In the fluctuating history of the nation’s civil calendar there is a moment when the date of June 2 has finally become a symbol for all Italians. In 2020, when the first wave of the pandemic from Covid-19 was ending, and the victims were more than 33,000, President Sergio Mattarella chose to celebrate the Republic Day in Codogno, among doctors, nurses, pharmacists, police forces, volunteers, the inhabitants of that town that first faced the pandemic attack. «Here today», Mattarella said in a sober ceremony before the Lombard mayors, «the Italy of solidarity, civilization, courage is present. In an ideal continuity in which we celebrate what holds the country together: its moral strength ». The Tricolore and the national anthem had been spontaneously rediscovered in the choirs from the balconies of the condominiums where people experienced the first lockdown. And with emotion at the end of May the Lombards, and gradually all the Italians, had admired the aerobatic team of the Air Force darting by, tracing trails of green, white and red. Signs of hope.
Carlo Azeglio Ciampi was right when he restored the military parade in 2000 and with the law of November 20 of the same year he brought back June 2 to the center of the public calendar. “Sometimes”, the president explained, “there is a need to collectively applaud, share moments of joy in difficult times.” A turning point, the one made by Ciampi, arrived after more than two decades of underestimation of the day when in 1946 12.7 million Italians and Italians (that year called for the first time to the polls) chose the republican symbol of the turreted woman, against the 10.7 who had put a cross on the Savoy coat of arms. The Republic won with a difference of 2 million, a large margin which, however, was not considered sufficient by those who shouted fraud and filed an appeal to re-run the elections.
On June 2, 1946, the Italians also chose the composition of the Constituent Assembly, sanctioning the affirmation as the first party of the DC with over 35 per cent, placing the Socialist Party in second place, with more than 20 per cent, the PCI in third with 18.9, and surprisingly revealing a new subject, the ‘Uomo Qualunque by Guglielmo Giannini, who exceeded 5 percent, almost four times the consensus reaped by the noble Action Party. But the game considered most important was that of choosing the institutional form. The ballot boxes gave the image of a geographically divided country: all the regions of the Center-North, where the Resistance movement had been stronger and a civil war had been fought, together with a war of liberation, against the Italians still lined up with Mussolini, they had voted for the Republic. In Rome and in all the cities of the South he had won the Monarchy.
In Italy governed by the prudent and skilled Alcide De Gasperi they preferred not to exacerbate the spirits, not to exacerbate the divisions which in the days following the vote, especially in the cities of the South, had caused demonstrations with dead and wounded. It is no coincidence that a southerner, Enrico De Nicola, of monarchical sentiments, was chosen as the first provisional head of state.
With the polls closed, the first data seemed to indicate a victory for the Monarchy, because the results came mainly from the South. Then, when the news came from the Center-North, the situation was reversed; it was officially given on 10 June, in the Sala della Lupa in Montecitorio, by the president of the Court of Cassation, Giuseppe Pagano. The next day the government, also to respond to the resistance of Umberto II who was late in leaving, proclaimed June 11 a national holiday. It was necessary to wait until 1949 for the date of June 2 to enter the official calendar of the nation, even if the first celebration of the anniversary had already taken place in 1947. Law 260 of May 27, 1949, which established the calendar of civil and religious holidays, indicated in art. 1 on 2 June and then, in a long list that included 4 November as the day of national unity, also 25 April. A date, that of the Liberation, which for decades has been lived and celebrated as the real holiday of the Italians.
On the anniversary of June 2 they touched more and more paludal tones, with an emphasis on celebrating the role of the armed forces, as can be easily seen from the speeches of the presidents who succeeded one another at the Quirinale, from Luigi Einaudi to Giovanni Gronchi, from Giuseppe Saragat to Sandro Pertini, to Oscar Luigi Scalfaro. “On the anniversary of June 2, the armed forces raise their glorious banners in a renewed commitment to dedication to the homeland”, declaimed Einaudi in 1951. Thirty years later the partisan president Pertini underlined the repudiation of the war contained in our Constitutional Charter, but then he added that “the sacred duty of defending the homeland places the armed forces as a guarantee of its integrity and independence”. In short, on 2 June the Republic and the unity of the country were celebrated, but above all the armed forces. And the parade at the Imperial Fora attracted many citizens, even if a popular party more felt and participated by the political forces had already taken place on April 25th.
There was a long season, which began in 1977, in which the celebrations of June 2 were moved to the first Sunday of the month, due to economic austerity. In Italy gripped by one of its cyclical crises, an attempt was made to reduce the holidays to give greater impetus to production, even at the cost of sacrificing what is perhaps the most important date in our civil calendar, the birth of the Republic, which is the daughter of Equal resistance, as the jurist Piero Calamandrei wrote, of our Constitutional Charter.
With the recovery of national symbols and celebrations, which President Ciampi gave impetus, the feast of June 2 was gradually updated, with the reference to European values repeatedly emphasized by Giorgio Napolitano and Sergio Mattarella, and with greater space given to the presence of civilians alongside that of the military.
The volume
The book by Dino Messina is on newsstands for a month with the Corriere della Sera June 2, 1946. The battle for the Republic, at a price of € 9.90 plus the cost of the newspaper. Proposed on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the referendum that decided the form of the Italian State, the volume – an excerpt of which we publish on this page on this page – traces the events that, starting with the armistice of 8 September 1943 and the subsequent struggle for liberation to the institutional choice of June 1946 and therefore to the birth of the Republic. Precisely on the referendum of 1946 “la Lettura” # 496 on newsstands throughout the week and in the App it publishes an extensive dossier with direct testimonies of people who took part in the vote.
In addition to the author’s reconstruction, Messina’s book offers an anthology of the most significant interventions published at the time in the Corriere, which in the tumultuous days of the referendum campaign sided in favor of the Republic under the guidance of director Mario Borsa. The review includes four articles from the same Borsa and other writings by illustrious authors: Giovanni Battista Boeri, Piero Calamandrei, Cesare Degli Occhi, Guido De Ruggiero, Eucardio Momigliano, Adolfo Omodeo, Ernesto Orrei, Carlo Sforza and Mario Vinciguerra.
The contents of the Messina volume are completed by an extensive bibliography and a chronology of the events that followed one another from the armistice with the Anglo-Americans to the election of Enrico De Nicola as provisional head of state by the Constituent Assembly on 28 June 1946. , after the outcome of the referendum and the proclamation of the Republic.
May 30, 2021 (change May 30, 2021 | 20:07)
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