This book examines the development of Italian Fascism, and surveys the themes and issues of the movement. It includes fully integrated analysis, extensive notes on sources, a glossary, and a useful guide to further reading.

This book examines the development of Italian Fascism, and surveys the themes and issues of the movement. It includes fully integrated analysis, extensive notes on sources, a glossary, and a useful guide to further reading.

In her examination of the culture of Italian fascism, Mabel Berezin focuses on how Mussolini's regime consciously constructed a nonliberal public sphere to support its political aims. Fascism stresses form over content, she believes, and the regime tried to build its political support through the careful construction and manipulation of public spectacles or rituals such as parades, commemoration ceremonies, and holiday festivities. The fascists believed they could rely on the motivating power of spectacle, and experiential symbols. In contrast with the liberal democratic notion of separable public and private selves, Italian fascism attempted to merge the public and private selves in political spectacles, creating communities of feeling in public piazzas. Such communities were only temporary, Berezin explains, and fascist identity was only formed to the extent that it could be articulated in a language of pre-existing cultural identities. In the Italian case, those identities meant the popular culture of Roman Catholicism and the cult of motherhood. Berezin hypothesizes that at particular historical moments certain social groups which perceive the division of public and private self as untenable on cultural grounds will gain political ascendance. Her hypothesis opens a new perspective on how fascism works.

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.

This book explores the complex ways in which people lived and worked within the confines of Benito Mussolini’s regime in Italy, variously embracing, appropriating, accommodating and avoiding the regime’s incursions into everyday life. The contributions highlight the experiences of ordinary Italians – midwives and schoolchildren, colonists and soldiers – over the course of the Fascist era, in settings ranging from the street to the farm, and from the kitchen to the police station. At the same time, this volume also provides a framework for understanding the Italian experience in relation to other totalitarian dictatorships in twentieth-century Europe and beyond.

This source book examines the development of Italian Fascism, and surveys the themes and issues of the movement. It spans from the emergence of the united Italian state in the nineteenth century, to the post-war aftermath of fascism. It provides: * analysis of propaganda and Mussolini's journalism * new documentary material, previously unavailable in English * an extensive range of other source material, including images * thematic coverage of major topics such as the transformation of agrarian and urban society * analysis of the political, social, and economic status of Italy * the legacy of fascism in modern Italy. John Pollard also includes extensive notes on sources as well as a glossary and guide to further reading.

The question of how ordinary people related to totalitarian regimes is still far from being answered. The tension between repression and consensus makes analysis difficult; where one ends and the other begins is never easy to determine. In the case of fascist Italy, recent scholarship has tended to tilt the balance in favour of popular consensus for the regime, identifying in the novel ideological and cultural aspects of Mussolini's rule a 'political religion' which bound the population to the fascist leader. The Party and the People presents a different picture. While not underestimating the force of ideological factors, Paul Corner argues that 'real existing Fascism', as lived by a large part of the population, was in fact an increasingly negative experience and reflected few of those colourful and attractive features of fascist propaganda which have induced more favourable interpretations of the regime. Distinguishing clearly between the fascist project and its realisation, Corner examines the ways in which the fascist party asserted itself at the local level in the widely-differing areas of Italy, at its corruption and malfunctioning, and at the mounting wave of popular resentment against it during the course of the 1930s - resentment and hostility which, in effect, signalled the failure of the project. The Party and the People, based largely on unpublished archival material, concludes by suggesting that the abuse of power by fascists mirrors much wider problems in Italy related to the relationship between the public and the private and to the modes of utilisation of power, both in the past and in the present.