Richard Bosworth

Everyday Mussolinism: Friends, Family, Locality and Violence in Fascist Italy

The article uses a range of archival material to commence an investigation into how and with what assumptions Italians lived under a Mussolinian dictatorship which called itself totalitarian. It suggests that ‘revolutionary’ Fascism – what Emilio Gentile and others have seen as a new ‘political religion’ – met with some scepticism in the daily behaviour of many Italians. The family, the locality, the most helpful functioning of patron–client networks, the search for special advantage for oneself and ‘friends’ conditioned Fascist militancy and framed ‘ordinary life’, all the more because the practice of the dictatorship was itself so shot through with contradictions.

The Oxford handbook of fascism

IDEAS AND FORMATIVE EXPERIENCE THE FIRST FASCIST NATION THE NAZI COMPARISON OTHERS REFLECTION AND LEGACIES

The British Press, the Conservatives, and Mussolini, 1920-34

Debates on the impact of public opinion on foreign policy have reached few satisfactory conclusions, and the historian who ventures into this field is likely to find marshy ground. His very premises are open to grave suspicion. What is public opinion? Does a newspaper represent it? How can a newspaper’s views affect the conduct of diplomacy by a foreign ministry ? It must be admitted that no precise replies can be given to these

War, Totalitarianism and ‘Deep Belief’ in Fascist Italy, 1935-43

In this article material is used from the Italian archives about so-called ‘defeatists’ to illuminate ‘deep beliefs’ among the Italian populace about war and empire. To a perhaps surprising degree, these beliefs embrace views that are widely separate from the fascist norm and were often hostile to it. Thus, at least some Italians resisted propaganda about the glory of Ethiopian conquest in 1935-6 and the virtue of the Italian presence in the Spanish Civil War. They remained even more sceptical about many aspects of Italy’s ‘special’ Second World War. Some thought Britain, France and the United States rich and powerful compared with Italy. Others disliked Nazism, or the Germans, or both. A number simply recalled that aggression was sinful and in the past had been generally unproductive for the Italian people anyway. By this evidence some Italians continued to a considerable degree to make their own imaginings, for all the fascists’ attempts to impose a cultural revolution on the nation.

Tourist Planning in Fascist Italy and the Limits of a Totalitarian Culture

The historiography of Italian fascism has reached a curious pass. Once, especially in the English-language world, all was dominated by the study of politics, diplomacy and war. Moreover, these studies were automatically ‘intentionalist’ in their interpretation. For Denis Mack Smith as, ironically, for Renzo De Felice, it did not seem possible to think of the period from 1922 to 1945 except as ‘Mussolinis Italy’; any analysis of fascist Italy could not depart far from the dominant and dominating figure of the Duce .

Bernardo Bertolucci, 1900 and the Myth of Fascism

Historians are students of time, servants of time, dealers in time. But this time in which they deal is not a simple, reliable, linear one. All historians know that the past which they study is in a state of flux, that it is not set in time, or rather that it is set in a way little less evanescent than the present. A stable past lasts only as long as the latest ’authoritative study’ on it remains authoritative. The present, too, is evanescent. The creation of some version of the past, it in turn manufactures another past for itself. Whatever may be true of historical time, the historian’s time is complex, fragmented, convoluted. Past and present endlessly jostle, meeting and separating like the parts of an atom. Recent historians, perhaps in reaction to the relative decline of our discipline and to the threat which the times manifest, have commented on the history of time, on its conceptualization. Stephen Kern believes that a study of views about time (and space) is the most fruitful way to appraise the ’culture of an age’. Individuals, he asserts confidently, ’behave in distinctive ways when they feel cut off from the flow of time, excessively attached to the past, isolated in the present; without a future, or rushing towards one’. Different patterns of behaviour in the July Crisis of 1914, he claims, arose from the protagonists’ diverse attitudes towards time. The leadership of Austria-Hungary was convinced that time was running out; Russia believed it had time to spare.2

Per necessità famigliare: Hypocrisy and Corruption in Fascist Italy

Recent literature has made great play of an alleged Fascist cultural revolution, extending its influence deep into the subjectivities of the citizens of Fascist Italy. In his article, Bosworth doubts the completeness of this intrusion of an alleged totalitarianism. Reviewing material from Mussolini’s personal office, Bosworth traces the way in which the Fascist leadership and, most notably, Mussolini himself, remained impervious to Fascist idealism. In instance after instance, leading Fascists expressed the worlds of patronage and clientship, localism and the family, hypocrisy and corruption, rather more evidently than they did Fascist ideals about a fully ordered and disciplined society of ‘new’ men and women. In other words, the evidence which Bosworth assembles appears to demonstrate that many of the familiar structures of Italian life continued despite the Fascist ‘revolution’. Certainly in the longue duree, and perhaps also in the short, Italian Fascism failed more than it succeeded.

Venice between Fascism and international tourism, 1911–45

Summary This article uses Venice as a case study of the ‘cultural revolution’ urged by some historians as a feature of the totalitarianizing ambition of the Fascist regime. But Bosworth finds a Venice which, though plainly affected by Fascism, nonetheless preserved much that was its own and much that expressed a continuity with the liberal era before 1922 and the liberal democratic one after 1945. He shows that many of the rhythms of Venetian life moved in ways which were different from those of political history, and argues that such differences ensured that Fascism scarcely instituted an all‐controlling and completely alienating totalitarian society, at least in this Italian city.

The Messina Earthquake of 28 December 1908

an interesting one since the confidence and achievement of that political master, Prime Minister Giolitti, were looking thinner than they had for some time. The economic growth to which the ruling classes had been becoming accustomed since 1896 had faltered in 1907; and 1908 had brought only a partial recovery. The international scene, too, was stormy. Only two months before, Austria, perennial ’ally or enemy’ of the Italian state, had annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, whisking an international triumph not only from beneath the nose of Russia, but also from Italy which once again received no compensation for a Balkan advantage gained by another. Press and publicists sustained their eloquence against the danger of general war or in favour of a more forward and combative foreign policy. Worst of all was the social peril. Socialism

L’Anno Santo (Holy Year) in Fascist Italy 1933—34

Between Easter 1933 and Easter 1934, Rome was the venue for two major and potentially rival efforts to seize history for popular use. The Roman Catholic Church, under the rule of Pope Pius XI, held a supernumerary Anno Santo, Holy Year or Jubilee, the first since the signature of the Lateran pacts with the Fascist regime in 1929. That agreement had formally ended the Pope’s ‘imprisonment in the Vatican’, permitting the Church publicly to deploy a greater array of Rome’s religious pasts than had been possible since the Risorgimento. Meanwhile, in October 1932, Mussolini’s dictatorship had opened its Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, there making with stridently modernist dynamism its own claims to carry Rome’s histories in its hands. Many ‘pilgrims’ in 1933—34 attended both Catholic and Fascist events. What, then, does this coincidence illustrate of the Fascist version of totalitarianism, to some historians a ‘political religion’ of span and depth, but one that was never able fully to master a Church that was at least as determined to claim that it best expressed transcendence and eternity?