The ‘civic religion’ of the Resistance in post-war Italy

Abstract

SummaryThe problem of the legitimacy or otherwise of the Resistance tradition in post-war Italy has been addressed in recent years mainly in terms of the role of the partisan struggle and its political legacy. This article aims to assess the tradition in terms of commemorative practices, rituals, artistic representations and monuments. It seeks to evaluate whether the Resistance gave rise to a civic religion that may be compared to those which existed in the Liberal period, based on the heroic struggles and figures of the Risorgimento, and the Fascist period, which drew on the feelings of loss and injustice that followed the First World War. It is argued that, although the Resistance lacked, prior to the 1960s, a high degree of official sponsorship, it did acquire some of the features of a civic religion. Its appeal was mainly limited to the regions administered by the Left which had seen a significant degree of Resistance activity in 1943-5. Even here, however, it was difficult to sustain the tradition as a key feature of community life during and after the economic boom: the eclipse of public culture, the decline of public mourning and the development of commercial leisure and mass culture all served to deprive it of meaning. Although intellectuals, politicians and ex-partisans reacted to this situation, the visual and rhetorical languages associated with the commemoration of the Resistance became increasingly divorced from everyday life and dominant social values.

Performing wartime memories: ceremony as contest at the Risiera di San Sabba death camp, Trieste

“…Viewed as such, neither side had any monopoly on heroism or brutality. This undermines claims for the special status of the Resistance (Gundle 2000;Pezzino 2005), whilst encouraging those who identify themselves with Italy's Fascist heritage. Echoing controversial national moves to assert the patriotism of supporters of Mussolini's Salò Republic after 1943 (Ellwood 2005), An activists in Trieste have advanced similar claims for those whose co-operation with the occupying Germans was allegedly motivated by the desire to defend the region's Italian identity.…”

“…In Italy too, political change and historical revisionism are inter-twined. The role of the Resistance has long been controversial, reflecting wartime divisions and post-war unease about celebration of a force largely under Communist leadership (Bosworth 1998;Gundle 2000;Pezzino 2005). Periods, particularly during the 1960s, when the Italian left achieved intellectual and political ascendancy, saw efforts to honour the Resistance as the inspiration for post-war democracy.…”

The Holocaust in Italian Collective Memory: Il giorno della memoria, 27 January 2001

“…Commemoration of the former brought to the fore, obliquely and thus in revealing light, many of the most fraught problems of memory and history relating to the latter. Ongoing debates about the (fading) civic religion of the Resistance (Gundle 2000) and the (returning, revisionist) memory of Salo`, about 8 September 1943 and the choices of the years 1943-45, were intensified, perhaps surprisingly, by 27 January 2001; and conversely, otherwise uncontroversial commemoration of the Holocaust took on a harder local edge.…”

The massacre-centred memory of Sant’Anna di Stazzema, Italy

“…The mourning community recognised unanimously the trauma, but the feeling of alienation from the greater national family created antagonism in some, while in others it manifested itself as hope that one day the nation will recognise this terrible event (Rovatti, 2004). However, this period of waiting reinforced the martyred community in opposition to the national silence and became ‘divided memory’ (Contini, 1997, 2006; Cooke, 2011; De Luna, 2010; Foot, 2009; Gundle, 2000).…”