Italian Fascism and the Racial Laws of 1938: the Politics and Birth of Doctrinal Tragedy

ITALIAN FASCISM AND THE RACIAL LAWS OF 1938: THE POLITICS AND BIRTH OF DOCTRINAL TRAGEDY Dr. Patrick Anthony Cavaliere, BA, MA, DPhil (Oxon) Professor of History, Laurentian University, Canada Adjunct Professor of History, Università di Roma, La Sapienza, Italy Introduction The principal object of this paper is to present a intellectual history of racism in Fascist Italy in the period surrounding the drafting of the Racial Laws of 1938.1 Central to the work is the thesis that Fascist racism was a unique functional synthesis of neo-Hegelian idealism and an organic nationalism that had matured in Italy long before Benito Mussolini’s political and tactical considerations of strengthening his ties with Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich forced Fascist ideologues to artificially realign Fascist racial theories along the biological lines expounded by German National Socialism. The work argues specifically that the racial theories of mature Fascism constituted a relatively stable compound of diverse intellectual constituents that can be best understood by coming to terms with Fascism’s philosophical doctrines on the Nation-State; and, perhaps more importantly, by coming to terms with the concerted political effort the Fascist State itself made in placing constitutional strategies in defense of the race at the very heart of Fascism’s domestic political agenda. To fully appreciate the phenomenon of Fascist racism, in sum, the paper claims that it is essential to transcend the generally accepted view of ‘imported cuttings of a mystical and biological racism’ that made its appearance on the Italian political scene in the late 1930s by way of the Rome-Berlin Axis and the Pact of Steel signed with Nazi Germany. To be sure, Fascism’s attempt to repair the ideological breach between the two totalitarian regimes on the racial question by enacting the Racial Laws of 1938 represents a momentous event in the history of Fascist Italy, but this historic political and ideological compromise cannot be understood unless greater emphasis is placed on the political and ideological pressures Italian Fascism imposed upon itself and its evolving doctrinal rationale to fulfill its functional and organizational vision of Italy as a kind of national race 1 This paper was drawn in part from an ongoing study sponsored by the Vidal 82 cradle, where the integral, organic State, as the sovereign personality and conscious will of the Nation, could, through its political pronouncements and legislative enactments, act as the vehicle of race formation, as the manager of its constituent elements, and, ultimately, as the guardian of its long-term survival. With few exceptions, contemporary historians have inadequately assessed the political and intellectual history of Fascist racism, and, as a consequence, it remains almost entirely misunderstood. Over the years the leading contributions in the field have been content to develop what might be termed a radical interpretation. For many writers, Fascist racism, like many other aspects of the twenty-year dictatorship, represented a unique parenthesis in the development of the modern Italian State, a product of individual and collective perversity and moral disability, and, in the extreme, a historic anomaly which was the illegitimate offspring of one man’s crude political ambition. At times, Fascist racism is also cited by these same writers as evidence that Fascism itself held no firm doctrinal commitments, and that its postures, at any specific juncture, were almost always a function of its immediate political interests and objectives. Fascist racism, this thesis maintains, was a foreign importation, an ideological encumbrance, and a catastrophic misadventure that stemmed almost exclusively from Mussolini’s primitive instincts as both plagiarist and political opportunist. Neo-Fascist apologists, ironically enough, have also used many of these same arguments to dispel what they now conveniently term the doctrinal myths of Fascist racism. When forced to explain the racial theories and policies of the regime, neo-Fascists have invariably argued that it represented nothing more than a theoretical degeneracy, a philosophical excrescence for which Hitler and the biological determinism of German National Socialism were uniquely responsible. Clearly, scholarship in the field has addressed itself only peripherally to the unique ideological and political synthesis of Fascist racism, and it has been conducted under the burden of preliminary assumptions that have led to a serious neglect of its explicit historical development. Without question, several eminent scholars have treated the general phenomenon of Fascist racism with intellectual vigor and moral detachment, and there have been numerous important studies chronicling the persecution, rescue, and survival of Italian Jews during the Holocaust. Nevertheless, almost all of these have broadly focused attention on ‘Mussolini and the Jewish Question’ or ‘Italians and Final Solution’ and neglected the much more specific issue of Fascist racism as a complex and systematic intellectual product that held significant prescriptive value for the Italian State and its constitutional order long before the desire to 83 strengthen the political and ideological ties to the Third Reich conditioned a reassessment of racial doctrine and politics. The Mature Doctrine of Fascism and Racism By the early 1930’s, Fascism had developed a theory of race that had become a relatively stable compound of diverse intellectual constituents. The ideological core of Fascist racism drew originally and principally from the political and theoretical contributions of Italian Nationalist Association, a political party that was founded in 1910, only to eventually merge with Fascism in 1923.2 The Nationalist Association was, from its first stirrings, a ‘reactionary ultra-conservative’ political phenomenon, and although it leadership drew from a variety of intellectual sources and political traditions, and included most prominently the contributions of Wilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, Roberto Michels, Scipio Sighele, Giuseppe Prezzolini, Giovanni Papini, Angiolo Olivetti, F.T Marinetti, Enrico Corradini, Alfredo Rocco, Luigi Ferderzoni, and Francesco Coppola, its primary goal was to point out to Italians the inadequacy of liberalism, socialism, and traditional conservatism to find adequate solutions to remedy the recurrent political crises, the embarrassing colonial defeats, the persistent social unrest, the oppressive poverty, the scandalous illiteracy, and the deep-seated regionalism and provincialism that had overwhelmed Italy over the course of its first half century of unified life. The Nationalists, beginning in the first decade of the twentieth century, stressed the need to find a new political ideology, a new conception of politics and political life that would take Italy out of an essentially classical liberal world of political discussion into one that was recognizably modern and resolutely capable of fulfilling their national objectives.3 To this end, the Nationalists constructed an ideology that revolved around the notion of the Nation-State as a specific personality, with rights and freedoms, with interests and assets, which transcended 2 On the Italian Nationalist Association, the two most important works, particularly as they concern the influence on Fascism, remain Francesco Perfetti, Il nazionalismo italiano dalle origini alla fusione col fascismo, (Bologna: Cappelli, 1977), and Alexander De Grand, The Italian Nationalist Association and the Rise of Fascism in Italy, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1978). 3 Enrico Corradini, in a review of M. Morasso, “L’imperialismo artistico,” in Marzocco, 43(October 26, 1902), cited in Enrico Corradini, Scritti e discorsi (1901-1914), (Torono: Einaudi, 1980, p. xvii. 84 those of individuals.4 The Nation-State was considered both the guarantor of internal order and external security, as well as the custodian and the vehicle of transmission of the spirit of the people as it had been elaborated throughout the centuries in language, custom, culture, and faith.5 The Nationalists also made explicit references to biologism when referencing the ‘spirit of the people, and in some instances they conceived of ‘race’, rather than nationality, to be the first order of distinction among men, nations, and civilizations.6 After merging with Fascism in 1923, the Italian Nationalists always resisted what they understood to be the efforts of Gentilean Actualism to monopolize Fascist ideology. They insisted that Fascism, as a pragmatic political system, must give constant evidence of its concern for contemporary political issues rather than preoccupy itself with abstract or philosophical lucubration. They tended to be more scientific, to conceive of ‘politics as an applied science’ concerned with the regularities that govern the behaviour of men in association. They sought to explain, predict, and control collective human behaviour by isolating the determinate variables that influenced conduct, and to this end they relied extensively on some of Italy’s most distinguished cultural anthropologists and theorists who advanced the Mediterranean identity of Italians, such as Giuseppe Sergi, Angelo Mosso, and Enrico de Michelis. The Nationalists conceived collective human behaviour to be governed by interests and sentiments: interests that defined societal goals and norms, and sentiments that identified the individual with his kinship, his territorial and traditional community, i.e., that community

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