Emilio Gentile. Storia del fascismo. Bari-Rome: Laterza, 2022. xxi, 1350 PP. Cloth 38€. ISBN: 9788858148914.
Emilio Gentile. Totalitarismo 100. Ritorno alla storia. Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2023. 204 PP. Cloth 21€. ISBN: 9788869737794.
Fascism died in 1945, never to return, yet the terms “fascism” and “fascist” have remained among the most common in the political lexicon, applied without any very specific content or meaning to a bewildering variety of phenomena. Given such broad polemical usage, almost anyone or anything can notionally be considered fascist, just as there can purportedly be both left-wing and right-wing fascism. Negative connotations, already firmly established before World War II, were deepened in the 1960s by the emphasis that began to be placed on Hitler’s “Holocaust” of European Jewry, universally denounced as the most fiendish crime of “fascism.” This gave the term a special demonic cast not found even in references to Stalinist communism, all the more sinister since almost any disagreeable political phenomenon was denounced at one time or another as “fascism.”
In the 1970s Soviet spokesmen sought to distinguish the Marxist-Leninist communism of their regime from all other socialisms, real or imagined, as being the only “really existing socialism.” In a similar but much more convincing manner it is possible to say that among the endless charges and imputations of fascism, the only significant regime in world history that constituted indisputable fascism was the one “really existing fascism” — the Mussolini movement and state in Italy from 1919 to 1945. Italian Fascists invented specific use of the term on the level of national politics and constituted the only movement to call itself officially Fascist from beginning to end. There has been a variety of other movements and parties around the world that also claimed the term, but each was more insignificant than the other. Thus it would seem that any effort to understand fascism would have to begin with the Italian movement, while some scholars, skeptical that there has ever existed any such thing as “generic fascism,” insist that it should end there, as well.
Emilio Gentile is one of the leading historians of modern Europe and is indisputably the leading living historian of Italian Fascism. Author of nearly thirty books, most of them monographic studies of major aspects of Fascism, the indefatigable Gentile has inherited the mantle of his own mentor, Renzo De Felice (1929-1996), who had been Italy’s leading practitioner of contemporary history in the late twentieth century. With his six-volume political biography of Mussolini, as well as other works, De Felice almost single-handedly put the critical objective historiography of Italian Fascism on the scholarly map. Gentile is a completely worthy successor. (Admirers of George L. Mosse will note that both these outstanding Italian scholars were also personal friends and colleagues of Mosse himself. Indeed, in the very last years of the latter’s life, with Walter Laqueur (1921-2018) already established in Washington, Gentile became probably Mosse’s closest European collaborator.)
Gentile has already addressed many of the major aspects of Fascist history in key monographs that treat the party itself, early Fascist identity, the development of ideology, the Fascist concept and strategy of totalitarianism, the character of its political religion, and a variety of key turning points in the regime’s history. So broad and deep a body of work raises the question of what role a new 1350-page history plays in this distinguished bibliography.
Storia del fascismo is not another one-volume narrative history of Fascism for the general reader, of which there already exist a score or more in Italian and English. It is, instead, a unique and original undertaking amid the broad existing historiography: a highly detailed and nuanced treatment focused on the major issues, challenges, and initiatives in the development of Mussolini’s leadership, the party, and the regime. All these issues are contextualized by Gentile’s commentary and analysis, but much of the space is given to the words not merely of the Duce, but of a widely diverse variety of Fascist party leaders, government figures, and activists. Major Fascist ambitions, criticisms, problems, policy conflicts, and rivalries are treated in their own words, through lengthy quotations from speeches, publications, letters, debates, and protests. The book is thus both a history on one level and a fascinating source-book of internal Fascist policy, politics, and personalities. Many of these documents are published here for the first time, often from new sources hitherto restricted in access, difficult to find, or simply overlooked. The result is a unique historical account of Fascism from within, often in the original words of the Fascist leaders themselves.
Very nearly all the major turning points in the history of Fascism are treated, beginning with the complex and strained relationship between Mussolini and his own party, since it is a truism to say that the original Fascism was made more by the Fascists than by Mussolini himself. As De Felice insisted, the Duce always remained l’homme qui cherche, and this book sheds new light on his uncertainties and search for alternatives. It illuminates many key issues such as the “March on Rome,” long-term tension with regional leaders and the militia, conflictive relations with Catholicism and the monarchy, the development of economic policy and institutions, and the persistent problems of incorporating the masses, as well as the final collapse of morale in the party and the overthrow of Mussolini.
Roughly the final third of the book treats the activist years of Fascist policy abroad following the conquest of Ethiopia. The goal here is not more diplomatic history, already extensively studied, but to reveal the reactions and concerns of the party’s own leaders during the crucial climax of Fascism, and their increasingly desperate efforts to revitalize the party and extend its role amid national crisis.
This work brings to bear the immense learning and comprehensive perspective developed by Gentile in more than half a century of study. Obviously not a work for the general reader, it will become an indispensable reference for political investigation and debate in the future, both for its analytic commentary and the rich and deep cornucopia of Fascist speeches and writings that treat most of the major debates and conflicts which interacted in forming Fascist policy.
After so major an achievement, most scholars would be willing to rest on their laurels, at least for a brief period. Within less than a year, however, Emilio Gentile has followed up this massive work with yet a new monograph, Totalitarismo 100. Ritorno alla storia. The “100’ in the title refers to the fact that the term “totalitarian” first appeared in Italian in 1923, so that this book marks its centenary. Since the 1930s there have been many debates and also controversies about the meaning and use of the term, and this has sometimes produced the contention that the term has little meaning, and even that genuine totalitarianism never existed.
Gentile seeks to “return to history” in this new book by revealing with precision and detail the original meaning and usage of “totalitarian” and “totalitarianism” when these terms were first coined and expanded by the anti-Fascist opposition during the years 1922-1925, the time in which the dictatorship originally took shape. His methodology is much the same as in the preceding work, employing numerous long quotations from speeches, articles, and correspondence primarily by leading moderate anti-Fascists such as the liberals Giovanni Amendola (1882-1926) and Luigi Sturzo (1871-1959).
To them, Fascism aimed to establish a “total,” not a temporary, dictatorship that would not merely impose complete political domination but also carry out total control and transformation of the state. This was different from the self-proclaimed temporary and legal or semi-legal dictatorships of João Franco (1855-1929) and Miguel Primo de Rivera (1870-1930) in Portugal and Spain. The surprising irony of this prophetic neologism was that by 1925 it was being taken over by the nascent dictatorship as a badge of honor, conveying the uniqueness of its new complete authoritarianism.
During the interwar years more and more commentators in Europe and North America discussed totalitarianism as a more general phenomenon that was sometimes attributed to all three of the major European dictatorships. Only a very few, such as the Spanish Jesuit Joaquín Azpiazu (1887-1953) in the journal Razón y Fe in 1938, distinguished between “political” and “structural” totalitarianism, between a system of total political domination and one of complete domination of all institutions in society. Azpiazu contended that the only contemporary system of complete structural totalitarianism was that of the Soviet Union. Later, during the Cold War, the term was applied frequently not so much to the defunct Fascist regime as to the Hitler state and Marxist-Leninist systems from East Germany to North Korea.
The paradox is that in Hannah Arendt’s (1906-1975) classic Origins of Totalitarianism (1954), she used the term for Hitlerian Germany and the Soviet Union but mostly exempted the Italian regime from the category that it had helped to propagate. Many analysts have agreed with Arendt. Gentile presented his own interpretation of Italian Fascist totalitarianism in his earlier book on La via italiana al totalitarismo (1995), in which he defined Fascist usage of the concept and label. Of Fascism’s political totalitarianism there can be no doubt, but Gentile also argued that Fascist objectives by the 1930s also included structural totalitarianism, though this remained more an ambition and a slowly evolving process than a fully consummated reality. Storia del fascismo explicitly revisits this earlier interpretation, revealing how Fascist leaders sought to move toward this goal through each incremental phase. During the final years in World War II some argued that Fascist Italy could only survive by imposing what might be termed a more completely structural totalitarianism, though, as it turned out, this could not be achieved in practice.
In multiple publications Gentile has shown more completely than any previous scholar the complex and contradictory origins and development of Italian Fascist ideology. With its immediate roots in the “Left Interventionism” of World War I and the originally Marxist doctrines of revolutionary syndicalism, Fascism at first developed as an emphatically “progressive” movement, and Bruce Kuklick’s recent monograph Fascism Comes to America: A Century of Obsession in Politics and Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2022) makes clear that for a number of years more than a few American progressives accepted it as such.
Even after his regime became a dictatorship, for some years Mussolini administered a kind of authoritarianism of limited semi-pluralism. Throughout its history the regime largely avoided political executions, jailed comparatively few political prisoners, permitted a certain amount of freedom of expression, and for some time cooperated with European pacificism. Not only did Fascism initially eschew antisemitism but its membership was disproportionately Jewish (compared with the tiny Jewish percentage of the Italian population) for nearly twenty years. In view of the eventually demonic connotations of the term “fascism,” an occasional commentator has even questioned whether Italian Fascism was really “fascist.”
The problem, of course, was the rise of Hitlerian National Socialism, which never ever called itself “fascism.” Mussolini and most Italian Fascists were initially quite averse to the German movement, whose resemblance to their own was in key respects superficial. Yet Fascism had been nothing if not opportunistic and the dynamic growth of German power made it increasingly difficult to resist Hitler’s blandishments. From beginning to end, Mussolini was motivated by an unstable combination of fear and envy. Though many Italians were always dominated by the former, Mussolini himself eventually succumbed to the latter.
Emilio Gentile has contributed more than anyone else to the historical analysis of Italian Fascist totalitarianism, what it was, and what it aspired to be. Storia del fascismo reveals more thoroughly than any previous account the terms and character of the internal debates, doubts, and aspirations of the party and state leaders, even as they struggled uncertainly and unsuccessfully to achieve full totalitarianism.
Stanley G. Payne taught in five American universities, from 1968 to 2005 at the University of Wisconsin, where he was Hilldale-Jaume Vicens Vives Professor of History. He followed George L. Mosse as co-editor of the Journal of Contemporary History from 1999 to 2015. He has published numerous books on Spanish history, the most recent in English The Spanish Civil War (2012), Franco: A Personal and Political Biography (2014), with Jesús Palacios, and Alcalá Zamora and the Failure of the Spanish Republic, 1931-1936 (2017). His works on European History include A History of Fascism 1914-1945 (1995) and Civil War in Europe 1905-1949 (2011).