“Moriremo democristiani!”—“We will die Christian Democrats!”—was a common lament among left-wing Italians in the 1980s and early 1990s. The center-right Christian Democracy party (Democrazia Cristiana, or DC) dominated every Italian government from 1946 to 1994: fifty of them in less than fifty years. What seemed like constant chaos—a dizzying game of musical chairs, of crises and endlessly shifting, fragile coalitions—was in fact quite predictable, for when the music stopped the Christian Democrats were always left sitting at the head of the table.
The DC’s uninterrupted run as the country’s largest party brought with it many of the vices and defects of permanent power: an often-sclerotic bureaucracy, a highly developed patronage system, widespread corruption, and, in southern Italy, dangerous collusion with organized crime. Because the chief opposition party was the Italian Communist Party (PCI)—the largest Communist party in Western Europe—the DC was seen by many Italians as the lesser of two evils. “Hold your nose and vote DC,” the conservative journalist Indro Montanelli famously quipped.
The Soviet Union dissolved in late December 1991, and with it went Italy’s tolerance for high levels of corruption as the price of fending off communism. About six weeks later Italian police made the first arrest in what became the enormous investigation known as Operation Clean Hands. There had been plenty of tawdry corruption cases in the past, and either the government had succeeded in limiting their scope or Italians had chosen to hold their noses. But this time, when the parties tried to invoke parliamentary immunity to protect the most important politicians, large crowds protested. Two years and hundreds of indictments later, the DC—along with the four centrist parties it had frequently shared power with—ceased to exist. A power structure that had seemed unchangeable vanished almost overnight.
After World War II the DC inherited a country in ruins and eventually presided over the greatest and most widely shared prosperity in the peninsula’s history. In the immediate postwar years millions of Italian peasants endured abject poverty. Italians’ life expectancy in 1940 was fifty-seven. It is now eighty-four—among the highest in the world. By the late 1980s the economy was comparable to—and by some measures bigger than—Britain’s. But since the early 1990s and the end of Christian Democratic rule, Italy has been in a prolonged period of stagnation, with one of the slowest-growing economies in the world. While it is not clear that the DC and its allies would have managed much better the challenges of the past thirty years—globalization, deindustrialization, integration into the European Union—the half-century of Christian Democratic government looks far better today than it did when it ended.
Italy Reborn: From Fascism to Democracy by the historian Mark Gilbert focuses on the period between the fall of fascism in 1943 and the death of the Christian Democratic leader Alcide De Gasperi in 1954, the years in which the foundation of Italian democracy was constructed. De Gasperi had been a leader of the Italian Popular Party, a Catholic party that opposed the rise of fascism but was dissolved, with the acquiescence of the Vatican, in 1926, when the fascist government ended all vestiges of democratic life. He spent a year in prison and then eked out a living working in the Vatican Library until 1943. De Gasperi is the hero of Italy Reborn: “He shepherded a defeated, reviled country into the political mainstream of the West, and into Europe.”
Gilbert makes the strange decision to dedicate much of the first hundred pages of his book to the well-trodden history of fascism, even though his real focus is the post–World War II period. It would have been enough to summarize in a ten-page chapter how fascism short-circuited Italian democracy and corrupted and co-opted Italy’s institutions, such as the judiciary, the police, and the local bureaucracy; how Mussolini’s ill-fated entry into World War II cost more than 450,000 Italian lives and destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure; and how after the fall of Mussolini in 1943, Italy was the theater of a kind of civil war between pro-fascist forces allied with Hitler and partisan units waging a guerrilla war against them. It is only when Gilbert reaches the period from 1943 to 1954 that the book finds its focus: How did such a badly divided nation emerging from two decades of dictatorship become a highly successful democracy? In this time of widespread democratic backsliding, it may be worth examining Italy’s accomplishment.
We generally take it for granted that after World War II Italy would have joined the democratic nations of Western Europe and become a bulwark of the NATO alliance, but in the years after the collapse of fascism, that was far from clear. Greece, for example, fell into civil war between Communist and anti-Communist forces from 1944 to 1949, and after a right-wing military coup in 1967 it was governed by a junta until 1974.
Italy was riven by deep cleavages that could easily have devolved into civil war or right- or left-wing authoritarianism. As Mussolini’s war effort was clearly failing during the summer of 1943, King Victor Emmanuel III and members of the fascist government forced him from power on July 25 and appointed Marshal Pietro Badoglio as prime minister. After vowing to continue the war while secretly negotiating peace with the Americans and the British, Badoglio dragged his feet in signing and announcing the armistice. This gave the Germans, who were not fooled by his double game, nearly six weeks to pour troops into Italy to “support” their ally.
Finally the Allies forced Badoglio’s hand by announcing the armistice on September 8, at which point he and the king fled Rome. Before departing, Badoglio made a vague and confusing speech that left the Italian army with no clear instructions about whether and against whom it was supposed to fight. The result was that although it greatly outnumbered its German counterpart, it was quickly overwhelmed, and its troops either fled or surrendered. Rome fell to the Germans within forty-eight hours, and some 500,000 Italian soldiers were deported to concentration camps in Germany.
The country was, in effect, split in two, with a small and weak official government headed by Badoglio and the king that was based in Brindisi in southern Italy and recognized by the Allies but had little power or credibility. Most of the rest of Italy spent the next year and a half under German occupation, while a reconstituted fascist state headed by Mussolini was based in Salò, a small town on Lake Garda in Lombardy. As painful and tragic as the German occupation was, during these eighteen months forms of democratic participation began to reemerge. In late 1943 in central and northern Italy various resistance groups were organized around the main prefascist political parties—the Socialists, the Communists, and the Catholics—as well as three smaller antifascist parties. These six parties joined in a shadow government known as the Committee of National Liberation (CLN). It coexisted uneasily with the Badoglio government, which it distrusted because of Badoglio’s and the king’s long complicity with fascism and their cowardly flight from Rome.
Things took a dramatic turn in April 1944 after Palmiro Togliatti, the leader of the Italian Communist Party, returned to Italy from Moscow, where he had lived in exile for most of the twenty years of Mussolini’s rule. At a speech in Salerno, Togliatti, to almost everyone’s amazement, announced his willingness to support and join the Badoglio government. While the speech is often seen as proof of the pragmatism and democratic good faith of the PCI, Gilbert shows that the svolta di Salerno (“Salerno turnaround”) was the result of meetings between Stalin and Togliatti just before he left Moscow. Stalin shrewdly decided that unifying Italy’s antifascist forces and defeating the Nazis and fascists took priority over everything else. Togliatti’s move convinced the other members of the CLN to set aside their reservations and cooperate with the Badoglio government.
In Italy Reborn’s opening chapter, Gilbert makes the perplexing statement that “Italy…did not become a democracy until after the Second World War.” Most historians would vigorously disagree with this rather broad statement. Italy was an electoral democracy with a constitutional monarchy as of 1861. It is true that before 1912 the right to vote was limited to men who met a literacy requirement and paid relatively modest annual taxes. This meant that Italian democracy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was something of a gentlemen’s club composed largely of property owners and the urban middle and professional classes:
Pre-Fascist Italy…was shaped like a wine decanter, with an elite class of landowners, industrialists, and professionals tapering down to a wide base of sharecroppers, industrial workers, and labourers at the bottom. The people at the bottom lived precarious lives, had little access to education, to decent housing, or to health care when they were sick.
In 1912 the franchise was expanded to more than 8 million voters, and in the elections of 1919 and 1921 the total number reached nearly 12 million—near-universal male suffrage, comparable to many other democracies at the time. The Italian Socialist Party (PSI) became the country’s largest party in 1919, controlling more than two thousand cities and towns where it undertook a series of radical reforms: water rights, free lunches and books for poor schoolchildren, and factory councils in important industries. These profound changes frightened the Italian elites.
Denying this period the label of democracy misses something essential: the rapid transformation of Italy from a limited to a mass democracy was a prerequisite for fascism. Robert Paxton in The Anatomy of Fascism (2004) makes the point that fascists do not come to power in countries that have not experienced democracy and the mobilization of the masses. This also meant that Italian democracy was not starting entirely from scratch after World War II, and the fact that its political parties had established deep roots in the country meant that vestiges of them survived the fascist period and were able to be activated when political participation became possible again. It was also the case that the failure of the Communists, Socialists, and Catholics to cooperate after World War I, even though they represented a majority of the country, had paved the way for Mussolini to seize power in 1922. This history of division and infighting haunted Italy’s main political parties and after the fall of fascism helped them compromise at crucial moments when democracy was at stake.
The antifascist resistance in the north was critical during the final year of World War II. Gilbert writes that “approximately 200,000 Italians fought in the resistance and tens of thousands of patriots assisted in non-combatant roles.” The partisan struggle greatly increased the stature and power of the PCI, which fielded the largest and best-organized units. Although the PCI was the smallest of Italy’s three main opposition parties, it built the strongest fighting force in part because of international communism’s extensive experience with operating underground. This gave the Communists a degree of prestige that helped them overtake the larger and older Socialist Party as Italy’s principal opposition party, which had considerable consequences for Italy’s postwar development.
De Gasperi’s revived Catholic party, the DC, was the largest party able to attract Italy’s centrist and conservative voters. Its predecessor Catholic party, the Italian Popular Party, had been Italy’s second-largest party (after the Socialists) in 1921, when the last truly free elections before the fascist seizure of power were held. De Gasperi, having been tried and sent to prison, had antifascist bona fides. And the Catholic Church, despite being badly compromised by its close ties to fascism, had maintained enough independence and popularity to be the most powerful cultural and political counterweight to the parties of the left. For example, it had successfully resisted Mussolini’s attempt to suppress the charity Catholic Action, which remained one of the only major civil society organizations able to function independently in fascist Italy. The Church provided humanitarian aid during the Nazi occupation. Its extensive network of volunteers, operating in virtually every parish in Italy, became the DC’s backbone.
In the first elections after the war, the DC won about 35 percent of the vote, while the Socialists and the Communists each won about 20 percent. De Gasperi was thus in a somewhat tenuous position: he was the head of the largest party, but its share of the vote was less than the combined vote of the two parties of the left, which were committed to a Communist and atheist ideology that was anathema to him. De Gasperi, Gilbert writes,
had two large, pro-Moscow parties, one of them well-financed and organized, striving to undermine him most of the time (though not all the time, and he and his party owed much to the moderation and genuine patriotism of the left at certain junctures).
After De Gasperi became prime minister for the first time in late 1945, he had the good sense to include both the Socialists and the Communists in the government, appointing the Socialist leader Pietro Nenni as his deputy prime minister and Togliatti as his minister of justice. He retained the foreign ministry for himself because he knew it was important for him to manage relations with the US and Britain, which regarded the presence of two leftist parties in the government with considerable suspicion. Making Togliatti minister of justice was something of a masterstroke. One of Italy’s main problems at war’s end was what to do with all the people who had served in the fascist government. While Germany had the Nuremberg trials and an extensive denazification program, Togliatti proclaimed a general amnesty for former fascists. With the exception of a few of the most egregious war criminals, the overwhelming majority of fascist party leaders and bureaucrats were allowed to become full citizens of democratic Italy.
While the amnesty was and remains controversial—some blame it for Italy’s inadequate reckoning with its fascist past—it may have also been one of the things that guaranteed a peaceful transition from civil war to democracy. Togliatti, ever the Machiavellian pragmatist, essentially opened PCI membership to former fascists: “The PCI declared that anybody who accepted the party’s political line and discipline could join, including people with religious convictions, or even former members of the PNF [Partito Nazionale Fascista].” This was a brilliant marketing and organizational move that swelled its ranks from 400,000 to 1,800,000 by 1946, making it the party with the largest number of active members.
Nenni, the third member of the governing troika, was a charismatic leader and a powerful orator but no match strategically for Togliatti or De Gasperi. He remained under the spell of Stalin, despite the purges and show trials of the 1930s, the assassination of Leon Trotsky, and other atrocities. This led to major tensions between pro- and anti-Soviet Socialists. Rather than heal the rift, Nenni allowed the anti-Stalinists to split off and form the Italian Socialist Workers’ Party, greatly weakening the Socialist Party. Nenni only rethought his allegiances after the Soviets crushed the democratic uprising in Hungary in 1956. By that time the Socialists’ support had shrunk to about 15 percent of the Italian electorate, a distant second to the Communists.
Italy Reborn takes us through a series of crossroad moments when Italian democracy might have foundered. One of these was the referendum in June 1946 on whether the country should remain a monarchy or become a republic. Even though his supporters in the DC were divided on the question, De Gasperi unequivocally backed the republic, forming a united front with the Socialists and the Communists. He understood that to become a democracy, Italy needed, at least in this regard, to make a clean break with the past. When Mussolini had threatened to take power by force in 1922, King Victor Emmanuel, rather than using the Italian military to put down the rebellion, invited him to form a government. The monarchy had gone along with all of Mussolini’s major decisions, from the suppression of democracy and the brutal invasion of Ethiopia to the shameful racial laws of 1938 and, finally, Italy’s disastrous entrance into World War II at Hitler’s side. After months of a vigorous campaign, some 54 percent of the country voted for a republic.
In early 1947 De Gasperi made his first trip to the US and in May of that year decided to form a new government excluding the Socialists and the Communists. It has long been supposed that he was given an ultimatum by the Americans. Gilbert offers the somewhat more nuanced view that De Gasperi reached this decision on his own. He sensed the cold war atmosphere as he traveled in the US and had a clear picture of the desperate state of the postwar Italian economy. The Marshall Plan was announced later that year and did much to revive it. According to Gilbert, De Gasperi “grasped that there was no way a country as war-torn as Italy could be transformed democratically without American investment, higher levels of output, and openness towards Europe.”
The exclusion of the Socialists and Communists set the scene for the elections of April 1948—the most hotly contested and consequential Italian elections of the cold war period. They were presented by both sides as a choice between remaining part of the capitalist, American-dominated postwar order or choosing a united left-wing front allied with the Soviet Union. The left depicted De Gasperi as an American puppet and defender of a corrupt plutocracy little better than fascism. The Christian Democrats portrayed the leftist parties as poisonous snakes that were a threat to Christianity as well as democracy. Two months before the Italian election the Communists in Czechoslovakia carried out a coup and ousted all non-Communists from the government, which worked in the DC’s favor. Priests from one end of the Italian peninsula to the other urged their parishioners to vote to keep out godless communism. The Christian Democrats emerged with their greatest electoral triumph, winning 48 percent of the vote, an exceptional feat in Italy’s multiparty proportional system. An incredible 92 percent of eligible Italian voters went to the polls.
The 1948 elections are sometimes thought to have been orchestrated by a huge covert CIA operation. Gilbert pushes back against this notion:
Any portrayal of the 1948 elections in Italy as a kind of Vatican–State Department semi-coup, during which the plucky forces of the democratic left were overwhelmed by American money and threats, and scaremongering propaganda by the Church, is a parody of what happened, though it remains the dominant interpretation in English-language scholarship.
Both sides had under-the-table financing—the PCI from Moscow and the DC from Washington—and both distorted the truth in smearing the other side. More influential was the funding that the US was offering openly via the Marshall Plan:
It is widely agreed that the most decisive intervention by Washington in the Italian electoral campaign was the pointed announcement, in mid-March 1948, that aid from the European Recovery Plan would not be extended to any country with a communist government.
A few months after the elections, a rabid anti-Communist fired four shots at Togliatti as he walked out of the parliament building, severely wounding him. “THE GOVERNMENT IS RESPONSIBLE!” ran the front-page headline in the Socialist paper Avanti! Angry left-wing supporters went on a two-day rampage, sacking and in some cases burning the offices of the Christian Democrats and their allies, killing fourteen people and wounding some two hundred, many of them police officers. Many Communist partisans were oiling the guns they had been keeping under their beds and preparing to do what they felt they should have done in 1945: attempt a revolution. Togliatti, considering this to be suicidal folly, broadcast a reassuring speech from his hospital room in order to restore calm. This was another crucial moment at which Italy’s postwar leadership pulled it back from the brink of civil war.
In 1949 De Gasperi and the Christian Democrats negotiated Italy’s entrance into NATO. Gilbert writes, “It was one thing to receive Marshall Plan aid, quite another for a former fascist state to count as a member of the ‘West’ in good standing. West Germany would not achieve the same status until 1955.” De Gasperi was also an enthusiastic supporter of opening Italy’s economy up to international trade and of the economic cooperation among European nations that evolved into the European Union. The PCI bitterly opposed Italy’s entrance into NATO and its integration into the American economic and military orbit. It staged enormous and rowdy street protests that were frequently met with brutal repression directed by De Gasperi’s minister of the interior, Mario Scelba. Demonstrators were beaten and in some instances shot at and killed. Despite these violent street battles, De Gasperi stopped short of trying to restrict the left’s rights to free speech and protest, and Togliatti resisted the radical wing of his own party, which pushed for armed revolution. On the eve of major elections in 1952, the Vatican pressured De Gasperi to expand his government to include an openly neofascist party in a grand anti-Communist coalition. To his credit, he resisted.
While a staunch anti-Communist, De Gasperi came from a liberal Catholic tradition that focused on the need for social and political justice. From conviction as well as for political advantage, he pushed for land reform and public housing to improve the lives of Italy’s poorest citizens. This reduced social tensions and land occupations by peasants, which often turned violent.
De Gasperi’s long run of success ended in 1953 after an attempt to overhaul Italy’s electoral laws. He and the DC wanted to award an electoral bonus to the winner of parliamentary elections, granting two thirds of the seats to the coalition that gathered more than 50 percent of the votes. De Gasperi insisted it would bring stability by limiting the constant crises, endless cabinet shuffles, and short-lived governments. The Communist opposition saw the law as authoritarian and denounced it as the legge truffa (“swindle law”). De Gasperi was able to ram it through parliament, but the real test was the national elections in June 1953. The electorate failed to grant De Gasperi and the DC a majority, and the new parliament abrogated the law. (Interestingly, the current government of Giorgia Meloni is pushing for a similar change.) This failure led to his resignation in August 1953, during his eighth term as prime minister, bringing to an end his remarkable and eventful years of success between 1945 and 1953. He died a year later.
After the failure of the electoral reform, De Gasperi told his faithful aide Giulio Andreotti, who went on to be prime minister seven times, that it was “the first time I’ve been wrong since the war ended.” While this may sound arrogant on De Gasperi’s part, Gilbert writes that it was fundamentally correct:
He had…opted for the Republic, compelled the king to step down after 2 June 1946, made peace with Austria, made a dignified protest against the Peace Treaty, wooed the Americans in January 1947, ended governmental cooperation with the PCI in May 1947,…sought Marshall Plan aid, fought the PCI passionately in April 1948 (but respected the PCI’s constitutional rights thereafter), joined the Atlantic alliance in April 1949, implemented land reform, stood firm against Vatican pressure to ally with the undemocratic far right, and had committed Italy to being an integral part of the process of constructing greater West European economic and political cooperation. One need only envision what might have happened in Italy had De Gasperi failed to make even one of those calls, to see how much his agency had mattered for Italy’s transition to democracy.
With the exception of his election law, De Gasperi perfected a unique form of government, one that was dominated by the DC but surprisingly open and pluralistic. The Christian Democrats maintained a monopoly on power, but they had the good sense to adopt some of the reforms advocated by the left to boost their popularity and co-opt their adversaries. During the 1960s De Gasperi’s successors brought the Socialists into center-left governments that undertook major progressive reforms that greatly expanded the Italian welfare state. During the 1970s the DC cooperated extensively with the PCI on both expanding the rights of workers and defeating violent terrorism.
The forty-eight years of Christian Democratic hegemony looked like one-party rule, but it was in fact characterized by a complex interaction between left and right. It was the DC’s protean nature and pragmatism—its ability to preside over both deeply conservative and extremely progressive governments—that allowed it to govern uninterrupted for so long. Through all those years it maintained a firm commitment to democracy and the rights of the opposition, even when terrorism was at its peak.
But the story of the DC is also an object lesson in the price of maintaining power at any cost. In a patronage state with pervasive corruption, public services were slow and wildly inefficient: it took several months to have a phone installed and several years to resolve a simple civil dispute. Getting a hospital bed or a permit for a business often depended on the right connections or the willingness to pay a bribe. As dissatisfaction with this state of things grew in the more prosperous north and center of Italy, the DC came to depend more and more on votes from the southern third of the country, which remained underdeveloped and under the sway of party chieftains with ties to organized crime. What had seemed a reasonable alternative to Soviet-style communism before the fall of the Berlin Wall no longer seemed viable in an era of European unification and global competition.
English (US) · 