Fascist Rule Research Articles

The Class Without Consciousness: Fascism's ‘New’ Workers and the 1942 World's Fair of Rome

In 1936 Mussolini's fascist regime embarked upon an ambitious plan to hold the 1942 World's Fair in a newly built city south of Rome. At the peak of construction in 1939–40 an army of 5,000 workers laboured to complete the city in ‘record time’. The labour utilised to build the new city became a critical public spectacle in the final years of fascist rule, highlighted in films, covered by the press and featured on the itineraries of Rome's most important visitors. This activity was guided not just by the construction of buildings but also the purported fabrication of a distinct Italian fascist worker subjectivity. With the aim of fashioning pliant workers lacking in proverbial ‘class consciousness’, fascist thinkers publicly exhibited Italian workers as fixed within a ‘natural’ hierarchy of ancient Roman origin. In these renderings of the ‘new’ worker, class antagonisms in the modern division of labour were replaced with illustrations of exemplary sacrifice to familial and interpersonal authority with the function of subsuming ‘class interests’ to both employers and the state. In spite of these narratives, fascist aims regularly encountered limits when confronted by real workers, as yielded by an examination of responses to the regime's mandates within the built environment. Although workers never fully embodied this new ‘interiority’, the regime was successful in grounding cultural norms in a constrained field of practice, generating a framework for the domination of labour.

Amerikos lietuvių konferencijos 1943 metais vaidmuo

The Lithuanian-American Conference that took place 1943.9.1-2 in Pittsburgh was referred to as the Lithuanian-American Congress in later historiography. Since delegates from the influential and patriotic U.S. Lithuanian nationalist movement did not participate in that conference, it had less weightier consequences than a Congress might have had. The Conference was called in response to the successes of the Allies (the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain) on the European Front and in response to the emerging opportunity to liberate Lithuania from the Nazi occupation. The fact that Leonardas Šimutis, Pijus Grigaitis and other stalwarts of the Lithuanian-American Council (ALT) took the lead in calling this conference reflected their desire to retain and strengthen their own position as leaders of the diaspora community in the struggle for Lithuanian independence. In that period the Lithuanian nationalists in America attempted to unify their ranks so they could effectively participate themselves in efforts to reestablish Lithuania’s independence. But it proved difficult to unite all the Lithuanian patriotic forces in the United States, mainly because the diaspora nationalists (first of all the editor of the weekly “Dirva” newspaper Kazys Karpius) felt offended by the stalwarts of the Lithuanian American Council (ALT), particularly the socialists. The latter did not support President Antanas Smetona, demanded that upon liberation a “democratic Lithuania” be established, incessantly castigated the previous authoritarian regime, and failed to invite the nationalists’ political organization, the Union to Free Lithuania, to the conference. The still active Lithuanian Communists in the United States fully rejected participation in the conference, which their newspapers “Vilnis” and “Laisvė” denounced as an effort to revive “Fascist rule in Lithuania.”[...]

Designing the Latina landscape: graphic images of Italian Fascism

ABSTRACTThe Latina Province in Italy is synonymous with Italian Fascism. This connection is manifest in the different design perspectives that contributed to the formation of the region’s visual character during the 21 years of Fascist rule between 1922–43. Corporativist urbanism framed how Fascism’s stories, myths and fables were told through numerous graphic objects that embellished new towns during the region’s reclamation. Through the lens of graphic design as urban design, this study provides a comprehensive understanding of how the Latina landscape was conceived, planned and made at the macro, meso and micro scale.

Religion as Resistance: Negotiating Authority in Italian Libya

Religion as Resistance: Negotiating Authority in Italian Libya

Alessandro Clericuzio, Tennessee Williams and Italy: A Transcultural Perspective

Alessandro Clericuzio’s Tennessee Williams and Italy: A Transcultural Perspective traces the work of the young American playwright’s growing international reputation against the currents of cultural history in a conflicted Italy struggling to emerge from post-war Fascist rule.

GROUP PORTRAIT: THE ISPETTRICI NAZIONALI OF THE ITALIAN FASCIST PARTY, 1937–1943

AbstractThe years of fascist rule in Italy saw an unprecedented mass political mobilization of women, a mobilization that has, to date, been little studied by historians. This article focuses on the role of the ispettrici nazionali – the highest rank that women ever reached in the fascist party hierarchy. It attempts to piece together a ‘group portrait’ of these hitherto unstudied female hierarchs, who were appointed from 1937 onwards to form a group leadership for the fasci femminili – the women's section of the party and the only way that women could join it. The article investigates who these women were, how they managed to rise to this prominent position, their ideas and motivations, and their role in organizing and mobilizing millions of female party members for political campaigns and for the war effort.

Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism [Book Review

In the current political climate, one may assume that the anti-intellectual, anti-expertise, anti-truth wave which is sweeping the globe, and that the rise of the far right necessarily spells an end for science-informed policy. The author of this book shows that this assumption is — for better or worse — misplaced. The author argues that agricultural science came to promote and embody fascist ideals in Portugal, Italy, and Germany in the early twentieth century. As a tool for engineering livestock and crops that would sustain and secure these aspiring empires, the author demonstrates how the organisms produced by scientists served to shape the narratives and politics of these regimes. The book begins with an introduction to the central premise of the book, which the author attributes to Canguilhem and Foucault: that biopolitics, the management and control of life, were central to fascism. The author then expands this account to encompass how new “techno-scientific organisms,” such as purpose-bred crops and animals, themselves interacted to promote and produce fascism. While biopolitics has understandably focused on human biopolitics in action under fascist rule, most infamously the Nazi’s experiment in human eugenics, the author develops an inquiry into the way that plants and animals informed and reinforced social change. The book is laid out in two primary sections. Section one, “Nation,” describes the national programs for Mussolini’s Italy and Salazar’s Portugal, and potatoes and the eponymous “fascist pigs” in the German Reich. The second section, “Empire,” focuses on the relationship between fascist techno-science and the imperial ambitions of each regime. Fascist Pigs offers more questions of science and politics than it answers, but in a style reminiscent of the opening book of a saga. This is an accessible and important book that I would recommend for students of science, technology, and society as well as political science, and to philosophers of science and historians.

Fascism as Action through Time (Or How It Can Happen Here)

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how fascism may be identified by its actions, the stages through which a fascist rule takes power, and how to recognize it before it does so. The thesis is that a fascist takeover of a democratic government is rapid and unexpected. Its goal is a revolutionary reversal of representative government in the name of the people, while it accomplishes the opposite: a single-party corporate regime that replaces individual liberty with subtle, bureaucratic, and overt types of coercion. Rather than generate a generic definition of the many types of fascism, it is more useful to study how it affects the lives of ordinary people, the milieu out of which it develops, and what its precursors look like. Understanding fascism entails studying it from the point of view of those who lived under it and recorded their experiences, as well as from the analytic perspectives of social scientists. As Robert O. Paxton observes: “The fascist phenomenon was poorly understood at the beginning in part because it was unexpected.”1 We are facing the question again in 2017 with the surprise election of Donald Trump as the forty-fifth president of the United States by a minority of the popular vote and the evident support of the white nationalist milieu. Paxton proposes a five-stage theory for understanding fascism in its many varieties. A developmental sequence is proposed against which current events in the United States may be assessed.

Black Bread by Peter Bush

more engaged with the Russian spirit than with the country’s quotidian concerns. The novel almost floats; we are engaged from beginning to end, and one couldn’t find a better companion than Rostov. Rita D. Jacobs New York City Emili Teixidor. Black Bread. Trans. Peter Bush. Windsor, Ontario. Biblioasis. 2016. 393 pages. There is nothing more profound than the realization of what war does well beyond its official end. Peter Bush has given us a poetic translation of Emili Teixidor’s novel Black Bread, in which each line seems to be given complete attention and where Teixidor has loaded line after line with both wonderful and terrible beauty. From the opening scene to the finale, the narrative of war and chaos and coming-of-age is underpinned with what seems an eternal forest—a natural world that holds secrets and desires and will ultimately outlive all the pettiness that is humanity. Though the narrative of Black Bread is based in Catalonia just after the Spanish Civil War, it is a timeless setting for contemporary humanity. This is a novel that will stick with us because of the continued relevance of divisive social orders in addition to the complexities of religion and politics. Telling a story of war, class divisions , sexuality, religious doctrine, executions , and fascist rule from the point of view of a young boy is, perhaps, one of the best ways to deliver a litany of existential questions without a hint of preachiness . It unfolds flawlessly, through honest characters, scenes, and descriptions of rural Spain. From the start, we are folded into a familiar world—the close relationships that children have as they grow up together; the hard-working family; the grandmother with infinite wisdom. Ultimately, Emili Teixidor’s novel allows us to see aspects of ourselves by situating us in moments of sympathy for the speaker . Teixidor’s linguistic brushstrokes paint everything we need in order to see ourselves just as the speaker finally does himself: that we are, in the end, always somehow at war within ourselves. That we are all doomed to someday grapple with moments so uncomfortable and arresting that we might find ourselves completely changed into something we no longer recognize. Sarah Warren University of North Texas Sachin Kundalkar. Cobalt Blue. Trans. Jerry Pinto. New York. The New Press. 2016. 240 pages. The entrance of an unknown stranger who radically impacts the lives of other characters is a commonly used fictional device. Consider Pasolini’s Teorema, where the entrance of an opaque character called “The Visitor” radically changes the day-to-day existence of five characters. Sachin Kundalkar’s Marathi novel, Cobalt Blue, brilliantly translated by Jerry Pinto, deploys a similar device. The everyday and erotic lives of two characters, a gay man named Tanay and his sister Anuja, are completely altered after a young artist , whose backstory remains shrouded in mystery, rents an upstairs room in their parental home. The novel, divided into two parts (“Tanay” and “Anuja”), depicts the profound impact this stranger has on the two characters after he disappears without explanation. Tanay’s narrative is an imaginary, emotionally intense dialogue between an “I” and a “you.” Anuja’s narrative consists of diary entries where she tries to reconstruct her life after her lover leaves her. What unites these two narratives, which often show us the same events from different perspectives, is the polyvalent use of blue. Blue functions as a marker for the alluring difference of the other, for example when Tanay says: “You had a way of looking at things which seemed sharp, perceptive , cobalt blue.” The color signifies an incorporation of the other within the self when Tanay ruminates on relationships: “If nothing else,” he says, “you adopt some of the other person’s habits.” Almost as an afterthought, he reveals how his beloved is World Literature in Review 80 WLT JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2017 ...

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more engaged with the Russian spirit than with the country’s quotidian concerns. The novel almost floats; we are engaged from beginning to end, and one couldn’t find a better companion than Rostov. Rita D. Jacobs New York City Emili Teixidor. Black Bread. Trans. Peter Bush. Windsor, Ontario. Biblioasis. 2016. 393 pages. There is nothing more profound than the realization of what war does well beyond its official end. Peter Bush has given us a poetic translation of Emili Teixidor’s novel Black Bread, in which each line seems to be given complete attention and where Teixidor has loaded line after line with both wonderful and terrible beauty. From the opening scene to the finale, the narrative of war and chaos and coming-of-age is underpinned with what seems an eternal forest—a natural world that holds secrets and desires and will ultimately outlive all the pettiness that is humanity. Though the narrative of Black Bread is based in Catalonia just after the Spanish Civil War, it is a timeless setting for contemporary humanity. This is a novel that will stick with us because of the continued relevance of divisive social orders in addition to the complexities of religion and politics. Telling a story of war, class divisions , sexuality, religious doctrine, executions , and fascist rule from the point of view of a young boy is, perhaps, one of the best ways to deliver a litany of existential questions without a hint of preachiness . It unfolds flawlessly, through honest characters, scenes, and descriptions of rural Spain. From the start, we are folded into a familiar world—the close relationships that children have as they grow up together; the hard-working family; the grandmother with infinite wisdom. Ultimately, Emili Teixidor’s novel allows us to see aspects of ourselves by situating us in moments of sympathy for the speaker . Teixidor’s linguistic brushstrokes paint everything we need in order to see ourselves just as the speaker finally does himself: that we are, in the end, always somehow at war within ourselves. That we are all doomed to someday grapple with moments so uncomfortable and arresting that we might find ourselves completely changed into something we no longer recognize. Sarah Warren University of North Texas Sachin Kundalkar. Cobalt Blue. Trans. Jerry Pinto. New York. The New Press. 2016. 240 pages. The entrance of an unknown stranger who radically impacts the lives of other characters is a commonly used fictional device. Consider Pasolini’s Teorema, where the entrance of an opaque character called “The Visitor” radically changes the day-to-day existence of five characters. Sachin Kundalkar’s Marathi novel, Cobalt Blue, brilliantly translated by Jerry Pinto, deploys a similar device. The everyday and erotic lives of two characters, a gay man named Tanay and his sister Anuja, are completely altered after a young artist , whose backstory remains shrouded in mystery, rents an upstairs room in their parental home. The novel, divided into two parts (“Tanay” and “Anuja”), depicts the profound impact this stranger has on the two characters after he disappears without explanation. Tanay’s narrative is an imaginary, emotionally intense dialogue between an “I” and a “you.” Anuja’s narrative consists of diary entries where she tries to reconstruct her life after her lover leaves her. What unites these two narratives, which often show us the same events from different perspectives, is the polyvalent use of blue. Blue functions as a marker for the alluring difference of the other, for example when Tanay says: “You had a way of looking at things which seemed sharp, perceptive , cobalt blue.” The color signifies an incorporation of the other within the self when Tanay ruminates on relationships: “If nothing else,” he says, “you adopt some of the other person’s habits.” Almost as an afterthought, he reveals how his beloved is World Literature in Review 80 WLT JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2017 woven into his perception of self: “Yesterday , when a cobalt blue smudge of the wall ended up on my hand, I wiped it on my trousers without thinking.” Blue operates as a cipher of loss like the blue paint drying on the floor in Tanay’s “museum of broken things” or the “stream...

Race, Religion, and Jewish Identity in the Operas of Fascist Italy

Race, Religion, and Jewish Identity in the Operas of Fascist Italy Jesse Rosenberg (bio) As wartime allies and ideological kin, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany are firmly linked in many people’s minds. In assessing the policies and attitudes toward Jews in these countries in the years after World War I, however, the tendency of many historians has been to focus on the striking differences between them—differences deeply rooted in the prior history of the two countries. In the decades before the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF) (National Fascist Party) entered government in 1922, Italian history offers no example of a clamorous antisemitic movement analogous to those that emerged in Germany and elsewhere in northern Europe; no full-scale polemical writings such as Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century) by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Richard Wagner’s son-in-law; no episodes comparable to, or with the international resonance of, the Dreyfus Affair in France or the blood libel trial of Menahem Mendel Beilis in Kiev. Moreover, not only prior to but also during much of the period of fascist rule, Italy was replete with manifestations of tolerance that were impossible to conceive in Nazi Germany. Jewish participation in the fascist movement was welcomed and Italian Jews joined the party in numbers triple their proportion in the overall population.1 After the Nazis ascended to power in 1933, Italy provided a safe haven for Jews escaping persecution in Germany.2 A pro-fascist Jewish periodical, La nostra bandiera (Our Banner), was established in 1934 as an outlet for that considerable portion of Italian Jews anxious to declare their loyalty to Benito Mussolini (1883–1945). He had himself met several times with Chaim Weizmann in 1934.3 Mussolini openly expressed his support of Zionism, and on a number of occasions he emphatically denied that fascism had anything to do with antisemitism; he also dismissed theories of racial purity as ridiculous.4 It was an open secret, at least among insiders, that the Jewish journalist Margherita Sarfatti, Mussolini’s first biographer, was also his mistress. Considerable evidence exists, finally, that once German troops entered Italy, following the fall of Mussolini in 1943, many Gentiles—civilians and soldiers alike—courageously resisted the policy of genocide, contributing to the relatively high rate of Jewish survival in Italy as contrasted with Germany.5 For these reasons, many historians have painted [End Page 105] a generally benign picture of the treatment of Jews in Fascist Italy, at least until the promulgation of the discriminatory “Racial Laws” (Leggi Razziali) in fall 1938. In their view, those laws were best understood as imposed on Italy by Germany, as a condition for their military alliance, and accepted by Italy as a matter of political expediency rather than any genuine expression of hatred.6 To an extent, Italian musical life reflected the sharply different social situation of Jews in the two countries. The oft-noted 1942 production in Rome of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, banned in Germany and Austria, and composed as it was by a proud disciple of the same Schoenberg who had been pressured into exile from Germany in 1933, is only one example. Italian censorship of positive Jewish references in print could also be quite porous during this period, and allowed much to appear that would have been inconceivable in Germany.7 To an increasing number of scholars, the positive view I have just outlined appears a drastic distortion of the situation for Jews in Italy during the fascist period, and has been energetically combatted in the last several decades. Historians such as Michele Sarfatti, Giorgio Fabre, Mimmo Franzinelli, Simon Levis Sullam, and Wiley Feinstein have instead focused on the evidence of a deeply rooted anti-Jewish tradition in Italy, present in the fascist movement even during its earliest phases, and independent of and predating any German prompting.8 In their telling, the Racial Laws, while undoubtedly related to the alliance with Germany, should also be seen as the culmination of tendencies inherent in Italian culture that long preceded the advent of National Socialism. To these writers, the benign view is a whitewash. The fissure between these views has implications that extend well...

"Mal de Mar": A Reading of Jorge de Sena's "A Grã-Canária" in (trans-)Atlantic Transit

ABSTRACT: This article analyzes Jorge de Sena’s short story “A Grã-Canária” in the context of a wider discussion on the topographies of the South Atlantic taken as an ideological construct, to some extent always already textual(ized). The story emphasizes the tensions in the enclosing of either the boat or the island as spaces of absolute fascist rule (in 1938 and 1961), and its setting in the Atlantic allows for a wider criticism of oppressive regimes operating in the South Atlantic axis while also addressing the “Atlantic exception” (Roberto Vecchi) in the context of wider European headings. It dismantles both the incipient establishing of the Atlantic as a “Portuguese Sea” by the Estado Novo and the construction of the legal and political conceptions such as that of the “overseas provinces” in the Constitutional Revision of 1951. This reading aims to foreground the spacing (Jacques Derrida) intrinsic to the inscription of such topographies of otherness and the projection of the selfsame in order to stress the tensions, the contradictions, and the limits of discourses underwriting an “immunitary paradigm” (Roberto Esposito) bent on establishing and marking the borders between a supposed self and its projected others. KEYWORDS: Jorge de Sena; South Atlantic; immunitary paradigm

Learning by Hart: Gender, Image, and Ideology in Vittorio De Sica's Maddalena zero in condotta

Vittorio De Sica's early comedy Maddalena zero in condotta (1940) celebrates a female student's free-spiritedness and appears to reward her rebelliousness. This essay argues, however, that De Sica's film reconsolidates the very gender norms that it appears to relax. Maddalena does this by prompting spectators to identify with a schoolgirl whose heart's desire is for a maturità that rules out real mobility, and whose disobedience thus in fact constitutes deferred obedience. Though not as subversive as it has seemed, De Sica's film remains valuable as a record of continuities between fascist rule and the post-war regime of ‘repressive tolerance’. Such tolerance, which still figures in contemporary theories of ideology, makes it difficult to distinguish capture from liberation, obligation from breathing free. Maddalena lets us see the school as a key testing ground for this kind of tolerance, at once ideological and ‘counter-ideological’.

Pedro Almodóvar's La piel que habito: Of Late Style and Erotic Conservatism

In this article, I read Almodóvar's film La piel que habito (2011) as an example of what Edward Said calls late style. However, unlike the perfecting or visionary style of artists' later works, Almodóvar's late style, lacking the counter-cultural ground provided by La movida, the urban movement in post-Francoist Spain, becomes self-referential, not only in the repeated allusions to his earlier films, but also in his readiness to imitate Hollywood's canonical cinematic language. In fact, I argue that La piel que habito maintains an internal dialogue with Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. The avant-garde aura identified with Almodóvar's cinema is often related to La Movida. Yet, as Eduardo Subirats contends in Modernidad y exilio, this cultural movement never attempted to revise the political, social and cultural content remaining from the fascist rule but rather recycled them into a form of cultural transvestism. I argue that, beyond its liberated disguise, Almodóvar's conception of sexuality is ideologically conservative, hinging on an understanding of gender relations that corroborate the tenets of Laura Mulvey's classic critique of the patriarchal gaze in Hollywood narrative cinema. The conservatism unearthed in this article refers to patriarchal conceptions of courtly love developed by Jacques Lacan in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Particularly, I look at the construction of the feminine that results from Almodóvar's erotic conservatism.

Fascism and Social Anthropology: The Case of Spain Under Franco

This social thought piece constitutes a contribution to the history of anthropology in southern Europe. Using Spain under Francisco Franco as a case study, it demonstrates the close connection between anthropology as an academic discipline, on the one hand, and fascist rule, on the other. While anthropologists neither whole-heartedly accepted the Franco regime (1939–1975) nor worked directly on that regime’s behalf, anthropological topics, theories, and approaches of the day posed no threat to the fascist regime and were, in fact, consonant with certain basic principles promoted by that regime. The culture concept, which linked particular territories to particular customs and ways of life, was in complete accord with the fascist division of society into named geographic entities, each with its own folklore, speech patterns, and popular forms of ritual and religion. Anthropologists and supporters of the Franco dictatorship alike—whether intentionally or not—ignored considerations of socioeconomic class. At the same time, anthropologists began to investigate small communities located in highly complex, literate societies. The rural peoples of these societies came to be classified as “peasants,” identified as repositories of traditional, stable ways of life, inherited from the distant past. Such anthropological studies were consonant with the ideology of the Franco regime, which glorified rural peoples and a supposedly ancient, heroic past. Similar developments were occurring elsewhere in Europe, particularly among anthropologists and folklorists working during the political reign of dictator António Oliveira de Salazar (1932–1968). This piece concludes with changes that have occurred both politically and anthropologically since the rise of democracy in Spain and Portugal during the late 1970s.

Maestras y maestros en Italia desde el fin del Antiguo Régimen hasta el ascenso del Fascismo. Nacimiento y desarrollo de una profesión

The article examines the slow process of professionalization of elementary school teachers, from the fragmented educational reality of the old regime to the emergence of a teaching body with a specific preparation and a collective identity. The Italian State played a significant role in this process because it concerned itself with the requalification of teachers and the education of new students up to the demanding task of fighting the high levels of illiteracy and promoting people’s adherence to the new values on which it was based. Teaching, however, remained poorly paid and quite precarious and those aspects increased feminine recruitment: the job was considered a respectable and typically womanly occupation, even though the arrival of single girls in small provincial towns sometimes resulted into persecutions that found an echo in press and literature. The improvement of teachers’ cultural level made untenable the contradiction between the rhetoric exaltation of the role of the teacher and the real conditions of the profession, which also contributed to the pedagogical press. In the new century, an increasingly combative association movement developed which obtained important results, but was undermined by deep internal divisions, between men and women, urban and rural teachers, catholic and secular teachers. Teachers were accused of defending corporative interests and neglecting the school system needs, and then called to order by the Gentile’s education reform, one of the first acts of Fascist rule.

Punishment in Europe: A Critical Anatomy of Penal Systems edited by V.Ruggiero and M.Ryan (Eds.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (2013) 304pp. £55.00hb ISBN 978‐1‐137‐02820‐4

Comparing penal systems is a complex and messy endeavour. Collecting, collating and comparing data from different countries, some with more than one jurisdiction, is fraught with difficulty. So the editors of this collection, while recognising that some countries will share common trends, gave contributors the opportunity to ‘focus more on national peculiarities rather than across the broad commonalities’ (p.5, italics in original). This has paid rich dividends. With chapters by scholars from twelve jurisdictions examining penal systems from the Republic of Ireland in the west to Russia in the east, we learn about each jurisdiction's penal history, prison system, alternative sanctions, juvenile justice and wider criminal justice and social systems. Many of the peculiarities relate to the influences of the past and political culture on the development of penal policy. Examples include Italy, which in the post-war period had many former prisoners (including two who became president) building the new legal system. It had ‘amnesty after amnesty’ and the passing of the ‘penitentiary law’ in 1975 promoted ‘treatment’ over ‘punishment’. Spain emerged from fascist rule after Franco's death in 1975, determined to model its criminal justice system on democratic principles, abolishing capital punishment and torture, and declaring rehabilitation as the objective of punishment. The chapter on Poland explains that criminology was banned in the Eastern bloc; no need for such a discipline, with time simply needed to end crime and get rid of those with bourgeois vices. Russia is marked out by its ‘penal history, and arising from that, its penal geography’ making it ‘like none other in the entire world’ (Piacentini, p.159). Despite a shift towards a more punitive discourse on crime and punishment, due to its embedded welfare state model, Sweden still has one of the lowest imprisonment rates in the world. While this book has not attempted to follow Cavadino and Dignan (2006) in creating a comparative typology, commonalities exist. Overcrowding is one of them. In the Netherlands, the principle of one person per cell was abandoned due to an increase in prison numbers, leading to more austere conditions; the French prison system is characterised by chronic overcrowding, as are, to a greater or lesser extent, prison systems in England and Wales, Italy, Poland, Russia, Republic of Ireland and Spain. This has mainly occurred due to lack of investment in the penal estate and longer sentences leading to an increased prison population. Ruggiero (p.289) in an interesting conclusion, points out that it is now ‘common practice to punish individuals who belong to specific groups because of an actuarial calculus indicating them as more likely to offend and re-offend’. The book demonstrates in stark detail the disproportionate levels of punishment of immigrant populations, the marginalised and socially excluded. In Italy, over 36% of the prison population is non-Italian. In Sweden, foreign prisoners comprise 28% of the prison population, although it has remained relatively stable over the last decade. In Greece, over a twelve-year period, non-nationals increased from one-quarter to more than one-half of the prison population. In England and Wales, ethnic minorities are disproportionately represented in the prison system with almost 26% of the prison population from black, Asian and minority (BME) groups. In Bulgaria, between a third and a half of the prison population are Roma and in the Republic of Ireland, multiple forms of socio-economic disadvantage are found among those in prison. In his introduction, Mick Ryan argues that it is imperative to develop ‘a more critical and accessible public criminology that goes beyond the academy to embrace wider social movements’ (p.6, italics in original). It is essential to move ‘beyond the parameters of conventional penal discourse’ to ‘build (and sustain) public support for progressive penal change’. The scholarship produced in this book will be of interest to those within, and outside, the academy. It enhances our understanding of contemporary penal systems in Europe and underlines the urgent need for progressive penal change.

The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe by David I. Kertzer (review)

Reviewed by: The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe by David I. Kertzer Robert A. Ventresca The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe. By David I. Kertzer. (New York: Random House. 2014. Pp. xxxiii, 553. $32.00. ISBN 978-0-8129-9346-2.) David Kertzer’s The Pope and Mussolini offers a vividly descriptive, highly readable yet partial account of one of the most consequential political relationships of the twentieth century, between Pope Pius XI (Achille Ratti) and Italy’s Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. On the basis of extensive research in ecclesiastical and Italian state archives, Kertzer does an admirable job of working the archival material into an evocative narrative that is accessible to a general audience. With a keen eye for the illustrative anecdote and a theatrical appreciation for the dramatis personae at the heart of this all-too-real story (à propos, see the list of the “Cast of Characters” provided at the outset), Kertzer brings to life the complex interplay of mutuality, interdependence, incompatibility and conflict that characterized the relationship between pope and Duce, between Catholicism and Fascism, and between church and state in Italy on the eve of World War II. This book will convey to the general reader a history that is familiar to specialists—the tortuous evolution of church-state relations after Italian Unification, culminating in the momentous 1929 accords that restored to the Holy See territorial sovereignty and thereby furnished the papacy with juridical and diplomatic standing in Italian and international affairs. With the signing of the historical accords, Mussolini made peace with the Vatican, at least on paper. In return, the Duce expected the pope essentially to stay out of Italy’s political and foreign affairs; in short, to render unto Caesar that which was, ostensibly, Caesar’s. It was, as Kertzer puts it, “a peculiar partnership” with which neither pope nor Duce was “entirely comfortable” (pp. 121–22), as their voluble relationship, which Kertzer describes in colorful detail, amply demonstrated. Yet framing this relationship as a “partnership” risks underestimating the persistent tensions and conflict between Pius XI and Mussolini over various matters—tensions that exposed some basic ideological incompatibilities between Catholicism and Fascism and, in practical terms, tested the logic of the accommodation achieved in the 1929 accords. To speak as Kertzer does of the Church as a “willing partner” of the Fascist regime (p. xxx) is to conflate concordance with alliance, thereby imputing to the relationship a far greater degree of political-ideological compatibility and complementarity than existed. It also attributes to the Holy See and to Pius XI an exaggerated role and undue influence in the consolidation of Fascist rule. Kertzer goes so far—too far, one might argue—as to contend that by the time the 1929 accords were signed, the putative “Fascist revolution” already had been transformed into a “clerico-Fascist revolution” (p. 68). In Kertzer’s telling, Mussolini [End Page 630] and the Vatican forged “a new partnership” based on the shared vision of remaking Italy by re-Catholicizing it—hence the self-interested motivation behind the notoriously anticlerical Mussolini’s moves to “[shower] the Church with cash and privileges.” These ranged from powerful symbolic gestures such as returning crucifixes to honored places of public display, to substantive state patronage of Catholic ideals and institutions in the social, civic, and economic realms of Italian life (p. 61). In return, Mussolini expected Italian churchmen to contribute to consensus-building as the Duce worked in fits and starts to transform his fractious early political coalition into one-party authoritarian rule by the latter 1920s. Reading Kertzer’s account of the early years of the Fascist experience, the reader might very well conclude that certain influential prelates—many of whom were very close both to the Vatican and to Mussolini such as Jesuit priest Pietro Tacchi Venturi—were more fascist than the Fascists, in thought if not in name. To be sure, there were many areas of consensus and mutual self-interest driving the constant search for a workable modus vivendi between the Church of Pius XI and Mussolini’s...

Cultural Revolution and Intellectuals in Fascist Italy : Rome and Turin, 1930-1940

This essay looks into Italian fascism’s cultural policies and their repercussions to the Turin intellectual society in the 1930s. Seen from the perspective of stateformation as cultural revolution, Italian fascism can be considered as a totalitarian project to build the nation-state based on the coherent and unitary national culture. In particular, under the serious economic crisis, the regime began to make new efforts to intensify the fascistizzazione of culture, revealing the significant differences from the former cultural policies. Yet, it seems retrospectively that the regime failed to make any serious inroads into Italian culture, at least, the territories of high culture. A case of the Turin intellectual society is symptomatic. Turin, the capital of the Savoyard monarchy and modern industry, showed the remarkable internal intellectual and cultural autonomy under the fascist rule. Turin intellectuals derived the resources for autonomy from the conservative-nationalistic values connected with the monarchy and the liberal customs inspired by Gobetti, Croce and Einaudi etc. Indeed, a case of Turin implies that the so-called fascist cultural revolution was a slow and partial process through adaptation and compromise which might be termed the “gradualist revolution.”

Drinking from the River Lethe: Case del Fascio and the Legacy of Fascism in Postwar Italy

The endurance of a remarkable quantity of buildings constructed during Fascist rule, a consequence in part of Mussolini’s comprehensive public works projects as well as the state’s willingness to fund their completion during the postwar period, has attracted significant attention among historians and preservationists. Many of these buildings are leading examples of Italian modernism, and recent restoration campaigns have fueled new debates about how best to confront the material remains of the nation’s interwar history as well as the preservation of modern architecture in Italy more generally. Fascist Party headquarters—the buildings most intimately identified with Fascism and often designed by young architects influenced by avant-garde modernism—are largely absent from this literature, perhaps in part because of their relative modesty but also because of their continued associations with political power. The relationship between these buildings and the political ambitions of the regime, their use as centers for political activity in the immediate aftermath of Fascism’s collapse, and their transformation in the following decades into military and police headquarters raise questions about how and to what extent the representations of political authority cultivated under Fascism have persisted in the postwar period, and what consequences this has for the study and preservation of modern Italian architecture.