2023-04-25 17:39:25
The President of the Republic, in Cuneo, recalled his words on the resistance origin of the Constitution. Distinguished jurist, lawyer, father of Franco, who in occupied Rome was one of the leaders of the Gap (Patriotic Action Groups), made a fundamental contribution to the drafting of our Constitution
Born in Florence in 1889, volunteer officer in the First World War, Piero Calamandrei was a constituent father of enormous prestige and at the same time the most passionate and vibrant voice in recalling the events of the partisan struggle. It is no coincidence that the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella quoted him on April 25 in Cuneo, recalling his words on the resistance origin of the Constitution and the indignant text with which in 1952 he replied to the arrogant words of the former German marshal Albert Kesselring, according to the which the Italians should have erected a monument to him for the way he had behaved commanding the occupying forces. The stone with which we will build your monument, replied Calamandrei in a historic epigraph, will be the silence of the tortured, harder than any boulder.
However Piero Calamandrei had not participated directly in the Resistance, unlike his son Franco, who had been in Rome one of the leaders of the Gap (Patriotic Action Groups), the structure created by the PCI for urban warfare. Although he had joined the Action Party (Pd’A), a liberal-socialist formation that made a significant contribution to the partisan struggle, in those terrible months he did not take up arms and preferred to take refuge in the countryside to escape possible attacks by the fascists.
The years of Mussolini’s Ventennio were a period of great suffering for Calamandrei. A distinguished jurist, lawyer, full professor of civil procedure at the University of Florence, before the establishment of the regime he had joined the anti-fascist movement Italia libera, then the National Union of Giovanni Amendola, a liberal-democratic formation. He had also signed the manifesto of anti-fascist intellectuals written by Benedetto Croce in 1925. Under the dictatorship he never took the Fascist Party card, but he agreed to swear allegiance to the regime, like almost all university professors. Despite his lack of political orthodoxy, Mussolini’s Minister of Justice, Dino Grandi, who appreciated his skills as a jurist, made use of Calamandrei in 1939 for the work of defining the new code of penal procedure, which came into force in 1942. The same year in which the professor participated in the founding of the Pd’A. Just over a month after the fall of the fascist regime, on 31 August 1943, Calamandrei was appointed rector of the University of Florence, but he remained in office for very little due to the Nazi occupation, during which, as already mentioned, he held aside.
On the other hand, Calamandrei’s contribution to the Constituent Assembly was very important. Elected to the shareholder list in 1946, he fought in vain for a hypothesis of a presidential and federal republic, but he was an assiduous presence on a series of central issues: the structure of the judiciary, the discipline of marriage, the relationship between the state and confessions religious. Later he would fight with great commitment for the implementation of the Constitution. After the dissolution of the Action Party in 1947, Calamandrei ader to the Social Democratic Party, in which, however, he remained for only one legislature. Intolerant of the centrist political balance based on the hegemony of the DC, he sided against the majority law of 1953 (which went down in history as a fraud law) and in that year’s elections he presented the Popular Unit list, of which he was the most illustrious exponent together with Ferruccio Parri. But he was not elected.
In addition to the activity of jurist, lawyer and politician, Calamandrei is remembered for his attachment to the values of anti-fascism, of which he was a tireless supporter after the war. Collects his writings and speeches on the subject the book Men and cities of the Resistance (Laterza, 1955). He died in Florence in 1956.
April 25, 2023 (change April 25, 2023 | 5:39 pm)
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