Last Stands

The moment of liberation in Western Europe spans several years before and after Victory in Europe Day. The roughly two years before 8 May 1945 witnessed the greatest extension of antifascist resistance activism, imparting an aura of radicalization to this period. It is possible to pinpoint specifically when the pressures of radical antifascist resistance activism broke out one last time in post-liberation Western Europe. In Belgium, tensions rose in conjunction with the attitudes of the new post-liberation government headed by the conservative Catholic Hubert Pierlot. In November 1947, first in Marseille but then also in Saint-Étienne, resistance activists defied the old political elite in militant actions which were the last of their kind in post-liberation France. In Italy, the assassination attempt on Palmiro Togliatti in 1948 marked the last stand of the radical resistance spirit, witnessing instances of quasi-urban insurrections in some of the traditional hotspots of antifascism in Italy.