Today Mussolini is remembered as a hated dictator who, along with Hitler and Stalin, ushered in an era of totalitarian repression unsurpassed in human history. But how was he viewed by ordinary Italians during his lifetime? In Fascist Voices, Christopher Duggan draws on thousands of letters sent to Mussolini, as well as private diaries and other primary documents, to show how Italian citizens lived and experienced the fascist regime under Mussolini from 1922-1943. Throughout the 1930s, Mussolini received about 1,500 letters a day from Italian men and women of all social classes writing words of congratulation, commiseration, thanks, encouragement, or entreaty on a wide variety of occasions: his birthday and saint's day, after he had delivered an important speech, on a major fascist anniversary, when a husband or son had been killed in action. While Duggan looks at some famous diaries-by such figures as the anti-fascist constitutional lawyer Piero Calamandrei; the philosopher Benedetto Croce; and the fascist minister Giuseppe Bottai-the majority of the voices here come from unpublished journals, diaries, and transcripts. Utilizing a rich collection of untapped archival material, Duggan explores "the cult of Il Duce," the religious dimensions of totalitarianism, and the extraordinarily intimate character of the relationship between Mussolini and millions of Italians. Duggan shows that the figure of Mussolini was crucial to emotional and political engagement with the regime; although there was widespread discontent throughout Italy, little of the criticism was directed at Il Duce himself. Duggan argues that much of the regime's appeal lay in its capacity to appropriate the language, values, and iconography of Roman Catholicism, and that this emphasis on blind faith and emotion over reason is what made Mussolini's Italy simultaneously so powerful and so insidious. Offering a unique perspective on the period, Fascist Voices captures the responses of private citizens living under fascism and unravels the remarkable mixture of illusions, hopes, and fears that led so many to support the regime for so long.

A Primer of Italian Fascism makes available for the first time in English translation the key documents pertaining to one of our century?s defining mass political movements. Whereas existing anthologies survey Fascist writings in a multiplicity of national settings, A Primer of Italian Fascism opts for a tightly focused, in-depth approach that emphasizes the development of Fascist ideology in the country of its birth. ø Historically speaking, Italian Fascism was the original Fascism. The model for subsequent movements including Nazism, Falangism, and Integralism, Italian Fascism set out to define a ?third way? to modernization known as ?corporatism.? A Primer of Italian Fascism situates the rise and fall of corporatist ideals within the framework of the actual history of Mussolini?s movement and regime. It includes not only classic doctrinal statements such as Mussolini?s ?Foundations and Doctrine of Fascism? and writings by corporatist theorists such as Bottai, Pellizzi, Rocco, and Spirito, but also an array of fundamental political and juridical documents, including the party platforms adopted by the Fascist combat brigades, the 1938 Manifesto of Race, the 1940 Manifesto of Verona, and the Fascist labor and school charters. By making available such an extensive array of source texts, A Primer of Italian Fascism aims to open up for the English reader a more complex and complete vision of Fascism, both in Italy and beyond.

This richly textured cultural history of Italian fascism traces the narrative path that accompanied the making of the regime and the construction of Mussolini's power. Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi reads fascist myths, rituals, images, and speeches as texts that tell the story of fascism. Linking Mussolini's elaboration of a new ruling style to the shaping of the regime's identity, she finds that in searching for symbolic means and forms that would represent its political novelty, fascism in fact brought itself into being, creating its own power and history. Falasca-Zamponi argues that an aesthetically founded notion of politics guided fascist power's historical unfolding and determined the fascist regime's violent understanding of social relations, its desensitized and dehumanized claims to creation, its privileging of form over ethical norms, and ultimately its truly totalitarian nature.

"For the third edition, De Grand has substantially revised the discussion of culture and ideology, the conclusion, and the bibliography."--BOOK JACKET.

This book compares the Italian Fascist and the Spanish Falangist political cultures from the early 1930s to the early 1940s, using the idea of the nation as the focus of the comparison. It argues that the discourse on the nation represented a common denominator between these two manifestations of the fascist phenomenon in Mussolini’s Italy and Franco’s Spain. Exploring the similarities and differences between these two political cultures, this study investigates how Fascist and Falangist ideologues defined and developed their own idea of the nation over time to legitimise their power within their respective countries. It examines to what extent their concept of the nation influenced Italian and Spanish domestic and foreign policies. The book offers a four-level framework for understanding the evolution of the fascist idea of the nation: the ideology of the nation, the imperial projects of Fascism and Falangism, race and the nation, and the place of these cultures in the new Nazi continental order. In doing so, it shows how these ideas of the nation had significant repercussions on fascist political practice.

Fascism was one of the defining experiences of the European 20th Century. Within it many of the economic, political, social and cultural contradictions that had been brewing in the unprecedented transformation that European society underwent in the 19th and early 20th century came to a head. Mussolini, the man who most fashioned Italian Fascism, dramatically expressed the unease and the hopes of his age. To what extent can we compare Mussolini's Italy to Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia? What legacy has the experience of Fascism left behind in Italy and in Europe? These and many more important questions are explored in Finaldi's introduction to one of the most important movements of the European 20th Century.

Extensive study by a historian.