Ordinary anti-Fascism? Italy and the fall of Fascism, 1943–1945

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the immediate years after the fall of the Fascist regime from 1943 through the end of World War II. It asks: What did the Italians make of Fascism and its role in the country’s history as they witnessed the demise of the regime? How should we assess the nature of their anti-Fascist reactions at the time? Does the post-war conflation of Resistance and Liberation with anti-Fascism adequately represent their experience? Drawing on personal diaries written during 1943–1945, the article specifically examines three key temporal moments: the downfall of Mussolini on 25 July 1943, the armistice of 8 September 1943 and Italy’s proclamation of war against Germany on 13 October 1943. The article’s ultimate goal is to bring out the meanings that emerge out of the lifeworld of ordinary citizens in interaction with official narratives.     

‘Reckless youth’. Cardinal Maffi and Fascism (1919–31)

The article focuses on Cardinal Pietro Maffi's attitude towards Fascism. As one of the mightiest princes of the Church and a well-known patriot, the Archbishop of Pisa enthusiastically supported the war effort in 1915–18. Concerned by the spread of strikes and social disorders after the victory, he saw Fascism as a bulwark against socialism and tried to make an alliance through celebrations of the ‘heroic’ memory of the Great War together with the Black Shirts. Maffi's strategy seemed to work: with a few exceptions the alliance remained effective and became official with signing of the Lateran Pacts of 1929. Consequently, Cardinal Maffi made a significant contribution to the success of the secular religion of the Fatherland preached by Fascism which shortly after his death in March 1931 would become a major source of tension between the regime and the Church.     

War veterans and the transnational origins of Italian Fascism (1917–1919)

This article explores the origins of the historical relationship between war veterans and Fascism. Transcending the predominant paradigm of the controversial ‘brutalization’ thesis (George L. Mosse), the article relies on a transnational perspective that focuses on the interconnections between historical events and on processes of political communication and symbolic appropriation. Examining historical processes taking place in different European countries, as well as their effects on Mussolini and the Italian interventionists, the article argues that a transnational process of symbolic appropriation of the notion of the ‘veteran’, taking place between 1917 and 1919, is crucial to understand how the Fascist ideology and movement were born.     

‘Defending the race’: the Italian reinvention of the Hottentot Venus during Fascism

Abstract In 1938 the regime's popular periodical La Difesa della Razza published the portrait of Saartjie Baartman (a Khoisan woman known to the western world as ‘The Hottentot Venus’) to discourage miscegenation in the empire of Italian East Africa. But by 1938, Italian public and scientific interest in the Hottentot Venus had long faded away. In addition, readily available photographs of Italo-Eritreans could have been used to show the ‘outcome’ of miscegenation. Why then did the regime's organ publish a portrait of ‘The Hottentot Venus’? This article addresses this question, and explores how Baartman's story could serve the regime's aim of forging a new ‘racial consciousness’ among Italians. By focusing on the transformation of scientific discourses from the 1850s to the late 1930s, and on their silences, the article illuminates the process through which some of the regime's anthropologists constructed a new, ‘made in Italy’ story for the Hottentot Venus. Deliberately leaving out all the main issues long debated during the previous century, they turned this figure into an empty icon to support Fascist colonial obsession with the purity and prestige of the Italian race.     

A path towards Fascism: nationalism and large-scale industry in Italy (1910–1923)

In the decade before World War I, close connections developed in Italy between the nationalists and major elements of large-scale industry. As the Italian Nationalist Association, founded in 1910, became the main political reference for industrialists, the ties between nationalism and the business community helped to undermine the liberal state and end the political system established by Giovanni Giolitti. During World War I, the Nationalist Association developed close links with the Ansaldo company and supported it in the ‘parallel wars’ of Italian capitalism. Ansaldo went bankrupt in 1921, but the nationalists were able to establish relations with other entrepreneurs. Their connection with large-scale industry lay behind Mussolini’s decision in 1923 to accept the Nationalist Association into the National Fascist Party. Nationalism not only ensured that important economic forces would support the Fascist regime but its ideology significantly contributed to the building of Mussolini’s dictatorship.     

The Origins of European Fascism: Memory of Violence in Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon

Michael Haneke’s film The White Ribbon (2009) narrates violent attacks that disrupt the cyclical life of a German village in 1913–14. The narrator frames the violence as a study of the origins of fascism: the alleged perpetrators are children, who rebel against the disciplinary powers of patriarchal authority. Coming to maturity during World War I, they will have become the generation of Nazism’s followers. In contrast to psycho-historical readings of The White Ribbon as a cinematic exploration of the causal relationship between the authoritarian formation of the juvenile subject and her susceptibility to fascism’s redemptive illusions, I propose an anti-psychological interpretation of the film. This reading seeks to understand The White Ribbon in terms of Haneke’s aesthetic and formal choices, which underpin his notion of “ethical spectatorship.” I argue that the film offers a dual metaphorical construction of the nexus between memory and the cinematic image, and of the mnemonic and affective aspects of the history of violence. Haneke forges a link between the European attitude to its history of fascism and its ongoing politics of exclusion, arising from its covert fascist desire for the unified self. The significance of The White Ribbon in the ongoing debate on history/memory thus lies in its critique of Europe’s current self-understanding as having outgrown its violent past.     

Two new books on Fascism. A review,the authors’ responses and the reviewer's comments

This section contains a review by the Italian historian Emilio Gentile of Paul Corner's new book on the Fascist Party and public opinion, and of Christopher Duggan's intimate history of Mussolini's Italy. The review is followed by responses from Corner and Duggan, and the section concludes with comments by Gentile.     

Nation and state building in Italy: recent historiographical interpretations (1989–1997), I: Unification to Fascism

Abstract

This is the first part of a general historiographical review of recent studies on the formation of the modern Italian nation and national identities. The review is organized chronologically and the first part covers literature on the development of the Italian state and society to the end of the nineteenth century.     

A neglected chapter in Italy's transition from Fascism to the Republic: The Kingdom of the South (1943–1944)

Gallerano's paper examines the reasons why Italian historians have paid little attention to the political events that followed the liberation of the Italian Mezzogiorno and the brief life of the government established under the auspices of the monarchy during the period of what was termed the Kingdom of the South. He argues that this neglect derives in part from the brevity of the period of civil government in the south, but mainly from the fact that historians have been attracted above all by the history of the Resistance which has led them to consider events in the south to be of secondary importance. Gallerano argues that such a view is quite unjustified and shows how some historians ‐ from Chabod in the early 1950s ‐ have understood that events in the south bore very directly on the broader transition from Fascism to the Republic. Challenging Renzo De Felice's recent claims that Italy's defeat on 8 September 1943 marked the beginning of a crisis of national identity, Gallerano argues that the circumstances that obtained in the months that followed made the south an exceptionally rich terrain for exploring the very contradictory feelings and expectations that were aroused in Italy by the experience of military defeat and political reconstruction.     

The management and memory of fascist monumental art in postwar and contemporary Italy: the case of Luigi Montanarini’s Apotheosis of Fascism

In postwar Germany, the Allies and the German authorities moved quickly and systematically to destroy or physically remove all traces of Nazi art. No such process occurred in postwar Italy. This meant that hundreds of ideologically inspired statues, mosaics, murals and other artefacts survived into the republican period. This article uses Luigi Montanarini’s mural, the Apotheosis of Fascism, as a case study to examine the management, meaning and memory of fascist monumental art (and, more broadly, fascist monumental architecture) in postwar and contemporary Italy. To date, memory studies of fascism have largely overlooked the artistic and architectural legacies of the dictatorship. This article helps to address this historiographical lacuna and speaks to current debates and controversies in Italy surrounding the meaning and significance of historic fascism.