ABSTRACT: The re-evocation of the battle for introducing divorce in Italy. The desire to wipe out of collective memory that great victory of civilisation so that no one will identify with the party that brought it about.

(STAMPA SERA, November 17, 1986)

We have asked Marco Pannella, one of the protagonists of the divorce campaign, to recall the climate of opinion and the events that brought about the approval of that law.

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Argentina Marchei is a Roman women of the populace from Trastevere. She was about eighty years old when the Fortuna law was passed by Parliament during the night of November 30 to December 1, 1970. More than fifty years earlier, after a few months of marriage, her husband left her and she never saw him again. She quite soon made herself a new family and was a grandmother several times over, but all outside the law. Her companion was now ill and they wanted to be married before parting forever. Her legs covered with varicose veins, holding aloft her Communist Party card dating back to 1922, Argentina Marchei took part in all the demonstrations, marches and hunger strikes sponsored by the LID [divorce league] and the Radicals from 1965 to '70 and then until '75.

At Avola [Sicily], in isolation but untiring, there is a man past sixty, nostalgic about Mussolini, a representative of the MSI [the neo-Fascist Italian Social Movement, ed.], known to all as an entirely honest person with a myriad of children and grandchildren, but all outside the law. By law he is "married" to a woman he has not seen for decades and cannot even live together with the mother of his children. He is a militant, a representative of the LID, but also active in the fight against the Concordat (2) which the PR [Radical Party] alone conducted at that time.

From Macomèr [Sardinia] an army warrant officer writes to

us: "My wife left me with a new-born child. She is walking the streets on the mainland. In the army barracks I have been saying for years that she is ill. I cannot even have a woman who will look after the child, because she would be dishonoured. Now I am rounding up members for the LID. But I thank you as a person, as a soldier, as a citizen I was a cuckold; I am pro-divorce, a democrat".

Meanwhile the news of the social world tells of the clamorous divorces granted by the Sacra Rota. Actors, aristocrats, millionaires, obtain divorces for non-consummated marriages. In the presence of the heirs, sometimes numerous, at the end of incredibly barbarous "trials". Meanwhile, not only in the South, tens of thousands of grass widows are waiting, are making false declarations of presumed death for husbands who disappeared decades ago when everyone began singing "the ships are sailing for far distant shores" (3).

There is a confrontation between radically Christian choices, lay ones against clerical ones. Should matrimony and the family be based on liberty, responsibility and love, or on the authority of the law and the rule of the magistrates or the Carabinieri? Should the Catholic sacrament be defended by the consciences of the faithful or imposed by the state as an absolute value, as "natural law"?

With Loris Fortuna [PSI, author of the divorce law, ed.] and Mauro Mellini we have for five years been organising and conducting the hardest, historical and successful civil-rights battle everywhere, in the streets and squares, in the party headquarters, in the halls of the Sacra Rota, in Parliament, over the mass media, with the LID.

Even democrats of the moral and political stature of Ugo La Malfa [Italian Republican Party, PRI] fear our action like the plague as creating a crisis in the centre-left coalition, just as the Communists worry about the "historic compromise" (4), and like the unionist Trimurti's "unification" of the working masses. For years La Malfa insisted that divorce should only be a recourse for civil marriages which amount to little more than one per cent in Italy.

But there is pressure from the grass roots, the Christian, lay, democratic and civil "depths" of the country. Thanks to Enzo Sabato's ABC [a periodical, ed.] tens of thousands of postcards are being sent to Parliament in time to save the divorce bills from being buried under the parliamentary articles and regulations. Daily papers owned at the time by the bourgeoisie, thanks to their erstwhile editors (Perrone of "Il Messaggero" and "Il Secolo XIX", Crespi for "Il Corriere della Sera" and "Il Piccolo" of Alessi) and others such as "La Stampa"; thanks to the admirable efforts of judges working in the cultural and civil paths laid down by Peretti Griva and contributors like Mario Berutti and Galante Garrone, allow for a noble, difficult and creative kind of politics to give chase to political intrigue.

In Parliament, only a few - Baslini, Ballardini, Fausto Gullo and Terracini among the first - represent the LID and the Radical Party, of which latter Loris Fortuna has also meanwhile become a "card-carrier" (having dual membership along with belonging to the PSI). On this occasion will also commence Gandhian types of struggle: non-violence, hunger strikes, self-accusations, poster parades. In Parliament the DC and the MSI have been beaten, sometimes by a single vote, by the "lay" coalition which has been "obliged" to form and win for the first time in the history of the republic.

The Speaker of the Chamber [Sandro] Pertini [PSI] is in the front line of defenders of the rights and duties of parliamentary rules against the obstructionism and bogging down which have been practised for decades. But the Speaker of the Senate [Amintore] Fanfani [DC] also acts with great respect for his functions. And he is all the more deserving of recognition in this inasmuch as his political actions as prime minister and DC leader as well as his personal culture make it impossible for him to share or even understand the liberal and pro-divorce heresy.

From crude anti-Communism not a few of the laity, even prestigious ones, have found themselves in recent years in agreement with the PCI's top leaders who ended by having to swallow perforce the purge of the lay choices. The divorce law is not to be passed. For once these Don Rodrigos and "Innominati" lost. When the law was passed presitgious papers on various continents took notice of Italy for the first time. The front pages carried headlines with the news of an Italy that had chosen Europe.

The fact is that the RAI-TV [Italian state tv and radio, ed.] in 1986 recently produced a retrospective of 1970 in which they managed to censor that event totally except for a 12-second mention, while dedicating more than eight minutes to the beginnings of Carrà's career (5) and other amenities. It dealt simply with the anniversary of a great act of government such as the "Workers' Statute", illustrated and documented the election (not the fall and assassination) of Allende and once again "abrogated" Loris Fortuna, even in memory, by not even mentioning his name or showing his picture; "abrogated" Parliament which on that occasion demonstrated the civilisation of our country as it never has before or since; "abrogated" above all Mellini, the thousands of militants, and the Radical Party and its "people".

There is, in fact, the risk in not abrogating the history of this country - the best of its history - that today's democratic conscience may be startled and through recognition, through awareness, will not consent to the exclusion to which the Radical Party by now seems doomed, and that in the handful of days still remaining the 4,000 memberships may come in which are necessary to its survival. Thus it was not possible to risk inviting me - like Gino Giugni - to Frajese's television programme.

Every hand was played and won in that year, in that early December of 1970. The 1974 referendum was only a result, in great measure just as stirring as it was foreseen.

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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) Don Rodrigos and the Innominati - Two figures representing oppressive power from Manzoni's classic novel "The Betrothed".

2) Concordat - The treaty between the Italian state and the Vatican extending special priveleges to the Catholic church.

3) Words from a Neapolitan emmigrants' song.

4) Historic compromise - The Communist policy of collaboration with the Christian Democrats.

5) Rafaella Carrà, a very popular television MC.