Leo Valiani

Leo Valiani, a maker of modern Italy, died on September 18th 1999, aged 90

On the evening of April 25th 1945, Leo Valiani gave the order that Benito Mussolini should be killed. It was finito, he said later. In 1943 Italy had surrendered to the Allies, but Germany had taken control of the north of the country, and had set up a separate state with Mussolini as its leader. Now the Allies were advancing rapidly northwards and much of Mussolini’s “state” was controlled by the Italian resistance.

On this April evening, Mussolini met resistance leaders on neutral ground, the archbishop’s palace in Milan. Mussolini wanted an agreement that would protect his followers and their families. Mr Valiani said that Mussolini was in no position to make terms, only to surrender, and the meeting would last one hour only. An angry Mussolini stormed out of the palace. Shortly afterwards he was shot dead while on his way to Switzerland.

Accounts of Mussolini’s end are varied. In some stories, the resistance leaders prepared a death warrant signed by Mr Valiani and the sentence was duly carried out on the fleeing Mussolini. This would have given his execution a façade of legitimacy, but little that was lawful was happening in northern Italy in the last days of the second world war. What is clear is that, whether or not there was a formal death sentence, Mr Valiani brushed aside any talk among the resistance for clemency and insisted that Mussolini, having refused to surrender, should be executed without a trial. “Let’s end it,” he said.

The body of the inventor of modern fascism, and the early mentor of Hitler, was displayed, with that of his mistress, hanging upside down in a square in Milan. General Eisenhower, the Allied commander, said, “God, what an ignoble end.” Leo Valiani was said by his friends to have disapproved of the displaying of the bodies, but otherwise seems to have had no regrets. He saw himself simply as a servant of history. He went on making history after the war. He helped to write the Italian constitution and was regarded as a founding father of the republic. But he declined to pursue a career in politics. History is what interested him more. Mr Valiani was that rarity, a historian who had made history.

Leo Valiani was an old European, using the term in a respectful and slightly awed sense, like old money. One of his books was “The End of Austria-Hungary”. Who now gets excited about the break-up of this once powerful empire whose origins date back to the 13th century? Perhaps only those, like Mr Valiani, who saw that history does repeat itself, albeit in new guises. The Austro-Hungarian empire was bedevilled by the constant demands of competing nationalities within the super-state, a problem that these days the European Union faces as it toys with federalism.

Mr Valiani had an additional interest in Austria-Hungary. He was born there, in the Adriatic seaport of Rijeka (now in Croatia), and took Italian nationality when the town was annexed by Mussolini’s Italy in 1924 and renamed Fiume. As a Jew and a communist, Mr Valiani had a natural antipathy to Europe’s new caesar. Mussolini’s only virtue, he said, was that he encouraged Italian football, which for Leo Valiani rivalled history as a worthwhile

pursuit.

He was often in trouble as an agitator and had several spells in prison in the 1920s and 1930s. When Russia signed an agreement with Germany in 1939 to divide Poland he broke with communism. But new masters, the British, were waiting in the wings.

The British had given up trying to recruit resistance workers in Germany, where any dissent was efficiently crushed. But Italy seemed less brutal, or was simply inefficient. Resistance groups operated with some success, among them Leo Valiani’s. In Mussolini’s northern Italian “state” in 1943, Mr Valiani set up a “committee of national liberation”, which claimed to be the next provisional government. It had the support of both Britain and America, whose Allen Dulles, later to be head of the CIA, was a spy operating in the region. With Mussolini dead and the Germans defeated, Mr Valiani’s committee was in a strong position to help shape Italy’s real government.

The constitution he helped to produce in 1948 runs to many thousands of words and, judged as a piece of democratic guidance, is a model of itskind. But, whatever its successes, it has not produced enduring governments. Since 1948 there have been more than 50, although their defenders point out that in many of them the members were simply reshuffled without any great change of political direction. Corruption became widespread.

The constitution’s weakness, Mr Valiani later agreed, was that it had the effect of paralysing government. He wanted a stronger presidency, and in his books and articles in Corriere della Sera was fiercely critical of the politicians who held on to the old system. He thought Italians were a bit soft. Just as they had once accepted the abuses of fascism, they were lax in dealing with the Mafia. He once argued for the return of the death penalty. Parliament took his scoldings gracefully and made him a senator for life. He never took a job in government and said his great regret was that he had never written about football.