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The Italians and Fascism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2015
Extract
In a recent review of Christopher Duggan's latest book, Emilio Gentile notes that in the 1970s an ‘intimate history of fascist Italy’ would have met the opposition of ‘militant anti-fascist historiography’ because of its proneness to acknowledge the involvement of Italians in Fascism. Still, after criticising the book, Gentile stresses that the ‘question of consent’ – a topic on which he himself has provided some crucial contributions – is a ‘poorly posed question’.
- Type
- Roundtable on Italian Fascism: Responses to Patrick Bernhard's ‘Renarrating Italian Fascism: New Directions in the Historiography of a European Dictatorship’ (CEH, Vol. 23, No.1, February 2014)
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015
References
1 Gentile, Emilio, ‘Il duce, che emozione!’, Il Sole 24 Ore, 4 May 2014 (review of Christopher Duggan, Fascist Voices. An Intimate History of Mussolini's Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012))Google Scholar.
2 To the best of my knowledge, Duggan's book has only been reviewed in Il Sole 24 Ore, briefly in Il Corriere della Sera (11 Feb. 2014) and in La Nazione di Arezzo (24 Dec. 2013). None of the other recent English-language books that I will mention have yet been translated into Italian.
3 To mention but a few of the reviews of this volume, which bear witness to the interest in this topic on the part of the press, see Bering, Henrik, ‘Dear Duce. Benito Mussolini's devoted subjects made pilgrimages to his birthplace and sent him 1500 letters a day’, Wall Street Journal, 16 Aug.2013Google Scholar; Hirst, Christopher, ‘The banality of evil, spoken in its own voice. Fascist voices by Christopher Duggan’, The Independent, 6 Dec.2013Google Scholar; Thompson, Ian, ‘Roman descent. Italy under Mussolini is revealed through the accounts of ordinary people’, Financial Times, 14 Dec. 2012Google Scholar; Ghiat, Ruth Ben, ‘Fascist Voices: An Intimate History of Mussolini's Italy’, Times Higher Education, 10 Jan. 2013Google Scholar. The reason why Duggan's book is partly an exception may lie in the fact that it is addressed not just to historians but to the broader public as well – which is also why it received the Wolfson Prize. Still, I believe that the number of relevant reviews of the volume also testifies to the interest elicited by the topic.
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11 I am here drawing upon some of the conclusions which Roberta Pergher and I have reached in ‘Historians, Fascism and Italian Society: Mapping the Limito of Consent’, the introduction to Albanese, Giulia and Pergher, Roberta, In the Society of Fascists: Acclamation, Acquiescence and Agency in Mussolini's Italy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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15 Gentile, Il duce che emozione!