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The Fascist Party and the Problem of Popular Opinion in the Provinces
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2015
Extract
As a non-specialist in the historiography of Fascism and Nazism, I enter this discussion with trepidation. Viewed from the outside, antagonism and rigidity have long characterised historical debate about the causes, nature and consequences of both regimes, although it is clear (and as the other contributions published here have pointed out) that some of this fierceness has attenuated of late with the rise of a new generation of historians. I don't propose to go over the various points of disagreement about fascist Italy – the problem of popular ‘consensus’ for the regime, the reasons for collective ‘amnesia’ after the fall of the regime, and the myth of ‘Italians as good people’ (Italiani brava gente) – as these have already been discussed by Bernhard in his review and in the contributions by Giulia Albanese and Roberta Pergher. Nor will I enter into related debates about the Italian Resistance, the issue of Italian war crimes and the broader controversy about ‘divided memory’ in post-war Italy, although these questions have also generated a significant literature in recent years. Instead I want simply to re-visit Paul Corner's The Fascist Party and Popular Opinion in Mussolini's Italy and to propose a rather different interpretation than the one offered by Patrick Bernhard.
- 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)
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015
References
1 Among the many recent titles, see, for example Focardi, Filippo, Il cattivo tedesco e il bravo italiano. La rimozione delle colpe della seconda guerra mondiale (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2013)Google Scholar; Cooke, Philip, The Legacy of the Italian Resistance (London: Palgrave, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Foot, John, Italy's Divided Memory (London: Palgrave, 2010)Google Scholar; Battini, Michele, The Missing Italian Nuremberg. Cultural Amnesia and Postwar Politics (London: Palgrave, 2007)Google Scholar.
2 Evans, Richard, ‘Coercion and Consent in Nazi Germany’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 151 (2006), 52–81Google Scholar. See also Roberta Pergher's comments in this roundtable.
3 Duggan, Christopher, Fascist Voices. An Intimate History of Mussolini's Italy (London: The Bodley Head, 2012)Google Scholar.
4 Bernhard, Patrick, ‘Renarrating Italian Fascism: New Directions in the Historiography of a European Dictatorship’, Contemporary European History, 23, 1 (2014), 158Google Scholar, 163.
5 Corner, Paul, The Fascist Party and Popular Opinion in Mussolini's Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Ibid.
7 Duggan, Fascist Voices, 231.
8 Duggan, Fascist Voices, xii.
9 Bernhard, ‘Renarrating Fascism’, 153, 154, 155, 160.
10 Ibid, 153.
11 Roberta Pergher also notes the same point in the contribution published here. The most prominent proponent of a ‘culturalist’ approach to Fascism is Emilio Gentile; see, for example, his The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996). See also Tarquini, Alessandra, Storia della cultura fascista (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011)Google Scholar.
12 Corner, The Fascist Party, 24.
13 Ibid, 4.
14 Bernhard, ‘Renarrating Italian Fascism’, 154.
15 Corner, The Fascist Party, 172-80.
16 Duggan, Fascist Voices, xiii-xvi.
17 Corner, The Fascist Party, 172.
18 Bernhard, ‘Renarrating Italian Fascism’, 162.
19 de Felice, Renzo, Mussolini il Duce. Gli anni del consenso (1929-1936) (Turin: Einaudi, 1974)Google Scholar.
20 Corner, The Fascist Party, 7.
21 On this question, see Corner, Paul, ‘The Road to Fascism: An Italian Sonderweg?’, Contemporary European History, 11,2 (2002), 273–95Google Scholar, and now Goeschel, Christian, ‘A Parallel History? Rethinking the Relationship between Italy and Germany, c.1860-1945’, Journal of Modern History (forthcoming, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.