Far right turn
DAVID LAVEN has mixed feelings about an engaging but uneven new examination of the causes, methods and impacts of Mussolini’s Fascist regime
Foot’s plausible thesis is that it was violence that brought Fascism to power and which underpinned the regime
In this lively, readable, and provocative work, John Foot uses anecdotes and episodes, vignettes and thumbnail portraits to tell the story of Fascism.
Unusually, he begins his narrative in June 1914, when popular insurrection broke out in central Italy, only to be met with the full repressive power of the Liberal state. But he really hits his stride when recounting the systematic violence used by the nascent Fascist movement after 1919. I’d thought I was fully aware of Fascist thuggery: the savage beatings and forced castor oil administrations, the kidnap and torture of opponents, the arson and vandalism, the connivance of the police and armed forces. But I had never appreciated its sheer scale or nastiness until I read this book.
Foot’s plausible thesis is that it was violence that brought Fascism to power and underpinned the regime. What he does not do is explain why so many Italians embraced squadrismo (the semi-organised violence of black-shirted Fascist paramilitaries), nor why so many more enthusiastically rallied to Mussolini after his March on Rome in 1922.
This book includes lots of detail on the victims of Fascism, including brilliantly crafted and tragic accounts of individuals who suffered intimidation, exile and even death for opposing the regime. Foot also vividly depicts the individuals who tried to kill Il Duce in the 1920s. But he never tells us why Italians wanted to lynch attempted assassins, nor why women wept with joy when they learned that Mussolini had survived. The extensive historiographical debate about whether Mussolini was able to build consensus in the 1930s is largely absent here, too, and Foot scarcely discusses the key role of Catholicism.
Given his brilliant books on Italian football and cycling, it is not surprising that sport features centrally in Foot’s otherwise slightly rushed account, but it is a shame he does not draw more on the vast literature on Italian culture and society in this period.
Some key areas are neglected almost entirely. For example, the so-called “Battle for Highbury” between Italy’s hitherto all-conquering football team and England – probably the least friendly “friendly” ever played – gets more space than Italy’s economy or Italian relations with Germany in the 1930s. Yet it was Mussolini’s alliance with Hitler that brought Italy into the Second World War, providing the context for much of the worst Fascist violence and for the fall of Fascism. Foot flits over Italy’s disastrous campaigns in Greece, Yugoslavia and the USSR – but he mentions the magnificent beard of the leftwing Jewish lawyer Emanuele Modigliani on half a dozen occasions.
At the end of this engaging work, Foot refers to his great-grandmother’s view of “the era of Fascism in Italy as a ‘wonderful’ time”, and speculates that many Italians probably shared her opinion. So it’s a shame that the voices of the vast numbers of Italians who actively supported the regime – or at least found ways to accommodate themselves to it – are not heard.
Overall, Foot’s quirky book is a joy, but someone who does not know much about the period will end up with an odd view of Fascist Italy if this is all they read.