The FUCI 1943–45: The Path to Post-Fascism

Abstract

Richard J. Wolff has asserted that from approximately June/July 1943 the FUCI was embarked on an ‘open and undisguised … propaganda for a post-war Christian Democratic state’.¹ However, this vision of the Catholic students association firmly united behind a sole political project and party is far removed from the historical truth. Above all, with Mussolini’s eviction from office on 25 July 1943, the vast majority of the fucini were concerned with other issues than the formation of a political party, principally the future of Italy as a nation state and the enormous task of rebuilding the country after a devastating war. The bulk of the Catholic intellectuals insisted that the desire—evident among many of the former popolari—to return to the liberal regime that had prevailed on the peninsula before the rise to power of the Fascists had to be rejected as an unrealistic possibility. The nation had to fight the temptation of considering the generation that had grown under the sign of the littorio as ‘a nonentity, dried up by the education received by the past regime’, adding that no one could doubt that ‘even the fascio had known how to obtain some good results in some areas’.² Indeed, this was evidence of the profound fracture caused by the Fascist regime during its 20 years of government in the Catholic world, where the new generation had little or no contact with, or knowledge of, the generation of Luigi Sturzo and Alcide De Gasperi.