Political Tropes of the PCI in Party Discourse and Historiography : the Case of “Progressive Democracy”

After the second world war there was no Italian party, and perhaps not even a Western European one, that was as dedicated to the propaganda and political elaboration of an official discourse about its past and to the construction of a corresponding apparatus of beliefs and traditions, as the Italian Communist Party. Since the 1940s, this discourse has been based on a number of intricate narrative tropes, as part of a celebratory discourse on Resistance and Liberation. These paradigms were the party’s exceptionalism within the international communist panorama, its autonomy from Moscow and its substantial democratic commitment. All of these were elements of a broader discourse that pivoted on the assumption of a logical and coherent political tradition dating back to Antonio Gramsci. In the early years of the republic, the strength of these paradigms went beyond the boundaries of party discourse, migrating into public opinion and, from the 1970s, also into historiographical debate. This essay therefore proposes to reconstruct this journey, first by analysing the genesis of this narrative, which coincided with the creation of the slogan ‘progressive democracy’ in 1943, and then by investigating how these tropes migrated into parts of the historiographical debate about some of the most important texts on the party’s history between the 1970s and the first fifteen years of the current century.