Introduction

Abstract

The legacy of Fascism continues to cast a shadow over modern Italy. This is demonstrated by the ample coverage of its history in scholarly and popular media; and the sorts of questions about coercion or complicity which they have provoked among contemporary German historians have analogues in the case of Fascist Italy.1 Daniel Goldhagen’s controversial anthropological reconstruction of German ‘commonsense’ in the Nazi period, presents an argument for the eventual rise of the Nazis drawing on a number of factors, principal among them a deep-seated anti-Semitism spread wide in German society. According to this argument, anti-Semitism combined with other factors such as a smarting defeat in the Great War, the crippling economic consequences of that military defeat and the settlement at the Treaty of Versailles, which with a widening of suffrage created conditions sufficient to enable the acceptance of a profoundly anti-democratic model of consensus. Out of this emerged a generation of willing executioners. Few historians would accept that things were quite so simple, but the debate the book engendered has had repercussions outside of German history. The Italian case is different in many ways from the German one, not least in that the Fascists achieved power far earlier, and the common wisdom brings anti-Semitism into the Italian model far later, dating it to the Race Laws of summer and autumn 1938.