Page 80 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo I

80 XXXIV Congresso della CommIssIone InternazIonale dI storIa mIlItare • CIHm

soldiers who were more cost-effective than mercenaries and in the second half of the
Nineteenth century from the abandonment or tendency to re-size the draft in favor of
professional armed forced, has never been disavowed, nor could it be renounced, since
State-nations have always carried this practice out, no matter their ideological bias. As a
consequence, the “civil population” syntagm has a rather residual meaning under some
aspects. As it says in Salvatore Battaglia’s Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, by
“civil population” “the whole of citizens who do not take part in armed forces in case of
war” are meant, in other word, the non-combatants. Actually, it deals with “citizens”
11
partly, considering only the potential ones (underagers who have not yet reached the age
of vote and women, until not many decades ago and in most countries.) In the mean-
while, in particular, before granting universal male suffrage, many youngsters and men
have been included in armed forced, who did not enjoy any political rights.
At the same time, the virtual coincidence between civil and military at the basis of
the citizen-soldier postulate – except, of course, the intention of preventing children,
the elderly and, in most cases, women, from participating armed in wars as a principle
– has allowed for opening a front on the ideological plane, i.e. total wars, which on one
side technological developments and on the other side ideological, ethnic and religious
fanaticism have sought to extend over the plane of execution to a terrifying extent, even
if this has been opposed by international agreements and humanitarian war codes to
protect civil populations. The great contemporary fortune of Los desastres de la guerra
by Goya enjoys the ability to depict an abyss, which opens before the armed conflict of
“everybody” against “anybody”, a conflict in which the battlefield does not respect any
boundaries, fronts do not stop at any sanctuary and asylum and whose terrorist goals do
not spare any potential victim intentionally in the mirror of Spanish Guerra de la Inde-
pendencia (a war at a national and ideological time, hence, also a civil war, led partly
by guerilla warfare methods and very differently from the Thirty Year’s War despite ap-
parent similarities, which had inspired Callot.)

11 Refer to S. Battaglia , Grande dizionario [The Great Dictionary], XIII, 1986, p. 879 (lacks refe-
rence to authors).