Notes Introduction 1. Giuseppe Bottai, Diario 1935–1944, ed. Giordano Bruno Guerri, Milan: Rizzoli, 1982, p. 468. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid., p. 149. 4. Ibid., p. 186 (April 15, 1940). 5. Reference should first of all be made to the classic studies by George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich, New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964; and Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of Germanic Ideology, 2nd ed., Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1974. 6. On Italy, see Mario Isnenghi, Il mito della grande guerra, new ed., Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997 and, for greater detail, Emilio Gentile, The Origins of Fasicst Ideology, 1918–1925, trans. Robert L. Miller, New York: Enigma Books, 2005 (orig. ed. Bologna, 1996). Gentile emphasizes the appeal to Mazzini in critiques of the liberal and Giolittian state in the context of what he refers to as “national radicalism” (“radicalismo nazionale”) in Id., Il mito dello Stato nuovo: Dal radicalismo nazionale al fascismo, 2nd ed., Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1999, pp. 5–9. 7. Gentile recalls these remote influences, yet with respect to the way Fascism appealed to them, and not in terms of their actual direct or historical influence. See Gentile, The Origins of Fasicst Ideology. They are examined as one of the myths of Fascism by Pier Giorgio Zunino, L’ideologia del fascismo. Miti, credenze e valori nella stabilizzazione del regime, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995. By contrast, these roots of fascism have definitively been underestimated by Zeev Sternhell, Mario Sznajder, and Maia Asheri, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, trans. David Maisel, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994 (orig. ed. Paris, 1989). 8. See Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, pp. 276–282. On the origi- nally humanitarian bent of Herder’s nationalism, however, see F. M. Barnard, Herder’s Social and Political Thought: From Enlightenment to Nationalism, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967, pp. 88–108. Concerning 122 NOTES Fichte’s cosmopolitan vision, see Hans Kohn, “The Paradox of Fichte’s Nationalism,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 10, 3, June 1949, pp. 319– 343. This contrasts with Fichte’s later popularity as a nationalist: see H. C. Engelbrecht, Johann Gottlieb Fichte: A Study of His Political Writings with Special Reference to His Nationalism, New York: Columbia University Press, 1923, pp. 160–190. 9. On the way the term “nation,” for instance, is conveyed and decoded, see Umberto Eco, La struttura assente, 2nd ed., Milan: Bompiani, 1983, p. 94. Eco echoes the observations on the “ideological” use of the word made by Roland Barthes, Mythologies, Paris: Seuil, 1957, p. 247. On the “appropri- ation” of “discourses,” see Michel Foucault, Che cos’è un autore? (1969), in Id., Scritti letterari, ed. and trans. Cesare Milanese, 3rd ed., Milan: Feltrinelli, 2004, p. 9 (English translation: “What is an author?,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, New York: Pantheon Books, 1984, 101–120). 10. For an initial overview of the concept of ideology, see Mario Stoppino’s entry in Dizionario di politica, 3rd ed., Turin: UTET, 2004, 487–499. 11. It is useful to refer here to the methodological suggestions made by John G. A. Pocock, according to whom not only texts are historical “events,” but languages are the “matrices” within which texts as events occur. Texts, Pocock explains, “have readers and outlive their authors. The author, in creating the text, creates the matrix in which others will read and respond to it.” Mazzini’s words and language, therefore, were not just historical events in their own time, but linguistic matrices that contributed to establishing a “continuity of discourse” and meanings which, aside from being objects of interpretation in themselves, also fostered other interpretations. With regard to Mazzini’s texts, we might say then—quoting Pocock—that they “surviv[e] in language matrices that modify the actions performed with them but that they continue to modify through their surviving capacity to act in themselves as matrices for action.” See John G. A. Pocock, “Texts as Events: Reflections of the History of Political Thought” (1987) in Id., Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009, 106–119 (especially pp. 114 and 116). 12. On this point, see chapter 1 in this book. 13. As we shall see, the roots, if not the onset, of the democratic appropria- tion of Mazzini, based on a new historiographical interpretation, are probably to be found in the publication of Luigi Salvatorelli’s work Il pen- siero politico del Risorgimento italiano, Turin: Einaudi, 1935 (although the previous interpretations by Gaetano Salvemini and Alessandro Levi also represent important precedents). Prior to that, in the 1920s and early 1930s, democratic political readings of Mazzini—or, to be more exact, democratic ideological appropriations of his thought—played an utterly marginal role in antifascist theory and discourse. NOTES 123 14. For all these quotes and their context, see chapter 5, part 3 in this book. 15. Raoul Girardet, Mythes et mythologies politiques, Paris: Seuil, 1986, p. 73. 16. See Jean Tulard, Le mythe de Napoléon, Paris: Armand Colin, 1971; Lucy Riall, Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2006; Mario Isnenghi, Garibaldi fu ferito. Storia e mito di un rivoluzionario disciplinato, Rome: Donzelli, 2007; Dino Mengozzi, Garibaldi taumaturgo, Manduria: Lacaita, 2008; Barry Schwartz, George Washington: The Making of an American Myth, New York: Free Press, 1987; Schwartz. Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. One might also want to consider the—no doubt rather different—case of the appropriation of literary authors and icons: see, for instance, Rodney Symington, The Nazi Appropriation of Shakespeare: Cultural Politics in the Third Reich, Lewinston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005. 17. This parallel was first drawn by Carducci in a speech on Mazzini’s death, quoted in “Per la morte di Giuseppe Mazzini” (1882) in Giosue Carducci, Confessioni e battaglie, Second series, Rome: Sommaruga, 1883, p. 219. On Napoleon as Prometheus, as well as a “demigod,” “messiah” etc., see Tulard, Le mythe de Napoléon, passim. 18. Mazzini was described as “the Christ of the [19th] century” by Jessie White Mario in her biography of the Genoese; a parallel with Christ and Socrates is drawn in Giovanni Bovio, Mazzini, Milan, Sonzogno, 1905, p. 40. Both references may be found in Alessandro Levi, La filosofia politica di Giuseppe Mazzini, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1917, p. 311. The myth of Mazzini as Christ also raises the more general question of his role as a martyr-hero or “sad hero” (particularly famous are his melancholy portraits and his “face that never laughed,” to quote the poet Giosue Carducci). On this, see Alberto Mario Banti, “La memoria degli eroi,” in Storia d’Italia. Annali 22, Il Risorgimento, ed. Alberto Mario Banti and Paul Ginsborg, Turin: Einaudi, 2007, pp. 641–645. 19. Girardet, Mythes et mythologies, pp. 78–80. However, one should also take account of the “legislator” variant (ibid., pp. 77–78), with reference, for instance, to Mazzini’s Duties of Man. 20. Girardet, Mythes et mythologies, p. 83. 21. See Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1992, pp. 1–16, from which the subsequent quotes have been drawn. With regard to Italy, see Domenico M. Fazio, Il caso Nietzsche. La cultura italiana di fronte a Nietzsche, 1872–1940, Milan: Marzorati, 1988 and Mario Sznajder, “Nietzsche, Mussolini and Italian Fascism,” in Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? On the Uses and Abuses of a Philosophy, ed. Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Wistrich, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002, pp. 235–262. 22. Different views on this issue emerge from the aforementioned volume Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? 124 NOTES 23. This issue has been raised—albeit without taking into account the influ- ence of Mazzini, which fascism openly embraced—first of all by Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, trans. David Maisel, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986 (orig. ed. Paris, 1983), and by Gentile, The Origins of Fascist Ideology. By contrast, it does not seem to me that Mazzini’s thought can easily be associated with the so-called totalitarian democracy Jacob Talmon has studied, even less used to explain—on account of its alleged Jacobin origin—the veer- ing of maximalist socialists, starting from Mussolini himself, toward stances that eventually led to the emergence of fascism (as has indeed been argued by Giovanni Belardelli, “Il fantasma di Rousseau: Il fascismo come democrazia totalitaria,” in Belardelli, Il Ventennio degli intellettuali: Cultura, politica, ideologia nell’Italia fascista, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2005, pp. 245–246 and 252–254; and, more recently, Belardelli, Mazzini, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2010, p. 244; see also Roberto Vivarelli, Il fallimento del liberalismo: Studi sulle origini del fascismo, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1981, p. 137; Vivarelli, Storia delle origini del fascismo: L’Italia dalla grande guerra alla marcia su Roma, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991, vol. II, pp. 396– 398). Again with reference to Talmon, we might say that Mazzini was an exponent not of “totalitarian democracy” in the tradition of Rousseau and the Jacobins, but rather of the later “romantic messianism” (see Jacob Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, London, 1952; Talmon, Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase, New York and Washington: Praeger, 1960, pp. 256–277 focusing on Mazzini). If the invoking of Mazzini led to fascism, or at any rate was used to justify it, this is precisely because of the markedly antisocialist component of his thought and his criticism of the French revolutionary tradition.