Ruth Ben-Ghiat

Fascist Modernities

A regenerated Italian culture would advertise national creative genius throughout the world, much as it had during the Renaissance. From the inception of the regime, then, fascist culture was to aid external as well as internal colonization schemes, supplementing military conquest with a work of 'spiritual penetration.'

For many intellectuals, the advent of dictatorship in Italy represented an opportunity to redress an issue that had nagged at elites since the Risorgimento: the lack of a national culture. The absence of a cohesive Italian taste and style, fascists felt, had allowed the country to become a cultural colony of more dominant nations. Internalizing foreign views of themselves as 'insignificant imitators,' Italians had become a people who believed that 'everything foreigners do is great, everything we do is awful.' Such status anxieties resulted, in part, from the different path taken by the Italian cultural industries with respect to those of France and Germany. Since the late nineteenth century, low literacy rates and a high percentage of dialect speakers had kept production of Italian-language newspapers, periodicals, and books small—even under market demand. World War I had only intensified this trend, since book production fell and the formerly prestigious Italian film industry nearly ceased to operate. Throughout the liberal period, therefore, Italian consumption of foreign culture, both popular and elite, was among the highest in Europe. The fascists won followers by promising to reverse this situation of 'foreigner-worship' and create a national culture that would be well received abroad.

This project, no less than other fascist nationalization schemes, involved the mobilization of state resources to remold the social collective. Culture was envisioned as an integrative device that would create a shared set of values to bind Italians to the state and reaffirm the normative behaviors envisioned by fascist reclamation schemes. Especially after 1936, when Mussolini accelerated his campaigns of collective transformation, culture became an important site for the articulation of autarchic and racist sentiments by those who wished to replace the 'voice of the ghetto and the amusement park' with 'the voice of blood and the spirit.' Considering cultural developments in the context of the regime's social and foreign policies, this book seeks to problematize the distinctions between 'moderate' and 'extremist' movements and individuals that have long been used to plot the dictatorship's cultural map. Openness to the latest foreign trends, as we will see, was not incompatible with racism of the most virulent sort: the officials Giuseppe Bottai and Roberto Farinacci were both anti-Semites, despite their famously different attitudes with respect to modern art. In the years of the Axis alliance, though, culture also served as a sphere through which Italians asserted their autonomy and opposition to Nazi agendas of cultural imperialism.

A premise of this book is that fascism found support among the majority of Italian intellectuals because it addressed both the hopes and the fears of the modern age. Defined by Mussolini as a 'revolution of reaction,' fascism expressed tensions within modernity between the push toward progress and the fear of degeneration, the demand for emancipation and the impulse to preserve order, the frisson of impermanence and the desire for stable identities. Its ideologies gave political voice to the cult of youth, the primacy of myth, and the modernist idea of history as malleable, but also represented a response to long-standing anxieties about modernity that escalated in the interwar years. Natalist measures, for example, answered fears about unstable racial and gender hierarchies, and the mass organizing undertaken by the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro (OND, or National Leisure Time Organization) aimed to break down class and regional allegiances and protect local traditions of culture and craft. For still other Italians, fascism appeared to counter the dangers posed by globalization, which were summed up by one commentator as the 'yellow peril, the red peril, and the danger of the American standard.'

At the level of doctrine, the fascist claim to protect the individual from the excesses of technology and mass society found expression in several ways. Whereas capitalism and communism valorized only homo economicus, supporters claimed, the fascist model of modern existence catered to 'real man in all his historic and psychological complexity' by promoting spiritual as well as social development. As theorized by party philosopher Giovanni Gentile, the dictatorship was an 'ethical state' that embodied moral values and offered the individual protection and community without suppressing individual initiative. Fascism, accordingly, was defined as a 'spiritual revolution' that, unlike socialism or communism, would improve the moral as well as material climate of Europe. The left might offer a worker's paradise of 'wine, women, chicken, and cinema,' Mussolini declared, but only fascism would generate new values to underpin innovations in the social and economic spheres.

To fascism's opponents, the idea that it constituted a spiritualistic 'return to man' contrasted ludicrously with the repressive and dehumanizing reality of life under blackshirt rule. Yet the notion of fascism as an ethical force proved to be a valuable consensus-building device among Italians. First, it underwrote the production of a sacralized political culture and public sphere that used religious symbols and rites as integrative devices. Second, it allowed Catholics to discover points of convergence between the ideas of fascism and those of the Roman Church, facilitating their participation in the life of the dictatorship. Third, it enabled the blackshirts to distinguish themselves from the Bolsheviks even as they made use of leftist language to advance a competing program of 'revolutionary' change. Fourth, it helped intellectuals to sustain their understanding that fascism respected personal conscience and will. This notion also informed distinctions Italians drew in the thirties between Mussolini's 'humane' regime and the brutal dictatorships set up by Stalin and Hitler. The ideologue Camillo Pellizzi spoke for many of his peers when he characterized fascism in 1936 as 'the last trench in the modern world where one fights for the defense of Man.'