1920–2016
○ Natural causes
A historian who clarified the Resistance's moral choices and the war's layered character
In A Civil War, he analysed the Resistance as a struggle that was at once patriotic, civil, and a class war.
Claudio Pavone was an Italian historian and archivist whose work examined fascism, the Resistance, and the continuities of state institutions. His own participation in the Resistance during the Second World War shaped both his historical questions and his civic outlook. His major study A Civil War analysed the struggle of 1943–45 as an overlapping patriotic war, civil war among Italians, and class war, placing political choice and moral tension at the centre of scholarly debate. He also helped organize the Central State Archive and direct the General Guide to the Italian State Archives.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1943Graduated in law at the University of Rome and joined the Resistance
- 1943–1944Worked with the PSIUP, was arrested and imprisoned
- 1949Joined the State Archives administration
- 1975–1991Professor of contemporary history at the University of Pisa
- 1991Published A Civil War
- 1994–1995Vice-president of the National Institute for the History of the Liberation Movement in Italy
- 1995–1999President of the Italian Society for the Study of Contemporary History
- 1993–2016Directed the journal Parolechiave
Related historical events
Restoring the category of civil war, and the polemic it provoked
The scholarly significance of Pavone's A Civil War lies largely in the rehabilitation of the category itself. The term "civil war" was used during 1943–45 by both partisans and the fascists of the Italian Social Republic, but after the war the antifascist camp, and especially the Communists, progressively set the expression aside until it was used almost exclusively by neo-fascist polemicists, who turned it into a weapon for pinning responsibility for Italians killing Italians on the partisans. Italian historiography accordingly framed the period chiefly as a war of liberation against the German invader, stressing the patriotic character of the partisan struggle.
Pavone re-proposed the category of civil war in academic debate in 1985 after many years, and placed it at the centre of his 1991 book. He treated the concept not as one camp's propaganda but as an interpretive category needed to explain the clash between fascists and antifascists. The book analysed 1943–45 as an overlapping patriotic war, civil war and class war, and sought to shift the historiographical focus from party lines to "morality" by centring the combatants' motives, conduct, expectations and aims.
The intervention provoked heated controversy. The former partisan commander Nuto Revelli praised the book as "an extraordinary work that freed us from all the rhetoric that had settled on the Resistance" while rejecting the civil war label; the partisan Giorgio Bocca dismissed the concept as exaggerated. Vittorio Foa, by contrast, backed Pavone, arguing that denying the civil war amounted to denying the antifascist character of the Resistance itself. The communist former partisan Giulio Seniga called the title "a showy and improper" one that downgraded and distorted the Resistance's ideals, while the neo-fascist Giorgio Pisanò remarked that since "the other side" now spoke of a civil war, he would no longer do so. Pavone read such resistance as evidence of how the term had been removed from postwar memory. He traced that removal to the absence of the words "civil war" anywhere in the 1944–1955 volume of Palmiro Togliatti's works, and noted that the 1946 amnesty presupposed a civil war that had continued past 25 April 1945. The controversy helped spread the civil war category throughout Italian historiography and popular history, and became a site of ideological conflict over the public use of history.