‘La straordinaria storia dell’Italia’ (‘The extraordinary history of Italy’ ep.10, The catastrofy)
11 September 1991
(Teca ID: not available) This little-known drama stages the conversation between Mussolini and King Vittorio Emanuele III which took place in the residence of the sovereign, Villa Savoia, the day after the session of the Grand Council of Fascism on 25th July 1943 - following such conversation Mussolini will be deposed and arrested by the king. The sequence carries on with a speech by the historian Claudio Pavone, who in 1991 published his important essay “A Civil War” and that reflects precisely on the use of this term for the events of '43-'45, interviewed by Francesco Malgeri, also a historian.
Read the transcriptHistoriography
L’opinione degli italiani sotto il regime 1929-1943 (The opinion of the Italians under the 1929-1943 regime)
Simona Colarizi, Laterza. Based on an extensive archival documentation consisting basically of reports on the public spirit of Public Security informants, this volume represented the first systematic investigation of the «public spirit» of the population, to use the definition of the time, between the consolidation of the dictatorship and its collapse. Reports produced by a wide audience of agents infiltrated or recruited by different agencies (OVRA, Carabinieri, police headquarters, PNF) are often a crude and sometimes unreliable source, but still offer a remarkable insight into the changes in public opinion towards the choices of the regime, up to the vertical collapse of the consensus from the entry into war.
Le donne nel regime fascista (Women in the fascist regime)
Victoria de Grazia, Marsilio. This is the first (and still fundamental) research work on the condition of women from the immediate post-war period and during the Twentieth Century. The reactionary policies of the regime are reconstructed analytically, starting from the need for «return to order» (after the mobilization of the Great War) which fascist governments shared with most conservative public opinion and coincided with the (only partially successful) attempt to exclude women from many sectors of the labour market, starting with education, according to the wishes of the Gentile reform.
La via italiana al totalitarismo. Il partito e lo Stato nel regime fascista (The Italian way to totalitarianism. The party and the state in the fascist regime)
Emilio Gentile, La Nuova Italia Scientifica. With this contribution, destined to great success (in 2008 the publisher Carocci would propose a third edition revised and enlarged), Gentile consolidated and in many respects defined his own research on the totalitarian dimension of the fascist regime. That fascism was intrinsically totalitarian in its action (even if a true totalitarian doctrine was never elaborated within the party) emerges clearly from the policies of collective control and transformation, as they are designed and perfected gradually in the twenty years. Denying the prejudice popularized by Arendt of a non-totalitarian dictatorship, contrary to National Socialism and Bolshevism, (reading accepted substantially by both De Felice and Acquarone)Gentile identified fascism as a movement aimed at the total political domination of Italians and the replacement not only of the State with a new regime but of the old man, through an anthropological revolution.
Il delitto Matteotti (The Matteotti crime)
Mauro Canali, Il Mulino. The killing of the leader of reformist socialism, Giacomo Matteoti, in June 1924, is conventionally accepted as one of the turning points in the Fascist Twenties. The volume of Canali not only traces the genesis of the murder and the developments of the trial but delves deep into the interweaving of powers (and even corruption), in the climate of impunity and violence of a dictatorship that was alreMauro Canali, Il delitto Matteotti, Il Mulino, 1997ady widespread at the time, and marked a profound break with the rule of law and liberal traditions.
La repubblica delle camicie nere. I combattenti, i politici, gli amministratori, i socializzatori (The Republic of Black Shirts. Fighters, politicians, administrators, socializers)
Luigi Ganapini, Garzanti. The study and narrative of RSI has always attracted less attention than other moments of fascism, such as the genesis of the dictatorship or its actors. In his monograph, Ganapini reconstructs biographical parables and motivations of those who joined the puppet state of Salò both driven by generational enthusiasm and convinced of being able to give continuity to a regime that had not yet fulfilled its original revolutionary promise.
Culture and politics
Fascist legacy
Gianfanco Fini, leader of Alleanza Nazionale, celebrates the 70th anniversary of the March on Rome and define Mussolini "the greatest statesman of the century". In the name of a reconciled past, some centre-right administrations promote a new toponymy in various Italian cities with squares, streets, public buildings named after the “martyrs of the phobes”. In the same year Rai bought the BBC documentary Fascist legacy, about Italian war crimes in Ethiopia and Yugoslavia, which was translated into Italian but was never broadcast. Italian viewers will see it on La7, within a program directed by the historian Sergio Luzzatto, soon deleted from the schedule.
Mancino Law
the Parliament approves Law 205/1993, known as the Mancino Law, which punishes by imprisonment (from 6 months to 4 years) anyone who commits violent acts on racial, ethnic, national or religious grounds, imposing harsh sanctions for the propaganda of ideas based on superiority or racial hatred as well as inciting discrimination. The law condemns, in particular, gestures, actions and slogans linked to the fascist ideology and prohibits any organization, association, movement or group whose aims include inciting discrimination or violence. Among the first effects of the law, the dissolution of the Western Political Movement, a far-right organization founded in 1984 by Maurizio Boccacci. In 2014 the “Lega” proposes a referendum to repeal the law stating it's a liberticidal law.
The “closet of shame”
Deputy Mirko Tremaglia presents a draft law to the Chamber of Deputies to rehabilitate former RSI fighters and make them equivalent to effective members of the Armed Forces. In the same year, the "cabinet of shame" was found in the premises of Palazzo Cesi in Rome, the headquarters of the Military General Prosecutor’s Office, containing 695 judicial files with investigative material on Nazi-fascist crimes, illegally covered up in 1960. The discovery gave rise to numerous investigations at military prosecutors, followed by trials and convictions, with life imprisonment in absentia against Nazi criminals and the establishment of a parliamentary commission of inquiry in May 2003. Thanks to the discovery of the files, in 2004, in La Spezia the proceedings begin against those responsible for the massacre of Sant'Anna di Stazzema (560 civilians massacred on 12th August 1944), one of the great massacres of Italians who remained unpunished.
The “reconciliation”
In his inaugural speech, the President of the Chamber Luciano Violante invites to reflect on the "yesterday’s losers" in an effort to understand "the reasons that fifty years ago saw the Italians divide between the Resistance and the Republic of Salò and the reasons for which thousands of boys, when all was lost, sided with Salò and not with rights and freedoms". The speech opens a series of proposals for "reconciliation", coming from the very ranks of the left.
The crimes of the fascist wars
In February, the Ministry of Defence admitted the use of gas by the Italian armed forces during the Ethiopian War. The recognition puts an end to the controversy between the journalist Indro Montanelli and the historian Angeli Del Boca, who was the first to document and denounce the use of mustard gas against civilian populations during the fascist colonial campaigns in Libya and Ethiopia. The result is a new season of historiographical studies on the criminal conduct of the fascist wars, in particular on the Italian occupation in the Balkans, which overturns the stereotype of the "good Italian" focusing on the participation of fascists in German reprisals, on the fascist concentration camps for the Yugoslavs, on the story of the war criminals demanded by Yugoslavia, Greece, Albania, Ethiopia, the Soviet Union never handed over and put on trial in Italy for their crimes.
National day deported
A draft law is presented in the Senate (speaker sen. Anna Maria Bucciarelli, Dems Ulivo) for the "establishment of a national day dedicated to all those deported to concentration camps during the war 1939-1945", proposing 16 October, day of the raid of 1943 in the ghetto of Rome. The proposal ends a year later in the Senate.
Ciampi and the politics of memory
The President of the Republic Carlo Azeglio Ciampi inaugurates a new policy of memory and a new civil pedagogy focused on the myth of the Risorgimento and the Resistance. Ciampi’s attempt is to reconstruct the national fabric, deeply torn by the political crisis experienced by the country after Tangentopoli, and to counteract the memory anti-renaissance and anti-unification, coming from the Lega.