History: In the wake of his important biography of Benito Mussolini, RJB Bosworth has produced a complementary work, designed to illustrate the nature of life in Italy under fascism.
This is an ambitious goal, all the more so since Bosworth uses this latest book to address a number of significant concerns, as well as reflect on the ongoing debates on the nature of Italian fascism and the existence of a transnational, generic fascism.
Bosworth takes Mussolini seriously. Gone, finally, are the views of Mussolini as a clown and fascism as comic opera - views based, ultimately, on racist assumptions about "Mediterranean peoples" and wartime caricature. Bosworth also warns against the recent willingness - especially evident in Italy - to overlook fascist crimes. Mussolini and his followers were as savage as they had to be in order to destroy opposition and keep themselves in power. In Italy this resulted in some 3,000 political murders (with violence being directed mostly against the Left and, in the north-eastern border, against Slovenes). A much higher death toll was to result from Italian aggression in Libya, Ethiopia, Spain and, of course, Mussolini's intervention in the second World War. Bosworth argues, correctly, that the fact that Hitler's regime was more murderous should not allow one to forget fascism's victims.
Bosworth, finally, is sceptical about the efforts of cultural historians both to make sense of fascist doctrine, by trying to analyse its enormous literary and propagandistic output, and to relate it to the other authoritarian regimes that proliferated across Europe after 1919. He views fascism, controversially, as a uniquely Italian phenomenon: the product of nationalist ambition unmatched by economic and military power; of the ghost of imperial Rome in a half-finished Italy undermined by local and class rivalries, where most still spoke local dialects and did not participate in politics; of the Bolshevik threat and the memory of 600,000 men who had died in the Great War.
Mussolini's Italy charts fascism's relationship with the Italian people from 1915 to 1945. It follows the careers of Mussolini's more important collaborators but also, more intriguingly, the relationship of "average" Italians with the regime and the Duce. The result is mixed. Each period in the regime's history is interpreted in the light of fascist leaders' actions and the reactions of ordinary Italians. At the end of each chapter the same conclusion is reached. Fascism, ideologically empty, was the means by which the frustrated elements of Italy's war generation had seized power and now ruled Italy in, ironically, traditional fashion. This included the establishment of complex patronage networks, accommodation of the powerful (the royal family, the army, industry, the Catholic Church), and intimidation of the weak (workers, peasants, dissenting intellectuals). It was only thanks to this time-honoured approach to politics that fascism survived for so long; as it sought to manipulate ordinary Italians, so too did these men and women seek to manipulate it for their own ends. Whatever consensus existed was the result not of a cultural and social revolution, but rather of a willingness to be corrupted, to turn a blind eye, to not be, as fascists incessantly claimed to be, totalitarian. It was a regime endured, not cherished, by the bulk of the population.
It was also the case, Bosworth argues, that the enormous gulf between fascist rhetoric and reality made leading fascists, especially Mussolini, nervous about their future, leading the movement down the path of radicalisation, always hoping to stumble on to a way of making their "revolution" permanent. When no more change could be brought about domestically, it was sought in colonial and European expansion, and in the adoption of a racist posture borrowed from Hitler's Germany. The result was a catastrophic war for which Italy was not prepared, which Italians did not want, and which spelled the doom of the regime and its leadership.
Mussolini's Italy is very long, since it contains three different narrative strands: events, how Mussolini's coterie shaped and profited from them, and how ordinary Italians felt about it all. This means that its most original aspect - the tracing of popular attitudes towards fascism - has to compete for space with the rest. Moreover, this strand is based largely on police reports, which, by definition, illustrate dissent. Bosworth sprinkles the book with characters who appear briefly, fall foul of the police, and are not mentioned again - but the reader is not given any certainty that they were the rule and not the exception. This is a problem of methodology.
More serious is the rejection of much recent research on fascism, which leaves out some valuable explanations for its evolution, and radicalisation, notably the notion of a second generation of fascists who, raised by the regime, and accepting its premises, sought to carve out a role in a society dominated by the old, corrupt, and ultimately - by its professed standards - un-fascist leadership.
Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses lectures in the Department of History at NUI Maynooth and is currently a Government of Ireland Research Fellow in the Humanities and Social Sciences
Mussolini's Italy By RJB Bosworth Allen Lane, 661pp. £25