A Pact with Vichy

Abstract

Angelo Tasca, a pivotal figure in the political history of twentieth-century Italy, and indeed the history of Europe, is frequently overshadowed by his Fascist opponent Benito Mussolini or his Socialist and Communist colleagues (Antonio Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti). Yet, as this biography reveals, Tasca—also known as Serra, A. Rossi, André Leroux, and XX—was in fact a key political player in the first half of the twentieth century and an ill-fated representative of the age of political extremes he helped to create. In this book, readers meet the Italian intellect and politician with fresh eyes as the text demystifies Tasca’s seemingly bizarre trajectory from revolutionary Socialist to Communist to supporter of the Vichy regime. The book demonstrates how Tasca, an indefatigable cultural operator and Socialist militant, tried all his life to maintain his commitment to scientific analysis in the face of the rise of fascism and Stalinism, but his struggle ended in a personal and political defeat that seemed to contradict all his life when he lent his support to the Vichy government. After his expulsion from the Italian Communist Party as a result of his refusal to conform to Stalinism, Tasca reinvented his life in Paris, where he participated in the intense political debates of the 1930s. His political choices were motivated by the desperate attempt to find an alternative between Nazism and Stalinism.