The politics of partisan memory: Last letters of anti-fascist resistance in Italy and France (1943–2003)

Alexandra De Ciantis and Daniel R. Brunstetter discuss the key points from their new co-authored Review of International Studies article along with Brent Steele - The politics of partisan memory: Last letters of anti-fascist resistance in Italy and France (1943–2003)

Want to know more? You can read the full article at DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210526101922

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Abstract

Scholars are increasingly interested in how collective memories of war and civil conflict shape competing conceptions of democracy. Less attention has been paid to the role of political parties as representative institutions that select and reinterpret the past to address present issues in the public sphere. This article contributes to this debate by theorizing what we call the public–party tension as a core challenge of democratic memory politics. We examine this tension through a comparative study of how the French and Italian Communist Parties instrumentalized or overlooked the last letters written by partisans and patriots of the anti-fascist resistance before their execution by Nazi and fascist forces during World War II. Drawing on excerpts from the Italian and French anthologies, we uncover an ethics of partisan memory that offers an alternative to both sectarian uses of the past and contemporary cosmopolitan, antagonistic, and agonistic modes of remembering World War II. We argue that these letters offer an enduring normative resource for democratic memory politics, showing how the legacy of anti-fascist resistance can help sustain a pluralist democracy today.

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