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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
deepest look at fascist italy,
This review is from: Mussolini's Italy (Hardcover)
RJB Bosworth is likely the pre-eminent scholar exploring Benito Mussolini and Fascist Italy today; his previous biography of Mussolini himself is simply masterful, complete, satisfying scholarship in every way. In this substantial book, he leaves Mussolini the man himself to one side, and instead examines Italy and the Italians as a nation (or, as becomes clear, several very different regions inside one set of borders), how life was lived under Fascism, what Fascism meant to them, and how it was interpreted and imposed from above.
Italy following World War I remained the very least of the Great Powers, impotent politically, weak militarily, essentially shunted aside by the other Allied powers at Versailles now that Italy's usefulness as a co-combatant was over; the nation was still incompletely assimilated and although technically united as one country since the Risorgimento, was in fact a clump of disparate regions, some poor but beginning to develop (the north, principally), some more poor and living roughly no better than had been done 200 years prior - besides Naples, eveerything south of Rome. Fascism offered a type of nationalist pride, promised economic development, modernization, and swung between its socialist beginnings and a syndicalist corporatism, depending on the speaker, the region, and the year. If the people couldn't read the newspapers, and most of them could not, at least the speeches sounded serious. And there were a lot of speeches. In practice, Italy's client-based political, social, and financial arrangements changed little. Local party bosses ruled in whatever way was most natural to them as people, occasionally benign, occasionally harshly; bosses feuded among themselves to defend their turf or their clients; little order was imposed from the top, with Mussolini nowhere as decisive an influence as has been portrayed. Fascism's details and program were, over 25 years, changed and modified and contradicted, imposed unevenly and sometimes ineffectively. Sometimes, questionable behavior would get one in serious trouble; sometimes, not so much. Sometimes the secret police were everywhere (or, more commonly, citizens would turn one another in); but just as often, long sentences were commuted after a few weeks or months. What would have been a concentration camp sentence in Germany would become the internal exile of a Milanese to a tiny paese in Calabria (though this was no less objectionable, apparently, to the sentenced Italian). Mussolini's vision of a united, iron-fisted machine was a joke, in reality a keystone kops affair, the image a mirage concocted by copious use of levers and pulleys, the propaganda and outsized personality cult in retrospect an almost laughable farce. The Italians as a people generally did the minimum they thought necessary to stay on the good side of their patrons political and social, as they have done for 2500 years, and tried not to color too much outside the lines. This does not make Fascist Italy or Mussolini one of the good guys; far from it. The regime could be arbitrary, cruel, murderous (especially in its colonial administration), and obviously on the wrong side when it counted most. But by the time World War II broke out, Hitler's Germany completely dominated Italy, the Nazis being everything the Fascists wanted to be and were portrayed to be (but fell far short of achieving) and in spades. Bosworth covers the war itself only in passing, taking the thread of the story up again with the final, dismal years of Fascism as the Salo Republic, short-lived puppet state in the north of Italy erected by the Germans only to facilitate local order, chase down the growing partisan movement, and persecute the local Jewish population for the two years the Allies slogged up the Italian boot to the final end of the war. Bosworth examines people, places, mindsets, Fascist programs, their implementation or failure to implement; relationships with other nations, contrasting colonial policies of the Monarchy and under Fascism (no differences, basically - equally racist and blinkered); and much, much more. This book will give the reader genuine insight into the cardboard construct of Fascist Italy. It is an outstanding piece of social history in evey way.
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