Partisan Justice

History is an investigation and a story where, as in works of fiction, the paths of multiple characters intersect in an interweaving of events and destinies, whose visible and invisible traces shape the memory of beings, places and societies. With an assumed share of subjectivity, the historian becomes a narrator, even a director.

It is in this spirit that Sergio Luzzatto, professor of modern history at the University of Turin, known for his numerous writings on the Terror and Italian fascism, undertakes to untangle the human and political threads of a historical plot, starting from an enigmatic point in the writings of Primo Levi alluding, in his most autobiographical book – The Periodic System –, to the condemnation of two partisans from the Aosta Valley, Zabaldano and Oppezzo, executed under the customs of partisan justice, which intends to enforce its law against all excesses likely to threaten the group.

An execution

A fragment of testimony structures the initial questions:

We had found ourselves obliged in conscience to carry out a sentence, and we had done so, but we had come out of it demolished, demoralized, eager to see everything end and to end ourselves. (p. 97)

The execution of the traitor constitutes one of the key scenes of the Resistance, notably in Army of Shadowsa story by Joseph Kessel from 1943, adapted for the cinema by Jean-Pierre Melville in 1969. In the post-war period, emblematic figures of the French Resistance such as Georges Guingouin, nicknamed “the prefect of the maquis” in Limousin, were harshly attacked, accused of summary justice combined with embezzlement. Clearing up this “nasty secret” – a nagging secret – became the starting point, if not the pretext, for a vast and in-depth investigation, in a way archaeological, at the heart of the partisan world, from the summer of 1943 to the trials and commemorations of the post-war period a decade later, in a sequence relevant to understanding the phenomenon as a whole.

From a framework woven from numerous archives and pages of testimonies, emerges a reconstruction, both sensitive and meticulous, of the springs of the Italian civil war whose shifting divisions take on a particular relief when they focus on the life and death of very young people, “the gang of the Col de Joux”, a mountain refuge rather than a maquis fighting in the name of disembodied ideals.

This micro-event, examined at scale zero, concentrates the main constituent elements of a general history of the Resistance against a backdrop of hunting Jews, denunciation, sweeping rebel zones and civil war – from which the Germans were almost absent – ​​in a singular approach that the historian describes as “hand-to-hand combat”. The partisan combat is restored in all its intelligence and complexity, outside of the polemics and attempts at demystification that characterize the national accounts of the resistance as they were presented after the war, not only in Italy or France but in most occupied countries in Europe. Considering the partisans, with their weaknesses and courage, even their poverty, does not constitute a desacralization of the combat but a way of approaching the phenomenon as closely as possible in all its nuances, contradictions and pain.

Resistance and Civil War

The Resistance is both an invention and a necessity, Sergio Luzzatto reminds us, for beings who, under the pressure of events, are thrown into History. Through a salutary distancing from heroism, he is keen to clarify the contours of the phenomenon: it is “a Resistance made up of great promiscuity, improvised and insidious, between men and women, young and old, military and civilians, rebels and refractory, Italians and foreigners, antifascists and opportunists” (p. 81-82) situated between “banditry and picaresque adventures” (p. 89).

Far from giving a static vision, the historian underlines the slow transformation of spontaneous movements into organizations, whose experience was painfully forged in the harshness of the winter of 1943-1944, replacing the dearly paid solitary bravado of the beginnings with more targeted actions. The partisan fight cannot be read outside its environment, its telluric anchoring and its support in the population.

For the people of the Aosta Valley, the world war and the civil war were reduced to a matter of milk, butter and cheese. (p. 44)

Cutting the partisans off from their protective environment was precisely the objective of the various forces, fascist and Nazi, associated in the repression. “Rake after sweep, the local communities experienced the presence of the gangs in the valleys with a distrust bordering on hostility” (p. 159). The summer of 1944 saw the maximum extension of the guerrilla movement, fed by the slow but continuous flow of desertions from the National Guard of the Republic of Saló. The Liberation sounded the hour of settling scores and revenge against the supporters and auxiliaries of fascism where “one can blame the vanquished for everything the victors have done” (p. 186) in the inversion of the charges of an identically expeditious justice. The civil war experienced prolongations through trials and mourning.

The historian highlights the caesura of the autumn of 1945 as a change in the way post-war Italy settled the accounts of the civil war (Claudio Pavone). If the extraordinary assize courts continued to operate with rigour until the Togliatti amnesty of 22 June 1946, the technical then prevailed over the political and “traditional legality ended up taking precedence over revolutionary legality” (p. 205). The divisions between partisans and Nazi-fascists were complicated by “new passions born of the conflict between the anti-fascists in favour of autonomism and those who were inclined to secessionism” in the Aosta Valley (p. 216).

One of the characteristics of the civil war is precisely that it is a war without a name and without end, the figure of the enemy constantly changing according to events. The amnesty of the summer of 1946 triggers a resumption of the civil war within the circles of former partisans where “the profiteers of the partisan spirit” are denounced, perpetrators of all kinds of trafficking. This new fault line leads to a recomposition of alliances causing the reversal of former agents infiltrated into the partisan movements and primarily responsible for the fall of the gangs, like the collaborator Edilio Cagni, agent provocateur and informer who went over to the service of the Allies, designated by Primo Levi as a “complete spy”.

Their recycling in the service of the American secret services in the hunt for former fascists and in the search for fascist gold contributes to softening the conditions of their own judgment for crimes committed during the war, at a time when the Cold War is operating a reclassification of political priorities.

An original approach

In the wake of the war period, the post-war period and the commemorations of the “partisans who died for the cause of Liberation”, Sergio Luzzatto looks beyond the events themselves, by means of a field survey of the last witnesses and descendants, so that the transmitted word completes – or contradicts – the information provided by the archives, giving the Resistance a presence that no political defeat can erase.

Beyond the circumstantial struggle, the motives and reliefs of the action take on their full meaning. In Italy, the work reached a wide audience despite harsh criticism that labeled it “revisionist,” accusing it of undermining both the substratum of a national identity reconstructed after the war on a consensual anti-fascism, and the figure of Primo Levi deported to Auschwitz a few days after the execution, with a bullet in the back of the head, of the two young partisans by their comrades. It is a safe bet that its reception in France will do justice to the originality of the approach, which proceeds, from the deployment of the “tiny event,” to a vast fresco of history and memory. It is necessary to emphasize the heuristic value of the approach, whose historiographical contributions prove transposable to the study of other partisan movements in the rest of occupied Europe. Contrary to what the French title might suggest, Primo Levi does not constitute the centre of gravity of the work, which is entirely focused on the question of the civil war and its recompositions in a broader chronological sequence including the war and the post-war period.

The merit of Sergio Luzzatto’s work lies as much in the creativity as in the honesty of the questions and the unfolding of the story, where all the layers of sources are found, from the most contemporary traces of the event to the most recent abundance of memory and its transmission. Its innovative force can be seen in the freedom of tone as well as in the absence of prejudices concerning the history of the Resistance which, in Italy as in France, occupies a statue-like place that inhibits many questions.

The passing of the baton between different generations of historians allows us to progress in our knowledge of a phenomenon that is fascinating in itself. It is up to the author of Body of the Duce to happily tackle the task, without avoiding any questions, but without naivety either.