After the philosophical ‘Father of Italian Fascism’ and Minister of Public Education under Mussolini, Giovanni Gentile, instituted his Reforma in 1923, the ousted Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Florence, Francesco De Sarlo, ridiculed illusions of any remaining intellectual freedom. ‘[Autonomy] nothing but a mere word is left,’ declared De Sarlo to Friar Agostino Gemelli, Professor of Psychology at the University of Milan, when the latter claimed in the Rivista di psicologia in 1925 that the Gentile reform would guarantee more freedom in the academy than before. Patrizia Guarnieri points out, however, that De Sarlo was correctly stating that, by then, the Fascistisation of Italian culture and academic life had made it necessary to ‘proclaim that Fascism was auspicious for culture and the university: a refrain rich in silences, empty or sweetened words, false news’. This was a world where ‘pure propaganda became habitual’ in academic journals as much as in public newspapers and media (pp. 80–1).
Guarnieri’s powerful analysis of intellectual and political totalitarianism under Italian Fascism tells a gripping but fearful tale with profound resonances and implications for our own epoch as authoritarian populist nationalism begins to overtake democratic governments in Europe, the newly ‘independent’ UK and the United States. As Guarnieri states, following the Fascistisation of culture means stalking its ‘stealthy and distorted appropriation of the immediate past on which Fascism had imposed itself, by discrediting, suffocating, or simply cancelling whatever was unwelcome’, engulfing the present, ‘as if it were its own invention’ (p. 4). So the journey she takes with intellectuals escaping Fascism, or surviving or thriving under it, begins with the period that immediately preceded its rise in Italy in 1922. She uses the story of the marginalised discipline of experimental psychology at the University of Florence as her historical field site because it offers a critical window into the contradictory role played by Italian neo-idealism in that process. The uniquely renowned exponents of that philosophy, Giovanni Gentile and Benedetto Croce, split the Italian academy with warring Manifestos proposing and opposing Fascist culture but were united in loathing the scientific empiricism of the Wundtian discipline robustly represented by its professor at Florence and director of its first laboratory, De Sarlo. Gentile began eroding the discipline by engineering the transformation of De Sarlo’s chair into a temporary lectureship, afterwards held for years by De Sarlo’s assistant, Enzo Bonaventura, who was ultimately exiled under the racial law of 1938. The Fascist Education Minister ultimately neutralised the discipline by co-opting its friar-professor at Rome and the founder of the Universita Cattolica, Agostino Gemelli, to the Fascistisation mission. De Sarlo remained in Italy after retreating to his hometown of San Chirico, dying before the fall of Fascism. He escaped the physical violence of the Blackshirts who beat up his ex-students and murdered the socialist Giacomo Matteotti. Neither did he suffer the legal persecution experienced by his colleagues such as Gaetano Salvamini who was forced to leave Italy after his trial for founding the Florentine emblem of resistance, the newspaper Non Mollare! But De Sarlo fought his own war, becoming a signature of Croce’s anti-Fascist Manifesto, publishing a comparative critique of Gentile and Croce and continuing to speak out when he got the chance. De Sarlo’s Jewish colleagues did not have the option.
Hitler and Mussolini had claimed that science and scholarship would be unaffected by the expulsion of Jewish university faculty members. Guarnieri follows the journeys of two Italian émigrés, expelled by the racial law, to understand the consequences of what contributions were lost and to recover scenarios without taking anything for granted. She focuses not on exiled Nobel Prize Winners but on scholars who left without having achieved tenure and found it impossible in the post-war period to be reintegrated into the complex Italian university system.
Enzo Bonaventura was one of three faculty members from the Lettere e Filosofia at Florence expelled within two days of the Prefect’s instructions to the podesta in August 1938 regarding the new racial law. After twenty-three years as a liberto docente (untenured lecturer) and directing the psychology laboratory he was immediately replaced by his assistant, Alberto Marzi, who had been a member of the Partito Nationale Fascista for over a decade from the age of nineteen. Bonaventura immediately decided to leave Italy for Palestine. He had been involved with the Italian Zionist community seeking to establish a state of Israel from the 1920s and this provided him with a network facilitating his migration to a post in the University of Jerusalem. Without that network it is unclear what options would have been available since the British and American organisations assisting academics escaping Fascism offered him and many other untenured faculty nothing. Despite gaining a chair, directing psychological research at Jerusalem and achieving international publishing success, Bonaventura was prevented from reintegrating into the faculty at Florence after the 1944 decree of the Badagolio government that repealed the racial law. In the Lettere e Filosofia, anti-fascist allies such as Giovanni Calo returned in September 1944 along with the renowned professor of Italian literature, Attilio Momigliano. But Guarnieri unearths the Friar’s hand in dissuading Bonaventura from even applying for the chair in psychology so that he would not outcompete Gemelli’s favoured candidate, Cesare Musatti. As Guarnieri explains, despite his efforts to redeem his reputation, a shadow remains over Gemelli’s record not only because of his ‘brutality with Jews, well before the racial laws’ (p. 141) but because of his post-Fascism Machiavellian manoeuvrings. The question of Bonaventura’s return to Italy, desired by himself and many of his previous colleagues of the Lettere at Florence, was fatally resolved in 1948. On April 13th he was amongst the victims of an ambush by Arab forces in the Mount Scopus Jewish enclave of the Arab zone in Jerusalem, where the Hebrew University was located next to the Hadassah Hospital. The ambush was in retaliation for the massacre at the Arab village of Deir Yasin four days earlier.
Renata Calabresi made extraordinary achievements, obtaining her doctorate at the University of Florence under De Sarlo and then winning a competitive appointment in the Psychology Department at Rome. Perhaps because she was a woman in an almost totally male-dominated academic world she judiciously kept records of her achievements and actively maintained a network of academic referees, supporters and connections. Those networks and documentation proved crucial when seeking employment after she moved to New York. Nevertheless Calabresi struggled to obtain work and was a low priority for organisations assisting exiled academics, but she eventually shifted her career path to a successful hospital-based clinical practice. When it came time to contact her about reintegration after the fall of Fascism, the University administration at Rome listed her as lost without trace, despite her communications with colleagues at Florence and Rome. She was identified as having ‘given no more news of herself since 1939’ (pp. 194–5).
Guarnieri’s brilliant historical research and analysis brings academic life under Fascism into a chilling spotlight making the blood run cold with fears of history repeating itself. A professor of psychology, Olga Cox of Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa in California, has been living under death threats and grotesque harassments for weeks since this year’s US Presidential Election. A conservative student made a video of Cox at a lecture shortly after the election denouncing the politics of Donald Trump and Mike Pence as racist and homophobic in response to a question from another student. The video was uploaded to Republican student websites, went viral and was then shown on the ‘O’Reilly Factor’ on Fox News. Cox’s name has been added to a list of 200 academics on a conservative website called ‘Professor Watchlist’ who are accused of ‘leftist propaganda’ and ‘discriminating against conservative students’. Cox’s union representative is working with her university to strengthen freedom of speech policies to protect academics from what he identifies as ‘Gestapo tactics’.Footnote 1 Guarnieri’s account, however, demonstrates emphatically that facistisation, is a categorical process extending beyond any individual cultural border.
