Since 1948, April 25 hasn’t been the “shared memory” of Italians

For some days now, the controversies have begun over the participation or otherwise of the members of the Brothers of Italy in the celebrations for the feast of April 25th. In reality, despite the prominence (and amplification) they receive in the media, these controversies are small compared to what happened after 1945. The Liberation Day was then the subject of what has been defined as a war of memory, in which to clash – differently from what one might think today – it wasn’t the constitutional parties, on the one hand, and the former fascists on the other (always remained a minority and who themselves felt like “exiles at home”). The protagonists of a very bitter confrontation were precisely the forces that invoked anti-fascism: on the one hand the DC and its centrist allies, on the other the left. The trigger was represented by the ousting of the left from the government and then by their defeat in the elections of April 18, 1948. If initially, in 1946 and 1947, it was possible to remember the Liberation in a unified way, after then and for several years essentially two different holidays were celebrated, with separate and opposing events: the DC placed the emphasis on war and the Resistance as a moral sacrifice of an entire people and on the need, once fascism fell, for a national reconciliation, while the PCI underlined the centrality of the armed struggle to the detriment of other forms of civil resistance (in both cases there was that “distortion of memory”, as Michele Salvati defined it, whereby in the eyes of the Italians fascism ended up appearing defeated not by the Allies but by the partisans).