A Pact with Vichy: Angelo Tasca from Italian Socialism to French Collaboration

Epilogue

During the forty days he spent in prison in September 1944, Tasca still talked about socialism, but he dreamed of a trip to Italy with Liliane Chaumette . Surrounded by inmates who wanted to see a new German-Russian alliance that would embarrass the French communists, and by the military police who tortured some of the prisoners, he wished to go back to the Italy that he had left in 1926: Turin, Milan, Naples, and all the other places that carried memories for him.1 At that point, he still toyed with the idea of making an intellectual contribution to the reconstruction of Europe. Among his projects was still the idea of a book discussing the future political architecture of France. Increasingly, however, he wanted to distance himself from active politics. In the past, he had periodically entertained the idea of a more theoretical engagement, far from the exigencies of everyday politics, but this time he felt that he had the opportunity, and certainly the need, for a more traditional life. He was sure that he did not want to be a journalist any longer, and he desired more time for himself and his family. He also wanted to go back to Paris and live with one of his daughters, Valeria, and visit his eldest daughter, Elena, in Turin. He hoped that Liliane Chomette would agree to live with him and was distressed when in one of her letters she addressed him formally as vous.2 He also knew that his desire to live with Chomette and go back to Paris meant that his youngest daughter, Catherine, would stay with her mother.3 After being released from prison, Tasca managed to realize almost all his dreams. He married Liliane Chomette and moved with her and his daughter Valeria into a new apartment in Paris.4 In 1949 he visited Italy, where he saw his daughter Elena. He wrote for journals, including the conservative French publication Le Figaro Littéraire and the Italian Il Mondo, but never about everyday politics. He earned his income publishing books, which were well received. He stayed away from party politics and, despite an invitation from André Malraux to join the Rassemblement du Peuple Français, refused to lend his name to any specific party.5 Most important, Epilogue epilogue | 155 he never had to return to prison, and his incarceration in 1944 was his last. Thus at the end of his life, Tasca managed to reinvent a normal life for himself and his family, far from the revolutionary dreams that he had cultivated for almost forty years. Tasca’s longing for a normal life certainly was one reason he did not resume the activities that had characterized his life until the end of the war, but his personal wishes were not the only factor that kept him from playing a direct role in postwar France or Italy. Tasca’s trajectory from revolutionary socialism to Vichy no longer allowed him to think positively about the future of France, Italy, or Europe more generally. It was his own role in the first half of the “age of extremes” that continued to be the center of interest for the people around him and, consequently, for his intellectual activity.6 In this context, Tasca’s vocation as a historian acquired a new importance, and his entire cultural production became oriented toward the project of justifying his own past. In the years immediately after the war, France’s attempt to cope with the history of Vichy through the legal system further complicated Tasca’s position, constantly producing an intellectual short circuit between moral, political, and legal responsibilities. On one hand, Tasca took advantage of the confusion created by the attempt to define moral and political problems in the language of criminal law. On the other hand, his need to create multiple truths—one legal, one moral, and one political— and the constant confusion between these different realms prevented him from facing his own past critically and from leaving behind the events of his earlier life. The confusion started with his incarceration in 1944. Tasca, brought to prison unaware of the charges against him, naturally believed that the new Republican government had an interest in prosecuting him for his role in Vichy. But, as we have seen, the charges against him were absurd and had nothing to do with Vichy, and Tasca did not have too many problems in convincing the prosecutor that he had never been a Trotskyist, that...