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

Notes

Introduction 1. The latest biography of Palmiro Togliatti (and the only new biography published since 1973) is Aldo Agosti, Palmiro Togliatti: A Biography (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008). 2. Tasca’s multiple pseudonyms continue to constitute a challenge even for the most thorough scholars. Julian Jackson, for instance, did not realize, or at least did not tell his readers, that the “Angelo Tasca who worked in Vichy’s propaganda services” is the A. Rossi who wrote Les communistes français pendant la drôle de guerre, a book he cites as a source on the communists in the Phony War (Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001], 639, 114). As another example, France’s National Library identifies A. Rossi as Amilcare Rossi, a name that Tasca never used; Amilcare Rossi is in fact the name of another author, who continued to publish books in the 1970s, sixteen years after Tasca’s death, including Nell’occhio del ciclone come già nella cresta dell’onda; Wikipedia, unfortunately, makes the same mistake. 3. Paolo Spriano, Storia del Partito comunista italiano, 2nd ed. (Turin: G. Einaudi, 1978); Alceo Riosa and Angelo Tasca, Angelo Tasca socialista: Con una scelta dei suoi scritti (1912–1920) (Venice: Marsilio, 1979); Sergio Soave, Un eretico della sinistra: Angelo Tasca dalla militanza alla crisi della politica (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1995). 4. Angelo Tasca, La France de Vichy: Archives inédits d’Angelo Tasca (Milan: Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 1996); Angelo Tasca and Denis Peschanski, Vichy, 1940–1944: Quaderni e documenti inediti di Angelo Tasca: Archives de guerre d’Angelo Tasca (Milan: Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 1986). 5. Ibid., 41. 6. Ibid., 46. 7. Peschanski titled his first essay on Tasca “Le régime de Vichy a existé” [The Vichy regime existed] to signify that the regime was not simply a puppet government controlled by the Germans and in which the French had no responsibility . Denis Peschanski, “Le régime de Vichy a existé,” in Tasca and Peschanski , Vichy, 1940–1944, 3–51. Notes 172 | notes to pages 4–10 8. Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 92. 9. Alexander J. De Grand, In Stalin’s Shadow: Angelo Tasca and the Crisis of the Left in Italy and France, 1910–1945 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986). 10. Philippe Burrin, “La France dans le champ magnétique des fascisms,” Le Débat 32 (November 1984): 52–72. 11. I owe this second definition to Martin Jay’s analysis of the concept as used by Theodor W. Adorno. See Martin Jay, Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique (New York: Routledge, 1993), 2–3. 12. Jean-Paul Sartre and W. D. Redfern, Les mains sales (London: Methuen, 1985). 1. Into the Battlefield 1. See David King, The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1997). 2. István Rév, Retroactive Justice: Prehistory of Post-Communism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 12. 3. The bibliography on Antonio Gramsci is simply too vast to be inserted in a note. However, it is worth mentioning here Carlos Nelson Coutinho, Gramsci: Um estudo sobre seu pensamento político (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Campus, 1989), which suggests that politics rather than culture was the central focus of Gramsci ’s reflection; thus Coutinho amplifies the distance between Tasca and Gramsci. The thesis is interesting and certainly well documented but reinforces a teleological reading of the Sardinian communist. 4. The Communist Party of Italy (PCd’I) officially changed its name to the Italian Communist Party (PCI) only in 1943, when the Third International was terminated. Here, however, I will use the acronym PCI throughout. 5. Leonardo Rapone’s Cinque anni che paiono secoli: Antonio Gramsci dal socialismo al comunismo (Rome: Carocci, 2011) and Albertina Vittoria’s Storia del PCI: 1921–1991 (Rome: Carocci, 2006) are two perfect examples of how excellent historians can still unwittingly underestimate and obscure Angelo Tasca’s role in the history of the Italian Communist Party. Rapone, by presenting Gramsci as a hero who creates a radically new approach to socialism, recognizes the role Tasca played in Gramsci’s formation but describes their drifting apart as a consequence of Gramsci’s development of “a new sensitivity, a new vision, an original vision,” whereas Tasca’s vision is described as based “on the methods of the past” (98; my translation). This judgment might be justified in light of the Prison Notebooks, but Rapone has...