The second Badoglio government

In the second half of April 1944, in royal Italy, which had been fighting on the Allied side since the autumn, the government of Marshal Pietro Badoglio fell and a new one was formed almost immediately – again led by him, but this time with the participation of all the anti-fascist parties, from the Liberals to the Communists. War chronologies often record the event under 21 April. Government documents, however, show two dates: on 17 April Badoglio’s first cabinet tendered its resignation to King Victor Emmanuel III, and on 22 April the ministers of the new government were sworn in at the Villa Episcopio in Ravello on the Amalfi Coast. In between, the marshal was again given the task of forming a cabinet and concluded his talks with the parties.

The change looked minor – the same prime minister, the same king, the same temporary capital in Salerno. In reality it was a turning point in Italy’s political history. For the first time since 1922 the government included representatives of parties that Fascism had banned, and for the first time in the history of the Italian state it included Socialists and Communists. The second Badoglio government opened the road that after the war led Italy to the referendum on the monarchy and to the republic.

The king, the marshal and the parties

Badoglio had become head of government on 25 July 1943, when the Grand Council of Fascism and the king removed Benito Mussolini from power (the fall of Mussolini). His first cabinet consisted of civil servants, generals and experts, with no party participation. After the announcement of the armistice on 8 September 1943 the king and the government fled Rome for Brindisi, and on 13 October they declared war on Germany. The Allies recognised Italy as a co-belligerent, but real power in the south lay with their military authorities and the Allied Control Commission. In February 1944 the government moved to Salerno and took over the administration of the southern provinces outside the front zone.

For the reviving anti-fascist parties, the king and the marshal symbolised continuity with twenty years of dictatorship. Victor Emmanuel III had handed power to Mussolini in 1922 and signed the racial laws and the declaration of war in 1940, while Badoglio had been Chief of the General Staff and Viceroy of Ethiopia. The parties united in the Committee of National Liberation (CLN) – the Communists, the Socialists, the Action Party, the Christian Democrats, the Liberals and the Labour Democrats – demanded the king’s abdication and a government made up of anti-fascists. At the congress in Bari on 28–29 January 1944, the first free political congress in Italy for twenty years, the committees’ delegates demanded that the monarch step down, but they lacked the strength to force it.

The dispute also divided the Allies. Winston Churchill saw the king and the marshal as the only guarantee of order and of the fulfilment of the armistice terms. In a speech in the House of Commons on 22 February 1944 he compared them to the handle of a pot of hot coffee: one should not break it off until one has another to take hold of. The Americans, under pressure from public opinion and Italian émigrés, leaned towards a quicker change and a government including the parties. The deadlock had lasted since the autumn of 1943.

Moscow and Togliatti’s return

The deadlock was broken by a party the British and Americans had not expected. The USSR had a representative on the Allied Advisory Council for Italy – Andrey Vyshinsky, the prosecutor at the Moscow trials – but no real influence over the occupation, which was run by the Western Allies. At the beginning of 1944 the Secretary General of the Italian Foreign Ministry, Renato Prunas, held talks with Vyshinsky in Naples and Salerno. On 14 March 1944 the USSR and the Kingdom of Italy established direct diplomatic relations. Moscow thus became the first great power to recognise the Badoglio government as a fully fledged partner, without coordinating the step with London and Washington, which caused irritation there.

Linked with this decision was the return home of Palmiro Togliatti, leader of the Italian Communist Party, who had spent years in exile, mainly in Moscow, as one of the leading figures of the Comintern. According to the diary of Georgi Dimitrov, on the night of 3–4 March 1944 Joseph Stalin received Togliatti in Molotov’s presence and advised him that the Communists should not demand the king’s immediate abdication but should join the Badoglio government. The aim was to strengthen the war against Germany and to secure a place for the Communists in the post-war state. Historians disagree about how far the initiative came from Stalin and how far from Badoglio’s diplomacy, which had been seeking Soviet recognition.

Togliatti reached Naples via Cairo and Algiers on 27 March 1944. A few days later, at a meeting of the party leadership in Naples at the turn of March and April, he announced the turn that Italian historiography calls the svolta di Salerno (the Salerno turn). The Communists would postpone the dispute over the monarchy until the end of the war and declared themselves ready to join the Badoglio government, because what mattered most was the liberation of the country and the common struggle against the Germans and the Fascists of the Italian Social Republic. For Pietro Nenni’s Socialists and for the Action Party it came as a shock: for months they had made their participation in government conditional on the king’s departure. In the north, still under German occupation and where in March workers had staged great strikes, the news was received with mixed feelings.

The De Nicola compromise

Once the Communists dropped abdication as a condition, the other CLN partners did not want to be left out of the government. They still needed a formula, however, that would let them sit in the cabinet without recognising the king as legitimate leader. Earlier the monarchy had rejected a plan by Carlo Sforza for Victor Emmanuel III to abdicate in favour of his under-age grandson with Badoglio as regent. The solution was proposed by a Liberal lawyer and former President of the Chamber of Deputies, Enrico De Nicola, and backed by Sforza and the philosopher Benedetto Croce. The king would formally keep the throne but, on the day the Allies entered Rome, would hand over all his powers to his son, Crown Prince Umberto, as Lieutenant General of the Realm. The form of the state would be decided by the Italians after the war, when they elected a constituent assembly.

Victor Emmanuel III accepted the plan reluctantly, under pressure from the Allied representatives on the Allied Control Commission and from the British Minister Resident in the Mediterranean, Harold Macmillan. On 12 April 1944 he announced on the radio that on the day Rome was liberated he would withdraw from public life and appoint Umberto Lieutenant General. With that, the main obstacle to the talks fell away.

On 17 April, as agreed, Badoglio’s first government resigned. The king again entrusted the marshal with forming a cabinet. Badoglio remained prime minister and also took the foreign affairs portfolio. Within a few days the parties agreed on the composition of the government, and on 22 April the ministers were sworn in before the king at Ravello, where the monarch was living. It was the first Italian government based on political parties since before the dictatorship, and the first in the country’s history to include Socialists and Communists.

The make-up of the government of national unity

Each of the six CLN parties was given a seat in the government. The best-known politicians became ministers without portfolio: Togliatti, Croce, Sforza, the Christian Democrat Giulio Rodinò and the Socialist Pietro Mancini. The Christian Democrat Salvatore Aldisio became Minister of the Interior, the Liberal Vincenzo Arangio-Ruiz Minister of Justice, the Action Party historian Adolfo Omodeo Minister of Education, and the Communist Fausto Gullo Minister of Agriculture; in the following months Gullo issued decrees handing uncultivated land from the great estates of the south to peasant cooperatives. The service ministries remained in the hands of generals and admirals loyal to the Crown, such as the Minister of the Navy, Admiral Raffaele de Courten.

The government still operated under Allied control. It could not decide for itself on foreign policy, the size of the armed forces or the administration of the areas near the front and of large cities such as Naples. But it gained what Badoglio’s first cabinet had lacked: the support of all the organised political forces of anti-fascist Italy, as well as Soviet recognition.

Place in the war

The second Badoglio government was formed at a moment when the front in Italy had come to a standstill. Since January the Allies had been stuck in the bridgehead at Anzio (the Anzio landing), and in March they had failed for the third time to break the German defences at Monte Cassino (the third battle of Monte Cassino). In occupied Rome the Germans answered resistance attacks with terror, the most notorious example being the Ardeatine Caves massacre of 24 March. The Salerno government had no influence on the course of the fighting, but its broadening mattered politically: royal Italy ceased to be merely the state of the marshal and the court, and the parties that directed the partisans in the north gained representation in a government recognised by the Allies. This strengthened Italy’s part in the war – both the regular units fighting alongside the Allies and the resistance behind the front line.

The Salerno turn was also the first clear sign of how Stalin intended to conduct his policy towards the states that the Western Allies occupied after their capitulation. Moscow, shut out of real power in Italy despite the pledges of the Moscow Conference, sought influence through recognising the government and through an obedient Communist party. The Communists joined the government of a monarchy they had recently condemned, and gave up revolutionary slogans in the name of national unity. A similar tactic of coalition governments including Communists was later applied in other European countries. Historians still judge it differently: as evidence of Togliatti’s realism or as proof of his subordination to Stalin.

The cabinet lasted less than two months. After the Gustav Line was broken in May 1944, the Allies entered Rome on 4 June. The next day Victor Emmanuel III, as announced in April, handed power to Umberto as Lieutenant General of the Realm. The CLN politicians who had lived through the occupation in Rome refused to work with Badoglio any longer. The marshal resigned, and on 18 June 1944 the new government was headed by Ivanoe Bonomi, former chairman of the central committee in Rome and a prime minister from before the dictatorship. Badoglio withdrew from politics. The dispute over the monarchy, postponed in April 1944, was settled by the referendum of 2 June 1946: the Italians chose a republic, and Umberto II, who had become king in May 1946 after his father’s abdication, left the country.