Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, ISBN: 9780230232860; 272pp.; Price: £55.00
Date accessed: 20 August, 2017
A number of
Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, ISBN: 9780230232860; 272pp.; Price: £55.00
Date accessed: 20 August, 2017
A number of scholars have recently examined the ways in which Italians participated in, supported and/or resisted the Fascist project of radically transforming politics, society, and the citizens’ private sphere, including the transformation of the boundaries between private life and the public arena. This book is a contribution to this historiography, and explores the extent to which Fascism was capable of affecting deeply the private lives of Italians.
The issue of consent/consensus goes back to the mid-1970s, when De Felice, and later a plethora of his followers, insisted in particular on the capacity of Mussolini and other leaders to create a vast consensus around the regime and to mobilise the masses through instruments of mass communication. Historians who opposed this interpretation, like Rochat, emphasised, among other aspects, that De Felice’s sources were exclusively from the records of Fascist and institutional groups contained in the Central State Archive, or the private papers of Fascist leaders. Like other works from the 1990s in particular, Kate Ferris’s book is based on a variety of private and public sources and moves from the institutional to the social aspects of Italian lives in the 1930s.
The Fascist regime created an efficient propaganda machine by utilising the press, radio and cinema to valorise in a spectacular way the regime’s successes (such as the ‘Battle for Grain’ or the reclamation of the Pontine Marshes), with the aim of maintaining the masses in a state of permanent emotional mobilisation through collective rites and ceremonies. The major problem, however, is how to measure the extent of the impact this had on Italian lives. The book thus aims to compare the regime’s intentions with the population’s reception.
The concept of consensus is problematic also because of the tendency to consider ‘Italians’ as a generic group. Interpretations should vary depending on which social, geographical, or economic group is studied: it is difficult to describe a ‘national’ or a ‘collective’ identity and is more fruitful to be specific and provide circumscribed and well-documented case studies. This is what Ferris has done here, investigating the case of Venice, and within that, some particular aspects: youth; popular festivals; consumption during the Ethiopian war; and funerals. In all these cases, she seeks to assert the citizens’ agency rather than assuming a direct relationship between propaganda and its reception. The difficulty in drawing conclusions is evident from the very first pages of the introduction, where the author suggests that the impact of dictatorship was not felt consistently in everyday life, nor was it entirely remote; however, what was taking place in the streets, bars, markets, and other public places, and even more at home, remains hard to assess.
A first chapter on Venetian life between the wars illustrates Venice’s peculiarity as a tourist city, where Fascism (just as the regimes of past centuries had done) expressed itself as a spectacle not only to the inhabitants but also to a global audience. It was particularly important to exploit the myth of the Serenissima in conjunction with that of imperial Rome, of which Venice was described by Fascist propaganda as being the principal heir in Italy: founded just as Rome fell, Venice continued to expand its influence in the Mediterranean, sustaining the link with the capital’s glorious past. Important allies in the establishment and re-enacting of that myth were the Catholic Church and the city notables, who claimed a Serenissima ancestry. In order to function, the Fascist project had to rely on discourses that were already understood and on pre-existing rituals. It is evident from other chapters too (the one on rituals of death in particular), that Venetians could empathise with beliefs and practices which were familiar to them.
The chapter on youth provides a thorough analysis of what children read, and contributes in this way to wider studies on the Fascist organisation of culture (Turi, Mangoni, Isnenghi, Gibelli, for example). The Fascist message, which sought to persuade children to see themselves as future citizen-soldiers, invaded their time at school (through to university) as well as leisure time. However, the difficulty in moving from the analysis of propaganda to its reception is evident: the fact that the act of reading is active and not passive, although important, is not in itself guarantee that children were immune from the Fascist message. Ferris’s research shows that children, when writing about their readings, did not demonstrate a clear interest in politics; however, it can be claimed that this would be typical of their age in any circumstances, at least as a general tendency. Naturally children enjoyed fairy tales and cartoons; in the same way, it can be argued (through an analysis of contemporary images, children’s writings and LUCE films) that when they attended summer camps they enjoyed the games more than Fascist speeches. The next step, and the problematic one, would be to understand the extent of the Fascistisation that occurred while reading fairy tales or playing games. The author reaches the balanced (but not conclusive) deduction, at p. 76, that children’s essa