Mazzinianesimo, fascismo, comunismo: l'itinerario politico di Delio Cantimori (1919-1943)

Abstract

Delio Cantimori (1904-1966) was one of the most important Italian historians of the twentieth century. His studies on sixteenth-century religious history, on Italian 'Jacobinism' and on the various projects for social reform in Italy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, on Marx and Marxism, on the history of Italian and European culture in the early modern era put him in a leading position in Italian historiography, from the 1930s to the end of the 1960s. But this vast historiographical enterprise is not the only reason for the fascination which Cantimori exercised, directly or indirectly, over generations of Italian historians, nor does it explain why he still arouses so much interest among students of twentieth-century Italian intellectual history. Cantimori was much more intimately connected to political events than most of the historians of his generation. Especially in the Fascist period, he often wrote on political topics in essays, reviews and critical analyses. In some respects, his complex evolution, from his youthful republicanism inspired by the nineteenth-century republican ideologist and agitator Giuseppe Mazzini to revolutionary Fascism, and then to Communism, is an exemplary case of the ideological evolution of important sections of the Italian intelligentsia of the twentieth century.

Michele Ciliberto (Intellettuali e Fascismo. Saggio su Delio Cantimori, Bari, 1977) was the first to start research in that direction, especially in the two initial chapters of his 1977 much-discussed book, where the risk was of propounding a teleological interpretation of Cantimori's long journey through Fascism and of its conclusion, much as if this could be seen as an itinerarium mentis in Deum, gradually leading to the communist militancy. The recent upsurge of studies due to the separate publication as a volume of a collection of Cantimori's-1927-1942 political writings and to the reprinting of Eretici italiani del Cinquecento (originally appeared in 1939) has instead followed different routes. Some scholars (A. Prosperi, R. Fubini, A. Rotondò, C. Vivanti) brought their attention to bear on strictly historiographical problems, on the research about early modern Italian heretics and on its significance in the study of sixteenth-century religious life. Those who have concentrated themselves mostly on Cantimori's political writings emphasised on their part the importance of his 'German' essays, his articles on the late-1920s right wing youth movement up to the very first years of Nazi regime, with its myths and ideologists: in so doing they followed chiefly Luisa Mangoni's idea of the central importance of Cantimori's reflection on Germany as a clue to interpreting his later production. Prosperi's and Mangoni's works gave also a great documentary contribution on Cantimori's politico-intellectual activity to 1943, especially on the basis of materials belonging to the historian's personal archive, now undergoing a complete inventory at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and consequently unavailable for the time being to the scholars' inspection. Some important documents concerning the historian's relationships with Giovanni Gentile were recently presented also by Paolo Simoncelli (Cantimori, Gentile e la Normale di Pisa. Profili e documenti, Milano, 1994). The Author of the present essay intends to bring the debate back to the fundamental problem of Cantimori's Fascism and attempts at explaining his tormented political and intellectual itinerary, in the belief that his very diverse political and ideological options share nonetheless some basic elements to be found in his personality and culture and in the ideas he developed on contemporary problems. The Author also strives also not to insulate Cantimori's political reflection from his historical production and tries to distinguish the not always apparent and obvious links between these two fields of the historian's work.

Cantimori himself often remarked on the importance of his upbringing in a highly politicized family milieu in Romagna, an Italian region in which political conflict was very intense and sometimes violent, with a strong 'subversive', Mazzini-inspired and republican tradition which lasted more than a century. Carlo Cantimori (1878-1963), Delio's father – a teacher and journalist – was for a long time a local and national leader of the Republican party, a political force which was radically critical of the post-Risorgimento Italian political order. He was the author of a book of some interest on Giuseppe Mazzini's thought, published in 1904 and re-issued in 1922, and of a great number of essays and newspaper articles on Mazzini. His evolution is in some respect typical: a positivist in his youth, he was rapidly influenced by the new cultural climate which asserted itself in Italy (and in Europe) at the beginning of the twentieth century, the so-called 'rebirth of idealism'. In 1910 he started to look with interest at the work of Giovanni Gentile (rather than that of Croce, who instead opposed the Mazzinian legacy); he followed attentively the debates of the cultural and political reviews of those years, such as Giuseppe Prezzolini's La Voce and Gaetano Salvemini's L'Unità. Together with all of this cultural world, Carlo Cantimori was a firm supporter of Italy's intervention in the First World War in 1915, not just for the conquest of 'unredeemed' territories, but to break the Italian political order and eliminate the political forces which had run the country in the so-called 'Giolitti era'. In this wide political front in favour of Italian intervention in the war, Gentile became, after 1917, one of the most respected figures. In those years Gentile focused his political thought on Mazzini as a man and as a thinker, re-interpreted from an idealist and anti-individualistic Etatist point of view. Gentile's writings on Mazzini in 1919 strongly influenced Carlo Cantimori's thought. He revised his 1904 book on the basis of Gentile's influence, and published it a few months before the March on Rome of 1922. When Fascism rose, Carlo Cantimori initially opposed it and in 1924 he even planned to emigrate abroad. But in 1926 he joined the Fascist Party, and from that moment onwards he was a convinced republican and Mazzini-inspired Fascist. In 1944 he still saw Mazzini's 'Repubblica romana' of 1849 as a forerunner of Mussolini's 'Repubblica sociale' of 1943-45. The Author devotes much attention to Carlo Cantimori because his case is a typical illustration of the relationship which existed between the Mazzini-inspired tradition and a certain kind of Fascism. One must bear in mind that the Mazzini tradition was not confined to the Partito repubblicano and organizations connected to it, but covered a rather wider ideological spectrum, much vaguer and politically undefined; and that 'Fascism' refers not so much to nationalism, traditionalism or Catholicism, but rather to the intellectual rebellion of the 1910s, to Sorel-inspired syndicalism, revolutionary interventionism and some aspects of the wave of enthusiasm for the First World War, to D'Annunzio's movement for Fiume, the youth movements inspired by Gentile's attualismo in immediate post-war years and the urge to get rid of 'Old Italy'.

This was the background to Cantimori's upbringing. For the young student at the 'liceo' his first impact with Giovanni Gentile's thought consisted of Gentile's interpretation of Mazzini, and the school reform which Gentile carried out as Minister of Education in the Mussolini government. In 1924, when he went to the Scuola Normale Superiore, Cantimori was able to study in greater detail the more strictly philosophical aspects of Gentile's thought. There has been much discussion of Cantimori's 'attualismo', and there have been attempts to prove and emphasize an early crisis of this 'attualismo'. The Author shares with other scholars the view according to which there was a 'sustained loyalty' to Gentile's thought, and Cantimori derived many historical topics from Gentile, both in the field of the studies of heresy and on concepts such as 'culture' and the 'history of culture'. Loyalty does not imply slavish repetition. Cantimori always tried to reformulate in an independent manner the categories of Gentile's Idealist Historicism, often applying them to new problems emerging both from historical research and from political reality, thus taking this Historicism beyond its hermeneutic limits and simplifications. This goes as far as the strictly intellectual sphere is concerned. As far as academic life and publishing life go, Paolo Simoncelli's recent studies have stressed the full participation of Cantimori in Gentile's cultural policy right up to Mussolini's fall from power in 1943.

Cantimori's Fascism emerged at an earlier stage of life than was the case for his father. Already in 1924, in the months following the assassination of the Social Democrat MP, Giacomo Matteotti, he thought of joining the National Fascist Party (PNF, Partito Nazionale Fascista), as he eventually did in 1926. In his detached attitude towards the Matteotti affair one can find in Cantimori (as in Gentile himself) that combination of voluntaristic Idealism and political realism, revolutionism and 'Machiavellism' which will always be typical of his mental framework. Fascism was for him a 'religion', a 'totalitarian' vision of life, which would make possible a more general religious reform of Italian society, eliminating the historical defects of Italian national character, to complete that plan of «making Italians» (after the making of Italy) which had been set as an objective from the Risorgimento to the time of Liberal Italy, and which had miserably failed. The masses had been excluded from the Risorgimento movements, and then led (and ultimately misled) into the political arena by the Socialists. They could now proceed in their upward march, to become a nation and thus identify with the state. All these motifs are typical of Gentile's thought. The young Cantimori added a greater degree of attention to the general European situation, to the topics of the European crisis and decline, in which he felt that Fascism could offer a solution. Already in 1929, in some of the writings which had remained unknown and which are published in the Appendix to this essay, the young scholar reveals himself as a supporter of Fascist 'Europeanism' which will develop along its own lines up to the end of the Fascist regime. It was a 'Europeanism' which was radically opposed to the liberal democratic version; it did not abandon any ambitions to a continental hegemony and an imperial perspective, but considered it still necessary to move in the existing international framework, such as that represented by the League of Nations. The young Cantimori also added to these interests a special attention to social issues (which came from the 'subversivism' of his background). This emerged especially after 1929, in the 'second phase' of Cantimori's Fascism.

The turning point is represented by the Lateran Treaty, the reconciliation between the Catholic Church and the Italian state, signed on 11 February 1929. The Apostolic Roman Catholic confession was reasserted as the religion of the Fascist state and the old Nationalist, Catholic and antimodernist tendencies of Fascism were greatly strengthened by the new situation. How could Fascism be the basis of a new 'religious reformation', when it was running the risk of being hegemonized by traditionally reactionary forces, hostile to all the history of the Italian Risorgimento? It was precisely against the influence of these forces on the culture and the national character of Italians that the reform should have been carried out. As many other followers of Gentile, Cantimori reacted to the political and cultural disarray which followed the 'Concordato' by redefining his Fascism in two directions. On the one hand he challenged more forcefully all reactionary and nationalist catholic interpretations of Fascism. On the other he stressed its social aspect, i.e. the Corporatist doctrine. For Cantimori and and many young Italian intellectuals, Corporatism represented for many years a third way, distinct from Western capitalism and Bolshevik statism, the revolutionary solution proposed by Fascism to the crisis of European society, which was also aggravated by the consequences of the Great Depression of 1929. For those who took seriously this revolutionary solution (together with its roots in the Italian Risorgimento, that is to say in a revolution with its own social and religious agenda) Fascism could not be assimilated to the various reactionary movements which were present all over Europe. Fascism was to be the banner of «European revolution, not reaction». In a similar manner Cantimori – once again following in Gentile's footsteps – marked a sharp division between authentic Fascism and the men and the ideological baggage which was brought over to Fascism by the old Nationalist movement, its political Catholicism, its ideological traditionalism, its social authoritarianism. He was firmly opposed to the «revanche over the Risorgimento», which many of the Nationalists coveted in the wake of the 'Concordato'.

On the basis of this interpretation of Fascism, which was shared by a significant number of young Italians and by some political and intellectual milieus, such as Critica fascista (a review run by Giuseppe Bottai, minister of the Corporations between 1929 and 1932) and by the Nuovi studi di diritto, economia e politica, a series edited by two pupils of Gentile, Ugo Spirito and Arnaldo Volpicelli. Cantimori took part in their publishing activities until1935 , dealing with new political movements in Europe, and especially Bolshevism and National Socialism. Cantimori inherited from the political milieu in which he was brought up an overall anti-bourgeois attitude, which found expression in his kind of Fascism. He was therefore extremely interested in the Soviet experience, avoiding any anti-Communist preconception, both with reference to planning and the human and economic costs it involved, and to the restrictions on freedom and the regimentation of cultural life existing in Stalin's Russia. In Cantimori's eyes, the rationalization of social life which was carried out by 'enlightened' minorities seemed preferable to the 'anarchy' of the market, which he considered essentially immoral. This is why he often wrote that Fascism should not be conceived as anti-Communism, as a bulwark of European reaction. For Cantimori, the relation between Italian Fascism and Bolshevism was not one of opposition, but of competition. In 1931 he wrote that these were «two new movements, which are fighting among each other in different ways for the conquest of an old world», not an old movement (Fascism) opposed to a new one (Communism).

Cantimori's relationship with the German intellectual milieu and with National Socialism was much more complex. This essay does not rediscuss his studies on German culture (Schmitt, Jünger, Moeller van der Bruck), which have been discussed at length by other authors. It prefers, instead, to focus on the political judgement of National Socialism, which Cantimori expressed as an Italian Fascist between 1933 and 1935, in the context of the judgement expressed by the Fascist milieu to which he was connected. Cantimori had been following since the mid-Twenties that political and cultural constellation which goes under the name of «konservative Revolution», and in 1927-28 he had portrayed sympathetically their positions. In the following years Cantimori often criticized the 'political Romanticism' which he sees lurking in many aspects of German political culture, stressing its reactionary aspects, as opposed to the revolutionary nature of Fascist Corporatism. In March 1933 he dealt for the first time with National Socialism, and he judged it negatively from a political point of view, as a «confused and dark movement, spiritual heir to pre-war racist pan-German movement and to Romantic statism». He stressed the ideological distances which separates it from Fascism, while praising the social Left of the Strasser brothers and being attentive to the anticapitalist National Socialist milieus, to Nationalbolschewismus, which he knew well, and which were destined to lose in the political infighting of the NSDAP. In Cantimori's 1933 short review we find all the basic themes of his attitude towards National Socialism. This essay follows in detail the evolution of this judgement in the following years and the role which Cantimori played in the reception of Carl Schmitt's thought in Italy.

Despite the fact that Cantimori noticed profound differences between revolutionary Fascism and National Socialism, he nevertheless shows no sympathy for the Weimar Republic, or its parties, for its culture. This is one of the many symptoms of another constant aspect of Cantimori's thought: his hostility towards parliamentary institutions, democratic systems, liberal values as a whole. For Cantimori and for many other members of his generation, liberalism belonged to Stefan Zweig's «World of Yesterday». The present work examines in this perspective Cantimori's relationship to Croce, the greatest 'legal' opponent of the Fascist regime. In those years Croce was reflecting on the eclipse of liberalism and the triumph of totalitarianism. A wide gulf separated the young historian from the moral world of Croce. Cantimori expressed highly critical judgements on Alain, Ortega y Gasset, Huizinga, Thomas Mann and many other figures of European liberal and Christian culture. This study attempts to address the difficult issue concerning the relationship between Cantimori's political choices in these years and his field of research, i.e. the history of Italian heretics of the Sixteenth-century, forerunners of religious freedom. Cantimori's studies on this topic up to 1939 are discussed.

Cantimori's confidence in Fascism begins to waver in 1934-35 and it vanishes in the years 1935 through 1938, when the actual policy of Mussolini's regime leads many supporters of 'Corporatism' see the failure of their ideals, and its dissolution into its different components (refusal of reactionary positions and anti-Communism, opposition to National Socialism, anti-racism, immanent and non-confessional ethics). This is the point at which begins the political diaspora of many intellectuals who had believed in Corporatism and the revolutionary nature of Fascism. Cantimori realized the mystification involved in many of his earlier positions, but did not accept a merely critical or agnostic position towards Fascism, nor did he return to ideological positions, such as liberalism, which he considered relics of the past. Communism – which he embraced after 1938 – seemed to him a new 'system of truth', which was not exposed to dark irrational tendencies, and which satisfied, in a historically visible form, many of the aspirations which he had thought Fascism could have fulfilled. This was a complex intellectual evolution, which this essay investigates on the basis of the fragmentary evidence now available and through his political writings, considered in all their cautiousness and hesitancy. Cantimori's political choice remained undetected by most of his contemporaries, and it did not lead to political activism or underground activities. He continued to operate in the cultural institutions of the regime, and at the end of 1940 he began teaching at the Scuola Normale in Pisa, in close contact with Gentile. Nevertheless, in 1941-42 he established contact with Giulio Einaudi, the heterodox publisher in Turin. The changes affected more his cultural attitudes: around 1940 he began a study of Marxism, which was to continue until the end of the 1940s. In the field of historical research he devoted himself to the analysis of some Italian social reformers in the period between the French Revolution and 1848.