The Sacred Syntesis: The Ideological Cohesion of
Fascist Cultural Policy
Roger Griffin
published
in Modern Italy - vol.
3, no. 1 (1998)
The
elusiveness of Fascist ideology
This article
sets out to identify the ideological matrix underlying Fascist cultural policy.
By doing so it risks creating an alienation effect of a far from Brechtian
nature, for there has been a marked tendency for academics to treat the
proliferation of conflicting styles of art under the Fascist regime and the
general failure of its efforts to create a Fascist culture as symptoms of
ideological confusion and vacuousness. Synoptic histories of Mussolini's Italy
thus tend to give the whole subject short shrift, at most offering a brief
account of the events which led to Giovanni Gentile's publication of the
Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals and Benedetto Croce's defiant response to it,
followed by an impressionistic survey of the kaleidoscopic array of aesthetics
vying for a place in the sun which were so complacently accommodated by the
regime. As for specialist literature, numerous individual cultural initiatives
undertaken by the `new Italy' have received in-depth analysis over the years,
yet in all the pages written it is difficult to find sustained attempts to
relate the bewildering variety of phenomena which resulted to a cohesive
ideology. A well-illustrated scholarly monograph surveying the various spheres
of Fascist culture as different manifestations of a unifying world-view is
conspicuous by its absence, even though such works exist on art in the Third
Reich.
The general
impression thus formed, is that in the cultural sphere at least, the ethos which
prevailed was of laissez-faire, not to say anarchy. The fact that such an
assumption goes unchallenged is in large part attributable to the fact that it
fits in well with the common sense view of Fascism as being an ideological
hotchpotch, a rag-bag of contradictory influences and ideas. This in turn seems
to mirror the received view of the personality of its leader, Benito Mussolini,
who, as Denis Mack Smith documented with such undisguised glee in his biography,
apparently exhibited a capacity to chop and change between contradictory
positions which bordered on the pathological. The inference is that, lacking any
genuine ideology, his regime operated on an ad hoc basis as far as
formulating policies were concerned, and hence in the cultural or any other
sphere had no scruples about welcoming into its fold any artists and
intellectuals prepared to contribute their energies to the Fascist cause,
irrespective of the precise political philosophy or values they stood for, thus
giving rise to an extraordinary heterogeneity of positions.
Following
the logic of this approach it would be natural to argue that any hint of
ideological cohesion in the arts was further undermined by the continued
activity of artists and intellectuals who, even if they were not convinced
Fascists themselves, were willing to pay lip-service to the shibboleths of the
new Italy so as to be allowed to pursue their careers undisturbed by a regime
keen to harness any creativity as long as it could be presented as an expression
of Italian genius. The `Third Rome' thus never threatened to resemble the Third
Reich by becoming a land of book-burnings, degenerate art exhibitions, and
strictly regimented cultural production. The validity of this stance seems borne
out by the fact that an internal report on cultural life after nine years of
Fascist rule conceded that, in marked contrast to Nazi Germany, `everyone does
what he wants, how he wants'.
The
underlying unity of Fascist ideology
While
acknowledging the acute lack of consensus about what should constitute the
official aesthetic of Fascism, this article aims to challenge the assumption
that the blatant failure to produce a coordinated or effective Fascist culture
is attributable to the lack of a unitary and unifying ideology. It will argue
instead that Fascism did indeed possess a cohesive ideological core, but one
which in the cultural sphere encouraged, not totalitarian uniformity, but the
paradoxical situation of `totalitarian pluralism'.
To suggest
that Fascism possessed an ideology at all, of course, remains highly contentious.
By axiomatically assuming that Fascism is a reactionary force mobilized in the
defence of capitalism against revolutionary socialism, even the most
sophisticated Marxists can see in its cultural activities only the mystification
of a state system of class exploitation and imperialistic violence, Gramsci's
concept of `cultural hegemony' being just one of the more famous and
sophisticated examples. Meanwhile many `liberals', heirs of the Enlightenment
blind-spot which confuses the anti-rational with the irrational and the mythic
with the primitive or downright pathological, implicitly deny the existence of a
Fascist ideology by ignoring the subject altogether in histories of the regime.
Sometimes they at least make their position explicit, as when Mack Smith tells
his interviewer in a teaching video `ideology meant very little to Mussolini...forget
about Fascist ideology', or John Whittam claims that the very `concept of
Italian Fascism' was `illusory', making the quest to identify a generic,
European `fascism' analogous to `searching for a black cat in a dark and
possibly empty room'.
The premise
which informs what follows is that the underlying cohesion of Fascist ideology
is not to be sought at the surface level of statements made in specific
manifestos, programmes, policies, or declarations of value positions. At this
level confusion and contradiction certainly prevail, not only synchronically in
the sense that sharply conflicting Fascisms coexist at every stage in the
evolution of both movement and regime, but also diachronically: the official
programme undergoes major transformations over time, and many prominent Fascists
repeatedly shed their ideological skins, none more so than Mussolini himself.
Yet the countless `Fascisms' can be empirically shown to share a common
ideological core, without which their protagonists would never have been able to
feel that they belonged to the same movement. In other words, while the species
of Fascism may vary wildly, they all derive from an identical genus of political
thought inferable from the particular pronouncements of its protagonists. This
genus can be extrapolated by the researcher through a cognitive process which
Max Weber termed `idealizing abstraction'. Applying this process to a wide
sample of different currents of Fascist ideology, this common core consists of
two components which fuse into a single compound: first, the myth of
palingenesis (rebirth, renewal), and, second, an organic, illiberal conception
of the nation which celebrates the collective energies of the `people' (ultra-nationalism).
These two
components crystallize in the image of the rejuvenated nation rising
phoenix-like from the ashes of the decadent order which has suffocated the true
life of the people, an image which supplies Fascism's mobilizing myth. In
concrete terms this means that even a relatively unsophisticated textual
analysis of any Fascist text of substance will reveal a recurrent set of images
and themes relating either to the condemnation of the decadent, liberal nation
of decline, weakness, crisis, anarchy, or to the celebration of the reborn,
post-liberal nation of regeneration, strength, stability, order which Fascism
aspires to be creating -
and very often to the gulf which divides the `old' Italy from the `new'.
Ideal-typically, therefore, each contrasting permutation of Fascism manifests an
identical mythic core of `palingenetic populist ultra-nationalism'. This core
also constitutes a prime candidate for being accepted heuristically as the
definitional lowest common denominator shared by all varieties of generic
fascism.
The `fascist
minimum' thus turns out to be a `virtual' cat more akin to Schrödinger's than
to the living, breathing household moggy that Whittam referred to, which may
explain why empirical historians allergic to anything as abstrusely theoretical
as Weberian epistemology are prone to dismiss the whole debate out of hand. They
are of course right to feel that an ideal-typical construct is a figment of the
imagination -
Max Weber himself stressed that generic concepts in the social sciences are
`utopias'. It is their blindness to the heuristic value of such utopias, whose
construction involves a flight of imagination informed and delimited by
empirical data, which perhaps points to a certain methodological ingenuousness.
An
illustration of how this approach modifies conventional approaches to the issue
of Fascist ideology is provided by an article which Mussolini wrote for his
newspaper Il Popolo d'Italia on 15 Dec. 1917. Entitled `Trenchocracy' it
portrays the soldiers returning from the trenches as forming the basis of a new
ruling elite who will sweep aside the old Italy of Giolittian liberalism to
usher in a new era in the life of the nation. The future Duce makes the
following comment on what might form the ideological basis of the new Italy:
The words
republic, democracy, radicalism, liberalism, the word `socialism' itself, have
no sense any longer: they will have one tomorrow, but it will be the one given
them by the millions of `those who returned'. And it could be something quite
different.
It could,
for example, be an anti-Marxist and national socialism. The millions of
workers who return to the furrow in their fields, after being in the furrows of
the trenches, will realize the synthesis of the antithesis: class and nation. (my
emphasis)
For Marxists
such a passage would provide eloquent testimony to the ultimate aim of the
future leader of Fascism in the year of the Russian Revolution to hi-jack
genuine socialism by creating a counter-revolutionary force based on a
militaristic brand of chauvinism which will perpetuate capitalism and the
bourgeois exploitation of the masses, mystifying them beneath the verbal mantle
of pseudo-revolution and pseudo-socialism. By the same token, `liberal'
historians convinced of Mussolini's cavalier attitude to political doctrine and
policy might read this text as evidence of his legendary cynicism and
opportunism: despairing of socialism as his vehicle to power on the eve of the
First World War, he then embraced interventionism. He now shows his
determination to manipulate the wave of patriotism unleashed in the wake of the
Italian army's defeat at Caporetto by trying to monopolize the veteran movement
while the war is still on, unashamedly shuffling his marked pack of conventional
political concepts in the process and thereby showing his disdain for
ideological nicety or consistency.
The ideal
type of `palingenetic ultra-nationalism' prompts a different reading. It
suggests that, once the object of his early revolutionary fervour shifted from
the utopia of the classless society to the utopia of a reborn Italy nation (which
it demonstrably did as early as 1909), Mussolini's dramatic conversion to
interventionism was but a logical step. He was thus predisposed to see in war
veterans the agents of national rejuvenation and renewal that he was so
desperately looking for, as is demonstrated by his formation of a highly
politicized veteran league, the Fascio di Combattimento, in March 1919.
What the passage expresses, therefore is Mussolini's commitment to a core myth
of palingenetic ultra-nationalism, and simultaneously his utter indifference to
the precise vehicle for its rationalization in detail and realization in
practice which the volatile situation in Italy might supply, whether from
leftists or rightists, anarchists or statists, proponents or critics of
established religion, republicanism, capitalism, modern technology, rural life,
or any specific aspect of existing Italian society, as long as the basic thrust
of their dissatisfaction with the status quo was towards national regeneration
in a post-Giolittian `new order'. Indeed, the impossibility of specifying in
advance the theoretical contents and political constituency of his cause points
to its nature as genuinely revolutionary force born of seismic social and
historical forces rather than in the head of an armchair radical.
This
position, a paradoxical blend of the most unrealistic utopianism and extreme
pragmatism, explains the future Duce's willingness for his Fascist
movement to be a broad church of all the forces either bent on creating a new,
non-liberal and non-Bolshevik Italy or prepared to collude with them for their
own non-revolutionary ends. His notorious u-turns and ideological
inconsistencies thus point not to fickleness, but to the practical problems he
had to surmount in trying to aggregate a significant following of `faithful'
around a core myth which was sufficiently nebulous and multivalent to admit any
number of nuanced permutations at the level of surface rationalization.
The
implications of palingenetic ultra-nationalism for Fascist culture
This
ideal-typical characterization of Fascism has significant implications for its
cultural policies. It suggests that Mussolini's movement and regime are to be
considered a deliberate and serious project to sweep away for good the liberal
ideal of a civic society made up of autonomous individuals loosely
(`contractually') associated by the dictates of enlightened self-interest. In
particular, it meant forcing a radical break with the grotesque travesty of the
liberal ideal embodied in Giolittian Italy whose inefficiency, corruption, and
unrepresentativeness made a nonsense of any talk of liberty, equality, or
fraternity. What was to replace it was a national community integrated
organically through the binding effects of charismatic forces and a strong,
authoritarian state which would enable Italians to feel for the first time a
sense of pride in belonging to a nation whose creative genius was expressed in
every sphere of activity.
Such an
aspiration not only expressed itself in the features most associated with
Fascism, such as the personality cult of Mussolini, mass rallies, and militarism,
but in a sustained attempt to bring about what Walter Benjamin called the
pervasive `aestheticization of politics', whose function it was to restore the
numinous, `auratic' dimension of objects and events which had been eroded by the
rise of secularization, materialism, rationalism, and individualism. A national
holiday commemorating a significant moment in the (heavily mythicized) history
of the movement, the organization of an exhibition celebrating the Fascist
Revolution or Italy's Roman legacy, the opening of a new Casa del Fascio in the
town square, the revival or invention of a regional festival were thus all
symptomatic of the bid to encourage as many Italians as possible to experience
politics under Fascism as something poetic, contemporary affairs as something
stirring, and everyday life as a continuous source of collective enthusiasm and
transcendent meaning. In fact, the bussing of school-children to catch a sight
of the Duce when his cavalcade stopped at a local railway station, the
mass rally to celebrate a victory of the armed forces in Abyssinia, the
proliferation of uniforms, the regimentation of leisure, the spread of a
military discourse (e.g. the `Battle for Grain'), the preparations for war
itself, all were in fact rooted in the same `ritual', `aesthetic', `sacral'
conception of politics.
For Walter
Benjamin the attempts by the state to `auraticize' daily life under Fascism was
reducible to little more than a cynical conjuring trick designed to remystify
the capitalist system. Using the subterfuge of charismatic authoritarianism
instead of liberal democracy, the Fascists aimed to exercise power in such a way
that the toiling masses exploited by it experienced the illusion of
participation while continuing to be systematically alienated from direct
control over the means of production and the exercise of political sovereignty.
What the perspective suggested by our ideal type proposes instead is that we see
the Fascist regime's efforts to mass-produce the auratic in modern Italy as
stemming from a genuine bid to involve `ordinary' Italians in the collective
sense that they were living in a qualitatively new period of the nation's
history, one infused by a spirit of epic destiny comparable to that which
inspired all `great' civilizations in history. Since each healthy civilization
in the past was the outward expression of the unique creative genius of the
race, the task of Fascism was to reawaken that genius in the Italian race,
dormant after so many centuries of disunity and misrule, and usher in a new
period of glory and greatness comparable to its earlier flowerings in the Roman
empire and the Renaissance. The result would be a new type of human being, the homo
fascistus, who voluntarily lived not for himself as liberalism intended, or
for the whole of humanity as communism intended, but for the greater good and
higher destiny of the nation. Such `palingenetic' aspirations were no mere
rhetorical devices, let alone calculated propaganda, but manifestations of
Fascism's core myth, which to Fascists themselves was a living reality.
The
precondition of the national rebirth was thus a revolution in culture. Instead
of reflecting, celebrating even, the fragmentation of world-views into a myriad
personal outlooks, private ways of seeing, and idiosyncratic experiences or
values, culture would, so Fascist idealists trusted, once more come to embody
the total vision and ethos of a whole people. Instead of forming a separate
sphere of social life divorced from politics, economics, science, and bracketed
by association with art, religion, and leisure, it would again be inseparable
from them all, nourishing and harmonizing them. Contemporary life itself would
become a living Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art, with the Italian
people both its performers and spectators.
It is the
contention of this article that convinced Fascists who attached importance to
cultural matters shared an understanding (largely intuitive, but sometimes
explicit) of the need for a comprehensive cultural revolution which would act as
both as the corollary and the well-spring of (though not a precondition for) the
`total' political, economic, and social revolution that they believed had been
inaugurated under Mussolini's leadership. In this respect Fascism was
characterized by a consensual core cultural myth, one which corresponded
precisely with its core political myth, that of the regeneration of the national
community in a post-liberal new order.
In the most
general terms, the shared myth of cultural renewal as the underpinning and
expression of national rebirth meant that Fascism's cultural pundits also shared
a vision of what was to replace the `decadent' contemporary culture of
Giolittian Italy. Expressed in a cosmological discourse (which was rarely used
by Fascists themselves), it was to be a culture which would generate a
collective sense of sacred time, one which would protect each Italian from the
invasion of secular, anomic, chronological time. Just as culture allowed members
of `primitive' communities to commute effortlessly between ritual, festive and
`dead', secular time, so Fascist culture would enable Italians to experience the
nation's History as a constantly unfolding higher reality. By participating in
it they would partake in an epic destiny which would give meaning to otherwise
meaningless lives. The linguistic register which such a concept of culture
instinctively summoned up was that of religion: Fascist culture would allow life
to be lived `religiously'.
Testimonies
to the Fascist core myth of cultural renewal
With this
ideal-typical characterization of Fascism's core cultural programme in mind, it
should now possible to read samples of the highly speculative discourse employed
by its spokesmen on cultural matters neither as devious remystifications of
capitalism, nor as mindless exercises in rhetoric or propaganda. Instead this
article invites a reading of them as statements of beliefs which, no matter how
utopian and nebulous, were not only deeply held, but rooted in the cohesive core
myth of national palingenesis which permeated the whole of Fascist thought.
Within the constraints imposed by an academic article a few specimens will have
to stand for hundreds.
An example
of the central role played by the idea of destruction as the prelude to rebirth
in Fascism's core cultural myth is provided by one of the regime's most prolific
and influential spokesmen on cultural issues, the idealist philosopher Giovanni
Gentile. In his inaugural speech to the National Institute of Fascist Culture
made in December 1925 he stated:
Fascism
seems to have littered the field of culture with ruins. And yet in reality its
work has only been one of construction. Nothing of what the past has bequeathed
us has been jettisoned as long as it appealed to the spirit and meant something
to us, and hence formed a stone that could be used in the edifice which the new
Italy has undertaken to construct: it is just that the site has been cleared of
materials which were cluttering it up, and thus impeded the construction work.
And the construction, so ardently awaited and longed for, has begun.[...]
In his
speech Gentile went on to speak at length about the new ethos, the spiritual
unity which is the precondition for a new, unified culture:
We scholars
who have placed our faith in Fascism can turn to those who still stand apart and
refuse to let themselves be blinded by passion, and say to them: `see for
yourselves: this is a new Italian culture, created by Fascism'.
I say a new
culture, because culture is not content, but form: is not the quantity of
knowledge which has been accumulated or disseminated, but spiritual power; it is
not matter, but style. Today in Italy there is, as we have seen, a spiritual
force at work: a vitality which spontaneously tends to pervade and inform every
sphere of life.
In a
discourse which is typical not only of Gentile, but of the attempted
`sacralization of politics' characteristic of Fascism (and generic fascism) as a
whole, Gentile proceeds to refer to refer to the new ethos in terms of
`religion':
What has
come over us to endow us with this sensibility, the sign that new spiritual
needs and new directions are being taken by life and thought?[...] It is a
religious sentiment,[...] one which takes life seriously: really seriously...and
no longer distinguishes doing from talking, deed from thought, literature from
life, reality from programmes, life and death from the triumph of ideals which
we have faithfully served: this is the new spiritual value which Fascism has
planted in the Italian soul: it is to these heights that we are now trying raise
national culture.
A closely
related concept of culture was presented by Forges Davanzati, not an idealist
philosopher, but a leading representative of the Italian National Association
when it merged with Fascism in 1923. The central theme of a talk given to the
Giacomo Venezian Cultural Circle in 1926 was the intimate relationship between
culture and politics. In an allusion to the signatories of Croce's Manifesto of
Anti-Fascist Intellectuals, he agreed with those who contended that culture is
`everything that has a vital sense of creation', but asks:
is it
possible to say that art is something abstract that can really be separated from
what is good politics?[...] Is it possible to admit that art, that speculation,
do not carry with them the best seeds of a race, and are not the expression of a
people? When within the word culture we want to include as well that fresh zone
of creation where the seed of a people blossoms, we no longer see in the fruits
thus produced that aridity, that sterility, that abstraction which men of
culture believe they need to defend against what are made out to be the dangers
of politics. And when, leaving aside so much in the production of art which is
transitory and contingent, we come to the great creative figures, at this point
we link up with that great, ideal lineage in which all the heroes of the spirit
are related, whether they are great captains and the founders of empires, or
great artists and creators of works of the mind.
Even
Giuseppe Bottai, a technocratic modernizer, and hence a completely different
political animal from both Forges Davanzati and Giovanni Gentile in so many
respects, hinted at precisely the same intimate relationship between culture and
(at least for the liberal mentality) unrelated spheres of society in a speech he
made in November 1928 at Pisa University to inaugurate a course in corporative
legislation:
Only a
unified way of thinking, only an ordered culture can establish the relationships
and connections necessary to endow the politics of a ruling class with a truly
national dimension. A great politics is basically no more than a method to think,
study, predispose, and order the relationships between ponderable and
imponderable values which operate in the life of a people; an energy which,
reconnecting the particular with the universal, determines the fundamental
qualities of a historical process and creates, in a unified and unifying
movement, a political style and the character of an epoch.
Operating on
this premise it is not surprising to find Bottai presenting the new state as
founded on Fascism which is primarily a political force, rather than a cultural
one:
It is in
these terms that, as I see it, the problem of culture in the present phase of
Fascism is to be framed. Fascism-as-culture, in which, as we saw,
Fascism-as-action is not denied but integrated, is the foundation of
Fascism-as-State. In our type of State, which is not an arid bureaucratic
construction (whether we are talking about the old bureaucracy or the one now
emerging within the framework of syndicalism), professional skills based on the
mentality of the accountant is not enough. Our State engages the spirit and
conscience of our citizens; it is with their spirit and conscience that they
must operate in order to serve it.
This
conception allows him to see even a course in corporatist legislation in terms
of political and cultural renewal:
It is in
this precise point that, according to me, the role of the university under
Fascism lies: in laying the basis for a living culture, one which creates a
class of men able to provide leadership in politics, science, and art.
The third
example is taken from Balbino Giuliano's chapter `Il fascismo e l'avvenire della
coltura [sic]' in a work entitled portentously Fascist Civilization
published in 1928. A former Nationalist, Giuliano went on to become minister of
national education, a position which he used to impose on university professors
an oath of loyalty to the regime. Though temperamentally very different from
Bottai, a major theme of his argument is the symbiosis between politics and
culture which Fascism has brought about:
The first
development within the new culture is simply this: that today for the first time
the Italian people has understood the need for a really national politics, one
which is really realistic and really idealistic simultaneously, transcending
egoistic interests of class and region.
He goes on
to present Fascism as bringing about a cultural transformation which could bring
new life to every aspect of Italian society:
When we
affirm the divinity of our beautiful Italian nation we fully understand that we
are announcing a religious idea in the true sense of the word, capable of
creating a whole new development in culture, practical and theoretical, via
which we can arrive at new conceptions of God, cosmic reality, and human destiny,
at a new way of ordering our interior life and external social life.
Giuliano
believes that an art which achieves this cosmological function will create a
symbiosis between the Italian people and the Italian state:
Time will
tell whether Italy can succeed, as we said earlier, in resolving the problem
which the Nineteenth century never resolved, in other words whether the new
Fascist culture, which has justified in the name of the spirit both the
legitimacy of the State and the life of its subjects, is able to bring forth
from its depths the new syntheses of life similar to those descending from above
which gradually dissolved during the Renaissance, and by virtue of these
syntheses endow the State with total sanctity through the total sanctification
of life.
It is in
this sense that Giuliano talks of Fascism having brought about a `sacred
synthesis' between the Italian nation and its institutional form, born of the
national uprising which it carried out against the State.
How far this
core myth of culture penetrated Fascist thought can be inferred from an article
published seven years later by M. Scaligero, an obscure figure who later made a
minor contribution to Italy's anti-Semitic campaign. Writing for a special page
which the Fascist daily Il Regime Fascista once a fortnight gave over to
followers of Julius Evola's highly unorthodox `Traditionalist' theory of Fascism,
he makes the following observation concerning the `Fascist function of art':
A true art,
one which rises above the contingent and does not tolerate limitations of a
spatial or temporal character, but is able working within time and space to find
ways of connecting up with the enduringly and authentically spiritual, is above
all the fruit of a superior civilization. Great art has always been underpinned
by the reality of a culture, a tradition, an empire: it has never been the
emanation of a decadent civilization or a period of degeneration: it has always
wanted to express the state of spiritual plenitude, the happiness and warmth of
a life which transcends life itself, and hence has always been a sort of rich
symbology epitomizing an epic moment or time in the solar period of a race or
its emergence, which at first is woven as a myth, as cosmic-religious
representation, and finally culminates with motifs of regality, of mature power,
of supreme authority over things and forms, only to give way to involution,
rhetoric, and decadence thereafter.
And what of
Mussolini himself, so often presented as an ideological bricoleur,
scavenging in the waste-paper bins of `real' thinkers to cobble together the
semblance of a `world-view'? As I suggested earlier, there is ample documentary
evidence (if considered in the light of the myth of palingenetic
ultra-nationalism) that he had more insight into the core ideology of his own
movement than is generally realized. This can be gleaned, for example, from two
speeches which he made in Perugia on his visit there in October 1926. In them
Mussolini alludes to the basic components of Fascism's core cultural myth so
casually that it suggests the umpteenth restatement of deep-seated convictions
rather than rhetorical bluster. In the first, with which he regaled the crowd
gathered in Perugia's town square to hear him, he makes a throw-away remark
emphasizing the gulf which divided Fascism from traditional political movements:
`Perhaps we are the bearers of a new political system; but we are also the
bearers of a new type of civilization.' The next day he visited the town's
Academy of Fine Arts. In his brief reply to the address by its president
Professor Francesco Guardabassi in which he had waxed lyrical about the
importance of art, the Duce stated:
Without art
there is no civilization. I believe that art marks the dawn of every
civilization. When Italy was still divided its unity was expressed in the
renaissance of its art. Italy existed in the world by virtue of this single
glory: the Renaissance. Today Italy is a people with great possibilities ahead
of it and the condition has been realized which all its great men looked forward
to, from Machiavelli to Mazzini. Today there is more: we are about to be united
morally.
Now on a
ground thus prepared a great art can arise which can be traditionalist and at
the same time modern. We must create, otherwise we shall be no more than the
exploiters of an old patrimony: we must create the new art of our times: a
Fascist art.
In such
pronouncements Mussolini is consistent with the various commentators cited above
specifically in identifying Fascism's mission with the three interconnected
ideas: the moral and spiritual unification of the people, the appearance of a
new form of art, and the creation of a new civilization (essentially Italian,
but with the mission of inspiring renewal in Western civilization as a whole).
The
irreducible pluralism of Fascist culture
Fascism thus
possessed a cohesive core myth of imminent cultural renewal. It was to have
three interrelated aspects. First, it would mediate the subjective, `moral'
adherence of the people to the institutions and processes of government which
was the premise of the `ethical', `totalitarian' state in the positive (Gentilean)
sense of the word. Second, it would express the organic unity of the Italian
people and its regeneration as a national community, thus completing the
Risorgimento project of unification so disastrously botched by liberalism. Third,
it would betoken the renewed flowering of the Italian creative genius which had
produced the Roman Empire and the Renaissance, turning Italy into the heartland
of a new type of civilization which would act as a lodestar to other modern
nations of the world which found themselves so mired in crisis. The Fascist
political revolution would thus act as the precondition for, and find fulfilment
in, an all-encompassing cultural revolution: artistic excellence would
complement the outstanding achievements in the economic, technological, social,
and military spheres. Italy would be `great' once again.
It was a
myth which despite its boundless nebulousness at least acquired a certain degree
of concreteness in what it precluded. Just as Fascism's core political myth of
national rebirth allowed a high degree of consensus to exist between Fascists
about what political systems their movement rejected in order to achieve its
revolutionary ends (notably those of liberalism and international socialism), so
its core myth of cultural renewal assured a high level of agreement on what
forms of cultural life the new Italy had to purge itself of, namely everything
which bore the hallmark of their liberal origins. As far as high-brow culture
was concerned, this meant ivory tower elitism, self-indulgent subjectivism,
Bohemianism, hermeticism, the tendency to overspecialization, sterile erudition,
and anything which smacked of an anti-heroic, cynical, pessimistic, or
gratuitously aestheticizing attitude to life cut off from the vitality of `the
people'. On the other, existing popular culture was condemned for its crass
materialism, commercialism, hedonism, vulgarity, triviality, sensationalism, or
banality, all symptoms of a decadence as evident in the slushy romanticism of
escapist love-stories as in the mindless violence of pulp fiction. For the
Fascist the contemporary art (as opposed to modernist art) which had thrived
before the March on Rome was thus as much associated with fragmentation, class
division, and a lack of unifying ideals as were the other spheres of life in the
`old' Italy.
There were
also few ardent Fascists who would dispute the need for the new state to create
institutions and sponsor initiatives to associate more and more of the nation's
existing cultural life with the triumph of Fascism, to stimulate a revival of
creativity in every sphere of cultural production, and to ensure that the
maximum number of Italians were exposed to and felt integrated within the
Fascist experience of life. What could not be resolved so easily were two major
issues: first, how prescriptive, proactive, or interventionist should the new
Fascist state be in cultural affairs when it came to banning `un-Fascist' art
and actually promoting Fascist aesthetics in a prescriptive spirit? Second, what
precisely should constitute Fascist aesthetics? It was the lack of consensus
concerning these two fundamental questions, not the lack of a core theory of
culture, which lies at the root of the Fascist Tower of Babel in aesthetic
matters.
This can be
illustrated by considering a series of articles published in Giuseppe Bottai's Critica
Fascista in 1926-1927. They were written by a motley assortment of artists
and cultural commentators in response to the cryptic allusions to the task of
creating a `Fascist art' made by Mussolini in Perugia in the speech cited
earlier. The contributors included Ardengo Soffici, who started out writing for
Papini's La Voce, went through a Futurist phase, and ended up an advocate
of the classicizing modernism of Novecento; Curzio Malaparte, who passed through
a Novecento phase only to embrace the ultra-ruralist strapaese ideals;
Mario Puccini, a novelist influenced by the late nineteenth century naturalist
Verga; and Filippo Marinetti, founder of the Futurist movement, not to mention a
number of Fascist ministers and high-ranking civil servants.
The articles
are in unison with Fascism's core cultural myth about what the ultimate function
of art should be in the new Italy. Thus Soffici reminds the reader that as early
as September 1922 he had argued in the pages of Gerarchia that Fascism
was not a party, but a `movement aimed at total regeneration', and that it
`tends necessarily towards a vision of the whole where political facts
spontaneously merge with spiritual facts, philosophy mixes with action, reality
with imagination, and thus poetry with politics'. In admittedly far more
grandiose terms, this is precisely the point which Bontempelli makes when he
defends the idea of a `Fascist art'. He starts by conceding that the phrase
would be a nonsense if `"Fascism" were only the name of a party or a
political preference'.
But by
`Fascism' we mean a whole orientation of life, public and private: a total and
perfected order that is at once practical and theoretical, intellectual and
moral, application and spirit. We all agree on this (and those who do not,
simply do not count [my emphasis]. And so it is evident that one can
legitimately speak of `Fascist art' just as one can properly speak of `classical
art' or `romantic art'.[...]
Fascism, a
specifically Mediterranean phenomenon, is the precise historical event which
inaugurates the latest era: the Third Epoch of Human Civilization.[...] Art is
the sensitive instrument that must at once mark off and foster, express and
bring to maturation, the fecundity of the third epoch of civilization: the
Fascist Era.
Similar
allusions to the core Fascist myth of cultural renewal, and to the `total'
function of art as expressing the ethos of the entire Italian people now that it
is being regenerated, can be found in all the essays. Puccini, for example,
assures us that `it may well be that a Fascist art will be born, since the
spirit of the race is by now essentially Fascist'. He goes on to observe that a
Fascist art is one which `improves the race and at the same time expresses it'.
In the next issue Marinetti, in a typically bombastic contribution, associates
Fascist art with `the creative genius of the race', `colonial expansion',
`innovative Italian pride', and everything that is quintessentially Italian, and
hence `virile, bellicose, joyous, optimistic, dynamic, synthetic, simultaneous,
and colourful'. There are also scattered though the essays pointed attacks on
the enemies of Fascist culture: scepticism, pessimism, foreign spiritual values,
trash fiction, immoral plays, primitivism, atheism, the vacuously decorative,
fragmentary, psychoanalytic, and so on.
The problems
start when the reader looks for consensus on what Fascist culture should be and
how the state should act to promote it. For, as is only to be expected, each
essayist defends the merits of his own particular aesthetic as embodying the
true spirit of Fascism. Nor is there any agreement on how best the state can act
to promote Fascist art. Marinetti, the arch-enemy of libraries, museums, and
academies, characteristically implies that nothing need be done by the state
since both the theory and practice of Fascist art are already a reality, since
they came into existence avant la lettre with the Futurist crusade
against `pastism'. Malaparte too pours scorn on the idea of an art `which is
proposed, defended, advanced by push and shove, imposed upon us in a shower of
pamphlets' and produced by `the oh-so-highly disciplined sheep who would accept
a fist in the eye as art, as long as it were handed down to them via the proper
hierarchical channels.' But, after lashing out in typical strapaesano
fashion at the corrupting influence of foreign art, he calls for a truly Italian
art `that has roots in our true, classical and most Italian tradition'. The
first step towards this would be to `clear the field of all that which claims
the right to call itself `Fascist art', suggesting a draconian policy of
censorship and establishing norms of cultural `health' whose logical conclusion
would have been the Italian equivalent of the Nazis' purge of `un-German art'.
Bottai, in
his role as editor of Critica Fascista and arbiter of the debate, comes
to an even more interventionist, dirigiste conclusion. He proposed that
`the development and perfection of artistic culture' be entrusted to the newly
created Italian Academy. This he envisaged as proceeding in a spirit which was
`anti-academic' — i.e. `anti-parasitic and anti-static, dynamic, working,
creative'. Eventually it would be the Academy which would `set the tone and
indicate the paths to be taken by Italian culture (a phrase to be understood in
its broadest sense as nearly synonymous with civilization itself).'
As for the
type of aesthetic to which the Academy might grant official recognition as the
regime's orthodoxy, Bottai clearly felt it unpolitic to express his own growing
predilection for the type of internationalist modernism which he was later to
encourage when he instituted the Bergamo Prize in 1940. Hectored by so many
fundamentally incompatible claims to embody the `true' spirit of Fascism, Bottai
prefers to sit on the fence. Instead of passing judgement, he takes refuge in
wishful thinking. Fascist art, he predicts, `is ready to burst forth from the
deepest roots of the consciousness of the new Italian, the Fascist Italian', but
he concedes that `it is easier for us to say what Fascist art should not
be, rather than what it should be':
We cannot
give decalogues, formulae, maxims, or recipes which would contain the exact
doses of the various ingredients that make up Fascist painting, sculpture,
music, or literature. The creation of Fascist art now requires only artists:
artists who possess creative genius.
In
retrospect Bottai's observation that `at the moment the only great artist of the
regime is its founder, Mussolini' did not bode well for the future of Fascist
culture.
The
failure of the Fascist bid for cultural renewal
In her
analysis of the fate of yet another bid to stimulate the creation of a genuine
Fascist culture, the launching of the arts periodical Corrente di Vita
Giovanile, Ruth Ben-Ghiat shows that a decade after the great debate in the
pages of Critica Fascista the fundamental paradox of Fascist culture was
as far from being resolved as ever. Its founders still aspired to bridge high
art with popular culture in order to awaken the spiritually inert of the new
Italy and so help generate the `new Fascist man'. This time the medium was to be
Realism, not naturalistic realism, but one infused with idealism and heroism.
The article traces how this initiative too came to naught, breeding a
disillusionment amongst its most ardent protagonists which eventually turned
some into the proponents of the Neorealism of the war and post-war years, much
of which still bore the traces of the palingenetic aspirations of the heady days
of the early thirties, but now in communist rather than Fascist key.
Ben-Ghiat
rightly observes that `the redefinition of Realism by the writers of Corrente
can be taken as a symbol of the failure of the regime's cultural policy'. It was
a failure on two distinct levels. First, as we have seen, the core myth of a
total culture to reflect the totality of the Fascist revolution admitted any
number of specific aesthetics, all of which could be claimed by their advocates
to embody the `true' spirit of Fascism. In this sense there is a profound
parallel with the political sphere. The vision of national palingenesis, of the
total regeneration of Italy, similarly admitted many conflicting interpretations:
syndicalist, Dannunzian, Futurist, squadrista, Nationalist, Gentilean,
ruralist, technocratic, Romanizing, Europeanizing, racist, to name only the most
important.
Furthermore,
Mussolini's instinct, conditioned by the deep-seated traditions of Italian
politics and reinforced by the absence of any one powerful Fascist faction to
support him, was not to impose any one version of Fascism, but to operate as a
super-trasformista, co-opting different Fascisms into a loose coalition.
This was as true in the area of culture as in any other sphere. The widespread
impression noted at the outset of this article, that he was happy to accommodate
any activist or ideologue willing to put their backs into pushing the Fascist
juggernaut is thus true. But the reason is not the absence of a core ideology,
but rather the fact that the skeleton of an ideology of national renewal could
be fleshed out in so many conflicting ways, and his temperament led him to
cultivate the proliferation of rival Fascisms rather than put an arbitrary stop
to it by using his authority to dictate a single orthodoxy.
Second, even
if some Darwinistic law had enabled one particular aesthetic or vision of
palingenesis to win out over all others, Fascist cultural policy would still
have failed disastrously. The idea that it is still possible in the twentieth
century to recreate the type of total culture which seemingly existed under the
Pharaohs of ancient Egypt, the Emperors of dynastic China, or the Mayas of
pre-Hispanic America once the forces of secularization, internationalization,
and individualism have wrought their havoc is irremediably utopian.
The Humpty
Dumpty of a fully homogeneous society, even if such a thing ever existed, cannot
be put back together, no matter how many of Caesar's horses and Caesar's men are
sent to the scene of his great fall. Even the attempts by today's fundamentalist
theocracies to keep back the tide of ideological relativism, pluralism, and
fragmentation in societies exposed far less than early twentieth-century Italy
to the faith-corroding onslaught of Westernization has a Canute-like quality.
Mussolini's goal of turning his regime into a `totalitarian' state as a role
model for other nations was doomed from the start to remain a chimera. Equally
flawed was the syllogism which implicitly informed so much Fascist cultural
speculation: `A great civilization produces great art. Fascist Italy is creating
a great civilization. Therefore it will produce great art' (though it would take
a sophisticated exercise in cultural anthropology and art theory to explain why
it was flawed). The upshot is that Fascism remained a chronically disunited,
divided, heterogeneous society till the bitter end. Unsurprisingly, not only did
no great art spontaneously arise under Mussolini's aegis, but specifically
non-Fascist culture continued to be produced, not just when the jerry-built
Fascist edifice collapsed in ruins, but the whole time attempts were being made
to erect it. The doomed project of mounting a huge Universal Exhibition of Rome
in 1942, which came to be known as E'42, or, even more tellingly, E quaranta-mai
(`E 40-never') came to epitomize not the cultural greatness of the new imperial
Italy, but the insoluble aesthetic contradictions and monumental hubris of the
regime's whole concept of a reborn civilization.
Fascism was
not anti-modern. It envisaged an alternative modernity as the solution to the
perceived crisis of civilization, but one which denied one of the fundamental
features of modernization: the pluralization, bastardization, and
cross-fertilization of culture as they intermingle so unpredictably and
inexorably. Despite its totalitarian aspirations, then, what emerged under
Mussolini was not uniformity, but, as we pointed out at the beginning, the
paradoxical situation of `totalitarian pluralism'. However, as has hopefully
been shown, this was not because of the lack of a cohesive cultural ideology,
but because of the intrinsic multivalence and ambiguity of that core ideology
when it came to translating it into concrete terms.
For the
regime's intransigent `believers', though, what was even more intolerable than
the absence of cultural homogeneity, was the fact that instead of the boundless
enthusiasm and dynamism which was meant to characterize the inner life of the homo
fascistus, Fascism had created an all-pervasive apathy and inertia. The
generation of Italians whose individual human potential was to have found
complete expression and fulfilment as citizens of the Third Rome was still-born:
Fascist Italy was a nation of `indifferenti' and `conformisti'.
Even Bottai,
who throughout his many years of unstinting service to the regime had poured so
much idealism and energy into creating a Fascist culture and who officially
maintained his optimism about the imminent regeneration of the nation till the
very end, was forced to admit in the privacy of his journal the gap between the
ideal and the reality:
I look
around me, and it seems to me that the little bit of social life which the
Mussolinian regime has allowed to survive is kept going by the same provisional,
fragile equilibrium which regulates the inner life of each of us. There is no
individuality left any more to express itself in this inarticulate community
which is so close-knit it has reached a point of stasis. There is neither
personality, nor seriousness. It is erroneous to believe that the rule of a
single person, protracted beyond the limits permissible for a dictatorship,
destroys individual values so as to foster collective ones. It destroys both.[...]
The dictatorship has devoured itself.
E.g. both Philip Morgan, Italian Fascism 1919-1945, Macmillan, London, 1995; John Whittam, Fascist Italy, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1995 ignore cultural issues entirely, while even scholarly studies such as E.R. Tannenbaum, Fascism in Italy. Society and Culture 1922-45, Basic Books, New York, 1972 and A. Lyttleton, The Seizure of Power. Fascism in Italy 1919-1929, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 1987, ch. 14 make no attempt to identify a basic theory underlying Fascist cultural phenomena. Nor is the reader given much sense of the existence of such a theory from multi-author treatments of the subject, such as R. J. Golsan (ed.), Fascism, Aesthetics, Culture, University Press of New England, 1992, or the two special issues of periodicals devoted to the subject, Stanford Italian Review, Vol. 8, Nos. 1-2, 1990, `Fascism and Culture' and Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 31, No. 2, 1996 `The Aesthetics of Fascism'.
The refreshing exception to this generalization is the essay published in the latter collection by Ruth Ben-Ghiat called `Italian Fascism and the Aesthetics of the "Third Way" (Ibid., pp. 293-316), which emphasizes the fascist bid to create a new type of total culture. In addition I must draw attention to M. Affron and M. Antliff (eds) Fascist Visions. Art and Ideology in France and Italy (Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1997), which went to press only after I had finished the present article. Underlying this important collection of essays is a concept of the vision of culture adopted by generic fascism which corroborates and illustrates the one expounded in this article to a remarkable degree: the essay by Marla
Stone, `The State as Patron Making Official Culture in Fascist Italy' introduces the concept of `hegemonic pluralism' which is profoundly congruent with the present article. (Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi's Fascist Spectacle. The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini's Italy, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1997, and Mabel Berezin's Making the Fascist Self, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1997, similarly unavailable at the time of writing, both indirectly provide lavish documentation of the centrality of palingenetic myth to the concrete measures taken by Fascism to create a new type of culture. However, neither make it central to the conceptual framework of their investigation.)
The catalogue to the Anni Trenta exhibition held in Milan in 1982 (ed. A. Pansera, Nuove Edizioni Gabriele Mazzotta, Milan) is one of the most comprehensive collection of essays and images so far to have appeared, but again there is no attempt to identify a cohesive Fascist cultural theory.
Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 1981.
Quoted in P. V. Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso, Laterza, Bari, 1975, p. 103.
John A. Davis and Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini and Italian Fascism, Warwick Teaching Videos, University of Warwick, Coventry, 1991.
John Whittam, Fascist Italy, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1995, p. 1.
On the essential heterogeneity of ideological communities within political movements, however strong the shared illusion of their homogeneity, see G. M. Platt, Thoughts on a theory of collective action: language, affect, and ideology in revolution, in M. Albin (ed.), New Directions in Psychohistory, Lexington Books, Lexington, Massachusets, 1980.
For a more detailed exposition of the methodological premises outlined here see R. Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, Routledge, London, 1993, ch. 1.
See R. Griffin, Fascism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1995, which gives an extended account of this theory, as well as providing comprehensive documentary evidence for the presence of the ideological matrix it identifies in the writings of inter-war and post-war ideologues widely associated with fascism. For an understanding of how the theory of palingenetic ultra-nationalism forms part of an emerging consensus on the nature of fascism, consciously advocated by some and unwittingly applied by others, see R. Griffin International Fascism. Theories, Causes, and the New Consensus , Arnold, London, 1998.
For a classic example see G. Allardyce, What fascism is not: thoughts of the deflation of a concept, The American History Review, 84, 2, 1979.
Quoted in Griffin, Fascism, p. 29.
See E. Gentile, Il mito dello stato nuovo, Laterza, Bari, 1982, pp. 103-6.
For a more detailed account of the implications of this ideal type for an understanding of Fascism and generic fascism, see Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, chs 2, 3; Griffin, Fascism, General Introduction.
See Russell A. Berman, The aestheticization of politics: Walter Benjamin and the Avant-Garde, Stanford Italian Review, Vol. 8, Nos. 1-2, 1990, `fascism and culture', pp. 35-52.
The crucial importance to the Fascist regime of the `art of secular celebrations' had already been noted by Herbert Schneider in his study of the regime published in 1928: see H. W. Schneider, The Making of the Fascist State, Howard Fertig, New York, 1968 (1928), pp. 216-230.
See Maria Stone, `Staging fascism: The Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution', Journal of Contemporary History, 28, 1993, pp. 215-241. For a contemporary source on this exhibition see D. Alfieri e Luigi Freddi (eds), Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, PNF, Rome, 1933.
See Tim Benton, Rome Reclaims its Empire, in David Britt (ed.), Art and Power. Europe and the Dictators, Hayward Gallery, London, 1995, pp. 120-129. On the way the essays in this catalogue corroborate the importance of an essentially modern (and modernist) project of cultural renewal in the Fascist, Nazi, and Soviet regimes see R. Griffin, Totalitarian Art and the Nemesis of Modernity, Oxford Art Review, 19, 2, 1996.
See D. Y. Ghirardo, Città Fascista: Surveillance and Spectacle, Journal of Contemporary History, 31, 1996, (special issue: The Aesthetics of Fascism), pp. 347-372; D. Y. Ghirardo, City and Theatre: the Rhetoric of Fascist Architecture, Stanford Italian Review, Vol. 8, Nos. 1-2, 1990, `Fascism and Culture', pp. 165-194.
Stefano Cavazza, Piccole Patrie. Feste popolari tra regione e nazione durante il fascismo, Il Mulino, Bologna, 1997.
See particularly E. Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1996.
By contrast it is central to the `Gramscian' diagnosis of contemporary history put forward by the Nouvelle Droite strand of neo-fascist ideology that `cultural hegemony' has to be gained before the political and social transformations they long for can take place. See Griffin, Fascism, pp. 346-51.
Though it is by currents within post-war Fascism: Marco Revelli, La nuova destra, in F. Ferraresi (ed.), La destra radicale, Feltrinelli, Milan, 1984, pp. 119-214. See too R. Griffin, Revolts against the modern world: The blend of literary and historical fantasy in the Italian New Right, Literature and History, 11, 1, 1985.
Cf. M. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, Harcourt, New York, 1959. For a more detailed exposition of some of these ideas see Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, pp. 186-200.
See Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy.
Giovanni Gentile, Fascismo e cultura, Fratelli Treves Editori, Milan, 1928, ch. IV, pp. 53-8.
Forges Davanzati, Fascismo e cultura, R. Bemporad e Figli, Florence, 1926, pp. 30-1.
Giuseppe Bottai, Cultura e azione, reprinted in R. Bartolozzi and R. del Giudice (eds), Giuseppe Bottai. Scritti, Capelli, Bologna, 1965, pp. 64-8.
In G. L. Pomba (ed.), La civiltà fascista, Torinese Unione Tipografica Editoriale, Turin, 1928, pp. 195-196, 205.
Ibid. p. 191
M. Scaligero, Funzione fascista dell'arte, first published in Regime Fascista, 18 Jan. 1935, reprinted in M. Tarchi and J. Evola (eds) Diorama filosofico. Problemi dello spirito nell'etica fascista. Antologia della pagina speciale `Regime fascista' diretta da Julius Evola, Edizioni Europa, Rome, 1974, pp. 221-3.
E. and D. Susmel (eds), Omnia Opera di Benito Mussolini, La Fenice, Florence, 1951-81, 8, pp. 228-30. It is worth reading too Mussolini's introduction to Pomba, Civiltà Fascista.
On the prevalence of the Fascist sense of a generalized `crisis of Western civilization' see Pier Giorgio Zunino, L'ideologia del fascismo, Il Mulino, Bologna, 1985, ch. 6.
For an excellent case-study in the fierce critique of pre- and non-Fascist culture offered by a group of Fascist idealists who looked to art (this time in `realist' key) to unite the people to the regime and create the `new man', see R. Ben-Ghiat, The politics of realism: Corrente di Vita Giovanile and the youth culture of the 1930s, Stanford Italian Review, 8, 1-2, 1990, pp. 139-164.
34.
The principal institutions created by Fascism to regulate cultural
production included the Istituto Nazionale Fascista di Cultura (1925) (renamed
Istituto Nazionale di Cultura Fascista); L'Unione Cinematografica Educativa or
LUCE (1925); Ente Italiano Audizione Radiofoniche (1928); Accademia d'Italia
(1929); the Scuola di Mistica Fascista Sandro Mussolini (1930); Gruppi
Universitari Fascisti (independent from 1926); Enciclopedia Italiana (1925);
Corporazione dello Spettacolo (1930); Corporazione degli Intellettuali (originally
the National Syndicate of Intellectual Work, then the Confederazione di
Professionisti e degli Artisti); Comitato Nazionale per le Arti Popolari (1932);
Ministero di Cultura Popolare (1937) which grew out Mussolini's Press Office;
Opera Nazionale Balilla (1926) (merged into Gioventù Italiana del Littorio in
1937). A major role in generating and coordinating popular art was played by the
Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro (1925).
For a full English translation of some of the most important of these articles see J. Schnapp and B. Spackmann, Selections from the Great Debate on Fascism and Culture: Critica Fascista, Stanford Italian Review, 8, 1-2, 1990, pp. 235-72.
Ibid. p. 239
Ibid, pp. 248-9.
Ibid., p. 258.
Ibid. pp. 261-2.
Ibid. p. 255.
Ibid. 269.
Ibid., p. 272.
Ibid. p. 266.
Ibid. p. 267.
Ibid.
Ibid. p. 163.
On this crucial aspect of Mussolini's role as leader of Fascism see D. D. Roberts, The Syndicalist Tradition and Italian Fascism, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1979, ch. 8, `The varieties of Italian Fascism'.
Contrast the way in Nazi Germany Expressionism eventually was judged to be `un-German' despite the vociferousness of its proponents. See Brandon Taylor, Post-Modernism in the Third Reich, in B. Taylor and W. van der Will, The Nazification of Art, The Winchester Press, Winchester, 1990, pp. 130-2.
For a recent study of totalitarianism which rightly underlines the hopelessness of the bid to create any more than the façade of total conformity and consensus within the population of a modern state see Simon Tormey, Making Sense of Tyranny, Manchester University Press, 1995.
See Britt, Art and Power, p. 131, and L'Esposizione Universale di Roma. Utopia e scenario del regime, Archivio di Stato, Venice, 1987.
The allusion is to Moravia's novel Gli indifferenti and Bertolucci's film Il conformista, both of which can be read as allegories of the vacuousness at the core of Fascist society.
Diary entry for 5 September 1942, G. Bottai, Venti anni e un giorno, Milan, 1949, cited in A. J. De Grand, Bottai e la cultura fascista, Laterza, Bari, 1978, p. 244.
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