Rome

ON THE WORLD TODAY

ITALY has suddenly come of age. It was a solemn ordeal, of which people were acutely conscious. Unlike an American campaign, the rostrum was silent the week before the June 2 plebiscite, but the people themselves took up the argument; in every square, far into the night, there was the nearest thing to a forum Italy has ever experienced. It was Union Square multiplied by ten thousand. Opponents brought together by chance disagreed fluently; but there was scrupulous courtesy and at worst some good-natured chafling.

Wandering through the streets of Florence on that unforgettable first night after the proclamation of the Republic, one could realize the depth of the pentup feelings and hopes which had been awaiting release. Shops and windows were festooned with greenery wreaths, with colored-paper knots, stars, streamers, and flowers arranged with unstudied grace, with dolls and bright silverware put out in surrealistic simplicity, with floodlit vegetable displays in national colors. Old flyspecked prints of Garibaldi, Mazzini, and Risorgimento battles were brought out of back rooms into the light of day.

Between the orderly voting and the final proclamation of the Republic there had been an ugly moment. Of what happened behind the scenes during those strange days the American press seems to have taken little notice, although the crisis in Rome was far more serious than that in Naples. The King was willing at first to take ill fortune with good grace. But as it became clearer that there was a substantial number of disputable ballots, court circles took heart and asked for a second referendum. Meanwhile they began talking about the feasibility of a coup de force.

The prudent decision of the Supreme Court not to proclaim the Republic as official at the meeting staged for this purpose on June 10 was a surprise even TO the Cabinet but became partially explainable when it was known that someone had warned the justices that in the event they were on the wrong side they would be the first to be executed.

The inner circle

In all these emergency machinations the King himself did not take the initiative. The leading role was played by that inner circle existing in all royal courts but which to modern Americans would seem to be a tale of the times of Marie Antoinette. Yet such circles have played a decisive role in many contemporary crises, including the British abdication in 1936. In Italy they brought Mussolini to power in 1922 and then deposed him in 1943.

What are such circles made of? Added to the confidential advisers are retired die-hards, jurists, generals, admirals, key men of the Army Intelligence, military aristocrats, feudal landlords, and a small knot of senior political figures closely tied up with the traditional order. One should not forget certain titled ladies with extensive connections, handling the country’s problems as they do their own family affairs, who have been gadflies and busybodies in many Italian political adventures, especially in the Spanish intervention in 1936. Of all these figures, only the Minister of the Royal Household had any constitutional responsibility.

This group of monarchists had brought intrigue and propaganda to a feverish pitch during the week preceding the elections. A large part of the middle classes, people who would have backed impeachment of the monarchy a few months before, had been worked into a panic and went around warning others not to “jump in the dark.” They were persuaded by now that if the Republic became a reality they would lose their jobs, their eyes would be gouged out, and their daughters would be handed to the multitude. The monarchists worked up the frenzy sedulously. Knighthoods and crosses were distributed in quantity; grave threats were circulated in certain other quarters. Ex-Fascist bigwigs with followers who had hitherto merely sulked against the monarchy for its “betrayal” in 1943 now openly rallied to the cause and went around prophesying “the end of the interlude” and mass anti-Fascist executions. They were backed by irresponsible court groups pressing hard on the King to “reassert authority” and break once and for all the power of the upstart common people.

This was a strange contrast to Humbert’s avowed and probably sincere wish of becoming a socialist King in the Scandinavian pattern, but the handicaps of a dynasty are not all on the surface.

Monarchy versus the people

Then there was the presence of the British, aloof but extremely visible in the display of military means, and it was understood by both factions that if they came to blows, the occupant would restore law and order — on the side of the monarchy.

Both sides played their cards accordingly. De Gasperi, the Prime Minister, was visibly wavering. At this critical juncture it was the people who saved the situation. The huge creature which had lain apathetic for years, bewildered and stunned by so many changes, disgusted by politicians and liberators alike, now gathered itself together, and the more it was belabored by the scarehead monarchist propaganda, the more it began to know its own mind.

There were parades, hundreds of thousands strong, almost frightening in discipline and compactness. National symbols and patriotic anthems showed that the people had decided not to provoke civil war.

The court group had been banking to the last minute on the carabinieri and parachute battalions with the backing of the Navy and grenadier regiments for a swift coup. De Gasperi was courting death when he went to challenge them legally at the Royal Palace on the evening of June 11; but the next day it was clear that the end had come.

The armed forces had not responded. The police force, the faithful carabinieri, even the cuirassiers of the palace guard, went on taking orders from the government. The British were backing out and so was the Pope. The Left by now had grown confident of its organization and was prepared to counter force with force. The fleeting chance of the monarchy had disintegrated. During the night of June 12 the British themselves advised Humbert to go. The next day the King took a plane Lisbonward.

Today the whole monarchy issue is a thing of the past. The vague fears and inhibitions which caused so many to vote monarchist against their professed ideals have yielded to stable reality; forces which gathered around the throne in a last effort are now scattered, resigned to the new order of things.

The South and the North

The monarchists had always known that they would have Northern and Central Italy against them. They had even thought for the moment of splitting the South away, but it was really Southern Italy that let them down: there the percentage in their favor was 65 instead of the expected 85.

The attachment of the South to the House of Savoy does not spring from ancient fealty (this, if at all, should have been the case in Piedmont, which actually voted against the monarchy), but from a deepseated apprehension of having the machinery of government wrested from it by a politically more advanced North. The monarchy seemed to provide a stable frame for the feudal clients and bureaucratic mandarins from the South who fill the Italian administration, while the Southern masses have their own reasons for fearing economic control by the North, which to them used to mean big tariffs and high prices.

Such is the background of the much overplayed riots in Naples, in which a few people were killed and a number of republican priests stripped and dosed with castor oil. Actually, in the political melee the Christian Democrats came out on top, but the Church hierarchy seems to have taken some hard knocks.

The bishops had committed themselves from the start. Instructions were tightened throughout Italy, as they were also in France, in favor of the Right. Of hundreds of parish priests in Rome, only five had voiced republican opinions, and these five were called in by the Vatican ad audiendum verbum.

Turin and Trieste

The new Republic came in under difficult and painful auspices. It is as if the Big Three had timed their decisions so as to make it bear the penalty of all the crimes of the monarchy. The Italians have learned only now what they are to lose. The French border corrections seem to have meant only petty aggravation, but there is more to the situation than meets the eye.

Turin now stands under the threat of being wiped off the map by the flood from the Mont Cenis Dam. It is really being held by the throat. But what has sent the Italians into agonies of hurt feelings is Trieste. It is not a matter of sound reason but of sentiment.

Trieste had been built up as a holy city of Italian patriotism for three generations. Hundreds of thousands died during the First World War to free it from the foreign yoke — and now the city is again detached and turned into another precarious Danzig. The clumsy horse-trading at Paris has sent the Italians into another tailspin of frantic nationalist emotion which affords a welcome escape from their past guilt and need of self-criticism.

As for the press, which might help them to find their bearings, it is now nine-tenths controlled by rightist money. The trained seals of the fascist propaganda section, who have been put back to run it, are only too happy to mix hurt innocence, a persecution complex, and anti-Allied abuse in an unending stream of rhetoric.

Reconstruction begins

Despite such adverse circumstances, and thanks to the ancient soundness of the people, the Republic has weathered its first storm creditably. New “influences” are not quite sure where the new fulcrums of power are going to appear and they are sparring cautiously for position.

The general pattern, as in France, is tripartite: Catholics, Socialists, and Communists, in that order. This division lends itself to dangerous stalemates, but the responsible men are showing for the present a remarkable team spirit. They know that the time has come at last, after what seemed an interminable paralysis, when something has to be done.

There is reconstruction to be accomplished; there is a state to be reorganized, waste and confusion to be stopped, and a budget to be balanced. Money for this work can come only from the pockets of the rich.

Wealth and taxes

The rich, who have come through the war and defeat unscathed, see the danger clearly. But with the breaking up of the old order, they are temporarily at a loss. During this transition period there is still a chance for the electorate to push through essential financial measures. The stabilization of the lira and budget balancing would entail the raising of taxes from a present 11 per cent to an over-all 22, which approximates our own, with a steeply rising scale for large incomes, because the little man is already taxed to capacity.

The rich in Italy have never been willing to pay more than token taxes. They cannot rouse another Fascism, so they are casting around for support, but the tides have turned against them, at least for the time being, even that of business opinion, for not everybody is a landholder living off the black market.

If half the money now frozen in banks were circulating on short-term credit, the whole reconstruction could be financed in five years’ time. That is why the conservatives are in a weak position. The group to whom the rich would look most naturally are the Christian Democrats, but these, while conservative by nature, cannot forget that they are also the mass party — and a new one which must establish a position with the people.

But the party suffers from the traditional handicaps of Catholic parties: timidity, uninspiring conformism, mediocrity of leaders, and avidity of moral and intellectual control which defeats itself with tiresome regularity. It is also unreliable in emergencies, as it showed recently by standing up for the republican ticket and then allowing or even encouraging most members to vote monarchist.

Many people must have thought along these lines, for one notices the tendency among property owners and retainers to enter the Socialist Party with the avowed hope of weighting the right wing and thus splitting the party.

The European compromise

It is a recurrent characteristic of Europe that the moderate Socialists, who are about the only democrats in our sense of the term, effect a compromise with the upper classes out of a desire for evolutionary policies and out of a fear of a class war with its ensuing civil tragedy. But the upper classes have never been willing to play ball and start a new deal. Thus the Social Democrats appear doomed always to compromise and then to be ground up as in Germany. Today the French Socialists under Blum are going the same way.

An additional reason for the moderates’ weakness in the Latin countries lies in the tendency of the big bureaucratic middle class to hang on to the rich (who are now draining their blood through the black market) for the sake of protecting their puny privileges and for strength against the workers. It is this middle class which is pushed around to shift the political balance.

So the old fight goes on, but the setup has changed somewhat and a step forward has been taken. Many industrialists and top business organizers have found that they could establish a working arrangement with the Communists in order to break this obtuse standpattism.

On their side the Communists, who are not strong enough to inspire intelligent fear, and who will become leaders of the Left by default, have shrewdly shelved class war and are moving in the direction of a managerial setup in which their intellectual and organizational gifts would be given the key role. There will be interesting new developments even in the atmosphere of foreign control and enforced bureaucratic order.