Vae victis. But for how much longer?

In the summer of 1940, Marc Bloch writes L’Étrange défaite, Strange Defeat.

I consider Bloch one of my intellectual and moral reference points. A middle-aged man, mild-mannered in appearance, wearing quaint little spectacles, who teaches history. He has already fought in the Great War and, in 1939, at fifty-three and with six children, asks to return to service, although he could claim exemption. He will prove a highly capable military organiser. A few years later, he will die a hero. He will join the Resistance, be captured and tortured, yet manage to protect the identities of some of his fellow resistance fighters. He will be executed by a Nazi firing squad in June 1944.

Strange Defeat, published posthumously in 1946, is both an analysis of and a testimony to France’s collapse, written with unsparing clarity and love for his country. Bloch examines the responsibilities of the army, the ruling classes and the society to which he himself belongs. In its pages, we hear the voice of a nation on its knees which, in trying to understand what has overwhelmed it, seeks the strength to rise again.

This short work came back to me as I read Federico Goddi’s recent study, Il prezzo della salvezza. Fascismo e “questione ebraica” in Dalmazia (1941–1943) [The Price of Salvation: Fascism and the “Jewish Question” in Dalmatia (1941–1943)], published by Giuntina.

The volume, written with great care and analytical depth, addresses a delicate question. During the Second World War, in Dalmatia and other territories under Italian control, military and civilian authorities offered protection to Jewish residents and refugees, resisting German demands for their surrender on several occasions. This happened in the context of a war of occupation, under a regime that had adopted its own racial laws and policies of persecution.

Why on earth did they do it?

As an amateur historian—but not entirely an amateur—I have read several contributions on the subject by Italian and foreign authors. They have left me with an impression, rather than a conviction. I acknowledge it as such, along with the bias arising from my love for my country, and it is this: that part of our historical scholarship finds it particularly difficult to accept that moral motives might have played a decisive role in those choices. Goddi’s work has brought this question back to my mind—a question that extends beyond his book to our relationship with our national history.

I am well aware of the weight that political calculations, rivalries between institutions, military considerations, personal interests and corruption may have carried. Nor do I believe that a single motive can explain actions taken in different circumstances. Historians must reconstruct those motives through the sources, distinguishing what is documented from what we can only hypothesise. The moral intentions of people long dead are almost entirely inaccessible to them.

Yet I wonder whether, in our necessary scrutiny of the myth of the italiani brava gente—Italians as inherently decent people—we sometimes risk viewing even a basic human explanation with excessive suspicion: that some people, confronted with an atrocity, did not wish to become complicit in it.

I am thinking, for example, of official correspondence in which opposition to German demands was put in writing while the outcome of the war was still uncertain, and plain common sense would have counselled against committing such views to paper. This alone does not establish the moral nature of the choice. Yet it seems to me a circumstance that deserves to be examined from this perspective too.

If my impression captures something real, where does that distrust come from?

Certainly, there is a desire to avoid the very real risk of ideological exploitation. Rehabilitating those actions might bring with it the rehabilitation of the entire system in which they took place. As though admitting that someone acted out of humanity necessarily risked diminishing the responsibility of the regime to which they belonged.

Yet that responsibility can remain undiminished even when we acknowledge that, within that system, some people were capable of making different choices. Complexity encompasses this too.

This is where I return to Bloch.

The two countries’ experiences cannot be equated: France in 1940 suffers an invasion; Fascist Italy bears responsibility for aggression and occupation. The connection I see concerns the relationship between historical consciousness and belonging to a country.

Only months after a dramatic and humiliating defeat, Bloch has the civic courage to examine its causes. He confronts the shame without looking away and retains the conviction that France still has something worth fighting for. The historian’s severity is accompanied by the citizen’s faith. His subsequent commitment to the Resistance will bear the ultimate witness to that conviction.

In doing so, he rendered his country a great service, perhaps greater still than his ultimate sacrifice: giving a defeated nation a voice, helping it acknowledge its responsibilities and imagine a future.

More than eighty years after those painful events, it is time for us, too, to look at our history with this freedom. To acknowledge its wrongs fully, while also recognising the worth of those who, confronted with atrocity, knew how to choose differently.