A Civil War Read Online Free PDF Page B

were developed earlier, or, if developed at that time, were later on elaborated a great deal and organised in a climate of rapid political change. This not only made the identification of the sources difficult, but also indicated the necessity of analysing the behaviour of the protagonists to understand the ideas that inspired them, even if those ideas were formulated without clarity or coherence. Thus, the objective of my research shifted from programmes to the protagonists themselves – their moral convictions, the cultural structures around the protagonists themselves, their feelings, and the doubts and passions elicited by that brief and intense sequence of events. On what grounds did people base their actions, when institutions – within the frame of which they had been accustomed to operate – vacillated or vanished, to then reassemble themselves and demand new and different loyalties? To this question, years of terrorism added yet another question, illustrated with particular dramatic force: if, how, and why is violence justified when it must be carried out without a clear, institutional legitimacy? In other words: when the state is no longer capable of exercising its monopoly of violence with any certainty? The question appeared particularly difficult to those who refused an answer that denied politics and history. And it was in fact at that moment, during a series of seminars on the relationship between politics and morality initiated by Norberto Bobbio at the Centro studi Piero Gobetti in Turin, that the presentation I made constituted the first nucleus of this book.
    The word that seemed to me to best summarise what appeared to become the object of my research was ‘
moralità
’. Not ‘morals’, a term that, on the one hand was confined to the individual conscience, while on the other risked sliding into the rhetoric of the Resistance. Not ‘
mentalità
’, a word that in a shorttime has acquired multiple meanings and generated controversies which I did not intend to get caught up in. When my book was already finished, I found confirmation of my choices in a letter from Giorgio Agosti to Dante Livio Bianco in their recently published correspondence: ‘Your correspondence has the interests and the character of an eighteenth-century epistolary exchange – full, as it is, of “
moralità
” and of perspicacious “notations.” ’ 1
    Moralità
is a word particularly suited to define the territory on which politics and ethics meet and clash, relying on history as a possible common measure. It was necessary, whenever possible, to immerse oneself in the historical context when dealing with matters that first appeared to be political but which were in reality great moral problems and, reciprocally, to show how these same historical events necessarily influenced those problems.
    The ‘high’ [political] sources – the most noted and studied – have thus ceded much of the field to ‘low’ [popular] sources. In fact, I propose not to reconstruct once again the history of leading organisations – parties such as CLN, CVL, etc. – but to see how the general directives were received and acted upon at various levels, being adapted by these organisations to a vast array of individual and collective experiences, that just through these adaptations, and even upheavals, left a trace of themselves. That which the political approach and military strategy in this subtle diffusion lost in coherence, it gained in adherence to reality; and this, if not always pleasing to politicians, today it is surely so for historians.
    Is it possible, in only so many pages and with only so many examples, to give everyone a say? There are partisans who have never spoken, nor will they ever speak; they have not escaped from the situation, as expressed by a concentration camp survivor, in which: “It is sad to live without letting others know.” I would be very happy if they could recognise themselves, even slightly, in what I