Today in Spain, Tomorrow in Italy

After a decade of violence and repression, the war in Spain, and the news from the Italians who fought and died in defence of the Republic, rekindled hope among the opposition to Fascism. Carlo Roselli, the founder of the Justice and Liberty (Giustizia e Libertà) movement, summarized it in a famous speech that was broadcast over Radio Barcelona on 13 November 1936: “Today in Spain, tomorrow in Italy”. Their heroic example called into question all the propaganda designed to denigrate them as cowards and traitors who had fled the fatherland. In militant worker circles and among the clandestine opposition, news from Spain fell on a diffuse malaise caused by unemployment, the rising cost of living, and the growing fear of a new European war.

Following the fall of the regime in 1943, and especially after the defeat of the Axis in 1945, the memory of the Spanish Civil War was subsumed, and largely made invisible, by the story of the Resistance. This memory, which was dominated by the Italian Communist Party (PCI), also hid the great political diversity of the volunteers who fought in Spain beneath their supposed anti-Fascist unity. This was particularly true of the anarchists, who had endured repression after the events of May 1937 in Barcelona, including the murder of militants like Camillo Berneri and Francesco Barbieri by Stalinist agents.

This is why the dominant myth in postwar Italy was that of the International Brigades. This was sustained by institutions such as the Italian Association of Anti-Fascist Volunteer Fighters (AICVAS) and the Ferruccio Parri National Institute, which today has the Data Spanish Civil War project. On the other hand, for even the most anti-Fascist Christian Democrats, the Civil War recalled anticlerical violence. There was also the Vatican’s unconditional support for the Franco regime, at least until the aggiornamento (updating) that came with Vatican II in the 1960s.

The memory of the war was kept alive by the prominence of Republicans, Socialists and especially Communists such as Palmiro Togliatti, Luigi Longo (author of a book about the International Brigades) Vittorio Vidali, Pietro Nenni and Randolfo Pacciardi in postwar Italian political life. Opposition to the Franco regime brought it up to date. At the same time, there many people who had fought for the rebels in the civil service and the army, as well as in neo-Fascist organizations like the Italian Social Movement (MSI), who also collaborated with Francoist diplomats.

Culture played a key role in this “Resistance” memory, which was used as a political cement for the left in the face of neo-Fascism, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. One example was the publication of the collected writings of Carlo Roselli under the title Today in Spain, Tomorrow in Italy, with an introduction by Aldo Garosci, author of Intellectuals in the Spanish War (1959). Another was Leonardo Sciascia’s story “Antimony” in his collection The Sicilain Uncles (1960), which recovered the memory of the Sicilian peasants and workers who Mussolini sent to fight in Spain.

FJMS