Introduction
The last letters written by partisans condemned to death for their anti-fascist resistance during World War II preserve original testimonies of the struggle for democracy against fascism. Addressed to family, friends, and fellow partisans in the final moments before execution, these letters shaped postwar democracy in ways that illuminate the dilemmas of democratic memory politics. This article compares the memorial trajectories of the anti-fascist last letters in Italy and France across six decades (1943–2003) and examines how partisan memory practices intersected with editorial efforts to build a plural democratic memory of the Resistance. Two contrasting commemorative strategies emerge in the practices of the French Communist Party (PCF) and the Italian Communist Party (PCI). Whereas the PCF republished the letters at key electoral moments during the Cold War to mobilize citizens around its current political agenda, the PCI never undertook a comparable initiative, focusing instead on communist heroes, above all, Antonio Gramsci, to construct its new national-democratic identity as a mass party capable of rebuilding Italy after fascism.Footnote 1
This comparison reveals what we call the public–party tension in democratic memory politics, which refers to the ambiguous role partisan memory practices play in shaping a form of public commemoration that is open to citizens of diverse convictions and political affiliations. The contrast between the PCF’s instrumentalization of the letters and the PCI’s relative neglect demonstrates how partisan memory can oscillate between empowering diverse democratic voices in the public sphere and subordinating them to narrower political agendas. To address this tension, we turn to the anti-fascist letters themselves and argue that they offer a resource for rethinking partisan memory as an ethical and inclusive mode of collective remembrance capable of sustaining pluralist democracy against contemporary anti-democratic forces.
An extensive multidisciplinary literature in political theory and International Relations has examined how memories of violent conflict during World War II, particularly the traumas of totalitarianism and the Holocaust, have shaped competing conceptions of democracy and the nation-state.Footnote 2 A related scholarship on the commemorative politics of the PCI and the PCF explains how each party sought to establish hegemony over the memory of the Resistance after the war.Footnote 3 While the form of the last letters and their postwar reception has been studied in both national contexts, a comparative account of the partisan appropriation of the French and Italian anthologies remains absent from the existing literature.Footnote 4 Furthermore, the significance of the anti-fascist letters for democratic theory and for cultivating democratic memory politics in the present has yet to be explored.
Drawing on excerpts from various letters in the Italian and French anthologies, we identify common democratic values through which condemned anti-fascist partisans justified their resistance. Among the values articulated in the letters that are most significant for democratic theory are a civic duty to participate in political conflict, responsibility towards others, and a commitment to equal freedom that extends even to one’s adversaries. These ethical–political commitments reveal the enduring potential of the anti-fascist letters to rethink the ethics of partisan memory as a means of promoting pluralistic democratic politics beyond sectarian conceptions of partisanship.
We therefore propose a new approach to memory politics inspired by the anti-fascist letters as an alternative to prevailing modes of remembering the conflicts of World War II. As we show, the anti-fascist letters both anticipate and move beyond the limits of three predominant modes of remembrance within the field of memory studies: cosmopolitan, antagonistic, and agonistic memory.Footnote 5 Our letter-centred approach emphasizes the importance of building a consensus around anti-fascist values while remaining attentive to the risks of depoliticizing or neutralizing past conflicts. The last letters help to recover the ethical role of parties and partisanship in constructing a usable democratic memory of anti-fascist resistance to advance democratic politics in the present.
The following analysis proceeds in five sections. The first section theorizes the public–party tension as an overlooked dimension of democratic memory politics. The second section discusses the genre of the anti-fascist last letters and unearths an original conception of ethical partisan memory that transcends sectarian party politics. The third section continues this excavation and presents the letters as a democratizing alternative to the cosmopolitan and agonistic approaches to memory conflict. The fourth section examines the Italian case to explain why the letters remained largely absent from the PCI’s elaboration of its own public narrative of the Resistance. It focuses on the central roles played by Giovanni Pirelli and Einaudi Editore in constructing Lettere di condannati a morte della Resistenza italiana (1952) as a multipartisan memory of the Resistance and explains how this unifying narrative conflicted with Italy’s increasingly divided party-centred democracy. The fifth section turns to France and traces the PCF’s selective republication of the Lettres de fusillés (1946) throughout the Cold War, arguing that this strategy aimed at enhancing the party’s democratic legitimacy but ultimately clashed with the letters’ universal ideals of patriotic duty. The conclusion briefly reflects on the enduring relevance of the letters amid the rise of exclusionary populist parties seeking to diminish the democratic values and legacy of the anti-fascist resistance.
The public–party tension in democratic memory politics
A central debate in memory studies concerns how different ethical–political modes of remembrance sustain or undermine pluralist democracy. Less examined is the role of political parties and partisanship in mediating past conflicts and constructing democratic representations of collective memory in the present. Our theory of the public–party tension addresses this gap by examining how parties and partisan actors can either undermine or enable inclusive public commemoration. Political parties play a central role in determining and challenging official national memories. Like their broader procedural function of channelling social conflicts into collective decision-making,Footnote 6 parties selectively invoke past struggles, link them to present concerns, and translate them into competing narratives of the official story. Partisan memories are therefore never neutral: they reflect conflicts of interest and values, as well as competing interpretations of what happened. Public memory, too, has never been fully neutral or inclusive, often reinforcing dominant narratives of national history.Footnote 7 The term suggests a resource open to all, yet because collective memories are inherently conflictual, public memory rarely lives up to its pluralistic promise.
Cosmopolitan and agonistic memory represent two competing ethical approaches to remembering past conflicts. Agonistic memory emerged in response to what Cento Bull and Hansen identify as cosmopolitanism’s insufficient attention to the political and social substance of memory conflicts and its tendency to frame past conflicts as abstract moral struggles between good and evil.Footnote 8 For proponents of agonistic memory, an ethical mode of remembrance ‘should not neglect the socio-political context in which human beings came to commit evil acts and the human agency that promoted this shift’.Footnote 9 In the liberal cosmopolitanism view, public memory is an open space where mnemonic consensus forms around universal democratic values. In the agonistic view, public memory is a site of ongoing conflict in which a multiplicity of groups with differing degrees of power openly debate the past while recognizing each other as equally legitimate competitors.Footnote 10 Whereas cosmopolitanism searches for consensus on universal values, agonism promotes ongoing democratic contestation over the past. Our notion of ethical partisan memory, as derived from the anti-fascist last letters, stands in tension with both approaches.
The cosmopolitan model emphasizes the capacity of decontextualized victim-centred narratives to transcend historical particularism and unite citizens around discourses on human rights.Footnote 11 Yet, collective memory rarely emerges on neutral ground: citizens enter commemorative space with divergent interests, values, and partisan affiliations. Cosmopolitan memory’s aspiration to inclusive, consensus-based remembrance, therefore, depends on abstracting from these conflicts to secure agreement on universal principles. The anti-fascist letters challenge this premise by showing that universal democratic values need not arise from abstract oppositions between good and evil but can instead emerge from historically situated memories of political agency that foreground individual choices to resist and take a side against their perpetrators.
In contrast to cosmopolitanism, agonistic memory politics acknowledges the political and conflictual character of memory struggles, but advocates for a plural commemorative field in which adversaries recognize one another as equals in a public contestation over the past. Agonistic memory politics builds on the political theory of Chantal Mouffe, particularly her model of a radical, plural, agonistic democracy.Footnote 12 It foregrounds what agonistic theorists call ‘radical multiperspectivism’, whereby opposing viewpoints, including those of perpetrators and victims, can ‘confront each other in an open-ended manner, without being constrained to fit into an authoritative narrative’.Footnote 13
Agonists thus reject the ideal of an ideologically neutral commemorative field and instead define memory politics as a struggle for hegemony. In this neo-Gramscian view, official memory takes shape through political actors who succeed in establishing their interpretation of past conflicts as dominant over time. Democracy, on this account, depends on keeping the commemorative sphere open to contestation among a plurality of actors and perspectives. This openness gives agonistic memory politics its ethical dimension: it resists the closure of collective memory into a fixed narrative by promoting democratic debate, in contrast to cosmopolitan and antagonistic discourses that tend to exclude opposing perspectives through rigid moral boundaries.Footnote 14
Rather than seeking mnemonic consensus, the agonistic approach conceives memory politics as an ongoing process of deconstructing hegemonic narratives and constructing counter-hegemonic alternatives. However, it risks depoliticization insofar as it privileges ongoing contestation between opposing memories over the democratic construction of a new mnemonic consensus. When radical multiperspectivism becomes the normative aim of memory politics, participants in commemorative struggles are encouraged to remain ambivalent about ethical–political outcomes – namely, which side of the story should prevail and whether the values institutionalized through memorial conflict are themselves democratic (i.e. promoting equality, freedom, and justice). As Glover argues, ‘agonism’s valorization of multiplicity and contestability must eventually be filled by something’, and thus the framework appears ‘incapable of setting limits to democratic discourse and establishing standards for legitimacy’.Footnote 15
Scholars have highlighted normative tensions within agonistic memory politics.Footnote 16 Our notion of ethical partisan memory stemming from the anti-fascist letters brings these tensions into sharper view. Like agonistic memory, the letters foreground the plural and conflictual nature of politics as well as the productive role of conflict in securing equal freedom. However, the anti-fascist letters do not regard adversarial engagement as an end in itself. Instead, they call upon citizens to take sides in pursuit of a common cause grounded in shared democratic principles. In their final letters, the authors do not seek to sustain an open-ended confrontation over the past but rather to forge a consensus around the memory of anti-fascist resistance and its core democratic values.
In this anti-fascist tradition, partisanship is understood as a mode of active democratic participation rooted in responsibility to the common good. As Gramsci famously declared in 1917, ‘I believe, like Federico Hebbel, that “to live means being a partisan” … Whoever truly lives cannot but be a citizen, and take sides’.Footnote 17 For Gramsci, to be partisan and take sides does not mean excluding one’s adversaries from the political community or embracing conflict for its own sake. Rather, it means assuming active responsibility for pursuing common ethical–political aims through democratic participation. The anti-fascist last letters similarly embody this aim of democratic conflict. With their explicit commitment to defeating fascism, the letters stand in tension with agonistic memory’s radical multiperspectivism and its insistence on treating perpetrators’ memories as equally legitimate perspectives among many. Instead, the letters emphasize democratic participation directed towards the construction of a new hegemony that does not deny plurality but channels it towards the realization of universal democratic ideals. This dialectic of conflict and consensus appears across both the Italian and French anthologies and gives rise to an ethical partisan memory distinct from cosmopolitan, antagonistic, and agonistic modes of remembrance.
Despite its normative democratic potential, any defence of partisan memory politics needs to confront its own ambivalent place in democracy as a conflictual practice. Parties have always stood in tension with the ideal of an inclusive public sphere. To be partisan means to take sides, to align with some and not others in pursuit of a shared cause.Footnote 18 Thus, the conflictual nature of partisanship challenges the myth of harmony of interests around the common good, which is typical of classical theories of political representation.Footnote 19 As Ignazi puts it, ‘the problem is in the name’: party (from partire, which means to divide) is seemingly at odds with ideas of national unity.Footnote 20
And yet, parties are indispensable to a pluralist democracy: they institutionalize conflict in ways that enable both compromise and partisan alternation in office.Footnote 21 On this basis, many democratic theorists have recently defended an ethical view of partisanship, in which taking sides means not pursuing narrow sectarian interests but ‘advancing principles and aims that are generalizable, i.e. irreducible to the beliefs or interests of particular social groups’.Footnote 22 While we, too, endorse this ethical conception of partisanship through the anti-fascist last letters, our case studies show how actual partisan memory practices often fail to perform their function of democratic representation.
The public–party tension is especially evident in the PCF’s reissuing of Lettres de fusillés, the most systematic partisan appropriation of anti-fascist last letters in Cold War Europe. From the outset, the PCF relied on a selective source. The 1946 anthology published by the communist press Éditions France D’Abord included only communist resistors’ last letters, but it aimed to represent the anti-fascist resistance as a whole. Its preface, written by the unaffiliated poet and resistor Lucien Scheler, presented the letters as part of a universal collective memory: ‘the letters ought to serve the memory of all the résistants, of all the dead … The names by which they are signed become symbols, valid for everyone’.Footnote 23 Despite its selectivity, the anthology retained a plural democratic memory by including foreign résistants and defining patriotic duty beyond party loyalty. For example, Joseph Epstein, a Polish-born Jewish vice commander in the Francs-tireurs et partisans-Main-d’œuvre immigrée (FTP-MOI), grounds his sacrifice not in service to the Party but in the common cause of a free France. Above all, Epstein asks his wife and son for forgiveness: ‘Faithful to my ideal to the very end … I beg your forgiveness for any hurt I have caused you … Long live Liberty! Long live France!’.Footnote 24
French memory politics in the Cold War context was dominated by Gaullism’s myth of a unified Resistance, which inflated the scope of participation while obscuring France’s role in the Holocaust. In this context, the communist-specific anthology helped the PCF construct a counter-hegemonic narrative highlighting its leadership in the Resistance and commitment to universal democratic values.Footnote 25 Over time, however, this selective collection hardened into a partisan myth of its own. Later editions (1958 and 1970) omitted the letters written by foreign résistants, including Epstein’s, while retaining only Missak Manouchian (an Armenian-born commander) whose letter had already gained public acclaim. The PCF’s homogenization of the letters reflected a broader shift in its commemorative practices, as Resistance memory was increasingly instrumentalized for the party’s immediate agenda rather than as a plural democratic resource.
In Italy, where the PCI was the leading party of Resistance commemorations,Footnote 26 a different tension emerged between the party’s inclusive national-democratic identity and its focus on communist heroes. Palmiro Togliatti’s ‘Gramsci Operation’ made Gramsci’s theory of hegemony central to il partito nuovo, transforming it from a Leninist cadre into a mass party committed to a pluralist democracy.Footnote 27 After the 1948 electoral defeat, the PCI anchored its Resistance narrative around key protagonists (Gramsci, the working class, and the masses of the 25 April northern insurrection) while presenting anti-fascist unity as the foundation of its idea of a new progressive democracy.Footnote 28 Textual commemorations were at the centre of this heroic narrative, including political biographies, speeches by the former Garibaldi Brigade commander Pietro Secchia, the series Martyrs and Heroes of the New Italy, and annual pilgrimages to Gramsci’s tomb around 25 April.
During the ‘Second Risorgimento’ phase of Italian memory politics,Footnote 29 the PCI foregrounded these protagonists to construct its hegemonic role as a mass party capable of involving the whole working population in rebuilding the nation. Yet, this hero-centric narrative stood in tension with the narrative of a multipartisan Resistance articulated in the Lettere, which represents not individual heroes or a single mass party but the partigiani themselves as the protagonists of the first democratic republic. The term partigiani, at once partisan and plural, referred to all who participated in opposing fascism, regardless of class, faith, gender, or political affiliation. This multipartisan unity was later institutionalized in the Committees of National Liberation (CLN), which paved the way for the Constituent Assembly and the 1946 referendum on the choice between monarchy and republic. Throughout the Cold War, as divisions deepened among the parties of the formerly united CLN forces, it became difficult for any single party to appropriate the multipartisan unity embodied in the Lettere.Footnote 30 Consequently, while the anthology remained a powerful symbol of anti-fascist unity in civil society, its ambivalent place in party politics constrained its political influence.
The French and Italian cases show that the public–party tension is not a simple divide between bad-selective partisan memory and good-inclusive public memory. Partisan memory can homogenize and exclude, as in the PCF’s use of the Lettres de fusillés, but the absence of party appropriation can also depoliticize past struggles, as in Italy. The challenge is to cultivate an ethics of partisan memory that is neither sectarian nor depoliticizing.
Anti-fascist last letters: towards an ethical partisan memory
The anti-fascist last letters form a distinct genre of Resistance literature and collective remembrance. Written in the final moments before execution, the last letters are more than just sentimental farewells following a stereotypical schema, as some scholars suggest.Footnote 31 Rather, they are expressions of conscious ethical and political conviction. What begins as a private farewell addressed to parents, siblings, beloveds, friends, fellow partisans, or the Party itself becomes a testimony of political agency against injustice for a wider public. Since they are composed in full awareness that death is certain and no reply will come, the authors must break from the ordinary reciprocity of correspondence and transform their letter into a final act of self-memorialization. In doing so, they explain to the living who they are ‘in the most solemn moment of life’, what has happened to them, and why they chose to resist.Footnote 32
Unlike autobiographical memoirs, which are composed in conditions that allow authors time and resources to construct a coherent self-narrative,Footnote 33 the last letters are written in contexts of violent conflict under the coercive authority of their executioners and cannot be reduced to acts of self-construction alone. Yet, just as a single letter can provide essential biographical insight into its author, the last letters constitute a large and diverse historical archive of the personal and political lives of early twentieth-century anti-fascist thinkers and activists captured, imprisoned, and condemned to death by the fascists. In this sense, they belong to the broader anti-fascist generation that includes figures like Antonio Gramsci, Piero Gobetti, and Carlo Rosselli, who met a similar tragic fate for opposing a regime that used violence to stifle freedom of thought and action.
The distinctiveness of the anti-fascist last letters lies in how each condemned partisan bears witness to an impending political crime by articulating the experience of facing execution for opposing authoritarian power. Each letter thus becomes not only an act of self-representation that explains the reasons for resistance but also a final correspondence addressed to those still living under conditions of unfreedom. The condemned write to be remembered, to comfort loved ones or seek comfort from them, and to sustain those who continue the struggle. As Daniel Decourdemanche (32, teacher, PCF) wrote to his parents, ‘I consider myself somewhat like a leaf that falls from the tree to nourish the soil. The quality of the soil will depend on the leaves. I wish to speak of the French youth, in whom I place all my hope’.Footnote 34
For many authors, the letters serve as a vehicle for expressing a final moral and political justification of partisan action as a necessary commitment to a higher ideal.Footnote 35 In many cases, this justification of partisan action is explicitly linked to the cause of universal freedom.Footnote 36 Irma Marchiani (33, nurse and vice-commander, Matteotti Battalion), for example, asks her brother Piero not to remember her as ‘a bad little sister’ but as ‘a creature of action’ whose ‘spirit needs to range freely’ in pursuit of ‘high and beautiful ideals’.Footnote 37 For Marchiani, this ideal is not abstract universalism detached from political struggle, but a concrete vision of a democratic future in which everyone, men and women, fulfil their civic obligation of participating in politics. As she writes:
In my heart there has taken hold an idea (unfortunately not felt by many) that everyone, more or less, has the obligation to give their own contribution. This call is so strong that I feel it so deeply that, after putting all my affairs in order, I depart content.Footnote 38
Marchiani thus ascribes to her resistance a popular-democratic and emancipatory function, highlighting women’s equal role in founding Italy’s democratic republic.Footnote 39 Félicien Joly (21, student, FTP) likewise sees his sacrifice as serving a universal ideal, but he has a different aim: a future where humanity can flourish. As he writes:
I wanted all of humanity to be happy; see the future in the eyes, radiant, certain … my name will ring out after my death, not like a death knell, but as a flight of hope.Footnote 40
The different ways Marchiani and Joly conceive anti-fascist resistance as a civic duty to the common good reflect the distinct national contexts in which they wrote their final letters. If, in Gobetti’s memorable words, ‘fascism is the autobiography of the [Italian] nation’, then the Italian letters of the partigiani can be read as the autobiography of the nation’s unfinished effort to create a popular democracy against an authoritarian power.Footnote 41 In Gramsci’s terms, politics from the Italian Unification to fascism rested on coercive authority, but not an authority grounded in organized popular consensus. Gobetti likewise saw fascist corporatism as the expression of a society that used the state to suppress individuality and autonomous plural action by imposing uniformity in place of democratic conflict in the public sphere.
For both anti-fascist thinkers, the problem was not the search for national unity or consensus but the homogeneity enforced by coercive power that denied an already passive population the means for organized action. Seen from the perspectives of Gramsci and Gobetti, the potential of the anti-fascist last letters, as a distinct genre, to contribute to popular sovereignty during and after fascism lies in their common theme of civic duty to the homeland. This patriotic conception of civic duty is expressed not as attachment to a myth of national homogeneity but as a form of shared civic responsibility, which recovers an ethical partisanship capable of promoting a concern for the common good and equal political autonomy among the citizenry.
In his preface to the Lettere, Enzo Agnoletti, himself an anti-fascist partisan, drew a crucial distinction between the Italian and French Resistance. In France, he argued, fascism was largely imposed through Nazi occupation, so resistance meant continuing the struggle after military defeat: refusing submission, forging alliances, and preserving France’s republican heritage.Footnote 42 However, the French letters suggest a more revolutionary understanding of resistance than Agnoletti’s account admits. Rather than simply expressing a desire to preserve a past national identity, many partisans understood their struggle as contributing to the creation of a new and more egalitarian France. For example, Henri Fertet, a sixteen-year-old student, socialist, and member of the Guy Môquet group, writes that the country for which he died ought to secure freedom and equality for all: ‘I want a free France and happy French people, not an arrogant France or great power, but a France that is hardworking, laborious, honest’.Footnote 43
Nevertheless, Agnoletti rightly observed that in Italy, where the partisans confronted a totalitarian regime that emerged from within society, anti-fascist resistance meant something different than in France. As he puts it, ‘patriotic motives’ had to be linked to an idea of homeland ‘less elementary, less physical’ than elsewhere, ‘an idea of homeland that views it not simply as a common origin but as a type of society opposed to another type of society’.Footnote 44 In this way, Agnoletti’s account can be understood as an early antagonistic narrative of the war, linking anti-fascist struggle to the democratic founding of the Republic through the defeat of a common adversary. Yet unlike exclusionary antagonistic discourses grounded in territorial conceptions of the nation-state, his interpretation avoids imperial triumphalism and Manichean divisions between good and evil,Footnote 45 emphasizing instead unified popular action by recalling that ‘everywhere, as had never happened until now, the Italian people took part without exclusions in the common sacrifice’.Footnote 46
Despite their differences, the Italian and French anthologies reveal a diverse range of participants, emotions, and moral convictions alongside shared democratic aspirations. Like other postwar autobiographies of PCI and PCF leaders and militants, some of the condemned express their sacrifice in terms of loyal service to the Party. Paul Camphin (21, radio technician, Communist Youth), for instance, directly addresses his final letter to the PCF: ‘I will go with my head held high, with the satisfaction of a duty fulfilled, and the awareness of having been towards you, my dear party, a faithful militant’.Footnote 47 Other partisans reflect deeply on the formation of their partisan identity. For example, Pedro Ferreira (23, officer, Justice and Liberty Brigade) explains in a long letter to his friends how he is becoming more aligned with the political thought of Gobetti and Rosselli and the PDA’s programme of justice and freedom.Footnote 48
As Lavabre observes, postwar autobiographical writings of PCF members often viewed memory as a sectarian practice of self-construction.Footnote 49 Similarly, Boarelli’s study shows how the PCI encouraged ordinary militants to read and write autobiographies of the Resistance, but often in ways that reinforced party hierarchy and limited independence of thought, particularly for women.Footnote 50 By contrast, the anti-fascist last letters articulate a civic commitment to the public good that transcends particular party affiliations, ideologies, class, gender, faith, region, or national origin.
Read collectively, the letters do not speak with a single ideological voice. Instead, they contain a plurality of ethical–political convictions through which the condemned justify their partisan action against fascism. Some authors ask forgiveness for their actions, while others write with hope or calm resolve. Although a few call out for vengeance, others stress the need to recognize their adversaries’ equal rights and dignity. In doing so, the anti-fascist letters recover an ethical partisan memory that can promote a more inclusive mode of remembering past conflicts.
The conflict between fascism and anti-fascism: beyond cosmopolitan and agonistic modes of remembrance
Cosmopolitan memory remains the predominant framework for remembering fascism, World War II, and the Holocaust in Western Europe.Footnote 51 Emerging alongside transnational Holocaust remembrance, trauma theory, and global human rights discourses, cosmopolitan memory sought to universalize victim suffering and promote postnational identity construction.Footnote 52 Critics argue, however, that cosmopolitanism’s victim-centred approach risks depoliticizing past conflicts by obscuring citizens’ agency.Footnote 53 The last letters offer an empowering alternative to the cosmopolitan model because they present the condemned partisans not as passive victims but as autonomous moral and political agents in opposition to injustice and authoritarian rule.
Through their letters, the condemned give themselves a voice, despite the trauma they are enduring. In doing so, they simultaneously historicize the cruelty of fascist political crimes and challenge notions of victimhood that presume the condemned as powerless and unable to fight for their own rights. Giovanni Mecca Ferroglia (18, electrician, Garibaldi Brigade), for example, recalls that the judges who condemned him ‘did not even let me speak’ and ‘asked for my death sentence with a smile on their lips and pronounced my sentence laughing loudly as if they attended a comic performance’.Footnote 54 Others, like Paul Camphin (PCF) and Antonio Fossati (unknown), document in extensive detail the torture inflicted on them by their adversaries.
Although the letters unequivocally side with the persecuted, they cannot be reduced to an abstract victim-centred discourse. Many move beyond a rigid victim–perpetrator dichotomy by emphasizing individual responsibility for the consequences of their political action. Pedro Ferreira, for example, asks his fellow PDA members to care for his parents, acknowledging the material hardship his death will bring. Alfonso Paltrinieri (49, industrialist) seeks his wife’s forgiveness, aware of the burdens she will bear raising their children alone. Such self-reflections turn the final letter into a space of reciprocal recognition between writer and recipient. This reciprocity is especially embodied in Pierre Grelot’s (19, student, FTP) letter to his mother, whom he credits as the source of his civic commitment: ‘It is here, in my cell, that I have truly understood who you are. You are a heroine … If I bring you this immense pain, it is because, like you, I always wanted the happiness of others’.Footnote 55
Agonistic theorists warn that victim-centred discourses risk dehumanizing perpetrators and foreclosing recognition of the ‘Other’ as a political equal.Footnote 56 Their proposal for a radical multiperspective commemorative field seeks to transform antagonistic conflict into an agonistic contest in which opponents recognize one another not as enemies to be defeated but as ‘adversaries with a right to their position’.Footnote 57 In this view, political equality refers to the moral equality of voices within an open arena of contestation.Footnote 58 However, placing perpetrators and victims on an even adversarial playing field risks recasting the struggle between fascism and anti-fascism as a democratic competition between equally legitimate sides.
The letters advance a distinct account of the relationship between conflict and equal freedom. Although they share agonism’s rejection of a friend–enemy binary, they do not view perpetual adversarial engagement as an end in itself. Even in the face of violent death, many partisans combine an uncompromising commitment to defeating the unjust fascist regime with a recognition of their opponents’ equal rights. As Boris Vildé (33, Musée de l’Homme) writes, ‘Our death must not be a pretext for hatred against Germany. I acted for France, but not against the Germans’.Footnote 59 Others articulate the principles of justice required for a post-fascist democracy. Pedro Ferreira, for example, urges his fellow partisans not to deny justice to their adversaries solely on the basis of political affiliation:
the new Italy of tomorrow must not stain itself with the crimes with which today the Italian Social Republic stains itself, judging hastily and en masse, ignoring the human being and seeing only an enemy to destroy … Even among the [R.S.I.] officials there are elements who … must tomorrow be treated with the utmost consideration and respect, weighing the good they have done as men against the harm you may attribute to them simply because they belonged to the organizations or institutions of the Social Republic.Footnote 60
Such final appeals to justice and equality show how Resistance memory can sustain an anti-fascist consensus while avoiding both the tendency to seek vengeance against past enemies and drawing a false moral equivalence between fascists and anti-fascists. In postwar Italy, striking this balance lay at the centre of memorial conflicts over how anti-fascism and the last letters should be remembered.Footnote 61 Although anti-fascist unity underpinned the 1948 Constitution, the neo-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) emerged in 1945 to legitimize the fascists’ side of the conflict. In the early 1960s, the National Association for the Fallen of the R.S.I. published La R.S.I. nelle lettere dei suoi caduti, a counter-anthology of letters portraying fascists as noble martyrs while seeking to replace the partigiani’s democratic values with authoritarian ideals of state obedience. In his preface, Don Angelo Scarpellini, a former Fascist army chaplain, described the volume as a response to ‘the repugnance aroused by the trite judgements’ against the executed of the R.S.I. in Agnoletti’s preface.Footnote 62 In this context, Einaudi’s sixteen republications of the Lettere (1952–2015) played a crucial mediating role by transmitting the partisans’ democratic values to a postwar public increasingly distant from a lived memory of the Resistance.
The Italian and French anthologies entered the public sphere through vastly different modes of memorial production. In France, Lettres de fusillés was a single-party-led project coordinated by several PCF publishing houses, including Éditions France D’Abord, Éditions Sociales, and Éditions Messidor. In Italy, by contrast, the Lettere was compiled by the independent publisher Einaudi, whose politically diverse editorial board sought to represent a plural and democratic Resistance. As Malvezzi and Pirelli explain in their compiler’s note, their aim was not ‘to collect the greatest number of letters’ but ‘to document the experiences of individuals from different social classes, captured and killed in the most diverse places and conditions of struggle’.Footnote 63
These editorial approaches produced anthologies with distinct social and political compositions. By the third 1952 edition, the Lettere included 112 letters spanning ‘workers, students, professors, peasants, businessmen, soldiers, and priests; and consequently Catholics, Communists, Monarchists, Republicans’, as well as four women whose roles ranged from commander to liaison.Footnote 64 The political affiliations represented in the anthology included anti-fascist formations linked to the PCI (Garibaldi Brigades, Gramsci Division), PSI (Matteotti Brigades), PDA (Giustizia e Libertà), and DC (Fiamme Verdi). By contrast, the 1946 Lettres de fusillés comprised seventy-one letters primarily from the FTP-MOI and the Communist Youth. Women were absent from the original anthology (though incorporated in later editions), and non-communist résistants such as the Gaullists and formations such as Group Élie, Musée de l’Homme, and Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne were excluded, resulting in a more politically homogeneous collection.
Ultimately, these editorial decisions shaped how the anthologies could be later appropriated in postwar party politics. In Italy, Einaudi’s pluralistic approach produced a nationally representative anthology but risked depoliticization, proving it difficult for any single mass party to appropriate. In France, a communist-specific anthology could be readily instrumentalized by the PCF, though its narrow scope limited its resonance beyond the party’s immediate agenda.
Italy: Einaudi and the Lettere in the shadow of a divided party democracy
If the anti-fascist last letters form a distinct genre of Resistance writing, in Italy, the publication of the Lettere in 1952 contributed to the formation of that very genre. The compilation of the anthology was driven above all by Giovanni Pirelli, who conceived the project as an effort to produce an accessible public history of the Italian (and later European) Resistance and, in explicitly Gramscian terms, a form of ‘national-popular’ literature.Footnote 65 As an editor at Einaudi, Pirelli played a central role in creating a literary canon called Letteratura della Resistenza, which assumed a multigeneric form and expanded to include writings on the Algerian anti-colonial struggle.Footnote 66 Einaudi was a highly politicized publisher with close ties to the PCI and other radical currents of the Italian left. Pirelli himself had strong political affiliations as a committed socialist and co-founder of Quaderni Rossi, the publisher of the Movimento Operaio.Footnote 67
Given the editors’ strong political affiliations, one might expect the Lettere to have been appropriated within Italian party politics, as occurred in France. Yet this did not happen. It is therefore puzzling that in Italy, where anti-fascism was enshrined in the 1948 Constitution, none of the major anti-fascist parties incorporated the last letters of executed partisans into their postwar programme. Consequently, while the anthology played a key role in reconstructing Italian memory around Resistance literature, its political influence remained largely within civil society while exerting only an indirect impact on Italy’s party-centred democracy. This outcome in the memorial trajectory of the Lettere illustrates our concept of the public–party tension. Explaining why this gap in the anthology’s reception occurred requires returning to the editorial debates surrounding the anthology’s formation in the early 1950s, when the tension between Einaudi’s narrative of a multipartisan Resistance and Italy’s new party democracy first emerged.
1951: constructing a plural democratic memory
Both editors of the Lettere were politically positioned outside the main anti-fascist parties. Malvezzi, an independent Milanese socialist, and Pirelli, the son of an industrialist and a former fascist turned anti-fascist socialist, would have found little space within the former CLN forces, including the PCI, which had split from the PSI before the war. Their first collaboration was the unpublished typescript of the Lettere, with a preface by Agnoletti, which won the Premio Venezia della Resistenza in 1951. The Judging Commission hailed the manuscript as ‘perhaps the highest, most sacred, and exemplary documents of the bloody war of Liberation’, capable of consoling mourning families and ‘keeping alive … the memory’ of ‘all Italians’, from which they might ‘draw strength … that their resistance fighters fell even for the freedom of their adversaries’.Footnote 68
That same year, editorial debates at Einaudi shaped the Lettere into a work of public memory, as recorded in the meeting minutes.Footnote 69 Over the summer, a politically diverse editorial board associated with the PCI and the recently dissolved PDA discussed publication of the collection. Participants included Italo Calvino, then a PCI member; Giulio Einaudi, a close friend of PCI secretary Togliatti; Massimo Mila, a formerly imprisoned partisan of Giustizia e Libertà; Norberto Bobbio, a Gobettian and democratic proceduralist; and Natalia Ginzburg, whose husband Leone had written a last letter before his execution.
The meetings centred on two issues: the national representativeness of the collection and the form the book should take to ensure accessibility to a public readership. At the first meeting on 4 July 1951, Calvino supported publication but noted that ‘the selection was made almost exclusively in Piedmont’ and argued that ‘the book ought to also include testimonies of those who fell in other regions’.Footnote 70 By 11 July, he reported that Pirelli had gathered sufficient material to make the collection ‘representative of the Resistance throughout the whole country’.Footnote 71
Calvino’s insistence on national inclusiveness reflected Einaudi’s broader commitment to representing the plurality of the Resistance rather than the memory of any single political group. A second, more contentious issue concerned the political and conflictual character of Agnoletti’s preface. Mila, reflecting the majority view, argued that any attempt at a ‘true commentary’ would be ‘inappropriate’ for these writings and insisted that the preface be limited to ‘factual explanations’, such as selection criteria and execution data.Footnote 72 At the meeting of 1 August, Calvino reported a letter from Pirelli noting that Agnoletti’s preface could not be removed, since the Venice prize had also been awarded to him, and suggested persuading him to revise it as a compromise.Footnote 73
The final anthology retained Agnoletti’s preface alongside a compiler’s note by Malvezzi and Pirelli, emphasizing the documentary character of the collection. Yet, the editorial debate revealed a deeper tension between Einaudi’s aspiration to construct an inclusive public memory and the partisan nature of the letters. While the judging commission had praised the anthology’s high political value, Einaudi’s preference for neutral documentation risked depoliticizing Agnoletti’s central claim: that the partisans’ struggle was a popular-participatory and creative-revolutionary action. The Italian people, he wrote, ‘found suddenly without a State, took the initiative of the struggle against Nazis and Fascists without waiting for violence and massacres’, and in doing so ‘did much more than resist’.Footnote 74
For Agnoletti, the letters revealed how partisans across class, political, and regional divisions ‘shar[ed] a common inspiration that will remain as testimony to how humanity and courage were never lacking’. Their memorial value lay less in preserving a documentation of the Resistance than in offering a model for future political action, so that ‘if it ever becomes necessary, the example of these Italians will be present’, reminding the nation ‘not [to] forget the simplicity with which these men, animated by different faiths, were united in a sacrifice without equal in Italian history’.Footnote 75
Interestingly, the debates over the Lettere’s publication mirror those surrounding Gramsci’s postwar reception, when Cold War polarization produced competing efforts to canonize him either as a democratic thinker or a Marxist–Leninist theorist of revolutionary action. But whereas the ‘Gramsci operation’ was carried out by Palmiro Togliatti and Giulio Einaudi ‘through a skillful blend of philology and political strategy’,Footnote 76 Einaudi’s production of the Lettere showed similar editorial care yet lacked a party apparatus capable of mobilizing the anthology at key political moments.
1952–1955: between consensus and conflict
Following its publication, the Lettere was an immediate success, a ‘long seller’ that went through multiple printings in its first year.Footnote 77 The rapid sell-out of the first two editions showed that the anthology’s appeal extended beyond intellectual or party circles.Footnote 78 Its success soon inspired a European volume (1954), which amplified Einaudi’s plural democratic message abroad by bringing together last letters from anti-fascists across eighteen countries. The Lettere thus became what the judging commission had anticipated: a ‘sacred text’ of the Resistance that inspired the creation of monuments and musical compositions, and by the 1960s, it was a civic ritual in schools to have readings of excerpts around Liberation Day on 25 April.Footnote 79
However, this immense impact on civil society did not translate into direct influence over Italy’s political sphere. The anthology’s multipartisan and cross-class character gave it broad public resonance. As Cooke notes, the political plurality of the Lettere meant it ‘contains something for everyone (with the exception of neo-fascists)’ and thus became ‘one of the few Resistance texts around which there exists some form of consensus’.Footnote 80 This consensus simultaneously aligned communists, socialists, liberals, and the DC against classical fascism, but it also made it more difficult for any single party to claim the Lettere for its own agenda. Those who mobilized the anthology most actively were not the dominant parties but the Actionists, who by then no longer had a party or formal parliamentary representation. As Cooke observes, ‘Only the Actionists were in a position to champion unrestrainedly the movement without fear of political recriminations. But that was because the Actionists had no political power and therefore no strategic imperative’.Footnote 81
The Lettere proved difficult to instrumentalize because it combined both conflictual and consensual elements of the Resistance that did not align fully with the policies of the dominant parties. The letters demanded both the outlawing of fascism and the incorporation of popular forces into the democratic state, embodying what Gramsci described as the dialectic between force and consent. Yet this dual character clashed with the commemorative politics of both the PCI and DC. It was the Catholics whose ‘rediscovery of the Resistance dated from the publication of the Lettere’, but neither the DC nor the PCI embraced the letters’ armed-insurrectional dimension.Footnote 82 For the PCI, whose strategy followed Gramsci’s war of position of building consensus, ‘the use of violence in the past conflicted with the strategy of the party in the present’.Footnote 83 For the DC, the challenge lay in reconciling the Republic’s insurrectionary origins with its postwar commitment to peace and justice through centrist coalitions, which often required alliances with neo-fascist forces.
The DC’s electoral dominance (1948–1953) allowed it to exclude partisan associations from official 25 April commemorations, transforming an insurrectionary anniversary into a patriotic celebration of the state’s armed forces.Footnote 84 The PCI countered with commemorations emphasizing the decisive role of the Communists’ popular alliance strategy in the northern insurrection. In this context, two articles were published in 1954 by prominent PCI leaders in the party’s journal Rinascita that explicitly recognized the significance of the Lettere. Pietro Secchia celebrated the European anthology within the PCI’s heroic narrative of the Resistance, praising these ‘documents whose value is made invaluable by the heroic death of the authors … for the contribution they make to the struggle for peace and freedom’.Footnote 85
Benvenuto Santus, leader of the Communist Federation in Como, similarly invoked the anthology, but to praise Christian Democratic youth who rejected their party’s ‘formal anti-communism’ and neo-fascist alliances by republishing the Lettere, singing Fischia il vento, and reciting poems by Pablo Neruda.Footnote 86 Referencing their manifesto, signed with Republican, Liberal, and Social Democratic youth groups, Santus highlighted their resolute commitment to the anti-fascist principle that ‘the strengthening of the democratic Republic can be achieved only through the integration of popular forces into the State … against every anti-democratic and reactionary attempt’.Footnote 87
Despite this grassroots resonance, the Lettere received only ‘weak, partial sponsorship from above’, as no party integrated them into official commemorations.Footnote 88 In a party-centred system, popular memory rarely reshapes the political order without mediation through parties and representative government. Consequently, the Lettere and their testimony of anti-fascist popular unity remained constrained in its capacity to renew party leadership or counter efforts to delegitimize anti-fascism in Italian public memory.
1960–2002: from anti-fascist depoliticization to false moral equivalence
After the ‘missed revolution’ phase (1960–1975), the postwar anti-fascist consensus began to fracture over the memory of wartime violence.Footnote 89 By the mid-1970s, revisionist discourses recast the Resistance as a ‘civil war’, constructing a story of moral equivalence between fascists and anti-fascists while portraying Italian civilians as the true victims. In 1975, Lettere dei condannati a morte della R.S.I. was published to reinforce this narrative and establish an alternative memory in which fascists were presented as morally equal to, but more patriotic than, the anti-fascists. In his preface, Don Angelo Scarpellini praised the ‘honor and sacrifice’ of ‘old fascists’ and the ‘love of Italy’ of young men who ‘knew nothing of politics’, insisting that ‘these dead too should be remembered’.Footnote 90 By equating fascists and anti-fascists, the anthology helped legitimize later revisionist narratives that obscured fascist crimes and eroded the democratic legacy of the Resistance.
The ‘Death of the Fatherland’ phase (1990–2006) coincided with Italy’s crisis of party democracy and the dissolution of the PCI.Footnote 91 Denunciations of partitocrazia (rule by parties) increasingly targeted anti-fascism itself, now ‘openly held to be responsible for the formation of the Republic of parties’.Footnote 92 In this context, a joint volume combining Einaudi’s 1952 anthology with the R.S.I.’s fascist collection appeared in 1995 under the title Ho il cuore buono: Lettere di condannati a morte della Resistenza e della Repubblica Sociale Italiana. In his preface, Vitaliano Peduzzi advanced a conflict-neutralizing discourse of the war that replaced the partigiani’s commitment to universal freedom with a portrayal of fascists and anti-fascists as ‘good citizens’ united by ‘human dignity’ and ‘the universal pain of human destiny’.Footnote 93 What mattered, he argued, was not the cause for which they fought but the sincerity of their convictions, each following ‘the part that conscience indicated’ and ‘believing it right in good faith’.Footnote 94
In 2002, Einaudi sought to counter the hegemonic narrative of moral equivalence by republishing the Lettere with a new introductory note by constitutional scholar Gustavo Zagrebelsky. Rather than embracing agonistic discourse that includes perpetrators or cosmopolitan victim-centred memory, Zagrebelsky instead repoliticized the universal significance of the anti-fascist struggle, echoing Agnoletti’s earlier insistence on the revolutionary agency of the partigiani. Writing amid widespread civic disengagement, he argued that Italian commemorative culture had stripped the Resistance of its democratic value and embraced a logic of ‘non-fascism-non-anti-fascism’, which depoliticized the conflict by portraying partisanship and popular participation as dangerous and ‘waiting it out as practical wisdom rather than a vice of apathy’.Footnote 95
For Zagrebelsky, the Lettere spoke not only to a past event for which contemporary Italians had no living memory, but to the renewal of plural democratic action in the present, ‘contain[ing] the voice of another people: men and women of all ages and every social class, aware of the duty of freedom and the price it demands in extreme moments’.Footnote 96 But the question then, as today, was how to invoke the letters’ plural democratic agency without allowing it to become either depoliticized or monopolized by a single party – a dilemma made especially clear in the case of the PCF.
France: partisan politicization of the Lettres de fusillés at the ballot box
Throughout the Cold War, the PCF published four editions of Lettres de fusillés in 1946, 1958, 1970, and 1985. Each republication, with a new preface timed to a key electoral moment, reveals a deliberate strategy to adapt the design of the anthology to changing public concerns in order to enhance the party’s democratic legitimacy. Yet editorial choices about which voices to include or exclude reflected tensions between rigid party ideology and the inclusive democratic ideals of the Resistance, limiting the anthology’s ability to speak to a diverse public or sustain its democratic values of universal equality.
In postwar France, memory became a battleground as the PCF sought to counter the hegemony of the Gaullists’ myth of a unified Resistance by asserting its own leadership in the anti-fascist struggle.Footnote 97 This memorial battle began during the war itself, when the first anthology, Morts pour la France: Lettres de condamnés à mort, was published by the Gaullist-linked Société des Éditions de la France Libre. Its anonymous preface, written in December 1943, represented the fallen as a single national movement: ‘Miner or merchant, metallurgist or priest, craftsman or magazine director, hostage or resistor, man or woman, they are called Legion, they are called France’.Footnote 98 While invoking inclusive patriotism, the preface obscured the political affiliations of the executed partisans, portraying them instead as an ‘army that mobilized itself, spontaneously and silently: young people with old people, fathers with sons, teachers with their students’.Footnote 99
1946: mobilizing the masses at the birth of the Fourth Republic
If the Gaullists’ wartime anthology aimed to shape opinion abroad and sustain hope in the Resistance at home, the PCF’s Lettres de fusillés, published immediately after the war, pursued a different goal: mobilizing participation in the creation of the new Fourth Republic. A stamp on the final page dates the edition to April–June 1946, during the constitutional crisis that followed the defeat of a PCF-backed proposal for a unicameral parliament in the 5 May referendum, weeks before the 2 June elections. Presenting itself as the ‘party of the masses implanted across all of France’,Footnote 100 the PCF used the communist letters to appeal to a broad public who could find in the 185-page sober grey volume the final words of seventy-one communist resistors that reflected hope for a better future.
In his preface, Scheler emphasized the letters’ universality, insisting ‘the dead had names’ and that their words, from workers to immigrants, ‘attained an equal nobility’.Footnote 101 He sought to represent the Resistance as a plural democratic memory resonating beyond a communist readership. Scheler’s initial inclusive discourse ultimately contrasted with later editions, which reshaped the anthology into a means for the PCF to assert itself as the sole representative of the Resistance, rather than an equal among all those who participated.
1958: de Gaulle’s return and resistance betrayed
In 1958, when Éditions Sociales, the PCF’s official publishing house, issued a new edition of Lettres de fusillés, both the representation and political function of the anthology shifted significantly. The familiar grey cover remained, but the volume was drastically reduced to just twenty-eight letters and explicitly excluded the letters written by foreign résistants from the FTP-MOI. This selective republication signalled a turn towards a more nativist national memory of the Resistance, even as the inclusion of women’s letters for the first time expanded the anthology’s representation. The stamp of the new edition, 8 August, places its republication within a moment when France faced what Leake calls a ‘crisis of ontological security’.Footnote 102 The Algerian War had brought the Fourth Republic to the brink of collapse, and Charles de Gaulle’s return to power, denounced by the PCF as a coup d’état, opened the path to the Fifth Republic.
The new preface by senior party leader Jacques Duclos broke with Scheler’s inclusive framing, presenting the letters as testimony to a betrayed popular struggle and a call for renewed resistance. ‘It is a worthwhile and particularly opportune initiative’, he wrote, ‘that there is a re-edition of the letters of the executed, which are as much emotional testimony of the fight of the people of France’.Footnote 103 These ‘life-shattering letters’, he continued, ‘could not be read without feeling a deep emotion mixed with anger’ and confidence in the ‘final victory of the cause for which these dead … fell’.Footnote 104 By invoking their sacrifice in the present political moment, Duclos reframed the résistants’ struggle as an unfinished cause for liberty and democracy in opposition to the contemporary authoritarianism of de Gaulle.
Referencing more than a dozen letters, Duclos depicted the PCF as the political force best equipped to defend the Resistance’s legacy and lead a new domestic struggle. Among them, he recalled Pierre Rebière’s final letter, highlighting the partisan’s ‘certitude in the Communist Party’ and his ‘compassion … for all those who have fallen without an ideal’.Footnote 105 Duclos concluded with a call to ‘fight … against the dictator, against fascism, for the Republic of liberty’,Footnote 106 which transformed the anthology from a record of common sacrifice into a partisan instrument for mobilizing a new generation around the PCF’s opposition to what it portrayed as a common existential threat to the present and future of the Republic.
1970: from opposition to political education
In the wake of the May 1968 student protests, the memorial battle with de Gaulle had abated, and French memory politics entered a new phase as the PCF gained popular support ahead of the upcoming parliamentary election. Seizing this opportunity, the party adapted its commemoration of the Resistance to a new generation of voters. The 1970 edition of Lettres de fusillés, published by Éditions Sociales, reinstated the last letters of the cinq martyrs de Buffon (Jacques Baudry, Pierre Benoît, Pierre Grelot, Lucien Legros, and Jean-Marie Arthus), who were five high school students executed for their resistance activity. Their faces, printed on a commemorative stamp, invited younger readers to identify with the youth of the past and view their struggle as part of a shared democratic legacy. The redesigned format reinforced this generational appeal: issued as a livre de poche (pocketbook), the volume was inexpensive, portable, and therefore more accessible to students.
Duclos’ new preface placed greater emphasis on youth and socialism as essential to democracy’s future. He quoted Decourdemanche’s letter, the teacher who likened himself to a leaf nourishing the soil for the future generation, to emphasize hope in the youths’ capacity to continue the struggle. Duclos concluded with a call to ‘fight for a new democracy, attacking the all-powerful capitalist monopolies and opening the pathway to socialism’.Footnote 107 This shift meant the anthology was no longer used to mobilize opposition against a common adversary but instead served as an instrument of political education. The aim, however, was not simply to manipulate opinion but to recover the civic duty expressed in the letters in order to promote active participation among young citizens in the present.
1985: reclaiming moral representational authority amid party decline
By the 1980s, the PCF was in decline, having lost significant vote share in the 1981 presidential election, particularly to the Socialist Party, which now led the French left. In this weakened position, the party faced growing challenges to its claim of being le parti de la Résistance. The crisis culminated in the controversy surrounding the 1983 documentary Des terroristes à la retraite, which alleged that, as Liberation approached in 1944, communist leaders betrayed foreign résistants to the Gestapo. Central to the scandal was a passage from Manouchian’s final letter, omitted from earlier editions (1946, 1958, 1970), in which he wrote: ‘I forgive all those who did me wrong … except the one who betrayed us to save his skin and those who sold us out’.Footnote 108
In response, the party returned to the letters to defend the ethics of its wartime conduct and restore its moral authority as representative of the Resistance. In January 1985, ahead of the 1986 legislative elections, Éditions Messidor published Ils aimaient la vie: Lettres de fusillés, printing Manouchian’s letter in full and restoring the letters by other immigrant resistors, including Joseph Epstein, Spartaco Fontano, Fernand Zalkinow, and Celestino Alfonso. The new title, They Loved Life, marked a shift in commemorative strategy. Rather than asserting communist dominance of the memory of the Resistance, the anthology emphasized the universal motivations of the résistants.
In a new preface, Étienne Fajon, director of L’Humanité and former PCF deputy, argued that the dead should speak for themselves. As he explained, ‘in the simplicity of the farewell, the condemned says what he judges essential about his life and the meaning of his death’.Footnote 109 The preface thus reframed the anthology as an unmediated, direct representation of the résistants’ final convictions, whose true meaning could not be the interpretation of a single party. Breaking with the more exclusionary discourses of the 1958 and 1970 editions, Fajon underscored ‘the dissimilarity of these glorious dead … as diverse as France itself … workers, teachers, intellectuals, union militants, elected officials, young people, women, and immigrants who chose to fight and die for her … here they are expressing themselves … with their own words and original thoughts’.Footnote 110
Fajon’s preface marked a return to the inclusive, plural democratic memory characteristic of the original 1946 edition, now explicitly aimed at countering accusations of betrayal and re-establishing the communists as legitimate participants in the Resistance. For Fajon, the moral character of the communist résistants lay not in obedience to the party but in their refusal to betray others as an exemplification of civic duty. As he recalled, ‘our comrades were people like everyone else, with their loves, their happiness, their difficulties, their qualities and weaknesses’, but ‘facing the alternative between death and life conserved at the price of abandoning a duty, the idea of ratting out did not even come to their minds’.Footnote 111
2003–present: from party monopoly to open resource
For decades, the PCF monopolized the memory of the Resistance through repeated republications of the letters, presenting itself as the sole representative of the ideals for which the résistants died. Without an alternative multipartisan anthology, the party’s interpretation largely defined the public memory of the Resistance for more than half a century. France’s memorial landscape shifted in the twenty-first century with the 2003 publication of La vie à en mourir: lettres de fusillés, the first anthology to present the letters as a shared, cross-party heritage aimed at ‘offering a renewed knowledge of the French Resistance and its humanist and universal values’.Footnote 112
The postwar trajectory of Lettres de fusillés thus illustrates the dilemmas of single-party-based representations of the past and underscores the importance of keeping collective memories open to instrumentalization by multiple political actors. When memory is monopolized by a single party, it can be used to claim exclusive representation of the people, enabling authoritarian forces to undermine the pluralist logic of party democracy by suppressing the political equality of those who disagree and dissent.Footnote 113 These anti-plural and anti-democratic forces are precisely the threats the anti-fascist partisans of the last letters confronted, and they remain central challenges for representative democracies today.
Concluding reflection
This article has examined how political parties used the anti-fascist last letters to shape postwar memory politics in Italy and France. Through this comparison, we have shown how an ethics of partisan memory inspired by these letters can help resist authoritarian forces today. We conclude with a brief reflection on the enduring relevance of the letters and of our concept of the public–party tension, as the memory of anti-fascism in both countries continues to be instrumentalized by parties and leaders in ways that reinforce anti-pluralist erasure, neutralization, and depoliticization.
In Italy, the memory of the Resistance is increasingly threatened by populist revisionism. A pivotal moment came in 2008, when Silvio Berlusconi sought to rebrand Liberation Day on 25 April as ‘Freedom Day’ to align the Republic’s founding myth with his party, The People of Freedom. This commemorative strategy exemplifies what Müller calls the populist ‘claim to a moral monopoly of representation’, whereby political actors portray themselves as the sole legitimate representatives of a mythically unified and morally homogeneous ruling people.Footnote 114 A similar populist strategy continues under Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and her party, Brothers of Italy, which has roots in the neo-fascist MSI, and has discussed replacing 25 April with the supposedly less divisive national holiday of Italian Unification on 17 March. Such populist revisionism risks erasing the memory of the partigiani’s struggle and imposing cultural uniformity by force, as seen in the censorship of anti-fascist speeches by the state broadcaster RAI on 25 April 2024. In this context, the last letters remain a vital reminder that, as Pedro Ferreira wrote in his last letter in 1945, today’s partisans ‘bring to the new Italy of tomorrow’ the citizenry’s ‘healthy and free energies so necessary for the regeneration of the country’.Footnote 115
In France, by contrast, the contemporary politics of memory surrounding the Resistance has taken an inclusive patriotic turn through the instrumentalization of Manuchian’s last letter in official commemorations. In 2024, President Emmanuel Macron inducted the Manouchian group into the Panthéon, presenting them as symbols of patriotic duty intended to promote narratives of national inclusion and counter the exclusionary discourse of the far right. Yet this invocation of Manouchian stands in tension with the government’s restrictive immigration policies, most notably the 2022 Law to Control Immigration and Improve Integration, which facilitates the deportation of immigrants deemed incompatible with republican values. Manouchian’s own last letter articulates a vision of international solidarity and peaceful coexistence that conflicts with the way it has been politically instrumentalized. This tension between universal ideals and partisan memory practices, once again, illustrates how partisan actors can diminish rather than represent the democratic principles of the past.
The last letters themselves demonstrate that partisan memory need not devolve into anti-pluralist distortions or a single party’s myth of national unity. On the contrary, they show how partisan remembrance can renew a pluralist democracy by reminding us that diverse actors understood their partisanship as an equal contribution to the cause of universal freedom. Today, Einaudi has translated the letters into dozens of languages, with new editions appearing across East Asia, the Middle East, and beyond. Although written in a time vastly different from our own, these final letters, speaking across languages, generations, and borders, continue to challenge us to confront injustice with a sense of civic duty and hope. Thus, even if they are read with a less vivid memory of the historical moment in which they were written, this distance affirms their universal significance as, in Zagrebelsky’s words, ‘a root from which we may still draw strength’ for all those committed to renewing democracy today.Footnote 116
Video Abstract
To view the online video abstract, please visit: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210526101922.
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this article were presented at the International Studies Association Annual Convention in 2025 and the Association of Political Theory Annual Conference also in 2025. For the insightful feedback on previous versions, we thank Rory Cox and Kevin Duong, as well as all the participants at ISA and APT. We offer special thanks to the editors of this journal and to our three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. We would like to acknowledge funding from the Albert … Elaine Borchard Foundation, which supported our research on the French case. We also thank Brent Steele for his incisive reading and valuable discussion of our article in the video abstract. Finally, we thank the undergraduate students at UC Irvine for their thoughtful engagement with the subject across a series of classes, which enriched our understanding of the last letters.
Open access
