Postwar

stands… ’

But notwithstanding this concern for the state of the Continent, British (and especially English) commentators stood a little aside; as though the problems of Europe and of Britain, while recognizably related, were nevertheless different in crucial respects. With certain notable exceptions, [63] British intellectuals did not play an influential part in the great debates of continental Europe, but observed them from the sidelines. Broadly speaking, affairs that were urgently political in Europe aroused only intellectual interest in Britain; while topics of intellectual concern on the Continent were usually confined to academic circles in the UK, if indeed they were noticed at all.

The situation in Italy was almost exactly the opposite. Of all the countries of western Europe, it was Italy that had most directly experienced the plagues of the age. The country had been governed for twenty years by the world’s first Fascist regime. It had been occupied by the Germans, then liberated by the Western Allies, in a snail-paced war of attrition and destruction that had lasted nearly two years, covered three quarters of the country, and reduced much of the land and its people to near-destitution. Moreover, from September 1943 to April 1945 the north of Italy was convulsed in what amounted in all but name to a full-scale civil war.

As a former Axis state Italy was an object of suspicion to West and East alike. Until Tito’s split with Stalin, Italy’s unresolved border with Yugoslavia was the most unstable and potentially explosive frontier of the Cold War, and the country’s uneasy relationship to its Communist neighbor was complicated by the presence in Italy of the largest Communist Party outside the Soviet bloc: 4,350,000 votes (19 percent of the total) in 1946, rising to 6,122,000 (23 percent of the total) in 1953. In that same year the Partito Communista Italiano (PCI) boasted a paid-up membership of 2,145,000. The Party’s local influence was further strengthened by its near-monopoly of power in certain regions (notably the Emilia-Romagna, around the city of Bologna); the support it could rely on from Pietro Nenni’s Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI) ;[64] and the widespread popularity of its subtle and thoughtful leader, Palmiro Togliatti.

For all these reasons, intellectual life in post-war Italy was highly politicized and intimately tied to the problem of Communism. The overwhelming majority of young Italian intellectuals, including even some of those tempted by Fascism, had been formed in the shadow of Benedetto Croce. Croce’s distinctive blend of Hegelian idealism in philosophy and nineteenth-century liberalism in politics had provided an ethical reference for a generation of intellectual anti-Fascists; but in the post-war circumstances it seemed manifestly insufficient. The real choice facing Italians appeared as a stark alternative: politicized clericalism—the alliance of a conservative Vatican (under Pius XII) and the US-backed Christian Democrats—or else political Marxism.

The PCI had a special quality that distinguished it from other Communist parties, East and West. From the outset, it had been led by intellectuals. Togliatti, like Antonio Gramsci and the Party’s other youthful founders of twenty years earlier, was markedly more intelligent—and respectful of intelligence—than the leaders of most of the other Communist parties of Europe. In the decade following World War Two, moreover, the Party openly welcomed intellectuals—as members and as allies—and took care to tone down those elements in Party rhetoric likely to put them off. Indeed, Togliatti consciously tailored Communism’s appeal to Italian intellectuals with a formula of his own devising: ‘half Croce and half Stalin.’

The formula was uniquely successful. The path from Croce’s liberal anti-Fascism to political Marxism was taken by some of the Italian Communist Party’s most talented younger leaders: men like Giorgio Amendola, Lucio Lombardo Radice, Pietro Ingrao, Carlo Cassola and Emilio Sereni, all of whom came to Communist politics from the world of philosophy and literature. They were joined after 1946 by men and women disillusioned by the Action Party’s failure to put into practice the aspirations of the wartime Resistance, signaling the end of hopes for a secular, radical and non-Marxist alternative in Italian public life. ‘Shamefaced Crocians’, one writer called them at the time.

Presented as the voice of progress and modernity in a stagnant land, and as the best hope for practical social and political reform, the PCI gathered around itself a court of like-minded scholars and writers, who gave to the Party and its politics an aura of respectability, intelligence and even ecumenicalism. But with the division of Europe, Togliatti’s strategy came under growing pressure. The criticism addressed by the Soviets to the PCI at the first Cominform meeting in September 1947 revealed Stalin’s determination to bring the Italian Communists (like the French) under tighter control; their political tactics were to be more closely coordinated with Moscow and their latitudinarian approach to cultural affairs was to be replaced by Zdanov’s uncompromising thesis of the ‘two cultures’. Meanwhile, with America’s brazen but successful intervention on behalf of the Christian Democrats in the elections of 1948, Togliatti’s post-war policy of working within the institutions of liberal democracy began to seem naive.

Whatever his doubts, then, Togliatti had no option but to exercise tighter control and impose Stalinist norms. This provoked public dissent among some Party intellectuals, who had hitherto felt at liberty to distinguish between the Party’s political authority, which they did not question, and the terrain of ‘culture’ where they prized their autonomy. As Vittorini, the editor of the Communist cultural journal Il Politechnico, had reminded Togliatti in an Open Letter back in January 1947, ‘culture’ cannot be subordinated to politics, except at its own expense and at the price of truth.

Togliatti, who had spent the 1930s in Moscow and had played a leading role in the Comintern’s Spanish operations in 1937-38, knew otherwise. In a Communist Party everyone took their instructions from above, everything was subordinate to politics. ‘Culture’ was not a protected zone in which the Soviet writ need not run. Vittorini and his companions would have to accept the Party line in literature, art and ideas, or else leave. Over the course of the next few years the Italian Party cleaved more closely to Soviet authority and Vittorini and many other intellectuals duly drifted away. But despite Togliatti’s unswerving loyalty to Moscow, the PCI never altogether lost a certain un-dogmatic ‘aura’, as the only major Communist Party that tolerated and even embraced intelligent dissent and autonomy of thought; this reputation would serve it well in later decades.

Indeed, Togliatti’s critics on the non-Communist Left were consistently wrong-footed by the widespread perception at home and (especially) abroad that the PCI was not like other Communist parties. As Ignazio Silone would later acknowledge, Italian Socialists and others had only themselves to blame. The close relations between Communists and Socialists in Italy, at least until 1948, and the consequent reluctance of non-Communist Marxists to criticize the Soviet Union, inhibited the emergence in Italian politics of a clear left-leaning alternative to Communism.

But if Italy was unusual in Western Europe for the relatively simpatico quality of its Communists, it was also of course atypical for another reason. The overthrow of Mussolini in 1943 could not obscure the complicity of many Italian intellectuals in his twenty-year rule. Mussolini’s ultra-nationalism had been directed, among other things, against foreign culture and influence; and Fascism had blatantly favored ‘national’ intellectuals by applying to literature and the arts autarkic policies of protection and substitution similar to those imposed against more commonplace foreign products.

Inevitably, many Italian intellectuals (especially younger ones) had accepted support and subsidies from the Fascist state: the alternative was exile or silence. Elio Vittorini himself had won prizes in Fascist literary competitions. Vittorio de Sica was a well-known actor in Fascist-era films before becoming the leading exponent of post-war Neo-Realism. His fellow Neo-Realist director Roberto Rossellini, whose post-war films were distinctly Communist in their political sympathies, had just a few years before made documentaries and feature films in Mussolini’s Italy with help from the authorities, and his was not an isolated case. By 1943 Mussolini’s rule was the normal order of things for the many millions of Italians who had no adult memory of any other peacetime government.[65]

The moral standing of the vast majority of Italian intellectuals in the post-war years thus mirrored the rather ambivalent international position of the country as a whole, too uncomfortably implicated in its authoritarian past to take center stage in post-war European affairs. In any case, Italy had long been oddly peripheral to modern European culture, perhaps because of its own centrifugal history and arrangements: Naples, Florence, Bologna, Milan and Turin each formed little worlds of their own, with their own universities, newspapers, academies and intelligentsias. Rome was the source of authority, the fount of patronage and locus of power. But it never monopolized the nation’s cultural life.

In the end, then, there could be only one place for a properly European