LEADERS OF THE NEW ITALY?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 230, 19 November 1943, Page 12

LEADERS OF THE NEW ITALY?

NE ot the most extraordinary developments in the Italian situation has been the recall of Count Carlo Sforza from America and the appeal to the philosopher Benedetto Croce to assist in the reconstruction of the State. Here is something about these two men whom the world had almost forgotten.

cultivated Italian family was on holiday in the little town of Casamicciola when it was shaken by a severe earthquake. Many houses collapsed, and the father, mother, and daughter of the family were killed. Only the son survived; he was a boy of 17 and he was dug out of/the ruins badly injured but alive. The years of convalescence turned this thoughtful lad into |: 1883 a conservative and highly

a scholar, and with the comfortable fortune of the family estates to back him, he devoted his life to the pursuit of absolute Truth-he became’ a _ philosopher, It is this man, Benedetto Croce, who has been wrenched by the turn of events from his profound speculations on Logic, Aesthetics, and History, and brought up against the immediate political problems of his broken country. He will not like it, and if he accepts office in a provisional Italian government, it will be only at the compulsion of a stern and patrician sense of duty. For Croce, by temperament and the circumstances of his life, is remote from the hurly-burly of politics. He is one of the few remaining idealist philosophers and he prefers to contemplate from a standpoint of lofty abstraction, what ought to be the motives and actions of men. He was brought up in the order and discipline of a devoutly Catholic

Neapolitan family. Benedetto’s father attended scrupulously to the running of his estate, his mother was an amateur collector of art and antiquities. There was no enthusiasm in his home for the men who were acclaimed in Britain as the saviours of Italy. Cavour, Mazzini and Garibaldi had set the country alight, but "I seldom heard the authors of the Risorgimento named, and never without reservations, expressions of distrust, or even satirical remarks about liberal windbags and self-seeking ‘patriots’." So Croce grew up with what he calls "my contempt for the cant of Liberalism, and my hatred of pompous phrases and all rhetorical ostentation." He lived to see a regime the very*opposite of liberal but so pompous and windy that in the end it burst. The young scholar lost his religious faith, and for a time he was swept along on the tide of Marxism. But soon his fastidious intellect found it just as un-

bearable to have the purity of thought sullied with economics as it had been to see it dilluted with love and mercy. Croce’s life work has been to build up a vast structure of pure thought by means of books austere in their integrity and dry as vintage wine. His reward has been the. attention and respect of the world’s scholars. The greatest of modern Italian intellectuals (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) and her only philosopher with a worldwide reputation, he is a national figure revered even by those who cannot understand what he is talking about. His Views on Liberty Once before he ventured into politics. He was Minister of Education in 192021, but with the rise of Fascism which he detested he retired again to his speculations. That he may be ready to play his part in the re-birth of a free Italy is suggested by the book he wrote in 1938-published in English as History as Story of Liberty-in. which he lays "particular emphasis . . . on the relation between the writing of history and practical action." He says to those who are rejoicing or bemoaning that liberty has now deserted the world: "to assert that liberty is dead is the same as saying that life is dead, that its mainspring is broken." There is, he says, no ideal that can make men’s hearts so beat as liberty. "The law of life which is history . . . calls for an ideal in which liberty is accepted and respected and so placed as to produce ever greater achievements." % % * VERY different man is Count Carlo Sforza. He is a wealthy aristocrat, head of the ancient house whose founder, Francesco Sforza, was first Duke of Milan in 1450, and his wife comes of one of the oldest Belgian houses. The Count held many high political offices before the rise of Fascism and led the democratic opposition to it while that was possible. Mussolini made many offers to win him over but Sforza said "The only thing I want is to be free; it is the only thing this fellow cannot give me!" Mussolini’s Greatest Enemy After his voluntary exile in 1928 Sforza became Miussolini’s best hated enemy, for in his travels and books he gave the lie to the slogan that "Fascism is the best bulwark against Communism." He showed that the great liberal tradition of Europe was the true bulwark against revolution and that in any ‘case a Bolshevik danger never existed in Italy. He has criticised the Soviet regime for its intolerance, but in his book The Totalitarian War and After (1941) he prophesied that Russia would one day "turn to the side of

civilisation-while Fascism and WNaziism are fatally on the side of barbarism ... old Russia may prove some day that she is still a great human force." After the Nazi-Fascist invasion of Spain, Sforza went to France to warn Daladier against further flirting with Mussolini, whom he knew to be in complete agreement with Hitler. On hearing "him, he tells us, Daladier became pale with rage and would have run him out of France if he had dared. In the fatal June of 1940, Sforza was in Bordeaux trying to persuade Petain and Weygand not to break faith with Britain. .A friend warned him during these negotiations that the new French government was planning to hand him over to the Nazis, so he collected his family and with difficulty chartered a small Dutch trawler. All their luggage was lost on the beach, and after five terrible days, in which they were frequently bombed, they arrived in England. Mr. Churchill welcomed Sforza as an Italian who had frequently warned Britain against Mussolini. The Count went to America the following month and has since been lecturing in various universities on International relations. He believes in a Europe of regional federations. In August, 1942, a PanAmerican Conference of Free Italians was held at Montevideo and Sforza was recognised as the unofficial leader of the Free Italy movement throughout the world. Are They Too Old? The return of these men to power raises some interesting speculations about the future of liberated Europe. For example, if we are to rely on men who had already made national or world reputations before the gangster epoch of Nazi-Fascism, we shall be pinning our hopes to elderly men. Croce is 77, Sforza, though a vigorous athletic figure, is 70. Thomas Mann, the outstanding German liberal thinker is 68. Further, will these powerful intellects be able psi seize the imagination of the masses as did the dictators and their henchmen? | If these men are to be merely provisional leaders of the interim period, then Europe will have to find, and find quickly, younger leaders from the people themselves who belong to the great liberal tradition of Europe and who can make it live again in the changed con-

ditions of a new age.

H.

W.