Dante Livio Bianco (19 May 1909 – 12 July 1953) achieved early distinction among legal professionals as an exceptionally able Italian civil lawyer, and then came to wider prominence as a wartime partisan leader.
[1][2][3][4][5][6] Dante Livio Marcel Angelo Nikin Robert André Bianco was born at Cannes on the southern coast of France, [7] a short distance to the west of Nice.
Cannes had grown rapidly in extent and wealth during the final decades of the nineteenth century, largely on account of the European tourism boom triggered by industrialisation and the resulting increase in leisure spending.
Gioachino Bianco (1859-1918), his father, had moved to Cannes from the family’s home base at Valdieri, a small town set in the mountains on the western edge of Piedmont.
[4][9][10] After graduating under the tutorial supervision of Gioele Solari, Livio Bianco embarked on a legal career, working initially in Cuneo.
From 1932/33, having evidently completed any necessary apprenticeship qualification, he worked and exercised his advocacy skills in the district at Turin, while employed at the legal practice run by the youthful Manlio Brosio.
[8][9][11][12] In a frequently referenced speech which he delivered during 1948 in the presence of President Einaudi, Livio Bianco sought to summarize, in the rhetorical style of his profession and of the postwar optimism of those times, how the spirit of antifascist resistance had underpinned partisan opposition to fascism and, after 1943, to German occupation between 1943 and 1945.
In June 1940 a short-lived Italian invasion of France, though militarily inconsequential in itself, marked the beginning of military engagement, this time alongside Germany.
It was both a reaction against fascism among men who would never have supported Mussolini and a response to a growing feeling across society more generally that the leader’s increasingly personalised alliance with Germany had placed the nation on the road to disaster.
Seven weeks later, on 8 September 1943, news emerged of an armistice signed between the new Italian government and Major General Walter Bedell Smith on behalf of the Anglo-American armies advancing from the south.
He was appalled that the possibility that the Italian Social Republic, dominated by a Hitlerite Germany might become a permanent fixture with all the dark fascist inhumanity that had become the underlying context for life in post-democratic Vichy France since 1940.
In his article he warned of Italy becoming permanently “flaccid, sluggish, and without confidence or legitimacy” ("fiacca, lenta e dubitosa") as the price to be paid if the war were to end with anything less than a total decisive defeat for fascism, whether home grown or imposed from Berlin.
[9][17] Livio Bianco was also among those taking a lead in pushing for contacts between antifascist partisan fighters in Italy and Résistance groups across the border in France.
[8][16] (There were by this time “Justice and Liberty” brigades, battling what remained of the fascist state structures and the slowly diminishing military effectiveness of Mussolini’s German backers, across most of occupied Italy.)
He sustained a public profile, however, keen to preserve and share the idealism that had inspired him as an antifascist resistance leader during the 1940s (and not infrequently critical of developments in national politics during the 1950s).
[8][10] A passionate mountaineer from an early age, on 12 July 1953 Dante Livio Bianco was killed in a climbing accident while ascending the “Cima di Saint Robert” from the Valle Gesso in the ”Alpi Maritimi”, south-west of Cuneo and on the Italian side of the Franco-Italian frontier.
[1][21] The body was returned to Valdieri where it was buried with appropriate quiet pomp in the local cemetery: Ferruccio Parri delivered a eulogy on behalf of his partisan comrades, many of whom attended the ceremony.