2,532 research outputs found
At the Service of Fascist Propaganda: Italian Artists and the 1937 International Exposition in Paris
No full textThe fascism-culture relationship has for a good while been read under the interpretation of Mussolin’s regime as “imperfect totalitarianism”. As is generally recognized, Italian fascism did not promote an art of the state. The affirmation that fascism did not codify its own official style has led to the belief that Italian art enjoyed full freedom of expression. Compared to other dictatorial regimes, fascism was therefore characterized by an extraordinary expressive liberty conceded to its artists.
This essay discusses the Fascist concept of art developed during the twenties and the thirties, analyses the fascist quest for the monopoly of artistic organization and form of expressions, and then, as a study case, focuses on the relationship between fascism and artists in the organization of the Italian participation at the Paris International Exhibition of 1937.
In his conclusions, the author argues that, despite a certain degree of aesthetic pluralism, each artist placed himself in the ideological-cultural horizon of fascism and thought of contributing to the production of the “new art” of the “fascist era” advocated by Mussolini
Lo studio sulle organizzazioni giovanili fasciste: una chiave per penetrare nel sistema di potere del regime mussoliniano
No full textStudying Fascist Youth Organizations: a Key for Understanding the System of Power in Mussolini's Regime. This article focuses on the results of Niccolò Zapponi’s research on fascist youth organizations, a groundbreaking essay published in 1982. The author emphasizes the originality of the essay, the very first account of the history of youth fascist organizations based on previously unpublished archival material and, above all, one of the first historiographical attempts to describe and better assess the dynamic of power within the fascist regime. Faced with the well-established interpretation of the National Fascist Party as a bureaucratic institution lacking in any political weight, Zapponi highlighted, instead, the enduring dynamism of the party; he demonstrated the existence of a plurality of centers of power - often in conflict with each other - as a structural feature of the regime; he maintained, finally, that the system’s «internal logic» had determined its evolution toward a «party dictatorship». Based on these outcomes, the historian decisively put Italian fascism among contemporary totalitarianisms. In his conclusion, the author claims that credit should go to Zapponi for having adopted - even if not actually theorized - a new approach to the study of Fascism, based on his intuition of the relationship between ideology and organization, between the myth of the fascist «new man» and the institutions established to make the myth real
M. Griner, La «pupilla» del duce. La legione autonoma mobile Ettore Muti, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino 2004.
No full textCarlo Curcio e la dottrina del fascismo: le voci del Dizionario di politica del Pnf
No full textL'impegno politico-intellettuale militante di Carlo Curcio nei ranghi del fascismo è stato probabilmente più lungo e più intenso di quanto non si sia sinora sospettato. Dai suoi primi scritti in chiave nazional-liberale dei primi anni Venti alla sua organica e qualificante collaborazione al Dizionario di politica nel 1940, a cura del Pnf. Ne esce l'esigenza, sul piano storico-interpretativo, di spiegare il significato e il valore di questo impegno, di studiarne le diverse fasi, di approfondire altresì i rapporti, anche di natura personale, che Curcio ha intrattenuto durante il Ventennio con altri intellettuali del regime. L'articolo rappresenta un primo contributo di un lavoro ancora in gran parte da fare su questa figura e che potrebbe rivelarsi di grande utilità per ricostruire in modo ancora più dettagliato il mosaico ideologico del fascismo italiano
Barbara Henry, Daniele Menozzi, Paolo Pezzino (a cura di), Le vie della libertà. Maestri e discepoli nel “laboratorio pisano” tra il 1938 e il 1943, Carocci, Roma 2008.
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Interpretations of Fascism as a Political Religion in Post-Fascist Italy (1943-1948)
No full textIn the last two decades considerable work has been devoted to Italian Fascism
considered as a form of political religion. Yet the debate about the religious nature of
Italian fascism after the fall of the regime is almost completely neglected. After July 1943
anti-Fascist public discourse aimed at promoting the so-called ‘antifascist paradigm’. This
reassuring narrative, which depicted fascism as a regime that had failed its goal to fascistize
the Italian people, was supposed to allow the country to start a new democratic life, but produced
a substantial misunderstanding of the actual nature of Mussolini’s regime. Opposing
this trend, some Catholic and ex-fascist intellectuals affirmed a counter-narrative of the
recent past. They described fascism as a contemporary, religious-based totalitarian regime,
and attributed to these features its appeal to Italian society. The opinions expressed by
these intellectuals openly recalled those of Italian anti-fascists as well as Christian and lay
intellectuals all over Europe who, starting from the mid-1930s, had acknowledged the religious
nature of contemporary totalitarianism. From this point of view, they became part of a wider
school of thought which sought to understand the phenomenon of the sacralization of politics.
Intentionally disregarded and misunderstood by their contemporaries, these intellectuals nonetheless
left a valuable patrimony of knowledge which, subsequently brought to light, has represented
the basis for the elaboration of more advanced interpretations of the twentiethcentury
totalitarian experience
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