Analysis
In 1945, the partisan grammar was committed to paper
To restore the long wake of the legacy of the Liberation, it is essential to start from the material heritage sedimented by the partisan war, which became embodied in the new republican nation.
Article from 1945, l’anno più grande (“1945, The Greatest Year”), a special supplement to il manifesto (which you can buy here).
Italy’s national insurrection of April 25, 1945 did not represent “only” the end of the Nazi occupation and the final collapse of fascism. It marked the starting point of a re-founding of the state and the notion of citizenship in our country, enshrined in a Constitution written with the pen and earned with the rifle. The Constitution was the direct offspring “of the struggle, the denial of fascism and the revolutionary war for which we found ourselves together on the front of the Resistance,” as Aldo Moro definitively stated in a session of the Constituent Assembly.
Eighty years later, the historical leap embodied in those events still preserves intact the value structure of a collective pact which – precisely because it is located in the context of a regression of democracy on the international scale – casts a sharply divergent figure with respect to the totalizing ideologies of the free market (understood as the expansion of global capital that overflows wherever it encounters lines of ever-diminishing resistance, overwhelming the labor factor); of access to fundamental rights on a private basis (moving them into the sphere of individual consumer goods); of the marginalization of democratic participation, interpreted as an irrelevant practice not only by the owner classes (who don’t need it), but also by the popular classes who need it precisely because they are in a subaltern condition.
To restore the long wake of the legacy of the Liberation, it is essential to start from the material heritage sedimented by the partisan war, which became embodied in the new republican nation.
It is essential to remember that before the advent of anti-fascist democracy in Italy, sovereignty moved along a descending vertical, that is, from the top (king, Duce and government) to the bottom (the subjects). In the historical space between April 25, 1945, and January 1, 1948, the day the Constitution came into force, sovereignty changed in a radical manner, starting to move from below (the people, to whom it rightfully belonged) towards the top (those delegated with temporary offices in Parliament).
Before anti-fascist democracy, women, half of the population, had never enjoyed the socio-political rights of citizenship.
It is only with anti-fascist democracy that rights took on a fundamental mass character with respect to work, health and education. And likewise, it was only the democracy that emerged from the partisan struggle that recognized in the Constitution the existence of social inequalities, assigning to the Republic the task of intervening to remove those obstacles. The repudiation of war as a means of resolution of international disputes is not only a caution in favor of peace included after the “pedagogy of disaster,” but a precise indication of the fact that systems organized around capitalism and power politics tend to make use of that instrument of death in order to untie the knots of their irreducible contradictions. Quite the contrary, our Constitution envisions for the first time a healthy, conflictual democracy which sees the instruments of strikes, mobilizations, participation in public life and radical critique of the existing order as indispensable vectors of emancipation and full self-realization of the person. The Constitution represented the material final shape of an impulse based on ideals, the concretization of a partisan grammar that the women and men of the Resistance used when they were still only “mountain rebels,” announcing to the country: “This faith that we carry with us will be the law of the future.”
However, the law of the future has always had strong, well-resources and indomitable enemies.
It wasn’t just Giorgio Almirante, who is considered the father of the post-fascists in government today, who penned an article with the eloquent title “It's not a celebration” on the tenth anniversary of the Liberation. Just like him – and certainly to much greater effect – it was the country's ruling and propertied classes that opposed the implementation of the new state established on April 25, exploiting the Cold War balances which, in the eyes of the Western allies, painted a distorted picture of the strong trunk of the Constitution as merely a branch of the Communist enemy.
These were the years when the partisan brigades were forbidden to celebrate the Liberation in the streets across Italy because, according to then-Interior Minister Mario Scelba, their parading recalled paramilitary groups banned by law.
Thus, in the first decade of its life – 1946-1956 – the Constitution, branded by Scelba as “a trap,” suffered the so-called “freeze,” and all the main institutions of republican democracy failed to see the light of day: from the Constitutional Court to the Superior Council of the Judiciary, the Regions, referendums, labor law reform, the closing of asylums, the establishment of the National Health Service, the divorce law, the right to abortion, the reform of fascist penal codes or the reform of schools and universities. It would be only thanks to the great impetus of the labor, student and women's movements that the Republic would finally experience the “decade of the Constitution” from 1968-1978, which brought its values into factories, schools, universities, homes and society as a whole. That impetus given by anti-fascist democracy was countered by the “deep state” and the neo-fascists with indiscriminate massacres, brought up once again from the cesspool of history after they had been used against Italian civilians during World War II.
Now, in a world that is turned completely upside down, our democracy remains a “difficult” one, and working amid this new complexity means not only trying to read the past in order to understand the present, but also – according to Marc Bloch's indispensable teaching – trying to keep attention and engagement alive in the present in order to ask the past the right questions.
Our April 25 comes at this time of collapse, in the knowledge that the understanding of the Constitution as a “promised revolution” put in place of a “failed revolution” – Piero Calamandrei's famous formula – remains a formidable program for the future, bequeathed to us from long ago.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/la-grammatica-partigiana-che-prese-forma-di-carta on 2025-04-25