War, totalitarianism and 'deep belief' in fascist Italy, 1935-43

European History Quarterly

Volumn 34, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 475-505

  Bosworth, Richard ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA   (Australia)

Author keywords

Fascism; Foreign policy; Italy; Popular mentalit ; Totalitarianism; War

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950059853     PISSN: 02656914     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0265691404046544     Document Type: Article

References (38)

1. Macgregor Knox, Hitler's Italian Allies: Royal Armed Forces, Fascist Regime, and the War of 1940-1943 (Cambridge 2000), 2
2. Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli: the Story of a Year (New York 1947), 131-40
3. Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, MA 1996), i
4. See especially Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il duce: 1. gli anni del consenso 1929-1936 (Turin 1974)
5. Simona Colarizi, L'opinione degli italiani sotto il regime 1929-1943 (Bari 1991), 207
6. Luisa Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory: the Cultural Memory of the Turin Working Class (Cambridge 1987), 75
7. Cf. also Luisa Passerini, Mussolini immaginario: storia di una biografia 1915-1939 (Bari 1991) which, however, restricts itself to an assessment of the words used to depict Mussolini without seriously probing their impact
8. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York 1999)
9. For a brilliant and moving ethnographic case study of the Zamboni family, whose 15-year-old son was lynched by fascists in 1926 as presumably responsible for an assassination attempt against Mussolini, and using confinati and other police files, as well as family correspondence preserved there, see Brunella Dalla Casa, Attentate ad duce: le molte storie del caso Zamboni (Bologna 2000)
10. The best history of fascist policing is Mimmo Franzinelli, I tentacoli dell'Ovra: agenti, collaboratori e vittime della polizia politico fascista (Turin 1999)
11. For summaries of this material, but ones where the key interest is political commitment, see Adriano Dal Pont and Susanna Carlini, L'Italia al confino: le ordinanze di assegnazione al confino emesse dalle Commissioni provinciali dal novembre 1926 al luglio 1943 (pubblicazione patrocinata dall'ANPPIA nazionale) (4 vols, Milan 1983)
12. Adriano Dal Pont, I lager di Mussolini: l'altra faccia del confino nei documenti della politica fascista (Milan 1975)
13. For a study of the role of denunciation in fascist Italy, see Mimmo Franzinelli, Delatori: spie e confidenti anonimi: l'arma segreto del regime fascista (Milan 2001)
14. Italian military commentators, after the event, naturally enjoyed crowing about the 'idiotic lying' (as Mussolini himself put it) of the purblind foreigners. See the Duce's preface to Amedeo Bollati, La campagna italo-etiopica nella stampa militare estera (previsioni, critiche, riconoscimenti e deduzioni) (Rome 1938), v
15. De Felice, op. cit., 642
16. Luigi Federzoni, 'Hegemony in the Mediterranean', Foreign Affairs, Vol. 14 (1936), 396
17. For an amusing popular biography, see Arrigo Petacco, Il Superfascista: vita e morte di Alessandro Pavolini (Milan 1998)
18. Alessandro Pavolini, Disperata (Florence 1937), 59. Ciano was the unlikely commandant, blindly followed by these 'desperate ones'
19. Richard Bosworth, Mussolini (London and New York 2002), 85
20. Levi, op. cit., 131-40
21. For further commentary on this dilemma, see Richard Bosworth, Italy and the Wider World (London 1996), 94-158
22. For an account, see Haile Larebo, The Building of an Empire: Italian Land Policy and Practice in Ethiopia 1935-1941 (Oxford 1994)
23. Loredana Polezzi, 'Imperial Reproductions: the Circulation of Colonial Images Across Popular Genres and Media in the 1920s and 1930s', Modern Italy, Vol. 8 (2003), 31-47, provides some background to the ambiguities of Italians' constructions of gender identities in their empire
24. For more context, see Bosworth, Italy and the Wider World, op. cit., 94
25. For a neat introduction, see Paul Preston, 'Italy and Spain in Civil War and World War, 1936-1943', in Sebastian Balfour and Paul Preston, eds, Spain and the Great Powers in the Twentieth Century (London 1999), 151-84
26. It was now that the splendidly activist and independently democratic antifascist Emilio Lussu remarked that Italian anti-fascism had more need of the Spanish Republic than the Republic had of their Italian helpers. See Manlio Brigaglia, Emilio Lussu e 'Giustizia e Liberià' (Cagliari 1976), 155
27. See, for example, Luigi Salvatorelli and Giovanni Mira, Storia d'ltalia nel periodo fascista, Vol. II (Milan 1969), 459
28. De Felice, op. cit., 156-7
29. Franzinelli, I tentacoli dell'Ovra, op. cit., 260-76
30. See Roger Absalom, A Strange Alliance: Aspects of Escape and Survival in Italy 1943-45 (Florence 1991)
31. Claudio Pavone, Una guerra civile: saggio storico sulla moralità nella Resistenza (Turin 1991)
32. cf. also the more recent, massive, local study by Giulio Guderzo, L'altra guerra: neofascisti, tedeschi, partigiani, popolo in una provincia padana: Pavia 1943-1945 (Bologna 2002)
33. See further Bosworth, Mussolini, op. cit., 386
34. February 1942, Questura (Benevento) to Prefect (Benevento)
35. Franzinelli, Delatori, op. cit., 99-103
36. Rodogno, op. cit., 488
37. For my use of this term, see Richard Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism (London 1998)
38. See Enzo Forcella and Alberto Monticone, Plotone di esecuzione: i processi della prima guerra mondiale (Bari 1968), 349