The Italian Action Party and the Institutional Question

Abstract

D URING THE LAST months of Italian action in the war against the Allies the latent anti-fascist resistance, however ill-formed and nebulous it had been in the past, gradually crystallized into a coalition of parties which, in September, 1943, declared itself a Committee of National Liberation. The six parties forming this Committee were, from right to left, the Liberals, Labor Democrats, Christian Democrats, Actionists, Socialists, and Communists. The first three contained both monarchists and republicans in their ranks while the parties to the left were decisively republican. The controversy over the position of the House of Savoy in Italian life has been called the institutional question. The following material concerns the interesting, though small, Italian Action party, its role in the institutional dispute, and its internal struggles. No attempt is made here to present a broad, over-all picture of the institutional question as it was related to the policies of other parties or the Allied govern-