Fighting against ‘Apology of Fascism’: Origins and Contradictions of the Italian Approach to Militant Democracy

The article is both part of the larger research project Transnational Neo-Fascism and Its Impact on Europe After WWII (1945 −1952) that was funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation (which I want to thank for its invaluable support), and of the project A militant democracy? Three moments of fracture: the Scelba law, the Mancino law and the Fiano draft bill currently financed by the Giunta Centrale degli Studi Storici.

In May 2019, on the eve of the XXXII edition of the Turin International Book Fair, a number of important Italian public figures and organisations, including the historian Carlo Ginzburg and the National Association of Italian Partisans (ANPI), spoke out against the participation of the Altaforte publishing house, which had been included among the exhibitors after its recent publication of the biography of Matteo Salvini, the leader of the Lega Nord party (Northern League, since rebranded simply Lega) and then-Minister of the Interior. ¹ The statement was based on the fact that among Altaforte's titles and those of publishing houses associated to it was a large number of books related to the culture of fascism, or more generally, to the culture of the extreme right.

The book fair's steering committee responded by asserting the importance of Article 21 of the Italian Constitution, which guarantees freedom of expression. Nonetheless, after a few days, it decided to remove the publisher from the guest list, following interventions from the mayor of Turin and the president of the Piedmont region. Both of them made statements criticising the publisher's director, Francesco Polacchi, and reported him to the authorities for ‘apology of fascism’, in accordance with the Scelba Law named after the minister of the interior, Mario Scelba, who proposed it in 1952. The complaint was based on Polacchi's comments on a radio broadcast, on which he said: ‘I am a CasaPound militant ² and I am a fascist, anti-fascism is the real evil of this country’. ³

This was only one of the most recent moments in Italy's post-World War II history when the issue of how the country might respond appropriately not only to the presence of fascist or pro-fascist organisations, but also to political and/or cultural actors seeking to publicly re-launch an apologetic view of fascism.

An even more intense public debate occurred when the Chamber of Deputies discussed a draft bill put forward on 2 October 2015 by the Democratic Party MP, Emanuele Fiano, who is considered a ‘prominent figure’ in the Italian Jewish community. ⁴ Even though it was approved by the Lower House on 12 September 2017, it did not pass into law after failing to receive the approval of the Senate before the dissolution of the left-wing Gentiloni government in the spring of 2018. The bill called for a prison sentence of 6 months to 2 years for ‘whomever that promotes the images or content of the Fascist Party or the German National Socialist Party, or their respective ideologies, even if only through the production, distribution, dissemination or sale of items depicting persons, images or symbols clearly referencing these, or who publicly recall their symbology or gestures’. ⁵ The intention was to strengthen the Scelba Law, and especially the 1993 Mancino Law (also named after the minister of the interior, Nicola Mancino, who proposed it). The latter provides criminal sanctions for anyone who propagates ‘ideas based on racial or ethnic superiority or hatred’, who commits or incites others to commit acts of discrimination, or who carries out or incites acts of violence inspired by such principles. ⁶ Fiano's proposal was opposed by several political parties, namely Forza Italia, the Lega Nord, the Movimento 5 Stelle and Fratelli d’Italia, with the latter proving its most tenacious opponent. Fratelli d’Italia MPs initially insisted that it was important for the country to protect the principle of freedom of expression, but then changed their strategy and attempted to insert an amendment which, if accepted, would have extended the sanctions to anyone propagating any presumed anti-democratic ideologies, including communism. ⁷

Such debates demonstrate how important it is to think carefully about the attitude taken by Italian democracy in the face of the re-emergence of fascism after 1945. By the expression ‘re-emergence of fascism’, I refer both to the reappearance of groups that were inspired by the experience of 1920s and 1930s European fascism (and specifically by Italian Fascism) and have come to be known as ‘neo-fascists’, ⁸ and to the rise of an apologetic vision of the Fascist ideology and its political methods. ⁹

It is worth remarking that the re-emergence of fascism in the post-war period was not only an Italian phenomenon but something that affected other countries, and in some way still represents a threat today, as attested by the recent rise in popularity, however non-linear, of political parties linked to the extreme right in Europe and elsewhere. ¹⁰

The urgency of this threat is precisely one of the recent impetuses for the reactivation of a debate on the costs and benefits of countries’ establishment of a ‘militant democracy’. ¹¹ The origins of this concept go back to the studies of the German political scientist Karl Loewenstein and the sociologist of Hungarian origin Karl Mannheim, who in the 1930s and the 1940s attacked the German political elite of the Weimar Republic for failing to respond to the emergence of the Nazi Party. ¹²

Despite the ‘certain degree of vagueness’ associated with the concept of militant democracy, ¹³ sociologists, political scientists and jurists continue to explore the range of instruments available to democracies seeking to tackle political groups or citizens spreading potentially dangerous extremist ideologies. These might include not only the deployment of repressive measures, such as banning political parties, but also electoral laws designed to stop small parties from obtaining seats in parliament, or informal agreements to exclude certain actors from the political negotiating table (the so-called cordon sanitaire and the conventio ad excludendum strategies). In these studies, comparisons with past measures arise almost spontaneously, but the impression is that the analysis tends to be somewhat superficial (naturally with some exceptions), ¹⁴ in part as a consequence of the reluctance on the part of historians to engage in the debate and thus provide reconstructions that might be of use to this interdisciplinary field of study. ¹⁵

This article tries to reverse this trend. While I am aware of the inevitable changes of the political, economic, social and cultural contexts on both a national and global scale, I believe it is timely to observe how some aspects of this debate on how militant a democracy can and should be have evolved. Thus, the essay focuses on the stance adopted by the Italian governments, which were led by the Christian Democracy (DC) Party, in response to the return of fascism in the immediate post-war period. It investigates especially the actions (or the lack thereof) taken against those who performed acts of apology of fascism and those who circulated cultural products (such as books, articles and pamphlets) suspected or proven to have an apologetic intention. The research is largely based on archival sources produced by the Ministry of the Interior for one main reason: to assess both the extent and impact of those acts of apology and the reaction of local and national authorities.

The article casts light on the period from the end of World War II to 1952, arresting its analysis precisely at the time of the enactment of the afore-mentioned Scelba Law, on which the literature has already dwelt extensively. ¹⁶ The article wants to explore this time frame, which has not been analysed sufficiently until now, for two reasons. First of all, it is important to thoroughly understand the causes that prompted the government to adopt the Scelba Law. Secondly, I believe that the latter did not represent a real turning point in the way Italian democracy dealt with the re-emergence of fascism and the numerous acts of apology of fascism (even though that measure had the effect of inducing the neo-fascists to moderate their behaviour). Instead, if anything, it represents a sort of final chapter in the debate opened in the previous years.

By adopting this perspective and this timeframe, the article also intends to emphasise the centrality of the question of the return of fascism in the historiographical accounts of post-World War II Western Europe. In recent years, several studies have sought to develop a history of this period that reveals how the establishment of a democratic culture was by no means a predictable outcome. ¹⁷ Nevertheless, with a few exceptions, ¹⁸ the re-emergence of fascism has remained in the background and isolated in specific publications that were expressly dedicated to the field of study of post-1945 fascism. This was despite the fact that the re-emergence fuelled significant debates in Germany, with the concern aroused by the presence of the Werewolves; ¹⁹ in Italy, due to the birth of the fascist-like Italian Social Movement (MSI); ²⁰ and even in countries where the fascist ideology had not been popular even in the 1930s, such as Great Britain, which witnessed the comeback of Oswald Mosley. ²¹

The immediate post-war period: A season of nostalgia

In the immediate post-war period, several political organisations inspired by fascism came into being in Italy: the Squadre d’azione Mussolini (Mussolini Action Squads, SAM), the Fasci d’azione rivoluzionaria (Fasces of Revolutionary Action, FAR) and the Partito fascista democratico (Democratic Fascist Party, PFD). While both SAM and FAR operated in complete secrecy, the PFD opted for a more provocative approach by presenting itself as a full-blown fascist political party, which was counter to the Lieutenant's Legislative Decree no. 149 (DLL 149) enacted on 26 April 1945, at the end of the war. ²² This decree, in fact, which was intended to remain in force for only 1 year (Article no. 6) reserved the punishment of confinement or imprisonment for anyone who committed ‘acts aimed at encouraging the resurgence, under any form or name, of the dissolved Fascist Party or publicly exalting its persons, institutions and ideologies with any written or verbal actions’. ²³ The PFD's termination was thus the inevitable consequence of its beginning, although this did not stop the party from becoming the protagonist of one of the most remarkable acts in post-war fascist history, when, in April 1946, its members dug up Mussolini's remains from the Musocco Cemetery in Milan. ²⁴

The episode caused so much concern that once the body was recovered and the culprits (starting with the ringleader, Domenico Leccisi) were punished, the government decided to keep the corpse in a secret location, until it was decided to return it to the Mussolini family in 1957. ²⁵ On the whole, however, the re-emergence of groups like the PFD (which was immediately dismantled), FAR and SAM did not seem to alarm the post-war coalition governments. A note written by Minister of Interior, the aforementioned Christian Democrat Scelba, on 3 October 1947 is indicative of this. The letter stated that all the fascist cells that had come into being up to that point were under control, and that they were ‘rigorously tackled’ by the police whenever they tried to act. The fact that, according to the information in his possession, the organisations were not interconnected in any significant way further reassured the minister. ²⁶

When Scelba wrote this note, a little less than 1 year had passed since the establishment of the MSI in December 1946. The party was explicitly inspired by fascism, particularly by the Italian Social Republic (RSI) that marked the final stage of Italian fascism, as could be seen from its political agenda and activists. ²⁷ Nonetheless, Scelba, and the Italian government more generally, did not seem concerned, to the point that the authorities did not take any action when they became aware of MSI existence. Scelba pointed out that the MSI had ‘never made a clandestine profession of neo-fascism’, and therefore could not represent a political threat. ²⁸ The chief of the Italian police was in agreement, as can be deduced from his response to an article by William L. Shirer published in the Times Herald on 14 December 1947. While the American journalist expressed fears regarding the return of fascism to the Italian scene, ²⁹ the chief disagreed that the fascists had ‘that consistency, that freedom of action and that influence over public opinion […] that the columnist claims’. ³⁰

The authorities would become more concerned only in the following months, or more precisely between the end of 1948 and the beginning of 1949, when they in fact began to think about banning the MSI. This consideration was in line with the twelfth Disposizione transitoria e finale (Temporary and Final Regulation) of the Constitution, which had been discussed in November 1946 and came into force on 1 January 1948. ³¹ Moreover, it accounted for Law no. 1546 of 3 December 1947, which re-launched and reinforced what had been established in the aforementioned DLL 149. ³²

However, the re-emergence of fascism was signalled by another important element, namely the return to the public scene of a view of fascism that was not just nostalgic, but also explicitly apologetic.

This phenomenon even caught the attention of the foreign press. Painting a portrait of the extreme right in Italy in an article published by the weekly magazine New Republic in December 1947 that was immediately reprinted by the bulletin of the British Wiener Library (which was particularly careful to denounce any sign of a fascist revival), ³³ the journalist Corrado Pallenberg dwelt on the circulation in the Italian peninsula of the magazine La rivolta ideale. ³⁴ The weekly, based in Rome and headed by Giovanni Tonelli, had obtained a circulation of 25,000 copies since its establishment in April 1946, despite its clear fascist imprint. ³⁵

A little more than a year later, the journalist John Gunther – who had been a war correspondent in Europe – published an article in the New York Herald Tribune which, while adopting a less concerned tone than Pallenberg's piece, nevertheless deplored the existence of a certain nostalgia for fascism among some Italians and a continuing enchantment with Mussolini. ‘The personality and career of the Duce still arouse interest’, he wrote, ‘the newspapers and bookshops are loaded with reminiscences about him. His widow wrote one book, and his chauffeur another’. ³⁶

The highly widespread availability of hagiographic portraits of Mussolini and fascism in newsstands and bookshops was considered so important and disturbing that the former partisan and historian Giorgio Vaccarino devoted an article to it in The Wiener Library Bulletin. In Vaccarino's opinion, post-war Italy had been overwhelmed by a type of ‘fascist literature’ whose boundaries were undoubtedly difficult to draw, but whose ‘fairly extensive’ presence could not fail to amaze. ³⁷

Many other political and cultural figures stressed the same point, albeit from different perspectives. On 22 July 1947, representatives of the Communist Party, the Republican Party, the Socialist Party, the Action Party, as well as members of smaller political groups, told Scelba of their deep concern about the ‘formidable resurgence, especially in recent times, of the monarchist, reactionary and openly fascist press’. ³⁸ There were also criticisms at the local level. The provincial committee of the Pavia branch of the ANPI (National Association of Italian Partisans), for example, turned to the Ministry of the Interior to denounce the fact that several newspapers were ‘competing with each other’ to ‘publish photographs of Mussolini, [other Fascist] leaders, Graziani and all the traitorous oppressors’. ³⁹

As for the authorities, the Prefect of Bari offered a particularly farsighted reflection in a report dated 30 August 1946 to the Ministry of the Interior. He dismissed the idea that there was ongoing ‘neo-fascist activity’ in his jurisdiction. However, he warned that the situation was not completely reassuring because the ‘fascist idea’ was still able to arouse sympathy in the province, and indeed was ‘discreetly alive to the point that one might assume that … [not only] many old fascists, but also those who are not fascists, would not prove averse, should the situation require it, from joining movements with ideas more or less similar to those of the suppressed regime’. ⁴⁰

Even though it is difficult to measure the veracity of the prefect's statement, there is no doubt that, as reported by several journalists, the representatives of the former regime had the opportunity to force a reconsideration of fascist history and offer some semblance of credibility to fascist ideology.

The studies by Giuseppe Pardini and Elisabetta Cassina Wolf respectively have brought to light the existence of a vast array of newspapers that were sympathetic to the fascist cause, like Il Nazionale, asso di bastoni, Illustrato, Lotta politica, Brancaleone and Meridiano d’Italia, in addition to the aforementioned Rivolta ideale, and have demonstrated just how popular these publications were. In June 1950, for example, the weekly magazine Brancaleone, which was full of nostalgia for Italian fascism despite not being aligned with the MSI, sold 41,000 copies, while Lotta politica had a circulation of 22,000, asso di bastoni 21,000, and Meridiano d’Italia 20,000, respectively. ⁴¹

Vaccarino's article denouncing the existence of a ‘fascist literature’ was also extremely realistic. In the immediate post-war period, the market was inundated by memoirs, ⁴² and while a good proportion of them did not belong to the fascist front, this does not mean that the fascists did not throw themselves enthusiastically into the genre. ⁴³ While many memoirs, biographies, short stories and historical essays devoted to Mussolini's dictatorship and/or the Italian Social Republic were printed by small publishing houses, others obtained support from certain notorious publishers that provided extraordinarily important platforms. One particularly interesting case is that of Garzanti, a company which was doing everything it could and building an extensive catalogue of titles in the immediate postwar period to compete in the editorial market. The memoirs of RSI Minister of Defence and the future honorary president of the MSI, Rodolfo Graziani, Ho difeso la patria (1947) (I defended the Fatherland), were included, and this was by no means an isolated case. Garzanti also published the memoirs of Mussolini's former personal secretary, Giovanni Dolfin, Con Mussolini nella tragedia (1949), and those of the Fascist Minister Giuseppe Bottai, Vent’anni e un giorno (1949), just to mention some of the most remarkable examples. Garzanti also released one of the first biographies of the Duce, Mussolini e il suo tempo (1950), which was published posthumously by the fascist supporter Edoardo Susmel. The former member of the Chamber of Fasces and Corporations painted an enthusiastic portrait of the Fascist leader and compared him to figures such as Columbus, Da Vinci and Galilei for being able to see ‘earlier, more and better than others’. ⁴⁴ Susmel also underplayed, almost to the point of outright denial, the impact of the Fascist government's antisemitic measures. ⁴⁵

Garzanti was not a unique case. Mondadori also gave voice to the fascist cause by releasing the autobiography of Mussolini's widow, Rachele Guidi, La mia vita con Benito (1948). This was predictably apologetic but nevertheless accepted by the well-known publishing house without any reservation, except for a request for the omission of a few lines from Guidi's dedication, in which she referred to Mussolini as a ‘living torch keeping watch over the Fatherland’. This was a definition which, in the opinion of Mondadori's editors, seemed more than appropriate if seen through Guidi's eyes, but was nevertheless not in keeping with the (supposedly) sober approach of the publisher. ⁴⁶

The support of these publishing houses enabled the fascist voice to circulate not only within the movement's close circles but also beyond. The commercial results were at least reasonably good, otherwise it would not be possible to explain why so many other fascist memoirs made it onto the shelves of Italian bookshops. In fact, the case of Ho difeso la patria, it would be fair to judge the book's performance as something altogether more impressive: Graziani's book was printed in 18 editions between late 1947 and 1951, and it sold 30,000 thousand copies in its first few months alone. ⁴⁷

It may be difficult to account for the fact that prominent figures in a dictatorial regime and government, like that of the RSI, which was complicit in supporting the Nazi occupation, were able to disseminate their own version of events in the aftermath of World War II, and could even gain assistance from mediators – such as newspapers and publishers – that did not belong directly to their political realm. In this sense, Italy was a unique case in Europe, if one takes into account the extent and quality of the phenomenon. However, as already mentioned, it was not the only country that in some way had to face the re-emergence of fascism in the form of the reappearance of fascist political groups and/or the circulation of pro-fascist texts. In the UK, for example, hundreds of Oswald Mosley's supporters gathered in December 1945 at the Royal Hotel in London to witness their leader's political return. ⁴⁸ The episode attracted great attention from the Labour government, to the point that Prime Minister Clement Attlee decided to establish a Committee of Fascism to investigate the phenomenon. ⁴⁹ At the same time, there were also reports of the return of pamphlets and magazines belonging to the milieu of the British extreme right to the public sphere, which sparked a political debate on the measures needed to tackle the issue without interfering with freedom of expression. ⁵⁰

Some pro-fascist items were also circulated in Belgium and France, or at least there were attempts to do so, albeit without the support that well-known publishing houses had provided in Italy. One thinks of La champagne de Russie and La cohue de 1940 by Léon Degrelle, the founder of Belgium's pro-Nazi Rexist movement, ⁵¹ as well as the works by Maurice Bardèche that went on to become key points of reference for post-1945 fascism, ⁵² including Lettre à François Mauriac (1947), Nuremberg ou la Terre promise (1948) and Nuremberg II ou Les Faux Monnayeurs (1950). These books were not overtly devoted to rehabilitating the fascist ideology (as 1961's Qu’est-ce que le fascisme? later tried to do), but rather to criticising the so-called ‘transitional’ justice system ⁵³ and the alleged inconsistencies of the Nuremberg trial, to the point that it is possible to think of Bardèche as one of the first Holocaust deniers, alongside Paul Rassinier. ⁵⁴ The new context, which was signed by the early stages of the Cold War, induced the governments to identify communism (and thus communist political groups and the circulation of texts close to communist ideology) as the most important threat, but this does not mean that those signs of a new life of the fascist cause were not seen as a danger at the eyes of Western European democracies. Especially pushed by anti-fascist circles and, in some cases, Jewish communities, ⁵⁵ the phenomenon came to the centre of public debate. Consequently, the governments were induced to take official countermeasures or, at least, to make official statements (in which they recognise the consistency of the threat).

‘You cannot kill ideas with bullets’ ⁵⁶

In a report written in December 1945 and forwarded to the aforementioned Committee on Fascism, the British Security Service wrote: ‘you cannot kill ideas with bullets: still less can you kill them by a period of detention’. It was right. Stopping the circulation of ideas was, and remains, complicated.

This did not, however, stop the British government from considering which measures and postures it might adopt to tackle the activities of Abbeys Supplies Limited, a publishing house linked to Mosley, while also taking into account the potential side effects. Ultimately, ministers convinced themselves that employing any specific measures would represent a turning point in recent British history and undermine respect for one of the pillars of democracy: freedom of expression. ⁵⁷ The BBC also considered the issue of how to handle Mosley's return to the scene, although its decision was rather different; the broadcaster judged Mosley to be a persona non grata and he was not allowed to appear on any of its programmes until 1968 (when the politician released his biography My Life). ⁵⁸

In the meantime, Belgium decided to ban the distribution of Degrelle's books – the author was even wanted by the authorities – and pressed countries such as France and Switzerland to do the same. ⁵⁹

In France, besides making use of a piece of legislation dating back to January 1936 – when the government of the Third Republic under Pierre Laval tried to curb the activities of the numerous extreme right-wing leagues which were raising the level of public tensions – ⁶⁰ to tackle any effort made by fascist groups to re-emerge, ⁶¹ the authorities decided to charge Bardèche with apologie des crimes de meurtre (apology for crimes of murder). This allowed the government to stop the circulation of his texts, notwithstanding the 1881 law guaranteeing freedom of expression, even if the final word ultimately belonged to the judges, who found Bardèche guilty. ⁶² In 1963, the right-wing writer Alfred Fabre-Luce and the publisher René Juilliard were also brought to trial after the publication of Fabre-Luce's book Haute Cour (1962), in which the author staged a ‘fictitious’ trial of Charles De Gaulle in order to criticise his behaviour during the war. ⁶³

For its part, Italy adopted a relatively broad strategy that simultaneously appears at least partly contradictory. Unlike the Federal Republic of Germany which, in 1949, with the approval of Article no. 21 of the Basic Law, decided to ban all the ‘parties which by reason of their aims or the behaviour of their adherents seek to impair or destroy the free democratic order or to endanger the existence of the […] republic’ ⁶⁴ – so both the fascist, the neo-fascist and the communist parties –, the new Italian democratic course limited itself to fascism. It could not have been otherwise due the weight of the communist forces in Italy in electoral terms and, even before that, their role played in liberating the peninsula from Nazi-fascist occupation. ⁶⁵ Nevertheless, as already mentioned, the government did not stop the MSI from coming into being and from taking part in both local and national elections. More generally, it seems evident that the Italian governments showed a vacillating approach to the new party.

On the one hand, it adopted an attitude of openness and even dialogue. This is attested by the meeting (albeit an informal one) held in April 1950 between Prime Minister De Gasperi and two leading members of the MSI, Arturo Michelini and Giovanni Roberti, and the earlier one between the same two men and President of the Republic Luigi Einaudi. It is also shown by the initial benefit of the doubt given to the party by the authorities, which did not take seriously those who declared the connections between the MSI and the fascist ideology. ⁶⁶

On the other hand, some attempts were made to exclude the MSI from every political negotiating table, at least at the national level. ⁶⁷ Furthermore, over the course of the years, the authorities periodically threatened to ban the party, and, in 1950, they even prevented it from holding its national congress on public order grounds (or, to put it in another way, for the series of incidents and acts of apology of fascism in which representatives of the MSI had been involved in the previous months). ⁶⁸

However, Italy's reaction to the numerous acts of apology of fascism was even more ambiguous. An archival survey based on the documentation produced by the Ministry of the Interior could lead to the conclusion that the authorities had adopted a strict attitude against any actions of this sort. It is worth mentioning, for instance, an episode that occurred at the end of the first afternoon session of the MSI's second national congress, held in Rome in June 1949, involving Edmondo Cione, a philosopher and disciple of anti-fascist Benedetto Croce. Cione, who gradually had moved towards fascism, openly supporting the RSI and becoming a prominent figure in the MSI after the war, ⁶⁹ took the floor and invited the party to renew itself. In particular, he prayed the MSI to shape a new ‘philosophy of activism’ in order to encourage the youth to engage in a fascist ideology that – this was the key sentence – had remained superior due to its strength. This last statement was conceived as a threat by the chief commissioner of public security for Naples, or, more precisely, it was interpreted by him as an apology of fascism, which thus convinced him to order Cione's arrest. ⁷⁰

Cione was immediately cleared of any wrongdoing (probably because the Public Prosecutor's Office did not consider his making of the statement a genuine act of apology of fascism, which shows well how ambiguous it was, and it still is, to establish what an act of apology is and is not), but similar cases were not uncommon. During the campaign for the 1948 general election, for instance, the Naples commissioner of public security pressed charges against Emilio Patrissi – a member of the Constituent Assembly of the right-wing populist movement Uomo qualunque (UQ) and, later, the founder of the Nationalist Movement for Social Democracy, another obviously fascist group – for his explicit glorification of Mussolini's actions. In the same period, the Naples Prefect Giulio Paternò reported the MSI member Gustavo Roncalli for ending his public speech ‘by making a comparison between the current Italian political system and the Fascist regime […] and stating that the latter had created ideal conditions of ethical and economic life for the Italian people’. ⁷¹

An accusation of apology of fascism was also brought against the lawyer Giuliano Bracci and his comrade Alberto Trinchieri after they affixed several posters in Rome exalting the fascist era and insulting the new course of Italian politics. The police dealt with them for the first time on 28 September 1948 when a complaint was filed about a ‘coloured poster in front of the Italian Social Movement headquarters … containing vulgar insults against members of the government and political figures, as well as an evident apology of fascism’. An order was immediately issued for the removal of the poster, but on the same evening another was affixed in the same place, stating the following: ‘as a tribute to the traditional freedom of the press, a mural newspaper was confiscated from us in which we simply baptised as traitors the Honourable Members of the Parliament … Togliatti, Calosso, Sforza, Pacciardi. Who won the great traitors’ derby? Who spoke from enemy radios and who brought the Slavs to Trieste and the Moroccans to Esperia? Personally, we rank them all equally’. According to the Rome Questore (Police Chief), Saverio Polito, the poster represented a new attempt to spread fascist ideas since it conveyed the message that ‘the blame for the defeat and unprecedented suffering of the Italian people during the war’ did not belong to those who ‘dragged us into the catastrophe of war, but to those who, instead, consistently chose to fight against the fascist adventure’. The second poster was duly removed but, following a further repeat of the gesture, Polito opted to arrest Bracci and Trinchieri on the evening of 30 September, charging them with the crime of apology of fascism. ⁷²

Repressive measures were also taken against the band of the municipality of Sant’Antonio Abate (province of Naples), who the authorities interrupted immediately after hearing the opening notes of the fascist hymn Giovinezza resounding through the streets of the town. Officers opted to collect the personal details of the musicians with the intention of reporting them to the local judicial authorities.

The events of June 1950 in Rome are equally representative. As a result of a complaint from a number of citizens, the Carabinieri caught a 29-year-old man in the act of listening a young fascist march on a gramophone provided by the local MSI headquarters. The device was confiscated, and both the listener and the secretary of the party's local section were reported to the authorities. ⁷³

Slogans and cries sympathetic to fascism were also repressed. On 25 September 1949, for example, the Rome Police Chief charged Antonio Mura, a former RSI soldier, with apology of fascism when he was caught singing the fascist slogan Eia-Eia Alalà at a rally, thus violating Article no. 7 of the apology of fascism law, which had been enacted in December 1947. ⁷⁴

As suggested by the Cione affair, the Italian authorities paid special attention to conferences exalting Mussolini and Fascism. For example, Fernando Gori, a PNF member since 1920 and president of the Movimento artistico nazionale (National artistic movement), was arrested in the aftermath of a conference on the Italian colonies held in Rome when he took the floor to speak against the lawyer Antonio della Scala, who had strongly criticised Fascist colonial policies at the same event. Gori also praised Mussolini, and cried ‘Viva il duce’ and ‘long life fascism’. His arrest was immediate even though, as had been the case with Cione, he was released very quickly.

Repressive actions also appeared to be targeted at the fascist press, which both local anti-fascists and foreign journalists had fiercely denounced while wondering how it was possible that the authorities were tolerating the circulation of such publications. One indication that the authorities did not ignore the phenomenon is a report written on 5 March 1949 by the police chief of Rome, Polito, who stopped the circulation of a leaflet published by the pro-fascist magazine Pensiero nazionale on the basis that it clearly offered an apology of fascism ⁷⁵ by praising the Charter of Verona, the RSI's programmatic manifesto. ⁷⁶

Polito also targeted another fascist magazine, Illustrato, which was edited by Bruno Spampanato. Its issue of 22 May 1949 included a transcription of the notorious speech by the Duce at Milan's Teatro Lirico, to which Polito reacted by summoning the editor and threatening to suppress the newspaper. ⁷⁷

When considered in tandem, all these examples might lead one to conclude that the Italian authorities were involved in a genuine fight against any acts of apology of fascism. Alternatively, it may be concluded that at least some political actors, both at the national and local levels, were sincerely engaged in one. Nevertheless, as the next section will demonstrate, a most cautious and problematic approach needs to be taken.

The importance of a bottom-up approach

As the political scientist Bénédice Laumond noted in her study dedicated to the French and German attitudes towards the extreme right, the analysis of individual political actors, their strategies and their aims is an important step, and in fact I would say an unavoidable one, in any attempt to measure the degree of militancy of a democracy. ⁷⁸ In light of this, I think it is also particularly worth noting the (at least apparent) contradictions of the political actors who were most involved in countering the resurgence of fascism, starting with Scelba, who was not only the then-minister of the Interior (and therefore, as we have seen, was in the forefront of the fight against fascism) but was also one of President of Council De Gasperi's most trusted advisors and one of the proudest supporters of the model of protected democracy that was articulated by De Gasperi himself. ⁷⁹ In Scelba's case, it is clear that he was highly committed to opposing any form of apology of fascism, yet it is equally evident how forgiving he was of the MSI. It is also important to shed light on how he tried to legitimise his behaviour. On the one hand, he insisted on the insignificance of the MSI threat. On the other hand, he sought to demonstrate his commitment to the fight against any form of apology of fascism by citing the example of the frequent interventions of the local authorities in Rome, ⁸⁰ and the efforts of the questore Polito in particular. It is true that the latter consistently demonstrated particular zeal in opposing the return of fascism, but this, of course, cannot be considered sufficient evidence of Scelba's own commitment.

Moving our attention to Polito himself, since he was the Questore of the capital, which was one of the most important centres of the renewed fascist universe, it is easy to notice how many other variables came into play in the fight against fascist resurgence, and therefore how many variables scholars must take into account to develop a complete picture of the posture adopted by a country towards these issues. Polito, like most Italian civilian servants of the second half of the 1940s and the 1950s, had started his career during Fascism, and he eventually become a director of the IV OVRA zone (the Fascist secret police). His brilliant career was at risk of coming to an end in April 1944 when the Tribunale Speciale della Difesa dello Stato (Special Tribunal for the Defence of the State) sentenced him to 24 years’ imprisonment for the sexual harassment of Rachele Guidi, Mussolini's wife. ⁸¹ However, that verdict was withdrawn after the war, and it afforded Polito with the opportunity to resume his profession. It is difficult to establish how influential that event was, and continued to be, in encouraging in him to reject the fascist universe so strongly, but there is no doubt that he was extremely determined to oppose the ideology, as well as – and it is important to insist on the level of self-representation of each actor involved in this question – to make his commitment to this aim as visible as possible. In the meantime, however, it is worth mentioning that Polito showed equal robustness towards the former partisans, whom he considered a kind of communist threat against public order. When, in early 1946, in the aftermath of the conflict, he took the role of general inspector in the Milan Police Headquarters, ‘He resolved to put on trial the partisans within the police’ as admitted by the then-minister of the interior, the socialist Pier Luigi Romita, when he expressed regret for his decision to give Polito this responsibility in Milan and opted to move him to the small southern town of Andria. ⁸² It is therefore evident that Polito's repressive attitude towards the fascists was both the product of a more comprehensive opposition to any presumed threat against democracy (or, perhaps, just against public order) and the result of a mentality shaped during the Ventennio that any form of criticism and dissent of the state should be firmly and immediately stamped out. ⁸³

Even the language used by Polito reveals his sincere opposition to individuals and movements perceived as a threat. As the analysis of his reports attests, the fascists were labelled as responsible for ‘ignoble and nefarious revivals’, and fascist leaders were considered incapable of adapting to the new political context and accepting the fact that they no longer ‘count for anything’. ⁸⁴ The 179 instances of apology of fascism reported by Polito between 1948 and 1951, i.e. a number without equal in Italy, are also indicative of the questore's efforts (even if they also demonstrate the vivacity of the fascist community in the Italian capital, which was matched only in Milan). ⁸⁵

However, Polito's attitude was not entirely exceptional, and while the Rome police chief proved implacable, the authorities in other locations behaved similarly. Thus, between 1948 and 1951, 39 offences of apology of fascism were reported by the authorities in Milan, and 40 in Naples. ⁸⁶ This tough approach was encouraged by Scelba in his circulars, but it is possible to imagine that as in the case of Polito, the attitude of other local authorities was not inspired (or at least not exclusively) by sincere anti-fascist values but rather by a more general inclination to stamp down on any form of political dissent. This, once again, was an attitude shaped during the Fascist era, even if it does not necessarily serve as proof of any commitment to the fascist faith. ⁸⁷

However, regardless of the number of offences reported in the immediate post-war period and the more or less sincere efforts put in place by the local authorities to tackle incidents of apology of fascism, it is important not to forget the broader context described in the previous section, namely the spread of a nostalgic and apologetic vision of fascism through the circulation of fascist and pro-fascist articles and books.

Fascist newspapers were subjected to particularly rigorous surveillance, but this did not lead to their termination. In the case of the aforementioned Rivolta ideale, for example, on 30 August 1946, the Rome police suggested the magazine should be closed due to its apologetic tone, ⁸⁸ but this did not happen, since the local judge who would have been entitled to take such an action decided not to intervene (perhaps so as not to violate the principle of freedom of expression, or maybe because the judge himself was rather inclined to fascist values – one must in fact bear in mind the controversial and partial purge that affected judges). ⁸⁹ The publication's activities were hindered only by the accusation of apology of fascism made against its editor, Giovanni Tonelli, on 25 March 1949. ⁹⁰

If we shift the attention to more popular magazines, such as Oggi, Tempo and Epoca, which, while not directly linked to fascist circles nevertheless printed articles with a firmly apologetic viewpoint, we might notice that the authorities were even more indulgent. ⁹¹

The public institutions went so far as to tolerate the publication of the Opera Omnia of Benito Mussolini. The multi-volume work, edited by Duilio Susmel, who planned it along with his father, Edoardo, was intended to collect all the dictator's writings and speeches. Beginning with the release of the first volume in spring 1951, the project, which was undertaken by a small publisher named La Fenice, ultimately ran to 36 volumes and 8 appendices. There was no attempt to stop the initiative, and Susmel, a journalist with a past as a soldier in the RSI, completed the enterprise in the 1980s of creating a resource that remains problematically indispensable for any scholar who might need to engage with Mussolini's written or oral production in some way.

In fact, some objections to the project were raised after the publication of the first volume, ⁹² with certain voices denouncing its potential danger. According to the newspaper La Giustizia, which has close links to the Italian Democratic Socialist Party, the publication of the Opera Omnia posed a real problem because Mussolini's words inevitably contained a constant ‘exaltation […] of violence’ as well as a ‘perennial vituperation of legality, democracy and freedom’. The newspaper thus asked why Minister Scelba had not yet intervened by applying the law that theoretically sanctioned any form of glorification of the fascist regime. The newspaper's editors were not only concerned with the contents of the work, but also with the extensive hype surrounding the announcement of the first volume. Many newsstands had ‘for weeks [been] literally plastered with large portraits of Mussolini in a hundred different poses’. ⁹³ Nevertheless, no action was taken, with the state reacting in much the same way as it had to the publication of Benito, il mio uomo by Mussolini's widow, Guidi, and of the Italian translation of Bardèche's Nuremberg ou la terre promise by a new publisher, Longanesi, that had acquired it and changed its title – perhaps to make it more appealing – to I servi della democrazia (1949). ⁹⁴

In summary, the archival survey of the documentation relating to the positions taken by the minister of the Interior and other authorities in the late 1940s and the early 1950s paints a, at least partially, different picture to the one that emerges from a straightforward analysis of the publications that appeared in the same period. While the former points to a quite particularly inflexible attitude towards fascism on the part of the Italian government, the fortunes of pro-fascist literary and journalistic production suggest no such thing.

In Scelba's opinion, the judiciary bore the majority of the responsibility for this ambiguity, a point which he made explicit – in a somewhat problematic way – in a letter written on 1 January 1950 to the defence minister, who had in turn informed him of worrying expressions of apology of fascism. According to Scelba, the Public Prosecutor's Office tended to proceed ‘slowly’, especially when it came to investigating the conduct of the newspapers and magazines that played such an important role in bringing fascist ideas back to life. The minister's words implied that the specific organ of state might have been somewhat complicit in the fascist renewal. ⁹⁵

Although further archival research focusing on the activities of the different Italian courts would be needed before the true responsibility of the judiciary could be accounted for, Scelba's words were not without foundation. It is worth pointing out, for example, how the same judges, with verdict No. 1 of the Constitutional Court of 16 January 1957, would later downgrade the Scelba Law (and consequently the previous Law no. 1546 of 3 December 1947) by stating that cases of apology of fascism could only be prosecuted when they were directly linked to an attempt to reconstitute the fascist party. ⁹⁶ Nevertheless, it is worth making two final points. First of all, the tendency to identify the judges as the sole bearers of responsibility may be the result of a lack of familiarity on the part of Scelba, and probably of the state machinery as a whole, with the principle of the separation of powers. While this principle is a central pillar of democracy, it is certainly not of a dictatorship, which was the political regime in which Scelba had been raised and trained. Judicial autonomy, which represents a crucial step in the transition from an authoritarian to a democratic regime, was probably scarcely tolerated by political figures like Scelba and Polito, whose mentality was shaped during the fascist era. Secondly, the fact that the judiciary was not subjected to an extensive purge offers only a partial explanation of why it maintained such an apparently lenient attitude, since the adherence of members of the judiciary to the fascist cause varied from case to case. ⁹⁷ In addition, Scelba completely denied the possibility that the judges, or at least some of them in being so lenient, had tried to soften the militant approach of Italian democracy, which is understood here as a dangerous attitude precisely because it is prone to containing the freedom of speech and expression.

Conclusions

Despite the fact that militant democracy did not represent a category frequently associated by historians and political scientists to Italian post-1945 political course, this article, which has combined a straightforward reflection on the enacted laws with a more in-depth analysis centred on archival research, has shown that the Italian governments of the immediate post-war period, led by DC, tried to counter the re-emergence of fascism. However, its analysis also insists on how much fragile and contradictory a militant democracy can be and how such an ideology can foster (and in the Italian case, certainly fostered) a ‘restrained’ ⁹⁸ or ‘circumscribed’ ⁹⁹ democracy.

In his Political Extremism in Democracies, William M. Downs assumes that the more a democratic pathway has been threatened or disrupted by forms of political extremism, and the stronger the mark of that experience on a country's history, the more militant the response will be. ¹⁰⁰ The Italian case both confirms and problematises this theory. In particular, it allows us to observe how the way that a new militant democracy, which is shaped in the aftermath of the demise of a previous authoritarian regime, is not only affected by the context in which it takes place (the early stages of the Cold War and the rise of a new, at least presumed, threat, the communist one). Instead, it is also closely influenced by and intertwined with the way that the transition unfolds. A transition is never perfect. The Italian one, at least, was far from being so ¹⁰¹ and this could only have a negative impact on how the DC governments of the immediate post-war period shaped its model of militant democracy. Following the same pattern as the purge of Nazi collaborators in Italy, the measures undertaken against the re-emergence of fascism seem to be inspired by a particular indulgence, which is even clearer if – as I have at least illustrated in part in this article – we compare the Italian attitude to elsewhere in Europe, and if we also bear in mind the broad tolerance granted by the Italian political system to the MSI from the very beginning (which I briefly touched upon in this article). Furthermore, the measures to tackle such re-emergence of Fascism, in line with what happened during the purge, affected ordinary citizens more than better-known figures, including former fascist leaders who were entirely allowed to write and, most importantly, publish memoirs, biographies and historical essays.

However, there is another, final dark aspect to the Italian path towards militant democracy that is linked to the problematic previous transition and that this article has tried to bring to light. I am referring to the fact that the authorities materially involved in countering the resurgence of fascism. The prefects, police chiefs and judges acted with particular zeal not (or at least not only) in the name of the democratic culture that they were theoretically supposed to protect, but in the name of a ‘repressive vocation’ against dissent, ¹⁰² which was the result of a mentality shaped by more than 20 years of dictatorship. This specific mentality ended up actually limiting Italy's journey towards democracy and making it more fragile. This fragility would have consequences in the following decades as it contributed to an ‘insecure democracy’ that would struggle to find the balance between the need to repress dissent and curb political violence on the one hand, and the need to guarantee freedom of expression to all political cultures on the scene on the other. ¹⁰³