Eighty years ago, Croce rejected Nenni’s proposal to become the first president of free Italy. He would have received votes from everyone except the DC, with whose leaders he was on bad terms. An opportunity, unfortunately, missed.
In June eighty years ago, the Italian Republic missed the historic opportunity to begin its life on a grand scale. Once the fascist regime fell and the monarchy was defeated in the referendum, he needed to recognize himself in an authoritative, representative figure, esteemed beyond national borders, above the parties. There was a philosopher, a writer, an important personality who could at that moment represent at the highest level the continuity with Risorgimento Italy and with the liberal state, anti-fascism and the overcoming of the civil war. Furthermore, he was a southerner, Neapolitan by adoption, and the political leaders, all from the North, were looking for a figure capable of involving the South in the constituent process. That South that had voted for monarchy.
Despite being a moderate and a conservative, Benedetto Croce was also respected by progressives and social-communists. On 22 June 1946, Pietro Nenni sent two emissaries, Sandro Pertini and Ignazio Silone, to Senator Croce, now eighty years old, with a letter in which he proposed to nominate him for the first President of the Republic. The communists, the secularists, the democrats and the liberals were ready to vote for him. Croce politely refused, maintaining his inadequacy and his limitations as a scholar. But perhaps the real reason for his refusal was the DC’s hostility to his candidacy (for the left it was one more reason to nominate him). As he himself noted in his diary on 26 June, “the Christian Democrats are against me, because assholes as they are and shameless, they shout that I am an atheist philosopher and that there is the vicar of Christ in Rome”, even if he then added that even without the DC his election would still have been certain, he had the majority of votes. Thus Italy missed a great opportunity to start well, without taking anything away from the dignified figure of the Neapolitan Enrico De Nicola then chosen by De Gasperi for the Quirinale. Croce later also refused the laticlavian senator for life from Einaudi.
The response to Nenni is now published by Adelphi in Croce’s splendid epistolary anthologies, Perdorsi nei altri e nelle cose. Selected letters, of rich humanity, to adults and young people, even adolescents. What has always struck me about Croce, and many of his great contemporaries, is their rich correspondence; they also dedicated extensive letters to illustrious strangers, men and women, girls and young men; a form of generosity that no longer exists. And then letters of extraordinary beauty, like the one addressed to Renato Serra, when the philosopher lost the love of his life, Angelina Zampelli. Or the extraordinary letters to Giovanni Gentile or about Gentile, which testify to the end of a great friendship. And then the life lessons to Sibilla Aleramo, a laudatory letter to Marinetti, who was also his antipodes, or to Palmiro Togliatti… It is curious to learn that, just a hundred years ago, receiving the Indian poet Tagore who asked him about Croce, with the desire to meet him, Mussolini telegraphed to the philosopher to facilitate the meeting. Croce had initially been a supporter of fascism (and in this correspondence there is a letter from 1923 to Francesco Saverio Nitti praising the ideology); but by that time he had already become, after having launched the manifesto of anti-fascist intellectuals, the main opponent of the regime. Croce appreciated Mussolini’s gesture and, upon meeting Tagore, out of loyalty and good taste, did not want to say anything against the regime and its leader, as he himself writes.
Returning instead to the time of the fall of the regime, there is a letter to Ferruccio Parri dated 18 June 1945 in which the philosopher attacks the proposal to exclude from the government anyone who had been a member of the PNF, ignoring that “all Italians were forced to register to practice professions”. Croce condemned the sectarian spirit of the proposal which would have generated new discrimination and gaps between citizens. And, in the letter, he threatened not only to leave public life but even to join the fascist party “in a posthumous and ideal act”, to suffer the same fate as many men who had joined it and whom he respected and loved. Another great lesson in freedom. Then there is a heartfelt writing to Vittorio Emanuele Orlando from 1946, in which Croce sees the attack on the Italy born of the Risorgimento and denounces the destructive work of the English and the unacceptable conditions imposed on the country, which led him to vote, in the summer of 1947, in the Constituent Assembly, against the humiliating Peace Treaty.
From the disagreements with the DC of Sturzo and De Gasperi, some traces of bitterness remained in him. In a letter to Egidio D’Alessandri, he is very harsh with the invasive clericalism of his time, with its particular interests and its irrational cults, which does not express any culture, despite being the majority party of Christian inspiration. The clerical world, in his words, “has no thinkers, no writers, no poets”, despite having many means of printing. But, on the other hand, he said not to rely on the communist opposite, “which in effect is Slavic and eager to destroy Western culture and civilization.” Croce’s third way, liberal and conservative, between clericalism and communism, never took off. Ultimately he remained a Martian, or rather “a Hyksos” (a foreign force, as he had defined fascism) in republican and Catholic-communist Italy.
