Resistance and Resurgence: The Politics of Memory in Italy, 1943-1948—and Why It Still Matters

This paper analyzes the case of Italy and how the memory of World War II came to provide the ground for political legitimacy of post-war democracy.  It focuses on the image of the Resistance against Fascism as a Second ‘Risorgimento’ (literally: ‘Rising Again’, or ‘Resurgence’), a national and patriotic war of liberation supported by the entire populace rallying around partisans and soldiers. It proposes to explain how and why the image of the ‘Risorgimento’ established as the paradigm for the historicization of the Resistance as well as the dominant, albeit contested, narrative of the war, and the official site of memory (lieu du memoire) of post-Fascist Italy up until the present. The paper argues that the Resistance as a Second Risorgimento was not only a distorted narrative of the past constructed in order to uphold the political and moral renewal of Italy—in short, an invented tradition—but also a symbol embedded in the nation’s cultural memory. As in past, this symbol re-emerged in a period of radical uncertainty, sustaining the political transformation and allowing people to render meaningful the experience they lived. The more general, theoretical proposition defended here is that the studies on the politics of memory should avoid the danger of reducing culture and memory to politics, ideology and rationality, and instead investigate the co-existence of political-instrumental and cultural-experiential memory practices—levels that cannot be reduced to each other.