Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922–43

George Talbot 0230543081_01_Prexpdf 4/28/07 12:08 PM Page i

Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922–43 0230543081_01_Prexpdf 4/28/07 12:08 PM Page ii

Also by George Talbot

ESSAYS IN ITALIAN LITERATURE AND HISTORY IN HONOUR OF DOUG THOMPSON, ed., with Pamela A. Williams MONTALE’S ‘MESTIERE VILE’: THE ELECTIVE TRANSLATIONS FROM ENGLISH OF THE 1930s AND 40s 0230543081_01_Prexpdf 4/28/07 12:08 PM Page iii

Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922–43

George Talbot 0230543081_01_Prexpdf 4/28/07 12:08 PM Page iv

© George Talbot 2007 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copying or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identiﬁed as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–54308–9 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–54308–1 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Talbot, George, 1963– Censorhip in fascist Italy, 1922–43 / George Talbot. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–54308–9 (cloth) ISBN-10: 0–230–54308–1 (cloth) 1. Fascism–Italy. 2. Censorship–Italy–History–20th century. 3. Politics and culture–Italy–History–20th century. 4. Fascism–Italy–History–Sources. 5. Censorship–Italy–History–20th century–Sources. I. Title. DG571.T324 2007 303.3'76094509041–dc22 2007060075

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Contents

Acknowledgements vii List of Abbreviations viii

1 Introduction 1 Historiography, politics and the idea of commonsense 1 Culture, myths and definitions 7 Censorship and surveillance 12 Methodologies and intentions 15 2 Consolidating Power and Silencing Opposition 21 Dismantling the Liberal state 21 The Press Office 28 Policing, censorship and surveillance 33 Media ownership and effective control 38 The Agenzia Stefani 43 State, church and censorship 46 3 Giovinezza: Education for the Ethical State 48 The need for reform 48 The choice of Gentile 51 A programme of work 54 Reform and censorship 57 Consequences of the Gentile reform 62 ‘Consensus’ and the marginalization of Gentile 67 Hearts, minds and bodies 70 4 Journalism as Mission 77 Inspiring loyalty 77 From Press Office to independent ministry 79 Policy and inconsistency 91 War, empire and the media 98 Mission accomplished? 101 5 The Duce’s Image 105 The Istituto LUCE 105 The Duce’s body 107

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vi Contents

Other bodies 116 Racism and the imagination 125 6 Culture Wars 132 Writers and politics 134 From ministry for press and propaganda to Minculpop 139 Film 144 Theatre 148 Literature and translations 153 7 Censorship, Secrets and Lies 159 Public and private 160 Covert operations 162 Informers 165 Lies, corruption, deviation and degeneration 171 Minority communities 175 War and public opinion 182 Morale and popular culture 190 8 Conclusion 196 Continuities 197 The panopticon model and its limits 198 Censorship and complicity 203 Notes 210 Bibliography 234 Index 243 0230543081_01_Prexpdf 4/28/07 12:08 PM Page vii

Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of staff at the Archivio centrale dello Stato in Rome, the Biblioteca nazionale centrale in Florence, the British Library and the University of Hull library. I am also grateful to the British Arts and Humanities Research Council and to the University of Hull for research leave in 2002. Parts of the work in progress were delivered and discussed at conferences including one on Censorship, Culture and the State in Twentieth-Century Italy (organized by Dr Guido Bonsaver and Dr Robert Gordon in London, Institute for Romance Studies, 2002) and another on The Body in Italian Culture (organized by Dr Loredana Polezzi and Dr Charlotte Ross in London, Society for Italian Studies, 2004), and at seminars held in the University of Hull. Discussion and debate in all cases helped to clarify my ideas and sharpen points. Dr Neil Vickers read several chapters in draft and made a number of helpful suggestions, from a perspective outside of Italian Studies, which I hope will commend the book to a wider audience. Professor Brian Moloney and Professor Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin read the entire typescript and provided welcome and judicious advice. Research for this book has meant that my family members have seen less of me than they might have wished over the last few years, and they have tolerated and supported my academic obsessions with patience and good humour. George Talbot, Hull, November 2006

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List of Abbreviations

ACS Archivio centrale dello Stato (Rome) b. busta BBC British Broadcasting Company BCI Banca Commerciale Italiana cat. categoria CEKA Secret police co carteggio ordinario cr carteggio riservato DAGR Divisione affari generali e riservati DG Direzione generale / Directorate generale DGPS Directorate General of Public Security (Direzione generale di pubblica sicurezza) DPP Divisione polizia politica EIAR Ente italiano per le audizioni radiofoniche f. fascicolo FP fascicoli personali Gab. Gabinetto GIL Gioventù italiana del Littorio IRI Instituto per la ricostruzione industriale LUCE L’Unione cinematografica educativa Mat. Materia MCP Ministero di Cultura popolare MI Ministero dell’Interno MiCup Ministry of Popular Culture (Minculpop) NAZI German National Socialism OMNI Opera nazionale maternità e infanzia ONB Opera nazionale Balilla PCI Italian Communist Party PNF Partito nazionale fascista – National Fascist Party RSI Repubblica sociale italiana – Salò Republic SASP Societa anomina Stefano Pittaluga sf. sottofascicolo SPD Segreteria particolare del duce SSR Servizio speciale riservato UC Ufficio criptografia

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List of Abbreviations ix

UCI Unione cinematograﬁca italiana UTPN Ufﬁcio tecnico di propaganda nazionale This page intentionally left blank 0230543081_02_ch01pdf 4/28/07 12:08 PM Page 1

1 Introduction

Historiography, politics and the idea of commonsense

The legacy of Fascism continues to cast a shadow over modern Italy. This is demonstrated by the ample coverage of its history in scholarly and popular media; and the sorts of questions about coercion or complicity which they have provoked among contemporary German historians have analogues in the case of Fascist Italy.1 Daniel Goldhagen’s controversial anthropological reconstruction of German ‘commonsense’ in the Nazi period, presents an argument for the eventual rise of the Nazis drawing on a number of factors, principal among them a deep-seated anti-Semitism spread wide in German society. According to this argument, anti-Semitism combined with other factors such as a smarting defeat in the Great War, the crippling economic consequences of that military defeat and the settlement at the Treaty of Versailles, which with a widening of suffrage created conditions sufﬁ- cient to enable the acceptance of a profoundly anti-democratic model of consensus. Out of this emerged a generation of willing executioners. Few historians would accept that things were quite so simple, but the debate the book engendered has had repercussions outside of German history. The Italian case is different in many ways from the German one, not least in that the Fascists achieved power far earlier, and the common wisdom brings anti-Semitism into the Italian model far later, dating it to the Race Laws of summer and autumn 1938. Robert O. Paxton, however, in his stimulating comparative study of Fascism in Europe has argued recently that the assumptions about German anti-Semitism need more careful analysis, and that other European countries actually had far more anti-Semitism latent in their mentalité than did Germany.2 The rise of the Nazis, he concludes, was

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2 Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922–43

not an inevitable consequence of the social, cultural and economic factors at work in Germany. Equally Giorgio Fabre has demonstrated that the roots of Mussolini’s own anti-Semitism extend well beyond Hitler’s suggestive influence in 1933 and other Italian historians, among them Enzo Collotti and Michele Sarfatti have demonstrated the existence of a spontaneous anti-Semitism in parts of the Italian population which cannot be attributed to the theatrical ravings of a couple of dictators.3 Some historians and TV pundits in Italy, nonetheless, while critical of the record of Fascist Italy have drawn comfort from the fact that whatever wrongs the Italian Fascists may have committed, at least they were not directly responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and other marginalized minorities. Such a view is difficult to reconcile entirely with the archival evidence presented by Mimmo Franzinelli in his Delatori (2001).4 Other historians, less critical of the Fascists, continue to praise various social and educational improvements achieved during the ventennio. The Fascists’ direct spiritual descendants, the Alleanza nazionale, have occupied ministerial portfolios in two Italian governments since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Their leader, somewhat to the dismay of some of his supporters has now accepted publicly that Fascism was a ‘male assoluto’ or an ‘absolute evil’.5 In the case of Italian historiography, the late and extremely industri- ous historian Renzo De Felice has inspired several schools of thought which have in common the view that the early and mid-1930s were essentially ‘years of consensus’ in Italy, with the vast majority of the Italian population giving their willing allegiance to a benevolent tyranny.6 Repressive measures, he accepted, were certainly necessary for the early survival of the dictatorship, but after the plebiscite of 1929 they were brought to bear only on adversaries of the regime. De Felice set these years of consensus between 1929, the year of the Lateran Pacts with the Catholic Church and 1936, which marked Italian involvement in the Spanish Civil War. In his view, reconciliation with the Church brought the first phase of Fascism to an end and established the regime in the minds of the king’s loyal subjects as their natural temporal power, whose protectionist economic policies insulated the country against the worst effects of the Wall Street Crash and ensuing Depression and then, in defiance of the League of Nations inaugurated a new empire across the Mediterranean, in a popular attempt to turn back the clock to Roman times. More critical historians argue that reconciliation with the Church allowed a brutal, rapacious but short-sighted imperial programme to be cloaked in the convenient 0230543081_02_ch01pdf 4/28/07 12:08 PM Page 3

Introduction 3

mystification of a civilizing mission, which could be interpreted with characteristic Fascist ambiguity as bringing either imperial values to Africa or the light of Christianity to the darkness of superstition.7 In cultural terms, Philip Cannistraro argued that the regime put in train a progressive programme which attempted to bring culture to the workers, the peasants and other groups traditionally marginalized in Italian society.8 It did this by means of ‘theatre for the masses’ and a socialization of the intellectuals, in the interests of bringing to an end the symbiotic relation between culture and wealth.9 He argued that unlike in Nazi Germany, Mussolini and the Fascists tolerated a plural- ity of artistic and cultural expression as part of that cultural programme. There were neither extensive book-burnings nor campaigns against degenerate art in Fascist Italy. On these points Cannistraro was mostly correct: there was no modern-day Bonfire of the Vanities in Piazza della Signoria, or any other public space in Italy, although Socialist books certainly were burned by squadristi in isolated incidents during the early phase of Fascism. That does not mean that the powers of the state as censor were significantly fewer than across the Alps as we will see. There are those who take a less subtle and nuanced line than De Felice or Cannistraro and argue further that Mussolini’s anti-Semitic campaign and alliance with Nazi Germany were the tragic mistakes which have obscured an authoritarian but otherwise relatively benign regime. This view has been advocated with insistence especially in the media over the last 30 years. It has been advanced most recently by Marcello Staglieno, a popular historian writing in the Mondadori Storia series, who has emphasized the positive aspects of Fascism, such as land reclamation and job creation through extensive public works.10 His is far from being a new thesis in Italian historiography: indeed it largely repeats the regime’s own propaganda.11 Aside from the occasional diatribe against the role of the Italian communist party (PCI) in the resistance, Staglieno has put forward, again, the comforting view of Italian history according to which it was really the Nazis who were responsible for the racist policies and the war which toppled Fascism.12 But for the seduction of Hitler, according to this view, Mussolini’s regime could have lasted as long as Franco’s in Spain. In other words, Mussolini and the Fascists bear little responsibility for the Endlösung and the cataclysm of the Second World War.13 Issues of memory and forgetting have been aired now for over a decade in often heated public debate over the resistance, often on the broadcast media, over whether the period 1943–45 should be regarded 0230543081_02_ch01pdf 4/28/07 12:08 PM Page 4

4 Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922–43

as a civil war and how it should be commemorated. Claudio Pavone, in his preface to the second edition (1994) of his seminal Una guerra civile. Saggio storico sulla moralità della Resistenza (1991), has described the context in which his book appeared and indeed helped to inform:

Discussion of the Resistance risked sinking into indifference. The debate had often been punctuated by radical critiques which sometimes came close to outright condemnation. There were serious-minded efforts at critical understanding, usually from parts of the Left, but these never achieved consensus as commonsense, and they were knocked off course not by reasoned argument (although there have been contributions of this kind too) but by the mere redeﬁnition of terms, thinly veiled by colourless platitudes. All this generated a defence strategy on the part of upholders of the Resistance who, caught off their guard, felt slighted and offended. The dispute between the detractors and the hagiographers, which serious historical research thought it had left behind, suddenly ﬂared up again. Despite all the claims that the matter had been resolved, it became evident just how deeply felt is the historical and civil problem of the war and the Resistance. At the same time, we have risked generating more heat than light, to the point of public spectacle in the form of televised show-downs.14

In the intervening decade plans have been brought forward by government ministers, and then dropped, to name a street after Giuseppe Bottai, in a transparent attempt to rehabilitate Fascist hierarchs.15 Italian television audiences have been treated to ever more emotive documentaries on the foibe, atrocities allegedly perpetrated by Com- munist resistance ﬁghters in Istria which involved throwing their opponents to their deaths in deep limestone caverns, bringing such issues into the ambit of 1990s examples of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. There are several important political and methodological issues at stake here. The traditional and sentimental presentation of italiani brava gente (‘good-natured Italians’) is being pressed into service in the media to demonstrate the truism that there were victims on both sides of the contest over Fascism.16 The argument then goes on to take the relativist turn, urging that if there were victims on both sides, then there must have been right on both sides, and therefore it is impossible to regard one side as right and the other as wrong. To be a victim, however, is not necessarily to be in the right. This needs to be borne in 0230543081_02_ch01pdf 4/28/07 12:08 PM Page 5

Introduction 5

mind when watching and listening to what has been characterized by some historians as the anti-anti-Fascism which has come to dominate the Italian media representation of Italy’s twentieth-century past.17 A rose-tinted view of the Fascist past can be made to stand up only by taking a very selective approach to evidence, and ﬁltering out or dis- missing evidence which contradicts that interpretation in order to shape an understanding of ‘commonsense’, to use Pavone’s term, later taken up independently by Goldhagen and Robert Gellately in the German context. These practices correspond alarmingly to interpretations of contemporary history put forward by the Fascists themselves in the 1930s, and which I will be characterizing as aspects of censorship in action, something far more insidious than book-burning. The pages which follow are intended as a contribution to an understanding of ‘commonsense’ as promoted by Fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, by examining the interplay between that concept of ‘commonsense’ and the various forms of censorship which at times shaped it and at other times were shaped by it. Studies of Italian Fascism are, understandably, dominated by the ﬁgure of Mussolini and some of the more discerning of them have demonstrated ways in which the regime set about using text and image to create a myth of him as the embodiment of commonsense.18 He may well have coined the term ‘totalitarian’, and even if he did not, it is now fatally linked to his regime. The concept of totalitarianism presupposes an underlying consensus, a commonsense. Not many would argue against the interpretation that he set about re-balancing the social contract between the individual and the state, harnessing human and technological resources against personal freedoms, creating mass forms of socialization and culture, and establishing a personality cult which dominated that state for over two decades. Given that he had inherited a ruined economy in 1922 and raised expectations inspired by D’Annunzio’s rhetoric of a ‘mutilated victory’, what else, his apologists argue, could he have done in the circumstances? As this book is not an essay in counterfactual history, I will not attempt to answer it here. Any state, but more especially a dictatorship, will rely on censorship to limit the public’s horizon of expectation and therefore to shape consensus. It would be naïve to believe that this does not hold to some extent for democratic states too, but in many ways the process is more visible in democratic states which now have Freedom of Information legislation. No regime, however, to my knowledge, has left to posterity the mass of archival, documentary and visual evidence which we have inherited 0230543081_02_ch01pdf 4/28/07 12:08 PM Page 6

6 Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922–43

from the Italian Fascists. Patient sifting of documents in the Archivio centrale dello Stato in Rome’s EUR district yields up detailed information of censorship policy and its implementation, ranging from phone tapping, to sequestration of private mail, to daily veline (carbon-copy instructions) for newspaper editors and broadcasters, to networks of police informers engaged in spying on their neighbours, foreigners and occasional passers-by; not to mention casual denunciations from members of the public. De Felice’s contention that repressive measures became less prevalent after 1929 is less convincing when checked against the archival evidence. The evidence, some of which is set out in this book, may not all constitute censorship as such, but a totalitarian state which has embarked on policies of systematic censorship will inevitably also develop corrupting practices of surveillance to carry them through. One of the uses of such surveillance in Fascist Italy was to assess the extent to which censorship was working. The mass of information collected and archived by the censors and the police provides the historian with a vast source of evidence for what the Italian population really thought, and it is evidence which is far more reliable than the often self- serving retrospective accounts by former protagonists and the accounts which come down by means of oral history. My hope for this book is that it will provide a comprehensive overview of at least part of the very large mass of archival evidence generated by acts of censorship and the closely-related practices of surveillance. It draws on recent scholarship, especially work published in Italian, as well as my own work in the archives. The early Fascist impulses to silencing opposition were violent in nature. Once the Fascists were established in power, the initial impulses found an insti- tutional place in various pieces of illiberal legislation and in police structures inherited from Liberal Italy. Both the legislation and the police forces came to be modified and moulded into something quite different from the Liberal inheritance. The police forces under Arturo Bocchini (from 1926 to his death in 1940), and especially the divisione polizia politica, developed very extensive archives on individuals, movements and what might be described euphemistically as ‘security problems’. The Prime Minister’s Press Office (Ufficio Stampa), was eventually transformed into the Ministry for Popular Culture (whose official abbreviation was MiCup, but which is generally known by the slightly ironic title ‘Minculpop’), via the Under-Secretariat for Press and Propaganda and later the Ministry for Press and Propaganda (modelled on Goebbels’ initiative north of the Alps). In its various bureaucratic incarnations it was scarcely less diligent in its archiving of files. Most of 0230543081_02_ch01pdf 4/28/07 12:08 PM Page 7

Introduction 7

these police and Minculpop ﬁles are now available for consultation in the Archivio centrale dello Stato, and they have been drawn upon extensively in the pages which follow. There is some excellent recent work in Italian on Fascist censorship, spying and policing by scholars such as Mauro Canali, Giorgio Fabre, Mimmo Franzinelli, Nicola Tranfaglia, and others.19 It is not generally available to an English-speaking audience. Where this book differs from their work, and from those of earlier contributions to our knowledge of censorship by Maurizio Cesari, Aurelio Lepre, Lorenzo Greco and Loris Rizzi is that it deals systematically with a wide range of different forms of censorship, rather than concentrating on a speciﬁc aspect such as literature, the press, or military censorship.20 Aside from the work of these authors, there is surprisingly little explicit coverage of censorship in the existing body of work on Fascism, especially that written in English. This is all the more surprising given that much recent scholarship has tended to focus on culture rather than politics, taking Fascist texts and ideology often at face value.

Culture, myths and deﬁnitions

Censorship inhabits an intersection between culture and politics. Implementing a totalitarian vision has to involve both ﬁltering out images and messages held to be deviant by those exercising power as well as the other side of the coin, promoting images and messages which constitute the acceptable norms on which society is to be organized. In the memorable formulation of Curzio Malaparte, a dissident Fascist, in a totalitarian state everything which isn’t banned is compulsory. I want to consider different kinds of censorships in this book because it would be misleading to think of ‘Fascist censorship’ as a straightforward monolithic term. Both noun and adjective are almost equally mercurial. Before examining deﬁnitions of ‘censorship’, it may be helpful to map out the terrain of culture and politics. David Forgacs has drawn some distinctions within the term ‘culture’:

A study of twentieth-century culture, particularly in its relations with the state, cannot afford to ignore the fact that modern cultural products are characteristically made to be distributed and sold on markets beyond the local level – regionally, nationally or internationally –, that they tend to be made using technologies of mass reproduction and distribution, and that all this affects the ways in which the state intervenes in relation to them.21 0230543081_02_ch01pdf 4/28/07 12:08 PM Page 8

8 Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922–43

He illustrated this proposition with the example of film production. Films are expensive to make. They require extensive financing. A state wishing to stimulate the creative and cultural industries, for reasons of prestige or regeneration, can promote the interests of production companies by providing them with soft loans or tax breaks, for mutual benefit, as has been done successfully by various other governments since, authoritarian and democratic ones. The Fascists in the 1930s belatedly created very favourable economic conditions for the Italian film industry. A government can also apply protectionist tariffs to defend the interests of domestically-produced films. This is precisely what the Fascists did in the 1930s in order to promote the interests of Italian film-makers in the face of competition from Hollywood. Competition of this sort, of course, was not simply an economic matter. The Italian government had invested in its domestic films, directly or indirectly, and these productions, to a significant degree encoded Fascist commonsense and values for transmission on to the large screen. Hollywood values, regulated by the Hays code, became contentious for Fascist Italy only when international relations deteriorated from 1935 because of Ethiopia, the Spanish Civil War and Italy’s alliance with the Nazis. Hollywood values came to be perceived as more of a threat to the Fascist way of life because they represented America, potentially an enemy. Hollywood values, in themselves, could be accommodated or imitated in the Italian film industry. The distinctions drawn by Forgacs apply with even more force to newspapers. The State’s interventions in setting the news agenda and trying to control it are likely to be more co-ordinated but also more subject to risk, given the real-time nature of news stories. Mussolini came to power in 1922 with a well-developed practical grasp of journalism, newspaper management and media funding. He had been editor of Avanti! in his days as a Socialist, before expulsion from the party for his espousal of interventionism in 1915. At that point he set up Il Popolo d’Italia. In his capacity as editor of Avanti! he had come into contact with censorship as practised by the Liberal state through the offices of the local prefects, who were no friends of Socialism. Among Mussolini’s allies in 1919 was Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, leader of the Futurists who was also no stranger to the prefects. Marinetti participated in both the founding meeting of squadristi in Piazza San Sepolcro on 23 March and the movement’s first ‘spectacular’, three weeks later.22 He has left a text which is both a witness statement and a participant report of the latter:

One, two, three, twenty, thirty revolver shots. A volley of stones and ﬂying cudgels. Cudgels hitting their mark. One for all, Arditi! 0230543081_02_ch01pdf 4/28/07 12:08 PM Page 9

Introduction 9

The cordon of carabinieri breaks up and disappears. […] Leaving us poised and ready for action. Then, like a flash, pell-mell towards the enemy. They break apart. Lots of them, gripped by terror, dive for cover. […] The revolver fire, which now has the rat-tat-tat-tat of the infantry, resounds down Via Dante. We stop in front of the Teatro Eden. The battle has lasted an hour. […] We reform our column which, half an hour later, having broken through more cordons of troops, reaches Via San Damiano and attacks and sets fire to the offices of Avanti!. We throw furniture out of the windows but we don’t find Serrati, the editor, skiving as usual and far away from the struggle. Pinna, the Futurist, was one of the first to break in to the Avanti! rooms and he was wounded in the hand. Many others wounded. The column now lording it over reconquered Milan marches back to Piazza del Duomo chanting ‘L’Avanti! is finished’ and carrying the wooden insignia of the burned-out newspaper, which was then given to Mussolini at the offices of Il Popolo d’Italia.23

In Marinetti’s vivid account, this could be the treatment for a movie scene. The violence is valued aesthetically; but it was real enough for those on the receiving end of it, as was the implied complicity of the carabinieri who made themselves scarce, leaving the way open to the mob. Marinetti’s description of ‘the first victory of Fascism’ captures the exhilaration felt by squadristi as they set about destroying the nerve-centre of the enemy newspaper and bringing a trophy back to Mussolini, and it contains, even in this fragment, some of the characteristics which Roger Griffin has identified as hallmarks of Fascist texts:

Any Fascist text of substance will reveal a recurrent set of images and themes relating either to the condemnation of the decadent, liberal notion of decline, weakness, crisis, anarchy, or to the celebration of the reborn, post-liberal nation of regeneration, strength, stability, order which Fascism aspires to be creating – and very often to the gulf which divides the ‘old’ Italy from the ‘new’. Ideal-typically, therefore, each contrasting permutation of Fascism manifests an identical mythic core of ‘palingenetic populist ultra-nationalism’.24

Marinetti’s was one of the earliest Fascist texts, and there is certainly implicit condemnation of weakness and decadence, and celebration of strength and bravado. The early Futurist strain of Fascism, however, did not aspire to creating the stability and order that pervades later Fascist rhetoric of the sacred state. Marinetti’s model and his language 0230543081_02_ch01pdf 4/28/07 12:08 PM Page 10

10 Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922–43

drew on the rhetoric and shared experiences of trench warfare. In 1919 he belonged among the Intransigents. To cite Grifﬁn again:

The precondition of the national rebirth was […] a revolution in culture. Instead of reﬂecting, celebrating even, the fragmentation of world-views into a myriad personal outlooks, private ways of seeing and idiosyncratic experiences or values, culture would, so Fascist ideal- ists trusted, once more come to embody the total vision and ethos of the whole people. Instead of forming a separate sphere of social life divorced from politics, economics and sciences, and bracketed by association with art, religion and leisure, it would again be inseparable from them all, nourishing and harmonizing them. Contemporary life itself would become a living Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art, with the Italian people as both its performers and spectators.25

There are some fairly obvious dangers in taking a text such as Marinetti’s account of the destruction of a printing shop and reading it as a ‘total vision and ethos of the whole people’. Firstly Marinetti was a well-educated creative writer and a performance artist with an internationally notorious reputation. This is therefore not an account from below. It is violence transformed into art, mediated by an experienced manipulator of audiences. It is not spontaneity. The military terminology he deployed in this text and more especially in his performances was a provocative call to arms for the veterans of the trenches, many of them barely literate, who were now returning, with the right to vote, to a shattered economy. Marinetti was aware of the audience for which he was performing: Intransigents avant la lettre. He was exploiting a military rhetoric and harnessing the sentiment of the trenches against the non-interventionist Socialists who had stayed at home along with the big business interests which were alleged to have made proﬁt out of the war.26 Secondly, there has been greater emphasis among cultural historians on the intentions of the Fascists and how they interpreted what they read in the pages of Gustav Le Bon, Georges Sorel, Vilfredo Pareto or their divulgators, rather than on the effects and consequences of their actions. The squadristi who wrecked the Avanti! ofﬁces in April 1919 may conceivably have thought they were expressing a popular will by their action. In an objective sense, what they thought they were doing is an irrelevance: what they actually did was strike a physical blow against a newspaper, and cultural interpreters might just as easily read that action as a symbolic attack on the free press. 0230543081_02_ch01pdf 4/28/07 12:08 PM Page 11

Introduction 11

The ofﬁcial, authorized, vision of the Fascist state, the palingenetic myth, required not just passive acceptance by the people: it required their active participation, and a good number of the recent books on the subject have detailed the forms assumed by this active participation or ‘communion’ with the state, with individuals cast as both performers and spectators.27 There is further potential for controversy here. ‘Myth’ is a term used quite loosely – perhaps surprisingly so – by a number of cultural historians. For the Fascists of the First Hour, the notion of myth derived speciﬁcally, if not always directly, from the writings of Sorel, and that notion was quite precise in Sorel’s work, even if it may now appear somewhat bizarre. According to Roberto Maggiore, a minor Fascist ideologue of the time:

Whereas in common parlance myth is a form of fable, or an historical deed transformed by fantasy, in the language of Sorel it becomes not a description of things but an expression of will, the ideological content of a programme of action. Utopia is that which has been or which is to come, an optical illusion projected on to the past or the future; myth, on the other hand, is that which must be, or better still an imperative which aims unfailingly towards its realization.28

Without some appreciation of Giovanni Gentile’s philosophy of Actualism, of which Maggiore was obviously an adept, passages such as the one above are unlikely to have much meaning, or even to make sense at all. Maggiore, writing in 1939, was not talking about myth as a form of coercion or consensus building. It was both something more complex and more profoundly simple: it was the bedrock of ‘commonsense’. David D. Roberts, in an admonition to some cultural historians, has written:

Myth is especially tricky, because even Sorel’s concept is widely misread as a manipulative notion, whereas for Sorel it entailed a kind of primitivism: bound up with pre-rational commitment and belief, myth could only well up from below. Familiar though it is, the notion of elites consciously using myths to mobilize masses was absolutely antithetical to Sorel’s notion. […] To be sure, the Sorelian idea could be taken from its original context to stimulate others – Mussolini, for example – to make manipulative use of myth. But the distinction is important to any attempt to understand the connection between intellectual innovation and subsequent political departures.29 0230543081_02_ch01pdf 4/28/07 12:08 PM Page 12

12 Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922–43

This is a valid distinction, but while there might be heuristic value in interpreting the attack on the Avanti! offices as an example of Sorelian myth, of commonsense in action, it is also true that this direct action had been whipped up by manipulative rhetoric and that the mytho- logizing accounts of it, such as Marinetti’s, sought to manipulate the crowd further, inculcating in the Italian masses a spirit of intransi- gence. Embracing a myth must constitute an act of faith, and so scepticism, irony, satire and dissent had no place in the official vision of Fascist culture. In Mussolini’s own contemptuous dictum, which effectively personifies a scapegoat of scepticism and dissent: ‘I prefer the squadrista who takes decisive action, to the doddering professor’.30 The satirist was even less welcome.

Censorship and surveillance

The work of many recent scholars has dealt with the various uses of culture in the forging and sustaining of a Fascist identity for the Italian masses. Chief among these has been Emilio Gentile, distinguished ex- student of De Felice, who has argued consistently over the last 30 years for Fascism’s being an attempt at anthropological revolution, a forging of the new man, and perhaps even the new woman (though she was rarely at the forefront of attention). Gentile has asserted that:

The regeneration of Italians was, for Mussolini, a genuine obsession that accompanied him until the collapse of the regime. He saw the anthropological revolution as a personal contest between himself and the Italian people, whom he held in rather low esteem.31

According to this view, Fascism’s ‘totalitarian pedagogy, its propaganda, its educational monopoly over the young generations, its mania for a capillary organization through which to organize Italians, its rites, its parades, symbols and style of behaviour, as well as its racism, anti- Semitism, social reform, and anti-bourgeois campaign’, even the Second World War itself were a part of the projected, and ultimately failed anthropological revolution. Well perhaps they were. The problem with intentions is that they are most readily measured in the actions which follow from them, and actions may be open to more than one interpretation. Gentile is certainly no apologist for the regime, but a concentration on nebulous intentions, and a willingness to suspend disbelief, and take Fascist texts at face value may be a dangerous approach to evaluating the historical 0230543081_02_ch01pdf 4/28/07 12:08 PM Page 13

Introduction 13

record. To be fair to Gentile he has also accepted in his writings that the rhetoric of Fascism was as successful as it was because it was under- pinned and enforced by its dark side. This dark side was constituted by an organized structure of state power, guided by a set of rational, sober, cynical and often brutal policies, implemented by the security forces, the civil service, a tightly-regulated media industry and the school system, as well as a network of spies, informers, paramilitaries and part- time censors. It is this dark side which we will explore in the chapters which follow, rather than the positive side of spectacle, parades, ‘Fascist Saturdays’ and theatre for the masses. Before that we need to clarify what we intend by the term ‘censorship’. On one level, censorship was the instinctive reaction of the squadristi after their founding meeting in Piazza San Sepolcro, as we have seen, but systematic studies of its operation have been limited mainly either to literary culture or to military and civilian correspondence. These are clearly important spheres of activity but censorship had wider ramiﬁcations, and more subtle levels of power, which crossed government ministries and which had effects on virtually every sector of the population, whether or not the people were aware of them. The opening of archives and the deaths of just about all those involved in the murky world of censorship and espionage, taken together, allow us a broader and quite dispassionate view in order to understand the policy and operation of censorship in Italian Fascism. Prima facie, censorship is an instrument of suppression, and as I have already indicated, it certainly is not unique to totalitarian states. Postal censorship was introduced in twentieth-century Italy by a Liberal government, using a royal decree (regio decreto no. 689) during the Great War on 23 May 1915. That decree had not been repealed when Mussolini came to power seven and a half years later.32 According to a modiﬁcation made in July 1915, civil censorship had been dropped except in areas which were considered subversive. The boundaries of these ambiguous areas were to widen considerably under Fascism, as we will see. In essence though, this royal decree ushered in an instrument for dealing with military correspondence, and it ran in parallel with similar provisions in the other belligerent state armies. What was its purpose? At its crudest, military censorship was of course a repressive instrument. Its intention was to prevent soldiers, wittingly or otherwise, sending home from the front scraps of information which might compromise military operations. Words or larger parts of letters might be blacked out by the censor before the message could be delivered. In 0230543081_02_ch01pdf 4/28/07 12:08 PM Page 14

14 Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922–43

more extreme situations a letter might be suppressed altogether. This is common practice in every state during times of war. Censorship of this kind can be judged successful if information is kept from people. The more that can be hidden away, the better. It would be reasonable to call this preventive censorship. Numerous examples will follow in this book. It would later be extended to cutting telephone lines and then to jamming foreign radio stations and cutting or banning foreign ﬁlms. Even in advanced western democracies, we are familiar with the beeping out of unacceptable language on radio and television broadcasts. Until relatively recently, the voices of members of a proscribed organization could not be heard on British or Irish radio and television. Their words had to be dubbed. But there is more to censorship than its preventive function. In Italy, phone taps were authorized as early as 1903 by a Giolitti government. A state, once it has developed the habit of snooping on its people, can use the intelligence it gathers at its listening stations to gauge the morale of its troops, or in the case of civilian censorship, the morale of its subjects or citizens, as well as keeping tabs on where they are and what they are getting up to. Mussolini’s state machinery was engaged in an increasingly sophisticated, intrusive and secretive practice of informative censorship from within days of his coming to power, in what was still nominally a Liberal administration rather than the totalitarian one which he was bent on establishing. Informa- tive censorship is more qualitative than quantitative and can provide an evidence base on which to formulate social or cultural policy, or track down ‘subversives’. As Rizzi has put it:

Censorship is not just repression and a prohibition on speech, it also produces knowledge, a knowledge built up by means of a minute examination of everything written by the military and civilian population. Censorship is not just the suppressing of dangerous information which is essential to the safe-keeping of military secrets or harmful to public spirit, it also collects all that information on the morale, on the political sympathies and on the living conditions of the military and civilian population which is useful to those in power to enable them to control the home front and the soldiers under arms.33

This qualitative interpretation of censorship came to be used by the Fascist state and in its totalitarian aspirations, as did its preventive interpretation. 0230543081_02_ch01pdf 4/28/07 12:08 PM Page 15

Introduction 15

The third strand of censorship is the productive one, in which censorship can be seen (or perhaps to put it better, cannot be seen, except by those trained to find it) in the construction of positive messages. In other words, productive censorship is that which cannot be seen but which gives shape to presentations of the duce, or the Italian landscape or stories in the news. It can be detected in Istituto Luce newsreels, in the telefoni bianchi films of the 1930s, and very graphically in suppressed images of Mussolini, recently published by Mimmo Franzinelli and Emanuele Valerio Marino in Il duce proibito (2003).34 In this function, censorship goes hand in hand with propaganda. The powers of extensive censorship, however, gave the Fascist regime a novel problem to resolve in the early 1930s, the ‘years of consensus’. On the one hand they wanted to maintain the firm grip of control they had established over a decade in power on setting the political agenda in the domestic press through censorship. On the other, they wanted a differentiated domestic press, a scenario in which Italian newspapers maintained distinct identities, while retailing substantially the same censored news and uncritical editorial interpretation, so as to reinforce a commonsense Fascist view of the world.

Methodologies and intentions

How then does ‘commonsense’ relate to censorship and propaganda? Commonsense is more a matter of culture than of politics, and it is likely to be dominated by media presentation and opinion-making in all its varied forms, rather than by open and rational political debate. The question of who controls the media and who sets its agenda is of course a political one. It applies to other opinion formers too, such as the churches, schools, youth organizations, popular entertainers and others. So culture, power, and politics interact on various levels. Mussolini was helped to power because the king and enough of his subjects had little faith in democracy. The political culture of the day rejected democracy with the failed entity of Liberal Italy. Recent work on Italian Fascism has concerned itself with the question of whether the myths of culture or of politics should be given primacy in its interpretation. This debate, which has widened out to embrace art historians, literary and cultural historians, geographers and anthropologists, has helped to deepen our understanding of sets of assumptions, conscious or otherwise, which were present in Italian society in the 1920s and 1930s. From the work of cultural historians, guiding theories have emerged which involve the ritualization, aestheticization and 0230543081_02_ch01pdf 4/28/07 12:08 PM Page 16

16 Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922–43

‘sacralization’ of power. Following in the wake of Emilio Gentile there are stimulating North-American cultural historians, such as Ruth Ben- Ghiat, Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Marla Stone, Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Emily Braun and Mabel Berezin who have shed important light on these processes.35 This has proved an extremely fruitful model for cultural historians working in related disciplines as well as for more traditional historians who have claimed the primacy of culture over politics in the study of Fascism.36 These scholars have examined the construction of the sacralized state in the terms Fascism’s own rhetoric: re-born phoenix-like out of the ashes of the Great War, and ritualized by religious discourse and public spectacle. Another related strand of recent work looks at the construction of masculinity. A seminal text here is Luisa Passerini’s Mussolini immaginario (1991) and there are several North-American Italianists working in this area such as Karen Pinkus and Barbara Spackman, following in the wider European traditions of George L. Mosse and Klaus Theweleit.37 These latter scholars have dealt more with Germany than with Italy of course, and in the Germanic context Mosse has argued that in the 1930s ‘respectability provided society with an essential cohesion that was as important in the perceptions of men and women as any economic or political interests’.38 In this case, to codify ‘respectability’, nationalism and sexuality combined to generate a virulent racist mix of anti- Semitism and homophobia. Respectability for Italian Fascists may have assumed some slightly different forms but a conception of the body was central to both the German and the Italian interpretations, and we will pursue this point further in a later chapter. The background context to the consensus argument put forward by De Felice, Cannistraro and others is Italian imperial expansion in the 1930s. This pits Fascist ideological constructs of ideal manliness and virility against representation of its opposite, or Other, that is to say Black Africa, regarded as poor, backward and alien. These various images, particularly regarding the covering or disclosure of nakedness, involve evaluation of the messages encoded in those representations in terms of intention, category of text, technological medium, media language and demonstrable or likely audience response. Censorship and propaganda are inextricably linked to such presentations. Mussolini (or perhaps it was his tame philosopher Giovanni Gentile) wrote in the Dottrina del Fascismo (1932) in the Enciclopedia italiana that:

For Fascism, the push towards empire, national expansion, is a manifestation of vitality. Its contrary, the stay-at-home, is a sign of 0230543081_02_ch01pdf 4/28/07 12:08 PM Page 17

Introduction 17

decadence: peoples who rise [sorgono] and rise again [risorgono] are imperialist, peoples who die, renounce life.39

Consciously implying an afﬁliation with the Risorgimento in his use of verbs, Mussolini was enunciating a variation on his familiar theme of virility, which was, according to Barbara Spackman not simply one of many Fascist qualities:

The cults of youth, of duty, of sacriﬁce and heroic virtues, of strength and stamina, of obedience and authority, and physical strength and sexual potency that characterize Fascism [were] all inﬂections of the master term virility.40

We recognize in that characterization the various still photographs, paintings and drawings of Mussolini himself as hero, ‘the invincible Man’, to cite another recent commentator who in turn is quoting Giuseppe Prezzolini.41 Prezzolini was writing in 1913, almost a decade before Fascism found itself in power, and even before the beginning of the Great War, indicating that the myth of Mussolini as redemptive hero had long roots. Describing developments of a decade later Emily Braun has written of Mario Sironi’s early 1920s representations of Mussolini that:

In the early twenties, Sironi still depicts Mussolini as an earthbound politician in Blackshirt garb or parliamentary suit; yet already at work are the myth of his more than human prowess and the emphasis on physical might in the achievement of his aims. Mussolini’s malleable face – the exaggerated protrusion of the jaw and furrowed brow – could border on the grotesque, making him easy game for the infamous anti-Fascist caricatures by Gabriele Galantara (1865–1937) in the pages of L’Asino and Il Becco giallo. By contrast, Sironi pictures the middle-aged future dictator with a youthful visage, his features bearing a fearful symmetry.42

Clearly we could multiply the illustrations of this point almost to inﬁnity of Mussolini once he had become the duce. The object of the exercise is to demonstrate the power of charisma in the presentation of an image of power as a phenomenon of nature, or a matter of commonsense.43 Mussolini had imbibed Max Weber’s concept of charisma, probably not directly, in his disordered reading during the early decades of the twentieth century. According to this concept, the charisma of political 0230543081_02_ch01pdf 4/28/07 12:08 PM Page 18

18 Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922–43

(or religious) leadership is to be found either in the outstanding individual or in the ofﬁce of leadership. Mussolini’s supporters and cham- pions actively sought to muddy that distinction and to identify in his own person the individual and the role, transforming the duce into a myth: the myth of the Strong Man, the Maciste of ‘real life’ which we ﬁnd in the newsreels. Indeed, the mythology of the Man is something which Mussolini appears to have convinced even himself to take at face value. Aquarone cited a 1943 letter from the duce, before 25 July, in which we read of what he regards as his titanic struggle with inferior material:

If you could only imagine the effort it has cost me, this searching for balance and compromise in order to avoid collisions between antago- nistic influences which rub shoulders, diffident towards each other: Party, King, Vatican, Army, Militia, prefects, provincial party secre- taries, Ministers, the ras of the Confederations and huge monopolistic interests! You would understand just what are the indigestions of totalitarianism. We have not succeeded in melting down that legacy (asse ereditario) which I had to take on in 1922, without the benefit of an inventory. A pathological tissue holding together the traditional and contingent deficiencies of this great little Italian people, (questo grande piccolissimo popolo italiano), which a tenacious therapy of twenty years has managed to modify only on the surface.44

Here we have the Fascist refrain, derived from Le Bon, of the feminized masses being unworthy of their selfless, generous and paternal Dux. This is the ideological justification which required on the one hand a mystify- ing public synthesis of ritual, spectacle and entertainment, and on the other a cynical, secretive, clear-sighted and centralized administration, run through the Ministry of the Interior. But the Ministry of the Interior, while centrally important, was just one of five ministries which dealt with censorship, and this allowed for further nuances to what was never a monolithic concept of ‘Fascist censorship’. The other ministries involved were the Ministry for Popular Culture (formerly the Press Office of the President of the Council of Ministers, the Under-Secretariat for Press and Propaganda and the Ministry for Press and Propaganda), the Ministry for Foreign Affairs (Ministero degli Affari Esteri), the Ministry for Posts and Telegraphs, the Ministry of Finance. To these should be added the prefects who had devolved executive powers on censorship, especially censorship of newspapers and public spectacle, not to mention the mil- 0230543081_02_ch01pdf 4/28/07 12:08 PM Page 19

Introduction 19

itary censorship of the armed forces. Therefore in theory, and often in practice, different policy lines could be promoted by different ministries and could be variously implemented at local level, at the discretion of the prefects. The creation of the Under-Secretariat for Press and Propaganda (later Minculpop) in 1934, the first fiefdom of Galeazzo Ciano, brought a new level of co-ordination to censorship policy and implementation, but anomalies persisted right up to 1943. This book differs from recent studies which have explored Fascist spectacle, ritual, myth, and cultural policy. I set out instead to triangu- late three constituencies: (1) the rarefied sphere of cultural policy (the world of Giovanni Gentile, of Alfredo Rocco, of Giuseppe Bottai, of Galeazzo Ciano and Mussolini himself); (2) the world of its implementation, by prefects, secret policemen, ex-squadristi, part-time censors, informers, schoolteachers, editors, writers, publishers, booksellers, librarians, and various agents of the state; and (3) those at the sharp end of the procedures (opposition politicians and newspapers, prominent dissident individuals, ordinary men and women, writers, foreigners, black Africans, individual Jews and later entire Jewish communities). The book seeks to understand the motivations and intentions of policy and to examine the procedures of its implementation, but crucially this includes a study of its consequences, both intended and unintended. As all or virtually all the protagonists are now dead, even the lowliest of them, I make no direct use of interviews or oral history, the usual modus operandi of triangulation. Instead, I draw on the archival sources already mentioned as well as documentary evidence which has long been in the public domain.45 If there is a unifying thread running through the various constituencies which made up Fascism, whether Futurists, arditi, squadristi, ex- Anarchists, Corporativists, Nationalists, Syndicalists, Racists, Patriots, Right-Wing Catholics or mere opportunists, it is the authoritarian instinct to silence opposition. This instinct drives policy through the ventennio but it was evident in Italian governance well before Mussolini came to power, as we shall see. The instinct, unlike its counterpart in Nazi Germany, was usually moderated by political expediency and cunning. Studies of Fascist censorship such as Giorgio Fabre’s ground- breaking L’Elenco, tend to deal with the period from 1934 to 1943. My book demonstrates how the impulse to suppress opposition, evident as early as 1919, developed into a series of policies, provisions and procedures designed to implement the Fascists’ totalitarian vision of Italian society. Censorship was in place well before 1934 although policy underwent one mutation that spring and another one in 1938. 0230543081_02_ch01pdf 4/28/07 12:08 PM Page 20

20 Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922–43

The chapters which follow address different aspects of Fascist censorship. I will begin by exploring the place of censorship in the daily life of the regime through the initial consolidation of power. I then move on to the shaping of young identities through reform of the school system. Next comes regulation of the news in the print media, followed by a chapter on the shaping of the imagination through censorship of performers, writers and ﬁlms and the presentation of the cult of the leader in the context of race and cultural identity. After that there is a study of the culture wars between the intellectual factions. This is followed by an account of the effects of censorship and surveillance on private individuals. The unifying thread is provided by an interroga- tion of the concepts of commonsense, consensus, negotiation, and mystiﬁcation. 0230543081_03_ch02.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 21

2 Consolidating Power and Silencing Opposition

Dismantling the Liberal state

Mussolini came to power in a bloodless coup, without the need for any clearly-articulated censorship policy. Three years earlier, however, Fascists of the First Hour, less than a month after their meeting at Piazza San Sepolcro on 19 March 1919, had committed their first symbolic act, and that was a direct-action approach to censorship: the effective destruction of the newspaper offices of Avanti!, the Socialist newspaper which Mussolini himself had edited until 1915. This was a symbolic act because it represented an attack on the freedom of the press but the symbolism was secondary to practical objectives on the part of a motley crew of Arditi, demobilized veterans of the Great War, Futurists such as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Emilio Settimelli and erstwhile Anarchists. These latter constituencies were using the very methods of violent repression on their Socialist adversaries which had previously been used against them by agents of the state not many years before. It did not do them much good at the polls in 1919, the first Italian election with near-universal suffrage. The Socialists and the Partito popolare both emerged with far more votes than the Fascists, but failed to agree a compromise coalition government, leaving the reins of power precariously in the hands of the old guard of pre-war Liberal Italy, who proved sitting-duck targets for revolutionary rhetoric. D’Annunzio was the first to batter the door of Liberal Italy by defiantly leading his Arditi into the city of Fiume, given up by the Italian government at Versailles, despite a secret deal done in London which the US president Woodrow Wilson refused to accept. Next came the Fascists and the biennio rosso, the two years dominated by strikes and fears of a Bolshevik revolution in Italy. An important

21 0230543081_03_ch02.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 22

22 Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922–43

point about the squadristi smashing up of the Avanti! ofﬁces, however, is that it probably was an example of Sorelian myth in action. It was not the programmatic act of a totalitarian state, because that state had not come into existence and indeed Mussolini had not yet coined the term ‘totalitarian’. The violence came from below, giving vent to a sense of moral outrage:

Our violence is different in its intention from that of the others: theirs is simple delinquency. Our people face danger openly; the others lie in wait to ambush and murder. We are always ﬁred up by a generous spirit and we do not forget the great moral law of humanity; they are guilty of barbarous cruelty. […] Violence for us is not a system, but a necessary means imposed on us by our adversaries, and we use it only to counter their violence. We are always ready to disarm and to make peace, as soon as the other side runs up the white ﬂag.1

To most of us, this is an assault on commonly-accepted meanings of words and a case of bad faith or extreme self-delusion, which is not to say, by any means, that the squadristi were the only source of violence in Italy during the biennio rosso. There were street-fighting men who felt drawn in almost equal measure to direct action inspired by both Left and Right. It produced front-page news. Fascism emerged out of violent disorder, with Marinetti and the Futurists fanning the flames, but the ideological core had its roots not only in street fighting but also in revolutionary syndicalism. And the chief proponent of syndicalism, writing in 1922, was scathing about a distinctive, violent group of Fascists:

They have joined up with Fascism just as yesterday they were Bolsheviks and tomorrow they will join some other movement which gives free rein to their antisocial tendencies: mercenary rapaciousness, spirit of adventurism or hope of easy success.2

This is a very different nuance of Fascism from that proposed by the adepts of castor oil and the manganello, or big stick. If Fascism had been nothing more than violent repression it would not have endured for two decades. De Ambris’ critique, however, is not inconsistent with the aspiration to censor the expression of opposition. Once in power Mussolini knew that he had to moderate squadrista violence in order to establish himself by gaining acceptance and 0230543081_03_ch02.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 23

Consolidating Power and Silencing Opposition 23

respectability. Fascist violence had to be removed from the newspaper headlines in the interests of this normalization. Mussolini was a pragmatist. He knew that one way to do this was to put down Fascist violence. But that was a risky strategy. Would the genie return so readily to the bottle? The other strategy was to control the newspaper reporting. Censorship was one means to the latter end. The challenge Mussolini faced was to develop and implement policies which would protect his authority and undermine that of his opponents, and those opponents were to be found across the political, economic and cultural spectra: all of them making use of the press. In the event he saw a way to combine the two strategies, developing policies which tended to avoid violence (while maintaining a constant level of threat), and to present himself as the epitome of rugged commonsense and pragmatism, and the defender of Italian society against the extremists of whatever faction: ‘Extremism in the middle’, in Seymour Martin Lipset’s memorable characterization of Fascism.3 Well before Italian Fascism set out to become ‘totalitarian’, Mussolini sought to capture the middle ground of ‘commonsense’ by means of negotiation, intimidation or use of the calculated risk. Part of the reason why Mussolini came to power without a clear censorship plan of action was that in October 1922 there was virtually no culture of mass communications in the country. Historically, Italy had high levels of illiteracy, especially in the south, and the Liberal regime had done little to improve public education. For that reason, there was a very limited market for print culture of any kind, and cinema was not yet a mass medium, being largely confined to the urban wealthy. Such national newspapers as did exist – chief among them Il Corriere della Sera in Milan and La Stampa in Turin – were written in a literary and rhetorical style of Italian which was far removed from the linguistic experience of most Italians. Therefore newspapers were largely the preserve of the ruling classes and they sold no more than a few million copies per day. A further reason for the weak presence of the Italian press was that Italy had a very limited rate of participation in politics and political debate, with no significant public commitment to democracy and the idea of a free press.4 There was no public outcry when Mussolini obtained from the King a Royal Decree on 15 July 1923 which limited the power of the press. At first he made no use of this power but a law had replaced direct action. The later totalitarian ambitions which required consensus-building measures to win over the intellectuals and the people have been studied in great detail in recent years.5 The ambition to control ‘commonsense’ 0230543081_03_ch02.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 24

24 Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922–43

has usually been studied in terms of the overt propaganda produced or sponsored by the regime.6 That is certainly an important aspect of it, although there is obviously more to achieving an anthropological revolution than effective propaganda. The dark side of the anthropological revolution included censorship which the regime came to use as a tool to implement a number of its cultural policies, and the main players were doing this long before the attempted fascistization of intellectuals in the early 1930s. Censorship has seen less extensive study than propaganda and ideology, at least until quite recently. It is important to bear in mind, however, that Mussolini and his Fascists did not invent either censorship or propaganda in Italy. Both had a very long history on the peninsula. Preventive censorship had been practised extensively by the Catholic Church, especially from the Council of Trent onwards when the combination of reform and the printing press threatened its hegemony in Christendom. In secular terms King Carlo Alberto’s pre-Unification edict on the press of 26 March 1848 remained in place until the Fascist laws of 1923–25. Within that legislative context Francesco Crispi had exercised political influence over the press as President of the Council of Ministers.7 In 1898 he had required prefects to keep a register and make quarterly reports on all local periodicals, in which they were to supply details of political leanings, the interests the papers represented, the circles and associations with which they were connected and the sources of their funding.8 Tame newspapers could expect to receive modest subsidies of secret funds through the offices of the prefects. Opposition papers knew there was a line across which it was imprudent to tread, on pain of sequestration, which brought obvious financial penalties and encouraged a spirit of self- censorship, of going with the flow. Within a decade of Crispi’s administrative provision Giovanni Giolitti introduced law no. 278 of 28 June 1906 which liberalized Italian journalism by abolishing preventive sequestration (sequestro preventivo); but only after he had authorized a system of phone tapping. When Italy entered the Great War, however, in common with all other belligerent states, tighter censorship was introduced. Law no. 273 of 21 March 1915 required newspapers to suppress any news concerning defence of the realm. The next week (28 March 1915) a specific period was set during which newspapers could not publish reports concerning the armed forces. Two months later, law no. 675 (23 May 1915) banned publication of any information relating to the military. In addition, prefects were again given a free rein to impose a sort of censura preventiva on publishers and editors, who had to submit their 0230543081_03_ch02.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 25

Consolidating Power and Silencing Opposition 25

typeset newspaper one hour before publication.9 In such circumstances, preventive censorship had financial teeth. Antonio Salandra, the President of the Council of Ministers, issued a secret circular to prefects, requiring them to monitor the local press, just as Crispi had done almost 20 years before, and also authorizing a wider use of phone taps. Some of the more overt censorship of newspapers was lifted at the end of the Great War but local papers continued to be subject to the same restrictive measures on the part of prefects. Even the editors of papers with national circulation such as Il Corriere della Sera (in Milan), Avanti! (also in Milan) and Il Roma (in Rome) all complained of continuing phone taps. Local papers which supported the government line continued to be subsidized through the use of secret funds. The purpose of such funding was quite blatantly to influence public opinion at local and regional level by setting the news agenda. The Caporetto crisis in 1917 ushered in a short-lived, but generously funded, Under-Secretariat for Propaganda abroad and for the Press, which reported directly to the new prime minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando.10 This would become an important precedent for Mussolini as he set out to dismantle the Liberal state in the following decade. While he made play of the rhetoric of sweeping away antiquated laws and customs, a rhetoric inherited from the trenches, Mussolini’s actual practice was more subtle and cunning, and quite distinct from that rhetoric. He was careful to take over successful administrative procedures and modify them to his own ends. Given that he had to work with the legal code, civil service and security forces of the previous administration, it could hardly have been otherwise. His first instinct was to put trusted followers into key posts and his first initiative was to gather information rather than to censor, although the instrument he chose lent itself to both activities. Phone taps were the domain of Servizio speciale riservato (SSR), which reported to the Council of Ministers. According to the procedures laid down by Giolitti’s government in 1903, requests for a phone tap came from the Chief of Police, only, on a proforma.11 Mussolini, as President of the Council of Ministers, on 27 January 1923 – at that point head of a democratically-elected government – specified that transcripts of all intercepted calls were to be delivered to him alone, and no other copies were to be kept.12 The SSR was based in the Ministry of the Interior, one of the key ministries over which Mussolini presided for most of the ventennio. The service had been expanded during the First World War to facilitate counter-espionage and was also applied to private citizens. 0230543081_03_ch02.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 26

26 Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922–43

Censorship was added to the simple phone tap by giving operators the power to break the connection. Under Mussolini, the SSR was transferred within the Ministry of the Interior to the Directorate General of Public Security (Direzione generale di pubblica sicurezza – DGPS), by means of Royal Decree Law 2 July 1925, no. 1205.13 The Rocco laws of 1926, taking account of anti-Fascist activity abroad, extended the provision to set up monitoring offices in cities from which the police could eavesdrop on border areas and international lines. Offices were instituted in Turin, Milan, Genoa, San Remo, Trieste and Fiume. Mussolini took personal charge of appointing the Head of the SSR in 1933. Up until 1925, the SSR had tapped no more than 50 lines. Once it moved to the DGPS this increased to 90 in 1926, going up to 560 with the application of new, American, technology. By 1938 the SSR maintained 462 stenographers, 200 of them based in Rome. Two thirds of these had a passive knowledge of at least one other modern language. The Rome office could monitor over 1,000 city lines and 400 inter-urban or international lines. In March 1942 the government ordered an extension of the monitoring and censorship service to all major towns in the provinces. Mussolini remained a newspaper man for most of his adult life. Famously he drew no salary from the state, but supported himself, his family and his mistresses by his royalties, his journalism and his editorship of Il Popolo d’Italia. After he transferred to Rome in late 1922, his brother Arnaldo, until his death in 1931, continued to run the family newspaper in Milan, and the brothers spoke on the telephone every evening to decide on the details of the following day’s edition. As a journalist and editor, Mussolini had a practical knowledge of the print media which was unique for a prime minister in 1922. He understood the power of the press and its capacity to set the news agenda and manipulate public opinion. His strategy for media control, which became ever tighter over the 20 years, took things back to first principles. He took effective charge of the source of news by ensuring he had his man in charge of the Agenzia Stefani, which although nominally a private company, became the de facto state news agency. He set about weakening the independence of rival newspapers, both national and local, and he increased discretionary powers in relation to censorship. Mussolini’s media policy also led to some legislative provisions. Royal Decree Law of 15 July 1923, his first summer in power, granted to prefects ‘the power to issue a warning to the editor of any newspaper or periodic publication which may have printed news of public 0230543081_03_ch02.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 27

Consolidating Power and Silencing Opposition 27

disorder or which may have excited class hatred or disobedience of the laws’.14 Article 3 of Royal Decree Law no. 3299 gave prefects the power to revoke the editor’s licence. Furthermore the prefect could refuse to recognize a new editor, which in effect would mean the death of the publication. For almost a year, however, Mussolini did not make formal use of this statutory instrument, although the threat of it hung over editors and newspaper proprietors, and that threat was no less real than the occasional visits of groups of armed squadristi, especially to provincial newspaper ofﬁces of limited means. Thus the police had the power to sack newspaper editors and to sequester newspapers and periodicals if they published:

False or tendentious news, injurious to the government’s foreign policy or to the reputation of the nation, causing unjustiﬁed alarm among the population, or liable to disturb public order, or if they incited to class struggle or civil disobedience, undermined discipline in the public services, favoured foreign states or companies at Italy’s expense, or calumniated the king, the royal family, the pope, the state religion, state institutions or friendly powers.15

In the changed political circumstances after October 1922, the competition between local newspapers drove some of them out of business in a Darwinian struggle for market share: in Trieste Il Piccolo proclaimed its adherence to Fascism on its mast from 1923 and its rival, La Nazione went out of business altogether. The police were also the proprietors’ defence against gangs of squadristi. But Mussolini encouraged restraint in the ambiguous manner that characterized Italian Fascism. Here was an extremely-repressive instrument dressed up as commonsense and patriotism. Who could reasonably object to a government defending the monarchy or the pope from calumny? To object would be to court subversion and to declare oneself fair game for the forces of law and order, in the public perception, and commonsense might also regard such subversives as fair game for gangs of squadristi in Fiat 18 BL trucks with large clubs (manganelli). Even before the Royal Decree of July 1923, however, and therefore under Liberal legislation, the will of an individual prefect or questore was sufﬁcient to close a newspaper. For example the communist weekly newspaper L’Avanguardia was suppressed daily from 15 February to 15 March 1923 without any formal order, and on the basis of spurious technicalities.16 Recognizing inconsistencies in practice, Mussolini moved on 9 August 1923 by ministerial decree to make the Press Ofﬁce 0230543081_03_ch02.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 28

28 Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922–43

(Ufficio Stampa) report directly to the Prime Minister’s Office (Presidenza del Consiglio), i.e., directly responsible to him. As Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior, he could call upon the resources and expertise of the Press Office and the DGPS, led by his Chief of Police, who managed the prefects and questors. The kidnap and murder of Giacomo Matteotti in summer 1924, however, was to have important and enduring consequences for both the Press Office and Mussolini’s direct control over the Ministry of the Interior. Matteotti’s death spelled the end of liberal Italy and the demise of the free press for a generation.

The Press Ofﬁce

Galeazzo Ciano’s Italian biographer Giordano Bruno Guerri claims that Mussolini was not a nepotist, ‘or at least not excessively nepotist’ in his distribution of posts and sinecures.17 It is nonetheless true that his brother Arnaldo and nephew Vito, son-in-law (Ciano) and his own son Vittorio all occupied significant positions respectively within the family newspaper, the government Press Office and, eventually, the nationalized film industry. He also surrounded himself, in the manner of a mafia boss, with men who had demonstrated their loyalty in his rise to power, and he relied on them every bit as much as on family members in the promotion of his political vision. Nonetheless, he kept files on their various weaknesses and misde- meanours. When they fell from grace there were few safety nets if he wanted to destroy them. Once in office as President of the Council of Ministers, according to Cannistraro, it was through the Press Office that Mussolini formulated that complex and more or less coherent corpus of propagandistic themes which he needed for his first decade in power.18 With his brother Arnaldo safely in charge of the family newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia, he appointed Cesare Rossi as his Press Officer. Rossi had passed through the ranks of Socialism and syndicalism, and had been war correspondent for Il Popolo d’Italia. He had also been with Mussolini at Piazza San Sepolcro in March 1919. In late 1922 Rossi was one of Mussolini’s closest advisors and an important figure in his first administration. Under the direction of Rossi the Press Office was transformed from a simple channel of government communication into an instrument for suppressing anti-Fascist opinion and dissent. Its main brief at this early stage, however, was to monitor and comment on all Italian and foreign newspapers. Rossi, from the 0230543081_03_ch02.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 29

Consolidating Power and Silencing Opposition 29

Press Ofﬁce, ﬁled regular reports on press coverage. The following is one example of many:

Il Mondo this evening on its front page and in the Cronaca section continues its campaign to damage the well-deserved success of the Fascist list. It makes out that the Italian Constitution and tradition have been overturned and that the Government, fearing the moral inferiority in which it would have found itself if it had been limited to the minimum of the votes laid down by the law, in order to gain more votes has turned a blind eye to violent intimidation in very many cases. […] You can easily imagine that in the next few days the columns of Il Mondo will be ﬁlled with stories of our violent acts. […] La Voce Repubblicana on its front page, over six columns talks about victorious demonstrations throughout Italy despite the violent atmosphere in which the elections took place. […] All the other papers, including Il Giornale d’Italia, give great weight to the victory illustrating the disappointment of the opposition. Don Sturzo’s Il Popolo in an editorial titled ‘Resistenza popolare’ talks about violence, vote rigging, mystiﬁcation and conspiracies, etc, promising to continue its opposition.19

Thus the Press Ofﬁce was the main source of media intelligence, brought directly to the duce and not shared with the prefects. The prefects, on the other hand, were usually the ones who ordered the sequestrations, against informal criteria such as the following:

I have received news of the imminent publication of issue 3 of La Riscossa dei giovani repubblicani […]. A previous issue of this paper contained a lively protest against the anniversary of the Fascist government’s ascent to power and it was my view that the distribution of this newspaper would constitute a grave threat to public order, re-igniting hatred and dissention […] so I proceeded, without delay, to the sequestration of all copies as well as the typographic plates.20

In this phase, prefects were required to keep more detailed records of provincial newspapers and magazines, especially in relation to their funding. Mussolini knew from experience that newspapers needed funds and expensive equipment in order to operate.21 Meanwhile squadrista direct action continued against printing presses, distribution points and sales outlets. 0230543081_03_ch02.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 30

30 Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922–43

Mussolini’s double track of intelligence, at the centre and from the periphery, allowed him to intervene directly with the prefects and send out orders from the centre for immediate implementation, rather than trusting to the prefects’ initiative. Examples include the following instruction from Mussolini to the prefect of Palermo:

Make it known to the executive of the Palermo Press Association that the newspaper Babbio has been shamefully abusing the freedom of the press by insulting members of the Fascist government in the most vulgar manner. Let it be known that the Blackshirt Revolution does not allow insult and mockery to go unpunished. […] I leave it up to your discretion whether or not to suppress this newspaper but make sure the editor changes his attitude, otherwise the suspension which I have ordered personally will become deﬁnitive.22

Such examples fuelled the myth of his omniscience. The official response to the Matteotti crisis and the Aventine Secession drove a new policy initiative and some changes in personnel. On 8 July 1924 the government approved an edict which brought into force the Press Law of 15 July 1923. On 10 July 1924, by means of a new decree law, Mussolini devolved to prefects the powers to sequester any newspaper or periodical without warning.23 Luigi Federzoni had by this stage replaced Mussolini as Minister of the Interior. Rossi, tainted with involvement in the Matteotti abduction and murder, was replaced at the Ufficio Stampa by a conservative nobleman Giovanni Capasso Torre di Pastene, who had not been a Fascist of the First Hour.24 Indeed he had been personal secretary to Vittorio Scialoja, Liberal Minister of Foreign Affairs and had been at Versailles for the Treaty negotiations. As editor of the Corriere italiano, however, he had supported the government through the Matteotti affair. He had an aristocratic pedigree and he brought respectability and gravitas to the post. His term in charge was characterized by stability and normalization: he managed a team of eight which included five journalists. The office was given enhanced powers, located in the Viminale, headquarters of the Ministry of the Interior, and encouraged to work more closely with Federzoni and the prefects, looking after the collection and distribution of communications and orders to national, regional and local newspapers. Capasso Torre stepped up monitoring and surveillance of newspaper reporting. A section was moved from the Ministero degli Affari Esteri and added to the Ufficio stampa. Personnel in this section combed the foreign newspapers for coverage of Italian affairs. 0230543081_03_ch02.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 31

Consolidating Power and Silencing Opposition 31

Once organized in this centrally-managed structure, the police proceeded to draw up inventories of all daily and periodical newspapers for each province. These lists (alphabetical by province, beginning with Alessandria) included data on sales and political orientation, and formed the evidence base on which to develop an action plan. This plan had three principal objectives. The first of these was the stamping of state authority on the already pliant press, throughout the kingdom, and especially in the provinces, where because of Italy’s peculiar history, local papers often had more influence on opinion than the national dailies such as Mussolini’s own Il Popolo d’Italia. The second objective was to take effective political control of the non- Fascist, liberal press and to make sure it did nothing to undermine the regime. The third objective was the complete elimination of all opposition newspapers. The plan had been put into effect in the second half of 1924, culminating in the governmental crisis at the end of the year when, between 31 December and 1 January 1925 all of the following opposition newspapers were sequestered: the nationals Il Corriere della Sera, La Stampa, and L’Avanti!, as well as the locals Il Piccolo, Il Popolo, Il Momento, La Voce repubblicana and Il Sereno. Federzoni intensified his circulars to prefects inveighing against newspaper subversion in the form of editorial comment, stories of violence or police heavy-handedness, photographs of crime scenes and humour, especially satire. He also took a close interest in the independent news agencies, closing down one after another until only the Agenzia Stefani was left. From newspapers and press services, the Ministero dell’Interno broadened its remit to take on cultural magazines such as Piero Gobetti’s Rivoluzione liberale, Il Caffè, edited by Riccardo Bauer and Ferruccio Parri, Lelio Basso’s Pietre, Giovanni Amendola’s Il Mondo and Non Mollare, the Florentine journal founded and run by Gaetano Salvemini, Ernesto Rossi, Carlo Rosselli and Nino Traquandi.25 The combination of legal and illegal raids in the course of 1925 drove opposition papers and journals into bankruptcy or pushed them underground. Not satisfied with that, however the Testo Unico or Consolidation Law no. 2307 of 31 December 1925 stipulated in article 1, that all periodical publications had to have a director-in-charge (direttore responsabile) as opposed to a managing editor (gerente) and in article 7 that all journalists must be registered in the albo professionale dei giornalisti, or professional register of journalists. Journalists could be struck off this register for two offences as defined by the laws relating to news 0230543081_03_ch02.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 32

32 Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922–43

media. If the direttore responsabile was struck off, the publication would remain suspended until such time as the Procurator General, through the Court of Appeal, agreed to recognize a new managing editor. This was the legislation which effectively fascistized the Italian press.26 That is not to say there was no opposition at this relatively early stage of Fascist rule. On 7 May 1925, during the Aventine Secession, Luigi Albertini, long-time editor of Il Corriere della Sera, delivered a stinging speech in the Senate attacking press censorship:

Today the press is reduced to saying only what the government and the prefects allow it to say, like during the war. But this is worse: because during the war censorship was just, and the censor made clear the criteria, nearly always obvious ones, which motivated the Ministry of the Interior. But now it’s different: you take pot luck. Publications are sequestered not in relation to the general political criteria but to criteria inspired by personal and interested considerations. The most monstrous prohibitions are imposed. One newspaper is persecuted more than another. Writers have the torment of not knowing what they may and may not say, how far they can push a story or a criticism. And they don’t even know if sequestration will be the only misfortune which may befall them. No! What we have learned from the cases of La Voce repubblicana and Il Caffè as well as the recent business involving Il Mondo, the principal organ of democratic opposition, is that sequestration can be followed by a warning which is a prelude to complete suppression of the newspaper. And this suspension or suppression, ordered not by the courts but by the Executive, is not only an unprecedented legal and moral excess, it is also a penalty which strikes the owners, the journalists, the workers and the staff of the whole newspaper. Where will it all end?

This extract of Albertini’s speech was printed in Il Corriere della Sera the following day. The Times editorial commented:

A telegram from our Milan Correspondent to-day shows the shame- less partisanship with which the decree against the freedom of the Press is applied where Opposition papers are concerned. A local journal has been suppressed ‘for having given prominence to the speech delivered in the Senate by Senator Albertini, by publishing the full text of it on the front page with prominent headlines.’ […] The Press decree under which acts like this are done at the arbitrary 0230543081_03_ch02.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 33

Consolidating Power and Silencing Opposition 33

discretion of the Prefects is in ﬂagrant contradiction with the Italian Constitution. Last Friday [8 May 1925] the Minister of the Interior [Federzoni] repeated the promise that it would be abandoned in favour of a regular Press law, but he omitted to give any information as to when this much-needed law would be introduced into the Legislature.27

The provisions which Federzoni promised did indeed come into force. The remaining left wing newspapers were suppressed in late 1925 following an attempt on Mussolini’s life. Liberal papers such as Il Corriere della Sera were not suppressed, though the threat of periodic sequestration hung over them. They were gradually fascistized. In the case of Il Corriere della Sera, Ugo Ojetti, a conservative rather than a subversive, who replaced Albertini’s choice of successor, was ousted from the editorship to make way for a more committed Fascist. Conditions were ripe for a culture of self-censorship on the part of editors. There was a largely successful strategy to tame foreign newspapers too by offering cheap wire services to proprietors, which in most cases overcame the political qualms which some of their journalists may have entertained.28 (Many of the foreign correspondents, in any case, were quite bewitched by Mussolini’s law and order bluster, and wrote eulogies about trains running on time and other inconsequentials fed to them by the Press Ofﬁce). A further 1925 law made Mussolini responsible for appointing all editors-in-charge (direttori responsabili) of Italian newspapers. From his position at the centre of this web of power would come pressure to eliminate cronaca nera (crime stories or scandal) from news reporting. Italian readers (very largely the middle classes) were to have their commonsense myths reinforced by sober daily news coverage which stressed patriotic values. By all accounts they were as impressed as foreign correspondents by the duce. The fact that he survived the Matteotti crisis indicates that by summer 1924 Mussolini had done just enough to hang on to power. That gave him conﬁdence.

Policing, censorship and surveillance

The provisions of the 31 December 1925 Consolidation Act (Testo Unico) established Fascist control over the domestic press. Homo- geneity of the domestic press, however, was not the most immediate concern of the newly-proclaimed dictator. Police reform, on the 0230543081_03_ch02.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 34

34 Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922–43

other hand, was a matter very high on Mussolini’s list of priorities when he achieved power in 1922. As an agitator and subversive, he had been well known to the Italian police, and he had more reasons than most incoming prime ministers for wanting to make radical changes. But in the early days, he was hampered by budgetary constraints which frustrated his desire to have his own police force, outside of traditional structures.29 He could not afford to recruit paid informers, so another Royal Decree Law (12 July 1923, n. 1602), provided for the commissioning of secret agents, what Canali describes as a CEKA fascista, made up of loyal volunteers, hard men from among the ex-squadristi. These included the likes of Amerigo Dumini and Albino Volpi, Matteotti’s assassins. The initiative foundered with the public outcry over the Matteotti murder in 1924. The position of secret agents was regularized by Royal Decree Law 33, Jan 1927, articles 8 and 9. By this point, informers with important political information to impart were reporting to the divisione polizia politica (DPP or POLPOL) of the Directorate General of Public Security (DGPS). In September 1926, Arturo Bocchini replaced Francesco Crispo Moncada, in charge of Public Security, i.e., Chief of Police. This was to be the beginning of a complete restructuring, and a consolidation of the dictatorship. Bocchini had been Prefect of Bologna, and had demonstrated himself favourable towards Fascism. Each morning, from his appointment as Chief of Police until his death in 1940, he had a briefing with Mussolini. In November 1926, a further Consolidation Act (testo unico) of the Laws on Public Security (RDL 6/11/26, n. 1848) banned political parties other than the PNF (art. 215), set up a Special Tribunal and Provincial Commissions for the Issuing of Warnings (ammonizione) and Internal Exile (confino). Warnings and confino were not Fascist innovations; they had been used in Liberal Italy too. What the November 1926 law did was to remove the suspect’s right to a trial or even a hearing. Warning and confino, henceforth, were to be punish- ments imposed by Mussolini and Bocchini on the basis of reports from the prefects. This really marked the birth of a police state. Those eligible for a spell in confino included anyone who:

Engages in activities or shows signs of proposing to engage in activities aimed at the violent subversion of the political, economic or social order of the state, or who opposes or obstructs ofﬁcers of the state, or who engages in any activity which may damage the national interest.30 0230543081_03_ch02.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 35

Consolidating Power and Silencing Opposition 35

Later that month, Bocchini set up the divisione polizia politica, as the elite body within the Italian police. RDL 9, January 1927, n. 33, art. 4 began a clear out of questori in order to improve performance. In very short order seven questori, four vice questori, 20 commissioners, six adjunct commissioners and ﬁve vice commissioners were put out to grass. Bocchini’s estimation of them was that they were all men who whether because of their limited intelligence, defeatist attitude, uninspiring physical condition or lack of motivation no longer carried out their work in a satisfactory manner.31 Mussolini elaborated on police reform in his famous Discorso dell’Ascensione on 26 May 1927, in which he recommended to his audience that the police should be not merely respected, but honoured.32 Furthermore, he continued:

Ladies and Gentlemen, the time has come to say that mankind felt the need for order before feeling the need for culture. In a sense we may say that historically the policeman preceded the teacher because where there is no armed force, the laws remain a dead letter. Fascist courage is needed for speaking in these terms.33

Along with the Rocco laws (the 1925 and 1926 Consolidation Acts) there was also a considerably increased budget: 110 million lire in 1926–27 for the Public Security, 50 million going to the Political Police, including 33 million lire for informers, i.e., ‘spese per il servizio di investigazione politica’. This rose to 40 million in 1929–30. Bocchini had access to very signiﬁcant resources. According to Carmine Senise’s subsequent account, when he succeeded Bocchini in 1940, he found in the safe 21 million lire of secret funds, earmarked for paying informers.34 Bocchini, like Mussolini, brought in his own men, starting with Ernesto Gulì, who had worked with him at the Prefecture in Brescia. Gulì was given expedient promotion in order to bring him to the appropriate grade, to enable him to take charge of the Political Police. He also brought in Michelangelo Di Stefano from Bologna. He too progressed rapidly through the ranks, becoming a questore in October 1933.35 In order to keep their activities as secret as possible, in 1927 the Political Police set up its own divisional archive of documents, presided over by Domenico Farese, Tommaso Nesci and Emilio Pellecchia. It is worth dwelling on the detail of their procedures as the ﬁles they kept, which now reside in the Archivio centrale dello Stato, provide a mass of primary documents for historians of the period. Farese ran a team of 0230543081_03_ch02.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 36

36 Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922–43

ten archivists. Originally the Political Police archive was divided into two parts: (1) ‘materia’ which held reports from informers, divided by operation and subject (known as ‘categorie’), identified by a letter and number, and (2) the personal files (known as the ‘fascicoli verdi’) on individuals who were the objects of informers’ reports. The final part of the archive consisted of the red files (‘fascicoli rossi’).36 These were personal dossiers on informers who were recruited directly before October 1938. Each of these informers was identified by a numerical code and also by the pseudonym used by the informer in his or her report. The combination of numerical code and pseudonym allowed Farese both to match the incoming report to the informer’s file and to keep the informer’s identity secret. The typewritten transcription of the report would carry only the informer’s number, and would be filed in the appropriate ‘categoria’ or ‘fascicolo verde’. The original went into the ‘fascicolo rosso’. At first the ‘fascicolo rosso’ was made up of two sub-files, the ‘semplice’ which contained the original report and the ‘bis’ which included correspondence with the informer and any other information received on him or her from other sources. From October 1938, when Guido Leto joined the service, a third sub-file (‘ter’) was introduced, detailing the amount of money paid to the informer. The ‘ter’ files are particularly useful as they provide an indication of the scale of resources which were channelled into surveillance. Incoming reports were read by the divisional head (‘capo divisione’) and sent to the copying office, where normally three typewritten copies were made. More would be made if there were references to other individuals, in order to supply copies for their files too. The original document was put in the ‘semplice’ sub-file. Two of the three copies remained with the capo divisione while Farese wrote the informer’s code on the third typewritten copy, put it together with any existing file on the individual spied upon and sent this file to the investigating officer. Of the remaining copies, one went to Bocchini, for his daily briefing session with Mussolini, and the second was intended for the Undersecretary of the Interior. There was further reorganization in 1933 with the replacement of some key staff by experienced operators such as Renzo Mambrini, who soon took charge of the ‘gruppo Francia’ which dealt with investigating anti-Fascists in exile in France and French colonies in North Africa. The other main group, known as the ‘gruppo Spagna’ or the ‘gruppo SBS’, directed by Saverio Caccavale, took charge of Spain (including Latin America), Belgium and Switzerland. (Surveillance of dissidents in 0230543081_03_ch02.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 37

Consolidating Power and Silencing Opposition 37

North America was relatively independent of Rome and involved close liaison with the console generale in New York). When an anti-Fascist abroad moved from one territory to another, his or her file was passed from one group to the other. This core of about a dozen officers also monitored dissidents inside Italy. Unlike when dealing with abroad, domestic activities worked not in geographical terms but in terms of political groupings. For instance, the novelist Antonio Pizzuto and a colleague Gesualdo Barletta were responsible for co-operation with OVRA, working against any groups which were maintaining links with subversives abroad, e.g., communists, anarchists, giellisti and republicans.37 Pizzuto has left an important slightly-fictionalized account of his time in the political police in a novel published posthumously.38 Between mid-1927 and 1930 Bocchini set about using the considerable financial resources at his disposal to build up OVRA, the service known only by what one might take to be its acronym, although what the letters stood for has never been clear. This phase of Fascist consolidation corresponded to a moment in which the opposition had been weakened and dangerous anti-Fascists were either in exile or were not in a position to cause much trouble in Italy. OVRA was based within the Ministry of the Interior rather than being under regional prefectural control. Officers gathered intelligence and had access to technical expertise and equipment which allowed them to copy photographs, break secret codes, monitor mail and generally to study the activities of known and suspected subversives. By the end of 1927 there were files on 100,000 individuals. This represented a substantial police database. In the words of the director of the DAGR:

The records (rubriche) allow us to examine, at any time, the total number of subversives sorted by their political affiliation and geographical location; the number of people in confino, those under warning (ammoniti) and under suspicion (diffidati); the most dangerous subversives who are subject to special attention; the subversives who have lost Italian citizenship; the individuals who have been rehabilitated in a political sense and other data which may be extracted using more elaborate searches.39

Keeping track of anti-Fascists abroad, from an ofﬁce in Rome, required a well resourced and tightly-managed network of informers who could inﬁltrate dissident groups and pass information without raising suspicions. This information was sifted by the Political Police, 0230543081_03_ch02.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 38

38 Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922–43

who could call on the Prefetture and Questure to supply further information as required. The purpose of assembling this intelligence was to prevent dissident groups abroad from establishing working relations with groups inside Italy. Intelligence received on groups or individuals within Italy was passed either to the regular police or to OVRA for action. The relationship of the Political Police to OVRA was very close. Other parts of the DGPS could not liaise with OVRA directly. They had to work through the DPP. Mambrini’s group cooperated very closely with OVRA in the period 1933 to 1936 during which time they had important successes against the anti-Fascist group Giustizia e Libertà in Turin, on the basis of information gathered in Paris by his informers.40 The Political Police were not involved in the Turin arrests, but took charge of the interrogations once the captives had been brought to the Regina Coeli jail in Trastevere. The Political Police, not OVRA – and certainly not the Questure – possessed the archive of evidence against the accused. Mambrini himself interrogated the distinguished musicol- ogist Massimo Mila in 1934. The rivalries between different branches of the police were considerable, but for all that, the Fascist reform of the police created a well- resourced, highly centralized and generally effective machine for the surveillance of the population and repression of dissent.41 There is some justified scepticism as to whether Italian police officers were effectively fascistized but their activity proved fit for the purpose of reporting to Mussolini on the activities of subversives and popular feeling.42 They provided a rich source of up-to-date information. The significance of these police reforms for censorship policy is that Mussolini was now in possession of a very large amount of intelligence, thanks to the work of Bocchini and his men. The chief of police and the Press Officer, both based in the Viminale, were daily visitors to Mussolini’s office. Rossi had begun the practice of sending instructions from the Press Office to the prefects and newspapers giving instructions on how news stories were to be presented in the press.43 After 1926 these instructions to the press became more frequent, on the basis of police intelligence. The duce observed and manipulated from the centre of his web.

Media ownership and effective control

Retailing news even in a free market can be a precarious business, which depends on reputation, brand loyalty and revenue from advertising and sales. In a more controlled market, such as that operating in 0230543081_03_ch02.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 39

Consolidating Power and Silencing Opposition 39

Liberal Italy, with various forms of state intervention, there were additional constraints, such as hidden subsidy of newspapers which supported the government’s line and censorship of dissident ones. As a newspaper owner prior to October 1922, Mussolini had been acutely aware of both commercial pressures and invasive state interference, of the need for cash flow and of the financial consequences of censorship and sequestration. Cash flow, in particular, was a recurrent problem. Manlio Morgagni, later to be his lynchpin at the de facto state news agency, the Agenzia Stefani, had been responsible for raising advertising money on behalf of Il Popolo d’Italia. There are several letters from Arnaldo Mussolini to Morgagni similar in character to the following, written on 20 September 1922, five weeks before the March on Rome:

I need to pay out 35,000 lire and I have no money. If you have none yourself then you can’t help me. But if you do have some, then I need you to send it so that I can avoid the mortifying spectacle of last Saturday when I had to borrow from friends and even dig into my own pocket, to the point of not being able to pay the postage costs. […] And as we are on the subject of advertising, allow me to express my concern over the drying up of this source. You have said that in senior management we think that advertising is a gold mine. Let me tell you that we regard it more as a tin mine. […] I would like you to examine the situation carefully and you will see that in terms of advertising revenue we are doing worse than the Giornale delle Puglie and one and a half million behind the Corriere della Sera.44

The Mussolini family enterprise was struggling to make ends meet in autumn 1922. Funding for Il Popolo d’Italia came from various sources both before and after the March on Rome. Giorgio Fabre has demonstrated that some of this funding came in the form of irregular payments from the Banca commerciale italiana (BCI) through its managing director Giuseppe Toeplitz.45 Toeplitz came from a Polish Jewish family but he had been baptized over 30 years earlier, in 1890. His son Ludovico had been in Fiume with D’Annunzio. (He would go on to be part of the Italian ﬁlm industry in the 1930s). Giuseppe Toeplitz was also an old friend of Margherita Sarfatti, who continued to exercise an inﬂuence over Mussolini. His other connection to Mussolini was through Aldo Finzi, soon to be Mussolini’s right-hand man at the Ministry of the Interior, until the backlash following the Matteotti murder. On the basis of the Banca commerciale archives, which have been made available recently Fabre has demonstrated that Toeplitz 0230543081_03_ch02.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 40

40 Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922–43

made generous payments to Morgagni in 1918 and again in 1921 for advertising space in Il Popolo d’Italia. Indeed in 1918 the Banca commerciale had twice as much advertising space in the pages of Il Popolo d’Italia as did Ansaldo, the steel company. Extensive advertising in a radical newspaper with a low circulation was hardly a strategic necessity for an issuing bank.46 Just before the 1921 elections, Toeplitz made a further payment to Morgagni of 200,000 lire. The line of Fabre’s argument is that Toeplitz’s Banca commerciale financed, or considered financing, the fledgling Fascist movement and then moved closer to Mussolini and in particular to his newspaper.47 That said, the Banca commerciale was also hedging its bets by making payments to other newspapers, including Critica sociale, the newspaper run by Treves and Turati, as well as to publishers such as Bemporad in Florence. Fabre has tracked down four substantial payments to Arnaldo Mussolini, made after Morgagni’s departure from Il Popolo d’Italia for the Agenzia Stefani in 1923. These took place on 26 January 1924 (500,000 lire), 9 January 1925 (250,000 lire), 27 October 1925 (250,000 lire) and 22 February 1928 (500,000 lire). Arnaldo Mussolini supplied signed receipts in each case. This would equate to irregular payments in the region of €2.5 million over a four-year period in today’s terms, and suggests large- scale corruption sustaining the Mussolini family business, confirming long-standing allegations about the secret funding of Mussolini once he had abandoned Socialism. Of course, such ‘generosity’ was not a form of altruism.48 Supply of capital implies an expected return. Donato Barbone, writing in a later issue of the journal which published Fabre’s article, argues that the matter is more complicated than it at first appears and that in fact the levels of corruption were far higher, but by no means confined to the Mussolini family interests.49 He points out that the document cited by Fabre to support his thesis concerning Banca commerciale funding of Fascism is in fact not a Banca commerciale document at all, but one from a shadowy organization called the Ufficio tecnico di propaganda nazionale (UTPN). This body was set up in late 1917, after the military defeat at Caporetto, by a ‘cross- party group of patriots’ based in Milan. Contributors gave up to 3000 lire per month and the list of contributors included businesses and banks such as Pirelli, Marelli, the Banca commerciale italiana, Credito italiano, and the Banca italiana di sconto. The executive committee of UTPN was chaired by Eliseo Antonio Porro, and the direct funding activities of the organization involved welfare for war-wounded and bereaved families, educational activities (teaching demobbed soldiers how to read) and subsidies for publications including Il Giornale del 0230543081_03_ch02.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 41

Consolidating Power and Silencing Opposition 41

contadino. Indirectly UTPN funded other organizations. It issued a liberal-conservative manifesto in 1919 at the beginning of the biennio rosso, according to which it strove:

To protect the people against all forms of social violence, pointing them towards principles of class co-operation and illustrating the threat inherent in every movement given to hysterical and demagogic behaviour. […] A drawing closer together and cordial understanding between the various elements of production must be achieved very quickly in a systematic and lasting way, before it is too late, for the protection of industry, agriculture and Italian business.50

It may be no coincidence if this sounds like a harbinger of corporativism, although it would be a gross simplification to ascribe corporativism only to the interests of big business. Certainly the Banca commerciale italiana had already been paying over the odds for advertising space in Il Popolo d’Italia in 1918, but Barbone argues that Toeplitz’s payments to Mussolini’s newspaper need to be seen in the context of the UTPN manifesto. The UTPN may have been prepared to put up with outbursts of hysteria and demagogic behaviour if such outbursts were to lead to social harmony in the longer term. Rather than seeing Margherita Sarfatti as the intermediary between the financier and the duce, as Fabre had argued, Barbone suggests that it was in fact Aldo Finzi, Mussolini’s phone-tapper, who was the effective connection. Finzi’s fall from grace in June 1924, after the discovery of Matteotti’s body, was a blow to the BCI, which was followed up rapidly by two payments to Arnaldo Mussolini in Milan for the benefit of Il Popolo d’Italia, as there was no longer a direct line to the duce through the Ministero dell’Interno. Still, the Banca commerciale italiana continued to hedge its bets: Mussolini looked vulnerable in the early summer of 1924. At the end of April 1924 Italo Balbo had set up Il Corriere padano in Ferrara. His editor Nello Quilici took a relatively-independent line on news reporting and on editorial policy.51 During the Matteotti crisis, on 19 June 1924, the Banca commerciale paid 50,000 lire to Balbo. Three weeks later, on 8 July, he received another 100,000 lire. Thereafter he received 300,000 lire a year until 1930. During this time he became undersecretary at Ministero dell’Economia nazionale (late October 1925) before moving on to the Ministero dell’Aeronautica, where he was promoted to Minister in November 1929. As well as the obvious benefits to a 0230543081_03_ch02.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 42

42 Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922–43

bank of having an influential friend in the Economia nazionale, the Banca commerciale developed financial interests (Consorzio aereo italiano) in aviation business too, in 1927. Toeplitz, however, continued to fund Mussolini’s paper and his regime after the fall of Finzi and the Matteotti crisis, as part of a strategy of patronage. Barbone has cracked a police cypher of transcribed phone taps. These reveal that Finzi’s eventual replacement as intermediary between the financier and the dictator was none other than the Chief of Police himself, Arturo Bocchini, who took up his post in 1926. This informal but now documented connection between high finance and Mussolini press interests began before the Fascists achieved power and it intensified over the 20 years from 1922 to 1943. It is of a piece with the corrupting practices of police informers and direct censorship and is another manifestation of the Fascist mentalité which seems to have been accepted as commonsense at the time. The vast majority of the Italian population was unaware of such chicanery. Paolo Murialdi, however, in his seminal accounts of Italian journalism under Fascism, argues for a significant distinction between capital (i.e., ownership) and control.52 Mussolini’s need to consolidate his power led quickly to processes of accommodation and negotiation with a range of social forces wider than those representing capital. Principal among these were the Church and the monarchy. The Church and the newspapers within its sphere of influence were less concerned about an authoritarian government than by the fear of a communist revolution, and where necessary the Church took steps to replace editors or close down titles altogether in the interests of maintaining good relations with Mussolini. Luigi Sturzo is an exemplary casualty of this process. By February 1929, when the Lateran Pacts were signed, all remaining Catholic titles were staunch supporters of the Fascist government. The established liberal newspapers, on the other hand had national and international standing and their suppression would have implied a strategy of high risk; threatening Italy’s international reputation. Characteristically this high-risk strategy was the line proposed by Roberto Farinacci and the other Intransigents of the First Hour. Mussolini instead decided to distance himself from the extremists and to appeal to the middle ground. The strategy was to fascistize Il Corriere della Sera and La Stampa rather than close them down. In some cases, this process involved the active collaboration of prominent capitalists: the removal of Alfredo Frassati as director of La Stampa was not fully effected until Giovanni Agnelli bought a majority stake in the newspaper in 1926. The newspaper was suspended for six weeks, 0230543081_03_ch02.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 43

Consolidating Power and Silencing Opposition 43

during which time, Frassati, the majority shareholder, was pressured into selling. Agnelli assumed financial control in October 1926 and La Stampa returned to the news-stands in late November, directed by Andrea Torre. By this point Luigi Albertini had long been removed from Il Corriere della Sera, and replaced as editor first by Pietro Croci (Albertini’s own recommendation) and then by Ugo Ojetti (Mussolini’s choice). Mussolini, however, indulged the Crespo brothers, owners of Il Corriere della Sera, to some degree, by agreeing to their choice of Rome editor (Aldo Valori) rather than his own nomination (Roberto Forges Davanzati). Il Corriere della Sera experienced no significant drop in sales, so Mussolini felt sufficiently confident to remove Ojetti, and replace him with the harder-line Maffio Maffii, who had worked in the Ufficio Stampa. This pattern of hostile takeover and fascistization affected the less prominent newspaper titles too, at times degenerating into rivalries between different factions within the Fascist movement, such as the cases of Il Resto del Carlino in Bologna and Il Mattino in Naples.

The Agenzia Stefani

Mussolini’s instincts for placing trusted collaborators in positions of power and inﬂuence and for media savvy found a unique realization in the person of Manlio Morgagni, his man at the Agenzia Stefani. Morgagni, from Forlì, had a long association with Mussolini, having written for and managed Il Popolo d’Italia and been present at Piazza San Sepolcro on 23 March 1919 for the birth of the fasci di combattimento. His most important managerial function with Il Popolo d’Italia was to raise funds, mostly through persuading businessmen to buy advertising space. The Mussolini brothers had come to rely on his ﬁnancial acumen.53 Alone among the duce’s inner circle, Morgagni killed himself on the night of 25 July 1943 when he learned of Mussolini’s arrest. In August 1924 Morgagni had founded a monthly magazine La Rivista illustrata del Popolo d’Italia along with Arnaldo Mussolini.54 Three and a half years later (January 1928) he founded Natura. In 1930 he published L’agenzia Stefani nella vita nazionale, a monograph which set out his historic mission as journalist and news manager. In his view, as set out in 1930, Italian newspapers had for too long been forced to rely on foreign news agencies for international news. International news supply was dominated by Reuters in Britain, Havas in France and Wolff in Germany, a smaller agency. In 1870 they had established a cartel that divided up national and regional markets. 0230543081_03_ch02.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 44

44 Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922–43

Wolff’s sphere of influence did not extend beyond Europe unlike Reuters and Havas which could exploit the relative advantages of their native languages being understood in the far-flung British and French empires. The Agenzia Stefani had been set up as a family business in 1853 in the shadow of these giants and in 1861 managed to establish links with Havas, giving the Stefani access to reports from French correspondents around the world. With the advantages of access to fresh news came the disadvantage of a French political interpretation of this news. This political point had also exercised Francesco Crispi, and when he came to power he set about reforming the arrangement by making the Stefani more dependent upon the Italian government and therefore not simply a cypher for French interests. Crispi had sought to bring the Stefani closer to German and Austrian news sources. Late in 1923 negotiations were underway between Mussolini (through Federzoni) and the owners of the Agenzia Stefani, Gustavo Nesti and Giovanni Cappelletto. The outcome of these negotiations was that Morgagni was elected to the position of managing director. He set about making the agency more efficient and responsive to the needs of the Fascist state. His first important initiative was the radio-telegraphic service for stock exchange rates. The purpose of this service was to make sure that stock exchange rates no longer arrived from foreign sources but through ‘the only national agency, collected exclusively by reporters of Italian origin and sentiments’.55 The Stefani radio receivers in Milan and Rome would receive news of the stocks moments after close of business on the various markets and would then prepare a bulletin giving the closing prices for the main Stock Exchanges and the Italian banks, to be distributed at 8am each working day. Shortly afterwards this was supplemented by a daily bulletin on cereal prices abroad, giving the prices from Chicago, Winnipeg, Liverpool, and Buenos Aires. At a time when Mussolini was mounting his ‘battle for the wheat’ at home, Morgagni explained the Stefani strategy in terms of the national interest:

In the past the Italian businessman, deprived of genuine and reliable information from abroad, either had to trust a foreign mediator who bundled prices to him or he had to wait until the following day to read the prices in the newspapers. Thus our farmers were always uncertain about prices and in their uncertainty they would decide whether or not to sell their produce not on the basis of the needs of international markets but on the basis of the foreign mediator’s 0230543081_03_ch02.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 45

Consolidating Power and Silencing Opposition 45

interests. The new Stefani services have put an end to this damaging situation.56

To this was added in 1928 an economic bulletin, edited at Head Office in Milan, and issued twice a day. Alongside the business news the Stefani also provided a general telegraphic service which carried all official and semi-official news, home news and political, business and general interest stories from abroad. This linked to an internal telegraphic service which by the end of the 1920s worked around the clock. There was also a special foreign service which reported on world politics ‘as viewed from an Italian [i.e., Fascist] perspective’. In November 1928 the Agenzia Stefani began its Radio Stefani service, again from Milan, on long and short wave. This service received the dispatches of its Italian correspondents in the major European and American cities. These were edited in Milan and transmitted by telephone or telegraph to the regional and provincial offices in Italy, which in turn supplied information to the press. According to Morgagni in this way all Italian newspapers, even the most modest of them could ‘finally compete on an equal footing with the big national and foreign titles’.57 This service was supplemented by the capacity to send images down a wire which gave all provincial and local newspapers the opportunity to publish photographs of people and events from around Europe and America in a matter of hours. The agency expanded its operations considerably between the mid and the late 1920s, opening new offices and moving to larger premises in major cities. This expansion came at a cost. A profit of 64,953 lire in 1925 became a loss of 91,676 lire by 30 June 1927. The state stepped in to bail the agency out with taxpayers’ money. Romano Canosa has cited a letter to Morgagni from the Press Office of the Foreign Ministry dated 21 August 1929:

Mr President, allow me to point out to you that according to a new budget provision, the monthly subsidy of 31,750 lire laid down for the ‘Special Stefani service’ has recently been raised to 60,750 lire per month. This sum should be allocated in the following way: 31,750 lire remain assigned to the Rome, Trieste and Munich offices. 29,000 lire will be devolved to new offices to be set up in Vienna, Bucharest, Prague, Tirana, Athens and Belgrade. 4,000 lire per month will be allocated to the offices in Vienna, Bucharest, 1,000 lire each to Tirana and to Athens, and 2,500 to Belgrade, to cover salaries. […] The Head of Government has specified that the following people are to be 0230543081_03_ch02.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 46

46 Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922–43

employed in the various ofﬁces: Dott. Mario Villa in Vienna; Mr Mario Marchini in Bucharest; Mr Roberto Suster in Prague; Comm. Enrico Ceresole in Athens who will also be secretary of the local branch of the PNF and correspondent for Il Popolo d’Italia; Mr Solari Bozzi in Belgrade, where he is already correspondent for Il Giornale d’Italia.58

Therefore by the late 1920s Mussolini maintained a substantial control over the press agency which provided the news to all newspapers published in the kingdom. Italian newspapers were obliged to take their news stories and images from the Agenzia Stefani and the Istituto Luce, and with greater frequency as the years went by, to reproduce Stefani text and images without editorial comment.

State, church and censorship

When courting the Catholic Church, shortly before the signing of the Lateran Pacts (1929), the interests of the Fascist censors extended beyond politics to the moral sphere. In 1928 when Lando Ferretti replaced Giovanni Capasso Torre at the Press Ofﬁce, still located in the headquarters of the Ministry of the Interior, he sent out the following circular to all prefects:

I think it is only right to draw to your attention certain illustrated publications where the female nude constitutes the sole dubious attraction for young male readers. It would be well immediately to recall the owners of these publications to a more digniﬁed understanding of their journalistic mission and then to proceed with due rigour.59

Moral as opposed to political censorship intensiﬁed after 1929, and extended its brief from glossy magazines to radio, theatre and cinema in an unremitting campaign to promote patriotism and a bland enthusiasm for family values. This went down well with the middle classes and with the Catholic hierarchy. Bosworth argues that:

The Church authorities judged Nazism before and after 1939 an ungodly movement. It is fairer, however, to see Pius [XII] and the hierarchy over whom he presided as fellow travellers or outright sympathizers with Mussolini and Fascism. In what they perceived as this wicked world, the Vatican liked most of what they saw in 0230543081_03_ch02.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 47

Consolidating Power and Silencing Opposition 47

Fascism and, should the truth be known, preferred it probably to liberal democracy and certainly to socialism and communism. All in all, the Church’s wartime stance towards the dictatorship was not very different from that prevailing among businessmen and landowners, who thought that Fascism, despite its eccentricities, was ﬁne for them until it became obvious that it was going to lose its battles on every front.

This account would be no less true of Pius XI. Throughout the ‘years of consensus’, Church and Fascist state tended to co-exist very happily, to the chagrin of the likes of Emilio Settimelli, Fascist writer of the First Hour and Giovanni Gentile, the philosopher and educational reformer of the regime.60 In their different ways the theatrical anarchist Settimelli and the cerebral reformer Gentile represented the extremes which had been attracted to Mussolini’s charisma from the early days of Fascism.61 They both found their attempts to separate Church and state undermined, especially by the ambassador to the Vatican, Cesare Maria de Vecchi. Fascist patience with Settimelli would ﬁnally be exhausted by late 1938 when he was sent to conﬁno to break his spirit, itself a form of preventive censorship. Well before that, Gentile had been censored by the Church: all his works were placed on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1934. 0230543081_04_ch03.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 48

3 Giovinezza: Education for the Ethical State

Mussolini’s appointment of Giovanni Gentile in winter 1922 as his first Minister for Public Instruction (istruzione pubblica) was to have the effect of beginning a comprehensive but uneven reform of the Italian school system which would continue up to the collapse of the regime itself and one which Mussolini would describe as ‘the most Fascist of all his policies’. Educational reform is also the initiative in which we find the first uses of censorship as a tool of cultural policy, with far-reaching consequences for the publishing industry, textbook writers, teachers, pupils and their families. This chapter will deal especially with this ‘most Fascist’ of reforms and it will seek to articulate Gentile’s vision of the State as Educator (lo Stato educatore), to examine details of its implementation, its revision and tacit abandonment in the light of competing influences, and to take stock of the economic and cultural consequences, the pedagogic shortcomings and the generally negative effects of Fascist educational reform. With the latter in mind, it is a sobering thought that Italian boys born in the spring and summer of 1922 had their education framed in a model designed to produce the new Italian man (l’uomo nuovo), and that they reached their eighteenth birthdays just in time to march off to a disastrous war from which many of them would not return, and during which Gentile himself would be assassinated.

The need for reform

The Casati Law (13 November 1859, no. 3725) had broken new ground in the nineteenth century for public policy on education by enshrining in law three fundamental principles: (1) the state’s right to replace the Church as the main provider of teaching, (2) compulsory schooling to a minimum of the ﬁrst two years of the scuola elementare, and (3) free

48 0230543081_04_ch03.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 49

Giovinezza: Education for the Ethical State 49

public education for all (to be funded by local tax-payers with a sub- vention from central government in some cases). The Casati law had also introduced teacher-training colleges and the bringing together of schools administration into a single ministry, that of Istruzione Pubblica. The needs of the newly-unified Italian state were stark. In the first elections (1861), less than 2% of the population of 25,750,000 had the right to vote, since to qualify for the vote one needed to be male, literate, aged over 25 and paying more than 40 lire per annum in taxes. The illiteracy rate in 1861 for the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was 87%.1 The Casati law set up different models of school and different routes through the education system. To reproduce the elite there was the route through the scuola elementare (ages 6 to 9/10, with separate schools for boys and girls), and the ginnasio (ages 10 to 15) followed by the liceo classico (ages 16 to 18). The two-year junior cycle of the scuola elementare (the biennio inferiore) was obligatory and free to all, and funded by local authorities (comuni). As there was no national pay-scale for teachers, levels of remuneration depended on the economic strength (and often geographical location) of the comune. Teachers in rural areas were paid less than their counterparts in towns and cities. According to Casati, there was to be a ginnasio in all principal towns in the provinces, again funded by the comune. There was to be one liceo classico per province, funded by the state. The real innovation of the Casati law was the instituting of the istruzione secondaria tecnica, designed to produce public servants and businessmen, thus stimulating the economic sectors. Pupils taking this route passed from the scuola elementare to technical schools (scuole tecniche) whose programme lasted three years, funded jointly by comune and the state, and on to technical institutes (istituti tecnici), also with a three-year cycle and part-funded by the state. In all cases it was the responsibility of the local authorities to build and maintain school premises. The expectations raised by this liberal initiative however were soon disappointed. The state did not so much replace the Church as the provider of education as develop state schools in parallel to private schools, with both institutions questioning implicitly the other’s legitimacy. The state backed off open confrontation. The principle of compulsory education was never given any teeth and illiteracy figures, while they did drop, continued to be high by European standards right into the next century, which indicates that the principle was largely ignored in the reality of Italian life, especially in rural areas where the seasonal rhythms of the year held more sway than legislators in distant Turin, or Florence, or Rome. 0230543081_04_ch03.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 50

50 Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922–43

Illiteracy statistics in Italy from 1861 to 1931

Year Male % Female % Total % 1861 7,889,238 72.0 9,110,463 84.0 16,999,701 78.0 1871 9,031,836 67.04 10,521 78.94 19,553,792 72.96 1881 8,706,125 61.03 956 73.51 19,141,157 67.26 1901 8,259,704 51.13 10,435 60.82 18,186,353 56.0 1911 7,244,648 42.8 32 50.5 16,107,173 46.7 1921 6,375,645 33.4 9,926,649 38.3 13,888,556 35.8 1931 3,014,736 17.0 8,862,525 24.0 7,458,909 21.0

Source: Giovanni Genovesi, Storia della scuola in Italia dal Settecento a oggi, revised edition (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2004 [1998]), p. 246

Most seriously of all, there was too little investment in education. There was little incentive to attract people of talent to the teaching profession.2 It remained the case in late 1922 when the Fascists took power that the country had high levels of illiteracy. The figures of 33.4% male and 38.3% female illiteracy in 1922 mask far higher figures in the South, and the cohesive effect of education on national life was at best marginal. State education was free but the unit of resource was very low in state schools and education in Italy was patently not fit for purpose. It was failing to meet the needs of the economy or civil society. Moreover, the Southern economy depended on an inefficient agricultural sector which had little interest in innovation, the development of skills or the creation of regular employment. So there was a substantial population of men who were employed seasonally as unskilled labourers or braccianti. This suited the absentee landlords in the great latifondi in the South as oversupply and competition for the few jobs available depressed earnings. Social unrest was avoided most of the time by the conservatively-framed charitable welfare networks of the Catholic Church and because every year a large mass of unskilled and semi-skilled young men – often the most enterprising – left Italy to emigrate in search of a better life.3 Their remittances helped to keep their families from starvation. The small industrial base located in the North in the Turin–Milan–Genoa triangle did need a trained workforce, but schools and universities produced few young people with appropriate skills in science and technology or a sense of enterprise. Instead Italy’s universities produced more graduates, especially in law and the humanities, than the backward economy could accommodate. 0230543081_04_ch03.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 51

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School buildings and resources were rudimentary, especially in impoverished rural areas. Elementary schooling was free, but the principle of universal free education was undermined by the requirement that all pupils should provide their own books. This requirement was a serious financial imposition for poorer families and the high price of schoolbooks did little to promote the popularity of school attendance. It was a state of affairs satirized not just in the pages of Il Becco giallo in the 1920s but familiar from Carlo Collodi’s story of Pinocchio, where Geppetto has to sell the coat off his back to buy schoolbooks for his adopted son, the literal blockhead (testa di legno).4 Furthermore the idea of a commonly-spoken standard Italian language was a fiction. Standard Italian was something derived from literary texts written centuries earlier and it had achieved limited penetration outside the literate middle and upper classes. Even there, regional and local dialectal identities predominated to the extent that people from different parts of the kingdom often had genuine difficulties understanding one another. Six decades after unification there was only a weak sense of a shared Italian identity.5 But there were other, more specifically Fascist reasons why schools reform was desirable and necessary. Mussolini had come to power in a bloodless coup d’etat. In order to retain that power he needed to legit- imize his authority with the masses. He had to establish the power of the new state by identifying himself with the state and getting his message delivered daily at every parish pump. The tussle for legitimacy in Italy between Church and state which had taken place since 1859 on a variety of levels continued to be most evident in relation to the education of the young. Private schools (i.e., religious ones) were protected zealously from state influence. State schools were far from models of good practice, and control of both was going to be necessary to ensure that a new generation could be moulded so as to achieve a Fascist consensus. Mussolini had himself been a schoolmaster and understood the moral and political influence an effective teacher could exercise over pupils: pupils saw much more of their teachers than they did of their priests. Schools would be the key to a long-term survival strategy for the regime and the creation of a new order on the basis of radical renewal and the cult of youth (giovinezza).

The choice of Gentile

It is in this context that Giovanni Gentile assumed the responsibility for education (istruzione pubblica) in Mussolini’s ﬁrst government, 0230543081_04_ch03.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 52

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replacing the gentleman philosopher Benedetto Croce who had held the office in the last Liberal government, headed by Luigi Facta. Gentile remains a controversial figure, not least in the manner of his death in 1944. Assassination is the fate of very few philosophers. The collapse of Italy’s First Republic in the early 1990s and subsequent revisions of the history of the Resistance have led to a profusion of books on Gentile in recent years, in Italy, and to a smaller extent in North America. He has become a contested figure. Gabriele Turi’s meticu- lously-researched critical biography, which was the first of these books, offers a balanced account on which I have drawn for information in the following pages.6 A. James Gregor’s short political biography has a polemical edge which goes with the grain of revisionist history produced in Italy by historians associated with the journal Nuova storia contemporanea, whose editor Francesco Perfetti has produced another biography which, like Gregor’s, is more laudatory and polemical than critical or sceptical.7 Mussolini’s choice of Gentile for the ministry in 1922 was shrewd. He had retained some ministers from the Facta government, such as Luigi Siciliani at Antiquities and Fine Arts, but Croce, while not hostile in 1922, was too far away from Fascism, too much part of the liberal establishment, and too wealthy to be interested in government patronage. Co-option of Gentile was part of Mussolini’s strategy to win a parliamentary majority. Gentile could deliver the support of the Partito popolare. Indeed before accepting the post Gentile sought and received Mussolini’s assurance on the introduction of state examinations, a policy advocated by the popolari but opposed in principle by the Fascists at their plenary meeting in Naples months earlier.8 Mussolini was content to compromise on that in order to gain a broader base of support in parliament. Croce sent Gentile a telegram of congratulation describing his long-time collaborator as ‘the right man in the right place’ but making no reference to the political complexion of the government Gentile was about to join. Croce continued to pay Gentile as joint editor of La Critica until late 1923. Other friends and associates were more cautions and concerned. Giuseppe Lombardo Radice, who had deep reservations about Fascism but who nonetheless would soon chair Gentile’s first Central Commission for reform of schoolbooks, wrote to the new Minister:

Your unstained name is now alongside the name of preachers of violence, architects of mayhem, imitators of the Communists in their methods of political struggle. Let us hope that your presence in 0230543081_04_ch03.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 53

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the government will moderate the anti-liberal reaction which may await the country.9

Even Gentile’s own brother expressed similar concerns, but within months these concerns appear to have evaporated as the new minister began to use his influence for the material benefit of his siblings and his own family. His professorial salary at the Scuola normale in Pisa almost doubled in the 30 months between May 1921 and December 1923 as his influence grew, and he began to take a financial interest in the publishing industry. Mussolini had evidently judged his man wisely. Croce and Gentile were both philosophers who worked in the tradition of German Idealism and had been joint editors of Croce’s journal La Critica for over two decades, but by 1922 they were moving in different directions. Croce gave a cautious welcome to Mussolini’s leading a coalition government, and putting an end to the biennio rosso, but when Gentile published his Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals after the Congress of Fascist Culture in March 1925, Croce responded with his counter manifesto within weeks.10 After that, they never communicated with one another again. According to Gentile’s Actualism, a variant of the anti-Realist tradition, as it had developed in the second, blood-stained decade of the century, reality was not to be identified with an independently-existing external world, as commonsense and realist philosophy would have it. Instead reality, including the world ‘external’ to the individual was the product of consciousness – ‘the production of a series of willed collective moral choices’.11 Individual lives gained meaning only by participation in the collective life through which alone they could achieve fullness in the shared transcendental consciousness which was made manifest in the culture, history and traditions of the Italian people. In political terms it followed that Italians, in order to raise themselves up from the backward state in which their country languished, needed to ‘give themselves over to a sense of selfless mission – a sense that they were responsible for the world in which they chose to live’.12 Implanting this sense of mission in the hearts and minds of the rising generation in order to bring about the ethical state was the ultimate purpose of education in Gentile’s charismatic view. Gentile’s Idealism however did not cause him to disdain the material advantages of his new position, although it would be wrong to suggest that he was motivated only by self-interest. He seems to have been driven by a messianic belief in the power of the Will to change the 0230543081_04_ch03.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 54

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world and by all accounts he worked long hours to bring this about. In 1920 he had written that there must be ‘a substantial interior transformation capable of redirecting and disciplining all the energies that the Great War had revealed, in order to make Italy capable of a vast productive undertaking, social pacification, and reorganization of the state’.13 He took up his post as minister with the intention of forging a new sense of Italian identity out of the carnage of the trenches and consequent cultural disorientation by seeking to continue the process of Risorgimento after the parenthesis of failed liberal democracy. In order to do that he began to draw up plans for the education in reformed licei and universities of a new elite destined for future leadership. For the rest of society his plan was to create a disciplined secular state to which the individual was devoted to the point of willingly making the ultimate sacrifice. Gentile had been considering these problems for some time. He had published a pamphlet in 1919 called Il problema scolastico del dopoguerra [The problem of the post-war school system]. It was made up of short essays published between 1917 and 1919. In his analysis, some of the main practical problems to be addressed were economic ones. Recruitment and retention of good staff were both difficult. Teachers’ salaries continued to be low, especially in rural areas, which meant either that male teachers had to take on additional private tutoring or they left teaching altogether for other, more respected, professions. Either way, the rewards structure was inadequate for returning heroes from the trenches. Those who remained and the women who replaced them did not and could not possess ‘the spir- ited originality of thought or the iron strength of character which are the highest intellectual and moral endowments of humanity and should be the core of the school that moulds the higher culture of the country’.14 His proposed solutions were to put more resource into teachers’ salaries and pensions, to remove women from key posts in schools and to put war heroes into the classrooms as teacher-role models for the new generation, fighting illiteracy and low aspiration in the spirit of the trenches.

A programme of work

Gentile set about his programme of reform with alacrity, enthusiasm, and missionary zeal, concentrating on the key issues of human resources, management structures, methods of evaluation and costs of physical resources, especially teaching and learning resources. He sur- 0230543081_04_ch03.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 55

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rounded himself with a small and dedicated team, and for his 18 months as minister he worked in his ofﬁce 11 hours a day.15 Achievement of his programme was facilitated by almost complete independence from parliamentary scrutiny and a refusal to consult teachers’ representative organizations. Instead a torrent of ministerial circulars couched in the language of military discourse began to rain down on the teaching profession. A communication of 25 November 1922 gives an indication of the tone. Schools must be:

Quick to inculcate and practise respect for discipline, law and order with enlightened obedience as well as cordial devotion to state authority.16

In order to make schools ‘a true mirror of the renewed national consciousness (coscienza)’ the minister called for ‘acceptance and scrupu- lous obedience to the new order which must begin to bed itself down in the schools if we are to see its consolidation in the country at large’. For that reason ‘any action which disturbs the smooth running of the teaching provision or which insinuates a lack of confidence (sfiducia) or indiscipline in relation to the authority of the state will be swiftly and severely punished’. In another of his ministerial circulars, sent out under the title ‘Dovere degli insegnanti’ (‘Duty of Teachers’) on 23 May 1923 Gentile explained that rather than sending out notices (avvertimenti) he was delivering orders (consegne). Principals were required ‘to respect as sacred the orders they receive, with military devotion, with swift, absolute and unconditional obedience’. They were expected to instil the new spirit of the nation in the teaching body (corpo insegnante). In line with this policy Gentile had approved a decree law which assigned to secondary schools in important towns and cities teachers who had been decorated with the gold medal for military bravery.17 Circulars from his undersecretary Dario Lupi instructed primary schools to establish gardens of remembrance to commemorate those fallen in the Great War and for those described as ‘Fascist martyrs’, thus eliding in the minds of young children the Great War and the Fascists’ four-year armed struggle to overthrow the democratic Italian state. These measures were put in place at the same time as permission to replace the Crucifix alongside the portrait of the king in school classrooms, repeal- ing a provision of the Casati law. The Vatican’s approval for the latter was easily extended to the former in the public imagination, whether or not such approval could be assumed. 0230543081_04_ch03.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 56

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A week after his circular to school principals on their duty, Gentile ofﬁcially joined the PNF with an open letter to Mussolini (31 May 1923) in which he wrote that his participation in government had persuaded him that:

The liberalism as I understand it and as it was understood by the men of the glorious Historic Right (Destra storica) who led Italy since the Risorgimento, the liberalism of the freedom of the law and thus of the strong state and the state conceived as an ethical reality, is no longer represented by today’s Italian liberals who are opposed to you, but by you yourself.18

Earlier he had turned down the offer of honorary membership, made by Michele Bianchi, one of the quadrumviri, on the grounds that he had done nothing to deserve it. He had now become a born-again Fascist. His protégés, as well as his family, were already seeing the beneﬁts of his position. Giuseppe Saitta was named a cavaliere in December 1922, Ernesto Codignola won the concorso for the chair of Pedagogy at Messina in February 1923 and Adolfo Omodeo was appointed to the chair of Church History at Naples in June 1923, to the outrage of the selection panel which had failed to reach an unambiguous recommendation. To answer Omodeo’s evident concerns about his appointment in such shady circumstances Gentile wrote to him:

You and I have obligations to scholarship and to the country, and we can’t hold ourselves back for love of the quiet life, getting embroiled in the petty squabbles of those imbeciles.

Gentile was being true to his principle of creating an elite. Italian universities had been producing too many graduates in the wrong disciplines. Therefore new admissions policies were required and he needed his men in place to drive through the reforms. That principle also extended to school structures. Gentile’s reforms increased the duration of primary schooling (scuola elementare) from four to ﬁve years. The old technical schools were abolished and replaced by a scuola complementare with a three-year cycle giving a broad academic education. There was no continuation route to university from these complementary schools. Children destined for the technical institutes had to enter them at the age of 11 which meant that the istituti tecnici were compelled to introduce junior classes, in exchange for losing their higher ones which went to make up new scientiﬁc colleges (licei 0230543081_04_ch03.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 57

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scientiﬁci) which catered for those aged 15 to 18. The progression route from these licei was to science and engineering faculties in the universities. Those university courses were not generally open to pupils from the technical institutes although pupils from these were eligible to apply to business and economics faculties.19 The elite ginnasio and liceo classico remained as they had been, but were reduced in number. They were joined by a liceo for girls. The scuole normali were renamed istituti magistrali and allocated an extra year of tuition at the end of the cycle. Gentile’s overarching strategy was to create an elite state-school system on a humanist model, with rigorous standards and public funding. He had less interest in the rest of the school population. Gentile’s ministerial ordinance of programmes of study for elementary schools (11 November 1923) instructed teachers to keep their own knowledge and culture up to date, drawing not on anthologies (man- ualetti) but on the ‘living sources of true culture’, which he went on to specify as the following:

The popular and living tradition, perennial educator of the people, which still savours the word of the Fathers; and great literature which has given, in every generation, wonderful works of poetry, of faith and of science, accessible to the humble, because they are great.20

State examinations were introduced with the twin aims of providing a more objective evaluation so as to raise standards and of gaining for the state a measure of control over the network of private schools by bringing curricula into line. Examinations had been a long-standing concern for Gentile and once in power the Fascists were content to drop their opposition especially when the benefits for control and regulation became apparent. Nonetheless the most pressing practical problem remained a lack of money in the education system. This lack of resource influenced Gentile’s first ministerial steps.

Reform and censorship

In support of the proposal for reform, once he was in ofﬁce, Gentile argued unsuccessfully in 1923 for the introduction of a nominal school fee, to replace free education. Monica Galfré has cited an internal memorandum of the Ministero dell’Istruzione Pubblica:

If the government were to propose a fee, in order to respond to urgent necessities in the school sector, such as rural school buildings, the 0230543081_04_ch03.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 58

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setting up of nursery schools (asili d’infanzia) and the pensions of primary-school teachers, in the current state of affairs it would ﬁnd that the publishers have already taken for themselves what families can afford to pay.21

Gentile’s hostility towards the publishing sector on this point and at this time was wholly consistent with his social philosophy in that the financial self interest of publishing houses was in conflict with his conception of the interests of the state. The state needed to control education in order to mould young minds. The area of common ground between different schools in the regions was the need for textbooks to support the curriculum, and so the school-textbook market was a lucrative one for publishers, as pupils were required to supply their own books. Therefore, to Gentile, the publishing sector needed reform as well, as part of his programme. After four months of preparation, the programme was given legislative expression by decree law no. 737 of 11 March 1923, known as the Norme per l’adozione dei libri di testo nelle scuole elementari e popolari pub- bliche e private (Regulations for the adoption of textbooks in public and private primary schools). This provision required publishers to submit schoolbooks to special regional commissions for approval. Given the timescale for the school year 1923–24, it was decided that a single central commission would fulfil the function in the first year of the law’s operation. In fact a central commission continued to hold sway after 1923 and there was never any effective devolution of the powers to the regions. That was a significant aspect of the reform because up to 1923 very many of the textbooks in use had very limited circulation. In lots of cases books were written by local teachers and printed for them in the manner of a cottage industry. Giuseppe Lombardo Radice, who chaired the first Central Commission (1923–24), later described its work as the ‘purging of didactic literature’.22 This model of reform however had obvious authoritarian consequences. Ten days before the law was announced Gentile had sent out a ministerial circular to all school principals and schools inspectors requiring all teachers to complete a short questionnaire giving details of the textbook used by each class which they taught. These signed question- naires were to be checked by principals and sent by the end of the month to the Ministry for Public Instruction, making sure that ‘no book escapes this investigation’.23 The details required included specification of author, title, publisher and price as well as an indication of how long the book had been in use for each respective class, 0230543081_04_ch03.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 59

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who had proposed its adoption, where it was bought by pupils and whether the teacher intended using it in the following year. The purpose of the questionnaire was to provide an evidence base for the Central Commission’s deliberations, and the objective of the Central Commission was to establish an ‘official list of approved textbooks’. This was referred to explicitly in rubric 1 of the decree law and it is the first example of legislated censorship in Fascist Italy. Publishers and authors intending to bring forward new books were required to submit personal details along with five printed copies (either published or in proof) and a fee of 75 lire for books intended for the first two years of the primary cycle, and 100 lire for all others. This provision had a predictable effect of self-censorship, especially for the smaller publishing houses in the provinces. The Central Commission was made up of teachers, men and women of letters and senior civil servants. The commissioners included Giuseppe Prezzolini, former editor of La Voce and enthusiast of Mussolini’s leadership style ten years before the March on Rome. Over a period of 14 months the commissioners dealt with textbooks for History, Geography, Grammar and Mathematics as well as readers. The commission’s first report, concerning Geography textbooks, was published in June 1923. It approved a select list of textbooks and rejected all the others. The tone of the review is consistent with the following judgement:

Leaving aside the various books rich in gross historical errors, what strikes one most piteously is the lack of moral seriousness in many authors, their absence of spiritual direction, their inability to rise above a pale repetition of anecdotes, biographies, stories and dates.24

The review considered new books and also books which had been in circulation for several decades with a view to recommending improvements in order to make the material more stimulating for children. The review was rigorous and robust. Of 459 anthologies (readers) submitted Lombardo Radice rejected 222, dividing the remaining 237 into ﬁve (subsequently four) categories and classifying 32 of them as praiseworthy for their artistic and pedagogical value. Textbooks for Mathematics and Religion were judged uniformly pedantic, on the one hand too dense but on the other full of gaps and likely to bore most children. Most were held to be written in deplorably poor Italian, and rejected on that basis. A small number of books were 0230543081_04_ch03.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 60

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classed as being appropriate for libraries of teacher-training colleges but not for the classroom. Some titles were approved on a transitional basis with mandatory recommendations for improvement, and the sure prospect of a review 12 months later. Implicit in the programme of the reviewers was an aversion to Positivism and to any form of social Realism as well as an outright opposition to stories of orphans and children abandoned and left to make their own way in the world.25 Such sentimental stories were not compatible with the formation of the disciplined and ethical state. An outcome of the review, perhaps not entirely consistent with these principles, was the re-launching of De Amicis’ sentimental novel Cuore as an approved text for elementary schools. Although economic conditions had improved, Pietro Fedele, who replaced Gentile’s immediate successor Alessandro Casati, in 1926 was still caught between government policy and the perennial problem of a limited budget. Decree law no. 209 of 7 January 1926 imposed a price freeze on schoolbooks for three years, even though the price of paper continued to rise as did labour costs owing to inﬂation. The price control was an obvious attempt to protect the prosperity of the middle classes in the light of Fascist monetary policy, i.e., the Quota 90 revaluation of the lira. For Fedele the question of school texts went hand in hand with the structural reform of rural life, Gentile’s educational equivalent of boniﬁca integrale to ‘reawaken in Italians the rural spirit’.26 Fedele, sceptical of Gentile’s elitism, performed the familiar argument in parliament that rural schools displayed ‘the spirit of the trenches’, where local teachers, with exemplary Fascist zeal overcame the problems of a paucity of resources by teaching with a very limited number of textbooks. This, he claimed, was proving ‘successful in both pedagogic and economic terms’. Fedele offered no metric to measure the pedagogic success, and while literacy rates did improve, the improvement was not dramatic: the war was not being won. The economic argument however linked neatly to the need to modernize the building stock of rural schools and provide funds for teachers’ salaries and pensions. Less money spent on books could mean more resource for building programmes and welfare. Reports from the South (Aquila, Bari, Cagliari, Campobasso, Cosenza, Palermo and Potenza), where illiteracy remained ‘an open wound’, supported the contention that poor school attendance was rooted in the cost of schoolbooks. Fedele argued for a state textbook on the grounds that money saved could be ploughed back into improving education. In the view of the 0230543081_04_ch03.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 61

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senior inspector of schools Alessandro Marcucci (who had been appointed by Gentile) ‘it would give us at least 20 million lire per year’. Fedele faced understandable opposition from spokesmen close to the publishing lobby such as Franco Ciarlantini and concerted action by publishing houses in the face of discounts and price freezes. Mondadori, the largest publisher in Milan, called for a commission to review the textbook industry, with equal representation from the publishing sector. Bemporad, the largest publisher in Florence, wanted the whole idea dropped. Gentile’s decree in 1923 had established that elementary schools public and private could not adopt textbooks other than those which appeared on the ofﬁcially-approved lists. This was a powerful political weapon. The ﬁrst report of the commission included comments on the merits of every book surveyed. Publishers could request an explanation in cases where their book had been rejected. There was a provision to appeal a decision and in theory they were free to amend their text and resubmit. The high cost, however, of submitting a text for scrutiny (75 lire for books intended for the two junior classes and 100 lire for all others) without any guarantee of success before the next commission, was such as to make publishers prudent, and to internalize the process of censorship. Of the history and geography textbooks approved, 15 were published by Bemporad in Florence.27 Among those I bimbi d’Italia si chiaman Balilla was singled out for praise as a volume which should be found ‘in the library of every little Italian boy and girl’. Six of the volumes approved were published by Mondadori in Milan. In the later review carried out by the Romano Commission, Fascist criteria became more explicit, and chairman Michele Romano noted that many books submitted for consideration lacked ‘Fascist spirit’. He continued:

We must instil a passion for everything that is heroic and for all the typically virile qualities (virtù) such as faithfulness, courage, work, perseverance, lack of self interest and probity as well as the cult of our forefathers and respect for authority and the hierarchy, without neglecting the gentle qualities which form the civilized basis of human goodness and generosity.28

Fascist ideology became more explicit in the content of schoolbooks with each successive review. For publishers, especially the smaller ones and those without strong Fascist credentials, whose books were not included on the lists, the outlook was bleak. 0230543081_04_ch03.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 62

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Consequences of the Gentile reform

Gentile held office for just 18 months. He was replaced briefly by Alessandro Casati, a descendent of Gabrio Casati the nineteenth- century educational reformer, in the reshuffle after the elections in 1924. Pietro Fedele took over from him in early 1925, as part of Mussolini’s seizure of dictatorial powers. Fedele held office for twice as long as Gentile. He continued the centralizing process which had been ushered in by the Reform Bill of 1923, but moved the focus from grooming an elite class, to putting the Fascist stamp on the school system. Under his leadership there was a further reduction in the number of prescribed books, and eventually the more drastic step of establishing an approved list of about 20 titles to which the state would buy the rights in order to raise 40,000,000 lire so as to be able to finance public education. The state thus came to exercise effective economic control over private publishing houses and so to regulate the market and to impose a de facto censorship on publishing for the schools sector, long before 1934, the year traditionally seen as the beginning of censorship in Fascist Italy, in the wake of Nazi book-burnings. A law of August 1928 ushered in the state textbook, the logical consequences of Fedele’s policy, with effect from January 1929. Lombardo Radice, chairman of Gentile’s first commission greeted this development with dismay, as having a deleterious effect on the learning experience in Italy’s schools and little to do with the inspiration of Gentile’s quixotic Reform Bill. The new law required further revisions of practically every textbook in circulation, at considerable expense on the part of publishing houses. Publishers active in the schools sector were up in arms. As a direct result of the libro di stato their warehouses were suddenly crammed with unwanted books. Franco Ciarlantini, president of the publishers’ association and close friend of Arnaldo Mussolini, estimated the loss in sales to be at least 48 million lire for the sector as a whole, judging by the cover price, not to mention a further 15 million on redundant typographical plant. This gives a graphic illustration of ideological censorship’s influence on the market.29 Fedele’s successor, Giuseppe Belluzzo, having been minister for the national economy, understood the commercial implications of this ideological bravado and was ready to compromise. He requested from the new president of the commission, Alessandro Melchiori, a list of 50% of the textbooks for history, geography, law and economics which were likely to be approved once appropriate revisions had been made, so that he could ensure a reasonable distribution of the spoils between 0230543081_04_ch03.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 63

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the large publishing houses. Thus Bemporad received a letter from the ministry in May 1928 explaining that Domenico Giannitrapani’s Albo geograﬁco e letture di geograﬁa would be approved if the following changes were made: The sentence ‘Not all of Italy forms part of the Kingdom of Italy’ should not be followed by ‘There are parts which are still subject to foreign powers’ but by the alternative sentence ‘The island of Corsica while geographically Italian belongs to France’.30 The publishing industry in Italy was backward and in most cases it was not in a position to gear up to the effective nationalization which Fascism imposed on it with the introduction of the state textbook. The policy of a national textbook had the direct effect of driving at least 33 small publishing houses out of business, but it appears to have been a failure in terms of projected sales on the ‘open’ market. The theory had been that forced adoption of an approved textbook would rationalize production, raise standards and sell copies to every child in the country. Yet sales of new books actually fell. The ministry responded by cutting the price of the books by 50% to the dismay of the publishers who were still left in the market and of booksellers with stock on their shelves. The publishers’ association lobbied the minister, in 1931–32 to carry out an inspection to ascertain that every boy and girl in the state had their own copy of the textbook. Mondadori even petitioned for a ban on the sale of second-hand books.31 The introduction of the libro di stato had profound implications for the publishing industry. A letter to Mussolini from the publishing house Ceschina of Milan, former publisher of Il Popolo d’Italia, gives a vivid indication of the problems for publishers cut out of that market:

With the setting in train of provisions relative to the adoption of the libro di stato, the state accorded exclusive rights for the printing and sale of the textbook to a group of thirty three publishing houses (out of a total of about 300 which had their own school texts in their warehouses and were therefore damaged by the reform). Thus it came about that this group has a monopoly on the printing and sale of the libro di stato, making an annual profit of five million lire. Apart from the fact that since 1929 no other publisher can benefit from this market, the Ceschina publishing house makes the observation that the publishers in this group, sure of a income guaranteed to them, feel free to enter other markets at competitive rates and offering discounts to booksellers such as to make impossible the lives of other publishers, which do not have the cushion of the school textbook. To make matters worse, the retailers – who are 0230543081_04_ch03.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 64

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always short of funds – are obliged to pay for the libro di stato in cash, with the result that they ﬁnd it difﬁcult to meet their obligations to other publishers.32

Ceschina was outside the charmed circle and was requesting a sub- vention from Mussolini, which it duly received. It is important to remember however that the libro dello stato initiative applied only to primary schools (scuole elementari). Post-primary education presented a much smaller and more disparate market, but it was a market which continued to offer some opportunities to publishers, although, as the Ceschina letter makes clear, those without a contract for the libro di stato were at a distinct disadvantage. After the 1923 legislation, the number of titles increased very signiﬁcantly for the scuole medie:33

Year No. of book titles % of book market 1923 490 8.06 1925 860 14.0 1927 1001 15.3

This was a market in which because of the different types of secondary schools, even for the most popular books, print runs of more than 200,000 made no economic sense. While there were about four million primary-school pupils, there were only about 300,000 in secondary education, and these were concentrated mainly in urban areas. The secondary-school market was therefore much more like the university sector. But the market did allow a survival strategy for the smaller publishing houses, such as Vallardi and Carabba, which had been squeezed out of the primary-schools market by Bemporad and Mondadori, on the basis of decisions made by the Commissioni centrali. The literary and humanist emphasis of Gentile’s reforms led to success in the secondary- schools market for anthologies which combined literature with history and politics.34 There is an irony here as Gentile himself favoured and promoted editions of complete texts (testo integrale) but the market response to his reforms was driven by the efﬁciencies which anthologies represented. A rise in the number of anthologies for the scuole medie led to wrangling over copyright. Galfré cites the example of Gentile’s son Federico wanting to anthologize some of Carducci’s poems and being granted grudgingly six pages by Zanichelli who held the copyright and who had offered initially just three pages, the legal minimum.35 Publishers entered into competition for the services of known authors whose names would provide endorsement for the anthologies 0230543081_04_ch03.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 65

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and thus secure market share. Grazia Deledda, future Nobel laureate, made an anti-Communist narrative contribution to rural values in 1930.36 The four main Florentine publishing houses, Bemporad, Sansoni, Le Monnier and Vallecchi, came increasingly under Gentile’s personal inﬂuence, especially in the 1930s, and Bemporad’s strategy in relation to his authors is indicative of the degree to which the successful publishing houses had internalized the process of censorship. In a letter of 1927 Bemporad explained to Arpalice Cuman Pertile, one of his most proliﬁc authors:

My ﬁrm has to insist to its authors that there is the closest harmony possible between our books and the ethos of Italian schools, in relation to the curriculum and to ministerial directives […] between books and the practice of the Catholic Church […] between books and the national ideals: independence, pride, and Italian autonomy; between books and the lifestyle promoted by Fascism, between books and the legislation which Fascism has put into effect in Italy in terms of the constitution, the administration and the unions; between books and the general directives for the physical health of the young, directives which Fascism wants to follow and see followed and see widely propagated.37

In response Cuman Pertile suggested small revisions to one of her books, such as placing a picture of Mussolini alongside ones of the king and an image of the crucifix. Bemporad was not satisfied that this would be seen as sufficiently Fascist to protect his investment in a new edition and therefore demanded far more extensive revisions. With these measures in place and this mindset embedded, the regime could claim disingenuously that it was not seeking to influence the market, and that when small publishers went to the wall they did so because they were not supplying what their customers demanded. Discussion of the market however would be incomplete without some consideration of the retail sector. There were clear differences between the interests of publishers and booksellers. The latter did not have the same exposure to risk or production cost, but they stood to lose out to direct selling and to bulk discounts for schools and public bodies. Competition between publishers for the market in the scuole medie pushed them in the direction of printing and distributing inspection copies to teachers. This was of course a commercial risk which put bulk-buying power in the hands of teachers. Publishers therefore had to compete in terms of both quality and value, which allowed for price 0230543081_04_ch03.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 66

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wars and removed all remaining small players from the market. It also drove down the unit cost of the royalty rates for authors.38 Effective nationalization did not succeed in resolving the sectors’ problem of discounting books. In autumn 1930 the booksellers of Naples reported angrily that some schools in the province continued the practice of subsidized selling of books to pupils, on the (probably reasonable) pretext that the schools were meeting the needs of poor families by their actions. The minister repeated his ban on the practice which, after almost eight years of this consistent message, indicates limited success for the policy’s implementation. Monica Galfré argues convincingly that the material problem of discounts and local arrangements with publishing houses lies at the heart of the libro di stato debate, rather than the legislation or Gentile’s Actualism. In one way or another, teachers remained a cause for concern in the eyes of the regime. It was reassuring for the state to have a list of approved textbooks. This represented a state-directed horizon of expectation for teachers and pupils, but it also left enough of an element of choice at teachers’ discretion to worry both government and the publishing industry. That was particularly true of the scuole medie. At the end of December 1928 the minister Belluzzo sent out a circular to headteachers requesting a list of the textbooks used in secondary schools. One month later and just after the law on state textbooks for primary schools came into force, Belluzzo sent out a second circular indicating that secondary-school teachers also had an obligation to adopt textbooks which conformed to the ethos and values of the Fascist state. This was a new and more subtle approach than the legislative route. Teachers were now required to act as censors, by bringing the power of the customer to bear on the publishing industry. The free market was thus harnessed to Fascist will.39 A ministerial circular of May 1930 warned that:

The adherence of the textbook to the spirit and action of the Fascist regime must consist in more than just pompous phrases. They must interpret their subject in a way which responds to our new culture which is intimately and passionately Italian in character.

This directive had largely been anticipated by the publishers and it worked across the curriculum, most obviously in the humanities where the work of writers such as D’Annunzio and Oriani replaced writers from the wider European canon, such as Balzac. The fascistization of the textbook extended to the sciences and to languages as well. Further 0230543081_04_ch03.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 67

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reforms in 1933 removed Rousseau and Croce from the philosophy curriculum. Schools were required to terminate their subscriptions to Croce’s journal La Critica, which he had founded along with Gentile three decades earlier. This move was again consistent with the regime’s strategy of imposing economic sanctions on its enemies, where these had the potential to be effective. These blacklists were issued with increasing frequency and breadth of coverage from 1929 onwards.40

‘Consensus’ and the marginalization of Gentile

Gentile had come from humble origins in Sicily. In December 1932 he acquired a majority stake in Sansoni and became chairman of the board at Le Monnier, installing his family in positions of power and creating a dominant publishing interest in Florence with two well- respected brands and extensive market penetration, especially in the universities. In 1933 he took a signiﬁcant interest in Bemporad along with Armando Paoletti and Vito Benedetto Orzalesi, driving Enrico Bemporad out of his family business in 1934. The centres of schools publishing were Milan (Mondadori), Turin (Paravia, Sei), Bologna (Zanichelli), Abruzzo (Carabba) and Sicily (Principato and Sandron). After 1929 these publishers sought to build up good relations and curry favour with the regime through self-censorship and the marketing of blatant propaganda. The results were publications such as Paravia’s Italian Pioneers and Martyrs in East Africa (1936). Gentile himself however began to withdraw from public political life into the more rareﬁed atmosphere of the Accademia d’Italia and his editorship of the Enciclopedia italiana. The fact that he engaged known anti-Fascists as contributors to the latter has been taken by his posthumous supporters as an indication of his independence of mind and his distancing himself from Fascism. The latter contention might even be sustained were it not for his subsequent activities in the Repubblica sociale italiana. It is nonetheless true that a distance did open up between his educational reforms and the policy of the regime in the 1930s. One main reason for this is also related to a form of censorship. On 11 February 1929 Mussolini signed the Lateran Pacts with the Vatican, taking by surprise even members of his own government who had been unaware of the negotiations which had been underway for some years. It was not a surprise to Gentile. As a convinced secularist, he had been entrusted by Mussolini with responsibility for negotiating with Father Tacchi Venturi. His earlier pronouncements on the role of the Church had not won much favour with the Catholic hierarchy. In 0230543081_04_ch03.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 68

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his ﬁrst signiﬁcant act on becoming minister in 1922 he stressed the power of the state to control schools by revoking the provision which allowed pupils to be absent from school for a religious festival which was not recognized by the state. Apparently backtracking, in a ministerial communication of 26 December 1922 he had announced his intention to make religious education ‘the principal foundation of public education and the whole moral restoration of the Italian spirit’. But this pragmatic adoption of religion for reasons of state was an ambiguous compromise and it did not go far enough to please the Vatican. In an interview published ten days later (La Tribuna, 5 January 1923) Gentile explained that by making religious education obligatory, in the manner of the Casati Law in the previous century, ‘Italian children should be taught the Catholic religion in the same way as they should be taught the language of the Italian writers’.41 Gentile’s concern however was not in Catholic terms with the children’s immortal souls but with their sense of discipline and culture. To forge a strong state Catholicism was preferable to any form of Protestantism because:

Leaving to the individual complete freedom of conscience and allowing everyone to come up with his own credo, offers much less force of cohesion (forza di fusione) or reduction to unity of the thinking spirit.42

This preference was consistent with confessional policy throughout the ventennio. Giorgio Rochat in his history of the small Protestant communities under Fascism has argued that their treatment:

Demonstrates just how precarious religious liberty was, when it had to depend of the personal whims of prefects and their capacity to resist the inﬂuence of the local Catholic hierarchy, without any concrete opportunity for the evangelicals to be protected by the laws of the land or have recourse to the central authorities.43

Gentile’s strategy corresponded to Mussolini’s in seeking a rap- prochement with the Catholic Church in order to consolidate power. His interview in Tribuna was sufﬁcient to win him some praise in the pages of L’Osservatore romano and Civiltà cattolica where his words were interpreted in Catholic terms. The editor wrote that the minister Gentile deserves ‘the sincere approval of the majority of Italians, that is to say the Catholics, although their beliefs are far from the theories of the philosopher’. 0230543081_04_ch03.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 69

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These public utterances accompanied private dialogue between Gentile and the Vatican, authorized by Mussolini, originally with the intention of undermining the Partito popolare and yielding Catholic consensus for the new order. Under pressure from the Vatican, Gentile instructed the Central Commission for school textbooks to permit the Church freedom in selection of the appropriate teaching materials for religious education. Gentile and Tacchi Venturi were in regular contact from 1923 onwards, through which Gentile was permitted to consult Giordano Bruno’s papers in the secret archive of the Inquisition. Two years later the papers were published in the Giornale critico della filosofia italiana, edited by Monsignor Enrico Caruso.44 The public war of words continued however between the Catholics and the Actualists, Gentile’s philosophical disciples. Padre Agostino Gemelli in Milan launched an attack on Gentile in the pages of La Civiltà cattolica at the time of the signing of the Lateran Pacts, criticizing the bringing into schools of works by Bruno, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Rosmini and the other heretical philosophers introduced by the 1923 reforms, adding pithily that ‘no philosophical system negates Christian values as much as Idealism, even though it may use our very words’.45 This attack provoked a swift reply from Gentile in the Giornale critico della filosofia italiana, defending his philosophy from the charges of heresy. But by 1929, as the libro di stato was introduced, Catholics were gaining ground against Gentile’s Actualism, and threatening to put his works on the Index of Prohibited Books. The Fascist consensus began to shift away from Gentile. When the conservative monarchist and quadrumvir, Cesare Maria De Vecchi, became Minister for National Education in January 1935, after having spent five years as ambassador to the Vatican, he brought to his new post a personal commitment to compromise between Fascism and the Church, and an antipathy to Gentile and his educational reforms. The tide had turned against Gentile definitively: the previous year, all of his writings had been placed on the Index. De Vecchi was thoroughly unpopular with the teaching profession, and regarded by Gentile’s circle as an ignoramus, but given Mussolini’s imperial ambitions in early 1935 it is not difficult to see why he wanted a philistine hard-liner in charge of his Ministry for National Education.46 He was replaced by Giuseppe Bottai at the end of 1936 who set about drafting a Carta della scuola or Schools’ Charter, to undo most of Gentile’s reforms. Italy’s entry into the war in 1940 frustrated attempts at implementing Bottai’s charter. 0230543081_04_ch03.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 70

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Hearts, minds and bodies

The introduction of the state textbook (libro di stato) in 1928, represented a U-turn on the proposals for reform which had been brought forward by Gentile and by Lombardo Radice. Their original project had been to appoint an expert commission, made up in part of teachers and educationalists, to advise the government on the choice of appropriate textbooks, in order to provide the basis for a spiritual renewal of Italian youth, where teaching and learning would become a stimulating experience rather than rote-based tedium. This reform, however, paved the way for far greater state control, and for the scenario which manifested itself in 1928 when the state rejected the traditional, liberal element of a teacher’s judgement by imposing an approved set of textbooks. In the view of Anna Ascenzi and Roberto Sani, Gentile’s Idealist proposal became the Wooden Horse through which the Fascist regime was able to impose, in the name of the state, its conception of the school textbook as an instrument of ideological and political propaganda.47 To give a brief example, the following is Grazia Deledda, writing in 1930, for the 12-year olds of the terza elementare. The Communists, she wrote are people who ‘do not understand other people’s rights, won by sacrifice’. On the other hand, they don’t really mean what they say and hard work could improve them: ‘continual contact with nature, with the dawn, sunsets and sun-drenched noontides […] makes them good, although they don’t at times want to appear so’.48 Despite his later opposition, the values upheld by Lombardo Radice and his successor Giovanni Vidari, of nationalism, the cult of the Fatherland, the exaltation of the Great War as a further step in the process begun by the Risorgimento, the sniping at democracy and the general social conservatism, all played their part in the forging of commonsense-values in the everyday life of the regime. The cumulative effect of Gentile’s reforms was to reduce the status of scientific and technical education at school and university in a short-sighted and traditionalist attempt to promote education in the humanities in order to mould a new ruling class. Literature, history and philosophy, previously the domain of the liceo were extended to the istituti magistrali and the istituti scientifici. Even fewer pupils went on to read science and engineering at the universities at a time when the university population actually doubled. Therefore many more humanities graduates emerged on to the labour market as teachers, lawyers, journalists and especially as civil servants. 0230543081_04_ch03.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 71

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Breakdown of university students by faculty, 1913–14 to 1940–41

1913–14 1920–21 1926–27 1930–31 1936–37 1940–41 Law 9,382 9,766 8,871 10,073 14,097 20,937 Economics 1,379 7,212 5,886 8,285 13,008 23,011 Languages & 1,908 3,586 2,501 2,709 7,756 15,779 Literature Teacher training 282 941 1,070 1,456 6,229 13,800 Medicine 5,342 10,208 8,865 9,991 13,829 13,781 Engineering 6,332 12,362 6,567 4,290 4,472 9,331 Science 1,325 4,030 2,906 2,269 3,347 8,840 Pharmacy 1,080 2,350 3,228 2,734 2,266 2,567 Agricultural 547 1,391 1,027 1,130 1,382 2,533 science Applied 0 0 152 121 127 450 chemistry Others 449 1,393 1,791 3,204 4,999 16,029 Total 28,026 53,239 42,864 46,262 71,512 127,058

Source: ISTAT, Statistica dell’istruzione superiore nell’anno accademico 1945–46 (Rome, 1948).49

Gentile’s reforms were more traditionally Liberal than Fascist in any meaningful sense. Bottai quipped at a meeting with teachers in November 1938 that it could be described as ‘the most Fascist of reforms’ only because chronologically it was the ﬁrst one to take place.50 Mussolini had been impressed by the speed with which Gentile carried out his project, but he had no interest in producing a ruling class of young men versed in the Humanities. Instead Mussolini wanted to recruit teachers to the cause, and to produce a population of young warriors and their wives who would give their unreﬂecting devotion to the state. In the realization of the ethical state and the daily functioning of the regime, Mussolini’s ‘most Fascist of reforms’ was meant to change hearts and minds. In some ways the policy succeeded. Many teachers took very seriously their role of monitoring and reporting behaviour and attitudes which were unconventional or politically incorrect. Those who joined the PNF – and many did – saw it as their duty to root out from the profession colleagues who displayed a lack of commitment to the ideals of the ethical state. In December 1933, a male primary school teacher in Perugia, Raffaele went to ask a female colleague in another classroom a routine question about work.51 He noticed, on the wall behind her chair, and beside the enormous portrait of the duce, a small postcard depicting 0230543081_04_ch03.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 72

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a small boy. He asked his colleague who the little boy was. According to the police report she replied: ‘Don’t you see? It’s Benito Mussolini as a boy’. To which Raffaele joked: ‘So he’s always had that delinquent look about him!’ His colleague was not amused. She reported him to the carabinieri and Raffaele was arrested. Despite decoration for valour in the Great War, and the prefect’s consequent recommendation for leniency, the matter was referred to Bocchini, who, after his daily consultation with Mussolini, ordered that Raffaele be sent to confino. The Opera nazionale Balilla or ONB, was established in 1926 as a politicized version of the Boy Scouts, to provide paramilitary instruction and male bonding in military ceremonies and rituals, as part of boyhood experience. Mussolini’s infamous slogan, libro e moschetto, fascista perfetto (A book and a rifle make the perfect Fascist) made its way into school life in 1928 when the running of many rural schools was given over to the ONB. Some of their activities can be viewed on the LUCE newsreels which are now online as part of the Istituto’s archive.52 A parallel Party-controlled network, the fasci giovanili di combattimento was set up in 1930, with a similar mission, but aimed at the working classes and rural youth, and the two networks existed in a spirit of rivalry until 1937 when they were merged into the GIL, the Gioventù italiana del Littorio, which was managed by the PNF. Rates of illiteracy did decline under Fascism, in common with the rest of the developed world, but the decline was spread unevenly throughout the peninsula, with persistent peaks in the rural south, where in 1936 after more than a decade of Fascist improvements, 21% of brides could not sign their names on the marriage register.53 The raising of educational aspiration among working-class women was not a high priority of Fascism’s programme. Employment rates doubled in the public sector during the 1930s. This was good news for the middle classes whose position was consoli- dated in terms of wealth and educational opportunity. Many of these new public sector jobs were in education. Educational reform was creating additional posts for which university degrees were required, but in 1931–32 it is estimated that only 3% of university students came from working-class backgrounds in contrast to 5% 20 years earlier, before the First World War.54 Virtually none of these were women. Alongside those figures however it should be noted by in 1935–36, 17.4% of university students were female, as opposed to less than 4% in 1914.55 The real beneficiaries of Fascist educational policies appear therefore to have been the daughters of the middle classes, whose 0230543081_04_ch03.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 73

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reading tastes, as we shall see in a later chapter, caused further problems for the Fascist censors. Many of these young women gravitated towards jobs as teachers, usually science teachers, as under the Fascist laws women were prevented from teaching history, philosophy, Italian and Latin, while the Catholic Church had its own dogmatic reservations about their teaching religion. Certainly, young female teachers, especially those entering the profession having themselves been educated in Italian schools after 1922, appear to have been the most zealous when it came to reporting examples of unorthodoxy.56 Their reports could have profound effects on the lives of both older colleagues and children or their families. Even occasional passers-by could be in trouble if they got on the wrong side of the young maestra. On the morning of 22 October 1939, in the little village of Cedegolo in the hills around Brescia, a young maestra was taking her class for an orderly walk. The children, dressed in their Balilla and figli di lupa uniforms were singing suitably wholesome Fascist songs which they had learned from listening to the radio. An elderly man, observing the scene, was reported to the police by the outraged maestra, for suggesting to a group of little girls from her class that they should sing Bandiera rossa instead of the song they were singing. Just in case they were unfamiliar with the tune he began singing it for them. Police investigations revealed that the man was married, unemployed and living in dire poverty. He was sent to confino in a remote part of the province of Catanzaro.57 Disrespectful boys could find their behaviour reported to the prefect or even have their homework sent to the local PNF boss. On 5 December 1933, in a town near Perugia, the maestra asked her class if they knew who had founded the Opera nazionale Balilla. Twelve-year old Gustavo, whose father was a member of the PNF, replied in an insolent tone: ‘That blackguard (beccamorto) Benito Mussolini!’ The carabiniere report noted that Gustavo had enjoyed the benefits of being a member of the ONB for five years, but that he was arrogant, astute, deceitful and not fond of his studies. Having established that his family was above suspicion of anti- Fascist sentiment, the prefect concluded that the boy must be tainted with a moral defect, with the implication that he represented a danger to moral development of other children: a cancer to be removed. Gustavo, aged 12, was sent to a reformatory for insulting the duce. Fascism had taken less of a hold among university staff. Towards the end of 1931 university professors were required to take an oath of loyalty.58 Gentile conceived of this oath as a means of providing a public repudiation for those who had signed Croce’s anti-Fascist manifesto and 0230543081_04_ch03.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 74

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who now wished to hold on to their university posts. It was intended as a humiliation and an extension of the oath which he had imposed on teachers in his 1923 reforms. The university oath, published in the Gazzetta ufﬁciale on 8 October 1931 read:

I swear to be faithful to the king, to his royal successors and to the Fascist regime, to observe loyally the Statute and the other laws of the state, to carry out the ofﬁce of lecturer and to discharge all my other academic duties with the aim of producing subjects who are diligent, honest, and devoted to the country and to the Fascist regime. I swear that I do not and that I will not belong to associations or parties whose activities are incompatible with my ofﬁce.59

More than simply a humiliation, any academic who took the oath in bad faith knew he could be setting himself up to be pilloried as a hypocrite and forced out of his position anyway. The academics were bound in golden chains. Losing one’s job in those circumstances would have meant emigration, ﬁnancial ruin and consequent family break-up or a morally-corrupting compromise with the ethical state. The oath, however, was not accepted without protest. Pope Pius XI in his encyclical Non abbiamo bisogno of 19 June 1931 had criticized a similar oath of loyalty to the PNF which was being used as a weapon against Azione cattolica. Agostino Gemelli, rettore of the Sacro Cuore in Milan negotiated a dispensation for staff at his university, a step reprobated by the pope who saw the dangers of breaking ranks. Pius XI took the unusual step of issuing an anonymous criticism of the oath on the front page of the Osservatore romano, arguing that the words ‘Fascist regime’ ought to be replaced by ‘government of the state’.60 Croce was opposed to the imposition of the oath as one more Fascist attack on liberty, but he recognized that as a senator of private means he had no moral authority to advise men to give up their livelihoods for the sake of principle. In any case he took the view that it was preferable for sceptics to remain within the university system in order to keep alive some spirit of anti-Fascist liberty of thought, for the beneﬁt of the students and the future of Italy. He passed this advice on in private communications. Unlike Pius XI, he did not have access to media of wide circulation. Togliatti’s line of reasoning differed from Croce’s but it resulted in the same advice: he instructed the relatively few Communist academics to take the oath as a meaningless gesture in order to further the interests of the party and the anti-Fascist cause. 0230543081_04_ch03.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 75

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A total of 12 professors refused to take the oath. Gentile had reason to feel vindicated in that initiative at least. Gentile’s school reforms, intended to confer status and prestige on the humanities had the direct and probably unintended effect of con- signing the future of Italian science and technology teaching to the daughters of middle class families, many of whom appear to have cherished the ideals of the ethical state. In most cases this appears to have had a deadening effect on the pupils’ educational experience, even if though did create true believers among the ranks of the teaching profession right up to the point in 1941 when it began to dawn on the Italian population at large that Fascist rhetoric and propaganda were not sufﬁcient to win the war. Aurelio Lepre has cited coffee talk involving another maestra, in Sardinia on 9 November 1940, reported by an ambulant OVRA spy:

The victory is within our grasp. It’s ours for the taking. The Duce’s words were holy words, announcing our going to war. And he was so manly! Our motto is: we will win, and we will. This man is truly led by God […] he is truly the man whom Italy needed.61

But while doubtless there were true believers among the teaching profession, the experience of Fascist schooling probably had less in common with Gentile’s vision of active learning than with the tedious and authoritarian experience conveyed by Federico Fellini in Amarcord. In political terms the most important side effect of Gentile’s reform was the promotion of censorship as a tool which could be used to distort the market. It was used adroitly to create apparently free market conditions in which publishers, booksellers and writers had to internalize censorship in order to remain in a market that made them dependent on state subsidy at the personal whim of the duce, and in which readers in school and in society at large were fed a daily ration of censored information and interpretation manipulated by ideology masquerading as commonsense. That model, however, presupposes a passive, uncritical readership in order to achieve its aims. That was not always the case: in April 1939, a 12-year old boy in Macerata, Lucio, handed in his homework essay on the subject of ‘Our duce’. He appears not to have believed Grazia Deledda. The essay gave a vivid description of Mussolini’s Socialist youth, but then continued:

Rich now, forgetting the battles in defence of the proletariat, with vile manoeuvres he has become the plutocratic Dictator of this 0230543081_04_ch03.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 76

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Italy of nearly 44 million people, where more than 40 million are forced to live a miserable, poverty-stricken existence while the rest live in abundance, on the hog’s back under the ﬂuttering ﬂags: the ridiculous farce of imperial Italy dying of hunger.62

In disgust, the maestra, ‘widow of one of the province’s first Fascists, sister of a volunteer in Spain and another one in East Africa’ and a true believer in Fascist values, confiscated the child’s exercise book and sent it to the secretary of the local Fascist federation in Macerata. He paid a visit to the school, accompanied by the commander of the local carabinieri, and they questioned the maestra and Lucio separately. It tran- spired that Lucio’s mother, a widow, had been befriended by Fulgo, a middle-aged builder’s labourer, and that Fulgo was taking a hand in the boy’s education at home. Arrested by the federation secretary, Fulgo confirmed that he had explained Italian politics to Lucio, from the viewpoint of an unemployed Communist who had been sentenced for desertion in 1918, amnestied in 1922, and later sent to confino in Ustica from 1926 to 1933. He was condemned to another four years in confino by Mussolini for corrupting young Lucio. Released in August 1943, he died in action as one of the partisan leaders in the province of Macerata.63 0230543081_05_ch04.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 77

4 Journalism as Mission

Journalism occupied a special place in the life of the Fascist regime. Next to educating the rising generations, journalism seemed to represent the most effective means to mould consensus and consolidate power. That said, throughout the first decade in power the Fascist conception of journalism rarely strayed beyond the print media, despite the opportunities for mass communication presented by radio and cinematic news-reel technologies. Mussolini understood how to run a newspaper and he surrounded himself with newspaper men, promoting former journalists and press officers to positions of great power within his government. Some fell from grace spectacularly: Cesare Rossi was kidnapped by covert security forces in Marseilles and brought back to Italy so that he could be sent to confino, Galeazzo Ciano died before a firing squad, on the orders of his father- in-law at Christmas 1941. Alessandro Pavolini, ex-Minister for Popular Culture, who signed Ciano’s death warrant, died himself with his duce at Dongo. The only one of the duce’s associates to take his own life when Mussolini lost power in 1943 was Manlio Morgagni, head of the Agenzia Stefani and a former editor of Il Popolo d’Italia. Mostly, however, the story of journalism under the regime has less to do with obsessive loyalty and violent death, and more to do with money, rivalries, censorship, protectionism, resistance to innovation, resentments and frustrations.

Inspiring loyalty

On 10 October 1928, the directors of about 70 daily newspapers, all of them male, were summoned to Palazzo Chigi in order to hear a speech from Mussolini which has come to be known as ‘Il giornalismo come

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missione’ or Journalism as Mission.1 In it Mussolini set out to reject criticism that he was muzzling a free press, and to articulate his views concerning the mission of the Fascist journalist. The address reiterated that the draconian legislation of January 1925 was fundamental to the direction of a Fascist press, which had the duty to be a force in the service of the regime. Applying this principle, it followed that the press was to censor out stories and interpretations which were damaging to the regime and to promote ones which were useful to furthering Fascist aims and objectives:

In Italy, unlike in other countries, rather than being a profession or a trade, journalism becomes a mission of great importance and deli- cacy, because in the contemporary era, [second in signiﬁcance] after the schools which teach the next generation, it is journalism which circulates among the masses and carries out its work of informing and sensitizing (informazione e formazione).2

In a neat piece of sophistry, the duce went on to argue that the Italian press under Fascism had more freedom than any other national press because in other countries newspapers got their orders from ‘plutocratic groups’, parties and individuals, and were driven by sales ﬁgures to publish scandal and salacious news stories. Echoing a confessional turn of phrase in a characteristically blas- phemous manner, Italian journalism, on the other hand, he argued, had perfect freedom because it served just one cause and one regime. Departing from quasi religious discourse, and in order to preserve the illusion of diversity, he used the famous musical simile of setting the tone:

I consider Fascist Italian journalism to be like an orchestra. You tune to a common pitch. This note is not given by the government through its Press Ofﬁces […]. It is the pitch which Fascist journalism sets for itself. It knows how to serve the regime. It does not need to await daily orders. […] But within this common pitch there is a diversity which avoids cacophony and instead produces full and divine harmony.3

Thus, for example, provincial newspapers were to avoid world news in a rational division of labour, which left foreign news to the dailies with national circulation. But all were to unite to create and maintain 0230543081_05_ch04.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 79

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an atmosphere of consensus. The regime’s war against adjectives stems from this speech too. Mussolini warned, in matters of style, that:

Six years of the deeds of the Fascist Revolution are greater than any word, and certainly greater than a profusion of words. Nouns render adjectives superﬂuous.4

Even more unhelpful to the regime than traditional journalistic discourse, he warned, was excessive space given over to cronaca nera, or sensational news, aimed at boosting sales rather than promoting a positive image of Fascist Italy. Fascist newspapers were to be discreet and balanced, giving no hostages to fortune which opponents abroad might use against the regime. On the other hand, matters of opinion in art, science and philosophy were to be open to vigorous debate, where party membership was no guarantee of being in the right. By the time he made this speech in late 1928, opposition newspapers had been suppressed and the old liberal titles such as Il Corriere della Sera and La Stampa had been placed in the hands of editors sympathetic to the regime. Mussolini had his own direct daily-newspaper interest in the form of Il Popolo d’Italia, edited by his brother in Milan, and the brothers spoke on the telephone most evenings about news stories for the following day. Mussolini also had a less direct interest in a Roman daily, Il Tevere, which he founded in December 1924. It was edited by Telesio Interlandi, with whom he had regular, unminuted meetings. Mussolini produced anonymous pieces for Il Tevere, and it would be fair to regard it as a vehicle for ideas and debates which were regarded as too radical or polemical for the mainstream press under Fascism.5 The purpose of the October 1928 speech was to motivate the leaders in the Italian press. His audience was well aware that behind the words of encouragement and occasional reproach, there lurked polemic with Giuseppe Bottai who had criticized the Italian print media in his Critica fascista for being grey and uninspiring. They were also aware that the threat of sanctions had not gone away and that it hung over any attempt to boost sales at the expense of discipline and the good reputation of the regime. It is an unusual conception of a free press.

From Press Ofﬁce to independent ministry

‘Journalism as Mission’ was delivered within weeks of a shake up at the Press Ofﬁce. Lando Ferretti, sports journalist and Fascist of the 0230543081_05_ch04.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 80

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First Hour, replaced Capasso Torre in September 1928. Unlike his aristocratic predecessor, Ferretti had no hesitation in transforming the Ufﬁcio stampa into a propaganda machine, on the model of the Ufﬁcio propaganda of the PNF, in which he had worked previously. His instincts were more demotic and his tone with editors and prefects was more strident than that of Capasso Torre. The following, for example, is a telegram to the High Commissioner of Naples, 5 June 1929 sent at 13.30:

It is quite appropriate that Il Mezzogiorno of Naples should publish a lengthy item on the eruption of Vesuvius. But it is not right that the eruption itself should take up two columns, under the cinematographic title ‘Fire Magic’. That is journalistic licence which I pray Your Excellency to mute in line with the instructions issued from this ofﬁce yesterday. Ferretti6

In 1931 he persuaded Mussolini to institute a propaganda section in the Ufficio stampa, to sit alongside the existing sections for the Italian and foreign press. The Press Office had therefore expanded its role from its original monitoring of the domestic press, under Rossi, and the foreign press, under Capasso Torre. The function of the propaganda section would be to spread ideas of Italianità and Romanità in the run up to the Decennale, the tenth anniversary of the March on Rome. In spite of this forward planning, however, Ferretti was replaced in December 1931, after three years in post, by Gaetano Polverelli, another former editor of Il Popolo d’Italia and a political animal to his finger-tips. Polverelli was a committed Fascist who, as Minister for Popular Culture, would later vote against Grandi’s motion to the Gran Consiglio in July 1943, which brought the regime to an end, and would follow Mussolini to the RSI. He took over the role of press secretary in the same month that Starace was appointed secretary of the PNF, in another instance of Mussolini’s periodic changing of the guard. Polverelli immediately set about browbeating newspaper editors and proprietors, so that they would appoint reliable Fascists to important positions within their enterprises. He encouraged a process of myth making in relation to the duce and to the image of Italy which the regime wanted to present to its people and to the world. Ferretti and Polverelli had moved the focus of the Ufficio stampa from monitoring and preventive censorship to propaganda and productive censorship, shaping the news agenda. Both Cannistraro and Guerri cite 0230543081_05_ch04.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 81

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a circular from Ferretti, issued in 1931, which sums up the role set out for newspapers in Fascist Italy at this point: ‘Newspapers must be organs of propaganda for Italianità and the regime’.7 The means to achieve this end were to be on the one hand a myth making of the person of Mussolini as both an elite political leader and as supercontadino and on the other consistent and uncritical praise of Italy and her government’s actions, occasionally accompanied by denigration of foreign governments. This treatment of Italian affairs extended to Mussolini’s obsession with ﬁltering out cronaca nera. Polverelli wrote a very detailed document in 1931 (‘Rinnovare il tipo di giornale’), setting out ofﬁcial communications policy, when he took up his new post:

One must reproduce regularly the salient ideas expressed by the Duce in his most recent speeches […] make the front page uniform with titles on seven columns […] improve the pagination technique […] promote an ardent passion for Italian and Fascist identity, which should shine from every issue of the newspaper […] you must check the news and the articles from the national and Fascist point of view, asking yourselves the question, are these publications helpful or unhelpful to Italy and to the Regime? […] you must illustrate periodically the institutions, the projects and the initiatives of the Regime […] guide the paper towards optimism, confidence and faith in the future. Get rid of alarmist, catastrophic and depressing news […] you must present social welfare programmes only in terms of their organizational side without dwelling on sentiment so as not to give out abroad the impression of grave poverty, which does not exist here […] it is a serious error to publish in newspapers photographs of socialists, communists, etc. It’s time to have done with articles on old poverty-stricken Italy, divided and discordant […] You must bring together all news in the foreign papers which relates to the Regime and to Fascism, as well as news on the spread of Fascism throughout the world […] you must publicize all news which refers to notable acts of Fascists. Fascist women must be phys- ically healthy so as to become mothers of healthy children, according to the ‘rules for life’ set out by the Duce; so there must be an end to images of female figures which are artificially thin or masculine as they represent the type of barren woman of decadent western society. […] Court reports must be checked for political soundness, cutting anything that might damage the credit or interests of the nation […] Photographs of Italian events and panoramas must always be examined for their political effect, so if it is a photograph 0230543081_05_ch04.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 82

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of a crowd, shoot the photographs with blank spaces, if the story is about new roads, or an area of monuments, etc., leave out the ones which do not give a good impression of order, of activity, of trafﬁc, etc […] Do not publish articles, poems or titles in dialect. The encouragement of dialect literature runs counter to the spiritual and political directives of the Regime which are resolutely unitary. Regionalism and dialects are the residue of centuries of the division and servitude of the old Italy […] You should no longer use the expression ‘the Mezzogiorno’ […] nor talk about the family of the Duce […] you should take a constructive interest in artists and professionals, important forces for the Nation.8

In May 1933 Joseph Goebbels visited Italy’s cultural institutions and imparted his experience of even greater centralization in Germany. Just over three months later, in August 1933 Polverelli was replaced by the duce’s son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano, recently recalled from his tour of duty in China, along with his wife and first-born, Mussolini’s first grandchild. Ciano belonged to a younger generation, and was son of a Fascist of the First Hour, rather than being one himself. He had educated, conservative middle-class tastes and had some experience of journalism. Furthermore he had diplomatic training and a far less heavy-handed approach to dealing with editors and journalists. Ciano expanded the Press Office assigning seven journalists to collect from and distribute news to the prefects in Rome, Florence, Milan, Turin, Bologna, Naples and Palermo. Ciano formalized the preventive censorship implicitly put in train by Ferretti and Polverelli, by requiring publishers and printers to submit to their local prefect three copies of every text, design or picture which they intended to publish or otherwise distribute. The prefect was to keep one copy and forward the others to the Ufficio stampa and to the Direzione generale di pubblica sicurezza, in the Ministry of the Interior. The copy held locally was to be examined by an official from the prefecture and one from the Pubblica sicurezza. Material which was considered politically suspect was to be referred immediately to the Ufficio stampa for a judgement. Material which gave offence to morals or public decency (including information on birth control) was to be referred to the Pubblica sicurezza. Prefects were also to make rulings on language policy, something well outside the brief normally associated with the security forces. There was understandable confusion among the prefects in relation to local newspapers and their use of regional Italian and of dialect. In 0230543081_05_ch04.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 83

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response to their various requests for clariﬁcations Ciano issued the following document on 10 August 1934:

The principle has not been applied consistently, according to which ‘dialect literature runs counter to the spiritual and political directives of the Regime, which are resolutely unitary, since regionalism and the dialects which are its principal expression are the residue of centuries of division and servitude’. Indeed in some regions the criteria have been applied so loosely that not only have newspapers escaped sequestration even though they print articles and poems in dialect, they have not even been reported to this Office. In other regions the criteria have been applied more rigidly and it is natural that we hear rumours of discontent from these latter when it comes to light that some folklore displays take place as usual, such as the San Giovanni song contest in Rome and the Piedigrotta in Naples, while others do not such as the Conca d’oro in Palermo. You must take account of the dialect productions which form the repertory of the different companies. The Press Office issues the following definitive clarifications which may fix the criteria to be observed, uniformly and unequivocally. These criteria are: (1) Suppress dialect newspapers and magazines, forbid articles, dialogues and poems in dialect, any publication which flouts this is to be sequestered, the director to receive a warning and to lose his licence for a subsequent infraction; (2) Refuse permission for new publications, unless they be reproductions of the work of old authors which have entered into the national literature; (3) Allow dialect song competitions only where these are established and traditional.9

Directives of this kind became both more frequent and more consistent as the 1930s progressed. In September 1934 the Press Ofﬁce was transformed into an Under- secretariat for Press and Propaganda. Ciano had persuaded Mussolini to increase his budget in order to take on more staff and to move from the Viminale, headquarters of the Ministry of the Interior, just south of Stazione Termini, to a more prestigious location on the Via Veneto.10 This enhancement of the press ofﬁcer’s brief corresponded with both Ciano’s personal ambition and with developments in Mussolini’s foreign policy which would soon lead to the invasion of Ethiopia and the imposition of sanctions by the League of Nations. Despite Mussolini’s protestations in his speech on journalism as mission about not issuing order to the press, the veline – instructions to 0230543081_05_ch04.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 84

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the press duplicated on carbon paper – became an aspect of daily life for Italian newspaper men under Polverelli’s time in charge. Before that there had been occasional requests to the press, going back to spring 1924, during Rossi’s tenure, which it would not have been wise for the press to ignore, on pain of sequestration: but these were not systematic orders as such. Gastone Silvano Spinetti, who worked in the Ufﬁcio stampa for many years, published a memoir in De Felice’s journal Storia contemporanea in 1971, detailing how the process of daily press brieﬁngs worked in practice:

Around 1pm he [Mussolini] handed over to the press officer all the communications he had received which he wanted to see carried in the press, along with his modifications, abbreviations and instructions for editors. Some communications instead went into his bin. When the press officer got back to his desk we had to get out as quickly as possible the communications edited by Mussolini and his instructions for the Agenzia Stefani and the evening newspapers. As we could not use the cyclostyle duplicator because it took too long, the communications had to be typed on a single typewriter using multi- ple sheets of carbon paper (veline) which were distributed to waiting journalists. Important news was communicated to journalists in their daily briefing with the head of the Press Office, or by telephone to the editors if it was urgent. ‘Reserved’ (riservato) communications for individual newspapers were conveyed by word of mouth.11

This meeting would have followed a morning of news gathering by Mussolini himself which began at about 6am with his reading of the newspapers and his daily briefing with Bocchini, his Chief of Police. Spinetti added that Mussolini, ever the schoolmaster, used to circle in red anything which the Ufficio stampa had missed and send a note back to them as a reprimand. Thousands of the veline have survived in state and newspaper archives. After years of relative neglect, a significant body of these veline has now been published, the most comprehensive collection appearing in Nicola Tranfaglia’s exemplary anthology, La stampa del regime.12 It would be easy to cite examples of apparently ridiculous orders to the press, such as instructions not to report on bad weather, for fear of damaging the tourist trade. But the sheer size of the archive indicates the importance of the daily orders to the functioning of the news media in Fascist Italy and an attentive reading of the recurring and emerging themes tells us a great deal about the preoccupations of the regime and the limits of what could and could not be written.13 0230543081_05_ch04.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 85

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A close reading of the veline demonstrates many of the contradictions inherent in trying to manage an entire national press while at the same time trying to maintain the illusion of diversity and freedom for the beneﬁt of the domestic and foreign readership.14 Many of the veline are not explicitly acts of censorship, prima facie at least, and ones from the early 1930s take up the concerns set out in Journalism as Mission. For example, there are directives on style such as:

Headlines: With some notable exceptions journalists seem to be inca- pable of composing headlines which both draw the reader’s attention and give a precise indication of the article’s content. Furthermore, pagination leaves a lot to be desired. Some newspapers conﬁne the most important items of news to remote corners of the page, and set them out in tiny characters. This must improve (16 February 1932).

On one level this sort of instruction could be read as part of a desire to give a professional gloss to the Italian news media in order to engage its audience and to attract new readers. Implicit in the rebuke, however, is the message that editors could not distinguish between important and banal news stories. In other words: the censor’s message about what should and should not be said. The following month there were instructions about photographs:

Photographs of recruits should be the expression of the new spirit with which conscripts report for military service (18 March 1932).

Given that this was a regime approaching the end of its tenth year in power, reference to ‘the new spirit’ is significant. Three years after the Wall Street Crash and with the world economy in recession, news management involved agenda setting which foregrounded sacrifice, civic duty and national pride. Images of fresh-faced young men in uniform are the flip side of unemployment and falling standards of living. An order of 15 months later, however, indicates that image management can be a complicated task:

In order to avoid uniformity in the newspapers from now on the Press Ofﬁce will distribute different photographs to illustrate news stories (22 June 1933).

All of these stylistic instructions are inﬂections of the principle set out in the instruction that ‘all news must be considered with a political 0230543081_05_ch04.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 86

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eye and with Fascist sensitivity, and must be examined thoroughly before publication’ (23 July 1932). Another stylistic refrain which runs through the veline from the very early ones up to summer 1943 is the injunction not to exaggerate, elaborated very frequently as an attack on the use of adjectives, referring back to Mussolini’s 1928 speech. The campaign against unfascist adjectives is probably in the background of an admonition such as:

Il Mattino has been reprimanded for modifying an ofﬁcial communiqué (12 July 1932).

Editors were warned that press releases from the Agenzia Stefani, especially the words of the duce, were to be published without modiﬁca- tion, almost as holy writ, and often without editorial comment. Again, an awareness of contradiction is apparent in the instructions:

Count Ciano advised everyone [in his press brieﬁng] not to reproduce uncritically the editorials from Il Popolo d’Italia, on the grounds that they are not all written by the Head of Government himself. He added that before publishing them editors must examine them carefully to be certain that they are really the work of the master (se veramente c’è la mano). When it was objected that this is not always an easy task and is liable to error, Count Ciano said that in case of doubts, newspapers should consult him. He then said that not all newspapers should carry each editorial at the same time so as not to give the impression that the Italian press was subject to government command (27 January 1934).

Such moments of cynical self-awareness abound in the veline. As with Mussolini’s 1928 speech to newspaper directors, style over- laps with substance in the recommended treatment of cronaca nera, the sorts of story which keep the popular press in business. One of Ciano’s ﬁrst telegrams to editors as press ofﬁcer dealt with crime stories and reads as follows: ‘It is a deplorable anachronism in this Fascist Regime for newspapers to dedicate entire columns to such futile matters (18 September 1933)’.15 He was repeating a familiar theme from the veline:

The newspapers are reminded of what has been said in relation to cronaca nera; stories must be limited to ten lines which a headline which does not exceed one column (20 February 1933). 0230543081_05_ch04.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 87

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What was at issue here in this tension between newspaper editors and the Press Office was conflict over two different orders of economic imperative. On the one hand, newspapermen knew that a menu of crime, sex and scandal sells newspapers and keeps their profits healthy. On the other, the government knew (though it was usually careful not to articulate the fact explicitly) that Italy’s economy, poor in natural resources, was dependent to a significant degree on the income from foreign tourists. The impression of order was good for the national interest. Therefore newspapers were expected to sacrifice their own financial interest for the greater good. Reading the veline it sometimes appears that the power relationship of the Press Office (and its later incarnations) over the newspaper editors resembles the one between an occasionally despairing teacher and his wayward pupils, passing down the chain of command Mussolini’s red-pen corrections. An admonition from February 1935 illustrates this nicely, turning on the ambiguity inherent in the word consiglio, meaning both ‘council’ and ‘counsel’:

Count Ciano has praised Lavoro fascista for a little piece on falling birth rates, ‘Un vuoto incolmabile’ [A void which cannot be ﬁlled]. But he has deplored Il Corriere della Sera which halfway down a note on the demographic crisis, entitled ‘Il modo di morire’ [The way to die] printed a story relating to the convocation of the Council of Ministers. The placing of two titles ‘The Way to Die’ and ‘The Counsel/Council of Ministers’ one above the other, a short distance apart, is not opportune (8 February 1935).

The regime was very sensitive to humour and irony at its expense. Mussolini’s own family newspaper was not immune to criticism from the Press Ofﬁce:

Il Popolo d’Italia has been criticized for having written Via Mussolini instead of Viva Mussolini (27 May 1932).16

Likewise, hints of satire were dealt with in the veline, in this case when the country was at war:

Absolute prohibition on publishing the advertisement for the ﬁrm Luigi Peschiera of Bologna (Borgo Panigale), which includes the caption ‘Our products are always right’. The advertisement may be published if the strap line is changed (2 September 1940). 0230543081_05_ch04.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 88

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The concern was that the commonly-known expression ‘The Duce is always right’ (Il Duce ha sempre ragione), coined by Leo Longanesi, was being appropriated to a different context and thereby showing a lack of respect. The issues here were ones of image management and popular mythology. According to Tranfaglia and Bruno Maida the veline reveal the basic principles by which newspapers were expected to live. They should give the impression of order and moderation to all things regarding Mussolini and the dictatorship; reinforce the myth that Fascism arose as a patriotic reaction to violence and red subversion; and speak as little as possible about opponents so as not to encourage the young to take an interest in them. Relations with the Church could be good, provided that the pope avoided criticizing the dictatorship.17 These principles are upheld broadly in the veline, with the odd confusion and contradiction. So, for example, on 9 May 1932 newspapers were instructed to give ample space to Bottai’s speech at Ferrara, but less than three weeks later editors found themselves being told to avoid articles in praise of members of the Fascist hierarchy, with the exception of the duce himself. The summer before the tenth anniversary of the March on Rome, with an economy in crisis, the instructions to the press were preoccupied with popular Fascist interpretations of recent history:

The big newspapers are invited to invoke the 30–31 July 1922 to demonstrate once again how the March on Rome was a counter- blow to dangerous and widespread subversive activity (25 July 1932),

and

The big newspapers are invited to write political articles on the period July–August 1921, stressing the outbreak of red forces in that period, the impotence of the Liberal state, that the political strike was broken by Fascism and that the March on Rome was a response to the subversive action of July–August (30 July 1932).

In addition to these tendentious demands on the press in the interests of propaganda – which are still to be found in segments of the Italian media – there are also examples of media manipulation which amount to censorship. For example, newspapers were forbidden to mention ‘Il Mezzogiorno’ (the south) on the grounds that ‘this word represents an example of terminology which relates to the divisions of 0230543081_05_ch04.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 89

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the old Italy which no longer has any reason for existing’ (6 February 1933). Later there were more explicit examples of press censorship as the Undersecretariat was further enhanced into ﬁrst a Ministry for Press and Propaganda (June 1935) and ﬁnally a Ministry for Popular Culture (May 1937):

So as not to foment a spirit of litigation in those who have an interest in proceedings you are requested not to publish sentences of the Council of State if these are unfavourable to the Minister for War (1 January 1938). In publishing articles on our war avoid reminding readers of alleged errors on the part of our military commanders (18 June 1938).

By summer 1938, Dino Alfieri was minister for Popular Culture, having replaced Ciano as Minister for Press and Propaganda in summer 1936 while the latter was flying in bombing raids over Ethiopia. The transformation, under Ciano, of the Undersecretariat into a fully- fledged Ministry for Press and Propaganda in June 1935 brought the government press officer into the cabinet as a minister. The ministry was given enhanced responsibilities which would eventually extend to books, film, theatre, tourism, and very belatedly, radio. Throughout the 1930s, under Polverelli, Ciano, Alfieri and finally under Alessandro Pavolini (appointed minister for Popular Culture in October 1939 when Alfieri was sent to Berlin as ambassador) there was a consistent emphasis on the rhetoric of self-sufficiency in order to show in their best light the economic policies pursued by the regime in order to escape from the international recession. Newspapers were instructed repeatedly not to draw attention to inflation. Instead there were instructions to promote stories concerning subsidized travel (e.g., the treni popolari) and the setting up of IRI, the State holding company. When Mussolini abruptly abandoned the quota 90 policy on the exchange rate in October 1934, devaluing the lira by 40% in order to stimulate exports and increase tourism, the Italian press was ordered not to comment. This policy shift is reflected in invitations to the press to go easy on countries with which the Italian government was engaged in trade negotiations, including the Soviet Union. In the later 1930s, on the other hand, newspapers were instructed to write about salary increases and falling unemployment. The more aggressive foreign policies of intervention in Ethiopia and in Spain were also mir- rored by instructions to the press. 0230543081_05_ch04.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 90

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Running in parallel with these events is an interesting development in the instructions to the media concerning coverage of Germany. In January 1933 the instruction was to conﬁne reporting of German news to the cronaca sections, which is to say, to provide no political comment.18 But two months later:

It is recommended to newspapers that they give great prominence to the German election results, with titles over six or seven columns on the front page and editorial comment which stresses the end of the Weimar Republic and the birth of Fascist Germany (6 March 1933).

Within days there were explicit instructions to avoid coverage of the persecution of Jews in Germany. These were repeated on an almost daily basis for the rest of March 1933. In July 1933 Italian newspapers were prohibited from publishing news of Nazi policy and implementation of sterilization. While there were certainly concerns in Italy over the Anschluss, not least because of the Alpine border, the instructions to the press throughout 1934 were consistent with the following:

Count Ciano has recommended absolute reserve concerning everything pertaining to Germany. All news concerning executions, internal divisions among the Nazis etc is false and must not be reproduced. The stories are put out by enemies of Germany based in Prague and Brussels. These [spreaders of rumour] are also our enemies. We may have differences with Germany, some of them quite serious ones, but we have the same enemies. You must never quote the Weltbuhe, the underground newspaper of German exiles. Especially you must not mention the conflict between the Reichswehr and the Hitler Militia because that conflict could remind readers of an unhappy period for Italy in which there was the possibility of a similar conflict (28 December 1934).

Reporting of German news moved in line with the development of Italy’s foreign policy throughout the 1930s and up to the declaration of war in June 1940. By 1940 the country was well prepared for war journalism because this had appeared in the Italian press from the mid-1930s leading up to the invasion of Ethiopia. From summer 1934 onwards, newspapers were being instructed, sometimes daily, to prepare the country for war 0230543081_05_ch04.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 91

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in the choice of images of troops and arms and a steady stream of articles instilling a military spirit.

Policy and inconsistency

Fascistization of the old liberal newspaper titles was a successful strategy which served to manipulate the political agenda and to establish the tone of commonsense, at least among a majority of the newspaper- reading public, although this was a tiny minority of the population in Fascist Italy. As a strategy it still left substantial discretion to newspapers and journalists despite the tight legislative framework for Italian journalism introduced by means of Royal Decree Law no. 2307 on 31 December 1925. Article 1 of this law provided for the appointment of a director-in-charge (direttore responsabile) as opposed to a managing editor (gerente). Article 7 stipulated that membership of the professional register (albo professionale dei giornalisti) was to be a legal requirement for all journalists. This was not implemented immediately but hung over the heads of journalists for two years as a threat. The albo itself however was formally constituted on 26 February 1928, by means of Royal Decree Law no. 384. Up to this point more informal methods were used as sanctions against journalists who were not sufficiently trustworthy and reliable. These sanctions ranged from being permitted to write and publish, but not to sign pieces in their own names, to a period of imprisonment or in confino.19 (Giovanni Ansaldo in fact experienced all three, being permitted to write without seeing his name in print once he had been ‘rehabilitated’ after a stretch in jail followed by confino). From 26 February 1928 all journalists had to be enrolled on one of three lists: professionisti, praticanti or pubblicisti. This had the immediate effect of making life difficult for known anti-Fascists because the prefects had the legal means by which to deprive them of their livelihood. But as PNF membership was not a necessary requirement for joining the albo professionale, it allowed the regime to present itself as something other than a closed state. Those to be excluded were anyone ‘who had engaged in activities which were in conflict with the national interest’, in the opinion of the local prefect. It remained in force for the next 20 years, with the result that in theory writers and journalists with anti-Fascist convictions either had to leave Italy or had to compromise and negotiate with the regime. Compromise and negotiation took various forms and relatively few writers and journalists did actually leave Italy, as compared to the exodus from Nazi Germany. The cases of Mario Soldati and 0230543081_05_ch04.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 92

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Alberto Moravia are good examples of how the policy and legislation affected individuals. There is a very substantial file on Soldati in the archives of the political police.20 Soldati (1906–99) had studied History of Art under Lionello Venturi in Turin and after graduating he travelled to New York in 1929, at the invitation of Giuseppe Prezzolini, to work at the Casa Italiana, Columbia University. In America he married an American and the couple had a child but the relationship was not an enduring one. Back in Italy in the 1930s, he wrote an account of his time in America, America primo amore and various pieces of literary and filmic journalism as well as making a number of movies, including a propaganda film, Italia, shot in Ethiopia in 1936 and later, Piccolo mondo antico (1941). Soldati was under surveillance soon after his return from the USA. A police informer, in a report filed on 14 November 1932, described him as making frequent criticisms of the regime. Four months later, another informer report reads:

Nobody can explain the regular trips which Mario Soldati of Cines makes to North America. His wife is American, but they are not well off and he earns no more than one million lire per month. Soldati’s most recent trip took place about two months ago and he spent no more than a fortnight in America. Everybody wonders where Soldati gets the money from for these journeys, and we all know that his political ideas are far from being Fascist.

Nonetheless, in 1934 Soldati tried to join the PNF. Police informer 139 (Francesco Salvi) reported on 19 November 1934:

About six months ago, Mario Soldati asked a Fascist journalist, a certain Leo Bomba, to help him get Party membership. He gave Bomba his application form so that Bomba would present it to the Federation and act as Soldati’s guarantor. A few days later Soldati turned up again asking Bomba to cut corners, not to bother check- ing up with the police (Questura) so that Soldati could have his membership card as quickly as possible. All this haste and Soldati’s general attitude and demeanour caused Bomba to have suspicions, and Soldati’s form remained in his pocket, rather than going before the Federation. Shortly afterwards Soldati disappeared from circulation and no-one has heard anything of him since. Bomba believes that he may be living in Milan, but he is not sure. […] I am looking for more precise information to convey to you. 0230543081_05_ch04.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 93

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Two weeks later (1 December 1934) Salvi reported that Soldati was believed to be in London, working for London Film, among whose major shareholders was his friend Ludovico Toeplitz, son of Mussolini’s banker. By this point, another informer had implicated Soldati in a Paris-based Giustizia e Libertà plot to assassinate Mussolini. An undated police report on Soldati (but from late December 1934) gives a general description of him, and continues:

He is someone notorious for his opposition to the regime, but he is able to cover his tracks. His character is impulsive and irascible. For this reason he lives apart from his American wife. He is a friend of the known anti-Fascists Giulio Einaudi, Dr Giulio Carlo Argan and Dr Mario Bonfantini. The Divisione affari generali e riservati, letter no. 441.021756 of 27 July 1934, directed the prefect of Turin to keep a close watch on all of them because they are politically suspect. He is particularly close to Mario Bonfantini, to the point of being invited to accompany him to Ponza, to visit his brother Corrado who was in conﬁno for political reasons. It should be noted that Mario Bonfantini is a notorious anti-Fascist, member of the G & L group who had contacts at Paris with the fuorusciti Carlo Rosselli and Prof. Lionello Venturi. Soldati was interrogated by the Questura in Rome about an accusation brought against Bonfantini in relation to an unknown person suspected of planning an attempt on the life of His Excellence the Head of Government. Informer 139 [Salvi] has cited Soldati several times as someone of an anti-Fascist tendency, from his days at Cines. […] After the month of August Soldati returned to Turin and he has gone to ground. He needs to be found.

Within a matter of days Soldati had been tracked down to Carconio di Orta San Giulio and the questore of Rome sent a highly conﬁdential memo (riservatissima personale) to the questore of Novara, with a copy to the Ministry of the Interior (DAGR section 1 and the political police), requesting:

Very close surveillance of him in order to know what he is doing and with whom he is associating, and the monitoring of all post addressed to him.21

During this time Soldati was writing America, primo amore, working mostly at the Bonfantini home. The questore of Novara duly informed 0230543081_05_ch04.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 94

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the authorities in Rome that Soldati was consorting with the Bonfantini brothers (Corrado had just been released from conﬁno) and there was nothing remarkable in his mail. By April 1935 Soldati was in Rome, living at the home of Emilio Cecchi, and – according to spies – in a relationship with Cecchi’s daughter. Soldati’s mail was still under scrutiny. His chances of getting a party card did not appear strong. After the summer of 1935, and back in Turin, Soldati applied to join the albo professionale dei giornalisti. Eugenio Bertuetti, president of the regional committee of the albo wrote to the prefect of Turin for guidance, on 19 September 1935. The prefect consulted the political police and indicated that ‘it was not appropriate to admit Dr Mario Soldati into the albo as he was not a member of the PNF’. Soldati, however, tried another tack and wrote directly to Ciano at the Ministry for Press and Propaganda, about a ﬁlm-making project in the colonies. Ciano agreed to Soldati’s request, apparently without reference to the police or the party, undermining hierarchies of command and control. This left the questore of Turin in a quandary, so on 7 February 1936 he wrote to the political police:

Since it has come to the attention of this ofﬁce that in the last few months the Ministry for Press and Propaganda has conferred on Dr Mario Soldati various responsibilities of a cinematographic character, may I ask you to carry out further investigations on Soldati’s political activities, so as to conﬁrm your earlier instruction.

There was no change in relation to his request for membership of the albo, but the African trip went ahead, and was reported on by the carabinieri in Asmara:

The subversive Soldati (not Soldato) Mario, son of Umberto and of Bargilli Barbara, born 17-2-1906 at Turin, arrived in this colony on 5 June 1936 with a group of nineteen, made up of drivers, operators and film technicians, headed by the well-known director Camerini, of Rome. They made a patriotic film called Italia on behalf of the Ministry for Press and Propaganda, staying for a fortnight in various parts of Eritrea including Afalbà, Saganeiti, Corbaria, Decameré and Uogherti. When the work was finished the company returned to Rome in several smaller groups. Soldati left on 14 July aboard the Conte Verde, sailing for Brindisi from where he was expected to continue to Rome.

Soldati continued to travel abroad. A trip to Paris in summer 1938 was reported on directly by Vicenzo Bellavia (ﬁduciario 353, leader of 0230543081_05_ch04.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 95

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the Paris spy-ring from 1930 to late 1938), by Pitigrilli (the novelist Dino Segre), and indirectly by Giacomo Antonio Antonini (‘Giacomo’). He continued to work, but he was not admitted to either the party or the albo. Bellavia’s report to Bocchini (24 June 1938) gives an indication as to why this anomaly should have persisted:

Recently Dr Mario Soldati, 32, writer-journalist from Turin, has visited this city. He is well known in our ﬁlm world because in addition to having been artistic director for various ﬁlms, he is friendly with many directors, artists and producers, and, what is more, he often has occasion to frequent Vittorio’s circle [i.e., Mussolini’s son]. This Soldati, although he has not carried out concrete activities against Fascism, has never had any sympathy for the regime. Indeed he has shown himself to be hostile to it, and he is in constant contact with young litterati who are known anti-Fascists.22

It is a measure of the regime’s ambivalence to culture and creativity that anti-Fascist writers and journalists could find themselves at home in the circles of Ciano or Vittorio Mussolini. Especially interesting is the case of Alberto Moravia. Like Soldati, he had also spent some time in New York at the Casa Italiana, after the publication of his first novel, Gli Indifferenti, in 1929. Gli Indifferenti could not seriously be described as a Fascist novel, but it was one of very few Italian novels between the wars which achieved international recognition. The regime was keen to be associated with that success, and Moravia was mentioned as a rising star in the first edition of the Enciclopedia Treccani. As a first cousin of Carlo Rosselli however, and someone known to frequent anti-Fascists, Moravia was under surveillance on his return from the United States. An anonymous informer working for the Ministry for Press and Propaganda submitted a long report on 24 January 1934 in relation to Oggi for which Moravia was an occasional contributor:

I enclose two reports concerning the magazine Oggi: the ﬁrst is from the same informer who drew attention to the shady activities of the contributors to that magazine and the second is by a person in whom I have full trust. He is well embedded among the journalists of the capital. […] In politics Moravia has never shown clear and precise ideas. He is neither a Fascist nor an anti-Fascist. Instead he has no will-power, a menefreghista, animated by that same sense of indifference which Moravia shows in every respect, including morality. […] 0230543081_05_ch04.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 96

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From what I can glean so far, the contributors to Oggi are not individuals who can be trusted as reliable in political terms, but neither is there anything to suggest that they intend to use the magazine in ways contrary to the directives of the regime. Such a judgement would seem premature. One has the impression rather that we are dealing with a group of young men intent on notoriety without any well-deﬁned programme. Nonetheless further investigations will be carried out, with appropriate vigilance, so as to identify any developments.23

Of the two enclosed reports, the ﬁrst draws attention to Moravia’s presumed Jewishness; four and a half years before the Race Laws. The second describes him in the following terms:

Alberto Moravia is a writer in the school of Benedetto Croce, and it is said that he is highly regarded by the well-known anti-Fascist philosopher, on the basis of shared sympathies. He is considered a mediocre writer. The only work of note which he has produced is Gli Indifferenti. Moravia – in politics – is not an admirer of the regime. Moravia travels and often visits Turin. He is a social-climber, much given to intrigue. But he is not held to possess special gifts. His character is mysterious and treacherous.

The following year Ermanno Amicucci, director of La Gazzetta del Popolo informed Moravia in writing that his articles were no longer welcome at the Gazzetta. Moravia wrote to Ciano on 26 March 1935 arguing that the fact he was not a member of the PNF was not motivated by dissident political views and that in fact he admired the regime, especially in relation to its cultural policy. The letter is a study in ambiguity and is open to several interpretations.24 The typed copy of the letter is annotated ‘he can write’, also ambiguous, but probably intended as ‘permit him to write’. In the summer of 1935 when it was announced that Ciano would be stepping down as minister in order to ﬂy warplanes in Africa, Moravia wrote to him congratulating him on the example he was setting, and asking for permission to spend some months in Eritrea in order to write a book about Italians at war in Africa. He also received another letter from Amicucci telling him again that his articles were not welcome in La Gazzetta del Popolo. He spent the winter in the United States, where he gave ﬁve lectures on the Italian novel (on Manzoni, Nievo, Verga, Fogazzaro and D’Annunzio) at the Casa Italiana (where he was a 0230543081_05_ch04.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 97

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guest), at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, at Vassar College and at Smith College. Back in Italy, he wrote to the minister, Dino Alﬁeri, on 9 July 1936, for permission to resume writing for La Gazzetta del Popolo in order to be able to convey his impressions of America. Permission appears to have been granted. In common with Jewish writers and journalists, Moravia’s problems began in earnest in July 1938 with the coming into force of the Race Laws. Amicucci received a directive from the Ministry of Popular Culture, successor to the Ministry for Press and Propaganda, on 18 July ordering him to suspend Moravia’s collaboration on La Gazzetta del Popolo. Moravia responded with a letter to the duce, on 28 July 1938, arguing that as his mother was not Jewish then he was not Jewish, and should be permitted to get on with his professional activities. In April 1941, Moravia had a meeting with Gherardo Casini, Director General for the Italian press, one of the DGs within the Minculpop, the original remit of the Press Ofﬁce in fact. Moravia prepared a promemoria which he sent to Casini later that day:

As we agreed during our interview of today, until further notice, I will write for newspapers and magazines using a pseudonym. But I must point out to you that before this decision was reached I had sent to the magazine Letteratura a short story in my own name. Immediately after our discussion I telegraphed the director so that he could suspend the publication of the story. But he replied that it was impossible because the magazine was already typeset and printed. He said he had received no orders on my account and that he stood to lose thousands of lire if the issue did not appear. The magazine comes out just four times per year. For those reasons he sees himself having to publish the story in my name. I must inform you of this because, as you can see, it is something over which neither I nor the director of the magazine have any control.

Moravia also wrote to the new director of La Gazzetta del Popolo, Eugenio Bertuetti, who in turn wrote to Casini for conﬁrmation. Moravia, with characteristic irony, began writing under a pseudonym, PSEUDO. On 8 September 1941, Alessandro Pavolini, the minister for Popular Culture since 1939, sent a telegram to all prefects ordering them to instruct directors of newspapers and magazines to cease publishing the writings of Alberto Moravia. Bertuetti again wrote to Casini for 0230543081_05_ch04.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 98

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clariﬁcation (10 September 1941). There was considerable confusion in publishing circles about what was permitted and what was not. The director of Tempo, Alberto Mondadori, wrote to Casini asking whether he could publish a Moravia novella in the author’s name or whether he had to use a pseudonym (22 September 1941). Casini replied a week later that Moravia’s work was now banned, with or without a pseudonym. But a month later, 31 October 1941 Casini wrote to Bertuetti stating that Moravia could write for La Gazzetta del Popolo so long as he used a pseudonym. What had changed in the intervening few weeks was that Moravia’s brother, Lieutenant Gastone Pincherle, had died in battle at Tobruk. A note prepared for the duce on 25 October 1941 by Pavolini reads as follows:

The writer Alberto Moravia and his family under the law are considered to be of the Italian race. Indeed recently Moravia lost in combat, at Tobruk, his brother Lieutenant Gastone Pincherle. Given this circumstance and Moravia’s recent betrothal (to a woman of the Italian race) which places economic responsibilities on him, it is worth considering whether the absolute ban on Moravia’s works should remain in force or whether he should be permitted to write for a limited number of newspapers under a pseudonym (as he used to do for La Gazzetta del Popolo), while continuing to check attentively the substance of the pieces themselves.

The publications indicated in the margin are La Gazzetta del Popolo and Oggi. The duce agreed, and Moravia resumed his journalism as well as publication of short stories. Given this confused mechanism of control and sanction, which fostered caution and uncertainty, selective agenda setting, and self- censorship, one may wonder what was the real role of the journalist under Fascism. The careers of Soldati and Moravia seem distinctly out of tune with Mussolini’s vision articulated in October 1928.

War, empire and the media

Until shortly before the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, the principal goal of Mussolini’s media strategy had been to present Italy as a country improved by muscular, virile Fascism, which had defeated a perceived Communist threat and reawakened the nation from the torpor of the Liberal era, delivering low crime rates, social justice and 0230543081_05_ch04.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 99

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efficient services. This was a picture of Italy for both domestic and foreign consumption. The image was carefully managed in the press, while the potential of the new technology of radio remained largely untapped. Ciano’s arrival at the Press Office, and its transformation into first an Undersecretariat and then a Ministry ran almost in parallel with a shift in the image of the country which Mussolini sought to present to the public. Indicative of the first stirrings of this shift is an order to the press from 10 March 1934:

La Stampa wrote again about Mussolini’s ‘policy of peace’. Everybody loves peace and wants it, but it is not appropriate to become sentimental (sdilinquirsi) and to repeat continually ‘peace, peace’.25

Mussolini’s policy was beginning to change. Wars sell newspapers and increase media audiences. The Ethiopian war was no exception. It gave rise to a concerted and sustained propaganda effort in Italy but it also compounded further the confusions inherent in Fascist policies on media and censorship. It ushered in postal censorship for soldiers in the field. A censors’ office was set up in East Africa for in-coming and out-going air mail. The equivalent office was set up in Naples for the mail boats. These offices, of course, were under military control. No less attention was paid to newspaper coverage of the war, both domestic and foreign, but here the line of control was more complex.26 There are transcripts of American and French radio broadcasts in the Italian state archives which indicate the success of Mussolini’s media and censorship strategy in Eritrea which led him to transfer it to Ethiopia.27 Mussolini took a personal interest in colonial censorship, sending out telegrams in his own name. One of these (22 December 1935), addressed to the High Commissioner (i.e., Badoglio) in Asmara, clarifies the distinctions between postal and media censorship:

It is understood that censorship of news within correspondence is the business of the military authorities. For everything that concerns the complex organization of press services and support for the Italian and foreign press corps I beg Your Excellency to avail of the East African Press Ofﬁce, which has been set up expressly, on my orders, to carry out such duties. That ofﬁce, which operates within the wider frame of reference of the Ministero Stampa e Propaganda is at your disposition.28 0230543081_05_ch04.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 100

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Turf wars between different branches of government and the military continued to dog Fascist communications policies. Little over a week later, Mussolini sent Badoglio a longer telegram:

The foreign press is dominated by news coming from special envoys who are on the Abyssinians’ side. To neutralize their action we must make sure that the foreign correspondents in Eritrea are enabled to expand their work. It would be appropriate to provide them with more information, facilitate visits and allow them to have direct access to the front, where there are no countervailing reasons. Even the censorship service, while it must remain inﬂexible as far as concerns news which would help the enemy, should allow the foreign journalists a greater freedom of action. Otherwise we will not be able to counter this incessant bombardment of criticism from our adversaries.29

At the conclusion of the Ethiopian war, in May 1936 the following instruction was issued to the Press Ofﬁce in Asmara (Eritrea) by Dino Alﬁeri, by now Minister for Press and Propaganda:

The duce has ordered that this office transfer as a matter of urgency to Addis Ababa where it must organize its services in such as way as to help and support the various members of the national and foreign press corps. It is most desirable that foreign journalists should file reports on the new life of Addis Ababa and on the new dispensation in its various aspects. I await confirmation of this transfer.30

This represented a transplanting of Polverelli’s 1931 principles on renewal of journalists’ mission from Italy to colonial soil. Alﬁeri sought to centralize yet further governmental control over the Italian print media by insisting on the suppression of all ministerial Press Ofﬁces and routing all governmental press releases through his ministry. This enhanced level of control, however, led to some farcical situations:

Yesterday a group of journalists including Malgeri, Cappaletto, Gayda, Guglielmotti etc, criticized this ministry harshly for issuing orders to newspapers that they should publish a commemorative article with the title ‘Bandiere al vento’ [‘Flags in the wind’] on the Ethiopian war. The result was that the following day every Italian newspaper had the same headline on the front page.31 0230543081_05_ch04.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 101

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There was a real and persistent tension here. Mussolini wanted total control of the domestic press, but also wanted each newspaper to maintain something of its own identity.

Mission accomplished?

In theory then, the mission of the journalist was clear and unambiguous in Fascist Italy after 1925. Domestic and foreign journalists were licensed by the state. They reported news. Their Italian editors, also licensed by the state, filtered this news and provided comment for the edification of the Italian masses. Italian newspaper owners knew they ran the daily financial risk of sequestration and knowledge of this risk led them to influence editorial policy in their own financial interest. Foreign newspapers were less of a threat to Fascist hegemony because most were written in languages which the majority of Italians were unable to understand. None the less, stories relating to Italian affairs in the foreign press were monitored very closely by Italian embassies and consulates abroad and there are plenty of examples of foreign newspapers being sequestered at port of entry. Therefore, the theory ran, the state controlled the news and could mould public opinion at will. So dissent and scepticism about the news agenda should have been eliminated progressively by a combination of censorship, propaganda and media control. At the height of the summer and on the eve of war, 8–10 August 1939 the Ministry for Popular Culture held a conference in Venice on the function of the press media, attracting among the delegates Marinetti and Goebbels. The conference report elaborated on the mission of the journalist:

The journalist is an active collaborator of the regime. He has the speciﬁc task of acting as the daily intermediary between the regime and the masses, illustrating all the action which takes place in the different ﬁelds. In the democratic countries the journalist is the professional of the pen; for us he is the bearer of a faith, the soldier of an ideal. When the democratic press takes us to task, accusing the journalism of totalitarian countries of being in the service of the state, it doesn’t realize that it is formulating the gravest accusation against itself, because it proves that it is in the service of obscure and secret forces.32

The statement reiterated yet again the ofﬁcial line which had been set out by Mussolini over a decade earlier, developed by Bottai in the 0230543081_05_ch04.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 102

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pages of Critica fascista and implemented in the transformation of the Prime Minister’s Press Office first into an Undersecretariat and later Ministry for Press and Propaganda, and then into a Ministry for Popular Culture in 1937. It confirms the familiar image of Mussolini as the ‘senior editor of the regime’, trying to run the country as he had run his family newspaper, loaded pistols on his desk. Every evening, until 1931, he spoke to his brother Arnaldo on the telephone about how the treat the news for the following day in Il Popolo d’Italia. This habit did not die with Arnaldo, as his son-in-law Ciano would discover:

Mussolini besieged him with telephone calls, giving orders and then countermanding them. Ciano used to complain that he could get no rest: his father-in-law/duce would wake him up at six almost every morning as soon as he received the morning copies, the ink still wet, of Il Messaggero and Il Popolo di Roma.33

Mussolini’s regime was genuinely obsessed with news reporting and he expected missionary zeal from his journalists. On the other hand, newspaper editors were frequently reminded not to exaggerate because exaggeration undermined credibility. Considering that the Italian press had been directed to give sympathetic coverage to the Nazis from as early as March 1933, to ignore the persecution of Jews and even to participate in discrimination from summer 1938, and to promote hostility to Britain and France, it would be reasonable to expect that public opinion might be other than is indicated in a report from 11 February 1940, four months before Italy entered the Second World War:

The readers of Il Tevere, of which there are shamefully many, have had a treat today, from what I hear, because the Germanophile newspaper and its editor Trizzino have really outdone themselves this time! The author, after having listed on the German model the horrors of British repression in Ireland, concludes: ‘It is incredible that England should invoke the solidarity of America when America was populated by the Irish who were forced to ﬂee their country. And there is no other Catholic people in the modern period which has suffered such persecution’. There were three people in the trattoria who were talking about Trizzino’s piece, saying that evidently he was not aware of what the Germans have done and are doing in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland, against civil and peaceable Catholic populations, against the 0230543081_05_ch04.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 103

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elderly, women and children; not to mention the unheard of tortures and persecutions visited on the Jews of the Reich. The putting down of Irish terrorists, they observed, looks like child’s play when compared with the barbarous acts carried out by the Nazis in recent years. Everybody is of that view, they added, and only Il Tevere would be capable of maintaining the contrary, denying evidence and not seeing what we can all see and what we know from memory. Another said, this Tevere fails to understand how England can call on the solidarity of America, the refuge of the Irish, but pretends that the whole world sides with the Germans when throughout the world there are millions of Austrians, Bohemians, Moravians, Poles, Jews and even Germans who have ﬂed Hitler’s terror. I have reported this conversation since it is a good indication of public opinion generally in relation to our ally and its political systems, as well as on a certain publication we ﬁnd on the news- stands.34

Il Tevere, we should remember, was Mussolini’s ‘unofficial mouthpiece’, edited by the man entrusted with control of radio in the RSI after he had escaped north following his arrest on 25 July 1943. The response of the Minculpop official is every bit as significant as the report itself: a handwritten note in red pencil reads ‘Interlandi told not to exaggerate’. This is one particularly good example of missionary zeal falling on sceptical ears, but it is far from being an isolated one. The mission of journalists was reiterated again and again right up to the death throes of the regime. In a press briefing held by Pavolini on 6 November 1942, editors were warned:

There is a great deal of defeatism in Rome. We see a Quartarella rising up again (risorgere), in one guise or another. Many people are either excessively dejected or excessively happy. We see these things and we note them, because I believe there are Fascists who are neither beaten down in their courage nor whispering among themselves. They are serious and they look on things with calm attention and they continue to believe in Mussolini and in Victory. That is my attitude and I believe it is yours. (Cheers of approval. Shouts of ‘Yes’). If any of you are not of that opinion I invite you to leave now: if not the rest of us will kick you out.35

Not quite the harmony of Mussolini’s orchestra image of the press. The critical question to address in an evaluation of Fascist press and 0230543081_05_ch04.pdf 4/5/07 1:57 PM Page 104

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media policy is the simple one of whether the mission was successful. Did it succeed in limiting the horizon of expectation and forging a nation of true believers in the message of Fascism? Both Colarizi and Bosworth in their studies of public opinion and daily life in Fascist Italy have argued that at most Fascist propaganda made a superficial impression on the popular mentalité, and that Italians began to disengage from their collective suspension of disbelief at the end of the 1930s as the regime began seriously to contemplate war alongside the Nazis.36 This thesis is built on the reports on public opinion filed by prefects on the basis of informers’ reports and the censorship of wartime correspondence. Below the surface of bellicose racism and popular piety, it was a sense of family and pride in one’s team which continued to guide the unconscious actions of most Italians. On balance, this is probably true. The widespread reaction of jubilation which met radio reports of Mussolini’s arrest in July 1943 suggest that the anthropological revolution was merely skin-deep. Aside altogether from debate about years of consensus, there was a fundamental flaw in Mussolini’s view of the journalist’s mission: Rates of literacy in Italy continued to lag well behind the rest of the western world, despite over a decade of Fascist educational reform. Therefore, the penetration of newspapers into the national consciousness remained limited and had far less of an impact than other factors such as the Church, schools, workplace culture, popular entertainment, traditional distrust of central authority, radio and film. 0230543081_06_ch05.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 105

5 The Duce’s Image

If Fascism sought to bring about a fundamental change in Italian culture as an ‘anthropological revolution’ to use Emilio Gentile’s term, then a study of the censor’s part in the programme cannot afford to concentrate on the printed words, in a semi-literate society, to the exclusion of spoken words and of ﬁxed and moving images. Indeed, regardless of speculation about intentions, empirical study of media artefacts produced in the time of Fascism can reveal a great deal about the workings of censorship and propaganda. Earlier chapters have explored how legislation, security policy, education reform and control of the print media contributed to the aims of totalitarianism and the reality of daily life. The following pages will look instead at the ways in which Fascism attempted to negotiate the public sphere so as to set the boundaries on the Italian people’s horizons of expectation, implanting models to be emulated and censoring out models to be rejected, on the basis of sounds, images and symbols.

The Istituto LUCE

The early Italian film industry had been successful, innovative and highly regarded. It was all but destroyed in the First World War and the regime showed no early signs of coming to its rescue. The origins of Italian documentary and propaganda film-making under Fascism, on the other hand, are a different matter. In 1923 Ferdinando Cortese, a film-maker from Milan, set up a small company called the Ente nazionale per la cinematografia istruttiva ed educativa.1 His intention was to make short films to promote industry and tourism. He approached the PNF for accreditation and for permission to make a documentary film to celebrate the first anniversary of the March on Rome. His

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request for monopoly rights on film-making for the regime received a frosty response from the party, but it attracted the interest and attention of Luigi Freddi, at that time director of the Ufficio propaganda of the PNF. The Istituto Luce was established in September 1924, probably as an acronym for L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa, which brought together various small companies. In 1925 Mussolini ordered his ministries to use the Istituto Luce as source of all official images for propaganda purposes, and the Ministry for Public Instruction was given the task of developing a programme to bring films into schools. Two years later a photographic service was put in place with the remit of providing coverage of daily life under Fascism for the benefit of the daily newspapers and illustrated periodicals. It complemented eight sections, dedicated to tourism, agriculture, industry, religion, culture, the armed forces, social care and foreign affairs. Decree law no. 1985 of 5 November 1925 brought the Istituto Luce under direct governmental control. Giacomo Paulucci de’ Calboli was appointed president and Luciano De Feo became director. A further decree law, no. 1000 of 5 April 1926 made it mandatory for all cinemas in the jurisdiction to screen Istituto Luce shorts as part of each film programme. Failure to do so could lead to temporary closure of the cinema or withdrawal of the licence to operate. Royal Decree Law no. 122 of 24 January 1929 reorganized the Istituto Luce to take account of the introduction of the talkies. The head of the Prime Minister’s Press Office joined the board by means of this provision, which was a first attempt to bring together the print and other media, excluding radio, which would lead eventually to the Ministry for Popular Culture. The first Luce films showed Mussolini visiting PNF federations, military reviews and crowds in Rome, Milan and Bologna, with occasional cameo parts for the king and one or two gerarchi. There were also numerous shorts of religious festivals and sports events such as football matches and cycle races. In the course of 1925 three propaganda films were made on the ruralism theme: La battaglia del grano, La foresta fonte di ricchezza and Vita nuova.2 These short propaganda films, promoting positive messages about life under Fascism, found a far wider daily audience than newspapers, and resources were made available by both state and church to bring cinema into every corner of the kingdom. In that way, the population, even in the remotest of rural communities was brought face to face with the duce in a real example of taking the ruler to the masses. Although there were important precedents for propaganda film-making in Russia and in the United States, Italy was blazing a trail in western 0230543081_06_ch05.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 107

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Europe. Italy pioneered the propaganda ﬁlm as an interactive experience: at the cinema, when the duce’s image appeared on the screen during Istituto Luce newsreels the public stood as a mark of respect, and in order to comply with a law passed in 1927 which made it obligatory to do so. This could happen half a dozen times in the course of a newsreel which provided the Luce editors with interesting challenges in terms of managing audience participation. It became part of the ritual of daily life under Fascism, almost on a par with standing at Mass for the elevation of the Host. Approved stills from Luce newsreels would be distributed to newspapers, to be carried on front pages of newspapers and magazines in a conscious attempt at multi-media co-ordination. Veline from the Press Ofﬁce would advise on the types of shot to be printed in newspapers, and the types to be avoided, especially in the 1930s when the regime woke up to the huge potential of the media.

The Duce’s body

The peril of trail blazing is that it is those coming behind who really learn from one’s mistakes. The quantity of images produced by the Istituto Luce was enormous. Its quality, for the most part, was indifferent. There was no very sophisticated theory at work on the role or mission of the documentary photographer or cameraman. Their job was to capture images of the reality they were observing and they did not have the beneﬁt of elaborate mise en scene or retakes. It is unlikely anyone had the nerve to ask the duce to do a second take before his adoring masses. The press instructions were rudimentary: avoid shots of Mussolini with other gerarchi, plenty of pictures of crowds, and advice on the following lines:

La Stampa and Il Piccolo di Trieste published horrible photographs of the duce signing the Italo-Russian agreement. If you do not have good photographs it is better not to publish any at all […] News- papers publishing photographs of ceremonies held yesterday and today must not reproduce shots of the duce on his own. Show instead pictures of crowds. (6 September 1933).3

Paulucci de' Calboli, acknowledging the limited sophistication of early Istituto Luce ﬁlms, compared, implicitly, to the work of Leni Riefenstahl in Germany, reﬂected that:

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director, and put in place in the best weather conditions, in the best light at the right time. We didn’t have that and we couldn’t have it. You can only have a real and proper piece of direction in a documentary if you are not dealing with a real-time event.4

The Luce films of Mussolini addressing the masses in the Veneto and Calabria in the late 1930s, with the repetition of panning shots featur- ing cheering crowds and serried ranks of soldiers show that the Italian film-makers had learned something from Riefenstahl. One of the iconic poses of Mussolini from the late 1920s onwards is a still, and it frames him on horseback, almost as an equestrian statue, recalling classical Roman sculpture and the figure of the Renaissance condottiero. There are numerous variations on this theme, including a later one in colour on the front page of the periodical Tempo, with the caption Guerra! (‘War!’). Sergio Luzzatto has drawn attention to the ambiguity in this image, and the tension between revolution and restoration. Mussolini mounted a horse just as he might clamber aboard an airplane or get into a racing car or climb onto a threshing machine, to lead the country forward in the spirit of modernity. On the other hand, Mussolini on horseback is also Mussolini on a pedestal, surveying the Italians from a higher vantage point, as he did regularly from the balcony of Palazzo Venezia, as a statue, a monolithic homage to himself. So the image lends itself to both active and static interpretations. By 1940, with Italy about to enter a war of tanks, submarines and aircraft, Luce images of Mussolini on horseback had begun to alienate Italian cinema audiences.5 Up until that point, however, Mussolini had demonstrated an instinctive grasp of charisma, the telling image and the photo opportunity. The relatively sober pictures of him in the period immediately after the seizure of power were probably calculated to reassure the middle classes that their new leader was a responsible statesman, virile, bareheaded and clean-shaven in contrast to the greybeards of Liberal Italy. This image gave way to a succession of different characters and poses, especially after the celebrations for the Decennale in 1932, most of them captured by photographers from the Istituto Luce. Erving Goffman’s psychological account of the gesture, rediscovered thanks to the work of Judith Butler and other theorists of performativity, demonstrates that symbolic effectiveness is a function of the credibility of performance, and that the surface appearance triumphs over the sincerity of the actor making the gesture.6 Historians of the duce’s image have made a convincing case for Mussolini’s having been a consummate 0230543081_06_ch05.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 109

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character actor, who spent hours almost every day in the public gaze, quite probably reliant on narcotic substances in order to keep going.7 Although, objectively speaking, Mussolini’s own physique never came anywhere close to the Fascist ideal of youth and virility, he made an heroic effort to transform his body into a symbol of the new Italy:

He began having himself photographed naked to the waist, chest out and stomach in, harvesting or threshing on the hottest days of the battle for the wheat; or in immaculate sports gear on the ski slopes of Terminillo, or bolt upright on his favourite white horse, or intent of fencing in the classic uniform of the swordsman.8

In an interview with an American journalist in 1937 Mussolini claimed that he had made of his body a motor which was constantly under surveillance and control and which ran with absolute regular- ity.9 His corporeal sense of leadership is reminiscent of the traditional symbolism of kingship. He was not the king of course, but beside the uninspiring little ﬁgure of Victor Emanuel III, Mussolini seemed more than a mere king, the man who would deliver the empire to the Italian masses, and become the incarnation of the Nietzschean Superman. Michel Foucault has argued for a conception of the imperial leader in the post-revolutionary state:

The importance, in historical mythology, of the Napoleonic character probably derives from the fact that it is at the point of junction of the monarchical, ritual exercise of sovereignty and the hierarchical, permanent exercise of indeﬁnite discipline. He is the individual who looms over everything with a single gaze which no detail, however minute, can escape.10

Where Foucault’s account of the Napoleonic character gains some piquancy in relation to Mussolini, is in the Fascist hall of mirrors: the duce was the object of the nation’s gaze – in the ﬂesh, in newspapers, in newsreels, at school, at work, scowling out from signed portraits in people’s homes – and at the same time he was observer in chief, scruti- nizing intercepted letters and telephone calls and reading monthly reports on public opinion ﬁled by his prefects on the basis of informers’ testimony. As the incarnation of the leader in a structure of power, the body of the duce, and the people’s relationship with it, was grafted on to pre- existing traditions which were part of western culture long before 0230543081_06_ch05.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 110

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Mussolini was born. Luisa Passerini has argued that the mythological construction of the hero’s death and resurrection presented itself in an impoverished and superﬁcial version in the case of Mussolini. That is not to diminish the real and present need felt by the Italian masses immediately after the Great War for a profound regeneration after the horror of the trenches and the torpor of Liberal Italy, a need addressed ﬁrst by D’Annunzio and his Arditi occupying Fiume, and to which Mussolini and Fascism provided a 20-year response.11 But even if the authentic need was ultimately frustrated for everyone, the myth was accepted by many, for a long time. The newsreels are certainly edited and the message managed, but the cheering crowds really were there. Likewise, the mythology of the duce’s body outlived the Mussolini who was executed at Dongo. It underwent a grotesque public ‘punishment’, as a lifeless cadaver at Piazzale Loreto – a ritual which recalls a pre- revolutionary tradition of the spectacle of torture alluded to by Foucault in the book from which the foregoing quotation is taken – and a set of truly bizarre post-mortem adventures, recounted in Luzzatto’s Il corpo del duce.12 The duce’s body was still front page news in the Italian press well over a decade after Mussolini died. According to Luzzatto:

For twenty years after the March on Rome, the body of the duce was loved, adored by the majority of Italians. The personal charisma of Mussolini constituted the key to the popular consensus of the regime. Favoured by the physical and political mediocrity of King Vittorio Emanuele III, the duce managed to occupy the public scene as the providential incarnation of power. Not the august sovereign of the House of Savoy, but the son of a blacksmith from the Romagnolo dominated the real and imaginary landscape of the Italians, with the fascination of his presence.13

Mussolini could not have succeeded in incarnating the myth, if it had not represented an aspiration for Italians. In the Fascist narrative, the rebirth that followed his severe physical crisis appeared providential, and Mussolini was the man sent by Providence, as even Pope Pius XI agreed. Passerini, in her account of early popular biographies of Mussolini, including his own war diary and culminating in Margherita Sarfatti’s Dux (published in English in 1925, in Italian the following year), dis- cusses his mythic presentation in terms of a narrative of resurrection. As a soldier in the Carso, he had been wounded, and this fact, on the suggestion of his own diary, became woven into a narrative texture of 0230543081_06_ch05.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 111

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a symbolic death, descent into the Underworld and, in the silence of a deserted hospital ward, rebirth as the New Man (uomo nuovo).14 The narrative dwells on Mussolini at death’s door, his body racked by war wounds, in order to accentuate the ‘miracle’ of his resurrection; a com- monplace of hagiography, essential to mark the passage from one life to another, from an old to a new identity. This secular appropriation of the palingenetic myth was familiar to the Catholic subsoil of Italian culture and it echoed contemporary, and equally secular versions to be found in Marinetti and Ungaretti, two writers closely associated with the future duce.15 Although Istituto Luce shorts began in the mid-1920s, the early ones did not engage to any extent with this personal mythology, although they did no doubt promote a national fascination with the figure of the duce. The hagiographic narrative was conveyed in texts rather than in images, and Passerini has traced a history of censorship in their presentation in the course of the 1920s. Early accounts of Mussolini’s life, such as that of Emilio Settimelli (1922), which stressed the anarchic, picaresque or romantic traits of his early adult- hood – living practically as a tramp in Switzerland, his voracious appetite for sexual conquest, etc – were edited out of the official narrative in order to present the duce as a serious, disciplined and courageous leader and statesman. It is really in the early 1930s, however, that the media were brought to bear significantly on Polverelli’s myth-making agenda. It is with the approach of the Decennale that mythology and the media come together in the projection of a richer mix of Fascist narrative than the brief report of Mussolini’s visit to this or that town or city. It marks the beginning of a more sophisticated aesthetic engagement, which has been studied in a number of recent books. Marla Stone, writing about architecture and Fascism, has contended that Fascism negotiated a series of compromises in which it did deals to further the interests of both producers and consumers, for the purpose of winning legitimacy for the regime. That is certainly true of the early years after 1922, although the will to compromise became less evident as the 1930s progressed. By means of a policy of tolerance of, not to say cynical indifference towards, diverse forms of artistic expression, the regime had won the participation and the consent of large swathes of Italian artists and the creative and cultural sectors, as well as the assent of the masses. This strategy led the way to an official endorsement of Modernism in 1932 – and a long list of artists and writers with state sinecures or receiving secret sub- 0230543081_06_ch05.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 112

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sidies from the Press Ofﬁce – in marked contrast to aesthetic policy north of the Alps:

Contemporary celebrities, from Mario Sironi to Giuseppe Terragni to Enrico Prampolini, lent their formidable talents to the project of giving Fascism a cultural identity. The adhesion of prominent and unknown artists, in turn, gave the dictatorship a cultural legitimacy that further cemented its rule.16

These talents were greatly in evidence in the exhibition to mark the decennale and in the public artworks and buildings on view in many urban piazze, as well as Sironi’s daily sketches in the pages of Il Popolo d’Italia. In her monograph on Mario Sironi, Emily Braun presents his career as a fascinating case study of the relationship between artistic freedom and political authoritarianism under Fascism.17 Sironi fash- ioned the Fascist regime’s image in both high and low-art forms, from daily propaganda in Il Popolo d’Italia to monumental mural projects.18 In that process his work was defended by progressive critics such as Bottai, and even by Mussolini himself, as the leading artist of Fascist identity, and of Mussolini’s efﬁgy as its emblem. Mussolini’s body became emblematic of the regime and the visible part of a complex mythology, capable on the one hand of appealing to the Italian population so as to create a consensus, and on the other of being a superﬁcial target for anti-Fascist dissent at home and especially abroad. Charlie Chaplin’s depiction of the duce in The Great Dictator (1940), for example, presents him as Benzino Napaloni, a genial buffoon: opera buffa, rather than as the serious threat to peace and democracy that he incarnated. Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, in her work on Fascist spectacle and the body, has argued along the lines of Emilio Gentile’s ‘anthropological revolution’ thesis, that the regime, rather than being mired in absur- dity as its detractors asserted, strove to achieve a formal transformation of Italian society, even if the results were to be mixed. Mussolini conceived of power in artistic, performative terms:

The regime’s historical unfolding took place in accordance with the creation and elaboration of spectacular practices and rituals, myth- ical inventions and cultic constructions. Thus, in narrating the March on Rome, fascism instilled the revolution in its own collective memory; in invoking the martyrs’ blood, it sanctiﬁed its virtu- ous role in leading Italy’s spiritual rebirth.19 0230543081_06_ch05.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 113

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A theatrical example of this conjunction between myth and performance is Alessandro Pavolini’s ill-fated 18 BL, staged in Florence on Sunday 22 April 1934, before an audience of 20,000, five and a half years before he became Minister for Popular Culture.20 This was an attempt to bring popular culture to the masses and to excite the pas- sions of a sports fixture, with a dehumanized narrative of the Fascist seizure of power. The heroine is not a beautiful Hollywood starlet, but a battered military truck which makes the ultimate sacrifice in what ought to have been a dramatic conclusion, had things gone right on the night. In human terms, the ritual interpretation is consonant with another one put forward by Mabel Berezin, who has argued that the use of ritual facilitated the creation of new identities, such as a Fascist identity, but that in fact ritual actually drew on a fundament of prior identities:

In fascist Italy, rituals served as expressive popular arenas where Italian cultural meanings – Catholicism as popular culture and the cult of motherhood – were appropriated and reinvented.21

The contingency of this assumed identity would become manifest in the collapse of the regime, when it would be discarded as the real British and American bombs, rather than the Expressionist fantasy world of 18 BL, destroyed the regime. Ruth Ben-Ghiat argues convincingly that culture played an identity- deﬁning role for those born too late to have participated in the First World War and the March on Rome.22 For these young people – Indro Montanelli’s generation – culture compensated for political activity:

We twenty-year olds feel irremediably parvenus. We are spiritually equipped to be assault squads, but fate has given us the role of Swiss Guards of the constituted order.

Montanelli was writing in 1933, by which time the Decennale exhibition set the official seal on the mythology and imagery of Mussolini as the great father of the new Italy. The new statute of the PNF, on Starace’s initiative, decreed that in future DUCE was to be written in upper-case letters every time the word was used in the newspapers. Journalists and apologists flocked to provide hagiographic accounts of Mussolini as soldier, educator and saviour of Italy, successor to Caesar and to Napoleon, giving rise to one of the first great personality cults of the twentieth century. 0230543081_06_ch05.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 114

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The image of Mussolini’s body, therefore, became a public possession, a force-ﬁeld in the collective imagination, a screen onto which hopes, fears and desires could be projected. Curzio Malaparte, in a posthumous work, wrote about Mussolini as a character which could be disassembled from various components such as the soldier, the statesman, the sportsman, the musician, the thresher, and reassembled in a sort of an ars combinatoria.23 On that screen, the divergent forces of opinion in Italy sought to project their positive and negative images of what it meant to be Italian and Fascist. In the words of Lorenzo Benadusi:

The human body became […] a politicum, a battleﬁeld, capable of expressing publicly a series of irreconcilable antinomies: young/old; black/white; healthy/sick; strong/weak; normal/abnormal; male/female.24

On this ideological battleﬁeld, the images and sounds captured struggles for conceptions of commonsense in those binary oppositions, and to present a normative view of Italian society, censoring out what did not ﬁt the ideal, such as aspects of Mussolini’s dissolute past. The results which appeared on the nation’s cinema screens provided a contemporary body of evidence for Walter Benjamin’s classic essay on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936).25 Following Benjamin’s lead Falasca–Zamponi has argued that:

For a regime that opposed consumption not only in its material sense but also as a disease of the body – a site of desire – the high visibility of visual commodities is perplexing. […] In the totalitarian politics of fascism, there was only one focus of desire, only one object of pleasure: the regime, anthropomorphically embodied in the public persona of the Duce, Mussolini. […] Political publicity exalted the ﬁgure of Mussolini as the link between the people and the nation, the expression of fascist principles. The ‘gendered mass’ was supposed to adhere to the regime and place authority in the hands of the state through its faith in Mussolini, the superior artist, the ‘man’. People’s feelings and emotions were channelled toward worshiping Mussolini. The Duce would then be able to capitalize on this love and turn the female mass into a virile army whose spiritual attributes overcame material predispositions. A loving body of admirers was only conceived as a depersonalized and desensitized integration of the body politic.26 0230543081_06_ch05.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 115

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This is an incisive piece of analysis, even if less direct than Benjamin in 1936, whose verdict on the newsreel-mediated personality cult was: ‘All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war’.27 Mussolini cleaved to the visual rhetoric of the trenches, dressing as a soldier in a never-ending succession of different uniforms, and in that process establishing the ﬁgure of the active soldier as the yardstick for virility and masculinity, in contrast to the effete bourgeois. The Ministry for Press and Propaganda addressed aspects of image management in several of their daily veline to the press. The instructions will also have gone to the Istituto Luce, and their effect is readily demonstrable from the subsequent content of newsreels and propaganda ﬁlms:

For some time now your photographers have been taking pictures of the Duce on his own which – as you know – does not please him at all. In order to avoid a telling off, photographs must stick rigorously to the order, [previously issued] to show the Duce with large crowds, and never on his own. (13 September 1935)

and

Remember, photographs of the Duce must not be published unless they have been authorized. (22 November 1936)

Mussolini took an obsessive and narcissistic interest in the photographs of his body which would be permitted for public display, and the veline which emanated from his Press Office (and its later forms) as well as from the PNF secretariat and the Agenzia Stefani were often his direct instructions.28 He continued to take an active interest in the presentation of the family newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia, to the point of choosing photographs for the front page, realizing that the propaganda value of a good picture was much more immediate and potent than a long article which relatively few would read. His decision to publish photographs of himself naked to the waist, working in the fields, in the late 1930s, needs to be read in the context of his ‘anti-bourgeois campaign’, as an admonition to sedentary city life. Franzinelli cites an example of Mussolini visiting the theatre and being brought quickly-developed photographs of his arrival for approval before the performance had finished, so that the approved pictures could appear in the newspapers the following morning.29 His practice was to write Sì or No on the backs of the photograph and to sign them with a large M. The rejected photographs went into the 0230543081_06_ch05.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 116

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archives of the Istituto Luce and form the basis of the collection assembled by Franzinelli and Marino; a collection which is important for cultural historians because it gives practical examples of images which the regime censored in order to ﬁlter out pictures which did not conform to the mythology of the duce and of Fascist Italy. There appears to have been a variety of reasons for censorship of the Luce images. Some of them are obvious enough, and are personal rather than political: Mussolini bored and about to yawn, beside Hitler who is intently examining a painting in an art gallery; Mussolini scratching his groin through cavalry twill, Mussolini resembling a badly-made version of Michelin-man, disembarking from an airplane. Franzinelli has made the point that Mussolini always came off worse in physical comparison with his son-in-law Galeazzo Ciano, who was young, slim and handsome with an easy manner, a natural smile (when not imitating the jutting out chin and scowl of his father- in-law), and an ability to wear military and civilian clothes with grace. Mussolini on the other hand tended towards self-parody in his inability to maintain a digniﬁed bearing in any set of clothes for more than a few minutes. With characteristically cruel detachment Curzio Malaparte observed:

His taste for military uniform played tricks on him, one funnier than the next. When his shoulders were in uniform, his paunch was in civvies. When his legs were in uniform, his arms were in civvies. His backside was never either in uniform or in civvies. […]. He never managed to be all hero at the same time and in the same way. All hero from head to toe. Either his paunch was sticking out, or it was his double-chin, or his backside.30

This verdict on Mussolini, corroborating Chaplin’s black-propaganda version in the Great Dictator (1940), was after the event, published many years after the deaths of both observer and observed.31

Other bodies

It was the twin themes of racism and empire which yielded some of the most controversial examples of Fascist image management, and which are intimately involved with the development of censorship policy in the 1930s. This is the faultline where the binary oppositions between black and white bodies, men and women, virile men and ephebic men, ruler and subjects, Aryans and Others were acted out in 0230543081_06_ch05.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 117

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the collective imagination of Fascist Italy. Giorgio Fabre has traced a shift in Mussolini’s censorship policy to 1934, and has argued that the new policy was inspired by a photograph of a black man and a white woman, on the cover of a popular novel, both clearly in the grip of an amorous passion.32 The regime had already demonstrated its sensitivity with regard to images of black bodies, when they were associated with success. Two years earlier, on 8 April 1932, a velina from the Press Office had taken Il Giornale d’Italia to task for publishing photographs of the black ballerina Josephine Baker and drawing public attention to the her gracefulness.33 This was almost certainly the first of the veline to treat specifically of racism, although the formulation of the instruction makes no explicit reference to razza (race). The concept of race, however, was very much on the agenda of the Fascist hierarchy. On a visit to the United States in 1931 Dino Grandi had spoken in Italian about razza e sangue (race and blood). He also spoke in English but in less direct terms.34 Shortly after Hitler’s coming to power in Germany, Polverelli at the Press Office issued the following rebuke:

The representative of Il Messaggero has received a special admonition because of the article that his newspaper published under the headline ‘Balilla abroad camped at Frascati’ which included the illustration of a Balilla with flat nose, blubbery lips and curly hair. In other words, a negro. This is to be ‘strongly reprobated’ because it presents to Italy the figure of an inferior nation which needs to have recourse to black boys to provide the model of a Balilla. On the campsite, among the flower of daring youth (balda giovinezza) there are plenty of good models for the Italian race. (21 July 1933)

This message about appropriate role models was clear enough. The conquest of empire was not yet a publicly-stated aim, but racism was demonstrably implicit in the Fascist world-view, although that would have been as true of the western democracies at the time. Ciano, whether as press ofﬁcer, undersecretary or minister took a hard line on newspaper coverage of black Africa.35 In February 1935 he informed newspaper editors that he would sequester any paper which published photographs of Abyssinia, unless they were photographs which showed it to be a backward country populated by beggars and bandits. He even mused about Il Corriere della Sera being in the pay of the Abyssinian government because of the photographs it had 0230543081_06_ch05.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 118

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published on 14 February 1935. Three months later, the very idea of an Abyssinian government was questioned:

As regards Abyssinia, make clear in all articles that it is not a state. It is an agglomeration of tribes, a dictatorship of one tribe over another: the exploitation of the whole population for the advantage of the ruling tribe. You must never speak either of an Abyssinian state or an Abyssinian form of civil organization. (21 May 1935).36

By January 1936 newspapers and magazines were being warned not to publish photographs which showed closeness between Italian soldiers and Abyssinians.37 Once empire had been achieved and declared by Mussolini on 9 May 1936, the instructions to the press grew even tougher:

Minister Ciano, after having conﬁrmed the instruction to avoid polemic in relation to England, ordered an end to the displays of mushy sentiment which some newspapers have shown regarding the Abyssinians. These people are our subjects and we must make a sharp distinction between the race which rules and the race which is ruled. The Italian race must not have any type of reconciliation with the black race and must keep intact its strong racial purity. The minister concluded by giving an informal indication of the views held by senior members of the regime, on the problem of race. (26 May 1936).38

The whole imperial campaign had been presented to children in exciting boy-scout terms, drawing on Emilio Salgari’s novels of adventure, following troop movements on large maps at school and singing popular songs such as Faccetta nera. Advertising men naturally took advantage of this wave of free publicity in order to market products. One of the most emblematic of these advertisements was for the National Savings Banks (Casse di Risparmio), depicting a young Balilla and an Abyssinian boy, and promoting a World Savings Day (31 October 1936). The iconography of this poster is important for the implicit narrative of race in Fascist Italy. What we see is a direct binary opposition of clothing and nakedness. The white boy is wearing a dark-coloured Balilla uniform, with a kerchief reminiscent of Garibaldi’s red one and with a device on his hat which plays on the media obsession with the letter ‘M’, the ﬁrst letter of the duce’s 0230543081_06_ch05.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 119

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surname. The familiar ‘libro e moschetto’ are ritually present, reminding the audience of the implied ‘fascista perfetto’. The white boy is generously putting his arm around the half-naked black boy, and it is the latter, signiﬁcantly, who is contributing a coin to the strangely-shaped money box, which may suggest a military helmet, among other things. The black boy was therefore placing his coin and his trust in a military machine which had been engaged in rape and conquest in black Africa for over a year, reducing his country to the status of a colony. In this case, black nakedness represents power- lessness in the face of the white boy in the dark (military) uniform, and the image presents itself to its audience as a manifestation of commonsense. The Ministry for Press and Propaganda ordered newspapers and magazines to refrain from any further publication of the image in a velina dated 31 October 1936. In a sense the instruction was point- less, given that the purpose of the advertisement was to promote something taking place on 31 October 1936 and therefore no-one was likely to pay for it to be carried in the press after that date. The velina does suggest, however, an anxiety about the implications for the Fascist master narrative of the image of two boys embracing. It might be a stretch of the imagination to read this poster as a gay text, but the image of the virile male leader does of course bring with it the negatively-charged feminized male, or the rent boy. The concept of virility, central to Fascism, raised some interesting issues of male sexual identity.39 Fascist virility celebrated the male bonding and homoeroticism of the trenches and the sports ﬁelds, while rel- egating the feminine to a condition of passivity. Fascist theorists of sexuality had grown up with the theories of Cesare Lombroso on criminal anthropology and on homosexuality. As Benadusi puts it, ‘in a society where women were cast in a subordinate role in relation to men, and held to be inferior, sexual passivity was suspect and considered to be negative behaviour’.40 A medical authority of the time, Dr Vito Massarotti, wrote that:

Some homosexuals love to be possessed, to do as women do: these are the so-called passive ones. Others instead remain male in the act of sexual union […]. These are the active ones. Often, in a single individual, we encounter both types, where one is dominant […]. A man who loves another man passively feels, and thinks of himself as a woman. This is the most serious form of sexual degeneration, the lowest on the scale.41 0230543081_06_ch05.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 120

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The implication of this for Fascist sexuality appeared to be that active homosexuality was analogous to active heterosexuality, especially among young men in a society, dominated by Christian iconography, which stigmatized the loss of female virginity before marriage. ‘Pedastria passiva’, on the other hand, negated virility, and was therefore a matter of shame and opprobrium, although it was not legislated for explicitly, on the grounds that it did not exist in Fascist Italy. Detlev Peukert, writing about everyday life in Nazi Germany, suggests on the question of consensus that:

It is quite clear that the long prison terms in concentration camps given to alleged professional criminals, so-called ‘asocial’ gypsies or ‘recidivist’ homosexuals were approved of by wide sections of the population, including many who criticised the detention and torture of political opponents of the regime.42

There is good reason to believe that Italian society in the 1930s har- boured similar prejudices. Certainly it was impossible for writers to publish texts which had overtly gay themes. Karen Pinkus, who has also discussed the World Savings Day image, has written a perceptive chapter on the black body in Italian advertising in the 1930s. Her conclusion was that the presentation of black bodies in the Italian media of the 1930s was predominantly as a body without power or self-control: the negative of the Italian Fascist hero who was both virile and disciplined. This interpretation is certainly consistent with instructions to the press and the media from the Ministry for Popular Culture and its ancestors. This anxiety over virility and race may explain an otherwise puz- zling instruction to the press, from the duce himself, not to publish the ofﬁcial Luce photograph of Mussolini, deliverer of Empire, with the submissive Ras Sejum and his three fellow Abyssinians, who were received on 6 February 1937 at Palazzo Venezia. Luzzatto and Franzinelli have both reproduced photographs of the visit.43 The ofﬁcial photograph was not a good image in terms of propaganda as the duce looks less than imperial and the Abyssinians look more than a little sceptical. Again, the instruction to the press to censor the image suggests an uneasiness. Franzinelli has offered the further suggestion that Mussolini’s reasoning may have taken into account the assassination attempt on Field Marshal Graziani at Addis Ababa a couple of weeks later, as a result of which there were violent Italian reprisals and the four Ras in the picture were brought back to Italy in 0230543081_06_ch05.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 121

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chains and sent into confino. That would be a reason for not having the image in circulation four weeks after it was taken, but not for censoring it immediately after the visit. Not all photographs taken of black Africans by Italians in the 1930s were intended for the press. Some of the most infamous photographs are those taken by Lidio Cipriani, the Fascists’ anthropologist of racism.44 His work is an example of the visual anthropologist as voyeur, using his camera almost as a surgical instrument in order to objectify the human body, to strip away any thread of dignity and to deny it human subjectivity. For Cipriani the inferiority of blacks was not a matter of culture, it was tied to biological conditions, which by their nature admitted of no improvement. This was the basis of the ‘scientific’ argument against miscegenation.45 His scientific credentials were used to justify some of the most brutal excesses of racist policy under Mussolini. Mussolini, however, was not acting in an historical vacuum when he put in place discriminatory laws for the colonies.46 Royal Decree no. 485, 14 May 1908, set out racist legislation which dis- criminated against black Africans, e.g., according to article 13, the death penalty was applied to colonial subjects in cases where penal servitude (ergastolo) was recommended for Italian subjects and foreigners resident in Italian territory. Furthermore, article 371 set out a penalty for sexual violence against children of 12 or under, if they were Italian, but nine or under if they were ‘colonial or assimilated subjects’. Article 385 established a penalty for introducing girls into prostitution if the woman ‘prostituted’ was under 21, in the case of Italian or foreign women, but under 12 in the case of ‘colonial or assimilated subjects’. The effect would have been to legalize the prostitution of minors in the colonies. It never became law however: Catholic morality held sway. Shortly afterwards, Italy annexed part of what is now Libya, adding to the list of ‘colonial subjects’ not just black Africans but Arabs, Muslims and Jews, and this complicated the task of law makers, who appear to have shared assumptions about hierarchies of ‘races’. Laws had been introduced in 1908 and 1909 which prohibited the cohabitation of colonial staff with ‘indigenous women’ in Eritrea and Somalia, but Liberal Italy had not been out on a limb: similar legislation was enacted by Britain and Germany around the same time. Fabre makes the point that:

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described as wild and inferior, or in the case of more ‘evolved’ ones, capable of being civilized by Europeans.47

This way of creating consensus and manipulating commonsense continued through the 1930s, in terms of popular songs (e.g., ‘Faccetta nera’), advertisements and children’s ﬁction, including the co-opting of Salgari’s adventure novels, written in an earlier era. Fascist commonsense also had some deeply-held assumptions on gender roles back home as well as in the colonies. Instructions to the press read as symp- toms of this pathology. Polverelli informed the press on 8 February 1933 that:

From now on publication of photographs or drawings of thin women will lead to immediate sequestration.48

He elaborated on his line of reasoning a week later:

You have been advised to avoid carrying images of donne serpenti (snake women) who represent the negation of the real woman whose function is to procreate healthy children. You are therefore invited to write articles against the fashion of the silhouette [i.e., thin fashion model].

Articles on Hollywood were to be avoided and especially ones dealing with the weight of American actresses. Newspaper editors were even invited to ﬁnd writers who would write stories poking fun at thin women.49 Gigliola Gori in a recent book on Fascism and the female body has examined the question of women and sport in Italy, before and during the ventennio. She has demonstrated that the engagement of women in some sporting activities did promote and support a degree of gender emancipation. Nevertheless, the dominant assumption on the adult female gender role was that set out by Polverelli: her function was the procreation of healthy children for the duce and his empire. This was the message for the press and the media to promote:

Il Popolo di Roma has been withdrawn for having published photographs of naked women on page three while there are photographs of the pope on the front page. Deputy Polverelli wishes to take this opportunity to remind you again not to publish photographs of naked women because they constitute a threat to demography. (11 July 1933)50 0230543081_06_ch05.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 123

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The demographic campaign was never too far from the surface in the instructions to the press, under both Polverelli and Ciano, and this extended to banning advertisements for remedies against impotence and syphilis. How did these various strands of commonsense and Fascist anxiety manifest themselves in the media in order to shape the popular imagination? There is a well-known brief Istituto Luce newsreel of Mussolini from 1937, at the founding of Aprilia, stripped to the waist, working in the fields. This short was edited every bit as carefully as Nazi newsreel and films – Italian directors had learned in their turn from Leni Riefenstahl – and in its brevity it contains some defining images of Italian Fascism. What does this tell us about Fascism? Firstly, there is the rather portly body of the duce in the opening section of the newsreel. Here it is half covered, dressed in white. Mussolini’s attire contrasts with the colours worn by the other clothed men around him, and this makes the leader stand out from the crowd. Signs generate their meaning by differences. In this case, the denotative differences are clear enough. The connotations of the duce as contadino, in the context of 1937, refer to a contrast with the comfortable bourgeois. The portrayal of Mussolini also recalls in cinematographic terms the figure of Maciste, whose inter- textual memory had appeared at the end of Cabiria (1937). The newsreel was speaking the language of imperial epic film, and implicitly recalling Italy’s imperial achievements in black Africa. The soldier, going back to the Fascists’ myths of origin in the First World War, was the yardstick against which to measure manliness, and the leader was the Man amongst men; violent men at that. We see on the screen the charismatic image of the semi-naked worker in the fields, the blacksmith’s son, engaged in another violent and almost sexual act with Nature herself, transforming the soldier’s prowess into autarky, economic self-sufficiency, reaping the harvest of 15 years of Fascism. This short film demonstrates some of the mag- netic pull which Mussolini held over many Italian people, and some foreigners, for the better part of two decades. But it is a propaganda film: it is artifice, intended to impress, and needs to be decoded in order to tell the truth, just like a dream. In all of this presentation of self-image, there are contradictions and problems. There is the contrast between virile nakedness and pictures of fully-clothed men. The duce is the great white leader, the only man who can wear the white breeches, symbol of purity. Yet he can also appear semi-naked without losing his power. He is an active and virile 0230543081_06_ch05.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 124

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nude as opposed to the powerless and undisciplined naked black Africans. He is ﬁrst among:

The real males [who] were the muscular and virile men, with vigorous and honed bodies, with a threatening warrior air, strong and audacious, always ready and dynamic to go into battle or to make a conquest of a woman. The non-men instead were people of puny and ephebic constitution, delicate, timid and gentle, with willowy movements, easily agitated, timorous and tender with the gentle sex.51

Mussolini’s own almost spectral whiteness is emphasized in the black and white newsreel, projected in a darkened auditorium, the screen on which the Italian population projected their collective hopes and fears. The positive messages of the propaganda film summon up their neg- atives, that which needs to be censored, and they conjure up another, darker and more menacing image. The image which, according to Fabre, inspired a concerted effort at censorship, presents a man in an expensive suit and a woman in a dressing gown. In terms of gender roles, this was not a challenge to Fascist common sense. What is a challenge is the fact that the man is black, and the woman is white. With the invasion of Abyssinia, Ethiopia and Libya, the Italian imperial adventure extended to exhuming indigenous corpses, in order to measure sizes of skulls, so as to develop a taxonomy of black African racial types. This self-image of virile Italians as European scientists ‘engaged upon important research requiring an optimal data set, over- rode the sanctity of any local burial rites’ and effectively dehumanized the colonial subjects.52 Subjects became objects, literally. Italy’s Fascist imperial geographers were engaged in a discourse of scientific prestige, normalizing cultural stereotypes for their 1937 report on the state of the Libyan colony. In this taxonomy of racial types ‘the logic of homo- geneous racial categories implied the possibility of accurate and comparative measurement between races’. This involved races other than the European ones to which Italian Fascists claimed affinity, and it meant that the issue of a union involving miscegenation was always destined to come at the bottom of the hierarchy of races. The regime feared miscegenation and the implicit breaching of inte- gral boundaries of social identity. Black Africa had nothing to offer Fascist Italian (or even European) identity. Instead, it meant voyeurism, when contemplating black female bodies, or the threat of difference and transgression in the case of black male bodies. According to 0230543081_06_ch05.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 125

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Loredana Polezzi, this threat of otherness was most often played up by emphasizing ‘savage’, ‘primitive’ traits such as scariﬁcation and nakedness.53 What Mussolini and Ciano saw in the 1934 bookcover, therefore, was not the Fascist stereotype of the black male, but something much more threatening to social identity. The black male body in the picture is not encoded as a ‘savage’ or as an oppressed colonial subject. He is neither scarred nor naked. He is wearing a professional suit, and clothes encode indicators of education, class, wealth and power. Sambadù is radically Other because he represents the negation of the Fascist stereotype of the male black body, the thing which is inconceivable: the black man who has education and wealth. He has stolen Mussolini’s imperial clothes. What is more, he has stolen the power to seduce and rape Italian womanhood and the feminized masses, and in that seduction to debase the national stock, to penetrate the integrity of the body politic. In short, Sambadù encodes the worst nightmare of the Mediterranean Master-race.

Racism and the imagination

The cover of Maria Volpi’s novel Sambadù amore negro came to Mussolini’s attention within days of the Giustizia e Libertà arrests in Turin.54 On 30 March 1934 Ciano had advised the press on how to cover the Turin story:

A press release will be sent out concerning the arrest, as part of an anti-Fascist plot, of twenty people, mostly residing in Turin, of whom eighteen are Jews. Give the press release a prominent place on the front page.55

Interlandi’s Il Tevere, Mussolini’s unofﬁcial mouthpiece, did more than that; it provided extensive and inﬂammatory editorial comment:

What was the point of the polemic which we have mounted over the last few weeks and which was so lazily welcomed by the organs of public opinion? Its point was to establish, with the support of Jewish documents, that the Jew does not assimilate, because in assimilation he sees a diminution of his personality and a betrayal of his race; that the Jew demands a double nationality, even a double country, in order to remain a productive element, that is to say to carry out his business and to have beyond the borders a super-national centre of attraction and propulsion; that not even 0230543081_06_ch05.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 126

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the war (and Fascism) has assimilated the Jews to the nation for which they bore arms: the Jewish press indeed speaks of Jews who fought among them in the name of foreign countries. All this today has the dramatic seal of OVRA; and let no-one overlook this role-call of names, at the risk of being ingenuous, let us remember that the best of anti-Fascism, past and present is of the Jewish race: from Treves to Modigliani, from Rosselli to Morgari, the organizers of subversion were and are of the ‘chosen people’.56

So in spring 1934, in the minds of the two most powerful politicians in Italy, Mussolini and Ciano, a parallel was being entertained between blacks and Jews, with neither group belonging to the Fascist vision of Italy’s future, any more than homosexuals or other minority groups did. Blacks and Jews were regarded as inferior races. Until recently, the line put forward by Mussolini himself on the Jewish question has largely been accepted at face value. According to this, there was no ‘Jewish problem’ in Italy before Mussolini announced there was one in a speech at Trieste in the summer of 1938. Why did he choose Trieste for his only public speech on racist policy? It was not, after all, on a direct line from Rome to Munich, where he was bound for peace talks with Hitler and Chamberlain. Trieste, a cosmopolitan port city, part of the German-speaking world until 20 years earlier, had seen two waves of Jewish immigrants, ﬁrstly from Germany (1936–37), and then from Austria (after 12 March 1938), both ﬂeeing the Nazis. A police memorandum from mid-1938 may explain Mussolini’s choice of venue for his speech:

After the German occupation of Austria the number of Jews in Trieste increased greatly because of the warm hospitality they receive in Italy and the help which the Jews of Trieste offer to their co-religionists. After the publication of racist articles in Il Popolo d’Italia, also carried in the national newspapers, the Jews formed a sort of single front and they are often to be seen chattering in their ‘language’. They live in fear of a worse tomorrow. They are studying ways of saving their capital and smuggling their goods and their shares abroad. They need to be watched in this regard and they should be kept under surveillance in their work. Many of them are commercial travellers, driving around the province, and some of them are thought to be Communists. For example, there is a certain Salpeter who is believed to be the link between different Communist cells in Istria. He is in business with Cavaliere Troiani – 0230543081_06_ch05.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 127

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ex-PNF secretary at Grado – and while Troiani is usually to be found in the shop, Salpeter is out driving around the province. The phenomenon is not new. These Jews in order to achieve their aims don’t think twice about selling their country and family. They are all a hybrid people, corrupters of women who try to conquer with money and ﬂattery.57

Mussolini will have been well aware of the atmosphere of tension in which his Trieste speech would be received. Renzo De Felice, in later years, advanced the view that Mussolini adopted racist policies at the behest of Hitler, and that therefore the Nazis were the ones really responsible for this aberration in Italy’s history. This is open to question. Fabre, following a number of well-researched books which have appeared in Italy and elsewhere, has argued in a more recent work that Mussolini’s interest in racist doctrines actually pre-dates 1934 by a quarter of a century.58 His argument is based on close examination of Mussolini’s early journalism which demonstrates that Mussolini was toying with racist theory ten to 15 years before he had even heard of Hitler, and that 1933, and the subsequent invasion of Ethiopia, reawakened a strong latent tendency in Mussolini rather than inspiring a change of heart.59 Fabre has identiﬁed Mussolini’s early Nietzschean obsession with Jews and with the ﬁgure of Jesus Christ, the Jew responsible for bringing down the Roman world. Mussolini’s essay ‘Il pangermanismo’, published in 1910 in the columns of Pagine libere, and later published as part of Il Trentino veduto da un socialista contains the following:

It is not yet the change of political forms, from republican to monarchist, which marks the beginning of the decline of Rome, but the corruption of the dominant races (stirpi), brought about by too frequent and prolonged contact with the inferior peoples. Nietzsche in the Genealogy of Morals explains the fall of Roman power with the overturning of the code of moral values achieved by the Jewish people, which Gobineau lists among the peoples of ‘Mediterranean chaos’. Jesus is the archetype (campione) of the inferior race which defeats the superior one.60

Mussolini had not returned in print explicitly to that theme for a long time, and his public pronouncements on the debilitating inﬂuence of religion had been moderated by negotiations to conclude the Lateran Pacts in 1929, but Romanità had become an explicit and 0230543081_06_ch05.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 128

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omnipresent cultural value of the regime, and the accusation against individual Jews of undermining the state became more insistent once Hitler came to power. Mussolini’s racist concern about Jews in Italy was evident several years before 1933, at the time of the Lateran Pacts. Fabre has drawn attention to archival evidence of a truly bizarre instance of this concern. The day after negotiation concluded with the Vatican (11 February 1929) on the Lateran Pacts, Mussolini himself, the President of the Council of Ministers, wrote to the governor of the Banca d’Italia, Bonaldo Stringher, demanding the immediate sacking of the manager of the Genoa branch of the bank, on the basis of an anonymous informer’s report which accused Ugo Del Vecchio of anti-Fascist sentiments. Mussolini also pointed out that Del Vecchio was a Jew. Stringher interviewed Del Vecchio who did not deny his Jewish origins. He did deny anti-Fascist activity of any kind and added that his second wife was a Catholic and that he had had his youngest son recently baptized. Stringher relayed all this information to Mussolini, who telegraphed the following message to the prefect of Genoa on 1 March:

Check whether it is true that the youngest son of Commendatore Del Vecchio, manager of the local Banca d’Italia, has been baptized and identify in which Catholic church the ceremony took place.61

The prefect confirmed that the boy had indeed been baptized at Palmanova, and so his father was allowed to remain in his post. This is one of several examples of the Head of Government’s discriminatory interests cited by Fabre, dating from 1929, the year of the Lateran Pacts.62 One more intimately connected with Mussolini’s own family at the end of that year was the broken engagement of Edda Mussolini with Dino Mondolfi, son of a Jewish colonel in the Italian army. Edda herself relates that her mother Rachele served ham to the young fiancé, while at the same uncomfortable family meal Mussolini declared to his prospective son-in-law that ‘The Jews are my worst enemies’.63 The previous year Mussolini had written an anonymous article, ‘Religione o nazione?’ in Il Popolo di Roma (29–30 November 1928), questioning the extent of Jewish assimilation into Italian life. This gave rise to a debate in the pages of the newspaper over the next few weeks, with several Jewish Fascists proclaiming their loyalty to the Italian state. On 14 December 1928 Bocchini issued a circular to prefects asking to be kept informed of the activities of Jews in Italy, in relation 0230543081_06_ch05.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 129

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especially but not exclusively to Zionist organizations.64 In ‘Religione e nazione’ Mussolini wrote:

I want to make clear that I do not wish to begin anti-Semitism, despite the fact that Semites are among the main protagonists of anti-Fascism worldwide […] from Treves to Torrès […] I hope instead that anti-Semitism in Italy does not come to be provoked […] by Jews living in Italy.

To this thinly-veiled threat, in an anonymous article, he added:

In Italy there is another people which declares itself to be quite apart from not just our religion but from our nation, our people, our history and our ideals. Guests, in short, who are to us as oil is to water; together but unmixed, to use an expression of the late Margulies, the Florentine rabbi. That is a serious claim.

The reference to ‘our religion’, calculated to allay Vatican sentiments, is a very different tone from Mussolini’s writing of 20 years earlier. But it is clear that religion is only a part of his concerns from the following:

All Zionists speak of ‘a Jewish people’, of ‘a Jewish race’, of ‘a Jewish nation’ and ‘Jewish ideals’ without the faintest allusion to religion.

Mussolini closed the debate with another anonymous letter to the paper on 15 December 1928, overestimating significantly the number of Jews resident in Italy, and therefore accentuating the ‘threat’ from an untrustworthy minority, the ‘inferior people’ who had contam- inated the Roman Empire, whose emulation was Fascism’s cherished aim. His summer 1938 speech in Trieste returned specifically to those themes. Discriminatory laws were introduced on 30 October 1930, (RDL, no. 1731) and 19 November 1930, (RDL no. 1561) which separated clearly the Jewish community from the rest of Italian life.65 The political police appear to have been taking note routinely of fact that a significant number of suspected anti-Fascists were Jews, or were thought to be Jews.66 In 1932, with Hitler growing stronger by the day but not yet in power, Mussolini began to take steps to remove Jews from positions of power and influence. Among the first of the casualties was Margherita Sarfatti, who ceased writing for Il Popolo d’Italia in December 1932. This, 0230543081_06_ch05.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 130

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however, was not an explicit policy and it was not applied consistently. Fabre has made the point that most counter-examples, that is to say of Jews appointed to positions of responsibility, involved cases of financial advantage to Mussolini’s own business interests. His erstwhile financial backer, Giuseppe Toeplitz, found himself squeezed out in March 1933, at Mussolini’s instigation. In public pronouncements he maintained a benevolent attitude towards Jews and Judaism.67 But his actions spoke differently. He began to remove Jews from positions of influence. Margherita Sarfatti did continue to write for Gerarchia, but only until January 1934. On 30 March 1933, in response to the Nazi boycott of Jewish shops, he sent the following message to Hitler, via Vittorio Cerruti, the ambassador in Berlin:

Every regime has not only the right but the duty to remove from posts of authority any elements which are untrustworthy but this does not make it necessary, indeed it can be dangerous, to link to ‘race’ (razza), Semitism and Aryanism, what is instead a defence measure and the development of the revolution.

A few weeks later, on 18 April he commented on Nazi activities that ‘there are many ways of achieving a purge without having to resort to overt persecution’. Fabre has argued that:

There was a turning point [in Mussolini’s attitude to the Jews], perhaps confused at ﬁrst, when he decided that he had to take action against all Jews in Italy, not just isolated cases. And this set in motion a truly national and public process of anti-Semitism. We may suppose that this turning point was around June 1935.68

It is true that there are relatively few directives to the press on this theme before 1936. There was a ban on reporting the visit of a Jewish theatrical troupe at the end of March 1934 – the day after the Turin arrests, as it happens. In any case, the instruction was revoked ten days later. The bulk of veline on the theme of anti-Semitism dates from the summer of 1938. Therefore the Race Laws were not being trailed in the usual way through the mass media, in order to shape the public’s imagination, which suggests that they did not need to be. What still shocks the observer, three generations later, listening to the live recording of his words in the Trieste speech are not the words themselves, but the rapturous cheers of the crowd which greeted the ominous message.69 Nobody should be under the illusion that anti-Semitism came out of 0230543081_06_ch05.pdf 4/28/07 12:09 PM Page 131

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the blue in Italy in 1938. It was not something which the duce needed to instil in the Italian population as part of his anthropological revolution. On that September afternoon in Trieste, the duce could still do no wrong in the eyes of the cheering crowd. But that judgement needs to be moderated by another observation which indicates a deep ambivalence on the part of the crowd for the logical consequences of Fascism’s aesthetic fetishes of power. The following week when Mussolini returned to Verona from negotiations in Munich, he was treated to a rapturous welcome by the waiting crowds, relieved that he had averted a war. Unwilling to play the peacemaker on this occasion, and displeased by this paciﬁst sentiment amongst the people he had hoped to recast as warriors, for once, the duce refused to come to the balcony to embody the familiar iconic pose for his adoring crowd. With due diligence, the Istituto Luce captured this anti-climactic return on ﬁlm. 0230543081_07_ch06.pdf 4/28/07 12:10 PM Page 132

6 Culture Wars

Mussolini may have always been anxious to cut a dash among intellectuals, writers, artists and scholars but as a politician he tended to take a pragmatic view of them.1 If they were willing to be pliable – and many were, to protect their material interests – he made use of their endorsement and traded on their respectability or reputation. Gentile and Marinetti are good examples of commitment rewarded by state sinecures. Luigi Pirandello, a far greater international asset, proved less tractable, but not actually hostile. Others were beyond any form of compromise, and Fascism dealt with them brutally: Piero Gobetti, Giacomo Matteotti and the Rosselli brothers all died at the hands of Fascist henchmen. Antonio Gramsci was released from jail at death’s door. Only Croce had the intellectual pre-eminence, hereditary wealth and international reputation which allowed him to maintain an Olympian disdain for Mussolini’s brand of violent right-wing pop- ulism. His mail and his movements were closely monitored and his inﬂuence on public opinion was negligible.2 Marinetti in particular had proved useful for stirring up popular opinion after Piazza San Sepolcro. Once in power Mussolini began very quickly to distance himself from Futurist rhetoric. He had no interest in realizing Marinetti’s ambition to establish Futurism as state art. Indeed he probably had no interest in a state art. He was after power: culture could wait. Futurists were excluded from the exhibition at the Venice Biennale of 1924, to Marinetti’s dismay. He heckled and berated Gentile, who was delivering the opening address, before being bundled out of the conference hall and into a police van.3 The second phase of Futurism held a conference of their own at Milan in 1924 where the movement decided to adapt to the new political realities and to negotiate a position within the Fascist state. The Futurists moved their

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headquarters from Milan to Piazza Adriana in Rome and lost their original, rebellious soul. Marinetti, Carli and Settimelli had played a marginal part at the Congress of Fascist Culture in March 1925. The congress was to be Mussolini’s opportunity to quash the ‘myth’ that Italian intellectuals were against Fascism. The whole event was stage managed so as to stiﬂe debate. The ofﬁcial report stated that in the new Fascist Italy:

The ‘failings of centuries’ would be corrected replacing the traditional values and attitudes of the Italian people with the principles of the Fascist revolution, and redirecting the spiritual and physical resources of the Italian people to the service of the state.4

This was Mussolini’s first, and unsuccessful, programme for mass propaganda. The Futurists played the familiar role as hecklers at the congress, though they were not arrested on this occasion. The practical consequences of the congress were firstly plans for the establishment of an Istituto nazionale fascista della cultura, over which Gentile was invited to preside, and secondly the publication of Gentile’s Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals. Italian Fascism experienced a number of false starts.5 Mussolini’s first attempt at setting up a private CEKA ran into the sand after the Matteotti murder. So he tried again, with more success, in 1926. The organization of culture fared no differently. Six months after the first abortive attempt at a programme of mass propaganda, Mussolini set up the Reale Accademia d’Italia, again with Gentile in charge, a reward for loyalty now that he was no longer a government minister. This was only a slight improvement and it had little or no effect on the country as a whole. The great Treccani encyclopedia project, again directed by Gentile, did have more value and it produced a tangible result which Mussolini could point to as a Fascist achievement for the benefit of national pride. Following De Felice’s lead of seeing the period 1929–36 as the years of consensus, Cannistraro argued in his analysis of the mass media under Fascism that Mussolini’s first decade in power was characterized by the absence of a cultural policy. This is true up to a point. Com- paratively there was less of an articulated cultural policy in the 1920s than there would be in the 1930s. The creative and cultural industries were largely ignored. The emphasis really was on sport and the organization of leisure-time activities, rather than high culture. The regime nonetheless had deeply-held prejudices on cultural questions and these 0230543081_07_ch06.pdf 4/28/07 12:10 PM Page 134

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manifested themselves in various ways, especially with a view to censoring rather than propagating innovation, as we shall see. Mussolini’s personal antipathy and lack of patience for the intellectuals is apparent in the diatribe against Benedetto Croce and the signatories of his anti-Fascist manifesto, published on 1 May 1925 in response to Gentile’s manifesto:

We men of the Fascist regime are not closed away in an ivory tower, far removed from contact with the labouring masses. We are in continuous and direct contact with the people. […]. In the last year we have carried out the true, unique and profound revolution. We have buried the old agnostic, paralytic, liberal democratic state […] and replaced it with the corporative and Fascist state […] which gathers together, controls, harmonizes and tempers the interests of all the social classes.6

Prominent intellectuals, such as Gaetano Salvemini (1873–1957) and Don Luigi Sturzo (1871–1959) had already emigrated by this point. Giuseppe Prezzolini (1882–1982) had made up his mind to go to America. Giuseppe Antonio Borgese (1882–1952) would leave in 1931. It is worth noting that all of them came from different intellectual traditions and they all worked in Florence at the same time. Salvemini was a socialist from Puglia. Sturzo was a priest and the former leader of the Partito popolare. Borgese was a progressive Sicilian Liberal who had studied in Florence and participated in the avant-garde. Prezzolini, who founded La Voce in Florence in 1908, had been an interventionist and close to Mussolini before and during the First World War. Subsequently he had served on Gentile’s schoolbook commission before parting company with the Fascists, leaving Italy for good in the mid-1920s. As director of the Casa Italiana at Columbia University, he played host to Alberto Moravia and Mario Soldati at formative stages of their careers at the end of the 1920s and the early 1930s. But the most prominent intellectuals, Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) and Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944) remained in Italy, acting respectively as the two poles of dissent and conformity with their rival manifestoes.

Writers and politics

Borgese’s novel Rubè (1921) is one of the ﬁrst novels to deal with Fascist violence. The hero, Filippo Rubè, a committed interventionist 0230543081_07_ch06.pdf 4/28/07 12:10 PM Page 135

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in 1915 like Borgese himself, wanders around the centre of Milan on the day of the destruction of the Avanti! ofﬁces in April 1919:

The strange, changeful air, peppered with traces of ozone and explo- sive dust, assaulted his blood. Filippo felt himself squeezed by a desire for violence, sharp as thirst. This was a beautiful battle, not like the lugubrious life in the trenches where dangers and death were present everywhere. And the enemy, usually invisible, was the Enemy with a capital ‘E’, an abstraction capable of inciting blind terror but not the pleasure of a hate which can see its object and can seize it. Here instead were ﬂags, songs, a short race before a crowd of partisan spectators, the shouts, calling men by name, body to body, and victory before nightfall, with victors and vanquished going home for dinner, leaving three or four corpses on the pavement warmed by the sun.7

Rubè, deeply disillusioned by his wartime and post-war experiences, is killed in a subsequent skirmish at Bologna, where he is an innocent bystander, and the opposing sides are left to argue over whether he was a Bolshevik or a Fascist martyr. Borgese’s was not the Fascist grand narrative of heroic struggle and it is very different from Marinetti’s account of April 1919 in Milan. The novel remained in print throughout the 1920s and 1930s, despite Borgese’s ambivalence towards Mussolini’s Italy. The regime had little to fear from a novel. But when a list was drawn up in the late 1930s of writers to be banned, predominantly Jewish writers, the Liberal Borgese would be included as would the Catholic Sturzo and the Socialist Salvemini.8 In common with the Futurists’ move to the capital, the Società italiana degli autori transferred from Milan to Rome in 1926, and Mussolini inaugurated the new headquarters with a speech on the first of August.9 It was a far less expansive speech than the one to newspaper editors two years later, reflecting a relative lack of political interest in creative writing, despite the fact that Mussolini did himself dabble in novels and plays. His opening point was to welcome the Society of Authors’ recognition of Rome as the capital, and implicit in that to welcome an end to what he regarded as regional factionalism. Romanità had not yet emerged as a specific theme of Fascism, but it was bubbling away below the surface. He reminded the audience that his government had helped them by legislating for authors’ commission, something achieved ‘in one month after thirty years of waiting’. 0230543081_07_ch06.pdf 4/28/07 12:10 PM Page 136

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In return for this generous help, he indicated, Italian writers had a mission:

What then is your task, the task of those who are creators? All Italian writers have to be the standard-bearers of the new kind of Italian civilization, at home and especially abroad. It is the job of writers to spread what we might term a ‘spiritual imperialism’ in their plays, in their books, in their lectures; to make Italy known abroad not just for its time-honoured achievements, and not just for the past, because we must not limit ourselves to the past. You must produce something new which has the unmistakable sign of our time, take abroad a knowledge of the new Italy, just as the war did and the Fascist revolution is doing.10

Superficial even by the duce’s standards for this mode of address, his message to writers was that he expected them to promote the reputation of the regime in return for modest material advantage. In due course this would run to membership of the Accademia d’Italia and invitations to write entries for the Enciclopedia Treccani. The speech lacked any reference to how this cultural programme might be achieved or to questions of style or aesthetics. Mussolini was not really interested. He wanted to promote propaganda initiatives such as creating a special committee for the dissemination of books among the masses, leading to la festa del libro, or the book festival, although this too met with very limited success in a partially-literate society.11 Libraries were established at PNF offices, and mobile libraries were instituted, under the auspices of the Ente nazionale per le bib- lioteche popolari e scolastiche, in turn part of the Ministero dell’Educazione nazionale. Outside of the state’s bureaucratic structures there was aesthetic debate in the pages of low-circulation periodicals. Curzio Malaparte and Massimo Bontempelli set up 900 in 1926 as a cosmopolitan, Modernist forum. Originally it was published in French as a quarterly journal, with an office in Paris, welcoming the work of contemporary European writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence, among others. Joyce was even on the editorial committee. It moved to Rome and became a monthly publication in the course of 1926. The restless Malaparte soon lost interest and Bontempelli was left to uphold the standard of stracittà: 900 survived until 1929. Bontempelli was received into the Accademia. The rival movement, strapaese, clustered around Il Selvaggio, the literary journal edited by Mino Maccari. Promoting rural 0230543081_07_ch06.pdf 4/28/07 12:10 PM Page 137

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values, it was more likely to find favour with a regime engaged in a battle for wheat, and despite the occasional telling off from Polverelli, the journal was granted a monthly subsidy of 2000 lire by the Press Office on 23 December 1931, which continued until Mussolini’s fall in July 1943.12 Giuseppe Bottai edited a string of titles, most notably Critica fascista and latterly Primato, which invited aesthetic debate throughout the ventennio. Ironically, the only enduring novel to emerge as an international success from this first decade of Fascist cultural enthusiasm was a bleak story of indifference, from a writer on the margins of Bontempelli’s 900 circle. Alberto Moravia, as a very young man, achieved international prestige and as Prezzolini’s guest in New York in 1931, he was a literary ambassador abroad, in the image of Mussolini’s speech five years earlier. Moravia gave lectures in America on Manzoni, Verga, Nievo, Fogazzaro and D’Annunzio. Gli Indifferenti was recognized as something important and new by Borgese.13 But it was not exactly what Mussolini and the Fascists wanted from culture. Unlike Borgese, Moravia would not be included in the list of banned authors drawn up in late 1938, but he did have a difficult time with censorship.14 By the time his novel was published, the regime was already using the November 1926 security legislation, the Testo unico, or Consolida- tion Act, to ban books, but it was not drawing attention to the fact. In February 1929 the complete works of Luigi Sturzo were banned by means of an administrative instruction. The Consolidation Act had made a specific law unnecessary.15 Staff of the Pubblica Sicurezza were also carrying out periodic checks of bookshops and bookstalls and reporting on anything which gave cause for concern, such as Russian literature, in translation, which was for sale at modest prices. The police drew from this latter fact the conclusion that the books were being subsidized by a hostile foreign government. Michele Bianchi, undersecretary to Mussolini at the Ministry for the Interior issued a circular, which was taken up and commented on with characteristic lack of restraint by Interlandi’s La Tribuna:

We recognize the timeliness of the circular, but we want to add that the surveillance of propaganda literature is not merely a duty. It is a right of the unitary Fascist regime which cannot ignore with the indifference and apathy of liberal-democratic regimes the inﬂuence which foreign books, hostile to our civilization and way of thinking, may have on the spiritual development of our young people.16 0230543081_07_ch06.pdf 4/28/07 12:10 PM Page 138

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It is worth pointing out that Interlandi himself had published translations of Russian literature. Bottai was the Fascist hierarch who aspired to be the authoritative voice of culture. As the ﬁrst minister for Corporations in 1929, the year in which Gli Indifferenti was published, he established two different corporations: one for ‘serious art’ and one for spettacolo, what would later be dubbed ‘popular culture’. Five unions (sindacati) were set up and linked to the corporation for serious art under the umbrella organization of a Confederazione dei professionisti e degli artisti: journalists, authors and writers, architects and engineers, painters and sculptors, and musicians. The Confederazione dello spettacolo dealt with opera, theatre, musical spectacle, variety and light opera, cinema, sport and bands. This division set out a cleavage between traditional high culture and popular culture which was to become more pronounced in the course of the 1930s.17 It was a means to manage culture and to bring writers and intellectuals into line. Before long university professors would be required to take an oath of loyalty to the regime.18 Even with these bureaucratic provisions in place, the hierarchs of the regime were not convinced that they had really won over the hearts and minds of the intellectuals. Bosworth has described this anxiety vividly:

Fascism in the 1930s became a sort of relief organization for a slew of otherwise potentially unemployed intellectuals. By boosting the intellectuals’ self-importance and anchoring the Fascist regime more ﬁrmly to words than to material matters, Mussolini, Bottai and the rest were deepening the unreality, later to be exposed so dramatically in the war. They were not so much controlling culture as allowing culture or its veneer to occupy the centre of Italian life and to become Fascism. The unreality of this project, impossible wholly to overlook, in turn deep- ened the dictatorship’s longstanding nervousness, its half-expressed fear that things were not what they were said to be.19

Relatively few intellectuals had joined the PNF and the more talented writers and artists continued to work, ignoring as far as possible, the tentacles of the state. One hierarch lamented from the pages of Bottai’s journal Critica fascista in 1933:

Even after ten years of Fascist rule the old divide between the new state and the cultural life of the country has not been overcome. The latter remains either anti-Fascist, or abstinent and extraneous, 0230543081_07_ch06.pdf 4/28/07 12:10 PM Page 139

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or tepidly and hypocritically friendly, or only partly Fascist. […] They are in charge of our culture, […] and occupy university chairs, assume intellectual responsibility, direct our publishing houses and the organs of public opinion.20

The time had come for more decisive action on culture. The popular culture side of Bottai’s brief did not remain with the Ministry for Corporations for long. Bit by bit, elements such as theatre, variety and cinema were moved to the new Undersecretariat for Press and Propaganda, in a shifting of the balance of power between ministries and recognition of a new conception of cultural policy which can be dated to between the Decennale in 1932 and the summer of 1933. After a decade of indecision on a direction for the culture of the regime, where the publishing industry had been shaken up, but the popular potential of cinema and radio had been missed, Mussolini set the course for a brave new world. His new cultural message was: ‘Make something for today, so very modern, and audacious without melan- choly reminiscences of decorative styles belonging to the past’.21 This initiative would be led not by Bottai and his ministry but by the Segretaria particolare del duce and by the Press Ofﬁce.

From ministry for press and propaganda to Minculpop

Joseph Goebbels, newly installed as Reichsminister for Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, visited Rome in May 1933, at the beginning of Polverelli’s last summer in charge of the Press Ofﬁce. He had talks with the king, with Mussolini, with Starace, and with Galeazzo Ciano, recently returned from China. The arrival of the Nazis in power caused some concern for the Italian Fascists, summed up in a memorandum by Polverelli:

The problem of organizing propaganda abroad has not yet been resolved. […] The time has come to centralize these services, not least because under considerable pressure from national-socialist propaganda, which is able and efﬁcient, we must defend our positions to make sure there is no equivocation and to prevent Mussolinian thought and action being presented under the NAZI label.22

Ciano replaced Polverelli at the Press Ofﬁce on 1 August 1933, with a brief to reform, innovate and centralize. He set up a section with 0230543081_07_ch06.pdf 4/28/07 12:10 PM Page 140

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responsibility for propaganda abroad, working with the Agenzia Stefani and the Ministry for External Affairs. In early 1934 he carried out a study of Goebbels’ ministry with a view to a complete restructuring of the Press Office. Mussolini accepted the recommendations and on 6 September 1934, the Ufficio stampa was abolished, to be replaced by an Undersecretariat of State for Press and Propaganda, divided into three direzioni generali, with responsibility for the domestic press, the foreign press and for propaganda at home and abroad. Ciano became undersecretary, with delegated powers to sign all decrees, letters and provisions with regard to press and propaganda, on behalf of his father-in-law, the duce. His powers widened further in the following months with the introduction of DGs for Cinematography and Tourism, as well as an Inspectorate of the Theatre, transferring the relevant powers respectively from the ministries for the Corporations, National Education and the Interior. On 24 June 1935, to reflect the expanded brief, the undersecretariat was upgraded to a ministry, and Ciano became the first minister for Press and Propaganda: the Prime Minister’s Press Office had become a ministry in its own right. Eleven years after the Congress on Fascist Culture at Bologna, Mussolini had the appropriate structure in place to co-ordinate mass propaganda. The Italian Fascist propaganda machine had much to learn from German efficiency, as Polverelli’s memorandum had indicated. In terms of censorship, on the other hand, Mussolini’s methods were more subtle than Goebbels’ book-burning. On 3 April 1934 he issued a circular, implementing article 112 of the November 1926 Consolidation Act, which included the following instruction:

All publishers or printers of all types of publication or design, including those of a periodic character must present three copies of each publication to the prefect before putting them out for sale or effecting their distribution in any other way.23

One copy was intended for Ciano at the Press Office, one was for the DG for Public Security and the third one was for the prefect, who was to set up his own Press Office if such did not already exist. The prefectural press offices were to have both police staff and a political adviser. The function of the office was to screen items proposed for publication. Once this had been carried out, a recommendation was to be made to the prefect and he would have the power to authorize publication, unless there were present ‘elements contrary to the social and economic order of the state or damaging to the prestige of the state and 0230543081_07_ch06.pdf 4/28/07 12:10 PM Page 141

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public authority, or offensive to national sentiment’.24 In such cases, the matter was to be referred to Ciano for a political judgement. The prefect had the authority to decide in cases of moral questions, relating to sex, birth control or abortion. In cases of doubt he was refer such matters to the DG for Public Security rather than to the Press Office. This was infinitely more subtle than burning books or even seques- tering them once published. Publishers and printers had to assume the financial risk of typesetting, printing and binding the work they intended to publish and then to submit three copies of their finished product for approval. Refusal of permission to distribute would have had grave financial consequences, as in the case of the libro di stato. The process therefore put the onus of preventive censorship onto printers and publishers. It may not have appeared as radical as smashing up a print shop, as the squadristi were wont to do 15 years earlier, but the reality of the provision was far more profound for culture under Fascism. Furthermore, as Fabre has observed, it was achieved with a special law which permitted the regime to claim, for foreign consumption, that there was no censorship in Fascist Italy. It was also quite clearly a panic measure, responding to a momentary crisis without thinking about the practical consequences: prefects’ offices would soon be filling up with books which nobody had time to read in any detail, if at all. Nonetheless, printers and publishers knew they were being watched: fear was the real point rather than the administrative difficulties it might engender. Under the provisions of the 1926 Consolidation Act (Testo unico) prefects still had the power to sequester newspapers, magazines or any other publications which were politically or morally suspect. Mussolini’s circular, however, had the effect of limiting their powers subtly by requiring them to consult the DG for Public Security on moral questions and the Press Office on political ones. On 24 October 1935, four months after Ciano had become a minister, royal decree law no. 2040 gave him the authority to order prefects to carry out sequestrations. Prefects, however, retained the power to sequester publications on their own initiative too. Royal decree law no. 1834 of 24 September 1936 transferred from the Ministry for the Interior to the minister for Press and Propaganda the power to nominate press officers for the prefectures, that is to say, to hand-pick the political advisers who would work alongside the police. On 11 June 1936 Dino Alfieri replaced Ciano, who became minister for External Affairs. Alfieri, as minister issued an important circular on 30 October 1936 which relaxed the financial risk on printers and publishers by requiring them 0230543081_07_ch06.pdf 4/28/07 12:10 PM Page 142

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to submit proofs for approval rather than the final product. While welcome risk mitigation for the industry, it gave the regime early warning of what was likely to be coming off the presses. It was also a practical move on the part of the regime which had by now found itself flooded with books to read, requiring a modification of the strategy in order to make it more selective. Alfieri on 18 December 1936 issued another, longer, circular which aimed at building up a precise and detailed knowledge of everything being published in Italy, not merely in order to check and revise it, but to direct publishers as to what was expected of them.25 The lessons learned from the experience of the libro di stato were being applied across the whole of the publishing sector. Or at least that was the intention. In March 1937 Starace, outraged that anti-Fascist books were still available in Italy, asked the minister for Press and Propaganda to pass over to the Istituto di cultura fascista responsibility for the censorship of books, possibly having been gingered up by Bottai. Alfieri, replied on 2 April 1937, rejecting Starace’s request on the following grounds:

The task of reviewing everything published in Italy is entrusted institutionally to my ministry which exercises a second level of vigilance, complementing that of the prefects, who work in their desig- nated areas. My offices examine about 600 volumes per month and from September 1936 to February of this year we have read 10,217 volumes. You will understand that these figures require resources which would not be at the disposition of the Istituto di cultura fascista. You have pointed out to me that there are some unortho- dox political books in circulation in Italy. The definition of unorthodoxy is of course open to question and I would like you to provide me with some examples which we may examine.26

That is a further example of the turf wars which dogged state-party relations as well as inter-ministerial relations throughout the ventennio. The following month, on 27 May 1937 the Ministry for Press and Propaganda became the Ministry for Popular Culture, or MiCup, its official abbreviation, with Alfieri as its first minister. Cesari has reconstructed a list of censorship initiatives undertaken by Minculpop between then and Alfieri’s replacement in October 1939 by Alessandro Pavolini.27 In April 1937, the ministry sequestered 14 of the 80 books notified to it by the prefects. It banned the translation of a French magazine, Elle et Lui, published by Rizzoli in Milan, on account of its immoral content, thereby straying into the remit of the DG for Public 0230543081_07_ch06.pdf 4/28/07 12:10 PM Page 143

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Security. The monthly Humana met the same fate, at the request of the prefect of Florence. A ban was placed on war reports from Spain. Prefects were instructed not to send in requests for the authorization of new publications unless they were for newspapers or magazines of exceptional importance. In June 1937, 668 books sent in by publishers were examined as were 54 referred by the prefects. Of these, 12 were sequestered, 28 were authorized and 14 were left pending. Prefects were instructed to impose a ban on reproduction in the press of the hammer and sickle device, for whatever reason, even if the intention was to combat Communism. (This led to the sequestration of a book with a preface by Bottai, published by Sansoni, Gentile’s publishing house). In September 1937, the publishers of illustrated papers were asked to abstain from printing pictures of female athletes, other than cameo shots of the faces of winners or participants in competitions. In November, L’eco del mondo was sequestered for having published an image of a hammer and sickle. With the agreement of the Direzione generale for cinema, a review was begun of all publications relating to the film industry, and a number were banned on the grounds that they were either useless or detrimental from an educational point of view. In December 1937 it was the turn of entertainment and variety publications to come under review, i.e., publications intended largely for a female audience. These were held to be of limited value for the interests of the nation and publishers were urged to concentrate on themes of social utility such as family life, maternity, domestic economy, participation in Fascist life, sport and anything else consonant with the new Fascist consciousness. Alfieri continued to tighten the screw, issuing circulars which required all printers and publishers to send in lists of their recent publications. On 17 January 1938 he ordered prefects to convey to him lists of everything published in their provinces in the previous month, presumably in order to cross-reference the two sources. Data from these lists appear to have led to the eventual list of ‘writers unwelcome in Italy’. In February 1938 L’illustrazione italiana was sequestered because it had published an unflattering photograph of the duce. Opere e giorni was sequestered for a story which offended public morality. In March newspapers were instructed to reduce their coverage of domestic and foreign cronaca nera, again. On 12 April 1938 copies of the newspapers Il Popolo di Roma and Il Lavoro were sequestered for ‘indiscretions relating to the Führer’s visit’. Prefects were instructed to ban the publication in newspapers of offers of employment placed by foreign nationals who wished to set up in Italy.28 The DG responsible for the foreign press brought together years of 0230543081_07_ch06.pdf 4/28/07 12:10 PM Page 144

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uncoordinated activity and in March 1938 completed a list of foreign newspapers and magazines which were to be banned. That list included The Economist and The Manchester Guardian. In the autumn of 1938 the prefectural press offices were required to submit to Rome not just the proofs of books which were in press but also publishers’ catalogues of new books including those not yet published. In 1937 Paolo Orano’s book La difesa della razza had ignited an intense campaign in the papers on the ‘Jewish problem’ which led directly to Telesio Interlandi’s founding the infamous newspaper which shared its name with Orano’s book. A race propaganda office was set up in Minculpop during 1938, headed by an ex-legionario from Fiume, Alberto Luchini, with the brief to build up a specialist library for a study of the ‘problems of race’, establish a photographic archive of the racial types of Italy and Italian Africa, begin publication of non- specialist, popular articles, organize conferences, use the cinema to exalt the Italian race, and to set up a popular magazine. In parallel with this campaign the fight for cultural autarky was pushed ahead with the aspiration to a systematic censorship of articles and books by foreign authors.29 In October 1939 Alessandro Pavolini replaced Alfieri as minister for Popular Culture when Alfieri was posted to wartime Berlin as ambassador. Resources were increased to enable Minculpop to conduct an extensive wartime propaganda programme. Cannistraro has estimated that the ministerial budget for 1938–39 had been just over 100 million lire. ‘Special funds’ alone, intended for secret activities, reached 40 million lire by 1942.30 Where Alfieri had been a very diligent func- tionary, Pavolini was charismatic, on friendly terms with publishers such as Bompiani, founding editor of Il Bargello in Florence and the driving force behind the experimental 18 BL performance in spring 1934.31 He interrupted his tenure, as Ciano had done before him, to fly bombing raids over north Africa. In January 1943, as the regime hastened towards implosion, Pavolini was replaced by Polverelli: in the space of ten years, the ministry had turned a full circle.

Film

Italy’s pre-war ﬁlm industry had been a commercial and critical success at home and abroad. Its economic basis was badly damaged, however, in the war, and Mussolini’s regime inherited a sector which lacked appropriate technology, capital and a robust infrastructure. There was no national ﬁlm industry. To make matters worse, nostalgia for a 0230543081_07_ch06.pdf 4/28/07 12:10 PM Page 145

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golden age was hampering innovation, and public taste was turning to Hollywood. The Fascist state was slow in coming to the aid of the Italian film-makers. Its early media priority, beyond press and radio, was the nationalization of the Istituto Luce in November 1925, with the task of producing news, propaganda, education and culture for the home market. This was quite distinct from a strategy on film as entertainment. The support which was made available to production companies was modest, and with isolated exceptions, there was little or no interest shown by the Fascist hierarchy in cinema. Certainly there was no strategic plan.32 In this vacuum, the industry struggled and American films flooded into the country, introducing a thrill of modernization which crossed all class and regional divisions. American film distribution networks expanded rapidly in the 1920s attracting huge investment and soft loans from American banks. The Fox Corporation was the first one to set up in Italy, in 1921. Italian production companies became dependent on American technology, especially once the talkies arrived in 1929. The American studios were able to increase foreign market share by using domestic revenue to subsidize overseas sales. All this combined with a growing public appetite in Italy for the American dream: American posters and publicity were ubiquitous. Between 1925 and 1930, it is estimated that 80% of the films projected in Italian cinemas were American.33 In 1926 Stefano Pittaluga from Turin bought the failing Unione Cinematografica Italiana (UCI) and used the acquisition to build up his own company, the Società anomina Stefano Pittaluga (SASP), giving him control of over 10% of Italian cinemas. This marked the beginning of an attempt to build an Italian film industry. Mussolini’s government had shown itself willing to protect Italian business interests and so Pittaluga looked for help. A law of 16 June 1927 set out to limit the number of foreign movies screened in Italy. In 1927 this was more of an aspiration than a sensible policy given that there were so few new Italian films available to be shown. Nonetheless, it was recognition for the sector. Mussolini received a delegation in late 1930, consisting of Pittaluga and three associates to discuss the Italian film industry. The outcome of the meeting was his personal commitment to promote and support the industry in the political and social interests of the country. Pittaluga’s death in 1931 was a blow to the industry as he had been the natural leader. The practical consequence of Mussolini’s commitment to Italian film was law no. 918 of 18 June 1931. Bottai, then Minister 0230543081_07_ch06.pdf 4/28/07 12:10 PM Page 146

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for Corporations, introduced the bill, stating that the government’s intention was:

To give a considerable, not to say heroic propulsion to the industry so as to facilitate the rebirth of Italian cinema. By means of this provision we intend to help the industry which faces stiff competition. The government wants to help the industry resist foreign competitors who bring to our national market different light genres of film, such as variety and entertainment, which constitute a strong attraction for the public. I rarely go to the cinema myself but I think that films which seek to educate the public are more likely to bore them. The public wants to be entertained and it is precisely in this field that we want to help the Italian industry.34

In other words, the strategy for entertainment was to imitate the style of Hollywood, while protecting the domestic industry against American competition, but retaining a mixed economy of domestic innovation and foreign imports. In 1933 Italy imposed a limit on the number of films which could be imported and it levied a tax on foreign films, the revenue from which would be ploughed back into the Italian film industry. This made Italian film-making indirectly dependent on the American industry in terms of finance as well as being utterly dependent for its technology. The veline from Polverelli, however, urged moderation in relation to Hollywood:

Newspapers are advised not to publish articles about Hollywood […] because we have in Italy a ﬁlm industry of our own to praise. (20 February 1933).35

Luigi Freddi, former director of the Press Office of the PNF was given the brief of reporting on the state of the Italian film industry. His report, written in 1933–34 after a fact-finding visit to America, was critical of the personnel involved and of the absence of any co- ordinated strategy.36 He proposed an authoritative body to ‘regulate, direct, inspire, control and where necessary dispense rewards and penalties to all forms and initiatives which make up the field of Italian cinema’. His recommendations led to the establishment of a Direzione generale della cinematografia, within Ciano’s Under- secretariat, and later Ministry. Freddi was appointed as director and 0230543081_07_ch06.pdf 4/28/07 12:10 PM Page 147

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he used his inaugural address to reiterate his vision for the Italian ﬁlm industry:

The state will frame it. The state will help. The state will reward. The state will control. The state will goad. The production of this industry concerns directly the dignity, self-image and economic and moral interest of the regime, and for that reason I do not hesitate to declare that it is at last time for the state to intervene directly, stamping on its production the authoritative and severe sign of its will and control.37

Preventive censorship was generally left to the importers and distrib- utors, given that Hollywood already had its own strict censorship code which satisfied Freddi. In 1935 Ciano and Will Hays signed an agreement according to which an annual quota of 250 American films could be exported to Italy. The different aspects of the industry, including production, training and distribution were brought together under Freddi’s control. Most significant of all, the Centro sperimentale di Cinematografia was set up, and Cinecittà was born, an environment in which Mussolini’s son Vittorio was quite at home. It was inaugurated in November 1935 by Dino Alfieri, and soon came to be seen as a hotbed of anti-Fascism. Hollywood accounted for almost three quarters of the takings in Italian cinemas in 1938, on the eve of the Alfieri law which would restrict American imports. International politics, by that stage, had strained relations with America and the distribution of German films had increased in Italian cinemas. Critics such as Interlandi, who had been railing against American cinema since 1924, and fellow racists began to call for the Italian industry to make films which showed the physical superiority of the Italian race, along the lines of German films which glorified the Aryan myth.38 Interlandi was reprimanded by Minculpop for the critical tone of film criticism in the pages of Il Tevere, in relation to national productions.39 This did not stop his young protégé Giorgio Almirante writing in menacing tones some years later:

After four years of official racism, what has the Italian film industry done? Nothing, absolutely nothing. That is all the more amazing when you consider how appropriate the racist propaganda is to a good and effective commercial film. Anti-Semitism is only one aspect of racism, and yet how many themes, how much interest it can offer to a director! It galls me to have to cite foreign examples: 0230543081_07_ch06.pdf 4/28/07 12:10 PM Page 148

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but there is no doubt that the Germans have achieved things which should open the eyes of our producers. […] But as I said anti- Semitism is just one aspect of racism. Just think of the formidable and dramatic theme of inter-racial alliances: there is the complex and unlimited theme of heredity (think of a Zola of the cinema, of a director who would be able to render on ﬁlm the sense of generations which the invisible tie of the blood unites indissolubly. […] There is a whole world to explore. […] (No, dear reader, I am not naïve. I know well that before we can discover the world of racist cinema we must ﬁrst rid the world of cinema dominated by Jews, the world of the more or less clandestine involvement of Jews in the life of the cinema. No, I am not naïve. But I dare to hope that the necessary clearing out will proceed without obstacle and with no favour for anybody. Smile not, dear reader, let me hope…)40

Interlandi himself wrote the treatment for a ﬁlm Agar, in 1938, dealing with miscegenation and abortion which evidently did not ﬁnd favour with Minculpop censors, and was never realized.41

Theatre

Fascism inherited from Liberal Italy a legacy of statute, custom and practice on stage censorship. Prefects had delegated powers to censor on grounds of sedition and offences against morality or the monarchy. The legislative framework in which they operated had been set in place by Francesco Crispi in 1889.42 According to the Consolidation Act of 6 November 1926 a licence was required in order to stage plays, show ﬁlms, organize conferences, dancing festivals, horse races or any other public spectacle or entertainment, whether outdoors or indoors. Per- formances were to be banned at the discretion of the prefect if he feared a threat to public order or offence to morals or family values. Regulation of the theatre, therefore, remained the domain of the prefects, as it had been in Liberal Italy. Royal decree law no. 62 of 21 January 1929 introduced some Fascist modiﬁcations, on the eve of the Lateran Pacts. Performances were to be banned henceforth if

(1) they presented a sympathetic account of a vice or crime which aimed at exciting class hatred; (2) they gave offence, even by means of allusion, to the Emperor King, the Pope, the Head of government, Ministers, institutions of the state or sovereigns or representatives of foreign powers; 0230543081_07_ch06.pdf 4/28/07 12:10 PM Page 149

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(3) they stirred up disdain for the laws or for national or religious sentiment or might give rise to a disturbance in international relations; (4) they offended the decorum or prestige of public authorities, ofﬁcers, agents of the state, members of the armed forces, or private and family life; (5) they referred to acts or events which might convulse public opinion; (6) they were held to be a danger to the public for some other reason.

These modifications reduced the extent of the prefects’ discretion, but did not remove it. Law no. 599 of 6 January 1931, however, modified the Consolidation Act, and set up the Ufficio per la censura teatrale in the Ministry of the Interior, with Leopoldo Zurlo named as censor. This represented a centralization of theatrical censorship, which extended to what might be broadcast over the airwaves. This development, while it sounds ominous, was not primarily an initiative of the Fascist state at all according to Nicola Fano: it was the theatre fraternity itself which had petitioned Mussolini to set up centralized censorship.43 Before that, in order to get permission to put on a show, actors had to ask the permission of the prefect in each city or town in which they wanted to perform. Every first night required a certificate (visto) which involved submitting a complete copy of the text and paying an inspection fee. In 1930 this amounted to five lire which was half of the average daily earnings of a comic actor. More problematic was providing a fresh copy of the script every few days, in an era before photocopiers. It meant travelling theatre companies had to have access to a good typist, reams of paper, a typewriter and a large supply of carbon paper. In addition, applications had to be presented to prefects several days in advance. Given that the theatre company was likely to be working in another province, perhaps hundreds of miles away, performing to a paying public, this was next to impossible. Centralization seemed to offer advantages. In conceding this favour to the travelling players, the Fascists’ motives were not entirely benevolent, and Fano’s interpretation sounds uncomfortably close to that of Carmine Senise, Bocchini’s successor as chief of police.44 The new law did reduce costs for the industry, in theory, but it gave the state far greater control over what the public could and could not see on a stage or hear on the radio. Before 1931 there had been tension in the system between the ministry at the centre and the prefects at the periphery, and the decentralized 0230543081_07_ch06.pdf 4/28/07 12:10 PM Page 150

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decision-making arrangement allowed for the possibility of one prefect permitting a show to be staged while his counterpart in the next province might take the opposite view. Under the new law, anyone wishing to stage a show had to submit an application to the censor’s office along with two copies of the complete script. The censor would read the script and perhaps cut lines or whole scenes and return the marked copy to the company’s representative. The other copy was archived. Approved scripts had permission to be performed anywhere in the jurisdiction. On the other hand, any script which did not pass the censor’s test was banned throughout the country (and later throughout the Italian colonies too). Plays suppressed in this way were marked rejected. One copy was returned without explanation, the second one was archived. Some of these rejected copies bear Zurlo’s annotations, giving some indication as to why they were rejected.45 However, even in cases where permission was granted, there was a further condition. Prefects were required to send along to each performance a member of their staff whose job was to ensure that the words spoken by the actors corresponded to the approved words on the page. If they did not, the police had to powers to suspend a performance, although in practice those powers were rarely exercised. On the face of it Leopoldo Zurlo might appear an unlikely Fascist censor. That is how he sought to present himself in his post-war memoirs, whose title Memorie inutile (1952), echoes those of Carlo Goldoni. It has been out of print for many years. Already contemplating an early retirement in 1931 when Mussolini appointed him as head of the Ufficio di censura teatrale, he had spent years as a civil servant in Liberal Italy and had taken no part whatever in the March on Rome. Zurlo had a genuine passion for the theatre and he was zealous to a fault: he read all the scripts himself rather than entrusting them to the commission of experts envisaged under the law. When first established the Ufficio censura teatrale was part of the Ministero dell’Interno, on the grounds that it was rationalizing what had been a prefectural responsibility, and therefore reported to Mussolini as he was the minister. In January 1935 it was transferred to Ciano’s new Ministry for Press and Propaganda as the Theatre Inspectorate. Subsequently it was incorporated into the Minculpop. Despite these changes in the formal lines of management, however, Zurlo continued to refer any problem cases directly to the duce.46 Therefore, he fulfilled the role of mediator between the duce and the theatrical community, which, given Zurlo’s own theatrical leanings, probably explains why Mussolini chose him for the post of censor. 0230543081_07_ch06.pdf 4/28/07 12:10 PM Page 151

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Zurlo found himself caught up in Mussolini’s circular of 3 April 1934 relating to censorship. Within 90 minutes of Mussolini’s circular being dispatched, Bocchini issued an order withdrawing permission to perform a play by an innocuous Fascist playwright Luigi Chiarelli, called Carne bianca (white flesh), which featured a black cannibal, and which had already been approved by Zurlo. As a rule high culture as represented by Chiarelli, was not the target of Zurlo’s censorious zeal. He was far more concerned by the challenge which genuine popular culture posed for the self-image of the regime through the genre of variety.47 This was knock-about comedy which arose from the stock themes of hunger, sex and poverty, the stuff of all popular sketches. The regime, on the other hand, wanted people to believe the illusion of a disciplined and improved Italy. These two visions were necessarily on a collision course. Humour and satire were spontaneous among most ordinary Italians, especially from the mid- to late 1930s, as gaping chasms began to appear between the bellicose rhetoric of the regime and the pitiful state of the economy and the military campaigns. Of all the comic writers and performers working in Fascist Italy the most emblematic was Angelo Cecchelin (Trieste 1894–Turin 1964), from Cittavecchia in Trieste, a poor, colourful and innately irreverent quarter of the city.48 Cittavecchia was precisely the type of urban area which Mussolini’s regime sought to suppress. It was the world of Charlie Chaplin’s tramps. (Indeed like Chaplin, Cecchelin dressed in a black suit with a bowler hat.) Cecchelin’s play Gli ultimi giorni di Zitavecia (The Last Days of Cittavecchia) was presented to the censor’s office in 1934, containing a two-page scene in which a group of prostitutes present arguments in defence of their trade. Zurlo played safe, mindful of the duce’s capacity to over-rule decisions, and crossed the two pages out. When returning the copy with this cut, he also wrote to the prefect of Trieste advis- ing him to make sure that the banter which had not been cut did not provoke excessive participation from the audience, such as to transform the evening into a popular protest against the knocking down of Cittavecchia. Were such an event to take place, the police were advised to take any steps they saw fit to restore public order. There is no suggestion that Gli ultimi giorni di Zitavecia was an anti- Fascist play. By all accounts it was a rambling, nostalgic show which drew too much attention to the seamier side of daily life in urban Trieste, and was therefore too close to realism, an aesthetic which rarely found favour with the Fascists. 0230543081_07_ch06.pdf 4/28/07 12:10 PM Page 152

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Cecchelin was a showman out of joint with his times. He had grown up in Austrian Trieste and had observed satirically in 1918 as people who had prospered under Austrian rule quickly adapted to regime change in order to protect their status as loyal subjects of the House of Savoy, and indeed, as Fascists. Predictably this did not go down well with the local political, commercial and industrial networks, and after the Fascists came to power he was represented as a Communist. Fano has argued that rather than being political in any real sense, Cecchelin inveighed against modern times, against modernization, and as it happened, that modernization in the 1920s and 1930s meant Fascism. He was a satirist ﬁrst and an anti-Fascist second. More and more material was cut from his shows by Zurlo in the 1930s, but his public remained loyal.49 To make up the time and provide the audience with value for their money he struck on the stratagem of improvising a parody of the Istituto Luce newsreels which had accompanied performances in the cinemas from 1925. He would come out from behind the curtain himself and improvise jokes and wisecracks:

It was a sort of touring news-service (gazzettino ambulante) which elaborated on the news which was on the lips of members of his audience but which would never have been carried in the newspapers of the regime. His elaborations were couched in irony, sassiness and irreverence.50

This was genuine stand-up comedy, of the type which authoritarian governments fear the world over, contrasting the hunger and poverty of ordinary people with the hypocrisy, cynicism and pious illusions of the ruling classes. Predictably, the police in the hall regularly moved to break up the evening and accompany Cecchelin to the questura, as they had done with Marinetti when there was still fire in his belly. Other popular comedians fared slightly better under Fascism. The two most prolific were Enzo Turco and Guglielmo Inglese, both of whom were associated with Totò, and went on to have cameo appearances in Totò’s post-war films. Their work consisted in popular escapism and happy endings. It was rarely cut by the censor, and never rejected. One cut in a play by Inglese, La vera fortuna, is particularly interesting in terms of what the regime’s implicit aesthetic policy. The play was submitted in July 1939, and there was a scene which involved the actors singing the Fascist Hymn to Rome, an imperial anthem beginning ‘Sole che sorgi libero e giocondo’. Zurlo’s annotation on the 0230543081_07_ch06.pdf 4/28/07 12:10 PM Page 153

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archive copy reads: ‘The Hymn to Rome has no place in a review’. In other words:

It was fundamentally important that writers for the theatre (not just comic writers) steered clear of any reference to the realism of daily life in contemporary Italy, to living under the shadow of Fascism.51

Literature and translations

When the Ministry for the Press and Propaganda was set up, book censorship passed to it from the Ministry of the Interior. A new section was established within the Directorate general for the Italian Press, headed by Gherardo Casini. In the first sustained study of literary censorship under Fascism, Lorenzo Greco presented the case of Elio Vittorini’s Il Garofano rosso as an example of political censorship in action at the Ministry for Press and Propaganda, largely on the basis of Vittorini’s subsequent account of what had happened.52 More recently Guido Bonsaver has examined the archival evidence and demonstrated that the decision to censor the novel probably had more to do with moral than political considerations.53 The novel was published in instalments by Solaria, the quarterly Florentine literary journal edited by Alberto Carocci, beginning in February 1933. The prefectural Press Office decided to sequester the August 1934 edition of Solaria, partly because of the sexual content of Vittorini’s chapter, which, like Cecchelin’s play, involves a prostitute. The issue of Solaria also contained a short story by Enrico Terracini which was also held to offend morals. Bonsaver has argued very plausibly that the censors were on a heightened alert in the months following Mussolini’s circular of 3 April 1934. Solaria closed down at the end of 1934 because of financial pressures. Vittorini published three articles in Il Bargello in the second half of 1934, arguing against literary censorship as outmoded prudery.54 Il Bargello had a circulation of about 5,000: presumably a readership of PNF members. His articles certainly did not provoke an outcry against literary censorship. Fear of offending sexual morality is quite certainly the reason why Henry Furst’s novel Simun was never published in Fascist Italy. Furst, a polyglot American, translator of D’Annunzio, Ojetti and Croce and apparently once a member of the PNF, had spent two years back in America, working first for Prezzolini at the Casa Italiana, Columbia University and at Vassar College before moving on to the Library of Congress in Washington.55 In America he married an English woman 0230543081_07_ch06.pdf 4/28/07 12:10 PM Page 154

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who had accompanied him from Rome, but the relationship was short- lived and evidently something of a personal trauma. He was dismissed by Vassar College in January 1930 on the euphemistic grounds that he had not spent Christmas with his wife. Returning to Italy via London and Paris he began work on his only novel, in Italian, whose plot involved a homosexual relationship with a French sailor. The manu- script circulated among friends and acquaintances including Croce, Eugenio Montale and Mario Soldati, and he had high hopes that Giacomo Noventa might serialize it for him in 1936. But these came to nothing because nobody was prepared to take that kind of ﬁnancial risk with such a text. The novel was published in Paris, in French as Simoun, in 1939, in a very short print run, probably with Montale’s endorsement. Gianfranco Contini reviewed it favourably in 1940. Once Italian censorship laws had been relaxed in the 1960s it eventually came out in Italian, two years before Furst’s death.56 His volume of poems, Songs of Tokimarne, was published in Genoa in 1938 without incident, but they were not morally or politically contentious and they were written in English. Both the police and Minculpop took a close interest in Furst, not because of his novel, which they will never have seen, but because he was an occasional reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, com- menting on Italian books and books about Italy. His review of the Hoepli edition of Mussolini’s Scritti e discorsi, while expressing his fascination with the duce, also drew American readers’ attention to a process of censorship which had taken place between the words uttered in the heat of the moment and the words in cold print:

This preface, and other writings of the Duce which we miss from this collection, will perhaps be published in the two volumes that are still to appear; or perhaps it has been deemed opportune to omit them. More serious is the fact that some of the most important political speeches have not been reprinted in their original form. We believe that our memory does not betray us in recalling a remark in one of the four ‘revolutionary’ speeches, to the effect that Nietzsche was right when he said that the masses should be provided with the necessities of life in order that they may keep quiet and not interfere with the life of the leaders of humanity. This courageous remark has always endeared Mussolini to us; but no doubt a Prime Minister may be excused for omitting it from a publication destined to have a wide circulation. After all, the thing is not that the phrase should be reprinted, but that the dream should come true.57 0230543081_07_ch06.pdf 4/28/07 12:10 PM Page 155

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It was well known that Mussolini improvised around his scripts and that the printed versions were always more anodyne than what his audience heard.58 But the regime was sensitive about these things being pointed out by foreign journalists, even when done in approving terms. Furst also became embroiled in the complex vicissitudes sur- rounding Moravia’s second novel, Le Ambizioni sbagliate, by reviewing it for the New York Times Book Review (in early 1936) and offering to translate it. His letter to Moravia, intercepted by the security forces, ended up on the duce’s desk.59 Moravia’s novel was not censored, but Italian editors were instructed not to review it. On the other hand, some of Furst’s reviews in the New York Times Book Review will have been welcomed by the regime, however, because at times he cast polemical barbs at anti-Fascist exiles writing from America. In his review of Soldati’s America primo amore, for example, he wrote:

I fear that those who among his countrymen in this country [i.e., America] have poured invective on it are not all actuated by the purest motives. Soldati has not been lenient to the mediocrities who leave Italy, where they are ignored, to become shining lights of Italian culture in America, where few are able to put their titles to the test, and it is only natural that they should hit back. To this they are perfectly entitled, but not below the belt, gentlemen, not below the belt!60

This invective may have been aimed at Prezzolini, whom Furst knew, or at Borgese or Salvemini. On political matters, Furst was a weather- vane. Criticism of Mussolini and his regime from across the Atlantic became more pronounced after 1935, the year of the invasion of Ethiopia, with George Seldes’ Sawdust Caesar (1935), Borgese’s Goliath (1938), and Gaudens Megaro’s Mussolini in the Making (1938) all banned in Italy, although of these three only Borgese’s name appeared on the list of ‘writers unwelcome in Italy’. The repackaging of the Ministero della Stampa e della Propaganda into a new Ministero di Cultura Popolare in May 1937, was marked by a conference on books, which took place in Florence on 2–3 June.61 Alﬁeri’s Minculpop wanted to stake its claim to control of the libro di stato and the libri scolastici, the most lucrative and only aspect of the book market not in its remit, with a view to guiding the sector in the direction of planned autarky. Alﬁeri was particularly interested in the linking of schoolbooks to children’s literature. The stories in the genres 0230543081_07_ch06.pdf 4/28/07 12:10 PM Page 156

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such as adventure, history, and crime were either imported from America or followed American models. Alfieri wanted to proceed to a review of these publications, making clear to publishers their duty to develop Italian subjects, inspired by the exemplary lives and adventures of Italian explorers, navigators, aviators and heroes, so as to inspire children in school and outside school.62 Schoolbooks, however, had remained under the direction of the Ministero di Educazione nazionale, over which Bottai now presided, having returned to the cabinet after an unwelcome year as Governor of Rome. Bottai objected strenuously in advance of the conference and Casini, the Minculpop representative had to state at the com- mencement of proceedings that the schoolbooks were not on the agenda. Publishers used the occasion as an opportunity to request sub- ventions similar to the ones allocated to those active in film and theatre. Disputes over control continued between the two ministries, but as had happened five years earlier, Bottai was out-manoeuvred and Alfieri, head of the successor to the Prime Minister’s Press Office, enhanced his powers. Practical consequences for writers and publishers included the requirement to supply not three copies of a work for approval, but eight. The regime, as we have seen, had taken an interest in controlling the publication and distribution of books from the beginning of the 1930s, but not in a sustained manner and not to the point of developing a detailed and strategic censorship policy. The result was that people had access to anti-Fascist books and modern American novels, even in state libraries which were controlled by Bottai’s Ministry for National Education. In early 1938 Casini prepared a memorandum for his minister, Alfieri, in which he pointed out that the number of foreign books imported into Italy had dropped by 75% since 1928, and that only 7% of the national production consisted of translations.63 The strategy of cultural autarky was working. But for the likes of Interlandi (himself a former translator) and Marinetti, 7% was roughly 7% too many. Marinetti began a campaign against translations, attacking publishers in newspaper articles and regional conferences. Interlandi supported the campaign from the pages of Il Tevere, deploring the fact that the work of an anti-Fascist like Thomas Mann should be available in Fascist Italy. Bottai warned of the dangers of isolationism, for an imperial power, from his Critica fascista and continued his tussle with Alfieri for a primacy in national culture. On 15 January 1938, Casini sent a telegram to publishers requiring them to send him, as a matter of urgency, a list of their foreign works in print and those planned for the 0230543081_07_ch06.pdf 4/28/07 12:10 PM Page 157

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future. A census of translations had begun, the purpose of which was not yet clear. The political atmosphere became increasingly anti-Semitic over the next six months. Fabre has shown that the order to remove Jewish and decadent writers from Italian culture dates from April 1938, one month before Hitler’s visit. Lists of Jewish writers were drawn up over the following three months and these would form the basis of the list of writers unwelcome in Italy which was motivated by racist policy but which was not confined exclusively to Jewish writers. Their books were to be removed from libraries and retail outlets, and copies in publishers’ warehouses were to be pulped. Included on the eventual list was Pitigrilli (Dino Segre), better known to the political police as fiduciario 373, active as an OVRA spy in Paris until 22 September 1939, and Margherita Sarfatti, the duce’s ex-mistress. The perception of enemies without and within continued to drive censorship policy for the remaining five years of the regime, and it was brought to bear on language and translation as well as on the policy of racism. Alessandro Pavolini replaced Alfieri in 1939 and this handover quickened the pace of censorship. The trend included a move towards a cultural autarky which extended into daily patterns of language, requiring a suppression of the formal personal pronoun ‘Lei’, now held to be a foreign import and uncomfortable reminder of centuries of foreign domination, in favour of ‘Voi’. Censors were employed by publishing houses to ‘correct’ dialogue printed in books.64 Censorship on the language extended to dialect literature, although plans for its systematic removal from circulation were not actually implemented. Increased resources for Minculpop meant that the new minister could deploy staff to censor American films, translations and even cartoons. Thus Mickey Mouse was eventually banned in January 1942. In fact pirated versions of the Disney character swatting flies had supported the war effort in Ethiopia eight years before to illustrate a popular song, ‘Topolino in Abissinia’.65 In July 1940, with Italy’s entry into the war, a law was passed with the aim of controlling the publication of translations. All proposals for translation now had to be given explicit approval by officials from Minculpop. The most famous case of translation censorship remains Vittorini’s Americana project in which Bompiani invested, with a view to publication in 1941 as part of a series of world literature. Vittorini had experienced censorship, as we have seen, in 1934, on moral grounds, and he had worked for Pavolini on Il Bargello in the early 1930s. Bompiani had good relations generally with Minculpop and 0230543081_07_ch06.pdf 4/28/07 12:10 PM Page 158

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clearly did not expect Pavolini’s reaction, which was to sequester the two-volume anthology. His reasons for doing so are revealing:

The work is worthy of praise for the criteria used in making the selection of texts, for the information provided and for the whole presentation. I remain however of the opinion that the publication, at this time, of the American anthology is inopportune. The United States are a potential enemy. The attitude of their president towards the Italian people is well known. It is not the time for courtesies towards America, not even literary ones. Furthermore, the anthology would only refocus the excessive enthusiasm for recent American literature, which is a fashion to be discouraged.66

What appeared to be of most concern was Vittorini’s own editorial contribution, in the form of polemical short introductions to each text. Pavolini offered as a compromise that the volumes could go ahead, without Vittorini’s introductions, and with a critical essay instead from Emilio Cecchi. The book appeared in August 1942, by which time the list of authors unwelcome in Italy had been distributed to prefects for onward transmission to publishers. On the 25 July 1943, after Mussolini was dismissed by the king, General Badoglio ordered a round up of known or suspected trouble- makers around the kingdom. Among those arrested were Vittorini, in Milan and Interlandi, in Rome. Each was held for about a month. When the RSI was established Vittorini went underground and edited the Milanese edition of L’Unità. Interlandi ﬂed north from Rome and Mussolini placed him in charge of radio. Bottai, the self-selected apostle of Fascist culture was sentenced to death in absentia, at the Verona trial. The cultural tensions which had been building up since Italy’s intervention in Spain had become a civil war. 0230543081_08_ch07.pdf 4/28/07 12:11 PM Page 159

7 Censorship, Secrets and Lies

The effectiveness of censorship in Mussolini’s regime could be measured in various ways. If the press officer or minister ordered a news blackout on a topic or pulled a story from the press, then that topic or story did not go out to the public. It was kept secret: preventive censorship had worked. There was no Italian press or media coverage of the bombing raid on Taranto which hobbled the navy for example. Reports on enemy radio were ignored in the Italian media, on the instruction of the minister. It was far more difficult to measure and control things which might be going on in the day to day interactions of ordinary people, in the routines of the stand-up comics, in the apartments, fields, sacristies, railway carriages, bars and brothels of Italy. Throughout the ventennio there was the linger- ing doubt, on the part of those in power, that the intended messages were getting lost, or worse, that they were being modified or resisted. A symptom of this frustration is the chivvying tone of Polverelli, Ciano, Alfieri and Pavolini when dealing with the press- men. Another is Giovanni Gentile’s concern over the possibility of teachers at the periphery undermining central efforts at education reform. Yet another is the vast archive of anonymous denunciations received by senior members of the regime and prefects from all corners of the kingdom, indicating that not all was well within the Ethical State, and that perhaps not enough had been removed from circulation after all. This chapter looks at the interaction of censorship policies with the realities of daily life under the regime, and in doing so it considers some of the shared assumptions which were rarely articulated in public but which proved more enduring than any attempts at an anthropological revolution.

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Public and private

Addressing parliament on 16 May 1925, Alfredo Rocco, the architect of Fascist law and order legislation, outlined the key principle motivating his revision of the legal code:

The state is more than a juridical body. It is, and must be, an ethical body. The state must make itself the tutor of public morality and it must assert this morality. It must take care of the spirits as well as the bodies of its people. It is in the name of this supreme duty that the state must intervene to suppress lies, corruption and all forms of deviation and degeneration of public and private morality.1

Therefore from early in the ventennio, and Mussolini’s real ‘seizure of power’ in 1925, there was an intentional blurring of the public and the private, and suppression of ‘lies, corruption and all forms of deviation and degeneration of public and private morality’ became part of the state’s mission. If the ethical state was to be greater than the sum of its parts, then what Emilio Gentile has called the ‘anthropological revolution’ had to be felt at the level of each individual. The implicit Fascist social policy was that the ethical state would provide the role models (for healthy children, wholesome women, valiant soldiers, virile athletes and disciplined workers), secular models of veneration (such as the war heroes) and directives on types of life style. These values, at ﬁrst sight, are not strikingly different from traditional ones of zeal, temperance, discipline, kindness, generosity, sub- missiveness and charity. They would be reinforced daily by the press, radio, posters, and newsreels as well as at school, in church and at leisure organizations. Their negative poles, sloth, gluttony, lust, anger, envy, greed and arrogance, would be reprobated by appropriate pun- ishments and occasionally by isolated acts of exemplary, corrective violence, where they proved necessary. Mussolini, in his Ascension Day speech in 1927, would later use the image of a surgeon removing disease and damaged cells from the body politic. What was different, and modern about the Fascist value system, was that preparation for war became a guiding principle of social organization. That required a growing and healthy population.2 Therefore Fascist social policy had to be pro-natalist and to involve improvements in children’s health and general welfare. This general trend on demographic policy, at least, was fully in line with Catholic teaching, however, so the Church had no grounds for objection. Indeed given the generalized demographic 0230543081_08_ch07.pdf 4/28/07 12:11 PM Page 161

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decline in most European countries after the First World War, the Church was positively disposed to the prospect of greater fecundity in Italy, and a society poised for bonifica, or renewal. Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Casti Connubi (1931), issued two years after the Lateran Pacts were signed, reiterated Catholic orthodoxy on the sanctity and indis- soluble nature of marriage as well as the traditional dogma of procreation being the primary purpose of matrimony, with a consequent ban on divorce, birth control, and abortion. Who, after all, could publicly quibble with the ideals of healthy and loving children, kind and wholesome women, happy families, proud and valiant soldiers, disciplined and virile athletes or zealous and temperate workers? In most respects Mussolini’s programme was not significantly out of line with contemporary trends in most other European countries of the time which were witnessing an increased state intervention through social welfare programmes, a progressive medicalization of all sorts of social relations and a growing awareness of the importance of the social sciences in policy making.3 The Fascists’ ethical state embraced positive intentions on progress and innovation as well as on anthropological revolution, and sought to bring them to fruition. In that process, the demographic campaign brought the tentacles of the state into the intimate recesses of private dwellings. For a start, OMNI, the Opera nazionale maternita` e infanzia was established in 1925 as the Fascist welfare agency. This certainly had all the appearances of positive innovation and it was trumpeted publicly as progressive Fascism in action. Part of OMNI’s remit was to support single mothers and their children, on the grounds that children were the nation’s future. This was a significant difference from traditional Catholic morality which tended to be less supportive of the figure of the unmarried mother and her child. Consistent with increasing birth-rates, there was a crackdown on abortion: midwives suspected of performing terminations could find themselves sent to confino, without a hearing before a magistrate, let alone a trial by jury to establish guilt or innocence.4 Generations before routine use of the opinion poll, Mussolini’s regime felt the need to gauge public opinion, in order to ensure that policy making remained in touch with the people. Where a democratic government might have qualms about using the police as researchers into public opinion, a totalitarian one bent on anthropological revolution could not afford such qualms. The emergency measures of the first phase of government had put in place some important administrative instruments of state, of which we are now have an insider’s view. 0230543081_08_ch07.pdf 4/28/07 12:11 PM Page 162

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Covert operations

Antonio Pizzuto, secret policeman, polyglot, and talented novelist, has left a fascinating posthumously-published insight into the daily routine of the political police. Born in Palermo in 1893, to a lawyer married to a poet, Pizzuto had graduated in both law and philosophy, spending three years in the Red Cross, at Palermo and Agrigento, in lieu of military service, before entering the police training school in 1918 out of necessity, when his father’s death altered the family income for the worse. An expert linguist, he represented the Italian police force at the forerunner of Interpol abroad throughout the 1930s and in the post-war period made a name for himself as an experimental novelist, in the manner of Tommaso Landolfi and Carlo Emilio Gadda, while maintaining a discreet silence about most of his policing activities between 1922 and 1945. He was also a translator of Immanuel Kant and had flirted with the idea of translating Ulysses in the mid-1920s. His posthumous writings, while evidently fictionalized to some degree, provide a unique insight into the routine mechanisms of Fascist surveillance and censorship. From 1930 to 1944 Pizzuto worked at the nerve-centre of the Ministry of the Interior, the divisione polizia politica, under Guido Leto, liaising with OVRA and tracking fuorusciti. Fear of correspondence between the domestic population and fuorusciti induced the Division of the Political Police to order each Questura to set up an observation service (servizio di osservazione) as well as, or instead of, a system for the surveillance of correspondence (revisione della corrispondenza).5 This was to be a covert operation, carried out with alacrity and care, so that no-one would be aware of its existence. The questure and prefetture were responsible for reporting daily on this activity to the DG for Public Security in the Ministry of the Interior, either to the Divisione affari generali e riservati (section 1) or to the political police, or both.6 Permission for tracking of specific individuals had to be sought from the Divisione affari generali e riservati, which in turn would consult the political police, to ensure that local action did not jeopardize a political police project or indeed involve the correspondence of an informer. Pizzuto wrote an ironic account of how this sometimes worked out in practice. The scene is the regular morning meeting of the senior layer of the police, chaired by Bocchini, who has become ‘Senator Foscolino’ in Pizzuto’s narrative:

‘Let’s take a look at the telegrams’, concluded Foscolino. Decàmpano made a throwaway gesture in the direction of the ante-room, from 0230543081_08_ch07.pdf 4/28/07 12:11 PM Page 163

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whose darkness behind the half-open door leaf, came the gleam of spectacles. A little man entered, stammering ‘May I disturb you?’ There was no reply, but he had grown used to being ignored. He proffered nonetheless a blue file of deciphered dispatches as if he was bestowing a gift. Only when he had reached the middle of the room did the chief acknowledge his presence and, while the semicircle of senior men opened out to let him reach the writing desk, the chief said ‘Well Gianfilippo, what delights do you bring me today?’ Gianfilippo, handing over the papers, replied with resignation: ‘The only bit of interesting news, your Excellency, is that that notorious Professor Fosboni has been arrested at the Swiss border in Domodossola’. There was a silence. But a silence such as that of babies when they suck in all their breath in preparation for letting out a seemingly-interminable wail, and which eventually fades away without either the actor or the audience being aware that it has ended. ‘Jesus wept!’ shouted Foscolino, and his coffee cup and the sugar bowl jumped off the tray, sending the spoon flying over the desk to nestle down in the thick carpet, where Farropelante bent over to pick it up. Foscolino shouted and swore, threatened and shouted again, slamming his fists on the desk, sending papers in every direction. Ungulúsquibus gathered them up and replaced them, ready for another outburst. Everyone looked balefully at Gianfilippo. ‘Release him immediately’, spluttered the chief, amid a stream of abuse, ‘and make sure whichever imbecile arrested him is transferred to the end of the earth’.7

Prosaic analysis of the files demonstrates conclusively that local police were in the dark when it came to the strategic objectives of the political police, which is to be expected in covert operations. More importantly, there was no robust and effective communication between the different branches of police.8 In towns, the postal interception usually took place within the Questura itself. In cities, a police officer worked from the central post office. Letters were steamed open, read and if necessary copied or photographed. In most cases they were then resealed and put back into circulation. If intercepted letters were written in other languages, a copy was sent to the political police, for the attention of Pizzuto. Letters in more exotic languages, such as Serbo-Croat or Yiddish were referred to expert informers who also acted as translators, when required. The following extract, which may have come to Pizzuto, is taken from a letter intercepted by police in Genoa on 14 May 1934, 0230543081_08_ch07.pdf 4/28/07 12:11 PM Page 164

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when concerns over dissident groups in France were near their peak following the Turin arrests at the end of March:

[…] Notre seule espoir est dans la Russie des Soviets, sans elle il est plus que probable que nous serions soumis aux regimes des camps de concentrations et à l’inquisition fascistes, malgré que la France prétend étre une grande democratie dans tout le terme du mot. Comme tu vois, tout ça n’est guére brillant et l’horizon n’a rien de rassicurant.

CHARLOS Montreuil S. Bois9

The complete letter was transcribed at the prefecture in Genoa and sent to Rome. Its recipient, Henry Furst, like Pizzuto also born in 1893 and also a translator from German, was already under police surveillance. The identity of ‘Charlos’ remains a mystery. Fear of correspondence with fuorusciti was an important motivation for policies of surveillance and censorship of private correspondence, but it was not the only one. Enemies of the people within the state also had their mail monitored. Benedetto Croce’s police files bulge with copies of intercepted letters. Some letters intended for him were considered so sensitive that they were censored definitively by being removed from circulation altogether.10 The suppression of information was more far-reaching in the case of intercepted consignments of underground newspapers and other anti-Fascist propaganda materials. But censorship was not just about suppression. Most of the serious opposition had been suppressed by the mid-1920s. It became more about information gathering than repression, although the latter did not disappear by any means. Pizzuto described a visit to the Ufficio speciale, located in a disused school in Rome, the Istituto Vittorino da Feltre – Scuola Froebeliana:

The cupola was topped by a great white façade bearing the legend Enter happily Children. Here we teach. We do not torment. A great silence pervaded the wide avenue with its manicured box hedges. Silence and peace! […] [Inside] there was the smell of a post ofﬁce. Impressive complete collections of ofﬁcial stamps in their holders decorated the walls, beneath quotations from Emerson, Tommaseo and Cuoco. Throughout the hall people worked in silence. Stacks of letters were piled up on the tables and one by one the envelopes 0230543081_08_ch07.pdf 4/28/07 12:11 PM Page 165

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were subjected to sharp tools, the more intractable were dealt with by the long and sturdy kettle spouts, made of toucan. All resistance ceded in the face of their jets of steam. They seemed like a squadron of tiny Fafners. You could think of it as a sort of laparotomy. The entrails tumbled out and were interrogated. Where necessary they were put under the rays of the Gall lamps, which revealed invisible secrets. There were iodine vapours used for reading between the lines, beside the hyposulphite of soda which would remove all traces when held before the fan. And when something good turned up, there was the handy light bath in the drawer to capture it. When the examination was complete each letter was returned to its own envelope and subjected to the paste brush.11

No post hoc account of the activities of a member of the secret police operating in Italy under the Fascist regime can be read without a high degree of scepticism about the author’s motives. Pizzuto remained in Rome after 8 September 1943, as Italian liaison officer for General Kesselring, and remained in his job – indeed he was promoted – after the war, to Vicequestore of Trento (1945), Questore of Bolzano (1946) and subsequently Questore of Arezzo. He took his pension in 1950 and returned to his writing career. Where his account differs from the self- serving autobiographies of the likes of Leto, Senise and Zurlo is that there is no attempt at self-justification, and there is a thread of irony and a sense of the absurd running through the novel as well as considerable linguistic creativity. The imprisoned letters are personified, and their treatment in the ominously-named Ufficio speciale is brutal. They are disembowelled, and the verb Pizzuto uses for the spilling of the guts (fuoruscivano) is a conscious echo of the term for the political exiles such as Carlo Rosselli, fuorusciti. The narrator knows the potential consequences of this surveillance activity.

Informers

The aspiration to Fascist totalitarianism in Italy encouraged certain types of behaviour, most notably in this respect, the practices of informing and the anonymous denuncia. Not that there was anything particularly new about these activities. The world’s second-oldest profession, informing had been encouraged by temporal and inquisitorial authorities in Italy for centuries.12 The usual pattern was for the heretic, petty criminal or low-ranking political opponent to be arrested, abjure their past errors, and to turn informer in return for absolution and freedom. 0230543081_08_ch07.pdf 4/28/07 12:11 PM Page 166

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Such freedom came at the price of guilt and moral corruption. In the terms of Fascist Italy this meant trading one’s friends, family, neighbours, party or associates against the prospect of years in jail or in confino. In practice this often meant condemning someone else to years in jail or in confino instead. Franzinelli, in the first detailed study of the subject in Italy, has argued that:

Between the poles of repression and clemency there was a subtle dialectical game, played at the discretion of the dictator and the chief of police, with the intention of recuperating the felon through the renouncing of his own conscience and therefore his own reason for living. The activities of OVRA and the political police in the 15 years from the late 1920s to the fall of the regime are characterized more by the implications of moral abjection than by the brutal use of physical violence (to which they had recourse only in exceptional circumstances).13

Profound in its simplicity, the regime brought to bear its powers of retribution and temptation in the police interview, to elicit a confes- sion and to recruit an informer out of a frightened man or woman with a weak moral or political code and something to lose: part interro- gation, part job interview. Once recruited onto the secret payroll of OVRA or of the police, informers became bit players in the tentacles of power until they were exposed (bruciati – burned – was the technical term) or proved unreliable, at which point they were abandoned to their fates. This coercive model of the ethical state was not trumpeted in the manner of OMNI, but the fear and suspicion it engendered was real and pervasive nonetheless. This pervasive atmosphere also facilitated the more banal practice of casual informing, often for no direct ﬁnancial beneﬁt from the state. Indeed, as in any country at war, informing the police of one’s suspicions was presented as a moral good. The young and naïve were more especially prone to informing. Article 282 of the penal code had criminalized ‘causing offence to the Head of Government’, something akin to a secular version of blasphemy. This was reinforced in school through the hagiographic accounts of Mussolini’s life as the country boy miraculously reborn in the trenches of the First World War as the Man sent by Providence. These conditions had their effects. As one example among very many, there is the case of Mario, an 18-year old, newly appointed to a factory at Savona in October 1939. To personal- ize his working environment he hung a photograph of the duce on the 0230543081_08_ch07.pdf 4/28/07 12:11 PM Page 167

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machine which he had been allocated. An eager young man, expecting praise for this initiative, he called the attention of an older colleague to the new picture. His colleague, Antonio, happened to be a convinced Socialist who had spent a year in conﬁno for bringing a wreath of red ﬂowers to the funeral of a friend in 1937. Instead of praise and approval, Mario heard:

Now we even have him here to keep an eye on us; we are slaves and we can do nothing about it. He can call all the shots. […] There are things you can’t understand because you were born in a prison. You have always lived in it. You have been educated in their way of thinking, but you are young and you have time to educate yourself and to understand things that you don’t know about yet.14

Instead of heeding such subversive advice, Mario reported Antonio to the local PNF delegate. Antonio was picked up that night by the police. The matter was referred to Bocchini, who discussed it with Mussolini at their daily briefing. Antonio was sent to confino in Pisticci for two years. More usually the product of jealousy or petty rivalries, the casual denunciation could be wrapped in the flag of patriotism, religious or sexual orthodoxy, or any other type of hypocrisy. On rarer occasions people may have been impelled to inform the authorities for what they held to be nobler reasons, but there is less evidence of that in the archives. Of the examples there is the story of an itinerant trader in Siena. Itinerant traders, like doormen in apartment blocks, were the ideal informers because they saw and heard a great variety of things in their daily round. Giuseppe, however, was not an informer. Sitting on a bench in the public park in Siena in September 1934, he got into conversation with a young German man who was praising Italy’s great recent achievements. Giuseppe responded to this praise of his country by the young Nazi by countering that life was better in France, and that he would be happy to emigrate there if only his family situation permitted it. The tourist went on his way, casually meeting Giorgio Alberto Chiurco, member of parliament and historian of the ‘Fascist revolution’, to whom he related his strange conversation. Chiurco instigated a police search for the trader, who was easily tracked down. An earlier charge against him for ‘causing offence to the Head of Government’, in 1927, had been dropped for want of proof, but that in itself constituted a police record. Mussolini ordered three years in confino. Released early, in the amnesty to mark the birth of Prince 0230543081_08_ch07.pdf 4/28/07 12:11 PM Page 168

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Victor Emanuel, Giuseppe was returned to a penal colony in August 1938 for a further four years as a subversive. His children were taken into care and the life of a family was blighted.15 Finally, at the bottom of the moral ladder, the police archives contain many thousands of anonymous letters, sent with the malevo- lent intention of ruining neighbours, rivals in business or in love, alleged defeatists, and, from summer 1938, Jews. These, at the very least, testify to a signiﬁcant element of complicity with the ethical state on the part of the king’s loyal subjects. Anonymous and forged letters provide insidious examples of the population taking advantage of the regime, rather than vice versa, in order to settle old scores. Franzinelli has cited a striking example of mischief-making from 13 December 1928:

Dear Mussolini, You are a great big traitor, a coward and a villain. You have a cruel heart. You are a beast. We have the courage to sign our names, and we are Germi Emilio and Sabbadini Adolfo, both resident in Saranza, Via Olmo. Greetings.16

The Segreteria particolare del duce referred the letter to the Ministry for the Interior, and local police interviewed Germi and Sabbadini, taking samples of their handwriting. The investigation was sufﬁcient to prove that the two men were innocent of writing the letter. They were asked if they had enemies, or if there was anyone who might wish to get them into trouble. They were unable or unwilling to come up with any names. Further investigation by the police revealed that two years previously, Germi’s son-in-law was believed to have killed the Sabbadini’s cat. There is no indication that this was a wilful act rather than an accident, but on the basis of suspicion, the police raided the son-in-law’s house where they found an automatic pistol. He was duly arrested for unauthorized possession of a ﬁrearm. But his handwriting did not match that of the apocryphal letter. The letter had not hit its intended targets, but it had done collateral damage. Letters, anonymous or otherwise, and transcripts of oral reports were sent to the DG for Public Security in Rome where Bocchini and his team examined them. They would routinely seek additional information from the local prefect. If required, local police would arrest and interview the suspect or suspects, and send a report to Rome where a 0230543081_08_ch07.pdf 4/28/07 12:11 PM Page 169

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copy would go to Bocchini, who, as we know, briefed the duce daily. Decisions were then communicated to the relevant prefect, who had the power, under the Consolidation Act of November 1926 to send people to conﬁno without trial. The emotional and economic consequences of conﬁno for families could be profound if their bread-winner was sent away.17 Informers came from all social strata. The following is the report of a relatively-cultured one from Milan (19 November 1931), reporting Henry Furst:

American journalist, ex-legionario in Fiume, translator of Ojetti and, it seems of Gabriele D’Annunzio too. He visited D’Annunzio a few days ago. Furst has been out of Italy for about three years. He has been working as a librarian at the Library of Congress in Washington. He returned to Italy a fortnight ago. I know that while abroad he frequented anti-Fascist circles. In London he met Don Sturzo, who a few days before the announcement of the August accord between the state and the Vatican was telling people it was a cer- tainty, declaring that ‘if the Church has given ground it is a sign that it has recognized the strength of the Fascist regime’. Furst himself told me this. In Paris too Furst was in direct contact with anti-Fascists and now that he is back in Italy I have found him preoccupied and nervous. I will give you an example: One day Furst showed me a letter from the Banca Commerciale addressed to him, which showed signs that it may have been tam- pered with. Naturally he attributed this to a secret service. I tried to convince him that could not be the case and to give me the envelope, but without success. Furst really is a great friend of Italy, and he has a profound knowledge of our culture. He also has sympathies for the regime and especially for the Duce, but he was a very close friend of the notorious De Bosis, and of the Toscanini family.18

Furst was not arrested. No action was taken against him, not least because he had not actually done anything other than complain to an acquaintance that he thought his letters were being intercepted. He may well have been right. He was monitored closely for several years. A subsequent report (19 September 1932), ﬁled by the same informer added some signiﬁcant details: 0230543081_08_ch07.pdf 4/28/07 12:11 PM Page 170

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I already told you about this American a few months ago shortly after he had returned to Italy after some years spent in his own country and months abroad (in France and England). I tried to keep in contact with him because his behaviour gave me grounds for suspicion, suspicion based on his uncommon intelligence and his detailed knowledge of international politics. He loves to know what is happening in Italy and to seek out stories about politicians of the regime, which sometimes he relates to third parties. Most concerning of all is the fact that he is a Jew, and that for the last six months he has been coming and going to and from France, whilst complaining of poverty which simply isn’t true. I have tried to get into his conﬁdences, taking advantage of what he was writing to me about being short of money. But he never lacks means and what he says sounds strange to me. Also strange is his attitude to the regime, about which he has little good to say, and his preoccupation with a loss of freedom and what he describes as the police-state of the regime. At present he is living in the same building as me in Milan, Via Passerella 20. In vain I have tried to invite him into my home so that I could take the opportunity to go through his papers and certain archives which he carries around with him, made up of record cards on which are noted down names of books. Furst works for Walter Toscanini, son of the maestro, and he has been in regular contact with Gabriele D’Annunzio. Furst was a legionario at Fiume. He translated Ojetti’s Cose viste into English. He enjoys a certain popularity in Italian intellectual circles, and his work is published in several Italian literary magazines. I remember that in Fiume with his friend Leone Kisniski [Leon Kochnitzsky], another Jew, and about whom I have also reported, he took a pro-Communist line. This man leads a rather mysterious life, which merits special attention.

The informer, who also appears to have been in Fiume, was quite well informed, but not correct in all respects. The errors are signiﬁcant. Furst and Kochnitzsky were presented as exotic, remarkable characters, too smart for their own good. The informer made the inference that they must therefore be Jews. In fact they were both Catholics, but the informer’s inference tells us something about assumptions and perceptions of difference which were part of the collective imagination in the early 1930s. Six years before the passing of the Race laws in 1938, and 0230543081_08_ch07.pdf 4/28/07 12:11 PM Page 171

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one year before the collapse of the Weimar Republic, and Hitler’s ascent to power. Furst’s ﬁle remained in Limbo until there was something more substantive to bring against him.19

Lies, corruption, deviation and degeneration

Furst was informed on by a chance acquaintance, who had known him slightly over ten years earlier, and who was now a paid informer. Many informers’ reports were of more domestic affairs, having nothing to do with foreigners or presumed Jews, at least not before 1938, and they usually had more self-interested motives. There are thousands of examples from the files, most of them not yet analyzed in detail, but from the ones that have come to light some interesting patterns emerge. They read very much like a sordid decent into Dante’s vision of Hell, with different categories of sin represented by exemplary sinners who were alleged to have engaged in a bewildering variety of ‘lies, corruption and all forms of deviation and degeneration of public and private morality’, to quote Rocco. Pasquale, a married man from Lecce with three children, had fought in the Great War, though he had a blemished record – sentenced to penal servitude (ergastolo) for desertion in 1916 and amnestied in 1919.20 Aged 52, he was arrested on 23 October 1940, nearly six months into the war for defeatist talk in a private house which was reported to the police. After two years of confino in Lucania he was freed in the amnesty for the Ventennale, the regime’s twentieth anniversary. The podestà received an anonymous letter, which he ignored, warning him that Pasquale was a dangerous subversive and a smuggler. Pasquale returned home to his wife and children. Anti-Fascist slogans appeared mysteriously on the walls of his house. The carabinieri investigated and discovered that the letter and the slogans were the work of his wife, a 35-year old nurse who had taken a lover in his absence, and was keen to be free of her husband for good. She was arrested on 8 March 1943 and sent to confino herself for two years. After Mussolini’s fall she appealed disingenuously on the political grounds that she had been sent away for writing anti-Fascist slogans. She was released on 8 September 1943, a fateful day for the country. Years earlier, on 11 April 1932 Dino was reported to the Political Investigations Office of the Militia for ‘having openly declared himself to be a Communist and expressing the hope that a revolution would overthrow the political order in Italy’.21 His accuser was his fiancée. 0230543081_08_ch07.pdf 4/28/07 12:11 PM Page 172

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Her written denunciation included a love letter she had received from Dino, which contained a compromising passage:

Political ideas – But listen, my dear, if I am a Communist is that fact a reason for you to hate me or (worse still) not to love me anymore? Are you an ultra-fascist maniac, or a high-ranking state employee for whom it would be dangerous to have a relationship with a subversive? And who says that politically I don’t know more than you do, and that the future doesn’t belong to people who think as I do in political terms? Anyway, to be clear, I am not being watched or under suspicion. I don’t run any risk of that sort. I don’t see how my political ideas can make you fall out of love with me.

Dino was picked up and interrogated. He made an unsuccessful attempt to wriggle out of the hole the letter had dropped him in. He was released with a warning after a fortnight in the cells, and kept under surveillance for the next four years. What had he really done? Interviewed by the police, his ﬁancée admitted that her motive was revenge because Dino ‘had repeatedly offended her in front of her girlfriends’. Bosworth has given a richly-textured account of a denunciation at Maranzana, near Alessandria, on 27 March 1933, reporting six men who drank too much wine one spring evening, and on their inebri- ated stagger home they were heard singing Socialist songs. One witness claimed to have heard Nella risaia. Another heard Bandiera rossa. One of the men, described by the police as a ‘work-shy boozer’, was sent to conﬁno at Grassano (Matera) for three years.22 The regime had not much time or sympathy for the undeserving poor, and in that respect it often seemed to encourage the consensus of the majority who wanted to see the country cleaned up, and the active complicity of more than a few. Work-shy, boozing gluttons, after all, were the very opposite of the positive model of disciplined and zealous workers. This was an infringement of both Fascist and traditional moral codes: just the sort of thing an anthropological revolution should eliminate. On this incident, Bosworth has made the telling point that in spite of a decade of Fascism in government, and the censorship of subversive publications, songs and performances, everybody in the village still recognized Bandiera rossa when they heard it. Indeed one of the singers was himself still a teenager. Getting rid of a noisy neighbour for three years with the help of the 0230543081_08_ch07.pdf 4/28/07 12:11 PM Page 173

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police tells us something about the dynamics of village life under the anthropological revolution. Sometimes, however, mischief-making backﬁred. In a tale of treach- ery, revenge and recrimination worthy of Dante’s treatment of Count Ugolino, two doctors from Montemaggiore Belsito, Giuseppe Nicastro and Vincenzo Licata, after once enjoying cordial relations, spent years locked in trying to smear one another, making the other out to be the leader of a dangerous and subversive faction. The carabinieri at Termini Imerese reported, and one can sense a deep sigh behind these words:

They have been ﬁghting each other for years, trying to compromise each other by means of denunciations, anonymous letters, malign insinuations, etc. So much so that all the authorities, political, administrative, judicial, public security, are engaged almost full-time in dealing with these two individuals. They try to wound each other’s honour and their public and private reputations by the most ignoble means, not just the anonymous letters. They even drag into the dispute their family and friends, to the point where there are now two groups at war with one another.23

Matters came to a head in February 1939 when a mysterious fire at the door of the Town Hall and an incendiary device left at the PNF offices were attributed respectively, in two apocryphal letters, to the ‘Licata group’ and to the ‘Nicastro group’. Both men were arrested and sent into confino, together. For the ethical state, sexuality was not a private matter: the state had the right and the duty to direct and control individual behaviours in order to achieve power and greatness for the nation, in theory. Accordingly, the state developed policy on public health, on safe- guarding traditional moral values, and on raising the nation’s birth- rate.24 Formulation of these policies brought together biologists, psychologists, experts in forensic medicine, anthropologists and crim- inologists as well as artists and the media, but lurking behind their work were older codes and assumptions about human sexuality which were not the result of cutting-edge research. Benadusi has argued that after the first world war, urbanization and industrialization saw the arrival of mechanization and the introduction of new technologies in the cities, which, together with a parallel growth in the tertiary sector, began to undermine the traditional role of men, manifested in male strength and physical resistance in the mode of Maciste the strongman of silent films, thus reducing the difference between male and female 0230543081_08_ch07.pdf 4/28/07 12:11 PM Page 174

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employees. The Fascists rejected this blurring of gender roles and set about a championing of masculinity through a rediscovery of the body as a temple of virility, by means of programmes of exercise and health education.25 This plan revived pre-war medical and anthropological ideas about the fundamental healthiness of the Latin peoples: ‘The effeminacy of the Latin race (razza)’ was not ‘a constitutional or organic vice, but rather a defect of education’ which might be overcome by physical exercise, sport and outdoor games.26 The restoration of virility, and the masculine spirit of the trenches became the leading strategy of the Fascists, in order to counter the ‘feminine’ principles of consensus and democracy. This was to be the basis of a boniﬁca umana, which would promote traditional gender roles and see an increase in the birth-rate. Originally, in 1928 Rocco had drafted article 528 of his criminal code as follows:

Homosexual relations: Whoever […] commits libidinal acts on a person of the same sex, or consents to such acts, is to be punished if the act gives rise to scandal, with a period of imprisonment of between six months and three years. The period of imprisonment is from between one year and ﬁve years if the guilty party is aged above twenty years and commits the deed on a person of under eighteen years; if the act is committed habitually, or for ﬁnancial gain.27

Rocco’s proposed article 528 was dropped, however, on the grounds that the problem did not exist in Italy:

Provision for this crime is unnecessary, because thankfully and as a matter of Italian pride, the abominable vice to which it gives rise is not so widespread among us as to justify the intervention of the leg- islator. Should such cases arise they may be dealt with by recourse to application of the most severe sanctions in relation to crimes of carnal violence, corruption of minors and offences against public morality (offese al pudore).28

In fact, the usual punishment for homosexual men was for them to be sent to conﬁno, and there were colonies effectively reserved for gay men. Postal censorship in 1942, rather than a denuncia, revealed a case of homosexuality involving a married man who worked as a driver in Rome.29 This case led to a debate over whether to issue the man a warning or to hush the affair up. In Florence an ex-carabiniere was denounced and sent to conﬁno, as was his young accomplice who was 0230543081_08_ch07.pdf 4/28/07 12:11 PM Page 175

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classified as a sexual degenerate because he was an active male prostitute whose services were regularly purchased by upper-class foreign passive pederasts.30 There was no question of the latter group being sent to confino. Again we can sense the dynamic of social mores at work. Applying Rocco’s legal framework, officials of the state took action to root out lies, corruption, degeneracy and deviance from Fascist Italy, by removing people from circulation and sending them into internal exile just as offending letters were removed from circulation, to be stored in the archives.

Minority communities

The Rocco code with which this chapter began, was drafted in the 1920s, before the Lateran Pacts had been signed. Subsequent amendments in the early 1930s made provisions for recognizing Protestant churches, while according the Catholic Church a special position within the state. Giovanni Gentile, although personally a secularist, in his proposals for educational reform, had taken an instrumentalist line on the presence of Catholic ritual and symbolism in schools, as early as 1923. The Catholic Church therefore gained a level of power and influence in schools the length and breadth of Fascist Italy which it had not enjoyed under the Liberal dispensation. Studies of minority communities in the Fascist period suggest that this increasing influence, in the popular consensus, did not work to the benefit of those outside the mainstream, in minority communities. That is particularly true of certain Evangelical groups, pop- ularly regarded as on a par with heretics. It would become even more pertinent in the case of the Jewish communities after summer 1938. Giorgio Rochat, in a detailed study of the Evangelical churches in Italy during the Fascist period, has shown that moves in the direction of persecuting minority churches had begun in fact as early as 1923, and that it came as part of the package of education reforms assembled by Gentile.31 Gabriella Klein has demonstrated that linguistic discrimination was being considered against the Waldensians within months of the March on Rome. In summer 1923, Mussolini, in a letter to Gentile, deplored the fact that:

The use of the French language in those valleys is so extensive as to require special teaching. […] We do not want to use force to make these populations stop speaking French, but equally we do not want to encourage and help them to continue a custom that should have died out. In Italy we speak Italian.32 0230543081_08_ch07.pdf 4/28/07 12:11 PM Page 176

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The Waldensians were well-established indigenous communities, in the foothills of the Alps, which usually managed to maintain a distinction between their patriotism as loyal Italian subjects, and the commitment of their communities to their spiritual and apolitical identity. The Waldensian churches prayed for an Italian victory in all wars and the return of peace, but (with a few exceptions) they did not organize a collection of gold for the patria.33 Bocchini’s appointment as Chief of Police in 1926 was not good news for religious minorities, or indeed any minorities. He was a thoroughly cynical, clear-eyed career policeman who had no time for rapture of any religious or even political kind. He regarded small sects as security risks. The Vatican, on the other hand, had its own reasons to be concerned, and sought to confound these with the state’s political suspicions. In September 1928, when secret negotiations were underway between Mussolini (represented by Gentile) and the Pope (represented by Father Tacchi Venturi) plans for the building of a new Methodist church in Salerno in were blocked by a letter to Mussolini from Tacchi Venturi:

Your Excellency,

The Very Reverend Archbishop of Salerno informs me that there are rumours that the pastor and freemason De Rosa, is planning to erect a protestant church on Via Armando Diaz, in the most conspicuous part of the city, opposite the historic cathedral of St Matthew […]. I thought it best, at the entreaty of the Archbishop, to bring the matter to your attention. He writes: ‘It would be highly desirable if the Duce were to say a curt (recisa) word. It is certain that this is the sectarian work of Freemasons. The erection of a protestant church would be a source of shame for the city and would be the cause of continual strife’. With profound religious obsequiousness and firm confidence that this antireligious and antipatriotic proposal […] will not prevail I confirm my devotion to your Excellency. Pietro Tacchi Venturi S.J.34

This exchange was evidently in the spirit of negotiating the Lateran Pacts. The Methodist church, in the end, was built in a side street. Also in 1928, under some pressure from the Vatican, the Pentecostalist community at Via Adige in Rome was placed under observation. The Pentecostalists could not credibly be characterized as either anti-Fascists or Freemasons, so the Church’s strategy in 1928 was to medicalize them 0230543081_08_ch07.pdf 4/28/07 12:11 PM Page 177

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and present them as madmen. Dr Osvaldo Zacchi, a surgeon and brother of a prominent Dominican, was sent to a Pentecostalist meeting on the evening of 15 July 1928, under cover. Zacchi observed that some of those present showed ‘evident degenerative signs characteristic of epilepsy’. He noted signs of ‘hysteria’ in many of the women as they broke into ‘cries and gestures, throwing themselves abruptly to their knees, beating their breasts, sobbing, and shouting convulsively in a way that was striking’. He concluded that:

For children and adolescents, it is my opinion that the spectacle is very harmful to the health, having an enormous effect on their psychic balance and therefore predisposing them to the development of functional neuropathic forms, perhaps even organic ones.35

The state’s medical advice was less alarming and the complaints of the Catholic clergy were over-ruled on that occasion. The special position of the Catholic church within the state, however, was enshrined in law in 1931, and this was greeted with popular approval. The law also recognized other faiths, the so-called ‘culti ammessi’. After 1931, there was to be sustained persecution of the Methodists in the province of Aquila, at the instigation of the Catholic clergy, reaching something of a climax in 1934, the year in which Il proselitismo protestante in Italia appeared.36 Rochat has drawn attention to this 47-page pamphlet sent from the papal embassy in Rome to the Ministry for Foreign Affairs on 16 May 1934. The date is signiﬁ- cant, for reasons discussed in earlier chapters, and to which I return below. According to this pamphlet the dangers of Protestant proselytiz- ing included the charge that Protestant sects were anti-hierarchical. The sects in the line of ﬁre were not the ‘respectable’ and largely foreign, middle- and upper-class Episcopalians or Lutherans, but ‘dangerous’ popular groups such as the Pentecostalists, the Shakers and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, though the latter, in theological terms, had little if anything in common with the others. What the groups did have in common was that they had small footholds in working-class and rural indigenous communities. These footholds were the product of cases of where emigrants had returned from the United States with some savings, bringing their new religion home with them. To be against hierarchy was presented in the pamphlet as tantamount to being anti-Fascist. The guiding principle of all Protestant sects, the document argued, was that each individual was the interpreter of divine revelation and therefore free to form his or her 0230543081_08_ch07.pdf 4/28/07 12:11 PM Page 178

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own credo just from reading the Bible. This principle, it was suggested, lay at the root of all democratic errors, from Liberalism to Socialism to anarchy. This was a familiar argument against ‘heretical’ communities, stretching back to the Reformation. Furthermore, it was alleged that all Protestant sects allowed divorce, and were therefore out of step with the regime’s family-based values. Worse still, it was claimed, many of them permitted birth control, even though it was accepted that in Italy they were careful not to promote this idea too prominently. Nonetheless, that was their unpatriotic doc- trine: sex without babies. Finally, all the Protestant sects assailed the Catholic Church and sought to destroy the papacy, not being able to bring themselves to see that the bishop of Rome was the pontiff of the whole Church, throughout all the world. The implication drawn from that hypothesis was that this represented a desire to attack Fascist Italy because for almost two millennia the papacy had constituted the greatest glory of the eternal city and therefore of Italy, embodying the myth of Romanità. This was a self-serving little document unlikely to have caused Bocchini or Mussolini a second thought, until it got to the Evangelicals. The most serious charge set out related to the Pentecostalists and the Shakers. In their meetings, it was claimed, again, that the congregation was whipped up to a paroxysm, constituting a grave danger especially for women and children. To verify this it was suggested, again, that the police should send a psychiatrist, under cover, to one of their meetings in Via Adige, 20, in Rome. It was also noted however, that:

It should be borne in mind that Italian law tolerates faiths other than the Catholic religion, ‘as long as they do not profess principles which involve rites contrary to public order and common decency (buon costume)’. It is therefore difﬁcult to understand why the Pentecostal cult continues to be tolerated in Italy.37

This was ingenious: basing an attack on an argument for public order rather than theological deviance or collective mental illness. The police were uninterested in theology and only interested in criminal forms of mental health problems. Six weeks after the Turin arrests, however, they were very interested in the threats to public order from mysterious small groups. The Protestant churches began to be viewed with growing suspicion and the Pentecostalists became the ﬁrst victims. They were easy targets. They had no central hierarchy, no support from foreign governments and no allies among the wealthy, unlike the 0230543081_08_ch07.pdf 4/28/07 12:11 PM Page 179

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Episcopalians. Pentecostalism had been imported into Italy, especially into poor communities in the South, by emigrants returning from the United States, and its spontaneity, unusual doctrines and success in finding new adherents alarmed the Catholic Church. Il proselitismo protestante in Italia, and the effect which it had within the security forces and the minority communities, is significant for a host of different reasons. 1934, the year after Hitler’s ascent to power in Germany, was the year which saw the introduction of racism as a policy (in relation to Black Africa) and a new crackdown in Italy on freedom of expression, with the centralization of book censorship under the control of the Ministry for Press and Propaganda. (It was also, as it happens, the year in which the Vatican placed Gentile’s works on its Index of Prohibited Books.) Il proselitismo protestante in Italia represents an attempt on the part of the Church to use Fascism’s lurch further to the Right in order to protect its influence over the Italian population. The Rome Questura, which had previously been pro- tective of the Pentecostalists, suggested towards the end of 1934 that the church on Via Adige should be closed down. It was joined by the prefect and the Fascist federation. On 14 March 1935, Carmine Senise at the Division of political police issued a long memorandum, and the following day the church was closed, even though it was recognized under the law of October 1931 as a non-Catholic church. Three weeks later, on 9 April 1935, Buffarini Guidi, Undersecretary at the Ministry of the Interior, issued the following circular to prefects:

There exist in some provinces of the kingdom simple de facto associations which, under the denomination of Pentecostali or Pentecostieri or Neumatici or Tremolanti, practice a cult in meetings generally presided over by an Elder. The cult professed by these associations, which is not recognized by article 2 of law 24 of 24 June 1929, no. 1159, is no longer permitted in the kingdom, by virtue of article 1 of the aforementioned law, it having been established that it leads to religious practices which are contrary to the social order and damaging to the physical and psychic integrity of the race. Therefore your Excellencies will see to the immediate suppression, wherever they exist, of the associations in question, and the closure of the relevant oratories and meeting rooms, maintaining vigilance that no further meetings and manifestations of religious activity may take place in any form whatsoever.38

This circular was issued by the police (Buffarini Guidi and Bocchini), not by a magistrate. The Pentecostalists were recognized by the law of 0230543081_08_ch07.pdf 4/28/07 12:11 PM Page 180

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24 June 1929, but the transfer of responsibility for religious denomina- tions from the Ministry for Justice to the Ministry for the Interior in summer 1932 had taken their fates out of the hands of the magistrates and put them into the hands of the police. Rochat has argued that the significance of the Buffarini Guidi circular is that the argument against the Pentecostalists in 1935 is not one based on public order – the Vatican case the previous year – but on the defence of social order and crucially, defence of the race. It is therefore in line with the evolution of social policy as Fascist Italy became an imperial power. The Pentecostalists were hardly a serious menace to social order even if, in theory, they did not recognize temporal rulers. In practice they were obedient, poor and without influence. Defence of the race was a new category on Italian soil in 1935 and it appears to take up Zacchi’s medical account of their degeneracy, one of those things the ethical state was on a mission to root out. This circular put the Pentecostalists on a par with homosexuals in the eyes of the Fascist police. Rochat has demonstrated that what was prohibited, in effect, was not being a Pentecostalist, but to practice the faith even in a private meeting. The distinction is a subtle one but one which applied with equal force to homosexuality, as Benadusi has shown. The defence of the race argument is also to be found in a circular (28 February 1936) from Senise, urging attentive surveillance of Protestant churches in the light of conflicting loyalties over Ethiopia.39 On 22 August 1939 Bocchini sent out another circular on religious sects, which confounded the relatively numerous Pentecostalists with the tiny group of Jehovah’s Witnesses. The ban on Pentecostalists was extended to the Jehovah’s Witnesses too, although theologically they had nothing whatever in common. The point was that they were regarded as degenerates. In this respect, Nazi models were being domesticated for an Italian setting. In Nazi Germany the Jehovah’s Witnesses had been banned under the anti-Communist Reichstag Fire decree in 1933 as being both Communist stooges and sympathizers with the Jews.40 This characterization, however, did not accord with the anti-bourgeois drift of Fascist policy in 1938. Pentecostalists and Jehovah’s Witnesses, whatever else they might be, could not be characterized as wealthy or bourgeois. They were emphatically not the targets when Mussolini launched his anti- bourgeois campaign in October 1938, in an effort to stir up enthusiasm, especially among the young and restless, the ‘Fascist Left’ as it has been called, following on from his self-presentation as supercontadino, threshing wheat in the fields of the Agro Pontino: an exemplary rebuke 0230543081_08_ch07.pdf 4/28/07 12:11 PM Page 181

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to the sedate and comfortable bourgeois in his city apartment.41 The campaign extended to linguistic pedantry, outlawing the use of ‘Lei’, the polite form of the personal pronoun, as well as attempting to excise foreign loan words and to replace them with newly-coined Italian terms. Excising foreign words from the language may have been an absurd aspiration, but it did represent a lethal consistency, albeit one increasingly distant from reality, continuing the surgical image, from the Ascension Day speech in 1927, of cutting out cancerous growths. When this model was next grafted on to social engineering in the Race Laws, the consequences became more tangible, and tragic rather than absurd. The archives contain many anonymous denunciations of Italian Jews from 1938. Some of them elide ofﬁcial racism with the anti-bourgeois campaign. The Race Laws made it an offence for Jewish families to have non-Jewish servants. On 30 April 1940, an outraged resident of Turin wrote anonymously to the prefect complaining that despite the new laws:

The rich Jews, who brag about having friends in high places and being able to oil the wheels, have kept their servants. Look, for example, at the multi-millionaire Jew who lives at 25 Via Tommaso. This gentleman has ten (yes 10) Aryans working for him as servants. Is this Fascist justice I ask you?42

Guido Leto, long-time head of OVRA, in his unreliable memoirs, sought to minimize the levels of persecution suffered by the Jewish communities in Italy from 1938 onwards.43 While there is no comparison to the atrocities in Nazi-occupied Europe, and there are numerous anecdotes of heroic acts of kindness and humanity among the Italian population, the archival record also reveals a signiﬁcant atmosphere of malevolence, amoral opportunism and moral cowardice. A police spy, reporting in June 1942 on public opinion in Rome, wrote that:

Those Israelites who remain here in their businesses, are making money to the detriment of Aryan businessmen who are at the front, doing their duty. In fact, a Catholic called to arms, if he has a business, has to abandon it for the Country, and start up again from nothing when he gets back. The Jew, excluded from military service, carries on in his business, industry or profession and gets richer. Not only that, they spread defeatism, stabbing our soldiers in the back.44 0230543081_08_ch07.pdf 4/28/07 12:11 PM Page 182

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Against this background of what was accepted as commonsense, it is no great surprise to ﬁnd anonymous denunciations of Jewish businesses by interested rivals, seeking to eliminate a competitor. With racism and religious intolerance in place as government policy from summer 1938, on the eve of war, in 1940, the focus of repression still included small sects such as the Adventists, near the Yugoslav border, as well as the Jewish communities.45 Between summer 1940 and 25 July 1943, about 400 Italian Jews and 6,000 foreign Jews were interned in Italy, on Mussolini’s instructions. These people were selected for internment on the basis of suspicions about their activities, often brought to light by anonymous informers. In fact without the active collusion of parts of the Italian population, the security forces could not have rounded up so many Italian and non-Italian Jews.

War and public opinion

Alcohol and conviviality loosen tongues: bars and public places were a major source of intelligence on public opinion, up and down the kingdom, and abroad. Indeed, given that that the population did much more talking than writing, by far the most common form of surveillance and information gathering was carried out by spies in schools, factories, trains, trams, bars and on the streets and in the piazzas up and down the country and in centres of subversion abroad. Information gleaned from these sources could lead to the implementation of other forms of censorship (e.g., seizing printed matter, conﬁno, instructions to editors) or more simply the gauging of public opinion in the days before opinion polls. The most complete and revealing archive of bar conversations to survive in the archives comes from an OVRA informer at the periphery, in Cagliari on the island of Sardinia. As a peripatetic trader (venditore ambulante) it was quite natural that he would travel his daily rounds visiting bars and piazzas, striking up conversations with people and overhearing the conversations of others. In the evenings he would go home and write his account of what he had observed during the day and convey it to his political handler. His reports have proven fertile ground for a number of important studies of everyday life under Fascism.46 As it became clear in late 1940 that the war would not be won quickly, public opinion started to turn from bellicose aspirations for Italy’s rightful place in the sun to concern about poverty and food shortages, although in truth both strands can be seen in the pragma- 0230543081_08_ch07.pdf 4/28/07 12:11 PM Page 183

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tism of a young Sardinian soldier whose conversation was noted by the spy on the eve of 10 June 1940:

If we go to war it will be short and sweet. Today’s war is not like 1914. This one will be over in a ﬂash (guerra lampo) so it’s worse for people who stay behind. Today it’s better to be in the army than to stay at home, especially if you have lots of kids. Between the family subsidy and the army pay, the family is guaranteed enough to eat, but times are hard for those who stay at home. They have no money. Things are dear and hard to come by.47

The patriotism of a young middle-class person was less conditional in the run up to war:

Uncle, in this grave hour I call on your sense of being Italian, if it still burns in your heart, to come home [from abroad] to be ready for the call up, if your Country needs you.48

But by and large, the Sardinian informer’s reports from late May 1940 show almost overwhelming popular support, in his part of Cagliari, from all classes, for intervention in the war in order to crush the French once and for all.49 In the chorus of popular enthusiasm at the Caffè Todesco there was just one discordant voice which, in response to his companion’s professed willingness to volunteer for action, suggested that it was poverty which lay at the root of his enthusiasm. To this his companion replied:

You may be right. But I’m still an Italian. I have fought a war, in 1915, which I didn’t understand at all. But I’d ﬁght this one with enthusiasm.50

This sentiment will have reassured the authorities that the official message was getting through. The Italian population had no great love for the Germans, but there was considerable admiration for their deter- mination and efficiency. Hitler’s easy victory in northern France reinforced this admiration and gave a boost to Mussolini’s reputation for foresight in having chosen the right ally.51 The anti-bourgeois campaign, which had already elided into the anti-Semitic one, was easily grafted on to a prejudice, in the popular imagination, against a carica- ture of the British as upper-class twits who ate five meals a day. Even in the popular imagination, however, as reported by the Cagliari informer, 0230543081_08_ch07.pdf 4/28/07 12:11 PM Page 184

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there was a clear gender division between bellicose men and the more practical, sceptical women who observed that there were already bread shortages in Sardinia, even before war was declared:

The people who have money are clearing out the shops to hoard pasta, rice, jam, etc. We have no money. What are we going to do in wartime when we have nothing to eat?52

The consensus among the neighbours and customers of the peripatetic trader was that it was better to be drawing pay and family allowance in the army than to be starving at home, especially for those with numerous dependents. Three days after Italy entered the Second World War, on 13 June 1940, censorship in Italy moved from being a cottage industry to being an industrial enterprise, a full-blown attempt at totalitarianism. Seven thousand new censors were recruited, at least one thousand of them civilians. A small proportion of women were employed to reseal envelopes. In the first year of Italy’s war, ten million letters were examined by the censors. But the sudden expansion of activity brought with it unforeseen problems. In effect two systems of censorship had been established: one for the military and one for the civilian population. Therefore, when a woman wrote to her husband at the front, her letter could be delayed twice, by two different censors. Delays were soon irri- tating both soldiers and civilians. The Ministry of the Interior responded to this crisis on 8 July 1940 by merging the two services and making military censors accountable to the civil censorship board, that is to say, to the Minister of the Interior, who was also the Head of Government. By means of Royal Decree Law no. 1415 (8 July 1938) Mussolini’s government had introduced the principle of postal as well as telephonic and telegraphic censorship in time of war. Two further Royal Decrees, nos 2247 and 2248 of 12 October 1939 were issued but were not published in the Gazzetta Ufficiale as they were held to be military secrets. The first of these decrees enabled wartime censors to examine the contents of postal telephonic, telegraphic and radio communications and to suppress them if suppression was held to be in the national interest. The second decree set out the framework in which wartime censorship was to take place.53 War-time censors, who were all male and members of the PNF, read between 150 and 200 letters per day. They had to balance following detailed guidelines with the exercising of their own judge- 0230543081_08_ch07.pdf 4/28/07 12:11 PM Page 185

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ment in difﬁcult cases. Entire sentences could be obliterated with indelible ink if they crossed the line on any one of four different criteria: military secrets (e.g., location of troops), political sentiments (including ‘inappropriate sentimentality’), economic complaints (e.g., increases in the price of bread) or moral reasons (generally relating to ‘intimate relations’). Especially troublesome letters could be removed from circulation altogether. This provision had already been in place for political undesirables, well before Italy’s entry into the war.54 Wartime censorship was on a different scale and of an order different from the processes described by Antonio Pizzuto earlier in this chapter. It was not surreptitious activity. Soldiers and those corre- sponding with soldiers knew their mail was being censored. And it was not unique to Fascist Italy. It combined repression of certain types of information with a detailed investigation into what the Italian population was really thinking, assuming that people were writing what they were really thinking, even when they knew their words would be read by censors. Each month, prefects compiled reports on public opinion, on the basis of censored letters, and sent the reports to the Viminale, headquarters of the Ministry of the Interior, from whence they were conveyed to Mussolini.55 The reports gave the regime a regular update on public opinion and therefore interacted with Minculpop policies on instructions to the press and radio about themes to promote or ignore. Censors had to look out for ﬁve categories of information. First there were notizie segrete, military secrets which consisted in information about the location or state of readiness of the armed forces. Allowing such information into the public domain could compromise national security and be a danger to the ‘political interests, internal and international, of the state’. According to the instructions:

Censorship, in addition to intercepting and suppressing secret information which might be useful to the enemy, assists with identifying crimes of espionage and the passing on of military secrets (to be punished by death with demotion of rank), notifying the Servizio informazione militare of all suspect or incriminating correspondence.56

The second category to look out for was that of notizie riservate or reserved information, that is to say, information which was not actually secret but which the regime did not wish to have 0230543081_08_ch07.pdf 4/28/07 12:11 PM Page 186

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discussed or brought to other people’s attention. This category was sufficiently vague to have perplexed censors. A detailed list was provided in the annex to Royal Decree no. 1161 of 11 July 1941. It included ‘regulations and positions of the armed forces’, their ‘use and efficiency’, ‘communications systems’, ‘means and organization of transport’, ‘military fortifications, bases and systems’, ‘civilian factories for war production and civil power plants’, ‘military and civilian mobilizations’, ‘official publications, documents and records’, and ‘through the activities of the government’. It remained an elastic category. The third category concerned false and defeatist news. This was defined as ‘news which is untrue and which is apt to disturb public order or otherwise damage the public interest’ as well as ‘criticisms of or polemic about military operations or the progress of the war’, ‘expressions of denigration’, ‘words of scorn’ or ‘invective’ against the war, the conduct of the war, the armed forces and their command. The fourth category concerned news which had not been authorized or which differed from the official interpretation. This was a long-standing Fascist concern, which had been brought to bear on newspapers on a regular basis since the mid-1920s. According to military law it became an offence to spread unauthorized news concerning ‘the number of wounded, dead or taken prisoner’, ‘changes of personnel in military command’, ‘forecasts on the outcome of military operations’ as well as ‘interpretations of news different from those brought to the public’s attention by the government or the military command through official channels’. In addition, censors were to look out for information which although not such as would need to be censored, on the grounds that it was not false, ‘could not be made public at the present time for fear of alarming people unnecessarily’. As Rizzi observed, the unspeakable was not simply that which was true but had to be veiled in secrecy, or erro- neous because it was untrue or dangerous, it extended to that which had not yet been announced by the regime. The final category consisted of information to be gathered. This might be new information which could be used in the national interest as part of the war effort. It could include news on morale, discipline, living conditions and examples of patriotism. It could also cover the economic, financial and material conditions of the country as well as information on individuals and organizations. From these instructions Rizzi has constructed a grid representing the decision procedure for censors. 0230543081_08_ch07.pdf 4/28/07 12:11 PM Page 187

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CATEGORY ACTION

Secret or reserved information or Remove letter from circulation. defeatist interpretations which Incriminating correspondence, to be represent a crime or a grave lack sent to the Servizio informazione of discipline militare and the police Information suspected of being of Remove the letter from circulation a subversive, paciﬁcist or pornographic nature Information to be censored Carry out partial censorship and (not incriminating) return letter to regular delivery service News which could cause alarm if Forward the letter, but with a delay transmitted before it has been ofﬁcially sanctioned Information which violates the Return to sender censorship arrangements Useful information which should Draw attention to it in your report be gathered Innocuous news which does not Let it pass without obstacle require censorship

In compiling this detailed account of people’s hopes and fears, censors had detailed guidelines to follow which were set out in a highly-confidential 50-page document in a small font, called the Norme per il funzionamento degli uffici provinciali di censura postale (Guidelines for the Running of Provincial Offices for Postal Censorship), issued by the Servizio informazione militare in 1935. Censors were warned that:

It is necessary that the examination of correspondence should be carried out with attention and cunning, since the most dangerous elements dedicated to espionage and subversive propaganda use great ingenuity in trying to avoid censorship by giving their correspondence the most common and innocent appearance.57

The checklist to be followed required the censor to use his contextual knowledge when examining the external characteristics of any communication. First on the list was the letter’s place of origin: was it of military importance or a centre of subversive activity? Did the date immediately precede, correspond to, or follow some important event? What was known of the person to whom the correspondence was 0230543081_08_ch07.pdf 4/28/07 12:11 PM Page 188

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addressed? Was the person somebody regarded as suspect? Censors should be suspicious if the address were vague, e.g., to a post-office box or more generally to unknown commercial offices. How was the correspondence addressed: on a typewriter, in block capitals or artistic calli- graphy? Were there any unusual markings? Was the postage stamp affixed in the normal way and did the postage paid correspond to what would be expected for such a letter or package? Censors should also look out for absence of the sender’s details, for envelopes which appeared to contain a further envelope, for seals and other devices designed to make it difficult to open packages without leaving a mark. They were also to note particular patterns such as frequent correspondence between one address and another. Even with those guidelines, however, detailed as they were, there remained an element of interpretation. Lepre has cited the example of a letter from a woman in which she writes that she is sad because her husband is far away.58 Should that be interpreted as ‘dangerous for the spirit of the army or of the country’? Such a sentiment was indeed judged to be dangerous by the provincial commissioners. It was an example of ‘inappropriate sentimentality’ and should therefore be censored as coming too close to defeatism. Complaints about a rise in the price of vegetables were even more serious and should be suppressed because they fell into the category of ‘complaints about the increasing costs of living’. A third category to look out for was that of sexual relations. All such allusions were to be blacked out, after they had been copied into the files. As poverty took hold of the country, the censors found themselves faced with moral dilemmas, having to use their discretion in human tragedies such as the letter from a wife to her husband who is away at war, in which she pleads for his forgiveness because she has bartered her body to the miller for a sack of flour in order to feed her children.59 Even before entry into the war, in 1939–40 the standing of the regime – though not the duce – had deteriorated seriously because of an increase in unemployment, a fall in the real value of salaries with consequent worsening in living conditions, especially among the poor. This was compounded by the introduction of rationing. This all resulted in a sort of passive anti-Fascism which the censors noted in their reports to their superiors. The wartime censors observed a trend in morale which began with a mixture of reckless enthusiasm and cynical pragmatism in mid-1940, fuelled on the one hand by two decades of duce mythology rather than a sober analysis of the far from encouraging economic and military conditions, and on the other hand 0230543081_08_ch07.pdf 4/28/07 12:11 PM Page 189

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by acceptance of the view that the war would be brief and that it offered Italy substantial gains, a view bolstered by newspaper reports of the Nazis cutting through French, Belgian and Dutch defences like a knife through butter. Worsening conditions were not sufﬁcient to undermine the duce mythology, until well into the war, probably not before late 1942. The problems were blamed on others, by the majority of the population. The following, from Naples, is a representative example of the blame culture:

Here life is becoming impossible with this maﬁa which makes the local decisions. There are no longer sufﬁcient powers to put a stop once and for all to the abuse suffered by the poor consumers. We have the laws which were made by our great and beloved Duce, but they are completely undermined by this shady crowd of hoarders (accaparratori). What we need again is the manganello and a good dose of castor oil. Those are the only things to put manners on them. It’s the only way to put an end to this scandal. […] we have unlimited faith in our Duce. If only the others were worthy of Him.60

Talk of hoarders widened the cast list of public enemies from Jews and other minority groups to the reawakening of class consciousness. The content of the censored letters from mid-1941 began to revolve around food, or more precisely, the lack of it. Censors, and their political masters, will have been alarmed at this spontaneous rekindling of internal divisions, communicated between the poor at home and their men at the front, not least because of the prospect of these armed men returning home at the war’s end, to exact vengeance against those currently identiﬁed as the powerful.61 The letters of the soldiers themselves were before long bristling with indignation against their superior ofﬁcers:

Dear sister, just to let you know that I am well and I hope you are too. Things are bad here, not just the life we are leading but because they don’t give us our rights and make us eat our rations without any seasoning. We are the unlucky band. These scoundrels, our ofﬁcers, don’t just earn thousands of lire each month, but they rob us too, this race (razza) of rogues and exploiters of poor soldiers. If I’m not killed by the enemy I’ll die of poisoning. If we defend our rights as soldiers, they shoot us.62

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public opinion hardened against the regime and even the censors themselves, now regarded as part of a repressive apparatus, as we can see in this poignant extract from a letter to a soldier-husband in Russia:

There’s no need for you to say it to get it off your chest because even if the censor blots it out I’ll still know the dog’s life you are being made to live in Russia by people who call themselves Italians. They would do better to look at the rotten mess they have made here rather than doing down other countries. The censor can cross out what he likes but God knows everything and it will all come out in the end […]. The newspapers are a disgrace. Nothing but lies. I know they are written by lackeys who have sold their souls for cash.63

Naturally, this letter was suppressed. Pavolini had stopped brieﬁng journalists on Russia by this point, which meant there was little or no Russian coverage in the Italian press. It had been taken off the news agenda. The three strands of censorship, the preventive, the informative and the productive, had converged.

Morale and popular culture

In wartime, radio technology became a double-edged sword for the Fascist regime. By 1940, Italian access to radio had never been wider, even though it was relatively modest by the standards of other developed countries. The propaganda effort geared up on the home front. But it was largely bombast, as practised by the likes of Mario Appelius. It was not popular, or at least, not popular for long. Unregulated possession of radio sets allowed for the reception of propaganda campaigns from abroad, aimed at undermining Mussolini and his government. Principal among these foreign stations were Radio Londra (Radio London) and Radio Mosca (Radio Moscow). The Fascist government recognized the threat and tried to deal with it in two ways. Firstly, legislation introduced in July 1938 was tightened. This had set out penal sanctions for listening to foreign radio stations. Those caught doing so could be sentenced to up to six months of detention and ﬁned 10,000 lire.64 On 15 June 1940 it was decreed that all private radio-transmitting equipment be dismantled, placed in a sealed box and handed over to the authorities. Secondly, Minculpop was allocated 60 million lire to set up jamming stations in 0230543081_08_ch07.pdf 4/28/07 12:11 PM Page 191

Censorship, Secrets and Lies 191

the major Italian cities.65 This initiative proved almost entirely counter-productive according to Maura Piccialuti Caprioli.66 The regime was losing credibility in the propaganda war. Reports from the BBC were more balanced and timely than those from the EIAR. So the assumption made by the Italian population was that if their government jammed Radio London broadcasts, it must mean that things were going especially badly on one or more of the Italian fronts. On 21 February 1941, newspaper editors were instructed to give front- page prominence to a reminder that it was illegal to listen to foreign radio.67 Further legislation was introduced in 1941, increasing penalties for listening to foreign stations. People could now be sent to conﬁno for 18 months.68 Nonetheless, according to a report from Genoa on 15 August, four months later:

Despite the increase in the sanctions on people who listen to enemy radio stations, there are still many, from what I hear, who continue to receive enemy news. Indeed, from what I hear, the threefold increase in the penalty for those caught listening to enemy news, instead of decreasing the number has actually increased the number of listeners, and increased curiosity. The explanations I have heard indicate that the general view is that if our government has increased the punishment for those who listen to enemy radio it must mean that the government has something to hide, and doesn’t want people to know what is really happening, and that what is reported by our radio and our press does not correspond to the truth.69

Yet another decree law came into force on 5 January 1942, setting a minimum penalty of six months and a maximum one of three years. The minimum ﬁne was to be 4,000 lire; the maximum 40,000. In spite of these measures, it remained the case that very few poor people owned radio sets, and penalties under Fascism, for all sorts of infractions, fell disproportionately hard on the poor and those without inﬂuence. It is therefore no great surprise that Piccialuti Caprioli has observed:

The number of those sent into conﬁno for listening to enemy radio stations was considerably lower than those punished in that way for singing Bandiera rossa in a tavern while under the inﬂuence or for insulting a portrait of the duce or for being Jehovah’s Witnesses.70 0230543081_08_ch07.pdf 4/28/07 12:11 PM Page 192

192 Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922–43

Her analysis of the files of those sent to confino for listening to Radio Londra indicates that they were drawn almost exclusively from the working class or the socially marginalized such as travelling players or musicians. Relatively minor offences such as listening to the radio, poking fun at official news reports or telling anti-Fascist jokes were a sufficient pretext for removing these social undesirables from circulation, with a stiff sentence to make an example of them. The regime had always been nervous of jokes, sensing subversion in humour. In various parts of Italy streets were named after Arnaldo Mussolini following his death in 1931. Via Arnaldo Mussolini, in Italian, lends itself to two interpretations, the intended one ‘Arnaldo Mussolini Street’ and the subversive one which could be translated as ‘Get rid of Arnaldo Mussolini’. Police in Liguria observed a piece of graffiti under one such street name – ‘e via anche suo fratello!’, meaning ‘and get rid of his brother too!’.71 This sort of spontaneous humour and delight in language, bursting bubbles of pomposity is one of those enduring features of Italian culture which Fascism did not manage to eliminate, despite its best efforts. More examples are provided by the people’s interaction with Hollywood and popular film generally. Franzinelli and Bosworth have both cited variations on a list of film titles and related terms which was doing the rounds of the entire kingdom in the early 1940s.72 Its perusal indicates if not anti-Fascism, then at least a growing scepticism about the regime:

Il pirata sono io! [I’m the pirate] Hitler Un’ora sola ti vorrei [An hour of you is enough] Mussolini Il prigioniero dell’isola [The prisoner on the island] The King I diavoli volanti [The ﬂying devils] The Mussolini family La prima moglie [The ﬁrst wife, i.e., Rebecca] Donna Rachele Mussolini I miserabili The Italians Paradiso perduto [Paradise Lost] The Empire L’eterna illusione [The Eternal Illusion] Vincere [Winning] Non è una cosa seria [It’s a joke] Fascism Alba tragica [Tragic dawn] 28 October Cartoni animati [Cartoons] The Fascist hierarchy Sette anni di guai [Seven years of misfortunes] The Pontine Land Reclamation 0230543081_08_ch07.pdf 4/28/07 12:11 PM Page 193

Censorship, Secrets and Lies 193

I pirati della Malesia [The pirates of Malaysia] The Blackshirts of the Militia L’eroe del giorno [The Hero of the Day] Churchill Terra d’oro [Land of Gold] England I nostri parenti [Our kin] The Russians Dopo divorzieremo [We’ll split up later] The Axis Un caso disperato [A Hopeless Case] The War

One of those caught in possession of the list, a Sicilian hairdresser working in Milan, was arrested in February 1942, beaten up and sent to conﬁno in Basilicata. No soldier suffered the same fate although the list circulated in army barracks. Fascist justice struck selectively. Bosworth has also related the story of an itinerant musician, Angelo Rossi, who was sent to conﬁno in December 1942 for spreading rumours about the duce having an ulcer which would kill him, spelling certain defeat in the war. According to Bosworth:

Rossi’s story […] provides significant insight into a rural world, with rural attitudes, flourishing at the very gates of Rome, despite two decades of ‘modernizing’ Fascist propaganda. Rossi and his audience retained a knowledge of their own, an understanding of present and future that was nearer the truth than that retailed by Fascist officials.73

The Fascist criminal justice system dealt with him in the manner consistent with other cases of unwanted news: they censored his story by sending him into internal exile, as a warning to others. What this brief excursion into the censored private lives of ordinary Italians under the regime reveals is a very mixed picture. On the one hand, the censor was a person with a certain level of education and culture, who was aware that among intellectuals and the upper classes there were admirers of British and American culture. He knew that this did not extend to other parts of society, except in very rare cases. Lepre has argued that the historian may then imagine the surprise of the censors and informers at the end of the war in 1945 when they heard accounts of friendship and regard for the British and Americans among the Italian population generally.74 In fact there was little or no trace of such sentiments in the letters they censored or the reports which they ﬁled. Indeed up until July 1943 the British and the Americans were referred to in terms of open hostility, as the enemies raining bombs down on Italy. America, as represented in the pages of a novelist such 0230543081_08_ch07.pdf 4/28/07 12:11 PM Page 194

194 Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922–43

as Steinbeck – a banned author whose work was nonetheless available and read, albeit not very widely – was no match for the order and discipline of Nazi Germany. War-time letters also contain elements of a passive or indifferent anti-Semitism, as do the reports of police and informers. Many anonymous denunciations were rather more active in their anti-Semitism, but these were usually motivated by material considerations of gaining an advantage rather than ideological ones of race and blood. On the other hand, there was something different from and older than Fascism going on in Italian popular culture, especially during the war. The more the dictatorship tightened its grip on the country, the more unarticulated examples of other forms of commonsense manifested themselves, indicating submerged roots of behaviour and attitudes which were impervious to attempts at ideological manipulation, and the imposition of models of the New Man of Fascism.75 These ancient roots of a popular imagination showed themselves in puns and word play and in the images and iconography of Catholicism, what Bosworth has referred to aptly as a ‘Catholic subsoil’. There are many examples of the latter in wartime letters, censored by the authorities so as to avoid the spread of defeatism. A soldier on the Russian front wrote home, on 4 May 1942:

The good things we seek never come. I am so tired, so tired and I can’t go on. I don’t know how I will be able to get through it. There’s no end to it. All I hope is that the grace of the Lord will take me out of this torment.76

In addition to simple, orthodox prayers, apocalyptic prophecies began to appear in letters from early 1942, indicating ancient, pre- rational anxieties. According to one version, a Latin document, dating from 1701 had been found in the ruins of a demolished convent in Germany. It related that 240 years in the future a terrible conﬂict would break out in Europe:

Seven kingdoms will fight against an eagle and another two-legged bird. The struggle between the East and West of Europe will be long and cruel, and many men will die. Great horseless chariots will crush under their mighty wheels the harvests and the crops. Flying monsters will spew fire and incandescent blasts will annihilate cities and villages. This work of destruction and death will last for three years and five months and a time will come when it will be impossi- 0230543081_08_ch07.pdf 4/28/07 12:11 PM Page 195

Censorship, Secrets and Lies 195

ble to buy or to sell. Bread will be distributed in crumbs, the walls of houses will be tinged with blood and men will be forced to live in steel sarcophagi at the bottom of the sea. The war will reach its greatest intensity of violence when the pomegranates ﬂower for the third time. Peace will come the following Christmas.77

The censors carefully removed such stories from postal circulation, but there is no doubt that they circulated in other ways, indicating deep, supernatural fears which proved more instinctive than Fascist totalitarianism in times of trouble. One final symptom of popular anxiety will conclude our journey through the infernal regions of collective nightmare. Flying had been one of the great expressions of Fascism’s modernity and virility. The duce was to be seen flying his own plane in an iconic image of the regime: the aviator as superman. To complement Bosworth’s story of the unfortunate musician who was sent to confino for suggesting that the duce had an ulcer (which he did), Imbriani has presented anxious stories of the duce suffering from paralysis:

The duce, ﬁnding himself on a plane along with his assistant pilot and undersecretary Valle, had to ditch suddenly in order to avoid a hurricane, and the rapid change in temperature and low air pressure brought on an attack as a result of which he now has to take care.78

For the imagination of a population which had grown up, not merely with Catholic popular culture but with a superﬁcial yet widespread knowledge Dante’s vision of the afterlife, what we appear to be witnessing is an example of contrapasso in the collective consciousness, according to which sinners are punished by an inversion of their sins: the virile duce has become impotent. 0230543081_09_ch08.pdf 4/28/07 12:12 PM Page 196

8 Conclusion

In Liberal Italy the prefects had enjoyed extensive powers of censorship. They had the power to suppress subversive newspapers and to withhold permission for public performances on stage or in the cinema. Their discretion ranged over politics, blasphemy and morality. The Catholic Church also held a tenacious influence over the morals and political culture of a very large mass of Italian families, an influence which rivalled that of the state. From 1861, Church and state questioned the legitimacy of each other’s control over the lives of ordinary Italians, particularly in relation to schooling, but both were as one in their fear of Socialism and revolution, especially at the end of the first world war, against the background of events in Russia. Fascism emerged at the end of the Great War, wanting to turn its back on the Church and the Liberal state, and to set its course in a direction at variance with the Bolsheviks in Russia, forging a new man out of the spirit of the trenches. D. H. Lawrence published Lady Chatterley’s Lover in Florence in 1928, the sixth year of the Fascist state, without any trouble from the prefect. It could not be published in Britain until the 1960s because of British censorship laws. The novel, however, was available to anyone in Italy who could read English. But it did not appear in Italian translation until the 1960s. US authorities burned copies of Ulysses on the dock- side in 1922. Antonio Pizzuto, a member of the elite Italian secret police, entertained plans to translate Joyce’s novel into Italian just a few years later. By one set of measures therefore, Fascist censorship was considerably more progressive than literary censorship in the western democracies. The cultural censorship of the Fascist state was certainly more open to Modernism and experiment than that of the Catholic Church or of the Nazis, across the Alps. It is in this context that we should examine the relationship of Fascism to censorship.

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Conclusion 197

Continuities

As we have seen, Fascism, as a movement, set out with the impulse to suppress political interpretations of reality which were not consonant with its own. The Fascists of the First Hour were mostly men brutalized by war, frustrated by the impotence of the government, and the perceived cowardice of the non-Interventionists; they were eager for change. The attack of the squadristi on the offices of Avanti! demonstrates that frustration very clearly. It was a crude political stunt aimed at one group of non-Interventionists. The police, no friends of the Socialists either, did not intervene to stop the destruction, thereby undermining their role as guardians of law and order, and hastening the demise of Liberal Italy. 28 October 1922 was commemorated in Fascist mythology – and still is in some quarters – as the date marking a ‘Fascist revolution’, a seizure of power. The evidence suggests rather that the king, never a very committed democrat, lost his nerve, fearing the army might disobey, and Mussolini, safely out of the firing line, a couple of hundred miles away in Milan, took his chance, arriving the following morning in the sleep- ing car of an express train: trasformismo rather than revolution. Not a shot fired in anger. Nobody really knew what it meant at the time. Giolitti, King Victor Emanuel III, and the other old men, long used to power, banked on the uncouth Mussolini not knowing what to do with authority, and turning to them for guidance. Once in power, the methods changed, but it was gradual rather than rapid change. The impulse to suppress unwelcome news continued unabated for two decades. News was filtered out if it might upset the consensus and undermine public faith in the government. On a banal level, the regime sought to censor or minimize coverage of daily news stories of crime, the cronaca nera, quite unlike Nazi press policy in Germany in the 1930s. Mussolini was determined to present Fascist Italy as a state which had restored law and order after the post-war social upheaval; a strategy certainly at odds with that of April 1919. This dismayed some of his early supporters, but it went down well with the population at large. The closing down of Left-wing newspapers and periodicals in the first phase of Fascist government did not meet with popular protest. There was tacit approval from the monarchy, the Church and most sections of the business community. Mussolini now occupied the middle ground: ‘extremism in the middle’.1 In the first phase of Fascist government we can see three models of censorship policy in action; the three discussed in the Introduction: 0230543081_09_ch08.pdf 4/28/07 12:12 PM Page 198

198 Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922–43

preventive, informative and productive censorship. The preventive model, very familiar to the prefects of Liberal Italy, intensified and took as targets opposition newspapers and magazines. But even as opposition newspapers were being driven out of business, information gathering and surveillance methods were being honed as tools of government. Transcripts of tapped telephone calls came directly to Mussolini. Additional spies and informers were recruited and paid with irregular, secret funds. This information gathering was directed at opponents rather than at monitoring the general public. The fruits of all this intelligence were channelled through the Press Office, which reported directly to Mussolini, and eventually through the Agenzia Stefani. The public argument for greater police surveillance, enunciated in Mussolini’s speech to parliament on 3 January 1925 concerned primarily the need to monitor subversive activity and to take action against enemies of the state. Public opinion hardened in support of these emergency powers following the four attempts on his life. Censorship of the surviving newspapers had no appreciable effect on their sales figures, however, which is in itself one indication of consensus. So was Fascism simply more efficient than the previous governments at managing the bureaucracy of censorship inherited from the Liberal State?

The panopticon model and its limits

The foregoing chapters have demonstrated that there was much more to Fascist censorship than repression. The regime had a more ambitious agenda: to create the Ethical State and to re-forge Italians as a race of new men and women. Just as a virus modifies healthy cells, this Fascist aspiration was a genetic modification of the aspiration of the Risorgimento. It was in the field of education that this agenda first manifested itself. As a means to realizing the ethical state, Giovanni Gentile embarked on a purge of textbooks which his Commission held to be defective or deficient. This purge involved pulping thousands of volumes, well out of the public gaze, rather than burning them in piazzas throughout the country. It was a purge, nonetheless, and achieving control over the schoolbook market provided important lessons in terms of practices which would later be used in the wider publishing industry. This model of censorship was not simply repressive. It retained the threat of repression but placed the financial risk on the publisher, from whom it cascaded down to editors and writers, establishing a culture of self-censorship, without the need for dracon- 0230543081_09_ch08.pdf 4/28/07 12:12 PM Page 199

Conclusion 199

ian laws. It was a model of censorship which invited and rewarded complicity. A select few publishers grew rich on the lucrative schoolbook trade. Many more went out of business. But evidence of public outcry is scant. The methods of the schoolbook purge were simple and familiar to the state administration. Lists were drawn up for each region, according to a proforma. This gave to the Minerva, the headquarters of the Ministry for Public Instruction, an exhaustive dataset of all textbooks which were used in Italian elementary schools. Lombardo Radice’s Commission, in Rome, set about a careful examination of these texts, subject by subject. Despite the fact that this was an impossible task for a relatively small group of experts, the original plan for regional commissions was never implemented. Fascism in government had embarked on a plan of utopian centralization, indicating a distrust of devolved powers but also an underestimation of the resources that would be required to make it work. The intended purge of schoolbooks, or market regulation, ran to its predictable conclusion after six years, with the introduction of the libro di stato, or state textbook for elementary schools, and the suppression of all other titles. In one sense this was repressive, preventive censorship, because it closed down many small publishers. In another sense it was productive censorship, because the textbook writers, whether Grazia Deledda, Roberto Forges Davanzati or a host of names we no longer remember, lent their active support to constructing and reinforc- ing the narrative of Fascism. This included censoring the earlier, Blackshirt, accounts of Mussolini’s life, to make them fit with the characterization of the virile statesman sent by Providence. Textbook writers, editors and publishers therefore combined – many of them probably in good faith – in limiting the horizon of expectation of a new generation, to instil the belief that to be Italian was to be a Fascist. At the same time, in the adult world, information gathering for the first couple of years of Fascist government was not radically different from the procedures of Liberal Italy. The Ministry for the Interior continued, on a limited scale, to monitor and intercept telephone lines and letters. There were small networks of informers, recruited to undermine anti-Fascist activity. It was only after the declaration of dictatorship in January 1925 that the methods began to become more refined, firstly through Rocco’s new legal code (1926) and then as a result of reforms in policing and an enhancement of the Prime Minister’s Press Office. 1925–26 marks the beginning of a new phase, moving from preventive censorship to productive, or self-censorship, in several spheres of activity. 0230543081_09_ch08.pdf 4/28/07 12:12 PM Page 200

200 Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922–43

Was there a conscious model of censorship and surveillance by 1925–26? It would appear that Rocco was setting out a legislative basis for a Fascist appropriation of Jeremy Bentham’s social model of the panopticon, which, according to Michel Foucault:

is an important mechanism, for it automizes and disindividualizes power. Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up. […]. Consequently, it does not matter who exercises power. Any individual, almost at random, can operate the machine: in the absence of the director, his family, his friends, his visitors, even his servants.2

The reference to family, friends and servants alludes specifically to Bentham’s figure of the prison governor – because this was his model for the ideal prison – though Bentham himself advocated use of his model outside the confines of prisons to all forms of social organization.3 Mussolini’s government embraced something very like this model with the passing of the Rocco laws, in which the unblinking eye of the state sees everything and knows everything.4 The censor and policeman could observe everyone and everything without being seen themselves. They were the incarnation of power. In this model, power resides in the knowledge that the prisoner can be watched, and knows he can be watched, at any given moment. Therefore ‘surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action’.5 In Mussolini’s own words, when planning the establishment of OVRA in 1926:

We must transform the Inspectorate General of the police into a mysterious, powerful and omnipresent organism. Every Italian should feel at every moment of his or her life that they are under control, observed, scrutinized, under surveillance. […] It will be as if every individual is in the sights of a gun, as if two arms were ready, in that instant, to stop them […] like some monstrous dragon, like a gigantic octopus. That’s it. Just like the tentacles of an octopus.6

In this model, censorship did not have to be continuous. It was sufﬁcient for journalists and newspaper directors to know that their printed words could lead to sequestration and be aware of the ﬁnancial consequences. The same held true for radio producers, but 0230543081_09_ch08.pdf 4/28/07 12:12 PM Page 201

Conclusion 201

the model ceases to be valid for ordinary citizens writing letters, at least until wartime censorship. The divisions of the police involved in the monitoring of postal correspondence and telephone calls were very careful to cover their tracks because their mission was not to prevent the free expression of sincere sentiments. On the contrary, they were seeking to track down subversives, deviants and undesirables. Therefore it was imperative that the panopticon model was not too widely disseminated in Italian society in the mid-1920s, and indeed not until the totalitarian apotheosis of World War II. This is an important distinction. Newspaper men and those in the media and publishing had to be aware of the model, in order for productive censorship to flourish. The phone tap had been introduced in Italy by a Liberal government, and used as an exceptional service. Under Fascism it was transformed with progressive stealth and as a matter of policy into an indispensable tool. People within the state machinery and the media needed to know that they were under surveillance in even the deepest recesses of their family life. They knew the phones were tapped. Surveillance was used not only against subor- dinates in the hierarchy, in order to ascertain their level of commitment to the regime; Mussolini’s evening conversations with his brother in Milan were tapped and transcribed. Later, throughout the ‘years of consensus’, Mussolini had a powerful weapon with which to assess the true loyalty of his men and women. On the other hand, the great mass of the population was to be kept in the dark and fed carefully-sifted information. The security forces cracked down on subversives, vagrants and criminals, cleaned up the streets, inspiring public confidence by means of that process, and their attention remained fixed on those categories of undesirables until well into the 1930s, as it had under previous administrations. An unguarded comment in a private telephone conversation could lead to years in confino.7 Mauro Canali has cited the case of Giannino Macario Bay, a military historian, whose phone was tapped from 1934 until 1941, at which point he was interned on suspicion of subversion.8 The Moravia family house in Rome was likewise tapped for almost ten years, right up to July 1943.9 This was effective surveillance, but something other than simply the panopticon model, because these victims were probably not aware the state was listening in. For the surveillance of postal and telephonic communication to bear fruit as an information-gathering tool, informative censorship, it had to be secret, and unsuspected, and that reveals a contradiction inherent in totalitarianism, which in fact was not very different from a problem 0230543081_09_ch08.pdf 4/28/07 12:12 PM Page 202

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faced by military censors during the First World War. Enzo Forcella, writing about the experience of the latter argued:

On the one hand, we wanted to know in detail the feelings of soldiers and of the ‘internal front’. On the other, the frank expression of those feelings could be considered an offence, and the military censors did what they could to impose a stereotyped and anodyne type of correspondence. The political and military authorities worried not just about the circulation of ‘correspondence containing even generic expressions of denigration of war-time operations, of disdain and of contempt for the army’, or ‘news and interpretation different from that brought to public attention by the government or by military or naval commands’, or that ‘public order and morale might be disturbed’. They wanted to ensure that such expressions were not even thought, that such news did not exist.10

What Mussolini and the other Fascists took over from this war experience was the desire to impose discipline as part of their utopian anthropological revolution, to supervise another re-birth in Italian consciousness, and in that process to implant the stern censor into the conscience of every Italian. Internalizing the censor, or the concept of self-censorship, while far from being a new idea, was current in the culture of the early decades of the twentieth century from Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic writings. According to that model, the message, whether a letter, phone call, article in a newspaper, or work of art, equated to a symptom, a compromise between the need to express something and the duty to remain silent. The duty to silence, to support implicitly the Fascist norms, was imposed on the media and publishing industry through strategies of encouragement (such as ﬂattery or irregular funding) and punishment (sequestration, hostile take over, conﬁno). It was extended to the wider public by making examples of aberrant modes of behaviour and meting out exemplary sanctions. Freud’s model, however, does not really apply to the vast majority of Italians living under Fascism. They did not have to fear censorship and to:

soften and distort the expression of [their] opinion. According to the strength and sensitiveness of the censorship [they found themselves] compelled either merely to refrain from certain forms of attack, or to speak in allusions in place of direct references, or 0230543081_09_ch08.pdf 4/28/07 12:12 PM Page 203

Conclusion 203

[…] conceal […] objectionable pronouncements beneath some apparently innocent disguise.11

There are numerous examples of newspaper editors being castigated for their errors and omissions in respect of self-censorship, and soldiers’ letters home from the front likewise extend to regular allusion to avoid the censor’s black pen. But it is more difﬁcult to prove that the Italian population at large chafed under the yoke of Fascist censorship. Informers were ubiquitous and people could get into trouble for unguarded comments, and sometimes they did. But while many were sent to conﬁno, they were a minority. Did that make for an atmosphere of fear and anxiety throughout society?

Censorship and complicity

Another way of putting that question is to ask how committed was the Italian population to Mussolini’s idea of an anthropological revolution? The connections between censorship and consensus demand close elaboration. Rochat has argued that Mussolini’s government after 1932 tried to address the growing economic difﬁculties of the global Depression by injecting a greater dynamism at all levels of society through the forging of the myths of Romanità, of empire, African conquest and the development of an organized racism. Children and adults were enrolled into all sorts of Fascist and para- Fascist organizations whose aim was to control all forms of socialization, in order to effect the anthropological revolution for which Emilio Gentile has argued, producing a new type of Italian, aggressive yet obedient, sharing sets of behaviours and ways of looking at the world. At the root of these values was a parochial nationalism which condemned and derided everything that came from abroad or which smacked of apparently out-dated values such as democracy or freedom of conscience. As part of Mussolini’s anthropological revolution, the razza italiana, the Italian race, from 1935 was presented with a collective identity, which, as with any collective identity, implied exclusion of the Other. The Italian razza had its national secrets, and these needed to be protected from outsiders by means of censoring information. So, for example, if Italy was to be presented to the world as a virtually crime- free society, then newspapers had to refrain from publishing crime stories, even though it was in their commercial interests to do the contrary: Hence the rationale for censorship of cronaca nera. Censorship, 0230543081_09_ch08.pdf 4/28/07 12:12 PM Page 204

204 Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922–43

therefore, became a weapon in the defence of the national interest, and therefore in the individual interests of all Italians, and thus a form of social contract between the individual and the state.12 The obligations on the individual included a curtailment of free speech and criticism, in the national interest. This sort of social contract is common enough in times of war, and it was certainly also present in democratic wartime Britain, but the Italian Fascists sought to make it the social norm during the ventennio by holding up foreign powers and internal subversives as enemies of the state, whose presence required the vigilance and support of the Italian population in order to preserve the state from a descent into chaos. The list of external ‘enemies’ included Bolsheviks, the principal signatories of the Treaty of Versailles, the Greek leaders, the Ethiopian emperor, the League of Nations, Jews, and the ‘plutocratic’ powers ranged against the Axis from 1939. The spectre of the foreign antagonist fed a sense of outrage against the sanctions imposed by the League of Nations, and the regime called for national solidarity, as the ‘proletarian nation’ battling with the old imperial powers, especially Britain and France. This was similar to a state of war, only without the ﬁghting. The power of such a rhetoric of external threat was that the Fascist government could impose restraints on the press and the media in the national interest. In the face of the external enemy things had to be kept secret and it could be assumed that there were traitors among all strata of society. Although not articulated explicitly, this was a powerful argument, and it placed no limits on what might be deemed to be secret. Individuals had to accept that defending the secrets of the state implied prying into the secrets of other individuals, and therefore, potentially, their own. In other words, we observe something like the internalization of the panopticon model. Long before the League of Nations’ sanctions, Mussolini’s 1928 speech to newspaper directors on the mission of journalism had contained explicit orders on the suppression of information such as crime stories or reports of suicides. This line was reinforced in daily instructions to the press throughout the 1930s, instructions which intensiﬁed after the outbreak of the Second World War. A further motivation for information gathering, which came to have an increasing importance in the 1930s was as a means of gauging public opinion. From 1934, and the beginning of Mussolini’s wars, surveillance and censorship became the principal weapons in assessing and managing the morale of the population at large and of soldiers at the front. Censorship was the domain of several different branches of government, but central to 0230543081_09_ch08.pdf 4/28/07 12:12 PM Page 205

Conclusion 205

all of Fascist governance was the Divisione polizia politica in the Ministry of the Interior. Censorship became more systematic in 1933–34. This corresponded to Galeazzo Ciano’s return from Shanghai and his replacing Gaetano Polverelli at the Press Office. At this point, almost 11 years into Mussolini’s regime, prefects retained devolved powers over book censorship, as they had in Liberal Italy, and while there were occasional directives from the Ministry for the Interior, they were rare. Fabre has cited one from 1929, expressing concern over the availability of foreign books, by Russians, and Americans with Socialist sympathies, such as Jack London.13 In general, however, even after the recalibration of the Press Office into an Undersecretariat and then into a Ministry, books were rarely censored on political grounds. Bonsaver has argued that the issue of Solaria which contained a chapter from Vittorini’s Il Garofano rosso was sequestered on moral rather than political grounds.14 When one considers other episodes in the novel, which were not censored, the argument for moral censorship is compelling. But, as ever with Italian Fascism, there were contradictions here too. Henry Furst’s gay novel Simun, written in Italian during the early 1930s, did not appear in print in Italy until 1965. His collect of poems, Songs of Tokimarne, written in English, was printed privately in Genoa in 1938, without incident. The real factors driving the more systematic censorship policy were the Nazis’ victory in Germany, the first stirrings of racist policy and the aspiration to imperial expansion in Africa. In 1934, Ciano as undersecretary for Press and Propaganda, established a tighter, more centralized control of censorship, reducing the discretionary powers of the prefects, but not eliminating them. He built up extensive new powers over book publishing and the media. Fabre has demonstrated that the anti-Semitic strain of racism motivated the drawing up in 1938 of lists of writers whose work was to be banned. These lists were eventually distributed to prefects and publishers in 1942. By that time, in fact from June 1940, wartime censorship had made explicit the panopticon model of censorship which was in operation in Italy. It was supplemented by jamming stations to block foreign radio broadcasts, an extensive network of spies in the community as well as police reports on public opinion which played their part in shaping news coverage. By 1943 it was clear there remained little confidence that Italy would end up on the wining side in the war, and a comparison of the daily newspapers with letters to and from the front reveals a gulf in public opinion. Censors removed letters from circulation in a forlorn attempt 0230543081_09_ch08.pdf 4/28/07 12:12 PM Page 206

206 Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922–43

to hold back the tide of news. The earlier sense of discipline and internalization of self-censorship had become less pervasive, although of course there remained true believers in the Blackshirt cause, or more speciﬁcally those who clung to the myth of the duce, laying blame elsewhere.15 A mother writing from Cuneo on 13 July 1943 put it like this:

Poor Duce! He has done so much and he ﬁnds himself betrayed right at the crucial moment in the struggle. […] I have been trying to talk to them [her adult daughter and her children] for three days but they won’t listen to me. They say we should never have got involved in this war. […] If I had the strength to match my will, I would organize a squad, and they could start with their cudgels in this house and continue with beatings throughout the village. If I thought the Duce would get my message, I would tell him things that he doesn’t know. If he knew his people, he would be more severe. He is too indulgent, too good. And we are ungrateful.16

Twenty-four years after Marinetti’s account of the smashing up of the Avanti! offices, the impulse to violence is still apparent in this authentic Fascist text, now blacked out by the censor. The historian with access to the censored books, newspaper articles and the suppressed passages from letters, as well as the veline, transcripts of telephone conversations and the files on political internees, has a censor’s insight into the truths which the regime sought to suppress, and therefore the moral responsibility as well as the keys to decode the dream-work content of Fascist rhetoric, its education, media and cultural policies, and to understand the often provisional nature of popular consensus, and a tacit willingness to suspend disbelief. It is an inescapable fact that the majority of the Italian population, especially the middle classes, believed fervently in their duce for 20 years as a Napoleonic hero, sent by Providence to rescue the country from chaos. This mythology was fostered both by the official and semi-official media and by the accounts of popular biographers and apologists, especially those writing in the late 1920s and early 1930s.17 The intimate imaginary dialogue created by these accounts and by the Italian media, where pictures of the duce were ubiquitous and where his voice was often to be heard on radio, enabled the illusion of an almost magical sense of communication between individuals and their leader. It crops up again and again in the letters. One problem raised by this personality cult however, was that when things went wrong, and clearly it was not the duce’s fault, then his retinue of 0230543081_09_ch08.pdf 4/28/07 12:12 PM Page 207

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hangers on or the local prefects must be to blame. The personality cult undermined the already weak conﬁdence in the state. The personality cult is at its least subtle in children’s literature. Luisa Passerini has cited an example: a boy is taken prisoner by an African tribe. He tears the page out of his Illustrazione italiana on which there is a picture of Mussolini and addresses it:

Duce, look at me, help me. I want to see you. I want to speak to you, tell you my name. […] You don’t know that a poor lad like me, far away from his home, loves you so much […] I bear your picture next to my heart, beloved duce, now that I have risked my life and got you back from the hands of the evil ones. Now save me! […] Duce, do you want me among your Balilla? Will you let me come to you in Rome?18

This story clearly draws on a long tradition of casual racism in colonial literature, much of it written originally in English, but familiar to Italian children of the 1930s through translations and the novels of Emilio Salgari. It is a representative example. For those actively involved in the media and publishing industries, the meaning of censorship in the ethical state was more often than not moral abjection. Fascist censorship exploited economic conditions and human weakness by combining the promise of patronage with the threat of sanction. There was always a more remote threat of physical violence. Once the critical opposition newspapers had been closed down by 1925 there was no longer a free press in Italy. Editors understood this, and knew that their newspapers could be sequestered without warning, causing them financial difficulties. Solaria, the low-circulation cultural quarterly in Florence, never recovered from the sequestration of the issue containing a chapter from Vittorini’s Il Garofano rosso. In order to stay in business, publishers had to act as censors, keeping their writers in check. Some of these writers seem to have been quite content going along with the regime. Quite a few of them received regular subsidies from the Press Office.19 Others had comfortable sinecures. Did this amount to active collusion? In some cases it did, but there is a danger of overstatement. Belardelli has argued that since known anti-Fascists wrote entries for the Enciclopedia italiana and since the articles in the encyclopaedia are all in line with Fascism, it therefore follows that these known anti-Fascists really did share the regime’s orientation.20 This argument sounds reminiscent of Deledda’s account of Communists in the libro di stato, aimed 0230543081_09_ch08.pdf 4/28/07 12:12 PM Page 208

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at 12-year olds. Belardelli’s argument is more sophisticated but equally fallacious. It is true that some anti-Fascists wrote for the encyclopaedia, including honourable men dismissed from Italian universities for refusing to swear the pernicious oath of loyalty to the regime. The second premise of the argument is the flawed one, flawed for at least two reasons. Firstly, most Italian anti-Fascist intellectuals of the time (and some Fascist ones) were influenced by Benedetto Croce’s philosophy, and shared his view that culture should be kept separate from politics. Some anti-Fascists, therefore, did not perceive a contradiction in writing entries for the Italian encyclopaedia edited by Giovanni Gentile, because they did not accept the Fascist premise that culture and politics were intertwined. Anti-Fascists simply did not accept the ideological view that to be Italian meant to be Fascist. Secondly, ‘Fascism’ was (and remains) a hopelessly woolly term, open to any number of different interpretations. Its proponents and apologists have consistently made the most of these ambiguities. Giorgio Levi Della Vida, distinguished scholar of the Arab world, wrote for the encyclopaedia. There is nothing overtly anti-Fascist about what he wrote. (Had there been we may be sure it would have been censored). But there is nothing remotely Fascist about his contribution either. Belardelli’s conclusion does not follow from his premises, unless one accepts the Fascist view of culture, politics and Italian identity; and that surely is to beg a question. Nonetheless, while there were not a few honourable exceptions, the archives demonstrate plenty of passive indifference to the loss of liberty which Fascism entailed for minorities and marginalized groups, as well as considerable hostility to the figures of public enemies put forward by the state’s media machine, be they Abyssinians (after the unsuccessful attempt on Marshal Graziani’s life), Jews or Americans (during the war). Letters and bar talk suggest widespread popular support for Mussolini’s strategy on entering the war in June 1940, because it looked as if Germany was about to win. This held up until it became clear that Italy was going to lose. Rather more sinister than amoral opportunism of this kind was the activity of spies, informers and those responsible for anonymous denunciations. Mussolini’s police could not possibly have built up the vast mass of evidence which was at their disposal without the active complicity of many ordinary Italians, content to go along with the regime and to use the police state as a mechanism for settling old scores with neighbours, family members, ex-lovers, business rivals, or simply people they did not like.21 Among the ranks of the spies and informers, no doubt, there 0230543081_09_ch08.pdf 4/28/07 12:12 PM Page 209

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were true believers, although a study of their motivations is beyond the scope of this book. The local police, generally not particularly fascistized, tended to be sceptical about the motivations of anonymous letters, with good reason. Some reports, however, were sufﬁcient to ruin the lives of individuals and their families. Rather than creating the New Man and an anthropological revolution, Fascism’s dark side, censorship, surveillance and punishment, reveals instead the tenacity of Old Adam. 0230543081_10_Notes.qxd 4/28/07 12:12 PM Page 210

Notes

Chapter 1 Introduction

1 Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (London: Little, Brown and Co., 1996); Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). On the reception in Germany of Goldhagen’s theses see Fred Kautz, The German Historians, ‘Hitler’s Willing Executioners’ and Daniel Goldhagen (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 2003). 2 Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (London: Allen Lane, 2004). 3 Giorgio Fabre, Mussolini razzista. Dal socialismo al fascismo: la formazione di un’antisemita (Milan: Garzanti, 2005); Razza e fascismo. La persecuzione contro gli ebrei in Toscana, 1938–1943, 2 vols, edited by Enzo Collotti (Rome: Carocci, 1999); Enzo Collotti, Il fascismo e gli ebrei. Le leggi razziali in Italia (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2003); Michele Sarfatti, Gli ebrei nell’Italia fascista. Vicende, identità, persecuzioni (Turin: Einaudi, 2000). 4 Mimmo Franzinelli, Delatori. Spie e conﬁdenti anonimi: l’arma segreta del regime fascista (Milan: Mondadori, 2001), especially pp. 135–96. 5 For a critical historian’s view of Gianfranco Fini’s statement, see Simonetta Fiore, ‘Interview with Enzo Collotti’, La Repubblica, 29 November 2003, p. 43. 6 Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il Duce. Vol. 1: Gli anni del consenso 1929–1936 (Turin: Einaudi, 1974). 7 Nicola Tranfaglia, Un passato scomodo. Fascismo e postfascismo (Milan: Baldini Castoldi Dalai, 2006), ﬁrst published in 1996, the year after De Felice’s interview with Pasquale Chessa, which was published as Il rosso e il nero (Milan: Baldini and Castoldi, 1995); Angelo Del Boca, Italiani, brava gente? Un mito duro a morire (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 2005), pp. 205–27. 8 Philip V. Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso. Fascismo e mass media, translated by Giovanni Ferrara (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1975). Cannistraro wrote this work as a PhD thesis and the Italian translation appeared with a preface by De Felice. The book was never published in English. 9 Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso, p. 9. 10 Marcello Staglieno, Arnaldo e Benito (Milan: Mondadori, 2003) for example. This view is countered by a number of very well documented recent studies including: Giorgio Fabre, L’Elenco. Censura fascista, editori e scrittori ebrei (Turin: Silvio Zamorani editore, 1998) and his Mussolini razzista; Michele Sarfatti, Gli ebrei nell’Italia fascista, and his more recent La Shoah in Italia. La persecuzione degli ebrei sotto il fascismo (Turin: Einaudi, 2005). 11 What does mark it out from other conservative histories of the period is Staglieno’s contention that the king, rather than Mussolini, was behind the abduction and murder of Matteotti in 1924. 12 David Forgacs, in his Rome Open City (London: British Film Institute, 2001) has demonstrated how this ideological construction also informs Rossellini’s

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classic Neorealist film. By setting the movie in the first quarter of 1944 Rossellini was able to avoid disturbing issues such as on the one hand the deportation of Jews in the immediate aftermath of 8 September 1943 and, on the other, the massacre at the Fosse Ardeatine (March 1944), and in doing so, he could plausibly present an Italian population more or less united in their resistance to the Nazis. 13 See Tranfaglia, Un passato scomodo, pp. 19–20. 14 Claudio Pavone, Una guerra civile. Saggio storico sulla moralità nella Resistenza, second edition (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1994 [1991]), p. xi. On the problems of memory and remembering in English see also Roger Absalom, ‘Memories of Occupations: Perugia 1943–45’ in Essays in Italian Literature and History in Honour of Doug Thompson, edited by George Talbot and Pamela Williams (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002), pp. 117–24. 15 It is nonetheless true that at least one provincial town (Locorotondo in Puglia) now has streets named after prominent Fascists such as Italo Balbo, Giovanni Gentile, and even Giorgio Almirante, long-time leader of the Movimento sociale italiano, forerunner of Gianfranco Fini’s Alleanza nazionale. 16 On this theme, especially in relation to colonialism, see Del Boca, Italiani, brava gente?. 17 For a very useful historiographical account in English see R. J. B. Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship. Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism (London: Arnold, 1998). Most of the secondary sources I draw on in this book have been published since that book appeared. 18 Luisa Passerini, Mussolini immaginario. Storia di una biografia 1915–1939 (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1991); Angelo Michele Imbriani, Gli Italiani e il duce. Il mito e l’immagine di Mussolini negli ultimi anni del fascismo, 1938–1942 (Naples: Liguori, 1992). 19 Mimmo Franzinelli, I tentacoli dell’OVRA. Agenti, collaboratori e vittime della polizia politica fascista, third edition (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2000 [1999]), Franzinelli, Delatori (Milan: Mondadori, 2002), and Franzinelli, Squadristi. Protagonisti e tecniche della violenza fascista 1919–1922 (Milan: Mondadori, 2003), Mauro Canali, Le spie del regime (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004); as well as Nicola Tranfaglia, La stampa del regime 1932–43. Le veline del Minculpop per orientare l’informazione (Milan: Bompiani, 2005). Of fundamental importance for recent work on Fascist censorship is Fabre’s L’Elenco (1998). 20 Maurizio Cesari, La censura nel periodo fascista (Naples: Liguori, 1978); Lorenzo Greco, Censura e scrittura: Vittorini, lo pseudo-Malaparte, Gadda (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1983); Loris Rizzi, Lo sguardo del potere. La censura militare in Italia nella seconda guerra mondiale 1940–45 (Milan: Rizzoli, 1984); and Aurelio Lepre, L’occhio del duce. Gli italiani e la censura di guerra 1940–1943 (Milan: Mondadori, 1992). 21 David Forgacs, ‘How exceptional were Culture-State relations in twentieth- century Italy?’ in Culture, Censorship and the State in Twentieth-Century Italy, edited by Guido Bonsaver and Robert S. C. Gordon (Oxford: Legenda, 2005), pp. 9–20 (10). 22 Marinetti also turned up a few months later in Fiume among the Arditi for Gabriele D’Annunzio’s defiant and theatrical occupation of that city. See 0230543081_10_Notes.qxd 4/28/07 12:12 PM Page 212

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Claudia Salaris, Alla festa della rivoluzione: artisti e libertari con D’Annunzio a Fiume (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002). 23 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, ‘La battaglia di Via Mercanti il 15 aprile 1919 prima vittoria del Fascismo’ in his Opere, vol. II, edited by Luciano De Maria (Milan: Mondadori, 1968), pp. 449–50, cited in Mimmo Franzinelli, Squadristi, p. 22. 24 Roger Griffin, ‘The Sacred Synthesis: the Ideological Cohesion of Fascist Cultural Policy’, Modern Italy, 3 (1998), 1, 5–23 (7). 25 Griffin, ‘The Sacred Synthesis’, p. 10. 26 Marinetti’s strategy here was analogous to Mussolini’s method of self- presentation in his war-time diary which he published in instalments in Il Popolo d’Italia. See Passerini, Mussolini immaginario, pp. 15–32. 27 R. J. B. Bosworth, ‘War, Totalitarianism and “Deep Belief” in Fascist Italy, 1935–43’, European History Quarterly, 34 (2004), 4, 475–505 and his Mussolini’s Italy. Life under the Dictatorship 1915–1945 (London: Allen Lane, 2005). 28 Roberto Maggiore, Razza e Fascismo (Palermo: Agate, 1939), p. 28. 29 David. D. Roberts, ‘How not to think about Fascism and Ideology, Intellectual Antecedent and Historical Meaning’, Journal of Contemporary History, 35 (2000), 185–211 (192). 30 Epigraph to Franzinelli, Squadristi, p. 1. Mussolini’s own words, from a 1925 speech: ‘Preferisco al cattedratico impotente lo squadrista che agisce’. 31 Emilio Gentile, ‘The Fascist Anthropological Revolution’, Culture, Censorship and the State in Twentieth-Century Italy, pp. 22–33 (30–31). 32 Rizzi, Lo sguardo del potere, (1984) p. 11. 33 Rizzi, Lo sguardo del potere, (1984) p. 7. 34 Mimmo Franzinelli and Emanuele Valerio Marino, Il Duce proibito. Le fotografie di Mussolini che gli italiano non hanno mai visto (Milan: Mondadori, 2003). 35 On the sacralization of the Fascist state: Emilio Gentile, Il mito dello Stato nuovo (Bari-Rome: Laterza, 2002 [1982]); Emilio Gentile, Il culto del littorio (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1993) [in English, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy, trans. K. Botsford (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996)] and also his Fascismo. Storia e interpretazione (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2002); Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities. Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley-Los Angeles-London: University of California Press, 2001); Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Staging Fascism 18BL and the Theater of Masses for Masses (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1996); Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Mabel Berezin, Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of interwar Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); Marla Stone, The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); and Emily Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 36 Griffin, ‘The Sacred Synthesis’(1998); Aristotle Kallis, Fascist Ideology: Territory and Expansionism in Italy and Germany, 1922–1945 (London: Routledge, 2000); Günther Berghaus, Futurism and Politics: between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist Reaction, 1909–1944 (Providence R.I.-Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1996); and Philip J. Morgan, Italian Fascism, 1915–45, second edition (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), especially pp. 143–5. 0230543081_10_Notes.qxd 4/28/07 12:12 PM Page 213

Notes 213

37 Karen Pinkus, Bodily Regimes. Italian Advertising under Fascism (Minneapolis- London: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities. Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy (London-Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality. Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985); and his later book The Image of Man. The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), as well as Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Vol. I: Women, Floods, Bodies, History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987). For more on the sacralization of German politics under the Nazis see Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich. A New History (London: Macmillan, 2000). In the Italian context, see Lorenzo Benadusi, Il nemico dell’uomo nuovo. L’omosessualità nell’esperimento totalitario fascista (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2005). 38 George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, (1978) p. 191. 39 Cited in E. Collotti, Il fascismo e gli ebrei, p. 27. 40 Spackman, Fascist Virilities, p. xii and Passerini, Mussolini immaginario, pp. 99–109. 41 Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, p. 87. Prezzolini’s formulation (La Voce, 4 December 1913) is cited by Emilio Gentile on various occasions, e.g., Il culto del littorio, p. 237 and Il mito dello Stato nuovo (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2002 [1982]), p. 123. 42 Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism, p. 136. Braun was describing an illustration by Sironi in Il Popolo d’Italia, 19 November 1922, three weeks after the March on Rome. 43 There are several earlier books which provide collections of images. Among others, see Umberto Silva, Ideologia e arte del Fascismo (Milan: Mazzotta editore, 1973) and Laura Malvano, Fascismo e politica dell’immagine (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1988). Among less critical but equally well-stocked volumes see Nicola Caracciola, Tutti gli uomini del duce (Milan: Mondadori, 1982) and Storia fotografica del fascismo, edited by Renzo De Felice and Luigi Goglia, second edition (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1982). 44 Cited by Gentile, Fascismo. Storia e interpretazione, pp. 106–7. Gentile in turn is citing Alberto Aquarone, L’organizzazione dello Stato totalitario, second edition (Turin: Einaudi, 1965), p. 310. 45 My principal archival sources are in the Archivio centrale di Stato (ACS) in Rome, specifically the Direzione generale di pubblica sicurezza (DGPS), Ministero dell’Interno (MI), files of the Divisione affari generali e riservati (DAGR) and the Divisione polizia politica (DPP). New material includes the second batch (‘secondo versamento’) of papers from the Ministero della Cultura Popolare (Minculpop), released in July 2003. The Istituto Luce is in the process of digitizing its very extensive archive and some of the results are available at http://www.archivioluce.com.

Chapter 2 Consolidating Power and Silencing Opposition

1 From an article by Francesco Giunta, leader of the squadristi in Trieste, originally published in Il Popolo di Trieste, 4 March 1921 and later in F. Giunta, Essenza dello squadrismo (Rome: Libreria del littorio, 1931), pp. 53–5. Cited 0230543081_10_Notes.qxd 4/28/07 12:12 PM Page 214

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in Mimmo Franzinelli, Squadristi. Protagonisti e tecniche della violenza fascista 1919–1922 (Milan: Mondadori, 2003), p. 51. 2 Alceste De Ambris, ‘Il Fascismo al bivio’ in La riscossa dei legionari fiumani, 12 September 1922. See Renzo De Felice, Sindacalismo rivoluzionario e fiumanesimo nel carteggio De Ambris-d’Annunzio (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1966), pp. 331–42, for a full transcription. 3 Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1963), chapter 5, ‘Fascism – Left, Right and Centre’. 4 Nicola Tranfaglia, La stampa del regime 1932–1943. Le veline del Minculpop per orientare l’informazione (Milan: Bompiani, 2005), pp. 8–10. 5 Philip V. Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso. Fascismo e mass media, translated by Giovanni Ferrara (Bari-Rome: Laterza, 1975); Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il duce. Gli anni del consenso (Turin: Einaudi, 1974); Doug Thompson, State Control in Fascist Italy: Culture and Conformity 1925–43 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991); and Giovanni Belardelli, Il ventennio degli intellettuali. Cultura, politica, ideologia nell’Italia fascista (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2005). 6 Victoria de Grazia, The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); and her How Fascism ruled Women: Italy 1922–45 (Berkeley-London: University of California Press, 1991); Tracy H. Koon, Believe, Obey, Fight: Political Socialization of Youth in Fascist Italy 1922–43 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1985). 7 Christopher Duggan, Francesco Crispi, 1818–1901: from Nation to Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 482–5. 8 Their reports are preserved in the Archivio centrale dello Stato. As one example among many, the following is a report from the prefect of Milan marked ‘riservato’ and dated 3 March 1922: ‘The newspaper L’Azione is financed principally by two groups, one of which runs the Credito italiano, which has its delegate on its board of directors and the other group is led by the Marquis Raggio of Genoa (not the senator) and by the brother of the late Raimondo, member for San Remo. Its director is Guglielmo Quadrotta, the well-known modernist, ex-communicated because of his differences with Pius X. The political line of the newspaper is reformist in the manner of Raimondo. Its inspiration is Bonomi who has been constantly in the company of Quadrotta recently. Indeed it has been said that Bonomi is the real director of the newspaper. We know [crossed out and replaced in pencil by ‘it is said’] for certain that in spite of the fact the current polemics which make it seem to favour Nitti, in reality Quadrotta is completely against Nitti’s return to power. The newspaper has sufficient means to enable it to run for two years. It has no plans to expose itself to large expenses. Its objective is to be regarded as politically authoritative. So it is not worried about increasing sales. It defends the interests of Ligurian and Milanese industry’ – ACS, MI, PS, DAGR 1923, b. 68, Milan. 9 Jonathan M. Dunnage, The Italian Police and the Rise of Fascism. A Case Study of the Province of Bologna, 1897–1925 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood-Praeger, 1997), p. 72: Law 675 of 23 May 1915 ‘prohibited references in the press to the number of dead, injured or imprisoned in the war, to changes in military leadership and to military operations. Editions of newspapers could be 0230543081_10_Notes.qxd 4/28/07 12:12 PM Page 215

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confiscated by the prefect, sub-prefect or “whoever was acting in his place” if in their opinion publication could lower public morale and faith in the government interests in any way. Most important, Article 3 of the Law stipulated that all editions of the newspapers should be presented to the prefect, sub-prefect or their representatives at least an hour before publication for possible censorship’. 10 R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy. Life under the Dictatorship 1915–1945 (London: Allen Lane, 2005), p. 75. 11 There is an example in the file of ACS, MI, PS, PP, FP, b. 1283, f. Soldevilla (Don) Pedro. 12 Mimmo Franzinelli, Delatori. Spie e confidenti anonimi: l’arma segreta del regime fascista (Milan: Mondadori, 2001), p. 91. There is a memorandum from Mussolini (written on headed paper of the Ministero degli Affari Esteri) to Aldo Finzi, his first undersecretary in the Ministry of the Interior, Rome 27 January 1923: ‘Dear Finzi, from now on transcripts of phone taps are to be copied to me only. So, one copy which you receive and you send to me.’ The original document is to be found in ACS, Collezione De Felice, Autografi di Mussolini, Album 1, document 17. The relative informality of this memorandum, which marks a fundamental change in policy, is to be explained by the fact that Finzi was Mussolini’s own appointment, a squadrista who had flown over Vienna with D’Annunzio and had been with Mussolini at Piazza San Sepolcro. Finzi, an assimilated Jew, was sacked after the Matteotti murder, although he does not appear to have been involved, and ended his days as one of the victims in the Fosse Ardeatine. For a popular account of his life: Domizia Carafòli and Gustavo Bocchini Padiglione, Aldo Finzi. Il Fascista ucciso alle Fosse Ardeatine (Milan: Mursia, 2004). Mussolini’s own telephone calls were regularly tapped too. Some transcripts of calls to his brother are to be found in Marcello Staglieno, Arnaldo e Benito. Due fratelli (Milan: Mondadori, 2003), pp. 154–5 and pp. 233–4. 13 Mauro Canali, Le spie del regime (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004), p. 81. 14 Maurizio Cesari, La censura nel periodo fascista (Naples: Liguori, 1978), p. 12. For more recent work on the subject see Tranfaglia, La stampa del regime 1932–1943 (2005) and Paolo Murialdi, Storia del giornalismo italiano, second edition (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000 [1996]), pp. 141–84. 15 The law was Royal Decree, 15 July 1923, n. 3299, in Leggi e decreti reali, 1924, p. 1530 (secondo l’ordine di inserzione nella Gazzetta Ufficiale), Edizioni Roma, ‘Il foro italiano’. 16 Distribution was prevented the first week because the editor was out of the country, the second week because police were not satisfied with the guaran- tees offered by the new (replacement) editor, the third week because the signature of the second editor was not deemed authentic and the fourth because his signature, now authenticated, was placed on the wrong page. The story was reported by Avanti!, 23 March 1923. 17 Giordano Bruno Guerri, Galeazzo Ciano. Una vita (1903–1944), second edition (Milan: Mondadori, 2001 [1979]), p. 88. 18 Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso, (1975) p. 73. 19 ACS, SPD, cr, b. 6, f. 251/R, telegram no. 8195, Cesare Rossi to Mussolini, 7 April 1924. 0230543081_10_Notes.qxd 4/28/07 12:12 PM Page 216

216 Notes

20 ACS, MI, PS, b. 25, categoria F1, Rome, 29 October 1923, from the prefect of Rome. Cited in Cesari, La censura nel periodo fascista, p. 14. 21 On the funding of Il Popolo d’Italia see Meir Michaels, Mussolini and the Jews: German-Italian relations and the Jewish question in Italy, 1922–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978) and Giorgio Fabre, Il contratto. Mussolini editore di Hitler (Bari: Dedalo, 2004). 22 Document cited by Cesari, La censura nel periodo fascista, p. 14. 23 Leggi e decreti reali, 1924, p. 1534. 24 Rossi left his post in the recriminations over the abduction and murder of Matteotti. Following a j’accuse article which he published in Amendola’s Il Mondo he became a bête noir for the Fascists and despite a brief exile in France he spent over a decade in Italian jails between 1928 and 1940. See Mauro Canali, Il delitto Matteotti, second edition (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004). 25 Frank Rosengarten, The Italian Anti-Fascist Press (1919–1945): from the legal opposition press to the underground newspapers of World War II (Cleveland Ohio: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1968); and Giorgio Luti, La letteratura nel ventennio fascista: cronache letterarie tra le due guerre: 1920–1940, third edition (Scandicci: La nuova Italia, 1995). 26 See Paolo Murialdi, La stampa quotidiana del regime fascista, in Nicola Tranfaglia, Paolo Murialdi and Massimo Legnani, La stampa italiana nell’eta fascista (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1980), pp. 31–257 (p. 39). 27 The Times, 11 May 1925, issue 43958, p. 15. 28 John P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: the view from America (Princeton N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1972). 29 Canali, Le spie del regime, p. 131ff. On the reform, or otherwise, of the police in this period see also Dunnage, The Italian Police and the Rise of Fascism (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood-Praeger, 1997). 30 Article 181 of Consolidation Act (Testo Unico) on Public Security, 1931. 31 Canali cites documents in ACS, Autograﬁ del duce, Cassetta di zinco, b. 4. 32 Benito Mussolini, ‘Il discorso dell’Ascensione’, Scritti e discorsi, VI (Milan: Hoepli, 1934), pp. 37–77. 33 Mussolini, ‘Il discorso dell’Ascensione’, p. 51. 34 Carmine Senise, Quando ero capo della polizia (Rome: Ruffolo, 1946), p. 66. 35 Canali, Le spie del regime, p. 63. 36 For example, ‘category F’ refers consistently to the press. 37 On the organization of OVRA see Mimmo Franzinelli, I tentacoli dell’OVRA. Agenti, collaboratori e vittime della polizia politica fascista, third edition (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2000 [1999]), pp. 61–90; Romano Canosa, I servizi segreti del duce (Milan: Mondadori, 2000) and Canali, Le spie del regime. 38 Antonio Pizzuto, Rapin e Rapier, edited by Antonio Pane (Rome: Editori riuniti, 1998). 39 Cited in Franzinelli, I tentacoli dell’OVRA, p. 63. 40 Joel Blatt, ‘The Battle of Turin, 1933–1936: Carlo Rosselli, Giustizia e Libertà, OVRA and the Origins of Mussolini’s anti-Semitic Campaign’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 1 (1995), 22–57. 41 On an example of the rivalries see George Talbot, ‘A Micro-History of Censorship in Fascist Italy: the case of Henry Furst’ in Censorship, Culture 0230543081_10_Notes.qxd 4/28/07 12:12 PM Page 217

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and the State in Twentieth Century Italy, edited by Guido Bonsaver and Robert S. C. Gordon (Oxford: Legenda, 2005), pp. 86–95. 42 Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy, p. 362. 43 Between March and May 1924 ten telegrams were sent to over 40 newspapers and to the Volta news agency. 44 Arnaldo Mussolini to Manlio Morgagni, 22 September 1922, cited in Marcello Staglieno’s almost hagiographic double biography, Arnaldo e Benito, p. 137. 45 Giorgio Fabre, ‘Mussolini e le sovvenzioni della COMIT’, Quaderni di storia, 57 (2003), 281–99. 46 Fabre, ‘Mussolini e le sovvenzioni della COMIT’, 284. 47 Fabre, ‘Mussolini e le sovvenzioni della COMIT’, 283. 48 Predictably this interpretation is hotly disputed by Staglieno, pp. 122–5. There is, however, more bluster than argument. 49 Donato Barbone, ‘Ancora sulle elargizioni della COMIT a fascisti (1919–1930)’, Studi di storia 58 (2003), July–Dec, 259–79. 50 Barbone, ‘Ancora sulle elargizioni della COMIT a fascisti (1919–1930)’, 260. 51 In the wake of the Lateran Pacts in February 1929, the Corriere padano, reprinted part of an article by Francesco Nitti, published in the Münchener Post on 5 February. Although the intention was to discredit Nitti (referred to throughout as ‘Cagoia’ and described as a ‘lurid traitor’), his critique of Fascism was carried on the front page – Corriere padano, 14 February 1929. Quilici and Balbo died together over Tobruk in what was, ironically, the only plane shot down in Libya by the Italian military during the war. Rumours still persist that Balbo, heroic aviator and the duce’s arch rival for the role of Fascist alpha-male, may have died on Mussolini’s instructions. 52 Murialdi, La stampa quotidiana del regime fascista; Murialdi, Storia del giornalismo italiano, pp. 141–84. 53 Romano Canosa, La voce del duce. L’Agenzia Stefani: l’arma segreta di Mussolini (Milan: Mondadori, 2002), p. 22 and Staglieno, Arnaldo e Benito, p. 137. 54 Canosa, La voce del duce, p. 24. 55 Cited in Canosa, La voce del duce, p. 32. 56 Manlio Morgagni, L’Agenzia Stefani nella vita nazionale (Milan: Alﬁeri & Lacroix, 1930), cited in Canosa, La voce del duce, p. 33. 57 Canosa, La voce del duce, p. 34. 58 Canosa, La voce del duce, p. 35. 59 Cited in Cesari, La censura nel periodo fascista, p. 28. 60 Settimelli made reference to his presence at Piazza San Sepolcro in a letter to Mussolini from conﬁno in 1938 – ACS, MI, PS, C.O., 544.830, cited in Günter Berghaus, Futurism and Politics: between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist Reaction, 1909–1944 (Providence, R.I.: Berghahn Books, 1996), p. 265 61 For Settimelli, one of Mussolini’s earliest biographers: Simonetta Falasca- Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle. The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 49; and Paul O’Brien, Mussolini in the First World War: The Journalist, the Soldier, the Fascist (Oxford: Berg, 2004), p. 5. 0230543081_10_Notes.qxd 4/28/07 12:12 PM Page 218

218 Notes

Chapter 3 Giovinezza: Education for the Ethical State

1 Vera Zamagni, The Economic History of Italy 1860–1990 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 14. 2 Pasquale Villari, ‘La scuola e la quistione sociale in Italia’, Nuova Antologia, XXI, November 1872. 3 Social unrest did flare up from time to time and in the case of Puglia it led to the rural metamorphosis of Fascism as squadristi came to the assistance of the landlords in the violent reaction against the braccianti. See Frank M. Snowden, Violence and the Great Estates in the South of Italy. Apulia 1900–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 4 On satire in Il Becco giallo see Monica Galfré, Il regime degli editori. Libri, scuola e fascismo (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2005), pp. 3–4. 5 Tullio De Mauro, Storia linguistica dell’Italia unita, eighth edition (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2003), pp. 105–18. 6 Gabriele Turi, Giovanni Gentile. Una biografia (Florence: Giunti, 1995). 7 A. James Gregor, Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism (New Brunswick- London: Transaction Publishers, 2001) and Francesco Perfetti, Assassinio di un filosofo: anatomia di un omicidio politico (Florence: Le Lettere, 2004). See also M. E. Moss, Mussolini’s Fascist Philosopher. Giovanni Gentile Reconsidered (New York: Peter Lang, 2004); and Angelo Guerraggio and Pietro Nastasi, Matematica in camicia nera. Il regime e gli scienziati (Milan: Paravia Bruno Mondadori, 2005), pp. 73–85. For an earlier account in English, which has not aged well, see Tracy H. Koon, Believe, Obey, Fight: Political Socialization of Youth in Fascist Italy, 1922–1943 (Chapel Hill-London: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), pp. 41–59. 8 Turi, Giovanni Gentile, p. 304. 9 Cited in Turi, Giovanni Gentile, p. 305. 10 See below, chapter 6, p. 134. 11 Gregor, Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism, p. 29. 12 Gregor, Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism, p. 29. 13 ‘Ammonimenti’, Dopo la vittoria. Nuove frammenti politici (Rome: La Voce, 1920), p. 51. This is Gregor’s translation. See Gregor, Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism, p. 32. 14 Cited in Moss, Mussolini’s Fascist Philosopher, p. 33. 15 Turi, Giovanni Gentile, p. 311. He resigned on 14 June 1924. 16 ‘Circular to School Authorities’, 25 November 1922, in Giovanni Gentile, La riforma della scuola in Italia, third edition, revised and edited by Hervé A. Cavallera (Florence: Le Lettere, 1989), pp. 4–5 (4). 17 Turi, Giovanni Gentile, p. 313. 18 Gentile, La riforma della scuola in Italia, pp. 94–5. 19 The number of students following economics degrees at Italian universities went up from 7,212 in 1920–21 to 23,011 in 1940–41, well ahead of the general growth in undergraduate numbers in the same period, i.e., 53,239 in 1920–21 to 127,058 in 1940–41. Source: ISTAT, Statistica dell’istruzione superiore nell’anno accademico 1945–46 (Rome, 1948). Cited in Zamagni, The Economic History of Italy, p. 305. 0230543081_10_Notes.qxd 4/28/07 12:12 PM Page 219

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20 Ordinanza ministeriale, 11 November 1923, cited in Enricomaria Corbi and Vincenzo Sarracino, Scuola e politiche educative in Italia dall’unità a oggi (Naples: Liguori, 2003), pp. 169–70 (169). 21 Galfré, Il regime degli editori, p. 12. 22 Il libro per la scuola tra idealismo e fascismo. L’opera della Commissione centrale per l’esame dei libri di testo da Giuseppe Lombardo Radice ad Alessandro Melchiori (1923–1928), edited by Anna Ascenzi and Roberto Sani (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2005), p. 4. Lombardo Radice was writing in 1926. 23 Ministerial circular, 2 March 1923, no. 21 ‘Inchiesta sui libri di testo’, reproduced in Il libro per la scuola tra idealismo e fascismo, p. 34. 24 ‘Relazione sui libri di testo per le scuole elementari e popolari ed elenco dei libri approvati’ (Bollettino Ufﬁciale del Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione, 1923, supp. 2, no. 26, pp. 5–46), cited in Il libro per la scuola tra idealismo e fascismo, p. 79. 25 Il libro per la scuola tra idealismo e fascismo, p. 13. 26 Galfré, Il regime degli editori, p. 51. 27 Galfré, Il regime degli editori, p. 15 28 Relazione della Commissione Ministeriale dei libri di testo, 1927, reproduced in Il libro per la scuola tra idealismo e fascismo, pp. 665–8 (666), and cited by Galfré, Il regime degli editori, p. 26. 29 Galfré, Il regime degli editori, p. 29. 30 Cited in Galfré, Il regime degli editori, p. 28. 31 Galfré, Il regime degli editori, pp. 102–3. 32 Letter sent to Mussolini, dated 7 March 1934. ACS, SPD (1922–1943), CO, b. 272, f. 13.799 ‘Ceschina Comm. R. E., Casa editrice, Milano’. Cited in Giorgio Fabre, L’Elenco. Censura fascista, editorial e autori ebrei (Turin: Silvio Zamorani editore, 1998), pp. 15–16. 33 Galfré, Il regime degli editori, p. 32. 34 Galfré, Il regime degli editori, p. 36. 35 In a letter of 16 April, 1940 Federico Gentile wrote: ‘It is inconceivable that curricula for the licei and ginnasî should continue to require a knowledge of authors such as Pascoli, Carducci and D’Annunzio when all we can print in the anthologies are mutilated extracts’. In some cases, long poems had to be abridged in order to comply with copyright law. See Galfré, Il regime degli editori, p. 168. 36 Brian Moloney, Italian Novels of Peasant Crisis, 1930–1950. Bonﬁres in the Night (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005), pp. 58–9. 37 Enrico Bemporad to Arpalice Cuman Pertile, 7 October 1927, cited in Galfré, Il regime degli editori, p. 83. 38 Galfré, Il regime degli editori, p. 129. 39 Galfré, Il regime degli editori, p. 109. 40 Galfré, Il regime degli editori, p. 114. 41 Gentile, La riforma della scuola, pp. 23–6 (24). 42 Gentile, La riforma della scuola, pp. 23–6. Cited in Turi, Giovanni Gentile, p. 318. On the relationship of Fascism to the Protestant churches in Italy see Giorgio Rochat, Regime fascista e chiese evangeliche. Direttive e articolazioni del controllo e della repressione (Turin: Claudiana, 1990). 43 Giorgio Rochat, Regime fascista e chiese evangeliche. Direttive e articolazioni del controllo e della repressione, p. 81. 0230543081_10_Notes.qxd 4/28/07 12:12 PM Page 220

220 Notes

44 Turi, Giovanni Gentile, p. 319. 45 Agostino Gemelli, Religione e filosofia nelle scuole medie, La civiltà cattolica (1929), pp. 80, 2, 421–3. Cited in Turi, Giovanni Gentile, p. 401. 46 Ernesto Codignola’s letter to Gentile, 10 March 1935, describes him as an idiot (coglione). It is cited in Rino Gentili, Giuseppe Bottai e la riforma fascista della scuola (Florence: La nuova Italia, 1979), p. 1. 47 Il libro per la scuola tra idealismo e fascismo, p. 32. 48 Cited in Brian Moloney, Italian Novels of Peasant Crisis, 1930–1950, pp. 58–9. 49 Cited in Zamagni, The Economic History of Italy, p. 305. 50 Gentili, Giuseppe Bottai e la riforma fascista della scuola, pp. 20–1. 51 Mimmo Franzinelli, Delatori. Spie e confidenti anonimi: l’arma segreta del regime fascista (Milan: Mondadori, 2001), p. 30. 52 A good example is the short film archived under the title Giornale Luce A0328, Taranto, 5 May 1929. See http://www.archivioluce.it/ for details. 53 Martin Clark, Modern Italy 1871–1982 (London: Longman, 1984), p. 278. 54 Clark, Modern Italy, p. 272 55 Clark, Modern Italy, p. 276. 56 Franzinelli, Delatori, pp. 28–36. 57 Franzinelli, Delatori, p. 29. 58 Helmut Goetz, Il giuramento rifiutato. I docenti universitari e il regime fascista, translated by Loredana Melissari (Milan: La nuova Italia, 2000 [1993]). 59 Goetz, Il giuramento rifiutato, p. 10. 60 L’Osservatore romano, 4 December 1931. The piece was also carried in Il nuovo cittadino in Genoa. See Goetz, Il giuramento rifiutato, pp. 12–13. 61 Aurelio Lepre, L’occhio del duce. Gli Italiani e la censura di guerra 1940–1943 (Milan: Mondadori, 1992), p. 26. 62 ACS, MI, PS 1939, b. 22, f. Teofani, cited in Franzinelli, Delatori, p. 32. 63 Franzinelli, Delatori, p. 32.

Chapter 4 Journalism as Mission

1 Benito Mussolini, Scritti e discorsi, vol. VI (Milan: Hoepli, 1934), pp. 249–55. 2 Mussolini, Scritti e discorsi, VI, p. 250. 3 Mussolini, Scritti e discorsi, VI, p. 251 4 Mussolini, Scritti e discorsi, VI, p. 252. 5 Meir Michaels, ‘Mussolini’s unofﬁcial mouthpiece: Telesio Interlandi – Il Tevere and the evolution of Mussolini’s anti-Semitism’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 3 (1998), 217–39. 6 ACS, MCP, Gab., II vers., b. 8, Il Mezzogiorno. 7 Philip V. Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso. Fascismo e mass media, translated by Giovanni Ferrara (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1975) p. 91 and Giordano Bruno Guerri, Galeazzo Ciano. Una vita (1903–1944), second edition (Milan: Mondadori, 2001 [1979]), p. 90. 8 Gaetano Polverelli, Rinnovare il tipo di giornale (1932), cited in Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso, pp. 419–24. ACS, MCP, Gab., b. 155, f. 10. 9 ACS, MCP, Gab., b. 3, f. 12, sf. 113 (10 August 1934). On the question of dialect usage, see also an earlier circular from Polverelli to the prefects 0230543081_10_Notes.qxd 4/28/07 12:12 PM Page 221

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(1 August 1932): ‘Fascism is intransigently unitary. So articles will be immediately sequestered if they are written in favour of dialects, regional, provincial or local (campanilismo) conceptions of the divisions of the old Italy’ – ACS, MCP, Gab., b. 3, f. 12, sf. 113. 10 Royal decree law of 13/3/1934 authorized the relocation of the office to Palazzo Balestra on the Via Veneto. 11 Gastone Silvano Spinetti, letter to Storia contemporanea, 2 (1971), 223–5, cited in Guerri, Galeazzo Ciano, p. 93. 12 Nicola Tranfaglia, La stampa del regime 1932–1943. Le veline del Minculpop per orientare l’informazione (Milan: Bompiani, 2005). See also Ministri e giornalisti. La guerra e il Minculpop 1939–43, edited by Nicola Tranfaglia (Turin: Einaudi, 2005). For less representative selections see Giancarlo Ottaviani, Le veline del Minculpop. Aspetti della propaganda fascista (Milan: Todariana, 1999) and Riccardo Cassero, Le veline del Duce (Milan: Sperling & Kupfer, 2004). Earlier anthologies include Carlo Matteini, Ordini alla stampa (Rome: Editrice Polilibraria Italiana, 1945); Francesco Flora, Stampa dell’era fascista. Le note di servizio (Rome: Mondadori, 1945); Fausto Coen, Tre anni di bugie (Rome: Pan, 1977) and more recently Mimmo Franzinelli and Emanuele Valerio Marino, Il Duce proibito. Le fotografie di Mussolini che gli italiani non hanno mai visto (Milan: Mondadori, 2003). 13 Tranfaglia, La stampa del regime, p. 90. 14 Tranfaglia, La stampa del regime, p. 61. 15 Guerri, Galeazzo Ciano, p. 90. 16 The humour is linguistic: ‘Via Mussolini’ could mean ‘Mussolini Street’ but it could also mean ‘Mussolini out!’, precisely the opposite of the intended ‘Viva Mussolini’, ‘Long live Mussolini’. 17 Tranfaglia, La stampa del regime, p. 95. 18 Tranfaglia, La stampa del regime, p. 298. 19 Paolo Murialdi, Storia del giornalismo italiano, second edition (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000 [1996]), pp. 144–5. 20 ACS, MI, PS, DPP, FP, b. 1287, f. 47 ‘Soldati, Mario’. 21 ACS, MI, PS, DPP, FP, b. 1287, f. 47, Soldati. The document, from the Regia Questura di Roma, is no. 38587 U. P. A. 4. A, 9 December 1934. Novara was asked to keep the Rome Questura informed as well as the DAGR (section 1) and the political police. 22 ACS, MI, DPP, FP, b. 1287, f. 47, ‘Soldati’. 23 ACS, MCP, Gab., II vers., b. 8, ‘Moravia, Alberto’. Anonymous typed document with a hand-written date 24/1 934 XII. 24 George Talbot, ‘Alberto Moravia and Italian Fascism: Censorship, Racism and Le ambizioni sbagliate’, Modern Italy, 11 (2006), 2, 127–45. 25 Tranfaglia, La stampa del regime 1932–1943, p. 235. 26 Maurizio Cesari, La censura nel periodo fascista (Naples: Liguori, 1978), p. 71, quotes a press release from the Agenzia Stefani which appears never to have been issued: ‘The New York Herald Tribune writes that the activity of journalists in Somalia is being frustrated because there is in operation a very rigid political and military censorship’. 27 ACS, MCP, Gab., b. 48, f. 305 ‘Ufficio stampa A. O.’, telepresso no. 461/7–5, Asmara, 1 November 1935. 0230543081_10_Notes.qxd 4/28/07 12:12 PM Page 222

222 Notes

28 ACS, MCP, Gab., b. 48, f. 299 ‘Giornalisti A. O. Espulsioni’, telegram dated 22 December 1935 (no number). 29 ACS, MCP, Gab., b. 48, f. 299 ‘Giornalisti A. O. Espulsioni’, telegram dated 2 January 1936 (no number). 30 ACS, MCP, Gab., b. 48, f. 305 ‘Ufﬁcio stampa A[frica] O[rientale]’, telegram no. 2527, 14 May 1936. 31 Cesari, La censura nel periodo fascista, p. 72. 32 Cesari, La censura nel periodo fascista, p. 61. 33 Celso Luciano, Rapporto al duce (Rome: Società editrice ‘Giornale del Mezzogiorno’, 1948), p. 8. 34 ACS, MCP, Gab., II vers., b. 7. Report from informer 3049, 10 February 1940. The article in question is A. Trizzino, ‘La propria gobba’. 35 Ministri e giornalisti, p. 308. 36 Simona Colarizi, L’opinione degli Italiani sotto il regime, 1929–1943 (Rome- Bari: Laterza, 1991), pp. 13–14; R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy: Life under the Dictatorship (London: Allen Lane, 2005).

Chapter 5 The Duce’s Image

1 Philip V. Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso. Fascismo e mass media, trans. Giovanni Ferrara (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1975), pp. 276–80. On the history of the Istituto Luce see Ernesto G. Laura, Le stagioni dell’aquila. Storia dell’Istituto Luce (Rome: Ente dello Spettacolo, 1999) and for Luce coverage of the second world war, Luigi Passarelli, La guerra italiana nei documentari dell’Istituto Luce (Rome: Prospettiva editrice, 2006). 2 Unfortunately none of these silent films appear to have survived. Several later films were made with the title Vita nuova. For details see the very impressive digital archive of the Istituto Luce on the web: http://www.archivioluce.com/. 3 Nicola Tranfaglia, La stampa del regime 1932–1943. Le veline del Minculpop per orientare l’informazione (Milan: Bompiani, 2005), p. 137. 4 Giacomo Paulucci de Calboli, president of the Istituto Luce, writing in 1939, cited in Sergio Luzzatto, L’immagine del duce. Mussolini nelle fotografie dell’Istituto Luce (Rome: Editori riuniti-Istituto Luce, 2001), p. 16. 5 Letters exchanged between Emilio De Bono and Cesare Maria De Vecchi, two of the quadrumviri. See Luzzatto, L’immagine del duce, pp. 9–10. 6 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (London: Penguin, 1969 [1959]). 7 Luzzatto, L’immagine del duce, pp. 51–3; Mimmo Franzinelli and Emanuele Valerio Marino, Il duce proibito. Le fotografie di Mussolini che gli Italiani non hanno mai visto (Milan: Mondadori, 2003). On Mussolini’s probable use of stimulants Franzinelli cites the transcript of an intercepted telephone call from Manlio Morgagni to a friend, reporting the observations of a techni- cian who had been working inside Villa Torlonia, Mussolini’s residence in Rome. 8 Plinio Ciani, Grafito del Ventennio (Milan: SugarCo, 1975), p. 26, cited in Mimmo Franzinelli, ‘Immagini da una dittatura’, introduction to Franzinelli and Marino, Il duce proibito xxviii. 0230543081_10_Notes.qxd 4/28/07 12:12 PM Page 223

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9 Benito Mussolini, Opera Omnia, XXVIII, edited by Edoardo and Duilio Susmel (Florence: La Fenice, 1959), p. 136. 10 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1977 [1975]), p. 217. 11 Not the only one in Europe, by any means – see Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (London: Allen Lane, 2004), pp. 24–32. 12 Sergio Luzzatto, Il corpo del duce. Un cadavere tra immaginazione, storia e memoria (Turin: Einaudi, 1998). 13 Luzzatto, Il corpo del duce, p. 15. 14 Passerini, Mussolini immaginario. Storia di una biograﬁa 1915–1939 (Rome- Bari: Laterza, 1991), pp. 28–9. See also Pierre Milza, Mussolini (Paris: Fayard, 1999), p. 277. 15 On Marinetti’s account of death and rebirth in a muddy ditch following a car crash see Luca Somigli, Legitimizing the Artist. Manifesto Writing and European Modernism, 1885–1915 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), pp. 124–5. The Ungaretti poem I have in mind is ‘Pellegrinaggio’, written in the trenches, and dated 16 August 1916. 16 Marla Stone, The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 255. 17 Emily Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 18 Sironi’s life very nearly ended at Dongo along with Mussolini’s – he was recognized by the partisans in Mussolini’s ﬂeeing entourage and spared because he was an artist. 19 Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 185. 20 Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Staging Fascism. 18 BL and the Theater of Masses for Masses (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1996). 21 Mabel Berezin, Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of interwar Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 247. 22 Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities. Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley-Los Angeles- London: University of California Press, 2001), p. 13. 23 Curzio Malaparte, Muss. Il grande imbeccile, edited by Francesco Perfetti (Milan-Trento: Luni editrice, 1999), p. 98. 24 Lorenzo Benadusi, Il nemico dell’uomo nuovo. L’omosessualità nell’esperimento totalitario fascista (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2005), p. 30. 25 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, translated by Harry Zohn, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 219–53. 26 Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, pp. 144–5. 27 Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, p. 243. 28 Franzinelli, ‘Immagini da una dittatura’, p. xxiff. 29 Franzinelli, ‘Immagini da una dittatura’, p. xxv. 30 Malaparte, Muss. Il grande imbeccile, p. 98. 31 Other reasons for the censorship of images had less to do with the duce’s unpredictable body. Sometimes Mussolini decided to impose a news blackout on certain meetings he had held, such as his meeting with the Austrian Chancellor, Schuschnigg in May 1935. The reason for this was political: Italy did not want to provoke Hitler by giving publicity to the meeting. 0230543081_10_Notes.qxd 4/28/07 12:12 PM Page 224

224 Notes

32 Giorgio Fabre, L’Elenco. Censura fascista, editoria e autori ebrei (Turin: Silvio Zamorani editore, 1998), p. 26ff. See below, p. 125ff. 33 Tranfaglia, La stampa del regime, p. 148. Ten and a half years later, on the twentieth anniversary of the March on Rome, Pavolini again deplored newspaper coverage of her – Tranfaglia, La stampa del regime, p. 156. 34 Giornale Luce B0021, 1931 Dino Grandi in America – http://www.archivioluce.com. 35 Tranfaglia, La stampa del regime, pp. 288–95. 36 Tranfaglia, La stampa del regime, p. 290. 37 Tranfaglia, La stampa del regime, p. 294. 38 Tranfaglia, La stampa dela regime, p. 149. 39 More generally on this line of enquiry see Karen Pinkus, Bodily Regimes. Italian Advertising under Fascism (Minneapolis-London: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities. Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy (London-Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality. Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985), and his later book, The Image of Man. The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), as well as Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Vol. I: Women, Floods, Bodies, History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987). For German image politics under the Nazis: Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich. A New History (London: Macmillan, 2000). 40 Benadusi, Il nemico dell’uomo nuovo, p. 47. Benadusi cites at least one example of an Italian national (a restaurant owner) in Africa orientale being sent to confino for having had passive relations with a local boy in Eritrea. See Benadusi, Il nemico dell’uomo nuovo, p. 182. The relevant documentation is to be found in ACS, UCP, FP., b. 9, f. ‘Otello A.’ 41 Vito Massarotti, Nel regno di Ulrichs, Appunti e considerazioni sull’omosessual- ità maschile (Rome: Lux, 1913), p. 7, cited in Benadusi, Il nemico dell’uomo nuovo, p. 48. 42 Detlev J. K. Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany. Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday Life, trans. R. Deveson (London: Batsford, 1987), p. 199. 43 Luzzatto, L’immagine del duce, pp. 222–3; Franzinelli and Marino, Il duce proibito, p. 45. They are different photographs. The one reproduced by Luzzatto is blurred and would have been discarded in any case. See Franzinelli, ‘Immagini da una dittatura’, p. xxxi, for his analysis of the official photograph of the Abyssinians. 44 Paolo Chiozzi, ‘Autoritratto del razzismo: le fotografie antropologiche di Lidio Cipriani’, in La menzogna della razza. Documenti e immagini del razzismo e dell’antisemitismo fascista, edited by the Centro Furio Jesi (Bologna: Grafis, 1994), pp. 91–4. 45 Enzo Collotti, Il fascismo e gli ebrei. Le leggi razziali in Italia (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2003), p. 31. 46 Giorgio Fabre, Mussolini razzista. Dal socialismo al fascismo: la formazione di un antisemita (Milan: Garzanti, 2005), p. 143. 47 Fabre, Mussolini razzista, p. 147. 48 Tranfaglia, La stampa del regime, p. 168. 49 Gigliola Gori, Italian Fascism and the Female Body: Submissive Women and Strong Mothers (London: Routledge, 2004). See also Victoria De Grazia, How 0230543081_10_Notes.qxd 4/28/07 12:12 PM Page 225

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Fascism ruled Women: Italy, 1922–45 (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1992). 50 Tranfaglia, La stampa del regime, p. 171. Images of naked women appear to have preyed on Polverelli’s mind. They surfaced again years later when he became minister for Popular Culture: ‘A propos what I said about semi- naked women (I have some examples in front of me), these semi-naked women attract the attention of adolescents and that leads to masturbation. These youths then arrive at their regiments worn out and that, especially in time of war, is a danger to the race’ – Ministri e giornalisti. La guerra e il Minculpop (1939–43), edited by Nicola Tranfaglia (Turin: Einaudi, 2005), pp. 115–16. 51 Benadusi, Il nemico dell’uomo nuovo, p. 34. 52 David Atkinson, ‘The Construction of Italian Libya’, Modern Italy, 8 (2003), 1, 15–29 (22). 53 Loredana Polezzi, ‘Imperial reproductions: the circulation of colonial images’, Modern Italy, 8 (2003), 1, 31–47 (40). 54 Joel Blatt, ‘The Battle of Turin, 1933–1936: Carlo Rosselli, Giustizia e Libertà, OVRA and the origins of Mussolini’s anti-Semitic campaign’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 1 (1995), 22–57; Michele Sarfatti, Gli ebrei nell’Italia fascista. Vicende, identità, persecuzione (Turin: Einaudi, 2000), pp. 90–1. 55 Tranfaglia, La stampa del regime, p. 148. 56 Telesio Interlandi’s editorial in Il Tevere, 31 March 1934. 57 Cited in Mimmo Franzinelli, Delatori. Spie e conﬁdenti anonimi: l’arma segreta del regime fascista (Milan: Mondadori, 2001), pp. 144–5. 58 Fabre, Mussolini razzista and also Sarfatti, Gli ebrei nell’Italia fascista and his more recent La Shoah in Italia. La persecuzione degli ebrei sotto il fascismo (Turin: Einaudi, 2005); Aaron Gillette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy (London-New York: Routledge, 2002); Collotti, Il fascismo e gli ebrei; and another book by Fabre, Il contratto. Mussolini editore di Hitler (Bari: Dedalo, 2004). 59 Fabre, Mussolini razzista, p. 9. 60 Fabre, Mussolini razzista, p. 174. An early draft of Mussolini’s essay was published in Pagine libere, 15 Sept.–1 Oct. 1910, pp. 389–400. 61 ACS, MI, UC, telegram, 1 March 1929, no. 7885, cited in Fabre, Mussolini razzista, p. 13. 62 Collotti, Il fascismo e gli ebrei, pp. 5–6. 63 Edda Ciano, La mia vita. Intervista di Domenico Olivieri, ed. Nicola Caracciolo (Milan: Mondadori, 2001), p. 30. Cited in Fabre, Mussolini razzista, p. 15. 64 Fabre, Mussolini razzista, p. 16. 65 Sarfatti, Gli ebrei nell’Italia fascista, pp. 73–6. 66 The case of Henry Furst is instructive in this regard. See George Talbot, ‘A Micro-History of Censorship in Fascist Italy: the Case of Henry Furst’ in Censorship, Culture and the State, edited by Guido Bonsaver and Robert S. C. Gordon (Oxford: Legenda, 2005), pp. 86–95. 67 Fabre, Mussolini razzista, p. 27. 68 Fabre, Mussolini razzista, p. 37. 69 The Istituto Luce ﬁlm of the speech (18 September 1938) has not survived, but the off-air recording from the radio is in the archive of the Discoteca dello Stato. 0230543081_10_Notes.qxd 4/28/07 12:12 PM Page 226

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Chapter 6 Culture Wars

1 R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy. Life under the Dictatorship, 1915–1945 (London: Allen Lane, 2005), pp. 274–5. 2 George Talbot, ‘Unpublished Letters from Henry Furst to Benedetto Croce’, Italian Studies, 60 (2004), 112–31. 3 Günther Berghaus, Futurism and Politics: between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist Reaction, 1909–1944 (Providence R.I.-Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1996), pp. 220–1. 4 ACS, PNF (Mostra), b. 69, f. ‘Congresso del PNF del 1925’, document titled Istituto nazionale fascista di cultura, dated 1 June 1925, cited in Philip V. Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso. Mass media e fascismo, translated by Giovanni Ferrara (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1975), p. 22. 5 This was also true of Fascist movements in other countries. See Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (London: Allen Lane, 2004), pp. 55–86. 6 Mussolini’s improvised speech, known as Al Popolo di Roma, given from the balcony of Palazzo Chigi on the night of 28 October 1926, after an earlier, scheduled performance at the Colosseum – Benito Mussolini, Scritti e discorsi, V (Milan: Hoepli, 1934), pp. 447–51 (448–9). 7 Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, Rubè (Milan: Treves, 1921), pp. 240–1. 8 For the list ‘writers unwelcome in Italy’ see Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso, pp. 427–34 and Giorgio Fabre, L’Elenco. Censura fascista, editori e autori ebrei (Turin: Silvio Zamorani editore, 1998), pp. 474–81. There are many different copies of the list in various archives. Fabre’s version is longer than Cannistraro’s: it contains an additional 14 names. Well over 90% were Jewish. 9 Mussolini, Scritti e discorsi, V, pp. 373–5. 10 Mussolini, Scritti e discorsi, V, pp. 374–5. The English translation is partly that of Doug Thompson in his State Control in Fascist Italy: Culture and Conformity, 1925–43 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991). 11 Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso, p. 115. 12 Maurizio Cesari, La censura nel periodo fascista (Naples: Liguori, 1978), pp. 43–4; Walter L. Adamson, ‘The Culture of Italian Fascism and the Fascist Crisis of Modernity: The Case of Il Selvaggio’, Journal of Contemporary History, 30 (1995), 555–75. 13 Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, review of Gli Indifferenti (1929), reprinted in his La città assoluta e altri scritti, edited by Mario Robertazzi (Milan: Mondadori, 1962), pp. 214–20. 14 Moravia’s case, however, is more complicated, and is tied up with the Race Laws of 1938. See Fabre, L’Elenco, pp. 33–8; George Talbot, ‘Alberto Moravia, and Italian Fascism: Censorship, Racism and Le ambizioni sbagliate’, Modern Italy, 11 (2006), 2, 127–45. My contention in that article is incorrect that the ‘Pincherle Alberto’ on the list of unwelcome authors refers to Moravia. It refers to the Biblical scholar Alberto Pincherle (1894–1979), translator and editor of Gli oracoli Sibillini giudaici (Rome: Libreria di Cultura, 1922), editor of I detti di Gesù (Rome: Bottega di poesia, 1922) and author of various works published by Laterza. 15 ACS, MI, PS, DAGR, f. 4, b. 108, F4/AG ‘Sturzo Luigi (pubblicazioni di)’, cited in Giorgio Fabre, L’Elenco, p. 20. Fabre maintains that there was 0230543081_10_Notes.qxd 4/28/07 12:12 PM Page 227

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already a list of banned authors in existence by 1934, although copies have not yet come to light. The list included the works of Lenin, but not those of Stalin. 16 Fabre, L’Elenco, p. 22. 17 Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso, p. 33. 18 See chapter 3, pp. 73–5. 19 Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy, pp. 275–6. 20 Bruno Spampanato, ‘Antifascismo della cultura’, Critica fascista, 11 (1933), 1, 1 January. Cited in Berghaus, Fascism and Politics, p. 233, in his translation. 21 Cited in Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso, p. 65. 22 Undated note written by Polverelli in 1933. ACS, MCP, Gab., b. 155, f. 10 (Ufﬁcio stampa), cited in Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso, p. 103. 23 Cited in Fabre, L’Elenco, p. 22. 24 In other words, the provisions of the Consolidation Act, article 112. 25 Fabre, L’Elenco, p. 30. 26 ACS, MCP, b. 84, f. 3, sf. 1800/1. Cited in Cesari, La censura nel periodo fascista, p. 56. 27 Cesari, La censura nel periodo fascista, pp. 56–63. 28 Most of these veline can now be consulted in Nicola Tranfaglia, La stampa del regime 1932–1943. Le veline del Minculpop per orientare l’informazione (Milan: Bompiani, 2005). 29 Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso, pp. 132–6; Cesari, La censura nel periodo fascista, pp. 60–1. 30 Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso, p. 133. 31 On BL 18 see Jeffrey T. Schnapp, 18 BL: Theater of the Masses for the Masses (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1996). On Il Bargello, Peter Hainsworth, ‘Florentine Cultural Journalism under Fascism: Il Bargello’, Modern Language Review, 95 (2000), 3, 696–711. On Pavolini’s friendship with Bompiani, Guido Bonsaver, ‘Fascist Censorship on Literature and the Case of Elio Vittorini’, Modern Italy, 8 (2003), 2, 165–86 (181). 32 Gian Piero Brunetta, Cent’anni di cinema italiana (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1991), pp. 186–8. 33 James Hay, Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy. The Passing of the Rex (Bloomington-Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 67. 34 Giuseppe Bottai, cited in Brunetta, Cent’anni di cinema italiano, pp. 166–7. 35 Tranfaglia, La stampa del regime, p. 169. 36 Brunetta, Cent’anni di cinema italiano, p. 186. 37 Brunetta, Cent’anni di cinema italiano, pp. 186–7. 38 Hay, Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy, p. 69, describes anti-American editorials in Il Tevere from 1924, sitting incongruously beside large advertisements for ﬁlms starring Tom Mix and John Ford. Examples of Fascist concerns over a lack of racism in Italian cinema include G. Cogni, ‘Preliminari sul cinema in difesa della razza’, Bianco e nero, 2 (1938), 1, 66–74, cited in Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso, p. 316. 39 ACS, MCP, Gab., II vers., b. 7. 40 Il Tevere, 5–6 August 1942, p. 3, signed gi. al., i.e., Giorgio Almirante. 41 ACS, MCP, Gab, II vers., b. 7. 42 Censura teatrale e fascismo (1931–1944). La storia, l’archivio, l’inventario, ed. Patrizia Ferrara (Rome: Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali, 2004), p. 19. 0230543081_10_Notes.qxd 4/28/07 12:12 PM Page 228

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43 Nicola Fano, Tessere o non tessere. I comici e la censura fascista (Florence: Liberal libri, 1999), pp. 21–3. 44 Leopoldo Zurlo, Memori inutile. La censura teatrale nel Ventennio (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1952), p. 7. 45 The archive is now to be found in ACS, MCP, Ufficio Censura Teatrale. The archive has been catalogued and the catalogue published – Censura teatrale e fascismo (1931–1944), ed. Patrizia Ferrara. 46 On Mussolini’s capacity to short-circuit the chains of command he had himself put in place see Bonsaver, ‘Fascist Censorship on Literature and the Case of Elio Vittorini’, 169. 47 Fano, Tessere o non tessere, pp. 42–7. 48 Fano, Tessere o non tessere, pp. 42–52; Roberto Duiz and Renato Sarti, La vita xe un bidon. Storia di Angelo Cecchelin, comico triestino (Genoa: Baldini Castoldi Dalai, 1995). 49 The Cecchelin plays rejected by Zurlo were: El negus in spirito (1936), Xe arivada Sua Ecellenza (1936), Una montura (1938), Lo scandalo del giorno (1940) and L’omo del giorno (1943). See Censura teatrale e fascismo (1931–1944), pp. 286–92. 50 Fano, Tessere o non tessere, p. 47. 51 Fano, Tessere o non tessere, p. 56. 52 Lorenzo Greco, Censura e scrittura. Vittorini, lo pseudo Malaparte, Gadda (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1983), pp. 99–132. 53 Bonsaver, ‘Fascist Censorship of Literature’, pp. 172–3. 54 Hainsworth, ‘Florentine Cultural Journalism under Fascism’, p. 705. 55 For Furst’s apparent membership of the PNF there is a letter to D’Annunzio in his file at the Vittoriale, Archivio Generale xlviii, 1 (fascicolo Furst), dated 1 August 1925, from Iran, in which he claims to have joined. I am grateful to Jeffrey T. Schnapp for bringing this to my attention. Throughout the 1930s Furst was under periodic surveillance by the Italian police. See George Talbot, ‘Unpublished Letters from Henry Furst to Benedetto Croce’ and ‘A Micro-History of Censorship in Fascist Italy: the case of Henry Furst’, in Censorship, Culture and the State, edited by Guido Bonsaver and Robert S. C. Gordon (Oxford: Legenda, 2005), pp. 86–95. 56 Henry Furst, Simun (Milan: Longanesi, 1965). 57 Henry Furst, ‘Writings and Speeches of Mussolini’, New York Times Book Review, 14 October 1934. 58 Giorgio Fabre, Mussolini razzista. Dal socialismo al fascismo: la formazione di un’antisemita (Milan: Garzanti, 2005), pp. 297–8. 59 Fabre, L’Elenco, p. 36; Talbot, ‘Alberto Moravia and Italian Fascism’, 135–7. 60 Henry Furst, ‘An Italian’s Memory of America’, New York Times Book Review, 2 August 1936. 61 Fabre, L’Elenco, pp. 58–62. 62 Cesari, La censura nel periodo fascista, 54. 63 ASDMAE, MCP, SE, b. 41, f. ‘Ufficio stampa, sf. Compiti e attribuzioni del Ministero’. Cited in Fabre, L’Elenco, p. 62. 64 This exercise in linguistic autarky was initiated by Bruno Cicognani in an article published in Il Corriere della Sera on 15 January 1938. It relates to Mussolini’s anti-bourgeois campaign, for which see Thomas Buzzegoli, 0230543081_10_Notes.qxd 4/28/07 12:12 PM Page 229

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‘L’umorismo antiborghese e le ossessioni della stampa fascista’, Italia contemporanea, 239–40 (2005), 173–90. 65 Luigi Goglia, ‘Le cartoline illustrate italiane della guerra 1935–1936: il negro nemico selvaggio e il trionfo della civiltà di Roma’, in La menzogna della razza. Documenti e immagini del razzismo e dell’antisemitismo fascista, edited by the Centro Furio Jesi (Bologna: Graﬁs, 1994), pp. 27–40. The song in question runs as follows:

Su moviamo con ardore Il nemico a sterminare Che il vessillo tricolore Dovrà sempre trionfare!

Goglia comments that ‘the process of trivialization of war reaches its extreme limits here, converting extermination of an enemy into a lighthearted game and the identiﬁcation of the enemy with an insect’, p. 32. 66 Pavolini, letter to Valentino Bompiani (7 January 1941), cited (in part) in George Talbot, Montale’s ‘mestiere vile’: the Elective Translations from English in the 1930s and 1940s (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1995), p. 33. For the full text see La ﬁera letteraria, 19 December 1968. See also Nicolo Carducci, Gli intellettuali e l’ideologia americana nell’Italia degli anni trenta (Manduria: Lacaita, 1973); Christopher Rundle, ‘The Censorship of Translation in Fascist Italy’, The Translator, 6 (2000), 1, 67–86; Bonsaver, ‘Fascist censorship on literature’; and Jane Dunnett, ‘Anti-Fascism and Literary Criticism in Postwar Italy: Revisiting the mito americano’ in Culture, Censorship and the State in Twentieth-Century Italy, pp. 109–19.

Chapter 7 Censorship, Secrets and Lies

1 Alfredo Rocco, La formazione dello Stato fascista (1925–1934) (Milan: Giuffrè, 1938), pp. 797–8. 2 Carl Ipsen, Dictating Democracy: The Problem of Population in Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Gender, Family and Sexuality: The Private Sphere in Italy, 1860–1945, edited by Perry Willson (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004). 3 Perry Willson, ‘Gender and the Private Sphere in Liberal and Fascist Italy’, in Gender, Family and Sexuality, pp. 1–19 (6–7). 4 Alessandra Gissi, ‘Between Tradition and Innovation: Italian Midwives during the Fascist Period’, in Gender, Family and Sexuality, pp. 122–38. 5 Mauro Canali, Le spie del regime (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004), p. 79. 6 The Questore in Rome, for example, requested that his opposite number in Novara should ﬁle copies of reports on Mario Soldati to both the DAGR, section 1, the Political Police and the Questura in Rome – ACS, MI, PS, DPP, FP, b. 1287, f. 47, ‘Soldati’, document dated 9 December 1934. 7 Antonio Pizzuto, Rapin e Rapier, edited by Antonio Pane (Rome: Editori riuniti, 1998), pp. 152–3. The novel was written between 1944 and 1948 but never published in Pizzuto’s lifetime (1893–1976). It was rejected by both 0230543081_10_Notes.qxd 4/28/07 12:12 PM Page 230

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Bompiani and Longanesi. Pane has reconstructed the novel from papers in the Fondazione Antonio Pizzuto. 8 George Talbot, ‘A Micro-History of Censorship in Fascist Italy: the case of Henry Furst’, in Bonsaver, Guido and Gordon, Robert S. C. (eds), Censorship, Culture and the State in Twentieth-Century Italy (Oxford: Legenda, 2005), pp. 86–95. 9 ACS MI PS DPP, b. 539, f. 36 FURST Enrico. 10 George Talbot, ‘Unpublished letters from Henry Furst to Benedetto Croce’, Italian Studies, 60 (2004), 112–31. 11 Pizzuto, Rapin e Rapier, pp. 170–2. 12 Mimmo Franzinelli, Delatori. Spie e confidenti anonimi: l’arma segreta del regime fascista (Milan: Mondadori, 2001), pp. 3–5; for a contrast with Nazi Germany, Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler. Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). On inquisitorial practices, Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: the Cosmos of a sixteenth-century Miller, translated by John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980 [1976]). 13 Franzinelli, Delatori, p. 4. 14 ACS, MI, PS 1940, b. 26, f. ‘Savona’, cited in Franzinelli, Delatori, p. 63. 15 Franzinelli, Delatori, pp. 73–4. 16 ACS, MI, PS 1929, b. 186, f. ‘Anonime’, cited in Franzinelli, Delatori, pp. 82–3. 17 There are many examples of confino causing financial ruin to be found in Franzinelli, Delatori, and in English, R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy. Life under the Dictatorship, 1915–1945 (London: Allen Lane, 2005). 18 ACS, MI, PS, DPP, b. 539, f. 36 ‘FURST Enrico’. Lauro De Bosis had died earlier in 1931 when his aircraft ran out of fuel returning to France from dropping anti-Fascist leaflets over Rome. Arturo Toscanini, after some initial enthusiasm for Mussolini, left Italy in 1931, having been roughed up by Blackshirts for refusing to play Giovinezza, a Fascist anthem. On De Bosis see J. M. Mudge, The Poet and the Dictator. Lauro de Bosis resists Fascism in Italy and America (Westport, Connecticut-London: Praeger, 2002). These pages amplify my account in ‘A Micro-History of Censorship in Fascist Italy: the case of Henry Furst’, in Censorship, Culture and the State in Twentieth-Century Italy. 19 Talbot, ‘Unpublished letters from Henry Furst to Benedetto Croce’. 20 Franzinelli, Delatori, p. 58. 21 Franzinelli, Delatori, pp. 57–8. 22 Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy, pp. 333–8. 23 ACS, Confinati politici, FP, b. 711, f. Nicastro, cited in Franzinelli, Delatori, p. 89. 24 Benadusi, Il nemico dell’uomo nuovo, p. 51ff. 25 Benadusi, Il nemico dell’uomo nuovo, p. 44; Gigliola Gori, Italian Fascism and the Female Body: Sport, Submissive Women and Strong Mothers (London-New York: Routledge, 2004). 26 The words are those of the physiologist Angelo Mosso (1897), cited by Benadusi, Il nemico dell’uomo nuovo, p. 45. See also Gori, Italian Fascism and the Female Body, pp. 42–4. 27 Cited in Benadusi, Il nemico dell’uomo nuovo, p. 107. 0230543081_10_Notes.qxd 4/28/07 12:12 PM Page 231

Notes 231

28 Cited in Benadusi, Il nemico dell’uomo nuovo, p. 115. 29 ACS, MI, PS, DPP, b. 822, f. M.A. Cased in Benadusi, Il nemico dell’uomo nuovo, p. 284. 30 ACS, UCP, FP, b. 657, f. ‘Eugenio M’. Case cited in Benadusi, Il nemico dell’uomo nuovo, p. 175. 31 Giorgio Rochat, Regime fascista e chiese evangeliche. Direttive e articolazioni del controllo e della repressione (Turin: Claudiana, 1990). 32 Gabriella Klein, La politica linguistica (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1986) p. 82. 33 Rochat, Regime fascista e chiese evangeliche, p. 157. 34 ACS, PCM, 1928–30, f. 2/5, n. 1531, cited in Rochat, Regime fascista e chiese evangeliche, p. 74. 35 ACS, G.1, Roma, Pentecostali, report dated 16 July 1928, cited in Rochat, Regime fascista e chiese evangeliche, p. 114. The medical terminology, current at the time, is to be found in Boris Sidis, The Causation and Treatment of Psychopathic Diseases (Boston: Badger, 1916). 36 Rochat, Regime fascista e chiese evangeliche, p. 222 37 The document from which Rochat cites, Il proselitismo protestante in Italia, is in ACS, ASMAE, SS, 1934, b. 22, f. 9. 38 Cited in Rochat, Regime fascista e chiese evangeliche, p. 246. 39 ACS, G.1, Propaganda evangelica, cited in Rochat, Regime fascista e chiese evangeliche, p. 156. 40 Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich. A New History (London: Macmillan, 2000), p. 173. 41 Thomas Buzzegoli, ‘‘L’umorismo antiborghese e le ossessioni della stampa fascista’, Italia contemporanea, 239–40 (2005), 173–90. 42 Cited in Franzinelli, Delatori, p. 142. 43 Guido Leto, OVRA Fascismo Antifascismo (Bologna: Cappelli, 1952), pp. 190–2. 44 Cited in Franzinelli, Delatori, p. 153. 45 ACS, G.1, Gorizia, cited in Rochat, Regime fascista e chiese evangeliche, p. 187. 46 Simona Colarizi, L’opinione degli Italiani sotto il regime, 1929–1943 (Rome- Bari: Laterza, 1991); Angelo Michele Imbriani, Gli Italiani e il duce. Il mito e l’immagine di Mussolini negli ultimi anni del fascismo, 1938–1943 (Naples: Liguori, 1992); Aurelio Lepre, L’occhio del duce. Gli Italiani e la censura di guerra, 1940–1943 (Milan: Mondadori, 1992); and Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy. 47 Cited by Lepre, L’occhio del duce, p. 13. The source is ACS, MI, PS, A56 IIg, b. 30–47. 48 Cited in Lepre, L’occhio del duce, p. 19. The letter was sent from Florence, 24 May 1940. 49 Lepre, L’occhio del duce, p. 8. 50 Lepre, L’occhio del duce, pp. 8–9. 51 Lepre, L’occhio del duce, pp. 143–57. 52 Lepre, L’occhio del duce, p. 12 53 Loris Rizzi, Lo sguardo del potere. La censura militare in Italia nella seconda guerra mondiale, 1940–45 (Milan: Rizzoli, 1984), p. 11. A number of local studies have been published in recent years, including, for Lucca, Giuseppe Pardini, Sotto l’inchiostro nero. Fascismo, guerra e censura postale in Lucchesia (1940–1944) (Montespertoli: MIR edizioni, 2001). 0230543081_10_Notes.qxd 4/28/07 12:12 PM Page 232

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54 A letter from Henry Furst to Mario Soldati, dated (October 1939) had been removed from circulation because Furst had expressed the view that the democratic powers would win the war. Indeed a much earlier letter from Furst had been suppressed as early as 1932, again for political reasons – Talbot, ‘Unpublished letters from Henry Furst to Benedetto Croce’, Italian Studies, 60 (2004), 112–31. 55 Colarizi, L’opinione degli Italiani sotto il regime. 56 Cited in Rizzi, Lo sguardo del potere, p. 41. 57 Cited in Rizzi, Lo sguardo del potere, p. 43. 58 Lepre, L’occhio del Duce, p. 3. 59 Lepre, L’occhio del Duce, pp. 51–2. 60 Letter from Naples, dated 20 November 1941, cited in Lepre, L’occhio del Duce, pp. 115–16. 61 Lepre, L’occhio del Duce, pp. 93–4. 62 Letter from an unidentiﬁed military post, dated 7 May 1943, cited in Lepre, L’occhio del Duce, p. 92. 63 Letter dated 28 June 1942, from a woman in Villa Agostina Asola. Cited in Rizzi, Lo sguardo del potere, p. 105. 64 Royal decree law no. 1415, 8 July 1938. 65 Philip V. Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso. Mass media e fascismo, trans. Giovanni Ferrara (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1975), p. 257. 66 Maura Piccialuti Caprioli, Radio Londra 1939–1945 (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1979), p. 35. 67 Nicola Tranfaglia, La stampa del regime. Le veline del Minculpop per orientare l’informazione (Milan: Bompiani, 2005), p. 75. 68 Royal decree law no. 530, 18 April 1941. 69 Informer’s report from Florence, 21 July 1941, cited in Piccialuti Caprioli, Radio Londra, pp. 41–2. 70 Piccialuti Caprioli, Radio Londra, p. 47. 71 Cesare Garelli, Linguaggio murale (Milan: Garzanti, 1978), p. 77. I am grateful to Charlotte Miller for bringing this to my attention. 72 Franzinelli, Delatori, pp. 99–100; Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy, 477. There are several versions of the list, to be found in three envelopes at ACS, PS, Cat. F 1, b, 95 and b. 96 and b. 97. 73 Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy, p. 480. 74 Lepre, L’occhio del duce, p. 125. 75 Colarizi, L’opinione degli italiani sotto il Regime, p. 5. 76 Cited in Rizzo, Lo sguardo del potere, p. 118. 77 Letter from a mother to her son at the front, 5 July 1942, cited in Rizzi, Lo sguardo del potere, p. 122. 78 Imbriani, Gli italiani e il duce, pp. 57–8.

Chapter 8 Conclusion

1 Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1963). 2 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1977 [1975]), p. 202. 0230543081_10_Notes.qxd 4/28/07 12:12 PM Page 233

Notes 233

3 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 206. 4 In relation to military censorship see Loris Rizzi, Lo sguardo del potere. La censura militare in Italia nella seconda guerra mondiale, 1940–45 (Milan: Rizzoli, 1984), pp. 24–7. 5 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 201. 6 Cited in Rizzi, Lo sguardo del potere, p. 210. 7 See R. J. B. Bosworth, ‘War, Totalitarianism and “Deep Belief” in Fascist Italy, 1935–43’, European History Quarterly, 4 (2004), 4, 475–505, which deals with this theme in relation to police reports of confinati. 8 Mauro Canali, Le spie del regime (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004), pp. 685–6. 9 ACS, MI, PS, DPP, FP, Pincherle Moravia Alberto e sorella Adriana. 10 Enzo Forcella and Alberto Monticone, Plotone d’esecuzione (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1988 [1972]), p. xxi, cited in Rizzi, Lo sguardo del potere, p. 25. 11 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1991 [1900]), pp. 223–4. 12 Rizzi, Lo sguardo del potere, pp. 33–5. 13 ACS, MI, PS, DAGR, Massime, b. S4 103 A (provv.), S4 B, f. 5, ‘Traduzione e diffusione nel Regno di opera di autori stranieri’, circular no. 18627, 20 May 1929, cited in Giorgio Fabre, L’Elenco. Censura fascista, editoria e autori ebrei (Turin: Silvio Zamorani editore, 1998), p. 21. 14 Guido Bonsaver, ‘Fascist Censorship on Literature and the Case of Elio Vittorini’, Modern Italy, 8 (2003), 2, 165–86. 15 Aurelio Lepre, L’occhio del duce. Gli italiani e la censura di guerra, 1940–1943 (Milan: Mondadori, 1992), p. 160. 16 Lepre, L’occhio del duce, p. 138. 17 Luisa Passerini, Mussolini immaginario. Storia di una biografia, 1915–1939 (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1991), p. 79. 18 Passerini, Mussolini immaginario, pp. 196–7. 19 There are many examples. They include Sibilla Aleramo, Vitalino Brancati and Vincenzo Cardarelli. See respectively, ACS, MCP, 2nd vers., b. 1, b. 2 and b. 3. 20 Giovanni Belardelli, Il Ventennio degli intellettuali. Cultura, politica, ideologia nell’Italia fascista (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2005), p. 16 21 Mimmo Franzinelli, Delatori. Spie e confidenti anonimi: l’arma segreta del regime fascista (Milan: Mondadori, 2001), p. 17. 0230543081_11_Biblio.pdf 4/5/07 2:00 PM Page 234

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Index

Abyssinia, 100, 117–18, 120, 124, Asmara, 94, 99, 100, 221 208, 224 autarky, 123, 144, 155, 156, 157, 228 Accademia d’Italia, 67, 133, 136 Avanti!, 8–10, 12, 21–2, 25, 31, 135, Actualism (Attualismo), 11, 53, 66, 69 197, 206, 215 Addis Ababa, 100, 120 Aventine Secession, the, 30, 32 Agenzia Stefani, 26, 31, 39–40, 43–6, Azione cattolica, 74 77, 84, 86, 115, 140, 198, 217, 221 Badoglio, Pietro, 99–100, 158 Agnelli, Giovanni, 42–3 Baker, Josephine, 117 Albertini, Luigi, 32–3, 43 Balbo, Italo, 41, 211, 217 albo professionale dei giornalisti, 31, 91, Balzac, Honoré de, 66 94 Banca commerciale italiana, 39–42, 169 Aleramo, Sibilla, 233 Banca d’Italia, 128 Alﬁeri, Dino, 89, 97, 100, 141–4, 147, Banca italiana di sconto, 40 155–7, 159 Bandiera rossa, 73, 172, 191 Almirante, Giorgio, 147, 211, 227 Barbone, Donato, 40–2, 217 Amendola, Giovanni, 31, 216 Barletta, Gesualdo, 37 America, 8, 37, 45, 92–3, 95, 97 Basso, Lelio, 31 102–3, 106, 122, 137, 146, 147, Bauer, Riccardo, 31 153, 155–8, 193, 216, 224, 227, Bay, Giannino Macario, 201 228, 230 Belardelli, Giovanni, 207–8, 214, 233 Americana, 157, 229 Bellavia, Vicenzo, 94–5 Amicucci, Ermanno, 96, 97 Belluzzo, Giuseppe, 62, 66 Ansaldo (the steel company), 40 Bemporad (Florentine publishing Ansaldo, Giovanni, 91 house), 40, 61, 64–5, 67 anti-bourgeois campaign, 12, 115, Bemporad, Enrico, 65, 67, 219 123, 180–1, 183, 228–9, 231 Benadusi, Lorenzo, 114, 119, 173, anti-Communism, 65, 180 180, 213, 223, 224, 225, 230, 231 anti-Fascism, 3–5, 17, 26, 28, 36–7, Ben-Ghiat, Ruth, 16, 113, 212, 223 67, 73, 74, 91, 93, 95, 96, 112, Benjamin, Walter, 114–15, 223 125, 128–9, 134, 138, 142, 147, Bentham, Jeremy, 200 151–2, 155, 156, 164, 169, 171, Berezin, Mabel, 16, 113, 212, 223 176–7, 188, 192, 199, 207–8, 229, Bertuetti, Eugenio, 94, 97 230 Bianchi, Michele, 56, 137 anti-Semitism, 1–2, 12, 16, 125–31, biennio rosso, 21–2, 41, 53 147–8, 199, 220 Bocchini, Arturo, 6, 34–8, 42, 72, 84, Antonini, Giacomo Antonio, 95 95, 128, 149, 151, 162, 167–9, Appelius, Mario, 90 176, 178–80 Aquarone, Alberto, 18, 213 Bomba, Leo, 92 Arditi, the, 8, 19, 21, 110, 211 Bompiani, Valentino, 144, 157, 227, Argan, Giulio Carlo, 93 229 Ascenzi, Anna, 70, 219 Bonfantini, Corrado, 93–4 asili d’infanzia, 58 Bonfantini, Mario, 93–4

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Bonomi, Ivanoe, 214 Catholicism, 113, 121, 194 Bonsaver, Guido, 153, 205, 211, 217, Cecchelin, Angelo, 151–3, 228 227, 228, 229, 233 Cecchi, Emilio, 94, 158 Bontempelli, Massimo, 136–7 censorship, 5, 7–8 Borgese, Giuseppe Antonio, 134–5, civil communications, 26, 162–6, 137, 155, 226 174, 184–90, 215, 216, 225 Bosworth, R. J. B., 46, 104, 138, 172, language, 157 192, 193, 194, 195, 211, 212, 215, literary, 47, 111, 137, 142, 144, 217, 222, 226, 227, 230, 231, 232, 153–7, 179, 196, 205, 211, 221, 233 226, 227, 228, 229, 233 Bottai, Giuseppe, 4, 19, 69, 71, 79, 88, military, 99–100, 104, 184–90, 205, 101, 112, 137–9, 142, 143, 146, 233 156, 158, 220, 227 models, 13–15, 197–202, 205 Brancati, Vitaliano, 233 moral, 46, 205 Braun, Emily, 16, 17, 112, 212, 213, organisational aspects, 18–19, 82, 223 182, 184–5, 196, 205 Britain, 102–3, 121, 196, 204 policy, 20–5, 80, 116–17, 140–1, Bruno, Giordano, 69 159, 172, 204 Buffarini Guidi, Guido, 179–80 press, 32, 39, 42, 77, 80, 82, 85, Butler, Judith, 108 88–9, 101, 207, 214–15 propaganda, 16, 104–5 Cabiria, 123 radio, 205 Caccavale, Saverio, 36 schoolbooks, 48, 59, 62, 75 Camerini, Mario, 94 self-censorship, 24, 32, 59, 61, 65, Canali, Mauro, 7, 34, 201, 211, 215, 67, 75, 84, 98, 198–9, 202–3, 216, 227, 233 206 Cannistraro, Philip V., 3, 16, 28, 80, theatre, 148–53 133, 144, 210, 214, 215, 220, 222, Central Commission for Textbook 224, 226, 227, 232 Reform, 58–9, 69 Canosa, Romano, 45, 216, 217 Ceresole, Enrico, 46 Capasso Torre di Pastene, Giovanni, Cerruti, Vittorio, 130 30, 46, 80 Cesari, Maurizio, 7, 142, 211, 215, Caporetto, Battle of, 25, 40 216, 217, 221, 222, 224, 227, Cappelletto, Giovanni, 44 228 Carabba (Lanciano-based publishing Ceschina (Milan-based publishing house), 64, 67 house), 63–4 Cardarelli, Vicenzo, 233 Chamberlain, Neville, 126 Carducci, Giosuè, 64, 219 Chaplin, Charlie (The Great Dictator), Carli, Mario, 133 112, 116, 151 Carocci, Alberto, 153 Charles Albert (Carlo Alberto), King, Caruso, Monsignor Enrico, 69 24 Casa Italiana (Columbia University), Chiarelli, Luigi, 151 92, 95, 96, 134, 153 Chiurco, Alberto, 167 Casati Law, 48–9, 55, 68 Churchill, Winston, 193 Casati, Alessandro, 60, 62 Ciano, Galeazzo, 19, 28, 77, 82–3, 86, Casati, Gabrio, 49, 62 87, 89–90, 94, 95, 96, 99, 102, Casini, Gherardo, 97–8, 153, 156 116, 117–18, 123, 125, 126, Catholic Church, 2, 24, 42, 46–51, 65, 139–41, 144, 146, 147, 150, 159, 67–8, 73, 128, 175, 177–9, 196 205, 215, 220, 221 0230543081_12_Index.pdf 4/5/07 2:00 PM Page 245

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Ciarlantini, Franco, 61, 62 De Feo, Luciano, 106 Cicognani, Bruno, 228 De Vecchi, Cesare Maria, 47, 69, 222 Cinecittà, 147 Decennale, the, 80, 108, 111–13, 139 Cines, 92–3 defeatism, 35, 103, 168, 171, 181, Cipriani, Lidio, 121, 224 186–8, 194 Codignola, Ernesto, 56, 220 Del Vecchio, Ugo, 128 Colarizi, Simona, 104, 222, 231, 232 Deledda, Grazia, 65, 70, 75, 199, 207 Collodi, Carlo, 51 Di Stefano, Michelangelo, 35 Collotti, Enzo, 2, 210, 213, 214, 215 dialects, use of, 51, 82, 83, 157, 220–1 colonialism, 99–100, 121, 124, 125, Disney Corporation, 157 207, 211, 225 Dumini, Amerigo, 34 Columbia University, 92, 142, 143 Communism, 3, 4, 27, 42, 47, 52, 70, EIAR, 191 74, 76, 81, 98, 126, 143, 152, 170, 18 BL, 27, 113, 144, 223, 227 171, 172, 180, 207 Einaudi, Giulio, 93 conﬁno, 34, 37, 47, 72, 73, 76, 77, 91, Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 164 93, 94, 121, 161, 166, 167, 169, Enciclopedia italiana Treccani, 16, 67, 171–5, 182, 191–3, 195, 201–3, 95, 136, 207 217, 224, 230 Episcopalians, 177, 179 Congress of Fascist culture, 53, 133 Eritrea, 94, 96, 99, 100, 121, 224 Consorzio aereo italiano, 42 Ethiopia, 8, 83, 89, 90, 92, 98–100, Contini, Gianfranco, 154 124, 127, 155, 157, 180, 204 copyright, 64, 219 Evangelical Churches, 68, 175, 178 Corporativism, 22, 41 Cortese, Ferdinando, 105 Fabre, Giorgio, 2, 7, 19, 39–41, 117, Crespo brothers, 43 121, 124, 127, 128, 130, 141, 157, Crispi, Francesco, 24–5, 44, 148, 214 205, 210, 211, 216, 217, 219, 224, Crispo Moncada, Francesco, 34 225, 226, 227, 228, 233 Critica fascista, 79, 102, 137, 138, 156, Faccetta nera, 118, 122 227 Facta, Luigi, 52 Critica sociale, 40 Falasca-Zamponi, Simonetta, 16, 112, Croce, Benedetto, 52–3, 67, 73, 74, 114, 212, 213, 217, 223 96, 132, 134, 153, 154, 164, 208, Fano, Nicola, 149, 152, 228 226, 228, 230, 232 Farese, Domenico, 35–6 Croci, Pietro, 43 Farinacci, Roberto, 42 cronaca nera, 33, 79, 81, 86, 143, 197, Fedele, Pietro, 60–1, 62 203 Federzoni, Luigi, 30–1, 33, 44 Cuman Pertile, Arpalice, 65, 219 Fellini, Federico, 75 Cuoco, Vincenzo, 164 Ferretti, Lando, 46, 79–81, 82 ﬁlm industry in Italy, 8, 15, 28, 39, D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 5, 21, 39, 66, 105, 143–7 96, 110, 137, 153, 169, 170, Finzi, Aldo, 39, 41, 42, 215 211–12, 214, 215, 219, 228 Fiume, occupation of, 21, 26, 39, 110, Dante, 171, 173, 195 144, 169–70, 211–12 De Ambris, Alceste, 22, 214 Fogazzaro, Antonio, 96, 137 De Amicis, Edoardo, 60 Forcella, Enzo, 202, 233 De Bosis, Lauro, 169, 230 Ford, John, 227 De Felice, Renzo, 2, 3, 6, 12, 16, 84, Forgacs, David, 7, 8, 210, 211 127, 133, 210, 213, 214, 215 Forges Davanzati, Roberto, 43, 199 0230543081_12_Index.pdf 4/5/07 2:00 PM Page 246

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Foucault, Michel, 109–10, 200, 232, Graziani, Rodolfo, 120, 208 233 Great War, 1, 13, 16, 17, 21, 24, 25, Fox Corporation, 145 54–5, 70, 72, 105, 113, 123, 134, France, 36, 43, 63, 102, 164, 167, 170, 161, 166, 171, 173, 196, 202 183, 204 Greco, Lorenzo, 7, 153, 211, 228 Franco, General Francisco, 3 Gregor, A. James, 52, 218 Franzinelli, Mimmo, 2, 7, 15, 115, Griffin, Roger, 9–10, 212 116, 120, 166, 168, 192, 210, 211, Guerri, Giordano Bruno, 28, 81, 215, 212, 214, 215, 216, 220, 221, 222, 220, 221 223, 224, 225, 230, 231, 232, 233 Guglielmotti, Umberto, 100 Frassati, Alfredo, 42–3 Gulì, Ernesto, 35 Freddi, Luigi, 106, 146–7 Freud, Sigmund, 202, 233 Havas News Agency, 43–4 Furst, Henry, 153–5, 164, 169–71, 205 Hays Code, 8 Futurism, 8–9, 19, 21, 22, 132–3, 135 Hays, Will, 147 Hegel, Georg Friedrich, 69 Gadda, Carlo Emilio, 162, 211, 228 Hitler, Adolf, 2, 3, 103, 116, 117, 126, Galantara, Gabriele, 17 127, 128, 129, 130, 157, 169, 183, Galfré, Monica, 57, 64, 66, 218, 219 192, 223 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 118 Hollywood, 8, 113, 122, 145–7, 192 Gayda, Virgilio, 100 homosexuality, 119–20, 174, 180 Gellately, Robert, 5, 210, 230 Gemelli, Padre Agostino, 69, 74, 220 Il Bargello, 144, 153, 157, 227 Genovesi, Giovanni, 50 Il Becco giallo, 17, 51, 218 Gentile, Emilio, 12–13, 16, 105, 112, Il Caffè, 31, 32 160, 203, 212, 213 Il Corriere della Sera, 23, 25, 31, 32, 33, Gentile, Federico, 64 39, 42–3, 79, 87, 117, 228 Gentile, Giovanni, 11, 16, 19, 47, 48, Il Corriere italiano, 30 51–5, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62, 64, Il Corriere padano, 41, 217 67, 68, 69–70, 71, 75, 134, 159, Il Giornale critico della filosofia italiana, 175, 198, 208, 211, 218, 219, 220 69 Gerarchia, 130 Il Giornale d’Italia, 29, 46, 117 Giannitrapani, Domenico, 63 Il Giornale del Contadino, 41 Giolitti, Giovanni, 14, 24, 25, 197 Il Giornale delle Puglie, 39 Gioventù italiana del Littorio, 72 Il Lavoro, 143 Giunta, Francesco, 213 Il Lavoro fascista, 87 Giustizia e Libertà, 38, 93, 125, 216, Il Mattino, 43, 86 225 Il Messaggero, 102, 117 Gobetti, Piero, 31, 132 Il Mezzogiorno, 80, 220 Gobineau, Arthur de, 127 Il Momento, 31 Goebbels, Joseph, 6, 82, 101, 139, 140 Il Mondo, 29, 31, 32, 216 Goffman, Erving, 108, 222 Il Piccolo di Trieste, 27, 31, 107 Goldhagen, Daniel, 1, 5, 210 Il Popolo d’Italia, 8–9, 26, 28, 31, Goldoni, Carlo, 150 39–41, 43, 46, 63, 77, 79, 80, 86, Gori, Gigliola, 122, 224 87, 102, 112, 115, 126, 129, 213, Gramsci, Antonio, 132 216 Grand Council of Fascism (Gran Il Popolo di Roma, 102, 122, 128, 143 Consiglio), 80 Il Popolo di Trieste, 213 Grandi, Dino, 80, 117, 224 Il Popolo, 29, 31 0230543081_12_Index.pdf 4/5/07 2:00 PM Page 247

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Il Resto del Carlino, 43 L’Asino, 17 Il Roma, 25 L’Avanguardia, 27 Il Selvaggio, 136, 226 L’Illustrazione italiana, 143, 207 Il Sereno, 31 L’Osservatore romano, 68, 74, 220 Il Tevere, 79, 102–3, 125, 147, 156, La battaglia del grano (propaganda 220, 225, 227 film, 1925), 106 Imbriani, Angelo Michele, 195, 211, La Civiltà cattolica, 68, 69, 220 231 La Critica, 52–3, 67 Index of Prohibited Books, 47, 69, 179 La foresta fonte di ricchezza informers, 6, 13, 19, 34–8, 42, 92–3, (propaganda film, 1925), 106 95, 104, 109, 128, 162, 163, La Gazzetta del Popolo, 96–8 165–71, 182–3, 193, 194, 198, La Nazione, 27 199, 203, 208, 222, 232 La Riscossa dei giovani repubblicani, 29 Inglese, Guglielmo, 152 La Rivista illustrata del Popolo d’Italia, 43 Interlandi, Telesio, 79, 103, 125–6, La Rivoluzione liberale, 31 137–8, 144, 147, 148, 156, 158, La Stampa, 23, 31, 42–3, 79, 99, 107 220, 225 La Tribuna, 68, 137 Interpol, 162 La Voce repubblicana, 29, 31, 32 Ireland, 102–3 La Voce, 59, 134, 213 Istituto per la ricostruzione industriale Landolfi, Tommaso, 162 (IRI), 89 Lateran Pacts, 2, 42, 46, 67, 69, istituti magistrali, 57, 70 127–8, 148, 161, 175, 176, 217 istituti scientifici, 70 Lawrence, D. H., 136, 196 istituti tecnici, 49, 56 Le Bon, Gustav, 10, 18 Istituto Luce, 15, 46, 72, 105–8, 111, Le Monnier (Florentine publishing 115, 116, 123, 131, 145, 152, 213, house), 65, 67 222, 225 League of Nations, 2, 83, 204 Italian Communist Party (Partito Lepre, Aurelio, 7, 75, 188, 193, 211, comunista italiano), 3 220, 231, 232, 233 Italianità, 80–1 Leto, Guido, 36, 162, 165, 181, 231 Letteratura, 97 Jehovah’s Witnesses, 177, 180, 191 Levi Della Vida, Giorgio, 208 Jewish Liberalism, 6, 8, 9, 13, 14, 15, 21, 23, communities, 19, 121, 130, 175, 25, 27, 28, 30, 31, 33, 34, 39, 42, 180–2 47, 52, 54, 56, 71, 79, 88, 91, 98, families, 39, 128, 181 108, 110, 121, 134, 137, 148, 150, identities, 96, 97, 125–9, 170, 171, 175, 178, 196, 197 204, 208, 215 libro di stato, 62–4, 66, 69, 70, 141, ‘problem’, 126, 130, 144 142, 155, 199, 207 writers and journalists, 97, 135, Libya, 121, 124 148, 157, 226 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 23, 214, 232 Jews, persecution of, 2, 19, 90, 102–3, Lombardo Radice, Giuseppe, 52, 58–9, 168, 181–2, 189, 211 62, 70, 199, 219 Joyce, James, 136, 196 Lombroso, Cesare, 119 London Film, 93 Kant, Immanuel, 69, 162 London, Jack, 205 Kesselring, General Albert, 165 Longanesi, Leo, 88 Klein, Gabriella, 175, 231 Luchini, Alberto, 144 Kochnitzsky, Leon, 170 Lupi, Dino, 55 0230543081_12_Index.pdf 4/5/07 2:00 PM Page 248

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Luzzatto, Sergio, 108, 110, 120 Modigliani, Giuseppe Emanuele, 126 Mondadori (Milan-based publishing Maccari, Mino, 136 house), 61, 63, 64, 67 Maciste, 18, 123, 173 Mondadori, Alberto, 98 Maffii, Mafio, 43 Mondolfi, Dino, 128 Maggiore, Roberto, 11 Montale, Eugenio, 154 Maida, Bruno, 88 Montanelli, Indro, 113 Malaparte, Curzio, 7, 114, 116, 136, Moravia, Alberto, 92, 95–8, 134, 137, 211, 223, 228 155, 201, 221, 226, 228, 233 Malgeri, Francesco, 100 Morgagni, Manlio, 26, 39–40, 43–5, Mambrini, Renzo, 36–8 77, 217, 222 Manchester Guardian, 144 Morgari, Oddino, 126 Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals, 53, 133 Mosse, George L., 16, 213, 224 Mann, Thomas, 156 Murialdi, Paolo, 42, 215, 216, 217, Manzoni, Alessandro, 96, 137 221 March on Rome, 39, 59, 80, 88, 105, Mussolini, Arnaldo, 26, 39–41, 43, 62, 110, 112, 113, 150, 175, 213, 224 102, 192, 217 Marchini, Mario, 46 Mussolini, Benito, Marcucci, Alessandro, 61 assassination attempts, 33, 93 Margulies, Rabbi Samuel Zvi, 129 finance, 39–41 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 8–10, identity, 12, 16–18, 109–14, 124–5 12, 21–2, 101, 111, 132–3, 135, police intelligence, 34–8, 72–6, 152, 156, 206, 211, 212, 223 167–8 Marino, Emanuele Valerio, 15, 116, Mussolini, Edda, 128, 225 212, 221, 222, 224 Mussolini, Rachele, 128 masculinity, 16, 115, 174 Mussolini, Vito, 28 Massarotti, Vito, 119 Mussolini, Vittorio, 28, 95 Matteotti, Giacomo, 28, 30, 33, 34, 39, 41, 42, 132, 133, 210, 215, Napoleon, 109, 113, 206 216 Nationalism, 9, 16, 19, 70, 203 Megaro, Gaudens, 155 NAZI Germany, 1–2, 3, 19, 46, 62, 80, Melchiori, Alessandro, 62, 219 82, 90–1, 97, 102, 104, 107, 117, Methodists, 176–7 120, 126, 127, 130, 179, 180, 194, MiCup see Ministry for Popular 197, 205, 208 Culture Nesci, Tommaso, 35 Mila, Massimo, 38 Nesti, Gustavo, 44 Minculpop see Ministry for Popular newsreels, 15, 18, 72, 107, 109, 110, Culture 115, 152, 160 Ministry for Popular Culture, 6–7, Nietzsche, Friedrich, 127, 154 18–19, 77, 89, 97, 101, 102–3, Nievo, Ippolito, 96, 137 106, 120, 139, 142, 144, 147, 148, Nitti, Francesco Saverio, 214 150, 154–7, 185, 190, 211, 213, Non Mollare, 31 214, 221, 222, 225, 227, 232 Noventa, Giacomo, 154 Ministry for Press and Propaganda, 6, Nuova storia contemporanea, 52 18, 19, 83, 89, 94, 95, 97, 99, 102, 115, 119, 139–42, 150, 153, 179 Oggi, 95–6, 98 miscegenation, 121, 124, 148 Ojetti, Ugo, 33, 43, 153, 169, 170 Mix, Tom, 227 Omodeo, Adolfo, 56 Modernism, 111, 196 Opera nazionale Balilla, 72, 73, 117–8 0230543081_12_Index.pdf 4/5/07 2:00 PM Page 249

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Opera nazionale maternità e infanzia Pius XII, Pope, 46 (OMNI), 161, 166 Pizzuto, Antonio, 37, 162–5, 185, 196, Orano, Paolo, 144 216, 229, 230 Oriani, Alfredo, 66 Polezzi, Loredana, 125, 225 Orlando, Vittorio Emanuele, 25 Political Police (divisione polizia Orzalesi, Vito Benedetto, 67 politica), the, 34–8, 92–4, 129, OVRA, 37–8, 75, 126, 157, 162, 166, 157, 162–3, 166, 179, 221, 229 181, 182, 200, 211, 216, 225, 231 Polverelli, Gaetano, 80–2, 84, 89, 100, 111, 117, 122–3, 137, 139–40, Pagine libere, 127, 225 144, 146, 159, 205, 220, 225, 227 palingenetic myth, 9–11, 16, 111 Porro, Eliseo Antonio, 40 Paoletti, Armando, 67 Prampolini, Enrico, 112 Papacy, the, 177–8 Press Ofﬁce (Ufﬁcio stampa), the, 6, Paravia (Milan-based publishing 18, 27–30, 33, 38, 45–6, 79–80, house), 67 82–7, 97, 99, 102, 106–7, 112, Pareto, Vilfredo, 10 115, 117, 137, 139–41, 144, 146, Parri, Ferruccio, 31 153, 156, 159, 198, 199, 205, 207 Partito nazionale fascista (PNF), 34, 46, Prezzolini, Giuseppe, 17, 59, 92, 134, 56, 71, 72, 73, 74, 80, 91, 92, 94, 137, 153, 155, 213 96, 105–6, 113, 115, 127, 136, Primato, 137 138, 146, 153, 167, 173, 184, 226, Principato (Milan-based publishing 228 house), 67 Partito popolare, 21, 52, 69, 134 Protestantism, 68, 175–90, 219, 231 Pascoli, Giovanni, 219 Passerini, Luisa, 16, 110–11, 207, 211, Quilici, Nello, 41, 217 212, 213, 223, 233 Quota 90, 60, 89 Paulucci de’ Calboli, Giacomo, 106–7, 222 Race Laws, 1, 96, 97, 130, 226 Pavolini, Alessandro, 77, 89, 97, 98, racism, 12, 16, 94, 116–18, 121, 103, 113, 142, 144, 157–8, 159, 124–5, 147–8, 157, 179, 181–2, 190, 224, 227, 229 203, 205, 207, 221, 224, 226, 227 Pavone, Claudio, 4, 5, 211 Radio Londra, 190, 192, 232 Paxton, Robert O., 1, 210, 223, 226 Radio Mosca, 190 Pellecchia, Emilio, 35 Radio Stefani, 45 Pentecostalism, 176–80, 231 Repubblica sociale italiana (RSI), 67, Perfetti, Francesco, 52 80, 103, 158 Peukert, Detlev, 120, 224 Resistance, the, 3–4, 52, 211 phone tapping, 6, 14, 24–5, 41–2, Reuters, 43–4 109, 198–9, 201, 206, 215, 222 Riefenstahl, Leni, 107–8, 123 Piazza San Sepolcro, 8, 13, 21, 28, 43 Risorgimento, the, 17, 54, 56, 70, 198 Piccialuti Caprioli, Maura, 191, 232 Rizzi, Loris, 7, 14, 186, 211, 212, 222, Pincherle, Gastone, 98 231, 232, 233 Pinkus, Karen, 16, 120, 213, 224 Roberts, David D., 11 Pinna, Gaetano, 9 Rocco Laws, 26, 35, 175, 200, 229 Pinocchio, 51 Rocco, Alfredo, 19, 160, 171, 174, Pirandello, Luigi, 132 175, 200, 229 Pitigrilli (Dino Segre), 95, 157 Rochat, Giorgio, 68, 175, 177, 180, Pittaluga, Stefano, 145 203, 219, 231 Pius XI, Pope, 47, 74, 88, 110, 161 Romanità, 80, 127, 135, 178, 203 0230543081_12_Index.pdf 4/5/07 2:00 PM Page 250

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Romano, Michele, 61 Smith College, 97 Rosmini, Antonio, 69 Socialism, 3, 8, 10, 21, 28, 40, 47, 75, Rosselli, Carlo, 31, 93, 95, 126, 132, 81, 127, 167, 172, 178, 196, 197, 165, 216, 225 210, 214, 228 Rossellini, Roberto, 210–11 Solari Bozzi, Giuseppe, 46 Rossi, Angelo, 193 Solaria, 153, 205, 207 Rossi, Cesare, 28–30, 38, 77, 80, 84, Soldati, Mario, 91, 92–5, 98, 134, 154, 215, 216 155, 221, 229, 232 Rossi, Ernesto, 31 Somalia, 121, 221 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 67 Sorel, Georges, 10–12 ruralism, 106 Spackman, Barbara, 16, 17, 213, 224 Russia, 106, 107, 190, 194, 196 Spanish Civil War, 1, 2, 8, 76, 89, 144, 158 Saitta, Giuseppe, 56 Spinetti, Gastone Silvano, 84, 221 Salandra, Antonio, 25 Spinoza, Baruch, 69 Salgari, Emilio, 118, 122, 207 squadristi, 3, 8–10, 12, 13, 19, 22, 27, Salvemini, Gaetano, 31, 134–5, 155 29, 34, 141, 197, 211, 212, 213, Salvi, Francesco, 92–3 214, 215, 218 Sambadù, amore negro, 125 Staglieno, Marcello, 3, 210, 215, 217 Sandron (Palermo-based publishing Starace, Achille, 80, 113, 139, 142 house), 67 Steinbeck, John, 194 Sani, Roberto, 70 Stone, Marla, 16, 111, 212, 223 Sansoni (Florentine publishing Storia contemporanea, 84, 221 house), 65, 67 Stracittà, 136 Sarfatti, Margherita, 39–41, 110, Strapaese, 136 129–30, 157 Stringher, Bonaldo, 128 Sarfatti, Michele, 2, 210, 225 Sturzo, Don Luigi, 29, 42, 134–5, 137, satire, 12, 87, 151, 218 169, 226 Schnapp, Jeffrey T., 16, 212, 223, 227, Suster, Roberto, 46 228 Syndicalism, 19, 22, 28 Schuschnigg, Kurt von, 223 Scialoja, Vittorio, 30 Tacchi Venturi, Padre Pietro, 67, 69, scuole complementari, 56 176 scuole elementari, 48, 49, 56, 64 Tempo, 98, 108 scuole medie, 64, 65, 66, 220 Terragni, Giuseppe, 112 scuole normali, 57 The Times, 32 Segre, Dino see Pittigrilli Theweleit, Klaus, 16, 213, 224 Sei (Turin-based publishing house), Toeplitz, Giuseppe, 39–42, 130 67 Toeplitz, Ludovico, 93 Sejum, Ras, 120 Togliatti, Palmiro, 74 Seldes, George, 155 Torre, Andrea, 43 Senise, Carmine, 35, 149, 165, 179, Torrès, Maurice, 129 180, 216 Toscanini, Arturo, 169–70, 230 Serrati, Giacinto Menotti, 9 Toscanini, Walter, 169–70 Servizio speciale riservato (SSR), 25–6 totalitarianism, 5, 7, 12, 13, 14, 18, Settimelli, Emilio, 21, 47, 111, 133, 217 19, 22, 23, 105, 165, 184, 195, Shakers, 177–8 201, 212, 223 Siciliani, Luigi, 52 Tranfaglia, Nicola, 7, 84, 88, 210, 211, Sironi, Mario, 17, 112, 212, 213, 223 214, 215, 216, 221, 222, 224, 225 0230543081_12_Index.pdf 4/5/07 2:00 PM Page 251

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Traquandi, Nino, 31 Victor Emanuel III, King, 15, 18, 23, Treves, Claudio, 40, 126, 129 27, 55, 65, 74, 106, 109–10, 139, Trizzino, Antonio, 102, 222 148, 158, 192, 197, 210 Turati, Filippo, 40 Victor Emanuel, Prince, 168 Turi, Gabriele, 52, 218, 220 Vidari, Giovanni, 70 Villa, Mario, 46 Ufﬁcio tecnico di propaganda nazionale Viminale, the (HQ of Ministry of the (UTPN), 40–1 Interior), 30, 38, 83, 185 Ulysses, 162, 196 virility, 16–17, 109, 115, 119–20, Undersecretariat for Press and 123–4, 174, 195 Propaganda, 83, 89, 99, 102, 117, Vita nuova (propaganda ﬁlm, 1925), 106 139–40, 146, 205 Vittorini, Elio, 153, 157, 158, 211, Ungaretti, Giuseppe, 111, 223 227, 228, 233 Volpi, Albino, 34 Vallardi (Milan-based publishing Volpi, Maria (‘Murà’), 125 house), 64 Vallecchi (Florentine publishing Waldensians, the, 175–6 house), 65 Wall Street Crash, 2, 85 Valori, Aldo, 43 Weber, Max, 17 Vassar College, 97, 153–4 Weimar Republic, 90 Vatican, the, 18, 46, 47, 55, 67–9, Wilson, Woodrow, 21 176, 179–80 Wolff News Agency, 43–4 veline, 6, 83–8, 107, 115, 117, 119, Woolf, Virginia, 136 130, 146, 206, 211, 214, 221, 222, 227, 232 Zacchi, Dr Osvaldo, 177, 180 Venice Biennale, 132 Zanichelli (Bologna-based publishing Venturi, Lionello, 92, 93 house), 64, 67 Verga, Giovanni, 96, 137 Zola, Emile, 148 Versailles Treaty, 1, 21, 30, 204 Zurlo, Leopoldo, 149–52, 165, 228