April 25, 2026. After 81 years, April 25 has once again proven to be a divisive date. One need only read the day’s news reports to see this. It is no coincidence that historians have devoted particular attention to the “divided memory of the ‘Resistance,’ the founding myth of the Italian Republic.” Reflection has been given to the very choice of April 25 as the date to celebrate the “democratic nation.” It is the date of the “general uprising,” which, moreover, was proclaimed—the context of events is not entirely irrelevant in the face of historically significant facts—when the Anglo-Americans were already just a few kilometers from Milan: in short, a “prudent insurrection,” as someone wrote in 1956, “timid and gentle toward the Germans barricaded in the Hotel Flora, as well as toward Valerio Borghese, shut away in his barracks, while it was vengeful and implacable toward the defenseless Claretta Petacci, the Counts Manzoni, and the poor prisoners of Schio.”
Those who have studied the subject in depth have not drawn a comforting conclusion: it has been noted “how a ‘partisan’ memory of recent history … has nipped in the bud the possibility—though sincerely nurtured by the parties of the anti-fascist spectrum—of endowing the cause of the resurgent democracy with mass consensus.” Such an outcome would have been possible—it is noted—“on one condition: that one not indulge in the rhetoric of anti-fascism” and that one not yield to the temptation of “a significant distortion of memory, starting with the simple fact that fascism was overthrown by the Allies and not by the ‘Resistance.’”
This distortion of memory, of course, was neither accidental nor politically neutral. It has become a constitutive element of the so-called “anti-fascist paradigm,” the formation of which served to shift the country’s political balance to the left starting in the late 1950s, first with the “center-left,” then with the “historic compromise” and “national solidarity.” This is an aspect that fits into the so-called “public use of history,” that is, the construction of a “public memory,” which is quite different from historiography. Precisely with reference to anti-fascism and the “Resistance,” in 1959 Roberto Battaglia, a historian who was active in the Action Party and later in the Communist Party, very clearly outlined the aims and premises of a “political use of history.” He began with a highly realistic observation: “a political party is not an academy of scholars or a movement of historians, but exists directly engaged in reality, in the service of an immediate struggle or controversy to be waged”. This is because “political action and historical interpretation do not necessarily coincide”: “the elaboration of ‘history’ is valid insofar as it is capable of driving action forward, of translating into a genuine ‘slogan’ that everyone can understand and internalize.”
It follows—in the words of those who have most recently taken up the discourse on “public memory” and “anti-fascism”—that “public memory is distinct from historiography: [in the former] historians do not act, except on an occasional basis; political and institutional actors act, as do the mainstream press and the mass media.” “Public memory” is entirely free from the strict constraints imposed, by contrast, on historiography: the latter “must grapple with the task of comprehending and analyzing everything in a country’s history; public memory is inevitably selective, making choices, even drastic ones,” thereby placing, among other things, serious responsibility on those institutional figures who help shape it according to the political needs of the moment, as they perceive them.
The responsibility of institutional figures emerges. They confer the stamp of officialdom on “collective memory,” transforming it into “public memory” and thus shaping a particular “public use of history” at a specific historical-political moment. It has already been emphasized that “public memory is inevitably selective; it makes choices, even drastic ones.” And the drastic nature of these choices stems from the fact that through them, events, contexts, and people can be condemned to oblivion simply because—to put it bluntly—they are not to the liking of the dominant forces or the politics of the moment. In this regard, one need only recall the absolute and conspiratorial silence that still persists regarding a figure who was absolutely crucial to the “Resistance” but highly inconvenient for militant anti-fascism, such as Alfredo Pizzoni, a highly decorated war veteran who later became president of Credito Italiano.
The role of oblivion is therefore bitter and complex. Oblivion casts people and events into the shadows and thus shapes memory, contributing to its construction and to the construction of the group’s identity and the project implied within it. In this sense, memory—shaped in part by oblivion—has the delicate function of projecting a community’s past into the future: even the most personal memories are mediated by group membership and can be evoked only through social interactions with those who share the same memories. The group sharing these memories may vary in size (the family, the religious group, the social class, the nation), but it remains circumscribed by the relationship its members have with the past in light of their expectations for the future; and this transition from past to future, to which the identity-forming process is anchored, is more or less intense depending on the extent of the future expectations upon which identity is constructed.
At this point, the responsibility of institutional figures becomes clearer. Their official statements “matter” because they shape public memory and construct an identity project. Depending on the direction intended for this project, those “drastic choices” mentioned earlier will be made, in the sense that, depending on the project, historical facts worthy of remembrance will be selected and, if necessary, “reworked,” while others will be consigned to oblivion.
Here, then, emerges a topic of inquiry that is not without interest from multiple perspectives. It consists of a sine ira et studio examination of the official statements issued by the highest institutional figures on the occasion of April 25, 2026. The themes addressed were freedom and democracy set in contrast to “fascist oppression, which had denied Italians freedom and democracy.” Reference was also made to a “Party of the Fatherland,” which would have opposed “an occupier, to redeem the shame of the collaborators.” This party would include “the young people who fled the summons of the self-styled Italian Social Republic… the priests slaughtered in retaliation… the Poles and the Italian Corps of Liberation, along with the reconstituted formations of the Italian Army.”
These very recent words seem, in reality, to have an old-fashioned ring to them. It is hard to say, in fact, how much the references to “oppression” and the “shame of the collaborators” differ from the early phase of studies on fascism and antifascism, when the history of fascism was constructed along the lines of the memory of the antifascists and consequently was fundamentally structured around two interpretive frameworks: one according to which the Regime imposed itself through the actions of a violent minority and its police apparatus; the other, according to which the Italian people were alien to the Regime and victims of its repressive actions. If this were indeed the perspective, the observations made in 2001 by a historian who is absolutely above suspicion of any “revisionist” sympathies would once again be relevant: Gianpasquale Santomassimo, according to whom, at the end of World War II, in Italian public discourse “the image of a mythical fascism took hold, a sort of absolute evil, of inhumanity, devoid of real roots and consensus in customs and common sentiment.”
The creation of a “mythical fascism” did not benefit the republican institutions and their quest for legitimacy, nor the creation of a shared “homeland” felt as such by Italians emerging from a bloody civil war, nor—much less—the construction of a shared memory. And this for a simple reason: that “myth” found no reflection in the experience that Italians of the time had just lived through.
An unavoidable question arises at this point: in 2026, 81 years after the end of the war, has “mythical fascism” finally been discarded? Is the complexity of the Italian reality of the time—as reconstructed by the most recent historiography—adequately reflected in the language used in today’s official statements? [1 – continued]
