2 June 1946, institutions and rules: the still living strength of the Republic

June 2, 1946, the day Italy changed. Society, rules, institutions, symbols and protocol. On Business here is the analysis of the state master of ceremonies Enrico Passaro who saw seven prime ministers parade at Palazzo Chigi

*Enrico Passaro, former head of the State Ceremonial Office and for the Honors of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers which saw seven prime ministers parade at Palazzo Chigi, from Silvio Berlusconi to Mario Draghi, passing through Mario Monti, Enrico Letta, Matteo Renzi, Paolo Gentiloni, Giuseppe Conte.

The date of June 2 inspires a thousand thoughts in those who have lived in contact with them Institutions, but also, I am sure, to the common citizen. It makes you want to travel with a time machine to 1946 and live, in a setting not dissimilar to the one staged by Paola Cortellesi for its very delicate “C‘And again tomorrowthe”, the experience of the change that that date brought to our country.

Here we are inside the June 2, 1946 and in the days that followed. We live this imaginative experience as a state ceremonial worker would live it, with all the anxieties and worries of his profession. Will everything change or nothing will change with the result of the polls? Or will everything change so that everything remains as before, as Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa would say? Almost 25 million Italians went to vote to choose between monarchy and republic. They were about 89% of those entitled. Percentages, alas, from other times, who knows if we will see them again today!

For the first time women entered a voting booth. Think of the emotion! Consider that until that moment they had never had the opportunity to express their political preferences through the ballot box, simply because women were not recognized as having the right to have opinions, political ones, but not only that. Well, this was a change, indeed!

When it comes to June 2 you think about referendum. Official results: 12,718,641 Italians expressed their preference for the Republic, 10,718,502 votes went to the Monarchy. Two million ballots made the difference. But that wasn’t all the vote: the citizens were also called to elect the Constituent Assembly. 556 elected representatives were called to reflect, discuss, draft and approve the republican Constitution. Just to return to the gender issue, of these there were 21 women in total.

What if the monarchy had won? Should the constituents have worked on a monarchic charter to replace the old Albertine Statute of 1848? With around 40% of its members being socialists and communists? Curious perspective, but things went in the most coherent direction.

At 4.00 pm on June 25th the Assembly officially took office and elected Giuseppe Saragat as President. He would stay there until February 6, 1947, when he resigned to become secretary of the newly formed PSDI. He was elected to preside over the assembly in his place Umberto Terracini. On 28 June he was elected on the first ballot as provisional Head of State Enrico De Nicola. “Provisional Leader” and not “President of the Republic”, the title did not yet exist, because there was not yet a Fundamental Law that defined it as such. De Nicola signed the Constitution on 27 December 1947 and acquired the title of President from 1 January 1948 as a result of the first transitional provision.

It must be said that the Constituent Assembly had worked at a good pace: in about a year and a half it had put together one of the most beautiful fundamental charters of a modern state and that charter was ours, it was Italian, of a country that was finally to democracy.

Here begins the torment of master of ceremony. With the referendum and the Constitution almost everything about the forms and behaviors of public authorities in ceremonies and relationships must be changed. Let’s start with Head of State. It seems that Luigi Einaudi, De Nicola’s successor from 12 May 1948, personally dedicated himself to drawing up the ceremonial of the new Presidency. He did it with the firm intention of reducing the glories of the monarchy, orienting himself towards a sober style, without however giving up the solemnity of the role entrusted to one of the three fundamental symbols of the State. In those months the rules are born (almost all unwritten), the practices, the ways in which events are celebrated, international relations are held, the procedural steps are managed to ensure the functioning of the state machinery, starting from the swearing-in ceremony of the Head of State himself and the steps to establish a new Government. How much effort for the master of ceremonies, who found himself having to draw up presidential protocols from scratch. There were no precedents in the country’s history and there were also few international references, especially in Europe, largely governed by ancient monarchies.

And how much work had also had to be done for the other two fundamental symbols: the flag and the national anthem. For the first, the coat of arms of the House of Savoy was immediately removed from the white field of the tricolour. And it was decided to enshrine its characteristics in the Constitution. Article 12 in fact states: “The flag of the Republic is the Italian tricolour: green, white and red, with three vertical bands of equal size”. Subsequently, the shades of the pantone colors will also be defined to definitively characterize it.

For the anthem everything was much more complicated. From 2 June 1946 we were quickly arriving at the armed forces ceremony of 4 November at the Altare della Patria. It was realized that, since the Royal March, which was the anthem of the kingdom, was unacceptable, the republic did not yet have its own national anthem. Not an easy choice, between opposing supporters of “Il canto degli italiani” by Goffredo Mameli, the “Leggenda del Piave” by EA Mario, “Va pensiero” by Verdi, the “Hymn of Garibaldi” or the hypothesis of a song completely new. The De Gasperi’s government finally decided in a hurry, in a Council of Ministers meeting on 12 October, to “provisionally” adopt Mameli’s anthem in time for the ceremony in Piazza Venezia 23 days later. A provisional provision, you should know, which lasted until 4 December 2017, when law no. 181 formally and definitively recognized the “Canto degli italiani” by Goffredo Mameli and the original musical score by Michele Novaro as the national anthem of the Republic. For all these years the masters of ceremonies have continued to play the “Brothers of Italy” at official moments, always waiting for its qualification as the national anthem of our country to be definitively and irrevocably recognised.

Other issues had to be addressed from a protocol point of view starting from that June 2nd date: from the choice of the emblem (the famous Stellone), to the honors granted by the President of the Republic, to the order of precedence in ceremonies, to public heraldry and to all the protocol practices of the life of the representatives of the institutions. All aspects with important symbolic contents within the framework of the representativeness of the State. It would take too long if we were to describe them one by one.

So let’s finish this dive into the past of our republican history. The historian Guido Melis, in a beautiful publication in honor of the great prefect Carlo Mosca, speaks of “the lability of memory, amnesia of the past” regarding our current society.

The History of a Nation, the exemplary role of the institutional figures who have contributed and contribute concretely to realizing its ideal contents, its formal structure, its normative references, the valorization of symbols and its organization: all this constitutes the dignity of the State and the testimony of a collective conscience. The celebrations of June 2nd are renewed every year for this reason. Let’s feel them as ours, let’s feel them alive, let’s feel them as there strength of our democracy.