Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (50 page)

Needless to say, the landowners did not quite see things the same way. More importantly, the new authorities (many of which, as we have seen, were not so new at all) were unequivocally on the side of maintaining the status quo. At Calitri Allied troops and carabinieri entered the village within just a few days, suppressed the republic and returned the land – still fallow – to its former owners. The same thing happened elsewhere. At Oniferi in Sardinia fighting broke out that lasted for two days, resulting in one villager being killed and several wounded. In Calabria the Peasant Republic of Caulonia, which saw revolts in Stignano, Stilo, Monasterace, Riace, Placanica, Bivongi, Camini, Pazzano and many other places, was also forcefully put down.
²

That such events were even possible shows just how fractured the south of Italy had become in the wake of the war. Individual villages felt quite justified in declaring themselves independent republics because they were both physically and politically cut off from central government. They saw the temporary absence of leadership created by the war as a small window of opportunity to take power into their own hands.

More significantly, however, these events show the lengths that some villages were willing to go to in order to achieve social reform. Contrary to what one might expect, very few of these uprisings were organized by the Italian Communist Party, who by their own admission had virtually no presence in the south of Italy before 1945. They were spontaneous protests, organized locally by people who were sick of social injustice.
³

The appetite for social reform after the war – not only in Italy but across the whole of Europe – was enormous. It was this appetite that led to the birth of dozens of new political parties across the continent; that spawned hundreds of new newspapers in which left-wing writers could argue about how best to bring about societal change; that inspired demonstrations in support of workers’ rights, economic reform, and immediate action against social and legal injustice. The postwar period saw an explosion of left-wing expression that was effectively the rebirth of everything that had been so brutally suppressed during the Nazi occupations. Even the British, whose country had never been occupied, voted for social reform in the aftermath of the war: in the summer of 1945 they ejected Churchill’s centre-right administration and elected the most radical left-wing government in British history.

In most of Europe, the political organizations best placed to take advantage of this swing to the left were the various Communist parties. Not only were they ideally suited to harnessing the continent-wide zeal for social reform, but they also had the moral kudos of having been the backbone of the armed resistance to Nazi rule. Taking into account its association with the Soviet Union, regarded by many as the true victor of the Second World War, communism began to seem like an unstoppable force in European politics. Our collective memories of the Cold War have rather obscured the fact that to huge sections of the European population the Communists were viewed as heroes, not villains.

Furthermore, their popularity was greatest not in those countries that would eventually form the Eastern Bloc, but in those countries that would end up to the west of the Iron Curtain. In the postwar elections in Norway and Denmark the Communists won 12. per cent of the popular vote, in Belgium 13 per cent, in Italy 19 per cent, in Finland 23.5 per cent and in the French elections of November 1946 they achieved a massive 28.8 per cent of the vote, making them the biggest political force in the country.
⁴
More importantly, throughout Europe the Communist Party had a vast pool of committed activists: there were 900,000 party members in France, for example, and two and a quarter million in Italy – far more than in Poland or even Yugoslavia. Communism in western Europe was a hugely popular, and largely democratic movement.
⁵

There were many, however, who found this popularity profoundly disturbing. Churchill was railing against the totalitarian evils of socialism, ‘or in its more violent form communism’, long before his famous ‘Iron Curtain’ speech at Fulton, Missouri.
⁶
Of the many groups that Charles de Gaulle mistrusted, the Communists easily topped the list. In Italy, the Christian Democrat leader Alcide De Gasperi confided to friends that he was ‘afraid that the future republic will lean too much to the left. The unity of the Communists, their courage, their organization, their means, make them a block that has the same power as old-school fascism.’
⁷
Even the US State Department was worried about a ‘pattern developing in Europe of attempt[s] by Communists to wield an influence disproportionate to their real numbers and eliminate their opponents either by public stigmatism or epuration if possible’.
⁸

Such fear and mistrust were born of the fact that communism is ideologically opposed to the very thing that many had been fighting for throughout the war: their national sovereignty. The ultimate goal of communism was not the liberation of France or Italy, but the merging of the working classes of all nations in a supranational brotherhood. What many European politicians were worried about, therefore, was that the Communists would put
class
interests above
national
ones. De Gaulle in particular could not help remembering that French Communists had refused to fight Germany in 1939 and 1940 because Germany was still allied to the Soviets at the time. In other words, in a straight choice between France and the Soviet Union, they had chosen the Soviet Union.

On a more prosaic level, the Communists touched far too many sensitive spots for the majority of the European population to be comfortable with their rise in prominence. Not only were they opposed to all of the things that the middle classes held most dear, such as religion, the family, and the sanctity of private property, but they also advocated violence to achieve their goals. According to their manifesto, the Communists desired nothing less than ‘the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions’.
⁹

After years of savage conflict, the last thing most people wanted was a new class war. Unfortunately, in some areas this was exactly what they were about to get.

The Targets of Political Violence

Some extravagant claims have been made about the Communist parties of France and Italy, so it is necessary to make a couple of things clear straight away. Firstly, there is no evidence to suggest that the Communist Party leadership in these countries intended to seize power immediately after the war. Neither did they authorize political violence - indeed, they appear to have done whatever they could to discourage it. The leader of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), Palmiro Togliatti, made personal visits to the most unruly areas of the country in order to tell regional and provincial PCI leaders to take better control of their members and ensure that the killings stopped. He regularly asserted, both in private and in public, that any movement for social change must be carried out by democratic, non-violent means. He even went so far as to expel from the Party some of those who advocated violence.
¹⁰
Likewise the leader of the French Communist Party (PCF), Maurice Thorez, made it quite clear that ‘we must hold national unity dearer than what we ourselves cherish’ – in other words, that the Communists must sacrifice their desire for radical social change for the sake of rebuilding the country. Both he and the Party leadership in general were regularly praised in government for their efforts to restore public order.
¹¹

However, just because the Party leadership expressed a wish to cooperate with their political rivals did not mean that the rank and file were equally willing. In both Italy and France there was a split between the ‘politicians’ and the ‘partisans’. The latter, who had done all of the fighting, felt that they had earned the right to dictate policy to the former: in the words of Walter Sacchetti, one of the leaders of the Italian partisans, ‘Siamo noi che vi abbiamo liberate’ (‘It was
we
who liberated
you
’).
¹²
From the very beginning of the liberation in both countries there were many amongst the cadres who were disillusioned with the direction in which the Party leadership was taking them. Many partisans in the regions of France and Italy began to ignore instructions and take the law into their own hands. A minority went so far as to instigate small-scale purges of their traditional class enemies in their own areas. These were effectively revolutions in miniature.

It is difficult to see what exactly this violent minority were hoping to achieve. In the absence of support from their leadership it is unlikely that their actions would result in any long-term political gains – and yet their motives were often undeniably political. Perhaps the best way to make sense of their aims and objectives is to look at who their victims were, and show what, if anything, they had in common.

The first target of the Communists in these miniature revolutions was often the police force. This is perhaps not surprising, given the role that the police had played in propping up the discredited wartime governments. However, it seems that many of these attacks had nothing to do with whether the policemen in question had collaborated or not, but were the result of older grudges. In many parts of France, for example, Communists had been rounded up by police right at the beginning of the war because their loyalty to Stalin (who at the time was still allied to Hitler) made them a potential threat to national security. After the liberation, some French Communists deliberately targeted policemen who had taken part in these arrests, simply because the opportunity to avenge themselves was too good to miss.
¹³

One such victim was Abel Bonnet, the police chief in Cognac. Bonnet was a staunch patriot who had been wounded and decorated in the Great War, and who had bravely taken part in various Resistance activities during the occupation. However, local Communists also remembered that he had ordered the arrest of several of their militant comrades in 1939. When Cognac was liberated by members of the FTP in September 1944, this fact came back to haunt him. Bonnet was arrested and taken to nearby Angoulême, where he was kept in a coal cellar for two months. Here he was beaten about the head with a revolver and almost strangled to death. By the time he was released he could no longer walk unaided, and was suffering from a burst ear-drum from the repeated beatings he had received. At no point had he ever been interrogated, or even accused of any crime. On the one occasion when he was brought before the local FTP leader, ‘Commandant Pierre’, he asked why he had been arrested, but received the cryptic reply, ‘I only take orders from Stalin.’
¹⁴

Bonnet’s story is corroborated by another man who was imprisoned in the same cellar in Angoulême. Felix Sanguinetti was a
résistant,
but belonged to the Gaullist Armée Secrète – a group that was supposedly allied to the FTP, despite their ideological differences. When brought before Commandant Pierre, Sanguinetti was told the same thing: ‘De Gaulle, Koenig and the rest, to hell with them. I only have one boss, and that’s Stalin.’ Then he too was put in the cellar, where he witnessed the continuing barbarity of his captors.
¹⁵

8. Areas liberated by the French Resistance alone, as of 23 August 1944

It is impossible to tell how many policemen in France and Italy were targeted for their anti-Communist past rather than any active collaboration with the occupiers – but a wealth of anecdotal evidence suggests that it was reasonably common in both countries. It is quite likely that many others were also branded as ‘fascists’ or ‘collaborators’ simply as a way of undermining their authority: if the police were not to be trusted, then the people were much more likely to rely on the partisan militias to uphold law and order instead. This was certainly a Communist tactic that was used to great effect in eastern Europe.

Another traditional enemy ‘class’ were the bosses – factory owners and managers who exploited the workers for profit. Many of the industrial cities in northern Italy and central and southern France saw a temporary inversion of power after the war, with workers setting up committees to investigate the wartime actions of their employers. In Lyon alone there were 160 ‘patriotic committees’ inside the city’s factories and businesses at the start of 1945, who took it upon themselves to arrest dozens of directors and employers, despite the fact that they were not supposed to do this without the official permission of the local prefect.
¹⁶
In Turin the workers took over the Fiat factory, and the managing director only narrowly escaped being shot on the factory floor. A visitor from the US State Department in May 1945 reported that the factory was being patrolled by armed gunmen and ‘Management is virtually ignored.’
¹⁷
In the months after the liberation several high-profile Italian businessmen were killed, including the Christian Democrat industrialist Giuseppe Verderi, and Arnaldo Vischi, the vice-director of the biggest industrial complex in Emilia-Romagna.
¹⁸