At the end of March 1944, Palmiro Togliatti returned to Italy from his Russian exile and announced to his comrades a radically new political strategy: the Italian Communist Party had to accept an alliance with any political group, on the left or on the right, interested in fighting against fascism for the liberation of Italy.¹ The immediate consequence of Togliatti’s turn, known as the “Salerno turn,” was that for the rest of World War II the Italian communists lent their support to the government led by General Pietro Badoglio, whom King Victor Emanuel III had nominated as prime minister to...

During the twentieth century, the communist movement was never afraid to manipulate its own history to serve its political goals. Josef Stalin famously instructed his secret police and his photographic experts to erase from photographs and paintings the images of revolutionary leaders who had become his enemies.¹ In Hungary, as István Rév documented, a complex system of manipulations of dead bodies and their graves was perfected to control public memory, becoming one of the legacies of the “prehistory of post-Communism.”² In the case of Angelo Tasca, one of the key figures of the Italian radical socialist and communist movement of...

During the second half of the 1920s, Angelo Tasca’s life was changed forever by two events he could not control: the fascist seizure of power and the Stalinization of communist parties worldwide. Fascism forced Tasca into exile, permanently separating him from Italy. The Stalinization of the Italian Communist Party deprived Tasca of his political and cultural identity, keeping him in spiritual exile for the rest of his life.

Even though the two events had an equal practical impact on the course of Tasca’s life, it was his expulsion from the Communist Party that had the deepest consequences for his intellectual...

The historical events that characterized the 1930s until the eve of World War II deeply changed Angelo Tasca. As in the previous decade, his life was determined more by the history of the great ideologies of the first half of the twentieth century than by his private decisions. The progress of the Stalinization of the communist movement, the ideological and political victories of fascism, and the reactions that these events produced in Europe directly affected Tasca’s life in all its dimensions.

The unusual tempo of historical change forced Tasca to react quickly to events beyond his control. The political activism...

In 1938, while Léon Blum was still trying to salvage the Popular Front, Gallimard publishedLa naissance du fascisme, Tasca’s historiographical masterpiece.¹ This book sparked a debate on the danger of a fascist seizure of power in France, and its author became the recognized expert on the topic. Suddenly Tasca’s opinion was valued across the political spectrum. Many intellectuals and politicians, both from the left and from the right, started to consider Tasca’s opinions on fascism as relevant to France. Thanks to this success, Tasca’s analyses of the international situation, which appeared daily in the newspaper of the French Socialist...

On September 3, 1944, Angelo Tasca spent the day in his apartment in Vichy, writing in his diary. At night, three young men knocked on his door.¹ One of them, who identified himself as Captain Chartons (or Chartrons), said that Tasca was under arrest and that they had come to take him to prison. Tasca noticed that they were armed with submachine guns and displayed a foulard with the colors of the French flag. When Tasca asked to see the warrant for his arrest, the captain replied rather harshly that he did not need to provide any explanation. After this...

During the forty days he spent in prison in September 1944, Tasca still talked about socialism, but he dreamed of a trip to Italy with Liliane Chaumette. Surrounded by inmates who wanted to see a new German-Russian alliance that would embarrass the French communists, and by the military police who tortured some of the prisoners, he wished to go back to the Italy that he had left in 1926: Turin, Milan, Naples, and all the other places that carried memories for him.¹

At that point, he still toyed with the idea of making an intellectual contribution to the reconstruction of...