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The Reclamation of Fascist Culture 02_EHQ 31/4 articles 15/10/01 12:54 pm Page 609 Review Article Roger Griffin The Reclamation of Fascist Culture Alexander De Grand, Italian Fascism: Its Origins and Development, Lincoln, NE and London, University of Nebraska Press, 3rd edn, 2000; xvi + 191 pp.; 0803266227; £9.95 Jeffrey Schnapp, A Primer of Italian Fascism, Lincoln, NE and London, University of Nebraska Press, 2000; xxi + 325 pp.; 0803292686; £16.95 G.L. Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Towards a General Theory of Fascism, New York, Howard Fertig, 1998; 230 pp.; 0865274320 Emily Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000; 316 pp.; 0521480159; £40.00, US$64.95 John London (ed.), Theatre under the Nazis, Manchester, Man- chester University Press, 2000; 356 pp.; 0719059917; £17.99 Stanley G. Payne, Fascism in Spain, 1923–1977, Madison, Uni- versity of Wisconsin Press, 2000; xii + 601 pp.; 0299165647 Tom Linehan, British Fascism, 1918–1939: Parties, Ideology and Culture, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000; 306 pp.; 0719050243; £15.99 The term bonifica, used originally about ‘making good’ uninhabit- able, malaria-infested marshes, became a key metaphor under Fascism for the regeneration of Italy. It evoked the purging, re- furbishing and recycling of what was usable in Italy’s past and turning it into something new, modern, healthy. Fascist culture was once mostly treated as an oxymoronic non-subject, since genuine art and intellectual creativity were assumed to be incompatible with totalitarianism except when they were reduced to machine tools for the manufacture of consensus or travestied into media for aestheti- European History Quarterly Copyright © 2001 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi, Vol. 31(4), 609–620. [0265-6914(200110)31:4;609–620;019445] 02_EHQ 31/4 articles 15/10/01 12:54 pm Page 610 610 European History Quarterly Vol. 31 No. 4 cizing the reactionary or nihilistic nature of the regime. However, in the last ten years a velvet revolution has taken place in this area of studies. Increasingly scholars are finding it common sense to approach it on the tacit or explicit recognition that Fascism was driven by the utopia of a reborn Italy conceived in terms of an anti-materialist revolt which made the sphere of ‘culture’ in its widest sense, rather than that of politics, economics or militarism, the primary focus of transformation and renewal. It is an insight bound up with a number of important secondary realizations: Fascism was by no means a ‘parenthesis’ in Italian history, but an integral part of its development into a modern nation with roots deep in the political and cultural history of the Risorgimento and the Giolittian era. Cultural policies were not essentially propagandistic in the coercive sense, but engaged the enthusiastic collaboration of a significant percentage of the intelli- gentsia and artistic elite in the attempt to ‘remake’ Italians. The cultural revolution they sought to bring about was not ‘anti-modern’, but part of the attempt to create an alternative modernity to rescue society from decline and decadence, an aspiration which in turn gave Fascism’s bid for the renewal of civilization a deep affinity with modernism itself. Another important corollary, though less widely grasped, is that the thrust towards national rebirth which provided the common denominator between the highly disparate cultural and political energies which converged in Fascism, is the best candi- date to date for the ‘fascist minimum’. It constitutes the structural kinship which links it to other manifestations of ‘generic fascism’, whatever the differences which separate them at the level of the specific content of surface ideologies, policies and national ‘style’. The quantum leap in the sophistication of analysis which accom- panied the growing acceptance of this paradigm has opened up ‘fascist culture’, once regarded as a boggy wasteland, to the expan- sionist drive of academia. Broad stretches of it have metamorphosed into building sites for promising academic careers in Italian studies, while elsewhere once inaccessible regions in other countries are now being energetically exploited as terrain rich in new revelations about the nature both of Fascism’s ill-starred revolution and of Western modernity itself. A sign of the times in this context is Alexander De Grand’s Italian Fascism: Its Origins and Development, which has evolved since its first edition in 1982 into the best one-volume synoptic history of the rise and fall of Fascism available to the undergraduate. Clear and concise without being simplistic, the new edition also contains an excellent annotated bibliography that will guide to the most impor- tant texts those students and teachers keen to penetrate further into 02_EHQ 31/4 articles 15/10/01 12:54 pm Page 611 Griffin, The Reclamation of Fascist Culture 611 the subject. In contrast to other more recent overviews (e.g. Philip Morgan’s Italian Fascism, 1919–1945 and John Whittam’s Fascist Italy), De Grand dedicates an entire chapter to the roots of Fascism in Italy’s incomplete Risorgimento, and concludes his account with a sustained discussion of ‘The Political Culture of Fascism: Ideologies and Intellectuals’. This brings out the unresolved tensions between the various ideological currents and political traditions which Fascism harnessed in the ‘new Italy’, and gives due weight to the cultural initiatives of the regime. Yet, as De Grand himself concedes in his ‘preface to the third edition’, he remains at heart a traditional historian. It is economic and social realties that are his primary concern, which is perhaps what makes this book so accessible to undergraduates and newcomers to the complexities of the subject. Narrating lucidly what happened under Fascism is more important to him than explaining why it embarked on such a vast project of destruction and reconstruction in the first place. He points out himself that since the first edition ‘much work has been done on Fascist culture and the efforts of Mussolini’s regime to reshape Italians through the formation of civic religion, manipula- tion of symbols, mass rallies, and the intrusion of the state into the private sphere’. Yet he remains true to his conviction that ‘what Fascism did’ was always more important than what it said it wanted to do (ix). In terms of the ‘culturalist’ approach to Fascism now in the ascendancy, then, De Grand’s book is reminiscent of a moulting mammal whose new fur has not quite grown through. He accepts in the preface that (generic) ‘fascism was one of the three great approaches to the challenge of organizing the new mass society that emerged at the end of the previous century’ and that its ‘bind- ing ideological glue’ was ‘the myth of national or racial rebirth’ (ix–x). Yet he identifies the common denominator of the many components of the Fascist ‘coalition’ as nationalism, elitism, authori- tarianism and collectivism (146–7). This obscures the crucial func- tion of the myth of national rebirth, of palingenesis, in binding the various strands of Fascism together, however loosely. Similarly, his statement that the Fascist regime ‘opted for an essentially conserva- tive solution to the complicated problem of distributing power’ (165) underestimates the revolutionary significance of the scores of initia- tives undertaken by the regime for transforming the nature of Italian political culture, from Dopolavoro, local festivals, and state festivities to the demographic campaign, the state sponsorship of sport and art, and organization of the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution visited by millions. In stark contrast to Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s regime never 02_EHQ 31/4 articles 15/10/01 12:54 pm Page 612 612 European History Quarterly Vol. 31 No. 4 made a serious attempt to impose a single orthodoxy of thought or style in any area. Its Gleichschaltung consisted in the effort to present the state as the inspiration and patron of all artistic creativity and intellectual endeavour to a point where it could bathe in their reflect- ed glory (a tactic which Marla Stone calls ‘hegemonic pluralism’). In this way the state’s official narrative of contemporary history gradu- ally became internalized to the point where the March on Rome really did mark for millions of ‘ordinary Italians’ the start of Italy’s political and cultural renaissance, at least as long as popular support for Mussolini persisted. The fact that this aspect of the regime is dealt with at the end of De Grand’s book rather than at the beginning is revealing. The cultural perspective remains an ‘add-on’ to the out- ward history of the regime rather than the key to understanding its inner dynamics. This is consistent with the way in his Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: The ‘Fascist’ Style of Rule (1995) De Grand rejects the fruitfulness of approaching the two regimes in terms of a shared fascist ideology (the search for which he describes as so much ‘wasted ink’), and opts instead to work ‘from outside in’. There is nothing transitional about Jeffrey Schnapp’s A Primer of Italian Fascism. The premise of this, the first major anthology of Fascist writings available to English readers, is that the Fascist regime can only be understood by working from ‘inside out’. Furthermore, the criterion of selection has been to reproduce texts which bring out ‘the role played by intellectuals and artists in defin- ing the nature and scope of the fascist revolution’ (xiii) — Schnapp uses lower case for Fascism throughout. The result is a fascinating selection of twenty-four excellently translated texts, each supplied with a helpful introduction. They cover such topics as the evolution of Fascist doctrine from the 1919 San Sepolcro programme to the 1943 Manifesto of Verona; various attempts by sympathetic intel- lectuals to define the essence of what they were convinced was the Fascist revolution; the corporate state; labour policy; Fascism’s role in the renewal of Europe (‘Universal Fascism’); racial doctrine; education; and culture.
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