
absolute democracy, he wrote in 1936, able to fully eliminate authoritarian-
ism, is plain Utopia . . . What is important is to see that the organization of the
state be based on federative and autonomous principles.
92
These two princi-
ples may thus be understood as the exact counterparts, on the level of the orga-
nization of the state, of the freedom and autonomy enjoyed by each member
of society. What Rosselli wished to see was the creation of a democratic and
federalist Republic founded upon liberty and social justice. He also imagined a
social revolution, inextricably tied to such a process, whose contours remained
570 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 43 No 4
86 Ibid., 530, emphasis in original.
87 C. Rosselli, Fronte verso lItalia, Giustizia e Libert, 18 May 1934 (vol. 2, 5).
88 C. Rosselli, Realt di oggi e prospettive di domani (vol. 2, 291).
89 C. Rosselli, Fronte verso lItalia, Giustizia e Libert, 18 May 1934 (vol. 2, 5).
90 C. Rosselli, Classismo e antifascismo , Giustizia e Libert, 25 January 1935 (vol. 2, 100).
91 Ibid.
92 C. Rosselli, Tesi sullo Stato e il partito, Giustizia e Libert, 6 June 1936 (vol. 2, 291).
fairly blurred. The resolution of the agrarian question would be sought
through a fair distribution of land: there would be no collectivization and no
socialization. With regard to the question of industrial reform, Rosselli may be
seen as remaining close to positions held by Salvemini, as he advocated nation-
alizing a number of vital industries, but maintaining small businesses, which in
themselves constituted a vital economic structure in contemporary Italy.
93
The passage from the fascist regime to the new society he dreamed of could
thus only be made through revolution a creative revolution, to be sure
which should at once reach the most important goals assigned to it: the
Republic, agrarian reform, industrial reform.
94
In the end, this inevitable revolution must originate in the fascist countries
and be exported throughout Europe, in order to make an antifascist Europe,
a Europe of the peoples: To create Europe . . . in the name of a new human-
ism, that is the essential ide-force of the Italian revolution.
95
The programme
of this antifascism can be summed up in the watchwords freedom and social-
ism: A guaranteed freedom, but an effective freedom for the vast majority.
And a socialism which does not deify the State, a non-bureaucratic and non-
military Socialism.
96
Examining the anti-totalitarian characterization of the antifascist struggle
means, in my opinion, questioning the antifascist configuration from the view-
point of a political movement rooted in its time, led by men who were, as
Leonardo Rapone emphasizes,
immersed, like the actors of any historical experience, in tensions and contradictions and
whose decisive contribution to the construction of Italian democracy was certainly the final
achievement, but which cannot, for all that, be seen as the horizon that embraced and gave
meaning to each aspect of their previous action.
97
This is why I have been interested in this article in examining the positions held
by Giustizia e Libert and by its leader. First of all, antifascism represented for
them the porro unum necessarium of political conflict.
98
As their orientation
involved both a necessary initial understanding of the phenomenon against
which the antifascists structured themselves and an uncertainty or contingent
fluctuation of their own goals, one is forced to define the time span during
which this specific activism existed.
99
Moreover, Rosselli himself inscribed this
Prezioso: Antifascism and Anti-totalitarianism 571
93 C. Rosselli, Socialismo e socializzazione, Giustizia e Libert, 8 February 1935 (vol. 2,
110114).
94 C. Rosselli, Chiarimenti al programma, Quaderni di Giustizia e Libert (January 1932)
(vol. 1, 36).
95 C. Rosselli, LAzione antifascista internazionale (vol. 1, 246); C. Rosselli, La guerra che
torna (vol. 1, 2509); and C. Rosselli, Europeismo o fascismo (vol. 2, 16571).
96 C. Rosselli, Che cosa vogliamo (vol. 2, 2434).
97 L. Rapone, Antifascismo e storia dItalia, in: E. Collotti (ed.), Fascismo e antifascismo.
Rimozioni, revisioni, negazioni (Bari 2000), 223.
98 C. Casucci, Introduction, op.cit., xiv.
99 B. Groppo, Fascismes, antifascismes, op. cit., 500ff.
struggle in historical time, without making GL either a simple variant or a
by-product of Soviet communism.
100
Rosselli nevertheless did try to count on
the Italian Communist Party. And it is true that, whether underground or in
the Resistance, the Italian Communist Party, sometimes despite itself, did, to
quote the analysis of Marco Revelli, provide the impetus for profoundly social
emancipatory tendencies that were only partly filtered by the party.
101
To sum up, the values which were conveyed by lay and non-communist
antifascism in the 1920s and 1930s and then during the war of resistance, and
were finally drafted within the framework of the Italian Constitution, origi-
nally constituted a radical alternative to the fascist and Stalinist regimes. It was
then the business of political struggle to implement the values and worldviews
that were associated with antifascism and, during the course of the battle,
influenced communist and non-communist activists alike.
102
Thought of by
Rosselli as something in constant becoming, this type of antifascism and the
values associated with it did come back to life in sudden bursts in Italian
society. As Carlo Rosselli maintained in April 1934: We can become the
object of all kinds of accusations except that of being ruled by a preoccupation
with immediate success. We work for eternity!
103
Stfanie Prezioso
is Professor of History in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences
at the University of Lausanne. Her work deals mainly with the
generation of 1914; the question of political exile; and the problems
relating to the appropriation of historical memory (public use of
history). She is the author in particular of Itinerario di un figlio del
1914. Fernando Schiavetti dalla trincea allantifascismo (Bari 2004);
Exprience de guerre et militantisme rpublicain en Italie
(19141926), European Review of History/Revue europenne
dhistoire 13(1) (March 2006) 14161; Aujourdhui en Espagne,
demain en Italie: lexil antifasciste italien et la prise darmes
rvolutionnaire, Vingtime Sicle 93 (JanuaryMarch 2007), 7992.
572 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 43 No 4
100 E. Traverso, Le totalitarisme. Jalons pour lhistoire dun dbat, in E. Traverso (ed.), Le
Totalitarisme. Le 20
e
sicle en dbat (Paris 2001), 81845.
101 M. Revelli, Le idee, op. cit., 26.
102 E. Collotti and L. Klinkhammer, Il fascismo e lItalia in guerra: una conversazione fra storia
e storiografia (Rome 1996).
103 Carlo Rosselli a sua madre, Paris 4 aprile 1934, in Z. Ciuffoletti (ed.), I Rosselli: epistolario
familiare di Carlo, Nello, Amelia Rosselli 19141937 (Milan 1997), 568.