Abstract
Long at the center of historical debates about Fascism, the subject of consent has often been studied in relation to state-sponsored racism and anti-Semitism. Indeed, for a long time it was argued that the “racial turn” taken with Italy’s 1936 conquest of Ethiopia also marked the moment of greatest popular support for the regime. At the same time, the promulgation of the racial laws in 1938 has often been seen as the beginning of a process of disenchantment with Fascism that subsequently came to a head during the Second World War.1
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Notes
See Renzo De Felice, Storia degli ebrei sotto il fascismo (Turin: Einaudi, 1961), 353: “Notwithstanding the massive and flattering campaign in the press or the activities of the PNF, the provisions did not find any sympathy among the majority of Italians. One could even say that, despite the dripping of anti-Semitic venom in the preceding years, it was precisely on the occasion of the launching of the racial campaigns that Fascist propaganda failed to pass the test for the first time, and for the first time large numbers of Italians … began to see Fascism and Mussolini himself through new eyes.”
See the contributions and bibliography in Marcello Flores et al., eds., Storia della Shoah in Italia: Vicende, memorie, rappresentazioni, vol. 1 (Turin: Einaudi, 2010).
See Gianpasquale Santomassimo’s entry for “Consenso,” in Dizionario del fascismo, eds. Victoria De Grazia and Sergio Luzzatto (Turin: Einaudi, 2002). See also the everuseful book by Simona Colarizi, L’opinione degli italiani sotto il regime 1929–1943 (Rome: Laterza, 2009). Colarizi, who based her study on reports by police informants, indicated several directions for further research in her introduction, but her suggestions have remained unheeded.
On the sources dealing with popular opinion, see among others, Paul Corner, ed., Popular Opinion in Totalitarian Regimes: Fascism, Nazism, Communism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009);
Pierre Laborie, L’opinion française sous Vichy: Les français et la crise d’identité nationale 1936–1944 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2001); and Colarizi, L’opinione degli italiani. Regarding the use of the same types of sources, but in a very different political context, please see
Valeria Galimi, L’antisemitismo in azione: Pratiche antiebraiche nella Francia degli anni Trenta (Milan: Unicopli, 2006), 25ff.
Among the many works on this topic, see Michele Sarfatti, The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy: From Equality to Persecution, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (2000; transl. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006);
Enzo Collotti, Il fascismo e gli ebrei: Le leggi razziali in Italia (Rome: Laterza, 2003); and
MarieAnne Matard-Bonucci, L’Italie fasciste et la persecution des juifs (Paris: Perrin, 2007).
Several documents of primary importance with respect to the 1938 racial laws have been published in Galimi et al., eds., Dalle leggi antiebraiche alla Shoah: Sette anni di storia italiana (Milan: Skirà, 2004); see also the special issue of La Rassegna mensile di Israel, Sarfatti, ed., “1938: Le leggi contro gli ebrei,” 54, no. 1–2 (January–August 1988).
ACS, MI, Polizia politica (1928–1944), b. 19, f. Padova, Informant’s report on the situation in Trieste, March 21, 1934; cited in Colarizi, L’opinione degli italiani, 244. See also Simone Duranti, Lo spirito gregario: I gruppi universitari fascisti tra pubblica e propaganda (1930–1940) (Rome: Donzelli, 2008).
ACS, MI, Polizia politica (1928–1944), b. 219, Ebrei italiani, Note, Rome, December 31, 1938: “Stories are circulating aimed at tugging the heart-strings (atte ad impietosire); the following one has been told to simple women, of the popular classes. A Jewish colonel, having gathered his troops, spoke to them to remind them that he had always treated them well, but that he had to leave on a long journey, that before they could send him away he was leaving of his own accord. Ultimately, the story goes, he killed himself.” A paradigmatic real-life case can be found in Fabio Levi, L’identità imposta: Un padre ebreo di fronte alle leggi razziali di Mussolini (Turin: Zamorani, 1996).
ACS, MI, Polizia Politica (1928–1944), b. 219, Ebrei italiani, Note, Rome, December 27, 1938. See Luigi Balsamo, ed., Angelo Fortunato Formiggini: Un editore del Novecento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1981); and
Gabriele Turi, Il fascismo e il consenso degli intellettuali (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1980).
See the essays in Galimi and Giovanna Procacci, eds., “Per la difesa della razza”: L’applicazione delle leggi antiebraiche nelle università italiane (Milan: Unicopli, 2009).
ACS, MI, Polizia politica (1928–1944), b. 219, Ebrei stranieri, Note, Florence, March 5, 1940. On the lawyers’ reaction, see Francesca Tacchi, Gli avvocati italiani dall’Unità alla Repubblica (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002), 531–52.
ACS, MI, Polizia politica (1928–1944), b. 219, Ebrei italiani, Note, Turin, May 29, 1940. See also Iael Orvieto-Nidam, “Letters to Mussolini: Italian Jews and the Racial Laws,” in Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide, ed. John K. Roth and Elisabeth Maxwell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001).
In many cases, the loss of such vendors’ employment served as a motive for their subsequent internment. Regarding the situation in Tuscany, see Galimi, “L’internamento in Toscana,” in Razza e fascismo: La persecuzione degli ebrei in Toscana, vol. 1, ed. Collotti (Rome: Carocci, 1999), 517.
ACS, MI, Polizia politica (1928–1944), b. 219, Ebrei italiani, Note, Livorno, September 14, 1940. Regarding the denunciation of Jews, see Mimmo Franzinelli, Delatori: Spie e confidenti anonimi: L’arma segreta del regime fascista (Milan: Mondadori, 2001).
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© 2012 Giulia Albanese and Roberta Pergher
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Galimi, V. (2012). The “New Racist Man”. In: Albanese, G., Pergher, R. (eds) In the Society of Fascists. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230392939_8
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