Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of ...

The Italian post-war experience 229
The historical evolution of the idea of honour, homeland and nation
was far less linear in Italy than in France and, therefore, even more ambiguous.
The late unification of the country meant that different allegiances
to different homelands remained even after territorial unity was
achieved. In other words, the Italian State and the Italian nation did not
develop along parallel paths and did not become a unit with which all
Italians could identify. During the Risorgimento, the struggle to create
an Italian homeland and nation was not pursued on the basis of one single
project. How many formerly independent Italian states would the new
nation include and which form of government would be finally chosen?
These remained open questions up to the end of the unification process.
Only the Piedmontese king, after national unity, could claim allegiance
on the basis of what honour should dictate first of all to the aristocrats
and the officers, but this allegiance had been built – except in the case
of the Piedmontese themselves – on breaking similar allegiances to the
monarchs of the former independent states, not all of whom were foreign
and loathed as much as the Austrians. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s
novel The Leopard shows extremely well how weak a Sicilian aristocrat’s
feeling of allegiance towards the new Italian king could be in the aftermath
of unification. The First World War turned out to be a unifying but
very trying experience. During that war military discipline was harshly
enforced, and after the war the liberal state failed to reward this tremendous
national effort. Finally, within this scenario, violent confrontation
between a new left and right brought Mussolini to power. Subsequently,
the events of 1943 brought about another dramatic split in national allegiances.
The armistice, the continuity of government represented by the
king under the protection of the Allies in the south, and, on the other side,
the comeback of Mussolini with the help of the Germans in the north,
forced the Italians to choose between two homelands – or hide. In the
post-war period, the Italians faced yet another major national confrontation:
that of the 1948 general election. The choice was now between East
and West, between renovation and stabilisation, between remembrance
and amnesia.
Memories of the end and new myths
Between 1947 and 1948, with the country on the verge of civil war, once
again no unifying idea of the Italian nation could provide a rallying point
or a source of consensus for the Italians. One could argue that by that
time an already weakly integrated Italian nation had became even weaker,
and maybe ceased to exist altogether. Alternatively, one could argue that
what had disintegrated in 1943 had been only the Fascist nation. Indeed,