Free The Body of Il Duce by Sergio Luzzatto Page A

adopted during the underground years were not enough to explain why the party hid Walter Audisio from public view. Nor were reasons of security, especially considering that the party never assigned Audisio bodyguards, even after his name was revealed. There were other motives for the silence surrounding Colonel Valerio’s identity, and these were ideological.
    As far back as 1925–26, during the first wave of attempts on Mussolini’s life, and especially in 1931–32, after a second, the Communists had condemned any focus on individual targets, preferring a broad battle against an entire class of enemies. In opposition to other Resistance forces, among them Emilio Lussu and leaders of Justice and Liberty, the Communists argued that killing Mussolini was the crudest of political expedients. After 1945, when Communist partisans formed Il Duce’s execution squad, it no longer made any sense for the party to dismiss the “exemplary gesture” as futile. Nevertheless, the fact that Il Duce’s execution had occurred not at the beginning but at the end of a movement of national insurrection made the Communists cautious regarding the presentation of Mussolini’s death. The party’s strategy under Togliatti was to legitimize itself as a democratic force, and that meant casting the Resistance as a war of the people rather than a revolt of a minority and the Liberation as a season of brotherhood, not of violence. The terrible tableau of two or three partisans shooting an old, unarmed man and his young lover did not fit easily into this frame.
    In 1947, the unity of the Committee of National Liberation came to an end when the parties of the left were excluded from the government. Thus the first months of that year marked an important turning point in modern Italy’s political history. At the same time, Italians learned something new about the death of Il Duce—hardly an insignificant coincidence. In March 1947, Italians discovered the name and the face of the man who had shot Mussolini. But Colonel Valerio’s identity—that he was Walter Audisio, an accountant from Alessandria, a Communist militant since 1931, leader of the Garibaldi Brigades, secretary of the high command of the Liberty Volunteers Corps—was not revealed to the world by the Communists, those who had suffered the highest casualties in the fight against Fascism. Audisio’s name was instead made public by a neo-Fascist publication in Milan, by his enemies rather than his comrades. Naturally they presented him not as a man carrying out justice but as an assassin. It was only later, making the best of a bad situation, that Communist leaders decided to treat Audisio as a political asset, taking him around Italy in triumph.
    The propaganda battle surrounding Colonel Valerio’s identity was part of a larger war that in Milan, at least, pitched indomitable veterans of the Republic of Salò against the most pugnacious ex-partisans. At the same time, this localized recrudescence of the civil war was set in the context of the early Cold War and the attendant conflict regarding Italian Communism. Thus, the skirmishes in the press over a crucial episode in Italy’s past—Mussolini’s execution—were a way of fighting a conflict in the present as well as one for the future. In this way, Mussolini’s dead body continued to write history.
    The clash between the two most active militant groups in the province—adherents of Lotta fascista, familiar to us through the activities of Domenico Leccisi, and Volante Rosso, a band of Communist ex-partisans based in one of the party’s clubs—began in 1946 and was by no means confined to warring over the memory of Piazzale Loreto. On October 9 that year, the neo-Fascists threw a bomb at a Communist Party club in the Porta Genova neighborhood, killing a five-year-old child. Then, on January 17, 1947, the Communists shot two neo-Fascist activists, one